However pacific the king’s first words had been, and whatever was the influence of the constable, the proposal of Vieilleville had a great effect upon the council. The king showed great readiness to adopt it. “I think,” said he to the constable, “that I was inspired of God when I created Vieilleville of my council to-day.” “I only gave the opinion I did,” replied Montmorency, “in order to support the king’s sentiments; let your Majesty give what orders you please.” The king loudly proclaimed his resolve. “Then let every one,” he said, “be ready at an early date, with equipment according to his ability and means, to follow me; hoping, with God’s help, that all will go well for the discomfiture of so pernicious a foe of my kingdom and nation, and one who revels and delights in tormenting all manner of folks, without regard for any.” There was a general enthusiasm; the place of meeting for the army was appointed at Chalons-sur-Marne, March 10, 1552; more than a thousand gentlemen flocked thither as volunteers; peasants and mechanics from Champagne and Picardy joined them; the war was popular. “The majority of the soldiers,” says Rabutin, a contemporary chronicler, “were young men whose brains were on fire.” Francis de Guise and Gaspard de Coligny were their chief leaders. The king entered Lorraine from Champagne by Joinville, the ordinary residence of the Dukes of Guise. He carried Pont-a-Mousson; Toul opened its gates to him on the 13th of April; he occupied Nancy on the 14th, and on the 18th he entered Metz, not without some hesitation amongst a portion of the inhabitants and the necessity of a certain show of military force on the part of the leaders of the royal army. The king would have given the command of this important place to Vieilleville, but he refused it, saying, “I humbly thank your Majesty, but I do not think that you should establish in Metz any governor in your own name, but leave that duty to the mayor and sheriffs of the city, under whose orders the eight captains of the old train-bands who will remain there with their companies will be.” “How say you!” said the king: “can I leave a foreign lieutenant in a foreign country whose oath of fidelity I have only had within the last four-and-twenty hours, and with all the difficulties and disputes in the world to meet too?” “Sir,” rejoined Vieilleville, “to fear that this master sheriff, whose name is Tallanges, might possibly do you a bad turn, is to wrongly estimate his own competence, who never put his nose anywhere but into a bar-parlor to drink himself drunk; and it is also to show distrust of the excellent means you have for preventing all the ruses and artifices that might be invented to throw your service into confusion.” The king acquiesced, but not without anxiety, in Vieilleville’s refusal, and, leaving at Metz as governor a relative of the constable’s, whom the latter warmly recommended to him, he set out on the 22d of April, 1552, with all his household, to go and attempt in Alsace the same process that he had already carried out in Lorraine. “But when we had entered upon the territory of Germany,” says Vieilleville, “our Frenchmen at once showed their insolence in their very first quarters, which so alarmed all the rest that we never found from that moment a single man to speak to, and, as long as the expedition lasted, there never appeared a soul with his provisions to sell on the road; whereby the army suffered infinite privations. This misfortune began with us at the approach to Saverne (Zabern), the episcopal residence of Strasbourg.” When the king arrived before Strasbourg he found the gates closed, and the only offer to open them was on the condition that he should enter alone with forty persons for his whole suite. The constable, having taken a rash fit, was of opinion that he should enter even on this condition. This advice was considered by his Majesty to be very sound, as well as by the princes and lords who were about him, according to the natural tendency of the Frenchman, who is always for seconding and applauding what is said by the great. But Vieilleville, on being summoned to the king’s quarters, opposed it strongly. “Sir,” said he, “break this purpose, for in carrying it out you are in danger of incurring some very evil and very shameful fate; and, should that happen, what will become of your army which will be left without head, prince, or captain, and in a strange country, wherein we are already looked upon with ill will because of our insolence and indiscretions? As for me, I am off again to my quarters to quaff and laugh with my two hundred men-at-arms, in readiness to march when your standard is a-field, but not thither.” Nothing has a greater effect upon weak and undecided minds than the firm language of men resolved to do as they say. The king gave up the idea of entering Strasbourg, and retired well pleased nevertheless, for he was in possession of Metz, Toul, Verdun, and Pont-a-Mousson, the keys for France into Germany, and at the head of an army under young commanders who were enterprising without being blindly rash.
Charles V. also had to know what necessity was, and to submit to it, without renouncing the totality of his designs. On the 2d of August, 1552, he signed at Passau, with the Protestant princes, the celebrated treaty known under the name of “treaty of public peace,” which referred the great questions of German pacification to a general diet to be assembled in six months, and declared that, pending definitive conciliation, the two religions should be on an equal footing in the empire, that is, that the princes and free towns should have the supreme regulation of religious matters amongst themselves. Charles V. thus recovered full liberty of action in his relations with France, and could no longer think of anything but how to recover the important towns he had lost in Lorraine. Henry II., on the other hand, who was asked by his Protestant allies on what conditions he would accept the peace of Passau, replied that at no price would he dispossess himself of the Three-Bishoprics of Lorraine, and that he would for his part continue the contest he had undertaken for the liberation of Germany. The siege of Metz then became the great question of the day: Charles V. made all his preparations to conduct it on an immense scale, and Henry II. immediately ordered Francis de Guise to go and defend his new conquest at all hazards.
Ambition which is really great accepts with joy great perils fraught with great opportunities. Guise wrote to Henry II.‘s favorite, Diana de Poitiers, Duchess of Valentinois, to thank her for having helped to obtain for him this favor, which was about to bring him “to the emperor’s very beard.” He set out at once, first of all to Toul, where the plague prevailed, and where he wished to hurry on the repair of the ramparts. Money was wanting to pay the working-corps; and he himself advanced the necessary sum. On arriving at Metz on the 17th of August, 1552, he found there only twelve companies of infantry, new levies; and every evening he drilled them himself in front of his quarters. A host of volunteers, great lords, simple gentlemen, and rich and brave burgesses, soon came to him, “eager to aid him in repelling the greatest and most powerful effort ever made by the emperor against their country and their king.” This concourse of warriors, the majority of them well known and several of them distinguished, redoubled the confidence and ardor of the rank and file in the army. We find under the title of Chanson faite en 1552 par un souldar etant en Metz en garnison this couplet:—
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“My Lord of Guise is here at home, With many a noble at his side, With the two children of Vendome, With bold Nemours, in all his pride, And Strozzi too, a warrior tried, Who ceases not, by night or day, Around the city-walls to stride, And strengthen Metz in every way.” [Peter Strozzi, “the man in all the world,” says Brantome, “who could best arrange and order battles and battalions, and could best post them to his advantage.”] |
To put into condition the tottering fortifications of Metz, and to have the place well supplied, was the first task undertaken by its indefatigable governor; he never ceased to meet the calls upon him either in person or in purse; he was seen directing the workmen, taking his meals with them, and setting them a good example by carrying the hod for several hours. He frequently went out on horseback to reconnoitre the country, visit the points of approach and lodgment that the enemy might make use of around the town, and take measures of precaution at the places whereby they might do harm as well as at those where it would be not only advantageous for the French to make sallies or to set ambuscades, but also to secure a retreat. Charles V., naturally slow as he was in his operations no less than in his resolves, gave the activity of Guise time to bear fruit. “I mean to batter the town of Metz in such style as to knock it about the ears of M. de Guise,” said he at the end of August, 1552, “and I make small account of the other places that the king may have beyond that.”
On the 15th of September following, Charles was still fifteen leagues from Metz, on the territory of Deux-Ponts, and it was only on the 19th of October that the Duke of Alba, his captain-general, arrived with twenty-four thousand men, the advance-guard, within a league of the place which, it it is said, was to be ultimately besieged by one hundred thousand foot, twenty-three thousand horse, one hundred and twenty pieces of artillery, and seven thousand pioneers. “After one and the first encounter,” says a journal of the siege, “the enemy held our soldiers in good repute, not having seen them, for any sort of danger, advance or retreat, save as men of war and of assured courage; which was an advantage, for M. de Guise knew well that at the commencement of a war it was requisite that a leader should try, as much as ever he could, to win.” It was only on the 20th of November that Charles V., ill of gout at Thionville, and unable to stand on his legs, perceived the necessity of being present in person at the siege, and appeared before Metz on an Arab horse, with his face pale and worn, his eyes sunk in his head, and his beard white. At sight of him there was a most tremendous salute of arquebuses and artillery, the noise of which brought the whole town to arms. The emperor, whilst waiting to establish himself at the castle of La Horgne, took up his quarters near the Duke of Alba, in a little wooden house built out of the ruins of the Abbey of Saint-Clement: “a beautiful palace,” said he, “when the keys of Metz are brought to me there.” From the 20th to the 26th the attack was continued with redoubled vigor; fourteen thousand cannon-shots were fired, it is said, in a single day Guise had remarked that the enemy seemed preparing to direct the principal assault against a point so strong that nobody had thought of pulling down the houses in its vicinity. This oversight was immediately repaired, and a stout wall, the height of a man, made out of the ruins. “If they send us peas,” said Guise, “we will give them back beans” (“we will give them at least as good as they bring “). On the 26th of November the old wall was battered by a formidable artillery; and, breached in three places, it crumbled down on the 28th into the ditch, “at the same time making it difficult to climb for to come to the assault.” The assailants uttered shouts of joy; but, when the cloud of dust had cleared off, they saw a fresh rampart eight feet in height above the breach, “and they experienced as much and even more disgust than they had felt pleasure at seeing the wall tumble.” The besieged heaped mockery and insult upon them; but Guise “imperatively put a stop to the disturbance, fearing, it is said, lest some traitor should take advantage of it to give the assailants some advice, and the soldiers then conceived the idea of sticking upon the points of their pikes live cats, the cries of which seemed to show derision of the enemy.”