Transcriber’s Note: As a result of editorial shortcomings in the
original, some reference letters in the text don’t have matching entries
in the reference-lists, and vice versa.
THE HISTORIANS’ HISTORY OF THE WORLD
[Illustration: MARTIN]
THE HISTORIANS’
HISTORY
OF THE WORLD
A comprehensive narrative of the rise and development of nations
as recorded by over two thousand of the great writers of all ages:
edited, with the assistance of a distinguished board of advisers
and contributors, by
HENRY SMITH WILLIAMS, LL.D.
[Illustration]
IN TWENTY-FIVE VOLUMES
VOLUME XI--FRANCE, 843-1715
The Outlook Company
New York
The History Association
London
1905
COPYRIGHT, 1904,
BY HENRY SMITH WILLIAMS.
_All rights reserved._
Press of J. J. Little & Co.
New York, U. S. A.
Contributors, and Editorial Revisers.
Prof. Adolf Erman, University of Berlin.
Prof. Joseph Halévy, College of France.
Prof. Thomas K. Cheyne, Oxford University.
Prof. Andrew C. McLaughlin, University of Michigan.
Prof. David H. Müller, University of Vienna.
Prof. Alfred Rambaud, University of Paris.
Capt. F. Brinkley, Tokio.
Prof. Eduard Meyer, University of Berlin.
Dr. James T. Shotwell, Columbia University.
Prof. Theodor Nöldeke, University of Strasburg.
Prof. Albert B. Hart, Harvard University.
Dr. Paul Brönnle, Royal Asiatic Society.
Dr. James Gairdner, C.B., London.
Prof. Ulrich von Wilamowitz Möllendorff, University of Berlin.
Prof. H. Marczali, University of Budapest.
Dr. G. W. Botsford, Columbia University.
Prof. Julius Wellhausen, University of Göttingen.
Prof. Franz R. von Krones, University of Graz.
Prof. Wilhelm Soltau, Zabern University.
Prof. R. W. Rogers, Drew Theological Seminary.
Prof. A. Vambéry, University of Budapest.
Prof. Otto Hirschfeld, University of Berlin.
Dr. Frederick Robertson Jones, Bryn Mawr College.
Baron Bernardo di San Severino Quaranta, London.
Dr. John P. Peters, New York.
Prof. Adolph Harnack, University of Berlin.
Dr. S. Rappoport, School of Oriental Languages, Paris.
Prof. Hermann Diels, University of Berlin.
Prof. C. W. C. Oman, Oxford University.
Prof. W. L. Fleming, University of West Virginia.
Prof. I. Goldziher, University of Vienna.
Prof. R. Koser, University of Berlin.
CONTENTS
VOLUME XI
FRANCE
PAGE
CHAPTER I
THE LATER CARLOVINGIANS (843-987 A.D.) 1
Charles the Bald, 1. The Northmen, 2. Edict of Mersen, 3. The
Northmen’s allies, 4. Beginning of the great fiefs, 5. Edicts
of Pistes and Quierzy, 6. Louis II to Carloman, 7. Charles the
Fat, king and emperor, 8. The feudal régime, 10. The church,
13. Capetians and Carlovingians, 14. The last Carlovingians, 17.
CHAPTER II
THE FOUNDATION OF THE CAPETIAN DYNASTY (987-1180 A.D.) 22
Henry I, 24. Deeds of the great barons, 26. Philip I, 27. Louis
the Fat and Louis the Young, 30. Battle of Brenneville, 31. The
abbot Suger, 34. Emancipatory movements after the Crusades,
38. The communes, 38. Philosophy and thought; Abelard and St.
Bernard, 40. Abelard and the university, 44. The position of
woman, 45.
CHAPTER III
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY (1180-1270 A.D.) 47
Prince Arthur of Brittany, 49. The Albigensian Crusade, 51.
League against Philip Augustus, 54. The battle of Bouvines,
54. Last years and influence of Philip Augustus, 56. Louis
VIII, 56. Louis IX, called St. Louis, 58. First Crusade of St.
Louis, 60. Last years and death of St. Louis, 61. Hallam’s
estimate of St. Louis, 63. Piety and christianity of St. Louis,
64. Progress of the monarchy under St. Louis, 67. Aspects of
thirteenth-century civilisation, 71.
CHAPTER IV
PHILIP III TO THE HOUSE OF VALOIS (1270-1328 A.D.) 74
Philip (III) the Bold, 74. Philip (IV) the Fair, 75. New war
with Flanders, 76. The quarrel between Philip and Boniface
VIII, 77. Sentence of the Templars, 83. Philip’s fiscal policy,
84. Execution of Jacques de Molay, 85. Political progress in
Philip’s reign, 87. Louis (X) the Quarrelsome, 89. Philip
(V) the Tall, 91. Charles (IV) the Fair, 92. Aspects of
civilisation, 93. The great fairs, 95.
CHAPTER V
THE OPENING OF THE HUNDRED YEARS’ WAR (1328-1350 A.D.) 98
Edward III claims the throne of France, 103. The battle
of Sluys or L’Écluse, 104. The war in Brittany, 107. Joan
de Montfort defends Hennebon, 108. Philip’s financial
difficulties, 110. Renewal of the war with England, 111. Edward
returns to France, 112. Froissart’s description of Crécy, 114.
Michelet on the results of Crécy, 118. The siege of Calais,
119. Suspension of the war, 121. Territorial acquisition, 122.
CHAPTER VI
JOHN THE GOOD AND CHARLES THE WISE (1350-1380 A.D.) 124
Trouble with Charles of Navarre, 126. The states-general of
1355, 128. The battle of Poitiers, 130. The states-general of
1356-1357, 132. The dauphin repudiates the _Grande Ordonnance_,
134. The Jacquerie, 135. Death of Marcel, 137. Peace
negotiations; Edward in France, 138. The story of Le Grand
Ferré, 139. The Treaty of Bretigny, 141. The last years of King
John, 142. Charles the Wise, 143. Early exploits of Bertrand du
Guesclin, 144. End of the Breton War; battle of Auray, 146. Du
Guesclin leads the free companies into Castile, 147. The Peace
of Bretigny is broken, 149. The English invasion, 150. Last
years of Charles V and of Du Guesclin, 152.
CHAPTER VII
THE BETRAYAL OF THE KINGDOM (1380-1422 A.D.) 155
War in Flanders; battle of Roosebeke, 156. Insurrections in
Paris and Rouen, 157. The King assumes the rule, 159. Hatred
of the nobles for the ministry, 162. The king goes mad: the
princes return to power, 163. Domestic troubles and scandals,
165. Civil war, 167. Henry V invades France; a French view,
169. Michelet’s account of the battle of Agincourt, 170.
Massacre of the Armagnacs in Paris, 174. The duke of Burgundy
master of Paris, 175. Siege of Rouen, 176. Henry and John the
Fearless, 177. The Treaty of Troyes, 178. Henry’s struggle with
the dauphin, 180. Woes of the people; the _Danse Macabre_, 182.
The University of Paris and the council of Constance, 184.
CHAPTER VIII
THE RESCUE OF THE REALM (1422-1431 A.D.) 187
Monstrelet describes the siege of Montargis, 189. The siege
of Orleans, 190. The “battle of the Herrings,” 191. The Maid
of Orleans (La Pucelle), 194. Joan at the court, 196. The
deliverance of Orleans, 198. Joan of Arc leads the king to
Rheims, 200. Joan defeated at Paris, 203. Capture of Joan of
Arc, 204. Trial of Joan of Arc, 206. The Twelve Articles,
207. The findings of the faculty, 211. The sentence and its
execution, 213. The rehabilitation of Joan of Arc, 218. The
British estimate of Joan’s services, 219.
CHAPTER IX
“THE CONVALESCENCE OF FRANCE” (1431-1461 A.D.) 220
The Treaty of Arras, 222. The French return to Paris, 224. The
Pragmatic Sanction, 225. The atrocious crimes of the barons,
226. Gilles de Retz, 226. Charles begins the work of reform,
228. Agnes Sorel; the Praguerie, 230. Effective progress
against England, 233. Expedition to Switzerland and Lorraine,
235. The battle of Sankt Jakob, 236. Military and financial
reforms, 236. The close of the Hundred Years’ War, 238. The
battle of Castillon, 239. The last years of Charles VII, 242.
Quarrels with Burgundy and with the dauphin, 242. Death of
Charles VII; the influence of his reign, 244.
CHAPTER X
THE REIGN OF LOUIS XI: THE TRIUMPH OF THE CROWN (1461-1483 A.D.) 247
Relations with the Church, 249. The war of the Public Weal,
250. The battle of Montlhéry and the Treaty of Conflans, 250.
Political intrigues, 253. The struggle with Charles the Bold,
254. Comines describes the visit to Péronne, 255. The storming
of Liège, 259. The return of Louis to France, 262. Edward IV
of England aids Charles the Bold, 263. Gold and diplomacy make
Louis the victor, 265. Last deeds of Charles the Bold, 266.
Mary of Burgundy, 268. War with Maximilian, 270. Last years
and death of Louis, 272. Martin’s estimate of Louis XI, 274.
Louis’ influence on civilisation, 275. Establishment of posts
in France, 275.
CHAPTER XI
CHARLES VIII AND LOUIS XII--THE INVASION OF ITALY (1483-1515 A.D.) 278
Charles VIII, 278. The rule of Anne de Beaujeu, 279. The
struggle with the duke of Orleans, 284. Charles VIII in Italy,
288. Death of Charles VIII, 293. Louis XII, “the father of his
people,” 293. Marriage with Anne of Brittany, 295. Foreign
affairs, 297. Internal affairs, 302. Last years of Louis XII,
304.
CHAPTER XII
IMPERIAL STRUGGLES OF FRANCIS I AND HENRY II (1515-1559 A.D.) 306
Critical survey of Francis I and his period, 306. A brilliant
campaign in Italy, 308. The Concordat, 309. Strife between
Francis I and Charles V, 310. Meeting of Henry VIII and
Francis I on the Field of the Cloth of Gold, 311. Francis I
and Charles V at war, 313. Defection of the duke de Bourbon,
314. A disastrous campaign in Italy; the battle of Pavia, 316.
Francis captive in Spain; the Treaty of Madrid, 320. Further
dissensions and the “Ladies’ Peace,” 322. Internal affairs,
325. The French Renaissance, 328. War again between Francis I
and Charles V, 332. Last years and death of Francis I, 335.
Gaillard’s estimate of Francis I, 336. Character and policy of
Henry II, 337. Court favourites, 338. Religious persecutions
and royal marriages, 339. War with Charles V and his successor,
342. The siege of Metz, 343. Minor engagements; the abdication
of Charles V, 346. Battle and defence of St. Quentin, 347. The
retaking of Calais, 347. The Treaty of Câteau-Cambrésis, 348.
The last days of Henry II, 349.
CHAPTER XIII
CATHERINE DE MEDICI AND THE RELIGIOUS WARS (1559-1589 A.D.) 351
Francis II, 352. Religious parties, 353. Death of Francis II,
355. The accession of Charles IX, 356. Civil war, 357. The
Edict of Amboise and its results, 359. The Second Religious
War, 361. The Third Religious War, 362. Admiral Coligny; the
Peace of St. Germain, 364. A troubled peace; the marriage of
Henry of Navarre, 365. The attack on Coligny, 368. Preparing
for the massacre, 370. The Massacre of St. Bartholomew, 374.
Effects of the massacre, 376. Last years, death, and character
of Charles IX, 378. The accession of Henry III, 380. Political
conditions, 381. The Holy League, 383. The war of the Three
Henrys, 384. The battle of Coutras, 386. The Day of the
Barricades and the Treaty of Union, 388. The meeting of the
states-general, 388. The assassination of Henry, duke of Guise,
390. Death of Catherine de Medici, 392. The siege of Paris and
the death of Henry III, 392.
CHAPTER XIV
HENRY OF NAVARRE, FIRST OF THE BOURBONS (1589-1610 A.D.) 395
Henry’s struggle for the crown, 395. The battle of Ivry, 397.
The duke of Parma and the Spaniards, 400. Henry IV and the
league, 401. Opposition of the pope and Philip II, 404. The
Edict of Nantes, 405. Reorganisation of France with the aid
of Sully, 407. Amours and second marriage of Henry IV, 409.
Intrigues of De Biron, 412. The last years of Henry’s reign,
414. Grand design of Henry IV; his death, 415. Character and
policy of Henry IV, 417. Martin’s estimate of Henry IV, 418.
Stephen’s characterisation of Henry IV and his times, 419.
CHAPTER XV
THE LITERARY PROGRESS OF FRANCE IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 422
Calvin, 426. Montaigne, 427.
CHAPTER XVI
THE EARLY YEARS OF LOUIS XIII AND THE RISE OF RICHELIEU
(1610-1628 A.D.) 432
The regency of Marie de Medici, 432. Disgrace of Sully,
434. First revolt of the lords, 434. Last assembly of the
states-general, 436. Majority of Louis XIII; marriage with
Anne of Austria, 438. Richelieu appears, 438. Assassination of
Marshal d’Ancre, 441. The ministry of Luynes, 443. The Huguenot
uprising; the siege of Montauban, 445. Death of Luynes,
448. Richelieu’s return to the ministry, 449. Conspiracy of
the court against Richelieu, 450. The siege of La Rochelle
described by Seignobos, 452.
CHAPTER XVII
THE DICTATORSHIP OF RICHELIEU (1629-1643 A.D.) 457
Richelieu and the king, 458. Richelieu enters the European
arena, 460. Enmity of Marie de’ Medici against Richelieu, 462.
The Day of Dupes, 462. Exile of Marie de’ Medici, 464. The
revolt of Gaston and the execution of Montmorency, 465. Foreign
affairs, 466. Wars with Austria, 468. Attempt to assassinate
the cardinal, 469. Character of Louis, 470. Revolt of the count
de Soissons, 472. Caillet’s estimate of the administration
of Richelieu, 472. The church and the state under Richelieu,
475. The conspiracy of Cinq-Mars, 478. Recovery and triumph
of Richelieu, 480. The last days of Richelieu, 482. Stephen’s
estimate of Louis XIII and of Richelieu, 484.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE SUPREMACY OF MAZARIN (1643-1661 A.D.) 487
Battle of Rocroi, 489. The _importants_, 491. The education of
the young king, 493. Military glory, 494. Treaty of Westphalia,
496. Mazarin’s domestic policy, 497. First insurrection of the
Fronde, 499. The Day of the Barricades, 500. Second act of the
Fronde; arrest of Condé, 505. Resistance of Bordeaux, 506.
Disgrace and exile of Mazarin, 507. Condé in power, 508. Return
of Mazarin, 509. The last phase of the Fronde, 511. Battle of
St. Antoine, 513. Second exile of Mazarin, 513. Mazarin again
in power, 515. War with Spain continues, 516. Alliance with
Cromwell; war in Flanders, 517. The Treaty of the Pyrenees,
520. Last years and death of Mazarin, 522.
CHAPTER XIX
“_L’ÉTAT, C’EST MOI_” (1661-1715 A.D.) 525
The ministers, 528. The man with the Iron Mask, 531. The
ministry of Colbert, 531. Reorganisation of the finances, 532.
Michelet’s estimate of Colbert, 535. Louvois, 538. Vauban,
539. Séguier, legislative works, 540. Lionne, foreign affairs
and diplomacy, 541. Triumph of the absolute monarchy, 541.
Submission of Parliament, 542. Submission of the nobility,
543. The third estate, 543. Louis XIV and the church, 544.
The Protestants, 545. Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, 546.
The Jansenists, 548. The police, 549. The court of the grand
monarch, 550. Mademoiselle de la Vallière, 551. Madame de
Montespan, 555. Poisoning: the Brinvilliers case, 556. The
retirement of Montespan, 558. Madame de Maintenon, 559. Effect
of Louis XIV’s policy on the nation, 561.
CHAPTER XX
LOUIS XIV, SPAIN, AND HOLLAND (1661-1679 A.D.) 563
The war of the Queen’s Rights, 566. The Triple Alliance, 569.
Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, 570. Projects against Holland, 571.
The Treaty of Dover; death of Madame, 572. Treaties with other
powers, 573. The war with Holland begins, 574. The passage of
the Rhine, 575. The French in Holland and Germany, 576. The
new coalition against France, 577. Defection of England and
the imperial allies, 581. Operations in Franche-Comté; Turenne
in Alsace, 581. Condé in the Netherlands, 584. Last campaigns
of Turenne and Condé, 584. Events of 1676; affairs in Sicily,
585. Campaign of 1677; negotiations for peace, 587. Louis XIV
settles with the coalition, 589.
CHAPTER XXI
THE HEIGHT AND DECLINE OF THE BOURBON MONARCHY (1679-1715 A.D.) 592
Acquisition of frontier places, 593. Preparations for a second
coalition, 596. Relations with Turks and Berbers, 598. Second
coalition; the league of Augsburg, 599. The Revolution in
England, 600. War of the league of Augsburg, 601. Attempts to
restore James II, 601. Devastation of the Palatinate, 603. The
war in Savoy and Piedmont, 604. The war in the Netherlands,
604. Steenkerke and Neerwinden, 605. Last years of the war;
treaty with Savoy, 606. The Treaty of Ryswick, 608. Louis
XIV and the Polish throne, 609. The question of the Spanish
succession, 610. Accession of the Bourbons in Spain, 612.
The Grand Alliance or third coalition against France, 613.
War of the Spanish Succession; the French victories, 615.
The _camisards_, 617. War of the Spanish Succession; French
reverses, 617. The battle of Blenheim, 618. The battle of
Ramillies, 620. The battle of Malplaquet, 624. The battle of
Denain, 626. Treaties of Utrecht and Rastatt, 627. Death of
Louis XIV, 629.
CHAPTER XXII
THE AGE OF LOUIS XIV: ASPECTS OF ITS CIVILISATION (1610-1715 A.D.) 632
Foundation of the French Academy, 632. The patronage system,
633. Literary characteristics, 635. Science, 637. Poetry:
Boileau, 640. Oratory: Bossuet, 641. The third period, 642.
The drama; tragedy, 643. Corneille, 643. Racine, 644. Comedy,
645. Architecture, 647. Sculpture and painting, 648. Music and
the opera, 650. Rapid decline of the age of Louis XIV, 651. A
French view of the effect of the age, 651.
BRIEF REFERENCE-LIST OF AUTHORITIES BY CHAPTERS 653
PART XVI
THE HISTORY OF FRANCE
BASED CHIEFLY UPON THE FOLLOWING AUTHORITIES
A. ALISON, ALEXIS BELLOC, L. P. E. BIGNON, LOUIS BLANC, JULES CAILLET,
J. B. R. CAPEFIGUE, THOMAS CARLYLE, FRANÇOIS R. CHÂTEAUBRIAND,
ADOLPHE CHÉRUEL, JOHN WILSON CROKER, E. E. CROWE, C. DARESTE
DE LA CHAVANNE, BRUGIÈRE DE BARANTE, A. GRANIER DE CASSAGNAC,
PHILIP DE COMMINES, JURIEN DE LA GRAVIÈRE, LE COMTE DE
TOCQUEVILLE, JEHAN DE VAURIN, VICTOR DURUY, GABRIEL
HENRI GAILLARD, FRANÇOIS GUIZOT, C. P. M.
HAAS, ERNEST HAMEL, LUDWIG HÄUSSER, KARL HILLEBRAND, G. W. KITCHIN,
LACRETELLE, A. LAMARTINE, T. LAVALLÉE, P. E. LEVASSEUR, J.
MALLET-DUPAN, HENRI MARTIN, JULES MICHELET, F. A. MIGNET,
MONSTRELET, C. PELLETAN, VICTOR PIERRE, JULES QUICHERAT,
ALFRED RAMBAUD, J. E. ROBINET, DUC DE SAINT-SIMON,
J. R. SEELEY, C. SEIGNOBOS, J. C. S. DE SISMONDI,
ALBERT SOREL, H. M. STEPHENS, H. VON SYBEL,
H. TAINE, M. TERNAUX, A. THIERS,
F. AROUET DE VOLTAIRE
TOGETHER WITH AN ESSAY IN FOUR PARTS
THE POLITICAL AND SOCIAL EVOLUTION OF FRANCE
BY
ALFRED RAMBAUD
WITH ADDITIONAL CITATIONS FROM
J. AMBERT, MARQUIS D’ARGENSON, A. ARNETH AND M. A. GEFFROY, JULES BARNI,
E. BERTIN, PAUL BONDOIS, A. BOUGÉART, M. N. BOUILLET, E. BOUTARIC,
H. T. BUCKLE, T. BURETTE. F. CANONGE, HIPPOLYTE CASTILLE, H.
CARNOT, SYMPHORIEN CHAMPIER, CHRONIQUE DE ST. DENIS,
CONTINUATOR OF GUILLAUME DE NANGIS, OLIVIER
D’ORMESSON, C. A. DAUBAN, A. DE BEAUCHAMP,
G. AND M. DU BELLAY, MAXIMILIAN DE
BÉTHUNE, DUC DE SULLY, ÉMILE DE
BONNECHOSE, MARQUIS DE CHAMBRAY, MARQUIS DE FERRIÈRES, PIERRE DE
L’ESTOILE, CHARLES MERCIER DE LACOMBE, BERNARD DE LACOMBE,
FRANÇOIS DE LANOUE, LA BARONNE DE STAËL, DU FRESNE
DE BEAUCOURT, H. FORNERON, C. A. FYFFE, BERNARD
GERMAIN, ABBÉ GIRARD, HENRI GIRARD, SAINT-MARC
GIRARDIN, HENRY HALLAM, HERMANN HETTNER,
VICTOR HUGO, W. H. JERVIS, J. B. F.
KOCH, H. LEBER, U. LEGEAY, G. H.
LEWES, L. DE LOMÉNIE,
O. DE LA MARCHE, SIR THOMAS ERSKINE MAY, MARQUIS OF NORMANBY, E. DE
MÉZERAY, COUNT VON MOLTKE, WILHELM MÜLLER, DAVID MÜLLER, W. F. B.
NAPIER, J. B. PAQUIER, JULIA PARDOE, A. RASTOUL, P. ROBIQUET,
C. ROUSSET, ROSSEEUW ST. HILAIRE, D. SAUVAGE, MAURICE DE
SAXE, EDMOND SCHÉRER, F. C. SCHLOSSER, SIR WALTER
SCOTT, A. SORBIN, J. L. SOULAVIE, SAINT
RENE-TAILLANDIER, EUGÈNE TÉNOT, J. E.
TYLER, MAURICE WAHL, JAMES WHITE,
E. F. WIMPFFEN, HENRY SMITH
WILLIAMS, R. T. WILSON
COPYRIGHT, 1904,
BY HENRY SMITH WILLIAMS.
_All rights reserved._
[Illustration]
CHAPTER I. THE LATER CARLOVINGIANS
CHARLES THE BALD (843-877 A.D.)
[Sidenote: [843-877 A.D.]]
Up to the present we have told the history of the Gauls, the
Gallo-Romans, and the Franks; with the Treaty of Verdun we begin the
history of the French people. There now existed in France, except
the Northmen, who already were beginning to appear on its coast and
who established themselves there only in small numbers, all the
races of which her people are formed, and all the elements, Celtic,
Roman, Christian, and Germanic, whose combination goes to make up her
civilisation. The medley is even already too sufficiently advanced
for one to distinguish any longer the Gallo-Roman from the Frank, the
civilised man from the barbarian. All have the same customs and almost
all the same tongue. The French idiom showed itself officially in the
Treaty of Verdun. Law ceases to be personal and becomes local; national
custom replaces the Roman or barbaric codes; there are scarcely any
slaves; there are but few free men--we shall soon see nothing but serfs
and lords.
But this France has no longer the extent of Gaul; the Treaty of Verdun
has confined it to the Schelde and the Maas, the Saône and the Rhone, and
the population within these narrow limits finds them still too broad;
they wish to live apart, for themselves alone, and not to sustain a vast
dominion which is crushing them and which they do not understand.
The son of Judith and Louis le Débonnaire, Charles the Bald, king of
France since 840, was nothing but an ambitious man of the people.
Length of days was generously bestowed upon him, as it had been with
Charlemagne, for he reigned thirty-seven years--but he knew how to do
nothing with his life. Difficulties, it is true, were great. The same
year when the destinies of the empire were moulded at Fontenailles,
Asnar, count of Jaca, helped himself to the sovereignty of Navarre, and
the Northmen burned Rouen--in 843 they pillaged Nantes, Saintes, and
Bordeaux. At the same time the Aquitanians rose up for a national king.
The Bretons had found theirs in Noménoë, whom Charles had excommunicated
by the bishops, but who defeated his lieutenants; and Septimania had its
chief in Bernhard. The Saracens and the Greek pirates ravaged the south
while the Northmen devastated the north and the west. And as if to fill
the cup of misfortune of which this age was the bearer, the Hungarians,
successors of the Huns and Avars, were putting in an appearance in the
east.
THE NORTHMEN
[Sidenote: [843 A.D.]]
These dreaded pirates, the Northmen, were the men whom hunger, thirst for
pillage, and love of adventure drove each year from the sterile regions
of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. In three days an east wind brought their
two-masted ships to the mouth of the Seine. The fleet obeyed a _kuning_
or king. “But,” says Augustin Thierry, “he was king only at sea and in
battle; for when the banquet hour arrived the whole troop sat at the
same table, and the beer-filled horns passed from hand to hand without
there being a first or a last. The sea-king was followed everywhere with
fidelity and obeyed with zeal, for always he was reputed the bravest of
the brave, like him who had never drained a cup at a protected fireside.
“He knew how to handle ships as a good knight his horse, and to
the ascendency of courage and skill there was added the power that
superstition gave him. He was initiated in the sciences of the Runes. He
knew the mysterious characters which, graven on swords, would procure
victory, and those which inscribed on the stern or on the oars would
prevent shipwreck. All equal under such a chief, supporting lightly their
voluntary submission and the weight of mailed armour which they promised
themselves to exchange for an equal weight of gold, the Danish pirates
gaily travelled the ‘path of the swans,’ as their ancient national poetry
called it. Now they hugged the shores and watched their enemy in the
narrow straits, bays, and little anchorage grounds, from which they got
their name of vikings,--children of the bays and creeks,--now they hurled
themselves forth in pursuit of him across the ocean. The violent storms
of the North Sea scattered and crushed their frail ships. There were
always some missing when from the chief’s ship came the signal to gather
together, but those who survived their shipwrecked companions had no less
confidence and no more concern. They laughed at the winds and the waves
which could not destroy them. ‘The might of the storm,’ they sang, ‘aids
the arms of our oarsmen--the tempest is at our service; it throws us
where we would go.’”
Some of them often, in the midst of the clash of arms and the sight of
blood, became possessed with a sort of mad fury which redoubled their
strength and made them insensible to wounds--as if they saw revealed to
their eyes the palace of their god Odin and the shining hall of Valhalla.
Others showed an irresistible courage under torture, and sang their
death-song in the agonies of torment. Thus the famous Lodbrog, when
thrown into a ditch filled with vipers, flung proudly back these words to
his enemies:
“We have fought with the sword. I was still young when in the East, under
the stars of Eirar, we dug a river of blood for the wolves and invited
the yellow-legged bird to a great banquet of corpses: the sea was red
like a fresh-opened wound and the ravens swam in blood.
“We have fought with the sword. I have seen near Aienlane (England)
numberless bodies filling the decks of the ships; we continued the fight
for six whole days and the enemy did not give in; the seventh, at
sunrise, we celebrated the mass of swords. Valthiof was forced to bend
under our arms.
“We have fought with the sword. Torrents of blood rained from our swords
at Partohyrth (Pesth). The vulture could find no more in the bodies; the
bow thrummed and arrows buried themselves in coats of mail; sweat ran
over the sword blades. They poured poison into the wounds and harvested
the warriors like Odin’s hammer.
“We have fought with the sword. Death seizes me. The bite of the vipers
has been deep. I feel their teeth at my heart. Soon, I hope the sword
will avenge me in the blood of Ælla. My sons will rage at news of my
death--anger will redden their visages; besides, brave warriors will take
no rest until they have avenged me.
“I must cease--behold the Dysir whom Odin sends to lead me to his joyful
palace. I go thither with the Ases, to quaff hydromel at the seat of
honour. The hours of my life have run out and my smile braves death.”
[Sidenote: [837-847 A.D.]]
Religious and warlike fanaticism are here joined together--these pirates
loved to shed the blood of priests and stable their horses in the
churches. When they had ravaged a Christian land: “We have sung them,”
they said, “the mass of spears; it began at early morn and lasted till
the night.” Charlemagne felt these terrible invaders from afar; under
Louis le Débonnaire they grew bolder. Some of them set up abodes, in 837,
on the island of Walcheren, and made tributary the river lands of the
Maas and the Waal. After 843 they came every year. From the mouth of the
Schelde, the Somme, the Seine, the Loire, and the Gironde, they ascended
into the interior of the country. A number of towns, even the more
important, as Orleans and Paris, were taken and pillaged by them without
Charles being able to make any defence. From the Rhine to the Adour, from
the ocean to the Cévennes and the Vosges, all was devastated. They even
acquired the habit of not returning home during the winter and settled
down on the island of Oissel--above Rouen, at Noirmoutiers at the mouth
of the Loire and on the island of Bière, near St. Florent. It was thither
they carried their booty and thence they set out on new expeditions.
EDICT OF MERSEN (847 A.D.)
Chroniclers not understanding that apathy of the Frankish nation once so
brave, who now let themselves be pillaged by a handful of adventurers,
could only explain these things on the supposition that there had been a
tremendous massacre at Fontenailles (Fontenay).
_La peri de France la flor_
_Et des baronz tuit li meillor_
_Ansi troverènt Haenz terre_
_Vinde de gent, bonne a conquerre._
[There perished the flower of France
And the best of all the barons died
And thus was the land of Haenz
Void of the brave--easy to conquer.]
There is some truth in these words. Charlemagne’s fifty-three expeditions
had used up the Frankish race, and his conquests, where always some
of his warriors were left behind to rule, had spread it over three
kingdoms. The dissensions of Louis le Débonnaire’s sons completed this
dissemination. Now there were no longer free men to be found, because of
the terrible results of so many wars, because in the midst of growing
anarchy almost all the free men had renounced an independence which left
them in isolation and consequently in danger, to become the vassals of
men able to protect them. The Edict of Mersen (847) says, “Every freeman
may choose a lord, either the king or one of his vassals, and no vassal
of the king will be obliged to follow him in war unless against a foreign
enemy.” With the subjects thus disposing of their obedience, the king in
civil war remained unarmed and powerless, and as he was as incapable of
making the great obey him as he was of protecting the small, the latter
gathered around the former. The king’s vassals diminished; those of the
great lords increased. On all sides national interest was forgotten in
solicitude for that of the individual. Rouen troubled itself little
about the misfortunes of Bordeaux, Saintes, and Paris, and that is why
in this age, as in the last days of the Roman Empire, and for the same
reason, namely the absence of that common and spirited sentiment known
as patriotism, a few small bands could ravage a great country. Charles
tried to send them back by giving them gold; but this was the surest
means to attract them. The Roman Empire had done the same thing with the
barbarians, and we know with what result.
THE NORTHMEN’S ALLIES
[Sidenote: [843-850 A.D.]]
The number of true Northmen must have been comparatively few, since they
came from afar and over the sea. “But,” as a chronicler of the time
remarks, “many inhabitants of the country, forgetting their regeneration
in the holy waters of baptism, plunged into the dark errors of the
pagans: they ate with these pagans the flesh of horses sacrificed to Thor
and Odin, and took part in their atrocious crimes.” And these renegades
were the most to be feared. They acted as guides to the invaders, they
knew how to foil the ruses their countrymen adopted to cheat the greed of
the barbarians, and showed even less respect and mercy than the latter
for the religion and the people they had abandoned. Sometimes even some
of the powerful nobles were paid by the Northmen, with money raised by
the pillage of France, so as not to be disturbed in their expeditions.
The most dreadful of these pirates was Hastings, who ravaged the banks of
the Loire from 843 to 850, sacked Bordeaux and Saintes, threatened Tours,
which still celebrates to-day, on the 21st of May, a victory won from
him, circumnavigated Spain and, robbing and burning the while, reached
the shores of Italy. He had been drawn by the great name and wealth of
the capital of Christendom; but he mistook Luna for Rome. Hastings sent
word to the count and the bishop that his companions, conquerors of
France, wished no harm to the people of Italy and only wished to repair
his storm-battered ships, and that he himself, wearied of his roving
life, wished to seek repose in the bosom of the church. The bishop and
the count refused him nothing; Hastings even received baptism; but the
gates of the town remained shut. Some time after the camp was filled
with lamentations; Hastings was dangerously ill. Messengers came with
the news and declared at the same time that the dying man intended to
leave all his booty to the church provided his body might be interred
in consecrated ground. The Northmen’s cries of grief soon announced the
death of their chief. They were permitted to bring his body into the
town, and the funeral ceremony was prepared in the cathedral itself. But
when they had set down the corpse in the middle of the choir, Hastings
suddenly rose up and struck the bishop down, while his companions,
drawing their concealed arms, massacred both priests and soldiers.
Master of Luna, Hastings perceived his mistake. He was made to understand
that Rome was a long way off, and could not be so easily captured, so he
set sail with his booty and at the end of several months reappeared at
the mouth of the Loire.
[Illustration: ANCIENT FRENCH DOORWAY]
[Sidenote: [850-882 A.D.]]
Charles the Bald had reunited one part of the country, between the
Seine and the Loire, under command of Robert the Strong, ancestor of
the Capetians, in order to oppose a more efficacious resistance to the
Northmen and the Bretons, a great number of whom had joined the pirates.
Robert gained two victories over the Bretons and defeated a body of
Northmen loaded with the booty of Brie and of the town of Meaux. This was
the valiant leader whom Hastings encountered on his return from Italy.
He had just sacked Le Mans when Robert and the duke of Aquitaine caught
up with him at Brissarthe (Pont-sur-Sarthe) near Angers. The barbarians
numbered but four hundred, half Northmen, half Bretons; and at Robert’s
approach they betook themselves to a church and barricaded it. It was
evening, and the French put off the attack until the next day. Robert
had already taken off his helmet and coat of mail, when the Northmen,
suddenly opening the doors, threw themselves upon the dispersed troops.
Robert rallied his men, drove the enemy back to the church, and tried
to follow them in. But he fought with bared head and breast and on the
threshold was mortally wounded. Duke Rainulf of Aquitaine fell by his
side (866). Hastings, delivered of his dread adversary, ascended the
Loire and made his way as far as Clermont-Ferrand. No other means could
be found of ridding France than by giving him, in 882, the county of
Chartres. But he even abandoned this at the age of nearly seventy, to
resume his life of adventure.
BEGINNING OF THE GREAT FIEFS
[Sidenote: [848-877 A.D.]]
The Northmen were the greatest but not the only one of Charles’ troubles;
the Breton Noménoë repelled all his attacks, crowned himself king,
and left the title to his son Hérispoë. The Aquitanians elected as
leader the son of their late king, Pepin II, whom Charles the Bald had
deposed. Driven out on account of his vices, Pepin allied himself with
the Northmen and Saracens to pillage his former subjects, but he was
captured and shut up in a cloister. Charles recovered, for the time,
Aquitaine, lost it, recovered it again and gave it to one of his sons.
But the true masters of the country were Raymond, count of Toulouse,
who also ruled over Rouergue and Quercy; Walgrin, count of Angoulême;
Sancho Mitara, duke of Gascony, whose capital was Bordeaux; Bernhard,
marquis of Septimania; Rainulf, duke of Aquitaine and count of Poitiers;
Bernard Plantevelue, count of Auvergne; all of whom founded hereditary
houses. To the north of the Loire, Charles had been constrained in the
same way to constitute, for Robert the Strong, the grand duchy of France,
from which sprang the third line of kings. North of the Somme it had
been the same thing with the county of Flanders, given to the king’s
son-in-law, Baldwin Bras de Fer (Iron Arm), and between the Loire and
Saône, the powerful duchy of Burgundy for Richard the Judge. Thus under
Charlemagne’s grandson not only was the empire divided into kingdoms, but
the kingdoms themselves were dismembered into fiefs.[1]
EDICTS OF PISTES AND QUIERZY
Charles made, however, more and more the effort to retain in his service
and that of the state the class of freedmen. In 863, the Edict of Pistes
ordered a census of the men bound to military duty. The most severe
penalties were pronounced against those who deprived these men of their
horses and their arms, and also against the artful ones who sought to
avoid military duty by giving themselves to the church.
This prince, so weak at home, wished nevertheless to aggrandise himself
abroad. The king who could not wear his own crown undertook to acquire
others. At the death of the emperor Lothair, in 855, the inheritance
was shared between his three sons. The eldest took Italy, the second
Lorraine, and the third Provence. The last only lived until 863, and the
king of Lorraine until 869, and neither had any children. Charles the
Bald tried, on their death, to lay hands on their dominions. His plans
miscarried in 863, but succeeded in 870, when he shared Lorraine with his
brother, Louis the German. In spite of the weakness and dishonour of his
reign, Charles the Bald brought together again, at least on one side, the
France which the Treaty of Verdun had broken up.
Instead of continuing this policy Charles sought for the imperial crown,
left once more without a wearer in 875. He sought it in Rome from the
hands of the pope, took on his return to Milan that of the Lombard
kingdom, and as his brother, Louis the German, had died, he attempted to
annex the latter’s dominions to his own--that is, Germany to France. At
this moment the Northmen took Rouen from him. He was beaten on the Rhine;
Italy likewise escaped him.[b]
Unity existed only in the ambitious fancy of the feeble Charles. In
spite of his titles and his crowns, his power in Italy, Lorraine, and
Provence was as much a cipher as it was in Gaul; the dismemberment of the
kingdoms into duchies and counties, and of the latter into viscounties,
_sireries_, and _seigneuries_, still continued; and, at the very moment
when he was dreaming of his grandfather’s empire, he was finally
completing his own destruction by changing the feudal system from a
custom into a law.
Before going to Italy in 877, he assembled a diet at Quierzy to formulate
rules for the government of Gaul by his son, and there was delivered that
famous capitulary from which we may date the feudal revolution: “If one
of our trusty subjects,” runs this capitulary, “inspired by the love of
God, desire to renounce the world, and if he have a son or some other
relative capable of serving the state, he is free to transmit to him his
privileges and honours at pleasure. If a count of this kingdom dies, we
desire that the nearest relatives of the deceased, the other officers of
the county, and the bishops of the diocese provide for its administration
until such time as we shall be able to intrust his son with the honours
with which he was invested.”
This capitulary effected no change in the existing state of things, it
only confirmed accomplished facts and legalised a revolution which had
its origin in the customs of the Germans even before their entry into
Gaul, that is to say the transformation of fiefs into freeholds and the
acquisition of hereditary rights in duchies and counties. From this time
the distinction between _allods_ and _feods_ had no longer either reality
or importance; as the son of the count inherited not only the domains but
also the offices of his father, the distinction between the magistrate
sent from the king and the lord of the manor was done away; and the
titles of duke and count no longer expressed merely an office, an honour,
or a dignity, but sovereign rights. The feudal system was thus inscribed
in the law.[c]
[Sidenote: [877-879 A.D.]]
Such was the condition in which Charles the Bald left France when, in
877, he went to Italy, to fulfil the obligations he had contracted on
receiving the imperial crown. Pope John VIII had begged him to drive the
Saracens from the peninsula, and repress the aggressions of his nephew
Carloman, king of Bavaria, a pretender to the empire. It is astonishing,
the persistence with which Charlemagne’s descendants, in taking arms
against each other, not only hastened the disorganisation of their own
states, but accomplished the rapid ruin of their house in Italy, Germany,
and even France, where it lasted three or four generations longer than
anywhere else. The campaign of 877 bore no result. Charles’ only idea
after he got to Italy seems to have been to pillage the imperial domains.
Abandoned for the most part by his vassals, he was obliged to return to
France, fell ill during the return, and died the 6th of October, a few
days after he had crossed the Mont Cenis.
LOUIS II TO CARLOMAN (877-884 A.D.)
Louis the Stammerer, given a share in the throne during his father’s
lifetime, was crowned by Hincmar at Compiègne in presence of most of the
great vassals. By the advice of Hincmar the new king pledged himself
to disturb no man in the possession of his benefices or offices and
to respect the liberty of the churches. He was also obliged to make
a distribution of lands, abbeys, and counties “to whoever,” says one
chronicle, “demanded them first.”
Charles the Bald had worn four crowns, those of France, the empire,
Italy, and Lorraine. His son inherited the first only. The imperial crown
and the crown of Italy passed to the head of a Carlovingian prince of
the Germanic branch. Ludwig of Saxony contended with Louis the Stammerer
for that of Lorraine and the two claimants came to terms by dividing the
kingdom on the bases of the treaty of 870. This treaty was renewed in 878
at Fouron on the Maas. The south was troubled by the revolt of Bernhard,
marquis of Gothia, who took arms and formed a league of malcontents. But
Bernhard, count of Auvergne, and Boson, duke of Provence, took from him
successively Gothia and several counties which he possessed in Burgundy.
[Illustration: LOUIS III AND CARLOMAN
(From an old print)]
[Sidenote: [879-885 A.D.]]
Louis the Stammerer, having fallen into a decline, died in 879 at
Compiègne leaving two sons, Louis and Carloman, of whom the eldest was
sixteen years old. The seigneurs were divided; some wished to proclaim
the young French princes, others to give the crown to the German prince,
Ludwig of Saxony. But the party of French princes was the most numerous
and the abbot Hugo, who was its leader, hastened to crown the two
brothers.[d] Two victories over the Northmen, notably that of Saucourt
in Vimeu, gave a little glory to these princes. But these advantages did
not prevent the recommencement of brigandage. In 885 the famous Hastings
gave up the county of Chartres, and Carloman paid the others of his race
to take themselves off. “They promised peace,” says the chronicler sadly,
“for as many years as we could count them one thousand pounds’ weight of
silver.” The two kings died by accident, Louis in 882, Carloman in 884.
One had governed the north of France, the other Burgundy and Aquitaine.
CHARLES THE FAT, KING AND EMPEROR (884-887 A.D.)
These two had a brother, Charles the Simple, but the nobles preferred a
grandson of Louis le Débonnaire, Charles the Fat, then emperor and king
of Germany. The whole heritage of Charlemagne was now reunited in Charles
the Fat’s hands. But times had changed. This man weighted down with so
many crowns could not even inspire terror in the Northmen.
[Sidenote: [885-887 A.D.]]
Charles had already ceded Friesland to one of their chiefs. Another, the
famous Rollo, a kind of giant who, as legend tells us, always went about
on foot because no horse could be found for his mount, had recently taken
Rouen and Pontoise and killed the duke of Le Mans. At the approach of
his countrymen, the new count of Chartres, the former pirate Hastings,
hastened to meet them and all marched upon Paris, which had already three
times submitted to the sack. But Paris had recently been fortified.
Great towers covered the bridges (Petit-Pont and Pont-au-Change) which
connected the island of the city of Paris with the two shores. The Seine
was then barricaded with seven hundred huge barges in which the Northmen
intended to voyage into Burgundy, a region they had not yet visited. The
inhabitants, encouraged by their bishop Gozlin and by Count Eudes, son
of Robert the Strong, held out for one year. The attack began November
26th, 885. The tower of the Grand-Pont, on the right bank, not being
finished, the Northmen assailed it. For two days they fought there with
great fury and Bishop Gozlin was wounded by a javelin. The Northmen were
driven back and intrenched themselves in a camp around the church of St.
Germain l’Auxerrois, where deserters soon taught them all the knowledge
of Roman military science that had survived the ages. The invaders first
built a three-storied rolling tower, but when they tried to bring it up
to the walls, the Parisians killed with arrows those who were moving
it. Then they advanced with battering-rams, some under portable screens
covered with raw leather for protection from fire, and some under
shields in the form of the Roman testudo. When they came to the edge of
the moat they began to fill it up with earth, fascines, whole trees, and
even the bodies of captives whom they put to death before the very eyes
of the besieged. While those farthest away drove off the defenders of
the battlements with a hail-storm of arrows and leaden ball, those close
to the tower hammered it with the rams; but all in vain. The Parisians
poured streams of boiling oil, wax, and molten pitch upon the enemy;
their catapults hurled huge rocks which crushed the assailants’ screens
and shields, and let down iron hooks which tore away the coverings and
made the enemy a target for their arrows. Three blazing ships floated
down to the bridge, were stopped by the abutting stone piles, and could
not set it on fire.
This hopeless resistance had lasted for more than two months when a
sudden rise of the river carried away, on the night of February 6th, 886,
a portion of the “Petit-Pont.” The Northmen immediately rushed upon the
tower on the left bank, now cut off from the city. Only twelve men were
stationed there, but they held out for a whole day and then retired,
still fighting, to the wreckage of the bridge. Finally they surrendered
on the promise that their lives would be saved, but as soon as the
barbarians got hold of these brave men they put them to death. One of
them, of gigantic frame, appeared to be a chief, and the Northmen decided
to spare him; but he begged to share the fate of his companions. “You
will never get ransom for my head,” he told them, and so forced them to
kill him.
Meanwhile reports of the Parisians’ courage had spread over the land and
others were emboldened to emulate their example. Several pirate bands
which had left the siege were beaten; the counsellor of the emperor
Charles, Duke Henry, succeeded even in getting relief into the besieged
town, but the pagans still maintained the blockade. Misery became extreme
in the city and many people died. Bishop Gozlin and the count of Anjou
“passed to the Lord.” The brave count Eudes managed to make his way out
and went to hasten the emperor’s arrival, and when he saw the latter
started, went back to his besieged people. The promised relief finally
appeared, Duke Henry at its head. Wishing to reconnoitre the situation
himself the duke advanced too near, and his horse fell into one of the
Northmen’s pits. Here he was killed and those who had come with him
were disbanded. Paris was once more left to its fate. The Northmen now
believed that despair reigned there, and that they could have the people
at little cost. They began a general attack, but the walls covered with
valiant defenders proved insurmountable. They then tried to fire the door
of the great tower, by heaping up against it a great wooden pile, but the
Parisians made a sudden sortie and drove back the assailants and the fire
at the same time.
At the end of long months, Charles finally arrived with his army on the
heights of Montmartre. The Parisians, filled with ardour, awaited the
signal of combat, when the news came to them that the emperor had bought
with money the withdrawal of their half vanquished enemy and given the
barbarians permission to “winter” in Burgundy, that is to say, to ravage
that province. They at least refused to be a party to this shameful
agreement, and when the Northmen’s ships presented themselves at the
bridges they refused to let them pass. The pirates had to drag their
boats upon the shore and made a wide detour in order to avoid the heroic
city (November, 886). The brave people of Sens imitated the courage of
the Parisians and resisted the Northmen for six months.
In that year Paris gloriously won its title of capital of France; and its
chief, the brave count Eudes, laid the foundation of the first national
dynasty. The contrast between the courage of the little city and the
cowardice of the emperor turned everyone against the unworthy prince.[b]
On all sides he was accused of indolence and incapacity. A great weakness
of body and spirit had come over him. The vassals wanted an able and
active king.
Those of Germany and Lorraine, assembled at Tribur, near Mainz, in
887, pronounced Charles’ deposition “because he was lacking,” says the
_Annals_ of St. Waast, “in the necessary strength to govern the empire.”
The feeble and unfortunate emperor suffered the fate of the “do-nothing”
Merovingian kings. He was shut up in the monastery of Reichenau,
on Lake Constance, and died in about two months.[d] The empire of
Charlemagne was irrevocably dismembered; its pieces served to form seven
kingdoms--France, Navarre, Cisjurane Burgundy, Transjurane Burgundy,
Lorraine, Italy, and Germany.
THE FEUDAL RÉGIME
[Sidenote: [843-887 A.D.]]
But it was not only the empire that was dismembered; it was also the
realm and royalty itself. At the close of Charlemagne’s reign, feudalism
was not yet founded, but it was almost completely established at the
death of Charles the Bald a half century afterwards. And this was because
the progress of feudal institutions was singularly hastened by the
historical events we have just been studying.
Royal authority at the end of Charles the Bald’s reign was ruined, as it
had been under the later Merovingians, for the same reasons and in the
same fashion. The king had no more money and he had no more land to give
away. He tried to take from the church, but the church resisted. The
bishops assembled in council at Meaux and at Paris in 846, in the early
years of the reign, advised Charles the Bald to send _missi dominici_ to
make a thorough investigation of the lands of the royal fisc, which had
been usurped. “You must not,” they told him, “let a state of poverty,
which does not accord with your dignity, push your magnificence to do
things you would not wish to do. You cannot have attendants to serve
you in your house, unless you have the means to pay them.” Here we see
royalty reduced to indigence. The king himself recognised it. “We wish,”
he said, one day, “to determine, with the advice of our faithful, how we
may live in our court honourably and without poverty, as our predecessor
did.”
Since the reign of Charles the Bald, public authority had disappeared.
The kingdom, ravaged by the Northmen, the Bretons, and the Aquitanians,
was in the throes of brigandage. Brigandage had sunk so deeply into
the customs of the country that oaths were exacted from freemen not to
attack houses or to conceal robbers. In his twenty-third capitulary
(857) the king, after speaking of the infinite evils caused not only by
the incursions of the pagans, but also by the vagabondage of some of
his own royal subjects, orders the bishops, counts, and _missi_ to call
together general meetings which everyone without exception must attend.
The bishop was to read to the gathering the precepts of the Gospels,
the fathers, and the prophets against brigandage. The capitulary itself
furnished quotations from Christ, the prophet Isaiah, St. Augustine and
St. Gregory. If these were not sufficient the bishop was to add all those
he might find himself. He was also to threaten all hardened sinners with
anathema, and to explain to them what a terrible punishment it was. On
their own side the counts and missi were to read the laws of Charles and
of Louis against brigandage.
If these readings had no effect the guilty man was threatened with the
sentence of the bishops and the prosecution of the judges. If he showed
contempt for the one or the other he could be summoned to the king’s
presence. If he refused to come he would be excluded from the holy
church, on earth as well as in heaven. He would be pursued until driven
from the realm. But to this there must be a public force, and such
existed no longer; and this is why the king was compelled to replace it
with sermons and threats of hell.
[Illustration: RUINS OF A NORMAN CHURCH, FRANCE]
In no age of history did the weak have more need of protection than
in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and this is why the last freemen
disappeared throughout a large portion of Gaul, especially north of the
Loire.
After having fled for a long time at the approach of the pagans to the
forest, among the wild beasts, some stout-hearted had turned their heads
and refused to abandon all they had without some attempt at defence. Here
and there in mountain gorges, at river fords, or on the hill overlooking
the plain, walled strongholds were raised up where the brave and the
strong held their own. An edict of 862 directed the counts and the
king’s vassals to repair their old castles and to build new ones. The
country was soon covered with these strongholds against which invaders
often flung themselves in vain. A few defeats taught these bold people
prudence, and they dared not venture so far amid these fortresses which
had sprung out of the ground on all sides, and the new invasion, now
made hazardous and difficult, came to an end in the following century.
The masters of these castles became later the terror of the country side
they had helped to save. Feudalism so oppressive in its age of decadence
had its legitimate term. All power is raised up by its good services and
falls by its abuses. These hedged and walled-in castles were places of
refuge from the Northmen, but often also they became nests of brigands.
However, little by little, out of the chaos came a new order of things.
We have seen how the king and his nobles assured themselves of the
services of a greater or less number of men by giving them benefices
or rather taking these men under their protection by making them their
vassals. One might be a beneficiary without being a vassal or a vassal
without being a beneficiary; in the days of Charles the Bald there
were vassals who held no land. These were the _vagi homines_, so often
mentioned in the prince’s edicts--brigands in search of fortune and who
transferred their loyalty from one noble to another at their pleasure.
It was to remedy these disorders and to organise these unruly members of
society that Charles the Bald ordered every freeman to choose a lord and
remain faithful to him.
Doubtless it happened more often than otherwise that the man who received
a piece of land made himself a vassal of the man who gave it to him, but
the two states finally became much confused. One might be at the same
time both beneficiary and vassal, and take upon himself the very narrow
obligations of one and the other condition. Indeed after a property had
been held for several generations by men who inherited their obligations
together with the land, it seemed as if the fief carried its rights and
duties with it and communicated them to those that held it. In the end
the property, which always remained, was considered rather than the men,
who came and went. It was no longer the weak man who bound himself to
the strong one but the little acreage to the great domain, and certain
formalities symbolised this new relation. The land became his in a manner
to replace itself in the hands of the great landlord, in the shape of a
clod of sod or the branch of a tree, which the petty proprietor brought
himself. This land, so burdened with obligations, was the fief.
When France became covered with fiefs each property had its own
organisation; it had its lord, great or small, and there was no land
without its lord. Whoever had no land had no condition, for there was
no lord without his land. Certain relations were established between
the different fiefs--there were some which were dominant and others
which were dominated. The dominant fiefs were those of the dukes and the
counts, who assumed all the power which royalty had delegated them and
who ruled as petty kings over their duchies and counties. Their vassals
and the latters’ sub-vassals depended upon them before depending upon the
king. As for the dukes and counts, they were the vassals of the king,
but as the feudal hierarchy developed, the obligation of the vassal
became, as a matter of fact, less strict. The duke of Burgundy’s vassals
obeyed him; of course the duke of Burgundy would not make the mistake of
disobeying the king.
Such was the great revolution accomplished at the end of the ninth and
in the tenth century. After the deposition of Charles the Fat appeared
the great fiefs whose names we find over and over again throughout the
whole of French history. The duke of Gascony owned all the country south
of the Garonne, and the counts of Toulouse, Auvergne, Périgord, Poitou,
and Berri, the district between the Garonne and the Loire. To the east
and north of the latter river everything belonged to the count of Forez,
the duke of Burgundy, the duke of France, and to the counts of Flanders
and Brittany who exercised their royal rights over the land. To the kings
remained only a few towns which he had not yet been constrained to give
away in fiefs.
THE CHURCH
In the ninth century royalty fell and feudalism arose; the former had
lost its strength, the latter had not yet acquired that which it was soon
to have. The church alone had all the power. She wanted nothing--the
authority in knowledge and morality, the ardent faith of the people,
rich domains--in fact, while everything was breaking up and civil and
political society going to pieces, the ecclesiastical body showed its
unity and its healthy condition in the fifty-six councils which were
held in the reign of Charles the Bald alone. The bishops, reasoning on
the right of the church to interfere in the conduct of every man guilty
of sin in order to correct and punish him, arrived logically at the
pretension that they could depose kings and dispose of their crowns. They
were not only the ministers of religion, but participated at the time
in the administration of public affairs. Since Charlemagne, who brought
them into the government of his empire, they may be found taking part in
all affairs and speaking everywhere with authority. These were they who
degraded and re-established Louis le Débonnaire, who told at Fontenailles
on which side justice lay. In 859 Charles the Bald, threatened with
deposition by some of the bishops because he violated his own laws, could
find nothing further to reply to this assumption of authority than that
“having been consecrated and anointed with the holy chrism, he could
not be overthrown on his throne, nor supplanted by anyone without being
heard and judged by the bishops who had crowned him king.” This right
Archbishop Hincmar, of Rheims, the most illustrious personage of his day,
had haughtily claimed.
This power of the church was a fortunate thing in these days, when might
made right, for she alone found herself in a position to keep alive the
idea that justice was above strength; and to oppose the aristocratic
principle of the feudal organisation, she put forward that of the
brotherhood of man. In place of hereditary primogeniture which prevailed
in civil society, she practised election for herself and proclaimed the
rights of the intellect. If the prerogative of deposing kings which she
claimed was a usurpation of temporal authority it must be recognised that
the latter had no antidote but the sacerdotal power, and the weak and
oppressed no other security than the protection of the churches. When
Lothair II, king of Lorraine, put away without reason Queen Thietberga
in order to marry Waldrada, Pope Nicholas I took up the poor, betrayed,
outraged woman’s cause, and at the risk of persecution established her
rights. While law was impotent and opinion without strength, it is well
that somewhere there existed an avenger of outraged morality.[b]
CAPETIANS AND CARLOVINGIANS (887-936 A.D.)
[Sidenote: [887-911 A.D.]]
Eight kings shared in the division of the empire through the deposition
of Charles the Fat. In France it was Eudes, count of Paris, who had just
defended that town against the Normans and whose glory was heightened by
contrast with the ignominious conduct of Charles the Fat.
The accession of Count Eudes was an important fact, although
overestimated perhaps, if one wishes to regard it as a bridge between
Gaul and France and between the Franks and the French. It was not the
beginning of a revolution of which he was the consummation; nor yet
a point of departure, for it was Frenchmen rather than Angevins who
fought with Robert the Strong at Brissarthe. However, apart from the
fact itself, the reign of the first French king was certainly important.
The Normans, turned loose upon Burgundy by Charles the Fat, had gone
still further; they threw themselves upon Champagne which they were
proceeding to ruin with fire and sword when the new king attacked them
in the defiles of the Argonne, near Montfaucon. A brilliant victory
made a worthy beginning to his reign, but that was all. Wearied by the
fruitless struggle, occupied elsewhere by the anxieties which Aquitaine
gave him where through race jealousy his “usurpation,” as the monks of
that time and the seventeenth century historians called it, had not
been recognised, and at a time when they placed at the head of acts,
_Christi regante: rege nullo_ (“in the reign of Christ and absence of
the king”). Eudes finally adopted the Carlovingian policy and drove the
Normans back with his purse. What brought about his ruin was that he
broke too abruptly with the feudalism that made him king. His cousin
Vaucher rebelled against royal authority. Eudes could not understand that
this authority was no longer anything but a phantom, even in his hands,
and he had his cousin’s head cut off after obtaining his submission. The
people deplored the light-hearted nonentity of a Carlovingian king, but a
faction which formed in favour of young Charles the Simple, youngest son
of Louis the Stammerer, waxed in strength until the former count of Paris
was obliged to capitulate. He admitted his rival to a sort of partnership
and at his death the kingdom of France returned to Germanic dominion, if
we can admit, that it is still possible to recall the Austrasian origin
of Charles the Simple (898).
Under this reign the people were finally delivered from the long Norman
invasion, which stopped of its own accord, and by act of the invaders
rather than resistance of the invaded. Since the time the Norman vassals
collected at the mouth of the Seine, the country round about had been
nothing but a desert, towns abandoned, villages in ashes; one could
travel whole leagues without even hearing a dog bark. Since there was
nothing more to be got they ran the risk of dying by hunger. The Normans
finally perceived with their positive spirit that it was better to take
possession of the land than to pillage its ruined inhabitants, and that
it was worth more to make these rich territories valuable than to get
sustenance from their ruins. Thenceforth everything was changed. The
fleets from the north brought colonists instead of pirates, and the
peasants found in their midst a protection which they could not have
gotten anywhere else.
[Sidenote: [911-923 A.D.]]
The new plan had been in operation for some time when a great emigration
was determined upon in the north, owing to the subjection of all the
chiefs under one head. The movement set out in the direction of Neustria
under the leadership of Rollo, the famous sea-king--one of those who had
assisted at the siege of Paris in the days of Charles the Fat, and had
established a fixed home in that country. For some years the new-comers
kept up their old practises. They burned St. Martin of Tours, and went
to Bourges and killed the bishop. Rollo reappeared before the towers
of the châtelet. Finally he came to an understanding with Charles the
Simple, who gave him his daughter Gisela in marriage and raised him to
the rank of the feudal barons, by legalising his seizure of Neustria.
Rollo became duke of Normandy, and the king of France’s vassal, not
without making the latter often feel that he troubled himself little
about the nominal suzerainty. When the time for doing homage came and
they wished him to do it in the Carlovingian manner, by kissing the
sovereign’s foot, “No, by God,” exclaimed the proud sea-king, and he
signed to one of his soldiers to kiss the royal foot for him. But the
soldier, not less proud, seized Charles’ foot and put it to his lips
without kissing it. The king fell back and his people remained dumb and
motionless amid the laughter of Rollo and his companions[2] (912). The
barbaric traits of the Normans did not prevent their quickly assimilating
the semi-civilisation they found in their new country. Normandy was
soon the most prosperous and best policed province in the kingdom. As
Ordericus Vitalis[i] says, a child could have crossed it in safety, a
purse full of gold in his hand. There runs a tale that one day while
hunting Rollo hung his gold bracelets on a tree and they remained there
two years without anyone’s daring to touch them.
Charles the Simple lost no time in indemnifying himself for the cession
of Neustria by the acquisition of Lorraine which became his on the death
of Louis the Child, son of the emperor Arnulf; but he did not profit long
by this addition to his realm. He had made a favourite of a person of low
degree, a man named Haganon. Haganon, more solicitous than his master
to uphold the royal dignity, soon displayed the desire of raising it,
to his own profit, from the state of subjection in which it was kept by
the powerful nobles. Two of the latter presented themselves four days in
succession to speak with the king and waited in vain at the door of his
bed-chamber. They finally went away thoroughly angry, saying that Haganon
would soon be king with Charles, or Charles a man of low condition with
Haganon. Of these two noblemen, one was Henry the Fowler, or the Saxon,
king of Germany, and the other Robert, duke of France, brother of the
late king Eudes.
In 920, at a court held at Soissons, the nobles assembled together, all
broke the blades of straw and threw them on the ground at the feet of
Charles the Simple, declaring that they disowned him as their king. Each
took his departure at once, and Charles remained alone on the spot where
the assemblage had met. There followed two years of hesitation, at the
end of which Robert, duke of France, caused himself to be proclaimed king
in the cathedral of Rheims by his vassals and those of his son-in-law,
Rudolf of Burgundy. Charles having retired to Lorraine, the new king
prepared to seek him as far as the foot of the Ardennes. He did not
anticipate any resistance, but Haganon purchased the services of a
band of Normans, living along the Maas, which Charles led in person
into Robert’s domains. A battle took place on the plain of St. Médard
(Soissons) near the Aisne (923). Robert, throwing his long white beard
over his coat of arms, seized his banner and flung himself into the
mêlée. He fell upon Fulbert, his rival’s standard-bearer, when Charles
cried out, “Take care, Fulbert.” The standard-bearer, turning, dodged
the blow which Robert was aiming, and cleft the duke’s head with his
sword. Charles the Simple gained nothing by this. Robert’s son, Hugh,
hastened up with his brother-in-law, Héribert de Vermandois, and remained
to the end master of the battle-field, strewn with eighteen thousand dead.
[Sidenote: [923-927 A.D.]]
Of the two men who had claimed the title of king that morning, one lay
cold in death, the other was dethroned by defeat. Robert’s son sent to
consult his sister Emma, wife of Rudolf of Burgundy, to know what he
should do with the crown on his hands. Emma replied that she would prefer
to kiss the knees of her husband rather than those of her brother, and
Rudolf was made king (July 13th, 923).
The aged Rollo was now minded of the homage which he had formerly held so
cheaply, and as faithful vassal loudly declared himself the protector of
the vanquished king. Doubtless he preferred such a sovereign as Charles
the Simple to a connection with that powerful house of the dukes of
France, who moved everything at their pleasure. Unfortunately he did not
have the king in his hands. Charles had taken refuge at Bonn with the
king of Germany, the same Henry the Fowler whom he had once kept waiting
at his own door. He wished now to make use of the services of Héribert of
Vermandois, who swore to replace him on the throne. The king sought Count
Héribert at the gates of St. Quentin, where the latter knelt and kissed
the king’s knee. The count’s son refused to do the same and Héribert took
him by the neck and forced him to kneel. Then he conducted the king into
St. Quentin and entertained him with great magnificence. But the next day
he had him seized in the night and conducted to Château Thierry, whence
they carried him to the tower of Péronne. Héribert then marched with
Rudolf against the Normans, who were with great difficulty driven back
from the Île-de-France and Beauvoisis. Rudolf believed himself mortally
wounded during an encounter in Artois and the inhabitants of Laon saw him
carried into their city on a barrow. Rollo died a short time afterwards,
leaving as successor his son, William Longsword.
[Illustration: RUDOLF, KING OF FRANCE]
[Sidenote: [927-942 A.D.]]
The count of Vermandois had not undertaken this piece of treachery
for nothing, and had already obtained the archbishopric of Rheims for
his son, a child of five years. They placed the boy on a table in the
presence of the bishops, and after stammering a few words of catechism,
he was consecrated with the approbation of the onlookers. But even
this did not satisfy the father’s ambition, who demanded the county of
Laon for himself. Rudolf, who was finding his restless and dangerous
auxiliary too powerful, feared perhaps the fate of Charles the Simple,
and met the demand with a refusal. Thereupon Héribert dragged Charles
from prison, clothed him in rich raiment, and took him to the court
of William Longsword, who saluted him as king. This was all that was
needed to decide Rudolf, who ceded the county of Laon, and Charles was
put back in Péronne. But when Héribert tried to commence the same game
again, Rudolf this time took up arms and pressed him so hotly that he
was obliged to flee to Germany. There now remained to him nothing but
Péronne, but Henry the Fowler, the count of Flanders, and the duke of
Lorraine interfered; Rudolf gave him back his possessions and died soon
after without a male heir (936). Charles the Simple had preceded him by
a few years to the tomb (929). The vacant throne was for a second time
at the disposition of the duke of France, who did not want it, since
he found it much pleasanter to remain peacefully in real possession,
pre-eminent as he was among the feudal lords, than to plunge himself
into interminable controversies by placing on his head a crown which
had become the target for so much contention. Rudolf’s enemies, of whom
we have mentioned but a small part, had much reason to support the duke
in this resolution. Hugh now remembered that at the time of the fall of
Charles the Simple the latter’s wife Odgiwe had taken to England their
son Louis, then a child, but now, after thirteen years of exile, entering
upon his sixteenth year. Hugh congratulated himself on his great mind and
went after him.
THE LAST CARLOVINGIANS (936-987 A.D.)
Louis IV, surnamed Louis d’Outre-Mer on account of his long sojourn on
the other side of the Channel, occupied the throne eighteen years, but
his reign was one long humiliation. Hugh exploited his generosity to the
king, as Héribert had done about his treachery, and scarcely got him
to the shores of France than he dragged him to the duchy of Burgundy
and made Louis invest him with it; and moreover Louis had the chagrin
of seeing that his act was useless. Hugh the Black, Rudolf’s brother,
bravely defended his heritage. The royal signature served nothing to
the duke of France who, armed as he was, could only snatch a few shreds
from the duchy of Burgundy. Thwarted in his ambition he turned to other
things and demanded the county of Laon. Following Rudolf’s example, Louis
refused this demand, but for a still more powerful reason. The county
of Laon was the sole domain left the crown through the usurpations of
feudalism. Louis, who would have been nothing more than a stranger in
his kingdom if this were taken from him, preferred a one-sided struggle.
Fortunately for him, the emperor Otto came to his rescue, but not before
he was besieged in his own city, and deserted by his most faithful
partisans. The presence of the imperial army saved him from disaster, but
Otto when he went home did not leave him any the stronger. Incapable of
holding his own so close to the duke of France, Louis appeared before the
people of Aquitaine, always favourably disposed towards the Carlovingian
kings, since they had nothing to fear from them and had shown no more
preference for the kingship of Duke Rudolf than they had for that of
Count Eudes. Well received everywhere, Louis nevertheless encountered but
a sterile compassion, and must have thought himself fortunate in that
the duke of France, become more formidable than ever since the death of
Héribert de Vermandois, was willing to await an occasion of revolt or
rather of war.
[Illustration: LOUIS IV
(From an old print)]
[Sidenote: [942-948 A.D.]]
Meanwhile William Longsword had met a tragic end, assassinated by Arnulf,
count of Flanders, after an interview on one of the islands of the Somme,
in December, 942. He left one son named Richard, only ten years old.
The moment was now favourable for Louis to assert the royal authority,
inactive in his hands. He appeared at once in Rouen, received the homage
of the young Richard, and made himself the child’s guardian. The people
nearly besieged the house in which he lodged when they learned that he
intended to take the boy back to Laon, but a few tactful words calmed
everything. But once he had the young duke in his palace he used no
more caution. The child, separated from all his Norman attendants, even
from his tutor, found himself in truth a captive. The people who looked
after him were severely reprimanded on one occasion for having taken him
outside the city on a hunt for birds. Evidently the king’s intention was
to strengthen the royal crown by putting it under the protection of the
ducal crown of Normandy. Osmond, Richard’s tutor, cut this dream short by
a bold stratagem. Disguised as a groom he managed to get near his pupil,
enveloped him in a bale of hay, and carried him thus on his shoulders to
the outskirts of Laon, where horses were waiting. Touched to the quick
Louis d’Outre-Mer appealed to the ambition of Hugh of France and proposed
to share Normandy with him if he would help get it back. Hugh agreed, but
scarcely was Louis established in Normandy than he forgot his promises
and sent the duke back to Paris. But the king paid dearly for this breach
of faith. At news of the subjection with which their Neustrian brothers
were threatened, the Northmen sent a large fleet under the command of
Harold, the Dane. A battle took place on the banks of the Dive, not far
from Rouen, in which the French were completely routed (945). Louis,
wandering swordless through the country at the will of his horse, whose
bridle had been cut by sword-blows, met a soldier from Rouen who, anxious
for the king’s safety, concealed him on an island in the Seine, where
however he was discovered. The king’s liberty was negotiated with great
show by Hugh of France, who finally got him out of the Normans’ hands.
Great was the surprise when the end of this fine devotion became known.
From his Norman prison Louis entered another which Hugh was determined
he should not leave until he gave up the city and county of Laon. After
this last misfortune Louis seemed less a king than a ruined lord. He
filled the German court with his plaints, wrote to the pope, and summoned
councils. Councils, pope, and emperor all failed before Hugh’s will.
Finally tired of the fight, and knowing well that Louis would be none the
more formidable with it, Hugh gave the county back to the king, who did
not enjoy it for long. Four years later, while pursuing a wolf on the
road from Rheims to Laon, Louis’ horse threw him and he died from the
fall (954).
[Sidenote: [948-980 A.D.]]
Hugh had obtained a part of Burgundy on the return of Louis d’Outre-Mer;
he now made use of the accession of Louis’ son Lothair, to have Aquitaine
given him. But this time again, the royal sanction was powerless.
William, duke of Aquitaine, received the invader in arms, and the war
lasted for two years, when the duke of France died. He had named two
kings and permitted a third to reign. Hugh Capet, his eldest son,
inherited the duchy of France, and at the same time his father’s great
influence, which he used in more moderate fashion.
He never came into hostility with Lothair throughout the latter’s whole
reign. He looked on quietly while the king was active in the east, west,
and north, trying to get his hands on Normandy, seizing some territory
from the count of Flanders, which he had to give back, and making
military excursions into Lorraine as far as the borders of Germany. This
fruitless activity, this restless desire to attempt hopeless conquests,
was in singular contrast with Hugh Capet’s power of repose. One would
have said that the latter divined the future and that he disdained to
forestall fortune by a single step in the belief of what would come to
him.
In all this empty reign there is but one event that offers anything
of interest. During an expedition in Lorraine (978), the principal
object of his covetousness, Lothair came unexpectedly upon Aachen
(Aix-la-Chapelle), where Otto II was then staying. The emperor was about
to sit down to table when the arrival of the king of France forced him
to flee, and Lothair ate the dinner prepared for Otto. Otto swore to
sing to him beneath the walls of Paris such a Halleluiah as the king had
never heard; and what seemed like an angry piece of bravado was really
carried out. The emperor appeared with sixty thousand men upon the
heights of Montmartre after having ravaged the country around Rheims,
Laon, and Soissons, and caused to be intoned by a number of clerks the
Halleluiah with which he had threatened Parisian ears, and in the chorus
of which this whole army joined.[3] Paris was avenged for this din; for
in crossing the Aisne, swollen by storms, on his return, Otto lost his
booty, baggage, and all his rearguard (980). It is true that he carried
away with him the remembrance of the most formidable psalmody of which
history makes mention, and the honour of having planted his lance in
one of the gates of Paris; but these were rather frivolous achievements
for the son of Otto the Great, and his Halleluiah would certainly have
produced much more effect had he taken his sixty thousand men to sing it
at Rome.[f]
The campaign, however, was successful in having raised mutual disgust
between Lothair and Hugh Capet, the latter finding himself exposed to
incursions and ravage from the idle ambition and provocation of Lothair,
who was unable to support him by any force; while Lothair, on his side,
saw that Hugh merely protected his own territories, without caring for
Laon or Lorraine. Lothair, therefore, became reconciled to Otto, held
a meeting with him on the Maas, and, as the price of the emperor’s
friendship, waived his pretensions to Lorraine, at which his followers’
hearts _corda Francorum_, says the Chronicle of St. Denis,[j] were much
saddened. If the descendant of Charlemagne gave up his claims upon
Lorraine to Otto, it was idle for Hugh Capet to remain in hostility with
the German emperor. The latter, after his pacification with Lothair,
had gone to Italy; thither Hugh Capet sent, proffering friendship and
alliance with Otto. The reply was an invitation to the duke to visit the
emperor in Italy: a request with which Hugh Capet complied, to the great
anxiety and suspicion of Lothair, who, according to Richer,[k] used every
effort to have Hugh’s return intercepted. The latter felt it necessary to
pass the Alps in the disguise of a groom, and thus returned to his duchy.
[Sidenote: [980-987 A.D.]]
Otto II expired in 982. Henry of Bavaria claimed the throne, setting
aside the right of the future Otto III, a boy of but five years of age;
and Lothair, alive to every opportunity of gaining Lorraine, leagued
with Henry, and undertook an expedition to the Rhine. The people of
the country were, however, hostile to him, and he retreated with some
difficulty. In the following year he was more fortunate; aided by
Héribert of Troyes, he succeeded in winning possession of the strong
town of Verdun, from the walls of which he repelled all the efforts of
the Lorraine chiefs to expel him. A gleam of prosperity thus shone upon
Lothair, when death carried him off in 986. His eldest son, who had been
crowned by anticipation several years previous, succeeded to the hopeful
position of his father. Even Hugh Capet seemed inclined to restore his
friendship and protection, as the first act of the young king was, in
concert with the duke, to march to the reduction of the archiepiscopal
town of Rheims.
It is considered by M. Thierry, who has been in general followed by
modern French historians, that the principal cause which about this
time led to the enthronement of Hugh Capet as king of France or of the
French, in place of the Carlovingian princes, was the antipathy of race,
and especially that of French against Germans, which prompted the chiefs
and the population of the central provinces to throw off the yoke of
the Germans, which the Lorraine or Belgian princes were to a certain
degree. A study of the records and chronicles of the time does not lead
to this conclusion. On the contrary, they prove beyond a question that
the personages and the party which were most influential in awarding the
crown definitively to Hugh Capet were precisely Belgian or Lorraine, and
attached moreover to German interests.
Hitherto the Carlovingian princes had maintained their hold and
influence in their own circumscribed territories by the support of the
archiepiscopal church of Rheims, which maintained its jealousy both of
the duke of Paris and of the German emperor, labouring at the same time
to save and to recover its church property, as best it might, from the
counts ever ready to despoil it.
Adalbero, son of Godfrey, count of the Ardennes, had been promoted
to that see, and had laboured to reform and restore it. The prelate
Adalbero was not what his predecessor had been, a devoted partisan of
the Carlovingian princes. He saw that they were too weak to protect the
church, especially that of Rheims, which, situated between the frontiers
of two great nations, was continually the spoil of both. Adalbero,
connected with all the German noblesse and princely families of Lorraine,
was for preserving that province for the young emperor Otto; and his
letters of exhortation written by Gerbert, addressed to all the prelates
and counts of the border region, entreat them to resist all the efforts
of Lothair and Louis, whilst recommending that they make a friend of
Hugh, duke of France.
Policy so hostile to them on the part of the prelate of Rheims excited
the inveterate enmity of the Carlovingian princes; and, at length, Louis
marched to reduce Rheims with an army that Adalbero could not for the
moment resist, for he gave hostages to answer for his conduct before
an assembly that was to be convened. The prelate did this, apparently,
in connivance with Hugh Capet, between whom and Adalbero there was in
all probability an early agreement to aim at the setting aside of the
Carlovingians, and the division between the German emperor and Hugh
Capet of the countries between France and Lorraine. The great obstacle to
the completion of such a scheme, young king Louis, was at this very time
carried off.[g] As the result of a fall from a horse “he was seized with
a great pain in his liver and a burning fever; much blood flowed from
his nose and throat”; he died May 21st, 987. Such is the simple account
of the contemporary, Richer.[k] But if Adhémar de Chabannes[l] and other
more recent chroniclers are to be believed Louis died “the same death as
his father, of a poisoned draught given by his wife.” This more dramatic
tradition has prevailed with the greatest number. The multitude were not
willing to believe that so famous a dynasty could have come to an end by
a burning fever or a commonplace accident. Both father and son died most
opportunely for Hugh Capet, and what we know of the moral tone of that
century allows us to suspect anything: but the testimony of Richer lends
all the more weight to Hugh’s justification, since the monk of Rheims is
a partisan of the ancient dynasty and not of the Capets.[h]
The meeting of chiefs and prelates already summoned at Compiègne to
hear Louis’ accusation of Adalbero took place. But no accuser appeared.
Charles the uncle of Louis held aloof. By his conduct as lord of Cambray,
which dignity he had accepted under the suzerainty of the emperor, he had
alienated the clergy, the French or Franci, both of Laon and of the duchy
of France, as well as public opinion in general. He had made a lowly
marriage, lived a dissipated life, and had, in fine, but few friends.
Hugh Capet took upon himself to absolve Adalbero of the crime laid to his
charge, that crime being treason to the Carlovingian family, which was
then in the thoughts and purposes of all. It was, however, judged right
to defer the final decision, and to appoint another meeting at Senlis,
where, after due reflection and deliberation, a solemn resolve might be
made. In the interval between the assemblies, Charles came to remonstrate
with Adalbero. The prelate repelled him as one given to the worst vices
and the worst associates. When the second meeting took place at Senlis,
Adalbero represented Charles as unworthy of the crown, which he declared
had never been hereditary. And no doubt Adalbero, as archbishop of
Rheims, had in view the example of Hatto, archbishop of Mainz, who, on
the extinction of the German Carlovingians, had rendered the crown of the
empire elective, and attributed to the church and its metropolitan the
chief influence in the election. Hugh Capet was therefore unanimously
declared king in the midsummer of 987, and was solemnly crowned soon
after at Noyon.[g]
[Illustration]
FOOTNOTES
[1] [The gradual re-absorption of these fiefs or provinces into the royal
domain is the story of the development of the French monarchy. They were
annexed at different periods by conquest, purchase, voluntary or forced
cession, confiscation, forfeiture, inheritance, marriage, or treaty. The
reader is referred to the chronological table for the dates and manner of
these annexations.]
[2] [“In this unseemly manner,” says White,[e] “the pirate of the Baltic,
and worshipper of the almost forgotten Odin, took his place among the
Christian chivalry of Europe as duke of Normandy and one of the twelve
peers of France.” On his conversion Rollo took the name of Robert.]
[3] [It must be stated that this incident, though related by many
historians, is based solely upon tradition.]
[Illustration]
CHAPTER II. THE FOUNDATION OF THE CAPETIAN DYNASTY
[Sidenote: [987-1180 A.D.]]
The period of 240 years--from the accession of Hugh Capet to that of
St. Louis--is described by Sismondi[i] as “a long interregnum, during
which the authority of king was extinct, although the name continued
to subsist.” A history of France, during this period, is a history not
of its monarch but of its nobles. And as yet these details are neither
heroic nor important enough to be interesting. A duke had sprung up in
Aquitaine, a king in Provence. The establishment of the Norman princes
has already been narrated. Betwixt them and Aquitaine, Anjou obeyed a
warlike count. To the north, the first Baldwin possessed the county
of Flanders betwixt the Somme and the Maas. The duchy of Burgundy was
formed in the east; whilst that of Lorraine was altogether independent of
France, and held by tongue as well as régime to the empire of Germany.
Taking away these provinces from the map of France, a central portion
will be found to remain betwixt the Loire and the Flemish border. Even
here, however, the last Carlovingians possessed scarcely a castle which
they could call their own. The counts of Paris possessed that city, as
well as Orleans. The counts of Vermandois, whose capital was St. Quentin,
at this time ruled Champagne also; but soon after that province came
to increase the territories of the counts of Blois. The only town that
obeyed the last reigning descendants of Charlemagne was Laon, and here
they usually resided, unless when obliged to take refuge at Rheims, under
the protection of the archbishop, against the attacks of the surrounding
nobles.
Charles of Lorraine, the uncle of Louis V and sole heir of the
Carlovingians, though thus prevented of his rights, was neither
friendless nor vanquished. He soon took forcible possession of Laon and
of Rheims, from which Hugh Capet was unable to drive him by force of
arms. He adroitly, however, contrived to attach to his interests Ascelin,
bishop of Laon, whom Charles, somewhat mistrusting, kept with him at
Rheims. A conspiracy, formed by Ascelin, was attended with complete
success. Charles was seized in his bed, and, together with his nephew,
the archbishop of Rheims, delivered over to Hugh Capet. That monarch
placed his prisoners in confinement at Orleans, where the competitor,
Charles of Lorraine, soon after died (991).
[Sidenote: [991-996 A.D.]]
These, if we except a long quarrel respecting the archbishopric of
Rheims, are the sole events of the reign of Hugh Capet, which is supposed
to have occupied nine years. Some modern historians regard the founder
of the third dynasty of French monarchs as a hero and a master spirit,
whose talents won for him a crown. Others, amongst whom is Sismondi,[i]
represent him as a pious sluggard, indebted solely to fortune for his
elevation. Both are in extreme. We see no proof of his heroism. But his
was an iron age, in which the exertions of individuals had slight power
in changing the course of events. Nor does it follow that, because he
was pious, he was pusillanimous. He made war on the count of Montreuil,
to recover the relics of St. Riquier, which that count had stolen. Hugh
Capet compelled him to surrender them, and himself bore the memorable
remains on his royal shoulders to the abbey of the saint. Such is the
account of the chroniclers. But if we observe that Hugh at the same time
built and fortified Abbeville, the monarch will not seem altogether sunk
in the superstitious votary.
[Illustration: ROBERT II, KING OF FRANCE]
“Who made thee count?” demanded Hugh Capet of a refractory noble,
supposed by some to be Talleyrand, count of Angoulême. “The same right
that made thee king,” was the bold reply. Such was the measure of the
new monarch’s authority. The great feudatories, in consenting to place
the crown on one of their own body, thought less of his elevation than
of humbling the throne. Their views were sound, if they considered but
themselves--short sighted, if they looked forward to posterity. Feudality
ascended the throne with Hugh Capet; and, despite the precautions or
intentions of the founders, the head of so powerful a system could not
long remain powerless himself. Organised as society now was in regular
and successive gradations of inferior and superior, a supreme chief
became necessary to complete the whole. There was something wanting to
crown the structure. The nobles imagined to adorn it with the lifeless
image of royalty. But their statue, like Pygmalion’s, took life as it
became the object of veneration, and grew at length to wield its sceptre
with a muscular arm.
[Sidenote: [996-1035 A.D.]]
Hugh Capet had taken the precaution to have his son crowned and
consecrated during his own lifetime. Thus, on the demise of the former,
Robert II found himself the undisputed king of France. The young monarch
was one of those soft, domestic tempers which fate so often misplaces
on a throne. He had married Bertha, the widow of the count of Blois,
and was tenderly attached to her. The spouses had the misfortune to be
distantly related, and Robert had been godfather to one of Bertha’s
children by her former husband. The pope considered these circumstances
sufficient to render the marriage incestuous; and he accordingly issued
a command to Robert, desiring him to put away Bertha, under pain of
excommunication. The popes had erected themselves into the censors of
princes, and they were especially rigid in prohibiting the marriage of
cousins. Such unions, they said, drew down divine vengeance, and were to
be avoided, lest they should produce national calamities. Nor was this
mere superstition on their part: it had its policy. It was chiefly by
intermarriages that the great aristocracy at this time increased their
territories and influence. Every obstacle thrown in the way of these
alliances consequently checked the growth of their exorbitant might;
every difficulty or scruple, being in the power of the pontiff alone to
remove, brought considerable advantage, both in revenue and respect, to
the holy see. Robert struggled for four or five years in behalf of his
legitimate wife, against the terrors of excommunication; but he was at
length compelled to yield, to chase poor Bertha from his presence, and
to take another wife, Constance, the daughter of the count of Toulouse.
With her, a woman of more spirit than her predecessor, Robert was less
happy. The monarch dreaded her, and was even obliged to do his alms in
secret for fear of her reproof. His chief amusement was the singing and
composing of psalms, to which the musical taste of that age was confined.
In a pilgrimage to Rome, Robert left a sealed paper on the altar of
the apostles. The priesthood expected it to contain a magnificent
donation, and were not little surprised and disappointed to find it to
contain but a hymn of the monarch’s composition. The piety of Robert was
most exemplary. He was anxious to save his subjects from the crime of
perjury; the means he took were to abstract privately the holy relics
from the cases which contained them, and on which people were sworn. He
substituted an ostrich’s egg, as an innocent object, incapable of taking
vengeance on the false swearer.
Such are the facts which we have to relate of a reign of nearly
thirty-five years. The good king Robert slumbered on his throne, with a
want of vigour and capacity that would have caused a monarch of the first
two races to totter from his seat, or at least would have transferred
his authority to some minister or powerful duke. The Capetians as yet,
however, unlike the Carlovingians, had neither power nor prerogative to
tempt the ambition of a usurper. The very title of king was unenvied. And
whilst the sovereign led the choir at St. Denis, France was not the less
vigorously governed by its independent and feudal nobility.[b]
HENRY I (1031-1060 A.D.)
[Sidenote: [1031-1060 A.D.]]
Robert’s son and successor, Henry I, had first of all to sustain a family
war against his mother, Constance, who put his young brother Robert
on the throne. The church declared for Henry, and the famous Robert
the Magnificent, more commonly known as Robert le Diable, duke of the
Normans, lent him the support of his sword and secured the crown upon
Henry’s head. Henry vanquished his brother, pardoned and granted him the
duchy of Burgundy, the first house of which was founded by Robert. During
this reign a famine made terrible ravage among the French and in several
places men ate one another. Following this scourge, troops of wolves
devastated the country, and the lords, more terrible than wild beasts,
carried on their barbaric wars in the midst of this widespread desolation.
[Illustration: EXCOMMUNICATION OF ROBERT THE PIOUS]
The clergy with difficulty husbanded their anger in calling the vengeance
of heaven upon this state of affairs and in affirming a multitude of
miracles, and finally, in councils, ordered everyone to lay down his
arms. They put forward the “Peace of God” in 1035, and threatened
excommunication to those who violated so holy a decree. When the council
in each province had formulated this peace deacons made it known to the
people assembled in the churches. After the Gospel had been read the
deacons mounted the pulpits and launched against infractors of the peace
the following malediction: “Cursed be they who aid in doing evil; cursed
be their arms and their horses! may they be banished with Cain, the
fratricide, with Judas the traitor; with Dathan and Abiram, who descended
living into hell. May their joy be extinguished at the sight of the holy
angels as are these flames before your eyes.” At these words the priests
who were holding lighted tapers threw them down and put them out, while
the people, seized with fear, repeated with one voice, “May God thus
extinguish the joy of those who will not accept peace and justice.”
[Illustration: HENRY I
(From an old engraving)]
But passions were too rampant and ambitions, too indomitable for evil
thus to be rooted out entirely. The Peace of God only multiplied
perjurers without diminishing assassins. Five years later another law
known as the “Truce of God” was substituted for it. The councils which
proclaimed this did not try to stop the flow of all human passions but to
control them and regulate war according to laws of honour and humanity.
Recourse to force was no longer forbidden to those who could invoke
no other law, but the employment of this means was submitted to wise
restrictions. All military attack and all shedding of blood was forbidden
from sunset Wednesday evening to sunrise Monday morning, as well as on
all fast and feast days. A perpetual inviolability was accorded the
churches, unarmed clerics, and monks, while the protection of the truce
was extended to the peasants, their flocks, and implements of tillage.
Promulgated first in Aquitaine, this wise and beneficial law was adopted
throughout almost all Gaul, where the lords swore to observe it; and
although it was often violated and soon fell into desuetude, it did much
good in softening the manners of the nation and was the finest work of
the mediæval clergy. Rumour spread that a horrible malady known as the
“sacred fire” would punish infractors of the truce. The weakling king
Henry, through “unreasonable pride,” was almost the only one to refuse
to recognise it within his estates, giving as a pretext that it was an
encroachment of the clergy upon his authority.
This king has left no creditable impression upon history.[d] Save for a
few expeditions into Normandy, most of which were unfortunate, he did
nothing. In 1046 he refused the homage of the duke of Upper and Lower
Lorraine, and even allowed the count of Flanders to declare for the
emperor of Germany as suzerain.[c]
It is said that from fear of unwittingly marrying a wife who might be
allied to him by ties of blood, he sought one at the extremities of
Europe, and married for his third wife the princess Anne, daughter of the
grand duke Yaroslaff of Russia. Henry had three sons by this marriage, of
whom he caused the eldest, Philip, to be made joint king in the last year
of his life. He died in 1060 after a reign of twenty-nine years.[d]
_Deeds of the Great Barons_
[Sidenote: [1028-1054 A.D.]]
The king did nothing, but the great lords accomplished much. Three
especially filled France with the noise of their ambitions and their
wars. Robert, surnamed the Magnificent by the nobles and the Devil by
the people, had usurped the ducal crown of Normandy by poisoning his
brother Richard III and his chief barons at a feast (1028). By force of
energy and courage he crushed the opposition which his crime aroused and,
uncontested sovereign of Normandy, interfered with all his neighbours.
He upheld King Henry I against his brother, for which he received the
French Vexin in return. He set out to oust Canute the Great from the
throne of England for the profit of the sons of Ethelred, his cousin;
but a storm having driven his fleet from the English coast upon that
of Brittany, he invaded this country and forced the duke Alain to do
him homage (1033). In 1035 struck with remorse he went to seek peace of
conscience at Jerusalem. While returning he died in Asia Minor. Below
Rouen, in one of the most beautiful positions in Normandy, you may see
a hill covered with shapeless ruins. These are the remains of Robert
le Diable’s castle, which, according to tradition, was haunted by evil
spirits. The place is not far from the spot where John Lackland is said
to have stabbed his nephew.
The son and successor of Robert the Magnificent was William the Bastard,
who had much to do to obtain the obedience of his vassals: the battle
of Val-des-Dunes, near Caen (1046), finally rid him of his adversaries.
King Henry, his suzerain, who fought that day on his side, soon found the
young duke too powerful, and formed an alliance of all his enemies. This
was the cause of numerous encounters between the Normans and the French
(inhabitants of the Île-de-France), the latter in every event sustained
by the Angevins and the Bretons. The bloodiest of these combats was that
fought at Mortemer in 1054. The king supported by the count of Anjou had
entered Normandy through the county of Évreux, while his brother Eudes
penetrated the Pays de Caux with horsemen from Picardy, Champagne, and
Burgundy.
Duke William met this double invasion with two armies--that which marched
against Eudes encountered, near Mortemer, the French, dispersed, and
engaged in pillaging. The Normans killed some, took others, and put the
rest to flight. Swift messengers bore the good news to the duke. “When
night had come he despatched one of his men who climbed a tree near the
king’s camp and began to utter loud cries. The sentinels asked why he
thus cried aloud at an unseemly hour. ‘My name is Raoul de Ternois,’
he replied, ‘and I bring you bad news. Take your wagons and carts to
Mortemer to carry away your friends who are dead, for the French came
against us to test the Normans’ chivalry, and they have found it much
greater than they liked. Eudes, their standard-bearer, has been put to
flight in shame; and Guy, count of Ponthieu, has been taken. All the
others have been made prisoners or are dead, or have had great difficulty
in saving themselves by rapid flight. Announce at once this news to the
king of the French, on the part of the duke of Normandy.’” The frightened
king retired in all haste, and Geoffrey Martel was obliged to abandon to
William the sovereignty of Maine.
Eudes II, count of Blois, desired to seize the kingdom of Provence and
afterwards Lorraine, and to this reconstructed Lorraine he hoped to add
the crown of Italy. But a battle in Barrois ended the schemes of the
turbulent baron. Eudes was defeated and killed (1037); his wife alone was
able to recognise his body among the corpses which strewed the field,
and pay the last honours to his remains.
[Sidenote: [987-1066 A.D.]]
A prince against whom Eudes often fought, Fulk (Foulques) Nerra--or
the Black--count of Anjou, was even more renowned. Thrice did he make
pilgrimages to the Holy Land. On the last he caused himself to be drawn
on a sledge, naked, and with rope around the neck, through the streets of
Jerusalem, whipped the while with great blows by two valets, and crying
with all his might, “Lord have mercy on the traitor, the perjurer Fulk.”
Then he attempted to return on foot, but died on the way (1040). Fulk
had indeed many crimes to expiate. Queen Constance was his niece. One
day she complained to him of one of her husband’s favourites, and Fulk
immediately despatched twelve knights with orders to stab the favourite
wherever they might find him. Of his two wives, he had one burned to
death, or according to other accounts stabbed her himself after she had
been rescued from a precipice over which he tried to throw her; the other
he compelled by ill treatment to retire to Palestine. His son Geoffrey
Martel was also a fighter. He tried by force of arms in 1036 to compel
his father to cede him the county of Anjou, but the old Fulk defeated and
made him undergo the punishment of the _harnescar_. The rebel son had to
travel several miles on all fours, a saddle on his back, to reach the
count’s feet and implore his pardon.
Geoffrey Martel, jealous of the duke of Normandy’s power, united with
Henry I against him. His successors kept up this policy and the kings
of France found the Angevin counts useful allies against the Norman
duke--now become kings of England, at least until the moment the counts
inherited the English crown themselves. It is related that Geoffrey
Martel’s wife was fond of reading, but such was the scarcity of books
that she was obliged to give two hundred sheep, five quarters of wheat,
and as much rye and millet for a manuscript of the homilies. The
beautiful cathedral of Angers was begun under Fulk Nerra.[c]
PHILIP I (1060-1108 A.D.)
Philip I at the age of eight succeeded his father under the regency
of Baldwin V, count of Flanders. The most important event of Philip’s
minority, and one in which he took no part, was the conquest of England.
The Norman knights were distinguished above all others by their
immoderate desire for warlike adventure and their brilliant exploits.
Some of them, landing sixty years before as pilgrims on the south coast
of Italy, had helped the besieged inhabitants of Salerno to drive off a
Saracen army. Inspired by the success of their compatriots, the sons of a
petty nobleman, Tancred de Hauteville, followed by a band of adventurers,
wrested Apulia from the Greeks, Lombards, and Arabs, and sustained
with success a most unequal struggle against the German and Byzantine
emperors, who joined forces to exterminate them. They made prisoner the
German pope Leo IX, devoted to the family of the emperor Henry III;
and, humbling themselves before their captive, obtained permission to
hold their conquest as a fief of the church. Robert Guiscard completed
the subjection of Apulia and Calabria, and his brother Roger conquered
Sicily, and it was thus the Normans founded the kingdom of the Two
Sicilies and the pope obtained suzerainty over it.
Norman valour was the talk of Europe, when William the Bastard, son of
Robert the Magnificent, began to assemble an army for the conquest of
England. Warriors, full of confidence in his destiny, rushed from all
directions to his standard.[4] It was several hundred years since Britain
had been conquered by the Saxons, and the country was now under the rule
of King Harold, whom a storm had once wrecked, before he was king, upon
the coast of Normandy. As William’s prisoner, Harold was compelled to
cede the Norman his rights to the throne; and when free at this price no
longer considered himself bound by an oath extracted under compulsion. It
was the custom in those days to consider shipwrecked persons as delivered
by the judgment of God to the lord of the shore on which the storm had
cast them. They could be held captive and even put to torture for the
sake of ransom. William recalled to Harold his promise, especially
invoked the will of Edward the Confessor, the last king of England, and
declared his willingness to abide by the decision of the church. The
consistory, assembled at the Lateran, pronounced in William’s favour,
and at the instigation of the monk Hildebrand awarded him the kingdom
of England and sent him, together with a blessed standard, a diploma as
sovereign of the country. A great battle fought between the two rivals
near Hastings in 1066 decided the issue. Harold lost his life; and
England, after a desperate struggle, became the conquest of the Normans.
William divided the country into fiefs for his barons and knights, and
thenceforth feudalism spread over England the network it had already
fastened upon France, Germany, and Italy.
[Illustration: PHILIP I
(From an old French print)]
This great event inflamed people’s spirits and disposed them to
adventurous expeditions in distant lands. It was the forerunner of the
Crusades; although the latter had a nobler motive than the others,
springing, as they did, from the enthusiasm of exalted piety.
[Sidenote: [1066-1073 A.D.]]
A great revolution was taking place at this time in the church. Nicholas
II occupied the pontifical chair at this moment. He had for counsellor
a monk who deplored the vices of the clergy and the degradation of the
church as much as the encroachments of the temporal upon spiritual
authority. This monk, this man so celebrated in ecclesiastical history,
was Hildebrand. He resolved to deprive the princes and lords of every
source of influence over the clergy, to strengthen the ecclesiastical
hierarchy, and to raise the pope above the kings of the earth, hoping
thus to regain for the church her virtue, her splendour, and all her
power. Such a project of universal domination, which would seem like
madness to-day, was in Hildebrand’s age a conception of genius. It
was Hildebrand’s glory to have wished to free the church’s spiritual
authority from all temporal bonds; it was his mistake to have listened
too much to his own ambition in trying to enslave the political
government of the princes to ecclesiastical authority. In 1073 Hildebrand
was chosen by the people and clergy of Rome as successor to Pope
Alexander II. He took the name of Gregory VII.
[Sidenote: [1071-1099 A.D.]]
Philip of France was leading a life filled with scandal and violence.
To satisfy his unbridled desires he, like Henry IV of Germany, was
carrying on, in contempt of Gregory’s prohibition, the most shameful
traffic in clerical benefices. The angered pontiff threatened Philip
with excommunication. The colossal structure raised by the pontiff did
not perish with him; his successors bound it together. He founded the
universal monarchy of the popes upon a durable basis and on the ruling
spirit of the time, and this domination reached a century after him, its
highest point. The Crusades contributed powerfully to hold it together.
Gregory conceived the plan of these, but it was not given to him to carry
it out. The first of these memorable events took place in the time of
Philip I and in the pontificate of Urban II. Philip was not associated
with the First Crusade; he took no part in any of the great enterprises
which marked the age in which he lived, and his reign offers nothing
worthy of remembrance.
In 1071 the widow of his guardian, Count Baldwin of Flanders, was robbed
by the latter’s brother, Robert the Frisian, and she had recourse to
Philip. The king took up arms in her behalf and marched against Robert,
but suffered a shameful defeat at Cassel.[5] He also fought a twelve
years’ war with William the Conqueror, but it was a war marked by no
memorable event. William seduced Philip’s counsellors and partisans by
offering them great domains in England. Philip on his side promised
protection to the discontented element among the Normans and took the
part of William’s eldest son Robert, in revolt against his father. After
a truce and during an illness of the duke, the king made fun of the
former’s extreme fatness by inquiring when he expected to be brought to
bed. William heard of this and, furious, swore to bring the king the
candles for the churching. He assembled a formidable army and was setting
out to ravage Philip’s estates when he fell ill at Rouen and died there
in 1087. When he was scarcely cold the lords who were with him departed
in haste for their castles; his servants pillaged his effects, taking
everything but the bed he lay on, and left the body of the conqueror
naked on the mattress. A poor knight found it in this state and moved to
pity covered it, at his own expense, with mourning robes and prepared to
bury it. He had spoken the funeral service and the body was in the grave
when a Norman named Asselin came forward and said, “This ground belongs
to me; the man whose eulogy you have just pronounced robbed me of it. On
this spot stood my father’s house, this man seized it against all justice
and without paying a price for it. In God’s name I forbid you to cover
the robber’s body with earth that is mine.” This is a memorable example
of the vanity of an existence full of greatness and iniquity--a striking
sign of the forerunner of the judgment which threatened, on the threshold
of the other life, him who had founded his power on rapine and the
extermination and misery of a people. This William, conqueror of a great
realm and ravisher of immense domains in a foreign land, only obtained a
resting-place in his native soil through pity; those who assisted at his
funeral had to lay the price of it upon his coffin.
[Sidenote: [1087-1108 A.D.]]
None of his three sons paid him his last duties, but waged fierce war for
his heritage.[d] William Rufus succeeded to the throne in England, and
his brother Robert Courte-Heuse (Court-Hose or Short-Hose) in Normandy.
But William was not content with his portion. He invaded Normandy in
1090, and also disturbed the peace of the French monarchy by a vigorous
claim on the French Vexin and a war on the count of Maine. When Robert
joined the First Crusade he mortgaged his duchy to his brother, who
occupied it. But William’s tenure was short. An arrow in the New Forest
ended his life (1100). Robert Courte-Heuse hastened home and resumed his
rule, but Henry I, the Conqueror’s youngest son who succeeded William
Rufus in England, thirsted likewise for the paternal dominions. In 1104
he appeared in Normandy and two years later the struggle was over. At
the battle of Tinchebray Robert lost his lands and his liberty. Normandy
passed to the English crown.[a]
The death of the Conqueror was a great cause of joy to Philip and enabled
him to continue his indolent and scandalous career. He had married
Bertha, daughter of Count Florent of Holland, but tired of her and shut
her up while he eloped with Bertrade, wife of Fulk le Réchin, count
of Anjou, and married her. Pope Urban ordered the dissolution of this
marriage, and on the refusal to obey a council assembled at Autun in 1094
excommunicated the king. Philip no longer wished to wear the external
marks of royalty; he was afflicted with grievous infirmities, which he
recognised as the chastisement of God; so in 1100 he associated his son
Louis with the crown, and thenceforth reigned only in name. A terrible
fear of hell seized upon him. In humility he renounced burial in the
sepulchre of the kings at St. Denis, and died in 1108 in the habit of a
Benedictine monk.[d]
LOUIS THE FAT AND LOUIS THE YOUNG (1108-1180 A.D.)
Feebleness and inertness mark the reign of the first four Capetians. In
the successor of Philip the race began to partake in the general activity
of the age.
The reign of Louis VI, better known as Louis le Gros, or the Fat, began
in the lifetime of his predecessor. He was the first French monarch that
entertained any settled maxim of government, or whose ideas reached a
system of policy. His predecessors had been the creatures, the followers,
of events. Louis knew how to control these. The whole effort and aim of
his reign was to reduce the barons of the duchy of France to obedience.
His views did not extend to the kingdom. He prudently limited his
exertions to the counties within or bordering upon his power. History
may disdain to recount minutely the wars carried on by Louis against the
barons of Montmorency, whose castle rose within view of his capital, or
against the lords of Puiset, of Montlhéry, or of Coucy, possessors of
strongholds within a few leagues of Paris, from whence they were wont
to sally forth to the plunder of travellers and merchants. And yet,
of all the wars that adorn or sully the French annals, none was more
wise in aim, more useful or important in consequences, than these petty
enterprises of Louis.
His first attempt was against the Burchards, lords of Montmorency, who
were continually in quarrel with the abbaye of St. Denis; and, if we
are to believe the chronicles of the day, written for the most part
in that famous convent, the Montmorencys were impious spoliators and
enemies of the church. Louis stood forth the champion of the clergy, and
brought the Burchards to reason. His next efforts were directed against
the château of Montlhéry and its rapacious owners, who interrupted all
communication betwixt the royal towns of Paris and Orleans, greatly to
the detriment of commerce and the annoyance of the townsfolk. Louis here
took care to have a pretext also. He did not assert his royal authority
and arm to avenge it. It was as the ally of the clergy that he subdued
the Montmorencys; it was as the friend of commerce, and the avenger of
the plundered burgesses, that he besieged Montlhéry. Louis XI did not
use more policy and feint in his undermining of the aristocracy than did
Louis VI; the latter, unfortunately for his own fame, having only the
smaller sphere of action (1101).
[Illustration: LOUIS VI
(From an old engraving)]
[Sidenote: [1101-1119 A.D.]]
Nevertheless, the name of Louis the Fat stands connected with one of the
most important revolutions in the civil history of France, _viz._, the
enfranchisement of the _communes_ or commons, as the early municipalities
were called. From him towns received their first charters; from his reign
their first liberties date. In some towns the bishops favoured, in some
they opposed, the enfranchisement of the commons. The barons were, in
general, averse. The king was obliged to wage a tedious war against the
family of Coucy, which, by means of a fortress, kept possession of the
town of Amiens. He at length took and razed it; and the seigniory of the
De Coucys merged in the township of Amiens.
It was not merely by military exploits, and by the elevation of the
_tiers état_ or third estate, that the royal authority progressed during
the reign of Louis VI. The judicial authority attributed to the monarch
by the feudal system, and exercised by him in his court or council of
peers, made him the arbiter of disputed successions. It was thus that
Philip I had extended his influence over the province of Berri. His
son Louis interfered in the quarrels of the house of Bourbon, where a
minor struggled against the usurpation of his uncle. Louis entered the
Bourbonnais with an army in 1115, took Germigny, the principal fortress
of Aymon de Bourbon, and compelled him to submit. Not since the early
Carlovingians had the banners of a king of France been seen so far from
his capital.
[Sidenote: [1119-1127 A.D.]]
The continued rivalry betwixt the Normans, or English, and the French
excited and kept alive the warlike spirit of both nations. Henry I
reigned in England, and also in Normandy, which he had usurped from his
brother Robert. Louis took the part of the latter, as well as of his son
William Clito; and mutual wars, or rather ravages, were frequent, with
intervals of peace, betwixt the nations.[b] The principal feud between
Henry and Louis was produced by accident.
_Battle of Brenneville_
On the 20th of August, 1119, Louis and Henry found themselves
unexpectedly face to face on the plain of Brenmule or Brenneville,
three leagues from Les Andelys. Henry descended from the height of
Verclive with his sons Richard and Robert, five hundred men-at-arms,
and some infantry. Louis, seeing that what he had long desired was now
approaching, marched straight at the enemy at the head of four hundred
knights, accompanied by William Clito, who had taken arms to deliver
his father from a long captivity and to win back the heritage of his
ancestors. William de Crespigny, a Norman knight on Clito’s side, charged
first with eighty men-at-arms, penetrated as far as King Henry himself,
and smote him such a blow on the head as, but for his cap of mail, must
have split his skull; but Crespigny was instantly thrown from his horse
and made prisoner with most of his followers. The knights of the Vexin
and the rest of the French then fell impetuously on the Anglo-Normans,
and at first caused them to give way, but Henry’s soldiers, closing up
their ranks, pressed between them and overthrew the assailants, who were
thrown into disorder by the sheer force of their charge. King Louis,
seeing his followers in disarray and anxious to effect a retreat in order
to avoid an irreparable loss, fled at full gallop, leaving his royal
banner and 140 of his knights in the hands of the conquerors.
“Of nine hundred knights who were present at this battle,” says Ordericus
Vitalis,[g] “there were only three killed; for they were completely cased
in iron and, moreover, mutually sparing one another as much from the fear
of God as for the sake of brotherhood in arms. They concerned themselves
less to kill the flying than to take them prisoners.”
The king of the French, divided from his companions in his fright, lost
his way in a forest (that of Lyons) where a peasant, who did not know
him, guided him to Les Andelys in the hope of a large reward. King Henry
bought the silver standard of Louis for forty marks from a man-at-arms,
who had seized it and kept it as a witness of his victory; but the next
day he sent back to King Louis his horse with its saddle, its rein, and
all the royal trappings (Louis had apparently changed horses that he
might fly without being recognised). And William Ætheling had sent back
to his cousin, William Clito, the palfrey which the latter had lost in
the battle, with other presents which King Henry had thought needful
for an exile.[e] After this defeat Louis had to abandon William Clito’s
cause. Pope Calixtus II arranged a peace and Henry I embarked for England
with his family and his court. The journey is memorable for the loss of
the “White Ship” (_Blanche Nef_) in which the most renowned knights and
the heirs of the most illustrious house of the Norman race, including the
two sons and a daughter of the king, perished. One child alone remained
to the bereaved monarch, Matilda or Maud, the wife of the emperor Henry V
but afterwards married to Geoffrey Plantagenet, count of Anjou.[a]
[Sidenote: [1127-1149 A.D.]]
Another enterprise of Louis, in the year 1121, marks the rapid increase
of the king’s influence. A few years since he had established his
authority in the Bourbonnais: now he extended it to Auvergne. In a
quarrel betwixt the count and the bishop of Clermont, the latter
appealed to Louis, who summoned the count to his supreme court, and, on
his refusal to appear, marched with an army and subdued him, as he had
previously the lord of Bourbon. The counts of Anjou and of Nevers aided
him in the expedition. They felt no reluctance in carrying into effect
the decrees of that court of peers of which they formed a part. Louis
was not so fortunate in his treatment of Flanders as in his subjugation
of Aquitaine. The Flemings, indeed, proved always intractable to French
treatment whether of amity or hostility. The count of that province,
perplexed and curbed by the frowardness of the townsfolk and the middle
class, sought to taunt the family of Van der Straten by asserting they
were serfs. One of them replied by cleaving the young count’s skull
as he knelt at prayers. There being no heir to the family of Flanders,
Louis sought to give the county to William Clito (1127). This unfortunate
prince soon after fell in an engagement; and Flanders passed to Theodoric
of Alsace, a descendant of Robert the Frisian (1129). Louis VI died in
1137. It is strange that history could find for this monarch no epithet
save that of the Fat, at the same time that it records innumerable proofs
of a talented mind, of an active and enterprising spirit.
[Illustration: LOUIS VII]
Towards the conclusion of this monarch’s reign, fortune came to reward
and crown his efforts for the extension of the royal authority. William,
count of Poitiers, about to undertake a pilgrimage, from which he had the
presentiment that he never should return, offered his daughter Eleanor in
marriage to Louis the Young, son of Louis the Fat. She was the heiress
of her father’s possessions, which surpassed in extent and importance
those of the king of France himself, comprising Guienne and Poitou--all
the country, in fact, betwixt the Loire and the Adour. The marriage was
celebrated at Bordeaux; and soon after it arrived tidings of the deaths
both of the king and of the count of Poitiers. Thus Louis VII, or the
Young, succeeded to dominions and authority infinitely more ample than
those which his father had inherited. But the want of talent in the son
did away with all these advantages. Nevertheless he commenced his reign
with spirit. He chastised several refractory nobles, and resolved to
support the queen’s rights to the county of Toulouse. Louis besieged that
town. He failed in taking it, indeed; but the king of France, at the
head of an army, made his name and power known for the first time to the
inhabitants of the south. During a war carried on about the same time
against Thibaut, count of Champagne, an accident occurred which had a
marked effect upon the future conduct and character of Louis the Young.
He had taken by storm the castle of Vitry, and set fire to it. The flames
chanced to catch the neighbouring church, into which the population
had crowded, to preserve themselves from the fury of the soldiery. It
appears that they had no means of escape. Thirteen hundred men, women,
and children perished in the conflagration. Louis was horror-struck on
beholding the mass of half consumed bodies, and the weight of the remorse
hung ever after upon him, and weighed down his spirit. It was the chief
cause that induced him to receive the cross, and to lead that expedition
to Jerusalem which is known in history as the Second Crusade.
Not a single feat of arms marked the stay of Louis in Palestine, where he
lingered till 1149, ashamed to return. The ignominy of this ill success,
and the desertion of his followers, fell upon King Louis; and he felt
it, not to rally and redeem his character, but to sink under the shame.
He abandoned the feelings of the monarch and the warrior for those of
the pilgrim; refused at first to undertake any enterprise against the
infidels, and stole from Antioch to Jerusalem like a craven. If his
subjects were discontented with such weakness in their sovereign,
Eleanor of Aquitaine was still more disgusted with such a husband: she
refused longer to remain on any friendly terms with him.[b] On his
return the king repudiated his wife, who had so displeased him during
the crusade. [Queen Eleanor at once petitioned the pope for a divorce.
In 1152 the pope granted her wish.] Shortly afterwards a new marriage
transferred her duchy of Guienne to Henry Plantagenet, count of Anjou,
duke of Normandy and heir to the English crown. When, two years later,
Henry entered into possession of his heritage, and afterwards added
Brittany, through the marriage of one of his sons with the only daughter
of the count of that country, he found himself master of almost the whole
of western France.[c]
[Sidenote: [1103-1180 A.D.]]
Hence dates the rivalry betwixt the kings which fills up the rest of
their reigns. But in that age war tended more to mutual annoyance than to
conquest: it was a livelihood to the needy, a portion to the powerful;
and neither were very serious or bent upon the destruction of an enemy.
Feudal rights and supremacy were also held in high respect; and the name
of suzerain, though but a name, often supplied to Louis the place of
the armies of his vassal Henry. In time the church came to fling itself
into the scale. The persecution and murder of Thomas à Becket roused
all the clergy in enmity to Henry, and Louis took advantage of their
aid. Later still, the French monarch used the more unworthy expedient of
exciting the sons of Henry to rebel against their parent; and throughout
he contrived to supply by intrigue what he wanted in martial spirit,
activity, and power. Louis VII married Alix of Champagne, after the
divorce; he was long without a son, and at length, so the story goes,
he obtained one by dint of prayer. When the life of the prince was
threatened by a fever, the anxious parent undertook a pilgrimage to
Canterbury, to the tomb of Thomas à Becket, for his recovery. The young
Philip recovered; but Louis, on his return, was struck with a palsy,
under which he lingered for the space of a year, and died in 1180.[b]
_The Abbot Suger_
[Sidenote: [1081-1149 A.D.]]
On his return from the crusade, Louis found his country in a most
peaceful and flourishing condition owing to the skilful administration of
his preceptor the abbot Suger, whom he had left in charge of affairs.[a]
Suger is indubitably the most illustrious, perhaps, even, the only
historian who has a place in the general history of France, and who
really influenced her destinies. Such a fame cannot be usurped; whoso
possesses it merits it.
No great and lasting memorials were raised in France by Suger and his
master, Louis the Fat; they made no great conquests, established no
memorable laws; it is even a mistake to ascribe to them the honour of
being the first to enfranchise the communes. This enfranchisement had
preceded them; it arose from causes beyond their control, fulfilled its
destiny without their aid, and was as often opposed as seconded by them.
But Louis the Fat and Suger, the one as king, the other as minister, were
the first since Charlemagne to have a true and just perception of their
position and mission, and to bind themselves to act upon it. This great
idea, without which there can be nothing of state or king, the idea of
a public authority, devoted to the maintenance of public order, called
to something higher than ministration to the interests and personal
caprices of its temporary holder, had been conceived by the giant mind of
Charlemagne, but, despite his genius and a long reign, it was not for him
to put it into action, to found a throne and a nation. Certain customs
of unity, of regularity, of government, in short, existed indeed in the
earlier years of Louis le Débonnaire’s reign, but they soon vanished,
society and authority alike fell into decay, and for two centuries there
was neither king, kingdom, nor nation, Frank nor French.
Hugh Capet, in taking the title of king, laid the first stone of a new
monarchy in the very heart of feudalism. But it was no more than a
title of vague meaning and no import under him. He had not the force of
character, nor is there anything to indicate that he had the design,
to raise the sovereignty above suzerainty and reunite in one body the
scattered members of the nation. Under his immediate successors the
power of the throne drooped more and more. In the reigns of Robert,
Henry I, and Philip I, one can scarcely discern any traces of national
and monarchical unity. Isolation and independence waxed stronger, not
only in the case of powerful or distant feudatories, but also among the
nearest and humblest vassals of the crown. Only the feudal tie continued
in force, a real and precious tie since it still maintained a show of
confederation under a leader and prevented the utter dismemberment of
the government and the country; but its influence, always more moral
than political, yielded at the least shock and seemed even on the point
of disappearance. With Louis the Fat a new era begins; the extent of
his power, even the sphere of his activities, is still very restricted;
the results of his endeavours are, for the present at least, of little
value. It is almost always in the outskirts of Paris, against the simple
squires, for the securing of a route, for the protection of merchants,
that his courage and wisdom are exercised. Nevertheless in these small
undertakings, and in certain others more remote, we can see a definite
design of central and regular government; sovereignty separates itself
from suzerainty, and in its own name claims, though timidly, rights of
another sort. It presents itself to us as a power general and superior,
called to maintain justice and order, to the advantage of all, and
against all comers--a power all too weak for such a task, but awake to
a perception of its dignity and its mission, and to a dawning of the
same in the mind of its subjects. Such is the true character of the
reign of Louis the Fat; he did little for the liberties of the public,
much for the forming of the state and national government. He guided
sovereignty in its first steps out of a feudal régime, gave to it other
principles, placed it in a different attitude; and it is in this work,
the development of which decided the lot of France, that Suger rendered
powerful assistance during twenty five years’ administration.
He did not seem marked out by birth for so great things, his father,
Hélinand, being only a man of the people, living, according to the
most probable supposition, at St. Omer, where Suger was born in 1081.
But even at that date the church busied herself in searching out and
welcoming, even from among the lowest ranks, men capable of serving and
honouring her. Everywhere present and active, in touch with all the
social conditions, associating alike with poor and rich, dwelling with
the humble as with the great, she went forward to meet even childhood
on its way, studying its varying dispositions, surrounding its earliest
days, unfolding to it a brilliant career, the only one which invited
development of its intellectual faculties, in which every reward was
accessible to merit, and, finally, in which principles of equality and
co-operation reigned. The monastery of St. Denis received and brought
up the young Suger; he passed ten years in the dependent priory of
Lettrée, and when, in 1095, Philip intrusted the education of his son,
Louis the Fat, to the monks of St. Denis, Abbot Adam recalled Suger
into the abbey itself that he might become the companion of the young
prince. Thus sprang up between the children the intimacy which was to
bind them together all their lives. In 1098, Louis returned to his
father’s house, and Suger went to complete his studies in the monastery
of Florent-de-Saumur, where the sciences of the day flourished under
Abbot William. In returning to St. Denis in 1103 he speedily became the
confidant of Abbot Adam, who, not content with employing him in all
matters relating to the monastery, frequently took him to court where
Prince Louis, who now for four years had had a share in the throne, knit
yet more closely the bonds that had bound him to his childhood’s friend.
From this date there is no further need to trace the life of Suger; it
is part of history and nearly all the details that have come down to us
are to be found either in his _Vie de Louis VI_[k] or in the _Panegyric_
written upon him by the monk William, his secretary.
Before his elevation to the dignity of abbot of St. Denis, when
charged with diverse missions either to ecclesiastical gatherings or
to the court at Rome, or even called upon to defend with mailed fist
certain domains belonging to St. Denis against the brigand nobles who
ravaged them, he displayed in turn the tact of the ecclesiastic and the
courage of the knight. Later on, when Louis had constituted him his
most intimate adviser, it seems that so much power temporarily dazzled
Suger. St. Bernard speaks of his pomp and pride, and of the disorder
introduced into his abbey. “The interior of the monastery,” he says,
“is filled with knights, sometimes it is even open to women; one hears
business of all sorts being transacted there; there quarrels break out;
lastly it is there that that which is Cæsar’s is rendered unto Cæsar,
without deduction or delay, but never unto God that which is God’s.”
Whether it be that St. Bernard’s warnings aroused Suger from this first
intoxication of power, or whether he perceived of himself the harm the
scandal would do him, he did not delay putting an end to it. In 1127 he
introduced drastic reforms into his abbey, compelled his monks to submit
to them, and scrupulously conformed himself, and very shortly his power
in the court was but more firmly established by this episode. Proud of
the austerity of his morals, whilst at the same time profiting by his
influence, the church cried him up on all occasions, and bishops and
abbots of the most celebrated monasteries contemplated with equal pride
the gorgeous church rebuilt by him at St. Denis, and the humble cell,
barely fifteen feet long by ten feet wide, where he applied himself in
solitude to religious exercises. After the death of Louis the Fat his
power increased yet more; the indolent and incompetent Louis the Young
shifting to his shoulders the whole weight of the government.
[Sidenote: [1147-1149 A.D.]]
Suger’s regency during this king’s crusade, from the year 1147 to the
year 1149, is the most brilliant period of his career. He firmly upheld
the royal authority, rebuked the usurpations of the vassals, established
some degree of order wherever his influence attained to, met the king’s
expenses in Palestine by his excellent administration of the crown
revenues, and the advancement of his domains, and, finally, won such fame
throughout the length and breadth of Europe that persons from Italy and
England came to study the salutary results of his government, and the
title of “the Solomon of the century” was bestowed upon him by foreigners
contemporary with him. Hitherto only illustrious bishops, or learned
and subtle theologians had attained this European distinction by their
authority in the church or by their writings; no other man had ever won
it on the sole merit of his political conduct, and from the ninth to the
twelfth century Suger remains the first example of a minister who won
admiration for his skill and wisdom from beyond the mountains and over
the seas. He did not show any anxiety to retain this absolute power which
the king’s absence conferred on him, and, by a rare unselfishness, the
interests of the state preoccupied him more than his personal ambitions.
He was himself opposed to a crusade from which he foresaw dangers, and
had only yielded at the instance of St. Bernard’s ardent entreaties, the
pope’s orders, and the prevailing opinion of the day. When certain of the
nobles, Robert de Dreux, his brother, among them, who had accompanied
Louis, abandoned him in Palestine and returned without him to France,
Suger never ceased from urging his immediate return to his dominions.
“The disturbers of the public peace,” he wrote, “have returned, whilst
you, under bond to defend your subjects, remain as it were captive in a
foreign land. Of what are you thinking, sire, thus to leave the flock
intrusted to you at the mercy of the wolves? How can you disguise from
yourself the perils with which the robbers who have outstripped you
menace the state? No, it is not permissible for you to remain any longer
so far away from us. Everything here craves your presence. Therefore we
pray your highness, we exhort your piety, we call upon your goodness
of heart, finally we conjure you by the faith which binds reciprocally
prince and subject, not to prolong beyond Easter your sojourn in Syria,
lest a longer delay render you guilty in the eyes of the Lord of
disregarding the oath which you swore on assuming the crown. You will, I
think, find cause for contentment in our conduct. We have placed in the
hands of the knights Templar the money which we had intended to send you.
We have further repaid to the count of Vermandois the £3,000 which he
had lent us for your use. At the present time your land and your people
enjoy a happy peace. We lay in store against your return the broken
victuals for the fiefs dependent on you, the tallage and victuals which
we levy from your domains. You will find your houses and palaces in good
preservation owing to the care we have taken in doing repairs. I have now
reached the decline of life, but I dare venture to say that the works I
engaged to do from love to God and devotion to your person have hastened
my old age. With regard to the queen, your wife, I advise that you
conceal the dissatisfaction she causes you till such time as, restored to
your realm, you can quietly deliberate over that and other matters.”
[Illustration: AN OFFICER OF THE KING, TWELFTH CENTURY]
Louis kept them waiting for him yet a long time. Suger had to fight
against the pretensions and plottings of Robert de Dreux and his party.
He realised that single-handed he would not be able to hold his own, and
boldly summoned to Soissons an assembly of the bishops and principal
barons of the realm. This generous appeal to the opinions and the
liberties of the times had the result he anticipated: the assembly sided
with him and strengthened him against his enemies. Defeated in their
purpose in France, they made an attack on him in Palestine, this time
within the mind of the king himself, who, frivolous and credulous, at
first believed all their accusations. But on passing through Italy on
his return to his dominions Louis received through Pope Eugenius III,
friend and admirer of Suger, a completely different impression, in which
he was fully confirmed on arriving in France by the good order which he
there found established, the resources husbanded for him by Suger, and
the eagerness shown by the regent to hand over to the king his rightful
authority.
Other ideas were at work in the old man’s brain. He had disapproved of
his master’s crusade as fatal to the interests of the kingdom; but the
misfortunes to the Christians in the East, and regret at seeing the Holy
Land on the point of once more falling into the hands of the infidels,
preoccupied his mind continually. He conceived the idea of himself
attempting a fresh expedition to Palestine, of raising an army at his
own expense, of devoting all his wealth and influence to the cause, of
inducing the leading bishops to follow his example, and of personally
heading an undertaking by which he hoped Jerusalem would be saved without
imperilling France and his king. In the narrative of William, his
biographer, we can see with what ardour and perseverance he threw himself
into this project, even after illness forbade him to hope for the glory
resulting from it. He had already chosen the leader whom he deemed most
competent to replace him and had presented him with the sums of money
collected for carrying out the scheme, when death overtook him, January
12th, 1151, at the age of seventy.[h]
EMANCIPATORY MOVEMENTS AFTER THE CRUSADES
[Sidenote: [1000-1151 A.D.]]
The grand movement of the crusade having for a while withdrawn men from
local servitude, and led them abroad through Europe and Asia, they sought
Jerusalem and found freedom. That liberating trumpet of the archangel,
which was thought to have been heard in the year 1000, sounded a century
later in the preaching of the crusade. The village awoke at the foot
of the feudal castle, whose shade hung heavy over it. The pitiless man
who descended from his vulture’s eyrie only to despoil his vassals,
now himself armed them, led them, lived with them, suffered with them.
Communion in misery softened his heart. Many a serf could say to the
baron, “My lord, I found you a draft of water in the desert; I shielded
you with my body at the siege of Antioch, or Jerusalem.”
_The Communes_
Humanity, then, began again to honour itself, even in its most miserable
conditions. The first communal revolutions preceded, or closely followed,
the year 1100. They began to think that every man was entitled to dispose
of the fruits of his own labour, and to give away his own children in
marriage; they emboldened themselves to think that they had a right to
come and go, to buy and sell, and they suspected, in their presumption,
that it might very possibly be that men were equal.
Until then, that formidable thought of equality had not come forth in a
very precise and tangible form. We are told, indeed, that the peasants
of Normandy revolted in the year 1000, but they were easily put down; a
few knights ravaged the country, dispersed the villeins, cut off their
feet and hands, and there was an end of the matter. The peasants, in
general, were too much isolated from each other; their _jacqueries_ were
always unsuccessful throughout the Middle Ages. Unhappily, too, it
must be owned, they were too degraded by slavery, too brutalised by the
excess of their woes; their triumph would have been that of barbarism.
It was especially in the populous boroughs, grouped round the castles,
and, above all, round the churches, that ideas of emancipation fermented.
The lay, or ecclesiastical lords had encouraged the population of those
boroughs by concessions of land, being desirous of augmenting their own
strength and the number of their vassals. These towns were not large
and commercial cities, like those of the south of France and Italy, but
they had some rude branches of trade, some blacksmiths, many weavers,
butchers, and innkeepers, in the towns of transit. Sometimes the lords
invited skilful workmen to settle in their towns, such, at least, as
could embroider a stole, or forge armour; it was absolutely necessary to
leave those men a little liberty, for, otherwise, as they carried their
all in their hands, they would have left the country.
The growth of freedom, then, was destined to commence by the central
towns of France, which, obtaining their franchises by fair means or by
force, received the name of privileged towns, or communes. The occasion
of this result was, generally, the defence made by the inhabitants
against the oppression and robbery of the feudal lords, and, in
particular, the defence of the Île-de-France against Normandy, the feudal
country _par excellence_. “At this period,” says Ordericus Vitalis,[g]
“popular communality was established by the bishops in such wise that
the priests accompanied the king to siege or battle, with the banners
of their parishes and all their parishioners.” According to the same
historian, it was a Montfort (an illustrious family, which was, in the
following century, to destroy the liberties of the south of France, and
to lay the foundation of those of England), it was Amaury de Montfort,
who advised Louis the Fat, after his defeat at Brenneville, to employ
against the Normans the men of the communes, marching under the banners
of their parishes (1119). But when these communes returned within their
own walls, they became more urgent in their demands; it was a mortal
blow to their humility, to have once seen the great war-steeds and the
noble knights flying before their parochial banners; to have put an
end, with Louis the Fat, to the highway robberies of the Rocheforts; to
have harried the lair of the De Coucys. They said, with the poet of the
twelfth century: “We are men as well as they; our hearts are as great;
we are as capable of endurance as they.” They all wanted some franchise,
some privilege, and for this they offered money--which they contrived to
find, indigent and wretched as they were. Poor artisans, blacksmiths, or
weavers, allowed, as a matter of favour, to set themselves down at the
foot of a castle; fugitive serfs, who had taken refuge round a church,
such were the founders of liberty; they stinted themselves of bread to
obtain them, and the lords and the king were eager to sell diplomas so
well paid for.
This revolution was accomplished everywhere, under a thousand forms, and
with little noise; it was only prominently remarked in some towns of Oise
and Somme, which, being placed in less favourable circumstances, divided
between two lords, lay and ecclesiastical, applied to the king to obtain
a solemn guarantee for concessions often violated, and which maintained
a precarious liberty at the cost of many centuries of civil war. It
was upon these towns that the name of “communes” was more particularly
bestowed. These wars are a small, but dramatic incident in the great
revolution which was taking place silently, and under various forms, in
all the towns of the north of France.
It was in the valiant and choleric Picardy, the communes of which had so
well beaten the Normans; it was in the country of Calvin, and so many
other revolutionary spirits, that these explosions took place.[f] Le
Mans in 1066, then Cambray in 1076, gave the signal, followed by Noyon,
Beauvais, St. Quentin, Laon, Amiens and Soissons. All wrested communal
charters from their lords, mostly of the ecclesiastical order. In 1112
the bishop of Laon attempted to repeal the communal charter he had
granted, somewhat under compulsion, three years before. His house was
surrounded; the nobles who came to his assistance were killed, and the
prelate himself fell under the blows of an axe. The king came and the
commune was abolished. But before sixteen years had passed the communal
party regained the ascendancy. In 1128 the king ratified a new charter
granted by the bishop.[c] Great or small, the Picard communes were
heroic, and bravely did they fight. They too had their belfry, their
tower, not inclined and faced with marble, like the _miranda_ of Italy,
but furnished with a sonorous bell, that summoned the citizens, not in
vain, to battle against the bishop or the lord. Women went forth to these
fights, against men. Eighty women insisted on taking part in the attack
upon the castle of Amiens, and were wounded there.
So, likewise, Joan Hachette fought afterwards, at the siege of Beauvais.
A sprightly and laughter-loving population it was, of impetuous
soldiers and merry story-tellers, a country of light manners, of smutty
_fabliaux_, of good songs. It was their delight, in the twelfth century,
to see the count of Amiens, mounted upon his big horse, venturing beyond
the pont-levis, and caracoling clumsily; thereupon the innkeepers and
the butchers planted themselves boldly at their doors, and startled the
feudal animal with their loud laughter.
It has been said that the king founded the communes, but the reverse is,
rather, the fact--it was the communes that founded the king; without them
he could not have repulsed the Normans. Those conquerors of England and
of the Two Sicilies would, probably, have conquered France; it was the
communes, or, to employ a more general and more exact word, it was the
_bourgeoisies_ which, under the banner of the parish saint, achieved the
security of public peace between the Oise and the Loire; and the king,
mounted on horseback, carried the banner of the abbey of St. Denis, at
the head of the lords. A vassal, as count of Vexin, abbot of St. Martin
de Tours, canon of St. Quentin, defender of the churches, he waged holy
war against the brigandage of the lords of Montmorency and Puiset, and
against the execrable ferocity of the Coucys. He had upon his side the
nascent _bourgeoisie_ and the church; feudalism had had all the rest, all
the strength and the glory; the poor helpless king was smothered between
the vast dominations of his vassals.
_Philosophy and Thought; Abelard and St. Bernard_
[Sidenote: [1079-1115 A.D.]]
The chain of free-thinkers, broken, it would seem, after Johannes Scotus,
had its links reunited by the great Gerbert, who became pope in the year
1000. Educated at Cordova, and admitted a master at Rheims, Gerbert had
for disciple Fulbert of Chartres, whose pupil Bérenger [Berengarius] of
Tours affrighted the church by the first doubt cast upon the Eucharist.
Soon after, the canon Rosselin of Compiègne dared to touch upon the
question of the Trinity. He taught, moreover, that general ideas were but
words: “The virtuous man is a reality; virtue is but a sound.” This bold
reform gave a violent shock to all poetry, to all religion; it accustomed
men to see nothing but personifications in those ideas that had been
regarded as real things; it was nothing less than a transition from
poetry to prose. This logical heresy inspired the contemporaries of the
First Crusade with horror; nominalism, as it was called, was stifled for
a while.
Champions were not wanting to the church against the innovators.
The Lombards, Lanfranc and St. Anselm, both of them archbishops of
Canterbury, combated Bérenger and Rosselin. St. Anselm, an original
genius, anticipated the famous argument of Descartes, for the existence
of God: “If God did not exist, I could not conceive him.” It was a
great delight for him to have made this discovery, after a long fit of
sleeplessness. Another conflict of an intellectual kind, and one of a
much graver nature, was about to begin, so soon as the question should
have come down from politics to theology and morals, and the very
morality of Christianity should have been brought in question. Thus,
Pelagius came after Arius, and Abelard after Bérenger.
The church seemed at peace; the school of Laon and that of Paris were
occupied by two pupils of St. Anselm of Canterbury, Anselm of Laon, and
William of Champeaux. Great signs and tokens, however, were appearing;
the Vaudois had translated the Bible into the vulgar tongue; the
_Institutes_ were also translated, and law was taught, simultaneously
with theology, at Orleans and at Angers. The mere existence of the
school of Paris was an immense innovation and danger. The ideas which,
till then, had been dispersed, and exposed to close inspection in the
various ecclesiastical schools, were about to converge to a centre. The
conquests of the Normans and the First Crusade had carried that potent
philosophic idiom everywhere--into England, into Sicily, into Jerusalem.
This circumstance alone gave France, especially central France and
Paris, an immense attractive force. The French of Paris became gradually
proverbial; feudalism had found its political centre in the royal city,
and that city was now about to become the capital of human thought.
He who began this revolution was not a priest; he was a handsome young
man, of brilliant and engaging qualities, and of noble race. No one,
like him, could write love verses in the vulgar tongue, and he sang them
himself; then his erudition was extraordinary for the times--he was the
only man who knew Greek and Hebrew.[6] Perhaps he had frequented the
Jewish schools (there were many of them in the south), or the rabbis
of Troyes, Vitry, or Orleans. There were then two principal schools in
Paris; the old episcopal school of Notre Dame, and that of St. Geneviève,
on the mountain, where William of Champeaux was in the zenith of his
fame. Abelard became one of his pupils, laid his doubts before him,
puzzled his master, made sport of him, and put him to silence. He would
have done the same with Anselm of Laon, had not the professor, who was
a bishop, expelled him from his diocese. Thus did the knight-errant of
dialectics go about unhorsing the most famous champions. He says himself
that he renounced the other kind of tilting, that of the tournaments,
only from his love for the war of words. Thenceforth, victorious and
unrivalled, he taught at Paris and at Melun, where Louis the Fat resided,
and where the lords were beginning to gather in great numbers. These
knights encouraged a man of their own order, who had beaten the priests
upon their own ground, and who put the most self-sufficient of the clerks
to silence.
The whole body of Christianity was at stake; it was attacked at its base.
If original sin, as Abelard said, was not a sin, but a penalty, that
penalty was unjust, and redemption was useless. Abelard defended himself
from such a conclusion; but he justified Christianity by means of such
feeble arguments, that he rather did it more damage by declaring that
he had no better answer to give. He suffered himself to be brought to a
stand by means of the _argumentum ad absurdum_, and then he appealed to
authority and faith. And so, then, man was no longer guilty; the flesh
was justified and restored to honour; all the sufferings with which
men had immolated themselves were superfluous. What became of so many
voluntary martyrs, so many fastings and mortifications--the vigils of
monks, the tribulations of hermits, the countless tears shed before God?
All was vanity--mockery. God was an amiable and easy God, who had nothing
to do with all this.
The church was then under the sway of a monk, a simple abbot of
Clairvaux, St. Bernard. He was of noble birth, like Abelard, a native of
Upper Burgundy. He had been brought up in the puissant house of Cîteaux,
the sister and rival of Cluny, which sent forth so many illustrious
preachers, and which, half a century afterwards, made the crusade
against the Albigenses. But St. Bernard thought Cîteaux too splendid and
too rich: he went into needy Champagne, and founded the monastery of
Clairvaux in the “Valley of Wormwood.” There he was free to lead that
life of sorrows that was needful to him: nothing could win him from it;
never would he hear of being anything else than a monk, though he might
have become archbishop and pope. Constrained to reply to all the kings
who consulted him, he found himself all-potent in spite of himself, and
condemned to govern Europe. A letter from St. Bernard made the army of
the king of France withdraw from Champagne. When schism broke out, by the
simultaneous elevation of Innocent II and of Anacletus, St. Bernard was
appointed by the church of France to choose between them, and he chose
Innocent. But these were not his greatest affairs, as his letters inform
us; he lent, not gave, himself to the world; his love and his treasure
were elsewhere. Living in the inward life, in prayer and sacrifice, no
one could make himself more alone in the midst of bustle; the senses
no longer spoke to him of the world. He walked a whole day, says his
biographer, along the Lake of Lausanne, and in the evening he asked where
the lake was. He drank oil for water, and took clotted blood for butter.
He could hardly support himself erect, and yet he found strength to
preach the crusade to a hundred thousand men. The multitude thought it
was a spirit, rather than a man they saw, when he appeared thus before
them, with his red and white beard, his fair and hoary hair; meagre and
weak, with but a scarcely visible indication of life upon his cheeks. His
sermons were terrible; mothers kept their sons away from them, and wives
their husbands; they would else have all followed him to the monasteries.
As for him, when he had sent forth the breath of life over the multitude,
he returned with speed to Clairvaux, reconstructed his little hut of
boughs and foliage near the convent, and assuaged a little his love-sick
soul in writing the exposition of the “Song of Songs” which employed his
whole life.
Imagine with what grief such a man must have heard of Abelard’s
success--of the usurpations of logic over religion; the prosaic victory
of reasoning over faith; the flame of the sacrifice becoming stifled and
extinguished in the world. It was robbing him of his God. St. Bernard was
not to be compared with his rival as a logician; but the latter himself
wrought his own downfall. He undertook to deduce its consequences from
his doctrine, and he applied it to his conduct in life. He had reached
that excess of prosperity in which the infatuation common to our nature
plunges us into some great fault. Everything succeeded with him; men
held their peace before him; women all regarded with looks of love an
engaging, invincible young man, beautiful in face and all-powerful in
mind, who had a whole people for his followers. “I had reached such a
pass,” he says, “that honour what woman I would with my love, I had
no refusal to fear.” Rousseau says precisely the same thing in his
_Confessions_ in relating the success of the _Nouvelle Héloïse_.
[Sidenote: [1115-1140 A.D.]]
The Héloïse of the twelfth century was the niece of the canon Fulbert,
very young, beautiful, learned, and already celebrated; she was intrusted
by her uncle to the teaching of Abelard, who seduced her. This fault had
not even love for its excuse; it was deliberately, in cold blood, by way
of pastime, that Abelard betrayed the confidence of Fulbert. We know
that he was cruelly punished by mutilation for his crime; he renounced
the world, and became a Benedictine at St. Denis, about the year 1119.
Thither he was pursued by ecclesiastical persecutions, and he found
no rest there. The archbishop of Rheims, the friend of St. Bernard,
assembled a council against him at Soissons; Abelard was like to have
been stoned by the people; he was frightened, shed many tears, burned his
books, and said whatever they pleased. He was condemned without inquiry,
his enemies alleging that it was enough that he had taught without the
authority of the church.
Shut up at St. Médard de Soissons, and afterwards a refugee at St. Denis,
he was obliged to fly from that asylum. He had presumed to doubt that St.
Denis, the Areopagite, had ever visited France.[7] To impugn that legend
was to attack the religion of the monarchy; and from that moment the
court withdrew its protection from him. He fled to the dominions of the
count of Champagne, and hid himself in a desert place on the Ardusson,
two leagues from Nogent. Reduced now to poverty, and having but one
clerk with him, he built a hut of reeds and an oratory in honour of that
Trinity he was accused of denying, and named his hermitage the Comforter,
the Paraclet. But his disciples, having learned where he was, flocked
round him; they built them huts, and a town rose in the desert, dedicated
to science and to liberty. A little more, and he would once more have
appeared as a public teacher; but he was compelled again to hold his
peace, and to accept the priory of St. Gildas de Ruys in Brittany, the
language of which he did not understand. It was his fate to find no rest;
his Breton monks, whose habits he endeavoured to reform, endeavoured to
give him poison in the chalice. Thenceforth, the unfortunate man led
a wandering life, and even thought, it is said, of taking refuge in
some land of the infidels; but first he would once measure his strength
against that of the terrible adversary who everywhere pursued him with
his zeal and his sanctity. At the instigation of Arnold of Brescia, he
challenged St. Bernard to a logical duel before the Council of Sens. The
king, the counts of Champagne and Nevers, and a host of bishops were
to be present, and to judge of the hits. St. Bernard repaired to the
rendezvous reluctantly, conscious as he was of his inferiority. But the
threats of the people and the timidity of his rival relieved him from all
embarrassment. Abelard durst not defend himself, but contented himself
with appealing to the pope. Innocent II owed everything to St. Bernard,
and hated Abelard for the sake of his disciple, Arnold of Brescia, who
was then roaming over Italy, and summoning the towns to freedom. He
ordered Abelard to be shut up; but the latter had anticipated him by
voluntarily taking refuge in the monastery of Cluny. The abbot, Peter
the Venerable, answered for Abelard, who died there two years afterwards.
Such was the end of the restorer of philosophy in the Middle Ages--the
son of Pelagius, the father of Descartes, and a Breton like them. From
another point of view, he may be regarded as a precursor of the humane
and sentimental school, which was revived in the persons of Fénelon and
Rousseau.
[Sidenote: [1140-1142 A.D.]]
There is no memory more popular in France than that of Abelard’s
mistress. The fall of the man made the grandeur of the woman; but for
Abelard’s misfortune, Héloïse would have been unknown; she would have
remained obscure and in the shade, she would have desired no other glory
than that of her spouse. At the period of their separation, he made her
take the veil, and built for her the Paraclet, of which she became the
abbess. There she held a great school of theology, Greek, and Hebrew.
Many similar monasteries rose around the Paraclet, and some years after
the death of Abelard, Héloïse was declared head of an order by the pope.
But her glory consists in her love, so constant and so disinterested--a
love to which Abelard’s coldness and hardness of heart give a new lustre.
Let us compare the language of the two lovers:
“Fulbert,” says Abelard, “gave her up, without reserve, to my control,
so that, upon my return from the schools, I should apply myself to her
instruction, and, if I found her negligent, should chastise her severely.
Was not this giving full license to my desires, so that, if I did not
succeed by caresses, I might compass my end by threats and blows?”
This dastardly brutality of a pedant of the twelfth century is in strange
contrast with the exalted and disinterested sentiments expressed by
Héloïse. “God knows, in thee, I sought but thee; nothing of thee but
thyself; such was the sole object of my desire. I was ambitious of no
advantage, not even of the bond of wedlock; I thought not, thou well
knowest, of satisfying either my own wishes or my own pleasure, but
thine. If the name of spouse is more holy, sweeter to me seemed that
of thy mistress, that (be not angry) of thy concubine (_concubinæ vel
seorti_). The more I humbled myself for thee, the more I hoped to gain in
thy heart. Yes, though the master of the world, though the emperor had
been willing to honour me with the name of his spouse, I would rather
have been called thy mistress than his wife and his empress (_tua dici
meretrix, quàm illius imperatrix_).” She accounts in a singular manner
for her having long refused to be the wife of Abelard: “Would it not have
been an unseemly, a deplorable thing, that one woman should appropriate
and take for herself alone, him whom nature had created for all mankind?
What mind, intent upon the meditations of philosophy or of sacred
things, could endure the crying of children, the prating of nurses, the
disturbance and tumult of serving-men and women?”
The mere form of the letters that passed between Abelard and Héloïse
shows how little the passion of the latter was returned. Abelard divides
and subdivides his mistress’s letters; he replies to them methodically,
and by chapters. He heads his own: “To the spouse of Christ, the slave
of Christ”; or “To his dear sister in Christ, Abelard her brother in
Christ.” Héloïse’s tone is very different: “To her master, nay, father;
to her husband, nay, brother; his handmaid, his spouse, nay, his
daughter, his sister; Héloïse to Abelard.”[f]
_Abelard and the University_
[Sidenote: [1100-1150 A.D.]]
Hasting Rashdall describes the relations between Abelard’s influence in
Paris and the ultimate development of the University of Paris as follows:
“The less imaginative historians of the University of Paris have
generally been contented with tracing its origin to the teaching of
Abelard. And it was undoubtedly to the intellectual movement of which
Abelard is the most conspicuous representative that the rise of the
university must ultimately be ascribed. But there was nothing in the
organisation of the schools wherein Abelard taught to distinguish them
from any other cathedral schools which might for a time be rendered
famous by the teaching of some illustrious master. In the age of Abelard
there were three great churches at Paris more or less famous for their
schools. In the first place there was the cathedral (Notre Dame), whose
schools were presided over by William of Champeaux. Then, on the left
bank of the Seine, there was the collegiate church of St. Geneviève;
and there was the church of the Canons Regular of St. Victor’s, where a
school for external scholars was started by William after his retirement
from the world. St. Victor’s became the head-quarters of the old
traditional or positive theology, and it had ceased to exist, or ceased
to attract secular students, before the first traces of a university
organisation begin to appear. With both the secular schools of Paris,
Abelard was at one time or other connected. Denifle’s repudiation of
the old view that the university arose from a junction between the arts
schools of St. Geneviève and the theological schools of Notre Dame goes
slightly beyond the evidence, but in the main he is unquestionably
right in contending that it was the cathedral schools which eventually
developed into the university.
“It was the fame of Abelard which first drew to the streets of Paris the
hordes of students whose presence involved that multiplication of masters
by whom the university was ultimately formed. In that sense, and in that
sense only the origin of the University of Paris may be connected with
the name and age of Abelard. Of a university or a recognised society of
masters we hear nothing; nay, the existence of such an institution was
impossible at a time when the single master of the cloister school seems
to have been as a rule the only recognised master in or around each
particular church.”[m]
_The Position of Woman_
Abelard had propounded the ideal of pure and disinterested love in his
writings, as the consummation of the religious soul. Woman rose up to
it, for the first time, in the writings of Héloïse; but still indeed
referring it to man, to her spouse, to her visible God.
The restoration of woman, which had begun with Christianity, took place
chiefly in the twelfth century. A slave in the East, even in the Greek
gynæceum a recluse, emancipated by imperial jurisprudence, she was
recognised by the new religion as man’s equal. Still Christianity, but
just liberated from pagan sensuality, continued to fear and distrust
woman; men knew themselves to be weak and fond, and they repudiated her
all the more strongly, the more they felt how they sympathised with her
in their hearts. Hence, the harsh, and even contemptuous expressions with
which they labour to fortify themselves. Woman is usually designated by
the ecclesiastical writers, and in the Capitularies, by that degrading,
but most expressive phrase, “the weaker vessel” (_vas infirmius_). When
Gregory VII wished to free the clergy from its double bond, woman and
land, there was a new outburst of invective against that dangerous Eve
whose seduction wrought Adam’s ruin, and who evermore pursues him in his
sons.
A quite opposite movement began in the twelfth century. Free mysticism
undertook to raise up what sacerdotal harshness had trampled under
foot. It was especially a Breton, Robert d’Arbrissel, who fulfilled
this mission of love. He reopened the bosom of Christ to women,
founded asylums for them, built them Fontevrault, and there were soon
Fontevraults all over Christendom. The enterprising charity of Robert
applied itself, by preference, to great sinners of the female sex. He
taught the clemency of God, and his immeasurable mercy in the vilest
haunts. It was a curious thing to see the blessed Robert d’Arbrissel
holding forth day and night amidst a crowd of disciples of both sexes,
all resting together around him. The bitter sarcasms of his enemies
had no effect upon the charitable and courageous Breton, nor even the
scandals to which these meetings gave occasion; he covered all with the
wide mantle of grace.
As grace prevailed over the law, a great religious revolution took
place. Piety became converted into an enthusiasm of chivalric gallantry;
the mystical church of Lyons celebrated a festival of the Immaculate
Conception (1134), thus exalting the ideal of maternal purity precisely
at the period when Héloïse was expressing the pure disinterestedness of
love in her famous letters. Woman reigned in heaven; she reigned also
upon earth. We see her interfere, and with authority, in the affairs of
this world. Bertrade de Montfort ruled at once over her first husband,
Fulk of Anjou, and her second, Philip I, king of France. Louis VII dates
his acts from the coronation of his wife Adela. Women, natural judges in
poetical contests, and in the courts of love, sat also as judges in grave
matters, and upon an equality with their husbands. The king of France
expressly recognises this right.
In the first half of the twelfth century women were everywhere restored
to that right of inheritance from which they had been excluded by feudal
barbarism in England, Castile, Aragon, Jerusalem, Burgundy, Flanders,
Hainault, Vermandois, Aquitaine, Provence, and Lower Languedoc. The rapid
extinction of male heirs, the softening of manners, and the progress
of equity, restored the right of inheritance to women. They brought
sovereignties with them into foreign houses; they linked and bound the
world together, accelerated the agglomeration of states, and prepared the
way for the centralisation of the great monarchies.
One royal house alone, that of the Capets, did not recognise the right
of women; it remained safe from the mutations which transferred the
other states from one dynasty to another; it received and it did not
give. Foreign queens might come; the female, the movable element, might
be renewed, but the male element did not come to it from without, it
remained always the same, and with it remained an identity of spirit and
a perpetuity of system. This fixity of the dynasty is one of those things
which have most contributed to insure the unity and the personality of
this mobile country. The common characteristic of the period following
the crusade, is an attempt at emancipation. The crusade in its immense
movement had been an occasion--an impulse; when the occasion came, the
attempt took place, an attempt for the emancipation of the people in the
communes, for the emancipation of women, for that of philosophy and of
pure thought. This echo of the crusade, like the crusade itself, was to
display all its potency and its effect in France, among the most sociable
of nations.[f]
FOOTNOTES
[4] [Contemporaries assign very varied and incoherent numbers for the
size of William’s army. One of them, Hugues de Fleury, estimates it at
150,000 men. Modern historians have cut this down to about 60,000, which
is still regarded by some as too high.]
[5] [The trouble with Robert did not end until 1076, when a treaty was
made and the king received the homage of Flanders.]
[6] [She (Héloïse) was perfect mistress of Latin and knew enough Greek
and Hebrew to form the basis of her future proficiency. He (Abelard)
knew nothing of Greek or Hebrew, although all his biographers except M.
Rémusat assume that he knew them both.--G. W. LEWES.[l]]
[7] [A legend had identified St. Denis who flourished in the third
century with Dionysius the Areopagite who was converted by St. Paul.]
[Illustration]
CHAPTER III. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY
Almost at the moment that the Crusades broke out, an
institution commenced its aggrandisement which has, perhaps,
contributed more than any other to the formation of modern
society, and to the fusion of all the social elements into two
powers, the government and the people,--the institution of
Royalty.--GUIZOT.[m]
[Sidenote: [1180-1270 A.D.]]
Philip Augustus, Louis’ son and successor, who was about fifteen years of
age when he began to reign, was already the nursling of court adulation
and homage. His predecessors had not attained dignity sufficient to
expose them to this bane of the royal nature. Congratulations, couched
in the language of oriental hyperbole, had greeted his birth. He was
styled the _Dieu-donné_, “the God-given”; and self-constituted laureates
began already to celebrate the majesty of the monarch of the French.
Formerly, the surrounding nobles had disdained to dispute court favour
or influence; but the first years of Philip’s reign were taken up with
the rivalry of the houses of Flanders and Champagne, which each sought
to be the masters and ministers of the young sovereign. Henry II of
England gave his support to the counts of Champagne, and the partisans
of Flanders were obliged to retire from Paris. They formed a league, and
menaced war; but Philip, with the English monarch’s aid, easily overcame
the malcontents. Henry showed generosity on this occasion. Instead of
profiting by the divisions of the French, and keeping them alive, he
frankly supported the young king against his refractory barons. He was
king himself, and sympathised with royalty. Philip ill repaid this
kindness: he imitated his father’s policy in seducing the sons of the
English monarch from their allegiance; and their frequent ingratitude at
length broke the heart of the sensitive and passionate monarch. Richard,
duke of Aquitaine, known as Cœur de Lion, and his father’s successor on
the throne, was the especial friend and ally of Philip in these quarrels;
and for a long time the princes shared the same tent and the same bed.
Meantime a third crusade began to be preached. This prevalent enthusiasm,
like the rebellions of an oppressed yet brave people, was sure to arouse
itself and reawaken as soon as time had elapsed sufficient to allow
the disasters of the past to be forgotten. Saladin had recently taken
Jerusalem. Fugitives instantly filled Europe with the dismal tidings. The
cry for a crusade became general: it was no longer, however, the church
that called a council to debate and decide upon the question; another
power had arisen to rob the clergy of their initiative. The king called
a parliament (_parlement_) of his barons at Gisors, and there a third
crusade was determined upon. Cœur de Lion was the first to assume the
cross; and king Philip, only hurt at being anticipated, followed his
example. Frederick Barbarossa also took the same resolution.
[Sidenote: [1190-1194 A.D.]]
In June of the year 1190, Philip Augustus received the pilgrim’s scrip
and staff from the hands of the abbot of St. Denis. Richard received his
at Tours; and it was remarked, as an omen, that, as he leaned on the
staff, it broke under his weight. In order to avoid the disasters of
former crusades, they were to proceed to Palestine by sea. The two kings
wintered in Sicily on their voyage thither, and there laid the foundation
of their future jealousy and hate. The crusaders found the barons of
Syria engaged in the siege of Acre. Their arrival hastened its surrender,
and at the same time marked it with crime. Richard caused upwards of two
thousand captives to be massacred in cold blood, and Philip was guilty of
a similar piece of cruelty. The monarchs, indeed, had some slight breach
of stipulations to allege, or might excuse their conduct as a reprisal
for that of Saladin, who put to death many of the prisoners whom he
made at the battle of Tiberias, more especially all those whose tonsure
marked them to belong to the order of the Templars. It was thus that the
ferocity of oriental manners came to alloy the more generous spirit of
chivalry. In Palestine the French learned to be merciless towards their
religious enemies, and hence it was that the fair page of their history
was soon afterwards stained by the massacre of those whom they called
heretics at home.
[Illustration: PHILIP AUGUSTUS]
[Sidenote: [1194-1200 A.D.]]
Philip Augustus could not long endure the superior renown and prowess
of Cœur de Lion. He seized the pretext of an illness to quit Palestine
and abandon the field of glory to his rival. Returning home, he besought
the pope to release him from the oath which bound him to respect the
rights and territories of a brother crusader. The pontiff refused; but
Philip felt himself sufficiently absolved by the Macchiavellian law of
monarchical policy: and fortune, in making Richard fall captive to the
duke of Austria, on his return from the Holy Land, seemed to favour the
envious designs of the French monarch. Philip no sooner was informed of
Richard’s captivity, than he leagued with his brother John, and invaded
Normandy. He took several towns and castles, but was repulsed from
before Rouen. At length Richard was released, or, as Philip wrote to his
confederate, “the devil broke loose.” We expect on this occasion to read
of a furious war betwixt the sovereigns. And yet no brilliant feat, no
general engagement, marked that which ensued. Petty treason and short
truce, varied by a skirmish or a marauding party, were all the effects
produced by the envy of Philip and the resentment of the lion-hearted
king. The death of the latter by an arrow-shot, as he besieged a castle
in the Limousin, left a less formidable rival to Philip in the person of
King John (1199). The writer of fiction never imagined a baser character
than that of John. His cowardice and meanness form a phenomenon and an
exception in the feudal ages. The nullity of such a rival converted
Philip Augustus from the powerless intriguer to the conqueror and the
hero.[b]
PRINCE ARTHUR OF BRITTANY
[Sidenote: [1200-1204 A.D.]]
Although Richard on his death-bed declared John to be his heir, the
crown of England descended by right of primogeniture to the young prince
Arthur, son of Geoffrey, duke of Brittany and the elder brother of John;
the latter seized it. But Anjou, Poitou, and Touraine, weary of English
domination, declared for Arthur, and invoked Philip’s protection. The
king of France took up Arthur’s cause and then abandoned it (1200),
after obtaining from John the advantage his political selfish policy was
seeking.[c]
But Arthur had been accepted by the Bretons at his birth as a liberator
and avenger. Old Eleanor, alone, held out against her grandson, for her
son John, and for the unity of the English realm, which the accession of
Arthur would have divided. Arthur, in fact, held that unity very cheap.
He offered the king of France to cede Normandy to him, provided he might
have Brittany, Maine, Touraine, Anjou, Poitou, and Aquitaine. John would
have been reduced to the possession of England alone. Philip willingly
assented to this, put his own garrisons in Arthur’s best fortresses, and
demolished them when he had no hope of maintaining his position in them.
John’s nephew, thus betrayed by his ally, turned once more to his uncle;
then he came back to the party of France, invaded Poitou, and besieged
his grandmother, Eleanor, in Mirebeau. It was nothing new in that family
to see the sons armed against their parents. Meanwhile, John came to the
rescue, delivered his mother, defeated Arthur, and took him prisoner with
most of the great lords of his party. What became of the captive? This
has never been clearly ascertained. Matthew Paris[j] alleges that John
treated him well at first, but was afterwards alarmed by the threats and
the obstinacy of the young Breton. “Arthur disappeared,” he says, “and
God grant that it may not have been as malicious rumour reports.” But
Arthur had excited too many hopes to allow of the popular imagination
resigning itself to this uncertainty. It was confidently affirmed that
John had caused him to be put to death, and it was soon added that he had
killed him with his own hand. The chaplain of Philip Augustus relates,
as if he had seen it with his own eyes, that John took Arthur in a boat,
stabbed him twice with a dagger, and threw him into the river three miles
from the castle of Rouen. The Bretons placed the scene of the tragedy
in their own country near Cherbourg, at the foot of those ill-omened
cliffs that present a line of precipices all along the ocean. Thus the
tradition went on enlarging in details, and in dramatic interest, and at
last Shakespeare makes Arthur a helpless young child, whose gentle and
innocent words disarmed the most brutal assassin.[d]
Philip was in the meantime checked in his projects by the court of Rome,
which had laid an interdict upon him, on account of his divorce from
Ingeborg (Ingeburge) of Denmark. And the preaching of a fifth crusade,[8]
which eventually led to the establishment of the Frankish empire of
Romania, about the same time took from him the interest and the aid of
many nobles and chevaliers. He was, during the same interval, engaged
in the conquest of Normandy, which the imbecility and cowardice of John
delivered to his arms without defence. Roger de Lascy held the fortress
of Les Andelys for several months against the French, and was the only
valiant servitor of an unworthy monarch. The barons and warriors of
England disdained to fight under his banner. There was as yet none of
that rivalry which afterwards sprang up betwixt the nations. The monarchs
of both were French princes, speaking the French tongue; and, although
subsequent historians have given a national colour to the combats and
conquests of Philip, the struggle was almost purely personal. Rouen, the
capital of Normandy, surrendered to him (1204), without John’s making a
single effort to preserve it. And thus a few years of the reign of one
weak prince more than counterbalanced the long-established superiority of
the monarchs of England.
[Sidenote: [1204-1208 A.D.]]
It has been seen what use the French monarchs made of their courts of
peers, and of the judicial supremacy allowed them, in extending their
authority over barons heretofore independent. Philip dared to apply
the same principle to the dukes of Normandy, which his father had
successfully done with regard to the counts of Bourbon and Auvergne.
He summoned John before his suzerain court, to answer for the murder
of Arthur and other crimes. Henry II, or Richard, would have given fit
answer to such a summons. The Norman princes always held their homage to
be that by parade or courtesy, not _homage-liège_. But John had neither
the sense of his dignity, nor the spirit to maintain it. He allowed the
jurisdiction of Philip’s court, though he feared to obey his summons; and
he thus seemed to allow a legal right to the usurpations of Philip. The
latter, indeed, appeared to feel the want of dignity in the assessors
of his court. All nobles holding their lands directly of the king were
peers in his parliament; and thus the petty lords of the counties of
Paris and Orleans ranked equally with the dukes of Burgundy or the counts
of Flanders. Philip remedied this, by appointing twelve great peers, or
rather by pretending that such a number had always existed since the
twelve paladins of Charlemagne. Of these, six were clerics, six laics;
the latter being the dukes of Normandy, of Aquitaine, of Burgundy, the
counts of Toulouse, of Flanders, and of Champagne. This division of
the aristocracy in the high and low nobility, was, however, as yet but
nominal; the lesser barons still continued to consider themselves as the
peers of the greater, and to have an equal voice in the royal courts. It
is important for the reader to mark the rise of this feudal institution,
and equally so to mark the difference of its fate and progress in France
and in England. In the former country, the parliament became amalgamated
with lawyers, and preserved to the last its judicial functions,
whilst its legislative authority became but a shadow. In England, on
the contrary, it guarded the more precious privilege of legislation,
abandoning a considerable portion of its judicial rights.
By the discomfiture of John, Philip Augustus united to the monarchy of
France not only Normandy, but the provinces of Maine, Anjou, Touraine,
and Poitou. Artois he had acquired as the dowry of his wife, Isabella
of Hainault. The counties of the south remained still independent of
his sway. They looked to the king of Aragon as their suzerain; and
there existed far more congeniality of feelings and habits betwixt the
Spaniards and Provençals, than betwixt the Provençals and French. Certain
events of the reign of Philip, which we are about to relate, destroyed
the independence of the people of the south, as well as their connection
with the Aragonese, and extended the authority of the French monarch to
the Mediterranean and the Pyrenees.
THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADE
While Philip Augustus adroitly wrested Normandy and its dependencies
from the hands of John, a series of events took place in Languedoc which
had the effect of destroying its independence, and of bringing that fine
region not only nominally, as it had hitherto been, but really under the
dominion of the kings of France.[b]
At this period the southern part of France held but distant relations
with the north. Two powerful houses, that of Barcelona and that of
Toulouse, shared dominion over it, with the exception of Aquitaine,
which extended to the Pyrenees. This isolation naturally gave the south
a separate existence, character, and interest. The tongue, that of the
Limousin or of Provence, resembling more the Aragonese than the French
of Paris, had become, thanks to the troubadours, a literary language.
The cities contained a large bourgeois element, which had become wealthy
through commerce.
It was in the midst of this people, active, ardent, isolated from most
of their neighbours by political as well as natural barriers, corrupted
moreover by the refinements of an equivocal civilisation and by the
enervating literature of the troubadours, that there broke forth, at the
end of the twelfth century, the Albigensian heresy, a powerful one, that
having long undermined the ground, ended by being a menace to Catholic
beliefs, the church, and society itself.
Several heretical sects dating from the early Christian time had
not ceased to have their obscure upholders in France. Such were the
Manichæans or Paulicians who believed in the co-existence of a principle
of good and a principle of evil. It was the Paulicians who were condemned
to be burned at Orleans by King Robert (1022). During the time of the
crusaders, the sect, revived by frequent intercourse with the Orient
where it had originated, spread all over the centre of France. It is
thought that this extension was the work of the emigrants who arrived
from Bulgaria; at last the heretics received the name of Bulgarians or
Boulgres, and it was rumoured that they had a mysterious chief, or, as
they said, a resident pope in that country. They were called Albigenses
because they were especially numerous in the vicinity of Albi, and by
this last name they have been preserved in history.
Some of their doctrines are known: they regarded the devil, or principle
of evil, as the first author of the creation; they rejected the
sacraments; they interpreted the Scriptures in a different way from the
Catholic tradition. Also they possessed a kind of sacerdotal college
whose members, called “the perfect ones,” performed special rites. It is
very difficult to form any idea of their dogmas as a whole, for they had
no theologian, no teacher, and they have left no writings. One can judge
the basis of this heresy, and the sects belonging to it, only indirectly
by the writings of the authors and teachers who fought them. These
writers have attacked above all the strangeness of their practices and
the vulgarity of their superstitions.
[Sidenote: [1208-1209 A.D.]]
But the dominant character of all these sects was their hatred of the
church. They pretended to re-establish the primitive simplicity of the
religion, which the church had corrupted, and among themselves they were
known as _cathares_, or “the pure ones.”[e]
For a long time the holy see seemed not alive to the importance of
this sect. It was Pope Innocent III who first perceived its dangerous
tendency, and who took certain steps for its destruction. He issued
interdicts against such princes as should favour them, and offered the
spoil of the heretic to whoever should subdue and slay him. The principal
lord of the south of France was at that time Raymond VI, count of
Toulouse; and he at least tolerated the Albigenses, as those primitive
reformers were called, aware of their moral purity and sincere devotion.
Peter of Castelnau, the pope’s legate, reproached the count of Toulouse
with his want of zeal, and was indignant at his forbearance to extirpate
the new opinions by fire and sword. The legate used no measured language;
he not only excommunicated Raymond, but insulted him in his court, and
then took his departure. The count of Toulouse expressed his indignant
feelings before his followers as Henry II did after the insolence of
Thomas à Becket, and with the same fatal effect. On the day after, Peter
of Castelnau fell under the dagger of a gentleman of the count, in a
hostelry on the Rhone, where he had stopped.
[Illustration: AN OFFICER OF THE KING’S HOUSEHOLD, THIRTEENTH CENTURY]
Pope Innocent was driven to transports of rage on learning the
assassination of his legate. He not only excommunicated the count of
Toulouse, but promulgated a crusade against him. He called on all the
nobles of France, on its princes, and its prelates, to join in the “holy”
war, to assume the cross, as being engaged against infidels. And the same
privileges and indulgences were granted to the crusader of this civil
war, that previously were bestowed on those who embarked fortune and
life in the perilous attempt to rescue the Holy Land from the Saracen.
Spoil, wealth, and honour in this world, together with certain salvation
in the next, were now offered at too cheap a rate to be refused.
Crowds of adventurers flocked to the standard; and a formidable army
was assembled at Lyons in the spring of 1209, under the command of the
legate commander, Amalric, abbot of Cîteaux. The pope at the same time
created a new ecclesiastical militia for the destruction of heresy. The
order of St. Dominic, or of the friars inquisitors, was instituted; and
these infernal missionaries were let loose in couples upon the hapless
Languedoc, like bloodhounds, to scent their prey and then devour it.
[Sidenote: [1209-1217 A.D.]]
Raymond, count of Toulouse, had neither the force nor the courage to
oppose so formidable an invasion. He repaired to the crusaders’ army,
delivered up his fortresses and cities, and suffered the humiliating
penance of a public flogging in the church of St. Giles. The count’s
relative and feudatory, Raymond Roger, viscount of Béziers and
Carcassonne, regions infected with the heresy of the Albigenses, came
also to make submission. The abbot of Cîteaux, who was prudent enough to
accept that of the count of Toulouse, feared to lose all his prey. He
refused to admit the exculpation of the viscount of Béziers, and plainly
told him that his only chance was to defend himself to the utmost. The
young viscount courageously accepted the advice. He summoned the most
faithful of his vassals, abandoned the open country as well as towns
of lesser consequence to the enemy, and restricted his efforts to the
defence of Béziers and of Carcassonne. He shut himself up in the latter.
The fury of the crusaders fell first upon Béziers: they had scarcely
sat down before the unfortunate town, when a sally of the garrison was
repulsed with such vigour that the besiegers entered the town together
with the routed host of the citizens. Word of this unexpected success
was instantly brought to the abbot of Cîteaux, and his orders were
demanded as to how the innocent were to be distinguished from the guilty.
“Slay them all,” exclaimed the legate of the vicar of Christ; “the Lord
will know his own.” The entire population was in consequence put to
the sword; nor woman nor infant was spared. Upwards of twenty thousand
human beings perished in the massacre--the sanguinary first-fruits of
modern persecution. Carcassonne was next invested, bravely attacked,
and as valiantly defended; the young viscount distinguishing himself in
defence of his rights, while Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester, was
the most prominent warrior of the crusaders. At length the legate grew
weary of the viscount’s obstinacy, and offered him terms. He gave him
a safe-conduct, sanctioned by his own oath and that of the barons of
his army. Raymond Roger came with three hundred of his followers to the
tent of the legate. “Faith,” said the latter, “is not to be kept with
those who have no faith”; and he ordered the viscount and his friends
to be put in chains. The inhabitants of Carcassonne found means to fly.
In a general assembly of the crusaders, the lordships of Béziers and
Carcassonne were given to Simon de Montfort, in reward of his zeal and
valour; and to make the gift sure, it was accompanied with the person of
his rival. The unfortunate viscount, the victim of the legate’s perfidy,
soon after perished in prison.
The victory of the crusaders was of course followed by executions at
the stake and on the scaffold. The friars inquisitors of the order
of St. Dominic did not relax their zeal. A general revolt against De
Montfort was the consequence, in which the people of Toulouse joined.
The Provençal army was headed by Pedro king of Aragon, the uncle of the
late viscount of Béziers. It was he who had persuaded the unfortunate
viscount to trust himself to the legate, and to him in consequence
fell the duty of taking vengeance. The cross, however--the profaned
cross--was still successful. The Provençals were routed by Simon de
Montfort at the battle of Muret, and the king of Aragon was slain. This
victory seemed to establish the power of De Montfort in Languedoc. He
took possession of all the provinces of his rival, even of the town of
Toulouse; and an assembly of prelates sanctioned the usurpation. But
the cruel spirit of De Montfort would not allow him to rest quiet in
his new empire. Violence and persecution marked his rule; he sought to
destroy the Provençal population by the sword or the stake, nor could he
bring himself to tolerate the liberties of the citizens of Toulouse. In
1217 the Toulousans again revolted, and war once more broke out betwixt
Count Raymond and Simon de Montfort. The latter formed the siege of the
capital, and was engaged in repelling a sally, when a stone from one of
the walls struck him and put an end to his existence. The death of De
Montfort was of course considered a martyrdom by the clergy, and his
fame in their chronicles far outshines that of Godfrey de Bouillon or of
Richard the Lion-hearted.
LEAGUE AGAINST PHILIP AUGUSTUS
King Philip was in the meantime pursuing his darling object, the humbling
the power of the princes of England. He had already driven John from the
west of France. That monarch, at variance with his barons, and at the
same time excommunicated by the church, seemed an easy prey to Philip.
The French king meditated the conquest of England. He leagued with the
malcontents of that country, and formed a powerful army for the purposes
of invasion. John, to ward off the blow, not only became reconciled to
the Roman see, but made himself and his kingdom feudatory to the pope. A
papal legate immediately took John under his protection; and the French
monarch, rather than risk a quarrel with the church, turned his armies
towards Flanders, which he wasted and plundered impitiably, from hatred
to its count.
The emperor Otto, then in alliance with King John against France, came
to the relief of the Flemings; and thus, for the first time since the
accession of the new dynasty, the armies of France and Germany found
themselves arrayed against each other in national hostility, each
commanded by its respective monarch. The rival hosts met at Bouvines, in
the month of August, 1214. Twenty thousand combatants on either side,
together with the presence of two monarchs, gave gravity and importance
to the meeting.[b]
_The Battle of Bouvines (1214 A.D.)_
[Sidenote: [1214 A.D.]]
The two armies remained for a time a short distance apart, not daring
to begin operations; and the French were retreating over the bridge of
Bouvines to march upon Hainault, when the enemy, attacking the rearguard,
obliged them to turn about.
The chaplain, William le Breton,[k] who during the action remained beside
the king singing psalms, says: “Philip was resting under a tree near a
chapel, his armour laid aside. At the first sound of combat he entered
the church for a short prayer, armed hastily, and mounted his steed with
as great enthusiasm as though on his way to a wedding or a feast. Loud
shouts resounded from the field: ‘To arms, men of war, to arms!’ together
with the blare of trumpets. The king rode to the front, not waiting for
his banner--the oriflamme of St. Denis, a flag of scarlet silk, that day
carried by Gallon de Montigny, a brave man. The bishop-elect of Senlis,
Guérin, ordered the battle so that the French had the sun behind them,
while the enemy fought with the sun in their eyes. Three hundred mounted
peasants of Soissons, vassals of the abbot of St. Médard, opened action
on the right wing, boldly charging the Flemish cavalry. The latter
hesitated to engage with their inferiors, but the cry, ‘Death to the
French!’ raised by one among them proved decisive; and the Burgundians,
led by their duke, arriving to reinforce those of Soissons, there was a
furious combat. On this side Count Ferrand of Flanders fought.”
[Illustration: THE BATTLE OF BOUVINES]
When the battle began the militia had already crossed the bridge; they
recrossed in haste, rallied under the royal standard, and took position
in the centre in front of the king and his guard. The German cavalry,
among whom rode the emperor Otto, charged and penetrated their ranks,
and had almost reached the king when they were checked by the prompt
action of his officers. In the midst of this encounter arrived the German
infantry. These dragged Philip from his horse, and before he could
recover his feet attempted to thrust at him through the visor of his
helmet or a flaw in his armour. Montigny, who carried the colours, waved
his banner frantically for assistance; some horse- and foot-soldiers
hastened up. These rescued the king, set him on his horse, and he again
plunged into the mêlée.
Otto in his turn was near to being captured. William des Barres, the
bravest and ablest of the French cavaliers, the fortunate adversary of
Richard the Lion-hearted, whom he had twice overcome, had the emperor
by the helmet, and was thrusting at him furiously when overwhelmed by
a torrent of the enemy. Unable to make him loose his hold or to close
with him, they killed his horse under him; but disentangling himself he
succeeded, alone and on foot, in clearing with his sword and his poniard
an ample space around him. Otto escaped.
On the right Ferrand, count of Flanders, had fallen wounded into the
hands of the French; in the centre the emperor and his German princes
had taken to flight: but on the left Renaud de Boulogne and the English
held firm. They had overcome the men of Dreux, of Perche, of Ponthieu,
and of Vimeu. “Whereupon,” says the poet-chronicler, “Philip de Dreux,
bishop of Beauvais, happening to have in his hand a club, and forgetting
in his rage and grief the dignity of his office, struck down the English
commander and with him many others, spilling no blood but breaking many
bones. He enjoined upon those about him the necessity of taking upon
themselves the credit of this deed, that he might not fall under reproach
for violating the traditions of his office.”
The English were soon completely routed with the exception of Renaud de
Boulogne, who had drawn up a double circle of infantry bristling with
spears. He charged therefrom as from a fort, and there returned for
refuge and to recover breath. At last his horse was wounded; he fell and
was captured. Five other counts and twenty-five knights-banneret had been
taken.
The return of the king to Paris was a march of triumph. All along the
route the churches dispersed indulgences, and the hymns of the choirs
mingled with the clash of war implements. The houses were hung with
draperies; the roads strewn with branches and fresh flowers. Men and
women, children and old people ran to the crossroads to see the count of
Flanders who, wounded and in chains, was carried in a litter; some among
them crying: “Ferrand, bound and in irons (_ferré_), no longer shalt thou
kick against the pricks and hurl defiance at thy masters.”
At Paris the townspeople, with a multitude of clerks and students, burst
into songs and hymns on the arrival of the king. The day not sufficing
for the jubilation, they festooned the dark with innumerable lanterns, so
that the night was brilliant as the day. The students kept holiday for a
week. In the midst of these rejoicings the troops, which had comported
themselves so creditably in the strife, delivered to the provost of Paris
the prisoners in their charge. The king left them a certain number to be
ransomed and imprisoned the rest. Ferrand was lodged in the new tower of
the Louvre, where he remained for thirteen years. Near Senlis was built
Victory Abbey, whose ruins are still to be seen.[c]
LAST YEARS AND INFLUENCE OF PHILIP AUGUSTUS
[Sidenote: [1214-1224 A.D.]]
The brilliant success of Bouvines seems to have contented and allayed
the hitherto restless ambition of Philip. In a year or two after, the
barons of England, discontented with John, offered their crown to Louis,
the son of Philip Augustus. The old monarch hesitated; he dreaded the
anathema with which the pope threatened him, if he attacked his vassal,
John of England. Prince Louis was obliged to undertake the expedition
with but scanty aid from his parent. He was at first successful. Almost
all England owned his sovereignty. The castle of Dover alone held out.
But the death of John, and the proclaiming of his son, Henry III, soon
obliged the French prince to abandon his claim and his conquests in
England.
In the south, Philip Augustus showed himself equally dead to enterprise
and lost in spirit. Amaury de Montfort, son of Simon, offered to cede
to the king all his rights in Languedoc, which he was unable to defend
against the old house of Toulouse. Philip hesitated to accept the
important cession, and left the rival houses to the continuance of a
struggle carried feebly on by either side. He at length expired, in 1223,
after a reign of forty-three years. This period of half a century was one
of uninterrupted progress to the French monarchy, and to its sovereign
power. Though much of this was due to the age, to circumstances, and to
the natural development of the country’s political system, still much
remains due to the personal character of Philip--to his activity, his
prudence, foresight, and courage. The mere list of the provinces which
he subdued and united to the monarchy forms the fittest monument to his
fame. These were Normandy, Maine, Anjou, Touraine, and Poitou, wrested
from John; Picardy and Auvergne, won in the commencement of his reign;
Artois, acquired by his marriage with Isabella of Hainault; and, finally,
the influence over Languedoc which the crusaders brought him, and which
nothing but Philip’s age and declining strength prevented him from
converting into sovereignty. In minor matters the active spirit of Philip
Augustus equally displayed itself. He put the police on an efficient
footing; he walled and paved Paris and the principal towns under his
sway; he built and fortified; he encouraged literature by the foundation
of professorships; improved the discipline of the army; and, with all
his enterprises and expenses, so ordered his finances as to leave a
considerable treasure at his death.
LOUIS VIII (1223-1226 A.D.)
When Louis VIII succeeded his father Philip on the throne, it was
remarked with joy by the lovers of legitimacy that he was descended by
his mother, Isabella of Hainault, from Charles of Lorraine, the last
prince of Charlemagne’s blood, and that he thus united the rights of
Carlovingian and Capetian. He was feeble in person, and is said not to
have been endowed with much capacity; but the sage policy of Philip
Augustus, together with the impulse he had given to affairs, continued
to direct them, and to render France triumphant over her enemies. Henry
III lost the towns of Niort and La Rochelle, and was driven by Louis from
Poitou; yet so little did the English feel the loss of this province,
that it is scarcely noticed by the historians of the island. The barons
were so much occupied with jealousy of their sovereign and of his power,
that Henry could procure or send no aid to his French provinces. A feeble
expedition was at length fitted out, which preserved Gascony to England,
but recovered nothing.
A singular cause of contention arose about this time in Flanders.
Baldwin, its last count, had been one of the leaders of the Fifth
Crusade, which, in the commencement of the century, took Constantinople
from the Greeks. He had been elected emperor of Romania, and had been
the first of the Latin dynasty which reigned over it. Soon after, in
the year 1205, he had been taken prisoner by the Bulgarians, and had
not since been heard of. His daughter Joan succeeded to the county of
Flanders, and had married Ferdinand (Ferrand), prince of Portugal, who
had opposed Philip Augustus, and who was taken prisoner by that monarch
at the battle of Bouvines. Joan took no steps to liberate her husband, or
to pay his ransom, when an aged man appeared in Flanders, calling himself
Count Baldwin, and giving an account of his long captivity and recent
escape from the Bulgarians. Joan denied the identity of this person with
her father; Louis VIII was of her opinion; while Henry III treated and
allied himself with him as the veritable Baldwin. The self-entitled count
appeared before King Louis at Péronne, offering proofs of his identity;
but unfortunately he could not recall the place where he had done homage
to Philip Augustus, nor the place where he had been knighted, nor yet the
place and day of his marriage. Whether he really could not make answer
to these questions, or whether age had troubled his memory, the old man
was condemned as a pretender, and the countess Joan soon after caused him
to be hanged. The common people still persisted in giving credit to his
identity with Count Baldwin, and looked on Joan as the murderer of her
father. Henry III in no way supported this his unfortunate ally.
[Illustration: LOUIS VIII
(From an old French print)]
[Sidenote: [1204-1226 A.D.]]
The sovereignty over Languedoc was still undecided. King Louis was
anxious to undertake a crusade in that country, with all the indulgences
and advantages of a warlike pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The hostilities
with England and the fickleness of the pope delayed the execution of this
purpose. Both obstacles were removed at length. Amaury de Montfort being
driven from the conquests of his father by the sons of Count Raymond,
reanimated the zeal of the pope and the old crusaders. Amaury retired
to Paris, and made cession of his claims to King Louis, who, in return,
promised him the office of constable. A new crusade was preached against
the Albigenses; and Louis marched towards Languedoc at the head of a
formidable army in the spring of the year 1226. The town of Avignon had
proffered to the crusaders the facilities of crossing the Rhone under
her walls, but refused entry within them to such an host. Louis, having
arrived at Avignon, insisted on passing through the town: the Avignonais
shut their gates and defied the monarch, who instantly formed the siege.
One of the rich municipalities of the south was almost a match for the
king of France. He was kept three months under its walls, his army a
prey to famine, to disease, and to the assaults of a brave garrison.
The crusaders lost twenty thousand men. The people of Avignon at length
submitted, but on no dishonourable terms. This was the only resistance
that Louis experienced in Languedoc. Raymond VII dared not meet the
crusaders in the field, nor durst one of his towns or châteaux remain
faithful to him. All submitted. Louis retired from his facile conquest;
he himself, and the chiefs of his army, stricken by an epidemy which had
prevailed in the conquered regions. The monarch’s feeble frame could not
resist it: he expired at Montpensier in Auvergne, in November, 1226.[b]
LOUIS IX, CALLED ST. LOUIS (1226-1270 A.D.)
[Sidenote: [1226-1236 A.D.]]
Now we come to the true hero of the Middle Ages, a prince pious as he
was brave; who was devoted to feudalism and yet struck it the most
telling blows; who venerated the church yet knew how to resist its head;
who respected law yet placed justice above it; a frank and gentle soul
and loving heart filled with Christian charity, yet one that condemned
to torture the body of the sinner for the salvation of his soul; who
on earth looked only towards heaven and made of his kingly office a
magistracy of order and equity. Rome has canonised him, and the people
still see him seated under the oak of Vincennes dispensing justice to all
comers. This saint, this man of peace, did more in the simplicity of his
heart for the advancement of royalty than the most subtle counsellors or
ten fighting monarchs, because the king, in after time, appeared to the
people as the incarnation of Justice.[9]
For more than a century the sword of royalty, so far as it pertained to
France, had been valiantly carried. But the son of Louis VIII was a child
of eleven years. A coalition of the most powerful vassals was formed
at once to profit by his minority. The regent, his mother, Blanche of
Castile, won to her side one of the confederates, Thibaut, the powerful
count of Champagne, sent the royal army to save him from the attack of
his former allies and obtained from him, when he inherited the kingdom
of Navarre, the important counties of Blois, Chartres, and Sancerre.
A treaty, signed in 1229, assured to one of the king’s brothers the
succession of the county of Toulouse and a marriage arranged between a
second brother of St. Louis and the heiress of Provence prepared the way,
at a future date, for the union of that country with France. Already
the royal seneschals were established at Beaucaire and Carcassonne, by
which the king found himself master, through himself or his brothers, of
a large part of southern France. The king’s majority was proclaimed in
1236, but the wise regent still held the greatest influence over her son
and the direction of affairs.
The great pontificate of Innocent III had given new energy to the church
and to religious sentiment. The spirit of the Crusades which had been
extinguished during the rivalry of Philip Augustus with Richard Cœur
de Lion and John Lackland was rekindled. In 1235 preaching the “holy
war” was recommenced in France, and, as on too many other occasions, the
movement was begun by the massacre of those whose ancestors had nailed
the sainted victim to the cross of Golgotha. Everywhere the Jews were
slaughtered, until the Council of Tours was obliged to take these unhappy
people under their protection. Heretics found even less mercy. Thibaut of
Champagne burned 183 of them on Mount Aimé near Vertus. This crusade, in
which Thibaut himself, the dukes of Burgundy and Brittany took part, was
not successful. The crusaders were beaten at Gaza in Palestine, and those
who returned brought back with them nothing but the honour of having
broken a few lances in the Holy Land.
[Sidenote: [1236-1259 A.D.]]
Up to his war with England St. Louis gave little sign of activity; but in
1241 the emperor Frederick II detained the French prelates who had gone
to Rome to attend a council, and Louis demanded with great firmness that
they be set at liberty.
“Since the prelates of our realm have for no reason deserved their
detention,” he writes the emperor, “may it please your grace to set them
at liberty. You will thus appease us, for we regard their detention as an
insult, and our royal majesty would lose respect if we could keep quiet
under such circumstances. May your imperial prudence not go so far as
to allege your power or your will, since the kingdom of France is not
so weak that it will resign itself to be trampled under your feet.” The
emperor released his prisoners. Some time before Louis, on behalf of
himself and one of his brothers, refused the imperial crown of Frederick
II which the pope had offered him, and he had also refused the pontiff’s
request to modify a royal ordinance of 1234 restraining the jurisdiction
of ecclesiastical tribunals--a necessary measure, since these courts had
come to judge many more civil cases than the lay tribunals.
This man who spoke so firmly acted in the same manner when forced to take
up arms. Attacked in 1242 by the English, who sustained several of his
rebellious barons, St. Louis beat them at Taillebourg and at Saintes.
Perhaps he would have been able to drive them out of France, but he
refused to push his victory. Acquisitions made in the last half century
had tripled the extent of the royal domain, but they seemed to him
tainted with violence because they were the gain of two confiscations.
Through conscientious scruples he left the king of England, in a treaty
which he did not sign until his return from the crusade in 1259 [The
Treaty of Abbeville], the duchy of Guienne, that is to say Bordeaux,
Limoges, Périgueux, Cahors, Agen, Saintonge to the south of the Charente,
and Gascony, on condition of homage to the crown. And to prevent perjury
he obliged the lords who held fiefs from both crowns to choose between
the two sovereigns. The limits of the kingdom were equally uncertain on
the south; he fixed them at a convention with the king of Aragon, and the
county of Barcelona ceased to be dependent on the French crown.
In 1245, Pope Innocent IV, driven out of Italy by the emperor Frederick
II, took refuge at Lyons and there held in the cathedral church of
St. John of that city the thirteenth ecumenical council at which 140
bishops assisted. The pope solemnly deposed the emperor and exhorted all
Christian princes to march to the deliverance of the Holy Sepulchre.
The spirit of the Crusades, which had been extinguished during the
rivalry of Philip Augustus and Richard Cœur de Lion, was rekindled.
The Spaniards had their crusade against the Moors, the Germans against
the Slavs, and the knights of Italy fought against the cities; but
in France, in spite of the great satiety of war from the Albigensian
troubles, there remained sufficient martial spirit to undertake new
crusades. In 1239 many had gone; we know with what success. Jerusalem,
which Frederick II had bought back from the hands of the infidels (1229)
had now come again under the power of Khwarismian barbarians (1239).
_First Crusade of St. Louis (1248-1254 A.D.)_
St. Louis had not listened to the appeal of the Fathers of the Council
of Lyons to assume the cross, but during an illness which, in 1244,
brought him to the edge of the grave, he made a vow to go to the Holy
Land. His mother and counsellors struggled in vain against this imprudent
resolution. Louis left his power again in the hands of Queen Blanche and
embarked at Aigues-Mortes, a little city which at that time was joined
to the Mediterranean by a canal across the swamps and salt marshes. The
king bought it from the monks of Psalmodi Abbey in order to have a port
of his own upon that sea, for Marseilles belonged to his brother the
count of Provence. Many crusaders embarked at the latter city, among them
the king’s friend the seneschal of Champagne and the sire de Joinville,
who, with Villehardouin, is the first in point of date, as in merit,
of the old French prose writers. It was not without many misgivings
that he determined to follow his master. In setting out to join him he
passed near his own castle, “but,” he said, “I dare not turn my face
towards Joinville, for fear that my heart would fail me in leaving my two
children and my fine castle which are so dear to me.” On the banks of
the Rhone he saw the ruins of a castle which the king had had destroyed
because its lord had a bad name for stripping and robbing all the
merchants and pilgrims who passed by.
[Illustration: A FRENCH KNIGHT, THIRTEENTH CENTURY]
[Sidenote: [1249-1270 A.D.]]
St. Louis had been collecting for two years a large store of provisions
on the island of Cyprus. The army left there in eighteen hundred ships,
large and small, for Egypt. Damietta, at one of the mouths of the Nile,
was captured (June 7th, 1249), but precious time was lost before marching
upon Cairo. Five months and a half of delay stoutened the hearts of the
mamelukes. The crusaders took a month to cover the five leagues which
separated them from the town of Mansurah. A badly directed fight at
the same place cost the lives of a large number of knights and of St.
Louis’ brother the count of Artois. When the prior of the Hospital, says
Joinville,[i] came to ask of St. Louis if he had any news of his brother,
the king replied that he had, that he knew his brother was in heaven. The
prior tried to comfort him in praising the valour the prince had always
shown and the glory he had gained that day, and the good king replied
that God was adored in all that he had done. And then he began to shed
great tears, at which many people who were looking on were oppressed by
grief and compassion (February, 1250).
Soon the army was surrounded by enemies and decimated by pest. Joinville
was stricken down, and equally so his poor chaplain. One day it happened
that he was chanting mass before the seneschal’s bedside; when the priest
was at the sacrament Joinville perceived him to be so ill that with his
own eyes he saw him faint. The seneschal got up and ran to raise him
and then he managed to finish the mass, but never said it again, and
died. The retreat was disastrous and finally they had to surrender.
“The good, saintly man, the king,” did honour to his captivity by his
courage and inspired even his enemies with respect for his virtues. They
released him for a large ransom. Once free he made his way to Palestine
and stayed there three years, employing his influence and zeal in
maintaining harmony among the Christians and his resources in repairing
the fortifications of the places they still occupied.
The news of these disasters only served to increase the king’s popularity
in France. The people would not see his faults and thought only of the
virtues he had shown. The prelates and lords had deserted and betrayed
him, they said; it would take the humble people to rescue him, and an
immense crowd of serfs and peasants gathered together to cross the sea
and go to the king’s help. This was the Shepherds’ Crusade. These people
lived, on the way, by pillage--even murders were committed. It was
necessary to deal harshly with them, and they were scattered like wild
beasts.
The news of the regent’s death (December, 1252) recalled Louis at last to
France. In passing Cyprus the king’s galley grazed a rock, which carried
away fully eighteen feet of her keel. Louis was advised to change ships,
and according to Joinville[i] said, “If I leave the ship, five or six
hundred people who are on it and who value their life as I do mine will
be afraid to stay behind and will land at Cyprus with no hope or means of
ever returning to their own country. I prefer to place myself, my wife,
and children in danger under the protection of God, than to bring such
misfortune on so many people.”
_Last Years and Death of St. Louis_
It was after his return to France that St. Louis made treaties with
England and Aragon to determine definitely the boundaries of the three
kingdoms. He hoped in making substantial sacrifices to strengthen
his hold on the provinces he kept for himself and to prevent the war
so frequently provoked by uncertainty with regard to frontiers. This
solicitude to do justice to all caused him to be chosen as arbitrator
between the king of England and his barons in the controversy over the
provisions of Oxford (1264). Louis pronounced in favour of the king,
and this time was not successful, for the barons did not hold to his
decision, and deposed Henry III. More fortunate elsewhere, he settled a
dispute of succession which delivered Flanders from civil war. In the
year 1270 St. Louis undertook another crusade in which his faithful
Joinville this time refused to engage.[f]
[Sidenote: [1270 A.D.]]
A pacific expedition which should merely intimidate the king of Tunis and
induce him to become a convert was not what suited the Genoese in whose
vessels St. Louis was making his passage. Most of the crusaders preferred
violence; it was said that Tunis was a rich town, the pillage of which
might indemnify them for their dangerous expedition. The Genoese,
regardless of the voice of St. Louis, began hostilities by seizing the
vessels they found before Carthage. The landing took place without
obstacle. The Moors only showed themselves to provoke the Christians,
and make them waste their strength in fruitless pursuits. After spending
some weary days on the burning shore, the Christians advanced towards the
castle of Carthage. All that remained of the great rival of Rome was a
fort guarded by two hundred soldiers, and the Saracens who had retreated
into the vaults or subterranean chambers were butchered or suffocated by
smoke and flames. The king found the ruins full of corpses, which he had
removed, that he might take up his quarters there with his followers.
He had to wait at Carthage for his brother, Charles of Anjou, before
marching on Tunis.
The greater part of the army remained under the African sun, tormented by
the thick dust swept from the desert by the winds, and surrounded by the
festering remains of the dead. The Moors prowled all around, continually
cutting off some stragglers. There were no trees, no vegetable food; for
water there was nothing but fetid marshes and cisterns full of disgusting
insects. In eight days the plague had broken out. The counts of Vendôme,
de la Marche and Viane, Walter de Nemours, marshal of France, the sires
de Montmorency, Piennes, Brissac, St. Briçon, and d’Apremont were already
dead.
The legate soon followed them. The survivors being no longer able to
bury them, they were thrown into the canal, till they covered the whole
surface of the water. Meanwhile, the king and his sons were attacked by
the malady; the youngest died in his vessel, and it was not till eight
days afterwards that the confessor of St. Louis took on himself to
acquaint him with the mournful event. The deceased was the most beloved
of his children, and his death announced to a dying father was, to the
latter, one tie less to earth, a call from God, a temptation to die.
Accordingly, without perturbation or regret, he accomplished that last
work of a Christian life, making the responses to the litanies and the
psalms, dictating a noble and affecting instruction for his son, and
receiving even the ambassadors of the Greeks, who came to entreat his
intervention in their favour with his brother Charles of Anjou, whose
ambition menaced them. He spoke to them with kindness, and promised to
exert himself with zeal, if he lived, to keep them in peace; but the next
day he himself entered into the peace of God.
That last night of his life he desired them to raise him from his bed and
lay him on ashes; and so he died, with his arms constantly folded in the
form of a cross. “And on Monday the blessed king stretched his folded
hands towards heaven, and said, ‘Good Lord God, have mercy on this people
that here remaineth, and lead it into its country, that it fall not into
the hand of its enemies, and that it be not constrained to renounce thy
holy name!’ In the night before he deceased, whilst he was reposing, he
sighed, and said in a low voice, ‘O Jerusalem! O Jerusalem!’”[d]
In his lifetime the contemporaries of St. Louis suspected in their
simplicity that he was already a saint, and more saintly than the
priests. Says the king’s confessor, Geoffrey de Beaulieu:[l] “Whilst he
lived a word might be said of him which is said of St. Hilary, ‘O most
perfect layman whose life priests even desire to imitate.’ For many
priests and laymen desired to be like the blessed king in his virtues
and his morals; for it is even thought that he was a saint in his
lifetime.”[d]
The French during this reign accomplished a great achievement without the
help of royalty. Charles of Anjou, count of Provence, summoned by the
pope against King Manfred, son of the emperor Frederick II, conquered
the kingdom of Naples in 1266. But the Latins had five years before lost
Constantinople which the Greeks had taken possession of. It was to the
interested advice of Charles of Anjou that was due the direction taken by
the last crusade, since the submission of the king of Tunis would free
Sicily from the constant attempts of the Saracens upon that island.[f]
_Hallam’s Estimate of St. Louis_
[Sidenote: [1226-1270 A.D.]]
Louis IX had methods of preserving his ascendency very different from
military prowess. That excellent prince was perhaps the most eminent
pattern of unswerving probity and Christian strictness of conscience
that ever held the sceptre in any country. There is a peculiar beauty
in the reign of St. Louis, because it shows the inestimable benefit
which a virtuous king may confer on his people, without possessing any
distinguished genius. For nearly half a century that he governed France,
there is not the smallest want of moderation or disinterestedness in his
actions; and yet he raised the influence of the monarchy to a much higher
point than the most ambitious of his predecessors.
To the surprise of his own and later times, he restored great part
of his conquests to Henry III, whom he might naturally hope to have
expelled from France. It would indeed have been a tedious work to conquer
Guienne, which was full of strong places, and the subjugation of such a
province might have alarmed the other vassals of his crown. But it is
the privilege only of virtuous minds to perceive that wisdom resides
in moderate counsels; no sagacity ever taught a selfish and ambitious
sovereign to forego the sweetness of immediate power. An ordinary king,
in the circumstances of the French monarchy, would have fomented, or
at least have rejoiced in the dissensions which broke out among the
principal vassals; Louis constantly employed himself to reconcile them.
In this, too, his benevolence had all the effects of far-sighted policy.
It had been the practice of his last three predecessors to interpose
their mediation in behalf of the less powerful classes--the clergy, the
inferior nobility, and the inhabitants of chartered towns. Thus the
supremacy of the crown became a familiar idea; but the perfect integrity
of St. Louis wore away all distrust, and accustomed even the most jealous
feudatories to look upon him as their judge and legislator. And as the
royal authority was hitherto shown only in its most amiable prerogatives,
the dispensation of favour, and the redress of wrong, few were watchful
enough to remark the transition of the French constitution from a feudal
league to an absolute monarchy.
It was perhaps fortunate for the display of St. Louis’ virtues that the
throne had already been strengthened by the less innocent exertions
of Philip Augustus and Louis VIII. A century earlier, his mild and
scrupulous character, unsustained by great actual power, might not have
inspired sufficient awe. But the crown was now grown so formidable, and
Louis was so eminent for his firmness and bravery, qualities without
which every other virtue would have been ineffectual, that no one
thought it safe to run wantonly into rebellion, while his disinterested
administration gave no one a pretext for it. Not satisfied with the
justice of his own conduct, Louis aimed at that act of virtue which
is rarely practised by private men, and had perhaps no example among
kings--restitution. Commissaries were appointed to inquire what
possessions had been unjustly annexed to the royal domain during the last
two reigns. These were restored to the proprietors, or, where length of
time had made it difficult to ascertain the claimant, their value was
distributed among the poor.
[Illustration: A FRENCH PAGE, TIME OF LOUIS IX]
It has been hinted already that all this excellence of heart in Louis IX
was not attended with that strength of understanding which is necessary,
we must allow, to complete the usefulness of a sovereign. During his
minority, Blanche of Castile, his mother, had filled the office of regent
with great courage and firmness. But after he grew up to manhood, her
influence seems to have passed the limit which gratitude and piety would
have assigned to it; and, as her temper was not very meek or popular,
it exposed the king to some degree of contempt. He submitted even to be
restrained from the society of his wife Marguerite, daughter of Raymond,
count of Provence, a princess of great virtue and conjugal affection.
But the principal weakness of this king, which almost effaced all the
good effects of his virtues, was superstition. It would be idle to sneer
at those habits of abstemiousness and mortification which were part to
the religion of his age, and, at the worst, were only injurious to his
own comfort. But he had other prejudices, which, though they may be
forgiven, must never be defended. No man was ever more impressed than
St. Louis with a belief in the duty of exterminating all enemies to
his own faith. With these he thought no layman ought to risk himself
in the perilous ways of reasoning, but to make answer with his sword
as stoutly as a strong arm and a fiery zeal could carry that argument.
Though, fortunately for his fame, the persecution against the Albigenses,
which had been the disgrace of his father’s short reign, was at an end
before he reached manhood, he suffered a hypocritical monk to establish
a tribunal at Paris for the suppression of heresy, where many innocent
persons suffered death.[g]
_Piety and Christianity of St. Louis_
The natural piety of St. Louis but strengthened with his growth. His
Christian life, or to reduce the statement to its simplest terms, his
daily Christianity, which edified his own century, might very easily
fill ours with a sense of shock. But whatever it may leave of such an
impression, the history would be incomplete which passed over in silence,
or only vaguely indicated, that which filled so large a part in his
life. Let us not, therefore, endeavour to build up for ourselves a St.
Louis in accordance with our present-day tastes. Nothing is beautiful but
the true, and that truth which the saintly king sought in all things is
alone worthy to retrace the likeness of him which should endure.
According to those of his historians who were most intimate with him--the
chaplain who accompanied him on one and another of the Crusades, the
confessor whom he kept beside him for twenty years, the confessor of his
wife Marguerite--he seemed to live for God alone. The offices were read
in the king’s chapel; almost it might have been the chapel of a monastery
or the choir of a cathedral. There he had the Hours sung to him, the
Office for the Dead being added by his command. He heard two masses,
sometimes three or four; and when the grandees grumbled at his wasting
so much time on masses and sermons, he retorted that if he were to lose
twice as much time over gaming and hunting no one would complain: a
remark which scarcely silenced the murmurs; the barons made no complaint
against thus wasting their time with him.
The holy Scriptures and the Fathers were his study. Marguerite’s
confessor tells us that he caused a candle three feet or thereabouts
in height to be lighted, and so long as it lasted read the Bible. He
remained for so long a time upon his knees that sometimes his sight and
his wits became confused, and, rising up quite dazed, he would ask:
“Where am I?” Led back to his room, he would go to bed, but at midnight
he was up again and had matins sung by his chaplains (it was no sinecure
being king’s chaplain in those days!). He would, however, grant to his
attendants the repose he refused for himself. So softly did he rise that
on several occasions they did not hear him, or, awakened too late, ran
after him barefoot.
Every Friday he made his confession, after which he made his confessor
administer “the discipline” to him. This discipline was composed of five
small iron chains, which he enclosed in an ivory box and carried about
with him. He had similar boxes made, with similar contents, and presented
them to his children and his friends, counselling them to make use of
them. When his confessor struck him too lightly, he urged him to use
more force. This advice was not always needed. He had one confessor so
full of zeal (_solicitus sibi_) who struck the king in such a manner as
to terribly lacerate his flesh, which was extremely delicate. St. Louis,
however, held his peace; he never mentioned the matter so long as the
confessor lived, but afterwards he spoke of it laughingly to another.
His confessors, one should add, were not commonly so zealous, and they
reprimanded him for austerities which threatened his delicate health, and
urged him to substitute for them alms, which, as a fact, the king did not
stint; and they ended by forcing him to renounce the hair-shirt which
he wore during Advent and Lent and on the vigils of certain feasts. He
renounced it only to wear occasionally a girdle of horse-hair next his
skin.
On Good Friday he would visit all the churches barefoot; to keep up
appearances he wore shoes from which the soles had been removed. For the
adoration of the cross he removed his upper garments, retaining only his
vest and coat. With bare feet and uncovered head he advanced a short
distance on his knees, bowed himself in prayer, then advanced a little
further, and the third time arrived at the cross, prostrated himself as
though he too were crucified, and kissed it, bathed in tears. Fervently
did he desire the gift of tears. When in singing the litanies the verse
was reached: “Grant us a fountain of tears” (_Ut fontem lacrymarum nobis
dones_), he used to say: “Lord, I dare not ask of thee a fount of tears,
but only a few drops to refresh my parched and sterile heart.”
Are all these details, which have perhaps provoked the pitying smiles
of more than one reader, the marks of a feeble intelligence, or do they
rather bear witness to a powerful mind that has perfected self-control
by keeping the senses in sternest bondage? One can only truly judge of
things by their results. His singleness of speech and his aversion to
coarse or equivocal language bore eloquent witness to the purity of his
heart. Not only did he detest the licentiousness of contemporary poetry,
he was also filled with loathing for the popular songs, and innocently
recommended one of his equerries who sang them to learn instead the
_Ave Maris Stella_. His modesty was excessive. The purity of his youth
had never been shadowed by the slightest hint of license, and marriage
only served to throw his chastity into higher relief. He demanded moral
uprightness from all in his household, and banished without mercy whoso
offended against a virtue so dear to his heart.
[Illustration: A FRENCH KNIGHT OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY]
On feast days he would bid to his palace two hundred beggars, and himself
serve them at table. On the Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays of Advent
and Lent, and every Wednesday and Friday throughout the year, he would
send for thirteen of them into his own or a neighbouring room and give
them food with his own hand, without disgust at their dirtiness. If one
among the number was blind the king would give the piece of bread into
one of his hands, and guide the other to the bowl containing his portion.
If this consisted of fish, he would remove the bones, dip it in the
sauce and place the morsel in the blind man’s mouth. Before the meal he
gave to each person twelve deniers or more according to his need; and
if a mother was there with her child, he added more for the little one.
On Saturdays he would choose three of the most decrepit, most miserable
among the poor, and leading them into his dressing-room, where towels
and three basins of water were in readiness, he washed their feet. With
reverence he would dry and kiss those feet, whatever their deformity,
however hardened by daily contact with the ground; then, kneeling, he
would offer them water to wash their hands, give to each forty deniers,
and kiss their hands. Nor was this all. Every day, in all weathers, he
sent for thirteen other beggars and from among them chose out the three
most repulsive, whom he seated at a table drawn up close beside his own.
On many of these points he would not to-day have won the same universal
approbation. It is, however, difficult for us to reinvest his figure with
the atmosphere by which it must be surrounded before we can form a just
judgment; it is far more difficult to place ourselves at the necessary
point of view from which we can see him clearly. The modern historian is
ofttimes reduced to pleading extenuating circumstances for the saints;
for the saints, and St. Louis among them, have this much in common
with the Saviour, that in more than one case they could say with him:
“Blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended in me.”[h]
St. Louis built the asylum of the Quinze Vingts for the blind, several
hospitals, and the church of Vincennes. To provide a place for the
crown of thorns which the Venetians had turned over to his keeping, he
had built by Pierre de Montereau within the precinct of his palace,
now the Palais de Justice, the Sainte Chapelle, a shrine of open-work
stone. His confessor Robert de Sorbon founded a community under the
title of _Congrégation des pauvres maîtres étudiants en théologie_.
This congregation became the Sorbonne, the theological faculty so
famous throughout the entire Christian world that Mézeray calls it “the
permanent council of the Gauls.”
_Progress of the Monarchy under St. Louis_
The house of Capet had made such progress that no lord now dared say to
his vassal, “Come fight under my banner against the lord, our king,”
much as this anarchial privilege was still recognised in the so-called
“Establishments” of St. Louis, a compilation of customs in vogue in
Orleans. The counts of Flanders and of Brittany and the duke of Guienne,
were about the only ones who had not degenerated to the condition of
docile vassals; yet feudalism still preserved some immense prerogatives
and St. Louis attacked these in the name of justice and religion.
In holding to a strict execution of the ordinances of
_quarantaine-le-roi_[10] and _asseurement_ (inviolability) he suppressed
nearly all private wars. As a Christian he did not approve of these
wars which sent to God so many souls ill-prepared to appear before him.
As a prince he wished to stop the devastation throughout the country,
“the fires and the obstacles placed in the ways of tilling the fields.”
He forbade in his domains the _duel judiciare_ which gave over the
settlement and right to the chances of skill and strength. The king’s
justice usurped the place of individual violence, and proof by witnesses
and procedure by writ replaced justice by battle, for “battle is not the
path of right.”
The lords still dispensed justice throughout their domains. The villein
could not escape this judgment, but the vassal had the rights of
appeal to the sovereign from the judgment of his lord “in default of
right,” when the lord refused to render justice; for “false judgments”
when the condemned believed himself to have been injured by an unjust
sentence. Now the king favoured the custom of direct appeal to his
court, which subordinated the lord’s justice to that of his own which
was final; “for,” says Beaumanoir,[j] “since he is sovereign, his court
is sovereign”; and the “Establishments” explain why there could be no
appeal from the royal decision: “There is no one who can have this right,
since the king gets his power from no one but God and himself.” The duke
of Brittany also retained the final appeal. When a case brought to the
justice of the lords interested the king, in whatever way it may be, the
bailiff raised the “conflict” as we would say nowadays and laid claim to
the judgment, the king not being under the jurisdiction of a lord. These
cases were the “royal cases.” Legists were most careful to define them so
as not to deprive the king’s officials of any pretexts for interfering in
trials before the feudal courts. It was easy to multiply these at that
time and the officials did not fail to do so--taking as much as possible
from the province of the lord’s justice and adding it to the king’s.
At the same time the king’s _bourgeoisie_ was established. An inhabitant
of a piece of seigniorial land might under certain conditions of
establishment and residence in a royal city acquire the condition of
“king’s bourgeois.” “I am a king’s bourgeois” was equivalent to “I am
a Roman citizen.” The Roman citizen could only be judged at Rome. The
king’s bourgeois could not be tried except by the king’s officials.
The king’s court was on this account much more occupied than formerly.
It continued to accumulate every possible prerogative. It was a court
of exchequer, and, if it pleased the king, a political council; but it
was above all things, in the days of St. Louis, a court of justice. The
royal finances were always of a very simple nature; in case of crusades,
captivity of the king, knighthood conferred upon the king’s eldest son
or his marriage, feudal aid was demanded. The revenues of the domain, if
well administered, were quite sufficient for royalty to live upon. When
it had greater needs and it was necessary to increase revenues of all
sorts, the financial prerogatives of the court became more important.
The office of the exchequer was detached from it; but in the time of St.
Louis justice was the court’s business.
But even in this court considerable changes were taking place. The rôle
of the great vassals and the crown officials was diminishing, that
of the legists was beginning. Now, since judgment was pronounced on
written procedures, it was not the knights who had sufficient knowledge
and application of mind to deal with the stability of proof and the
obscurities of the black-book. The lawyer was necessary to them. At first
the barons disdainfully made these plebeian personages sit at their feet,
on stools. But in the meeting of ignorance and knowledge the latter
quickly asserted its sovereignty. The baron, who had nothing but nonsense
to talk, kept quiet before the learned counsellors, and upon these latter
soon devolved the direction of judgment; and the fate of the guilty, even
of the noblest station, lay in their hands. The king’s court, which was
always held at Paris, had regular sessions, usually four times a year;
and it kept a record of its deliberations which under the name of “Olim”
was the beginning of royal jurisprudence.
In the administration of the provinces, St. Louis protected his own power
and that of his subjects against any abuses his officials might practice.
He forbade bailiffs and seneschals to make presents to the members of
the council or receive money from those dependent on them or to loan
such any, or to take part in sales, markets, or leases held in the
king’s name. They were forbidden to purchase any property within their
jurisdiction or to marry their sons and daughters without the king’s
permission. If they disobeyed they were punished both in their property
and their persons. When going out of office they were obliged to live
forty days within their territory, in order to reply to their successors
or to royal inquiries in any charge of misconduct that might be brought
against them.
St. Louis sent into the provinces commissioners or royal inquirers, a
custom adopted from Charlemagne. These inquirers defended the king’s
rights and those of his subjects as well. The care which they took to
protect the latter against exaction, won them the name of _enquesteurs
aux restitutions_. In all these measures can be recognised the influence
of the legists and echoes of Roman administration.
We have noted the organisation of provostships. That of Paris demanded
large funds. Therefore several officials joined together to farm it out,
and these provosts, according to Joinville, trampled upon the people,
sustained their families by the “outrages” they committed, let themselves
be corrupted by the rich, and took no notice whatever of the robbers and
malefactors who infested Paris and its vicinity.
The king resolved to give in the future “great and high wages to those
who should look after his provostship,” and sought for someone “who would
give good and stiff justice.” He chose Étienne Boileau who maintained so
well the provostship that no malefactor, robber, or cut-throat dared come
to Paris but he was at once hanged and exterminated; and neither lineage,
gold, nor silver could save him. Justice and policing were the principal
functions of the provost of Paris, who commanded the watch and presided
at the tribunal of the Châtelet.
St. Louis struck hard blows at feudalism by the suppression of judiciary
duels, the interdiction of private wars, and the establishment of appeal;
but he was not for all this a revolutionary king in the sense of Philip
the Fair. He repeated constantly that none must “take away any one’s
rights; but it is,” so he said at the head of an ordinance, “the duty of
royal power to assure peace and happiness to our subjects.” Besides he
had that same spirit of justice that is found in Roman law, and which
united so well with the principles of Christianity. When he condemns, for
example, the duel, he does it because “battle is not the way to determine
right”--here is the Roman spirit; and because it “criminally tempts
God”--here is the spirit of Christ.
He expected that all would submit to what it seemed to him he was charged
by God to establish. His brother the count of Anjou, had, on trial,
condemned a knight; and the latter, on appealing to the king’s court, was
imprisoned by the count. The king let his brother know that there was but
one king in France and although Charles was his brother, he would not be
treated in any different ways as regarded justice. The count of Anjou had
to release his prisoner and came in person to oppose the appeal at the
king’s court, which, however, was decided in favour of the knight.
One of the most powerful lords of the realm, the lord of Coucy, caused
three young men to be hanged for offence against the hunting laws, and
although all the barons pleaded for him he was ordered a heavy fine.
A lord cried with irony, “If I were king I would hang all the barons;
for the first step taken, the second costs nothing.” The king heard and
called him back. “How, Jean, you say that I should hang all my barons.
Certainly I shall not do it, but I will punish them if they do wrong.”
We have seen how the reputation for equity of the good king was so
well established that the English barons in revolt against their king
chose Louis as arbitrator, an example followed by the counts of Bar and
Luxemburg.
The right of coinage belonged to more than eighty lords who sometimes
made bad money. St. Louis decided that his own should have circulation
throughout the entire kingdom and alone should be legal tender in the
royal domain and those whose lords had not the right of coinage; that the
seigniorial coinage should only be legal in the province of the lord who
issued it and that this lord could only strike off the _tournois_, and
_parisis_,[11] and other coins whose legal value was fixed by relation
to the _tournois_ in the ordinance. Thus the king ruled, in absolute
power, in his own domain. He recognised elsewhere seigniorial rights, but
limited them in the interest of the subjects whose protector he was. His
money circulated everywhere.
It only remained for the king to coin better _parisis_ and better
_tournois_ than those of the lords; which he did. His money, like his
justice, was worth more than his vassal’s. Another measure was extremely
useful to commerce. It made the lords responsible for the policing of
the roads through their domains. In Paris he established the royal watch
and had drawn up by the provost, Étienne Boileau, the ancient rules
concerning the hundred trades which existed in the town, in order to
infuse peace and order into industry as he had done in the country. These
trades grouped themselves into great corporations; in the fifteenth
century all the Parisian merchants formed six bodies of “arts and trades.”
St. Louis showed a respectful firmness towards papal authority; we
have seen that he did not recognise the pope’s right to dispose of
crowns. There has even been attributed to him a pragmatic sanction, the
foundation of the liberties of the Gallican church, which would have
confirmed the liberty of canonical elections, restrained to the most
urgent necessities the impositions which the court of Rome could levy
upon the French churches and contained the king’s vow that they should
be established. This ordinance is not authentic, but its principles are
those of the government. When the bishops demanded that the king force
the excommunicated to submit, he declared that he could not do so without
knowing the reasons for excommunication, which made him a judge of the
bishops.
St. Louis’ lively faith assured him against all fear of the church’s
wrath; and led him besides to severe practices which seem to us of to-day
barbaric. “No one,” he said, “unless he be learned clerk or perfect
theologian, should dispute with the Jews, but may do so with the layman
who is heard to slander the Christian faith, and defend it not only with
words but with his good drawn sword, striking the miscreant across the
body or even letting it cut him.” He punished blasphemers by running
red-hot irons through their tongues.
He loved to recall that on one occasion during his minority, when pursued
up to the very walls of Paris by rebel vassals, he had been saved by the
city soldiers who came to his rescue. He always took great interest in
the welfare of the large towns, but without sacrificing to them the new
needs of society. He conferred a number of charters, and amended others.
Communal independence never seemed to him better than feudal liberties,
and he favoured the transformation of the communes into royal cities
which were dependent on and watched over by the supreme power, while
their internal affairs were attended to by officials chosen in free
election. An ordinance of 1256 prescribes that the communes name four
candidates among themselves from whom the king shall choose a mayor who
shall come to Paris once a year to give account of his stewardship.
Thus little by little was established the principle that it was the
king’s prerogative to deal with the communes and that all owed him
allegiance above everyone else. Thus the communes gradually disappeared
and with them the proud sentiments, the strong ideas of right and liberty
which sustained the men who had founded and defended them. The “third
estate” was beginning.
Through his undermining of feudal and communal independence, and through
his strong ruling with regard to the church, St. Louis pointed the
way of absolute power to French royalty. He rendered it still another
service. The remembrance of his virtues did not perish with him.
Venerated in his lifetime as a saint, he was canonised after death. He
put the seal of sanctification, so to speak, upon French royalty, and his
descendants were fond of invoking at the head of their decrees the name
and example of “Monsieur St. Louis.”[f]
ASPECTS OF THIRTEENTH CENTURY CIVILISATION
[Sidenote: [1100-1270 A.D.]]
In proportion as the Middle Ages advanced, national individuality took
more definite shape. Intellectual life had been during a protracted
period confined almost exclusively to religious circles, and had been
given expression in the universal language--Latin. Accordingly the
beginning of the thirteenth century saw only three active established
literatures--in Germany, in the north and in the south of France; the
last having preceded the others and served them as models. This was the
literature of the _langue d’oc_, also called Provençal, which overflowed
the Pyrenean borders into Christian Europe, passed over the Alps into
the whole of Italy, and awakened the muse that lay sleeping on the banks
of the Ebro, as on those of the Po and the Arno. Brilliant, sonorous,
harmonious, full of imagery and movement, it was unexcelled as the
language of love and battle songs. Bernard de Ventadour, Bertram de
Born, and Richard Cœur de Lion moulded it with a skill and ardour worthy
of Tyrtæus. The songs of Bertram de Born, above all, were like swords,
dazzling and penetrating; the passion of war flamed in them like fire.
This language of the south, into which something of the Arabian accent
has passed, lent itself gracefully to the requirements of the courts of
love presided over by ingenious tribunals of noble dames.
But the continued development of the north of France gave the
preponderance to its idiom. The Normans carried it into Italy, where it
failed to establish itself; and to England, where it prevailed during
three centuries. By the crusaders it was everywhere disseminated. While
the intellectual fame of Paris attracted there the eminent minds of the
whole Catholic world, the vulgar tongue which the doctors disdained
extended its empire well beyond the frontiers. We must add also that
French genius, so often accused of epic sterility, poured over into the
adjacent countries a flood of great poetry. The troubadours had been mute
since the Albigensian crusade had drowned in blood the civilisation of
the _langue d’oc_; and no more were heard the virile accents of Bernard
de Ventadour or of Bertram de Born, nor the melodious lyrics of the _jeux
partis_.[12] But north of the Loire the _trouvères_ still composed heroic
songs--veritable epics, which were translated or imitated in Italy,
England, and Germany.
But these epic cycles were exhausted: the heroic ode disappeared.
Robert Wace, “clerk of Caen,” composed about 1155 the _Roman de Brut_,
a legendary history of Britain. Christian de Troyes, who wrote after
1160, spun out a diluted version of the Arthurian legend in a long poem
in lines of eight syllables, while the same tale was given a religious
twist by another school of poets by adding the history of the Holy
Grail. The aspect of the times was mirrored in the poem with its double
face--chivalry and piety. The naïve inspiration of the song of Roland was
lost; the new school subtilised, ran after novelties, or rummaged among
the classics. The story of Ulysses and that of the Argonauts, borrowed
from _The Thebaid_ of Statius, furnished tales which could not fail to
please those Christian Ulysseses whom the Crusades had sent wandering in
Asia. The Trojan War, the sorceress Medea, and Alexander, attracted the
_trouvères_ of this period. They had already begun to imitate the style
of the ancients. Thus the nature of the epic was altered and a transition
took place from primitive composition to the diverse styles of advanced
civilisation. The epic was divided: the elements dealing with the
passions were blended into allegorical romance; the narrative elements,
into prose history. Analysis and realism took the place of spontaneous
and poetic inspiration.
Guillaume de Lorris, who died in 1260, began the famous _Roman de la
Rose_, whose personages were abstract qualities--Reason, Good-will,
Danger, Treason, Baseness, Avarice. Jean de Meun continued it later,
after another transformation had given birth to satire. The fable
flourished already, having derived its origin from that very romance:
animals played the rôles of passions, of social conditions; and the tale
of _Renard_, developed in its turn from the others, made its appearance,
in 1236, as the comedy of the period. Rutebœuf offers the first example
of the professional poet, ill remunerated, perishing with cold, agape
with hunger; yet, in the depths of this misery, gay, daring, caustic, he
wrote upon all sorts of subjects in the frank, open style which heralded
Villon. Language acquires in his hands skill and power; it is more mellow
and more tender than that of Guillaume de Lorris or from the lips of the
famous count of Champagne or of Marie of France.
The most noteworthy event in French literature in the thirteenth century
was the appearance of prose. The first prose writers were not, be it
understood, professional historians, but two noblemen, both involved
in the events they depicted. Geoffroy de Villehardouin, marshal of
Champagne, has left us the history of the Fourth Crusade in the _Conquête
de Constantinople_, in which he himself figured. He writes as a soldier,
his style being firm and brief, not without a touch of military
stiffness; he invents little, goes straight ahead, from one attack to
the next, with a brief exclamation when encountering some object which
astonishes him. The lord of Joinville, also seneschal of Champagne,
exhibits in his _Mémoires_ a greater suppleness of style, a more marked
refinement of mind; he observes, reflects, and talks upon all subjects,
discussing his personal sentiments as freely as the events of war. He
was the foreshadowing of Froissart, as only the councillor and friend of
the pious and excellent Louis IX could be.[c] “In point of time,” says
Villemain, “the narrative of Joinville is perhaps the first monument of
genius in the French language,--a work of genius being, as I understand
it, one having a high degree of originality of diction; a characteristic
and expressive physiognomy; in short, a work that has been done by one
man and that could not have been done by another. Such is the book of
Joinville.”[o]
France was indebted to St. Louis for the multiplication of manuscripts.
It is remarkable that he should first, while in the East, have resolved
to establish a library at Paris. Hearing that the soldan of Egypt was
indefatigably collecting from all parts, and causing to be transcribed or
translated, the works of the ancient philosophers, “he was afflicted,”
says a chronicler of the times, “to perceive more wisdom in the sons of
darkness than in the children of light.” He began to collect manuscripts
of the Old and New Testaments, and of the fathers, which he caused to
be multiplied by transcription; all these he placed in the royal chapel
at Paris, making them accessible to professors and students. The same
liberality was shown by the Dominicans of Toulouse, by the bishops of
Beauvais and Paris, by the archbishop of Narbonne, by many chapters, and
by more monasteries. The professors of the University of Paris, too,
were eminent enough to draw students from all parts of Europe: in fact,
such names as Alexander de Hales, Albertus Magnus, St. Thomas Aquinas,
St. Buonaventura, would have conferred splendour on any establishment.
With inferior fame, but probably with equal utility, the universities
of Bourges, Toulouse, Orleans, and Angers--foundations of this
century--imitated the example of the capital.[n]
The thirteenth century marks the triumph of the style of architecture
so improperly called Gothic. Its characteristic is the arch. This form,
at no other time and in no other country employed with such profusion
and prominence as in Western Europe during the Middle Ages, has been
attributed primarily to the Goths, whence its name; afterwards, with
as little justification, to the Arabs. Undoubtedly pilgrims to the
Orient, among them many ecclesiastics, brought back from their travels
impressions and souvenirs which left their traces upon Christian
edifices; numerous churches were built after the pattern of the Holy
Sepulchre. Mosaic and colour alternation appear also to be importations
from the East. As to the arch, if it is much in evidence in the Arabian
style, it is also prominent in that of the Byzantines; it is of all times
and all countries, from the tomb of Atreus and the gates of the Pelasgian
cities in Italy to the constructions of the savages of Nubia and America.
It is simply an elementary form and easy to construct in building vaulted
roofs, which require more precision than science.
Vulgar and irregular at first, the arch became monumental little by
little--by natural progression, by a gradual refinement of line, by
a greater diversity of ornament, by the ribs and columns which began
to adorn it. It lent itself marvellously, moreover, as a delineation
of the celestial vault, to the mysticism of the Christians and to the
passionate soaring of their souls toward heaven: thus soared the mass of
Gothic columns, straight, bold, fearfully light, and appearing higher in
proportion as the vaulted roof was less open. It was not in the formal
Roman _Midi_, it was in the mystic North that the Gothic spread and
attained perfection.
The new style, born north of the Loire, crossed the Channel, the
Rhine, and the Alps; and the colonies of French artists transplanted
it to Canterbury, to Utrecht, to Milan, to Cologne, to Strasburg, to
Ratisbon--even into Sweden. A crude but ingenuous statuary adorned
portals, galleries, and cloisters; and the art of glass-painting
possessed, for the production of magic effects on glazed windows, secrets
which we are only just beginning to recover. Miniature paintings adorned
the missals, and the books of Hours have preserved to us some exquisite
masterpieces.
Astrology was one of the fads of this period; it reached its highest
development in the sixteenth century, and was not wholly extinguished
till the seventeenth. The astrologers pretended to read in the stars the
destiny of human lives. Another folly was the search of the alchemists
for the philosopher’s stone--that is to say, the method of creating gold
by the transmutation of metals. These dreams, however, led to happy
results: the astrologers from much star-gazing discovered the laws that
governed the movements of those bodies; the alchemists found in their
crucibles--not gold, indeed, but new substances, or new properties of
those already known. So were discovered the process of forming salts by
distillation, powerful acids, enamels, and convex glasses leading to the
making of spectacles.[c]
FOOTNOTES
[8] [This is called by many historians the Fourth Crusade.]
[9] [“St. Louis,” says Guizot,[m] “was above all a conscientious man, a
man who before acting weighed the question to himself of the moral good
or evil, the question as to whether what he was about to do was good
or evil in itself, independently of all utility, of all consequences.
Such men are rarely seen and still more rarely remain upon the throne.
Truly speaking, there are hardly more than two examples in history, one
in antiquity, the other in modern times: Marcus Aurelius and St. Louis.
These are, perhaps, the only two princes who, on every occasion, have
formed the first rule of their conduct from their moral creeds--Marcus
Aurelius, a stoic, St. Louis, a Christian.”]
[10] [Custom had permitted that when anyone had murdered, wounded, or
beaten another the victim or his relatives might immediately avenge
themselves by killing, wounding, or beating the offender or any of his
relatives, even if the latter were ignorant of what had occurred. The
ordinance of _quarantaine-le-roi_, forbade the injured to attack any
of the offender’s family until after the lapse of forty days (_une
quarantaine_). During the interval the offender himself was alone held
answerable for his action. Furthermore, if either victim or offender
chose to submit his cause to his suzerain he could secure inviolability
(_asseurement_), for his goods and person, until a judicial decision had
been given. When this inviolability had been demanded its breach was
punishable by death.]
[11] [The livres of Tours and of Paris; their values being 20 and 25 sous
respectively.]
[12] The disquisitions of the _troubadours_ or the _trouvères_ on
questions of gallantry were called _jeux partis_; whence grew those
“courts of love” in which were tried, before tribunals of noble ladies,
complicated cases and subtle questions. These “courts of love” were of
course but a poetical fiction, never a serious or permanent institution.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER IV. PHILIP III TO THE HOUSE OF VALOIS
Of all epochs of French history, the second half of
the thirteenth century appears to be that in which the
subordination (of the people to the crown) was most
complete.--DARESTE.[k]
PHILIP (III) THE BOLD (1270-1285 A.D.)
[Sidenote: [1270-1285 A.D.]]
Little is known of the reign of St. Louis’ eldest son in spite of its
length of fifteen years. It began under the walls of Tunis whence Philip
III brought home his father’s body, after forcing a treaty upon the
Mohammedans in which they recognised themselves tributary to the king of
Sicily and agreed to pay the costs of the war. One can, however, still
follow the ascending march of royalty under this prince, who, without any
new war, and by extinction of several feudal lineages, reunited to his
domain Valois, Poitou, and the counties of Toulouse and Venaissin. But
Philip gave up to the pope this last fief and half of Avignon. The count
of Foix, vanquished and a prisoner in his own capital, was compelled
to promise faithful obedience and cede a portion of his territory. The
dominion of the king of France thus approached the Pyrenees; and it
finally crossed them. Philip made a match between his eldest son and the
heiress of Navarre and if he did not succeed in placing on the throne of
Castile a prince subservient to his influence, or in setting the crown of
Aragon on the head of his second son Charles, at least he showed his arms
in Catalonia where he took the stronghold of Gerona. Thus the Capetian
dynasty, triumphant at home since the days of Louis VI, tried to become
so abroad. But the time for this was not ripe.
The expedition to Catalonia, which turned out badly, had no other motive
than that of family interest. Philip wished to punish Don Pedro, king of
Aragon, for his support of the rebellious Sicilians against Charles of
Anjou after the massacre of all the French citizens in the island, which
had taken place during vespers on Easter Monday. (“The Sicilian Vespers,”
1282.)
An ordinance of Philip III, drawn up in 1274, obliged the advocates in
the royal courts to take oath each year that they would defend none
but just cases. The first example of a commoner made noble by the king
will be found in the letters of ennoblement issued by Philip III to his
silversmith Raoul, in 1272, if the fact is absolutely certain.
PHILIP (IV) THE FAIR (1285-1314 A.D.)
[Sidenote: [1285-1300 A.D.]]
Philip IV, surnamed the Fair, was but seventeen when he succeeded his
father in 1285. He ridded himself, as far as possible by treaties, of
futile wars, and occupied himself in place of conquest with increasing
his domains by acquisitions within his reach. His marriage with the
heiress of Navarre and Champagne had only been worth two great provinces
to him. A decree of parliament which despoiled the heirs of Hugh de
Lusignan secured him La Marche and Angoumois. Then his second son married
the heiress of Franche-Comté; thus through marriage, escheat, or conquest
all France came little by little into the royal domain. But powerful
vassals still remained--the duke of Brittany, the count of Flanders, and
especially the duke of Guienne. Philip began by attacking the last. He
was a formidable adversary since he was at the same time king of England.
Fortunately Edward I, who had just subdued the Welsh and was now
threatening the independence of Scotland, was too much occupied in his
own island to come over to the continent, and owing to this the royal
army was able to make rapid progress in Guienne. A French fleet went to
pillage Dover; and another army led by the king in person made its way
into Flanders, where the count had declared for the king of England, and
beat the Flemings at Furnes (Veurne) (1297). The intervention of Pope
Boniface VIII established a peace between the two kings which was sealed
by a marriage. A daughter of Philip the Fair wedded the son of Edward I
and gave the English house rights to the throne of France which Edward
III in due time asserted (1299). By this peace the two kings gave up
their allies, Philip the Scotch, and Edward the count of Flanders. The
latter in terror hastened to place himself under the protection of Philip
and Flanders was reunited to the domain (1300).
[Illustration: PHILIP III]
[Sidenote: [1300-1302 A.D.]]
The whole French court went to visit the new acquisition. It was
received with great pomp; the Flemings, to do honour to their noble
visitors, donned their best attire and displayed all their riches. The
entrance into Bruges was especially magnificent. The bourgeois wives
showed such gold and jewels in their toilets that the queen felt her
woman’s vanity wounded. “I thought,” she said, “there was but one queen
of France; now I see six hundred.” Flanders was in truth the richest
country in Europe because it was there that the people worked hardest.
In that fruitful land men had sprung up like crops, towns were numerous,
and the population active and industrious, devoted, like the Guienne
towns--especially Bordeaux, because the English bought their wines--to
England, whence came the wool necessary to their manufactures. Flemish
cloth sold throughout the whole of Christendom as far as Constantinople,
and the towns of the Low Countries formed the market where the
productions of the north from the Baltic were exchanged for those of the
south brought from Venice and the east of Italy down the Rhine.
On a soil which it had taken a thousand canals to rescue from the sea,
among the scores of stoutly walled cities, with a population accustomed
to hard work, but none the less proud of its numbers, strength, and
wealth, chivalry had had small chance to play its game, and there was
little feudalism in Flanders. Every town had its privileges and it was
not safe to tamper with them.
_New War with Flanders (1302-1304 A.D.)_
Philip had appointed James de Châtillon governor of Flanders--a man who
did not know how to treat a conquered people, especially such a rich one.
The people, rather intolerant and accustomed to more consideration from
their counts, rebelled. In Bruges alone three thousand French were put
to death. Philip sent Robert of Artois with a large army to avenge this
deed. Twenty thousand Flemings awaited it bravely behind a canal near
Courtrai. Before the fight the Flemings confessed their sins, the priest
said high mass, and all, bowing down, took some earth and put it in their
mouths, swearing thus to fight to the death for their country’s freedom.
This gathering of a whole army usually augurs badly for its assailants.
The latter advanced in bad order, sure of victory and not giving those
common people the credit of believing that they would dare look them
in the face. In vain the constable Raoul de Nesle cautioned prudence.
He was asked if he was afraid. “Sir,” he replied to Count Robert, “if
you come where I go, you will be well in the front,” and he spurred his
horse forward at all speed. They did not even take the precaution to
reconnoitre the Flemings’ position. The first ranks of the heavy columns
of knights, advancing at full speed, had no sooner fallen into the canal
that covered the enemy’s lines than those just behind pressed by the rear
were precipitated upon them, and then the Flemings had only to plunge
their long lances into the confused mass of men and horses to kill with
perfect safety to themselves. A sortie which they made from the two ends
of the canal completed the rout. Two hundred nobles of high degree and
six thousand soldiers perished. And what was most humiliating was that
the duke of Burgundy, the counts of Saint-Pol and Clermont, with two
thousand hauberts, fled, leaving the constable, count of Artois, and
so many noble warriors, beaten, maimed, and killed in the hands of the
common people (1302).
The battle of Mansurah had already shown the undisciplined impetuosity
and military incapacity of the knights, but this occurred in the Orient
and distance had helped to preserve the reputation of the vanquished;
but the battle of Courtrai, lost by the flower of French chivalry to
the common people, made a great sensation without, however, curing the
nobility of their mad presumption. The defeats of Crécy, Poitiers,
and Agincourt came from the same causes. Stripped by royalty of its
privileges, the feudal nobility lost on the battle-field the prestige
with which it had long been surrounded and saw, to complete its own ruin,
arise at its very side another army--that of the king and the people.
Philip the Fair took energetic measures to repair the disaster of
Courtrai. He forced nobles and bourgeois to bring to the royal mint their
gold and silver plate, for which he paid in debased coinage. He ordered
each property yielding 100 livres of rent to provide one horseman, every
one hundred villein families to provide six foot-sergeants, and every
commoner having 25 livres income to serve in person. He sold many serfs
their freedom and many commoners titles of nobility. By this means he
collected in two months ten thousand mounted and sixty thousand men on
foot. It was a royal effort and it was a great one, but that of the
people was greater still. From the Flemish towns there issued this time
eighty thousand fighters. With two such opposing armies the contest must
be terrible and decisive; they felt this and not wishing to take any
risks, the year 1302 was spent in trying to get thoroughly acquainted
with the situation. Philip was then at the height of his quarrel with
Boniface VIII and a new defeat would be fatal to him; he even let the
Flemings take the offensive the following year (1303). But the pope
died the same year and Philip attacked Flanders by land and sea. His
fleet defeated the Flemish at Zieriksee and he himself avenged at
Mons-en-Pévêlle, or Mons-en-Puelle, the defeat of Courtrai. He thought
the enemy exterminated, but in a few days they were back as numerous as
ever, asking a new battle. “But it rains Flemings,” cried the king. He
preferred to treat rather than fight again. They promised him money and
ceded Douai, Lille, Béthune, Orchies with all Walloon--that is to say
French-speaking Flanders between the Lys and the Schelde. To this the
king gave them back their count, who promised nothing more than feudal
homage.
Thus French royalty receded before Flemish democracy as did German
royalty almost at the same period before Swiss democracy. The communes of
France remained isolated, and succumbed; in Flanders and in Switzerland
they united and triumphed.[b]
_The Quarrel between Philip and Boniface VIII_
[Sidenote: [1296-1304 A.D.]]
The complaints made by a certain section of the French clergy to the holy
see in 1296, against what they designated as the exactions of Philip the
Fair, met with a far better reception than did similar complaints from
England, where Edward was employing much more vigorous methods than those
of his rival to obtain subsidies from the clergy.
It was a great opportunity for Pope Boniface VIII, and he did not let
it slip. The bull, _Clericis laïcos_ (1296), was familiar throughout
Christendom. This bull, forbidding the clergy to pay taxes to temporal
rulers, was too sweeping to be enforced. Boniface realised that, and
forestalled the objections that it could not fail to raise. All that was
too peremptory in the preceding bull was corrected in the one beginning
_Ineffabilis amor_. The king might raise subsidies among the clergy, with
the pope’s consent, who, if the kingdom were menaced, would order them to
contribute to its defence even unto the selling of the sacred vessels.
In the same bull Boniface demanded an explanation of the prohibition
recently made by the king against exporting gold, silver, and merchandise
out of the kingdom, a prohibition which threatened to dry up one of the
principal sources of revenue of Rome.
The edict which is universally regarded as Philip’s retort to the bull
_Clericis laïcos_, was not aimed at the pope, for it was issued in the
month of April, a few days after the drawing up of the bull and before
its contents could possibly have become known to the king of France. It
did not apply solely to money, but forbade also the exportation of arms,
horses, and other things, its object being to damage England and Flanders
with which Philip was at war. Similar edicts were issued on several
occasions during this reign. In this same bull Boniface threatened Philip
with excommunication. The king and his councillors were furious at this
liberty.
In 1297, came a fresh prohibition to export gold and silver, fresh
fears on the part of the pope, fresh explanations from Philip. In the
midst of all this the French bishops wrote to Boniface praying him to
grant the king a tithe on all the churches. The clergy began to realise
that they could not abstain from contributing to the defence of the
country. Abandoned by a portion of the French clergy, Boniface made
fresh concessions. In the bull beginning _Romana mater ecclesia_ he
even granted permission to raise, in cases of necessity, ecclesiastical
tithes, with the consent of the clergy but without consulting the holy
see. The bull _Noveritis nos_ went still farther: it handed over to the
king, if he had attained his majority, and to his council if he were
still a minor, the responsibility of deciding as to which were cases of
necessity, and the right of taxing the clergy even though the pope had
not first been consulted. It concluded by declaring that the holy see had
never had any intention of making an attempt upon the rights, liberties,
freedoms, and customs of the kingdom, the king, or the barons. This
compliance on the part of Boniface VIII, his sudden sweetness, must not
be attributed altogether to feelings of benevolence towards Philip the
Fair; they are explained principally by the difficult position in which
the pope found himself in his own states.
Harmonious relations continued between the king and the pope;
nevertheless certain incidents occurred to mar them. Boniface
had summoned the bishop of Laon to Rome to give account of his
administration; the king thereupon affected to consider his benefice as
vacant and proceeded to appropriate to himself the revenues according
to the royal prerogative. A fresh cause for reciprocal discontent was
found in the complaints made by the bishops against the collection of the
first-fruits granted to the king.
One event to which no one attached any importance took place about
that time, changing the already unsettled feelings of Boniface into
hostility. This was the alliance formed at Vaucouleurs in 1299 between
Philip and Albert, king of the Romans, who had been excommunicated for
having dethroned Adolphus of Nassau--a very threatening alliance for the
papacy. The news of the negotiations between Philip and Albert spread
consternation in Rome; a false rumour announcing a rupture between
them was received with joy. Boniface conceived the idea of holding
a conference with the kings of France and England and the count of
Flanders--the only means, in his eyes, by which to establish peace on a
solid basis. He did not dream of summoning them to Rome. He knew Philip
and Edward well enough to be aware that they would regard it simply as
officious interference on his part. So he determined to go himself to
some neutral territory. He had even got so far as to make overtures to
Philip the Fair under these conditions when a serious malady, which
caused him excessive pain, coupled with his great age, compelled him to
renounce the scheme.
The Flemish ambassadors judged this moment to be a favourable one for
making themselves heard, by flattering the pope’s notions of supremacy
and exciting his suspicions against Philip the Fair. They forwarded to
Boniface a memorial in which they prayed his support and intervention,
and sought to reassure him as to the mightiness of this sovereign power
which they attributed to him by appeals to the holy Scriptures. Boniface
was only too ready to listen to insinuations which fell in with his own
hopes and ambitions.
[Sidenote: [1301-1303 A.D.]]
However, causes of complaint against Philip continued to accumulate,
among others being his usurpation of the county of Melgueil, which
belonged to the bishop of Maguelonne, and the refusal of the viscount of
Narbonne to do homage to the archbishop who was his over-lord. The pope
let drop some severe remarks, and despatched Bernard de Saisset, bishop
of Pamiers, to invite the king to restore the consecrated land. Philip,
exasperated by the bishop of Pamiers, allowed him to return to his
diocese; but he instituted a secret inquiry about him to which evidence
was contributed by the bishops and barons of the south. He was accused of
having purloined Languedoc from the crown for the purpose of re-uniting
it to Aragon; his real offence was his hatred of the king. Bernard was
arrested at Pamiers by the vidame of Amiens, and arraigned before the
king and an assembly of barons at Senlis, October 14th, 1301. So haughty
was his defence that the whole assembly rose to its feet and clamoured
for his death. Within an ace of being massacred, he flung himself on
the compassion of the archbishop of Narbonne, his metropolitan, who was
present, as well as the bishops of Béziers and Maguelonne. The archbishop
took him under his protection and made himself answerable for him. This
proceeding of Philip was contrary to the laws of the church: a bishop
cannot be brought up for judgment before a lay court; in the same way,
the councils have not the right to judge him without the intervention of
the pope, who must authorise the proceedings.
[Illustration: ANCIENT CHURCH NEAR ROUEN, BUILT IN THE ROCK]
Philip despatched Peter de Flotte to Rome to demand the punishment of
Saisset. The ambassador declared that his master did not wish to avail
himself of his right to punish a man whose crimes rendered him unworthy
of the priesthood and of the protection accorded to the clergy; but that
he desired to show the pope a token of deference and respect by handing
over to him the charge of avenging the insult offered to God as the
author of all legitimate authority, to the king as a son of the church,
and to the kingdom as a very considerable portion of Christendom. He
further requested Boniface to declare Bernard stripped of his episcopal
dignity and of all clerical privileges. It was in vain that Flotte urged
and demanded a reply; he received none, and returned raging to France.
Boniface suspended the privileges accorded by himself and his
predecessors to the crown of France, and convoked, for November
1st, 1302, a general council at Rome, in order to put an end to the
oppressions endured by the French clergy. The king was invited either to
attend in person or to send someone to defend him. The bull _Ausculta
fili_ indicated the superiority claimed by Boniface over Philip. “God, in
laying upon us the yoke of apostolic servitude, has placed us above kings
and empires, to uproot, destroy, annihilate, disperse, build and plant
in his name; dearly beloved son, do not allow yourself to be persuaded
that you are not subject to the supreme head of the church, for such
an opinion would be folly.” He further accused the king of tyrannising
over his subjects, oppressing the church, and offending the nobles.
In conclusion he invites him to turn his attention to the deplorable
condition of the Holy Land and to prepare a crusade. Another bull,
_Secundum divina_, enjoined Philip to set Saisset at liberty and let him
return to Rome. The king drove him out of France, and prepared to obtain
a great demonstration in his own favour, in opposition to the pretensions
of Boniface, by summoning the first states-general. By acting in this
manner Philip was only defending his crown: his right was obvious, he
needed but to claim it and exercise it with dignity. His cause was good,
but he had the misfortune to sully it by falsehood and violence; in this,
doubtless, following the advice of the lawyers who surrounded him.
The Sunday after Candlemas (February, 1302) the king solemnly burned the
bull _Ausculta fili_. The defeat of the French army at Courtrai, in the
month of July, gave confidence to Boniface without disheartening Philip.
In the month of December Philip sent the bishop of Auxerre to Rome to
signify to Boniface that, in conjunction with the king of England, he had
renounced his arbitration. Outwardly Philip was most deferential towards
the pope. While all this was going on grave news came from Rome. The
council summoned by Boniface had met on All Saints’ Day, 1302, several
French bishops having responded to the pope’s summons, despite the king’s
prohibitions. Philip had seized all their worldly goods, and a decree
issued November 18th, doubtless at the instigation of the council,
ratified the doctrine of the papal superiority.
Boniface directed those French bishops who had not taken part in the
council to present themselves at Rome within three months’ time. Philip
forbade them to leave the kingdom, and set guards at all the passes into
Germany and Italy. By the king’s wish Cardinal de Saint-Marcellin (the
pope’s legate) summoned a council in France. Boniface recapitulated all
his grievances against Philip, and called upon him to clear himself. He
accused him among other things of coining false money and of burning the
bull _Ausculta fili_. Philip’s answer was moderate and conciliatory. He
expressed his wish to maintain, as his ancestors had done, the union
between France and the holy see, and concluded by entreating Boniface
not to meddle with him in the legitimate exercise of his rights; he
offered to refer the matter to the decision of the duke of Brittany or of
the duke of Burgundy, who were particularly agreeable to him. The pope
declared this answer to be insufficient, and complained bitterly of it to
the bishop of Auxerre and to the king’s brother, Charles of Valois, who
for nearly two years had lived in Italy with the title “champion of the
holy see,” and whom Philip had lately recalled.
On the 12th of March, 1303, an assembly of barons, prelates, and lawyers
was held at the Louvre in the presence of the king. William de Plasian
(or, according to Dareste[k] and Martin,[c] the chancellor, William
de Nogaret) read aloud a document in which were set forth accusations
against Boniface:
“He is a heretic; he does not believe in the immortality of the soul
or in the life everlasting: he has said that he would sooner be a dog
than a Frenchman; he does not believe in the real presence in the
Eucharist. He has approved of a book by Armand de Villeneuve, which
book has been condemned and burned; he has set up images of himself in
the churches to the end that he may be worshipped; he has a familiar
spirit who advises him; he consults sorcerers; he has openly preached
that the pope cannot be guilty of simony; he traffics in benefices; he
sows strifes everywhere; he has said that the French are of the Patarins
(Albigenses); he has ordered murders; he has forced priests to reveal
confessions; he has nourished a bitter hatred of the king of France.
Before his election he was heard to say that if he did become pope he
would destroy Christianity or lower the French pride; he has prevented
peace between England and France; he has urged the king of Sicily to
massacre all French; he strengthened the king of Germany on condition
of his humbling the arrogance of the French, who, he pretended, boasted
that they recognised no superior in temporal matters, in which they lied
in their throats; that if an angel from heaven were to tell him that
France was not subject to him, he would shriek curses against both him
and the emperor. He has brought about the ruin of the Holy Land, having
confiscated all the money intended for its aid, that he might give it to
his relatives, of whom he has made marquises, counts, and barons, and for
whom he has built castles; he has driven out the nobility of Rome; he has
broken up marriages; he has made a cardinal of one of his nephews who is
but an ignorant fellow and who was married, and has forced the wife to
take the veil in a convent; he has done Celestine, his predecessor, to
death in prison.”
On the 13th of April Boniface declared Philip to be excommunicate if he
persisted in not submitting himself to the holy see. He commissioned
Nicholas de Bienfaite, archdeacon of Coutances, to bear to Cardinal de
Saint-Marcellin the bull which cut off the king from communion with
the church. But the king, warned of the archdeacon’s mission, had him
arrested at Troyes and thrown into prison. His bull was taken from him;
in point of fact it was not to have been fulminated except in the case of
Philip’s remaining deaf to a final summons. In vain the legate protested;
no one listened to him; the goods of all prelates absent from the kingdom
were sequestrated. Realising that he compromised himself uselessly by
remaining any longer, he quitted France.
On the 31st of May Boniface, who had pardoned Albert of Austria and
had recognised him as king of the Romans, launched a bull in which
the nobles, churches, and _communes_ of the metropolises of Lyons,
Tarantaise, Embrun, Besançon, Aix, Arles, and Vienne, of Burgundy,
Barrois, Dauphiné, Provence, of the county of Forcalquier, the
principality of Orange, and the kingdom of Arles, provinces held of the
kingdom, were ordered to break such ties of vassalage and obedience as
they had been able to contract prejudicial to the emperor, and to release
themselves from such oaths of obedience as they had sworn.
It was almost equivalent to dismembering France. On the 13th of June a
great assembly took place at the Louvre at which the king was present.
The counts of Évreux, Saint-Pol, and Dreux, and William de Plasian,
demanded that the church should be governed by a legitimate pope.
Boniface was charged anew with all the old crimes and infamies. The king
was entreated, in his capacity as “defender of the faith,” to work for
the convoking of a general council. To this he consented. On the 24th of
June, St. John Baptist’s Day, an immense crowd of people gathered in the
palace gardens; there the king’s challenge to the future council was read.
At last, on September 8th, Boniface, in the bull _Petri solio excelso_,
pronounced against Philip the excommunication he had courted. All
the world knows how, in defiance of public liberties, Boniface was
arrested at Anagni, on the evening before the very day on which the
excommunication of the French king was to have been publicly posted.[d]
One of Philip’s agents, William (Guillaume) de Nogaret whose grandfather
had been burned as an Albigensian, had been sent to Italy. He came to an
understanding with Sciarra Colonna, a Roman noble and the pope’s mortal
enemy. Boniface was at that time in his native city of Anagni. By dint
of money Nogaret won over the chief of the military forces of Anagni,
and one morning entered the place with four hundred mounted armed men
and some hundreds of foot-soldiers. At the noise they made in the town
and the cries of “Death to the pope!” “Long live the king of France!”
Boniface believed his last hour had come. But showing in spite of his age
(he was eighty-six years old) an uncommon degree of agility, he got into
his pontifical robes, and seated himself on his throne, the tiara on his
head, the cross in one hand and the keys of St. Peter in the other. Thus
he awaited his assassins. The latter called upon him to abdicate. “Here
is my neck and here is my head,” he replied; “betrayed like Jesus Christ,
if I must die like him at least I shall die a pope.” A story ran that
Sciarra Colonna dragged him from his throne, struck him across the face
with his gauntlet, and would have killed him had not Nogaret interfered,
saying: “Oh thou wretched pope, witness and consider the goodness of my
lord, the king of France, who, far from thee as is his kingdom, guards
and defends thee through me.” [But the story of Colonna’s violence seems
quite unfounded.[13]]
[Sidenote: [1303-1308 A.D.]]
Nogaret hesitated, however, about dragging the old man out of Anagni. The
people had time to recover from their astonishment. The townspeople armed
themselves, the peasants rushed in, and the French were driven from the
town. The pope, fearing they had put poison in his food, remained three
days without eating. A short time after, he died of shame and anger, at
the humiliating insults he had received. His successor, Benedict XI,
tried to avenge him by excommunicating Nogaret, Colonna, and all those
who had helped them. The excommunication reached up to the king. A month
after the publication of the bull, Benedict died, perhaps poisoned. This
time Philip took measures to make himself master of the election of
the new pontiff. Bertrand d’Agoust (de Goth), archbishop of Bordeaux,
was elected after he had promised the king to comply with the royal
wishes. The new pope, who took the name of Clement V, caused himself to
be consecrated at Lyons, and abandoning Rome, fixed his residence in
1308 at Avignon, a possession of the holy see beyond the Alps, where
he soon found himself under the hand and will of the king of France.
His successors remained there until 1376. The sojourn of the popes at
Avignon, which so upset the church, has been called the Babylonish
Captivity. This sojourn was memorable in connection with the history of
Philip IV.
_Sentence of the Templars (1307 A.D.)_
[Sidenote: [1307 A.D.]]
Villani relates a mournful scene--the ominous interview between pope and
king in the forest of St. Jean d’Angély where one sold his tiara and
the other bought it. This meeting did not take place, but conditions
were certainly proposed and accepted. One of them was nothing less
than the destruction of the military order of the Templars. The wealth
of these warrior monks, now of no use to them since it was no longer
expended in armament against the infidel, had tempted the king’s greed,
always keen-scented for money, and their powers stood in the way of his
despotism. There were 15,500 knights with a great multitude of servant
knights, brothers and their dependents, so that if gathered together they
could defy all the royal armies of Europe; and their strong organisation,
under the hand of the grand-master, made them seem more formidable than
did their numbers and their wealth.
They possessed throughout Christendom more than ten thousand
establishments, and a number of fortresses, among them the temple at
Paris where Philip had once found a safe asylum from a riot which stormed
and raged in vain around its thick walls. In the treasury of the order
there were 150,000 gold florins not counting silver or precious vessels.
The world never knew what went on in their houses. Everything was secret,
but there were vague rumours of orgies, scandals, and impieties, and no
profane eye had ever penetrated the mysteries. Knights had disappeared,
because, it was said, they had threatened compromising revelations. The
pride of the order irritated the people, who charged it with the most
odious crimes; but they were guilty only of great laxity of morals, and
their religious ceremonies were perhaps mingled in the East with some
impure alloy and strange customs.
[Illustration: A TEMPLAR]
The 14th of September, 1307, the seneschals and bailiffs were given
notice to hold themselves in arms for the 12th of October, and they
received at the same time sealed letters not to be opened until the
night of the 12th and 13th of October. The surprised knights had no time
to resist or gather together. Torture drew from them such statements
as torture always draws. It was Philip’s desire to associate the
whole nation with this great trial, as he had associated it with his
dispute with Boniface VIII. The states-general assembled at Tours; the
accusations and statements were put before it and the deputies pronounced
the knights deserving of death. Provincial councils likewise condemned
them. That of Paris consigned to the flames in one day, in the faubourg
St. Antoine, fifty-four Templars, who retracted what they had avowed
under torture. Nine were burned at Senlis and there certainly were other
executions. The pope pronounced at the Council of Vienne the dissolution
of the order throughout all Christendom, and ordered their great wealth
turned over to the Hospitallers (knights of Rhodes). But the royal fist
did not readily release what it held. All the money found in the temples,
two-thirds of the personal property, credits, and a considerable amount
of lands remained in the hands of the king. In Italy, England, Spain,
and Germany, the order of the Temple was abolished and its wealth in
part confiscated by the princes. But there were no executions except
in France. The memory of Philip IV must alone bear the burden of these
atrocities.
[Sidenote: [1307-1312 A.D.]]
This same Council of Vienne condemned several errors, born within the
Franciscan order--the heresy of the “Spirituels” who regarded St.
Francis almost as a new reincarnation of Jesus; that of the “Beguins” or
“Beghards,” who exempted mankind, perfect according to their ideas, from
any judgment by human standards. And finally that of the Fraticelli who
[inquisitors tell us] abolished property and declared that everything
should be in common, family as well as property. We see these wild
doctrines are very old.[b]
_Philip’s Fiscal Policy_
Nothing satiated the royal exchequer, neither the spoils of the Templars,
nor the tithes collected under pretext of the “holy war,” nor the taxes
levied for the knighting of the king’s sons and the marriage of his
daughter--that fatal marriage, from which sprang Edward III. Even the
_maltôtes_ did not suffice.
The maltôte, an illegal exaction, which, to a certain extent placed all
subjects in the position of serfs taxable at their owner’s will and
pleasure, was at least openly arbitrary and illegal; but the “mutable
currencies” were treacherously sprung upon the citizens in the midst of
their transactions and money exchanges, and brought dismay upon society
at every turn, doing his subjects a wrong out of all proportion to the
benefit gained by their ruler. In all of this there was as much ignorance
as perversity, and one has difficulty in conceiving the ineptitude
shown in the government financial business by legal men, ordinarily so
clever. Philip the Fair’s statutes regarding the currency are a genuine
chaos: sometimes the king takes the paternal tone, and pretends to so
contrive the rate of exchange that his subjects shall suffer as little
as possible; sometimes he throws off the mask, and prohibits the testing
and weighing of the royal moneys issued, on pain of forfeiting the coins
submitted to the test and of “being both body and goods at the king’s
disposal.” No one could obtain either silver or copper but at the royal
mints. The importation of the Florentine golden florin and other foreign
coins was forbidden under the same penalty (for fear of comparison).
Next Philip withdrew from circulation half of his own current coins,
under the pretext of their having been counterfeited and tampered with
by others--coiners, Lombards, etc. The Jews and the Lombards were always
convenient scapegoats for the royal iniquities. They were again expelled
in 1311-1312, with the usual confiscations. In 1310 there was a grand
re-coining of all the moneys; everyone was forced to give in all he
possessed to the directors of the royal mints, who gave out in exchange
new money, much inferior in weight and purchasing power to the value
attributed to it. The king was anxious to gain popularity at the expense
of the money-lenders, and issued orders that all liabilities should be
discharged in the new money, in spite of every previous stipulation to
the contrary. To the same end, after having fixed a maximum (15 to 20 per
cent. per annum!) for the exorbitant interest charged on silver, he ended
by prohibiting all usury, which is to say all interest. If the rates of
usury were scandalous, one must lay the blame of them on the king’s
persecution of capitalists, Jews, and Italian bankers: naturally the
rate of interest increased in proportion to the chances of loss incurred
by the lender. By these means Philip raised fresh barriers to trade and
swelled the public discontent.
[Sidenote: [1312-1314 A.D.]]
A statute enacted in June, 1313, surpassed in audacity all others that
had preceded it. The king was no longer satisfied with managing his
own money as he would; he wished to handle that of the barons also,
and asserted himself to be the only coiner of the realm. By friendly
transactions, by usurpations, by every possible means, he had already
reduced by more than half their number the nobles who minted money. In
the preamble to his statute he now announced his intention of restoring
all French moneys “to their ancient currency and status” (of the time
of St. Louis, apparently), and forbade all prelates and barons to mint
fresh money until further orders. He was acting, he said, under the
advice of “the whole caboodle of decent people in every decent town in
his kingdom,” and he looked to the _bourgeoisie_ to uphold him against
the resentment of the nobles. As a matter of fact, at another time the
bourgeoisie would have been only too pleased to see the nobles deprived
of the right of coining money, a right which they grossly abused; but
under Philip the Fair, would they gain much by it? This very statute of
June, 1313, introduced mutations more disastrous than any heretofore.
It hit all classes of society, and all were equally irritated, with the
exception of the lawyers and certain large tradesmen who constituted
themselves overseers, farmers, or coiners on the king’s account.
_Execution of Jacques de Molay (1314 A.D.)_
Philip defied public discontent by redoubling his brutalities. The
smallest murmur was reported to the king’s spies, and punished by his
tyrants. One saw everywhere people flogged and pilloried; every lay and
ecclesiastical court robed itself in pitiless severity. In the Place de
Grève they burned, in 1313, a nun of Hainault, Marguerite de la Porette,
the Mystic. Shortly after a more celebrated execution startled Paris
and the whole of France. For more than six years the foremost members
of the order of the Temple, the grand-master, the “visitor” of France,
and the masters of Aquitaine and Normandy, had languished in the king’s
dungeons; they could not be left to die unjudged in darksome cells. At
last the pope, who had reserved the decision of their fate to himself,
appointed a commission consisting of the cardinal D’Albano and two other
cardinals. The archbishop of Sens and various doctors of divinity and of
canonical law joined them. Brought before their judges, the four captives
reiterated, it is said, the confessions made by themselves and their
comrades. It was wished to mark their arrest with great solemnity and
to “read a lesson” to the public, as the saying is. The court therefore
held its sitting in the open space before Notre Dame de Paris, upon a
scaffold draped in scarlet. The four accused were led to the foot of the
scaffold, where they repeated their confession before all the people.
Their sentence was then pronounced--they were to be immured for life.
“But just when,” says the continuator of Nangis,[g] “the cardinals
believed they had ended the affair, the grand-master, Jacques de Molay,
and the master from Normandy, Guy, brother of the dauphin of Auvergne,
suddenly retracted their confession, denying it in toto, and stubbornly
defended themselves against the cardinal who had ‘pointed the moral’ and
the archbishop of Sens, to the immense surprise of everybody.”
The commission, struck dumb with astonishment and a sort of fear by
this unlooked-for incident, did not know how to decide. They adjourned
till the morrow to deliberate at their leisure, and handed over the
grand-master and his companions to the guardianship of the royal warder
of Paris till the next day. The news of what had taken place outside
Notre Dame was promptly carried to the king, who was at that time at
the Palais de la Cité. Philip, seized with a dread only equalled by his
anger, sent in haste for his most trusty advisers, “without summoning
the scholars” (_i.e._, the commission). The determination he had
arrived at was the boldest and most atrocious that can be imagined. At
night-fall he had the two Templars conveyed to a small island in the
Seine, “between the garden of the Palais de la Cité and the church of the
Frères-Hermites,” and there had them burned together. “They helped,” says
the continuator of Nangis,[g] “to prepare the fagots with so stout and
resolute a heart, persisting to the end in their denials with so great
steadfastness, that they left those who witnessed their torment filled
with admiration and stupefaction.” (March 11th, 1314.)
The ecclesiastical powers swallowed this outrage as many another,
demanding from the king no account for the double murder of two offenders
who did not come within his jurisdiction, and whose backsliding he had
dealt with on his own authority alone. Indeed Clement V was already
failing, and did not long survive the unfortunates whom he had sold to
their persecutor. He died on April 20th. An Italian historian, Ferretus
or Fereti of Vicenza, asserts that Jacques de Molay, from the midst of
his fagots, cited the king and the pope to appear before the tribunal of
God, Clement within forty days and Philip within a year.
Philip was in truth nearing the end of his sinister career. The last year
of his reign will be seen to be the most bloody. France was horrified by
more hideous scenes than any she had hitherto witnessed, more hideous
even than the murder of the Templars, and this time the tragedy was
enacted at the foot of the throne among the royal family. Philip’s
three sons, Louis Hutin, king of Navarre, and count of Champagne and of
Brie, Philip, count of Poitiers, and Charles, count of La Marche, had
married--the first Marguerite, sister of Hugh V, duke of Burgundy; and
the other two Joan and Blanche, daughters of Otto or Othelin, count of
Burgundy or of Franche-Comté. In the spring of 1314 the young wives of
the king’s three sons were suddenly arrested on a charge of scandalous
conduct. Marguerite, queen of Navarre, and Blanche, countess of La
Marche, were accused of frequent acts of adultery, “even on the most holy
days,” with Philip and Walter d’Aulnai, young Norman knights in their
service. The Aulnai brothers were not allowed to challenge to a duel in
defence of their innocence and that of their mistresses; confession of
guilt was wrung from them by torture, and the princesses, “stripped,”
says the continuator of Nangis,[g] “of all temporal honours, after
receiving the tonsure, were imprisoned, Marguerite in Château Gaillard
d’Andely, and Blanche in the abbey of Maubuisson, where, after strict
seclusion, and deprived of all human consolation, they ended their days
in despair.”
The fate of their lovers was even more terrible. They were conducted
to the place du Martroi St. Jean, in Paris, and there flayed alive and
mutilated; they were not beheaded until every means had been exhausted
that an infernal science could devise to prolong the victim’s sufferings
without actually killing him.
Joan of Burgundy, countess of Poitiers, more fortunate than her sisters
Blanche and Marguerite of Navarre, was declared chaste and not guilty
by a parliament in which sat the king’s brothers and the great nobles:
she was “reconciled to her husband.” Joan of Burgundy was heiress to
Franche-Comté: it was not possible to condemn her as an adulteress
and annul her marriage without renouncing the wealth she had brought
to the royal house; perhaps her riches had something to say as to her
innocence.[c]
The general oppression nearly caused an insurrection when Philip ordered
a new tax on the sale of all merchandise. There was, from the first, a
union between the nobles and the bourgeoisie similar to the league which
in England laid the foundations of the people’s liberty and imposed
the Magna Charta on John Lackland. Philip, this time, withdrew, and
cancelling the obnoxious tax he summoned representatives of forty of
the largest towns to a conference at Paris at which he promised to coin
henceforth nothing but honest money.
But this ill-starred man, this king, the harshest France had had up to
this time, although but forty-six years of age, had already reached the
end of his days. He expired November 29th, 1314.[b] The exact cause of
Philip’s early demise has never been perfectly understood. The commonly
accepted account is that it resulted from an accident that occurred
during a stag hunt. “He saw the stag coming and drew his sword, and
clapped spurs to his horse and thought to strike the stag; but his horse
carried him so violently against a tree that the good king fell to the
ground, and was very severely hurt in the heart, and was carried to
Corbeil. There his malady grew very sore.”[f] But this narrative bears
the date 1572. “The contemporary French historian” [the continuator of
William de Nangis[g]] says Michelet[e] “does not speak of this accident.
He says that Philip sank without fever or visible malady, to the great
astonishment of the physicians.” Nevertheless there was a contemporary
rumour of an accident during a hunt of the wild boar, for Dante[h]
writing exactly at the time of Philip’s death speaks contemptuously of
him as “The false coiner who died of a blow from a pig’s skin” (_i.e._, a
boar).[a]
_Political Progress in Philip’s Reign_
[Sidenote: [1285-1314 A.D.]]
Whether or not Philip the Fair was a wicked man or a bad king, there
is no denying that his reign is the grand era from which we date civil
order in France and the foundation of the modern monarchy.[e] Under
this reign the royal domain made important acquisitions, some of which,
unfortunately, were not lasting; the counties of La Marche, Angoumois,
Champagne, Franche-Comté, Lectoure, a portion of Flanders (Lille, Douai,
and Orchies), Quercy, the great city of Lyons and a part of Montpellier.
The count of Bar had been compelled to do homage to the French crown for
all his land situated west of the Maas.
Vassals were bound to serve their sovereign, in his court, by their
advice and justice. The king’s feudal court had a double character, for
in it the king called upon his barons for advice and sentences. With the
further evolution of royalty the functions of the king’s court developed,
and a division became necessary; there was the political court or grand
council, and the judiciary court or parliament. Under St. Louis the
functions of the parliament were not yet clearly defined. Philip the Fair
perfected its organisation. He caused this court to be held at Paris
twice a year for two months in the Palais de la Cité, which later bore
the name of the Palais de Justice (1303). This sovereign court of justice
which claimed to exercise its jurisdiction over the entire kingdom was
destined to be the great instrument employed by future kings to bring the
whole of France under their absolute authority. Philip also established
two _échiquiers_[14] at Rouen and two _grands jours_ at Troyes and placed
these provincial courts under the control of the parliament. The office
of public prosecutor (_ministère public_) charged with defending in all
causes the rights of the king and society, seems to date from the time of
Philip the Fair.
As the king had formed the parliament from the grand council, so
he formed the chamber of accounts (_chambre des comptes_) from the
parliament of which it first was a part but later became a separate
institution. Thus there were three great divisions in the high
administrative department of the country--the judiciary parliament; the
financial, chamber of accounts; and the political, the grand council.
The many ordinances of Philip which have been preserved prove his
activity in organising the new administration, which was the debt of
royalty to the country, since it had substituted its own powers for those
of the feudal lords. If these laws often bear the stamp of a despotic and
taxing spirit, they sometimes show a knowledge of the true principles of
government. One of them prohibited private war and judicial duels during
wars of the crown. This was done to disarm feudalism.
A most important event of Philip’s administration was the convocation in
1302 of the first states-general. Brought by his violences face to face
with a great peril, and ruined by his constant disastrous undertakings,
the most despotic of the French kings was compelled [as we have seen]
to call around him the deputies of the nation, in order to obtain the
assistance of which he stood in need and to fortify himself in his
quarrel with the pope, with the assent of France. But in discussing
before them the prerogatives of his crown and of the tiara, he recognised
by implication the ancient right of national sovereignty so deeply
obscured for centuries. Philip doubtless asked nothing but what he was
sure of obtaining, but the men who, in 1302, fought for the king against
the pope and in 1326 disposed of the crown, would later on be emboldened
to the attempt to lay hands on the crown itself.[b]
The states-general consisted of a strictly national assembly which the
barons, bishops, abbeys, provosts, and deans of chapters were invited
to attend in person, and to which each city of the realm was invited to
send two or three deputies or representatives. This was not the first
time that the crown had consulted the nobles and the prelates; but it
does not appear that until now the deputies of the third estate had taken
part in such a council. If they had been previously consulted on rare
occasions, it was in regard to special matters such as the regulation of
the currency, and even then certain determinate cities were represented.
The states-general thus called together by Philip the Fair, and which
assembled the 12th of April, 1302, in the church of Notre Dame at Paris,
was convoked, to be sure, with a specific aim and under extraordinary
circumstances. Its unique object was to show the pope that the country
upheld the king (see p. 80). But none the less does this meeting stamp
the year 1302 as an important date in French history.[15] Through this
representative assembly France, as such, takes part for the first time
in its own government; an intervention already necessary, and which is
destined soon to become consistent and regular.[k]
LOUIS (X) THE QUARRELSOME (1314-1316 A.D.)
[Sidenote: [1314-1316 A.D.]]
Philip the Fair had mingled little with the chivalry of his time. He
forbade tournaments, and, after the fashion of oriental despots, kept
his sons secluded. The eldest, known as Louis X, called Hutin or the
Quarrelsome, was fond of rude pastimes. In 1305 he had been crowned king
of Navarre at Pamplona, and succeeded at the same time to the county of
Champagne. His uncle Charles, count of Valois, had much influence over
him, a prince who had shown eagerness, but not perseverance, to tread in
the adventurous and ambitious path of Charles of Anjou.
[Illustration: LOUIS X
(From an old French print)]
Charles entertained an aversion for all his brother’s councillors. He
accused his chancellor Latilly, bishop of Châlons, with having caused the
death of the king by means of sorcery. Latilly’s obvious interest had
been to keep Philip alive; but Charles caused him, nevertheless, to be
imprisoned and tortured under the accusation. Raoul de Presle, another of
Philip’s legists, was implicated in the same crime, and underwent similar
persecution.
But Enguerrand de Marigny, Philip’s prime minister, was the chief
object of hatred to the king’s uncle. Charles blamed Marigny for the
depreciation of the coin; but for this crime, even if considered guilty,
Louis Hutin thought him not worthy of punishment more severe than
banishment to the isle of Cyprus. Charles seemed unable to bring against
Marigny himself the accusation of sorcery; he however accused his wife of
employing others to make the terrible images of wax. All of those thus
implicated were brought, not before parliament, but in the presence of
the king, of Charles, and of some barons at Vincennes. The councillors
of Philip had set the example of creating courts of justice in whatever
way suited their convenience. It was now the turn of the barons, and
they condemned Marigny to be hanged on a gibbet; the king, on hearing of
sorcery, abandoning his previous efforts to save him (1315).
Another murder was that of Marguerite, wife of Louis, who had been sent
to seclusion in the château Gaillard.
The young king was beset with difficulties which required a wise head
and an established authority to deal with them. A war threatened him
already. Count Robert of Flanders hesitated and refused to render the
homage due to the king of France on his accession. Philip would have
avenged such frowardness by sequestrating the county of Nevers, held by
the eldest son of the count of Flanders. But the prince appeared at the
French court, and was well received. The war could only be carried on by
feudal levies; when these were summoned, the noblesse of the different
provinces sent in their grievances in lieu of their contingents. His
legists would have counselled Philip the Fair to resist such demands; but
his son had surrounded his person, not with legists, but with barons,
and these remained acquiescent with the demands of their brother nobles.
Of course what was granted to one could not be refused to another.
But under the date of this one year, 1315, the French statute book is
filled with ordinances regranting their old privileges to the noblesse,
and rescinding a large portion of the voluminous legislation [such as
abandoning the ancient courts of justice, abolishing the judiciary duel,
the right of private war, and procedure by written deposition which had
made lawyers necessary] of the French monarchs during the preceding
century.[i] The general demand was that the king should hold no relations
with the barons’ men. But at the same time Louis, in order to get money,
made a solemn statement that “according to the law of nature every man
should be born free”; from which he concluded that all Frenchmen being by
nature free, the serfs of the royal domain could ransom themselves.
Serfdom began to decline from this moment, in contrast with the state
of affairs in preceding centuries; freedom now became the prevailing
condition amongst rural populations, as it had long been among the
inhabitants of the towns--while serfdom was the exception.[b]
Whilst the monarch made these large concessions to his noblesse, he seems
to have derived from them no efficient aid in the prosecution of the
war with Flanders. To raise money for this purpose, he was obliged to
compound with the Lombard merchants of Paris; they consented to pay so
much a pound on their importations. The Jews, too, were again permitted
to reside in certain cities on the payment of a tax. Louis Hutin was the
first king who formally borrowed money on the credit of the state, his
successors being obliged to devote to the purpose of repayment all the
sums that might accrue from forfeiture and confiscation.
With an army raised at these pains and costs, Louis marched into
Flanders. The Flemings were in the neighbourhood of Lille, and the French
king encamped opposite to them, with a river running between the armies.
The monarch had not an opportunity of putting his own valour and that of
his soldiers to the proof. For the elements put a stop to hostilities,
the rain pouring down in unusual torrents, flooding the camps, and
destroying provisions and crops. This unsuccessful campaign flung the
country into anarchy, the barons levying war wherever they could foresee
profit from it; and those who had right of coinage, Charles of Valois
included, making exorbitant use of it to enrich themselves at the expense
of the country. The king suspended this right, but his order was set at
naught; and he then strove to regulate the nature and fineness of the
coin which each grandee might issue.
Whilst Charles of Valois was thus employed, the king despatched his
brother, Philip, count of Poitiers, to Avignon, to hasten the election
of the pope. He was there when tidings reached him that Louis Hutin had
expired at Vincennes on the 5th of July, 1316. After heating himself at
ball-playing, the king had descended to the cellar to quench his thirst,
an imprudence that proved fatal.
PHILIP (V) THE TALL (1316-1322 A.D.)
[Sidenote: [1316-1322 A.D.]]
Philip immediately hastened to Paris, and took possession of the royal
palace. Charles of Valois thought at first of disputing the regency; but
the armed citizens of Paris, whom Louis had enrolled for the Flemish
war, with the constable at their head, drove Charles’ followers out of
the Louvre. Clemence, the young widow of Louis Hutin, now announced
her pregnancy. In addition to this posthumous child, Louis had left a
daughter, Joan, by Marguerite of Burgundy. The duke of Burgundy, although
he had been unable or unwilling to protect Marguerite, maintained the
rights of her daughter, and pleaded that Philip the Fair had acknowledged
her legitimacy.
Soon afterwards the queen gave birth to a son, who was christened John;
but the child lived only a few days. Philip lost no time in at once
claiming the rank of king, and appointing no distant day in January,
1317, for his coronation at Rheims. Charles of Valois, who was at the
head of the noblesse, already began to entertain well-founded hopes of
the royal succession accruing to his own family. The duke of Burgundy
was pacified by obtaining one of Philip’s daughters in marriage, with
a considerable sum of money in dowry, as well as Franche-Comté. Joan,
daughter of Louis Hutin, whose claims the duke thus abandoned, was
affianced to the only son of the count of Évreux.
The grounds for this exclusion of females from the throne of France are
not to be found in any law, but in the circumstance of Joan’s mother
having been stricken with infamy, with no staunch friend to defend her,
whilst Philip was in possession of the royal authority, of which it
would have required a civil war to dispossess him. With respect to the
old Salic law afterwards invoked, it related but to fiefs and military
service, and yet in fiefs it had been so generally set aside, that women
succeeded to lands and to noble property in all the provinces of France.
It must have been evident to the noblesse, as to others, that the descent
of a fief, much more of the crown, to females weakened it for a time,
and eventually rendered it liable to become the prey of personages,
perhaps foreigners, who had not the interest of the kingdom at heart.
The accession of Philip the Tall, therefore, and the exclusion of the
daughters of Louis Hutin, were popular with the citizens, not displeasing
to the noblesse, and not against the interest of the princes of the
blood. And thus was it decided that the kingdom of France, instead of
being considered as a patrimony that descended to direct heirs, even if
female, was a high function which it required a prince to fill.
The reign of Philip the Tall was marked by no chivalrous enterprise or
military feat. French and Flemings were disposed more to negotiate than
fight. The chief object of Philip the Tall’s efforts and edicts was to
organise a regular administration. He ordered, first, that a certain
number of the members of the great council should be always with the
king, a provision afterwards repeated in the order that the small or
privy council (_l’estroit conseil_) should meet every month. [In this
council cruel persecutions of the Jews and lepers were organised.] He
established the chamber of accounts, and regulated the issues of the
treasury, no payment to be made without the king’s own signature. The
abuses of Philip’s predecessors are chiefly known by his efforts to amend
them. Philip regulated parliaments, their number and their sitting. No
prelate was to sit in that of Paris unless he belonged also to the king’s
council. Parliament should always be attended by a baron or two. It was
empowered to send commissioners into the provinces to judge causes
instead of bringing the parties to Paris and thereby creating expenses.
The king forbade (1316) nobles to sell fiefs or feudal property to
non-nobles.[i]
Like his grandfather Philip III, Philip the Tall gave titles of
nobility to people of common origin, an innovation which, by renewing
the aristocratic body, assured its longevity, but at the same time
altered its character. In the beginning, nobility was a personal matter;
feudalism had made it an attribute of the military fief; here were the
kings separating it. It is a serious change; for one day these letters of
nobility will be bought, and there will be no real nobility when all the
world may be noble with the power of money.
Thus threatened from above by the kings, feudalism was also threatened
from below by the people. The development of the towns continued: that
of the country began; the bourgeois obtained from Philip V permission to
have their own military organisations; each town had a captain for its
citizen companies, each bailiwick a captain-general; and it was in this
century, if not in this reign, that the ecclesiastical parishes became
civil communities. The country people, formerly completely isolated, were
being brought more and more together, at first around the church and the
castle under the surveillance of the seigniorial intendant, later under a
syndic or mayor always appointed by the lord and who brought the people
together to discuss their common interests.
This was the beginning of municipal organisation in country places.[b]
One of the latest schemes of Philip, much too advanced for his time,
was to establish but one measure and one money throughout the kingdom.
He calculated that this could not be done without great expense, and he
proposed taking the fifth part of the goods of all his subjects for the
purpose. But the townsfolk objected to the tax, whilst the nobles who had
the right of coinage persisted in retaining so profitable a privilege.
Philip was seized in the same year with dysentery and intermittent fever,
which terminated in languor and confined him for months to his couch. The
people did not fail to attribute his disease to the unheard-of exactions
and extortions that he meditated. Philip the Tall did not live to
accomplish them; he expired in January, 1322.
CHARLES (IV) THE FAIR (1322-1328 A.D.)
[Sidenote: [1322-1328 A.D.]]
No one put forward any claim on the part of the daughters of Philip the
Tall to the regal succession. Charles, the youngest son of Philip the
Fair, was at once hailed as king; and so incontestably, that he seems
to have dispensed with the ceremony of coronation. The first object
with Charles, called, like his father, the Handsome or the Fair, was to
leave an heir to the throne. Less cruel than Louis Hutin, he obtained
a papal dispensation or divorce from his wife Blanche, not on account
of the adultery of which she had been convicted, but on the plea of
consanguinity. Charles immediately married Mary of Luxemburg, daughter
of the late emperor Henry VII. This queen produced no heir, dying in
premature childbirth within two years, when Charles married his cousin
Joan, daughter of the count d’Évreux.
The first years of the reign of Charles the Fair were chiefly marked
by a trial in which severity was at least warranted by justice, and in
which the king and court were above sparing culprits even of the highest
connection. Jourdan de Lille, lord of Casaubon, in Gascony, having
married the niece of Pope John XXII, considered himself above restraint.
Accused of eighteen crimes each worthy of death, the king had spared
him, out of consideration for the pope; but Casaubon resumed his old
habits. No traveller or merchant was safe from his rapine, nor damsel
nor even man from his violence. Summoned to appear before the court of
parliament to answer some of these acts, the Gascon lord beat with his
own mace the royal sergeant who bore the summons. He came to Paris,
nevertheless, with a noble suite, bravely reckoning on impunity. He was,
however, committed to prison, tried, condemned to death, and hanged.[i]
Contemporary writers tell us little of the life of Charles IV, or of his
government. We know that he paid visits to various parts of his realm,
and that while so doing he confirmed the charters of certain cities of
the south of France. We know, too, that in his earlier years Charles
aspired to the crown of the Holy Roman Empire, and that for a time
circumstances seemed to favour his ambition. He had the support of the
pope and of the two most powerful German houses, those of Austria and
of Luxemburg. But the Germans as a nation were opposed to the idea of a
French emperor, and the negotiations to this end were abandoned on the
death of Leopold of Austria in 1326.[k]
It would appear from the ordinances and other acts of Charles the Fair
that the party of the noblesse, dominant under Louis Hutin, but repressed
under Philip the Tall, recovered full authority under Charles. The
Valois, who put themselves forward as the representatives of the chivalry
of the age and as the enemy of the legists, appear dominant. They led an
expedition against Guienne, threatened Flanders, and aided Mortimer and
Isabella in the struggle which terminated in the murder of Edward II.
The ordinances of Charles the Fair do not interfere with the noblesse,
except to shield them from the encroachments of the king’s _baillis_: the
lords of Auvergne and Brittany obtained especial immunities of this kind.
Although armies were raised from Flemish and for Gascon war, the nobles
were apparently not called upon to contribute to them except by feudal
service; whilst the Parisians were called upon to keep up a body of two
hundred men-at-arms, and to levy a tax on sales to meet this expenditure.
Towns which had not the privileges of _communes_, and were without mayors
or sheriffs, were ordered not to pay _taille_, but, instead of it, the
tax on sales, of one denier in the livre, which tax was not to be levied
on the produce sent to market by either nobles or clergy. Money continued
to be the great trouble and principal anxiety of government, the middle
and civic classes being singled out as the only ones which could
regularly furnish it, except when some rich and privileged body offered
itself to the greed of the spoiler.
The same fate which had carried off his brother at so young an age
awaited Charles. Taken ill at Christmas, he expired at the end of
January, 1328. “Thus was the entire progeny of Philip the Fair, and finer
was not to be found in the kingdom of France, completely exterminated in
the space of fourteen years.”[i]
ASPECTS OF CIVILISATION
The Middle Ages themselves at this moment, at least in France, were near
their end, for the things they were attached to--the Crusades, chivalry,
feudalism--were gone, or fast passing away; the papacy, scoffed at in
the days of Boniface VIII, was captive at Avignon; the successor of
Hugh Capet was a despot, and the sons of villeins were sitting in the
states-general of the realm, opposite the nobles and the clergy.[b]
Two or three centuries before, France had seen a great movement
accomplished in her midst, called the communal revolution. The greater
part of the cities had acquired--be it pacifically, be it at the cost
of struggles against the land-owners, or by dissensions and intestine
wars--municipal rights combined with independent jurisdiction. Some of
them had acquired a veritable sovereignty. At present, under King John,
this sovereignty existed no longer. The cities had gradually returned to
the royal administration, although each retained its charter; it may be
said, in a general way, that they had again become dependent, since St.
Louis in regard to finance, since Philip the Fair in regard to tribunals,
and for the levying of militia since Philip the Tall. But, in spite of
this change which took from them the character of independent republics,
to make them members of a great state, they had retained considerable
liberty and power of action. Their citizens formed a third order, having
like the clergy or the nobility their own peculiar privileges and
correlative obligations. They possessed a great and fruitful initiative
for their commercial interests and their industries. They aspired to
exercise a rightful influence over the government, and the states-general
offered them an obvious means.
The bourgeoisie was not hostile to seigneurial aristocracy as several
historians have represented, but it had different interests and different
aims, since it owed its wealth and power to industry and commerce. As
for industry, it is well known that the corporations of crafts assured a
monopoly more or less extensive to their members, of more or less regular
revenues, and the perpetuity of hereditary influence. Nevertheless, it
is necessary to recall how the development of these corporations was
hampered by their own laws, and if there were already some of great
wealth, like those of the butchers of Paris, they were the exception.
Industries were restricted in their nature in proportion as they were
reduced to the usual crafts, and this was generally the case. They
employed only the raw materials produced in the country, like flax, wool,
or hides. They worked in iron and other metals, but having no knowledge
of large machinery they had little use for coal, the principal agent of
metallic production. In general, also, they produced only enough for
home consumption. Exportations were confined principally to the textiles
manufactured in the south which had a market in the Levant, to the
woollen stuffs, serges, and tapestries of Arras, to the linens of Rheims
and Picardy. Thanks to this circumstance the towns of the latter province
began to rival the large industrial cities of the Netherlands.
The progress of industry was genuine, but would only follow that
of commerce. Now it was principally the progress of commerce which
amazed the fourteenth century. The use of the compass, of which no
traces can be found before St. Louis, in permitting longer voyages,
established connections, used more than formerly, between the coasts of
the Mediterranean and those of the ocean and the English Channel. The
commerce of the two seas, by the straits of Gibraltar, rare enough before
the year 1300, took, at the beginning of that epoch, a rapid stride
forward. On the other hand the triumph of Christianity and civilisation
in the northern districts along the tributaries of the Baltic,
accompanied by the establishment of German settlements along the coasts
of that sea in Prussia and Livonia, opened to the merchants northern
Europe, long infested by pirates and long difficult of access. Now began
a regular exchange of the products of the north and those of the south.
Amiens, whose ordinary commerce had long been restricted to Flanders,
England, Scotland, and Ireland, now extended the circumference of her
commerce to the Hanseatic countries and their towns, to the Scandinavian
kingdoms and those of the Spanish peninsula. All these towns prospered,
and following more or less the movement of the Flemish cities became
store-houses for the products of northern or southern Europe and even of
the merchandise of the Orient.
Bruges and Antwerp were at that period markets of great importance.
The whole world seemed to gather there; the influx of strangers was
unceasing. The Hanseatics, the Venetians, the Genoese elbowed the English
and the merchants of all the states of the continent. This favoured
that commercial movement begun in the thirteenth century, and largely
increased during the first years of the fourteenth, when the cloth
industry of Flanders took such a rapid stride and became powerful enough
to lay down the law to the governments, a thing which has hardly been
seen before. In effect it gained thereby numerous markets for the sale of
its products, and abundant capital to increase its operations.
The commercial movement which had its centre in Flanders extended to a
certain distance, and made itself felt in the towns of northern France.
All these towns had treaties with the Flemish cities. Paris was even
affiliated with the Hanseatic League, of which Bruges was the principal
warehouse. The safety of navigation and maritime commerce preoccupied
the French government in the fourteenth century. In order that the
ownership of cargoes might be guaranteed to the ship-owners, Philip the
Fair created special tribunals of _commissionaires examinateurs_, charged
with judging the questions of flotsam and jetsam on the coasts; these
tribunals were the originals of the admiralties. The government also
undertook to fight piracy and restrain the usage of letters of marque.
It was customary for the proprietors of a vessel robbed by pirates, if
they could not obtain satisfaction from the town to which the pirates
belonged, to indemnify themselves by selling for their own profit the
property of foreigners of the same nation established in the realm.
International conventions alone could destroy this barbarous custom.
The maritime wars against England were far from being favourable to its
suppression; but they helped to restrain and submit its exercise to
regulations. Treaties to that effect were signed with several foreign
rulers. One council, assembled in Paris in 1314, proscribed letters of
marque, as contrary to religion and morals.
Certain ports were opened to foreigners. Harfleur to the merchants of
Aragon, of Majorca, Castile, and Portugal who had also free entrance
into the Seine; Le Crotoy and Abbeville were opened to those of Castile
who had the entrée to the Somme. Philip of Valois made the agreement to
maintain these ports, to suppress the taxes which hindered commerce, and
to accord various privileges to foreigners, among others that of having
consuls and judges of their own nationality. At Harfleur the Spaniards
were included among the inhabitants, and participated in the rights
of the bourgeoisie. At Rouen they occupied a particular quarter. The
Italians received, in 1315, definite privileges from Louis X, in four
cities--Paris, St. Omer, La Rochelle, and Nîmes. The Venetian fleet,
which came annually to the port of Bruges, stopped generally at Dieppe.
_The Great Fairs_
The fourteenth century is the epoch of the prosperity of the great fairs.
The fairs were then to the towns of considerable importance and for
certain parts of France what they still are to the villages. At these
fairs were bought and sold all such articles as were not common; these
purchases and sales could be made only there and at certain times of the
year. Since individual commerce offered a great deal of difficulty, and
lacked the most indispensable elements of security, it became necessary
for the merchants to agree upon the transportation of their merchandise,
and to unite in order to insure the fairness, often even the simple
possibility, of transactions.
The most important fairs in the fourteenth century were those of St.
Denis, and the Lendit, of which the origin was in Merovingian times;
those of Champagne, held at Troyes, Provins, Lagny, Rheims, and
Bar-sur-Aube, protected by the regulations of Philip the Fair and Philip
of Valois, those of Beaucaire in the south. They served as marts for the
principal foreign productions, the linens of Holland, which were still
an object of luxury; the woollens of England; the silks of Italy; the
hides and leathers of Spain; the cloths of Flanders, whose superiority
was recognised everywhere; the Italian stuffs, ornamented with embroidery
and woven with gold; the wines of Spain, Portugal, and Greece. At Troyes
were to be met the merchants of Germany and the countries of the north.
To Beaucaire came those of the southern countries, Italians, Spaniards,
Portuguese, Greeks, Berbers, Egyptians; the Genoese came to Beaucaire to
buy the cloths woven at Narbonne, Perpignan, and Toulouse, and destined
for exportation. Ordinarily the merchants of the same nation, sometimes
those of the same town, formed a syndicate. At the fair of the Lendit
every town had for its negotiations its particular place, as is the
custom to-day in our great expositions.
All the kings, from Philip the Bold, strove to attract foreign merchants
by giving them new privileges, that is to say, in multiplying the
guarantees which they needed. They were exempted from certain tolls.
International treaties were made to assure the free land passage of
merchandise transported from one realm to another. We have a remarkable
example of this sort of treaty. It was a stipulation, signed in 1327 by
the kings of France, England, Spain, Aragon, Sicily, and Majorca.
The fairs of Champagne were the objects of regulations which it was aimed
to make as definite and at the same time as favourable as possible.
The tariff was fixed for the taxes which were collected there. Royal
commissioners were chosen for the police, for brokers, and notaries, in
order to assume the sincerity of transactions and of guards to certify
to the quality of the merchandise sold. To the merchants of each nation
was conceded the right to elect their national judges, and to submit to
these judges the regulation of their disputes, except in case of appeal,
which could be carried to the tribunal of fairs as a first resort,
and as a second resort to the chamber of accounts. Guarantees were
also accorded to foreign merchants against deterioration of money and
arbitrary confiscations. In order to define the point where usury began,
which the laws continued to fight, interest on commercial matter was
fixed at fifteen per cent., and the stipulations of private persons were
tolerated up to this figure. The importance of the fairs, and the pains
taken by the government to make them popular, could not but be favourable
to public wealth. A rich and enlightened bourgeoisie was founded in
the large cities, at Rouen, Amiens, Rheims, Troyes, Orleans. All these
towns and others enlarged their areas, raised façades of cut stone in
their principal streets, constructed arcades, galleries, porticoes, and
municipal buildings; but Paris already dominated them all. Her population
rose to two or three hundred thousand souls. She already possessed some
sort of a monopoly for the fabrication of articles of luxury.
Paris had grown with the monarchy. To the advantage of a very
considerable commerce, of extended and special industries, were joined
others not less important. It was an ecclesiastical and literary centre.
A whole quarter was occupied by the population of the schools. Her
universities, at the same time French and European, could not fail to
play an important rôle in the revolutions of the country and in the
discussion of the great interests of the church. Finally, Paris was
the seat of parliament, that of the highest administration, the centre
of government, and the residence of the court. The greater part of the
provinces possessed in the quarter of the Louvre or the quarter of
St. Paul, hôtels, where they lived surrounded by guards and numerous
servitors, which very often occupied vast spaces with their gardens and
out-houses. Ever since then the merchants from the interior or from
foreign countries, able workmen, clerks, writers, the nobility, have
thronged into the great capital. The bourgeoisie of Paris had more
learning, more wealth, and also more pretensions than those of other
towns. Their chief and natural representative, the provost of merchants,
was one of the powers of the state.
The idea of a national representation, with fixed conditions and
attributes, is a modern one, and was almost unknown in the Middle Ages.
There were no written constitutions in existence, except civic charters,
which had a purely local character. The government on its part, without
being absolute, admitted of no binding control. In the meantime, public
opinion was being consulted, as it became necessary to reckon with it,
and the independence which asserted itself everywhere. In the thirteenth
century deputies from the cities were convoked and consulted separately;
in the fourteenth they were combined with those of the clergy or the
nobility of the provincial estates or the states-general. But no fixed
rule was followed. It was the king and his officers who determined each
time the conditions and the forms of the election.[k]
[Illustration]
FOOTNOTES
[13] [Boutaric,[d] who has made a special study of the reign of Philip
the Fair, bases his account of the remarkable events at Anagni on the
narratives of Rinaldo de Supino and of Nogaret[l] himself rather than
on those of Giovanni Villani[m] and Walsingham,[n] the source of most
modern historians. Nogaret’s alleged speech is from the chronicle of St.
Denis.[o]
Nogaret says that Philip had sent him to Rome to demand the summoning of
a council, but Boniface in fear of the hostile population had retired to
his native Anagni. Nogaret learned of the impending excommunication of
his master and determined to prevent it at all costs. The Ghibellines of
Romagna listened to his plan, and Rinaldo de Supino, their leader and his
friend, agreed to accompany Nogaret to Anagni and bring Boniface to terms.
But Nogaret was compelled to take full leadership and promise the
protection of France, from all consequences, temporal or spiritual,
to his allies. Sciarra Colonna, the pope’s mortal enemy, now joined
the scheme. All of this would indicate that Nogaret acted on his own
responsibility in the matter of the descent on Anagni, wishing only to
protect the king of France from the curse of excommunication, and that
the latter was in no way connected with the conception of the affair. As
to the events at Anagni, Boutaric says:
“There are fables that Colonna struck the pope in the face with his
gauntlet; that he was tied to a donkey with his face toward its tail and
paraded through Anagni in the midst of insults; but all these stories
should be rejected. It seems certain that the person of Boniface was
respected. Nogaret contented himself with holding him captive and
pestering him to consent to the convoking of the council. Boniface was
immovable; Nogaret was at his wits’ end. After a lapse of three days the
people, ashamed of their treachery, came to demand Boniface. Nogaret was
obliged to flee.” Dareste[k] holds Colonna guiltless of violence but
thinks that others might have injured the pope but for Nogaret.]
[14] The _échiquier_ of Rouen was the ancient feudal court of the dukes
of Normandy; it was held alternately at Rouen, Falaise, and Caen. Philip
the Fair put royal magistrates at its head and fixed it at Rouen, where
it met twice a year at Easter and Michaelmas, whence the expression _les
deux échiquiers_. The _grands jours_ were presided over by a judicial
commission appointed by the king, but like the _échiquier_ of Rouen it
was a local institution that had already long existed.
[15] [Perhaps Guizot’s[p] slightly dissenting view is worth quoting. He
says: “It has often been asserted that Philip the Fair was the first who
called the third estate to the states-general of the kingdom. The phrase
is too grand, and the fact was not new. Under St. Louis deputies of towns
were called around the king to deliberate upon certain legislative acts.
There are other examples of this. Philip the Fair, then, had not the
honour of the first call; and, with regard to assemblies of this kind
which occur under his reign, far too great an idea of them is formed.
These meetings were very brief, almost accidental, without influence upon
the general government of the kingdom, and deputies of towns held but
a very inferior place in them. Nevertheless under Philip the Fair they
became more frequent than before.”]
[Illustration]
CHAPTER V. THE OPENING OF THE HUNDRED YEARS’ WAR
Great enterprises and deeds of arms were achieved in these
wars; since the time of good Charlemagne, king of France, never
were such feats performed.--FROISSART.[e]
[Sidenote: [1328-1350 A.D.]]
Although France was little prepared for a great national war, a king
mounted its throne who was almost certain to provoke one. The princes of
the family of Valois had always represented the ideas and the interests
of the noblesse during the preceding reigns, when reasons of state,
maxims of law, and necessities of finance had led the government to look
to other councillors and undergo other influence. With the accession of
Philip of Valois, the noblesse recovered that ascendency of which they
had been so long deprived. And this influence they displayed with a
petulance and a pride which could not but provoke what they most loved, a
war.
“Charles the Fair having expired, the barons assembled to take into
consideration the government of the kingdom. The queen was pregnant,
and until the sex of her issue was known, the title of king could not
be assumed. The only question was to whom, as nearest in blood, the
government of the kingdom should be committed, especially as in France a
female could not succeed to the crown. The English said that their king,
the son of Philip the Fair’s daughter, and consequently nephew of the
late monarch, was, as nearest of kin, more entitled to the regency and
to the throne, if the queen did not bring forth a prince, than Philip
of Valois, who was but the cousin of the deceased monarch. Many learned
in the civil and canon law were of this opinion. Isabella, the daughter
of Philip the Fair, might, they alleged, be set aside on account of her
sex; but one of the right sex, and of the nearest affinity, ought to
succeed. The men of France, incapable of suffering the idea of becoming
subjects of an English prince, replied, that Edward could only succeed by
the right of his mother; and when the mother had no right, the son could
have none. This opinion being accepted as the most sensible, was approved
by the barons, and the government delivered to Philip of Valois. He
accordingly received the homage due to the crown of France, but not that
due to the crown of Navarre, which the count of Évreux claimed by right
of his wife, daughter of Louis Hutin.”
[Sidenote: [1328-1330 A.D.]]
This narrative, by the continuator of Nangis,[c] is sufficiently
correct. Navarre was given to the count of Évreux, he consenting to
receive pecuniary compensation for the counties of Champagne and Brie.
In April the queen was confined of a daughter; Philip instantly assumed
the title of king, and gave orders for his coronation at Rheims. At the
same time, by a letter dated Northampton, the 16th day of May, 1328,
Edward appointed two bishops as procurators to make good his claim to the
kingdom of France. At the close of the same month Philip was solemnly
crowned at Rheims.
[Illustration: PHILIP VI
(From an old French print)]
The first act of the new king as regent seems to have been to order the
treasurer of the late monarch, Peter Remi, to be tortured--thus compelled
to confess treason, and finally hanged. He also summoned his barons to
support him in a military expedition into Flanders. Count Louis was
obstructed in his government, and especially in his levy of taxes, by the
people of Bruges, Ypres, and other cities; those of Ghent alone remaining
true to him and to France. Louis demanded aid of Philip. The greater
part of the barons were of opinion that the season was too far advanced
to admit of an expedition that year; but Philip, anxious to signalise
his reign, turned to the constable, Walter de Châtillon, and asked his
advice. “The brave heart finds all times opportune for fighting,” replied
the constable. The king accordingly summoned his lieges to meet him at
the feast of the Madeleine in July, at Arras. “But the good towns,”
says the chronicle of St. Denis,[h] “did not attend, giving their money
instead, and staying at home to mind their cities.”
The king’s army was most numerous, divided into ten divisions or battles,
the nobles from every quarter hastening to evince their loyalty by
attending the first summons of a new and chivalrous king. The citizens
of West Flanders alone mustered to oppose the French, and not more than
twelve thousand of them, according to Froissart, took post under Colas
Zannequin on the hill of Cassel. They were confident, however, and hung
out a flag with a cock painted on it, and an inscription saying, that
this cock would crow, ere the upstart king, the _roi trouvé_, would find
his way into Cassel.
The Flemings remained tranquil for several days, with the French
encamped before them. At last at the hour of vespers when the latter
were preparing supper, the Flemings marched out in three bodies, fell
upon them, and penetrated into their camp. Philip, like his namesake at
Mons-en-Pévêlle, was obliged to withdraw, and it was his chaplains who
helped him to put on his armour. When the king showed himself with the
_oriflamme_, the knights rallied round him from all quarters, the foot,
who were more numerous, continuing their flight. The Flemings had failed
in mastering as well as surprising Philip’s camp, and now assailed by
the French cavalry (having none of their own), they stood firm and fought
for a long time a defensive battle. At last a charge made a breach in
their solid phalanx, the French knights poured in, and the Flemings were
routed and slaughtered. One of the divisions regained the hill of Cassel,
but all alike perished. The king estimated the loss of his enemies at
twenty thousand.
He entered the several towns one after the other in triumph, took a
thousand citizens of Bruges as hostages, tore down the bells, levelled
the walls, and proscribed municipal liberties. When Philip delivered the
county of Flanders, thus humbled and mutilated, to its lord, he addressed
him, as the continuator of Nangis[c] records, in the following words:
“Count, I come hither at your request, and in all probability because you
were too negligent in executing justice. I could not have come, as you
know, without great expense; yet, out of my liberality, I restore you
your land quiet and pacified, and I forgive you the expense. But another
time take care. Let me not be obliged to return by your over-clemency,
for if I do, it shall be for my own profit.”
Thus exhorted, adds the chronicler, Count Louis so exerted himself that,
within three months, he had put ten thousand persons to various kinds of
death. In this manner was signalised the triumph of the French noblesse
over the citizens of West Flanders.
[Sidenote: [1328-1335 A.D.]]
Meantime, in England, affairs were somewhat unsettled. Edward III cannot
be considered to have undertaken the government of that country until the
death of Mortimer and the imprisonment of the queen-mother in October,
1330. In the first year after Philip’s accession, Isabella seemed
inclined to dispute his title, and steps were taken to conclude alliances
against France. But the success of Philip in the Flemish war, and the
hostile attitude of the English barons, as well as the discontent of the
English people with the concessions made to Scotland, precluded the idea
of prosecuting the quarrel with France.
Edward, therefore, at his mother’s bidding, proceeded to Amiens in the
spring of 1329, and did homage to Philip, maintaining his rights to those
portions of his possessions in the south of France which the French king
still retained. But this act of submission led to disputes, one monarch
pretending that it was homage simple, the other that it was homage
_liège_. Philip thought the opportunity favourable for invading Guienne,
the power of Isabella and Mortimer being paralysed by their many enemies.
The king levied an _aide_ upon his barons for the expedition. So far had
these hostile intentions proceeded, that the count of Alençon, Philip’s
brother, attacked the English in Saintonge, and took and burned the
castle of Saintes. On the death of Mortimer, however, and the assumption
of full power by Edward, Philip returned to more amicable sentiments,
and promised to make amends for the affair of Saintes, as well as for
several other grievances. The monarchs seemed to be on the most friendly
terms; they spoke of proceeding to the Holy Land together, and even of
contracting a marriage between their children.
The subsequent coolness and enmity between them is universally, and
apparently with justice, attributed to the malice of Robert of Artois,
who for some years had been a pretender to the lordship of that county.
Robert had undoubtedly been wronged in the judgment which took Artois
from him, the direct heir, and gave it to a female and a collateral,
merely because she was more closely allied to the reigning king of
France. When Robert asserted his rights in arms, Philip the Tall was
unable to reduce him; and if Robert submitted, and even constituted
himself a prisoner, it was on the understanding that the unjust sentence
against him should be revoked, and the county restored to him. On this
understanding, Robert married the daughter of Charles of Valois.
Nevertheless Philip the Tall and Charles the Fair evaded the demands
and expectations of Robert, who reckoned on having his rights at last
from his brother-in-law, Philip of Valois. Robert accordingly served the
crown with zeal, and was one of the principal supporters of this prince’s
claims to the throne. “Thus, on Philip’s accession, Robert became
everything in France,” says Froissart.[e] There having been two sentences
of the court of parliament against Robert’s claim, it was difficult
to rescind them, at least without some new plea, some yet unproduced
documents in his favour. Such, probably, was the remark with which Philip
and his law officers met the demands of Robert.
If a document existed likely to prove favourable for his claim, it must
have fallen into the hands of those who had robbed him of the county.
The countess Mahaut, to whom Philip the Fair had adjudged Artois, died
soon after the accession of Philip of Valois. Her chief counsellor and
confidant had been the bishop of Arras. He also dying, left voluminous
papers, some of which had been secreted and carried off from Arras by
a woman named Divion, mistress of the prelate. The countess lived long
enough to endeavour, by law or vengeance, to get back the papers from
Divion.
Aware of these circumstances, Joan, the countess of Artois, set to work
and procured from this woman, or caused to be forged by her, certain
documents. One was a letter from the bishop of Arras to Robert of
Artois, craving pardon for having purloined the documents. Another was
a charter of Robert, count of Artois, the grandfather, settling Artois
upon his son, the father of Robert. Michelet[f] declares the documents,
which still exist, to be forgeries. Robert of Artois boldly produced
them, claimed by virtue of them to be restored to the possession of his
county; and, as a proof of what value was men’s testimony in those days,
he brought upwards of fifty witnesses in support of his false documents.
Had the king been prosecutor, these, no doubt, would have been found
authentic enough for the parliament. But Robert of Artois was no friend
of the legists, and parliament remained firm to its first decision. The
king’s _procureur_ objected to the documents, and Robert, summoned to say
whether he would stand by them, hesitated. The woman, Divion, was seized,
put to the torture, and acknowledged her forgery. The parliament ordered
her to be burned. Robert of Artois being proved so far culpable as to
have plotted with her, was accused, moreover, of aiding her to poison the
countess Mahaut of Artois. Robert fled to Brabant. The king caused him to
be condemned for forgery, and deprived of his estates and honours. His
wife, his sons, and relatives were imprisoned, and, the legists accusing
him of attempting to murder and to kill the king by sorcery, drove
Robert altogether from the continent, and compelled him to take refuge
in England. The fugitive was well received by Edward, appointed of his
council, and endowed with ample domains.
Philip of Valois knew not what use to make of that absolute power, which
the efforts of so many kings had built up. Policy, he evidently had
none. He liked the splendour, magnificence, and pride of a court; and,
consequently, preferred his noblesse to any other class of society. Still
he showed, in the case of Robert of Artois, his determination not to
allow any of them to dictate or impose upon him. He consulted his lawyers
as in the case of church encroachments, but shrunk from ordinance or
legislation in their favour. Abroad, Philip was generally uncertain in
purpose.
[Sidenote: [1335-1337 A.D.]]
The monarch’s incertitude was, however, soon relieved. Edward III became
more and more irritated at the support which the French and Flemings
gave to the Scots: in June, 1335, he issued an order from Newcastle to
the Cinque Ports to arm, and intercept a naval expedition fitting out
at Calais for Scotland. In February, 1336, an edict appeared ordering
all Englishmen, from sixteen to sixty, to be prepared to repel invasion.
Still negotiations continued; and it was not till August of the same year
that Edward announced to his subjects the refusal of the French king to
cease rendering active assistance to the Scottish foe. At the same time
the count of Flanders threw off the mask by arresting all the English
traders in his dominions, and Edward was obliged to respond to it by a
similar act.
The following year was spent by both monarchs in preparing alliances, and
by Edward in making the most active and unusual preparations for war.
Philip hired large bodies of Germans, both men-at-arms and light troops.
By marrying the heiress of the duke of Brittany to one of his relatives,
he hoped to have secured the allegiance of that prince and family; but
Philip’s attention was chiefly turned towards the south and the conquest
of Guienne, for which enterprise he had the succour of the nobles of the
Pyrenees as well as of Languedoc. He seemed not to expect to be seriously
attacked on the side of Flanders.
Yet it was in that direction that Edward principally turned his efforts,
spending the year 1337 in negotiations with the princes whose territories
extended from Antwerp to Cologne. The English king had married the
daughter of the count of Hainault, who was the first that he gained,
or hoped to have gained; the duke of Brabant, the duke of Gelderland,
and the archbishop of Cologne also listened to Edward’s proposals, and
willingly received his subsidies. They might bring into the field a
thousand knights. But Edward pushed his quest for allies still further:
he engaged the duke of Austria to invade Burgundy, he concluded an
agreement with the count palatine for a subsidiary force, and even
obtained a promise from the emperor Ludwig of Bavaria that he would aid
in the war against France with an army of two thousand knights; for this
his imperial majesty was to be paid 300,000 florins.
These counts and knights observed to the envoy of Edward that,
notwithstanding their own prowess, the Flemish artisans would prove
far more potent auxiliaries against France than any number of lordly
chivalry. Edward approved of the idea; and the bishop of Lincoln and
other envoys proceeded to Ghent, “not sparing their money by the way.”
The subjection of Flanders had been caused by the rich citizens of Ghent
proving false to the national cause, supported solely by the men of
Bruges and West Flanders. This enabled the democracy of Ghent to triumph
over them, and to become organised under the lead of a brewer of that
city, named Artevelde. The envoys of Edward addressed themselves to
this new king or popular sovereign, and were well received by him. He
summoned consuls or deputies from the other towns, and these soon came
to an accord that trade should be carried on as usual, and wool imported
from England, notwithstanding the prohibitions of France and the count of
Flanders.
To Edward wool was at once money and alliance. Whilst the working and
manufacturing class of Flemings thus profited by the English, the chiefs
and Artevelde himself received money for the occasion. Still, however
easy to win over the Flemings to neutrality, it was difficult to induce
them to enter upon active war with France. The French, however, and
the Flemish aristocracy did all in their power to provoke the civic
democracy; they enticed from Ghent almost the only personage of birth
who favoured the popular party, and had entertained the envoys of Edward.
This was a knight of Courtrai, father-in-law of Artevelde; when he fell
into their hands, they decapitated him, to the great irritation of the
men of Ghent. The Flemish knights, in order to intercept the frequent
communication and envoys passing between England and the Low Countries,
took possession of the isle of Cadsand, close to Walcheren, and lying in
wait there for the English, obliged them in going or in returning home,
to take the route of Dordrecht, instead of sailing direct from Antwerp.
Edward no sooner learned this, than he fitted out an expedition in the
Thames under Lord Derby and Sir Walter Manny, of six hundred knights
and two thousand archers. These assailed Cadsand, defeated the Flemish
knights, and captured Guy of Flanders, who, after some delay, joined the
English party.
EDWARD III CLAIMS THE THRONE OF FRANCE
[Sidenote: [1337-1339 A.D.]]
In October, 1337, Edward took the important step of laying claim to the
throne of France by right of his mother, sister of Philip the Fair, and
of declaring Philip of Valois, descended from a brother of that monarch,
a wrongful usurper. This he announced in letters from Edward, king of
France and England, to his allies in the Low Countries; and he at the
same time appointed the duke of Brabant his vicar-general in the kingdom
of France. The king’s allies received this solemn announcement, but do
not seem to have acted upon it; the duke of Brabant, far from assuming
the office of vicar-general, on the contrary assured Philip of Valois of
his friendship.
In the spring of 1338, Edward embarked for Antwerp with what forces he
could muster, hoping to make a brilliant campaign with the princes of
the Low Countries. They showed very little alacrity, and though willing
to receive large sums, prepared to prove themselves as little hostile to
the French king as was consistent with their receiving the money from the
English. The emperor, though he had promised to be ready by St. Andrew’s
day was too anxious for a reconciliation with the pope to defeat his
purpose by aiding in an invasion of France; and Edward was reduced to
recommence the task of negotiation.
It was late in 1339 before Edward was joined by his German allies.
Some time was passed in solemnly declaring war, and then the English
advanced to Cambray, which was garrisoned by French troops. But as it
did not belong to the king of France, there was no profit in capturing
it; Edward, therefore, pursued his march, against the advice of many of
his allies, into France, upon which his relative, the count of Hainault,
formally quitted his banner for that of Philip. Edward nevertheless
advanced towards St. Quentin, at the head of about forty thousand men.
Philip of Valois had mustered an army nearly double in number that of his
enemy, there being forty thousand infantry raised by the money of the
towns, and twenty thousand more Genoese and Italian foot; three divisions
of men-at-arms were each fifteen thousand strong. When the armies were
in presence, Edward sent to request the king of France to appoint a day
for the battle. Philip eagerly fixed a day, but with all his chivalry,
the monarch hesitated. King Robert of Sicily, skilled in the science
of astrology, had written to warn the king of France not to engage in
combat with the English whilst Edward was with them in person. The French
monarch in consequence showed reluctance to engage, and the auxiliaries
of both armies took the pretext to separate. Edward’s German allies
withdrew, and Philip distributed his men-at-arms amongst the garrisons of
the frontier.
[Sidenote: [1339-1340 A.D.]]
It was subsequent to this bootless campaign that Froissart fixes the
time of Edward’s assuming habitually the title, and quartering the arms,
of king of France with his own. This assumption of the crown of France,
which seemed not only drawing the sword, but flinging away the scabbard,
was a promise to the Flemings that he would wage the “great war” and
chiefly through their means and in behalf of their interests. For this
purpose he prepared a great expedition, whilst his Queen Philippa spent
the winter at Ghent among the good citizens, in order to encourage and
attach them to England. But while Edward won the Flemings, his German
allies grew lukewarm. He had learned in the last campaign to mistrust
their sincerity: they now offered to make peace with France; but Philip
rejected their offer, and sent troops to ravage Hainault.
In 1340, Edward had collected a formidable army on board a navy equally
numerous. Philip directed his efforts to intercept this expedition,
and to muster a fleet capable of performing so important a service. He
took into pay great numbers of Genoese officers and seamen; granted
the Normans several boons and privileges to induce them to fit out
ships, and with these they surprised and burned Southampton, whilst
the English visited Eu with equal severity. But on the other hand, the
French captured two of their largest vessels, called the _Christopher_
and _Edouarda_, in a naval engagement that lasted all day, and cost the
lives of a thousand men. In June, Edward sailed from the Thames with his
army for the Schelde, not expecting, indeed, to fight a naval combat, for
there was a number of the ladies of his court on board.[b]
THE BATTLE OF SLUYS OR L’ÉCLUSE
King Edward embarked on the 22nd of June with the élite of the English
knights and archers, and went down the Thames towards Sluys. The
French fleet, 140 strong in large ships, “without counting the smaller
ones,” and carrying more than forty thousand men, awaited them between
Blankenberghe and Sluys. This naval army, under the command of Admiral
Hugh Quiéret, the treasurer Nicholas Béhuchet, and the Ligurian corsair
Barbavara, had for two years wrought much damage to English commerce,
taking ships, massacring crews, and making descents on Plymouth, Dover,
Southampton, Sandwich, and Rye. England breathed out vengeance, but
would not have obtained it if the French fleet had been well commanded.
This fleet, thanks to the Genoese auxiliaries, had a great numerical
superiority, but the three commanders were at variance.
Béhuchet was a rough bourgeois who had served his naval apprenticeship
in the king’s exchequer, and whom Philip had been foolish enough to
associate with the admirals; this man actually tried to teach an old
sea-dog like “Barbevaire.” Hugh Quiéret, the titular admiral, was hardly
more skilful than Béhuchet. They massed the fleet in a narrow creek off
the coast of Flanders, as if the great thing for a navy was to choose a
“sure and easily defensible” position.
King Edward and his men, who came along with a fair wind, looked and
beheld before Sluys so large a number of vessels that the masts seemed
like a wood. The king was very much astonished and asked whose they could
be. “Sire,” they said, “it is the Norman army kept by the king of France
at sea, and which has done you so much damage and burned the good town
of Hantonne (Southampton), and conquered the _Christopher_, your large
ship, and slain those who manned her.” “Oh,” said the king, “I have
wanted to fight them for a long time, and please God and St. George, we
will; for of a truth they have caused me so much vexation that I would
avenge myself.” After so saying, he wisely and skilfully set out his
ships, putting the strongest in front, and giving the best places to his
soldiers and archers. And he manœuvred and wheeled about so as to get the
wind and sun on the poop. The Normans thought he was tacking about so as
to flee, but the leader of the Genoese auxiliaries was not so deceived.
[Illustration: CHÂTEAU OF DIEPPE]
“When ‘Barbevaire’ (Barbavara) saw the English ships approaching, he
said to the admiral and Nicholas Béhuchet: ‘My lords, here is the king
of England and all his navy coming upon us; if you take my advice you
will steer for the open sea, for, if you stay here, while they have sun,
wind, and wave in their favour, they will hem you in so closely that you
will be helpless and unable to manœuvre.’ To this Nicholas Béhuchet,
who understood accounts better than naval warfare, answered, ‘Let him
be hanged who goes away, for here we will stay, and take our chance.’
‘My lord,’ replied Barbevaire, ‘since you will not believe me, I will
not stay to be destroyed and I shall get myself and my ships out of this
hole’” [St. Denis.[h]] And he went off out of the creek with all his
Italian galleys and gave all his care to his own fleet.
Edward immediately attacked and began by boarding the great
_Christopher_, the ship taken from him a year ago by the Normans. The
crew were seized, killed, or thrown into the sea, while the fight became
general all along the haven. “The battle was hard and fierce on both
sides, archers and crossbow-men shot stubbornly at one another, while
soldiers closed and fought hand to hand. That they might fight at better
advantage they had large hooks with iron chains which they threw from one
ship to another and attached them together.”
Right bitterly from six in the morning till three in the afternoon did
they fight, Béhuchet himself behaving as a true knight, but all the
courage in the world could not repair his error. “The French ships were
so entangled in their moorings that they were helpless.” Their numbers
availed not at all; one after the other they were boarded by the English.
Nevertheless the resistance was so fierce that the fate of the day could
yet have been changed by the aid of Barbavara, who was manœuvring on the
enemy’s flanks, but a considerable reinforcement of Flemings arriving
from Bruges and neighbouring districts by the port of Sluys, decided the
fate of the French fleet.
“In short, King Edward and his men gained all along the line; the Normans
and all the other French were discomfited, dead, or drowned, none
escaping, for if they tried to take refuge on land, the Flemings awaited
them on the sands.”
The English gave almost no quarter. Hugh Quiéret was, they say,
slaughtered in cold blood after he had given himself up. Béhuchet was
hanged from the mast of his own ship, “to spite the king of France.”
Barbavara managed to make good his retreat and regained the open with
his forty Genoese galleys, but the French were exterminated. It has been
made out that their loss amounted to thirty thousand men. The English
bought their victory dearly, but it was complete. The French navy was
annihilated. That 24th of June, 1340, marks the naval début of the Valois
dynasty.[d]
This first naval battle between the two nations very much raised the
confidence of the English and the alacrity of the Flemings. Edward had
not only a larger army of his own than in the previous campaign, together
with the troops of the German allies, but, in addition, forty thousand
Flemings under Artevelde, besides those of West Flanders, who proceeded
in the direction of St. Omer. This immense host, instead of marching to
meet and overwhelm the French king, sat down before Tournay.
Edward sent from thence a challenge to Philip of Valois, as he styled
him, to decide their quarrel by single combat, or by an encounter of
a hundred knights on either side. Philip replied, on the last day of
July, that such a title could not be addressed to him; that the writer
was his liege, and had no right to enter his dominions. He promised to
cast the intruder out of the kingdom without loss of time; and that, as
to the Flemings, he was confident they would rally to their own lord.
Philip marched to the neighbourhood of Tournay with an army as formidable
as that which he brought in the preceding year; but neither party were
prepared to engage in a general action. The French hesitated to attack,
and eleven weeks’ siege made no impression upon Tournay. Robert of
Artois, who commanded the armed citizens of West Flanders, led them
against St. Omer, not with the hope of capturing that important town, but
for purposes of pillage and devastation. The Flemings were thus engaged
in plundering one of the suburbs, when the French within, issuing by
another gate, came round and surprised them in the rear, routing and
slaying them as they fled, to the number of four thousand. This disaster
made such an impression on the army of West Flanders, that a panic seized
it on the following morning, and all fled and dispersed to their homes.
If the campaign of the preceding year had taught Edward how little was
to be expected from the Walloon or the German, he learned this year that
even the redoubtable Flemings would not enable him either to conquer
France or to reduce Philip to just and reasonable terms. He therefore
consented that Joan de Valois, sister of Philip and countess of Hainault,
should seek to bring about an accommodation. Her efforts led to a six
months’ truce, consented to in order that plenipotentiaries from both
monarchs might treat for the conclusion of a more definite peace.[b]
Thus ended the campaign of 1340, “a year of misery and calamity,” says
the continuator of Nangis; “although for two or three years past,
the common people had been oppressed with very hard exactions, our
misfortunes were much greater this time.”[c]
THE WAR IN BRITTANY
[Sidenote: [1340-1342 A.D.]]
The belligerents had scarcely suspended hostilities on the northern
frontier of France, when a quarrel arose in another quarter, giving equal
facilities for English interference, and offering to Edward more sincere,
zealous, and martial allies than the Flemings had proved, whether knights
or artisans.[b] It also brought the English king much hope.
In 1341 hostilities were revived in Brittany where the two kings each
sustained a different claimant for the ducal throne. The duke John
III had just died, leaving no children. Should the duchy fall to the
daughter of his eldest brother--whose death had preceded his own--Joan
de Penthièvre, who had married Charles of Blois, or to his own younger
brother, John de Montfort? The two pretendants set forth the Mosaic law,
the edicts of the Roman empire, the Salic law, and tradition; the lawyers
piled up innumerable authorities: but politics decided the question.
Charles of Blois was nephew to Philip VI; with him Brittany would be in
closer dependence upon the crown. A parliamentary act pronounced at the
château of Conflans decided the matter in his favour. John de Montfort
hastened to England, and agreed to recognise Edward III as king of
France. In view of his promise as vassal loyally to aid and defend the
English king, he was to possess Brittany in fief.
Thus began one of those wars--marked by “engagements, sallies, gallant
rescues, surprising feats of arms, and brave adventures”--so delightfully
depicted by Froissart[e] so grindingly oppressive to the people.
Charles of Blois, supported by a numerous French army, among whom was
the son of the king, besieged his adversary in the city of Nantes.
Thirty Breton knights had been taken in a neighbouring castle. Charles,
despite the piety which gained for him the name of “saint,” and Duke
John, who was later to glory in the title “the good,” had these thirty
knights decapitated and their heads thrown into the market-place by the
ballistas. The terrified citizens capitulated; John de Montfort was
imprisoned at Paris in the tower of the Louvre.[g]
The countess Joan de Montfort was at Rennes when she heard that her
husband had been taken. With a heart full of grief she yet bravely
consoled her friends and supporters; and showed them her little son,
named also John like his father, saying, “Ah, my friends, be not bowed
down for my lord whom we have lost; he is but one man. Behold my son who
shall be, if God so wills it, his avenger and your benefactor. I will
give you of my wealth and will provide for you a captain who shall bring
you consolation.”[e]
She then journeyed from Rennes to all the fortresses and towns, taking
her son with her; she encouraged her men, reinforced her garrisons with
troops and supplies; and came at length to Hennebon, where she wintered.
She had chosen this place, situated as it was on the Blavet, not far from
the sea, to have facile communication with England. With the advent of
spring, officers and troops swarmed to Nantes to join Charles of Blois;
and the siege of Rennes was begun. The city was taken after a valiant
defence; and the French marched on Hennebon, which they bombarded with
showers of stones and enormous rocks.[16][g]
_Joan de Montfort defends Hennebon_
[Sidenote: [1342 A.D.]]
The countess, who had clothed herself in armour, was mounted on a
war-horse, and galloped up and down the streets of the town, entreating
and encouraging the inhabitants to defend themselves honourably. She
ordered the ladies and other women to unpave the streets,[17] carry the
stones to the ramparts, and throw them on their enemies. She had pots
of quicklime brought to her for the same purpose. That same day, the
countess performed a very gallant deed; she ascended a high tower to
see how her people behaved; and, having observed that all the lords and
others of the army had quitted their tents, and were come to the assault,
she immediately descended, mounted her horse, armed as she was, collected
three hundred horsemen, sallied out at their head by another gate that
was not attacked, and, galloping up to the tents of her enemies, cut
them down, and set them on fire, without any loss, for there were only
servants and boys, who fled upon her approach. As soon as the French
saw their camp on fire, and heard the cries, they immediately hastened
thither, bawling out, “Treason! Treason!” so that none remained at the
assault. The countess, seeing this, got her men together, and, finding
that she could not re-enter Hennebon without great risk, took another
road, leading to the castle of Brest, which is situated near. The lord
Louis of Spain, who was marshal of the army, had gone to his tents, which
were on fire; and, seeing the countess and her company galloping off as
fast as they could, he immediately pursued them with a large body of
men-at-arms. He gained so fast upon them, that he came up with them, and
wounded or slew all that were not well mounted; but the countess, and
part of her company, made such speed that they arrived at the castle of
Brest, where they were received with great joy.
On the morrow, the lords of France, who had lost their tents and
provisions, took counsel, if they should not make huts of the branches
and leaves of trees near to the town, and were thunder-struck when they
heard that the countess had herself planned and executed this enterprise;
whilst those of the town, not knowing what was become of her, were very
uneasy; for they were full five days without gaining any intelligence of
her. The countess, in the meanwhile, was so active that she assembled
from five to six hundred men, well armed and mounted, and with them
set out about midnight from Brest, and came straight to Hennebon about
sunrise, riding along one of the sides of the enemy’s host, until she
came to the gates of the castle, which were opened to her; she entered
with great triumph and sounds of trumpets and other warlike instruments,
to the astonishment of the French, who began arming themselves, to make
another assault upon the town, while those within mounted the walls to
defend it. This attack was very severe, and lasted till past noon. The
French lost more than their opponents; and then the lords of France put
a stop to it, for their men were killed and wounded to no purpose. They
next retreated, and held a council whether the lord Charles should not go
to besiege the castle of Auray, which King Arthur had built and enclosed.
It was determined he should march thither, accompanied by the duke de
Bourbon, the earl of Blois, Sir Robert Bertrand, marshal of France; and
that Sir Hervé de Léon was to remain before Hennebon with a part of the
Genoese under his command, and the lord Louis of Spain, the viscount de
Rohan, with the rest of the Genoese and Spaniards. They sent for twelve
large machines which they had left at Rennes, to cast stones and annoy
the castle of Hennebon; for they perceived that they did not gain any
ground by their assaults. The French divided their army into two parts;
one remained before Hennebon, and the other went to besiege the castle of
Auray. The lord Charles of Blois went to this last place, and quartered
all his division in the neighbourhood: and of him we will now speak, and
leave the others. The lord Charles ordered an attack and skirmish to be
made upon the castle, which was well garrisoned; there were in it full
two hundred men-at-arms, under the command of Sir Henry de Spinefort and
Oliver his brother.
[Illustration: ANCIENT TOWER AT ROUEN]
The town of Vannes, which held for the countess de Montfort, was four
leagues distant from this castle; the captain whereof was Sir Geoffry de
Malestroit. On the other side was situated the good town of Guingamp,
of which the captain of Dinant was governor, who was at that time with
the countess in the town of Hennebon; but he had left in his hôtel at
Dinant his wife and daughters, and had appointed his son Sir Reginald
as governor during his absence. Between these two places there was a
castle which belonged to the lord Charles, who had well filled it with
men-at-arms and Burgundian soldiers. Girard de Maulin was master of it;
and with him was another gallant knight, called Sir Peter Portebœuf, who
harassed all the country round about, and pressed these two towns so
closely that no provisions or merchandise could enter them without great
risk of being taken; for these Burgundians made constant excursions, one
day towards Vannes, and another day to Guingamp. They continued their
excursions so regularly, that Sir Reginald de Dinant took prisoner, by
means of an ambuscade, this Sir Girard de Maulin and thirty-five of his
men, and at the same time rescued fifteen merchants and all their goods,
which the Burgundians had taken, and were driving them to their garrison,
called La Roche Perion; but Sir Reginald conquered them and carried them
prisoners to Dinant, for which he was much praised.
We will now return to the countess de Montfort, who was besieged by Sir
Louis of Spain in Hennebon. He had made such progress by battering and
destroying the walls with his machines, that the courage of those within
began to falter. At that moment the bishop of Léon held a conference with
his nephew Sir Hervé de Léon, by whose means, it has been said, the earl
of Montfort was made prisoner. They conversed on different things, in
mutual confidence, and at last agreed that the bishop should endeavour
to gain over those within the town, so that it might be given up to the
lord Charles; and Sir Hervé, on his side, was to obtain their pardon
from the lord Charles, and an assurance that they should keep their
goods, etc., unhurt. They then separated, and the bishop re-entered the
town. The countess had strong suspicions of what was going forward, and
begged of the lords of Brittany, for the love of God, that they would
not doubt that she should receive succours before three days were over.
But the bishop spoke so eloquently, and made use of such good arguments,
that these lords were in much suspense all that night. On the morrow he
continued the subject, and succeeded so far as to gain them over, or very
nearly so, to his opinion; insomuch that Sir Hervé de Léon had advanced
close to the town to take possession of it, with their free consent, when
the countess, looking out from a window of the castle towards the sea,
cried out, most joyfully, “I see the succours I have so long expected
and wished for coming.” She repeated this expression twice; and the
townspeople ran to the ramparts, and to the windows of the castle, and
saw a numerous fleet of great and small vessels, well trimmed, making all
the sail they could towards Hennebon. They rightly imagined it must be
the fleet from England, so long detained at sea by tempests and contrary
winds.[e] The besiegers were forced to retire. About this time the
traitor Robert of Artois fell in an engagement near Vannes.
[Sidenote: [1342-1345 A.D.]]
Little by little, the two kings found themselves drawn personally into
the contest. In 1342 Edward went himself to Brittany and appeared at the
siege of Vannes, of Rennes, and of Nantes. The duke of Normandy drew
up on his side an army comprising an infinity of barons and over forty
thousand soldiers. The two forces met near Malestroit. The English, in
numbers less than a fourth of their enemy, were careful to obtain a
strong position. It was in the depth of winter; provision was lacking;
cold rains flooded the two camps and multiplied disease. The papal
legates proposed a truce, which was accepted on January 19th, 1343, to
continue till the feast of St. Michael, 1346.[g]
It was also agreed that each monarch was to take the pope for arbiter,
and plead his cause at Rome. Edward empowered certain commissioners to
fulfil this office, and negotiate concerning “the right which he had, or
might have, to the kingdom and crown of France.” That he was prepared
to insist upon this right, is proved by his order to the authorities in
Guienne to have all appeals from that province to the king of France
addressed to him, in that capacity, at his court in London.
PHILIP’S FINANCIAL DIFFICULTIES
These repeated truces were not the result of any diminution of inveteracy
or of pretensions on either side, but of the impossibility to continue
the payment and employ of such large armies. Of Philip’s financial or
political acts we have not ample records; but sufficient exist to show
the immense difficulty he found in supporting the military expenses of
such campaigns. If to find proper soldiers was no easy task, to raise
wherewith to pay them was a difficulty still greater. In 1342, Philip VI
issued an ordinance, establishing store-houses and gabelles of salt, a
government monopoly, in fact, of this necessary of life. Taxes on trade,
wholesale or retail, had for some time existed. The Italian merchants
paid so much in the pound on imports and exports. The city of Paris,
in order to pay for the men-at-arms which were furnished to the royal
army, had been allowed to levy a duty on all sales and purchases in the
markets. The fairs of Champagne had always paid a similar tax. The
king now levied this generally at the rate of five deniers the livre;
but the chief resource was alternately debasing the coin, and raising
its standard, until there was no ascertaining or being certain of its
value for a month together. This incertitude put a stop to trade, and
a scarcity coinciding with it, produced such universal distress, that
partial insurrection and a general feeling of discontent were the
consequence.
RENEWAL OF THE WAR WITH ENGLAND (1344 A.D.)
In the meantime, the pope made no progress in reconciling the two
monarchs, or passing judgment upon their differences; and a cruel act of
Philip’s so aroused Edward’s resentment, that although the term of the
truce had not expired, he gave orders for recommencing war. Olivier de
Clisson, a Breton noble, had been the prisoner of the English. Edward,
it seems, released him instead of the bishop of Léon, also his captive.
This sufficed to inspire Philip with doubts of his fidelity, and of a
sudden, De Clisson, De Laval, and some twelve or thirteen Breton nobles,
were seized, conveyed to Paris, and, without form of trial, or even
public accusation, decapitated. Several barons of Normandy were soon
after seized, and as summarily slain, one of them, of the family of
Harcourt, alone escaping. These acts were not more cruel and unjust than
the tortures, trials, and condemnations of Philip the Fair; but they were
worse precedents, evincing a contempt for even the forms of justice, and
making barefaced murder and assassination one of the regular proceedings
of government.
Many of the decapitated nobles were at least friends of Edward. Without
being guilty of treason, they might well have considered the rights of
De Montfort in Brittany as superior to those of Charles of Blois. Edward
denounced the assassinations committed by King Philip in issuing an order
to his lieutenants to recommence the war. The French were by no means
gladdened at this renewal of hostilities. They feared not so much the
enemy as the tax-gatherer, and began to think that their intolerable
burdens would be made permanent. In February, 1345, therefore, Philip
found it necessary to issue a proclamation, stating that it was not his
intention to unite the gabelle of salt or the tax of four deniers the
livre to his domain: in other words, he promised that they were not to be
permanent.
Edward had hitherto neglected Guienne, against which his enemies directed
their principal efforts. The chief men of Bordeaux and Bayonne and
the noblesse, true to the English crown, came to the festivity which
Edward gave on the occasion of his instituting the order of the Garter,
and their representations made so great an impression on him, that he
despatched Lord Derby soon after, with three hundred knights, six hundred
men-at-arms, and a greater number of infantry, to Bayonne. The French,
not in force to defend the country south of the Dordogne, endeavoured to
prevent Lord Derby from passing that river at Bergerac, and marching to
the recovery of Périgord and the districts north of Bordeaux. The English
accomplished this, the Genoese alone withstanding their arrows, and the
troops which the French had raised in the county flying before them.
Derby marched into Périgord, and so well provided was he with what
Froissart calls artillery, his engines throwing immense stones, that
all the fortresses in upper Gascony submitted to him. The strongest of
these was Auberoche, which fortress, as soon as Derby retired for the
winter to Bordeaux, the nobles of the county in the French interest came
to besiege. There were ten or twelve hundred of them, and Auberoche was
hard pressed. Lord Derby and Sir Walter Manny instantly left Bordeaux,
with three hundred lances and six hundred archers, and, with this small
force, surprised and fell upon the army besieging Auberoche at the time
of supper. The French were routed, and all the chief nobles of the
district taken: every English soldier had two or three. The consequence
of this victory was not only the fall of Réole and the places held by
Philip north of the Garonne, but the capture of the important town of
Angoulême by Lord Derby. The general submission to the English commander
was not only due to his prowess, but to his _gentillesse_, in preventing
his soldiers from pillaging and burning the towns and massacring the
prisoners, as was then generally the custom in war.
[Sidenote: [1345-1346 A.D.]]
Whilst Lord Derby was reconquering Angoulême, Edward was endeavouring,
by means of Artevelde, to turn the Flemish alliance to profit.
Notwithstanding the English king’s assumption of the arms and title of
king of France, the Flemings seemed not disposed to go much further than
neutrality. Artevelde himself ruling by the democracy, with the rich
citizens opposed to him, felt himself neither secure at home nor able
to direct the forces of the Flemings abroad. In order to strengthen his
position, he proposed making the son of Edward (the Black Prince) count
of Flanders. The English king came with his fleet to Sluys, and had an
interview there with the town magistrates of the Flemings; they could
not entertain his proposal without first consulting their townsmen. The
people of Bruges and Ypres were not averse to having the prince of Wales
for their count; but with Ghent it was otherwise: there the enemies of
Artevelde accused him of wishing to sell his country to the foreigner.
They asked what had been done with all the money proceeding from the
revenues that had been sequestered. The “great treasure,” they said,
had been despatched to England. Artevelde hastened to Ghent to face his
enemies, and refute them; but he had no sooner entered the streets than
he perceived the efforts of his enemies to have prevailed, and the minds
of his fellow-townsmen turned against him. He shut himself up in his
hôtel; harangued and tried to move the crowd from one of the windows.
Their reply was, “Give us an account of the great treasure of Flanders.”
Artevelde promised that he would do this fully on the morrow. “No,”
replied the crowd; “we must have an account of it immediately, lest
you escape to England, whither you have already sent your treasure.”
Artevelde then wept, and reproached them with “having made him what he
was, and now wanting to kill him. Recollect that your trade was lost when
I took the government, and that I recovered all for you--procured you
abundance, and work, and peace; and for all the great good I did you, God
knows I obtained little profit.” Such reproaches were not calculated to
move the mob, which clamoured but the more. Artevelde tried to escape to
a neighbouring church; but his enemies seized him in the street, and slew
him without mercy. Edward’s first movement was to take vengeance on the
Flemings for the death of their leader; but the towns of West Flanders
convinced him that they regretted the act of the people of Ghent as much
as he did.
EDWARD RETURNS TO FRANCE (1346 A.D.)
The reverses which the French monarch suffered in Guienne had been thus
compensated by Edward’s loss of his Flemish ally, and, at the same time,
by the death of John de Montfort. That prince, after his escape from the
Louvre, had led succours from England to Brittany, but was able to do
little towards changing the aspect of affairs or the relative position
of parties, when he died at Hennebon. All the efforts of Philip were
directed towards repelling Lord Derby. The French king assembled his
estates in the north and in the south, but more to appease discontent
than to command succour or adhesion: he merely proposed continuing his
present levies of money, on the understanding that they were to cease at
the peace. An army was collected and sent, under the duke of Normandy,
to the south. He recovered Angoulême, and laid siege to Aiguillon, an
important fortress not far from Agen; but Sir Walter Manny and Lord
Pembroke were within the walls, and infused such spirit into the garrison
that during four months it defied the duke of Normandy and his army, said
to number one hundred thousand men.
The obstinacy of the siege as well as the defence induced the English
king to march to the succour of his general, for Lord Derby at Bordeaux
had no force sufficient to encounter the duke of Normandy. An expedition
was fitted out, at Southampton, consisting of four thousand men-at-arms
and ten thousand archers, besides the Irish and Welsh.[b]
The English fleet set sail for the mouth of the Gironde, where a tempest
hurled it back into the Channel. A new traitor, Godfrey d’Harcourt,
advised landing in Normandy, and promised the aid of his vassals and
the use of his entire province. The king landed (July 22nd, 1346), with
thirty-two thousand men, at La Hogue St. Waast, in the Cotentin. He
easily possessed himself of Barfleur, Cherbourg, Valognes, and St. Lô.
The 26th, he was at the walls of Caen--a city larger than any in England
excepting London.
The inhabitants sallied forth bravely to the encounter. “But as soon as
they beheld the approach of the English,” says Froissart,[e] “in three
divisions, close and compact, a multitude of banners flying, and saw the
archers, to whom they had not been accustomed, they were so frightened
that they betook themselves to flight, and not all the world could have
stopped them.”
The English entered the city with the fugitives, slaying as they went,
showing mercy to none. But the inhabitants recovered their courage and
defended themselves in their homes; more than five hundred English
were dead or wounded when Edward put an end to the fighting, promising
the inhabitants to spare their lives.[18] Louviers, which was already
great, wealthy, and commercial, was next taken. An attempt on Rouen
had miscarried. He returned along the left bank of the Seine, burning
Pont-de-l’Arche, Vernon, Poissy, and St. Germain. His couriers came
within sight of Paris, and burned Bourg-la-Reine and St. Cloud.
Hereupon Philip assembled a large force and marched on the English.
Edward rebuilt the bridge at Poissy and by it passed over the Seine and
retreated to his fief at Ponthieu, to establish himself beyond the Somme.
Philip fortified and sentinelled all the fords of that river. At that of
Blanquetaque he posted one thousand men-at-arms and five thousand Genoese
archers. Edward forced a passage; but realising that he could retreat
no further he halted, and on the 27th of August disposed his army for
battle on the slope of a hill near Crécy, his men being in good order and
condition.[g] His knights and nobles were to fight on foot, there being
but four thousand of them.
The total English army must have numbered from twenty-five to thirty
thousand combatants. Froissart evidently underestimates its size as he
increases the total of the French force, doubtless in order to make the
issue of the battle all the more marvellous.
But all exaggeration aside, the disproportion was enormous. Philip
marched at the head of at least seventy thousand men among whom were
about ten thousand men-at-arms, and a large body of Genoese archers whose
numbers have been placed at from six to fifteen thousand.[d] But the
French were a disorderly and undisciplined host while the English were
professional soldiers and old campaigners, obedient to their chiefs and
their sovereign.[b]
Philip had left Abbeville in the morning to go in quest of the enemy,
then five miles distant. Heavy rains impeded the march. Four scouts sent
to reconnoitre returned with the report that they had found the English
waiting in the position they had chosen; and they counselled the king to
allow his soldiers a night’s repose.
Philip gave the order to halt. But the great lords of France, instigated
by vanity, moved one ahead of another, to get nearer the enemy. Neither
the king nor his marshals could exercise any control over the troops,
on account of the multitude of nobles each striving to assert his own
authority. These rode about, without orders and without discretion, until
they stumbled suddenly upon the camp of the enemy.[g]
FROISSART’S DESCRIPTION OF CRÉCY (1346 A.D.)
[Illustration: A FRENCH KNIGHT OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY]
The English, who were drawn up in three divisions, and seated on the
ground, on seeing their enemies advance, rose undauntedly up, and fell
into their ranks. That of the prince[19] was the first to do so, whose
archers were formed in the manner of a portcullis, or harrow, and the
men-at-arms in the rear. The earls of Northampton and Arundel, who
commanded the second division, had posted themselves in good order on his
wing, to assist and succour the prince, if necessary.
You must know that these kings, earls, barons, and lords of France
did not advance in any regular order, but one after the other, or any
way most pleasing to themselves. As soon as the king of France came
in sight of the English, his blood began to boil, and he cried out to
his marshals, “Order the Genoese forward, and begin the battle, in the
name of God and St. Denis.” There were about fifteen thousand Genoese
crossbow-men; but they were quite fatigued, having marched on foot that
day six leagues, completely armed, and with their crossbows. They told
the constable, they were not in a fit condition to do any great things
that day in battle. The earl of Alençon, hearing this, said, “This is
what one gets by employing such scoundrels, who fall off when there is
any need for them.” During this time a heavy rain fell, accompanied by
thunder and a very terrible eclipse of the sun; and before this rain
a great flight of crows hovered in the air over all those battalions,
making a loud noise. Shortly afterwards it cleared up, and the sun shone
very bright; but the Frenchmen had it in their faces, and the English
in their backs. When the Genoese were somewhat in order, and approached
the English, they set up a loud shout, in order to frighten them; but
they remained quite still, and did not seem to attend to it. They then
set up a second shout, and advanced a little forward; but the English
never moved. They hooted a third time, advancing with their crossbows
presented, and began to shoot. The English archers then advanced one
step forward, and shot their arrows with such force and quickness, that
it seemed as if it snowed. When the Genoese felt these arrows, which
pierced their arms, heads, and through their armour, some of them cut
the strings of their crossbows, others flung them on the ground, and all
turned about and retreated quite discomfited. The French had a large body
of men-at-arms on horseback, richly dressed, to support the Genoese. The
king of France, seeing them thus fall back, cried out, “Kill me those
scoundrels; for they stop up our road without any reason.” You would then
have seen the above-mentioned men-at-arms lay about them, killing all
they could of these runaways.
The English continued shooting as vigorously and quickly as before; some
of their arrows fell among the horsemen, who were sumptuously equipped,
and, killing and wounding many, made them caper and fall among the
Genoese, so that they were in such confusion they could never rally
again. In the English army there were some Cornish and Welshmen on foot,
who had armed themselves with large knives; these, advancing through
the ranks of the men-at-arms and archers, who made way for them, came
upon the French when they were in this danger, and, falling upon earls,
barons, knights, and squires, slew many, at which the king of England was
afterwards much exasperated. The valiant king of Bohemia was slain there.
He was called John of Luxemburg; for he was the son of the gallant king
and emperor, Henry of Luxemburg; having heard the order of the battle,
he inquired where his son the lord Charles was; his attendants answered
that they did not know, but believed he was fighting. The king said to
them: “Gentlemen, you are all my people, my friends, and brethren-at-arms
this day; therefore, as I am blind,[20] I request of you to lead me so
far into the engagement that I may strike one stroke with my sword.”
The knights replied, they would directly lead him forward; and in order
that they might not lose him in the crowd, they fastened all the reins
of their horses together, and put the king at their head, that he might
gratify his wish, and advanced towards the enemy. The lord Charles of
Bohemia, who already signed his name as king of Germany, and bore the
arms, had come in good order to the engagement; but when he perceived
that it was likely to turn out against the French, he departed, and I
do not well know what road he took. The king, his father, had ridden
in among the enemy, and made good use of his sword; for he and his
companions had fought most gallantly. They had advanced so far that they
were all slain; and on the morrow they were found on the ground, with
their horses all tied together.
The earl of Alençon advanced in regular order upon the English, to fight
with them; as did the earl of Flanders, in another part. These two lords,
with their detachments, coasting, as it were, the archers, came to the
prince’s battalion, where they fought valiantly for a length of time. The
king of France was eager to march to the place where he saw their banners
displayed, but there was a hedge of archers before him. He had that day
made a present of a handsome black horse to Sir John of Hainault, who had
mounted on it a knight of his, called Sir John de Fusselles, that bore
his banner; which horse ran off with him, and forced his way through the
English army, and, when about to return, stumbled and fell into a ditch
and severely wounded him; he would have been dead, if his page had not
followed him round the battalions, and found him unable to rise; he had
not, however, any other hindrance than from his horse; for the English
did not quit the ranks that day to make prisoners. The page alighted, and
raised him up; but he did not return the way he came, as he would have
found it difficult from the crowd. This battle, which was fought on the
Saturday between La Broyes and Crécy, was very murderous and cruel; and
many gallant deeds of arms were performed that were never known. Towards
evening, many knights and squires of the French had lost their masters;
they wandered up and down the plain, attacking the English in small
parties; they were soon destroyed; for the English had determined that
day to give no quarter, or hear of ransom from anyone.
Early in the day, some French, Germans, and Savoyards had broken
through the archers of the prince’s battalion, and had engaged with the
men-at-arms; upon which the second battalion came to his aid, and it was
time, for otherwise he would have been hard pressed. The first division,
seeing the danger they were in, sent a knight in great haste to the king
of England, who was posted upon an eminence, near a windmill. On the
knight’s arrival, he said, “Sir, the earl of Warwick, the lord Stafford,
the lord Reginald Cobham, and the others who are about your son, are
vigorously attacked by the French; and they entreat that you would come
to their assistance with your battalion, for, if their numbers should
increase, they fear he will have too much to do.” The king replied,
“Is my son dead, unhorsed, or so badly wounded that he cannot support
himself?” “Nothing of the sort, thank God,” rejoined the knight; “but
he is in so hot an engagement that he has great need of your help.” The
king answered, “Now, Sir Thomas, return back to those that sent you, and
tell them from me, not to send again for me this day, or expect that I
shall come, let what will happen, as long as my son has life; and say,
that I command them to let the boy win his spurs; for I am determined, if
it please God, that all the glory and honour of this day shall be given
to him, and to those into whose care I have intrusted him.” The knight
returned to his lords, and related the king’s answer, which mightily
encouraged them, and made them repent they had ever sent such a message.
It is a certain fact that Sir Godfrey d’Harcourt, who was in the prince’s
battalion, having been told by some of the English that they had seen the
banner of his brother engaged in the battle against him, was exceedingly
anxious to save him; but he was too late, for he was left dead on the
field, and so was the earl of Aumarle his nephew. On the other hand,
the earls of Alençon and of Flanders were fighting lustily under their
banners, and with their own people; but they could not resist the force
of the English, and were there slain, as well as many other knights
and squires that were attending on or accompanying them. The earl of
Blois, nephew to the king of France, and the duke of Lorraine his
brother-in-law, with their troops, made a gallant defence; but they were
surrounded by a troop of English and Welsh, and slain in spite of their
prowess. The earl of Saint-Pol and the earl of Auxerre were also killed,
as well as many others. Late after vespers, the king of France had not
more about him than sixty men, every one included. Sir John of Hainault,
who was of the number, had once remounted the king; for his horse had
been killed under him by an arrow; he said to the king, “Sir, retreat
whilst you have an opportunity, and do not expose yourself so simply; if
you have lost this battle, another time you will be the conqueror.” After
he had said this, he took the bridle of the king’s horse, and led him off
by force; for he had before entreated of him to retire. The king rode
on until he came to the castle of La Broyes, where he found the gates
shut, for it was very dark. The king ordered the governor of it to be
summoned; he came upon the battlements, and asked who it was that called
at such an hour? The king answered, “Open, open, governor; it is the
fortune of France.” The governor, hearing the king’s voice, immediately
descended, opened the gate, and let down the bridge. The king and his
company entered the castle; but he had with him only five barons, Sir
John of Hainault, the lord Charles of Montmorency, the lord of Beaujeu,
the lord of Aubigny, and the lord of Montfort. The king would not bury
himself in such a place as that, but, having taken some refreshments,
set out again with his attendants about midnight, and rode on, under the
direction of guides who were well acquainted with the country, until,
about daybreak, he came to Amiens, where he halted. This Saturday the
English never quitted their ranks in pursuit of anyone, but remained on
the field, guarding their position, and defending themselves against all
who attacked them.
[Illustration: RUINS OF A FRENCH TOWER OF THE THIRTEENTH OR FOURTEENTH
CENTURY]
The battle was ended at the hour of vespers. When, on this Saturday
night, the English heard no more hooting or shouting, nor crying out to
particular lords or their banners, they looked upon the field as their
own, and their enemies as beaten. They made great fires, and lighted
torches because of the obscurity of the night. King Edward then came down
from his post, who all that day had not put on his helmet, and, with his
whole battalion, advanced to the prince of Wales, whom he embraced in his
arms and kissed, and said, “Sweet son, God give you good perseverance:
you are my son, for most loyally have you acquitted yourself this day:
you are worthy to be a sovereign.” The prince bowed down very low, and
humbled himself, giving all honour to the king his father. The English,
during the night, made frequent thanksgivings to the Lord, for the happy
issue of the day, and without rioting; for the king had forbidden all
riot or noise. On the Sunday morning, there was so great a fog that
one could scarcely see the distance of half an acre. The king ordered
a detachment from the army, under the command of the two marshals,
consisting of about five hundred lances and two thousand archers, to
make an excursion, and see if there were any bodies of French collected
together. The quota of troops, from Rouen and Beauvais, had, this Sunday
morning, left Abbeville and St. Ricquier in Ponthieu, to join the French
army, and were ignorant of the defeat of the preceding evening: they met
this detachment, and, thinking they must be French, hastened to join them.
As soon as the English found who they were, they fell upon them; and
there was a sharp engagement; but the French soon turned their backs,
and fled in great disorder. There were slain in this flight in the open
fields, under hedges and bushes, upwards of seven thousand; and had it
been clear weather, not one soul would have escaped.
A little time afterwards, this same party fell in with the archbishop
of Rouen and the great prior of France, who were also ignorant of the
discomfiture of the French; for they had been informed that the king was
not to fight before Sunday. Here began a fresh battle, for those two
lords were well attended by good men-at-arms; however, they could not
withstand the English, but were almost all slain, with the two chiefs
who commanded them, very few escaping. In the course of the morning, the
English found many Frenchmen who had lost their road on the Saturday, and
had lain in the open fields, not knowing what was become of the king, or
their own leaders. The English put to the sword all they met[21]: and
it has been assured to me for fact, that of foot-soldiers sent from the
cities, towns, and municipalities, there were slain, this Sunday morning,
four times as many as in the battle of the Saturday.[e]
MICHELET ON THE RESULTS OF CRÉCY
The battle of Crécy was not merely a battle; the event involved a great
social revolution. The whole chivalry of the most chivalrous nation was
exterminated by a small band of foot-soldiers. A new system of tactics
came forth from a new state of society; it was not a work of genius or
reflection. Edward III employed foot-soldiers for want of horse. The
issue revealed a fact of which no one dreamed till then; namely, the
military inefficiency of that feudal world which had thought itself
the only military world. The private wars of the barons, and of canton
against canton, in the primitive isolation of the Middle Ages, had not
disclosed this truth; for then gentlemen were defeated only by gentlemen.
Two centuries of defeats, during the Crusades, had not damaged their
reputation. All Christendom was interested in disguising the successes
of the misbelievers. Besides, these wars were waged so far away, that
there was always some means of excusing every disaster: the heroism of a
Godefroy and a Richard redeemed all the rest. In the thirteenth century,
when the feudal banners were habituated to follow the king’s, when out
of so many seigniorial courts was formed a single one, brilliant beyond
all the fictions of the romances, the nobles, diminished in power,
increased in pride; humbled in their own person, they felt themselves
exalted in their king. They valued themselves more or less in proportion
as they shared in the galas of royalty.
In excuse for the disaster of Courtrai, the nobles pleaded their own
hare-brained heroism, and the Flemish ditch. Two easy massacres at
Mons-en-Pévêlle and Cassel retrieved their reputation. For several years
they railed at the king, who forbade them to vanquish. An opportunity
was afforded them at Crécy; the whole chivalry of the kingdom was
there assembled; every banner flaunted in the wind, with all those
haughty blazons, lions, eagles, castles, besants of the Crusades, and
all the arrogant symbolism of heraldry. Opposed to this gallant array,
excepting four thousand men-at-arms, all the rest were the barefooted
English commons, the rude mountaineers of Wales, and the swineherds of
Ireland, blind and savage races, that knew neither French, nor English,
nor chivalry. They aimed none the worse for this at noble banners;
they killed but so much the more: there was no common tongue in which
to parley. The Welshman or Irishman did not understand the noble baron
prostrate beneath him, who offered to make him rich, and he made answer
only with the knife.
From that day forth there was many an unbeliever in the religion of
nobility. Armorial symbolism lost all its effect. Man began to doubt that
those lions could bite, or those silken dragons vomit forth fire and
flames. The cow of Switzerland and of Wales seemed good armorial bearings
too.
THE SIEGE OF CALAIS
This huge disaster only led the way to a greater one. Edward laid siege
to Calais, and set himself down before it in fixed quarters for life or
death. After the sacrifices he had made for this expedition he could
not show his face to the commons until he should have accomplished his
enterprise. Round the town he built a second town with streets, and
wooden houses solidly and snugly constructed, to serve for residence
through summer and winter.
The Englishman, established in good quarters, and with abundant supplies,
let those within and without the town do what they had a mind. He did
not even grant them battle, but preferred starving them out. Five
hundred persons, men, women, and children, expelled from the town by
the governor, died of cold and hunger between the town and the camp.
Such, at least, is the statement of the English historian Knighton.[i]
Froissart[e] says, on the contrary, that he not only let them pass
through his army, but also gave them an abundant repast.
Edward had taken root before Calais, nor was the pope’s mediation capable
of forcing him from thence. News was brought him that the Scotch were
about to invade England. He never stirred. His perseverance was rewarded,
for he soon learned that his troops, encouraged by his queen, had taken
the king of Scotland prisoner. The next year Charles of Blois was
likewise taken in besieging La Roche de Rien. Edward had but to fold his
arms and leave fortune to work for him.
It was matter of most urgent necessity for the king of France to succour
Calais; but so great was his penury, so inert and embarrassed was
that feudal monarchy, that it was not until the siege had lasted ten
months that he was able to put himself in motion, when the English
were fortified and intrenched behind palisades and deep ditches. Having
scraped together some money by a debasement of the coinage, the gabelle,
the ecclesiastical tithes, and the confiscation of the property of the
Lombards, he at last began his march with a huge army like that which had
been beaten at Crécy. He had no way of reaching Calais except through
marshes or over sand-hills. To take the former course would have been
certain destruction, for all the passes were intersected and guarded. The
men of Tournay, however, gallantly carried a castle by assault, without
machines and by strength of hand alone.
[Sidenote: [1346-1347 A.D.]]
The downs on the coast of Boulogne were under the fire of the English
fleet. Those about Gravelines were kept by the Flemings whom the king
could not suborn. He offered them heaps of gold, and the surrender of
Lille, Béthune, and Douai; he would enrich their burgomasters, and make
knights and lords of their young men. Nothing could tempt them; they
were too much afraid of the return of their count, who, after a false
reconciliation, had again escaped out of their hands. Philip could do
nothing. He negotiated, he challenged; Edward remained unmoved.[22]
Horrible was the despair in the famished town when they saw all those
banners of France, all that great army marching away and leaving them
to their fate. Nothing remained for the people of Calais but to give
themselves up to the enemy if he would condescend to accept their
surrender. It was probable enough that the king of England, who had
passed such a tedious time before Calais, who had sat down a whole year
there, and spent in one campaign the enormous sum for those days of
nearly £400,000 sterling, would give himself the satisfaction of putting
the inhabitants to the sword, whereby he would certainly have gratified
the English merchants. But Edward’s knights told him flatly that if
he treated the besieged in that manner his own men would never again
venture to shut themselves up in fortresses for fear of reprisal. He gave
way, and condescended to admit the town to mercy, provided some of the
principal townspeople came, according to custom, bareheaded and barefoot,
with ropes round their necks, and presented the keys to him.
There was danger for those who should first appear in the king’s
presence. There were instantly found in that little town, depopulated
as it was by famine, six volunteers to save the rest. Nevertheless,
the queen and the knights had to intercede with Edward, to prevent his
hanging those gallant fellows.[f]
Thus did Calais fall into the hands of England a year after the battle
of Crécy. Edward, according to Walsingham,[j] spent a month in the town,
ordering and fortifying it. He sent all the knights captive to England,
and expelled a certain number of the other French townsmen, replacing
them by English. He induced thirty-six rich citizens of London, with
their families, to settle there, with three hundred of lesser condition,
bestowing upon them several privileges and advantages. He fixed at Calais
the staple of tin, lead, and woollen cloth, and prohibited all persons
from exporting or shipping these commodities to England, unless they
took oath to unship them at Calais. Eustace of St. Pierre was amongst
the French citizens who remained and recovered their property, on
transferring their allegiance to the English king. His heirs afterwards
forfeited the property by refusing this allegiance.
SUSPENSION OF THE WAR (1347 A.D.)
[Sidenote: [1347-1348 A.D.]]
The papal legates seized this opportunity of renewing their efforts to
bring about an accommodation between the monarchs. The capture of Calais,
indeed, rendered terms of peace more difficult to arrange; but that
event, with the campaign which preceded it, rendered a peace desirable
on both sides. Edward consented, although Rymer contains many proofs of
his intention to sail again to the continent and renew the war. The truce
was at first concluded for ten months, but was extended from time to
time, the monarchs being occupied with other cares. It was a cessation
but from great expeditions and large armies, for partisans on both sides
did not relax in their schemes to surprise and their efforts to hurt.
Although Scotland was included in the truce, Douglas would not keep
the peace; neither would French or English in Gascony. The _brigands_,
as foot-soldiers were called, associated in bands of thirty or forty
to pillage towns, surprise castles, and then sell them for large sums.
King Philip did not disdain to purchase the castle of Combourne from the
brigand Bacon, for 24,000 livres. This brigand, says Froissart, “was as
well armed and mounted as any knight in the army, and in as great honour
with the king.”
The truce was not even observed between the now hostile towns of Calais
and St. Omer. Geoffrey of Charny, who commanded for Philip in the
latter place, hearing that Edward had intrusted the command in Calais
to an Italian, Aimery di Pavia, made offers of many thousand florins,
if he would betray the town. Pavia pretended to consent, but warned
Edward, who came with his son, the Black Prince, and a body of archers
and men-at-arms. Pavia, by the king’s order, allowed a division of the
French to pass the bridge and enter the fortifications, where they were
instantly surrounded and taken prisoners. And then Edward and his son
attacked the French under Charny, routing, slaying, and capturing the
greater number. The king himself in the fray had a personal encounter
with Eustace de Ribeaumont, whom he compelled to surrender, and to whom
he afterwards presented a chaplet adorned with pearls, as a token of
friendship and admiration.
In Brittany the lieutenants of King Philip were not more successful than
at Calais. Charles of Blois himself had set the truce at naught by an
attack upon the castle La Roche de Rien. Whilst thus engaged, he was come
upon unawares by the forces of the De Montfort party, his army routed,
himself severely wounded, and taken prisoner (1347). From Brittany he was
sent to England.
A more general renewal of the war was rendered impossible by the eruption
of the plague, which in the summer of 1348 carried off large numbers,
first in the south of France,[23] from whence it extended to Paris and
the towns of the north. Tumours under the arms and in the groin were
the peculiarities of the disease, which almost always proved fatal. Out
of twenty persons in a village, says a chronicler, not two remained.
The towns of the south were especially depopulated, such as Marbonne,
Montpellier, and Avignon. The Laura of Petrarch was amongst the victims.
Eight hundred died each day in Paris, where the loss could not have been
less than one hundred thousand. Amongst the consequences of the epidemic
are mentioned a great scarcity of provisions and a complete suspense of
education from the lack of teachers.
TERRITORIAL ACQUISITION
[Sidenote: [1343-1348 A.D.]]
Whilst France was thus ravaged by pestilence and humiliated by defeat,
Philip succeeded in annexing to the monarchy the important province of
Dauphiné, which lay between its possessions of Burgundy and Provence, and
gave France the entire region westward of the Alps. The two contiguous
principalities and dynasties of Savoy and of Dauphiné had started up and
grown together in continued rivalry. Although the Savoy princes were
defeated in one great battle they were still more than a match for the
dauphins, as the princes who kept their court at Vienne were called from
the arms they had assumed. The dauphin had recourse to the aid of the
king of France; and, by degrees, the protection which these afforded grew
into suzerainty. Humbert, the last dauphin, was a strange and capricious
character; he had the misfortune to have let fall from a window of his
castle his only son, the child being dashed to pieces as he fell. This
misfortune disturbed the reason of the prince, who determined to proceed
to the Holy Land and sell or mortgage his possessions in order to raise
funds for the purpose. He began by selling lands, which he possessed in
Normandy, to John, duke of this province. At last the dauphin consented
to sell the reversion of the principality. He agreed to appoint the
second son of Philip of Valois, Philip of Orleans, as his future heir, in
the event of his having no children.
This treaty, so advantageous to France, was concluded in 1343, and
Humbert took his departure for Palestine. None ever expected to see the
return of so witless a prince. The dauphin, however, did return, not only
to resume the government of his paternal dominion, but to regret the
reckless manner in which he had alienated the independence of Dauphiné.
He began to seek to extricate himself from his engagements. Edward III
tried to induce the emperor of Germany to confer upon Humbert the title
of king; but, surrounded by the power and the emissaries of France,
the dauphin was not able to shake off his dependency. He was finally
(1349) induced to transfer his adoption to Charles, son of John, duke
of Normandy, heir to the French throne. This was the future Charles V.
Having accomplished this act, Humbert withdrew to a convent, whilst young
Charles assumed the title of dauphin, which was afterwards borne by the
heir to the throne, and the possession of that rich province.[b]
The money spent in the purchase of Dauphiné was at least well spent
for France. A few days after the definite treaty with Humbert, Philip
made another useful acquisition: he bought the lordship of Montpellier
from the last king of Majorca, James II. This prince, despoiled of the
Balearic Isles, Roussillon, and Cerdagne, by his cousin, the king of
Aragon, sold Montpellier in order to raise an army with which to recover
his realm. Don James was beaten and killed; Montpellier remained to
France.[d]
The plague of this year had been peculiarly fatal to princesses. The
queen of France, Joan of Burgundy, the duchess of Normandy, wife of
Prince John and daughter of the king of Bohemia, the queen of Navarre,
daughter of Louis Hutin, perished under its influence. But no sooner
had the pestilence disappeared, than marriage and its accompanying
festivities became the order of the day. “The world,” says the
chronicler, “was renewed, but, unfortunately, not bettered; the enemies
of France and of the church were no fewer, nor less powerful.”
[Sidenote: [1348-1350 A.D.]]
King Philip espoused a young wife, daughter of the queen of Navarre, just
deceased. This princess, Blanche by name, had been destined to the duke
of Normandy; but the king, his father, found her beautiful, and married
her himself. The duke of Normandy married a duchess of Burgundy, and the
dauphin, Charles, espoused a daughter of the duke of Bourbon. Thus were
celebrated the marriages of three generations of princes.
Philip of Valois did not long survive his marriage with Blanche. He fell
ill, and expired at Nogent in August, 1350. The continuator of Nangis[c]
relates that he called his sons, the duke of Normandy, and Philip of
Orleans, afterwards of Valois, to his bedside, and pointed out to them
the validity of his right to the crown, and the necessity of defending it
strenuously, and without any concession, against Edward of England, with
whom the truce was about to expire.
Philip of Valois was the first prince of truly chivalrous spirit that
ascended the throne of France. Unfortunately for him, he succeeded at a
period when chivalry was insufficient either to illustrate the warrior
or achieve great results in war. Unfortunately, too, he derived from his
predecessors those unscrupulous habits of wreaking vengeance and spilling
blood, which they were taught to consider their sovereign right, as if
royal power and descent cancelled every crime, and consecrated even the
basest treachery and felony. French kings are lauded by their countrymen
for having considered themselves above feudalism. Feudalism, however, had
its laws of honour and its sense of right; with these, unfortunately,
French kings too soon and too completely dispensed.[b]
[Illustration]
FOOTNOTES
[16] [Charles intrusted the siege to Louis of Spain, a descendant of
Ferdinand de la Cerda--eldest son of Alfonso the Learned. Ferdinand’s
sons had been set aside in favour of their uncle. Some of this family
took up their residence in France. This Louis de la Cerda was Ferdinand’s
grandson. In 1341 he received the title of “Admiral of France.”]
[17] Lord Berners reads, “She caused damoselles and other women _to
cut shorte their kyrtels_,” instead of “to unpave the streets,” as Mr.
Johnes translates it. The words in D. Sauvage’s edition are “_dépecer
les chaussées_,” to tear up the causeways, but when we consider that the
streets of cities were very rarely paved at this period, Lord Berners’
version appears the more probable, and may be reconciled to the text if
we read “_chausses_” for “_chaussées_,” which is not unlikely to be an
error in transcribing.
[18] [Among the captures at Caen, was a document dated 1338, wherein
the Normans offered Philip to reconquer England at their own cost, on
condition he would reportion it among them after the fashion of William
the Conqueror. It was used with good effect in rousing English spirit and
continuing the wars. Some authorities regard it as a forgery.]
[19] [Prince Edward of Wales--the famous “Black Prince.” He was but
thirteen years old and only nominally in command of the first line under
the guardianship of the earl of Warwick and Godfrey d’Harcourt.]
[20] [His blindness was supposed to have been caused by poison, which was
alleged to have been given to him when engaged in the wars of Italy.]
[21] [According to Froissart the English reconnoitring party slaughtered
7,000 in the fog. He declares that more perished on this Sunday than on
the day of battle. The clerks sent by Edward to tally the dead reported
11 princes, 80 bannerets, 1,200 simple knights, and above 30,000 common
men.]
[22] Edward announces in a letter to the archbishop of York that he had
accepted the challenge, and that the fight did not take place, because
Philip marched off precipitately before the day, after having set fire to
his camp.
[23] [It had spread to France from Italy where its ravages were no less
appalling. An extended notice of it is given in our history of Italy,
Volume IX, where Boccaccio’s vivid description of its terrors may be
found.]
[Illustration]
CHAPTER VI. JOHN THE GOOD AND CHARLES THE WISE
[Sidenote: [1350-1380 A.D.]]
The new king John was between thirty-one and thirty-two years of age. It
was long since a king of France had ascended the throne in such critical
circumstances. All the internal maladies which, ever since the days of
Philip the Fair, had been undermining the constitution of the state
had burst out at the first shock of external violence. The weakness
of this monarchy, arbitrary without order, fiscal without finances,
military without an army, which had failed to create for itself any other
instrument or any other support than a body of legists; the fragility of
this colossus with feet of clay was now revealed both to the foreigner
and to France herself. A country desolated by plague, impoverished by
a disastrous war and by a government more ruinous than plague and war,
where the lowest depths of society were stirred by those dull mutterings
which announce the distant tempest; a royalty despoiled, by deserved
misfortunes, of the prestige of birth and grandeur which had survived
its popularity; finally a war which set at stake not the position of
some frontier but the existence of the dynasty and the independence of
the nation: such was the inheritance which the first of the Valois had
bequeathed to his son.[b]
King John inaugurated his reign by debasing the coinage to meet the
expenses of the coronation which was celebrated at Rheims, on the 26th of
September, 1350, with all the accustomed splendour. The brilliant train
of princes who accompanied him drew upon themselves not only the glances
but the hopes of the entire population.
Treachery, however, was on all sides. Already Philip of Valois had
attempted to deal with it outside the regular forms of judicial
procedure; the newly made king followed in his footsteps. Raoul, count
of Eu and of Guines, constable of France, obtained of Edward III, whose
prisoner he was, liberty on parole, and returned to Paris to present
himself at court. John caused him to be arrested and confined in the
Louvre. A few days afterwards the constable was beheaded, and his
property given to John of Artois, who assumed the title of count of Eu.
[Sidenote: [1350-1352 A.D.]]
The office of constable was conferred upon a certain De la Cerda, Charles
of Spain, brother of that Louis of Spain who had upheld the party of
Blois in Brittany. The new constable, being the personal favourite of the
king, found many rivals at court, and thus arose contentions that were to
be the source of further troubles. For the purpose of anticipating acts
of treason and of strengthening the attachment and devotion to himself
of the most powerful nobles, John created a new order of chivalry; or,
as Froissart[g] says, “A fine company, high and noble, after the manner
of the Round Table which existed in the time of King Artus [Arthur].”
He also had another model, the order of the Garter, recently created
by Edward III. Thus was instituted the order of the Star, which had
for emblem a star in gold, silver, gilt, or pearls, and which the king
bestowed on the three hundred knights who had proved themselves “the most
valiant at arms and the most useful to the kingdom.” He imposed upon them
an oath that they would never flee before the enemy to a distance of over
four arpents. On the first occasion the king designated the recipients
of the order himself, but later the choice was decided by the majority
of the members. This was the first time that a court order of chivalry
had been created in France. The new institution was destined to be of
but short duration, however, as its dissolution immediately followed the
captivity of its founder.
Preparations were begun for a renewal of the war with England, and in
expectation of this event John displayed great activity. Financial
aid, which was to be a portion of the profits on the sale of beverages
and merchandise, was voted to him by the provinces of Vermandois and
Normandy, the city of Paris, and the bailiwick of Amiens, the assemblies
stipulating in exchange the confirmation of certain privileges and the
suppression of various abuses; among others the right of lodgment and of
_prise en vertu_ by which the king caused his expenses and those of his
household to be defrayed by anyone with whom he chose to lodge.
We can form some idea of the deplorable state of the finances from the
fact that during the course of the year 1351 John issued no less than
eighteen ordinances altering monetary values, although neither the help
of such expedients nor the subsidies voted by the provinces availed
to bring about an equilibrium between receipts and expenditures. The
treasury continued, as in the preceding reign, to pay annually only a
part of the officers’ wages and of the interest on the debt. There were
also ordinances regulating the order in which the public expenses were to
be met, just as to-day, in cases of bankruptcy, the succession in which
creditors are to be paid is determined by law. In the case of certain
outlays the government was extremely tardy in making payment, taking
for its model the nobility, to the members of which great latitude was
allowed. “Let no one,” said King John, “wonder or be ill-pleased, for we
take account of the respites and delays accorded to the nobles in the
payment of their debts, and it would not be seemly that we should be in a
worse condition than they.”
The truces, although renewed from year to year, were imperfectly kept;
hostilities continued to break out from time to time at different
points, and there was not a campaign during which special engagements
did not take place between parties of English or French knights. There
were frequent skirmishes during 1351 in the neighbourhood of St. Jean
d’Angély, and in 1352 between Guines and St. Omer. The war in Brittany
had been kept up in desultory fashion since the capture of Charles of
Blois in 1347, when his wife, Joan de Penthièvre, took up the cause.
The most celebrated of these minor combats was the _combat des trente_,
fought in Brittany, August 1352, on the moor of Mi-Voie, between Josselin
and Ploërmel.[c]
[Sidenote: [1352-1354 A.D.]]
Robert de Beaumanoir, governor of the castle of Josselin, challenged
the English captain Richard Bamborough who commanded at Ploërmel. They
met on the lands of Josselin each with twenty-nine companions. The
sixty champions fought on foot with short swords. “Such a combat,” says
Froissart, “had not been recorded for over a hundred years.” It did not
cease until all the combatants were either killed or badly wounded--four
French and nine English, Bamborough among them, lay dead on the field.
The rest of the English gave themselves up to the French. But such
contests did not help matters, and so the war dragged on.[a]
TROUBLE WITH CHARLES OF NAVARRE
[Illustration: JOHN THE GOOD
(From an old French print)]
To the exterior dangers with which France was menaced was now added the
calamity of civil war. The cause for this fresh trouble was to be found
in the pretensions held by the king of Navarre, and the jealousy which
he conceived against the new constable, Charles of Spain. This king of
Navarre was Charles the Bad, so named for the rigour with which he had
put down a sedition in Pamplona. A prince of the royal house of France
on the side of his father, Philip of Évreux, he succeeded in 1349 not
only to the kingdom of the Pyrenees, but to the county of Évreux, and
the possession of several fiefs in Normandy. He was young, ambitious,
enterprising, as were also his two younger brothers, Philip and Louis;
and to attach him more securely to his interests, John betrothed to him
one of his daughters, then a child, to whom he promised as marriage
portion an income raised from the counties of Angoulême and Mortain.
These counties having been ravaged by the English, Charles of Navarre
demanded another dowry, and at the same time claimed indemnity for
Champagne and Brie, former possessions of his mother which had been
ceded to the crown during the preceding reign, but by treaty of which
all the clauses had not been put regularly in execution. John refused to
acknowledge these claims, or at any rate was in no hurry to satisfy them,
and gave Angoulême and Mortain to Charles of Spain.
The king of Navarre laid all the blame for this real or pretended breach
of faith to the constable, and the two held a spirited altercation
together in the presence of King John. With the king of Navarre was his
brother Philip of Navarre, count of Longueville, who on being given the
lie by the constable swore to be revenged. On leaving the scene of the
quarrel he defied the constable and warned him to be on his guard against
the infantes of Navarre. Charles of Spain paid so little heed to these
menaces that he betook himself, insufficiently attended, to Laigle, the
latest evidence of the royal favour, which was situated not six leagues
from Évreux, where dwelt his enemies. As soon as the count of Longueville
learned of this move he left his home at night, accompanied by a troop of
men-at-arms, and entering the hôtel of the constable, murdered the latter
in his bed (1354).
[Sidenote: [1354-1355 A.D.]]
The infantes of Navarre wrote letters of self-justification to several
cities of France, and to the council of the king. At the same time they
stocked their castles with supplies, assembled all their nobles, and
opened up relations with the English, who were only too pleased to have a
foothold thus established for them in Normandy. John, determined not to
leave unpunished an act of personal vengeance that infringed seriously
upon his own authority, marched in person against Évreux, and sent orders
to the count d’Armagnac, his representative in Toulouse, to occupy
Navarre with the whole strength of the southern troops.
This civil war, breaking forth so unexpectedly, was certain to renew the
war with England, since it offered that country an unexampled opportunity
to re-enter the lists. In fear of this event, the princes and princesses
of the house of France, aided by the legate cardinal of Boulogne, offered
their mediation and succeeded in bringing about an arrangement at Nantes,
the 22nd of February, 1354. Payment of all that was due him, and the
satisfaction of his legitimate claims were assured the king of Navarre,
on condition that he should so far humiliate himself as to ask the king’s
pardon in open parliament. This he consented to do, but demanded that
certain hostages be sent him. “And in the presence of all he asked pardon
of the king for the deed wrought upon the said constable, for he had had
just and sufficient cause thereto, all of which he was ready to reveal
to the king then or at any time. Furthermore he declared and swore that
he had not committed the act out of contempt for the king nor for the
office of constable, and that nothing would afflict him so sorely as to
be in the evil graces of the king.” John accepted the excuse and took the
offender back into favour.
This understanding retarded further hostilities, but only for a little
time. John, who had been unaware of the secret relations entered into
with the English, soon learned of them; whereupon Charles the Bad,
fearing for his own safety, retired to Avignon, where he besought
protection of the pope. In the month of November John entered Normandy,
took possession of and sequestrated the estates of the king of Navarre,
and commanded the officers who were in charge of the various castles
to deliver them up to him. Six of the defenders refused to obey, among
others those in charge of the castles of Cherbourg and Évreux.
The court of Avignon had not ceased its efforts to negotiate a treaty
between England and France, and as it was necessary that this treaty
should be a final one the king of Navarre must be included in its terms;
hence the papal protection had not been refused him in his need. The
negotiations were carried on actively during the winter of 1354-1355, but
fell through like all preceding ones, and in the spring came definitely
to an end. Edward demanded that his full sovereignty should be recognised
over Guienne and Ponthieu, which provinces should be separated from the
French crown. He also refused to continue to pay homage to France, and
tried to stipulate for a semi-independence for Brittany. John refused
to consider propositions so injurious, and in a legitimate spirit of
national pride resolved to try once more the fortunes of war.
On all sides preparations for war were being carried on. The king of
Navarre, having passed through Pamplona and English Guienne, embarked
in July, 1355, at Cherbourg, which port it was his intention to open to
Edward III. The English sovereign manned a fleet for the purpose of
descending upon the north coast of France; but contrary winds held him
for a long time in the Channel, in sight of Jersey, and finally obliged
him to return to the harbour of Plymouth.
In spite of this mischance the English remained full of ardour, and built
great hopes upon the assistance of the Navarrese. John’s counsellors
represented to him that he could not with safety allow his enemies
to retain allies of such energy and power, and that at any cost the
interests of Charles the Bad must be separated from those of Edward III.
With great repugnance, therefore, the king consented to grant certain
concessions to the king of Navarre, who joyfully accepted them. A second
treaty was signed at Valognes, by the terms of which Charles the Bad was
reinstated in his French domains on consideration that he should make
formal apology for having allied himself with the enemies of the kingdom
(September 10th, 1355). He hastened to fulfil his promise, and for the
second time came to the Louvre to ask public pardon of the king. His
brother Philip, count of Longueville, could not be induced to follow his
example, but remained true to the English side.
By depriving the English of the Navarrese alliance King John robbed
them of their chief support, and obliged them to change their plan of
campaign. Edward III landed at Calais, and in October made several
incursions into Artois; but John marched against him in person, and
prevented him from crossing the French frontier, thus paralysing all his
efforts.
The English were more successful in the south, where they had sent a
large army headed by the prince of Wales and the celebrated John Chandos.
This army made a rapid and fruitful passage through Languedoc--pillaging
Castelnaudary, Carcassonne, and a number of towns and castles--as far as
the very gates of Montpellier without meeting with the least resistance.
The cities were all entered, and the whole district, one of the richest
in France, laid waste as Normandy had been in 1346. The English returned
with five thousand prisoners and a thousand wagons laden with silver,
objects of worth and merchandise, particularly cloths and velvets taken
from Narbonne and Limoux. In order to transport safely all this booty to
Guienne it was necessary to cross the Garonne at a distance of only three
leagues from Toulouse. The count d’Armagnac, commander of Languedoc, was
shut up in this town with forces more considerable than those of the
English; he refused, however, to sally forth and arrest them as they
passed by, in spite of the orders which had been brought to him by the
new constable James de Bourbon, successor to Charles of Spain.
To meet the needs of the war, and to provide himself with a still greater
force for the coming campaign, John resorted to all sorts of financial
expedients. He ordered his treasurers to adjourn all payments out of the
public funds, be they for what purpose they might; he made treaties for
subsidies with several provinces, Auvergne, Normandy, Maine, and Anjou,
and lastly convened the states-general at Paris.[c]
THE STATES-GENERAL OF 1355 A.D.
The estates of the north, or of the Languedoïl, convoked on the 30th of
November, showed no tractable temper. It was necessary to promise them
the abolition of that direct robbery called the right of seizure, and
of the indirect one which was practised through the coinage. The king
declared that the new impost should extend to all persons, and that it
should be paid by himself, the queen, and the princes. These fair words
did not reassure the estates. They put no trust in the royal word, or in
the royal tax-gatherers. They required that the money should be received
by themselves, through collectors chosen by them; that accounts should be
laid before them, and that they should meet again on the 1st of March,
and again, after the lapse of a year, on St. Andrew’s day.
[Sidenote: [1355-1356 A.D.]]
To vote and receive taxes is to reign. No one in those days was aware of
the full import of this bold demand of the estates, probably not even
Étienne Marcel, the famous provost of the merchants, whom we see at the
head of the deputies of the towns. The assembly purchased this royalty by
the enormous concession of 6,000,000 livres parisis for the pay of thirty
thousand men-at-arms. This money was to be raised by two imposts, on salt
and on sales--bad imposts, no doubt, and bearing heavily on the poor; but
what other could be devised in so pressing an emergency, when the whole
south was at the enemy’s mercy?
Normandy, Artois, and Picardy sent no deputies to these estates. The
Normans were encouraged by the king of Navarre, the count d’Harcourt,
and others, who declared that the gabelle should not be levied on their
lands: that there should not be found a man so bold on the part of the
king of France, who should enforce it, nor sergeant who should levy a
fine, but should pay for it with his body. The estates gave way. They
suppressed the two imposts, and substituted for them a tax on income:
five per cent. on the poorest classes, four per cent. on middling
fortunes, and two per cent. on the rich. The more one had the less he
paid. The king, bitterly offended by the resistance of the king of
Navarre and his friends, said that he should never have perfect joy so
long as they were alive. He set out from Orleans with some cavaliers,
rode for thirty hours, and surprised them in the castle of Rouen, where
they were at table, having been invited by the dauphin. He had D’Harcourt
and three others beheaded; the king of Navarre was thrown into prison,
and threatened with death (April 16th, 1356). A rumour was set afloat
that they had urged the dauphin to escape to the emperor, and make war on
the king, his father.[e]
A third session of the states-general was held in Paris on the 8th of
May, under the shadow of these tragic events, and new subsidies from the
revenues were granted the king. John was particular to mislead the public
as to the causes of the recent affair at Rouen, and it was everywhere
given out that he had seized letters that furnished evidence of a
conspiracy between the Navarrese and the king of England. Nevertheless
the people suspected that the “real treason” of Charles of Navarre lay
in his resistance to taxation, and this opinion joined to the current
rumours as to the harsh treatment the captive had received, won him the
compassion and the interest of the masses.
The people as a whole regarded in the same manner the captivity of the
Navarrese, the execution of D’Harcourt, and the vengeance which King
John took upon the authors of a revolt at Arras, which occurred almost
simultaneously with the arrest of Charles the Bad. On the 27th of April
the marshal D’Audeneham had entered Arras without resistance and had
seized those guilty of rebellion. Twenty of these were decapitated in the
market-place.[b]
King John, who had begun the campaign by seizing those strongholds of
the king of Navarre in Normandy into which he might have introduced
the English, at last advanced with a great army, as numerous as France
ever lost. The whole country was covered with his runners; the English
could no longer find means of subsistence. Neither of the two hostile
forces knew its own position. John thought the English were before him,
and was hastening to overtake them, whilst they were really behind him.
The prince of Wales, no better informed, thought the French were in his
rear. This was the second and not the last time the English entangled
themselves blindly in the enemy’s country. Only a miracle could have
saved them, and John’s blundering rashness was no less.
THE BATTLE OF POITIERS (SEPTEMBER 18TH, 1356)
[Sidenote: [1356 A.D.]]
The army of the prince of Wales, partly English, partly Gascon, numbered
2,000 men-at-arms, 4,000 archers, and 2,000 light troops, brigands hired
in the south. John was at the head of the great feudal gathering of the
ban and arrière-ban, making fully 50,000 men. There were John’s four
sons, 26 dukes or counts, and 140 knights-banneret, with their banners
displayed; a magnificent spectacle, but the army was none the better for
all that.
Two cardinal legates, one of whom was a Talleyrand, interfered to prevent
the effusion of Christian blood. The prince of Wales offered to give up
all he had taken, and to swear he would not serve for seven years to come
against France. John refused the offer, as was natural; it would have
been shameful to let those plunderers escape. He insisted that, at least,
the prince of Wales should yield himself prisoner, with one hundred
knights.
The English had fortified themselves on the Coteau de Maupertuis, a
steep hill near Poitiers, planted with vines, and flanked with hedges
and thorny thickets. Their archers covered all the summit. There was no
need of attacking them. No more was requisite than to keep them there;
hunger and thirst would have quelled them in two days. But John thought
it more chivalric to subdue his enemy by force of arms. There was but one
narrow path by which access could be obtained to the English position.
The king of France sent horsemen forward to the charge. The archers shot
down clouds of arrows, wounded and scared the horses, and threw them in
confusion one on the other. The English seized this moment to charge down
from the hill, and presently all that great army was in disorder. Three
sons of the king of France retired from the field, by their father’s
command,[24] taking away with them an escort of eight hundred lances.
[Illustration: A FRENCH KNIGHT OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY]
Meanwhile, the king stood fast. He had employed horsemen to charge up the
hill; and with equal good sense, he ordered those about him to dismount,
and fight on foot against the English, who were coming upon them on
horseback. John’s resistance was as injurious to his realm as the flight
of his sons. His brethren of the order of the Star were, like himself,
true to their vow, and did not retreat. “And they fought by troops and
by companies, as they chanced to meet and fall in together.” But the
multitude fled to Poitiers, which closed its gates. “So there was on the
road and before the gate such a horrible spectacle of men slaughtered and
trampled down as is wonderful to think of; and the French surrendered the
moment they caught sight of an Englishman ever so far off.”
Meanwhile, the field was still contested. “King John himself did wonders;
he was armed with a battle-axe, with which he fought and defended
himself. By his side was his youngest son, who well deserved the surname
of the Bold, who guided his blind valour, crying out to him every moment:
‘Look to your right, father! to your left!’ But the throng of assailants
continually increased, all being eager to make so rich a capture. The
English and Gascons poured in so fast on the king’s division that they
broke through the ranks by force; and the French were so intermixed
with their enemies that at times there were five men attacking one
gentleman. There was much pressing at this time, through eagerness of
taking the king; and those that were nearest to him, and knew him, cried
out: ‘Surrender yourself, or you are a dead man.’ In that part of the
field was a young knight from St. Omer, who was engaged by a salary in
the service of the king of England; his name was Denys de Morbeyne,
who for five years had attached himself to the English, on occasion of
his having been banished in his younger days from France, for a murder
committed in an affray at St. Omer. It fortunately happened for this
knight that he was at the time near to the king of France, when the
latter was so much pulled about; he, by dint of force--for he was very
strong and robust--pushed through the crowd, and said to the king in good
French: ‘Sir, sir, surrender yourself.’ The king, who found himself very
disagreeably situated, turning to him, asked: ‘To whom shall I surrender
myself--to whom? Where is my cousin, the prince of Wales? If I could see
him, I would speak to him.’ ‘Sir,’ replied Sir Denys, ‘he is not here;
but surrender yourself to me, and I will lead you to him.’ ‘Who are you?’
said the king. ‘Sir, I am Denys de Morbeyne, a knight from Artois; but
I serve the king of England, because I cannot belong to France, having
forfeited all I possessed there.’ The king then gave him his right hand
glove, and said: ‘I surrender myself to you.’ There was much crowding and
pushing about, for everyone was eager to cry out: ‘I have taken him.’
Neither the king nor his youngest son, Philip, was able to get forward
and free himself from the throng.”
The prince of Wales did honour to the unparalleled good fortune that had
placed such a pledge in his hands. He took good care not to treat his
captive otherwise than as a king; in his eyes that captive was the true
king of France, and not John of Valois, as the English had been used to
call him. It was of the last importance to the prince that John should
be king in reality, so that the kingdom might seem itself taken captive
in the person of its sovereign, and should ruin itself to ransom him. He
waited on John at table, after the battle; and when he made his entry
into London, he set him on a tall white horse (an emblem of suzerainty),
whilst he himself followed on a little black hackney.
The English were not less courteous to the other prisoners. They had
twice as many of them as there were men to guard them, and dismissed
the greater part of them on parole, pledging them to come at Christmas,
and pay the enormous ransoms they set upon them. The prisoners were
too good knights to fail. In this war between gentlemen, the worst that
could happen to the beaten party was to go and take their part in the
festivities of the victors, to hunt and joust in England, and enjoy the
courtesy of the English; a noble war, doubtless, which crushed none but
the villein.
Great was the dismay in Paris when the fugitives from Poitiers, with the
dauphin at their head, brought news that there was no longer a king or
barons in France, but all were killed or taken.[25] The English, who had
withdrawn for a moment to secure the captives, would, doubtless, speedily
return. This time it might be expected that they would take, not Calais,
but Paris and the realm.[e]
THE STATES-GENERAL OF 1356-1357 A.D.
[Sidenote: [1356-1357 A.D.]]
The king a captive, the nobles prisoners or destroyed--the people alone
remained to save France. This younger member, disinherited in the
political family of the Middle Ages, took in hand the government of
the realm, now falling to pieces through the incapacity of its elder
brothers. It was not this one that had been vanquished at Crécy and
Poitiers. These defeats, on the contrary, brought it forward, for it was
evident that, scorned as it was by the nobility, at least it had not
conducted itself worse, and perhaps even may have made a better show
against the English archers than the knights. The people ruling--that
was a novel and extraordinary thing. Nevertheless they were not, at
least in their leaders, totally inexperienced in the conduct of affairs.
Former progress had prepared them somewhat; the common people were in
parliament, the church, and the universities; they had control of all
commerce and had formed vast industrial corporations. The clergy and
commerce (which was soon to become the aristocracy of the third estate)
both furnished a leader to the new movement started after the battle of
Poitiers--Robert Lecoq, bishop of Laon and president of the parliament,
and Étienne Marcel, provost of the merchants of Paris.
Marcel’s first care at the news of the disaster was to finish the
fortifications of the capital, to place cannon on them, and to barricade
the streets. The dauphin Charles arrived ten days after the battle,
but the people did not make much of this young prince. His conduct at
Poitiers had been decidedly equivocal; he had been one of the first to
flee. He took the title of lieutenant of the king of France and convoked
the states-general at Paris for the Languedoïl, at Toulouse for the
Languedoc (October 17th, 1356). The assembly at Paris had eight hundred
members, of which four hundred came from the cities and towns; Marcel
presided over the third estate and Robert Lecoq over the clergy. The
nobles were few in number; their principal leader was John de Pecquigny,
lord of Vermandois, and a friend of the king of Navarre. The three orders
deliberated separately, but to bring unity into their actions nominated
a mixed commission of eighty members. It formulated the wishes of the
states-general and demanded for the reform of the kingdom the summons and
trial, before judges nominated by the states-general, of the king’s chief
officers of finance and justice, accused of having perverted and sold
judgments; the deliverance of the king of Navarre; the establishment of a
council of four prelates, twelve lords, and twelve bourgeois elected by
the states-general, without which the dauphin could give no orders and
which would control the entire government. On these terms they granted
the dauphin one and a half tenths for one year of the revenues of the
three orders. In truth, by their revolutionary changes the people placed
themselves on the throne and undertook the burden of public affairs and
the public welfare. The states-general of the Languedoc, less radical,
voted a levy of fifteen thousand men with the necessary money to maintain
them.
The dauphin would not listen to an agreement with these conditions. He
played skilfully with the deputies of the third estate, in persuading
them to consult their constituents once more, while he himself would go
to ask help of his uncle the emperor of Germany. Charles IV was then
putting forward his famous “golden bull” in the Diet of Nuremberg.
The dauphin appeared there. He had strong hopes that on his return
he would find the deputies dispersed and discouraged. Far from that,
the provincial councils had reassembled, approved the measures of the
states-general, and the whole country declared itself in the same
fashion (1357). On the 3rd of March the dauphin was obliged to call a
general assembly at the palace. The bishop of Laon acted as spokesman.
He demanded that the prince dismiss twenty-two of his councillors or
servitors and authorise the formation of a council of thirty-six members
elected by the states-general “to provide for the needs of the kingdom,
and which everyone would be compelled to obey.” Commissioners at first
had to be sent into all the provinces, but the states finally acquired
the faculty of handling the government of its own creation by endowing
itself with the power to meet twice a year without convocation. As to
reforms, relating for the most part to finances and justice, the dauphin
provided for them in the “grand ordinance of reformation.” By this
memorable charter he promised to impose no taxes without the vote of
the states-general, to divert no money from the treasury, and to leave
the levy and expenditure of taxes to the states-general’s delegates, to
make justice impartial and prompt, to sell judiciary offices no longer,
and not to alter the coinage from a model which the provost of the
merchants was to furnish. The right of seizure, forced loans, judgments
by commissioners, and alienation of the crown domains were some of the
abuses corrected by the ordinance which at the end declared the members
of the states-general inviolable and authorised armed resistance to all
illegal procedure.
[Sidenote: [1357-1358 A.D.]]
The popular government of 1357 unfortunately did not have in its bosom
sufficient harmony, strength, and experience to maintain the important
conquest the people had just made. Moreover its situation was one of
the most difficult; its credit was shaken by King John, who from his
prison forbade the states-general to assemble and the people to pay
the taxes they themselves had voted. The rural committees were in the
most deplorable state. Overburdened by taxes, by the heavy ransoms
which their captive lords extracted by torture, the peasants could no
longer cultivate a land that had moreover been ravaged in the war. They
developed into vagabonds and preferred to become the accomplices rather
than victims of the bands of discharged soldiers from every country,
which the war had left upon French soil.[f]
In the fourteenth century the name brigand was given to this licensed
soldiery, nearly all of whom, as we are aware, fought on foot, and were,
as a general rule, but slenderly equipped; they carried, as a part of
their equipment, a small fine coat of mail, which took its name of
brigantine from them. The pay of the mercenaries being stopped in time
of truce or between the different expeditions, they turned to the daily
practice of rapine and plunder for their means of subsistence, which
brought them in more than their pay. A crowd of adventurers and loafers
joined forces with them, among the number being many noblemen. As to the
rest, the following passage from Froissart[g] sets forth vividly the
methods by which the brigands carried on their terrible profession:
[Illustration: A FRENCH NOBLEMAN OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY]
“And the poor brigands always succeeded in sacking and pillaging towns
and castles, and got thence such wealth as was marvellous, and some of
them became rich, especially those who had made themselves leaders and
captains of other brigands; there were among them some who even had as
much as forty thousand crowns. Indeed and in truth right marvellous were
the things they did. When--and this happened very frequently--they espied
a large town or a fine castle, distant a day’s journey or two, twenty or
thirty brigands would band themselves together and travel night or day by
secret ways, and just as day broke they would enter the town or castle
they had descried and set fire to a house. The townspeople, fearing that
an army of a thousand warriors had come to burn their town, escaped each
as best he might, and the brigands sacked houses, coffers, and libraries,
seizing whatsoever they could find and departing laden with booty.”
In spite of such horrors no profession was more lucrative or held in
greater honour in the fourteenth century than that of the brigand. Even
royalty, whose duty it was to protect the peasants, showed itself eager
to make advances to the brigands and to reward their strange exploits.
Philip of Valois proposed to Croquart, the famous chief of the brigands
settled in Brittany, to knight him, marry him well, and pay him an
annual income of two thousand pounds, if he would place himself at his
disposal. This same king, hearing of the extraordinary cleverness by
which one Bacon, a brigand who harassed Languedoc, had surprised the
castle of Chambon in the Limousin, wished to keep by his side so daring
and crafty a captain; so he made him his sergeant-at-arms and loaded him
with honours. Too often the kings did not even attempt to protect the
unhappy victims of the brigands. On the contrary they helped to complete
the ruin of the peasants by authorising the abuse of _le droit de prise_
(the right of seizure), and above all by arbitrarily raising or lowering
the money standard, according to whether the question was one of levying
taxes or of paying debts.[h]
THE DAUPHIN REPUDIATES THE _GRANDE ORDONNANCE_ (1358 A.D.)
[Sidenote: [1358-1360 A.D.]]
Under such existing conditions the dauphin believed himself powerful
enough to declare that he would no longer tolerate trustees. February
8th, 1358, he revoked the _grande ordonnance_, and thus destroyed the
popular government. This was a complete rupture with the states-general
and the resumption of absolute power by the crown.
Against the dauphin the people called Charles of Navarre, who was dragged
from his prison. This ambitious prince, skilful and eloquent, became the
orator of the market-places, promising to defend the country and letting
it be understood that he was not without some claim to the throne of
France. The dauphin hoped to balance this new kind of influence with the
same means. He went to the Pré-aux-Clercs; and Paris, as if by a magical
transformation, suddenly beheld herself in the midst of the Middle Ages
adorned with two forums. But the dauphin lost again, by his unfortunate
alteration in the coinage, the sole means indeed of raising money without
calling the states-general together. Marcel had armed the bourgeoisie at
once and given them, as a rallying sign, caps part red and part blue. At
the head of a company of this militia he made his way into the dauphin’s
palace, and had the marshals of Champagne and Normandy, the two principal
officials, put to death; with his own hand he placed the red and blue
cap upon the prince’s head as a pledge of security and said to him, as
the two bodies were thrown to the crowd, “I demand that you sanction the
deaths of these traitors, for it is by the will of the people that this
has been done”--of a small portion of the people, it might be added--the
Parisian bourgeoisie (1358).
Indeed, the further they went the more the revolution they undertook
lost its general character. The provincial deputies separated from their
constituents lost their enthusiasm, while the commune of Paris, never
away from their own hearths, remained numerous, ardent, and popular. The
states-general, jealous of the commune’s influence, permitted itself in
part to be removed to Compiègne by the dauphin. The nobles gathered about
the prince. He had seven thousand lances with whom he lived freely on the
country between the Seine and the Marne, ravaging the whole land as far
as Paris, which was suffering from famine. This maddened the peasantry of
the Beauvoisis, of Brie, of Valois, Laon, and Soissons.[f]
THE _JACQUERIE_ (1358 A.D.)
It is quite unnecessary to lay stress upon the sufferings of the
villeins here. The days were no more, as we have seen, when the lords of
the manor, although they considered themselves of different clay from
their serfs, defended them at the peril of their lives. Of the feudal
institutions, nothing remained but the oppression. Ruined by the love of
luxury, by gambling, by debauchery, by the necessity of paying a heavy
ransom--preferring to run into debt rather than to impose privations
upon themselves, and to wrest from those around them by means of blows,
imprisonment, or the pillory the miserable savings they had laid by for
bad times rather than to pay their debts, which would have prevented
their contracting new ones--they used and abused the right to command so
far as to make all testaments, all marrying, on their estates, dependent
on their express permission. They even scoffed at their victims, giving
them the name of “Jacques Bonhomme” in derision, on account of their
awkwardness in carrying weapons, and of their patience in enduring all
things. “Save a villain from hanging, he’ll cut your throat; show a
villain the steel, and he kneels,” says a proverb of these times (_Oignez
vilain, il vous poindra: poignez vilain, il vous oindra_).
To these permanent, and in some respects regular evils, aggravated still
more by the caprices, the exactions of the kings, or at least, of their
officers, were added, to render them more intolerable, the accidental
evils of life and war. A series of bad years had brought famine and the
plague. The Navarrese of Philip of Longueville, the brigands of James
Pipes, and other generals devastated all that the English had spared, and
that a few only too uncommon inhabitants had not allowed to lie fallow.
The Navarrese, the brigands, and the English inspired them with such
terror that the unhappy villeins would leave their dwellings and fields,
spend the nights on the islands or in boats moored in the middle of the
river, and place one of their number in the church belfry in order that
he might ring the tocsin, while they hid themselves in the bowels of the
earth, in those subterranean places which were still to be found in the
eighteenth century, along the Somme, from Péronne to its mouth.
Thus the hardships which nature and warfare imposed upon those living in
country places made them more sensitive to those which their masters, if
better advised or more humane, might have spared them. Their original
devotedness had disappeared, as had their protection, of which they were
no longer the object, and given place to muttered imprecations, to a
vague and far-away desire to shake off the yoke. The hatred increased
every day, but it still resembled a fire smouldering beneath the ashes.
In order that it should burst forth, change into violence and activity,
it was only necessary that a new exigency, a lesser one perhaps than many
others to which they were subject, but more startling to their simple
good sense, should arise in some wise to place the weapons in their
hands. The occasion for movement was the fifth article of the ordinance,
issued at Compiègne, which enjoined all those whom it might concern to
put the strongholds in a state of defence at their own cost and expense.
They whom it concerned were the unfortunate peasants, who were thus
forced to pay for out of their savings, and to rebuild with their own
hands, those citadels which when restored would make the oppression more
intolerable than ever. This it is that caused a contemporary to say that
the rebellion began with a protest against injustice.[i]
About a hundred of the peasants met at Clermont first, and raised the
cry of “Death to gentlemen!” They elected a leader, called William Karl,
or Callet, and rushed to the attack and destruction of the houses of the
nobles. These hundreds soon swelled to thousands, and there was no excess
of which they were not guilty: they slew the nobles themselves, with
their wives and children, first treating the women with every indignity,
their avowed purpose being to extinguish the race. They roasted a noble
before the eyes of his family, and sought to make its members eat the
flesh of the victim. Saracen or Christian, says Froissart,[g] never
committed such iniquities.
There remains a doubt as to how far the townsfolk may have excited their
rustic brethren to this revolt; but it does not appear that any great
town made common cause with them. They were repulsed from Compiègne,
though they entered Senlis. Marcel endeavoured to make use of the Jacques
in humbling the noblesse and destroying their strongholds, without the
infamy of outraging women and slaying children. But whilst Marcel was
politic enough to make this attempt, the king of Navarre could not
but sympathise with the noblesse, and fly to their aid. The Jacques,
knowing his liberal reputation, were inclined to negotiate with him,
which enabled the king of Navarre to entice the chief and some of his
officers to parley. While thus engaged, they were surprised, bound, and
decapitated. This is not the last instance of a magnate betraying those
who trusted, and massacring those who could have best supported him.
Charles afterwards attacked the army of Jacques, and slew three thousand
of them.
The regent, after holding the estates of Champagne and Vermandois, and
procuring their adhesion, took his principal military post at Meaux in
order to straiten Paris. To this place not only did his troops repair,
but the ladies of the court--the duchesses of Normandy and Orleans, as
well as the wives of the noblesse--betook themselves to Meaux as to a
place of safety. The market of this town, surrounded by walls and by
water, had been rendered a fortress by the regent. The Jacques attacked
the town, in concert with a few Parisians, and easily made themselves
masters of all save the market. The count of Foix, and the captal De
Buch, Gascon nobles, were returning from a campaign with the Teutonic
knights of Prussia against the pagans, when they heard of the peril
of the noble ladies at Meaux. Though the captal was a subject of King
Edward, he nevertheless flew with De Foix to the rescue of the three
hundred ladies menaced by the Jacques; and these were routed and driven
into the Maine with great slaughter. The victors of Meaux then attacked
Senlis; there the citizens and Jacques fought together, and made a most
obstinate resistance. But the nobles, reinforced by knights and nobles
from Brabant, Hainault, and the Gascon hordes, annihilated the peasantry,
notwithstanding their numbers; and the insurrection of the Jacques was
drowned in blood.[j]
DEATH OF MARCEL
The effects of the _Jacquerie_ reached Marcel; discord appeared in the
commune. Obliged to seek outside help, the provost of the merchants
called upon the king of Navarre and agreed to prepare the way for him
to the throne of France. On the night of July 31st, 1358, as Marcel
was changing the guard at the Porte St. Denis through which Charles of
Navarre was to enter, he was massacred, together with those who were with
him, by the alderman, John Maillart, who had discovered the plot.[26] The
dauphin returned to Paris with an army and had Marcel’s chief companions
decapitated or exiled.[f]
It is necessary to dwell upon the memorable part played by Étienne
Marcel and the municipality of Paris in the political and social crisis
which followed the disaster of Poitiers and the captivity of King John.
In the middle of this fourteenth century, so uncivilised and sombre, a
man appeared who, by wonderful instinct, laid down and nearly succeeded
in obtaining the adoption of the essential principles on which modern
society is founded; that is, the government of the country by elected
representatives, taxes voted by the representatives of the taxpayers, the
abolition of privileges founded upon right of birth, the extension of
political rights to all citizens, and the subordination of traditional
sovereignty to that external sovereign known as the nation. Marcel was
that man.
Doubtless there are blots in Marcel’s life. His siding with the Jacques
is to be reproached against him as well as his friendship with the king
of Navarre, “the third aspirant in the midst of the rival ambitions of
France and England.” But it was a question of putting down an absolute,
unlimited power. If the aim is the entire remodelling of the organisation
of society, when the end in view is the high ambition of snatching the
direction of public affairs from the hands of an entire class, history
shows that such objects have never been reached without bloodshed. When,
four centuries later, the substitution of a representative government
for a monarchy founded upon divine right caused so many heads to fall
and entailed so much agony, is it to be wondered at that the revolution
undertaken by Marcel should follow the same course and suffer the same
fate? After all, if the bold provost shed the blood of his adversaries,
he was playing a losing game, and staking his own life against the
dominion of the nobility. Which is the more illustrious victim, the
marshal or himself? Which executioner should be blamed? Marcel failed
apparently, because the time was not yet ripe; he had, by a great bound
into the future, put himself ahead of his epoch. But he threw an external
lustre over the provosts of Paris, and as an eminent historian said, when
he demanded that statues should be raised in memory of Marcel, “he is the
greatest personage of the fourteenth century.”[k]
PEACE NEGOTIATIONS; EDWARD IN FRANCE (1359 A.D.)
The dauphin had returned to Paris, but the state of the kingdom seemed
desperate. People, however, spoke of peace. Weary of the sumptuous
hospitality he had received at Windsor, John had treated with the king
of England. He had abandoned to him the shores of the Channel, that is
to say Calais, Montreuil, Boulogne, Ponthieu, and Normandy; the whole of
Aquitaine, which included Gascony, Bordelais, Agénois, Quercy, Périgord,
the Limousin, Poitou, Saintonge, and Aunis; also Touraine and Anjou; and
besides this four million gold crowns for the king’s personal ransom. It
was the greatest and best part of France, including the entrances to all
the rivers. When the treaty was brought to Paris the dauphin refused to
execute it, and to strengthen himself for the contest with his father
called, at Paris on the 19th of May, 1359, the semblance of an assembly
of the three orders, which rejected the shameful terms and added that
King John must stay in England until it pleased God to show him the way
out.
Five months after, October 28th, 1359, Edward landed at Calais with his
four sons, the most powerful lords of his kingdom, six thousand coats of
iron armour, six thousand carts loaded with ammunition, ovens, mills,
forges, tents--everything necessary to live comfortably, even to falcons
and hunting-packs, and skiffs of rough hides for fishing. “There was
such a multitude of armed men that all the country was covered, and so
richly armed and bedecked that it was a marvel and great joy to see
their shining armour, waving banners, and arranged contests. And again
there were five hundred pages with shovels and picks who went before the
wagons and opened the way and cut the thorns and the bushes to make the
transport easier.”
The weather did not favour the expedition, for it rained incessantly. On
the 30th of November, the English arrived before Rheims. John de Craon
the archbishop shut the gates upon them and valiantly repulsed all their
attacks. Edward had announced a long time before that he wished to be
crowned there. He passed some weeks before its walls, unable to take
it by storm, but hoping each day that he would be attacked and win a
great battle as Crécy and Poitiers. Finally, nobody appearing, he turned
back, going leisurely across country to Châlons, Bar-le-Duc, Troyes, and
Tonnerre; the duke of Burgundy obtained from the pillage some two hundred
thousand gold crowns. Then Edward marched straight towards Paris, and
established himself about two leagues from the town at Bourg-la-Reine.
The English heralds approached to offer battle to the dauphin, who
refused it. A knight of the enemy, Sir Walter Manny, advanced to the very
ramparts, seeking for single combat, but Charles expressly forbade his
warriors to go outside the barriers. He wanted none of this war as the
nobles were conducting it at present.
And so the citizens shut up in their towns and the nobles in their
castles let pass the storm which could not reach them behind their walls.
Everything fell upon the peasants, who dared not even defend themselves.
But misery finally gave them courage and despair brought them strength.
They came to dare to look in the face the iron-sheathed men before whom
they used to tremble, and at several points the foreign aggressor began
to meet with local popular resistance, more dangerous for him than the
great battles of the feudal princes. Edward himself wearied of this inert
but invincible resistance. It was said that the English king and his
followers making their way, weary and discouraged across the plains of
Beauce, encountered a terrific storm which seemed a warning from heaven,
and that the king made a vow before Notre Dame de Chartres, to do all he
could to re-establish peace between the two nations. The king’s heart had
not been turned suddenly by the storm; it was the fatigues of a war that
was bringing no glory, for there were no battles and no booty, because
everything had been captured or hidden in the fortresses.
_The Story of Le Grand Ferré_
One of the most curious incidents of this popular resistance is thus
described by a chronicler of the age, the continuator of Nangis, in
language not without charm in spite of many Latin barbarisms.[l]
[Illustration: A FRENCH PAGE, FOURTEENTH CENTURY]
There was one strong enough place, in a little Longueil village, close to
Compiègne. The inhabitants, seeing they would be in great peril if the
enemy should take possession of it, demanded of their ruling lord, and of
the abbé of St. Corneille whose serfs they were, permission to fortify
their village. After having obtained this, they collected provisions and
arms, chose for captain a fine strong man named Guillaume des Alouettes
from among themselves, and swore to defend their town with their
last breath. When this was done and became known, many hastened from
neighbouring villages for protection. The captain had for servant a man
as brave as he was tall and strong, known as “Le Grand Ferré” (_Magnus
Ferratus_). In spite of his huge size and strength Le Grand Ferré had a
very poor opinion of himself, and the captain could do with him what he
liked.
There were about two hundred of them, all labourers and accustomed to
gain a scanty livelihood with their hands. The English, who occupied
a strong position near Creil, on learning of these preparations for
defence, were filled with scorn for such wretched people. “Let us drive
the villagers out,” they said, “the place is good and strong and we
will occupy it.” And they prepared to do as they said. Two hundred
English marched thither. Watch was not well kept; even the gates were
open, and the enemy entered boisterously. At the noise they made those
in the houses rushed to the windows, and seeing so many armed men were
overcome by fright. The captain finally appeared with some of his men,
and began to strike the English bravely, but was soon surrounded and
mortally wounded. At this misfortune the others including Le Grand Ferré
said among themselves, “Let us go down and sell our lives dearly, for we
may expect no mercy.” So they collected together and suddenly appearing
from different directions threw themselves with redoubled blows upon the
English; they struck as if threshing wheat on the barn floor. Arms were
raised and lowered and at each blow an Englishman fell.
When Le Grand Ferré reached the side of his dying captain, his grief
overcame him and he threw himself furiously upon the enemy. As he was
head and shoulders above his companions they could see him wielding his
axe, striking and redoubling his blows, none of which missed a victim.
Helmets were broken, skulls split, and arms cut off. In a short time
there was a clear space around him, for he had killed eighteen and
wounded many more. His encouraged comrades did marvels, and the English
quit the affair and took to flight. Some jumped into the moat and were
drowned, others flung themselves against the gates; but blows rained upon
them thick and fast. Le Grand Ferré, reaching the middle of the street
where the enemy had planted its standard, killed the bearer, and seizing
the flag told one of his own men to go and throw it into the moat. The
man however pointed with terror to the still thick mass of English.
“Follow me,” called out Le Grand Ferré, and seizing his great axe in both
hands he struck right and left, till he made a path to the moat where the
others threw the enemy’s ensign into the mud. Le Grand Ferré stopped a
moment for breath, but returned at once to what remained of the English.
Only a very few of those who came to perform this deed escaped, thanks to
God and Le Grand Ferré, who killed that day more than forty of them.
The English were very angry and disturbed to see so many of their brave
soldiers perish at the hands of these peasants. The next day they
returned in greater numbers, but the people of Longueil no longer feared
them. They went forth to meet the enemy, Le Grand Ferré at their head.
And when the enemy saw him and felt the weight of his arm and his iron
axe, they wished they had never come that way. They could not get back so
fast that many were not mortally wounded, killed, or taken prisoners, and
among these were some men of high lineage. If the folk of Longueil had
consented to ransom them as the nobles do among themselves, they would
have been very rich. But they would not hear of this and killed their
captives, saying that in this way the enemy would do no more harm.
In this last struggle the fighting was very hard and Le Grand Ferré
became much exhausted. He drank quantities of cold water and was almost
immediately seized with a fever. He managed to get back to the village
to his cottage and went to bed, but keeping close to him his good axe,
an iron axe so heavy that a man of ordinary strength could scarcely lift
it from the ground with both hands. The English learned with joy that Le
Grand Ferré was ill, and without giving him time to recover despatched
twelve soldiers with orders to kill him. His wife saw them from afar and
cried to him, “Oh, my poor Ferré, here come the English, what will you
do?” He forgot his illness, and got up quietly. Taking his heavy axe he
strode into his yard. When they entered, “Ah, brigands,” he cried, “you
come to take me in my bed, but you don’t know me.” He placed his back to
the wall so as not to be surrounded, and swinging his axe brought his
assailants face to face with death. Of the twelve he killed five and
put the rest to flight. Le Grand Ferré returned to his bed, but he had
again overheated himself in dealing so many blows and drank more cold
water. The violence of the fever redoubled, and a few days later, having
received the sacraments, he passed away. Le Grand Ferré was buried in
the village cemetery. All his companions, the whole countryside in fact,
mourned his loss; for with him alive the English would never have dared
approach.[d]
One feels, in the wealth of detail into which the chronicler enters, the
sympathy of the old monk for the poor peasants. In the depths of the
monasteries were narrated their valiant deeds against the pillagers of
churches; these are told much more frequently in village companies. The
tales spread slowly but went far. Little by little the foundations of
hatred for the foreigner were laid in the hearts of the people, and a
love of country whose fiercest outburst is found in Joan of Arc.
THE TREATY OF BRETIGNY (1360 A.D.)
The dauphin was still more anxious to send the English home because
“France was in its last throes, and for so little as its woes might last
it might perish.” A conference was opened at Bretigny, near Chartres, the
1st of May, 1360. The English negotiators demanded in the first place the
whole crown of France; then they limited themselves to what had belonged
to the Plantagenets; finally Edward III contented himself with the duchy
of Aquitaine and all its dependencies (Gascony, Poitou, Saintonge, Aunis,
Agénois, Périgord, the Limousin, Quercy, Rouergue, and Angoumois), ceded
in independent sovereignty, and Calais with the counties of Ponthieu and
Guines, also the viscounty of Montreuil. Thus ended the first period of
the Hundred Years’ War. The king’s ransom was fixed at three million gold
crowns;[27] in guarantee for which sum John had to leave in Edward’s
hands a certain number of hostages taken from the highest nobles and
richest bourgeoisie of the land. Edward carried them with him across
Normandy, which he harassed once more, in order to embark at Honfleur,
the Havre of that day. The provinces promised to the king of England were
given up, despite the protests against this pretended restitution by the
great majority who said, with the inhabitants of La Rochelle, “We will
acknowledge the English with our lips, but never with our hearts.” For a
whole year they refused to open their gates to the English.
At Abbeville things went still better. When the patriotic citizens saw
in their streets the soldiers who for fifteen years had trampled France
under foot, they were unable to restrain themselves; secret meetings
were held; then a riot broke out which was quickly suppressed, but not
before a rich citizen, Ringois, was captured. The English commandant
used, however, moderation and offered Ringois his liberty on sole
condition that he would take the oath of allegiance to Edward III.
Ringois refused. They took him to Dover, threatening him this time with
death if he were obstinate, but he persisted. They brought him even to
the platform of the fortress and showed him the furthermost parapet with
the sea beating furiously at its feet; if he said one word he would be
saved. He still refused and the guard threw him off.
There still remained to find the money for the first payment of the
ransom, and it was obtained by a shameful expedient. “The king of
France,” says Matteo Villani[q] the historian, “sold his flesh and
blood.” For 600,000 florins he bestowed his daughter Isabella, then only
eleven years of age, on Gian Galeazzo Visconti, the son of the fiercest
tyrant in Italy, who hunted men in the streets of his capital and threw
them living into the flames. Thanks to this money the king left Calais on
the 25th of October, 1360.
THE LAST YEARS OF KING JOHN (1360-1364 A.D.)
[Sidenote: [1360-1364 A.D.]]
The 5th of December following we find an ordinance by which John
announces, in spite of the great compassion he has for his people, the
levy of a new tax on all merchandise sold or exported, on salt and on
wine, in return for which he promises henceforth good and loyal justice
to all, to put nothing but undebased coin into circulation, and to
abolish the right of seizure and other abuses that fell so heavily upon
the poor people. These promises did not deceive any more than the taxes
profited them. What could be produced in a country ceaselessly ravaged by
large forces and desolated by frequent appearances of the black death? It
became necessary to fall back on other resources--loans, the revocation
of all donations made by kings since Philip the Fair, and giving the
Jews considerable privileges in matters of finance. With the money thus
procured what did the king do? Did he use it to break up those bands of
brigands, marauders, and _tard venues_ that had just (1362) captured and
killed the constable James de Bourbon at Brignais near Lyons? He made
little journeys at great expense, travelling from town to town to take
possession of the rich heritage of the Capetian house of Burgundy, which
the death of Philip de Rouvre had recently placed in his hands. From
there he journeyed down to Avignon where he spent six months in feasting,
and planning a marriage with the famous queen Joanna of Naples. The pope,
who had already been twice ransomed from the great companies, made John
a proposition capable of appealing to his adventurous imagination--to
form all these warrior bands into a crusade, which would rid France of
them, and at the same time win glory for himself. It is not impossible
that John would have embarked on this rash enterprise had he not learned
that one of his sons, the duke of Anjou, had escaped from the English,
by whom he was held in hostage. John felt for his son to do a thing
like this was a slight on royal honour, and resolved to go himself to
replace the fugitive. He thus escaped in a chivalrous manner from his
embarrassing position and the sight of France’s misery. A part of the
winter was spent in London, “in great rejoicings and recreations,” says
Froissart,[g] “in dinners, suppers, and other fashions.” These fêtes and
great repasts killed him; he died in London, April 8th, 1364, at the age
of forty-four.[l]
Towards the end of 1361 the young duke Philip de Rouvre of Burgundy
expired, leaving no issue; his marriage with the young heiress of
Flanders not having been consummated. The duke possessed not only
Burgundy, but Franche-Comté, Champagne, Artois, and Boulogne. An
ancestor of Duke Philip had three daughters, to whom the succession now
reverted. The eldest had been Marguerite, the unfortunate queen of Louis
Hutin, whose daughter, married to the king of Navarre, had conveyed
to the representative of that family the best right to the Burgundian
succession. King John, descended from the second sister, would admit no
right to the king of Navarre, nor yet to the count of Bar, descended from
the third sister. He pleaded that he was nearer of kin than Charles of
Navarre to the duke just deceased; and thus made use of the same claim
to Burgundy that Edward III had done to France. John hastened to Dijon
and installed himself there as duke, taking a solemn oath to respect
all the privileges and rights of the duchy. Artois and Franche-Comté
returned to the duchess-dowager of Flanders. John had no intention of
uniting Burgundy to the crown, which he well knew would displease the
Burgundians, accustomed from time immemorial to their native dukes
and provincial independence. He therefore, in 1363, gave the duchy of
Burgundy to his youngest son, Philip, who had been constantly by his side
during the battle of Poitiers and his subsequent captivity. King John,
indeed, assigned this reason for the gift. It was fully acquiesced in
by John’s successor; and thus was founded that brilliant house of the
dukes of Burgundy of the second race, which reigned from the Schelde
to the Alps, and overshadowed and endangered the monarchy of France
itself.[28][j]
CHARLES THE WISE (1364-1380 A.D.)
Charles V was seven-and-twenty when he began to reign, and if he had
followed the example of his father, he would have played the part of
feudal king and fighting cavalier, as that for which he was ordained. But
the young monarch saw that France had need of other defenders than feudal
kings and fighting cavaliers. It needed a clear eye and a steady hand--a
man at the helm, not a gilt figure at the prow; for never was there a
time when the vessel of the state seemed in such danger. There was a
whole people to feed and satisfy--rebellious vassals to reclaim--an open
foe to guard against--riotous bands in the very heart of the kingdom to
be discomfited; and for all this he had an empty treasury, a discontented
parliament, ambitious communes, and a disunited nobility. But the French
heart of courage and chivalrous spirit of loyalty was still entire.
[Illustration: CHARLES V]
Charles was weak in body, and over him hung the sentence of death passed
on him by the physicians in his youth. Charles the Bad, it was said, in
return for his arrest at Rouen, had poisoned the dauphin’s food.[29] The
prince escaped destruction by the opening of a perpetual wound in his
left arm. “Whenever the sore heals over,” the doctors said, “the dauphin
must die.” This issue was probably only a sign of a feeble constitution,
but it silenced the sneers of his enemies, who were not accustomed to see
a king except in armour; it doubled the respect of the few discerning
potentates of the time, who began to perceive that a cabinet might be
quite as great a scene of glory as a field of battle. Edward III said he
was never so resisted in open fight, as by the calm, sagacious councillor
who had never drawn a sword. Before the first year was over all men
perceived that things were greatly changed. There were no tournaments at
the Louvre--no feasts at the palace. The king lived like an anchorite,
except on state occasions, when he outshone the magnificence of oriental
princes; and paid his men-at-arms their wages, and granted privileges
to the trading towns, and did not increase a single tax! People must
have grown ashamed of sustaining the cause of Charles the Bad against so
true a Frenchman and gracious a king as Charles the Wise; yet the war
continued.[n]
Charles V at first made use of the help of his brothers, committing to
their hands the provinces most remote from the centre, Languedoc to the
duke of Anjou, and Burgundy to Philip the Bold. He himself attended only
to the centre; but he needed an arm--a sword. There was then hardly
any military spirit except among the Bretons and the Gascons. The king
attached to him a brave Breton of Dinan, the sieur Du Guesclin, whom he
had himself seen at the siege of Melun, and who had been fighting for
France for some years.[e]
_Early Exploits of Bertrand du Guesclin_
The childhood of Bertrand du Guesclin offers some striking peculiarities.
His ugliness, his deformity, and his rough, wild bearing had won for him
the dislike of his family; the harsh treatment he endured only served to
embitter his character. Armed with a stick, which he invariably carried,
young Bertrand was a great trouble to his mother, and the terror of all
the children in the neighbourhood. He could not be taught to read. “He
knew nothing of letters,” says a chronicle, “and no masters could ever be
found from whom he was willing to learn; but he always wanted to strike
and beat them.”
One fine day, being then about sixteen or seventeen years of age,
Bertrand escaped from his father’s house, which to his youthful ardour
felt like a prison, and went off in triumph to Rennes to wrestle with a
young Breton, already made proud by having overcome twelve adversaries;
and soon afterwards Rennes beheld him again victorious in a solemn
tournament, and from that time everyone who knew him, even his parents,
understood that Bertrand had a great future before him. The war between
Charles of Blois and John de Montfort, the two claimants of the duchy of
Brittany, afforded Bertrand a favourable opportunity for distinguishing
himself; he took the side of Charles of Blois, whose cause appeared
to him more French than that of his rival, and the walls of Vannes,
Fougeray, and Rennes were in turns witnesses of his extraordinary
valour. Charles of Blois, to show his gratitude, presented him with
the valuable domain of La Roche d’Airien or De Rien. In 1359 Bertrand
compelled the duke of Lancaster to raise the siege of Dinan. His
battle-cry was, “Notre Dame, Guesclin. Guesclin!” When in battle, this
name rang in the ears of the English; it had the effect of a clap of
thunder, and even the bravest trembled before such an enemy. The most
careful and complete investigations have not enabled the learned to state
the precise date when Bertrand entered the service of the king of France;
it is not certain whether it was to King John or to the dauphin that he
first offered the support of his valour. But at least we know that in
1361 he was already in the royal pay, and that he was in command of a
company of men-at-arms and archers; this fact is proved by a discharge
signed at Paris by Du Guesclin, and preserved amongst the registers of
the court of exchequer.
[Illustration: BERTRAND DU GEUSCLIN]
Some authors say that the governorship of Pontorson was given to Du
Guesclin as a mark of special favour. Whilst fighting for the glory
of the lilies of France, the Breton warrior by no means forgot the
interests of Charles of Blois, his natural sovereign; thus, after driving
the English out of Normandy, he marched to the siege of Bécherel and
routed De Montfort’s troops. It must have been about this time that his
marriage took place with Tiphaine or Thiéphaine Raguenel, a rich heiress
who, if we are to believe the traditions of the fourteenth century,
foretold future events. The date of this marriage is one of the points of
uncertainty in the history of Bertrand.[o]
The new king’s first care was to recover the mastery of the course of the
Seine. Mantes and Meulan belonged to the king of Navarre; Boucicault and
Du Guesclin got possession of them by an act of signal perfidy. The two
towns had paid the penalty of all the mischief the Navarrese had done to
the Parisians. The citizens had the satisfaction of seeing twenty-eight
of them hanged in Paris.
The Navarrese, reinforced by English and Gascons under the captal De
Buch, desired to avenge themselves, and do something to hinder the king
from going to Rheims. Du Guesclin soon advanced with a considerable
body, of French, Bretons, and also Gascons. The captal retreated towards
Évreux, and halted at Cocherel, on an eminence; but Du Guesclin had the
address to deprive him of the advantage of the ground. He sounded a
retreat and made a feint of running away. The captal could not hinder his
Englishmen from descending to pursue; they were too proud to hearken to
a Gascon general, though a great lord and of the house of Foix. He was,
therefore, constrained to obey his soldiers and accompany them into
the plain. Thereupon Du Guesclin wheeled round. The Gascons whom he had
with him appointed thirty of their number to carry off the captal from
the midst of his men. The other Navarrese leaders were killed and the
battle was won. Won on the 16th of May (1364), it was known at Rheims on
the 18th, the coronation day--a fine omen for the new royalty. Charles V
gave Du Guesclin such a reward as never king before him had bestowed: an
establishment on the footing of a prince, the county of Longueville, the
patrimony of the king of Navarre’s brother. At the same time he beheaded
the sire de Saquenville, one of the chief advisers of the Navarrese.
He dealt no better with the French who were found in the ranks of the
companies. Men began to bethink them that brigandage was a crime.
_End of the Breton War: Battle of Auray (1364 A.D.)_
The war in Brittany ended in the same year. The king of France lent
Charles of Blois Du Guesclin and one thousand lances. The prince of Wales
sent De Montfort John Chandos,--the only rival in Europe to the fame
of Du Guesclin as general and knight,--two hundred lances, and as many
archers; and with these were joined several English knights. Montfort
and the English were posted on a height, like the prince of Wales at
Poitiers. Charles of Blois did not care for that. That devout prince,
who believed in miracles, and who himself performed them, had refused at
the siege of Quimper to retreat before a flood. “If it is God’s will,”
he said, “the tide will do us no harm.” He made no more account of the
mountain at Auray than of the flood at Quimper. Charles of Blois had
the greater strength; many Bretons, even, of La Bretagne-Bretonnante
joined him, out of hatred doubtless to the English. Du Guesclin disposed
the army in an admirable manner. “Each man-at-arms,” says Froissart,[g]
“carried his lance straight before him, projecting five feet, and had a
small, hard, and well-sharpened axe, with a small handle. And thus they
advanced in most handsome array. They rode so close that you could not
have thrown a tennis ball among them, but it would have fallen on the
points of the lances.” John Chandos gazed long on the French order of
battle, “the which he praised mightily within himself.” He could not
conceal his sentiments, but said, “So help me God as it is true that
there is here flower of chivalry, great sense, and good arrangement.”
Chandos had set apart a reserve to support each corps that wavered. It
was not without difficulty he prevailed on one of his knights to remain
in the rear and command that reserve; prayers, and almost tears were
necessary to overcome the feudal prejudice that made the front rank be
regarded as the only post of honour. Du Guesclin could not have effected
the same thing in the other army.
[Sidenote: [1364-1366 A.D.]]
The two adverse claimants fought at the head of their respective forces.
The Bretons were weary of this war, and wished to see it ended by the
death of the one or the other. Chandos’ reserve gave him the advantage
over Du Guesclin, who was unhorsed and taken prisoner. The whole brunt
of the battle then fell on Charles of Blois; his banner was pulled down
and himself slain. The greatest lords of Brittany obstinately held out,
and were likewise slain (September 29th, 1364). When the English came,
with great exultation, and showed De Montfort his enemy whom they had
killed, the voice of French blood, or perhaps of kindred, awoke within
him, and tears started from his eyes. A haircloth was found under the
dead man’s cuirass. His piety and his good qualities recurred to memory.
He had recommenced the war only in deference to his wife, whose patrimony
Brittany was. This saint was also a man. He made verses and composed
_lais_ in the intervals between his battles. He had been a lover, too;
a bastard of his was killed by his side, endeavouring to avenge him. De
Montfort got possession of all the strongest places in the country in a
few days. The children of Charles of Blois were prisoners in England. The
king of France, who carried no passion into the trade of war, made terms
with the victor, and induced the widow of Charles of Blois to content
herself with the county of Penthièvre, the viscounty of Limoges, and an
income of 10,000 livres. The king did wisely. The essential thing was to
hinder Brittany from doing homage to the English sovereign. There was
every probability that, sooner or later, it would become weary of the
protégé of England.[e] Peace was concluded on these terms at Guérande in
1365, and Du Guesclin was restored to liberty.
Peace also was concluded with Charles of Navarre, who was glad to accept
the city of Montpellier in exchange for the places he had lost upon the
Seine, and a period of rest was promised to the distracted land.
_Du Guesclin Leads the Free Companies into Castile (1366 A.D.)_
But the rest was impossible with so many conflicting interests to
arrange, and such a spirit of unrule diffused by the recent struggles.
Charles the Wise looked back with fond regret to the time of the
Crusades, and meditated an exportation of the thousands of armed men of
all surrounding countries to the East. But the Brabanters, English, and
Saxons were very well satisfied with their present position, and had
no desire to distinguish themselves against the enemies of the faith,
when they could live so comfortably on the fat of abbey-lands, and
occasionally put a bishop to ransom at home. The example of Montferrat,
who had saved the pope at Avignon by leading the free lances of the south
against the wealth of Milan, occurred also to the anxious thoughts of
the king; and just at the moment when he was in greatest distress, a
circumstance occurred in Spain which gave him the wished-for opportunity.
Pedro, known in general history as the Cruel, but recognised in Spanish
annals as the Great Justiciar, had offended a great proportion of his
subjects by his relentless executions and harsh behaviour. He had
poisoned his wife, a princess of Bourbon, at the instigation of his
favourite Maria de Padilla, and threatened death to the surviving natural
children of his father. Of these, Don Henry of Trastamara was the most
popular and the best; he fled to France, and implored the aid of Charles
against the murderous husband and unpitying brother. Du Guesclin saw the
opening. “Sir,” he said, “the free lances are anxious for work, and will
gather from all parts if I hoist my banner. Better neighbours will they
be on the other side of the Pyrenees than on this.”
Charles adopted the party of the banished brother, and preparations
were instantly made. Du Guesclin himself had begun as a leader of free
lances, and knew their ways. Thirty thousand of them joined him in an
incredibly short space of time, and he marched southward down the Rhone.
The pope was as much alarmed as his predecessor had been, and sent out
to know the object of their approach to Avignon. Bertrand answered with
a grim smile, “We are thirty thousand poor Christian pilgrims bound on a
crusade against the Saracens of Granada, and we want the holy father’s
absolution, and also 200,000 livres.” “Touching the absolution, my son,”
replied the nuncio, “you shall have it without fail; but with regard to
the money, that is a different thing.” “Sir,” replied the knight, “there
be many here who reck not of absolution, but many who desire the money,
for we make them prudent men in spite of themselves.” Their prudence
was rewarded with both the absolution and coin to the amount of 200,000
livres. They made a detour and Avignon was saved. When they reached
Toulouse, the object of the expedition was for the first time declared to
them. Plunder and battle was all they required, and a deluge of cruelty,
courage, and destructiveness poured down on devoted Spain. Pedro was
expelled from the throne, and fled to Portugal. Henry was crowned at
Burgos with Du Guesclin at his side, and was joyously received in the
other cities of Castile.
[Sidenote: [1366-1368 A.D.]]
Both nations now seemed ready for repose, and the triumph of having
restored an exile and created a king was added to the other glories of
the French monarch. But the Black Prince held his court at Bordeaux.
Shortly after his marriage, in 1361, he was created duke of Aquitaine
and had been living in his dominions since 1363. Feasts and tournaments
were celebrated according to the strictest rules of chivalry, and
noble ladies listened to the songs of troubadours, and the picturesque
narratives of Froissart, and the adventures of fabulous warriors, as
their predecessors were said to have done in the days of Charlemagne
and Arthur. Suddenly the dethroned and powerless Pedro threw himself at
the feet of the master of the lists; and half the stories of kingdoms
lost and won by the irresistible sword of a single champion immediately
rushed to their minds. All the blood of knighthood was on fire at the
insolence of a people who had rebelled against their anointed lord, and
Edward of Wales, as became a knight and man of honour, vowed to restore
his suppliant to the throne. Crécy was renewed over again in the great
field of Navarrete in 1367. Du Guesclin himself fell into the enemy’s
hands, and all the work of the free lances was utterly undone. Pedro was
king and justiciary in one, and let loose his royal vengeance on all
the land. Murders, executions, confiscations threw the whole kingdom
into despair, and the English bitterly repented of their interference in
behalf of so unchivalrous, unpitying a tyrant. The dreadful heats of the
south came to the support of Henry. The English died of fever and excess,
and discipline became relaxed. The reinstated king declined to pay the
stipulated rewards; mutiny broke out among the discontented conquerors;
and in the scorching summer, and amid these disturbances, the health of
the Black Prince began to fail.
Meantime, Charles the Wise endeared himself to his subjects by
diminishing their burdens, by encouraging agriculture, and giving greater
influence to the parliaments he convoked. The contrast was great and
striking. Conquest in the field was of no avail against the steady
advance of a popularity so justly founded and nobly sustained, as now
grew on the vanquished side. The free lances, who had joined the prince,
if not paid by the treasuries of Pedro, must be satisfied by the wealth
of their employer. Edward returned to Bordeaux with barren laurels, and
an empty exchequer. He laid fresh burdens on his unhappy subjects in
Aquitaine, to pay for the expenses incurred in Castile, and when the
population of that trampled province compared their position with that
of their neighbours under the crown, dissatisfaction took a wider range,
and they complained of their rulers, not only as oppressors, but as
foreigners. The English, indeed, even when the languages were the same,
never became acclimated in France, and now there was added the great
distinction of a different tongue; for the Norman portion of the English
people had now become so small that English at this time was declared to
be the language of law, as it had long been of religion and commerce.
Anglo-Saxon bowmen, who never spoke a word of French, served in the
ranks of the Black Prince, and, of course, offended the nations by their
brutal contempt for everything they did not understand. The prince,
therefore, in the midst of failing health and military disappointment,
perceived that his countrymen were not the masters of the land he
claimed, but were only forcibly encamped on it.
[Illustration: A FRENCH KNIGHT, END OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY]
[Sidenote: [1368-1369 A.D.]]
From England no help was to be had. The king was old, and had fallen into
the hands of a designing favourite, Alice Perrers, and her accomplices,
who ruled him at their will. And nothing was wanting to the French
monarch in these favourable circumstances, but warriors who could carry
his plans into effect. Du Guesclin was a prisoner at Bordeaux, and all
the wiser spirits in the court advised the prince on no account to let
so dangerous an enemy go. But Edward was made of penetrable stuff; and
on one occasion when they were in familiar conversation, he said, if
the captive could collect a hundred thousand francs, he should be set
at large--a vast sum in those days; but the sight of Du Guesclin, sword
in hand, and released from bondage, was worth forty times the amount to
the French king. The money was sent at once, and Du Guesclin lost no
time in showing his arm was as strong and his heart as brave as ever. A
rapid incursion into Spain and the battle of Montiel (March 14th, 1369)
established Henry of Trastamara once more upon the throne, and freed him
from the rivalry of Pedro, by the death of that ferocious tyrant. He was
stabbed to the heart by his infuriated brother, after a personal struggle
which lasted a long time. Henry was now undisturbed, and attributed his
prosperity to the favour of the French king. He put the Castilian navy at
the service of France.
_The Peace of Bretigny is Broken (1368-1369 A.D.)_
Charles was not slow in seeing the advantage of his position.
Strengthened by the gratitude of his new ally, and the general favour
of all his subjects, he spoke in a tone of defiance and majesty to the
English prince, which sounded strange in his ears within twelve years
of the battle of Poitiers. He summoned the prince of Wales to appear
before his court of peers, as one of the feudatories of the realm, to
answer for high crimes and misdemeanours. Edward answered, with much
submission, that he would not fail to obey the summons, but would bring
sixty thousand men along with him--helmet on head and spear in rest.
Charles knew too well that this was but a vain boast, for the warrior was
now too feeble to ride, and advanced in the exorbitance of his claims.
Edward of England took up the game of brag on behalf of his son, and
retorted from Windsor by reasserting his claim to the French throne, and
calling himself, in formal documents, king of England and France once
more. War was openly declared, and Charles summoned his states in Paris
(May 9th, 1369). Never was meeting so unanimous and so sedately firm.
Taxes were voted, forces were raised, and defiance was hurled against
the English both in their island fastness and the lands they usurped in
France. The court of peers, consulted in its turn, declared that King
Edward and his, not having appeared in answer to these summons, the duchy
of Aquitaine and other English holdings in France should be and were
confiscated. Every village, in imitation of the enemy they had learned
to fear, had butts for practice of the bow; games of manly exertion
were encouraged; freedom was extended to the serfs, and the municipal
towns were enriched with further privileges. Du Guesclin returned from
the Spanish triumph, and visited the king. The feeling in favour of
illustrious birth was then so strong that, though Charles had bestowed
the highest commands on the Breton soldier, they were offices which gave
him only a temporary superiority over the forces employed, and implied
no permanent pre-eminence when peace should be restored. But on this
occasion a stately assemblage was called. All the princes of the blood,
nobles of highest rank, chancellors, judges, warriors, were assembled
in the great hôtel St. Pol, and Charles gave his sword to Du Guesclin,
and said: “Du Guesclin, take my sword, and use it against my enemies.
Henceforth you are constable of France.” This was the highest dignity a
subject could hold, and Bertrand excused himself on account of his humble
extraction; but Charles persisted, and the Montmorencys, and De Coucys,
and Courtenays, and Bourbons, thought the sword could not be in better
wielding, and did obeisance to Sir Bertrand du Guesclin, who was now the
foremost man in all the land.[n]
_The English Invasion (1369-1370 A.D.)_
[Sidenote: [1369-1370 A.D.]]
The English immediately landed at Calais, while the Black Prince prepared
another attack upon the south. A French army marched to meet them, but
refused to engage them and retreated as they advanced. The towns were
well fortified, and none was taken; the expedition was confined to
useless devastation of the surrounding country.
In 1370 they returned and the same programme was repeated. The order to
refrain from combat was so rigorously observed that at Noyon, when one of
the enemy’s cavalry climbed the ramparts crying out: “My lords, I have
come to call on you; since you do not condescend to come out of your
shell, I will come in!” he was allowed to depart safe and sound. Before
Rheims, before Paris, the English encountered the same stolidity. From
his refuge at St. Pol, where he had shut himself up, the king could watch
the burning of the villages. But the brave Clisson himself exclaimed:
“Sire, you have no need to pit your own men against these furies; let
them wear themselves out. They will not deprive you of your heritage with
all these rubbish-heaps.”
“Never was a king of France less given to war,” said Edward III; “never
was one who kept me so busy!” Charles V, in fact, feeble and ailing,
never held a lance; he was vastly more fond of books. He had the most
valuable library of the day, 910 volumes carefully guarded behind iron
bars in a tower of the Louvre. He read the Bible through once every
year. He corresponded with the pope and sent him presents; and again, to
quote Froissart,[g] “my lord the king piously marched barefoot in the
procession, and madame the queen also.” So good a friend of the pope, so
pious a sovereign, merited the alliance of every bishop of the realm;
and in fact the majority opened to him the gates of their capitals; even
those upon whom the English most depended, as the bishop of Limoges,
comrade of the prince of Wales, turned French.
This last act of treachery exasperated the English. The Black Prince
swore by the soul of his father that he would enter into no other
undertaking until he had made Limoges and the other traitors pay dearly
for their treason. Having arrived before the city, he had part of the
wall torn down, and his soldiers plunged through the breach into the
streets. The prince had himself carried in in his litter.
“That was a sad scene,” writes Froissart,[g] “where men, women, and
children flung themselves at his feet, crying, ‘Mercy, gentle prince.’
But he was too inflamed with excitement to attend. Their pleading went
unheard, and all were put to the sword. Never a heart so hard but would
have wept to have stood in that city of Limoges and witnessed so great
slaughter; more than three thousand men, women, and children lost their
heads that day. And may God receive their souls, for martyrs they truly
were.”
[Sidenote: [1370-1380 A.D.]]
The English grew somewhat calmer at last through their interest in
a new spectacle: three French cavaliers, with backs to an old wall,
contended as if in the lists against the duke of Lancaster and the earls
of Cambridge and Pembroke. The prince of Wales stopped his chariot near
by, the better to look on; and he allowed the three cavaliers to be
recommended to mercy. The bishop, the principal author of the treason,
he also spared. This unfortunate exploit was the Black Prince’s last
adventure; he languished for a few years, and returned to die in England
(1376).
The English possessed an excellent infantry, archers whose darts pierced
the best-made cuirasses, and men-at-arms almost worth a regular cavalry
by their remarkable discipline and their habituation to concerted
movement. To these Charles could oppose only an immense throng of nobles
who, though they might be very brave, were also totally undisciplined.
The part of wisdom, therefore, was to avoid encounter with large bodies;
but in the intervals between expeditions he allowed his men to indulge in
skirmishes. Thus Du Guesclin fought at Pont-Valain with Robert Knolles,
a redoubtable English partisan (1370), and another corps near Chizey in
Poitou (1373). Chandos had been killed during the first campaign. Another
leader of great renown, the captal De Buch, was taken in 1372, near
Soubise. The French were not always beaten back.
Meanwhile the king had his own battles to fight, and his victories are
inscribed intact in the _Recueil des Ordonnances_. Under date of 1370 we
read: “February, 1370, letters according the inhabitants of Rodez the
right to trade with the entire kingdom free of duty on imports.--March,
1370, letters to the effect that the inhabitants of Figeac, now on land
declaring allegiance to Edward, son of the king of England, will not
have their goods confiscated if they return to French soil; ordinance
setting forth privileges accorded the city of Montauban.--April, 1370,
ordinance setting forth privileges accorded the city of Verfeil.--May,
1370, letters exempting the city of Milhaud from imposts during twenty
years, and ordinance of privileges accorded the city of Tulle.--June,
1370, ordinance containing privileges accorded the inhabitants of the
county of Tartas, the cities of Dorat and Puy-Mirol.--July, 1370,
ordinances containing privileges accorded the cities of Cahors, Castres,
Puy-la-Roque, Sarlat, Montégrier, and Salvetat.”
These were Charles V’s implements of war. Among those cities whose doors
the royal ordinances failed to open prowled his captains with their
stratagems of war, cajoling and negotiating. Du Guesclin treated in
secret with the inhabitants of Poitiers, who like those of many other
towns had remained French at heart, and they allowed him to enter with
three hundred lances within their walls (1372). Charles at once granted
titles to all those who afterwards exercised the functions of mayor or
alderman in that city.
Philip Mansel with one hundred English held La Rochelle. One day while
dining with the mayor, John Caudourier, he received a letter from the
king of England. The governor, recognising the royal seal, but being in
his quality of gentleman unable to read, requested his host to read it
for him. The mayor read out a message composed by himself to the effect
that on the following day, August 15th, 1372, the citizens and the
garrison should pass in review before the square. As soon as Mansel had
drawn his men from the château, a troop placed in ambush by the mayor
occupied the citadel. Du Guesclin was there with two hundred lances,
ready to take possession in the name of France. Some weeks previously the
Castilian fleet had destroyed an English fleet before La Rochelle.
Nevertheless the confident enemy tried again in 1373. Landing at Calais
with thirty thousand men, the duke of Lancaster set forth to conquer
France: he only crossed it. The journey was prosperous as long as it
lay through the rich provinces of the north; but in the poor and meagre
central districts deprivation and illness were encountered. At Auvergne
not a horse remained; at Bordeaux only six thousand men were left: the
cavaliers as well as foot soldiers had to beg their bread from door to
door.
The English, disgusted with such warfare, remained away the following
year; and the year after that they demanded a truce, which lasted up to
the death of Edward III in 1377. Charles then broke the truce and struck
a blow. He fitted out five armies and conquered all Guienne, while a
Castilian fleet manned by French troops ravaged the English counties of
Kent and Sussex. In 1380 there remained to the enemy only five French
towns--Bayonne, Bordeaux, Brest, Cherbourg, and Calais. At the same time
Charles the Bad was overwhelmed and saved his Pyrenean kingdom only by
the ceding of twenty places as a pledge of peace (1379).
LAST YEARS OF CHARLES V AND OF DU GUESCLIN
The king of France attempted in Brittany what had served him so well in
Guienne. June 20th, 1378, he summoned the duke John IV to appear before
the court of nobles; the duke not appearing, his fief was declared
forfeit to the crown. The Gascons gave themselves up to France. The
Bretons would not hear of the alliance. Barons, knights, and esquires
signed at Rennes, April 26th, 1379, an act of confederation that the
citizens themselves subscribed.
John IV, although expelled from the country, was recalled. All the
Bretons in the service of the king--and there was a great number of
them--abandoned him; even those who had previously promised to second his
projects turned against him. The old Du Guesclin sent him the constable’s
sword; and on March 1st, 1380, a treaty of alliance was signed at
Westminster between England and Brittany. Again an English army landed at
Calais under the earl of Buckingham, and again it journeyed with impunity
across the north of France. It had not reached Brittany when Charles V
died at Vincennes, September 16th, 1380.[l]
Many things had conduced to weaken the health of the too thoughtful
king. Dissensions among his brothers renewed in Paris the scenes of
falsehood and partisanship which were going on in London. The influence
he possessed over Europe as long as the pope resided in Avignon was taken
from him, first by the removal of Gregory XI to Rome; and, in a short
time after that, the usefulness of the papal chair in his schemes of
advancement was altogether destroyed by the schism which broke out at the
election of the next pope.
France accepted the Frenchman, Clement VII, who resided at Avignon as
his predecessor had done; and half the rest of Christendom, including
England, adhered to his Italian rival. This is the commencement of the
great schism which afforded such vantage-ground, not only to the enemies
of priestcraft but of Christianity itself. Charles felt the blow equally
as Christian and king. While mourning this unhappy event, his grief was
increased by the fall of the constable. Bertrand was besieging one of
the strong castles in Auvergne which was rebellious against the royal
authority and strengthened with an English garrison. The commander
had agreed to surrender if not relieved within a certain time. Fever,
pain, and anxiety laid Du Guesclin low; and when the appointed day came
he was lying on his bier, and preparations were making to carry him
to the grave. The governor, true to his word, hauled down the flag of
independence, and marched out with all his men, head bare and sword
drawn, and laid the keys of the fortress on the hero’s coffin. So died
the best soldier and truest gentleman of France. His last words to his
comrades who bent over his couch were these: “Remember that whenever you
are at war, the churchmen, the women, the children, and the poor are not
your enemies.”[n]
The modern editors of the works of the sieur Le Fevre give the following
exaggerated estimate of Du Guesclin’s merits:
“Bertrand was the man selected by providence as the instrument by which
France was to be saved. Such a man deserved to take his place beside the
kings among the tombs of St. Denis. He has been compared to Turenne;
both brave and generous, they were like fathers to the men fighting
under them; and when they were in want, Turenne sold his silver service
for the benefit of his troops, as Bertrand sold his lands; there is
some resemblance between these two characters, and the parallel might
truthfully be carried further. But in reviewing the history of the
Middle Ages, we find two heroes who much more strongly resemble Du
Guesclin--Tancred and Richard Cœur de Lion. Examine carefully these
three men, Tancred, Richard, and Du Guesclin, and you will find the
same courage, the same boldness, the same rashness, the same contempt
for danger, the same self-abnegation in victory; you will see three men
who, on the battle-field, kill men as easily as an autumn wind blows
down the leaves from the trees, and who, on their return to their tents,
are as mild and docile as children; for them there is no intoxication
in triumph, they show no pride in the hour of victory; their brows are
humble, and you would think them unconscious of their own greatness.
Bertrand du Guesclin swore ‘by God who suffered on the cross and rose
again the third day’; Tancred and Richard swore by the Holy Sepulchre,
and trusting in the justice of their cause, the three knights would rush
on the enemy with as much confidence as if God himself were speaking to
them and urging them on. Does not the disinterestedness of Du Guesclin
remind one of Tancred? How many knights were fed and paid by them--how
many times they took off their own cloaks to conceal the poverty of some
needy nobleman! Du Guesclin has all the characteristics of a hero of the
Crusades; he would figure worthily in the Christian _Iliad_ of the poet
of Sorrento.”[o]
The entire secret of Charles’ success was reliance on his people; and
perhaps the most valuable portion of this reliance was in the fact that
in the word “people” he included the whole population of France. This
great word was not limited, in his interpretation of it, to the taxpaying
inhabitants of the towns or free labourers on the farms. The very serfs
on the soil were fellow-countrymen of the great successor of St. Louis.
His laws had reference as often to the interests of the lowest of his
subjects as to the rights of the richest cities. He was the first and
the last to put arms into the hands of the whole nation. Each man had
his bow and quiver of arrows, his short sword or iron-pointed staff.
He was openly practised in the use of them, and was taught that it
was dishonourable for a Frenchman to be unable to defend his wife and
children with his own hands. The experiment was so successful against
even such generals as Chandos and the Black Prince, that it might be
expected to continue one of the standing institutions of the kingdom. But
these feelings of self-respect were only useful against a foreign enemy,
and might be dangerous against a domestic master. So, ere many years
elapsed, the system was abolished; the butts were destroyed, the bows
and swords withdrawn, for fear the “small people” should find themselves
too powerful; and the result was--as we shall see--Henry V of England
and the battle of Agincourt. It was not more in the formation of new
establishments that Charles showed his wisdom than in the purification
and improvement of the old. The legalism so strongly encouraged by
Philip the Fair, as a preservative against the power of the nobles, had
now become an oppression to the people. The civil servants of the crown
absorbed a vast portion of the taxes they were employed to raise, and
the paid offices about the provincial courts and local parliaments were
innumerable. He diminished them both in number and amount of salary, and
tried to save his subjects from the intricacies of technical pleadings,
as almost an equal evil with the violence of lawless force. The only
people, indeed, he could not bring within the rules of mercy and justice
were the lords and gentlemen, who were the ornaments of chivalry and the
strength of his armies. Feudalism, in fact, was dissolving, and chivalry,
which was its poetic ideal, could not stand the trial of actual war.
Knights were still mere gladiators--sometimes more for show than action;
and gentlemen, in our sense of the word, were not yet in existence.[n]
[Illustration]
FOOTNOTES
[24] [The continuator of Nangis[d] is responsible for this statement.]
[25] [The French left 11,000 dead on the field of battle. The English
loss was but 2,500, and they made prisoners of 13 counts, 1 archbishop,
70 barons, and 2,000 armed men, not counting persons of less importance.]
[26] [Maillart entered into communication with two leaders of the
dauphin’s party, Pépin des Essarts and John de Charny. All three with
their men “came properly armed, a little before midnight, to the porte
St. Denis, where they found the provost of the merchants with the keys
of the gate in his hand. Upon this, John Maillart said to him, calling
him by his name, ‘Étienne, what do you do here at this time of night?’
The provost replied, ‘John, why do you ask it? I am here to take care
of, and to guard the city, of which I have the government.’ ‘By God,’
answered John, ‘things shall not go on so: you are not here at this hour
for any good, which I will now show you,’ addressing himself to those
near him; ‘for see how he has got the keys of the gate in his hand, to
betray the city.’ The provost said, ‘John, you lie.’ John replied, ‘It is
you, Étienne, who lie’; and rushing on him, cried to his people, ‘Kill
them, kill them: now strike home, for they are all traitors.’ There was
a very great bustle; and the provost would gladly have escaped, but John
struck him such a blow with his axe on the head, that he felled him to
the ground, although he was his comrade, and never left him until he had
killed him. Six others, who were present, were also killed; the remainder
were carried to prison. They then put themselves in motion, and awakened
everyone in the different streets of Paris.”[g]]
[27] [According to Leber,[m] the king’s ransom would equal 247,500,000
modern francs; and he adds: “This sum, enormous as it is, cannot equal
the total of the single ransoms that went out of the country during this
reign.”]
[28] [This famous house consisted of but four dukes: Philip the Bold,
1363; John the Fearless, 1404; Philip the Good, 1419; and Charles the
Bold (_le téméraire_), 1467-1477.]
[29] [This story is related by Froissart[g], but, as Martin[b] says, “the
fact is more than doubtful.” Charles’ biographer, Christine de Pisan,[p]
is unable to give the cause of the king’s constitutional weakness.]
[Illustration]
CHAPTER VII. THE BETRAYAL OF THE KINGDOM
Fourteenth century France was the prey of Anarchy, of Civil
War, of Foreign Invasion. When one considers the unhappy reigns
of Philip of Valois and of John, the captivity of the king, the
occupation of France by the English, the insanity of Charles
VI, and the crimes of Isabella of Bavaria, one can explain why
two centuries separated the literary epoch of France from that
of Italy.--VILLEMAIN.[t]
[Sidenote: [1380-1422 A.D.]]
Charles V was but forty-three years of age when he died. His death was
a great misfortune for the country, for his eldest son was only twelve
years old, and intrusted to the care of his three uncles, the dukes of
Anjou, Burgundy, and Berri, grasping men, each solely preoccupied with
one subject--the first with the kingdom of Naples where Queen Joanna had
proclaimed him her successor, the second with the great fief of Flanders
which he would in time inherit, the third with his pleasures and his
wealth. The young king, who came to the throne as Charles VI, and who,
owing to his tender years, was quite at the mercy of his relatives, had,
on his mother’s side, a fourth uncle, the duke de Bourbon, an excellent
prince but wholly without influence; and a brother, the duke of Orleans.
During the late king’s last moments, his eldest brother, the duke of
Anjou, who by virtue of his title would assume the regency, kept himself
hidden in an adjacent chamber. Scarcely had Charles drawn his last breath
than the duke seized the crown jewels, and by threatening the treasurer,
Savoisy, with death, got hold of a number of gold and silver ingots
which had been sealed up in the walls of the castle of Melun by masons
who had immediately been got rid of. The year before, while governor
of Languedoc, he had caused an insurrection by his rapacious acts, and
in Montpellier alone condemned two hundred citizens to the stake, two
hundred to the gallows, two hundred to the block, eighteen hundred to the
loss of their property, and the rest of the town to a fine of 600,000
francs. The king modified these atrocious sentences and recalled the
duke. Unfortunately the power of regency belonged to this prince. His
brothers, like himself, filled their pockets; Burgundy allotted himself
the government of Normandy and Picardy; Berri, who had already had Berri,
Auvergne, and Poitou in appanage, took Languedoc and Aquitaine. Thus a
third of the realm became a field for his rapacity.
[Sidenote: [1380-1382 A.D.]]
A new reign always brings a moment of hope. The abolition of certain
taxes was demanded, and the duke promised to suppress all those which had
been instituted since Philip the Fair. He might as well have promised to
renounce the government of France; the regent did not know how to keep
his word. One day a mounted crier appeared in the public square, and
announced that the king’s silver plate had been stolen, promising a large
reward to whoever recovered it. When a crowd had gathered to discuss
the news, he cried that the next day a new tax would be levied on all
merchandise sold, and galloped away at full speed.
The next day, in truth, which was the first of March, 1382, tax-gatherers
appeared in the market-place and demanded a tax on a bit of cress which
had just been sold by an old woman. A furious riot at once broke out. The
rebels rushed to the Hôtel-de-Ville and the arsenal, and armed themselves
with new mallets that had been stored up there in view of an attack from
the English. These _maillotins_ were, for the moment, masters of the
situation; then, as in all popular riots of this time, fury gave way to
terror and discouragement. The princes, who took the matter in hand,
executed in secret the most seditious and imposed on others the most
ruinous fines, with the proceeds of which the duke of Anjou departed for
Italy. But the new tax was withdrawn and the leaders of the riot were
punished secretly. The Parisian rising had meantime spread to Rouen,
Rheims, Châlons, Troyes, and Orleans, where it formed the nucleus of two
other revolutionary movements--one in the north in Flanders, the other in
the south in Languedoc.
The duke of Berri had scarcely appeared in his province of Languedoc
when trouble broke out. The pope interfered and put an end to it, but
the pope could not stop the executions and cruelties of the governing
prince. The peasants despoiled of everything by the soldiers commenced a
sort of _jacquerie_ (peasant revolt). They took refuge in the mountains,
especially on the slopes of the Cévennes and thence, organised into armed
bands, rushed down upon the nobles and wealthy inhabitants, giving no
quarter to those whose hands were not callous with toil. They were called
the _tuchins_. Affairs in Flanders were still more serious.
WAR IN FLANDERS: BATTLE OF ROOSEBEKE (1382 A.D.)
The Flemings had rebelled, in the preceding reign, against their French
count who amused himself with violating the municipal franchises of
the country. Peter Dubois and Philip van Artevelde, son of the famous
brewer, had led with success the insurrection of the “chaperons
blancs” (white-caps), and at the battle of Bruges (May 3rd, 1382) had
overturned the last hopes of Count Louis. Philip van Artevelde pushed the
insurrection with the same boldness and in the same manner as his father.
Plenipotentiaries from Ghent, Ypres, and Bruges were sent to Richard
II of England, offering to recognise him as king of France if he would
come to their aid. For a quarter of a century the breath of revolt had
been blowing over the middle classes throughout Europe--the enterprise
of Rienzi at Rome, Wat Tyler in England, then Étienne Marcel and now
the “Jacques,” the “maillotins,” the “tuchins,” and the “white-caps”!
Insurrection, smothered in one place, broke out afresh in another, and it
was to be feared, as Froissart[c] says, “that all nobility and refinement
would be dead and lost in France as well as in many other countries.”
[Sidenote: [1382-1383 A.D.]]
One day while the dukes of Burgundy and Berri were discussing together
the dangers of the situation and the necessity for intervention in
Flanders, and of striking at the roots of the spirit of revolt and
liberty, the young king entered, with a hawk on his fist. “Well, my
dear uncles,” said he, “and what are you talking about in such solemn
council?” “Ah, monseigneur,” replied Berri, “here is my brother of
Burgundy who complains of the people in Flanders where the wretches have
turned their lord and nobles out of their heritage. They have a leader
who calls himself Artevelde, a true Englishman for courage, who has
besieged a crowd of nobles in Oudenarde, and swears he will never leave
and will have his will with those in the town unless your power relieve
them.” “By my faith,” rejoined the king, “I have a great desire to help
them. For God’s sake, let us go there. I want nothing more than to arm
myself, for I have never yet been armed, and if I wish to reign with
power and honour, must I not learn the use of arms?” And he was anxious
to set out that day or the next.
A great army was soon ready. At its approach all the Flemish towns made
submission and the people of Ghent had now no resource but to win a
great battle by throwing themselves upon the enemy with the impetuosity
of the boar, as they had done at Bruges and as they now tried to do at
Roosebeke, November 27th, 1382. They were tied one to the other, so as to
make it impossible to retreat, and advanced in a single battalion. This
manœuvre had been successful at Bruges against a much smaller number.
But this time the wings of the great French army folded upon them, and,
assailed on its side, the battalion was helpless. The lances of the
cavalry carried much farther than the short Flemish spears, and the
latter could not reach the enemy which was attacking them. Disorder soon
reigned supreme in the little cohort surrounded on all sides.
“The men-at-arms,” says Froissart,[c] “knocked down the Flemings with all
their might. They had well-sharpened battle-axes, with which they cut
through helmets and disbrained heads; others gave such blows with leaden
maces that nothing could withstand them. Scarcely were the Flemings
overthrown when pillagers advanced, who, mixing with the men-at-arms,
made use of the large knives they carried, and finished slaying whoever
fell into their hands, without more mercy than if they had been so many
dogs. There was a large and high mound of the Flemings who were slain;
and never was there so little blood spilt at so great a battle where
such numbers were killed.” Twenty-six thousand dead remained upon the
field and among them the whole battalion of Ghent, including Artevelde.
Flanders was not laid low by this defeat, for Ghent held out for two
years more. But the nobles had avenged the shame of their defeat at
Courtrai; and to efface even the memory of it, on leaving the town which
had lodged them for a fortnight but where they had found, hanging in the
churches, the golden spurs of the knights killed in 1302, they gave it to
the flames after ransacking it. On his own account the duke of Burgundy
took down from the cathedral a magnificent clock with figures which he
removed to Dijon and set up in the south transept of the church of Notre
Dame. It is still there.
INSURRECTIONS IN PARIS AND ROUEN
The Paris riots, quite as much as the rising at Ghent, had been put down
at Roosebeke. The Parisians realised that nothing more would be tolerated
from them, but hoped nevertheless by showing their strength that nothing
would be attempted. So they set out to meet the king to the number of
twenty thousand armed men, who drew up in line of battle beneath the
heights of Montmartre. At this sight the nobles said to themselves: “Look
at the fine rabble and its insolence. Why didn’t they come with our army
to serve the king in Flanders? They kept well out of it, and instead
of ringing the bells to celebrate our victories, they dare to show
themselves in arms before their lord.”
Heralds came forward who asked the Parisians: “Where are your leaders?
Which of you are captains?” The Parisians replied, “We have none other
than the king and his nobles.” The heralds then demanded whether the
constable and four barons would be allowed to enter in safety. “Ah, you
laugh at us,” returned the Parisians; “go, tell them that we are ready
to receive their commands.” The constable then confronted them. “Well,
men of Paris,” he said, “who has made you come out thus from the city?
You look as though you would fight your lord the king.” “My lord,” they
replied, “we have no such wish and we never had; we only wish to show
the king the power of his fair city of Paris. He is very young and does
not know what we could do for him should he ever need us.” “Well said,”
retorted the constable, “but the king for this once does not wish to see
you thus. If you would that he enters your city, go back to your homes
and lay aside your arms.” They obeyed (1383).
[Illustration: CHARLES VI
(From an old French print)]
The next day the king arrived. The gates were all wide open; but he
wished to enter through a breach and had a section knocked out. Then he
made his way through the streets, helmeted, lance in hand, with the most
terrible air his young person could assume. Executions began at once;
first those of the city’s liberties. They took away its franchises, its
elective magistrates, provost, aldermen, clerk, syndic, centurions, and
tithing-men; they suppressed the people’s masterships, corporations,
and brotherhoods; they deprived them of their arms and of the chains
that made the streets safe. Then followed executions of persons; they
arrested, made summary investigation, and finished by killing. Three
hundred of the richest bourgeoisie were drowned, hanged, or decapitated
with scarcely a form of trial. Noteworthy were the deaths of Nicholas
le Flamand, one of those who followed Étienne Marcel the day of the
slaying of the two marshals, twenty-six years before, and of John
Desmarets, _avocat-général_ in the parliament, one of the negotiators
of the Peace of Bretigny, and who was worn out in vain efforts between
the two parties. His trial was iniquitous and his death touching. “When
Desmarets,” says the monk of St. Denis,[d] “arrived at the place of
execution, ‘Ask mercy of the king, Master John,’ the people cried, ‘that
he may forgive your crimes.’ The old man turned to them and replied,
‘Loyally and well did I serve King Philip his great-grandfather, King
John, and King Charles, his father; never had these kings anything to
reproach me with; and this one would reproach me neither, had he the age
and knowledge of a grown man. I do not believe him responsible in the
least for this judgment. I have done nothing to ask mercy of him. It is
God alone from whom I must ask it and I pray him to pardon my sins.’”
[Sidenote: [1383-1388 A.D.]]
The bourgeoisie were brought together and read a long list of their
misdeeds, with the punishments they deserved. At the moment when terror
was at its height the two uncles of the king threw themselves at his feet
and begged for pity. He let himself be influenced, and announced through
his chancellor that he would change the punishments into fines. “This
was,” says Mézeray,[e] “the true reason for this _coup de théâtre_!”
Paris did not get off on less than 400,000 francs, worth to-day about
20,000,000; at Rouen, Rheims, Troyes, Châlons, Orleans, Sens, in Auvergne
and Languedoc, the same proceedings took place, especially the enormous
fines. “And this all went,” says Froissart,[c] “to the profit of the
duke of Berri and the duke of Burgundy, for the young king was in their
power!” This blow fell upon the bourgeoisie more disastrously than that
of 1359, because the government was then in the hands of an intelligent
man who checked the feudal reaction; in 1383 the princes gave themselves
a free hand. The upper middle class was decimated and ruined; and when,
after thirty years, public grievances caused them to essay another
revolution, they were in no condition to assume its control and left it
to violent men, who drenched Paris with blood.
In 1384 the count of Flanders died and the duke of Burgundy, his
son-in-law, inherited his vast dominions. In 1369 Charles V, in order
to facilitate the marriage of his brother the duke of Burgundy with
the heiress of the county of Flanders, had abandoned French Flanders
to him. But at the same time the king exacted an agreement from his
brother, that the donation would be restored on the death of the latter’s
father-in-law, Louis de Mâle. But the count of Flanders survived the
king, and Philip the Bold easily obtained from Charles VI the remission
of his promise. Henceforth the house of Burgundy will turn all its
affection towards these rich provinces, and as it finds means for
aggrandisement in this direction at the expense of the petty German
princes, it will forget little by little both the stock from which it
came, and the France which began its greatness.
The following year was employed in immense preparations for an invasion
of England. They collected, says Froissart, enough ships to make a bridge
from Calais to Dover; there were fourteen hundred of them. They built a
whole town of wood, which could be taken apart, piece by piece, in order
to take an entrenched camp with them. But they let the proper moment for
crossing over pass, and the project had to be given up, but not until
enormous sums had been squandered. Another expedition against the duke
of Gelderland who, for the price of a pension of £400 from England, bade
defiance to the king of France, cost still more, and came to nothing
(1388).
THE KING ASSUMES THE RULE (1388 A.D.)
The voice of public opinion was still very feeble, but it could be
heard. On the return from the sad war in Germany, the king called a
general council in the hall of the palace of the archbishop of Rheims,
and demanded of those present, in virtue of the obedience they owed
him, their advice on the conduct of public affairs. Peter de Montaigu,
cardinal of Laon, took the floor, and praising the king’s good qualities,
exhorted him to begin the exercise of his absolute power by taking under
his own control and direction the ministry of war and his own household,
taking counsel from no one. Others supported the cardinal’s advice;
Charles declared himself determined to follow it and thanked his uncles
for the good offices they had rendered him. The king had scarcely left
Rheims when the cardinal of Laon died by poison.
[Sidenote: [1388-1389 A.D.]]
The former counsellors of Charles V, the “small fry,” the _marmousets_
as the great lords dubbed them in disdain, Olivier de Clisson, Bureau de
la Rivière, Le Bègue de Vilaines, John de Novian, and John de Montaigu,
reassumed, as ministers of state, the direction of affairs. The new
administration was wise and economical, and stood for internal order and
foreign peace, but through it the king only became the more prodigal;
having no longer the pleasures and distractions of war, those of the
fête and tourney became necessary to him, and these diversions now never
ceased.[b]
Prodigious sums were needed for the “incomparable” fêtes in which Charles
VI gloried, and which attracted to Paris the flower of the knights and
noble ladies of all Christendom. This vast concourse of strangers,
the stir, the joyful tumult, the dazzling shows intoxicated the young
nobility and even the people of Paris; the Parisians had their share of
the rain of gold and recovered in one way what was taken from them in
another. In the first days of May, 1389, the most magnificent tournament
which had ever been seen was held at St. Denis on the occasion of the
knighting of the two sons of the late duke Louis of Anjou, the eldest of
whom, Louis II, duke of Anjou and count of Provence, was preparing to
set out to assert his claims to the kingdom of Naples against the heir
of Charles of Durazzo. Charles VI had endeavoured to realise the most
brilliant descriptions of the romances and to present to the feudal world
a complete type of chivalric splendours. The ceremonial of initiation
to the “holy order of chivalry,” which had almost fallen into disuse
since the adoption of the custom of conferring the order on the field of
battle, was reproduced with scrupulous exactness.
In a neighbouring field the lists had been prepared, surrounded with
wooden galleries for the ladies; and in the great court of the abbey
a banquet hall had been constructed 192 feet long by 36 wide and hung
throughout with tapestries of silk and gold. The first day of the
tournament twenty-two knights in green and gold armour were conducted
into the lists to the sound of music, by twenty-two fair ladies similarly
attired and mounted on elegant palfreys; each gave her knight a ribbon of
her own colours. The contests lasted all day; then the company proceeded
from the enclosure to the festival hall and after the supper the ladies
awarded the prize to the two who had done the best. The rest of the
night was passed in dances and _caroles_[30] and in “pastimes” of a less
innocent kind. The fête lasted three days and three nights--nights of
orgy and delirium which rendered the venerable cloisters of St. Denis
the witnesses of many voluptuous mysteries and which must have strangely
scandalised the chaste shade of St. Louis in the depths of its tomb.
The jousts and balls were succeeded by a ceremony of a sterner character
but equally sumptuous: the young king loved to vary his emotions and his
shows. He had been seized with “a great love” for the memory of Bertrand
du Guesclin, a feeling which was shared by the whole nation: although
nine years had passed since the death of that great captain, and though
Charles V had honoured him with a splendid funeral, Charles VI insisted
on recelebrating the obsequies of Messire Bertrand in presence of all the
French and foreign nobility whom the tournament had brought together.
The fêtes of St. Denis had not satiated Charles VI; he remembered that
the queen his wife had not yet been crowned: this was a fine occasion to
indulge in fresh magnificences. He resolved to have Isabella anointed at
Paris, and to compensate himself for the paucity of ceremonial which had
been accorded to the queen’s first entry into the capital. He notified
his intention “to those of Paris,” in order that they might be prepared,
and charged the old queen, Blanche of Navarre, widow of Philip of Valois,
to arrange the ceremony. Accordingly Blanche ordered the _Chronicles of
St. Denis_ to be examined for everything which they reported concerning
the anointing of queens in olden times. Froissart[c] and the monk of
St. Denis[d] have vied with one another in describing the queen’s
procession which arrived before St. Denis the 22nd of August, 1389,
with all the princesses, some in painted and gilded litters, others on
palfreys marvellously caparisoned. The king’s uncles, who sought every
opportunity to approach the supreme power, had presented themselves at
court with their families; the dukes and all the great nobles escorted
the litters which entered Paris to the sound of a thousand instruments
and between two rows of horsemen clad, some in scarlet silk, others
in green silk: they were on the one side the members of the king’s
household, on the other twelve hundred citizens of Paris led by the
provost of the merchants. Across the whole of the rue St. Denis and the
Grand Font (the Pont au Change) were hung draperies of silk, camlet, and
cendal (taffetas), which “shut out the sky”; all the houses were hung
with silks and tapestries of a high warp and the windows were crowded
with women adorned with dresses of brilliant materials and with gold
necklaces. Fountains of milk and perfumed wine flowed at the street
corners, and beautiful young girls offered the passers-by to drink from
golden goblets. At the Porte St. Denis, at the _moûtier_ (monastery)
of the Trinity, at the second Porte St. Denis or Painters’ Gate (Porte
aux Peintres), at the church of St. Jacques de l’Hôpital, at the Grand
Châtelet, platforms, wooden castles, and richly ornamented theatres had
been erected; one represented God in his paradise and the starry heavens
filled with angels who sang “very melodiously” and congratulated in rhyme
“the lady enclosed amongst _fleurs-de-lis_”; another “showed” the king of
France and his twelve peers, King Richard Cœur de Lion, and King Saladin
with his Saracens. A rope had been stretched from one of the towers of
Notre Dame to the Pont au Change: as the queen passed the bridge a man
dressed as an angel, seated on this rope, descended from the towers of
Notre Dame, passed through an opening in the awning which covered the
bridge, placed “a beautiful wreath” on the queen’s head, and “was drawn
up again through the said opening as if he were returning to heaven.”
The procession presented itself before Notre Dame, whence it returned
to the Palais, and the next day the queen was anointed and crowned in
the Sainte-Chapelle, by the archbishop of Rouen. The descriptions of the
banquets which took place at the “marble table” in the great hall of
the Palais, and of the jousts at the Hôtel St. Pol are to be found in
Froissart.[c] The king had adopted a golden sun with rays as his device:
he was one of the victors in the jousts. The rich presents of the city of
Paris to the queen and the duchess of Touraine, the king’s sister-in-law,
contributed to pay for the gaiety of the court; the Parisians offered the
princesses gold and silver plate to the value of sixty thousand crowns:
they doubtless calculated on being repaid for this munificence by a large
diminution of the taxes; but their expectation was cruelly deceived. The
king left Paris a few days later, and as a farewell to his people left an
increase of the gabelle and an ordinance which prohibited, under pain of
death, the use of silver coins of twelve and four deniers which had been
in circulation since the reign of the late king.[f]
HATRED OF THE NOBLES FOR THE MINISTRY (1389-1392 A.D.)
[Sidenote: [1389-1392 A.D.]]
The ministry attempted to combat this state of affairs or at least to
extenuate its disastrous effects. It economised in state expenditure to
make up for the king’s extravagance, and the state was the gainer by the
arrangement.
[Illustration: COSTUME IN THE REIGN OF CHARLES VI]
The ministers gave Paris back its provost and conferred upon the
bourgeoisie the right to acquire fiefs, as though they were nobles, and
deprived the duke of Berri of his government in Languedoc, where four
hundred thousand inhabitants had fled into Aragon. Not being able to
inflict further punishment on Berri, they caused his treasurer Bétisac
to be put to death. This Bétisac had merited the hate of all by his
exactions. But they did not dare condemn him as an embezzler, since the
duke of Berri had authorised all his acts and it was on the duke himself
that the complaints of the people should have fallen. So they laid a trap
for Bétisac, by advising him to declare heretical opinions, for which he
would be summoned to ecclesiastical jurisdiction which would exculpate
him. The accused man followed this advice and they burned him for a
heretic instead of hanging him for a thief.
The “small fry” ruled the kingdom for four years. Four years in which
the king’s uncles and the great nobles had to keep their hands off the
management of affairs, and longed for an opportunity to get back into
power. Finally an Angevin nobleman, Peter de Craon, mortal enemy of the
leader of the marmousets, the constable Olivier de Clisson, placed his
personal hatred at the service of the aristocracy’s political resentment.
On June 13th, 1392, at the close of a fête given at the Hôtel St. Pol,
the constable lingered a little to take leave of the king and the duke
of Orleans, and then with eight attendants, two carrying torches, made
his way towards the rue Ste. Catherine. Here Peter de Craon was waiting
for him, with forty mounted brigands, scarcely a half dozen of whom knew
what was expected of them. When Clisson appeared, Craon’s men threw
themselves on his attendants and extinguished their torches. Clisson
at first thought it a joke of the duke of Orleans, whom he supposed to
have followed him. “My lord,” he said, “you are young, we must pardon
you. These are the pranks of youth.” But Peter de Craon cried, “Die,
die, Clisson; here you shall die.” “Who art thou,” asked Clisson, “who
speakest such words?” “I am Peter de Craon, your enemy. You have many
times provoked me, and shall here pay for it. Forward,” he called to
his men, “I have him whom I wanted and will have.” The constable tried
to defend himself but was soon wounded and thrown from his horse. In
falling, his head came against the unlatched door of a bake-shop, which
gave way. This saved him. The assassins thought him dead; they had,
moreover, recognised the constable, and fearful of having attacked so
powerful a personage, they fled with Craon to his castle of Sablé in
Maine.
The news of the outrage was brought to the king as he was preparing for
bed. He called his guard, had torches lighted and went to the bake-shop
where Clisson was beginning to recover consciousness. “Constable,”
said the king, “how do you feel?” “Weak and poorly, sire.” “And who
brought you to this pass?” “Peter de Craon, sire, and his accomplices,
treacherously and with no warning.” “Constable, nothing will be paid more
dearly or amends made for than this thing.”
Peter de Craon, who no longer felt himself safe in the castle of Sablé,
sought refuge with the duke of Burgundy, who, called upon to deliver
up the rascal, caused him to be hid and replied that he knew nothing
whatever of him. Charles immediately collected an army, swearing to take
no rest until he had punished this rebellion. The dukes of Burgundy and
Berri endeavoured to block this enterprise. Their hatred towards Clisson
had grown since they learned he possessed great wealth. The constable,
believing himself about to die, had made his will, and besides his fiefs
and heritage he had disposed of 1,700,000 francs’ worth of personal
property. But the king paid no heed to the delays and bad will of his
uncles and to the fears which his physicians expressed for his health. He
led his army as far as Le Mans.
THE KING GOES MAD: THE PRINCES RETURN TO POWER (1392 A.D.)
It was the middle of summer, during the prolonged August heat. As the
king was crossing the forest, a man dressed all in white seized his
bridle and cried, “Stop, noble king, go no further, thou art betrayed.”
This sudden apparition startled the king greatly; a little farther on the
page who carried the royal lance nodded in the saddle. The lance fell
and struck a shield a resounding blow. At the sound of arms the king
trembled, drew his sword and cried, “Quick, quick, upon the traitors!”
He thrust his naked sword at his brother the duke of Orleans, who barely
avoided it. One of his knights finally had to seize him from behind. They
disarmed him. He no longer knew anyone.
The king was mad. Some said it was sorcery, but the king himself was to
blame. Possessor at twelve years of age of that unlimited power which is
often the undoing of the strongest characters, he was at twenty-four worn
out with every pleasure and emotion in the range of human experience from
debauch to battle-field. His constitution was ruined, his mind shaken; a
violent shock had deranged everything.
When it was hinted that the king was the victim of poison or sorcery,
“No,” exclaimed the duke of Berri, “he is neither poisoned nor bewitched,
except by bad advice.” These words sealed the fate of the marmousets. A
few days later Clisson demanded of the duke of Burgundy the pay of the
knights who had accompanied the king on his last expedition. The duke
looked him through and through, and said, “Clisson, you need not trouble
yourself about the affairs of the kingdom, for without your help it
will be well governed. It was an evil day for the realm when you first
meddled with it. How the devil have you got so much money, that you were
recently able to will away 1,700,000 francs? Neither his majesty, my
brother Berri, nor I with all our present power have been able to acquire
so much. Leave my presence and let me never see you again, for were it
not for my honour I would put your other eye out.” Clisson hastened to
the safety of his castle in Brittany, while parliament declared him
guilty of extortion, and banished him from the country, imposing a fine
of 100,000 silver marks. The sire de Montaigu, warned by this experience,
sought refuge at Avignon. Bureau de la Rivière, the sire de Novian, and
Le Bègue de Vilaines were arrested and imprisoned in the Château St.
Antoine (the Bastille).
[Sidenote: [1392-1396 A.D.]]
The king’s uncles came again into full possession of the government: what
would they do? They signed a twenty-eight years’ truce with England in
1395 and gave King Richard II the infant princess Isabella, Charles VI’s
daughter, in marriage. But four years later (1399) the English deposed
and afterwards, it is said, strangled their king, and this valuable
alliance was broken.[b]
The signing of the truce of 1395 was a real assurance of peace in France,
even in Brittany, where Clisson, banished to his fiefs, had armed his
vassals at once and attacked John de Montfort. But the duke of Burgundy
appeared in person at Ancenis, mediated between the two parties, and made
them in January, 1395, sign a reciprocal promise to lay down their arms.
Shortly after this John IV attended the meeting of Charles VI and Richard
II at Guines (where the truce was arranged) and obtained from the English
the restitution of Brest which had only been pledged to them.
With peace thus restored France was now able to occupy herself more
particularly with the great questions then agitating all Europe: that
of the papal schism of which all Christendom was longing for the end,
and that of the crusade--or rather the barrier which it was felt must
be raised against the conquests of the Ottoman Turks in the European
provinces of the Greek empire.[g]
Forty years before the Ottoman Turks had crossed the Bosporus, taken
Adrianople and a portion of the Danube valley. Now they were threatening
Hungary. A crusade was therefore resolved upon, and put under the
direction of a young man of twenty-four, John, count of Nevers, who
later became the famous duke of Burgundy (John the Fearless). Young and
old, equally short-sighted, gaily descended the Danube, taking the whole
matter as a pleasure excursion. When they arrived at Nicopolis, King
Sigismund of Hungary advised them to meet the advance troops of the enemy
with his Hungarian foot-soldiers and light cavalry, and to reserve the
knights for the real Ottoman army which would appear afterwards. But no
one was willing to forego the honour of striking the first blow. So all
opposed themselves to the advance-guard, threw themselves upon the first
enemy who appeared, and arrived exhausted and in disorder at the top of
a hill where they were received by the redoubtable janissaries which
Amura had just organised, and who made short work of the breathless,
disordered troops. It was said that Bajazet put ten thousand captives[31]
to death in his own presence, saving only from the massacre the count of
Nevers and twenty-four nobles whom he ransomed (1396).[b] Consternation
was universal throughout France, especially in Burgundy. Duke Philip
strangely abused the obligations of feudalism which compelled vassals
to ransom a captive lord or his son and raised as much from his vassals
as from the royal treasury, more than double the 200,000 ducats which
Bajazet demanded for the freedom of his captives.[f]
DOMESTIC TROUBLES AND SCANDALS
[Sidenote: [1396-1407 A.D.]]
The government of the aristocracy was not fortunate: its acts were
discrediting it abroad; its quarrels were weakening it at home.
Isabella of Bavaria was but fifteen years old when she came from Germany
to wed Charles VI. Without parents, without a guide in the midst of a
corrupted court, she learned its morals quicker than she learned its
tongue, and she lived solely for luxury and pleasure. Years did not
render her conduct more circumspect, or her thoughts more serious. From
pleasure she descended to debauchery. Charged after the king’s affliction
with the keeping of his person, she used the authority obtained through
the melancholy situation of her husband to satisfy her passions, her
vices, and her vengeances. It will soon be seen how fatal this foreign
queen was to France.
The duke of Burgundy, Philip the Bold, kept the sovereign authority until
his death in 1404. His son, John the Fearless, wished to receive, with
his heritage, his father’s influence in the government, but the duke of
Orleans, the king’s brother, all powerful with the queen--master, through
her, of the king and the dauphin; chief of the nobility, and brilliant
knight himself--had no intention of renouncing the power to anyone. So
there soon sprang up, between John the Fearless and Orleans, a rivalry
that threatened to become civil war right in the midst of Paris. Each
collected his arms and fortified his palace; they were about to fight
when the aged duke of Berri interposed. He brought Burgundy to the
bedside of Orleans who was lying ill and made the two men embrace and
talk and take food together. This reconciliation took place November the
20th, 1407; on the 23rd Louis of Orleans fell, assassinated by John the
Fearless.
For more than four months, the duke had been planning this murder. He had
bought, in the city, a house for the ostensible purpose of storing wine,
corn, and other provisions, but really concealed in it seventeen hired
assassins. This house, situated in the rue Vieille du Temple, near the
Porte Barbette, lay in the path of the duke of Orleans while returning
from the king’s residence to his own palace. Wednesday, the 23rd of
November, at eight in the evening, the duke of Orleans left the Hôtel
Montaigu on muleback. The night was very dark, and he was accompanied
only by two equerries mounted on one horse and four foot attendants
carrying torches. Although it was not late, all the shops were closed.
The duke, keeping a little behind his people, was singing softly to
himself and toying with his glove when suddenly the assassins, concealed
by the corner of a house, rushed upon him crying, “Die! Die!”
“I am the duke of Orleans,” the duke shouted. “Then we want you,” they
replied, striking him. A page tried to cover the prince with his body
and was killed. A woman who witnessed the affair from a window screamed
murder. One of the assassins called to her, “Shut up, wretch.” Then by
the light of the torches she saw come out of the duke of Burgundy’s
recently bought house, a large man with a red hat over his eyes, who,
with a lantern, looked to see that there had been no slip as in the case
of the constable De Clisson. But this time the murderers had well earned
their wage. The body was literally hacked to pieces; the right arm was
cut in two, the severed left wrist was thrown to one side, the skull
split from ear to ear, and the brains scattered on the pavement. At this
the man in the red hat said to the others, “Put out your lights and let
us go, he is dead.” They put their torches back into the house they had
occupied, strewed caltrops behind them to prevent pursuit, and retired to
the Hôtel d’Artois in the rue Mauconseil.
[Sidenote: [1407-1409 A.D.]]
The next day John the Fearless went, like all the princes, to see
the corpse, and sprinkled it with holy water, at the church of the
Blancs-Manteaux. “Never,” he said, at sight of the dead, “has so foul a
murder been committed in this realm.” He wept at the funeral and held a
corner of the pall. Some days later, however, when the provost of Paris
announced in the council that he would make every effort to find the
assassins if they would give him permission to search the palaces of the
princes, John the Fearless became confused and grew pale. Then it was
he drew aside the duke of Berri and the king of Sicily, “I did it,” he
whispered, “the devil tempted me.” This state of mind soon passed, and
the duke of Burgundy resolved to admit and justify his crime. In fact
the next day he boldly appeared at the council of the princes, but his
uncle Berri met him at the door and said, “My good nephew, don’t come in
this time. I don’t want you here.” The thought came to the guilty man
that perhaps they were going to arrest him, and he fled at once to his
possessions in Flanders. From there he proclaimed, preached, and wrote to
the world that he had but forestalled an ambush of the duke of Orleans. A
Franciscan monk, the learned John Petit, was the following year charged
with the proof in twelve arguments, in honour of the twelve Apostles,
that if the duke was killed it was for the glory of God, since he was a
heretic; for the good of the king, since he wished to usurp the throne,
and for the public welfare, since the state was rid of a tyrant.
To this strange apology for the murder, from the pen of a monk, Burgundy
added a bloody victory.[b] An insurrection of the people of Liège against
their bishop, a creature of the duke, called the latter from Paris. His
influence had caused John, a younger brother of the house of Bavaria, to
be elected bishop; John took deacon’s orders to entitle him to assume
the episcopal sovereignty, but he refused to be priested, preferring the
helmet to the mitre. The Liègeois were discontented at having a profane
knight in lieu of a bishop; they entreated and petitioned John to take
upon him the sacerdotal character. He laughed at them. They rebelled and
drove him out. Such was the crime of the Liègeois. The duke of Burgundy
marched against them; a battle was fought at Hasbain, in which the
burgesses of Liège were as unfortunate as those of Ghent had been at
Roosebeke. It is said that twenty-six thousand dead were counted on the
field of battle.[h]
This was the best argument in Burgundy’s defence; he returned to Paris
promising the people an immediate abolition of taxes, and extracted from
the king a letter of forgiveness, in which Charles VI declared that he
cherished no resentment towards the author of his brother’s death (Peace
of Chartres, March, 1409).
The duchess of Orleans, the beautiful and gentle Valentine Visconti, was
at least spared this last shame. The death of her husband killed her. She
had taken for her motto, “_Rien ne m’est plus; plus ne m’est rien_,” and
“died in 1408” [says Juvénal des Ursins[i]] “in anger and grief.”
The duke of Orleans was not worth much regret. His administration had
been as deplorable as his morals. He had declared war on England, and
had not carried it out, and had used this pretext for an increase of
taxes which he himself had appropriated. Burgundy had bitterly opposed
this new burden, and to appease the people, and especially to lay his
own hand on the rich spoil, he now sent the superintendent of finances
to the scaffold (1408). Then he restored the Parisians their ancient
free constitution, the rights to elect their provost and to organise a
citizen militia under elective leaders, and even to hold noble fiefs with
the privileges thereto attached. Besides this he was extremely popular,
which state of affairs he increased by showing citizens, even the least
important, such consideration as they had never before known. These were
the market people who formed, in Paris, the strength of the Burgundian
party. Feudalism never forgave John the Fearless for having sought
such support, no more than it did for having compromised seignorial
inviolability by slaying a prince of the blood, the king’s brother. A
considerable faction of the nobility turned against him. The avengers of
Orleans ranged themselves under the banner of the father-in-law of one
of his sons, the count d’Armagnac, who gave the party its name (1410).
Thus, with the king mad, the queen ignored and incapable, the dauphin
threatened by his excesses with his father’s end, the first prince of
the blood stained with an infamous murder, there was no government--only
armed factions, and war at home and abroad. Such was the state of France;
nothing but disaster could come of it.
CIVIL WAR
[Illustration: SHIELD USED IN THE FIRST PART OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY]
From 1410 to 1412 the two factions attacked each other twice, and twice
came to a settlement (Peace of Bicêtre, November, 1410; Peace of Bourges,
July, 1412). Both sides made advances to the English to win over the
country’s enemy.[b] The Gascon soldiers, preferring a plundering life in
the midst of France to their own rude and poor homes, were constant to
their banners. The duke of Burgundy, on the other hand, could not get
his Flemings to quit their families and crafts for more than forty days;
he was therefore obliged to call in the English. Henry IV sent a body of
archers to his aid, with whom he drove his enemies from the north of the
capital (February, 1410). In May we find Henry in league with the Orleans
party, who were to restore to the English, in recompense, all their
ancient possessions in France. The emissary who bore this treaty was
seized at Boulogne; its contents were made public, and great odium was in
consequence excited against the Armagnacs. The hapless monarch, Charles,
recovering for a moment from his frenzy, joined in this indignation; he
called an army, displayed the oriflamme, and marched with the Burgundians
to besiege Bourges. The campaign, as usual, ended without an action, in
a kind of treaty. Both parties felt the thirst of pillage and of blood;
both wanted the courage to decide their differences in a general combat.
No period of history manifests such an utter want of talent; no prowess
was shown except in tournaments; no statesmanship save in the planning
of a murder. Although the passions of men possessed of power and means
were excited to the utmost, yet not a decisive blow was struck in policy
or in arms. The fortune of the struggling parties was left to events--to
chance. Success and reverse, the former at least, if not both, unearned,
alternately ensued; conquerors and conquered pursued and fled, rolling
like destructive waves over the necks of a prostrate and ruined people.
Civil wars in general, destructive as they are of peace and prosperity,
beget at least the virtue of courage; yet it was not so in France. The
peasantry were crushed and trodden down; the nobles and knights feared
to trust them with arms. The Bretons and the Gascons, natives of distant
provinces, were the only foot-soldiers, the sole infantry of France at
this time; and a handful of English sufficed in these quarrels to give
the advantage to either party.[h]
[Sidenote: [1410-1413 A.D.]]
In this condition of affairs there was much to recall the worst days
of king John, and to better them the bourgeoisie took the initiative,
parliament, as in 1356, holding back. The University of Paris was very
proud of having recently accomplished the deposition of two anti-popes,
the election of Alexander V, a former doctor of the Sorbonne, and the
convocation of a general council for the consideration of reforms within
the church; and the bourgeoisie thought it could pacify the state as
it hoped to have pacified Christianity. It obtained from Charles VI,
in one of his lucid moments, a decree ordering all the princes back to
their provinces and forbidding them to leave. But in a few months the
war recommenced. The Armagnacs committed a thousand atrocities, telling
their victims to seek vengeance from the “poor mad king.” The body of
citizens asked, in the king’s council, that the defence of Paris might
be committed to a friend of Burgundy’s, the count of Saint-Pol, and the
latter, not very sure of the upper middle classes, wished to overcome
them by means of the populace. He took refuge in the great and rich
corporation of the butchers which he authorised to raise five hundred men
for the municipal defence. The butchers armed their servants and all the
men employed about the slaughter-houses. This violent mob, accustomed to
the sight of blood and killing, and who made a slaughterer named Caboche
their chief, let themselves be led for a time by their masters and the
learned men of the University of Paris. Then Paris presented the most
singular and terrible spectacle. One day the mob presented itself at the
dauphin’s palace, forced him to appear on a balcony and through their
spokesman, the old surgeon, John de Troyes, made him listen to their
demands. He must send away his evil companions; lead a more regular life
in every way; and take care of his health, and of his soul. The butchers
charged themselves with superintending this change of morals which would
bring with it, according to their ideas, the reformation of the kingdom.
They set a watch around the Hôtel St. Pol for the safety of the king
and monseigneur the duke of Guienne, and if they heard the sound of
instruments and dancing in the night they entered boldly to put a stop to
it, and preserve decency and order. But these rough and violent natures
were not always content with words. If they had compassion on “that good
fellow, the dauphin,” they broke out against those who were corrupting
him and removed them violently from the palace and dragged them before
the parliament for justice, even sometimes administering it on the way to
those who had displeased them the most.
However, the able members of the party drew up, for the repression of
abuses, the ordinance of 1413, known as the Cabochian ordinance, whose
application would have been successful, if in making elections universal
it had not made its administration impossible (May 25th). “But,” says
Augustin Thierry, “men were found to conceive that great reform charter,
joint work of the citizens and the university, while none could be found
to execute and maintain it. Wise men and those accustomed to affairs
had at this time neither will power nor political energy. They kept
themselves apart, and all action rested upon fanatics and the unruly
who precipitated, through their intolerable excesses, a reaction which
brought about their fall and put a stop to all reform.”
[Sidenote: [1413-1415 A.D.]]
What the bourgeoisie respected, the mob outraged. It proscribed not
only vice and immorality, but wealth, and mingled pillage and murder
with its reforms; it disgraced finally those who had employed it and
who, blushing at the association, now preferred the Armagnacs to the
Cabochians. Called upon by all men of moderation the Armagnacs put a stop
to the mob’s excesses, but at the same time overthrew the reform measures
of the bourgeoisie (September 5th, 1413). John the Fearless fled again
to his Flemish provinces.[b] Charles VI marched in person against him
at the head of the Armagnacs, besieged and took Soissons, of which the
inhabitants of every age and sex were inhumanly massacred. Arras was next
invested,[32] but the Armagnacs becoming disgusted at the tediousness
of the siege, as the Burgundians had been the previous year at that of
Bourges, an accommodation ensued, the duke of Burgundy making verbal
submissions, and promising never to show himself in Paris again. (Treaty
of Arras, September, 1414.)
HENRY V INVADES FRANCE--A FRENCH VIEW
[Sidenote: [1415 A.D.]]
Whilst France was thus occupied and torn by civil contests, Henry V had
succeeded, in 1413, to the throne of England.[h] He now judged the time
come to interfere in the French mêlée. He stood, moreover, in need of a
foreign war to settle himself on the throne his father had usurped. Since
the great campaigns of the preceding century, the idea of a war with
France had ever been popular in England. Therefore, when Henry proposed
a serious expedition, he obtained easily from parliament six thousand
men-at-arms and twenty-four thousand archers, with whom he debarked at
Harfleur on the 14th of August, 1415. After a heroic defence which lasted
a whole month, Harfleur, unsuccoured, was compelled to give up. But Henry
V had lost fifteen thousand men (two thousand men-at-arms, thirteen
thousand archers)--the half of his army. Too feeble now for any great
undertaking, he resolved to march across country to Calais, and to throw
the French knighthood a new and insolent defiance.
The English left Harfleur on the 8th of October, traversing the Pays de
Caux, not without some resistance, although they took nothing but food
and wine from the towns for fear of arousing the inhabitants. On the 13th
they arrived at Abbeville intending to cross the Somme there, but they
found the ford at Blanquetaque so well defended this time that they were
obliged to ascend the stream as far as Amiens.
Near Nesle a peasant pointed out a ford that could be reached across a
marsh. It was a difficult and dangerous passage; they would be lost if
attacked. But the French army was still far away. Besides, the nobles
would not have wished a combat in this swamp; they were seeking a fine
battle in open field and to this end asked king Henry for a day and place
for a fight. To which the Englishman replied that it was not necessary to
name either day or place, since every day would find him on the field.
In spite of this answer, they feared, in the French army, that the
enemy would escape; and to make sure they should not, the princes took
up a position between the villages of Tramecourt and Agincourt [French
Azincourt], where the English must necessarily pass, on a narrow plain,
newly ploughed and all sodden with rain.[b]
On Thursday, the 24th of October, the English having passed Blangy
learned that the French were close at hand, and thought they were about
to attack them. The men-at-arms dismounted from horseback, and all of
them kneeling down, and lifting up their hands to heaven, prayed to God
to take them into his keeping. Nothing, however, took place as yet, the
constable not having reached the French army. The English proceeded to
quarter themselves at Maisoncelle, still nearer to Agincourt. Henry V
disencumbered himself of his prisoners, saying to them, “If your masters
survive, you will present yourself again at Calais.”
At last, they discovered the huge French army, its fires and its banners.
There were, according to the estimate of the eye-witness, Lefebvre de St.
Rémy,[j] fourteen thousand men-at-arms, in all perhaps fifty thousand
men; thrice the number of the English. The latter had eleven or twelve
thousand men remaining of the fifteen thousand that had marched from
Harfleur, ten thousand of them at least being archers.
The Welshman, David Gam, the first who brought word to the king of the
enemy’s presence, being asked how many men the French might have, is said
to have replied, “Enough to be killed, enough to be taken prisoners,
enough to fly.” An Englishman, Sir Walter Hungerford, could not forbear
from observing that it would not have been amiss to have brought ten
thousand more stout archers; there were as many in England who would have
desired no better. But the king replied peremptorily, “Now in our Lord’s
name, I would not have one man more. The number we have is that which he
has willed; these folks place their confidence in their multitude, and I
in him who so often gave victory to Judas Maccabæus.”
The English having still a night at their disposal, employed it usefully
in making their preparations, and providing as well as possible for both
body and soul. First, they rolled up the banners for fear of the rain,
and took off and folded up the handsome coats of arms they had put on for
the fight. Then in order to pass the cold October night in comfort, they
opened their baggage and laid straw under them, which they procured from
the neighbouring villages. The men-at-arms fitted the rivets of their
armour, the archers applied fresh strings to their bows. They had for
several days employed themselves in cutting and sharpening the stakes
which they usually planted before them to stop the advance of cavalry.
Amidst all their preparations for victory, these brave men did not forget
their souls’ weal, but set their accounts in order with God and their
consciences. They confessed hastily, those at least whom the priests
could attend, and all this was done without noise, in whispers. The king
had commanded silence, under penalty of forfeiture of their horses for
the gentlemen, and of loss of the right ear for those of lower degree.
It was otherwise on the French side, where the time was spent in
making knights. In every direction there were great fires which showed
everything to the enemy; a confused din of people shouting and calling to
each other; a bustling mob of valets and pages. Many gentlemen passed the
night on horseback in their heavy armour, no doubt to avoid soiling it in
the deep mud, which with the cold rain chilled them to the bones.
MICHELET’S ACCOUNT OF THE BATTLE OF AGINCOURT (OCTOBER 25TH, 1415)
On the morning of St. Crispin and St. Crispinian’s day, October 25th,
1415, the king of England heard three masses, bareheaded, but otherwise
in full armour. “For it was his custom,” says John de Vaurin,[k] “to
hear three masses each day, one after the other.” He then put on a
magnificent helmet with an imperial gold crown. He rode without spurs
on a gray palfrey, and made his men advance over a field of green corn,
where the ground was less spoiled by the rain, the whole army forming
one body, with the few lances he had in the centre, flanked by bodies
of archers. He then rode slowly along the line, speaking a few brief
sentences: “You have a good cause; I am come but to demand my right.
Remember that you belong to old England; that your kindred, your wives
and children are awaiting you there; see that you return to them with
good cheer. The kings of England have always fared well in France. Look
to the honour of the crown; look to yourselves. The French say they will
cut off three fingers from each archer’s hand.”
[Illustration: MAP ILLUSTRATING THE MARCH OF HENRY V AND THE BATTLE OF
AGINCOURT
(The dotted line indicates a doubtful part of the route.)]
The ground was in so bad a condition that no one was disposed to attack.
The king of England parleyed with the French, offering to renounce the
title of king of France, and to surrender back Harfleur, provided he were
given Guienne, with some few convenient additions, Ponthieu, a daughter
of the king, and 800,000 crowns. While this parleying between the two
armies was going on the English archers were securing their stakes.
The two armies formed a strange mutual contrast. On the French side were
three enormous squadrons, like so many forests of lances, following
each other in lengthened file through the narrow plain; at their head
the constable, the princes, the dukes of Orleans, Bar, and Alençon, the
counts of Nevers, Eu, Richemont, and Vendôme, a multitude of lords, a
dazzling iris of enamelled armour, escutcheons, banners, the horses
fantastically disguised in steel and gold. The French, too, had archers,
men of the commonalty; but where were they to be placed? Every post was
numbered, and no one would give up his own; these men would have been
a blot upon so noble an assemblage. There were cannon, but it does not
appear that they were made use of; probably there was no place for them
either.
The English army did not look handsome. The archers had no armour, often
no shoes; for headpieces they had sorry caps of boiled leather, or even
of willow with a crosspiece of iron; the axes and hatchets stuck in their
belts gave them the appearance of carpenters. Many of these good workmen
had taken off their breeches, in order to be at their ease and to work
the better. It is a strange, incredible, and yet certain fact, that the
French army really could not stir either to fight or to fly. The rear
alone escaped.
At the decisive moment, when old Thomas of Erpingham, having drawn up the
English army, threw his truncheon into the air, crying out, “Now strike!”
and when the English had replied with a shout from ten thousand throats,
the French army, to their great astonishment, still remained motionless.
Horses and riders, all appeared enchanted, or dead in their steel cases.
The fact was that the big war horses, loaded with their heavy riders
and their steel caparisons, had sunk deep in the stiff soil, had become
firmly fixed there, and only struggled out to advance slowly a few
paces. Such is the acknowledgment of the English chroniclers; a modest
acknowledgment, which does honour to their probity.
Lefebvre,[j] John de Vaurin[k] and Walsingham[m] expressly say that the
field was nothing but viscid mud. “The place was soft and cut up by the
horses, so that it was with great difficulty they could drag their feet
out of the ground. The French were so loaded with harness that they
could not advance. They had long and very weighty coats of mail, hanging
below the knees; below these they had leg harness, and above them plate
harness, and, moreover, helmets of proof. They were so much crowded
together that they could not lift their arms to strike an enemy, except
some of them in the front.”
Another historian of the English side, Titus Livy,[l] informs us that
the French were drawn up thirty-two deep, whilst the English were ranged
in but four ranks. This enormous depth of the French served no purpose;
their thirty-two ranks consisted wholly, or almost so, of cavalry; the
majority of whom, far from being able to act, did not even see the
engagement; whereas every man of the English was efficient. Of the fifty
thousand French, two or three thousand only could fight against the
eleven thousand English, or at least might have done so if their horses
could have extricated themselves from the mud.
To rouse those inert masses, the English archers discharged volleys of
ten thousand arrows with extreme rapidity and pertinacity at their faces.
The iron-clad horsemen stooped their heads, otherwise the arrows would
have entered through their visors. Then, from the two wings of Tramecourt
and Agincourt, two French squadrons began with much spurring to execute
a clumsy charge, led by two excellent men-at-arms, Messire Clignet de
Brabant and Messire William de Saveuse. The first squadron, advancing
from Tramecourt, was unexpectedly taken in flank by a body of archers
concealed in the woods; neither squadron reached the enemy.
Of twelve hundred men who began this charge, there remained not more
than 120 when they came up with the English palisades. Most of them had
fallen in the mud by the way, men and horses. Would to God that all had
so fallen; but the others, whose horses were wounded, could no longer
control the frantic animals, which rushed desperately back on the French
ranks. The vanguard, far from being able to open and let them pass, was,
as we have seen, so closely packed together that not a man could move. We
may imagine the frightful accidents that took place in that dense mass,
the horses wild with terror, backing and smothering each other, flinging
off their riders, or crushing them under their armour as the iron masses
clashed together. Then came the English to complete the havoc. Coming
out from their line of stakes, and throwing down their bows and arrows,
they advanced quite at their ease with axes, hatchets, heavy swords, and
leaded clubs, to demolish that confused mountain of men and horses. In
process of time they succeeded in clearing away the vanguard, and made
their way, with the king at their head, to the second line of battle.
It was perhaps at this moment that eighteen French gentlemen made a dash
at the king of England. They had made a vow, it was said, to die or bring
down his crown; one of them struck off a point from it; all perished in
the attempt. This _on dit_ is not enough for the historians, who further
adorn the tale, and convert it into a Homeric scene, in which the king
fights over the body of his wounded brother, like Achilles over that
of Patroclus. Then it is the duke of Alençon, commander of the French
army, who kills the duke of York and cleaves the king’s crown. Being
speedily surrounded, he yields; Henry holds out his hand to him; but he
was already slain.[33] What is more certain is that the duke of Brabant
arrived in haste at the second stage of the engagement. He was the duke
of Burgundy’s own brother, and seems to have sought the field to clear
the honour of his family. He arrived very late, but time enough to die.
The brave prince had left all his men behind him, and had not even put
on his coat of arms: instead of which he took his banner, made a hole in
it, passed his head through it, and charged the English, who slew him
instantly.
There remained but the rearguard, which soon dispersed. A great number of
cavaliers, dismounted, but raised up again by their servants, had made
their way out of the throng of battle and surrendered to the English. At
this moment, word was brought the king that a French corps was pillaging
his baggage; and at the same time he saw some Bretons or Gascons in the
French rear, that seemed about to return to the charge against him. He
was alarmed for the moment, especially as he saw his men embarrassed
with so many prisoners, and instantly ordered every man to kill his
captive. Not one obeyed; those soldiers without shoes or breeches, who
held the greatest lords of France in their hands, and thought they had
made their fortunes, were now ordered to ruin themselves. As they refused
to comply, the king appointed two hundred men to act as executioners.
“It was a sad spectacle,” says Lefebvre,[j] “to see those poor disarmed
wretches, who had just received promise of quarter, slaughtered in cold
blood, cut and hewed, head and face!” The alarm was groundless. It was
only some pillagers of the neighbourhood, people of Agincourt, who, in
spite of their master, the duke of Burgundy, had taken advantage of the
opportunity. The battle being ended, the archers made haste to strip the
slain, whilst they were yet warm. Many were dragged forth alive from
beneath the corpses; among others, the duke of Orleans. Next day the
victor, on his departure, killed, or made prisoners, all that remained
alive.[34] “It was a piteous sight to see the great nobles who had there
been slain, and who were already stark naked, like those who were born
of men of no account.” An English priest was not less affected by the
spectacle. “If this sight,” he says, “excited pity and compunction in us,
who were strangers, and but passed through the country, how great was
the sorrow for the native inhabitants. Oh, may the French nation come to
peace and union with the English, and depart from its iniquities and its
evil ways!” Sternness then prevails over compassion, and he subjoins:
“Meanwhile, let his grief be turned upon his head.”
The English lost 1,600 men; the French 10,000, almost all gentlemen,
120 lords having banners. The list fills six large pages in Monstrelet,
beginning with seven princes (Brabant, Nevers, D’Albret, Alençon, the
three De Bar); then come lords without number, Dampierre, Vaudemont,
Marle, Roussy, Salm, Dammartin, etc., the bailiffs of Vermandois, Mâcon,
Sens, Senlis, Caen, and Meaux, and Montaigu, the brave archbishop of
Sens, who fought like a lion.[35]
The duke of Burgundy’s son bestowed the charity of a grave on all the
dead that lay naked on the field of battle. Twenty-five square rods of
ground were measured out, and in that huge pit were laid all the bodies
that had not been carried away, fifty-eight hundred men by the tale. The
ground was consecrated, and a thick thorn hedge was planted round it, for
fear of the wolves. There were but fifteen hundred prisoners, including
the dukes of Orleans and Bourbon, the counts d’Eu, de Vendôme, and de
Richelieu, the marshal de Boucicaut, Messire James d’Harcourt, Messire
John de Craon, etc.[p]
MASSACRE OF THE ARMAGNACS IN PARIS (1418 A.D.)
[Sidenote: [1415-1418 A.D.]]
With this rich capture, Henry hastened to re-embark at Calais. His
army, reduced to ten thousand men, was unable to consider any further
enterprise. The duke of Burgundy had taken no part whatever in the battle
of Agincourt;[36] it was his enemies that brought about that shameful
defeat. If he had made haste, he might have entered Paris as its master.
D’Armagnac, the new constable and successor of D’Albret, showed more
promptitude; he took possession of the capital, of the king and the
dauphin his son, who was still a minor; that is to say, of the entire
government. To recall a little popularity to the side of the party he
showed a praiseworthy activity, borrowing ships from the Genoese, raising
troops in France, and besieging Harfleur (1416). But funds were lacking
and he fell back on the great resource of the times, debasement of money
and false loans.
John the Fearless was always the patron of the poor. Paris murmured, and
John the Fearless, to increase the fermentation, prevented the arrival of
provisions in the city. He succeeded in carrying off Queen Isabella from
Tours and having her declared regent. He forbade the cities, in his name,
to pay the taxes imposed by D’Armagnac, and he entered into negotiations
with the English (1417).
The latter had now returned. Henry V had taken Caen (1417), and like
a conqueror who is sure of himself had divided his army into four
divisions, the more quickly to accomplish his purpose. What, in fact, did
he have to fear? The dukes of Brittany, Anjou, and Burgundy had signed
treaties of neutrality with him. D’Armagnac could do nothing, for he was
reduced to “borrowing from the saints,” in melting their shrines, with
the people of his party fast abandoning him because they were not paid
enough; it was necessary to protect Paris with the Parisians who hated
and betrayed him.
[Illustration: A FRENCH CROSSBOW-MAN, BEGINNING OF FIFTEENTH CENTURY]
One Perrinet Leclerc, iron merchant on the Petit Pont, had charge of the
small gate at St. Germain. “His son,” says Monstrelet, “and some reckless
young companions, who formerly had been punished for their escapades,”
plotted to deliver the city over to the Burgundians. On the night of
May 29th, 1418, Perrinet entered his father’s chamber while the old man
slept and stole the keys from under the pillow. The sire de l’Isle-Adam
informed in advance, was on the other side of the moat. He entered with
eight hundred men, and the former partisans of the faction, the butchers,
the slaughterers--all the people of the market flocked around him. Some
Armagnacs tried to escape, taking the dauphin with them; but the greater
part including the constable were thrown into prison, where their lives
were soon in peril. The mob, which in 1413 had made its first appearance,
reappeared on the scene in 1418 exasperated and furious with misery and
uneasiness. Provisions failed and Paris was threatened with famine at
the same time that ugly rumours circulated in the crowd; the Armagnacs
were coming to assail such a gate, such a faubourg; the English, another.
The cause of these misfortunes, they cried on every side, were those
Armagnacs they had in their keeping. Vengeance must be had upon them and
an end put to their schemes.
Sunday the 12th of June, 1418, the mob got under way and rushed to the
prisons, Hôtel-de-Ville, Temple, St. Éloi, St. Magloire, St. Martin, and
the Grand and Petit Châtelet, to murder indiscriminately everyone they
found there. Armagnacs or not, by Monday morning sixteen hundred people
had perished, killed in the prisons and streets. Their bodies were left
there and “bad children played with them and dragged them about.” With
that of the constable they amused themselves by raising a large strip of
skin “to represent the white scarf of Armagnac.”
THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY MASTER OF PARIS (1418 A.D.)
These dreadful occurrences had just taken place when John the Fearless
returned with the queen to Paris, amidst the enthusiastic acclaims of the
crowd, who believed he brought peace and abundance with him. Vain hope!
Neither one nor the other was to come from the duke of Burgundy, but on
the contrary to all preceding misfortunes there was added an epidemic
which carried off in Paris and its environs fifty thousand persons. Again
the fury of the mob became uncontrollable and wrought its vengeance on
the wretched beings that had been overlooked in the prisons or sent there
since June. The 31st of August an immense assemblage formed itself under
the orders of the hangman Capeluche, and set out for the prisons. The
duke of Burgundy hastened after them imploringly, and even went so far as
to press the hand of Capeluche, but in vain. A new massacre took place.
Some days after the duke sent the bloodthirsty mob after some Armagnacs,
shut up, as he said, in Montlhéry, and as soon as they were gone he shut
the gates of Paris behind them and had Capeluche beheaded.[b]
In becoming master of Paris, the duke of Burgundy had succeeded to all
the embarrassments of the constable D’Armagnac. He had now in his turn to
rule the great city, victual and maintain it, which could only be done by
keeping the Armagnacs and the English at a distance--that is to say, by
making war, re-establishing the taxes he had suppressed, and losing his
popularity.
The equivocal part he had so long played, accusing others of treachery,
while he himself was betraying his country, was now to come to a close.
As the English were ascending the Seine and menacing Paris, he had no
alternative but to forego his hold on the capital, or to give them
battle. But by his eternal tergiversation and duplicity, he had enervated
his own party, and was now powerless alike for peace or war.
The people of Rouen and Paris, who had chosen him for their leader, were
Burgundians, indeed, and foes to the Armagnacs, but still more foes to
the English. They were astonished, in their simplicity, to see that their
good duke did nothing against the enemy of the kingdom. His warmest
partisans began to say, as the Bourgeois de Paris[q] relates, that “he
was, in all his proceedings, the slowest man that could be found.” The
Armagnacs possessed the whole centre, Sens, Moret, Crécy, Compiègne,
Montlhéry, a girdle of towns round Paris, Meaux, and Melun; that is to
say, Marne and Haute Seine. The duke sent to Rouen all the forces he
could spare without leaving Paris unprotected, namely, four thousand
horse.
It had long been foreseen that Rouen would be invested. Henry V had
approached it with extreme slowness. Not content with having two great
English colonies in his rear, Harfleur and Caen, he had completed the
conquest of lower Normandy by the capture of Falaise, Vire, St. Lô,
Constance, and Évreux. He kept possession of the Seine, not only by
Harfleur, but also by Pont de l’Arche. He had already re-established
some degree of order, reassured the clergy, and invited the absentees to
return, promising them support in case of their compliance, and declaring
that otherwise he would dispose of their lands or their benefices. He
reopened the exchequer and the other tribunals, and appointed his grand
treasurer of Normandy supreme president over them. He reduced the tax on
salt to almost nothing, “in honour,” says Rymer,[r] “of the Holy Virgin.”
SIEGE OF ROUEN (1418-1419 A.D.)
[Sidenote: [1418-1419 A.D.]]
There were in Rouen fifteen thousand foot-soldiers and four thousand
horse, in all, perhaps, sixty thousand souls--a whole people to feed.
Henry, knowing he had nothing to fear, either from the dispersed
Armagnacs, or from the duke of Burgundy, who had just besought of him
another truce for Flanders, did not hesitate to divide his army into
eight or nine bodies, so as to embrace the vast compass of Rouen. These
bodies communicated with each other by means of trenches, which protected
them from shot; whilst in the direction of the open country they were
defended from a surprise by deep ditches set with thorns. He was prepared
for an obstinate resistance, but his anticipation was surpassed. There
was a strong Cabochian leaven in Rouen. Alain Blanchard, the chief of the
arblast men, and the other Rouennese leaders, seem to have been connected
with the Carmelite Pavilly, the Parisian orator of 1413. The Pavilly of
Rouen was the canon Delivet. These men defended Rouen for seven months.
The king of England, thinking to terrify the inhabitants, had gibbets
erected all round the town, and hanged the prisoners on them. He barred
the Seine, too, with a wooden bridge, chains, and barges, so that nothing
could pass. The Rouennese seemed reduced to extremities at an early
period of the siege, and yet they held out six months longer; it was a
miracle. They ate up the horses, dogs, and cats. When these were gone,
those who could anywhere find a morsel of food, however filthy, took good
care not to let it be seen; a thousand greedy wretches would otherwise
have seized upon it. The most horrible necessity that befell the town
was that of expelling all who could not fight, twelve thousand old men,
women, and children. The piteous crowd presented themselves before the
English intrenchments, and were received at the sword’s point. Repulsed
alike by their friends and their enemies, they remained between the camp
and the town, in the ditch, without any other food than the weeds they
plucked. There they passed the whole winter, with nothing between them
and the sky.
Meanwhile, the duke of Burgundy was beginning to put himself in motion.
First, he went to Paris from St. Denis, where he made the king go through
the solemn mockery of displaying the oriflamme, to remain a long while at
Pontoise, and again a long while at Beauvais. There he received another
message from Rouen by a man who had risked his life to convey it. It was
the voice of an expiring town, and said merely that fifty thousand men
had died of famine in Rouen and its environs. The duke of Burgundy was
touched by this sad tale, and promised succour; then having got rid of
the messenger, and feeling assured that he should hear no more of Rouen,
he turned his back on Normandy, and took the king to Provins.
A surrender was then inevitable; but the king of England, desirous of
making an example on account of so long a resistance, wished to have
the inhabitants at his mercy. The Rouennese, who well knew what was the
mercy of Henry V, resolved to undermine a wall, and to pass out that way
by night with arms in their hands, trusting in God’s grace. The king and
the bishops reconsidered the matter, and the archbishop of Canterbury
personally offered the besieged the following terms of capitulation:
(1) their lives to be spared, five men excepted (those of the five who
were rich, or churchmen, got themselves out of the difficulty, and Alain
Blanchard paid for all; the English were bent on an execution, in order
to ratify the principle that the resistance had been rebellion against
the lawful king); (2) for the same reason, Henry insured to the town all
the privileges which the kings of France, his ancestors, had granted to
it, “before the usurpation of Philip of Valois”; (3) it had to pay a
tremendous fine--300,000 gold crowns--one-half before the end of January
(it was already the 19th of that month), the other half in February,
1419. To squeeze all that from a depopulated, ruined town was no easy
matter.
HENRY AND JOHN THE FEARLESS (1419 A.D.)
The king of England being occupied with the task of organising the
country he had conquered, granted a truce to the two French parties, the
Burgundians and the Armagnacs. He felt it necessary to refit his army;
and, above all, to collect money and discharge his debts to the bishops,
who had lent him funds for his long expedition.
Henry was so far from apprehending danger from the dauphin, that he
was not afraid to displease the duke of Burgundy. The latter sought an
interview with him, and proposed to him a marriage with a daughter of
Charles VI, with Guienne and Normandy for a dower; but Henry required
also Brittany as a dependence of Normandy, besides Maine, Anjou, and
Touraine.
But the duke of Burgundy had about him persons who besought him to treat
with them. They were followers of the dauphin, Barbazan, and Tannegui
Duchâtel, the commanders of his troops. It was full time France should
become self-reconciled, when her ruin was so imminent. The parliament of
Paris, and that of Poitiers, laboured equally to that end; so, too, did
the queen, who talked, wept, and found means to move his hardened soul.
On the 11th of July was beheld, at the bridge of Pouilly, this singular
spectacle: the duke of Burgundy surrounded by the old servants of the
duke of Orleans, and by the brothers and kinsmen of the Agincourt
prisoners, and of the victims butchered in Paris. Of his own accord he
knelt before the dauphin. A treaty of amity and mutual aid was signed
and submitted to by both parties. But on the 29th of July, less than
three weeks after the signing of the treaty, the Burgundian garrison of
Pontoise, near Paris, suffered themselves to be surprised by the English;
the inhabitants fled to Paris, which they filled with consternation, and
this augmented when, on the 30th, the duke of Burgundy, carrying away
the king from Paris to Troyes, passed beneath the walls of the capital,
without making any other provision for the defence of the distracted
Parisians than naming his nephew, a boy of fifteen, captain of the town.
[Sidenote: [1419-1420 A.D.]]
Seeing all this, the dauphin’s followers believed, rightly or wrongly,
that the duke had a secret understanding with the English, and his
servants told him, it is alleged, that he would perish in an interview
which the dauphin sought with him. The dauphin’s people had set about
erecting on the bridge of Montereau the gallery in which it was to take
place; a long, tortuous wooden gallery, without any barrier in the
middle, contrary to the custom always observed in that suspicious age.
In spite of all this he persisted in his resolution to meet the dauphin;
such was the wish of Dame de Giac, who never quitted him.
As the duke did not come in time, Tannegui Duchâtel went to fetch him.
The duke hesitated no longer, but slapped him on the shoulder, saying:
“Here is the man I trust in.” Duchâtel made him hasten his pace, for the
dauphin, he said, was waiting. In this way he separated him from his
suite, so that he entered the gallery along with none but the sire de
Noailles, brother of the captal de Buch, who was in the service of the
English, and had just taken Pontoise. Neither of them came out alive
(September 10th, 1419).
The altercation which took place is variously related. Tannegui Duchâtel,
however, averred that he had not struck the duke. Others boasted that
they had done so. One of them, Le Bouteiller, said: “I said to the duke
of Burgundy: ‘Thou didst cut off the hand of the duke of Orleans, my
master; I am going to cut off thine.’” However little worthy of regret
was the duke of Burgundy, his death did the dauphin immense mischief.
John the Fearless and his party had both fallen very low, and in a little
time there would have been no more avowed Burgundians. Everyone was
beginning to despise and hate him; but from the moment he was killed all
were again Burgundians.
THE TREATY OF TROYES (1420 A.D.)
We must not suppose that Paris easily admitted the foreigner, but extreme
lassitude and inexpressible suffering made everyone only too happy to
find a pretext for a settlement with Henry. Each man exaggerated to
himself his feelings of pity and indignation. The shame of calling in
the stranger was veiled by a fair show of just vengeance; but the real
fact was that Paris yielded, because it was perishing of hunger. The
queen yielded, because, after all, if her son was not to be king, her
daughter, at least, would be queen. The duke of Burgundy’s son, Philip
the Good, was the only person who acted sincerely; he had his father’s
death to avenge. But he, too, doubtless, thought to find his advantage in
the new order of things; the Burgundy branch would thrive by the ruin of
the elder branch, by placing on the throne a stranger, who would never
have more than one foot on the continent, and who, if he were wise, would
govern France through the duke of Burgundy.
[Illustration: FRENCH MAN-AT-ARMS, BEGINNING OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY]
Paris then left the Burgundians, who again possessed full authority in
the town, to do as they thought fit. Young Saint-Pol, nephew to the duke
of Burgundy, and captain of Paris, was sent, in November, to the king of
England, with Maître Eustace Aloy, “in the name of the city, the clergy,
and the commune.” He received them extremely well, declaring that he
desired nothing but the independent possession of what he had conquered,
and the hand of the princess Catherine; and he said graciously: “Am I not
myself of the blood royal of France? If I become the king’s son-in-law,
I will defend him against all men living.” He obtained more than he
demanded. His ambassadors, encouraged by the inclinations of the new duke
of Burgundy, asserted their master’s right to the crown of France, and
that right the duke acknowledged. The king of England had spent three
years in conquering Normandy; the death of John the Fearless seemed to
give him France in one day.
The treaty concluded at Troyes, May 20th, 1420, in the name of Charles
VI, secured to the king of England the hand of the daughter of the
king of France, and the reversion of the kingdom: “It is agreed that
immediately after our decease the crown and realm of France shall remain
and be perpetually to our said son King Henry and his heirs. The faculty
and exercise of governing and ordering the public affairs of the said
realm shall be and remain, during our life, to our said son King Henry,
with the counsel of the nobles and sages of the said realm. During our
life the letters pertaining to matters of justice shall be written
and shall proceed under our name and seal; nevertheless, for as much
as extraordinary cases may occur, it shall be competent to our son to
write his letters to our subjects, wherein he shall order, prohibit, and
command, on our behalf, and on his own, as regent.” After this, was not
the subsequent article a mockery? “All conquests which shall be made by
our said son king, over the disobedient, shall be and shall be made to
our profit.”
This monstrous treaty concluded worthily with these lines, in which the
king proclaimed the dishonour of his family, the father proscribed his
son: “Considering the enormous crimes and misdemeanours perpetrated upon
the said realm of France by Charles, styling himself (_soi-disant_)
dauphin of Viennois, it is agreed that we, our said son the king, and
also our very dear son Philip, duke of Burgundy, will in no wise treat
concerning peace or concord with the said Charles, nor will we treat by
ourselves or others, except with the consent and counsel of all and each
of us three, and of the three estates of the two realms aforesaid.”
The mother received prompt payment for the shameful phrase, _soi-disant
dauphin_. Isabella immediately had 2,000 francs a month assigned to her,
payable out of the mint at Troyes. For this price she denied her son, and
gave up her daughter. The English took from the king of France, at one
stroke, both his kingdom and his child. The poor girl was forced to wed a
master, and brought him for dower her brother’s ruin.[p]
HENRY’S STRUGGLE WITH THE DAUPHIN (1420-1422 A.D.)
Such was the tenor of the Treaty of Troyes, so glorious to Henry, yet
so impracticable of accomplishment, that it must be doubted whether
there was any sincerity in the French signers of it. To be avenged
of the dauphin, and to crush him by the assistance of England, was
evidently the foremost thought, the first desire. But it is scarcely
credible that the duke of Burgundy looked forward to continuing, after
the accomplishment of his vengeance, the faithful vassal of the house of
Lancaster. The arrangement of one king governing the two countries was
plainly impracticable. And that Henry himself could have entertained it
only shows how the most vigorous intellects may allow their perspicacity
and sense to be clouded by success and superstition. He was well aware
that his new position could only be preserved by force of arms. On the
occasion of his marriage with the princess Catherine, which took place
on June 2nd, the knights of both countries were for celebrating the
event by a tournament. But he forbade the rival combat, and told those
who proposed it to join him in the siege of Sens, where they might
exercise their prowess against the Armagnacs. Sens made but a trifling
resistance.[h] Next, this implacable hunter of men hurried to Montereau,
and not being able to reduce the castle, he had his prisoners hanged by
the ditch sides.
With all his impetuosity he was forced to have patience before Melun,
where the brave Barbazan detained him many months. The king of England,
employing all the means of which he could avail himself, took Charles VI
and the two queens to the siege, presenting himself as the son-in-law of
the king of France, speaking in his father-in-law’s name, and using his
wife as a bait and a snare. All these clever devices were ineffectual.
The besieged resisted valiantly; obstinate conflicts took place round the
walls, and beneath them, in the mines and countermines, and Henry did
not spare his own person. At last, however, provisions failed, and the
garrison were constrained to surrender. Henry, according to his custom,
accepted the capitulation, and put to death several citizens, all the
Scotchmen who were in the place, and even two monks.
During the siege he had got the Burgundians to deliver up to him Paris
and the four fortresses, Vincennes, the Bastille, the Louvre, and the
Tour de Nesle. He made his entry in December, riding between the king
of France and the duke of Burgundy. The latter was dressed in mourning,
in token of grief and vengeance, perhaps also from a feeling of shame
for the unworthy part he played in thus introducing the foreigner. The
king of England was accompanied by his brothers, the dukes of Clarence
and Bedford, the duke of Exeter, the earl of Warwick, and all his lords.
The king of England was well received in Paris. He entered into formal
possession as regent of France, by assembling the estates on the 6th of
December, 1420, and making them sanction the Treaty of Troyes.
[Sidenote: [1420-1421 A.D.]]
That the son-in-law might be sure of inheriting, it was necessary that
the son should be proscribed. The duke of Burgundy and his mother
presented themselves before the king of France, sitting as judge in the
Hôtel St. Pol, to make “great plaint and clamour of the piteous death of
the late duke John of Burgundy.” The king of England was seated on the
same bench as the king of France. Messire Nicholas Raulin demanded in
the name of the duke of Burgundy and his mother that Charles, styling
himself dauphin, Tannegui Duchâtel, and all the murderers of the duke of
Burgundy, should be carted through the streets, with torches in their
hands, to make _amende honorable_. The king’s advocate spoke to the same
effect, and the university supported the demand. The king authorised
the prosecution, and Charles was cried and cited at the Marble Table,
to appear within three days before the parliament. He did not put in an
appearance and was condemned by default, sentenced to banishment, and
stripped of all right to the crown of France (January 3rd, 1421).
The cumbrous and devouring army which Henry brought with him was but too
necessary to him. His brother Clarence was defeated and killed, with
two or three thousand English, in Anjou (battle of Baugé, March 23rd,
1421). In the north even the count d’Harcourt had taken up arms against
the English, and was overrunning Picardy. Saintrailles and La Hire were
advancing by forced marches to combine with him. All the men of family
were gradually going over to the side of Charles VII, to the party that
made bold expeditions and adventurous forays. The peasants, it is true,
who were the sufferers by these pillaging exploits, would in the long run
declare for a master who could and would protect them.
The ferocity of the old Armagnac marauders was of service to Henry’s
cause. He did a popular thing in besieging Meaux, the captain of which
town, the bastard De Vaurus, a sort of ogre, had filled the country
round with indescribable terror. But as the bastard and his men expected
no mercy, they defended themselves with desperate determination. They
detained the English the whole winter, eight long months, before Meaux,
till cold, want, and pestilence consumed that fine army. The siege began
on the 6th of October, and on the 18th of December, Henry, who already
saw his forces diminishing, wrote urgently for fresh soldiers to Germany
and Portugal. Englishmen were probably more costly to him than those
foreigners. To induce the German mercenaries to take service with him
rather than with the dauphin, he caused them to be told, among other
things, that he would pay them in better coin.
He could not reckon on the duke of Burgundy. That prince appeared for a
short while at the siege of Meaux, but soon withdrew, under pretence of
going into Burgundy, and obliging the towns in his duchy to accept the
Treaty of Troyes. Henry had good reason to believe that the duke himself
had secretly instigated their resistance to a treaty which annulled the
contingent rights of the house of Burgundy to the crown, as well as those
of the dauphin, the duke of Orleans, and all the French princes. And why
had young Philip made such a sacrifice to the friendship of the English?
Because he thought he needed their aid to avenge his father and beat
his enemy. But it was much rather they who had need of him. Fortune had
forsaken them. Whilst the duke of Clarence was getting himself beaten in
Anjou, the duke of Burgundy had been brilliantly successful in Picardy,
where he had come up with the dauphin’s partisans, Saintrailles and
Gamaches, before they could form a junction with d’Harcourt, and had
defeated and made them prisoners.
[Sidenote: [1421-1422 A.D.]]
During that interminable siege of Meaux, whilst Henry was seeing his fine
army dissolving away around him, word was brought him that the queen
had been delivered of a boy at Windsor Castle. He evinced no joy, and
comparing his own destiny with that of the child, he said, with prophetic
sadness: “Henry of Monmouth will have had a short reign and will have
conquered much; Henry of Windsor will reign long and will lose all. God’s
will be done!”
Henry was still young, but he had toiled much in this world, his time for
rest was come; he had never had any since his birth. He was attacked,
after his winter campaign, with an acute irritation of the bowels, a
malady very common in those days. Being warned by the physicians that his
end was at hand, he commended his son to his brothers, and gave them two
wise counsels; first, to conciliate the duke of Burgundy, and secondly,
in any treaty that might be made, to manage always so as to keep Normandy.
He died at Vincennes on the 31st of August, 1422; Charles VI followed him
on the 21st of October. The people of Paris shed tears for their poor mad
king as freely as the English for their victorious Henry V. “The whole
people,” says the Bourgeois de Paris,[q] “were in the streets weeping
and crying, as if each had lost the friend he most loved. Truly, their
lamentations were like those of the prophet, ‘_Quomodô sedet sola civitas
plena populo!_’ The petty folk of Paris cried, ‘Oh, most dear prince,
never shall we have one so good! Never shall we see thee more! Cursed be
death! We shall never have aught but war since thou hast left us. Thou
art gone to rest; we remain in tribulation and sorrow.’”
Charles VI was carried to St. Denis, “poorly accompanied for a king of
France. There were only his chamberlain, his chancellor, his confessor,
and some subordinate officers.” One prince only attended the funeral, and
that was the duke of Bedford. When the corpse was lowered into the grave,
the ushers-at-arms broke their wands and threw them into the grave, and
reversed their maces. Then Berri, king-at-arms of France, cried out,
over the grave, “May it please God to have mercy on the soul of the very
high and very excellent prince Charles, king of France, sixth of the
name, our natural and sovereign lord.”[p] And then he added, “God grant
long life to Henry, by the grace of God, king of France and of England,
our sovereign lord.” About the same time at Mehun-sur-Yèvre, in Berri,
some French knights unfurled the royal banner, crying, “Long live King
Charles, seventh of the name, by the grace of God, king of France.”[b]
WOES OF THE PEOPLE--THE _DANSE MACABRE_
[Sidenote: [1418-1424 A.D.]]
After having spoken of the death of the king, we must mention that of the
people. From 1418 to 1422, the depopulation was frightful. The history
of those dismal years runs in a murderous circle; war leads to famine,
famine to pestilence, and pestilence again brings round famine. It is
like that night of the Exodus, in which the angel passes and repasses,
touching each house with the sword.
When men have come to that pass they weep no more; there is an end to
tears, or there mingle even with tears gleams of hellish joy and savage
laughter. It was the most tragical characteristic of the times that
in the gloomiest moments there were alternations of frantic gaiety.
The beginning of that long series of evils, “of that woeful dance,”
as the Bourgeois de Paris[q] says, was the madness of Charles VI, and
contemporaneously therewith the too famous masquerade of the satyrs, the
piously burlesque mysteries, and the _basoche_ farces.[37]
The year in which the duke of Orleans was murdered was distinguished
by the organisation of the corporation of minstrels. That corporation,
quite indispensable of course in so joyous a period, became important and
respected. Treaties of peace were cried through the streets with a mighty
strumming of violins; hardly any six months passed in which a peace was
not cried and sung. The eldest son of Charles VI, the first dauphin, was
an indefatigable player on the harp and the spinet. He had a great staff
of musicians; and in addition to these, he used to call in the aid of
the choir-boys of Notre Dame. He sang, danced, and “balled” (_balait_),
night and day, and that even in the year of the Cabochians, whilst they
were killing his friends. He killed himself, too, by dint of singing and
dancing.
It seems an ascertained fact that in the fourteenth century dancing
became involuntary and maniacal in many countries. The violent
processions of the Flagellants set the first example. The great
epidemics, and the terrible and lasting shock they gave to the nerves of
the survivors, easily gave occasion to St. Vitus’ dance. These phenomena
are, as we know, contagious. The spectacle of the convulsions acted
with so much the more force, as there was nothing in men’s souls but
convulsion and vertigo; and then the sick and the hale danced together
promiscuously. They would catch each other violently by the hand, in
the streets and the churches, and foot it round in a ring. Many a one
who at first laughed at this sight, or looked on coldly, became at last
bewildered, his head reeled, and he, too, reeled and danced with the
rest. The rings went on multiplying, interlacing; they became bigger and
bigger, more and more heady, fast, and furious, as though they were huge
coiling reptiles, that momently swelled to view. There was no stopping
the monster, but its joints might be lopped; the electric chain was
broken by one falling with feet and fists on some one of the dancers. The
rude dissonance interrupting the harmony, they found themselves free,
otherwise they would have gone on reeling until utterly exhausted, and
have danced themselves to death.
This phenomenon of the fourteenth century does not occur again in the
fifteenth; but in the latter we find, in England, France, and Germany, a
strange amusement, which reminds us of those great popular dances of the
sick and dying. It was called the dance of the dead, or _danse macabre_.
It was a great favourite with the English, who introduced it into France.
The spectacle of the dance of the dead was enacted in Paris in 1424, in
the cemetery of the Innocents. That narrow space in which the enormous
city for so many ages accumulated the remains of almost all its
inhabitants had been at first both a cemetery and a laystall, haunted at
night by robbers, and in the evening by wantons, who plied their trade
among the tombs. Philip Augustus enclosed it with walls, and to purify
it dedicated it to St. Innocent, a child crucified by the Jews. In the
fourteenth century the churches were already very full, and it became
the fashion among the good citizens to bury their dead in the cemetery.
Such was the suitable theatre of the _danse macabre_. It was begun in
September, 1424, when the heat had diminished, and the first rain had
rendered the smell of the place less offensive. The performances lasted
many months.
Whatever disgust both the place and the spectacle might inspire, it was
matter suggestive of much thought to see in that fatal period, in a town
so frequently and so cruelly visited by death, the hungry, sickly, scarce
living multitude, merrily making death itself a matter of spectacle,
attending with insatiable avidity to its moralising buffooneries, and
enjoying them so heartily as to tread heedlessly upon the bones of their
fathers, and on the gaping graves they were themselves about to fill.[p]
THE UNIVERSITY OF PARIS AND THE COUNCIL OF CONSTANCE
[Sidenote: [1414-1424 A.D.]]
A very different phase of life which demands at least a passing notice
is that which clustered about the wonderful University of Paris.[a] As
early as the thirteenth century, the university shone in all its glory.
Born in the shadow of the cloister of the bishopric, and primarily
confounded with the ancient cathedral college of the town, it had
obtained, little by little, immunities and privileges by favour of
which it had grown and had reached a point where it was dependent upon
no one but the court of Rome. Among the popes who conferred the most
important privileges may be cited Alexander III, Innocent III, and his
successor Honorius III, all promoters of the progress of knowledge, all
jealously seeking to retain for the church that superiority of studies
and learning to which its power was bound. The University of Paris rose
rapidly above the universities of Italy, the only ones with which it was
then in serious rivalry. It became the most important ecclesiastical
and scientific college of Europe, the school whence the high clergy of
France was recruited, as well as that of a large part of Christianity.
It belonged to the church by its creation, by its studies in which
theology predominated, and by its object, which was to prepare the
learned candidates for the obtention of livings. For all its rights it
depended on the holy see, which subjected it to visits and regulations.
Meanwhile it formed in the bosom of the church itself a vast corporation
(_universitas_), governing itself by its own laws with an extended
liberty.
It was divided into four faculties: arts or philosophy which comprised
nearly all the known sciences; theology; decree or canonical law; and
medicine. The faculty of arts had a particular celebrity; it is to it
that the capital of France owes its appellation of the Modern Athens.
The faculty of theology was not less celebrated after the lectures
of Roscellinus and Abelard. That of law was incomplete, since civil
law, which restored to honour the work of the great Italian jurists,
was taught in Paris only subsidiarily. It even ceased to exist at the
beginning of the year 1220, although the laws of Justinian had found
able interpreters in France as well as in Italy. The decree of the
pope, Honorius III, to suppress its instruction in Paris, had probably
its entire concentration in the college of Boulogne for an object. In
any case, that suppression was only for a time, and a little later
at Orleans a special university was founded, called the University of
Law. As to the study and profession of medicine, it is well known that
in the Middle Ages it was a prerogative of the religious orders almost
exclusively.
Each faculty held special assemblies, in which the masters and graduates
had deliberative voice. The four faculties met once a year to elect their
rector, the formulæ of which elections, determined with infinite care,
in order to guarantee liberty of vote and prevent intrigue, presented a
great analogy to the election of a pope. Thus the University of Paris
possessed a liberal government, with a regular hierarchy, where degrees
conferred powers, and where superior intelligence ruled.
The pope gave it its highest protection. He made the rules of study,
intervened in disputes with the civil authorities. The principal
ecclesiastical privilege of the University of Paris was that of being
dependent on no bishop, and having its own jurisdiction. Its members
could not be excommunicated except by the court of Rome.[g]
It is one of the strangest contrasts of history that while France was
at the lowest ebb of its national history, the University of Paris was
attempting to carry out one of the greatest revolutions in the history of
Europe. The conciliar movement in the church, which produced such great
international gatherings as the councils of Constance and of Bâle, and
which aimed to limit papal absolutism by something like a parliamentary
system, was due to the work of men like Jean Gerson, chancellor of the
University of Paris, and Pierre D’Ailly, scholar and prelate. It was
universally admitted that abuses had crept into the administration of the
church. There was evidently something wrong when, while Frenchmen were
perishing from famine, and France was on the verge of ruin, the papal
court at Avignon luxuriated on a revenue that was more than royal, and a
pope (John XXII) could accumulate a treasure of eighteen millions of gold
florins, and jewels and vestments estimated at seven millions more.
But the evils which date from the residence at Avignon were increased
twofold during the schism. All Christendom was in doubt how this would
end. For the civil war in the church had divided the countries under
rival obediences. France, Scotland, and Spain adhered to the pope at
Avignon; and England, Germany, and Italy obeyed the Italian pope.
At first they tried to induce the rivals to resign; and Pedro de Luna,
who was elected pope at Avignon as Benedict XIII, won the high office
by declaring that he would resign as easily as take off his hat. But
the wily prelate, after his election, declared that no earthly power
could dethrone him, and for more than a decade defied the attempts of
reformers to achieve union. It was then that in the University of Paris
the theologians began agitation for a universal council, as supreme over
the pope. It is said that a German doctor began the movement, but the
credit has gone to France. First at Pisa and then at Constance, the great
parliaments of the church took in hand the reformation.
In the later council (1414-1418) union was achieved by the deposition of
opposing popes and the election of Martin V (see volume on The Papacy),
but the decree _Frequens_ which demanded regular meeting of councils in
the future, was gradually lost sight of in the following pontificates,
and the great experiment of a constitutional church was a failure. That
such an attempt should be made while France was in the throes of this
great Hundred Years’ War, and that mostly by Frenchmen, shows that
alongside of the story of carnage, crime, and superstition, there were
signs of intellectual life and earnest effort of reformers, which are
suggestive in the age of Wycliffe and Huss.
A strange page of history is opened here. Sigismund, emperor of Germany,
who presided at the council of Constance, was anxious to play a great
part in the world’s affairs. He took advantage of the great international
assemblage in his dominions to attempt to put himself at the head of a
European confederacy to fight the Turks, who were advancing along the
Danube.
To accomplish this he made a journey into France and England to try to
prevent the war. His visit took place just before the fatal invasion of
Henry V which brought the victory of Agincourt.[38] To raise the money
for that journey Sigismund made over the mark of Brandenburg to Frederick
of Hohenzollern, burggraf of Nuremberg, and thus founded the power of the
Hohenzollern.
Henry V, was willing to accede to Sigismund’s plans, but although he even
offered the succession of Hungary as a bribe, the court of France refused
to make the peace he desired, and Sigismund’s great effort at European
concord resulted in only one thing--the foundation of the great dynasty
which rules in Germany to-day. France and England went their own way,
bringing mutual disaster for another generation.[a]
[Illustration]
FOOTNOTES
[30] [This old French word denoted either a song or a particular kind of
dance.]
[31] Doubtless a monkish exaggeration.
[32] [At the siege of Arras the harquebus was used for the first time.]
[33] This embellishment is of Monstrelet’s[n] contrivance. He places it
apart from the account of the battle after the long list of the killed.
Lefebvre, an eye-witness, could not make up his mind to copy Monstrelet
in this place.
[34] Lefebvre[j] and Monstrelet[n] are the authorities for this
statement. De Barante[o] says without naming his source, “Henry V
put a stop to the carnage and caused the wounded to receive relief.”
[Tyler,[s] after reviewing the evidence, declares that “Henry did not
stain his victory by any act of cruelty. His character comes out of the
investigation untarnished by a suspicion of his having wantonly shed the
blood of a single fellow-creature.”]
[35] [For other views of the battle of Agincourt see our history of
England.]
[36] [But neither for that matter had, in person, the count d’Armagnac.
The princes had refused the aid of any civic corps, and as Burgundy
could command but the town folk of Flanders and Picardy, his offers
of help were rejected. The responsibility of the battle lay therefore
entirely with the Armagnacs; but, as Crowe[h] says, “to the honour of the
Burgundian party, more of its princes, than of the Armagnacs, fell on the
field of Agincourt.”]
[37] [In 1402 letters-patent were issued by the king permitting the
bourgeois of Paris to constitute themselves into a religious fraternity
for the representation of the “Mystery of the Passion.” This is the
origin of the modern tragic theatre. The “morality plays,” or comedies,
were created by the clerks of the _basoche_--the corporation formed by
the clerks of the _procureurs_ of the parliament of Paris. This body
exercised extensive jurisdiction over its members--its head bore the
title of “king.” In the reign of Charles VI playing-cards were perfected,
and about 1420 Jan van Eyck, called Jean of Bruges, discovered a drying
oil, which has caused him to be regarded as the inventor of oil painting.
Hitherto men had used distemper, fresco, gum, paste, or white of egg.[b]]
[38] [It was Sigismund’s grandfather, the blind King John of Bohemia,
whose death at Crécy gave the famous motto, _Ich dien_, to the prince of
Wales.]
[Illustration]
CHAPTER VIII. THE RESCUE OF THE REALM
No longer on St. Denis will we cry,
But Joan la Pucelle shall be France’s saint.
--SHAKESPEARE.
[Sidenote: [1422-1427 A.D.]]
The king proclaimed at St. Denis was an infant of ten months, grandson,
on his mother’s side, of Charles VI. His two uncles ruled in his
name,--one the duke of Bedford in France; the other the duke of
Gloucester in England. This child was recognised as sovereign of the
kingdom of France by parliament, by the university, by the first prince
of the blood, Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy, and by the dowager
queen, Isabella of Bavaria. Paris, Île-de-France, Picardy, Artois,
Flanders, Champagne, and Normandy--that is to say, almost all the country
north of the Loire--and Guienne, south of that river, obeyed him.
The king proclaimed in Berri, sole surviving son of Charles VI, was a
youth of nineteen years, graceful bearing, but weak in body, pale of
figure, of small courage, and ever in fear of violent death; and besides,
adds Chastelain,[d] “a good Latinist, a fine _raconteur_, and most wise
in council.” Such indeed he was later on; but for the present and for
many years to come he showed spirit only for his own pleasures and a
sort of dull apathy in matters of state and in the face of peril. His
authority was recognised only in Touraine, Orleans, Berri, Bourbonnais,
Auvergne, Languedoc, Dauphiné, and Lyonnais. Indifferent to disaster,
he was resigned to hearing himself called derisively “the king of
Bourges.” To Poitiers he transported his council, his parliament, and
his university. But Bourges and Poitiers were still great towns in his
eyes; he dragged his little court from castle to castle, completely
submissive to the sire de Giac, to Le Camus de Beaulieu, to the sire de
la Trémouille, and willingly enduring the all-powerful influence of his
mother-in-law Yolande of Anjou.[b]
The young king, brought up by the Armagnacs, found in them his chief
support, and so shared their unpopularity. These Gascons were the most
veteran soldiers in France, but the greatest and most cruel plunderers.
The hatred they inspired in the north would have been sufficient to
create there a Burgundian and English party. The brigands of the south
seemed more of foreigners than the foreigners.
Charles VII next made trial of the foreigners themselves, of those who
had gained experience in the English wars. He called the Scotch to his
aid. These were the most mortal enemies of England, and their hatred
might be relied on as much as their courage. The greatest hopes were
built on these auxiliaries. A Scotchman was made constable of France;
another, count of Touraine. Notwithstanding, however, their incontestable
bravery, they had often been beaten in England. They were not only beaten
in France, at Crevant and Verneuil (1423, 1424), but destroyed: the
English took care that none of them escaped. It was asserted that the
Gascons, out of jealousy against the Scotch, had not supported them.
The English narrowly escaped giving Charles VII an ally far more useful
and important than the Scotch--the duke of Burgundy. So little concert
was there between the two brothers, that at the selfsame time Bedford
married the duke of Burgundy’s sister, and Gloucester was commencing war
against him. A word as to this romantic story.
The duke of Burgundy, count of Flanders, never thought himself secure of
his Flanders until he should have flanked it with Holland and Hainault.
These two counties had fallen into the hands of a girl, the countess
Jacqueline, widow of the dauphin John. The duke of Burgundy married her
to a cousin of his own, a sickly boy. Jacqueline, who was a handsome
young woman, did not resign herself to so irksome a fate, but left her
sorry mate, nimbly crossed the Straits, and herself proposed marriage to
the duke of Gloucester. Gloucester committed the folly of accepting the
proposal (1423). He espoused Jacqueline’s cause, thus beginning against
the duke of Burgundy, the indispensable ally of England, a war which, for
the latter, was a question of actual existence, a war without treaty, in
which the sovereign of Flanders would risk his last man. The incensed
duke of Burgundy concluded a secret alliance with the duke of Brittany,
and then he made pecuniary demands on Bedford. What could Bedford do? He
had no money; instead of it, he offered an inestimable possession worth
more than any sum of money--his whole barrier on the north (September,
1423). The bands of Charles VII came and lodged themselves in the very
heart of English France, in Normandy; a pitched battle was fought before
they could be expelled. It took place on the 17th of August, 1424, at
Verneuil. In June, Bedford had regained the good will of the duke of
Burgundy by an enormous concession, having pledged his eastern frontier
to him, Bar-sur-Seine, Auxerre, and Mâcon.
All northern France was greatly in danger of thus falling bit by bit into
the duke of Burgundy’s hand; but suddenly the wind shifted. The sapient
Gloucester, in the midst of this war begun for Jacqueline, forgets that
he has married her, forgets that at that very moment she is besieged
in Bergues, and weds another, a fair English woman. This new folly had
the effect of an act of wisdom. The duke of Burgundy consented to be
reconciled to the English, and made a show of believing all Bedford told
him; the essential thing for him was to be able to despoil Jacqueline,
and occupy Hainault, Holland, and afterwards Brabant, the succession to
which could not but soon be opened.
Charles VII, therefore, derived little advantage from this event which
seemed likely to be so profitable to him. The only benefit that accrued
to him from it was that the count de Foix, governor of Languedoc,
comprehended that the duke of Burgundy would sooner or later turn
against the English, and declared that his conscience obliged him
to recognise Charles VII as legitimate king. He placed Languedoc in
subjection to him, with the clear understanding that the king should draw
from it neither money nor troops, and should not in any wise interfere
with the little royalty which the count de Foix had contrived for himself
in that province. The friendship of the houses of Anjou and Lorraine
seemed to promise more direct advantage to the party of Charles VII. The
head of the house of Anjou was then a woman, Queen Yolande, relict of
Louis II, duke of Anjou, count of Provence, and pretender to the throne
of Naples; she was the daughter of the king of Aragon, by a lady of
Lorraine, of the house of Bar. The English having committed the egregious
mistake of troubling the houses of Anjou and Aragon, as regarded their
pretensions to the throne of Naples, Yolande formed against them an
alliance of Anjou and Lorraine with Charles VII. She married her daughter
to the young king, and her son René to the only daughter of the duke of
Lorraine. Yolande was of service to her son-in-law. By her sage counsels
she removed the old Armagnacs from about him; she had the address to win
the Bretons back to him, and caused the constable’s sword to be conferred
on the count of Richemont, brother of the duke of Brittany.
Charles VII, combining together the Bretons, Gascons, and Dauphinois,
had thenceforth the real military strength of France on his side. Spain
sent him Aragonese, Italy Lombards. But the war sped feebly for all
that; money was wanting, and union still more so. The king’s favourites
frustrated Richemont’s first enterprises; not, indeed, with impunity, for
the stern Breton put to death two of them within six months, without form
of trial. Since a favourite was necessary to the king, he gave him one of
his own choosing, young La Trémouille, and the first use the latter made
of his ascendency was to dismiss Richemont. The king, strange to say,
forbade his constable to fight for him; the king’s men and Richemont’s
were on the point of drawing their swords against each other. Thus
Charles VII found his cause less advanced than ever.[c]
Meanwhile the towns were resisting the foreign domination. La
Ferté-Bernard underwent in 1422 a four months’ siege and only yielded
to the earl of Salisbury in the last extremity. In 1427 the English, in
order to get closer to the Loire, sent three thousand men-at-arms to
besiege Montargis on the Loing. The town had only a small garrison under
the brave La Faille, but the inhabitants supported him well.[b]
MONSTRELET DESCRIBES THE SIEGE OF MONTARGIS (1427 A.D.)
Shortly after their arrival the English built some bridges and passages
over the river. This being done, they began to approach the town and
fortress of Montargis, and attacked and destroyed several engines of war.
But despite this, the besieged defended themselves valiantly, and kept
the besiegers thus employed for the space of about two months. During
this time tidings were carried to King Charles of France, which informed
him that, if he did not shortly send succour to the besieged, they must
needs yield to their adversaries. This news came to the knowledge of
King Charles, and it is said that king summoned a council, where it
was concluded and determined to send help to Montargis, or, at least,
to reinforce it with men and provisions. The charge of the relief was
bestowed upon the bastard John of Orleans and Étienne de Vignolles, known
as La Hire.
[Sidenote: [1427-1428 A.D.]]
They, with about sixteen hundred fighting men and skilful soldiers, took
the road with much display, with the intention of victualling the said
town of Montargis, and raising the siege. When they had come within half
a league, as secretly as they could, they took counsel together and
determined to make an attack upon some of the camps of the English, on
both sides of the town. They had with them some of the garrison of the
said town of Montargis who would direct them. They attacked the camps of
the English with much violence (which attack the English had not guarded
against), crying, “Montjoie St. Denis!” and began to fire a number of
the camps, and killed and captured several of the English. Such was the
spirit they put into their work, that the camp of Sir John de la Pole
was overthrown in a short space of time; but the same lord and about
eight others escaped in a small boat. The water was so high at that time
that the bridges the English had made were covered, so that when they
attempted to escape they fell beside these bridges and were drowned.
[Illustration: CHARLES VII
(From an old French engraving)]
Whilst this was going on, the bastard of Orleans was on the other side
of the town, attacking on foot the camp of Henry Basset, and there being
much to do, the others, when they had overthrown the first camp, came to
his assistance. The English, perceiving that the victory was not to them,
began to retreat to the camp of the earl of Warwick, and crossed a bridge
so hastily and in such numbers that the bridge gave way beneath them, and
there perished miserably very many; for besides this the inhabitants of
Montargis, who had sallied forth boldly to the help of their own people,
slaughtered and captured many, and did not spare them.
Meanwhile, the earl of Warwick assembled his men as quickly as he could.
But when he learned the great loss and pitiable defeat of his host,
of which from a thousand to fifteen hundred men were either killed or
captured, he departed and went his way, with the remainder of his men
of which the greater number were on foot. They retreated to the castle
of Landou in Nemours, and to other places under their suzerainty.[e]
This was the first time that the bastard of Orleans was intrusted with a
command of any importance, and he did not fail to justify his brilliant
début.[f]
THE SIEGE OF ORLEANS (1428-1429 A.D.)
[Sidenote: [1428-1429 A.D.]]
The following year (1428) Bedford resolved to push military operations
vigorously and to force the barrier of the Loire. In the month of June
the earl of Salisbury debarked at Calais with six thousand of the best
soldiers England ever had in France; Bedford joined him there with four
thousand men drawn from garrisons in Normandy, and their army took
Jargeau, Janville, Meung-sur-Loire, Thoury, Beaugency, Marchenoir, and La
Ferté-Hubert, thus approaching Orleans step by step.
Orleans was the gate to Berri, the Bourbonnais and Poitou. This taken,
the “king of Bourges” would become the king of Dauphiné and Languedoc.
October 12th, 1428, the English appeared before its ramparts and at
once formed around the place a series of bastilles, each of which was
commanded by one of the first lords of England--by William de la Pole,
earl of Suffolk; the “English Achilles,” Lord Talbot; and William
Glasdale, who had sworn to kill everyone in Orleans. Salisbury was
commander-in-chief. The Orléanais, who had been expecting the siege, had
fortified the heart of their town by burning the suburbs. Their captain
was the sire de Gaucourt whom the English had held captive for thirteen
years, because he had persisted in defending Harfleur against them. The
garrison did not number more than five hundred at the most, but they
were all hardened warriors. Moreover, the bourgeois were looking out for
themselves. They had formed thirty-four companies--and each undertook the
defence of one of the thirty-four towers of the wall.
Artillery was beginning to play a great rôle in battles and sieges. That
of the besiegers was badly handled, and the bourgeois laughed at the
unskilful English cannoneers who threw eighty-pound balls into the town
and killed no one.[39] The Orléanais artillery was very different. It was
composed of seventy pieces, aimed by twelve master cannoneers, expert at
firing. Each cannon had its name and its own particular duty. The good
cannon _Riflard_ (Clean Sweep) killed its man at every shot.[b] Another
one, too, was the celebrated culverin of a skilful Lorrainian cannoneer,
Maître Jean; the two, man and culverin, made the finest hits. The English
came at last to know this Maître Jean; he never ceased killing them
except to make game of them: from time to time he would drop down and
pretend to be dead; his body was carried off into the town; the English
were in ecstasy when--behold! back he would come, alive and merry, and
fire upon them worse than ever.[c]
But the luckiest shot of all was fired by a child [according to Grafton,
the son of a gunner who had gone to dinner]. This schoolboy came across a
fully loaded piece on the rampart. He lit the fuse and ran away. The ball
went straight into the face of the earl of Salisbury, who was standing on
one of the bastilles and to whom, at that very instant, William Glasdale
was saying, “My lord, behold your town.”
The English commander was dead; and the next day the bastard of Orleans,
the handsome, brave Dunois, entered the town with the best knights of
the time--La Hire, Saintrailles, Marshal de Broussac, and six or seven
hundred soldiers. Others followed until little by little seven thousand
were gathered in Orleans.[b]
_The “Battle of the Herrings” (1429 A.D.)_
The siege continued with various success to the 12th of February, 1429,
with sundry episodes in the way of sorties, feigned attacks, conflicts
about provision entering the town, and even duels, to amuse the two
parties and try their respective mettle. They went on slowly completing
their fortifications, and it was to be foreseen that the town would be at
last almost entirely shut in.
However careless the king might appear about saving the appenage of
the duke of Orleans, it was clear that, once that city had fallen,
the English would advance unhindered into Poitou, Berri, and the
Bourbonnais, would live at the expense of those provinces, and ruin
the south after having ruined the north. The duke de Bourbon sent his
eldest son, the count de Clermont, under whom some Scotch forces and
some lords of Touraine, Poitou, and Auvergne were to succour Orleans,
cast provisions into it, and even hinder the arrival of provisions in
the English camp. The duke of Bedford sent a supply from Paris under
the conduct of the brave Sir John Fastolf; and he had availed himself
of the old Cabochian enmity of Paris to Orleans, to add to his English
detachment a considerable number of Parisian arblast men, and the
provost of Paris himself. They took with them three hundred wagon-loads
of provisions, particularly herrings, an article indispensable in Lent.
Troops and wagons all marched in narrow file, and nothing could have been
easier than to break their line and destroy them. The Gascon La Hire,
who was in advance of the French, burned with impatience to fall upon
them, but received express orders not to do so, from the prince, who was
advancing slowly with the main body of his force.
Meanwhile, the English had taken the alarm, and Fastolf had drawn his
men together under cover of the wagons and a line of sharp stakes which
these provident English always carried with them. The English archers
were posted on the right, the Parisian arblast men on the left. In spite
of all the count de Clermont could say, his men were carried away by
their impetuous rancour; the Scotch leaped from their saddles to fight
the English on foot, and the Armagnac Gascons rushed upon their old
enemies the Parisians; but the latter stood their ground. The Scotch and
Gascons having thus broken their ranks, the English issued from behind
their temporary ramparts, pursued them, and killed three or four hundred.
The count de Clermont remained immovable. La Hire was so furious that he
turned back upon the English who dispersed in the pursuit, and killed
some of them. The count’s party had to return to Orleans after this
unlucky engagement, to which the Orléanais, always satirical, gave the
name of the “battle of the Herrings”; in fact, the balls had burst the
barrels; and the field was strewn with herrings more than with the slain.
Slight as was this check, it discouraged everyone. The most knowing
hastened to quit a town that seemed lost. The young count de Clermont had
the weakness to withdraw with his two thousand men; the admiral and the
chancellor of France thought it would be a sad thing if the king’s great
officers should be taken by the English, and they too departed. As the
men-at-arms no longer hoped for human aid, and the priests did not reckon
very confidently on divine succour, the archbishop of Rheims took himself
off, and even the bishop of Orleans left his flock to defend themselves
as they could.
They all went away on the 18th of February, assuring the citizens that
they would soon return in strength. Nothing could stay them. The bastard
of Orleans, who with equal skill and valour defended the appenage of his
house, had in vain been telling them since the 12th that a miraculous
succour should be looked for, that a daughter of God, who promised to
save the town, was coming from the marches of Lorraine. The archbishop,
an ex-secretary of the pope, and an old diplomatist, paid little heed to
this talk about miracles. Dunois himself did not reckon so exclusively on
aid from on high as to neglect employing a very human and very politic
means against the English. He sent Saintrailles to the duke of Burgundy,
to beg him, as a relative of the duke of Orleans, to take the latter’s
town into his keeping. He was now asked to accept the grand and important
possession of the centre of France, and he did not refuse the offer. He
went straight to Paris, and told the affair to Bedford, who answered
dryly that he had not toiled for the duke of Burgundy’s behoof. The
latter, much offended, recalled all the troops he had at the siege of
Orleans.
Supplies arriving with difficulty, discontent began in the town; many
no doubt were of opinion that the town had made quite enough sacrifices
for the sake of its lord, and that it was better Orleans should become
English than cease to be. Things did not stop there. It was discovered
that a hole had been made in the wall of the town; treachery was
manifestly at work. Besides all this, Dunois could expect no help from
Charles VII. The estates, assembled in 1428, had voted money and summoned
the tenants of fiefs to fulfil their feudal duties. Neither money nor men
had arrived.
We are not well acquainted with the intrigues that divided the little
court of Charles. The divisions in it had naturally augmented in this
its extreme distress. The old Armagnac advisers, whom Richemont and the
king’s mother-in-law had for a while removed, were in the way to regain
their credit. That southern party would have been well pleased to have a
king of the south holding his court at Grenoble. The duchess of Anjou,
the king’s mother-in-law, on the contrary, could not preserve Anjou if
the English definitively passed the Loire. So far there was a community
of interests between her and the house of Orleans. But the house of
Anjou had so many other interests, so various and divergent, that she
thought it expedient always to keep on fair terms with the English, and
to negotiate perpetually. When the defence of Orleans appeared to be
desperate (May, 1429), the old cardinal De Bar hastened to treat with
Bedford, in the name of his nephew, René of Anjou, lest he should lose
the inheritance of Lorraine, calculating that René could disavow his
proceedings, should the affairs of Charles VII at any future time assume
another aspect.
The impending ruin of Orleans had frightened the other towns of the
Loire. The nearest, Angers, Tours, and Bourges, sent provisions to
the besieged; Poitiers and La Rochelle, money; then, when the alarm
increased, the Bourbonnais, Auvergne, and even Languedoc sent the
Orléanais saltpetre, sulphur, and steel. Gradually all France became
interested in the fate of one town, and moved with sympathy for the
brave resistance of the men of Orleans and their fidelity to their lord.
Orleans was pitied; so too was its duke. The captive Charles of Orleans
could not defend his town.[40]
The English had one thing in their favour, namely, that their young king,
Henry VI, was certainly a Frenchman by the mother’s side, and grandson
of Charles VI, whom he resembled but too much as regarded the weakness
of his mind. The legitimacy of Charles VII, on the other hand, was very
doubtful; he was born in 1403, in the high tide of his mother’s intimacy
with the duke of Orleans; and she herself had acquiesced in the acts
in which he was called _soi-disant_ dauphin. Henry VI had not yet been
crowned at Rheims, but neither had Charles VII. The people in those days
recognised a king but by two things, royal birth and the crown placed
on his head with the church’s solemn sanction. Charles VII was not king
according to religion, nor was he sure that he was so according to
nature. This question, of no moment for politicians of that class who
decide after their own interests, was everything for the people, who are
willing to obey only the right. A woman had obscured this great question
of right, and by a woman it was cleared up. This second woman bore the
name Jeanne Darc. She was soon to be famous as the Maid of Orleans.
THE MAID OF ORLEANS (_LA PUCELLE_) (1429 A.D.)
The originality of the Maid of Orleans, and what determined her success,
was not so much her valour or her visions as her good sense. Through all
her enthusiasm, this daughter of the people saw the question clearly, and
was able to solve it. She cut the knot which the politic and the men of
little faith could not untie. She declared, in God’s name, that Charles
VII was the true heir, and she set him at ease as to his legitimacy, of
which he himself had doubts. That legitimacy she sanctified, taking her
king straight to Rheims, and gaining over the English, by the celerity of
her movements, the decisive advantage of the coronation.
It was at Domrémy, just between Lorraine of the Vosges and that of the
plain, between Lorraine and Champagne, that the beautiful and brave girl
was born, who was to wield the sword of France so well.
Joan or Jeanne was the third daughter of a peasant, Jacques Darc,[41]
and of Isabella of Romée. She had two godmothers, one of whom was named
Jeanne, the other Sibylle. The eldest son having been named James
(Jacques), another Peter (Pierre), the pious parents gave one of their
daughters the more exalted name of St. John (Jean). Whilst the other
children accompanied their father in his field work or tended cattle,
the mother kept Joan at home for sewing or spinning. She did not learn
to read or write, but she knew all her mother could teach her of sacred
things. She acquired religion, not as a lesson or a ceremony, but in the
homely popular form of a winter night’s tale, as the simple faith of a
mother.
Everybody knew her charity and her piety. They saw clearly she was the
best girl in the village. What they did not know was that in her the life
from above always absorbed the other life, and suppressed all vulgar
development. Hers was the divine gift to remain a child in soul and
body. She grew up, became strong and comely, but never knew the physical
miseries of her sex. They were spared her, to the advantage of her mental
growth and religious inspiration.
Joan had her share in the romantic adventures of those restless times.
She saw poor fugitives arrive in the hamlet, and the kind-hearted girl
assisted towards their reception, gave up her bed to them, and lay down
in the hayloft. Her kindred, too, were once obliged to save themselves
by flight. Then, when the inundation of brigands had passed off, the
family returned and found the village sacked, the house devastated, and
the church burned down. Thus she knew what war meant. She understood that
anti-Christian state of things, and abhorred that reign of the devil, in
which every man died in mortal sin. If, as everyone said, the ruin of the
kingdom was the work of a woman, an unnatural mother, it might be that
its salvation should proceed from a girl. This very fact was foretold
in one of Merlin’s prophecies, a prophecy which, variously enriched and
modified in the several provinces, had become thoroughly Lorrainian in
the country of Joan of Arc. It was a girl of the marches of Lorraine
that was to save the realm. The prophecy had probably received this
embellishment, in consequence of the recent marriage of René of Anjou
with the heiress of the duchy of Lorraine, which was in reality a very
fortunate event for France.
One summer’s day, a fast day, Joan, being in the garden at noon with her
father, close by the church, saw a dazzling light in that direction, and
heard a voice saying, “Be a good child, Joan, and go often to church.”
The poor girl was greatly frightened. Another time she again heard the
voice and saw the light; but now she discerned it in noble figures,
one of which had wings and seemed a sage counsellor. He said to her,
“Joan, go to the aid of the king of France, and thou wilt restore him
to his kingdom.” She answered, trembling all over, “My Lord, I am but a
poor girl; I cannot ride the war-horse, or lead men-at-arms.” The voice
replied: “Thou shalt go to M. de Baudricourt, captain of Vaucouleurs, and
he will take thee before the king. St. Catherine and St. Margaret will be
with thee to help thee.” She remained stupefied and in tears, as if she
had already beheld her whole future destiny.
The sage counsellor was none other than St. Michael, the stern archangel
of judgment and battle. He returned again, cheered her courage, “and
related to her the pity there was in the realm of France.” Then came the
white figures of female saints, surrounded with innumerable lights, their
heads adorned with rich crowns, their voices sweet and melting even to
tears. But Joan wept above all when the saints and angels left her. “I
should have been very glad,” she said, “if the angels had taken me away
with them.” Joan has told us nothing of the first inward conflict she
sustained; but it is evident it took place, and endured a long while,
since five years elapsed between her first vision and her departure from
the home of her parents.
She encountered not only resistance but temptation in her own family.
They tried to marry her, in the hope of bringing her back to a more
rational way of thinking. A young man of the village alleged that she
had promised him marriage when she was still a child; and as she denied
the fact, he cited her before the ecclesiastical judge at Toul. It was
supposed she would make no defence, but would submit to be cast by the
court and married; but to everyone’s great astonishment, she went to
Toul, appeared in court, and spoke--she who had always held her peace.
To enable her to escape from the control of her family, it was necessary
she should find in her family itself someone to believe her; this was
a most difficult problem. Failing to persuade her father, she made a
convert of her uncle, who took her away with him, under the pretext of
her nursing his wife in her lying-in. She prevailed on him to go to the
sire de Baudricourt, captain of Vaucouleurs, and ask his support for
her; but the man of war gave the peasant a very bad reception, and told
him the only thing to be done was “to slap her well,” and take her home
to her father. She was not cast down by the rebuff, but determined to
depart, and her uncle was constrained to accompany her. The decisive
moment was come; she quitted her family and her native village forever;
she embraced her friends, especially her dear little friend Mengette,
whom she commended to God’s keeping; but as for Haumette, the friend she
loved above all others, she preferred to depart without seeing her.
She arrived then in the town of Vaucouleurs, dressed in her clumsy red
peasant garments, and went along with her uncle to lodge with the wife
of a wheelwright who took a liking to her. She had herself taken into
Baudricourt’s presence, and said to him boldly that “she came to him
on the part of our Lord to bid him tell the dauphin to keep his ground
steadily, and not give battle to his enemies; for our Lord would grant
him succour in mid-Lent. The kingdom did not belong to the dauphin but to
our Lord; nevertheless, it was our Lord’s will that the dauphin should
become king, and that he should hold the kingdom in trust.” She went on
to say that, in spite of the dauphin’s enemies, he would be king, and
she would take him to be crowned. The captain was amazed, and suspecting
there was some deviltry at work, he consulted the parish priest, who
apparently entertained the same doubts. Joan had not spoken of her
visions to any churchman. The priest, therefore, accompanied the captain
to the wheelwright’s house with his stole on, and adjured Joan to depart
if she was sent by the evil spirit.
But the people did not doubt; their admiration was extreme; persons
flocked from all parts to see her. It appears that Baudricourt sent
to ask leave of the king. Meanwhile, he conducted Joan to the duke of
Lorraine, who was ill and wished to consult her. He got nothing from her
but advice to appease God’s anger by becoming reconciled with his wife.
He gave her encouragement notwithstanding. On her return to Vaucouleurs,
she found a messenger from the king, who brought the permission she
desired. The disaster of the battle of the Herrings disposed the king to
accept every means of which he could avail himself. Joan had predicted
the battle on the very day when it took place. The people of Vaucouleurs,
entertaining no doubt of her mission, clubbed together to buy her a
horse. The captain gave her only a sword.
It was a rough and very perilous journey she was about to make. The whole
country was overrun by armed bands belonging to either party. There was
now neither road nor bridge; the rivers were swollen; it was the month of
February, 1429.
_Joan at the Court_
The court of Charles VII was far from being unanimous in the Maid’s
favour. That inspired girl, just come from Lorraine, and patronised by
the duke of Lorraine, could not fail to strengthen with the king the
party of the queen and her mother, the Lorraine and Anjou party. An
ambush was laid for Joan at some distance from Chinon, and she escaped
from it only by miracle.
So strong was the opposition against her that, after she was actually
arrived, the council continued for two days to discuss the question
whether or not the king should see her. Her enemies thought to postpone
the matter indefinitely, by having it decided that inquiries should be
made respecting her in her native place. Fortunately, she had friends
also--the two queens, no doubt, and above all, the duke of Alençon, who,
having recently come out of the hands of the English, was very impatient
to carry the war into the north, and recover his duchy. The inhabitants
of Orleans, to whom Dunois had been promising this marvellous aid since
the 12th of February, sent to the king and claimed the Maid’s presence.
The king received her at last, surrounded with the greatest pomp; which,
in all probability, was adopted with the hope of disconcerting her.
She presented herself humbly “as a poor shepherd wench,” distinguished
the king at the first glance from the crowd of lords among whom he had
purposely mingled; and though he insisted, at first, he was not the king,
she embraced his knees. But as he was not yet crowned, she styled him
only dauphin: “Gentle dauphin,” she said, “my name is Jehanne la Pucelle.
The King of heaven sends you word by me that you shall be anointed and
crowned in the town of Rheims, and you shall be lieutenant of the King of
heaven, who is King of France.”
[Illustration: THE CATHEDRAL OF RHEIMS]
The archbishop of Rheims, chancellor of France, and president of the
king’s council, summoned doctors and professors of theology, some of them
priests, others monks, and ordered them to examine the Maid. The doctors
being introduced and seated in a hall, Joan sat down on the end of the
bench, and replied to their questions. She recounted the apparitions and
the words of the angels, with dignified simplicity. A Dominican met her
with a single objection, but it was one of weight: “Jehanne, thou sayest
it is God’s will to deliver the people of France; if such is his will he
has no need of men-at-arms.” The observation did not confound her. “Ah!
_mon Dieu_,” said she, “the men-at-arms will do battle, and God will give
the victory.” Another person was not so easily satisfied. This was Friar
Séguin, a Limousin, professor of theology in the university of Poitiers,
“a very sour man,” says the chronicle. He asked her, in his Limousin
French, “What language did the celestial voice speak?” Joan answered with
rather too much sharpness, “A better one than yours.” “Dost thou believe
in God?” said the enraged doctor; “well then, God will not have us put
faith in thy words unless thou show a sign.” She answered, “I am not come
to Poitiers to perform signs or miracles; my sign shall be to raise the
siege of Orleans. Let me have men-at-arms, few or many, and I will go.”
The question of her inspiration was made to depend on the test of her
virginity. The duchess of Anjou, the king’s mother-in-law, accomplished
the ridiculous examination, with the aid of some ladies, to the honour
of the Maid. Some Franciscans who had been sent to her native place to
collect information, brought back the most satisfactory accounts. There
was no more time to be lost. Orleans was crying out for help; Dunois
was sending message upon message. The Maid was equipped, and a sort of
establishment was formed for her. First of all they gave her for squire
John Daulon, a brave knight of mature years, who belonged to the count
de Dunois, and was the most respectable among his followers. She had
also a noble page, two heralds-at-arms, a seneschal, and two valets; her
brother, Pierre Darc, had also joined her suite. John Pasquerel, a friar,
hermit of the order of St. Augustin, was assigned her for confessor.
_The Deliverance of Orleans (1429 A.D.)_
[Sidenote: [1429 A.D.]]
When we read the list of the captains who threw themselves into Orleans
with Joan of Arc--La Hire, Saintrailles, Gaucourt, Culan, Coaraze,
Armagnac; when we see that, independently of the Bretons under Marshal de
Retz, and Marshal de St. Sévère’s Gascons, Florent d’Illiers, captain of
Châteaudun, had brought all the nobles of the vicinity to take part in
this short expedition, the deliverance of Orleans seems less miraculous.
One thing, however, was by all means wanting to enable these great
forces to act with advantage, an essential, indispensable thing--unity
of action. Dunois might have created this, had no more been requisite
to that end than address and intelligence; but this was not enough. An
authority was requisite, one surpassing that of the crown; the king’s
captains were not habituated to obey the king.
War had changed men into wild beasts, and these beasts required to be
turned again to men, Christians, docile subjects. A great and difficult
change! Some of these Armagnac captains were perhaps the most furious
men that ever existed. It was a ludicrous and touching thing to see the
sudden conversion of the old Armagnac brigands. They did not stop short
halfway in their amendment. La Hire no longer ventured to utter an oath;
but the Maid, compassionating the violence he did himself, allowed him to
swear, “by his staff.” The devils had all at once been transformed into
little saints.
She had begun by insisting that they should renounce their wanton women,
and should confess. Then in the course of her march along the Loire, she
had an altar erected in the open air, at which she took the communion,
and so did they. The first night they bivouacked, she lay down in full
armour, as there were no women about her; but she was not yet habituated
to such hardships, and she was ill in consequence. As for danger, she
knew not what it meant. She wanted to cross over to the north side of
the river, and march along the English bank and between the bastilles of
the invaders, who, she asserted, would not stir. Her followers would not
listen to her advice, but marched along the left bank, so as to pass two
leagues above Orleans. Dunois came out to meet her: “I bring you,” she
said, “the best succour ever sent to anyone, the succour of the King of
heaven. It comes not from me, but from God himself, who, at the entreaty
of St. Louis and St. Charlemagne, has had pity on the town of Orleans,
and will not suffer that the enemy should have both the duke’s body and
his town at once.”
She entered the city slowly at eight in the evening (April 29th), the
crowd scarcely allowing her to advance. Everyone strove eagerly to touch
at least her horse. They gazed on her “as if they saw God.” Talking
gently to the people all the while, she proceeded to the church, and then
to the houses of the duke of Orleans’ treasurer, an honourable man, whose
wife and daughter gave her welcome. She slept with Charlotte, one of the
daughters.
She had entered the town along with the provisions, but the army marched
down-stream again, to cross at Blois. She would, nevertheless, have had
an immediate attack made on the English bastilles; but as she could not
effect this, she sent a second peremptory message to those on the north
side, and then proceeded to repeat her summons to those on the south.
Glasdale, the captain, abused her in the coarsest terms, calling her
cow-girl and ribald. In their hearts they believed her to be a witch, and
were greatly afraid of her. They kept her herald, and were thinking of
burning him, in hopes that this would, perhaps, break the charm.
The army not arriving, Dunois ventured forth in search of it. The
archbishop of Rheims, chancellor of Charles VII, had detained the little
army at Blois. The old politician was far from conceiving the existence
of such an irresistible enthusiasm, or perhaps he feared it. It was,
therefore, much against his will that he came to Orleans. The maid went
out to meet him, with the people and the priests singing hymns. The
procession passed and repassed before the English bastilles; and the army
entered the town, protected by some priests and a girl (May 4th, 1429).
Joan, who, in the midst of her enthusiasm and her inspiration, had much
shrewdness of apprehension, very clearly discerned the hostile temper of
the new comers. She was right in surmising that there was a design to act
without her. As she lay by Charlotte’s side, she suddenly started up,
exclaiming, “My God! the blood of our people is running on the ground.
It was ill done! Why was I not wakened? Quick! my arms, my horse!” She
was armed in a moment, galloped off at full speed, and met men already
wounded, whom they were carrying back from the field. The fugitives faced
round on her arrival. Dunois, who had also not been called, arrived on
the ground at the same time. The bastille (one of those on the north
side) was attacked again. Talbot strove to succour it; but fresh forces
issued from Orleans; the Maid put herself at their head, and Talbot
withdrew his men. The bastille was carried. This was her first victory,
the first time she looked on a field of slaughter. She sought confession
for herself and her followers; and declared that she would take the
communion on the morrow, being the feast of the Ascension, and pass the
day in prayer.
Advantage was taken of this resolution to hold a council without her,
wherein it was determined that this time the besiegers should cross the
Loire and attack St. Jean le Blanc, the bastille which most impeded the
introduction of provisions into the town, and that a false attack should
be made at the same time on the other side. The English then did what
they ought to have done before. They concentrated their strength. With
their own hands burning the bastille which was to have been attacked,
they retired upon the other two on the south side, the Augustins and the
Tournelles. The former was instantly attacked and carried, the success in
this instance again being partly due to the Maid. The French were seized
for a while with a panic, and rushed back towards the floating bridge;
but the Maid and La Hire disentangled themselves from the throng, threw
themselves into boats, and took the English in flank.
There remained the Tournelles. The victors passed the night before it;
but they obliged the Maid, who had eaten nothing all day (it was Friday),
to recross the Loire. Meanwhile the council had assembled. The Maid was
told in the evening that it had been unanimously resolved that, since the
town was now fully victualled, they should wait for a fresh reinforcement
to attack the Tournelles. It is difficult to believe that such could
have been the real intention of the leaders, for delay was extremely
dangerous, since the English might at any moment be succoured by Fastolf.
Probably the intention was to deceive the Maid and deprive her of the
honour of the triumph she had so powerfully contributed towards securing.
She disappointed them.
In the morning she rode to the Burgundy gate with a multitude of
men-at-arms and citizens; but the sire de Gaucourt, grand-master of
the king’s household, kept it shut. The crowd opened the gate, and
forced another near it. The sun was rising on the Loire when the whole
concourse threw themselves into the boats. On arriving, however, at the
Tournelles, they felt that they wanted artillery, and they sent for some
to the town. At last they attacked the outward rampart which protected
the bastille. The English defended themselves valiantly. The Maid,
perceiving that the assailants were beginning to show signs of weakness,
jumped into the ditch, seized a ladder, and was in the act of applying it
to the wall, when an arrow struck her between the neck and the shoulder.
The English sallied out to seize her, but she was carried off by her
own party. She only allowed a little oil to be poured on the wound, and
confessed.
Meanwhile no progress was made, and night was at hand. Dunois himself
gave orders to sound a retreat. A Basque had taken out of the hands of
the Maid’s squire that standard of hers which struck such dismay into the
enemy. “When the standard touches the wall,” said she, “you will be able
to enter.” “It is touching it.” “In then! all is your own.” And just as
she had predicted, the assailants in a frenzy of enthusiasm climbed the
wall “as though by one step.” The English were at this moment attacked on
two sides at once.
Meanwhile the men of Orleans, who watched the fight from the other side
of the Loire, could contain themselves no longer. They threw open their
gates and rushed to the bridge, but there was an arch broken; they pushed
a rickety plank across the opening, and a knight of St. John ventured
to pass over the frail spar in full armour. The bridge was hastily
repaired, and the whole multitude hurried to the other side. The English,
seeing such a human sea rushing upon them, thought the whole world had
come together against them. Their senses grew bewildered; some of them
beheld St. Aignan, the patron of the town, others the archangel Michael.
Glasdale endeavoured to retreat from the rampart to the bastille, across
a small bridge; but it was shattered by a shot, and the Englishman fell
into the water and was drowned, before the eyes of the maid he had so
vilified. There were five hundred men in the bastille, all of whom were
put to the sword.
Not one Englishman remained south of the Loire. Next day, Sunday,
the besiegers on the northern side abandoned their bastilles, their
artillery, their prisoners, and their wounded comrades. Talbot and
Suffolk conducted the retreat steadily and in good order. The Maid would
not allow them to be pursued, since they retired of their own accord; but
before they withdrew out of sight of the town, she had an altar erected
on a plain, at which mass was celebrated, and the people returned thanks
to God in the presence of the enemy (Sunday, May 8th). The effect of the
deliverance of Orleans was prodigious; everyone beheld in it the agency
of supernatural power. Many attributed it to the devil, but the majority
to God; it began to be generally believed that Charles had right on his
side.[c]
_Joan of Arc leads the King to Rheims_
However discomfited and paralysed by the panic of their soldiers, as
well as by the great diminution of their numbers in the siege, the
English generals would not retreat from the Loire, but withdrew, Suffolk
to Jargeau, up the stream of the river, Talbot to Meung, lower down
its current. They were unmolested for a month. The French were lost in
jubilation. Joan left Orleans on the 13th of May, and hurried back to the
court at Tours to press the king for an army to proceed to Rheims.[g]
To be crowned at Rheims would have been a decisive victory for Charles
over his young competitor Henry VI. It would have made him a real king
of France. But once again the politicians believed themselves the wiser,
and the coronation was not to be thought of until the English were driven
from the Loire.[b]
Early in June, however, Joan was able to muster eight thousand
combatants, of whom twelve hundred were knights, most of them townsmen of
Orleans.[g] Suffolk, who had thrown himself into Jargeau, was besieged
and the place stormed. Beaugency, too, was taken before Lord Talbot could
receive the succours which Sir John Fastolf was bringing him from the
regent. The constable De Richemont, who had long kept aloof within his
own estates, came, in spite of the king and the Maid, to lend his aid to
the victorious army.
A battle was imminent; Richemont came to share the honour it might
afford. Talbot and Fastolf had formed a junction of their forces; but
it is a curious fact, illustrative both of the condition of the country
and of the fortuitous character of the war, that no one knew where to
find the English army in the wilderness of La Beauce, which was then
covered with coppices and thickets, until they were discovered by a stag,
which, being pursued by the French vanguard, rushed into the ranks of the
English.
The latter were on their march, and had not set up their defensive line
of stakes as usual. Talbot alone was for fighting, furious as he was,
since the defeat at Orleans, at having shown his back to the French.
Fastolf, on the contrary, who had gained the battle of the Herrings,
had no need of an engagement to retrieve his reputation, and said, like
a sensible man, that with a disheartened army it was better to remain
on the defensive. The French men-at-arms did not wait for the end of
the discussion, but charged headlong, and met with no great resistance.
Talbot fought with desperate obstinacy, hoping perhaps to be killed,
and succeeded only in getting himself made prisoner. The pursuit was
murderous; the bodies of two thousand English were strewed over the plain.
After this battle of Patay (28th or 29th of June), it was now or never
the time to venture on the expedition to Rheims. The politicians wanted
to remain still on the Loire, and make sure of Cosne and La Charité. This
time they talked in vain; no timid counsels could now be listened to.
Every day brought people flocking in from all the provinces, attracted by
the fame of the Maid’s miracles, and believing only in her, and in her
purpose forthwith to convey the king to Rheims. There was an irresistible
outburst of the pilgrim and crusading spirit. The indolent young king
himself at last yielded to the popular flood, and suffered himself to
be borne along by that vast tide that set in towards the north; and off
they started all together, willingly or perforce--the king, courtiers,
the politic and the enthusiastic, the madmen and the sages. They were
twelve thousand when they began their march, but their numbers augmented
continually as they advanced; every hour brought them additional
strength; and those who had no armour followed the holy expedition in
plain doublets, as archers or sword-and-buckler men, even though they
were of gentle blood.
The army marched from Gien on the 28th of June without attempting to
enter it, that town being in the hands of the duke of Burgundy, whom
there were reasons for treating with favour. Troyes had a mixed garrison
of Burgundians and English, who ventured to make a sortie on the first
appearance of the royal army. There seemed small chance of storming a
large town so well guarded, and that too without artillery. There was
only one old Armagnac councillor, the president Mâcon, who was of a
contrary opinion, well knowing that in such an enterprise prudence was
on the side of enthusiasm, and that men must not reason in a popular
crusade. “When the king undertook this march,” said he, “he did so not by
reason of the great armed force or the abundance of money he possessed,
nor because the achievement seemed to him possible; he undertook it
because Joan told him to advance and be crowned at Rheims, and that
he would encounter little resistance by the way, such being the good
pleasure of God.” The Maid then presented herself at the door of the
council-room, and assured them they would be able to enter the town in
three days. “We would willingly wait six,” said the chancellor, “if we
were sure what you say is true.” “Six? You shall enter to-morrow!”
[Illustration: A FRENCH KNIGHT, TIME OF JOAN OF ARC]
She seized her standard; the whole army followed her to the ditch, and
they threw into it all they could lay their hands on, fagots, doors,
tables, rafters, with such rapidity that the townspeople thought the
ditches would very soon disappear altogether. The English began to be
dazzled and bewildered as at Orleans, and fancied they saw a cloud of
white butterflies fluttering round the magic standard. The citizens on
their part were in great dread, recollecting that it was in Troyes the
treaty had been concluded which disinherited Charles VII, and fearing
that an example would be made of their town. Already they were taking
refuge in the churches, and crying out that the town must surrender. The
fighting men, who desired nothing better, parleyed and obtained leave to
depart with what they had.
What they had was chiefly prisoners, Frenchmen. Charles VII’s
councillors, who had drawn up the capitulation, had stipulated nothing
with respect to those unfortunate persons. The Maid alone thought of
them. When the English marched out with their prisoners in irons, she
stood at the gates and cried out, “In God’s name, they shall not carry
them off!” She stopped them, in fact, and the king paid their ransom.[c]
Charles simply passed through Troyes, neither did he stop at Châlons,
which opened its gates with alacrity; and, on July 13th, he arrived
before Rheims. Two Burgundian nobles, the sires of Châtillon and of
Saveuse, were in command, but they had no men. They assembled the
townsmen, and asked them to hold out for six weeks only; at the end of
that time they guaranteed that the dukes of Burgundy and of Bedford would
arrive with so powerful an army that it would easily raise the siege.
The townsfolk refused to run the risk, persuaded the two captains to
retire, and sent a deputation to the chancellor of France who was at the
same time archbishop of Rheims, begging him to enter his episcopal town.
On July 17th Charles was at last crowned in accordance with the usual
ritual, anointed with oil from the holy ampulla of Saint-Rémy and lifted
up to his seat by the ecclesiastical peers.
_Joan defeated at Paris (1429 A.D.)_
Joan had done the two great things which her ‘voices’ told her to do:
she had delivered Orleans, and had caused the king to be crowned; she
now wished to return to her village. “On her entrance into Rheims,” says
the _Chronique de la Pucelle_[h] “seeing how all the poor people of the
country cried ‘Noel!’ and wept from joy and gladness, and how they came
to the king singing _Te Deum laudamus_ without response or anthem, she
said to the chancellor of France and to Dunois: ‘In God’s name this is a
good and pious people, and when it shall be my time to die, I should like
it to be in this country.’
“Then the said count Dunois asked her: ‘Joan, do you know when you will
die and in what place?’ She answered that that was as God willed; and
said moreover to the said lord: ‘I have fulfilled what my Lord commanded
me, and I wish that he would send me back to my father and mother to keep
their sheep and cattle.’”
But her rôle was not ended, for the English still held a large part
of the kingdom. Joan, with the same firmness which had made her go to
Orleans and to Rheims, asked to be allowed to march to Paris. The king’s
counsellors could not accustom themselves to these heroic deeds of daring
which, at certain moments, are more estimable than prudence; they decided
first to take the small towns on the road to Paris. These opened their
gates of their own free will. The royal army entered Laon, Soissons,
Coulommiers, Provins, Senlis, and St. Denis without trouble. But when
they came to Paris the opportunity had passed.[b] Bedford had sent for
the duke of Burgundy to secure Paris, and he came at the invitation,
but almost alone; all the use the regent could make of him was to have
him figure in an assembly of notables, where he harangued, and repeated
once more the lamentable history of his father’s death. This being done,
he took himself off, leaving Bedford, by way of aid, only some Picard
men-at-arms; and even for this slight assistance, he required to have the
town of Meux given to him in pledge.
There was no hope save in Beaufort. That priest was king in England. His
nephew, Gloucester, the protector, had ruined himself by his own follies.
In order to uplift the cardinal’s power to the highest pitch, it was
necessary that Bedford should be brought as low in France as Gloucester
was in England; that he should be reduced to such exigency as to call for
Beaufort’s presence, and that the latter should come at the head of an
army to crown Henry VI. That army Beaufort had in readiness. With it he
was to secure Paris, convey young Henry thither, and crown him.
It was not until July 25th, nine days after Charles VII had been duly
anointed and crowned, that the cardinal entered Paris with his army.
Bedford did not lose a moment, but set out with these troops to observe
Charles VII. Twice they were in presence of each other, and some
skirmishes took place. Bedford, fearing for Normandy, kept watch over it,
and during this time the king marched against Paris (August). This was
contrary to the wish of the Maid, whose voices told her not to advance
beyond St. Denis.
It was an imprudent enterprise; the French nevertheless carried a
rampart. The Maid went down into the first ditch, and crossed the
shelving bank between it and the second, and found the latter full of
water, up to the foot of the wall. Heedless of the arrows, that fell like
hail about her, she shouted to her men to bring fascines, and meanwhile
sounded the depth of the water with her lance. She was almost alone,
a mark for every arrow, and one passed through her thigh. She strove
to bear up against the pain, and remained on the spot to encourage the
troops to mount to the assault. At last, having lost much blood, she
retired to the cover of the outer ditch, and it was not until ten or
eleven at night she could be prevailed on to return to her quarters. She
seemed to feel that this decisive check under the very walls of Paris
would ruin her beyond recovery.
[Sidenote: [1429-1430 A.D.]]
Fifteen hundred men were wounded in this attack, which she was wrongfully
accused of having advised. She was now vilified by her own party as well
as by the enemy. She had not scrupled to make the attack on the day of
our Lady’s Nativity (September 8th), to the great scandal of the pious
town of Paris. The court of Charles VII was still more shocked at this
irreverent deed. The libertines, the politic ones, the blind worshippers
of the letter and sworn foes to the spirit, all declared bravely against
the spirit the moment it showed signs of weakness. Negotiations were
resolved on, contrary to the Maid’s advice, at the instigation of the
archbishop of Rheims, chancellor of France, who had never been cordially
in her favour. He proceeded to St. Denis, to ask for a truce; perhaps he
had secret hopes of prevailing with the duke of Burgundy, who was then in
Paris.
Regarded with ill will, and badly supported, the Maid carried on the
sieges of St. Pierre le Moûtier and La Charité during the winter. Though
almost abandoned before the former, she nevertheless stormed and took it.
The siege of La Charité proceeded slowly and languidly; a panic broke out
among the besiegers, and they dispersed.
_Capture of Joan of Arc (1430 A.D.)_
Meanwhile the English had induced the duke of Burgundy to give them
effectual aid. The weaker they were, the more hope he had of being able
to retain the strongholds he might take in Picardy. The English, who
had just lost Louviers, offered him his own terms, and he, the richest
prince in Christendom, no longer hesitated to stake men and money in a
war, the profit of which he hoped to appropriate. A bribe to the governor
put him in possession of Soissons. Then he laid siege to Compiègne, the
governor of which was also a man of very questionable integrity; but
the inhabitants were too strongly committed to the cause of Charles
VII to let their town be given up. The Maid threw herself into it, and
on the very same day made a sortie in which she nearly surprised the
besiegers. But the latter rallied in a moment, and pressed hotly upon the
besieged, up to the rampart and the bridge. The Maid, having remained
in the rear to cover the retreat, was not able to get within the walls
in time--whether it was that the bridge was blocked up by the crowd, or
that the gates were already closed. Being identified by her costume, she
was soon surrounded, seized, and dragged from her horse. Her capturer,
a Picard archer, brought her to his master, the bastard of Wandomme,
who sold her to John of Ligny, who belonged to the illustrious house of
Luxemburg and was the duke of Burgundy’s vassal.[c]
Now this John of Luxemburg had need of the duke of Burgundy in order to
inherit peacefully the domains of Ligny and St. Pol, to the detriment of
his elder brother. The duke of Burgundy, in order not to be disturbed
when seizing Brabant, Brussels, and Louvain, in spite of the rights of
his aunt Margaret, needed the assistance of the English. The English
were inclined to allow anything provided Joan of Arc was given up to
them.[b] It was absolutely necessary to get her out of the hands of the
Burgundians. She had been taken on the 23rd of May; on the 26th a message
was sent from Rouen in the name of the vicar of the Inquisition summoning
John of Ligny to give up the woman, she being suspected of witchcraft.[c]
A violent tempered man, a Burgundian, who was willing to do anything in
the hope of obtaining the archbishopric of Rouen, Pierre Cauchon, bishop
of Beauvais, undertook to prove it by a trial in due form.[b]
[Sidenote: [1430-1431 A.D.]]
The university stepped forward, and wrote to the duke of Burgundy and to
John of Ligny (July 14th). Cauchon, in his exceeding zeal making himself
the agent and courier of the English, carried the letter with his own
hands to the two dukes. At the same time he summoned them as a bishop to
deliver over to him a prisoner over whom he had jurisdiction. In this
strange proceeding, we find him pass from the part of a judge to that
of a negotiator, and make offers of money; though the woman in question
cannot be considered a prisoner of war, the king of England will give
John of Ligny and the bastard of Wandomme 200 or 300 livres’ yearly rent,
and a sum of 6,000 livres to those in whose keeping she is. Towards the
end of the letter he advances as far as 10,000 livres, “as much,” he
says, “as would be given for a king or a prince according to the custom
of France.”
Thus on all sides that world of interest and covetousness was opposed
to the Maid, or at least indifferent as to her fate. The good Charles
VII did nothing for her, the good Duke Philip gave her up to her mortal
foes. It was in vain John of Ligny’s wife threw herself at his feet,
and implored him not to dishonour himself.[42] He was not free; he had
already received English money, and he gave up Joan, not directly indeed
to the English, but to the duke of Burgundy, who took her to Arras, and
then to the keep of Crotoy.
Compiègne was delivered on the 1st of November. The duke of Burgundy had
advanced as far as Noyon, as though it were to meet the disgraceful blow
more nearly and in person. He was again defeated shortly afterwards at
Germigny (November 20th). At Péronne Saintrailles offered him battle, but
he durst not accept it. These humiliations no doubt confirmed the duke in
his alliance with the English, and fixed his determination to give up the
Maid to them.
At the moment when the English had the Maid at last in their hands,[43]
and could begin her trial, their affairs were in a very bad condition.
Far from having recovered Louviers, they had lost Château Gaillard; La
Hire, who took it by escalade, found Barbazan a prisoner there, and let
loose that redoubtable captain. The towns were going over of their own
accord to the side of Charles VII, and the citizens were driving out the
English. The men of Melun, so close to Paris, ejected their garrison.
The rapid downhill course of English affairs was only to be checked by
some strong machinery, and such had Beaufort ready in the trial and the
coronation of Henry VI. The latter entered Paris on the 2nd of December.
The university had been made to write on the 21st of November to Cauchon,
accusing him of tardiness, and requesting the king to begin the trial.
Cauchon was in no hurry, thinking it hard, apparently, to begin the
work, whilst the payment was as yet uncertain. It was not until a month
later that he obtained authority from the chapter of Rouen to proceed in
that diocese. He opened the proceedings at Rouen, on the 9th of January,
1431.[c]
_Trial of Joan of Arc_
[Sidenote: [1431 A.D.]]
He based the accusation on the four following points: infringement of
the laws of the church, by making use of magic practices; by taking up
arms, contrary to her parents’ wishes; by wearing clothes which were not
those of her sex; and lastly, by announcing revelations which were not
sanctioned by ecclesiastical authority. Thus a poor girl of nineteen was
alone, without protection against judges who were sold to her enemies,
who arbitrarily suppressed every proof of her innocence, who prevented
her appealing to the pope or to the council, who sought to embarrass her
by absurd and misleading questions or by extremely delicate ones, and who
were often disconcerted by her heroic replies.
[Illustration: COSTUME OF A FRENCH PEASANT, AT THE TIME OF JOAN OF ARC]
The maid was finally brought before her judges on the 21st of February.
“Joan,” they asked her, “do you believe you have found salvation?” “If
I have not, may God grant it me; if I have, may God preserve me in it!”
“Did you not say that standards made by the soldiers in imitation of
yours would bring them good luck?” “No; I only said, ‘advance boldly
among the English,’ and I advanced also.” But she declared that she had
never killed anyone. “Why was her standard carried to the church at
Rheims at the coronation, more than those of the other captains?” “It had
borne the burden, it was only just that it should receive the honour.”
“What was the idea of those people who kissed your hands, your feet,
your clothes?” “The poor people came to me gladly, because I did them no
ill; I supported them and defended them to the best of my power.” “Do
you think you were right to leave without permission from your mother
and father? Ought one not to honour one’s father and mother?” “They have
forgiven me.” “Did you not think you were sinning in acting in this
manner?” “God commanded it; if I had had one hundred fathers and one
hundred mothers I should have gone.” “Do you think your king did right
in killing or having killed Monseigneur of Burgundy?” “It was a great
pity for the kingdom of France. But, whatever may have been between
them, God sent me to help the king of France.” “Do St. Catherine and St.
Margaret hate the English?” “They love what our Lord loves, and hate what
he hates.” “Does God hate the English?” “I know nothing of the love or
hatred which God has for the English; but I know well that they will be
driven from France, except those who perish here.” “Is it not a mortal
sin to admit a man to ransom and then put him to death?” “I have not done
so.”
The judges laid stress on the man’s clothing which Joan had assumed
contrary to the laws of the church, which she was still wearing, and
which she would not relinquish. The wretches affected not to understand
what the poor girl did not dare to tell them--that in camp, even in
prison, this dress had been, and still was, her protection.[b]
_The Twelve Articles_
Between the 2nd and 4th of April the judges, on the advice of the members
of the university, caused the seventy points of accusation brought
forward by the prosecutor to be summed up in twelve articles. There
were two doctors of Paris, Nicholas Midi and Jacques de Touraine, who
worked on this--one on the plan, the other on the final form. The twelve
articles reviewed the trial in a spirit very hostile to Joan, while it
eliminated the prosecutor’s accusation of impostures and brutalities. On
the 12th of April twenty-two doctors and licentiates deliberated together
on the twelve articles. They left the question hanging between a matter
of human invention and an inspiration of Satan.[f]
We give herewith these twelve articles and follow them with the findings
of the faculty, as they are given in the report of the trial, edited by
M. Quicherat.[i]
I. And in the first place, a certain woman states and affirms that,
when she was thirteen years of age or thereabouts, she herself saw,
with her own corporeal eyes, St. Michael consoling her, and sometimes
St. Gabriel appearing in bodily form; sometimes, also, she saw a great
multitude of angels: and afterwards, SS. Catherine and Margaret showed
themselves visible in bodily form to the same woman, and she also sees
them daily and hears their voices, and has embraced them at times, and
kissed them, touching them sensibly and corporeally. She truly saw the
heads of the said angels and saints, but concerning their other parts or
their garments she was unwilling to say anything. And that the aforesaid
SS. Catherine and Margaret sometimes spoke to her at a certain spring
near a large tree, commonly called “the fairies’ tree,”[44] concerning
which spring and tree there was a common report that the “fates of the
ladies” frequent there, and that many fever-stricken persons go to the
said spring and tree for the sake of recovering health, although they are
situated in a profane place. These she frequently worshipped there and
elsewhere and paid them reverence.
She says, moreover, that the aforesaid SS. Catherine and Margaret appear
and show themselves to her crowned with very beautiful and costly crowns,
and from the aforesaid time and ofttimes subsequently spoke to the
same woman concerning the command of God, that it behoved her to go to
a certain secular prince promising that by the help of the same woman
and by her labours the said prince would recover by force of arms great
temporal dominion and worldly honour, would obtain victory over his
enemies, and that the same prince would receive the said woman and would
bestow on her arms together with an army of soldiers for the carrying out
of what was promised. Furthermore, the said SS. Catherine and Margaret
instructed the same woman concerning the command of God, that she should
assume and wear male attire, which she has worn and still wears in
persevering obedience to this kind of command insomuch that the woman
herself has said that she would rather die than abandon this kind of
dress, saying this simply at different times, and occasionally “unless it
were the command of God.” She even chose rather not to be present at the
offices of mass and to go without the holy communion of the Eucharist at
times ordained by the church for receiving the sacrament, than to resume
female and put off male attire. They were also protectors of the said
woman in this matter that, without the knowledge and against the will of
her parents, when she was seventeen years of age or thereabouts, she left
her father’s house and associated with a number of soldiers, frequenting
with them by day and by night, never or rarely having another woman with
her. And many other things did the said saints tell and teach the same
woman, by reason of which she says that she has been sent by the God of
heaven and by the victorious church of the saints now enjoying beatitude
to whom she commits all her good deeds.
She declines, however, and refuses to submit her deeds and words to the
church militant, having been ofttimes required and admonished concerning
this; saying that it is impossible for the same woman to act contrary to
those things which she affirmed in her process, that she had acted by the
command of God, nor would she render account concerning these things to
the conclusion or judgment of anyone living, but only to the judgment of
God; and that they revealed to the same woman that she herself will be
saved in the glory of the blessed ones and she would attain the salvation
of her soul if she should keep her virginity, which she vowed to them on
the first occasion when she saw and heard them. By the occasion of which
revelation she asserts that she is as certain of her own salvation in the
kingdom of heaven as if it were already a present fact.
II. Further, the said woman declares that the sign which the prince
had to whom she was sent, and by which he was influenced to believe
her concerning her revelations and to receive her for the purpose
of carrying on war, was that St. Michael came to the same prince
accompanied by a multitude of angels of whom some had crowns and others
had wings, with whom were SS. Catherine and Margaret. This angel and
the woman were walking above the earth along a way like unto steps and
an arch stretching a great way, other angels and the aforesaid saints
accompanying them; and a certain angel delivered to the same prince a
very costly crown of purest gold and the said angel bowed himself before
the said prince showing him reverence. On one occasion she said that,
when her prince had the sign given him, she herself thought that he was
then alone although several others were near enough at hand; and on
another occasion that, as she believes, one archbishop received that sign
of a crown and delivered it to the aforesaid prince, several temporal
lords being present, witnessing it.
III. Further, the aforesaid woman knew and was assured that he who visits
her is St. Michael, by the good advice, comfort, and good doctrine which
the aforesaid St. Michael gave and made for the same woman; and in that
he named himself, saying that he himself was Michael. And similarly she
knows St. Catherine and St. Margaret distinctly from each other through
this--that they name themselves and salute her. On account of which
things, concerning the appearance of St. Michael to her, she believes
that he is St. Michael himself, and she believes that the words and deeds
of that Michael are true and good as firmly as she believes that our Lord
Jesus suffered and died for our redemption.
IV. Further, the said woman declares and affirms that she herself is
certain concerning certain future things that are wholly coming to
pass, and will happen, just as she is certain about those things which
she indeed sees done before her; and boasts that she has and has had
information concerning certain hidden things by means of revelations
as far as the meaning of the word extends through the voices of St.
Catherine and St. Margaret--namely, that she will be liberated from
prison and that the French will do a fairer deed in her company than
was ever done for the whole of Christianity; that, furthermore, she has
recognised by means of revelation, as she says, some men whom she had
never seen before without anyone pointing them out to her, and that she
has revealed and discovered a certain sword which was hidden in the earth.
V. Further, the said woman declares and affirms that according to the
command of God and that which is well pleasing to him she has assumed
and worn and continually wears and clothes herself with a dress after
the fashion of a man. And further, she declares that from the time that
she held it to be the command of God to take male dress, it behoved her
to get a short tunic, a hood, a jerkin, breeches, and boots with many
tags, the hair of her head being cut off round over the tops of her
ears, leaving nothing upon her body which represented or pointed out
the feminine sex beyond those things which nature conferred on the same
woman for the distinction of the feminine sex. And that she ofttimes
received the Eucharist when wearing the aforesaid dress. She neither has
wished nor does she wish to resume feminine attire. Having been ofttimes
lovingly questioned and admonished about this, she has said that she
would rather die than leave off male attire, sometimes simply saying so,
and sometimes, “unless it were by God’s command.” And that if she were in
male attire among those for whose sake she at other times armed herself
and did as she used to do before her capture and detention, this would
be one of the greatest benefits which could happen for the whole kingdom
of France; adding that for nothing in the world would she take an oath
of not wearing male attire and not arming herself, and in all aforesaid
she declares that she has done and does do well in obeying God and his
commands.
VI. Further, the said woman confesses and asserts that she has caused to
be written many letters in some of which on the one hand these names,
Jesus Maria, were added together with the sign of the cross, and at times
she superadded a cross, and then she was unwilling that that should be
done which she ordered to be done in her letters. In other letters, on
the other hand, she caused to be written that she herself would have
those put to death who were not obedient to her letters or her counsels
and that “it will immediately be seen who has the greater authority from
the God of heaven”; and she frequently declares that she has done nothing
except by the revelation and commandment of God.
VII. Further, the said woman declares and confesses that when she was
seventeen years of age or thereabouts, she went of her own accord and
by revelation according as she says to a certain esquire whom she had
never seen, before leaving her father’s house against the wish of her
parents; who, as soon as they were aware of her departure, were almost
out of their mind. The said woman requested indeed this esquire that
he should lead her or cause her to be led to the prince of whom it has
been before spoken. And then the said gentleman, a captain, delivered
to the said woman a man’s dress together with a sword at the request of
the woman herself, and deputed and ordered one soldier, one esquire, and
four serving men to conduct her; who when they had come to the aforesaid
prince the said woman said to the same prince that she herself wished to
head the war against his enemies, promising that she would place him in
great power and would overcome his enemies; and that she had been sent
for this purpose by the God of heaven, saying that in the aforesaid she
did well by the command of God and by revelation.
VIII. Further, the said woman declares and confesses that she, no one
forcing or compelling her, threw herself down from a certain very lofty
tower, preferring rather to die than to be delivered into the hands
of her enemies, or than to live after the destruction of the city of
Compendium (Compiègne); she declares too that she could not avoid this
kind of fall and yet that the aforesaid SS. Catherine and Margaret
prevented her from casting herself down, to offend whom she declares is
a great sin. Yet she knows well that this kind of sin has been forgiven
her after she has made confession of it. And concerning this she declares
that she has had a revelation.
IX. Further, the said woman declares that the aforesaid SS. Catherine and
Margaret promised her that they themselves would lead her into paradise
if she kept well the virginity which she vowed to them both in body and
in soul. And concerning this she declares she is as certain as if she
were already in the glory of the blessed ones. Nor does she think she has
committed works of mortal sin; for if she were in mortal sin, it seems to
her that the aforesaid SS. Catherine and Margaret would not visit her as
they daily do visit her.
X. Further, the said woman declares and affirms that God loves certain
men determined and named hitherto travellers, and loves them more than
he does the same woman. And she knows this through the revelation of
the SS. Catherine and Margaret who speak to her frequently in French,
and not in English, since they are not on their side. And since she has
known by revelation that their voices were on behalf of the prince above
mentioned, she has not loved the Burgundians.
XI. Further, the said woman declares and affirms that she has ofttimes
shown reverence to the aforesaid voices and spirits whom she calls
Michael, Gabriel, Catherine, and Margaret, by uncovering the head,
bending her knee, kissing the earth over which they walked, and by
vowing to them virginity and at times by embracing and kissing the same
Catherine and Margaret; and that she has touched them corporeally and
sensibly, and has besought of them counsel and help by invoking them
at times, although they frequently visit her when not invoked, and she
acquiesces in and obeys their counsels and commands and has acquiesced
from the beginning without seeking advice from anyone, for example, from
father or mother, curate, or prelate, or any other ecclesiastic. And
nevertheless she firmly believes that the voices and revelations which
she has had through male and female saints of this sort come from God
and by his ordering, and she believes this as firmly as she believes the
Christian faith and that our Lord Jesus Christ suffered death for us;
adding that if an evil spirit appeared to her, who pretended that he was
St. Michael, she would know well how to distinguish whether he were St.
Michael or not. The same woman also declares that at her own request, no
other person compelling or requiring it of her, she swore to the SS.
Catherine and Margaret, who appeared to her, that she would not reveal
the sign of the crown which was to be given to the prince to whom she was
sent. And in conclusion she said that “unless she had license to reveal
it.”
XII. Further, the said woman declares and confesses that if the church
should wish that she should do anything contrary to the command which she
declares has been given her by God she would not do that for anything,
affirming that she knows well that those things which are contained in
her process come by the commandment of God, and that it were impossible
for her to do anything contrary to them. Nor was she willing to refer,
concerning these things, to the judgment of the church militant or to
any man in the world, but to one Lord God alone, whose commands she
will always do; especially as to the subject-matter of the revelations
and those things which she declares she has done by revelation. And she
declares that she has not made this answer and other answers of herself
alone, but she has made and given these answers by command of the voices
and revelations made to her; although the article of faith, “one holy
Catholic church,” was ofttimes explained to the said woman by judges and
others there present, explaining to her that every faithful pilgrim is
bound to obey and to submit his deeds and words to the church militant,
especially in the matter of faith and that which touches holy doctrine
and ecclesiastical sanctions.
_The Findings of the Faculty_
I. And in the first place as to the first article, the faculty declares
by means of doctrine that the manner and matter of the revelations, the
quality of the person and place, together with other circumstances,
having been finally considered, they are either fictitious lies,
seductive and pernicious, or the aforesaid apparitions and revelations
are superstitions, proceeding from malignant and diabolical spirits,
Belial, Satan, and Behemoth.
II. Further, as to the second article, that that which it contains
does not seem true; yea, the latter is a presumptuous lie, seductive,
pernicious, fictitious, and derogatory to the dignity of angels.
III. Further, as to the third article, that the signs contained in it are
not sufficient and the said woman believes lightly and asserts easily.
Furthermore in the statement which she makes she believes wrongly, and
errs in the faith.
IV. Further, as to the fourth article, that in it is contained a
superstition, a soothsaying and presumptuous assertion, together with
empty boasting.
V. Further, as to the fifth article, that the said woman is blasphemous
towards God and a despiser of God in his sacraments; a prevaricator of
divine law and holy doctrine and of ecclesiastical sanctions; of evil
wisdom, she errs from the faith and is an empty boaster, and is to be
held suspected of idolatry and the curse of herself and of her garments
by imitating the custom of the Gentiles.
VI. Further, as to the sixth article, that the said woman is a traitress,
crafty, cruel, and thirsting after the shedding of human blood, seditious
and provoking to tyranny; a blasphemer of God in his commands and
revelations.
VII. Further, as to the seventh article, that the said woman is undutiful
to her parents, a prevaricator of the precept concerning honouring
parents; scandalous, blasphemous towards God, and errs in the faith and
makes a rash and presumptuous promise.
VIII. Further, that in the eighth article is contained weakness of mind
tending to despair, that is to say, to suicide and to presumptuous and
rash assertion concerning the pardon of sin held out; and that the said
woman has an evil opinion of the freedom of human judgment.
IX. Further, that in the ninth article is contained a presumptuous and
rash assertion and a pernicious lie, and she contradicts herself in the
preceding article and has an ill knowledge of the faith.
X. Further, that in the tenth article is contained a presumptuous and
rash assertion, superstitious divination, blasphemy against SS. Catherine
and Margaret, and transgression of the precept concerning the love of
your neighbour.
XI. Further, as to the eleventh article, that the said woman, supposing
that she had the revelations and apparitions of which she boasts with
certain beings according to the first article, is an idolatress, an
invoker of demons, and errs in the faith, asserts rashly, and has made an
unlawful oath.
XII. Further, as to the twelfth article, that the said woman is a
schismatic, having an evil opinion of the unity and authority of the
church; an apostate and hitherto errs obstinately in the faith.
Here follows a deliberation and determination by manner of doctrine
of the Venerable Faculty of degrees in the University of Paris upon
the twelve articles concerning the words and deeds of Joan, commonly
called La Pucelle, above annotated and described; which deliberation and
determination the said faculty submits to the order and judgment of the
great pontiff of the holy apostolic seat and of the holy general council.
If the said woman being of right mind obstinately affirm the propositions
declared in the above written twelve articles and in performance abide
by the deeds contained in the same, it seems to the faculty of degrees,
having diligently examined the aforesaid propositions, speaking in love
by manner of council or doctrine:
I. That the said woman has become schismatic, since schism is unlawful
division, through her disobedience from the unity of the church, and
separates herself from the obedience of the church militant, in that she
says, etc.
II. Further, that the woman herself errs in the faith: contradicts the
article of faith contained in the lesser symbol “one holy Catholic
church”; and, as says St. Jerome, by contradicting this article she
acknowledges herself not only unskilful, malevolent, and uncatholic, but
heretical.
III. Further, that the woman herself is also even apostate, both because
with an evil purpose she caused to be cut off from her the hair which God
gave her for a covering; and also because, for the same purpose having
given up female dress, she imitated the dress of men.
IV. Further, that the woman herself is a liar and a soothsayer when she
says that she was sent by God and spoke with the angels and saints and
did not make it known by the operation of a miracle or special witness
of Scripture; as when the Lord wished to send Moses into Egypt to the
children of Israel, in order that they might believe that he was sent
by him he gave them a sign that he should turn his rod into a serpent
and the serpent into a rod again; that John the Baptist also should
reform them, he brought forward a special testimony of his mission from
Scripture, saying: “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness; make
straight the way of the Lord, as saith the prophet Esaias.”
V. Further, that the same woman, by her presumption of authority, and
concerning right, errs in the faith both firstly, since she herself is
anathema by canonical authority and has continued in the same state for
a long time; and secondly, because she says she would rather not receive
the body of Christ and not make her confession at the time appointed by
the church than put off her male attire and resume the dress of women;
she is therefore most vehemently suspected of heresy, and is to be
diligently examined concerning the articles of faith.
VI. Further, the same woman also errs in that she says that she is as
certain that she will be led into paradise as if she were already in the
glory of the blessed ones; since, in this journey, whether the traveller
be worthy of praise or tribulation is unknown but is recognised by the
supreme Judge alone. Wherefore, if the aforesaid woman be charitably
exhorted and duly admonished by a competent judge to return of her own
will to the unity of the Catholic faith and publicly to abjure her errors
at the will of the aforesaid judge, and be unwilling to show suitable
satisfaction, she is to be abandoned to the power of the secular judge
under obligation to receive vengeance in proportion to the quality of her
crime.[i]
_The Sentence and its Execution_
Her condemnation was decided beforehand; but they wanted to obtain from
her some words implicating Charles VII, and they employed all means for
this purpose; they sent for the executioner to come to the prison; then
they said that all was ready for the torture. She was very ill during
holy week. Threats had little effect on this heroic mind; they resorted
to promises, to the most pernicious for her--that of being taken from the
hands of her English gaolers and given over to men of the church. She
yielded, and signed the recantation which was presented to her, without
even knowing what it contained: and then, out of mercy and moderation,
she was only condemned to spend the rest of her days in prison, on the
bread of affliction and water of sorrow, to weep over her sins.[b]
She was admitted by the ecclesiastical judge to do penance, nowhere else
of course than in the church prisons. The ecclesiastical _in pace_, hard
as it was, would at least take her out of the hands of the English,
protect her from their insults, and save her honour. What were her
surprise and horror when the bishop said coldly, “Take her back to the
place whence you brought her!”
Nothing was done; thus deceived, she could not fail to retract her
retraction. But even had she been willing to persist in it, the rage of
the English would not have allowed her. They had come to St. Ouen, where
the sentence had been delivered, in hopes at last to burn the witch;
they waited in breathless expectation; and were they now to be sent off
in this way, with nothing for their pains but a scrap of parchment, a
signature, and a grimace? At the moment when the bishop suspended the
reading of the sentence, stones flew about the platforms without respect
for the cardinal. The doctors were in danger of their lives when they set
foot on the ground; bare swords were everywhere pointed at their throats;
the most moderate of the English confined themselves to insulting words:
“Priest, you do not earn the king’s money.” The trembling doctors,
shuffling away as fast as they could, said, “Be not uneasy, we shall
surely catch her again.” It was not merely the common soldiers, the
English mob, that showed this thirst for blood. The respectable people
and the lords were not less rancorous. The king’s man and his tutor, Lord
Warwick, said, like the soldiers, “The king fares badly; the girl will
not be burned” (May 23rd, 1431).
The poor girl, exposed to such danger, had hitherto possessed no other
defence than her male attire; but strange to say, no one had ever chosen
to understand why she wore it. Her friends and her enemies were alike
shocked at her doing so. In the beginning she had been obliged to explain
herself to the women of Poitiers. After her capture, when she was in the
custody of the ladies of Luxemburg,[45] those good dames begged her to
dress as became a decent girl. If the women understood nothing of this
female question, how much less did the priests! They quoted the text of
a council of the fourth century, which anathematises this exchange of
garments. They did not perceive that this prohibition applied especially
to an epoch which had scarcely emerged from pagan impurity.
[Illustration: A FRENCH KNIGHT, TIME OF JOAN OF ARC]
On Friday and Saturday the unfortunate prisoner, deprived of her male
attire, had much to fear. According to the statement of her confessor,
to whom she revealed the fact, an Englishman, not a soldier, but a
gentleman, a lord, bravely undertook to violate a chained girl and,
failing in the attempt, loaded her with blows.
“When the morning of Trinity Sunday was come, and it was time for her to
rise (as she has related to him who speaks) she said to the English, her
guards, ‘Un-iron me that I may rise.’ One of them took off the woman’s
garments that were on her, emptied the bag in which was the male dress,
and said to her, ‘Get up.’ ‘Sirs,’ said she, ‘you know it is forbidden
me; certainly I will not take it.’ This dispute lasted until noon, and
at last, by reason of bodily necessity, she was obliged to go out and
take that dress. On her return, they would not give her any other,
notwithstanding all her supplications.”
In reality, it was not for the interest of the English that she should
resume the garb of a man, and thus annul the retractation so laboriously
obtained; but at that moment their rage knew no bounds. Saintrailles had
just made a bold attempt on Rouen. It would have been a fine exploit
to seize the judges on their bench, and carry off Beaufort and Bedford
to Poitiers. The latter had another narrow escape of being captured on
his return between Rouen and Paris. There was no safety for the English
so long as that infernal girl lived, who was doubtless continuing her
diabolical arts in prison. It was necessary she should die.
The assessors being instantly sent for to the castle to see the change
of dress, found in the courtyard some hundred English, who stopped their
way. Thinking that if these doctors entered, they might spoil all, they
brandished axes and swords in their faces, and drove them out, calling
them Armagnac traitors. Cauchon, getting in with great difficulty,
assumed a gay air to please Warwick, and said, laughing, “She is
caught.” On Monday he returned with the inquisitor and eight assessors
to interrogate the Maid, and ask her why she had resumed that garb. She
offered no excuse, but bravely accepting her danger said that this dress
suited her better so long as she should be guarded by men; that moreover,
word had not been kept with her. Her saints had said to her that it was
great pity to have abjured to save her life. At the same time she did not
refuse to put on female garments again. “Let me be consigned to a mild
and safe prison,” she said, “I will be good and do all the church shall
desire.”
On Tuesday the judges got together, at the archiepiscopal palace, some
sort of an assemblage of assessors, some of whom had been present only
at the first sittings, and the rest at none; they were men of every
kind--priests, lawyers, and three were even physicians. The judges
reported to them what had taken place, and asked their opinions. The
opinion they gave, very different from what was expected, was that
the prisoner ought to be brought again into court and have her act
of abjuration read again to her. It is doubtful that this was within
the power of the judges. Judge or judgment was in fact no longer a
thing possible amidst naked swords and raging soldiers. Bloodshed was
inevitable; the judges perhaps were not far from seeing their own spilt.
They drew up a hasty citation to be served the next morning at eight; her
next appearance was only to be for the purpose of being burned.
In the morning, Cauchon sent her a confessor, Brother Martin l’Advenu,
“to announce death to her and induce her to penitence. And when he
announced to the poor girl the death she was to die that day, she began
to cry out woefully, sinking with faintness, and tearing her hair. ‘Alas!
am I to be treated so horribly and cruelly, and must my body, whole and
entire, which was never corrupted, be now consumed and reduced to ashes?
Oh! oh! I would rather be beheaded seven times than be thus burned! Oh! I
appeal to God, the great Judge of the wrongs and grievances they do me!’”
At nine she was dressed in women’s clothes and placed on a car, with
Friar Martin l’Advenu on one side of her, and the _huissier_ Massieu
on the other. Isambart, the Augustine monk, who had already displayed
so much charity and courage, would not quit her. The Maid had never
despaired until now. Even whilst saying, as she did at times, “the
English will put me to death,” she did not in reality believe it. She
did not imagine she could ever be forsaken. She had faith in her king,
and in the good people of France. She had said expressly, “There will
be in the prison or at the condemnation some tumult by which I shall
be delivered--delivered with great victory!” But though the king and
the people should fail her, she had another aid, far more potent and
sure--that of her friends on high, the good and precious saints. What
then were her thoughts when she saw that she was really to die--when,
mounted on the cart, she passed along through the trembling crowd,
guarded by eight hundred Englishmen armed with lances and swords? She
wept and bewailed her fate, but never accused either her king or her
saints. But one phrase escaped her lips, “O Rouen, Rouen, must I die
here!”
The end of this dismal journey was the Vieux Marché, the fish market.
Three platforms had been erected there. On one was the episcopal and
royal chair, the throne of the cardinal of England, surrounded by the
seats of his prelates; the other was destined for the performers in
this melancholy drama, the preacher, the judges, and the bailiff, and
lastly the culprit. Some way off from these was seen a great platform in
plaster filled and heaped with wood; materials had not been spared upon
the pile: it struck terror by its height. This was done not merely for
the purpose of rendering the execution more solemn; there was another
intention--namely, that the great height of the pile should make it
inaccessible to the executioner except from below, where he was to
light it, and thus prevent him from abridging the sufferer’s agony and
despatching her, as usual, before the flames reached her. There was no
thought here of defrauding justice and giving a dead body to the fire; it
was meant that she should be literally and truly burned alive, and that
placed on the summit of that mound of wood she should be visible above
the circle of lances and swords to every spectator on the ground. Burning
slowly before the eyes of a gaping multitude there was reason to expect
that she would at last yield to some weakness, and utter something that
might be given out as a recantation; at the very least it was probable
that some incoherent words would escape her, which might be interpreted
as her judges desired; perhaps that in womanly terror and despair she
would descend to ignoble prayers and cries for mercy.
The hideous ceremony began with a sermon. Master Nicholas Midi, one of
the lights of the University of Paris, preached from this edifying text:
“When a member of the church is sick the whole church is sick.” That poor
church could only be cured by cutting off a limb. He concluded with the
formal phrase: “Joan, go in peace; the church can no longer defend thee.”
Then the ecclesiastical judge, the bishop of Beauvais, benignly exhorted
her to think of her soul and to recollect all her misdeeds, that she
might be moved to contrition. The assessors had decided that it was
incumbent in law to read her abjuration to her again; but the bishop did
not do so, fearing that she would contradict and remonstrate. But the
poor girl had no thought of thus battling with lawyers’ subtleties for
her life; her mind was far differently engaged. Before even she had been
exhorted to contrition she was on her knees invoking God, the Virgin, St.
Michael, and St. Catherine, pardoning all and asking pardon, and saying
to the by-standers, “Pray for me.” She particularly requested each of the
priests to say a mass for her soul; and all this she did in a manner so
pious, humble, and affecting, that the emotion spread from man to man,
and none present could restrain their feelings; the bishop of Beauvais
wept, the bishop of Boulogne sobbed, and at last the English themselves
shed tears, and Beaufort as well as the rest.
The judges soon recovered from their momentary fit of humanity, and the
bishop of Beauvais, wiping his eyes, began to read the sentence. He
recapitulated to the culprit all her crimes, schism, idolatry, invocation
of fiends, and set forth how she had been admitted to repentance, and
how, “seduced by the prince of lies, she had relapsed, O grief! as a dog
returns to his vomit. Therefore we pronounce you a rotten member, and
as such cut off from the church. We give you over to the secular power,
entreating it at the same time to moderate its sentence, and to spare you
the pain of death and mutilation of your limbs.”[46]
Thus abandoned by the church she cast herself in full confidence on
God. She asked for the cross. An Englishman handed her a wooden cross
which he had made out of a stick; she received it not the less piously,
kissed it, and put that rough emblem of salvation under her clothes next
her skin. But she would rather have had the church cross to keep before
her eyes until death. The good _huissier_ Massieu and Brother Isambart
exerted themselves to fulfil her wishes, and the cross was brought her
from the parish of St. Sauveur. While she was embracing it, and Isambart
was exhorting her, the English began to think the business very tedious;
it was noon at least; the soldiers grumbled, and the captains called out,
“Holla, priest! are you going to keep us here to dinner?” Then losing
patience and not waiting for the order of the bailiff, though he alone
had authority to send her to death, they sent up two sergeants to take
her out of the hands of the priests. She was seized at the foot of the
tribunal by the soldiers, who dragged her to the executioner, and said to
him, “Do thy office.” This fury of the soldiery excited horror; many of
the by-standers, and even of the judges, rushed from the ground to avoid
seeing any more of it.
When she was on the ground among those English who laid hands on her,
nature gave way and the flesh was troubled. Again she cried, “O Rouen,
thou art then to be my last abode!” She said no more and sinned not with
her lips, even in that awful moment. She accused not her king or her
saints. But when she was on the top of the pile, and saw that great town
and that motionless and silent multitude, she could not help saying, “Ah,
Rouen, Rouen, I fear me much thou wilt have to suffer for my death!”
Wonderful gentleness of soul! she who had saved the people, and whom the
people forsook, expressed but compassion for them in her dying moments.
She was bound beneath the infamous inscription, and on her head was
placed a mitre, on which was written: “Heretic, relapsed, apostate,
idolator.” Then the executioner applied the fire. She saw it from above
and shrieked. The monk who was exhorting her did not pay attention to the
flames; and she, forgetting herself, became alarmed for him and made him
go down. What plainly proves that until then she had retracted nothing
expressly is that the wretched Cauchon was obliged (doubtless by the
imperious Satanic will of him that presided) to approach the foot of the
pile, obliged to look his victim in the face, and try to elicit something
from her. She repeated to him mildly what she had already said: “Bishop,
I die by you. Had you placed me in the church prisons this would not
have happened.” Of course it had been expected that, thinking herself
abandoned by her king, she would at last accuse him and speak against
him; but she defended him still: “Whether I have done well or done ill,
my king is in no wise implicated therein: it was not he who advised me.”
Meanwhile, the flames were ascending. At the moment they reached her the
poor creature started and called out for holy water; this apparently was
a cry of terror. But immediately collecting herself she uttered no names
but those of God, her angels, and her saints. She testified her faith in
them: “Yes, my voices were of God; my voices have not deceived me!” That
grand expression of hers is attested by the compulsory and sworn witness
of her death, the Dominican who ascended the pile with her, whom she sent
down from that dangerous post, but who continued speaking with her from
below, listened to her words, and held up the cross to her sight.
We have yet another witness of this holy death, a witness of very grave
character, who was himself doubtless a saint. This man, whose name
history ought to preserve, was the Augustine monk already mentioned,
Brother Isambart de la Pierre. He was near perishing in the course of
the prosecution for having given counsel to the Maid, and yet though so
conspicuously obnoxious to the English, he voluntarily ascended the cart
with her, procured her the parish cross, and stood by her in the midst of
the furious crowd, both on the platform and at the stake. Twenty years
after the event the two venerable men, humble monks, devoted to poverty
and with nothing to gain or to fear in this world, depose as follows: “We
heard her in the fire invoking her saints and her archangel; she repeated
the Saviour’s name. At last, dropping her head, she cried aloud, ‘Jesus.’”
“Ten thousand men wept.” Some English alone laughed or tried to laugh.
One of the most violent among them had sworn to fling a fagot on the
pile; she was expiring at the moment he deposited it, and he was taken
ill. His comrades carried him off to a tavern to revive his spirits
with drink, but he could not recover his equanimity. “I saw,” he cried
distractedly, “I saw a dove escape from her mouth with her last sigh.”
Others had read in the flames the word Jesus which she repeated. The
executioner went that evening in utter dismay to Brother Isambart, and
confessed, but could not believe that God would ever forgive him. One of
the king of England’s secretaries said openly as he returned from the
horrid scene, “We are undone; we have burned a saint!”[c]
THE REHABILITATION OF JOAN OF ARC (1456 A.D.)
For a long time the people refused to believe in Joan’s death.[47] The
memory of her who had been both the heroine and victim of patriotic and
national sentiment became more and more popular, and several years after
the English had been driven from France and her predictions accomplished,
there arose a desire that her memory should be avenged.
When Charles VII entered Rouen in 1450 he had ordered the revision of
the trial. Cardinal Estouteville, archbishop of Rouen and papal legate,
began investigation in the name of the church. But for political reasons,
and so as not to irritate the English, it was judged better to have the
request for rehabilitation come from Joan’s own family, as a private
matter. Two doctors designated by the court of Rome examined the request,
declared it founded on the most serious motives, and concluded if the
church must hesitate to pronounce on Joan’s visions, it could not charge
them with crime. Upon these conclusions Pope Calixtus III appointed three
prelates and an inquisitor to form a court of revision over which the
archbishop of Rheims presided.
The new judges began their labour. All the witnesses still living who
had known Joan appeared before them. Military leaders who had fought
with her--as Alençon and Dunois--gave testimony to her memory. Three
clerks who had exercised their office at the trial in Rouen furnished
proof of irregularities that had been committed. No defender of the
former proceedings appeared. Thereupon the court, giving the most
simple explanation of all that had determined the former judges, found
a hundred and one reasons for nullity. In consequence the new judges
quashed, in 1456, the decree of their predecessors--as stained with
illegality, fraud, violence, and manifest partiality. They declared
the twelve articles of the condemnation false, calumnious, and full of
fraud--while recognising that the manner in which they had been drawn up
might easily have deceived the good faith of those that acted upon them.
They declared the trial iniquitous--that Joan had been judged by her
enemies. The church thus restored that which an ecclesiastical tribunal
had struck down. The sentence of rehabilitation was published in every
town of France; Orleans raised on a bridge over the Loire a statue to her
liberator. Rouen held expiation processions in honour of her victim.[k]
A BRITISH ESTIMATE OF JOAN’S SERVICES
Those writers who consider Joan of Arc not merely as a female Mohammed,
but as a heaven-sent saviour, do not enhance the virtue or the beauty of
her own natural character, whilst they exaggerate the depression, and
derogate from the martial spirit of the French, by representing them as
only to be saved at the time by an avatar. It does not appear that France
was in such imminent danger, or was likely to be conquered, even had
Orleans fallen by a handful of English, very unequal to the subjugation
of the country.
If the starting up a great prince or warrior, like Henry V, on the
throne of England had brought disaster upon France, his premature death,
with the consequent abstraction of English aid and English vigour from
the duke of Bedford, was a greater blow to English ascendency than any
supposed mission of Joan of Arc. If the French were defeated at Agincourt
and Verneuil, this was mainly owing to the yeoman middle classes, which
formed the strength of the English army, whilst a similar class in France
was kept out of the ranks of the national defence. But the sieges of
Rouen and of Orleans had restored to the French peasant and the French
townsman the right and the habit of wielding a sword by the side of the
gentleman. What Joan of Arc did was to restore their confidence; this was
her good fortune or her mission. The disinherited and degraded middle
and lower classes rose to defend and save the monarchy, which counts and
barons had allowed to fall with themselves into the mire. This was the
revolution, this the new spirit that saved France from the English, and
not the trumped-up miracle of La Pucelle. It was the red right arm of
French manhood which did that act, and not the prophecies of Merlin, the
visions of saints, or the embroidered banner of the virgin of Domrémy.[g]
FOOTNOTES
[39] [It was positively asserted that a ball had taken off a man’s shoe
without hurting his foot.]
[40] [The duke of Orleans had been a captive in England since the battle
of Agincourt.]
[41] [The family name was Darc, and the name of the Maid of Orleans was
therefore, properly, Jeanne Darc, not Jeanne d’Arc as commonly written;
but the latter has the sanction of general usage.]
[42] [His aunt, the saintly Joan of Luxemburg, was also most energetic in
her efforts to have Joan released.]
[43] [The count of Ligny received the money before October. The duke of
Burgundy handed Joan over to the English on the 21st of November.]
[44] [From the door of her father’s dwelling she looked on an old oak
wood. The fairies haunted that wood; their favourite spot was a certain
spring near a great ash called the “fairies’ tree.” The children used to
hang garlands on it and sing to it. These somewhile ladies and mistresses
of the forest could no longer, it was said, assemble at the spring; they
had been excluded from it for their sins. The church, however, always
retained a jealous fear of the old local divinities, and the curé used to
go once every year, and read a mass at the spring, in order to drive them
away.[c]]
[45] [The mother and aunt of the count of Ligny, who took a tender
interest in the Maid while she was in his keeping.]
[46] [The regular formula for the sentence of giving over a heretic to
the secular arm.]
[47] [In 1436 rumour spread through France that it was not La Pucelle
that the English had burned at Rouen. In fact, a woman whose resemblance
to Joan was astonishing had presented herself to her two brothers and was
acknowledged by them. In 1438 and 1439 this “false Joan” headed a body
of armed men and was enthusiastically received by the people of Orleans.
Brought before the king, she admitted the imposture, was imprisoned,
afterwards released and came, according to report, to a bad and shameful
end.]
[Illustration]
CHAPTER IX. “THE CONVALESCENCE OF FRANCE”
Confused as was the long period of the last years of Charles
VII, it may nevertheless be thus summarily defined--the
convalescence of France. France recovered and England fell
ill.--MICHELET.[b]
The sorceress, the she-devil, was burned; the charm was doubtless
broken, the spell removed; there was nothing now to prevent the English
from conquering the kingdom of France. Nevertheless, before they should
recover the power in fact they deemed it right to have the power in law
on their side--to legitimise the young Henry VI by having him crowned.
The coronation to which Charles VII had been led by an agent of the devil
being, by that means itself, null and void, they wished to have for their
little prince a coronation perfectly orthodox and irreprehensible.
[Sidenote: [1431-1432 A.D.]]
The ceremony took place the 17th of December, 1431; not at Rheims, which
the English no longer held, but at Paris. An English prelate, Beaufort,
the cardinal-bishop of Winchester, officiated, to the great discontent
of the bishop of Paris; for assistants there were English lords, not a
single French prince. There was no liberation of prisoners, no reduction
of taxes, no largesse to the people. “A bourgeois marrying off his
daughter,” says the Bourgeois de Paris,[i] “would have done better.”[c]
The child king was found to have little intelligence or grace, and the
day after Christmas he was taken from Paris to Rouen, and thence to
England.[d]
Paris was far from prosperous under foreign domination. Public officials
were ill paid. The university was no longer recruited, except from the
English and Burgundian provinces. It lost its pupils; it lost still more
when, a month after his arrival, Bedford established schools of civil
and canon law at Caen, in the midst of the English provinces. Charles
responded by creating, in his turn, a university at Poitiers, and by
according new privileges to the schools of Angers.[e]
It was now that period when the feeble bond that still united the duke of
Burgundy to the English began to give way. His sister, Bedford’s wife,
died in November, 1432. The duke of Burgundy had never had much reason to
like the English, nor had he more to fear them. Their war in France was
becoming ridiculous.[b]
The marshal De Boussac, as the result of a conspiracy, was almost able to
seize Rouen. His advance guard was already in the castle when his bands
began to quarrel over the division of the booty, and the English drove
them off. Dunois was more successful at Chartres; he had an understanding
with a preacher of renown. The latter announced that he would preach
every day in a certain church; the entire English garrison assisted
devoutly at the sermon while the French took the town. The English,
from whom so important a place had been taken, were not even able to
capture a hamlet. A certain French captain, John Foucauld by name, was
stationed at Lagny and greatly harassed the neighbourhood of Paris. The
duke of Bedford and the earl of Warwick went to besiege the place. They
soon made a breach in the wall, but when they saw the besieged bravely
awaiting them, they returned to Paris, where they arrived on Easter eve,
“apparently to confess,” says the Bourgeois de Paris,[i] maliciously,
in his journal. Meanwhile several soldiers of fortune in the service of
the king of France had seized St. Valéry, Gerberoy, St. Denis, and other
places (1432).[c]
The Parisians, delighted at this retreat of Bedford from Lagny, made
themselves no less merry on the subject of his second marriage. At
fifty years of age he wedded a girl of seventeen, “sprightly, fair, and
gracious,” a daughter of the count of Saint-Pol, one of the duke of
Burgundy’s vassals, and that abruptly and furtively without saying a word
to his brother-in-law. The duke would not have consented to the match.
The Saint-Pols, raised by him for the purpose of guarding his frontier,
were beginning to play that double game which was to be their ruin;
they were giving the English a footing in the dominions of the duke of
Burgundy.
Beaufort saw more clearly that if the alliance with Burgundy were broken
off, the war would change its aspect; that it would become far more
costly, and that the church would infallibly have to bear the expense.
A beginning had been made with the church of France, from which it was
sought to wrest all the pious donations it had received for sixty years.
In this state of anxiety, he exerted himself strongly for peace, and
had it arranged that a conference should take place between Bedford and
Philip the Good. He succeeded in making the two dukes advance towards
each other as far as St. Omer. But this was all; once in the town,
neither of them would take the first step. Though Bedford ought to have
seen clearly that France was lost for the English if he did not bring
back the duke of Burgundy to their party, he remained peremptory on the
point of etiquette; as the king’s representative, he awaited the visit of
the king’s vassal, who never moved. The rupture was definitive.
France, on the contrary, was gradually becoming reunited, a result
brought about chiefly by the efforts of the house of Anjou. The old
queen, Yolande of Anjou, the king’s mother-in-law, brought him back
the Bretons; and in concert with the constable Richemont, the duke of
Brittany’s brother, she dismissed the favourite, La Trémouille.[48]
It was more difficult to allure the duke of Burgundy, who was supporting
the pretender Vaudemont, in Lorraine, against René of Anjou, Yolande’s
son.[49] That prince, who has remained in the memory of the Angevins and
Provençals by the name of “the good king René,” possessed all the amiable
qualities of old chivalric France; and with them, too, its imprudence
and levity. He suffered himself to be beaten and taken prisoner at
Bulgnéville, by the Burgundians (July, 1431). The duke of Burgundy
restored him to liberty, under security.[b]
Philip the Good might well have congratulated himself on a victory which
clipped the wings of the royalists in Lorraine, but he made no use of
it, and now showed himself disposed for pacific measures. In September,
1431, at the very moment that the royalist captains were preparing to
invade Charolais and Burgundy, he signed at Chinon a two years’ truce
with Charles VII for his frontiers of Réthelois, Picardy, Burgundy, and
Charolais.[e] The English had no good reason for their complaints of
Philip’s loyalty in this; if he had concluded a separate truce for his
own states, he did not treat for peace on their behalf or without them.
The English ambassadors were called to take part in all negotiations; but
it was very evident, at the conferences of Auxerre (July, 1432) and those
held in the village of Simport (now Seineport) in March, 1433, that while
peace was now almost an easy matter between Charles VII and Philip on
account of the great concessions to which the king resigned himself, it
was next to impossible between Charles VII and Henry VI.[f]
The princes were becoming friends, and there was nothing to hinder
the people from doing likewise, if they had the will. Paris, governed
by Cauchon and other bishops, tried to get rid of them and expel the
English. Normandy, even, that little French England, at last grew weary
of a war of which it was made to bear the whole burden. A vast rising
took place, in 1434, among the rural population of Lower Normandy; the
leader was a peasant named Quatrepieds; but there were knights also
engaged in the affair, which was not a mere Jacquerie. The English could
not fail soon to lose the province.
THE TREATY OF ARRAS (1435 A.D.)
[Sidenote: [1435 A.D.]]
They seemed themselves to look on their prospects as desperate.
Bedford abandoned Paris. The poor town, smitten by turns with famine
and pestilence, was too hideous an abode. The duke of Burgundy,
nevertheless, ventured to visit it with his wife and son, on his way
to the great assembly at Arras, where the terms of a treaty of peace
were to be arranged. The Parisians welcomed him, and implored his aid,
as though he had been an angel from God. The assembly in question was
one of all Christendom, including ambassadors from the council, the
pope, the emperor, the sovereigns of Castile, Aragon, Navarre, Naples,
Milan, Sicily, Cyprus, Poland, and Denmark. All the French princes,
and all those of the Low Countries, attended in person or by deputy;
so did the University of Paris, and a number of good towns. All these
personages being assembled, England herself arrived, in the person of the
cardinal-bishop of Winchester. The conferences opened August 5th, 1435,
in the chapel of St. Waast.
The first question to be considered was the possibility of an
accommodation between Charles VII and Henry VI. But how was it to be
effected? Each of them claimed the crown. Charles VII offered Aquitaine,
and even Normandy, which was still in the hands of the English. The
latter required that each party should retain what it then had, with
the exception of mutual exchanges for the purpose of rendering the
possessions of each more compact.
Nothing could be made of the English, and they were allowed to depart
from Arras. Everyone turned towards the duke of Burgundy, beseeching him
to have pity on the realm and on Christendom, which suffered so much from
these long wars. But he could not make up his mind; his conscience and
his knightly honour were engaged, he said; he had given his signature;
besides, was he not bound to take vengeance for his father’s murder? The
pope’s legates told him he might make light of such scruples, for they
had power to release him from his oaths. But this did not yet satisfy
him. Ecclesiastical law not seeming sufficient, recourse was had to civil
law, and a fine case was drawn up, in which, to leave the minds of the
jurisconsults the more free, the parties were designated by the names
of Darius and Ahasuerus. The English and the French doctors gave such
opinions as might have been expected of them respectively; but those of
Bologna, whom the legates brought forward, declared, in conformity with
the French lawyers, that Charles VI had no power to conclude the Treaty
of Troyes.
[Illustration: A FRENCH NOBLEMAN, FIRST PART OF FIFTEENTH CENTURY]
[Sidenote: [1435-1436 A.D.]]
The duke of Burgundy allowed the suppliants to argue and implore. But, in
reality, the desired change had already taken place in him; he was weary
of the English. The Flemings, who had so often forced their counts to
remain united with England, were becoming hostile to that nation; they
suffered from the forays of the garrison of Calais, and were maltreated
when they went to that great wool market. England was then becoming a
rival and enemy of Flanders; had she been friendly to that country, her
friendship would henceforth have availed little. The duke of Burgundy
had gained the barrier of the Somme, through the English alliance, and
rounded and completed his Burgundy; but their alliance could no longer
guarantee him the possession of his new acquisitions. Divided as they
were, it was with difficulty they could defend themselves. Bedford alone
could maintain some sort of balance between Winchester and Gloucester;
but he died, at Rouen in September, 1435, and his decease was a further
alleviation to the conscience of the duke of Burgundy. Thenceforth the
treaties concluded with Bedford, as regent of France, appeared to him
less sacred; such was the strictly literal mode of viewing things in the
Middle Ages; he deemed himself bound during the lifetime of him to whom
he had given his signature.
The duke of Burgundy’s two brothers-in-law, the duke de Bourbon and the
constable De Richemont, contributed not a little to fix his wavering
purposes. They plied him so hard that he vouchsafed at last to yield
to their entreaties and grant mercy. The Treaty of Arras cannot be
characterised by any other phrase. The king asked pardon of the duke for
the murder of John the Fearless, and the duke did not pay him homage;
thereby he became himself king, as it were. He retained for himself
and his heirs all he had acquired: on the one side Péronne and all the
fortresses on the Somme, on the other Auxerre and Mâcon.
The explanations and reparations for the death of Duke John were very
humiliating. The king was to say, or have it said, that at that time
he was very young, had as yet little knowledge, and had not been
sufficiently advised to see duly into the matter, but that at present
he was about to use all diligence in searching out the guilty parties.
He was to found a chapel in the church at Montereau, and a convent for
twelve Carthusians; and to erect, moreover, on the bridge where the act
had been perpetrated, a stone cross, which was to be kept in repair at
the king’s expense. The ceremony of forgiveness took place in the church
of St. Waast. The dean of Paris, Jean Tudert, threw himself at the feet
of Duke Philip, and cried him mercy, on the king’s part, for the murder
of John the Fearless. The duke appeared moved, raised and embraced him,
and told him there should never be war between King Charles and himself.
The duke de Bourbon and the constable then swore a peace, as did the
French and Burgundian ambassadors and lords.
[Sidenote: [1436-1438 A.D.]]
But the reconciliation would not have been complete if the duke
of Burgundy had not concluded a definitive arrangement with the
brother-in-law of Charles VII, René of Anjou. René, not having been able
to adhere to the terms of the first treaty, had preferred returning
to prison. Philip the Good released him and gave him back part of his
ransom money, in consideration of the marriage of his niece, Mary de
Bourbon, with René’s son. Thus were the houses of Burgundy, Bourbon, and
Anjou united with each other and with the king. That of Brittany still
vacillated; the duke did not declare himself; he found great profit
in the war; it was said that thirty thousand Normans had taken refuge
in Brittany. But whether the duke was English or French, his brother
Richemont was constable of France: the Bretons followed him cheerfully;
the Breton bands were the main force of Charles VII, and were called the
_bons corps_.
THE FRENCH RETURN TO PARIS (1436-1437 A.D.)
This self-reconciliation of France drove the English distracted; their
wrath blinded them, and they plunged as it were wilfully into their ill
fortune. The duke of Burgundy wished to keep some terms with them, and
offered them his mediation; but they rejected it, and plundered and
killed the Flemish merchants in London. Flanders becoming incensed in
its turn, the duke seized the opportunity to lead the communes to the
siege of Calais.[b] For this he collected a large army in 1436, the
Flemings, especially the Ghenters, answering his call to the number of
forty thousand, and promising not merely to second his enterprise, but to
accomplish it themselves. They found the task, however, so much beyond
their power, that they grew disheartened, accused the Burgundians of
betraying them, and marched off leaving the duke to extricate himself
with his other forces as best he could.[g]
The Burgundian party turned round like the duke; those of Paris, of the
_halles_ even, the Burgundian quarter _par excellence_, called in the
king’s forces and his constable, and installed them in the town. The
English, who had still fifteen hundred men-at-arms there, and at first
made a show of resisting, shut themselves pitiably in the Bastille,
and then, apprehensive of famine, obtained leave to embark and descend
the river to Rouen. The people, who had been harshly governed by three
bishops on behalf of the English, pursued them with hootings, and
shouted, “Fox! fox!” after the bishop of Thérouanne, the chancellor of
the English. The Parisians were loath to let them off so cheaply, for
they calculated that the ransom of so many rich nobles would bring in at
least 200,000 livres; but it would have been necessary to besiege the
Bastille, and the constable himself was at his shifts, money failing him.
The king had only 1,000 livres to give him for the purpose of retaking
Paris (1436).[b]
At length, in November, 1437, Charles made his solemn entrance into
his capital, from which he had been an exile nearly twenty years. The
constable rode on the monarch’s right hand, the count de Vendôme on his
left, and the royal cavalcade was met at the Porte St. Denis by “the
seven virtues and the seven mortal sins, well clad, mounted upon various
beasts.” Charles had previously reunited the parliament of Poitiers to
that of Paris, and the new judges and councillors returned to take their
seats, and thus restore Paris to the rank of judicial capital of the
_languedoïl_.[g]
THE PRAGMATIC SANCTION (1438 A.D.)
In that vast and multitudinous wretchedness, amid so many ruins, two
things were still standing--the nobility and the church. The nobility had
served the king against the English, gratuitously served a beggared king;
it had consumed much of its own wealth, at the same time that it devoured
the people’s substance, and it looked for compensation. The church, on
its part, represented itself as very poor and afflicted; but there was
this notable difference, that its poverty consisted in the suspension
of its revenues--in general the capital remained. The king, indebted
to the nobility, could discharge his obligations only at the church’s
expense, either by forcing it to pay for him, which seemed difficult and
dangerous, or rather by gently and indirectly, for the sake ostensibly
of the ecclesiastical liberties, re-establishing the elections in which
the lords had the paramount influence, and thus enabling them to dispose
of benefices. These were often bestowed by the pope on the partisans
of England; Charles VII had no inducement to respect his claims. He
adopted in his _pragmatique_ of Bourges (July 7th, 1438) the decrees of
the council of Bâle, which re-established elections, and recognised the
rights of the noble patrons of churches to present to benefices. These
patrons, descendants of the pious founders or protectors, regarded the
churches as portions severed from their fiefs, and desired nothing better
than to protect them still, that is to say, to put their own men into
them, by causing them to be elected by the monks or canons.
What delighted France in its then extreme poverty was that the
_pragmatique_ would stop the outgoing of money from the kingdom. The
absence of gold was acutely felt. Under Charles VII it was really
necessary as an instrument of war and a means of rapid action. The
bankers were turning their speculations in that direction; previously
occupied with the exchange of Rome and the transmission of the
ecclesiastic tithes, they were about to draw on the English that bill of
exchange which was paid with Normandy.
One thing, however, was to be feared, namely, that a church so completely
closed against papal influence might become not national but purely
seigniorial. It was not the king or the state that would inherit what the
pope lost, but the lords and the nobles. At a period when organisation
was still so feeble, it was not very practicable to act with effect from
a distance; now at every election the lord was on the spot to present or
recommend, and the chapters obsequiously elected his nominee; the king
was very far away. It was a question whether the nobility were worthy
of being intrusted with the chief active part in the affairs of the
church--whether the lords on whom really devolved the choice of pastors
and the responsibility for the salvation of souls were themselves the
pure souls whom the Holy Spirit would enlighten in so delicate a matter.
THE ATROCIOUS CRIMES OF THE BARONS
[Sidenote: [1435-1440 A.D.]]
In his fief the baron of the twelfth century, haughty and stern as he
might be, had yet a rule of conduct which, though unwritten, seemed but
the more inviolable. This rule was “usage,” custom. In his most violent
proceedings he saw himself accosted by his men, who said respectfully to
him: “Messire, it is not the ‘usage’ of the good people here.” The fear
of God and respect for usage, those two bridles of the feudal times, were
broken in the fifteenth century. The lord was no longer a resident on his
estate, and knew neither his people nor their customs. If he returns,
it is with soldiers to raise money abruptly; he falls on the country
occasionally like storm and hail, everyone hides at his approach, and the
whole district is seized with a panic.
This lord, though bearing his father’s seigniorial name, was not the
more a lord for all that; he was commonly a rough captain, a barbarian,
scarcely a Christian. Often he was a leader of _houspilleurs_,
_tondeurs_, or _écorcheurs_, like the bastard de Bourbon, the bastard of
Vaurus, a Chabannes, or a La Hire. _Écorcheurs_ (flayers) was their right
name: ruining the ruined, taking away the shirt from him who had been
left with nothing but a shirt to cover him; and if nothing remained but
the skin, then stripping off the skin.
It would be a mistake to suppose that it was only the captains of the
_écorcheurs_, the bastards, the lords without lordship, that were so
ferocious. The grandees and the princes had acquired a strange appetite
for blood in these hideous wars. What shall we say when we see John of
Ligny, of the house of Luxemburg, exercising his nephew, the count of
Saint-Pol, a boy of fifteen, in massacring fugitives?
They treated their relations just as they did their enemies; in fact,
as regarded safety, the enemy was better off than the relation. It
would seem as though there were no fathers, no brothers in those days.
The count d’Harcourt keeps his father a prisoner all his life; the
countess de Foix poisons her sister, the sire de Giac his wife; the
duke of Brittany starves his brother to death, and that publicly--the
horror-stricken passer-by heard his piteous voice imploring a morsel of
bread for charity. One evening, on the 10th of January, Count Adolphus of
Gelderland drags his old father out of bed, marches him five leagues on
foot through the snow without hose, and throws him into a subterraneous
dungeon (1440). The son, indeed, might have said in his own behalf that
parricide was matter of usage in the family. But we find it likewise in
most of the great houses of the time, in all those of the Low Countries,
in those of Bar, Verdun, Armagnac, etc.
_Gilles de Retz_
[Sidenote: [1426-1440 A.D.]]
People were well inured to these things, but one such that came to light
stupefied all men with wonder and horror. The duke of Brittany being at
Nantes, the bishop, who was his cousin and his chancellor, was emboldened
by his presence to proceed against a great lord of the neighbourhood,
regarded with singular awe, a Retz of the house of Laval, which was
itself a branch of the Montforts, of the lineage of the dukes of
Brittany. Such was the terror inspired by that name that it had silenced
every tongue for fourteen years.
The accusation was a strange one. An old woman called La Meffraie used
to travel about the country and the heaths, and make up to the children
who kept cattle or begged. Caressing and cajoling them, but all the while
keeping her face half covered with a piece of black gauze, she used to
entice them to the château of the sire de Retz, and they were never seen
again. This Gilles de Retz was a very great lord, rich both in patrimony
and by his marriage into the house of Thouars, besides which he had
inherited the wealth of his maternal grandfather, John de Craon, lord of
La Suze, Chantocé, and Ingrande.
There was found in the tower of Chantocé a tunful of calcined children’s
bones, the remains, it was calculated, of some forty victims. Similar
discoveries were made in the château de la Suze, and in every other
place where he had made his abode. Murder accompanied him wherever he
went. The number of children slaughtered by this beast of extermination
is estimated at 140. How slaughtered, and why? In the answer to this
question lay something more horrible than death itself. They were
offerings to the devil. He invoked the fiends Barron, Orient, Beelzebub,
Satan, and Belial, praying them to grant him “gold, knowledge, and
power.”[50]
He was condemned to the flames and placed at the stake, but not burned.
Out of deference for his powerful family and the nobility in general, he
was strangled before the flames reached him. The body was not reduced to
ashes. “Damsels of high condition,” says Jean Chartier,[h] went to the
meadows of Nantes, where the execution had taken place, raised the body
with their noble hands, and, with the aid of some nuns, gave it very
honourable burial in the Carmelite church (1440).
Barbarism had returned, only without what was good in it, simplicity and
faith. Feudalism had come back, but without its traits of devotedness and
fidelity, and its chivalry. These ghosts of buried feudalism appeared
like damned souls bringing unknown crimes to earth from their infernal
abode. It mattered not that the English withdrew; France still continued
the work of self-extermination. The provinces of the north were becoming
a desert; the waste heaths were spreading. In the centre, Beauce was
becoming overrun with briers and thickets; two armies sought and could
hardly find each other there. The towns in which the whole population of
the rural districts sought refuge, absorbed that miserable multitude, and
yet remained not the less desolate. A vast number of houses were empty,
says the Bourgeois de Paris,[i] and many a door was closed to open no
more. The poor took from those houses whatever they could for firing.
Paris was burning Paris. We may judge of the other towns from this one,
the most populous of all, the town in which the government had held its
seat, and where resided those great corporations, the university and the
parliament. Famine and wretchedness had made it a focus of disgusting
contagious maladies, the nature of which was not very accurately
discriminated, but which were called at random the plague. Charles VII
had a glimpse of that hideous thing which was still called Paris, was
struck with horror, and hurried away. The English did not try to return
thither. The two parties withdrew as if by a common understanding. The
wolves alone were voluntary visitors, entering at evening in search of
carrion; for as they no longer found food in the fields, they were rabid
with hunger, and attacked men. The contemporary historian, who no doubt
exaggerates, alleges that in September, 1438, they devoured fourteen
persons between Montmartre and the Porte St. Antoine.
These terrible miseries are expressed, very feebly indeed, in the
_Complaint of the poor Commonalty and the poor Labourers_. It is a medley
of lamentations and threats; the starving wretches warn the church,
the king, the burghers and merchants, and, above all, the lords, that
“the fire is very near their hôtels.” They call the king to their aid.
But what could Charles VII do--that king of Bourges, that weak and
mean-looking personage,[51] how could they expect him to impose respect
and obedience on so many audacious men? With what forces was he to put
down the _écorcheurs_ of the rural districts, and the terrible petty
kings of châteaux? They were his own captains;[52] it was with them and
through them he was waging war against the English.
CHARLES BEGINS THE WORK OF REFORM (1439 A.D.)
On the 2nd of November, 1439, Charles VII ordained in the states of
Orleans, and at their request: that henceforth the king alone shall
nominate the captains; that the lords, as well as the royal captains,
shall be responsible for the acts of their men; and that both alike must
answer before the king’s functionaries, that is to say, that henceforth
war shall be subjected to the control of justice. The barons shall no
longer take anything beyond their seigniorial rights, under pretext of
war. War becomes the king’s affair, and he undertakes, in consideration
of 1,200,000 livres a year granted him by the states, to maintain fifteen
hundred lances with six men to each. By and by we shall see him back this
cavalry with a newly created infantry of the communes. Contraveners shall
obtain no grace; should the king pardon, his servants should take no
heed thereof. The ordinance subjoined a more direct and more efficacious
threat: the spoils of the contraveners shall belong to whoever shall
take them. This was a tremendous clause; it armed the peasant, and
sounded, as it were, the tocsin in the village.
What partially explains the boldness of the measure is that the
self-styled royal captains, the pillagers and _écorcheurs_, had recently
damaged their own strength. They had attempted an expedition to Bâle
with the hopes of extorting ransom-money from the council, but instead
of this they were themselves very roughly handled on their march by the
peasants of Alsace; and then, seeing the Swiss ready to receive them,
they returned with their tails between their legs. The king, who had
taken Montereau, valiantly leading the assault in person (1437), took
Meaux with his artillery (1439); then feeling himself in strength, he
listened to the complaints made against the soldiery, and lent a gracious
ear to the lamentations of his good subjects. Acts of justice were done
with rapid despatch; the constable De Richemont, willingly exchanging his
functions for those of provost-martial, hanged and drowned all along his
route. His brother, the duke of Brittany, did not delay to strike that
great blow, the sentencing and burning of Marshal de Retz. This first
instance of justice done upon a lord was effected only in God’s name, and
with the aid of the church; but it was, nevertheless, a warning to the
nobility that their impunity was at an end.[b]
The most important effect of the memorable meeting of the states-general
of 1439 was to render further meetings of that body unnecessary. In
effect, the king was given the exclusive right to raise troops and to
levy taxes. This virtually amounted to the creation of a permanent army,
and, by implications, to the imposition of a perpetual tax. So at least
the king interpreted it. From then on the king, having no need of the
authorisation of the estates for the imposition of taxes, took good pains
to dispense with its services. In point of fact it assembled but once
more during the remaining period of his reign.[p]
Who were the intrepid advisers that urged the king upon this course of
proceeding? Who were the servants that could have prompted him to these
reforms, and procured for him the name given by contemporaries: Charles
“the well served”?
Along with the princes in the council of Charles VII, the count of Maine,
the cadet of Brittany, and the bastard of Orleans, there were also petty
nobles, the brave Saintrailles, and those wise and politic men, the
Brézés, nobles, but men who were nothing without the king. We find in
it two burghers, Jacques Cœur, the money-changer, and the master of the
artillery, Jean Bureau, both very humble _roturier_ names. Bureau was a
man of the robe, a master of the accounts. He threw down his pen, and by
this remarkable transformation exemplified the truth that an able mind
can apply itself to anything. Henry IV reformed the finances through a
man of the sword; Charles VII waged war through a financier. Bureau was
the first who made an able and scientific use of artillery.
War needs money, and Jacques Cœur contrived to supply it. Whence came
he? We are sorry to know so little of his early career. All we know is
that in 1432 we find him engaged in commerce in Beirut in Syria; sometime
afterwards we see him at Bourges in the capacity of money-changer to
the king. This great trader had always one foot in the East, and one in
France. Here, he made his son archbishop of Bourges; yonder, he married
his nieces or other female relations to the masters of his galleys. On
the one hand he was continuing his Egyptian traffic; on the other he was
speculating on the maintenance of armies and the conquest of Normandy.
Such were the able and humbly-born councillors of Charles VII. If it be
asked who brought them about him, and what was the influence that made
him yield to their advice, it will be found, if we are not mistaken,
that it was a woman, his mother-in-law, Yolande of Anjou. We see her
in possession of power from the beginning of this reign; it was she
who caused the Maid to be received with favour; and it was with her on
one occasion that the duke of Alençon arranged the preparations for a
campaign. This influence, balanced by that of the favourite, seems to
have been without a rival from the moment the old queen had given her
son-in-law a mistress whom he loved for twenty years (1431-1450). This
was Agnes Sorel.
AGNES SOREL; THE _PRAGUERIE_ (1440 A.D.)
[Sidenote: [1440 A.D.]]
Agnes la Sorelle or Surelle--she assumed for arms a gold _sureau_ (elder
tree)--was the daughter of a gownsman, Jean Soreau, but she was noble
by the mother’s side. She was born in honest Touraine. The _naïveté_ of
Agnes was early transplanted into a land of craft and policy, Lorraine.
She was brought up with Isabella of Lorraine, with whom René of Anjou
espoused that duchy. Isabella, the wife of a prisoner, waited on the king
to beseech his aid, bringing her children with her and also her good
friend from childhood, the demoiselle Agnes. The king’s mother-in-law,
Yolande of Anjou, who stood also in the same relation to Isabella, was,
like her, a woman of masculine mind; and they both agreed to attach
Charles VII forever to the interests of the house of Anjou-Lorraine. The
gentle creature was given him for his mistress, to the great satisfaction
of the queen, who wished at any cost to remove La Trémouille and the
other favourites.
Everyone knows the little story how Agnes said one day to the king
that, when very young, she had been informed by an astrologer that she
was to be loved by one of the most valiant kings in the world: she had
thought that this was Charles, but she now saw clearly it was the king of
England, who took so many fine towns from him in defiance of his beard;
therefore to the king of England she would go. Stung by these words, the
king burst into tears, “and quitting his hunting and his gardens, he took
the bit in his teeth,” and to such purpose, that he drove the English out
of the kingdom.
The pretty verses by Francis I[53] prove that this tradition was of
earlier date than Brantôme.[l] Be this as it may, we have an equivalent
testimony in favour of Agnes from a hostile pen, that of the nearly
contemporary Burgundian chronicler, Olivier de la Marche.[m] “Certest
Agnes was one of the most beautiful women I ever saw, and did in her
quality much good to the realm.” And again: “She took pleasure in
bringing under the king’s notice young soldiers and gentle companions, by
whom the king was afterwards well served.”
Charles VII thought wisdom charming when preached by such lips; old
Yolande in all probability spoke through Agnes, and no doubt she had the
principal part in all that was done. More politic than scrupulous, she
had welcomed with equal readiness the two girls that came to her so _à
propos_ from Lorraine, Joan of Arc and Agnes, the saint and the mistress,
who both in their several ways were of service to the king and the realm.
This council of women, _parvenus_, and _roturiers_, it must be confessed,
did not command much reverence, or greatly tend to set off to advantage
the unroyal figure of Charles VII. To sit as judge of the realm on the
throne of St. Louis, and be like him the guardian of God’s Peace, he
ought apparently to have surrounded himself with people of a different
sort. The league of the three ladies, the dowager queen, the queen, and
the mistress, was not edifying in anybody’s eyes. What was Richemont? An
executioner. Jacques Cœur? A trader in Saracen lands. A Jean Bureau, a
limb of the law, “an inkhorn,” had made himself a captain, was riding all
over the kingdom with his cannon, and not a fortress could stand before
him; was not that a shame for the men of the sword? The foxes had become
lions. Thenceforth the knights were to account to the knights at law--the
most noble lords and the high justiciars were to tremble before the
underlings of justice!
So much was this the tone of feeling prevalent among the nobles, not
excepting those who were most immediately in contact with Charles VII,
that even Dunois quitted the council after the famous ordinance. “The
cool and tempered lord,” as Chartier[h] calls him, repented of having
served his king too well. This bastard of Orleans had begun his fortunes
by defending the town of Orleans, his brother’s appanage, in which
service he had very adroitly employed the heroic simplicity of the Maid.
After having grown great through the king, he wished to grow great
against the king. The misfortune was that his brother the duke was still
in England; but the ancient enemy of the house of Orleans, the duke of
Burgundy (converted no doubt by Dunois), was labouring to get that future
chief of the malcontents out of the hands of the English.
The duke of Alençon threw himself headlong into the affair; the Bourbons
and the Vendômes lent their hands to it. The ex-favourite, La Trémouille,
whom Richemont had removed, readily engaged in it. The most eager of all
were the leaders of the _écorcheurs_, the bastard de Bourbon, Chabannes,
and Le Sanglier (“the wild boar”). In truth, the matter was one that most
nearly concerned them; the lords had their honours and jurisdictional
prerogatives to contend for; but as for them, they had their necks to
save; the gallows stared them in the face.
Nothing was now wanting but a leader. As the duke of Orleans could not be
had, the malcontents took the dauphin, a mere child in point of age, but
it was thought that a name would be sufficient. The supposed child, who
was already Louis XI, had made his first efforts in arms, as he made his
last, against the very party of the lords that chose him for their chief.
At fourteen years of age he had been commissioned to pacify the marches
of Brittany and Poitou. His first capture had been that of one of Marshal
de Retz’s lieutenants; such a commencement did not promise the grandees a
very trusty friend. Friend or not, he accepted their offers. This dauphin
of France resembled Charles VII in no respect, but took rather after his
grandmother, who was sprung from the houses of Bar and Aragon.
The king was keeping his Easter at Poitiers, and was at dinner, when word
was brought him that St. Maixent had been seized by the duke of Alençon
and the sire de la Roche; whereupon Richemont said to him in Breton
fashion, “Remember King Richard II, who shut himself up in a fortress
and got taken.” The king thought the hint a good one, mounted his horse,
and galloped with four hundred lances to St. Maixent. The burghers had
been fighting four-and-twenty hours for their king, when he came to their
relief. De la Roche’s men were decapitated or drowned, according to
Richemont’s custom, but Alençon’s were let go. The small fortresses of
Poitou did not hold out; Richemont carried them one by one. Dunois then
began to reflect, and he calculated too that the first who should leave
the rest would be allowed good terms. He came, was well received, and
congratulated himself on the course he had adopted, when he saw the king
stronger than he had supposed, with 4,800 cavaliers, and 2,000 archers
at his back, without having been obliged to weaken the garrisons in the
marches of Normandy.
More than one of Dunois’ party thought as he did. Many an _écorcheur_ of
the south took the king’s pay, and fought against the _écorcheurs_ of the
north. Charles VII drove back the duke de Bourbon upon the Bourbonnais,
securing the good will of the towns and châteaux by prohibiting all
pillage. He assembled the states of Auvergne, and got them to declare
loudly that the rebels were hostile to the king, only because he
protected the poorer classes against the plunderers. The princes,
abandoned by their followers, and obtaining no support from the duke of
Burgundy, came in and made their submission; first Alençon, then the duke
de Bourbon and the dauphin. As for La Trémouille and two others, the king
would not receive them. The dauphin hesitated about accepting a pardon
which was not extended to his friends, and said to the king, “I find
then, my liege, that I must go back to them, for I have promised so.” The
king replied coldly, “The gates are open for you, Louis, and if they are
not wide enough, I will have sixteen or twenty fathoms of the wall pulled
down for you.”
This war, so well conducted, was not less wisely terminated. The duke
de Bourbon was deprived of his possessions in central France (Corbeil,
Vincennes, etc.) and the dauphin was dismissed from court, and assigned
an establishment on the frontier, in Dauphiné. Thus he was isolated, and
allotted his separate portion; there was no getting rid of him, except by
giving him a little royalty, in advance of his hereditary expectations.
[Illustration: FRENCH NOBLEMAN, MIDDLE OF FIFTEENTH CENTURY]
This _praguerie_ of France (it was so called after the name of the great
Bohemian _praguerie_), although it was so quickly ended, nevertheless
produced some disastrous results. The military reform was postponed. The
English were emboldened to attack Harfleur, which they took and retained.
They released the duke of Orleans at the request of the duke of Burgundy
(1440). When the ancient enemy of his house thus exerted himself to take
him out of captivity, the king could not decently refuse likewise to
guarantee the ransom-money, and aid in the deliverance of the dangerous
prisoner. He proceeded straight on his return to the duke of Burgundy,
who threw the chain of the Golden Fleece[54] over his neck, and gave him
his niece in marriage. Against whom was formed this close union of two
enemies, if not against the king? He took the hint.
[Sidenote: [1440-1442 A.D.]]
First of all, he obtained from the states a tenth to be levied on all the
clergy of the realm. He recalled Tannegui du Châtel, the mortal enemy
of the house of Burgundy. Then concentrating all his forces towards
the north, he proceeded along the frontier, doing justice upon the
Burgundian, Lorrainian, and other captains, who were desolating the land.
Among those who made their submission, there was a man of turbulence, the
most audacious of plunderers; audacious both from the strength his birth
gave him, and because he was the common agent of the duke de Bourbon and
the duke of Burgundy; this was the bastard de Bourbon. He did not get off
so cheaply as he had expected. The king handed him over, Bourbon as he
was, to the provost, who put him on his trial just like any other robber;
and after being well and duly found guilty, he was put in a sack, and
thrown into the river.
Another lesson, not less instructive, was given. The young count of
Saint-Pol, relying on the protection of the duke of Burgundy, dared to
intercept some of the king’s cannon on the march, and carry them off; the
king deprived him of two of his best fortresses; Saint-Pol hastened to
the king and besought pardon, but he could obtain no favour, except by
submitting to the decision of the parliament on the litigated question of
the Ligny inheritance.
EFFECTIVE PROGRESS AGAINST ENGLAND (1441-1444 A.D.)
Meanwhile the English, all this time so near Paris, and so strongly
established on the lower Seine, had advanced up the river and seized
Pontoise. Lord Clifford, who had surprised that important and formidable
post, kept possession of it in person. The inveterate obstinacy of the
Cliffords acquired but too much notoriety in the wars of the Roses.
Besides the English, there were in Pontoise numerous deserters, who knew
they had no quarter to expect.
Invincible pertinacity of purpose was displayed on both sides. The duke
of York, regent of France, now came to the aid of Clifford, whom he was
afterwards to put to death in the civil wars. He brought with him an army
from Normandy, revictualled the place, and offered battle (June); Talbot
was with him. The king let the English pass, fell back, and returned.
Talbot also returned, and again threw provisions into the town (July).
The duke of York once more marched his army back, but could not yet bring
on an engagement. He was allowed to roam over the ruined Île-de-France
as much as he pleased, and waste his strength in those useless
evolutions. When they had exhausted and harassed themselves, in four
times revictualling Pontoise, Charles VII seriously resumed the siege;
Jean Bureau battered the walls with admirable activity; two murderous
assaults were made, that lasted five hours; first a church, that served
as a redoubt, was carried, and then the place itself (September 16th,
1441). Thus men, who dared not meet the English in the plain, attacked
and defeated them by storm.
The recapture of Pontoise was a deliverance for Paris, and for the whole
country around; cultivation could thenceforth recommence, the means of
subsistence were secured. Yet the Parisians evinced no gratitude to the
king; they felt but their present miseries and the burden of the taxes;
these were beginning to affect the brotherhoods even, and the churches,
which were loud in their complaints. There was no want of willingness
on the part of the princes to take advantage of these discontents. The
duke of Burgundy, without himself appearing, assembled them in his own
home at Nevers (March, 1442). The duke of Orleans, with whom he did
as he pleased, since he had delivered him, presided for him over the
meeting, which consisted of the dukes de Bourbon and d’Alençon, the
counts d’Angoulême, d’Étampes, and de Dunois. The king frankly sent his
chancellor to this conclave which was held against him, and notified to
them that he would readily hear what they had to say.
[Sidenote: [1442-1443 A.D.]]
Their demand and alleged grievances very plainly showed what were their
secret views. The princes, therefore, in their love for the public
welfare, and for the good people of France, set forth before the king the
necessity of making peace. They called for the repression of the brigands.
The king’s reply, which was sedulously made public, was overwhelming,
and the more so as its tone was calm and moderate. He answers specially,
respecting the taxes, that the aids had been consented to by the lords
on whose property they had been levied; that as to the tallages, the
king had “notified” them to the three estates, although in matters so
urgent, when the enemy was in occupation of one portion of the kingdom,
and was destroying the rest, he had a good right to levy tallages of his
royal authority. “It is not necessary to that end,” he says, “to assemble
the estates; it is but a burden for the poor people who have to pay the
charges of those who attend. Many notable persons have requested that
these convocations should cease.”
The king, leaving the malcontents to waste time in their meeting at
Nevers, was then performing a grand and useful journey all through
his kingdom, from Picardy to Gascony, everywhere establishing peace,
especially in the marches, in Poitou, Saintonge, and the Limousin.
Strengthened in the north by the recovery of Pontoise, he went to make
head against the English in the south. The count d’Albret, being hard
pressed by them, had promised to surrender if the king did not come on
the 23rd of June to “keep his day,” and await them on the _lande_ of
Tartas. They liked the condition, not believing that he could arrive
in time, much less that he would offer them battle. On the appointed
day they saw the king of France and his army on the _lande_ (June 21st,
1442). All these Gascons, who had imagined themselves far beyond the
king’s reach in a world of their own, were beginning to feel that he was
everywhere. They came and did homage, performed feudal service, and the
king rendered justice to them.
He did this conspicuously in an important case the following year (March,
1443). The estates of Comminges supplicated Charles VII on behalf of
the aged countess de Foix who had been imprisoned by her husband. He
frightened the count de Foix, liberated the old countess, divided the
usufruct of Comminges between the husband and wife, and adjudged the
property to himself. This startling act of justice struck great awe into
all those lords who had hitherto been so independent.
This was not all. In order to remain always among them as judge, the
king gave them a royal parliament, which was to reside in Toulouse. This
judicial royalty of the south was altogether free of the parliament of
Paris; it judged in accordance with the law of the country, the written
law, and was not dependent on anyone, but was self-elected. Until such
time as this great body could establish order and justice in Languedoc,
Charles VII authorised the poor to take justice into their own hands, and
hunt down the brigands and vagrant soldiers.
[Illustration: LOUIS XI AND CHARLES THE BOLD AT PÉRONNE]
He could not remain long absent from the north. Dieppe, which had been
recovered by a fortunate and bold stroke, was in danger of being lost
again. A great fleet and an army were every moment expected from England;
it was urgently necessary to anticipate their arrival. The dauphin got
permission to undertake this service along with Dunois; many Picard and
Norman gentlemen also volunteered. The Bastille was taken. The duke of
Somerset, the English commander, returned to Rouen to rest from his toils
and take up his winter quarters.
[Illustration: COSTUME OF A NOBLEWOMAN, MIDDLE OF FIFTEENTH CENTURY]
[Sidenote: [1443-1444 A.D.]]
That winter, whilst Somerset was enjoying his victorious repose,
the dauphin Louis was rapidly traversing the whole kingdom, to ruin
and destroy the best friend of the English. The count d’Armagnac,
dissatisfied by the way in which Comminges had been disposed of without
giving him a share, had attempted to seize the whole country. He reckoned
on the English, and particularly on the duke of Gloucester, who in fact
wanted to marry Henry VI to a daughter of the count. The dauphin set out
in winter, made his way over snows and swollen rivers, and found the game
in its lair, everything that bore the name of Armagnac shut up in one
place. Gloucester and the war party, though they had encouraged Armagnac,
were unable to defend him. They had enough to do to defend themselves in
England against the bishops, and the partisans of peace, Winchester and
Suffolk, who had gained the upper hand.[b] Painful as it was to their
pride they were obliged at conferences held at Arras, in 1444, to beg for
a truce and the hand of a French princess, Margaret of Anjou, for their
young king Henry VI, placing also a new enemy at their gates through the
marriage of the dauphin Louis with Margaret of Scotland, daughter of
James I.
EXPEDITION TO SWITZERLAND AND LORRAINE
Charles VII only granted that truce in order the better to complete
the work of reform begun in 1439.[c] But there was a third people very
embarrassing during the truce, the war-folk namely. What could be done
was to induce them to go and rob elsewhere, to quit ruined France for
thriving Germany, and make a pilgrimage to the council of Bâle, to
the rich and saintly towns of the Rhine, and the fat ecclesiastical
principalities.
[Sidenote: [1444-1445 A.D.]]
Just then the king received two applications for aid, the one from the
emperor Frederick III against the Swiss, the other from René, duke
of Lorraine, against the cities of the empire. The king was equally
favourable to both proposals, and generously promised aid for and against
the Germans.[b]
Switzerland had founded and consolidated its independence of Austria and
the empire in three battles--Morgarten, Sempach, and Näfels--in which
a handful of peasants had heroically vanquished great feudal armies.
The French nobility was always ready for positive warfare, but that of
Germany showed itself more circumspect and the Austrian provinces were
reduced to setting, by means of wretched intrigue, the Swiss cantons one
against the other, and then if possible to intervene. This time Frederick
III reckoned to make the Armagnacs of Charles VII intervene for him.
_The Battle of Sankt Jakob (1444 A.D.)_
Charles hastened to set in motion, in as orderly a fashion as possible,
an army of 14,000 French and 8,000 English, Scotch, Brabanters,
Spaniards, and Italians. The commander-in-chief was the former leader of
the praguerie--the dauphin Louis. This terrible band turned the Jura in
fairly good order, and entered Switzerland by crossing the little river
Birse. The Swiss, who were then besieging Zurich, were able to send only
2,000 men to meet the enemy. These brave fellows had expected only to
skirmish and knew not with what force they had to deal. A messenger had
come from Bâle to warn them of the numbers of the French, but they had
killed him; and in the brutal pride their former successes had inspired,
they threw themselves head-foremost on the first corps they met (1444).
Their bravoura did not save them. After making a desperate resistance in
a hospital and behind the dilapidated walls of a garden, their position
was forced and they perished, every one. The dauphin had such respect
for the brave men that fought so well that he went no further and made a
treaty of alliance with the Swiss. As for the _écorcheurs_, they found
nothing to take away from these poor mountaineers and many turned towards
Alsace and Swabia.[c]
The dauphin’s return, and the report of the check the Swiss had suffered,
considerably advanced the affairs of Lorraine. The towns which sheltered
themselves under the name of the empire saw that, if the emperor and
the German nobility had called in the French to the heart of the German
countries, to save Zurich, they would not come and fight the French on
the marches of France. Toul and Verdun acknowledged the king as protector.
Metz alone resisted. That great and aspiring town had others dependent
on it, and was encompassed by from twenty-four to thirty forts. Épinal,
however, had from the beginning seized the opportunity to emancipate
itself, and had put itself into the king’s hands. The forts having
afterwards surrendered, the Metz men made up their mind to negotiate.
They represented to the king that “they were not of his realm or
lordship, but that, in his wars with the duke of Burgundy and others,
they had always received and comforted his men.” Thereupon, by order of
the king, Master Jean Rabateau, president of the parliament, propounded
many arguments to the contrary. The grand question of the limits of
France and the empire could not be settled thus incidentally, and during
a truce to the English war. The matter remained undecided. The king
contented himself with drawing on the finances of the wealthy town of
Metz.[b]
MILITARY AND FINANCIAL REFORMS (1443-1448 A.D.)
[Sidenote: [1443-1448 A.D.]]
These two expeditions had disembarrassed the king of the most riotous
among his adventurers, and broken in the rest to an elementary
discipline; it was at last possible to put into execution the ordinance
of Orleans. In 1445, the army was consolidated into fifteen companies
of one hundred lances; to each lance six paid men were reckoned--a
man-at-arms and his esquire, three archers and a _coutillier_, all
mounted. By these were the cities garrisoned, the largest having only
from twenty to thirty lances; in this way the inhabitants remained
stronger than the soldiers, and in a position to check any disorder. The
demand for positions in the army was so great that numerous old stagers
followed the companies about that they might be ready to snap up the
first vacancy. All the others were obliged to retire immediately to their
homes without disturbing the peace, under penalty of being given up to
justice as vagabonds. Such was the progress of order that they obeyed and
at the end of the fifteen days nothing more was heard of them; as for
those who had enlisted, they submitted to a rigorous discipline. Charles
VII had thus at his disposition a picked troop of nine thousand horse.
By another ordinance, that of April 28th, 1448, the king secured to
France an advantage which she had hitherto furnished to foreigners--to
the Genoese, at need--but had never herself possessed: a regular and
permanent infantry. Each of the sixteen thousand parishes of the kingdom
was obliged to furnish the king “a good comrade,” said the ordinance,
“who has seen service.” He had to furnish at his own expense his
_brigandine_, a light coat of armour of iron plates joined together; a
short coat, light helmet, dagger, sword, crossbow, and quiver of arrows.
He was obliged to drill on all feast days, and be ready to serve the king
at any time he should be called upon to do so; he received in payment
four francs a month when in service and exemption from all taxes and
subsidies, excepting the _aide_ and the _gabelle_.
The free archer did not become at once a model soldier; military genius
was not developed in a day in a nation so long without arms. But while
Villon depicts for us one of those archers dropping on his knees before
a scarecrow, taking it for a gendarme, entreating pardon, and beginning
to feel extremely ill, satiric poetry is not history; a century later, in
1554, the same archers, incorporated in the provincial legions of Francis
I, gained against the first army in the world--the Castilian veterans--a
battle that had been once lost by the men-at-arms; still another century,
and in 1643, changing their quivers for guns, they had developed into the
foot-soldiers that fought at Rocroi.
All these reforms were subordinate to that of the finances, set in
motion in 1443 by Jacques Cœur. To establish a reciprocal control by
the regulators of finances over one another; to oblige individual
receivers to account to the receiver-general and the latter in his
turn to the chamber of accounts; to force the king’s officers--the
ministers of finance, the master of the horse, the treasurer of wars,
and the commander of artillery--to render monthly accounts to the
king in person--these were excellent and admirable reforms, thanks to
which Charles VII found himself in a position to create in France an
institution that the most powerful of his predecessors had been unable to
establish--a military force dependent only on the king, and protecting
him, instead of leaving him at the mercy of the barons’ evil humours,
as had heretofore been the case. Since Charles V, the ordinary indirect
taxes, such as that on salt, on merchandise, and on liquors, had been
permanent. Since Charles VI, the land tax (the _taille_), for payment of
the soldiers, had become permanent--that is, it continued to be levied
without the vote of the estates. But the king gave guarantee for the
proper administration of financial justice by declaring sovereign the
_cour des aides_, which alone had the right to interpret ordinances
pertaining to the taxes and was the last resort of all civil and criminal
processes growing out of the administration of the finances.
Though it was not yet possible, in the fifteenth century, to reduce all
France to one uniform law, she was at least beginning to emerge from
the arbitrary customs of a justice exercised, above all in the north
of France, according to unwritten laws. Charles VII thought--and the
thought is an honour to him--that it was essential that all the laws
of a kingdom should be written and “agreed upon by the lawyers of each
country,” and examined and authorised by the supreme court and by the
parliament, so that it would not be possible to deviate from the text
thus officially inscribed. To him was due this innovation.
THE CLOSE OF THE HUNDRED YEARS’ WAR
[Sidenote: [1448-1450 A.D.]]
Having accomplished these reforms, Charles found himself sufficiently
strong to finish with the English. A certain Francis de Surienne, an
Aragonese adventurer in the service of the English, wishing to garrison
one of the Norman villages possessed by the English, found himself
repulsed on all sides. The soldiers, having received from Henry VI
neither pay, provisions, nor munitions, were unwilling to share with
this foreigner their already insufficient resources. The Aragonese,
finding the doors of the allies closed to him, provided for the needs
of his company after the fashion of the greater number of the military
leaders: during the season of peace he fell upon Fougères, a rich city of
Brittany, and gave it over to his men to plunder in lieu of their arrears
of pay.
Immediately the king of France and the duke of Brittany demanded
of the English governor of Normandy reparation and an indemnity of
1,600,000 crowns damages. They demanded an impossibility. The indemnity
not arriving, the French set out to collect it for themselves at
Pont-de-l’Arche, Gerberoy, Verneuil. Dunois entered the province with
an efficient army which the Burgundians and Bretons joined voluntarily.
Pont-Audemer, Lisieux, Mantes, Vernon, Évreux, Louviers, St. Lô,
Coutances, and Valognes were taken or surrendered by the inhabitants
without striking a blow.
England was then beginning her Wars of the Roses, which during thirty
years were to cover her with blood and ruins. The parliament, not as yet
daring to take action against the king, fastened upon his minister, the
duke of Suffolk, and troubled itself little about Normandy, since the
reverses there were new and potent arguments against the accused. The
governor, Somerset, instead of concentrating his forces, divided them
into twenty garrisons, and sent ambassadors to open negotiations; but,
knowing no better how to make treaties than how to make war, he forgot
to invest them with authority. Order, proficiency--all that had hitherto
contributed to their success was now on the side of the French: to the
French Victory went over. On October 18th, 1449, they appeared beneath
the walls of Rouen.
In a moment all the inhabitants of Rouen were armed, but armed against
the English, who took refuge in the citadel. Somerset was there, and
the veteran Talbot, and numerous lords, officers, and soldiers; but it
must be remembered that it would have been impossible to resist at once
both the population and the French army. There was talk of a treaty, but
on what conditions!--that, in addition to Rouen, Caudebec, Villequier,
Lillebonne, Tancarville, Harfleur,--that is to say all the lower course
of the Seine,--should be delivered up to the king of France; and that
a hostage should be furnished in the person of the famous Talbot
himself--the English Achilles.
The governor of Honfleur refused to recognise this capitulation. The city
was taken in the middle of winter (December, 1449); Harfleur met the
same fate. The English, pushed to extremities, sent a knight of great
renown, Thomas Kyriell, with 6,000 men. It was a last effort. Landing
at Cherbourg, Kyriell sought to join the duke of Somerset at Bayeux, by
way of the shore; the French followed, and on April 15th, 1450, near
the village of Formigny, the constables of Richemont from one side, the
count of Clermont from the other, vigorously attacked him. Kyriell’s
soldiers fought bravely, but were defeated and left 4,000 on the field.
This insignificant number sufficed to blot out from the minds of the
French the 30,000 dead at Crécy, the 12,000 captive at Poitiers and at
Agincourt. Vire, Bayeux, Avranches, Caen, Domfront, and Falaise fell into
the hands of Charles.
[Sidenote: [1450-1453 A.D.]]
The numerous garrison of Cherbourg counted upon having nothing to fear,
thanks to its own strength and above all to the neighbourhood of the sea.
From this side it was taken. The French cannoneers established seven
batteries in the sea itself; when the tide rose they left their cannon
well anchored on the beach and protected by oiled skins; when the tide
fell they returned to them. It was the English who, first of all, had
turned against the French, at Crécy and Agincourt, this terrible arm of
the artillery; the latter now manipulated it better than themselves.
Cherbourg capitulated, and in a year the whole of Normandy was taken.
Also the French army presented a novel spectacle: disciplined and
obedient, it now lived on its pay and not by plunder.
A month later, Dunois, Saintrailles, Chabannes, and the brothers Jean
and Gaspard Bureau, who directed so advantageously the French artillery,
marched with 20,000 men against Guienne. Bourg-sur-Gironde, Blaye,
Castillon, Libourne, St. Émilion, offshoots from Bordeaux, which the
English had loaded with privileges as they had that city, were easily
taken. The inhabitants of Bordeaux, so well disposed to the England who
bought their wines, attempted a sortie, fled upon catching sight of the
enemy, and entered like the others into negotiations. The French granted
nearly all that was asked of them. This was the 5th of June, 1451; the
surrender was delayed until the 23rd. On that day, the herald of the
city having cried with a loud voice for succour from the English for the
people of Bordeaux, and no one replying, the gates were opened to the
French.
However mild the conquerors were, the great town soon regretted that
English domination so far removed as to be scarcely felt. Now it had to
pay taxes and furnish soldiers, the harbour was deserted, the shops were
encumbered with unsold tuns. If an English army had appeared, no matter
how weak, Bordeaux would have thrown herself into its arms. Such an army
now appeared.
The government of Henry VI, or, to speak more correctly, of Margaret of
Anjou, had need of a great success abroad in order to establish itself at
home. Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, now eighty years of age, was charged
with bringing Guienne again under the English rule. The first steps were
easy. The inhabitants of Bordeaux themselves introduced the English into
their town, September 22nd, 1452; almost the whole province followed
their example, and the king of France had to recommence his conquest.
With the spring of 1453 his troops were marching into Guienne; on the
14th of July they laid siege to Castillon.[c]
_The Battle of Castillon (July 17th, 1453)_
The royal army, the greater part of which, including the artillery under
the Bureau brothers, was concentrated in the camp, nearly two thousand
feet long by one thousand wide, occupied also an abbey, which was later
on the priory of St. Florent, and which overlooked Castillon; on the
plain of Mount Horable, near to the village of Capitourlans, were the
Bretons of Count d’Étampes, to the number of 240 lances under the
command of the knights of Hunaudaye and Montauban. The night of the 16th
of July was passed in fortifying the camp, which was surrounded by deep
trenches and defended by powerful artillery. Talbot on the morning of
the 17th attacked the abbeys, defended by eight hundred free archers
under the command of Jacques Rouhault and Pierre de Beauvau. The archers,
terrified by the impetuosity of the English, who shouted the war-cry of
their old leader, abandoned the abbey and retreated in the direction of
the entrenched camp, followed by the enemy. On hearing of the approach
of Talbot, Jacques de Chabannes left the camp and advanced at the head
of two hundred lances. Aided by Rouhault and Beauvau, he protected the
retreat of the archers. A very brief engagement took place; one hundred
men were killed on either side. Rouhault, thrown from his horse, owed his
safety only to the devotion of his archers, to whom he had sworn that he
would live and die with them. Chabannes, surrounded at one moment, was
delivered by his men.
[Illustration: FRENCH NOBLEWOMAN, EARLY FIFTEENTH CENTURY]
Finally it was possible to effect the retreat. Talbot rallied his men
and regained the abbey. There, seizing the provisions abandoned by the
French, he broke open the casks and distributed wine to his soldiers;
it was still early in the day; the earl of Shrewsbury (Talbot) had mass
performed by his chaplain. The holy sacrament was about to be celebrated,
when news was brought that the French were abandoning their enclosure and
fleeing. “Never,” he exclaimed, “will I hear mass till I shall, to-day,
have overthrown the band of Frenchmen which is before me”; and he gave
orders to advance. The English advanced uttering their war-cry, “Talbot,
Talbot, St. George!” Mounted on a little nag, the old captain was dressed
in a simple red velvet cassock. Vain attempts were made to stop him,
he was told that it was a false rumour, and that it would be better to
await quietly the onset of the enemy; he answered his standard-bearer,
who gave him this advice, by insults, and drove him away, it was said,
by a sword-cut across the face. On arriving at the palisade Talbot began
to shout, “On foot, on foot, all!” His men-at-arms, supported by the
archers, who arrived gradually and fell into rank, were received by a
formidable discharge; three hundred catapults, howitzers, culverins,
and ribaudequins, the firing of which was directed by the famous gunner
Giribault, threw their projectiles, which slew a large number of victims.
The English hesitated. Talbot brought them back, and formed them in
testudo; sheltered behind their bucklers they attacked the entrenchments.
Talbot succeeded in planting the banner of St. George on the summit of
the trench. A terrible conflict took place; for more than an hour they
fought hand to hand.
Suddenly, from the neighbouring heights, the sires de Montauban and de la
Hunaudaye descended with their Bretons, and took the enemy in the rear;
this movement decided the issue of the combat. The English stopped to
face this fresh body of troops. The terrible tempest of the artillery
did not cease to rain down on them. Seizing the opportunity, the French
dashed from the camp, some on foot, some on horse, and charged with fury.
Talbot, though wounded, held out. A blow from a culverin struck him on
the leg and threw him under his horse. The French archers surrounded him
and pierced him with their arrows. His son, who had vainly endeavoured
to persuade him to flee, died at his side, trying to protect him. The
English, seeing the fall of their chief, fled in disorder. Some wished
to regain their vessels or to cross the Dordogne at the ford of Rozan;
the others took the road to St. Émilion. A body of about two thousand
men under the leadership of the Gascon nobles fell back in good order
on Castillon and succeeded in penetrating into the town. The French,
tired, worn out, breathless, renounced the pursuit of the enemy; only
the count de Penthièvre, with his troops, gave chase to the fugitives in
the direction of St. Émilion. The English army was overwhelmed; thirty
knights and four thousand soldiers perished; in the heat of the action
they were killed without mercy. It is said that even in our day bones are
found in the plain which was the scene of this sanguinary struggle. On
the French side the loss was considerable; some of their leaders, Admiral
de Bueil, Jacques de Chabannes, Pierre de Beauvau, were wounded, but not
seriously. In spite of the reinforcements brought by the Gascon nobles,
Castillon could not oppose a long resistance; the town capitulated July
20th. From there the army marched immediately against St. Émilion and
Libourne, which opened their gates.[n]
Cadillac and Blanquefort followed suit. The royal army closed in around
Bordeaux. The free archers overran the country; the ships loaned by
La Rochelle and Brittany blocked the mouth of the Gironde. Bordeaux,
threatened with famine, sent deputies to Charles VII. In their presence
Jean Bureau made it a point to say to the king: “Sire, I have been
reconnoitring for proper positions for our batteries; if such is your
pleasure, I promise you on my life that in a few days I shall have
demolished the town.” The envoys understood that this time they must
accept what conditions the king would make. He stripped Bordeaux of her
privileges, exacted a contribution of 100,000 crowns and ordered the
banishment of twenty guilty citizens with the confiscation of their
wealth; finally the construction of two citadels to guarantee the
fidelity of the town in the future. The sire de l’Esparre, who had called
in the English, promising a rising of all the nobility of the province,
lost his head. On the 19th of October, 1453, Charles VII entered Bordeaux
in triumph--the Hundred Years’ War was over. The English held nothing in
France except Calais and two small neighbouring towns.[c]
Thus after a century’s struggle was decided the impossibility of English
monarchs holding France, under whatever pretensions or rights. The
French had outgrown those times when the sovereignty over them could
be transmitted to foreigners, or divided with them by the mere laws of
feudal heritage or proprietorial descent. All that the ablest kings and
bravest warriors of England could do was to hold their ground upon the
continent. Any lack of talent, suspension of vigilance, or remissness of
energy on their part restored military superiority to the French upon
their own soil, and insured with this their independence.
It was fortunate for both countries that such a decision had taken place,
and that it should be final. The circumstances as well as the result of
the war now rendered it so. The re-conquest of all the French provinces
by Charles was not, like that of Philip Augustus or Philip the Fair, the
work of trickery or deceit. It had been achieved in fair and stand-up
fight, and, what was more remarkable, with forces on either side almost
balanced in number. The French were not more numerous than the English at
Formigny; and Talbot, when he fell at Castillon, led a greater army than
that which defeated him. It was the French free archers, too, and peasant
soldiers, who fought more than the knights on that field. Experience had
taught the mistake of attempting to ride down the hardy sons of the soil
by mounted gentry. English and French met on these last fields equal
in courage and in strength. But as the French soldiers were now more
carefully selected, disciplined, and organised, they were victorious over
those of England, distracted as it was by civil war, sending forth armies
as distracted as its government.[g]
THE LAST YEARS OF CHARLES VII
[Sidenote: [1451-1456 A.D.]]
About this time the services of the wise counsellor we have already
mentioned--the great merchant and shipper, Jacques Cœur--were lost to
the state. After the conviction of Jean de Xaincoings, receiver-general
of the realm, for embezzlement in 1451, Jacques Cœur was accused of
malversation in his office of treasurer of the crown. He was said to have
heaped up incredible riches; and on some occasions he made a display of
his wealth which in a great measure compensated for the evil proceedings,
if such they were, by which he gained it. He furnished funds for fleets
and armies out of his private stores, when they could not otherwise be
had; and continued his sage advices to the king, inculcating economy
and repose. Charles was still indolent and self-indulgent when no great
national effort was to be made. He allowed the prosecution of his
faithful servitor, accepted the sentence of death which was passed upon
him, and only started up to the kindness and generosity of his character
when he remembered his services, and granted him his life (1453). The
rest of the treasurer’s story is very strange. Jacques Cœur escaped from
prison and found refuge at Rome, was appointed admiral of the Italian
fleets against the Saracens, trafficked in goods and money while sweeping
the infidels from the sea, and died in the island of Chios, 1456, richer
and more honoured than he had ever been in Paris. The king must have
seen, when it was too late, that he had banished a financier whose advice
on public affairs was cheaply paid for by the acquisition of private
riches.[j]
_Quarrels with Burgundy and with the Dauphin_
[Sidenote: [1451-1453 A.D.]]
The expulsion of the English from the continent, where they no longer
held any town save Calais, left the king of France in the presence of his
powerful rival, the duke of Burgundy, who reigned over dominions no less
vast, and after a manner quite as independent.
After the English had been driven from Normandy, Philip of Burgundy began
to feel the hostility of Charles and of his court. Whenever his subjects,
especially of towns, had cause of complaint against him, they appealed
to the king of France and his parliament as suzerain. Ghent would
not submit to the _gabelle_ (or salt tax) imposed by Philip, and the
people appealed to the king of France, who pretended that the _gabelle_
peculiarly belonged to the suzerain, and a French embassy soon arrived
to arbitrate between the duke and the Ghenters. The duke altogether set
aside the demand of _gabelle_, but insisted merely on the fact of the
chiefs of trades and the demagogues having usurped the entire power in
Ghent, even the administration and the election of magistrates. The
French envoys took completely the duke’s view of the difference, and gave
an award, obliging the people of Ghent to admit the ducal bailiffs to a
share of authority, to pay a large fine, give up the rallying emblem of
the white _chaperon_, and desist from holding the meetings of the united
trades.
In the following year, 1452, the French court returned to the charge
and sent fresh ambassadors, not approving of the facility with which
their predecessors had abandoned and condemned the democracy of Ghent.
But at that time occurred the descent of Talbot on the Garonne, and
the attention and efforts of Charles were necessarily turned in that
direction. Duke Philip saw his opportunity. He must crush the rebellious
towns ere Charles succeeded in expelling the English from Guienne. He
raised a large army, brought it to Ghent, and captured several small
places round it, cruelly hanging every prisoner. Treachery is reported to
have been employed to induce the citizens to come forth to battle on the
open plain. But 40,000 armed inhabitants of the Flemish capital, so often
victorious in the field, scarcely needed any incentives to march to the
relief of their towns and garrisons. Duke Philip was engaged in the siege
of Gavre, from which the commander escaped to Ghent, craving succour, if
the fortress was to be saved. The citizens accordingly mustered to the
number of 30,000 and marched to attack the Burgundians. The encounter
took place on the 23rd of July, 1453; it began by the cannon on both
sides. The Ghenters were most of them slain, 20,000 being left on the
field; and the duke, on beholding the heaps of slaughtered men, felt, for
the first time, that these were his subjects, the sources of his wealth
and the sinews of his strength.
In the same year Muhammed II carried Constantinople by assault, and
extinguished the Greek empire in the East. The catastrophe, alarming
to Italy and Germany, might well have aroused the king of France.
Charles VII was not the hero of a crusade; the sphere of his activity
and ambition did not extend so far. Yet, when the duke of Burgundy,
in a solemn festivity at Lille, made a public vow to lead his armies
against the Turks, when all his noblesse became associated in the same
vow, and when the pope and emperor joined in the enterprise, Charles
was mortified; nor was his jealousy diminished when Philip, after this
vow, set forth in person to visit the Swiss and the Germans, in order to
negotiate alliances and aid in his great design.
However wisely the councillors of King Charles had conducted his military
operations, and his negotiations with England and with Burgundy, the
spirit of their domestic administration was narrow in the extreme. The
princes of the blood, however cautious and apparently submissive, looked
with jealousy and anger upon those upstarts of the king’s court who so
completely eclipsed and set them aside.
The king and his council, therefore, looked upon the duke of Burgundy’s
proposed crusade as merely a scheme for enhancing his importance, and
placing himself at the head of the princes of Europe and of a formidable
army, and they resolved to attack and crush those of his subjects whom
he supposed to be associates and fellow-conspirators with Duke Philip.
The principal of these was his son Louis, who lived independently, but
not tranquilly, in Dauphiné, now warring, now intriguing with the duke
of Savoy, and omitting no opportunity of gaining followers and procuring
money.
[Sidenote: [1453-1457 A.D.]]
The first of the dauphin’s friends whom the court attacked was the count
d’Armagnac, who afforded every pretext for Charles’ interference. He was
living in incest, excommunicated by the pope, and guilty of many crimes.
Unable to resist Charles’ lieutenants, Armagnac was soon reduced, his
seventeen castles were taken, and he was driven across the Pyrenees. The
court then resolved to make an example of the duke of Alençon. The prince
was noted for his gallantry and independent spirit, which had won the
admiration of Joan of Arc. He had been foremost as a partisan against
the English, yet was an object of suspicion to Charles. Dunois was sent
to arrest and bring him to the king’s presence, who accused him of
conspiring to receive the English into his fortresses. According to some
he made an indignant answer to the king; according to others he confessed
his treason, and gave information of the designs of his confederates.
By what was elicited from the duke of Alençon, the king’s suspicion and
anger were increased against his son Louis, whom he resolved to leave
no longer in possession of the revenues and government of Dauphiné,
at least unless he submitted. In April, 1456, the king signified his
intention of resuming the government of that province. The dauphin would
not put himself in the power of the council, the members of which he
believed capable of any crime. Nor would Charles receive his son into
favour, except upon his complete submission. The march of an army, led
by his declared enemy, Dammartin, alarmed Louis. He at first thought of
resistance, but none of the nobles of Dauphiné or of his court would
support him in resistance to his father. With a few followers Louis
abruptly quitted Dauphiné, as Dammartin advanced into it, and hastened
to St. Claude, in Franche-Comté. From thence he informed the king that
he was determined to take part in his uncle the duke of Burgundy’s
crusade against the Turks. He at the same time informed that potentate
of his arrival. An answer of welcome speedily came, and Louis proceeded
to Brussels. Here the duke embraced him so cordially and so long, as
scarcely, so Chastelain[k] relates, to let his feet touch the earth. The
dauphin was all in all for a few days; but a quarrel arising between the
duke and his son, the latter was brought by his mother to Louis, who
undertook to intercede for him, and remonstrate with his sire. This at
once interrupted friendship and harmony. The duke saw in the dauphin one
who might take his son’s part against him. Louis thus found it necessary
to retire to the château of Gennape, near Brussels, where he lived on a
monthly pension of 2,500 livres allowed him by the duke (1456-1457).
_Death of Charles VII; the Influence of His Reign_
[Sidenote: [1457-1461 A.D.]]
This was the very result which Charles most dreaded, and which he most
carefully should have avoided. But his council feared the reconciliation
between father and son: and some of them meditated setting Louis
aside altogether, and prolonging their own power by proclaiming his
brother Charles, then but a boy. The king would not entertain a project
necessarily so fatal to his family and his kingdom. As to Charles, his
inward distrust became at last a malady, and almost an insanity. Yet
his suspicions were not without grounds; for as his health and strength
visibly declined, especially after the breaking of a boil in the mouth,
the members of his court--even those who had been the bitterest enemies
of the dauphin--addressed letters to that prince containing information
as to the state of things, and assurances of their own attachment. Even
the king’s new mistress, the dame de Villequier,[55] was amongst those
who hastened to seek security in the worship of the rising sun.
The desertion of his own ministers did not escape Charles, who reasoned
that those who were so eager to abandon him in his decline might, without
scruple, hasten his death. The dauphin is said to have caused some of the
letters addressed to him to be placed within reach and view of the king.
Charles’ terror was equal to his disgust. A captain told him that his
physicians had been suborned to administer poison; one was instantly sent
to prison, whilst the others fled. In his alarm, Charles refrained from
taking sustenance altogether; and when the cause of his consequently weak
state was discovered, and it was sought to administer food, his stomach
refused to retain it. Thus did one of the most successful and triumphant
among monarchs expire of mistrust--of hunger and inanition. Death levels
all distinctions: Charles, the restorer of the French monarchy, died the
death of a beggar (July 22nd, 1461).
The character of Charles VII is perplexing to the historian; it affords
subject of surprise that such great aims, which must have been wisely
conceived and steadily pursued, should have been attained by a personage
in many respects so weak. We are thus obliged to separate the private
habits of the prince from the public life of the monarch. In the one
Charles was indolent, self-indulgent, inconstant, and immoral; in
the other, active, adventurous, persevering, and patriotic. He first
introduced the important novelty of a royal council. Such, indeed, had
existed under his predecessor, but it was an assemblage of magnates,
not of ministers, the orators and inferior members being the followers
or exponents of their chiefs’ opinions. Charles VII did nothing
without consulting his council. This, perhaps, is the most remarkable
characteristic of his rule. And it stands in strong contrast with the
habits of his son and successor, who ruled altogether from his own
judgment, and who with far greater talents and capacity committed the
greatest blunders, and fell far short in all his aims, which his sire
contrived to avoid or to accomplish, by merely mistrusting his own
omniscience and not disdaining the counsels of others.
The upper classes, their ideas, their spirit, and privileges, were no
doubt undergoing in this century a great and remarkable change. This
was the gradual metamorphosis from the feudal baron and knight into the
courtly _seigneur_ and the modern gentleman. As their numbers greatly
increased it became impossible for all to preserve the superiority in
power and wealth which the ancient holders of fiefs had possessed. The
younger brothers of the gentry were obliged to seek for public service
and live upon pensions or pay, in military or other capacity. But they
carefully preserved themselves from losing caste, by insisting that
they alone should fill these numerous offices. Thus the originally
restricted class of the nobility in France was spread into the wider
caste of the _gentilhomme_, the power and pretensions of the whole being
undiminished.[g]
Most important of all, however, was the steady growth in power of the
crown. We have seen that Charles VII practically dispensed with the aid
of the states-general after 1439, and that in so doing he virtually
established a standing army and a permanent tax.[a] In reality the taxes
were already permanent, or nearly so, but they had been considered as
extra revenue; now they became usual. Charles VII in suppressing the
vote of the assembly followed the example of Charles V under identical
circumstances, and thus rid himself of an obligation which was often only
a useless formality, and often a hindrance and restraint.[e]
A more fatal consequence of this usurpation on the part of the crown
was that the nobility and clergy, remaining exempt from the tax on land
which was only levied on the property of the _roturiers_, ended by
taking no interest in the question. They abandoned the great principles
supported at the estates of 1355 and 1356, to wit, that no tax could be
levied save with the assent of the estates, and that the three orders
should be subjected to the same taxes. Liberty established itself in
England because the prelates, nobles, and towns remained closely united
in their resistance to the encroachments of royalty, all accepting the
same burdens and vindicating the same guarantees. In France the nobility
and clergy deserted the common cause, handed over the third estate to
the arbitrary authority of the crown, and sold the public liberties for
a pecuniary advantage. From that moment it was an admitted formula that
the clergy paid with their prayers, the nobility with their swords, the
people with their money. The third estate, betrayed by the privileged
orders, approached the king, applauded all the attacks made by the crown
on the rights of the nobles and clergy, and energetically aided it to
consummate the ruin of their power, until the moment that it found itself
alone, face to face with the crown, and overthrew it. The defection of
the clergy and the nobility was the first cause of the establishment of
absolute power and of the Revolution which was accomplished 350 years
later.[p]
But little enough did Charles VII or his contemporaries concern
themselves with such remote consequences of their deeds as are here
ominously suggested; and, not to be ourselves blinded to the true
historical relations of the times we are treating, let us seek again the
atmosphere of the fifteenth century, and in leaving Charles VII take a
parting glance at him through the eyes of a contemporary writer, whose
quaint phrasing and peculiar smack of piety will remind us that our stage
setting is still of the Middle Ages. That the phrases of the courtier
are somewhat more flattering than strict justice demands need neither
surprise nor concern us. “Charles VII,” says Henry Baude,[o] “was loved
as much by his subjects as by foreign nations, who came often to him for
advice in settling their disputes, and this because of the great justice
that he observed. He was feared by the good and by the wicked: by the
good, who were afraid to do evil lest it should come to his knowledge; by
the wicked who were afraid of his justice. He was obeyed by his vassals
and subjects, and well served by old, wise, and well-tutored servants,
who knew his disposition to be such that he wished each to have his own.
He died in old age [in reality he was but fifty-nine]; and after his
death was in great solemnity, weeping, and lamentation honourably buried,
and with great regret by men of all estates, in the church of St. Denis
in France, with his ancestors. May God in his holy grace receive his soul
into Paradise. Amen.”
FOOTNOTES
[48] [The fall of La Trémouille was due to a conspiracy aroused by his
lethargy, through which the English in 1432 were able to regain Montargis
and take several important towns. “M. de la Trémouille,” says De
Brantôme;[l] “was so happy as to prove a faithful and worthy servant to
three kings. He was an excellent and worthy captain, and for this reason
he had the honour and happiness to be known as ‘the knight without fear
and without reproach.’ Splendid title indeed for him who can keep it, and
wear it to the end of his life!”]
[49] [Vaudemont was the nephew and René the son-in-law of Duke Charles
I who had just died. René was appointed heir by Charles’ will, but
Vaudemont persisted in his pretensions, alleging Lorraine to be a
masculine fief.]
[50] [Just how much of truth there is in this tale of Gilles de Retz, it
would be difficult to determine. The motive alleged for the crimes smacks
of the familiar witchcraft stories. A perversion of a type well known to
psychiatrists might offer a more plausible explanation, supposing the
facts to be assured.]
[51] [Henri Baude[o] has a different conception of the personality of
the king. He says: “Charles was a man of handsome figure, tall, and of
good temperament; of sanguine complexion; humble, gentle, gracious, and
of pleasant temper, liberal and not prodigal. He was solitary, living
soberly, loving joyously, frank, decorous, and humane. He loved ladies in
all honesty, and held all women in honour. His amusements were chess and
shooting with the crossbow, and he rose early. The day after he entered a
town and the day before he left it he went to the principal church. His
oath was ‘St. George! St. George!’ He took only two meals a day. He spoke
and drank little. He had a courteous gravity, tempered familiarity, and
effective diligence. His word was the word of a prince and kept as law.
He thought continually of the affairs of his kingdom and the relief of
his people. He heard three masses a day, that is to say, the high mass
with music and two low masses, and said his prayers every day without
fail. At meals he was alone at table, and few persons in his room; and
his doctor was always there, and honest people and valets who spoke of
gay subjects or told old stories in which he took delight.
“Naught cared he for false wisdom. At the yearly feasts, a bishop or
abbot was seated at the head of his table, he in the centre, and at the
end of the table one of the nobles of royal blood. When the table was
spread there was none so great that did not leave the room, and all was
so well arranged that none presumed to remain. He loved all virtuous
people; was true and certain in promise and in all his acts. When he knew
a man of virtue he took him. He had in his house and in his service the
children of the princes, great nobles, and barons of his kingdom. He had
around him, his chamberlains and others, the most handsome persons of the
kingdom.”]
[52] Many of these captains of _écorcheurs_ have left lasting traces in
the memory of the people. The Gascon La Hire has given his name to the
knave of hearts. The Englishman, Matthew Gough, whom the chroniclers call
Mathago, has remained, we believe, as a puppet and bugbear for children
in certain provinces. The history of Gilles de Retz, greatly softened
down, has furnished matter for a tale: he is the original of Blue Beard.
[53]
More honour, gentle Agnes, thou hast won,
For that thy voice our France recoverèd,
Than could be achieved by cloister-prisoned nun,
Or holiest beadsman to the desert fled.
[54] [The order of the Golden Fleece was instituted at Bruges in 1429,
by the duke of Burgundy, Philip the Good, in honour of one of his
mistresses, Marie de Cumbrugge, whose red tresses had been the object
of many pleasantries. On the extinction of the Burgundian house the
grand-mastership passed to the Habsburgs.]
[55] [Agnes Sorel had died of dysentery on the 9th of February, 1450. The
_dame de Beauté_, as she was called, had her enemies, the dauphin among
them, and rumours that she had been poisoned were not long in spreading
through the court. These were made use of later in many infamous
machinations, even against Jacques Cœur.]
[Illustration]
CHAPTER X. THE REIGN OF LOUIS XI: THE TRIUMPH OF THE CROWN
Louis XI, that king more adroit than the most adroit courtier;
that old fox furnished with lion’s claws; powerful and shrewd,
served secretly as in the light, constantly sheltered by his
guards as by a shield, and accompanied by his executioners as
with a sword.--VICTOR HUGO.
[Sidenote: [1461-1483 A.D.]]
During fifteen years, the dauphin, afterwards Louis XI, had maintained
a struggle against his father, which had commenced on account of Agnes
Sorel and had been continued by mutual distrust. Throughout this struggle
the dauphin had shown a most indomitable pride and the utmost tenacity,
and in all this delicate and false situation he affected to act as the
prince and as the prince who would one day be king. If he rebelled
against the king it was against the king only, and not against the crown.
Such at least is the attitude revealed by the tone of his letters.
As soon as he succeeded to the throne, he hastened to leave his little
court of Gennape and return to France. He asked the duke of Burgundy
to lend him an escort of four thousand soldiers in case he should
meet with opposition from his father’s councillors who might wish to
impose their own conditions on him. However, on arriving at Avesnes,
the nobility thronged around him to swear allegiance, and, finding his
escort unnecessary, he sent it back to the duke. He repaired at once to
Rheims to be crowned and at that place the throng became greater. This
adulation, which always follows when a new prince succeeds one but little
loved, made Louis believe that he would be popular. Perhaps his absence,
his exile, which had been interpreted as a protest or a disgrace, had
contributed to this apparent popularity. It was, at least, very ephemeral.
Louis XI was thirty-eight years old when he ascended the throne, with
his experience of governing and his virtues and vices equally matured
by his exile. Like his father, he loved power and did not wish to share
it. A contemporary, Chastelain,[b] called him “the universal spider,”
because he never ceased weaving a web of which he was the centre,
and the threads of which extended everywhere. Not only did he wish to
decide everything himself, but he was loath to accept any advice, and
the least opposition would make him obstinate. Like his father, also, he
was observant, discreet, suspicious, esteeming men but little, rewarding
them richly when he had need of their services and forgetting them the
day after. He had in this respect the three faults that Chastelain[b]
attributes to Charles VII--fickleness, diffidence, and envy. On the
other hand he had a wonderful discernment in seeing the use that each
person could be to him. Those who served him must serve him absolutely.
Independence to him seemed conspiracy. Comines[c] says that he did
not like to have serve him “the great ones who could surpass him.” He
preferred to choose for his agents men of humble birth whom he took from
the lowest of his household, knowing them to be more easy to control
and capable of a more blind devotion. Reared in the school of Charles
VII, he resembled him very much, in spite of the aversion he had shown
toward him. He continued his reign and his policy. He employed the same
means to maintain, or to extend the results already attained. If he had
any advantage over him, it was the knowledge, which he had acquired by
personal experience, of the opposition he would be obliged to combat.
At the same time, to these hereditary traits he joined others. He was
distinguished by a feverish activity, a perpetual restlessness, an
irresistible taste for intriguing. He would complicate affairs on all
sides, then meet the difficulties and make light of them. Chastelain[b]
describes him as “scheming new thoughts day and night.” His government
was very secret. He sought the shadowy ways, which makes it difficult
for one to follow the thread of his diplomacy, the details of which
necessarily escape us. He was educated, like most of the princes of his
day. He was possessed of great keenness and vivacity--almost too much,
as he very often allowed himself to be carried away by it. He had been
surrounded, at Gennape, by a small court, vivacious and refined. He had a
certain loftiness in his views, notwithstanding all that the historians
have said of his littleness and his superstition. In his relations with
the pope he showed a sense of nobility and justice. But these sentiments
and qualities, which keep him from being regarded altogether as a bad
man, had but little influence on his political conduct. His passion to
rule, and to carry on secret intrigues, was so strong that it destroyed
all scruples, if he had any. He knew no rule save his own will, no goal
but success. He had no respect for established things, but followed the
necessity of the moment. He sought to attach men to himself only by
corruption, believing that the more corrupt they were the more useful
they would prove; he was prodigal with money to gain tools in France and
traitors in the neighbouring states. In fact the celebrated portrait
of _The Prince_, for which he served as one of the models employed by
Macchiavelli,[d] gives a just idea of the personal government, arbitrary
and mysterious, which existed in the sixteenth century and which most
fortunately is no longer possible, at least under the same conditions.
He has received much praise for his ability. He hastened the progress
of the unity, and the ruin of the great feudal houses. The crown
acquired important provinces during his reign and he greatly augmented
the power of France. These results are incontestable, but at the same
time we must remember it was not he alone who brought them about; that
these results had been preparing for a long time; that the twenty years
of Charles VII had done much; that Louis XI had, in the beginning,
compromised by his imprudence the conquests of the preceding reign and
that his principal merit was to profit, in an incontestable manner, by
favourable circumstances. If he has been regarded as a great statesman,
it is because, meeting with reverses in the commencement of his reign,
he in the end triumphed over his enemies who were less calculating and
less prudent than himself. For it is the final success that sways the
judgment of posterity, and even the judgment of contemporaries, as is
shown by Philip de Comines,[c] that observer so profound, that spirit so
penetrating and so cold.[e]
RELATIONS WITH THE CHURCH
After his coronation Louis looked around the land he was now about to
“bring into order,” and was alarmed at the condition of the national
church. A national church it really deserved to be called; for, while
confessing the superiority of Rome in antiquity and rank, it rested
firmly on the decision of the Council of Bâle, and acknowledged a power
superior to the holy see. It defended, also, freedom of election to
vacant benefices, and refused the annates, or first year’s income of
bishoprics and incumbencies, to the exchequer of the pope. Louis saw
that the first advance against the citadel of civil liberty was a return
to the obedience of Rome. He gave up at once all the franchises and
exemptions wrung with such difficulty by the church of France. He placed
it again, bound hand and foot, under the heel of the successors of St.
Peter, and even gave advantages to the ecclesiastical ruler which he had
never held before. In return for this, the faithful son of the church was
sure of the pontiff’s support. Though he oppressed his subjects, deceived
his friends, and murdered his enemies by treachery, he had shown a most
religious regard for the interest of the papacy, and was honoured with
the title, which his successors have retained, of “the most Christian
king.” The least Christian monarch of his time, being elevated by popish
gratitude to this lofty position, it was only left for the adulation of
the courtiers to bestow upon him the title of “majesty,” which great
word had not yet been applied to the person of the sovereigns of Europe;
but Louis XI set the example of claiming the highest sounding and least
deserved epithets, and cheated and grovelled through a long reign of
trickery and meanness as his Majesty the Most Christian King. When the
church was again governed by a foreign master, whom it was easy for the
king to win over to his side, the next important step in the progress of
his design was to render the people powerless. For this purpose he did
away with the free-archers of the previous reign. No village was allowed
its butts and shooting-grounds. The parish was relieved of the expense
of finding an “archer good” for the interior defence of the country, and
the spirit of emulation in warlike sports was discouraged. But the land
was not to be left unprotected. So in addition to his Scottish allies,
he took into his pay large bodies of Swiss mercenaries, whose valour had
struck him with such admiration at the battle of Sankt Jakob near Bâle.
He now more than doubled the taxes; and as, although saving and grasping
from personal disposition, he was liberal and even generous from policy,
he derived great support from the absence of a home-force of his own
subjects, and the devoted adhesion of penniless mountaineers from the
two poorest and most courageous populations in Christendom. We will
only insert a word of surprise here with regard to the Swiss, that a
people who are honoured throughout the world for the defence of their
liberties at home, should be the scorn and shame of all generous minds
by furnishing their strength and valour for the maintenance of the worst
tyrannies abroad.
THE WAR OF THE PUBLIC WEAL
[Sidenote: [1465 A.D.]]
The nobility saw the object of the king, and took arms to prevent the
extinction of their order, and the diminution of their individual power.
A cry is never wanting when people are determined to quarrel, and as the
feudal chiefs could not, with any decency, state openly the reasons of
their opposition, they placed it upon the two grounds of the sacrifice
of French ecclesiastical liberty by the abrogation of the Pragmatic
Sanction, and the intolerable weight of taxation which the new king
had imposed. This, therefore, was called “the war of the public weal.”
Princes and feudatories, and all who had a lingering regard for the grand
old days of license and free quarters, took up the patriotic cause.
Charles of France, the king’s brother, was the nominal chief, but the
real head of this league was Charles the Bold [properly Le Téméraire or
the Rash], at this time called count of Charolais, eldest son of the
good Philip, duke of Burgundy. In the list besides him were read the
names of Saint-Pol, Brittany, Lorraine, Alençon, Bourbon, Armagnac, and
Dunois. In short, the two parties were perfectly aware of each other’s
intentions, and met face to face. If the league succeeded, Louis’ life
would have been short, and a regency was openly promised. If Louis was
successful, farewell to the great nobility, its independent power and
hereditary magnificence; it must sink into an ornament of the court, or
be exterminated altogether. It was the life of one or the other which
lay upon the scales; and though the swords were sharpest, and the cause
apparently the freest on the side of the great vassals, the cunning, the
policy, the perseverance were all on the side of the king. Suddenly the
oppressors of the towns, and the harsh masters of country populations,
affected a deep interest in the common weal. With haughty condescension
they assumed the championship of the overburdened commons, and kept them
at the same time from coming “between the wind and their nobility,” as
if contact with them would have stained their coats of arms. But Louis,
dressed in very undignified apparel, looking like a small shopkeeper,
and affecting no airs of grandeur or superiority, entered into familiar
talk with any well-to-do citizen he encountered, joked with him about
his family, poked him under the ribs to give emphasis to his innuendoes,
and strolled off to have a merry conversation with somebody else. Nobody
could believe that so free-spoken a gentleman cared less for the common
people than the prince of Charolais, who would have put a townsman to
death if he stood in his way; and in a short time the people liked better
to pay their taxes to a man who put them at their ease, than to owe their
deliverance to a set of champions who despised them in their hearts and
insulted them in their manners.
_The Battle of Montlhéry and the Treaty of Conflans_
Louis saw his advantage, and tried to gain his object by a battle
with the confederates at Montlhéry, where neither party was decidedly
victorious.[f]
An account of this battle is given by Monstrelet.[q] His description,
however, is criticised by his continuator,[p] who professes to draw
on other authorities and whose brief account may be quoted. The later
chronicler says: “At this battle which was fought on Tuesday the 6th day
of July, in the year 1465, the king of France, coming with all haste
from beyond Orleans to Paris, halted at early morn at Châtres, under
Montlhéry, and that having taken scarcely any refreshment, and without
waiting for his escort, which was, for its number, the handsomest body
of cavalry ever raised in France, he so valiantly attacked the army of
the count de Charolais and his Burgundians that he put to the rout the
van division. Many of them were slain, and numbers taken prisoners. News
of this was speedily carried to Paris, whence issued forth upward of
thirty thousand persons, part of whom were well mounted. They fell in
with parties of Burgundians who were flying, and made them prisoners;
they defeated also those from the villages of Vanvres, Issi, Sevres, St.
Cloud, Arcueil, Surennes, and others.
“At this recounter, great booty was gained from the Burgundians, so that
their loss was estimated at two hundred thousand crowns of gold. After
the van had been thus thrown into confusion, the king, not satisfied
with this success, but desirous to put an end to the war, without taking
any refreshments or repose, attacked the main body of the enemy with
his guards and about four hundred lances: but the Burgundians had then
rallied, and advanced their artillery, under the command of the count
de Saint-Pol, who did on that day the greatest service to the count de
Charolais. The king was hard pressed in his turn, insomuch that at times
he was in the utmost personal danger, for he had but few with him, was
without artillery, and was always foremost in the heat of the battle; and
considering how few his numbers were, he maintained the fight valiantly
and with great prowess. It was the common report of the time, that if
he had had five hundred more archers on foot, he would have reduced the
Burgundians to such a state, that nothing more would have been heard of
them in war for some time.
“The count de Charolais, on this day, lost his whole guard,--and the king
also lost the greater part of his. The count was twice made prisoner by
the noble Geoffroy de Saint Belin and Gilbert de Grassy, but was rescued
each time. Towards evening the Scots carried off the king, that he might
take some refreshments; for he was tired and exhausted, having fought the
whole of the day without eating or drinking, and led him away quietly and
without noise, to the castle of Montlhéry. Several of the king’s army not
having seen him thus led off the field, and missing him, thought he was
either slain or taken, and took to flight. For this reason, the count du
Maine, the lord admiral De Montaulban, the lord de la Barde, and other
captains, with seven or eight hundred lances, abandoned the king in this
state, and fled, without having struck a blow during the whole of the
day. Hence it is notorious, that if all the royal army who were present
at this battle had behaved as courageously as their king, they would have
gained a lasting victory over the Burgundians; for the greater part of
them were defeated, and put to flight. Many indeed were killed on the
king’s side, as well as on that of the enemy; for after the battle was
ended, there were found dead on the field three thousand six hundred,
whose souls may God receive!
“The king of France came to Paris, the 18th day of July, after the
battle of Montlhéry, and supped that night at the hôtel of his
lieutenant-general, Sir Charles de Melun,--where, according to the
account of Robert Gaguin, a large company of great lords, damsels, and
citizens’ wives supped with him, to whom he related all that had happened
at Montlhéry. During the recital, he made use of such doleful expressions
that the whole company wept and groaned at his melancholy account. He
concluded by saying, that if it pleased God, he would soon return to
attack his enemies, and either die or obtain vengeance on them, in the
preservation of his rights. He, however, acted differently, having been
better advised; but it must be observed, that some of his warriors
behaved in a most cowardly manner,--for had they all fought with as much
courage as the king, he would have gained a complete victory over his
enemies.”[p]
Continuing, the chronicler gives an extended account of the events of the
ensuing months, during which the allies approached Paris and besieged
the city. “The king,” he says, “finding that he had many enemies within
his realm, considered on the means of procuring additional men-at-arms
to those he had,--and it was calculated how many he could raise within
Paris; for this purpose, it was ordered that an enrolment should be made
of all capable of bearing arms, so that every tenth man might be selected
to serve the king. This, however, did not take place,--for such numbers
of men-at-arms now joined the king that there was no need of such a
measure. The king was very much distressed to get money for the pay of
these troops, and great sums were wanted; for those towns which had been
assigned for the payment of a certain number of men-at-arms, being now in
the possession of the rebellious princes, paid no taxes whatever to the
crown, for they would not permit any to be collected in those districts.
“On the 3rd of August, the king, having a singular desire to afford
some comfort to the inhabitants of his good town of Paris, lowered the
duties on all wines sold by retail within that town, from a fourth to
an eighth; and ordained that all privileged persons should fully and
freely exercise their privileges as they had done during the reign of his
late father, the good Charles VII, whose soul may God pardon! He also
ordered that every tax paid in the town, but those on provision, included
in the six-revenue farms, which had been disposed of in the gross,
should be abolished, namely, the duties on wood-yards, on the sales of
cattle, on cloth sold by wholesale, on sea-fish and others; which was
proclaimed that same day they were taken off, by sound of trumpets, in
all the squares of the town, in the presence of Sir Denis Hesselin, the
receiver of the taxes within the said town. On this being made public,
the populace shouted for joy, sang carols in the streets, and at night
made large bonfires.” Such deeds as this illustrate the diplomacy of a
king who, whatever else he may have been, was assuredly a consummate
politician. Meantime, as practical aids to defence, fires were lighted
and a strict watch kept in Paris, and chains were fastened across the
principal streets.
The guard kept about Paris was evidently not very strict, for the
king was able to go and come at will. There were occasional sallies,
but these amounted to nothing more than skirmishes. On the second of
September, after several parleys, commissioners were at length named by
the king and the confederates to settle their differences. There were
numerous meetings which came to no very definite issue, but meantime the
statecraft of the king was preparing the way for the final issues.[a]
[Sidenote: [1465-1467 A.D.]]
A truce was proclaimed in the two camps on October 1st; from that day
until the 30th, when the articles of peace were registered by the
parliament and published, the king continued to show an almost boundless
friendship and confidence in his attitude toward the princes and
especially toward the count of Charolais. He furnished their camp with
supplies, he received their soldiers at Paris, he was present without
guards at their military reviews, abandoning himself to their care;
finally he acceded to their demands, conditions which seemed to make him
wholly dependent upon them.[56] Thirty-six commissioners were appointed
by him to reform all the abuses in the kingdom, of which the princes
had complained; the past was to be forgotten; no one could blame anyone
else for what he had done during the war, and all the confiscations
proclaimed by the tribunals were revoked. In exchange for Berri the king
gave his brother the duchy of Normandy, with the homage of the duchies
of Brittany and Alençon, as a hereditary title in the male line. To the
count of Charolais he restored the cities on the Somme which he had so
recently bought back, reserving for himself only the right to buy them
back again, not from him but from his heirs, for the sum of 200,000
gold crowns. He gave over to him, moreover, as a perpetual possession,
Boulogne, Guines, Roye, Péronne, and Montdidier. To the duke of Calabria,
regent of Lorraine, Mouzon, Ste. Menehould, Neufchâteau, he gave 100,000
crowns in cash and the pay of five hundred lances for a month.
To the duke of Brittany he granted the royal prerogative, which had been
a subject of dispute between them, also a part of the aids; he ceded to
him Étampes and Montfort and gave presents to his mistress, the same
dame de Villequier who had formerly been mistress of Charles VII. To
the duke de Bourbon he gave several seigniories in Auvergne, 100,000
crowns in cash, and the pay of three hundred lances; to the duke de
Nemours, the government of Paris and of the Île-de-France, together with
a pension and the pay of two hundred lances; to the count d’Armagnac,
the castellanies of Rouergue, which he had lost, a pension, and the pay
of a hundred lances; to the count de Dunois, the restitution of his
domain, a pension, and a company of gendarmes; to the sire d’Albret,
various seigniories on his frontier. He gave back to the sire de Lohéac
the office of marshal with two hundred lances; he made Tannegui du Châtel
master of the horse; De Beuil was made admiral; the count of Saint-Pol
constable. Finally he pardoned Antoine de Chabannes, count of Dammartin,
gave back all his estates, and granted him a company of a hundred lances.
Such were the principal clauses of the Treaty of Conflans, which was the
most humiliating that rebel subjects ever extorted from a crown, and also
the most degrading for the character of the allied princes, because they
concluded a war which they had undertaken under the pretext of the public
good, by sharing the spoils of the people as well as those of the king.[g]
POLITICAL INTRIGUES
Louis now commenced one of the games which must have given him as much
enjoyment as if he had been playing a game of chess. How to move a
castle to resist a knight, or a number of pawns to surround a bishop,
how to keep Normandy in order by stirring up the enmity of Brittany,
how to paralyse the motions of the young duke of Burgundy--for in 1467
Charolais succeeded his father[57]--by inciting insurrections among the
men of Liège--these were the problems worked out in the solitude of his
own thoughts; for he boasted that he formed all his plans without the
aid of others. The marshal De Brézé said, accordingly, that the horse
the king rode was a much stronger animal than it looked, for it carried
the whole council on its back. The results of the deliberations of this
unanimous assemblage were soon visible in the vengeance which fell on
the heads of the late confederacy. Charles of France, when all the
others were getting lofty offices and rewards, had been presented with
the dukedom of Normandy. The people of Rouen, who had at first taken
part against the crown, received the first prince of the blood with
acclamations, as a champion of their cause; and the king determined to
show them they had chosen the wrong side. He raised an army, and hurried
down to Caen; bought and bullied the duke of Brittany, whom he found in
that town, out of his friendship with Charles; and then fell upon the
capital of the duchy, as if it had been in open rebellion. His right-hand
man on this, as on similar occasions, was the famous Tristan l’Hermite,
the executioner. Tristan’s hands were soon full, for the king, with a
vigorous impartiality which showed he was not a bigot to either side, cut
off the heads of the aristocracy who had helped the princes, and threw
hundreds of the commonalty, who had grumbled at his taxes, into the Seine.
[Sidenote: [1467-1468 A.D.]]
The church, which he had bought over by the sacrifice of the Pragmatic
Sanction, and still kept in awe by threatening to restore it--as he had
engaged to do by the treaty with the leaguers--was next to be taught
that, however much he prized its friendship as a politician, its loftiest
officers were the mere creatures of his breath. The system he pursued of
excluding the higher orders from civil employments had been introduced
into ecclesiastical affairs. Wherever the sharp eye of Louis detected
a fitting instrument for his purpose in the person of a penniless
adventurer, or townsman of the lowest rank, he was very soon invested
with the necessary authority, and perverted justice in the character of
president of a court, or vilified religion in the office of a bishop.
The son of a small tradesman of the name of La Balue had early shown
such amazing want of principle, combined with quickness of talent and
audacious self-reliance, that he gained the notice of the king, then his
confidence, then his friendship. The pope made great efforts to win over
this ornament of the faith, who was now bishop of Évreux, and promised
him the cardinal’s hat if he persuaded his master to enregister the
suppression of the Pragmatic Sanction in the rolls of parliament; and in
foolish reliance on the promises of La Balue, sent him the blushing sign
of his dignity before the service was performed. La Balue relaxed in his
endeavours, as his wages were already received, and gained additional
favour with the king for ceasing to trouble him on the subject. The
favour continued for a long time, but at last, when Louis, in reliance
on his powers of persuasion, and the counsels of his friends, trusted
himself again within the power of Charles of Burgundy, and hoped to win
him over as he had done in the former interview which destroyed the
league of the Public Weal, the advice given by the cardinal was found to
lead to very dangerous results.[f]
THE STRUGGLE WITH CHARLES THE BOLD
This visit of Louis to the redoubtable Charles was one of the most famous
incidents of his reign. Louis went with meagre attendance to Péronne,
and placed himself entirely within the power of Charles. He of course
had a safe conduct, but considering the morals of the time, this by no
means insured him a safe return. His anomalous act has been variously
criticised. On its face it seems foolhardy; yet rightly considered it
speaks for the keen intelligence and practical political sagacity of
the king quite as much as for his personal courage. The truth seems to
be that Louis at this time felt that he could not trust his officers.
Dammartin, his right-hand man, was, as we have seen, a soldier who had
been in the employ of Louis’ father, and therefore at that earlier
period had been in antagonism with Louis himself. His exact attitude of
mind could not be known to the king, and the loyalty of various other
officers was more than questionable. And to win battles loyal soldiers
are absolutely necessary. On the other hand, in the field of diplomacy
the king, acting as his own emissary, could feel sure of his results,
in proportion as he felt confidence in his own powers. And he had every
reason to trust his own sagacity. He knew himself more than a match for
Charles in matters of intrigue, and in thus putting his antagonist upon
his honour, and appearing to trust him, he doubtless felt that he paved
the way most advantageously for his future movements. The visit did not
turn out triumphantly, as we shall see, but its ill success was perhaps
largely due to an incident beyond the king’s control. We may best gain
an idea of the incidents of this famous visit through the narrative of
the celebrated chronicler Comines, who at this time was in the employ of
Burgundy and who afterwards became still more famous as the minister to
Louis himself. Comines,[c] as Sismondi[g] says, considered history as a
lesson in politics, not as a catalogue of events; but here he confines
himself chiefly to the narrative, letting the story point its own
moral.[a]
_Comines describes the Visit to Péronne (1468 A.D.)_
[Sidenote: [1468 A.D.]]
It was agreed [says Comines] that the king should come to Péronne.
Thither he came, without any guard, more than the passport and parole
of the duke of Burgundy; only he desired that the duke’s archers, under
the command of the lord des Quedes (who was then in the duke’s service),
might meet and conduct him; and so it was done, very few of his own train
coming along with him. However, his majesty was attended by several
persons of great quality and distinction, and among the rest by the
duke de Bourbon, the cardinal his brother, and the count of Saint-Pol,
constable of France, who had no hand in this interview, but was highly
displeased at it; for he was now grown haughty, and disdained to pay that
respect to the duke which he had formerly done; for which cause there was
no love between them. Besides these, there came the cardinal Balue, the
governor of Roussillon, and several others. When the king came near, the
duke went out (very well attended) to meet him, conducted him into the
town, and lodged him at the receiver’s, who had a fine house not far from
the castle; for the lodgings in the castle were but small, and no way
convenient.
War between two great princes is easily begun, but very hard to be
composed, by reason of the accidents and consequences which often follow;
for many secret practices are used, and orders given out on both sides
to make the greatest efforts possible against the enemy, which cannot
be easily countermanded as evidently appears by these two princes,
whose interview was so suddenly determined that, neither having time to
notify it to their ministers in remote parts, they went on performing
the commands which their respective masters had given them before. The
duke of Burgundy had sent for his army out of Burgundy, in which at that
time there was abundance of the nobility; and among the rest the count of
Bresse, the bishop of Geneva, and the count of Romont, all three brothers
of the house of Savoy (for between the Savoyards and Burgundians there
was always a firm amity), and some Germans, who were borderers upon
both their territories. And you must know that the king had formerly
imprisoned the count of Bresse, upon the account of two gentlemen whom
he had put to death in Savoy, so that there was no right understanding
between him and the king.
In this army there were likewise one Monsieur du Lau (who had been a
favourite of the king’s, but upon some disgust had been kept afterwards a
prisoner by him a long time, till at length he made his escape and fled
into Burgundy), the lord d’Urfé, since master of the horse to the king
of France, and the lord Poncet de Rivière; all which company arrived
before Péronne as the king came into the town. Bresse and the last three
entered the town with St. Andrew’s cross upon their clothes (supposing
they should have been in time enough to have paid their respects to the
duke of Burgundy, and to have attended him when he went out to receive
the king), but they came a little too late; however, they went directly
to the duke’s chamber to pay their duty, and in the name of the rest, the
count of Bresse humbly besought his highness that himself and his three
companies might have his protection (notwithstanding the king was in the
town), according to the promise he was pleased to make them in Burgundy;
and at the same time assured him they were at his service, when and
against whomsoever he might command them. The duke returned them thanks,
and promised them protection. The rest of this army, under the command
of the marshal of Burgundy, encamped by the duke’s orders in the fields.
The marshal had no more affection for the king than the above-mentioned
gentlemen had; for the king had given him the government of Épinal in
Lorraine, and taken it from him afterwards to give it to John, duke of
Calabria. The king had notice presently of all these persons being in the
town, and of the habits in which they arrived, which put him into a great
consternation; so that he sent to the duke of Burgundy to desire he might
be lodged in the castle, for he knew those gentlemen were his mortal
enemies; the duke was extremely glad to hear it, appointed him his own
lodgings, and sent to him to bid him fear nothing.
But the king at his coming to Péronne had quite forgot his sending of
two ambassadors to Liège to stir them up to a rebellion against the
duke,[58] and they had managed the affair with such diligence that
they had got together such a considerable number, that the Liègeois
went privately to Tongres (where the bishop of Liège and the lord of
Humbercourt were quartered with more than two thousand men) with a design
to surprise them. The bishop, the lord of Humbercourt, and some of the
bishop’s servants were taken, but the rest fled and left whatever they
had behind them, as despairing to defend themselves. After which action
the Liègeois marched back again to Liège, which is not far from Tongres;
and the lord of Humbercourt made an agreement for his ransom with one
Monsieur William de Ville, called by the French Le Sauvage, a knight,
who, suspecting the Liègeois would kill him in their fury, suffered the
lord of Humbercourt to escape, but was slain himself not long after. The
people were exceedingly overjoyed at the taking of their bishop. There
were also taken with him that day several canons of the church, whom the
people equally hated, and killed five or six of them for their first
repast; among the rest there was one Monsieur Robert, an intimate friend
of the bishop’s, and a person I have often seen attending him armed at
all points, for in Germany this is the custom of the prelates. They slew
this Robert in the bishop’s presence, cut him into small pieces, and
in sport threw them at one another’s heads. Before they had marched
seven or eight leagues, which was their full journey, they killed about
sixteen canons and other persons, the majority of whom were the bishop’s
servants; but they released some of the Burgundians, for they had been
privately informed that some overtures of peace had already been made,
and they were forced to pretend that what they had done was only against
their bishop, whom they brought prisoner along with them into their city.
Those who fled (as I said before) gave the alarm to the whole country,
and it was not long before the duke had the news of it.
It was said by some that all of them were put to the sword; others
affirmed the contrary (for in things of that nature, one messenger seldom
comes alone); but there were some who had seen the habits of the canons
who were slain, and supposing the bishop and the lord of Humbercourt had
been of the number, they positively averred that all that had not escaped
were killed, and that they had seen the king’s ambassadors among the
Liègeois, and they mentioned their very names. All this being related to
the duke, he gave credit to it immediately; and falling into a violent
passion against the king, he charged him with a design of deluding him
by coming thither; ordered the gates both of the town and castle to be
suddenly shut up, and gave out, by way of pretence, that it was done for
the discovery of a certain casket which was lost, and in which there were
money and jewels to a very considerable value. When the king saw himself
shut up in the castle, and guards posted at the gates, and especially
when he found himself lodged near a certain tower, in which a count of
Vermandois had caused his predecessor, one of the kings of France, to
be put to death,[59] he was in great apprehension. I was at that time
waiting upon the duke of Burgundy in the quality of chamberlain, and
(when I pleased) I lay in his chamber, as was the custom of that family.
When he saw the gates were shut, he ordered the room to be cleared, and
told us who remained that the king was come thither to circumvent him;
that he himself had never approved of the interview, but had complied
purely to gratify the king; then he gave us a relation of the passages
at Liège, how the king had behaved himself by his ambassadors, and that
all his forces were killed. He was much incensed, and threatened his
majesty exceedingly; and I am of opinion that if he had then had such
persons about him as would have fomented his passion, and encouraged him
to any violence upon the king’s person, he would certainly have done it,
or at least committed him to the tower. None was present at the speaking
of these words but myself and two grooms of his chamber, one of whom
was called Charles de Visen, born at Dijon, a man of honour, and highly
esteemed by his master. We did not exasperate, but soothed his temper as
much as possibly we could. Some time after he used the same expressions
to other people; and the news being carried about the town, it came at
last to the king’s ear, who was in great consternation; and indeed so
was everybody else, foreseeing a great deal of mischief, and reflecting
on the variety of things which were to be managed for the reconciling of
a difference between two such puissant princes, and the errors of which
both of them were guilty in not giving timely notice to their ministers
employed in their remote affairs, which must of necessity produce some
extraordinary and surprising result.
The king thought himself (as I said before) a prisoner in the castle of
Péronne, as he had good reason to do; for all the gates were shut and
guarded by such as were deputed to that office, and continued so for two
or three days; during which time the duke of Burgundy saw not the king,
neither would he suffer but very few of his majesty’s servants to be
admitted into the castle, and those only by the wicket; yet none of them
was forbidden, but of the duke’s none was permitted to speak with the
king, or come into his chamber, at least such as had any authority with
their master. The first day there was great murmuring and consternation
all over the town. The second, the duke’s passion began to cool a little,
and a council was called, which sate the greater part of that day and
night too. The king made private applications to all such as he thought
qualified to relieve him, making them large promises, and ordering 15,000
crowns to be distributed among them; but the agent who was employed in
this affair acquitted himself very ill, and kept a good part of the money
for his own use, as the king was informed afterwards. The king was very
fearful of those who had been formerly in his service, who, as I said
before, were in the Burgundian army, and had openly declared themselves
for his brother, the duke of Normandy.
The duke of Burgundy’s council were strangely divided in their opinions;
the greatest part advised that the passport which the duke had given the
king should be kept, provided his majesty consented to sign the peace
as it was drawn up in writing. Some would have him prisoner as he was,
without further ceremony. Others were for sending with all speed to the
duke of Normandy, and forcing the king to make such a peace as should
be for the advantage of all the princes of France. Those who proposed
this advised that the king should be restrained, and a strong guard set
upon him, because a great prince is never, without great caution, to
be set at liberty after so notorious an affront. This opinion was so
near prevailing, that I saw a person booted and ready to depart, having
already several packets directed to the duke of Normandy in Brittany,
and he waited only for the duke’s letters; and yet this advice was not
followed. At last the king caused overtures to be made, and offered the
duke de Bourbon, the cardinal his brother, the constable of France, and
several others, as hostages, upon condition that, after the peace was
concluded, he might return to Compiègne, and that then he would either
cause the Liègeois to make sufficient reparation for the injury they had
done, or declare war against them. Those whom the king had proposed for
his hostages proffered themselves very earnestly, at least in public; I
know not whether they said as much in private; I expect they did not:
and, if I may speak my thoughts, I believe that the king would have left
them there, and that he would never have returned.
The third night after this had happened, the duke of Burgundy did not
pull off his clothes, but only threw himself twice or thrice upon the
bed, and then got up again and walked about, as his custom was when
anything vexed him. I lay that night in his chamber, and walked several
turns with him. The next morning he was in a greater passion than ever,
threatening exceedingly, and ready to put some great thing in execution;
but, at last, he recollected himself, and it came to this result: that
if the king would swear to the peace, and accompany him to Liège, and
assist him to revenge the injuries which they had done him and the bishop
of Liège, his kinsman, he would be contented. Having resolved on this,
he went immediately to the king’s chamber, to acquaint him with his
resolutions himself. The king had some friend or other who had given him
notice of it before, and who had assured him that his person would be in
no manner of danger, provided he would consent to those points; but that,
if he refused, he would run himself into so great danger that nothing in
the world could be greater.
When the duke came into his presence, his voice trembled by the violence
of his passion, so inclinable was he to be angry again.[60] However, he
made a low reverence with his body, but his gesture and words were sharp,
demanding of the king if he would sign the peace as it was agreed and
written, and swear to it when he had done. The king replied he would;
and, indeed, there was nothing added to what had been granted in the
treaty at Paris, which was to the advantage of the dukes of Burgundy
or Normandy, but very much to his own; for it was agreed that the lord
Charles of France should renounce the duchy of Normandy, and have
Champagne and Brie, and some other places adjacent, as an equivalent.
Then the duke asked him if he would go along with him to Liège, to
revenge the treachery they had practised by his instigation, and by
means of that interview. Then he put him in mind of the nearness of
blood between the king and the bishop of Liège, who was of the house
of Bourbon. The king answered that, when the peace was sworn, which he
desired exceedingly, he would go with him to Liège, and carry with him
as many or as few forces as he pleased. The duke was extremely pleased
at his answer, and the articles being immediately produced and read, and
the true cross which St. Charlemagne was wont to use, called “the cross
of victory,” taken out of the king’s casket, the peace was sworn, to the
great joy and satisfaction of all people; and all the bells in the town
were rung. The duke of Burgundy immediately despatched a courier with the
news of this conclusion of peace into Brittany, and with it he sent a
duplicate of the articles, that they might see he had not deserted them,
nor disengaged himself from their alliance; and, indeed, Duke Charles,
the king’s brother, had a good bargain, in respect of what he had made
for himself in the late treaty in Brittany, by which there was nothing
left him but a bare pension, as you have heard before. Afterwards the
king did me the honour to tell me that I had done him some service in
that pacification.[c]
_The Storming of Liège_
The next day the two princes left together, Charles with his army, Louis
with his modest following, increased by three hundred soldiers whom he
had sent for from France. They arrived before Liège the 27th of October.
Since Duke Charles’ last victories the city had neither ramparts nor
moats; nothing seemed easier than to enter; but the besieged could not
believe that King Louis was a sincere ally of the duke of Burgundy. They
made a sortie, crying: “Long live the king! Long live France!” Their
surprise was great when they saw Louis advance in person, the cross of
St. André of Burgundy on his hat, and heard him exclaim: “Long live
Burgundy!” Among the French themselves who were about the king, some were
shocked; they could not be resigned to so little pride and to so much
effrontery in the deceit. Louis himself paid no attention to their humour
and kept repeating: “When pride prances in front, shame and disaster
follow close at hand.”
The surprise of the people of Liège was turned into indignation. They
resisted more energetically and for a longer time than had been expected;
confident of their strength, the besiegers guarded themselves badly; the
besieged increased the number of their sorties. One night Charles was
informed that his people had just been attacked in a suburb they occupied
and were fleeing. He mounted his horse, gave orders not to awaken the
king, betook himself alone to the scene of combat, re-established order,
and returned to tell Louis what had happened, the latter appearing very
much pleased over the affair. At another time the night was dark and
rainy: towards midnight a general attack awakened the whole Burgundian
camp; the duke was soon afoot; an instant later the king arrived; the
disorder was great. “The people of Liège came out on that side,” said
some. “No, it was by this gate,” said others; nothing was certain, no
order was given. Charles was impetuous and brave, but became easily
alarmed. His followers were not a little worried not to see him put on a
more cheerful countenance before the king. Louis on the other hand was
cool and calm, firm in giving his orders, and prompt to take authority
wherever he might be. “Take what people you have,” he said to the
constable Saint-Pol who accompanied him, “and go in this direction; if
they are to come upon us, they will pass on that side.” It was discovered
afterwards that it had been a false alarm.
[Illustration: A FRENCH CANNON, MIDDLE OF FIFTEENTH CENTURY]
Two days later the situation was more serious; the inhabitants of a
canton bordering the city, and called Franchemont, decided to make a
desperate attempt and to fall unexpectedly upon the very quarter in which
the two princes were lodged. One evening, at ten o’clock, six hundred
men went out through one of the breaches in the wall, all of them men
of stout heart and well armed. The duke’s house was the first to be
attacked; twelve archers alone kept watch below and were playing at dice.
Charles was in bed; Comines quickly helped him on with his helmet and
cuirass; they went down the stairs; the archers were with difficulty
preventing an entrance through the door; reinforcements arrived; the
danger disappeared. The lodging of King Louis had also been attacked;
but at the first sound the Scotch archers had hastened to the scene,
had surrounded their master, and repulsed the attack, without troubling
themselves to see whether their arrows killed the people of Liège or the
Burgundians who had come to help. Almost all the braves of Franchemont
perished in the enterprise they had undertaken. The duke and his chief
leaders held a council the next day; the duke wanted to make an attack.
The king was not present at this council; when informed as to what had
been decided upon in it, he was not in favour of an assault. “You see,”
he said, “the courage of this people; you know how much slaughter and
uncertainty there is in a fight among the streets of a city; you will
lose in it many useful men. Wait two or three days; the people of Liège
will without doubt come to terms.” Almost all the Burgundian chiefs
shared the king’s opinion. The duke became angry. “He wants to save the
people of Liège,” he said; “what peril is there in an assault? There
is no wall; they cannot put one single piece of artillery into action;
I shall certainly not give up making an attack. If the king is afraid,
let him go to Namur.” The insult shocked even the Burgundians. Louis was
informed of it and said nothing. The next day, October 30th, 1468, the
order for the assault was given; the duke marched at the head of his
troops; the king came up. “Stay behind,” said Charles to him, “do not
needlessly expose yourself to peril; I will have you informed when it is
time.” “My brother,” returned Louis, “do you march in advance; you are
the most fortunate prince alive; I follow you,” and he continued to march
with him.
The assault was useless; discouragement had taken hold of the people of
Liège; the bravest of them had perished. It was a Sunday; the people
who were left were not expecting an attack. “The cloth was laid in
every house; all were preparing to sit down to dinner.” The Burgundians
advanced through deserted streets; Louis marched quietly, surrounded by
his men and crying, “Long live Burgundy!” The duke came back to join him
and together they went to thank God in the cathedral of St. Lambert.
It was the only church preserved from the fury and pillaging of the
Burgundians; at noon there was nothing more left to take, either in
the houses or churches. Louis heaped Charles with congratulations and
compliments. The duke was charmed and mollified. The next day as they
were conversing together: “My brother,” said the king to the duke, “if
you have any further need of my assistance, do not spare me; but if you
have nothing further for me to do, it is fitting that I return to Paris
in order to proclaim in my court of parliament the arrangement we have
agreed upon; otherwise it runs the risk of becoming invalid; you know
that that is the custom of France. Next summer we must meet again: you
will come to your duchy of Burgundy; I shall go to visit you, and we will
pass a month together joyously in making good cheer.” Charles answered
nothing, sent for the treaty which they had concluded shortly before at
Péronne, and gave the king his choice of confirming or abandoning it,
excusing himself in veiled terms for having thus forced him and led him
about. The king appeared to be satisfied with the treaty, and the 2nd of
November, 1468, the second day after the capture of Liège, he left for
France. The duke accompanied him half a league out from the city. As they
were on the point of taking leave of each other, the king said to him:
“If perchance my brother Charles, who is in Brittany, is not pleased with
the partition I have made him, out of love for you, what do you want me
to do?” “If he does not want to take it,” answered the duke, “do you take
measures to satisfy him; I will leave the matter to you two.” Louis asked
for nothing more; he returned home free and confident in his own powers,
“after having passed the three hardest weeks of his life.”[i]
_The Return of Louis to France_
To appreciate the import of the promises which Charles had exacted from
the king, it must be recalled that Champagne and Brie, which Louis
promised to transfer to his brother, were geographically so situated as
to separate--or unite--the duchy of Burgundy and the northern possessions
of Charles the Bold. Hence Charles’ interest in having this territory
controlled by his friend, the king’s brother, rather than by his enemy,
the king. Quite as obviously, Louis’ interests were opposed to such
an arrangement, and of course he had no intention of fulfilling his
agreement. But he wished to avoid fulfilment in the most diplomatic
manner possible. This he accomplished by persuading his weak-minded
brother to take the territory of Guienne instead of that specified in the
compact with Charles. Thus Louis’ brother was separated by all France
from the duke of Burgundy instead of being his nearest neighbour; and
Champagne continued a barrier, not a bridge, between the Burgundian
possessions. So in the end the diplomacy of Louis stood him in good
stead, notwithstanding his momentary discomfiture.[a]
Louis’ bearing was far from proud when he recrossed the frontier. He had
received two great checks from the Burgundian power; in 1465 a check of
power, in 1468 a check of honour. Had it been only a question of honour
Louis might have easily consoled himself; but, aside from honour, his
reputation as an able ruler came into question. It was that which made
him ill from shame. He knew his contemporaries. The treason to and the
sacrifice of Liège troubled him less than his blunder at Péronne. It was
not so much indignation as mockery that he dreaded. Paris received from
him an order to neither speak, write, paint, or sing anything of the
detested name of “Monseigneur de Bourgoyne,” and an order was sent out
that all birds, magpies, crows, starlings, who were making the streets
resound with allusions to the king’s discomfiture at Péronne, should be
delivered to a commissioner of the king.[j] At least so runs the story.
When Louis arrived in Paris strange discoveries awaited him. He
intercepted letters from his favourite the cardinal. He found that his
friend and gossip was the friend and gossip also of the duke of Burgundy,
the adviser of all that had happened at Péronne, especially of his forced
presence at the siege, the degrading clauses of the final treaty, and
the general harshness of his treatment. He found at the same time that
the cardinal was in correspondence with his brother Charles, late leader
of the league, who was still in resistance to his authority; and, in
short, that he was betrayed in every point. The king was offended at the
perjury of his subject, but the man was a thousand times more angry at
the error in his judgment. The son of the tailor, in the red stockings,
had outwitted the son of St. Louis with the crown on his head. La Balue,
though prince of the church and bishop of a diocese, was imprisoned in
an iron cage, about eight feet square, and kept like a wild beast in his
den for eleven years in the castle of Loches. All that can be said in
extenuation of this pitiless proceeding was that the man was the disgrace
of his order and his country, and that the instrument of his torture
(as the natural justice of mankind is so prone to make out in other
instances) was of his own invention.
There were some institutions, as well as individuals, which it was now
Louis’ purpose to get within his power. Edward III of England, reposing
upon the laurels of Crécy, had founded the order of the Garter in 1349.
John of France, in rapid imitation, as we have already seen, founded the
order of the Star. Philip of Burgundy had founded the order of the Golden
Fleece in 1429, and the principles of all these lordly confederations
were derived from the ideas of chivalry which the romances had spread
among the people. They were to be brotherhoods of noble knights, bound
together by the bonds of mutual honour; they were to succour the weak,
bridle the strong, and pay honour, as they fantastically expressed it, by
purity of life and courage of conduct, to God and their ladies. But the
Garter was a foreign badge; the Golden Fleece was a symbol of his subject
and liegeman; the Star had fallen into disrepute from its promiscuous
distribution among the favourites of the crown; and Louis XI determined
on instituting an order of chivalry himself.
It was to be select in its membership, limited in its number, generous
in its professions, and he fondly hoped the Garter and Fleece would soon
sink into insignificance compared to the order of St. Michael. The first
brethren were named from the highest families in France; the remaining
great feudatories, who had preserved some relics of their hereditary
independence, were fixed upon to wear this mark of the suzerain’s
friendship. But when they came to read the oaths of admission, they
found that the order of St. Michael was in reality a bond of stronger
obligation than the feudal laws had ever enjoined. It was a solemn
association for the prevention of disobedience to the sovereign. The
members were to swear submission in all things to the chief of the order;
they were to enter into no agreements with each other, or anyone else,
without the king’s consent; they were to submit to such punishment, in
case of breach of the rules, as the order might appoint; and, in short,
the brotherhood of noble knights sank, in the degrading treatment of its
founder, into a confederation of spies. Armed with this new weapon, the
king tried its effect on the duke of Brittany, who was discontented with
many things that had occurred. If he accepted, he would be bound by the
statutes; if he refused, it would be an insult to the dignity of the
king. The duke temporised, and consulted the duke of Burgundy. The fiery
Charles saw through the design, and swore to defend his neighbour in case
of a quarrel with the crown. Louis, nothing daunted, sent the collar of
the order to Burgundy himself. Burgundy refused it, and Louis’ object was
gained. He discovered who was bold or strong enough to stand out against
him, and the war began. Not openly--it was not yet time to make it a
matter of national honour--but the angry subject and hostile king were
perfectly aware of each other’s designs.
_Edward IV of England aids Charles the Bold_
[Sidenote: [1469-1470 A.D.]]
Their animosity first broke out in the sides they chose in the great
struggle then going on in England, called the Wars of the Roses. Edward
of York, representing the direct line of Edward III, had taken arms
against the feeble and dissolute Henry VI of the Lancastrian house.
Margaret of Anjou had mingled in the fray, and embittered it. We know how
fortune alternately swayed to the red and the white of the emblematic
flowers. Warwick, who is known in English history as the “king-maker,”
had just established Edward IV on the throne, and then failed, when
he had quarrelled with the monarch he had set up, in restoring Henry.
While preparing an expedition for this purpose in France, he had fitted
out privateers, who enriched themselves equally on the English and
Flemish traders, and then found refuge in the French harbours. Charles
of Burgundy complained; Louis retorted with accusations of his having
aided the new king of England in his attacks on the coasts of Normandy,
and of having accepted the English order of the Garter, though he had
refused his own St. Michael. He summoned the vassal to appear before
his parliament in Paris, and the vassal threw the summoners into prison.
Louis saw the game now in his hands. He had put his enemy legally in
the wrong, and, moreover, he had all the counsellors, and favourites,
and warriors, by whom Charles was surrounded, in his pay. We need not,
however, waste much pity on the duke. He was nearly in the same situation
with regard to the courtiers and officers of the king. When the armies
lay face to face, and famine had almost placed the Burgundians in Louis’
hands, Charles sent a flag of truce with a statement and proofs of the
infidelity of half the princes and feudatories who commanded the royal
troops. Charles of France, now duke of Guienne, was at the head of the
deceivers, and was anxious to gain Charles’ good-will, in hopes of
obtaining the hand of his daughter and heiress, Mary of Burgundy. Battle,
with traitors commanding both the armies, would have been madness, and
Louis agreed to a truce. Bitterer thoughts than ever, about the pride
and falsehood of the nobility, rankled in that ignoble heart. Another
incident soon occurred that brought affairs to a crisis. One of his
spies, being in the castle of the count de Foix, saw a mass of torn
papers in a corner of his room, which had previously been occupied by a
messenger of the duke of Burgundy. The man gathered up the fragments,
saw a name or two that excited his attention, pasted them all together,
and was enabled to present to the king a bond of firm alliance, and the
signatures of enemies whom he might well have trembled to see united
against him--Edward of England, triumphant at the battle of Barnet, where
his enemy Warwick was slain, and now firmly established on the English
throne; the duke of Burgundy, Nicholas of Lorraine, the duke of Brittany,
and, above all, Charles of France, duke of Guienne. These were all to
be on him at once, and, as one of the papers said, were to set so many
greyhounds at his heels that he could not know where to fly for safety.
[Illustration: FRENCH GUNNER, MIDDLE OF FIFTEENTH CENTURY]
[Sidenote: [1470-1471 A.D.]]
Louis, however, was more of the fox than the hare. He doubled on his
pursuers, and tempted the duke of Burgundy with the promise of restoring
him some towns on the Somme, and letting him have his full revenge on his
former favourite, the constable Saint-Pol, who had betrayed him to the
king. Charles, on the other hand, was to let Louis do as he chose with
the dukes of Brittany and Guienne.[f] The duke of Guienne, indeed, was
not likely to be an annoyance much longer to his brother the king, for he
was seized of a mortal malady, presumably consumption. He died May 24th,
1472, at Bordeaux. There was a rumour current that he had been poisoned
along with his mistress the lady of Monsoreau, by the abbé of St. Jean
d’Angély, at the instance of Louis himself. The story of a peach, cut
with a poisoned knife and shared by the lovers, became famous. There
were many suspicious circumstances, and very likely the king may have
watched the progress of his brother’s illness “with ill-disguised hope”
as Martin[j] suggests; but the fact that the duke had suspected no one
during his long illness and had named Louis as his executor may perhaps
justify us in giving the king the benefit of the doubt for the nonce.
“Examples of fratricide are all too common in this sinister century,”
says Martin; but he adds, half doubtingly, that “the best justification
of the king appears to lie in the long illness of his brother. A man
poisoned with fruit does not survive eight months.” In any case, the
death of the duke removed one of the most important obstacles to Louis’
plans for the centralisation of power and the ultimate autocracy of the
crown.[a]
[Sidenote: [1471-1474 A.D.]]
Now, then, there was to be war to the knife carried on by the crown
against the nobility. Burgundy was bought off by promises and gifts;
England was soothed by concessions. But within the boundaries of France
itself, no limit was put to the vengeance and cruelty of the king. He
arrested the duke of Alençon in full peace, and immured him in a dungeon
in Paris. He sent an army into the territories of the count d’Armagnac,
and a detachment of it burst into his house, and murdered him in his bed.
They also forced his wife, who was pregnant, to drink a mixture which
produced immediate death. His brother was thrown into the Bastille, and
kept in a cave below the level of the Seine, so that the water penetrated
the floor. The wretched prisoner lived for eleven years in this manner,
without shoes or proper clothing; and when released at the end of that
time, on the accession of Charles VIII, was found to have fallen into a
state of fatuity. A short cessation in this career of murder and revenge
was produced by a new combination against Louis’ life and crown. French
honour and patriotism had now fallen so low that the princes and great
vassals, in order to get revenge upon their oppressor, agreed to assign
the crown of France to Edward IV of England. He was to be crowned at
Rheims, and already he bestowed rewards upon his adherents as if he were
in possession of the kingdom. The treaty united many contending factions,
with but one object in common--the destruction of him whom all now knew
to be their destroyer.
_Gold and Diplomacy make Louis the Victor_
Burgundy and Brittany and Saint-Pol forgot their animosities, and
signed the bond. But Louis detected the plot. The old plans were tried,
and succeeded. Promises scattered the confederates, and they became
distrustful of each other. Edward had disembarked in France at the head
of an English army. Louis sent for great bags of coined money from Paris,
and signed several papers, with the names in blank, bestowing salaries
and pensions for distribution among the English council. He disguised a
common lackey as a herald, and sent him to an interview with the invader.
The lackey was as clever and subservient as if he had been bred an
ambassador, and won over the luxurious king. Louis flattered his ambition
and bribed his avarice. He called him “king of England and France, and
lord of Ireland,” contenting himself with the title of “king of the
French.” He gave him 60,000 crowns on condition of withdrawing his forces
at once, and promised him 50,000 crowns a year so long as they both
lived. Edward was so captivated by the arts and liberality of Louis that
he agreed to visit him at Paris. But Louis repented of the invitation
he had given, and put him off, for fear he should grow too fond of that
most fascinating of towns. “It is better,” he said, “the sea should be
between us”; and to attain this object no expense was spared. Gifts were
heaped upon the officers, and all the public-houses were made free to the
retiring army. The English pocketed the money, and marched from pothouse
to pothouse with the greatest satisfaction.
[Sidenote: [1474-1476 A.D.]]
At last it was reported to Louis that his invaders were safe home, and he
resolved to make use of his victory. The fate of the constable Saint-Pol
was sealed. Conscious of his approaching doom, he threw himself on the
protection of his former friend, the duke of Burgundy. Charles hated
him for his falsehood, but could not reject a suppliant. He told him
to take shelter in St. Quentin. Louis, however, was at his heels with
twenty thousand men. He fled, and Charles, rash in promise but infirm
of purpose, forgot his chivalry, and surrendered him on the threat of
hostilities against himself. He was tried for treason at Paris, and
condemned to lose his head on the place de Grève. Thousands of the brave
and noble have spilt their blood since that time in the great square
which faces the Hôtel-de-Ville, and allows a last view of the towers of
Notre Dame; but this is the first occasion in which a prince, a near ally
of the throne,--for he had married a sister of the queen,--was exposed to
the sword of the headsman for a crime against the crown. The supremacy
of the king’s will was now so well established that there was no further
use for secret assassination. A public execution struck more awe into the
populace, and kept the nobility in more subjection, than a stab in the
dark or a poisoned peach. Tristan l’Hermite, almost equally with Louis,
was from henceforward the acknowledged governor of France. But as long
as Charles the Bold preserved his independent attitude in Burgundy, the
discontented had always a refuge from the justice of the king.
_Last Deeds of Charles the Bold_
Fortunately at this time the overweening Burgundian became engaged in
controversy with the strong-armed highlanders of Switzerland. They had
offended him, by refusing compensation for some injury they had done to
one of his adherents. To be resisted by a set of republican shepherds was
too much for the knightly pride of the most touchy prince in Christendom.
A great army was raised, and poured down upon the town of Granson. The
inhabitants were put to the sword or drowned in the Lake of Neuchâtel.
All the cantons were irritated at the shameless deed, and rushed to
rescue or revenge. Charles met them in a narrow defile at the head of
his horsemen, who could not act on such unequal ground. The first rank
fell back upon the second, the second carried confusion into the rear.
The quick-footed Swiss still pressed on, and at last a complete panic
seized the Burgundian host. Charles himself spurred out of the confusion,
and galloped as far as his horse could go. Never had the eyes of the
mountaineers rested on such wealth and splendour as met them in the tents
of the discomfited army--silken curtains, golden vessels, barrels of
money, and armour of the finest polish. A jewel was taken by a soldier
from the private chest of the duke, sold to a priest for a florin, sold
by him for five shillings, and is now considered the greatest ornament of
the French crown, and one of the richest stones in Europe. Louis did not
know how to proceed in these astonishing circumstances. He had signed a
treaty to maintain the peace towards the duke, and yet could not resist
showing his approbation of the Swiss. With the Swiss also he had signed a
treaty, by which he was bound to give them aid in men and money whenever
they were attacked. He compromised the two obligations by abstaining from
assaulting the Burgundian, and from sending assistance to the Swiss. He
could not fulfil both stipulations, and it was more economical to execute
neither. He gave the mountaineers, however, unmistakable evidence of his
sympathy in their cause; and when Charles, in the same year, came forth
at the head of another powerful army, Louis encouraged the cantons to
resist. The same thing as before occurred, with only the variation of
place. Morat was a repetition of Granson. The slaughter of the defeated
Burgundians was so great that, till the latter end of the eighteenth
century, a vast monument was still to be seen upon the field of battle,
built up of the bones of the slain, and called the Bone-Hill of Morat.
[Sidenote: [1476-1477 A.D.]]
The battle of Nancy followed in 1477, and raised the Swiss to the summit
of military fame, besides weakening Burgundy so as to render it forever
powerless against France. In the midst of winter, ill-provided, and
doubtful of the issue themselves, the hosts of Burgundy moved on, and
laid siege to the town of Nancy. Charles was no longer the impetuous
warrior he had been. He was broken in spirit, and at times almost mad
with disappointment and chagrin. He had even summoned to command his army
an adventurer from Italy, of the name of Campobasso. Campobasso was, as
might be expected, a correspondent of Louis, and had offered to place
Charles in his hands.
But Louis played, of course, a double game with the deceiver and his
dupe. To show how generous he was, he warned the duke of the insincerity
of his general, feeling well assured that his advice would be attributed
to dishonourable motives; and accordingly it was thought a weak invention
of the enemy, and Campobasso was more trusted than before. Again the
Swiss battalions, aided by the forces of René of Lorraine, began to
appear. In the midst of a great storm, and in a hard frost, Charles
resolved to attack them. Campobasso sent over an offer of his treachery
to the gallant mountaineers; but they despised a traitor, and scorned the
disgrace of having such an auxiliary. He therefore retired to the rear
of the Burgundian line, to intercept the fugitives, and enrich himself
with their ransom. There were few fugitives, however, to ransom; for, as
the horses slipped upon the icy plain, the victory was easier than at
either Granson or Morat. The earth was heaped with corpses, and among
them, after a long search, was found the body of the fiery duke, fixed in
the snow, and so disfigured that he was only recognised by a scar on his
face and the length of his nails, which he had allowed to grow, as a sign
of mourning, ever since his calamities began. Not deserving of a very
favourable epithet, this harsh and arrogant potentate closed a life of
violence with a death of defeat.
But now all men’s eyes were turned with earnest expectation to the first
move in the great drama of intrigue and policy which his demise was
certain to produce. His daughter had been the great card which he had
held in his hands for many years. Lady of Hainault and Flanders, and all
the Low Countries, she was a bait which none of the princes could resist.
MARY OF BURGUNDY
Charles had silenced enemies and gathered friends, by a mere hint of
the bestowal of Mary’s hand. He had played it against the name of king,
and promised it to the son of Frederick the emperor, if that successor
of the Roman cæsars would consent to convert his ducal coronet into a
royal crown. The treaties and arrangements, and all the preparations
for the betrothal and the creation, would be amusing, if they did not
show how low morality and honour had fallen in those days. The emperor
said, “Let the young people marry, and I will name you king.” But the
duke, who gave no credit, said, “Make me king, and I will give your son
my daughter.” Neither would trust the other. The emperor hurried off by
stealth from the place of meeting, when he found the duke had summoned
an increase to his escort; and Charles, vowing vengeance, and fearful of
ridicule, packed up the royal crown he had brought with him beside the
sceptre and mantle, and took his way to his states with no higher rank
than when he came. Other expectations had been equally disappointed, and
now, in the year 1477, Mary was an orphan twenty years of age, handsome
and well-informed, with a portion in her own right which would make any
man she chose a sovereign prince, or double the grandeur of the greatest
potentate. When Louis heard of the father’s death, his first thought
was, of course, to secure the daughter’s succession. He knelt to all his
saints in gratitude for the defeat of his rival, walked on a pilgrimage
of grace to a church in Anjou, and vowed silver banisters to the tomb
of St. Martin of Tours. Having purified his mind by these religious
exercises, he sent a peremptory demand for the restoration of the two
Burgundies to the crown, as they lapsed for want of male heirs.
Of this there could be no doubt with respect to the duchy, which
had been conveyed by John to Philip the Bold; but the county of the
same name was capable of feminine holding, and if Mary had been in a
condition to assert her claims, might have refused obedience to the king.
Mary, however, was lonely in the midst of all that wealth. She had no
disinterested guardian to apply to, and made only a feeble protest when
the parliament of Burgundy, purchased or intimidated, recognised its
feudal obligation, and transferred its allegiance to the French crown.
Holland, however, and Flanders, and Artois, and large territories in
Germany, and the disputed cities on the Somme, belonged to her still. If
she had given her hand to some gallant soldier who would have defended
her states, she might have aroused the chivalrous feelings of all the
gentlemen in Europe on her behalf. But this she did not try, knowing too
well, perhaps, that chivalrous feelings were limited to books of fiction.
[Illustration: THE ENTRANCE OF LOUIS XI INTO PARIS]
The encumbered heiress wrote in her despair to Louis himself. Louis
was her godfather, and she had no other friend. She sent four trusty
counsellors to lay her case before him. She begged his protection, and
made a confidential request that he would conduct all his correspondence
with her through no one but these trusted friends. “You want, of course,
to know what I intend to do,” said Louis, when he had read the letter
on the day of audience; and the four envoys bowed. “I will marry my
godchild Mary to my son, the dauphin. I will rule her states in their
joint names, till she is old enough to do homage. I will take possession
of the male fief at once, and if anyone opposes my decisions, I have
forces enough to make my will obeyed.” There was no circumlocution
here, and the ambassadors were silent with surprise. The dauphin was
a sickly boy of eight years old, and their young mistress, as we have
seen, was in the flower of her age. The king, in return for the visit
of the Burgundian envoys, sent an envoy of his own. His barber was a
quick-witted, unprincipled adventurer, of the name of Oliver le Daim.
He had come originally from Ghent, and was, of course, master of the
Flemish tongue. This was the dignified emissary whom France despatched
to the highest princess in Europe. He covered his original baseness with
a pinchbeck title, and the barber took his northward way under the name
of the count of Meulan. But the count of Meulan smelt dreadfully of the
shop. He never could get the shaving-basin out of his countrymen’s sight;
and at his first reception he behaved so unlike a royal ambassador that
he was hissed by the audience, not without allusions to the propriety
of throwing him out of the window. He was hustled downstairs, and was
glad to slip out of his house and out of the town in the darkness of the
night, and make his way back to his employer without having presented his
letters of recall.
[Sidenote: [1477-1478 A.D.]]
Louis was delighted, for, while these things were going on at Ghent, he
had succeeded with the messengers of poor Mary, and did not care if they
had hanged the barber-ambassador on a lamp-post in the street. The trusty
counsellors, won over by his address and protestations, surrendered
Artois to his honourable keeping; and on their return were executed by
the states of Flanders, in spite of the prayers and intercession of the
princess. The accusation was not for having betrayed their mistress,
but for having constituted themselves members of the council of Four,
in whom Mary had told Louis she put all her confidence. She had told
nobody else, and declared the innocence of her hapless friends. But
Louis, with his usual generosity, had forwarded the letter in which his
goddaughter made the fatal avowal, and the discovery was almost fatal to
herself. The states were republican in tendency, and resolved to submit
as little as possible to the governance of a woman. They tormented her
with their advice and wearied her with their reclamations, till she
fortunately escaped their further importunities by persuading them to
consent to her marriage with Maximilian, the son of the emperor, the man
to whom her father had resolved to give her in return for the title of
king. Louis was quieted for a time by the fear of offending the emperor,
but carried on more fiercely than ever his war against feudalism, as
represented by the great nobility at home. Burgundy was gone--Artois was
his own--Normandy had long been attached to the crown.
The duke of Brittany, uneasy at the rapid extirpation of his brethren,
intrigued with England; but Louis intercepted the letters, convicted him
by his own handwriting, and forced him to a treaty which rendered him
utterly dependent. The duke had seen that a cloud was gathering from
the increased religious fervour visible in the king. When a murder or
a treachery was on hand, his activity in visiting shrines and vowing
church ornaments became remarkable. People trembled when they saw the
meanly dressed, slouch-gaited, sallow-faced old man travelling from altar
to altar, and sticking his bonnet full of little images of saints, and
pouring out flatteries and adulations to the statues of the Virgin. A
tale of blood was sure to follow; and in 1478 the wildest expectations of
Paris were surpassed by the horror of one of his executions. There had
been no such cold-blooded monster since the days of Tiberius. The duke
de Nemours was representative of the great house of Armagnac, and was
married to a princess of Anjou, first cousin of the king. A headstrong,
discontented, and ambitious man, he had joined in the league of the
Public Weal, and in many of the intrigues against the monarch since
that time. Louis had taken no notice till he could secure his revenge.
But two years before this, he had got him in his power, and kept the
unfortunate man in chains. He was now tried for treason and condemned and
executed.[f] In after times it was related that the king had placed the
children of the culprit beneath the scaffold, that a father’s blood might
bathe their innocent heads. But this is only a fable of later invention
that marks the reaction against the memory of Louis XI. “What is more
certain and equally odious, however,” says Michelet,[o] “is that one
of the judges who were to receive the goods of the condemned, feeling
insecure of the heritage unless he had the natural heir in his power,
demanded to be given custody of the eldest son of Nemours. The king
had the barbarity to deliver up the child, who promptly disappeared.”
Moreover, the king suspended from office three counsellors who had not
favoured the death penalty.[j]
WAR WITH MAXIMILIAN
[Sidenote: [1478-1479 A.D.]]
Louis’ pilgrimages and prayers must have increased in frequency shortly
after this, for a tremendous thought had come into his head, and it
would require a vast amount of saintly aid to make it tolerable to his
subjects. This was no less than the trial for felony and treason of the
deceased duke of Burgundy. A court was called, the culprit was summoned,
barristers were appointed to support the accusation; his whole life
was inquired into, his faults pointed out, and malicious antiquarians
ascended to the actions of his ancestors; and the murder of the duke of
Orleans, in the reign of Charles VI, was urged as an aggravation of his
crimes. After so much eloquence and such convincing proofs, the verdict
could not be doubtful. The duke of Burgundy was sure to be found guilty
of the crimes laid to his charge, and his estates forfeited to the
crown. Maximilian, the husband of Mary, took the alarm. He begged his
father the emperor to interfere. He was afraid that action would follow
the judgment, and tried at least to delay the sentence. The diet of the
states of Germany was about to meet, and might take up the cause of their
chiefs. Louis therefore allowed the trial to expire, and had merely the
satisfaction of showing that a grand vassal was not safe from his insults
and vengeance even after death. Yet the daughter and son-in-law of the
insulted potentate could not be expected to remain satisfied under so
insolent a proceeding. Maximilian collected his forces, and declared war
against the king of France.[f]
[Illustration: A FRENCH KNIGHT OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY]
By uniting all his forces, Maximilian had assembled, at St. Omer, an army
of about 27,400. On Sunday, the 25th of July, 1479, he reached Arques,
waiting there three days, and on the Thursday following, the 29th of
July, attacked and invested Thérouanne. The belief in his numerical
superiority, the desire to retrieve his repulses in Burgundy, and
perhaps also the absence of the king, whom he knew to be occupied in
Dijon, decided him to take the initiative. Besides, he could only keep
his army together for a limited period. This was certainly the moment to
try his fortune.
It was really not until Saturday afternoon, the 7th of August, that the
principal action took place. Des Querdes, with six hundred picked men,
tried to surround the Flemish on his right. The Flemish men-at-arms
hastened to defend the spot attacked. Soon the whole of the cavalry was
engaged, and the struggle became serious. But the Flemish, separated from
their infantry, were forced to give in and began to flee towards Aire,
Thérouanne, and St. Omer. The French thought they had won the battle.
Encouraged by this success Des Querdes hotly pursued the fugitives, urged
on by the hope of capturing rich prizes. “Philip de Raverstein,” says the
chronicle, “was wearing a mantle of cloth of gold, so that, mistaking him
for Duke Maximilian himself, they pursued him to the gates of Aire, but
paid dearly for their mistake.”
The battle was far from being over, as Des Querdes imagined. Very few
men-at-arms remained to support the French infantry, and Maximilian’s
hope revived. He redoubled his efforts, aided by the Flemish soldiers and
German crossbows. The French archers, already seeing that all exertions
to break the enemy’s lines were fruitless, began to slacken their efforts
and their discouragement was obvious. Just then, the lord de St. André
arrived with the garrison from Thérouanne. He could still, in this
critical moment, hope for victory. But instead of making for the thick
of the combat the new arrivals threw themselves upon the enemy’s baggage
and provisions, counting upon a rich spoil. The lords of Romont and
Nassau, seeing the archers busy pillaging, fell upon them. In this tumult
they threw them into disorder. Then Maximilian, whilst his cavalry was
escaping, himself caused confusion in the ranks of the French by pursuing
them with the small number of knights which he could still command, and
remained master of the battle-field. But he was thus obliged to raise
the siege of Thérouanne, and could only continue the campaign two months
later.
Louis XI was much upset when he heard of this defeat. Perhaps he
regretted the absence of his experienced and proven chief, who had
defended his frontier so well. Comines,[c] who was then returning from
his mission in Italy, has preserved for us the portrait of the king:
“I thought the king our master grown older and beginning to break up.
However, he conducts his affairs with great common sense. I was with
him when he received the news of the battle. He was very downcast, for
he is not accustomed to defeat; it even seemed as if everything always
happened to suit his pleasure. His common sense helped him in this hour
of trouble. At first, he feared that his advantages had been lost; but
when he knew the truth, he was patient and decided to act so that such
things should not be undertaken without his knowledge again.”
As soon as Louis XI was aware of how the men-at-arms, thinking only of
making many prisoners, had lost a battle all but won, he ordered that all
the prisoners and spoil should be collected, sold at auction, and the
money equally divided amongst them all. This was returning to the times
of Achilles, to the natural equality of the Homeric ages--an equality
too often forgotten in barbarous centuries. Forbidding prisoners to be
ransomed on the battle-field was already a great step gained; but again,
the chiefs, sure under this system of having prisoners at a cheap rate
after the battle, thought less of making any during the combat.
[Sidenote: [1479-1483 A.D.]]
But the archduke, in his turn, had to endure some annoyances. The naval
campaign had been disastrous for him. Through the care and perseverance
of William de Casenove, known as the vice-admiral Coulon, France was
in possession of her first real fleet. For several years past, vessels
were being unceasingly constructed, their forms perfected, and their
size and strength increased. From henceforth, great battles could be
waged upon the sea, even against the strongest. Herring fishing had,
for a long time, been one of the principal resources of wealth, and a
precious means of existence to the northern nations. The French admiral,
taking advantage of the fact that the fishermen of Zealand and Holland
were bringing into port the fruit of their labours, went to meet them,
attacked them boldly, and brought nearly their entire fleet into the
Norman ports. In vain did the Dutch equip other vessels to serve as
escorts to the fishing boats. Coulon attacked and dispersed them and
brought back more prisoners. Thus the archduke and his followers were cut
off at one and the same time both from the cereals of Prussia and from
the fish they depended upon.[k]
The defeat of Guinegate humbled the hopes of Louis. The war was no
longer prosecuted with vigour. Even the death of Mary of Burgundy,
which soon after took place, afforded him no opportunity of adding to
his usurpations. A treaty, called the Treaty of Arras, was concluded
between him and Maximilian, in December, 1482. Its stipulations were that
the dauphin Charles should espouse Margaret of Austria, Maximilian’s
daughter; and that France should acquire, as her dowry, the county of
Artois, and that of Burgundy (or Franche-Comté), with other territories;
those possessions reverting to Austria in case no heirs came of the
marriage. Independently of these cessions, Louis acquired the duchy or
province proper of Burgundy, as well as that of Picardy, as his share
of the spoils of Charles the Bold. About the same time, on the death of
the good king René, he inherited Provence and Anjou. René II of Lorraine
made some efforts to establish a claim, but in vain. Good fortune never
crowned political craft more completely than in the instance of Louis
XI. That monarch had now brought all his favourite schemes to their
completion: his nobles were humbled; his great rival was destroyed.[l]
LAST YEARS AND DEATH OF LOUIS
In 1480 Louis XI had a first attack of apoplexy at the château de
Montils-les-Tours, called Le Plessis because it had a fortress with many
enclosures. Other attacks followed this one and warned him that his end
was approaching. He undertook in 1482 the pilgrimage of St. Claude, but
the progress of his malady obliged him to retire to Plessis, which he
never left. Here he lingered for eighteen months, seen by no one, having
in attendance only a small number of officers and servants, and seeking
vainly to quiet by religious devotions his customary restlessness. His
illness, while subduing his physical forces, only served to increase the
activity of his spirit. The more he felt his power waning the more he
wished to make others feel it and he became more tyrannical in proportion
to his weakness.
Meanwhile he lived in this seclusion in perpetual suspicion of
everyone--not only the princes of the family, but even of the most
obscure members of the household, though they had been chosen most
carefully. His castle was a prison, well guarded, where he was bound,
following the expression of Comines, by strange chains and enclosures,
in fear of conspirators. Jealous of his power up to the last hour, “he
had himself arrayed in rich vestments, such as had never been the custom
before.” His isolation was such that he rarely saw even the dauphin, who
was brought up far from him, in the château d’Amboise. Little by little
his state of weakness effaced the king and left only the man. During this
period he returned to himself, and perhaps to new thoughts; for he wished
the relief of his people and a peace of six months at least. This was,
also, the time of his terrors and superstitions, which have been so much
exaggerated, for he retained his clearness of mind and gave proof of it
even in the last days of his life. At times the king awoke in him, and
made those around him feel that he was master; and he was more jealous
than ever of his authority, suffering no one under any circumstances to
question it.
He overwhelmed the church with donations in order to obtain acquittal of
his offences, just as the ancient Merovingian kings thought to expiate
their crimes on their death-beds at a similar price. He surrounded
himself with priests whose prayers he desired; he brought from Calabria
the famous Francis of Paula (Paola), founder of the order of Minims, for
which order he had built a monastery at Plessis. His doctor, Jacques
Cottier, took a scandalous part in these liberal actions. He seemed to
ask of heaven not so much the salvation of the soul as the prolongation
of life. Many hold that this long agony, these physical and moral
sufferings, were an expiation. Comines sees in it “a punishment which God
had sent upon him in this world that he might suffer less in the next,
and that those who succeeded him might have more pity on the people and
punish them less than he had.” He died the 30th of August, 1483, in his
sixty-first year.
The opinions expressed by contemporaries on this king, whose character
was so remarkable and strange, were various, but of uniform severity.
Comines, whose opinion might be subject to question, as he was his
minister, his confidant, and almost his accomplice, has praised but
little his prodigious activity, his genius for intriguing, and his
singular aptitude for the carrying on of dark schemes in all directions.
John de Troyes, although recognising that the power of the country had
been strengthened, the kingdom brought more into unity, and new provinces
acquired, blames most strongly the means employed, the dilapidation of
the finances, the ruin of the people, the excess of arbitrariness, and
the injury to the morals of the public. If public opinion was mute during
this reign, it does not follow that it was favourable to the king. Of
course the evidence that has been preserved is too slight to be able
to make a positive assertion, but the theatre and popular verse of the
period show the fault-finding spirit that existed.
In truth, Louis XI left the kingdom overwhelmed with burdens, the people
unhappy, the prisons full, and discontent everywhere. He is reproached
with always having had a large army and never having carried on a
brilliant war; with not having respected the liberty of the church; with
having ceaselessly violated justice; with having preferably employed
corrupt agents who were justly detested; with having acted without
definite plans; with being humble in misfortune and insolent in success,
commencing enterprises which were never finished. He, however, knew so
well how to be master; to bring the will of others into subjection to
his own; to inspire in the world, and especially in those who approached
him, the sentiments of obedience, fear, and almost admiration for his
political genius; in fact, he had so well filled the position of king and
of prince that, even after his death and when a strong reaction had set
in against his reign, a certain terror continued to be attached to his
name. It would seem that no one dared oppose him; Comines himself, who
has drawn his portrait with such a master hand, has in this respect a
singular discretion.[e]
Guizot, after quoting Comines[c] and Duclos,[m] adds: “I am more exacting
than Comines and Duclos; I cannot consent to apply to Louis XI the
words “liberal,” “virtuous,” “good”; he had neither greatness of soul,
uprightness of character, nor kindness of heart; he was neither a great
king nor a good king; but I hold to the last word of Duclos, ‘He was a
king.’”[i]
“He was a king.” That verdict, at least, no one will dispute; and for a
concluding estimate of the character of his kingship, we perhaps cannot
do better than to quote the judicious words of Martin:
MARTIN’S ESTIMATE OF LOUIS XI
[Sidenote: [1461-1483 A.D.]]
Utility was Louis’ sole rule; he never comprehended what power there
is in justice. In everything he preferred, sometimes to his own
disadvantage, the crooked line to the straight line, stratagem to force,
suavity to courage, although when necessary he had the stubborn courage
of an indomitable will. He was the incarnate reaction against the Middle
Ages, against its morals and its ideality as well as its errors, against
its liberties as well as its anarchy. The very devoutness of Louis,
the only inconsistency in a character which would otherwise have been
incredible, had no more of the grand, austere fanaticism of earlier days;
it was a materialistic fetichism that went back beyond the Middle Ages
to the time when the barbarian kings gave the saints of heaven half the
credit for their enterprises and their aims. Except for this weakness
Louis XI was the most illustrious disciple of that policy of which the
contemporary Italian despots gave the example and the theory of which
Macchiavelli was later to set forth and give his name to. The usurper
of the duchy of Milan, the famous Francesco Sforza, had been Louis XI’s
master and model. Italian education invaded France earlier in politics
than in fine arts.
There was one essential distinction between Louis and his masters. He
was like them in his means, but different in his end. These tyrants on
the other side of the Alps had only a personal, or at best a family end,
while Louis pursued a common end. He was the head of a real political
society, the head of a nation. On this point, and on this alone, he had a
conscience. He had a strong instinct for the future and wished to leave
behind a work that would endure after him. This bad man was not a bad
Frenchman.
His reign, so troublous, so oppressive, so unhappy for the people, had
accomplished wonderful things for the unity of the French nation. It gave
to France, Picardy from the sources of the Oise to Burgundy, Provence,
Anjou, Maine, Barrois, and Roussillon; and at least a provisional title
to Artois and Franche-Comté. It upheld the power of France to the
Pyrenees on the west, to the Jura on the east, and to the maritime Alps,
and it powerfully advanced the important work of establishing natural
frontiers. It had subordinated the power of great and petty lords alike
and had placed under the control of the crown a great military force. It
had favoured the development of the middle classes and of the industrial
and commercial forces of the country. But if the growth of national
power under him was immense, if social progress was in certain respects
incontestable, it is equally certain that despotism made a like progress.
The instruments of autocracy were fortified and perfected by him, and
under him the religion of force and of strategy, “the religion of
success” as Michelet terms it, everywhere dethroned the religion of duty
and of right; nor is it possible to stifle morality everywhere in the
political world without profoundly altering the ethics of private life.
The aurora of a brilliant intellectual dawn was now appearing above the
horizon; active minds turn eagerly towards the new light; but France
was not in a healthy moral condition to receive the new lessons of the
Renaissance.[j]
LOUIS’ INFLUENCE ON CIVILISATION
It must not be overlooked, however, that Louis had a powerful influence
upon his time in other directions than that of mere statecraft. His mind
was ever receptive to any novelty that did not contradict his authority.
He favoured literature and science; in particular the healing art made
progress under the valetudinarian king. In surgery there was at least one
great conquest; the operation of lithotomy was performed for the first
time under the authorisation of the king, upon a condemned criminal,
who recovered and was granted his life. Louis also came to some extent
under the influence of the learned Greeks, who after the overthrow of
Constantinople, in 1453, scattered over western Europe. Several of these
were received at the French court. The king took a certain interest also
in the famous discussion between the nominalists and the realists which
so long distracted the philosophical world. Acting, it is supposed,
under the advice of his confessor, Louis in 1474 took the part of the
nominalists and prohibited the works of Ockam, Buridan, and other
realists; though three years later the prohibition was removed. Louis
showed himself equally receptive in regard to the new art of printing. As
early as 1469 three exponents of the wonderful new method of book-making
appeared in Paris in answer to the summons of William Fichet, rector of
the university, and began their work with the royal sanction. Before the
close of Louis’ reign many books had been printed in Paris as well as
in several of the other large cities of France. The chronicles of St.
Denis were published in 1476, together with numerous other religious and
classical works. A translation of the Bible appeared in 1477. From this
time books multiplied so rapidly that the contemporary poets assure us
with hyperbolic enthusiasm that more books are produced from day to day
than formerly could be written in an entire year.[a][j]
The catholicity of interest which enabled Louis thus in the midst of his
political activities to become to so considerable an extent a patron
of the sciences and arts, furnishes conclusive evidence of the fulness
of his mental equipment. It remains to call attention to an even more
important contribution made by Louis to the amenities of civilisation.
This was in the matter of the establishment of government posts. Here
he was an innovator not merely for France but for the modern world; and
there have been those enthusiasts who would claim for this feat a place
among the three greatest achievements of the fifteenth century--the
other two being the invention of printing and the discovery of America.
Whatever may be thought of this estimate, there is no question that the
creation of the postal service was a most important innovation, and it
seems equally little in question that Louis XI was the innovator.[a][n]
_Establishment of Posts in France_
Certain ancient writers have attributed Louis’ motives in creating the
posts to his paternal solicitude. They say “Louis XI, being anxious about
the illness of the dauphin, from whom he was separated, established
the posts in order to be informed at almost every moment of the hope
or fear which his condition inspired.” This is most improbable, given
Louis XI’s character, but it can readily be admitted that his spirit
of dissimulation might easily have prompted him to invent and circulate
a fable of this kind, in order to distract attention from the end which
he really had in view. His restless life, his disputes with his greater
vassals, particularly with the duke of Burgundy, his continual intrigues
with the principal courts of Europe, at which he had secret agents,
suffice to explain the interest he had in establishing posts, by means
of which he could satisfy at once his suspicious mind and his ambitious
schemes. In character Louis XI’s institution resembles the ancient
posts, especially the Roman (_cursus publicus_). Louis’ only object was
to facilitate the exercise of his royal power and to strengthen his
authority at the time when the league of the Public Weal was about to be
founded with the object of dismembering his kingdom. Therefore it was
greatly to his interest to be rapidly informed of all the unforeseen
events which might arise. Is it necessary to add that it never entered
into the thoughts of Louis XI to institute a public service in his
kingdom by which private individuals might profit in any way?
The exact date when the posts began to be placed along the high-roads
is not known. According to Nicholas de la Mare even the name of the
first postmaster-general is not given; but, says he, as Louis XI’s
intention was to confide this office to a person of credit, intelligent
and capable, it was probably given to the grand equerry of France, whose
functions had much more in common with the new charge; the grand equerry
had, it is true, the king’s messengers already under his orders. The
same author says, in another passage, that the king’s messengers became
so numerous that it was found necessary to create a controller of king’s
messengers (edict of October, 1479). In the absence of proofs to the
contrary, we believe that it was Robert Paon who, in October, 1479,
received the double charge of postmaster-general of foot runners and
of controller of king’s messengers, and was thus invested with supreme
authority over the growing institution.
The runners or king’s messengers were, properly speaking, cabinet
messengers, by which denomination they were afterwards known. They
followed the court and had to be always in readiness to carry the
king’s despatches. They already existed previous to the decree of 1464,
and it is to be supposed that the towns or villages that they passed
on their route were bound to provide them with relays of horses. This
we understand from the statute of St. Louis, of December 13th, 1254,
which we have already quoted, and from a statute of Philip V, surnamed
the Tall, of February 11th, 1318, which gives the royal couriers the
qualification of king’s messengers (_chevaucheurs_). The edict of 1464
officially sanctioned the existence of the couriers or messengers and
made them into a regular and definite body. Their number, fixed at
first at 230, had at the death of Louis XI risen to 234. But it is very
probable that this number comprised the officers who kept horses for
the service of the king, or _maîtres coureurs_, that is to say king’s
messengers who went by the name of _chevaucheurs_.
The _maîtres coureurs_ were established at distances of four leagues
along the high-roads, keeping four or five horses of light build and
suited to go at a gallop; they received, besides their wages, a fee for
each horse which they supplied to people holding a passport from the king
with the seal of the postmaster-general. They were also, as we have said,
qualified as king’s messengers, because they were not only charged with
keeping horses, but also with carrying letters and parcels of the king,
the governors, the lord-lieutenants of the provinces, and other superior
officers. It is not probable, however, that the _maîtres coureurs_
actually carried the king’s despatches from post to post, as it is
certain that the court despatches were conveyed by special messengers or
_coureurs de cabinet_.
Later on the king’s messengers lost the title of _chevaucheurs_, which
placed them in a relatively inferior position to the _coureurs de
cabinet_, but what they lost in dignity they gained in profits. At first
the new institution profited only the king, his commissioners in the
provinces, or personages accredited to foreign courts. Even the terms of
the edict, which defined the attributes of the postmaster-general, have
from the outset given a political character to this high post.
The postal organisation created by Louis XI comprised two distinct postal
systems--a system of relays, embracing the most important towns and
served by the king’s messengers on horseback; a secondary postal system,
branching off at certain points from the former and including secondary
localities. The latter system was covered by messengers “sworn and
received in the court of parliament.”
This organisation is justly considered as having been the starting
point of the modern post, but the state did not as yet look upon itself
as being the servant of the public. Private letters continued to be
transported almost exclusively by university messengers. But these,
even in the time of Louis XI, were in competition with the royal
messengers already in existence at that time, as is testified by the
numerous inquiries and proceedings relating to disputes of this nature
mentioned in the voluminous collection of manuscripts known as the _de
Toisy_, which is in the Bibliothèque Nationale. These disputes were
prolonged in the sequel with a vivacity which increased as the interests
engaged became more considerable by reason of the incessant progress of
circulation and correspondence.[n]
[Illustration]
FOOTNOTES
[56] [In reality, Louis only sanctioned what was already lost. He
acceded to conditions as they were, awaiting his time to overthrow them.
The peace was a part of his political game. Needless to say he had no
scruples as to the carrying out of any terms of the treaty that could
advantageously be avoided.]
[57] [Enguerrand de Monstrelet[q] ends his famous chronicle with an
account of the death of the duke of Burgundy. He says: “On the 12th day
of June, in the year 1467, the noble duke Philip of Burgundy was seized
with a grievous malady, which continued unabated until Monday, the 15th,
when he rendered his soul to God, between nine and ten o’clock at night.
When he perceived, on the preceding day, that he was growing worse, he
sent for his son, the count de Charolais, then at Ghent, who hastened
to him with all speed; and on his arrival, about mid-day of the Monday,
at the duke’s palace in Bruges, he went instantly to the chamber where
the duke lay sick in bed, but found him speechless. He cast himself on
his knees at the bedside, and, with many tears, begged his blessing,
and that, if he had ever done anything to offend him, he would pardon
him. The confessor, who stood at the bedside, admonished the duke, if
he could not speak at least to show some sign of his good will. At this
admonition, the good duke kindly opened his eyes, took his son’s hand,
and squeezed it tenderly, as a sign of his pardon and his blessing. The
count, like an affectionate child, never quitted the duke’s bed until
he had given up the ghost. May God, out of his mercy, receive his soul,
pardon his transgressions, and admit him into Paradise!”]
[58] [Legeay,[k] in his _Histoire de Louis XI, son siècle, ses exploits,
etc._, defends Louis against the charge of having incited the Liègeois to
revolt, in opposition to most of the other French historians.]
[59] [King Charles the Simple. He died in prison at Péronne in 929.]
[60] [“As soon as the king saw the duke enter his chamber, he could not
conceal his fear, and said to the duke, ‘My brother, am I not safe in
your house and in your country?’ And the duke answered, ‘Yes, sire; and
so safe that if I saw an arrow coming towards you, I would put myself in
front to shield you.’ And the king said to him, ‘I thank you for your
good will, and will go whither I have promised you; but I pray you that
peace may be from this time sworn between us.’”--OLIVIER DE LA MARCHE.[h]]
[Illustration]
CHAPTER XI. CHARLES VIII AND LOUIS XII--THE INVASION OF ITALY
There never was a period of history in which the efforts of
individual minds were more important in their effects than the
present. The inventions of one or two artisans on the banks
of the Rhine presented mankind with the art of printing; an
idea, a theory, springing up in the manly mind of Columbus, led
to the discovery of another hemisphere; a whim conceived by
Charles VIII, who, from hearing tales of Cæsar and Charlemagne,
suddenly became desirous of turning conqueror, had more effect
on the destinies of Europe than all those occult causes of
human progress which the philosopher of history loves to
fathom.--CROWE.[c]
CHARLES VIII (1483-1497 A.D.)
[Sidenote: [1483-1515 A.D.]]
We now enter the epoch when, according to the usual computations of
modern writers, the Middle Ages are passing away and modern times are
being ushered in. Just at the time when Charles VIII is preparing to
establish a new order of things in Europe by invading Italy, Columbus
is sailing out into the western seas to discover the New World. This is
the age when the new forces of the Renaissance are making themselves
felt in Italy, and, to a less extent, all over Christendom. It is
the age of Lorenzo de’ Medici in Florence, and of Leonardo da Vinci
and Michelangelo; of Alexander VI, the Borgia, and of Savonarola; of
Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain; and of Edward V and Henry VII in
England. It is an age of new ideas, an age of discovery. The seat of the
new culture is Italy; the centres from which the explorers start out
in quest of new worlds are Spain and Portugal. France has little share
in either of these movements; but she shares with the other peoples a
spirit of unrest; and this spirit is to manifest itself in the attempt
of Charles VIII--Charles the Little as Brantôme[b] calls him--and his
immediate successors to make the conquest of Italy. A fatal ambition
that! It will cost France the lives of two millions of her best men; it
will gain her little else than bitter experiences. But the vain ambition
of a selfish prince never yet learned to count the cost; and in this case
it must be admitted that the dominant spirit of the people is in full
accord with the reckless ambition of the kings.
This idea of extending the domain of France was the one thought that
dominated the life of Charles VIII, after he came to maturity. Yet the
first years of his reign were devoted to a very different purpose. During
these earlier years, as we shall see, the weakly youth was under the
control of his sister Anne de Beaujeu, who had inherited many of the
traits of Louis XI, and who carried forward the policy of that crafty
monarch to its logical conclusion when she succeeded in bringing the last
of the great feudal fiefs under full control of the crown, through the
marriage of her brother Charles with Anne of Brittany. Thus the earlier
years of Charles VIII must be regarded, thanks to the influence of his
sister, as continuing and perfecting that policy of the unification of
France which Louis XI had carried forward so efficiently. The events
of the reign, therefore, divide themselves into two sharply defined
periods. The first of these, during which Charles though nominally king
is really subordinate to the influence of his sister, will now claim our
attention.[a]
_The Rule of Anne de Beaujeu_
Charles VIII, born June 30th, 1470, had entered his fourteenth year
when his father died, and he was consequently of age by the terms of
the famous ordinance of Charles V: it was therefore not necessary to
establish a regency. But the government of the realm and the direction of
council had been given to the first occupant, as the struggle which was
to begin between the ambitions of the rivals could not be foreseen. The
king, feeble of body, gave no hint of precocious talents; his minority in
fact if not in law seemed as if it should be prolonged beyond the usual
term.
[Sidenote: [1483-1484 A.D.]]
The true danger to the state lay less in public unrest, so easily
appeased by the reforms partially foreseen and indicated by Louis XI
himself, than in the pretensions of the princes of the blood to take
again their baleful power which had been crushed under Louis XI. The late
king, in dying, had confided his son and his authority to his daughter
Anne and his son-in-law Peter de Bourbon, sire de Beaujeu. His widow,
Charlotte of Savoy, trembling still at the memory of her tyrannical
spouse, made no objection to this exclusion. She survived Louis only a
few months. Anne of France had laboured in advance to gain the confidence
of the young king, whom she inspired with a timid deference, and had
attached to herself the greater part of the councillors as well as the
leaders and servitors of Louis XI. Anne, who was then twenty-two years
old, was the only one of the children of Louis XI who resembled him. She
had the tenacity, the dissimulation, and the iron will of the late king,
who had once said of her with his usual caustic manner that she was “the
least foolish of women, since there were no wise women.” She proved that
there was at least one, since she continued with admirable sagacity and
energy all that was national in the plans of Louis XI. “She would have
been worthy of the throne by her prudence and courage, if nature had
not denied to her the sex upon which empire devolves.” This opinion of
a contemporary is also that of posterity. Anne’s husband, a man of ripe
age, of upright judgment, and a certain practical capacity, was but the
first and most useful instrument of his wife. Through him she hoped to
conciliate the other princes of the house of Bourbon, the duke de Bourbon
and the archbishop of Lyons, brothers of the sire de Beaujeu; the old
count de Montpensier, their uncle; the count de Vendôme and his son,
their cousins; and the admiral de Bourbon, their bastard brother. The
natural rival of Anne and her husband was the other son-in-law of Louis
XI, the first prince of the blood, the duke Louis of Orleans, whose
birth gave him the place of honour in the council. The name of Orleans
awakened sad memories. But Duke Louis was hardly twenty-one years of
age; repressed during the whole of his first years under the iron hand
of his terrible father-in-law, bound from his infancy to a woman worthy
of esteem for her gentleness and kindness, but whose exterior repulsed
every other sentiment, it was not ambition to which he devoted the first
days of his liberty. He emancipated himself more like a schoolboy than
a prince, and broke rein only to throw himself body and soul into a
whirl of pleasure. Women, gambling, tournaments, horses, the pleasures
of the table, left him little inclination for the cares of politics. He
preferred courting women, breaking lances, jumping ditches “fifteen feet
wide,” to discussing royal edicts. Meanwhile he shared with the Bourbons
the semblance of power, and his cousin, Dunois, son and heritor of the
great count de Dunois, a most able man, and accustomed to diplomatic
intrigues, spared nothing to draw him in the direction of duty. All who
remained of the members and allies of the royal house had hastened to sit
in council, and the first letters and edicts of Charles VIII are signed
by several among them.
Some acts of indispensable reparation and amends signalised the beginning
of the new régime. All who had suffered, all who had been offended,
oppressed, justly or unjustly, under the late king--that is to say,
nearly everyone in the kingdom--urgently demanded justice. The people
clamoured loudly for the abolition of duties, and the punishment of the
“wicked councillors” of Louis XI. A host of great noblemen, the count du
Perche, the children of the duke de Nemours, the count de Bresse, the
brother of the last count d’Armagnac, the prince of Orange, and very many
others asked, some of them liberty, others restitution of property which
had been confiscated. The duke, René de Lorraine, came in his turn to
reclaim the duchy of Bar, and the county of Provence as the heritage of
his mother. Claims threatened to go very far.
From the 22nd of September, all alienations of the royal domain, made for
the benefit of either the church or private individuals, were revoked.
The necessity for that measure could not be contested. The count du
Perche was liberated from the cruel prison where he languished, and
recovered the duchy of Alençon, confiscated but lately in spite of the
just title of his father. The duke John de Bourbon, who had endured
many affronts and vexations from Louis XI during the last years, was
created lieutenant-general of the realm, and invested with the office of
constable, vacant since the death of the count of Saint-Pol. This was
the most powerful of the princes of the blood, by reason of the extent
of his domains, but his infirmities and love of repose made him hardly
equal to active participation in the government; his sister-in-law
asked of him only the support of his name. The count de Dunois acquired
a large pension with the governorship of Dauphiné, while the duke of
Orleans became lieutenant-general of the Île-de-France, Picardy, and
Champagne. The prince of Orange and the count de Bresse were again put
in possession of their lands. This was only justice--at least to the
prince of Orange, since the Treaty of Arras had stipulated reciprocal
amnesty for all events relating to the war of the Burgundian Succession.
The duke René of Lorraine, thanks to the support of the duke de Bourbon
and Madame de Beaujeu, who expected to make use of the hero of Nancy
against the princes of Orleans, obtained the restitution of Barrois,
without re-embursement of the sums for which the king held Bar in pledge,
a company of one hundred lancers, and 3,600 francs annually for four
years, “during which time the claims of the count of Provence should
be investigated.” Madame Anne did not intend to go further than the
concession of Barrois and wished only to gain time in regard to Provence.
According to feudal law, the pretensions of René were justified: female
succession was so thoroughly admitted in Provence that two women had
successively brought this county into the two houses of Anjou; but
another law, more conformable to reason and the nature of things, tending
to be substituted in place of feudal law, was that of French nationality
recognised and accepted by Provence.
These favours accorded to the princes were accompanied by harsh measures
against the most odious of the ministers of the former reign. Oliver le
Dain, count de Meulan, was sacrificed to popular vindictiveness, and
Doyat to the resentment of the duke de Bourbon, whose follower he had
been, and whom he had gravely offended. Oliver was condemned to death for
various crimes, among others for having secretly killed a prisoner whose
wife had sacrificed her honour to him as the price of her husband’s life;
the barber count de Meulan was hanged on the gibbet of Montfaucon, and
his properties were given to the duke of Orleans. Doyat was beaten with
rods at the pillory of the market-place, and lost both his ears, after
having had his tongue pierced by a hot iron--punishment reserved for
blasphemers and calumniators. One of his ears was cut off at Paris, the
other at Montferrand, where he had filled the office of royal bailiff.
The physician Coitier was relieved from the loss of his lands and castles
by a ransom of 50,000 crowns.
Public sentiment demanded more than the punishment of a few wretches.
The princes, divided among themselves, little known to the people, who
had for them hardly any affection or fear, felt the impossibility of
maintaining the despotic rule of Louis XI, and the necessity of having
recourse to a national authority to obtain the obedience of the masses.
The people would not have failed to resist universally the continuation
of arbitrary taxation. This law reacted with irresistible force against
the existing tyranny: a thousand voices repeated that “no king nor lord
had the power to levy one denier on his subjects and on the revenues of
his domain without the concession and consent of the people.” Comines,
the admirer of Louis XI, devotes a whole chapter to the discussion of
this principle, which he declares not only equitable but essential to
the prosperity of states, and regrets profoundly that the late king had
not respected it. “In England,” said he, “the kings can undertake no
great enterprise, nor levy any subsidies without assembling parliament,
which equals the three estates, and which is a just and holy thing.”
And he declares that “men who enjoy credit and authority without in the
least meriting them” are the only ones who fear the great assemblies,
since they will through them be known for the little they are worth. The
king’s council, on the proposition of the duke of Orleans, decided the
convocation of the states-general at Tours, for the 5th of January, 1484,
in spite of the outcries of some persons “of small importance, and little
virtue, who said it was a crime of _lèse majesté_ to talk of assembling
the estates, and would tend to diminish the authority of the king.”
The friends of “Madame” as Anne of France was called, and those of the
duke of Orleans, were agreed upon that important question. Each of the
two parties which began to outline itself in the council hoped for the
assistance of the estates against the other.
The record of state of 1484, drawn up by one of the most trustworthy
members of the order of the clergy, Jean Masselin, official of the
archbishopric of Rouen, has been preserved to us. It is the most explicit
account we possess of the national assemblies of France, before the
sixteenth century. It is of great interest, and it preserves for us
the memory of most important incidents. Nevertheless the states of 1484
became less remarkable for their actions than for their mode of action,
that is, innovations practised in the system of election. Louis XI, in
1468, had already overturned the old form of the estates, but without
substituting definitely a new form in the place of the old. The daughter
of Louis XI, and the members of the council who nursed the project
of the late king in the midst of a feudal reaction, effaced from the
elections all trace of feudality, completing and regulating the work of
Louis. Before Louis XI, the estates were composed only of the immediate
feudatories of the king--prelates, barons, representatives of the _bonnes
villes_, and the ecclesiastical or lay committees held by the crown.
In the estates of 1484 the elections were made after a uniform
regulation, by bailiwicks and _sénéchaussées_, by purely administrative
divisions; the electors were convoked not as feudatories of the king, but
as subjects of the realm; and for the first time the peasants, at least
the free peasants, were called upon to take part in operations of first
degree; they sent delegates from the villages to the lesser bailiwicks
or provostships, where the electors of the third degree were chosen, who
in the head-quarters of the bailiwick elected the deputies of the third
estate. The social importance of such a change needs no commentary. There
is now a real third estate, embracing the whole body of the people. The
peasant is no longer the chattel of the lord of the manor, the appendix
of the fief; he is the equal of the citizen, he is a member of the third
estate.
This is not all; the same spirit of unity and equality, at least
relative, is manifested in the regulation applied to the two privileged
orders. There, all vote directly and not by triple degree; and not only
do the lower clergy elect representatives, but the bishops are admitted
to the estates only when they have the votes of the ecclesiastical order,
and not by virtue of their episcopal title. In the nobility as well, no
great baron is member of the estates unless elected by the noblemen. The
three orders, under this régime, appear like three superimposed nations,
in which equality reigns. It is here the great difference appears between
the democratic spirit of France and the aristocratic spirit of England.
The only exceptions to the new rules were those provinces which were
administered by annual provincial estates, and which continued to
choose their deputies in their provincial estates, without resorting
to popular assemblies of three degrees. This is true at least of
Languedoc, and resulted, as a rule, in a veritable political inferiority
of those countries formerly so much in advance of the others, their
provincial estates retaining an oligarchical character in presence of a
transformation wholly democratic.[g]
The king’s minority and the factions at court seemed no unfavourable
omens for liberty. But a scheme was artfully contrived which had the
most direct tendency to break the force of a popular assembly. The
deputies were classed in six nations, who debated in separate chambers,
and consulted each other only upon the result of their respective
deliberations. It was easy for the court to foment the jealousies
natural to such a partition. Two nations, the Norman and the Burgundian,
asserted that the right of providing for the regency devolved, in the
king’s minority, upon the states-general; a claim of great boldness,
and certainly not much founded upon precedent. In virtue of this, they
proposed to form a council, not only of the princes, but of certain
deputies to be elected by the six nations who composed the states. But
the other four, those of Paris, Aquitaine, Languedoc, and Languedoïl
(which last comprised the central provinces), rejected this plan, from
which the two former ultimately desisted, and the choice of councillors
was left to the princes.
A firmer and more unanimous spirit was displayed upon the subject of
public reformation. The tyranny of Louis XI had been so unbounded that
all ranks agreed in calling for redress, and the new governors were
desirous at least, by punishing his favourites, to show their inclination
towards a change of system. They were very far, however, from approving
the propositions of the states-general. These went to points which no
court can bear to feel touched, though there is seldom any other mode of
redressing public abuses--the profuse expense of the royal household, the
number of pensions and improvident grants, the excessive establishment
of troops. The states explicitly demanded that the taille and all other
arbitrary imposts should be abolished; and that from thenceforward,
“according to the natural liberty of France,” no tax should be levied
in the kingdom without the consent of the states. It was with great
difficulty, and through the skilful management of the court, that they
consented to the collection of the taxes payable in the time of Charles
VII, with the addition of one-fourth, as a gift to the king upon his
accession. This subsidy they declare to be granted “by way of gift and
concession, and not otherwise, and so as no one should from thenceforward
call it a tax, but a gift and concession.” And this was only to be in
force for two years, after which they stipulated that another meeting
should be convoked. But it was little likely that the government would
encounter such a risk; and the princes, whose factious views the states
had by no means seconded, felt no temptation to urge again their
convocation. No assembly in the annals of France seems, notwithstanding
some party selfishness arising out of the division into nations, to have
conducted itself with so much public spirit and moderation; nor had that
country perhaps ever so fair a prospect of establishing a legitimate
constitution.[j]
The most serious question which the estates had to determine was that
of regulating the composition of the council and deciding to whom
the care and education of the king should be confided. The deputies
would have liked to conciliate the princes without clashing with them.
However, in the course of examining the various projects submitted to
them, they were led to inquire if the states-general were invested with
the constituent power. The opinion that this was so was shared by the
most eminent members of the assembly, especially by those belonging to
the order of the clergy, and had for interpreter an eloquent deputy of
the Burgundian nobility, the sire de la Roche. He demonstrated that no
absolute, fundamental rule for the administration of the kingdom during
the minority or childhood of the king existed in France; that neither was
the right of the princes in such circumstances in any way definite or
precise. In consequence he maintained that it was for the nation, that
is for the estates, to constitute the government in moments of crisis.
He presented a theoretical and philosophic analysis of the principle of
the sovereignty such as might be laid down in the schools; then he passed
in review the history of preceding assemblies and showed that several of
them, called together under exceptional circumstances, had exercised a
genuine constituent power.
In spite of the weight of this justly celebrated speech, the estates
shrank from the danger of entering into a struggle with the council
and the princes. They preferred to attempt an amiable conciliation of
the different claims. It was not easy to come to an understanding even
on this basis; for each day brought new difficulties. “It was,” says
Masselin, “the seven-headed hydra. Cut one and two grow in its place.”
Finally it was agreed that the duke of Orleans should have the first
place at the council and the presidency in the young king’s absence; the
duke de Bourbon and the sire de Beaujeu the second and third places; that
the other princes of the blood should have the right to take their seats
there after them; that all the existing councillors should be retained
and that twelve new councillors, taken from the six bureaux of the
estates, should be added to them.[k]
_The Struggle with the Duke of Orleans_
[Sidenote: [1484-1488 A.D.]]
The discontent of the duke of Orleans was not appeased by the decision
of the states. He was a handsome, frank, amiable man, not naturally
inclined to be turbulent; but as first prince of the blood, and heir
presumptive to the throne, it was derogatory to his pride and spirit to
remain tranquil, while deprived of all influence by a woman. Dunois, son
of the famous bastard of Orleans, was his chief friend and councillor--a
man as fond of intrigue, apparently, as his stout sire had been of
battle. The dukes of Lorraine and Bourbon seemed at first inclined to
join him, but both were won over by the lady Anne; Bourbon, the elder
brother of the lord of Beaujeu, being made constable. Orleans tried
every expedient to shake the authority of the king’s sister. He sought
to make himself popular in the capital, and to bring its citizens to
declare in his favour. He tried the parliament also; but its president,
La Vaquerie, replied that it was not their interest or duty to interfere
in a private struggle for power. Orleans was soon after closely pressed
by La Trémouille at the head of a superior army, and obliged to make
submission; Dunois being banished to Asti, a town in Italy which the duke
of Orleans inherited from his grandmother, Valentine of Milan.
Such a forced submission could not conduce to a lasting peace. Dunois
soon afterwards returned from exile. There was a plot for carrying
off the king, which failed, and the duke of Orleans was obliged to
take refuge in Brittany. The gay and fascinating manners of the French
prince entirely won the good will of Francis, the reigning duke. He was
without male heirs; and his daughter, as inheritor of the duchy, was a
rich prize for an ambitious prince. It is said that the duke of Orleans
became a suitor for the hand of Anne, and that Duke Francis favoured his
pretensions.[61] But the native nobles of the province were jealous of
the duke of Orleans and of his influence with their prince. They leagued
with the lady of Beaujeu against both; and a French army, supported
by a great body of Bretons, soon after besieged the dukes of Brittany
and Orleans in Nantes. There were two other pretenders to the hand of
the heiress of Brittany: the sire d’Albret, a rich lord of Gascony,
into whose family the crown of Navarre had passed from that of Fox.
The duke of Orleans, in prosecuting his own suit, affected to support
this competitor. The other was Maximilian, king of the Romans. A timely
succour sent by this prince obliged the French to raise the siege of
Nantes; and the lady of Beaujeu betraying a disposition to conquer the
duchy, and to garrison and appropriate its towns, the Bretons became
suspicious, abandoned her, and resumed their allegiance to the duke.
The war nevertheless continued. The troops on both sides met at St.
Aubin, and a battle ensued. The French were commanded by La Trémouille;
the prince of Orange and duke of Orleans led on the Bretons. The French
gendarmerie, having routed the cavalry opposed to them, took the Bretons
in flank and rear, and routed them. The duke of Orleans and the prince
of Orange were both taken prisoners. They were startled to perceive a
confessor enter their tent in the evening. La Trémouille, who saw and
enjoyed their consternation, reassured them by observing that it was only
for the inferior rebels to clear their consciences and prepare for death.
[Sidenote: [1488-1491 A.D.]]
An accommodation followed this defeat. The duke of Brittany made
submissions, and survived but a short time. He was the last duke of the
province, which now descended to his daughter Anne. There was another
sister, who, as she died soon after, need not be more than mentioned.
Affairs were now as unsettled as ever. The count d’Albret, seconded by a
strong party of Bretons, who above all things aimed at the independence
of their duchy, pushed his suit with the young heiress. The addresses
of this aged noble could not be agreeable to a princess of fourteen.
The duke of Orleans, the object of her predilection, was in prison. The
armies of France were invading the duchy, and it behoved her to espouse
a prince capable of defending her dominions. The resolution was taken
that she should be married to Maximilian, king of the Romans, and the
ceremony was accordingly performed by proxy; the archduke’s ambassador,
to conclude it, putting a naked leg into the couch of the young duchess.
Hitherto the aim of king Charles and his regent sister had been to
conquer the duchy by force of arms, laying claim to it as a male fief.
Charles had been long betrothed to Margaret of Austria, Maximilian’s
daughter, who was then receiving her education in the French court, and
awaiting the age of nubility. The stubbornness of the Bretons, however,
made the lady of Beaujeu despair of her project. The ever-ready Dunois,
in order to make his own peace and procure the liberty of the duke of
Orleans, proposed that Charles should espouse the young duchess himself,
and thus unite Brittany to the kingdom. Charles and his sister instantly
entered into this scheme. The king, with a kingly generosity, began by
setting the duke of Orleans, his secret rival, at liberty. This the
monarch did without consulting his sister; nor was his generosity abused,
for the duke remained ever after faithful to him, and even seconded his
purpose of espousing Anne. Dunois, on his side, laboured to render the
duchess less hostile to France. Anne still held with all the faithfulness
of a wife to Maximilian, to whom she was nominally betrothed. An
ostensible act of compulsion was deemed requisite to overcome her
reluctance. A royal army besieged her in Rennes. One of the conditions of
the capitulation was that she should espouse the king of France.[c]
[Illustration: CHARLES VIII
(From an old French engraving)]
The marriage festivities which united Brittany to France took place at
Langeais-Touraine. The pope declared the former marriage of Anne and
Maximilian null and void, and the new queen was conducted to Paris to be
crowned. All these negotiations took place in the greatest secrecy, as
it was desired to conceal them from the envoy of Maximilian. The king of
the Romans was doubly insulted. Charles VIII took from him a princess
whom he had already married by proxy, and sent back to him his daughter
Margaret, educated in Paris, since the Treaty of Arras, and destined to
the throne of France. When the time came to declare the marriage, it
was shown that Maximilian had been the first to violate the Treaty of
Arras, that he had never ceased to make war against France for fourteen
years, and that he had not respected the conventions of Frankfort or
Plessis-les-Tours.
[Sidenote: [1491-1492 A.D.]]
The contract was made with much artfulness. Charles VIII and Anne gave up
all their rights, their reciprocal pretensions which it was useless to
pronounce upon. It was stipulated that these rights should be combined
in the persons of the children born of this marriage; that if there were
none, and the king should die, the duchess could not contract a second
marriage except with his successor or the heir presumptive to the crown,
on pain of losing the duchy.
The province demanded the maintenance of its privileges, which were
confirmed (declaration of July 7th, 1492). It preserved its particular
estates, its supreme court of justice, which sixty years later became
the parliament of Rennes, and its independent administration. It was
assimilated in every respect with Dauphiné, Languedoc, Provence, and
Burgundy, but it ceased to be a sovereign state, to become like those
countries one of the members of the body of the monarchy. It is annoying
that we cannot to-day follow, step by step, the artful conduct of the
duchess of Bourbon. However that may be, she had at that time achieved
her ends, and scored a complete triumph. Brittany was joined permanently
to France; the princes were reconciled, in a definite manner this time.
Finally Charles VIII arrived at man’s estate, and having nothing to fear
of internal conspiracies, could defy those of foreign countries.
Meanwhile the coalition, which had shown too little activity to hinder
the reunion with Brittany, was too strongly opposed to it to accept it
without protest. A war might be expected, or at least great diplomatic
difficulties. Henry VII, Maximilian, and Ferdinand the Catholic protested
in common against an act which the latter called an unheard-of and
execrable fraud. They agreed to attack France on her different frontiers.
But the king of England was in a measure the only one to act. Ferdinand,
for the last twelve years, was directing all his forces against Granada,
and in spite of the triumph of his officers, who raised the Christian
flag there in February, 1492, he could undertake nothing against France,
unless it was to continue the hostilities on the frontier of Roussillon,
which had never been interrupted. Maximilian, obliged to submit to
Hungary, and to make war against the Turks, could the less wage war on
the frontier of Artois, as he continued to be hampered by the ill will
of the Flemish towns. Henry VII, on the contrary, had full liberty of
action, and, what made him more dangerous, he never acted on calculation
or on personal resentment. It was the national sentiment of England which
protested against the aggrandisement of France. The English rightly
regarded the union of Brittany with the rest of the monarchy as a fatal
blow to their hopes of some day regaining Normandy and Guienne. Henry
VII therefore declared war against Charles VIII; however, in yielding to
the enthusiasm of his subjects, he took very little part in it; for, if
the historian of his reign, the chancellor Bacon, is to be believed, he
proposed alone to obtain the subsidies from parliament by flattering
national vanity, and to sell to France as dearly as possible his
recognition of the acquisition of Brittany.
[Sidenote: [1492-1493 A.D.]]
Charles VIII had to oppose the English regular army, already increased,
whose augmentation had brought taxes up to the figure of 2,300,000
livres. He collected all his supporters and obliged the principal towns
of the realm to furnish him with men-at-arms. He called to his court also
Perkin Warbeck, whom the Yorkists of England represented as a pretended
son of Edward IV and a rival of Henry VII.
The latter passed the Channel, but not before October, after long delays,
and besieged Boulogne, which would have strengthened the position on
the continent which Calais already assured him. Arriving under the
walls of the fortress, he found there much stronger resistance than he
had expected; he received no aid from the Netherlands, and he heard
that the Spaniards had begun separate negotiations with Charles VIII.
These reasons decided him to sign a treaty at Étaples in the month of
November. He contented himself with the payment of large sums by France
as indemnity for the English troops which had served in Brittany, or as
amends for the rupture of the Treaty of Picquigny and interruption of the
payment of subsidies promised to Edward IV by Louis XI.
Charles VIII had undertaken separate negotiations with Ferdinand the
Catholic. Roussillon and Cerdagne were objects of litigation between
the crowns of Aragon and France, which had already lasted more than
thirty years. Charles VIII finished by purely and simply restoring those
two provinces, without even exacting reimbursement of the sums lent by
Louis XI. The treaty was signed at Barcelona in January, 1493. France
felt a certain astonishment at this abandonment of pretensions, on the
subject of which all former offers of compromise had been refused. But
notwithstanding that the question of law was not a simple one, and that
the different acts of Louis XI had greatly complicated it, Charles VIII
considered that, in buying the friendship of Spain at such a price, he
would attain the dissolution of the coalition, assure to himself the
possession of Brittany, and finally open an unobstructed road into Italy.
He then made preparations to force the realm of Naples to respect the
rights inherited by Louis XI through the princes of the house of Anjou.
The king of Spain promised at Barcelona not to hinder his march to Italy
in any way, and to furnish no aid to Ferdinand of Naples, who was of a
bastard branch of Aragon, and even to aid the pretensions of France at
the court of Rome, sovereign of the Two Sicilies.
There remained still Maximilian and his son, the archduke Philip, then
fourteen years of age. Although these princes were for the time not
redoubtable, a treaty with them presented more difficulties, as they
had been more personally offended, and in sending back the princess
Margaret it was not possible to preserve her dowry, stipulated in the
Treaty of Arras, that is to say of Artois and Franche-Comté. Already
disturbances had broken out in the two provinces. Arras, which remembered
the cruelties of Louis XI, had driven out her French garrison the day
after the Treaty of Étaples. Franche-Comté became insurgent in its
turn. Charles VIII by a last treaty signed May 23rd, 1493, at Senlis,
restored the counties of Burgundy, Artois, Charolais, and Noyon. He
contented himself by sequestrating the fortresses of Hesdin, Aire, and
Béthune, until the day when Philip, having reached his majority, paid
him homage; and to stipulate the restitution of Tournay, Mortagne, and
St. Amand, towns of the ancient domain of the crown. Maximilian finished
by accepting these conditions, which after all he was not in a position
to refuse; for although his ambition was cosmopolitan, the extensiveness
of his dominions and the multiplicity of interests which called him
every year to a new point of Europe never permitted him to pursue to
the end any enterprise of long duration. His thoughts were now turning
towards the imperial throne, which the death of his father Frederick III
allowed him to mount a few months later. The French government wished
that, following usage, the Peace of Senlis should be guaranteed by the
principal towns of Flanders, Hainault, and Artois, such as Ypres, Namur,
Arras, and Valenciennes.
Historians have often reproached Charles VIII with having signed
oppressive treaties at Étaples, Barcelona, and Senlis, and above all to
have partly restored by the last the power of the house of Burgundy,
which had been previously weakened by the Treaty of Arras. Here was in
effect a sad offset to the acquisition of Brittany; but the choice had to
be made between Anne and Margaret, between Brittany and Franche-Comté. If
Charles VIII made a blunder it was at least more excusable than that of
Louis XI, who had never been placed in the same position.
Charles VIII has also been reproached with having sacrificed the frontier
and French-speaking provinces in seeking aggrandisement and conquests in
a country so far removed as Italy. The conquests in Italy were bound to
be ephemeral. It had been necessary in the peninsula to battle for half a
century without retaining in the end a single inch of ground.
Much more would have been attained by extending the northern frontier,
which was too near Paris, and by attaching again to France the provinces
which gravitated around her. But it was forgotten that Charles VIII, in
sending back Margaret, had no claim worth considering on Franche-Comté or
the Netherlands; that he had consequently on this side no motive for war,
and that he could not undertake such a war without running foul of the
empire and of allied Europe.
Italy offered no such dangers. If prudence had, until now, hindered him
from interfering in her revolutions, Charles VIII, having no longer
any interior questions to regulate, was in a much better position than
his father or grandfather had ever been. It is thus the treaties of
1492 and 1493 should be understood. In France they were judged rather
unfavourably, which was natural, since they stipulated concessions and
restitutions; but they were not as has been said the result of the
heedless enthusiasm of a young king, sacrificing the manifest interests
of his realm to the passion for foreign conquest.[k]
_Charles VIII in Italy_
As already suggested, the acquisition of Brittany marks the conclusion
of the first period of the reign of Charles VIII. The king was now of an
age to shake off the leading-strings of his sister. He was old enough to
have a policy of his own, and he was soon to show that he had one. It was
a policy dominated by a single thought--the conquest of Italy. In putting
that sinister policy into effect, Charles VIII inaugurated a new era in
French history; a new era, indeed, in the history of all Europe. France
was now the most closely unified kingdom in all Europe; it aspired to
become an empire.
The idea of the invasion of Italy was no doubt suggested by the fact that
certain claims upon the kingdom of Naples had been bequeathed to Louis
XI by Charles II of Anjou. Solicited by disaffected Neapolitans and by
Lodovico Sforza, duke of Milan, Charles VIII now determined to go to
Italy and make good his hereditary claims.[62][a]
The thought of an expedition to Italy was most seductive to a prince as
young as Charles VIII, nourished on traditions of chivalry, in which the
study of antiquity was mingled with souvenirs of Cæsar and Alexander. It
was equally seductive to the nobility, the army, and the whole country,
as flattering to the national vanity. Since the Crusades no great foreign
enterprises had been undertaken by the kings in the name of the nation.
The campaigns of Du Guesclin in Spain, of John the Fearless at Nicopolis,
of the princes of Anjou at Naples, had been only private expeditions
and had not involved France. The war in Italy reopened the era of great
conquests.
In addition, this was an important epoch in French history as well
as in that of all Europe. The old political system was upset. The
empire was nothing more than a name at the head of what was still
called Christianity. France seeking aggrandisement, the result was the
prevalence of an idea of a necessary equilibrium among the great powers.
This idea was not entirely new. The growth of France under Louis XI,
the marriage of Maximilian of Austria to Mary of Burgundy, had already
conduced to its formation. The powers observed how the rôle of diplomacy
gradually grew, and conquests formed their necessary counterpoise in
coalitions.
Without going back to reminiscences of the brother of St. Louis, and the
protectorate assumed by France over the Guelfs of Italy two centuries
before, it may be well to recall the expeditions, undertaken by the
princes of the younger branch of Anjou, to seize the crown of Naples.
Louis II, René, John of Calabria, had, one after the other, claimed
a succession regarded in France as a legitimate inheritance. René of
Lorraine would again have followed that example in 1486, if the news that
the great Angevin barons were treating with the house of Aragon had not
stopped him, almost at the moment of departure. Men’s minds were occupied
with what Comines called “the smoke and glories of Italy.” Louis XI had
exercised some sort of a protectorate over the different states of the
peninsula, governing Savoy and Montferrat by French princes; all-powerful
at Milan; refusing the sovereignty of Genoa, which was offered to him;
intervening as mediator in the dispute between Rome and Tuscany. Pius II
has already stated that the greater part of the princes and people of
Italy were more French than the French themselves, _Gallis Galliores_.
The Orient was also thought of. The prediction of a crusade renewed
by Pius II and Sixtus IV, after the entrance of Muhammed II into
Constantinople, the terror with which the Turks inspired Europe, the
growth of their conquests which had not slackened, the recent heroic
defence of the walls of Rhodes by Pierre d’Aubusson, grand-master of
the knights of St. John, carried back public thoughts to memories
whose vividness time could not alter. Although times had changed, the
brilliancy and glory of the Crusades had not been forgotten. It was
indeed all that tradition had kept up after two centuries. Moreover the
military strength was much greater, and inspired another confidence than
that of former times. If the route of Charles of Anjou were followed,
the Ottoman empire could not be attacked before being sure of a base of
operations at Naples, and it was hoped that the Greek Christians would
rise at sight of the banners of the new crusaders.
In reality the oriental question had been asked; Europe was interested in
solving it. Preparations were being made for the expedition into Italy.
Each time that great events take place, public opinion is excited and the
dominant ideas of the times reveal themselves in one way or another. It
was now the first period of the Renaissance, in which the savants caused
a perpetual confusion of antiquity and modern society.
Ancient memories had therefore a peculiar influence. Guillaume de
Villeneuve, officer and historian of Charles VIII, Jean Bouchet, author
of _The Life of De la Trémouille_, Comines himself, in the latter part of
his memoirs--all abused ancient history, from which they borrowed a long
list of comparisons; they even took occasion to compare the crossing of
the Alps by the king to the similar feats of Hannibal and Cæsar.
Italy has always exercised a great and natural fascination, due to the
beauty of the land and its cities, the splendour of its civilisation. The
presence of so many monuments of antiquity, the study and appreciation
of which had begun, had so much attraction for the French nobility, whom
the Italians haughtily regarded as “barbarians,” but who were far from
meriting this title. The French had indeed an exaggerated idea of a
country less known than we should be inclined to suppose, since nations
were far from having the same intercourse that they have at the present
day.
Charles VIII was, according to the Italians, who have portraits of
him, small, of insignificant appearance, and expressed himself with
difficulty. The desire for pleasure seemed to dominate him, and he is
reproached with caring only for the chase, for dogs, falcons, and horses.
The Tuscan and Venetian envoys at his court refused for a long time to
believe that he could ever become a conqueror. They recognised, however,
that he showed a certain natural ardour, when he assisted regularly at
the reunions of his council, and reserved the decisions to himself.
Nearly two years were consecrated to the necessary preparations. The
enterprise, without being officially announced, was no secret to anyone.
The Italian states were engrossed in it, and, with the exception of
Milan, sent embassy after embassy to the court of France, to spy upon its
actions, divine its intentions, and avert a project which menaced them
all. The envoys, Florentines and others, whose correspondence has come
down to us, showed infinite ability and genius in a series of delicate
and difficult negotiations. But nothing proves more clearly the weakness
of the government they were trying to serve than their tendency to
intrigue, their perplexity, their suspicion, combined with self-deception
and the duplicity of some of them.
[Sidenote: [1493-1494 A.D.]]
Charles VIII, on his side also, sent envoys beyond the Alps. He wished
to isolate the king of Naples, to entangle the different states in an
offensive alliance against him, or at least obtain their neutrality,
but a neutrality favourable to free passage over their lands. Above
all he scrutinised closely the court of Rome. As he had had his rights
to southern Italy examined by the parliament and the parliament had
declared them valid, he demanded a similar declaration from the pope,
sovereign of the crown of Naples. Alexander VI could not be relied upon
very strongly--a Spaniard by birth whose election had been opposed by the
French; but it was hoped to frighten him by threatening to uphold his
personal enemies, who were many, and by demanding a general reform in the
church, a reform equally desired by France and demanded by Maximilian and
Ferdinand the Catholic.
Much as it was hoped also to find allies and resources in Italy, nothing
was neglected for raising a large army, well equipped, and which should
be sufficient in itself. Men-at-arms were not wanting. The difficulty was
in organising them--the artillery, the wagons, and the ships necessary.
Money was also needed, and to raise it every means in usage in such a
case was employed. The pensions paid to the king were reduced for half
a year; the treasurers were made to give advances; different loans were
obtained, and an assessment was made on the banks of Milan and Genoa, and
on Italian merchants; finally a particular tax was made on the clergy,
under the form of a forced loan, as well as on the states of Languedoc,
and several cities of the realm. All these negotiations required time,
and were not concluded without difficulty. Paris and the other cities
presented remonstrances, from which the Italian ambassadors concluded
that the war was not popular and would not materialise.
The pecuniary difficulties, the inevitable length of the preparations,
the boldness of the enterprise, the uncertainty of the political
situation in Europe gave rise to a natural opposition. Several of the
former councillors of Louis XI, such as M. d’Argenton (Comines), and the
sire de Graville, grand admiral, expressed their doubts and fears. The
duke de Bourbon saw with regret the abandonment of the prudent policy
which he had followed until then, but neither he nor the duchess was any
longer master of the government. Des Querdes maintained that, if it were
desirable to make conquests, it would be better to look for them in the
Netherlands rather than in Italy. Meanwhile the opponents generally held
themselves in reserve, and sought rather to moderate the enthusiasm than
to combat it.
The general rendezvous was to be at Lyons. Des Querdes, who was to have
the command, died before the departure. The king resolved therefore to
place himself in person at the head of his troops. He arrived at Lyons
in the month of April, 1494; but preparations were not completed, and
he had to wait several months before entering upon the campaign. Ships
were wanting, and it became necessary to construct a certain number
for transporting one division of artillery. At last the departure took
place in the month of September, although no tents, pavilions, nor other
necessaries were at hand.[k]
[Sidenote: [1494-1495 A.D.]]
The details of the incidents of this memorable tour[63] have already
been given in our history of Italy, and need not be repeated here. We
have there seen how Charles VIII was permitted to enter Florence as the
friend of the people, yet came with all the presumption of a conqueror;
how he went to Rome and was there received with the outward semblance
of friendship by Alexander VI; and how he entered Naples and took the
nominal kingship of that realm without striking a blow. It will be
recalled that while the king lingered in Naples, antagonistic princes
gathered in the north of Italy, and attempted to intercept the French
army on its return. The French army, fatigued from its long march, and
only about nineteen thousand strong, with five or six thousand servitors
or guards of the transport in its train, met the Italian army of at least
thirty thousand fresh and well-supplied men in the duchy of Parma near
the castle of Fornovo on the right bank of the Taro, on the 5th of July,
1495.[a]
It was a brief but sharply fought battle with alternations of success
and defeat for both armies. The two chief officers of the royal forces,
Louis de la Trémouille and Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, sustained without
wavering the shock of troops far more numerous than their own. “At
their throats--at their throats!” cried La Trémouille after the first
counter, and his three hundred men fell upon the enemy with sufficient
force to break their ranks. During the heat of the battle the French
baggage wagons were attacked by the _stradiots_, a Greek corps recruited
and paid by the Venetians. “Let them alone!” shouted Trivulzio to his
troops; “their ardour for pillage will make them forget everything else
and we can the more easily overcome them.” At one time the king was in
advance of the main body of his guard and had neglected to see if they
were closely following. He approached to within a hundred feet of the
marquis of Mantua, who, seeing him so slimly accompanied, charged at him
with all his cavalry. “It is not possible,” says Comines,[d] “to strike
harder blows than were given on both sides.” The king, closely pressed
and surrounded, defended himself valiantly against those who sought to
take him. The bastard Matthew de Bourbon, his brother-at-arms and one of
the bravest knights of the army, rushed forward twenty steps in advance
of the king to protect him, and had just been taken prisoner when a large
body of the royal troops came to the rescue of both and delivered them
from peril. It was in this engagement that Pierre du Terrail, Chevalier
de Bayard, at that time scarcely twenty years of age but destined later
to achieve such fame, performed his first feats of arms.[64] He had two
horses killed under him, and took one standard, which he presented to
the king, being rewarded by the latter after the battle with a gift of
500 crowns.[e]
[Sidenote: [1495-1498 A.D.]]
As a result of the battle Charles VIII and his troops were allowed to
continue their march unmolested; but their return to France partook
somewhat of the nature of a retreat. It was not to be expected that a
territory so distant as Naples could be held subordinate to the French
crown without difficulty; and while Charles himself and his followers
no doubt regarded the expedition as a great success, it was really in
the sober view of posterity a most lamentable enterprise. It was fraught
with all manner of deplorable sequels, as we shall see. But of course
the French people could not be expected to anticipate future events, and
for the moment they were able to welcome their king back to Paris as a
conqueror and a hero.[a]
_Death of Charles VIII_
The two years which elapsed from Charles’ return over the Alps to his
death were marked by no event of importance. The chief expenditure and
amusement that occupied him seemed to be the building and ornamenting
of the castle of Amboise, for which he had brought with him eminent
architects and artists from Italy. His sons perished in infancy one after
the other; the name of the last, Charles Orlando, marking the favourite
studies and thoughts of the monarch. In the spring of 1498 a game of
ball, which interested the king, was played in the fosse of the castle
of Amboise, where he resided. Charles, an affectionate husband, brought
the queen to witness it. Passing in haste through the low archway of a
gallery, he struck his head somewhat violently against it; for the moment
the blow did not seem to affect him, but soon after, he was seized with a
stroke of apoplexy, and died at the early age of twenty-seven. “Charles,”
says Comines,[d] “was of a small person, and little understanding; but a
better creature was not to be seen.”[c]
By the death of Charles VIII, the direct line of Valois was ended, and
the crown was transferred to the collateral branch of Valois-Orleans,
descended from Louis I, duke of Orleans, second son of Charles V.
LOUIS XII, “THE FATHER OF HIS PEOPLE” (1498-1515 A.D.)
The transmission of the crown of France to another branch of the royal
house had been effected without agitation and without an obstacle;
there were whispers, but in hushed voices, round Madame de Bourbon, the
ancient enemy of duke Louis, that that prince had forfeited his rights by
bearing arms against the crown of France in the Breton war; but no one
ventured to exhibit such ideas abroad, and the new king, by his prudent
and generous conduct, prevented any chance of disturbance. It would not
be becoming and to the honour of the king of France to avenge the wrongs
of the duke of Orleans--such was the maxim which guided the first acts of
Louis XII.
[Sidenote: [1498-1499 A.D.]]
He sent for the sire Louis de la Trémouille, that renowned captain who
had made him prisoner at the battle of St. Aubin, and confirmed him in
all his offices, rank, pensions, and advantages. He declared that he
would maintain every man in his full possessions and rights, and refused
to bear in mind which of the late king’s servants had persuaded Charles
VIII in the latter part of his life to keep the first prince of the blood
in a species of exile. Finally he invited Madame Anne of France and her
husband Duke Peter de Bourbon to come to him at Blois and lavished on
them marks of esteem and favour of every kind; his generosity towards
them even appeared to many people to go beyond the boundaries prescribed
by the interests of the state. Louis XI, in giving his daughter Anne in
marriage to the sire Peter de Beaujeu, had stipulated in the contract
that if Peter should inherit property from the ducal branch of the house
of Bourbon (which actually happened), those great domains, although
originally feminine fiefs, should return to the crown in case Peter
should die without male heirs. Now Duke Peter was old and had only
a daughter named Suzanne; the last great lordship (_seigneurie_) of
central France was thus about to be merged in that royal domain which had
successively absorbed all the great fiefs. The king allowed himself to
be drawn into sacrificing this final result of the labours of Louis XI,
and by letters patent of the 12th of May, 1498, he annulled the ancient
contracts and treaties which excluded Suzanne from the paternal fiefs.
The marriage of Suzanne with her cousin Charles de Bourbon, who like
herself was still a child, secured that the heritage should not pass from
that house. The parliament of Paris, accustomed to defend the permanent
interests of the crown against the kings themselves, only enregistered
the royal letters after a resistance of several months.
[Illustration: LOUIS XII]
Louis XII showed no less benevolence to the good towns than to the
princes and old servants of Charles VIII; he promised the citizen
deputies who had come to pay him their respects to give his attention
to improving the condition of the poor people; he published a severe
ordinance for the repression of robberies and violences committed by the
soldiers; he diminished the taxes (_tailles_) by two hundred thousand
livres, and dispensed Paris and the whole kingdom from the _don de joyeux
avènement_. Louis XII kept the promises of the opening of his reign: his
well-directed energy, his desire to do good did not fail. The frivolous
and libertine young prince had become a humane king, moderate, devoted to
his duties, an economical administrator, who kept a careful watch over
the public wealth, the protector of order and of justice, the equitable
rewarder of merit and honesty: unfortunately he had little initiative
and little breadth of mind, and the facility of his disposition placed
him to an inordinate degree under the influence of those he loved. It is
true that he often had the good sense and the good fortune to bestow his
affections in safe keeping: his principal minister and his best friend,
George d’Amboise, archbishop of Rouen, who had participated in his evil
fortune and who shared, not to say absorbed his power, was certainly
worthy to govern the king and the kingdom, if the internal administration
alone is taken into consideration; but abroad the blind and often
reprehensible policy in which George involved Louis afforded a melancholy
compensation for the services rendered at home.
_Marriage with Anne of Brittany_
The first months of the reign of Louis XII were filled with an important
matter which touched no less the most precious interests of the realm
than the private life of the king. By the marriage contract of Charles
VIII and Anne of Brittany the husband and wife had combined their
respective rights over Brittany to the advantage of the survivor; this
duchy therefore returned to the widow and was once more separated from
France. Madame Anne of Brittany had already returned to her town of
Nantes and had been reinstated in full possession of her sovereignty.
It is true that another article of the contract, in order to obviate
this separation, required the duchess not to marry again except with the
successor of Charles VIII or the heir presumptive to the crown; but for
twenty-two years the king had been married to the second daughter of
Louis XI and had no son. Louis resolved to push aside the obstacle which
separated him and the widowed queen and set to work to obtain a divorce
from the deformed Joan of France in order to marry the fair sovereign
of Brittany. It has been universally repeated, on the faith of certain
writers, contemporaries of Louis XII, that the duke of Orleans and the
duchess Anne had been previously attached to one another and that, during
the Breton war, Louis had secretly contended with the other suitors for
the hand of Anne. This tradition is confuted by a simple comparison
of dates: when the duke of Orleans withdrew to Brittany in 1484, the
princess was only eight years old: she was but twelve when he was taken
prisoner at St. Aubin-du-Cormier. What does seem certain was that
Landois, the intriguing favourite of Francis II, had even then suggested
to Duke Louis the idea of a divorce for purely political objects, and
that Duke Francis II had secretly promised his daughter to the duke
of Orleans. Be that as it may, the duke of Orleans, after leaving his
prison, figured without apparent repugnance in the negotiations which
brought about the union of Charles and Anne and was even one of the
king’s witnesses at Rennes and Langeais.
[Illustration: ANNE OF BRITTANY
(From an old French engraving)]
Whilst Charles VIII was still alive nothing indicated that the duke and
the queen had feelings of tenderness for one another; they were even at
one time on very bad terms--on the occasion of the death of the little
dauphin Charles Orlando, the death which had made Louis heir to the
crown. Anne bore a grudge against Louis for the slight sympathy he had
shown for her in her maternal grief. Finally Anne gave expression to a
somewhat theatrical despair on the death of Charles VIII, a husband very
far from faithful, but gentle and affectionate; she was the first queen
of France who wore black for mourning; hitherto the widows of kings had
dressed in white, which circumstance had procured for them the title of
“white queens” (_reines blanches_). Anne assumed black as the symbol of
constancy, because it cannot fade.
In spite of these demonstrations of a showy grief, the proud and
ambitious Anne graciously received the first advances of the new king
who proposed to her that she should not leave the throne of France,
and Louis had little difficulty in persuading her to sign on the 9th
of August a promise of marriage to be fulfilled as soon as might be.
The king, without loss of time, had presented to Pope Alexander VI an
application for the dissolution of his marriage. The circumstances were
favourable: the Roman pontiff wished to withdraw his son, the cardinal
De Valence (Cesare Borgia), from the ecclesiastical state that he might
make him a secular prince; he had asked for him the hand of a daughter
of Frederick, king of Naples. Frederick refused this shameful alliance.
Alexander in his anger threw himself on the French side and undertook not
only to authorise the king’s divorce but to second his plans in Italy on
condition that Cesare Borgia should have his share. A bull of the 29th
of July charged three ecclesiastical commissioners to inquire into and
take proceedings on the monarch’s application. Two of these delegates,
the cardinal De Luxemburg and the bishop of Albi, brother of George
d’Amboise, were devoted to the king. Louis recognised this service by
investing Cesare Borgia with the counties of Valentinois and Diois in
Dauphiné; besides this he gave him a company of one hundred lances and
a pension of 20,000 livres and promised to help the holy see to subdue
the petty princes of Romagna. George d’Amboise received the cardinal’s
hat from Alexander VI: such was the earnest of the odious alliance which
formed the ineffaceable stain on the reign of Louis XII. The excuse of
the public advantage, the necessity of gaining over the pope in order to
procure the divorce, closed the eyes of Louis and induced him to take
the first steps; he was then unable to stop and almost his whole reign
presented the aspect of two faces offering a strange contrast, the one of
uprightness, good sense, and humanity at home; the other of injustice,
violence, and folly abroad.
Joan of France, who had not been crowned with her husband and had not
been accorded the honours of a queen, was summoned to appear on the
30th of August at the deanery of Tours before the pope’s commissioners.
There is something sad and ignominious about the details of this trial.
Joan, resigned beforehand to a fate too clearly foreseen, defended
herself solely from a sense of duty: the dissolution of the marriage was
pronounced on the 17th of December and the repudiated wife withdrew to a
convent at Bourges.
Louis XII now only awaited the necessary dispensation of consanguinity
to marry Anne of Brittany: Cesare Borgia, whom the king had enticed into
France in order to make him an instrument and who had arrived at the
court in semi-royal state, was endeavouring to extort fresh favours from
Louis before complying with his wishes; the bishop of Ceuta, one of the
pope’s commissioners, revealed to the king that the dispensation had been
signed by Alexander VI and was now in Cesare’s possession. Louis made
ready to take further proceedings; Cesare then produced the bull which he
had no further interest in keeping; but the bishop of Ceuta died a few
days later--poisoned.
In the château of Nantes, three weeks after the granting of the divorce,
Louis XII married the widow of Charles VIII: the marriage treaty, signed
the 6th of January, 1499, by the chief nobles of France and Brittany,
was much less advantageous to the crown than the contract of Langeais
between Charles VIII and Anne. Anne and her subjects, having in view the
re-establishment of Breton independence,[65] required that the duchy of
Brittany should be destined to the second child, male or female, to be
born of the future marriage or, if the married couple had only one heir,
to the second child of that heir; if the duchess died childless before
the king, Louis was to retain Brittany during his life, but after him the
duchy was to return to the next heirs of Madame Anne. As yet it was but a
feeble bond which attached Brittany to France. The king swore to preserve
to Brittany all its rights and liberties, its own administration judicial
and political, its council, parliament, chamber of accounts (_chambre
des comptes_), general treasury, and assembly of the three estates for
the reform of the customs, tolls, and the levy of subsidies; he promised
that benefices should only be given to natives according to the exclusive
choice of the queen; that no new jurisdiction might be established and
that free episcopal electors should be defended against the pretensions
of the pope.
The whole conduct of Louis had shown that he desired this alliance
equally as man and king: whether he had or had not loved the queen during
the lifetime of Charles VIII he bore her during the whole period of their
union a constant and unique affection which formed a singular contrast to
the vulgar and licentious amours of his youth. It was doubtless by a kind
of delicate flattery that contemporary writers traced back the origin
of the king’s passion to the childhood of the heiress of Brittany. The
Breton duchess, who had the obstinacy rather than the sensibility of her
race, made but a feeble response to this tenderness and took advantage of
it to draw her docile husband into deplorable political errors.[g]
_Foreign Affairs_[66]
The domestic and internal affairs of the kingdom thus regulated, Louis
turned his views towards Italy. He was eager to renew the successes and
avenge the defeats of his predecessor. He had not only to support the
claims of the house of Anjou upon Naples, but to maintain his own private
right to the duchy of Milan. The Sforza, soldiers of fortune, had usurped
the duchy, and founded their right on the marriage of the first Sforza
with Blanche, the natural daughter of the last Visconti. Louis XI had
allied with them, and had refused to permit the duke of Orleans to insist
upon his heritage. No sooner did the latter become Louis XII than he
assumed the title of duke of Milan, and prepared, by arms and alliances,
to prosecute his claim.
Lodovico Sforza had usurped the duchy, and secured it by poisoning his
nephew: he was peculiarly hateful to the French, from having been the
first to entice Charles VIII into Italy, and afterwards the first to
betray him. His crimes made him equally odious to his countrymen. The
pope was won over by the gift of the duchy of Valentinois, which the king
gave to his notorious son, Cesare Borgia. The Florentines were in the
French interest, and the Venetians leagued with Louis in order to share
the spoils of Lodovico. In short, when a French army entered the Milanese
in the summer of 1499, it met with no resistance. The duchy submitted
almost without a blow, and Lodovico fled to Innsbruck, to his only ally,
Maximilian.
[Sidenote: [1500-1502 A.D.]]
Lodovico returned with an army in the ensuing year. The capital rose
in his favour. Trivulzio, who had been left governor of the duchy,
was besieged in the town-house, and was only rescued by the audacious
gallantry of some sixty knights, his followers. The French were obliged
to evacuate the province. At the first tidings of the insurrection, La
Trémouille marched from France to succour Trivulzio. Lodovico sought to
intercept this aid by posting himself at Novara. But when the outposts
of both armies touched, the Swiss in Lodovico’s service learned that
their comrades in the French army were better paid and treated. On the
eve of action these mercenaries declared their intention of deserting to
the French. Lodovico Sforza used the strongest entreaties to dissuade
them; but finding them determined, he merely begged not to be delivered
to the enemy. How was he to escape from Novara, in which he was in a
manner besieged? The Swiss consented to allow him to mingle in their
ranks, clothed as one of their soldiers. Their treachery, however, or
the vigilance of the French, discovered the unfortunate Lodovico in the
Swiss ranks, as they marched out of Novara. He was taken, and conveyed to
France, where he was confined in the castle of Chinon until he died. Thus
Louis subdued for the second time the duchy of Milan.
The conquest of Naples still remained to be achieved; but the present
enmity of Maximilian king of the Romans rendered it inexpedient to
undertake at present so distant an expedition, which would leave Milan
exposed to the hostility of the Germans. This inability to conquer,
joined with the impatience to possess, caused Louis to commit an
egregious blunder. He formed an alliance with Ferdinand king of Spain,
to divide between them the kingdom of Naples, to the exclusion of its
reigning monarch, who was of the illegitimate race of Aragon. Louis was
to have the better or northern half of the kingdom, the city of Naples
included. Ferdinand, who merely wanted a pretext to obtain a footing in
the peninsula, and introduce forces, was to content himself with Apulia
and Calabria. Accordingly, Ferdinand sent Gonsalvo de Cordova, and Louis
despatched Stuart d’Aubigny, each to conquer their respective portions,
which they effected; the reigning monarch at first confiding in Gonsalvo,
who of course betrayed him. Frederick of Naples, being driven from his
capital and kingdom, fled first to Ischia and thence to France, where
Louis gave him the duchy of Anjou as a compensation for the loss of his
crown.
Louis now turned his views towards the Venetians. They had obtained
Cremona, Bergamo, Brescia, the eastern territories of the duchy of Milan,
as the price of their co-operation against Sforza. The king envied them
this portion of his duchy, as they hated and feared the newly grown power
of a foreign monarch in Italy. He endeavoured to bring Maximilian of
Austria to join in an alliance against them; and a treaty was concluded,
by which Maximilian promised the investiture of the duchy of Milan to
Louis. Maximilian’s grandson Charles (afterwards emperor) was to marry
the princess Claude, the daughter of Louis. The designs, however, which
the monarchs entertained against Venice were interrupted by the bad
faith of Ferdinand of Spain, which began to manifest itself in Naples.
The agreement by which this kingdom was partitioned between two rival
powers, without any fixed line of demarcation, was necessarily rather
a source of war than a seal of peace. A great portion of the country’s
revenue proceeded from the tax on the herds of cattle, which were yearly
collected in the plains. Quarrels arose about this, and about the limits
of the provinces; and war soon broke out between Gonsalvo and the duke de
Nemours, who was viceroy for the French.
[Sidenote: [1502-1503 A.D.]]
He was now leagued with the Borgias--the father, the execrable pope
Alexander VI; his son, Cesare Borgia, one of the heroes of Macchiavelli.
They betrayed Louis at every turn; crushed and murdered his friends.
Still the French king temporised; and in a treaty concluded with them at
this period, he agreed to sacrifice to them several of the independent
nobility of Italy--among others, the Bentivoglios and the Orsini. One
of the causes of this blindness in Louis was the care which the pope
took to win the favour of the cardinal D’Amboise, the French minister,
whom he cajoled in a manner which was afterwards practised on Wolsey, by
flattering him with the hope of succeeding to the popedom. The French
were at first the strongest party in Naples. Gonsalvo retired before
D’Aubigny, and shut himself in Barletta. There were several combats: one,
in which the brave La Palisse was taken; another, of thirteen French
against thirteen Italians, in which the Italians had the best, although
their enemies assert that the advantage was won by treacherously stabbing
the horses of the French knights. The Spanish monarch had recourse to
artifice, his usual weapon. Seizing the opportunity of his son-in-law the
archduke Philip’s travelling through France, he proposed a new treaty
to Louis, by which Naples was to be brought as the princess Claude’s
dowry to young Charles, the grandson of Ferdinand and Maximilian. Louis
XII gladly and confidently agreed to these proposals. He relaxed in
his exertions for reinforcing his army in Naples, while Ferdinand made
use of the interval to send potent succours to Gonsalvo. The continued
hostilities and successes of this captain, notwithstanding the pacific
declaration and arrangement of his master, awakened Louis from his supine
confidence. But it was too late. D’Aubigny was beaten by the Spaniards
and taken prisoner at Seminara in Calabria, the scene of one of his
former victories. On the same day of the ensuing week, the hostile
commanders, Gonsalvo and the duke de Nemours, met at Cerignola. It was
towards evening, and the Spaniards threw up an entrenchment before their
position. The duke de Nemours would not tarry. He ordered an instant
attack, which was at first successful. He himself, leading on another to
support it, was slain by a bullet from an arquebuse; and his followers
failing in the assault, a rout ensued, in which the French army were
for the most part dispersed. Naples surrendered to Gonsalvo. Its castle
was taken by mining--a mode of offence invented in these wars. Shortly
afterwards, the fortress of Gaeta was the only post in the kingdom that
held for the French.
Louis raised armies to attack Ferdinand in the Pyrenees and in Italy; but
equally without result. The reign of the Borgias was immediately after
brought to a tragical close. The pope and his son had invited several
rich cardinals, their intimates, to sup with them in a vineyard. The
Borgias intended to poison them; and Cesare Borgia sent some bottles of
medicated wine, under the especial care of a domestic, to the spot. The
pope arrived first; he was thirsty, and called for drink. The poisoned
wine was poured out for him; and his son, coming in at the moment,
partook of it. Pope Alexander expired soon after, and his son’s life
was saved only by means of antidotes and a strong constitution. Great
intrigues agitated the conclave. An aged and infirm pope was elected by
way of compromise. In another conclave the cardinal D’Amboise was not
more successful. An Italian prelate was preferred, who soon displayed
his imperious, ambitious, and warlike spirit, under the name of Julius
II. Cesare Borgia had contributed to his election, in return for a
promise of protection; and Julius showed his gratitude by arresting
Borgia immediately afterwards. He escaped, however, and fled to Gonsalvo,
who, receiving him with friendship equally insincere, put an end to
the career of this prince of intrigue by sending him prisoner to Spain.
In the meantime the French army remained inactive for want of a chief.
Gonzaga had been driven from the command by the taunts of the French: the
marquis of Saluzzo succeeded him, but with no more success. The campaign
served but to display the valour of the brave Bayard, who alone defended
the passage of a bridge against a body of Spaniards for a considerable
time. Gonsalvo was everywhere successful; and Gaeta, the last fortress of
the French, surrendered in a panic.
[Sidenote: [1503-1506 A.D.]]
The tidings of this ill fortune, and especially of the loss of Gaeta,
so affected Louis that he fell into a dangerous illness. He was tended
with exemplary affection by his queen, Anne of Brittany. But that prudent
princess, seeing his death imminent, despatched much of her valuables
to be conveyed down the Loire to Brittany. The heir to the crown, young
Francis, Count d’Angoulême, then inhabited, with his mother, the château
of Amboise. The marshal De Gié was the chief counsellor and influential
man of this embryo court. Over zealous for the interests of the future
king, and deeming Louis past hope, De Gié stopped the valuables of the
queen as they descended the Loire past Amboise. Anne never forgave the
insult. Louis recovered, and the marshal De Gié was pursued by the
vengeance of the queen for years. He was tried; and it is a great proof
of the improvement of the judicature that he escaped with life from so
powerful an enemy. This circumstance increased the hatred between the
mother of Francis, Louise of Savoy, and Queen Anne. By the last treaty
with Maximilian it had been agreed that his grandson Charles should marry
Claude, the daughter of Louis, and with her inherit the Milanese. Some
time previous to the last illness of the king, Maximilian had sent an
embassy to conclude and enlarge this treaty. The monarch was at the time
sorely vexed by his disasters in Naples, and greatly enraged against the
fickleness and bad faith of the Italian powers. Above all he was incensed
against Venice; and in order to be avenged on this proud republic, he
granted to Maximilian all that he asked. The cessions then made or
stipulated by Louis are so enormous as to be incredible. The heirs of his
daughter Claude by Charles of Luxemburg were to possess not only Milan,
but the duchies of Burgundy and Brittany, thus dismembering the monarchy
of France, and reducing it almost by one-half.
De Seyssel,[h] the minister and biographer of Louis, excuses his
conduct on this occasion, by saying that the king merely wanted to gain
Maximilian’s aid against the Venetians, and that he never intended
to fulfil these conditions. It seems much more probable that these
stipulations were owing to the influence of Anne of Brittany; to the
love of that queen for her own daughter, whose exaltation she preferred
to that of France; and at the same time to Anne’s hatred of Louise of
Savoy, and of her son Francis, the heir to the throne. Every Frenchman
was shocked and terrified at the prospect of these provinces being
conveyed to a foreign power. Louis himself, listening to the advice
of his counsellors, was struck with remorse at the folly and want of
patriotism which characterised such measures. The states-general were
called together: they drew up a strong remonstrance against them, and
supplicated that the princess Claude should be given in marriage to
Francis. The king consented to this. But so long as Anne of Brittany
lived, she never allowed the marriage to take place.
Maximilian was of course extremely wroth on learning that the king of
France and the assembly of the nation refused to fulfil the treaty.
He resolved to attack the French in Italy. Genoa about this time had
rebelled against Louis. Louis, however, conquered and reduced it to
submission. Maximilian was too late to support the insurrection. The
Venetians, then allies of the king, barred the passage of the Austrians
into Italy. They defeated Maximilian, and compelled him to purchase a
treaty, resigning his conquests. They concluded it without awaiting the
consent of Louis, or allowing him to derive from it any advantage.
[Illustration: FRENCH PEASANT, REIGN OF LOUIS XII]
[Sidenote: [1506-1509 A.D.]]
This was a new grievance added to the many already entertained against
these republicans by the French. Maximilian was of course ready to join
against them. Pope Julius was at variance with them on account of Faenza,
and other towns, the wreck of the Borgian usurpations, which they held.
Between these powers and Ferdinand of Spain was formed the famous League
of Cambray for the destruction of Venice. It was called famous from
having nearly attained its aim--a distinction which could be applied to
few treaties of the time. In raising his army for this enterprise the
king made an important improvement in his levies. He began to mistrust
the Swiss, whose mercenary and turbulent spirit was scarcely recompensed
by their character for courage. Therefore, although he hired a corps
of them to the number of 6,000, he at the same time endeavoured to
resuscitate the French infantry. Louis XI had abandoned the good custom
of training the French peasants to arms, which had so contributed to
the victories of Charles VII. The despot dreaded a national army. The
armies of Charles VIII, and hitherto those of Louis XII, were composed of
mounted gentlemen, who formed the cavalry, and of hired Swiss, or perhaps
a few Gascons, for infantry. This was the principal reason of the first
success and subsequent defeats of the French in Naples. Cavalry force, so
superior when in good condition, is liable to be unhorsed, and is more
easily disorganised than infantry. Louis now levied a body of infantry in
France of from 12,000 to 14,000 men. To give spirit and respectability
to this force, he induced his bravest captains, Bayard, Molard, and
Chabannes, to fight on foot and command these new brigades; and it
required all his influence to make them submit to such degradation. The
French cavalry amounted to 12,000 men. With this army he marched against
the Venetians. Their army, nowise inferior, was commanded by the count
of Pitigliano, whose policy accorded with the orders of the senate to
avoid a battle. Alviano, the Venetian general second in command, risked
an attack in despite of this at Agnadello. An action took place, in
which the count feebly supported his lieutenant. Louis, who fought in
the thickest of the engagement, was victorious. The Venetian army was
utterly routed; and the French king, advancing to the brink of the
lagunes, enjoyed the satisfaction of sending from his cannon some vain
shots against the discomfited but still unsubdued queen of the Adriatic.
This success dissolved the league. Julius II, having obtained possession
of the towns which he coveted from the Venetians, leagued with them
against Louis; and a war, or a succession of skirmishes, ensued.
[Sidenote: [1509-1512 A.D.]]
Louis sent a powerful army against the pope, under the command of Gaston
de Foix, duke de Nemours, his sister’s son, then twenty-two years of age.
The battle of Ravenna ensued, and the French were victorious. The sack of
Ravenna was almost the only fruit reaped by this signal victory. Julius
II, undaunted by defeat, refused to yield. He raised up the English and
the Swiss against Louis, who threatened with invasion from both these
countries. Maximilian let loose upon Milan his namesake, Massimiliano
Sforza, son of Lodovico; and the Swiss espoused the youth’s pretensions.
The cantons were enraged against Louis for attempting to substitute
French soldiers for them. When he sent La Trémouille to negotiate with
them, they demanded that 15,000 Swiss should be yearly hired, and paid
by France in peace and war. They demanded also the Milanese for Sforza,
and the abolition of the Pragmatic Sanction for the pope. It is said
they also resented some injurious words spoken by Louis. Whatever was
its cause, their resentment was but too well seconded by their force.
The French under La Palisse and Trivulzio were driven out of the
Milanese, and even Genoa again declared itself independent. The feats
of Bayard during this unfortunate campaign might be made to fill pages,
but they availed nothing. Haute-Navarre was at the same time wrested by
Ferdinand from Jean d’Albret. The province has ever since remained to the
Spaniards.[c]
_Internal Affairs_
[Sidenote: [1509-1510 A.D.]]
Neither the war of Genoa nor that of Venice had interrupted that
universal movement of internal improvement in France, which, begun under
Charles VIII, had gone on and increased under Louis XII. The foundation
of this progress lay, above all, in the vitality of the nation itself;
next in the good supervision given to the legislation, administration,
and finances by the appointed members of council and parliament; but to
the prime minister was due the merit of having given to all this activity
a united impulse, and to the king the merit of zealous participation
therein.
During the winter of 1509 Louis visited a large portion of his kingdom,
and did much good in regard to the execution of justice. Never at any
epoch of its history had France enjoyed so much prosperity; the twenty
years’ absence of all civil disorders, the maintenance of order by
an absolute and vigilant administration, the security of people and
property, the protection given to the weak against the stronger, to
the labourers against the nobles and soldiers, bore marvellous fruits.
The population increased rapidly, the cities in their ancient limits
constantly expanded into large suburbs; hamlets and villages rose up
as if by enchantment in the woods and waste places. The last vestiges
of the fatal wars that had depopulated France were completely effaced,
and Seyssel, a contemporary writer, states that a third of the kingdom
had again been put under cultivation during the last thirty years. The
produce of the land increased enormously; the excise taxes, tolls, fees,
etc., had increased more than two-thirds in many places, and the revenue
of the royal estate, augmenting like the private ones, allowed the king
to carry out his enterprises without oppressing the nation.
Industry and commerce received no less an impetus, communications were
endlessly extended, and merchants made less of going to Rome, Naples,
or London than formerly to Lyons or Geneva. The luxury and elegance of
buildings, furniture, and apparel displayed the progress of the arts and
public wealth. The condition of all classes was improved, and the poor,
unaccustomed to see the sovereigns take such care of their interests,
were deeply grateful to the king and his minister. “Let George do as he
thinks right,” had become a popular saying expressing the confidence
placed in Cardinal Amboise. Louis XII received striking testimonies of
the affection of the people on a journey he took from Paris to Lyons
through Champagne and Burgundy in the spring of 1510. “Wherever he went,
men and women assembled from all parts, following him for three or four
leagues, and when they were able to touch his mule or his dress, or
anything belonging to him, they kissed their hands with as much devotion
as they would show to a reliquary.” (Saint-Gelais.) The Burgundians
displayed as much enthusiasm as the ancient French.
Cardinal George did not reap his share in the popular homage. The
inseparable companion of Louis XII had not accompanied him on this
journey; whilst the health of the king was improving somewhat, that
of the minister was rapidly declining. George, weakened by gout and
other infirmities, had not the strength to resist an epidemic, called
“whooping cough” by contemporary historians. Louis XII found him dying
at Lyons, whither the cardinal had gone to await the king, and had only
the consolation of receiving the farewells of his “faithful friend.”
Cardinal Amboise expired May 25th, 1510. He had not yet reached the age
of forty-five. He was the first of those cardinal-ministers, almost
kings, who have played so large a part in the history of the monarchy.
The experiment was not encouraging, for the duties of Cardinal Amboise
were altogether foreign to his ecclesiastical dignity, and his faults, on
the contrary, largely proceeded from it. His dream of the papacy and his
dealings generally with the college of cardinals and the holy see were
very detrimental to the interest and the honour of France.
His home administration saves his memory. He does not shine therein by
disinterestedness, but that was never the distinguishing virtue of great
ministers, and is scarcely compatible with monarchical government. He
left a vast fortune, amassed rather at the expense of Italy than of
France; his use of it at least pleads for his memory. Many touching
anecdotes attest his goodness of heart; the fine remains of those
buildings mutilated by the hand of the Revolution show us the use to
which his wealth was put. Like all men of superior talents, whether
princes or ministers, who have left their mark upon the destinies of
nations, George was the centre of the art movement, and diffused a
vivifying influence around him. One of the most beautiful periods of
French art belongs to his ministry; it has been incorporated too long
with the reign of Francis I, who during his best years merely continued,
whilst enlarging it, and who took the first step towards decadence when
he departed from it.
The artistic history of France in the sixteenth century may be divided
into two periods: in the first, Italian art modifies French art by
some happy innovations, and incites it to a healthy emulation; in the
second, it stifles and absorbs it. In the first period, the Italian
artists summoned to France concur with native artists in raising
French monuments; in the second, the Italianised French build Italian
monuments--vanquished Italy conquers her conquerors.[g]
_Last Years of Louis XII_
[Sidenote: [1513-1515 A.D.]]
The internal prosperity of France contrasted strangely with the
conditions of interminable warfare that characterised the external policy
of Louis XII. The seat of these wars was not confined to Italy. In 1513
France became embroiled with her old enemy, England.
Henry VIII of England invaded France in concert with Maximilian. He laid
siege to Thérouanne. The French succeeded in throwing supplies into the
town; but being attacked suddenly some days after by the English and
imperialists, they were seized with a panic and fled. This has been
called the battle of Spurs. Bayard, who refused to join in the flight of
his compatriots, was made prisoner after a gallant defence. Thérouanne
was the sole conquest of Henry.[c] But almost simultaneously the French
arms were checked in Burgundy and in Italy. In fact, the year 1513 has
been pronounced (by Dareste[k]) one of the most disastrous in French
military annals. Yet no very important political sequels were attached to
these reverses.[a]
In January, 1514, Louis lost his queen, Anne of Brittany. She was a
woman of distinguished beauty, though she limped in her gait. She
possessed great influence over Louis: was proud, independent, and
obstinate--qualities characteristic of the Bretons. Anne was at the same
time a pious, chaste, and exemplary queen. It was through her influence
and importance that the female sex, hitherto excluded, was introduced
into society: she formed a court, and collected around her the principal
young ladies of rank in the kingdom, whose manners and principles she
loved to form. The establishment of a court, that is, of a court in which
woman’s presence was allowed and her influence felt, was, trifling as it
may seem, a most important innovation.
[Illustration: LOUIS XII
(From an old French print)]
Louis, attached as he had been to Anne, did not long delay to fill up the
place by her left vacant. Policy joined with other reasons to prompt this
step. As the seal of a reconciliation and alliance with Henry VIII, Louis
espoused that monarch’s sister Mary, a princess then in the flower of
her age. The gay habits of a bridegroom did not suit the constitution of
the king, then past fifty-four. In a few weeks after his marriage he was
seized with a fever and dysentery, which carried him off at the palace of
the Tournelles, in Paris, on the first day of the year 1515.
Never was monarch more lamented by the great mass of his subjects than
Louis XII. He was endeared to them principally by his economy and
forbearance in levying contributions, and by his strict administration of
justice, so different from the sanguinary executions which characterised
the reign of Louis XI, when no man could be certain of life. He reduced
the taxes more than one-third in the early part of his reign, and even
in his distresses preferred selling the crown lands to any of the usual
expedients for exaction. Hence Louis earned the appellation of “Father
of his people.” His popularity was much greater with the middle than
with the higher classes. The latter called his economy parsimony, and
his sympathy with the commons forgetfulness of his rank. Writers of the
reigns of Louis XIV and XV seek to depreciate the character of Louis
XII, and to elevate that of his successor. Louis XII they consider as
the _roi roturier_, “the plebeian king”; Francis as the aristocratic and
chevaleresque. The nobility certainly do not appear prominent in this
reign. New names arise and become illustrious as in the time of Charles
VII. The lesser noblesse or gentry were in fact treading on the heels
and taking the places of the higher aristocracy. The latter rallied or
were re-created in the days of Francis, but these tendencies were as
much the effect of opposite states and circumstances, as of the opposite
characters of the two monarchs.
The writers of the Revolution reverse the system of favouritism: they
choose Louis, the father of his people, to be their hero, and they
depreciate the kingly Francis. An author of this school, Roederer,[i] has
seen every perfection in Louis XII, and he considers that the commons
of France were in possession of perfect constitutional freedom during
his reign: history, however, does not present this view of the question.
Although Louis did certainly seem to allow in the parliament a power of
examining and objecting to his edicts, yet the assembly of states in his
reign was far from assuming or being allowed aught like a constitutional
control. The very virtues and moderation of Louis were inimical to
political freedom, since, by rendering the commons contented, they took
from them, with the wish, the right of remonstrance. Had a prodigal and
an unpopular king been reduced to the same distress as Louis was in
the latter years of his reign, the commons of France might opportunely
have made a stand for their privileges, and at least kept alive their
traditions of freedom.[c]
[Illustration]
FOOTNOTES
[61] [The exact attitude of the duke of Orleans, at this early period,
toward his future wife is not clearly established. Further reference to
the subject is made later in the present chapter.]
[62] The following table will make clear the bearings of the French claim
to the kingdom of Naples: Full face type denotes reigning kings of France
and Naples. Italics denote titular kings of Naples.
=Louis VIII=, 1223-1226
=CAPET= | =ANJOU=
| | |
+------------------+------------------------+
| |
=Louis IX=, =Charles I=,
1226-1270 count of Anjou and
| Provence, ancestor
+---------------------+ of the kings of
| | Naples, 1285
| | |
=Philip III=, Robert, count of =Charles II=, 1309
1270-1285 Clermont, ancestor |
| of the Bourbons |
| |
+---------------------+++-+ +---------+----+
| | | |
=Philip IV=, Charles =Robert=, 1343 John
1285-1314 of Valois | |
| | Charles Louis
+-------------+-------------+ | | |
| | | | | |
=Louis X=, =Philip V=, =Charles IV=, | =Joanna I=, =Charles III=,
1314-1316 1316-1322 1322-1328 | 1382 1386
| |
| +------------+
| | |
| =Ladislaus=, =Joanna II=,
| 1414 1435
|
=Philip VI=, 1328-1350
|
John, 1350-1364 =BURGUNDY=
| |
+----------------------------------+-----------+---------+
| | | |
=Charles V=, _Louis_, John, Philip,
1364-1380 duke of Anjou, duke de duke of
| founder of the Berri Burgundy,
+-----------------+ second royal 1404
| | house of Naples
=Charles VI=, Louis, duke |
1380-1422, of Orleans, |
m. Isabella founder of |
of Bavaria the line of |
| Valois-Orleans _Louis II_, 1417
+----+----+----------+ |
| | | |
Louis, John, =Charles VII=, |
Dauphin, Dauphin, 1422-1461 +------+----+-----------+
1415 1416 | | | |
=Louis XI=, _Louis III_, _René_, Charles I,
1461-1483 1434 1480 count du Maine
| |
=Charles VIII=, _Charles II_,
1483-1498 count du Maine, 1481
He bequeathed Anjou, Maine,
Provence, and his title to
Naples to Louis XI, king of
France.
[63] See vol. IX, pp. 409 _et seq._
[64] Champier gives the following portrait of Bayard: The noble Pierre
du Terrail was born at Bayard, a stronghold situated in a province of
Dauphiné, called Givosdam, near the royal castle of Avalon--which castle
is a fine mansion wherein were born and bred, in this fair and beautiful
spot, a family noble and ancient, in Dauphiné, by name Montenar, from
whom are descended many brave knights and valiant men skilled in the art
of warfare. This same Pierre was well named Terrail, for no page was a
better horseman, which same by his prowess did send many to their end
before their time, and in many places and on many occasions did truly
guard and defend the territories of his lord and sovereign prince, the
noble king of France.
The noble Bayard in his youth was kindly, gracious, and courteous to all
men; none ever beheld him wrathful; he was greater than all other pages;
he did harm to no woman, relinquishing intrigues with them, as being
unlawful; but little given to melancholy, he was cheerful towards all,
loving good company, jestings, and pleasant sport. As for his gravity, it
was always mingled with kindness and affability; he loved order in all
things, and was benign, merciful, and charitable.[f]
[65] [Anne had Brittany in dangerously good order; and it has even been
suggested that she intended by this move to make it almost a political
necessity for Louis to marry her.]
[66] [The ensuing pages should be read with constant reference to our
history of Italy, vol. IX, pp. 425 _et seq._, where a complementary
treatment of the subject is given. See also the history of the Holy Roman
Empire, vol. XIII.]
[Illustration]
CHAPTER XII. IMPERIAL STRUGGLES OF FRANCIS I AND HENRY II
Francis I, his government and his times, commence the era of
modern France, and bring clearly to view the causes of her
greatnesses and her weaknesses.--GUIZOT.[b]
CRITICAL SURVEY OF FRANCIS I AND HIS PERIOD
[Sidenote: [1515-1559 A.D.]]
The accession of Francis I to the crown of France, January 1st, 1515,
on the death of Louis XII, may be considered as signalising the passage
from the Middle Ages to modern times and from ancient barbarism to
civilisation. The transformations of great masses of men amongst whom
new ideas and new passions are seen to germinate, are never sudden;
centuries have prepared them in silence, and an attentive eye may
have discerned, in the preceding age, the authors of the age which is
about to open; but their action on the people has an element of the
unexpected, because the men whose minds have been formed in principles
and sentiments scarcely avowed by themselves, and scarcely understood by
their contemporaries, all at once perceive that they form the majority,
that they are understood, that they will be followed; and they burst as
it were upon the country which had not noticed them. Thus simultaneously
with the reign of the young monarch there began a decided taste for arts
and letters which signalised itself by the most glorious monuments; a
new zest for the pleasures of society, for wit, and for gallantry which
corrupted morals while it perhaps gave more elegance to manners; an
esteem for learning, a zeal for study which reflected a special glory on
the French magistracy in whom dignity of character soon joined itself to
knowledge; and finally an independence of opinions which, while admitting
men to judge what they had adored, led some to new systems of philosophy
and others to the reform of religion. France, hitherto poor in writers,
began to turn her attention to herself, to study herself; her follies
and vices, like her virtues and learning, left their traces; and there
came into being the double series of courtly and philosophic writers,
of the friends of disorder and those of wisdom--a series which was not
afterwards interrupted until the fall of the throne of Louis XVI.
[Illustration: FRANCIS I]
The new sovereign, Francis d’Angoulême, duke of Valois, who gave the
signal for this revolution, was not however of sufficient force to
produce it. He was a son of Charles d’Angoulême, cousin german of Louis
XII, and as he had been born at Cognac on the 12th of September, 1494,
he was only twenty years and a few months old. His education had been
begun by Marshal de Gié, whom Louis XII had replaced in 1506 by Arthur
Gouffier, sire de Boisy; this last had been through all the Italian
campaigns, and he had acquired in that country a taste for arts and
polite literature which was scarcely ever to be met with amongst other
men of noble rank. He perceived that a certain glory might be attached to
the study of letters, he even accustomed his pupil to show some deference
to men of learning and to seek their conversation; but if Boisy himself
took pleasure in reading, it was in vain that he endeavoured to inspire
the prince he was training with the desire to read any books other than
the romances of chivalry. It was from them that Francis I derived his
sole instruction; he modelled himself on the heroes of the Round Table
and of the palace of Charlemagne, not on those of history; he desired
to shine as an Amadis rather than as a sovereign; and the height of his
figure, the beauty of his face, his skill in arms and in all physical
exercises, his bravery which he had already had occasion to exhibit, and
finally his love of pleasure which his young comrades esteemed in him
more than his moral qualities, marked him out for the admiration of those
who, like himself, knew the world only through the medium of romances.
“He was as fair a prince,” said Bayard’s _Loyal Serviteur_,[c] “as ever
was in the world; never had there been a king in France who so rejoiced
the noblesse.”[d]
A BRILLIANT CAMPAIGN IN ITALY
[Sidenote: [1515-1516 A.D.]]
After the coronation, which was celebrated at Rheims with great pomp,
and the festivities of the royal entrance in Paris, the preparations
for the expedition into Italy begun by Louis XII were resumed without
delay. France possessed nothing beyond the Alps since the fort at the
Lantern or Fanal at Genoa had capitulated. Everyone expected to see
the French retake the Milanese; but Francis I anticipated the general
expectation--he wished that conquest to mark the first year of his reign.
Two things were necessary: to hinder a coalition of the great powers, and
to find allies. The coalition had been dissolved in the year previous;
in order that it should not be formed again two treaties were signed,
with England and with the Netherlands. Henry VIII, always displeased with
the way in which the other kings had abandoned him, consented to renew
the alliance he had sworn with Louis XII in 1514. The young prince of
Castile, Charles of Austria, freed from guardianship, took the direct
government of the Netherlands, and prepared to cross into Spain; he was
the first to try to regain the friendship of France, in order to secure
the Belgian frontier. It was agreed that he should be affianced to Madame
Renée, the second daughter of Louis XII, who had a large dowry, and that
he might defer for five years the homage he owed to the crown in his
character of count of Flanders. On the part of Francis I, the concessions
were important but remote and eventual: the advantage was immediate.
France, safe-guarded in the north on its most vulnerable frontier, and
having nothing to fear from England nor the Netherlands, might proceed
boldly.
France had wished to gain the court of Rome. Leo X had never ceased
seeking reconciliation with France. His brother, Giuliano de’ Medici, had
married a sister of Louise of Savoy in 1514. Several ambassadors were
sent to him, among others the celebrated humanist, Guillaume Budé. But
the pope desired peace in Italy and the grandeur of his family. A new
French campaign would derange his plans, and for some months he had done
everything possible to dissuade the French from such an enterprise. He
refused to bind himself in any way, even that of simple neutrality.
There still remained Ferdinand the Catholic, Maximilian, and the
Swiss. The king of Aragon was old and in failing health. His death was
shortly expected, and he was known to be little in favour of taking the
management of a new league. It was he who, by his withdrawal, had caused
the failure of that of 1513. Meanwhile, fearing to lose the alliance
of the Swiss, and wishing to hinder the return of the French into the
peninsula, he refused to prorogue the truce of the preceding year, and
signed a defensive alliance with Maximilian and the thirteen cantons.
The emperor always had need of Spanish troops to continue his war against
Venice; he objected all the more to the troubling of the empire by
France by her levies of lansquenets. But his hostility was as harmless
as his friendship was useless. As for the Swiss, finding them rejecting
all offers and manifesting unqualified unreasonableness, the plan to
conciliate them was abandoned. The alliance with the Venetians was always
assured. Francis I renewed the treaty signed at Blois by Louis XII with
the republic.
After these diplomatic precautions it was necessary to renew and
strengthen the army. The gendarmerie was increased from 2,500 lances
to 4,000. A national infantry was added to it, also more numerous than
that of preceding years, 6,000 Basques and Dauphinois, 10,000 French
adventurers, Picardians, Gascons or Bretons, and 3,000 pioneers or
engineers. Part of these troops were formed by Pedro Navarro, prisoner of
the French since the battle of Ravenna. The celebrated Spanish captain,
not having obtained from Ferdinand the Catholic the payment of his
ransom, consented to enter into the service of Francis I. The foreign
infantry was composed of 26,000 lansquenets under the command of the duke
of Gelderland. The artillery, more important than ever, comprised 72
large cannon, and 500 mounted pieces.[f]
Thus equipped, Francis crossed the Alps and entered upon that campaign
which culminated in the brilliant victory over the Swiss army at
Marignano, a full description of which has been given in our history of
Italy.[67][a]
It is related that, after the battle, Francis wished to be knighted and
that he chose Bayard to give him the blow with the sword; a thing never
before seen, as it was supposed that kings had no need of being knighted,
as they were knights by birth.[f]
The victory of Francis resulted in his regaining possession of the whole
of the Milanese, with the addition of Parma and Piacenza. He also signed
two treaties, on November 7th, 1515, at Geneva, and November 29th, 1516,
at Friburg, which established a perpetual alliance between himself and
the Swiss.
_The Concordat_
In the course of an interview between himself and Leo X at Bologna,
Francis took the important step of abolishing the Pragmatic Sanction and
signed the Concordat, which gave the king the right of nomination to
bishoprics and other ecclesiastical privileges. “Then it was that Francis
I and his chancellor loudly proclaimed the maxims of absolute power;
in the church, the Pragmatic Sanction was abolished; and in the state,
Francis I during thirty-two years did not once convoke the states-general
and laboured only to set up the sovereign right of his own will.”[h]
The first article of the Concordat, destined to replace the Pragmatic
Sanction, transferred to the king the right to appoint the bishops,
abbots, and priors, the pope reserving for himself the veto, in cases
where the elect did not fulfil canonical conditions; by the second
article, the pope renounced the rights of reversion and expectative,
the reversion of livings during the life of the incumbents; but he
did not renounce in any way the annats, the most exorbitant of papal
exactions, and the silence of the Concordat on this subject implied their
re-establishment. The rights of collators of livings were subsequently
recognised and limited, and it was decreed that collators could accord
only to graduates “_ès universités_” the livings which became vacant
during the months of January, April, July, October. Every collator,
having from ten to fifty livings at his disposal, was obliged to resign
one to the discretion of the pope--or two if he had more than fifty.
It was ordained that ecclesiastical trials should be judged in the
realm, either by ordinary judges or by commissioners of the pope in
reserved cases. The Concordat kept a significant silence on the rights
and periodicity of the councils. A tithe on the clergy was accorded
to the king, in recognition of the re-establishment of annats, but on
condition that the pope and the Medici should receive their part. The
abolition of the Pragmatic was then proclaimed in the Lateran Council, a
servile assembly which did nothing but register the wishes of the pope,
which abjured the principles of the councils of Constance and Bâle, and
dissolved itself obscurely shortly afterwards, without the perception by
Europe, so to speak, of its closing.
[Sidenote: [1516-1520 A.D.]]
The Concordat was an act of boldness on the part of royalty; which ceded
only on a question of money (and reduced that concession when it came
to practice). It was an immense stride in the direction of despotism:
after the political order it seized upon the religious order; after
having usurped the right of the Estates in the fixation of taxes, it
usurped the right of the church in the election of its chiefs. In fact
during the whole extent of the Middle Ages, the temporal power frequently
troubled the liberty of elections, sometimes by force, more often by
recommendations equivalent to commands. The ecclesiastical bodies were
rarely in full enjoyment of their liberty, and the ancient participation
of the people, and even of the lower clergy, at the election of the
bishops had been reduced to a purposeless acclamation. But in the end
the law remained, the best kings having recognised it, the Pragmatic had
revivified it, and after the great reaction directed by the councils
of the fifteenth century against the papacy, the chapters and convents
proceeded more freely at elections than at any period of the preceding
centuries. It was this state of things which Francis I and Leo X
violently overturned in their division of what did not belong to them by
a bizarre exchange where, as Mézeray says, the pope, the spiritual head,
took the temporal power unto himself, giving the spiritual power to a
temporal prince.[k]
This displacement of the Pragmatic Sanction by the Concordat is justly
regarded as one of the most momentous events in French history. The
effect of the new order of things upon the immorality of the upper clergy
can hardly be overestimated. The Concordat remained in force until the
Revolution, and much of French scepticism and philosophical criticism may
be ascribed to its influence.
STRIFE BETWEEN FRANCIS I AND CHARLES V
The reign of Francis I thus opened brilliantly. That first victory was to
have no complete parallel during a long reign; but it served to establish
the reputation of Francis as a warrior, and to cast a glamour about his
name that no subsequent defeats could quite obscure. We are now to see
the victor of Marignano enter upon a struggle with that crafty monarch
Charles I of Spain,[68] who, when the emperor Maximilian died, was
elected to succeed him, and who came to the imperial throne as Charles
V. The life-long rivalry with this most powerful monarch of the century
furnishes the keynote to the reign of Francis I. Francis had himself
been an eager candidate for the imperial crown.[a] His mortification was
great when his rival was chosen by the electors. He dreamed of nothing
but revenge, and fancied that an alliance with Henry VIII of England
would help him to gain his object. A meeting was consequently arranged
between the two kings, and took place on June 7th, 1520. So gorgeous were
the garments of the kings and the trappings of their horses, that their
courtiers in trying to rival them “bore thither,” the contemporary writer
Du Bellay[g] graphically tells us, “their mills, their forests, and their
meadows, on their backs.”
_Meeting of Henry VIII and Francis I on the Field of the Cloth of Gold_
[Sidenote: [1520 A.D.]]
Nothing equalled in splendour this meeting between the two kings and
the two courts in the camp so well named “The Cloth of Gold.” It was a
struggle upon both sides for pre-eminence in magnificence. It would seem
as if they sought more to dazzle than to please, and etiquette, being
prejudicial to cordiality, was set aside.
Both arrived on the same day, June 1st, 1520, the one at Calais, the
other at Ardres. Henry VIII and Francis I exchanged visits through the
most important personages of their courts and councils. Six days passed
in the necessary negotiations for their meeting. All was at last arranged
with a care so distrustful and minute as to suggest a mutual fear of
treason. It was arranged that, leaving the castle of Guines, whither he
expected to go on June 5th, Henry VIII should advance towards Francis I,
who, on his side, would leave the castle of Ardres, and advance towards
Henry VIII.
On Wednesday, June 7th, the kings of France and of England, mounted upon
great chargers, clothed the one in cloth of gold, the other in cloth
of silver, covered with pearls, diamonds, rubies, and emeralds, their
heads covered by velvet caps resplendent with precious stones, from
which floated magnificent white plumes, set out at the same time and at
the same pace. Their constables preceded them, bare sword in hand, and
the lords of their court, most gorgeously apparelled, followed in their
train. Each of them was followed by a bodyguard of four hundred archers
or men-at-arms. Thus escorted they descended the two hills which led into
the pleasant plain of the Valdoré, where a pavilion had been erected to
receive them. Their appearance was more that of two knights marching to
battle than two princes going to a diplomatic interview.
The escort halted at a certain point, from whence they kept watch, so
that the English archers should not approach too closely to the king of
France, nor the men-at-arms of the French army to the king of England. At
a short distance from each other, Henry and Francis spurred their horses,
reining them in with all the grace of the experienced cavalier, when they
found themselves side by side. Saluting one another in kingly fashion
they then dismounted and entered the pavilion arm in arm. Cardinal
Wolsey and Admiral Bonnivet, who, since the death of his brother the
grand-master, Arthur de Boisy, had been the favourite of Francis I and
managed his affairs, preceded them.
Francis I showed great cordiality to Henry VIII, and, giving utterance to
the thought always present with him, proffered him his assistance in the
hope of gaining his. “Dear brother and cousin,” said he, “I have taken
much trouble to see you. You understand, I hope, that I am ready to help
you with the kingdoms and lordships which are under my authority.” Henry
VIII, evading any pledge, relieved himself from the obligation of helping
Francis I, by not accepting the assistance offered. He contented himself
with assurances of his friendship, which he still made conditional. “I
have not in view your kingdoms or your lordships,” answered Henry VIII,
“but loyalty and the instant execution of promises contained in the
treaty drawn up between us. If you keep these, my eyes have never beheld
a prince who could win more the affection of my heart.”
They then examined the treaty which had been drawn up that evening,
and by which, conforming to the agreement of the 4th of October, 1518,
the dauphin of France was to marry the only daughter of the king of
England, and Francis I was to pay an annual sum of 100,000 francs, which
is equivalent to more than 2,000,000 francs of modern money, until the
celebration of the wedding, which was yet far distant. Whilst reading the
introduction to the treaty, in which, according to diplomatic etiquette,
the title of king of France was added to that of king of England and of
Ireland, Henry VIII said with tact: “I will omit it. In your presence
it is not correct.” But if he omitted it in reading, he left it in the
treaty, and a little later was ambitious to make it real by invading
France and wishing to reign there. After some discussion, following the
custom of that time the sovereigns took wine together, and admired the
nobles of their courts, whom they presented to one another and who were
embraced, those of France by the king of England, those of England by the
king of France. As the meetings, so the fêtes were regulated and carried
through in a very ceremonious manner, with precautions that excluded
intimacy, and requirements which betrayed jealousy. When Francis I went
to dine with Queen Catherine at Guines, Henry VIII came to dine with
Queen Claude at Ardres. The two kings held hostages for one another, and
behaved in many ways as if they were in the presence of enemies. This
suspicious attitude, these timid steps, were as little suited to the
political views as to the trusting character of Francis I.
[Illustration: THE DAUPHIN FRANCIS, SON OF FRANCIS I]
Wishing one day to break down this ceremonious and distrustful barrier,
he arose earlier in the morning than was customary, and taking with him
two gentlemen and a page, and wrapped merely in a Spanish cape, he left
Ardres to go and surprise the king of England in Guines. Two hundred
archers and the governors were upon the drawbridge when he arrived.
At the sight of the king of France, come at such a time, so meagrely
attended, putting himself thus in their hands, they were aghast. Francis
I crossed their ranks with a frank and laughing countenance, and, as if
he wished to take the fortress by storm, summoned them gaily to surrender
to him. The king of England still slept. Francis I went straight to his
room, knocked at the door, awoke Henry VIII, who, on seeing him, was even
more astounded than his archers had been, and said frankly, with as much
cordiality as tact: “My brother, you have done me the best turn that one
man ever did to another, and showed me what confidence I ought to have
in you. From this moment I am your prisoner, and pledge you my faith.”
He took at the same time a beautiful collar from his neck and begged the
king of France to wear it that day for love of his prisoner. Francis
I went still further in his demonstrations. He had a bracelet double
the value of the collar. Putting this upon Henry’s arm he asked him to
wear it for love of him, and he added that he wished for that day to be
valet to his prisoner. The king of France as a matter of fact handed the
king of England’s shirt to him. The next day Henry VIII, imitating the
confidence of Francis I, went to Ardres slightly attended, and there took
place a fresh exchange of presents and courtesies between them.
This attempt to rival each other in friendship was followed by a rivalry
of skill in the tournaments and games that the two kings held at their
courts. Spacious lists, which ended in strong enclosures for the guards
of each prince and which adjoined elegant stands erected for the queens
and the ladies-in-waiting, had been prepared in a high and uncovered
place. There for eight days were held jousts in which the most skilful
men-at-arms of France and England took part on foot and on horseback,
with lance and sword. The two kings who directed them displayed therein
without contention, the one his brilliant dexterity, the other his
athletic strength. Francis I, who excelled in horsemanship, broke his
lances with an accomplished skill. Henry VIII, whose impetuosity could
not be resisted, struck his antagonist’s helmet so violently that he
unseated him, and prevented him from fulfilling his other engagements.
King Henry, who was one of the best bowmen in the kingdom, made himself
remarkable by the strength with which he drew the string and the
swiftness with which he struck his mark; he would also have liked to show
his superiority in wrestling with Francis I. The English wrestlers had
defeated the French wrestlers because through negligence the latter had
not brought with them the Bretons, who are unsurpassed in this sort of
game. In the evening Henry VIII, hoping to complete the victory of his
men by an easy triumph, came close to Francis I and said to him roughly,
“Brother, I want to wrestle with you.” At the same time he grasped him
with his powerful hands and tried to throw him; but Francis I, who was
a well-trained wrestler and more lithe, twisted his leg around his
assailant, so that the latter lost his balance and rolled on the ground.
Henry arose, crimson with confusion and anger, and wished to begin again.
Only the fact that dinner was ready and that the queens intervened
prevented this dangerous test, which was more likely to make bad friends
of the two kings by wounding their vanity, than the recent intimacies
of their long interview were likely to cement their friendship. After
twenty-five days passed together in the midst of festivals and pleasures,
Francis I and Henry VIII separated, apparently in cordial friendship.
_Francis I and Charles V at War_
[Sidenote: [1520-1522 A.D.]]
Francis I was not certain of the armed co-operation of Henry VIII, but he
believed he had secured his interested and, from thenceforward, faithful
friendship. He had bought it by a large annual payment which was simply
a subsidy in disguise. He flattered himself that if the king of England
failed to declare himself on his side in the war about to begin, at all
events he would not espouse the cause of the emperor, his enemy.[h]
But this interview was nothing more than play-acting, as Francis soon
realised when he learned that Henry on his way back to England had paid
a visit to Charles V, who was close friends with Wolsey. Furious at
this duplicity and at learning that Henry VIII had agreed to arbitrate
on Charles’ behalf in all quarrels between him and France, Francis
cast about for a pretext for war, and soon found occasions in the Low
Countries, Navarre, and Italy. In April, 1521, he despatched Marshal de
Lautrec to defend the Milanese against the Spaniards.[a]
[Illustration: A FRENCH BARON, EARLY SIXTEENTH CENTURY]
The government of the conquered province had been such as to render the
French yoke odious to the Milanese. The cause lay in the intrigues and
corruption of the court. As soon as the government has grown despotic,
we are instantly compelled to look for the causes of events in the
scandalous chronicle of harlotry. It has been related that Anne, queen of
Louis XII, had assembled around her the daughters of the French nobility;
and a court was thus gradually formed, no longer composed solely of
warriors and statesmen, but of the gay and idle also of both sexes. This
sudden freedom had an ill effect upon public morals. The principles and
habits of courtiers were not prepared for the increased temptation. The
grossness of the age did not yet admit of that true and pure enjoyment
of female society which modern cultivation allows. Francis, when he was
suddenly released from Amboise, and found himself possessed of all power,
and endowed with all attraction, in the midst of an assemblage of beauty,
gave a loose rein to his passions. His wife, Claude, daughter of the late
king, never had the command of his affections; and the court of Francis
soon arrived at that state of dissoluteness which we find recorded in the
pages of Brantôme, and from which we shrink in incredulity and disgust.
Françoise de Foix was one of those highborn maidens whom Anne of Brittany
had reared near her person. That queen had given her in marriage to the
count de Châteaubriant, who retained her at his remote château, far from
the fascinations of a court. Francis, however, insisted on the presence
of the beauty. The countess de Châteaubriant was summoned to the capital,
and soon became the avowed and chosen mistress of her sovereign. Her
brother Lautrec was made governor of Milan.[i] In spite of Lautrec’s
efforts Milan fell into the enemy’s hands, and on April 27th, 1522, he
lost a battle which robbed Francis of all his power in Lombardy. This was
the battle of Bicocca, in which Prospero Colonna, occupying an entrenched
position, repulsed the French and inflicted upon them a decisive
defeat.[a]
_Defection of the Duke de Bourbon_
The rage of Francis against his unsuccessful general was extreme. He
refused to see him. The duchess d’Angoulême exasperated the king’s
animosity by her censures; while Madame de Châteaubriant dared not
intercede for her brother. At length the constable procured Lautrec
admission to the king, who covered him with reproaches. “It is not I who
am to blame,” said Lautrec; “the gendarmerie have served eighteen months
without pay; and the wilfulness of the Swiss, both in fighting against my
wish and then abandoning me, was owing to my inability to pay them.”
“And the 400,000 crowns?” said the king. “Were never received,” was
the answer. Francis summoned his treasurer, Semblançay, and asked him
sternly how it came that the promised sum had not yet reached Lautrec.
The treasurer replied that the duchess d’Angoulême had made him pay it to
her. The king then rushed to the apartments of his mother. “It is to your
avarice then, madam, that I owe the loss of the Milanese?” The duchess
could not deny the receipt of the sum, but she alleged having received
it on her private account. The excuse did not satisfy the monarch, and
Semblançay kept his station. The vengeance of the queen-mother henceforth
unremittingly followed the unfortunate treasurer. Heads of accusation can
never be wanting against a man intrusted with the finances of a kingdom;
and five years after, Semblançay, an honest and irreproachable minister,
fell a victim to the intrigues and iniquity of the monarch’s mother, and
died as a malefactor on the common gibbet.
Whilst Francis met with these reverses, which were the natural
consequences of the blunders and recklessness of his administration,
the emperor Charles was carefully securing every friend, and improving
every advantage. The new pope, Adrian, was his creature: Wolsey’s
resentment, on being disappointed of the tiara, was soothed for a time;
and Henry VIII was induced not only to break with France, but to send
thither an army under the duke of Suffolk, which, however, achieved
nothing remarkable. The Venetian Republic, also, the last of the Italian
powers that inclined to France, was estranged from his friendship, and
joined the alliance against him. Not content with making every foreign
potentate his foe, the French monarch had at the same time the imprudence
to alienate the most powerful of his subjects. Trivulzio, we have seen,
expired beneath his neglect. Charles, duke de Bourbon, and constable
of the kingdom, was now driven by injustice to league with the enemies
of his country. The last duke de Bourbon had left a daughter, Suzanne.
The title, and a certain portion of the heritage, went by law to the
male heir; but as a considerable part would be inherited by Suzanne,
the paternal care of Louis XII arranged a marriage between Charles, the
existing duke, and Suzanne de Bourbon, thus preserving unbroken the
heritage and title of that illustrious family. The duke was of a handsome
person, and on the death of his duchess, Suzanne, without issue, the
duchess d’Angoulême made advances to fill her place. This she was the
more forward in doing, as, being descended in the female line from a
previous duke de Bourbon, she considered herself to have claims on that
part of the property which might descend to a female. The constable,
however, was blind to her advances, backed by this tacit menace. And the
slighted duchess instantly put forward her claim to the Bourbonnais as
appertaining by right to her.
Bourbon had previously received affronts from the king, who disliked his
cold temper and reserved demeanour. The duke was grave and dignified,
fond of war and business, and averse to join in the follies of a court.
It appears, too, that Francis amused himself at the duke’s expense; and
the latter bore raillery with so little good humour as to be called the
“prince of small endurance.” Whatever was the cause, they certainly
disliked each other; and Francis manifested this feeling first by
recalling Bourbon from the government of Milan, and afterwards by giving
the command of the vanguard in one of the northern campaigns to the duke
of Alençon, although that post of honour was the constable’s right.
[Illustration: CONSTABLE DE BOURBON]
[Sidenote: [1522-1524 A.D.]]
Bearing all this in mind, when his hitherto unquestioned right to the
Bourbonnais was called in question, the duke instantly apprehended that
a league to destroy him had been planned by the king and his mother.
Duprat, the chancellor, was but a creature of the latter; and to hope for
justice in the event of trial was absurd. Bourbon was, therefore, driven
to look abroad for a refuge or for vengeance. The emperor’s emissary
was at hand, proffering him that prince’s sister in marriage, and many
advantages, if he would join the emperor’s party, and raise a civil
war in France against its monarch. Bourbon hesitated long, but finally
acceded to the proposals of Charles. Francis in the meantime had been
roused from the lap of pleasure by the league of all Europe against him.
He was at Lyons, on the way to Italy at the head of an army, when Bourbon
was about to take the fatal step. Francis tried to soothe him: he showed
his confidence by appointing him lieutenant-general of the kingdom;
and assured him that whatever might be the result of this unfortunate
process, he would not see him despoiled. The object of Francis seems to
have been the gratification of his mother, and the driving of Bourbon
to a marriage with her. This failed, however, like every act of the
monarch’s policy. The constable determined to join the emperor. But
Francis was now near, accompanied with forces; and as circumstances had
awakened his suspicions, he called on the constable to accompany him to
Italy. Bourbon feigned sickness, and took to his couch, as a pretext for
delay; till at length, seeing that it would be dangerous to trifle any
longer with the impatient Francis, the constable dispersed his suite and
fled, followed by a single attendant, into the dominions of the emperor.
Francis gained by this desertion, as he confiscated the wide domains
of Bourbon. Charles acquired what he least wanted--a general, and an
unfortunate claimant.
_A Disastrous Campaign in Italy: The Battle of Pavia_
Bonnivet, the personal enemy of Bourbon, was now intrusted with the
command of the French army. He marched without opposition into the
Milanese, and might have taken the capital had he pushed on to its gates.
Having by irresolution lost it, he retreated to winter quarters behind
the Ticino. The operations of the English in Picardy, of the imperials
in Champagne, and of the Spaniards near the Pyrenees, were equally
insignificant. The spring of 1524 brought on an action, if the attack
of one point can be called such, which proved decisive for the time.
Bonnivet advanced rashly beyond the Ticino. The imperials, commanded by
four able generals, Lannoy, Pescara, Bourbon, and Sforza, succeeded in
almost cutting off his retreat. They at the same time refused Bonnivet’s
offer to engage. They hoped to weaken him by famine. The Swiss first
murmured against the distress occasioned by want of precaution. They
deserted across the river; and Bonnivet, thus abandoned, was obliged
to make a precipitate and perilous retreat. A bridge was hastily flung
across the Sesia, near Romagnano; and Bonnivet, with his best knights and
gendarmerie, undertook to defend the passage of the rest of the army.
The imperials, led on by Bourbon, made a furious attack. Bonnivet was
wounded, and he gave his place to Bayard, who, never intrusted with a
high command, was always chosen for that of a forlorn hope. The brave
Vandenesse was soon killed; and Bayard himself received a gunshot wound.
The gallant chevalier, feeling his wound mortal, caused himself to be
placed in a sitting posture beneath a tree, his face to the enemy, and
his sword fixed in guise of a cross before him. The constable De Bourbon,
who led the imperials, soon came up to the dying Bayard, and expressed
his compassion. “Weep not for me,” said the chevalier, “but for thyself.
I die in performing my duty; thou art betraying thine.”
[Sidenote: [1524-1525 A.D.]]
Francis, in the meantime, alarmed by the invasion, had assembled an army.
He burned to employ it, and avenge the late affront. He marched upon
Milan, whose population was spiritless and broken by the plague, and took
it without resistance. It was then mooted whether Lodi or Pavia should
be besieged. The latter, imprudently, as it is said, was preferred. The
siege of Pavia was formed about the middle of October. Antonio de Leyva,
an experienced officer, supported by veteran troops, commanded in the
town. By the month of January, 1525, the French had made no progress; and
the impatient Francis despatched a considerable portion of his army for
the invasion of Naples, hearing that the country was drained of troops.
This was a gross blunder, which Pescara observing, he forbore to send any
force to oppose the expedition. He knew that the fate of Italy would be
decided before Pavia.[i]
During the night of the 23rd of February the emperor’s generals harassed
the royal camp by a lively cannonade and a series of feigned attacks,
while the main body of their troops was approaching in silence the
walls of the park. Masons undermined and tore down a considerable
portion of the wall, and through the breach thus effected the imperial
advance-guard, under the young marquis del Guasto, cousin to Pescara,
closely followed by the remaining troops, rushed into the park. In the
light of the breaking day the French saw the imperial columns defile
rapidly by the king’s quarters and set out in the direction of Pavia.
The hostile troops were obliged to cross a wide clearing that was raked
by the shot of the artillery posted along the king’s entrenchments, and
so terrible was the fire opened out upon them by the veteran Galiot de
Genouillac that, says Martin du Bellay,[j] “one after the other great
breaches were made in the enemy’s battalions, and there was nothing to be
seen but flying arms and heads.” Their ranks thinned by this frightful
cannonade, the imperials began running in single file towards a valley,
where they hoped to be out of range of the royal batteries.
When Francis I saw this movement he believed the enemy to be in full
flight and his own victory assured; it had, moreover, been reported to
him that the division under Alençon and Chabot had routed a Spanish
battalion in the park and captured several cannon. Rallying his
gendarmerie, he rushed forth from the camp in pursuit of the flying
enemy, thus masking his own batteries and reducing them to silence at the
very moment when they might have been the most destructive; the remainder
of the army followed the king.
Bourbon and Pescara, transported with joy, hastily formed their line of
battle, while Del Guasto rushed up with his advance-guard, reinforced
by Antonio de Leyva, and the flower of the garrison of Pavia, which
the guard left in charge of the camp had been unable to hold back. The
division of the duke of Alençon formed the left wing of the French army
and was separated by a large body of Swiss troops from the king, who
commanded the centre; between the king and the right wing commanded by
La Palisse were placed four or five thousand lansquenets, the remnant
of the old bands of Gelderland and Westphalia who were used to fighting
under French banners against the house of Austria, and to being placed
under the ban of the empire by Charles V. The shock of the meeting
between these two armies, inconsiderable as to numbers but composed of
the bravest fighting-men in Europe, was terrific. Fallen upon by the
lansquenets of Charles de Bourbon and left without assistance by the
Swiss, the king’s lansquenets were overwhelmed by force of numbers and
crushed between two battalions of the enemy. Nearly all these brave men
perished, as did also their two chiefs, the duke of Suffolk (the White
Rose) and Francis de Lorraine, brother of the duke de Lorraine and of
Count Claude de Guise. Bourbon and his victorious infantry next turned
against the French right wing which was engaged in a hot contest with
a Spanish-Italian cavalry corps. The right wing, after many great but
useless exploits, shared the fate that befell the French lansquenets, and
it was on this field that the veteran Chabannes de la Palisse ended his
glorious career. His horse having been killed under him, he was about to
surrender his sword to the Neapolitan captain Castaldo, when a Spaniard,
envious of Castaldo’s good fortune, killed the illustrious prisoner by a
shot from his arquebuse.
No less furiously did the combat rage in the centre where the king,
at the head of his gendarmerie, overpowered an Italian squadron under
the command of the marquis de Saint Angelo, a descendant of the great
Scanderbeg; it is said that the king slew this nobleman, as well
as several other knights, with his own hand. The squadron of the
Franc-Comtois suffered overthrow in its turn; the Spanish cavalry would
have had a similar fate had not Pescara devised a manœuvre which was as
successful as it was terrible in its effects. This was to mingle with
his horsemen fifteen hundred or two thousand Basque musketeers whose
agility enabled them to slip into the ranks of the French to choose
their victims, and who by their deadly fire checked the advance of the
gendarmerie and threw all the squadrons into confusion. The richest coats
of mail, the most gallantly plumed helmets were the marks selected in
preference by these sharpshooters, and one after the other the famous
leaders who had raised French arms to glory during the last thirty
years were seen to fall--Louis de la Trémouille, Louis d’Ars, teacher
and friend of Bayard, the grand equerry San Severino, the bastard of
Savoy, and the marshal De Foix-Lescun, all were killed or mortally
wounded. The king and those immediately about him continued to fight
desperately, a furious charge having brought Pescara to the earth and
put to flight Lannoy. Victory might still have been on the side of the
French had Alençon and the Swiss done their full duty; but the duke, on
learning of the confusion into which the right wing had been thrown, fled
precipitately, carrying with him almost all the gendarmerie and the left
wing, while the Swiss, left uncovered by the desertion of Alençon and
menaced on their left flank by the imperial cavalry, turned their backs
in their turn, instead of repulsing the enemy’s attack and flying to the
succour of the king, and set out in confusion on the road to Milan. This
battle should have served as a terrible lesson to the kings of France,
who were in the habit of buying the services of mercenaries at a high
price rather than place arms in the hands of their own subjects.
All the stress and burden of the battle now fell upon the king and the
valiant body of nobles who pressed about him; Bourbon, Castaldo, Del
Guasto, De Leyva, and the viceroy Lannoy had successively joined Pescara,
and there remained to the French gendarmerie but to sell their lives as
dearly as possible. Diesbach, the Swiss general, and Admiral Bonnivet
decided not to survive--the one, the ignominious retreat which was to
tarnish the fame of the league, and the other the sad “misadventure” for
which he himself had been mainly responsible. They both flung themselves
upon the pikes of Bourbon’s lansquenets and at once found death.
Bonnivet, the favourite of Madame d’Angoulême as well as of the king,
had taken the most active part in the persecution of the constable, and
Bourbon was now seeking him all over the field of battle. When he finally
perceived his enemy’s mutilated corpse, “Unhappy man!” he exclaimed with
sadness, “you are the cause of France’s ruin and my own!”
The French gendarmerie at last succumbed to the superior numbers of
the enemy; they were broken, dispersed, and cut to pieces. Francis I,
wounded in the leg and in the face, defended himself bravely for some
time longer, but his horse, on being dealt a fatal blow, fell and bore
him to the earth, where he would have been despatched by the soldiers
who struggled to reach him had not Pompérant, the companion of the
constable’s flight, recognised the king and rushed to his rescue.
Pompérant proposed to the king to pledge his faith to Bourbon, but
Francis indignantly refused; then Pompérant sent for Lannoy, viceroy of
Naples, who bent his knee to receive the bloody sword of the king, and
proffered his in exchange.
Eight thousand French and auxiliaries had met death; and all the
leaders--the king of Navarre (Henry d’Albret), the count of Saint-Pol,
Fleuranges, Montmorency, Brion--who were not stretched upon the
battle-field, shared the captivity of Francis I. The king begged his
captors not to take him back to Pavia where he would be a “spectacle and
a laughing-stock to those upon whom he had formerly inflicted fear, evil,
and fatigue.” He was conducted to the tent of the marquis del Guasto,
where his wounds were properly attended to. In the evening Charles de
Bourbon presented himself with every mark of respect before the monarch
upon whom he had taken so cruel a vengeance. Both, according to the
accounts most worthy of credence, displayed great self-control and
admirably concealed feelings, of triumph on the one hand, of grief and
humiliation on the other; the king’s only departure from this reserve
was in the reception he gave Pescara, which was warm compared to his
attitude towards Bourbon. Francis I had at least one consolation in his
misfortune, the one that would most appeal to a nature such as his: the
imperial soldiers had been so struck by his prowess in the field that
they divided his effects as relics among themselves, and evinced so
strongly their desire to see him that the viceroy of Naples experienced
some alarm. The German mercenaries, without taking into account the
immense booty they had gained, demanded more imperatively than before
the battle their arrears of pay, and Lannoy feared that they would seek
to seize the king as surety, perhaps even go over to the royal side.
He averted this danger by sending Francis I to Pizzighettone under
the guard of a Spanish captain of whose fidelity he was sure, and by
extorting heavy contributions from the pope and the smaller Italian
states, in order that the soldiery might be induced to wait in patience.
[Sidenote: [1525-1526 A.D.]]
It was in the imperial camp near Pavia, on the eve of departure for
Pizzighettone that Francis I wrote to his mother the celebrated letter
that tradition has greatly altered by giving it this laconic form:
“Madame, all is lost save honour.” The true text is as follows: “Madame,
To let you know the full extent of my misfortune I have but to say, of
all things there remain to me only honour and my life; and that this news
may be of a little comfort to you in your adversity I have prayed them to
let me write you this letter, which prayer they have readily accorded; I
also beg of you to allow yourself to come to no harm but to make use of
your accustomed prudence, for I have hope that in the end God will not
abandon me. I recommend to you my children and your grandchildren, and
pray you to let pass the bearer of this to Spain and back, for it is his
mission to see the emperor to inform him of the treatment I receive.”[k]
_Francis Captive in Spain: The Treaty of Madrid_
Although Francis had hoped to overcome his conqueror, he did not fear to
humiliate himself before him. This rôle of captive and suppliant was so
new to him that he rather overdid it and rather bore in mind his present
fortunes, which might change, than his kingly dignity which he should
never lose. Thus, in three letters written by him to Charles, three times
he affected to call himself his slave.
“Having no other comfort in my misfortune than the hope of your goodness,
by which, if it please you, use me, the fruits of your own victory, with
all fairness. I have firm hope that your virtue will not constrain me to
do anything dishonouring, and I beg you to let your heart decide what you
will do with me. Wherefore may it please you to have the kindly pity to
assure the safety which is due the king of France as prisoner, then will
you render me friendly and not despairing, you will make an acquisition
instead of a useless prisoner, and have a king forever your slave. So
I end my humble petitions which have no other end to expect but that
you will style me, instead of a prisoner, your good brother and friend
Francis.”
But when Francis heard the rigorous conditions, when he saw he had in
vain humiliated himself before his enemy, death appeared less horrible
than captivity for him, and ruin and shame for France. “Tell your
master,” he cried, “that I would rather die than submit to his terms.
My kingdom is still intact, and for my deliverance I neither can nor
will harm it. If the emperor desires treaties, let him speak another
language.” The opportunity was propitious for Lannoy, and he well knew
how to use it. “Your majesty,” said he, “had made a better bargain with
the emperor by treating directly with him. Go yourself to Spain and put
yourself in the hands of my master. He will be touched by this proof of
confidence and will certainly not abuse the rights victory has given
him.” Francis allowed himself to be taken in the trap, and judging his
enemy by himself the chivalrous monarch resolved to put himself at the
discretion of Charles V. He had sent from Marseilles six of his galleys
to aid in the transport of troops which were to serve him as escort, and
forbade his admirals to alarm the imperial crews during the crossing. He
embarked at Genoa May 7th, 1526, and Lannoy was clever enough to persuade
Bourbon and Pescara that he was conducting his prisoner to Naples.
Charles V was unaware of Lannoy’s project; it was a pleasant surprise,
then, to learn that the king of France, whom he had thought in Italy,
was on Spanish soil. He immediately had him transferred to his castle
at Madrid, leaving it himself for fear of meeting him. Francis, always
liable to be deceived, had counted on prompt deliverance. While waiting,
he had imagined himself treated by his conquerors as a guest and not
as a prisoner. But seeing he had been tricked by Lannoy, guessing the
astuteness of Charles behind that of his minister, he immediately fell
ill of grief. Soon his life was in danger. The people of Madrid, moved
with sympathy for this knightly king, more fitted than Charles V to
reign over Spain, hastened in crowds to the churches to ask God to cure
him. Charles, who calculated everything, even his pity, realised that
if he allowed his prisoner to die he would lose a possible ransom. He
then decided to pay him a visit, and, lavish of fine words, succeeded in
raising Francis’ courage. But his object gained and the sick man saved,
Charles forgot all his promises, refused to see his prisoner again, and
reinsisted on the hard terms of release.[l]
France in the meantime, though stunned and disordered by the first news
of the disaster of Pavia, was recovering its composure and force. The
duchess of Angoulême was regent; the count de Vendôme, cousin of the
constable De Bourbon, did not take advantage of his being first prince
of the blood to embroil the kingdom. The parliament, indeed, displeased
with the imperious character of the king, and angered on account of the
Concordat and other causes, gave the regent some trouble. But new allies
flocked to France in her distress. The Italian states were all ready to
combine against the emperor, whose power they now dreaded. Henry VIII of
England instantly flung his support into the scale of the discomfited
Francis, and concluded a treaty with the regent, stipulating that the
kingdom should on no account be dismembered. Large numbers of the people
of Alsace had taken advantage of the opportunity to rise and invade
France, excited by that religious zeal which scorns restraint. The count
of Guise mustered some forces, fell upon them in time, and cut them to
pieces. It was for this service that Francis afterwards created the
county of Guise into a duchy-peerage--an honour heretofore granted solely
to princes of the blood. The parliament made great opposition to this
novelty; but the king was resolute in his friendship, and Guise became
one of the high noblesse of France, a duke and peer.
Negotiations for the liberation of the king proceeded, with little
prospect of success, at Madrid. Bourbon had betaken himself thither;
his presence and his claims were no small source of difficulties. The
emperor had promised him his sister Leonora, queen-dowager of Portugal,
in marriage; but as Francis, to disappoint Bourbon, offered to marry
this princess himself, the constable was obliged to forego the honour.
The marquis Pescara dying at this time, the emperor offered the command
of his Italian armies to Bourbon, who was urged to accept of it, and was
thus got rid of. Still the terms offered to Francis were so harsh that he
could not accede to them. His sister, the duchess of Alençon, had come
to tend him in his illness and captivity. She was now about to return;
and Francis put into her hand his absolute resignation of the kingdom,
that he might be considered as dead, and no further efforts be made for
his liberation. This alarmed the emperor, who became willing to relax in
some degree. Still his demands were so exorbitant and unreasonable that
Francis at length consented to extricate himself by a breach of faith,
and to swear to a treaty the stipulations of which he was determined not
to perform.
With these opposite views--grasping severity, that over-reached itself,
on the one side, and premeditated bad faith, the almost compulsory
resource of Francis, on the other--the Treaty of Madrid was concluded.
By it the king agreed to give up Burgundy, to renounce all right to
Milan and Naples, as well as to Flanders and Artois. He was to be set
at liberty, and to espouse Leonora of Portugal, the emperor’s sister.
He was, moreover, to abandon his allies, the king of Navarre, the dukes
of Gelderland, of Würtemberg, and the count de la Mark; and he was to
re-establish Bourbon in all his property and privileges. Moreover, the
two sons of Francis were to remain as hostages for the performance of
these conditions, the king himself promising to return into captivity if
they were not fulfilled. On the 14th of January, 1526, the treaty was
signed; Francis taking the precaution to protest secretly, in presence of
his chancellor, against the validity of such exactions. Charles himself
could not but mistrust the sincerity of Francis, and he even retained him
prisoner a month after the signature. The king’s health again declined
in consequence; and at length Charles, in a hurried and irresolute way,
gave orders for his final liberation. He was led to the river Bidassoa,
which separates the countries: his sons, who appeared on the opposite
bank, were exchanged for him, and Francis, mounting a horse of extreme
swiftness, galloped without drawing rein to St. Jean de Luz, and thence
to Bayonne.
_Further Dissensions and the “Ladies’ Peace”_
Thus freed from captivity, on terms which, if fulfilled, must ruin
his kingdom, and if unfulfilled must stain his honour, Francis, it
might have been expected, would be instantly occupied in the duty of
defending himself and retrieving his affairs. His first act on arriving
at Bordeaux, however, was to become enamoured of Mademoiselle d’Heilly,
better known as the duchess d’Étampes, who superseded the countess of
Châteaubriant in his affections, and held thenceforward the greatest
influence over the monarch.
The liberation of Francis was the signal for a general league against
the emperor. The Italian powers were ever disposed to unite against the
strongest. Sforza had already rebelled against Charles, and had been
driven from Milan by Pescara. All of them--the pope, the Venetians, the
Florentines--now formed an alliance with the king, on condition that
Sforza should remain in possession of Milan. A treaty to this effect
was signed at Cognac, but was kept secret for some time. The states of
Burgundy had assembled, to protest against the transfer of their province
to the emperor. The king, they said, had no right nor power to make such
a stipulation without their consent. When Lannoy, on the part of Charles,
demanded the cession of Burgundy, Francis referred him to the answer of
the states. The emperor, on learning this evasion of the treaty, called
on Francis, as a man of honour, to redeem his word and return into
captivity.
This was a trying moment for Francis, who piqued himself on possessing
all the chivalric virtues. He could not openly deride the credulity of
Charles, as Louis the XI or Ferdinand the Catholic would have done. He
was perplexed, distressed, and could only allege the necessity of the
case; a plea which by no means satisfied his nice notions of honour. He
therefore resolved on taking the advice of his subjects. Despotic as he
was, he felt in this case at least the necessity of having the nation
to participate his responsibility. To call together the states-general
of the kingdom was obviously the natural step in such a case. But no;
Francis dreaded the very name of that assembly, in which the vulgar
_tiers état_, or people, had a voice. The legists and judges of the
parliament had for some time taken upon them to represent the nation,
in demurring to taxes and to edicts. Francis, and his minister Duprat,
though not wholly contented with the parliament, yet deemed that
preferable to an assembly of bourgeois. It was resolved therefore between
them that the voice of the nation should now be taken, not in the good
old states-general, but in what has since been called an assembly of
notables--one of the most unfortunate inventions or innovations that
despotic craft could have imagined.
[Sidenote: [1526-1527 A.D.]]
This assembly of notables, or, as some historians will call it, this bed
of justice, was held in December, 1526. It consisted of prelates, nobles,
courtiers, gentlemen, the parliament of Paris, and the presidents of the
provincial parliaments; the only admixture of democracy being the provost
of merchants and the four sheriffs of the city of Paris. Before those
Francis made a long discourse; entering at large into the affairs of the
kingdom, its finances and resources. He recounted the misfortunes of his
captivity, and declared his readiness to return to it, if his people
thought that either their interest or his honour so demanded. The reply
of each class, for all answered separately, was that he was absolved
from an unjust and compulsory oath, against which he had previously
protested, and the fulfilment of which the privileges and welfare of
his people alike forbade. They at the same time accorded to him the
liberty of raising two millions for the ransom of his sons, assuming in
this particular all the rights of the states-general. Thus satisfied,
Francis published the general league against the emperor, denominated
“holy,” because the pope was at its head. Not only the Italian states,
but the Swiss and the king of England acceded to it; so that the reverses
of Francis, if they had stripped him of territories, rendered him much
stronger in alliances than his rival.
The emperor, on his side, promised to Bourbon the investiture of the
Milanese, if he succeeded in expelling Sforza. This the constable
accomplished, subsisting his mercenary troops on the unfortunate
inhabitants of Milan--for of money Charles had as notorious a lack as his
grandsire Maximilian. Milan taken, pillaged, and wasted, how was Bourbon
to support his army--that army by which he lived? For since his exile
the prince had inhabited camps, and was averse to any more orderly way
of life. He loved his soldiers, rapacious and licentious as they were;
and was beloved by them, as a valiant and successful leader inclined
to tolerate the license of the freebooter. Since his treason, Bourbon
had met everywhere with insults and ingratitude from the French, the
Spaniards, the emperor, and his brother generals. This situation made him
misanthropic, and his character degenerated into that of the reckless and
ferocious corsair. To obtain plunder for his army of lansquenets, in lieu
of pay, became indispensable; and he accordingly led them south, menacing
all the great cities of the peninsula, and uncertain which he should
attack. Florence and Rome had both declared against the emperor; Bourbon
fixed upon the imperial city as the more glorious prey, and accordingly
marched thither his mercenary army. Pope Clement was terrified at his
approach, and used all his country’s artifices to avert the danger. It
approached nevertheless, and Clement shut himself up in the castle of St.
Angelo.
The army of Bourbon attacked Rome in the morning of the 5th of May, 1527.
Bourbon himself applied the first scaling-ladder, and was in the act of
mounting it, when the first shot from the walls struck him and put an end
to his disastrous career. His army passed over his body to the assault,
and Rome was carried by storm. The pillage was general, so merciless
were the soldiery. Not all the ravages of Hun and Goth surpassed those of
the army of the first prince in Christendom. The cruelty of the German
soldiers was unequalled: they indulged in the most horrid extravagance
of debauch and impiety. For two months they remained masters of the
city; and the pontiff himself was finally obliged to surrender himself a
prisoner.
[Sidenote: [1527-1528 A.D.]]
This new triumph of the emperor, over the head of the church too, roused
the zeal of Henry VIII. He already meditated a divorce from Catherine,
Charles’ aunt; and it therefore became his policy to befriend and protect
the pope, whose assistance he would chiefly require, against the emperor.
Wolsey was therefore despatched to France; the treaty between the crowns
was renewed; and a joint army was raised, to march into Italy under the
command of Lautrec. That general now compensated for his former ill
success. He made himself master of Genoa by the aid of Andrea Doria;
and took Pavia by assault, abandoning it to pillage, in revenge for the
defeat which the French had suffered under its walls. The conquest of
Milan would have been easy; but as that city was now to belong to Sforza,
the French general turned from it towards Rome, in order to procure the
liberation of the pope. His approach effected this: the emperor became
less harsh in his terms, and Clement soon found himself free at Orvieto.
It was about this time, towards the commencement of 1528, that challenges
and defiances passed between Charles and Francis. The former, in his
reply to the French envoy, reproached the restored king with an infamous
breach of faith; and hinted that he was ready to support his charge as
a true knight, sword in hand. Francis, indignant, sent a reply that the
emperor “lied in his throat”; and demanded a rendezvous, or _champ clos_,
for the duel; but notwithstanding the choler of both parties, it never
took place. It is singular that in this affair of the single combat the
cold and politic Charles seems to have been most in earnest, whilst the
obstacles and delays were raised by the headlong and chivalric Francis.
Lautrec in the meantime advanced to the conquest of Naples. He marched
to the eastern coast, and soon reduced the provinces bordering on the
Adriatic. The command of Bourbon’s army had devolved on Philibert, the
last prince of Orange of the house of Châlons, another French chief of
talents and influence, whom the petulance of Francis had alienated from
him and driven into exile. With some difficulty this prince withdrew his
army from the spoils of Rome to the defence of Naples. He was not strong
enough to face Lautrec in the field: the prince of Orange, therefore,
and Moncada, the new viceroy, shut themselves up in Naples, where they
were soon besieged by Lautrec. Andrea Doria, a faithful partisan of
France, held the sea with his Genoese galleys, and blockaded the port.
It was proposed to reduce the town by famine. After some time Moncada,
fitting out all the galleys in port, made an attack on the Genoese, then
commanded by Filippino Doria, Andrea’s nephew. The attempt failed: the
Spaniards were beaten, Moncada slain, and most of the captains taken;
amongst others, the marquis del Guasto, and two brothers Colonna. Naples
thus became in prospect an easy prey to Lautrec. Its fall might have
brought the final submission of the kingdom; but the same blunder which
Francis persevered in committing throughout his whole reign lost him this
advantage, among so many others.
Such was the fatal habit of the French king to disgust and alienate his
best and most attached friends. Doria, for example, like Trivulzio, was
an Italian who united with a love of his own country a firm attachment
to the French. His exertions had but just torn Genoa from the emperor
to give it to Francis: he was now doing the very same by Naples, when
it pleased the French court to insult and disoblige him. The prisoners
he had won in action were taken from him, and no allowance was made for
their ransom. These insults to himself Doria might have passed over; of
wrongs offered to his country he was more sensible. The French undertook
to fortify Savona, and to raise it into a rival of Genoa. They removed
thither the trade in salt, one of the most lucrative sources of the
Genoese commerce. Doria expostulated; and another admiral, Barbescenas,
was sent to supersede him and bring him prisoner to France. When the
admiral arrived, Doria received him, saying, “I know what brings you
hither: the French vessels I deliver to you; the Genoese remain under
my command. Do the rest of your errand if you dare!” The consequence of
this blindness and ingratitude on the part of Francis was soon seen;
Genoa declared herself free, and allied herself with the emperor. The
blockade of Naples by sea was raised; and the influx of fresh troops
and provisions enabled the city to defy its besiegers. These, encamped
under a midsummer sun, ill supplied, and harassed, were soon attacked by
pestilence. Lautrec their general died of it. The marquis of Saluzzo,
who succeeded him, raised the siege and retired to Aversa, where he soon
after surrendered to the prince of Orange; and thus another unsuccessful
Italian expedition was added to the long list of French disasters.
[Sidenote: [1528-1529 A.D.]]
Another army led by the count of Saint-Pol into the north of Italy met
with as little success. Francis felt that he could not re-establish his
fortunes: he sickened of the love of glory that had hitherto animated
him, and showed himself willing to treat for peace on any terms, provided
the cession of Burgundy was not insisted on. Charles by this time saw
that the nation would never consent to such a sacrifice: he therefore
waived this part of the Treaty of Madrid. The negotiations on both sides
were carried on by the duchess d’Angoulême and Margaret of Austria. The
king gave up all his claims to possessions in Italy, Milan, Naples, and
even Asti, and abandoned all his allies in that country; he renounced
all right of sovereignty over Flanders or Artois; he ceded Tournay and
Arras; two millions were to be paid as ransom for the young princes; the
lands of the house of Bourbon were to be restored to the heirs of that
family (a stipulation, by the by, never performed); and, finally, the
treaty was to be sealed by the marriage of Francis with Leonora, the
emperor’s sister. This Peace of Cambray, called also the “Ladies’ Peace,”
was concluded in August, 1529: it was as glorious for Charles as it was
disgraceful to France and her monarch. The emperor remained supreme
master of Italy; the pope submitted, and obtained the re-establishment of
the Medici in Florence, with hereditary power; the Venetians, who said
that Cambray was destined to be their purgatory, were shorn of their
conquests. Charles forgave Sforza, and left him the duchy of Milan. Henry
VIII reaped nothing save the emperor’s enmity by his interference: the
English monarch showed himself generous to Francis, by remitting to him,
at this moment, a large debt. Thus was Europe pacified for the time.[i]
INTERNAL AFFAIRS
[Sidenote: [1525-1547 A.D.]]
The melancholy Peace of Cambray will not be of long duration; the wars
of Italy are not wholly finished; Francis I has not sincerely renounced
“his heritage” beyond the mountains, the theatre of his former glory;
he will continue to meditate and more than once to attempt, with some
partial success, to shake his rival’s dominion over Italy. But neither
great expeditions nor great events in the heart of the peninsula will
again be seen under his reign. The essential interest of the history
of France is no longer there: it returns to the interior; it is in the
moral, intellectual, and social condition of that nation--thrown back
upon itself after having failed in conquest, and confronted at home and
abroad by the problem, growing daily more formidable, of a religious
revolution or reaction which will compromise its destiny for centuries.
The question is no longer whether France will snatch Italy from the
political domination of Spain united with the empire, but whether France
will find, in the elements which the Renaissance has brought her, the
strength and light necessary to maintain or redeem her political and
religious independence between those two genii of the north and south,
Teutonic Protestantism and Hispano-Roman Papism[69] which, coming into
collision, are about to make an attempt to drag everyone into their whirl.
We will not here enter on the religious history, whose crisis does not
appear in all its intensity till some years after the Treaty of Cambray.
We will first take a glance at the economical situation of France, at
the industrial arts and particularly at the fine arts, at letters and
science, at that Renaissance movement which continued to develop under
the patronage of Francis I. The taste for a civilisation elegant and
learned, picturesque and varied, was the sole affection to which Francis
always remained faithful. He had a more genuine right to the title of
“father of letters” (_père des lettres_) than to that of “knightly
king” (_roi chevalier_). Even his own mistakes and the misfortunes of
the allies he had abandoned were made to contribute to the progress of
the arts among the French, a progress whose advance in a good direction
remains, indeed, questionable. The fall of Florence, the persecutions
of the partisans of France at Naples and in Lombardy, sent a multitude
of emigrants, the flower of the Italian population, streaming across
the Alps; and France, as she was so often obliged to do, at least
opened an asylum to the friends she had not managed to protect. The
king endeavoured to palliate the wrong he had done Italy by favours to
Italians, and the exiles experienced some consolation in finding on the
banks of the Seine and the Loire the tastes, fashions, habits of thought,
and almost the language of their own country.
Many refugees were pensioned or invested with distinguished posts in
the army and in diplomacy. The Florentine Strozzi and the Neapolitan
Caraccioli, prince of Melfi, became marshals of France. Italy not
only sent France artists and politicians, but merchants and skilful
manufacturers, who brought into her cities their industry and the
remains of their fortunes which had escaped the hands of the tyrants.
The pre-eminence of the manufactures of Lyons dates from the fall
of Florence: Louis XI had made Lyons a great commercial city and an
international entrepôt by instituting three annual fairs which caused the
decline of those of Geneva, and had endeavoured by the aid of Italian
workmen to develop the manufacture of silk goods, simultaneously at Lyons
and Tours: still Lyons, where various manufactures had rapidly developed,
did not begin to rival Tours in silks until about 1525; the Florentine
refugees soon gave her the superiority; two Genoese are also mentioned
amongst the chief founders of the manufactures of Lyons.
A bank was instituted at Lyons. An import duty of two gold crowns per
piece on velvet or silk goods protected the French silk manufactures
against foreign competition; as to the cloths and woollen goods of Spain
and Perpignan, they were absolutely prohibited in favour of the cloths of
Languedoc. In the north the manufacture of the cloths of Darnétal near
Rouen was very considerable; the edict of May, 1542, which regulated the
manufacture at Darnétal, qualities it as almost inestimable. An edict of
the 18th of July, 1540, had decreed that foreign stuffs in gold, silver,
and silk should enter France by Susa if they came from Italy, by Narbonne
or Bayonne if they came from Spain: they were to be taken straight to
Lyons and, there only, unpacked and exposed for sale. This privilege
must have enormously increased the prosperity of Lyons. Yet in 1543 one
of those sumptuary edicts which the rigid spirit of the parliament from
time to time wrung from the kings forbade the wearing of gold and silver
stuffs. French merchandises were subjected to a uniform export duty of
one sou per livre. In 1540 a royal ordinance attempted to establish a
uniform measure as already planned by Louis XI: an ell of three feet,
seven inches, eight lines was prescribed for use throughout the kingdom.
But commercial relations were not yet sufficiently active for the
advantage of such an improvement to be generally felt; local practice
protested and prevailed: the edict was revoked in 1543.
The French navy was making remarkable progress: Dieppe had raised its
head since the expulsion of the English and had resumed its ancient
preponderance amongst the French ports on the ocean; Norman and Breton
navigators gleaned, so to speak, on the tracks of the Spaniards and
Portuguese and tried to take up the threads of their old commercial
relations with Africa, and to open new ones with both Indies. Such
expeditions were full of peril, for the haughty rulers of the western
and eastern seas treated as pirates those competitors who ventured into
their domains. Captain Denis of Honfleur had touched at Brazil as early
as 1504, before the Portuguese, who discovered it in 1500, had founded
any settlement there; the French navigators continued to traffic with
the savage tribes who sold them those precious woods from which Brazil
has derived its name, and who “gave a better welcome to the French than
to the Portuguese and other European peoples.” In 1529 two ships from
Dieppe, under the command of Jean Parmentier, made a voyage to Madagascar
and Sumatra. During this time attempts which had more lasting results
were directed to the north of America, towards the countries whither
the Spaniards had not turned their steps. In 1506 Denis of Honfleur had
visited the island of Newfoundland which was then taken for a portion of
the continent; in 1508 Aubert, a native of Dieppe, followed him there
with a vessel fitted out by Jean Ango, the father of the illustrious
shipowner of the same name; the Bretons for their part discovered and
named the island of Cape Breton, and the annual codfishery was founded
on those coasts. The French government at last decided to second private
enterprise, and to claim its share of the New World. In 1524, by order
of Francis I, the Florentine Verazzano undertook a voyage of discovery,
reconnoitred all the coasts from Cape Breton and Acadia to Florida, and
took possession of them in the name of Francis I. Ten years afterwards,
in 1534, the Breton Jacques Cartier of St. Malo, commissioned by the
king at the suggestion of Admiral Chabot de Brion, satisfied himself
that Newfoundland was an island, penetrated into the vast gulf which
that great island bars, and reconnoitred the mouth of the St. Lawrence:
the year following he ascended this immense river as far as the spot
where Quebec was afterwards built, and discovered Canada. The name of
New France (_Nouvelle-France_) was imposed on the whole northern part of
America.
In 1540 Roberval, a Picard _gentilhomme_, was appointed viceroy of
Canada by Francis I, and set out with a squadron of five ships which
Cartier commanded under his orders; the colony was installed at Cape
Breton. The severity of the climate, so different from the magnificent
regions conquered by the Spaniards, the insufficiency of supplies, the
improvidence and negligence of the royal government were the cause
of the failure at the close of a few years of this first attempt at
colonisation, which was not renewed till the reign of Henry IV; but the
sailors of Normandy, Brittany, and La Rochelle continued the codfishery
and the fur trade with the peoples of Canada. A wealthy shipowner of
Dieppe, Jean Ango, whom the documents of the time describe as “merchant
of Rouen and viscount de Dieppe,” made himself one of the glories of the
French nation by his great enterprises, by his taste for the arts, and
the energy with which he sustained the honour of the French flag against
the rulers of the seas, particularly the Portuguese. His beautiful
manor of Warengeville, farm-house rather than château, still charms the
traveller amongst the green woodlands of the Dieppe coast. This family of
Ango was probably the same whence came the architect Roger Ango who built
the Palais de Justice at Rouen.
_The French Renaissance_
Whilst industry and navigation were thus progressing, the arts surrounded
Francis I with a splendour which Charles V and Henry VIII in vain
attempted to rival: for example, the king and all the nobles contended
with one another in erecting buildings, and there sprang from the earth
all those Renaissance châteaux which arose on French soil to take the
place of the feudal fortresses, and which like them have unfortunately
in great part disappeared. There was Madrid, the elegant retreat of the
Bois de Boulogne, so called because Francis loved to recall the weariness
of the prison in the midst of pleasures and liberty; there was La Meute
(by corruption La Muette), and St. Germain, and Villers-Cotterets and
Chantilly and Follembrai and Nantouillet, the splendid residence of
Duprat. The national architecture, threatened by the growing invasion
of the Italian taste, seemed to concentrate all its forces to protest
against it by a last creation of brilliant originality (1526). He who has
not seen Chambord does not suspect all the fantastic poetry that was to
be found in the French art of the sixteenth century. There is something
indescribable in this palace of the fairies, rising suddenly before the
eyes of the traveller from the depths of the gloomy woods of La Sologne
with its forests of turrets, spires, aërial campaniles, the beautiful
tints of their pearl gray stones, chequered with black mosaics standing
out on the sombre slates of the great roofs. This impression could only
be surpassed by the spectacle which delights us on the terraces of the
keep at the foot of the charming cupola which terminates the grand
staircase, the centre and pivot of this vast and varied whole and which
stands up radiant above the terraces like a flower one hundred feet
high. Everywhere between the _lacs d’amours_ and crowned F’s, mysterious
salamanders, vomiting flames, climb on the pediments, curl round the
medallions, or hang from the cornices and panels of the vaults, like the
dragons which watch over the enchanted castles of old legend, waiting the
return of the master who will come no more.[k]
Francis I had at first been the pupil of the Italian, Baldassare
Castiglione, author of a book called _Il Cortegiano_, or “the perfect
courtier.” Struck by the qualities of the Italian people, the French
monarch cherished for them a peculiar love, and drew about him the most
celebrated men of the peninsula. Leonardo da Vinci died at Fontainebleau
almost in the arms of the king. Primaticcio, Il Rosso, Andrea del Sarto,
and Benvenuto Cellini came with alacrity at his call, and some of their
greatest works were destined to be the property of France. The early and
most illustrious French artists, among them Jean Goujon, were trained in
the school formed by these masters, and it was to the construction and
embellishment of Chambord and Fontainebleau that the king devoted their
inspired brushes and chisels.
The type of the old fortress-castle of feudal times gradually gave place
to another and less repellent one, that of the great pleasure-mansions
which included among their attractions everything that the most luxurious
and refined taste could devise. The court journeyed without ceasing from
castle to castle and from feast to feast, eliciting loud complaints from
the foreign ambassadors, who, though unable to afford the expense of such
continual moving about, were yet obliged to follow.
Not satisfied with the presence of foreign artists about him, Francis I
offered great inducements to men of science to visit his court. Erasmus,
the literary oracle of Europe, was warmly solicited to leave Holland and
establish himself in France, but he consented merely to make the voyage
thither. Many Italians, however, among whom was the poet Alamanni, and
a number of Greeks with the aged Lascaris at their head, established
for themselves a second fatherland in France. The famous Guillaume
Budé, guardian of the king’s library and one of the most learned men
of the century, was, with the Estiennes, deputed by the king to show
these colonists all the honours of the land. Francis I gave his envoys
to Turkey the mission of procuring for him manuscripts in Greek, and
the translation into French of ancient documents was undertaken; while
the art of printing, introduced in France during the reign of Louis XI,
underwent rapid development; the presses of Lyons, where a numerous
Italian colony had become established, gaining a celebrity for the town
almost rivalling that of Venice or Bâle.
The College of France, called in the beginning College of the Three
Tongues, was founded in 1529 after a plan indicated by Budé, less
with the object of giving general instruction than for the purpose
of promoting the study of the three languages of learning, Latin,
Greek, and Hebrew. The institution bore a great resemblance to the
Italian academies. Philology, its chief object, was the science most
in vogue at that time, as it was held to be the initiatory stage in
the study of antiquity. Thus conceived, the College of France left
all instruction, properly speaking, in the hands of the old Sorbonne,
the ancient university. True to its old scholastic spirit, opposed to
innovations, and attached to its ancient privileges which it now believed
to be menaced, the Sorbonne entered upon a bitter war against the new
institution; but the latter, strong in the royal favour and patronage,
issued victorious from the conflict. The number of chairs was increased,
to the study of languages was added that of science, particularly
mathematics, and beginning with the very first years of its existence the
College of France gained the reputation of being the most brilliant and
complete of all the European institutes of learning.
The reason for the creation of this college and for its rapid success
and growth may be found in the tendencies of an age that was rich in
discoveries of all kinds. There are, in the history of the human mind,
certain happy periods when the horizons of thought seem to become
enlarged on all sides at once. A new field was opened to philological
research, as the Middle Ages had had but little knowledge of Greek and
less of Hebrew. A corresponding progress was also made in geography and
the natural sciences by the study of climates and races hitherto unknown.
Always powerful over the entire country, the influence of the court
increased under Francis I, and was no less beneficial to letters and
society in general than it was to the cause of learning. The king,
beloved of his men-at-arms because he was the best knight in the kingdom;
of artists and scientists because he so generously patronised and
encouraged them, commended himself equally to courtiers, men of letters,
and ladies because no one in his realm carried to such a point as he
the love of the beautiful. Aided by his mother and sister and later by
his daughter-in-law Catherine de’ Medici, he made his court the most
remarkable in Europe, not only for the luxury it displayed but for its
wit and grace and a certain elegant not to say corrupt refinement of
manners that was best exemplified in the foreign princess brought up
under the eyes of Catherine, Mary Stuart.
Never had the French court counted so many members. Under Louis XII it
had been composed of a few favourites, a definite number of officers, and
a guard of a hundred nobles. Francis I increased in enormous proportion
the number of court officers, which he intended to bestow on upstarts
who could in this manner rise to nobility. The posts were mostly filled,
however, by landless gentlemen of birth upon whom were also bestowed
detached titles. Thus arose a company of marquises and dukes possessing
neither marquisates nor duchies. These two innovations alone would have
sufficed to make the court the point upon which converged all ambitions
and hopes of fortune. Francis I desired that women should share the
offices and dignities of the court, and should have a hierarchy of their
own; he loved to shower upon them, as upon his nobles, the marks of his
liberality. Two of his mistresses, Madame de Châteaubriant, sister of
Lautrec and of Lescun; and afterwards Mademoiselle de Heilly, whom he
made Duchess d’Étampes, reigned for a long time side by side with the
king, and patronised artists as well as distributed remunerative posts.
Unfortunately one cannot have much to say about this court without
speaking of its corruption, to which Francis I himself contributed by the
changes he brought about and by his personal example. Destroying as they
did the simplicity of former modes of living, the innovations introduced
by him resulted in confusion to the rules and usages of the nobility, and
fostered fawning and intrigues. His own many scandalous deeds as well as
those that were with impunity committed around him, have heavily burdened
his memory with the charge of violating the public morality.
It would, however, be most unjust to view the court of the Valois only
through the biased medium of Brantôme’s[p] chronicle of scandals, or the
writings of contemporaneous Calvinists. As for these latter, they have
neglected no means by which they could blacken the fame of the prince and
personages who were the first to persecute their co-religionists; hence,
on many points, their testimony is not to be believed. The letters of
Venetian envoys, on the other hand, who were observers of great depth
and keenness, reveal the warmest admiration for a court of which they,
among all foreigners, were the quickest to feel the great seduction and
charm. All the literature of this century, in fact, imaginative as well
as historical, attests with striking force the elevated character of the
influence exercised by the court of Francis I over public opinion.
Particularly prominent among the writers of that time are Marguerite
de Valois[q] and Marot,[r] the king’s valet, from whose works the
fairest judgments may be formed concerning the tastes of the court--its
gallantry, its love of wit and social pleasures, the esteem in which it
held pure learning and the tolerance it accorded free thought. Severely
as we may condemn certain of their works, they are nevertheless worthy to
serve as models for sentiment, beauty of form, and light, poetic grace.
To these two writers compare Rabelais, the author of the people, the
creator of that strange and inexplicable encyclopædia wherein, as the
product of a great intellectual debauch, the whole sixteenth century
passes by us in review, and you will be able to judge on which side
lay delicacy and taste, in what degree the literature of the court was
qualified to elevate and refine the literature of the people.[f] But,
on the other hand, Rabelais[70] remains a classic in our own day, while
these other writers are forgotten. Rabelais, indeed, is not merely the
greatest writer of this time, but by common consent he is named as one
of the three or four greatest humourists of any age or country.[a] His
work is in itself sufficient proof that Francis I destroyed neither the
liberty of his subjects nor their originality. Although more absolute
than his predecessors, Francis always took account of public opinion and
had the insight to distinguish, as Ranke[s] ingeniously puts it, enforced
obedience from that which is rendered voluntarily.
Thus even in those personal memoirs wherein the individuality of the
writer is most wholly revealed, it is to be observed that the tendency of
the century was all toward expansion, in height as well as breadth. We
note the origin, the preliminary flights of that freedom of thought and
research that was later to soar so high. Apparent as are the excesses of
the age, we must not judge it by its faults alone; its very shortcomings
raised controversies that served to form public opinion in a graver,
sterner mould. More ado was made about the use or abuse of supreme
power, which was for the first time subjected to control. The writer who
passes the severest judgment on Francis I and his court is Gaspard de
Saulx-Tavannes, the representative of the most radical of the independent
nobility.[f]
A word must be said about another phase of intellectual development--that
which found expression in the words and deeds of Luther and Calvin and
their followers.[a] The new opinions early crept into France; their
first converts were men of letters. All the great French jurisconsults
of that century, in secret or openly accepted the Reformation. A party
at the court itself inclined towards it. Louise of Savoy appears not
to have been opposed to it. Her daughter Marguerite, queen of Navarre,
an independent genius and the author of mysteries and novels, openly
professed the principles of the German reformers; the duchess of Étampes,
the king’s mistress, made a point of protecting them. Lefèbre d’Étaples
(Faber Stapulensis), and Louis Berquin, both men of learning known and
esteemed by Francis, sustained these in their favour: the first had
begun six years before Luther. Finally the favourite court poet, Clement
Marot, abandoned his elegies and epigrams to translate the psalms of
David, which the reformists of Paris sang about the Pré-aux-Clercs. At
first Francis, far from being alarmed at these symptoms, would fain have
attached to himself Erasmus of Rotterdam, the king of the learned and of
the men of letters of the century, who was accused of having prepared the
way for Luther by his attacks on the monks. But when the German peasants,
following out the new doctrines to their socialistic consequences, would
have overturned all authority, Francis I thought that the Reformation,
which was a revolt against the pope, was in danger of leading politically
to a revolt against the king; and if he remained the interested friend of
the German Protestants he had no wish to allow their doctrines to gain
ground in his own states.
During the king’s captivity two Lutherans had been burned in the capital.
He had put a stop to these executions, but in 1528 a statue of the Virgin
was mutilated at Paris. Francis declared that “if he knew one of his
own members to be infected with this doctrine he would tear it away for
fear lest the rest should be corrupted,” and from that day he persecuted
the innovators. Berquin, who refused to retract, was burned on the
place de Grève (1529); at Vienne, at Séez, at Toulouse there were other
executions. The necessity of propitiating the Protestants of Germany
mitigated the persecution. Again in 1536 six unfortunates were sacrificed
on different squares in Paris in presence of the court.[m]
WAR AGAIN BETWEEN FRANCIS I AND CHARLES V
[Sidenote: [1528-1535 A.D.]]
But we must not pause for further details of this character;[71] we
must return to the sweep of political events in France, and the renewed
quarrels of Francis and his old enemy Charles V. A lasting peace between
such rivals as Charles and Francis was not to be expected. Even if
the latter could have confined himself to the pursuit of pleasure, to
the internal regulation of his kingdom, and to the patronage of the
arts, the spirit of Charles, ever restless in the cabinet, could not
fail to have provoked him. At one time the emperor sent him a summons,
requiring his aid against the Turks, and ending with the accusation
that he had called Suleiman to invade Europe. Francis was now on the
closest terms of alliance with Henry VIII, who was bent on divorcing the
emperor’s aunt. The French king used all his influence with the pope
to procure the necessary license for Henry, but was still baffled by
the influence of Charles. Clement VII was the potentate whose alliance
was most warmly disputed by the rival sovereigns. And both assailed the
pontiff on a pontiff’s weak side, by the offer of aggrandisement to his
family. Charles proposed that Clement’s niece, Catherine de’ Medici,
should espouse Francesco Sforza, duke of Milan; by which means the
Medici would necessarily be ever adverse to the claims of the French
kings on Milan. Francis, in opposition, offered his second son, Henry,
duke of Orleans, as a husband for Catherine; and Clement, elated by the
honour of an alliance with the royal house of France, exulted at the
proposal. The emperor, who knew the proud character of Francis, could
not believe that he would sincerely permit his son to ally with such
upstarts as the Medici; and this incredulity neutralised the exertions
that he might otherwise have made to obstruct the match. It took place,
however, in 1533, at Marseilles, where Clement and Francis met to
honour the ceremonial, and to arrange the conditions of their future
friendship. One of these, there is no doubt, was the vigorous prosecution
and extirpation of heresy. Francis, however, reaped as usual little
advantage from the negotiation. He failed to obtain for Henry VIII the
dispensation required, and that impatient monarch broke with the church
in consequence. Clement himself died in the year following, and was
succeeded by Paul III of the house of Farnese.[i]
[Sidenote: [1535-1537 A.D.]]
Francis I and Charles V vied with each other in seeking alliance with the
church. Francis burned heretics in the great cities, and made adhesion
to the new opinions a crime against the crown. Charles, on the other
hand, led an expedition into Africa, and slaughtered the infidels in a
new crusade (1535). Victorious over Barbarossa, the usurper of Tunis, and
followed by the blessings of the thousands of Christian captives whom he
had delivered from slavery, he made his way to Rome. There, in presence
of the pope, he stood forth and made his complaint against Francis. He
declared his readiness to invest one of his sons with Milan, on such
conditions of suzerainty and subjection as he should afterwards choose to
name; failing that, to meet his enemy foot to foot, on horseback, or in a
boat, armed _cap-à-pie_ or naked to their shirts; or, finally, to declare
internecine war upon him, binding himself by an oath never to sheathe the
sword till he had made him the poorest gentleman that ever lived. After
this decent and courageous bravado, at which the pontiff must have been
greatly amazed, the assembly broke up in most admired disorder, and the
dogs of war were let loose. An invasion of France was resolved on, and
Charles already counted his victory so secure that he distributed the
estates of the French nobility among his favourites (1536). An army of
Spaniards and Italians was to overrun Provence, and another of Flemings
to break in on Picardy. Between the two, Francis was to be crushed.
[Illustration: A FRENCH NOBLEMAN, TIME OF FRANCIS I]
Misfortunes crowded, not in single file but in battalions, upon the
thoughtless but affectionate king. His eldest son Francis, the dauphin,
died at this time [suddenly; there were suspicions, probably unfounded,
of poisoning]. Defection deprived him of some of the strongest fortresses
in Savoy; and the forces of his enemy were reported to be on the soil of
France. Instantly the courageous Francis was roused from his grief and
dejection. The territory in front of the Spaniards was made a desert; the
cattle were driven away, the villages burned, and parties of resolute
horsemen sent forth to harass them on the march. Charles expected that
all would be risked on the arbitrament of one great engagement, and was
foiled by the unexpected tactics. He marched without glory, for he saw no
enemy; and without food, for every field was bare. Sickness came to aid;
and, in frightful disorganisation, the starving hordes hurried across
the Alps, slain and pillaged on their way by the angry peasantry, and
perishing in the clefts of the rocks of hunger and fatigue. Thus fell the
pride of the invader almost without a blow.
Francis took now the lofty part which hitherto had been played by his
rival; and at a bed of justice in the palace of the Louvre, summoned
his rebellious vassal before his feudal court (1537), stripped him by
solemn sentence of his tenures of Artois, Flanders, and Charolais, which
always had been held of the French crown, and of which his renunciation
at the Treaty of Madrid was null and of no effect, as having been
obtained by violence and fraud. Beside him, on this great occasion, sat
the king of Navarre and James V of Scotland, who had just married the
short-lived Madeleine of France--a more dignified, though not a more
useful demonstration than the quarrel-scene of his rival at Rome. The
forms of feudalism were occasionally revived to gratify a hatred, as
the forms of chivalry were retained to justify a duel; but the hatred
of the two greatest sovereigns in Europe carried them beyond the bounds
both of feudalism and chivalry. Their language, by their respective
heralds, would have done honour to two English prize-fighters. They
interchanged the names of perjurer and liar, and reminded each other of
the discomfitures they had sustained; Charles being particularly caustic
on the subject of Pavia and the prison of Madrid, and Francis retorting
with reminiscences of the emperor’s overthrow in Provence, and starvation
among the hills. Yet, in a year after this time, the enemies met, and
spent four of the happiest days of their lives in unrestrained intimacy
at Aigues Mortes, a small seaport on the Mediterranean. Charles arrived
in a galley. Francis went on board, and grasping his hand said, “My
brother, you see I am your prisoner again.” Charles returned the visit
on shore; listened well-pleased to the open unsuspecting talk of his
companion, and put down all his sayings, and plans, and recollections in
his memory, to be used against him at the proper time. He promised him
great things in return for all his confidence; the investiture of Milan
for his son, and aid in all his schemes.
[Sidenote: [1537-1544 A.D.]]
A French king at that time would have sacrificed anything for the
vainglory of establishing himself in Italy. Charles saw his triumph,
confirmed it by a friendly visit to Paris, and made use of it by
obtaining permission to pass through France to punish the men of Ghent
who had rebelled (1539). And, when thus the whole advantages of his
superior policy were secured, he denounced his friend to the indignation
of every Christian, as an ally of Suleiman the chief of the unbelievers,
and bestowed the duchy of Milan on his own son, Philip, the prince of
Spain. Five armies sprang up at the king’s lifting his hand, to revenge
this wrong and insult. But though indignation may raise troops, it
cannot raise money. Fresh burdens were imposed; church ornaments were
coined into crowns, but still the chest was empty. La Rochelle set the
dangerous example of rebellion on account of its over-taxation, and was
only quelled by alleviation of its payments and pardon of its behaviour.
Assistance was greedily looked to by both parties. Suleiman, the champion
of Mohammedanism, on the side of Francis, was balanced by Henry, the
defender of the Protestant faith, on the side of Charles. The Turks,
under the same Barbarossa whom Charles had displaced from Tunis, besieged
Nice, and ravaged the shores of Catalonia. Henry did little but keep
Scotland from aiding France by the intrigues and menaces with which he
sued for the hand of the unfortunate Mary Stuart, now queen, for his son
Edward. A great victory at Ceresoles, in 1544, added another useless
wreath to the chaplet of French achievements, and for a moment Milan
opened its gates. But Charles and Henry were by this time on the soil
of France. The Spaniards were at St. Dizier, the English at Boulogne.
Troops were summoned from Italy, and collected from all quarters. Charles
steadily advanced, seized Épernay, and rested in Château-Thierry. Paris
almost heard the thunder of his guns; and, flushed with the possession of
Boulogne, Henry was reported to be upon the march to join the army.
[Sidenote: [1544-1547 A.D.]]
But other sounds reached the ears of the belligerents. The Protestants in
Germany were sharpening their swords, and Charles feared the men of the
confession of Augsburg more than the Catholic French. A peace was patched
up at Crespy in the Valois (1544) which left things as they were, and
enabled the two monarchs to turn their religious minds to the extirpation
of heresy. The royal heretic [Henry VIII] who had been the faithful
ally of one of them, and the considerate foe of the other, contented
himself with demanding a bribe of 2,000,000 crowns for the restitution
of his conquests. From this time Francis and Charles had more interests
in common. Both glowed with a hatred of the Reformation such as only
tyrants can feel. They persuaded the pope to summon a general council to
extirpate Lutheranism and Calvinism at once, and while the famous council
of Trent was gathering from all the orthodox nationalities, they occupied
themselves in cruel persecutions of their suspected subjects (1545).[v]
LAST YEARS AND DEATH OF FRANCIS I
Francis, however, was growing feeble. He was no longer the brilliant
knight of Marignano or Pavia, the friend of Leonardo da Vinci and of
Erasmus. Worn out before his time by excesses, at fifty-one he was a
morose old man. The greatest blot on his reign belongs to these last
unhappy years. So long as the war with Charles V continued, Francis
I was careful not to offend the dissenters; the Edict of Coucy had
even ordered, in 1535, the suspension of all persecution on account
of religion. The peace concluded, men of harsh and sinister counsel,
such as Montmorency and Cardinal de Tournon, resumed the upper hand.
They attributed the king’s reverses to the relaxation of severity and
he allowed himself to be persuaded to order new executions. At Meaux
fourteen pyres were erected in one day (1546); at the place Maubert
Étienne Dolet was hanged and then burned.
The most odious execution was that of a whole inoffensive population,
the Vaudois, whose beliefs were more than three centuries old. In 1540
they had been condemned as heretics. The execution of the sentence had
been suspended in favour of a peaceable peasantry who paid their taxes
regularly and merely offered the spectacle of pure and simple manners
in the two little towns of Mérindol and Cabrières and in some thirty
villages of the Alps of Provence.
But in the month of April, 1545, precise and rigorous orders from the
court reached the parliament of Aix. Without warning, the baron de la
Garde, assisted by the president D’Oppède and the _avocat-général_ Guérin
and accompanied by soldiers, entered the territory of these unfortunate
people: 3,000 were massacred or burned in their dwellings; 660 sent to
the galleys; the rest dispersed in the woods and mountains, where the
greater part died of hunger and privation. For fifteen leagues round not
a house, not a tree was left.
Francis I, who perhaps did not know all the details of this execrable
drama, approved what had taken place and ordered the persecution to be
continued. Foreign affairs went no better. It was the time when Charles
V, no longer trammelled by the war with France and assured of peace with
the Turks, turned his forces against the Protestants of Germany and,
under pretext of stifling heresy, sought to stifle German liberty; the
battle of Mühlberg seemed to lay the empire at his feet. Francis I did
not see this great success of his rival; he had died three weeks before
at the château of Rambouillet, at the age of fifty-two years (31st
of March, 1547).[m] He was buried with a magnificence far surpassing
anything which had yet been witnessed in France; eleven cardinals
assisted at his obsequies, and the ceremony extended over two and twenty
days. The bodies of his two sons, the dauphin Francis and Charles duke
of Orleans, were conveyed to St. Denis together with his own, and Henry
II succeeded to the vacant throne.[n] Before we take up the events of
that monarch’s reign, let us listen to an estimate of the character and
influence of the showy ruler whose life story we have just followed to
its close.[a]
GAILLARD’S ESTIMATE OF FRANCIS I
[Sidenote: [1515-1547 A.D.]]
Charles V and Francis I (says Gaillard) perhaps owe it to each other
that they were great men; each had some advantages that were denied the
other. The leading characteristic of Charles was diplomacy, of Francis
straightforwardness. If we compare the two princes as warriors, the sum
total of their military exploits appears about equal; nevertheless the
deeds of Francis are more famous. His early career was so brilliant that
it has shed a lustre over his whole life, even over his misfortunes. To
gain a victory at twenty makes a man famous forever. Charles V began his
career, or at any rate distinguished himself in it, too late. His first
important expedition was the one against the Turks in 1532; for the time
when he appeared at Valenciennes only to fly on the approach of the king,
and the occasion of his failure before Bayonne, when he was enabled to
regain Fuenterrabia by the treachery of a coward, must count for nothing.
The expedition to Tunis in 1536 was the first exploit of Charles V
which can be compared with the battle of Marignano; nevertheless it was
certainly better to gain the battle of Mühlberg than to lose that of
Pavia. On the whole Charles V was perhaps the greater general and Francis
I the better soldier, and this division of military talent is very
much what might be expected from their individual characters, the one
deliberate and thoughtful, the other ardent and impetuous.
[Illustration: THE BOUNDARIES OF FRANCE IN THE TIME OF FRANCIS I]
In the matter of policy it cannot be denied that Charles V was much
greater than Francis I. He kept or gained everything that was contested
between him and his rival; he obtained the empire and took possession of
the duchy of Milan, and he kept the kingdom of Naples. Nor did he owe his
success entirely to the favour of blind fortune; it was rather the result
of wise conduct, well-thought-out methods, and the adoption of measures
likely to bring about the end he had in view. He was fortunate, and would
have been thoroughly worthy of his good fortune had he not so often used
fraudulent means to bring about success. He possessed in a high degree
the royal faculty of understanding men. The greatest generals in Europe
were to be found at the head of his armies; his ministers had no sway
over him, and he always employed them in the matters for which they were
most suitable. He understood both his own subjects and foreigners; he
knew that Bourbon was a hero and that Saluzzo was only a traitor. He
therefore made use of Bourbon for conquest and Saluzzo for treachery.
Bourbon was a hero, but he was a French refugee, so Charles placed
Pescara to act as a spy over him. Pescara was almost on an equality with
Bourbon and was jealous of him. Both men however were ambitious and not
very faithful, so Charles employed the trustworthy and useful Lannoy to
watch them both. He won over from France La Marck, Sickingen, the sublime
Bourbon, the prince of Orange, and Andrea Doria, the greatest men of
his time, while Francis only took from him the obscure prince of Melfi.
Charles V greatly excelled his rival also in steadiness and energy.
Francis I was capable of actions which dazzle us, but he was only
energetic by fits and starts, with long intervals of lethargy and
languor; while with Charles V there were no such intervals. Always full
of energy, he made his preparations, he carried them out, he plotted,
he sowed dissension where it suited his purpose to do so, he went to
Germany, to Italy, to Spain; he controlled the great powers and subdued
the lesser ones, he fettered them all by his negotiations. Bayle remarks
that since there were many more leagues formed against Francis I than
against Charles V, the former must have been more feared than the latter;
but it was the emperor’s cleverness which made people believe that
Francis I was so formidable. Moreover such leagues do not always prove
that the power of the person against whom they are formed is greatly
feared. After the defeat of the De Foix and the expulsion of the French
in 1522, the whole of Italy formed a league against them; was it because
she had more fear of Francis I, who was routed and expelled, than of the
emperor, who was master of the Milanese and of the kingdom of Naples?
No, but she thought she would be more likely to be left in peace if she
submitted quietly to the emperor, than if she made an effort to help the
fallen king to rise, by lending him a helping hand.
Henry VIII, it is true, more often allied himself with Charles V than
with Francis I. He thought he had some claim to France; he knew he had
none to Italy, to Germany, or to Spain. Charles V knew how to turn to
his own advantage the power of his rival, which he exaggerated in order
to injure him. But Francis I was far superior to his rival when he was
defending Provence against his attacks, and Bayle is right in saying
that he deserved more glory for preserving his own kingdom, in spite of
circumstances, than Charles V, who failed to do this notwithstanding his
great power and numerous intrigues, deserved for all his other conquests.
Again, Francis was superior to Charles when he warned the latter that the
people of Ghent were in rebellion, and allowed him to pass through France
on his way to subdue them; when he pardoned the rebels of La Rochelle;
when he behaved with such moderation after the scandalous scene in Rome;
and when, Charles having calumniated him throughout Germany, he took no
further vengeance than heaping benefits on the German merchants.
Finally, in military ability Francis I was at least the equal of Charles
V; in political genius he was his inferior, but he surpassed him in
honour: indeed his political inferiority was partly the result of a
greater moral delicacy, which made him more fastidious than Charles as to
the means by which he tried to gain his ends. In drawing this parallel
we have been looking at Francis I as a politician and a soldier, but the
point of view is not advantageous to him. He will perhaps shine more
brightly in the history of literature and of art.[o]
CHARACTER AND POLICY OF HENRY II
Henry II, at the age of twenty-eight, displayed all the military
qualities that had distinguished his father in his youth. He was trained
in every kind of physical exercise, and enjoyed the reputation of
being a most accomplished knight. “He possessed,” says Brantôme,[p]
“majesty and grace, and manners that were suavely royal. He loved war,
and never found life so much to his liking as when he was in the midst
of battle.” His enterprising character had revealed itself in the last
two struggles against Charles V, in which he had taken part under
Montmorency and D’Annebaut. Cavalli, the Venetian envoy, who erred on
the side of leniency, said of Henry that his excellent qualities gave
promise to France of the worthiest monarch that had reigned there in two
centuries. Like his father he made it a point to become acquainted with
every gentleman in his realm. He detested Charles V, and took no pains
to hide his feeling. The emperor well knew the bellicose humour of the
king towards him and exerted every effort to furnish it satisfaction.
“Henry’s father,” wrote Charles V to his ambassador at Rome, “drew the
Turk towards him by the hair of his head; Henry will seize him by hair,
hands, and feet.”
One thing, however, was wanting in the new king: though a poet, and
possessing like all his race a cultivated taste in literature, he lacked
that personal charm which made of Francis I the natural head of the most
cultured court in Europe. The men of letters in general have little to
say in his praise, and the Calvinists, whose numbers were constantly
increasing and whom he persecuted with relentless rigour, have least of
all been inclined to spare him.
COURT FAVOURITES
Scarcely had Henry II ascended the throne when he recalled Montmorency,
the master who had instructed him in the art of war and who had beguiled
the tedium of a recent period of disgrace by building the superb mansions
of Écouen and Chantilly. Montmorency immediately became all-powerful,
and showered upon his family the highest dignities and honours. Claude
of Guise, his brother the cardinal De Lorraine, and his six sons, all
destined to attain the highest eminence, were also given great prominence
in the councils of the new reign; they literally blocked the approaches
to the throne. “It seemed,” says Tavannes, “as though the king had sworn
to partition France among them.” Diane de Poitiers, grand sénéschale of
Normandy and mistress of Henry II, though many years his senior, wielded,
under the title of duchess of Valentinois, an influence far wider and
more powerful than that exerted by the duchess d’Étampes during the
preceding reign. By the marriage of her daughter she became allied to the
family of Guise, with whom all her future movements were made in concert.
Lastly Saint-André, a former governor of the king, was elevated to the
position of marshal, and the pope bestowed the cardinal’s hat upon two
favourite prelates, Charles de Bourbon, brother of the duke de Vendôme,
and Charles de Lorraine, archbishop of Rheims.
D’Annebaut, to whom Henry attributed the defeat of Perpignan; the
cardinal De Tournon, and several gentlemen who had served as secretaries
of state under Francis I were banished from the court. Out of eleven
cardinals who sat in the council seven were sent to Rome, partly with
the intention of propitiating the new ministry, and partly to strengthen
French influence with the government of Rome, and to establish a French
party in the sacred college. The duchess d’Étampes was also requested to
withdraw, the king even taking from her the diamonds she had received
from Francis I to present them to the duchess of Valentinois.
These many changes resulted, as was inevitable, in widespread discontent.
The new councillors were accused of rapacity, and the spirit of jealous
distrust in which they arrogated all the power to themselves highly
incensed the people, while the king was reproached with the weakness
which made him so readily yield himself over to be governed. The
highest personages made open traffic of court dignities and positions;
Montmorency in particular being accused of having furthered his own and
his kinsmen’s interests by bribes given to the highest nobles, and by
peopling the courts of justice with magistrates and councillors of his
own creation. Venality and corruption everywhere prevailed, and the
spirit manifested by new ministers in entering upon their office was
almost that of dogs rushing upon a quarry.
Not one of the writings, in which speaks prejudice or passion, that has
come down to us from that day is unquestioningly to be believed; it
is an unfortunate fact that many of our most entertaining historical
memoirs are little better than chronicles of scandals, since, however
incontestable may be the facts they contain, the manner in which these
are dressed is invariably calculated to mislead.
On the other hand these memoirs enable us to form an excellent idea
of the brilliancy of the court, of the intellectual standard of its
members, of the political ability of the councillors surrounding Henry
II, of the sentiments of honour and obedience by which were actuated the
nobility. It is seen that to untrammelled liberty of opinion, whether
in praise or blame, was allied a deep-seated reverence for law, for the
government, and for the king. Indeed many diplomatic documents, which for
a long time remained unknown, are to the honour of Montmorency, Diane de
Poitiers, and the Guises, attesting a truth that contemporaneous writers
of military memoirs seem scarcely to suspect--namely, that diplomacy can
accomplish more than arms. From the additional circumstance that the
records of the relations with Venice are mainly favourable to the court,
it will be seen that, strange though it may appear, it was the Frenchmen
of that day who contributed the most towards blackening the national
character.
Catherine de’ Medici, wife of Henry II, and Jeanne d’Albret, queen
of Navarre, also played parts during this reign, small at first but
increasing to great prominence as time went on. Catherine, whom Francis I
had loved and protected against her enemies, gave as yet no evidence of
personal ambition or greed for authority. She passively submitted to the
rule of the duchess of Valentinois, but worked stealthily all the time to
strengthen her own private influence--an influence which Diane herself
finally came to second, and which paved the way to the reign upon which
Catherine was soon to enter.[f]
RELIGIOUS PERSECUTIONS AND ROYAL MARRIAGES
The first days of his accession were employed by Henry in royal
progresses through his domains, and in shows and spectacles. In the last
of these he was himself a chief performer, and no one held the lists with
a firmer lance, or overthrew his opponent with a more scientific thrust.
Henry next proceeded to the slaughter of such of his people as began to
think for themselves on religious subjects. Gibbets were erected on the
side of the road by which he made his entrance into the good city of
Paris, and unhappy Protestants were suspended from them by cords round
their bodies, and dropped into a slow fire, which was kindled under them,
till they expired. The Protestant princes of the league of Smalkald had
been completely beaten at the great battle of Mühlberg within a month of
Francis’ death. The elector of Saxony and the landgraf of Hesse were
taken prisoners, their military followers dispersed, and to all human
appearance the cause of the Reformation on the continent was at an end.
Before the fruits of the battle of Mühlberg could be gathered by the
victors, news reached the confederated Protestants that a quarrel had
broken out between the French king and the emperor, and between the
emperor and the pope. They actually became the arbiters of these great
dissensions, and were courted by all parties. Charles, in order to
intimidate his holiness, insisted on the return of the general council
to Trent, where it had been originally summoned in 1544, and its removal
from Bologna, to which it had been transferred by Paul. This was to
place it where the influence of Protestant belief was greatest, and
already there were hopes of a compromise, by which Germany might become
an undivided power. England was under an eclipse at this time, and was
nearly forgotten outside of her guardian seas. Edward VI was on the
throne, Somerset was protector, and both were too weak to do anything
more than defend their authority against the cabals of the political and
religious parties into which the nation was split.
[Illustration: HENRY II]
The career was therefore open to the rival crowns. Charles, in entering
on the new contest, showed his usual sagacity, and made concessions
after having obtained all the advantages of force. He granted liberty
of worship to the Protestants by an imperial rescript, marriage of
their priests, and communion in both kinds, till the council of Trent
should come to a final decision. But this was assuming too much of the
pontifical authority to be pleasing to the pope. He protested against the
Interim, as this act was called, and prosecuted his schemes in favour of
France more zealously than ever. Persecution and toleration therefore
became the conflicting arms of the champions in this great struggle;
and it shows us how completely the political view at this time excluded
the religious, that the heretics were slain and tortured by a man who
was utterly regardless of the great question in dispute, while their
liberties were defended by a gloomy and unrelenting bigot, who looked on
them as the enemies of God and man.
Henry, too thoughtless to take warning by the sudden change in his
adversary’s treatment of the innovators, sought to strengthen his cause,
and increase the papal influence, by double severity against the new
faith. The massacres and atrocities perpetrated under Francis at Mérindol
and Cabrières rested for a long time in the memory of the people, till
they were expelled by still wilder excesses of fanaticism and hatred.
Rebellions, prompted by despair and over-taxation, broke out in several
places, and an expedition into Italy was thwarted by the necessity of
hurrying back to punish refractory Bordeaux. Disregarding the protest of
the local parliament, the edict of the king had imposed a duty on salt,
which maddened the consumers; for the article lay at their doors, and
the commissaries were inquisitorial as well as unjust. Montmorency, the
favourite, was in his element now. He was sent down to execute justice
on the revolters, and spared neither sex nor age. A hundred of the chief
artisans of Bordeaux were ignominiously hanged; crowns of red-hot iron
were placed on other sufferers’ heads while they were broken alive on the
wheel. The bells were taken down, in sign of the withdrawal of the city’s
municipal powers; and a breach was made in the walls, in sign of its
subjection to military law. Wherever the constable went, he was preceded
by the executioners of his vengeance; and having spread desolation and
misery through the whole south of the kingdom, he returned to Paris
in time to take part in the rejoicings which had been going on while
these terrible events occurred, for the marriage of Anthony de Bourbon
with Jeanne d’Albret. The mother of this Jeanne was the Protestant and
poetess, Marguerite of Navarre, the sister of Francis I; and the eldest
son of this marriage was Henry IV. These blood-stained espousals were the
connecting link between the follower of Bayard and the friend of Sully.
It is a great step when we come, with only one life between, from the
armed bravo of Marignano to the author of the Edict of Nantes.
[Sidenote: [1547-1548 A.D.]]
At this time also another marriage was resolved on, and another royal
bride made her appearance at the court of France. A beautiful and
graceful child she was, whose life has been studied with more zeal, and
fate lamented with more tears, than those of any other queen; for it was
the fair and unfortunate Mary of Scotland, transplanted now, in her sixth
year, from the bleak land which scarcely owned its allegiance, and always
refused its affections--to appear for a brief moment on the brightest
and gayest throne in Europe, and go back to the toils and struggles, the
errors and sorrows of her native realm. She was betrothed in 1548 to
Francis the dauphin, who later ascended the throne as Francis II. The
rejoicings on these two auspicious events were soon interrupted; for all
the nations were in a roused and unsettled state, and every day brought
forth some new complication of parties, or totally unexpected turn in the
progress of affairs.
A distinction seems always to have been drawn between the doctrines of
the Lutherans and the Calvinists. The Lutherans were considered merely
dissidents from the papal church, but the Calvinists were thought rebels
against royal authority. Excesses on both sides justified to superficial
observers the opinion, which inflamed the Catholics and reformers
with unappeasable rage, that their joint existence was impossible.
Catholicism, when it was triumphant, trampled on the faintest spirit of
dissent; and dissent, when it had the opportunity, retorted with almost
insane retribution. The release from the darkness in which all men’s
minds had been avowedly kept was too sudden to be wisely borne. The light
blinded their eyes, and the persecutors could point to their victims’
acts in justification of their own. This will account for the tragedies
and nameless horrors of the next half century in France, in which the
national character entirely changed. Jacques Bonhomme became a ravening
savage instead of a complaining drudge, and knight and cavalier became
brutalised below the standard of a Chinese mandarin or maddened Hindu.
WAR WITH CHARLES V AND HIS SUCCESSOR
[Sidenote: [1548-1552 A.D.]]
National efforts, however they might ostensibly be only on temporal
or political subjects, borrowed their spirit from these theological
dissensions. Wars, sieges, marriages, all had reference to the
great argument of the time; for it was felt on both sides that the
preponderance of either of the parties in the religious struggle would
decide the predominance of the political opinions which were supposed
to be involved. Protestantism and free government, if not the cry, was
already the sentiment of all the peoples, and Catholicism and loyalty
to the crown were the counterblasts on the other side. If Charles V,
therefore, at any time, perceived that the pope himself relaxed in his
opposition to the Calvinist reformers, he opposed the person of his
holiness without the least compunction, but with an unabated reverence
for his office; and if Henry II saw, in the midst of his executions of
the Protestants of his own kingdom, that encouragement of the Lutherans
of Germany would weaken his rival’s forces, he sent assistance to the
confederated princes. But both were equally bent on maintaining their
individual authority. It will therefore not surprise us when we perceive
that, in the year 1552, the part played by these unprincipled potentates
became reversed. Charles, the publisher of the Interim which secured the
Protestant demands, is at open war with them in Germany; and Henry, the
torturer of the reformers of his own kingdom, is armed in their defence.
Maurice of Saxony, however, saved the French king the trouble of crossing
the Rhine, for he secretly placed himself at the head of a band of
determined Protestants, forced the passes of the Tyrol, and scattered the
council of Trent, which was still carrying on its labours. Without check
or pause they marched without beat of drum, and got so close to the house
in Innsbruck where Charles was in bed with a slight illness, that his
imperial majesty had to fly with no more dignified apparel than his shirt
and stockings.
While the confederated princes were lamenting the escape of their
expected prisoner, they were cheered with a message from the emperor
himself offering terms of accommodation. The rapidity of his flight had
been increased by the knowledge, which reached him in his retreat, that
Henry, with a great French army, was on the borders of Germany, and ready
to cross over to the assistance of his enemies. Better, he thought,
to yield at once than allow his French rival to gain the glory of a
reconciliation. The princes accepted the offer, and wrote to beg Henry to
discontinue his advance. Henry yielded to their request by discontinuing
his advance; but indemnified himself by turning to one side, and seized
by main force the cities of Metz, Toul, and Verdun, spread his legions
over Lorraine, and made an attempt on Strasburg and the county of Alsace.
In this he was only repulsed by the Protestantism of the people. They
feared the most Christian king and had more confidence in the Catholic
emperor, who, to the great satisfaction and at the powerful request of
sixty thousand armed Lutherans, had just signed his name to the Treaty of
Passau. This Treaty of Passau was the termination for a long time of the
German strife. Equal rights were secured by it to Protestant and papist;
equal eligibility to seats in the great council of Speier, and mutual
freedom of worship in the states of both communions.
The war henceforth became a petty personal quarrel between the
sovereigns. Charles, having pacified the reformers, swore he would die
before the walls of Metz, which the king had taken, before he would raise
the siege; and Henry swore he would lose his last man before a Spaniard
crossed the ditch. It was a duel with the world gathered round the
lists. Metz was a wretchedly placed town, with no regular fortifications,
no bastions or towers, and was commanded by hills in the immediate
neighbourhood. But Francis, duke of Guise, threw himself into the place,
and made preparations for defence.[v]
_The Siege of Metz (1552 A.D.)_
[Sidenote: [1552 A.D.]]
On approaching the place, the 120,000 men who accompanied Charles V found
neither food nor trees nor shelter in a province which the stupidity of
the men of Brandenburg had ravaged without aim or profit, as completely
as the defenders of Metz might have done systematically in their own
interest. Albert, their markgraf, with the improvidence of a savage, had
reduced himself to famine. Charles V remained for a long time encamped at
Saarbrücken and at Forbach, waiting for his heavy artillery.
Guise had no intention of letting himself be surprised by this army,
masked as it was behind the forests, and most frequently employed himself
in visiting the guards and sentinels. He established a “watch” of mounted
men at St. Julien, to give warning of the approach of the enemy. In the
beginning of October, the imperial army came and encamped at St. Avold,
and on the 19th Metz was invested. Under fire of the enemy’s cannon,
Guise continued the defensive works. Frequent sorties kept up the ardour
and health of his garrison and exhausted the enemy by continual alarms
and losses. Every day brought some damage to the enemy, taking soldiers
and horses and spoiling the provisions that were being brought to them.
At the very beginning the emperor sent a trumpeter to Guise to announce
that Hesdin had been taken from the king of France and that his
brother, the duke d’Aumale, had fallen into the hands of the markgraf
of Brandenburg. But Guise did not heed these communications; himself
informed of what was passing outside, he was in constant communication
with the king, and imparted to him every episode of the siege, his hopes,
his checks, and the movements of the besieging army. His quarters were
near the Champagne gate, the principal object of attack, that he might
be at all hours on the spot where action and the greatest danger were
making ready. He had about five thousand men under his orders in the town
a few days before the investment, but he was entirely without artillery.
He sent a letter to the king, through the enemy’s lines, on the 29th of
October: “Having already split and cracked four of the seven pieces of
artillery I have had fired, am decided on careful consideration to load
them only with half charges, and to use them to terrify more by their
noise than their effect, and to employ falconets and other small pieces,
it not having depended on me to give warning of what I needed in good
time, when means to assist me were available.” He had a double cannon
on the Ste. Marie platform, but “one of the pins of the said piece is
sticking out; the other large culverin is burst at the front end, about
a foot and a half, and I have had it sawn off and shall still be able
to use it. I assure you, sire, that the fault was not that they were
overloaded, but they are so badly cast and of such brittle material that
they cannot bear even the smallest charge.”
Thus reduced to make use of his artillery only for noise, he still did
not hesitate to announce that he could defend himself for ten months.
Every two or three days he sent despatches to Fontainebleau or to the
relieving army; he indicated means of supplying him with news and of
seizing convoys. He wrote to his brother, the cardinal De Lorraine, to
the constable, to the marshal De Saint-André; he excited everyone to an
interest in the honour of saving his town. The cardinal shared this
passion with all the ardour of his vehement temperament. To relieve his
brother, to save Metz, to hurry to the king at any moment to suggest an
idea, propose a surprise of the besiegers, and--noteworthy solicitude
which shows the party leader still hidden behind the courtier--commend
to him those gentlemen whom his brother singled out for their gallant
conduct in the sorties, name those who were wounded, demand for his
partisans the offices of those who had just been killed, were the
occupations of his every moment.
On the 20th of November, Charles V approached the ramparts of Metz,
believing that in a few days they were to fall into his hands; but at
this moment his engineers judged it necessary to change the point of
attack. Whilst they opened new trenches in front of the Tour d’Enfer, not
a day passed but some troops of French horse went to alarm the enemy and
ransack the highways, where spoil was made of provisions and booty of
prisoners. On the 28th of November the Tour d’Enfer fell with a crash.
Guise wrote to the king that the breach was three hundred paces in width,
but that he did not fear the assailants, for “St. Rémy swears by all the
gods he will make them a tasty dish. I think, sire, they will not be cold
when they go out.” The whole garrison awaited the assault with the same
gaiety. The ensigns and standards were planted on the breach to defy the
enemy and every morning on mounting guard new colours were seen to float.
While filling the sacks of earth, the men-at-arms removed their cuirasses
and worked clothed in their “woollen liveries.” Bales of wool were rolled
by women beside the sacks of earth in the space left empty where the
rampart had fallen in. One evening Guise, between two of these bales,
was watching the preparations for an attack, when the engineer, Camillo
Marini, putting his head in the place whence Guise had just withdrawn his
own, suddenly received a discharge from an arquebuse which scattered his
brains.
[Illustration: THE DUKE OF GUISE
(From an old French print)]
[Sidenote: [1552-1553 A.D.]]
Only on the 7th of December did the assault seem imminent. Guise hurried
to the breach with all his volunteers whom he encouraged “by many of
those good words which incite to honour, to virtue, and to victory.”
The assault was not attempted, but the besieged had no time to rejoice
at this, for the next day they learned that Henry II was on the march
to besiege Hesdin, instead of advancing to the relief of Metz. It is
true that they showed no appearance of desiring to be relieved, but they
began to be sparing of provisions; Guise had the pack-horses of the
foot-soldiers killed and salted, in order to husband the forage for his
cavalry. The Tour de Wassieux fell in near the Champagne gate and left
a new breach a hundred paces wide: this opening was closed up like the
first, with sacks of earth; the sorties went on; sometimes two or three
were made the same day, by different gates. The wounded in the place were
numerous. For their benefit Guise sent for the surgeon Ambrose Paré,
who had drawn the lancehead from his cheek when he was wounded before
Boulogne, and an Italian officer of the imperial army consented for a
hundred crowns to introduce him into Metz by night with “his apothecary
and his drugs.” The privations and sufferings which the emperor’s army
had to endure rendered treasons of this kind possible, especially amongst
the Italians, bewildered as they were at finding themselves transported
to the north in the middle of winter for the sake of a German quarrel.
Whole bands of these Italians deserted from the camp of the besiegers
and went to take service with Henry’s army, detachments of which were
overrunning Lorraine and intercepting all the convoys of provisions sent
from Franche-Comté to the emperor.
The garrisons of Verdun and Toul intercepted food and reinforcements,
which were arriving from other points for the besieging army, carried off
the famished soldiers who wandered from the camp, and held enclosed in
mud and snow this confused multitude of men of all nations. The imperial
leaders were not in agreement. The duke of Alva would not allow his
veteran Spanish soldiers to be sacrificed under the eyes of the Germans,
who refused to advance for an assault. Charles V, exasperated at seeing
such weak walls and crumbling ramparts resist so formidable an army,
exclaimed: “How, by the wounds of God, is it that they do not enter? By
the virtues of God, what is the meaning of it?” He grew irascible, ill,
discouraged. He was heard to exclaim: “Ha, I renounce God; I see well
that I have no men left; I must bid farewell to the empire, and shut
myself up in some monastery, and, by God’s death, in three years I will
become a Franciscan!” Finally, beaten in several sorties, and embarrassed
by the capture of his provisions, he opened a furious cannonade without
attaining the foot of the wall, took to mining, in which he was not more
fortunate, and withdrew shamed and desperate on the 26th of December,
1552, leaving his army orders to raise the siege after his departure and
execute a retreat on Thionville and Treves, under cover of some cannon
mounted at the château de Ladonchamp. He had lost thirty thousand men
during the siege.
When, on the 2nd of January, 1553, Guise perceived the men in full
retreat, he precipitated himself with his garrison into the camp, to
seize the artillery and cut to pieces those who had lagged behind. But
a heartrending spectacle presented itself to the eyes of the French.
Whichever way they looked, lay so many dead, and an infinity of sick were
heard groaning in the huts. In every quarter were great cemeteries, newly
dug, tents, arms, and other abandoned furniture. Some of the sick were
lying in the mud, others were seated on great stones, with their legs
frozen up to the knees in mire, so that they could not withdraw them.
More than three hundred were rescued from this horrible condition, but
the greater number were obliged to have their legs cut off.
As if by magic, the French forgot their own sufferings, the dangers they
had just escaped, the martial ardour which had animated them, and thought
of nothing but how to succour these unfortunate Germans, thus abandoned
with their feet in the snow, administering all necessaries and such
comforts as poor sick foreigners want. Guise had them taken in boats to
the duke of Alva at Thionville.[u]
_Minor Engagements; the Abdication of Charles V_
[Sidenote: [1552-1557 A.D.]]
The following year the emperor besieged Thérouanne in Artois. The little
garrison which held it did not capitulate till after a valiant defence;
he had the town levelled with the ground and it was never rebuilt. Hesdin
was treated in the same fashion. Charles was avenging his humiliated
pride by a savage war. In 1554 Henry II paid him ravages for ravages in
Hainault and Brabant; he sacked Mariembourg, Dinant, and, at the other
extremity of the Low Countries, he attacked Renty, not far from St. Omer.
The emperor tried to relieve the place, Guise and Tavannes defied his
cavalry; but the French army was compelled by lack of provisions to raise
the siege.
At the same time, Brissac, by a series of campaigns which have remained
the model of their kind, maintained himself with a small army in
Piedmont, in spite of the duke of Alva, and seized Casale, capital of
Montferrat; Strozzi and Montluc defended Siena in Tuscany against the
Florentines and imperialists; the Turks menaced Naples; finally the
baron de la Garde, the French admiral in the Levant, sacked the island
of Elba and set foot in Corsica. Thus the check given at Metz was not
counterbalanced; France seemed to have recovered her youth with her new
king: Charles V grew weary of a struggle which he had now sustained for
five-and-thirty years. Frustrated alike by France and by the princes of
Germany, he ceded the Low Countries, Italy, and Spain to his son Philip
II, and sought at the monastery of San Yuste that repose which is never
to be found by the ambitious great (1556).
Charles V had not been able to deliver all his crowns to his son; Austria
and the title of emperor remained to his brother Ferdinand. The house of
Austria was divided. But at the moment in which Philip II lost Germany
he seemed to gain England by a second marriage with the queen of that
country, Mary Tudor. He had already one son, Don Carlos; he reserved
for him all the Spanish possessions, and it was agreed that the child
who might be born of this new union should reign over both the Low
Countries and England, that is to say, that London and Antwerp should
be under the same master, the Thames and the Schelde under the same
laws, and that the North Sea should become an English lake. Thus both
for the present and the future France was seriously threatened by that
domination which was pressing on her from three sides, which might bring
upon her an English invasion against which she could no longer hope for
aid from Germany. At the beginning of 1556 Henry II had signed the Truce
of Vaucelles with Charles V: he broke it the same year (November), that
he might not leave Philip II time to establish himself firmly. The holy
see was then occupied by a fiery old man, Paul IV, who was alarmed to
see the Spaniards beside and above him, at Naples and Milan. The king
and the pontiff made alliance. An army under command of Montmorency was
sent to the Low Countries; another under the duke of Guise into Italy.
The object was to confine Philip II to Spain; Henry II was to enlarge
his dominions on the north by neighbouring provinces which it would be
easy to retain, and one of his sons received the promise of the crown of
Naples, which Duke Francis of Guise, descended in the female line from
the house of Anjou, counted on taking for himself. The plan was well
thought out. The energetic Paul IV placed his spiritual power at the
service of France and the Italian cause; he lanced an excommunication
against the most Catholic king.
_Battle and Defence of St. Quentin (August 10th, 1557)_
[Sidenote: [1557-1558 A.D.]]
Against Montmorency, Philip II opposed the duke of Savoy, Emmanuel
Philibert, who, despoiled of his states by Francis, rested all his
hopes on Spain; and against Francis of Guise, the duke of Alva, a true
Spaniard, devoted to the church more even than to his king. Guise,
received in triumph at Rome by Paul IV, penetrated into the Abruzzi, but
failed near Civitella before the scientific tactics of his adversary.
Emmanuel Philibert, after a feigned attack on Champagne, suddenly turned
on St. Quentin where he was joined by seven thousand English. This was
a place without walls, without munitions, without provisions. Admiral
Coligny threw himself into it with seven hundred men; Montmorency
approached with supplies; but came so near to the enemy with an army
very inferior in numbers and took so few precautions to preserve for
himself freedom of movement, that he was obliged to fight without
securing his rear. Emmanuel Philibert turned his flank, attacked him
in front and rear, and completely defeated him. A Bourbon, the duke
d’Enghien, and a viscount of Turrenne were slain; another Bourbon, the
duke de Montpensier, and the constable De Montmorency, the marshal De
Saint-André, the duke de Longueville were taken with four thousand men,
the artillery, and the baggage. There were more than ten thousand killed
or wounded.
“Is my son at Paris?” cried Charles V on learning in the depths of his
retreat of San Yuste of this great disaster to France. Philip II was not
at Paris and did not get there. Cold and methodical of temperament, and
obstinate but without dash, he had not thought it prudent to follow up
his victory. Before taking another step he wished to have St. Quentin,
and St. Quentin did not allow itself to be taken for seventeen days.
Coligny, knowing that the salvation of France was in question, had made
heroic efforts to prolong the defence. There had been time to collect
forces and Philip II, after having taken Ham and Le Catelet, re-entered
the Low Countries with the slender results of a victory which had
promised to be as disastrous to France as Poitiers or Agincourt.
_The Retaking of Calais (1558 A.D.)_
[Sidenote: [1558-1559 A.D.]]
Henry II had recalled the duke of Guise in all haste from Italy. The
conqueror of Metz left the duke of Alva to impose, one knee on the
ground, the Spanish will on the pope, and came to receive the title
of lieutenant of the kingdom with unlimited power. All the nobility
flocked round him; Guise responded to the universal expectation. Whilst
a movement of the troops was attracting the attention of the enemy on
the side of Luxemburg, the duke hastened to Calais which he immediately
invested on the 1st of January, 1558. The English, reckoning on the
fortifications of the place and on the marshes which envelop it, had
left in it but nine hundred men. Two forts cover the town: that of
Nieullay on the land side and that of Rysbank on the side of the sea.
Guise attacked the first with fury and carried it on the 3rd of January.
The fort of Rysbank fell into his power the same day. On the 6th the
castle was attacked; on the 8th the garrison capitulated. The last and
shameful memorial of the Hundred Years’ War was thus effaced; the English
no longer possessed an inch of territory in France. In an attempt to
compensate themselves by an attack on Brest they were unsuccessful, for
the troops landed at Le Conquet were driven back into the sea by the
peasants of lower Brittany. This was the death-blow of Queen Mary. “If
they open my heart,” she said when she was dying, “they will read upon
it the name of Calais.” The same blow ended the Anglo-Spanish alliance.
Elizabeth, who succeeded her sister Mary on the English throne, made
Protestantism triumphant in the island and became the irreconcilable
enemy of the king of Spain.
_The Treaty of Câteau-Cambrésis (1559 A.D.)_
Indeed Philip II, that sombre and fanatical spirit, desired to attain the
dominion of Europe by another road than his father’s. Half of Germany
and the Scandinavian states had separated themselves from Rome, and
the Reformation, stifled in Italy and Spain, was fermenting in France,
spreading in the Netherlands, triumphing in Scotland and England. Philip
II conceived the design of crushing Protestantism. He wished to make
himself the armed leader of Catholicism throughout Europe, the secular
arm of the holy see, the executor of the sentences of the church. His
faith and his ambition were in agreement; for he doubtless calculated
that if he stifled heresy it would not be to the profit of orthodox
Christianity alone, but to that of his own power, and that the unity
of religion would bring about the unity of the empire. In this idea a
war with France for a few towns on the frontiers seemed at the moment
impolitic and he desired to treat with its king in order to win him to
his own plan. Before the peace was concluded some further encounters took
place; Guise seized Thionville and Therme, captured Dunkirk, Bergues,
and Nieuwport, but suffered a defeat by allowing himself to be caught at
Gravelines between the count of Egmont who attacked him in front, and an
English fleet whose cannon belaboured his flanks. On the 3rd of April,
1559, peace was at last signed.
By this treaty France kept the Three Bishoprics (Metz, Toul, and Verdun
with their territory). She had already re-entered into possession of
Boulogne; she also retained Calais, engaging to pay a sum of 500,000
crowns to the English if she had not restored that city at the end of
eight years--which she took good care not to do. The two kings of France
and Spain mutually restored each other their conquests on the frontiers
of the Low Countries and in Italy, with the exception of Piedmont where
Henry retained several towns[72] until the claims of Louise of Savoy,
grandmother of the king of France, should be settled. The acquisitions
of France were valuable and protected her against England and Germany.
Nevertheless, one of the negotiators, Montmorency, has been accused of
having sacrificed his country’s interests to the desire of recovering his
own liberty more quickly; France ceded the county of Charolais, and 189
towns or castles, which she was occupying in the Low Countries or in
Italy, in return for St. Quentin, Ham, Le Catelet and a few unimportant
places which the Spaniards surrendered to her. “Sire,” Guise and Brissac
said bitterly, “you give in one day what would not be taken from you in
thirty years of reverses.” Some towns in Italy were neither necessary nor
desirable for the French, for they would have served them as a perpetual
temptation to return across the Alps. But they were abandoning French
territories which should have been preserved at all costs, especially as
the Spaniards did not restore Jeanne d’Albret the portion of her kingdom
of Navarre which they had held for half a century.[m]
Thus the great game of international politics that for half a century
had been played on the boards of Europe was brought to apparent
termination,--and France had lost. Since the time of Charles VIII,
France, as represented by its king, had longed for foreign conquests.
We have seen Francis I in a life-long struggle with Charles V, striving
vainly to give imperial influence to his kingly office. Henry II has kept
up the game, with Philip II for his counter-player. But now, after all
these struggles, all this loss of property and life, the bounds of France
still remain almost the same as they were when Francis I came to the
throne in 1515. The glamour of the deeds of Francis I may have given a
certain added éclat to the French name; but the actual extra-territorial
influence of France has shrunk rather than extended since the time when
Charles VIII marched practically unopposed to the confines of Italy
(1494).
On the other hand, the duchy of Bourbon has reverted to the crown,
and the recovery of Calais is an event of real significance. With the
expulsion of the English troops from this last coign of vantage, the work
begun by Joan of Arc a century before is finished. If the imperial hopes
of the French kings have been doomed to disappointment, at least France
is now mistress of her own territory; hers is a compact and unified
kingdom, if not an empire in the modern sense of the word.
THE LAST DAYS OF HENRY II
It is not to be supposed, however, that the French king regarded the
imperial contest as really over. Doubtless Henry II, while momentarily
turning his attention to the interior of his kingdom, dreamed of a future
day when he should return to the imperial struggle. But if so, the dream
was not to be realised. The end of his life was at hand. The same year
that witnessed the signing of the treaty of Câteau-Cambrésis was to see
Henry II pass finally from the scene; indeed there is nothing more to
record of him except the manner of his death. This came about in a way
characteristic of the times, but impossible in any other age; it was
the accidental outgrowth of the festivities that marked in a sense the
culminating features of the treaty.
It had been arranged that a double marriage of international significance
should be effected. Henry’s daughter was to marry the king of Spain; his
sister to marry the duke of Savoy. Thus the great imperial drama was
to close in the conventional way amidst the peal of wedding bells. The
weddings took place; but the fates mocked at such an ending, and insisted
that what had commenced as a tragedy should remain a tragedy to the
end.[a] In scandalous contrast to the feverish agitation--an exaltation
mingled with dread--that pervaded all France, the court had given itself
over to pleasures and festivities: nothing but balls, masquerades,
jousts, and banquets on the occasion of the double marriage of the
princesses of France. But the joyous sounds were soon to be changed to
the silence of death. On the 20th of June, 1559, Madame Elizabeth of
France, daughter of the king, was married at Notre Dame to the duke of
Alva, proxy of the king of Spain. On the 27th the contract of the duke
of Savoy and Madame Marguerite, the king’s sister, was signed. Splendid
lists were marked out, at the end of the rue St. Antoine, facing the
royal palace des Tournelles, and almost at the foot of the Bastille where
the deposed magistrates were imprisoned. During three days the princes
and lords tilted there in presence of the ladies. On the 29th of June the
champions (challengers) of the tournament were the dukes of Guise and
Nemours, the son of the duke of Ferrara and the king in person, wearing
the colours of his sexagenarian lady, the white and black of widows,
which Diana had never left off. When the passage at arms was finished the
king who had ridden in several races as “swift and expert rider” wished
to break another lance before retiring, and in spite of the entreaties of
the queen he ordered that the count de Montgomery should be his opponent.
Montgomery in vain tried to be excused. The two jousters rushed violently
against each other and broke their lances with dexterity. But Montgomery,
forgetting to throw away instantly the fragment remaining in his hand as
the rule was, involuntarily struck the helmet of the king, penetrating
the bars of his visor, and thrusting a splinter of wood into his eye. The
king fell on the neck of his horse, which carried him to the end of the
enclosure; here his equerries received him in their arms, and carried him
to Tournelles amidst the greatest confusion and indescribable dismay. All
the aids of science were ineffectual; the wood had penetrated into the
brain. Vainly the renowned Vesale hastened from Brussels on the command
of Philip II; Henry II languished eleven days, and expired on the 10th of
July after having the marriage of his sister Marguerite with the duke of
Savoy celebrated in his chamber the day before his death. He was a few
months over forty years of age. All Protestant Europe hailed the arm of
the Almighty in this thunderbolt which had struck down the persecuting
king in the midst of his “impious” festivities.
The reformers were not mistaken. The race of Valois was doomed. Restored
in the fifteenth century by the greatest marvel in French history, it had
disregarded the will of God as indicated by Joan of Arc. In the sixteenth
century it outraged humanity and hampered the natural development of
France. Its days were numbered. Now replacing the fanaticism of Henry
II by a policy devoid of principle or sincerity, it was to strive at
random during thirty years against the tempests of the religious wars, to
disappear finally in a sea of blood.[k]
FOOTNOTES
[67] [See vol. IX, Chapter XV, for the complementary account of this and
the subsequent Italian campaigns of Francis I.]
[68] [Charles had succeeded Ferdinand the Catholic, who died in 1516.
Francis made no murmur when Charles entered into his vast heritage;
indeed, he signed a treaty of offensive and defensive alliance with him
at Nyon in 1516. France gained nothing by it except the restitution
to Jeanne d’Albret of Basse-Navarre, which Ferdinand had seized. But
Maximilian’s death in 1519 changed the whole face of affairs.]
[69] [“I purposely make use of this Protestant term,” says Martin,
himself a Catholic, “as expressing a particular form of Catholicism.”]
[70] [The work of Rabelais is discussed in Chapter XIV of the present
volume.]
[71] [For a study of the Reformation, see vol. XIII.]
[72] The treaty of 1562 with Savoy finally left France only Pinerolo,
Perosa, and Savigliano, which were restored by Henry III in 1574. The
marquisate of Saluzzo which Francis I had snatched from the family of
that name was usurped by Savoy in 1588 and in 1601 exchanged for Bresse.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER XIII. CATHERINE DE’ MEDICI AND THE RELIGIOUS WARS
The lance-thrust with which Montgomery struck down Henry II in
the tournament of June 29th, 1559, was to change the aspect
of France. The reign so rudely interrupted in the midst of
festivities had not always been happy or brilliant, but it had
maintained an appearance of grandeur. The reigns of which it
led the sorrowful series, could not bring it the same honour
or the same profit. It was no longer the question as to who
should have the first place in Europe, the house of France or
that of Austria; but who in France would gain by the unchained
religious passions--the Guises or the Bourbons. In future
it is no longer a question of fighting the Spanish or the
English; when they are mentioned, it will be to open the French
frontiers to them and have them take part in the country’s
struggles.--DE LACOMBE.[b]
[Sidenote: [1559-1589 A.D.]]
Voltaire--struck with the violent contrast between the misery and
brilliancy of this century, the sudden rise of the arts, the refinement
and chivalry of the court which glittered even in the midst of
crimes--cries out: “It is a robe of silk and gold stained with blood.”
The gold and silk have been shown; now appear the blood and ruin.
Henry II left to Catherine de’ Medici four young sons. Sickly from birth,
and already weakened by excess, three of them rapidly succeeded to the
throne, having themselves no heirs; and thus for a quarter of a century
the weight of absolute power, so difficult to carry, falls into the
hands of children or young men without experience. Grandchildren of one
of the most brilliant of monarchs, and with the blood of the Medici in
their veins, they were able to show happy qualities of spirit and great
defects. They were eloquent speakers, occasionally poets, and always
friends of literature and art, but with vices that endangered the state;
and the crimes which resulted from their characters, at once violent
and perfidious, overshadowed their gifts of mind. The oldest, Francis
II, was not able to show the sad effects of these contradictions in his
nature; he reigned less than a year and a half.[c] His successor, Charles
IX, a child of ten on his accession, reigned fourteen years, but never
ruled, being dominated by the baleful influence of his mother. To Charles
succeeded his weak and perfidious brother Henry III, with whose troubled
and ineffectual reign the house of Valois came to an end. Such are the
reigning monarchs of our present epoch. But the real ruler of France
during this dark period of thirty years is the mother of the kings, the
scheming, pitiless Catherine de’ Medici. It is her story that we tell as
we follow the fortunes of her weakly offspring, the first of whom now
claims attention.[a]
FRANCIS II (1559-1560 A.D.)
[Sidenote: [1559-1560 A.D.]]
The law declared the king a major at thirteen years of age; at sixteen
Francis II was still weak of will and under the tutelage of others. With
a prince feeble both in mind and body at the head of the state, it was
natural that the queen-mother should be called upon to take an active
part in public affairs. The widow of Henry II had not as yet made her
influence strongly felt; with all her superstition she was known to
possess intelligence and a refined taste in art and in matters pertaining
to her personal pleasures, but in moral sense she was notably deficient.
Always kept by her husband in ignorance of public affairs, she had
hitherto revealed no higher qualities than a rare constancy under affront
and a marvellous ability to carry on intrigues. Now passing as she did
without transition from court circles into state factions, and from
minor intrigues into war, she was taken at a disadvantage and did not
at once show herself equal to the requirements of her new rôle; without
convictions of any kind as without scruples, she was not led to adopt the
firm and open policy that would best have served the state, but carried
all the artifices of the boudoir into the conduct of public affairs.
Her method of government consisted in ruling men by their passions, a
method which augments corruption by doubling the strength of the parties
it places in opposition to each other. The many outrages which had been
inflicted upon her by the triumphant Diane de Poitiers had effaced in her
mind all distinction between good and evil, and there was left her but a
single worthy sentiment, her affection for her children. All her efforts
were directed toward keeping the power in the hands of her sons, and to
fulfil this end she unhesitatingly made use of every means, from love
intrigues to assassination. A policy so perverse must inevitably bring
its own punishment, and the blood-stained crown of the Valois, falling
from the hands of this unscrupulous Italian woman, came near to being
irretrievably shattered.
The young Mary Stuart, wife of Francis II, superseded Catherine de’
Medici in power for a brief period. Henry II had wedded his son to
this daughter of James V and Marie de Lorraine in order to make sure
of the aid of Scotland in any future quarrel with England. Beautiful,
gracious, intelligent, and witty, Mary had not yet committed those faults
which were to be expiated by a long term of suffering, that ended only
in death. At the brilliant court of France, surrounded by the poets,
scientists, and artists that attended her every step, Mary threw herself
unrestrainedly into the pleasure of exerting those rare charms of mind
and person which have silenced all adverse criticism on the lips of
modern historians. The influence exercised by the young queen on all
around her, the empire she had gained over the mind of the king, might
have operated powerfully for the welfare of the state had she been
surrounded by disinterested advisers; as it was she gave herself up
completely to pleasure and left the management of affairs in the hands of
her uncles, the cardinal De Lorraine, and Duke Francis of Guise.
The house of Guise, a younger branch of the ducal house of Lorraine,
had, although but newly established in France, rapidly risen to power.
Claude, chief of the house, had obtained in recompense for his services
the governorship of the province of Champagne and the elevation of his
property of Guise into a duchy, his brother John being made a cardinal.
Two of his sons were destined to play a prominent part in the affairs of
France: the elder, Francis, had bravely defended Metz and reconquered
Calais; while another, Charles, had succeeded his uncle John as cardinal
and possessed as many as twelve ecclesiastical sees, among which were
three archbishoprics. The young king left to the first-named, Francis,
all matters pertaining to “the militia,” while Charles was given
jurisdiction in civil affairs. Thus the entire administration of the
state was practically given into the hands of these two brothers, the
“general superintendence” over the government which Catherine de’ Medici
was supposed to retain being only a high-sounding, empty title.
There were other candidates that aspired to power, some by reason of
their birth and others from pure ambition--the Bourbons, for example,
and the Montmorencys. The house of Bourbon had for chiefs at that time
Anthony who married Jeanne d’Albret, heiress of the kingdom of Navarre,
and his two brothers, Charles, Cardinal de Bourbon, and Louis, prince of
Condé. These three were the nearest kindred to the Valois, and Anthony,
in case of minority, could have laid claim to the regency; but since the
treason committed by the constable, the Bourbons had been somewhat in
disgrace, and for the time being were making no demands.
The aged and inflexible constable, De Montmorency, the chief who had met
defeat at St. Quentin, showed himself less disinterested; but the king,
pretexting his advanced years, gradually relieved him of the burden of
affairs. Thus the two Guises remained undisputed masters of the power,
the king, and the court, until a new enemy rose up to challenge their
supremacy. It was forty years since Luther had begun to preach against
the established church, and Europe was now divided into two communions.[c]
_Religious Parties_
In France the religious parties were political factors at the same time.
The Huguenots, as they came to be called, were largely recruited from
among the nobility which was hostile to the Guise party. This must be
kept in mind as we enter upon the long story of crime and civil war which
marks the religious settlement in France. It was particularly unfortunate
that this great question of religious differences came at a time when a
line of weak kings left authority the prize of faction or in the control
of women.[a]
A conspiracy against royalty became the first act of Protestantism in
France; and thus hundreds of loyal subjects and rational minds were
alienated from it, and their dislike was strengthened by prejudice.
The court, with some reason, henceforth declared against it an eternal
war. Many of the noblesse had already joined the party of Coligny and
of Condé, though the king of Navarre and the constable hesitated and
held back. La Rochefoucauld, Jarnac, and the vidame de Chartres declared
for them. An atrocious impertinence on the part of the cardinal De
Lorraine, opportunely occurring, swelled this band of foes to the Guises.
Tormented by demands, some for debts due and some for places promised,
the all-powerful prelate in a fit of spleen published a proclamation by
sound of trumpet, ordering all petitioners, of whatever rank, to quit
Fontainebleau, where the court then was, without delay, and this under
pain of being hanged. The cardinal, perhaps, meant to be facetious; for
the court instantly became a desert. The host of noble suitors, proud
though mendicant, could not forgive the threat, and many joined the
discontented.
The party had numerous meetings in the château of Vendôme, and in other
places. La Renaudie, a gentleman of Périgord, and an agent of Coligny,
was employed by him to be the ostensible leader. A meeting was secretly
convened at Nantes, where the Protestants and enemies of Guise united to
the number of six hundred, and took counsel together. It was agreed to
attack Blois, where the king then was, obtain possession of his person,
and get rid of the odious Guises. Amongst such a host of conspirators
secrecy was almost impossible: the duke received warning of the plot, and
removed the court to the castle of Amboise. The cardinal De Lorraine was
terrified; he proposed to summon the _ban_ and _arrière-ban_, and gather
an army against the rebels. All the anxiety of Guise, on the contrary,
was that his enemies should show themselves; and for that purpose he
affected confidence. Coligny and Condé both repaired to Amboise, where
Guise received them without betraying the least mark of suspicion,
and he appointed them to different posts of defence about the castle;
each, however, watched by his own trusty partisans. The rising had been
appointed for the 15th of March: it took place on the 16th, the baron de
Castelnau seizing the castle of Noizé, not far from Amboise. La Renaudie
was marching to join him: they hoped to surprise the court; when on a
sudden the royal troops sent by Guise made their appearance, attacked La
Renaudie, slew him, and besieged Noizé.
An amnesty was now published in the hope of allaying the insurrection;
but, as if in contempt of it, the château of Amboise was attacked on that
very night. All the vigilance and valour of Guise were required to repel
the rebels. By secret information he had time to prepare for them, and
they were routed. The amnesty was revoked, and no mercy was shown to the
captives. Twelve hundred of them were hanged, or otherwise despatched;
even Castelnau, who had surrendered on the faith of the duke de Nemours,
was executed in the presence of the court. In the confessions forced
from many by the torture, none of the real chiefs of the conspiracy was
mentioned except the prince of Condé. History is even in doubt to decide
if those chiefs were concerned in the attack: the Protestant party will
not admit that they by this rash and unwarrantable act produced the civil
war. Condé was brought to trial in presence of the court: he disdained
to defend himself but as a knight. “Let my accuser appear,” said he,
regarding Guise, “and I will prove upon him, in single combat, that he is
the traitor, not I, and that he is the true enemy of the king and of the
monarchy.” Guise rose to reply to this challenge: “I can no longer suffer
these dark suspicions to weigh upon so valiant a prince; I myself will
be his second in the combat against whoever accuses him.” Most of those
present were as perplexed as no doubt the reader is, to comprehend this
conduct in the duke of Guise. Some called it chivalric generosity, others
the perfection of guile.
In the trouble excited by the conspiracy, the young king, for the first
time, manifested an opinion of his own. He was shocked at finding
himself the object of hatred, and he began to mistrust the Guises. The
queen-mother, Catherine, after the example of her son, also took courage;
and the chancellor Olivier, as well as Vieilleville and other courtiers,
joined her party. Hence arose the first amnesty--a concession on the
part of the Guises which was recompensed by the duke’s appointment
as lieutenant-general of the kingdom. The executions which followed,
especially that of Castelnau, which the court witnessed, shocked the
princesses (the cardinal De Lorraine hoped that the sight of heretic
blood would have had an opposite effect), and they, with the young
queen Mary, flung themselves into the scale of mercy. Guise was unable
to resist this influence; he saw that the prince of Condé must in
consequence be released, and he sought to take to himself full credit for
a generosity that was forced upon him. Here then Catherine de’ Medici,
for the first time, appears as the leader of a party.
The continued mistrust and independence of the Guises shown on the part
of the queen-mother and the young king produced an assembly of notables,
summoned soon afterwards at Fontainebleau to take the affairs of the
kingdom into consideration. In it the Protestant leaders, even prelates,
spoke openly the apology for reformation; and Coligny demanded tolerance
for the sectarians, relying upon the neutrality of the court. Guise could
no longer command his temper, as he did at Amboise: mutual recrimination
and menaces were heard in the assembly of peace. Both parties struggled
in their discourses to convince the monarch of the justice and expediency
of their counsels; but the weakness and indecision of the court were at
the same time seen by both; and an appeal of equal earnestness was made
by them to the people. The Protestants continually cried out for the
states-general and a national council. And now the cardinal De Lorraine
forgot his nature so far as to join in the cry, and make the same demand.
The independent attitude of the queen rather forced the Guises to
strengthen themselves by popularity.
Such appear the true reasons why the states-general were summoned to
meet at Orleans, in October, 1560. Historians in general perceive in
them merely a snare to catch the Protestant chiefs. They served that
purpose indeed, but they had been already summoned ere Condé, just
released, could have recommenced his intrigues. The arrogance and
boldness of the Protestants, and of Coligny, in the assembly of notables
at Fontainebleau, were revolting to Catherine and Francis. Between
August, when that assembly was held, and October, the period for the
assembling of the states, the Guises had completely won the court to
themselves, and regained their influence. The prince of Condé attempted
during that interval to seize Lyons, and convert it into a stronghold
of rebellion. He failed, however; and his traitorous enterprise became
thoroughly known at court. Notwithstanding this, the brothers of Bourbon,
the king of Navarre and the prince, were induced to join the assembly of
the states. Though full of mistrust, they still ventured on the secret
favour or neutrality of Catherine, who joined in enticing them to come.
They were ill received by the king. Catherine was troubled, and shed
tears on beholding them, knowing them to be victims betrayed by their
confidence in her. The king’s mind had been filled with the bitterest
calumnies against them: he accused Condé of having attempted his life,
and ended by committing that prince to prison. The king of Navarre
instantly complained, and expostulated with the queen-mother; but she
could not now retract the consent she had given, or unbend the mind of
the young monarch. Condé was tried by a commission, and refusing to
answer, was condemned to death. The day was appointed for the execution,
and Catherine de’ Medici betrayed to all who approached the agony and
misgivings of her mind.
_Death of Francis II_
Historians will maintain that this sensibility on the part of Catherine
was affected; but it would seem that she was now sincere in wishing to
save the life of Condé, and fortune placed this in her power. The young
king was stricken with sudden illness, arising, it is supposed, from
formation of an abscess in his head. The supreme authority rested with
the queen-mother. The Guises urged her to execute the sentence upon
Condé; but she hesitated, and resolved to save him. She determined,
however, to turn her mercy to advantage; summoning the king of Navarre,
she offered to spare the life of his brother, provided he signed an
agreement renouncing all claims to the regency in case of the young
king’s death. Navarre signed; and Francis II expired on the 5th of
December, 1560.[d]
[Sidenote: [1560-1561 A.D.]]
France would quickly have forgotten this unfortunate young man but for
two ineffaceable memories which were connected with his reign--that of
the rise to power of the Guises, together with the beginning of the
terrible religious wars, and the far pleasanter one of the presence
on the throne of the lovely Mary Stuart. Obliged, after the death
of her husband, to leave the land of her adoption and return to her
native Scotland, she wept long on sailing away from the shores that had
witnessed “evil luck depart from her and good fortune take her by the
hand.” Leaning on the rail in the stern of the ship that was bearing her
westward, she kept her brimming eyes fixed on the receding coast-line of
the country she was leaving, and “remained in this attitude full five
hours,” says Brantôme,[e] “repeating unceasingly, ‘Adieu, France! Adieu,
France!’” When night came she caused rugs to be spread in the same place
and laid herself down there to sleep, refusing all food. At daybreak she
could still perceive a point of land on the horizon, and at the sight
she cried out, “Adieu, dear France, I shall never see you again!” She
was to find a crown, it is true, in the country towards which she was
journeying, but there awaited her chains as well, an eighteen-year period
of captivity, and instead of ascending a throne she mounted the steps of
the scaffold.[c]
THE ACCESSION OF CHARLES IX (1560-1574 A.D.)
Charles IX, a boy ten years of age, succeeded his brother Francis.
Catherine de’ Medici, according to her promise, liberated the prince of
Condé; and as the king of Navarre, according to his promise, supported
the queen’s pretensions, she took upon her the office of regent.[d]
The dangerous experiment of a meeting of the states-general was now
unavoidable, and all parties paused to see what the result would be. The
result was not so considerable as either side expected. The universal
voice was for reform in the management of the state and diminution
of taxation. Reform also in the church was strongly advocated; but
the priests voted that it could only be procured by strengthening the
laws against the Protestants; the third estate voted that the object
was to be gained by freedom of conscience; and the nobles were almost
equally divided in their votes. All, however, agreed in re-establishing
the Pragmatic, and diminishing the contributions to the pope. After a
session of six weeks the states-general was prorogued, and factions
breathed again. Guise reconciled himself to his enemies, the constable
and the marshal Saint-André; and the three put themselves under the
protection of Philip of Spain in defence of the Catholic church. This
gave them the name of the “triumvirate.” Condé and Coligny, on the other
hand, strengthened their relations with the Huguenots. They looked in
all quarters for assistance, and the Protestant prospects were not so
desperate abroad as to discourage their hopes at home. In Germany,
indeed, the Huguenots were at that moment triumphant. Not more than one
tenth of the people had retained their allegiance to the pope.
Catherine, the queen-mother, pretending an impartiality she did not
feel, condescended to listen to a controversy carried on in her presence
between the doctors of the contending faiths. She was struck with the
ability of the Huguenot champions, whom she had considered hitherto as
mere fanatical enthusiasts, and the admiration of such an enemy is more
dangerous than her contempt. From this time she brooded over plans for
the extermination of a sect who could argue so well and fight so bravely,
and in the meantime gave them some delusive privileges, which irritated
their opponents and dissatisfied them. They were permitted to worship
outside the walls of a town, but they must go to the meeting unarmed, and
disperse when ordered to do so.
[Sidenote: [1561-1562 A.D.]]
It chanced that Francis de Guise was travelling with a stout escort near
the little town of Vassy, in Champagne, on a Sunday in the March of 1562.
The Protestants were worshipping in and around a barn beside the road,
and the gallant escort drew sword upon the unhappy congregation, slew
sixty of them on the spot, and wounded almost all the rest. Guise, who
had been struck by a stone upon the cheek, rode on and took no notice of
the outrage committed by his guard.[f]
CIVIL WAR (1562-1569 A.D.)
This was the signal for a war which, interrupted seven times by
precarious treaties and as many times renewed, covered the land of France
during a period of thirty-two years with blood and ruins. At the news of
the massacre of Vassy the Huguenots everywhere took up arms; the duke of
Guise seized the king’s person in his castle of Fontainebleau and carried
him, with his mother, to Paris where there were but few Protestants.
[Illustration: CATHERINE DE’ MEDICI]
“As regards the efficient and assured force of the reformers,” says
Michel de Castelnan,[g] “it consisted of three hundred noblemen and
as many soldiers accustomed to arms; besides four hundred volunteers,
students and citizens, utterly without experience. What was this body,
in face of the infinite number of the people, but a fly measuring forces
with an elephant?” Outside of Paris, however, the Protestants thought
they could count upon a tenth of the population, and the greater part of
the provincial nobility was on their side.
They proclaimed Condé[73] defender of the king and protector of the
realm; and at the end of a few weeks they had gained possession of
two hundred towns, among which were Rouen, Lyons, Tours, Montpellier,
Poitiers, Grenoble, Orleans, and Blois. The Guises had not expected such
prompt action on the part of their antagonists. Though ill-prepared for
war, they had the king in their hands, and strong in this advantage they
declared the Calvinists guilty of rebellion and Condé of the crime of
lèse-majesté; whereupon Philip II, the champion of Catholicism over all
Europe, sent them a corps formed of members of those old Spanish bands
that were as noted for their cold-blooded ferocity as for their valour.
Condé on his side appealed for aid to the Protestant Elizabeth, who sent
him an equal number of troops for the defence of Rouen, on condition that
he would deliver over to her Le Havre as a pledge for the sums she had
advanced. Thus was committed by the chiefs of both parties the criminal
error of invoking foreign intervention in their affairs.
It was at the north, where the leaders had taken up their position and
where the fighting was consequently thickest, that the fortunes of the
war were finally decided. The duke of Guise, at the head of the Catholic
army that Anthony de Bourbon had recently rejoined, marched directly
upon Rouen, which, though scarcely tenable by reason of its position in
the midst of commanding heights, offered a brave resistance. Anthony
de Bourbon, king of Navarre, received during this conflict a wound of
which he died. Montaigne[h] relates that during the siege a Protestant
gentleman was apprehended who had been charged with the mission of
assassinating the duke. The latter pardoned and set him free. “I will
show you,” he said, “how much more merciful is my religion than that
which you profess. Your faith inspired you with the project of slaying me
without hearing me in my own defence, and without having received from me
the least cause for offence; mine commands me to pardon you, convinced
though I am that you were preparing to kill me without reason.” These
were noble words, such as are sometimes spoken by ambitious individuals
who aspire to every earthly glory, but are rarely borne out in their
lives. The duke had not behaved with such magnanimity at Vassy and at
Amboise, where he made reply to one of his victims, “My trade is not to
make speeches but to cut off heads;” nor did he show greater clemency
at Rouen when that city was at last obliged to surrender. “This great
city,” says Castelnau,[g] “full of riches of all sorts, was pillaged,
without regard to the religion of either side, in the space of a week,
notwithstanding that the very next day after the capture the crier had
announced that every company or standard-bearer, of whatever nationality,
must at once leave the city on pain of death.” When all the pillaging was
at an end judicial proceedings were begun.
Condé, in the hope of repairing the loss of Rouen, and reinforced by
seven thousand men whom he had received from Germany, set out for Paris,
the outskirts of which it was his purpose to attack. He turned first
in the direction of Le Havre with the intention of joining the English
troops there, but was forced by the duke of Guise to come to a stand at
Dreux, on the 19th of December. There were arrayed against each other
at this place fifteen or sixteen thousand men on either side. For some
time the two armies were directly facing each other--“each man,” says La
Noue,[q] “thinking in his heart that the soldiers he saw coming towards
him were neither Spanish nor Italian but French, that is to say, the
bravest among the brave, and that in their ranks were doubtless many
of his own comrades, relatives, or friends, whom in less than an hour
he must seek to kill. Those reflections lent additional horror to the
situation without diminishing the courage of a soldier.” Condé penetrated
to the centre of the Catholic ranks, wounding and taking captive the
constable; but the Swiss restored the balance of forces, and Guise was
made victor by a successful flank movement which took the prince of Condé
prisoner.
The admiral Coligny made good his retreat, however, with the Germans,
and rallied the fugitives. The marshal Saint-André, in endeavouring to
harass him, was taken and slain. The singularity of the battle of Dreux
was, that each of the two generals became prisoner to the opposite party.
Guise gained both ways--not less by the removal of the constable, whose
rank entitled him always to the superior command, than by the captivity
of Condé. This prince was treated with the utmost generosity by his
rival: they shared the same tent, the same bed; and while Condé remained
wakeful from the strangeness of his position, Guise, he declared, enjoyed
the most profound sleep. There were, indeed, heroic traits about the duke
of Guise, that mark him to have been naturally of a generous and noble
disposition. It appears that, especially when in arms and away from his
brother, he could shake off the hard-heartedness, the guile, and even the
ambition which in the cabinet rose to stifle every better quality.
[Sidenote: [1562-1563 A.D.]]
Guise followed up his victories by laying siege to Orleans. While he was
engaged in reducing this stronghold of his enemies a Huguenot gentleman
named Poltrot treacherously shot the duke with his pistol. He lingered
nine days, and expired with exemplary fortitude and piety. He was a brave
and great man, with such power of nerve and concentrated pride that,
notwithstanding his equivocal rank in France, the stern constable himself
and the princes of the blood quailed before him. His virtues were his
own; his vices those of his party.
_The Edict of Amboise and its Results_
The death and captivity of the chiefs on both sides, Coligny excepted,
necessarily brought on an accommodation. Peace was declared; and the
Edict of Amboise, issued in March, 1563, granted full liberty of worship
to the Protestants within the towns of which they were in possession up
to that day. Thus ended the first religious war, which, in addition to
the events we have recorded, deluged the entire south of France with the
blood of the contending parties.
[Illustration: CHARLES IX
(From an old French print)]
The conclusion of peace restored Catherine de’ Medici to the supreme
authority. In order to exercise it under a less invidious title than that
of regent, the parliament of Rouen, by her order, declared King Charles,
now thirteen years of age, to have attained his majority. Reared by the
crafty and prudent Catherine, he early acquired, in perfection, the power
of dissimulation; but he never imbibed that utter indifference to both
religious parties which distinguished his mother, and which allowed her
to consult her own interest or the public good in leaguing with either,
or in balancing and alternating between them. On the contrary, Charles,
thrown among the Catholic party at an age when a bias is soon and
strongly gained, amidst the bustle of war and of a camp, which pleased
him, soon imbibed the zeal of the partisans of Guise. He had the sagacity
to perceive that orthodoxy was much more favourable than the doctrines
of the reformers to his kingly authority. A worse effect on his character
was produced by sights of cruelty; for at this tender age he beheld
the atrocities practised on the Protestants at the siege of Rouen, and
during the campaign. The young king was thus led to adopt, in his sober
counsels, the sanguinary measures that the heat of war engendered but
could not excuse.
[Sidenote: [1563-1564 A.D.]]
This decision of her son in favour of the Catholics had a very great
influence in finally drawing over Catherine to that party. Other causes
also impelled her: the Catholics were without leaders; there was a
place, therefore, for her at their head; and, in a little time, the pope
and Philip of Spain both declared so strongly against the Protestants,
that the queen was driven, from a principle of self-preservation, to
adopt the winning side. This abandonment of her impartiality Catherine,
however, delayed as long as it was in her power. After the conclusion
of peace, she endeavoured to soothe Condé, and win him over to moderate
demands; thus preparing the way for an accommodation. Condé was a man of
pleasure, prone to indolence, in which he gladly indulged whenever an
interval occurred in war or in business. Catherine held out to him her
usual bait, the charms of her maids of honour; and Condé loitered, like
another Rinaldo, in the toils of this Armida, until the ministers of the
reformed religion recalled him from licentiousness and compelled him to
marry. These stern disciplinarians were said to have hanged one of their
flock for the crime of adultery. This alone was enough to alienate the
courtiers of France and the demoiselles of Catherine.
The Edict of Amboise had not long been issued, when a modification of
it was found necessary. That edict had allowed to the Protestants the
celebration of their worship in towns which they possessed. It was
found that several bishops and clergy, construing its terms in their
favour, had established the new rites in their cathedrals and churches.
This would have outraged the pope and the Catholic princes. Indeed,
notwithstanding the clamours of the Protestants, so great a concession
was not to be expected; and accordingly the privilege was withdrawn. The
ancient cathedrals were not allowed to become temples of the reformed
religion. New differences consequently arose: the Guises accused Coligny
of instigating the murder of the duke; and the admiral arrived to answer
the charge with his suite, which amounted almost to an army. Either
Catherine or Charles himself took this opportunity of increasing the
usual royal guard of 100 Swiss to upwards of 1,000 men. The old constable
came to instigate the Parisians, and a tumult ensued, in which lives were
lost.
In the following year, 1564, the young king resolved on making a progress
through his dominions, especially in the south. The cardinal of Lorraine
went to Rome at the same time, and Charles was met at Bayonne by his
sister, the queen of Spain, and the duke of Alva. This meeting, in which
the minister of Philip communicated the views of his master, completed
in the mind of Charles his hatred of the Reformation, and instructed him
concerning the means by which it might be eventually crushed. The Edict
of Roussillon,[74] which appeared while the court was in the south,
imposed new restrictions on the toleration granted by that of Amboise;
so that, as Pasquier observes, “edicts took more from the Protestants in
peace than force could take from them in war.” The Huguenots, therefore,
despairing of impartiality or justice from the court, already began to
look forward to another struggle.
[Sidenote: [1564-1567 A.D.]]
During this state of things an assembly of notables was held at Moulins.
Catherine, who, notwithstanding her sagacity, very often mistook the form
for the reality, insisted on a public reconciliation between the Guises
and Coligny. It took place at her bidding; the cardinal and the admiral
embraced; but young Henry duke of Guise showed even there, by his cold
and mistrustful demeanour, that his first ideas were those of vengeance
and hatred. It was in this assembly that the chancellor De l’Hôpital
proposed his improvements in the administration of justice. Whilst all
others, prince, noble, and functionary, were absorbed in the spirit of
religious party, De l’Hôpital alone, professing at once Catholicism and
tolerance, but unable to obtain attention, followed the unambitious track
of judicial amelioration.
Religious troubles, similar to those of France, began to agitate the
Low Countries. Philip, resolving to present a high example to France,
established the Inquisition among his Belgic subjects in all its vigour;
and as this only made matters worse, the duke of Alva was despatched to
those provinces with an army in 1567. The French court affected to fear
this course, and raised an army as if against it. When the duke of Alva,
however, appeared on the frontiers of France, he was treated as a friend;
and the Huguenots immediately perceived that the troops were levied, not
for the defence of the kingdom, but for the oppression of themselves.
They accordingly leagued and armed in secret, determined to meet the
perfidy of the court with corresponding guile. Their consultations ended
in a project to surprise the court at Monceaux, and get possession of
the king. It failed, however, as a similar plot had previously failed at
Amboise, through the postponement of a single day. The queen had warning;
the Swiss were summoned; and the court retired to Meaux, and from thence
to Paris, pursued and menaced by the disappointed Condé.
THE SECOND RELIGIOUS WAR
Thus commenced the second religious war, in September, 1567. “Catherine,”
says Henault, “caused the first civil strife by favouring the reformers,
and the second by irritating them.” She was now at least zealously
hostile to them. She had been provoked by the numerous calumnies and
libels which the Huguenots directed against her, and she accordingly
joined in the opinions of her young son, and of his and her ally, Philip.
She no longer sought an habitual adviser in the moderate De l’Hôpital,
who was of opinion that the reformers were unfairly treated. The
chancellor always asserted their loyalty. After their attempt to surprise
Meaux, the queen asked De l’Hôpital: “Would you now answer that their
sole aim is to serve the king?”--“Yes, madam,” replied he, “if you assure
me that they will be treated with good faith.”
Condé took up his quarters at St. Denis. The Catholics under Montmorency
were posted at La Chapelle, a village that is now the suburb of Paris
on that side. The constable wished as usual to procrastinate, but the
impatience of the Parisians forced him to attack. The battle was fought
in the plain of St. Denis: it began with a cannonade; but the Huguenots,
to avoid the destructive effects of the artillery, charged the Parisians
furiously, and routed them. Their flight left the constable unsupported;
Condé turned on him his victorious cavalry, and Montmorency defended his
position, when Stuart, the captain of the Scotch company in the service
of the Huguenots, coming up close to the constable, against whom he had
cause for hatred, fired his pistol and shot him. A furious and confused
_mêlée_, somewhat like a Homeric fight, immediately took place around
the dead body of the constable--the Huguenots with savage zeal seeking
to carry it off. They were beaten, however, and driven from the field
in the attempt. Thus fell, in civil strife, and engaged against his own
nephews, the veteran warrior of France. His years, his hardihood, and his
name, have rendered him deservedly celebrated. His defence of Provence
against Charles V is particularly memorable. By French historians he
is characterised in terms of the highest encomium: they commend his
sternness, his courage, his orthodoxy, and forget that avarice and
selfishness sullied and almost neutralised all of his virtues.
[Sidenote: [1567-1568 A.D.]]
The constable’s death was a victory to Condé, who was able to offer
battle to the Catholics on the following day. He denied having lost
that of St. Denis. Young Charles, who was witness to a dispute on this
point, asked Vieilleville who had won the battle. “Neither Catholic nor
Protestant,” responded the marshal; “it is the king of Spain who has
won by our discord.” The Huguenots had neither pay nor provisions, and
were therefore obliged to quit the vicinage of Paris, directing their
course across Lorraine towards the frontier of Germany, as they expected
a body of auxiliaries from that country. They were pursued, but not much
harassed in their retreat. Catherine endeavoured incessantly to decoy
them into negotiations, the department of warfare which she felt herself
most competent to direct. She restrained the warlike disposition of the
king; arguing with truth that, from the violent animosities of the time,
the leaders of armies marched to meet a certain fate, either in battle
or at the hand of the assassin. The king’s brother, Henry duke of Anjou,
was created lieutenant-general. Catherine, who knew the weak and yielding
nature of her second son, would gladly have made him the hero of the
Catholic party in preference to young Guise, whose name she dreaded.
After much privation, during a march in winter, the Huguenots fell in
with their German auxiliaries; and as they now outnumbered their enemies,
they marched back into France. They laid siege to Chartres, which, being
stoutly defended, kept the army fixed before it, and gave the queen full
opportunity for employing her favourite efforts at negotiation. Coligny
saw plainly the perfidy of these overtures; but their followers and
supporters, anxious for peace, obliged them to listen to terms. A treaty
was concluded at Longjumeau, in March, called the Lame Peace, as well
from its infirm and uncertain nature as from the accidental lameness of
its two negotiators. Its terms were a medium between the Edict of Amboise
and that of Roussillon.
THE THIRD RELIGIOUS WAR
The peace was, as Coligny already saw, but a trap to ensnare the Huguenot
chiefs as soon as their army should be disbanded. They were on their
guard, however, keeping away from the court, and far apart from each
other, that at least one might escape in case of treason. Notwithstanding
this resolve, Condé and the admiral found it necessary to consult
together, and for this purpose met at Noyers, a little town in Burgundy.
The court was soon informed of it; and orders were instantly despatched
to Tavannes, and to the other governors in the south, to arrest them.
Tavannes was not vigilant in the execution of their commands, and
Condé and Coligny escaped. By this order the queen had thrown off the
mask; though, indeed, without such an indication, the executions and
murders throughout the south sufficiently proved that the Lame Peace was
never intended to be observed by the Catholics. Through inconceivable
difficulties, the two chiefs traversed the country, and reached Rochelle
in safety, where the Protestants now found themselves obliged, for the
third time, to raise the standard of revolt. Troops did not fail to join
them from all quarters; but the most welcome aid came from Béarn, the
queen of Navarre and her young son [the future Henry IV] arriving at the
head of 3,000 of their subjects.
[Sidenote: [1568-1569 A.D.]]
This young prince, destined to run so glorious a career, was born at Pau,
in 1553. His father was Anthony of Bourbon, king of Navarre, slain at the
siege of Rouen. Chroniclers never forget to relate that his mother sang
at the birth, and that old Henri d’Albret, the infant’s grandfather, held
up the child in delight, rubbing its lips with garlic, and moistening
them with wine. Excepting a short period spent at court, the boy lived
the rude and healthy life of a mountaineer, and imbibed from his mother
the rigid principles of the Reformation. It was in September, 1568, that
he accompanied her to Rochelle.
As if to add to the horrors of civil war, winter was always chosen as
the period of operations. The duke of Anjou was at the head of the
Catholic army, with the marshal Tavannes for his adviser. When Condé and
the Huguenots approached, the cold was so extreme as to chill the zeal
of both armies. They found it impossible to engage in battle. Mutual
pillage and cruelties too horrid in many instances for the pen to record
were the only feats of the soldiery. During the inaction that ensued
(for the winter grew to that extreme rigour which is seldom known even
in France), a great part of the Huguenot army dispersed: the bourgeois
and volunteers, of whom it was principally composed, each betook himself
to his own home. The Catholic troops, on the contrary, were soldiers
by profession, paid and disciplined. Hence, in the spring, Condé was
far inferior in force to his enemies, before whom he was obliged to
retire towards La Rochelle. In his retreat, the prince, having crossed
the Charente, took post at Jarnac, determined to keep the river between
himself and the enemy, and to dispute his passage.[d]
There was some preliminary manœuvring on the banks of the Charente; at
last Tavannes surprised the rearguard of the admiral [Coligny] near
Jarnac (March 13th, 1569). Condé, on receiving news of the attack, rushed
up with three thousand cavalry, but at the moment of charging a kick
from a horse broke his leg. Oblivious of this, however, as of the wound
he had received in the arm the previous day, he continued to rush upon
the enemy, crying out to those behind him: “Remember in what condition
Louis de Bourbon does battle for Christ and his country!” This impetuous
onslaught at first made a breach in the enemy’s ranks, but Condé’s horse
being shot under him, he fell, and a terrific combat immediately ensued
around him. An old warrior, De la Vergne, who had brought with him into
battle twenty-five men-at-arms, all sons, grandsons, or nephews, made
heroic efforts to protect the prostrate body of the prince, but he was
himself killed, and fifteen of his followers fell with him, “all in one
heap.”
Condé was in the act of giving his gauntlet to a gentleman when
Montesquieu, the duke of Anjou’s captain of the guards, fired his pistol
point-blank at his head. Thus perished a prince as energetic as he was
brave, whose loss was irreparable to the party of which for nine years he
had been the head that plans and the arm that executes. The Protestants
talked of abandoning the campaign and shutting themselves up in La
Rochelle, but a woman caused them to change their plan. Jeanne d’Albret,
accompanied by her son Henry of Béarn and the young prince of Condé,
presented herself in the midst of the discouraged army at Saintes. “My
friends,” she said, addressing the soldiers, “here are two new chiefs
that God sends you, and two orphans that I confide to your care.” Prince
Henry,[75] the future king of France, up to his present age of fifteen
years had been brought up with all the severity that went to the training
of a country gentleman. Brave, intellectually brilliant, and with the
faculty of carrying away his auditors by his words, he pleased all with
whom he came in contact. He was appointed general-in-chief of the army,
and Coligny was given him as counsellor and lieutenant.
_Admiral Coligny; the Peace of St. Germain_
[Sidenote: [1569-1570 A.D.]]
Coligny possessed many of the qualities necessary to a party-leader
in a war such as was then waging. A Protestant of exemplary piety and
austerity, he was beloved and respected by ministers and soldiers alike.
He fell short of being a general of the very first rank, perhaps,
and Catherine in common with the other Italians at her court did not
attribute to him great depth as a politician; but he could never be
made to accept defeat, which is in itself one form of power, and he
had the faculty of rendering just judgment, which is another. He was a
master of limitless resource, and if no particularly brilliant victory
was to be expected under his leadership there was at least to be feared
no irremediable defeat. In two respects his name is entitled to come
down with distinction to posterity: the first of these claims is the
great deed which opened his career, the defence of St. Quentin; and the
second is his last political aim, the ambition to conquer the Spanish
Netherlands, whither he wished to conduct his Huguenot bands that France
might enjoy the double blessing of rich provincial possession and
internal peace. In his deep desire to avert domestic dissensions and
to assure religious liberty he had conceived still another method of
accomplishing this end; namely, the Protestant colonisation of America.
The very purpose which the Puritans of Great Britain brought into effect
in the seventeenth century had been cherished by him. Had he succeeded,
French blood and French speech might to-day dominate in the New World.
Jarnac had been nothing but a rearguard action in which the Protestants
had lost no more than four hundred men. Coligny was still strong enough
to defend Cognac and Angoulême; having been joined by 13,000 Germans
he even assumed the offensive and inflicted a check on the Catholic
army near La Roche-Abeille. But Tavannes repaired the harm done. German
Catholics, Spaniards sent by the duke of Alva, Italians sent by Pius V,
increased the forces of the duke of Anjou. Already pushed back to the
Loire, the duke returned on his steps by means of a diversion, relieved
Poitiers which Coligny had been besieging for the last six weeks, and
succeeded in surprising the Protestant army between the Dive and the
Thoué, near Moncontour. The position was a wretched one; six hundred
Huguenot soldiers were left on the battle-field (October the 3rd).
Yet this victory of Moncontour was as useless as that of Jarnac.
Charles IX, jealous of the laurels which were being gathered for his
brother, came to the army, and instead of pressing the Protestants to
the Pyrenees wasted his time in besieging Niort and St. Jean d’Angély.
Coligny traversed the whole breadth of the south, replenishing his army
as he went; and he suddenly appeared in Burgundy, at the head of all the
Protestant nobility of Dauphin and Provence. A Catholic army of 12,000
men tried to stop him at Arnay-le-Duc; he held his own against them and
reached the Loing, a short distance from Paris.
Catherine de’ Medici now triumphed in the council, events having proved
the justness of her views. Some other means than war must be devised to
gain control over a party that rose up in renewed strength after each
defeat. In order to disarm the Protestants, she caused the Peace of St.
Germain to be proclaimed, with terms extremely favourable to their side.
They were to be allowed full liberty of worship in two towns in every
province, and in all those in which the reformed religion had already
been established; Calvinists were to be admitted to all kinds of office,
and four fortified towns, La Rochelle, Cognac, Montauban, and La Charité,
were to be given up to them as strongholds in which to place a garrison
(August 8th, 1570). “A traitorous, violated peace, the perdition of those
who trusted in it.”[c]
A TROUBLED PEACE; THE MARRIAGE OF HENRY OF NAVARRE
What were the real intentions of Catherine at the moment when she
concluded the agreement of St. Germain? She had conceived a policy in
1563, which she tried to carry out by fraud from 1563-1567, then by force
mingled with fraud from 1567 to 1569. She certainly had still the same
views, the same desires, but no longer the same confidence. As she had
firmly believed that her object was attained after the murder of Condé,
the defeat of Coligny, and the triumph of her favourite son the duke of
Anjou, so she was proportionately stupefied and discouraged at seeing
the final victory escape her and the unforeseen powers of those moral
forces which she could not understand defeat the calculations of her
Macchiavellian wisdom.
It is almost certain that in 1570, when she entered into negotiations,
she desired, above all, time to breathe and to look about her, and had
no fixed plan; this is what appears from the diplomatic documents. There
is however no doubt that she continued to meditate the ruin of Coligny,
the man who was the great obstacle in her way; the idea of destroying
the leaders of the party was never absent from her mind; but in 1570 her
hopes on this subject were very weak and very vague. As to the general
extermination of heretics planned two years in advance by this “great
queen” and pursued without deviation to the dénouement with “an admirable
dissimulation,” it is a romance invented by the depraved fanaticism or
the cynical Macchiavellianism of Catherine’s Italian panegyrists, and
accepted by the resentment of the Huguenots.
The historians of Catherine have associated Charles IX with the two
years of plotting and with “the admirable dissimulation” of his mother:
they have done more than the Protestants themselves to draw on the name
of this unfortunate and guilty prince the immense execration which has
descended on him. Here it is no longer a question of mere exaggeration,
but of complete error. It was not by sentiments of morality that Charles
IX was incapable of deserving the hideous praises which posterity has
changed into maledictions; the lessons of the masters whom his mother
had imposed upon him had destroyed in him all principles; in his eyes
good faith was but folly, compassion nothing but cowardice; but the
passion and inequality of his humour would not have permitted him such a
long perfidy, and above all he was absolutely without bias: the grudge
which he nourished against the Protestants for the attempt of Meaux
was balanced by the jealous hatred he bore his brother Henry, and by
his distrust of his mother and the Guises. He submitted to Catherine’s
skilful domination as to a sort of fatality, but at times he chafed at
the curb in anger, and he was quite as capable of proceeding to final
acts of violence against the house of Lorraine or even against the duke
of Anjou as against Coligny. Although Catherine held him by chains
scientifically forged, he might well end by turning against her the
lessons she had given him.
What should he do? Whither should he turn? He had no idea. He received
the schemes of betrayal laid before him by Tavannes, the adviser of his
brother who desired to become his; but immediately he gave ear to the
most opposite projects.
Meantime, at court the politicians had got the better of the Catholic
zealots: little was wanting in order that a bloody tragedy should
exhibit this at the expense of the house of Lorraine. Even before the
peace was signed, the partisans of toleration had worked to prepare a
complete understanding between the court and the Protestant leaders: the
Montmorencys had proposed the marriage of Prince Henry of Navarre with
the king’s third sister, Marguerite of France. This marriage had been
talked of almost ever since the birth of the two young people; Charles IX
eagerly recurred to the idea, but Marguerite, then aged eighteen years,
had made another choice; she was beginning the series of her innumerable
gallantries and had surrendered to the young duke of Guise, the most
brilliant cavalier in France, all possible rights over her heart. Henry
of Guise, encouraged by the cardinal De Lorraine, wished to turn the
victory of his love to the profit of his ambition and aspired to the hand
of the princess. In the month of May, 1570, the marriage of Marguerite
and Guise was regarded at court as a thing decided on: suddenly, in the
middle of June, the king, the queen-mother, and the duke of Anjou turned
indignantly against the bold pretensions of Guise; the king, who knew
no half measures, gave orders to his brother the bastard d’Angoulême to
kill the duke of Guise at the hunt. The bastard, not from repugnance to
the crime, but from cowardice, missed the opportunity for action: the
reproaches made to him by the king were heard by a courtier who, perhaps
at Catherine’s instigation, warned Guise: the murder of Guise would have
thrown the king into the arms of the Huguenots and overturned the power
of the queen-mother. The young duke, forced to renounce Marguerite, found
no better expedient to appease the king than to marry another woman; he
espoused Catherine of Cleves, countess d’Eu, sister of the duchess de
Nevers and widow of the prince de Portien.
At this price Guise was restored to favour and followed the court to
Champagne where the king, in his turn, was to be married: after long
negotiations the emperor Maximilian II had granted Charles IX the hand
of his second daughter, Elizabeth, without further insisting on the
restoration of the Three Bishoprics to the empire. This alliance with
the house of Austria in no way impelled France towards Spain: it made
Charles IX for the second time brother-in-law of Philip II, who, the
widowed husband of Elizabeth of France, had just taken as his fourth wife
his niece, the eldest daughter of the emperor; but on the other hand
it gave Charles a father-in-law from whom he had to expect no counsels
but those of toleration and humanity. However, Elizabeth of Austria, a
gentle, simple, and modest young woman, did not have, or seek to have,
any share of influence in the events of her husband’s reign. The wedding
was celebrated, November 26th, 1570, at Mézières, whither the archduchess
Elizabeth had been conducted by the archbishop elector of Treves,
chancellor of the empire. The princes and the great Huguenots had been
invited to the marriage festivities. They excused themselves, and did not
quit their refuge at La Rochelle, although the admiral had written in
respectful terms to the queen-mother to protest his forgetfulness of the
past and his devotion.[l]
[Sidenote: [1570-1572 A.D.]]
Almost two years of relative quiescence followed, during which the
Huguenot party gained an increasing influence at court, chiefly through
the favour shown Coligny by the king. The admiral, ever mindful of the
interests of his fellow-Huguenots, attempted once more to put into
execution a colonisation scheme that had long been a favourite project
with him. He had made an effort to establish a colony in Brazil as
early as 1555; and in 1562 and again in 1564 Charles IX had given him
permission to found colonies in Florida; but all of these colonies had
failed, nor did anything tangible come of his present effort.
This colonisation project tended to bring France into antagonism with
Spain. But another plan of Coligny’s still more directly menaced that
power; this plan involved nothing less than a direct attack upon the
Spanish forces in the Netherlands. Charles IX lent an attentive ear to
this idea, actuated in part, perhaps, by the desire for military glory,
in part by Coligny’s belief that a foreign war would be the best possible
means to harmonise the political factions at home. It will be understood
that the Huguenot question at this time had come to be quite as much
a political as a religious problem. The antagonism between the Guise
faction and the Coligny faction, which led to the appalling scenes we are
now fast approaching, was based by no means exclusively--perhaps not even
prominently--upon differences of opinion regarding questions of doctrine.
It was essentially a personal and political rivalry that actuated the
chief personages in the drama. This, of course, does not necessarily
impugn the sincerity of their religious differences; it was merely that
these differences were not sufficient in themselves to supply motives for
the bitter and ineradicable hatred with which Catherine de’ Medici and
the Guises regarded Coligny.
The fact that the negotiations for the marriage of the king’s sister
Marguerite with the Protestant Henry of Navarre were carried forward,
sufficiently illustrates the superficiality of the religious element as
a source of political jarrings. This marriage was, indeed, opposed by
the pope, who declined to give to a heretic the dispensation necessary
to legalise the marriage of second cousins. None the less were the
negotiations carried forward at court in open defiance of the papal
decision. Jeanne d’Albret, the mother of Henry, came to Paris and was
received at court with at least the outward appearance of friendliness.
Her death there in 1572 was probably due to natural causes, though the
usual intimations of foul play--which the partisanship of that time
never neglected as an aid to practical politics, however shadowy the
evidence--were not wanting. The marriage of Henry, now king of Navarre,
with the not over-willing Marguerite, took place on a specially erected
platform in front of the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris on the 22nd of
August, 1572. The story goes that the bride refused to make the customary
affirmations, and that her brother, Charles IX, pushed her head forward
with his own hands; but this most likely is an embellishment suggested
by the known preference of Marguerite for another lover, and by the
uncongenial wedded life that followed the spectacular nuptials.
It may well be supposed that the Huguenots looked upon the marriage of
their leader with the sister of the king of France as a great political
triumph. Doubtless a large number of Huguenot nobles who had long been
conspicuous by their absence from court came to Paris in honour of the
occasion. To many of them it proved a fatal visit, for the awful tragedy
of St. Bartholomew’s day followed hard upon the wedding, turning the
seeming triumph of the Huguenots into disaster and threatening actual
annihilation of their party. Such being the sequence of events, it is
but natural that the surviving Huguenots should have tried to trace
a causal connection between the marriage of Henry of Navarre and the
massacre of St. Bartholomew. It has been alleged that the real pretext
for the marriage was to beguile the Huguenot nobles into visiting Paris
that they might be caught, as it were, in a trap and the more readily
massacred. No one doubts that Catherine de’ Medici was quite capable of
such a plan. But, on the other hand, it must not be overlooked that King
Charles was most anxious for the consummation of the marriage; and all
historical evidence tends to exonerate him from early complicity in the
plot, if plot existed. Still the fact of so many enemies being at hand
may no doubt have influenced Catherine to carry into effect an idea which
had at least been dear to her heart. Just how much she was influenced
by this; just when the first thought of it all came to her--these are
questions which Catherine herself probably could not have answered, and
which it is quite futile for any interpreter of her actions to attempt to
solve. Here, as so often elsewhere, the threads of design make a web too
intricate for disentangling. This much, however, seems sure: the tangled
mesh, whatever relations of designs and of accident in its structure,
was one of which Catherine de’ Medici was the main artificer; her chief
assistants being her son the duke of Anjou, and the Guises.[a]
THE ATTACK ON COLIGNY
[Sidenote: [1572 A.D.]]
A murderous coil had been woven around the king and the admiral.
Catherine had been for some time torn between her natural timidity and
her ardent desire to free herself from Coligny: at one time she had
hoped to obtain the admiral’s destruction from the king; after a first
success she had failed; a scene of an opposite kind drove her to the
last extremities. The duke of Anjou himself has revealed these mysteries
of crime: in a night of trouble and fear if not of remorse he dictated
with his own lips the history of his own and his mother’s guilt. “Every
time,” he says, “that the queen had conferred privately with the admiral,
the queen-mother and I had found him marvellously angry and sullen,
rough in countenance and aspect and still more in his answers. One day
when I entered the king’s room, without saying anything to me he walked
up and down with long strides, often looking at me askance and putting
his hand on his dagger with so much animosity that I expected to be
poniarded. I managed so dexterously that while he was walking about and
with his back turned to me I retreated to the door which I opened and,
with a brief reverence, I made my exit.” Charles IX was nearer striking
at Anjou than Coligny; the admiral certainly did not urge him to raise
the dagger against his brother, but he conjured him to despatch him with
all speed to Poland that there might no longer be two kings in France.
Catherine and Anjou, brought to bay, took their resolution. They secretly
sent for the duchess de Nemours, widow of the great Guise, the woman
in whose veins flowed the blood of Louis XI mingled with that of the
Borgia. She had continually professed an implacable hatred for Coligny.
Catherine declared to her that she placed in her hands the vengeance so
long pursued by the house of Guise. Catherine desired to profit by the
murder but to impose the execution and the responsibility on someone
else. Her Macchiavellian mind went further: she did not doubt that the
Huguenots would rush to arms to avenge the murdered Coligny and attack
the Guises even in their palaces; the people of Paris would go to the
help of the Guises, the Montmorencys and their friends to the help of the
Huguenots, all the great nobles, partisans of Lorraine, Huguenots and
politicians, would cut each other’s throats; the Huguenots would finally
be overwhelmed by numbers, the Guises would be exhausted by their very
victory; and royalty, held in reserve during the conflict, would remain
mistress of a field strewn with dead.
Whatever _arrière-pensées_ there may have been, an agreement was arrived
at as to the action to be taken. Young Guise, in his furious joy, at
first wished that his mother should herself kill the admiral with
an arquebusade in the midst of the court; more practical means were
resorted to; the blow was intrusted to a hand more expert in crime,
that of the same Maurevert who had already been hired during the last
war to assassinate Coligny, and who in his stead had killed one of
his lieutenants under the most odious circumstances. He was sent for
mysteriously and the duke d’Aumale’s maître d’hôtel concealed him in the
house of a canon, a former tutor of the duke of Guise, in the cloister
of St. Germain-l’Auxerrois, on the road from the Louvre to the rue de
Béthisi, where the admiral was staying. Maurevert remained there three
days on watch. On the morning of Friday the 22nd of August, as the
admiral was returning from the Louvre on foot, walking slowly and reading
a petition, a shot from an arquebuse came from behind the curtain of a
window, carried off the first finger of his right hand, and lodged a ball
in his left arm.
Coligny, with his mutilated hand indicating the place whence the shot
had come, sent to tell the king what had occurred and to ask him to
judge what fine fidelity that was, considering the understanding between
him and the duke of Guise; then he returned to his hôtel, supported by
some gentlemen, whilst his suite broke down the door of the dwelling
in which the assassin had lain in wait; the arquebuse was found still
smoking; “but not the arquebusier.” Maurevert had flung himself on a
horse belonging to the duke of Guise which was held in readiness for him,
and had fled by the rear of the house. He left Paris by the porte St.
Antoine; two Protestant gentlemen had discovered his track and pursued
him for several leagues, but without being able to come up with him.[l]
The king was playing at tennis when he was told that Coligny was wounded,
and that the king of Navarre and the prince of Condé were coming to him
to demand justice against the Guises. The circumstance both surprised and
alarmed him. He threw away his racket in a passion, and after giving vent
to a number of oaths, he declared he would have the assassin sought for,
even in the recesses of Guise’s hôtel. Charles succeeded in satisfying
the young princes that the assassins should meet with exemplary
punishment, and immediately ordered the president De Thou, the provost
of Morsan, and Veale, a counsellor, to commence an investigation; this
calmed them in some measure, and made them give up the plan, which they
had agreed on, of leaving Paris immediately.
But the king felt convinced that something more must be done. He
announced his intentions of visiting the admiral in the afternoon. He
could not with prudence go among the Huguenots unprotected, nor could he
consistently be attended by his guards; he therefore desired that all the
court should visit Coligny also.
Charles entered the admiral’s dwelling, accompanied by his mother,
the duke of Anjou, De Retz, and his other counsellors, the marshals
of France, and a numerous suite. He began by consoling the admiral,
and then swore that the crime should be punished so severely that his
vengeance should never be effaced from the memory of man. Coligny thanked
his sovereign for such testimonials of his kindness, and conjured him
to support with his authority the execution of the different edicts
in favour of the Protestants, many points of which were violated, or
misunderstood. “My father,” answered the king, “depend upon it, I shall
always consider you a faithful subject, and one of the bravest generals
in my kingdom; confide in me for the execution of my edicts, and for
avenging you when the criminals are discovered.” “They are not difficult
to find out,” said Coligny, “the traces are very plain.” “Tranquillise
yourself,” said the king, “a longer emotion may hurt you and retard
your cure.” The conversation then turned upon the war with Spain, and
lasted nearly an hour. Coligny complained of the Spanish government
being informed of whatever was decided on; and as the intimacy between
the queen-mother and the Spanish ambassador was very great and caused
suspicion, he spoke to the king in a low voice. The war in Flanders was a
subject of great alarm for Catherine; she knew her son’s secret wishes,
and she dreaded the effect which Coligny’s remarks might have upon him;
she interrupted the conversation and prevailed upon the king to leave
the place. Charles, who was exerting himself to efface any suspicion
which might have arisen in Coligny’s mind, became vexed at the anxiety
displayed by his mother; and as they were returning to the Louvre, being
pressed to tell what Coligny had said, he declared, with an oath, that
the admiral had said what was true--that he had suffered the authority
to fall from his hands, and that he ought to become master of his own
affairs. When the king and his suite retired, the admiral’s friends
expressed great astonishment at his affability, and the desire he showed
to bring the crime to justice. “But,” says Brantôme,[e] “all these fine
appearances afterwards turned to ill, which amazed everyone very much
how their majesties could perform so counterfeit a part, unless they had
previously resolved on this massacre.”[k]
PREPARING FOR THE MASSACRE
Catherine and Anjou returned in consternation: “We remained,” said
Anjou, “so bereft of counsel and knowledge of how to act that being, for
the moment, unable to resolve on anything we retired, putting off our
decision until the next day.” Meantime they despatched to the king the
count de Retz, Gondi, the man who best knew how to manipulate that fiery
and pliable mind, to endeavour to appease him. Retz made him uneasy,
agitated him, but got nothing from him.
The king’s attitude towards the Huguenots remained the same: Charles
IX launched great threats against the Guises, who were more and more
compromised by the information collected by the commissioners: orders
were given to arrest certain servants of their house. On the morning of
Saturday the 23rd the dukes of Guise and Aumale came to seek the king and
said to him, that it seemed to them that his majesty had not been well
pleased with their service for some time, and that they would retire from
court if their withdrawal was agreeable to him. The king “with an ill
countenance and worse words,” answered that they might go whither they
would, and that he would always be well disposed towards them if they
were recognised as guilty of what had been done to the admiral. They left
the Louvre about mid-day, mounted on horseback and with a good following
took their way towards the porte St. Antoine; but they did not quit
Paris, and shut themselves up in the hôtel de Guise.
Meantime the king was giving the Reformed fresh tokens of interest: he
had a general list made of the Protestants who were present in Paris; he
offered lodging to the Huguenot nobility about the admiral; he invited
the king of Navarre and the prince of Condé to accommodate their friends
at the Louvre. The security of the Protestant princes, of Téligny and
almost all those about the admiral, was complete: the vidame de Chartres
(Ferrières-Maligni) twice endeavoured to persuade them to leave Paris;
his advice was rejected with impatience. Ambroise Paré answered for
the life of the wounded man, and this great failure in crime seemed to
promise the ruin of its authors.
Most of the Huguenots indulged in vain clamours against the house of
Lorraine, passing and repassing “in great companies, in cuirasses, before
the lodging of MM. de Guise and d’Aumale,” but they took no precautions
for the night, trusting to the protection of a detachment of the king’s
guard and in the tranquillity of the first night which had followed the
wounding of the admiral.
In the afternoon the queen-mother and the duke of Anjou summoned the
count de Retz, the chancellor Birague, Marshal de Tavannes, and the duke
de Nevers to the garden of the Tuileries. Of the three advisers who
helped the widow and sons of Henry II to soil the annals of France with
an ineffaceable stain, three were foreigners. They arranged their plan,
and then all six went to seek the king in his cabinet in the Louvre.
Fatal hour, which decided for Charles IX between glory with Coligny and
eternal shame with Catherine; between the redemption of his misguided
youth and his eternal damnation in history. The destiny of France hung
on a word, on the motion of a weak head, of a mind without compass and
without curb, of one who was almost a madman. And the unhappy man was
alone, abandoned, in the midst of these demons!
We have the account of this infernal council dictated by that one of
the accomplices who became Henry III. A few other writings of the time
almost complete our knowledge on the subject. We see this impious mother
artfully distilling the poison into the shuddering soul of her son, and
closing round him every other issue save that of crime. “The Huguenots,”
she said to him, “are everywhere arming, not to serve you but to make
themselves your masters: the admiral has sent for six thousand _reiters_
and ten thousand Swiss; at home their leaders have an understanding with
a number of towns, communities, and peoples, all agreed to reduce your
authority to nothingness under pretext of the public advantage. The
Catholics, on the other hand, are resolved to put an end to this state
of affairs. If you refuse their advice they have decided to elect a
captain-general and to form an offensive and defensive league against the
Huguenots. You will be left alone between the two. Already Paris is under
arms.”
“How is that? I had forbidden them to arm in the _quartiers_.”
“The _quartiers_ are armed.”
In fact the demonstrations of the Huguenots and the rumour circulated
by Anjou and the Guises that the marshal De Montmorency, who after the
wedding had returned to his château of Chantilly for a few days, was
about to re-enter Paris “with a great force,” had greatly excited the
masses, and had brought out the citizen militia.
Fear began to take possession of the king. Anjou and others ardently
supported Catherine. She continued, “One man is the leader and author of
all this ruin and calamity; the admiral is deluding the king, making him
the instrument of his ambitions and of his party, urging the state to its
downfall while pretending to aggrandise it! Let the king remember the
attempt of Amboise against his brother, and that of Meaux against himself
when he saw himself constrained to flee before his revolted subjects!”
The memory of Meaux, as Catherine knew too well, always acted on the
pride of Charles IX as a hot iron on a wound.
“The Huguenots,” she resumed, “demand vengeance on the Guises. Well,
you cannot sacrifice the Guises; for they will exonerate themselves by
accusing your mother and your brother! And they will accuse us with good
reason. It was we who struck the admiral to save the king! The king must
finish the work or he and we are lost!”
Charles IX seems to have lost his head. He was seized with a fit of
blind, mad fury against all and everything; his only clear idea was that
he would not “have the admiral touched”; then, sinking into a melancholy
dejection, he conjured all these sinister advisers to seek some other
means of salvation.
Tavannes, Birague, Nevers insisted on the death of the admiral and of all
the principal leaders. Retz, if Anjou is to be believed, opposed himself,
contrary to all expectation, to the execution of a design which he,
more than anyone, had contributed to prepare. Was it fear or was it an
awakening of conscience in this corrupt man? “You will dishonour the king
and the French nation; you will plunge again into civil wars, and you
will be able to speak no more of peace! You will summon again the arms
of the foreigner, and calamities and ruin whose end we, and perhaps our
children, shall never see.”
There was a moment of stupor amongst the conspirators. The man who had
ruined the youth of Charles IX was holding out to him the plank of
safety. The king was to escape!
They recovered themselves and made a simultaneous and desperate effort.
“It is too late! The Guises are on the verge of denouncing the king
himself with his mother and his brother! The Huguenots will not believe
in the king’s innocence. They will turn their arms against all the royal
family! War is inevitable! Better to gain a battle in Paris where we have
all the leaders than to risk it in the open country!”
Retz was silent. The king resisted for more than an hour and a half. “But
my honour!--but my friends! the admiral!--La Rochefoucauld!--Téligny--”
Catherine saw that he was panting and exhausted: “Sire, you refuse. Give
us, myself and your brother, permission to take our leave of you--to go.”
He realised that Catherine and Anjou would not go far, and that the
“captain-general” of the Catholics was already found. He shuddered.
“Sire, is it from fear of the Huguenots that you refuse?”
He arose; he sprang forward intoxicated and furious: “By the death of
God,” he cried, “since you think good to kill the admiral, I will have it
so; but kill all the Huguenots in France as well, that there may not be
left one of them to reproach me with it afterwards! By the death of God
give the order promptly!” And he went out like one frantic. Catherine had
won--the race of Valois was devoted to the furies!
The conspirators passed the rest of the day, the evening, and a great
part of the night in preparing for the enterprise. The king having gone
they had discussed the heads to be proscribed. Should they strike at the
princes--Henry of Navarre, a king, and the king’s brother-in-law? They
shrank from this. Henry of Condé, son of him who died at Jarnac? The duke
de Nevers, whose sister-in-law he had just married, had, it is said,
great difficulty in obtaining his life. Catherine was aware that to kill
the Bourbons would be to render the Guises too strong. Should they strike
at the friends of the Huguenots, the Montmorencys? Retz, soon recovered
from his scruples, advised it. Tavannes opposed it. The head of the
house, who was at Chantilly, was not in their power; to kill the younger
members in the absence of the eldest would be to give a leader to the
civil war.
Thus it was agreed to kill only the Huguenots. All the Huguenots, as
the king had exclaimed in his madness. Catherine afterwards pretended
that she had the blood of only five or six on her conscience. Hypocrisy!
She insisted on the deaths of only these five or six, but she foresaw
and accepted the deaths of all the others. At the pass to which things
had come it was no longer a question of isolated assassinations but of
massacre--the massacre at least of the nobles who had come with the
princes and the admiral.[l]
[Illustration: A COURT GENTLEMAN, TIME OF CHARLES IX]
Everything was soon decided on; the duke of Guise was to begin the
massacre by despatching the admiral directly he heard the signal
given, by ringing the great bell of the palace, which was used only on
public rejoicings. Tavannes in the meantime sent for the provost of
the trades and some other persons of influence among the inhabitants;
he ordered them to arm the companies and to be ready by midnight at
the Hôtel-de-Ville. Those persons made some excuses and scruples of
conscience, for which Tavannes abused them in the king’s presence. He
told them that if they refused they should all be hanged and advised
the king to threaten them too. The poor frightened men then yielded
and promised to do such execution that it should never be forgotten.
The instructions they received were that directly they heard the
bell, torches were to be put in the windows and chains placed across
the streets; pickets were to be posted in the open places; and, for
distinction, they were to wear a piece of white linen on their left
arms and put a white cross on their hats. Notwithstanding the awful
crime in contemplation, the king rode out on horseback in the afternoon
accompanied by the chevalier d’Angoulême, his natural brother: but the
sight of his unsuspecting people had no effect upon him. The queen also
showed herself at court as usual in order to avoid suspicion.
Secrecy was desirable till the last moment and no one was informed of
the plan who was not necessary to its execution. But there were several
persons who caused great concern and anxiety to both the king and queen.
The queen of Navarre describes herself as altogether ignorant of the
affair previous to the execution; and when she retired after supper to go
to bed, her sister, the duchess of Lorraine, entreated her not to go. The
queen-mother was angry at that and forbade her telling anything further.
The duchess of Lorraine thought that it would be sacrificing her to let
her go to bed; and the queen-mother said that if she did not go it might
cause suspicion and observed that if it pleased God no harm would befall
her.
The count de la Rochefoucauld was a great favourite with Charles, who
took such delight in his company that he wished to save his life. He had
passed the evening with the king, and when he prepared to go home Charles
advised him to sleep in the Louvre. In vain did he press him; the count
resolved to go; the king was grieved that he could not preserve him
without violating his secret, and observed as his guest retired, “I see
clearly that God wishes him to perish.” Ambrose Paré, his surgeon, was a
person indispensable for the king’s health and comfort, and he used less
ceremony with him. He sent for him in the evening into his chamber and
ordered him not to stir from thence; he said, according to Brantôme,[e]
“that it was not reasonable that one who was so useful should be
massacred, and therefore he did not press him to change his religion.”
THE MASSACRE OF ST. BARTHOLOMEW, AUGUST 24TH, 1572
As midnight approached the armed companies were collecting before the
Hôtel-de-Ville. They required some strong excitement to bring them to a
proper mind, and in order to animate and exasperate them they were told
that a horrible conspiracy was discovered which the Huguenots had made
against the king, the queen-mother, and the princes, without excepting
the king of Navarre, for the destruction of the monarchy and religion;
that the king, wishing to anticipate so execrable an attempt, commanded
them to fall at once upon all those cursed heretics (rebels against God
and the king), without sparing one; and afterwards their property should
be given up to plunder. This was sufficient inducement for a populace who
naturally detested the Huguenots: everything being thus arranged, they
impatiently waited the dawn and the signal which it was to bring with it.
The wretched king of France had gone so far that a retreat was
impossible; but there is every reason to believe that even at the
last moment he would gladly have obeyed the dictates of nature and
have desisted from the cruel purpose. But the queen had perceived the
inquietude which tormented him; she saw that if the signal depended upon
him he would not have resolution enough to give it; she considered that
the hour should be hastened to prevent any rising remorse from destroying
her work: she therefore made another effort to inflame her son by telling
him that the Protestants had discovered the plot; and then sent someone
to ring the bell of St. Germain l’Auxerrois, an hour earlier than had
been agreed upon. A few moments after was heard the report of a pistol,
which had such an effect on the king that he sent orders to prevent the
massacre; but it was then too late.
Guise, who had waited with impatience for the signal, went at once to
Coligny’s house accompanied by his brother Aumale, Angoulême, and a
number of gentlemen. Cosseins, who commanded the guards posted there,
broke open the doors in the king’s name and murdered some Swiss who were
placed at the bottom of the stairs. Besme, a Lorrainer, and Pestrucci,
an Italian, both in Guise’s pay, then went upstairs to the admiral,
followed by some soldiers. He was awakened by the noise, asked one of his
attendants what it was: he replied, “My lord, God calls us to himself.”
Coligny then said to his attendants: “Save yourselves, my friends; all
is over with me. I have been long prepared for death.” They all quitted
him but one, and he betook himself to prayer, awaiting his murderers.
Every door was soon broken open, and Besme presented himself. “Art thou
Coligny?” said he. “I am he indeed,” said the admiral; “young man,
respect my gray hairs; but do what you will you can shorten my life only
by a few days.” Besme replied by plunging his sword into Coligny’s body;
his companions then gave him numerous stabs with their daggers. Besme
then called out of the window to Guise that it was done: “Very well,”
replied he, “but M. d’Angoulême will not believe it unless he sees him at
his feet.” The corpse was then thrown out into the court from the window;
and the blood spurted out on the faces and clothes of the princes. Guise
wiped the murdered man’s face in order to recognise him, and then gave
orders to cut off his head.
The ringing of the bell of St. Germain l’Auxerrois was answered by the
bells of all the churches, and the discharge of firearms in different
parts. Paris resounded with cries and howlings which brought the
defenceless people out of their dwellings, not only unarmed, but half
naked. Some tried to gain Coligny’s house in the hope of obtaining
protection, but the companies of guards quickly despatched them; the
Louvre seemed to hold out a refuge; but they were driven away by men
armed with spears and musketry. Escape was almost impossible; the
numerous lights placed in the windows deprived them of the shelter which
the darkness would have afforded them; and patrols traversed the streets
in all directions killing everyone they met. From the streets they
proceeded to the houses; they broke open the doors and spared neither
age, sex, nor condition. A white cross had been put in their hats to
distinguish the Catholics, and some priests holding a crucifix in one
hand and a sword in the other preceded the murderers and encouraged them,
in God’s name, to spare neither relatives nor friends. When the daylight
appeared, Paris exhibited a most appalling spectacle of slaughter: the
headless bodies were falling from the windows; the gateways were blocked
up with dead and dying, and the streets were filled with carcasses which
were drawn on the pavement to the river.
Even the Louvre became the scene of great carnage; the guards were drawn
up in a double line, and the unfortunate Huguenots who were in that
place were called one after another and were killed with the soldiers’
halberts. Most of them died without complaining or even speaking; others
appealed to the public faith and the sacred promise of the king. “Great
God,” said they, “be the defence of the oppressed. Just judge! avenge
this perfidy.” Some of the king of Navarre’s servants who lived in the
palace were killed in bed with their wives. Tavannes, Guise, Montpensier,
and Angoulême rode through the streets encouraging the murderers; Guise
told them that it was the king’s wish; that it was necessary to kill
the very last of the heretics, and crush the race of vipers. Tavannes
ferociously exclaimed, “Bleed! Bleed! the doctors tell us that bleeding
is as beneficial in August as in May.” These exhortations were not lost
upon an enraged multitude, and the different companies emulated each
other in atrocity. One Crucé, a goldsmith, boasted of having killed four
hundred persons with his own hands.
The massacre lasted during the whole week, but after the third day its
fury was considerably abated; indeed, on the Tuesday, a proclamation was
issued for putting an end to it, but no measures were taken for enforcing
the order; the people however were no longer urged on to the slaughter.
What horrors were endured during that time can be best described by those
who were present, or by contemporaries.
[Illustration: SULLY
(1560-1641)]
Sully[j] gives the following account of his suffering: “I went to bed the
night before, very early. I was awakened about three hours after midnight
by the noise of all the bells and by the confused cries of the populace.
St. Julien, my governor, went out hastily with my valet-de-chambre to
learn the cause, and I have never since heard anything of those two
men, who were, without doubt, sacrificed among the first to the public
fury. I remained alone dressing myself in my chamber where a few minutes
after I observed my host enter, pale and in consternation. He was of
the religion, and having heard what was the matter he had decided on
going to mass to save his life and preserve his house from plunder. He
came to persuade me to do the same and to take me with him. I did not
think fit to follow him. I resolved on attempting to get to the college
of Burgundy where I studied, notwithstanding the distance of the house
where I lived from that college, which made my attempt very dangerous. I
put on my scholar’s gown, and taking a pair of large prayer books under
my arm, I went down stairs. I was seized with horror as I went into the
street at seeing the furious men running in every direction, breaking
open the houses and calling out, ‘Kill! Massacre the Huguenots!’ and
the blood which I saw shed before my eyes redoubled my fright; I fell
in with a body of soldiers, who stopped me. I was questioned; they
began to ill-treat me, when the books which I carried were discovered,
happily for me, and served me for a passport. Twice afterwards I fell
into the same danger, from which I was delivered with the same good
fortune. At length I arrived at the college of Burgundy; a still greater
danger awaited me there; the porter having twice refused me admittance,
I remained in the middle of the street at the mercy of the ruffians,
whose numbers kept increasing and who eagerly sought for their prey,
when I thought of asking for the principal of the college, named Lafaye,
a worthy man who tenderly loved me. The porter, gained by some small
pieces of money, which I put into his hand, did not refuse to fetch him.
This good man took me to his chamber, where two inhuman priests whom I
heard talk of the Sicilian Vespers tried to snatch me from his hands to
tear me to pieces, saying that the order was to kill even the infants at
the breast. All that he could do was to lead me with great secrecy to a
remote closet, where he locked me in. I remained there three whole days,
uncertain of my fate and receiving no assistance but from a servant of
this charitable man who came from time to time and brought me something
to live upon.”[k]
EFFECTS OF THE MASSACRE
No allowable space would suffice for the records of such indiscriminate
massacre. Charles, by his missives, ordered the same scene to be renewed
in every town throughout his dominions. And the principal cities but
too zealously responded. Fifty thousand Protestants are said to have
fallen victims of the monarch’s order.[76] A few commanders refused. The
viscount d’Orthe wrote back to the court, that he “commanded soldiers,
not assassins.” And even the public executioner of a certain town, when
a dagger was put into his hands, flung it away, and declared himself
above the crime. The family of the Montmorencys, though Catholic, showed
their abhorrence of these acts, and had the courage to take down the
body of the admiral, which had been hung to the common gibbet, and to
give it burial at Chantilly. Charles IX had not failed to visit it,
while yet suspended. His followers complained of the odour. “The body
of a dead enemy cannot smell otherwise than sweet,” was his reply. He
now avowed that all was committed by his orders; and even held a “bed of
justice” in his parliament for the very purpose. The trembling judges,
with De Thou, their president, could not but applaud his zeal. As for De
l’Hôpital, who had long been banished from court, and who had abandoned
the friendship of Catherine since she had joined the Guises, he expected
not to be spared, and ordered his domestics to throw open the gates. They
disobeyed, and the murderers were unable to reach him. But De l’Hôpital
did not long survive to deplore the miseries of his country. His words
were, “After such horrors, I do not wish to live.” The joy of the pope,
on the other hand, and of Philip of Spain, knew no bounds. The supreme
pontiff went in state to his cathedral, and returned public thanks to
heaven for this signal mercy.
[Illustration: MICHEL DE L’HÔPITAL
(1505-1573)]
Charles had spared his sister’s husband, the young king of Navarre, and
his companion the prince of Condé. It was only at the price of being
converted. Death or the mass was the alternative offered to them; and
both, after some resistance, yielded in appearance. On the other hand,
mere abhorrence of the massacre caused many Catholic gentlemen to turn
Huguenots. Amongst these was Henry de la Tour d’Auvergne, viscount de
Turenne. After all, the crime, from which so much was expected, produced
neither peace nor advantage. The Huguenots were, indeed, paralysed by
the blow; but the Catholics were no less stupefied by remorse and shame.
King Charles himself seemed stricken already by avenging fate. He was
nervous and agitated. The blood he had spilled seemed ever to stream
before his eyes. A continual fever took possession of him, and henceforth
never ceased to consume him. The chiefs were equally languid, equally
disunited. The Huguenots had time to rally, and to prepare for defence.
Rochelle and Montauban shut their gates. Charles in his blindness sent La
Noue, the Huguenot, to Rochelle; he became its commander. The town was
at length besieged, and thousands of the Catholics fell before it; among
them, not a few of the murderers who assisted in the massacre on St.
Bartholomew’s eve. At length Charles, unable to conquer, and incompetent
to carry on the war with vigour, granted the Huguenots a peace. Rochelle
and Montauban preserved the freedom of their religion; and Charles had
the pain of perceiving that the grand and sweeping crime to which he had
been impelled had but enfeebled the Catholic party, instead of insuring
its triumph.
LAST YEARS, DEATH, AND CHARACTER OF CHARLES IX
[Sidenote: [1572-1574 A.D.]]
Catherine, in the meantime, had the address to procure the crown of
Poland for the son of her predilection, Henry duke of Anjou. She had
lavished her wealth upon the electors for this purpose. No sooner was
the point gained than she regretted it. The health of Charles was now
manifestly on the decline, and Catherine would fain have retained Henry;
but the jealousy of the king forbade. After conducting the duke on his
way to Poland the court returned to St. Germain, and Charles sank,
without hope or consolation, on his couch of sickness. Even here he was
not allowed to repose. The young king of Navarre formed a project of
escape with the prince of Condé. The duke of Alençon, youngest brother
of the king, joined in it. A body of horse were to wait in the forest
of St. Germain for the princes, and protect them in their flight. The
vigilance of the queen-mother discovered the enterprise, which, for her
own purposes, she magnified into a serious plot. Charles was informed
that a Huguenot army was coming to surprise him, and he was obliged to be
removed into a litter, in order to escape. “This is too much,” said he;
“could they not have let me die in peace?”
Condé was the only prince that succeeded in making his escape. The king
of Navarre and the duke of Alençon were imprisoned. The former, accused
of conspiring against the king’s life, defended himself with magnanimity,
and asked if it were a crime, that he, a king, should seek to free
himself from durance? This young prince had already succeeded by his
address, his frankness, and high character in rallying to his interests
the most honourable of the noblesse, who dreaded at once the perfidious
Catherine and her children; who had renounced their good opinion of
young Guise after the day of St. Bartholomew; and who, at the same time
professing Catholicism, were averse to Huguenot principles and zeal. This
party, called the _politiques_, professed to follow the middle or neutral
course, which at one time had been that of Catherine de’ Medici; but she
had long since deserted it, and had joined in all the sanguinary and
extreme measures of her son and of the Guises. Hence she was especially
odious to the new and moderate party of the _politiques_, among whom the
family of Montmorency held the lead. Catherine feared their interference
at the moment of the king’s death, whilst his successor was absent in a
remote kingdom; and she swelled the project of the princes’ escape into
a serious conspiracy, in order to be mistress of those whom she feared.
Lamole and Coconas, both confidants of the princes, were executed for
favouring their escape. The marshals De Cossé and De Montmorency were
sent to the Bastille.
In this state of the court Charles IX expired on the 30th of May,
1574, after having nominated the queen-mother to be regent during his
successor’s absence.[d] His end was so miserable that even Huguenot
writers express pity for it. His short and infrequent sleeping moments
were troubled by hideous visions. Exhausted by violent hæmorrhages, he
sometimes waked up bathed in his own blood, and this blood reminded him
of that of his subjects which had been shed in streams by his orders. He
saw again in his dreams all their dead bodies floating with the current
of the Seine; he heard mournful lamentations in the air. The night
before his death, his nurse, of whom he was very fond, although she was
a Huguenot, heard him complaining, weeping, and sighing: “Ah nurse,” he
cried, “what streams of blood, how many murders! What wicked counsel I
have had! O my God, pardon me and grant me mercy! I know not where I am,
so much do they agitate and perplex me! What will become of all this
country? What will become of me, to whom God intrusts it? I am lost, I
know it well!” Then his nurse said to him: “Sire, the murders and the
blood shall be on the head of those who influenced you, and on your evil
counsellors.” His last words were that he was glad he left no male child
to wear the crown after him.
This prince, who was so guilty and so unhappy, whose name has been
handed down from generation to generation, loaded with anathemas, was
born with the most brilliant gifts of mind and imagination, and with
less inclination to vice than most of his race. He had that real love
of art which had been the glory of his ancestor, Francis I, and verses
of his have been preserved, which are far superior to those of the
captive at Pavia--beautiful verses, addressed to Ronsard, who might
have taken lessons in good taste and spontaneity from this essay of
royal genius. He loved music no less than poetry, and during his last
illness melody alone had the power to soothe his pain for a moment. A
detestable education had destroyed all the gifts of nature in Charles
IX. When real glory was offered to him, when the chance was given him
to snatch France from factions, to make her enter upon her real destiny
by a bound towards her natural frontiers, by a brilliant and legitimate
conquest, the unfortunate man did not have the strength to seize this
unique opportunity. It came too late for him; his soul was confused and
without a guide, his mind vacillating. After long struggles he became a
prey to the infernal inspirations of his mother, and, as if carried away
by furies, he leaped into the gulf of shame and of blood, into which he
was followed by the rest of his race, and in which France came near being
destroyed with the Valois.[l]
The above version of the end of Charles IX expresses the opinion held
by most of the historians. Dareste,[m] however, finishes the reign of
Charles IX with the following remark in regard to this generally accepted
description: “During his last days there were current rumours which
have been transmitted to us by D’Aubigné,[n] L’Estoile,[o] and other
contemporaries. They recount his great inquietude, his idea that the
phantoms of the victims of the massacre of St. Bartholomew besieged his
death-bed; they tell us that he succumbed to his great remorse and these
avenging hallucinations. All these accounts, of doubtful origin, are at
least greatly exaggerated. His last illness, the phases and progress of
which were followed by the Venetian envoys,[77] was of a most natural
character. Cavalli[p] contents himself with saying that the plots during
the last days of his life caused him great torture of mind and prevented
his tasting an instant’s repose.”
Charles IX does not lack defenders. In great contrast to the almost
universal condemnation of him are the writings of some of his
contemporaries. Sorbin,[t] after a description of his physical qualities,
goes on to express his admiration of him in these words: “His manners
were the most gentle in the world; he loved peace and quiet for his
people, and desired nothing so much as to see his subjects reunited in
the faith and religion of the Catholic church, which made apparent to
everyone his great generosity, and showed how worthy he was to have
reigned in a more happy period than the one he lived in, when the
malice of his subjects kept him in difficulties. Had he reigned in a
more fortunate time, the opinion of his intimate friends and his most
faithful subjects and servants would have been correct, for they called
it a golden age. He would have been loved by all in a good and virtuous
age.”[a]
THE ACCESSION OF HENRY III (1574-1589 A.D.)
[Sidenote: [1574-1575 A.D.]]
The duke of Anjou,[78] heir presumptive of Charles IX, was in Poland at
the time of his brother’s death. Henry was no sooner in possession of
this crown than he took a dislike to the “land of the Sarmatians,” where
the rough and virile nobles knew nothing of the refinements of luxury and
vice which the corrupt civilisation of Italy had inoculated upon France.
Upon the news of his brother’s death he fled from his capital at night,
like a malefactor. Pursued by his subjects, who wished to keep him, he
did not stop until he was on Austrian soil. The pleasures of Vienna and
of Venice captivated him for a long time; he did not set foot within his
new kingdom until two months after he had secretly left the old one.
The prince was ill-fitted to master the situation that his brother had
left him. The victories won in his name by Tavannes had given him a
great reputation; but abuse of pleasure had cooled that early ardour
which had at first made him as brave as his ancestors. He no longer had
a taste for any but childish or effeminate pastimes, when he did not
surrender himself to horrible debauchery. It could hardly be said that
his ostentatious devotion was a trick of impiety, but all his religion
consisted in certain external practices. He thought that all his accounts
with heaven and his own conscience could be settled by a fast and a few
penances. Charles IX, his brother, had sometimes had ideas and plans
worthy of a king. Henry had almost puerile occupations; and D’Aubigné,[n]
seeing this man so careful of his toilet, his complexion, the whiteness
of his hands and face, was uncertain whether he beheld “a woman-king or
a man-queen.” Charles IX was vicious in anger and on occasion; Henry in
character and constantly. He read nothing but Macchiavelli, and, in a
word, he never knew that which makes pardonable much of his brother’s
conduct--remorse.
His first acts showed what was to be expected of him. At Turin he repaid
the hospitality of the duke of Savoy with prodigal magnificence by
giving him Pinerolo, Perugia, and Savigliano, the last remains of the
conquests of Francis I beyond the Alps. Hardly had he entered France
when he commanded the Protestants to turn Catholic or leave the kingdom.
His words were indeed menacing: but the reformers were reassured when
they saw that action was limited to sending a few officers to the
southern provinces, which were then much disturbed, and to processions
of flagellants, in which the king took part and which went through the
streets scourging their shoulders for the remission of their sins. He
made a solemn entry into Paris, where he greatly scandalised serious
people by having about him a great number of monkeys, parrots, and
little dogs. At Rheims, “when the crown was placed upon his head,” says
L’Estoile,[o] “he said in a loud voice that it hurt him; it slipped twice
as though it were going to fall.” An evil omen was seen in this, and with
reason. This head, which could not bear a crown, could no more bear the
strong and virile ideas that would have been so necessary to defend it.
POLITICAL CONDITIONS
France had need, however, of an able, honest, strong chief to take up
the reins of government. Castelnau[g] estimates that “already, by reason
of the civil wars, more than a million persons had been put to death,
all under the pretext of religion and public utility, with which both
parties shielded themselves.” It was only with great difficulty that
Catherine de’ Medici had been able to prevent a new explosion during
the last days of Charles IX and the two months of her regency. Between
the extreme Catholics and the fanatical Protestants a new party was
gaining ground, that of the _Politiques_, composed of moderate Catholics
who desired the re-establishment of public tranquillity by religious
tolerance and energetic repression of factions. The three Montmorencys,
Damville, Thoré, and Méru, were the most conspicuous men of this party,
which includes a great number of magistrates and of rich bourgeois. A
prince of the blood, the duke of Alençon, had undertaken the leadership
of it, less through patriotism than through ambition, for he counted upon
making use of it for his personal ends. The Guises were at the head of
the Catholics, the Bourbons at the head of the Protestants; in order to
be neither isolated nor second in one or the other camp he had thought it
possible to form a third party that should be devoted to his interests.
The Béarnais [Henry IV] justly calls him “a double heart, an evil and
misshapen mind, like a deformed body.” We must, however, give him credit
for two things: he wished to be French, he said, in name and in fact, and
an enemy of Spain; and he never stained his hands with the blood of the
Huguenots.[c]
On his return to Paris, Henry III remained there for the winter and
during Lent, taking part in the feasts and the devotions. Accompanied
by the queen, and carrying a large rosary in his hand, he visited the
churches, the oratories, and the different religious houses; an action
which gave rise to numberless lampoons, libels, and satirical writings.
[Illustration: HENRY III]
L’Estoile[o] in his journal, indifferent in the main and censorious,
gives a faithful portrayal of the feelings of the Parisian people. They
were anything but disposed to pardon the effeminacy and ridiculous
actions of the king.[m]
[Sidenote: [1575-1576 A.D.]]
They saw the descendant of St. Louis and Francis sink religion into
ridicule, and knighthood into disgrace. They saw a king of France,
surrounded by minions or favourites, dress himself in woman’s clothes,
and sing infamous ballads in a public meeting, and on the same day sing
psalms through the streets dressed in the robe of a penitent--a Christian
Nero, with the solemn voice of Coligny scarcely hushed, and the grim
eyes of the Bible-reading Huguenots fixed on all his proceedings. As a
consequence there was strife and misery in the land. Alençon, wicked
as the king, and not so clever, joined the levies which were gathering
round the old leaders. Henry of Navarre escaped from his honourable and
close-watched detention by the swiftness of his horse at a hunting-party,
and bade his adherents, who came to him in great numbers, once more “to
follow the White Plume, always in the front of battle.” He celebrated
his recovered independence by resuming the exercise of the Protestant
faith. But the great families of the Montmorencys and others, who were
merely discontented with the government, were disinclined to mix their
standards with the avowed Huguenots. It was, therefore, easy for the
queen-mother to break up the ill-assorted union. She sent embassies
of her bedchamber-women to wait on the duke of Alençon, and in a very
short time that feeble prince was detached from the cause. He, however,
mediated a peace which was very favourable to the reformers. Their
worship was permitted in all parts of France except in Paris; all edicts
against them were withdrawn; the massacre itself was disavowed; and
several additional towns were surrendered to them as pledges. This was
the fifth peace since the religious wars began, and was called the Peace
of Monsieur, in honour of Alençon.[79] The king, who appeared at ball
and theatre with rich necklaces round his bare neck, and affected the
appearance of a female beauty, had no wish, in signing this pacification,
but to be left undisturbed by the anger of faction or the ambition of
his brother. To separate Alençon from the Huguenots, he would have made
greater sacrifices still. But the sacrifice he made was quite enough. The
Catholics saw the overthrow of their faith in the terms of the treaty;
the Huguenots the finger of God in the spread of their opinions.
THE HOLY LEAGUE
[Sidenote: [1576-1584 A.D.]]
The Holy League began in 1576--a league which bound itself by the most
awful sanctions to extirpate heresy--to spare neither friend nor foe
till the pestilence was banished, and even, if need be, to alter the
succession to the throne. The next heir after the childless Alençon was a
Huguenot; but ascending far above the successors of Hugh Capet, Bourbon,
or Valois, there was a prince whose whole heart was devoted to Rome,
and who traced his lineal descent to Charlemagne--and this was Henry of
Guise, son of that old Francis who was assassinated by Poltrot, and who
himself bore marks of his Catholic soldiership in a wound upon his face,
which made him known as the Balafré. “No Protestant king of Navarre! We
will have Catholic Henry of Guise!”
But Alençon [who hated Guise and had tried once or twice to assassinate
him] was by no means pleased with this part of the league’s intentions.
He threw himself into its ranks by way of stemming its course, and was
lost or forgotten in the tumult which raged in every heart. The king
summoned the states to meet at Blois, but the states showed the somewhat
contradictory symptoms, not only of hatred of dissent, but of something
very like republicanism. They wished to control the royal power by
commissioners appointed by themselves, whose decision on any disputed
question was to be final; and being bribed and coerced by the party
of the Guises, they passed an edict interdicting the Huguenot faith,
and withdrawing all the guarantee towns from their hands. This was, in
fact, a declaration of war; the white plume was waving in the breeze in
a moment, and all the party were in arms. More sincerity arose on both
sides in viewing the matters in dispute, and amalgamation became almost
impossible. The king brought discredit on the league and on himself by
joining it as a member. This move degraded him from being monarch of
France to being one of a faction, and not even the chief of it; for in
spite of Henry’s calling himself the leader of the confederacy, the
real authority remained with Henry of Guise. The king, for instance,
wished to raise money, but the Balafré frowned, and the Catholic purses
remained closed. He could neither command nor persuade. [In fact there
seems to have been some idea of setting him aside somewhat as his fabled
ancestor Pepin had set aside the last of the Merovingians.] His thoughts,
therefore, were soon bent on peace. He managed to obtain a treaty at
Bergerac in 1577, by which the former state of affairs was restored. A
compliment at the same time was paid to the Huguenots, and a triumph
gained to himself, by the abolition of the league.
But one of the articles of the league was the indissoluble “association
and brotherhood of its members till its objects were obtained.” Now, its
objects could not be obtained while a Huguenot was favoured, or even
tolerated in France, or while there was a chance of the accession of so
dangerous a heretic as Henry of Navarre. War after war broke out, to
the number of seven in all, and with still increasing hatred; but it is
useless to particularise them. It will serve to show the curious mixture
of motive and action that one of these is called the War of the Lovers,
because it arose from the jealousies and rivalries of the leaders who
were invited to meet at the palace of the queen-mother. That astute
Italian introduced a sort of chivalry of vice in the prosecution of a
campaign. She invited the young king of Navarre to come to her court with
all the cavaliers he chose. There were balls and dances every night,
and the appearance of the greatest cordiality; for a radius of a mile
and a half was established round the house, within which quarrels and
fighting were unknown. It was an oasis consecrated to the coarser Venus.
But outside those narrow limits the war raged with undiminished ardour.
A Huguenot lord, after joining in the same dance with a Catholic, would
ask him to accompany him for a ride across the line, and the survivor
came in with bloody sword to boast of the result. One night Henry gave
a return entertainment to the queen and all the court. When the supper
was over, and the dances were resumed, Henry slipped out of the garden,
joined Sully and some other young nobles who were waiting his arrival,
and rode all night. On the following day the queen-mother heard that one
of her towns about thirty miles off had been surprised and pillaged; and
when Henry rode back within the peaceful circle, complimented him on the
success of his stratagem.
But gloomy forebodings began to mingle with these festivities. Alençon,
to weaken the power of Spain, was allowed to place himself at the head of
the revolted provinces. The revolt was religious as much as political,
and the furious leaguers saw the brother of the king and heir of the
throne enlisted against the church. His visit to London, to prosecute
his claim to Elizabeth’s hand, also, though terminating in ridicule and
disappointment, showed his want of attachment to the true faith. He came
back to Paris humiliated and unsuccessful, both in love and war. His want
of zeal was discovered, and not much reliance could be placed on a man
who supported the rebels of Holland and wooed the great heretic Elizabeth
of England. His death, in 1584, was not lamented on any other account
than that it advanced by one step the cause of a far more hated, because
far more terrible opponent.[f]
THE WAR OF THE THREE HENRYS
[Sidenote: [1584-1586 A.D.]]
The next heir to the throne was now the Huguenot Henry of Navarre. With
such a prospect before them the Catholic party grew stronger and more
determined. Three men, all Henrys, now stood forth as leaders of these
parties, and of these the royal faction was least. The vacillating king
sought alliance first with one side and then with the other. His own
inclination led him away from the Huguenot cause; his safety was not
assured with the cause of Guise. He was not strong enough himself to have
a loyal and determined following of his own.[a]
[Illustration: A GALLANT, TIME OF HENRY III]
The conduct henceforth of Navarre and Guise proved a remarkable contrast.
It was the interest of the Bourbon to elevate and dignify the throne
to which he saw himself likely to succeed; he therefore treated with
profound reverence the office of the king, and his person with outward
respect. It was the business of the Guise to degrade the crown, which
would otherwise have been too sacred for a sacrilegious hand to touch;
he therefore treated the king with marked indignity, and stirred up the
lowest passions of the mob in opposition to the highest authority in the
land. By his success in this policy he made a narrow escape of exciting
feelings of hatred to royalty itself, which would have punished his
ambition by taking away the object of it.[f]
An interesting result, however, of this attitude of the Guise party
was an advance in political thinking. There were hints abroad of the
sovereignty of the people. The Jesuit opponents of Elizabeth and
Navarre must give up the idea of hereditary monarchy. Orthodoxy was the
indispensable qualification, however, rather than popular choice; the
church rather than the nation was the source of sovereignty. It was on
this basis that the Guise party made a treaty with Philip of Spain. The
Pact of Joinville at the end of 1584 made the league party not only a
menace to hereditary monarchy in France, but by junction with Spain it
became anti-national in its character. The war now became more political
and less trivial. The destinies of France were at stake. But the foreign
aid which made the Guise cause a European question, and widened the
quarrel to one of universal religious war, was not destined to amount to
enough to repress Protestantism in France. The year 1585 was spent in
useless negotiations in France; during the next year the war was hardly
begun, and before decisive action had been taken in France the foreign
situation had changed entirely through the action of Elizabeth.[a]
On the 18th of February, 1587, the execution of Mary Queen of Scots
fell like a firebrand on the Catholic plans. She had once been queen
of France, and was related to the Guises. She had been true to but one
object throughout her life, but that object justified and ennobled all
her deeds, for it was the supremacy of the church. The violences of the
league, the curses of the pope, and the threats of Philip of Spain and of
all the Catholics of Europe, had led to the sad catastrophe, by showing
the wise counsellors of Elizabeth that while Mary lived and plotted there
was no safety for Protestantism or freedom; and now the blow recoiled
with tenfold force on the persons who had made it unavoidable. Philip
began his preparations for the Armada. Guise concealed no longer his
enmity to the king, and roused the populace and parliament of Paris,
both of which were entirely at his command, against him. The infatuated
monarch showed his usual want of judgment. He replied to the reclamations
of the magistrates by confiscating their salaries, and threatening to
throw them in sacks into the Seine. But no course of proceeding would
probably have altered the result. Victories and defeats all had the same
effect.[f]
_The Battle of Coutras (1587 A.D.)_
[Sidenote: [1587 A.D.]]
One great battle stands out in the dreary stretch of these years. Henry
of Navarre had marched from La Rochelle across the Loire country to meet
a German force which was advancing from the east. Henry III sent an army
under Joyeuse to intercept the forces of the Huguenots and he succeeded
in doing this at the strong position of Coutras. The situation was such
that the Huguenots had no hope of escape except through victory. Henry
had reached the château of Coutras an hour before Joyeuse and on the
evening of the 19th of October, 1587; the advance guard of the Huguenots
drove the duke’s Albanian scouts from the town. Joyeuse, however, was
afraid that the enemy would try to escape and began preparations for
battle in the middle of the night.[a]
The young courtiers had sworn to give quarter to no one. The king of
Navarre had only time to leave Coutras and prepare for battle, a little
before day, in the angle of land formed by the two rivers Dronne and
Isle. According to D’Aubigné,[n] who has left us the most circumstantial
account of this day [and who was himself a soldier in the service of
Henry IV], the Catholics had about five thousand foot-soldiers and
twenty-five hundred cavalry; the Protestants, almost as many infantry,
but hardly half as many cavalry.
The battle began with volleys of cannon. The Catholics suffered from
the Huguenot artillery, which was better aimed than their own, and with
loud cries demanded a charge. At the moment when the Catholics started,
the ministers Chandieu and D’Amours began to chant in front of the
Protestant army the twelfth verse of Psalm cxviii. At the sight of the
kneeling Protestants the frivolous youths who were about Joyeuse uttered
insulting cries. “They tremble, the cowards, they are confessing.” “You
are mistaken,” replied a more experienced captain, “when the Huguenots
look like that, they are determined to conquer or die.” In an instant the
Huguenot men-at-arms had mounted. “Cousins!” cried the king of Navarre
to Condé and Soissons, “I will say no more to you than that you are
of the blood of Bourbon, and, as God lives, I will show you that I am
your senior.” “And we,” replied Condé, “we will show that you have good
juniors.”
The Huguenot line was formed in a crescent on a little plain. The light
cavalry of Poitou, which formed the point of the crescent on the right,
were driven back by a great force of Catholic cavalry, and drew the
Gascon squadron of the viscount de Turenne along in their rout. The left
wing of the Catholics with a shout of victory pushed on to the baggage
in order to plunder, without heeding what was taking place on the rest
of the battle-field. Three hundred Protestant arquebusiers, believing
the battle lost and inspired by a heroic despair, threw themselves upon
a large battalion of nearly three thousand of the enemy’s foot-soldiers
with such violence as to break through the first ranks. The rest of the
Huguenot infantry followed this movement and the two bodies of infantry
attacked each other with great violence.
But in the meantime the fate of the day was decided elsewhere. Joyeuse
had started at a gallop with his men-at-arms spread out in a single line
of lances; the three Bourbons were awaiting him steadfastly at the head
of three squadrons formed six files deep. Most of the Huguenot cavalry
was armed with sword and pistol; when the enemy was fifteen paces distant
they threw themselves with all their might from their horses and fired
point blank, while some platoons of arquebusiers stationed between the
squadrons fired with surer aim upon the Catholics. The latter could
not even make use of their lances. Their long line was driven back and
broken. There followed a short and terrible hand-to-hand conflict, in
which the king of Navarre and his cousins kept their word to one another
and fought like true knights. The nobles of the court, gaily decked,
plumed, dressed in velvet and embroidery, were crushed like glass by the
poor and rude gentlemen of the south. These young effeminates knew only
how to die.
[Illustration: A FRENCH SAVANT, TIME OF HENRY III]
The first squadrons had met at nine o’clock; at ten there was not a man
of Joyeuse’s army who had not either fallen or fled. The infantry had
also dispersed after the defeat of the cavalry. The king of Navarre had
great difficulty in stopping the carnage. The Protestants took cruel
revenge for the barbarities practised by Joyeuse upon their comrades;
more than four hundred gentlemen and two thousand soldiers were put
to the sword. Joyeuse surrendered to two Huguenots when a third split
open his head with a blow of his pistol butt. Nearly all the lords and
gentlemen who had followed him were killed or taken prisoners. The booty,
including the ransoms, amounted to more than 600,000 crowns. The victors
had not lost forty men.
The king of Navarre showed himself worthy of this brilliant triumph by
moderation and humanity. He exhibited no more pride after the victory
than fear before the combat. He received all the prisoners with kindness,
restored their arms to some, released others without ransom, and declared
that after as before he demanded only the edict of 1577.[l]
At the same time Guise repulsed the enemy from the soil of France in
Alsace. The defeat was attributed to the king, and the victory to the
duke--a fatal contrast between him and Guise, of which he could not
weaken the effect by comparison with Navarre. The two uncrowned Henrys
were held up as models for the third, for even the Catholics saw with a
sort of pride the achievements of Henry, who, though a Huguenot, was a
prince and a Frenchman still. This state of affairs could not last long.
Guise made a solemn entry into Paris, and was received with all the
ceremony usually reserved for a king.[f]
Henry de Guise at this time was thirty-eight years of age. He was tall
and well proportioned, with blond curly hair and piercing eyes. The scar
on his cheek gave him a martial appearance. Although not a great general,
he possessed all the military qualities necessary to gain the love of the
populace. Indefatigable, prompt of decision, rapid and sure of execution,
affable, generous, familiar even, though ever guarding his dignity, he
had the external gifts and the successful personality which Henry III
lacked. Madame de Retz said that in comparison to him the other princes
were but people. All were devoted to him. “France,” Balzac said of him
later, “went mad over this man; to say they loved him is too weak an
expression.”[m]
_The Day of the Barricades and the Treaty of Union_
[Sidenote: [1588-1589 A.D.]]
Henry was at the Louvre, and trembled at his subject’s approach. When the
interview was over, Guise returned to his house and surrounded it with
armed men, as if to hint that his life was in danger from the king--a
very old trick, and very often successful. Everything continued quiet
on both sides till some Swiss royal guards marched into the town. In a
moment the mob were up in arms. Barricades were erected in the streets;
pistols were fired at the passengers. The Swiss were attacked, and
indiscriminate massacre began. Catherine strove in vain to induce her
unworthy son to go and show himself to the malcontents. He heard the
firing on his troops, and had not the courage to order them to defend
themselves; and while his mother rode boldly into the streets to quell
the insurrection, he slipped noiselessly to his stables, where the
Tuileries gardens now are, and galloped without pause to Rambouillet.
On the following day he got safe within the walls of Chartres. This was
called the day of the Barricades, and for a while it certainly advanced
the cause of the duke of Guise. With affected moderation he rejected the
acclamations of his party, allowed the Swiss guards to escape, and in
other ways endeavoured to pacify the adherents of the king. To Chartres
the king was followed by the now triumphant Guise, who dictated there,
to the degraded king, what was thenceforward called the Treaty of Union
of July, 1588. It forgave, or rather it applauded, all the outrages of
Paris. It declared all heretics incapable of any public trust, office,
or employment. It excluded the heretical members of the house of Bourbon
from the line of succession to the crown. It raised the duke to the
office of lieutenant-general of the kingdom; and it provided for the
immediate convention of the states-general of France. To the observance
of these terms, Henry pledged himself in the most solemn forms of
adjuration.
_The Meeting of the States-General_
Again, therefore, the states-general were summoned to meet at the city
of Blois; and, on the 16th of October, 1588, 505 deputies were assembled
to listen to the inaugural oration of the king. “Among them,” says the
contemporary historian, Matthieu, “was conspicuous Henry, duke of Guise,
who, as great master of the royal household, sat near the throne, dressed
in white satin, with his hood thrown carelessly backward; and from that
elevated position he cast his eyes along the dense crowd before him that
he might recognise and distinguish his followers, and encourage with
a glance their reliance on his fortune and success; and thus, without
uttering a word, might seem to say to each of them, ‘I see you;’ and
then (proceeds Matthieu) the duke rising, with a profound obeisance
to the assembly, and followed by the long train of his officers and
gentlemen, retired to meet and to introduce the king.”
The lofty consciousness of his royal character still imparted some
dignity to Henry’s demeanor. Addressing the states with a majestic and
touching eloquence, he asserted his title to the gratitude of his people,
claimed the unimpaired inheritance of the prerogatives of his ancestors,
pronounced the pardon of those who had already entered into traitorous
conspiracies against him, and threatened condign punishment of all who
might in future engage in any similar attempts. Even Guise listened, with
evident discomposure, to this unexpected rebuke, and public menace, from
the lips of his sovereign. It was, however, the single gleam of success
with which Henry was cheered in his intercourse with the representatives
of his people; and the rest of the history of the states-general of 1588,
is little else than a record of the humiliations to which they subjected
him.
He spoke, as we have seen, with royal indignation, of the outrages of
Paris and of Chartres: but he was compelled to omit all those passages of
his address in his subsequent publication of it. He publicly claimed for
himself the cognizance of all questions respecting the verification of
the powers of the deputies: but he was constrained, with equal publicity,
to retract that pretension. He entertained an appeal from one of the
members of the Tiers État against a decision of his order: but he was
sternly reminded that the states had met at Blois, not as supplicants
to obey, but as councillors to advise, him. He pardoned the dukes of
Soissons and Conti their having borne arms under the Huguenot standards,
that so they might be qualified to take their places among the order of
the nobles: but the validity of his pardon was contemptuously denied.
He resisted, as an insult, the demand of the states, that he should
repeat, in their presence, the oath he had already taken to observe the
Treaty of the Union: but he was taught that submission was inevitable.
He demanded that the states should, in their turn, swear fidelity to
himself, and to the fundamental laws of the realm: but he was obliged to
withdraw that demand. He insisted that the exclusion of Henry of Béarn
from the succession to the throne should be preceded by an invitation to
that prince to return into the bosom of the church: but his proposal was
inflexibly and scornfully resisted. He commissioned two of his officers
to lay before the order of the clergy his objections to the acceptance of
the decrees of the Council of Trent: but his officers were driven away
with insult. He solicited pecuniary aid for carrying on the war against
the Huguenots: but the suit was answered by a demand for his surrender of
a large part of his actual revenue.
This long series of indignities was readily traced by Henry to the
guidance of a single hand. Guise was but too successfully exerting his
influence at Blois to dethrone the king by degrading him. The crown,
which must inevitably fall from the grasp of a prince whom all men had
been taught to despise, might readily be transferred to the brows of a
prince to whom all were looking with admiration.
Yet it was a hazardous policy. The king who had conquered at Jarnac
and Montcontour, and who had concurred in devising the massacre of St.
Bartholomew, was not a man to be restrained by the voice either of fear,
of humanity, or of conscience. The friends of Guise saw, and pointed out
to him, the danger of provoking the dormant passions of the enervated
Henry; but he received their remonstrances with contempt, and habitually
and ostentatiously placed himself within the powers of the sovereign
whom he at once despised, exasperated, and defied.[w] This contemptuous
attitude was to lead to his undoing.
THE ASSASSINATION OF HENRY, DUKE OF GUISE (1588 A.D.)
On December 23rd, at three o’clock in the morning, the duke of Guise left
the room of Charlotte de Beaune, and found on returning to his house five
notes which warned him to leave Blois immediately. His attendants begged
him to take refuge without delay with his troops; but being weary he
retired to sleep. At about eight o’clock, he got up, dressed himself in
a new gray satin doublet, too thin for the season, took his cloak, went
out, passed over the drawbridge and entered the castle.
Henry III, during the same night, prepared the ambuscade. The evening
before, at seven o’clock, he told Liancourt, the chief equerry, in a loud
voice, to order his coach for four o’clock in the morning, because he
wished to visit a shrine and return in time for the council. He gave a
secret order to the Corsican Ornano, and to the forty-five Gascons of his
especial guard, to be near his room the following day at five o’clock;
then he shut himself up in his private chamber. At four he rose and went
out, saying nothing to the queen, who was uneasy. He ascended one flight
with Du Halde, led him into a gallery which he had divided into fifty
cells, during the last two or three days, under the pretext of lodging
there some Capuchin friars whom he wished to have constantly near him,
but in reality to hide and separate all those who were to take part in
the premeditated act. He pushed Du Halde into one, and without speaking
a word shut him in. Towards five o’clock the forty-five guards presented
themselves, one by one. He took each one in turn to the higher landing,
and locked them up, each in a separate cell.
The members of the council convoked for six o’clock arrived, and not
noticing anything strange on the staircases or in the corridors, began
their sitting. As soon as the king had seen Cardinal De Guise, who was
staying in the town, at the hôtel d’Allaye, enter the large hall, he
ascended to his cells, opened the doors, made his men come down, took
them into his room, having commanded them to make no noise so as not
to awaken the queen-mother, who was dying on the lower landing. The
glimmering light of the December dawn and the light from the king’s
candle but dimly showed their uneasy countenances and eager eyes. The
king made a speech to his forty-five men, urging them to avenge him; he
was delighted to find that his oratory was more successful than it was
with the state deputies. These young noblemen, suddenly transported from
their Gascony cottages, where they suffered hunger and every sort of
privation, to become the confidants of the king, to enter his chamber,
to hear themselves called his champions, his avengers, his friends, must
have been the more amazed at this sudden fortune, in that the duke of
Guise had threatened to plunge them back into their former misery.
By the advice of the duke of Guise these forty-five noblemen, sent by the
states to entreat the king to reform his household, were to be dispersed
as unnecessary. Still boorish, and knowing nothing beyond the patois
of their villages, they remained homely and unaffected. One of them,
called Périac, dimly understood that the king’s speech showed that it was
necessary to stab the duke of Guise, and he interrupted him with a joyous
familiarity, striking him in the stomach with the flat of his hand, and
crying out to him, “Cap de Jou, I’ll kill him for you!” Reassured by the
enthusiasm of these young men, Henry III himself posted them in his room
and in the passages; then he retired to his private chamber, impatient
and troubled at not having seen the duke of Guise arrive, but learning
finally, at half-past eight, that Henry of Guise had just entered the
council-room.
Henry of Guise had felt very cold in his satin doublet; his night had
exhausted him. As he entered he felt sick and faint; his eyes were full
of tears. “I am cold,” said he, “let me go to the fire.” Whilst more
wood was being thrown on the fire, he said to M. de Morgondaine, keeper
of the treasury, “I beg of you to ask M. de Saint-Prix to give me some
Damascus raisins, or some preparation of roses.” They could only find
some Brignolles plums, which he began to eat. M. de Marillac, master of
requests, read a report upon the salt-taxes, when the door opened and
Revol, secretary of state, was seen to advance. He said to the duke,
“Monsieur, the king asks for you; he is in his old room.” Then he hastily
went out. The duke did not notice this hasty retreat, nor the agitation
of Revol, who was so white that the king had come to him a minute before,
and said, “My God, Revol, how white you are! Rub your cheeks, Revol, rub
your cheeks.” The duke of Guise got up, put some prunes in his silver
comfit plate, leaving the rest upon the cloth. “Gentlemen,” said he “who
will have some?” He threw his cloak upon his left arm, took his gloves
and the comfit plate in the same hand, placed the fingers of his right
hand upon his beard, was saluted and followed by the forty-five who were
waiting for him. Two paces from the door of the old room he turned to see
why they followed him, and immediately received first a sword-thrust in
the back, then innumerable stabs from sword and dagger. Seizing hold of
some of his murderers he dragged them along with him, and fell near the
king’s bed.
On hearing this noise Cardinal De Guise broke up the council and rose:
“Ah,” he cried, “they are killing my brother!” “Do not move, sir,”
answered the marshal D’Aumont, drawing his sword, “the king has need of
you!”
At the same moment, the king half-opened the door of his room, and
seeing the body gave orders for the pockets to be searched. Whilst they
were carrying out this command the Balafré, uttering a long, deep, and
husky sigh, died. The body was covered again with a gray cloak and with
a cross of straw, and left lying there for some time exposed to the
taunts and mockeries of the courtiers, who called him “the handsome king
of Paris.” They were not content with insulting him by words alone. “A
diamond heart,” someone says, “was taken from his finger by the sieur
D’Entragues.” To prevent the members of the league procuring any relics
of their leader, the dead body was burned, by order of M. de Richelieu,
grand provost of France, and the ashes were thrown into the Loire.[s] The
cardinal De Guise and many other partisans of the house of Guise were
arrested. The president of the Tiers État, and three other conspicuous
Leaguers among the members of that body, were made state prisoners. The
cardinal De Guise was murdered next day.[a]
It is said that when Henry III was certain that Guise had expired, he
stepped from his room, sword in hand, and cried out: “We are no longer
two! I am now king!”[80] then pushed with his foot the still quivering
body. It was just sixteen years since Guise, at dawn of a fatal day, had
struck with his foot another corpse!
DEATH OF CATHERINE DE’ MEDICI
Another famous death soon followed that of the Guises. The queen-mother
had been violently affected by the catastrophe of December 23rd. Several
days after, she visited the cardinal De Bourbon in the apartment whither
he had retired. The cardinal broke forth in reproaches and accused
Catherine of having caused the assassination of the Guises. This scene
so disturbed the aged queen that her gout became worse; she was confined
to her bed and never recovered. The 5th of January, 1589, at the age
of sixty-one years, she joined her accomplice in the disaster of St.
Bartholomew. The other accomplice, doubly an assassin, was not long in
following his mother.
The death of this woman, who had figured so prominently in Christian
affairs for thirty years, made but a feeble sound in the midst of the
tempests that rose from the ashes of the Guises. The importance of
Catherine had diminished greatly in the last few years: justly punished
through the only source which could affect her, her love for Henry
III, she had seen her power wane at the moment when she hoped to reign
completely: neglected by her favourite son, half sacrificed to the
favourites, at enmity with her son-in-law the Béarnais, she finally was
without guidance; the race of Valois, which she had dreamed to place on
all the thrones, being without issue, the Bourbons being her enemies,
with the instinct of family, always found in a woman even the most
corrupted, her hopes turned to the children of her eldest daughter;
she thought to found a Lorraine dynasty; and only made herself the
instrument and the puppet of the league. Her qualities as a ruler cannot
be judged by the last years of her life: although morality and patriotism
equally forbid the justification of this fatal woman, the historian must
acknowledge that when it was possible to combine the policy of her family
with the policy of state, she pursued two ideas which were beneficial to
the destiny of France--the humiliation of the great, and resistance to
the house of Austria. The end which she failed to attain by treachery
and deceit might have been gained by the force and audacity of a genius
more magnanimous: Richelieu was in this regard the happy inheritor of
Catherine’s idea.[l]
THE SIEGE OF PARIS AND THE DEATH OF HENRY III
Heaven and earth rose against the massacre of Blois. It seemed a wilful
playing into the hands of the Huguenots to remove the Catholic chief, and
the pope looked on the deed not only as murder, but as heresy. The unruly
capital burst into a cry of disobedience, and the Sorbonne formally
withdrew the allegiance of the people from an unworthy king. The name
of royalist was as fatal as that of Huguenot had been. The president
Harlay, and sixty of the councillors, who bore the royal commission,
were only saved from death by being taken to the Bastille. But in the
midst of this general indignation, the states-general, and they alone,
were, in appearance at least, unmoved. Occasionally, indeed, and even
earnestly, they solicited the release of the prisoners. But they breathed
not so much as a single remonstrance to the king against his enormous
infringement of their sacred character and privileges in the persons of
their colleagues. With an almost incredible abjectness they addressed
themselves at once to the ordinary business of the session, and discussed
with Henry, amendments in the law of treason, schemes for the admission
of his officers to join in their deliberations, and plans for bringing
to account all public defaulters. They presented to him, not indignant
defiances, but humble descriptions of the sufferings of his people,
and meek supplications for the redress of them; and continued, during
a whole month after the death of the Princes of Lorraine, to prostrate
themselves before the king, as in the presence, not of an assassin, but
of a conqueror. The session then closed with the royal audience customary
on such occasions; when, in the hope of propitiating his favour to the
imprisoned deputies, they addressed him in a speech in which his royal
virtues, and especially his _clemency_, were lavishly extolled. On the
16th January, 1589, they at last took their leave of their sovereign, and
of each other: when “we parted,” says their great orator and memorialist,
Bernard, “with tears in our eyes, bewailing what had passed, and looking
forward with terror to what was yet to come; and observing that, in our
separation, France had an evil augury that she herself was about to be
torn in pieces.”
The augury was but too well verified. The states-general of France never
again assembled till they met ineffectually in the reign of Louis XIII,
to be then finally adjourned till the eve of the French Revolution.[w]
Notwithstanding all this, however, when the meeting at Blois was
dissolved, the members spread the flame of disaffection through town
and country. The duke of Mayenne, brother of the murdered Guise, was
declared by the council of Sixteen, consisting of deputies from the
sixteen quarters of Paris, lieutenant-general of the kingdom, till the
states-general could be assembled. In short, the king was deserted by
his people, and nothing was wanting but the formal sentence of his
deposition. Henry of Navarre saw his inheritance endangered, and came
to the rescue. An interview took place between the cousins--the most
Christian king, and the most chivalrous Bourbon. It was not altogether
regard for his own interests which moved the new ally. In so unsettled a
nation as France then was, a forcible change of dynasty would have led
to unending conflict. To save his country from perpetual civil war or
total anarchy was the object of Henry’s efforts. His plans were bold and
masterly. The few devoted adherents who still clung to their sovereign,
from hereditary attachment, or from the poetic compassion which binds
noble natures to a fallen race, accepted the guidance of the Huguenot
chief. Mayenne was repulsed from Tours, and when men saw such measures
of tenderness, as now distinguished the royal army, announced in the
royal name, and such admirable military tactics displayed under the royal
banner, the personal vices of the nominal monarch began to be forgotten.
Opposition was paralysed by the consciousness that the royal authority
was now supported by conduct worthy of a king; and at the end of July,
an army of forty thousand men, confident in their leader, and restored
to the full feeling of loyalty to the throne, commenced the siege of
Paris. Henry of Valois gazed on the hated battlements with delight.
“Farewell, Paris,” he said; “from this time your towers and pinnacles
shall offend my eyes no more. I will make it difficult to discover where
your position was.” But Henry of Navarre was more wisely employed. He was
superintending the placing of the troops, bringing up the guns, arranging
the tents; and it was understood that the day of assault was fixed for
the 2nd of August. Mayenne saw no chance of safety. His garrison was weak
and dispirited; the populace, with its usual fickleness, was cowardly
where it was not mad.
But among the rabble there was a youth of twenty-two, who had been a
Jacobin friar for some time, and had degraded the cowl by the wildest
excesses, both of debauchery and blood. Every crime was sweet-smelling
odour to Jacques Clément the monk. He wore a dagger which was displayed
with ferocious energy in every quarrel, and yet was fanatical in his
religious beliefs, and carried the practices of superstition and idolatry
to an almost insane extent. This was a sort of man who might be extremely
useful in the distress to which the Catholic party was reduced. He was
sent for by the duchess de Montpensier, sister of the duke of Guise, a
woman so wicked that her conduct drives us into a charitable unbelief of
its reality, who used such arguments and arts with the blinded, arrogant,
sensual young fanatic, that he went forth on the 1st of August determined
to repay his benefactress for her goodness and condescension in the way
she herself had prescribed. Letters were furnished to him, which were
obtained by false pretences from the president Harlay in the Bastille,
and on presenting them he was admitted to the camp of the besiegers, and
taken into the presence of the king. While Henry was reading the missive
which Clément put into his hand, the Jacobin drew a knife from his
sleeve, and stabbed him in his chair. It was not at once fatal. The king
started up, and, drawing the weapon from his side, wounded his assailant
in the face, thus mixing on the same blade the blood of the assassin and
his victim. The attendants rushed forward and killed the murderer at
once--a happy chance for his employer, for her name escaped the formal
revelation which a trial would have produced. Henry was placed in his
bed, and for a while hopes were entertained of his recovery.
Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it. An undiscovered
spring of goodness welled forth as his last hour drew nigh. He forgave
his enemies, recommended himself to his friends, embraced the hero of
Navarre, and thanked him for all his aid. He turned to the crowd in the
apartment, and declared Henry his rightful and true successor, and added,
“Dear cousin and brother-in-law, be sure of this, you will never be king
of France unless you profess yourself a Catholic.” If the dignity and
tenderness of a death-bed could have wiped out the vices and deficiencies
of all his former years, Henry III might have been reckoned among the
kings who have done honour to the crown. But the inflexible verdict of
history must be delivered upon the course of a man’s life, and not on
the expressions or aspirations of his last hours; and the last of the
Valois must be pronounced a king without honesty or patriotism, and a man
without courage or virtue.[f]
The Valois had given to France thirteen kings in the space of 261 years.
They had assisted and contributed to the decline of old feudal France:
they seemed at first during several reigns to institute a new order;
then, incapable and weak, they let slip from their hands this great work,
and disappeared after having plunged France into chaos.[m]
FOOTNOTES
[73] [Louis I of Bourbon, first prince of Condé (1530-1569), brother of
Anthony, King of Navarre, and great-grandfather of the “Great Condé.”]
[74] It was this edict which ordered that the year should commence on the
1st of January, instead of, as heretofore, commencing at Easter.
[75] [He did not take the title of King of Navarre until after the death
of his mother in 1572.]
[76] [Martin[l] says: “Nothing definite can be affirmed as to the
exact number of the victims: the _Martyrologe des réformés_ places it
at 30,000; M. de Thou thinks this figure somewhat exaggerated; the
_Réveille-matin_ speaks of no less than 100,000 dead; Capilupi speaks
of 25,000; La Popelinière of more than 20,000; Papyre Masson, one of
the panegyrists of the occasion, reduces the number to 10,000. The last
figure is too low; about twenty thousand appears to be the most probable
estimate.” This estimate of Martin’s, confessedly only conjectural, is
perhaps a trifle conservative. Sully[j] thought that 70,000 perished
throughout France. Davila[i] estimated the number killed in Paris at
10,000, over 500 of whom were nobles. This is manifestly overdrawn, when
we consider that the massacre of the first night was for the most part
confined to the north of the Seine. Possibly about three thousand may
have perished in and about Paris and twenty-five thousand in the rest of
France. But this, let it be repeated, is mere conjecture.]
[77] [The Venetian despatches are regarded as among the most reliable
historical sources.]
[78] The following table shows the genealogy of the last kings of the
house of Valois:
HOUSES OF ORLEANS AND ANGOULÊME
=Charles V= (third king of the house of Valois), 1364-1380.
|
+----------+--------------------------------+
| |
=Charles VI=, Louis, duke of Orleans, 1407.
1380-1422. m. Valentine Visconti
| He received the
| duchy of Orleans
| from Charles VI in
| exchange for Touraine.
+---------------------------+----------+
| |
Charles, John,
duke of Orleans, 1467. count of Angoulême, 1467.
| |
=Louis XII=, Charles,
1498-1515. count of Angoulême, 1496.
m. (2) Anne of Brittany m. Louise of Savoy
| |
Claude II---------------+-------------=Francis I=,
| 1515-1547.
=Henry II=,
1547-1559.
m. Catherine de’ Medici
|
+---------------+--------------+--------+----+------------+--------+
| | | | | |
=Francis II=, Elizabeth, =Charles IX=, =Henry III=, Francis, Margaret,
1559-1560. m. Philip 1560-1574. 1574-1589, duke of m.
m. Mary II, king duke of Anjou, Alençon =Henry IV=
Stuart of Spain king of Poland, and Anjou,
last king of 1584
house of Valois
[79] [The title of Monsieur for the king’s brother next himself begins
to be used from now on. But, according to Saint-Simon, it was not used
regularly and constantly until the time of Gaston, brother of Louis XIII.]
[80] [When he repeated the remark to his mother, she is said to have
replied: “God grant you have not made yourself king of nothing.”]
[Illustration]
CHAPTER XIV. HENRY OF NAVARRE, FIRST OF THE BOURBONS
It is my wish that every peasant may have meat for dinner every
day of the week, and a fowl in his pot on Sundays.--HENRY IV.
HENRY’S STRUGGLE FOR THE CROWN
[Sidenote: [1589-1610 A.D.]]
Jacques Clément in killing Henry III, whom he found not Catholic enough,
opened to a Huguenot the road to the throne. This was Henry, king of
Navarre, to be known in future as Henry IV of France.[b]
Henry IV has been compared to Francis I. His face has, in fact, the same
large outlines, the same sensual mouth and brilliant eye, the same smile
full of an attraction that is sometimes deceptive, the same expression
of countenance whose openness is not always that of sincerity. But we
must not be misled. This quick, ardent eye sometimes looks within to
depths unattainable to Francis I; and above these projecting eyebrows,
a sign, as with the Valois, of quickness of perception, rises instead
of the low forehead of Francis I the vast brow of genius. Though Henry
too pushed voluptuousness to the point of license, he nevertheless had
tenderness if not constancy of heart. Though his language has too much
of the unstable levity with which his Gascon race is reproached, though
the confinement of his youth in the most depraved of courts and later the
infinite difficulties of his position changed the cordial spontaneity
of his nature, he nevertheless has a reserve of true and strong feeling
that Francis I never knew. Apparently selfish, he was able in reality to
associate his interests and his glory with the idea of the welfare of
France and the interest of humanity. Infinitely superior in essential
things to the Valois and the Guises, he is their inferior in elegance, in
external dignity. Compared with the other two Henrys he has the air of
a soldier of fortune before princes, but he redeems this inferiority of
manners by a singular charm; he attracts the imagination and the heart
by an irresistible mixture of shrewdness and good nature, of tenderness
and sharp raillery, of ardour and calculation, of gaiety and heroism, of
authority and the comradeship of the soldier. After two centuries and
a half he is still irresistible when we see him act and hear him speak
in history, when we follow him almost day by day in the truly unique
monument of his prodigious correspondence. The most severe, whether
historians or moralists, after many and too often deserved reproaches,
almost always end, if they are French, by extending their hands to the
most French of the kings of France.
[Illustration: HENRY IV]
We shall witness the stubborn struggle in which he fought for his throne;
after the struggle we shall see what his work was as re-organiser of
domestic peace and founder of foreign politics. The immediate effects
of the death of the last Valois in the rebellious capital and in the
besieging army announced only too forcibly to the first of the Bourbons
the immense tasks and the immense perils that confronted him. The news
of the death of Henry III was spread in Paris after the morning of the
2nd of August; all doubts were dissipated when the duchesses de Nemours
and de Montpensier were seen driving through the city in their coaches
and crying out on all the squares: “Good news, my friends--good news!
The tyrant is dead! There is no more a Henry of Valois in France!” The
mother of the Guises, mad with joy and vengeance, mounted the steps of
the high altar of the church of the Cordeliers to harangue the crowd. Her
daughter distributed everywhere scarfs of green, the colour of hope and
joy, instead of black scarfs. In a few moments the multitude passed from
consternation to frenzy. There was nothing but “laughter and singing,”
tables set in the streets, feasts in the open air. In the evening
bonfires burned on all the squares. Everywhere resounded the praises of
the “new martyr” who had given his life for the good of the people. The
blessed Jacques Clément was honoured in the pulpits, sung in the streets,
invoked as a saint. Images of him, painted and sculptured, were set in
the place of honour in private houses, in public places, in churches,
and even on the altars! His old mother was brought to Paris, loaded with
presents and shown to the people “as a wonder,” who had borne in her
bosom the liberator of the church.[c]
[Sidenote: [1589-1590 A.D.]]
When the intelligence reached Rome, the rejoicings were still more
revolting. Sixtus pronounced the assassin’s praises in full consistory,
and compared his achievement in usefulness and self-sacrifice to the
incarnation and crucifixion. In Germany and England the deed was
differently viewed. Elizabeth got ready troops to be landed in Normandy
in aid of the new king. Lutherans and Swiss came pouring into France. Yet
Henry’s position was dangerous and undefined. The nobles who commanded
his armies were Catholics as zealous as the enemy. Before the corpse
of the late king was cold, they proposed to his successor a retraction
of his Huguenot errors, and conformity to the church. “You don’t know
what you ask,” replied Henry. “You require a change which would argue no
sincerity either in one faith or the other. If you think to terrify me to
so sudden an alteration, you know neither my courage nor my conscience.”
“Sire,” cried the gallant Givry, and kneeled at his feet, “you are the
true king of the brave, and none but a coward would desert you.”
The others, however, hung back. The spirit and principles of the
league remained unbroken. The cardinal De Bourbon was even proclaimed
by Mayenne under the name of Charles X. All the victories which made
Henry’s name distinguished had been gained over Catholic foes. If full
powers were conveyed to him, would his policy of depressing the leaguers
not be continued? Henry came to an agreement. He consented to accept
a conditional allegiance, binding himself to study the doctrines of
the Catholic faith; to summon a states-general at Tours; to restore to
the churches the goods of which they had been despoiled; and to limit
the privileges of the reformers to the places in which they at present
existed. These things were all to be done within six months. In reliance
on these terms, he was recognised sole sovereign of France, and entitled
to the obedience of all.
But Paris still resisted, and riots and massacres were continually
renewed under pretence of religious fears, till Mayenne himself was
glad to leave that city of contention and misrule, and take the field
against the Man of Béarn, as he was insultingly called. The quality and
composition of the contending forces had greatly changed. Mayenne, at the
head of preponderating numbers, besieged Henry in Arques, and was only
repelled by the union, which his great rival displayed, of the courage of
despair and the calmness of military skill. With a mixed army of English,
French, Germans, and Swiss, he found it difficult to keep them together,
as his purse was low, and the diversity of tongues and nations prevented
the unity of the force. To fight was the only way to combine those
discordant elements; and on the 13th of March, 1590, the battle of Ivry
took place.[d]
_The Battle of Ivry_
The plain on which the king desired to offer battle to the leaguers
extends to the west of the river Eure, between Anet and Ivry; neither
bank, hedge, nor any natural obstacle intersects it, but in the middle
the ground slopes almost imperceptibly, so that the royal army, protected
on the one side by the village of St. André, and on the other by that of
Turcanville, could not be reached by the enemy’s artillery. Henry IV,
having seen to the rest and refreshment of his forces, occupied this
position on Tuesday, March 13th; his cavalry, which was almost entirely
composed of nobles, and upon which he consequently placed most reliance
as being more dependable in point of honour, he divided into seven
divisions, each of them supported by two regiments of infantry. Marshal
D’Aumont, the duke de Montpensier, the grand-prior assisted by Givry, the
baron de Biron, the king, the marshal De Biron, and Schomberg, commandant
of the _reiters_ (German troopers), were at the head of the seven
divisions.
Whilst the army was taking up its position, it was joined successively by
Duplessis, De Muy, La Trémouille, Humières, and Rosny, who, with two or
three hundred horse, came from Poitou, Picardy, and the Île-de-France to
take part in this much desired engagement. The last comers were nearly
all Huguenots; up to now but very few had been numbered among the army.
The duke of Mayenne did not suppose that Henry wished to await him, but
flattered himself he would overtake him in crossing some river in his
retreat upon Lower Normandy, so hurried on his march in expectation of
this, not without exposing his own forces to that disorder in which he
expected to find the enemy. But on reaching the plain of Ivry, on the
afternoon of March 13th, he beheld before him the royalists awaiting him,
drawn up in order of battle with the advantage of position. He slackened
his march to restore order to his forces, and did not come within range
of the enemy until evening, when it was too late to contemplate beginning
hostilities. The weather was very unfavourable, and the soldiers of the
league, wearied by the cold rain they had experienced throughout their
march, were forced to sleep in the open, only a few officers succeeding
in pitching their tents, whilst the royalists established themselves for
the night in the villages of St. André and Turcanville.
On the morning of Wednesday, March 14th, the royal army occupied the same
position as on the previous day. The two armies were not ranged in order
of battle until ten o’clock. D’Aubigné[e] relates that whilst putting on
his helmet Henry addressed these words to his companions-in-arms: “My
friends, God is for us! Behold his enemies and our own! Behold your king!
At the enemy! If your ensigns fail you, rally round my white feather. You
will find it in the path that leads to victory and honour!” These words
were received with a universal cry of “God save the king!” and the battle
began.
The royalist artillery directed their fire full upon the leaguers,
who were exposed upon the rising ground; that of the league, on the
contrary, was unable to reach the royalists, sheltered as they were in
their hollow. Count Egmont, stationed at the extreme right of Mayenne’s
army, would not wait for a third discharge from this artillery, and fell
furiously upon the light cavalry of the grand-prior, which was opposite
him and which he overthrew. With the same impetuosity he came up to the
cannon of the king, which had cut up his company. “Friends,” cried he, “I
will show you how the weapons of cowards and heretics should be served,”
and, turning his horse at the same moment, he backed it up against the
royalist guns. Not one of his warriors but wished he could boast of
having done as much. They lost not only their time in this extraordinary
manœuvre, but all Egmont’s cavalry fell into disorder. No longer carried
forward by that impetus which constituted its strength, it was attacked
simultaneously by Marshal d’Aumont, the baron de Biron, the grand-prior,
and Givry. Egmont and his chief officers were killed, all his followers
routed and cut to pieces.
[Illustration: THE ENTRANCE OF HENRY IV INTO FRANCE]
In another part of the line the duke of Brunswick, who led the leaguers’
reiters, was also killed. These reiters were accustomed after each
charge to pass through gaps left for the purpose between each battalion
to form again behind the line; but the viscount de Tavannes, to whom
Mayenne had intrusted the drawing up of his army in battle array, was so
short-sighted that he mistook the interval that should be left between
the corps, so that there was not sufficient space left for this manœuvre.
Thus the reiters returning from the charge, bore down upon the duke of
Mayenne’s squadron of lancers, and threw it into disorder. The duke was
forced to repulse them at the point of the lance, for there was no room
to manœuvre his horses, and whilst striving in vain to restore order, he
was violently charged by the king, who perceived his predicament; he was
routed and forced to fly to the woods. Soon all the cavalry of the league
shared the same disastrous fate, the battalions of infantry, hitherto
covered by the cavalry, now found themselves alone in the middle of the
plain, and attacked on all sides by the king’s forces.
The Swiss, though as yet not routed, held up their arms in token of
surrender, and were immediately given quarter by the marshal de Biron;
the lansquenets, encouraged by this example, and at the same time
weakened by this defection, also held up their arms, declaring that
they surrendered. But Henry and his soldiers held them in particular
abhorrence. Several of them had been already concerned in the treachery
of Arques, where they had feigned to give themselves up; several, engaged
by the Protestant princes to reinforce the royal army, had gone over to
the enemy; the king declared that they had transgressed against martial
honour, and that he would give them no quarter. The massacre lasted a
whole hour, but whilst they were being killed without resistance, the
king cried, “Spare the French and put the foreigners to the sword!” And,
as a fact, after the _mêlée_ no more French were killed.
The fugitives of the league sought refuge, some in Chartres, some at
Mantes. The bridge of Ivry, by which they made their escape, gave way,
and the king’s cavalry, in order to pursue them, was forced to go by a
longer route and to cross the Eure at Anet. The losses of the army of the
league were nevertheless very considerable. Davila[f] reckons them at
six thousand men; D’Aubigné,[e] calculating the armies as being weaker
by one-half than his estimate, also reduces the loss of the leaguers by
the same amount, namely one-half. Since the beginning of the civil wars
no such brilliant victory had yet been won. Henry IV, victor at Coutras,
victor at Arques, victor at Ivry, seemed to surpass his rivals both in
military ability and good fortune, and the people rejoiced as much in his
good luck as in his skill.[g]
After this a new power displayed itself, which had never played a part
in the quarrels of a nation before. It was the brilliancy of the sayings
of the new king, which spread all through France, the land of all others
in Europe where a brilliant saying has most weight. After the combat of
Arques, where he had been foremost in the attack, he wrote to his friend
the duke de Crillon, “Hang yourself, brave Crillon; we have fought at
Arques, and you weren’t there.” At supper, on the night before the battle
of Ivry, he had spoken harshly to an old German of the name of Schomberg;
and while he was marshalling the troops before the charge, he stopped his
horse. “Colonel,” he said, “we have work before us, and it may chance I
don’t survive; but I must not carry with me the honour of a gentleman
like you. I beg your pardon for what I said last night, and declare you
a brave and honourable man.” He embraced the colonel. “Ah! sire,” said
the German in his broken language, “you kill me with your words, for now
there is nothing for it but to die in your defence.” Schomberg did so. He
rode up to the rescue of the king in the hottest of the fight, and fell
before Henry’s eyes.[d]
_The Duke of Parma and the Spaniards_
The change that came over public opinion after the battle of Ivry raised
the hopes of the royalists. Henry was no longer a contestant but the
logical master of the realm. This feeling of the people caused Henry to
move but half-heartedly against Paris where the strength of his opponents
lay. He besieged the city, but he did not forget that the inhabitants
were his own people. He permitted Mayenne to send out the useless people,
said to number some six thousand.[a] Henry fed them, and soothed their
fears. Some peasants were brought before him for having introduced
provisions into the beleaguered town, and expected to be hanged for
aiding the rebels. He gave them all the money he had in his purse. “The
Man of Béarn is poor,” he said; “if he were richer, he would give you
more.”
Compared to these actions and words of Henry, the conduct of his
opponents was not only unchivalrous but unpopular. Divisions raged high
among the leaders of the league. Mayenne wished to be king; the duke of
Lorraine wished his son to be king; and when Henry of Guise, the son of
Balafré, escaped from his prison of Tours, and joined the garrison of
Paris, he also wished to be king. The infanta, or daughter of Spain,
wished to be queen; and it did not need half the quickness which is
always found in the French to perceive that, compared with any or all of
his competitors, the man of the white plume and the generous spirit was
the fittest occupant of the throne.
But a rigorous pontiff filled the Roman chair. Sixtus V would hear of no
accommodation with a heretic, and Henry would hear of no recantation when
his motives might be suspected. “Master first, disciple afterwards,” was
his motto, and the war went on. The Sixteen, as the sections of Paris
called themselves, were in the pay of Spain. Availing themselves of the
absence of Mayenne, they encouraged the brutal populace to break out into
a riot; they tore the more moderate of the judges from their seats and
hung them, with their president, above the doorway of the court. Mayenne
came back. Great was his fear of Henry, but greater his wrath against
the Sixteen. He hanged four of them from lamp-posts in the street, and
restored the ordinary municipal officers to their authority. But regular
authority dislikes rebellion, and the now pacified city looked kindly on
the legitimate heir.
Other opponents were driven over to his side by the injudicious aid
his enemies received. Alessandro Farnese, duke of Parma, was the most
famous general of the time, and had been chosen to bring the legions
of Spain and the chains of the Inquisition over to France in the year
of the Armada, 1588. He was now selected to head the same legions to
support the fantastic claim of his master’s daughter. Henry was driven
to extremities, for Alessandro was unluckily the most cautious of
commanders, and always refused a battle. The daring gallantry of the
royalists, with Henry at their head, fell back like sparkles of foam
before the imperturbable solidity of the Spanish lines. They would not
fight--they would not retreat--they solemnly performed the work assigned
to them, the protection of a border or the relief of a town, but they
would do nothing more. Alessandro of Parma had nothing of the hero in him
except his courage, and trusted nothing to chance. Against policy like
this the Man of Béarn had no defence. His allies were not united in their
desires. The English wished to drive the Spaniards from the shores of
Brittany and Normandy, where they would have been dangerous neighbours to
Elizabeth; Henry wished to drive them from the middle of France and send
them to the shore, where they could do least harm to himself. He could
raise no taxes by the legal machinery of parliament and council, and
would not lay hard contributions on the districts he held.
[Sidenote: [1590-1593 A.D.]]
He was the poorest of gentlemen, this most lovable of kings; and hints
are given that his majesty’s apparel was not altogether free from darns,
or his boots from holes in the leather. Nothing kept its gloss but the
plume of white feathers which swayed above his head, and his bright sword
and imperturbable good-humour.[d] But even this left him as he faced the
almost certain defeat which a battle would mean. In August he wrote to
Gabrielle d’Estrées: “The issue is with God. If I lose the battle thou
wilt never see me again, for I am not one to flee nor to retreat.”
But Parma’s masterly generalship was more than a match for the king’s
chivalric courage. He relieved Paris after it had been reduced to the
most awful straits. Two hundred thousand are said to have perished of
hunger and disease. There were rumours that mothers devoured their own
children; the Protestants had made merry over the fact that the one cheap
thing in Paris was sermons; but such fanaticism was yet bound to conquer
the king. The relief of Paris was a victory for the Spanish party which
was growing stronger in the capital. In 1592 the same story was repeated
at Rouen. Once more Parma outmanœuvred the king. But a wound in the
hand received before Candebec was destined to prove fatal to the great
Italian, and the conqueror of Antwerp withdrew to the Netherlands, and,
then turning back, died in the harness at Arras, December 3rd, 1592.
Henry’s fortunes revived with the fall of this redoubtable adversary.[a]
He gathered all his forces for a last attempt upon Paris, and his enemies
as usual played into his hands. Philip of Spain, who had united all
classes and creeds of Englishmen in favour of Elizabeth by his insolent
Armada, now was the creator of French union by his domineering conduct
in France. Mayenne summoned a states-general at his request, and Philip
there in no courteous terms stated his royal will; it was very short and
very decisive--they were to accept his daughter as queen, that was all.
A compromise was attempted; they would declare the duke of Guise king,
and he should marry the infanta. Philip refused; his daughter should be
queen in her own right, and then would marry Guise. Mayenne, who saw,
whether it was king or queen, his pretensions were at an end, procured
a resolution of the parliament of Paris, that “any sentence, decree, or
declaration contrary to the Salic law, should be void and of non-effect.”
Whatever strengthened the Salic law and the direct succession was a vote
on the side of Henry of Navarre.[d]
_Henry IV and the League_
The league was now divided into two parties, the Spanish League and the
French League, who conspired incessantly, sometimes together, sometimes
against one another, to promote their personal interests. But meantime
the great national instinct was gradually winning France over to Henry’s
cause; men’s eyes turned to him as the only one able to put an end to
war at home and abroad, and to bring about national unity. The burning
question of the day was, would Henry turn Catholic? Rumours were rife;
the question was openly discussed. Such being the case, it was only to be
expected that Henry would boldly face the question himself and lose no
time in finding an answer.
[Sidenote: [1593-1594 A.D.]]
And this he found most puzzling, notwithstanding his broad and
independent mind. It is M. Guizot’s opinion that Henry’s religious creed
was not based on mature or deep conviction, but was rather the result
of first claims of his having been born in the reformed faith; and
that it was a feeling of patriotism, a desire to save France from all
the horrors of civil and religious wars, that decided him to abjure his
religion. However that may be, he did so decide, and on the 16th of May,
1593, announced to his council his intention of becoming a Catholic. On
July 15th, 1593, he assembled a conference of Catholic and Protestant
divines at Mantes, and ten days after, on Sunday, July 25th, he solemnly
abjured his Protestant creed at the church of St. Denis. Here then, says
M. Guizot, was religious peace, a prelude to political reconciliation
between the monarch and the great majority of his subjects. And now the
Catholic Henry was crowned king of France,[81] the 27th of February,
1594.[a]
France has known few periods which can be compared to this time of Henry
IV; few periods when she has been nearer to ruin and yet has raised
herself from a state of terrible disturbance to one of glorious peace. A
kingdom only just relieved from the exhaustion of prolonged strife, and
threatened with downfall by the new religious doctrines; feuds which stir
up struggles whose annals are stained by murder, and which are destined
to end in a huge massacre; a crown rendered insecure by the claims of
rival houses, and in turn making use of criminal measures as a means of
vengeance or finding in them its own punishment; a prince whose birth
seems to call him to the throne while his beliefs seem likely to deprive
him of it forever; poverty, famine, the growing claims of the foreigner
whose pretensions increase in proportion to the misfortunes of France;
and in the midst of all these vicissitudes a nation which does not know
where to look for help, nor in whose hands to trust its fate--what
scenes! what years! what memories full of dark heroic grandeur!
The importance of contemporary events and the sombre majesty which
seems to preside over all the actions of the league, make it difficult
to pass judgment on it. It presents, both as regards things and men,
such striking contrasts, it has passed through so many different phases,
and has included under one name so many motives entirely opposed to
one another, that it would be impossible to criticise it from only one
point of view. And yet what contrary opinions it has elicited! Some have
praised, while others have condemned everything connected with it. It has
been handed down as entirely faultless or utterly blameworthy.
But through all this confusion one thing is clear, and sums up the whole
matter--namely, that the conversion of Henry IV was the triumph of the
league and the ruin of its members. The law of France was not entirely
on the side of Henry IV nor wholly in favour of his adversaries; it
was divided. The accession of the king of Navarre placed in opposition
two principles which had hitherto been united: hereditary monarchy,
whose claims this prince represented; and the national religion, whose
doctrines he did not profess. Can it be denied, unless we bring to bear
on the examination of this period ideas which belong to a different
age, that the union of monarchy and Catholicism had become a part of
the constitution just as monarchy itself had? And had not the country
some right to insist on the maintenance of this union, which was one
of the first laws imposed on the sovereign? One thing remains certain,
and that is that after the league this union was re-established, and
peace along with it; that Henry IV, when he became king, recognised its
existence by promising to be instructed in the faith; that, with rare
exceptions, the best of the royalists, the bishops, those hundred bishops
who so firmly supported him, the chief generals of his army, and his
parliaments, continually referred to and called upon the king to remember
this promise, either in the hope of attracting to him the members of
the league, or of inducing him to embrace their religion; in short that
France, exhausted, a prey to the horrors of civil war, and in danger of
the Spanish yoke, did not rally round Henry IV till after his abjuration,
but, that abjuration once pronounced, she unanimously declared in his
favour.
Who can be astonished at this? Who could fail to understand that
a nation accustomed to mingle its faith and its history, finding
amongst its Catholic princes its greatest kings, and knowing nothing
of the Protestants but the unhappy dissensions which were the result
of persecution on the one side and revenge on the other, must hate
the idea of seeing on the throne, which was the centre to which its
dearest traditions clung, a representative of that belief which was
destroying those very traditions? Was the promise of Henry IV to respect
the Catholic religion a sufficient guarantee at that time, when party
strife ran so high, when political law was on all sides confounded
with religious law and had everywhere followed the vicissitudes of the
latter, and when an instance of a king professing a different religion
from that of the nation he ruled was unknown? And, as if to emphasise
the apprehensions of the leaguers, did not England furnish them with an
example of a nation which had changed its religion three times to suit
the pleasure of three successive monarchs? This resolution to maintain
the Catholic religion on the throne of St. Louis, regardless of all
political considerations, was not the predominant idea of one party only:
the whole of France was strongly imbued with it.
The league was responsible for more than this. How can we forget that
besides inculcating the principle which it succeeded in rendering
triumphant, the league was the moving spirit of many excesses, that it
abolished beliefs, or used them as means to an end, as best suited its
purpose; that it was responsible for the frenzied actions of the famous
faction known as the Sixteen, of which the very name is sufficient;
that it appealed in turn to revolutionary and tyrannical theories; that
it menaced the monarchy even before it had been threatened by the reform
party; and that the result of this violent party feeling was to place
before the nation the alternative that France must either have a Catholic
king who was not legitimate or a legitimate king who was not a Catholic?
Of course the union of the two principles which constituted the monarchy
found partisans and opponents in both camps. In both also there were many
of those turbulent spirits who war against peace, who elevate hatred into
a duty, and encourage strife on principle. Some of these exaggerated the
rights of the king, others those of the pope; though they compromised
the former by their violence, and disavowed their support of the latter
by rising in rebellion when the king and the pope were reconciled to
each other. In both camps also, wise and moderate men with a true
understanding of religion and of France were advancing by different paths
towards the same goal. Jeannin, Villeroi, and perhaps at certain moments
the duke of Mayenne, were approaching the same goal as Luxemburg, the
duke of Nevers, the bishop of Paris and the archbishop of Bourges. But
the royalists had the good fortune to possess as their leader a prince
who, personifying one of the two great principles, was soon to submit to
the other; whilst the members of the league, divided against themselves,
having no recognised head, in revolt against monarchic authority and
yet having no special right to be considered as the representatives of
the Catholic religion, lost ground by the want of consistency in their
claims.[h]
The extravagant enthusiasm of the league had evaporated; in part it had
been reasoned down by the mild and rational philosophy promulgated in the
_Essays_ of Montaigne,[i] and in part scouted by the poignant ridicule of
the _Satire Ménippée_.[j] These are the two chief literary works of the
epoch--the former sufficiently known to every reader, the latter one of
the finest specimens of political satire to be found in any language. It
proved to the leaguers what Hudibras proved to the English Puritans--it
exposed the absurdity and hidden selfishness of fanaticism, and showed
that ridicule might be made a more effectual weapon than the sword.[k]
Henry, in his negotiations with the clergy, had ignored the
ultramontanes, who leaned on Spain, but dealt with the patriotic national
clergy. Whether Henry said that Paris was worth a mass or not,--and the
saying was in accord with his wit and his sincerity,--he had left off
conversion until he could deal with effect directly with the people, and
not play over into the hands of the high Catholic party. France was ready
for the act. By the end of 1593 the most of the kingdom had declared for
Henry; the centres which had been in opposition, Meaux, Orleans, and
Bourges, and finally Lyons gave in, and in the winter of 1594 he was
crowned at Chartres,--Rheims not having yet declared for him. The papal
absolution had not yet arrived and the higher clergy was mostly hostile
still. But in March Paris opened its gates and Henry went to mass at
Notre Dame amid the riotous joy of the citizens.[a]
_Opposition of the Pope and Philip II_
The only two powers who now delayed the recognition of the king were the
pope and Philip. The Catholic Henry availed himself of the Pragmatic
which had conveyed the patronage of abbeys and bishoprics to the crown,
and turned the tables on the holy father by employing the honours of
the church in pacifying the state. If a zealous leaguer still held
back, hesitating to believe the sincerity of the conversion, he was
convinced of the Catholicism of the most Christian king by the bestowal
of the revenues of a vacant stall or rich deanery. Villars Brancas, a
zealous papist and gallant soldier, who was governor of Rouen against
the king, never gave credit to Henry’s attachment to the church till he
was presented with two or three abbacies for his own enjoyment. Rouen
then opened its gates, and the military abbot did suit and service to his
orthodox and discriminating patron. All the leaders were softened by the
same arts, and at last Guise and Montmorency were admitted into favour.
Guise, a disappointed opponent, was made governor of Provence; and
Montmorency, a discontented supporter, received the constable’s staff.
Hatred, doubt, and bitterness of course lay for a long time in the hearts
of the fanatical and ambitious. Clement VIII, the fifth pope who within
four years had sat on the Roman throne, had not pronounced the absolution
of Henry’s previous unbelief, and a youth, a pupil of the Jesuits, imbued
with their principles, if not incited in this instance by their advice,
attempted the murder of the king. His knife slipped, and only inflicted
a trifling wound; but the whole nation was awake to the indignity of the
action. The university and parliament pronounced against the Jesuits,
and they were ordered from the soil of France. Henry confessed the step
was necessary, but it was not legal, and in a few years he revoked the
sentence of banishment, and allowed the society to return.[d]
[Sidenote: [1594-1598 A.D.]]
When the papal absolution came it was the sign of the end of the league,
which collapsed when Mayenne made his peace early in 1596. The only
revenge which the king allowed himself being, Sully[p] tells us, to lead
him on a hot, tiresome tramp around the park of Soisson, which the gouty
Mayenne must acquiesce in without grimace.[a]
Meantime Philip II refused to recognise the king of France under any
other title than that of Prince of Béarn, and in other ways also showed
his hostility. So in January, 1595, Henry formally declared war against
Spain and a conflict began which lasted for three years. It is not worth
while to follow step by step this monotonous conflict, pregnant with
facts which had their importance for contemporaries but which are not
worthy of an historical resurrection.[l] Several battles were fought,
several towns submitted; Amiens surrendered in September, 1597, after
a long siege, and with the fall of Amiens fell all the knights who had
been raising their heads throughout France. The Peace of Vervins was
signed May 2nd, 1598, four months before the death of Philip II. So
the peace was made; and in it the aged sixteenth century seems to sink
to rest. It closed the wounds of all that strife of three generations
which began with the Reformation as a group of purely religious wars,
and, after dreary epochs of civil contest, came to an end in which
nothing was said as to matters of faith, an end heralded by the great
Edict of Toleration.[m] A month previous to the signing of the treaty
of peace Henry had signed and published the Edict of Nantes, defined by
M. Guizot[l] as his treaty of peace with the Protestant malcontents.
Hitherto there had never been anything but truces or armed neutrality.[a]
THE EDICT OF NANTES
The Edict of Nantes, in common with almost all measures which have
been taken to redress grievances in times of disturbance, consisted of
two distinct parts: one of temporary value and intended to meet the
special circumstances of the case, the other calculated to endure, and
dictated by fixed principles. Much has been said about the excessive
privileges granted by the Edict of Nantes to the Huguenots. This special
organisation, giving them quite a peculiar position in the state; those
two hundred towns, where they were to be secure from interference, and
which were placed for a time in their hands; those places, strong enough
to endure a siege and against which the whole of the royal forces were
no more than adequate, given up to them--these, as Sully declared, were
concessions quite incompatible with the security of any government, and
when Cardinal Richelieu, after two civil wars, cut down these privileges
without interfering with the Protestant religion, it became evident that
they were not at all necessary to insure liberty of conscience.
The measures which did insure that liberty formed the very basis of the
Edict of Nantes. They secured to the Huguenots the free practice of the
reformed religion throughout the greater part of the kingdom, excepting
certain towns belonging to the league, where the Calvinists had realised
that it was better not to settle. They provided that Protestants should
enjoy the same civil rights as Catholics, and the very law for depriving
people of hereditary rights on account of religious opinions, which was
to be formally promulgated in England against the Catholics, was as
formally suspended in France with regard to the Protestants. Lastly,
not to mention the less important clauses, a chamber was created in
parliament called the chamber of the Edict, an allowance was granted to
the Protestants for their ministers and their schools, and they were
admitted to the dignities and offices of state.
The true spirit of the Edict of Nantes, temporarily obscured by the
granting of the concessions which it enumerated, is contained in these
latter clauses which granted toleration to the Protestants while
depriving the Reformation movement of any political character whatever.
At a time when sovereigns and people were in the habit of shielding
their ambition and their crimes under the name of religion, Henry IV
consistently tried, in his relations with foreign powers, as well as in
his own kingdom, to separate the two orders, and to maintain civil unity
in the midst of religious dissension; civil unity being in his eyes not
only a pledge of peace, but the presage of a still higher unity.
Besides this tolerance granted to the Protestants, there is also an
evident desire to encourage where it was possible a reconciliation with
the church, and to put an end simultaneously to persecutions and to
religious differences. He had seen that persecution, far from destroying
opposition, only tended to excite it, and that the persecution itself,
by a sort of reaction, tended to become more virulent. He expressed this
with striking eloquence in the parliament of Paris, saying: “After St.
Bartholomew four of us who were playing with dice at a table saw drops
of blood appear there, and finding that after they had been wiped away
twice they returned a third time I said I would play no more; and that
it was a bad omen against those who had shed it; M. de Guise was one of
the party.” He had said elsewhere: “It is a clear proof of unreasonable
excitement to begin the work of conversion by subversion, of instruction
by destruction, by extermination, and by war, when one ought to begin by
fraternity, admonition, and gentleness.” Whilst granting these liberties
to the Protestants, whilst further developing the significance of the
Edict by ordering it to be enforced in Béarn and in the places where
Catholics were in a minority, whilst he instanced his own example in
order to protect the latter from the harshness of Protestant rulers,
Henry turned his attention to the church; strove to satisfy her claims,
to secure her liberty, and by so doing to insure her ascendency. “I
know,” he said to the clerical deputies in 1598, “that religion and
justice are the pillars and the foundation of this kingdom, whose
preservation depends on justice and piety; and where these do not exist I
wish to establish them, but little by little, as I wish to do everything.
I will, God helping me, act in such a way that the church will be in as
good a state as she was a hundred years ago. I hope to satisfy you and my
own conscience.”[h]
REORGANISATION OF FRANCE WITH THE AID OF SULLY
In 1598 Henry IV had driven out the foreigner, united Catholic and
Protestant, and finally established peace in his domestic and in his
foreign relations. It was now necessary to heal France from all the
blows she had received. “I have hardly a horse on which I could fight,”
wrote Henry in 1596: “my doublets have holes at the elbows and my pot
is often empty.” The country was in a like condition. A contemporary
estimated that, since 1580, 800,000 persons had perished by wars and
massacres, that nine cities had been razed, 250 villages burned, 128,000
houses destroyed. And since the period preceding the league, what fresh
ruin! Workmen without work, commerce interrupted, agriculture ruined,
brigandage everywhere--that was the condition from which Henry must raise
France. The nobility had proposed to him a means to get out of this
distress; they offered him all the money necessary for the government and
the maintenance of the army on the sole condition of a decree “that those
who held governments by appointment might hold them as their property
upon acknowledging them to be from the crown by simple liege homage,
a thing that was formerly practised.” This thing formerly practised
was precisely what royalty had incessantly been destroying piece by
piece for two centuries, and Henry IV was less disposed than any of his
predecessors to restore feudalism. On the contrary, it was by withdrawing
France from the hands of these “tyrants” in order to govern it himself
that he undertook to regenerate it.
Henry had already found the man who was to aid him in this work which was
more difficult than that of the battle-field; a man of strong good sense,
intrepid heart, and withal a wise mind, the Protestant Maximilian de
Béthune, later duke of Sully. Born at the château of Rosny, near Mantes,
in 1560, he was seven years younger than the king. At the time of St.
Bartholomew he was studying at Paris. He attached himself to the king of
Navarre and followed him in all his adventures and his battles, showing
himself as brave as any. He was often wounded, for example at Ivry,
whence he was borne apparently dying, when the king met him and “embraced
him with both arms” as “a brave soldier, a true French knight.” Not a
knight, however, after the paladins of romance, for though he attended
well to the affairs of his master, he did not forget his own. He married
a rich heiress, a Courtenay. He did not disdain the profits of war, the
pillage of cities or the ransom of captives, nor even the profits of
business; he bought horses at a low price in Germany and sold them in
Gascony for a high price. Increasing his fortune in every honest fashion,
he established order in his own house as he did in the public finances.
But, devoted to the prince and to the state, this good manager cut down
his forest of Rosny to take the proceeds to Henry when the latter was at
the end of his resources; and the zealous Protestant advised the king to
end the war by becoming a Catholic. Sully was neither a Colbert nor a
Bayard; he had, however, some of the qualities of both.[n]
Sully introduced into the government the energy of a soldier, and into
the prince’s household the same economy and punctuality as prevailed in
his own. Having become superintendent of finances, and having assumed
the supreme direction of this department, he laid the traditions of
method and of that perfect efficiency which cannot exist without it. He
performed a very important, very difficult, but not very brilliant work.
He formed men and trained them so that they could satisfactorily carry
on existing institutions. By his unfailing watchfulness, he succeeded in
having the accounts systematically kept, and rendered peculation almost
impossible. As most of the hereditary financial offices had gradually
acquired an independence which had been fostered by the civil wars, Sully
tried to reunite, as far as they were concerned, the ancient ties of
centralisation, so as to secure the influence of the supreme power over
them. He also wished to have the census taken regularly, and to insure
an accurate statement of the budget being drawn up. He wanted to find
out the exact value of the taxes, and to institute a regular system for
their collection; finally he took advantage of the low rate of interest
to reduce the pensions paid by the state.
This change, and a better system for farming the taxes and of securing
their returns enabled him to leave the ministry, having made up the
deficit, and leaving several millions of savings in the cellars of the
Bastille. This accumulation was very valuable at a period when there was
hardly any better way of providing for future emergencies than by laying
by money. Sully was the first superintendent of finance whose memory was
not execrated, and even remained popular. Let us hear what is said of him
in an anonymous eulogium, written probably after his death, and which,
in spite of its somewhat obscure language, contains a true appreciation
of his administrative powers: “He only, up to the present time, has
discovered the connection between two things in the government of states,
which our forefathers were not able to unite, and which they even
considered incompatible: the amassing of wealth in the royal coffers,
side by side with the diminution of taxation and increasing prosperity of
the people: the increase of the king’s wealth simultaneously with that of
private individuals.”
Sully called agriculture and cattle breeding the two feeders of France;
he made a point of encouraging agriculture, the interests of which had
already attracted attention in the sixteenth century, and he diminished
the rates though he could not succeed in compelling the nobles to pay
them in those provinces where the assemblies claimed the right of levying
them. As for commerce and manufactures, he did not yet recognise their
importance. He looked upon them simply as ministers to luxury, just
as he saw nothing in luxury but the extravagance of individuals and
the corruption of the public mind. Fortunately Henry IV, who did not
share these very military prejudices, instituted an elective chamber
of commerce, granted many facilities to manufactures which were taking
root or seemed likely to take root in France, protecting them by fixing
tariffs, commanded the most competent men to draw up memoranda on the
economic interests of the country, created or rather tried to create
an India company, and assumed the exclusive right of legislating in
commercial matters--a right which had hitherto been claimed by the
representatives of the provincial governments.
We owe to Sully the institution of two important administrations, one for
public works by which many valuable enterprises were at once undertaken,
such as the draining of marshy places, and the construction of canals;
the other in connection with the mines, the working of which, having
been granted as a monopoly to companies by Charles VI and Louis XI, had
not produced very good results. His reforms extended to almost every
service. In the army responsibility and discipline were re-established,
the stock of ammunition, artillery, etc., was augmented, the condition
of the troops ameliorated, and provision made for the wounded and for
veterans. The fifteen years of this ministry were too short, though much
was effected during their course; Sully could not carry out all the
plans he had conceived. The most important of these were to accustom
the nobility to take part in business, to form a training school for
statesmen in connection with the king’s council, which would have insured
the maintenance of traditions and made the carrying out of reforms much
easier. He retired “satisfied,” he said in his letter to Marie de’
Medici, “with having by his industry and ingenuity succeeded in reducing
to order the most terrible confusion which had ever existed in the
finances of France.”[b]
AMOURS AND SECOND MARRIAGE OF HENRY IV
[Sidenote: [1597-1599 A.D.]]
Let us inspect another phase of the character of Henry of Navarre. Let us
turn from the warrior and the reformer to the man and the lover.
Who has not heard of the fair Gabrielle? Henry saw her first at the
château of her father, during one of his campaigns, and became enamoured.
He frequently stole from his camp in disguise, and crossed the enemy’s
lines to visit her. A hundred stories are told of the romantic adventures
he underwent whilst wooing. He won, and was happy. Never had illegitimate
love a more flattering excuse. Compelled to espouse, when a boy, the
abandoned sister of Charles IX, his wedding feast had been stained with
the blood of his friend, and the dissolute Marguerite led a life such as
might be expected from such a race and such espousals. Henry consoled
himself in the affections of Gabrielle d’Estrées, whose society he loved,
and to whom he was constant. She had borne him several children.
And now the wish of Henry was to obtain a divorce from his queen, and
to sanction his connection with Gabrielle by a marriage. So serious
and sincere was he in this that all his courtiers applauded the
determination. Sully alone looked cold. Henry consulted him, and besought
his advice; and the minister represented to him all the dangers of a
disputed succession, of the pretensions of the young duke de Vendôme,
who could not be legitimated, and of all the obvious objections to
such a step. Henry was grieved: he saw the justice of the counsel, and
remained irresolute. Gabrielle broke forth in invectives against Sully,
and at length demanded his dismissal. Henry brought his minister by the
hand into the apartment of Gabrielle, and entreated her to be reconciled
to him. She persisted in her pride and in bursts of resentment. “Know,
madam,” said Henry, harsh for the first time, “that a minister like
him must be dearer to me than even such a mistress as you.” Gabrielle
henceforth gave herself up to grief. The king was true and kind as
ever. In the spring of the year 1599 she was advanced in a state of
pregnancy. Henry, about to go through the pious ceremonies of Easter
at Fontainebleau, felt it decorous to separate for a few days from his
mistress. She retired to Paris, weighed down by despondency and the
blackest presentiment. Astrological predictions were then the mode; and
some imprudent or malevolent information of this kind tormented her: “We
shall never meet again,” were her words on parting from the king, and
they proved true. She was taken with convulsions, delivered of a dead
child, and expired in a few hours. Henry had mounted on horseback at the
first news, and was halfway on the road to Paris, when he was told it
was too late. The brave Henry could not support this blow: he wellnigh
fainted, and was obliged to be conveyed back to Fontainebleau. There
he retired, and shut himself up to indulge his grief. Sully alone was
able to console him, and rouse him, after a time, to the affairs of the
kingdom.
[Sidenote: [1599-1600 A.D.]]
It were to be wished, for Henry’s character, that his amours had ended
here. His intention was to marry; and the niece of the grand duke of
Tuscany, Marie de’ Medici, had already been mentioned. But the divorce
had not yet been expedited by the pope; and the inflammable temperament
of Henry took fire in the meantime with a new passion. Mademoiselle
d’Entragues was the object, a being lovely indeed, but wanting alike
the modesty, the sweet temper, and unambitious conduct of Gabrielle.
She long enticed and tormented the monarch. Her father, the count
d’Entragues, affected resentment and vigilance; and Henry had recourse
to such disguise as he had formerly used to gain admission to Gabrielle
d’Estrées. Henrietta d’Entragues had not the same taste: she is said
to have so disliked the monarch in the humble dress of a gardener that
she turned him from her presence. At length she obtained from Henry a
promise of marriage in case that a son was born to her within the year,
and Mademoiselle d’Entragues became marquise de Verneuil. Henry showed
the contract to Sully, who, without other comment, tore and cast it under
his feet. The king felt bound to write another; but in consequence of a
stroke of lightning which fell on the house where the marquise resided,
it ultimately became void. The fright which the lightning occasioned had
the effect of destroying the hopes she had entertained of fulfilling her
part of the contract, a stipulation indecent and unworthy of the monarch.
Henry soon after was roused to a fuller sense of his dignity and of the
nation’s weal. A divorce was by this time obtained; and he espoused Marie
de’ Medici in the course of the year 1600.[k]
The duke de Bellegarde, a successful rival to Henry IV in the affections
of several of his mistresses, had been sent by him to Florence to fetch
the bride. The Tuscan princess, already twenty-seven years of age, had
shown some inclination for gallantry. Paul Giordano Orsini, her first
cousin, one of the nobles who accompanied her to the French court, was
said to have inspired her with love. Concino Concini, grandson of a
secretary of Cosmo, a young man of wit and pleasing appearance, but who
had ruined himself by his licentiousness, came also in her train in
search of fortune in France. With her also went Leonora Dori, a woman of
low origin, remarkable for her slenderness and pallor, the daughter of a
carpenter and of a woman of ill-fame. This woman, in attendance on the
princess from her earliest infancy, had obtained a complete ascendency
over her. Leonora had profited by her patronage to induce the noble
Florentine house of Galigaï to bestow their name upon her. Marie gave her
the post of tire-woman, destined by the king for a French lady. The new
queen left Florence on October 13th, took ship at Leghorn for Marseilles,
and proceeded from one festivity to another, until she arrived at Lyons
on December 2nd.
It was not until December 9th that Henry, posting to Lyons, saw his queen
for the first time. He was not greatly pleased with her stout figure, her
round face, and her large, staring eyes. The queen had nothing endearing
in her manner, nor was she of a cheerful disposition; she had no liking
for the king, and did not pretend to show any; she did not propose to
amuse or please him; her temper was peevish and obstinate. She had been
brought up entirely according to the Spanish custom, and in the husband
who appeared to her old and disagreeable she still suspected the relapsed
heretic. Henry was detained at Lyons by the negotiations with Savoy, but
the signing of the treaty of peace taking place on January 17th, 1601,
he posted to Paris the next day, to be near the marquise de Verneuil, who
pleased him far more than the queen, possessing precisely the charms,
vivacity, and gaiety that the latter lacked.
[Illustration: MARIE DE’ MEDICI
(1573-1642)]
[Sidenote: [1601-1602 A.D.]]
After the departure of the king, Marie de’ Medici and all her court
set forth for the capital; travelling by post, she only reached Paris
on February 9th. The princess of Conti (Louise Marguerite de Lorraine)
relates that the day of the queen’s arrival in Paris, “the king bade the
duchess de Nemours (the first lady of the household) fetch the marquise
de Verneuil, and present her to the queen. The aged princess attempted
to excuse herself from so doing, saying she would lose all credit with
her mistress; but the king insisted, and ordered her to do his bidding,
and that somewhat rudely, which was contrary to his usual courteous
habits. She therefore conducted the marchioness to the queen who, greatly
astonished at the sight of her, received her with much coldness; but
the marquise de Verneuil, very bold naturally, talked so much and so
familiarly that she finally succeeded in forcing the queen to discourse
with her.
“The king, tired of going two or three times a day to see the marquise,
on perceiving that the queen had softened towards her, desired her
to come to the Louvre where he had an apartment made ready for her.
This, after some time, roused the jealousy of the queen, who had been
entertained by several people with sayings of the marquise de Verneuil;
who in truth, spoke of her freely enough and with little respect. The
queen and the marquise were both enceinte, and the king seemed as if
he did not know how to be on good terms with them both. He showed that
respect to the queen to which her rank entitled her, but he was happier
in the society of the marquise. Everyone wishing to please the king
visited the latter, which was taken very ill by the queen. They dwelt
so near one another as to be unable to avoid each other, and continual
misunderstandings were the result.”[g] Sully was more than once called
in to quiet their domestic broils. The birth of a son, afterwards Louis
XIII, occurred at Fontainebleau in 1601 to allay the fears of a disputed
succession, and also contributed to bind Henry to his queen.[k]
The king, though so well-wishing, never thought of cutting down the
expenses of the court. Yet the desolation of the country, due to the
civil wars, was appalling. The highways were lost in weeds and brambles,
and wolves preyed on the country in great bands. Taxes could not be
raised, so that finally the king gave up trying to collect arrears and in
1598 he gave up the taxes of 1594 and 1595.[a]
INTRIGUES OF DE BIRON
Another obstacle to the security and happiness of the monarch lay in
the intrigues of his grandees. The people gave him little trouble; the
turbulence of the civic class was over: they were ashamed, as well as
weary, of the long disorders of the league, and in no way sought to renew
them. Satisfied by the mild and economical management of the revenue by
Sully, they applauded so beneficent a power, and forgot, or regretted
not, that it was absolute. None clamoured for the states-general; they
made loyalty a part of their religion; and abandoned all doctrines of
liberty and republicanism to the hated Huguenots, who professed them.
The nobles, who were the contemporaries of Henry, could not find the same
repose: they had lived a life of turbulence and war; they had been bred
in intrigue, and in all the excitement of contending parties; peace could
not content them. Then the life of a camp had placed them on a kind of
equality with their monarch, who had terminated the war by yielding up
the administering authority in the provinces to the several grandees. He
had compounded with them, as much as conquered them; and the Protestant
nobles had taken a position of equal independence with that of the
Catholics. The high aristocracy, in fact, that Francis I so prudently
kept down, had reconstituted itself in the subsequent reigns. They now
made a covert, but not less serious proposal to Henry, choosing the
duke de Montpensier, a stripling and a prince of the blood, to be their
spokesman on the occasion. This demand was no less than to re-establish
the old feudal system, by allowing the present governors of provinces
to hold them in fief, and transmit them to their descendants. Henry was
not a monarch to tolerate such a demand; and his angry reply struck
young Montpensier with terror. The grandees determined to win by union
and force what gentler means could not obtain. They conspired, leagued
with Spain, with the duke of Savoy, and even with England, endeavouring
to excite a malcontent party. Protestants as well as Catholics joined
in this: the duke de Bouillon at the head of one, the proud Épernon
representing the other. Such, however, was Henry’s power, and such
his character for courage as well as promptitude, such, too, was the
vigilance of Sully, that this intrigue could never be matured into a
conspiracy. Henry’s frank and amiable temper won over many; and he never
proceeded to punish the guilty until he had used every gentle means to
admonish, to pardon, and recall them to duty.
The marshal De Biron was almost the only one of his nobles who still
persisted in treasonable views. The king, on one occasion, had summoned
him, charged him seriously, but not severely, with the crime, and showed
him that he was well informed of his intrigues. Biron fell on his knees,
confessed his weakness, but vowed that he would never more forsake the
path of loyalty. Henry pardoned and embraced him. But Biron, vain and
fickle, jealous even of his monarch’s fame, was weak enough to listen
once more to the insinuations of Spain. The duke of Savoy, on a visit
to Henry, manifested every sign of admiration for the king, while he
occupied himself in corrupting the French courtiers, and in fomenting a
party. He was ably seconded by the Spanish count de Fuentes. Biron was
fascinated by the mighty promises of these intriguers: he was to have
Burgundy as an independent state. The constable de Bourbon himself never
received more magnificent promises. Nothing more displays the baseness
and declension of the Spanish monarchy than its recourse to such weak and
dishonourable machinations.
Henry soon after, wearied with the bad faith and subtle subterfuges of
the duke of Savoy, made war on that prince. Biron was intrusted with
the command, and in conducting it his treachery became manifest. One
day, when Sully rode with him to view the siege of a fortress belonging
to the duke, the former could perceive that the fire from the ramparts
slackened, and was directed from them. Sully took the same ride alone
on the following day, and was received with a heavy and well-directed
cannonade. It afterwards appeared that the marshal had intended to
entice the king into an ambuscade, where the fire of the enemy would
have certainly proved fatal. The duke of Savoy, worsted by the arms of
Henry, made his submission, and obtained peace. Biron continued his
intrigues with Spain, in concert with the duke de Bouillon, with the
count d’Auvergne, bastard of Charles IX, and probably with Épernon, and
the whole body of the malcontent noblesse.
[Illustration: CHARLES DE GONTAUT, DUC DE BIRON
(1562-1602)]
The king was perfectly aware of these intrigues. Biron was betrayed by
his chief counsellor and instigator, a person named Lafin. Henry saw
Biron once talking with Lafin, and warned him, saying, “I know that
man; he will lead you into evil.” But the marshal was deaf to advice.
Henry did not at first place much credit in the revelations of Lafin,
who accused Sully himself among others of the court. But the informer
produced written documents, proofs of Biron’s connection with Spain.
Biron was summoned to court. It was the king’s intention to reproach
his ancient comrade, to endeavour to awaken his loyalty, shame him
into a confession of his treason, and again pardon him. Sully received
instructions to pursue the same conduct, and to try every means short
of letting the marshal know that Lafin had confessed all. Biron and the
count d’Auvergne came to court boldly. Henry drew the traitor apart, led
him into familiar conversation, showed himself open, frank, forgiving,
yet suspicious. Biron betrayed no misgivings, no repentance, no wish
to remove his sovereign’s distrust. At last, as they arrived before an
equestrian statue of Henry lately erected, which was ornamented with
trophies, the king asked, “What would the king of Spain say were he to
see me thus?” Biron, who felt that this was meant to try him, insolently
replied, “Sire, he scarcely fears you.” Then correcting himself, he
stammered out, “I mean in that statue, not in this, your person.” Henry
smiled sorrowfully, and gave up his merciful and friendly purpose. Sully,
on his side, exerted himself to the same effect, but in vain. Biron was
hardened. It was only then that Henry gave orders for his arrest, and
that of the count d’Auvergne. As they left the king’s chamber, their
swords were demanded. They were conveyed by water to the arsenal. Biron
was tried before the parliament, condemned, and executed. He evinced the
greatest rage on the scaffold; it amounted to frenzy, and was excited by
his horror of so disgraceful a death. The executioner was obliged to hide
his sword, and strike off the head of the culprit unawares.
THE LAST YEARS OF HENRY’S REIGN
[Sidenote: [1602-1609 A.D.]]
The last years of Henry’s reign are scarcely marked by any important
incidents. The few that did take place, such as the conspiracy of the
family D’Entragues, and the weaknesses into which Henry’s amorous
disposition led him, are exaggerated in importance, and narrated by
historians with a detail they little merit. The punishment of Biron,
which Henry meant as a warning to his discontented nobles, succeeded
in keeping them in awe. If they intrigued, it was in fear, and with a
caution that marred all progress or purpose. The count d’Auvergne alone,
though pardoned for being implicated with Biron, renewed his schemes in
conjunction with the marquise de Verneuil; this mistress treated the
king with the capriciousness and severity which a wronged beauty might
use towards a gallant more advanced in years; the monarch construed
her caprice into infidelity; and a loving quarrel grew to be a serious
misunderstanding. Henry withdrew the written document of the promise
of marriage. The father and daughter, joined by the count d’Auvergne,
plotted against the king, it was said against his life; and, as usual,
they found support in a Spanish emissary. They were all three arrested,
tried, and condemned to death; but Henry pardoned his mistress, as well
as her relatives, and commuted their punishment into exile. The restless
and false D’Auvergne was confined permanently in the Bastille.
Squabbles with his queen, Marie de’ Medici, on account of her Italian
favourites, Concini and his wife; distrust of Sully, excited by the
envious courtiers; these, with national improvements, negotiations,
festivals, and hunting parties, bring the reign of Henry IV nearly to its
close.
In 1609, its happy and glorious monotony was varied by the enthusiastic
admiration which the aged monarch conceived for Mademoiselle de
Montmorency, the young and lovely daughter of the constable, who had just
appeared at court and eclipsed all its beauties. There is some difference
of opinion as to the nature of Henry’s admiration: the memoir writers of
the age saw scandal in every connection; and certainly Henry’s past life
and his known failings incline to the worst side. Bassompierre,[o] then a
young man, relates that he himself became a suitor for the beauty’s hand,
and that he was induced by the entreaties or commands of the enamoured
king to desist. Bassompierre was a babbler, however, whose vanity
breaks out in the arrogance of the mere pretension. The young prince
of Condé was also smitten, but shrank back from so formidable a rival
as the monarch. What belies the account of Bassompierre is that Henry
came forward, and assured Condé that he might woo in all confidence,
and that he had nothing to fear on that score from his king. If Henry
had licentious views, Bassompierre, and not Condé, would have been the
convenient husband of Mademoiselle de Montmorency.
Condé was the successful suitor, and the marriage was celebrated at
court with unusual splendour. Henry, having given his word to the
prince, indulged his predilection for the lovely bride by showering
presents and favours upon her and her husband. The court, full of the
malevolent, amongst whom the followers of the jealous queen were not the
least forward, construed all these symptoms to be the homage of a guilty
passion: they poured this in the prince’s ear; and Condé, alarmed for
his wife’s honour, carried her off from the court by stealth, first
to Picardy, whence, on receiving a summons from the king to return, he
made a second flight, and gained the Low Countries. The king showed
himself strangely affected by this incident: the discovery of Biron’s
conspiracy did not cause him more trouble. Sully was called up in the
night; and the whole court was roused by the agitation of the monarch,
who was pacing and stamping up and down the chamber of the queen, while
the courtiers stood “pasted to the walls,” says Sully, lest they should
interrupt the monarch’s passion. The flight of the first prince of the
blood, and his taking refuge with the Spaniards, was certainly a grave
question, love and jealousy being set aside. The king demanded Sully’s
advice, who hesitated, but being forced, advised him to “do nothing.”
“Nothing!” said Henry; “call you that advice?” Sully replied that the
escape of the prince was a matter of little importance, unless the king
chose to make it important by raising a clamour, and showing that he took
an interest concerning it. Henry, however, was not in a humour to treat
the matter thus slightly and thus wisely: he instructed his ambassador to
demand of the archduke to deliver up the prince and princess of Condé;
and, as Sully foresaw, the court of Brussels, in refusing, filled Europe
with calumnies against Henry; asserting that he wanted to take by force
the wife of the first prince of the realm and of the blood. When Henry,
immediately afterwards, menaced war, the outcry was that Europe was about
to be deluged in blood for another Helen.
It was, indeed, unfortunate that Henry, who had remained so many years
at peace, no doubt preparing and amassing the materials and resources of
war, and cautiously awaiting fit pretext and proper reason, should now
draw the sword for a cause at once criminal and absurd.[k]
_Grand Design of Henry IV; His Death_
[Sidenote: [1609-1610 A.D.]]
At home the rest of Henry’s reign was perhaps monotonous; but it was
none the less momentous, for on the ruins of France the Bourbon monarchy
was already building up the centralised absolutism which it was the work
of Richelieu to perfect and Louis XIV to wield. But in foreign affairs
the schemes of Henry were not less far reaching. France was to become
the centre of European politics, the dictator of Germany. In Sully’s
_Economies Royales_ we may read of the details of the great scheme which
anticipated that of Napoleon by two centuries. But such details are the
work of subsequent addition and the plan of making Europe into a grand
republic of fifteen states with well-balanced interests, etc., was
perhaps not so clearly conceived even by Sully as historians have been
accustomed to state. But some such design was undoubtedly behind the
foreign policy which Henry was inaugurating at his death. He possibly
intended to unite with France the Flemish, Dutch, and North German states
in a movement that would overthrow Spain and Austria. His own statements
make this plain.[a]
Henry IV had expressed on many occasions and had incessantly repeated in
his diplomacy the end which he had in view. His object was to restore the
cities and states of the empire to their former rights and liberties,
to assure the liberty of the United Provinces, to base the politics of
France upon the alliance of the secondary states, in the north the United
Provinces, Denmark, Sweden, and the German principalities, in the south,
Switzerland, Savoy, and the Italian principalities; finally to extend his
system of religious tolerance so as to guarantee liberty everywhere to
the dissenters from the established cult, whether these dissenters might
be Catholics, Lutherans, or Calvinists; and to prevent religious wars or
religious pretexts assigned to purely political wars and enterprises. He
had long since declared to all the courts of Europe that he had ended the
era of civil war in France and wished to end it everywhere else.
However it may be as to these observations, France, according to him,
must pursue a double end in her foreign relations, lay the foundations
of perpetual peace, and drive the Turks from Europe. In order to bring
about perpetual peace it would be necessary to reduce the possessions
of Austria, establish a certain balance of power, and create periodical
diets or congresses, either for this or that category of states or for
all Europe, with federal armies and fleets to execute the decisions made
in common.[b]
He now resolved to realise his dream: but this, which had been a
vision of heroism and philanthropy, was now degraded and sullied by
the immediate motive. Henry, who was passionately fond of glory, saw
the stain that was to rob his achievements of their brightness and
purity. The accusation of the Spaniards troubled him: perhaps there
was even truth in the reproach that the love of a sexagenarian king
for a princess, and a married princess of twenty, was the only cause
and pretext for convulsing Europe and shedding its best blood. This
weighed upon Henry, and fretted him: his gaiety disappeared. Remorse and
mortification came to cloud the heaven of his declining days. A dark
presentiment, similar to that which had forewarned his loved Gabrielle of
her fate, now gathered around Henry: he could not shake it off.
He intended leaving the queen as regent during his absence at the head
of his army; and her previous coronation, a ceremony that had not
yet taken place, was considered requisite. This detained him in the
capital; and Marie de’ Medici, fond of state and ceremony, insisted on
it, and delighted in it. Henry was annoyed and fretted: he frequently
said he should never leave Paris alive, and he longed to contradict his
presentiment. The coronation of the queen at length took place. On the
following day, the 14th of May, 1610, he manifested strong feelings of
despondency. Despatches brought him word that his enemies were making
no preparations for defence, and that they gave out that the delivery
of the prince and princess of Condé would at once allay his choler and
arrest his schemes. This increased his ill humour: he called for Sully;
but learning that his minister was ill at the arsenal, the king’s coach
was ordered to convey him thither. Seven of the suite occupied with the
king his ample carriage. The duke d’Épernon was in one corner, and Henry
next to him. The vehicle proceeded, but was stopped in the narrow rue
de la Ferronnerie by two loaded carts. This was the moment chosen by an
assassin, Ravaillac, who, mounting on the step, and leaning full into the
carriage, struck the king with a poniard, first in the stomach, and then
in the breast. One of these stabs pierced the heart of the noble Henry.
To paint the rage and despair of the people would be impossible. The
once detested Henry had won every heart; and the general grief for
him partook of the character of madness. Tears were the least tokens
of sorrow; many died on learning the catastrophe, amongst others the
brave De Vic, the comrade of Henry. The lifeless body was borne to the
Louvre, whilst Ravaillac, who made no attempt to escape, was taken,
brandishing his dagger, and only preserved by the guards from being
instantly torn in pieces. He had been a monk, strongly imbued with the
king-killing principles that the Jesuits had broached. His crime had long
been meditated by him; but no proof exists that he had been instigated
either by Spain or by any knot of malcontent courtiers. Suspicion,
indeed, has scattered its stain on all with an unsparing hand. Épernon,
the queen, Concini, and many others, were accused as being privy to the
deed; and the record of Ravaillac’s trial having been destroyed, whilst
these personages possessed the chief influence, gives some colour to
the charge. But the tortured culprit might idly or malevolently cast
imputation on the powerful, as indeed he menaced to do. For when some
one pressed him to name his accomplices, Ravaillac answered, “Suppose
I name you.” The seed of his crime was the diabolical maxim to which
the fanaticism of the league had given birth, and which it had rendered
popular. It had germinated and grown in the dark solitude of a rancorous
and fanatic spirit.[k]
CHARACTER AND POLICY OF HENRY IV
[Sidenote: [1589-1610 A.D.]]
There are two Henry IV’s; the Henry of tradition and the Henry of
history. The one more heroic and, thanks to Voltaire,[q] more popular;
the other, underneath his crafty good nature, much more able and, with
his pliant character, much better fitted to raise a falling edifice
than a simple character would have been. Henry of Navarre had the most
brilliant bravery, a quality common to the warriors of that time and of
all times. But it is pleasing in a prince, and the chief who is ever
ready to offer his life to the sword point is sure to win his soldiers’
hearts. Reared among the mountaineers of the Pyrenees, he possessed an
agility equal to theirs and a body incapable of fatigue. The vicissitudes
through which he had passed had made his religion uncertain. Charles IX
said to him, “Death or the mass!” He took the mass; later he abjured,
and this abjuration was not to be the last. So he felt no anger against
those who professed a different doctrine; his nature made fanaticism
odious to him, and his position imposed tolerance upon him. Furthermore,
he was a good comrade, showing the same face to good or to ill fortune.
He bent under misfortune but did not break, and found resources in the
most desperate situations. He loved pleasure, but not as it was loved by
Henry III. He was kind through good nature as well as experience of life.
He had friends who, it is true, got from his friendship more good words
than good results; but his heart was open if his hand was closed, because
he was for twenty years the chief of a party obliged to give much and to
take nothing except from the enemy.
One night when D’Aubigné[e] and La Force were sleeping not far from the
king, the former complained bitterly to the latter of their master’s
stinginess. La Force, overcome by fatigue, did not listen. “Don’t you
hear?” asked D’Aubigné. La Force roused himself and asked what he was
saying. “Why, he is telling you,” cried the king, who heard everything,
“that I am a harsh, miserly fellow and the most ungrateful mortal on the
face of the earth.” “He did not treat me worse on account of it,” adds
D’Aubigné, “but he did not give me a quarter of a crown more.”
His forced residence at the court of the Valois had been fatal to his
morals. For several years he forgot his rôle and his fortune. After the
death of the duke of Anjou, Duplessis-Mornay wrote to him: “Pastimes are
no longer in season. It is time for you to make love to France.” Henry
felt this rebuke; he gave up his pleasures and put on his cuirass.[n]
In Sully’s _Mémoires_ we find this description of him[82]: “Such was
the tragical end of a prince, on whom Nature, with a lavish profusion,
had bestowed all her advantages, except that of a death such as he
merited. I have already observed that his stature was so happy, and
his limbs formed with such proportion, as constitutes not only what is
called a well-made man, but indicates strength, vigour, and activity;
his complexion was animated; all the lineaments of his face had that
agreeable liveliness which forms a sweet and happy physiognomy, and
perfectly suited to that engaging easiness of manners which, though
sometimes mixed with majesty, never lost the graceful affability and easy
gaiety so natural to that great prince. With regard to the qualities of
his heart and mind, I shall tell the reader nothing new by saying that he
was candid, sincere, grateful, compassionate, generous, wise, penetrating.
“He loved all his subjects as a father, and the whole state as the head
of a family; and it was this disposition that recalled him even from the
midst of his pleasures to the care of rendering his people happy and his
kingdom flourishing; hence proceeded his readiness in conceiving, and his
industry in perfecting, a great number of useful regulations. Many I have
already specified; and I shall sum up all by saying that there were no
conditions, employments, or professions to which his reflections did not
extend; and that with such clearness and penetration, that the changes
he projected could not be overthrown by the death of their author, as it
but too often happened in this monarchy. It was his desire, he said, that
glory might influence his last years and make them at once useful to the
world and acceptable to God; his was a mind in which the ideas of what is
great, uncommon, and beautiful seemed to rise of themselves: hence it was
that he looked upon adversity as a mere transitory evil, and prosperity
as his natural state.
“I should destroy all I have now said of this great prince if, after
having praised him for an infinite number of qualities well worthy to be
praised, I did not acknowledge that they were balanced by faults, and
those, indeed, very great. I have not concealed, or even palliated his
passion for women; his excess in gaming; his gentleness often carried to
weakness; nor his propensity to every kind of pleasure: I have neither
disguised the faults they made him commit, the foolish expenses they led
him into, nor the time they made him waste; but I have likewise observed
(to do justice on both sides) that his enemies have greatly exaggerated
all these errors. If he was, as they say, a slave to women, yet they
never regulated his choice of ministers, decided the destinies of his
servants, or influenced the deliberations of his council. As much may
be said in extenuation of all his other faults. And to sum up all, in a
word, what he has done is sufficient to show that the good and bad in
his character had no proportion to each other; and that since honour and
fame have always had power enough to tear him from pleasure, we ought to
acknowledge these to have been his great and real passions.”[p]
_Martin’s Estimate of Henry IV_
The whole reign of Henry IV, after the Peace of Vervins, had been but a
preface; the half-opened book is closed forever! All the past glory of
the Béarnais would have been eclipsed by the magnificent results that
his policy had prepared and that his arms were to realise. In spite
of the exertions and the excesses of his life his robust constitution
still promised him some years of military activity, enough without
doubt to make sure if not of the complete triumph, at least of the
predominance of his European system; his heirs would have done the
rest! The politics of France, allied with the Protestants without being
absorbed by Protestantism, triumphing by the aid of the entire foreign
and French Reformation, would have been started beyond recall upon the
paths of international equity, intellectual liberty, and religious
tolerance. Henry IV would have made splendid reparation for the faults
of Francis I and himself. He would not have abjured Catholicism, but
with his victorious sword he would have obliterated his coronation oath
and the humiliation of Roman absolution. Germany would not have seen the
Thirty Years’ War, nor France the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The
seventeenth century would have had all its glory without its fatal errors.
God did not grant it him! Henry IV bore to the tomb not only the European
system which he intended to inaugurate but all the elements of order
and power that he had given to his country. France fell from the height
to which he had raised her, until the day when a powerful genius came
anew to bring order into chaos and to revive in part the policy of
Henry, but under much less favourable conditions. This genius was that
of an individual, not that of a king, and Henry IV has remained the
greatest and above all the most French of the kings of France; not again
has there been seen on the throne a soul so national, an intellect so
liberal. No one ever felt better than he the true destiny of France.
It is not without reason that the popularity of Henry has increased
with the growth of the modern spirit; it is not without reason that the
eighteenth century tried to make him the epic hero of French history. The
labouring classes have never forgotten the king who was to them the most
sympathetic in manners and in heart, the king who occupied himself most
seriously with the interests of the soil and of labour. Thinkers will
never cease to honour in him the forerunner of a new Europe, the just
and profound mind whose diplomatic plans are to-day in many respects the
politics of the most enlightened men, and finally the champion and martyr
of the most sacred of liberties, that of conscience.[c]
Having listened thus to a contemporary and to a modern French estimate of
the great ruler, let us take a parting glance at him through the eyes of
a scarcely less appreciative English historian.[a]
STEPHEN’S CHARACTERISATION OF HENRY IV AND HIS TIMES
It has been said of Henry IV [says Sir James Stephen], with equal truth
and force, that he was l’Hôpital in arms. The principles which had been
asserted by the wisdom and the eloquence of the great chancellor became
triumphant by the foresight and the conquests of the great king. In an
age of wild disorder and overwhelming calamity, he was raised up to
restore his kingdom to affluence and to peace. He appeared to rescue
his Protestant subjects from the tyranny which had so long denied to
them the freedom of conscience. He came to give a firm basis to the
national policy, and to open to his people at large a new direction,
and a wider scope, for the martial energies by which they had hitherto
been at once so highly, and so ineffectually, distinguished. For these
high offices he was qualified by great talents, and by many virtues.
With a capacity large enough to embrace all the social, military, and
political interests of his dominions, he combined that practical good
sense and flexibility of address, without which there is no safe descent
from the higher regions of thought to the real business of life. The
intuitive promptitude, and the enduring stability, of his resolutions
attested at once his large experience in affairs, and his wide survey
both of the resources at his command, and of the contingencies to
which he was exposed. He possessed that kind of mental instinct which
advances by the shortest path to what is at once useful and possible,
and which turns aside, with unhesitating decision, from any illusive and
impracticable scheme. Never was a great innovator more characterised by
practical wisdom; and never did such wisdom assume a more attractive
aspect. His manners exhibited all the graces of his native land in
their most captivating form. Delighted with his bonhommie, his gaiety,
and his frankness, his subjects not only forgave his vices, but even
found in them a fascination the more. They smiled at the scandalous
amours of their gallant monarch as a not unbecoming tribute paid by
human greatness to human infirmity. If they looked with awe on the
desperate valour of his enterprises, on the inflexible rigour of his
discipline, or on the soaring ambition of his political designs, they
were reconciled to the stern character of the prince by the ever-flowing
and genuine sensibilities of the man. If his lofty sense of his personal
and ancestral dignity sometimes gave an austere aspect to his intercourse
with his people, that pride of birth did but enhance the charm of his
quick sympathy with the feelings and interests of the meanest of them.
And, above all the rest, every Frenchman loved and admired in Henry the
lover and admirer of France; and became patriotically blind to the faults
of his renegade, and debauched, but still patriot, king.
[Illustration: COSTUMES OF THE TIME OF HENRY IV]
And even now, when the spell is broken, and we may look back on the life
of Henry IV with judicial impartiality, and reprobate the apologies which
would have elevated his crimes into virtues, we cannot conceal from
ourselves the fact that he conferred on his people benefits which well
entitled him to their lasting gratitude.
For, first, Henry of Navarre was the founder of religious toleration
in France. Until the Edict of Nantes there had been many truces, but
no real peace, between the adherents of Rome and the followers of
Calvin. To compel all the fragments of the Christian church to coalesce
into one body, each member of which should hold the same opinions, and
worship under the same forms, had been the inflexible policy of all his
predecessors. To acquiesce in their separation, and yet to maintain each
section in the nearest possible approach to an equality both of civil
and religious privileges, was the no less inflexible design of Henry.
His charter could not, indeed, restore unity to the church, but it
established, on what seemed a secure basis, the unity of the state. The
two religions were thenceforward placed under ecclesiastical laws widely
differing from each other, but under a civil law common to them both.
The second great praise of the first of the Bourbon line is that of
having rescued France from the abyss of bankruptcy and financial
ruin in which it had been involved by the improvidence of the house
of Valois. For the completion of that great work the larger share of
honour is, indeed, due to Sully. But from his own _Economies Royales_ we
sufficiently learn that, unaided by the magnanimity, the self-denial,
and the affection of the king, not even the zeal, the courage, and the
sagacity of the great minister would have accomplished that herculean
labour.
The third title of Henry to the place which he has ever held among the
benefactors of France, has at all times been acknowledged by Frenchmen
with more enthusiasm than any other of his services. He was the first of
her kings who had at once the discernment to perceive how high a station
belonged to her in the European commonwealth, and the energy to devise
the methods by which that rank might be effectually vindicated.
It is not, however, on these grounds alone, that the reign of Henry
IV occupies a memorable position in the constitutional history of
his country. It was a period of great consummations and of great
beginnings. Like some inland sea, which is at once the receptacle of
many converging, and the source of as many diverging, streams, it was
interposed between two eras strikingly contrasted with each other. It
marked the close of the mediæval sovereignty, and the commencement of the
modern monarchy,--the first a dominion of undefined rights, of unsettled
habits, and of a fluctuating policy,--the second, a government absolute
in fact and in right, severely consistent in its arbitrary principles,
but elaborately adapted to the various exigencies of a civilised
commonwealth. The hitherto unorganised elements of the state were now,
for the first time, reduced into a political unity. The invidious
distinctions of earlier times now began to give place to social equality;
and the slow, though steadfast, progress of that unity and of that
equality may be considered as the subject of the whole of the subsequent
history of France. In the triumph of these two principles consists
the peculiar distinction, and the chief boast, of the French policy,
whether monarchical or republican, of later times; and, therefore, the
age of Henry IV when considered as the origin of these great national
characteristics, demands, and will repay, the most diligent attention.[r]
FOOTNOTES
[81] THE HOUSE OF BOURBON
=Louis IX=
|
+--------------+---------------------------+
| |
=Phillip III= Robert, c. of Clarmont,
m. Beatrix, heiress of Bourbon
|
Louis, d. of Bourbon, 1541
|
+---------------------------------------+
| |
Peter, d. of Bourbon, James, c. de la Marche,
1356 1362
| |
Louis, d. of Bourbon, John, c. de la Marche, 1393
1410 m. Catherine, heiress of Vendôme
| |
John, d. of Bourbon, +-----------+----------+
1488 | |
| James, c. de la Marche, |
| 1438 |
+--------------------------------+ |
| | |
Charles, d. of Bourbon, Louis, c. of |
1456 Montpensier |
| | |
+-------+----+---------+ | |
| | | | |
John II Charles Peter II | |
1488 1488 | |
Gilbert, c. of Montpensier, |
1496 |
| |
+------------------------------+ |
| | |
Charles, Constable of France, 1527, Francis, 1525 |
d. without male issue |
|
Louis, c. of Vendôme,
1446
|
John, c. of Vendôme,
1478
|
Francis, c. of Vendôme,
1495
|
Charles, d. of Vendôme,
1537
|
+-------------------+--------------+--------------+----+
| | | |
Antoine, d. of Vendôme, Francis, Charles, Louis,
m. Jeanne d’Albert, d. of Enghlên Cardinal Bourbon Prince of Condé
q. of Navarre, 1562 (Charles X)
|
=Henry IV=, 1610
m. (1) Margaret, d. of Henry II
m. (2) Mary de’ Medici
[82] [It must be recalled that Sully’s estimate is that of a comrade in
arms and a counsellor. It is a flattering tribute rather than a calmly
judicious one.]
[Illustration]
CHAPTER XV. THE LITERARY PROGRESS OF FRANCE IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
“It is in Rabelais, in the satire of Ménippée, and in Montaigne
that we shall find principles of social justice, ideas of
reformation, expressed with as much profundity as eloquence;
in these writers they are scattered, hidden under buffoonery
in Rabelais, tempered by philosophical _insouciance_ in
Montaigne; but they bear witness to the extent to which the
study of antiquity, the religious struggles, and the civil war
had set political ideas in motion. The great history of the
President de Thou marked in the highest degree the spirit of
legal freedom under the monarchy. Calvin had been the despotic
legislator of a democracy, yet the Reformation everywhere
raised the questions of civil liberty involved in the question
of religious liberty; and as the governments of the Middle Ages
owed their origin to the church the political innovators owed
theirs to dissenting theologians.”--VILLEMAIN.[b]
While we have followed the fortunes of Henry of Navarre another century
has been rounded out. Almost a hundred years have passed since Francis
I came to the throne; more than half a hundred since that monarch laid
down the sceptre. It has been a troublous epoch for France as we have
seen: a time of foreign and civil wars that would have disrupted a less
stable civil organisation. Yet the new forces of the Renaissance and
the Reformation were making themselves felt throughout this period,
and, as so often happens, the time of military strife has been also a
time of social development. Some phases of this development we have
studied, particularly in connection with the reign of Francis I; it
remains to mention in some detail the work of three great writers who
made this century memorable in French literary annals. We have already
cited a comment of Villemain on the retardation of the French literary
Renaissance. How marked this retardation was will be even more evident
when we reflect that the century which has just been rounded out saw
Italian culture in its decadence, and that the immediate period of Henry
IV is precisely contemporary with the age of Elizabeth in England,--the
time of Bacon, Ben Jonson, and Shakespeare; whereas French literature is
only at its beginnings. Notable beginnings these are however, for the
names that we now have to chronicle are those of Rabelais, of Calvin,
and of Montaigne. It is true that Stephen, whom we quote now somewhat
in extenso, cites this trio as the second great literary triumvirate
of France; having named Joinville, Froissart, and Comines as the great
triumvirate of an earlier period. In the widest view this classification
no doubt is just; yet it can hardly be asserted that these earlier
chroniclers are classic in the same sense as are Rabelais and Montaigne.
The earlier writers are preserved more for their method than for their
manner; and it is only work in which literary form takes precedence over
mere fact that can be classified on the highest plane of art. According
to this standard, the work of Calvin scarcely belongs beside that of
Rabelais and Montaigne; yet a study of French literary development in the
sixteenth century from which that work was omitted would be obviously
incomplete. Let us glance then at the work of these three greatest French
writers of the sixteenth century, between whom, as Sir James Stephen
asserts “the parallelisms are as remarkable as the contradictions.”
Taking them in the order of time we have first to consider the great
humourist Rabelais, mention of whose work has already been made when we
were speaking of the French Renaissance of the middle of the century.[a]
Rabelais, the son of an innkeeper at Chinon, was born at that place in
the year 1483.[83] He became a Franciscan friar, a deacon, and a priest
in holy orders; and then, at the mature age of forty-two, commenced
the study of medicine in the college at Montpellier. Various medical
treatises were the fruit of those labours; and the reputation derived
from them was sufficient to obtain for him the office of physician
to the public hospital at Lyons. But his professional books proving
unsaleable, Rabelais, to indemnify his bookseller, wrote and published
his _Pantagruel_, or _Chronique Gargantuine_, of which (as he says)
more copies were sold in two months than of the Bible in ten years.
Having thus discovered the secret of his power, he next produced the
_Gargantua_; the work which has secured for him the admiration of all
subsequent ages, though the reverence of none. It is a romance in
which Rabelais may be considered as depicting the habits, opinions,
errors, crimes, and follies of that age of religious and intellectual
revolutions, in the centre of which he lived. Yet the critics have
doubted, and must ever continue to doubt--whether Gargantua and his son
Pantagruel are actual portraits of those who led the armaments (literary,
theological, or military) of those times, or are mere impersonations of
those abstract qualities by which the world was then governed--whether
Panurge and Friar John had any living prototypes amongst the men of the
sixteenth century--or whether the one is but a name for mediocrity,
ceasing to be honest as it becomes conspicuous; and the other a name for
sensuality, rescued from contempt by a shrewd and jovial spirit. But why
investigate these and such other riddles, proposed by their author in
avowed defiance of any such attempt? Why, indeed, read at all a book of
which not only the general scope, but almost every page is enigmatical?
Why squander time and patience on a writer who, of set purpose, makes his
readers dependent on the guidance of some dull and doubtful commentator?
For those passages which do reward the toil of the student are separated
from each other, not only by this profound obscurity, but by foul abysses
of impurity, which no skill or caution can always succeed in overleaping.
I know not how to describe them in terms at once accurate and decorous,
except by borrowing Mr. Carlyle’s denunciation of a work of Diderot’s,
and saying with him, or in words resembling his, that he who, even
undesignedly, shall come into contact with these parts of Rabelais’ great
work, should forthwith plunge into running waters, and regard himself,
for the rest of the day, as something more than ceremonially unclean.
[Illustration: RABELAIS]
Yet he whose business, or whose determination, it is to appreciate aright
the civil, and therefore the literary, history of France, must needs
pay this heavy price of knowledge. For, in that history, the romance
of _Gargantua_ is an indispensable link. From the revival of heathen
antiquity, Rabelais had gathered a mass of learning resembling the diet
of his own Pantagruel, who had 4,600 cows milked every morning for his
breakfast. From the revival of Christian antiquity, he had learned to
despise the authority and the superstitions of the church of Rome;
without, at the same time, learning to reverence the authority and the
doctrines of the Gospel. He thus traversed the boundless expanse of
human knowledge. He traversed it under the guidance of his own wit,
sagacity, and humour, a wit, vaulting at a bound, from the arctic to the
antarctic poles of thought; a sagacity embracing all the higher questions
of man’s social existence, and many of the deeper problems of his moral
constitution; and a humour which fairly baffles all attempts to analyse
or to describe it. For it was the result, not of natural temperament
alone, but also of the most assiduous and severe studies. The language
of Greece had become as familiar to him as his mother-tongue; and, while
he learned from Galen and Hippocrates to investigate the properties
of living or of inert matter, he was trained, by Plato, to spiritual
meditation, and by Lucian to a scepticism and a buffoonery, alike
audacious and unintermitted. From the union of such a disposition and
of such discipline, emerged the strange phenomenon of a philosopher in
his revels. In contemplating it one knows not, as it has been well said,
“whether to wonder most that such wisdom should ever assume the mask
of folly, or that such folly should permit the growth and development
of any true wisdom.” It is, however, an apparent, rather than a real,
difficulty. The wisdom is never sublime, and the folly but seldom abject.
Each is but a different aspect of a nature, of which the parts are,
indeed, inharmonious, but not incompatible--of a genuine Epicurean gifted
with gigantic powers, but of cold affections, and of debased appetites;
ever worshipping and obeying his one idol, pleasure, though at one time
she bids him soar to the empyrean, and at another commands him to wallow
in the sty.
Rabelais was wise in the sense in which any man may be so who delights in
the strenuous exercise of a powerful understanding, and loves thinking
for thinking’s sake. He was wise to detect popular fallacies, and to
discern unpopular truths. He was wise to see how the young might be
better educated, laws better made, nations better governed, wars more
vigorously conducted, and peace more securely maintained. He was wise to
call down both theology and philosophy from the skies above to the earth
beneath us. And he was not more wise than eloquent; sometimes arraying
truth in the noblest forms of speech, though more frequently enhancing
her beauty by enveloping and contrasting her with the homeliest. At his
prolific touch his native tongue germinated into countless new varieties
of expression; and the mines of wealth, both intellectual and verbal,
which he bequeathed to future ages, after being wrought by multitudes in
each, still appear inexhaustible.
The wisdom of Rabelais, was, however, of the world, worldly. It never
ascended to the eternal fountains of light, nor descended to illuminate
the dark places of the earth. It neither sought to interpret the awful
mysteries of our nature, nor bowed down to adore in the contemplation
of them. It aimed at no exalted ends, nor did it ever lead the way
through any rugged and self-denying paths. It expressed neither sympathy
for the wretchedness, nor pity for the sorrows, of mankind; but was
satisfied to be shrewd, and witty, and comical upon them all. To the
keen gaze of Rabelais, the frauds, and follies, and ignorance, and
licentiousness of the papal court and priesthood afforded endless matter
of scorn and merriment; but to his last hour he lived in their outward
garb and communion. To that penetrating eye had been clearly revealed
the majesty of the truth which the Reformers taught, and the majesty
of the sufferings which they endured in its defence; but not one glow
of enthusiasm could they ever kindle in his bosom, as they toiled in
indigence, and died in martyrdom, to evangelise the world. Secure in the
absolution of Clement VII for whatever he had done and written against
the church, and secure in the license of Francis I, to publish whatever
else he might please, Rabelais delighted to assume the character of a
chartered libertine, or, as it might almost be said, of an intellectual
debauchee. And yet, voluptuary, scoffer, and sceptic as he was, his
laughter was so hearty, his glee so natural, his frolic so riotous, and
his buffoonery so irresistible, that he became, not merely the tolerated,
but the favoured and privileged, Momus of his times. He became also a
proof to all later times, that, by the great mass of mankind, anything
will be forgiven or permitted to genius, when, abandoning its native
supremacy, it condescends to undertake the strangely inappropriate office
of master of the revels.[c]
“In the works of Rabelais,” says Michelet,[f] “the French language
appeared in a greatness it never possessed before nor since. What
Dante accomplished for Italian, Rabelais did for French. He employed
and blended every dialect, the elements of every period and province
developed in the Middle Age, adding the while a wealth of technical
expression furnished by art and science. Another man would have been
overwhelmed by this immense variety, but he,--he harmonised everything.
Antiquity, especially the Greek genius, and a knowledge of all modern
languages permitted him to envelop and master that of France.”
Saintsbury[e] declares that the only two men who can be compared to
him in character of work and force of genius combined are Lucian and
Swift, adding: “He is much less of a mere mocker than Lucian, and he is
entirely destitute, even when he deals with monks or pedants, of the
ferocity of Swift. He neither sneers nor rages; the _rire immense_ which
distinguishes him is altogether good-natured; but he is nearer to Lucian
than to Swift, and Lucian is perhaps the author whom it is most necessary
to know in order to understand him rightly.”[a]
CALVIN
[Illustration: CALVIN]
One cannot better show how contrarieties are related than by the
immediate transition from Francis Rabelais to John Calvin;[84] for,
probably, no two men of commanding minds were ever more curiously
contrasted with each other, as certainly no two minds were ever enshrined
in bodies more dissimilar. To look upon, Rabelais was a drunken Silenus,
Calvin a famished Ugolino. The one emptied his bottle before he wrote,
while he was writing, and after he had written; the other contented
himself with a repast of bread and water once in each six-and-thirty
hours. Reposing in his easy chair, the merry doctor was hailed as lord of
misrule by all the jovial spirits of his age; enthroned in the consistory
of Geneva, the inexorable divine was dreaded as the disciplinarian of
himself and of the whole subject city. The witty physician was L’Allegro,
the austere minister Il Penseroso, of their generation. The reader of the
_Gargantua_ yields by turns to disgust, to admiration, and to merriment;
but Democritus himself would not have found matter for one passing smile
throughout the whole of the _Christian Institute_. To Rabelais, human
life appeared a farce as broad as the knights of Aristophanes; to Calvin,
a tragedy more dismal than the Agamemnon of Æschylus. And as they wrote,
so they also lived. The traditional stories about Rabelais, if true,
attest his love, and, even if untrue, they attest his reputed love, of
that kind of wit which is called practical; all the traditions of Calvin
represent him as a man at whose appearance mirth instantly took flight.
The gay doctor is made in these tales to play off his tricks on the
graduates in medicine, on the chancellor du Prât, on the king and queen
of France, and even on the mule of the pope himself; while the solemn
theologian makes his domiciliary visits to ascertain that no dinner table
at Geneva was rendered the pretext for levity of discourse, or for excess
of diet.
What, then, is the congruity on which to found any comparison between
these most incongruous minds? The answer is (to borrow an expressive
word), that they were both devoted _ergoists_, each of them being at once
a mighty master, and a submissive slave, of logic.[c] With the religious
significance of Calvin’s teaching we have no present concern. We shall
have occasion to see something more of this in the course of our study of
the Reformation. Here we are concerned rather with Calvin the writer--the
author of the _Institution Chrétienne_.
Published in 1536 this book was received with unbounded delight.[a]
We may, indeed, reject the story, that a thousand editions of it were
sold in his own lifetime; but we cannot dispute that, during a century
and a half, it exercised an unrivalled supremacy over a large part of
Protestant Europe. For that dominion it was indebted, in part, to the
novelty and comprehensiveness of the design it accomplished,--to the
vast compass of learning, scriptural, patristic, and historical, which
it embraced,--to the depth and the height of the morality which it
inculcated,--and to the calm but energetic keenness with which it exposed
the errors of his adversaries. But the popularity and the influence of
this remarkable book is also, in part, to be ascribed to its literary
merits. Calvin has been described as the Bossuet of his age. Of all
the French authors whom France had as yet produced, he was the most
philosophical when he speculated, the most sublime when he adored, the
most methodical and luminous in the development of truth, the most acute
in the refutation of error, and the most obedient to that law or spirit
of his nation, which demands symmetry in the proportions, harmony in the
details, and concert in all the parts of every work of art, whether it be
wrought by the pen, the pencil, or the chisel. In the ninth chapter of
Bossuet’s _Histoire des Variations_ may, indeed, be found the best, as
it is a very reluctant, eulogy on the literary excellence of his great
rival and predecessor. Even in the haughty gloom which the bishop of
Meaux discovers in the style and tone of the reformer of Geneva, there is
a not inappropriate interest. The beautiful lake of that city, and the
mountains which encircle it, lay before his eyes as he wrote; but they
are said to have suggested to his fancy no images, and to have drawn from
his pen not so much as one transient allusion. With his mental vision
ever directed to that melancholy view of the state and prospects of our
race, which he had discovered in the book of life, it would, indeed, have
been incongruous to have turned aside to depict any of those glorious
aspects of the creative benignity which were spread around him in the
book of nature.
MONTAIGNE
The immediate effect of the servitude into which Calvin had subdued
the minds of his disciples was to provoke a formidable revolt. When he
was giving his latest touches to his _Institution Chrétienne_, Michel
de Montaigne,[85] then in his twenty-second year, had just taken his
seat in the Parliament of Bordeaux. That he afterwards became a deputy
in the states-general of Blois, though maintained by no inconsiderable
authorities, seems to me impossible; but it is clear that his early
manhood was devoted to public, and especially to judicial, affairs. He
was thus brought into contact with the busy world at the moment of a
greater agitation of human society than had occurred since the overthrow
of the Roman Empire. Marvellous revolutions, and discoveries still more
marvellous, in the world of letters, of politics, of geography, and of
religion,--the welfare of inappeasable passions,--the working of whatever
is most base, and of whatever is most sublime, in our common nature,--and
calamities which might seem to have fulfilled the most awful of the
apocaliptic visions, had passed in rapid succession before the eyes
of this acute and curious observer. It was an unwelcome and repulsive
spectacle. He turned from it to seek the shelter and the repose of his
hereditary mansion. In that retirement he indulged, or cherished, a
spirit inflexibly opposed to the spirit by which his native country was
convulsed. The age was idolatrous of novelties; and, therefore, Montaigne
lived in the retrospect of a remote antiquity. It was an age of restless
ambition; and, therefore, he passively committed himself and his fortunes
to the current of events. The minds of other men were exploring the
foundations, and criticising the superstructure, of every social polity;
and, therefore, his mind was averted altogether from the affairs of the
commonwealth. Because his neighbours yielded themselves to every gust
of passion, he must be passionless. Because the times were treacherous,
he must punctiliously cherish his personal honour. Because they were
inhuman, he cultivated all the amenities of life. Because calamity swept
over the world, he was enamoured of epicurean ease. Heroism was the boast
of not a few, and to their virtues he paid the homage of an incredulous
obeisance. Dogmatism was the habit of very many; and, therefore,
Montaigne must surrender himself to an almost universal scepticism.
[Illustration: MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE]
The contrast was as captivating as it was complete. With a temper easily
satisfied,--with affections as tranquil as they were kindly,--with a
curiosity ever wakeful, but never impetuous,--with competency, health,
friends, books, and leisure, Montaigne had all the means of happiness
which can be brought within the reach of those to whom life is not a
self-denying existence, but a pleasant pastime. Yet, with him, it was
the pastime of an active, enlightened, and amiable mind. The study of
man as a member of society was his chosen pursuit, but he conducted it
in a mode altogether his own. The individual man, Michel Montaigne,
such as he would be in every imaginable relation and office of society,
was the subject of his daily investigation. He became, of all egotists,
the most pleasant, versatile, and comprehensive. He produced complete
sketches of himself with an air of the most unreserved frankness, and in
a tone frequently passing from quiet seriousness to graceful badinage.
He describes his tastes, his humours, his opinions, his frailties,
his pursuits, and his associates with the most exuberant fertility of
invention, and has wrought out a general delineation of our common
humanity from the profound knowledge of a single member of it. And, as
the variety is boundless, so is the unity well sustained. His essays
are a mirror in which every reader sees his own image reflected, but
in which he also sees the image of Montaigne reflecting it. There he
is, ever changing, and yet ever the same. He looks on the world with
a calm indifference, which would be repulsive were it not corrected
by his benevolent curiosity about its history and its prospects. He
has not one malignant feeling about him, except it be towards the
tiresome, and especially towards such of them as provoke his yawns and
his resentment by misplaced and by commonplace wisdom. He has a quick
relish for pleasure, but with a preference for such pleasures as are
social, inoffensive, and easily procured. He has a love for virtue, but
chiefly, if not exclusively, when she exacts no great effort, nor any
considerable sacrifice. He loves his fellow-men, but does not much, or
seriously, esteem them. He loves study and meditation, but stipulates
that they shall expose him to no disagreeable fatigue. He cherishes every
temper which makes life pass sociably and pleasantly. He takes things as
he finds them in perfect good humour, makes the best of them all, and
never burdens his mind with virtuous indignation, unattainable hopes, or
profitless regrets. In short, as exhibited in his own self-portraiture,
he is an Epicurean, who knows how to make his better dispositions
tributary to his comfort, and also knows how to prevent his evil tempers
from troubling his repose.
The picture of himself, which Montaigne thus holds up to his readers as a
representation of themselves, is not sublime, nor is it beautiful; but it
is a striking and a masterly likeness. It is drawn with inimitable grace
and freedom, and with the most transparent perspicuity; and they who are
best entitled to pronounce such a judgment, admire in his language a
richness and a curious felicity unknown to any preceding French writers.
Even they to whom his tongue is not native, can perceive that his style
is the easy, the luminous, and the flexible vehicle of his thoughts, and
never degenerates into a mere apology for the want of thought; and that
his imagination, without ever disfiguring his ideas, however abstract,
and however subtle they may be, habitually clothes them with the noblest
forms and the most appropriate colouring.
But our more immediate object is, to notice the relation in which
Montaigne stands to the other great moral teachers of his native land,
and to those habits of thought by which France is, and has so long
been, characterised. The antagonist in everything of the spirit of his
times, he seems to have regarded with peculiar aversion the peremptory
confidence by which the great controversy of his age was conducted, both
by the adherents of Rome and by the founder of Calvinism. Because they
would admit no doubt whatever, every form of doubt found harbour with
him. Because they were dogmatists, he must be a sceptic.
In M. Faugère’s edition of Pascal’s _Thoughts_ will be found the famous
dialogue on the scepticism of Montaigne, between Pascal and De Sacy,--a
delineation so exquisite, that it seems mere folly to attempt any
addition to it. The genius of Port Royal, however, exhibits there its
severity, not less than its justice; and a few words may not be misplaced
in the attempt to mitigate a little of the rigour of the condemnation.
Montaigne was a sceptic (as very many are), because his sagacity and
diligence were buoyant enough to raise his mind to the clouds which float
over our heads, but were not buoyant enough to elevate him to the pure
regions of light which lie beyond them. His learning was various rather
than recondite. It was drawn chiefly from Latin authors, and from the
Latin authors of a degenerating age; not from Cicero or Virgil, but from
Seneca and Pliny. Of Greek he knew but little, though he was profoundly
conversant with the translation of Plutarch, with which Amyot had lately
rendered all French readers familiar. From such masters Montaigne did
not learn, and could not have learned, the love of truth. They taught
him rather to content himself with loose historical gossip, and with
half-formed notions in philosophy. They taught him not how to resolve,
but how to amuse himself with the great problems of human existence. They
encouraged his characteristic want of seriousness and earnestness of
purpose. From such studies, and from the events of his life and times, he
learned to flutter over the surface of things, and to traverse the whole
world of moral, religious, and political inquiry, without finding, and
without seeking, a resting-place. His aimless curiosity and versatile
caprice form at once the fascination and the vice of his writings,
though not indeed their only vice, for the name of Montaigne belongs to
that melancholy roll of the great French sceptical writers--Rabelais,
Montesquieu, Bayle, Voltaire, and Diderot--who, not content to assault
the principles of virtue, have so far debased themselves, as laboriously
to stimulate the disorderly appetites of their readers.
Yet the scepticism of Montaigne was not altogether such as theirs is. He
has none of their dissolute revelry in confounding the distinctions of
truth and falsehood, of good and evil. He does not, like some of them,
delight in the darkness with which he believes the mind of man to be
hopelessly enveloped. He rather placidly and contentedly acquiesces in
the conviction that truth is beyond his reach. He could amuse himself
with doubt, and play with it. With few positive and no dearly cherished
opinions, he had no ardour for any opinion, and had not the slightest
desire to make proselytes to his own Pyrrhonism. He was, on the contrary,
to the last degree, tolerant of dissent from his own judgment; and, in
the lack of other opponents, was prompt, and even glad, to contradict
himself. Of all human infirmities, dulness, and obscurity, and vehemence,
are those from which he was most exempt. Of all human passions, the zeal
which fires the bosom of a missionary is that from which he was the most
remote. We associate with him as one of the most pleasant of all our
illustrious companions, and quit him as one of the least impressive of
all our eminent instructors.[c]
Montaigne’s fame has passed through several very different phases. Among
his own contemporaries it grew without overstepping a somewhat restricted
circle of enlightened minds. After that, the main current of French
thought took a direction opposite to that of Montaigne’s. Dogmatism
returned and the seventeenth century in general adhered to it. Pascal
launched anathemas at Montaigne. But the sumptuous edifice of the age of
Louis XIV soon crumbled away, and Montaigne came forward again, hailed as
a glorious ancestor by the entire age of Voltaire and Rousseau. To-day
he has ceased to arouse any tempests, but he occupies his uncontested
place in the national pantheon. He will live as a writer as long as
French literature exists, for like the other great sixteenth century
writers, men of strong individualities like Rabelais and Calvin, he had
his own language as well as his own thought--a language sovereignly
free, eternally young, inimitable, and above all a fertile source of
rejuvenation for the whole language. He will live as a philosopher as
long as men practise the axiom of the _Essays_, “Know thyself.”[d]
FOOTNOTES
[83] [The date of Rabelais’ birth is not certain, although most
authorities place it about 1483. Of his early years very little is
known, but from 1519 his history is more definite. He was educated at a
convent school and, after his entrance into the Franciscan order, devoted
himself to serious study. In 1524 he became a Benedictine, this change of
order and dwelling-place being attributed by some to a disgust with the
cloister. Six years later he is found studying medicine in Montpellier
and afterwards practising in Lyons. John du Bellay, bishop of Paris, took
him with him to Rome in 1534 as physician. Rabelais died at Paris in
1553.]
[84] [John Calvin, the celebrated Protestant reformer and theologian,
was born at Noyon, Picardy, France, in 1509, and died at Genoa, May
27th, 1564. His father, Gerard Calvin, was a notary-apostolic and
procurator-fiscal for the lordship of Noyon, besides holding other
ecclesiastical offices. His early years are obscure, but from childhood
he showed great religious feeling and an intense earnestness. He studied
at Paris, Orleans, and Bourges, and although brought up with the
intention of entering the priesthood, after close study of the Bible, he
embraced the Reformation. In 1532 Calvin published his first work, an
edition of Seneca’s _De Clementia_ with an elaborate commentary. In 1533,
on account of speeches in opposition to the court, he was banished from
Paris and it is said it was during his retirement at Saintonge that he
made his first sketch of his _Institution Chrétienne_. His other works
are all of a religious nature, mostly controversial. A great many of
these are of an exegetical character, of which his expository comments
or homilies on the books of Scripture are by some considered the most
valuable of his works. (For a further account of Calvin, see the history
of the Reformation movement, volume xiii.)]
[85] Lacépède, referring to Montaigne’s _Essays_, says: “In a work that
one reads again with delight and self-improvement, Michel de Montaigne
has given a new glory to France.” Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, was born
at Périgord, of an ancient and noble family, in 1533. Perhaps the finish
of his _Essays_, his principal work, is due to his early training, his
father having so managed his education, that at the age of five he spoke
the purest Latin, and, as an old book gives it, “was also taught Greek by
way of recreation.” He was married at the age of thirty-three. He lived
at the court of Francis II and Henry VIII. He became mayor of Bordeaux in
1581 and in 1592; according to one old chronicle, “he died a constant and
philosophic death, when he was some months short of sixty.” His _Essays_
were first published in 1580; the edition of 1588 was the last to be
published in the author’s lifetime.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER XVI. THE EARLY YEARS OF LOUIS XIII AND THE RISE OF RICHELIEU
THE REGENCY OF MARIE DE’ MEDICI
[Sidenote: [1610-1628 A.D.]]
The terrible instability of the monarchical government is revealed upon
the death of Henry IV, who left as his successor a child of eight years.
What follows is the opposite of what he desired; France turned inside out
like a glove.
The treasure that Sully had amassed and protected is squandered in
a moment, the domain that he cleared of debt is remortgaged, the
possessions of the state are sold. All the institutions of this reign are
abandoned, buildings are interrupted, canals given up. The manufactories
of silk and of glass, the Savonnerie and the Gobelins are closed and
the workmen discharged. The Louvre, which was to be degraded by lodging
great inventors--the Louvre is left to the courtiers. Adieu to the museum
of trades and the Jardin des Plantes; these hobbies of the king, and a
thousand others sleep on the charts of Sully. At the Tuileries, at the
arsenal, Henry’s favourite trees, his mulberries, are removed. But for
fear of the people his monuments would be torn down. By an unexpected
change the people discover that they loved Henry IV. The legend begins
the day of his death; it will go on increasing by comparison of what is,
with what was.
Paris at this moment was dominated by an extraordinary terror. The
people believed themselves lost. Women tore their hair, less from grief
than from fear. It was the same everywhere. The terror of the league
returned to people’s minds and caused them to tremble. Hence there was
a surprising, or rather a striking calm. For this great wisdom stuck to
one thing--that is, that France, having neither idea, nor passion, nor
moral interest, should no longer have a feeling of life. It was entirely
identified with the king, with a man who had been killed; and what
remained? A boy of eight who on the 15th of May surrendered the kingdom
to his mother and on the 29th got a flogging.[b]
The last dispositions of Henry, on his intended departure to head his
army, had appointed his queen, Marie de’ Medici, regent: this was
strongly in her favour as dowager; and she now found little difficulty in
assuming the same authority. The duke d’Épernon, her partisan, summoned
the parliament, and procured their acquiescence, not, however, without
having made some show of menace. This seemed unnecessary: of the princes
of the blood, three in number, who could alone have pretended to the
regency, Condé was absent in the Netherlands, his brother of Conti was
imbecile, whilst their uncle, the count de Soissons, also absent, was at
enmity with every influential personage.
[Sidenote: [1610-1614 A.D.]]
It was to Sully that Henry’s death came as the greatest blow. Sully was
panic-struck; he saw in the murder a Catholic plot, and dreaded a renewal
of the massacres of St. Bartholomew’s eve; he accordingly shut himself
up with his followers in the Bastille, which he hastily provisioned by
carrying off all the bread from the bakers’ shops around. By the morrow,
however, his suspicions had subsided, and he appeared at the court of the
regent. [He was cordially received; a reconciliation was effected, and
the queen got what she was after,--the treasure that Sully had stored up
in the Bastille.]
Marie de’ Medici was of a weak character; she was simple womanhood,
unenforced by either firmness or sagacity. She had come to France a
stranger; and wanting both charms and wit, she had never acquired any
influence either with her husband or amongst the followers of his
court. Marie, therefore, shrank back into her private circle, and made
confidants and counsellors of her two Italian domestics, the woman,
Leonora Galigaï, and Concini, the husband of Leonora. These upstart
personages, full of all the meanness and narrowness of their calling,
had frequently fanned the petty jealousies of the queen against Henry;
and now it was to be feared their influence would be perniciously felt.
Marie, however, was as yet too conscious of her weakness and inability.
She had a vague idea of the justice of the late king’s policy in keeping
down the noblesse, that now pressed around her, and terrified her with
their pretensions and their quarrels. She therefore had recourse to those
best fitted to guide her--the ministers of the late monarch, Villeroi
the secretary, Sillery the chancellor, the president Jeannin, and
Sully, superintendent of finances: these, except Sully, had none of the
pretensions and haughty bearing of the noblesse; and Marie felt no loss
of her will and authority in being guided by them.
It would prove a wearisome task either to narrate or to peruse an
account of the cabals, quarrels, duels, and claims of the personages
and princes amongst each other, and with or against the regent, during
the three years which followed Henry’s death. They formed a repetition
of the conspiracies and alliances of the aristocracy against Catherine
de’ Medici half a century previous, except that at that time there were
at least some noble characters and some serious aims. Whatever might be
said of Châtillon or of Guise, they were animated by high views; but
the political puppets who occupied the scene during Marie de’ Medici’s
regency, wanted not courage--indeed they were quite as ready as their
predecessors to slay each other in duels--but purpose, at least other
purpose than immediate greed, they had none. There were some examples
of ferocity in Louis XIII’s early days, which reminded one of Charles
IX--the chevalier de Guise, meeting the baron de Luz and running him
through the body, and being universally censured for the act until he
redeemed the murder by slaying the young De Luz, son of the baron, in
a fiercely-contested duel. This spirit, which showed itself in private
broils, never rose into a public sentiment. One would have thought that
in the army which Henry had formed, and amongst the officers whom he had
honoured with his patronage and friendship, there might have been some
who burned to distinguish themselves in prosecuting that war against the
house of Austria which the monarch had planned. Not one noble opposed
the peace; not one soldier of note raised his voice in behalf of the
spirited policy of the late king; scarcely even a Huguenot. For Bouillon
was immersed in the intrigues of Concini, and Lesdiguières was tempted by
the title of duke and peer, as he afterwards was by that of constable.
_Disgrace of Sully_
As long, however, as the rigid Sully held the finances under his care,
there was a check to spoliation, as well as a generous voice in the
council to support the sage, the firm, and yet conciliating measures of
the late monarch. He was at first retained, indeed, for the sake of the
stern negative which he was wont to put on the demands of the greedy
courtiers, as well as from fear or respect of his influence with the
Huguenots. But his economical temper became soon a disagreeable restraint
upon the queen herself; and the duke de Bouillon, an indefatigable votary
of intrigue, offering to effect more than even Sully in conciliating and
quieting the Huguenots, this old and upright minister of the great Henry,
was dismissed. Despite his probity, his able administration, and the
esteem of Henry, a cloud would rest on the character of Sully but for the
honest and simple exculpation contained in his own memoirs. His austere
and rude manners made him many enemies. Most of his contemporaries unite
in accusing him; and, strange to say, the only family, beyond his own,
whose friendship and good-will he preserved in his retreat, was that of
Guise.
The disgrace of Sully left the treasure of the late king completely at
the regent’s disposal, who dissipated it by bribing prince and noble to
remain quiet. The favour of Leonora Galigaï and her husband Concini, now
Marshal d’Ancre, became more apparent. The avarice of these foreigners
knew no bounds: not content with the purchase of a marquisate, and the
dignity of marshal, Concini contrived to get some of the principal
fortresses of the kingdom in his possession--Péronne amongst others, and
the citadel of Amiens. Épernon, on his side, secured Metz; whilst the
count de Soissons and the prince of Condé, despite their pensions and
their submission, by turns thwarted the court, and threw it into disorder
by their private quarrels. Although the marshal d’Ancre and his wife were
the chief favourites of the queen-regent, Villeroi was nevertheless the
counsellor whose views, in matters of serious policy, she principally
adopted. Villeroi, say the _Mémoires_ attributed to Richelieu,[e] bred
in the civil wars, had imbibed their virulence, which he repressed
during the life of Henry. Instead of now recommending that monarch’s
conciliating policy, which Sully upheld, Villeroi said that there were
but two parties in the state, Catholic and Protestant, and that the
government must necessarily embrace one or the other. He leaned to the
Catholic side, and supported the project of strengthening it by marrying
the young king to a daughter of Spain, rather than to a princess of
Lorraine or Savoy, as had been the advice of Henry. The prince of Condé,
however, urged by the duke de Bouillon, opposed the ministry in this,
for no reason, apparently, except the sake of making opposition. And for
the time, Louis XIII being as yet but nine years of age, the project was
allowed to slumber.[d]
_First Revolt of the Lords (1614 A.D.)_
The pretensions of the nobles grew with the weakness of the government.
“The presents of the queen,” said Richelieu, “stilled the great hunger of
their avarice and ambition; but it was by no means extinct. The treasury
and the coffers of the Bastille were exhausted; then they aspired to
so great things that royal authority could not possibly give them the
increase of power which they demanded.” What they wanted in fact was
governorships for themselves and their families, places of surety, and
the dismemberment of France. Épernon was governor of Metz, but Henry,
being afraid of that proud noble, had imposed a lieutenant upon him, who
occupied the citadel and corresponded directly with the ministers. The
very day of the king’s death Épernon hastened an order to take possession
of the lieutenant and the citadel. He had a strong place at that time
only two steps from the Spaniards, which people called “his kingdom of
Austrasia.” Many lords at the news of the assassination had thus thrown
themselves into the cities with which they had an understanding, and some
did not wish to ever come out again or wished at any rate to return.
“The time of kings is past,” they said, “that of the nobles is come.”
The first refusal of the regent brought about a civil war. Condé took up
arms and published a manifesto in which he accused the court of having
debased the nobility, ruined the finances, and taxed the poor--singular
reproaches in the mouth of a prince who with his friends had received the
best part of this money of the poor. He concluded according to custom by
demanding the convocation of the states-general to work at the reform of
existing abuses.
[Illustration: FRENCH COURTIERS, TIME OF LOUIS XIII]
Brought up in the Catholic faith, although born of a Protestant family,
Condé hoped to rally both parties to his cause. A large number of lords
came to take their places under his standard, at their head the dukes de
Vendôme, de Longueville, de Luxemburg, de Mayenne, de Nevers, de Retz,
etc. The Calvinists refused to be associated in this rising in arms. “We
have all the liberty for our consciences,” said they, “which we could
desire, and we do not wish to abandon our wives and our houses to satisfy
the appetite of some factious persons.” The Catholics did not take fire
either. Since the estates of the league, popular passions had been
greatly appeased. The party of tolerant politicians born with L’Hôpital,
and come to power under Henry IV, now counted nearly all members of the
cloth and bourgeoisie. The experience which had been so cruelly bought
by the civil war was not lost. The nation compared the twelve years of
prosperity it had enjoyed, with those thirty-eight years of massacres
and pillaging, and held close to the throne; leaving the great lords to
exercise their sterile ambition in space. “The people,” wrote Malherbe at
that moment, “remain obedient everywhere, and without them nothing can
be done.” Let a firm hand take the rudder and even the most turbulent
will return to the quiet in which Henry IV had held them. Some of Henry
IV’s old ministers, Villeroi, Jeannin, counselled the queen to act with
vigour. She preferred to make terms at Ste. Menehould (May 15th, 1614).
The prince of Condé received 450,000 livres in cash; the duke of Mayenne
300,000 “to get married”; M. de Longueville 100,000 livres pension, etc.
But the court, wanting to gain on one side what it had lost on the other,
did not pay the stockholders of the Hôtel-de-Ville in that year. That was
what was done for “the poor.”[f] And the court assented to the call of
the states-general.
_Last Assembly of the States-General_
The states-general, assembled at Paris in 1614, demands especial
attention, not only as the last of these national assemblies previous to
the Revolution (at the commencement of which it was continually referred
to as affording precedent), but as a scene in which the political
feelings and views of the age were completely developed. We have an
ample account of the sittings and discussions of the commons or third
order, written by Florimond Rapine,[g] a member, one of the king’s
advocates. From this we learn that the majority of the lower chamber
were lawyers, and a considerable portion nobles, almost all the king’s
lieutenant-generals being elected by their several governments. The most
important consideration in the eyes of all was evidently the respective
dignity of persons and classes. The first two months were consumed in
disputes of precedence, in ceremonials, in mutual compliments between the
orders at first, and afterwards in mutual abuse. Miron, provost of the
merchants of the city of Paris, was elected president. The address of
the commons to the king was spoken by this magistrate on his knees; the
deputies were clothed in simple black, whilst priests and nobles shone in
gold, and an attempt of the president to wear his city robes of red and
blue in a procession was looked upon as a monstrous piece of ambition.
The grievance most odious to the nation was the enormity of pensions
granted to the princes and chief officers. Against these the commons
and the clergy joined in lifting up their voice. The next demand
was to abolish the venality of the judicature, and the right of the
_paulette_, a kind of annual fine, paid by the officers of parliament,
in consideration of which their offices were considered hereditary. This
demand the chamber of the commons could not in decency oppose; but being
principally lawyers and provincial governors, it was their interest to
preserve the _paulette_, and they therefore slurred over the question,
and laid greater stress on the necessity of abating the _taille_, which
pressed upon the people. Thus, the nobles insisting on abolishing the
hereditary right to their offices held by the legists, the legists or
commons retaliated by demanding the retrenchment of pensions; and a
struggle ensued between them. Savaron, an orator of eloquence in the
_tiers_, exclaimed against the mercenary spirit of the noblesse, which,
he said, had forsaken the pursuit of honour for the worship of the
goddess Pecune, and bartered even its fidelity for a price. The nobles
were indignant at this, and demanded an apology. De Mesme, another
member of the _tiers_, was deputed to explain, and he made matters
infinitely worse. “France,” said he, “had three children: The clergy, if
not the eldest born, had at least, like Jacob, got the heritage and the
blessing, and therefore were to be considered the eldest. Next came the
noblesse, the second son--fiefs, counties, and commands, were its share.
The youngest born was the commons, whose portion was the offices of the
judicature. But,” concluded the orator, “let not the noblesse presume too
much over the _tiers_; since it often happens that the cadets of a great
family restore to it that honour and illustration which has been thrown
away by the elder brethren.”
[Sidenote: [1614-1615 A.D.]]
The difference of interest between the states rendered their meeting
productive of no effect. The regent would willingly have reduced the
pensions of the great, and destroyed the _paulette_, or hereditary
right of the legists to their offices; but she feared to outrage the
princes by the first, whilst uncertain of the support of the commons.
Nothing accordingly was decided on. The _cahiers_ or remonstrances
of the states were presented, were smilingly received, and slept in
the king’s hands. The assembly was dissolved. The queen took her own
inactivity and inability for prudence. It proved the contrary. The
party of the princes leagued with that of the legists, the union being
effected by the exertions and intrigues of the duke de Bouillon. As the
assembly of the states had proved an empty ceremony, all its advice and
remonstrance being disregarded, the legists of the parliament were urged
to put themselves forward as the popular representatives, and finish the
work that the states had vainly attempted. The chambers of parliament
accordingly assembled, and began by summoning the great peers to join
them, and form a court of peers for taking into consideration the affairs
of the kingdom.
This bold act was the inspiration of Bouillon. The court was terrified,
and with good cause; but the parliament itself was almost equally
intimidated by its own boldness, and showed but hesitation when the queen
put forth her authority. Nevertheless, the peers being forbidden to join
the parliament,--an injunction that Condé had the weakness to obey,--the
legists prepared their remonstrances; amongst which were not only all
the demands of the states, but also a claim that no act of the king
should have force unless freely registered by the parliament, and that
the parliament should have the right of summoning a court of peers and
great officers, when occasion required. These remonstrances they insisted
on reading in public before the young king, who showed a favourable and
benign countenance, whilst that of the regent was convulsed with anger.
But this bold attempt to put a check on the royal authority utterly
failed: an edict of the king reproved the audacity of the parliament; and
the latter who had been urged on more by the intrigues of the princes
than by any conscientious or firm love of liberty and the public good,
yielded pusillanimously, when affairs began to assume the appearance of
an open rupture. Condé acted pusillanimously, also, in not declaring
himself, and taking his place in the parliament, to which his secret
promises of support could not impart sufficient confidence. It ended
by the court obtaining the upper hand, and in the consequent revolt of
Condé; the queen resolving, at the same time, to fulfil the project of
the double marriage with Spain.
MAJORITY OF LOUIS XIII; MARRIAGE WITH ANNE OF AUSTRIA
[Sidenote: [1615-1616 A.D.]]
Marie de’ Medici, with the young king, set out for Bordeaux, to meet
his future spouse. It was a military enterprise rather than a nuptial
procession, the court marching at the head of an army, whilst it was
pursued by Condé with an equal force. Both sides avoided an action. The
king arrived at Bordeaux, despatched his sister Elizabeth, who was to
espouse the infante of Spain, to the Pyrenees, and received in return
Anne of Austria, a young and not unlovely princess of fifteen. The
marriage was celebrated at Bordeaux in November, 1615. Louis XIII was now
of age; the possession of a wife gave him the consciousness of manhood,
and he began accordingly to feel and to express a will of his own that
disquieted and constrained the queen-mother, no longer regent.
One of the young monarch’s most dominant tastes was falconry, and as he
was not allowed to follow it in the fields, he kept a number of these
birds of prey in his apartments. A young man, of the name of De Luynes,
charged with the care of them, interested the king by his knowledge and
conversation on such subjects. He soon became a favourite. And Marie de’
Medici, who discovered the rising sun, made repeated offers to resign
her authority, which Louis was not prepared to accept. She then sought
to conciliate Luynes, but he, ambitious and desirous of full power, held
aloof, and continued in the king’s presence to criticise the feeble
administration of Marie and the prodigal folly of Concini.
Feeling her influence undermined, and humouring the impatience of the
young monarch and his queen, who longed to visit Paris, she concluded a
new accommodation with Condé, greatly to the advantage of that prince.
He was allowed to participate in the government, and to sign the decrees
of the council. The queen objected to granting this power, but she was
overruled by Villeroi, who observed that this would put the prince always
in the king’s power, by bringing him to the Louvre.
“There is no danger,” said he, “in trusting the pen to a hand, the arm of
which you hold.” The duke de Longueville superseded the marshal D’Ancre
in the government of Picardy. The Huguenots, who had armed for Condé, had
also their recompense. The court and royal authority was, in fact, at the
feet of this young chief of the noblesse.
RICHELIEU APPEARS
The queen-dowager saw the condition to which her weakness had reduced
her. The marshal D’Ancre was her only friend, and, from the general odium
borne to him, he proved more a weight than a support. Another counsellor
indeed she had, a man attached both to her and D’Ancre, and who was well
capacitated to counsel her in this extremity. This was Armand du Plessis
Richelieu, bishop of Luçon, who had somewhat distinguished himself in the
states-general of 1614.[d]
[Illustration: COMING OF AGE OF LOUIS XIII. (BY RUBENS)
(From the painting in the Louvre)]
A painter who was remarkably faithful and conscientious in art and in
life--the Fleming, Philip de Champagne--has left us a true representation
of the fine, strong, and spare figure of the cardinal De Richelieu. This
Jansenist painter would have disdained to relieve or enrich the gray
image with a ray of light, as Rubens or Murillo would have done. That
would have been changing the nature of the grave, unpromising subject.
The eye would have been pleased and art better satisfied, but it would
not have been true to history. It must be remembered that this was the
epoch of the monochrome, when plain glass was replacing the stained glass
of the sixteenth century. In France especially the taste for colour was
dead.
Gray everywhere. Literary gray in Malherbe. Religious gray in Berulle and
the Oratory. The new-born Port-Royal aims at dullness, one might almost
say at mediocrity. Pascal will appear in thirty years. The colour is very
good here, but moderate in very truth, neither too much nor too little.
A learned master among masters, the good Philip nevertheless stuck so
closely to nature and went so deeply into it that he satisfies both the
conceptions of history and the popular impression. History recognises in
this gray-bearded phantom with its lustreless gray eye and its fine spare
hands the grandson of the prevost of Henry III who assassinated Guise.
He comes towards you, and you do not feel reassured. That personage has
indeed the appearance of life, but is it truly a man, a soul? Yes, an
intellect certainly, strong, clear, and shall we say luminous, or dark
and sinister? If he would take a few steps further we should be face
to face. He does not inspire anxiety, but one fears that this strong
head has nothing in its breast, neither heart nor vitals. In trials of
witchcraft there have been too many of these evil spirits that will not
remain in the lower regions, but return and disturb the world.
What contrasts in him--so hard, so yielding; so complete, so broken! By
how many tortures he must have been moulded, formed, and unformed, let us
say rather disarticulated, to have become that eminently artificial thing
which goes without going, advances without appearing, and noiselessly, as
though gliding over a deadened carpet--then, having arrived, overthrows
everything. He looks at you from the depths of his mystery, this
red-robed sphinx; one dare not say from the depths of his craftiness.
For, in contrast with the ancient sphinx, which dies if one divines it,
this one seems to say: “Whoever divines me shall die.” If one should
be densely and profoundly ignorant of Richelieu,[e] one must read his
_Mémoires_. All the people of this race, Sulla, Tiberius, and others,
have written memoirs or caused them to be written, in order to render
history difficult, to baffle men, to disconcert the public, and above
all to connect the beginning of their lives with the end and to disguise
somewhat the terrible contradictions of their different periods.
His ill-fortune forced him to have merit early. He was the youngest
of three brothers. His family was not rich, and had intermarried with
plebeians. The eldest brother, who was at court, spent everything. The
second, who held the bishopric of Luçon, became a Carthusian; and as this
bishopric did not leave the family, the third, our Richelieu, had to
become a churchman, in spite of his military taste. The eldest brother
was killed in a duel, too late for his cadet, who would have taken his
place and would never have become a priest. He perhaps was not born
ill-natured, but he became so. The contradiction between his character
and his robe gave him that rich fund of ill humour to which is due his
great strength--“the bitterness of blood, which alone makes him win
battles.” His battles as priest could only be theological. He promptly
transmitted his theses with great ostentation to the Sorbonne, dedicating
them to Henry IV, and offering himself to the king for important
services. Then he went to Rome to be consecrated, to offer himself to the
pope. Neither the king nor the pope responded to the impatience of the
ardent young politician.
Then he sadly fell back upon his bishopric of Luçon, which was poor
enough and in a country of disputes, near to La Rochelle and the
Huguenots. This nearness caused him annoyance; in spite of violent
headaches, he wrote against them. He is not without talent. His pen is
a sword, short and keen, well-fitted for disputation. He does not dwell
dully upon the absurd. If he writes nonsense he does not do it like a
fool. He has a happy insolence and bold turns of thought; and retreats
haughtily, and by this means he makes a very good showing.
For all that, he would have remained in his obscurity at Luçon if he had
had nothing but his controversy. But he was a handsome fellow, a fine
porcelain creature. Concini was of faience. The handsome Bellegarde,
a beau since the time of Henry III, was getting worn out. These
considerations influenced the queen-mother, and she took him as her
almoner.[b]
[Sidenote: [1616-1617 A.D.]]
It was the 30th of November, 1616, that Richelieu entered the ministry
for the first time. The Spanish ambassador, the duke of Monteleone,
showed keen satisfaction at his accession and wrote to Madrid that there
was “no better than he in France for the service of God, of the crown
of Spain, and of the public good”--of the public good, as the heirs of
Philip II understood it! This diplomat had not the gift of divination!
[Illustration: COSTUME OF THE TIME OF LOUIS XIII]
The majestic drama of the ministry of the great Richelieu thus opens
as a comedy of intrigue. It is by no means probable that he began his
career by deceiving the pope in order to obtain his bishop’s bull, but
it seems certain that he got into power by deceiving Spain and preparing
to deceive and supplant Concini. He was determined to gain power at any
price; he felt himself necessary; an irresistible force was driving him
forward! In this feverish need of action by which he is devoured he
passes over all obstacles, perhaps even over those of conscience and
personal dignity as over others. He flatters those who despise him,
caresses those who hate him, and lowers to vain mediocrity that brow
which was made for empire. He hides at the bottom of his soul all his
nobler and better feelings, as one would conceal criminal tendencies.
Unfortunate novitiate of political greatness! There will always be very
different opinions of Richelieu according to whether one studies the end
or the means, the public man or the private man. Richelieu never was
false to the duties of the statesman toward his country’s greatness,
but he was unfortunately less faithful to the laws of morality and of
humanity.[h]
Marie was not aware of the merit of this personage; yet it may have been
by his bold counsel that she ventured a stroke of policy, of boldness
unusual to her, in arresting Condé in the Louvre, and sending him to
the Bastille. The noblesse, his partisans, instantly fled to raise
their followers. The Parisian mob collected, and showed its humour by
pillaging the hôtel of the marshal D’Ancre; there, however, its fury
subsided. The queen was victorious, and the fugitive partisans of Condé
were reduced to impotent exclamation of vengeance and rage. Their cause,
however, was not lost. The young king had joined his mother in the
project for getting rid of Condé; but in delivering himself from one
master, Louis was mortified to find that he had given himself another.
The marshal D’Ancre now ruled uncontrolled at court and in council; and
the pride of Louis was even more hurt by the ascendency of the upstart
Concini than by that of Condé. Luynes, his favourite, and the young
nobles who composed his court, flattered the monarch’s pride, and fanned
his resentment. Marie de’ Medici deemed this knot of striplings to be
occupied in pleasure, whilst they meditated a plot. The arrest of Condé
was a precedent and example.[d]
ASSASSINATION OF MARSHAL D’ANCRE
It was well to have arrested the prince de Condé, said Richelieu;
one might have done as much for Concini. Strange forgetfulness of
circumstances; the king had no one, and his man Vitry, captain of the
guards, did not have the guards with him. Concini on the contrary never
went anywhere unless surrounded by thirty gentlemen. Vitry collected
fifteen with great difficulty, hid them, and armed them with pistols
under their coats.
They chose the moment when Concini came to make his usual morning visit
to the queen. He was on the Louvre bridge with his large escort. Vitry
was so frightened that he passed without seeing him, having him before
his eyes. When told, he returned. “I arrest you!” “_A mi!_” (“to my
aid!”) cried Concini. He had not finished when three or four pistol shots
went off and blew his brains out. “It is by order of the king,” said
Vitry. Only one of Concini’s men had put his hand to his sword (April
24th, 1617).
The Corsican Ornano took the king, raised him in his arms, and showed
him at the window. The people did not understand. It was first said that
Concini had wounded the king. But when it was known it was he on the
contrary who had been killed, there was an explosion of joy throughout
the whole city. The queen-mother was very much frightened. Her one
cry was “_Poveretta di me!_” However, what had she to fear? Whatever
antipathy her son might feel for her he could not dream of bringing her
to judgment. He was satisfied with removing her guards. The doors of
her apartments were walled up, save one. She showed no pity for Concini
or his widow. When someone said to her: “Madame, your majesty alone can
inform her of the death of her husband”--“Ah, I have many other things
to do! If you can’t tell it to her, sing it to her; cry in her ears:
_L’Hanno ammazzato_.” Terrible word; it was the very same that Concini
had used to the queen the day of Henry IV’s death, when he told her the
news that she knew only too well. Leonora tremblingly sought refuge with
her. She refused it. Then that woman to whom the queen had confided her
crown diamonds (as a resource in case of misfortune) undressed and went
to bed, hiding her diamonds under her. She was pulled from her bed;
everything was ransacked; the room was pillaged. She was taken to the
Conciergerie. Paris was in a state of celebration. The crowd hunted and
disinterred her husband’s body, which was solemnly burned in front of
Henry IV’s statue in token of expiation. It was said that a madman had
bitten out the heart and eaten a piece of it.
The life of the queen-mother hung by a thread. Among the murderers,
several would have liked to kill her, thinking that she might arise later
and avenge the death of her lover. But Luynes would have dared neither to
counsel the royal child to do such a thing nor to do it without orders.
He saved her by surrounding her with the king’s guards. The Capuchin
Travail, Père Hilaire, who had formerly intrigued against the marriage
of Marie de’ Medici, and who was actor and executor in the murder of her
favourite, thought that nothing was accomplished unless she perished.
He applied to a man of her party who had access to her at will, her
equerry Bressieux, trying to get him to kill her. The equerry refused.
“Never mind,” said Travail, “I will bring it about that the king goes
to Vincennes; and then I will have her torn in pieces by the people.”
Luynes, who had promised the Capuchin the archbishopric of Bourges if he
aided in killing Concini, did not wish to keep his word when the deed
had been done. Instead he profited by some sanguinary words which this
chatterer had uttered, out of folly and bravado, to have him judged and
broken on the wheel.
[Illustration: ALFRED DE LUYNES]
The king had caused parliament to be informed that he had ordered the
arrest of Concini, who, having resisted, had been killed. He spoke of
his mother only with respect, saying that he had prayed his lady and
mother to approve of his taking the rudder of state. Parliament came to
congratulate him. The action which could so easily be brought against
Concini and his wife was skilfully stifled and turned from the true
issue. A case of sorcery was made out of it. That was, moreover, the
custom of the century. The libidinous tyrannies practised by priests in
women’s convents, when by chance they came to light, were changed into
sorcery, and the devil was charged with everything. Leonora herself
thought the devil was in her body and had herself exorcised in the church
of the Augustines by priests who had come from Italy at her request. As
she suffered terribly in her head, Montalte, her Jewish physician, killed
a cock, and applied it to her head still warm, which was interpreted as a
sacrifice to hades. An astrological document was also found in her rooms,
the nativity of the queen and her children. It is not at all improbable
that when losing her influence she tried to keep her hold on the queen
by magic. It was the general folly of the age. Luynes believed in it
also. Richelieu says that he had two Piedmontese magicians come to find
him powders which he might put in the king’s garments, and herbs for his
shoes.
However much of truth there may have been in Leonora’s sorcery, it did
not deserve death, and her thefts even, her brazen-faced sales of places
and orders, would have merited only the whip. Court tradition, which was
very favourable to such people, as enemies of Henry IV, has not failed
to invent, to place in the mouth of Leonora proud and insolently daring
words--for example: “My charm was that of a mind set on folly.” She was
beheaded at the Grève and then burned.[b]
THE MINISTRY OF LUYNES (1617-1621 A.D.)
The position of the queen-mother was mortifying and distressing. She had
been deceived by the boy-king; stripped of her power; her dearest friends
had perished. Of the band of courtiers who so lately hung upon her smile,
Richelieu alone evinced a determination to adhere to the fortunes of
his mistress. Marie de’ Medici besought an interview with her son. This
favour was long denied. Luynes feared a mother’s influence over a being
so young and so weak as Louis. Marie was allowed to retire to Blois,
whither Richelieu accompanied her.
[Illustration: LOUIS XIII]
The wealth as well as the influence of Concini fell to the share of
Luynes, who was, however, neither a foreigner nor so rash and avaricious
as his predecessor. Louis XIII, from his very first moment of grasping
power, showed the same incapacity of wielding it that ever distinguished
him. The love of the chase was the only active quality the young monarch
seemed to have inherited from his father Henry. Luynes became hence sole
master of the state. He found two parties aspiring to influence--that of
the prince of Condé, and that of the queen-mother. One was in prison,
and the other exiled; so that Luynes found no difficulty in flattering
and giving hopes alternately to both, whilst he permitted neither the
liberation of the prince nor the return of Marie de’ Medici. The body
of the noblesse, who had flown to arms upon Condé’s arrest, and who had
returned on learning Concini’s fall, thought it a more serious step to
rebel against the king than against his mother and her favourite. The
young court, too, had charms; and the prince of Condé was now but ill
supported by that aristocratic band that had shared his envy and hatred
towards the family of Ancre.
Marie de’ Medici bore her disgrace with impatience. For some time she
lulled herself with the hope that Luynes was sincere in his promises of
allowing her to return. She expected in vain; and at length resolved to
work her deliverance by leaguing with the prince of Condé and her former
enemies. These intrigues coming to light, Richelieu, who was considered
to be the source of them, was ordered to quit Blois, where the queen
resided, and retire to his bishopric. But Marie had already profited by
the advice of this able counsellor. She kept up an active correspondence
with the duke d’Épernon, who was master of Metz, and through him with
such of the nobility as were envious of Luynes. Having by these means
formed a party, Marie escaped by night from the château of Blois; was met
by Épernon at the head of an armed body of gentlemen; and, retreating
south, soon found herself at the head of a party strong enough to defy
her enemies. There cannot be a stronger example of the overgrown power
of the nobles, and of the manner in which they absorbed the whole force
of the crown, than the authority wielded by Épernon at this time against
his sovereign. The duke had no less than five governments, viz., the
provinces of Saintonge, Auxerrois, the Limousin, the Bourbonnais, and the
Three Bishoprics. Add to these Metz, the bulwark of the kingdom adjoining
Lorraine; Loches, the strongest fortress of Touraine, which he held,
together with the command of all the French infantry, as colonel-general;
and it can be no longer a wonder that the defection of such a grandee
should have immediately reduced Louis and his favourite to treat with the
queen-mother.
[Sidenote: [1617-1620 A.D.]]
Richelieu was recalled from his diocese, and employed to effect an
accommodation, which took place. Marie de’ Medici was the principal
gainer: she obtained the government of Anjou, and the towns of Angers,
Chinon, and Pont-de-Cé, as fortresses of surety. The king promised to
restore Marie de’ Medici to his confidence, and to her place at court.
But this was postponed for the time. An interview took place betwixt
Louis and his mother. A light remark on one side, answered by a cold
compliment on the other, is all that is recorded of the meeting. “How
your majesty has grown!” exclaimed Marie. “Grown for your service,
madame,” was the young monarch’s reply. The queen-mother remained
at Angers, whilst the court returned to Paris. Épernon received
a written pardon for his rebellion, from which he had derived no
advantage; a circumstance that caused him to be taxed with folly by his
contemporaries. Disinterestedness was inconceivable to the age.
The first step of Luynes, in order to counteract the revived party of
the queen-mother, was to liberate Condé from Vincennes. But his long
captivity had secluded this prince from his ancient followers; and
Richelieu, who saw the object of Luynes, was able to succeed in not only
drawing over the whole body of the noblesse to the queen-mother, but
even in exciting the Huguenots to stir in her favour. These measures of
Richelieu, who was at the same time amusing Luynes by feigned friendship
and communications, became ripe in 1620, when, upon a fresh refusal to
admit Marie de’ Medici to court, all the great nobles, who had most
of them formerly conspired against her, now espoused her cause, and
quitted the court. Almost all France was in array against Louis and
Luynes. Épernon armed his five governments and his many towns. Marie
herself was in Anjou. The duke de Longueville held Normandy; the duke de
Vendôme, Brittany; the count of Soissons, Perche and Maine; the marshal
De Bois-dauphin had Poitou; De Retz, La Trémouille, Mayenne, Rouen, and
Nemours held the southern provinces betwixt them, except Languedoc, where
Montmorency remained neutral. The Huguenots were also against the court,
as was the duke de Rohan, their principal leader, and La Rochelle, their
chief town. This was owing to a decree, issued by Luynes, that the church
lands of Béarn, where Henry IV had established Protestantism, should
be restored to the Catholic priesthood. Thus Richelieu enlisted under
the banners of his mistress these two great malcontent and independent
powers in the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the reformers, which it
was afterwards the great aim and achievement of his policy to crush. In
thus wielding them successfully against the monarch, Richelieu became
acquainted with their danger, their strength, and their secret springs.
[Sidenote: [1620-1621 A.D.]]
Condé, however, inspired Luynes this time with additional vigour. The
prince himself was excited to avenge his long confinement upon the
queen-mother, who had caused it; and the king, therefore, was induced
to march with an army, headed by Condé, to reduce the rebels. He was
successful in Normandy; the insurgents retired everywhere before the
royal army, which turned southward, and drove the queen from even Angers,
her principal fortress. Luynes, contented with these advantages, showed
himself willing to treat, as did Richelieu, who was somewhat disgusted
by the want of alacrity and resolution evinced by the noblesse, his
partisans. Condé, however, pushed on the war; and although a treaty
was on the eve of being concluded, he attacked the forces of Marie’s
adherents, and put them to the rout at Pont-de-Cé.
This success, instead of breaking off negotiations, accelerated them; for
Luynes became instantly jealous of Condé, and feared his predominance,
if the queen-mother should be completely crushed. A treaty was therefore
concluded on similar terms to the preceding one, with the important
addition that the king should become really reconciled to his mother, and
that she should reside at court. Many doubts and accusations exist as to
the good faith of Richelieu in these transactions. The loss of Angers,
and the defeat of Pont-de-Cé, were said to be arranged and allowed by
him; and it is more than probable that, in disgust with the noblesse,
who were at once domineering to their friends and feeble towards their
enemies, Richelieu had conceived the project of reconciling Louis and the
queen-mother, as well as their respective favourites, Luynes and himself;
thus uniting the scattered elements of the government, and enabling it
to set its turbulent enemies at defiance. Richelieu, by this plan, hoped
to secure to himself a place in the council, where he felt confident
he would soon rule such weak spirits as Louis, the queen-mother, and
Luynes. But the latter had the sagacity to dread Richelieu’s superiority.
Although the bishop sedulously sought the favourite’s friendship, and
although an alliance took place betwixt their families, nevertheless
Luynes persevered in his jealousy; prevented, by his intrigues, the
cardinal’s hat stipulated for Richelieu in the late treaty, and kept the
doors of the council chamber inexorably closed against him.
_The Huguenot Uprising; The Siege of Montauban (1621 A.D.)_
Although Luynes had risen to power as a mere favourite, he still held
it with a firmer hand than Concini; nor was he without the views or
the sagacity of a statesman. Even previous to his having at court so
able a prompter as Richelieu, he had anticipated the future policy
of that minister in endeavouring to crush the Huguenots. Luynes was
determined upon restoring to the Catholic priesthood the church lands
of Béarn, which had been in the hands of the Protestants since the days
of Jeanne d’Albret. Louis was equally bent on rescuing from heresy
the native province of his family. After the Treaty of Pont-de-Cé,
the king marched into Béarn, and reduced not only the church lands to
his will, but the little province itself, the privileges of which he
annulled. The Huguenots were of course indignant and alarmed. This was
not the only infraction of the agreements made with them. Favas, their
deputy at court, declared that the government intended to reduce them
altogether. They accordingly summoned a general assembly of reform at
La Rochelle, despite the prohibition of the king; and their consistory
published a bold decree, dividing the Protestant regions of France into
circles, after the manner of Germany, uniting again those circles in a
general government, and establishing the rules by which this government
was to raise troops and taxes, to levy war and exercise independent
jurisdiction. The scheme was a direct imitation of the United Provinces
of Holland. It manifested fully the republican ideas and leanings of the
Huguenots, and roused the court, and above all Richelieu, to crush them.
An army was raised by Luynes,[d] and Louis XIII left Paris accompanied
by the good wishes of all zealous Catholics and those who were desirous
of peace. He had re-established the tax paid by judges, magistrates, and
financiers on their offices, to secure them to their sons in case of
death, contracted a loan, and obtained from the clergy an extraordinary
tax. On the 19th of May, 1621, he occupied Saumur, which he was able
to leave to Duplessis-Mornay in spite of his neutral attitude. It was
necessary to prevent all communication between the Protestants, both
north and south of the Loire. He afterwards received the submission of
the towns in Touraine and Poitou, with the exception of La Rochelle, and
St. Jean d’Angély. This latter place belonged to the duke de Rohan, who
placed a garrison there under the command of Soubise, whilst he himself
went to take command in Guienne.
Lesdiguières undertook the siege of it, which lasted twenty-five days,
from the 30th of May to the 25th of June, and was very murderous.
Soubise, seeing the royal troops continually increase, ended by
capitulating; he obtained for the garrison the honours of war, on
condition of his promising always to serve the king. The fortifications
of St. Jean were demolished, the trenches filled in, and its privileges
suppressed. Deliberations took place as to the besieging of La Rochelle,
or the advance on Guienne, where Rohan and La Force were raising arms on
all sides. The taking of La Rochelle would have ended the contest; but it
offered great difficulties, especially on the side next the sea, where
the royal fleet would scarcely hold its own against the numerous and
well-disciplined ships of the Calvinists.
Luynes wished to obtain peace by the quickest means; he believed it would
be much more rapidly accomplished by dividing the enemy and gaining over
the leaders. Therefore he sent Épernon with four or five thousand men to
blockade La Rochelle by land, whilst he himself took the Guienne route
with the king and the bulk of the army. Mayenne,[86] who commanded the
first division, carried Nérac by storm on the 9th of July; the little
towns hastened to throw open their gates. One of the principal Calvinist
_seigneurs_ of Guienne, De Boisse de Pardaillan, had made his submission
the moment the royal troops had arrived, so as not to obey La Force.
They received favourable intelligence on every side. In the north and
in the centre the Protestants allowed their arms to be taken from them
and the walls of their towns pulled down, without striking a blow. Condé
occupied and demolished without resistance the fortress of Sancerre,
in his government of Berri. They met with resistance only at Clérac, a
little town upon the Lot. It took the royal army twelve days to gain
possession of it; it then entered, August 5th, and inflicted the most
severe punishment. The chancellor Duvair, who accompanied the king, died
during this siege; Luynes did not hurry to appoint a successor, and
appropriated the seals meantime. This method of monopolising all the
power, all the military and civil honours, put the finishing touch to the
irritation caused by his favours, and furnished an inexhaustible subject
for the raillery of his enemies.
[Illustration: A FRENCH NOBLEMAN, TIME OF LOUIS XIII]
La Force was shut up at Montauban, where the minister Chamier, one of
the most fanatical Calvinists, and the mayor Dupuy, who showed an equal
devotion to the cause, co-operated with him most energetically. All the
future of the party lay in the defence of this place. Rohan scoured
Languedoc and the Cévennes to raise men, and to form a relieving army.
The king had the choice of pursuing Rohan, or of besieging Montauban. He
decided upon this last step, in the hopes of striking a decisive blow,
and after some useless parleying, with which Sully was intrusted, the
works were commenced without delay. Unfortunately they had not taken part
in any other siege for a long time, except that of St. Jean d’Angély;
they had fallen out of the way of taking part in real warfare, and they
were even obliged to employ Italian engineers. The royal army found
itself hardly sufficient for a siege of such importance. They believed in
vain that they might find some partisans in the place. They attempted to
surprise it, but were unsuccessful. Mayenne, who had opened the trenches
August 18th, wished to rush the attack, before the works were finished.
He lost many of his men, and, imprudently exposing himself, paid for his
temerity with his life.
The news of Mayenne’s death caused a stir in Paris, as his name had acted
as a spell on the populace, amongst whom the war against the Protestants
had awakened all the ancient passions of the league. The following day,
the 18th, they attempted with no better result to make a breach by aid
of the cannon. On the 28th, Rohan came to the assistance of the place in
spite of the vigilance of the dukes of Angoulême and Montmorency. He cut
himself a passage through at the point of the sword, although losing many
men, and gave to the besieged garrison the means for prolonging their
resistance. The king called together all the most experienced marshals
and military men. They recognised the fact that it was impossible to
carry Montauban before the winter. Luynes, who had become constable
without knowing how to command an army or direct a siege, incurred
the responsibility of this failure, but it did not disturb him. He
wished to make peace, contrary to the desires of the military men and
of the earnest Catholics. He asked for an interview with Rohan, and
tried to bribe him. Rohan refused to desert his party, all the more
because he was unable to do so, being under the direction of ministers
whose impassioned ideas allowed him very little personal freedom. The
Calvinists hoped that, thanks to the resistance of Montauban, they would
weary the king of his policy. They were not mistaken. A final attack,
attempted the 21st of October, failed like all the previous ones. The
royal army, weakened by fatigue and sickness, and decimated by little
battles, rapidly diminished. They had fired uselessly twenty thousand
cannon shots, an enormous total for the times. On the 2nd of November
Luynes decided to raise the siege, subject to a renewal in the spring.
[Sidenote: [1621-1622 A.D.]]
The king, on retiring, made his entry into Toulouse, the most Catholic of
the towns of the south, where he was received with general acclamation.
He decided to limit himself during the winter to the keeping open of the
communications between Toulouse and Bordeaux. Accordingly he ordered the
marshal De Rouquelaure and Bassompierre to besiege the little town of
Monheur, which the Calvinists occupied near Tonneins. The camp and the
court were full of divisions, as always happens after great reverses.
They threw on one another the responsibility for the errors that had
been committed. Luynes was naturally the one whom they attacked the
most. The most ardent Catholics reproached him with having desired peace
too much; the military men with having attempted the siege of Montauban
with insufficient forces, through avarice, some said. Father Arnoux,
the king’s confessor, and Puisieux, secretary of state, began to rise
up against him and tried to destroy his credit. On the 11th of December
Monheur capitulated.
_Death of Luynes (1621 A.D.)_
Their lives were granted to the garrison, but the town was pillaged and
burned for having given itself to the Huguenots. Three days after, on
the 14th, Luynes died suddenly of fever. He was just at the pinnacle
of his success. Nevertheless, Louis XIII, in spite of his caution and
his ordinary dissimulation, had begun to complain of his yoke, and to
lend an ear to the accusations of his adversaries. Luynes had had few
friends, and his enemies, whose numbers were increasing, were already
attacking him with extreme vigour. His ambition and his avidity, equally
unrestrained, had turned everyone against him. The greater number of
the authors who were contemporary with him, animated against him by
prejudice and the strongest personal feelings, had treated him unfairly,
and attributed all sorts of extravagances to him, as, for instance,
wishing to see himself made prince of Avignon, or king of Austrasia.
His political talents deserve more justice. Firm without illusion, and
knowing how to ally moderation with energy, he had conducted the war
briskly in the desire to arrive more quickly at a peace which he wished
to make prompt and certain. This end he never ceased to pursue, and
Richelieu, who gained it, only finished a work that had been begun.[i]
This check saved the Huguenots for the time, although it was
counterbalanced by the ascendency of Guise in Poitou. The treaty
was concluded in the following year at Montpellier, by which it was
stipulated that affairs should be replaced as they were before the war,
new conquests restored, and new fortifications demolished. One point
the king gained; this was that the Huguenots should no more have a lay
assembly. A synod of ecclesiastics was alone allowed them; thus obviating
the revival of that republican assembly at La Rochelle, which had roused
all the suspicions and energy of king and court. Louis, returning to his
capital, was welcomed as a hero. The two queens rivalled each other in
the brilliancy of their fêtes. But neither applause nor pleasure could
prevent the king from relapsing into that state of apathy which was
natural to him. Louis XIII was as completely the _roi fainéant_ as were
the last of the race of Clovis and Charlemagne. But times were altered;
the tree of royalty had taken root, and stood as erect, when withered and
sapless, as when in spring and leaf.
RICHELIEU’S RETURN TO THE MINISTRY
[Sidenote: [1622-1624 A.D.]]
Louis XIII had been inspired by Luynes with an aversion for Richelieu. It
was with great difficulty that Marie de’ Medici obtained for him in 1622
the cardinal’s hat stipulated in a former treaty; but all her efforts in
procuring him admission to the council were resisted. The marquis de la
Vieuville was favourite for the moment, and he strengthened the king’s
prejudice against the cardinal. Marie was persevering; and at length
Louis yielded. He permitted Richelieu to take his seat at the council
table, but on the express condition that he was to be without office, and
that he should not consider himself a minister. The cardinal expressed
himself perfectly contented with this arrangement: he took his seat; and
the inefficacy of all the precautions taken against him soon appeared.
They had bound the arms of a giant, who broke his bonds the instant that
it pleased him to be free. From the first moment that Richelieu spoke,
his genius dominated; and the monarch himself, as well as La Vieuville,
cowered beneath an ascendency that they found it vain to dispute.
To secure this ascendency over the monarch, Richelieu scorned to make
use of the same means which sufficed La Vieuville and Luynes. Instead
of flattering Louis, and directing him in the way of pleasure, the
cardinal at first strove to awaken the young king to a sense of the
country’s debasement, to its true interests, and its possible glory. He
pointed out the turbulent disobedience of the great, the sedition of
the Huguenot assemblies, the weakness of ministers, and the disorder of
the finances--the consequent poverty and misery of the kingdom, as well
as the decay of its influence and dignity in its relations with foreign
potentates. He pointed to the house of Austria, daily increasing its
strength and extending its territories, at that very moment triumphant
from the conquest of the Palatinate, and threatening to crush those
Protestant states of Germany which had defied the might of Charles V.
Louis listened, and was excited, not indeed to take vigorous counsels
himself, but to confide in a minister who had shown himself able to
conceive and execute them.[87]
The chief object then coveted by the house of Austria was the possession
of the Valtelline, a strip of Alpine territory which might serve to
connect the dominions of that family in Germany and in Italy. It had been
in subjection to the Grisons, a Protestant race; and Spain seized this
pretext to conquer it in the name of the pope. France had opposed this
with the usual feebleness of her diplomacy. The first act of Richelieu
was to cut short the negotiation, to defy both the pope and Spain, and
to send an army under the marshal D’Estrées into the Valtelline, which
expelled the Spaniards, and restored the region to its ancient masters.
Richelieu dared to show the same bold front to the Huguenots at the
same time. Determined on completely reducing them, his first endeavour
was to drive them from Poitou and La Rochelle, where they could at all
times receive succours from England, and to circumscribe their influence
to the provinces of the southeast. He refused to evacuate Montpellier;
and the Huguenots were thus provoked to rebel. The cardinal at the same
time deprived them of the aid of the English monarch, with whom he
was negotiating the marriage of Henrietta of France, sister of Louis.
Rohan, and a great number of the Protestants, thought it on this account
imprudent to recommence war; but his impetuous brother, Soubise, made an
attack on the port of Blavet, seized some ships that were fitting out
there, and sailing thence made a descent upon the island of Ré. He was
defeated, the Huguenots being neither decided nor prepared for a general
insurrection. The consequence of the rash attempt of Soubise was that
in the accommodation that ensued the royalists kept Fort Louis, merely
promising not to annoy from it the inhabitants or shipping of La Rochelle.
CONSPIRACY OF THE COURT AGAINST RICHELIEU
[Sidenote: [1624-1626 A.D.]]
Richelieu here postponed his design of completely reducing the Huguenots.
The conquest of La Rochelle could alone do this effectually, and that
required a large naval force, as well as such preparations of every kind
as would ensure success. Besides, for the present, the cardinal was
aware that he would soon have to encounter a court intrigue, a triumph
over which was more requisite to establish his power than even the
subjugation of La Rochelle. The marriage of the princess Henrietta with
Charles of England, which had been desired by Richelieu, as securing
the previous neutrality of the latter country in a war against the
Huguenots, had proved a source of difference rather than of alliance. The
gallant Buckingham, who had come to demand and escort back the princess,
had excited the jealousy of the cardinal. He had shown at the French
court the sample of such a minister as the age esteemed--gay, liberal,
handsome, looking as well as wielding command. He had admired the young
queen, and had boldly expressed his admiration. His friend, Lord Holland,
had paid court to the duchess de Chevreuse, the companion of the queen,
and the most lovely woman of the time. Richelieu admired Madame de
Chevreuse, nay, by some, is said to have pretended to the queen herself.
Whatever was the truth, Richelieu and Buckingham conceived for each
other a mutual hatred, which afterwards produced a rupture between their
respective sovereigns. And a strong pique at the same time arose between
the cardinal and the queen.
Another personage at court, now grown into importance, was Gaston, duke
of Orleans, brother of the king. Louis was extremely jealous of him.
A tutor, under whom the young duke improved and began to give promise
of good conduct and manly virtue, was superseded by a mere courtier,
calculated to give lessons in vice and dissipation. Ornano, who succeeded
this man, found the prince absorbed in pleasure, and debased. He
endeavoured to rouse Gaston, by explaining to him his rank, his hopes;
and he did succeed in awakening his ambition. The young duke of Orleans
demanded to enter the council. Richelieu, then in the commencement of his
influence, replied by banishing Ornano for a time. Gaston relapsed into
dissipation, and seemed little inclined to give umbrage or uneasiness to
the government.
The worst part of feudal tyranny was that it interfered with the private
affections of all men. Richelieu, wielding the power of Louis XIII, was
not content with commanding the loyal submission of the first prince of
the blood. He thought proper to impose a wife upon him, nay, to choose
one. The lady selected was Mademoiselle de Montpensier, rich, lovely,
allied to the crown, and heiress of the house of Guise. There could be no
objection to such a bride, except the compulsion that gave her. Gaston
rebelled. The projected marriage convulsed the entire court, and wellnigh
the kingdom also.
[Illustration: A FRENCH GENTLEMAN, TIME OF LOUIS XIII]
Richelieu’s object was to provide an heir to the crown, which Louis
seemed not destined long to wear. Anne of Austria, the little queen, as
she was called, to distinguish her from the queen-mother, was on the
other hand averse to Gaston’s marriage; and she joined the friends of the
latter in endeavouring to thwart the cardinal’s plan. Ornano had resumed
his influence and station in the prince’s household; and he it was who
chiefly urged Gaston to resist. Ornano was arrested. This increased
the rage of the duke of Orleans; and at length a plot was entered into
and approved by him, to get rid of the domineering Richelieu in the
same manner that Ancre had been removed. The cardinal then inhabited a
country house at Fleury. Gaston’s servants were to betake themselves
thither, under pretence that their master was to honour Richelieu on
that day with his company to dinner, and the murder was to have taken
place. Richelieu received warning. The count de Chalais, who was to have
been the chief perpetrator, ventured to sound a friend, who expressed at
once a lively abhorrence of the attempt, and threatened to denounce it.
Chalais became alarmed, and, resolving to anticipate the informer, went
himself to the cardinal, and made a disclosure. Gaston was astonished, in
consequence, by the appearance of the cardinal in his apartment, on the
morning appointed for the deed. “I am sorry,” said Richelieu, smiling,
“your highness did not give me warning of your intention to make use of
my residence. I should have been prepared. As it is, I abandon it to
your service.” Having so said, Richelieu handed his shirt to Gaston (one
of the ceremonials of etiquette observed at a prince’s levée) and then
retired.
The cardinal, not content with thus confounding his enemies, was resolved
to punish them and intimidate others by their example. By probing Chalais
and his family, it was discovered that the nobles upon whose aid Gaston
reckoned were the duke de Vendôme and his brother the grand prior,
illegitimate sons of Henry IV. The former was governor of Brittany.
Richelieu, dissembling his suspicions, enticed them to repair to the
court at Blois, where both were instantly arrested. The imprisonment of
all his friends, and the danger of some, would have roused to serious
resistance a prince of more energy than Gaston. The young duke was not
wanting in indignation; but Richelieu had prepossessed the monarch’s
mind, and had taught Louis to believe that his royal life had been aimed
at as well as his minister’s; that the young queen, Anne of Austria, was
privy to the plot; and that she was to have married the duke of Orleans
on his accession to the throne. These accusations hardened and enraged
the mind of Louis XIII. Gaston, in the power of the court, was forced to
espouse Mademoiselle de Montpensier; the count de Chalais perished on the
scaffold; the queen was publicly reproached by her husband with having
sought a second marriage, to which she indignantly replied that there was
not so much to be gained by the change. Her friend, Madame de Chevreuse,
was banished from court. Thus Richelieu, triumphant over his foes,
amongst whom the queen and the king’s brother were numbered, showed how
fatal it was to provoke his enmity, how fruitless to resist his power.[d]
[Sidenote: [1626-1627 A.D.]]
The Treaty of Montpellier in 1626 granted a hollow peace to the
Huguenots; and a few months later, that is to say in May, peace was
signed with Spain. Years before, Richelieu, then young and obscure, had
often discussed with his friend Father Joseph how best to subdue the
neighbouring town of La Rochelle, the stronghold of the Huguenots; and
time had not softened his views on the subject. The English people,
chafing under the influence of their French and Catholic queen, Henrietta
Maria, longed to assert their Protestantism; Buckingham, opposed to her
anti-Protestant policy, longed to provoke the French court. What then
would better serve their ends than adoption of the Huguenot cause? So war
was begun with France. Richelieu brought his forces up under the walls of
La Rochelle, and drew a cordon of forts around the unhappy town, cutting
off all approaches. To shut the city off from English aid, Richelieu
constructed a wonderful mole across the mouth of the harbour. This was
built of solid masonry, extending about seven yards from one shore and
four hundred yards from the other, the intervening space of six hundred
yards being partially blocked with sunken ships and further guarded by
a half-circle of ships lashed together with their prows outward. Inside
the boom a royal fleet watched against sallies, and outside another fleet
watched for the English.[a]
THE SIEGE OF LA ROCHELLE DESCRIBED BY SEIGNOBOS
The work of construction at first went on slowly, and the besieged could
do little to hinder it. They could only fire off a few guns or post a
few ambuscades in the path of the staff officers as they went from one
part of the army to the other; but it was winter time, and bad weather
often interrupted the work of construction. The besieged had sent to ask
the king of England to help them; and the latter pledged himself “to the
mayor, aldermen, peers, and citizens of La Rochelle, to help them by
land and sea according to his royal power until a firm peace had been
established.” As a result he promised to send an expedition to help them
in the spring, and to furnish them with provisions; in the meantime he
allowed a collection to be made for their benefit in his kingdom.
The inhabitants of La Rochelle, on their part, engaged themselves to
provide pilots for the English, to prepare magazines and shelters on
their coasts, and to equip vessels to help in the expedition. And if the
king of France should attack the territories of the king of England,
they would do all they could to create a diversion. It was agreed that
neither the besieged nor the king of England should make any treaty
without consulting the other. The king of England had wished to impose
two other conditions; he asked the besieged to send him the children of
their principal families as hostages, and to receive an English garrison
within their walls. They only consented to receive English ships into
their harbour. They accepted the king of England as an ally to help them
to defend their independence, but they did not wish to have him for a
master.
[Sidenote: [1627-1628 A.D.]]
The royal army encamped before La Rochelle did not suffer very much
from the winter. A tax had been levied in the principal towns in France
which had made it possible to provide the soldiers with good clothing.
The construction of the dike provided occupation for the men, and the
boats were manned by volunteers from picked regiments. Meanwhile Louis
XIII was wearying of this long siege with no fighting. He declared that
his health would suffer if he did not go to Paris for a time. Richelieu,
fearing lest the king’s departure might have a bad effect on the troops,
tried to afford him some distraction by giving false alarms; several
times a sortie was announced, and the king remained on horseback all
night waiting for it, but the besieged did not make any movement. At last
Richelieu felt he could no longer keep the king with the army, so he
wrote to him saying that he could now absent himself for a time “without
any injury to his cause.”
The king immediately announced his departure. In his absence the cardinal
was to be commander-in-chief, he was called “lieutenant-general of the
king in the army before La Rochelle.” He had full power over all the
troops, cavalry and infantry, and also over the artillery for continuing
the siege, and was even empowered to receive the submission of the
inhabitants and take possession of the town. The king admonished all the
generals and officers to “obey him as implicitly as they would their
king.”
On the 10th of February, 1628, Richelieu accompanied the king two leagues
from the camp; there they separated, embracing each other at parting.
Louis warned the cardinal to take good care of his health; but Richelieu,
out of respect for etiquette, had not dared to take his umbrella when
accompanying the king, and was very much upset by the winter sun and had
five attacks of intermittent fever. After being absent two months and a
half, Louis returned to the camp, where he was saluted by salvos from
the forts, the batteries, and the dike. He found his army stronger and
the military works considerably advanced. He had left his army reduced
by illness to eighteen thousand men; but owing to the recruits who had
joined from the neighbouring provinces, he now found a force twenty-five
thousand strong.
The whole line of circumvallation which was to cut off La Rochelle on the
land side was completed and furnished with redoubts. The shore on both
sides of the harbour was provided with batteries. The dike was almost
finished and was defended by a sort of floating palisade formed of ships
linked together. An attempt to surprise the town had failed, owing to bad
generalship. But the besieged had been unable to make any sorties or to
obtain any provisions; and hunger was beginning to make itself felt in
their ranks. The day after his return, on the 24th of April, Louis XIII
sent an envoy to call upon the besieged citizens to surrender. According
to the custom of the time the summons had to be made by a herald-at-arms,
but there was not one with the army and they could not even find the
insignia of the office. A tabard had therefore to be prepared in a hurry,
a clerk of finance put it on and went forth to play the part of a herald.
The besieged refused to receive the summons. A sort of revolution had
taken place in La Rochelle. The rich citizens who had hitherto governed
the town were anxious to bring the siege to an end, for it was ruining
their commerce and exposing them to the wrath of their king. The sailors,
who were on the side of resistance, seized the power and elected one of
themselves, a captain Guiton, as mayor. Guiton was a bold corsair, of
small stature, but brave and energetic. He had a splendidly furnished
house, full of flags which he had taken from the ships of his enemies;
he was fond of showing them and of saying from what kings and in what
seas he had captured them. He was not anxious to be made mayor, but when
he took possession of his office, he placed his dagger on the table in
the town hall and said to his companions: “You do not know what you have
done in choosing me; you had better think well about it, for it will be
useless to talk to me about surrendering. If anyone mentions it I will
kill him.”
Another English fleet set out to relieve the blockade of La Rochelle,
or at any rate to revictual the town. This fleet consisted of thirty
vessels and twenty boats laden with provisions and ammunition. It was
signalled on the 11th of May by three shots fired from the forts on
the island of Ré. The fleet took up its station near the point of the
island, opposite to La Rochelle. The besieged fired salvos as a sign
of rejoicing, and very soon their ramparts were fluttering with red,
white, and blue flags. The royal fleet of thirty-eight ships was divided
into four squadrons which were stationed in front of the dike; behind,
on the La Rochelle side, the dike was guarded by twenty-six galleys. A
light English ship succeeded in passing these batteries and in reaching
the harbour; she carried a captain, a native of La Rochelle on board,
and he was commissioned to ask his compatriots to open a passage before
their harbour, so that the ships laden with provisions might come in.
The English fleet, he said, had not come to fight. The inhabitants of La
Rochelle and the Protestant refugees on board the English ships begged
the admiral to force the passage; he replied that he only had orders to
cross to facilitate the entrance of the convoy with provisions, and that
he must spare his fleet. On the 18th of May, the English ships set sail,
drew close to the harbour, fired a salute, and sailed away to the open
sea. The besieged, deserted by their allies, found themselves in a very
critical position. One of them proposed to sacrifice himself and save
the town by assassinating Richelieu. That was the way in which Orleans
had formerly escaped from the duke of Guise. But he would not commit
this deed unless he was certain it was not a sin. He consulted Guiton,
who replied: “In such matters as this I never give advice.” He asked the
pastors what they thought; and they answered: “If God is going to save us
it will not be by means of a crime.” So he gave up the idea.
The besieged were suffering much from starvation. The rich still had
provisions which they kept concealed, but others were dying of hunger. On
the 26th of May they decided to drive out of the town all who were unable
to fight--women, children, old men, and all who were infirm. These poor
creatures made for the French camp; the soldiers, by the king’s order,
received them with a shower of bullets and forced them to go back to
the town. The royal troops also destroyed the crops of beans which the
besieged had sown at the bottom of the other side of the escarpment.
On the 1st of June some of the citizens who were anxious for peace
succeeded in opening communications with Bassompierre, proposing a
capitulation; but on the 10th a letter reached La Rochelle from the king
of England, promising that he would see his whole fleet destroyed rather
than fail to extricate the besieged from the peril they were in. They
therefore broke off the negotiations and began firing again. For three
months they waited for the promised help, while Richelieu continued his
dike. Towards the open sea he had had long beams bound together and fixed
in the ground at the bottom of the water to prevent access to the dike,
and on the harbour side he had placed a line of ships anchored and
chained together. Every day visitors came to the royal camp, and were
entertained; and sometimes, to amuse them, a skirmish was got up at which
they looked on. The king went out hunting and kept his court just as if
he had been in Paris.
Within La Rochelle the famine was becoming terrible. The rich were eating
horses, donkeys, dogs, and cats; and even for these they had to pay well,
the price of a cat being 45 livres. The poor were no longer able to go
and look for dead shellfish cast up by the tide and stranded in the mud,
for the guns of the besiegers made this dangerous. They had eaten up all
the green stuff and were reduced to boiling pieces of leather with fat
and moist sugar. Many left the town and would have given themselves up at
the outposts of the royal army; but they were sent back, so that the town
might not be enabled to hold out longer by having fewer mouths to feed.
The soldiers would take away their clothes and then drive them back to
the town with sticks or leather thongs. A great number of the inhabitants
had died from illness or privation. Even those who were defending the
town were so weak with hunger that they could only walk with sticks; they
could hardly drag themselves along and were quite unable to bear arms.
Often in the mornings sentinels were found dead of starvation at their
posts. Guiton still refused to surrender. He had some of those who wished
to capitulate imprisoned, and on the 22nd of July he had three or four
beheaded as traitors, and their heads placed on the gates of the town. On
the 9th of August the president of the presidial, an inferior court of
judicature, was imprisoned in his turn. The councillors were so alarmed
that two of them took refuge in the royal camp.
Louis XIII, hearing what great distress prevailed in La Rochelle, on the
16th of August sent a herald-at-arms to call upon the town to surrender.
This time it was a real herald in a tabard, cap on head, sceptre in hand.
Before him rode two trumpeters bearing waving pennants. They presented
themselves at one of the gates and asked to see the mayor. They were
kept waiting a long time; then, instead of the mayor, appeared a troop
of citizens and soldiers, whose leader told the herald with an oath to
go away at once, and pointed to his men’s guns ready cocked for firing.
The herald withdrew, placing on the ground two proclamations that he had
brought with him. The English fleet, on the point of sailing, had been
delayed by the murder of the duke of Buckingham. The longer the siege
went on the stronger became the temptation to fly to the royal camp;
and the chance of being killed seemed preferable to the certainty of
being starved to death. To rid themselves of these obtrusive fugitives
the besiegers adopted a cruel plan. They placed gibbets on the line of
circumvallation surrounding the town and every time a group of fugitives
arrived to give themselves up, they made them draw lots, and the one on
whom the lot fell was hanged while the rest were sent back to the town.
On the 29th of August Guiton read the citizens a letter from the king of
England saying that help was at hand. It was madness, he said, to hope
for mercy from the king of France: if the town surrendered it would be
sacked and the men massacred. They must stand firm as long as anyone
remained alive to shut the gates. “As for me,” he added, “if I am left
with only one other, and without food, I shall be quite willing to draw
lots to decide which of us is to eat the other.” On the 3rd of September,
Guiton, while speaking to the people who had assembled to hear the Sunday
sermon, was interrupted by a woman crying out that her child’s nurse
had not tasted food for a fortnight. Guiton to appease the crowd made a
pretence of negotiating. He sent two envoys to the king, who received
them fairly. But a native of La Rochelle, just arrived from England,
managed to make his way into the city in broad daylight and announced
that the English fleet was just setting sail; so again the negotiations
were broken off. A fortnight later, on the 28th of September, an English
fleet of 140 sail carrying 6,000 soldiers arrived, and taking up a
position before the harbour, tried to force the passage, which was
guarded by the French fleet. The French refugees asked to be allowed
to manage the fire-ships which were to be sent against their king. The
English wished to work them themselves, but the fire-ships proved a
failure, and would not act. They waited for a favourable wind, and on the
3rd of October began firing on the fleet and batteries of the besiegers.
The fighting continued for two days without much loss of life, and on
the evening of the 4th the English fleet withdrew to the isle of Aix. It
remained inactive for some days owing to stormy weather, and, when the
wind was once more favourable, the English, instead of making an attack,
sent an envoy to Richelieu.
Those inside La Rochelle, seeing they were deserted, resigned themselves
to the necessity of suing for peace. Richelieu received at the same time
the envoys from the town and those from the French Protestants on board
the English fleet. On the 29th of October the capitulation was signed,
the inhabitants of La Rochelle acknowledged the great offence of which
they had been guilty, “not only in resisting the just wishes of their
king, but in joining with foreigners who had taken up arms against the
state.” They begged the king to pardon them for this crime, and they
placed their town in his hands. The king, taking into consideration
“their repentance and protestations of sorrow,” promised them an amnesty,
the free exercise of their religion, and the restoration of any of their
property which had been confiscated. The officers and nobles might leave
the town wearing their swords, and the soldiers carrying white sticks,
and they would then be free. On the 30th of October the French army
entered La Rochelle and the garrison came out; they were reduced to
seventy-four Frenchmen and sixty-two English.[j]
Richelieu showed himself clement towards La Rochelle; there was
no vengeance taken, no victims were sacrificed. The town lost its
independence, which was, indeed, incompatible with the idea of
sovereignty; but its worship and its religious opinions were left free,
“the only avowed and open toleration,” says Hume[c] “which at that time
was granted in any European kingdom.”[d]
[Illustration]
FOOTNOTES
[86] [Henry, duke of Mayenne, son of that duke who was at one time the
head of the League.]
[87] [In Richelieu’s _Mémoires_, which he intended to serve as historical
material for his biography, it is stated that Richelieu in a single
interview dramatically placed this gigantic scheme before the young
king, and that Louis from this time was obedient to the minister. This,
however, is hardly in agreement with the facts. Richelieu seems hardly to
have found his policy at first; and he was not sure of Louis’ constancy
until after his success at La Rochelle.]
[Illustration]
CHAPTER XVII. THE DICTATORSHIP OF RICHELIEU
Cardinal Richelieu is one of those men in whose favour the tide
of affairs always turns at the critical moment, and who also
have skill and courage to take it at the turn. Vigilant, cool,
sagacious, and absolutely fearless, he never throughout his
life missed a single point in the great game he played; and
even with dramatic force knew how to snatch a triumph out of
the very clutches of defeat.--KITCHIN.[w]
[Sidenote: [1629-1643 A.D.]]
Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal Richelieu, grown now through the
exercise of his own genius to be the mightiest man in all Europe, was
born at the castle of Richelieu in Poitou, September 5th, 1585. He was
therefore forty-three years old when the famous siege of La Rochelle,
by which he broke the power of the Huguenots in France, was brought to
a close. Chronic invalid though he was, he was destined to live fifteen
years longer, and during that period to control the fortunes of France,
and to exercise a dominating influence in European politics at large; to
be recognised everywhere as the greatest statesman of his age. We have
already seen enough of him to know that he is a man of the largest ideas,
the most indomitable courage, and that he is a born master of men; we
must understand also that he is the wiliest of intriguers, the shrewdest
judge of human motives; that he has a taste for art and for literature;
and that with it all he is not restrained from the successes of practical
politics by any undue niceties of conscience. He is perhaps more similar
in his mental equipment to Augustus than to any other great man of
history; or let us say rather to Augustus with a certain share added of
the genius of Julius Cæsar, further modified by some traits of Louis XI.
But why attempt to characterise? We shall see the great cardinal in the
full exercise of these powers in the coming years. We shall see him carry
war into Italy, acting as his own lieutenant-general. We shall see him
take a hand in the Thirty Years’ War, and accomplish by diplomacy the
overthrow of the great Wallenstein. We shall see him put down uprisings
at home, triumphing over Marie de’ Medici and his other enemies;
holding King Louis XIII as a child in leading strings. We shall see him
dominating church and state alike, and exercising a permanent influence
on the literature of his land through the foundation of the French
Academy. And all the while we must remember that this myriad-minded
statesman is the most hated of Frenchmen at the same time that he is the
most feared. Even those he has benefited do not love him. “Let the world
speak well or ill of the famous cardinal,” says Corneille, “neither in
my prose nor in my verse will I mention his name; he has done me too
much kindness to speak ill of him, and too much injury to speak well.”
There is none to speak well of this strange man; but all speak of him
with bated breath; all contemplate him with something of apprehension.
A weird, incomprehensible figure, he stalks across the scene, lonely,
hated, feared,--but always masterful. Let us follow out the details of
his life story.[a]
RICHELIEU AND THE KING
The history of Richelieu is obscure as to the essential point, his
resources, the ways and means. On what did he live and how? This is not
to be seen either in his memoirs or his documents. All that we have of
Richelieu’s accounts includes only four years (1636-1640) and in a very
confused way gives the ordinary receipts, up to eighty millions. Not a
word of anything extraordinary.
In 1636, when France was invaded, a tax on persons in comfortable
circumstances (_des gens aisés_) was created, or rather regulated, and
the agents placed everywhere in 1637, with the triple power of justice,
police, and finance, collected it with great rigour. But one cannot
doubt that something similar existed even before, especially in the
passages of armies through certain provinces. Otherwise it is impossible
to understand how, with such a deficit under ordinary circumstances,
extraordinary and unforeseen expenditures, for wars or subsidies to
allies, could have been made every year.
Hence action was variable, intermittent, sometimes brilliant, with
relapses due to exhaustion. It was not possible to have a really
permanent army. That was evident in 1629, when Richelieu finished the war
with the Huguenots, but that with Italy was still in a critical state.
He disbanded thirty regiments to raise others six months later. The same
way, in 1636, he disbanded seven regiments in January to make them up
again in June--an economy of five months, necessary perhaps, but which
nearly lost France. In July nothing had been reorganised, and the enemy
came to within twenty leagues of Paris.
The suffering of the great man of affairs who directed this machine with
its spasmodic movements must have been terrible. And one can easily
understand that he was always ill. The insufficiency of his resources,
the continual effort to invent impossible money, on the other hand the
court intrigues, the pricks of no one knows how many invisible insects,
were something to keep him in a terrible agitation. But even that was
not enough; twenty other devils haunted this restless soul, like a
great ruined mansion--the battle of women, tardy gallantries, moreover
theology and the wild desire to write, to make verses, tragedies! What
tragedy could be more gloomy than his very person. Macbeth is gay in
comparison. And he had attacks of violence in which his inner fury would
have strangled him, had he not like Hamlet massacred tapestries with the
blows of his dagger. More often he swallowed his bitterness and fury,
covered everything with the outward seeming of ecclesiastical decency.
His powerlessness, his passion, turned within, worked themselves out on
his body; the red iron burned his soul and he was near to death.
His greatest evil was still the king, who might escape him at any moment.
Spain, the court, waited for the death of Louis XIII. His wife and his
brother looked at his face every morning and hoped. Valetudinarian at the
age of twenty-eight, feverish, subject to abscesses which nearly carried
him off in 1630, it was in vain he claimed to be alive, to act at times
and show courage; it was held that he was dead, at least that no one
had need of him. It was a curious union of two invalids. The king would
have thought his kingdom lost if Richelieu were wanting. Richelieu knew
that, with the king dead, he had not two days to live. So well hated,
especially by the king’s brother, he had to plan to die with Louis XIII.
Perhaps it was for that reason that he was so pleasing to the king, who
was sad, suspicious, and malevolent and who never liked him, but who
could always say to himself: “If I die, that man will be hanged.”
This double chance of death, on which the enemies of Richelieu placed
their hope, was precisely what made him strong and terrible. He had
moments when he talked and acted as though in the presence of death; and
then the sublime, which he had sought so laboriously elsewhere, came of
itself. He touches it, in fact, in passages of allocution which he had
with the king on the return from La Rochelle, in the presence of his
enemies, the queen-mother and the king’s confessor, the suave Jesuit
Suffren. In this conversation he tells everything, his actual situation,
what he has done, what received, what he owns, what he has refused. He
has a patrimony of 25,000 livres rental and the king has given him six
abbeys. He is obliged to make heavy expenditures, especially to pay for
guards, being surrounded with daggers. He has refused 20,000 crowns
pension, refused the appointments of the admiralty (40,000 francs),
refused the right of admiral (100,000 crowns), refused a million which
financiers had offered him in order not to be prosecuted.
He asks for his dismissal, not definitely but temporarily--he may be
called back later if he is still alive and is needed. He explains
clearly that he is in great danger and that he is obliged sometimes to
conceal himself. Does he want to make himself necessary, declare himself
indispensable, and so make sure of so much the more power? If that is
his end, one must say that the method is very strange and daring. He
speaks with the frankness of a man who has no end in view. He dares to
give his master, perhaps as a last service, an enumeration of the faults
of which the king ought to correct himself. And this was not one of
those flattering satires, where one shows a slight fault, a shadow, as a
successful method for showing the beauties of the portrait. No, it is a
firm, hard judgment, like that of a La Bruyère, of a Saint-Simon, which
would penetrate to the depths of a character after a hundred years, a
judgment of the dead by a dead person. Quickness of mind and instability,
suspicions and jealousy, no assiduity, no application to great things,
impulsive aversions, forgetfulness of services, and ingratitude--not a
trait is lacking.
The queen-mother must have trembled with indignation, with terror also,
perhaps, feeling that the man who would venture such a thing would
venture all--and that a man so composed, with death under his feet, would
pay little regard to the death of others. The Jesuit must have fallen
backwards, plunged into silence and humility. The king felt all this and
received it as the testamentary word of one invalid to another, of one
dying man to another. Richelieu, being begged and entreated, remained in
the ministry. It was difficult for him to retire with affairs at such a
crisis. The war with the Huguenots still continued in Languedoc, and the
war with Italy was commencing. Richelieu, called by the pope as well as
by the duke of Mantua, had a good opportunity which might relieve him
from his embarrassments. Victor at La Rochelle, if he saved Italy he
might hope that the pope would appoint him legate for life as Wolsey and
George d’Amboise[88] had been--real kings and more than kings, since they
united the two powers, temporal and spiritual.[b]
RICHELIEU ENTERS THE EUROPEAN ARENA
[Sidenote: [1629-1630 A.D.]]
France had submitted; six years of power had been sufficient for
Richelieu to make himself her master; now he turned his incessant
activity in the direction of Europe. “He feared the repose of peace,”
wrote Nani, the ambassador to Venice, “and believing himself more secure
in the turmoil of arms, he was the author of many wars, and of long and
weighty calamities. We may say that having reunited divided France,
succoured Italy, upset the empire, harassed England, and weakened Spain,
he was the instrument chosen by heaven to direct the great events of
Europe.”
The liberal, penetrating mind of the Venetian was not mistaken on this
point; all over Europe the hand of Richelieu was felt. “Far and near, we
must always negotiate,” he said. He had succeeded with negotiations in
France, and he carried his ideas further. Numerous treaties had already
marked the first years of the cardinal’s power; after 1630 his activity
in external affairs was redoubled. From 1623 to 1640 seventy-four
treaties were concluded by Richelieu; four with England, twelve with the
United Provinces, fifteen with the German provinces, six with Sweden,
twelve with Savoy, six with the Venetian Republic, three with the pope,
three with the emperor, two with Spain, four with Lorraine, one with the
Grison Leagues, one with Portugal, two with the rebels of Catalonia and
Rousillon, one with Russia, and two with the emperor of Morocco; such was
the network of diplomatic negotiation which the cardinal wove in nineteen
years.
While the cardinal was holding La Rochelle in siege, the duke of Mantua
died in Italy, and his natural heir, Carlo di Gonzaga, living in France
as the duke de Nevers, hastened to take possession of his estates.
Meanwhile the duke of Savoy claimed the marquisate of Montferrat. The
Spaniards upheld him, and entering the duke of Mantua’s states, lay siege
to Casale. When La Rochelle fell, Casale was still resisting; but the
duke of Savoy had already seized the greater part of Montferrat, and the
duke of Mantua asked help of the French king, whose subject he was. This
furnished a new field of battle against Spain.[t]
[Illustration: RICHELIEU]
Nobody could understand why the cardinal thought insignificant
possessions at a distance from France, like Mantua and Montferrat, were
of such great importance.[89] He was obliged to explain to the king that
Casale and Mantua were the citadels of Italy--the most valuable military
stations in the basin of the Po; and then war was decided on. Richelieu
left on the 29th of December with the title of “lieutenant-general
representing the person of the king.” He had doffed the cardinal’s
robe to assume the military uniform; under him were the cardinal De la
Valette, marshals Montmorency, Schomberg, and Bassompierre, with Sourdis,
now archbishop of Bordeaux, as administrative lieutenant. The duke of
Savoy declared himself neutral and refused to revictual Casale, though he
would allow the French free passage to go to its relief. The cardinal,
determined in spite of this treacherous ally to gain possession of the
passes into Italy, crossed the Alps at Susa and pretended he was about
to march on Turin; he then rapidly marched back and besieged Pinerolo,
which capitulated (1630). Spinola hastened to the defence of Piedmont,
and owing to his superior forces checked the advance of the French. Louis
XIII then took the command of the army himself and conquered the whole
of Savoy; but he fell ill and his place had to be taken by the duke de
Montmorency, who defeated the Spaniards at Vegliana and took possession
of the marquisate of Saluzzo on the 10th of July. However, Mantua had
been taken and Casale was sorely pressed, the French army was reduced by
sickness, reinforcements were expected from the army in Champagne and
money from Paris. The latter, however, did not arrive, for the marshal De
Marillac and his brother the chancellor, acting under the influence of
the queen-mother, neglected to send it off. Richelieu, rendered uneasy
by the intrigues of his enemies, effected a truce through the mediation
of the abbé Mazarin,[90] who had been sent from the court of Rome.
Mazarin, who was a man of supple and crafty temper, gained and retained
the confidence of Richelieu and was destined subsequently to carry on
the work which the latter had begun. At the expiration of this truce the
serious events which were passing in Germany prevailed on Austria, as we
shall see, to conclude a definite peace. This was the Peace of Ratisbon,
concluded on the 25th of October, 1630.[d] The emperor agreed to invest
the duke de Nevers and withdraw the imperial troops from his states on
the Grison passes provided that France would withdraw hers from Pinerolo
and Savoy.[a]
ENMITY OF MARIE DE’ MEDICI AGAINST RICHELIEU
The termination of war was the commencement of new perils for Richelieu.
He foresaw the fresh efforts of his enemies, and on the return of the
court to Paris, he used all the resources of his address to avert and
conciliate the resentment of the queen-mother. She dissembled, and did
not forgive. Leagued with the Marillacs, and favoured by many of the
nobility, Marie laboured to overturn the minister, who defended himself
with firmness and adroitness. Louis XIII was of a feeble mind, still more
enfeebled by a weak temperament and languid constitution. Resolution was
a state above his powers; it was to him an unnatural tension, menacing at
each instant a relapse.
Despite of this, he was clear-sighted. He loved France, was alive to
its glory and prosperity, and saw that it required the strong hand of
Richelieu to govern and to guide. He did not love the minister, indeed;
and it was thus the more to his credit that he upheld him from a sense
of his talents and utility. When Marie poured into his ear complaints
against the cardinal’s insolence, against his tyranny and domineering
ambition, Louis allowed that she was right. He acquiesced; and the
queen-mother argued from this passive assent that the king shared her
aversion and her views against the minister. She would hurry home to
her palace of the Luxembourg after such interviews, and confidently
assure her followers that her ascendency was complete, that the fall of
Richelieu was near. By that hour, however, Richelieu was closeted with
the monarch, was unfolding to him his high and masterly views of policy,
was exposing the selfish manœuvres of Marie de’ Medici; and had at length
gained in his turn such complete ascendency that the feeble Louis would
not only assent, but kindle up for the moment with warmth and friendship
towards his minister, and then, in confidence, betray the very secrets of
his mother’s converse with him. Richelieu thus drew from a certain source
the hopes, the plans, and the names of his enemies.
_The Day of Dupes_
In an interview with his mother, Louis, assenting to the justice of all
her complaints against the cardinal, had proposed that his niece first,
and then Richelieu himself, should come publicly and ask pardon of Marie
at the Luxembourg. The king intended this as a measure of conciliation.
The queen accepted it for the sake of seeing her enemy humbled.
Accordingly, on the appointed day, Madame de Combalet, the cardinal’s
niece, entered, and flung herself at the feet of Marie, imploring her
forgiveness. The latter, instead of preserving the disdain that suited
her purpose, or of assuming the air of forgiveness that the king desired,
was unable to contain her temper, and burst forth in invectives against
the suppliant lady. Madame de Combalet retreated, terrified and in tears.
The cardinal himself succeeded, equally suppliant, and was received by
the same volley of coarse vituperation. Louis XIII, scrupulous in his
ideas of dignity and delicacy, shocked at the conduct of his mother, took
the part of his minister, and reproved her; but at the same time bade
Richelieu, in the same tone of anger, to retire.[e]
Everyone was convinced of the cardinal’s disgrace; it was already
satirised on the Pont Neuf, and the little porter of the Samaritaine
indulged in a thousand grimaces in imitation of his eminence. At the
palace all minds were occupied with the approaching triumph of M. de
Marillac, lord keeper of the great seal and fairly popular with the
parliament on account of his being known to be for the interests of the
queen-mother and Gaston of Orleans.
Already presidents in caps, councillors in scarlet robes, deliberated
amongst themselves whether it would be made a criminal action to
prosecute his eminence as guilty of tyranny and peculation. The
ambassadors, watching the smallest diplomatic step in Paris, announced
the inevitable disgrace of Cardinal Richelieu to their courts, and the
increasing authority of the queen-mother. The _Mémoires_[f] relate that
Charles I, so ardent a promoter of royal prerogative, replied to the
despatch of his ambassador: “The king of France is making a great mistake
in disgracing a minister of so great competency.”
Louis XIII had set out for Versailles, that poverty-stricken palace he
was too parsimonious to restore, and had there sequestered himself. A
great concourse of people filled the apartments of Marie de’ Medici;
the crowd surrounded her and Gaston of Orleans; power was about to pass
into their hands. The queen-mother, smiling graciously, affectionately
held the hand of Anne of Austria, with whom she conversed amicably. They
treated each other as mother and daughter, although Anne of Austria,
intensely proud of her noble Spanish blood, considered herself superior
to a member of the princely and mercantile house of Florence. The court
wore a new aspect; it was thought that the days of the regency would
be reproduced and Marshal de Marillac, then with the army of Italy,
seemed a new Concini destined to enjoy the favours of Marie de’ Medici.
But the queen-mother was not sufficiently energetic. Naturally of an
indolent disposition, she easily yielded to the Italian _far niente_,
to that nerveless temperament which prevented her from prompt decision
in decisive circumstances. She did not join her son at Versailles, but
remained to be congratulated by the crowd of courtiers that surrounded
her.
[Sidenote: [1630-1631 A.D.]]
During this time the friends of Richelieu were becoming uneasy. Cardinal
de la Valette, that devoted prelate, had gone with all speed to
Versailles, and had had his arrival announced to the king. The cardinal
had been informed by Saint-Simon, the diminutive equerry and favourite,
that Louis XIII had spoken of his minister in terms that did not lead
one to suppose he was out of favour. La Valette was immediately ushered
into the king’s presence and the king smilingly said to him, “Cousin, I
think you are surprised at all that is taking place.” “Sire, more than
your majesty can imagine.” “Well, cousin, return to Cardinal Richelieu
and tell him that he is a good minister, and I desire him to come
instantly.” The minister’s friend did not wait to be told a second time.
Richelieu, who had retired to a small house in the village of Versailles,
immediately hastened to the old palace. The interview took place in the
presence of Saint-Simon, the first equerry, and the marquis de Mortemart,
the first gentleman of the household. Richelieu, throwing himself on his
knees, his customary attitude, thanked the king in humble and submissive
terms for the favour he was conferring upon him. Louis showed himself
kindly and affable. “Cousin, in you I possess the most faithful and
loving servant it were possible to find. I consider myself the more
obliged to protect you that I am cognisant of the respect and gratitude
you bear the queen, my mother. I would have forsaken you, had you not
shown these evidences of your generous nature. Be assured henceforth of
my protection. I shall know how to disperse the cabal of your enemies;
they abuse the credulity of the queen, my mother, who permits herself to
be easily prejudiced. Continue to serve me faithfully, and I will uphold
you against all those who have vowed your destruction.” “Sire,” replied
Richelieu, “solitude is a necessity to me, and I will never remain at
your court against the desire of the queen-mother.” “Cousin, it is not my
mother that you need fear, but certain mischief-making spirits about her;
I know them and I promise you they will do nothing.”[h] Thus the great
cardinal triumphed, while his enemies were rejoicing at his supposed
overthrow. The day when the queen-mother and her coterie were thus
deceived--the 11th of November, 1630--has passed into history as the “Day
of Dupes.”[a]
_Exile of Marie de’ Medici_
The popular feeling was nevertheless against Richelieu and in favour of
Marie de’ Medici, whose munificence and fête-loving habits had won the
good will of the Parisians. This had no small weight in detaining the
king at St. Germain, where he held his court, and where the two queens
appeared, although Louis scarcely spoke to them. Marie bore disgrace and
contempt with impatience; but she could now find no one hardy enough to
brave the cardinal and espouse her quarrel, except Gaston, her second
son, the rash and weak duke of Orleans. The prince imagined a singular
mode of vengeance. Accompanied by a body of young and armed companions,
he entered the cardinal’s palace, came rudely into his presence, and
apostrophised him in a rough and menacing speech. After this bootless
outrage, Gaston retired, left the capital, and proceeded to levy troops
in the provinces. Louis, on learning this sally of his brother, whom he
peculiarly disliked, took up the cause of his minister more warmly; and
attributing, not unjustly, the turbulence of Gaston to their mother, he
openly reproached her, and warned her to become reconciled to Richelieu.
Marie would not abandon her hate; and monarch and minister were obliged
to proceed to extremities.
It required much address to bring the king to this point; and Richelieu
was only enabled to reconcile Louis to use harsh measures towards his
parent by means of the confessors whom he himself had provided for his
master. These smoothed away the difficulties presented by the king’s
conscience, or rather by his filial habits. Some months passed in vain
attempts at accommodation; but the ultimate result was the flight of
Gaston and of Marie de’ Medici out of the kingdom. The latter retired
to Brussels. Thus Richelieu came triumphant from the second struggle.
Bassompierre was sent to the Bastille; the duke of Guise[91] was deprived
of his office of admiral, and went on a pilgrimage to Rome. Even the
proud and veteran Épernon was obliged to crave pardon. The parliament
objected to an ordinance of the king declaring the partisans of Gaston
guilty of high treason. They rightly argued that such a condemnation
could not be issued without trial or by other than a judge. But even from
this just position they were compelled to recede. They were summoned to
the Louvre; their edict of objection was cancelled in the presence of
Louis and his minister, and the obnoxious ordinance registered in its
stead. Richelieu showed a still more culpable contempt for the forms of
justice in the trial of the marshal De Marillac. He was brought before a
commission, which sat in the cardinal’s country-house at Ruel, accused
of a long list of crimes, of all save his true fault of conspiring with
Marie de’ Medici. Being convicted, he was beheaded in the place de Grève.
[Sidenote: [1631-1632 A.D.]]
Marillac was the second victim sacrificed to the supremacy of the
minister. The desire of vengeance and of blood grows, like other criminal
tastes, upon those who indulge and gratify it; and Richelieu stained
deeply his high reputation. Hitherto the nobility bore the tyrannic
ascendency of the cardinal with jealousy and impatience. They saw plainly
that his designs were directed against their power and independence.
Still, from want of union, and from the absence of a spirit amongst them
capable of coping with their great enemy, they held back, in trembling
though indignant submission, looked on while their chains were preparing,
and even aided to forge them. Thus they had helped to put down the
Huguenots, ever the mainstay of rebellion. They then, when too late,
sought to intrigue with Marie de’ Medici against the cardinal. The trial
of Marillac, not by his peers but by a mock commission, and the execution
of that marshal on no grounds save enmity to the minister, filled all the
noblesse with fresh indignation and alarm. And one who, from birth and
position, might well take the lead of the highborn of France in this its
cause, declared himself unhesitatingly on this occasion.
THE REVOLT OF GASTON AND THE EXECUTION OF MONTMORENCY
The duke de Montmorency was governor of Provence. He had distinguished
himself in the Italian war; had never been foremost to complain or to
intrigue; but, like his family, had been remarked for moderate and
independent principles; tolerant though orthodox in religion; a loyal
subject though no fawning courtier. In the king’s extreme illness, he had
given his word to protect the minister, and Richelieu had other causes of
gratitude.
[Illustration: A FRENCH GALLANT, FIRST HALF OF SEVENTEENTH CENTURY]
But Montmorency was now indignant at the insult offered to his rank
in the person of Marillac. He felt it equally a shame that the king’s
brother, the son of Henry IV, should be driven into exile by the enmity
of an upstart minister. Gaston had fled to Lorraine, and there passed
his time in the wooing and espousal of the duke’s daughter. Richelieu
advanced to Lorraine, and Gaston was obliged to fly. He applied to
Montmorency for protection and support, and the duke was both imprudent
and generous enough to grant it. This could be done with arms alone.
The dukes of Orleans and Montmorency therefore raised a little army,
cantoned themselves in Languedoc, and resolved to fight the royal
forces, which under Schomberg advanced against them. It appears that the
population of the south looked with disfavour on the enterprise of the
dukes, either in dread of Richelieu’s power and vengeance, or in dislike
of the aristocratic cause. The issue of the rebellion was decided in a
skirmish at Castelnaudary, where Montmorency, at the head of five hundred
followers, charged the royalists, and was taken prisoner. The news of his
capture dispersed his army, and left Gaston no resource but to join his
mother at Brussels.
It was now in the power of Richelieu to give an example of his
moderation. In pardoning Montmorency, he would have gained many hearts;
nor would his power have been less formidable. Gaston even promised
to submit, if his generous protector were spared: but Richelieu was
inexorable; he knew what would be his own fate if overthrown. He
recollected the fall of Ancre, of every favourite and minister whom
the nobles had overthrown; and private reasons of vindictiveness
concurred with the wish of making a striking example, and by the death
of Montmorency giving the same salutary warning to his order as the
execution of Biron had proved in the last reign. Richelieu had the
power of communicating his own firmness to the king. Louis resisted the
supplications of all the nobles of his court, of the princess of Condé,
Montmorency’s sister, and even the clamours of the mob, who cried under
the windows of the Louvre for mercy. The marshal De Châtillon begged the
king to show himself to the people, and to grant to their prayers the
life of the first noble of the land. “Should I obey the suggestions of
the rabble, I should not act as a king,” replied Louis, displaying that
extreme of monarchic arrogance which his posterity so deeply cherished
and so dearly expiated. The kingdom’s safety might have been an excuse
for cruelty--the pride of the monarch was none.
Montmorency owned his crime, and promised to redeem the disloyalty of
a moment by devoting his after life to the king; but he made no mean
submissions. In passing to the place of execution, he regarded the statue
of Henry IV with emotion. He was the godson of that monarch, who knew how
to unite clemency with firmness. But, shaking off thoughts of the past,
he pointed onward to the scaffold, which he said was the surest road to
heaven. In him perished the last of the lineal descendants of the great
constable, the most illustrious of which were still said to be only the
younger branch of that noble family.
FOREIGN AFFAIRS
[Sidenote: [1629-1632 A.D.]]
As soon as Richelieu felt assured that the political dissensions of
France herself would no longer obstruct his plans abroad, he marched with
firm step to that weakening of Spain and upsetting of the empire of which
Nani speaks. Henry IV and Queen Elizabeth, in pursuit of the same ends,
had sought and found the same allies. But Richelieu had better luck than
they for the execution of his designs to run across the king of Sweden.[t]
Gustavus Adolphus was young, active, bellicose and surrounded by a
military halo which permitted him to be looked upon as a future champion
of Germany against the house of Austria. He had had several clashes
with the emperor or his lieutenants over the Baltic towns, and the idea
occurred to Richelieu to make use of his sword.[l]
Richelieu arranged a truce between the young king and the Poles with whom
he was at war, in September, 1629; he then granted him by the Treaty of
Berwald, in January, 1631, a subsidy of 1,200,000 francs, and threw him
at Germany, pointing out, to excite his ardour, the immense booty to
be seized, his co-religionists to be avenged, and the great rôle to be
played on a brilliant stage.
The Thirty Years’ War was then at its height.[92] This struggle, both
religious and political, began in Bohemia in 1618, and had extended
little by little over the empire. The elector-palatine and the king of
Denmark (Christian IV) had been, one after the other, vanquished and
humiliated. The imperial army created and commanded by Wallenstein had
penetrated as far as the Baltic, crushing under foot on its way, both
Germany and her secular liberties. The oft-discussed problem of that
country--that is, its partition among independent princes or its union
under a single master, was on the point of being solved in favour of
unity under the despotism of the house of Austria. Cardinal though he
was, Richelieu acted like Francis I, like Henry II, and like Henry IV;
he undertook the cause of the German princes without regard to their
religion. His confidential agent, Father Joseph, managed the electors so
well at the diet of Ratisbon in 1630, that they wrung from the emperor
the recall of Wallenstein and the disbandment of his army, after which
they refused to give the emperor’s son the title of king of the Romans,
which Ferdinand II regarded as the implied price of these concessions. “A
miserable Capuchin,” he cried in anger, “has been clever enough to put
six electoral hats into his cowl.”
[Sidenote: [1632-1634 A.D.]]
Gustavus Adolphus fell upon the empire like a thunderbolt. He invented
new tactics which disconcerted his adversaries. He defeated Tilly near
Leipsic, killed him at the passage of the Lech, but was killed himself at
Lützen (November 8th, 1632). “The world is for others,” he cried, as he
fell. Richelieu picked up the hope and the fortune of the young hero. He
was now free from all domestic anxiety and could employ his attention and
his strength abroad. He boldly substituted in the struggle against the
Austrian house, for exhausted Denmark and for Sweden bereft of her king,
France full of youth and ardour.[u]
Richelieu still upheld his alliance with Sweden and the Protestant
powers; and thus keeping the force of Austria employed, he was enabled to
effect his next ambitious project, which was the occupation of Lorraine.
That province was in its origin feudatory to the empire, and was totally
independent of France, except that from vicinity and interest its dukes
were far more French than German. The Guises had drawn these ties closer.
And now that the duke of Lorraine had harboured the duke of Orleans,
and, against the king’s consent, had given him his daughter Margaret
in marriage, the latter had reason or pretext for anger. Richelieu, as
usual, caused an army, with the king at its head, to march to Lorraine.
The duke was alarmed, and sought to parry the attack by offering to
espouse Madame de Combalet, niece of the cardinal; but Richelieu refused
to sacrifice the interests of the state to the aggrandisement of his
family. Perhaps he saw in the offer a trap laid for him. Lorraine was
invaded; and Nancy, its capital, besieged. The duchess of Orleans
contrived to escape from it to Brussels; but Nancy fell into the power of
the king. In vain did the duke negotiate, and make submissions; equally
in vain did he resign his duchy in favour of his brother. The capital and
fortresses were held in firm possession by Richelieu.
Here fell another noble, or rather an independent prince, from having
espoused the quarrel of the duke of Orleans. Whilst the queen-mother gave
signs of increased exasperation, by suborning an attempt to carry off
the cardinal’s niece, Gaston began to be weary of exile. His favourite,
Puylaurens, who had chief influence with him, was still more anxious; and
Richelieu offered great advantages to the latter, if he would induce the
prince to submit. Gaston at length did so, quitted Brussels abruptly,
and repaired to Paris, where he was graciously and splendidly received.
Puylaurens received the hand of the cardinal’s niece, and was created
duke d’Aiguillon for his services. But Richelieu was a dangerous friend,
except to an all-devoted servant. He sought to break Gaston’s marriage;
and Gaston was obstinate in resisting. The cardinal laid the blame on
the new duke d’Aiguillon, and without further pretext arrested and shut
him up in the Bastille, where he soon after perished. Gaston was, as
usual, enraged; and, as usual, allowed his rage to evaporate in vain
menaces, and in vainer enterprises.
_Wars with Austria_
[Sidenote: [1634-1635 A.D.]]
The nobles checked, the Huguenot power destroyed, it remained to abase
still lower the house of Austria, and to extend the territories of France
at its expense. To make the Rhine the limit of the empire was the darling
aim of Richelieu, as of Henry IV. Gustavus Adolphus and the Protestant
princes of Germany had hitherto been instruments in Richelieu’s hand
to effect or further this; but, since the death of the king of Sweden,
the emperor had recovered his superiority, had defeated the Swedes,
and reduced his enemies. It behooved France no longer to confine her
efforts to negotiation; but to draw the sword, if she wished to preserve
her ascendency or to prosecute her political schemes. She demanded
certain advantages for thus declaring herself; and neither Sweden nor
the malcontent Germans were backward in paying the price. Oxenstierna,
the Swedish chancellor, ceded the fortress of Philippsburg to France.
The league of Protestants put the whole of Alsace and its important
fortresses under her protection. Lorraine was already occupied; and now
Richelieu pushed northwards, and garrisoned Treves, forming, at the
same time, a defensive alliance with Holland. Spain, informed of this
treaty, sent an expedition to surprise the town of Treves; and war was in
consequence declared by France against the emperor and the king of Spain,
in the commencement of 1635. A herald was sent to Brussels to announce
it; the last time that this species of feudal etiquette was observed.
Richelieu, the destroyer of the Huguenots, was thus leagued with the
Protestant powers of Europe against its Catholic princes--a clear proof
that his principles were politic, not bigoted. This war, which lasted
thirteen years against the emperor and twenty-five against Spain,
produced little glory to the minister, at least from its victories, and
has brought as little interest to history.[93] It is marked by as much
want of spirit as of talent. Yet the Thirty Years’ War in Germany, then
drawing to its close, was marked with both. But religious differences had
given ferocity to this war, which was carried on in the heart of Germany,
and which put daily at stake the fate of kingdoms, capitals, and creeds.
On the other hand, the war which we enter on was merely an extended
line of frontier skirmishes, idle sieges, and fitful expeditions, in
which Richelieu had the advantage, not from military but ministerial
superiority. His vigorous administration enabled France to bear the
expense and weight of the war, whilst the house of Austria, from the bad
husbandry of more immense resources, became exhausted, and towards the
close of it was in a tottering state. As to the lack of able generals, it
may be observed that great military talent must necessarily be wanting at
the commencement of a war, and that it requires half a score of years’
campaigning for the age and the nation to form its military system
anew--the old never sufficing--and to find for that system a head and an
arm capable of directing it. Turenne was a young officer at this epoch.
It was not till the following reign that he and Condé were able to assert
the superiority of French generalship.
[Sidenote: [1635-1636 A.D.]]
France entered on the campaign with four armies--one in the Low
Countries, one on the Rhine, the others in Italy, and the Valtelline.
The first exploit was one of promise and éclat. The marshal De Brézé was
marching to join the Dutch through the country of Liège. Prince Thomas
of Savoy, at the head of the Spanish, sought to prevent the junction.
He was defeated by Brézé at Avein, and lost all his cannon and colours.
Tirlemont was given up to the pillage of the victors. Louvain was
besieged, and Brussels threatened. The unfortunate Marie de’ Medici was
obliged to fly from the latter town, with the duchess of Orleans, pursued
by the good fortune of her enemy Richelieu. Chance, however, may give a
victory; talents can alone make the most of it. The French were obliged
to retire behind the Maas. They and the Dutch, most ill-assorted allies,
laid the blame of tardiness upon each other.
In the following year the imperialists had all the advantage. They
penetrated into Picardy, passed the Somme, and took Corbie. Paris was
in alarm, and her citizens began to retire southward. It was a critical
moment for Richelieu. His ascendency over the king consisted solely in
the monarch’s opinion of his sagacity and good fortune as minister. This
opinion was greatly shaken; yet Richelieu kept a good countenance, and
did all that the emergency required. He made the king show himself to
the people; he despatched reinforcements to the count de Soissons, who
commanded in Picardy. The Spanish knew as little as the French how to
push an advantage. Instead of advancing upon the capital, they passed the
time in pillaging, and were soon obliged to retreat. The court advanced
to Amiens, whilst the army besieged and endeavoured to retake Corbie.
ATTEMPT TO ASSASSINATE THE CARDINAL
Here Richelieu’s good fortune saved him from new peril. The count de
Soissons, son of that prince of the blood whose turbulence made him
conspicuous in the first year of the regency of Marie de’ Medici, had
stepped from the obscurity in which he had been kept, on the unexpected
invasion of his government by the enemy. He had valiantly resisted; but
the cardinal, who dreaded the renown of a prince of the blood, avoided
placing any large force at his disposal, and at length brought the king
himself to command and eclipse Soissons. The count vowed vengeance; he
leagued with Gaston, ever ready to commence a plot; and they agreed to
assassinate the cardinal at Amiens. Two gentlemen, named Saint-Ibal
and Montrésor, were charged with the execution, but were to wait for
the signal to be given by the duke of Orleans. An opportunity offered.
Richelieu was alone at the foot of his staircase, which he had descended
to his carriage, and in the midst of the conspirators. The agents had
their hands on pistols, eagerly watching the countenances of both the
count de Soissons and the duke of Orleans for the signal. Neither had
the courage to give it, and Richelieu walked on; for the moment he was
unsuspicious of the danger that he had escaped.
On reflection, the princes saw that the danger lay in having meditated
the deed, rather than in having executed it. They tried other means,
leagued with the Spaniards, and endeavoured to rouse the nobility to
rebel. Épernon, to whom they chiefly applied, bade them, in answer,
recollect the fate of Marillac and Montmorency. They did so, and fled
from court; the count de Soissons to Sedan, and Gaston to Blois. But the
latter was soon brought back by fair words.
CHARACTER OF LOUIS
[Illustration: A FRENCH GENTLEMAN, TIME OF LOUIS XIII]
[Sidenote: [1615-1638 A.D.]]
In the midst of these intrigues, this warfare, these struggles betwixt
nations and parties, Louis XIII was perhaps the personage who felt the
least interested. “He led,” says Madame de Motteville,[i] “the most
wretched and sad life; without court, or friends, or power; spending his
time in catching birds, whilst his armies were taking towns.” He was
plaintive, melancholy, retiring; not wanting either in good sense or
in any other manly quality, perhaps, but cursed with a diffidence that
neutralised them all. Thus he despaired of ever finding another minister
like Richelieu; and, in fear of offending the cardinal, whom he might
have controlled as well as employed, he resigned all authority into his
hands. Another idea of his, proceeding from the same diffidence, and a
great cause of discontent and sadness with him, was that he despaired
to render himself agreeable to the fair sex. He was cursed with a
bashfulness and a backwardness that he blushed to avow, and that he
concealed under the colour of apathy and suspicion. This kept Louis XIII
for a number of years a stranger to his young and not unlovely queen;
as the same defect produced, in after years, a similar result with his
descendant, Louis XVI. Anne of Austria, piqued by this coldness of her
spouse, avenged herself by ridicule and sarcasm. The king’s indifference
or distance thus became hatred; and Richelieu, who had cause to dread
the young queen, fanned the latter sentiment. Louis nevertheless felt
attracted towards female society, and he paid a kind of distant and
formal court to Mademoiselle de Hautefort. This young lady as little
understood his bashful and susceptible temper as did the queen, and Louis
soon accused them both of leaguing together to mock him. The attentions
of the king were then turned towards a new object, Mademoiselle de la
Fayette, with whom the novel of De Genlis has perhaps rendered the
reader familiar. She, of tenderer feelings and more penetration, knew
how to appreciate the timid affections of the monarch. She cherished and
returned them; never, however, overstepping the bounds of modesty. Louis,
whose reserve, or “wisdom,” to use the words of Madame de Motteville,[i]
“equalled that of the most modest dame,” at length ventured to propose an
apartment at Versailles to Mademoiselle de la Fayette, who replied, after
some hesitation, some intrigue, and certain interference, by retiring to
a convent. The king wept, and was in despair; but his scruples would not
permit him, like Louis XIV, to tear a beauty from the altar. He did not
cease, however, to visit Mademoiselle de la Fayette at her convent; and
long conversations were wont to pass between them through the _grille_
or iron railing of the parlour. The monarch felt the influence of this
virtuous young woman; her counsels, to which her piety now gave weight
and her secure position boldness, prompted him to mistrust Richelieu,
whom she represented as supporting heresy against Catholicism, and to
give peace to Europe.
[Sidenote: [1638-1641 A.D.]]
Another voice, of equal weight with the king, was pouring the same
sentiments into his ear. This was his confessor, the father Caussin, whom
Richelieu had placed in that station, but who betrayed his confidence.
To resist at once a mistress and a confessor was difficult, and the
influence of the minister began to totter. One urgent counsel given
to Louis by Mademoiselle de la Fayette and Caussin was that he should
become reconciled to his queen; they showed, and even proved to him,
that his suspicions against her were unjust. Richelieu, who observed the
changed sentiments of the king towards Anne of Austria, was alarmed, and
tried to prevent the reconciliation that he feared. Suspecting that the
queen held a correspondence with Spain, he caused the police to visit
and search her apartments at the Val de Grace. But his enemies were too
adroit: no discovery was made, and the insult served but to display the
unfounded rancour of the cardinal. After this the pious and generous
voice of Mademoiselle de la Fayette had more influence; and, obedient to
it, Louis XIII became reconciled for the time to his queen. The happy
and unexpected consequence was the birth of a prince (afterwards Louis
XIV) on the 5th of September following (1638). To this, however, the
result was limited. Richelieu regained his ascendency over the king; the
confessor was banished; Mademoiselle de la Fayette forgotten; and the
queen, though no longer banished from the king’s presence, had as little
share as before of his influence or friendship.
The fresh hold which Richelieu here took of the monarch’s confidence was
owing, in a great measure, to the success of the war. In the beginning
of the campaign two actions were fought at Rheinfelden, in the first of
which the gallant duke de Rohan perished; in the second, the duke of Saxe
Weimar defeated the imperials, and took their two generals, one of whom,
the famous Johann von Werth, was sent to Paris. The principal consequence
of this victory was the conquest of Breisach, the chief fortress of
Alsace. The name of the town reminds us again of the celebrated Father
Joseph, a Capuchin friar, the follower and confidant of Richelieu. We
can scarcely imagine a statesman and an ambassador clothed in a monk’s
frock and sandals: yet such was Father Joseph, a name more or less
mingled in all the intrigues of the French court, and its negotiations
with others. His influence was known, and he was dreaded by the court
as a kind of evil spirit, in fact the demon of Richelieu. Although the
latter never procured for his monkish friend the cardinal’s hat which he
demanded, still the people called Father Joseph his “gray eminence,” at
once to distinguish him from and assimilate him to his “red eminence”
the cardinal. They had been friends from youth; congenial spirits in
ambition, depth, and talent: the monk, however, sacrificed his personal
elevation to that of the cardinal. Richelieu was much indebted to him: it
was Joseph that roused and encouraged him, when stupefied and intimidated
by the invasion of Picardy; and it has been claimed that after his
death Richelieu showed neither the same firmness nor sagacity.[94]
When Father Joseph was on his death-bed, Richelieu stood by it: it was
a scene such as a novelist might love to paint. The conversation of
the two ecclesiastics was still of this world; and the cardinal’s last
exhortation to the expiring monk was, “Courage, Father Joseph, Breisach
is ours!” a form of consolation characteristic of both.
REVOLT OF THE COUNT DE SOISSONS (1641 A.D.)
The count de Soissons, on the failure of his scheme against the
cardinal, had taken refuge with the duke de Bouillon in Sedan. All
the enemies of the latter, especially the exiles, looked towards this
prince of the blood as the rallying-point, the support of their cause.
Richelieu employed every art to pacify the count, remove his distrust,
and entice him to court. All efforts proved vain; and Richelieu was
even obliged to purchase the tranquillity of Soissons, and tolerate his
independent posture. It was dangerous, however, to let such an example
of disobedience subsist; and the cardinal at length sent an army, under
the marshal De Châtillon, to reduce Sedan, and take or humble the count
de Soissons. Châtillon was both valorous and skilful; but nothing could
compensate for the ill humour and backwardness of the troops, who, with
their officers, felt more inclined to a gallant prince of the blood than
to the domineering cardinal. In an action that took place at La Marfée,
near Sedan, the royal troops showed neither alacrity nor determination;
and Châtillon, despite his efforts, was completely put to the rout. No
obstacle seemed now to prevent the count de Soissons from marching to
Paris, when the almost miraculous good fortune of Richelieu saved him
from ruin. As Soissons rode over the field of battle, he pushed up his
visor with his pistol; it was accidentally discharged, and the victor
perished. Report did not fail to say that he was assassinated, and, of
course, by the order of Richelieu; but there is no evidence to support
such a rumour. Louis, who, on receiving tidings of the defeat, was
preparing, with equanimity, to sacrifice the obnoxious minister, was
now struck with his unvarying good fortune; and, with a superstitious
feeling, bowed still lower to the cardinal’s will. The court did not
share the monarch’s obsequiousness.[e]
CAILLET’S ESTIMATE OF THE ADMINISTRATION OF RICHELIEU
[Sidenote: [1624-1642 A.D.]]
Having regarded the great minister of Louis XIII as the politician who,
after having conquered Protestantism and the reawakening of feudalism
at home, continued abroad the work of Francis I and Henry IV, and
finally subdued the power of Austria and laid the foundation of French
ascendency in Europe, we hope now to show that Richelieu was as great an
administrator as he was a politician, and that the sources of national
wealth, as well as what was essential for sound administration, were
subjects to which he gave deep and serious attention. It will be seen
that he did not suffer the work of regeneration, begun by Henry IV and
so disastrously interrupted by the dagger of the assassin Ravaillac, to
fall to the ground. Undertaking in his boundless energy affairs of the
most varied nature, this great genius gave a powerful impetus in every
direction to the national activity, which, having been long restrained or
wrongly directed, was ripe for producing great results.
Richelieu really laid the foundations on which Colbert and Louvois
afterwards built under the eye of Louis XIV. To him is due the final
triumph of pure monarchy, of that form of government which alone was
legitimate at that time, because it alone could bring about and maintain
unity in France. The kingship, elevated into a living symbol of the
national welfare and of the best interests of the country, became a
sort of rampart behind which Louis XIII’s minister, with indomitable
energy, and with that breadth of mind which characterises a great man,
carried on for eighteen years the work of monarchical centralisation.
What he accomplished during this immortal dictatorship, in the midst of
constantly recurring difficulties, is almost incredible. By destroying
Protestantism as a political power, Richelieu made a distinct advance
towards unity in the state. He gave a very essential bond of union to
the higher administration by establishing the council of state, which
remained practically unaltered till 1789. He rendered the triumph of
monarchical authority over the new feudalism a certainty by lessening
the excessive authority which the provincial governors had arrogated to
themselves, by establishing resident overseers, who were energetic and
obedient servants of the king, in various parts of the country to see
that the law was properly administered, that the police were properly
organised, and that the interests of the state in financial matters
were not neglected; by commanding fortified places to be destroyed; and
finally by his treatment of the most important members of the aristocracy
as well as of the royal family, whom he punished or even banished when
necessary, thus showing that the sword of the law was long enough to
reach any head, however highly placed.
He obliged the parliament to keep strictly within the limits of its own
judicial functions, and forbade its taking any part whatever in the
management of public affairs. He maintained a perpetual struggle against
provincial institutions, whose resistance, usually self-interested and
unjust, tended continually to fetter the action of the central power. But
though he abolished the power of all enemies of the royal prerogative,
Richelieu himself was capable of holding very wide and liberal views.
If he destroyed Protestantism as a political party, he rose above the
religious prejudices of his time by adhering strictly to the terms of
the treaties which had been concluded with the Protestants, and by
fearlessly bestowing his favours and his confidence on many of them. If
he compelled the nobility to renounce their claims to independence, he
opened up to them new paths to fortune and power, he enabled them to
engage in maritime commerce without any loss of dignity, he admitted
them to the royal councils, and he founded schools for them. In short,
he wished them to take the lead in the country by superiority of culture
as well as of wealth. If he failed to assemble the states-general, he
nevertheless did not claim to be independent of public opinion; he
frequently summoned assemblies of important people and explained to them,
in patriotic language, his great projects for the good of the country; he
more than once took for his text the resolutions presented to the states
of 1640 by the commons. Lastly, he created one of the most powerful
engines of modern civilisation, the periodical press, by authorising the
publication, under his patronage, of Renaudot’s _Gazette_.
Absorbed as he was by all these plans and preoccupations, Richelieu
nevertheless found time to effect important improvements in all the
public services. The statute of January, 1629, drawn up under the
direction of Marillac, the keeper of the seals, summarises and completes
the great statutes of the sixteenth century, and must be regarded as the
most important attempt at codification previous to the time of Louis
XIV. A stricter enforcement of police regulations increased the public
security, whilst the numerous hospitals and benevolent institutions of
all kinds founded at this time greatly ameliorated the condition of the
labouring classes. Nor were manufactures, agriculture, and internal
commerce neglected. Richelieu encouraged the formation of many companies
whose object was to turn to account all the riches of the soil; he had
the canal of Briare, begun in the time of Henry IV, finished, and he
made wise regulations respecting the taxation of the common people and
the allowance of provisions to be given to the troops, which improved
the condition of the rural population. He was the creator of military
administration; he gave France a merchant navy and a military navy,
he organised consulates, concluded commercial treaties with Russia,
Persia, Morocco, etc., and did much to encourage early French colonial
enterprise. Literature, science, and the arts were also in a flourishing
condition during this period. The special patronage accorded by Richelieu
to artists and men of letters, whom he extricated from the precarious and
humiliating position they had previously occupied; the creation of the
French Academy,[95] the reorganisation of the Sorbonne, the foundation of
the royal botanical gardens, of the royal press, and of the mint, prove
how large a share in the striking development of the national genius
which took place during his time may justly be claimed by the great
cardinal.
It is difficult to believe that one single man can have carried out
successfully so many plans whilst at the same time laying the foundations
of internal prosperity and of political ascendency in Europe, and that
amid such difficulties as no other statesman has ever succeeded in
surmounting. And what makes all this the more wonderful was the frailty
of the body which contained this invincible spirit, and which was
liable to be prostrated by illness at any moment. Although Richelieu’s
health was extremely delicate, and he was constantly falling ill,
this extraordinary man seemed able to make his body obey his mind. He
usually went to bed at eleven o’clock, and would sleep for three or four
consecutive hours; then he would do some writing himself or dictate to
a secretary till about six o’clock, at which time he would go to sleep
again till between seven and eight, when he rose. Avenel has clearly
proved that Richelieu kept some confidential secretaries night and day
about his person, but that he had no offices. The secretaries of state,
who were nothing more than his head clerks, used to come for his orders,
get the necessary work done in their own offices, bring it when required
to the prime minister for his inspection, and then signed the documents
themselves. Richelieu only signed what was written in his own study.
Father Joseph himself does not seem to have been permitted, any more than
were the secretaries, the privilege of supervising the minutes signed
by the cardinal. The latter wished everything to be seen and done by
himself. To our thinking, nothing more striking could be conceived than
the picture of this statesman fighting against sleep and death for every
moment of his existence, in order to consecrate it to the glory of France.
What is specially characteristic of Richelieu, and gives him a distinct
position among the founders of unity in France, is the clearness and
the grandeur of his projects. Without foreseeing all the results of his
system, results which he would no doubt have been unwilling to accept,
he inaugurated with power and splendour that last social phase which the
modern world was to pass through, before the light of a new era should
shine upon it. Raising the kingship above family ties, and above all the
traditions of precedent, he detached from it all foreign elements, and,
isolating it within its own sphere, as a pure idea, he made it the living
personification of the public welfare and the best interests of the
nation. Thanks to this formidable weapon he broke away definitely from
the traditions of the Middle Ages, and caused French society to enter
once for all on the path of civil unity and equality. From the time of
Louis the Fat to that of Louis XIV, the kingship had always pursued the
mission which providence seemed to have laid upon it, to draw towards the
shadow of the throne all the varied and inimical forces which divided the
country between them; but there had been unfortunate intervals when it
seemed almost as if the spirit of disaffection and anarchy would finally
prevail, as happened after the reigns of Philip the Fair, Charles V,
Louis XI, and after the death of Henry IV. From the time of Richelieu,
the work of monarchical centralisation met with no further check. The
kingship, having reached the height to which this great minister had
raised it, was only to descend from that position in order to make way
for a still wider and more productive form of government.
THE CHURCH AND THE STATE UNDER RICHELIEU
[Sidenote: [1624-1639 A.D.]]
Two great facts are of paramount importance in the history of the church
of France during the first half of the seventeenth century. On the one
hand a sort of intellectual and moral regeneration, a true religious
renascence, was taking place in her midst, a movement which might be
compared to the literary renascence which had taken place in lay society
in the preceding century. On the other hand, the question so long debated
between the temporal and the spiritual power was at last decided in
favour of the former. Richelieu fought desperately against ultramontanism
and loudly proclaimed the absolute independence of the civil power, and
the necessity of having a national clergy whose interests should be bound
up with those of the state.
The religious wars had left the French clergy in a deplorable condition.
The church of France was in such a lax state that she seemed in danger
of losing the fruits of the victory she had gained, by the incapacity or
the vices of her members. However, we may say at once that this state
of religious decadence was not irremediable. It was necessary to take
prompt measures for reform, but the machinery for the work was there,
and in greater completeness than appeared at first sight. It was only
awaiting the workmen who were to set it in motion. If the wars of the
league were responsible for great crimes and terrible outrages, they had
also produced great virtues and fine characters. Men’s minds, somewhat
enervated at the beginning of the sixteenth century by the introduction
of a new morality, had regained their vigour in the struggle. Having
erred temporarily they were nevertheless not weakened, and when the
combat was over they felt an intense craving for action and for a living
faith; two forces which, well directed, can accomplish wonders.
This condition of mind also explains the very practical tendency shown
by the religious movement which then took place. Indeed one of the most
remarkable features of this regeneration of French Catholicism was, as
Henri Martin[p] observes, the predominance of the practical over the
ascetic and contemplative element.
Richelieu did not intend to exclude either the nobility or the clergy
from the administration of state affairs; on the contrary he treated the
clergy just as he did the aristocracy. He sought to introduce members of
the order into the king’s councils, but only on condition that they were
sufficiently enlightened to be worthy of such a position. He acted in
the same way with regard to the clergy. We see him giving most important
positions, both military and naval, to ecclesiastics. What he insisted
upon was that these two orders of the nobility and clergy should not
subordinate the interests of the state to their own, as they had been
too prone to do in former times. He wished the clergy to be part of the
state and to belong to the state, and to contribute a fair proportion
towards public expenses. In a word, he wished for a national clergy.
Therefore in his struggles to maintain, in the civil power as well as in
the religious order, the ascendency of the patriotic principles of the
true Gallican spirit, Richelieu found himself supported by his bitterest
opponent, the parliament, and deserted by the majority of the clergy,
who saw in this extension of the civil power the possible abolition of
their own privileges. In 1625, the clergy, in order to defend themselves
from the constant demands for money made on them by the government, had
decided that in future no deputy could vote subsidies under any pretext
without having expressly received full powers in the matter, and that
the opposition of a single province should be sufficient to annul the
resolutions of the assembly. Richelieu replied that he could not admit
the principle in virtue of which the clergy were claiming absolute
immunity from taxation; that the needs of the state were real, while
those of the church were chimerical and arbitrary; that if the king’s
armies had not repulsed the enemy the clergy would have suffered much
more.
The struggle about taxation between the civil power and the clergy
attained still more formidable proportions in 1638. Richelieu seems to
have made use of the brothers Dupuy to prepare the ground on which he
intended openly to attack the immunities of the clergy in the matter
of taxation. Pierre Dupuy in conjunction with his brother Jacques
published anonymously, about the middle of 1638, his great work on the
_Liberties of the Gallican Church_. He collected in the first volume
some very daring tracts on the subject; then, following his usual
method, he supported them by a second volume of official acts and
significant precedents, systematically arranged under the title _Proofs
of the Liberties_. In the tracts, published mostly during the troubles
of the league, when the national orthodoxy of France was called in
question, it was stated amongst other things that the pope had exercised
no jurisdiction at all over the Gallican church during the first six
centuries; that in the time of Clovis the sovereign head of the church
after Jesus Christ was the king, not the pope; that the pope had no
right to issue excommunications outside his own diocese; that there
is no instance of either the popes or their legates presiding at any
council held in Gaul before 742; that the said popes had not then any
title which placed them above the other archbishops, and indeed did not
possess any which was not common to them all. As for the proofs, “great
care had been taken not to draw deductions from the acts; our kings, the
assembled bishops of France, the parliament, and other sovereign bodies,
the universities and some of the communities of the kingdom, were the
authors of this work.” This was an adroit way of assuming the consent of
the whole nation during many centuries.
The clergy understood the significance of the attack, and protested
strongly against doctrines which they thought would declare them
independent of Rome only to make them the slaves of temporal power. On
the 9th of February, 1639, eighteen bishops met at the house of Cardinal
de la Rochefoucauld and drew up a letter denouncing “this work of the
devil” to their colleagues in a most violent manner. The cardinal
undertook to deliver this letter to Richelieu. How the minister replied
is not known; but from that time edicts more violent than ever were
issued against the clergy.
[Sidenote: [1639-1640 A.D.]]
Amongst the bishops was one, the bishop of Chartres, who was entirely
devoted to the cardinal, and who supported him strongly in his struggle
with the church. He succeeded, it is said, in recovering a copy of all
the edicts issued against the church in the most disturbed times and
sent them to the superintendent Bullion. The latter made a report on
them to the cardinal, and on the 16th of April, 1639, appeared an edict
in which it was set forth that “ecclesiastics, communities, and other
persons falling under the statute of mortmain are incapable of holding
real property in France, that the king can compel them to pay dues on it
within a year and a day of acquiring it, and in default of this the king
may add the said property to his own domains; that the king is willing
nevertheless to be satisfied with the payment of the indemnity for royal
and feudal rights, which is due to him by his claims under mortmain; his
majesty commands that these rights shall be sought out wherever they
exist, in all sorts of livings, foundations, hospitals, confraternities,
etc., excepting only the new communities, established thirty years ago,
of the Jesuits and the Carmelites.” The edict commanded that the research
should extend as far back as 1520. This was, according to financiers,
a matter of nearly eighty millions for the state. A short time after,
an order appeared commanding the alienation of 200,000 livres a year
on the Hôtel-de-Ville, guaranteed for five years only by the clergy,
and imposing on the latter a perpetual responsibility for these 200,000
livres, and this without their own consent. The irritation of the clergy
had reached a climax. They protested forcibly against this measure.
Richelieu thought it would not be wise to push things to extremities. A
declaration issued on the 7th of January, 1640, announced that the king
would be satisfied with a levy of 3,600,000 livres as a compensation for
his royal rights.
It was then that Dupuy, seeing that the king’s authority was waning,
published a violent discourse in defence of the king. Upon this an
obscure priest named Hersent undertook in a Latin pamphlet, entitled
_Optatus gallus_, to defend the rights of the church and denounce the
machinations of those who were trying, he said, to foster schism in
France. The parliament by a decision dated March 23rd, 1640, ordered
the _Optatus gallus_ to be torn up and burned “as casting doubt on the
authority bestowed on sovereign princes by God.” On the 28th of the same
month, the archbishop of Paris, F. de Gondi, with Léonor d’Étampes bishop
of Chartres, Nicolas bishop of Orleans, and Séguier bishop of Meaux,
signed a declaration couched in almost the same terms, and having for
its special object to repel most decidedly the accusation of schism made
against the cardinal and a portion of the French clergy by the author of
the _Optatus gallus_.
As for the government, it recommenced its attacks on the clergy and,
no longer satisfied with the 3,600,000 livres at first demanded, it
called upon all holders of livings to pay over the sixth part of their
income for two years (6th of October, 1640). The edict was published
under the seal, and a chamber was established at the Louvre composed of
councillors of state, both ecclesiastic and lay, and magistrates, whose
function it was to carry out the provisions of the edict and settle the
law. Berland, the prior of St. Denis-de-la-Chartre, who, having entered
the clerical agency and not being recognised as an agent, had not the
keys of the archives at his disposal, had the audacity to break in the
doors and carry off the old assessment rolls, amongst them that of 1583,
and to hand them over to the superintendent. When the new assessment
was drawn up the agents of the clergy were desired to sign it. The abbé
Saint-Vincent immediately formed an opposition party. This was suppressed
by a decision of the 10th of November, which also forbade the agents
“to hold any meeting either general or particular without the king’s
permission.” The abbé Saint-Vincent then wrote to the dioceses telling
them that all was lost. They decided to write to the cardinal and even
the king, to appeal to his holiness, and to order public prayers to
be offered up. In short, the clergy were in a state of indescribable
tumult. The most violent accusations were hurled against this tyrant,
this apostate, who was violating the privileges of the church, and trying
to reduce her to a state of slavery which was quite unprecedented.
Richelieu, however, who was at this time involved in a gigantic struggle
against Austria and Spain, was anxious to be freed from all these
entanglements at home. He appeared to give way and agreed to accept from
an ecclesiastical assembly what he found it difficult to obtain by force.
A general assembly was summoned at Mantes at the beginning of 1641. The
government demanded 6,600,000 livres in all. The debate was long and
stormy. The sieur d’Émeri was deputed by the king to signify to the
archbishops of Sens and Toulouse and the bishops of Évreux, Maillezais,
Bazas, and Toulon that they must leave the town, and each one retire to
his own diocese without passing through Paris.
On the other hand the minority, who were devoted to Richelieu, made some
very bold speeches. The affair finally ended according to Richelieu’s
desires. The government reduced its claims to five and a half millions,
which were voted by the majority on the 27th of May.[r]
THE CONSPIRACY OF CINQ-MARS (1641-1642 A.D.)
[Sidenote: [1641-1642 A.D.]]
One more effort was made to shake off the trammels of the hated cardinal.
A conspiracy was entered into to deliver the land by the old Roman method
of putting the tyrant to death; and the curious part of the design is
that it was formed almost in the presence of the king.[j]
Louis XIII had at that time a favourite, Henry d’Effiat, son of the
old marshal and marquis de Cinq-Mars. He was a young man of twenty-two
years of age, with a handsome face, finished manners, magnificent and
extravagant. The king, always gloomy, found the need of an agreeable
person, capable of diverting his thoughts, and even of amusing him.
Having formed an affection for Cinq-Mars, he gave him in succession the
posts of keeper of the wardrobe and grand equerry. Richelieu, whose close
observation extended even over the intimate friends of Louis XIII, did
not take umbrage at the favour bestowed upon a young man of so frivolous
a nature, son of a father who had been one of his most devoted servants,
and step-brother of the marshal De Meilleraie; on the contrary he felt
that the equerry usurped the place in the king’s confidence of one of his
declared enemies, Mademoiselle de Hautefort.
But Cinq-Mars was a young madman and, as Monglat said, too presumptuous.
Intoxicated by his success, thinking he could do in all things as he
pleased, he began to show an inordinate ambition. He dreamed of the
fortune of Luynes; he wished to be a duke and a peer, and to command
the armies. Richelieu treated him like a child. Louis XIII had enough
strength of mind to resist these follies, but not sufficient to send
him away from him. He quarrelled with him, became reconciled again, and
treated him as if he were a spoiled child. They called the equerry “the
king’s plaything.” Cinq-Mars--offended at the way in which the cardinal
snubbed him, encouraged, moreover, by the society of the Marais in which
he was considered a success, and which was not afraid to show political
opposition, in words at least--thought that he could, thanks to the
liberty which Louis XIII granted him, compass the downfall of Richelieu.
Louis XIII, like everyone else, felt the burden of his powerful
minister’s rule. He allowed his favourite to talk; he even listened to
him willingly, without taking him seriously. At heart he looked upon
Richelieu as a necessary man and one whom he could not do without, as
much from habit as from a conviction of the superiority of his genius. He
told Cinq-Mars that he need never think of replacing him. Cinq-Mars then,
with his daring and swift imagination, conceived the most incoherent
ideas, such as killing the cardinal, waiting for his death, which the
failing condition of his health made him think might be very soon, or
bribing Gaston who would become regent if the king were to die. Each day
he changed his plans, deciding upon no particular one. He had made vows,
and probably more than vows, for the success of the count de Soissons.
After the battle of La Marfée, he was advised to leave court, because of
the suspicions that had arisen against him; he refused, hoping to refute
them by his presence, and to think of some new plan by which he could
compass the end he desired.
[Illustration: HENRI COIFFIER DE RUZÉ, MARQUIS DE CINQ-MARS
(1620-1642)]
Notwithstanding the risk, he formed a conspiracy. He tried to come to
an understanding with the duke of Orleans, who might become regent, and
also with the duke de Bouillon, whose fortress of Sedan was admirably
situated to furnish him a refuge should he be obliged to fly from France.
It was beginning over again the plot of the count de Soissons. Gaston
answered vaguely, according to his custom, leaving others to act, and
doing nothing himself. Bouillon showed himself more decided. Although
he had accepted from the cardinal the command of the Italian army,
he believed himself able, should the conspiracy prove unsuccessful,
to withdraw to Sedan, and there await the death of the king. Francis
Augustus de Thou, son of the historian, an inconsistent, restless, and
nervous person, served as a go-between for the equerry, with the duke
de Bouillon, and even with the queen. Bouillon simply observed that an
army was necessary to protect Sedan. Cinq-Mars and Gaston then sent into
Spain an agent, Fontrailles, with some blank signatures, to demand troops
and a subsidy, and to propose a treaty. Olivares seized this opportunity
to cause Richelieu trouble. Seriously or not, he accepted the proposals
which Fontrailles made to him; he signed the treaty, scarcely discussing
the terms of it, and contented himself with exacting from the princes
a promise to restore to peace all that France had wrested from Spain.
Fontrailles returned to Narbonne, where he found the conspiracy half
divulged, and the head equerry decided to undertake nothing until he knew
how the cardinal’s illness would end. The duke of Orleans, carried away
by the passion and zeal of some of his followers, but always irresolute
and full of contradictions, had not left Blois; Bouillon was in Italy
at the head of the army, they could not even communicate with one
another. Fontrailles took a great deal of trouble to establish a secret
correspondence between them. It was not only the illness of the cardinal
that induced them to wait, but also the striking failure of the king’s
health. Cinq-Mars only looked upon the treaty as a last resource which
they could keep back for a time. Gaston demanded that it should be given
to him; then when Cinq-Mars, after much resistance, decided to send it to
him, he kept it without signing it, or addressing the ratification to the
governors of the Spanish Netherlands, as they had agreed to. Fontrailles
fled to England.
RECOVERY AND TRIUMPH OF RICHELIEU
For a whole month Richelieu hung between life and death. At last he
recovered, not indeed his health, but that energy which even suffering
could not keep under. Prostrated by infirmity and pain, he appeared
to have scarcely a spark of life, but, notwithstanding, never has one
seen a finer example of Bossuet’s _mot_: “A courageous soul is master
of the body it animates.” Retiring to Tarascon, a healthful and lonely
town, under the care of the count d’Alais, governor of Provence, the
cardinal, in spite of illness and absence, did not cease to rule the
king, the government, and the army. A rumour was circulated that his
retirement was due to fear; his enemies made a last attempt to destroy
his influence over Louis XIII, but he triumphed over them on this as
on all former occasions. The king, wearied by the length of the siege
of Perpignan, and ill himself, left the camp to establish himself at
Narbonne. There he fell a prey to the most contrary anxieties. He saw
himself beset and spied upon on one side by Cinq-Mars, on the other by
Chavigny and the Noyers. But, apart from the fact that he was in no wise
willing to sacrifice Richelieu, he could perceive that the principal
leaders and officers of the army were partisans of the cardinal, that
the vain boastings of the equerry were displeasing to the military men,
and that the latter indulged the maddest schemes for making himself well
thought of. He was already very weary of his favourite, when on the 10th
of June, 1642, he received a copy of the Spanish treaty that Richelieu
sent to him at Narbonne by the intervention of Chavigny. How did this
copy get into the cardinal’s hands? No one could tell; according to the
most likely conjectures, he obtained it through one of his secret agents
or by the treachery of the abbé De la Rivière, who sought his favour, or
through a servant of the duke of Orleans. Louis XIII was most indignant,
and no longer hesitated. On the 12th he ordered Cinq-Mars, De Thou, and
two others, to be arrested. Cinq-Mars remained concealed all one day in a
house in the town, but he was discovered, and imprisoned in the citadel
of Montpellier. Bouillon was arrested in Italy by his brigadiers at the
head of the very army that he commanded. Gaston only was not pursued. The
abbé De la Rivière came in his name to acknowledge his fault and to beg
for the royal pardon.
The king went to Tarascon to the cardinal to assure him that his
sentiments had not changed, and that he wished to await with him the end
of this great trial. We are told how Richelieu was in bed; how Louis,
himself ill, was obliged to have a bed made up for himself by the side
of Richelieu, and how they discussed thus the measures they ought to
take. They decided that Gaston should be questioned and then pardoned,
but on the condition of his making a full confession, the only means of
convicting the accused parties. Louis XIII was unable to return to the
army; he went to Fontainebleau by easy stages, arriving there the 23rd
of July. Whilst on the road he heard of the death of his mother; Marie
de’ Medici had left England, where her presence was looked upon as a
public encumbrance. Not finding the inhabitants either of Spain or of
Holland willing to receive her, she went to Cologne where, at the house
of the archbishop elector, she terminated the anxieties of her wandering
life. The chancellor and the members of parliament claimed that a prince
could not be cross-examined like anyone else, and that it was necessary
he should give his declaration in writing. This mode of procedure had
been adopted towards the duke of Orleans. The judges received his
declaration at Villefranche on their way to Lyons, where the commission
would sit. This commission was composed of state counsellors, of
masters of requests, and of several members of the Grenoble parliament.
Cinq-Mars had been transferred from the citadel of Montpellier to that
of Pierre-Scize. De Thou had been taken to Lyons in a boat towed up the
Rhone by that of the cardinal. Bouillon was brought there from his side.
Richelieu had started by going up the Rhone slowly, for he could not
bear the least fatigue. As this navigation was very laborious, he left
the river at Valence and was placed in a great litter, or room, made
expressly and carried upon the shoulders of his musketeers, who succeeded
each other in relays. He was partially paralysed, incapable of moving or
even of signing anything; nevertheless he never ceased working, having
beside his bed in this portable room a chair and a table for a secretary.
In this fashion he arrived at Lyons. He remained there only a few days,
leaving before the end of the trial, and continuing his strange journey,
partly by land, partly by the Loire and the recently finished canal of
Briare.
Gaston’s declarations left no doubt as to the reality of the plot.
Cinq-Mars did not deny it; he owned to everything, and appeared before
his judges with a bearing as noble as it was courageous. As for De Thou,
he had played an absurd part, and one full of contradictions; “he was
concerned in everything,” said Fontrailles,[k] “and denied knowledge of
anything.” Priding himself upon a scrupulous loyalty and delicacy of
conscience, he was made the confidant of all the conspirators and all
the conspiracies invented against the cardinal and against the king.
He had got it into his head that his name, his character, his title of
former minister of state would assure him a high place in the government
that should succeed to that of Richelieu. He was then mixed up with the
enemies of the cardinal; he had even, which was far more serious, warned
the queen of what was being prepared. Of his complicity there was no
doubt. His guilt was not so certain.
The judges passed a sentence of death. Cinq-Mars was condemned
unanimously; De Thou unanimously but for one voice. The execution took
place at once upon a scaffold erected in the middle of the place des
Terreaux (September 13th). The grand equerry and his friend died with as
much dignity as resignation. De Thou, whose eager mind was filled with
the deepest sentiments of religion, showed a martyr’s enthusiasm. Neither
of them protested against the blow which struck them, but their youth,
the sensation they had caused, the candour of their answers at the trial,
their noble bearing upon the scaffold deeply affected the town of Lyons.
“M. de Thou,” wrote Marca, one of the judges, “died like a Christian and
a brave man. M. le Grand also showed an equal firmness and met his death
with an admirable confidence, composure, and Christian devotion.” The
sight of this execution awoke a very natural pity, seeing that the public
knew little of the details of the plot. It was regarded as the last act
of vengeance of a minister who felt his power ebbing with his life.[l]
THE LAST DAYS OF RICHELIEU
[Sidenote: [1642-1643 A.D.]]
The tempestuous year of 1642 was drawing to a glorious close. Fortune,
after long wavering, threw itself on the side of France. Austria
was humiliated and France was in the ascendency. Henry IV had won
independence for her, Richelieu gave her supremacy; the work of Charles V
and Philip II was undone forever. France resumed the position at the head
of the nations which she had held when she led Europe in the Crusades
of the Middle Ages. This grand symphony of victories resounded about a
funeral pyre. All these conquered standards were lowered before a dying
man. The epic poem that astonished the world for eighteen years was not
to lack a majestic end; the hero was to be buried in the triumph which
providence did not permit him to complete.
The victory over Cinq-Mars, and above all the general success of the
French policy, had for a few months brought back the life that was ebbing
away; but the slow dissolution of the worn-out organism had continued. On
the evening of the 28th of November Richelieu, after returning from Ruel
to the palais Cardinal, was taken with a violent fever, with pain in the
side, and spitting of blood; four bleedings were insufficient to allay
the fever. On the 2nd of December public prayers were offered for the
sick man in all the churches of Paris, and the king came from St. Germain
to see him. Richelieu talked to Louis like a man resigned to death,
asked him to protect his family in memory of his services, recommended
to him the ministers Noyers and Chavigny, and especially Mazarin whom he
represented, it is said, as the person most capable of filling his own
place; and finally submitted to the king a declaration which he had just
had drafted against the duke of Orleans, to exclude that prince from all
right to the regency and the administration of the kingdom in case of the
death of the king. This was the last service that Richelieu rendered to
France.
After the visit of the king the cardinal, feeling worse, asked the
physicians how long he might still live. They, wishing to flatter the
master to the very mouth of the tomb, replied that there was no need to
despair--that God, seeing how necessary he was to the welfare of France,
would intervene to save him. The cardinal shook his head and calling
back one of the royal surgeons said, “Speak to me with open heart, not
as a physician but as a friend.” “Monseigneur,” said the physician, “in
twenty-four hours you will be dead or well.” “That’s the way to talk!”
said Richelieu, “I like that.” He sent for the curate of St. Eustace,
his parish. “Here is my Judge,” he said when the consecrated host was
presented to him, “my Judge who is soon to pronounce my sentence. I pray
him to condemn me if in my ministry I have followed any other end than
the welfare of religion and of the state.” “Do you forgive your enemies?”
asked the curé. “I have never had any but the enemies of the state.”
Most of those present contemplated the dying man with admiration, some
with fear. “Here,” said Cospéan, the bishop of Lisieux, “is an assurance
that dismays me!” Doubtless Richelieu,[m] in order to fortify his
conscience, repeated the maxims of those two Latin testaments which
contain his supreme thought; his official will in which he disposes of
his dignities and his wealth concerns only his family; the other two are
addressed to posterity. “I have been severe to some,” he said, “in order
to be good to all. I have loved justice and not vengeance.” Was he very
sure of it? “I have tried to give to Gaul the boundaries that nature
intended for it, to identify Gaul with France, and to establish the new
Gaul wherever the old one was.”
On the afternoon of the 3rd of December the king came to see the cardinal
for the last time. The physicians, having no more hope, had given up the
sick man to empirics, who gave him a little relief. But his feebleness
was increasing; on the morning of the 4th, feeling the approach of death,
he made his niece, the duchess d’Aiguillon retire, as she was “the person
whom he had most loved,” according to his own words. This was the only
moment, not of weakness, but of tenderness, that he had; his indomitable
firmness had not given way during his long suffering. All present,
ministers, generals, relatives, and servants, burst into tears; for this
terrible man was, according to the testimony of his least favourable
contemporaries, “the best master, relative, and friend that ever was
known.” Towards noon he heaved a deep sigh, then a feebler one, then
his body collapsed and was still; his great soul was gone. He had lived
fifty-seven years and three months, the same number of years as Henry IV.
Human judgments [continues Martin] have been and still are contradictory
concerning this minister of salutary harshness, this strong-armed
labourer who is accused of having pulled up from French soil the good
grain along with the tares. The most opposite opinions are in league
for and against his memory. Before 1789 lords and commons, after 1789
ultramontanes and a large part of the liberals heap abuse upon him.
Retz[n] claims that Cardinal Richelieu traded on all the evil intentions
and all the ignorance of the last two centuries, in order to form in the
most legitimate of monarchies the most scandalous and most dangerous
tyranny. Montesquieu[o] believes that “the most harmful citizens of
France” were Richelieu and Louvois.
On the other hand the partisans of unity and of strong and vigorous
power, whether monarchists or democrats, rise in favour of the great
man, as do all those who put the love of country above all other social
or political sentiments. The _Moniteur_ of 1789, as the mouthpiece of
this party, exclaims with the voice of the Revolution itself: “Let
the aristocrats rage against the memory of this intrepid minister who
overthrew their pride and avenged the people for the oppression of the
great. By sacrificing great victims to the tranquillity of the state he
became its pacifier. He was the first to apply true remedies to the root
of the evil by degrading the intermediate powers that had enslaved the
nation for nearly nine centuries. Nothing that can make a vast kingdom
powerful and glorious escaped his indefatigable activity.”
The popular instinct however has not decided the question as it has for
Henry IV. The abstract and half veiled greatness of this invalid who
from his bed overturned empires has not taken hold of the heart and the
imagination of the unlettered masses and imprinted its pale mysterious
figure in ineffaceable lines. The man who did most for the greatness of
France is little known by the French people: is this the punishment for
his severity towards the suffering masses and for his harsh maxims? “If
the people were too much at ease, it would not be possible to hold them
within the rules of their duty.”[p]
When the king heard of the death of his minister he coldly remarked: “A
great statesman is dead.” He survived him but six months. A few days
before his death he named Anne of Austria regent and Gaston, his brother,
lieutenant-general of the kingdom. Louis XIII felt great remorse for the
assassination of Marshal d’Ancre and for his treatment of his mother, the
queen. He died at the château St. Germain, at the age of forty-two years.
One of his contemporaries says of him that he was so indifferent in his
government that all the world awaited his death with impatience, even
those who owed most to him.[c]
STEPHEN’S ESTIMATE OF LOUIS XIII AND OF RICHELIEU
Louis XIII [says Stephen] was a man of large and just capacity. His ideas
of the duties of his station were princely and magnanimous. He lived in
profound submission to the law of his conscience, in the fear of God,
and in veneration for all men in whom he saw, or thought he saw, any
image, however faint, of the divine beneficence and power. But he was of
a feeble, indolent, and melancholy spirit. He was habitually wrapt in
reveries, sometimes splendid, though more often gloomy; but he was always
incapable of prompt or decisive action. Though a king, he never was and
never could have been a free man. It was among the necessities of his
existence to live under the government of a master. After selecting and
rejecting many such, he at length submitted himself to the dominion of
Richelieu, and thenceforward endured that bondage to the last. He endured
it certainly, neither from attachment nor from fear, but because, as
often as he struggled to regain his liberty, his efforts were baffled by
his admiration of the genius of his great minister, and by his persuasion
that no other man could so effectually promote the welfare of his state
and people.
Richelieu, on the other hand, was one of the rulers of mankind, in virtue
of an inherent and indefeasible birthright. His title to command rested
on that sublime force of will, and decision of character, by which, in
an age of great men, he was raised above them all. It is a gift which
supposes and requires in him on whom it is conferred, convictions too
firm to be shaken by the discovery of any unperceived or unheeded
truths. It is, therefore, a gift, which, when bestowed on the governors
of nations, also presupposes in them the patience to investigate, the
capacity to comprehend, and the genius to combine, all those views of the
national interest, under the guidance of which their inflexible policy is
to be conducted to its destined consummation. For the stoutest hearted of
men, if acting in ignorance, or under the impulse of haste or of error,
must often pause, often hesitate, and not seldom recede. Richelieu was
exposed to no such danger. He moved onwards to his predetermined ends
with that unfaltering step which attests, not merely a stern immutability
of purpose, but a comprehensive survey of the path to be trodden, and a
profound acquaintance with all its difficulties and all its resources. It
was a path from which he could be turned aside neither by his bad nor by
his good genius; neither by fear, lassitude, interest, or pleasure; nor
by justice, pity, humanity, or conscience.
The idolatrous homage of mere mental power, without reference to
the motives by which it is governed, or to the ends to which it is
addressed,--that blind hero-worship, which would place Wallenstein and
Gustavus Adolphus on the same level, and extol with equal warmth the
triumphs of Cromwell and of Washington, though it be a modern fashion,
has certainly not the charm of novelty. On the contrary it might, in
the language of the Puritans, be described as one of the “old follies of
the old Adam”; and, to the influence of that folly, the reputation of
Richelieu is not a little indebted.
In his estimate, the absolute dominion of the French crown and the
grandeur of France were convertible terms. They seemed to him but as two
different aspects of the great consummation to which every hour of his
political life was devoted. In approaching that ultimate goal, there were
to be surmounted many obstacles which lie distinctly perceived, and of
which he has given a very clear summary in his _Testament Politique_.
“When it pleased your majesty,” he says, “to give me not only a place
in your council, but a great share in the conduct of your affairs, the
Huguenots divided the state with you. The great lords were acting not
as your subjects, but as independent chieftains. The governors of your
provinces were conducting themselves like so many sovereign princes.
Foreign affairs and alliances were disregarded. The interest of the
public was postponed to that of private men. In a word, your authority
was, at that time, so torn to shreds, and so unlike what it ought to be,
that, in the confusion, it was impossible to recognise the genuine traces
of your royal power.”
Before his death, Richelieu had triumphed over all these enemies, and
had elevated the house of Bourbon upon their ruins. He is, perhaps,
the only human being who ever conceived and executed, in the spirit of
philosophy, the design of erecting a political despotism; not, indeed,
a despotism like that of Constantinople or Teheran, but a power which,
being restrained by religion, by learning, and by public spirit, was to
be exempted from all other restraints; a dynasty, which like a kind of
subordinate province, was to spread wide its arms for the guidance and
shelter of the subject multitude; itself the while inhabiting a region
too lofty to be ever darkened by the mists of human weakness, or of human
corruption.
To devise schemes worthy of the academies of Laputa, and to pursue them
with all the relentless perseverance of Cortes or of Clive, has been
characteristic of many of the statesmen of France, both in remote and in
recent times. Richelieu was but a more successful Mirabeau. He was not
so much a minister as a dictator. He was rather the depositary, than the
agent, of the royal power. A king in all things but the name, he reigned
with that exemption from hereditary and domestic influences, which has so
often imparted to the papal monarchs a kind of preterhuman energy, and
has as often taught the world to deprecate the celibacy of the throne.
Richelieu was the heir of the designs of Henry IV, and the ancestor
of those of Louis XIV. But they courted, and were sustained by, the
applause and the attachment of their subjects. He passed his life in
one unintermitted struggle with each, in turn, of the powerful bodies
over whom he ruled. By a long series of well-directed blows, he crushed
forever the political and military strength of the Huguenots. By his
strong hand, the sovereign courts were confined to their judicial
duties, and their claims to participate in the government of the state
were scattered to the winds. Trampling under foot all rules of judicial
procedure and the clearest principles of justice, he brought to the
scaffold one after another of the proudest nobles of France, by sentences
dictated by himself, to extraordinary judges of his own selection; thus
teaching the doctrine of social equality, by lessons too impressive
to be misinterpreted or forgotten by any later generation. Both the
privileges, in exchange for which the greater fiefs had surrendered
their independence, and the franchises, for the conquest of which the
cities, in earlier times, had successfully contended, were alike swept
away by this remorseless innovator. He exiled the mother, oppressed the
wife, degraded the brother, banished the confessor, and put to death
the kinsman and favourites of the king, and compelled the king himself
to be the instrument of these domestic severities. Though surrounded by
enemies and by rivals, his power ended only with his life. Though beset
by assassins, he died in the ordinary course of nature. Though he had
waded to dominion through slaughter, cruelty, and wrong, he passed to his
great account amidst the applause of the people, with the benedictions
of the Church; and, as far as any human eye could perceive, in hope, in
tranquillity, and in peace.[v]
[Illustration: COSTUMES OF THE PERIOD OF LOUIS XIII]
FOOTNOTES
[88] [Thomas Wolsey (1471-1530), the celebrated English cardinal, was
prime minister of Henry VIII. Cardinal George d’Amboise (1460-1510) was
the minister of Louis XII of France (see pp. 294 and 303).]
[89] [The war in North Italy cut off Spain from the Netherlands, now that
England dominated the sea. Hence the great importance of Richelieu’s
plan.]
[90] [Giulio Mazarini, born at Piscina, Italy, July 14th, 1602; died at
Vincennes, France, March 9th, 1661. He was to be Richelieu’s successor
and scarcely his inferior in power.]
[91] [Charles IV, duke of Guise. He died in exile in Italy in 1640.]
[92] [For the detailed history of the Thirty Years’ War, see vol. XIII.]
[93] [As regards what was done by French armies. But of course the allies
entered constantly into Richelieu’s plans.]
[94] [Kitchin’s[w] estimate of Father Joseph seems a just one. He
says: “It is impossible to say with the Italians, that Richelieu owed
everything to him; that Father Joseph not only strengthened him in all
the crises of his fortune and gave him wise advice, but that he even
invented his policy for him, and supplied him with ideas; yet we must
admit that Richelieu owed more to him than to any other person, and that
he was thrice happy in such an agent and friend. Yet the difference
between them is great: Father Joseph lives in history as an able
intriguer; Richelieu as a king among men.”]
[95] [Richelieu formally created the ever afterward famous _Académie
Française_ in the year 1635. Its membership was (and is) limited to
forty,--the “forty immortals.” Its object was to control the French
language, and regulate the literary taste of the people. Its influence
has been extraordinary; but the wisdom of attempting to dam up the stream
of so limpid a medium as language may be questioned. Membership in the
Academy continues to be the highest honour that can be offered a French
man of letters. See below, chapter xxi.]
[Illustration]
CHAPTER XVIII. THE SUPREMACY OF MAZARIN
Any other nation, after its Mazarins, its Fouquets, its
Louvois, so many wars, so many glories, so many heroes, so
many rascals, would have stayed crushed and never arisen.
Nevertheless, France still lives.--MICHELET.[b]
[Sidenote: [1643-1661 A.D.]]
Louis XIII had hastened to carry out all the provisions of Richelieu’s
will. His own did not meet with the same fate, for its most important
dispositions were immediately modified. While regretfully appointing
Anne of Austria regent he had put strong restrictions upon her authority
and provided that the partisans of Richelieu, Mazarin and the prince of
Condé, were to control the government. He knew the queen had not been
unaware of the conspiracies of the court, not even of that of Cinq-Mars,
and that she had always listened to Richelieu’s enemies. Towards the end
he had drawn nearer to her and his brother, but without granting them his
confidence.
[Sidenote: [1643 A.D.]]
Scarcely had Louis closed his eyes when Mazarin resolved to give over the
entire government to the queen. Unity and power seemed, to the cardinal,
the most necessary thing: he came to an understanding with the bishop of
Beauvais, almoner of the queen; he was able to persuade Gaston, Condé,
and the other councillors, who withdrew opposition in consideration
of the compensation offered them. Consequently, on the 18th of May,
parliament met in extraordinary session; the peers were present. The
queen attended with the young Louis XIV and held a bed of justice. On the
express renunciation of the duke of Orleans and the prince of Condé the
assembly unanimously set aside all the restrictions to the queen’s power,
and decided that the title of lieutenant-general held by the duke of
Orleans would be simply honorary.[c]
The queen-mother was now in her forty-second year. She inspired almost
universal sympathy, by her good looks, agreeable manner, and previous
misfortunes which now counted for virtues. Age had made her more
sedate and more devout; her devotion, however, was still mingled with
gallantry, but it was the serious romantic gallantry of Spain which is
not incompatible with external dignity and reserve. Facile and genial in
ordinary intercourse, but altogether impulsive and insincere when her
passions were aroused; going when necessary as far as perjury--though
doubtless with the resource of mental reservation--to extricate herself
from a wrong step; intrepid by temperament, in spite of more than one act
of moral cowardice; of an unconquerable stubbornness in her prejudices
and in certain of her attachments, although sensitive to ingratitude; at
the same time absolute by her temperament and her principles, and unable
through inactivity to exercise the absolute power, her queenly nature was
invaluable to a minister capable of making a favourable impression on her
head and her heart.
Mazarin made an attack on both of these at the same time, and soon
occupied an unshakable position with her. Their correspondence leaves
doubt neither as to the passion which this minister expressed and which
he inspired in the queen, nor as to the constancy which Anne had at least
the merit of preserving in this last passion, which the progress of age
did not extinguish.[96]
Mazarin was of the same age as the queen. We may recall his brilliant
début as a diplomat thirteen years before, when before Casale he
prevented two armies from falling upon each other. Since then he had
remained faithfully attached to the interests of France, which had raised
him to the cardinalate without his having received holy orders--he never
was a priest.[97] He gave himself out to be a Roman nobleman. His enemies
denied this, and asserted that his father, a Sicilian merchant, had taken
refuge in the states of the holy father, after having gone bankrupt at
Palermo. A. Renée[e] has investigated every version of the cardinal’s
origin and concludes that his father, the son of a Sicilian artisan, came
a fortune-seeker to Rome, where he became chamberlain to the constable
Colonna. At all events the mind, the face, the complaisance, and the
dexterity of the young Giulio Mazarini won him, at an early age, the
patronage of some of the noble houses of Rome, and after having tried the
sword, the young adventurer felt his vocation and assumed the soutane
as a stepping-stone to diplomacy; at the age of twenty-eight he met
Richelieu--we know the rest.
The character and the future of the fortunate Italian were still at
this moment a problem for the court and for the public.[d] As yet he
frightened no one. He was far from being believed as powerful and
especially as much a master of the queen’s mind as he already was. He
often spoke of returning to Italy. What then was the astonishment when,
on the very evening of the bed of justice, it developed that Anne of
Austria had designated him to preside over the council.[c]
It would take a simple mind indeed to believe that an event as foreseen
as the death of the king should have taken the queen unawares, that
she should not have known which way to turn, and that she should have
seriously offered the power to this one or to that. The whole affair
was certainly settled beforehand; and for what reason? By reason of her
indolence, which told her that a bed already made was better to lounge
on, sleep in, than a new arrangement which would oblige her to will, to
think. She knew that, ready to set out from London, from Brussels, from
Madrid, there was a crowd of exiles, calling themselves martyrs to the
queen’s cause, who would demand the crown for their martyrdom. How to
satisfy them? She was all ears to him who taught her the sweetness of
ingratitude.
In this Mazarin was admirable. He often varied, but never on this point.
His character offers the beauty of a well-sustained type which does
not contradict itself. Ingrate towards Joseph and Chavigny, who made
him in France, he got out of two scrapes during the Fronde by the same
means--ingratitude towards Condé and then towards De Retz. Finally he
crowned his life with what was worse than all--ingratitude towards the
queen, his old-time sweetheart.
The puppets of Richelieu, odious, detested, the Chavignys, the
Bouthilliers, were impossible; Mazarin was a stranger, with no ties
in France, and ready to depart as soon as he had put the queen _au
courant_. He was packing up his things. A good excuse for remaining.
The queen appeared very uncertain. She consulted much, hesitated much.
Finally Condé came to tell Mazarin, “ready to depart,” that the queen
made him chief of the council, keeping also Chavigny and his father, the
chancellor Séguier, the same who had conducted the inquiry against her in
1637.
A mortal blow for Beaufort and the Vendômes, the queen’s friends. When
they demanded an explanation she said that Mazarin would not let her
forget her friends, that he was _au courant_ of affairs, a stranger,
consequently the less dangerous, that he was amusing, but above all
disinterested. This disinterestedness was so extreme, and the poor man
remained so poor, that after a few years, when he was driven out and
wished to return, he was able to raise an army with his own money![b]
BATTLE OF ROCROI (MAY 18TH-19TH, 1643 A.D.)
But before anything could happen, Paris was suddenly struck with a piece
of good news which produced the very greatest effect. While under the
last reign no great battle had been accomplished by the French armies,
that of Louis XIV opened with the victory of Rocroi.
Francisco de Mello had advanced to the frontier of the Low Countries
with 28,000 men, counting on profiting by the uncertainty into which the
last illness and death of Louis XIII would plunge the French government.
France had, on her side, an army in the field to observe him, and
it was Louis XIII’s will that this army be placed in command of the
duke d’Enghien, son of Condé, a young prince of twenty-two years, the
choice of whom must attach his house all the more closely to the future
regency. Enghien had served hitherto only as a volunteer; but he had
been instructed, exercised, and formed in the best of schools. He had
already shown in war a vigour and intelligence which everyone applauded.
He inspired confidence both in his officers and his soldiers. They
foresaw in him a great captain. As an adviser and to moderate his ardour
he had been given an able lieutenant-general, Duhallier, become Marshal
de l’Hôpital, and several excellent _maréchaux de camp_, Gassion, La
Ferté-Senneterre, and Sirot.
The Spaniards entered Champagne, and besieged Rocroi. The place,
important by its situation at the head of the Ardennes, was in no
condition to resist. Enghien, having collected between St. Quentin and
Guise 14,000 infantry and 6,000 horse, marched to its relief. On the
way he learned of Louis XIII’s death, but the news did not stop him. He
resolved to give battle to relieve the tedium of methodic warfare--this
was also the advice of Gassion and Sirot. On the 18th of May he arrived
before the Spaniards, who, protected by woods through which the French
had to pass, were not expecting to see them appear; and the time they
took to range themselves for battle permitted the French prince to
approach. The day was far advanced and he contented himself with a
small amount of cannonading. The next day Enghien ordered the attack at
daybreak, for he wished to forestall the arrival of a corps which General
Beck was bringing to Francisco de Mello. He himself, with Gassion,
charged at the head of the right wing and routed the enemy. The left
wing, commanded by Marshal de l’Hôpital and La Ferté-Senneterre, had
less success. It disputed its ground but was badly used. Enghien and
Gassion, victorious on the right, did not neglect their advantages. They
immediately fell upon the Spanish division which was in action with De
l’Hôpital, the moment at which, thinking itself victorious, it began to
break ranks and was running to pillage the tents of the French. Sirot,
in command of the reserves, received the order to advance, and he waited
to execute it until the very moment when Enghien and Gassion should have
renewed the contest. Then he gave it, and the victory was decided. The
two divisions of the enemy broken and put to flight, there yet remained
the Spanish reserve infantry which formed a square battalion difficult to
penetrate. It was composed of picked veterans and commanded by the old
count de Fuentes, who had to be carried in a litter at the head of his
soldiers. The victorious Enghien threw himself upon the square, dealt it
several sharp attacks, and finally broke it by attacking its rear and
flanks while his cannon thundered upon it.[c]
The massacre was appalling. Moved to pity, the duke d’Enghien threw
himself between the two armies, commanding his men to spare the
vanquished. “All the Spanish infantry,” says La Moussaie, “crowded
round him and his commanding officers, seeking shelter from the fury
of the French, and more particularly of the Swiss, who could not bring
themselves to make prisoners of any.” After giving orders to the
prisoners’ guard, the prince collected his troops and prepared to receive
Beck, should he have the courage to meet him on the plain. But Gassion
shortly returned from his pursuit of the enemy and informed the duke that
he had nothing to fear from the German general. Beck had not even passed
beyond the edge of the wood, being content with rallying the fugitives,
and at the approach of Gassion’s cavalry he had fled precipitately
towards Luxemburg.
Seeing his triumph thus complete, the duke d’Enghien, with the Christian
piety that never forsook him even in battle, fell on his knees, in
company with his whole army, and gave thanks to God for the victory.
Thus ended one of the most bloody and most glorious days in the history
of France. The battle had lasted four hours. The Spanish army left 8,000
dead upon the field, and 6,000 prisoners in the hands of the French.
Among the slain was the brave count de Fuentes. Don Francisco de Mello
had been made a prisoner for a few moments, but he managed to escape and
took refuge at Mariembourg, then at Philippeville, where he collected the
fragments of the Spanish army. Two hundred flags and sixty standards fell
into the hands of the French. The Spanish baggage wagons were plundered
and were found to contain all the money destined for the pay of the
troops. The French lost about two thousand men.[f]
Enghien possessed the power of prompt decision and knew the value of
time. He turned his victory to good account by marching immediately upon
Thionville, the possession of which was of extreme importance to the
Three Bishoprics and at the siege of which Feuquières had come to grief
in 1639. Mazarin approved his plan and furnished all that was necessary
for the siege. Instead of proceeding with that methodical regularity
learned from the Dutch, Enghien pressed his attacks; they were very
deadly, especially for the officers, but his plan was to reach his end
the more quickly, to astonish the enemy, and to avoid sickness, which was
more fatal than artillery in prolonged sieges. Thionville surrendered
the 8th of August. The little town of Sierck, which commanded Luxemburg,
capitulated a few days later.
Enghien was placed at a bound above all the captains employed by
Richelieu. The French army, formed by eight successive years of
campaigns, equal at least to those of neighbouring nations, leaving
nothing to be desired in instruction, experience of its officers,
discipline, good administration, or material organisation, had finally
found a leader worthy of it. Enghien, with his eagle glance, great
promptitude of execution, and an ardour which he knew how to moderate,
disconcerted the rational and prudent tactics of the enemy’s generals.
The battle of Rocroi bore witness to the military progress of France, and
dealt a serious blow to the prestige of the Spanish armies, when Spain
had, for three years, been seeing her power shaken and her resources
weakened.[c]
THE IMPORTANTS (1643 A.D.)
The return of Mazarin to power was received with surprise and
mortification by the returned exiles, the enemies of Richelieu, those who
had deemed themselves possessed of the heart and confidence of the queen.
They were for the most part young men, such as the duke de Beaufort,
and a host of noble striplings, who were all, nevertheless, profound
statesmen in their own esteem.
With pretensions to govern, they found it necessary to alter or conceal
their juvenile and frivolous habits; they affected to be grave and
sententious, and some even thought it necessary to give time to study and
reflection; a whim, the characteristic and beneficial consequences of
which are seen in the _Mémoires_ of De Retz and the _Maximes_ of the duke
de la Rochefoucauld. The latter was at this time one of the young friends
of the queen. Despite the talents that some of these youths afterwards
displayed, their present pretensions and demeanour were considered as
absurd, and the party was ironically called _les Importants_, that of the
“important.” On the side opposed to them were drawn up Cardinal Mazarin,
the old partisans of Richelieu, and, amongst the noblesse, the prince of
Condé and his gallant son, the duke d’Enghien.
The queen-regent, as became her position, affected neutrality, but
supported her newly chosen minister. The _importants_, however, hoped
to regain the ascendency through the means of Anne of Austria’s old
favourite, Madame de Chevreuse, who was now returning from her long
exile. This lady had once been all-powerful with the queen: her
misfortunes, occasioned by that attachment, gave her, she thought, an
increase of claim; she totally put out of consideration how far the
policy of a regent might interfere with the affections of a queen, and
her party pretensions were as high as her resentments. She was warmly
and cordially welcomed back by Anne; Mazarin hastened to conciliate her,
and commenced by placing 50,000 crowns before her, asking if he might
count her amongst his friends. Madame de Chevreuse required the dismissal
of Chavigny, and the cardinal instantly consented to sacrifice the
secretary: then came the great demands of the party, _viz._, that Sedan
should be restored to the duke de Bouillon, the government of Brittany to
the duke de Vendôme, and that of Guienne to young Épernon; Le Havre, too,
was required for the future duke de la Rochefoucauld.
[Illustration: MADAME DE MONTBAZON]
These demands were no less than to re-constitute the power and
independence of the grandees, that Richelieu had spent his life and
steeped his memory in blood in order to reduce. Anne of Austria and
Mazarin, now in the place of authority held by Richelieu, could not but
see with his eyes: the adroit Mazarin, however, did not give to Madame
de Chevreuse the flat and peremptory denial that would have come from
Richelieu’s mouth; he looked complaisant and yielding, and drew on the
negotiatrix of the _importants_ to fresh pretensions. One of these was
to supersede the chancellor Séguier by Châteauneuf. Now Châteauneuf had
presided at the commission which condemned the duke de Montmorency, and
to favour him would be to outrage the princess of Condé, sister of that
duke. Mazarin pretended to stand out on this point, hesitatingly, no
doubt; Madame de Chevreuse insisted; and the cardinal, determined to
break with a party whose pretensions were exorbitant, and which sought to
replace the aristocracy on its old footing of superiority to government
and ministry, affected to break with them rather than insult the family
of Condé; thus securing powerful support, and averting the suspicions of
the young noblesse from the political jealousy which he bore them.
A rupture was declared; and a lady’s quarrel soon afterwards occurred to
precipitate hostilities, and give the minister a pretext for acting. The
duchess de Longueville, of the family of Condé, and one of the beauties
of the court, was maligned by Madame de Montbazon, sister-in-law of
Madame de Chevreuse. The latter found a _billet-doux_ in the handwriting
of the former, and addressed, she asserted, to the count de Coligny. This
piece of scandal or calumny convulsed the entire circle of influential
personages. The duke d’Enghien challenged the duke de Beaufort; the Duke
of Guise and the count de Coligny fought in the Place Royal, Madame
de Longueville being spectatress of the discomfiture of her chevalier,
who died of his wounds. The queen in vain endeavoured to bring about an
accommodation. The _importants_ were too deeply mortified, and nothing
short of the disgrace of the cardinal would satisfy them. The queen
peremptorily refusing this, the duke de Beaufort entered into a scheme
for making away with the cardinal by violence. Circumstances occurred
to baffle and interrupt the design. Épernon was sounded in the meantime
by one of the conspirators, and he instantly betrayed it. The duke de
Beaufort was consequently arrested on the following day. Mesdames de
Montbazon and Chevreuse were both exiled, as well as the duke and duchess
of Vendôme, the dukes of Guise and Mercœur, and other less illustrious
nobles. Here is the exculpation of Richelieu, and the excuse of his
severity. No sooner is Anne of Austria, his rival and enemy, in the
place of power, than she is obliged to adopt his policy and his strong
measures, notwithstanding that such acts did violence to her private
feelings. She wept on ordering the arrest of Beaufort; but, like the late
monarch, she was compelled to sacrifice her feelings to her own interest
and that of the state. The reign of the _importants_ lasted three months
and a half.
[Sidenote: [1643-1647 A.D.]]
The four years which succeeded 1643 were years of tranquillity to the
regent, triumph to Mazarin, and glory to France. The petulance of the
noblesse was checked by the discomfiture of the _importants_. Mazarin,
instead of imitating Richelieu and reigning by terror alone, sought to
captivate by giving scope to pleasure, and creating a general taste for
light and social amusements. He encouraged fêtes and gallantry. He was
prodigal of favours, of money, of everything save authority. He bound
the noblesse, and their more froward dames and mistresses, in golden
and in flowery chains; and those who a year before were clamouring for
independent governments, then limited their ambition to a duke’s title.
The sage La Rochefoucauld himself has recorded in his _Mémoires_[m] how
he pleaded for this important distinction, in order, as he observes, that
his wife might enjoy the privilege of a _tabouret_ or stool at court.[g]
THE EDUCATION OF THE YOUNG KING
Louis XIV, born September 5th, 1638, had now (1645) completed his seventh
year; that being the age at which kings passed from the control of women
to the control of men, it became necessary to provide him with a governor
and a tutor. To Cardinal Mazarin the queen desired to hand over the
supreme control of Louis’ bringing up, and for that purpose created for
him the post of superintendent of the king’s education.
Several contemporary writers have reproached Mazarin with having directed
the education of the young Louis carelessly. La Porte, a groom of the
bed-chamber to the king, accused the cardinal of having no other dream
than to obtain empire over the young prince’s will by surrounding him
with his own family and partisans. Madame de Motteville,[k] without being
quite so prejudiced, claims that he thwarted the good intentions of the
young prince’s governor, the marquis de Villeroi. Nevertheless, an entry
in the note-books proves that even as early as 1647 Mazarin exerted
himself to remove from the prince such persons as he thought dangerous.
In the case of François de Rochechouart, who enjoyed an old-established
credit with the queen, Mazarin declared that a place must not be given
him near the king; “for,” he writes, “his incessant flatteries are
extremely prejudicial to the king, and prompt him to regard with great
displeasure those who speak the truth to him.” Yet one must recognise
that during a long period the cardinal, absorbed in politics, paid little
heed to the king’s education. It was only during the later years of his
life that, having reached the summit of power and glory, he helped by his
counsels to inspire in the young Louis habits of order, of regular work,
of strong and tenacious will, of supreme and authoritative government.
Judging by results, this education was far from being sterile. The king’s
governor, intrusted to accompany him everywhere, to watch over his safety
and direct his actions, was Nicolas de Neufville, first marquis, then
duke and marshal, de Villeroi. This individual had gained a certain
renown in war, but it was pre-eminently as a clever and pliant courtier
that he shone. He was a willing tool in the hands of the minister. It
seems that his rôle was limited to winning the young king’s good graces,
to teaching him the ways and manners of the court, in which he himself
excelled, and to giving him for companion and favourite his own son,
François de Neufville-Villeroi, who became in his turn Duke-Marshal de
Villeroi.
The post of tutor was filled by Hardouin de Beaumont de Péréfixe, doctor
of the Sorbonne, who ultimately became archbishop of Paris, and to whom
we owe a _History of Henry IV_ written for the instruction of Louis
XIV. The classical education of the young king was meagre. Madame de
Motteville[k] tells us “he was made to translate Cæsar’s _Commentaries_;
he learned to dance, to draw, and to ride, and he was very skilful in all
bodily exercises.” The Venetian ambassador, Nani, asserts that the tutor
did neglect to teach the young king the principles of virtue.[f]
MILITARY GLORY (1644-1648 A.D.)
[Sidenote: [1644-1648 A.D.]]
The year 1644 is marked by the brilliant manœuvres of the duke of Enghien
and Turenne.[g] After the capture of Sierck, Enghien drove the Germans
back across the Rhine, and crossed after them; he hastened to repair
the losses and defeats which the French had met with on the frontier
after the death of Marshal de Guébriant, which had occurred at the
siege of Rottweil in Swabia (1643). [Guébriant’s army, now badly led by
several leaders, had allowed itself to be surprised by the imperials at
Tuttlingen.] Enghien found Freiburg im Breisgau taken and the Bavarian
general Mercy beneath its walls with an army greater than his own.
Enghien had two marshals of France under him, of whom one was Grammont
and the other Turenne, who had just been created marshal after having
served brilliantly in Piedmont against the Spaniards. The duke and
his two generals attacked Mercy’s camp intrenched on two heights. The
battle recommenced three times on three different days (August 3rd-5th,
1644). It is said that the duke of Enghien threw his commander’s baton
into the enemy’s entrenchments and, sword in hand, went after it at the
head of the Conti regiment.[98] The battle of Freiburg, more bloody
than decisive, was the duke’s second victory. Mercy decamped four days
afterwards. Philippsburg, Worms, and Mainz were the proof and the fruit
of the victory.
Enghien returned to Paris, received the acclamation of the people and
demanded recompense of the court; leaving his army to the prince-marshal
Turenne. But this general, skilful as he was, was beaten at Marienthal
(May, 1645). Enghien hastened back to his troops, resumed the command,
and joined to the glory of again commanding Turenne that of repairing
his defeat. He attacked Mercy on the plains of Nördlingen, and won a
great battle early in August. Marshal de Grammont was captured, but so
was General Glen who commanded under Mercy, and the latter himself was
among the slain. Mercy, who has been reckoned among the great captains
of his time, was buried close to the battle-field, and on his tomb was
graven, “_Sta Viator; Heroem Calcas_” (Halt traveller, thou treadest on a
hero).
The name of the duke d’Enghien[99] now eclipsed all others. In October,
1646, he besieged Dunkirk in sight of the Spanish army, and was the first
to give that place to the French. Such success and such service brought
forth less reward than suspicion in the court, and made him as much
feared by the ministry as by the enemy. Condé [as we must now call him]
was therefore withdrawn from the scenes of this conquest and glory and
sent into Catalonia with inefficient and ill-paid troops. He besieged
Lerida, but was obliged to raise the siege (1647). A wavering state of
affairs soon forced the court to recall the prince to Flanders. The
archduke Leopold, brother of the emperor Ferdinand III, was besieging
Lens in Artois. Condé, restored to the troops which had always been
victorious under him, led them straight for the archduke. This was the
third time he had given battle with disadvantage in numbers. He spoke to
his soldiers these simple words: “Friends, remember Rocroi, Freiburg, and
Nördlingen!”[100] (August 20th, 1648).
He himself relieved Marshal de Grammont, who was about to surrender with
the left wing; he captured General Beck. The archduke saved himself with
difficulty with the count of Fuensaldaña. The imperials and the Spaniards
composing the army were scattered; they lost more than a hundred banners
and thirty-eight pieces of cannon, which was a considerable number for
that time. Five thousand prisoners were taken; three thousand men were
killed; the rest deserted and the archduke was left without an army.
Never since the foundation of the monarchy had the French won so many
battles in succession, and ones so noted for military ability and courage.
While the prince of Condé was thus counting the years of his youth in
victories, and the duke of Orleans, brother of Louis XIII, was upholding
the reputation of a son of Henry IV and of France by the capture of
Gravelines (July, 1644), Courtrai, and Mardyck (November, 1644), the
viscount de Turenne had taken Landau, had driven the Spaniards from
Treves, and re-established the elector. In November, 1647, with the help
of the Swedes under Wrangel, Torstenson’s successor, he won the battle of
Lawingen, and that of Zusmarshausen (May, 1648). He compelled the elector
of Bavaria to leave his states, at the age of almost eighty. The count
d’Harcourt took Balaguer and beat the Spaniards. They lost Porto Longone
in Italy (1646). Twenty vessels and twenty galleys of France, which
composed almost the whole navy as re-established by Richelieu, defeated
the Spanish fleet off the Italian coast.
This was not all. The French arms had again invaded Lorraine; and Duke
Charles IV, a warrior prince, but an inconstant, rash, and unfortunate
one, saw himself at the same time deprived of his state by France and
kept prisoner by the Spaniards (May, 1644). The allies of France pressed
the Austrian power on the north and south. The duke of Albuquerque, the
Portuguese general, won the battle of Badajoz from Spain in March, 1645.
Torstenson defeated the imperials near Tabor and obtained a complete
victory. The prince of Orange, at the head of the Dutch, penetrated as
far as Brabant.
The king of Spain, beaten on every side, saw Roussillon and Catalonia
in the hands of the French. Naples in revolt against him had just given
itself into the hands of the duke of Guise, the last prince of that
branch of a house fruitful in illustrious and dangerous men. This one,
who had passed only for a bold adventurer, because he did not succeed,
had at least the glory of boarding single-handed a bark in the midst of
the Spanish fleet and of defending Naples with no other resource than his
own courage.
At the sight of so many misfortunes crushing the house of Austria, so
many victories accumulated by the French, seconded by the success of
their allies, one would have believed that Vienna and Madrid were only
waiting to open their gates, and that the emperor and the king of Spain
were almost without dominions. Nevertheless these five years of glory,
crossed with only a few reverses, brought few real advantages and much
spilled blood, but no revolution. If one was to be feared it was for
France. She was on the verge of ruin in the midst of this apparent
prosperity.[i]
TREATY OF WESTPHALIA (1648 A.D.)
[Sidenote: [1641-1648 A.D.]]
Negotiations for peace had been going on for a long time. Proposed in
1641, conferences were opened April 10th, 1643, in two Westphalian
cities--Münster and Osnabrück. The questions for consideration were the
altering of the map of Europe after a thirty years’ war; of providing the
empire with a new constitution; and of regulating the civil and religious
rights of the several Christian nations. France was represented at this
congress by able negotiators, the count d’Avaux and Abel Servien; but her
best diplomats were Condé and Turenne, whose swords had simplified the
negotiations by rendering peace a necessity. At the last moment Spain
withdrew, hoping to profit by the troubles of the Fronde, then commencing
in France. The other countries, in haste to have finished, signed the
peace (October 24th, 1648).
During the Thirty Years’ War Austria had striven to stifle religious and
political liberty in Germany. Austria being defeated, that against which
she had fought remained and increased. The Protestants obtained full
liberty of conscience, and imperial authority, but lately threatening,
was annulled; the princes of the German states, confirmed in the
exercise of complete authority over their territories, had the right of
alliance with foreign powers so long as these alliances (so read a vain
restriction) were “against neither the emperor nor the empire.”
The two powers which had achieved the defeat of Austria had stipulated
for themselves important indemnities. Sweden gained the island of Rügen,
Wismar, western Pomerania with Stettin, the archbishopric of Bremen,
and the bishopric of Verden--that is to say, the mouths of the three
great German rivers, the Oder, the Elbe, and the Weser--with 5,000,000
crowns and three votes in the diet. France continued to occupy Lorraine,
promising to restore it to its duke when he should have complied with
her conditions. She obtained the empire’s renunciation of all right over
the Three Bishoprics--Metz, Toul, and Verdun, which she had possessed
for a century; over the town of Pinerolo, ceded by the duke of Savoy in
1631; over Alsace, which was now--with the exception of Strasburg--given
to France, carrying her boundaries beyond the Vosges as far as the Rhine.
She also obtained Breisach, on the right bank of that river, and her
right to garrison Philippsburg was recognised; the right of navigation on
the Rhine was guaranteed her.
[Illustration: A FRENCH OFFICER, MIDDLE OF SEVENTEENTH CENTURY]
These were great advantages; because, by recovering Alsace, France
covered Lorraine on the side of Germany and established herself to the
north of Franche-Comté, which since Henry IV she had enveloped on the
south; so that the return to France of these two provinces was only
a question of time. Not only were her frontiers now better outlined
for defence, but she was able to maintain an offensive position. By
the acquisition of Pinerolo France planted a foot beyond the Alps in
Italy; by Breisach and Philippsburg, beyond the Rhine in Germany. By
opening the eyes of the German states to their right to contract foreign
alliances France was always able to buy over one or another of their
indigent princes, and by guaranteeing the execution of the treaty, she
gave herself the right to interfere in German affairs. The empire--being
now no more than a sort of confederation of 360 states, Lutheran and
Catholic, monarchical and republican, laical and ecclesiastical--became
of necessity the theatre for all sorts of intrigues, the battle-field of
Europe, as Italy had been at the beginning of modern times, and for the
same reasons--division and anarchy.
The Treaty of Westphalia, which was the foundation for all diplomatic
conventions from the middle of the seventeenth century until the French
Revolution, put an end to the supremacy of the house of Austria, and
rescued the independence of the small states. If the Bourbons had not
inherited the ambition of the Habsburgs, and roused against themselves
the same coalitions, the Peace of Westphalia would have accomplished the
supremacy of France and the political liberty of Europe.
MAZARIN’S DOMESTIC POLICY
[Sidenote: [1646-1648 A.D.]]
While Mazarin gloriously continued the policy of Richelieu, his power in
France was being destroyed by factions.[h]
At first he used his power with moderation. He affected, at the beginning
of his supremacy, as much of simplicity as Richelieu had displayed of
arrogance. Far from employing guards, and keeping up royal splendour,
he had at first the most modest retinue. He was affable and even gentle
where his predecessor had shown inflexible pride.
But with all this, taxation was necessary to maintain the war against the
Spaniards and against the emperor. The finances of France were, since the
death of Henry IV, as badly administered as those of Spain and Germany.
The excise offices were in chaos, ignorance was extreme, thievery was
paramount. The revenue of the state amounted during the first year of the
regency to between fifteen and sixteen million livres. This was quite
sufficient if there had been any economy in the ministry; but in 1646 and
1647 there were deficits. The superintendent of the finances was at times
a Sienese peasant named Particelli Émery, whose soul was even baser than
his birth, and whose extravagance and debauchery aroused the nation to
indignation. This man invented burdensome and ridiculous expedients. He
created and sold posts of inspectors of fagots, of licensed hay venders,
of king’s councillors, of wine hawkers; he sold letters of nobility.
The debts on the Hôtel-de-Ville at Paris then amounted to only about
eleven millions, but the fund-holders were deprived of several quarterly
dividends; import duties were increased; several posts of masters of
requests (to whom all petitions were intrusted) were created; about
eighty thousand crowns of magistrates’ salaries were held back.
It is easy to realise how far the minds of the people were aroused
against two Italians, both come penniless to France, who had enriched
themselves at the expense of the nation and who now had such a hold over
them. The parliament of Paris, the masters of requests, the other courts,
the fund-holders, rebelled. In vain did Mazarin remove his confidant
Émery from office and relegate him to one of his estates--there was
indignation that this man should have estates in France. The cardinal was
held in abhorrence, although at this very moment he was consummating the
great work of the Peace of Westphalia; for it must be noted that this
famous treaty and the “day of barricades” are of the same year, 1648. The
civil wars began at Paris as they had begun in England, over a little
money. In 1647 the parliament of Paris, in verifying the tax edicts,
showed itself spiritedly opposed to them. It acquired the confidence of
the people by remonstrances which were very wearying to the ministry. But
it did not revolt. Its spirit became embittered and hardened by degrees.
The populace might rush to arms at once and choose a leader as they had
done with Masaniello at Naples; but magistrates and statesmen proceed
with more deliberation, and begin by observing the proprieties as far as
party spirit will permit.
Cardinal Mazarin had thought that by skilfully dividing the magistracy he
would prevent all troubles, but his cunning was met with inflexibility.
He withdrew four years’ salary from all the higher courts, at the same
time remitting the _paulette_; that is to say, exempting the judges
from paying the tax devised by Paulet under Henry IV for assuring the
magistrates the permanency of their posts and permitting them to sell
them. This retrenchment was not an injury, but he did not withdraw
the four years’ salary from parliament, thinking to disarm it by this
favour. But parliament scorned this mark of grace which exposed it to
the reproach of preferring its interests to those of the others; and it
did not hesitate to issue an _arrêt d’union_ with the other courts of
justice. Mazarin, who was never able to pronounce French, having said
that this _arrêt d’ognon_ was an attacking measure, and having had it
vetoed by the council, this single word _ognon_ made him ridiculous, and
as one never yields to one that is scorned, parliament became more active.
[Illustration: THE ARREST OF BROUSSEL]
It loudly demanded that all the intendants regarded by the people as
extortioners should be recalled, and that the new kind of magistracy
instituted under Louis XIII, without the procedure of ordinary forms,
should be abolished. This was to please the nation as much as to irritate
the court. It desired that, according to the ancient law, no citizen
should be put in prison without his natural judges knowing of it within
twenty-four hours.
Parliament did more; it abolished the intendants by a decree with orders
to the king’s prosecutors in its jurisdiction to inform against them.
Thus the hatred of the ministry, supported by the love of the public
weal, threatened the court with a revolution. The queen yielded; she
abandoned the intendants and asked only that three be retained. In this
she was refused. While these troubles were brewing the prince of Condé
won the famous victory at Lens, which crowned his glory. The king, who
was only ten years old, exclaimed, “Parliament will be very sorry!”
These words make it sufficiently evident that the court looked upon the
parliament of Paris as an assembly of rebels. Indeed, the cardinal and
his courtiers gave it no other name. But the more the parliamentarians
were treated as rebels the more resistance they made.[i]
This state of affairs between ruling power and the parliament expressing
the feelings of the people brings us to that remarkable revolt known as
the Fronde, “the last echo of the civil wars of the sixteenth century.”
“The origin of the name,” says Martin,[d] “seems to have been the
comparison made between the young and turbulent _conseillers aux
enquêtes_ and the urchins who gathered in the city ditches to indulge in
mimic fights with slings (_frondes_). The malcontents adopted the name
of _frondeurs_, and longed for the glory of ‘slinging the court well’
(_bien fronder la cour_). The first to adopt this title of _frondeur_
was, it is said, the councillor Bachaumont, son of the president Le
Coigneux.” Kitchin[q] says that the name of the Fronde was first adopted
by the coadjutor to the archbishop of Paris, Paul de Gondi, of whom
we shall presently speak. “The young lords and dames,” says Crowe,[g]
“who afterwards embraced the party, willingly adopted a name which so
well characterised their petulance, and sportive rather than serious
rebellion.” But the Fronde, sportive though it may have been to the
nobles, was the cause of immense misery to the people. Famine and pest
walked in its train and the country was enormously depopulated.[a]
FIRST INSURRECTION OF THE FRONDE (1648 A.D.)
[Sidenote: [1648 A.D.]]
The queen and the cardinal resolved to arrest three of the most stubborn
magistrates of the parliament: Novion Blancménil president of a court of
justice, Charton president of a court of inquiry, and Broussel former
councillor-clerk of the grand chamber. They were the tools of party
leaders and not leaders themselves. Charton, a man of very limited
abilities, was known by the nickname of “I say this,” because he always
opened and closed his remarks with those words. Broussel had nothing
to recommend him but his white hairs, his hatred for the ministry, and
a reputation for always raising his voice against the court no matter
on what subject. His confrères paid little attention to him, but the
populace idolised him.
Instead of arresting them without any hubbub in the silence of the night,
the cardinal thought to impress the people by having them arrested in
broad daylight, on August 26th, 1648, while the _Te Deum_ was being
sung at Notre Dame for the victory of Lens and the Swiss of the chamber
were carrying into the church the seventy-three banners taken from the
enemy. It was precisely this plan that caused the ruin of the kingdom.
Charton escaped, Blancménil was taken without difficulty, but it was not
the same with Broussel. An old servant, seeing her master thrown into a
coach by Comminges, a lieutenant of the bodyguard, collected a mob. It
surrounded the coach, which was smashed to pieces; but the French guards
lent assistance to Comminges and got Broussel away from his friends. He
was taken out on the road to Sedan. The arrest, far from intimidating the
people, irritated and emboldened them. Shops were closed. The great iron
chains which at that time were at the entrance to the principal streets
were stretched across them; barricades were built, and four hundred
thousand throats cried “Liberty and Broussel!”[i]
The marshal de la Meilleraie with two hundred guards tried to disperse
them; he drove some back to the Pont Neuf, where his progress was
impeded, and where he met Paul de Gondi, coadjutor of the archbishop of
Paris, so famous later under the name of Cardinal de Retz, who had rushed
out in his robes amongst the mob. After having harangued and momentarily
tranquillised the populace, De Retz hurried with the marshal to the
Palais Royal, to represent the alarming state of the city to the queen.
Anne of Austria, who knew the coadjutor’s character, suspected him as
one more likely to throw oil than water on the flame. “It is rebellion
itself to imagine that the people can rebel,” said she; “you would have
me deliver Broussel; I will first strangle him with these hands.” This
resentment, seconded by the jeers of the court, had the ill effect of
converting De Retz into a dangerous enemy.[g]
_The Day of the Barricades (August 27th, 1648)_
It is difficult to reconcile all the details of what followed, related
by Cardinal de Retz,[j] Madame de Motteville,[k] Advocate-General Talon,
and many others; but all agree upon the principal points. During the
night which followed the riot the queen had about two thousand troopers,
quartered a few leagues from Paris, come into the city to protect the
king’s residence. The chancellor Séguier had already proceeded to the
parliament accompanied by a lieutenant and several archers to quash all
its decrees and even, it is said, to suspend that body.
But during that very night the factionists assembled at the house of De
Retz, and everything was arranged to arm the city. The chancellor’s coach
was stopped and overturned. He escaped with difficulty, with his daughter
the duchess de Sully, who in spite of him had insisted on accompanying
him. He retired in disorder into the hôtel de Luynes, jostled and
insulted by the populace. The civil lieutenant now took him into his
coach, and escorted by two Swiss companies and a squadron of gendarmes
attempted to bring him to the Palais Royal. The people fired on them;
several were killed and the duchess de Sully was wounded in the arm.
Two hundred barricades were formed in an instant; they were pushed to
within a hundred paces of the Palais Royal. The soldiers, after seeing
several of their number fall, retreated and looked to see what the
bourgeois were going to do. The parliament marched on foot in a body
to the queen, across the barricades which were lowered before it, and
demanded the liberation of its imprisoned members. The queen was obliged
to set them free.[i]
The barricades were immediately levelled, and the people ceased their
turbulence and clamour. “Never was disorder more orderly managed,” says
Madame de Motteville;[k] “the citizens who had taken up arms to prevent
the ascendency of the rabble and to check pillage were little more
peaceable than the populace itself, and roared for the liberation of
Broussel with equal violence.” The court in yielding had but temporised,
however; and it soon made its escape from the capital to St. Germain.
Such was the first insurrection of the Fronde.[g]
Cardinal de Retz has boasted of having all by himself armed the whole of
Paris on that day (August 27th, 1648), which has been called the “Day
of the Barricades” and which was the second of its kind. This singular
man is the first bishop of France to plan a civil war without religion
for a pretext. He has described himself in his _Mémoires_,[j] written
in a grandiose manner with the impetuosity of genius and an unevenness
which are the mirror of his conduct. He was a man who, from the depths of
debauchery and the infamous consequences which it brings, preached to the
people and made them idolise him. He breathed faction and conspiracy; he
had been at the age of twenty-three the soul of a conspiracy against the
life of Richelieu; he was the author of the barricades; he precipitated
parliament into cabals and the people into seditions. His extreme vanity
made him undertake bold crimes in order that they might be talked about.
It was this same vanity that made him repeat so often, “I am of a house
of Florence as ancient as that of the greatest princes”[101]--he whose
ancestors had been merchants like so many of his compatriots.[i]
[Illustration: A FRENCH OFFICER, MIDDLE OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY]
The hopes of the queen were now in the young prince of Condé. But that
young hero, though opposed to the party of the _importants_, was not
yet prepared to martyrise his popularity for Mazarin. He proposed his
mediation. Mazarin accepted it, well knowing how soon the hot prince
would lose patience at the formal and democratic pleadings of the
parliamentary statesmen. De Retz, now the leading man of the popular
party, made every effort to gain Condé, who replied, “My name is Louis
de Bourbon: I will not shake the throne.” Through his means negotiations
were entered into with the court; the elders of the parliament, and
Molé, the president, at their head, being anxious to avoid a civil war,
whilst the violent party, bestowing on the pacific chiefs the nickname
of _barbons_, pushed matters to extremities. They had revived an old
law, passed after the fall of the marshal D’Ancre, which prohibited the
administration of the kingdom by foreigners, thus aiming at Mazarin.
Still a second accommodation took place: a royal declaration, dated the
28th of October [the very day of the signing of the Peace of Westphalia],
accepted the principal articles of the plan of reformation, and the court
returned to the capital.
[Sidenote: [1648-1649 A.D.]]
This proved but a hollow truce, entered into by both parties out of
respect for Condé, whom both feared and both hoped to gain. The popular
party was suspicious; De Retz continued his intrigues; whilst the queen
urged Condé to make preparations for defending the royal authority by
force. It has been the fate of all attempts to establish liberty in
France to be frustrated, not by the opposition of the aristocracy, but by
their affecting to abet and adopt its principles.
In the Fronde, the magistracy of Paris, supported by the citizens,
endeavoured to supply the want of a national assembly. They framed a
constitution; forced it on the court without effusion of blood; and might
have succeeded in upholding and perhaps ameliorating it, when the young
noblesse interfered, drove the citizens to insurrection first, then
to submission, and for the sake of their selfish quarrels, which all
their light-heartedness and valour cannot redeem, they sacrificed the
last hope that the French had of even a degree of liberty; they pierced
the last plank that shut out the overwhelming ocean of despotism. We
certainly, of the present day, can look but with a small degree of hope
or approbation on a judicial body which grasps at legislative power. But
had the noblesse known its true interests, and acted its natural part of
mediator, the states-general might have superseded the parliament in its
political functions; the moderation of the provincial deputies would have
tempered the ardour of the capital, and the ever consecutive extremes of
insurrection and pusillanimous submission might both have been avoided.
The old party of the _importants_ now roused itself. The duke de Beaufort
escaped from prison. The duke de Bouillon, smarting under the loss of
Sedan, joined counsels with him; and both intrigued with the violent
men in the parliament to form an insurrection against the court. The
duchess de Longueville brought her charms to support the same cause:
these decided La Rochefoucauld, her lover, to adopt it. She used all her
influence to the same effect with her brother Condé in vain. In default
of him, the prince of Conti, his brother, was won over. No cause could
subsist, in the opinion of these gentlemen, unless it could boast the
name of a prince of the blood. The duchess de Chevreuse, though still in
exile, corresponded with the party, and promised to it the accession of
the princes of Lorraine. Madame de Montbazon was found united in the same
cause with her rival, Madame de Longueville. The marshal D’Hocquincourt
offered the strong and important fortress which he commanded, in homage
to the charms of the former. “Péronne,” wrote he to her, “is at the
disposal of the fairest of the fair.” A crowd of nobles gaily joined the
conspiracy; and the court was once more obliged to make its escape from
Paris, and retire to St. Germain, in January 1649.[102]
Strong and extreme measures were at last resolved upon, although not
prepared with that vigour and foresight that Richelieu would have
displayed. Troops, under Condé and the duke of Orleans, prepared to
invest Paris, and occupied on either side of the city the bridges of
Charenton and St. Cloud; but with only 12,000 men, the utmost of the
royalist force, it was impossible to invest the metropolis. A royal
order, commanding the parliament to retire to Montargis, was treated by
them with contempt. A civic guard was raised, to the number of 12,000,
the chief officers, it is remarkable, being lawyers and officers of
parliament; the provost of the merchants, however, retained the supreme
command. In addition to these, a stipendiary force of 20,000 men was
raised in a few days, by means of a house tax, fixed at so much for
every plain house-door, and double the sum for the gate which admitted
a carriage. The noblesse did not forget their petty ambition, even in
adopting the bourgeois cause. The duke d’Elbeuf had first seized on the
chief command, and was reluctant to yield it to the prince of Conti.
The duke de Beaufort, however, was the most popular chief, owing to his
affable manners and handsome person. He was called the _roi des halles_
(the king of the markets). The war, if it can be called such, commenced
by the attack of the Bastille, at which the ladies of the party assisted.
It surrendered gallantly to these fascinating adversaries. On his side,
Condé began to press towards the walls; and some skirmishes took place,
in which a few were slain, amongst others the duke de Châtillon.
Two circumstances soon after occurred that much altered the views and
shook the resolutions of the court. One was the defection of Turenne,
who, won over by his brother the duke de Bouillon, promised to march the
army, which he commanded on the Rhine, to the support of the Fronde;
the other was the connection of the _frondeur_ nobles with Spain, and
the public reception by the parliament of an envoy from that power.
This savoured of the inveteracy of the league. The elder magistrates,
and principally Molé the president, indignant at this alliance with
the enemies of the country, began to exert themselves to frustrate the
violent projects of the young noblesse, and to seek an accommodation
with the court. The majority of the parliament, already disgusted with
the froward, frivolous, and arrogant behaviour of the nobles, came so
far into the same views, that Molé himself, with some of his brethren,
was despatched to the queen at Ruel, to essay an accommodation. The
court grasped at the opportunity, but still negotiated for advantages;
whilst Bouillon stirred the populace of Paris against the moderation of
the parliament, and urged the alliance with Spain. Molé, determined to
disappoint the ambitious duke, signed a treaty with the court in haste,
on the 11th of March, ere Turenne could arrive, or Spain despatch its aid.
Great was the indignation of the populace, and of the seditious
leaders, at the news of this peace. All cried out treason. Bouillon was
confounded, and De Retz perplexed. Molé knew that he risked his life by
thus balking the seditious ardour of both the nobles and the mob; but the
thought gave him courage, not hesitation. The critical moment was that
of declaring the treaty to the assembled parliament. A ferocious crowd,
crying “Treason! no peace! no Mazarin!” surrounded the Palais de Justice;
and the throng within its walls was scarcely less hostile or less
calm. Molé stood up and read the treaty; clamour instantly covered his
voice. The prince of Conti exclaimed against a peace concluded without
his knowledge, and that of the nobles his friends. “You, then, are the
cause,” retorted Molé: “whilst we were at Ruel, you were treating with
the enemies of France; you were inviting the archduke, the Spaniard, and
the foe to invade the kingdom.” “It is not without the consent of several
members of the parliament that we took this step,” replied the prince,
not denying the charge. “Name them,” was Molé’s instant retort; “name the
traitors, that we may proceed to try and judge them.”
The firmness of the president at once awed the nobles, and won over
the majority of the assembled magistrates to support him. The only
hope of the favourers of sedition was in the rabble, which, incensed
and tumultuous, had penetrated into the passages and corridors of
the palace. Some, with poniards and arms, demanded the head of the
president. “Give us up the _grande barbe_” (long beard); so they called
the venerable magistrate. Others shouted the word “Republic.” Molé heard
them with unshaken courage. Those around besought him to make his escape
by a postern. “Justice never skulks,” replied Molé, “nor will I, its
representative. I may perish, but will never commit an act of cowardice,
which would give hardihood to the mob.” Accordant to this magnanimous
resolution, the chief magistrate walked boldly down the principal
staircase through the mob, awing the most audacious by his firmness.
Even De Retz[j] was lost in admiration; and has recorded that he could
perceive in the countenance of Molé, then threatened by the fury of the
multitude, not a motion that did not indicate imperturbable firmness, and
at the same time a presence and elevation of mind greater than firmness,
and every way supernatural. This is one of the noblest exhibitions of
courage which history has recorded.
[Illustration: FRENCH MAN-OF-WAR, TIME OF LOUIS XIV]
When the chiefs of sedition saw that they could not conquer, and that
the treaty would pass in their despite, each hastened to make his
private offers and demands of the court. Bouillon wanted Sedan; Turenne,
Alsace; Elbeuf, the government of Picardy; Beaufort, to be admiral. They
were not listened to. Angered and resolved to proceed to extremities,
they wrote to Turenne to advance, and to the archduke to invade the
north. But Turenne’s treason was defeated by Erlach, commander of the
Swiss--himself obliged to fly; and the archduke, his support failing,
retreated. Thus the moderate portion of the parliament, supported by the
civic guard, succeeded in restoring peace with the court, despite the
opposition of the nobles and the mob. The reader will not fail to remark
how distinct these several classes kept from each other, even when in
alliance and fighting the same battles; a state of society that has not
ceased at the present day to characterise France: whilst in England, the
blending of the lower ranks of the nobly born with the higher ranks of
the industrious and unennobled, effected by the habits and institutions
of the country, have rendered the pernicious line of demarcation betwixt
castes and classes almost invisible to the historian.
SECOND ACT OF THE FRONDE; ARREST OF CONDÉ
[Sidenote: [1649-1650 A.D.]]
The scene now shifts, and another act of the Fronde commences, displaying
the chief actors in altogether new characters and dresses. No sooner was
the peace declared than the prince of Condé, jealous of the cardinal,
united with the nobles whom he so lately combated: he visited his sister,
Madame de Longueville, became reconciled to her and to La Rochefoucauld;
the duke de Beaufort and the coadjutor being the only two that remained
at the same time hostile to Mazarin and jealous of Condé. A few nobles,
however, were not sufficient to give weight to the demands of the prince,
and Mazarin resisted them. The prince, in consequence, saw the coadjutor,
and planned, or pretended to form, an alliance with him and the violent
members of the parliament. The court, terrified at the prospect of being
so abandoned, and of seeing Condé at the head of the frondeurs, granted
all the desires of the latter, who, ashamed to break with his new allies,
yet left without a pretext to continue his quarrel with Mazarin, “changed
his mind three hundred times in three days.” The haughty prince, who
hated the parliament and the rabble, at last decided to disappoint the
coadjutor; he became reconciled to Mazarin, and of course quarrelled with
the frondeurs, whom he accused of an attempt to assassinate him. The
same imprudence, the same haughtiness, petulance, and overbearing temper
marked the prince to whichever side he leaned, and disgusted both. As a
friend he was even more troublesome than as an enemy: Mazarin and the
queen felt this; they could no longer tolerate his insolence; and the
present moment, as he had left himself no friends in any party, seemed
the best opportunity for being revenged on him.
To arrest and send the prince to prison was the old monarchic mode
of treating the froward; but one of the articles stipulated by the
parliament, and secured to them in the last treaty, was that every
prisoner should be interrogated in four-and-twenty hours, and delivered
over to his lawful judges. To infringe upon this law might rouse the
parliament, and re-excite the rebellion of the Parisians. To secure
himself against such an event, Mazarin leagued with--whom? The coadjutor
himself, and the most violent of the frondeurs! They, the populace
sharing their sentiments, hated Condé for his ancient enmity and his late
desertion. De Retz and Mazarin, accordingly, had interviews, the former
entering the Palais Royal by night in disguise. The consequence of this
secret understanding soon appeared. The prince of Condé, the prince of
Conti, his brother, and the duke de Longueville were arrested at the
door of the council-chamber, and sent to Vincennes in January, 1650. The
dukes de Bouillon and de la Rochefoucauld, as well as the duchess de
Longueville, succeeded in escaping; the princesses of Condé were ordered
to retire to Chantilly. Bonfires, illuminations, and every sign of joy on
the part of the Parisians marked this extreme measure. The popular hatred
of Condé and confidence in De Retz lulled for the moment their dislike of
the cardinal Mazarin.
Two events which mark the spirit of the time, and which occurred previous
to the prince’s arrest, must not be passed over. The honour of a
_tabouret_, or stool at court, was only granted to the ladies of princes
of sovereign houses, or to the wives of dukes and peers. Exceptions,
however, had been made in favour of the younger branches of the Rohans,
the La Trémouilles, and the family of Bouillon. La Rochefoucauld
pretended to the same distinction: the prince of Condé supported his
claim. The noblesse instantly assembled to the number of eight hundred,
and formed a protest against such pretensions, which went, they said,
to destroy the natural equality that existed amongst all gently born.
The dispute led to a discussion of political rights and principles,
then the dangerous mania of the age, and some voices clamoured for the
states-general. The French noblesse are entitled certainly to the credit
of having demanded these national assemblies at a time when the judicial
body or parliament, in whom the favour and confidence of the people were
then centred, deprecated any such proposition. It may be asked why the
chiefs of the judicature, and such upright lovers of liberty as Molé,
were opposed to the convocation of the states-general. The answer is that
the example of England, then in the mouths and minds of many, terrified
them, and made them prefer their own body as a constitutional check,
to such a representative assembly as that which, in the neighbouring
kingdom, had begun with civil war, and ended in regicide and despotism.
It must be owned they had some cause for fear. A revolution is bad
enough; but an imitative revolution, a parody of such a great event,
is to be deprecated tenfold, as incurring all the evils and few of the
advantages of the convulsion.
Already the people of Paris talked of republics and liberty: the
monarchy, they said, was too old, and it was time it should expire. Nay,
the duke de Bouillon himself, adopting the revolutionary phrase, proposed
on one occasion to purge the parliament. The taste for assembling and
debating was general. The annuities charged on the Hôtel-de-Ville were
suspended by the troubles: three thousand of these fund-holders, chiefly
citizens of Paris, met, drew up resolutions, petitioned, and clothed
themselves in black, the uniform of the tiers or third estate. Molé
instantly rebuked them, as attempting to form a _chambre de communes_, a
house of commons. The citizens were indignant at the comparison: and this
very reproach, that they were imitating the commons of England, had great
effect in dissipating their assembly.
RESISTANCE OF BORDEAUX (1650 A.D.)
Principles, however, were soon forgotten in the general sympathy which
the misfortunes of Condé excited. The haughtiness, the imprudences of
the hero of Rocroi and Lens were now forgotten; and the nobility began
to rally to his cause as their own. The court were at first successful
in reducing Normandy, the government of the duke de Longueville; but in
Languedoc and the provinces on the Gironde, the dukes de la Rochefoucauld
and de Bouillon soon gathered an army of adherents, and were joined by
the wife and infant son of the prince.
Clémence de Maillé, princess of Condé, had hitherto commanded little
respect either from the world or from her husband, who, having married
her merely as the niece of Cardinal Richelieu, was ashamed of her
humble origin and his own condescension. She now however displayed a
heroism and an attachment worthy of the spouse of the Great Condé. The
princess escaped with her young son, the duke d’Enghien, from Chantilly,
and after some delay in a fortified place, joined the dukes de la
Rochefoucauld and de Bouillon in the south. But the noblesse was not
then the predominant order in the state, and she was obliged to seek
more powerful protection in the parliament of Bordeaux. This provincial
court of justice was highly incensed against the duke d’Épernon, governor
of Languedoc; and consequently ill-disposed towards the queen and the
cardinal, who seconded him. They of course embraced with ardour the new
laws established by the parliament of Paris, which gave to the courts
of magistracy power to control the measures of government, and which
forbade arrests without bringing the accused to speedy trial. They could
little comprehend the manœuvres by which De Retz and his violent party
induced the parliament of Paris to overlook the imprisonment of Condé.
They were eager to take his part and to admit the princess within their
walls; but at the same time had considerable distrust of the nobles who
supported her, and who were negotiating with Spain. To satisfy these
scruples, the princess entered Bordeaux alone; but the popular clamour
drowning the voice of the magistrates, she soon had the city at her
command, and the dukes de Bouillon and de la Rochefoucauld entered with
their troops and took the command.
The queen and Mazarin led the young king and an army commanded by the
marshal De la Meilleraie to reduce Bordeaux. Its first feat was to raze
Verteuil, the famous château of the La Rochefoucauld family, a barbarous
act, and inconceivable in Mazarin, who loved the arts. Bordeaux was then
invested, and its suburb was carried after a valiant defence, in which
La Rochefoucauld displayed remarkable gallantry. To gain footing in the
town itself was soon found impossible, such was the obstinacy of the
armed citizens. Whilst Mazarin and the court thus lay encamped before
Bordeaux, Turenne had entered the north of France, and was marching
without opposition towards the capital, intending to liberate the princes
from Vincennes. Condé, confined in the donjon of that castle, whiled away
his captivity by cultivating the few flowers that the terrace of his
window could contain. “Who would have thought,” exclaimed he, in learning
the resistance of Bordeaux, “that my wife should be fighting whilst I was
gardening!” The princes were removed from Vincennes to the safer retreat
of Marcoussis, and Turenne, who, fearing to indispose the parliament of
Paris by appearing at the head of foreign troops, retired again towards
the frontier.
DISGRACE AND EXILE OF MAZARIN (1650-1651 A.D.)
[Illustration: MAZARIN]
[Sidenote: [1650-1651 A.D.]]
The coadjutor and the violent frondeurs grew weary of their alliance with
Mazarin, into which their fear and hatred of Condé had alone induced
them to enter. They not only found Mazarin ungrateful and insincere,
refusing even to De Retz the cardinal’s hat that he demanded, but their
popularity, which was their chief force, and their influence over the
parliament, were rapidly diminishing from their union with the court.
Mazarin, suspecting the intention of the frondeurs, and alarmed by the
march of Turenne, granted peace to Bordeaux, concluding more a truce
than a treaty with the princess of Condé, La Rochefoucauld, and Bouillon.
The minister then returned to Paris, where he found the parliament no
longer silent as to the arrest of Condé, but prepared to expostulate,
and demand his release. Mazarin caused the princes to be instantly
conveyed from Marcoussis to La Havre, where they were still more in
his individual power. La Rochefoucauld and Bouillon also returned to
Paris; and a series of intrigues took place; these partisans of Condé
negotiating at the same time both with the coadjutor and with Mazarin
for his release. An alliance with either would effect this, and La
Rochefoucauld was in doubt. The coadjutor, in the habit of a cavalier,
came by night to the rendezvous at the house of the princess palatine. La
Rochefoucauld went in equal secrecy to the Palais Royal. The over-caution
of the cardinal lost his cause. La Rochefoucauld pressed him at once
to conclude the alliance, and give orders that Condé should be set at
liberty. Mazarin hesitated. Unprincipled as he was himself, he could not
believe it possible that the friends of Condé could unite with De Retz.
La Rochefoucauld warned the cardinal in parting that the morrow would
be too late. Mazarin smiled incredulity and irresolution; and the duke,
hurrying to the other place of rendezvous, concluded the agreement with
the coadjutor. The effects of this alliance were immediately manifest.
The majority of the parliament clamoured for the release of Condé, and
addressed the queen on the subject. It was necessary to yield; and
Mazarin saw that, deserted by all parties, he would infallibly be the
victim.
In his rage he anathematised the parliament before the whole court,
called it an English house of commons, compared the coadjutor De Retz
to Cromwell and himself to Strafford, and declared that, in sacrificing
its minister to popular clamour, the crown would, as in the case of
Strafford, sacrifice itself. This conversation, being reported to the
parliament by De Retz, raised a storm indescribable, and terminated in
an address to the queen, desiring that Mazarin should be banished from
her councils, and that the prince should be liberated. Nought was left
the cardinal but flight. He took his departure immediately. It was agreed
that the queen and young king were to follow him, and that, possessed
of La Havre and the persons of the princes, they would be able either
by open war or negotiation to bring the parliament and the frondeurs to
more reasonable terms. This project however failed, through the cunning
and activity of the coadjutor, who, learning the queen’s intention of
departing, raised a mob round the palace, and made her virtually a
prisoner there. Cardinal Mazarin alone found himself without authority.
He could not even gain entrance into Havre unless unattended. He entered,
nevertheless, saw the captive princes of Condé, Conti, and Longueville,
endeavoured to cajole them, and set them at liberty, without receiving in
return a single mark of gratitude or regard. Thus every way disappointed,
Mazarin resigned himself to his disgrace, and left the kingdom.[103]
CONDÉ IN POWER (1651 A.D.)
The prince of Condé was now all-powerful--the parliament, the Fronde,
the noblesse, the populace, had all rallied to him; the minister was in
exile, the queen a prisoner. Many blamed him for not setting aside Anne
of Austria, and assuming the regency; but he was totally without the
qualities requisite for taking advantage of his position; he was too
lazy, too confident, too generous, too rash: and, making not a single
exertion, the several parties that had united to compel at once his
release and the exile of the minister were allowed again to fall asunder,
and abandon to the court the recovery of its ancient influence. The
noblesse at this period were animated with a strong desire to imitate
the magistracy, and, by remaining united, to restore or re-establish the
influence of the aristocracy, in opposition both to crown and judicature.
They assembled in the convent of the Cordeliers (afterwards doomed to
hold a club of a very different kind, that of Danton), and formed a house
of peers, discussing state affairs, and fixing the privileges of the
nobles. The parliament took fire at this, and forbade the assemblies. The
noblesse looked to Condé to head them; but he, without principle or aim,
and deeming his interests, as prince of the blood, distinct from those
of the aristocracy, held back at this crisis. The noblesse called the
assembly of the church, then sitting, to their aid, who protested, and
complained that the parliament had altered the ancient constitution of
the kingdom, by adding themselves as a fourth and spurious estate to the
three established ones of king, lords, and commons. Despite of this, the
parliament had force and the popular feeling on its side. The noblesse
were obliged to succumb, and dissolved their assembly; not, however,
before they had recourse to the queen and the royal authority, who issued
a declaration, promising to convoke the states-general for the following
September.
Here the queen recovered consideration and authority sufficient to enable
her to aim at and grasp more, by allying with the prince of Condé. One of
the stipulations betwixt them was that the marriage should be broken off
betwixt the prince of Conti and Mademoiselle de Chevreuse. The coadjutor,
connected by gallantry and friendship with the family of Chevreuse, was
indignant at this, and a quarrel ensued betwixt Condé and the old party
of the Fronde. Hence another scene in the drama, which represents Condé
insulted by those very men who had been so instrumental in releasing him.
De Retz and the prince nearly came to blows in the Palais de Justice; and
the former had almost fallen a victim to the passion of La Rochefoucauld,
who jammed the coadjutor betwixt two folding doors till he was almost
suffocated: the duke at the same time called to one of his friends to
stab De Retz, an injunction that was not obeyed, and perhaps not intended
to be obeyed. It is, nevertheless, startling to the modern reader to find
the courtly author of the _Maximes_ engaged personally in the office and
using the language of the assassin.
The consequence of these dissensions was the recovery of her authority
by Anne of Austria, who, in affecting to ally with Condé, was merely
enticing him to disgust and desert the Fronde. This achieved, she flung
off the mask, and Condé found himself as much detested by all parties
as a few months back he was their favourite and their rallying word.
The prince, thus deserted, endeavoured to make common cause with the
noblesse, and clamoured for the states-general; but it was too late: the
parliament united with the court in opposing their convocation, and Condé
in despair retired from Paris, obliged to seek support in civil war and
an alliance with Spain.
RETURN OF MAZARIN (1651 A.D.)
In September, 1651, Louis XIV, then approaching fourteen years of age,
was declared to have completed his minority. The day was celebrated with
great magnificence. The royal authority remained, however, as before,
in the hands of the queen: her only thought was the recall of Mazarin.
The attachment borne by Anne to this prelate-minister is inexplicable.
She might have reigned supreme, and been the arbiter betwixt contending
parties, could she have consented to leave Mazarin in exile. De Retz
endeavoured to impress this necessity upon her; but power appeared to
her worthless without the cardinal; and no sooner had Condé broken with
the parliament, and burst into war against the court, than the minister
prepared to return. He levied an army, made an attempt on Brissac, and
soon after joined the court at Poitiers, taking as usual the chief seat
in the council.[g]
At the first news of his return, Gaston of Orleans, brother of Louis
XIII, who had demanded the removal of the cardinal, levied troops in
Paris without knowing for what they would be employed. Parliament renewed
its decrees; it proscribed Mazarin and put a price on his head. This
proscription tempted no one to earn the 50,000 crowns, which, after all,
would never have been paid. With another nation and in another age,
such a decree would have found executors; but here it served simply to
incite fresh pleasantries. The Blots and the Marignys, wits, who carried
gaiety into the tumult of these troubles, caused to be placarded all over
Paris a distribution of the 50,000 crowns--so much for whoever should
cut off the cardinal’s nose, and so much for an ear, so much for an eye,
so much to make him a eunuch. This ridicule was all the effect of the
proscription against the minister’s person, but his furniture and library
were sold by a second decree. This money was destined for the assassin’s
pay, but it was dissipated by the depositaries, like all funds that had
been raised hitherto. The cardinal on his side used against his enemies
neither poison nor steel and, in spite of the bitterness and madness of
so much partisanship and hatred, no great crimes were committed. The
party leaders were less cruel and the people less furious than in the
days of the league--this was not a war of religion.
[Illustration: CANNON OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY]
The spirit of madness which reigned at this time so possessed the
whole body of the parliament that, after having solemnly ordered an
assassination which everyone ridiculed, it passed a decree by which
several councillors should betake themselves to the frontier for
information against the army of Cardinal Mazarin: that is to say, the
royal army. Meanwhile the king interdicted the parliament of Paris and
transferred it to Pontoise. Fourteen members attached to the court
obeyed; the others resisted. There were now two parliaments, which,
to cap the confusion, thundered against each other with reciprocating
decrees, as in the days of Henry IV and Charles VI.
It was precisely at the time when this company was going to extremities
with the king’s minister that it declared the prince of Condé, who had
only armed himself against this minister, guilty of _lèse majesté_; and
by a turn of mind which its preceding steps could alone make credible,
it ordered the new troops of Gaston, duke of Orleans, to march against
Mazarin and forbade at the same time any money from the public receipts
to be used in maintaining them. We can expect nought else from a company
of magistrates, thrown out of their proper sphere, knowing not their
rights, their real power, political affairs, or war, assembling and
deciding amid tumult, making decisions of which they had no thought the
day before, and at which they themselves were afterwards astonished. The
parliament of Bordeaux was then serving the prince of Condé, but it kept
to a little more rational conduct, because being further removed from the
court it was less agitated by opposing factions. More important matters
were interesting the whole of France.
THE LAST PHASE OF THE FRONDE
[Sidenote: [1651-1652 A.D.]]
Condé, leagued with the Spaniards, was on a campaign against the king;
and Turenne, having quitted these same Spaniards, with whom he had been
beaten at Rethel, had just made his peace with the court and was in
command of the royal army. The exhausted finances did not permit either
of the two parties to maintain great armies, but small ones did not the
less decide the fate of the state. Louis XIV, brought up in adversity,
went with his mother, his brother, and Cardinal Mazarin from province
to province, without having as many troops about his person, by a great
deal, as he had afterwards for a single guard in times of peace. Five to
six thousand men, some sent from Spain, others raised by the prince of
Condé’s partisans, pursued him into the very heart of his kingdom.
Meanwhile the prince of Condé hastened from Bordeaux to Montauban, taking
towns and everywhere increasing his party. All the hope of the court lay
in Marshal Turenne. The royal army found itself near Gien on the Loire.
The opposing force of Condé was some leagues away, under the orders of
the dukes de Nemours and de Beaufort. The duke de Beaufort was incapable
of commanding anything. The duke de Nemours was braver and more amiable
than he was skilful. Both together had demoralised their army. The
soldiers of Condé knew that their leader was a hundred leagues away and
believed themselves lost, when, in the middle of the night, a courier
presented himself at the outposts in the forest of Orleans. The sentinels
recognised in this courier the prince of Condé himself, who had come
all the way across France from Agen, with many adventures and always in
disguise, to place himself at the head of his army.
His presence did much and his unexpected arrival still more. The royal
army was divided into two corps. April 7th, 1652, Condé fell upon that
which was at Bléneau, commanded by Marshal d’Hocquincourt, and his corps
was dissipated as quickly as it had been attacked. Turenne could not
even be warned. The terrified Mazarin hastened to Gien in the middle of
the night to awaken the sleeping king and himself tell him the news.
The little court was in consternation; they proposed to save the king by
flight and to conduct him secretly to Bourges. The victorious Condé drew
near to Gien; the desolation and the fear increased. Turenne reassured
their spirits by his firmness and saved the court by his skill. With
the few troops that remained to him he made such fortunate movements
that he prevented Condé from following up his advantage. It is difficult
to decide which won the more honours, the victorious Condé or Turenne
who had robbed him of the fruits of victory.[104] It is true that in
this fight at Bléneau not four hundred men were killed; but the prince
of Condé was none the less on the point of making himself master of
the entire royal family, and of having in his hands his enemy Cardinal
Mazarin. It would be hard to find in history any smaller battle with
greater interest and more pressing danger.
Condé, who did not flatter himself that he could surprise Turenne, as he
had done Hocquincourt, marched his army towards Paris. He hastened to
that city to enjoy his glory and the favourable disposition of a blind
populace. The admiration they had for his last fight,--all of whose
details had exaggerated the hate that was borne for Mazarin,--the name
and the presence of the Great Condé, seemed at first to make him absolute
master of the capital; but at the bottom all minds were divided. The
coadjutor--now become Cardinal de Retz, reconciled in appearance with the
court which feared him and which he defied--was no longer the master of
the people and no longer played the principal rôle. He ruled the duke of
Orleans and was opposed by Condé. Parliament wavered between the court,
the duke of Orleans, and the prince. Although all were in accord in
crying down Mazarin, each one was nursing his own particular interests in
secret; the people were a stormy sea whose waves were driven at chance by
many contrary winds.[i]
Condé hoped to find the parliament his ally against Mazarin: but the
stern magistrates, though firm in their abhorrence of that minister, were
not more favourable to Condé, and openly reproached him with his Spanish
alliance. From the parliament he did not scruple to appeal to the people,
whose lowest class rose in tumult, and threatened the magistrates. The
very courts proved no refuge: councillors and judges were insulted and
even beaten as “Mazarins.”
Condé, thus disappointed in the support of the parliament, and of the
respectable citizens, could not cope unaided with the royal army. The
Parisian rabble, very forward in a riot, could not be made to stand the
fire of regular troops. The prince had recourse to the Spaniards, who,
themselves busied in the sieges of Gravelines and Dunkirk, induced the
duke of Lorraine to march into France and support Condé. The skilful
strategy of Turenne, however, compelled this new auxiliary to retreat;
and the prince, after a fresh attempt to raise sedition in the capital
and control the parliament, was reduced to fight Turenne with far
inferior forces. The latter drove him from St. Cloud, and Condé marched
to take post at Charenton, when, his rival pressing him closely, as he
defiled round the walls of Paris, the prince was obliged to throw himself
into the faubourg St. Antoine, behind the entrenchments formerly raised
for their defence by the inhabitants.
_Battle of St. Antoine (July 2nd, 1652)_
The gate of Paris called St. Antoine was then immediately under the
Bastille, the cannon of which swept the three roads diverging from it.
Condé, denied entrance into the city, was still secure from attack on
this side; and, posted in the central position of the gate St. Antoine,
he determined to make head against the royalists, who approached to
attack him by the three roads. Mazarin and Louis XIV were on the heights,
now covered with the cemetery of Père Lachaise, spectators of the ensuing
action, the young monarch being most anxious to witness the destruction
of this rebellious prince.
The triple attack commenced: that on the prince’s left, commanded by
three sworn and personal enemies to him, was defeated by his valour, the
chiefs all perishing. The hero then rushed to defend the central street:
he met Turenne in person, and there the conflict was more doubtful. “Did
you see Condé during the action?” asked someone of Turenne when the
affair was over. “I must have seen a dozen Condés,” was the reply: “he
multiplied himself.” On the right the action was most bloody: the nobles
of the prince’s party were almost all slain or wounded there, amongst the
rest La Rochefoucauld, who, struck on the head, was carried off by his
wounded son. Turenne was the most powerful; and no chance appeared of
Condé’s saving himself and the relics of his army, when the gate of St.
Antoine unexpectedly opened to receive him, the cannon of the Bastille at
the same time sending their fire up the three attacked streets, and thus
effectually checking the progress of the royalists.
This well-timed succour came from Mademoiselle de Montpensier, daughter
of the duke of Orleans, whose sympathy for the heroic Condé, now in
distress, was aided by the clamours of the populace, enraged at beholding
a rash and imprudent but still generous prince sacrificed to the detested
Mazarin. She wrung from the municipal officers the orders for opening the
gates; herself directed the firing of the guns of the Bastille; nay, her
hand is said to have applied the match. Mademoiselle had aspired to the
hand of Condé, to that of the king, and might hope at least to espouse
a sovereign prince. But Mazarin observed, on seeing the fire of the
Bastille, and knowing who commanded it, “That shot has killed the husband
of Mademoiselle.”[g]
SECOND EXILE OF MAZARIN
After this bloody and useless combat of St. Antoine the king could not
return to Paris; and the prince did not remain there long. Popular
feeling and the murder of several citizens, for which he was believed
to be responsible, made him odious to the people. [He fled from Paris
and joined the Spanish army, October, 1652.] However, he still had his
faction in the parliament. This body, now intimidated by a wandering
court, and driven after a fashion from the capital to Pontoise, pressed
by the cabals of the duke of Orleans and the prince, declared, by a
decree, the duke of Orleans lieutenant-general of the realm, although the
king was an adult. The two parliaments of Paris and Pontoise, contesting
the authority one with the other and issuing contradictory decrees,
agreed in demanding the expulsion of Mazarin--so much did the hatred
of this minister seem the essential duty of every Frenchman. The court
saw itself obliged once more to sacrifice Mazarin whom everyone believed
the author of the troubles, but who was but their pretext. For a second
time he left the country, and to increase his shame the king must needs
make a public declaration dismissing his minister, the while praising his
services and deploring his exile.
[Illustration: LOUIS XIV AS A YOUNG MAN]
Charles I, king of England, who had just lost his head on the scaffold,
had in the beginning of his troubles abandoned the blood of Strafford,
his friend, to his parliament. Louis XIV on the contrary became the
peaceful master of his realm by permitting his minister’s exile. Thus the
same weakness bore different results. The king of England, in abandoning
his favourite, emboldened a people that breathed war and hated kings;
and Louis XIV, or rather the queen-mother, by dismissing the cardinal,
removed all pretext for revolt from a people tired of war and who loved
royalty.
While the state was thus torn at home it had been attacked and weakened
abroad; all the benefits of the battles of Rocroi, Lens, and Nördlingen
were lost; the important place of Dunkirk was retaken by the Spaniards
(September, 1652); they drove the French from Barcelona, they retook
Casale in Italy (October, 1652).
Scarcely had the cardinal left for Bouillon, place of his new retreat,
when the citizens of Paris, of their own accord, sent to the king and
asked him to return to his capital. Louis entered Paris October 21st,
1652, and all was so peaceful that it would have been difficult to
imagine that a few days before all was in confusion. Gaston of Orleans,
unfortunate in his undertakings, which he never knew how to carry
out, was relegated to Blois, where he passed the rest of his life in
repentance; and he was the second son of Henry the Great to die without
much glory. Cardinal de Retz, as imprudent as he was audacious, was
arrested in the Louvre, and after having been sent from prison to prison
long led a wandering life which he finished in retreat, where he acquired
virtues which his great courage had not known in the agitations of his
fortune.
Several councillors who had most abused their ministry paid for their
actions with exile; the others withdrew into the limits of the magistracy
and others attached themselves the closer to their duties with an annual
gratuity of five hundred crowns which Fouquet, attorney-general and
superintendent of the finances, gave them surreptitiously. The prince
of Condé meanwhile, abandoned in France by nearly all his partisans,
and badly assisted by the Spaniards, continued a disastrous war on the
frontiers of Champagne. There still remained factions in Bordeaux, but
they were soon pacified.[i]
[Sidenote: [1652-1653 A.D.]]
Thus ended the Fronde. Voltaire dismisses it in a few pages, satisfied
with recording its _bon mots_. He seems to have looked upon this civil
war as merely a pastime, entered into by a few froward youths and their
mistresses. He did not see in it the serious, the sanguinary and unhappy
struggle of a nation for its liberty. Even later writers, more profound
than Voltaire, have designated the Fronde as “the last campaign of the
noblesse.” It was indeed so. But the noblesse formed not the prominent
body. It was the parliament, the magistracy, that put itself forward
to represent the commons, of which they claimed and established the
privileges for themselves. This was, no doubt, an audacious and hopeless
enterprise. The states-general, the ancient representative assembly of
the nation, was the form to which they should have rallied. But the
extravagance of the English parliament deterred them; and they fixed
upon their own body, as a less democratic and dangerous assembly, to
participate in legislative power. The scheme was new: it was conceived
with boldness, and supported with courage; and if the legists failed
in arriving at settled liberty by its means, they may plead that
representative assemblies have frequently failed in the same endeavour.[g]
MAZARIN AGAIN IN POWER (1653 A.D.)
The calm in the kingdom was the result of Cardinal Mazarin’s banishment;
however, scarcely had he been driven away by the general cry of the
French people and the king’s decree, when the king made him come back.
He was astonished to see himself re-enter Paris all powerful. Louis XIV
received him like a father and the people like a master. He held a great
reception at the Hôtel-de-Ville amid the acclamations of the citizens; he
threw money to the populace, but it is said that in his joy for so happy
a change he showed his scorn for the inconstancy or rather the folly of
the Parisians. The officers of parliament, after having placed a price on
his head like a public robber, sued, almost all of them, for the honour
of asking his protection; and this same parliament a short time after
condemned by contumacy the prince of Condé to lose his life. They saw the
cardinal, who urged this condemnation of Condé, marry to the prince of
Conti his brother, one of his own nieces--a proof that the power of the
minister was going to be boundless.
The king reunited the parliaments of Paris and of Pontoise; he forbade
the assembling of the chambers. Parliament wished to remonstrate, one
councillor was sent to prison; several others were exiled: parliament
kept quiet; the change had already come.[i]
[Sidenote: [1653-1655 A.D.]]
The events of Louis XIV’s youth were such as to inspire him not only
with high ideas of his kingly rights, but to prove to him the necessity
of absolute power in the monarch.[105] In the great English rebellion,
and in the Fronde, he had seen freedom under its most hideous aspect,
and followed by the vainest of results. We can scarcely then blame him
personally for his despotic propensities, which, moreover, his manly and
ambitious character tended to increase. The young king and his brother
Philip, then called the duke of Anjou, were educated in the privacy of
the palace. The nieces of the cardinal were their playmates; and Louis
formed successive attachments for two of these young ladies, especially
for Maria Mancini, afterwards the wife of the constable Colonna. So
intimate was the connection betwixt Mazarin and Anne of Austria that many
were persuaded of their marriage.[106] Certainly her attachment to him
was personal and tender. Louis XIV always preserved for the cardinal a
sort of filial reverence: he may be said to have learned in the school of
implicit obedience how to be himself despotic.
At intervals, however, the imperious temper of the young monarch burst
forth, and betrayed itself. In 1655, the parliament, after registering
certain fiscal edicts, thought proper to re-examine them, to complain,
and show symptoms of their ancient independence. Louis was at Vincennes,
engaged in the chase, when he heard of their conduct. Instantly, without
consulting the cardinal, or even tarrying to change his dress, the
young monarch galloped to Paris, entered the Palais de Justice and
the Hall of Parliament in his hunting habit, booted, and with whip in
hand. “Gentlemen,” said Louis to the astonished legists, “everyone is
acquainted with the ill consequences of your former assemblies. Their
recurrence must be prevented. I command you instantly to cease busying
yourself with my edicts. And you, Mr. President, I forbid either to call
or suffer such assemblies.” This bold assertion of the royal will from
the mouth of a stripling proved sufficient to crush the reviving spirit
of the magistracy. It was silent, and obeyed.[g]
WAR WITH SPAIN CONTINUES
Condé, who had become general in the Spanish armies, was unable to revive
what he had himself weakened at Rocroi and Lens. He was fighting with raw
troops against the veteran French regiments that had learned to conquer
under him, and that were now commanded by Turenne. The fate of Turenne
and of Condé was to be uniformly victorious when they were fighting
together at the head of the French and to be defeated when they were
commanding the Spanish.
Turenne had with difficulty saved the wreck of the Spanish army at Rethel
when, instead of a general of the king of France, he had been made the
lieutenant of a Spanish general; the prince of Condé had the same fate
before Arras (August 25th, 1654). He and the archduke besieging this
city, Turenne attacked them in their camp and forced their lines; the
troops of the archduke were put to flight; Condé, with two regiments of
French and Lorrainers, sustained alone the attack of Turenne’s army; and,
while the archduke was in flight, he defeated Marshal d’Hocquincourt,
repulsed Marshal de la Ferté, and retired victorious, covering the
retreat of the defeated Spaniards.
The relief of Arras, the forcing of the lines, and the rout of the
archduke covered Turenne with glory; and it is to be observed that in the
letter concerning this victory written in the name of the king to the
parliament the success of the entire campaign is ascribed to Cardinal
Mazarin and that Turenne’s name is not even mentioned. The cardinal had
been in fact a few leagues from Arras with the king. He had even been in
the camp at the siege of Stenay, which Turenne had taken before relieving
Arras. Councils of war had been held in the presence of the cardinal.
On this basis he ascribed to himself the honour of the events; and this
vanity brought upon him a ridicule that all the authority of his ministry
could not suppress. The king was not present at the battle of Arras. He
had gone into the trenches at the siege of Stenay, but Cardinal Mazarin
was unwilling that he should further expose his person, upon which the
tranquillity of the state and the power of the minister seemed to depend.
Thus on the one side, Mazarin, absolute master of France and of the young
king, and on the other, Don Luis de Haro, who governed Spain and Philip
IV, continued in the name of their masters to carry on the war, but with
little vigour.
These two men vied with each other in directing their policies towards
forming an alliance with Cromwell, the English Protector, who for some
time enjoyed the satisfaction of seeing himself courted by the two most
powerful kingdoms of Christendom. The Spanish minister offered to help
him take Calais; Mazarin proposed to besiege Dunkirk and restore that
city to him. Cromwell had to choose between the key of France and that
of Flanders. He was also much solicited by Condé, but he did not wish to
negotiate with a prince who had nothing left but his name and who was
without a party in France and without power in Spain.
ALLIANCE WITH CROMWELL (1655 A.D.); WAR IN FLANDERS (1656-1658 A.D.)
[Sidenote: [1655-1657 A.D.]]
In May, 1655, the Protector decided in favour of France, but without
making any special treaty or a division of conquests in advance. He
wished to shed lustre on his usurpation by greater enterprises. His
design was to wrest Mexico from the Spaniards, but the latter were warned
in time. Cromwell’s admirals, however, took Jamaica from them. It was
not until after the Jamaican expedition that Cromwell signed his treaty
with the king of France, but without making any mention of Dunkirk. The
Protector treated as equal with equal; he forced the king to give him the
title of brother in his letters. In the copy of the treaty that remained
in England his secretary signed before the French ambassador; but he
negotiated really as a superior by forcing the king to drive out of his
dominions Charles II and the duke of York, the grandsons of Henry IV,
to whom France owed an asylum. A greater sacrifice of honour to fortune
could not have been made.
While Mazarin was making this treaty Charles II asked for one of his
nieces in marriage. The bad condition of his affairs that drove the
prince to this step also brought upon him a refusal. It has even been
suspected that the cardinal wished to marry to the son of Cromwell the
niece whom he refused to the king of England. This much is certain--that
when he afterwards saw the way to the throne more open to Charles II he
wished to renew this marriage; but was refused in his turn.
The war continued in Flanders with varying success. Turenne, having
besieged Valenciennes along with Marshal de la Ferté, suffered the same
kind of reverse that Condé had sustained at Arras. The prince, assisted
this time by Don John of Austria, who was more worthy to fight at his
side than the archduke had been, forced La Ferté’s lines, took him
prisoner, and relieved Valenciennes (July 17th, 1656). Turenne did what
Condé had done in a similar rout. He saved the defeated army and opposed
the enemy everywhere; a little later he even besieged and took the little
town of La Capelle (September 27th). This was perhaps the first time that
a defeated army had dared to make a siege.
This famous march of Turenne, which was followed by the taking of La
Capelle, was eclipsed by an even finer march of the prince of Condé.
Turenne had laid siege to Cambray when Condé, at the head of two
thousand cavalry, forced a passage through the besieging army, and having
driven back all who tried to stop him threw himself into the town (May
31st, 1657). The citizens received their deliverer on bended knees. Thus
these two men, opposed to each other, exhibited the resources of their
genius. We admire them in their retreats as well as in their victories,
in their good conduct and even in their faults, which they were always
able to retrieve. Their talents alternately arrested the progress of each
monarchy; but the financial disorder in Spain and in France was a still
greater obstacle to their success.
[Sidenote: [1657-1658 A.D.]]
The alliance with Cromwell finally gave France a more marked superiority.
On the one hand, Admiral Blake was about to burn the Spanish galleons
and cause the loss of the sole treasure with which the war could be
maintained. On the other hand, twenty English vessels had just blockaded
the port of Dunkirk and six thousand veterans of the English Revolution
reinforced Turenne’s army. Then Dunkirk, the most important place in
Flanders, was besieged by sea and land. Condé and Don John of Austria,
having united all their forces, came forward to relieve it. The eyes of
Europe were upon this event. Cardinal Mazarin brought Louis XIV near the
scene of war without allowing him to get to it, although he was nearly
twenty years old. The prince stopped at Calais, and hither Cromwell sent
to him a pompous embassy, at the head of which was his son-in-law, Lord
Falconberg. The king sent to him the duke de Créqui, and Mancini, duke
de Nevers, a nephew of the cardinal, followed by two hundred noblemen.
Mancini presented the Protector a remarkable letter from Cardinal Mazarin
in which he said that he was sorry not to be able to pay him in person
the respect due to the greatest man in the world.
Meanwhile the prince-marshal Turenne attacked the Spanish army, or rather
the army of Flanders, near the Dunes. The latter was commanded by Don
John of Austria, son of Philip IV and an actress, who two years later
became the brother-in-law of Louis XIV. The prince of Condé was with
this army but not in command; hence it was not difficult for Turenne to
gain the victory (June 14th, 1658). The six thousand English soldiers
contributed to the victory, which was complete.
The genius of the Great Condé was of no avail against the best troops of
France and England. The Spanish army was destroyed. Dunkirk surrendered
soon afterwards (June 23rd). The king came up with his minister in order
to see the garrison pass out. The cardinal did not allow Louis XIV to
appear either as warrior or as king. He had no money to distribute to the
soldiers, and was poorly attended. When he was with the army he dined
with Mazarin or with Marshal Turenne. This neglect of royal dignity was
not in Louis XIV the effect of contempt for pomp, but of the confusion
in his affairs and of the pains the cardinal took to unite splendour
and authority in himself. Louis entered Dunkirk only to turn it over to
Cromwell’s ambassador, Lord Lockhart. Mazarin tried whether by finesse
he could not evade the treaty and not give up the place; but Lockhart
threatened, and English firmness got the better of Italian subtlety.
Several persons have asserted that the cardinal, who had attributed to
himself the victory of Arras, tried to induce Turenne to yield to him
again the honour of the battle of Dunes. Du Bec-Crépin, count de Moret,
it is said, came on behalf of the minister and proposed to the general
to write a letter in which it would appear that the cardinal had himself
arranged the entire plan of operation. Turenne received these hints with
contempt and would not make a statement that would have brought disgrace
upon a general of the army and ridicule upon a man of the church.
Mazarin, who had been so foolish, now had the misfortune of remaining on
ill terms with Turenne until his death.
[Sidenote: [1658-1659 A.D.]]
In the midst of this first triumph the king fell ill at Calais and for
several days was near death. Immediately all the courtiers turned towards
his brother, Monsieur. Mazarin lavished deference and flattery upon
Marshal du Plessis-Praslin, the former tutor of this young prince, and
upon count de Guiche, his favourite. A cabal was formed in Paris that was
bold enough to write to Calais against the cardinal. He made preparations
to leave the kingdom and to conceal his immense riches. An empiric of
Abbeville cured the king with emetic wine that the court physicians
called poison. This good man seated himself upon the king’s bed and said,
“This is a very sick boy, but he is not going to die.” When the king
became convalescent the cardinal banished all who had intrigued against
him.
[Illustration: ENTRANCE GATE TO THE CHÂTEAU DE VINCENNES]
A few months later Cromwell died (September 13th, 1658) at the age of
fifty-five, in the midst of his projects for the strengthening of his
power and the glory of his nation. Richard Cromwell succeeded peaceably
and without opposition to the protectorate of his father, as a prince
of Wales would have succeeded a king of England. The emperor Ferdinand
III had died in 1657. His son Leopold, who was seventeen years old and
already king of Hungary and Bohemia, had not been elected king of the
Romans during the lifetime of his father. Mazarin wished to attempt to
make Louis XIV emperor. This was a chimerical idea; it would have been
necessary either to coerce or to bribe the electors. France was neither
strong enough to seize the empire nor rich enough to buy it; so the first
overtures made at Frankfort by Marshal de Grammont and by Lionne were
abandoned almost as soon as they were proposed. Leopold was elected. All
that Mazarin’s politics accomplished was to form an alliance, known as
the League of the Rhine, with certain German princes,[107] to observe
the Treaty of Westphalia, and to furnish a check to the authority of the
emperor over the empire (August, 1658). France, after the battle of the
Dunes, was powerful in her foreign relations through her glory and her
arms as well as through the condition to which the other nations were
reduced. But the country itself was suffering; it was stripped of money,
and there was need of peace.
THE TREATY OF THE PYRENEES (1659 A.D.)
The cardinal had to do two things in order to bring his ministry to a
happy close--make peace and insure the tranquillity of the state by the
marriage of the king. The intrigues during the latter’s illness made
Mazarin feel how necessary an heir to the throne was to the splendour of
the minister. All these considerations determined him to marry Louis XIV
promptly. Two princesses were proposed--the daughter of the king of Spain
and the princess of Savoy. The king’s heart had made another choice: he
was desperately in love with Mademoiselle Mancini, one of the cardinal’s
nieces. Born with a tender heart and a firm will, full of passion and
without experience, he would have been capable of resolving to marry the
lady of his choice.
Madame de Motteville, the favourite of the queen-mother, whose _Mémoires_
have a great air of truth, claims that Mazarin was tempted to let the
king’s love have its way and to place his niece on the throne. He had
already married another niece to the prince de Conti, and one to the duke
de Mercœur. The one whom Louis XIV loved had been asked in marriage by
the king of England. These were titles enough to justify his ambitions.
He adroitly sounded the queen-mother. “I fear,” he said, “that the king
has too great a desire to marry my niece.” The queen, who knew the
minister, understood that he desired what he feigned to fear. She replied
to him with all the haughtiness of a princess of the blood of Austria,
daughter, wife, and mother of kings, and with the bitterness which she
had felt for some time towards a minister who affected to be independent
of her. She said to him, “If the king were capable of this indignity I
would place myself with my second son at the head of the whole nation
against the king and yourself.”
Mazarin, it is said, never forgave the queen this reply; but he took
the wiser course of thinking as she did. He made it a point of honour
and merit to oppose the passion of Louis XIV. His power did not need a
queen of his own blood to support him. He even feared the character of
his niece; and he believed he would further strengthen the power of his
ministry by avoiding the dangerous glory of elevating his own house too
high.
In the year 1656 he had sent Lionne to Spain to negotiate peace and to
ask the hand of the infanta; but Don Luis de Haro, convinced that, feeble
as Spain was, France was not less so, rejected the cardinal’s offer. The
infanta, daughter of Philip IV by his first wife, was intended for the
young Leopold. By his second marriage Philip had at that time only a son
whose sickly infancy caused fears for his life. It was desired that the
infanta, who might be the heir to many states, should transfer her rights
to the house of Austria and not to a hostile dynasty; but finally, Philip
IV having had another son, Don Philip Prosper, and his wife being again
_enceinte_, the danger involved in giving the infanta to the king of
France seemed to him less great, and the battle of the Dunes made peace
necessary to him.
The Spaniards promised the infanta and asked for a suspension of
hostilities (1659). Mazarin and Don Luis de Haro repaired to the isle
of Pheasants on the frontier of France and Spain. Although general
peace and the marriage of the king of France were the objects of their
conference, more than a month passed in regulating ceremonies and
settling difficulties of precedence. The cardinals called themselves the
equals of the kings and the superiors of other sovereigns. France, with
greater justice, claimed pre-eminence over the other powers. Don Luis de
Haro, however, assumed perfect equality between France and Spain.
The conferences lasted four months. Mazarin and Don Luis employed all
the resources of their respective policies; that of the cardinal was
strategy, that of Don Luis delay. The latter never gave promises: the
former only equivocal ones. The genius of the Italian was to try to
surprise; that of the Spaniard, to keep from being surprised.
Such are the vicissitudes of human affairs that of this famous Peace of
the Pyrenees, signed November 7th, 1659, not two articles have endured.
The king of France retained Roussillon which he would have kept anyway,
without this peace, also Artois and Cerdagne; but the Spanish monarchy
has no more possessions in Flanders.
But if Don Luis de Haro said that Cardinal Mazarin could deceive, it has
been said since that he could foresee. He long meditated the alliance
of the houses of France and Spain. This famous letter of his, written
during the negotiations at Münster, is cited: “If the most Christian king
could have the Netherlands and Franche-Comté as dower upon espousing the
infanta, then we might aspire to the Spanish succession, whatever we
might have to relinquish to the infanta; and it would not be a very long
wait, since there is only the life of the prince her brother that could
exclude her from it.” This prince was Balthazar, who died in 1649.
The cardinal was evidently deceived in thinking that the Netherlands and
Franche-Comté could be given to the infanta as her marriage portion.
Not a single city was stipulated for her dower. On the other hand,
important cities that had been conquered, like St. Omer, Ypres, Menin,
Oudenarde, and other places, were restored to the Spanish monarchy. Some
were retained. The cardinal was not mistaken in believing that this
relinquishment would be useless some day. But those who gave him the
honour of this prediction make him also foresee that Prince Don Balthazar
would die in 1649; that later the three children of the second marriage
would be cut off in the cradle; that Charles, the fifth of the male
children, would die without issue; and that this Austrian king would one
day make a will in favour of a grandson of Louis XIV. But at any rate
Cardinal Mazarin foresaw what value this relinquishment would have in
case the male line of Philip should become extinct: and after more than
fifty years strange events justified him.
Maria Theresa, the infanta, able to have as dower the cities that France
restored, brought by her marriage contract nothing else than 500,000
gold crowns; it cost the king more than that to go to receive her at
the frontier. These 500,000 crowns, equivalent to 2,500,000 livres,
were the subject of a great deal of dispute between the two ministers.
In the end France never received but 100,000 francs. Instead of this
marriage bringing any other real and immediate advantage than that of
peace, the infanta renounced all rights she might ever have to any of her
father’s lands. Louis XIV ratified this renunciation in the most solemn
manner.[108]
[Sidenote: [1659-1661 A.D.]]
The duke of Lorraine, Charles IV, against whom France and Spain had much
cause to complain, or rather who had much to complain of against them,
was included in the treaty; but only as an unfortunate prince who was
punished, because he could not make himself feared. France restored his
states to him, demolishing Nancy, however, and forbade him to maintain
troops. Don Luis de Haro forced Cardinal Mazarin to receive Condé into
favour again, by threatening to leave in the sovereignty of the prince
Rocroi, Le Catelet, and other places of which he was in possession. So
France gained both these towns and the Great Condé. He lost his dignity
of grand-master of the royal household, which was afterwards given to his
son, and returned with scarcely anything but his glory.
Finally (August, 1660) Cardinal Mazarin brought the king with his new
queen to Paris.[109] Mazarin acted exactly like a father who would marry
his son without giving him charge of his own property. He returned
more powerful and more jealous of his power, and even of honours, than
ever. He required parliament to address him through deputies. This was
something unparalleled in the monarchy, but it was not too great a
reparation for the wrong that parliament had done him. He no longer gave
his hand to the princes of the blood as formerly. He who had treated Don
Luis de Haro as an equal tried to treat the Great Condé as an inferior.
He went about with royal pomp, having besides his guards a company of
musketeers, which was ever afterwards the second company of king’s
musketeers. There was no more freedom of access to him. If anyone was
a poor enough courtier to ask a favour of the king, he was lost. The
queen-mother, so long the stubborn protectress of Mazarin against France,
was without credit as soon as he had no more need of her. Her son, the
king, brought up in blind submission to this minister, could not shake
off the yoke that she had imposed upon him as well as upon herself; Louis
XIV could not reign during the lifetime of Mazarin.
LAST YEARS AND DEATH OF MAZARIN (1659-1661 A.D.)
A minister is excusable for the evil he does when the helm of state is
forced into his hands by tempests; but during a calm he is answerable
for the good that he fails to do. Mazarin did good only to himself and
his family. Eight years of absolute and undisturbed power, from his
final return until his death, were marked by no glorious or useful
establishment; for the college of the Four Nations was only created by
his will.[110]
He controlled the finances like the steward of a lord involved in debt.
The king sometimes asked money of Fouquet, who replied, “Sire, there is
nothing in your majesty’s coffers, but the cardinal will lend you some.”
Mazarin was worth about two hundred millions, reckoning in the money
values of to-day (_i.e._, the middle of the eighteenth century). Several
memoirs say that he amassed part of it by means far beneath the grandeur
of his position. They relate that he shared with privateer captains the
profits of their voyages. This has never been proved; but the Dutch
suspected him of it, and they never would have suspected Cardinal
Richelieu.[i]
In high spirits was Mazarin at the moment of signing the great treaty
at Bidassoa (Treaty of the Pyrenees). He wrote to Paris: “All will soon
be over. I shall not stay long in the Basque country, unless I find
amusement in watching them hunt whales, in learning their language and
their dances.”
However, the dancer was soon smitten by gout. His lungs became affected.
The bed of the moribund, covered with cards, was a gaming table over
which offices were sold. Cards and the sacrament went pell-mell.[b]
It is said that on his death-bed he felt remorse, but outwardly he
displayed courage. At least, he feared for his property, and he made the
king a complete donation of it believing that the king would return it
to him. He was not mistaken; the king returned the gift in three days.
Finally he died at Vincennes, March 9th, 1661, and no one but the king
seemed to mourn him, for this prince already knew how to dissemble.
The yoke was beginning to weigh heavily upon him; he was impatient to
reign. Nevertheless he wished to seem affected by a death that put him
in possession of his throne. Louis XIV and the court wore mourning for
Cardinal Mazarin, an unusual honour, and one which Henry IV had paid to
the memory of Gabrielle d’Estrées.
We will not undertake [says Voltaire] to decide whether Mazarin was a
great minister or not; his actions must speak for themselves. There is
often a popular idea of a vast breadth of mind and an almost divine
genius in those who have governed empires with some success. It is
not a superior power of penetration that makes statesmen; it is their
character. Men, if they have ever so little good sense, nearly all
perceive their own interests. In this respect a citizen of Amsterdam
or of Bern is as wise as Sejanus, Ximenes, Buckingham, Richelieu, or
Mazarin; but our conduct and our enterprises depend solely upon the
temper of our soul, and our successes depend upon fortune. For example,
if such a genius as Pope Alexander VI or his son Borgia had had to
take La Rochelle, he would have invited the principal leaders to his
camp under a solemn oath and would have made away with them. Mazarin
would have entered the city two or three years later by winning over
and dividing the citizens. Don Luis de Haro would not have risked the
enterprise. Richelieu built a dyke along the sea, after the example of
Alexander, entered and took La Rochelle; but a less strong tide or a
little greater promptness on the part of the English would have saved La
Rochelle and made Richelieu seem foolhardy.
The character of men can be judged by their enterprises. It may well
be said that the soul of Richelieu breathed pride and vengeance, that
Mazarin was wise, pliant, and avaricious. But in order to tell in how far
a minister has genius one must either have frequently heard him talk, or
one must read what he has written. What is seen every day among courtiers
often happens among statesmen: he who has most genius fails, while he who
has in his character more of patience, force, pliancy, and persistence
succeeds. On reading the letters of Cardinal Mazarin and the _Mémoires_
of Cardinal de Retz[j] one easily sees that De Retz was the superior
genius. Nevertheless Mazarin was all-powerful and De Retz was overthrown.
Finally, it is quite true that to make a powerful minister often nothing
is needed but a mediocre mind, good sense, and luck; but to be a good
minister a man must have love for the public welfare as his dominant
passion. The great statesman is he who leaves to his country great and
useful memorials.
The memorial that immortalises Cardinal Mazarin is the acquisition
of Alsace. He gave this province to France at a time when France was
enraged at him; and by a singular fatality he did more good for the
kingdom when he was persecuted than in the tranquillity of absolute
power.[i]
Mazarin’s end [says Michelet] was at least consistent with his life--he
lived and died a cheat. He believed he had cheated the future. Fortunate
player, he had all his plans well laid. The prophecies of his youth were
fulfilled. He had appeared, at the age of twenty-five, upon a field of
battle crying, “Peace! Peace!” From the noble and serious workers who had
died painfully in preparing his opportunities, he filched the glory of
the triumphant Peace of Westphalia and that of the Pyrenees. Richelieu
sowed, Mazarin harvested. The one created the administration, the army,
the navy, and died on the eve of Rocroi. The other spoiled everything
and succeeded in everything. Great through the greatness of Condé, and
greater through that of Turenne, his position was strengthened by even
the futile tempest of the Fronde; he retains at least the honour of that
forced and fatal peace into which France fell through sheer lassitude.
This pedestal is still left him; his features even after death wear the
mask of the Angel of Peace.
Was it really peace? Too late it had arrived: Germany, agonising in ruin,
found no peace in the Treaty of Westphalia; Spain, dead and done with,
was in no condition to reap benefit from the Peace of the Pyrenees. And
France herself, entering by this door into a fifty years’ struggle for
the Spanish succession, was to find in this peace fiscal war at home and
bloody strife abroad.[b]
[Illustration]
FOOTNOTES
[96] [Michelet[b] believes that the love affair of Mazarin and the
queen began even earlier than their contemporaries think. He says: “It
has been said that Louis XIV was the son of Mazarin--this is certainly
wrong. He was of France, ballasted by Austria. But his brother, the
second duke of Orleans (born September 22nd, 1640), like the first,
Gaston, was thoroughly Italian in spirit and in manner. He was as much
Mazarin as Gaston was Concini. I fully appreciate the difficulties. Their
contemporaries believe that she did not give herself to him until later.
There was at least one entr’acte in her favour.” To a court tradition,
related, among others, by the Princess Palatine,[n] mother of the regent,
is due a belief that Mazarin’s continued hold over the queen-mother is
explained by the fact that they had been secretly married. Kitchin[o]
says “there is no reason to doubt that they were actually married.” But
Martin assures us that “there is not the slightest indication of this,
either in their correspondence or in what we know of the _Carnets_[p] of
Mazarin.”]
[97] [He was, however, a deacon, and so in lesser orders.]
[98] [This statement is not substantiated, and is not to be found in any
contemporary writing. The first book that speaks of it bears the date
1694.]
[99] [The aged prince of Condé (Henry II de Bourbon) died December
26th, 1646, when the duke d’Enghien (Louis II de Bourbon) assumed his
father’s title. He came to be known as “The Great Condé,” and we shall
see much of him in the ensuing pages. He was born at Paris, September
8th, 1621; died, December 11th, 1686. The first prince of Condé (Louis I
de Bourbon), whose death at the battle of Jarnac in 1569 will be recalled
(see p. 363), was his great-grand-father. This first prince of Condé was
the younger brother of Anthony, king of Navarre, the father of King Henry
IV. So the Great Condé came honestly by his fighting propensities.]
[100] [Some historians refuse to credit Condé with these words. Indeed,
Madame de Motteville reports a much less stirring harangue: “My friends,
have good courage; we must of necessity fight to-day. It will be useless
to back out. For I promise you that all the brave and the cowardly will
fight; the ones of good will, the others through compulsion!” “This
was perhaps,” adds Duruy,[h] “the only kind of language to impress the
soldiers at that time.”]
[101] [Cardinal de Retz was the descendant of a Florentine family that
came to the court of France in the suite of Catherine de’ Medici; it
was his grand-uncle who figured so prominently in the massacre of St.
Bartholomew. See above, pp. 369, 399.]
[102] [According to Voltaire,[i] so low were the royal resources that
almost the entire court had to sleep, while at St. Germain, on straw.
They were obliged to leave the crown jewels as security with the usurers.
The young king often lacked necessities. The pages of his chamber were
dismissed because there were no means to keep them. At the same time
Louis’ aunt, Henrietta Maria of England, in refuge at Paris, was reduced
to the extremes of poverty; her daughter, afterwards married to Louis’
brother, had to stay in bed to keep warm.]
[103] [He went first to Liège and afterwards to Cologne.]
[104] [In comparing these great rivals, Kitchin[q] says: “It has been
well said of these two masters in war, that as Condé grew older he lost
his early fire and military insight, without becoming wiser or more
prudent, while each campaign made Turenne more daring as well as more
skilful. The careers of the two great soldiers form a striking contrast:
it is genius without industry pitted against high talent combined with
infinite painstaking, and a belief in the scientific treatment of the art
of war. The more brilliant Condé was sure to fail when pitted against
Turenne.” Vicomte de Turenne (Henri de la Tour d’Auvergne) was a grandson
of William the Silent. He was born in 1611 (September 11th, at Sedan),
and was therefore now just over forty. Condé was ten years younger (born
September 8th, 1621). The span of life of each of the great generals was
destined to compass almost exactly the same period; Turenne being just
under sixty-four, Condé just over sixty-five, at death.]
[105] [“Joan of Arc made France a nation against the English; Louis XIV
made France a state against all Europe. The Fronde had none of these
creative ideas--whence its incertitude and its weakness. Louis XIV had
the idea of state--whence his firmness, his decision, and that famous
phrase, ‘_L’État, c’est moi_,’ which has been taken for an expression of
pride but was an expression of policy.”--SAINT-MARC GIRARDIN.]
[106] [See note, page 488.]
[107] [The three ecclesiastical electors, the duke of Bavaria, the
princes of Brunswick and of Hesse, the kings of Sweden and Denmark.]
[108] [It has been suggested that Mazarin purposely made the dowry such
as Spain could not well pay, so that the treaty must be broken. That
clause once broken, the renunciation of the succession was also void,
with the rest of the treaty. If such was really Mazarin’s plan, it was an
extraordinary one.]
[109] [The marriage had taken place in June, 1660, at Fuenterrabia in the
Pyrenees.]
[110] [We may add that he pensioned several writers--among them Descartes
and the historian Mézeray--and that he provided for the splendid Mazarin
library, opened later to the public. “Mazarin,” says Duruy,[h] “had the
liveliest if not the best taste for art. He brought from Italy a number
of paintings, statues, and curiosities--even actors and machinists who
introduced the opera into France. In 1655 he founded the Academy of
Painting and Sculpture.”]
[Illustration]
CHAPTER XIX. “L’ÉTAT, C’EST MOI”
The two foundations of the absolute throne of Louis XIV
were terror and admiration: the terror of a power which had
subjugated the army, the church, the magistracy, the noblesse,
and the municipalities; the admiration of a power to which
literature and art, arms and fortune, rendered their richest
and their uninterrupted tribute. King-worship had never before
taken so entire a possession of any Christian state. Never had
the luxurious pomp of an Oriental court been so intimately and
so long associated with the energies, the refined tastes, and
the intellectual culture of an European sovereignty. During
fifty successive years, Louis continued to be the greatest
actor on the noblest stage, and in the presence of the most
enthusiastic audience, of the world.--STEPHEN.[p]
[Sidenote: [1661-1715 A.D.]]
Never had there been at any court more intrigues and hopes than
during the last hours of Cardinal Mazarin. Women who had any pretence
to beauty were flattering themselves that they would now govern a
twenty-two-year-old prince whom love had already so far seduced as
to make him offer his crown to his mistress. The young courtiers had
hopes that the reign of the favourites would return; each minister was
expecting the first place; none of them thought that a king who had
been so excluded from affairs would dare take upon himself the burden
of government. Mazarin had prolonged the king’s childhood as far as he
could; and only for a short time had been giving him instructions, and
that because the king had demanded it. So far were they from expecting
to be governed by their sovereign, that of all those who had hitherto
worked with the prime minister there was none who asked the king when
he wished an audience. One and all asked, “To whom shall we now address
ourselves?”--and Louis XIV replied, “To me.”[b]
The secretary of state for war, Michel le Tellier, hastened with the
astounding piece of news to the queen-mother, who laughed in his face:
“In good faith, M. le Tellier, what do you think of it?” This resolution,
however, was nothing but the accomplishment of the advice twenty times
given by Mazarin, and if there was any cause for astonishment it was
not that the king took the advice but that he held to it; he was, as La
Bruyère says, “his own prime minister and exacted of the chief state
functionaries that they deal directly with him.” For thirty years he
worked regularly eight hours a day. He relates in his _Mémoires_,[f]
with legitimate pride, the effect produced by the announcement of his
assumption of authority, and he recommends his son in a few truly
eloquent words “not to forget that it is by work one reigns; to rule
without working is to be ungrateful and defiant towards God, unjust and
tyrannical towards man.”
But what is still more remarkable is that the young prince who so boldly
assumed the power had already mapped out his policy. Not only did Louis
XIV rule with the boundless power of some of his predecessors, but he
was the first to establish in France the theory of an absolute monarchy.
In his eyes royalty was a divine institution. Sovereigns were the
representatives of God upon earth--his inspired lieutenants; and on this
account participators, in a fashion, in his power and infallibility. And
as royalty, in making itself absolute, had kept to the old principle of
feudal law, that sovereignty and property are the same thing, Louis not
only believed himself master of his subjects, but the owner of their
possessions--a monstrous doctrine which carries us back to oriental
monarchies. At all events it did not seem to him that authority to
which he recognised no limits but those imposed by conscience and by
religion, ought to remain sterile. He wished it active and hard working;
he believed that kings had imperious duties to fulfil. It was thus that
Louis XIV understood his royal profession.[c] Nor can it be denied that
he carried out to a large extent in practice the theory of royalty that
he professed. He was destined to reign for fifty-four years after the
death of Mazarin; his reign in its entirety being one of the longest
in history. After Mazarin he had no minister whom he did not dominate:
he was king in fact as well as in name. He came to be by far the most
famous monarch of his time. His court at Versailles set a standard of
magnificence which other monarchs of that and succeeding ages strove to
imitate without hoping to rival.
In his political relations with his subjects, as has been said, Louis
came to represent the culmination of that autocratic system which for
generations had been almost steadily advancing in France,--a system which
had known such exponents as Louis XI, Francis I, and Henry IV; and which
Sully, Richelieu, and Mazarin had done so much to fortify. Nor did he
confine his theory to his own subjects. He came finally to feel almost
the same proprietary right in the affairs of Europe and he attempted
with the aid of his armies to dictate to foreign nations somewhat as he
dictated within the bounds of his own territory. And, having the good
fortune to be served by two great soldiers, Condé and Turenne, he was
enabled, notwithstanding his own rather meagre military talents, to carry
out the idea here also with some measure of success. It was a qualified
success, to be sure, for he did not secure the control of Holland at
which he aimed; he did not very greatly extend the boundaries of France;
and if his grandson was left finally in possession of the Spanish throne,
this was a victory tempered with the concession that the thrones of Spain
and France should never be consolidated. Nevertheless, to have embroiled
all Europe in war after war; to have been the central figure of a long
epoch; to have given his name to an important period of history; to have
placed that name in the small list of those rulers to whom posterity
concedes the title “Great,”--this surely is to have played the part of
king right royally.
This reign, then, is a curiously full and vital one. We shall best
understand it perhaps if we study it first from within, witnessing the
activities of the great monarch in his relations with his own people
before turning (in subsequent chapters) to the foreign relations of
the kingdom. As preliminary to this study of the economic and social
development of France during the long reign of Louis XIV, we must take
a glance at the interesting figure of the monarch himself. In the first
place it must be remembered that this remarkable man had a remarkable
heritage. He numbered among his direct ancestors not far removed such
remarkable characters as Henry IV of France, the German emperor Charles
V, and the Spanish sovereigns Ferdinand and Isabella. This in itself
suggests a strange mixture of races in his ancestry. But further
examination of his ancestral tree reveals even more striking facts. It
appears that this greatest of French kings is, so far as his ancestral
blood is concerned, almost as much Spaniard or Italian as he is French;
and quite as much German. His father was born in France, his mother in
Spain; of his four grandparents one was born in France, one in Spain, one
in Italy, one in Germany. Of his thirty ancestors within four generations
only eight were born in France while ten were born in Germany or in the
yet farther outlying regions of Hungary and Bohemia; the remainder of the
company being distributed between Spain (and Portugal) and Italy. The
subtended table[111] showing details of the ancestry of Louis XIV for
four generations will make these facts clear at a glance. It is worthy
of careful study as illustrating in detail the heterogeneity of ethnic
elements that went to build up the personality of this cosmopolite.
Persons fond of generalising as to national characteristics will perhaps
feel that the more conspicuous traits of Louis’ personality are not
difficult to account for in the light of his conglomerate ancestry.
[Sidenote: [1661-1683 A.D.]]
Leaving such speculations, however, to whoever may choose to make them,
let us turn from the ancestry of the king to the king himself. “He had,”
says Kitchin,[q] “all the qualities which strike the eye: and was, as
Bolingbroke acutely remarked, ‘if not the greatest king, the best actor
of majesty at least that ever filled a throne’; as a king should be, he
was courteous, dignified, calm, and ‘debonair,’ firm in act and speech,
and constant: he had a great sense of duty and propriety; and said
himself that a king should act according to the dictates of good sense;
he cultivated that habitual discretion and seriousness of manner which
often cloak ignorance or want of capacity. He spoke but little, that
little, however, was to the point; he was reserved, was thought rather
stingy, did not often laugh. These characteristics were backed by one
marked quality, strength of will, which could be obstinacy: and were
all made subservient to one persistent passion, the inordinate desire
of reputation and glory.” Yet Kitchin sees in Louis, on the whole, a
“second-rate man,” distinctly inferior in many ways to his grandfather,
Henry IV. Thus he declares that “In no branch of his life’s work does
Louis show one spark of originality; even Voltaire confesses that there
was ‘more uprightness and dignity than spring’ in him: he had no boldness
and no enthusiasm: ‘he made war without being a warrior,’ decreed many
laws, but had not the slightest idea of legislation; he busied himself
with administration, but had no real organising gifts. He had that sure
mark which distinguishes the second-rate man from the great man: he
loved details for their own sake; he shrank instinctively from all that
was noble and strong; and chose the inferior agent in preference to the
better.”
It seems almost paradoxical to pronounce such a judgment as this upon
a monarch of such celebrity. Yet perhaps the judgment is not far from
just. Louis XIV had the good fortune to follow Henry IV and Richelieu
and Mazarin; the later years of his reign, in which he was in effect
gathering the harvest of his own sowing, are far less notable than
are the earlier ones during which he profited by the labours of his
forerunners. Yet after all allowances are made for Louis’ shortcomings
and for his mistakes, it seems futile to deny that the famous monarch who
for the space of almost three average generations dominated the European
situation had at least some of the elements of greatness.
With this introduction to the personality of Louis XIV, we are now
prepared to take up in detail the affairs of his government. First of
all, as has been said, we shall consider those measures through which
the internal prosperity of France was furthered during the early years
of the reign. In so doing we shall have occasion to see something of the
ministers who aided Louis in this work. There are no more Richelieus and
Mazarins; yet in Colbert we have a man not altogether unworthy to wear
the mantle of these great predecessors; nor are Le Tellier, Lionne, and
Fouquet by any means despicable.[a]
THE MINISTERS
The _clercs au secret_ who, in 1547, became ministers of state were
four in number; each of them administered not only certain affairs,
but all the affairs of certain provinces. They formed an impracticable
organisation. The religious wars, the troubles of Louis XIII’s minority,
prevented any change.[112]
In 1619 a single member of the ministry was charged with the conduct of
war and with the correspondence with the _chefs de corps_; another in
1626 had the foreign affairs. Finally under Louis XIV the ministry of the
king’s household was established for ecclesiastical affairs and those
of the navy. Important posts, raised to offices, that is to say, making
their holders irremovable--such as the chancellor-keeper of the seals,
chief of the magistracy, and controller-general of the finances--were
like two other ministries. The special functions allotted to each of the
four secretaries of state did not prevent them from keeping, for other
affairs, the old-time division by provinces which existed until the
Revolution.
The ministers whom Mazarin had left behind him were Pierre Séguier,
chancellor and keeper of the seals, a sort of irremovable minister who
was clever enough, by assuming no political importance, to make himself
regarded as necessary for fifty years; Michel le Tellier, secretary
of state for war, Hugues de Lionne who had charge of the marine (the
portfolio of which he kept till 1669) and of foreign affairs; and
Nicholas Fouquet, the superintendent of finance. The first two were
distinguished men, the third a superior man; as for the fourth, Fouquet,
by his encouragement of letters, he had acquired the reputation of
a generous Mæcenas, and he counted illustrious persons among his
friends--Pellisson, La Fontaine, Gourville, Madame de Sévigné and
Mademoiselle de Scudéry, who have pleaded his cause before posterity
without gaining it. He had put, or rather left, the finances in extreme
disorder and he himself drew without scruple on the treasury. He was
increasing the king’s expenses and diminishing the receipts; finally,
what was still more serious, he seemed to seek supporters everywhere,
even amongst the great nobles, and he fortified the places of which he
held command as though to prepare for himself, in case of disgrace, an
impregnable retreat. He was almost a frondeur; he was certainly a knave.
Less was needed for Louis to strike him.
The king had a secret minister who every evening called his attention to
the errors and falsehoods of the superintendent. This was Jean-Baptiste
Colbert, born at Rheims in 1619 of an ancient family of tradesmen and
magistrates. He had been intendant to Mazarin, who before he died had
said to the king: “Sire, I owe you everything; but I think I am to some
extent discharging my debt when I give you Colbert.”[c]
This working together in secret was the cause of the catastrophe of
Fouquet, in which were involved many others. The fall of this minister,
who is much less to be reproached than is Cardinal Mazarin, teaches us
that it is not the privilege of everybody to commit the same faults.[b]
The precaution of disarming Fouquet was made in advance. His post
of general prosecutor assured him the privilege of being judged by
parliament; and the king put no trust, and for reason, in the justice
of parliament. Fouquet therefore was skilfully inveigled into selling
his post. It is said that he discarded his robe of office in the hope
of obtaining the _cordon bleu_, which the king did not wish any longer
to give to persons connected with justice. Moreover, he was counting on
becoming chancellor on the death of the aged Séguier. Of the 1,400,000
francs, the price of his office, he offered one million as a pure
gift to the king, who had expressed to him a desire for ready money.
He thus prepared the instruments of his own ruin. It was feared that
at the moment of his arrest his friends would attempt to get him to
Belle-Île and to agitate Brittany and Normandy where many malcontents
were under cover. A journey to Brittany was planned for the coming month
of September, under pretence of holding the provincial estate at Nantes
and of obtaining a greater gratuitous gift through the presence of the
king.[d]
Fouquet’s undoing was thus already resolved upon when the king accepted
the magnificent fête which the minister arranged for him at his house
at Vaux for August 17th, 1661. The palace and its gardens had cost him
about eighteen millions.[113] He had built the mansion twice over and
bought three hamlets whose area was included in the enormous gardens,
then considered the most beautiful in all Europe. The fountains of Vaux,
since relegated to mediocrity by those of Versailles, Marly, and St.
Cloud, were marvels in their day. But however magnificent the place,
its enormous cost proves that he had been served with as little economy
as he himself served the king. It was also true that St. Germain and
Fontainebleau, the only pleasure places used by the king, could not
compare in beauty with Vaux. Louis XIV felt this and it irritated him.
All over the mansion were to be seen the arms and motto of Fouquet--a
squirrel with these words, _Quo non ascendam?_ (To what point shall I not
mount?)
The king interpreted the device for himself; the ambition of the motto
did not serve to appease the monarch. The courtiers remarked that the
squirrel was everywhere painted pursued by a snake which was the arms
of Colbert. The fête was far beyond those which Mazarin had given, not
only in magnificence but in taste. The _Facheux_ of Molière was presented
for the first time: Pellisson had written the prologue, which was much
admired.[b]
The king said to the queen-mother in anger, “Ah, madame, shall we not
make this fellow disgorge his prey?” And he was tempted to have the
minister arrested on the spot; however, he restrained himself.[c]
On the 5th of September, during the prearranged sojourn of the court of
Nantes, D’Artagnan, captain of the musketeers, laid hands on Fouquet
as he was leaving the cabinet of the king, put him into a coach and
conducted him under a strong escort to the château of Angers. He had the
greatest difficulty in protecting the superintendent during the journey
from the fury of the people. All his houses were sealed and his property
was seized. Among the latter were found directions as to what his friends
should do in case he was arrested. The plan, like those that Cardinal
de Retz had made several times, consisted in procuring for him places,
money, and presses by means of which France could be inundated with
pamphlets. Fouquet was transferred without delay to Vincennes and brought
before a chamber of justice.[e]
He was accused of wasting the revenues, which was only too true, and of
plotting against the safety of the state, which was never proved. At the
end of three years nine judges gave their voices for death, thirteen
others for banishment. The king, aggravating the penalty, changed it
into perpetual imprisonment and Fouquet was incarcerated in the citadel
of Pinerolo, where he died after nineteen years of captivity (March 23,
1680).[c]
_The Man with the Iron Mask_
For a long time Fouquet’s end remained a mystery; and even Voltaire,
writing little more than a half century afterwards, says, “We do not
know where died the unfortunate man, whose least actions in the days of
his power made a stir.” For this reason attempts were afterwards made to
connect Fouquet with one of the most extraordinary episodes of the secret
history of Louis XIV’s reign.[a]
We know that a masked and unknown prisoner, object of an extraordinary
surveillance, died in 1703 in the Bastille, whither he had been brought
from the Îsle Ste. Marguerite in 1698 (and was buried under the name
of Marchiali). He had been detained about ten years in these islands,
and traces of his existence are found in the fortress of Exilles and
at Pinerolo as far back as 1681. Now no great personage disappeared
in Europe about this time. What powerful motive had the government of
Louis XIV for concealing this mysterious visage from human sight? Many
explanations more or less chimeric, more or less plausible, have been
attempted of the “man with the iron mask” (an erroneous term; the mask
was not of iron but of black velvet; it was probably one of those _loups_
so long in use). In 1837 Le Bibliophile Jacob (Paul la Croix) published
an ingenious volume to prove that Fouquet was passed off as dead,
sequestered anew, and, masked, dragged from fortress to fortress until
his death in 1703.[d]
Many other theories have been advanced to account for this person’s
identity. It has been said that he was a twin brother of Louis XIV,
who had been made to disappear; the count de Vermandois, natural son
of Louis XIV and Mademoiselle de la Vallière, who was imprisoned for
having struck the dauphin; the duke de Beaufort, who disappeared at the
siege of Candia (1669); the duke of Monmouth, nephew of James II; Count
Girolamo Mattioli, minister of Mantua, who was abducted from Turin for
having prevented his master from selling Casale to the king of France
(this hypothesis is sustained by Topin[g]); or Giovanni di Gonzaga,
Mattioli’s secretary; a son of Anne of Austria by Buckingham or Mazarin;
the Armenian patriarch Avedick; and, according to a recent theory of M.
Bazeries, a certain general De Bulonde, imprisoned for raising the siege
of Candia in spite of Catinat’s orders.[h] But the very multiplicity of
theories sufficiently shows the doubtful character of each and all of
them; and the identification of the man with the iron mask still holds a
place among the most curious of the unsolved enigmas of history.[a]
THE MINISTRY OF COLBERT
The great trial of Fouquet involved another victim: Pellisson was
condemned to restore 200,000 livres. But he was one of those skilful
persons who, having fallen, always rise. From having been a Calvinist he
became a Catholic and perhaps died a Protestant; from being Fouquet’s
friend he became the favourite of the king [Louis XIV] and drew up his
_Mémoires_[f] in which he speaks of the superintendent’s thefts, and he
founded a prize at the Academy for an annual eulogy of Louis XIV. Thanks
to his verses and his prose, which were supple like his conduct, he was
very successful in money matters. In 1677 he was in receipt of 75,000
livres, just the same sum as Vauban received, without counting abbeys
and priories. Finally he was a kind of prime minister and had charge of
the funds devoted to the conversion of heretics, and yet he brought so
much dignity into his office that posterity has forgotten in him the man
of business and only remembers the man of letters. Colbert succeeded
Fouquet with the title of controller-general. In 1666 Michel le Tellier
left his charge to his son, the celebrated Louvois; the first ministry of
Louis XIV was thus complete.
Colbert directed five of the French departments of administration: the
king’s household, with the fine arts, the finances, agriculture, with
commerce, public works, and, after 1669, the navy--a crushing weight
under which he did not succumb.
“Jean Baptiste Colbert,” says a contemporary, “had naturally a frowning
countenance. His hollow eyes and thick eyebrows gave him an air of
austerity and rendered him at first sight savage and forbidding; but
afterwards when one came to know him, he was sufficiently facile,
expeditious, and immutably steadfast. He was persuaded that good faith
is the solid foundation of all business. Infinite application and an
insatiable desire to learn took with him the place of knowledge. He was
a restorer of the finances, which on his accession to the ministry he
found in a very bad condition. A solid but ponderous intelligence, born
principally for calculation, he disentangled all the embarrassments which
the superintendents and royal treasurers had purposely introduced into
the accounts in order that they might fish in troubled waters.” Let us
add that this austere and hard financier, “this man of marble,” as Gui
Patin calls him, had a heart. “We must be careful of every five sous in
matters which are not of necessity,” he wrote to Louis XIV, “and lavish
millions when it is a question of your glory. A useless banquet costing
3,000 livres gives me incredible pain; and when it is a question of
millions of gold for the affair of Poland, I would sell all my goods, I
would pledge my wife and children, and I would go on foot all my life to
provide them.”
_Reorganisation of the Finances_
The finances, indeed, had fallen back into the chaos from which Sully
had rescued them. The public debt was four hundred and thirty millions,
the revenues were swallowed up three years in advance, and out of
eighty-four millions in annual imposts the treasury received scarcely
thirty-five. Colbert began by annulling or reimbursing at the rate of
purchase eight millions of bonds on the Hôtel-de-Ville, which had been
acquired at an insignificant price, and caused the _chambre de police_
to make an investigation of the malversations committed by officers of
finance during the last twenty-five years; the very curés had to press
their parishioners to denounce abuses. The money lenders who had taken
advantage of the necessities of the state to lend to it at usurious
interest were made to disgorge their profits; the fines rose to one
hundred and ten millions; several money lenders were hanged. These were
measures in harmony with the spirit of the times but not in accordance
with good policy; the surest way for the state to avoid having to submit
to burdensome contracts in evil days is to hold, in good ones, to a
promise once given, because there are no usurers save for those who are
suspected of not paying their debts.
Colbert was the true creator of the budget. Hitherto money had been
dispensed haphazard, without consulting the receipts of the treasury.
He was the first to draw up annually a provisional statement divided
into two chapters in which the probable revenues and expenses were
set down beforehand. When a secretary of state had a disbursement to
make he signed an order for the intended payment; the persons receiving
it presented it at the office of the controller-general’s department,
when the payment of the sum was charged on a particular fund and this
assignment was presented for the king’s signature.
Colbert modified the form and assessment of the imposts. The _taille_,
or tax on landed property, was personal, that is it was paid by the
_roturiers_ and in certain circumstances two or three times in the same
year. He wished to make it real as it was in the south, as it now is
everywhere--that is to say, payable on the landed property, whoever the
holders might be. In 1661 it had reached fifty-three millions; he brought
it back to thirty-two. Amid the troubles of the Fronde many persons had
been ennobled on their own authority or had bought titles of nobility
for a few crowns; these were so many privileged individuals added to the
real ones. As early as 1662 Molière in the _École des femmes_ had laughed
at this vanity which cost the people dear. A royal ordinance revoked all
the letters of nobility granted within the last thirty years: Gros-Pierre
was obliged to show his titles and had none, and nearly forty thousand
families amongst the richest in the parishes were once more subjected
to the impost which proportionately lightened the burdens of their
neighbours.
[Illustration: COLBERT
(1619-1683)]
The controller-general rightfully preferred to the _taille_ the _aides_
or indirect taxes to which all contributed. He diminished the price of
salt, a commodity of the first necessity to the poor; but he increased
or created taxes on coffee, tobacco, wines, cards, etc., and from one
million five hundred thousand francs brought them up to twenty-one
millions. Thus the indirect taxes, some of which have been so vigorously
attacked in our own day, had their origin in an idea of justice and
equality.
He disliked loans, not because he did not understand the advantage of
borrowing at a low price to repay burdensome debts, but he dreaded giving
Louis XIV facilities for burdening the future to the advantage of the
present. On leaving the council in which the first loan was decided
on, in 1672, he bitterly reproached Lamoignon for having approved this
measure. “Do you know as I do the man with whom we have to deal, his
passion for display, for great enterprises, for all kinds of expenses?
Here is a free course opened for loans and by consequence for unlimited
expenditure and taxes. You shall answer for it to the nation and to
posterity.”
In truth a time was to come when Colbert would be no longer there and
Louis XIV would borrow at 400 per cent. At least the great minister
tried to protect the treasury against the exigencies of the financiers
by inviting the small capitalists to pour their funds directly, without
costly intermediaries, into a loan account which he established for the
purpose and into which the money flowed.[c]
Colbert’s efforts extended into so many fields that it is impossible to
follow them in detail. His service to agriculture was most beneficial. He
exempted very large families from paying tithes, and forbade the seizure
of implements and beasts of labour for non-payment of taxes. He improved
the breeds of horses and cattle by crossing them with imported animals.
His code for water highways and forests is still largely in force.
He assisted industry by sparing no means of obtaining the manufacturing
secrets of neighbouring countries. In 1669, says Duruy,[c] there were
42,220 looms and more than 60,000 workers in wool alone. The draperies
of Sedan, Louviers, Abbeville, and Elbeuf were unrivalled in Europe;
tin plate, steel, faience, and morocco leather, which had largely been
imported, were now made in France; the cloth and serges of Holland,
Genoese point, and velvets were imitated and equalled, the carpets of
Persia and Turkey surpassed at the Savonnerie, at Aubusson, and at
Beauvais. The rich silken stuffs shot with gold and silver were made at
Tours and at Lyons; at Tour-la-Ville (near Cherbourg) and at Paris they
made finer glassware than at Venice. The tapestries of Flanders yielded
to those of the Gobelins.
For commerce the great minister did much by regulating customs and
reducing tariffs. He made Dunkirk, Bayonne, and Marseilles free ports,
and was the projector of the Burgundian canal opened in 1692, and built
between 1664 and 1681, that connected the Mediterranean at Cette with
the Garonne (and consequently the ocean) at Toulouse. Henry IV’s council
of commerce was re-established in 1665 and the king presided over its
fortnightly meetings.
At that period the Dutch and the English were far ahead of the French
in foreign trade. The better to compete with these rivals Colbert
substituted privileged associations for the isolated efforts of
individuals. “He established,” says Duruy,[c] “five great companies
modelled on the English and Dutch societies; those of the _Indes
Orientales_ and the _Indes Occidentales_ in 1664; the _Compagnie du Nord_
and the _Compagnie du Levant_ in 1666, and the _Compagnie du Sénégal_ in
1673, according them exclusive commercial monopolies and granting them
considerable loans. He wished to restore life to the colonial system,
much neglected since the days of Richelieu. The French now possessed only
Canada, with Acadia, Cayenne, the Île de Bourbon [Île de Réunion], and
several establishments in Madagascar and the Indies. Colbert purchased,
for less than a million, Martinique, Guadeloupe, St. Lucia, Grenada,
and the Grenadines, Marie Galante, St. Martin, St. Christopher, St.
Bartholomew, Santa Cruz, and Tortuga (Île de la Tortue) in the West
Indies. He placed under the protection of France the French filibusters
of Santo Domingo who had seized the western portion of the island (1664).
He planted new colonies in Cayenne (1677) and in Canada (1665). He took
Newfoundland in order to control the entrance to the St. Lawrence, and
began the occupation of the magnificent valley of the Mississippi, which
had just been explored by that adventurous captain, Robert de la Salle
(1680). In Africa he wrested Gorée in Senegal from the Dutch in 1665 and
took possession of the east coast of Madagascar. In Asia the _Compagnie
des Indes_ established itself at Surat and Chandarnagar and afterwards
at Pondicherry,” but to offset these achievements he was short-sighted
enough to close the colonial ports to foreign vessels and to forbid in
1669 the importation of sugar and tobacco from Brazil.
Colbert also revived the navy and established the naval inscription by
which the people of these maritime provinces, in return for certain
advantages, furnished the necessary recruits for the navy, dividing them
according to age and family position into different classes (the _régime
des classes_). He likewise instituted in 1672 the corps of marine guards,
composed of one thousand gentlemen, in order to have good officers, a
school of cannoneers for good marksmen, a school of hydrography, and a
board of naval construction.
For the encouragement of the fine arts and the sciences, the Academy
of Inscriptions and Belle-Lettres was founded in 1663, the Academy of
Science in 1666, the Academy of Music (1669), the Academy of Architecture
in 1671. A school of fine arts established at Rome (1667) received the
prize pupils of the Academy of Painting in Paris who copied on canvas
or in marble the masterpieces of antiquity. The cabinet of medals
founded also a school for the study of oriental languages. The Royal
Library received many additions and the Mazarine Library was opened to
the public. The Jardin des Plantes was enlarged and the foundation of
academies in the provinces encouraged. All the famous littérateurs and
artists of the day were generally pensioned, including many from foreign
countries who were induced to take up their residence in France.[a]
_Michelet’s Estimate of Colbert_
The king in 1683 was relieved of Colbert. He pressed heavily upon him,
forced him to reckon, was always talking of making the receipts balance
the expenditures. In his long ministry of twenty years he had passed
through two phases. During the first he tried to live on the revenue;
during the second, dragged on and compelled, he borrowed and lived on
the future. One moment he lightened the taxes and nevertheless collected
ninety millions; but the king spent one hundred millions.
Between him and the king there was a dispute about everything: concerning
buildings--he condemned Versailles: concerning religion--he upheld the
Protestant manufacturers. He died from his public disgrace--died because
he could do nothing and had lost hope. Ridiculous quarrels were forced
upon him. The king reproached him for the expense of Versailles, which
had been built in spite of his advice to the contrary.[114]
He died, detested and cursed. It was found necessary to bury him at
night to protect his body from the insults of the populace. Songs were
composed, _ponts neufs_ on the death of the tyrant. Was this word wrongly
applied? Not at all. This great man had been the tyrant of France in two
ways at once--tyrant through his position, the times, and the necessity
of things; tyrant through his violence in well doing and his impatience,
through his impulsiveness of will.
The war and Louvois, the king and the court, Versailles and the immense
waste had been blamed very justly. But there was something else. The
situation was tyrannical. Colbert built on a foundation already ruined,
on that of the misery which grew in that century without anything being
able to stop it--political and moral causes come from afar, above all,
the indolence of the nobility and of the Catholics, which after having
ruined Spain was about to ruin France. Mazarin had killed Colbert
in advance. The tax placed by the league of notables on the small
landholder, which was doubled about 1648, compelled him to sell his
field to the lord of the parish. But these fields, gathered together
under idle hands, produced little. Under Colbert there was a famine
every three years. To sustain the army and the working classes with
ease, he himself kept the wheat at a low price, almost always forbidding
its exportation, thus discouraging agricultural labour. From 1600 to
1700 every manufactured article quintupled in value. Wheat alone was
treated as a natural product, in connection with which labour would avail
nothing; nothing was done for it; it remained at the same price. That
evil of Spain, the hatred of work, the taste for a life of ease had for
a long time been inoculated in France. Colbert revolved in the circle
of a fatal contradiction. He wanted to discourage idleness, he said; he
struck at the false nobles. With what? With the authority of the king--of
the king of nobles, who, attracting everything to the court, “ennobling”
the nation, drew it into idleness. The dead and unproductive life of the
courtier, of the priest, more and more deadened everything.
This man of work was devoured by three great unproductive classes:
the nobles, who more and more lived on the state; the officials, whom
the progress of order brought into existence; the third class, the
permanent army, enormously increased. Now, the king drawing little or
nothing from the large rich body, that is the clergy, Colbert, triply
crushed, was obliged to create a productive class, to over-stimulate
work by driving industry abroad. War of customs duties, and soon a war
of armies, resulted. He himself, who was so interested in maintaining
peace, actively engaged in the war against Holland, and expected to gain
something from it for the navy and for industry.
History can cite nothing greater or more terrible than his sudden
improvisation of the marine. It astonishes, it frightens, both by
material enormity and by moral violence. Colbert demanded from France
the severest sacrifice which had ever been asked of her (before the
conscription[115]).
He showed the same vehement impatience in commercial regulations, in the
improvisation of a French industry. He was justly indignant at seeing an
ingenious people, very artistic in many things, awaiting and receiving
from elsewhere all the products of the useful arts. Manufactories are not
only a product of wealth but of education also, a special development of
certain faculties, of a certain aptitude. A people who did only one thing
would be very low in the scale of nations. Colbert awakened and revealed
in the French people an unknown aptitude; he caused a new art to burst
forth, that above all, which puts good taste and elegance into all the
requirements for the fitting out of a house, which relieves material life
by a noble gleam of mind. It was splendid, it was grand of him. But the
means were less happy. On the one hand, this budding industry he wanted
perfect all at once; that young plant which could not grow without the
liberties of life he confined and choked with tyrannical precautions.
Almost at the outset, his regulations were laws of terror (even to
putting a person in the pillory for defective merchandise, 1670). By
requiring this perfection he hoped to gain credit for French goods abroad
and to make people buy them with confidence. But, on the other hand, he
prevented the manufacture of goods of inferior quality, to satisfy the
less pretentious needs of the poorer classes.
The grandeur of this industrial creation has been told wonderfully well;
but not its fall, its prompt decadence. It perished both from the
general poverty (no more buyers) and from emigration (the producers left
even before the death of Colbert). His last glances beheld the decay of
the edifice which was soon to crumble to pieces.
The great historian of France for the end of this century is Pesant de
Boisguillebert. He is not acquainted with ancient times and he is wrong
in thinking that evils date from 1660. He is none the less truthful and
admirable in the picture he gives of the misery of the country and of
the crying abuses which continued even under Colbert. The three fiscal
terrors (_tailles_, _aides_, _douanes_) are found there in characters
of fire. One must see the unfortunate peasant collectors, who raise the
land-tax and are responsible for it, march through the village. They go
only together in companies for fear of being killed. But it is impossible
to take away anything from him who has nothing. Everything falls back
upon the collectors. The king’s bailiff seizes their cattle, the village
flocks, then even their persons. They are imprisoned.
[Illustration: COSTUME OF A NOBLEMAN, TIME OF LOUIS XIV]
The case of the aides is much worse. The clerks, become merchants, make
a fierce war on the merchants who wish to buy wine from the vine grower
and not from them. All communication is broken off. “Everything which
comes from Japan quadruples its price, merely on account of the distance.
But everything here which passes from one province to another becomes
twenty times dearer, twenty-four times. Wine for a sou at Orleans is
worth twenty-four at Rouen. The salesman alone is six times more terrible
than pirates and tempests, than a sea of four thousand leagues.” France
pulls up its vines. The people no longer drink anything but water. The
custom-house has killed foreign commerce. No merchant dares any longer to
put himself in the hands of a receiver, who brings a suit against him if
he wishes and who is judged only by his own judges.
Thus the people, thus Colbert, remained the miserable slaves of the
financiers, of the general farmers of the taxes, of negotiators, of
partisans more powerful than the king. Colbert, on his coming to power,
had had the good fortune to hang several of them. In vain. They survived
and flourished and in the end strangled him; much worse, they caused
his name to be cursed. Under Mazarin there was absolute chaos. Under
Colbert there was relative order. The old abuses subsisted, but with
the odious force of order which an established government lent to them.
Under Mazarin France, miserable and in rags, still drank wine; but under
Colbert it drank water.
Progress was an evil. Under Colbert, the farming of the taxes was not
given out to favourites, but was sold at auction, to the highest bidder,
and thus it brought in more. Yes, but on the condition that the farmers
were permitted to use the terrible severity which made tax collecting a
war. In his mortal effort Colbert thus acted against himself. She escaped
him, however, do what he would--this France whom he wished to cure,
tormented by _recors_, eaten up by bailiffs’ men, expropriated, sold, and
executed.
The great malediction under which he died troubled him on his death-bed.
A letter from the king came to him and he did not wish to read it. “If I
had done for God,” said he, “what I have done for this man, I would be
sure of being saved, and I do not know where I am going.” We know it,
hero! You are going into glory. You remain in the heart of France. Great
nations, who judge with time like God, are as equitable as he, valuing
the labour less according to the result than in proportion to the effort,
the grandeur of the desire.[l]
After Colbert’s death his ministry was divided. The marquis of Seignelay,
his son, had the navy; the finances were intrusted to Claude le Pelletier
(1683-1689), later by the count de Pontchartrain (1689-1699); these last
succeeded but did not replace him. After 1689 the general penury was
such, that Louis was obliged to send to the mint the masterpieces in
chiselled silver which adorned Versailles.
LOUVOIS
[Sidenote: [1666-1691 A.D.]]
Colbert had organised peace; Louvois, “the greatest and most brutal of
clerks,” organised war. François Michel le Tellier, marquis de Louvois,
was born in 1641. At the age of fifteen years he entered the office
of his father, the secretary of state, and was initiated by a long
apprenticeship into the science of military administration, to which he
brought an activity equal to that of Colbert. When Louis XIV determined
to assume the rule, Louvois became the real minister of war, although he
did not succeed his father, Michel le Tellier, till 1666. He reformed the
army, and his reforms lasted as long as the old monarchy. If he preserved
the system of voluntary enlistment which had been in practice for three
centuries, he diminished abuses and dangers by a more exact discipline
and more severe regulations. He established uniforms by ordering that
each regiment should be distinguished by the colour of its clothes and
by various marks (1670). He introduced the use of copper pontoons for
crossing rivers; he instituted magazines of food and supplies, barracks,
military hospitals, the Hôtel des Invalides, all things almost unknown
before his time. He created the corps of engineers whence came the great
Vauban’s best pupils; schools of artillery at Douai, Metz, and Strasburg,
the companies of grenadiers in the infantry, the regiments of hussars in
the cavalry, and lastly cadet companies, a species of military school for
the _gentilshommes_.
The army still showed the spirit of feudal times. The soldier belonged
less to the king than to his colonel; the cavalry was given too much
importance and the nobility would serve only in it. From this reign the
French infantry became and long remained the first in the world. Louvois
required it to march in step and substituted the gun and bayonet for the
pike which was still prevalent; but it was not till after his time that
Vauban succeeded in making the gun at once a weapon for projectiles and a
weapon for fencing, and so rendered it the most formidable instrument of
destruction which was ever put into the hands of men.
He made a revolution in the army by the _ordre du tableau_ and by the
creation of the service of inspection. He did not destroy the venality
of offices which had been introduced into the army, and was exercised
almost entirely to the profit of the nobles; but in order to merit
promotion it was no longer sufficient for them to have ancestors--they
must have services; and the grades, from the rank of colonel, became the
prize of seniority--an excellent reform in those days, which would be
so now no longer. The hatred of the nobility pursued the minister who
was degrading “those born to command others, on the pretext that it is
reasonable to learn to obey in order to command; who wished to accustom
seigneurs to equality and to mingle with all the world indiscriminately.”
Louvois, with inflexible firmness, required that each should perform his
duty; to secure this he instituted inspectors-general who made the king’s
authority and his own everywhere present; and severe rebukes awaited
negligent officers.
He created recreation camps, a ruinous innovation when these assemblies
of troops were only a spectacle to divert the ladies of the court and
the king’s _ennui_, but an excellent school for officers and generals
when preparing for the great manœuvres of war. It was only after his
death that the order of St. Louis was instituted (1693) for the purpose
of bestowing honours as a reward for military services--this time
without distinction of birth, but not without distinction of religion;
the reformed could not obtain it. By such measures France was able to
have under arms, in the war of Flanders, 125,000 men; for that with
Holland, 180,000; before Ryswick, 300,000; during the War of the Spanish
Succession, 450,000.
VAUBAN
There was one point, the only one, perhaps, on which the minister of war
and the minister of marine were in accord: namely, the fortification
of the kingdom. To accomplish this immense work they found the man who
is, with Colbert, the greatest of this reign. Le Prestre de Vauban was
a _gentilhomme_ of no great family, who was born at Saulieu in Burgundy
in 1633. His father died in the service, leaving him only his name. A
prior of the neighbourhood took him in and brought him up. When he had
completed his seventeenth year the Fronde was in full swing. Eleven of
his brothers, uncles, and relatives were under arms; one morning Vauban
ran away and hastened to join the Great Condé, who received him as a
cadet and soon made him an officer.
Vauban fought well; he studied more. The good prior had given him some
notions of geometry; he developed them and these first acquirements
decided his vocation. Having passed into the royal army he served under
the chevalier de Clerville, the most renowned engineer of that time, and
at twenty-five directed the works during the sieges of Gravelines, Ypres,
and Oudenarde. In 1668 his reputation was so great that Louis XIV charged
him with the fortification of Dunkirk. This first work of the young
engineer was a masterpiece: two moles projecting over six thousand feet
into the water and defended by formidable batteries created a harbour
where nature had put only an unfavourable shore. The waters inside and
those of the high tides skilfully manipulated, incessantly hollowed
the channel and restored to the sea the mud it brought up. Henceforth
Vauban was the indispensable man whom every general demanded when he
had a siege to make. In time of war he took towns; in time of peace he
fortified them. It has been calculated that he worked on 300 old towns,
that he constructed 33 new ones, that he conducted 53 sieges, and was
present at 140 important actions. He was several times wounded; for in
order to reconnoitre the situation of a place and to spare the blood of
his soldiers, he exposed himself in such a manner as to call forth the
accusation of temerity, had not his cool and deliberate courage been like
the fulfilment of a duty.
Vauban, who fortified towns, knew still better how to take them. He
introduced the use of hollow cannon-balls for dispersing earth; ricochet
firing to dismount the artillery of the besieged and destroy the angles
of the bastions; above all he perfected the parallels at the siege of
Maestricht in 1673. These parallels joined the trenches which converged
towards the town, and gave the attack the advantage over the defence.
Vauban went forward slowly but surely; he marched under cover by lines on
which the troops were in a position to render each other mutual support,
did not hurry on attacks when he could dispense with them, took pains
to spare the soldiers, who had previously been flung away, and attained
his object incomparably more quickly and with fewer losses, because
he first silenced the enemy’s fire and left on the ramparts neither a
tenable point nor a cannon in condition to be fired. There was no longer
any impregnable fortress and it was easy to look forward to the day when
every well-besieged town would be taken. It is to him that we also owe
the invention of the socket which allows the infantry to fire whilst
still keeping the bayonet at the end of the gun.
SÉGUIER, LEGISLATIVE WORKS
[Sidenote: [1665-1685 A.D.]]
In a memorial handed to the king, August 15th, 1665, Colbert had proposed
to remodel the whole legislation so that there should be in France
but one law, one system of weights and measures; in addition he asked
for gratuitous justice, the abolition of the venality of offices, the
price of which was reckoned at four hundred and twenty millions, and
the diminution of the number of monks, and the encouragement of useful
callings.
A commission was appointed. When the members had held a meeting and at
last brought their task to a conclusion they discussed the matter with
eminent members of the parliament in the presence of the ministers,
under the presidency of the chancellor Séguier, sometimes under that of
the king. Six codes were the result of these deliberations: in 1667 the
civil ordinance or Code Louis which abolished some iniquitous procedure
belonging to the justice of the Middle Ages, “true witness of human
imbecility,” says Montaigne, shortened its delays and regulated the form
of the registers of births, marriages, and deaths which, it was ordered,
were to be deposited at the office of each law-court; in 1669 that of
Rivers and Forests which continues in its principal dispositions; in 1670
the ordinance of Criminal Instruction which the parliaments accepted only
after many _lettres de cachet_ and decrees of exile; it restricted the
application of the torture and various cases of provisional imprisonment,
fixed rights of jurisdiction so that none might be deprived of his
natural judges, laid down identical rules for all tribunals, thus
preparing the way for unity of principle by means of unity of form, but
did not yet allow either counsel or defender for the accused in capital
cases, preserved the atrocity of earlier penalties, the wheel and
quartering, and still made the penalty disproportionate to the crime; in
1673 the ordinance of Commerce, a true title to glory for Colbert; in
1681 that of the Navy and the Colonies, which has formed the common law
of the nations of Europe and serves them to this day as maritime law;
in 1685 the Black Code, which regulated the condition of negroes in the
French colonies.
These ordinances form the greatest work of codification executed from
Justinian to Napoleon. Some portions of them are still in operation.
LIONNE, FOREIGN AFFAIRS AND DIPLOMACY
[Sidenote: [1661-1715 A.D.]]
If Colbert and Louvois, by the re-establishment of the finances, the
creation of a navy, and the reform of the army, allowed Louis XIV to
make war successfully, Lionne, secretary of state for foreign affairs,
prepared that success by his negotiations. “He had,” says Choisy, “a
superior genius: his understanding, naturally keen and penetrating,
had been still further sharpened in the affairs in which the cardinal
had early employed him.” Saint-Simon, who was no flatterer, also says
that he did everything with a skill and superiority quite unequalled.
The king indeed watched closely over this branch; he himself wrote the
first despatches to his ambassadors; he often wrote minutes of the most
important letters with his own hand, and he always had the instructions
sent in his name read aloud to him.
When Lionne died in 1671 the king gave him as successor the marquis de
Pomponne who had conducted several embassies with success and was then in
Sweden, whose king he had succeeded in detaching from the Dutch alliance.
Pomponne directed all the negotiations which terminated in the Peace of
Nimeguen. “But,” said Louis XIV, “the office I gave him was found to be
too great and extensive for him. I was obliged to order him to retire,
because everything that passed through his hands lost something of the
grandeur and force which are needed in executing the orders of a king of
France who is not unfortunate.”
TRIUMPH OF THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY
Some of these ministers of Louis XIV, especially Colbert and Louvois,
were certainly great administrators; they were not, they could not be,
great statesmen. Colbert himself aimed at making France richer only in
order to render the king more powerful; and all laboured to constitute
the excessive centralisation which enveloped the whole country, its
industry and commerce, the arms and the brain, with a thousand bonds of a
minute regulation, so that the initiative of the ministers was everywhere
substituted for the action of individuals and communities. The result of
this system was to be that France would live less by her own vitality
than by that of her government. When age and sickness should freeze that
ever-present hand all would decline. A great people would be subjected to
the vicissitudes of one man’s existence.
[Illustration: A COURT COSTUME, TIME OF LOUIS XIV]
If the administration of the realm was as much the work of Louis XIV’s
ministers as his own, one thing belonged to him alone: this was the
general direction he gave to the government and to society--the skilful
and energetic manner with which he knew how to control all other powers,
to annul them, and make them to serve his greatness; it was in fact
that art of ruling which no other prince, in Saint-Simon’s[i] judgment,
possessed to a greater degree. We have already seen his ideas on the
rights of sovereigns; he had summed them up in that phrase attributed to
him, it is said, in his youth, at the end of the Fronde: “_L’État, c’est
moi_--The State, it is I.”[116]
He believed this; everybody believed it with him, and the church taught
it. Bossuet founded the divine right of the monarchy on maxims drawn from
the Scriptures. “Oh kings, ye are gods,” exclaimed the great bishop at
the very moment that Lebrun was filling Versailles with the apotheosis of
Louis XIV. While he lived there was but one uncontrolled and limitless
will--his own. The states-general might have recalled other wills, but he
never convoked it; he punished those that spoke of it, and when, at the
Treaty of Utrecht, the allies, still defying his ambition, tried to exact
that the conditions of peace should be ratified by a national assembly,
he haughtily refused and declared that he regarded the demand as an
insult to the majesty of the throne. The minority of the provinces had
their own estates, but he suppressed many of them. Those which remained,
as in Languedoc, Burgundy, Provence, Brittany, etc., never assembled
except to execute the orders of the ministers. Whatever remained of
municipal liberty disappeared like that of the provinces. The king,
coining money with the ancient rights dear to the towns, changed the
mayoralties into hereditary offices and sold them to the highest bidders.
An edict of 1683 placed the financial administration of the towns under
the direction of the intendants. Their finances did not improve. The
communities were made responsible for the payment of the _taille_ as the
_curiates_ had been under the Roman emperors. Former fiscal arrangements
had ruined the magistrates. The new one held them exempt, but ruined the
communes.
A phrase sums up this entire policy--unfortunately it was spoken by
Colbert: “It is not well,” he wrote to a governor, charging him to let an
elective magistracy fall into desuetude, “that some one should speak in
the name of all.”
_Submission of Parliament_
Royalty had taken five centuries to undermine the great body of the
feudal aristocracy, and the better to perfect this work had formed with
its own hands another body--that of the judiciary order. In the sixteenth
century they spoke of the parliaments as “the strong columns on which the
monarchy is supported,” but in the seventeenth the new royalty wished for
no other support than its absolute power.
Nevertheless, thanks to the sale of offices, which left the same offices
in the same hands, thanks to the dignity of the magistrate’s lives, to
the political rôles they had played on several occasions, to the _esprit
de corps_ which had quickly been established in the bosom of the great
judiciary companies, there had been raised alongside the nobility of
the sword a nobility of the robe, which seemed quite as troublesome as
the other because it already had its souvenirs and regrets. It was not
always easily managed. It parried attacks with that force of inertia
peculiar to assemblies of aged men, which is difficult to overcome at a
time when tradition stands for law. The spirit of opposition, everywhere
punished, took refuge here--political opposition, scarcely sensible
in the parliament of Paris, provincial opposition in the others, all
religious opposition, under the form of Jansenism. One of Louis XIV’s
ideas which he sought to realise with the greatest perseverance was to
transform the parliaments into simple courts of appeal, to put his state
councils over them, even the parliament of Paris which had brought about
the Fronde. In an edict of 1667 he proscribed it from enregistering
ordinances within a week and he suffered no remonstrance. The following
year he had torn from the parliament registers the records of all its
deliberations during the civil war, in order to efface even the memory of
its old-time pretensions. Besides this he changed its title of sovereign
court into that of superior court, as if the first were a usurpation of
royal sovereignty.
_Submission of the Nobility_
It appeared a more difficult task to reduce the nobles. Cardinal
Richelieu had razed their fortresses and cut off the heads of some of
the most unruly. Mazarin had bought them or vanquished them by ruse.
Louis XIV made himself their master by drawing them around him by his
fêtes, dragging them from their domains, where they thought too often of
their ancestors and still felt themselves free, filling his antechamber
and household posts with the descendants of those who had made his
fathers tremble, and forming for royalty such brilliant cortèges as the
representative of God on earth would wish to be surrounded by.
If they had titles and honours they had no political influence in the
state. In his councils, the king, after the death of Mazarin, admitted
but a single one of the old noblesse, the duke de Beauvilliers, governor
of the royal children; and he chose all his ministers from those of
middle conditions, in order, according to Saint-Simon’s[i] forceful
expression, to be able “to plunge them into the depths of nothingness
from which he had drawn them.” The French nobility never knew how, like
that of England, to become a political class; it was never anything but a
military caste.
_The Third Estate_
Louis XIV preferred, following in this the ancient monarchical
traditions, to be served by the middle class, more educated and,
moreover, more devoted, because it did not yet feel the inconveniences
of absolute power, as it had been feeling for centuries those of the
feudal régime. Louis turned over to it all the financial, political, and
judicial functions; he established it peacefully in the administration of
the realm; he pushed it energetically towards commerce and industry--two
forces of the new era--and the regard he had for those _petites gens_
named Boileau, Racine, Molière, announced the coming substitution of
the rights of intellect for those of birth. Louis XIV thus unknowingly
paved the way for democracy in France and the Revolution. However he must
not be regarded as a sort of bourgeois king, a _roi des maltôtiers_,
as Saint-Simon[i] disdainfully calls him. His policy, the high idea
he had of his person, the rigorous ceremonial which made a sort of
redoubtable and inaccessible divinity of him, the _carrousels_, the
brilliant fêtes--none of these recalls to mind the modest pictures of
constitutional monarchies.[117] More than that, those nobodies whom Louis
made his councillors, his ambassadors, and his secretaries of state
quitted their plebeian state before entering his court. They became the
marquis de Louvois, the count de Pontchartrain, the marquis de Torcy.
While working with the bourgeois, the grandson of Henry IV always had the
desire to remain the king of the noblemen.
LOUIS XIV AND THE CHURCH
[Sidenote: [1661-1685 A.D.]]
Louis XIV conducted himself towards the clergy as he had done towards the
nobility--in honouring them he watched to see that they robbed him of
none of his power. The great lords, with but few exceptions, were removed
from the church as they had been from the administration. Therefore the
aristocratic Saint-Simon[i] reproaches Louis “with having ruined the
episcopacy by filling it with seminarian pedants and their pupils without
education and without birth”--a strange reproach from the mouth of a man
who had lived with Bossuet, Fénelon, Fléchier, and Massillon, the eternal
honour of the French church.
[Illustration: STREET COSTUME, TIME OF LOUIS XIV
(From an old French print)]
The clergy was therefore under Louis XIV one force the more at the
disposal of royalty. In the affair of the _régale_, the bishops even
upheld the king against Rome. The _régale_ was the king’s right to enjoy
the revenues of certain benefices, bishoprics, and archbishoprics, during
vacancies in the sees. In 1673 an edict declared all the French sees
subject to the _régale_. Two bishops refused to obey and their action
was approved by the pope. Louis XIV, to end the dispute, convoked an
assembly of French clergy which adopted, in 1682, under the inspiration
of Bossuet, four propositions which were registered by the courts and
the faculty of theology. They were in substance: God gave to St. Peter
and his successors no power, direct or indirect, over temporal affairs.
The Gallican church approves those decrees of the Council of Constance
which declare the œcumenical councils superior to the pope in spiritual
affairs. The rules and customs received in the kingdom and in the
Gallican church must remain unalterable. The pope’s decisions, in matter
of doctrine, shall not be irreformable until the church has accepted them.
Innocent XI neither approved nor quashed these resolutions, but he
refused to grant bulls of investiture to those bishops, appointed by
the government, who had been members of the assembly. The consequence
was that at his death there were twenty dioceses without heads. The
matter was, however, brought to a conclusion in 1693 by a compromise.
Innocent XII granted the bulls of investiture and the king ceased to
impose upon the theological faculties the obligation of teaching the four
propositions of 1682.
_The Protestants_
The dissenters profited nothing by the quarrel with the court of Rome.[c]
Since the Peace of Alais the Protestants, being deprived of their
political organisation, of their “towns of security,” and of everything
which had helped to form them into a party, had been living in obscurity,
doing their best to make their enemies forget them, and carefully
abstaining from taking any part in the civil troubles of the time. During
the Fronde not one of them had shown any sign of life. Their attitude
towards the government was that of a child in disgrace, and towards
the Catholics that of a disdainful enemy. They persisted in isolating
themselves from the rest of the nation, and continued to correspond with
their friends in England and Holland. They were law-abiding, peaceable,
and industrious citizens, and contributed their full share to the
greatness and prosperity of their country by their courage and their
energy.
Nevertheless, the nation continued to look on them with mistrust, as if
they were foreigners; France felt as if there were a little Holland in
her midst, rejoicing at the success of the greater one (with which it
was then waging ineffectual war). To reunite the Protestants with the
national church was a fixed idea with Louis XIV. This desire inspired
his policy, and was the chief goal of all his efforts; this was to be
“the noble work and special feature of his reign”; and he looked upon
the enterprise as a noble one, not only from a political but from a
religious point of view. He was beginning to get into a narrow devotional
groove, and allowed the Jesuits to exercise a powerful influence over
him. He wished to free himself from the reproach of heresy, which his
conduct towards the pope had drawn down upon him, and to atone for the
irregularities of his youth. He resolved to revoke the Edict of Nantes.
The assembly of the clergy, the parliament of Toulouse, the Catholics in
the south all advocated this measure so strongly that it appeared to be
the general desire of the nation; Louvois in his ambition, Le Tellier in
his fanatical piety, also did their best to urge the king on, and last,
but not least, Madame de Maintenon, whose influence during the rest of
his life was to be paramount, threw all the weight of her persuasions
into the scale in order to bring about the revocation of this edict.
Up to this time bribery had been the chief means employed in the
attempts to convert the Protestants. Richelieu had used this method with
great success. Louis XIV followed his example with favourable results;
flattery, favours, rewards of every kind were lavishly bestowed in the
attempt to gain over the Protestants. Pensions were given to the newly
converted, they were exempted from taxation, all sorts of offices were
given to them over the heads of staunch Catholics. A fund was formed for
making conversions, with Pellisson, a converted Protestant, as director.
France was flooded with missions, sermons, tracts, and books of dogma.
Calvinism suffered such severe losses that Madame de Maintenon said,
“Very soon it will be ridiculous to belong to that religion.” But these
methods of bribery and persuasion were not rapid enough, and harsher
methods began to be used: royal edicts, parliamentary decisions, and
orders issued by governors of provinces and cities rendered the preaching
of the reformed doctrines difficult, made the Protestant pastors very
uneasy, forbade their synods to assemble. Protestants were deprived of
their pensions and of their titles of nobility; the chief burden of the
taxes was laid on them; they were excluded from the king’s household,
from the university, from holding municipal offices. They were also
forbidden to practice as lawyers or doctors. They were expelled from
financial offices, the rights of free citizenship were refused to them,
they were not allowed to be members of corporations, their schools were
closed, any of their places of worship which had been built since 1598
were destroyed, and their children were taken from them to be educated
as Catholics. Then the Protestants began to fly from France (1682); but
emigration was forbidden under pain of being sent to the galleys.
The Calvinists in the south made one last appeal to the king in March,
1684, begging him to allow them to serve God according to the dictates
of their own conscience, or else to take refuge in some other country.
For answer, the king sent them a number of missionaries accompanied by
a detachment of dragoons, who were supposed to be the most cruel of all
the French soldiers. Every day conversions by the hundred were announced
to the king. On the 2nd of September all the Protestants of Montauban
changed their religion by a resolution passed at a meeting in the town
hall; on the 5th of October Montpellier, Castres, Lunel, etc., followed
suit; then the dioceses of Gap and Embrun, then the whole of Poitou.
The governor of Languedoc said that he had seen sixty thousand people
converted in three days. It was thought that nothing more remained to be
done, but to publicly announce the destruction of a sect which had only
a few adherents left in distant provinces, among the rude inhabitants of
the mountainous parts; it was necessary to strike only one more decisive
blow and so complete the work for which a long series of unjust acts and
the ingenious tyranny of the last fifty years had been the preparation.
Père Lachaise, the king’s confessor, and Louvois promised that not a
single drop of blood should be shed.
_Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685 A.D.)_
Accordingly on the 22nd of October, 1685, an edict appeared ordaining:
(1) The suppression of all the privileges which had been accorded to
the Protestants by Henry IV and Louis XIII; (2) the proscription of
Protestant worship throughout the kingdom (except Alsace and Strasburg);
(3) the expulsion of Protestant ministers, the closing of Protestant
schools, and the demolition of the churches, etc. Numerous rewards were
given to those who agreed to change their religion; Calvinists were
forbidden on pain of being sent to the galleys and the confiscation of
their property, to go out of France; permission was given them to remain
on their own property and engage in business without their worship being
interfered with so long as they did not hold public services.
This edict was received in France with the greatest enthusiasm: sermons,
poems, pictures, medals were produced with astounding rapidity to
celebrate this great act of unity! At last the whole country was to
be under one jurisdiction and under one king! Louis XIV was a second
Constantine, a modern Theodosius. Never had any king performed such a
wonderful achievement, nor was it likely that any parallel to it would be
seen in the future. The whole of Europe was amazed at the promptitude and
ease with which this great king had stamped out a heresy which had defied
the efforts of six of his predecessors.
The only complaints that arose were directed against the leniency of that
clause which allowed the Protestants to worship in their own fashion in
private. This clause was only a lure, and Louvois wrote to the governors
and those in authority: “His majesty desires that those who refuse to
embrace his religion should be treated with the utmost rigour, and those
who foolishly pride themselves on being the last to be converted are to
be driven to the extremity of their endurance.” Then began a series of
bloody atrocities which the king had never commanded, and which were not
at all in accordance with his character for moderation. A defenceless
population was delivered over to the cruel brutality of the soldiery,
men were put to the torture, women were subjected to a dishonour worse
than death, children were torn from their parents, houses and farms
were wrecked, converts who refused to take the sacraments were sent to
the galleys, as were those who harboured Protestant ministers or those
who attempted to leave the kingdom. Sentence of death was pronounced
against all who practised any other than the Catholic religion, against
all Protestant ministers, and all who formed themselves into gatherings
or held meetings. Those who were weak yielded; they were dragged to
the altar and, with the executioner standing over them, forced to
commit sacrilege. “Torture, abjuration, and forced communion,” says
Saint-Simon,[i] “often all took place within twenty-four hours,” and the
executioners were the guides and the sponsors of the convert. Almost all
the bishops took part in these hasty irreverent practices. Most of them
urged on the executioners and used every means to swell the number of
conversions, for they sent an account of their triumphs to the court,
and were anxious to gain as much glory and substantial recompense as
possible. The king received from all quarters news and details of these
persecutions; those who had abjured Protestantism and received the
communion were counted by the thousand. The king gloried in his power and
in his piety; the bishops sent him the most fulsome panegyrics on the
great work he was doing; pulpits rang with his praises.
The Protestants fled from the country. The police were unable to prevent
them. Certificates of confession were required from all travellers,
sentence of death was pronounced against anyone who countenanced or
assisted others in emigrating. The emigrants had been deprived of
seventeen millions of francs in house and land property, the frontier
was guarded by numerous troops; but all these measures were vain, and
in spite of them fifty thousand families left the kingdom, and took
refuge in Holland, England, Germany, and Switzerland. They consisted
of nobles, tradesmen, and manufacturers. This active, energetic, and
enlightened body of men, placed at the service of foreigners their
talents, their swords, the secrets of French manufactures, their wealth,
and a relentless hatred of the tyrant who had banished them. Their
emigration did an irreparable injury to France. They were received
everywhere with the greatest kindness; they were even invited to leave
their country, and good positions were promised them. One part of London
was peopled with silk-weavers and workers in crystal and steel; and
England became the leading manufacturing nation. Brandenburg rose from
its abasement; Berlin became a town; Prussia was opened up; the influence
of the refugees on Frederick William’s states was so marked that it is
from this time that their greatness and their subsequent weight among
European powers may be dated. Amsterdam built a thousand houses for them,
William gave them pensions, granted them privileges, and provided them
with places of worship; he formed them into a royal guard of six hundred
noblemen and two regiments. He made use of their ministers, embittered by
hatred, to flood Europe with pamphlets against Louis XIV. Henceforth on
every battle-field the French would meet these emigrants filled with a
fierce hatred of their country, and, for more than a century afterward,
French soldiers found that their bitterest enemies in Germany were the
descendants of these refugees.[j]
_The Jansenists_
[Sidenote: [1661-1715 A.D.]]
Nor did Louis protect the Jansenists who were, on certain points, in
disagreement with the church of Rome. The Jansenists owed their doctrine
to a bishop of Ypres, named Jansenius, who died in 1638, and to the
abbé of St. Cyran who had sustained some ancient opinions, which seemed
to be new, upon grace and predestination. Jansenism deserves at least
a passing word especially on account of the character of the men who
defended it. The most illustrious of them, the great Arnauld, Lemaistre
de Sacy, Nicole, and Lancelot, retired to the ancient Cistercian abbey
of Port-Royal des Champs, near Versailles, when Pascal also joined them
in 1654, and there, leading a solitary life, these Catholic puritans set
the world an example of assiduous works of the hands and the intellect,
of lively piety, and of austerity which went as far as asceticism. They
wrote, for the most part in common, some excellent works which are still
in use; they had some illustrious pupils, among others Racine; they won
over to a great part of their doctrine almost the entire magistracy.[c]
The Jesuits then monopolised the authority and influence of the church,
whose spirit and moral code they attempted to modify, and adapt to
the present courtly and despotic times. The studious, reasoning, and
ascetic brethren of Port-Royal saw the tendency of the Jesuit preaching,
the false and worldly basis of their creed. It was on the subject of
Jansenism that the Jesuits had declared themselves, and had come forth
in the arena of argument. The pious wits of Port-Royal seized the
opportunity, took up a cause sufficiently absurd in its fundamental
dogmas, but which they were enabled to support by battering the still
more absurd outworks of the Jesuits. The latter won the pope to their
side, and obtained from the head of the church a condemnation of
the tenets of Jansenius. The polemic writers of Port-Royal bowed to
his holiness, confessed that he was infallible as a high priest, in
condemning such and such belief, but most fallible as a critic, since
not one of these propositions, so lustily condemned, were to be found
in Jansenius. This ingenious effrontery succeeded; for, under colour of
disputing about such abstractions, Pascal and Arnauld attacked their
enemies in more vulnerable points--in their moral laxity, their sophistic
logic, their worldliness, courtliness, and servility. Louis XIV took the
Jesuit side. Many of the courtiers, who dared no longer draw the sword
in rebellion, ventured to move the tongue, and exercise thought at least
in independence. Amongst the most distinguished sectaries of Port-Royal
was the duchess de Longueville, sister of Condé, the famous partisan of
the Fronde, and mistress of La Rochefoucauld. Her hôtel, once the resort
of the coadjutor [de Retz] and his party, of the hot cavaliers that
drove the court from Paris, was now the lurking-place and concealment of
the Jansenists. She braved the royal authority at all times, whether in
the cause of the noblesse or of religion; gallant and dissolute in the
Fronde, in Jansenism rigid and devout. “She was Jansenist in truth and
heart,” says Brienne, “just as she had indulged her gallantries with the
same sincerity, and always drums beating” (the expression means openly
and boldly): “a princess of the blood need fear nothing; and Madame de
Longueville marched on her way with head erect.” Although the Jansenism
of Pascal and of Arnauld was the protestation of reason, common sense,
and deep religious feeling, against the corruptions of the Jesuits,
that of Madame de Longueville and her class must be considered as a
kind of covert opposition to the court, and to the despotic will of
the sovereign. The froward love of independence, that could no longer
exercise itself in political intrigue, found more harmless vent in
criticism and polemics.[k]
The outcome of the Jansenist disputes was that in 1709 the king caused
the buildings of Port-Royal des Champs to be levelled to the ground.[118]
The bodies of the inoffensive solitaires were disinterred, and dogs were
seen quarrelling over them.
[Illustration: CANNON USED IN THE TIME OF LOUIS XIV]
THE POLICE
The police was the creation of Louis XIV. In 1687 he appointed a
magistrate to oversee the Paris police, Nicholas de la Reynie, who was
succeeded in 1697 by the marquis d’Argenson--these were the first two
_lieutenants de police_. They established order, decency, and security in
the city. Now commenced the system of public lighting; from the 1st of
November to the 1st of March, lanterns, burning candles, were placed at
the ends and in the middle of every street. There were five thousand of
these lights in Paris. The watch was augmented and reorganised. Firemen
replaced the Capuchins in the fire Service. The narrow streets, often
cut up and always filthy, were cleaned, widened, and paved; coaches and
cabs for the public were introduced; Pascal even devised the omnibuses,
which did not succeed at that time. The custom of going about Paris on
horseback was no longer kept up except by a few obstinate representatives
of the olden times.
The police attended to other things; it censured all writings,[119] it
held up the post, and read in what was afterwards called the _cabinet
noir_, all suspected correspondence, and to relieve the government of too
slow methods of justice it multiplied the _lettres de cachet_[120] which
removed all guarantee of personal liberty to citizens. The new power
charged with the overseeing of persons and opinions, thus became like
an ever-open eye, always defiant of royalty. Thus were all the orders
of state, all the existing authorities, all the conditions--parliament,
nobility, bourgeois, clergy, and dissenters--reduced and dominated.
Vauban, Catinat, and Fénelon resisted the contagion. Condé himself, in
spite of his rank, his services, and his spirit, became a courtier.
Turenne alone managed to keep a position from which he could tell the
king many truths which others dared not repeat.[c]
THE COURT OF THE GRAND MONARCH
Louis XIV put so much brilliancy and magnificence into his court that the
smallest details of its life seem interesting to posterity, to such an
extent were they an object of curiosity to all the courts of Europe and
to all his contemporaries. The splendour of his government shone on his
pettiest actions.
That is why no historian has failed to write of the early affections of
Louis XIV for the baroness de Beauvais, for Mademoiselle d’Argencourt,
for the niece of Cardinal Mazarin, who was married to the count de
Soissons, the father of Prince Eugene, and above all for Marie Mancini,
her sister, who afterwards married the constable Colonna.
The court, after the triumphant return of Mazarin after the Peace of the
Pyrenees, busied itself with games, and the ballet, with comedy, which,
being only new born, had not yet become an art, and with tragedy, which
had become a sublime art in the hands of Pierre Corneille. A _curé_
of St. Germain l’Auxerrois, who inclined to the rigorous ideas of the
Jansenists, had often written to the queen against these spectacles, ever
since the first years of the regency. He claimed that a person would
be damned for being present at them. He even had this anathema signed
by seven doctors of the Sorbonne, but the abbé de Beaumont, the king’s
preceptor, provided himself with more approbations of doctors, than the
strict _curé_ had with condemnations. He thus quieted the scruples of the
queen, and, when he became archbishop of Paris, he gave his authority to
the opinion he had supported as abbé.
There had been one continual succession of fêtes, entertainments, and
gallantries since the marriage of the king. Interrupted by the death of
Mazarin, they were redoubled on the marriage of Monsieur, brother of the
king, with Henrietta of England, sister of Charles II [which took place
twenty days after Mazarin’s death]. After the cardinal’s death the court
became the centre of amusements and the model for other courts. The king
prided himself on giving fêtes which should cast those of Vaux into
oblivion.
[Illustration: ROCROY]
The good taste of society had not yet received its full perfection
at court. The queen-mother, Anne of Austria, began to be fond of
retirement.[121] The reigning queen could scarcely speak French and
her goodness was her only merit. The princess of England, the queen’s
sister-in-law, brought to court the attraction of a kindly and animated
style of conversation, which was soon seconded by her reading of good
works and her sure and fine taste. She perfected herself in the language,
which she still wrote poorly at the time of her marriage. She inspired a
fresh mental stimulus, and introduced graces and a politeness into court,
of which the rest of Europe had scarcely an idea. Madame had all the wit
of her brother Charles II, embellished by the charms of her sex, by the
talent and the desire to please. The court of Louis XIV breathed forth
a gallantry which a sense of propriety made more piquant. That which
reigned at the court of Charles II was bolder, and too much grossness
disfigured its amusements.
There was at first between Madame and the king a great deal of sprightly
coquetry and a secret understanding, which was shown in little attentions
often repeated.[122] The king sent her verses; she answered them. It
chanced that the same man was at once the confidant of the king and of
Madame in this ingenious intercourse. This was the marquis of Dangeau.
He conducted the correspondence for both king and princess; thus serving
both of them without letting one suspect what he was doing for the other.
_Mademoiselle de la Vallière_
These pastimes gave way to the more serious and more protracted passion
which the king had for Mademoiselle de la Vallière, maid of honour to
Madame. He experienced with her the rare pleasure of being loved solely
for himself. She was for two years the hidden object of all the gallant
amusements, all the entertainments which the king gave. A young _valet
de chambre_ of the king, named Belloc, composed several recitals which
were interspersed between dances, sometimes in the queen’s, sometimes in
Madame’s apartments, and these recitals expressed with an air of mystery
the secrets of their hearts, which soon ceased to be a secret.
All these public entertainments which the king gave were so many homages
to his mistress. In 1662, a tournament (_carrousel_) was held opposite
the Tuileries in a large enclosure which has retained its name from this
event, Place du Carrousel. There were five _quadrilles_. The king was at
the head of the Romans; his brother of the Persians, the prince of Condé
of the Turks, the duke d’Enghien, his son, of the Indians, the duke of
Guise of the Americans.
The queen-mother, the reigning queen, the queen of England, widow of
Charles I, forgetting for the moment her misfortunes, were under a
dais to see this spectacle. The count de Saulx, son of the duke de
Lesdiguières, took the prize and received it from the hand of the
queen-mother. These fêtes reanimated more than ever the taste for devices
and emblems, which tourneys had formerly made the fashion, and which had
lasted after them.
In 1662, an antiquarian called D’Ouvrier designed for Louis XIV the
emblem of a sun darting its rays on a globe, with the words: _Nec
pluribus impar_. The idea imitated somewhat a Spanish device made for
Philip II, and which was more appropriate for the Spanish king, who owned
the best part of the New World and so many states in the old, than for
a young king of France who as yet gave only hopes. This device had a
prodigious success. The _armoires_ of the king, the crown furniture, the
tapestries, the carvings, were decorated with it. The king never wore it
in his tournaments.
The fête of Versailles, in 1664, surpassed that of the carrousel by its
originality, by its magnificence, and by the pleasures of mind which,
being joined to the splendours of these diversions, added an attraction
and graces which no fête before had ever had. Versailles began to be a
charming place of abode.
The 5th of May the king came there with the court, composed of six
hundred persons, who, together with their suites, were entertained
at his expense, as well as all those who assisted in preparing the
entertainments. Nothing was ever lacking at these fêtes except buildings
especially constructed for giving them, such as were raised by the Greeks
and Romans. The quickness, however, with which theatres, amphitheatres,
and porticoes were erected, and ornamented with as much magnificence
as good taste, was a marvel which added to the illusion and which,
diversified since in a thousand different ways, increased the charm of
these exhibitions.
There was first a sort of tournament. Those who were to take part
appeared on the first day as in a review; they were preceded by heralds
at arms, by pages and equerries who carried their devices and their
shields. On the shields were written verses composed by Périgny and
Benserade. This latter especially had a singular talent for those gallant
verses in which he always made delicate and piquant allusions to the
character of the persons, to the personages of antiquity or of fable
which were represented, and to the passions which animated the court.
The king represented Roger; all the crown diamonds glittered on his coat
and on the horse he rode. The queens and three hundred ladies, under
triumphal arches, watched this entrance.
[Illustration: MADEMOISELLE DE LA VALLIÈRE
(1644-1710)]
The king with all eyes fastened upon him distinguished only those of La
Vallière. The fête was for her alone; she enjoyed it hidden in the crowd.
The cavalcade was followed by a gilded car, 18 feet high, 15 feet wide,
and 24 feet long, representing the chariot of the sun. The four ages, of
gold, silver, bronze, and iron, the signs of the zodiac, the seasons, the
hours, followed this car on foot. Everything was in character. Shepherds
carried pieces of the barrier which were adjusted to the sound of
trumpets, followed at intervals by bagpipes and violins. Certain persons
who followed Apollo’s car came first to the queens to recite verses
appropriate to the place and time, to the king and the ladies. When the
races were finished and night was come, four thousand great torches lit
up the space wherein fêtes were given. Tables were served by two hundred
persons, representing the seasons, fauns, sylvan creatures, dryads,
together with shepherds, vintagers, harvesters. Pan and Diana advanced
on a moving mountain from which they descended to place on tables the
most delicious products of field and forest. Behind these tables in the
half circle, a theatre filled with performers arose. The arcades which
surrounded the tables and theatre were ornamented with five hundred green
and silver chandeliers, holding candles; a gilded balustrade shut in
this vast enclosure. These fêtes, so far superior to those invented in
romances, lasted for seven days. The king carried off the prize of the
games four times, and then let other cavaliers contest for the prizes
he had gained, which he abandoned to them. The comedy of the _Princesse
d’Élide_, although not one of Molière’s best, was one of the most
agreeable attractions of these entertainments, on account of an infinity
of fine allegories on the customs of the times and by the apposite
observations which form an agreeable feature of such entertainments, but
which lose their point for posterity.
The chief glory of these entertainments, which in France perfected good
taste, good form, and talent, came from the fact that they detracted
nothing from the continual labours of the monarch. Without these labours
he would have been able only to hold a court, he would not have known how
to reign; and if the magnificent amusements of this court had increased
the misery of the people, they would have been only odious; but the
same man who had given these fêtes had also given the people bread
in the famine of 1662. He caused grain to be brought, which the rich
bought at a low price, and which he gave to poor families at the gate
of the Louvre. He had returned three millions of taxes to the people;
no part of the interior administration had been neglected.[b] Yet it
cannot be overlooked that bad economics underlay most of these financial
measures,--as, indeed, of all Colbert’s work.[a]
The legate Chigi, sent by Pope Alexander VII, arrived at Versailles in
the midst of all these enjoyments to render satisfaction to the king
for the assault of the papal guards.[b] This attack had taken place on
August 20th, 1662, at Rome. It precipitated a quarrel very similar to
that which had taken place in London the preceding year. The liveried
servants of the duke de Créqui, the ambassador, had a fight with the
Corsican guard; one of them was killed, the duke was insulted and his
coach fired upon. Louis XIV demanded reparation. The court of Rome
attempted, according to the custom of the times, to gain time; the king
insisted, sent the papal nuncio to the frontier under escort, occupied
the county of Venaissin, sent troops into the duchies of Parma and Modena
in Italy, and finally threatened war. Alexander VII, seeing that these
menaces were serious, gave in (1664). His own brother, the legate Fabio
Chigi, brought in person the desired satisfaction. Louis XIV then gave
back Avignon and Venaissin.[e] This visit of the papal delegate revealed
to the court a new spectacle. The grand ceremonies were fêtes for the
public. The honours paid him made the satisfaction more brilliant. Seated
under a dais, he received the greetings of the superior courts, of the
municipal courts, and of the clergy. He entered Paris to the sound of
cannon, having the great Condé at his right and the son of that prince
at his left; and in this manner he came to humiliate himself, Rome, and
the pope, before a king who had not yet drawn a sword. After the audience
he dined with Louis XIV, and the chief thought of all was to treat him
magnificently and give him pleasure.
[Sidenote: [1669-1679 A.D.]]
All this gave to the court of Louis XIV an air of grandeur which affected
all the other courts of Europe. The king wanted this _éclat_, which
was attached to his person, to reflect on all that surrounded him. To
distinguish his principal courtiers he invented blue cassocks embroidered
with gold and silver. The permission to wear them was a great favour
to men influenced chiefly by vanity. They were sought after almost like
the collars of the order. We may mention here, since we are speaking of
details, that it was the fashion then to wear cassocks over a doublet
ornamented with ribbons, and over this cassock passed a shoulder band to
which the sword was attached. A kind of lace band was worn around the
neck and on the head a hat decorated with two rows of feathers. This
fashion, which lasted until 1684, became that of all Europe with the
exception of Spain and Poland. Almost everywhere people prided themselves
on imitating the court of Louis XIV.
Louis established order in his household, regulated ranks and factions,
and created new offices in connection with his person, such as that of
the grand-master of his wardrobe. He re-established the tables instituted
by Francis I, and augmented them. There were twelve for the officers
of the king’s household, which were served with as much niceness and
profusion as those of many sovereigns. He wanted all strangers to be
invited to them, and this attention lasted during all his reign. There
was another attention which was even more select and polite. When he had
the pavilions of Marly built in 1679, all the ladies found a complete
toilet-set in their apartments; nothing which belonged to commodious
luxury was forgotten. Whoever was on a journey could give repasts in his
apartments, and was served there with the same delicacy as the master.
These little things acquire value only when they are sustained by greater
ones. In everything which the king did might be seen splendour and
generosity. He made a present of 200,000 francs to the daughters of his
ministers on their marriage.
One can easily imagine the effect which this magnificence had in Europe.
The French were not the only ones who praised him: twelve panegyrics were
pronounced on Louis XIV in different towns of Italy--an homage rendered
neither from fear nor hope of favour, which the marquis Zampieri sent to
the king.
He continued to extend his patronage to letters and to the arts. Proofs
of this are the particular gratuities of about 4,000 livres to Racine,
the fortune of Despréaux, that of Quinault, and above all that of Lully
and of all the artists who consecrated their work to him. The king danced
in ballets until the year 1670. He was then thirty-two years old. The
tragedy of _Britannicus_ was played before him at St. Germain; he was
struck by these verses:
_Pour mérite premier, pour vertu singulière,_
_Il excelle à traîner un char dans la carrière,_
_A disputer des prix indignes de ses mains,_
_A se donner lui-même en spectacle aux Romains._
After that he never again danced in public: the poet had reformed the
monarch. His union with La Vallière still continued in spite of his
frequent infidelities to her. These infidelities cost him little trouble.
He never found women who resisted him, and he always came back to the
one who, by the sweetness and goodness of her character, by her sincere
affection, and even by the chains of habit, had subjugated him without
the aid of art. But beginning with the year 1669, La Vallière perceived
that Madame de Montespan was gaining the ascendency; she fought against
it with her usual sweetness; she supported for a long time, and almost
without complaining, the pain of being the witness of her rival’s
triumph; she still thought herself happy in being even thought of by the
king, whom she continued to love, and in seeing him without being loved
by him.
Finally in 1675 she embraced the resource of tender souls, which need
deep and intense sentiments to subjugate them. She thought that God
alone could succeed her lover in her heart. Her conversion became just
as celebrated as her affection. She became a Carmelite at Paris and
persevered in her resolve. To wear haircloth, to walk with bare feet, to
fast rigorously, to sing at night in chorus in an unknown tongue--all
this did not repulse the delicacy of a woman accustomed to so much glory,
luxury, and pleasure. She lived this austere life from 1675 to 1710,
under the simple name of Louise de la Miséricorde.
It is known that when Sister Louise de la Miséricorde was told of the
death of the duke de Vermandois, whom she had borne to the king, she
said: “I ought to weep for his birth more than for his death.” One
daughter was left to her, who resembled the king the most of all his
children. She married the prince Armand de Conti, nephew of the Great
Condé.
_Madame de Montespan_
[Sidenote: [1670-1675 A.D.]]
In the meantime the marquise de Montespan was enjoying the king’s favour
with much _éclat_ and authority. Athénaïs de Mortemar, wife of the
marquis de Montespan, her elder sister the marquise de Thiange, and her
younger sister, for whom she obtained the abbey of Fontevrault, were
the most beautiful women of their day, and all three joined to this
distinction singular attractions of mind. The duke de Vivonne, their
brother, and marshal of France, was also one of the men at court who had
the most good taste and was best read. It was to him that the king said
one day: “But what is the good of reading?” The duke de Vivonne, who
was stout and red faced, answered: “Reading does for the mind what your
partridges do to my cheeks.”
These four persons were universally popular by a singular style of
conversation mingled with pleasantry, naïveté, and wit, which was known
as _l’esprit de Mortemar_. They all wrote with an ease and grace peculiar
to them.
[Illustration: MADAME DE MONTESPAN
(1641-1707)]
Madame de Montespan’s triumph burst forth during a journey which the
king made to Flanders in 1670. The ruin of the Dutch was prepared
on this journey in the midst of entertainments. It was a continual
fête, accompanied with great pomp. The king, who made all his war
expeditions on horseback, made this one for the first time in a closed
carriage. Postchaises had not yet been invented. The queen, Madame,
her sister-in-law, and the marquise de Montespan were in this superb
equipage, followed by many others, and when Madame de Montespan was alone
she had four bodyguards at the doors of her carriage. The dauphin came
next with his court. Mademoiselle with hers; it was before the fatal
event of her marriage; she took part in all these triumphs in peace and
saw with complaisance her lover, the king’s favourite, at the head of his
company of guards. The most beautiful crown furniture was carried to the
towns where they slept. In every city they found a masked or dress ball,
or fireworks. All his military retinue accompanied the king and all his
household retinue followed or preceded him. The tables were kept as at
St. Germain. In this pomp the court visited all the conquered cities. The
principal ladies of Brussels, of Ghent came to see this magnificence. The
king invited them to his table. He made them very handsome presents. All
the officers of the garrison troops received gratuities. His liberality
cost the king several times fifteen hundred gold louis a day.
All the honour, all the homage was for Madame de Montespan, except
what duty gave to the queen. Nevertheless this lady did not share the
secrets of state. The king knew how to distinguish affairs of state from
pleasure. The unfortunate experience of a maid of honour to the queen in
1673 gave rise to a new court order. The danger attached to the position
of a young girl in a gallant and voluptuous court caused twelve ladies
of the palace to be substituted for the twelve maids of honour, who
had graced the court and the queen’s presence. After that the queens’
households were composed in that manner. This arrangement made the court
larger and more magnificent, by establishing in it the husbands and
families of these ladies, which increased the society and spread greater
opulence.
_Poisoning: The Brinvilliers Case_
[Sidenote: [1670-1685 A.D.]]
About 1670 the crime of poisoning began to be prevalent in France. This
revenge of cowards had not been employed during the horrors of the civil
war, but, by a singular fatality, had infected France in the time of
glory and of the pleasures which softened manners, even as it found its
way into ancient Rome in the fairest days of the republic.
Two Italians, one of whom bore the name of Exili, worked for a long time
with a German apothecary called Glaser, in quest of the philosopher’s
stone. In this enterprise the two Italians lost the little they had and
endeavoured, by crime, to repair the harm done by their folly; they
secretly sold poisons. Confession, the greatest curb to human wickedness
but which is abused in the idea that one may perform the crimes one is
sure of expiating, was the means of informing the grand penitentiary
of Paris that certain persons had died of poison; he apprised the
government. The two Italians were suspected, and put in the Bastille; one
of the two died there; Exili remained there without being convicted; and
from the depths of his prison he spread through Paris those dark secrets
which cost the lives of the civil lieutenant D’Aubrai and his family, and
which finally led to the establishment of the Chamber of Poisons, called
the _Chambre Ardente_.
Love was the prime source of these horrible tragedies. The marquis of
Brinvilliers, son-in-law of the civil lieutenant D’Aubrai, had in his
house Sainte-Croix, the captain of his regiment, a man with too handsome
a face: his wife warned him of the consequences; the husband persisted
in letting the young man remain in the house with his wife, a young,
beautiful, and susceptible woman. What might have been expected happened:
they fell in love with each other. The civil lieutenant, father of the
marquise, was harsh and imprudent enough to solicit a _lettre de cachet_
and get the captain, who needed only to be returned to his regiment,
sent to the Bastille. Sainte-Croix was unfortunately put in a room with
Exili: this Italian taught him how to revenge himself; the results make
one shudder. The marquise did not attempt the life of her husband, who
had had some indulgence for a love of which he was himself the cause,
but the fury of her vengeance induced her to poison her father, her two
brothers, and her sister. Amidst so many crimes she was religious; she
often went to confession, and when she was arrested at Liège a general
confession was even found written in her handwriting, which served not as
a proof against her but as presumptive evidence. It is not true that she
tried her poisons in the hospitals as the people said, and as written in
the _Causes célèbres_, the work of a briefless barrister (François Gabot
de Pitaval) and made for the people; but it is true that she as well as
Sainte-Croix had secret connections with persons afterwards accused of
the same crimes. She was burned in 1676 after having had her head cut
off. But from 1670, when Exili had begun to make poisons, down to 1680
this crime infected Paris. It cannot be concealed that Penautier, the
receiver-general of the clergy and a friend of this woman, was accused
some time afterwards of having put his secrets in practice and that it
cost him half his wealth to suppress the indictment.
The Bavarian princess, wife of Monseigneur,[123] at first added
brilliancy and vivacity to this court. The marquise de Montespan still
attracted the principal attention but finally she ceased to please, and
the violent transports of her grief did not bring back a heart that was
forsaking her. However, she still kept her place at court, through her
high position, being superintendent of the queen’s household, and with
the king through habit and through her authority. The youth and beauty
of Mademoiselle de Fontanges, a son she had borne to the king in 1680,
the title of duchess she had received, kept Madame de Maintenon away from
the first place, to which she did not then dare to aspire but which she
afterwards obtained. The duchess de Fontanges, however, and her son died
in 1681.
The marquise de Montespan, although she no longer had an open rival, none
the less did not possess the heart tired of her and of her complaints.
When men are no longer in their youth they almost all have need of the
society of an agreeable woman. Above all the weight of affairs makes
this consolation necessary. The new favourite, Madame de Maintenon, who
felt the secret power she was gaining every day, bore herself with that
art so natural to women and which is never displeasing to men. She wrote
one day to Madame de Frontenac, her cousin, in whom she placed an entire
confidence: “I always send him away dissatisfied but never discouraged.”
During this time, when her favour was increasing and Madame de Montespan
was nearing her fall, these two rivals saw each other every day, now with
a secret bitterness, now with a passing confidence which the necessity
of speaking to each other and the weariness of constraint sometimes put
into their interviews. They agreed to write, each from her point of
view, memoirs of all that happened at court. The work never went very
far. Madame de Montespan took pleasure in reading selections from these
memoirs to her friends, in the last years of her life. The pious devotion
which was joined to all these secret intrigues further strengthened the
favour of Madame de Maintenon and weakened that of Madame de Montespan.
The king reproached himself for his attachment to a married woman and
felt this scruple still more since he had begun to feel no more love
for her. This embarrassing situation continued until 1685, a year made
memorable by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Very different scenes
were to be seen at that time--on one side the despair and flight of a
part of the nation, on the other new fêtes at Versailles; Trianon and
Marly built; nature in all these places forced with delights, and gardens
in which every art was exhausted. The marriage of the grandson of the
Great Condé with Mademoiselle de Nantes, daughter of the king and Madame
de Montespan, was the last triumph of this mistress who began to retire
from court.
_The Retirement of Montespan_
[Sidenote: [1685-1707 A.D.]]
The king afterwards gave in marriage two other children he had had by
her: Mademoiselle de Blois to the duke de Chartres, and the duke du Maine
to Louise Benédicte de Bourbon, granddaughter of the Great Condé and
sister of Monsieur le Duc,[124] a princess celebrated for her wit and
liking for the arts.
Before the celebration of the marriage of Monsieur le Duc with
Mademoiselle de Nantes, the marquis de Seignelay in honour of that event
gave the king a fête worthy of that monarch in the gardens of Sceaux,
which had been planted by Le Nôtre with as much taste as those of
Versailles. The idyll of Peace composed by Racine was performed on that
occasion. At Versailles there was a new tournament and after the marriage
the king displayed a singular magnificence, for which Cardinal Mazarin
had given the first idea in 1656.
Four booths were put up in the salon at Marly, filled with the richest
and most select products of the industry of Parisian workmen. These four
booths were at the same time so many splendid decorations representing
the four seasons of the year. Madame de Montespan presided over one with
Monseigneur. Her rival, Madame de Maintenon, was in another with the duke
du Maine. The newly married couple each had charge of one: Monsieur le
Duc with Madame de Thiange; and Madame la Duchesse, whom propriety did
not permit to have one with a man on account of her extreme youth, was
with the duchess de Chevreuse. The so-called gentlemen and ladies _du
voyage_ drew lots for the jewels with which the booths were decorated.
The king then made presents to the whole court in a manner worthy of a
king. Cardinal Mazarin’s lottery was less ingenious and less brilliant.
These lotteries had been formerly put into fashion by the Roman emperors,
but not one of them ever relieved its magnificence with so much gallantry.
After the marriage of her daughter Madame de Montespan did not again
appear at court. She lived a very dignified life at Paris. She had a
large income, but it was a life annuity, and the king always paid her
a pension of 1,000 gold louis a month. She went every year to take the
waters at Bourbon, and there married off the girls of the neighbourhood,
whom she endowed. She was no longer at the age when the imagination,
affected by lively impressions, sends one to the Carmelites. She died at
Bourbon in 1707.
One year after the marriage of Mademoiselle de Nantes with Monsieur le
Duc, the prince of Condé died at Fontainebleau, at the age of sixty-six,
of an illness which was hastened by his desire to go to see Madame la
Duchesse, who had smallpox.
_Madame de Maintenon_
Meanwhile, after the marriage of Madame la Duchesse, after the total
eclipse of the mother, the victorious Madame de Maintenon achieved such
an influence and inspired Louis XIV with so much tenderness and such
scruples, that the king, by the advice of Père Lachaise, married her
secretly in the month of January, 1686,[125] in the small chapel in the
apartments occupied afterwards by the duke of Burgundy. There was no
contract, no stipulation. The archbishop of Paris, Harlay de Chanvalon,
pronounced the benediction, the confessor assisting. Montchevreuil and
Bontemps, first valet de chambre, were the witnesses. Louis XIV was
at the time in his forty-eighth year and the woman he espoused in her
fifty-second. This sovereign, crowned with glory, desired to combine
with the fatigues of governing the innocent joys of private life; this
marriage bound him to nothing incompatible with his rank; it was always
a problem to the court. Since Madame de Maintenon was really married, it
respected her as the king’s choice, without treating her as queen.
[Illustration: MADAME DE MAINTENON
(1635-1719)]
She was of an old family, granddaughter of Théodore Agrippa d’Aubigné,
gentleman of the chamber to Henry IV. His father, Constant d’Aubigné,
wishing to establish himself in business in the Carolinas, applied to
the English government, and was thrown into the prison of the château
Trompette, from which he escaped with the assistance of the daughter of
the governor of the prison, a gentleman from Bordeaux named Cadillac.
Constant d’Aubigné married his benefactress in 1627 and took her with
him to the Carolinas. Returning with her to France after several years,
both were imprisoned at Niort in Poitou, by order of the court. In this
prison was born, in 1635, Françoise d’Aubigné, destined to know all the
greatest hardships of life as well as the highest favours of fortune.
Taken at the age of three to America (Martinique), brought back an
orphan of twelve years, brought up with the greatest severity by Madame
de Neuillant, mother of the duchess de Navailles her relative, she was
only too glad to marry in 1651 Paul Scarron, who lived near her in the
rue d’Enfer. Scarron came of an old family of parliament, distinguished
by its important matrimonial alliances; but his profession of burlesque
poet lowered him while making him popular. It was nevertheless a stroke
of fortune for Mademoiselle d’Aubigné to marry this man, deformed in
mind and body, and with very modest means. She abjured Calvinism, her
own religion as well as that of her ancestors, before this marriage.
Her beauty and wit soon made her distinguished. She was eagerly sought
after by the best society of Paris, and this time of her youth was no
doubt the happiest period of her life. After the death of her husband,
in 1660, she was for a long time unable to obtain from the king a modest
pension of 1,500 livres which Scarron had enjoyed. Finally, after several
years, the king granted her one of two thousand, saying, “Madame, I
have made you wait a long time, but you have so many friends that my
only distinction could be in not being one of them.” Meanwhile it is
proved, by the letters of Madame de Maintenon, that she owed to Madame
de Montespan the slight assistance she received to relieve her poverty.
It was remembered several years later, when it became necessary to
bring up secretly the duke du Maine, son of the king by the marquise de
Montespan, born in 1672. The duke du Maine was born with a deformed foot.
The chief physician, D’Aquin, who was in the secret, decided that the
child should be taken to the baths at Barèges. It was necessary to find a
confidential person to be intrusted with this charge. The king suggested
Madame Scarron. Louvois went secretly to Paris to propose this journey to
her. From that time on she was in charge of the education of the duke du
Maine--chosen for this duty by the king and not by Madame de Montespan,
as has erroneously been said.
She wrote directly to the king; her letters pleased him greatly. This
was the origin of her good fortune--her shrewdness did the rest. The
king, who at first did not like her, passed from aversion to confidence
and from confidence to love. The letters which we have of hers are of
much greater importance than they would seem: they show that mixture of
religion and gallantry, of dignity and weakness, which are often found in
the human heart, and which certainly were in that of Louis XIV. Madame
de Maintenon seemed to be filled at the same time with an ambition and
a devoutness which never appeared to conflict. Her confessor, Gobelin,
approved equally of both: he was spiritual guide as well as courtier; his
penitent, having become ungrateful towards Madame de Montespan, always
dissembled this feeling. Her confessor encouraged her in her aspirations.
She called religion to the assistance of her waning charms to supplant
her benefactress, now become her rival.
This strange mixture of love and scruple on the part of the king, of
ambition and devoutness on the part of the new mistress, seemed to have
lasted from 1681 to 1686, the date of their marriage. Her elevation was
for her only a seclusion. Shut up in her apartments, which were on the
same floor as those of the king, she limited herself to the society
of two or three ladies, retiring like herself--she saw even them very
rarely. The king came to her apartments every day after supper, and
remained until midnight. There he worked with his ministers, while
Madame de Maintenon read, or occupied herself with needlework; she
never attempted to speak on affairs of state, seemed often to ignore
them, putting far from her any appearance of intrigue or plotting; much
more occupied in humouring him who governed than seeking to govern, in
managing her income, and expending it with the greatest cautiousness.
Louis XIV in marrying Madame de Maintenon gained only an agreeable and
submissive companion. The sole public distinction which testified to her
secret elevation was, that during mass she occupied one of those small
gilded stalls which were supposed to be only for the king and queen.
Beyond that, no display, no grandeur. The devoutness with which she had
inspired the king and which had led to her marriage, became gradually a
true and profound sentiment, which age and ennui served to strengthen.
She already posed at the court and before the king as a foundress by
gathering together at Noisy several young girls of the nobility; and the
king had already set apart the revenues of the abbey of St. Denis for
that budding community. St. Cyr was built at the foot of the park of
Versailles in 1686.
On the death of the king she retired for life to St. Cyr. What is
surprising, is that the king left her almost nothing. He simply
recommended her to the duke of Orleans. She asked for a pension of only
24,000 livres, which was scrupulously paid her, until her death on April
15th, 1719.[b]
Turning now from this survey of the court, let us examine the effect of
Louis XIV’s policy on the nation at large.
EFFECT OF LOUIS XIV’S POLICY ON THE NATION
[Sidenote: [1661-1715 A.D.]]
Louis XIV’s reign falls into two parts, easy to distinguish, the one
from the other; the first covers from 1661 to 1683, the second, and much
the longer, from 1683 to 1715. In the first period, Louis XIV found four
men of genius, who were also scrupulously honest men, to uphold and even
direct him in everything concerning the internal government, diplomacy,
warfare, and defence of the kingdom. In an equal degree Colbert, Lionne,
Turenne, and Vauban exercised a salutary and fruitful influence over
the king’s mind, never divorcing the welfare of the kingdom from that
of the king, and seeking before all else the greatness or the security
of the empire by adopting the best of the measures which had proved so
successful under Henry IV, Richelieu, and Mazarin. The profound reverence
which Colbert, more especially, had for the memory of Richelieu, whom he
wished the king to take as his model, provoked Louis’ jests. “When any
important matter was under discussion,” says a contemporary chronicle,
“the late king would often exclaim, ‘Colbert there will tell us: Sire,
the great Cardinal Richelieu.’ Which, however, did not prevent Colbert
from pursuing his object, and moulding the king in Richelieu’s likeness.”
In the second period, Louis, prematurely aged, disillusioned, and ill,
reduced to a stern performance of his duties as a man and a Christian
by the froward influence of an obstinate and ambitious woman, drew
inspiration from none but narrow ideals, applying the most fatal maxims
to home government and foreign policy. He yielded to the advice of
persons whom he had for long encouraged to flatter his prejudices, and
who urged him along a path of bloody repressions. Louvois, Madame de
Maintenon, Chamillard, and Villeroi were the real wielders of authority.
They sacrificed the well-being of the kingdom to their own interest,
which they sought to confound with the interests of the crown. They
prepared the way for the ruin of the state by the most disastrous home
measures, while they ruined the prestige of France abroad by changing the
character of her policy.[m]
The trouble was not only in the royal household; it also threatened to be
in the state; for Louis, violating all laws civil and religious, placed
the legitimated princes side by side with the princes of the blood.
He forced the court to pay equal respect to both; and public morality
received a blow from which it was slow to recover. The lessons in scandal
which came from the throne were not lost, and the corruption, which was
fermenting in spite of the apparent austerity of the last years, was to
break out under the new reign without restraint and without shame. Those
dukes of Orleans and Vendôme, given up to filthy debauches, that duke
d’Antin surprised in a flagrant act of theft, and so many others who
contrived at play to correct the chances of fortune; those princesses
of the blood who at Marly within two steps of the king and Madame de
Maintenon, send for such strange pastimes[126]--that court in fine which,
according to Saint-Simon,[i] “sweated hypocrisy,” all shows, under a
king who plays the devotee, when he is no longer able to do otherwise,
that human morality, conscience, and dignity can never be violated with
impunity. Already, even in the very heart of Versailles, a premonitory
cry is heard. In face of these gilded lives La Bruyère writes: “The great
have no soul; I would be of the people.” It was at Versailles that the
French nobility ruined themselves. There official ennui led to secret
debauches; the habit of receiving everything from the monarch led to the
belief that all was due not to services but to servility.
One irrefutable witness of the wretchedness of this period has been
left to us--the memorials which the king demanded of the intendants on
the condition of their provinces in order that his grandson the duke of
Burgundy might by studying them become acquainted with the affairs of
the administration. At every page these distressing words recur, “War,
mortality, the continual quartering and passage of the soldiers, the
militia, the great prerogatives, the withdrawal of the Huguenots have
ruined this country.” Bridges, roads were in a deplorable state and
commerce was annihilated. The frontier provinces were further crushed by
requisitions and the pillage of the soldiers who, receiving neither pay
nor food, helped themselves. In the generality of Rouen, out of 700,000
inhabitants 650,000 had a bundle of straw for their beds. In certain
provinces the peasant was returning to a state of savagery: living for
the most part on herbs and roots like the beasts; and, wild as they were,
he fled if one approached. “There is no nation more savage than these
people,” the intendant of Bourges says of those under his administration;
“sometimes troops of them are to be seen in the country, seated in a
circle in the middle of a field and always far from the roads; if one
approach the band immediately disperses.”[c]
We have seen Louis XIV at home; let us now turn to his relations with
other countries.[a]
[Illustration]
FOOTNOTES
[111] Table of the direct ancestors of Louis XIV for four generations,
showing birthplace of each ancestor. It will be noted that Ferdinand I
and Anna of Hungary appear twice in the fourth generation column. The
actual number of persons, therefore, is twenty-eight instead of thirty.[a]
THIRD GENERATION FOURTH GENERATION
Anthony +-Charles, d. of Vendôme France
SECOND de Bourbon|
GENERATION +----------+
| France |
Henry IV| +-Françoise d’Alençon France
+--------+
FIRST | France | Jeanne +-Henry II, K. of Navarre France
GENERATION| | d’Albret |
| +----------+
Louis | France |
XIII | +-Marguerite d’Angoulême France
+-------+
|France | +-Cosmo I, G. D. of Tuscany Italy
| | Francesco |
| | I, Grand D.|
| | of Tuscany |
| | +----------+
| | Marie | Italy |
| |d’Medici| +-Leonora of Toledo Spain
| +--------+
| Italy | Joanna +-Emp. Ferdinand I Spain
| | Arch., D.|
| +----------+
| Austria |
Louis XIV| +-Anna of Hungary Hungary
France |
1688-1715| +-Charles V Spanish Netherlands
| Philip II |
| +----------+
| Philip | Spain |
| III | +-Isabella Portugal
| +--------+
| | Spain | Anne of +-Maximilian II Austria
| | | Austria |
| | +----------+
|Anne of| Austria |
|Austria| +-Maria (d. Emp. Ch. VI) Spain
+-------+
Spain | Charles, +-_Emp. Ferdinand I_ _Spain_
| D. Styria |
| +----------+
| | Austria |
|Margaret| +-_Anna of Hungary_ _Hungary_
+--------+
Austria | Maria of +-Albrecht V Bavaria
| Bavaria |
+----------+
Bavaria |
+-Anne (d. Emp. Ferdinand I) Austria
[112] There were in Louis XIV’s day three councils: (1) The supreme
council, to which the king summoned the secretaries of state and
sometimes the princes of the blood. It had the general direction of the
governmental policy and important affairs. It judged appeals from the
state council. (2) The state council, placed beneath the ministry but
above the higher courts. It was the great administrative body of the
realm, meeting four times a week, the chancellor presiding. On one day it
read and discussed the reports of the provincial governors; on another
it discussed financial questions; on another it listened to complaints
on taxation; on another it adjudged differences between the courts. The
state councillors were eighteen in number. (3) The grand council, which
occupied itself with cases covering the bishoprics and the benefices at
the king’s disposal. It judged the edicts of the sovereign courts and
the conflicts between the parliament and the lower courts. Its decisions
were executive throughout the whole kingdom, while the sentences of each
parliament applied only to its own territory.
[113] [Voltaire is wrong here, says Martin:[d] “Fouquet had spent about
nine millions” (almost eighteen nowadays and perhaps forty-five in
relative value).]
[114] [Louis XIV had little love for Paris and created Versailles, or
rather greatly enlarged the old château of Louis XIII, by making immense
additions, and by constructing the fine façade on the park side which,
with its extended wings, made it the most superb and vast abode in the
world.[e]]
[115] [The above mentioned _régime des classes_.]
[116] [If the words were not uttered the thought was certainly present.
Louis XIV is known to have written on one occasion, “The nation does not
constitute a body in France; it resides entirely in the person of the
king.”]
[117] [In 1680 the Paris _corps de ville_ solemnly conferred on the king
the title of Louis the Great, which, hitherto used sometimes on medals,
now became _de rigueur_ in official language.[d]]
[118] In 1669 the sister house of Port-Royal de Paris was placed under
Jesuit management. It was to this house that Clement XI ordered the
transference of the property of Port-Royal des Champs, the year before
the buildings were destroyed. The aged sisters were dispersed.
[119] In 1694 a printer and a publisher were hanged for libel, by
sentence of De la Reynie. Several persons were interrogated or died in
the Bastille for the same reason. The author of the pamphlet against the
archbishop of Rheims was imprisoned in an iron cage at Mont St. Michel.
[120] These were letters written by order of the king, countersigned
by a secretary of state, and sealed with the king’s seal, by virtue of
which the police arrested a citizen, and imprisoned him without trial, as
long as it pleased the government, without his being seen or allowed to
receive letters from anyone.
[121] [Anne of Austria died of cancer January 20th, 1666.]
[122] [Madame’s husband, Philip duke of Orleans, who had assumed that
title on the death of Gaston in 1660, was a man of licentious habits,
and although he distinguished himself in war, as we shall see, his
effeminacy was of a most marked type. There is no doubt that Monsieur
was most indifferent to his wife, and many historians, including
Michelet,[l] believe that Louis XIV was the father of her children. Of
these, two daughters arrived at maturity--Marie Louise, who married
Charles II of Spain, and Anne Marie, who married Victor Amadeus of Savoy,
afterwards king of Sardinia. Madame died 1670, under circumstances
which will be related in the next chapter, and which were open to the
suspicion of poison. The following year Monsieur married the princess
palatine--Charlotte Elizabeth. She was the mother of the duke of Orleans,
regent of the realm, and died in 1722.]
[123] [By this title was known the “grand dauphin” Louis, only child of
Louis XIV and his queen, born in 1661. The dauphin married in 1680 the
princess Marie Anne Christine Victoire of Bavaria.]
[124] [Louis de Bourbon-Condé, who was the father of Louis XV’s prime
minister.]
[125] [The queen Maria Theresa had died July 30th, 1683, quite suddenly.
She held so little place at court that the event was scarcely noticed.[e]]
[126] Monseigneur played late in the salon. On withdrawing to his own
apartments he went up to the princesses (the duchesses de Chartres and de
Bourbon) and found them smoking with pipes which they had sent for from
the Swiss guardhouse. Monseigneur made them stop this diversion, but the
smoke betrayed them. Next morning the king administered a rough rebuke.[i]
The duchess de la Ferté assembled her purveyors at her house and played a
kind of lansquenet with them. She whispered in my ear, “I cheat them but
they rob me.” _Mémoires_ of Madame de Staal.[o]
[Illustration]
CHAPTER XX. LOUIS XIV, SPAIN, AND HOLLAND
I doubt whether any human being ever enjoyed, in greater
perfection, the blessing of nerves toned to habitual energy,
and exempt from all morbid sensitiveness. Heat, cold, pain,
fatigue, and hunger seemed to have no power over him. Not only
his delicate courtiers but his hardy veterans admired the
stoicism of their invulnerable king; and his mental composure
was on a level with his bodily hardihood. No provocation could
excite him to unseemly anger, and no calamity could depress him
to unmanly dejection. If he was often the victim, he was never
the slave of appetite or passion. Though constantly exposed to
the allurements of the most exquisite flattery, and the most
fascinating caresses, he never yielded himself to the guidance
of any favourite, male or female; but adhered, with immutable
constancy and calmness, to the ministers whom he had either
trained or chosen.--STEPHEN.[n]
[Sidenote: [1661-1679 A.D.]]
The foreign situation in 1661 was most favourable. If it was necessary
to wind up the affairs of Mazarin, all that had to be done abroad was to
gather the fruits and enjoy the glory acquired. Europe was basking in
a peace so profound that not a cloud seemed to threaten it. The powers
were all occupied in reorganising their forces, some like England in
reconstructing their government. Louis XIV was one of the freest of
sovereigns; he was the most powerful, thanks to Mazarin; and he became
the wealthiest, thanks to Colbert.
He desired them to preserve peace and give no offence to Europe.
Nevertheless he had inherited from Mazarin a fixed plan, and certain
projects in harmony with the spirit of his government. His ambition was
to invalidate the renunciation of Maria Theresa, in such a manner as to
create a right for himself or his sons to the Spanish succession, or at
least to the Netherlands.[127]
He charged the archbishop of Embrun, his ambassador at Madrid, to demand
that the renunciation be revoked. He maintained that it was not _ipso
facto_, the infanta not having renounced her rights and the court of
Spain having itself thus decided; that in all respects it had failed to
obtain the necessary ratification; finally that the condition on which
it had been made, the payment of a dowry of 500,000 crowns, had not been
complied with. He offered, in case his plea was accepted, to ally himself
the more closely with Spain, and even abandon all claims to Portugal in
her favour; but Philip and his ministers eluded the question and refused
to give an opinion.
[Sidenote: [1661-1662 A.D.]]
During the negotiations a serious affair occurred in London, where the
baron de Vatteville, the Spanish ambassador, claimed precedence over
the count d’Estrades, the ambassador of France. On October 8th, 1661,
the Swedish envoy, the count de Brahé, was to be presented to the king
of England. As the procession was about to start, D’Estrades tried to
make his coach pass first, and a troop of armed men under orders from
Vatteville stopped it. The Londoners took the part of the Spaniards;
there was a fight--some were killed and wounded. In the end the French
were obliged to retire.[b]
At this news Louis XIV ordered the Spanish ambassador to leave France,
and the French ambassador to Spain to demand the punishment of Vatteville
and a reparation which should make such affairs henceforth impossible.[c]
Philip IV granted this without much difficulty. Vatteville was recalled;
and March 22nd, 1662, the marquis de Fuentes declared at the Louvre
before the assembled court that the Spanish envoys would claim no
precedence over those of France, except at the court of Vienna where they
had long been accustomed to occupy the first place on account of the
close ties which united the two branches of the house of Austria.
Meanwhile Spain still refused to recognise the rights of the infanta, and
Louis XIV continued to uphold the Portuguese;[128] he even assisted in
bringing about the marriage of Charles of England to a princess of the
house of Braganza, who received Tangier, Bombay, and a considerable sum
as dowry. Charles II sought, as did Cromwell, to develop English commerce
and the navy, but he was needy, extravagant, and he feared the parsimony
of parliament. Louis XIV advanced him money in secret and offered to buy
back Dunkirk and Mardyck.[129] The bargain was concluded November 27th,
1662, and France recovered the two towns which Mazarin had turned over to
Cromwell with regret.
By this acquisition Louis XIV took a first step towards the Netherlands,
the object of his whole ambition. He awaited the moment when the
question of Philip IV’s successor should be opened to uphold the rights
of the infanta in the Belgian provinces, even though the determination
of these rights was still a matter of debate. He wavered between the
desire to reunite the major part of the Spanish Netherlands to France,
giving the rest to Holland, or to occupy only a few places and erect the
ten Belgian provinces into a republic or a neutral state. The latter
plan was the less brilliant, but the easiest to carry out; and a state
thus constituted would oppose a barrier to foreign invasion. Louis XIV
negotiated in secret to obtain the eventual concurrence of Holland in
his plans, but in spite of the efforts of the grand pensionary, the
celebrated Jan de Witt, he could not obtain this. The Dutch understood
too well that a Belgian republic would be dependent on Louis and would
not oppose his ambitions.[b] Besides this the Dutch had a cause for
complaint in the tax of 50 sous a ton, placed by Fouquet in 1659, upon
foreign ships trading in French ports. After long debates this tax was
reduced by half for Dutch ships and a defensive and commercial treaty was
signed in 1662 in which France and Holland agreed to protect each other’s
rights on land and sea.[a]
The duchies of Lorraine and Bar had been returned to Duke Charles IV in
1661 only on condition that he would not rebuild the ramparts of the
towns, that he would only maintain one fortress, Marsal, and that French
troops should have the right of passing through his territory. These
conditions were not fulfilled. Louis lost patience and sent an army corps
to Marsal. The duke bent before the necessity, and gave up Marsal on
condition that he might hold the rest of his estates according to the
terms of the treaty of 1661.[c]
Louis, admirably counselled by Lionne, took care in preparing the
execution of his designs against the Netherlands not to arouse the
defiance of Europe. He managed only ostensibly to sustain the Portuguese;
simply authorising them to take into their service Marshal de Schomberg
and a body of French volunteers which helped them defend their
liberties.[130]
[Sidenote: [1663-1665 A.D.]]
While Louis was feeling his strength he eagerly seized any opportunity
for military enterprise which would give a high idea of himself and
serve his policy.[b] In spite of his rough treatment of the head of the
church in 1662-1664, he displayed zeal for the interests of Christianity
against its great enemy the Turks, who continued to press the siege of
Crete[131] and extend their conquests in Hungary and to desolate by
piracy the entire coast of the Mediterranean. Divers plans were proposed
in the king’s council for attacking the Ottoman power on the Barbary
coasts and repressing the pirates. A squadron commanded by the duke de
Beaufort, the former hero of the Fronde, landed 5,000 picked soldiers at
Jijelli, a small Algerian port between Bougie and Bona. Jijelli was taken
without difficulty (July 22nd, 1664), but discord arose between Beaufort
and his officers. They were soon hard pressed by the Turks of Algiers,
reinforced by numerous Arab and Kabyle bands, while Beaufort cruised in
front of Tunis instead of making a diversion against Algiers, as the
king had ordered. The military resources of the Algerians and especially
their artillery were greater than the French had imagined; discord broke
out, and after having repelled a few attacks the French were compelled to
re-embark in such haste that they left their cannon behind.
But the successes of Beaufort’s squadron, which the famous Chevalier
Paul commanded, soon wiped out the stigma of this reverse; two Algerian
flotillas were annihilated during the course of the year 1665.[c]
A touching example of self-sacrifice was an incident of this war. The dey
of Algiers had among his captives an officer from St. Malo, named Porcon
de la Barbinais; he sent him to offer to the king proposals of peace,
making him promise to return in case his mission failed. The lives of 600
Christians were dependent upon his keeping his word. The propositions
were not accepted. Porcon knew it. He went to St. Malo, regulated his
affairs, then returned to Algiers, certain of the fate which awaited him.
The dey had him decapitated. This man was the equal of Regulus, yet he is
little known to fame.[d]
Reasons and pretexts for war with the porte were not long wanting. In
1664 some acts of bad faith on the part of the viziers were taken as an
excuse for sending 6,000 men under the orders of Coligny-Saligny into
Hungary, which the Turks were invading. This was a means of dissipating
the religious clouds which the threats against the pope had raised at
Rome and elsewhere. Louis XIV had still another reason. He had undertaken
in obtaining a [three years’] prorogation of the league of the Rhine
(1663) to furnish a contingent to his imperial allies in case the empire
should be threatened. He attached the highest importance to maintaining
a league whose principal object would be to close the road to the
Netherlands to Austrian troops if ever war should break out between
France and Austria, and he believed it all the more easy to play the rôle
of protector in Germany since the emperor’s power there had sensibly
declined since the Treaty of Westphalia.
Coligny-Saligny joined the Austro-German army commanded by Montecuculi;
the French took a considerable part in the combat at Körmend, and
especially in the battle of St. Gotthard (August 1st, 1664), where they
paid dear for the principal honour of the victory. But the emperor and
Austria, grateful though they were, could not pardon the French for
having claimed to have saved the empire. Leopold hastened to treat with
the Turks, and was as eager to deliver himself from his auxiliaries as he
was from his enemies.[b]
Indeed the emperor was alarmed, and not without reason, to encounter the
hand of Louis everywhere. A defensive alliance was concluded in August,
1663, between France and Denmark, as the result of a commercial treaty,
advantageous to the French marine. A secret negotiation of the very
highest importance was, about the same time, entered upon with Poland.
Since 1661 that republic had taken Louis XIV as arbiter in its quarrels
with Moscovy. In 1663, King John Casimir Vasa, discouraged by Poland’s
constant woes, determined to lay down the crown: his wife, a princess of
that branch of the Gonzagas which had long been established in France,
entered into communication with Louis XIV to bring about the election of
the duke d’Enghien, son of the Great Condé, to the Polish throne. With
regret Louis saw Poland plunging to her own ruin, and decided to arrest
the disaster by doing again that in which Henry III had so disgracefully
failed--infusing French spirit into the land of the Jagellons. Colbert
pushed the king to the same policy.[c]
THE WAR OF THE QUEEN’S RIGHTS (1667-1668 A.D.)
Meanwhile Louis XIV had not succeeded in having Maria Theresa’s act
of renunciation revoked, and he now thought of compelling Madrid to
recognise the right of devolution.
Such was the name given in Brabant and some of the other Belgian
provinces to the law, by virtue of which, when there were children of
two different marriages, those of the first inherited in preference to
those of the second. Louis XIV claimed Brabant and its annexes, in the
name of Maria Theresa. Philip IV rejected this new claim, which was
most contestable, since if the rule of devolution really existed in
the above-mentioned provinces, it had to be proven that it applied to
the succession of princes as well as to those of private individuals.
Moreover all the acts emanating from Spanish sovereigns since Charles V
were manifestly contradictory of this. Nevertheless both parties remained
on pacific terms until the death of Philip IV and Anne of Austria. The
king of Spain expired after a lingering illness September 17th, 1665.
The queen-mother, his sister, died of a cancer January 20th, 1666, after
constant efforts to maintain peace between the two crowns.
Philip IV directed in his will that the 500,000 crowns constituting Maria
Theresa’s dowry should be paid, but he regulated the succession in such
a manner as to confirm the renunciation of that princess and to exclude
all pretensions of the house of France to any portion whatsoever of his
estates. He left the throne of Spain to a sickly infant scarcely able to
walk, and who nobody believed would live. Foreseeing the contingency by
which the death of this child, the young Charles II, would extinguish the
male line, he stipulated that the throne should pass in that event to his
second daughter Margaret and her children. Margaret was then fourteen
years of age; she was betrothed to the emperor Leopold, and did in fact
marry him the following year.
The reign of an infant under the regency of a foreigner, his mother,
Maria Anna of Austria, the exhausted condition of the Spanish realm on
account of the Portuguese war, offered a magnificent opportunity for
Louis XIV’s ambition, but he waited until 1667 before declaring his
project. Impatient as he was, a maritime war between England and Holland
retarded the execution of his plans.
Under Charles II, as under Cromwell, England had in Holland a rival in
commerce and the marine. Charles II, who was desirous of flattering
public sentiment and who had the same reason as the Protector to seek in
foreign war a diversion to calm restless spirits, entertained, moreover,
a profound antipathy for De Witt and other leaders of the republican
government at the Hague. He wished to re-establish the stadholdership to
the profit of the young William of Orange, his sister’s son.[132] In this
state of feeling it only required a hostile meeting between some Dutch
and English ships off the African coast to precipitate the two navies
into a fearful war.
The Dutch convinced themselves that they were the attacked party and
demanded assistance of Louis XIV in fulfilment of the guarantee he
had given them in 1662. At first Louis refused, alleging that it was
not proved that the English were the aggressors, and he offered his
mediation. His desire was to act cautiously with regard to England and
not drive her to an alliance which Spain was seeking. As to the Dutch, he
was beginning to regard them with distrust. The grand pensionary De Witt
joined to his fine qualities a shrewdness, a proud reserve, and a talent
for making advances without committing himself, which were little to the
taste of the French agents. D’Estrades, ambassador to the Hague in 1665,
considered an English alliance more desirable for France than one with
Holland.
[Sidenote: [1665-1667 A.D.]]
The offer of mediation was declined. Louis XIV tried at least to confine
his struggle to a naval war, for he did not wish to see the English
on the continent. Meanwhile the states-general were insisting on the
complete execution of the guarantee treaty. Louis ended by deciding
to declare war on England. He gave out that he wished to convert the
world to the religion which kept him to his word. But he informs us
himself that there were still other reasons; he wished to keep Holland
from carrying out her projects against the Netherlands, and prevent a
reconciliation with England that might some day be a serious danger to
France. He therefore upheld her, but he kept as much as possible to
the rôle of a looker-on, and let the English and Dutch fleets almost
annihilate each other in the four great combats of two campaigns. The
duke de Beaufort and the Brest squadron never left the Channel. The
French never fought the English except in the West Indies, where they
captured a portion of the island of St. Christopher.
[Illustration: HENRI DE LA TOUR D’AUVERGNE
(1611-1675)]
In the beginning of 1667 Louis XIV supported Sweden’s offer of mediation,
and Breda was chosen as the seat of a congress. Besides the war, England
was suffering from another scourge--the plague of 1666. Charles II was
satisfied with France’s promise of a personal subsidy and with the
restitution of St. Christopher without indemnity. The treaty was signed
July 31st. Louis XIV did not await this moment to enter Flanders. He
based his aggression on the formal refusal of all his demands by the
court of Madrid, declaring that, having exhausted all peaceful means of
obtaining justice, he was now going to take possession of what belonged
to Maria Theresa.[b]
The league of the Rhine assured Louis of at least the neutrality of
Germany; the emperor was not prepared for war; Europe, favourable or
intimidated, beheld with astonishment King Louis XIV take the field in
the month of May, 1667. He had collected an army of fifty thousand men
carefully armed and equipped under the direction of Turenne, whom Louvois
still obeyed with docility. This fine army was not unequal to the task of
vindicating the queen’s rights to the duchy of Brabant, the marquisate of
Antwerp, Limburg, Hainault, the county of Namur, and other territories.
“Heaven not having established a tribunal on earth from which the kings
of France may demand justice, the most Christian king can expect it only
of his arms,” said the manifesto sent to the court of Spain. Louis XIV
set out with Turenne. Marshal de Créqui was commissioned to keep a watch
on Germany.
The Spaniards were caught unprepared; Armentières, Charleroi, Douai,
and Tournay had but inadequate garrisons and succumbed almost without a
blow. While the army was occupied with the siege of Courtrai, Louis XIV
returned to meet the queen at Compiègne; the whole court followed him to
the camp. “I brought the queen to Flanders,” said Louis XIV, “to show her
to the people of that country, who indeed received her with all the joy
imaginable, showing that they were sorry there had not been more time
to prepare themselves to receive her more worthily.” It was at Courtrai
that the queen took up her residence. Marshal de Turenne had gone in
the direction of Dendermonde, but the Flemings had opened their sluices
and the country was inundated; he was obliged to fall back on Oudenarde;
the town was taken in two days. The king, still followed by the court,
laid siege to Lille. Vauban, already celebrated as an engineer, formed
his lines of circumvallation. Créqui’s army rejoined that of Turenne; an
effort on the part of the governor of the Netherlands to relieve the town
was anticipated; the Spanish troops sent for that purpose arrived too
late and were defeated as they retired; the citizens of Lille had forced
the garrison to capitulate; Louis XIV entered the place on the 27th of
August, ten days after the trenches were opened. On the 2nd of September
the king set out on the way back to St. Germain; Turenne also took the
town of Alost before going into winter quarters.
THE TRIPLE ALLIANCE
[Sidenote: [1667-1668 A.D.]]
The first campaign of Louis XIV had been merely a warlike game almost
without danger or bloodshed; it had nevertheless sufficed to alarm
Europe. Scarcely had peace been concluded at Breda before another
negotiation was secretly entered into between England, Holland, and
Sweden. It was in vain that King Charles II was personally inclined to an
alliance with France; his people had their eyes open to the dangers which
Europe incurred from the arms of Louis XIV. On the 23rd of January, 1668,
the celebrated Treaty of the Triple Alliance was signed at the Hague.
The three powers requested the king of France to grant the Netherlands
a truce till the month of May, in order to give time to treat with
Spain and obtain from her, as France demanded, the final cession of the
places conquered or of Franche-Comté in exchange. In reality the triple
alliance was resolved to protect helpless Spain against France; a secret
article pledged the three allies to take arms to restrain Louis XIV and
if possible to bring him back to the position fixed by the Treaty of
the Pyrenees. At the same moment Portugal made peace with Spain, which
recognised her independence.
The king refused to concede the prolonged armistice which had been
demanded of him: “I grant it till the 31st of March,” he had said, “as
I do not wish to miss the season for taking the field.” The marquis
of Castel Rodrigo laughed at this: “I am content,” he said, “with the
suspension of arms which winter imposes on the king of France.” The
governor of the Netherlands was mistaken; Louis XIV was about to prove
that his soldiers, like those of Gustavus Adolphus, did not know what
winter was. He had confided the command of his new army to the prince of
Condé, who had been amnestied nine years before but had hitherto been a
stranger to the royal favours.[g]
Under pretext of being in Burgundy for the estates, Monsieur le Prince
had made careful note that Franche-Comté was without troops and
unsuspecting, because the inhabitants did not doubt that the king would
grant them neutrality as in the last war, since they had sent to him to
demand it. He kept up the delusion.[e]
The gaieties of St. Germain were at their height, when in the depth of
winter in the month of January, 1668, all were astonished to see troops
marching in all directions, coming and going on the roads of Champagne
and in the Three Bishoprics--trains of artillery, wagons of munitions
stopping under various pretexts in the roads which lead from Champagne
to Burgundy. That part of France was filled with movement of which the
cause was unknown. The uninitiated out of interest, and the courtiers out
of curiosity, exhausted themselves in conjectures; Germany was alarmed;
the object of these preparations and peculiar actions was a mystery to
everybody. The secrets of conspiracies were never more closely guarded
than in this enterprise of Louis XIV.
Finally, on February 2nd, the king left St. Germain with the young duke
d’Enghien, son of the Great Condé, and several courtiers; the other
officers being at the rendezvous with their troops. He travelled on
horseback by long stages and arrived at Dijon. Twenty thousand men,
assembled by twenty different routes, found themselves on the same day in
Franche-Comté, several leagues from Besançon, the Great Condé at their
head.[f] Besançon and Salins surrendered at sight of the troops. When
the king arrived he went to Dôle and caused counterscarps and demilunes
to be set up. Four or five hundred men were killed here. The amazed
inhabitants, seeing themselves surrounded by troops and without hope of
succour, surrendered on Shrove Tuesday, February 14th. The king at the
same time marched to Gray. The governor made as though he would defend
himself, but the marquis d’Yenne, governor-general under Castel Rodrigo,
who was of the country and had all his property there, came to surrender
to the king and, going to Gray, persuaded the governor to surrender. The
king entered Gray on Sunday, the 19th of February, and there caused a _Te
Deum_ to be sung, having the governor-general at his right hand and the
governor of the town itself on his left; and the same day he set out to
return. Thus in twenty-two days of the month of February he had started
from St. Germain, had been to Franche-Comté, taken complete possession
of it, and returned to St. Germain.[e] The king was back at St. Germain
preparing enormous armaments for the month of April; he had given the
prince of Condé the government of Franche-Comté.
_Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (1668 A.D.)_
War seemed imminent. The last days of the armistice were at hand. “The
opinion of peace which prevails in France is a malady which is becoming
widespread,” Louvois wrote in the middle of March; “but we shall soon
be cured, since the time to take the field is drawing near. You must
give out everywhere that the Spaniards will not have peace.” Louvois was
uttering a shameless falsehood; the Spaniards were without resources,
but they had still less courage than resources; and consented to the
abandonment of all the places in the Netherlands conquered in 1667.
A congress was opened at Aix-la-Chapelle and was presided over by the
nuncio of the new pope Clement IX, who was as favourable to France as
his predecessor Innocent X had been to Spain--“a phantom arbitrator
between phantom plenipotentiaries,” says Voltaire. The real negotiations
took place at St. Germain. “I did not only take care,” writes Louis
XIV, “to profit by the present conjuncture, but also to put myself in
a position to turn to good account those which seemed likely to ensue.
Amid the great augmentations which my fortune might receive, nothing
seemed to me more necessary than to acquire for myself, among my smaller
neighbours, a reputation for moderation and probity which might quiet in
them those emotions of terror which all naturally feel at the aspect of
too great power. I must not lack the means of breaking with Spain when
I wish to do so; Franche-Comté which I surrendered might be reduced to
such a condition that I could be master of it at any time, and my new
conquests, well secured, would open me a surer entry to the Netherlands.”
Determined by these wise motives, the king gave the order to sign;
and the 2nd of May, 1668, the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle was concluded.
Before surrendering Franche-Comté the king gave orders to demolish the
fortifications of Dôle and Gray; at the same time he commissioned Vauban
to fortify Ath, Lille, and Tournay. The triple alliance was triumphant,
the Dutch especially.[g]
PROJECTS AGAINST HOLLAND (1668-1672 A.D.)
The first period of the diplomatic and military history of Louis XIV
closes with the treaty that ended the War of the Queen’s Rights. A new
era is about to open in which Louis will cast aside the compass that was
so safely directing the ship of France to follow no other guides than his
passion and his fortune.
Recent events had succeeded in crushing the old French sympathies for
Holland, much weakened since the Dutch defection of 1648. Resentment
against the unfaithful ally, very keen in the active and military element
of the nation, had reached a point of exasperation with the king, who was
not unaware of the secret clauses of the Treaty of the Hague.[133] Louis,
who had laid down his arms much less for the confederates of the Hague
than for the sake of the future Spanish succession, bore a grudge against
Holland, not so much for having really arrested his progress [by having
formed the triple alliance] as for having boasted of doing so. Pride had
turned the head of the little republic, which plumed itself on having
laid colossal Spain low, saved Denmark from the blows of Sweden, beaten,
or at least quit even with England, set a limit on French conquests, and
drawn into its hands three-quarters of European commerce and sea trade.
But wounded pride was far from being the only motive that turned Louis
XIV against Holland. He was convinced that he must crush her in order to
get Belgium, and consequently he must appear, momentarily, to forget the
end in order to remove the obstacle. He might then, strictly speaking,
imagine to himself that he was still pursuing his old plans, and was
only changing the means of French policy; but passion might easily make
him take the means for the end. This passion, generated by diplomatic
disappointments, was nourished and envenomed by the dissimilarity
between the institutions, principles, and beliefs of the French and
Dutch governments. Holland was not only an unfaithful ally--she was a
republican and Protestant nation, the home of religious and political
liberty, which Louis hated with a growing hatred as his monarchy became
more clearly outlined in his head.
After the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, the ruin of Holland became the
king’s fixed idea. It was no longer a question of the commercial war
so ably conducted by Colbert with his tariffs and his differential
rights--it was a war of invasion and conquest that Louis was planning.[c]
The resolution taken, he adjourned its execution until such time as he
had completed the organisation of his sea forces, which were not then on
a level with those of the land, and until he could assure himself that
Europe would not interfere with his plan. The able and indefatigable
Lionne consecrated the last three years of his life (he died in 1671) to
performing diplomatic wonders to acquire this certitude.
While he was waiting, Louis XIV neglected no opportunities that presented
themselves to feed warlike passions and provide employment for his
unengaged officers and troops. In 1669 he sent a volunteer corps to
Crete to assist the Venetians, threatened in the capital of that island.
Beaufort disappeared in a combat, and Vivonne ineffectually bombarded the
grand vizier’s camp. But this was only a diversion from more important
projects. Louis XIV wished to isolate Holland, and for that reason to
break the triple alliance. He began by trying to detach England from it.
[Sidenote: [1669-1670 A.D.]]
The English were not less jealous than the Dutch of France’s maritime
progress; they were not less frightened at Louis’ ambitions. But
Charles II did not share these feelings. Although he had experienced
all the hazards of fortune, the vicissitudes of his life had in nowise
elevated his character. After the Treaty of Breda, he signed that of the
Triple Alliance and united with the Dutch, as a concession to national
sentiment. But he did not like parliament, and felt an especial aversion
for the Presbyterian spirit, and the religious passions which had
brought about the English Revolution. Finally, about 1670, he resolved
to become a Catholic, perhaps through real conviction, perhaps through
the influence of his brother, the duke of York, a secret convert to
the church of Rome, who was animated by the true ardour of a neophyte;
perhaps because he hoped to find in Catholicism a more solid support for
his throne and his royal prerogative than in Anglicanism.
To realise his object a French alliance was indispensable. France alone
could provide him with the money he needed; his court was wasteful and in
debt, and parliament measured out subsidies with jealous parsimony. If
France demanded the sacrifice of Holland, he was ready to make it.
Under these conditions he readily lent ear to the overtures of the French
ambassadors, Ruvigny and Colbert de Croissy, the minister’s brother. He
did not delay to let Louis XIV into the secret of his plans. Louis asked
nothing better than to grant much on condition that England would join
him in war on Holland. Nevertheless the negotiations dragged on account
of the precautions necessary to secrecy, and it took more than a year
to arrive finally at an understanding. When all was arranged Charles II
demanded that his sister, the duchess of Orleans, should come to England
and sign the treaty.[b]
_The Treaty of Dover: Death of Madame (1670 A.D.)_
On the 24th of May Madame Henrietta suddenly left the court which was at
Lille and embarked at Dunkirk for Dover where Charles II was awaiting
her. She persuaded Charles to sign the treaty without delay (June 1st).
The English monarch led his sister to hope that he would consent that
the attack on Holland should precede his declaration of Catholicism.
This is what Louis XIV most wished for. The treaty, however, far from
committing Charles to this course, stipulated that after Charles should
have made “the said declaration,” Louis might choose the moment of attack
on Holland.[134] Louis was to give Charles two millions, payable two and
three months after the exchange of ratification and was to assist him
with six thousand foot soldiers, if the return to Catholicism should
excite trouble. Charles was to furnish Louis at least four thousand foot
soldiers against Holland, Louis to reinforce the English fleet by thirty
vessels, of at least forty guns, and to pay Charles an annual subsidy
of three millions during the continuation of the war. The island of
Walcheren (with Sluys and Causand at the mouth of the Schelde) were to go
to England.
[Sidenote: [1670-1672 A.D.]]
An unforeseen catastrophe fell now like a thunder-clap upon the two
royal families which had just sealed the pact of Dover. The household of
Louis XIV’s brother had long been disturbed by domestic tempests. The
amiable and brilliant Henrietta, adored by the court, esteemed by the
king, who confided to her the most secret springs of his policy, inspired
nothing but antipathy in her husband, an effeminate prince, as mediocre
in mind as in heart, whose childish and strange habits have given rise
to suspicion of shameful practices. The king had recently intervened in
the family quarrels by imprisoning and afterwards exiling the chevalier
de Lorraine, Monsieur’s favourite. After this the king had had great
difficulty in compelling his brother to allow Madame Henrietta to go to
Dover.
She returned in triumph; leaving Dover on the 12th of June, she appeared
for a moment at St. Germain where the court was established; the 24th of
June her husband took her to St. Cloud, where she had scarcely arrived
when she complained of pains in her stomach and side. For several
days she lingered, and on the 29th, after having drunk a glass of
chicory-water, she was seized with a violent pain in the side; the next
day before daybreak she was dead. In her last agony she repeated several
times that she was dying of poison.
An outbreak of terrible suspicion against her husband and his people
occurred at once. The king had an autopsy performed by the most
celebrated physicians and surgeons of Paris, who agreed that death was
due to natural causes, and that it was a wonder the princess had lived so
long with her lungs and liver so gravely affected. The question, however,
has remained a question of controversy among historians to this day.[135]
The news of this tragic event made a great stir in England; but the real
sorrow expressed by Louis XIV and the report of the physicians calmed
Charles II and his court.[c]
_Treaties with Other Powers (1670-1672 A.D.)_
Already, as early as 1667, Louis XIV had privately provided for the
neutrality of the empire by a secret treaty regulating the eventual
partition of the Spanish monarchy. In case the little king of Spain
should die without children, France was to receive the Netherlands,
Franche-Comté, Navarre, Naples, and Sicily; Austria would keep Spain
and the Milanese. Accordingly the emperor Leopold turned a deaf ear
to the solicitations of the Dutch, who would have persuaded him to
join the triple alliance; and a new agreement between France and the
empire, signed secretly November 1st, 1670, reciprocally bound the two
princes not to give help to their enemies. The German princes were
more difficult to win over; they were beginning to be alarmed at the
pretensions of France. The electors of Treves and Mainz had already
assembled troops on the Rhine; and the duke of Lorraine seemed disposed
to give them assistance. Louis XIV took as a pretext the erection of
some fortifications contrary to the Treaty of Marsal; on the 23rd of
August, 1670, he sent Marshal de Créqui into Lorraine; in the beginning
of September the duchy was entirely subdued and the duke a refugee. To
the emperor’s protest, the king responded that he did not want Lorraine
for himself, but that he would never surrender it to anyone’s petitions.
Brandenburg and Saxony alone refused neutrality point-blank; France
had renounced the Protestant alliances in Germany, and the Protestant
electors recognised the danger which threatened them.
Sweden also recognised it, but Gustavus Adolphus and Oxenstierna were no
longer there; the memory of former alliances with France alone remained;
the Swedish senators, one after another, allowed themselves to be bought.
The treaty was signed the 14th of April, 1672; for an annual subsidy of
600,000 livres Sweden pledged herself to offer armed opposition to the
princes of the empire who should attempt to succour the United Provinces;
a space was being cleared round Holland.[136]
In spite of the secrecy which surrounded the negotiations of Louis
XIV, De Witt was filled with anxiety; always favourable to the French
alliance, he had sought to calm the irritation of France which imputed
the triple alliance to the Dutch. Jan de Witt negotiated everywhere;
Charles’ treaty with France had remained a profound secret, and the Dutch
thought they could count on the good will of the English nation. They
effaced the arms of England on the _Royal Charles_, a vessel taken by
Tromp in 1667, and hid from sight a picture in the town hall of Dordrecht
which represented the victory of Chatham with the _ruart_[137] Cornelis
de Witt leaning against a cannon. These concessions to the pride of
England were not made without a contest.
THE WAR WITH HOLLAND BEGINS (1672 A.D.)
The apprehensions of the grand pensionary were not without foundation; in
the spring of 1672 all the negotiations of Louis XIV had been successful;
his armaments were complete; he was at last about to crush the little
power which had so long presented an obstacle to his designs. The king
wrote in an unpublished memoir: “Amidst all my prosperity in my campaign
of 1667, neither England nor the empire, both convinced of the justice of
my cause, opposed themselves to the rapidity of my conquests, whatever
interest they may have had to stop them. I found in my path only my good,
faithful, and old-time friends, the Dutch, who instead of identifying
themselves with my fortune as with the foundation of their state, sought
to dictate to me and to compel me to peace, and even dared to threaten
violence in case I refused to accept their interference. I confess that
their insolence stung me keenly and that I was ready, at the risk of what
might happen to my conquests in the Spanish Netherlands, to turn all my
forces against this haughty and ungrateful nation; but having summoned
prudence to my aid and considering that I had neither the number of
troops nor the allies requisite for such an enterprise, I dissimulated
and concluded peace on honourable conditions, resolved to postpone the
punishment of this perfidy to another time.” The time had come; to the
last effort at conciliation attempted in the name of the states-general,
by De Groot, son of the celebrated Grotius, the king answered with a
haughty threat: “When I heard that the United Provinces were endeavouring
to corrupt my allies, and were urging kings, my relatives, to enter into
offensive leagues against me, I sought to put myself in a position to
defend myself, and I raised some troops; but I intend to have still more
towards the spring, and I will then use them in the manner which I may
judge the best adapted for the welfare of my states and for my glory.”[g]
[Illustration: LOUIS II DE BOURBON, PRINCE DE CONDÉ
(1621-1686)]
A public treaty had just been signed between France and England (February
12th), and the English, according to their custom, attacked without
declaration of war. On March 23rd an English squadron assailed a Dutch
merchant fleet returning from Smyrna off the isle of Wight. The Dutch
defended themselves so well that the aggressors after two days of
fighting were only able to capture two or three merchant ships and one
man-of-war. Charles II’s declaration of war was published March 29th,
six days after this fight. That of Louis XIV was launched on the 6th of
April.[c]
“The king sets out to-morrow, my daughter,” writes Madame de Sévigné[i]
to Madame de Grignan on the 27th of April; “there will be 100,000 men
outside Paris, the two armies will join hands; the king will give orders
to Monsieur, Monsieur to Monsieur le Prince, Monsieur le Prince to M. de
Turenne, and M. de Turenne to the two marshals, and even to the army of
Marshal de Créqui.”[g]
Ninety thousand men were gathered from Sedan to Charleroi; the bishop
of Münster, the bishop of Cologne, and other German princes furnished
about 20,000 more. The king led this magnificent army in person; Condé,
Turenne, Luxemburg, Chamilly, were in command under him. Vauban was to
take the towns, Pellisson to record the victories. What had Holland to
bring in opposition to such an enemy? She had a formidable navy; two
admirals, regarded to this day as the greatest of their century, Tromp
and De Ruyter; rich colonies, and an immense commerce; but she had
neglected her land-forces, so often dangerous in a republic; she could
hardly count upon 25,000 militia, badly equipped and wholly without
discipline, and 20,000 men promised by the elector of Brandenburg were
at the same time very insufficient and very far away. The intestine
struggles also enfeebled her; there were two parties, the one led by Jan
de Witt, and entirely devoted to the cause of ancient liberty. The other
aimed at the restoration of the young prince of Orange to the heritage
of his ancestors, and profiting by the present danger nominated him
captain-general at the age of twenty-two.
_The Passage of the Rhine (June, 1672 A.D.)_
Meanwhile Louis XIV advanced along the Maas, upon the lands of the bishop
of Liège, his ally, in order not to invade Spanish territory, thence
along the right bank of the Rhine from Wesel to Toll-Huys. There the
inhabitants informed the prince of Condé that the dryness of the season
had made the river fordable. Crossing was easy. On the other shore only
400 to 500 cavalry were to be seen and two feeble regiments of infantry
without cannon. The artillery mowed down their flank. While the king’s
household and the crack regiments of cavalry, in number about 15,000
men, were crossing in safety, the prince of Condé went beside them in
a copper-bottomed boat. A small number of the Dutch cavalry rode into
the river to give at least a semblance of resistance, but took flight
immediately before the approaching multitude. Their infantry laid down
their arms and begged for their lives. The French lost in that passage
only the count de Nogent, and several cavalrymen who strayed from the
ford and were drowned. No one would have been killed on that day had it
not been for the imprudence of the young duke de Longueville. It was
said that, being intoxicated, he fired his pistol at the enemy, who were
begging on their knees for their lives, crying, “No quarter for that
rabble!” One of their officers was killed by his shot. The Dutch infantry
despairingly resumed their weapons for a moment and fired a charge which
killed the duke de Longueville. A captain of cavalry, who had not taken
flight with the others, ran to the prince of Condé who was mounting
his horse, and pressed his pistol against the prince’s head, who by a
movement turned aside and had his wrist shattered by the bullet. This was
the only wound Condé ever received. The French, exasperated, charged upon
that infantry, which took flight in all directions. Louis XIV crossed on
a pontoon bridge with his infantry (June 12th, 1672).[d]
Such was the passage of the Rhine, celebrated ever after as one of
the great events which should occupy the memories of men. That air of
greatness with which the king surrounded all his actions, the fortunate
rapidity of his conquests, the splendour of his reign, the idolatry of
his courtiers, finally the tendency the French, above all the Parisians,
have towards exaggeration joined to their ignorance concerning war which
ruled in the idle life of the large cities--all this caused the passage
of the Rhine to be regarded as a prodigious achievement whose fame
continued to be exaggerated. The common belief was that the whole army
had crossed the river swimming, in the face of a thoroughly entrenched
army, and in spite of the artillery of an impregnable fortress called
Tholus (Toll-Huys). It was very true that nothing could have been a more
imposing sight to the foe than this passage, and if there had been a
corps of serviceable troops on the other side the enterprise would have
been very perilous.[f]
Fifteen years later Bossuet said in his funeral oration of the prince of
Condé, “Let us leave the passage of the Rhine the prodigy of our century
and of the life of Louis the Great.” But Bossuet was not writing history
in his funeral orations. Neither does Napoleon in his _Mémoires_ share
the enthusiasm of the sacred orator: “The passage of the Rhine is a
military operation of the fourth order, since in that place the river is
fordable, impoverished by the Waal, and moreover was defended by only a
handful of men.” “I have seen a woman,” says Voltaire, “who crossed the
Rhine twenty times at that place to defraud the customs.” The Toll-Huys
was exactly what its name indicates.
THE FRENCH IN HOLLAND AND GERMANY (1672-1673 A.D.)
[Sidenote: [1672-1673 A.D.]]
With the Rhine crossed, Holland was open to invasion. The provinces of
Overyssel, of Gelderland, and Utrecht submitted without trying to defend
themselves; there were very few hours during the day in which the king
did not receive news of some victory. An officer wrote to Turenne: “If
you will send me fifty cavalrymen I will take two or three fortresses
with them.”
Four soldiers became in a few moments masters of Muiden, the key to
Amsterdam, because the sluices by which the country surrounding the
capital could be flooded were in this village. The generals called to
council were anxious to march at once upon Amsterdam, Louvois thought it
better to garrison the forts; the army was in this manner enfeebled and
its operations retarded. Upon this the Dutch took courage once more, and
concentrating the state forces into the hands of one man, raised William
of Orange to the stadholdership (July 6th, 1672). This prince was to
save the independence of his country.[d] Soon afterward an infuriated
populace slaughtered the illustrious chiefs of the republican party, Jan
and Cornelis de Witt. French historians charge William with complicity in
these murders. Burnett, however, says that William “always spoke of it to
me with the greatest horror possible,” and there seems no good ground to
doubt that this sentiment was genuine. To suppose otherwise would seem to
belie the character of this far seeing, cautious, unconquerable man.[a]
The military dictatorship confided to the prince of Orange gave a new
aspect to the situation; he had the dykes cut, flooding all the country
surrounding Amsterdam, and forced the French to retreat before the
inundation.[d]
The French king, in the meantime, in answer to the Dutch deputies who
sought for peace (De Groot was of the number), demanded for himself the
limit of the Rhine, and the re-establishment of the Catholic religion in
Holland, besides satisfaction to the demands of the English. The Dutch
magnanimously refused such terms. The capital was for this year secure
behind its waters; the French army being weakened by garrisoning so many
towns. Condé pressed the monarch to dismantle these towns, and unite
the army to reduce Amsterdam; but Louvois, minister-at-war, biased by
his peculiar pursuits, would not consent to the demolition of a single
bulwark. The consequence was that nothing more could be effected, and
Louis returned, to enjoy the congratulations of his capital and the
flatteries of his court.[j]
THE NEW COALITION AGAINST FRANCE (1673 A.D.)
This is an epoch of great importance. The state system of the treaty
of Westphalia was really upset by Louis’ aggressions, _e.g._ the
German states making common cause with Emperor; and the fear of French
predominance acted from now on through the Dutch war and the War of the
Spanish Succession as a new and dominant force in European politics, much
as the pre-eminence of the Hapsburgs had acted before Westphalia. From
now to the treaty of Utrecht, European history is on another track, and
the treaty of Utrecht, which closes the foreign policy of Louis XIV, is
the real end of the chapter of history we are now beginning.[a]
Neither Spain nor Germany could remain indifferent spectators of Louis
XIV’s progress and Holland’s peril. Although Spain had not pronounced
herself, Monterey, the governor of Brussels, had furnished the
prince of Orange some auxiliary troops. The elector of Brandenburg,
Frederick William--“the Great Elector”--promised his assistance to the
states-general by a secret treaty. He also agitated the north German
courts and that of Vienna, representing to them the necessity of a
coalition. Austria, more reserved, was none the less exasperated in
spite of the arrangement to which she had consented, and concluded a ten
years’ defensive alliance with the great elector. The emperor likewise
concluded another treaty with the states-general, promising auxiliary
troops for a subsidy.
Louis XIV, warned by these events, gave these princes the most solemn
assurances of his intention to respect the Treaty of Westphalia as well
as the imperial territory. But as these assurances had no effect, he
finally declared that the continuation of their armed condition would
be regarded as an act of hostility against his allies of Cologne and
Münster, and he declined the responsibility of any war that might ensue.
Montecuculi [the imperial general] and the great elector united their
forces, which with the German contingents amounted to 40,000 men. Louis
XIV gave orders to Turenne to leave to Luxemburg the protection of the
conquered towns in Holland, and to betake himself with 16,000 men to
the lower Rhine, keeping the Germans from crossing, and to protect the
territories of Cologne and Münster. Condé was charged with covering the
upper Rhine and Alsace with an equal number of troops. The Germans’
plan was to march upon the Maas, to establish themselves there, and
then to bring thither the prince of Orange and cut off in this manner
communication between France and the French garrisons in Holland. But
Turenne, stationed at Andernach, kept them a long time on the banks of
the Rhine. They tried to cross higher up; Condé had destroyed the bridge
at Strasburg, but after several weeks they succeeded (on November 23rd)
in building a bridge of boats near Mainz. Turenne doubled on his track
to cover the Maas. The Germans spread themselves over the electorate of
Treves and the Palatinate; but this country being already ruined they
could find no sustenance, and they recrossed the Rhine to live on the
lands of Cologne and Münster. Turenne followed them.
[Illustration: SOLDIER, TIME OF LOUIS XIV]
Meanwhile Orange rallied a Spanish corps commanded by Marchin; he drove
off Duras who was guarding the Maas with several French regiments, and
conceived the bold idea of occupying Charleroi. He undertook the siege
on the 15th of December, but he did not have sufficient material and had
to retire before the arrival of Condé’s troops and the Flemish garrisons
which Louis XIV ordered to Charleroi. [Notwithstanding the lack of
troops, withheld through the jealousy of Louvois, these are said to have
been Turenne’s most brilliant campaigns.]
By March, 1673, Turenne had driven the Germans across the Weser, and
Frederick William, convinced of his powerlessness, and discontented with
his allies, asked for peace. Louis XIV was eager to grant it, for he
was in a hurry to dissolve the coalition, and simply imposed conditions
that the elector should not assist Holland, or maintain troops beyond
the Weser. Louis consented to withdraw his own troops from Frederick’s
territory except from the towns in the duchy of Cleves, which he
intended to hold until peace should be declared. This treaty was made
definite the 6th of June, 1673, at Vossem, and Louis XIV almost at the
same time signed two others with the duke of Hanover and the elector
of Cologne, assuring defensive and offensive alliances on the part of
France. Henceforth he regarded himself as delivered from all fear on the
side of northern Germany.
Louis was not willing to submit to a mediation purposed by the emperor
with arms in his hand. In the month of December, 1672, he accepted that
which the Swedes offered. The mediation of Sweden was accepted by the
other belligerents; it was agreed that a congress should be held at
Cologne, but various delays postponed the first _pourparlers_ until June,
1673.
Louis XIV in agreeing to this congress had attached little importance to
it and counted in reality upon war alone. For the campaign of 1673 he
disposed of 800,000 men without counting the garrisons of Roussillon,
Pinerolo, and Lorraine. In the month of June he sent Turenne into Hesse
to watch the imperials who were reorganising their army. He gave Condé
the command of the Dutch garrisons and placed Luxemburg under him. He
himself went to besiege Maestricht with 45,000 of his best troops. He had
no desire to declare war upon the Spaniards although Monterey had upheld
the Dutch; nevertheless he traversed their territory and made a false
demonstration upon Brussels in order to deceive them.
The 10th of June he arrived before Maestricht. He had reserved for
himself the chief command, which he wished to share with no one. But
Vauban was with him and alone conducted and directed the work of
approach. This was begun on the 17th and on the 29th the miner was under
the town. The next day the garrison, although strong and well commanded,
was obliged to capitulate.
If the taking of Maestricht was a brilliant success, the king really
sacrificed to it the campaign in the Netherlands, which had an
unfortunate ending. The Anglo-French fleet had, on its side, appeared
in the arena. It numbered 90 ships of the line of which 30 were French.
Parliament had voted a subsidy, but as it suspected King Charles’ project
of becoming a Catholic, it had made a condition that a declaration of
conformity to the Anglican church should be imposed upon all officers of
the crown. The duke of York was unwilling to submit to the obligation
of the “test” and had been dismissed from the admiralty. De Ruyter took
command of the Dutch fleet with Tromp second in command, and advanced
against the enemy, giving two battles on the 7th and 14th of June which
remained undecided. The Anglo-French fleet having put back into the
Thames for repairs embarked the troops under Schomberg’s command and set
sail for the shores of the Netherlands. De Ruyter on the 21st of August
gave a more decisive battle, in that it prevented the landing of the
forces, and compelled the fleet to retire.
The Dutch, emboldened by this success, raised little by little their tone
and their claims at the congress of Cologne. They cut down greatly the
concessions they were offering France and reduced to almost nothing those
they consented to grant the king of England, the elector of Cologne, and
the bishop of Münster. They intended to make no sacrifice essential to
keeping their rank as a great power. Louis XIV held out for a long time
and obtained nothing; finally, on the 30th of September, he reduced his
claims to Aire, St. Omer, Cambray, Ypres, and their dependencies and
the two castellanies of Bailleul and Cassel. As these places belonged
to Spain, he demanded that Spain should be indemnified by the United
Provinces, which would have recovered all that they had lost. This
proposition was rejected like the others.
Holland was now counting on more important alliances than those of 1672.
She no longer feared England, where the reawakening of the Protestant
spirit would reduce Charles II to powerlessness. She had signed on the
30th of August three treaties, with Spain, with Austria, and with the
duke of Lorraine. Spain had not declared war on Louis XIV, as she did
not wish to enter the arena except with a European coalition; but now,
having procured resources by extraordinary taxation and having succeeded
in overcoming the irresolution of the court of Vienna, she made a
twenty-five-years’ treaty of offensive and defensive alliance with the
republic, promising to furnish 8,000 men.
Austria, assured of Spain and the military co-operation of several
German states, among others Saxony, resolved to recommence her preceding
campaign. She made a point of war of Turenne’s presence on the right bank
of the Rhine and demanded the restitution of the places of the empire,
that of Lorraine for Duke Charles IV, and the abandonment of France’s
claims to the fiefs of Alsace and the Three Bishoprics. On Louis XIV’s
refusal, Leopold addressed a declaration to the diet of Ratisbon, making
known his intentions, and signed with Holland a ten-years’ treaty of
offensive and defensive alliance, enjoining himself for a subsidy to
furnish 30,000 men. As for the duke of Lorraine, he put, on consideration
of a subsidy, his sword and his troops at the service of the Dutch. Thus
the latter were paying for the war, and the war under these conditions
was changing its character, becoming European, and little by little
withdrawing from their territory.
Louis XIV recalled Condé to Flanders, where he left him with but few
troops. He gave Luxemburg the supreme command of the Dutch garrisons,
and he planned himself to lead the army which had taken Maestricht to
the Rhine, to occupy the bridges, and to support Turenne. Up to the
last minute he refused to believe in the coalition, but when he saw
it an accomplished fact he resolved to face it. Treves was occupied
August 26th; Louis XIV then visited Alsace and Lorraine, strengthening
fortifications without taking into consideration the privileges the
towns enjoyed from the Treaty of Münster. Montecuculi, at the head of
the imperials, left Bohemia in September and marched towards the Rhine.
Turenne tried without success to stop him at the Tauber and at the
crossing of the Main. He turned north, crossed the Rhine on a bridge of
boats near Mainz, and finally marched upon Bonn, before which he joined
the 25,000 Spanish and Dutch troops led by the prince of Orange, at the
end of October.
Orange had taken the offensive, and captured Naerden in six days
(September), crossed the Spanish Netherlands, where Condé had not
sufficient force to stop him, and gained the electorate of Cologne, to
join hands with the imperials. [This juncture of imperial and Dutch
troops constituted an important success for the coalition.] United they
attacked Bonn and took it on November 12th.
The taking of Bonn detached Germany from Louis XIV. Louvois had already
a few days before given Luxemburg orders to evacuate Utrecht and the
more distant places, keeping only those on the Maas, Waal, and Rhine, to
destroy as far as possible abandoned fortifications, to reduce garrisons
to 20,000, and to send home 30,000; but these orders took time to
execute, and their execution, being compulsory, was a fresh subject of
triumph for Holland and Europe.
The winter stopped hostilities, without ending the reverses; for Louis
XIV now saw himself abandoned by England and the whole empire aroused
against him.[b]
_Defection of England and the Imperial Allies (1674 A.D.)_
[Sidenote: [1674-1675 A.D.]]
The Protestant inquietude of the English parliament had not yielded to
the influence of the marquis de Ruvigny, French ambassador to London, and
the nation wanted peace with the Dutch. Charles II yielded in appearance
at least to the wishes of his people. On February 21st, 1674, he went to
parliament to announce to the two houses that he had concluded with the
United Provinces a prompt, honourable, and, he hoped, durable peace, as
they had asked for. At the same time he wrote to Louis XIV asking him to
pity rather than accuse him of a consent that had been dragged from him.
The English and Irish regiments remained, without remark, in the service
of France, and the king did not withdraw his subsidy from his royal
pensioner.
Thus, link by link, the chain of alliance which Louis XIV had cast around
Holland was coming apart. In her turn France was finding herself alone.
The congress of Cologne had dissolved. None of the belligerents was
looking for peace.[g]
The bishop of Münster, who could no longer count on the help of the
French, had already secretly approached the emperor, and in April, 1674,
agreed to defend by arms the decisions of the diet of Ratisbon, and
restore all that he had taken from the Dutch. The electors of Treves and
Mainz concluded an offensive pact with the emperor. So did the elector
palatine, that eternal enemy of Austria. As early as January, Denmark,
seeing Sweden inclined towards France, had thrown herself on the side of
the emperor. The dukes of Brunswick and Lüneburg promised auxiliaries to
Leopold for a subsidy. In May the elector of Cologne treated with the
United Provinces, and then gave them back the places he had taken. Like
the king of England, in abandoning France he at least left the soldiers
he had furnished. On the 28th of May the Germanic diet finally pronounced
against France and declared that the emperor’s war was a war of the
empire. The great work of French politics was destroyed; Austria had
regained, thanks to Louis XIV’s excesses, the supremacy and the direction
of Germany against France.[c]
OPERATIONS IN FRANCHE-COMTÉ; TURENNE IN ALSACE (1674-1675 A.D.)
With the war thus become European, Louis XIV changed its object with a
decision that did him honour. He abandoned Holland, which he was not
strong enough to retain, and turned all his forces against Spain, the
weakest of the states of the league. With 20,000 men and Vauban, he took
the direction of Franche-Comté. The second conquest was almost as rapid
as the first; Besançon was taken in nine days, and the entire province in
six weeks (May, 1674).
The allies had planned for this year a double and formidable invasion of
France by way of Lorraine and through the Netherlands. Turenne was to
stop the one, Condé the other. But the enemy was so slow in beginning
operations that the conquest of Franche-Comté was finished before
they had decided on their movements. Turenne was thus enabled to take
the offensive: he crossed the Rhine at Philippsburg with 20,000 men,
destroyed with fire the whole Palatinate in order to prevent the enemy
from subsisting there, and fought a number of unimportant engagements
at Sinsheim and at Ladenburg in July, 1674, where he showed resources of
tactics unheard of until then.[d] To this day numberless ruins of castles
along the Rhine bear witness to the savage work of Turenne.[a]
[Illustration: A CAPTAIN, TIME OF LOUIS XIV]
The imperials numbered 40,000 men. Moreover it was known that the elector
of Brandenburg, Frederick William, was coming with all haste at the head
of 20,000 men to assist Bournonville [who replaced Montecuculi, who was
ill, in the command of the imperial troops], and to crush the French by
superiority of numbers. This juncture once effected, the French would be
done for. Already in Germany they spoke of nothing less than marching on
Paris itself. Many princesses accompanied the elector, saying they would
“make the acquaintance of the French ladies, to learn manners from this
polite nation.”
Fortunately Turenne was on the watch. To prevent the two armies
joining, he began by attacking that which was nearer. He approached
Bournonville by a forced march of forty hours, and, without even giving
his soldiers time to rest, fell on the surprised imperialists at Enzheim
and forced them to retire under the walls of Strasburg in the greatest
disorder (October 4th, 1674). It was a great victory, but the numerical
inferiority of his troops hindered his reaping its full fruits. Ten days
after this victory the elector of Brandenburg in his turn passed the Kehl
bridge and joined his 20,000 men to Bournonville’s army. Turenne received
scarcely sufficient reinforcements to repair his losses at Enzheim. The
situation became more and more serious. How could it be thought that
the genius of a single man could compensate for such an overwhelming
disparity of forces--how believe that 20,000 Frenchmen could hold their
own against 60,000 Germans? No one doubted that the nation would soon be
swallowed up in defeat. Fear gained ground in the northeast provinces;
peasants abandoned their fields and flocked into the towns to seek
shelter from the enemy. Even at Paris great anxiety prevailed. It seemed
as if the capital of France would soon be at the mercy of the German army.
Alsace comprises the country between the Rhine and the Vosges, forming,
from Hüningen or Belfort at the south, to Weissenburg on the Lauter at
the north, a long band of territory of almost constant breadth. The river
and mountain which serve for limits for this province in the east and
west run nearly parallel one with the other. The Vosges separate Alsace
from Lorraine. After the juncture of the two armies near Strasburg on the
14th of October, Turenne retired slowly in good order in the direction
of the defiles which assured communication between Alsace and Lorraine.
The Germans followed the same route in this retrograde march. By this
time November had arrived with its cold and snow. The German generals,
reassured by Turenne’s retreat, thought the campaign over. So they
postponed military operations until the following spring, as well as the
invasion of Lorraine or Franche-Comté, and thought of wintering quietly
in Alsace. To get more supplies, they spread their troops all through the
province and installed them in quarters separated one from the other.
Seventy thousand imperials or Brandenburgers thus took up quarters
from Strasburg to Belfort in upper and lower Alsace. Frederick William
installed himself at Colmar, where his wife and court joined him. The
only thought now was how to speed the cold and rainy season by the help
of _fêtes_.
Meanwhile Turenne was quietly marching on Lorraine with his troops. On
the 29th of November the last French soldier left Alsace by the defile
of Lützelstein, in the north of Zabern. The news reached Paris. The
court murmured; Louvois let loose his wrath against the marshal who had
failed to save Alsace; the people, who had had a momentary hope after the
success at Enzheim, gave themselves up again to despair.
Turenne, not condescending to reassure public opinion--an opinion clearly
against him--began to put into execution the admirable plan he had
conceived. He divided his army into many detachments, placed them under
the direction of experienced officers, to whom his only instructions
were that they should defile from north to south along the western
slopes of the Vosges; and reunite on a given day in the neighbourhood
of Belfort. Thus, while the enemy dispersed itself imprudently in its
winter quarters, the French army, concealing its intention by means of
the Vosges chain, concentrated itself in upper Alsace. Issuing from
the province near Zabern in the north, it re-entered at forty leagues
from there, near Belfort in the south. Success complete, unheard of,
crowned this splendid stroke of genius. Such was the devotion of the
French soldiers to their chief that they accepted without murmuring the
necessity of marching in the depths of winter, in a country without
roads, covered with snow and intersected with torrents. From the 5th
to the 27th of December, the army, at the cost of incredible fatigue,
marched from Lützelstein to the pass of Belfort. There the marshal
reassumed in person the command of the troops, which he had divided up to
facilitate the march. On the 29th of December he came upon the first body
of the enemy, near Mülhausen, and destroyed it. Horrified at this sudden
appearance, in upper Alsace, of an army they had thought to be encamped
in Lorraine, near Nancy or Metz, the German generals realised the mistake
they had made in dispersing their forces. They tried to repair the fault
by sending orders for concentration in every direction.
It was too late. Turenne advanced with lightning speed. From Mülhausen,
the place of his first victory, he went northwards. Near Colmar, by
Türkheim, the imperials showed fight. He attacked them furiously on the
5th of January, 1675, and put them to flight. The remnant of the enemy
retired on Schlettstadt. The marshal pursued them without giving them
any rest. From Schlettstadt he pursued them at the sword’s point to
Strasburg, making an immense number of prisoners and carrying off cannon
and standards. On the 11th of January the small number of Germans who had
not been put _hors de combat_, killed, or taken, during this terrible
campaign, recrossed the bridge of Kehl in the greatest disorder (1675).
Alsace was delivered. A formidable invasion was spared to France.[k]
This campaign prepared with such secrecy, executed with an adroitness so
prudent, was ended in less than six weeks, and excited the enthusiasm of
the whole of France; Louis XIV wrote to the marshal: “I hope you will
soon return, as I am most impatient to see you to demonstrate to you by
word of mouth how much I appreciate the great and important services you
have rendered me, in the last victory you have gained over my enemies.”
On the entire route the inhabitants whom Turenne had saved from the
ravages of war turned out filled with admiration and gratitude, so that
his return was a march of triumph until he reached St. Germain.
CONDÉ IN THE NETHERLANDS
While Turenne was victorious in foiling the invasion from the east, Condé
arrested that of the north. He prevented 90,000 Spaniards and Dutch from
invading Champagne. He entrenched himself at Charleroi, with the Sambre
behind him, in a position where the prince of Orange dared not attack
him. Condé, who did not voluntarily prolong the war of defence, pursued
the enemy to his retreat and attacked the rearguard at Seneffe, near Mons
(August, 1674), routing it completely, broke through the centre, and
attacked and threw into disorder the remainder of the army, which was
drawn up in a very strong position. When night came, he had had three
horses shot under him, and the victory was still undecided. “He now,”
says an eye-witness, La Fare,[l] “ordered new battalions to advance and
cannon to be brought forward to attack the enemy at daybreak. All who
heard this order trembled, and it was very evident that he was the only
one who still desired to continue the battle.” The following day, the two
armies separated with an equal loss of from seven to eight thousand men.
The prince of Orange, in order to prove that he had not been defeated,
besieged Oudenarde. Condé proved himself the victor, and forced him to
abandon this enterprise; but Grave, the last of the French conquests in
Holland, opened its gates. Chamilly had defended it ninety-three days,
and caused the loss of 16,000 men to the assailants.
LAST CAMPAIGNS OF TURENNE AND CONDÉ (1675 A.D.)
In the early summer (June, 1675) Turenne returned at the head of his
army of the Rhine. He moved into the Palatinate. The emperor opposed him
with Montecuculi, who passed for a consummate tactician. They took six
weeks to follow and observe each other, and their reputations which had
seemed to have reached their apogee were still more augmented by these
actions. Finally they decided to come to battle near the village of
Salzbach in a place chosen by Turenne; where he believed himself certain
of victory, when the marshal on examining the position of a battery was
struck by a stray shot, which also tore off the arm of Saint-Hilaire,
lieutenant-general of the army (July 27th, 1675). The latter’s son burst
into tears. “It is not for me that you should weep,” said Saint-Hilaire
to him, “but for this great man.” Turenne’s death was truly a national
calamity. Louis XIV, in order to show honour to the greatest military
leader of his century, had him interred at St. Denis, in the royal
sepulchre. But in time, the memory of the services of Turenne grew
fainter, at least at court, and his reputation appeared overestimated.
In 1710 in the midst of the distress of the War of the Succession, his
family built a mausoleum for him in the chapel of St. Eustace. By order
of the king, the ornamentations and armorial bearings were destroyed,
under the pretext that they were not suitable to such a sacred spot.
[Sidenote: [1675-1676 A.D.]]
The death of Turenne undid the whole result of an able campaign. The
French, discouraged and seemingly seized with a panic of terror, fled in
the direction of the Rhine. Montecuculi penetrated into Alsace by the
bridge of Strasburg. At the same time the duke of Lorraine, Charles IV,
hastened to besiege the city of Treves with 20,000 men. Créqui tried
to come to his assistance, but was beaten at Consarbrück. He rushed
into the town, and after several weeks of heroic defence was obliged to
capitulate through the cowardice of the garrison (September, 1675). “His
misfortune,” says Condé, “made him a great general.” Condé was right.
After the death of Turenne, Condé was sent to Alsace to arrest the
progress of Montecuculi and to reanimate the confidence of the troops.
He forced the imperials to raise the sieges of Zabern and Hagenau,
and to recross the Rhine. This was his last victory; he never again
appeared at the head of the armies, but retired to Chantilly, where he
lived thereafter in the society of men of letters and philosophers.
During the campaign in Holland, he sought an interview with Spinoza,
and when Malebranche published his _Recherche de la vérité_ he sought
to meet the author. He enjoyed holding erudite conversations as much as
fighting battles, taking part in them with intelligence, with ardour, and
sometimes, says La Fontaine, took reason, like victory, by the throat! If
in conversations on literature he was sustaining a good cause he spoke
with much grace and gentleness, but if he upheld a bad one it was not
wise to contradict him. Boileau was once so astonished, relates Louis
Racine, by the fire of his eyes in a dispute of that nature, that he
prudently yielded, and said in a low voice to his neighbour, “From now
on I shall always agree with the prince whenever he is in the wrong.”
Bossuet says, “What a charming picture is presented to us in the avenues
of Chantilly, where the fountains play unceasingly by day and by night,
and our greatest poets debate with one of our greatest warriors.”
EVENTS OF 1676; AFFAIRS IN SICILY
In the following year (1676) the same campaign of sieges of which Louis
was so fond was recommenced. Condé and Bouchain were taken; Maestricht,
besieged by the prince of Orange, was delivered; but the Germans
re-entered Philippsburg, which Fay defended three months and did not give
up until he ran out of powder. An unexpected victory, however, consoled
France for these slight successes and reverses. The inhabitants of
Messina, in Sicily, revolting against Spain, had placed themselves under
the protection of Louis XIV in 1675. He sent them a fleet commanded by
the duke de Vivonne, brother of Madame de Montespan, who had Duquesne
under him. This illustrious sailor, born at Dieppe in 1610, had begun
life as a privateer and pirate; after which he had entered the service
of Sweden, where he acquired some reputation. Returning to France in
order to enter the royal navy, he passed through all grades, became
lieutenant-general, but could not rise any higher as he was a Protestant.
On the coasts of Sicily his adversaries were De Ruyter and the Spanish.
The first battle fought near the island of Stromboli was undecided
(1676); a second combat off Syracuse was a complete victory; De Ruyter
was killed there.
Louis XIV ordered military honours to be paid by all French ports to the
vessel which transported to Holland the remains of that great naval hero.
Finally Duquesne, Vivonne, and Tourville, in a last encounter at Palermo,
crushed the hostile fleets. France had for a time the control of the
Mediterranean (1676).
[Sidenote: [1676-1678 A.D.]]
The Dutch had taken Cayenne in that same year, and ravaged the French
Antilles. The vice-admiral D’Estrées armed, at his own expense, eight
ships with which the king intrusted him, in consideration of reserving
half the prizes. He retook Cayenne and destroyed ten ships of the enemy
in the harbour of Tobago where they had thought themselves to be in
security. In 1678 he took the island itself and all the Dutch factories
in Senegal. The French flag now floated over the Atlantic as it did over
the Mediterranean.[d]
In spite of the sufferings of his kingdom Louis XIV persisted in 1676
in the conditions he wished to impose on England and the empire, and
which these two powers were unwilling to accept. He was still flattering
himself over being able to keep England in the neutrality [she had
committed herself to by the treaty of peace with Holland in 1674].
England’s neutrality was indeed what concerned him most. He gave money to
Charles II and gave orders to the ambassadors, Ruvigny and Courtin, to
distribute more money, among such ministers, courtiers, and members of
parliament as they could win over. But the English desired that, at any
price, Louis should return his conquests or that Charles II should join
the Dutch to crush him. Parliament demanded the recall of those English
troops which Churchill was commanding in the army of the Rhine.
Charles himself was only desirous of satisfying public opinion, and
of conciliating that satisfaction with what he had promised Louis. He
believed he would do this by assuming the rôle of a mediator. He started
the idea of a congress that it was difficult for the powers to reject,
and which was particularly pleasing to Holland, overcome by the burden of
maritime war. During the preliminary negotiations of the congress, for
which the town of Nimeguen was chosen, Charles signed a new secret treaty
with Louis XIV (February, 1676), the two kings reciprocally engaging to
make no separate peace with the Dutch. Louis XIV on his side overwhelmed
the prince of Orange with offers that would detach him from Spain. All
was useless.
[Illustration: SOLDIER, TIME OF LOUIS XIV]
The campaign of 1677 was preceded like that of 1676 by several attempts
at negotiations in England and Holland. Courtin, who had replaced Ruvigny
in England, wrote to Louis XIV that it was absolutely necessary to detach
the prince of Orange from his allies, which might be accomplished by the
intervention of Charles II. In consequence the king renewed to Orange and
the states-general his former offers. He proposed to abandon the places
necessary to cover Ghent and Brussels, to make a commercial treaty with
Holland, and to conclude with her an eight years’ truce which would give
Spain the time to reflect. If, on the expiration of the delay, Spain
persisted in sustaining other claims, France and Holland would divide
the Netherlands between them. William did not absolutely repel these
conditions, but replied that he could not abandon his allies without
dishonour.
In order to have some faith placed in his pretended moderation, Louis
signed with Charles II, on February 24th, a commercial treaty which
offered some advantage to the English. Charles II insisted that France
should make peace. He represented that Holland would not separate from
her allies, that in the end he would be obliged to uphold her, and that
he could not continually go against the sentiments and interests of his
subjects.
The enterprises in Sicily had brought England’s uneasiness to a climax.
She already saw the ruin of her trade with the Levant, and Charles II
proposed a project of peace, the basis of which was that France should
keep Franche-Comté and a part of the places conquered in the Netherlands;
that she should grant the Dutch a barrier and a commercial treaty; that
she should indemnify the duke of Lorraine and abandon Sicily; but it
remained to come to an understanding on a number of particular points
and on the determination of the places that should remain to Louis XIV.
The latter wished to give up only three--Charleroi, Ath, Oudenarde;
and he demanded that Spain should cede him Ypres, Charlemont, and
Luxemburg in exchange. He was all the more obstinate because he knew
the states-general were tired of war and the damage inflicted upon
commerce. He hoped to separate them from the prince of Orange, through
the establishment of a barrier and some tariff concessions, but these
concessions were so weak that the Dutch only laughed at them. As for the
congress of Nimeguen, where the discussion of the propositions between
the plenipotentiaries of the various countries began on the 6th of May,
1677, it would necessarily take too much time to put a stop to military
events.[b]
CAMPAIGN OF 1677; NEGOTIATIONS FOR PEACE
Créqui had succeeded Turenne in Germany, Luxemburg replaced Condé in the
Netherlands. The former made amends for his defeat at Consarbrück by a
campaign worthy of Turenne. By a succession of quick marches, which kept
him constantly between the enemy and the French frontier, he covered
Alsace and Lorraine against an adversary superior in numbers, defeated
him at Kochersberg, between Strasburg and Zabern (October 7th, 1677),
and took Freiburg from him, thus taking the war to the right bank of
the Rhine. Luxemburg, who resembled more the victor of Rocroi, captured
Valenciennes in conjunction with the king, where the musketeers raised
formidable works in broad daylight, then Cambray, and with Monsieur,
against the prince of Orange, fought the battle of Cassel, near St. Omer,
which capitulated (April, 1677).[d]
The coalition was now seriously shaken. Orange was everywhere accused
of small ability for leadership. At Brussels and at Ghent the people
broke loose against the Dutch. Even in Holland the peace party began
to be demonstrative. Louis XIV reduced his tariff by half, in October,
1677, in order to stimulate the pacific desires of the Dutch. The
latter, exhausted and tired of continually paying useless subsidies to
their allies, complained that the Spaniards were always behindhand in
fulfilling their engagements, that the Germans never left Germany, and
that the prince of Orange never found provisions or stores in Belgium.
William and his partisans replied to these complaints that the honour of
the country was at stake, that the United Provinces could not abandon the
allies to whom they owed their salvation, and he had still one resource.
This was to force England, which according to him was alone capable of
doing it, to call a halt to the armies of Louis XIV. He went to London,
where Charles II not only authorised but desired his presence, believing
that it would be a convincing response to the defiances and murmurs of
the nation. Scarcely had the prince arrived when he asked the hand of
Mary, daughter of the duke of York. The king, who had long judged this
alliance necessary, hastened to grant it. The marriage was celebrated on
the 15th of November.
Charles II believed that Louis XIV would now raise no obstacle to
accepting the proposals of peace: but he was mistaken--Louis rejected
them, as going too far beyond those he had proposed himself, and which he
already considered too moderate. The other powers, Spain and the empire,
also declined them and preferred to continue the war. Charles II, having
signed a treaty with the states-general on January 10th, 1678, found
himself compelled to go further than he wished. He was obliged to recall
the English troops serving in the French army and to prepare armaments.
Louis XIV took little notice of these demonstrations, strengthened the
remainder of his armies, and decided to strike a great blow in the
Netherlands, where Vauban had just retaken St. Ghislain in the depths of
winter.
At the opening of the campaign of 1678, France could count on 219,000
men under arms, of whom half, it is true, were only fit for garrison
service. Louvois was resolved to capture Ghent, and deceived the enemy
by false demonstrations on other places, which led them to reduce the
garrison at Ghent. When this had been done, he suddenly appeared under
the walls of the town on the 1st of March. In less than two days 70,000
men were assembled and the siege was begun. Louis XIV, who had gone on
a journey to Metz and the borders of the Maas to outwit the Spaniards,
suddenly changed his direction and arrived on the 4th. The queen and the
court followed closely, but stopped at Tournay. Four marshals, Humières,
Luxemburg, Schomberg, and Lorges, assisted the king, Vauban pressed the
works. The town, in spite of its siege and the number of watercourses and
canals protecting it, was promptly surrounded. The 500 men forming the
garrison declined to defend it. It surrendered the 9th, and on the 11th
the castle capitulated. The army now marched upon Ypres, which it took
on the 25th after eight days of entrenchment and in spite of a bloody
resistance. The king, after this rapid campaign and its two important
acquisitions, returned to St. Germain on the 7th of April.
Louis XIV now believed himself secure in imposing his conditions. He
sent them the 9th of April to Nimeguen and to London: they were the same
as before the taking of Ghent and Ypres. He allowed his plenipotentiary
a month to have them accepted, but this term was further extended to
the 10th of August. The latest successes of the French had had the
effect that Louis XIV hoped for, that of strengthening the peace party
in Holland. Amsterdam and the large towns refused to prolong these
sacrifices. Charles II hastened to approve the French conditions. The
Dutch, ready to agree to Louis’ commercial stipulations, did not find
his proposed restitution of places sufficient to form such an efficient
barrier that they could oblige Spain to accept. Suddenly Villa-Hermosa
(successor of Monterey in the governorship of the Spanish Netherlands)
received the order from his court to lay down his arms. The Madrid
cabinet, divided and exhausted, had resigned itself to the abandonment
of that which had been lost, from fear of losing that which was still
retained. This decision relieved the states of Holland of their last
scruples. Louis XIV then put forward a condition which was nearly the
ruin of everything. He declared that, in engaging to restore Maestricht
and the other places on the Maas of which he was master, he intended to
maintain garrisons in them until his ally Sweden should have recovered
that which Denmark and Brandenburg had taken from her. This exigence
aroused the Spaniards, disconcerted the Dutch, exasperated the English,
and drove Charles II to despair. They gave up all hope of ending the war.
On July 26th, Charles II signed a treaty of defensive alliance with the
states-general.
Louis XIV realised the necessity of getting out of this hole, and as he
did not wish to recede, he engaged Sweden to ask the withdrawal of this
condition, which Charles XI generously did. The Dutch plenipotentiaries
at Nimeguen, Van Beverningk, Odyk, and Van Haren asked on August 7th for
a conference with the French plenipotentiaries, D’Estrades, D’Avaux,
and Colbert. They debated together for more than twenty-four hours, and
finally, before midnight on the 10th, they signed a treaty of peace and a
treaty of commerce with France.[138]
LOUIS XIV SETTLES WITH THE COALITION (1678-1679 A.D.)
[Sidenote: [1678-1679 A.D.]]
The first treaty returned to the states-general Maestricht and the little
towns which Louis XIV had kept in the vicinity and in Limburg, on sole
condition that free exercise of the Catholic religion should be allowed.
The second re-established freedom of commerce and navigation between the
two peoples.
D’Estrades brought in person the news of the treaty to Marshal de
Luxemburg, encamped on the plateau of Casteaux not far from Mons, which
a detachment of his troops was blockading. The prince of Orange, who had
come face to face with the French army with almost equal forces (45,000
men), knew of the Peace of Nimeguen, but had not yet received official
notice. He began a sharp attack upon Luxemburg, and the battle raged for
six hours around the abbey of St. Denis. It was a hard fight. A regiment
of French refugees fighting under the Dutch flag was literally hacked
to pieces. The day remained undecisive; and on the next the courier
announcing the peace arrived in the Dutch camp, and the two armies
separated.
The Dutch having signed the peace were assailed with violent
recriminations on the part of their German allies, especially the elector
of Brandenburg, the king of Denmark, and the bishop of Münster. But
the great point for them was to obtain the definite adhesion of Spain.
The latter country, exhausted and ill-governed, had long shown a great
repugnance to making peace. But as soon as Charles II had attained the
age of fourteen, his majority, the great personages of the kingdom
forced the queen to drive Valenzuela out; then they compelled her to
accept exile herself. Don John took the title of prime minister and
seized the government (June 20th, 1677). As the emperor insisted on the
re-establishment of his sister, Maria Anna, Don John, almost embroiled
with the court of Vienna, was compelled to lend his ear to pacific
propositions.
The treaty between France and the court of Madrid was finally signed
September 17th, 1678. Louis XIV restituted Courtrai, Oudenarde, Ath,
and Charleroi, which the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle had given him; also
Binche, St. Ghislain, Ghent Leuw, and Puigcerda in Catalonia, which
Marshal de Navailles had taken that same year. On his side he retained
with definite title St. Omer, Cassel, Aire, Bailleul, Poperinghe,
Ypres, Wervicq, Warneton, Cambray, Bouchain, Valenciennes, Condé, Bavay,
Mauberge, and the whole of Franche-Comté. The treaty of 1668 had in
reality only been a truce, giving France advance posts in the heart
of Belgium and leaving Spain with other places, isolated spots in the
midst of French possessions, particularly on the borders of the Schelde.
The treaty of 1678 established a much more regular border, by assuring
France a series of strongholds bound one to the other, and closing all
avenues to the kingdom from Dunkirk to the Maas, and leaving the Spanish
Netherlands another series of places which offered the same advantages
though in a less degree. The Treaty of Nimeguen was, in spite of a few
restitutions demanded by Europe as a guarantee of peace, one of the most
glorious and most advantageous that France had ever signed.
The emperor and the empire remained to be reckoned with. They were
left out of the Dutch and Spanish treaties. They began by protesting
and continuing the war. The imperial army, without stopping at the
negotiations of Nimeguen, undertook, under the duke of Lorraine, to
retake Freiburg in Breisgau, and to penetrate into Alsace. In May it
appeared on the Rhine between Offenburg and Wilstett. Créqui was again
charged with protecting Freiburg; and conducted a campaign which was
as fortunate as it was able, and which placed a seal upon his fame.
The Germans, reduced to powerlessness at every turn, quickly ended the
campaign. The emperor, abandoned by the Dutch and embroiled with the
Spaniards, ended by desiring peace. The possession of Philippsburg
indemnified him for the loss of Strasburg. The princes of the empire,
with the exception of a few in the north, refused to pursue the now
objectless war. The subsidies of Spain and Holland had ceased. Leopold
consented to a treaty which was signed January 15th, 1679, between the
emperor, the empire, and France. The whole difficulty centred around
the allies, whom Austria refused to abandon and for whom she demanded
satisfaction. The king made a few concessions; but he would not give up
Lorraine to Duke Charles except in retaining Nancy and four military
routes. The duke rejected these conditions. Louis XIV also reserved to
himself the right of passage through eight towns of the empire, to join
the duchy of Cleves, and to continue the struggle with the elector of
Brandenburg.
The imperial princes, interested in keeping their conquests over the
Swedes, were the only ones who would not lay down their arms. They did
not have to wait long to see themselves forced to do so, for Louis XIV
was not willing at any price to abandon unfortunate allies whose actions
had been of service to him. Pecuniary indemnity served to interest the
dukes of Brunswick, Lüneburg, and the bishop of Münster. The elector
of Brandenburg refused this sort of compensation. Créqui entered the
duchy of Cleves, occupied the county of Mark, [the two possessions of
the elector by the Rhine] and the town of Lippstadt beyond the Rhine,
and advanced as far as the Weser, whose passage he forced June 30th,
near Minden. The elector, incapable of continuing this unequal struggle,
had on the eve of that day made his submission. His envoy signed at St.
Germain a treaty by which he restored to the Swedes that which he had
taken from them, stipulating a rectification of the Pomeranian frontier,
and an indemnity of 300,000 crowns which France paid. The king of Denmark
was the last to treat. He restored the towns he had taken, but received
no pecuniary indemnity. These successive treaties, consequent upon those
of Nimeguen, re-established things in Germany almost upon the footing of
the Treaty of Westphalia.
[Sidenote: [1680 A.D.]]
All the powers had been weakened in the eight years’ war. Holland
alone escaped almost intact from the storm which had threatened to
destroy her. As for Louis XIV, he emerged from the struggle aggrandised
and triumphant. He triumphed all the more in that he owed nothing to
anyone--not even to the king of England, who, having shown himself
equally incapable of making war or peace, now raised against himself
as much scorn in France as hatred in his own state. If France had
suffered considerably from a prolonged struggle which demanded enormous
sacrifices, she had displayed resources superior to those of any other
power, although Holland had shown herself the richer in proportion.
France had struggled single-handed against the empire. The king’s proud
device, “_Nec pluribus impar_,” was justified. The courtiers and the
soldiers were unanimous in granting him the title of Louis the Great; an
equestrian statue representing him in the costume of a Roman emperor was
raised a short time after in Paris in a square which was called the Place
des Victoirés.[b]
[Illustration]
FOOTNOTES
[127] [See Volumes X and XIII.]
[128] [Richelieu’s interference in Portuguese affairs will be recalled.]
[129] [The price paid was five millions.]
[130] [These 4,000 veterans under Marshal de Schomberg assisted in 1665,
by the battle of Villaviciosa, to settle the house of Braganza on its
throne.]
[131] [Louis aided the Venetians to defend Crete. Between 1665 and 1669
more than fifty thousand men went there at different times.[d]]
[132] [In 1650 a violent attempt of the young William II of Nassau
against the states-general had failed and the stadholder died a few
months after, leaving an unborn son who was to become the famous William
III. The stadholdership had been abolished and the grand pensionary
of the province of Holland became the first personage of the United
Provinces, like the president of the states-general. Jan de Witt had
been filling these high functions since 1653. Elected at the age of
twenty-five, he showed at once the ripeness of a great statesman and
the devotion of a great citizen. With a mind at once practical and
philosophic, loving letters and the arts as much as affairs, a wise
administrator and skilful diplomat, he was not unlike the last great
men of Greece; and a contemporary--a very competent judge, the count
d’Estrades--has compared his mind to that of Richelieu.[c]]
[133] [By these secret articles England and Holland agreed to make war on
Louis XIV if he went back on his word, and they proposed to compel him to
make peace without including Portugal, if Spain was determined on this
point.]
[134] It was afterwards decided to defer the execution of the attack on
Holland until 1672. A new treaty was signed at Dover, December 31st,
1670, modifying the first in several points.
[135] [The chevalier de Lorraine and a maître d’hôtel of Monsieur,
Morel by name, were among those suspected of poison. We have seen in
the preceding chapter how epidemic that crime became about that time.
However, the theory of natural death, the result of an abscess of the
liver, hastened by domestic troubles, is now generally accepted as the
cause of Madame’s death. Dareste[b] says it was due to cholera morbus.
Madame was only twenty-six years old.]
[136] [This was an important departure from the old policy of Francis I
and of Richelieu, who, for political reasons, made Protestant alliances
abroad, though upholding Catholicism at home.]
[137] Ruart means inspector of the dykes.
[138] [The commercial party (the old one of De Witt) was attracted by
Louis’ offering commercial advantage, and thus forced the peace against
the will of William of Orange.]
[Illustration]
CHAPTER XXI. THE HEIGHT AND DECLINE OF THE BOURBON MONARCHY
Louis had many royal qualities--a noble presence; manners
full of grace and dignity; an elocution at once majestic
and seductive; unwearied assiduity in business; a luminous
understanding; an instinctive taste for whatever is magnificent
in thought or action; and a genuine zeal for the welfare of his
people. But for the high office of moulding and conducting the
policy of the greatest of the nations of the civilised world,
he wanted three indispensable gifts--an education so liberal
as to have revealed to him the real interests and resources
of his kingdom; the faculty by which a true statesman, in the
silence of all established precedents, originates measures
adapted to the innovations, whether progressive or immediate,
of his times; and that dominion over passion and appetite which
is the one essential condition of all true mental independence.
Without such knowledge, such invention, and such self-control,
Louis could not really think, and therefore could not really
act for himself.--_Stephen._[j]
[Sidenote: [1679-1715 A.D.]]
After Nimeguen, Louis XIV was at the climax of his fortunes. He had no
equal among the other sovereigns of Europe. If he had not realised all
his ambitions, if he had made political mistakes and military mistakes
he had none the less shown a vigour, a spirit of continuity, a power of
calculation and often a rectitude of judgment which placed him far above
contemporary princes. He was served by great men, and he had always known
how to direct them and appropriate their work to himself, although he
had sometimes conceded too much to Louvois, and yielded too much to the
desire to display in war the brilliance of his court. He continually saw
everything and did everything himself in order to train himself by work,
and, as he said, by this means to complete his ideas.
[Sidenote: [1679-1680 A.D.]]
In 1679 France, instead of returning to her ancient peace footing,
preserved an effective force of 140,000 men, part of which was so
organised as to be able to take the field immediately. The maintenance
of this armament had for its object the support of certain pretensions
relative to the regulation of the frontiers. At Nimeguen the territories
ceded on either side had not been delimited in a definite manner. Louis
XIV and Louvois calculated on profiting by this circumstance to make new
acquisitions. Louvois was ambitious of deriving as much advantage from
peace as from war.
Louvois no longer directed military affairs alone. For a long time he
had been encroaching on the office of the secretary of state for foreign
affairs. Pomponne, who complained of this and who lacked the authority
and energy necessary to resist him, was disgraced. His successor was
Colbert’s own brother, Colbert de Croissy, formerly ambassador to London
and plenipotentiary to the congress of Aix-la-Chapelle and Nimeguen; but
Louvois’ influence in diplomacy remained none the less preponderant.
ACQUISITION OF FRONTIER PLACES (1679-1681 A.D.)
The regulation of the frontiers on the side of the Spanish Netherlands
was debated in a conference which was opened at Courtrai in the month of
December, 1679. During the long discussions which occupied it Louvois’
ambition was particularly directed towards the eastern frontier, where
he could proceed by other means than diplomatic arguments. As early as
1679 he occupied Homburg and Bitche, dependencies of Lorraine which had
been pledged by Duke Charles IV to the electors of Treves and Mainz.
He made the parliament of Besançon pronounce two decrees, the one of
September 8th, 1679, which declared the reunion to Franche-Comté of the
castellanies of Clermont, Châtelet, and Blamont--that is to say, more
than eighty villages, forming part of the principality of Montbéliard,
the property of the dukes of Würtemberg; the other, dated the 31st of
August, 1680, declared the reunion of the principality itself.
At the parliament of Metz Louis instituted a _chambre de réunion_,
intended to search out all the dependencies of the Three Bishoprics, that
is to say, the territories which might be claimed as their fiefs by any
title whatsoever. This question of dependencies had been the subject of
old disputes between France and the empire. Louvois resolved to settle
them finally by simple judiciary decrees and without beginning vexatious
lawsuits with the empire and the German princes. He drew up himself, or
caused to be drawn up under his own eyes, detailed instructions for the
king’s _procureur_ of the _chambre de réunion_ at Metz. The result of
this inquiry was to reunite to France about eighty fiefs. The county of
Zweibrücken was vacant and several competitors were disputing for it;
Louvois seized it in virtue of a very ancient feudal right found in the
title deeds of the bishopric of Metz. The king of Sweden, Charles XI, one
of the principal claimants, protested; he was offered a sum of money to
indemnify him. He refused to sell his rights and abandoned France, whose
ally he had been in the late wars, to throw himself on the side of her
enemies.
Another dispute--less old, since it dated only from the Treaty of
Westphalia, but not less important--had for object the empire’s
jurisdiction in Alsace and the territories of ten towns reunited to
France in 1648. Louis XIV had never recognised this jurisdiction; he had
imposed oaths on the towns of Alsace which reserved his own rights and
had taken little account of their privileges when these inconvenienced
his armies. He had contented himself with conceding them, after the war,
certain abatements of taxes under the name of compensation. In 1680
the sovereign council of Alsace, instituted by Mazarin at Ensisheim
and afterwards transferred to Breisach, decreed the suppression of all
imperial jurisdictions in the province and proceeded to reunions of
territories, similar to those of the Three Bishoprics.
The reunion of Strasburg which was the most considerable was accomplished
in another fashion. Strasburg, a free imperial city, had given good
grounds for complaint, inasmuch as she had observed her neutrality
but ill during the last war; she had on several occasions delivered
the bridge over the Rhine to the imperial troops. Louvois began by
withdrawing certain neighbouring territories from the jurisdiction of
Strasburg; then, eluding the vigilance of the imperial troops, he sent
into Alsace 35,000 men, whom he scattered, but in such a manner as to be
able to assemble them again at a given point. He watched for a favourable
opportunity. The arrival in the city of an officer of the emperor having
furnished him with the pretext he was seeking, he caused the approaches
and the passage of the Rhine to be suddenly occupied by his troops during
the night of the 27-28th of September, 1681. The inhabitants, taken
by surprise, demanded explanations. The French resident knew nothing;
the officer who led the troops referred them to Montclar, the military
commandant of Alsace. The latter informed them that he had orders to
obtain their recognition of the sovereignty of France; but that otherwise
their municipal, religious, and other privileges would be preserved.
[Illustration: FRANÇOIS MICHEL LE TELLIER, MARQUIS DE LOUVOIS
(1641-1691)]
[Sidenote: [1680-1681 A.D.]]
The magistrates wrote to the diet and to the emperor to notify them of
the extremity to which they found themselves reduced; their letters were
intercepted. As they were not in a position to offer the least resistance
they demanded to be allowed to consult the people. This consultation
could be only a matter of form; acquiescence was a matter of necessity.
On the 30th the city capitulated. Louvois’ first act was to restore the
cathedral to the Catholic clergy, whilst guaranteeing religious liberty
to the Protestants. Without loss of time the construction of a citadel,
barracks, and entrenched cantonments was taken in hand, less for security
against the inhabitants than to oppose a powerful bulwark to the empire.
On the 24th of October Louis XIV came to make a triumphal entry into his
new acquisition.
On the 30th of September, 1681, the day of the entry of a French
corps into Strasburg, another entered Casale. Louvois had long aimed
at dominating Piedmont and through Piedmont Italy. Casale, added to
Pinerolo, should furnish him the means. Casale was a possession of
the duke of Mantua. This duke was a debauched and prodigal prince, in
pressing need of money.
On the 8th of July, 1681, a treaty was secretly signed at Mantua, between
the duke and a French agent who had no official character, the abbé
Morel. Some troops had been collected in Dauphiné and at Pinerolo. A
passage for these troops was requested of the duchess of Savoy [widow of
Charles Emmanuel and regent for the infant duke], with the threat that it
would be insisted on. Finally, on the 30th of September, Catinat, who had
been at Pinerolo incognito for several months, took possession not only
of the citadel but of the castle and town of Casale in the name of Louis
XIV.
[Illustration: MARQUIS ABRAHAM DUQUESNE
(1610-1688)]
Henceforth Piedmont was shut in between two French fortresses and Louvois
assumed towards her the tone of a master. But the regent of Savoy
resisted with extreme vigour; it was almost necessary to employ violence
to obtain from her a free passage for the French troops passing from
Pinerolo to Montferrat. Finally, in order to save the independence of
Savoy, she accepted the condition of marrying her son to Mademoiselle
d’Orléans, Monsieur’s daughter (in 1684). Louis XIV thought that this
marriage would complete the deliverance into his hands of Piedmont and
secure him the entrance into Italy. He believed that the other Italian
states were now condemned to submit to his dictation. The contrary
was the case. Italy kept silence; but as soon as Victor Amadeus found
an opportunity of escaping from France, which he detested, he had no
difficulty in raising the peninsula against her.
The reunions declared in the Three Bishoprics and Alsace, and the
occupation of Strasburg and Casale, did not make Louvois forget the
conferences of Courtrai. The Spaniards showed in these conferences as
much ill-will as weakness and sought to prolong them. They had pledged
themselves to hand over Charlemont in exchange for Dinant, which was to
be restored to them. They did not do so until 1681 after an infinite
amount of chicanery. Louvois profited by these delays; he had the address
to negotiate with the bishop of Liège, to whom Dinant belonged, a direct
cession of that town to France and made use of this cession as an
authority for not surrendering it to Spain. Almost immediately afterwards
he occupied the little county of Chiny in Luxemburg, in virtue of an
ancient title of the bishopric of Metz. He sent troops thither to make
what was called a “pacific execution”; the country was reunited to the
crown, and the work of hunting up his dependencies was taken in hand.
At last, on the 4th of August, 1681, Louis XIV notified the conference
of Courtrai of his claims. They comprehended the castellany of Alost,
the towns of Grammont, Ninove, Lessines, and various territories. He
offered, it is true, to exchange those towns and territories which might
be necessary for the defence of Brussels, in return for “equivalents.”
The Spaniards protesting against these pretensions, Louvois increased
the French troops of the county of Chiny, established a sort of blockade
round Luxemburg, seized the first difficulty which arose in consequence
as a _casus belli_, pressed the blockade still closer during the winter,
and made every preparation to make himself master of the place in the
spring.
Nothing was more popular in France than this policy of aggrandisement.
Men took little trouble to find out whether it were just or safe. It was
enough that it should flatter national feeling and the military passions
then greatly over-excited.
PREPARATIONS FOR A SECOND COALITION (1681-1682 A.D.)
[Sidenote: [1681-1682 A.D.]]
But if France thus made herself the accomplice of the enterprises and
the ambition of the king, it was not possible for Europe to content
herself with being a passive spectator. Whilst Spain was discussing
and protesting at Courtrai, Germany was discussing and protesting at
Ratisbon and Frankfort. Sweden was irritated, Italy discontented, Holland
embarrassed. All the powers showed themselves attentive and anxious. None
was strong enough to struggle alone; the question was whether, after
a coalition dissolved at Nimeguen they would succeed in again drawing
together and coming to an understanding.
Louis XIV had reason to fear it. Therefore, in spite of the disdainful
majesty of his diplomacy, he endeavoured to make some of them advances
of a nature calculated to flatter. The year which followed the Treaty
of Nimeguen he married the eldest of his nieces, a very young girl, the
eldest daughter of Monsieur and of Henrietta of England, to the king of
Spain, Charles II. The young princess Marie Louise was the victim of
policy and obliged to accept a union repugnant to her. The same year the
dauphin, aged scarcely eighteen years, married a princess of Bavaria. The
king was eager to secure the elector of Bavaria, who had been faithful
to him since 1670; he hoped to strengthen himself in Germany by this
alliance. The marriage of Monsieur’s second daughter to the duke of
Savoy, Victor Amadeus, which was concluded soon after, in 1684, had for
object the extension of French influence in Italy.
Dutch patriotism had been on the watch against the ambition of Louis XIV.
William had no difficulty in seizing the weapons the king gave him. He
denounced French policy to Europe in a host of pamphlets which circulated
everywhere. The answers which Louis XIV in his turn circulated, the
language which he dictated to his envoys, did not bring reassurance.
The prince of Orange believed that in order to form another stronger and
more solid coalition it was needful to provide a centre and a head. The
centre should be Holland; the head himself. He began by joining with
the king of Sweden, Charles XI, who, despoiled of his pretensions to
the duchy of Zweibrücken, was the more irritated against France because
he had been her ally. Sweden and Holland signed a treaty at the Hague,
September 30th, 1681, to guarantee those of Westphalia and Nimeguen.
The two princes solicited adhesions everywhere; they obtained that of
the emperor on the 28th of February, 1682. Louis XIV did not choose to
wait till the coalition should have grown or till William had succoured
Luxemburg. In March he gave his troops the order to withdraw from the
positions they occupied before the town and abandoned his claims. That
the coalition was formidable is proved by the fact that Spain entered
into it on the second of May and that this example was followed in the
course of the year by an infinity of German princes, even by the elector
of Bavaria.
In 1682 Louis XIV had stopped his progress before Luxemburg and had
submitted his claims to the arbitration of the king of England who had
already been mediator at Nimeguen. He had recoiled before the threat of a
coalition and the indignation of the Germans, although in this direction
he had secured the alliance of the elector of Brandenburg and of the king
of Denmark, both recently his enemies but disposed to serve him since he
was on bad terms with Sweden. In spite of the generosity he affected he
seized an opportunity which presented itself to make the prince of Orange
feel his vengeance. William had a lawsuit with the duchess de Nemours;
the king gave the order to occupy his principality. The town of Orange
was dismantled and its sovereignty declared to have devolved on the crown
(August, 1682).[139] The prince sent Heinsius (the grand pensionary)
to make complaint at Paris; he could obtain nothing and preserved keen
resentment in consequence.
[Sidenote: [1682-1684 A.D.]]
The empire through the diet at Ratisbon and the congress of Frankfort
claimed various restitutions from France. However, Germany being then
greatly threatened by the Turks, the majority of the princes restrained
their irritation; they had even tried to obtain the king’s support and
assistance. Louis XIV held out hopes to them, but solely for the purpose
of resuming in the empire the influence which he had had there at the
time of the league of the Rhine, and in order to play the part of saviour.
In 1683 Louis organised practice camps in Flanders, on the Saar, in
Alsace, and on the Saône. On the 1st of September, just as Vienna was
thought to be on the point of succumbing [to the Turks], 35,000 men
entered Belgium. The Spaniards protested, retaliated by occupying
French territories in their turn, and on the 26th of October launched a
declaration of war. The French invested Courtrai which was dismantled,
entered both it and Dixmude without difficulty and bombarded Luxemburg.
In March, 1684, Humières bombarded Oudenarde. In April Créqui,
accompanied by Vauban, besieged Luxemburg which, strong in natural
fortifications, was also heroically defended; but the genius of Vauban
and the great resources of which he disposed triumphed over these
difficulties and this resistance. On the 4th of June the garrison
surrendered. Créqui then marched on Treves and filled up the town moats,
in defiance of the elector’s protest. At the same time Schomberg assisted
the elector of Cologne, an ally of France, to restore his authority at
Liège, which had shaken it off. Finally a French division under the
command of Marshal de Bellefonds was sent into Catalonia.
Meantime Spain, in no condition to continue the war alone, was asking the
Dutch and the emperor for their support or mediation. The struggle which
the Germans were continuing in Hungary against the Turks compelled the
powers to postpone their plans for a coalition. The Dutch assumed the
character of mediators. Louis XIV again assumed an attitude of generosity
and accepted their proposals on condition that they should recall a body
of troops furnished by them to the governor of the Spanish Netherlands.
A twenty years’ truce was signed at Ratisbon--with Spain on the 11th of
August, with the empire on the 15th. France kept Luxemburg, Beaumont,
Bouvines, and Chimay, on consideration of restoring Courtrai and Dixmude.
The empire recognised all the reunions effected, even that of Strasburg
and of Kehl, on the sole condition that Louis XIV should abandon Tökely
and the Hungarian rebels.[140]
RELATIONS WITH TURKS AND BERBERS
[Sidenote: [1681-1685 A.D.]]
During this time the Turks were again beginning to threaten Europe. Led
by the Köprilis, viziers who were also great men, they had fallen on
Poland, whose divisions seemed to deliver her up to them as a prey; and
as they were suzerains of Transylvania they incessantly fomented revolts
in Hungary against Austria. Louis XIV, in order to keep the empire’s
forces in check, took care to constantly favour the disturbances in
Hungary and to maintain good relations with the porte.
The Turks were too proud and too distrustful; commercial privileges,
annulled or evaded by the hostility of the pashas, were nothing but
a cause of perpetual dispute. The piracies committed by the Berbers,
tributaries of the grand seignior, were another. In 1681 some corsairs
of Tripoli, pursued by Duquesne, took refuge under the protection of the
pasha of Chios. Duquesne required that they should be delivered up to
him and on the pasha’s refusal cannonaded the town. The sultan sent his
fleet to Chios; the French ambassador, Guilleragues, only succeeded in
appeasing him by considerable presents. The following year Louis XIV,
displeased with the divan, gave orders to Duquesne to punish the pirates
of Algiers.
A shipbuilder of Bayonne, Renau, had just conceived the idea of a new
form of vessel for use in bombardments. Duquesne made trial of it at
Algiers and the trial was a complete success. The town was bombarded a
first time August 30th, 1682, then twice more in June and August, 1683.
The Algerians by way of reprisals set the European prisoners at the mouth
of their cannons; the dey, who would have yielded, was put to death
and replaced by one of his officers. The lack of ammunition, for these
maritime bombardments were extremely costly, compelled Duquesne to retire
before he had brought the enemy to terms. However, the Algerians ended by
negotiating. Tourville, whom the admiral had left to cruise about with a
squadron in sight of their port, signed the peace April 25th, 1684. The
Algerians made reparation, restored the merchandise and captives they had
carried off, engaged not to countenance other pirates, and gave all the
guarantees required of them. Morocco had not expected to be attacked. In
1682 it had granted all the stipulations desirable, renewed the treaty
of 1631, and consented to the institution or reorganisation of French
consulates.[b]
Meanwhile a Christian city had been treated as though it were a den of
pirates. The Genoese had sold arms and powder to the Algerians, and had
built in their shipyards four war vessels for Spain, which had none of
her own. Louis XIV forbade the Genoese to equip these ships; and, on
their refusal, Duquesne and Seignelay in a few days threw 14,000 shells
into the city, destroying a number of the palaces of Genoa la Superba
(May, 1684). The doge had to come to Versailles to implore the king’s
pardon, in spite of an ancient law requiring the chief magistrate never
to absent himself from the city. He was asked what was the strangest
thing he saw at Versailles: “To see myself there,” he replied.[c]
The significance of this humbling of Genoa is that this power was forced
to abandon Spain, with which it had so long been in alliance, and become
dependent upon France. Such a turn of affairs on the Mediterranean, added
to the aggressions already made on the frontier, made war inevitable;
but the old ally of Francis I, the Turk, was again the friend of the
most Christian king. The emperor was too busy on his eastern frontier
to pay attention to the west; and the accession of James II in England
made William of Orange hesitate to act. In another year, however, the
situation had changed.[a]
SECOND COALITION: THE LEAGUE OF AUGSBURG (1686 A.D.)
[Sidenote: [1686-1689 A.D.]]
In the first months of 1686 various treaties were signed between Holland
and Sweden, Sweden and Brandenburg, Brandenburg and the empire. All these
states pledged themselves to guarantee the treaties of Westphalia, of
Nimeguen, and of Ratisbon, and protested against the reunions effected by
Louis XIV. On the 9th of July the emperor, Spain, and Sweden as members
of the empire, the elector of Bavaria, the circles of Bavaria and of
Franconia, the princes of Saxony and others besides, formed at Augsburg
a secret league, ostensibly for the preservation of the twenty years’
truce, in reality to put an army of 60,000 men into the field against
France. The league was to last for three years unless it were prorogued,
and the command was to be given to the elector of Bavaria. The reason or
pretext was the claim brought forward by Louis XIV to some territories
which he maintained should belong to Madame as the heritage from her
father, the elector palatine, who had died the preceding year.
William of Orange was again the soul of this coalition, although for
the moment he affected to remain outside it; the king of Sweden was its
principal promoter. The league was soon completed by the adhesion of
Victor Amadeus and the other princes of Italy, though this was secret.
The league in spite of very heterogeneous elements acquired a cohesive
force which was quite new and held itself in readiness to take the
offensive as soon as required.
Louis had flattered himself on converting the twenty years’ truce into
a definite peace, but the diet of Ratisbon formally refused this in
January, 1687. He felt that he could not take a step without unchaining
the tempest. Nevertheless he braved the pope and picked a quarrel with
him.[b]
The Catholic ambassadors at Rome had stretched the right of asylum and
immunity assumed from all time, and with reason, for their residences to
the quarter in which they lived. Innocent XI wished to abolish this abuse
which turned half the city into a den of criminals. He obtained without
difficulty the consent of the other kings, but Louis, irritated against
the pontiff on account of the _régal_ (see chapter XIX) replied with
haughtiness, that he had never acted on the example of others, and that
it was for him to serve as an example. He sent the marquis de Lavardin
with 800 armed _gentilshommes_ to maintain himself in the possession of
this unjust privilege. The pope excommunicated the ambassador; the king
seized Avignon.
The matter was straightened out under Innocent XI’s successor, but
this pontiff conceived an intense dislike for him that was not without
influence in the war of 1688. The occasion of this war was indeed the
pope’s opposition to France’s candidate for the archiepiscopal see of
Cologne, the cardinal von Fürstenberg who had thrown open the gates of
Strasburg. He was elected by a majority of the chapter, fifteen votes
against nine for his opponent, Clement of Bavaria. Nevertheless Innocent
gave the latter the investiture.[c] Louis XIV had the papal nuncio put in
prison and the Venaissin occupied by one of his officers, La Trousse, who
expelled the vice-legate.
War was now begun against Europe and against the pope. Louis resolved
to occupy Kaiserslautern and the cities of the Rhine. The dauphin, then
twenty-six years old, was put at the head of the army of Germany. To
assist him he was given Marshal de Duras, nephew of Turenne, and as
lieutenant-generals Catinat, Montclar, Vauban, and Chamlay. “In sending
you to command my army,” Louis XIV said to him, “I give you opportunities
of exhibiting your merit; go and show it to all Europe, so that when I
come to die it may not be noticed that the king is dead.”
Open preparations had been avoided, but the dispositions had been so well
taken that a few days sufficed to collect the troops before Philippsburg.
The necessary artillery was drawn from Strasburg and Breisach, and the
siege began the 27th of September; whilst Humières occupied the district
of Liège with a first division, Bouffiers with a second invaded the
Cis-Rhenish Palatinate and seized Kaiserslautern, and finally Huxelles
entered Speier with a third. Philippsburg was defended by the graf von
Starhemberg. Vauban pressed the siege with his usual prudence and vigour
in spite of the difficulties offered by the marshes which formed a girdle
round the place. These difficulties were still further augmented by
continual rains and a disastrous season.
Louvois requested the electors of Mainz and Treves to allow him to occupy
Mainz and Coblenz. He had no idea of using moderation. The elector of
Mainz admitted a French garrison into the capital. The markgraf of
Baden-Durlach surrendered Durlach and Pforzheim. Heilbronn and Heidelberg
opened their gates. But the elector of Treves refused to allow Coblenz to
be occupied. The town was bombarded by Bouffiers under Louvois’ orders;
the elector persisted in his refusal. Philippsburg capitulated on the
29th of October. The siege was murderous, especially for the engineers
whom Vauban calls the “martyrs of the infantry.” The siege of Mannheim
was proceeded to without delay and occupied only a few days; the ill-paid
soldiers of the elector palatine forced the governor to deliver up the
town and citadel. Frankenthal surrendered in less than forty-eight hours
and the French beheld themselves complete masters of the Palatinate.
Hitherto the French had had only inadequate garrisons to contend with.
The only hostile force which had appeared was a corps of 3,000 men from
Brandenburg which had entered Cologne under the orders of Schomberg,
one of the refugee French Protestants. But Louvois permitted himself no
illusions: all Germany was to be agitated in the ensuing campaign and if
William of Orange, the soul of the league of Augsburg, had not taken the
field, it was because he was at that very moment (November, 1688) taking
possession of the throne of England. On the 26th of November war was
declared between France and Holland. It did in fact exist between France
and the emperor and the empire, although the official declaration of the
diet of Ratisbon did not take place till somewhat later, the 24th of
January, 1689.
THE REVOLUTION IN ENGLAND (1688 A.D.)
The English Revolution gave the greatest hopes to the league of Augsburg
and the European coalition. Charles II had died in 1685. James II (the
duke of York), who succeeded him, joined to the courage of a tried
soldier more pride and decision of character. But his mediocrity, which
afterwards impressed everyone in France, was early pointed out by the
French envoys to the court of London. He resumed the projects formed
before the Treaty of Dover--that is to say, he aimed at restoring
Catholicism in his dominions, giving himself a permanent army, and
suppressing the laws, such as that of _habeas corpus_, which seemed to
encroach on his prerogative. These plans obliged him to seek the alliance
of Louis XIV.
Now this alliance harmed more than it served him. The revocation of
the Edict of Nantes alarmed the English Protestants, who believed, or
affected to believe, that with a Catholic sovereign allied to Louis XIV
their faith was in peril. James II addressed to all the foreign courts,
as well as to his own subjects, declarations in which he blamed the
persecution of the Huguenots; nowhere did he obtain credence.[b]
[Sidenote: [1689-1690 A.D.]]
The Revolution which overthrew this “tyranny,” and gave William III
the throne of James II, was more than a mere substitution of royal
personages. It changed royalty by divine right into royalty by consent,
and founded the English constitutional or parliamentary monarchy. A new
right, that of peoples, now arose in modern society, in the face of the
absolute right of kings, which for two centuries had ruled them, and
which was now finding in France its most glorious personification. There
was nothing astonishing in the fearful struggle which now broke out
between France and England. There was something more than two opposing
interests; there were two different political ideas. In the sixteenth
century, France had defended Protestantism and the liberties of Europe.
In the seventeenth she threatened the conscience of the people and the
independence of the states.
The rôle which France abandoned England now took up; she was to be
the centre of all the coalitions against the house of Bourbon, as
France had been the centre of resistance to the house of Austria. This
political change upset all the conditions of war. While Louis was keeping
England neutral by pensioning her kings, France had no one to fear on
the continent, for, protected by the Pyrenees, the Alps, and the sea,
she could face the Rhine and fight with both hands, without having to
look behind. England now openly joined the league (1689). It was now
necessary, not only to have armies on the Schelde, the Rhine, and in the
Alps, but also fleets on the ocean, and in the most distant seas. It was
the double effort that exhausted France.[c]
WAR OF THE LEAGUE OF AUGSBURG (1688-1697 A.D.)
War was declared on France by the diet of the empire, in the month of
January, 1689; by England and Holland, in March; in April, by the elector
of Brandenburg, and in May by Spain.[b]
Louis had, to oppose the coalition, 350,000 soldiers and 264 vessels
or frigates. Single-handed against these princes, badly united among
themselves, and obeying each other but badly, he mapped out a plan at the
same time simple and bold. To overthrow William III would end the war at
one stroke. Louis XIV intrusted a fleet to James II to aid him to remount
his throne. Spain and Savoy were the two most feeble states of the
league; the king turned against them the majority of his forces. On this
side he attacked; on the Rhine, the whole of whose left bank almost to
Coblenz he was occupying, he assumed the defensive, calculating that the
Turks, whom he had just succeeded in inducing to break off negotiations
with the emperor, would give that prince so much occupation on the lower
Danube that France would have no fear of his sending a large force to
the Rhine. Turenne, Condé, and Duquesne were dead; but Louis found able
leaders to replace them--Luxemburg, Catinat, Boufflers, Lorges, and
Tourville.
_Attempts to restore James II (1689-1692 A.D.)_
The war in favour of James II was fortunate at first. A squadron of
thirteen large vessels carried the prince in May, 1689, to Ireland,
Catholic like himself, and always groaning under the yoke of England.
Convoys of troops, arms, and munitions left Le Havre, Brest, and
Rochefort, protected by Château Renaud, D’Estrées, and Tourville. The
English and Dutch attempted to head them off. Château Renaud defeated
one of these fleets in Bantry Bay; Tourville with 78 sail attacked their
fleet off Beachy Head on the Sussex coast. Sixteen of the enemies’ ships
were sunk or burned on the shore, July 10th, 1690. This brilliant victory
gave the empire of the ocean to Louis XIV for some time. But James II did
not know how to follow it up. He had lost precious time at the siege of
Londonderry, and William III attacked him on the Boyne, July 11th, 1690.
The Irish, with their king, fled at the first attack; the French alone
made some resistance. A regiment of Calvinist refugees under Marshal
de Schomberg were especially prominent in routing the French. James II
returned to France.
[Illustration: ANNE HILARION DE COTENTIN, COMTE DE TOURVILLE
(1642-1701)]
[Sidenote: [1690-1692 A.D.]]
Louis XIV now prepared a descent on England itself; 20,000 men were
assembled between Cherbourg and La Hogue; 300 transports were made ready
at Brest. Tourville was to escort them with the 44 vessels he commanded
and 30 others which D’Estrées was bringing him from Toulon. But the wind
changed, and the Mediterranean fleet could not arrive in time. Louis XIV,
accustomed to force a victory, and reckoning that a number of the English
captains would pass to him, ordered his admiral to go seek the enemy, 99
sail strong. This was the battle of La Hogue, May 29th, 1692. Although
there was no defection, Tourville held his own victoriously, for ten
hours, against the Anglo-Dutch, who in spite of their numbers were more
badly battered than the French. But it was impossible the next day to
renew this heroic temerity: Tourville would at least have made a glorious
retreat if he had had a port behind him; the breakwater at Cherbourg
was not built at that time. He gave the signal to retire to Brest and
St. Malo. Seven of his vessels gained the former port; the rest of the
fleet entered the navigable channel off the Cotentin shore; twenty-two
passed through the race at Blanchard and arrived at St. Malo, but the
tide reached low ebb, and the rest were prevented from following. Three
stopped in front of Cherbourg and their captains, unable to defend them,
set them on fire. Twelve took refuge in the harbour of La Hogue, which
was no better prepared to offer shelter.
Tourville landed his guns, his stores, and his fittings, and on the
approach of the English applied the torch to the hulls of his ships.
The enemy could not boast of having taken a single one. This was the
first blow dealt to the French navy, but it is not true, as has often
been said, that it was its tomb, for the next year France was able to
oppose equal if not superior fleets to the English and the Dutch. At
any rate the re-establishment of the Stuarts in England was becoming an
impossibility and the most important part of Louis XIV’s plan had fallen
through.[c]
DEVASTATION OF THE PALATINATE (1688-1689 A.D.)
[Sidenote: [1688-1689 A.D.]]
The attention of Louis XIV and Louvois was especially directed to
the side of Germany where France would have to face the coalition.
Philippsburg and the Palatinate having been occupied, Louvois wished to
remain on the defensive. France was already secured by a girdle of towns,
of which the principal were Hüningen, Belfort, Landau, Philippsburg, and
Mont-Royal, an important position on the Moselle which had been occupied
and fortified after having been taken under various pretexts from the
elector of Treves. Louvois resolved to demolish all the towns beyond it
and to ravage the country for a great distance so as to oppose a desert
to the enemy.
Louvois according to his custom kept his plan a profound secret. He began
by giving Montclar orders to blow up the walls of Heilbronn and ravage
Würtemberg as far as the Danube (November and December, 1688). This order
being executed he gave one to destroy the castle and town of Heidelberg;
432 houses, delivered over to the flames, were demolished or suffered
enormous damage. Mannheim was likewise razed.
[Illustration: RUINS OF HEIDELBERG CASTLE
(Destroyed by order of Louvois)]
Devastation, savage and systematic, such as had not been seen even in the
Thirty Years’ War, was spread over the Palatinate and the territories of
the three ecclesiastical electors. The sinister glow of conflagrations
lighted the passage of the French troops. Trees and vines were cut down;
palaces, temples, convents, and hospitals were destroyed. At Heidelberg
the castle of the elector palatine, was destroyed like the rest. At
Mannheim the very stones of the ruins were thrown into the Rhine. A crowd
of unfortunates dying of cold and hunger and reduced to expatriating
themselves streamed along the snow-covered roads. The greater part,
refusing the shelter offered to them in Alsace or Lorraine, went to beg
from the enemies of France and still further to raise their indignation
against her. This treatment was meted out to the elector palatine without
any scruple.
There was at first some hesitation to sacrifice Speier and Worms, but
Duras and Chamlay represented that it was important not to spare them.
In consequence Worms and Oppenheim were burned on the 31st of May,
1689, and Speier on the 1st of June. Bingen also had its turn. The fire
spared neither churches nor palaces. All, say the memoirs of the times,
was burned and reburned. The cathedral of Speier contained the tombs
of eight emperors; the tombs were burned and the ashes they enclosed
thrown to the winds. Treves had been condemned; Louis XIV withdrew the
order as though frightened at the general cry called forth by this work
of destruction. A concert of recriminations rose against him. Whilst
he accused the Catholic princes of supporting the Protestant states,
Europe reproached him for allying himself with the Turks and carrying on
a war more cruel and more barbarous than the Turks themselves. English
caricatures called him the Most Christian Turk.[b]
The king’s discontent with these actions might have been the prelude of a
disgrace had not Louvois died of apoplexy in July, 1691. He was replaced
by his son, Barbezieux, who, with many more deficiencies, had none of his
good qualities. The duke de Lorges, Turenne’s nephew, and successor to
Marshal de Duras in 1691, contented himself with covering Alsace against
the imperials, who finding themselves as in a desert in the Palatinate
could not subsist there. Therefore the war remained defensive on the
Rhine, and the great blows were struck elsewhere.
_The War in Savoy and Piedmont (1689-1693 A.D.)_
[Sidenote: [1689-1693 A.D.]]
Catinat was now commanding in Italy. This general, without birth, had
raised himself by force of merit. Like Vauban, whose friend he was, he
joined civic virtues to military qualities and by his wise and methodic
tactics resembled, although slightly, Turenne. He was opposed by Victor
Amadeus, duke of Savoy. In order to bring his adversary to decisive
action before the arrival of the German troops, Catinat devastated the
fields of Piedmont, cut the trees, tore up the vines, and burned the
villages. Victor Amadeus could not contain himself in the face of these
ravages, and gave battle at Staffarda near Saluzzo on August 18th, 1690.
He lost 4,000 men while the French numbered scarcely 500 killed. Savoy,
Nice, and the greater part of Piedmont found themselves in the power of
the French. But a relative of the duke, Prince Eugene, whose services
Louis XIV had refused and who then had offered them to Austria, arrived
with strong reinforcements. The French returned to France, whither
the Piedmontese followed them. Dauphiné suffered a cruel retaliation
for the burning of the Palatinate and the ravages in Piedmont (1692).
Catinat, however, recrossed the Alps and a second battle took place
near Marsaglia, a few leagues from Staffarda, on October 4th, 1693. It
was as disastrous for Victor Amadeus as the first had been. Nothing now
remained to him but Turin, and Catinat would have taken this also if the
ministry had not reduced his forces. All that he could do was to keep his
conquests.
_The War in the Netherlands (1690-1692 A.D.)_
Luxemburg, posthumous son of that count de Bouteville whom Richelieu had
had decapitated, began his military career under the Great Condé, whom
he resembled in boldness and accuracy of prompt decision. In 1690, he
found himself near Fleurus in front of the prince of Waldeck. By a bold
and skilful manœuvre he carried his right wing across a small stream
which covered the hostile army. The prince suddenly attacked in his
flank, made a backward movement. Luxemburg took advantage of this, came
upon him suddenly in the midst of a disorderly march, killed 6,000 of
his men, captured 100 flags, his guns, his baggage, and 8,000 prisoners.
This was the first French victory of Fleurus, July 1st, 1690. Master of
the region, Luxemburg invested Mons, the capital of Hainault. Louis XIV
assisted at the siege.
William III, rid of James II, hastened thither with 80,000 men, but was
unable to prevent the capitulation of the city in April, 1691, after nine
days of entrenchment. The following year Luxemburg besieged Namur, the
strongest place in the Netherlands and at the confluence of the Sambre
and the Maas, and took it, again under the eyes of Louis XIV and the
army of the enemy (June, 1692). This was one of the great sieges of the
seventeenth century. Vauban’s rival, Coehoorn, defended the place, a
part of whose fortifications he had built. But William, always beaten,
never gave in. On August 3rd, 1692, he surprised Luxemburg at Steenkerke
(Steinkirk) in Hainault.[c]
_Steenkerke and Neerwinden (1692-1693 A.D.)_
A spy whom the French general had in William’s ranks was discovered;
he was forced, before being put to death, to write a false despatch to
Marshal de Luxemburg.[d] The latter was thrown off his guard, persuaded
by the false despatch that William had a totally different plan than to
take the offensive on that day.[e]
The sleeping army was attacked at daybreak, and a brigade was already
in flight before the general knew what was happening. Without an excess
of diligence and bravery all would have been lost. Luxemburg was lying
ill--a fatal circumstance at a moment demanding strong activity: but
the danger gave him strength; prodigies were necessary to be kept from
being beaten, and he performed them. To change his position, to give a
battle-field to the army which had none, to re-form the right wing where
all was confusion, to rally the troops three times, to charge three times
at the head of the household cavalry, was the work of less than ten
hours. Luxemburg had in his army Philip, duke de Chartres, the future
duke of Orleans and regent, who was just eighteen years of age. He could
not be useful in striking a decisive blow, but it was a great thing to
spur the soldiers on that a grandson of France should be charging with
the king’s household troops, be wounded in the fight, and return again to
the charge in spite of his wound.
A grandson and a grand-nephew of the Great Condé were both serving as
lieutenant-generals--the one, Louis de Bourbon, commonly addressed
as Monsieur le Duc, and the other François Louis, prince of Conti,
his rival in courage, spirit, ambition, and reputation. The prince of
Conti was the first to restore order, rallying some of the brigades and
making others advance. M. le Duc accomplished the same manœuvre without
need of emulation. The duke de Vendôme, grandson of Henry IV, was also
lieutenant-general in the army, where he had been serving since the age
of twelve, and although he was forty he had never been given a leading
command. It was necessary for all these princes, with the duke de
Choiseul, to put themselves at the head of the household troops, to drive
off a body of English who were holding an advantageous position upon the
possession of which the success of the battle depended.
The household troops and the English were the finest soldiers in the
world and the carnage was great. The French, encouraged by the number
of princes and young nobles who fought around their general, finally
carried the position. The Champagne regiment routed King William’s
English guards, and when the English were beaten the rest had to give
in. Boufflers, afterwards marshal of France, rushed up at this moment
from another part of the battle-field with the dragoons and completed
the victory. King William, having lost about 7,000 men retreated in as
fine order as he had attacked; and always beaten, though always to be
feared, still kept up the campaign. The victory due to the valour of the
young princes and the finest scions of the nobility created an effect at
the court, in Paris, and in the provinces which no victory had ever done
before.
[Sidenote: [1693-1695 A.D.]]
M. le Duc, the prince of Conti, Vendôme, and their friends found, on
returning, the roads lined with people; the acclamations and joy mounted
to frenzy; all the women were eager to attract their glance. The men were
wearing at that time lace cravats which were arranged at the expense of
much time and trouble; but the princes, who had jumped into their clothes
for the battle, twisted their cravats carelessly around their necks.
Women now wore ornaments in imitation of this; they were called _Stein
Kerques_. All novelties of ornament were _à la steinkerque_.[d]
The following year Louis XIV had a fine opportunity to conquer, perhaps,
the Netherlands and make peace. William ventured close to Louvain with
only 50,000 men. Louis was in the neighbourhood with more than 100,000.
The whole army believed that a great blow would be struck; but it was
represented to the king that he could not commit his person to the
hazards of a battle, and in spite of Luxemburg, who, it is said, threw
himself on his knees, he declared the campaign at an end and returned to
Versailles. From that day he never appeared with the army. His reputation
suffered much from this abroad; biting satires paraphrased Boileau’s
famous verses:
_Louis, les animant du feu de son courage,_
_Se plaint de sa grandeur qui l’attache au rivage._
Nevertheless it was not personal courage that was wanting. His conduct
in camp was perfectly conventional--no particular recklessness, but no
timidity. He exposed himself sufficiently. At the siege of Namur, if
Dangeau is to be believed, men behind him were wounded. The victories of
Namur and Steenkerke had delivered Hainault and the province of Namur
into Luxemburg’s hands; he penetrated into southern Brabant but found
William, strongly entrenched in the village of Neerwinden between Liège
and Louvain opposing him, July 29th, 1693. Few days were more murderous;
Neerwinden was carried in two assaults by the infantry which, the first
time, made a stout bayonet charge, an example which Catinat’s regiments
followed two months later at Marsaglia. For four hours the French cavalry
were under the deluging fire of 80 pieces of cannon; and William, who
observed them waver only to close up their ranks as the rows were mowed
down, exclaimed in admiration and vexation, “Oh the insolent nation!”
There were about 20,000 dead, of which 12,000 were on the side of the
allies. After this success it might have been possible to march upon
Brussels and dictate terms of peace, but the French were content to
besiege and take Charleroi. It is true that by doing this they held
the important line of the Sambre, whence an army might dominate the
Netherlands and make most perilous any attempt of the enemy against
Flanders or Artois.
_Last Years of the War; Treaty with Savoy (1693-1696 A.D.)_
The victory of Neerwinden was the last triumph of Luxemburg, “the
upholsterer of Notre Dame,” as he was called by the prince of Conti on
account of the many banners with which he had decorated that cathedral.
The following campaign was uneventful, and he died in the month of
January, 1695. His successor, the duke de Villeroi, did not accomplish
very much, in spite of an army of 80,000 men; he did not even prevent
the prince of Orange from retaking Namur (August, 1695). But in Spain
Vendôme entered Barcelona (August, 1695), after a memorable siege and
a victory over the army of relief. The year 1695 passed without any
military events. The allies destroyed the French stores gathered together
at Givet, and the two armies of the Netherlands had enough to do to
exist, without thinking of attacking.
[Sidenote: [1695-1696 A.D.]]
On the sea Tourville had avenged in 1693 the disaster of La Hogue, by a
victory in the bay of Lagos near Cape St. Vincent. During the following
years the great armaments were suspended, because Seignelay was dead;
but the corsairs, Jean Bart, Duguay-Trouin, Pointis, Nesmond, destroyed
the commerce of the English and the Dutch, who to revenge themselves
attempted to land on the French coasts, and trained engines of war
against St. Malo, Le Havre, Dieppe, Calais, and Dunkirk--vain and ruinous
threats which terminated “in breaking windows with guineas.” Dieppe alone
suffered from them. In America the count de Frontenac bravely defended
Canada, by taking the offensive always, although the province had not
above eleven or twelve thousand inhabitants and the English colonies had
ten times as many. Hudson’s Bay, and nearly the whole of Newfoundland
were conquered.
Meanwhile the war languished; everybody was exhausted. An attempted
assassination of William, which would have been followed by a French
invasion, having failed, Louis proposed peace. Charles II of Spain was
near death, this time in real earnest; he was leaving no child, and the
question of the Spanish succession began to be raised. It was important
to the king that the European coalition should be dissolved before this
great event. He showed an unaccustomed moderation; in the first place
detaching from the league the duke of Savoy (1696), he gave back to him
all his towns, not excepting Pinerolo, and proposed to him the marriage
of his daughter with the young duke of Burgundy, son of the Grand
Dauphin. In return the duke had to promise the neutrality of Italy, and
in case of need to join his forces with those of France.[c]
[Illustration: JEAN BART
(1651-1702)]
After the treaty with Savoy Louis XIV made the concessions which had
hitherto been most repugnant to his pride. He consented to accept the
treaties of Westphalia and Nimeguen as bases of the negotiations, taking
into consideration certain reservations with regard to Luxemburg and
Strasburg, and to recognise William III as king of England. Henceforth
the war had no further object. Commerce between France and Holland was
re-established October 1st, 1696. Preliminary _pourparlers_ between
France and the maritime powers took place at the Hague. Sweden obtained
acceptance of the mediation she had proposed several years before and
a congress was agreed upon which was to be held at Ryswick, a country
house belonging to William and situated between the Hague and Delft.
Caillères, Crécy, and Harlay were designated to represent France.
[Sidenote: [1696-1697 A.D.]]
The king intended to bring pressure to bear on the deliberations of the
congress of Ryswick, to render the empire and Spain more tractable and
to bring the maritime powers to abandon them or force their hands. He
counted the more on this since William III, a mark for the recriminations
of his allies, was already replying to them with acrimony and a deserved
haughtiness.
France made for the campaign of 1697 the same preparations as in other
years. One hundred and fifty thousand men, forming three armies under
the orders of Villeroi, Bouffiers, and Catinat, entered Belgium,
whilst two other armies under Choiseul and Vendôme were carrying on
campaigns in Germany and Catalonia. All that was done in the Netherlands
reduced itself to the taking of Ath which Catinat and Vauban forced to
capitulate on June 7th; a demonstration was made against Brussels but
William hurried up and covered the town. In Germany, the opposing armies
contented themselves with watching one another. It was otherwise in
Catalonia. Louis XIV had long meditated the taking of Barcelona but he
could only execute this project on condition of being master of the sea.
He took advantage of the circumstance that this year the Anglo-Dutch
fleet did not appear in the Mediterranean. The Toulon squadron, commanded
by Vice-admiral D’Estrées and the bailli de Noailles, surrounded the
harbour. Vendôme, who had 30,000 men, repulsed a relieving army and
forced Barcelona to surrender, August 10th, fifty-two days after the
trenches had been opened and after two assaults.
Shortly before, a squadron composed of ships belonging to the state
but equipped at the expense of private persons and commanded by an
experienced sailor, Pointis, had made a successful and brilliant cruise
in America. Pointis attacked Cartagena de las Indias, in New Granada, the
principal _entrepôt_ of the trade of Spain with Peru. He took possession
of the town and carried thence bullion to the value of nine millions,
besides rich merchandise. He had the address to escape the enemy’s fleets
which set out in pursuit of him and to return safely to France with his
prize.
THE TREATY OF RYSWICK (1697 A.D.)
The congress which had begun at Ryswick May 9th, 1697, proceeded with
the usual slowness. On the 10th of September three treaties were signed
with Holland, England, and Spain. By the first two France on the one
side, Holland and England on the other mutually restored all that they
had taken on the continent, on the seas, and in the colonies. The most
important of these restitutions were that of Pondicherry, which the
English had taken from France in 1693, and that of Orange which was
surrendered to William. Liberty of trade was completely re-established.
Louis XIV recognised William as king of England. A reciprocal amnesty
was granted to the French and English who had borne arms against their
own country, but Louis XIV refused to recall the banished Calvinists
to France; he maintained that questions of religion were questions of
the internal government of each state and he would not allow even a
discussion of this point.
By the treaty with Spain France restored her conquests in Catalonia, the
town and duchy of Luxemburg, with the county of Chiny, Charleroi, Mons,
Ath, Courtrai, with their dependencies, and the dependencies of Namur.
She surrendered Dinant to the bishop of Liège. She retained only a small
number of towns or villages dependent on Charlemont and Maubeuge.
On the 30th of October a fourth treaty was signed between France and the
empire and the emperor. Louis XIV surrendered all that he had occupied
in Germany except Strasburg, which was ceded to him in full sovereignty.
Kehl, Hüningen, and the forts of the Rhine were to be razed so as to
secure the free navigation of the river which had now become a frontier
from Hüningen to Landau. It was the same with Trarbach and Mont-Royal on
the Moselle. Louis XIV restored Lorraine to Duke Leopold on the terms of
the treaty of 1670, that is to say, while retaining Marsal and a right
of passage, besides Longwy and Saarlouis. It was agreed that the duke
should marry a daughter of Monsieur. Prince Clement of Bavaria remained
in possession of the electorate of Cologne; but Cardinal von Fürstenberg
recovered his titles and his confiscated property. The claims of Madame,
duchess of Orleans, on the heritage of her father, the former elector
palatine, were compounded for in money. The official gazettes and the
panegyrics still vaunted the glory acquired by ten years of struggle
against Europe in coalition, the brilliance of the captures of cities,
and that of victories. But if these are noble subjects of pride or rather
of consolation, the majesty with which Louis XIV effected to give peace
rather than to submit to it created no more illusion in France than
in the rest of Europe. No one could believe in his moderation or his
generosity. Those most disposed to admire his policy imagined that he had
had a deep laid scheme and a secret design.
In reality Louis XIV had been obliged to go back to the year 1679 or at
least to 1681. The necessity for making restitutions had always been
admitted but there was no idea that they would have to be so complete. On
the whole, if the Peace of Ryswick saved the honour of the country, it
was impossible not to see in it the final check and condemnation of the
policy pursued since Nimeguen.[b]
LOUIS XIV AND THE POLISH THRONE (1697 A.D.)
While Louis was arranging the Peace of Ryswick, the throne of Poland
became vacant. This was the only one in the world which at that time was
elective--citizens and even foreigners might aspire to it.
The abbé de Polignac, afterwards cardinal, had the ability to incline
the suffrage in favour of that prince of Conti, known for his valourous
actions at Steenkerke and at Neerwinden. He balanced with eloquence and
promises the money which Augustus, elector of Saxony, lavished for the
same purpose.
The prince of Conti was elected king by a majority, June 27th, 1697, and
proclaimed by the primate of the realm. Augustus was elected two hours
later by a much smaller vote, but he was a sovereign and powerful prince,
and had troops ready on the Polish frontier. The prince of Conti was
absent, without money, without troops, and without power; he had nothing
in his favour but his name and Polignac. It was necessary that Louis XIV
should either prevent Conti from accepting the throne or provide him the
means of taking it from his rival. The French ministry took the stand
that they had already done too much in sending the prince of Conti,
and too little in giving him only a feeble squadron and a few letters
of credit with which he arrived in the harbour of Dantzic. The prince
was not only not received at Dantzic, but his letters of credit were
protested. The intrigues of the pope, those of the emperor, the money and
troops of Saxony already assured the crown to his rival. Conti returned
with the glory of having been elected. France had the mortification of
letting it be seen that she had not enough strength to create a king of
Poland.[d]
THE QUESTION OF THE SPANISH SUCCESSION (1697-1700 A.D.)
[Sidenote: [1697-1700 A.D.]]
Immediately the Peace of Ryswick was signed, the attention of the powers
became fastened on the uncertainties of the Spanish succession. Charles
II had, since his infancy, gone entirely against all the unfavourable
prophecies inspired by his frail and sickly constitution. He had grown
to manhood and even married. Louis XIV had made him, in 1679, wed, as we
have seen, a daughter of the duke of Orleans in the hope of fortifying
French influence at Madrid and circumventing the designs of Austria;
for the emperor was leaving nothing undone to assure to himself the
alliance of Spain for the present and the succession for the future. The
indefinite treaty of partition, signed in 1669 between the courts of
Versailles and Vienna, had been entirely abandoned. Leopold, uneasy at
the thought of the influence a French queen might acquire, insisted that
one of his own sons, the archduke Charles, be accorded the title of heir
presumptive at Madrid as long as Charles II had no children; but France
succeeded in preventing this.
Marie Louise of Orleans, queen of Spain, succumbed in 1689, like
her mother, to a sudden illness and at the same age. Charles II
remarried--this time a German princess, Maria Anna of Neuburg, the
empress’ sister. The new queen, vain, pretentious, and extremely hostile
to France, never ceased to favour the wishes and schemes of Austria at
Madrid.
Two things were very necessary to Spain--that the heir to the crown
should be designated in advance, and that the already enfeebled monarchy
should not be dismembered. Charles II adopted the electoral prince of
Bavaria and by will declared him his heir.
It is necessary to enumerate here the claimants and give an idea of their
relationship. Philip III had two daughters--Anne of Austria married to
Louis XIII, and Maria Anna married to the emperor Ferdinand III. Philip
IV had married his two daughters in the same fashion--Maria Theresa to
Louis XIV and Margarita Theresa to the emperor Leopold. The Spanish
princesses married in France were the elder in their generations, but had
renounced the succession. The question was whether these renunciations
were valid. Louis XIV claimed that they were not, at least as regards
Maria Theresa. In this case the closest heirs to the Spanish crown were
the dauphin and his three sons, the dukes of Burgundy, Anjou, and Berri.
If, on the contrary, the French branch was outlawed, the succession
passed to the German line. Leopold had had a single daughter by his
marriage with Margarita Theresa, Maria Antonia-Josepha, the wife of the
Bavarian elector; who in turn had one son, still a child, whom Charles II
designated his heir.
But Leopold, although maternal grandfather of the young Bavarian
prince, raised another claim. On marrying his daughter he had imposed
a renunciation upon her, and henceforth he claimed that he himself was
the nearest heir through his mother Maria Anna, daughter of Philip III;
and his scheme was to transmit his personal rights to the sons of his
second marriage with Elizabeth of Neuburg. As the elder of these princes,
Joseph, elected king of the Romans in 1690, would succeed him in the
empire, Leopold aspired to make the second, the archduke Charles, king
of Spain--a combination which, without confounding the empire and Spain,
would perpetuate the rule of both branches of the Austrian house in these
two countries and recommence the work of Charles V.
Count von Harrach, Leopold’s envoy at Madrid, obtained with the queen’s
aid the annulment of the will in favour of the Bavarian prince. But he
wanted more, and insisted that the archduke Charles be declared heir
presumptive. The unfortunate king, worn out with these insistances, and
believing at moments that he had a new hold on life, announced that he
would await the day when the viaticum should be brought him before again
appointing his successor.
Louis XIV sent the marquis d’Harcourt to Madrid in the month of December,
1697, with instructions to keep watch on Charles’ court and to obstruct
the emperor’s plots; but knowing that he would obtain nothing directly
from the court of Madrid, he thought the surest and wisest plan was to
negotiate the bases of a partition with England and Holland, which would
be a means of proving his pacific disposition to Europe and would also
bear upon the emperor and the empire. Consequently Pomponne, whom he
had recalled to the head of foreign affairs, and Torcy, son of Colbert
de Croissy, invested with the office of secretary of state since 1689,
in March, 1699, made overtures to Lord Portland (Bentinck), English
ambassador at Paris. Tallard was sent to London to come to an agreement
with William III directly.
The negotiations, embarrassed by conflicting claims, lasted six months.
Finally a first treaty of partition was signed at the Hague on October
11th by Tallard and Briord, ambassadors of France to England and Holland.
It was agreed that the dauphin should have Naples, Sicily, the Spanish
towns on the coasts of Tuscany, the marquisate of Finale and Guipuzcoa,
that the archduke should have the Milanese, and that the electoral prince
of Bavaria should reign over Spain, the Indies, and the Netherlands. As
this last prince was only four years old and might die, it was decided
that in that event the elector, his father, should succeed him.
Charles II was not long in hearing that the succession had been regulated
without consulting him. He therefore convened an extraordinary council,
and to prevent the dismemberment of his state he constituted the prince
of Bavaria his sole heir (November, 1698) in spite of the fact that the
elector, father of the young prince, had consented to the treaty of
partition. This decision, in cutting short the dispute, was of a nature
to satisfy neither France nor Austria, and the death of the young prince
of Bavaria, which occurred unexpectedly at Brussels, on the 8th of
February, 1699, reopened the question. It annulled not only the will of
the king of Spain, but also the signed treaty of partition between France
and the maritime powers.
Louis XIV immediately undertook negotiations for a second treaty with the
powers, only more secretly, in order to be considerate of the last days
of Charles II and not to wound the susceptibilities of the Spaniards.
Tallard demanded that the Milanese should be added to the dauphin’s
portion, in consideration of which he offered to let the archduke rule
over Spain and the Indies, and to allow England and Holland the choice
of a sovereign for the Netherlands. Louis XIV hoped to attain with the
help of the maritime power the adherence of the emperor, if necessary, by
force, if Leopold made war.
Villars had left for Vienna in June, 1699, with the title of envoy
extraordinary and a suite of unusual splendour. But to his vague
overtures he received even more vague replies. Leopold had a rather
undecided character, and he was convinced that he would obtain from
Charles II a will in favour of the archduke Charles. He contested the
fundamental principles of the arrangement proposed by France, and finally
formally declined the acceptance of any treaty whatever (October, 1699).
Louis XIV then resolved to go further, and a second treaty was signed in
London and at the Hague, the 13th and 25th of May, 1700. It was agreed
that the dauphin should have all that had been assigned to him in the
partition treaty of 1698, plus the duchy of Lorraine; that the duke of
Lorraine should have the duchy of Milan, and that the remainder of the
Spanish monarchy, comprising Spain, the Indies, and the Netherlands,
should pass to the archduke Charles. Three months were given to the
emperor to accept this arrangement; if at the close of that time he had
not consented, another prince was to be substituted for the archduke.
[Sidenote: [1700-1701 A.D.]]
Rarely had Louis XIV shown himself as wise, as prudent, and as able, as
in forming these last combinations. He restored Lorraine to the crown,
with one stroke of the pen and without striking one blow--an important
province, and one which had been French for a long time. As for Naples
and Sicily, he offered them to Victor Amadeus in exchange for Nice and
Savoy, which would procure for France the natural barrier of the Alps and
repair the set-back of Ryswick.
In spite of the precautions which ought to have assured its secrecy, the
second treaty of partition was known in Madrid as quickly as the first
had been, and produced the same effect there. The king was much affected,
the queen became so enraged that, according to one story, she broke the
furniture of her apartment. The nation, wounded that the treaty should
have been concluded without consulting it, burst into recriminations
against the maritime powers; the thought only of dismemberment aroused
its pride.
The unhappy king then resolved to make a new will, the third. He
consulted jurists, theologians, the pope himself--to quiet his
conscience, alarmed by the thought of disinheriting the house of Austria.
Restrained by his scruples, he again feared that Louis XIV would not
accept a will made in favour of a French prince, and would prefer to
hold to the treaty of partition. Finally, feeling the approach of death,
he signed his third last will and testament, on the second of October.
He could not have put it off much longer, for he died on the first of
November.
The will was at once made public; Charles II declared the Spanish
monarchy to be indivisible. Recognising the rights of Maria Theresa and
her children, he designated as his successor the second of the grandsons
of Louis XIV, the duke of Anjou; and pending the arrival of the young
prince he confided the government to a junta, or council of regency,
presided over by the queen his widow. In case of non-acceptance of the
duke of Anjou, he substituted for him his brother the duke de Berri,
third son of the dauphin, and the duke of Savoy successively.[b]
The only doubt now remaining was whether Louis XIV would accept the will
of the late king of Spain in favour of his grandson, or whether he would
adhere to the treaty of partition. There was a long debate respecting
this in his council, which council consisted of but three ministers, the
chancellor Pontchartrain, the duke de Beauvilliers, and Torcy. They were
divided in opinion; but the dauphin, “drowned as he habitually was in
apathy and fat,” says Saint-Simon,[h] gathered warmth and energy on this
occasion, and spoke eloquently in behalf of his son’s rights. Madame de
Maintenon, who had also a voice in this council, adopted the same views;
and Louis decided.[f]
ACCESSION OF THE BOURBONS IN SPAIN
The duke of Anjou took the title of Philip V and left on the 4th of
December to live among his new subjects. Louis XIV wished that the
departure of his grandson should take place amid extraordinary solemnity.
It is at this time the celebrated phrase, “There are no more Pyrenees,”
is attributed to him.[141] The young prince travelled with the customary
pomp and slowness of royal cortèges. On the 21st of April, 1701, he
was received at Madrid, by the noisy acclamation of the Spaniards, who
flattered themselves with having saved the integrity of their monarchy.
In the whole of Europe the surprise was the same. Holland and
England believed that they had been duped, that Louis XIV had had an
understanding with Charles II, and that for the last two years he had
been playing a continuous comedy. However, they contained themselves and
made no manifestations. William contented himself with saying to Tailard,
“It is well. I recognise the loyalty of your master.” In Austria, where
until the last moment there was hope of a will in favour of the archduke,
there was both despondency and irritation. The emperor protested against
the will of Charles II, against its acceptance by France, and sent his
agents in hot haste to the different courts in order to resuscitate the
coalition; at the same time making preparations for a war of which he
resolutely counted the duration and extent.[b]
France had two great interests. The first was that Spain should be her
friend, to assure peace on the southern frontier; the second that the
northeastern frontier should be as far as possible from Paris and that
the Netherlands should at least be her ally. The first point seemed
gained by the advent to the throne of Charles V, of a Bourbon whom the
people received with enthusiasm, and whom the other states recognised.
The emperor protested and armed, but alone he could do nothing.
The second end was more difficult to attain, for neither England nor
Holland was willing to see the French at the mouth of the Schelde. To
get there much tact and prudence was necessary. The king unfortunately
unmasked his plans too quickly and braved Europe as if it was his
pleasure to do so. In spite of the formal clauses of Charles II’s will,
Louis did not exact from Philip V a renunciation of the French throne,
and by letters patent issued in December, 1700, preserved to him his
hereditary rank between the duke of Burgundy and the duke de Berri. This
would make possible a union of the two monarchies and show an alarmed
world France and Spain one day governed by the same king, which would not
have been a good thing for either country, and still less so for Europe.
A little later Louis drove the Dutch from the places they occupied in the
Netherlands by virtue of the Treaty of Ryswick, and replaced them with
French garrisons.[142] Finally on the death of James II he acknowledged
the prince of Wales, his son, as king of England, Ireland, and Scotland,
in spite of the advice of all his ministers. This insult to the English
people and to William III made war inevitable.
THE GRAND ALLIANCE OR THIRD COALITION AGAINST FRANCE (1701 A.D.)
[Sidenote: [1701-1702 A.D.]]
A third coalition was formed in September, 1701. This was the grand
league of the Hague into which England, Holland, Austria, and the
empire entered, and a little later Portugal, which became an enemy of
France[143] since a French prince was king of Spain, and especially since
French ports had been closed to her products. No allies in the whole of
Europe remained to Louis but the elector of Bavaria,[144] to whom the
Netherlands were secretly promised, and the dukes of Modena and of Savoy,
who were however soon to change sides. Spain was with him, but having no
soldiers or money or ships was, as Torcy said, “A body without a soul
whom France must nourish and sustain at her own expense.”
William III scarcely saw the opening of the war. He died in the month of
March, 1702, but his policy survived him because it was a national one.
Three men, famous for their hatred of France, Heinsius, Marlborough, and
Prince Eugene, replaced in close union the leader of the league. Heinsius
was grand pensionary of Holland, and he directed the republic with the
authority of a monarch when the stadholdership was abolished on the death
of William.
[Illustration: CLAUDE LOUIS HECTOR, DUC DE VILLARS
(1653-1734)]
Churchill, duke of Marlborough, received his first taste of war under
Turenne. He governed Queen Anne through his wife, parliament through his
friends, the ministry through his son-in-law Sunderland, secretary of
state for war, and through the great treasurer Godolphin, father-in-law
of one of his daughters. Prince Eugene, born in France about 1663, of the
count de Soissons and a niece of Mazarin, that Olympe Mancini whom Louis
had for one moment favoured, belonged to the house of Savoy. Destined to
an ecclesiastical career he preferred the profession of arms, and, at the
age of nineteen, demanded a regiment of Louis XIV, who refused to make a
colonel of the “Savoyard abbé.”[c] Disappointed in his hopes of obtaining
a command in the armies of France, he turned to the Empire and became its
greatest protector against the ambition of his former sovereign. During
one campaign of 1692 he had foiled Catinat in Italy and by a bold raid
from Piedmont into France had spread alarm far into the kingdom.[a] After
the Peace of Ryswick he resisted the Turks who had invaded Hungary and
won at Zenta, in 1697, a signal victory which placed him in the opinion
of his contemporaries by the side of Sobieski, the saviour of Vienna. Now
appointed president of the council of war and planning as a minister the
expeditions which he was to carry out as a general, he had a decisive
influence on the events which were to follow. By his good understanding
with Marlborough he was about to give the European coalition that thing
which it had always lacked--union.
To triumph over such adversaries France would have had to have the great
men of the preceding generation. But Louis had used them up. However,
some of the leaders that France still had, Villars, Catinat, Boufflers,
and Vendôme, deserved confidence and freedom. It is true that such as
Villeroi, Tailard, Marchin, and La Feuillade had every need of good
counsel and guidance, but it was not by holding these generals by the
leash that they were prevented from inflicting irreparable disaster upon
the French arms.
To Louis XIV’s idea the war should be defensive at all points except in
Germany, whither the elector of Bavaria summoned the French. Boufflers
was sent to the Netherlands to oppose Marlborough, who commanded the
Anglo-Batavian army; Catinat to Italy to shut the entrance to the
Milanese upon Prince Eugene and the imperials; Villars to Germany to join
the elector and march upon Vienna.[145]
WAR OF THE SPANISH SUCCESSION: THE FRENCH VICTORIES (1701-1704 A.D.)
For three years (1701-1704) the successes balanced each other. However,
Marlborough penetrated, in 1702 into the Netherlands in spite of
Boufflers, who with two armies on his hands did not know how to manœuvre
between them and abandoned without combat the places on the Maas as far
as Namur; at least he saved Antwerp the following year by the victory of
Eeckeren over the Dutch. In 1701 Prince Eugene descended into Lombardy
in spite of Catinat, who had a superior force, but who, badly obeyed and
perhaps betrayed by some Spanish officers, did not prevent him swooping
down from the Tyrol. Eugene threatened the whole line of the Adige, and
crossed that river without resistance at Castelbaldo on the plain, while
Catinat was waiting for him at Rivoli in the mountains. He forced the
passage of the Blanc canal in a fight at Carpi, July 9th, when Catinat
might again have stopped him; but the marshal, confused by manœuvres
as bold as they were able, retired behind the Mincio and further still
behind the Oglio which opened the Milanese to the enemy. The court
degraded him and gave his army to Villeroi.
This protégé of Madame de Maintenon was a good courtier but a bad
general. From the very first he wanted to take the offensive. He
recrossed the Oglio hoping to surprise Eugene at Chiari, but the duke of
Savoy kept the imperials informed of all his movements, and Villeroi,
surprised himself, was beaten in 1701.
However, the enemy could advance no farther, so long as it did not
have the stronghold of Mantua. Villeroi let the count de Tessé make a
brilliant defence there and took up winter quarters in Cremona. Once
while he was sleeping in supposed security he was awakened by sudden
firing. He dressed in haste, rushed from his lodging, and fell among
an Austrian squadron. It was Eugene, who was making a sudden attack on
Cremona. He would have succeeded had it not been for a regiment which
since four o’clock in the morning had been assembled for review by the
colonel. The enemy, arrived in the centre of the town, were driven back
through the gates; but they took the marshal with them (February, 1702).
[Ballads were sung in the streets of Paris to celebrate the double stroke
of fortune,--Cremona saved and Villeroi captured.] Vendôme replaced him
and for two years carried on a successful warfare against the imperials.
At first he forced them to retreat beyond the Mincio, which delivered
Mantua, then by a rapid march he went to seize their stores at Luzzara,
on the right bank of the Po (1702), so that he might approach the Tyrol.
At this moment the concealed treasons of the duke of Savoy changed to
open defection, the Bourbons having refused, very stupidly, to cede him
the Milanese in exchange for Savoy (1703). It was necessary for Vendôme
to turn against him to assure communication with France. He seized
the greater part of Piedmont and threatened Turin, but he no longer
threatened Austria.
[Sidenote: [1702-1703 A.D.]]
The same success in Germany. Catinat, called to the Rhine, did not
re-establish the reputation he compromised in Italy. He had allowed the
prince of Baden to cross the river and take Landau, Weissenburg, and
Haguenau. A diversion of the elector of Bavaria recalled the imperials to
Germany. Catinat, urged to follow them, dare not do so; but one of his
lieutenants, Villars, did. He attacked the prince of Baden in the Black
Forest near Friedlingen, and won his marshal’s baton on the field of
battle (October, 1702).[c] The victory was as absurd as that of Charles
the Bold at Montchery. The French infantry drove back the German and
then broke and fled in a panic. Villars was swept back with his men, and
was in utter despair when an officer rode up to say that the cavalry had
saved the day. It was not much to be proud of, for the German troops were
still in good order as they withdrew, but it gave the court its chance to
honour its favourite.[a]
The most decisive blow was struck at sea. Sir George Rooke and the duke
of Ormond made amends for an unsuccessful attack upon Cadiz, by forcing
the port of Vigo, and capturing and destroying the fleet of the enemy,
together with the galleons containing the treasures from South America.
The year 1703 passed in Flanders without any action of importance.
Marlborough took Bonn and Luxemburg, and manœuvred with a view to
capture Antwerp and Ostend, without success. More important movements
were taking place on the Rhine, where Villars commanded. The object of
the French king’s pushing the war into Germany, contrary to his usual
practice, was to succour his ally, the elector of Bavaria, who was so
sorely pressed by the imperialists that it was feared he would be obliged
to abandon the alliance of France. Villars employed the winter months
advantageously in making himself master of Kehl, opposite Strasburg. In
the spring he succeeded fully in breaking through the imperialist lines,
and joining the elector of Bavaria at Ratisbon; thus transferring the
seat of war from the Rhine to the Danube. If we are to credit Villars
himself, he conceived the idea of marching by Passau upon Vienna. The
elector, of a more sober school of tactics, could not share the French
general’s ardour. A difference of opinion, and subsequent coolness,
sprang up betwixt them. Even the more sage advice of Villars, to pass
the Danube and attack the imperialists before they could be joined by
an approaching army, was but reluctantly followed. The marshal was
obliged to shame his ally by threatening to make the attack alone. It
took place near Donauwörth, between Höchstädt and Blenheim (September,
1703), and the French were here victorious on a field which was destined
to be so fatal to them in the ensuing year. Unable to bring the elector
into his designs, Villars agreed to a plan to invade the Tyrol, and
open a communication through that country with the duke de Vendôme, who
commanded in Italy. The scheme was unsuccessful. Vendôme was kept in
check, not only by Prince Eugene, but by the duke of Savoy himself, and
the Tyrolese drove the elector from their valley. He made loud complaints
against Villars, and that able general in disgust threw up his command.[f]
[Sidenote: [1703-1704 A.D.]]
In November, 1703, the imperialists suffered a bloody defeat near Speier,
which gave Landau back to France. The victor was Tallard. He wrote to the
king, “Sire: Your army has taken more standards and flags than it has
lost common soldiers.”
THE CAMISARDS
This victory put an end to France’s success. Louis XIV sent Villars
against the revolting Protestants of the Cévennes, the _camisards_. These
unfortunate people had just seen Pope Clement XI renew the preaching of a
crusade against them (the bull of May 1st, 1703). Bewildered with terror
they accepted the help of England and the duke of Savoy, who were anxious
to foster civil war in the heart of France; and as they had been cruelly
treated, they revenged themselves in turn with similar cruelties.
Villars had it at heart to save the province and bring back these
exasperated men. “They are,” he said, “Frenchmen, very brave and very
strong--three qualities to be considered.” He used force against those
who persisted in fighting and was indulgent to those who put faith in his
word. He won over one of their leaders, Cavalier, and one campaign was
almost sufficient to re-establish peace in these provinces; but 100,000
men had perished in this horrible war.[c]
WAR OF THE SPANISH SUCCESSION--FRENCH REVERSES (1704-1713 A.D.)
The elector of Bavaria, however, remained master of the whole course of
the Danube as far as Passau. The small army of 20,000 men brought by
Villars, but now commanded by Marshal de Marchin [Marsin], swelled his
force, whilst Marshal Tallard, with 40,000 men on the Rhine, was ready
to march in the spring of 1704 and join Marchin and the elector. These
prospects made the court of Vienna tremble. That government was at the
same time pressed by the Hungarian insurgents, so that even the recall of
Prince Eugene from Italy with all the troops that could be spared from
keeping the duke of Vendôme in check, might not prove sufficient for
defending the Austrian capital--to such distress was the emperor reduced
in the spring of the year 1704.
It was then that Marlborough conceived the bold and generous design
of abandoning Flanders, that beaten field, so known and trodden by
commanders, so thickly sown with fortresses and cut with lines of defence
as to render decisive actions impracticable, and of marching on the
Danube, to the relief of the empire. Concealing his intentions, the duke
crossed the Rhine at Bonn, the Main near Frankfort, and marched towards
Bavaria.[f] At Mondelsheim near Heilbronn he had a conference with Eugene
and together they agreed upon the plan of campaign which was to bring the
victory of Blenheim and one of the greatest epochs in English military
history. The plan was Marlborough’s; he had laid it before William III
before his death and it had been rejected by the great Dutchman. Now
he staked all upon it and executed it in the face of the opposition of
England and Holland. From this time on, the greatest triumvirate of
Marlborough, Eugene and Heinsius direct the fortunes of the allies.[a]
The French had in the meantime mustered another army on the Rhine under
Villeroi. Him Prince Eugene undertook to observe, whilst Marlborough,
seconded by the prince of Baden, undertook to pass the Danube, penetrate
into Bavaria, and either force the elector to abandon the French
alliance, or punish him for his hostility to the empire. Marlborough lost
no time in manœuvring or counter-marches, but advanced straight against
the French and Bavarians, who were entrenched at Schellenberg, before
Donauwörth, a town that commands a bridge on the Danube. Marlborough’s
attack was decisive. The entrenchments were forced, the enemy were
defeated and fled, leaving many thousand men and several generals on
the field, as well as the passage of the Danube free. The English and
imperialists instantly poured over the river, crossed the Lech, and,
whilst the elector took refuge in Augsburg, until Marshal de Tallard
could reinforce him, Marlborough overran Bavaria to the gates of Munich,
ravaging and punishing the country for the hostilities of its chief. This
wretched and cruel system of warfare did not bring the elector to terms.
It irritated him, however, and drove his temper to seek vengeance in a
general engagement.
Unable to subsist south of the Danube in a country which he could not
occupy, and which he purposely ravaged, Marlborough withdrew to the
north of that river. Hoping to draw the enemy after him, he caused the
prince of Baden to lay siege to Ingolstadt. What he sought, took place.
The elector of Bavaria, anxious for revenge, and Tallard, who had joined
him, sharing his ardour, they passed the Danube, and posted themselves at
Höchstädt, on the very spot where Villars and the elector had in the last
year been victorious. Prince Eugene at the same time contrived to deceive
Villeroi, quitting his position, in front of that general, so as himself
to arrive with his army in time to join in the action, whilst Villeroi
remained perplexed or engaged in uncertain and tedious pursuit.
_The Battle of Blenheim_
On the morning of the 13th of August, 1704, the French and Bavarians drew
up before their camp. Their armies did not mingle, but remained separate,
that of Tallard on the right touching the Danube, that of Marchin and
the elector in continuance of the line on the left. Before the front of
Tallard was the village of Blenheim, on a rising ground, occupied by his
infantry. At some distance in advance of the French and Bavarians ran
a rivulet with marshy banks, on the other side of which were drawn up
the imperials, the Dutch and English; Marlborough commanding the latter
next the Danube, Prince Eugene the former. The elector committed a
capital fault in not posting his army near to the rivulet, so as either
to dispute its passage or to attack the enemy when they had partially
crossed it. But he did not suspect an intention to fight on the part
of Marlborough. Eugene began the action by attacking the elector and
Marchin, from whom he met with a stubborn resistance. Marlborough in
the meantime crossed the rivulet, and formed a strong body of infantry
opposite the centre of his antagonists. This centre was composed of
cavalry; for Tallard and the elector, remaining separate, had each drawn
up his army, according to rule, with its horse upon the wings.
But these wings, united, formed the centre of the combined army. And thus
a body of cavalry, destined by its nature to act offensively, was posted
in the principal, the central, the fixed position of the army. Tallard
no doubt reckoned that Marlborough would attack Blenheim, and, as Condé
would have done, spend a world of lives and heroic efforts to master the
position. Tallard knew this would cost hours; and he accordingly rode off
to the left to see how the elector was faring, whilst his antagonists
were drawing up, after having crossed the rivulet. Marlborough in the
meantime did despatch troops to attack Blenheim, with the view of
distracting Tallard from the principal movement. This was his advance
upon the centre, the weak, divided centre of cavalry. In fact it made
no resistance. Marlborough rushed in betwixt the elector and Tallard,
cutting the French and Bavarian line in two. This manœuvre decided the
victory. The elector with Marchin, taken in flank, gave up the advantage
they had gained over Eugene, wavered, retreated, fled; whilst Tallard,
hemmed betwixt the English and the Danube, ended by laying down their
arms and surrendering. As for the marshal himself, he was taken whilst
endeavouring to return from the elector’s division of the army to his
own. The entire glory of this victory was Marlborough’s; and he enhanced
it by that modesty and those attentions towards the vanquished which
had so redounded to the fame of the Black Prince after Poitiers. From
French writers we learn that Marlborough first set the example of
treating prisoners not only with clemency but with the politeness due
to misfortune; a trait that redeems those ravages in Bavaria which the
custom of war had unjustly sanctioned. The battle of Blenheim, in which
about 60,000 French and Bavarians against 52,000 of the allies were
engaged, cost to the vanquished 12,000 men killed, besides a greater
number made prisoners. The quantity of cannon, colours, and other
trophies, was immense. But its effects were greater than all. The French
armies were obliged to evacuate Germany altogether, abandon Bavaria, and
retire behind the Rhine. Marlborough proved to Vienna another Sobieski.
His victory re-established the imperial throne; nor was the house of
Austria ungrateful. [It created him a prince of the empire, while Queen
Anne made him a duke.]
[Sidenote: [1704-1706 A.D.]]
War was in the meantime raging in the Spanish peninsula. The archduke
Charles had been enabled by England to land with a respectable force in
that country, which he continued to dispute against Philip, the grandson
of Louis. Portugal had been won over to the side of England and the
archduke, and her aid proved of the greatest importance. It was singular
to observe in this campaign the armies of France and Spain commanded
by an Englishman, the duke of Berwick, while Ruvigny, created earl of
Galway, a native of France and a Huguenot _émigré_, commanded the English
forces. Sir George Rooke took Gibraltar in the same year in which the
victory of Blenheim was won.
Marlborough had delivered Germany from the French, and driven them
beyond the Rhine: he then turned his attention to the north, and aimed
at expelling them from those provinces of Spanish Flanders which they
had taken possession of in the beginning of the war. During the entire
campaign of 1705, the duke manœuvred in vain to attain this object by
bringing the French to action. A signal victory could alone enable him
to reduce a host of strong towns by a single blow; long watching for
this opportunity, it did not offer till the spring of the year 1706.
Marshal de Villeroi took the command in Flanders, and with orders to give
battle. Louis was weary of the tedious war, so many enemies besetting
him; the mere expense of resisting on every side being sufficient to
crush the monarchy. He was no longer in a condition to await the effect
of Louvois’ preparations, or Turenne’s manœuvres. Experience, sagacity,
skill no longer presided over either his councils or his armies: Louis
cried out for something decisive--for battle; like the gamester, whom
prudence has deserted, and who is anxious to stake all in a decisive
throw, which may relieve or ruin him. He bade Villeroi, therefore, give
battle. Had he even selected Villars for the important task! But Villars
was an indifferent courtier, being rude, independent, and proud. The
“short-geniused and superb Villeroi” was preferred, and despatched on the
difficult errand of giving battle to Marlborough.
_The Battle of Ramillies, 1706_
The French army, of about 80,000 men, reached the banks of the Mehaigne
near Ramillies, about half distance betwixt Namur and Tirlemont, on the
23rd of May, 1706. Despite the king’s order and his own ardour to fight,
it was Marlborough who marched to the attack. Villeroi was waiting to be
joined by Marchin; but, knowing himself to have a force stronger than the
English general, he resolved to await the attack, drawing up his army
in the position that chance had placed it, at an acute angle with the
Mehaigne. The French right wing was near this river, with the village
of Ramillies on a rising ground in front of it, precisely as Blenheim
had been with respect to the French army in the action called by that
name. Villeroi’s left was here covered by a little marshy river called
the Gheete, which rendered it unassailable indeed, but also rendered it
useless unless as supporting his right.
Marlborough did not arrive with his army till it was already past noon;
he reconnoitred, drew up in line corresponding to the French, and the
cannonade began. The duke in an instant had perceived that the Gheete
covering the enemy’s left rendered engagement on that side impossible; he
therefore drew all his force from that side, and drafting it in the most
concealed manner possible behind the troops about to attack Ramillies and
the French right, he concentrated his force on this point. This manœuvre
took a long time to execute, and yet Villeroi took no step to defeat it.
When Marlborough advanced, the French household cavalry charged him with
such impetuosity and valour as to break the attacking battalions, and
to endanger the duke himself; but the English, rallying in front, and
allowing these rash enemies to pass to the rear, where there was force
enough to deal with them, pushed on both upon Ramillies and upon the
French line behind it. The English, being in much superior numbers on
this point, owing to the inactivity of the French right, formed in one
unbroken line and charged, numbers breaking in between the intervals of
the French, who were drawn up in separate battalions, and taking them in
flank. Their rearguard failed to support those in front: the baggage,
it was said, impeded them: at all events the battle, though begun late,
proved ere sunset a decisive victory on one side and rout on the other.
The pursuit lasted the whole night, the fugitives suffering greatly in
their passage through the defile of Judoigne, which was blocked with
cannon and wagons. Here the day of Blenheim was renewed, the loss of
the French in killed and captive not being, however, so great. The
consequences were not less important; being the loss to France of all the
Spanish Netherlands, including Antwerp, Ghent, Bruges, Ostend, Brussels,
Mechlin, and Louvain. The fortresses of Menin and Dendermonde surrendered
also. Namur and Mons remained, the only towns unconquered.
The court was struck with consternation on learning of this second
defeat, of which the details were for a long time unknown. No courier
arrived, so that Louis was obliged to despatch Chamillart himself,
his minister, to Flanders. Villeroi was distracted, and had lost all
self-possession; everyone condemned a general whose imprudence had
placed the kingdom “within two fingers of its ruin.” Still Louis was
generous to his unfortunate general, and wrote him to give in his
resignation, in order to avoid the harshness of deprival. The duke
de Vendôme was recalled from Italy to take the command in Flanders;
and the duke of Orleans, the king’s nephew, succeeded Vendôme. This
last appointment surprised the court, which was aware of the extreme
repugnance felt by Louis to employ any of the princes of the blood; but
so unfortunate had proved his choice of late that the monarch resolved at
last to trust the defence of the kingdom to the zeal of his family.[f]
[Sidenote: [1706-1707 A.D.]]
Orleans found the army in Italy in great disorder, the generals divided
and insubordinate; Turin was besieged according to the plans of La
Feuillade [the most frivolous and incompetent of the favourites of
Louis], contrary to the advice of Vauban; the prince in irritation turned
over his powers to Marshal de Marchin. Prince Eugene, who had effected
his junction with Victor Amadeus, encountered the French army between the
Dora and Stura rivers. Orleans was seriously wounded at the battle of
Turin, September 7th, 1706; Marchin was killed and discouragement seized
the generals and the troops. The siege of Turin was raised and before the
end of the year almost all the places were lost and Dauphiné threatened.
Victor Amadeus refused to agree to a special peace and in March, 1707,
the prince of Vaudemont, governor of the Milanese for the king of Spain,
signed a capitulation at Mantua and sent back to France the troops
that still remained there. The imperials were masters of Naples. Spain
possessed nothing more in Italy.
Philip V had been threatened with the loss of Spain as of Italy. In the
past two years the archduke Charles of Austria under the name of Charles
III, with the support of England and Portugal, disputed the crown with
the young king. Philip V had lost Catalonia and had just failed in an
attempt to retake Barcelona, which had surrendered to Lord Peterborough.
The road to Madrid was cut off; the army was obliged to pass through
Roussillon and Béarn to resume the campaign. The king shut himself up in
the capital whither he was conducted by Marshal Berwick, a natural son
of James II; but Philip could not remain in Madrid, threatened by the
enemy. He betook himself to Burgos. The English entered the capital and
proclaimed Charles III.
But this was too much. The Spaniards could not allow an Austrian king
to be imposed upon them by heretics and the Portuguese. The cities
arose; a handful of cavalry was sufficient to enable Berwick to regain
possession of Madrid, and the king returned on the 4th of October amid
the acclamations of the people. Charles III now held only Aragon and
Catalonia in Spain. The French garrison, unoccupied since the evacuation
of Italy, came to the assistance of the Spaniards.
Louis XIV had made his grandson understand that a great sacrifice would
be necessary to obtain the peace he believed would soon be due to their
peoples. The Dutch refused their mediation. The campaign of 1707 was
signalled in Spain by the victory of Almansa, won on the 15th of April
by Marshal Berwick over the Anglo-Portuguese army and by the taking
of Lerida which surrendered on November 11th to the duke of Orleans.
In Germany Villars drove the enemy from the banks of the Rhine,[146]
advanced into Swabia, and ravaged the Palatinate, levying contributions
on the country of which he openly kept a part for himself.
[Sidenote: [1707-1708 A.D.]]
The inexhaustible elasticity and marvellous resources of France had
somewhat revived hopes in 1707. An invasion of Provence by Victor Amadeus
and Prince Eugene, a check before Toulon and their retreat, precipitated
by a rising of the peasants, had irritated the allies. Attempts at
negotiation at the Hague undertaken by the king remained without
result.[i]
But the emperor made a treaty of neutrality for Italy, and that brought
to the Rhine frontier the soldiers in Italy.[a] The allies hoped to
reduce the king lower; and certainly the prospects of France were never
more gloomy. The finances were in the greatest disorder. Chamillart had
the management of both war and finance departments: the exertion, united
with ill success, was too much; it was killing him. He wrote a piteous
letter to this effect, tendering his resignation to the king: Louis
read it, and writing on the margin of the letter, “Well, we will perish
together,” sent it back to the minister. One active genius, nevertheless,
was employed at this time to provide a remedy for the poverty of the
government, and a reform in the financial system: this was Vauban, the
celebrated engineer. The product of his labours was a plan for abolishing
the numerous and intricate branches of taxation, and substituting in its
place one uniform tax on property. He proposed to take a tenth of its
yearly value, which he called a _dîme royale_. This simple mode would
have proved the ruin of the financiers, the farmers of the revenue, and
the pensioners, that were paid out of divers intricate receipts ere they
reached the treasury. The scheme of Vauban was set aside; and paper
money now made its appearance in France for the first time.[f] The use
of credit was not understood, however, in France as it was being learned
in England. The establishment of the Bank of England, which enabled the
small kingdom to use all her resources without undue strain or present
exhaustion, had no parallel in France, where finances were managed
in secret councils of the king, and the nearest approach to national
banking was to anticipate future revenues to the utmost limit. To meet
or guarantee these anticipations, more imposts must be levied; more
distress and suffering resulted. In England the war furnished people with
a safe and new means of investment. In France the absence of a regular
institution of credit prevented that use of its resources which was to be
the astounding achievement of the Bank of France two centuries and a half
later.[a]
Despite his distresses, Louis was not inactive. He fitted out an
expedition for the pretender to Scotland, which failed. Funds were
wanting to supply the armies. Desmarets, who had succeeded Chamillart,
told the monarch that it was impossible to obtain money, except from
Samuel Bernard the banker. Louis saw Bernard, asked him to Marly, and
showed him the wonders of the place with a condescension that made the
courtiers stare. Bernard was so set beside himself by the honour, that
he declared he would rather see himself ruined than the empire of so
gracious a monarch in want; and the loan was instantly effected.
Villars commanded with his usual activity and success on the Rhine
in 1708, whilst the duke of Burgundy, grandson to Louis, aided by
Vendôme, commanded against Marlborough in Flanders. The allies had
not troops sufficient to garrison the numerous towns which they had
taken in Flanders, and which were far more inclined to French rule
than to the Dutch and English. Ghent and Bruges were, owing to these
causes, surprised. Emboldened by success, the French pushed across the
Schelde towards Brussels with rather uncertain intentions. Hearing
that Marlborough was approaching, they retired, and invested Oudenarde,
which intercepted the passage on the Schelde betwixt the French towns
and Ghent. They hoped to take it ere Marlborough could arrive. But that
general making forced marches, the French at his approach decamped from
before Oudenarde to retire to Ghent. The duke reached them on their
retreat, and a partial action took place, in which the French were
routed, and driven, with great loss, back to Ghent. The dukes of Vendôme
and Burgundy had a serious difference and quarrel on the field. Whilst
the commanders were squabbling, their army was beaten. The prince Eugene
then invested Lille, a bulwark not yet reduced. Lille surrendered in
October, 1708: with it fell Ghent and Bruges; and, with the exception of
one or two towns, the frontier of France lay completely open. [This was
the darkest hour for Louis XIV. Even the capital seemed no longer safe.]
[Sidenote: [1708-1709 A.D.]]
The year 1709 commenced by one of the most rigorous winters ever known.
The populace began to clamour under present sufferings, and with the
prospects of still greater. Seeing the disastrous and disturbed state
of the population, the parliament thought proper to assemble in the
great chamber, to consider the state of things. It was proposed to
appoint deputies to visit the provinces, buy corn, and watch over the
public peace. It was a bold attempt under Louis XIV. He reprimanded the
parliament, and told them that they had as little to do with corn as with
taxation. The magistrates obeyed, and were silent.
In such a state of threatened famine, aggravated by the oppression of
war, commerce remained at a stand: money was no longer forthcoming.
Bernard, the great banker, became a bankrupt. Even the insufficient
revenue could not be collected; and an adulteration of the coin was
had recourse to as the only expedient. Louis despatched the president
Rouillé to Holland to sue for peace; and soon after the marquis de Torcy,
minister, he might be called, of foreign affairs, was sent on the same
humiliating errand. The states of Holland, or their agents, here repaid
the French king all his past insults and pride. His envoys and his offers
were slighted, yet these last were sufficiently ample. Louis consented
to abandon his grandson the king of Spain, reserving for him merely
Naples. The states refused even Naples. Torcy offered them towns to form
a barrier in the Netherlands. In this nothing less than Lille and Tournay
would content them. They demanded Strasburg and Landau, tantamount to
Alsace, and the demolition of Dunkirk. Louis consented to demolish the
port of Dunkirk, as also the fortifications of Strasburg. In short, the
demands of the allies went not only to reduce France to what it was at
the accession of Louis, but prince Eugene claimed to keep possession
of his conquests in Dauphiné. Moreover, the allies insisted not only
upon the French king’s abandoning his grandson, but upon his aiding to
dethrone him. “If I am to continue warring,” replied Louis, “I had rather
fight my enemies than my children.”
The negotiations were thus broken off. The monarch gained much by them.
He showed his sincere desire for peace; and now making known, in a
printed appeal to his subjects, the terms that he had offered and that
had been rejected, the national feeling was roused to indignation.
The rich sent their plate to the mint, the king and royal family not
excepted; the poor hurried to the armies; and Louis was in a condition to
face his inveterate foes. The obduracy of Marlborough, of Prince Eugene,
and of the Dutch was certainly impolitic; for Spain might in one campaign
have been reduced, the French remaining neutral. France, herself, offered
to make every fair concession; and the commanders, in refusing, might
well incur the reproach of being actuated by selfish views, if the state
of distress in France had not warranted any hopes or pretensions on
their part. A great portion of the court of Versailles itself was for
abandoning Philip V, and withdrawing the troops from Spain; a measure
which did take place in part, owing, however, to a quarrel betwixt Madame
de Maintenon and the princess Orsini.
Meantime the allies had entered the field, well supplied from the copious
magazines of Holland. The French army, in a state of starvation and
nudity, opposed them. Its commander was the marshal de Villars. He was
indignant at the arrogance of the confederates, and the despondency of
the court: it was he who roused the drooping spirits of Louis and of his
ministers, and who alone preserved a confidence in the French soldiery
and in the fate of arms. Villars appears to be one of the truest and
finest specimens of the French soldier: he was ardent, bold, and valiant;
qualities which he enhanced by an air and habit of boasting. Full of
resources, he never lost confidence in himself, firmly believing that
neither Marlborough nor any other general could contend with him. At the
same time he was blunt and rude; could not brook to be commanded; too
independent to be a courtier, all ministers hated him and the butterflies
of the court joined them. “I am going to fight your enemies,” said he to
the monarch, as he was departing for a campaign; “I leave you amongst
mine.”
_The Battle of Malplaquet (1709 A.D.)_
The duke of Marlborough and Prince Eugene had taken Tournay, and now
menaced Mons. Villars advanced by the road from Valenciennes to succour
it, and posted himself to the right of the road, in an interval betwixt
two woods, near Malplaquet. By advancing, he might have routed Prince
Eugene, who was at first inferior in numbers; but Marlborough coming up,
the two generals determined to attack Villars, who on his side, anxious
to measure himself with them and secure an advantage, had covered his
strong position by entrenchments and _abatis_, or trees felled and thrown
with their branches towards the enemy. The envoys of the Dutch states
dissuaded Marlborough from fighting; and they were right. Mons was in the
rear of the allied army, and Villars was in no condition to disturb its
siege, without at least quitting his entrenchments. Marlborough, however,
accustomed to conquer, somewhat undervalued his enemies, and resolved on
the attack.
The battle of Malplaquet was fought on the 11th of September. Each wing
of the French was in a wood, covered and entrenched, whilst the centre,
occupying the interval, had taken scarcely less care to cover itself.
Opposite the French centre, however, was a farm and a little wood, which
Prince Eugene occupied, and filled with troops that did not appear. The
action began on the wings, Marlborough charging Villars and driving him
back after a struggle. To support himself, Villars drew reinforcements
from the centre, and was making fresh head against the English, when
a ball struck his knee, and incapacitated him from commanding. Prince
Eugene, watching his opportunity, seized the moment that Villars had
weakened his centre, and, leading his infantry from the farm and wood,
rushed on the centre, and broke it, carrying their entrenchments. This
was victory. In the meantime, the Dutch attack on the other wing, where
Boufflers commanded, was defeated. Despite the valour of the young prince
of Orange, he could not establish himself in the wood or within the
entrenchment; and he was driven back.
[Sidenote: [1709-1711 A.D.]]
But the success of Boufflers was to no purpose. The French left and
centre were broken; and all that its victorious right could accomplish
was to cover the retreat, and prevent Malplaquet from being converted
into the same rout as Ramillies. The allies lost a prodigious number of
men in the attack of the woods and entrenchments. The number of French
slain was much less. Villars, in consequence, was as proud as if he had
gained the battle. “If God should grant us another such defeat, our
enemies would be destroyed,” wrote he to Louis. He afterwards boasted
that but for his wound he would have won the victory: Voltaire, who
was present, remarks that few believed the boast. Mons surrendered
immediately. This was the last victory of Marlborough.
In the next campaign, indeed, he showed his decided military superiority
to Villars, by breaking through lines that the marshal had declared
impregnable, and this without losing a man. But whilst France, with
the languor of an exhausted but still valiant combatant, was warding
off these blows, which the Dutch, in their anxiety for capturing towns
and forming a barrier, prevented from being straightforward and vital,
fortune was pleased to prostrate Marlborough, and rescue Louis from ruin
by the means of a canting clergyman and an obscure woman, who rose to
court favour. Sacheverell and Mrs. Masham effected what all the warriors
and statesmen of Versailles despaired to do. Marlborough was overthrown,
and with him England’s inveteracy and force.
Previous to affairs taking this unexpected turn, the situation of Louis
was desperate. Again he sent envoys to sue for peace, and they were
treated with the same contempt. Sympathy is here excited for the monarch,
struggling bravely not for his conquests but for his crown and country.
Louis on this occasion showed a spirit that more entitled him to the
name of Great, than all his early triumphs. What were his intentions, in
case of the war’s continuing, and of Marlborough’s invading France? He
has himself recorded them in a letter to Villars: “I reckoned,” said he,
“on going to Péronne or St. Quentin, gathering there every disposable
troop, wherewith to make a last effort with you, that we might perish
together; for never could I remain a witness of the enemy’s approaching
my capital.” This, indeed, breathes the pride of Louis XIV, but at the
same time his magnanimity and heroism. The battle of Villaviciosa, gained
by the French over the Austrian party in Spain, revived his hopes; the
disgrace of Marlborough, and the blunted hostilities of England, restored
him to security and confidence.
[Sidenote: [1711-1712 A.D.]]
Whilst the clouds in the political sky were thus clearing up for Louis, a
mass of private misfortune, almost unexampled, fell upon him. His pride
had been brought low. He was now stricken in his nearest affections: his
only son, the dauphin, died of the smallpox, April 14th, 1711. The son
of this prince became, in consequence, heir-apparent to the crown. The
greatest hopes were entertained of this youth. He had been the pupil
of Fénelon. Though naturally most violent and extreme in his passions
and temper, a sense of religion had worked a reformation in him, and he
became forbearing, pious, just. His reign promised to be a golden one for
France. Such was the young duke of Burgundy. His duchess [Marie Adelaide
of Savoy] was of a character as rare. With the most buoyant spirits
and the aptest wit, she was the delight of her royal grandfather, who
could not take a journey without her; and with him she took all kinds of
liberties. It was she who remarked, on hearing him speak of the triumphs
of Queen Anne’s reign, that “queens reigned more prosperously than kings;
because under a queen men governed, and women under a king.”
This prince and princess were both carried off suddenly by some unknown
disease [the former on February 18th, the latter on February 12th, 1712];
possibly by the smallpox, which was then universally prevalent and fatal:
but none of the external marks of that malady appeared on them. The title
of dauphin fell, within a very short time, upon a third head [the duke of
Brittany]; and it too was carried to the grave on March 8th. The second
child of the late duke of Burgundy, the duke of Anjou, was then at nurse,
and about two years old. The same malady seized it; and it was saved,
probably, by its superintendent, who would not permit either bleeding
or emetic to be employed--the favourite remedies of the time for every
ailment. This infant lived, and soon after became Louis XV.
Popular belief could not assign so many deaths of such important
personages to the cause of nature or disease. They were attributed to
poison; and the physicians, either through alarm and ignorance, or to
excuse their want of skill, corroborated, all save one blunt man, the
same opinion. Who could be guilty of such crimes? All eyes turned towards
the duke of Orleans, nephew of Louis. His life was profligate, his
character reckless, and his pride seemed to be to brave public opinion.
The king, with his wonted jealousy, had kept the prince from all high or
martial employ, except on one or two occasions. In Italy he had shown
courage. In Spain, contemning the dullness of Philip V, who at that time
had meditated retiring to the Indies, he had intrigued, it was averred,
to take his place. This put him in disgrace at court.
Even his studies gave handle to calumny. Chemistry was what he most
delighted in, and in this pursuit he was said to be actuated by an unholy
curiosity to read and influence his future destinies. Of a sarcastic
spirit, that despised and mocked humanity, the duke perhaps encouraged
these opinions of him in order to cater to his own amusement. The cry of
suspicion was now serious. The court entertained it. The people clamoured
about the Palais Royal, and were only prevented by the police from
breaking in and tearing the “poisoner” in pieces. To such accusers the
duke scorned to justify himself. He sought, however, an interview with
the king, who, worn with sorrow and tormented with suspicion, granted it.
Orleans demanded to be sent to the Bastille, confronted with witnesses,
and tried. Louis for answer could but shrug his shoulders. The monarch’s
mind was paralysed with his misfortune. The duke’s teacher of chemistry
was arrested, and there the matter ended. Posterity seems to have
acquitted Orleans of the crime; but his contemporaries, more credulous,
were far from resigning themselves to the same opinion. Some indeed
accused the house of Austria; and the absurdity of this supposition,
upheld by many creditable persons, has the effect of invalidating the
other. But none at that time dared to doubt the agency of poison.
_Battle of Denain (1712 A.D.)_
[Sidenote: [1712-1714 A.D.]]
Conferences for peace had opened at Utrecht in the commencement of
1712. It was no longer Marlborough but the duke of Ormonde, who now
commanded in Flanders. He concluded a suspension of hostilities with the
French; and Villars, delivered from the English, undertook to strike
a blow against the prince Eugene. That commander besieged Landrecies,
communicating with his magazines through the entrenched camp of Denain.
Villars, pretending to assault the besieging army round Landrecies, made
a side march suddenly, broke into the fortified lines, called arrogantly
by the imperials the road to Paris, and advanced upon Denain. His
officers cried for fascines to fill up the ditch. “Eugene will not allow
you time,” cried Villars, “the bodies of the first slain must be our
fascines.” They advanced, stormed the camp, which was commanded by Lord
Albemarle, a Dutch general, and carried it ere the prince could arrive.
This gallant action roused the spirits and fortunes of the French, and
gave weight to their efforts at Utrecht. By their own writers Denain is
almost swelled into comparison with Ramillies; its success is said to
have saved the kingdom. The defection of the English, under their tory
minister, from the grand alliance was, however, the true and only cause
of their safety. Without it Villars could not have won the day of Denain,
nor Louis made peace at Utrecht on any terms less than the abandonment of
the crown of Spain by the house of Bourbon.
TREATIES OF UTRECHT AND RASTATT (1713-1714 A.D.)
In April, 1713, the plenipotentiaries of France signed the Treaties
of Utrecht with England, Holland, and Savoy. The former country was
gratified by the demolition of the port of Dunkirk, the cession of
Gibraltar and Minorca, together with Newfoundland, Hudson Bay, and
the island of St. Christopher’s. Spain remained to Philip V on his
renouncing forever all right of succession to the crown of France.
The English ministry endeavoured to render this unwelcome part of the
treaty palatable to the parliament by a number of advantages stipulated
in favour of British commerce, which, however, as savouring of free
trade, and inimical to the connection with Portugal, failed of being
well received. The duke of Savoy, in addition to his paternal dominions
already recovered by him, had Sicily thrown into his lot.
The treaty with Holland was but provisional till the following year.[f]
The emperor and the empire alone remained outside the general peace.
War was resumed in Germany and on the Rhine. Villars seized Speier and
Kaiserslautern, and laid siege to Landau. Landau capitulated August 20th,
and on September 30th Villars entered Freiburg; the citadel surrendered
November 13th. The imperials now began to make pacific overtures;
Villars and Prince Eugene were charged with the negotiations. The peace
was finally signed at Rastatt March 6th, 1714.[i] The Rhine was here
acknowledged the frontier line on the side of Alsace. The elector of
Bavaria was restored to his dominions. The emperor, in lieu of Spain,
received Naples, Milan, and Sardinia, together with Spanish Flanders,
in which, however, the Dutch retained the right of garrisoning the
principal towns, forming, as it was called, the barrier against France.
Namur, Tournay, Menin, and Ypres were amongst these. Lille and French
Flanders remained to Louis. He retained this important conquest, as well
as Alsace; advantages which the triumphs of Villars materially tended to
gain. The title of the king of Prussia was acknowledged, and a certain
accession of territory procured to him. The Protestant succession to the
throne of England was also guaranteed by France.
One of the principal difficulties of the treaty was to procure from the
kings of France and Spain a valid renunciation of their mutual rights
to either crown, so as to obviate the possibility of their being united
upon one head. The verbal renunciation, or even the oath of the monarch,
was found insufficient, and not without reason, seeing how lightly the
declaration of Louis XIV on his marriage had been set aside. The English
required the guarantee of a national assembly corresponding to their
parliament, that, in short, of a states-general. Louis was, however,
more indignant and hurt at this suggestion than at the most arrogant
demands of the allies. He represented the nullity of the states, and his
own omnipotence. Still his sovereign word was not sufficient. Different
modes were suggested. Saint-Simon advised the calling of an assembly of
dukes to affix their signatures. Others proposed the entire peerage:
but Louis was as jealous of noble as plebeian, and could not tolerate
the aristocracy except in the garb and in the submissive office of a
courtier. All the guarantee he could give was the solemn registry of
the renunciation in his parliament or assembly of legists; and even to
this he took care to invite the peers with less than the ordinary form
and solemnity.[f] The treaties of Utrecht and Rastatt mark a distinct
epoch in European history. The age of the Habsburg supremacy, which had
ended in the great Peace of Westphalia, was succeeded by that of Bourbon
predominance; and Utrecht and Rastatt mark its fall as decisively as the
Peace of 1648 had ended the dreams of Habsburg ambition. For a while the
French monarchy still stands erect, and by the splendour of its show it
still imposes upon the eye. But its tottering structure is doomed when
the first great shock of revolution is felt. From now till 1789 the
main interest in the history of France is the trend toward the new era
which was to replace the old, worn, battered, and ruined edifice of the
absolute monarchy with a reconstructed society.[a]
[Illustration: EUROPE AFTER THE TREATIES OF UTRECHT AND RASTATT
(1713-1714)]
Louis now began to feel his health seriously decay. The hour of his
dissolution could not be distant. The future fate of his family and
kingdom occupied his thoughts. Of his legitimate descendants but one
feeble infant remained, with the exception of the king of Spain, who
by his renunciation was set aside from inheriting the crown of France.
The duke of Orleans thus filled the place of heir presumptive, and
from his station aspired to the regency. Louis dreaded to trust the
infant Louis XV to the keeping of this prince, who bore the worst of
characters. Though unconvicted, suspicion still rested upon him of having
poisoned his relatives. Louis did him more justice in calling him a
_fanfaron de crimes_, a braggard of crimes. But still the objection in
the royal breast was not removed. Actuated by these motives, as well
as by tenderness for the children born to him of Madame de Montespan,
Louis issued a decree, giving to the illegitimate princes the full
rights of the legitimate blood, calling them in succession to the
throne immediately after the young dauphin. Nothing marks the extreme
submissiveness of the parliament more than their registry of this
decree. But this obsequiousness was evidently owing to the inutility of
disturbing the last moments of the monarch. Louis completed this attempt
in favour of his illegitimate children by a testament which gave to the
duke du Maine, the eldest of these princes, the command of the household
troops and the chief power during the minority.[f]
DEATH OF LOUIS XIV
[Sidenote: [1714-1715 A.D.]]
Since the summer of 1714 Louis XIV, already cruelly shaken in health in
1712, had been gradually failing. His chief physician, Fagon, himself
enfeebled by age, did not perceive in time the slow fever which was
undermining the king’s health and did not take advantage of the resources
still offered by that powerful constitution. After the 11th of August,
1715, Louis XIV did not again leave the château of Versailles. The fever
increased, sleep vanished. On the 24th one of the king’s legs which
had been causing him acute pain showed marks of gangrene. The next day
Louis received the sacrament with calm and firmness. He manifested some
scruples respecting what he had been made to do in regard to the bull
_Unigenitus_.[147] He would have liked to see his archbishop, Noailles,
once more, and to be reconciled to him; means were found to prevent this.
On the 26th he bade farewell in moving terms to the principal personages
of his court. He also took leave of the prince and princesses, addressed
kindly words to the duke of Orleans as though to banish evil designs from
his heart if he should have conceived any, and then sent for the dauphin,
a beautiful child of five years of age, sole relic of all his legitimate
line in France.
“My child,” he said to him, “you will soon be the king of a great realm.
Never forget your obligations towards God; remember that you owe him all
that you are. Try to preserve peace with your neighbours. I have been too
fond of war. Do not imitate me in that, nor in the too great expenditure
which I have made. Lighten the burdens of your people as soon as you can
and do that which I have had the misfortune not to do myself.”
Touching, but vain words! The successor of Louis XIV was not reserved
for a work of reparation but for a work of dissolution and ruin. On the
morning of the 28th the king said to Madame de Maintenon that in leaving
her he was consoled by the hope that they would soon meet again. She
did not respond to this idea of meeting in eternity and appeared to see
in this sign of affection only a token of egoism. Thinking the end was
near, she set out that very evening for St. Cyr; the next day Louis,
being still fully conscious, asked for her; she returned, but only to
leave again finally on the evening of the 30th, thus abandoning on his
death-bed the man who had so constantly loved her. Her excuse was in
her extreme weariness of the existence which Louis had imposed on her.
He had overwhelmed her with his absorbing personality; for more than
thirty years she had not had a single day to herself; the necessity of
perpetually finding new resources to occupy and interest this active but
infertile mind, accustomed to live, so to speak, on the substance of
others, had exhausted and crushed her.
Louis was now only conscious at moments. The day of the 31st of August
passed in this manner: the gangrene was gaining on him. In the night
Louis revived to recite with the clergy the prayers for the dying. He
repeated several times in a firm voice: “_Nunc et in hora mortis--Mon
Dieu, aidez moi!_” then he entered on a long death-agony. On the 1st of
September, at a quarter past eight in the morning, the king drew his last
breath. He had lived seventy-seven years, reigned seventy-two, governed
fifty-four. It was the longest as well as the greatest reign in the
history of France. It was not one man, it was a world that was ended.
Before descending, in the train of feudalism, into that night of the
past in which one after another the perishable forms of eternal society
are plunged, the monarchy, that symbolic form of national unity, had
been manifested in a supreme personification which will remain forever
engraved in the memory of peoples. Louis XIV is, and will remain, the
king, the royal type, for foreign nations as well as for France. All that
monarchy, after having brought under one yoke the divergent elements of
the multiplex world of the Middle Ages, succeeded in producing in the
fullness of her power, she produced in Louis the Great. Flourishing in
her prime with the Great King, she grew old with him. The signs of decay
multiplied; the gangrene was manifested in her as in him and, if monarchy
did not die the same day as the monarch, the silent work of decomposition
was no longer to be arrested in her organs. We are about to watch the
dissolution of that vast frame until the day in which the real unity, the
sovereign nation, shall for the first time break through the worn-out
covering in its own true essence, without figure and without symbol.
France prospered under Louis XIV so long as he continued in the ideas
of Richelieu; she suffered, then declined, when she became unfaithful
to them. He himself condemned the excess of his wars and expenditure;
his expenditure on luxury and art, though doubtless very considerable,
has been much exaggerated by tradition; as to his wars, they were, some
justifiable, others excusable in their principle, but not in the inhuman
character which he allowed to be imprinted on them, nor, at times, in
the fashion in which they were conducted politically. France desired her
natural completion, and, in the respective condition of the nations,
the action of France to achieve her retransformation into the larger
territory of Gaul was enough to overthrow the equilibrium of Europe and
to provoke coalitions. Louis XIV committed the error of claiming to be
able to do still more, and, above all, of making the claim believed.
The two gravest charges which he merited are not those on which he
condemned himself; they were: in economics, that of having wrought harm
and rejected the remedy, ruined the finances and refused the radical
reform which might have restored them; in religion, that of having
destroyed the great work of Henry IV which Richelieu had continued. But
the responsibility of the revocation may well be divided: the revocation
of the Edict of Nantes was the logical consequence of monarchy according
to Bossuet, and this great crime against the state condemns the monarchy
still more than the monarch. The more we blame the monarchical theory
as contrary to the true ends of man and of the citizen, the more we are
disposed to indulgence towards the prince who was carried away by this
theory as by an almost irresistible fatality.
When the New Era, which opened amid the tempests [of the eighteenth
century], shall have found its shape and position; when society, free
and democratic, shall be definitely founded and recognised; when parties
cease to seek weapons in history, the name of Louis XIV will no longer
excite the anger of the French people, as the expression of a hostile
principle; and his statue, alternately adored and broken, will finally
repose amid the great images of the national Pantheon. If the French
people do not forget the culpable and fatal errors of Louis, they will
also remember that Louis has deserved to be identified with the most
brilliant century yet seen in modern civilisation. France pardons
willingly, too willingly perhaps, all those who have loved her, even with
a selfish and tyrannical love--all those who have made her glorious,
even at the expense of her happiness; she is only implacable towards the
memory of those leaders who have degraded her.[e]
[Illustration: LOUIS XIV AT THE DEATH-BED OF JAMES II]
FOOTNOTES
[139] [It must be remembered however that the great opponent of France
took his title from the principality of Orange, which is now in the
department of Vaucluse by the Rhone, in southern France.]
[140] [Tökely was a Hungarian magnate--a Calvinist, who, implicated in a
conspiracy, had aroused a portion of Hungary against the emperor. Louis
XIV supported him in his war.]
[141] [As to the saying, “There are no more Pyrenees,” its history is
this. The ambassador to Spain, as reported by Dangeau, spoke these words:
“The journey became easy and presently the Pyrenees melted away,” which
the _Mercure_ on the following day rendered as follows: “What joy! There
are no more Pyrenees, they are levelled, and we are one.” However, the
phrase well expresses the situation and the aim of Louis XIV. If it did
not fall from his lips, it was in the minds of all.[c]]
[142] [This was done by Marshal de Boufflers in February, 1701, and
effected with the help of the elector of Bavaria, governor of these
provinces. Holland took fresh alarm at this act.]
[143] [Louis XIV at first won Portugal to his side, and, in return for
certain advantages, a treaty was signed with France and Spain on June
18th, 1701. But the provisions were not kept. Dom Pedro entered the
coalition in May, 1703.]
[144] [The elector Maximilian believed himself ill used by Austria, and
deserted the allies he had supported in the League of Augsburg. The
second treaty with France was signed March 9th, 1701. The elector of
Cologne, in spite of the trouble of 1688, also treated with Louis, and
threw open her territory to French troops. So did the bishop of Münster
and three other powers of the empire.]
[145] [Duclos calls the War of the Spanish Succession “The only _just_
one that Louis ever undertook.”]
[146] Villars’ achievements had been noteworthy for some time. In 1706
he raised the blockade of Fort Louis on the Rhine. In 1707 he forced
the lines of Stollhofen which, extending from Philippsburg to the Black
Forest, were regarded as the rampart of Germany.
[147] [The enemies of the Jansenists obtained a decree from the king,
interdicting a work entitled _Réflections Morales sur le Nouveau
Testament_ by Father Quesnel, which Cardinal de Noailles had already
approved of. Clement XI launched the bull _Unigenitus_ condemning one
hundred and one propositions extracted from the _Réflections Morales_.
Eight prelates headed by Noailles protested against the bull. The king’s
confessor, Le Tellier, urged the king to have Noailles deposed. The
affair dragged a long time at Rome. The king was about to bring the
affair to his bed of justice when he fell ill.]
[Illustration]
CHAPTER XXII. THE AGE OF LOUIS XIV:[148] ASPECTS OF ITS CIVILISATION
Augustus, Leo X, Louis XIV appear to us in the illumination of
art and poetry. Alexander, Cæsar, and Napoleon are greater, but
have they such a divine cortège?--ARSÈNE HOUSSAYE.[f]
[Sidenote: [1610-1715 A.D.]]
That development of French civilisation and letters which attained its
apogee in the second half of the seventeenth century, the progress
of science and the taste for art, was not the work of Louis XIV. The
movement was begun; Louis XIV had only to support it and give it a
particular direction.
In order to seek and determine the causes, it is necessary to go further
back. They will be found in the language, which became polished through
the aspiration of society, which was reformed after the religious
wars, in a better education which had reacted on manners, in a more
general education and one more appropriate to the time--in fact, in
the development of all the moral energies of France since Henry IV and
Richelieu. Those great and independent geniuses, Richelieu, Corneille,
and Descartes, gave the impulse, aroused writers or thinkers, and
inspired the best society with that love, that admiration of the
beautiful, which elevates the soul of a nation.
The cares of war and of power were far from engrossing all the attention
of Richelieu. He completed the construction of the Palais Cardinal, which
was one of the most sumptuous dwellings ever seen, and which during his
lifetime he bequeathed to the king, with the sole proviso that only a
prince should ever inhabit it. He likewise embellished his house at Ruel,
and his château at Richelieu in Touraine. He patronised Simon Vouet,
recalled Poussin from Rome, bought paintings of Lesueur and Philippe de
Champagne. He established the royal printing house, and tried, although
with little success, to re-establish the royal manufactures established
under the preceding reign and almost abandoned since then.
FOUNDATION OF THE FRENCH ACADEMY
In 1635 Richelieu conceived the idea of founding an association whose
mission should be the perfecting of the language, and which should be
the highest authority in the criticism of literary works submitted by
their authors. Boisrobert, Conrart, Chapelain, Rotrou, and the great
Corneille are counted among the founders of this association, which was
the Académie Française. The men of letters, until then placed only too
often in the “domesticity” of the great--a name then far removed from
the sense given to it to-day--by means of this association acquired more
independence and influence. Formerly they had flattered the powerful;
now they began to develop a power of their own and to be flattered in
their turn. The parliament made some difficulty about the incorporation
of the academy, because it had an invincible distrust of the cardinal’s
ideas, whose works seemed to it always despotic, and because it feared
the new company might be invested with too great privileges and with
jurisdiction. It was far from imagining that the academy was to become
one of the glories of France, in a time when Corneille led the list of
great French writers, when Descartes wrote the _Méthode_, when French
society was the most polished in Europe, when Europe already borrowed the
language of France, and took France for a model in everything.[b]
THE PATRONAGE SYSTEM
In the first thirty years of the seventeenth century royalty did not yet
seek to exercise any influence in intellectual matters. Richelieu is the
first to have had the idea of offering royal patronage to the “Nurselings
of the Muses.” He distributed a few pensions.[c]
Of all styles of literature the drama was most encouraged by Richelieu.
Until then it had hardly been more than a popular amusement; it now
became that of the most refined and most polished society. Doubtless,
the talent of Rotrou and the genius of Corneille bore the principal part
in this, but Richelieu aided them. His wish was to replace the ballets
and other ordinary diversions of the court by amusements of a nobler
sort, by tragedies and comedies of intrigue. He had a theatre in the
Palais Cardinal and another in his mansion at Ruel. He often had plays
represented there whose plan had been submitted to him. He gave advice to
authors, worked with them, and even wrote himself.
His patronage extended also to tuition and studies. An important
transformation was taking place in the schools. The reform of the
university under Henry IV had had the effect of substituting the study of
the great authors for that of scholasticism. Since then the teaching of
theology had been renewed; it is well known what brilliancy it gave to
the seventeenth century. The teaching of literature was not long delayed,
and it is not to be doubted that a more healthful direction of men’s
minds had largely contributed to prepare the intellectual superiority of
this century over those preceding it. Richelieu built the Sorbonne. He
favoured competition between the university and the Jesuits and showed
his usual superiority in discussing questions of education.
He thought moreover that liberal education was not for everybody, and
that the greatest number of families ought to prepare their children for
trade or for war. Therefore he founded at his own expense an academy,--a
military college for the education of the young nobility.
However, until the end of the Fronde, the court, filled with soldiers,
or given up to ambitious rivalries of the noble, full of intrigues
with Marie de’ Medici, of sadness with Louis XIII, of suspicions with
Richelieu, of agitations under Anne of Austria, could not assume to be
the supreme regulator of taste, the theatre of the arts, and impose rules
or regulations upon genius. After the Fronde it was different. The
refined elegance and magnificence of Mazarin, the brilliant festivities
of the first years of the personal reign of Louis XIV, the transformation
of the great into courtiers, the spirit of subordination substituted
for a spirit of independence, increased the importance of the court.
Gradually one became accustomed to look to it alone. It surrounded
royalty like a luminous circle, and its brilliancy made all else pale. It
became even a means of government. It contributed by its preponderance to
annul parliaments and other national bodies.
Louis XIV, who instinctively sought everywhere for aids to his grandeur,
understood how to nourish the brilliant society which surrounded the
persons and the works of the great writers and artists. He offered the
latter a magnificent theatre and unparalleled publicity. He united the
scattered forces into a mighty group, displaying their talents in a
strong light, making of them a majestic whole. He had all the qualities
necessary for this--disposition, taste, the feeling for the beautiful,
and particularly the sense of rule and harmony. He established a sort
of concert of the great writers, in the same manner as he put the great
ministers in harmony with each other.
From this time, with the striking uniformity, regularity, and discipline
which was the character of letters and arts under his reign, the men
of genius had full sway, nothing held them back. But their place was
determined in the great ensemble, and they felt they were obeying a law.
A great and noble harmony was established among literary efforts of the
most diverse character, as among the arts destined to compete in the
grandeur of the same edifice.
Less spontaneous, less audacious, perhaps even less original than in the
time of the preceding generation, literature attained a perfection under
Louis XIV which it never had to such a degree in any other epoch. It
attained this perfection because it addressed itself less to the king and
sovereign than to the flower of society grouped around him. The highest
society had never before formed such a public. Bred in a grand school
of admiration and surrounded by masterpieces, it evinced the greatest
interest in matters of intellect. Conversation was an art and a talent,
the literary taste an affectation of fashion, in fact a point of honour.
The women took part in the movement, and to such a degree that it is
to one of them that we owe most of our appreciation of it. Madame de
Sévigné[h] in her correspondence, so well named written conversation,
immortalised the society of the great century in painting it from life.[b]
Colbert took up the idea of pensions with more liberality and amplitude
than did Richelieu. He created the _feuille des pensions_, which was
a sort of pendant to the _feuille des bénéfices_. It was started in
1663 partly on the suggestion of Chapelain. Among those on the list
was Chapelain, who called himself “the greatest French poet that
has ever lived, and the one with the soundest judgment,” but whom
Boileau simply characterises as “the wealthiest of all the _beaux
esprits_”; also some of the great names of literature--Molière, the two
Corneilles, Racine, Fléchier, Mézeray, Quinault, Charles Perrault, later
Boileau himself, besides many mediocrities. Along with Frenchmen were
foreigners--Graziani, the littérateur; the jurisconsult Conring; Ferrari,
professor of oratory at the University of Padua; the erudites Böklerus,
Gevartius, Heinsius, and Vossius; mathematicians and astronomers,
such as Cassini of Bologna, Viviani of Florence, Huygens of the Hague
and Helvelius of Dantzic. Louis XIV did more than pension some of the
artists. He ennobled Lully, Le Nôtre, Mansart, and Lebrun. To the savants
Colbert gave not only money but means of working; for them he created
new chairs in the Jardin du Roi, built the Observatory of Paris, and
subsidised missions and scientific expeditions. He was the founder of the
_Journal des Savants_ which exists to-day.[149]
The Renaissance was above all things a period of freedom. The age of
Louis XIV is characterised by order and monarchical discipline. The
historians soon perceived that the king was a more exacting protector
than the lords of olden times. The latter, provided their families were
eulogised, left their clients perfect liberty in other matters, but the
history of Louis XIV’s ancestors was the history of the whole country,
and as his glory reached out in all directions, the historian was no
longer free in anything. Colbert let Mézeray know that if he wished
to keep his pension of 4,000 livres he would have to speak with more
discretion of the _gabelle_ and the _taille_ and to abstain from too
free reflections on the policies of former kings. Mézeray only half
understood, and half his pension was suppressed.
Assuredly the royal protection had its good effect, but there was caprice
in the king’s favours. For a sovereign to control letters and art
without making mistakes, he would have to be infallible and with a mind
to embrace and understand everything. But Louis XIV did not understand
everything and was often mistaken. When, in 1667, he forbade the funeral
eulogy of Descartes did he know that the latter was the most eminent
thinker of the age?
LITERARY CHARACTERISTICS
In the literary history of the seventeenth century a division must be
noted. Voltaire[i] has neglected it when he introduces into what he calls
the _Siècle de Louis XIV_ such dissimilar geniuses as Corneille and
Racine, Bossuet and Fénelon. But even while retaining this time-honoured
expression, it should be applied only to that period during which Louis
XIV’s personality, the prestige of his glory and the action of his laws
and institutions were predominant. Now during an entirely earlier period
of more than sixty years a whole group of writers was absolutely outside
his influence. Régnier, Rotrou, Corneille, Descartes, and Pascal, to
speak only of the greatest ones, had accomplished their labours before
the personal government of Louis XIV began. On the contrary Racine,
Bossuet, La Fontaine, and Boileau, and for the greater part of his work
Molière, belong to the generation which saw the splendour of Louis XIV,
and which disappeared from the scene before the decadence of the monarchy
had commenced. Finally La Bruyère, Fénelon, Vauban, and Bois-Guilbert,
without mentioning the great Protestant writers of France, are the
products of an entirely different period. In reality the true “century”
of Louis XIV did not last more than a quarter of that time, from 1661 to
1685.
The seventeenth century may thus be divided into three periods which
present certain common characteristics, and are also distinguished by
special characteristics. All three are equally a continuation of the
sixteenth-century Renaissance. The charm of antiquity revealed by the
humanists is still felt. The gods of the _littérateur_ are those of
Greece, or rather Greek gods under Roman names. If the French literature
of the seventeenth century had perished in some great cataclysm, and if
after a score of centuries some erudite Australian or American had found
some of its fragments, he might have believed that the contemporaries
of Louis XIV worshipped the same gods as the Athenians and the Romans.
However, the French, so smitten with antiquity, knew little about it.
They were, after all, so original, so French, and so steeped in their own
age that they showed a singular inability to imagine what was really the
civilisation of Athens and of Rome. Louis XIV’s contemporaries studied
Demosthenes, Plato, and Plutarch to no purpose; they got from them
nothing but a deification of the monarchy. They read the ancient authors
with keen pleasure, but it did not occur to them to do so in the light
of the conditions of ancient life, and they applied to them the same
rules of criticism as to the authors of their own day. Since journeys
to the East were at that time most infrequent, and no archæological
research had yet been undertaken, the age had no idea as to what were
the architecture, the furnishings, the costumes, and the manners of
antiquity. The French dramatic poets give the title of “prince” to
Agamemnon or Theseus, and addressed Phædra or Andromache as “madame,” as
though these personages had been their contemporaries.
In spite of the cult, well or ill understood, of pagan antiquity, no
century was so profoundly Christian as the seventeenth. The absence
of the marvellous, from a Christian point of view, in literary works
is explained not by indifference for Christianity, but by respect and
scruple. Corneille wrote _Polyeucte_ and other sacred pieces; but let
his _Cid_ be compared with those of the Spaniards; all the supernatural
is banished to such a degree that the type of the Castilian champion
is transformed and almost mutilated. Santiago no longer appears on the
battle-field to revive the hero’s courage. One of the rules of taste in
the seventeenth century is precisely to avoid a mixture of the sacred and
the profane.
Seventeenth-century literature chose its subjects from antiquity, from
contemporaneous society, from human psychology, but almost never from
nature. The world of letters no longer lived in the field as in the
sixteenth century; it lived in the cities, especially in Paris, or at
the court. Malherbe boasts of going to learn the real French language on
the place Maubert; Régnier, Chapelle, Bachaumont, and many others were
habitués of the Parisian _cabarets_, and in the narrow streets of the
capital formed, as we say nowadays, a literary Bohemia. Racan and some
others claimed to have composed _idylles champêtres_, but what is their
background? It is no more the French countryside than their shepherds and
shepherdesses are French peasants.
A strophe of Malherbe on the banks of the Orne, a few laboured
alexandrines of Boileau upon his country house and its trees; one fine
page of Honoré d’Urfé upon a valley of Forez--this is almost all that
Louis XIV’s contemporaries have to say about nature. They looked too much
into their ancient authors and too much at themselves to see it well. It
is for the same reasons that Le Nôtre was able to create that strange
and unreal nature in the gardens of Versailles, and that in painting the
genre of pure landscape is almost unknown in the seventeenth century.
As for the special characteristics in the first period--an Italian and
Spanish influence is perceptible. Corneille takes from Spanish history
the story of the _Cid_, and Molière that of _Don Juan_. After Louis XIV
assumed the government, the French borrowed almost nothing from their
neighbours. French taste is formed; it is original; it is exquisite.
The first period is a period of freedom; it continues the sixteenth
century. Literature has not yet felt the yoke of literary rules. All
forms are attempted--tragedy, comedy, and burlesque, and the three are
even combined without scruple.
The theatre, the Christian pulpit itself, have singular license.
Descartes creates a philosophy and Pascal polemics. On the contrary the
first twenty years of Louis XIV’s government are signalled at once by
the domination of rules and by the apotheosis of the king. Parnassus
has a legislator, Boileau, and a sort of Congregation of the Index, the
French Academy.[c]
SCIENCE
The seventeenth century was one of the great scientific ages of humanity.
It saw the birth of analytical geometry and of the infinitesimal
calculus, the formulation of the astronomical laws of Kepler and
Newton, and the workings of astronomical discovery. It witnessed the
first great stride of physics, the progress of optics and acoustics,
the invention of the barometer, the thermometer, the manometer,
the air-pump, the electrical machine; the first rudiments of the
steam-engine; the first researches on plant life, and the first attempt
at botanical classification. Anatomy and physiology were revolutionised
by the discovery of the circulation of the blood, of the chyliferous
and lymphatic systems, by the beginning of histology and microscopic
research. Medicine made progress in all its branches and was enriched by
new medicaments.
But much of this was accomplished outside of France. In mathematics the
French may place the names of Descartes, Pascal, and Fermat alongside
of Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and Leibnitz; but the great Keplerian and
Newtonian laws of universal gravitation; the great Leibnitzian theories
on the formation of our globe; the astronomic discoveries of Galileo,
Huygens, and Helvelius surpassed the work of Gassendi, Picard, Cassini,
Bouillaud, and Cassegrain. In physics, Pascal, Descartes, Mariotte, and
Denis Papin upheld the French name, but they have but one zoölogist[150]
(Claude Perrault also a physician and architect) to place alongside with
those of Italy, England, and especially Holland; in botany Tournefort let
himself be outdistanced by the English; in geology the French had but
Descartes and Maillet; in the medical sciences they had only Pacquet,
Duverney, and a few skilful practitioners. This comparative inferiority
of French science to art and letters proves that it needs an organisation
for work, and a liberality on the part of the public powers which at
that time it did not have. The yoke of authority, so harmful to free
research, was heavier in France than in the Protestant countries, where
scientific progress especially manifested itself. The French superiority
in mathematics is due perhaps to the fact that mathematics never had and
cannot have an Aristotle. Finally we must take into account the bent of
the French mind in that period when the people were above all artists,
orators, and moralists. “The physical sciences,” said Dacier at a later
date, “were little cultivated in an age which seems to find no charm but
in literature.” We might correct wherein this judgment goes perhaps too
far by this appreciation of Cuvier: he says that Francis I was the first
to make erudition flourish in France, Richelieu literature, and Louis XIV
science.
René Descartes, descendant of a noble family, was born in La Haye,
Touraine, in 1596. In 1612 he terminated his studies with the Jesuits at
La Flèche. The period between 1612 and 1629 was spent in travel, which
was followed by his stay in Holland. Just one year after the appearance
of the masterpiece of Corneille, _The Cid_, Descartes gave to the
world, in 1637, the _Discourse on Method_. This and his _Metaphysical
Meditations_ (1641) are his two chief works. In 1644 appeared his third
great work, _Principles of Philosophy_, in which is propounded his theory
of the world and the doctrine of Vortices. Descartes never married. In
1647 the French court granted him a pension; and shortly after he went to
the Swedish court, where he had been visited by Queen Christina.[a]
[Illustration: RENÉ DESCARTES
(1596-1650)]
France held it an honour to have given birth to René Descartes. While
still very young he solves certain famous mathematical problems; writes,
under the name of D’Abrégé, a treatise on music; and shuts himself up for
twenty years in a sort of retreat in Holland, where he devotes himself
with admirable assiduity to the research of truth, and composes those
works which are to have such an influence on the future progress, not
alone of science, but of civilisation. In 1629 he promulgates the law
of refraction, aspires to make clear the cause of celestial movements,
already demonstrated by Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler, by reducing
them all to a mechanical system. He conceives the idea of whirling
clouds of rarefied matter, in the centre of which he places the sun
and planets, supposing that the movement of the planets carries around
with them the satellites, and that planets and satellites are in turn
swept in a circular orbit round the sun. His theories seize upon the
popular imagination, and arouse keen enthusiasm; by what he calls his
system of “methodical doubting” he points out to humanity the true road
that leads to the intuitive perception of nature’s laws, and succeeds
in so impressing his lessons upon all minds that the absolute empire
given by the Arabs and their imitators to the theories of Aristotle--an
empire that would have been disavowed by that immortal man himself--is
completely destroyed. One of his aims is also to obtain command over
the human heart, that he may thereby fortify the basis of morality all
over the world, and to this end he gives forth his meditations on the
existence of God and the immortality of the soul.[q]
Meanwhile the theories of Descartes were invading France and all Europe.
In 1650, when occurred the death at Stockholm, at the age of fifty-four,
of the man who had given back to the modern world Pythagoras, Socrates,
and Plato, victory was assured, the science of philosophy was founded.
There are gaps and imperfections in the system which may expose it to
temporary eclipse, but as a whole it will never perish.[g]
Of the fifty-four years which Descartes thus passed on earth, more than
thirty were spent in a state of self-abnegation such as no anchorite
has ever emulated. It was little that his sleep and diet and exercise
were exactly regulated by the single purpose of securing, to the utmost
possible extent, the independence of his soul on his body. His mental
appetites were subjugated to a still more rigid discipline. To secure
to his reason an undisputed supremacy over all his other faculties, he
laboured, not only to cast down every idol of the cavern, but to consign
to oblivion all the interests, the sentiments, and the events with
which either his heart or his imagination had ever been occupied. He
even attempted to emancipate himself from the memory of those deceptive
languages, Greek and Latin, in which such subtle disguises have been
found for so many mental illusions. That he might ascend to the sanctuary
of truth, he thus aspired to become a pure abstraction of defæcated
intellect.
“_Cogito, ergo sum_” is the massive foundation stone of the colossal
edifice erected by Descartes. That famous proposition, though really
“the well-ripened fruit of long delay,” may perhaps sound not only as a
truism, but as of all truisms the most meagre. Such a judgment would,
however, prove nothing except the ignorance and incompetency of the judge.
“I think, therefore I exist,” is not the fragment of a syllogism which
might be reconstructed thus: “Whatever thinks, exists. But I think.
Therefore I exist.” It is rather an enthymeme--that is, an immediate
sequence of two propositions, of which the second is the necessary
offspring of the first. “I think”--that is, I am conscious of the act
of thinking. Myself and my thoughts are a plurality, not a unity. They
are the objects of which I am the subject. My consciousness of them is
my adjudication that such objects exist. Or suppose that I can doubt
even the existence of my own thoughts. Well, even so; that very doubt
is itself a thought of which I am conscious. Let my scepticism be so
absolute, and so universal, as to involve in uncertainty every other
conceivable position, yet that very scepticism is the affirmation of
myself as a thinking being.
Here, then, the naked reason has at length set her foot upon one
resting-place, narrow, if you will, but yet firm and immovable. Here is
one truth which cannot be assailed, even by doubt itself; or, rather,
here is a truth which doubt itself does but verify and confirm. Nor
is this a barren position. It is rather a ground which, when duly
cultivated, is prolific of results of the highest moment to every
thinking being.
Francis Bacon was not more the founder of rationalism in England, than
René Descartes was the founder of it in France. Nor was he content to
vindicate the rights of reason. He laboured, also, to determine and
enforce her obligations. In Descartes the characteristic logic of the
French understanding attained its perfection, as, in his writings, it
found its model.
Blaise Pascal was a Cartesian. Like Descartes he began with doubt,
in order that he might end in certainty. Like him he renounced all
allegiance to merely human authorities, however exalted, and however
venerable. In the spirit of his master, he received what was passing in
the microcosm of his own mind, as being, at least to himself, the primary
and indispensable witness of truth. As a true disciple of that severe
school, he not only revered his own reason as the supreme earthly judge
of every question so brought under his cognisance, but conducted all
such investigations by the aid of the same geometrical logic by which
Descartes himself had been guided.
But here the similitude ended, and the divergence began. Descartes
impersonated the “Pure reason,” sojourning among men, to occupy herself,
not with the business of their lives, but with the mysteries of their
nature. Pascal impersonated human sympathy, yearning over the world
from which he had withdrawn, and still responding to all the sorrows by
which it was agitated. Lofty as was the range of his thoughts, they were
never averted from that great human family to which he belonged. Every
afflicted member of it had in him a fellow-sufferer.[g]
[Illustration: BLAISE PASCAL
(1623-1662)]
Pascal was born at Clermont-Ferrand (1623), and died at Paris (1662).
He was, like Descartes, a universal scientist. His health, naturally
feeble, was still more injured by his intense thought. He was deeply
religious, and saw Christianity in Jansenism. A carriage accident, which
occurred on the Neuilly bridge, and which endangered his life, caused
him to become rigorously devout. He even became subject to visions and
hallucinations, and finally withdrew to Port-Royal, where he lived in
retirement. He devoted the last years of his life to collecting material
for a great work, destined to prove the truth of the Christian religion.
The fragments of this great work, notes, pieces of paper, strung together
without order or system, were found after his death. His friends at
Port-Royal made selections from these, and published them in 1670,--the
first edition, very incomplete, of his _Thoughts_ (_Pensées_). This book
of thoughts is above all a history of a great soul, tormented by doubt,
terrified, at the same time attracted, by the mysteries of the faith.[c]
_The Provincial Letters_ (1656), considered by many his masterpiece,
was a biting satire on the Jesuits. The greatest French critics,
including Voltaire and D’Alembert, agree in the statement that this work
contributed more than any other composition to form and polish the French
language. His ascetic life tended to shorten his life. He died in Paris,
aged 39.[a] After his death, appeared also two other little tracts, one
of which is _Equilibrium of Fluids_, the other _The Weight of the Mass of
Air_. To err on the side of rigour, is not the usual fault of genius: but
Pascal was in all respects singular, and differed, not only from ordinary
men, but from other men of genius. With every deduction that can be made
for a few errors arising out of his education, Pascal was undoubtedly
one of the ornaments of human nature; and if a few have rivalled him in
talents, no man of equal eminence, perhaps, can be found who lived so
innocently as Pascal.[r]
POETRY: BOILEAU
The writings of Descartes and Pascal, the doctrines of the French Academy
and of Port-Royal, had perfected the art of prose writing. This had not
been done for poetry nor yet for the art of writing in verse, which
constitutes the perfection of poetry. On this head much still remained to
be done, after the time of Malherbe, to consolidate his work. This was
the task of Boileau. To the glory of Port-Royal must be added that of
having enlightened, both by precept and example in the art of writing in
prose, the poet who best understood and perhaps best practised the art of
writing in verse.
For two centuries Boileau has been a bugbear, whom all poets fear. All
of them, in fact, find him on their road, threatening with innumerable
difficulties, with fatigue and labour, who so would aspire to the
glory of verse. The dramatic poet, the lyrist, the elegist, the
writer of comedies, and even the writer of sonnets, must take him
into consideration. They are all tormented by the ideal of style
which Boileau has set up, and by that other ideal of perfection of
language--indispensable to all styles, and without which nothing lasting
can be written.[d]
The taste of the great and the noble--in one word, the particular taste
of Louis XIV--dominated everything. Gallic and burlesque literature
disappeared. The admiration of Louis was universal, profound, and of such
sincerity that it excluded, in the grossest flatteries, all reproach of
flattery; love of the king was confused with love of the country, and
one would not have been believed more of an adulator in glorifying the
king than he would be to-day in glorifying France. The great care of
writers was studied elegance and perfection of form. Never was literature
so completely and exclusively literary and, with the exception of a few
works, especially those of Molière, one might say that it was void of
new ideas. The ideas which antiquity or Christian tradition furnished,
the great general ideas which belong to all ages and all countries, the
commonplaces of morality and human psychology were sufficient. It was on
this foundation that Racine pushed the analysis of passion to perfection,
that La Bruyère[j] struck off, as clean-cut and brilliant as medals from
the mint, his _Caractères_, and La Rochefoucauld[k] his _Maximes_.[c]
ORATORY: BOSSUET
The moral and social side of this great literature showed itself above
all in works of another kind. La Rochefoucauld wrote the thoughts of a
courtier, Nicole those of a director of consciences. The Christian pulpit
rose with Bossuet to an unparalleled greatness to keep with Bourdaloue
in that middle course, calm and regular, where wisdom tempers strength,
and dignity never lowers itself. Bourdaloue was the ordinary preacher
of the king and the court, and made for his audience as his audience
was made for him. In the pulpit he had the nobility and perfection of
Racine. As to Bossuet, he is above all comparison. If he does not for
one instant lose sight of rule and law, without which strength cannot be
sure of itself, he obeyed less the spirit of his time than he dominated
it. While leading the funeral cortège of all the grandeurs of the age,
he surrounded it with an incomparable lustre, which still retains the
illusion, by the majesty of his eloquence.
Bossuet has not treated of political subjects any more than Nicole or
Bourdaloue. He viewed society only from the heights of Christianity. If
he exalts the splendours of the court and the king, it is to humiliate
them all the more profoundly under the hand of God. The root of his
eloquence is in religion, as the form of it is in the Bible, the language
of which he applied so marvellously to the things of his time. He touched
on history and politics in only two works,[l] written for the dauphin.
Even there it is the preacher who speaks. He unrolls before the dauphin
the sequence of the purposes of God. He demonstrated to him according
to the Bible the sacredness of royalty, and if he deduced from this
sacredness the duty of obedience for subjects, he also deduced corelative
duties for kings. He recognises the fundamental law that kings should
be respected; he warns them against the danger of their passions, above
all against the mania for conquests which ruin the people. The clergy
of the seventeenth century ruled the court and the world because it
was disinterested. It took the temporal government of France, such as
Louis XIV had made it, and strove to raise it to a Christian ideal. The
government had a panegyrist of another disposition--Louis XIV himself.
Louis XIV was not content to be the author or inspirator of the acts
of his reign, he was also its first, one might say its only political
writer. His _Mémoires_,[m] of which the basis belongs to him, and of
which it matters little that the style has been polished by Périgny or
Pellisson, explain his conduct admirably. It is drawn there with the
fidelity which he himself admired and which he hoped would win so much
public admiration, that there was nothing to hide.[b]
[Illustration: JACQUES BÉNIGNE BOSSUET
(1627-1704)]
THE THIRD PERIOD
The third period has an entirely different aspect. Royalty has so much
abused its principle that it is being discussed. The Revocation, whose
aim was to complete the reign of silence at home, caused an outbreak of
a thousand rebellious voices beyond the frontiers which had its echoes
in France. The war which Louis XIV waged for one idea brought back
the reign of ideas. That confusion of king and country which hitherto
had been complete suddenly ceased. Formerly everything was admired;
everything was well. The plaints which arose from devastated fields and
ruined industries dealt a blow to this optimism. La Bruyère in a few
lines paints a terrifying picture of the French peasant. Fénelon in a
letter to Louis XIV judges with mournful severity both the government
and the character of the king. Now everything is not all right and other
things are sought for. Vauban proposes tax reform; Bois-Guilbert, a
whole new economic system. To this desolate reality Fénelon opposes in
his _Télémaque_ a Utopia, an ideal city--the Salento of King Idomeneus.
To the perpetual warfare the abbé de Saint-Pierre[n] would substitute
his project for perpetual peace, which appeared in 1713, and to the
government by one man a government by several. Finally in a room in his
hôtel at Versailles a man, a duke and a peer, every evening--his day as
a courtier over--shuts himself up and with what he has seen and heard
still vivid in his mind, adds a few pages to that colossal monument known
as the _Mémoires de Saint-Simon_.[o] It is from this that posterity,
disabused of eulogy and panegyric, will learn to know another king,
another Versailles from those which Racine and Bossuet have shown it.
In that period of French literature what is uppermost are new ideas.
What matters it now whether the form be elegant and harmonious as with
Fénelon, energetic and incorrect as with Saint-Simon, diffuse and dull
as with the abbé de Saint-Pierre? The interest no longer lies here; the
day of marvellous style and the time of art for art’s sake is past.
Henceforth the great writers will write only to uphold a thesis, propose
a reform, or prepare a revolution. Their greatness will be measured by
their success. The eighteenth century has begun.
THE DRAMA: TRAGEDY
The sixteenth century handed down, in France, two forms of dramatic
poetry, the mystery plays--that is to say, the religious drama--and the
tragedy, a so-called imitation of the ancient form. Mystery plays were,
in 1548, forbidden in Paris; the ancient tragedy had become sterile. The
real French theatre remained to be founded.[c]
_Corneille_
At last Corneille appears. _Mélite_ is the play given and the public
applauds it with transports under which there seems to lurk premonition
of the glory to which dramatic art is later to attain in France.
Corneille surpasses rather than falls short of this expectation. Having
made a deep study of the ancient tragic writers and the dramatic authors
of modern times, he weighs carefully all the rules which he observes them
to have used, and, while slavishly following none, adopts those which
he finds most conformable to his own needs. With the ease of one who is
their superior, or at least their equal, he reveals the inmost workings
of the minds and hearts of the famous men whom he introduces on the
stage; breathes into them, as it were, his own enthusiasms, raises them
up to his own high stature. He presents his characters with the fidelity
of history, but in proportions that would alone command admiration. He
paints portraits of a resemblance so striking that they seem to have come
from the hand of the subtlest of political writers, the most consummate
of statesmen, or the greatest of military leaders. To his astonished
and enraptured countrymen he gives _The Cid_, _Les Horaces_, _Cinna_,
_Polyeucte_, _Pompée_, _Rodogune_, and _Héraclius_, and may be said to
create French comedy when he writes _Le Menteur_. This genius seems the
more sublime when it is compared with the simplicity and modesty of his
private life. In his old age his head is crowned with laurels, and it
is of him that the great Racine says, “It is not easy to find a poet
who unites such a number of talents, so many excellent manifestations
of art, force, judgment, wit. We cannot too greatly admire the nobility
and economy of his subjects, the vehemence of his passion, the depth and
gravity of his sentiments, and the dignity as well as the prodigious
variety of his characters.”[q] Pierre Corneille was born at Rouen, 1606,
and according to a time-worn chronicle,[151] “of considerable parents,
his father holding no small places under Louis XIII.” He was brought up
to the bar but soon deserted it. His great success brought upon him the
enmity of his rivals, even Richelieu entering into this cabal. He was
chosen a member of the French Academy. His private life was uneventful,
due perhaps to the fact that his manners were simple and he was never
successful in paying court to the great. He died in Paris in 1684,
leaving several children. Corneille’s works consist of thirty plays,
tragedies and comedies.[a]
The drama of Corneille preserves a certain freedom of manner that is
not found in the succeeding generation. Thus he chooses sacred as well
as profane subjects; he restores Christianity to the theatre whence the
prejudices of a good society had banished it; from the acts of the
martyrs he borrowed the subject of _Polyeucte_ and _Théodore_. In such
works as _Nicomède_ or _Don Sanche_ the comic element mingles with the
tragic. Above all he finds it difficult to conform to the prescriptions
of Aristotle’s _Poetics_ to the rule of the three unities. Now Chapelain
had just discovered the _Poetics_; he had recommended its precepts to
Mairet for his _Sophonisbe_, Leagued with the Academy against the success
of the _Cid_, he tried to impose them on Corneille. Being commissioned
to draw up “the sentiments of the Academy” concerning this play, he did
not fail to denounce the author’s violations of the unity of time and
the unity of place. Corneille defended his tragedies. Finally, seized
with scruples and intimidated by this phantom of a system of poetics made
for a theatre wholly different from the French, Corneille submits. He
writes plays following all the rules, such as _Pertharite_, _Agésilas_,
_Attila_; but it is just these which are his weakest.[c]
_Racine_
[Illustration: JEAN BAPTISTE RACINE
(1639-1699)]
Racine, who rose when Corneille declined, founded his dramas on a very
different principle. With him the great motive is passion, and passion
no longer arrested by the conflict of duty. His characters are as though
carried away by their frenzies. The type of Racine’s tragedy is indeed
the drama of passion. What he excels in painting is love, furious
and cruel with Hermione, Roxane, Phædra; plaintive and resigned with
Iphigenia or Junia; grave and ready for sacrifice with Monima; full of
tears and of gentle reproaches with Bérénice.
This man, who divided with Corneille the glory of French classical
tragedy, was born in Ferté-Milon (1639) of bourgeois parents. He received
his education at the college of Beauvais and at Port-Royal. Becoming
disgusted with theology, which study he had entered into, he went to
Paris, where he formed his friendships with Molière and Boileau. It was
his ode on the marriage of Louis XIV, for which he received a pension,
which first brought him into prominence. Of a sensitive disposition and
inclined to melancholy, the criticisms and intrigues of the court made
him renounce dramatic composition. However after his marriage in 1677
he became reconciled with the gentlemen of Port-Royal and was appointed
historiographer by Louis XIV. At the suggestion of Madame de Maintenon he
wrote _Esther_ and afterward, _Athalie_. His tragedies are _Andromaque_,
_Britannicus_, _Bérénice_, _Mithridate_, _Iphigénie_, and _Phèdre_. “I
avow,” says Voltaire,[i] “that I regard _Iphigénie_ as the chef-d’œuvre
of the stage.” Racine was admitted to the Academy in 1673. The ill
reception of his _Athalie_ caused him to entirely renounce poetry. Hurt
by a disapproving criticism of the king on a memorial he had written,
“he conceived dreadful ideas of the king’s displeasure: and indulging
his chagrin and fears, brought on a fever, which surpassed the power of
medicine, for he died of it, after being grievously afflicted with pains,
in 1699.”[152][a]
With Racine French classical tragedy is finally constituted. It is a
quite peculiar species of literature, and one which could have arisen
only at one particular period of French history. It differs from Greek
tragedy for it dispenses with the accompaniment of music and does not
admit choruses.[153] It is the antipodes of the Shakespearian drama. The
latter journeys freely through time and space, multiplies characters,
allows the interposition of the crowd, mingles the comic with the tragic,
speaks alternately in the most poetic and the most trivial language,
evokes spectres from the tomb, brings shipwrecks, battles, murders,
executions on the scene. French tragedy makes the entire action take
place in a period which, according to the precepts laid down, must
not exceed twenty-four hours; it never changes the scene and to avoid
difficulties everything generally takes place in the vestibule of a
palace or the square of a city; it admits no more than three or at most
four characters, to whom are added confidants whose mission is to listen
to what the chief personages have to say to the public; when a valiant
army or an immense crowd is to be indicated an accessory character is
made to follow the principal actor. It never unbends, never exhibits
either a buffoon or a poltroon, it seldom takes its subjects from
elsewhere than Greek and Roman antiquity; it brings on the stage only
noble personages, gods, demigods, heroes, emperors, kings, or princes,
or servants who are not less dignified and who know how to keep their
places. It speaks the noblest and purest language; it leaves the spectres
in their vaults, and reduces the fantastic element to the recital of
some dream; all murders, the assassination of Pyrrhus, the poisoning
of Britannicus, the strangling of Monima, the execution of Haman or of
Athaliah are relegated behind the scenes, out of sight of the spectator.
If the actor cannot do otherwise than kill himself on the stage, he kills
himself neatly with a poniard or sword of a temper peculiar to tragedy,
for they do not draw blood. There is no action on the stage: we only see
the impression which the action produces on the characters, and hear the
reflections with which it inspires them.
This mould of classical tragedy maintained itself intact for nearly two
centuries. It contented the contemporaries of Louis XIV, of Louis XV,
of Robespierre and of Napoleon successively. The neighbouring nations
hastened to adopt it: even England herself did so though she continued to
play Shakespeare.
COMEDY
French comedy, during more than half the seventeenth century, was feeling
her way. She was hesitating between two types--antique comedy, so
difficult to transport to the French stage, and naturally cold because it
represented manners so very different from those of France; and Italian
comedy, in which under the most diverse names there incessantly recur
the old good-man who is deceived, the shrewd ward, the bold lover, the
cunning valet, or the complaisant soubrette. Most of the comedies on
which Corneille tried his hand and the first which came from Molière
belong to the Italian type.
When, in 1659, Molière put the _Précieuses ridicules_ on the stage,
there was a surprise almost equal to that which had been occasioned by
the _Cid_. After French tragedy, French comedy was now revealing itself.
The comical element proceeded not from some flimsy plot, a hundred times
repeated, but from the lively painting of contemporary manners. Molière
was to rise higher still and to paint not the absurdities of a day but
the eternal characters of humanity. Those whom he brings before us in his
great comedies--the hypocrite and dupe of his _Tartuffe_, the Alceste,
the Philinte and Célimène of his _Misanthrope_; the Harpagon of his
_Avare_; the vain _roturier_ of his _Bourgeois gentilhomme_, his _Femmes
savantes_, his _Malade imaginaire_--are so far as concerns their main
characteristics, of all times and all countries. Yet these personages,
though they are universal types, are quite specially of the time and
country in which Molière lived. Molière’s destiny required that he should
have to please three sorts of public: the court, the men of letters, and
the people. For the king he wrote _Amphitryon_ and the comic ballets; for
the literary men he drew his immortal types; for the people he returned
to the comic elements of the Italian theatre and the theatres at the
fairs and he raised them to the level of high art. If any one of these
three very diverse influences had been exercised alone upon the genius of
Molière, it might have refined, or ennobled, or vulgarised him to excess;
but by a happy combination he owed to the one that elegance and nobility,
to one that depth and knowledge, to the third that overflowing _verve_,
that power at once comic and dramatic, which are the characteristics of
his genius. He was not exclusively either the poet of the court or of
the Academy or of the crowd; this is why he has been and will remain the
national poet _par excellence_.[c]
Molière, whose true name was Jean Baptiste Pocquelin, was born at Paris
about 1620. He was both son and grandson to _valets de chambres_ on one
side, and tapestry-makers on the other, to Louis XIII and was designed
for the latter business, with a view of succeeding his father in that
place. But the grandfather being very fond of the boy, and at the same
time a great lover of plays, used to take him often with him to the hôtel
de Bourgogne; which presently roused up Molière’s natural genius and
taste for dramatic representations, and created in him such a disgust
to the trade of tapestry-making, that at last his father consented to
let him go, and study under the Jesuits, at the college of Clermont. He
finished his studies there in five years’ time, in which he contracted an
intimate friendship with Chapelle, Bernier, and Cyrano. Chapelle, with
whom Bernier was an associate in his studies, had the famous Gassendi
for his tutor, who willingly admitted Molière to his lectures, as he
afterwards also admitted Cyrano. It was here that Molière deeply drank
of that sound philosophy, and stored himself with those great principles
of knowledge, which served as a foundation to all his comic productions.
When Louis XIII went to Narbonne, in 1641, his studies were interrupted;
for his father, who was grown infirm, not being able to attend the court,
Molière was obliged to go there to supply his place. Upon his return to
Paris, however, when his father was dead, his passion for the stage,
which had induced him first to study, revived more strongly than ever;
and if it be true, as some have said, that he, for a time studied the
law, and was admitted an advocate, he soon yielded to the influence of
his stars, which had destined him to be the restorer of comedy in France.
What became of him from 1648 to 1652 we know not, this interval being
the time of the civil wars, which caused disturbances in Paris; but it
is probable, that he was employed in composing some of those pieces
which were afterwards exhibited to the public. La Béjart, an actress of
Champagne, waiting, as well as he, for a favourable time to display her
talents, Molière was particularly kind to her; and as their interests
became mutual, they formed a company together, and went to Lyons in 1653,
where Molière produced his first play, called, _L’Étourdi_, or _The
Blunderers_. In 1663, Molière obtained a pension of a thousand livres;
and, in 1665, his company was altogether in his majesty’s service.
His last comedy was _Le malade imaginaire_, or _The Hypochondriac_; and
it was acted for the fourth time, February 17th, 1673. Upon this very day
Molière died.
ARCHITECTURE
The fine arts, even more than literature, bear the impress of the period,
because a government has more means to act on them. If it cannot create
them, nor supply individual inspiration, it can at least impress a
certain direction by the nature of the works it orders from artists, and
the nature of the patronage which it affords them. For instance, Louis
XIV had a passion for building. His architectural constructions are of a
style apart, in harmony with his tastes, the needs of his court, and the
characteristics of his royalty.[b]
The French architecture of the Renaissance happily blended the elements
of ogival art and those of ancient art recovered in Italy. The
seventeenth century broke more completely with the national past. One of
the latest cathedrals is that of Orleans, constructed under Henry IV and
his successors, but which had been designed in the sixteenth century. The
ogival style was no longer in fashion; it was freely regarded as a relic
of ancient barbarism, and it was branded with the epithet of “Gothic.”
Numerous acts of vandalism were committed on the most venerable monuments
of the past. In 1699 Robert de Cotte, under the pretext of “restoring”
the interior of Notre Dame de Paris, destroyed the close, pulled down
the rood-loft, burned the wooden stalls, tore out the tombs and stone
effigies, and broke the coloured glass windows.
[Illustration: FRANÇOIS DE SALIGNAC DE LA MOTHE-FÉNELON
(1651-1715)]
The dominating influence of the age was that of the Italian monuments,
not only of the first epoch of the Renaissance but also that of its
decadence. However, French artists did not limit themselves to imitation;
and under the inspiration of those ideas of grandeur and majesty which
are the cachet of the seventeenth century, they created a truly original
art, as characteristic of Louis XIV’s reign as was its literature.
To obtain more imposing façades, instead of dividing them up as in
the preceding epoch into almost equal stories, each distinguished by
a different ornamentation, now only one principal story was admitted.
Below, it rests on a ground floor which sometimes is almost a basement;
above, it is surmounted by an attic which was only half or two-thirds
the height of the principal story. Everything is sacrificed to the
latter. To enhance still further the desired impression of unity
and grandeur the ornamentation is greatly reduced. None of those
architectural accidents, those happy caprices, or that ingenious
variety which in sixteenth century monuments interested the eye and the
mind--nothing but great sober lines severe to monotony. This is what is
called the colossal style and what might be called the Louis XIV style.[c]
Versailles is the indestructible monument of the royalty of Louis XIV.
One is struck at first by its large proportions; it is above all its
majestic regularity which produces such imposing effects. All is in
harmony with the habits of the court of the great king. One may criticise
the arrangements, and Saint-Simon[o] without being an artist has done so
with humour, sometimes with truth. But the ensemble leaves a profound
impression of admiration, almost of respect. One feels that Versailles,
to-day a vast solitude, was built to be peopled by an immense court,
where Louis XIV lived in the midst of a France made in his image.
Versailles, with its grandeur, its regularity, its majestic and classic
ornamentation, merits to be the type of an architecture truly royal. If
nobility is one of the principal conceptions of the ideal of beauty,
this ideal has never been attained in an equal degree. Also, even as the
court of Louis XIV gave the tone to the greater part of European courts,
Versailles has become the type and model of the greater part of royal and
foreign châteaux and gardens.
Other châteaux, like those of St. Cloud and Marly, were built almost
in the same style by Mansart and Le Nôtre, the one the architect of
the palace, and the other of the gardens of Versailles. St. Cloud was
the residence of Monsieur, brother of the king. Marly, which was begun
after Nimeguen, could offer a sort of retreat to the court fatigued by
magnificence. Meudon, Sceaux, Choisy, built for princes, princesses, or
ministers, produced in their more restricted proportions the essential
characteristics of this royal architecture.
Paris has kept fewer traces of Louis XIV; he rarely made long sojourns
there. The principal monuments he raised there were the triumphal arches
at the portes du Trône, St. Antoine, St. Bernard, St. Denis, and St.
Martin, monuments erected to celebrate his re-entry into Paris after the
Peace of the Pyrenees, or his victories during the war with Holland.
Meanwhile he also joined the Louvre to the Tuileries by means of the
magnificent colonnade designed by Perrault. To this reign also belongs
the northern boulevards arranged as great avenues, the Champs-Élysées,
and finally the garden of the Tuileries.[b]
SCULPTURE AND PAINTING
The taste for statuary did not revive until the time of the Italian
regent Marie de’ Medici. Puget (1622-1694) was an independent. The
other sculptors of the time bent themselves to monarchical discipline.
They entered academies of sculpture and painting and placed themselves
under the direction of Lebrun, for at that time it seemed natural to
subordinate sculpture to painting. The sculpture of the great epoch of
Louis XIV shows the influence of the vigorous studies the artists made
from the antique. It is a diversified sculpture, but skilful and strong.
The Renaissance had been in France more brilliant for architecture and
even sculpture than for painting. The French had still much to learn
from the Italians and the Flemish. They had a few painters, but they had
no French school. Besides it was in Italy that the first generation of
French artists of the seventeenth century was formed. Lesueur is perhaps
the sole great painter who did not leave France. Of these illustrious
travellers, some preferred to apply themselves to imitation of the severe
design of the Roman school; others stopped in the Venetian cities and
sought to worm from the canvases of Titian and Paul Veronese the secret
of their admirable colouring and obtain a knowledge of the science of
composition on a large scale. Whence comes the great variety in the
French school. But all got the feeling of classical beauty, from the
brilliant sky, the living types, and the magnificent antiquities of
Italy. Moreover the French artists found a hospitable welcome in the
peninsula; at a time when their kings were not rich enough to furnish
artists means of support, work was ordered of them by the popes,
cardinals, sovereigns, and great lords of Italy. Colbert’s foundation of
the Academy of Rome was to assure the education of French genius, for
centuries, by the genius of antiquity and of Italy.
In France the painters were organised as a corporation which was known as
the Academy of St. Luke, and into which no one was received, as in the
corporation of joiners or hatters, until he had served an apprenticeship
or had produced a masterpiece. The academy was all powerful in the
art-world until in 1648 it was confronted with a rival that eclipsed
it--the Academy of Painting and Sculpture. We must not forget that in
1673 the first exhibition of painting took place in the court of the
Palais Royal. Hitherto there had been open-air exhibitions--a kind of
picture fairs, as for example that held in the place Dauphine. In 1699
the exposition was held in the Apollo Gallery of the Louvre.
As in political and literary history, the history of painting in the
seventeenth century may be divided into three periods. The first sixty
years are years of artistic freedom; with the personal government of
the king the rule of Lebrun over the fine arts was established. At the
latter’s death a transformation took place. When the regent Marie de’
Medici wished to decorate the vast galleries of the Luxembourg palace,
she believed that she could not do better than to summon the great
Flemish painter, Peter Paul Rubens. But she soon became better acquainted
with the artistic resources of France, and sent for a number of Frenchmen
to collaborate in the decoration of the Luxembourg. Among them were Simon
Vouet (1590-1649), Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), and Philippe de Champagne
(1602-1674). If we examine the dates of the deaths of these artists and
others, such as Claude Lorraine (1600-1682), Lesueur (1616-1655), or
better, perhaps, the most brilliant period of their productiveness it
will be admitted that Louis XIV and Lebrun had no influence over them
whatever.
In the second period, Charles Lebrun of Paris (1619-1690) was the leader
of the French school. He might have, as has been said, paraphrased the
saying attributed to the king and have said “_L’Art, c’est moi_.” He was
the Louis XIV of the fine arts. The artist, whose genius sympathised so
completely with that of his sovereign, was nevertheless a very great
painter. He possessed the sacred fire; at the age of fifteen he had
produced two paintings that attracted attention, and he developed his
natural gift by arduous labour and incessant study. He went to Rome
and received instruction from Poussin. He painted for Louis XIV those
immense canvases representing the exploits of Alexander--the _Crossing
the Granicus_, the _Battle of Arbela_, the _Defeat of Porus_, and the
_Entrance into Babylon_--which form an epic series. Lebrun pushed
perfection of detail so far as to have horses sketched in Syria, so that
they would be typically Asiatic.
MUSIC AND THE OPERA
It is easy to count the musicians that France produced in the sixteenth
century; the true home of their art was then in Italy. Nevertheless the
French court acquired a taste for lyric representations, and the kings,
to free the art from religious domination, founded troops of lay artists,
and at the head of their singers and instrumentalists they placed a
superintendent of music.
These representations which the French called _ballets_ or _mascarades_
were an incoherent mixture of the three arts of poetry, music, and
dancing which the modern opera has brought into harmony. A ballet
was divided into _parties_ or acts, and the _parties_ into _entrées_
or scenes, both of variable number. There was no fixed plan for
the composition--or rather there was no composition. In front of a
great canvas the king and the nobles who were taking part in the
_divertissement_ composed or had composed the words at their fancy,
accommodated them to or made them accommodate familiar airs, putting the
words into the hands of the ladies, in order that they might follow the
piece, abandoning themselves in the end to the _boutade_, that is to say
to the inspiration.
Music was considered such an inferior art that the instrumentalists were
recruited from among the lackeys, and to be a violin player was almost a
sign of servitude. The airs were vulgar; the instruments were reduced to
lutes and viols, the dances were slow and monotonous like the _bourrée_
of the peasant of central France. Such was the court ballet, such, for
example, the ballet of the _Délivrance de Renaud_ danced by Louis XIII
and his courtiers in 1614. The court was lost in admiration and it was
declared that Europe had never heard anything so ravishing.
Mazarin tried to revive the fashion by bringing dancers, singers, and
musicians from Italy, obtaining the libretti and the music from composers
of the same country. The courtiers admired in order to please the
cardinal and the queen-regent, but Madame de Motteville[p] admits in all
frankness that these representations seemed to her mortally long and
tiresome. It is probable that French ears were not yet trained to Italian
music and that Madame de Motteville, like Molière’s Alceste, would have
given all the operas for one of the old popular airs like “_J’aime mieux
ma mie, au gué_.”
The taste of the court was too frivolous, the actors in their quality
of king or noble too unruly for opera thus conceived to raise itself to
the level of a serious art. Therefore the public but privileged theatres
succeeded to the aristocratic or court theatre. The abbé Perrin, a
prolific writer of _livrets_, although a most mediocre poet, associated
himself with Cambert, the most distinguished of French composers and with
the marquis de Sourdéac, who understood scenery and stage mechanism. He
obtained letters patent on June 28th, 1669. Thus was founded the Royal
Academy of Music, which has nothing in common with the learned academies
of the age; for the Italian word _accademia_ signifies simply concert.
The first result of this association was the representation of _Pomone_,
in 1671, words by Perrin; music by Cambert. The associates were preparing
to mount another opera when misunderstandings broke out among them. Lully
took advantage of this and through Madame de Montespan’s influence was
given the privilege. Cambert in vexation went to England where, although
he was well received by Charles II, he died of chagrin. Lully [himself
an Italian], who had claimed that it was impossible to write an elegant
score to French words, now became director of the first French National
Theatre of Music (1672).
Lully created a music distinctly French in spirit and his influence
extended over his contemporaries and successors, but his was the only
original work that appeared at the Academy. Its organisation was too
authoritative to lend itself easily to innovations. A large portion of
the public was not interested in that solemn monotonous music which only
concerned itself with mythological tragedies. Already in the seventeenth
century (1640) the _Comédie des Chansons_, sometimes attributed to
Timothy de Chillac and sometimes to Charles Beys, had furnished the type
of a kind that resembles both vaudeville and the French _opéra-comique_.
It was called the _comédie à ariettes_ and became universally popular.
In 1678 at the St. Laurent fair Allard and Maurice Vanderberg presented
the _Forces of Love and Magic_, which had a great success. This irritated
Lully, and invoking the privilege of the Academy he had an order served
upon these two itinerant directors to reduce their orchestra to four
violins and one oboe. The Academy decided however to sign a contract with
Catherine Vanderberg, permitting her to give pieces with song, orchestra,
and dance. Such was the origin of the _opéra-comique_, a term first
employed by Le Sage, in 1715.
RAPID DECLINE OF THE AGE OF LOUIS XIV
One characteristic of this age was that the efflorescence of arts and
letters was of short duration. The age was great so long as Louis was
surrounded by men whose talent had already seen the light when he began
to protect them; but new geniuses were not born and when that generation
was exhausted another did not arise to replace it.
The personal government presents but a single and very short period
of literary and artistic splendour. The last great work of secular
literature, _Athalie_, dates from 1691. If Bossuet, Fénelon, Bourdaloue,
and Massillon--that is to say the group of churchmen--were not there;
if Saint-Simon were not secretly writing his accusing _Mémoires_, one
might say that not a single work of high literary value was written in
France after the Peace of Ryswick (1697). The same observation may be
made of the arts. Many of the great painters of the seventeenth century
owed nothing to Louis XIV, for Le Valentin died in 1632, Lesueur in 1655,
Laurent de Lahire in 1656, Poussin in 1665. Claude Lorraine and Philippe
de Champagne, who died, the one in 1682, the other in 1674, were already
in the fullness of their genius when the king began to govern. Of the
four great architects of the age, Mansart, Claude Perrault, Blondel, and
Bruant, none lived to see the year 1697. Puget, the great sculptor, died
in 1694, Lully in 1687. The poet Quinault, who usually furnished the
latter the libretto of his operas, died the following year. After these
there is certainly a wide gap in the history of French art.[c] Indeed,
as Buckle says: “At the moment when Louis XIV died, there was scarcely a
writer or an artist in France who enjoyed European reputation.”[e]
A FRENCH VIEW OF THE EFFECT OF THE AGE
But it had been a royal epoch! Louis XIV had the rôle of a demi-god.
His Olympus was only a theatre, his _fêtes_ were only fairy-like scenes
and masquerades, but all was on a grandiose scale. Before his time the
king of France lived in a strong castle. He was, even after the time
of Francis I, a mighty baron shut up behind his battlements, his thick
walls, his deep moats. One can see the gloomy shadow of the monarch
flitting from window to window in the vast halls of the Château de Blois,
isolated, cold, imprisoned, anxious. Spies, guards, armed men; courts
where echoed the tread of sentinels; secret staircases where men charged
with dark errands mounted and descended--all proclaimed a shadowy king
watching with his hand upon his sword, spying out all, sharing the fear
which he inspired in others. But under Louis XIV all was changed. The
staircases widened, air and light circulated in the royal house; _fêtes_
replaced the gloomy official receptions; courtiers succeeded soldiers.
This time royalty was sure of victory. It trod on laurels, as half a
century later it walked on roses, without dreaming that either the
laurel- or the rose-strewn path would lead to the scaffold.[f] On that
splendid horizon of the seventeenth century great storm clouds appeared
one by one, lightning still unaccompanied by thunder flashed through
space; but the eyes of the multitude, blinded by the royal sun, did not
perceive these threatening gleams. Intoxicated France abandoned herself
to the contemplation of her present glory, without thinking to seize or
to understand the true reasons of that glory, and did not realise that
she was being dragged to a yawning chasm.
Never was error more excusable. How resist that seduction which all
realised, but which all contributed to exercise? Society is like an
immense concert all of whose parts mingle together to form, by their
divers accents, a universal harmony. Every class, every man, gave all
that he had to give to the work of common grandeur. The mass of the
people, confident in the good intentions of their prince, comforted
by the good order of the administration, bore their burden the more
lightly, and patiently awaited from the future a still greater relief.
The clergy, more worthy and more enlightened than in any other epoch of
French history, instructed and guided the society it no longer governed.
The nobility, which had gained in discipline not less than in polish what
it had lost in independence, furnished the majority of the warriors;
the third estate furnished almost all the rest, especially the great
administration and the great writers. By means of intellectual and
moral energy, of practical sense, of inventive and active force, the
French bourgeoisie reached the highest degree of its development--what a
bourgeoisie, to have produced within a half century Colbert, Corneille,
Pascal, Molière, Racine, La Fontaine, Boileau, Bossuet, Bourdaloue,
Arnauld, Nicole, Domat, Fabert, Poussin, Lesueur, Lorraine, Lebrun, the
Perraults, and Puget, without counting those men as powerful and more for
evil than for good--Fouquet and Louvois!
Marvellous assemblage of the most highly developed and complete society
that has appeared in the world since ancient times; vast and living
picture whose aspect produced on those who regarded it an enduring
fascination! All peoples admired and imitated it. The language, the
fashions, the ideas of France invaded Europe. Literary styles, like the
styles of costume, like the styles of objects of art and of luxury, like
the habits of life, formed themselves, at least in the upper classes, and
for long, after the French. It was not the breath of a momentary fancy,
but it was an atmosphere which enveloped little by little all objects and
all beings, a medium outside of which it became impossible for man to
live.[g]
FOOTNOTES
[148] By this term is meant the period covering the reigns of Louis XIII
and Louis XIV (1610-1715 A.D.).
[149] [Colbert’s foundation of learned academies is described in chapter
XIX.]
[150] An anecdote will show how much the science of zoölogy was still
in its infancy. In 1613 some fossil bones, probably those of a mammoth
or some other prehistoric quadruped, were exhumed near the Château of
Langon in Dauphiné. A surgeon, Habicot by name, recognised them as the
bones of the giant Teutobochus, king of the Teutons, and published a
ridiculous poem entitled _Gigantéostologie_. A physician named Riolan
suspected that they might be the bones of an elephant, but as that animal
was then unknown in France he searched for a description of it in the
Greek authors; then he abandoned this trail, which was the right one, and
came to believe that these bones were simply stones to which a caprice
of nature had given extraordinary forms. At that time the custom was to
explain thus what could not be understood.
[151] _Biographical Dictionary_, London, 1798, 15 vols.
[152] _Biographical Dictionary_, London, 1798, 15 vols.
[153] [Except in _Esther_ and _Athalie_; but these two sacred dramas are
not, for Racine, dramas for the theatre.]
BRIEF REFERENCE-LIST OF AUTHORITIES BY CHAPTERS
[The letter [a] is reserved for Editorial Matter.]
CHAPTER I. THE LATER CARLOVINGIANS
[b] VICTOR DURUY, _Histoire de France_.
[c] THÉOPHILE LAVALLÉE, _Histoire des Français depuis le temps des
Gaulois jusqu’à nos jours_.
[d] A. E. C. DARESTE DE LA CHAVANNE, _Histoire de France depuis les
origines jusqu’à nos jours_.
[e] JAMES WHITE, _History of France from the Earliest Times to 1848_.
[f] THEODOSE BURETTE, _Histoire de France_.
[g] EYRE EVANS CROWE, _History of France_.
[h] HENRI MARTIN, _Histoire de France depuis les temps les plus reculés
jusqu’en 1789_.
[i] ORDERICUS VITALIS, _Historia ecclesiastica_.
[j] _Chronique de St. Denis._
[k] RICHER, _Chronique_.
[l] ADHÉMAR CHABANNES, in _Monumenta Germaniæ historica_, Scriptores iv.
CHAPTER II. THE FOUNDATION OF THE CAPETIAN DYNASTY
[b] E. E. CROWE, _op. cit._
[c] VICTOR DURUY, _op. cit._
[d] ÉMILE DE BONNECHOSE, _Histoire de France depuis l’invasion des Francs
sous Clovis jusqu’à l’avénement de Louis Philippe_.
[e] HENRI MARTIN, _op. cit._
[f] JULES MICHELET, _History of France_.
[g] ORDERICUS VITALIS, _op. cit._
[h] FRANÇOIS GUIZOT, _Collections des Mémoires relatifs à l’histoire de
France_.
[i] J. C. L. S. DE SISMONDI, _Histoire des Français_.
[j] A. E. C. DARESTE DE LA CHAVANNE, _op. cit._
[k] SUGER, _Vie de Louis VI_.
[l] G. H. LEWES, _Biographical History of Philosophy_.
[m] HASTINGS RASHDALL, _The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages_.
CHAPTER III. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY
[b] E. E. CROWE, _op. cit._
[c] VICTOR DURUY, _Histoire du Moyen Âge depuis la chute de l’empire
d’occident jusqu’au milieu du XVᵉ siècle_.
[d] JULES MICHELET, _op. cit._
[e] A. E. C. DARESTE DE LA CHAVANNE, _op. cit._
[f] VICTOR DURUY, _Histoire de France_.
[g] HENRY HALLAM, _View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages_.
[h] H. WALLON, _St. Louis et son temps_.
[i] JEAN DE JOINVILLE, _Vie de St. Louis_.
[j] MATTHEW PARIS, _Chronica Majora_.
[k] WILLIAM LE BRETON (William of Armorica), _Histoire des gestes de
Philippe Auguste_.
[l] GEOFFROY DE BEAULIEU, _Vie de St. Louis_.
[m] FRANÇOIS GUIZOT, _History of Civilisation in Europe_.
[n] S. ASTLEY DUNHAM, _History of Europe during the Middle Ages_.
[o] ABEL FRANÇOIS VILLEMAIN, _Cours de Littérature Française_ (Table du
Moyen Âge).
CHAPTER IV. PHILIP III TO THE HOUSE OF VALOIS
[b] VICTOR DURUY, _op. cit._
[c] HENRI MARTIN, _op. cit._
[d] E. BOUTARIC, _La France sous Philippe le Bel_.
[e] JULES MICHELET, _op. cit._
[f] SAUVAGE, _Chronique traditionnelle continuée_.
[g] CONTINUATOR OF GUILLAUME DE NANGIS, _Chroniques des rois de France_.
[h] DANTE ALIGHIERI, _Paradiso_, Canto XIX.
[i] E. E. CROWE, _op. cit._
[j] PHILIP DE BEAUMANOIR, _Coutumes de Beauvaisis_.
[k] A. E. C. DARESTE DE LA CHAVANNE, _op. cit._
[l] GUILLAUME DE NOGARET, in _Chronique de St. Denis_.
[m] GIOVANNI VILLANI, _Istorie Fiorentini_.
[n] THOMAS WALSINGHAM, _Historia Anglicana_.
[o] _Chronique de St. Denis._
[p] FRANÇOIS GUIZOT, _Histoire de France_.
CHAPTER V. THE OPENING OF THE HUNDRED YEARS’ WAR
[b] E. E. CROWE, _op. cit._
[c] CONTINUATOR OF GUILLAUME DE NANGIS, _op. cit._
[d] HENRI MARTIN, _op. cit._
[e] JOHN FROISSART, _Chronicles of England, France, Spain, and Adjoining
Countries_.
[f] JULES MICHELET, _op. cit._
[g] V. DURUY, _op. cit._
[h] _Chronique de St. Denis._
[i] HENRY KNIGHTON, _Chronica_.
[j] THOMAS WALSINGHAM, _op. cit._
CHAPTER VI. JOHN THE GOOD AND CHARLES THE WISE
[b] HENRI MARTIN, _op. cit._
[c] A. E. C. DARESTE DE LA CHAVANNE, _op. cit._
[d] CONTINUATOR OF GUILAUME DE NANGIS, _op. cit._
[e] JULES MICHELET, _op. cit._
[f] VICTOR DURUY, _Histoire du Moyen Âge_.
[g] JOHN FROISSART, _op. cit._
[h] SIMON LUCE, _Histoire de la Jacquerie_.
[i] F. T. PERRENS, _La Démocratie en France au Moyen Âge_.
[j] E. E. CROWE, _op. cit._
[k] PIERRE ROBIQUET, _Histoire Municipale de Paris_.
[l] VICTOR DURUY, _Histoire de France_.
[m] M. LEBER, _Essai sur l’appréciation de la fortune privée au Moyen
Âge_.
[n] JAMES WHITE, _op. cit._
[o] JEAN LEFEBVRE (Sieur de Saint Rémy), _Chronique_.
[p] CHRISTINE DE PISAN, _Le livre des faicts et bonnes mœurs du sage roy
Charles V_.
[q] MATTEO VILLANI, continuation by Jean Villani, _Istorie Florentine_.
CHAPTER VII. THE BETRAYAL OF THE KINGDOM
[b] VICTOR DURUY, _op. cit._
[c] JOHN FROISSART, _op. cit._
[d] _Chronique de St. Denis._
[e] EUDES DE MÉZERAY, _Histoire de France_.
[f] HENRI MARTIN, _op. cit._
[g] A. E. C. DARESTE DE LA CHAVANNE, _op. cit._
[h] E. E. CROWE, _op. cit._
[i] JUVÉNAL DES URSINS, _Histoire de Charles VI_.
[j] JEAN LEFEBVRE (Sieur de Saint Rémy), _op. cit._
[k] JEAN DE VAURIN, _Recueil des croniques et anciennes histoires de la
Grant Bretaigne_.
[l] TITUS LIVY, _Vita Henrici Quinti regis Angliæ_.
[m] THOMAS WALSINGHAM, _op. cit._
[n] ENGUERRAND DE MONSTRELET, _Chronique_.
[o] BARON BRUGIÈRE DE BARANTE, _Histoire des ducs de Bourgogne_.
[p] JULES MICHELET, _op. cit._
[q] LE BOURGEOIS DE PARIS, _Journal_.
[r] THOMAS RYMER, _Fœdera_.
[s] J. ENDELL TYLER, _Henry of Monmouth: or Memoirs of the Life and
Elevation of Henry the Fifth as Prince of Wales and King of England_.
[t] A. F. VILLEMAIN, _op. cit._
CHAPTER VIII. THE RESCUE OF THE REALM
[b] VICTOR DURUY, _op. cit._
[c] JULES MICHELET, _op. cit._
[d] GEORGES CHASTELAIN, _Chronique de Normandie_.
[e] ENGUERRAND DE MONSTRELET, _op. cit._
[f] HENRI MARTIN, _op. cit._
[g] E. E. CROWE, _op. cit._
[h] _Chronique de la Pucelle._
[i] JULES QUICHERAT, _Procès de condamnation et de réhabilitation de
Jeanne d’Arc_.
[j] LAVISSE ET RAMBAUD, _Histoire générale du IVᵉ siècle à nos jours_.
[k] A. E. C. DARESTE DE LA CHAVANNE, _Histoire de France depuis les
origines jusqu’à nos jours_.
CHAPTER IX. THE CONVALESCENCE OF THE REALM
[b] JULES MICHELET, _op. cit._
[c] VICTOR DURUY, _op. cit._
[d] FRANÇOIS GUIZOT, _op. cit._
[e] A. E. C. DARESTE DE LA CHAVANNE, _op. cit._
[f] H. MARTIN, _op. cit._
[g] E. E. CROWE, _op. cit._
[h] JEAN CHARTIER, _Histoire de Charles VII_.
[i] LE BOURGEOIS DE PARIS, _op. cit._
[j] JAMES WHITE, _op. cit._
[k] GEORGES CHASTELAIN, _Chronique des ducs de Bourgogne_.
[l] PIERRE DE BOURDEILLES (Seigneur de Brantôme), _Vie des dames
galantes_.
[m] OLIVIER DE LA MARCHE, _La Parement et le Triomphe des dames
d’honneur_.
[n] G. DU FRESNE DE BEAUCOURT, _Histoire de Charles VII_.
[o] HENRI BAUDE, _Éloge ou portrait historique de Charles VII_ (in Jean
Chartier’s _Chronique de Charles VII_).
[p] ALFRED RAMBAUD, _Histoire de la civilisation française_.
CHAPTER X. THE REIGN OF LOUIS XI
[b] GEORGES CHASTELAIN, _Chronique des ducs de Bourgogne_.
[c] PHILIPPE DE COMMINES, _Mémoires_.
[d] NICOLO MACCHIAVELLI, _Le Prince_.
[e] A. E. C. DARESTE DE LA CHAVANNE, _op. cit._
[f] JAMES WHITE, _op. cit._
[g] J. C. L. S. DE SISMONDI, _op. cit._
[h] OLIVIER DE LA MARCHE, _Mémoires_.
[i] FRANÇOIS GUIZOT, _op. cit._
[j] HENRI MARTIN, _op. cit._
[k] URBAIN LEGEAY, _Histoire de Louis XI_.
[l] E. E. CROWE, _op. cit._
[m] CHARLES P. DUCLOS, _Histoire de Louis XI_.
[n] ALEXIS BELLOC, _Les Postes Françaises; Recherches historiques sur
leur origine_.
[o] JULES MICHELET, _op. cit._
[p] CONTINUATOR OF MONSTRELET.
[q] E. DE MONSTRELET, _op. cit._
CHAPTER XI. CHARLES VII AND LOUIS XII, THE INVASION OF ITALY
[b] PIERRE DE B. BRANTÔME, _Vie des hommes illustres et grandes
capitaines français_.
[c] E. E. CROWE, _op. cit._
[d] PH. DE COMMINES, _op. cit._
[e] FRANÇOIS GUIZOT, _op. cit._
[f] SYMPHORIEN CHAMPIER, _La Vie de Bayard_.
[g] HENRI MARTIN, _op. cit._
[h] CLAUDE DE SEYSSEL, _Louanges de Louis XII_.
[i] PIERRE L. ROEDERER, _Louis XII et François I_.
[j] HENRY HALLAM, _op. cit._
[k] A. E. C. DARESTE DE LA CHAVANNE, _op. cit._
CHAPTER XII. IMPERIAL STRUGGLES. FRANCIS I AND HENRY II
[b] F. GUIZOT, _op. cit._
[c] _Mémoires du Chevalier de Bayard._
[d] J. C. L. S. DE SISMONDI, _op. cit._
[e] LUCIEN A. PRÉVOST-PARADOL, _Essai sur l’histoire universelle_.
[f] A. E. C. DARESTE DE LA CHAVANNE, _op. cit._
[g] GUILLAUME DU BELLAY, _Mémoires_.
[h] F. A. M. MIGNET, _Rivalité de François I et de Charles Quint_.
[i] E. E. CROWE, _op. cit._
[j] MARTIN DU BELLAY, _Mémoires_.
[k] HENRI MARTIN, _op. cit._
[l] ROSSEEUW ST. HILLAIRE, _Histoire d’Espagne_.
[m] VICTOR DURUY, _op. cit._
[n] JULIA PARDOE, _Court and Reign of François I_.
[o] GABRIEL HENRI GAILLARD, _Histoire de François I_.
[p] PIERRE DE BOURDEILLES BRANTÔME, _Œuvres complètes_.
[q] MARGUERITE DE VALOIS, _L’Heptameron_.
[r] JEAN MAROT, _Le Recueil de Jehan Marot de Caen_.
[s] LEOPOLD VON RANKE, _Französische Geschichte_.
[v] JAMES WHITE, _op. cit._
[w] H. FORNERON, _Les ducs de Guise et leur époque_.
CHAPTER XIII. CATHERINE DE’ MEDICI AND THE RELIGIOUS WARS
[b] BERNARD DE LACOMBE, _Catherine de Medici_.
[c] VICTOR DURUY, _op. cit._
[d] E. E. CROWE, _op. cit._
[e] P. DE B. BRANTÔME, _op. cit._
[f] JAMES WHITE, _op. cit._
[g] MICHEL DE CASTELNAU, _Mémoires_.
[h] MICHEL EYQUEM DE MONTAIGNE, _Essais_.
[i] HENRI-CATHERIN DAVILA, _Histoire des guerres civiles de France depuis
la mort de Henri II jusqu’à la paix de Vervins_.
[j] MAXIMILIAN DE BÉTHUNE (Duc de Sully), _Mémoires_.
[k] W. S. BROWNING, _The History of the Huguenots_.
[l] HENRI MARTIN, _op. cit._
[m] A. E. C. DARESTE DE LA CHAVANNE, _op. cit._
[n] THÉODORE AGRIPPA D’AUBIGNÉ, _Histoire Universelle_.
[o] PIERRE DE L’ESTOILE, _Journal_.
[p] M. CAVALLI, _Relation de Marino Cavalli_ (Ambassador to France from
Venice).
[q] FRANÇOIS DE LA NOUE, _Mémoires_.
[r] MARGUERITE DE VALOIS (La Reine Margot), _Mémoires_.
[s] H. FORNERON, _op. cit._
[t] A. SORBIN, _Histoire contenant un ibrégé de la vie, mœurs et vertus
du Roy très chrétien et débonnaire, Charles IX_.
[w] J. STEPHEN, _Lectures on the History of France_.
CHAPTER XIV. HENRY OF NAVARRE, THE FIRST OF THE BOURBONS
[b] A. E. C. DARESTE DE LA CHAVANNE, _op. cit._
[c] HENRI MARTIN, _op. cit._
[d] JAMES WHITE, _op. cit._
[e] T. A. D’AUBIGNÉ, _op. cit._
[f] H. C. DAVILA, _op. cit._
[g] J. C. L. S. DE SISMONDI, _op. cit._
[h] CHARLES MERCIER DE LACOMBE, _Henri IV et sa politique_.
[i] M. E. DE MONTAIGNE, _op. cit._
[j] C. F. LENIENT, _La Satire en France_.
[k] E. E. CROWE, _op. cit._
[l] F. GUIZOT, _op. cit._
[m] G. W. KITCHIN, _History of France_.
[n] VICTOR DURUY, _op. cit._
[o] FRANÇOIS DE BASSOMPIERRE, _Mémoires_.
[p] M. DE BÉTHUNE (Duc de Sully), _op. cit._
[q] FRANÇOIS MARIE AROUET DE VOLTAIRE, _Le siècle de Louis XIV_.
[r] J. STEPHEN, _Lectures on the History of France_.
CHAPTER XV. THE LITERARY PROGRESS OF FRANCE IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
[b] A. F. VILLEMAIN, _op. cit._
[c] J. STEPHEN, _op. cit._
[d] HENRI MARTIN, _op. cit._
[e] G. E. SAINTSBURY, article on “Rabelais” in the _Encyclopædia
Britannica_.
[f] MICHELET, _op. cit._
CHAPTER XVI. THE EARLY YEARS OF LOUIS XIII
[b] J. MICHELET, _op. cit._
[c] DAVID HUME, _Histoire naturelle de la religion, 1752_.
[d] E. E. CROWE, _op. cit._
[e] ARMAND DU PLESSIS (Cardinal de Richelieu), _Mémoires_.
[f] VICTOR DURUY, _op. cit._
[g] FLORIMOND RAPINE, _Relation des États de 1614_.
[h] HENRI MARTIN, _op. cit._
[i] A. E. C. DARESTE DE LA CHAVANNE, _op. cit._
[j] CHARLES SEIGNOBOS, _Scènes et épisodes de l’histoire nationale_.
CHAPTER XVII. THE DICTATORSHIP OF RICHELIEU
[b] J. MICHELET, _op. cit._
[c] E. DE BONNECHOSE, _op. cit._
[d] THÉOPHILE LAVALLÉE, _op. cit._
[e] E. E. CROWE, _op. cit._
[f] _Mémoires de Pontis 1630_ (Journal de Bassompierre).
[g] FRANÇOIS DE BASSOMPIERRE, _op. cit._
[h] J. B. RAYMOND CAPEFIGUE, _Richelieu, Mazarin, La Fronde et le règne
de Louis XIV_.
[i] FRANÇOISE BERTAUT DE MOTTEVILLE, _Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire
d’Anne d’Autriche_.
[j] J. WHITE, _op. cit._
[k] L. D’ASTARAC DE FRONTRAILLES, _Relation des choses particulières de
la cour pendant la faveur de M. de Cinq-Mars_.
[l] A. E. C. DARESTE DE LA CHAVANNE, _op. cit._
[m] ARMAND DU PLESSIS (Richelieu), _Testament Politique_.
[n] J. F. PAUL DE GONDI (Cardinal de Retz), _Mémoires_.
[o] CH. DE SECONDAT DE MONTESQUIEU, _Pensées diverses_.
[p] HENRI MARTIN, _op. cit._
[q] PIERRE ET JACQUES DUPUY, _Traité des droits et libertés de l’Église
Gallicane, avec les Preuves_.
[r] JULES CAILLET, _L’Administration en France sous le ministère du
Cardinal Richelieu_.
[s] CORNEILLE.
[t] F. GUIZOT, _op. cit._
[u] V. DURUY, _op. cit._
[v] J. STEPHEN, _op. cit._
[w] G. W. KITCHIN, _op. cit._
CHAPTER XVIII. THE SUPREMACY OF MAZARIN
[b] JULES MICHELET, _Richelieu et la Fronde_.
[c] A. E. C. DARESTE DE LA CHAVANNE, _op. cit._
[d] H. MARTIN, _op. cit._
[e] A. RENÉE, _Les Nièces de Mazarin_.
[f] ADOLPHE CHÉRUEL, _Histoire de France pendant la minorité de Louis
XIV_.
[g] E. E. CROWE, _op. cit._
[h] V. DURUY, _op. cit._
[i] F. M. A. DE VOLTAIRE, _op. cit._
[j] PAUL DE GONDI (Cardinal de Retz), _op. cit._
[k] FRANÇOISE BERTAUT DE MOTTEVILLE, _op. cit._
[l] FRANÇOIS, DUC DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD, _Maximes_.
[m] FRANÇOIS, DUC DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD, _Mémoires sur le règne d’Anne
d’Autriche_.
[n] CHARLOTTE ELIZABETH DE BAVIÈRE (Princesse Palatine, Duchesse
d’Orléans), _Correspondance_.
[o] G. W. KITCHIN, _op. cit._
[p] _Les Carnets de Mazarin._
[q] G. W. KITCHIN, article on “France” in the Ninth Edition of the
_Encyclopædia Britannica_.
CHAPTER XIX. L’ÉTAT, C’EST MOI
[b] F. M. A. DE VOLTAIRE, _op. cit._
[c] V. DURUY, _op. cit._
[d] H. MARTIN, _op. cit._
[e] A. E. C. DARESTE DE LA CHAVANNE, _op. cit._
[f] LOUIS XIV, _Mémoires_.
[g] MARIUS TOPIN, _L’Homme au masque de fer_.
[h] M. N. BOUILLET, _Dictionnaire universel d’histoire et de géographie_.
[i] L. DE ROUVROY (Duc de Saint-Simon), _Mémoires de Louis XIV_.
[j] THÉOPHILE LAVALLÉE, _op. cit._
[k] E. E. CROWE, _op. cit._
[l] JULES MICHELET, _Louis XIV et la Révocation de l’Edit de Nantes_.
[m] J. B. PAQUIER, _Histoire de l’unité politique et territoriale de la
France_.
[n] PIERRE LE PESANT DE BOISGUILLEBERT, _Detail de la France sous Louis
XIV_.
[o] LA BARONNE DE STAAL, _Mémoires_.
[p] J. STEPHEN, _op. cit._
[q] G. W. KITCHIN, _op. cit._
CHAPTER XX. LOUIS XIV, SPAIN AND HOLLAND
[b] A. E. C. DARESTE DE CHAVANNE, _op. cit._
[c] H. MARTIN, _op. cit._
[d] V. DURUY, _op. cit._
[e] OLIVIER D’ORMESSON, _Journal_.
[f] F. M. A. DE VOLTAIRE, _op. cit._
[g] F. GUIZOT, _op. cit._
[h] F. MIGNET, _Négotiations relative à la succession d’Espagne_.
[i] MME. LA MARQUISE DE SÉVIGNÉ, _Lettres_.
[j] E. E. CROWE, _op. cit._
[k] GEORGES DURUY, _Vie de Turenne_.
[l] LE MARQUIS DE LA FARE, _Mémoires sur Louis XIV_.
[m] LOUIS RACINE, _Mémoires sur la Vie de J. Racine_.
[n] J. STEPHEN, _op. cit._
CHAPTER XXI. THE HEIGHT AND DECLINE OF THE BOURBON MONARCHY
[b] A. E. C. DARESTE DE LA CHAVANNE, _op. cit._
[c] V. DURUY, _op. cit._
[d] F. M. A. DE VOLTAIRE, _op. cit._
[e] H. MARTIN, _op. cit._
[f] E. E. CROWE, _op. cit._
[g] MME. LA COMTESSE DE LA FAYETTE, _Œuvres_.
[h] DUC DE SAINT-SIMON, _op. cit._
[i] F. GUIZOT, _op. cit._
[j] J. STEPHEN, _op. cit._
CHAPTER XXII. THE AGE OF LOUIS XIV
[b] A. E. C. DARESTE DE LA CHAVANNE, _op. cit._
[c] A. RAMBAUD, _op. cit._
[d] D. NISARD, _Histoire de la littérature française_.
[e] HENRY THOMAS BUCKLE, _History of Civilisation in England_.
[f] ARSÈNE HOUSSAYE, _La Régence_.
[g] H. MARTIN, _op. cit._
[h] MME. DE SÉVIGNÉ, _op. cit._
[i] F. M. A. DE VOLTAIRE, _op. cit._
[j] JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE, _Caractères ou les Mœurs de ce siècle_.
[k] FRANÇOIS, DUC DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD, _op. cit._
[l] JACQUES BÉNIGNE BOSSUET, _Discours sur l’histoire universelle_.
_Politique tirée de l’écriture sainte._
[m] LOUIS XIV, _op. cit._
[n] CHARLES CASTEL (Abbé de Saint Pierre), _Projet de paix perpétuelle._
_Discours sur la Polysynodie._
[o] DUC DE SAINT-SIMON, _Mémoires_.
[p] FRANÇOISE BERTAUT DE MOTTEVILLE, _op. cit._
[q] BERNARD GERMAIN ÉTIENNE DE LA VILLE DE LACÉPÈDE, _Histoire de
l’Europe, Paris_, 1833.
[r] _A New and General Biographical Dictionary_, London, 1798, 15 vols.
[s] J. STEPHEN, _Lectures on the History of France_.
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