CHAPTER XXXVII.
REGENCY OF MARY DE’ MEDICI. (1610-1617.)
On the death of Henry IV. there was extreme disquietude as well as grief in France. To judge by appearances, however, there was nothing to justify excessive alarm. The edict of Nantes (April 13, 1598) had put an end, so far as the French were concerned, to religious wars. The treaty of Vervins (May 2, 1598) between France and Spain, the twelve years’ truce between Spain and the United Provinces (April 9, 1609), the death of Philip II. (September 13, 1598), and the alliance between France and England seemed to have brought peace to Europe. It might have been thought that there remained no more than secondary questions, such as the possession of the marquisate of Saluzzo and the succession to the duchies of Cleves and Juliers. But the instinct of peoples sees further than the negotiations of diplomats. In the public estimation of Europe Henry IV. was the representative of and the security for order, peace, national and equitable policy, intelligent and practical ideas. So thought Sully when, at the king’s death, he went, equally alarmed and disconsolate, and shut himself up in the arsenal; and the people had grounds for being of Sully’s opinion. Public confidence was concentrated upon the king’s personality. Spectators pardoned, almost with a smile, those tender foibles of his which, nevertheless, his proximity to old age rendered still more shocking. They were pleased at the clear-sighted and strict attention he paid to the education of his son Louis, the dauphin, to whose governess, Madame de Montglas, he wrote, “I am vexed with you for not having sent me word that you have whipped my son, for I do wish and command you to whip him every time he shows obstinacy in anything wrong, knowing well by my own case that there is nothing in the world that does more good than that.” And to Mary de’ Medici herself he added, “Of one thing I do assure you, and that is, that, being of the temper I know you to be of, and foreseeing that of your son, you stubborn, not to say headstrong, madame, and he obstinate, you will verily have many a tussle together.”
Henry IV. saw as clearly into his wife’s as into his son’s character. Persons who were best acquainted with the disposition of Mary de’ Medici, and were her most indulgent critics, said of her, in 1610, when she was now thirty-seven years of age, “that she was courageous, haughty, firm, discreet, vain, obstinate, vindictive and mistrustful, inclined to idleness, caring but little about affairs, and fond of royalty for nothing beyond its pomp and its honors.” Henry had no liking for her or confidence in her, and in private had frequent quarrels with her. He had, nevertheless, had her coronation solemnized, and had provided by anticipation for the necessities of government. On the king’s death, and at the imperious instance of the Duke of Epernon, who at once introduced the queen, and said in open session, as he exhibited his sword, “It is as yet in the scabbard; but it will have to leap therefrom unless this moment there be granted to the queen a title which is her due according to the order of nature and of justice,” the Parliament forthwith declared Mary regent of, the kingdom. Thanks to Sully’s firm administration, there were, after the ordinary annual expenses were paid, at that time in the vaults of the Bastille or in securities easily realizable, forty-one million three hundred and forty-five thousand livres, and there was nothing to suggest that extraordinary and urgent expenses would come to curtail this substantial reserve. The army was disbanded, and reduced to from twelve to fifteen thousand men, French or Swiss. For a long time past no power in France had, at its accession, possessed so much material strength and so much moral authority.
But Mary de’ Medici had, in her household and in her court, the wherewithal to rapidly dissipate this double treasure. In 1600, at the time of her marriage, she had brought from Florence to Paris her nurse’s daughter, Leonora Galigai, and Leonora’s husband, Concino Concini, son of a Florentine notary, both of them full of coarse ambition, covetous, vain, and determined to make the best of their new position so as to enrich themselves, and exalt themselves beyond measure, and at any price. Mary gave them, in that respect, all the facilities they could possibly desire; they were her confidants, her favorites, and her instruments, as regarded both her own affairs and theirs. These private and subordinate servants were before long joined by great lords, court-folks, ambitious and vain likewise, egotists, mischief-makers, whom the strong and able hand of Henry IV. had kept aloof, but who, at his death, returned upon the scene, thinking of nothing whatever but their own fortunes and their rivalries. They shall just be named here pell-mell, whether members or relatives of the royal family or merely great lords the Condes, the Contis, the Enghiens, the Dukes of Epernon, Guise, Elbeuf, Mayenne, Bouillon, and Nevers, great names and petty characters encountered at every step under the regency of Mary de’ Medici, and, with their following, forming about her a court-hive, equally restless and useless. Time does justice to some few men, and executes justice on the ruck: one must have been of great worth indeed to deserve not to be forgotten. Sully appeared once more at court after his momentary retreat to the arsenal; but, in spite of the show of favor which Mary de’ Medici thought it prudent and decent to preserve towards him for some little time, he soon saw that it was no longer the place for him, and that he was of as little use there to the state as to himself; he sent in, one after the other, his resignation of all his important offices, and terminated his life in regular retirement at Rosny and Sully-sur-Loire. Du Plessis-Mornay attempted to still exercise a salutary influence over his party.
“Let there be no more talk amongst us,” said he, “of Huguenots or Papists; those words are prohibited by our edicts. And, though there were no edict at all, still if we are French, if we love our country, our families, and even ourselves, they ought henceforth to be wiped out of our remembrance. Whoso is a good Frenchman, shall to me be a citizen, shall to me be a brother.” This meritorious and patriotic language was not entirely without moral effect, but it no longer guided, no longer inspired the government; egotism, intrigue, and mediocrity in ideas as well as in feelings had taken the place of Henry IV. Facts, before long, made evident the sad result of this. All the parties, all the personages who walked the stage and considered themselves of some account, believed that the moment had arrived for pushing their pretensions, and lost no time about putting them forward. Those persons we will just pass in review without stopping at any one of them. History has no room for all those who throng about her gates without succeeding in getting in and leaving traces of their stay. The reformers were the party to which the reign of Henry IV. had brought most conquests, and which was bound to strive above everything to secure the possession of them by extracting from them every legitimate and practicable consequence. Mary de’ Medici, having been declared regent, lost no time about confirming, on the 22d of May, 1610, the edict of Nantes and proclaiming religious peace as the due of France. “We have nothing to do with the quarrels of the grandees,” said the people of Paris; “we have no mind to be mixed up with them.” Some of the preachers of repute and of the party’s old leaders used the same language. “There must be nought but a scarf any longer between us,” Du Plessis-Mornay would say. Two great Protestant names were still intact at this epoch: one, the Duke of Sully, without engaging in religious polemics, had persisted in abiding by the faith of his fathers, in spite of his king’s example and attempts to bring him over to the Catholic faith: the other, Du Plessis-Mornay, had always striven, and was continuing to strive, actively for the Protestant cause. These two illustrious champions of the Reformed party were in agreement with the new principles of national right, and with the intelligent instincts of their people, whose confidence they deserved and seemed to possess.
But the passions, the usages, and the suspicions of the party were not slow in reappearing. The Protestants were highly displeased to see the Catholic worship and practices re-established in Bearn, whence Queen Jeanne of Navarre had banished them; the rights of religious liberty were not yet powerful enough with them to surmount their taste for exclusive domination. As a guarantee for their safety, they had been put in possession of several strong places in France; neither the edict of Nantes nor its confirmation by Mary de’ Medici appeared to them a sufficient substitute for this guarantee; and they claimed its continuance, which was granted them for five years. After Henry IV.‘s conversion to Catholicism, his European policy had no longer been essentially Protestant; he had thrown out feelers and entered into negotiations for Catholic alliances; and these, when the king’s own liberal and patriotic spirit was no longer there to see that they did not sway his government, became objects of great suspicion and antipathy to the Protestants. Henry had constantly and to good purpose striven against the spirit of religious faction and civil war; anxious, after his death, about their liberty and their political importance, the Reformers reassumed a blind confidence in their own strength, and a hope of forming a small special state in the midst of the great national state. Their provincial assemblies and their national synods were, from 1611 to 1621, effective promoters of this tendency, which before long became a formal and organized design; at Saumur, at Tonneins, at Privas, at Grenoble, at Loudun, at La Rochelle, the language, the movements, and the acts of the party took more and more the character of armed resistance, and, ere long, of civil war; the leaders, old and new.
Duke Henry of Rohan as well as the Duke of Bouillon, the Marquis of La Force as well as the Duke of Lesdiguieres, more or less timidly urged on the zealous Protestants in that path from which the ancient counsels of Sully and Mornay were not successful in deterring them. On the 10th of May, 1621, in the assembly at La Rochelle, a commission of nine members was charged to present and get adopted a, plan of military organization whereby Protestant France, Warn included, was divided into eight circles, having each a special council composed of three deputies at the general assembly, under a chief who had the disposal of all the military forces; with each army-corps there was a minister to preach; the royal moneys, talliages, aid and gabel, were to be seized for the wants of the army; the property of the Catholic church was confiscated, and the revenues therefrom appropriated to the expenses of war and the pay of the ministers of the religion. It was a Protestant republic, organized on the model of the United Provinces, and disposed to act as regarded the French kingship with a large measure of independence. When, after thus preparing for war, they came to actually make it, the Protestants soon discovered their impotence; the Duke of Bouillon, sixty-five years of age and crippled with gout, interceded for them in his letters to Louis XIII., but did not go out of Sedan; the Duke of Lesdiguieres, to whom the assembly had given the command of the Protestants of Burgundy, Provence, and Dauphiny, was at that very moment on the point of abjuring their faith and marching with their enemies. Duke Henry of Rohan himself, who was the youngest, and seemed to be the most ardent, of their new chiefs, was for doing nothing and breaking up. “If you are not disposed to support the assembly,” said the Marquis of Chateauneuf, who had been sent to him to bring him to a decision, “it will be quite able to defend itself without you.” “If the assembly,” said Rohan, feeling his honor touched, “does take resolutions contrary to my advice, I shall not sever myself from the interest of our churches;” and he sacrificed his better judgment to the popular blindness. The Dukes of La Tremoille and of Soubise, and the Marquises of La Force and of Chatillon followed suit. As M. de Sismondi says, to these five lords and to a small number of towns was the strength reduced of the party which was defying the King of France.
Thus, since the death of Henry IV., the king and court of France were much changed: the great questions and the great personages had disappeared. The last of the real chiefs of the League, the brother of Duke Henry of Guise, the old Duke of Mayenne, he on whom Henry, in the hour of victory, would wreak no heavier vengeance than to walk him to a stand-still, was dead. Henry IV.‘s first wife, the sprightly and too facile Marguerite de Valois, was dead also, after consenting to descend from the throne in order to make way for the mediocre Mary de’ Medici. The Catholic champion whom Henry IV. felicitated himself upon being able to oppose to Du Plessis-Mornay in the polemical conferences between the two communions, Cardinal de Perron, was at the point of death. The decay was general, and the same amongst the Protestants as amongst the Catholics; Sully and Mornay held themselves aloof or were barely listened to. In place of these eminent personages had come intriguing or ambitious subordinates, who were either innocent of or indifferent to anything like a great policy, and who had no idea beyond themselves and their fortunes. The husband of Leonora Galigai, Concini, had amassed a great deal of money and purchased the Marquisate of Ancre; nay, more, he had been created Marshal of France, and he said to the Count of Bassompiere, “I have learned to know the world, and I am aware that a man, when he has arrived at a certain pitch of prosperity, comes down with a greater run the higher he has mounted. When I came to France, I was not worth a son, and I owed more than eight thousand crowns. My marriage and the queen’s kind favor has given me much advancement, office, and honor; I have worked at making my fortune, and I pushed it forward as long as I saw the wind favorable. So soon as I felt it turning, I thought about beating a retreat and enjoying in peace the large property we have acquired. It is my wife who is opposed to this desire. At every crack of the whip we receive from Fortune, I continue to urge her. God knows whether warnings have been wanting. My daughter’s death is the last, and, if we do not heed it, our downfall is at hand.” Then he quietly made out an abstract of all his property, amounting to eight millions, with which he purposed to buy from the pope the usufruct of the duchy of Ferrara, and leave his son, besides, a fine inheritance. But his wife continued her opposition; it would be cowardly and ungrateful, she said, to abandon the queen: “So that,” cried he, “I see myself ruined without any help for it; and, if it were not that I am under so much obligation to my wife, I would leave her and go some whither where neither grandees nor common folk would come to look after me.”