On that fatal day, when the knife of Ravaillac changed the destinies of France and of Europe, Louis XIII, the successor of the murdered King, was not yet nine years old. The fear of troubles within the realm and of complications without exacted the immediate institution of a regency, and Villeroy and the Chancellor, Brulart de Sillery, exhorted Marie de’ Medici, who was lying upon her bed prostrated with grief, to act “as man and as King.”
The great nobles, out of pity or the desire to assert their own importance, were zealous in the Queen’s cause; and some who had scarcely been on bowing terms with each other for years were seen to embrace and vow to die together sword in hand if the necessity should arise.
D’Épernon, Colonel-General of the French infantry, caused the approaches to the Louvre and the Pont-Neuf to be occupied by the French Guards; Guise, with part of a force of some 300 horse which he and Bassompierre had mustered, proceeded to the Hôtel de Ville to obtain from the Corporation a formal recognition of the new King and Regent; while Bassompierre, with the remainder, paraded the streets “to appease tumults and seditions.” Sully alone showed himself undecided, feeble and timorous. At the news of the King’s assassination, ill though he was, he had mounted his horse and set out for the Louvre, accompanied by some forty of his guards and attendants. Near the Place Saint-Jean he met Bassompierre and his cavalcade, the sight of whom appears to have filled him with misgivings.
“He began,” writes Bassompierre, “to say to us in lachrymose tones: ‘Gentlemen, if the service which you have vowed to the King, whom, to our great misfortune, we have just lost, is also imprinted in your souls, as it ought to be in those of all good Frenchmen, swear now at once to preserve the same fidelity to the King his son and successor, and that you will employ your blood and your life to avenge his death.’
“ ‘Monsieur,’ I replied, ‘it is we who are making others take this oath, and we have no need of anyone to exhort us to do a thing to which we are already so committed.’
“I know not whether my answer surprised him, or whether he repented of having come so far from his fortress; but he turned back forthwith, and went to shut himself up in the Bastille, sending at the same time to seize all the bread that could be found in the markets and the bakers’ shops. He sent orders also to M. de Rohan, his son-in-law, to face about with 6,000 Swiss who were in Champagne, and of whom he was Colonel General, and to march straight on Paris.... MM. de Praslin and de Créquy went to invite him to present himself before the King, like all the other grandees; but he did not come until the morrow, when M. de Guise brought him with difficulty, after which he countermanded his orders to his son-in-law and the Swiss, who had already advanced a day’s march towards Paris.”
Of the Princes of the Blood who might have been able to aspire to the regency, one, Condé, was a voluntary exile in the dominions of the King of Spain; the other, the Comte de Soissons, had left Paris in high dudgeon before the coronation of the Queen, because Henri IV had refused to permit Madame la Comtesse to wear on her ceremonial mantle a row of fleurs de lys more than the wife of his legitimated son the Duc de Vendôme. As for the Prince de Conti, he was deaf, afflicted with an impediment in his speech, and almost imbecile. Outside the Princes of the Blood, and in the absence of the States-General, there was only one power recognised by all—the Parlement of Paris. And to this body Marie de’ Medici at once addressed herself.
In her name, the Procurator-General demanded that “now and without adjourning, the Parliament should provide, as it had been accustomed to do, for the regency and the government of the realm.” The Parlement was too convinced of its right and too flattered by the part it was asked to play to hesitate. But, as a matter of form, it was proceeding to deliberate upon the matter, when d’Épernon, in his doublet, with his drawn sword in his hand, swaggered into the chamber, and, having begged the assembly to excuse his discourtesy, invited it to hasten. As he left, Guise entered in the same costume, took his seat and protested his devotion to the Crown. The First President, Achille de Harlay, solemnly ordered the duke’s words to be recorded; and the Court unanimously declared the Queen Mother Regent, “to have the administration of the affairs of the realm during the minority of the said lord her son, together with all power and authority.” It was quick work: Henri IV had not been dead two hours.
It was much, without doubt, to have settled so expeditiously the future government of France. But what a task for a woman, for a foreigner, for one, too, who bore a name little calculated to reassure the bulk of the nation, which remembered only too well the troubles in which the rule of another Medici had involved it, to be called upon to exercise supreme power in circumstances so difficult! Without, a war on the point of breaking out; within, princes affecting an entire independence and even negotiating with the foreigner; a turbulent nobility whom even the strong hand of Henri IV had not always been able to keep in check; the Protestant party entrenched in the West and South of France, with its own organisation, its privileges, its places of surety; finally, the governors of the different provinces, possessed of the most extensive powers and strong enough to renounce practically all obedience to the Crown. Marie de’ Medici has often been reproached with weakness, and weak in many ways she certainly was; but it would have required the energy and the resolution of an Elizabeth or a Catherine the Great to have steered the ship of State uninjured through the shoals and quicksands which beset its course.
The Regent retained the Ministers of the late King, Villeroy, Jeannin, Sillery, and Sully, and, to calm the apprehensions of the Protestants, lost no time in confirming the Edict of Nantes. But the war so long meditated against the House of Austria was promptly abandoned, though a small army under Le Châtre and Rohan was sent to co-operate with Maurice of Nassau in recovering Juliers, which was handed over to the Electors of Brandenburg and Neuburg, on their undertaking not to interfere with the exercise of the Catholic religion in that duchy.