VI.
The siege of La Rochelle began in 1627, and lasted more than a year before attentive Europe. The king of England promised to the inhabitants both his aid and credit. Thrice his fleet appeared in sight of the port; but the first time it could not take the citadel of the Isle of Ré; the second time it did not succeed in relieving the place, and the third, it seemed to have come only to assist at the ruin of the town. It was suspected that the duke of Buckingham had betrayed the cause of the Reformed communion, and that Charles I. shared in these disloyal manœuvres under the influence of his wife, Henrietta of France. The Puritans of England did not forget this grievance, when they drew up the account of the acts of that unfortunate prince in 1649.
The Cardinal de Richelieu constructed a dike in the sea, as Alexander did before Tyre, and shut up the besieged in an inclosure continually narrowing. He was at the same time admiral, chief engineer, and generalissimo; he superintended and directed everything, leaving to Louis XIII. only the vain pleasure of the chase, or of touching the sick at the grand fêtes of the Church. People cited the miracles of the king with admiration; those of the cardinal were more authentic and more useful to the monarchy.
We have a journal written by one of the besieged, Pierre Méruault, son of the chief of the artillery of the garrison. He relates the sufferings of the inhabitants with minuteness. As the mole gradually rose before the port, the dearth increased. It became horrible from the month of June, 1628. From two to three hundred persons died every day. The famished had acquired so sad an experience of this kind of death, that they could foresee the very hour, and moment, when they would cease to live, and give directions for their own burial.
They were driven, in this extreme distress, to send bands of children, women, and old men, from the town. Louis XIII. was not so generous as his father, Henry IV., at the siege of Paris. He ordered their repulse without pity, and even caused his soldiers to fire against some of these poor creatures, who stopped to pluck roots and herbs upon the glacis, or to gather shell-fish left by the ebbing of the tide. He commanded, also, that some crops of beans, which the besieged had grown at the foot of their counterscarps, should be destroyed.
Many of the fugitives, urged by the inexorable voice of hunger, continuing to present themselves at the royal camp, gallows were erected for their summary execution; and when they came in too great numbers, lots were drawn for those who were to undergo this punishment. Others, despoiled of their clothes, were beaten and hunted out by the soldiers with rods and leathern thongs. The desire was, by sending them back into the town, that there might be more people to press upon the scanty stores.
Where were the co-religionists of the inhabitants of La Rochelle? What were they doing in this last struggle for their political existence? The Duke de Rohan went to Uzès, to Milhau, to Nismes, to Cevennes, from one end of Languedoc to the other, exhorting the Huguenots to rise for the common cause. His efforts were useless; he found none but timid spirits and cold hearts, or consciences gained by the favour of the court. He repeated the motto, of which his mother, the dowager-duchess of Rohan, had reminded him from the bottom of her asylum at La Rochelle: “Complete victory, certain peace, or honourable death;” instead of arming and following him, he was met by every one of them with recrimination.
He thus complained of this inertness in the preface to his Memoirs; his language, though bitter, is that of the chief of a falling party; but it serves to paint the aspect of the epoch: “In the two former wars, divisions appeared in some quarters; in the latter, it burst out on every side, there being no place into which corruption had not entered, and where avarice had not appeared above piety, to such an extent, that, without tarrying for our enemy’s seeking, men hastened to prostitute themselves by selling their religion, and betraying their party. Our fathers would have destroyed their children in the cradle, had they foreseen that they would become the instruments of the ruin of the churches, which they founded by the glare of the martyr-pyre, and cemented with their blood.”
Deducting from these accusations what has been exaggerated by the irritation of defeat, it remains true that the great mass of the Reformers did not take part in this last war; some, as we have already explained, on account of the national impulse which induced entire submission to the royal authority; others, because they were weary of struggles which cost so many lives, and produced no good; some, because they did not perceive the bond that united their religious liberty to their political security; others, again, through indifference, through venality, or through that kind of prudence which is keener to see the greatness of the peril, than the means of eluding it.
The thing is notable; for many historians say that the whole Reformed population rose against the crown in 1628, and was defeated. These historians are in error: the majority of the Calvinists refused to arm. If it be a title of honour to have thus acted, let them have it; if it be a disgrace, let them bear its weight.
The people of La Rochelle, however, continued to perform prodigies of valour and heroism under the leadership of their mayor, Jean Guiton, a brave and inflexible old seaman, who had said: “If there should be no more than one townsman left, it will still be his duty to keep the gates closed.”
At length, when every hope of succour from without or within had departed, when two-thirds of the population had fallen, when the streets and the houses were choked with corpses, which none had sufficient strength left to inter; when scarcely a man was to be found, who was able to bear the weight of arms, or to walk without a staff, the town surrendered. This happened on the 28th October, 1628. On that day the Reformers of France fell powerless before their enemies, and were never able to raise themselves again until one hundred and sixty years afterwards, when the principles of 1789 released them.
Misfortune had not cast down the courage of the men of La Rochelle, and it is a matter of astonishment that Richelieu, who had the capacity to understand great things, should have done them so little justice. “The audacity that ever accompanies rebellion,” says he in his Memoirs, “was so deeply impressed upon the minds of these wretches, that although they were but the shadows of living men, and had no hope of life, except from the king’s clemency, of which they were unworthy, they nevertheless dared even then to propose to the cardinal that they would make a general treaty for the whole party of the Calvinists.” This proved that they were less careful, in their adversity, concerning their own fate than with reference to that of their co-religionists.
A declaration of the king, published on the 10th November, ordained the re-establishment at La Rochelle of the exercise of the (Roman) Catholic religion, and the restitution to the clergy of their churches and their property. A place of worship was to be designated for the Reformers. The privileges of the town were abolished, its franchises annulled, and its fortifications demolished, except those facing the sea. The Cardinal de Richelieu and the bishop Henri de Sourdis, who had plied the trade of the soldier during the siege, celebrated the first mass at La Rochelle, after having purified the churches. Perhaps the hands which had just quitted the sword, ought to have been first purified themselves before touching the host of the Prince of peace. But the history of mankind is replete with such violent contradictions.
There were great rejoicings at Rome upon the reduction of La Rochelle. Pope Urban VIII. sang a solemn Te Deum, made an extraordinary distribution of indulgences, and addressed to the king briefs of the most flattering kind. “Great prince,” he thus apostrophized Louis XIII., “God sits upon your right hand. May He ever aid and sustain the power and strength of your spear!”
The Duke de Rohan kept the field in the south, until the middle of the following year. He displayed courage, constancy, and self-denial, worthy of a better fate. An assembly of provincial deputies, convoked at Nismes, energetically protested against the overthrow of the political guarantee of the Reformation. It was too late. The Calvinist party had ceased to exist. Each town and village refused obedience to the assembly, and claimed to transact its affairs by itself: then division, defections, and treason, completed the ruin of the general cause.
The royal army presented itself before the little town of Privas, in the month of May, 1629. The inhabitants, seized with terror, amounting to a panic, fled to the fields; and the garrison, which retired to the fort, were soon forced to capitulate. At the moment of the troops entering, the explosion of a powder-magazine caused the suspicion of an ambush. The eight hundred Huguenot soldiers forming the garrison were murdered, fifty burghers hanged, the others sent to the galleys, the town sacked and burnt, and the property of the inhabitants confiscated to the crown. The missionaries, who followed in the rear of the army to convert the heretics, ascribed this catastrophe to the anger of God.
The merciless butchery at Privas spread consternation and dismay. The king marched upon Cevennes without meeting with any resistance; and the Duke de Rohan, seeing that the affairs of his party were desperate, sued for peace, in concert with the general assembly transferred to Anduze. Richelieu imposed as the first condition, that all the fortifications of the Huguenot towns should be razed to the ground. Anduze, and the province of Cevennes, submitted after some difficulty; and the king, being then at Nismes, published the Edict of Grace, in the month of July, 1629.
The name alone of this edict marked a new order of things. It was no longer a pacification—it was a grace, a grace granted by the good-will of the sovereign to his vanquished subjects. The preamble spoke of nothing but their rebellion, and of the goodness of the king: “to which we are the more easily disposed,” Louis XIII. was made to say, “because we have been desirous, by a rare instance of clemency, after so many relapses, the more advantageously to win the hearts of our subjects, spare the effusion of blood, the devastation of the province, and all the disorders and calamities of war; and we are moved to this solely by compassion for their misery and love for their well-being.”
The Reformers were reinstated in the possession of their places of worship, their cemeteries, and the exercise of their religion in the places they had before used, pending their return to the bosom of the (Roman) Catholic church, “in which,” adds Louis XIII., “for more than eleven hundred successive years, the kings, our predecessors, have lived without interruption or change; there being no possible way of so well testifying to the affection we bear them, than by desiring to find them in the same road of salvation that we keep and follow ourselves.”
There was a threat expressed in this hope, and the priests did not fail to avail themselves of it at the opportune time. There was also, as we shall see, a pretence of the Cardinal de Richelieu, who, aspiring to every kind of glory, flattered himself that he would be able to unite the two religions.
The conditions of the Edict of Grace were less severe than had been feared, except as regarded the political guarantees, and some authors have loudly extolled the clemency of the cardinal. If it be sought to establish the opinion that he was more tolerant than other churchmen, because he had more genius, and that he was a better statesman, we shall accord with such an opinion without difficulty. But it must not be forgotten that Richelieu, being leagued with the Swedish and German Protestants for the humiliation of the house of Austria by the sword of Gustavus Adolphus, could not treat the French Reformers with excessive rigour. Nor must it be forgotten that, in France itself, having to combat against the great (Roman) Catholic noblemen, against the king’s brother, the queen-mother, and the reigning queen, the prime minister of Louis XIII. would have been mad to have pushed a whole people to despair, who, in a case of extremity, might have compromised his fortunes and those of the kingdom itself. Richelieu was generous perhaps, but he was, above all, prudent.
The town of Montauban was the last to submit. It remembered with pride the heroic resistance it had opposed to the royal troops, and its inhabitants, accustomed to self-government from the commencement of the religious wars, felt a great repugnance to “return to their duty,” as the phrase then was. Two deputies came from Nismes with an envoy of Richelieu, to exhort them to submission. The people wished to preserve their ramparts: they obtained nothing, and the most determined at length perceived that to continue the struggle had become impossible.
Montauban opened its gates; and on the 21st August, 1629, its inhabitants witnessed the entry of Marshal de Bassompierre, with a part of the army, the pope’s nuncio, the first president of the Parliament of Toulouse, and lastly, Cardinal de Richelieu, who presented himself as one who had gained a triumph. When the ministers of the religion came to pay their respects to him, he consented to receive them, “not as forming a church body,” he told them, “but as a people following the profession of letters.” This was indeed carrying fiction a little too far.
He celebrated mass in one of the churches of Montauban, instituted convents for the Jesuits and Capuchins, and ordered the demolition of the walls. Then he resumed his journey to Paris, surrounded with more homage than Louis XIII. himself ever received from his people.
The Duke de Rohan was the object of the attack of his co-religionists, who, becoming unjust by reason of their misfortune, accused him of being the author of all their calamities. He wrote his apology with the satisfaction of a good conscience, and concluded it in these terms: “These are my crimes, for which I have been condemned at Toulouse to be dragged to pieces by four horses, whereof I take glory to myself.... I wish those who come after me may have the same affection, fidelity, and patience that I have had; that they may meet with people more constant, less covetous, and more zealous than I have done; and that God may bless them with greater prosperity, to the end that by restoring the churches of France, they may execute that which I dared to undertake.”
His hopes were realized otherwise than he had any notion of. Henri de Rohan was the last warrior-chief of the French Reformation; but that which the sword has not effected, civilization and liberty have accomplished in the day of God’s destiny.
Rohan offered his sword to the republic of Venice, and afterwards to Gustavus Adolphus, and died in 1638, on the plains of Germany, for the same cause, which he had so long and so valiantly defended in his own country.