XVI.
Catherine de Medicis had conceived a method of overcoming the Huguenot nobles, during the peace, whom it had been found impossible to vanquish by arms; and this was by debauching them. She passed through the provinces with a numerous troop of maids of honour (sometimes to the number of one hundred and fifty), who were called her flying squadron. Everywhere throughout her progress, balls, fêtes, gallantries, and intrigues took place, in the midst of which the former austerity of the companions of Coligny was lost.
It was thus, under the pretext of conducting Margaret of Valois to the house of her husband, the king of Navarre, that Catherine set out, in the month of July, 1578, for the southern provinces. The Béarnese king, who had too soon forgotten the lessons of his mother during his long residence at the Louvre, could not resist the seductions with which he was surrounded. “The court of the king of Navarre,” says Agrippa d’Aubigné, “was renowned for its brave nobility and virtuous ladies. Idleness attracted vice to it, as heat draws serpents. The queen of Navarre took the rust off their wits, and let it gather on their arms. She taught the king her husband that a cavalier was without a soul when he was without an amour.”[70]
The same historian relates that Catherine de Medicis affected a style of language borrowed from the Bible. She had composed a vocabulary of expressions in use among the most rigid of the Reformed, and made use of them, sometimes as a matter of policy, and sometimes in derision. “She had learned by heart,” says he, “several phrases, which she termed Consistorial; as, to approve of the counsel of Gamaliel; or, beautiful are the feet of those who preach the gospel of peace; to call the king, the anointed of the Lord, the image of the living God, with several sentences of the Epistle of St. Peter, in favour of dominion; she would often exclaim, Let God judge between you and us! I call the Eternal to witness! Before God and his angels! This style, which the ladies called among themselves the language of Canaan, was studied in the evening, when the queen retired to rest, and not without merriment.”[71]
Before and after the fêtes, conferences were held, from which resulted the explicative Treaty of Nérac, signed on the 28th of February, 1579. It added nothing essential to the Edict of Poitiers. The king of Navarre obtained only some fresh places of safety in Guienne and Languedoc, on condition that he should only retain them for six months.
An intrigue of the court caused arms again to be taken up, and this ridiculous quarrel was named the war of the amorous; but the great body of the Reformed took no part in it. It terminated by the signing of a peace at the castle of Fleix, in Périgord, on the 26th of November, 1580, which treaty confirmed the Edict of Poitiers; the Béarnese king, however, conquered, the appanage being given as a dowry to his wife in Agenois and Quercy.
Four or five years elapsed without war being declared, but they passed neither with security nor repose. Upon different occasions, the Reformed sent whole volumes of grievances and remonstrances to the court. Promises of reparation were made, but the next day the council troubled themselves no more about them.
Another means was invented of weakening the Calvinist party, and it had better success than all its predecessors. This was to remove or leave out the Huguenots from public appointments. Although the Edict of Pacification accorded to them an equal right of admission to all public offices, a thousand pretexts were made use of to elude this article. It was an indirect and underhand persecution, but it was both systematic and constant.
Mézeray pretends that these proceedings converted more of the Reformed in four years than either the executioner or war had done in forty. This is saying too much. It is certain, however, that many nobles yielded to the temptation of holding offices or court favours. Some, according to the historian Elie Benoît, ashamed of abandoning their religion themselves, made their children renounce it on the score of affection and paternal foresight. Others, on the contrary, declared themselves (Roman) Catholics, that they might enter upon offices, and caused their children to be brought up in the Reformed communion, in order, as they said, to tranquillize their conscience. Has the human heart ever been found deficient in sophisms when desirous of gratifying its passions?
But the more ardent (Roman) Catholics again complained, and also accused the leniency of Henry III. and Queen Catherine. Their spirit of opposition was increased by the death of the duke of Alençon or Anjou, which took place in 1584. Henry III. had no children, and his physicians feared that he would not survive the year. The race of Valois then would become extinct. Who would succeed him? Henry of Bourbon, according to the ancient laws of the kingdom. He was the nearest heir male, and no one could contest with him the title of first prince of the blood. But a heretic, an apostate, one who had relapsed (for they affected to look in a serious light at the abjuration, which had been imposed upon him at the massacre of Saint Bartholomew), one, in short, excommunicated by the Holy See, should he mount the throne of the most Christian kings? This single thought shocked three-fourths of the nation, and the League experienced an immense augmentation.
The League or Holy Union had existed since the year 1576. It even dated further back, and extended beyond the French frontier. The Cardinal de Lorraine formed the plan at the Council of Trent; the Jesuits had adopted and enlarged it; Philip II., the popes, and Duke Henry of Guise, had successively put their hand to it, and by degrees the association became developed to such an extent as to aspire to rouse (Roman) Catholic Europe in order that it might crush Protestantism. It was in France that the first blow was struck.
After having exterminated the Huguenots, the new crusaders would have overthrown the rebels of Holland, then they would unitedly have invaded England, and afterwards Germany and the north, never stopping until they had either brought back the last of the disciples of Luther and Calvin to the Church of Rome, or drowned them in their own blood.
Philip II. was the principal leader of this vast conspiracy. In his retreat of San-Lorenzo he incessantly revolved, as the published correspondence of our times attests, these great and dark thoughts. He understood but two things in the world,—the sovereign power of the prince in political matters, and the popes infallibility in questions of religion. The right of resistance to the temporal power, and the privilege of search on points of faith, were in his eyes the most detestable of crimes. All authority, in his idea, was concentrated in the hands of a few chiefs, and there was no liberty beyond or beneath them. The two swords were to strike together, to keep the people enslaved and trembling; and he added the axe of the executioner, with the fire of the inquisitor, and even the poniard of the assassin; for this (Roman) Catholic king descended to such a depth of infamy as to confer letters of nobility on the relations of Balthazar Gérard, the murderer of the prince of Orange. Philip II. had conceived this execrable system of terrorism, that it might redound to the profit of royalty and the pontificate. But it only resulted in the downfall of Spain and the execration of posterity.
The Holy See entertained implacable resentment at the sight of heresy raising itself up so pertinaciously, and was desirous of establishing at any cost, the one faith, under one single spiritual chief. Cardinals, bishops, priests, Jesuits, and monks of all orders, went about spreading these maxims of extermination, at the courts and in the bosom of the people, from the pulpits and in the confessional.
In France, Henry of Guise, le Balafré, was the soul of the League. Keeping himself at first in obscurity, he at length came more prominently forward, and made himself esteemed by the masses, in proportion to the contempt which Henry III. inspired. He endeavoured to be affable to wards the lower orders, was a sure friend, an inexorable enemy, generous towards those who were serviceable to him, prodigal of gold to the covetous, and never wanting in promises to the ambitious; he also showed attentions to the citizens and artisans of Paris, which were very flattering to their vanity. Capable of profound dissimulation, he yet assumed the frank and open air of a soldier. As a great captain he understood still better the art of gaining victories at the proper time, than that of merely achieving them. He evinced much zeal for the church of Rome, but without falling into the abject devotions of Henry III.; and, always watchful of his fortunes, he thought nothing more of religion than as a means of improving them.
One of the dependants of his house, Jacques d’Humières, was employed in 1576 to recruit in the cities of Picardy for adherents to the League, and that association soon spread through all the provinces. There was some difference in the articles which were presented for them to swear to, and to sign, but their ultimate object was the same—a mutual understanding between the members of the union; absolute obedience to the secret chief of the League; and an engagement to sacrifice everything, body and goods, in order to exterminate heretics and to re-establish the unity of religion.
The association was composed of very different elements. For the Guises, it was a question of aggrandizement and power; for one portion of the citizens and magistrature, a means of establishing public order; for another part, a precautionary measure against the reprisals, which the Calvinists might adopt towards the murderers and spoliators of Saint Bartholomew’s day; for the tradespeople, a manifestation of antipathy against the Huguenots; and for the priesthood, an affair of religious domination. Among these, as it always happens, there were conscientious men, who devoted themselves to the prosecution of an idea; and ambitious or hypocritical individuals, who thrived upon the sincerity of others. The most moderate were made to figure in the advance-guard, for fear of frightening the well-disposed; but those who were high in rank were resolved to reap all the advantages of the conspiracy.
At Paris, the prebendary Launoy, the curates Prévôt and Boucher, and adventurers of every description, addressed themselves to the very lowest orders,—the men of the slaughter-houses, mariners, horse-dealers, and street-porters,—and told them that the Huguenots were watching their opportunity to cut the throats of all good (Roman) Catholics, and that ten thousand of them were concealed in the faubourg Saint Germain, ready to commence the massacre. The most violent clubs assembled in the churches, and the preachers, monks, or doctors of the Sorbonne, hounded on the people to the most bloody excesses, invoking the will of Heaven. The same provocatives were repeated throughout the kingdom, and the League became a formidable combination.
Henry III., not daring openly to oppose the League, thought that he should perform a master-piece of policy by signing the articles of the union with his own hand; but he only emboldened the League and disgraced himself. From being king, he became the second among the conspirators, and a conspirator despised by his accomplices.
The League demanded that he should declare the king of Navarre disinherited, and name the Cardinal de Bourbon as his heir, an old man of upwards of sixty years of age, of limited capacity, of feeble character, and a priest of little reputation, since he had lived in habits of effeminate and dissolute luxury. This cardinal would have made way for the duke of Guise. Henry III. was aware of this, he knew also that the Lorraines only awaited an opportunity of making him turn monk, and shutting him up in a cloister, as other do-nothing kings had been treated in times gone by.
At this critical moment Henry III. displayed some courage, and refused. The kingdom was then a prey to the greatest anarchy; neither authority, government, nor law any longer existed. The Leaguers published manifestoes in the name of the Cardinal de Bourbon, and by treachery or force obtained possession of Toul, Verdun, Lyons, Châlons, Bourges, and other important towns. Henry III., who had no army to oppose to them, contracted a peace with the duke of Guise, at the expense of the Huguenots. He engaged by the treaty of Nemours, signed in 1585, to deprive them not only of the public exercise of their religion, but also of liberty of conscience. It was ordered that all the Calvinist clergy should quit the kingdom at the expiration of a month, and that all the Reformed should abjure or emigrate at the end of six months, under penalty of death and confiscation of their property. This term was shortly afterwards reduced to fifteen days, as if it were intended to take away from these abjurations even the appearance of good faith.
In thus putting an end to war on one side, it again broke out on the other. It no longer originated in some wretched court quarrel, but it became a war of liberty, of religion, of fortune, and for existence itself.
The Edict of Nemours was apparently intended to be so rigorously executed, that the king rejected the request of some poor women, who prayed to be permitted to live with their children in some corner of France, which it might please his majesty to assign to them. Henry III. would only promise to have them conveyed without injury or insult to England. Some women were even burned at Paris after the treaty,—the atrocious laws of Henry II. were again reverted to.
Some timid Calvinists endeavoured to find refuge by the use of equivocal terms, such as: “Since it pleases the king,” &c., and in that manner they subscribed, not an abjuration, but an act of obedience to the royal will. The bishops perceived this, and were most rigorous with those whom they admitted. One of them, the Bishop d’Angers, gave directions that none of the Huguenots should be received until they had undergone a lengthened course of instruction, and a strict examination on points of faith. Thus the prince enjoined their conversion in fifteen days, and the bishops repulsed those, who were not minutely versed in all the details of the Romish doctrines. Thus there was nothing but contradictions.
Henry III. did not, however, wish to crush the Calvinist party entirely; he feared lest too much power should be given to the League, and to the duke of Guise. His most ardent desire was to ruin each of the two parties by means of the other, and he was frequently heard to mutter: “I will be revenged upon my enemies by my enemies.”
Seeing that the king was deficient in energy in the prosecution of the heretics, Pope Sixtus V. lost patience, and fulminated a bull of excommunication against the Bourbons, which twenty-five cardinals signed with him. It stated that Henry of Bourbon, formerly king of Navarre, and Henry, also of Bourbon, Prince de Condé, being heretics, having relapsed into heresy, and not having repented, were deprived of all their principalities, they and their heirs for ever. If any one again dared to obey “this bastard and detestable race of Bourbons,” and to recognise as his sovereign this former king of the pretended kingdom of Navarre, he should incur the same excommunication. Never, even in the most violent invectives against “the ci-devant king, Louis Capet,” did the Convention of 1793 so completely fail in decency and modesty.
The Béarnese king replied to this insolent bull, by causing a protest to be posted up, on the 6th of November, 1585, in all the public resorts of Rome, commencing thus: “Henry, by the grace of God, king of Navarre, sovereign prince of Béarn, first peer and prince of France, protests against the declaration and excommunication of Sixtus V., calling himself pope of Rome, declares that it is false, and appeals against the same as slanderous to the court of the Peers of France. And in that, which touches the crime of heresy, of which he is falsely accused by the declaration, he says and maintains that Sixtus, calling himself pope in that behalf, hath falsely and maliciously lied, and that he is himself a heretic, as shall be made manifest in full council freely and lawfully assembled.” It is said that Sixtus, astonished by so bold an act, began from that time properly to appreciate the character of his adversary.