Ambition which is really great accepts with joy great perils fraught with great opportunities. Guise wrote to Henry II.‘s favorite, Diana de Poitiers, Duchess of Valentinois, to thank her for having helped to obtain for him this favor, which was about to bring him “to the emperor’s very beard.” He set out at once, first of all to Toul, where the plague prevailed, and where he wished to hurry on the repair of the ramparts. Money was wanting to pay the working-corps; and he himself advanced the necessary sum. On arriving at Metz on the 17th of August, 1552, he found there only twelve companies of infantry, new levies; and every evening he drilled them himself in front of his quarters. A host of volunteers, great lords, simple gentlemen, and rich and brave burgesses, soon came to him, “eager to aid him in repelling the greatest and most powerful effort ever made by the emperor against their country and their king.” This concourse of warriors, the majority of them well known and several of them distinguished, redoubled the confidence and ardor of the rank and file in the army. We find under the title of Chanson faite en 1552 par un souldar etant en Metz en garnison this couplet:—

To put into condition the tottering fortifications of Metz, and to have the place well supplied, was the first task undertaken by its indefatigable governor; he never ceased to meet the calls upon him either in person or in purse; he was seen directing the workmen, taking his meals with them, and setting them a good example by carrying the hod for several hours. He frequently went out on horseback to reconnoitre the country, visit the points of approach and lodgment that the enemy might make use of around the town, and take measures of precaution at the places whereby they might do harm as well as at those where it would be not only advantageous for the French to make sallies or to set ambuscades, but also to secure a retreat. Charles V., naturally slow as he was in his operations no less than in his resolves, gave the activity of Guise time to bear fruit. “I mean to batter the town of Metz in such style as to knock it about the ears of M. de Guise,” said he at the end of August, 1552, “and I make small account of the other places that the king may have beyond that.”

On the 15th of September following, Charles was still fifteen leagues from Metz, on the territory of Deux-Ponts, and it was only on the 19th of October that the Duke of Alba, his captain-general, arrived with twenty-four thousand men, the advance-guard, within a league of the place which, it it is said, was to be ultimately besieged by one hundred thousand foot, twenty-three thousand horse, one hundred and twenty pieces of artillery, and seven thousand pioneers. “After one and the first encounter,” says a journal of the siege, “the enemy held our soldiers in good repute, not having seen them, for any sort of danger, advance or retreat, save as men of war and of assured courage; which was an advantage, for M. de Guise knew well that at the commencement of a war it was requisite that a leader should try, as much as ever he could, to win.” It was only on the 20th of November that Charles V., ill of gout at Thionville, and unable to stand on his legs, perceived the necessity of being present in person at the siege, and appeared before Metz on an Arab horse, with his face pale and worn, his eyes sunk in his head, and his beard white. At sight of him there was a most tremendous salute of arquebuses and artillery, the noise of which brought the whole town to arms. The emperor, whilst waiting to establish himself at the castle of La Horgne, took up his quarters near the Duke of Alba, in a little wooden house built out of the ruins of the Abbey of Saint-Clement: “a beautiful palace,” said he, “when the keys of Metz are brought to me there.” From the 20th to the 26th the attack was continued with redoubled vigor; fourteen thousand cannon-shots were fired, it is said, in a single day Guise had remarked that the enemy seemed preparing to direct the principal assault against a point so strong that nobody had thought of pulling down the houses in its vicinity. This oversight was immediately repaired, and a stout wall, the height of a man, made out of the ruins. “If they send us peas,” said Guise, “we will give them back beans” (“we will give them at least as good as they bring “). On the 26th of November the old wall was battered by a formidable artillery; and, breached in three places, it crumbled down on the 28th into the ditch, “at the same time making it difficult to climb for to come to the assault.” The assailants uttered shouts of joy; but, when the cloud of dust had cleared off, they saw a fresh rampart eight feet in height above the breach, “and they experienced as much and even more disgust than they had felt pleasure at seeing the wall tumble.” The besieged heaped mockery and insult upon them; but Guise “imperatively put a stop to the disturbance, fearing, it is said, lest some traitor should take advantage of it to give the assailants some advice, and the soldiers then conceived the idea of sticking upon the points of their pikes live cats, the cries of which seemed to show derision of the enemy.”

The siege went on for a month longer without making any more impression; and the imperial troops kicked against any fresh assaults. “I was wont once upon a time to be followed to battle,” Charles V. would say, “but I see that I have no longer men about me; I must bid farewell to the empire, and go and shut myself up in some monastery; before three years are over I shall turn Cordelier.” Whilst Metz was still holding out, the fortress of Toul was summoned by the Imperialists to open its gates; but the commandant replied, “When the town of Metz has been taken, when I have had the honor of being besieged in due form by the emperor, and when I have made as long a defence as the Duke of Guise has, such a summons may be addressed to me, and I will consider what I am to do.” On the 26th of December, 1552, the sixty-fifth day since the arrival of the imperial army and the forty-fifth since the batteries had opened fire, Charles V. resolved to raise the siege. “I see very well,” said he, “that fortune resembles women; she prefers a young king to an old emperor.” His army filed off by night, in silence, leaving behind its munitions and its tents just as they stood, “driven away, almost, by the chastisement of Heaven,” says the contemporary chronicler Rabutin, “with but two shots by way of signal.” The ditty of the soldier just quoted ends thus:—

“At last, so stout was her defence, From Metz they moved their guns away; And, with the laugh at their expense, A-tramping went their whole array. And at their tail the noble Lord Of Guise sent forth a goodly throng Of cavalry, with lance and sword, To teach them how to tramp along.”

Guise was far from expecting so sudden and decisive a result. “Sing me no more flattering strains in your letters about the emperor’s dislodgment hence,” he wrote on the 24th of December to his brother the Cardinal of Lorraine; “take it for certain that unless we be very much mistaken in him, he will not, as long as he has life, brook the shame of departing hence until he has seen it all out.”

Irritated, and, perhaps, still more shocked, at so heavy a blow to his power and his renown, Charles V. looked everywhere for a chance of taking his revenge. He flattered himself that he had found it in Therouanne, a fortress of importance at that time between Flanders and Artois, which had always been a dependency of the kingdom of France, and served as a rampart against the repeated incursions of the English, the masters of Calais. Charles knew that it was ill supplied with troops and munitions of war; and the court of Henry II., intoxicated with the deliverance of Metz, spoke disdainfully of the emperor, and paid no heed to anything but balls, festivities, and tournaments in honor of the marriage between Diana d’Angouleme, the king’s natural daughter, and Horatio Farnese, Duke of Castro. All on a sudden it was announced that the troops of Charles V. were besieging Therouanne. The news was at first treated lightly; it was thought sufficient to send to Therouanne some re-enforcements under the orders of Francis de Montmorency, nephew of the constable; but the attack was repulsed with spirit by the besiegers, and brave as was the resistance offered by the besieged, who sustained for ten hours a sanguinary assault, on the 20th of June, 1553, Francis de Montmorency saw the impossibility of holding out longer, and, on the advice of all his officers, offered to surrender the place; but he forgot to stipulate in the first place for a truce; the Germans entered the town, thrown open without terms of capitulation; it was given up as prey to an army itself a prey to all the passions of soldiers as well as to their master’s vengeful feelings, and Therouanne, handed over for devastation, was for a whole month diligently demolished and razed to the ground. When Charles V., at Brussels, received news of the capture, “bonfires were lighted throughout Flanders; bells were rung, cannon were fired.” It was but a poor revenge for so great a sovereign after the reverse he had just met with at Metz; but the fall of Therouanne was a grievous incident for France. Francis I. was in the habit of saying that Therouanne in Flanders and Acqs (now Dax) on the frontier of Guienne were, to him, like two pillows on which he could rest tranquilly. [Histoire universelle, t. ii. p. 352.]

Whilst these events were passing in Lorraine and Flanders, Henry II. and his advisers were obstinately persisting in the bad policy which had been clung to by Charles VIII., Louis XII., and Francis I., that, in fact, of making conquests and holding possessions in Italy. War continued, from Turin to Naples, between France, the emperor, the pope, and the local princes, with all sorts of alliances and alternations, but with no tangible result. Blaise de Montluc defended the fortress of Sienna for nine months against the Imperialists with an intelligence and a bravery which earned for him twenty years later the title of Marshal of France. Charles de Brissac was carrying on the war in Piedmont with such a combination of valor and generosity that the king sent him as a present his own sword, writing to him at the same time, “The opinion I have of your merit has become rooted even amongst foreigners. The emperor says that he would make himself monarch of the whole world if he had a Brissac to second his plans.” His men, irritated at getting no pay, one day surrounded Brissac, complaining vehemently. “You will always get bread by coming to me,” said he; and he paid the debt of France by sacrificing his daughter’s dowry and borrowing a heavy sum from the Swiss on the security of his private fortune. It was by such devotion and such sacrifices that the French nobility paid for and justified their preponderance in the state; but they did not manage to succeed in the conduct of public affairs, and to satisfy the interests of a nation progressing in activity, riches, independence, and influence. Disquieted at the smallness of his success in Italy, Henry II. flattered himself that he would regain his ascendency there by sending thither the Duke of Guise, the hero of Metz, with an army of about twenty thousand men, French or Swiss, and a staff of experienced officers; but Guise was not more successful than his predecessors had been. After several attempts by arms and negotiation amongst the local sovereigns, he met with a distinct failure in the kingdom of Naples before the fortress of Civitella, the siege of which he was forced to raise on the 15th of May, 1557. Wearied out by want of success, sick in the midst of an army of sick, regretting over “the pleasure of his field-sports at Joinville, and begging his mother to have just a word or two written to him to console him,” all he sighed for was to get back to France. And it was not long before the state of affairs recalled him thither. It was now nearly two years ago that, on the 25th of October, 1555, and the 1st of January, 1556, Charles V. had solemnly abdicated all his dominions, giving over to his son Philip the kingdom of Spain, with the sovereignty of Burgundy and the Low Countries, and to his younger brother, Ferdinand, the empire together with the original heritage of the House of Austria, and retiring personally to the monastery of Yuste, in Estramadura, there to pass the last years of his life, distracted with gout, at one time resting from the world and its turmoil, at another vexing himself about what was doing there now that he was no longer in it. Before abandoning it for good, he desired to do his son Philip the service of leaving him, if not in a state of definite peace, at any rate in a condition of truce with France. Henry II. also desired rest; and the Constable de Montmorency wished above everything for the release of his son Francis, who had been a prisoner since the fall of Thorouanne. A truce for five years was signed at Vaucelles on the 5th of February, 1556; and Coligny, quite young still, but already admiral and in high esteem, had the conduct of the negotiation. He found Charles V. dressed in mourning, seated beside a little table, in a modest apartment hung with black. When the admiral handed to the emperor the king’s letter, Charles could not himself break the seal, and the Bishop of Arras drew near to render him that service. “Gently, my Lord of Arras,” said the emperor; “would you rob me of the duty I am bound to discharge towards the king my brother-in-law? Please God, none but I shall do it;” and then turning to Coligny, he said, “What will you say of me, admiral? Am I not a pretty knight to run a course and break a lance, I who can only with great difficulty open a letter?” He inquired with an air of interest after Henry II.‘s health, and boasted of belonging himself, also, to the house of France through his grandmother Mary of Burgundy. “I hold it to be an honor,” said he, “to have issued, on the mother’s side, from the stock which wears and upholds the most famous crown in the world.” His son Philip, who was but a novice in kingly greatness, showed less courtesy and less good taste than his father; he received the French ambassadors in a room hung with pictures representing the battle of Pavia. There were some who concluded from that that the truce would not be of long duration. [Histoire d’Espagne, by M. Rosseeuw Saint-Hilaire, t. viii. p. 64.]

And it was not long before their prognostication was verified. The sending of the Duke of Guise into Italy, and the assistance he brought to Pope Paul IV., then at war with the new King of Spain, Philip II., were considered as a violation of the truce of Vaucelles. Henry II. had expected as much, and had ordered Coligny, who was commanding in Picardy and Flanders, to hold himself in readiness to take the field as soon as he should be, if not forced, at any rate naturally called upon, by any unforeseen event. It cost Coligny, who was a man of scrupulous honor, a great struggle to lightly break a truce he had just signed; nevertheless, in January, 1557, when he heard that the French were engaged in Italy in the war between the pope and the Spaniards, he did not consider that he could possibly remain inactive in Flanders. He took by surprise the town of Lens, between Lille and Arras. Philip II., on his side, had taken measures for promptly entering upon the campaign. By his marriage with Mary Tudor, Queen of England, he had secured for himself a powerful ally in the north; the English Parliament were but little disposed to compromise themselves in a war with France; but in March, 1557, Philip went to London; the queen’s influence and the distrust excited in England by Henry II. prevailed over the pacific desires of the nation; and Mary sent a simple herald to carry to the King of France at Rheims her declaration of war. Henry accepted it politely, but resolutely. “I speak to you in this way,” said he to the herald, “because it is a queen who sends you; had it been a king, I would speak to you in a very different tone;” and he ordered him to be gone forthwith from the kingdom. A negotiation was commenced for accomplishing the marriage, long since agreed upon, between the young Queen of Scotland, Mary Stuart, and Henry II.‘s son, Francis, dauphin of France. Mary, who was born on the 8th of December, 1542, at Falkland Castle in Scotland, had, since 1548, lived and received her education at the court of France, whither her mother, Mary of Lorraine, eldest sister of Francis of Guise and queen-dowager of Scotland, had lost no time in sending her as soon as the future union between the two children had been agreed upon between the two courts. The dauphin of France was a year younger than the Scottish princess; but “from his childhood,” says the Venetian Capello, “he has been very much in love with her Most Serene little Highness the Queen of Scotland, who is destined for his wife. It sometimes happens that, when they are exchanging endearments, they like to retire quite apart into a corner of the rooms, that their little secrets may not be overheard.” On the 19th of April, 1558, the espousals took place in the great hall of the Louvre, and the marriage was celebrated in the church of Notre-Dame.

From that time Mary Stuart was styled in France queen-dauphiness, and her husband, with the authorization of the Scottish commissioners, took the title of king-dauphin. “Etiquette required at that time that the heir to the throne should hold his court separately, and not appear at the king’s court save on grand occasions. The young couple resigned themselves without any difficulty to this exile, and retired to Villers-Cotterets.” [Histoire de Marie Stuart, by Jules Gauthier, t. i. p. 36.]

Whilst preparations were being made at Paris for the rejoicings in honor of the union of the two royal children, war broke out in Picardy and Flanders. Philip II. had landed there with an army of forty-seven thousand men, of whom seven thousand were English. Never did any great sovereign and great politician provoke and maintain for long such important wars without conducting them in some other fashion than from the recesses of his cabinet, and without ever having exposed his own life on the field of battle. The Spanish army was under the orders of Emmanuel-Philibert, Duke of Savoy, a young warrior of thirty, who had won the confidence of Charles V. He led it to the siege of Saint-Quentin, a place considered as one of the bulwarks of the kingdom. Philip II. remained at some leagues’ distance in the environs. Henry II. was ill prepared for so serious an attack; his army, which was scarcely twenty thousand strong, mustered near Laon under the orders of the Duke of Nevers, governor of Champagne; at the end of July, 1557, it hurried into Picardy, under the command of the Constable de Montmorency, who was supported by Admiral de Coligny, his nephew, by the Duke of Enghien, by the Prince of Condo, and by the Duke of Montpensier, by nearly all the great lords and valiant warriors of France; they soon saw that Saint- Quentin was in a deplorable state of defence; the fortifications were old and badly kept up; soldiers, munitions of war, and victuals were all equally deficient. Coligny did not hesitate, however he threw himself into the place on the 2d of August, during the night, with a small corps of seven hundred men and Saint-Remy, a skilful engineer, who had already distinguished himself in the defence of Metz; the admiral packed off the useless mouths, repaired the walls at the points principally threatened, and reanimated the failing courage of the inhabitants. The constable and his army came within hail of the place; and D’Andelot, Coligny’s brother, managed with great difficulty to get four hundred and fifty men into it. On the 10th of August the battle was begun between the two armies. The constable affected to despise the Duke of Savoy’s youth. “I will soon show him,” said he, “a move of an old soldier.” The French army, very inferior in numbers, was for a moment on the point of being surrounded. The Prince of Conde sent the constable warning. “I was serving in the field,” answered Montmorency, “before the Prince of Conde came into the world; I have good hopes of still giving him lessons in the art of war for some years to come.” The valor of the constable and his comrades in arms could not save them from the consequences of their stubborn recklessness and their numerical inferiority; the battalions of Gascon infantry closed their ranks, with pikes to the front, and made an heroic resistance, but all in vain, against repeated charges of the Spanish cavalry: and the defeat was total. More than three thousand men were killed; the number of prisoners amounted to double; and the constable, left upon the field with his thigh shattered by a cannon-ball, fell into the hands of the Spaniards, as was also the case with the Dukes of Longueville and Montpensier, La Rochefoucauld, D’Aubigne, &c. . . . The Duke of Enghien, Viscount de Turenne, and a multitude of others, many great names amidst a host of obscure, fell in the fight. The Duke of Nevers and the Prince of Conde, sword in hand, reached La Fere with the remnants of their army. Coligny remained alone in Saint-Quentin with those who survived of his little garrison, and a hundred and twenty arquebusiers whom the Duke of Nevers threw into the place at a loss of three times as many. Coligny held out for a fortnight longer, behind walls that were in ruins and were assailed by a victorious army. At length, on the 27th of August, the enemy entered Saint-Quentin by shoals. “The admiral, who was still going about the streets with a few men to make head against them, found himself hemmed in on all sides, and did all he could to fall into the hands of a Spaniard, preferring rather to await on the spot the common fate than to incur by flight any shame and reproach. He who took him prisoner, after having set him to rest a while at the foot of the ramparts, took him away to their camp, where, as he entered, he met Captain Alonzo de Cazieres, commandant of the old bands of Spanish infantry, when up came the Duke of Savoy, who ordered the said Cazieres to take the admiral to his tent.” [Commentaire de Francois de Rabutin sur les Guerres entre Henri II., roi de France, et Charles Quint, empereur, t. ii. p. 95, in the Petitot collection.] D’Andelot, the admiral’s brother, succeeded in escaping across the marshes. Being thus master of Saint-Quentin, Philip II., after having attempted to put a stop to carnage and plunder, expelled from the town, which was half in ashes, the inhabitants who had survived; and the small adjacent fortresses, Ham and Catelet, were not long before they surrendered.

Philip, with anxious modesty, sent information of his victory to his father, Charles, who had been in retirement since February 21, 1556, at the monastery of Yuste. “As I did not happen to be there myself,” he said at the end of his letter, “about which I am heavy at heart as to what your Majesty will possibly think, I can only tell you from hearsay what took place.” We have not the reply of Charles V. to his son; but his close confidant, Quejada, wrote, “The emperor felt at this news one of the greatest thrills of satisfaction he has ever had; but, to tell you the truth, I perceive by his manner that he cannot reconcile himself to the thought that his son was not there; and with good reason.” After that Saint-Quentin had surrendered, the Duke of Savoy wanted to march forward and strike affrighted France to the very heart; and the aged emperor was of his mind. “Is the king my son at Paris?” he said, when he heard of his victory. Philip had thought differently about it instead of hurling his army on Paris, he had moved it back to Saint-Quentin, and kept it for the reduction of places in the neighborhood. “The Spaniards,” says Rabutin, “might have accomplished our total extermination, and taken from us all hope of setting ourselves up again. . . . But the Supreme Ruler, the God of victories, pulled them up quite short.” An unlooked-for personage, Queen Catherine de’ Medici, then for the first time entered actively upon the scene. We borrow the very words of the Venetian ambassadors who lived within her sphere. The first, Lorenzo Contarini, wrote in 1552, “The queen is younger than the king, but only thirteen days; she is not pretty, but she is possessed of extraordinary wisdom and prudence; no doubt of her being fit to govern; nevertheless she is not consulted or considered so much as she well might be.” Five years later, in 1557, after the battle and capture of Saint-Quentin, France was in a fit of stupor; Paris believed the enemy to be already beneath her walls; many of the burgesses were packing up and flying, some to Orleans, some to Bourges, some still farther. The king had gone to Compiegne “to get together,” says Brantome, “a fresh army.”

Queen Catherine was alone at Paris. Of her own motion “she went to the Parliament (according to the Memoires de la Chatre it was to the Hotel de Ville that she went and made her address) in full state, accompanied by the cardinals, princes, and princesses; and there, in the most impressive language, she set forth the urgent state of affairs at the moment. She pointed out that, in spite of the enormous expenses into which the Most Christian king had found himself drawn in his late wars, he had shown the greatest care not to burden the towns. In the continuous and extreme pressure of requirements her Majesty did not think that any further charge could be made on the people of the country places, who in ordinary times always bear the greatest burden. With so much sentiment and eloquence that she touched the heart of everybody, the queen then explained to the Parliament that the king had need of three hundred thousand livres, twenty-five thousand to be paid every two months; and she added that she would retire from the place of session, so as not to interfere with liberty of discussion; and she, accordingly, retired to an adjoining room. A resolution to comply with the wishes of her Majesty was voted, and the queen, having resumed her place, received a promise to that effect. A hundred notables of the city offered to give at once three thousand francs apiece. The queen thanked them in the sweetest form of words; and thus terminated this session of Parliament with so much applause for her Majesty and such lively marks of satisfaction at her behavior that no idea can be given of them. Throughout the whole city nothing was spoken of but the queen’s prudence and the happy manner in which she proceeded in this enterprise.”

Such is the account, not of a French courtier, but of the Venetian ambassador, Giacomo Lorenzo, writing confidentially to his government. From that day the position of Catherine de’ Medici was changed in France, amongst the people as well as at court. “The king went more often to see her; he added to his habits that of holding court at her apartments for about an hour every day after supper in the midst of the lords and ladies.” It is not to be discovered anywhere in the contemporary Memoires, whether Catherine had anything to do with the resolution taken by Henry II. on returning from Compiegne; but she thenceforward assumed her place, and gave a foretaste of the part she was to play in the government of France. Unhappily for the honor of Catherine and for the welfare of France, that part soon ceased to be judicious, dignified, and salutary, as it had been on that day of its first exhibition.

On entering Paris again the king at once sent orders to the Duke of Guise to return in haste from Italy with all the troops he could bring. Every eye and every hope were fixed upon the able and heroic defender of Metz, who had forced Charles V. to retreat before him. A general appeal was at the same time addressed to “all soldiers, gentlemen and others, who had borne or were capable of bearing arms, to muster at Laon under the Duke of Nevers, in order to be employed for the service of the king and for the tuition [protection] of their country, their families, and their property.” Guise arrived on the 20th of October, 1557, at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where the court happened to be just then: every mark of favor was lavished upon him; all the resources of the state were put at his disposal; there was even some talk of appointing him viceroy; but Henry II. confined himself to proclaiming him, on the very day of his arrival, lieutenant-general of the armies throughout the whole extent of the monarchy, both within and without the realm. His brother, the Cardinal of Lorraine, who was as ambitious and almost as able as he, had the chief direction in civil, financial, and diplomatic affairs; never, since the great mayors-of-the-palace under the Merovingian kings, had similar power been in the hands of a subject. Like a man born to command, Guise saw that, in so complicated a situation, a brilliant stroke must be accomplished and a great peril be met by a great success. “He racked his brains for all sorts of devices for enabling him to do some remarkable deed which might humble the pride of that haughty Spanish nation and revive the courage of his own men; and he took it that those things which the enemy considered as the most secure would be the least carefully guarded. Some years previously it had been suggested to the constable that an attempt might be made upon Calais, negligently guarded as it was, and the place itself not being in good order. The Duke of Guise put the idea of this enterprise forward once more, and begged the king’s permission to attempt it, without saying a word about it to anybody else, which the king considered to be a very good notion.” Guise took the command of the army, and made a feint of directing its movements towards an expedition in the east of the kingdom; but, suddenly turning westwards, he found himself on the night of January 1, 1558, beneath the walls of Calais, “whither, with right good will, all the princes, lords, and soldiers had marched.” On the 3d of January he took the two forts of Nieullay and Risbank, which covered the approaches to the place. On the 4th he prepared for, and on the 6th he delivered, the assault upon the citadel itself, which was carried; he left there his brother, the Duke of Aumale, with a sufficient force for defence; the portion of the English garrison which had escaped at the assault fell back within the town; the governor, Lord Wentworth, “like a man in desperation, who saw he was all but lost,” made vain attempts to recover this important post under cover of night and of the high sea, which rendered impossible the prompt arrival of any aid for the French; but “they held their own inside the castle.” The English requested the Duke of Aumale “to parley so as to come to some honorable and reasonable terms;” and Guise assented. On the 8th of January, whilst he was conferring in his tent with the representatives of the governor, Coligny’s brother, D’Andelot, entered the town at the solicitation of the English themselves, who were afraid of being all put to the sword. The capitulation was signed. The inhabitants, with their wives and children, had their lives spared, and received permission to leave Calais freely and without any insult, and withdraw to England or Flanders. Lord Wentworth and fifty other persons, to be chosen by the Duke of Guise, remained prisoners of war; with this exception, all the soldiers were to return to England, but with empty hands. The place was left with all the cannons, arms, munitions, utensils, engines of war, flags and standards which happened to be in it. The furniture, the gold and silver, coined or other, the merchandise, and the horses passed over to the disposal of the Duke of Guise. Lastly the vanquished, when they quitted the town, were to leave it intact, having no power to pull down houses, unpave streets, throw up earth, displace a single stone, pull out a single nail. The conqueror’s precautions were as deliberate as his audacity had been sudden. On the 9th of January, 1558, after a week’s siege, Calais, which had been in the hands of the English for two hundred and ten years, once more became a French town, in spite of the inscription which was engraved on one of its gates, and which may be turned into the following distich:—

The joy was so much the greater in that it was accompanied by great surprise: save a few members of the king’s council, nobody expected this conquest. “I certainly thought that you must be occupied in preparing for some great exploit, and that you wished to wait until you could apprise me of the execution rather than the design,” wrote Marshal de Brissac to the Duke of Guise, on the 22d of January, from Italy. Foreigners were not less surprised than the French themselves; they had supposed that France would remain for a long while under the effects of the reverse experienced at Saint-Quentin. “The loss of Calais,” said Pope Paul IV., “will be the only dowry that the Queen of England will obtain from her marriage with Philip. For France such a conquest is preferable to that of half the kingdom of England.” When Mary Tudor, already seriously ill, heard the news, she exclaimed from her deathbed, on the 20th of January, “If my heart is opened, there will be found graven upon it the word Calais.” And when the Grand Prior of France, on repairing to the court of his sister, Mary of Lorraine, in Scotland, went to visit Queen Elizabeth, who had succeeded Mary Tudor, she, after she had made him dance several times with her, said to him, “My dear prior, I like you very much, but not your brother, who robbed me of my town of Calais.”

Guise was one of those who knew that it is as necessary to follow up a success accomplished as to proceed noiselessly in the execution of a sudden success. When he was master of Calais he moved rapidly upon the neighboring fortresses of Guines and Ham; and he had them in his power within a few days, notwithstanding a resistance more stout than he had encountered at Calais. During the same time the Duke of Nevers, encouraged by such examples, also took the field again, and gained possession, in Champagne and the neighborhood, of the strong castles of Herbemont, Jamoigne, Chigny, Rossignol, and Villemont. Guise had no idea of contenting himself with his successes in the west of France; his ambition carried him into the east also, to the environs of Metz, the scene of his earliest glory. He heard that Vieilleville, who had become governor of Metz, was setting about the reduction of Thionville, “the best picture of a fortress I ever saw,” says Montluc. “I have heard,” wrote Guise to Vieilleville, “that you have a fine enterprise on hand; I pray you do not commence the execution of it, in any fashion whatever, until I be with you: having given a good account of Calais and Guines, as lieutenant-general of his Majesty in this realm, I should be very vexed if there should be done therein anything of honor and importance without my presence.” He arrived before Thionville on the 4th of June, 1558. Vieilleville and his officers were much put out at his interference. “The duke might surely have dispensed with coming,” said D’Estrees, chief officer of artillery; “it will be easy for him to swallow what is all chewed ready for him.” But the bulk of the army did not share this feeling of jealousy. When the pioneers, drawn up, caught sight of Guise, “Come on, sir,” they cried, “come and let us die before Thionville; we have been expecting you this long while.” The siege lasted three weeks longer. Guise had with him two comrades of distinction, the Italian Peter Strozzi, and the Gascon Blaise do Montluc. On the 20th of June Strozzi was mortally wounded by an arquebuse-shot, at the very side of Guise, who was talking to him with a hand upon his shoulder. “Ah! by God’s head, sir,” cried Strozzi, in Italian, “the king to-day loses a good servant, and so does your excellency.” Guise, greatly moved, attempted to comfort him, and spoke to him the name of Jesus Christ; but Strozzi was one of those infidels so common at that time in Italy. “‘Sdeath,” said he, “what Jesus are you come hither to remind me of? I believe in no God; my game is played.” “You will appear to-day before His face,” persisted Guise, in the earnestness of his faith. “‘Sdeath,” replied Strozzi, “I shall be where all the others are who have died in the last six thousand years.” The eyes of Guise remained fixed a while upon his comrade dying in such a frame of mind; but he soon turned all his thoughts once more to the siege of Thionville. Montluc supported him valiantly. A strong tower still held out, and Montluc carried it at the head of his men. Guise rushed up and threw his arm round the warrior’s neck, saying, “Monseigneur, I now see clearly that the old proverb is quite infallible: ‘A good horse will go to the last.’ I am off at once to my quarters to report the capture to the king. Be assured that I shall not conceal from him the service you have done.” The reduction of Thionville was accomplished on that very day, June 22, 1558. That of Arlon, a rich town in the neighborhood, followed very closely. Guise, thoroughly worn out, had ordered the approaches to be made next morning at daybreak, requesting that he might be left to sleep until he awoke of himself; when he did awake, he inquired whether the artillery had yet opened fire; he was told that Montluc had surprised the place during the night. “That is making the pace very fast,” said he, as he made the sign of the cross; but he did not care to complain about it. Under the impulse communicated by him the fortunes of France were reviving everywhere. A check received before Gravelines, on the 13th of July, 1558, by a division commanded by De Termes, governor of Calais, did not subdue the national elation and its effect upon the enemy themselves. “It is an utter impossibility for me to keep up the war,” wrote Philip II., on the 15th of February, 1559, to Granvelle. On both sides there was a desire for peace; and conferences were opened at Cateau-Cambresis. On the 6th of February, 1559, a convention was agreed upon for a truce which was to last during the whole course of the negotiation, and for six days after the separation of the plenipotentiaries, in case no peace took place.

It was concluded on the 2d of April, 1559, between Henry II. and Elizabeth, who had become Queen of England at the death of her sister Mary (November 17, 1558); and next day, April 3, between Henry II., Philip II., and the allied princes of Spain, amongst others the Prince of Orange, William the Silent, who, whilst serving in the Spanish army, was fitting himself to become the leader of the Reformers, and the liberator of the Low Countries. By the treaty with England, France was to keep Calais for eight years in the first instance, and on a promise to pay five hundred thousand gold crowns to Queen Elizabeth or her successors. The money was never paid, and Calais was never restored, and this without the English government’s having considered that it could make the matter a motive for renewing the war. By the treaty with Spain, France was to keep Metz, Toul, and Verdun, and have back Saint-Quentin, Le Catelet, and Ham; but she was to restore to Spain or her allies a hundred and eighty-nine places in Flanders, Piedmont, Tuscany, and Corsica. The malcontents—for the absence of political liberty does not suppress them entirely—raised their voices energetically against this last treaty signed by the king, with the sole desire, it was supposed, of obtaining the liberation of his two favorites, the Constable de Montmorency and Marshal de Saint-Andre, who had been prisoners in Spain since the defeat at Saint-Quentin. “Their ransom,” it was said, “has cost the kingdom more than that of Francis I.” Guise himself said to the king, “A stroke of your Majesty’s pen costs more to France than thirty years of war cost.” Ever since that time the majority of historians, even the most enlightened, have joined in the censure that was general in the sixteenth century; but their opinion will not be indorsed here; the places which France had won during the war, and which she retained by the peace,—Metz, Toul, and Verdun on her frontier in the north-east, facing the imperial or Spanish possessions, and Boulogne and Calais on her coasts in the north-west, facing England,—were, as regarded the integrity of the state and the security of the inhabitants, of infinitely more importance than those which she gave up in Flanders and Italy. The treaty of Cateau-Cambresis, too, marked the termination of those wars of ambition and conquest which the Kings of France had waged beyond the Alps an injudicious policy, which, for four reigns, had crippled and wasted the resources of France in adventurous expeditions, beyond the limits of her geographical position and her natural and permanent interests.

More or less happily, the treaty of Cateau-Cambreis had regulated all those questions of external policy which were burdensome to France; she was once more at peace with her neighbors, and seemed to have nothing more to do than to gather in the fruits thereof. But she had in her own midst questions far more difficult of solution than those of her external policy, and these perils from within were threatening her more seriously than any from without. Since the death of Francis I., the religious ferment had pursued its course, becoming more general and more fierce; the creed of the Reformers had spread very much; their number had very much increased; permanent churches, professing and submitting to a fixed faith and discipline, had been founded; that of Paris was the first, in 1555; and the example had been followed at Orleans, at Chartres, at Lyons, at Toulouse, at Rochelle, in Normandy, in Touraine, in Guienne, in Poitou, in Dauphiny, in Provence, and in all the provinces, more or less. In 1561, it was calculated that there were twenty-one hundred and fifty reformed, or, as the expression then was, rectified (dressees), churches. “And this is no fanciful figure; it is the result of a census taken at the instigation of the deputies who represented the reformed churches at the conference of Poissy on the demand of Catherine de’ Medici, and in conformity with the advice of Admiral de Coligny.” [La Reformation en France pendant sa premiere periode, by Henri Luttheroth, pp. 127-132.] It is clear that the movement of the Reformation in the sixteenth century was one of those spontaneous and powerful movements which have their source and derive their strength from the condition of men’s souls and of whole communities, and not merely from the personal ambitions and interests which soon come and mingle with them, whether it be to promote or to retard them. One thing has been already here stated and confirmed by facts; it was specially in France that the Reformation had this truly religious and sincere character; very far from supporting or tolerating it, the sovereign and public authorities opposed it from its very birth; under Francis I. it had met with no real defenders but its martyrs; and it was still the same under Henry II. During the reign of Francis I., within a space of twenty-three years, there had been eighty-one capital executions for heresy; during that of Henry II., twelve years, there were ninety-seven for the same cause, and at one of these executions Henry II. was present in person, on the space in front of Notre-Dame: a spectacle which Francis I. had always refused to see. In 1551, 1557, and 1559, Henry II., by three royal edicts, kept up and added to all the prohibitions and penalties in force against the Reformers. In 1550, the massacre of the Vaudians was still in such lively and odious remembrance that a noble lady of Provence, Madame de Cental, did not hesitate to present a complaint, in the name of her despoiled, proscribed, and murdered vassals, against the Cardinal de Tournon, the Count de Grignan, and the Premier President Maynier d’Oppede, as having abused, for the purpose of getting authority for this massacre, the religious feelings of the king, who on his death-bed had testified his remorse for it. “This cause,” says De Thou, “was pleaded with much warmth, and occupied fifty audiences, with a large concourse of people, but the judgment took all the world by surprise. Guerin alone, advocate-general in 1545, having no support at court, was condemned to death, and was scape-goat for all the rest. D’Oppede defended himself with fanatical pride, saying that he only executed the king’s orders, like Saul, whom God commanded to exterminate the Amalekites. He had the Duke of Guise to protect him; and he was sent back to discharge the duties of his office. Such was the prejudice of the Parliament of Paris against the Reformers that it interdicted the hedge-schools (ecoles buissonnieres), schools which the Protestants held out in the country to escape from the jurisdiction of the precentor of Notre-Dame de Paris, who had the sole supervision of primary schools. Hence comes the proverb, to play truant (faire l’ecole buissonniere—to go to hedge school). All the resources of French civil jurisdiction appeared to be insufficient against the Reformers. Henry II. asked the pope for a bull, transplanting into France the Spanish Inquisition, the only real means of extirpating the root of the errors.” It was the characteristic of this Inquisition, that it was completely in the hands of the clergy, and that its arm was long enough to reach the lay and the clerical indifferently. Pope Paul IV. readily gave the king, in April, 1557, the bull he asked for, but the Parliament of Paris refused to enregister the royal edict which gave force in France to the pontifical brief. In 1559 the pope replied to this refusal by a bull which comprised in one and the same anathema all heretics, though they might be kings or emperors, and declared them to have “forfeited their benefices, states, kingdoms, or empires, the which should devolve on the first to seize them, without power on the part of the Holy See itself to restore them.” [Magnum Bullarium Romanum, a Beato Leone Magno ad Paulum IV., t. i. p. 841: Luxembourg, 1742.] The Parliament would not consent to enregister the decree unless there were put in it a condition to the effect that clerics alone should be liable to the inquisition, and that the judges should be taken from amongst the clergy of France. For all their passionate opposition to the Reformation, the Magistrates had no idea of allowing either the kingship or France to fall beneath the yoke of the papacy.

Amidst all these disagreements and distractions in the very heart of Catholicism, the Reformation went on growing from day to day. In 1558, Lorenzo, the Venetian ambassador, set down even then the number of the Reformers at four hundred thousand. In 1559, at the death of Henry II., Claude Haton, a priest and contemporary chronicler on the Catholic side, calculated that they were nearly a quarter of the population of France. They held at Paris, in May, 1559, their first general synod; and eleven fully established churches sent deputies to it. This synod drew up a form of faith called the Gallican Confession, and likewise a form of discipline. “The burgess-class, for a long while so indifferent to the burnings that took place, were astounded at last at the constancy with which the pile was mounted by all those men and all those women who had nothing to do but to recant in order to save their lives. Some could not persuade themselves that people so determined were not in the right; others were moved with compassion. ‘Their very hearts,’ say contemporaries, ‘wept together with their eyes.’” It needed only an opportunity to bring these feelings out. Some of the faithful one day in the month of May, 1558, on the public walk in the Pre-aux-Clercs, began to sing the psalms of Marot. Their singing had been forbidden by the Parliament of Bordeaux, but the practice of singing those psalms had but lately been so general that it could not be looked upon as peculiar to heretics. All who happened to be there, suddenly animated by one and the same feeling, joined in with the singers, as if to protest against the punishments which were being repeated day after day. This manifestation was renewed on the following days. The King of Navarre, Anthony de Bourbon, Prince Louis de Conde, his brother, and many lords took part in it together with a crowd, it is said, of five or six thousand persons. It was not in the Pre-aux-Clercs only and by singing that this new state of mind revealed itself amongst the highest classes as well as amongst the populace. The Queen of Navarre, Jeanne d’Albret, in her early youth, “was as fond of a ball as of a sermon,” says Brantome, “and she had advised her spouse, Anthony de Bourbon, who inclined towards Calvinism, not to perplex himself with all these opinions.” In 1559 she was passionately devoted to the faith and the cause of the Reformation. With more levity, but still in sincerity, her brother-in-law, Louis de Conde, put his ambition and his courage at the service of the same cause. Admiral de Coligny’s youngest brother, Francis d’Andelot, declared himself a Reformer to Henry II. himself, who, in his wrath, threw a plate at his head, and sent him to prison in the castle of Melun. Coligny himself, who had never disguised the favorable sentiments he felt towards the Reformers, openly sided with them on the ground of his own personal faith, as well as of the justice due to them. At last the Reformation had really great leaders, men who had power and were experienced in the affairs of the world; it was becoming a political party as well as a religious conviction; and the French Reformers were henceforth in a condition to make war as well as die at the stake for their faith. Hitherto they had been only believers and martyrs; they became the victors and the vanquished, alternately, in a civil war.

A new position for them, and as formidable as it was grand. It was destined to bring upon them cruel trials and the worth of them in important successes; first, the Saint-Bartholomew, then the accession of Henry IV. and the edict of Nantes. At a later period, under Louis XIII. and Louis XIV., the complication of the religious question and the political question cost them the advantages they had won; the edict of Nantes disappeared together with the power of the Protestants in the state. They were no longer anything but heretics and rebels. A day was to come, when, by the force alone of moral ideas, and in the name alone of conscience and justice, they would recover all the rights they had for a time possessed, and more also; but in the sixteenth century that day was still distant, and armed strife was for the Reformers their only means of defence and salvation. God makes no account of centuries, and a great deal is required before the most certain and the most salutary truths get their place and their rights in the minds and communities of men.

On the 29th of June, 1559, a brilliant tournament was celebrated in lists erected at the end of the street of Saint-Antoine, almost at the foot of the Bastille. Henry II., the queen, and the whole court had been present at it for three days. The entertainment was drawing to a close. The king, who had run several tilts “like a sturdy and skilful cavalier,” wished to break yet another lance, and bade the Count de Montgomery, captain of the guards, to run against him. Montgomery excused himself; but the king insisted. The tilt took place. The two jousters, on meeting, broke their lances skilfully; but Montgomery forgot to drop at once, according to usage, the fragment remaining in his hand; he unintentionally struck the king’s helmet and raised the visor, and a splinter of wood entered Henry’s eye, who fell forward upon his horse’s neck. All the appliances of art were useless; the brain had been injured. Henry II. languished for eleven days, and expired on the 10th of July, 1559, aged forty years and some months. An insignificant man, and a reign without splendor, though fraught with facts pregnant of grave consequences.