This organization, however, had more of appearance than reality. The Duke de Bouillon remained neutral. The Marshal de Lesdiguières was on the point of embracing (Roman) Catholicism. The Duke de la Trémouille, and the Marquis de Châtillon, grandson of Coligny, were wavering, and soon about to exchange the command of the Huguenots for the bâtons of marshals. The Marquis de la Force dreaded an open rupture with the court. The Duke de Sully was anxious for quiet. Mornay refused to take part in this recourse to arms. There were among all the leaders but the Duke de Rohan, and his brother, the Duke de Soubise, who showed themselves disposed to throw their whole fortunes into the new wars of religion.
Nor did the provinces that had been divided into circles, reply with a unanimous voice to the appeal of the assembly Picardy, Normandy, the Orleanais, the Isle of France, where the number of Reformers was small, even Poitou and Dauphiny, where they were more numerous, refused to take up arms. All the efforts of resistance were concentrated in Saintonge, Guienne, Quercy, and the two provinces of Languedoc.
The regulations adopted by the assembly of La Rochelle, for the maintenance of religion and good order in the army, are deserving of mention, as an interesting trait of manners. Pastors were to say prayers and preach daily to the soldiery. The troops were forbidden to swear, under pain of a fine proportioned to the rank of the delinquent; a teston for a private, a crown for an officer. Heavier penalties awaited any who brought women into the military encampments. The protection of agriculture and commerce was enjoined. Prisoners were placed under the safeguard of the council. These regulations proved that the assembly of La Rochelle were anxious to honour this new war; but their execution required a fervent piety, that had already become rare at that time.
IV.
Louis XIII. had commenced hostilities, by advancing his army towards the Loire on the 24th of April, fifteen days before the adoption of the resolution at La Rochelle. Some, the sagest members of his council, had persisted in proposing means of accommodation. They represented that the Huguenots held two hundred fortified places, that their soldiers were of approved bravery, that despair made them still more redoubtable, that there were in the churches four hundred thousand men capable of bearing arms, and that the Calvinists had for sixty years lost more by peace than by war. Others counselled, on the contrary, that a great and decisive blow should be struck against the Calvinist party, and Louis XIII. adopted the last opinion.
The Jesuits, his early masters and spiritual directors, urged him unceasingly to undertake the destruction of the churches, and invented arguments to make him safely violate the word he had given to the heretics. “The promises of the king,” said his confessor Arnoux, “are either promises of conscience or of state. Those made to the Huguenots are not of conscience, for they are against the precepts of the Church, and if they are of state, they should be referred to the privy council, whose advice is, not to keep them.” Thus reasoned the contemporary and brother of Escobar.
The pope offered two hundred thousand crowns, on condition that the Huguenots were brought back willingly, or by force, into the Church of Rome. He also addressed a brief to Louis XIII., wherein he praised him for having imitated his ancestors, who had “honoured the exhortations of the pope as much as the commandments of God.” The cardinals offered, on the same condition, two hundred thousand crowns, and the priests a million.
In the harangues pronounced by the orator of the clergy, the king was pressed to follow the example of Philip Augustus, the grandfather of Saint Louis, who had utterly exterminated the Albigenses, or at least the example of the Emperor Constantius, who had forced the idolaters to quit the towns and to dwell in the villages, whence they had derived, said this priest, the name of Pagans.
The emissaries of Spain, with which country the double marriage had led to a strict alliance, were urgent for war, from reasons of a different kind. Every time France was troubled, the court of Madrid felt stronger, and its language assumed a higher tone.