We shrink from describing in detail all the horrors committed against a population without any means of self-defence by troops giving free rein to their brutal passions and gratifying the hateful passions of their leaders. In the end three small towns and twenty-two villages were completely sacked; seven hundred and sixty-three houses, eighty-nine cattle-sheds, and thirty-one barns burned; three thousand persons massacred; two hundred and fifty-five executed subsequently to the massacre, after a mockery of trial; six or seven hundred sent to the galleys; many children sold for slaves; and the victors, on retiring, left behind them a double ordinance, from the Parliament of Aix and the vice-legate of Avignon, dated the 24th of April, 1545, forbidding “that any one, on pain of death, should dare to give asylum, aid, or succor, or furnish money or victuals, to any Vaudian or heretic.”

It is said that Francis I., when near his end, repented of this odious extermination of a small population, which, with his usual fickleness and carelessness, he had at one time protected, and at another abandoned to its enemies. Amongst his last words to his son Henry II. was an exhortation to cause an inquiry to be made into the iniquities committed by the Parliament of Aix in this instance. It will be seen, at the opening of Henry II.‘s reign, what was the result of this exhortation of his father’s.

Calvin was lately mentioned as having pleaded the cause of the Vaudians, in 1544, amongst the Protestants of Switzerland and Germany. It was from Geneva, where he had lived and been the dominant spirit for many years, that the French Reformer had exercised such influence over the chiefs of the German Reformation in favor of that small population whose creed and morals had anticipated by several centuries the Reformation in the sixteenth century. He was born, in 1509 at Noyon in Picardy, was brought up in the bosom of the Catholic church, and held a cure in 1527 at Pont-l’Eveque, where he preached several times, “joyous and almost proud,” as he said himself, “that a single dissertation had brought me a cure.” In 1534, study, meditation on the Gospels, discussion of the religious and moral questions raised on every side, and the free atmosphere of the new spirit that was abroad, changed his convictions and his resolves; he abandoned the career of the law as well as that of the established church, resigned his cure at Pont-l’Eveque, and devoted himself entirely to the work of the nascent and much opposed Reformation. Having a mind that was judicious and free from illusion in the very heat of passion, he soon saw to what an extent the success of the Reformation in France was difficult and problematical; in 1535, impressed by the obstacles it met with even more than by the dangers it evoked, he resolved to leave his country and go else whither in search of security, liberty, and the possibility of defending a cause which became the dearer to him in proportion as it was the more persecuted. He had too much sagacity not to perceive that he was rapidly exhausting his various places of asylum: Queen Marguerite of Navarre was unwilling to try too far the temper of the king her brother; Canon Louis du Tillet was a little fearful lest his splendid library should be somewhat endangered through the use made of it by his guest, who went about, arguing or preaching, in the vicinity of Angouleme; the queen’s almoner, Gerard Roussel, considered that Calvin was going too far, and grew apprehensive lest, if the Reformation should completely succeed, it might suppress the bishopric of Oleron which he desired, and which, indeed, he at a later period obtained. Lefevre of Etaples, who was the most of all in sympathy with Calvin, was seventy-nine years old, and had made up his mind to pass his last days in peace. Calvin quitted Angouleme and Nerac, and went to pass some time at Poitiers, where the friends of the Reformation, assembling round him and hanging upon his words, for the first time celebrated the Lord’s Supper in a grotto close to the town, which still goes by the name of Calvin’s Grotto. Being soon obliged to leave Poitiers, Calvin went to Orleans, then secretly to Paris, then to Noyon to see his family once more, and set out at last for Strasbourg, already one of the strongholds of the Reformation, where he had friends, amongst others the learned Bucer, with whom he had kept up a constant correspondence. He arrived there at the beginning of the year 1535; but it was not at Strasbourg that he took up his quarters; he preferred Bale, where also there was a reunion of men of letters, scholars, and celebrated printers, Erasmus, Simon Grynee (Grymeus), and the Frobens, and where Calvin calculated upon finding the leisure and aid he required for executing the great work he had been for some time contemplating—his Institution de la Religion chretienne (Christian Institutes). This would not be the place, and we have no intention, to sum up the religious doctrines of that book; we might challenge many of them as contrary to the true meaning and moral tendency of Christianity; but we desire to set in a clear light their distinctive and original characteristics, which are those of Calvin himself in the midst of his age. These characteristics are revealed in the preface and even in the dedication of the book. It is to Francis I., the persecutor of the French Reformers, during one of the most cruel stages of the persecution, and at the very moment when he had just left his own country in order that he may live in security and speak with freedom, that Calvin dedicates his work. “Do not imagine,” he says to the king, “that I am attempting here my own special defence in order to obtain permission to return to the country of my birth, from which, although I feel for it such human affection as is my bounden duty, yet, as things are now, I do not suffer any great anguish at being cut off. But I am taking up the cause of all the faithful, and even that of Christ, which is in these days so mangled and down-trodden in your kingdom that it seems to be in a desperate plight. And this has no doubt come to pass rather through the tyranny of certain Pharisees than of your own will.” Calvin was at the same time the boldest and the least revolutionary amongst the innovators of the sixteenth century; bold as a Christian thinker, but full of deference and consideration towards authority, even when he was flagrantly withdrawing himself from it. The idea of his book was at first exclusively religious, and intended for the bulk of the French Reformers; but at the moment when Calvin is about to publish it, prudence and policy recur to his mind, and it is to the King of France that he addresses himself; it is the authority of the royal persecutor that he invokes; it is the reason of Francis I. that he attempts to convince. He acts like a respectful and faithful subject, as well as an independent and innovating Christian.

After having wandered for some time longer in Switzerland, Germany, and Italy, Calvin in 1536 arrived at Geneva. It was at this time a small independent republic, which had bravely emancipated itself from the domination of the Dukes of Savoy, and in which the Reformation had acquired strength, but it had not yet got rid of that lawless and precarious condition which is the first phase presented by revolutionary innovations after victory; neither the political nor the religious community at Geneva had yet received any organization which could be called regular or regarded as definitive; the two communities had not yet understood and regulated their reciprocal positions and the terms on which they were to live together. All was ferment and haze in this little nascent state, as regarded the mental as well as the actual condition, when Calvin arrived there; his name was already almost famous there; he had given proofs of devotion to the cause of the Reformation; his book on the Institution de la Religion chretienne had just appeared; a great instinct for organization was strikingly evinced in it, at the same time that the dedication to Francis I. testified to a serious regard for the principle of authority and for its rights, as well as the part it ought to perform in human communities. Calvin had many friends in Switzerland, and they urged him to settle at once at Geneva, and to labor at establishing there Christian order in the Reformed church simultaneously with its independence and its religious liberties in its relations with the civil estate. At first Calvin hesitated and resisted; he was one of those who take strict account, beforehand, of the difficulties to be encountered and the trials to be undergone in any enterprise for the success of which they are most desirous, and who inwardly shudder at the prospect of such a burden. But the Christian’s duty, the Reformer’s zeal, the lively apprehension of the perils which were being incurred by the cause of the Reformation, and the nobly ambitious hope of delivering it,—these sentiments united prevailed over the first misgivings of that great and mighty soul, and Calvin devoted himself in Geneva to a work which, from 1536 to 1564, in a course of violent struggles and painful vicissitudes, was to absorb and rapidly consume his whole life.

From that time forth a principle, we should rather say a passion, held sway in Calvin’s heart, and was his guiding star in the permanent organization of the church which he founded, as well as in his personal conduct during his life. That principle is the profound distinction between the religious and the civil community. Distinction we say, and by no means separation; Calvin, on the contrary, desired alliance between the two communities and the two powers, but each to be independent in its own domain, combining their action, showing mutual respect and lending mutual support. To this alliance he looked for the reformation and moral discipline of the members of the church placed under the authority of its own special religious officers and upheld by the indirect influence of the civil power.

In this principle and this fundamental labor of Calvin’s there were two new and bold reforms attempted in the very heart of the great Reformation in Europe, and over and above the work of its first promoters. Henry VIII., on removing the church of England from the domination of the papacy, had proclaimed himself its head, and the church of England had accepted this royal supremacy. Zwingle, when he provoked in German Switzerland the rupture with the church of Rome, had approved of the arrangement that the sovereign authority in matters of religion should pass into the hands of the civil powers. Luther himself, at the same time that he reserved to the new German church a certain measure of spontaneity and liberty, had placed it under the protection and preponderance of laic sovereigns. In this great question as to the relations between church and state Calvin desired and did more than his predecessors; even before he played any considerable part in the European Reformation, as soon as he heard of Henry VIII.‘s religious supremacy in England, he had strongly declared against such a regimen; with an equitable spirit rare in his day, and in spite of his contest with the church of Rome, he was struck with the strength and dignity conferred upon that church by its having an existence distinct from the civil community, and by the independence of its head. When he himself became a great Reformer, he did not wish the Reformed church to lose this grand characteristic; whilst proclaiming it evangelical, he demanded for it in matters of faith and discipline the independence and special authority which had been possessed by the primitive church; and in spite of the resistance often shown to him by the civil magistrates, in spite of the concessions he was sometimes obliged to make to them, he firmly maintained this principle, and he secured to the Reformed church of Geneva, in purely religious questions and affairs, the right of self-government, according to the faith and the law as they stand written in the Holy Books.

He at the same time put in force in this church a second principle of no less importance. In the course of ages, and by a series of successive modifications, some natural and others factitious and illegitimate, the Christian church had become, so to speak, cut in two, into the ecclesiastical community and the religious community, the clergy and the worshippers. In the Catholic church the power was entirely in the hands of the clergy; the ecclesiastical body completely governed the religious body; and, whilst the latter was advancing more and more in laic ideas and sentiments, the former remained even more and more distinct and sovereign. The German and English Reformations had already modified this state of things, and given to the lay community a certain portion of influence in religious questions and affairs. Calvin provided for the matter in a still more direct and effectual fashion, not only as regarded affairs in general, but even the choice of pastors; he gave admission to laymen, in larger number too than that of the ecclesiastics, into the consistories and synods, the governing authorities in the Reformed church. He thus did away with the separation between the clergy and the worshippers; he called upon them to deliberate and act together; and he secured to the religious community, in its entirety, their share of authority in the affairs and fortunes of the church.

Thus began at Geneva, under the inspiration and through the influence of Calvin, that ecclesiastical organization which, developing, completing, and modifying itself according to the requirements of places and times, became, under the name of Presbyterian regimen, the regimen of the Reformed churches in France, French Switzerland, Holland, Scotland, and amongst a considerable portion of the Protestant population in England and in the United States of America—a regimen evangelical in origin and character, republican in some of its maxims and institutions, but no stranger to the principle of authority, one which admitted of discipline and was calculated for duration, and which has kept for three centuries, amongst the most civilized people, a large measure of Christian faith, ecclesiastical order, and civil liberty. It was a French refugee who instituted, in a foreign city, this regimen, and left it as a legacy to the French Reformation and to the numerous Christian communities who were eager to adopt it. It is on this ground that Calvin takes a place in the history of France, and has a fair right to be counted amongst the eminent men who have carried to a distance the influence, the language, and the fame of the country in the bosom of which it was not permitted them to live and labor. In 1547, when the death of Francis I. was at hand, that ecclesiastical organization of Protestantism which Calvin had instituted at Geneva was not even begun in France. The French Protestants were as yet but isolated and scattered individuals, without any bond of generally accepted and practised faith or discipline, and without any eminent and recognized heads. The Reformation pursued its course; but a Reformed church did not exist. And this confused mass of Reformers and Reformed had to face an old, a powerful, and a strongly constituted church, which looked upon the innovators as rebels over whom it had every right as much as against them it had every arm. In each of the two camps prevailed errors of enormous magnitude, and fruitful of fatal consequences; Catholics and Protestants both believed themselves to be in exclusive possession of the truth, of all religious truth, and to have the right of imposing it by force upon their adversaries the moment they had the power. Both were strangers to any respect for human conscience, human thought, and human liberty. Those who had clamored for this on their own account when they were weak had no regard for it in respect of others when they felt themselves to be strong. On the side of the Protestants the ferment was at full heat, but as yet vague and unsettled; on the part of the Catholics the persecution was unscrupulous and unlimited. Such was the position and such the state of feeling in which Francis I., at his death on the 31st of March, 1547, left the two parties that had already been at grips during his reign. He had not succeeded either in reconciling them or in securing the triumph of that which had his favor and the defeat of that which he would have liked to vanquish. That was, in nearly all that he undertook, his fate; he lacked the spirit of sequence and steady persistence, and his merits as well as his defects almost equally urged him on to rashly attempt that which he only incompletely executed. He was neither prudent nor persevering, and he may be almost said to have laid himself out to please everybody rather than to succeed in one and the same great purpose. A short time before his death a Venetian ambassador who had resided a long while at his court, Marino Cavalli, drew up and forwarded to the Senate of Venice a portrait of him so observantly sketched and so full of truth that it must be placed here side by side with the more exacting and more severe judgment already pronounced here touching this brilliant but by no means far-sighted or effective king.

“The king is now fifty years of age; his aspect is in every respect kingly, insomuch that, without ever having seen his face or his portrait, any one, on merely looking at him, would say at once: ‘That is the king.’ All his movements are so noble and majestic that no prince could equal them. His constitution is robust, in spite of the excessive fatigue he has constantly undergone and still undergoes in so many expeditions and travels. He eats and drinks a great deal, sleeps still better, and, what is more, dreams of nothing but leading a jolly life. He is rather fond of being an exquisite in his dress, which is slashed and laced, and rich with jewelry and precious stones; even his doublets are daintily worked and of golden tissue; his shirt is very fine, and it shows through an opening in the doublet, according to the fashion of France. This delicate and dainty way of living contributes to his health. In proportion as the king bears bodily fatigue well, and endures it without bending beneath the burden, in the same proportion do mental cares weigh heavily upon him, and he shifts them almost entirely on to Cardinal de Tournon and Admiral Annebault. He takes no resolve, he makes no reply, without having had their advice; and if ever, which is very rare, an answer happens to be given or a concession made without having received the approval of these two advisers, he revokes it or modifies it. But in what concerns the great affairs of state, peace or war, his Majesty, docile as he is in everything else, will have the rest obedient to his wishes. In that case there is nobody at court, whatever authority he may possess, who dare gainsay his Majesty. This prince has a very sound judgment and a great deal of information; there is no sort of thing, or study or art, about which he cannot converse very much to the point. It is true that, when people see how, in spite of his knowledge and his fine talk, all his warlike enterprises have turned out ill, they say that all his wisdom lies on his lips, and not in his mind. But I think that the calamities of this king come from lack of men capable of properly carrying out his designs. As for him, he will never have anything to do with the execution, or even with the superintendence of it in any way; it seems to him quite enough to know his own part, which is to command and to supply plans. Accordingly, that which might be wished for in him is a little more care and patience, not by any means more experience and knowledge. His Majesty readily pardons offences; and he becomes heartily reconciled with those whom he has offended.” [Relations des Ambassadeurs venitiens sur les Affaires de France au seizieme siecle, in the Documents inedits sur l’Histoire de France, translated by M. Tommaseo, t. i. pp. 279-283.]

It is said that at the close of his reign Francis I., in spite of all the resources of his mind and all his easy-going qualities, was much depressed, and that he died in sadness and disquietude as to the future. One may be inclined to think that, in his egotism, he was more sad on his own account than disquieted on that of his successors and of France. However that may be, he was assuredly far from foreseeing the terrible civil war which began after him, and the crimes, as well as disasters, which it caused. None of his more intimate circle was any longer in a position to excite his solicitude: his mother, Louise of Savoy, had died sixteen years before him (September 22, 1531); his most able and most wicked adviser, Chancellor Duprat, twelve years (July 29, 1535). His sister Marguerite survived him two years (she died December 21, 1549,) “disgusted with everything,” say the historians, and “weary of life,” said she herself:—

And yet Marguerite was loath to leave life. She had always been troubled at the idea of death; when she was spoken to about eternal life, she would shake her head sometimes, saying, “All that is true; but we remain a mighty long while dead underground before arriving there.” When she was told that her end was near, she “considered that a very bitter word,” saying that “she was not so old but that she might still live some years.” She had been the most generous, the most affectionate, and the most lovable person in a family and a court which were both corrupt, and of which she only too often acquiesced in the weaknesses and even vices, though she always fought against their injustice and their cruelty. She had the honor of being the grandmother of Henry IV.

CHAPTER XXXI.

HENRY II. (1547-1559.)

Henry II. had all the defects, and, with the exception of personal bravery, not one amongst the brilliant and amiable qualities of the king his father. Like Francis I., he was rash and reckless in his resolves and enterprises, but without having the promptness, the fertility, and the suppleness of mind which Francis I. displayed in getting out of the awkward positions in which he had placed himself, and in stalling off or mitigating the consequences of them. Henry was as cold and ungenial as Francis had been gracious and able to please: and whilst Francis I., even if he were a bad master to himself, was at any rate his own master, Henry II. submitted without resistance, and probably without knowing it, to the influence of the favorite who reigned in his house as well as in his court, and of the advisers who were predominant in his government. Two facts will suffice to set in a clear light, at the commencement of the new reign, this regrettable analogy in the defects, and this profound diversity in the mind, character, and conduct of the two kings.

Towards the close of 1542, a grievous aggravation of the tax upon salt, called Babel, caused a violent insurrection in the town of Rochelle, which was exempted, it was said, by its traditional privileges from that impost. Not only was payment refused, but the commissioners were maltreated and driven away. Francis I. considered the matter grave enough to require his presence for its repression. He repaired to Rochelle with a numerous body of lanzknechts. The terrified population appeared to have determined upon submission, and, having assembled in a mass at the town-hall, there awaited anxiously the king’s arrival. On the 1st of January, 1543, Francis I. entered the town in state, surrounded by his escort. The people’s advocate fell on his knees, and appealed to the king’s clemency in dealing with a revolt of which every one repented. The king, who was seated on a wooden boarding, rose up. “Speak we no more of revolt,” said he; “I desire neither to destroy your persons nor to seize your goods, as was lately done by the Emperor Charles to the Ghentese, whereby his hands are stained with blood; I long more for the hearts of my subjects than for their lives and their riches. I will never at any time of my life think again of your offence, and I pardon you without excepting a single thing. I desire that the keys of your city and your arms be given back to you, and that you be completely reinstated in your liberties and your privileges.” The cheers of the people responded to these words of the king. “I think I have won your hearts,” said the king on retiring; “and I assure you, on the honor of a gentleman, that you have mine. I desire that you ring your bells, for you are pardoned.” The Rochellese were let off for a fine of two hundred thousand francs, which the king gave to his keeper of the seals, Francis de Montholon, whom he wished to compensate for his good service. The keeper of the seals in his turn made a present of them to the town of Rochelle to found a hospital. But the ordinances as to the salt-tax were maintained in principle, and their extension led, some years afterwards, to a rising of a more serious character, and very differently repressed.

In 1548, hardly a year after the accession of Henry II., and in the midst of the rejoicings he had gone to be present at in the north of Italy, he received news at Turin to the effect that in Guienne, Angoumois, and Saintonge a violent and pretty general insurrection had broken out against the salt-tax, which Francis I., shortly before his death, had made heavier in these provinces. The local authorities in vain attempted to repress the rising; the insurgent peasants scoured the country in strong bodies, giving free rein not only to their desires, but also to their revengeful feelings; the most atrocious excesses of which a mob is capable were committed; the director-general of the gabel was massacred cruelly; and two of his officers, at Angouleme, were strapped down stark naked on a table, beaten to death, and had their bodies cast into the river with the insulting remark, “Go, wicked gabellers, and salt the fish of the Charente.” The King of Navarre’s lieutenant, being appealed to for aid, summoned, but to no purpose, the Parliament of Bordeaux; he was forced to take refuge in Chateau-Trompette, and was massacred by the populace whilst he was trying to get out; the president of the Parliament, a most worthy magistrate, and very much beloved, it is said, by the people, only saved his own life by taking the oath prescribed by the insurgents. “This news,” says Vieilleville, in his contemporary Memoires, “grievously afflicted the king; and the Constable de Montmorency represented to him that it was not the first time that these people had been capricious, rebellious, and mutinous; for that in the reign of his lord and father, the late king, the Rochellese and surrounding districts had forgotten themselves in like manner. They ought to be exterminated, and, in case of need, be replaced by a new colony, that they might never return. The said sir constable offered to take the matter in hand, and with ten companies of the old hands whom he would raise in Piedmont, and as many lanzknechts, a thousand men-at-arms all told, he promised to exact a full account, and satisfy his Majesty.”

Montmorency was as good as his word. When he arrived with his troops in Guienne, the people of Bordeaux, in a fit of terror, sent to Langon a large boat, most magnificently fitted up, in which were chambers and saloons emblazoned with the arms of the said sir constable, with three or four deputies to present it to him, and beg him to embark upon it, and drop down to their city. He repulsed them indignantly. “Away, away,” said he, “with your boat and your keys; I will have nought to do with them; I have others here with me which will make me other kind of opening than yours. I will have you all hanged; I will teach you to rebel against your king and murder his governor and his lieutenant.” And he did, in fact, enter Bordeaux on the 9th of October, 1548, by a breach which he had opened in the walls, and, after having traversed the city between two lines of soldiers and with his guns bearing on the suspected points, he ordered the inhabitants to bring all their arms to the citadel. Executions followed immediately after this moral as well as material victory. “More than a hundred and forty persons were put to death by various kinds of punishments,” says Vieilleville; “and, by a most equitable sentence, when the executioner had in his hands the three insurgents who had beaten to death and thrown into the river the two collectors of the Babel at Angouleme, he cast them all three into a fire which was ready at the spot, and said to them aloud, in conformity with the judgment against them, ‘Go, rabid hounds, and grill the fish of the Charente, which ye salted with the bodies of the officers of your king and sovereign lord.’ As to civil death (loss of civil rights),” adds Vieilleville, “nearly all the inhabitants made honorable amends in open street, on their knees, before the said my lords at the window, crying mercy and asking pardon; and more than a hundred, because of their youth, were simply whipped. Astounding fines and interdictions were laid as well upon the body composing the court of Parliament as upon the town-council and on a great number of private individuals. The very bells were not exempt from experiencing the wrath and vengeance of the prince, for not a single one remained throughout the whole city or in the open country—to say nothing of the clocks, which were not spared either —which was not broken up and confiscated to the king’s service for his guns.”

The insurrection at Bordeaux against the gabel in 1548 was certainly more serious than that of Rochelle in 1542; but it is also quite certain that Francis I. would not have set about repressing it as Henry II. did; he would have appeared there himself and risked his own person instead of leaving the matter to the harshest of his lieutenants, and he would have more skilfully intermingled generosity with force, and kind words with acts of severity. And that is one of the secrets of governing. In 1549, scarcely a year after the revolt at Bordeaux, Henry II., then at Amiens, granted to deputies from Poitou, Rochelle, the district of Aunis, Limousin, Perigord, and Saintonge, almost complete abolition of the Babel in Guienne, which paid the king, by way of compensation, two hundred thousand crowns of gold for the expenses of war or the redemption of certain alienated domains. We may admit that on the day after the revolt the arbitrary and bloody proceedings of the Constable de Montmorency must have produced upon the insurgents of Bordeaux the effect of a salutary fright; but we may doubt whether so cruel a repression was absolutely indispensable in 1548, when in 1549 the concession demanded in the former year was to be recognized as necessary.

According to De Thou and the majority of historians, it was on the occasion of the insurrection in Guienne against the Babel that Stephen de la Boetie, the young and intimate friend of Montaigne, wrote his celebrated Discours de la Servitude voluntaire, ou le Contre-un, an eloquent declamation against monarchy. But the testimony of Montaigne himself upsets the theory of this coincidence; written in his own hand upon a manuscript, partly autograph, of the treatise by De la Boetie, is a statement that it was the work “of a lad of sixteen.” La Boetie was born at Sarlat on the 1st of November, 1530, and was, therefore, sixteen in 1546, two years before the insurrection at Bordeaux. The Contre-un, besides, is a work of pure theory and general philosophy, containing no allusion at all to the events of the day, to the sedition in Guienne no more than to any other. This little work owed to Montaigne’s affectionate regard for its author a great portion of its celebrity. Published for the first time, in 1578, in the Memoires de l’Etat de France, after having up to that time run its course without any author’s name, any title, or any date, it was soon afterwards so completely forgotten that when, in the middle of the seventeenth century, Cardinal de Richelieu for the first time heard it mentioned, and “sent one of his gentlemen over the whole street of Saint-Jacques to inquire for la Servitude volontaire, all the publishers said, ‘We don’t know what it is.’ The son of one of them recollected something about it, and said to the cardinal’s gentleman, ‘Sir, there is a book-fancier who has what you seek, but with no covers to it, and he wants five pistoles for it.’ ‘Very well,’ said the gentleman;” and the Cardinal do Richelieu paid fifty francs for the pleasure of reading the little political pamphlet by “a lad of sixteen,” which probably made very little impression upon him, but which, thanks to the elegance and vivacity of its style, and the affectionate admiration of the greatest independent thinker of the sixteenth century, has found a place in the history of French literature. [Memoires de Tallemant des Reaux, t. i. p. 395.]

History must do justice even to the men whose brutal violence she stigmatizes and reproves. In the case of Anne do Montmorency it often took the form of threats intended to save him from the necessity of acts. When he came upon a scene of any great confusion and disorder, “Go hang me such an one,” he would say; “tie yon fellow to that tree; despatch this fellow with pikes and arquebuses, this very minute, right before my eyes; cut me in pieces all those rascals who chose to hold such a clock-case as this against the king; burn me yonder village; light me up a blaze everywhere, for a quarter of a mile all round.” The same man paid the greatest attention to the discipline and good condition of his troops, in order to save the populations from their requisitions and excesses. “On the 20th of November, 1549, he obtained and published at Paris,” says De Thou, “a proclamation from the king doubling the pay of the men-at-arms, arquebusiers and light-horse, and forbidding them at the same time, on pain of death, to take anything without paying for it. A bad habit had introduced itself amongst the troops, whether they were going on service or returning, whether they were in the field or in winter quarters, of keeping themselves at the expense of those amongst whom they lived. Thence proceeded an infinity of irregularities and losses in the towns and in the country, wherein the people had to suffer at the hands of an insolent soldiery the same vexatious as if it had been an enemy’s country. Not only was a stop put to such excesses, but care was further taken that the people should not be oppressed under pretext of recruitments which had to be carried out.” [Histoire de J. A. de Thou, t. i. p. 367.] A nephew of the Constable de Montmorency, a young man of twenty-three, who at a later period became Admiral de Coligny, was ordered to see to the execution of these protective measures, and he drew up, between 1550 and 1552, at first for his own regiment of foot, and afterwards as colonel-general of this army, rules of military discipline which remained for a long while in force.

There was war in the atmosphere. The king and his advisers, the court and the people, had their minds almost equally full of it, some in sheer dread, and others with an eye to preparation. The reign of Francis I. had ended mournfully; the peace of Crespy had hurt the feelings both of royalty and of the nation; Henry, now king, had, as dauphin, felt called upon to disavow it. It had left England in possession of Calais and Boulogne, and confirmed the dominion or ascendency of Charles V. in Germany, Italy, and Spain, on all the French frontiers. How was the struggle to be recommenced? What course must be adopted to sustain it successfully? To fall back upon, there were the seven provincial legions, which had been formed by Francis I. for Normandy, Picardy, Burgundy, Dauphiny, and Provence united, Languedoc, Guienne, and Brittany; but they were not like permanent troops, drilled and always ready; they were recruited by voluntary enlistment; they generally remained at their own homes, receiving compensation at review time and high pay in time of war. The Constable de Montmorency had no confidence in these legions; he spoke of them contemptuously, and would much rather have increased the number of the foreign corps, regularly paid and kept up, Swiss or lanzknechts. Two systems of policy and warfare, moreover, divided the king’s council into two: Montmorency, now old and worn out in body and mind (he was born in 1492, and so was sixty in 1552), was for a purely defensive attitude, no adventures or battles to be sought, but victuals and all sorts of supplies to be destroyed in the provinces which might be invaded by the enemy, so that instead of winning victories there he might not even be able to live there. In 1536 this system had been found successful by the constable in causing the failure of Charles V.‘s invasion of Provence; but in 1550 a new generation had come into the world, the court, and the army; it comprised young men full of ardor and already distinguished for their capacity and valor; Francis de Lorraine, Duke of Guise (born at the castle of Bar, February 17, 1519), was thirty-one; his brother, Charles de Guise, Cardinal of Lorraine, was only six-and-twenty (he was born at Joinville, February 17, 1524); Francis de Scepeaux (born at Durdtal, Anjou, in 1510), who afterwards became Marshal de Vieilleville, was at this time nearly forty; but he had contributed in 1541 to the victory of Ceresole, and Francis I. had made so much of it that he had said, on presenting him to his son Henry, “He is no older than you, and see what he has done already; if the wars do not swallow him up, you will some day make him constable or marshal of France.” Gaspard de Coligny (born at Chatillon-sur-Loing, February 16, 1517) was thirty-three; and his brother, Francis d’Andelot (born at Chatillon, in 1521), twenty-nine. These men, warriors and politicians at one and the same time, in a high social position and in the flower of their age, could not reconcile themselves to the Constable de Montmorency’s system, defensive solely and prudential to the verge of inertness; they thought that, in order to repair the reverses of France and for the sake of their own fame, there was something else to be done, and they impatiently awaited the opportunity.

It was not long coming. At the close of 1551, a deputation of the Protestant princes of Germany came to Fontainebleau to ask for the king’s support against the aggressive and persecuting despotism of Charles V. The Count of Nassau made a speech “very long,” says Vieilleville in his Memoires, “at the same time that it was in very elegant language, whereby all the presence received very great contentment.” Next day the king put the demand before his council for consideration, and expressed at the very outset his own opinion that “in the present state of affairs, he ought not to take up any enterprise, but leave his subjects of all conditions to rest; for generally,” said he, “all have suffered and do suffer when armies pass and repass so often through my kingdom, which cannot be done without pitiable oppression and trampling-down of the poor people.” The constable, “without respect of persons,” says Vieilleville, “following his custom of not giving way to anybody, forthwith began to speak, saying that the king, who asked counsel of them, had very plainly given it them himself and made them very clearly to understand his own idea, which ought to be followed point by point without any gainsaying, he having said nothing but what was most equitable and well known to the company.” Nearly all the members of the council gave in their adhesion, without comment, to the opinion of the king and the constable. “But when it came to the turn of M. de Vieilleville, who had adopted the language of the Count of Nassau,” he unhesitatingly expressed a contrary opinion, unfolding all the reasons which the king had for being distrustful of the emperor and for not letting this chance of enfeebling him slip by. “May it please your Majesty,” said he, “to remember his late passage through France, to obtain which the emperor submitted to carteblanche; nevertheless, when he was well out of the kingdom, he laughed at all his promises, and, when he found himself inside Cambrai, he said to the Prince of Infantado, ‘Let not the King of France, if he be wise, put himself at my mercy, as I have been at his, for I swear by the living God that he shall not be quit for Burgundy and Champagne; but I would also insist upon Picardy and the key of the road to the Bastille of Paris, unless he were minded to lose his life or be confined in perpetual imprisonment until the whole of my wish were accomplished.’ Since thus it is, sir, and the emperor makes war upon you covertly, it must be made upon him overtly, without concealing one’s game or dissimulating at all. No excuses must be allowed on the score of neediness, for France is inexhaustible, if only by voluntary loans raised on the most comfortable classes of the realm. As for me, I consider myself one of the poorest of the company, or at any rate one of the least comfortable; but yet I have some fifteen thousand francs’ worth of plate, dinner and dessert, white and red [silver and gold], which I hereby offer to place in the hands of whomsoever you shall appoint, in order to contribute to the expenses of so laudable an enterprise as this. Putting off, moreover, for the present the communication to you of a certain secret matter which one of the chiefs of this embassy hath told me; and I am certain that when you have discovered it, you will employ all your might and means to carry out that which I propose to you.”

The king asked Vieilleville what this secret matter was which he was keeping back. “If it please your Majesty to withdraw apart, I will tell it you,” said Vieilleville. All the council rose; and Vieilleville, approaching his Majesty, who called the constable only to his side, said, “Sir, you are well aware how the emperor got himself possessed of the imperial cities of Cambrai, Utrecht, and Liege, which he has incorporated with his own countship of Flanders, to the great detriment of the whole of Germany. The electoral princes of the holy empire have discovered that he has a project in his mind of doing just the same with the imperial cities of Metz, Strasbourg, Toul, Verdun, and such other towns on the Rhine as he shall be able to get hold of. They have secretly adopted the idea of throwing themselves upon your resources, without which they cannot stop this detestable design, which would be the total ruin of the empire and a manifest loss to your kingdom. Wherefore, take possession of the said towns, since opportunity offers, which will be about forty leagues of country gained without the loss of a single man, and an impregnable rampart for Champagne and Picardy; and, besides, a fine and perfectly open road into the heart of the duchy of Luxembourg and the districts below it as far as Brussels.”

However pacific the king’s first words had been, and whatever was the influence of the constable, the proposal of Vieilleville had a great effect upon the council. The king showed great readiness to adopt it. “I think,” said he to the constable, “that I was inspired of God when I created Vieilleville of my council to-day.” “I only gave the opinion I did,” replied Montmorency, “in order to support the king’s sentiments; let your Majesty give what orders you please.” The king loudly proclaimed his resolve. “Then let every one,” he said, “be ready at an early date, with equipment according to his ability and means, to follow me; hoping, with God’s help, that all will go well for the discomfiture of so pernicious a foe of my kingdom and nation, and one who revels and delights in tormenting all manner of folks, without regard for any.” There was a general enthusiasm; the place of meeting for the army was appointed at Chalons-sur-Marne, March 10, 1552; more than a thousand gentlemen flocked thither as volunteers; peasants and mechanics from Champagne and Picardy joined them; the war was popular. “The majority of the soldiers,” says Rabutin, a contemporary chronicler, “were young men whose brains were on fire.” Francis de Guise and Gaspard de Coligny were their chief leaders. The king entered Lorraine from Champagne by Joinville, the ordinary residence of the Dukes of Guise. He carried Pont-a-Mousson; Toul opened its gates to him on the 13th of April; he occupied Nancy on the 14th, and on the 18th he entered Metz, not without some hesitation amongst a portion of the inhabitants and the necessity of a certain show of military force on the part of the leaders of the royal army. The king would have given the command of this important place to Vieilleville, but he refused it, saying, “I humbly thank your Majesty, but I do not think that you should establish in Metz any governor in your own name, but leave that duty to the mayor and sheriffs of the city, under whose orders the eight captains of the old train-bands who will remain there with their companies will be.” “How say you!” said the king: “can I leave a foreign lieutenant in a foreign country whose oath of fidelity I have only had within the last four-and-twenty hours, and with all the difficulties and disputes in the world to meet too?” “Sir,” rejoined Vieilleville, “to fear that this master sheriff, whose name is Tallanges, might possibly do you a bad turn, is to wrongly estimate his own competence, who never put his nose anywhere but into a bar-parlor to drink himself drunk; and it is also to show distrust of the excellent means you have for preventing all the ruses and artifices that might be invented to throw your service into confusion.” The king acquiesced, but not without anxiety, in Vieilleville’s refusal, and, leaving at Metz as governor a relative of the constable’s, whom the latter warmly recommended to him, he set out on the 22d of April, 1552, with all his household, to go and attempt in Alsace the same process that he had already carried out in Lorraine. “But when we had entered upon the territory of Germany,” says Vieilleville, “our Frenchmen at once showed their insolence in their very first quarters, which so alarmed all the rest that we never found from that moment a single man to speak to, and, as long as the expedition lasted, there never appeared a soul with his provisions to sell on the road; whereby the army suffered infinite privations. This misfortune began with us at the approach to Saverne (Zabern), the episcopal residence of Strasbourg.” When the king arrived before Strasbourg he found the gates closed, and the only offer to open them was on the condition that he should enter alone with forty persons for his whole suite. The constable, having taken a rash fit, was of opinion that he should enter even on this condition. This advice was considered by his Majesty to be very sound, as well as by the princes and lords who were about him, according to the natural tendency of the Frenchman, who is always for seconding and applauding what is said by the great. But Vieilleville, on being summoned to the king’s quarters, opposed it strongly. “Sir,” said he, “break this purpose, for in carrying it out you are in danger of incurring some very evil and very shameful fate; and, should that happen, what will become of your army which will be left without head, prince, or captain, and in a strange country, wherein we are already looked upon with ill will because of our insolence and indiscretions? As for me, I am off again to my quarters to quaff and laugh with my two hundred men-at-arms, in readiness to march when your standard is a-field, but not thither.” Nothing has a greater effect upon weak and undecided minds than the firm language of men resolved to do as they say. The king gave up the idea of entering Strasbourg, and retired well pleased nevertheless, for he was in possession of Metz, Toul, Verdun, and Pont-a-Mousson, the keys for France into Germany, and at the head of an army under young commanders who were enterprising without being blindly rash.

Charles V. also had to know what necessity was, and to submit to it, without renouncing the totality of his designs. On the 2d of August, 1552, he signed at Passau, with the Protestant princes, the celebrated treaty known under the name of “treaty of public peace,” which referred the great questions of German pacification to a general diet to be assembled in six months, and declared that, pending definitive conciliation, the two religions should be on an equal footing in the empire, that is, that the princes and free towns should have the supreme regulation of religious matters amongst themselves. Charles V. thus recovered full liberty of action in his relations with France, and could no longer think of anything but how to recover the important towns he had lost in Lorraine. Henry II., on the other hand, who was asked by his Protestant allies on what conditions he would accept the peace of Passau, replied that at no price would he dispossess himself of the Three-Bishoprics of Lorraine, and that he would for his part continue the contest he had undertaken for the liberation of Germany. The siege of Metz then became the great question of the day: Charles V. made all his preparations to conduct it on an immense scale, and Henry II. immediately ordered Francis de Guise to go and defend his new conquest at all hazards.