At the moment of her departure for Béarn, she clasped her son Henry in her arms, bathed him with her tears, and beseeched him to preserve the faith, in which he had been educated. One day Henry IV. had to forget both the prayers and the farewell of his mother.
When she was once more in her kingdom, Jeanne d’Albret, taking up the work of Margaret of Valois, opened schools, colleges, and hospitals, and published a new code—a precious monument of good sense and wisdom—which bears the name of Stil de la reine Jehanne. Soon there was not a beggar in Béarn. The children of the poor, who showed any aptitude for sciences and literature, were educated at the expense of the treasury. Drunkenness, usury, and games of hazard were severely repressed. All the arts flourished with the new faith; and even now, at the end of three centuries, the people of Béarn pronounce the name of the good queen, who so greatly raised the prosperity of their country, with an affectionate veneration.
Jeanne d’Albret had many struggles to sustain, and many perils to encounter. The Cardinal d’Armagnac reproached her, in the name of the pope, with having introduced into her dominions a heresy which had committed so many excesses. “You make me blush for you,” she answered him: “Take out the beam from your own eye, to see the mote in your neighbour’s; cleanse the earth from that just blood which you and yours have shed.”
In 1563, Pius IV. cited the queen of Navarre to appear before the tribunal of the Inquisition within six months, under pain of forfeiting her crown and her possessions. Jeanne d’Albert complained of this (insult) to all the sovereigns of Europe; and Charles IX., on the advice of the Chancellor l’Hospital, told the pontiff that he was singularly offended at this attempt to withdraw a subject and vassal of the crown of France from her natural judges. Once again the pope gave way. The times of Gregory VII. no longer existed!
Escaped from this peril, Jeanne d’Albret encountered another. The historian De Thou relates that the project was conceived at the court of Madrid, of carrying her off with her children, in order to hand her over to the Spanish Inquisition. The wife of Philip II., Elizabeth, a daughter of France, informed her of this intention, and the plot failed.
If Jeanne d’Albret had been placed on a larger theatre, she might have been the greatest woman of her age. “She was,” says the Abbé de Laboureur, in his notes on the Mémoires de Castelnau, “the wisest, most generous, most learned princess of her time; she had in her heart the source of every virtue, and of every great quality.” Agrippa d’Aubigné says also: “Of woman she had nothing but the sex, her whole soul belonged to manly things, her powerful spirit to vast affairs, and her unconquerable heart to great adversities.”
Whatever excellence Henry IV. possessed of a chivalrous character, or of love for his people, he inherited from his noble mother, and France must ever associate the name of Jeanne d’Albret with that of the most popular of her kings.
V.
The defection of the king of Navarre, lending weight to the triumvirate, bore the fruit which the (Roman) Catholic party expected. Coligny and his brothers, seeing that they were treated with mistrust, withdrew from court. The prince of Condé, who had hitherto been kept at a distance, went and fixed himself at Paris; and the Guises thus had full liberty to commit acts, which in more settled times would have been esteemed as high treason against the chief of the state. They concluded an alliance with the king of Spain and the duke of Savoy, and undertook to open to them the gates of the kingdom for the extermination of heretics. At the same time, they tore up the Edict of January at the sword’s point, by the massacre of Vassy.
Vassy was a small, but strong town in the county of Champagne. It contained about three thousand inhabitants, the third of whom, without counting the surrounding villages, professed the Reformed faith. This change of religion irritated the Lorraines, who were established near the town, in their dominion of Joinville, and in particular a very aged lady, the dowager-duchess of Guise, who could not understand why the Huguenots had not already been put an end to. She pretended that the inhabitants of Vassy had no right, as vassals of her grand-daughter Mary Stuart, to choose a new religion without her permission. She therefore threatened them with a terrible vengeance, and as they gave no heed to her violence, she invited her son, the duke Francis of Guise, to make a striking example of such insolent rebels.