CHAPTER XII
HENRY THE FOURTH OF FRANCE
CHAPTER XII
ASSASSINATION OF HENRY THE FOURTH OF FRANCE
(May 14, 1610)
RELIGIOUS wars—that is to say, civil wars for religious causes—had desolated France for half a century, and tranquillity and apparent harmony had finally been restored only by the genius of one man—Henry the Fourth. He it was who issued the Edict of Nantes, conferring equal religious and political rights upon the professors of both religions, the Protestant and the Catholic.
A short time after Martin Luther had inaugurated the great movement of religious reform in Germany, a similar movement had also been organized in France; but it was only since 1536 and through the influential and energetic agitation of John Calvin that it had assumed large dimensions and acquired a really national importance. After the disastrous battle of Pavia and after his release from Spanish captivity, King Francis the First had ordered a cruel persecution against the Protestants for political reasons, but it had utterly failed to put a stop to this movement. On the contrary, a great many noblemen had joined the new church and the originally purely religious movement had gradually assumed a pronounced political character. But this change of tendency only added fuel to the flame of intolerance and persecution. Not only were hundreds of professors of the new church most cruelly executed on the gallows or burnt alive for heresy, but among the Waldenses in Provence and in the valleys bordering on Savoy a wholesale massacre was inaugurated, which aimed at nothing less than their entire extirpation. On account of their peaceful and industrial habits, these people had for a long time enjoyed toleration in spite of their dissenting religious opinions. No less than twenty flourishing villages were destroyed and burned to the ground, and their entire population, men, women and children, were butchered in the most barbarous manner. But it seemed as if the very horror which such acts of inhumanity inspired, and the heroic constancy and bravery with which these unfortunate victims of religious fanaticism had sealed their convictions with their blood, had rather increased than diminished the ranks of the Protestants. The French translation of the Bible, which was secretly circulated throughout the kingdom, proved also a powerful means of propagandism for the principles of reform among the better educated and thinking classes.
Francis the First died in 1547 and was succeeded by his son, Henry the Second, who considered the Protestant movement merely a political question, and treated it as such. In Germany he supported the Protestant princes in their fight against Charles the Fifth, but at home, in France, he persecuted the adherents of Calvin even more persistently and cruelly than his father had done. Hundreds of excellent citizens were sent to the gallows or to the stake for heresy, and even the possession or sale of a French Bible was deemed a sufficient crime to warrant the death punishment. Henry the Second died after a reign of twelve years, in 1559, from a wound received in a tournament and inflicted accidentally by the captain of his own body-guard. His successor, Francis the Second, the husband of Mary, Queen of Scotland, was entirely under the control of his wife’s uncles, the Duke of Guise and the Cardinal of Lorraine. For the Protestants matters grew worse and worse. Francis the Second, who was merely a boy, died after a reign of less than two years, and was succeeded by his brother Charles the Ninth, of bloody St. Bartholomew Night’s memory. He was succeeded by Henry the Third, who after an inglorious reign, in which torrents of blood had flowed without quenching the fire of religious fanaticism, was assassinated in 1589 by Jacques Clément, a young Dominican monk, who had become exasperated at the concessions which the King had made to the Protestant Church. Before expiring, King Henry the Third recognized the young King of Navarre as his successor, who then ascended the throne of France under the name of Henry the Fourth.
The wars which devastated France during the preceding three reigns were waged almost without interruption; they were of a semi-religious and semi-political character. These wars must be largely ascribed to the pernicious influence of Catherine de Médicis, the wife of Henry the Second, and the mother of his three sons, Francis the Second, Charles the Ninth and Henry the Third. Her name stands in history as a synonym for an astute, unscrupulous, cruel, and intriguing ruler and politician. At the time of Henry the Third’s assassination, he was investing the city of Paris, which was in the hands of his enemies, the League, under the command of the Duke of Mayenne, who himself was aspiring to the throne. It was therefore not an easy matter for the new King to assume the reins of government, the half of his kingdom being in arms against him, and the royal army itself, in whose ranks he was fighting, being hostile to the religion he (as a Protestant) professed.