The St. Bartholomew had struck Europe with surprise and horror; not only amongst the princes and in the countries that were Protestant, in England, Scotland, and Northern Europe, but in Catholic Germany itself, there was a very strong feeling of reprobation; the Emperor Maximilian II. and the Elector Palatine Frederic III., called the Pious, showed it openly; when the Duke of Anjou, elected King of Poland, went through Germany to go and take possession of his kingdom, he was received at Heidelberg with premeditated coolness. When he arrived at the gate of the castle, not a soul went to meet him; alone he ascended the steps, and found in the hall a picture representing the massacre of St. Bartholomew; the elector called his attention to the portraits of the principal victims, amongst others that of Coligny, and at table he was waited upon solely by French Protestant refugees. At Rome itself, in the midst of official satisfaction and public demonstrations of it exhibited by the pontifical court, the truth came out, and Pope Gregory XIII. was touched by it when certain of my lords the cardinals who were beside him “asked wherefore he wept and was sad at so goodly a despatch of those wretched folk, enemies of God and of his Holiness: ‘I weep,’ said the pope, ‘at the means the king used, exceeding unlawful and forbidden of God, for to inflict such punishment; I fear that one will fall upon him, and that he will not have a very long bout of it (will not live very long). I fear, too, that amongst so many dead folk there died as many innocent as guilty.’” [Brantome, t. iv. p. 306. He attributes this language to Pope Pius V., who died four months before the St. Bartholomew. Gregory XIII., elected May 15, 1572, was pope when the massacre took place.] Only the King of Spain, Philip II., a fanatical despot, and pitiless persecutor, showed complete satisfaction at the event; and he offered Charles IX. the assistance of his army, if he had need of it, against what there was remaining of heretics in his kingdom.

Charles IX. had not mind or character sufficiently sound or sufficiently strong to support, without great perturbation, the effect of so many violent, repeated, and often contradictory impressions. Catherine de Medici had brought up her three sons solely with a view of having their confidence and implicit obedience. “All the actions of the queen-mother,” said the Venetian ambassador Sigismund Cavalli, who had for a long while resided at her court, “have always been prompted and regulated by one single passion, the passion of ruling.” Her son Charles had yielded to it without an effort in his youth. “He was accustomed to say that, until he was five and twenty, he meant to play the fool; that is to say, to think of nothing but of enjoying his heyday; accordingly he showed aversion for speaking and treating of business, putting himself altogether in his mother’s hands. Now, he no longer thinks and acts in the same way. I have been told that, since the late events, he requires to have the same thing said more than three times over by the queen, before obeying her.” It was not with regard to his mother only that Charles had changed. “His looks,” says Cavalli, “have become melancholy and sombre; in his conversations and audiences he does not look the speaker in the face; he droops his head, closes his eyes, opens them all at once, and, as if he found the movement painful, closes them again with no less suddenness. It is feared that the demon of vengeance has possessed him; he used to be merely severe; it is feared that he is becoming cruel. He is temperate in his diet; drinks nothing but water. To tire himself at any price, is his object. He remains on horseback for twelve or fourteen consecutive hours; and so he goes hunting and coursing through the woods the same animal, the stag, for two or three days, never stopping but to eat, and never resting but for an instant during the night.” He was passionately fond of all bodily exercises, the practice of arms, and the game of tennis. “He had a forge set up for himself,” says Brantome, “and I have seen him forging cannon, and horseshoes, and other things as stoutly as the most robust farriers and forgemen.” He, at the same time, showed a keen and intelligent interest in intellectual works and pleasures. He often had a meeting, in the evening, of poets, men of letters, and artists—Ronsard, Amadis Jamin, Jodelle, Daurat, Baif; in 1570 he gave them letters patent for the establishment of an Academy of poetry and music, the first literary society founded in France by a king; but it disappeared amidst the civil wars. Charles IX. himself sang in the choir, and he composed a few hunting-airs. Ronsard was a favorite, almost a friend, with him; he used to take him with him on his trips, and give him quarters in his palace, and there was many an interchange of verse between them, in which Ronsard did not always have the advantage. Charles gave a literary outlet to his passion for hunting; he wrote a little treatise entitled La Chasse royale, which was not published until 1625, and of which M. Henry Chevreul brought out, in 1857, a charming and very correct edition. Charles IX. dedicated it to his lieutenant of the hunt, Mesnil, in terms of such modest and affectionate simplicity that they deserve to be kept in remembrance. “Mesnil,” said the king, “I should feel myself far too ungrateful, and expect to be chidden for presumption, if, in this little treatise that I am minded to make upon stag hunting, I did not, before any one begins to read it, avow and confess that I learnt from you what little I know. . . . I beg you, also, Mesnil, to be pleased to correct and erase what there is wrong in the said treatise, the which, if peradventure it is so done that there is nothing more required than to re-word and alter, the credit will be firstly yours for having so well taught me, and then mine for having so well remembered. Well, then, having been taught by so good a master, I will be bold enough to essay it, begging you to accept it as heartily as I present it and dedicate it to you.”

These details and this quotation are allowable in order to shed full light upon the private and incoherent character of this king, who bears the responsibility of one of the most tragic events in French history. In the spring of 1574, at the age of twenty-three years and eleven months, and after a reign of eleven years and six months, Charles IX. was attacked by an inflammatory malady, which brought on violent hemorrhage; he was revisited, in his troubled sleep, by the same bloody visions about which, a few days after the St. Bartholomew, he had spoken to Ambrose Pare. He no longer retained in his room anybody but two of his servants and his nurse, “of whom he was very fond, although she was a Huguenot,” says the contemporary chronicler Peter de l’Estoile. “When she had lain down upon a chest, and was just beginning to doze, hearing the king moaning, weeping, and sighing, she went full gently up to the bed. ‘Ah, nurse, nurse,’ said the king, ‘what bloodshed and what murders! Ah! what evil counsel have I followed! O, my God! forgive me them and have mercy upon me, if it may please Thee! I know not what hath come to me, so bewildered and agitated do they make me. What will be the end of it all? What shall I do? I am lost; I see it well.’ Then said the nurse to him, ‘Sir, the murders be on the heads of those who made you do them! Of yourself, sir, you never could; and since you are not consenting thereto, and are sorry therefor, believe that God will not put them down to your account, and will hide them with the cloak of justice of His Son, to whom alone you must have recourse. But for God’s sake, let your Majesty cease weeping!’ And thereupon, having been to fetch him a pocket-handkerchief, because his own was soaked with tears, after that the king had taken it from her hand, he signed to her to go away and leave him to his rest.”

On Sunday, May 30, 1574, Whitsunday, about three in the afternoon, Charles IX. expired, after having signed an ordinance conferring the regency upon his mother Catherine, “who accepted it,” was the expression in the letters patent, “at the request of the Duke of Alencon, the King of Navarre, and other princes and peers of France.” According to D’Aubigne, Charles used often to say of his brother Henry, that, “when he had a kingdom on his hands, the administration would find him out, and that he would disappoint those who had hopes of him.” The last words he said were, “that he was glad not to have left any young child to succeed him, very well knowing that France needs a man, and that, with a child, the king and the reign are unhappy.”

CHAPTER XXXIV.

HENRY III. AND THE RELIGIOUS WARS. (1574-1589.)

Though elected King of Poland on the 9th of May, 1573, Henry, Duke of Anjou, had not yet left Paris at the end of the summer. Impatient at his slowness to depart, Charles IX. said, with his usual oath, “By God’s death! my brother or I must at once leave the kingdom: my mother shall not succeed in preventing it.” “Go,” said Catherine to Henry; “you will not be away long.” She foresaw, with no great sorrow one would say, the death of Charles IX., and her favorite son’s accession to the throne of France. Having arrived in Poland on the 25th of January, 1574, and been crowned at Cracow on the 24th of February, Henry had been scarcely four months King of Poland when he was apprised, about the middle of June, that his brother Charles had lately died, on the 30th of May, and that he was King of France. “Do not waste your time in deliberating,” said his French advisers; “you must go and take possession of the throne of France without abdicating that of Poland: go at once and without fuss.” Henry followed this counsel. He left Cracow, on the 18th of June, with a very few attendants. Some Poles were apprehensive of his design, but said nothing about it. He went a quarter of a league on foot to reach the horses which were awaiting him, set off at a gallop, rode all night, and arrived next day early on the frontier of Moravia, an Austrian province. The royal flight created a great uproar at Cracow; the noblemen, and even the peasants, armed with stakes and scythes, set out in pursuit of their king. They did not come up with him; they fell in with his chancellor only, Guy du Faur, Sieur de Pibrac, who had missed him at the appointed meeting-place, and who, whilst seeking to rejoin him, had lost himself in the forests and marshes, concealed himself in the osiers and reeds, and been obliged now and then to dip his head, in the mud to avoid the arrows discharged on all sides by the peasants in pursuit of the king. Being arrested by some people who were for taking him back to Cracow and paying him out for his complicity in his master’s flight, he with great difficulty obtained his release and permission to continue his road. Destined to become more celebrated by his writings and by his Quatrains moraux than by his courtly adventures, Pibrac rejoined King Henry at Vienna, where the Emperor Maximilian II. received him with great splendor. Delivered from fatigue and danger, Henry appeared to think of nothing but resting and diverting himself; he tarried to his heart’s content at Vienna, Venice, Ferrara, Mantua, and Turin. He was everywhere welcomed with brilliant entertainments, which the Emperor Maximilian and the senators of Venice accompanied with good advice touching the government of France in her religious troubles; and the nominal sovereign of two kingdoms took nearly three months in going from that whence he had fled to that of which he was about to take possession. Having started from Cracow on the 18th of June, 1574, he did not arrive until the 5th of September at Lyons, whither the queen-mother had sent his brother, the Duke of Alencon, and his brother-in-law, the King of Navarre, to receive him, going herself as far as Bourgoin in Dauphiny, in order to be the first to see her darling son again.

The king’s entry into France caused, says De Thou, a strange revulsion in all minds. “During the lifetime of Charles IX., none had seemed more worthy of the throne than Henry, and everybody desired to have him for master. But scarcely had he arrived when disgust set in to the extent of auguring very ill of his reign. There was no longer any trace in this prince, who had been nursed, so to speak, in the lap of war, of that manly and warlike courage which had been so much admired. He no longer rode on horseback; he did not show himself amongst his people, as his predecessors had been wont to do; he was only to be seen shut up with a few favorites in a little painted boat which went up and down the Saone he no longer took his meals without a balustrade, which did not allow him to be approached any Hearer; and if anybody had any petitions to present to him, they had to wait for him as he came out from dinner, when he took them as he hurried by. For the greater part of the day he remained closeted with some young folks, who alone had the prince’s ear, without any body’s knowing how they had arrived at this distinction, whilst the great, and those whose services were known, could scarcely get speech of him. Showiness and effeminacy had taken the place of the grandeur and majesty which had formerly distinguished our kings.” [De Thou, Histoire universelle, t. vii. p. 134.]

“The time was ill chosen by Henry III. for this change of habits and for becoming an indolent and voluptuous king, set upon taking his pleasure in his court and isolating himself from his people. The condition and ideas of France were also changing, but to issue in the assumption of quite a different character and to receive development in quite a different direction. Catholics or Protestants, agents of the king’s government or malcontents, all were getting a taste for and adopting the practice of independence and a vigorous and spontaneous activity. The bonds of the feudal system were losing their hold, and were not yet replaced by those of a hierarchically organized administration. Religious creeds and political ideas were becoming, for thoughtful and straightforward spirits, rules of conduct, powerful motives of action, and they furnished the ambitious with effective weapons. The theologians of the Catholic church and of the Reformed churches—on one side the Cardinal of Lorraine, Cardinals Campeggi and Sadolet, and other learned priests or prelates, and on the other side Calvin, who had been nursed, so to speak, in the lap of war, of that manly and warlike courage which had been so much admired. He no longer rode on horseback; he did not show himself amongst his people, as his predecessors had been wont to do; he was only to be seen shut up with a few favorites in a little painted boat which went up and down the Saone he no longer took his meals without a balustrade, which did not allow him to be approached any nearer; and if anybody had any petitions to present to him, they had to wait for him as he came out from dinner, when he took them as he hurried by. For the greater part of the day he remained closeted with some young folks, who alone had the prince’s ear, without anybody’s knowing how they had arrived at this distinction, whilst the great, and those whose services were known, could scarcely get speech of him. Showiness and effeminacy had taken the place of the grandeur and majesty which had formerly distinguished our kings.” [De Thou, Histoire universelle, t. vii. p. 134.]

The time was ill chosen by Henry III. for this change of habits and for becoming an indolent and voluptuous king, set upon taking his pleasure in his court and isolating himself from his people. The condition and ideas of France were also changing, but to issue in the assumption of quite a different character and to receive development in quite a different direction. Catholics or Protestants, agents of the king’s government or malcontents, all were getting a taste for and adopting the practice of independence and a vigorous and spontaneous activity. The bonds of the feudal system were losing their hold, and were not yet replaced by those of a hierarchically organized administration. Religious creeds and political ideas were becoming, for thoughtful and straightforward spirits, rules of conduct, powerful motives of action, and they furnished the ambitious with effective weapons. The theologians of the Catholic church and of the Reformed churches—on one side the Cardinal of Lorraine, Cardinals Campeggi and Sadolet, and other learned priests or prelates, and on the other side Calvin, Theodore de Beze, Melancthon, and Bucer—were working with zeal to build up into systems of dogma their interpretations of the great facts of Christianity, and they succeeded in implanting a passionate attachment to them in their flocks. Independently of these religious controversies, superior minds, profound lawyers, learned scholars were applying their energies to founding, on a philosophical basis and historic principles, the organization of governments and the reciprocal rights of princes and peoples. Ramus, one of the last and of the most to be lamented victims of the St. Bartholomew; Francis Hotman, who, in his Franco-Gallia, aspired to graft the new national liberties upon the primitive institutions of the Franks; Hubert Languet, the eloquent author of the Vindicice contra tyrannos, or de la Puissance legitime du Prince cur le Peuple et du Peuple sur le Prince; John Bodin, the first, in original merit, amongst the publicists of the sixteenth century, in his six livres de LA REPUBLIQUE; all these eminent men boldly tackled the great questions of political liberty or of legislative reforms. Le Contre-un, that republican treatise by De la Boetie, written in 1546, and circulated, at first, in manuscript only, was inserted, between 1576 and 1578, in the Memoires de l’Etat de France, and passionately extolled by the independent thinker Michael de Montaigne in his Essais, of which nine editions were published between 1580 and 1598, and evidently very much read in the world of letters. An intellectual movement so active and powerful could not fail to have a potent effect upon political life. Before the St. Bartholomew, the great religious and political parties, the Catholic and the Protestant, were formed and at grips; the house of Lorraine at the head of the Catholics, and the house of Bourbon, Conde, and Coligny at the head of the Protestants, with royalty trying feebly and vainly to maintain between them a hollow peace. To this stormy and precarious, but organized and clearly defined condition, the St. Bartholomew had caused anarchy to succeed. Protestantism, vanquished but not destroyed, broke up into provincial and municipal associations without recognized and dominant heads, without discipline or combination in respect of either their present management or their ultimate end. Catholicism, though victorious, likewise underwent a break-up; men of mark, towns and provinces, would not accept the St. Bartholomew and its consequences; a new party, the party of the policists, sprang up, opposed to the principle and abjuring the practice of persecution, having no mind to follow either the Catholics in their outrages or royalty in its tergiversations, and striving to maintain in the provinces and the towns, where it had the upper hand, enough of order and of justice to at least keep at a distance the civil war which was elsewhere raging. Languedoc owed to Marshal de Damville, second son of the Constable Anne de Montmorency, this comparatively bearable position. But the degree of security and of local peace which it offered the people was so imperfect, so uncertain, that the break-up of the country and of the state went still farther. In a part of Languedoc, in the Vivarais, the inhabitants, in order to put their habitations and their property in safety, resolved to make a league amongst themselves, without consulting any authority, not even Marshal de Damville, the peace-seeking governor of their province. Their treaty of alliance ran, that arms should be laid down throughout the whole of the Vivarais; that none, foreigner or native, should be liable to trouble for the past; that tillers of the soil and traders should suffer no detriment in person or property; that all hostilities should cease in the towns and all forays in the country; that there should everywhere be entire freedom for commerce; that cattle which had been lifted should be immediately restored gratis; that concerted action should be taken to get rid of the garrisons out of the country and to raze the fortresses, according as the public weal might require; and finally that whosoever should dare to violate these regulations should be regarded as a traitor and punished as a disturber of the public peace. “As soon as the different authorities in the state, Marshal de Damville as well as the rest, were informed of this novelty,” says De Thou, “they made every effort to prevent it from taking effect. ‘Nothing could be of more dangerous example,’ they said, ‘than to suffer the people to make treaties in this way and on their own authority, without waiting for the consent of his Majesty or of those who represented him in the provinces.’ The folks of the Vivarais, on the contrary, presumed to justify themselves by saying that the step they had taken did not in any way infringe the king’s authority; that it was rather an opening given by them for securely establishing tranquillity in the kingdom; that nothing was more advantageous or could contribute more towards peace than to raze all those fortresses set up in the heart of the state, which were like so many depots of revolt; that by a diminution of the garrisons the revenues of his Majesty would be proportionately augmented; that, at any rate, there would result this advantage, that the lands, which formed almost the whole wealth of the kingdom, would be cultivated, that commerce would flourish, and that the people, delivered from fear of the many scoundrels who, found a retreat in those places, would at last be able to draw breath after the many misfortunes they had experienced.”

It was in this condition of disorganization and red-hot anarchy that Henry III., on his return from Poland, and after the St. Bartholomew, found France; it was in the face of all these forces, full of life, but scattered and excited one against another, that, with the aid of his mother, Catherine, he had to re-establish unity in the state, the effectiveness of the government, and the public peace. It was not a task for which the tact of an utterly corrupted woman and an irresolute prince sufficed. What could the artful manoeuvrings of Catherine and the waverings of Henry III. do towards taming both Catholics and Protestants at the same time, and obliging them to live at peace with one another, under one equitable and effective power? Henry IV. was as yet unformed, nor was his hour yet come for this great work. Henry III. and Catherine de’ Medici failed in it completely; their government of fifteen years served only to make them lose their reputation for ability, and to aggravate for France the evils which it was their business to heal. In 1575, a year only after Henry III.‘s accession, revolt penetrated to the royal household. The Duke of Alencon, the king’s younger brother, who, since his brother’s coronation, took the title of Duke of Anjou, escaped on the 15th of September from the Louvre by a window, and from Paris by a hole made in the wall of circumvallation. He fled to Dreux, a town in his appanage, and put himself at the head of a large number of malcontents, nobles and burgesses, Catholic and Reformed, mustered around him under this name of no religious significance between the two old parties. On the 17th of September, in his manifesto, he gave as reasons for his revolt, excessive taxation, waste of the public revenues, the feebleness of the royal authority, incapable as it was of putting a stop to the religious troubles, and the disgrace which had been inflicted upon himself “by pernicious ministers who desire to have the government in their sole patronage, excluding from it the foremost and the most illustrious of the court, and devouring all that there is remaining to the poor people.” He protested his devotion to the king his brother, at the same time declaring war against the Guises.

King Henry of Navarre, testifying little sympathy with the Duke of Anjou, remained at court, abandoning himself apparently to his pleasures alone. Two of his faithful servants (the poet-historian D’Aubigne was one of them) heard him one night sighing as he lay in bed, and humming half aloud this versicle from the eighty-eighth Psalm:—

“Sir,” said D’Aubigne eagerly, “it is true, then, that the Sprit of God worketh and dwelleth in you still? You sigh unto God because of the absence of your friends and faithful servants; and all the while they are together, sighing because of yours and laboring for your freedom. But you have only tears in your eyes, and they, arms in hand, are fighting your enemies. As for us two, we were talking of taking to flight tomorrow, when your voice made us draw the curtain. Bethink you, sir, that, after us, the hands that will serve you would not dare refuse to employ poison and the knife.” Henry, much moved, resolved to follow the example of the Duke of Anjou. His departure was fixed for the 3d of February, 1576. He went and slept at Senlis; hunted next day very early, and, on his return from hunting, finding his horses baited and ready, “What news?” he asked. “Sir,” said D’Aubigne, “we are betrayed; the king knows all; the road to death and shame is Paris; that to life and glory is anywhere else.” “That is more than enough; away!” replied Henry. They rode all night, and arrived without misadventure at Alencon. Two hundred and fifty gentlemen, having been apprised in time, went thither to join the King of Navarre. He pursued his road in their company. From Senlis to the Loire he was silent but when he had crossed the river, “Praised be God, who has delivered me!” he cried; “at Paris they were the death of my mother; there they killed the admiral and my best servants; and they had no mind to do any better by me, if God had not had me in his keeping. I return thither no more unless I am dragged. I regret only two things that I have left behind at Paris—mass and my wife. As for mass, I will try to do without it; but as for my wife, I cannot; I mean to see her again.” He disavowed the appearances of Catholicism he had assumed, again made open profession of Protestantism by holding at the baptismal font, in the conventicle, the daughter of a physician amongst his friends. Then he reached Bearn, declaring that he meant to remain there independent and free. A few days before his departure he had written to one of his Bearnese friends, “The court is the strangest you ever saw. We are almost always ready to cut one another’s throats. We wear daggers, shirts of mail, and very often the whole cuirass under the cape. I am only waiting for the opportunity to deliver a little battle, for they tell me they will kill me, and I want to be beforehand.” Mesdames de Carnavalet and de Sauve, two of his fair friends, had warned him that, far from giving him the lieutenant-generalship, which had been so often promised him, it had been decided to confer this office on the king’s brother, in order to get him back to court and seize his person as soon as he arrived.

It was the increasing preponderance of the Guises, at court as well as in the country, which caused the two princes to take this sudden resolution. Since Henry III.‘s coming to the throne, war had gone on between the Catholics and the Protestants, but languidly and with frequent suspensions through local and shortlived truces. The king and the queen-mother would have been very glad that the St. Bartholomew should be short-lived also, as a necessary but transitory crisis; it had rid them of their most formidable adversaries, Coligny and the Reformers of note who were about him. Henry and Catherine aspired to no more than resuming their policy of manoeuvring and wavering between the two parties engaged in the struggle; but it was not for so poor a result that the ardent Catholics had committed the crime of the St. Bartholomew; they promised themselves from it the decisive victory of their church and of their supremacy. Henry de Guise came forward as their leader in this grand design; there are to be read, beneath a portrait of him done in the sixteenth century, these verses, also of that date:—

Guise cultivated very carefully this ardent confidence on the part of Catholic France; he recommended to his partisans attention to little pious and popular practices. “I send you some paternosters [meaning, in the plural, the beads of a chaplet, or the chaplet entire],” he wrote to his wife, Catherine of Cleves; “you will have strings made for them and string them together. I don’t know whether you dare offer some of them to the queens and to my lady mother. Ask advice of Mesdames de Retz and de Villeroy about it.” The flight and insurrection of the Duke of Anjou and the King of Navarre furnished the Duke of Guise with a very natural occasion for re-engaging in the great struggle between Catholicism and Protestantism, wherein the chief part belonged to him. Let us recur, for a moment, to the origin of that struggle and the part taken in it, at the outset, by the princes of the house of Lorraine. “As early as the year 1562, twenty-six years before the affair of the barricades,” says M. Vitet in the excellent introduction which he has put at the head of his beautiful historic dramas from the last half of the sixteenth century, “Cardinal Charles of Lorraine, being at the Council of Trent, conceived the plan of a Holy League, or association of Catholics, which was to have the triple object of defending, by armed force, the Romish church in France, of obtaining for the cardinal’s brother, Duke Francis de Guise, the lieutenant-generalship of the kingdom, and of helping him to ascend the throne, in case the line of the Valois should become extinct. The death of Duke Francis, murdered in front of Orleans by Poltrot, did not permit the cardinal to carry out his plan. Five years afterwards, Henry de Guise, eldest son of Francis, and then eighteen years of age, caused to be drawn up, for the first time, a form of oath whereby the dignitaries bound themselves to sacrifice their goods and lives in defence of the Catholic religion in the face of and against all, except the king, the royal family, and the princes of their connection. This form was signed by the nobility of Champagne and Brie, a province of which Henry de Guise was governor, and on the 25th of July, 1568, the bishop and clergy of Troyes signed it likewise. The association is named, in the form, Holy League, Christian and royal. Up to the year 1576 it remained secret, and did not cross the boundaries of Champagne.” To this summary of M. Vitet’s may be added that independently of the Champagnese league of 1568 and in the interval between 1568 and 1575 there had been formed, in some provinces and towns, other local associations for the defence of the Catholic church against the heretics. When, in 1575, first the Duke of Anjou and after him the King of Navarre were seen flying from the court of Henry III. and commencing an insurrection with the aid of a considerable body of German auxiliaries and French refugees, already on French soil and on their way across Champagne, the peril of the Catholic church appeared so grave and so urgent that, in the threatened provinces, the Catholics devoted themselves with ardor to the formation of a grand association for the defence of their cause. Then and thus was really born the League, secret at first, but, before long, publicly and openly proclaimed, which held so important a place in the history of the sixteenth century. Picardy and Champagne were the first scene of its formation; but in the neighboring provinces the same travail took place and brought forth fruits. At Paris, a burgess named La Roche-Blond, and devoted to the Guises, a perfumer named Peter de la Bruyere and his son Matthew de la Bruyere, councillor at the Chatelet, were, says De Thou, the first and most zealous preachers of the Union. “At their solicitation,” continues the austere magistrate, “all the debauchees there were in this great city, all folks whose only hope was in civil war for the indulgence of their libertinism or for a safe means of satisfying their avarice or their ambition, enrolled themselves emulously in this force. Many, even of the richest burgesses, whose hatred for Protestants blinded them so far as not to see the dangers to which such associations expose public tranquillity in a well-regulated state, had the weakness to join the seditious.”

Many asked for time to consider, and, before making any engagement, they went to see President de Thou [Christopher, premier president of the Parliament of Paris since 1562, and father of the historian James Augustus de Thou], informed him of these secret assemblies and all that went on there, and begged him to tell them whether he approved of them, and whether it was true that the court authorized them. M. de Thou answered them at once, with that straightforwardness which was innate in him, that these kinds of proceedings had not yet come to his knowledge, that he doubted whether they had the approbation of his Majesty, and that they would do wisely to hold aloof from all such associations. The authority of this great man began to throw suspicion upon the designs of the Unionists, and his reply prevented many persons from casting in their lot with the party; but they who found themselves at the head of this faction were not the folks to so easily give up their projects, for they felt themselves too well supported at court and amongst the people. They advised the Lorraine princes to have the Union promulgated in the provinces, and to labor to make the nobility of the kingdom enter it.

Henry de Guise did not hesitate. At the same time that he avowed the League and labored to propagate it, he did what was far more effectual for its success: he entered the field and gained a victory. The German allies and French refugees who had come to support Prince Henry de Conde and the Duke of Anjou in their insurrection advanced into Champagne. Guise had nothing ready, neither army nor money; he mustered in haste three thousand horse, who were to be followed by a body of foot and a moiety of the king’s guards. “I haven’t a son,” he wrote to his wife; “take something out of the king’s chest, if there is anything there; provided you know that there is something there, don’t be afraid; take it and send it me at once. As for the reitres, they are more afraid of us than we of them; don’t be frightened about them on my account; the greatest danger I shall run will be that a glass of wine may break in my hand.” He set out in pursuit of the Germans, came up with them on the 10th of October, 1575, at Port-a-Binson, on the Marne, and ordered them to be attacked by his brother the Duke of Mayenne, whom he supported vigorously. They were broken and routed. The hunt, according to the expression at the time, lasted all the rest of the day and during the night. “A world of dead covers the field of battle,” wrote Guise. He had himself been wounded: he went in obstinate pursuit of a mounted foe whom he had twice touched with his sword, and who, in return, had fired two pistol-shots, of which one took effect in the leg, and the other carried away part of his cheek and his left ear. Thence came his name of Henry the Scarred (le Balafre), which has clung to him in history.

Scarcely four years had rolled away since the St. Bartholomew. In vain had been the massacre of ten thousand Protestants, according to the lowest, and of one hundred thousand, according to the highest estimates, besides nearly all the renowned chiefs of the party. Charles IX.‘s earnest prayer, “That none remain to reproach me!” was so far from accomplishment that the war between Catholicism and Protestantism recommenced in almost every part of France with redoubled passion, with a new importance of character, and with symptoms of much longer duration than at its first outbreak. Both parties had found leaders made, both from their position and their capacity, to command them. Admiral Coligny was succeeded by the King of Navarre, who was destined to become Henry IV.; and Duke Francis of Guise by his son Henry, if not as able, at any rate as brave a soldier, and a more determined Catholic than he. Amongst the Protestants, Sully and Da Plessis-Mornay were assuming shape and importance by the side of the King of Navarre. Catherine de’ Medici placed at her son’s service her Italian adroitness, her maternal devotion, and an energy rare for a woman between sixty and seventy years of age, for forty-three years a queen, and worn out by intrigue, and business, and pleasure. Finally, to the question of religion, the primary cause of the struggle, was added a question of kingship, kept in the background, but ever present in thought and deed: which of the three houses of Valois, Bourbon, and Lorraine should remain in or enter upon possession of the throne of France. The interests and the ambition of families and of individuals were playing their part simultaneously with the controversies and the passions of creed.

This state of things continued for twelve years, from 1576 to 1588, with constant alternations of war, truce, and precarious peace, and in the midst of constant hesitation, on the part of Henry III., between alliance with the League, commanded by the Duke of Guise, and adjustment with the Protestants, of whom the King of Navarre was every day becoming the more and more avowed leader. Between 1576 and 1580, four treaties of peace were concluded; in 1576, the peace called Monsieur’s, signed at Chastenay in Orleanness; in 1577, the peace of Bergerac or of Poitiers; in 1579, the peace of Nerac; in 1580, the peace of Fleix in Perigord. In November, 1576, the states-general were convoked and assembled at Blois, where they sat and deliberated up to March, 1577, without any important result. Neither these diplomatic conventions nor these national assemblies had force enough to establish a real and lasting peace between the two parties, for the parties themselves would not have it; in vain did Henry III. make concessions and promises of liberty to the Protestants; he was not in a condition to guarantee their execution and make it respected by their adversaries. At heart neither Protestants nor Catholics were for accepting mutual liberty; not only did they both consider themselves in possession of all religious truth, but they also considered themselves entitled to impose it by force upon their adversaries. The discovery (and the term is used advisedly, so slow to come and so long awaited has been the fact which it expresses), the discovery of the legitimate separation between the intellectual world and the political world, and of the necessity, also, of having the intellectual world free in order that it may not make upon the political world a war which, in the inevitable contact between them, the latter could not support for long, this grand and salutary discovery, be it repeated, and its practical influence in the government of people cannot be realized save in communities already highly enlightened and politically well ordered. Good order, politically, is indispensable if liberty, intellectually, is to develop itself regularly and do the community more good than it causes of trouble and embarrassment. They only who have confidence in human intelligence sincerely admit its right to freedom; and confidence in human intelligence is possible only in the midst of a political regimen which likewise gives the human community the guarantees whereof its interests and its lasting security have absolute need. The sixteenth century was a long way from these conditions of harmony between the intellectual world and the political world, the necessity of which is beginning to be understood and admitted by only the most civilized and best governed amongst modern communities. It is one of the most tardy and difficult advances that people have to accomplish in their life of labor. The sixteenth century helped France to make considerable strides in civilization and intellectual development; but the eighteenth and nineteenth have taught her how great still, in the art of governing and being governed as a free people, are her children’s want of foresight and inexperience, and, to what extent they require a strong and sound organization of political freedom in order that they may without danger enjoy intellectual freedom, its pleasures and its glories.

From 1576 to 1588, Henry III. had seen the difficulties of his government continuing and increasing. His attempt to maintain his own independence and the mastery of the situation between Catholics and Protestants, by making concessions and promises at one time to the former and at another to the latter, had not succeeded; and in 1584 it became still more difficult to practise. On the 10th of June in that year Henry III.‘s brother, the Duke of Anjou, died at Chateau-Thierry. By this death the leader of the Protestants, Henry, King of Navarre, became lawful heir to the throne of France. The Leaguers could not stomach that prospect. The Guises turned it to formidable account. They did not hesitate to make the future of France a subject of negotiation with Philip II. of Spain, at that time her most dangerous enemy in Europe. By a secret convention concluded at Joinville on the 31st of December, 1584, between Philip and the Guises, it was stipulated that at the death of Henry III. the crown should pass to Charles, Cardinal of Bourbon, sixty-four years of age, the King of Navarre’s uncle, who, in order to make himself king, undertook to set aside his nephew’s hereditary right, and forbid, absolutely, heretical worship in France. He published on the 31st of March, 1585, a declaration wherein he styled himself premier prince of the blood, and conferred upon the Duke of Guise the title of lieutenant-general of the League. By a bull of September 10, 1585, Sixtus V., but lately elected pope, excommunicated the King of Navarre as a heretic and relapsed, denying him any right of succession to the crown of France, and releasing his Narvarrese subjects from their oath of fidelity. Sixtus V. did not yet know what manner of man he was thus attacking. The King of Navarre did not confine himself to protesting in France, on the 10th of June, 1585, against this act of the pope’s: he had his protest placarded at Rome itself upon the statues of Pasquin and Marforio, and at the very doors of the Vatican, referring the pope, as to the question of heresy, to a council which he claimed at an early date, and at the same time appealing against this alleged abuse of power to the court of peers of France, “of whom,” said he, “I have the honor to be the premier.” The whole of Italy, including Sixtus V. himself, a pope of independent mind and proud heart, was struck with this energetic resistance on the part of a petty king. “It would be a good thing,” said the pope to Marquis Pasani, Henry III.‘s ambassador, “if the king your master showed as much resolution against his enemies as the King of Navarre shows against those who attack him.” At the first moment Henry III. had appeared to unravel the intentions of the League and to be disposed to resist it; by an edict of March 28, 1585, he had ordered that its adherents should be prosecuted; but Catherine de’ Medici frightened him with the war which would infallibly be kindled, and in which he would have for enemies all the Catholics, more irritated than ever. And Henry III. very easily took fright. Catherine undertook to manage the recoil for him. “I care not who likes it and who doesn’t,” she was wont to say in such cases. She asked the Duke of Guise for an interview, which took place, first of all at Epernay, and afterwards at Rheims. The hard demands of the Lorrainers did not deter the queen-mother, and, on the 7th of July, 1585, a treaty was concluded at Nemours between Henry III. and the League, to the effect “that by an irrevocable edict the practice of the new religion should be forbidden, and that there should henceforth be no other practice of religion, throughout the realm of France, save that of the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman; that all the ministers should depart from the kingdom within a month; that all the subjects of his Majesty should be bound to live according to the Catholic religion and make profession thereof within six months, on pain of confiscation both of person and goods; that heretics, of whatsoever quality they might be, should be declared incapable of holding benefices, public offices, positions, and dignities; that the places which had been given in guardianship to them for their security should be taken back again forthwith; and, lastly, that the princes designated in the treaty, amongst whom were all the Guises at the top, should receive as guarantee certain places to be held by them for five years.”

This treaty was signed by all the negotiators, and specially by the queen-mother, the Cardinals of Bourbon and Guise, and the Dukes of Guise and Mayenne. It was the decisive act which made the war a war of religion.

On the 18th of July following, Henry III., on his way to the Palace of Justice to be present at the publication of the edict he had just issued in virtue of this treaty with the League, said to the Cardinal of Bourbon, “My dear uncle, against my conscience, but very willingly, I published the edicts of pacification, because they were successful in giving relief to my people; and now I am going to publish the revocation of those edicts in accordance with my conscience, but very unwillingly, because on its publication hangs the ruin of my kingdom and of my people.” When he issued from the palace, cries of “Long live the king!” were heard; “at which astonishment was expressed,” says Peter de l’Estoile (t. i. p. 294), “because for a long time past no such favor had been shown him. But it was discovered that these acclamations were the doing of persons posted about by the Leaguers, and that, for doing it, money had been given to idlers and sweetmeats to children.” Some days afterwards, the King of Navarre received news of the treaty of Nemours. He was staying near Bergerac, at the castle of the Lord of La Force, with whom he was so intimate that he took with him none of his household, as he preferred to be waited upon by M. de la Force’s own staff. “I was so grievously affected by it,” said he himself at a later period to M. de la Force, “that, as I pondered deeply upon it and held my head supported upon my hand, my apprehensions of the woes I foresaw for my country were such as to whiten one half of my mustache.” [Memoires du Due de la Force, t. i. p. 50.] Henry III., for his part, was but little touched by the shouts of Long live the king! that he heard as he left the palace; he was too much disquieted to be rejoiced at them. He did not return the greeting of the municipal functionaries or of the mob that blocked his way. “You see how reluctant he is to embroil himself with the Huguenots,” said the partisans of the Guises to the people.

It was the recommencement of religious civil war, with more deadliness than ever. The King of Navarre left no stone unturned to convince everybody, friends and enemies, great lords and commonalty, Frenchmen and foreigners, that this recurrence of war was not his doing, and that the Leaguers forced it upon him against his wish and despite of the justice of his cause. He wrote to Henry III., “Monseigneur, as soon as the originators of these fresh disturbances had let the effects appear of their ill-will towards your Majesty and your kingdom, you were pleased to write to me the opinion you had formed, with very good title, of their intentions; you told me that you knew, no matter what pretext they assumed, that they had designs against your person and your crown, and that they desired their own augmentation and aggrandizement at your expense and to your detriment. Such were the words of your letters, Mon seigneur, and you did me the honor, whilst recognizing the connection between my fortunes and those of your Majesty, to add expressly that they were compassing my ruin together with your own. . . . And now, Monseigneur, when I hear it suddenly reported that your Majesty has made a treaty of peace with those who have risen up against your service, providing that your edict be broken, your loyal subjects banished, and the conspirators armed, and armed with your power and your authority against me, who have the honor of belonging to you, I leave your Majesty to judge in what a labyrinth I find myself. . . . If it is I whom they seek, or if under my shadow (on my account) they trouble this realm, I have begged that, without henceforth causing the orders and estates of this realm to suffer for it, and without the intervention of any army, home or foreign, this quarrel be decided in the Duke of Guise’s person and my own, one to one, two to two, ten to ten, twenty to twenty, in any number that the said Lord of Guise shall think proper, with the arms customary amongst gentlemen of honor. ... It will be a happiness for us, my cousin [Henry de Conde] and myself, to deliver, at the price of our blood, the king our sovereign lord from the travails and trials that are a-brewing for him, his kingdom from trouble and confusion, his noblesse from ruin, and all his people from extreme misery and calamity.”

The Duke of Guise respectfully declined, at the same time that he thanked the King of Navarre for the honor done him, saying that he could not accept the offer, as he was maintaining the cause of religion, and not a private quarrel. On his refusal, war appeared to everybody, and in fact became, inevitable. At his re-engagement in it, the King of Navarre lost no time about informing his friends at home and his allies abroad, the noblesse, the clergy, and the third estate of France, the city of Paris, the Queen of England. the Protestant princes of Germany, and the Swiss cantons, of all he had done to avoid it; he evidently laid great store upon making his conduct public and his motives understood. He had for his close confidant and his mouth-piece Philip du Plessis-Mornay, at that time thirty-six years of age, one of the most learned and most hard-working as well as most zealous and most sterling amongst the royalist Protestants of France. It was his duty to draw up the documents, manifestoes, and letters published by the King of Navarre, when Henry did not himself stamp upon them the seal of his own language, vivid, eloquent, and captivating in its brevity.

Henry III. and the queen-mother were very much struck with this intelligent energy on the part of the King of Navarre, and with the influence he acquired over all that portion of the French noblesse and burgesses which had not fanatically enlisted beneath the banner of the League. Catherine, accustomed to count upon her skill in the art of seductive conversation, was for putting it to fresh proof in the case of the King of Navarre. Louis di Gonzaga, Duke of Nevers, an Italian, like herself, and one of her confidants, was sent in advance to sound Henry of Navarre. He wrote to Henry III., “Such, sir, as you have known this prince, such is he even now; nor years nor difficulties change him; he is still agreeable, still merry, still devoted, as he has sworn to me a hundred times, to peace and your Majesty’s service.” Catherine proposed to him an interview. Henry hesitated to comply. From Jarnac, where he was, he sent Viscount de Turenne to Catherine to make an agreement with her for a few days’ truce. “Catherine gave Turenne to understand that, in order to have peace, the King of Navarre must turn Catholic, and put a stop to the exercise of the Reformed religion in the towns he held.” When this was reported by his envoy, Henry, who had set out for the interview, was on the point of retracing his steps; he went on, however, as he was curious to see Catherine, to satisfy his mind upon the point and to answer her.” They met on the 14th of December, 1586, at the castle of St. Brice, near Cognac, both of them with gloomy looks. Catherine asked Henry whether Turenne had spoken to him about what, she said, was her son’s most express desire.

“I am astounded,” said Henry, “that your Majesty should have taken so much pains to tell me what my ears are split with hearing; and likewise that you, whose judgment is so sound, should delude yourself with the idea of solving the difficulty by means of the difficulty itself. You propose to me a thing that I cannot do without forfeiture of conscience and honor, and without injury to the king’s service. I should not carry with me all those of the religion; and they of the League would be so much the more irritated in that they would lose their hope of depriving me of the right which I have to the throne. They do not want me with you, madame, for they would then be in sorry plight, you better served, and all your good subjects more happy.” The queen-mother did not dispute the point. She dwelt “upon the inconveniences Henry suffered during the war.” “I bear them patiently, madame,” said Henry, “since you burden me with them in order to unburden yourself of them.” She reproached him with not doing as he pleased in Rochelle. “Pardon me, madame,” said he, “I please only as I ought.” The Duke of Nevers, who was present at the interview, was bold enough to tell him that he could not impose a tax upon Rochelle. “That is true,” said Henry: “and so we have no Italian amongst us.” He took leave of the queen-mother, who repeated what she had said to Viscount de Turenne, “charging him to make it known to the noblesse who were of his following.” “It is just eighteen months, madame,” said he, “since I ceased to obey the king. He has made war upon me like a wolf, you like a lioness.” “The king and I seek nothing but your welfare.” “Excuse me, madame; I think it would be the contrary.” “My son, would you have the pains I have taken for the last six months remain without fruit?” “Madame, it is not I who prevent you from resting in your bed; it is you who prevent me from lying down in mine.” “Shall I be always at pains, I who ask for nothing but rest?” “Madame, the pains please you and agree with you; if you were at rest you could not live long.” Catherine had brought with her what was called her flying squadron of fair creatures of her court: but, “Madame,” said Henry, as he withdrew, “there is nothing here for me.”

Before taking part in the war which was day by day becoming more and more clearly and explicitly a war of religion, the Protestant princes of Germany and the four great free cities of Strasbourg, Ulm, Nuremberg, and Frankfort resolved to make, as the King of Navarre had made, a striking move on behalf of peace and religious liberty. They sent to Henry III. ambassadors, who, on the 11th of October, 1586, treated him to some frank and bold speaking. “Our princes and masters,” they said to him, “have been moved with surprise and Christian compassion towards you, as faithful friends and good neighbors of yours, on hearing that you, not being pleased to suffer in your kingdom any person not of the Roman religion, have broken the edict of peace which was so solemnly done and based upon your Majesty’s faith and promise, and which is the firm prop of the tranquillity of your Majesty and your dominions; the which changes have appeared to them strange, seeing that your royal person, your dominions, your conscience, your honor, your reputation and good fame happened to be very much concerned therewith.” Shocked at so rude an admonition, Henry III. answered, “It is God who made me king; and as I bear the title of Most Christian King, I have ever been very zealous for the preservation of the Catholic religion. . . . It appertains to me alone to decide, according to my discernment, what may contribute to the public weal, to make laws for to procure it, to interpret those laws, to change them, and to abolish them, just as I find it expedient. I have done so hitherto, and I shall still do so for the future;” and he dismissed the ambassadors. That very evening, on reflecting upon his words, and considering that his answer had not met the requirements of the case, he wrote with his own hand on a small piece of paper, “that whoever said that in revoking the edict of pacification he had violated his faith or put a blot upon his honor, had lied;” and he ordered one of his officers, though the night was far advanced, to carry that paper to the ambassadors, and read it to them textually. They asked for a copy; but Henry III., always careful not to have to answer for his words, had bidden his officer to suppress the document after having read it; and the Germans departed, determined upon war as well as quite convinced of the king’s arrogant pusillanimity.

Except some local and short-lived truces, war was already lazing throughout nearly the whole of France, in Provence, in Dauphiny, in Nivernais, in Guienne, in Anjou, in Normandy, in Picardy, in Champagne. We do not care to follow the two parties through the manifold but monotonous incidents of their tumultuous and passionate strife; we desire to review only those events that were of a general and a decisive character. They occurred, naturally, in those places which were the arena, and in those armies which were under the command, of the two leaders, Duke Henry of Guise and King Henry of Navarre. The former took upon himself the duty of repulsing, in the north-west of France, the German and Swiss corps which were coming to the assistance of the French Reformers; the latter put himself at the head of the French Protestant forces summoned to face, in the provinces of the centre and south-west, the royalist armies. Guise was successful in his campaign against the foreigners: on the 26th of October, 1587, his scouts came and told him that the Germans were at Vimory, near Montargis, dispersed throughout the country, without vedettes or any of the precautions of warfare; he was at table with his principal officers at Courtenay, almost seven leagues away from the enemy; he remained buried in thought for a few minutes, and then suddenly gave the order to sound boot-and-saddle [boute-selle, i.e., put-on saddle]. “What for, pray?” said his brother, the Duke of Mayenne. “To go and fight.” “Pray reflect upon, what you are going to do.” “Reflections that I haven’t made in a quarter of an hour I shouldn’t make in a year.” Mounting at once, the leader and his squadrons arrived at midnight at the gates of Vimory; they found, it is said, the Germans drunk, asleep, and scattered; according to the reporters on the side of the League, the victory of Guise was complete; he took from the Germans twenty-eight hundred horses: the Protestants said that the body he charged were nothing but a lot of horse-boys, and that the two flags he took had for device nothing but a sponge and a currycomb. But fifteen days later, on the 11th of November, at Auneau, near Chartres, Guise gained an indisputable and undisputed victory over the Germans; and their general, Baron Dohna, and some of his officers only saved themselves by cutting their way through sword in hand. The Swiss, being discouraged, and seeing in the army of Henry III. eight thousand of their countrymen, who were serving in it not, like themselves, as adventurers, but under the flags and with the authorization of their cantons, separated from the Germans and withdrew, after receiving from Henry III. four hundred thousand crowns as the price of their withdrawal. In Burgundy, in Champagne, and in Orleanness, the campaign terminated to the honor of Guise, which Henry III. was far from regarding as a victory for himself.

But almost at the same time at which the League obtained this success in the provinces of the east and centre, it experienced in those of the south-west a reverse more serious for the Leaguers than the Duke of Guise’s victory had been fortunate for them. Henry III. had given the command of his army south of the Loire to one of his favorites, Anne, Duke of Joyeuse, a brilliant, brave, and agreeable young man, whose fortunes he had advanced beyond measure, to the extent of marrying him to Marguerite de Lorraine, the queen’s sister, and raising for him the viscountship of Joyeuse to a duchy-peerage, giving him rank, too, after the princes of the blood and before the dukes of old creation. Joyeuse was at the head of six thousand foot, two thousand horse, and six pieces of cannon. He entered Poitou and marched towards the Dordogne, whilst the King of Navarre was at La Rochelle, engaged in putting into order two pieces of cannon, which formed the whole of his artillery, and in assembling round him his three cousins, the Prince of Conde, the Count of Soissons, and the Prince of Conti, that he might head the whole house of Bourbon at the moment when he was engaging seriously in the struggle with the house of Valois and the house of Lorraine. A small town, Coutras, situated at the confluence of the two rivers of L’Isle and La Dronne, in the Gironde, offered the two parties an important position to occupy. “According to his wont,” says the Duke of Aumale in his Histoire des Princes de Conde, “the Bearnese was on horseback whilst his adversary was banqueting.” He outstripped Joyeuse; and when the latter drew near to Contras, he found the town occupied by the Protestant advance-guard, and had barely time to fall back upon La Roche-Chalais. The battle began on the 20th of October, 1587, shortly after sunrise. We will here borrow the equally dramatic and accurate account of it given by the Duke of Aumale: “At this solemn moment the King of Navarre calls to his side his cousins and his principal officers; then, in his manly and sonorous voice, he addresses his men-at-arms: ‘My friends, here is a quarry for you very different from your past prizes. It is a brand-new bridegroom, with his marriage-money still in his coffers; and all the cream of the courtiers are with him. Will you let yourselves go down before this handsome dancing-master and his minions? No, they are ours; I see it by your eagerness to fight. Still we must all of us understand that the event is in the hands of God. Pray we Him to aid us. This deed will be the greatest that we ever did; the glory will be to God, the service to our sovereign lord the king, the honor to ourselves, and the benefit to the state.’ Henry uncovers; the clergymen Chandieu and Damours intone the army’s prayer, and the men-at-arms repeat in chorus the twenty-fourth versicle of the hundred and eighteenth Psalm: ‘This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.’ As they were hastening each to his post, the king detains his cousins a moment. ‘Gentlemen,’ he shouts, ‘I have just one thing to say: remember that you are of the house of Bourbon; and, as God liveth, I will let you see that I am your senior.’ ‘And we will show you some good juniors,’ answered Conde.”

Before midday the battle was won and the royalist army routed, but not without having made a valiant stand. During the action, D’Epinay Saint-Luc, one of the bravest royalist soldiers, met the Duke of Joyeuse already wounded. “What’s to be done?” he asked. “Die,” answered Joyeuse; and a few moments afterwards, as he was moving away some paces to the rear in order to get near to his artillery, says D’Aubigne, he was surrounded by several Huguenots, who recognized him. “There are a hundred-thousand crowns to be gained,” he shouted; but rage was more powerful than cupidity, and one of them shattered his skull with a pistol-shot. “His body was taken to the king’s quarters: there it lay, in the evening, upon a table in the very room where the conqueror’s supper had been prepared: but the King of Navarre ordered all who were in the chamber to go out, had his supper things removed else-whither, and, with every mark of respect, committed the remains of the vanquished to the care of Viscount de Turenne, his near relative. Henry showed a simple and modest joy at his splendid triumph. It was five and twenty years since the civil war commenced, and he was the first Protestant general who had won a pitched battle; he had to regret only twenty-five killed, whereas the enemy had lost more than three thousand, and had abandoned to him their cannon, together with twenty-nine flags or standards. The victory was so much the more glorious in that it was gained over an army superior in numbers and almost equal in quality. It was owing to the king’s valor, decision, vigilance, quick eye, comprehension of tactics, and that creative instinct which he brought into application in politics as well as in war, and which was destined to render him so happily inspired in the beautiful defensive actions of Arques, at the affair of Ivry, and on so many other occasions.” [Histoire des Princes de Conde, &c., by M. le Due D’Aumale, t. ii. pp. 164-177.]

And what was Henry III., King of France, doing whilst two great parties and two great men were thus carrying on, around his throne and in his name, so passionate a war, on the one side to maintain the despotic unity of Catholic Christianism, and on the other to win religious liberty for Christian Protestantism? We will borrow here the words of the most enlightened and most impartial historian of the sixteenth century, M. de Thou; if we acted upon our own personal impressions alone, there would be danger of appearing too severe towards a king whom we profoundly despise.

“After having staid some time in Bourbonness, Henry III. went to Lyons in order to be within hail of his two favorites, Joyeuse and Epernon, who were each on the march with an army. Whilst he was at Lyons as unconcerned as if all the realm were enjoying perfect peace, he took to collecting those little dogs which are thought so much of in that town. Everybody was greatly surprised to see a King of France, in the midst of so terrible a war and in extreme want of money, expending upon such pleasures all the time he had at disposal and all the sums he could scrape together. How lavish soever this prince may have been, yet, if comparison be made between the expenditure upon the royal household and that incurred at Lyons for dogs, the latter will be found infinitely higher than the former; without counting expenses for hunting-dogs and birds, which always come to a considerable sum in the households of kings, it cost him, every year, more than a hundred thousand gold crowns for little Lyonnese dogs; and he maintained at his court, with large salaries, a multitude of men and women who had nothing to do but to feed them. He also spent large sums in monkeys, parrots, and other creatures from foreign countries, of which he always kept a great number. Sometimes he got tired of them, and gave them all away then his passion for such creatures returned, and they had to be found for him at no matter what cost. Since I am upon the subject of this prince’s attachment to matters anything but worthy of the kingly majesty, I will say a word about his passion for those miniatures which were to be found in manuscript prayer-books, and which, before the practice of printing, were done by the most skilful painters. Henry III. seemed to buy such works, intended for princes and laid by in cabinets of curiosities, only to spoil them; as soon as he had them, he cut them out, and then pasted them upon the walls of his chapels, as children do. An incomprehensible character of mind: in certain things, capable of upholding his rank; in some, rising above his position; in others, sinking below childishness.” [Histoire universelle de F. A. de Thou, t. ix. p. 599.]

A mind and character incomprehensible indeed, if corruption, lassitude, listlessness, and fear would not explain the existence of everything that is abnormal and pitiable about human nature in a feeble, cold, and selfish creature, excited, and at the same time worn out, by the business and the pleasures of kingship, which Henry III. could neither do without nor bear the burden of. His perplexity was extreme in his relations with the other two Henries, who gave, like himself, their name to this war, which was called by contemporaries the war of the three Henries. The successes of Henry de Guise and of Henry de Bourbon were almost equally disagreeable to Henry de Valois. It is probable that, if he could have chosen, he would have preferred those of Henry de Bourbon; if they caused him like jealousy, they did not raise in him the same distrust; he knew the King of Navarre’s loyalty, and did not suspect him of aiming to become, whilst he himself was living, King of France. Besides, he considered the Protestants less powerful and less formidable than the Leaguers. Henry de Guise, on the contrary, was evidently, in his eyes, an ambitious conspirator, determined to push his own fortunes on to the very crown of France if the chances were favorable to him, and not only armed with all the power of Catholicism, but urged forward by the passions of the League, perhaps further and certainly more quickly than his own intentions travelled. Since 1584, the Leaguers had, at Paris, acquired strong organization amongst the populace; the city had been partitioned out into five districts under five heads, who, shortly afterwards, added to themselves eleven others, in order that, in the secret council of the association, each amongst the sixteen quarters of Paris might have its representative and director. Thence the famous Committee of Sixteen, which played so great and so formidable a part in the history of that period. It was religious fanaticism and democratic fanaticism closely united, and in a position to impose their wills upon their most eminent leaders, upon the Duke of Guise himself.

In vain did Henry III. attempt to resume some sort of authority in Paris; his government, his public and private life, and his person were daily attacked, insulted, and menaced from the elevation of the pulpit and in the public thoroughfares by qualified preachers or mob-orators. On the 16th of December, 1587, the Sorbonne voted, after a deliberation which, it was said, was to be kept secret, “that the government might be taken away from princes who were found not what they ought to be, just as the administration of a property from a guardian open to suspicion.” On the 30th of December, the king summoned to the Louvre his court of Parliament and the faculty of theology. “I know of your precious resolution of the 16th of this month,” said he to the Sorbonne; “I have been requested to take no notice of it, seeing that it was passed after dinner. I have no mind to avenge myself for these outrages, as I might, and as Pope Sixtus V. did when he sent to the galleys certain Cordeliers for having dared to slander him in their sermons. There is not one of you who has not deserved as much, and more; but it is my good pleasure to forget all, and to pardon you, on condition of its not occurring again. If it should, I beg my court of Parliament, here present, to exact exemplary justice, and such as the seditious, like you, may take warning by, so as to mind their own business.” At their exit after this address, the Parliament and the Sorbonne, being quite sure that the king would not carry the matter further, withdrew smiling, and saying, “He certainly has spirit, but not enough of it” (habet quidem animum, sed non satis animi). The Duke of Guise’s sister, the Duchess of Montpensier, took to getting up and spreading about all sorts of pamphlets against the king and his government. “The king commanded her to quit his city of Paris; she did nothing of the kind; and three days after she was even brazen enough to say that she carried at her waist the scissors which would give a third crown to brother Henry de Valois.” At the close of 1587, the Duke of Guise made a trip to Rome, “with a suite of five; and he only remained three days, so disguised that he was not recognized there, and discovered himself to nobody but Cardinal Pelleve, with whom he was in communication day and night.” [Journal de L’Estoile, t. i. p. 345.] Eighteen months previously, the cardinal had given a very favorable reception to a case drawn up by an advocate in the Parliament of Paris, named David, who maintained that, “although the line of the Capets had succeeded to the temporal administration of the kingdom of Charlemagne, it had not succeeded to the apostolic benediction, which appertained to none but the posterity of the said Charlemagne, and that, the line of Capet being some of them possessed by a spirit of giddiness and stupidity, and others heretic and excommunicated, the time had come for restoring the crown to the true heirs,” that is to say, to the house of Lorraine, which claimed to be issue of Charlemagne. This case was passed on, it is said, from Rome to Philip II., King of Spain, and M. de Saint-Goard, ambassador of France at Madrid, sent Henry III. a copy of it. [Memoires de la Ligue, t. i. pp. 1-7.]

Whatever may have been the truth about this trip to Rome on the part of the Duke of Guise, and its influence upon what followed, the chiefs of the Leaguers resolved to deal a great blow. The Lorraine princes and their intimate associates met at Nancy in January, 1588, and decided that a petition should be presented to the king; that he should be called upon to join himself more openly and in good earnest to the League, and to remove from offices of consequence all the persons that should be pointed out to him; that the Holy Inquisition should be established, at any rate in the good towns; that important places should be put into the hands of specified chiefs, who should have the power of constructing fortifications there; that heretics should be taxed a third, or at the least, a fourth of their property as long as the war lasted; and, lastly, that the life should be spared of no enemy taken prisoner, unless upon his swearing and finding good surety to live as a Catholic, and upon paying in ready money the worth of his property if it had not already been sold. These monstrous proposals, drawn up in eleven articles, were immediately carried to the king. He did not reject them, but he demanded and took time to discuss them with the authors. The negotiation was prolonged; the ferment in Paris was redoubled; the king, it was said, meant to withdraw; his person must be secured; the Committee of Sixteen took measures to that end; one of its members got into his hands the keys of the gate of St. Denis. From Soissons, where he was staying, the Duke of Guise sent to Paris the Count of Brissac, with four other captains of the League, to hold themselves in readiness for any event, and he ordered his brother the Duke of Aumale to stoutly maintain his garrisons in the places of Picardy, which the king, it was said, meant to take from him. “If the king leaves Paris,” the duke wrote to Bernard de Mendoza, Philip II.‘s ambassador in France, “I will make him think about returning thither before he has gone a day’s march towards the Picards.” Philip II. made Guise an offer of three hundred thousand crowns, six thousand lanzknechts, and twelve hundred lances, as soon as he should have broken with Henry III. “The abscess will soon burst,” wrote the ambassador to the king his master.

On the 8th of May, 1588, at eleven P. M., the Duke of Guise set out from Soissons, after having commended himself to the prayers of the convents in the town. He arrived the next morning before Paris, which he entered about midday by the gate of St. Martin. The Leaguers had been expecting him for several days. Though he had covered his head with his cloak, he was readily recognized and eagerly cheered; the burgesses left their houses and the tradesmen their shops to see him and follow him, shouting, “Hurrah! for Guise; hurrah! for the pillar of the church!” The crowd increased at every step. He arrived in front of the palace of Catherine de’ Medici, who had not expected him, and grew pale at sight of him. “My dear cousin,” said she to him, “I am very glad to see you, but I should have been better pleased at another time.” “Madame, I am come to clear myself from all the calumnies of my enemies; do me the honor to conduct me to the king yourself.” Catherine lost no time in giving the king warning by one of her secretaries. On receipt of this notice, Henry III., who had at first been stolid—and silent, rose abruptly from his chair. “Tell my lady mother that, as she wishes to present the Duke of Guise to me, I will receive him in the chamber of the queen my wife.” The envoy departed. The king, turning to one of his officers, Colonel Alphonso Corso, said to him, “M. de Guise has just arrived at Paris, contrary to my orders. What would you do in my place?” “Sir, do you hold the Duke of Guise for friend or enemy?” The king, without speaking, replied by a significant gesture. “If it please your, Majesty to give me the order, I will this very day lay the duke’s head at your feet.” The three councillors who happened to be there cried out. The king held his peace. During this conversation at the Louvre, the Duke of Guise was advancing along the streets, dressed in a doublet of white damask, a cloak of black cloth, and boots of buffalo-hide; he walked on foot, bareheaded, at the side of the queen-mother in a sedan-chair. He was tall, with fair clustering hair and piercing eyes; and his scar added to his martial air. The mob pressed upon his steps; flowers were thrown to him from the windows; some, adoring him as a saint, touched him with chaplets which they afterwards kissed; a young girl darted towards him, and, removing her mask, kissed him, saying, “Brave prince, since you are here, we are all saved.” Guise, with a dignified air, “saluted and delighted everybody,” says a witness, “with eye, and gesture, and speech.” “By his side,” said Madame de Retz, “the other princes are commoners.” “The Huguenots,” said another, “become Leaguers at the very sight of him.” On arriving at the Louvre, he traversed the court between two rows of soldiers, the archers on duty in the hall, and the forty-five gentlemen of the king’s chamber at the top of the staircase. “What brings you hither?” said the king, with difficulty restraining his anger. “I entreat your Majesty to believe in my fidelity, and not allow yourself to go by the reports of my enemies.” “Did I not command you not to come at this season so full of suspicions, but to wait yet a while?”