Guise returned to his house in the Faubourg St. Antoine, still accompanied by an eager and noisy crowd, but somewhat disquieted at heart both by the king’s angry reception and the people’s enthusiastic welcome. Brave as he was, he was more ambitious in conception than bold in execution, and he had not made up his mind to do all that was necessary to attain the end he was pursuing. The committee of Sixteen, his confidants, and all the staff of the League, met at his house during the evening and night between the 9th and 10th of May, preparing for the morrow’s action without well knowing what it was to be, proposing various plans, collecting arms, and giving instructions to their agents amongst the populace. An agitation of the same sort prevailed at the Louvre; the king, too, was deliberating with his advisers as to what he should do on the morrow: Guise would undoubtedly present himself at his morning levee; should he at once rid himself of him by the poniards of the five and forty bravoes which the Duke of Epernon had enrolled in Gascony for his service? Or would it be best to summon to Paris some troops, French and Swiss, to crush the Parisian rebels and the adventurers that had hurried up from all parts to their aid? But on the 10th of May, Guise went to the Louvre with four hundred gentlemen well armed with breastplates and weapons under their cloaks. The king did nothing; no more did Guise. The two had a long conversation in the queen-mother’s garden; but it led to no result. On the 11th of May, in the evening, the provost of tradesmen, Hector de Perreuse, assembled the town-council and those of the district-colonels on whom he had reliance to receive the king’s orders. Orders came to muster the burgher companies of certain districts, and send them to occupy certain positions that had been determined upon. They mustered slowly and incompletely, and some not at all; and scarcely had they arrived when several left the posts which had been assigned to them. The king, being informed of this sluggishness, sent for the regiment of the French Guards, and for four thousand Swiss cantoned in the outskirts of Paris; and he himself mounted his horse, on the 12th of May, in the morning, to go and receive them at the gate of St. Honord. These troops “filed along, without fife or drum, towards the cemetery of the Innocents.” The populace regarded them as they passed with a feeling of angry curiosity and uneasy amazement. When all the corps had arrived at the appointed spot, “they put themselves in motion towards different points, now making a great noise with their drums and fifes, which marvellously astonished the inhabitants of the quarter.” Noise provokes noise. “In continently,” says L’Estoile, “everybody seizes his arms, goes out on guard in the streets and cantons; in less than no time chains are stretched across and barricades made at the corners of the streets; the mechanic leaves his tools, the tradesman his business, the University their books, the attorneys their bags, the advocates their bands; the presidents and councillors themselves take halberds in hand; nothing is heard but shouts, murmurs, and the seditious speeches that heat and alarm a people.” The tocsin sounded everywhere; barricades sprang up in the twinkling of an eye; they were made within thirty paces of the Louvre. The royal troops were hemmed in where they stood, and deprived of the possibility of moving; the Swiss, being attacked, lost fifty men, and surrendered, holding up their chaplets and exclaiming that they were good Catholics. It was thought sufficient to disarm the French Guards. The king, remaining stationary at the Louvre, sent his marshals to parley with the people massed in the thoroughfares; the queen-mother had herself carried over the barricades in order to go to Guise’s house and attempt some negotiation with him. He received her coldly, demanding that the king should appoint him lieutenant-general of the kingdom, declare the Huguenot princes incapacitated from succeeding to the throne, and assemble the states-general. At the approach of evening, Guise determined to go himself and assume the conqueror’s air by putting a stop to the insurrection. He issued from his house on horseback, unarmed, with a white wand in his hand; he rode through the different districts, exhorting the inhabitants to keep up their barricades, whilst remaining on the defensive and leaving him to complete their work. He was greeted on all sides with shouts of “Hurrah! for Guise!” “You wrong me, my friends,” said he; “you should shout, ‘Hurrah! for the king!’” He had the French Guards and the Swiss set at liberty; and they defiled before him, arms lowered and bareheaded, as before their preserver. Next morning, May 13, he wrote to D’Entragues, governor of Orleans, “Notify our friends to come to us in the greatest haste possible, with horses and arms, but without baggage, which they will easily be able to do, for I believe that the roads are open hence to you. I have defeated the Swiss, and cut in pieces a part of the king’s guards, and I hold the Louvre invested so closely that I will render good account of whatsoever there is in it. This is so great a victory that it will be remembered forever.” That same day, the provost of tradesmen and the royalist sheriffs repaired to the Louvre, and told the king that, without great and immediate concessions, they could not answer for anything; the Louvre was not in a condition of defence; there were no troops to be depended upon for resistance, no provisions, no munitions; the investment was growing closer and closer every hour, and the assault might commence at any instant. Henry III. sent his mother once more to the Duke of Guise, and himself went out about four o’clock, dressed in a country suit and scantily attended, as if for a walk in the Tuileries. Catherine found the duke as inflexible as he had been the day before. He peremptorily insisted upon all the conditions he had laid down already, the lieutenant-generalship of the kingdom for himself, the unity of the Catholic faith, forfeiture on the part of the King of Navarre and every other Huguenot prince as heir to the throne, perpetual banishment of the king’s favorites, and convocation of the states-general. “The king,” he said, “purposes to destroy all the grandees of the kingdom and to harry all those who oppose his wishes and the elevation of his minions; it is my duty and my interest to take all the measures necessary for my own preservation and that of the people.” Catherine yielded on nearly every point, at the same time, however, continually resuming and prolonging the discussion. One of the duke’s most trusty confidants, Francis de Mainville, entered and whispered in his ear. “Madame,” cried the duke, “whilst your Majesty has been amusing me here, the king is off from Paris to harry me and destroy me!” Henry III., indeed, had taken horse at the Tuileries, and, attended by his principal councillors, unbooted and cloakless, had issued from the New gate, and set out on the road to St. Cloud. Equipping him in haste, his squire, Du Halde, had put his spur on wrong, and would have set it right, but, “That will do,” said the king; “I am not going to see my mistress; I have a longer journey to make.” It is said that the corps on guard at the Nesle gate fired from a distance a salute of arquebuses after the fugitive king, and that a crowd assembled on the other bank of the river shouted insults after him. At the height of Chaillot Henry pulled up, and turning round towards Paris, “Ungrateful city,” he cried, “I have loved thee more than my own wife; I will not enter thy walls again but by the breach.”
It is said that on hearing of the Duke of Guise’s sudden arrival at Paris, Pope Sixtus V. exclaimed, “Ah! what rashness! To thus go and put himself in the hands of a prince he has so outraged!” And some days afterwards, on the news that the king had received the Duke of Guise and nothing had come of it, “Ah, dastard prince! poor creature of a prince, to have let such a chance escape him of getting rid of a man who seems born to be his destruction!” [De Thou, t. x. p. 266.]
When the king was gone, Guise acted the master in Paris. He ordered the immediate delivery into his hands of the Bastille, the arsenal, and the castle of Vincennes. Ornano, governor of the Bastille, sent an offer to the king, who had arrived at Chartres, to defend it to the last extremity. “I will not expose to so certain a peril a brave man who may be necessary to me elsewhere,” replied the king. Guise caused to be elected at Paris a new town-council and a new provost of tradesmen, all taken from amongst the most ardent Leaguers. He at the same time exerted himself to restore order; he allowed all royalists who wished to depart to withdraw to Chartres; he went in person and pressed the premier president of Parliament, Achille de Harlay, to resume the course of justice. “It is great pity, sir,” said Harlay, “when the servant drives out the master; this assembly is founded (seated) on the fleur-de-lis; being established by the king, it can act only for his service. We will all lose our lives to a man rather than give way a whit to the contrary.” “I have been in many battles,” said Guise, as he went out, “in assaults and encounters the most dangerous in the world; and I have never been so overcome as at my reception by this personage.” At the same time that he was trying to exercise authority and restore order, unbridled violence and anarchy were making head around him; the Sixteen and their friends discharged from the smallest offices, civil or religious, whoever was not devoted to them; they changed all the captains and district-officers of the city militia; they deposed all the incumbents, all the ecclesiastics whom they termed Huguenots and policists; the pulpits of Christians became the platforms of demagogues; the preachers Guiticestre, Boucher, Rose, John Prevost, Aubry, Pigenat, Cueilly, Pelletier, and a host of others whose names have fallen into complete obscurity, were the popular apostles, the real firebrands of the troubles of the League, says Pasquier; there was scarcely a chapel where there were not several sermons a day. “You know not your strength,” they kept repeating to their auditors: “Paris knows not what she is worth; she has wealth enough to make war upon four kings. France is sick, and she will never recover from that sickness till she has a draught of French blood given her. . . . If you receive Henry de Valois into your towns, make up your minds to see your preachers massacred, your sheriffs hanged, your women violated, and the gibbets garnished with your members.” One of these raving orators, Claude Trahy, provincial of the Cordeliers, devoted himself to hounding on the populace of Auxerre against their bishop, James Amyot, the translator of Plutarch, whom he reproached with “having communicated with Henry III. and administered to him the eucharist;” brother John Moresin, one of Trahy’s subalterns, went about brandishing a halberd in the public place at Auxerre, and shouting, “Courage, lads! messire Amyot is a wicked man, worse than Henry de Valois; he has threatened to have our master Trahy hanged, but he will repent it;” and, “at the voice of this madman, there hurried up vine-dressers, boatmen, and marchandeaux (costermongers), a whole angry mob, who were for having Amyot’s throat cut, and Trahy made bishop in his stead.”
Whilst the blind passions of fanatics and demagogues were thus let loose, the sensible and clear-sighted spirits, the earnest and moderate royalists, did not all of them remain silent and motionless. After the appearance of the letters written in 1588 by the Duke of Guise to explain and justify his conduct in this crisis, a grandson of Chancellor de l’Hospital, Michael Hurault, Sieur du Fay, published a document, entitled Frank and Free Discourse upon the Condition of France, one of the most judicious and most eloquent pamphlets of the sixteenth century, a profound criticism upon the acts of the Duke of Guise, their causes and consequences, and a true picture of the falsehoods and servitude into which an eminent man may fall when he makes himself the tool of a popular faction in the hope of making that faction the tool of his personal ambition. But even the men who were sufficiently enlightened and sufficiently courageous to tell the League and its leader plain truths spoke only rather late in the day, and at first without giving their names; the document written by L’Hospital’s grandson did not appear until 1591, after the death of Henry III. and Henry de Guise, and it remained anonymous for some time. One cannot be astonished at such timidity; Guise himself was timid before the Leaguers, and he always ended by yielding to them in essentials, after having attempted to resist them upon such and such an incidental point. His own people accused him of lacking boldness; and his sister, the Duchess of Montpensier, openly patronized the most violent preachers, whilst boasting that she wielded more influence through them than her brother by his armies. Henry III., under stress of his enemies’ zeal and his own servants’ weakness, Catherine de’ Medici included, after having fled from Paris and taken refuge at Chartres to escape the triumph of the Barricades, once more began to negotiate, that is, to capitulate with the League; he issued at Rouen, on the 19th of July, 1588, an edict in eleven articles, whereby he granted more than had been demanded, and more than he had promised in 1585 by the treaty of Nemours; over and above the measures contained in that treaty against the Huguenots, in respect of the present and the future, he added four fresh surety-towns, amongst others Bourges and Orleans, to those of which the Leaguers were to remain in possession. He declared, moreover, “that no investigation should be made into any understandings, associations, and other matters into which our Catholic subjects might have entered together; inasmuch as they have given us to understand and have informed us that what they did was but owing to the zeal they felt for the preservation and maintenance of the Catholic religion.” By thus releasing the League from all responsibility for the past, and by giving this new treaty the name of edict of union, Henry III. flattered himself, it is said, that he was thus putting himself at the head of a new grand Catholic League which would become royalist again, inasmuch as the king was granting it all it had desired. The edict of union was enregistered at the Parliament of Paris on the 21st of July. The states-general were convoked for the 15th of October following. “On Tuesday, August 2, his Majesty,” says L’Estoile, “being entertained by the Duke of Guise during his dinner, asked him for drink, and then said to him, ‘To whom shall we drink?’ ‘To whom you please, sir,’ answered the duke; ‘it is for your Majesty to command.’ ‘Cousin,’ said the king, ‘drink we to our good friends the Huguenots.’ ‘It is well said, sir,’ answered the duke. ‘And to our good barricaders,’ said the king; ‘let us not forget them.’ Whereupon the duke began to laugh a little,” adds L’Estoile, “but a sort of laugh that did not go beyond the knot of the throat, being dissatisfied at the novel union the king was pleased to make of the Huguenots with the barricaders.” What must have to some extent reassured the Duke of Guise was, that a Te Deum was celebrated at Notre-Dame for the King of Navarre’s exclusion from all right to the crown, and that, on the 14th of August Henry de Guise was appointed generalissimo of the royal armies.
The states-general met at Blois on the 16th of October, 1588. They numbered five hundred and five deputies; one hundred and ninety-one of the third estate, one hundred and eighty of the noblesse, one hundred and thirty-four of the clergy. The king had given orders “to conduct each deputy as they arrived to his cabinet, that he might see, hear, and know them all personally.” When the five hundred and five deputies had taken their places in the hall, the Duke of Guise went to fetch the king, who made his entry attended by the princes of the blood, and opened the session with the dignity and easy grace which all the Valois seemed to have inherited from Francis I. The Duke of Guise, in a coat of white satin, was seated at the king’s feet, as high steward of his household, scanning the whole assembly with his piercing glance, as if to keep watch over those who were in his service. “He seemed,” says a contemporary, “by a single flash of his eye to fortify them in the hope of the advancement of his designs; his fortunes, and his greatness, and to say to them, without speaking, I see you.” The king’s speech was long, able, well delivered, and very much applauded, save by Guise himself and his particular friends; the firmness of tone had displeased them, and one sentence excited in them a discontent which they had found difficulty in restraining: certain grandees of my kingdom have formed such leagues and associations as, in every well-ordered monarchy, are crimes of high treason, without the sovereign’s permission. But, showing my wonted indulgence, I am quite willing to let bygones be bygones in this respect. Guise grew pale at these words. On leaving the royal session, he got his private committee to decide that the Cardinal of Guise and the Archbishop of Lyons should go to see the king, and beg him to abandon the printing of his speech, and meanwhile Guise himself sent to the printer’s to stop the immediate publication. Discussion took place next day in the king’s cabinet; and a threat was held out to him that a portion of the deputies would quit the meeting of states. The queen-mother advised her son to compromise. The king yielded, according to his custom, and gave authority for cutting out the strongest expressions, amongst others those just quoted. “The correction was accordingly made,” says M. Picot, the latest and most able historian of the states-general, “and Henry III. had to add this new insult to all that were rankling at the bottom of his heart since the affair of the Barricades.”
This was, for the Duke of Guise, a first trial of his power, and great was his satisfaction at this first success. On leaving the opening session of the states-general, he wrote to the Spanish ambassador Mendoza, “I handled our states so well that I made them resolve to require confirmation of the edict of union (of July 21 preceding) as fundamental law of the state. The king refused to do so, in rather sharp terms, to the deputies who brought the representation before him, and from that it is presumed that he inclines towards a peace with the heretics. But, at last, he was so pressed by the states, the which were otherwise on the point of breaking up, that he promised to swear the edict and have it sworn before entering upon consideration of any matter.”
The next day but one, in fact, on the 18th of October, at the second session of the states-general, “the edict of July 21 was read and published with the greatest solemnity; the king swore to maintain it in terms calculated to dissipate all anxieties on the part of the Catholics. The deputies swore after him. The Archbishop of Bourges delivered an address on the sanctity of oaths, and those present began to think the session over, when the king rose a second time to recommend the deputies not to leave Blois before the papers were drawn up and the ordinances made. He reminded them that at the last assembly of the states the suggestions and counsels of the three estates had been so ill carried out that, instead of a reformation and an establishment of good laws, everything had been thrown into confusion. Accordingly the king added to this suggestion a solemn oath that he would not budge from the city until he had made an edict, sacred and inviolable. The enthusiasm of the deputies was at its height; a rush took place to the church of St. Sauveur to chant a Te Deum. All the princes were there to give thanks to God. Never were king, court, and people so joyous.” The Duke of Guise wrote to the Spanish ambassador, “At length we have, in full assembly of the states, had our edict of union solemnly sworn and established as fundamental law of this realm, having surmounted all the difficulties and hinderances which the king was pleased to throw in the way; I found myself four or five times on the point of rupture: but I was verily assisted by so many good men.”
After as well as before the opening of the states-general, the friends of the Duke of Guise were far from having, all of them, the same confidence that he had in his position and in his success. “Stupid owl of a Lorrainer!” said Sieur de Vins, commanding, on behalf of the League, in Dauphiny, on reading the duke’s despatches, “has he so little sense as to believe that a king whose crown he, by dissimulating, has been wanting to take away, is not dissimulating in turn to take away his life?” “As they are so thick together,” said M. de Vins’ sister, when she knew that the Duke of Guise was at Blois with the king, “you will hear, at the very first opportunity, that one or the other has killed his fellow.” Guise himself was no stranger to this idea. “We are not without warnings from all quarters that there is a design of attempting my life,” he wrote on the 21st of September, 1588: “but I have, thank God, so provided against it, both by the gathering I have made of a good number of my friends, and in having, by presents and money, secured a portion of those whose services are relied upon for the execution of it, that, if once things begin, I shall finish more roughly than I did at Paris.”