CHAPTER XII.
After long wandering in strange seas, we come in view of familiar lights and headlands. With the advent of the house of Bourbon, we have grasped a thread which leads directly down to our own time.
The accession of a Protestant king was hailed with delirious joy by the Huguenots, and with corresponding rage by Catholic France. The one looked forward to redressing of wrongs and avenging of injuries; and the other flatly refused submission unless Henry should recant his heresy and become a convert to the true faith.
The new king saw there was no bed of roses preparing for him. After four years of effort to reconcile the irreconcilable, he decided upon his course. He was not called to the throne to rule over Protestant France, nor to be an instrument of vengeance for the Huguenots.
He saw that the highest good of the kingdom required not that he should impose upon it either form of belief or worship, but give equal opportunity and privilege to both.
To the consternation of the Huguenots, he announced himself ready to listen to the arguments in favor of the religion of Rome; and it took just five hours of deliberation to convince him of its truth. He declared himself ready to abjure his old faith. Bitter reproaches on the one side and rejoicings on the other greeted this decision. It was not heroic. But many even among the Protestants acknowledged it to be an act of supreme political wisdom.
Peace was restored, and the Edict of Nantes, which quickly followed, proved to his old friends, the Huguenots, that they were not forgotten. The Protestants, with disabilities removed, shared equal privileges with the Catholics throughout the kingdom, and the first victory for religious liberty was splendidly won.
An era of unexampled prosperity dawned. Never had the kingdom been so wisely and beneficently governed. Sincerity, simplicity, and sympathy had taken the place of dissimulation, craft, and cruelty. Uplifting agencies were everywhere at work, reaching even to the peasantry, that forgotten element in the nation.
The formal abjuration of the Protestant faith was made by the King in the Church of St. Denis in 1593. This church also witnessed the marriage of Henry with Marie de' Medici, after his release from her debased relative, Margaret of Valois, daughter of Catharine de' Medici. Henry IV., great although he was, was not above the ordinary weaknesses of humanity, and, captivated by the beauty of Marie, was a willing party to the Italian marriage which was urged upon him, which marriage was the one mistake of a great reign.
It was not to be expected that any minister would rise to the full stature of Henry IV. at this time. But in the Duke of Sully he had a wise and efficient instrument for his plan, which was out of the chaos left by the devastation of thirty years of religious wars, to evolve peace and prosperity; and to create economic conditions upon a foundation insuring growth and permanence.
The royal authority, impaired by the successors of Francis, must first be restored. And to that end all political elements, including the States General, must be held firmly down; and that body, representing the Tiers État, was never summoned after France was well in hand by the king who was par excellence the friend of the people!
It is the Edict of Nantes which stands preeminent among the events of this reign, and which is Henry's monument in the annals of France. His foreign policy was controlled by a desire to check the preponderance of the Hapsburgs; that being, in fact, the dominant sentiment in Europe at that time. But a remarkable proof of the breadth of his treatment of this subject is the plan he formulated of a European tribunal composed of the five great powers, which should insist upon the maintenance of a balance of power—a phrase common enough now, but heard then for the first time; and which had for its immediate purpose the separating of the crown of Spain and the empire, by forbidding their being held by members of the same family, and of course designed as a check upon the Hapsburgs.
This was a pet theory with Henry, and the subject of much discussion with Sully and of negotiation with Elizabeth, Queen of England, at the very time when Philip II. of Spain, in pursuance of a precisely opposite policy, had been moving heaven and earth to bring about a marriage with that extraordinary sister of his dead wife Mary. Henry did not witness the realization of his dream. But time has justified its wisdom, and modern statesmanship has been able to devise no wiser plan than that conceived in the mind of this enlightened king nearly three centuries ago.
How much France lost by Ravaillac's dagger can only be surmised, and when Henry, fatally stricken (1610), was carried dying into the Louvre, a cry of grief arose from Catholic and Protestant alike throughout the kingdom. After a reign of twenty-one years, the sagacious ruler, who had done more than any other to make the country great and happy, was the victim of assassination. And France once more was the sport of a cruel fate which placed her in the hands of a woman and a Medici. Marie, the widow of Henry IV., was appointed regent during the minority of her son Louis aged ten years.
The regency of this woman is a story of cabals and the intrigues of aspiring favorites. If Marie had not the ability of her great kinswoman Catharine, it must be confessed neither had she her darker vices. She was simply intriguing and vulgar, and the willing instrument for designing people cleverer than herself. So powerful was the influence of Eleonora Galigai and her husband, Concini, both Italians like herself, that in that superstitious age it was ascribed to magic. Marie became the mere secretary to record the wishes of these parasites. Concini was made marquis, then minister. Whom he commended was elevated, and whom he denounced was abased. Public indignation reached its climax when this adventurer was finally created Marshal of France, before whom counts and dukes must bow. So furious was the storm raised by this, that Marie declared her willingness to surrender the regency, and after summoning the States General she presented her son, Louis XIII., thirteen years of age, declaring that he was qualified to reign.
Only once again was this body to be called together. That was in 1789, by Louis XVI., when it was transformed into a National Assembly.
But when it was discovered that the power of the detested pair was as great behind the boy king as it had been behind his mother, the storm gathered again from all parts of the kingdom. It was France in struggle with Concini, the man who was audaciously sending princes of the blood and dukes to the Bastille.
But a counter-influence was weaving about Louis. He was made to realize the indignity to himself in letting two vulgar Italians usurp his authority. Thus Albert de Luynes, his adored friend, procured his signature to a paper ordering the immediate destruction of Concini and his wife. And when Louis had seen Concini despatched by his own agents in the court of the Louvre, and the arrest, trial, and execution of Eleonora (upon the charge of sorcery), he completed the work by banishing his mother, only to fall immediately into the power of Albert de Luynes, himself an intriguing parasite, who intended to play the very same role as the pair he had overthrown.
The clever Eleonora, when arraigned on the charge of sorcery, replied, "The only magic I have used is that of a strong mind over a weak one." Albert de Luynes's head was never carried about Paris on a pike, as was hers. But he experimented with the same kind of magic.
This wretched period after the death of the great Henry had occupied twelve years. But in 1622 Cardinal Richelieu took his seat among the advisers of the king. The true man had been found. King, nobles, people of all ranks and religions, realized that a master had appeared in the land; a master inscrutable in his purposes, and clothed with a mysterious power.
The foundations of this man's policy lay deep, out of sight of all save his own far-reaching intelligence. Pitiless as an iceberg, he crushed every obstacle to his purpose. Impartial as fate, with no loves, no hatreds, catholics, protestants, nobles, parliaments, one after another were borne down before his determination to make the king, what he had not been since Charlemagne, supreme in France.
The will of the great minister mowed down like a scythe. The power of the grandees, that last remnant of feudalism, and a perpetual menace to monarchy, was swept away. One great noble after another was humiliated and shorn of his privileges, if not of his head.
The Huguenots, being first shaken into submission, saw their political liberties torn from them by the stroke of a pen; and even while the Catholics were making merry over this discomfiture the minister was planning to send Henrietta, sister of the king, across the channel to become queen of Protestant England, as wife of Charles I. But the act of supreme audacity was to come. This high prelate of the Church, this cardinal-minister, formed an alliance with Gustavus Adolphus, the great leader of the Protestants in the war upon the emperor and the pope!
He allowed no religion, no class, to sway or to hold him. He was for France; and her greatness and glory augmented under his ruthless dominion. By his extraordinary genius he made the reign of a commonplace king one of dazzling splendor; and while gratifying his own colossal ambition, he so strengthened the foundations of the monarchy that princes of the blood themselves could not shake it.
It was great, it was dazzling, but of all his work there is but one thing which revolutions and time have not swept away: the "French Academy" alone survives as his monument. Out of a gathering of literary friends he created a national institution, its object the establishing a court of last appeal in all that makes for eloquence in speaking or writing the French language. In a country where few things endure, this has remained unchanged for two hundred and thirty years.
But this master of statecraft, this creator of despotic monarchy, had one unsatisfied ambition. He would have exchanged all his honors for the ability to write one play like those of Corneille. Hungering for literary distinction, he could not have gotten into his own Academy had he not created it. And jealous of his laurels, he hated Corneille as much as he did the enemies of France.
The feeble King Louis XIII. manifested wisdom in at least one thing. He permitted this greatest statesman of his time, and one of the greatest perhaps of all time, to have a free hand in managing his kingdom. And whatever the pressure from the queen-mother, from cabals and intriguing nobles, he never yielded the point, but kept his great minister in his service as long as they both lived. This was especially commendable in Louis because they were personally antagonistic, and also because the queen-mother constantly used her powerful influence over her son for his downfall.
Marie had been permitted to return to Paris, where her son, perhaps to console her for the loss of the Concinis, had built for her the Palais de Luxembourg, intended as a reminiscence of her dear Italy, with its Medicean architecture and Italian gardens and fountains. Here she held her little court in great splendor, and here she wove her ineffectual webs for Richelieu's defeat and downfall. It is said that at one time Louis at her instigation had actually taken the pen in hand to sign the order for his minister's disgrace, when that vigilant and omniscient being, perfectly aware of what was occurring, appeared from behind the curtains. And Louis, quailing before the superior will of a master, sent his vicious, intriguing mother into perpetual banishment. And we are told that Marie, the subject of those immortal canvases now at the Louvre, was actually sheltered and fed by the great painter at his own home in the day of her disgrace and poverty.
It is not strange that Peter the Great pronounced Richelieu the model statesman! Their ideals were the same. The minister intended that everything in France should lie helpless at the feet of royalty; that kingship should absorb into itself every source of power. While Cromwell was tearing down a throne in England and leading a king to a scaffold, Richelieu, facing every class, current, and force, was making the throne impregnable in France, and preparing a magnificent inheritance for the infant Louis XIV., then in his cradle.
Queen-mother, nobles, parliaments, and Protestants must be taught to obey. The Huguenots at the siege of La Rochelle, lasting fifteen months, learned their lesson. The punishment for their revolt was the loss of every military and political privilege. But although there were to be no more political assemblies, the edict of Nantes was to be rigidly enforced, and their rights and immunities under it made inviolable. Louis the King saw his most intimate friend, Cinq Mars, sent to the scaffold; his brother Gaston, Duke of Orleans, thrown into the Bastille like a common prisoner; his mother in exile and poverty. But he also saw himself without the trouble of governing, surrounded by homage and adulation, towering high above everything else in France, and was content.
The growing power of Austria and the ascendency of the Hapsburgs was, as we have seen, the nightmare of Europe at this period. But the Reformation was tearing the empire almost asunder. A Protestant Prussia was trying to struggle away from a Catholic Austria. Richelieu cared nothing for Catholics nor for Protestants. His aim was to weaken the hands of the Hapsburgs. And if he joined the Protestant leader Gustavus Adolphus in a religious crusade, it was with this end in view.
The marriage of Louis with the Infanta of Spain, known as Anne of Austria, was doubtless a part of the same line of policy, and was the beginning of many attempts to draw the Spanish peninsula under the control of France.
When the end of all these schemings arrived, on the 4th day of December, 1642, Richelieu calmly laid down to die in his princely residence known at that time as the Palais Cardinal. But as it was his dying gift to the king, the name was changed to the Palais Royal. Upon the death of Louis XIII., which occurred in 1643, only a few months after that of his minister, the widowed Queen Anne, with her infant son, Louis XIV., removed from the Louvre to the Palais Royal, which continued to be the residence of the Grand Monarch for some time after his majority.
Anne was appointed regent for her son, not yet five years old, and, to the surprise of everyone, immediately called to her aid as her adviser not a Frenchman, as was expected, but an Italian, Cardinal Mazarin. So the fate of the kingdom was in the hands of two foreigners, a Spanish queen-regent and an Italian minister.
Richelieu's and Mazarin's methods were the opposite of each other. One was direct, the other tortuous and indirect. In true Italian fashion Mazarin overcame by seeming to yield; and what he said was the thing he did not mean. Intrigue and bribery were his implements and weapons.
The situation awoke distrust. It was a time to recover lost privileges, and to struggle out of the chains riveted by Richelieu. A civil war known as the Fronde was the result.
As all classes had grievances, all were represented in this general undoing of the last minister's great work. But as no two classes desired the same thing, the miserable war, without genius and without system, miserably failed. The royal cause triumphed; and Richelieu's political structure was not even shaken. Mazarin stood inflexibly by the work of his great predecessor. Turenne and Condé were the military heroes of this, as well as of the subsequent foreign wars, resulting in the acquisition of Alsace (1648) and other great territorial expansion.
When Cardinal Mazarin died in 1661, the young king was asked to whom the ministers should bring their portfolios. To which came the unexpected reply, "To me."