VI.—HENRY OF NAVARRE.
Henry IV. perfectly understood and steadily took the measure of the situation in which he was placed. He was in a great minority throughout the country as well as the army, and he would have to deal with public passions, worked by his foes for their own ends, and with the personal pretensions of his partisans. He made no mistake about these two facts, and he allowed them great weight; but he did not take for the ruling principle of his policy and for his first rule of conduct the plan of alternate concessions to the different parties and of continually humoring personal interests; he set his thoughts higher, upon the general and natural interests of France as he found her and saw her. They resolved themselves, in his eyes, into the following great points: Maintenance of the hereditary rights of monarchy, preponderance of Catholics in the government, peace between Catholics and Protestants, and religious liberty for Protestants. With him these points became the law of his policy and his kingly duty as well as the nation’s right. He proclaimed them the first words that he addressed to the lords and principal personages of state assembled around him. On the 4th of August, 1589, in the camp at St. Cloud, the majority of the princes, dukes, lords, and gentlemen present in the camp expressed their full adhesion to the accession and the manifesto of the king, promising him “service and obedience against rebels and enemies who would usurp the kingdom.” Two notable leaders, the duke of Épernon amongst the Catholics and the duke of La Trémoille amongst the Protestants, refused to join in this adhesion; the former saying that his conscience would not permit him to serve a heretic king, the latter alleging that his conscience forbade him to serve a prince who engaged to protect Catholic idolatry. They withdrew, D’Épernon into Angoumois and Saintonge, taking with him six thousand foot and twelve thousand horse; and La Trémoille into Poitou, with nine battalions of reformers. They had an idea of attempting, both of them, to set up for themselves independent principalities. Three contemporaries, Sully, La Force, and the bastard of Angoulême, bear witness that Henry IV. was deserted by as many Huguenots as Catholics. The French royal army was reduced, it is said, to one half. As a make-weight, Sancy prevailed upon the Swiss, to the number of twelve thousand, and two thousand German auxiliaries, not only to continue in the service of the new king but to wait six months for their pay, as he was at the moment unable to pay them. From the 14th to the 20th of August, in Ile-de-France, in Picardy, in Normandy, in Auvergne, in Champagne, in Burgundy, in Anjou, in Poitou, in Languedoc, in Orleanness, and in Touraine, a great number of towns and districts joined in the determination of the royal army.
As the government of Henry IV. went on growing in strength and extent, the moderate Catholics were beginning, not as yet to make approaches toward him, but to see a glimmering possibility of treating with him, and obtaining from him such concessions as they considered necessary, at the same time that they in their turn made to him such as he might consider sufficient for his party and himself.
Unhappily, the new pope, Gregory XIV., elected on the 5th of December, 1590, was humbly devoted to the Spanish policy, meekly subservient to Philip II.; that is, to the cause of religious persecution and of absolute power, without regard for anything else. The relations of France with the Holy See at once felt the effects of this; Cardinal Gaetani received from Rome all the instructions that the most ardent Leaguers could desire; and he gave his approval to a resolution of the Sorbonne to the effect that Henry de Bourbon, heretic and relapsed, was forever excluded from the crown, whether he became a Catholic or not. Henry IV. had convoked the states-general at Tours for the month of March, and had summoned to that city the archbishops and bishops to form a national council, and to deliberate as to the means of restoring the king to the bosom of the Catholic Church. The legate prohibited this council, declaring, beforehand, the excommunication and deposition of any bishops who should be present at it. The Leaguer parliament of Paris forbade, on pain of death and confiscation, any connection, any correspondence with Henry de Bourbon and his partisans. A solemn procession of the League took place at Paris on the 14th of March, and, a few days afterwards, the union was sworn afresh by all the municipal chiefs of the population. In view of such passionate hostility, Henry IV., a stranger to any sort of illusion, at the same time that he was always full of hope, saw that his successes at Arques were insufficient for him, and that, if he were to occupy the throne in peace, he must win more victories. He recommenced the campaign by the siege of Dreux, one of the towns which it was most important for him to possess, in order to put pressure on Paris and cause her to feel, even at a distance, the perils and evils of war.
On Wednesday, the 14th of March, 1590, the two armies met on the plains of Ivry, a village six leagues from Evreux, on the left bank of the Eure. A battle ensued in which, although the resources of modern warfare were brought into operation, the decisive force consisted, as of old, in the cavalry. It appeared as if Henry IV. must succumb to the superior force of the enemy; further and further backward was his white banner seen to retire, and the great mass appeared as if they designed to follow it. At length Henry cried out that those who did not wish to fight against the enemy might at least turn and see him die, and immediately plunged into the thickest of the battle. It appeared as if the royalist gentry had felt the old martial fire of their ancestry enkindled by these words, and by the glance that accompanied them. Raising one mighty shout to God, they threw themselves upon the enemy, following their king, whose plume was now their banner. In this there might have been some dim principle of religious zeal, but that devotion to personal authority, which is so powerful an element in war and in policy, was wanting. The royalist and religious energy of Henry’s troops conquered the Leaguers. The cavalry was broken, scattered, and swept from the field, and the confused manner of their retreat so puzzled the infantry that they were not able to maintain their ground; the German and French were cut down; the Swiss surrendered. It was a complete victory for Henry IV.
It was not only as able captain and valiant soldier that Henry IV. distinguished himself at Ivry; there the man was conspicuous for the strength of his better feelings, as generous and as affectionate as the king was far-sighted and bold. When the word was given to march from Dreux, Count Schomberg, colonel of the German auxiliaries called Reiters, had asked for the pay of his troops, letting it be understood that they would not fight, if their claims were not satisfied. Henry had replied harshly, “People don’t ask for money on the eve of a battle.” At Ivry, just as the battle was on the point of beginning, he went up to Schomberg: “Colonel,” said he, “I hurt your feelings. This may be the last day of my life. I can’t bear to take away the honor of a brave and honest gentleman like you. Pray forgive me and embrace me.” “Sir,” answered Schomberg, “the other day your majesty wounded me, to-day you kill me.” He gave up the command of the Reiters in order to fight in the king’s own squadron, and was killed in action.
The victory of Ivry had a great effect in France and in Europe, though not immediately, and as regarded the campaign of 1690. The victorious king moved on Paris and made himself master of the little towns in the neighborhood with a view of besieging the capital. The investment became more strict; it was kept up for more than three months, from the end of May to the beginning of September, 1590; and the city was reduced to a severe state of famine, which would have been still more severe if Henry IV. had not several times over permitted the entry of some convoys of provisions and the exit of the old men, the women, the children, in fact, the poorest and weakest part of the population. “Paris must not be a cemetery,” he said: “I do not wish to reign over the dead.” In the meantime, Duke Alexander of Parma, in accordance with express orders from Philip II., went from the Low Countries, with his army, to join Mayenne at Meaux, and threaten Henry IV. with their united forces if he did not retire from the walls of the capital. Henry IV. offered the two dukes battle, if they really wished to put a stop to the investment; but “I am not come so far,” answered the duke of Parma, “to take counsel of my enemy; if my manner of warfare does not please the king of Navarre, let him force me to change it instead of giving me advice that nobody asked him for.” Henry in vain attempted to make the duke of Parma accept battle. The able Italian established himself in a strongly entrenched camp, surprised Lagny and opened to Paris the navigation of the Marne, by which provisions were speedily brought up. Henry decided upon retreating; he dispersed the different divisions of his army into Touraine, Normandy, Picardy, Champagne, Burgundy, and himself took up his quarters at Senlis, at Compiègne, in the towns on the banks of the Oise. The duke of Mayenne arrived on the 18th of September at Paris; the duke of Parma entered it himself with a few officers and left it on the 13th of November, with his army on his way back to the Low Countries, being a little harassed in his retreat by the royal cavalry, but easy, for the moment, as to the fate of Paris and the issue of the war, which continued during the first six months of the year 1591, but languidly and disconnectedly, with successes and reverses see-sawing between the two parties and without any important results.
Then began to appear the consequences of the victory of Ivry and the progress made by Henry IV., in spite of the check he received before Paris and at some other points in the kingdom. Not only did many moderate Catholics make advances to him, struck with his sympathetic ability and his valor, and hoping that he would end by becoming a Catholic, but patriotic wrath was kindling in France against Philip II. and the Spaniards, those fomenters of civil war in the mere interest of foreign ambition.
The League was split up into two parties, the Spanish League and the French League. The committee of Sixteen labored incessantly for the formation and triumph of the Spanish League; and its principal leaders wrote, on the 2nd of September, 1591, a letter to Philip II., offering him the crown of France and pledging their allegiance to him as his subjects: “We can positively assure your Majesty,” they said, “that the wishes of all Catholics are to see your Catholic Majesty holding the scepter of this kingdom and reigning over us, even as we do throw ourselves right willingly into your arms as in to those of our father, or at any rate establishing one of your posterity upon the throne.” These ringleaders of the Spanish League had for their army the blindly fanatical and demagogic populace of Paris, and were, further, supported by 4,000 Spanish troops whom Philip II. had succeeded in getting almost surreptitiously into Paris. They created a council of ten, the sixteenth century’s committee of public safety; they proscribed the policists; they, on the 15th of November, had the president, Brisson, and two councilors of the Leaguer parliament arrested, hanged them to a beam and dragged the corpses to the Place de Grève, where they strung them up to a gibbet with inscriptions setting forth that they were heretics, traitors to the city and enemies of the Catholic princes. Whilst the Spanish League was thus reigning at Paris, the duke of Mayenne was at Laon, preparing to lead his army, consisting partly of Spaniards, to the relief of Rouen, the siege of which Henry IV. was commencing. Being summoned to Paris by messengers who succeeded one another every hour, he arrived there on the 28th of November, 1591, with 2,000 French troops; he armed the guard of burgesses, seized and hanged, in a ground-floor room of the Louvre, four of the chief leaders of the Sixteen, suppressed their committee, reëstablished the parliament in full authority and, finally, restored the security and preponderance of the French League, whilst taking the reins once more into his own hands.