IV.
Louis XIII. had commenced hostilities, by advancing his army towards the Loire on the 24th of April, fifteen days before the adoption of the resolution at La Rochelle. Some, the sagest members of his council, had persisted in proposing means of accommodation. They represented that the Huguenots held two hundred fortified places, that their soldiers were of approved bravery, that despair made them still more redoubtable, that there were in the churches four hundred thousand men capable of bearing arms, and that the Calvinists had for sixty years lost more by peace than by war. Others counselled, on the contrary, that a great and decisive blow should be struck against the Calvinist party, and Louis XIII. adopted the last opinion.
The Jesuits, his early masters and spiritual directors, urged him unceasingly to undertake the destruction of the churches, and invented arguments to make him safely violate the word he had given to the heretics. “The promises of the king,” said his confessor Arnoux, “are either promises of conscience or of state. Those made to the Huguenots are not of conscience, for they are against the precepts of the Church, and if they are of state, they should be referred to the privy council, whose advice is, not to keep them.” Thus reasoned the contemporary and brother of Escobar.
The pope offered two hundred thousand crowns, on condition that the Huguenots were brought back willingly, or by force, into the Church of Rome. He also addressed a brief to Louis XIII., wherein he praised him for having imitated his ancestors, who had “honoured the exhortations of the pope as much as the commandments of God.” The cardinals offered, on the same condition, two hundred thousand crowns, and the priests a million.
In the harangues pronounced by the orator of the clergy, the king was pressed to follow the example of Philip Augustus, the grandfather of Saint Louis, who had utterly exterminated the Albigenses, or at least the example of the Emperor Constantius, who had forced the idolaters to quit the towns and to dwell in the villages, whence they had derived, said this priest, the name of Pagans.
The emissaries of Spain, with which country the double marriage had led to a strict alliance, were urgent for war, from reasons of a different kind. Every time France was troubled, the court of Madrid felt stronger, and its language assumed a higher tone.
The king therefore put himself at the head of his army, with the Constable de Luynes, the Duke de Lesdiguières, who had openly declared for the court, the Cardinal de Guise, a crowd of lords, and his mother, Marie de Medicis, whom he distrusted. His council had taken the precaution to distinguish, before the commencement of the campaign, between the peaceable Calvinists and those who were not so—a distinction which gave the timid and the venal the opportunity of keeping at home, without being accused of treason.
One of the first exploits of Louis XIII. was the capture of the town and castle of Saumur, by deceit and treachery. Duplessis-Mornay had been governor of the place from the reign of Henry III. He kept it as a town of hostage, granted by the edicts; and as it commanded the course of the Loire, it was of great importance to the Calvinist party. The Constable de Luynes demanded ingress in the name of the king, promising that the immunities of Saumur should be as safe as the eye of the governor, and to this “he pledged his word, as well as that of his majesty, with his own mouth, which was also confirmed by M. de Lesdiguières.” Mornay opened the gates of the fortress, and led out, according to custom, the Calvinist garrison. But as soon as the king had entered with his troops, he declared that he took definite possession of Saumur.
To give to this breach of faith the appearance of an amicable arrangement, Mornay was offered, beside payment of the arrears of his appointment, one hundred thousand crowns and a marshal’s bâton. He retorted with indignation, that if he had loved money, he might have gained millions under the preceding reigns, and that, as for dignities, he had always been more desirous of rendering himself worthy of them, than of obtaining them. “I cannot, either in conscience or honour,” he added, “traffic in the liberty or safety of others.”
He went to dwell in his house, where he died on the 11th of November, 1623. His last hours were full of serenity. “We saw clearly the Gospel of the Son of God engraved on his heart by the Holy Ghost,” said the almoner of his family, Jean Daillé; “we saw him in the midst of death firmly possessed of life, and enjoying a full contentment at a moment when all men are usually shaken with fear. And this lesson was so striking and efficacious, that even those who suffered most from his loss, reaped both joy and edification.” He made his confession of faith, avowing that he had received much, and had little profited. And when he was told that he had faithfully employed his talent: “Ah! what is there of mine?” he exclaimed. “Do not say I, but God through me.”
Philippe de Mornay was the last representative of that great and strong generation, which had received the lessons of Calvin, and the examples of Coligny. He had shown that it is possible to preserve, during half a century, even in those worst of all wars, the wars of religion, a spotless name, an irreproachable character, conduct always even, and a humane and generous nature. This is the highest glory to which man can attain.
Beyond Saumur, the royal army encountered no serious resistance until it arrived before the gates of Saint Jean d’Angély, commanded by the Duke de Soubise. The siege began on the 30th of May, 1621, and lasted twenty-six days. Among the number of volunteers was the Cardinal de Guise, who acquitted himself in the soldier’s calling better than he had done in that of the priest. He embarked in it with so much ardour that he died of fatigue, a few days after, in the town of Saintes.
The king thence betook himself to Basse-Guienne, all the towns hastening to throw open their gates to him, except the little place of Clairac, which styled itself “a town without a king, defended by soldiers without fear.” It was taken after twelve days’ siege. A pastor named La Fargue, together with his father and son-in-law, was condemned to death.
On the 18th of August, the royal army commenced an attack upon Montauban. This siege is celebrated in the annals of the French Reformation. The town of Montauban enjoyed municipal franchises, which had inspired its inhabitants with a great spirit of independence. Its councillors were men of head and action, and the firmness of their faith redoubled their energy. The Marquis de la Force had the command. The Duke de Rohan held his head-quarters at a little distance, and supplied it with succours of men and ammunition.
Louis XIII. presented himself before the walls of Montauban with the Constable, the dukes de Mayenne, d’Angoulême, de Montmorency, the Count de Bassompierre, and the élite of the nobility of the kingdom. He also, during the siege, enlisted an auxiliary of a very different kind. This was a Spanish Carmelite, the Father Domenique de Jesu-Maria, who had performed, it was said, miracle upon miracle, in the preceding year, during the war of the emperor of Germany against Bohemia. He passed for a great prophet: the soldiers called him the Blessed Father. As he was returning to his monastery in Spain, he visited the camp of the king, who asked him for his advice. The monk directed that four hundred discharges of artillery should be played against the town, after which it would infallibly surrender. The four hundred shots were fired, but the town did not yield.
The siege lasted two months and a half, and the royal army tried, at repeated intervals, to take it by assault, but without success. At length, after considerable loss, the king, on the setting in of the adverse season, was, with tears in his eyes, compelled to retire. He raised the siege on the 2nd of November. “The people of Montauban,” says an historian, “were advertised of the approaching withdrawal of the army by a soldier of the religion, who the evening before the raising of the siege, betook himself to playing on the flute the sixty-eighth Psalm. The beleaguered inhabitants took this for the sign of their deliverance, and they were not deceived.”[76]
The war recommenced in 1622, and was conducted with unheard-of rigour. The prisoners were treated as rebels; some were executed on the spot, others were sent to the galleys. The Marquis de la Force, daunted by the dangers that menaced his person and his house, concluded a private treaty with the court, by which he delivered up Sainte Foy and Basse-Guienne. Many of the Calvinist leaders were either intimidated, or gained like him, so that the Huguenots were more injured by defections than by defeats.
The little town of Nègrepelisse, close by Montauban, was the object of horrible reprisals. All the inhabitants were put to the sword: they were accused of having massacred the (Roman) Catholic garrison in the preceding winter. “Mothers, who had saved themselves with their children, by crossing the river, could obtain no pity from the soldiers on the banks, but were thrust back or killed. In half an hour every one in the town was slaughtered, and the streets were so cumbered with the dead and blood that they were scarcely passable. Those who escaped into the castle were constrained to surrender on the next day at discretion, and were all hanged.”[77]
Another large village of the same parts, Saint Antonin, tried to defend itself; even the women armed themselves with scythes and halberts. But the place could not long withstand the royal army. The garrison, holding a white wand, were allowed to quit the town. Ten burghers were hanged with the pastor, formerly a monk of the order of the Cordeliers. The inhabitants redeemed themselves from pillage (the historians of the time perhaps exaggerate the amount) by a contribution of fifty thousand crowns.
To sanctify this war, at once so full of cruelty and treason, the lords and captains of the king’s army performed great acts of devotion at Toulouse. The Prince de Condé, the Duke de Vendôme, the Duke de Chevreux, went to confession and communicated with six hundred gentlemen of their friends. Some of them affiliated themselves with the order of the Blue Penitents; “which,” says a chronicle, “had this advantage, that imposing no obligation, it offered great indulgences, even at the moment of death.”
The army arrived on the 30th of August, 1622, before the walls of Montpellier, which had a strong garrison of Huguenots. The siege made no progress; and Louis XIII., fearing a similar check to that which he had experienced before the ramparts of Montauban, consented to treat with the Duke de Rohan for a general peace. The articles were agreed upon about the middle of October.
The king confirmed the Edict of Nantes, ordered the re-establishment of the two religions in the localities where they had been before exercised, authorized the meetings of the consistories, conferences, and synods for affairs purely ecclesiastical, but forbade the holding of any political assembly without his express permission. The fortifications of Montpellier were to be demolished, and the town governed by four consuls, to be named by the king. The Calvinists retained two places of safety, Montauban and La Rochelle.
This last town had been attacked several times during the war, and had vigorously defended itself. It prolonged the struggle some time after the new edict of peace, but ended by accepting it with the stipulation that its liberties should be maintained. Thus, after torrents of blood had been shed and several provinces of the kingdom had been desolated, everything remained nearly the same as when the war first began.