The League was more than ever dominant in Paris; Henry IV. could not think of entering there. Before recommencing the war in his own name, he made Villeroi, who, after the death of Henry III., had rejoined the Duke of Mayenne, an offer of an interview in the Bois de Boulogne to see if there were no means of treating for peace. Mayenne would not allow Villeroi to accept the offer. “He had no private quarrel,” he said, “with the King of Navarre, whom he highly honored, and who, to his certain knowledge, had not looked with approval upon his brothers’ death; but any appearance of negotiation would cause great distrust amongst their party, and they would not do anything that tended against the rights of King Charles X.” Renouncing all idea of negotiation, Henry IV. set out on the 8th of August from St. Cloud, after having told off his army in three divisions. Two were ordered to go and occupy Picardy and Champagne; and the king kept with him only the third, about six thousand strong. He went and laid the body of Henry III. in the church of St. Corneille at Compiegne, took Meulan and several small towns on the banks of the Seine and Oise, and propounded for discussion with his officers the question of deciding in which direction he should move, towards the Loire or the Seine, on Tours or on Rouen. He determined in favor of Normandy; he must be master of the ports in that province in order to receive there the re-enforcements which had been promised him by Queen Elizabeth of England, and which she did send him in September, 1589, forming a corps of from four to five thousand men, Scots and English, “aboard of thirteen vessels laden with twenty-two thousand pounds sterling in gold and seventy thousand pounds of gunpowder, three thousand cannon-balls, and corn, biscuits, wine, and beer, together with woolens and even shoes.” They arrived very opportunely for the close of the campaign, but too late to share in Henry IV.‘s first victory, that series of fights around the castle of Arques which, in the words of an eye-witness, the Duke of Angouleme, “was the first gate whereby Henry entered upon the road of his glory and good fortune.”
After making a demonstration close to Rouen, Henry IV., learning that the Duke of Mayenne was advancing in pursuit of him with an army of twenty-five thousand foot and eight thousand horse, thought it imprudent to wait for him and run the risk of being jammed between forces so considerable and the hostile population of a large city; so he struck his camp and took the road to Dieppe, in order to be near the coast and the re-enforcements from Queen Elizabeth. Some persons even suggested to him that in case of mishap he might go thence and take refuge in England; but at this prospect Biron answered, “There is no King of France out of France;” and Henry IV. was of Biron’s opinion. At his arrival before Dieppe, he found as governor there Aymar de Chastes, a man of wits and honor, a very moderate Catholic, and very strongly in favor of the party of policists. Under Henry III. he had expressly refused to enter the League, saying to Villars, who pressed him to do so, “I am a Frenchman, and you yourself will find out that the Spaniard is the real head of the League.” He had organized at Dieppe four companies of burgess-guards, consisting of Catholics and Protestants, and he assembled about him, to consider the affairs of the town, a small council, in which Protestants had the majority. As soon as he knew, on the 26th of August, that the king was approaching Dieppe, he went with the principal inhabitants to meet him, and presented to him the keys of the place, saying, “I come to salute my lord and hand over to him the government of this city.” “Ventre-saint-gris!” answered Henry IV., “I know nobody more worthy of it than you are!” The Dieppese overflowed with felicitations. “No fuss, my lads,” said Henry: “all I want is your affections, good bread, good wine, and good hospitable faces.” When he entered the town, “he was received,” says a contemporary chronicler, “with loud cheers by the people; and what was curious, but exhilarating, was to see the king surrounded by close upon six thousand armed men, himself having but a few officers at his left hand.” He received at Dieppe assurance of the fidelity of La Verune, governor of Caen, whither, in 1589, according to Henry III.‘s order, that portion of the Parliament of Normandy which would not submit to the yoke of the League at Rouen, had removed. Caen having set the example, St. Lo, Coutances, and Carentan likewise sent deputies to Dieppe to recognize the authority of Henry IV. But Henry had no idea of shutting himself up inside Dieppe: after having carefully inspected the castle, citadel, harbor, fortifications, and outskirts of the town, he left there five hundred men in garrison, supported by twelve or fifteen hundred well-armed burgesses, and went and established himself personally in the old castle of Arques, standing, since the eleventh century, upon a barren hill; below, in the burgh of Arques, he sent Biron into cantonments with his regiment of Swiss and the companies of French infantry; and he lost no time in having large fosses dug ahead of the burgh, in front of all the approaches, enclosing within an extensive line of circumvallation both burgh and castle. All the king’s soldiers and the peasants that could be picked up in the environs worked night and day. Whilst they were at work, Henry wrote to Countess Corisande de Gramont, his favorite at that time, “My dear heart, it is a wonder I am alive with such work as I have. God have pity upon me and show me mercy, blessing my labors, as He does in spite of a many folks! I am well, and my affairs are going well. I have taken Eu. The enemy, who are double me just now, thought to catch me there; but I drew off towards Dieppe, and I await them in a camp that I am fortifying. Tomorrow will be the day when I shall see them, and I hope, with God’s help, that if they attack me they will find they have made a bad bargain. The bearer of this goes by sea. The wind and my duties make me conclude. This 9th of September, in the trenches at Arques.”
All was finished when the scouts of Mayenne appeared. But Mayenne also was an able soldier: he saw that the position the king had taken and the works he had caused to be thrown up rendered a direct attack very difficult. He found means of bearing down upon Dieppe another way, and of placing himself, says the latest historian of Dieppe, M. Vitet, between the king and the town, “hoping to cut off the king’s communications with the sea, divide his forces, deprive him of his re-enforcements from England, and, finally, surround him and capture him,” as he had promised the Leaguers of Paris, who were already talking of the iron cage in which the Bearnese would be sent to them. “Henry IV.,” continues M. Vitet, “felt some vexation at seeing his forecasts checkmated by Mayenne’s manoeuvre, and at having had so much earth removed to so little profit; but he was a man of resources, confident as the Gascons are, and with very little of pig-headedness. To change all his plans was with him the work of an instant. Instead of awaiting the foe in his intrenchments, he saw that it was for him to go and feel for them on the other side of the valley, and that, on pain of being invested, he must not leave the Leaguers any exit but the very road they had taken to come.” Having changed all his plans on this new system, Henry breathed more freely; but he did not go to sleep for all that: he was incessantly backwards and forwards from Dieppe to Arques, from Arques to Dieppe and to the Faubourg du Pollet. Mayenne, on the contrary, seemed to have fallen into a lethargy; he had not yet been out of his quarters during the nearly eight and forty hours since he had taken them. On the 17th of September, 1589, in the morning, however, a few hundred light-horse were seen putting themselves in motion, scouring the country and coming to fire their pistols close to the fosses of the royal army. The skirmish grew warm by degrees. “My son,” said Marshal de Biron to the young count of Auvergne [natural son of Charles IX. and Mary Touchet], “charge: now is the time.” The young prince, without his hat, and his horsemen charged so vigorously that they put the Leaguers to the rout, killed three hundred of them, and returned quietly within their lines, by Biron’s orders, without being disturbed in their retreat. These partial and irregular encounters began again on the 18th and 19th of September, with the same result. The Duke of Mayenne was nettled and humiliated; he had his prestige to recover. He decided to concentrate all his forces right on the king’s intrenchments, and attack them in front with his whole army. The 20th of September passed without a single skirmish. Henry, having received good information that he would be attacked the next day, did not go to bed. The night was very dark. He thought he saw a long way off in the valley a long line of lighted matches; but there was profound silence; and the king and his officers puzzled themselves to decide if they were men or glow-worms. On the 21st, at five A. M., the king gave orders for every one to be ready and at his post. He himself repaired to the battle-field. Sitting in a big fosse with all his officers, he had his breakfast brought thither, and was eating with good appetite, when a prisoner was brought to him, a gentleman of the League, who had advanced too far whilst making a reconnaissance. “Good day, Belin,” said the king, who recognized him, laughing: “embrace me for your welcome appearance.” Belin embraced him, telling him that he was about to have down upon him thirty thousand foot and ten thousand horse. “Where are your forces?” he asked the king, looking about him. “O! you don’t see them all, M. de Belin,” said Henry: “you don’t reckon the good God and the good right, but they are ever with me.”
The action began about ten o’clock. The fog was still so thick that there was no seeing one another at ten paces. The ardor on both sides was extreme; and, during nearly three hours, victory seemed to twice shift her colors. Henry at one time found himself entangled amongst some squadrons so disorganized that he shouted, “Courage, gentlemen; pray, courage! Can’t we find fifty gentlemen willing to die with their king?” At this moment Chatillon, issuing from Dieppe with five hundred picked men, arrived on the field of battle. The king dismounted to fight at his side in the trenches; and then, for a quarter of an hour, there was a furious combat, man to man. At last, “when things were in this desperate state,” says Sully, “the fog, which had been very thick all the morning, dropped down suddenly, and the cannon of the castle of Arques getting sight of the enemy’s army, a volley of four pieces was fired, which made four beautiful lanes in their squadrons and battalions. That pulled them up quite short; and three or four volleys in succession, which produced marvellous effects, made them waver, and, little by little, retire all of them behind the turn of the valley, out of cannon-shot, and finally to their quarters.” Mayenne had the retreat sounded. Henry, master of the field, gave chase for a while to the fugitives, and then returned to Arques to thank God for his victory. Mayenne struck his camp and took the road towards Amiens, to pick up a Spanish corps which he was expecting from the Low Countries.
For six months, from September, 1589, to March, 1590, the war continued without any striking or important events. Henry IV. tried to stop it after his success at Arques; he sent word to the Duke of Mayenne by his prisoner Belin, whom he had sent away free on parole, “that he desired peace, and so earnestly, that, without regarding his dignity or his victory, he made him these advances, not that he had any fear of him, but because of the pity he felt for his kingdom’s sufferings.” Mayenne, who lay beneath the double yoke of his party’s passions and his own ambitious projects, rejected the king’s overtures, or allowed them to fall through; and on the 21st of October, 1589, Henry, setting out with his army from Dieppe, moved rapidly on Paris, in order to effect a strategic surprise, whilst Mayenne was rejecting at Amiens his pacific inclinations. The king gained three marches on the Leaguers, and carried by assault the five faubourgs situated on the left bank of the Seine. He would perhaps have carried terror-stricken Paris itself, if the imperfect breaking up of the St. Maixent bridge on the Somme had not allowed Mayenne, notwithstanding his tardiness, to arrive at Paris in time to enter with his army, form a junction with the Leaguers amongst the population, and prevail upon the king to carry his arms elsewhither. “The people of Paris,” says De Thou, “were extravagant enough to suppose that this prince could not escape Mayenne. Already a host of idle and credulous women had been at the pains of engaging windows, which they let very dear, and which they had fitted up magnificently, to see the passage of that fanciful triumph for which their mad hopes had caused them to make every preparation—before the victory.” Henry left some of his lieutenants to carry on the war in the environs of Paris, and himself repaired, on the 21st of November, to Tours, where the royalist Parliament, the exchequer-chamber, the court of taxation, and all the magisterial bodies which had not felt inclined to submit to the despotism of the League, lost no time in rendering him homage, as the head and the representative of the national and the lawful cause. He reigned and ruled, to real purpose, in the eight principal provinces of the North and Centre—Ile-de-France, Picardy, Champagne, Normandy, Orleanness, Touraine, Maine, and Anjou; and his authority, although disputed, was making way in nearly all the other parts of the kingdom. He made war not like a conqueror, but like a king who wanted to meet with acceptance in the places which he occupied and which he would soon have to govern. The inhabitants of Le Mans and of Alencon were able to reopen their shops on the very day on which their town fell into his hands, and those of Vendome the day after. He watched to see that respect was paid by his soldiers, even the Huguenots, to Catholic churches and ceremonies. Two soldiers, having made their way into Le Mans, contrary to orders, after the capitulation, and having stolen a chalice, were hanged on the spot, though they were men of acknowledged bravery. He protected carefully the bishops and all the ecclesiastics who kept aloof from political strife. “If minute details are required,” says a contemporary pamphleteer, “out of a hundred or a hundred and twenty archbishops or bishops existing in the realm of France not a tenth part approve of the counsels of the League.” It was not long before Henry reaped the financial fruits of his protective equity; at the close of 1589 he could count upon a regular revenue of more than two millions of crowns, very insufficient, no doubt, for the wants of his government, but much beyond the official resources of his enemies. He had very soon taken his proper rank in Europe: the Protestant powers which had been eager to recognize him—England, Scotland, the Low Countries, the Scandinavian states, and Reformed Germany—had been joined by the republic of Venice, the most judiciously governed state at that time in Europe, but solely on the ground of political interests and views, independently of any religious question. On the accession of Henry IV., his ambassador, Hurault de Maisse, was received and very well treated at Venice; he was merely excluded from religious ceremonies: the Venetian people joined in the policy of their government; the portrait of the new King of France was everywhere displayed and purchased throughout Venice. Some Venetians went so far as to take service in his army against the League. The Holy Inquisition commenced proceedings against them for heresy; the government stopped the proceedings, and even, says Count Daru, had the Inquisitor thrown into prison. The Venetian senate accredited to the court of Henry IV. the same ambassador who had been at Henry III.‘s; and, on returning to Tours, on the 21st of November, 1589, the king received him to an audience in state. A little later on he did more; he sent the republic, as a pledge of his friendship, his sword—the sword, he said in his letter, which he had used at the battle of Ivry. “The good offices were mutual,” adds M. de Daru; “the Venetians lent Henry IV. sums of money which the badness of the times rendered necessary to him; but their ambassador had orders to throw into the fire, in the king’s presence, the securities for the loan.”
As the government of Henry IV. went on growing in strength and extent, two facts, both of them natural, though antagonistic, were being accomplished in France and in Europe. The moderate Catholics were beginning, not as yet to make approaches towards 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. It has already been remarked with what sagacity Pope Sixtus V. had divined the character of Henry IV., at the very moment of condemning Henry III. for making an alliance with him. When Henry IV. had become king, Sixtus V. pronounced strongly against a heretic king, and maintained, in opposition to him, his alliance with Philip II. and the League. “France,” said he, “is a good and noble kingdom, which has infinity of benefices and is specially dear to us; and so we try to save her; but religion sits nearer than France to our heart.” He chose for his legate in France Cardinal Gaetani, whom he knew to be agreeable to Philip II. and gave him instructions in harmony with the Spanish policy. Having started for his post, Gaetani was a long while on the road, halting at Lyons, amongst other places, as if he were in no hurry to enter upon his duties. At the close of 1589, Henry IV., king for the last five months and already victorious at Arques, appointed as his ambassador at Rome Francis de Luxembourg, Duke of Pinei, to try and enter into official relations with the pope. On the 6th of January, 1590, Sixtus V., at his reception of the cardinals, announced to them this news. Badoero, ambassador of Venice at Rome, leaned forward and whispered in his ear, “We must pray God to inspire the King of Navarre. On the day when your Holiness embraces him, and then only, the affairs of France will be adjusted. Humanly speaking, there is no other way of bringing peace to that kingdom.” The pope confined himself to replying that God would do all for the best, and that, for his own part, he would wait. On arriving at Rome, “the Duke of Luxembourg repaired to the Vatican with two and twenty carriages occupied by French gentlemen; but, at the palace, he found the door of the pope’s apartments closed, the sentries doubled, and the officers on duty under orders to intimate to the French, the chief of the embassy excepted, that they must lay aside their swords. At the door of the Holy Father’s closet, the duke and three gentlemen of his train were alone allowed to enter. The indignation felt by the French was mingled with apprehensions of an ambush. Luxembourg himself could not banish a feeling of vague terror; great was his astonishment when, on his introduction to the pontiff, the latter received him with demonstrations of affection, asked him news of his journey, said he would have liked to give him quarters in the palace, made him sit down,—a distinction reserved for the ambassadors of kings, —and, lastly, listened patiently to the French envoy’s long recital. In fact, the receptions intra et, extra muros bore very little resemblance one to the other, but the difference between them corresponded pretty faithfully with the position of Sixtus V., half engaged to the League by Gaetani’s commission and to Philip II. by the steps he had recently taken, and already regretting that he was so far gone in the direction of Spain.” [Sixtus V, by Baron Hubner, late ambassador of Austria at Paris and at Rome, t. ii. pp. 280-282.]
Unhappily Sixtus V. died on the 27th of August, 1590, before having modified, to any real purpose, his bearing towards the King of France and his instructions to his legate. After Pope Urban VIII.‘s apparition of thirteen days’ duration, Gregory XIV. was elected pope on the 5th of December, 1590; and, instead of a head of the church able enough and courageous enough to comprehend and practise a policy European and Italian as well as Catholic in its scope, there was a pope 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, was fought the battle of Ivry, a village six leagues from Evreux, on the left bank of the Eure. “Starting from Dreux on the 12th of March” [Poirson, Histoire du Regne d’Henri IV., t. i. p. 180], “the royal army had arrived the same day at Nonancourt, marching with the greatest regularity by divisions and always in close order, through fearful weather, frost having succeeding rain; moreover, it traversed a portion of the road during the shades of evening. The soldier was harassed and knocked up. But scarcely had he arrived at his destination for the day, when he found large fires lighted everywhere, and provisions in abundance, served out with intelligent regularity to the various quarters of cavalry and infantry. He soon recovered all his strength and daring.” The king, in concert with the veteran Marshal de Biron, had taken these prudent measures. All the historians, contemporary and posterior, have described in great detail the battle of Ivry, the manoeuvres and alternations of success that distinguished it; by rare good fortune, we have an account of the affair written the very same evening in the camp at Rosny by Henry IV. himself, and at once sent off to some of his principal partisans who were absent, amongst others to M. de la Verune, governor of Caen. We will content ourselves here with the king’s own words, striking in their precision, brevity, and freedom from any self-complacent gasconading on the narrator’s part, respecting either his party or himself.