Death of Jeanne d'Albret, June 9, 1572.
Such were the anxieties of the Queen of Navarre in behalf of a son whom she had carefully reared, hoping to see in him a pillar of the Protestant faith. She was to be spared the sight both of those scenes in his life which might have flushed her cheek with pride, and of other scenes which would have caused her to blush with shame. At length the last difficulties in the way of Henry of Navarre's marriage, so far as the court and the queen were concerned, were removed.[885] Charles and Catharine no longer insisted that Margaret should be allowed the mass when in Béarn; while Jeanne reluctantly abandoned her objections to the celebration of the marriage ceremony in the city of Paris. Accordingly, about the middle of May the Queen of Navarre left Blois and came to the capital for the purpose of devoting her attention to the final arrangements for the wedding. She had not, however, been long in Paris before she fell sick of a violent fever, to which it became evident that she must succumb. We are told by a writer who regards this as a manifest provocation of Heaven, that one of her last acts before her sudden illness had been a visit to the Louvre to petition the king that, on the approaching festival of Corpus Christi (Fête-Dieu), the "idol," as she styled the wafer, might not be borne in solemn procession past the house in which she lodged; and that the king had granted her request.[886] During the short interval before her death she exhibited the same devotion as previously to the purer Christianity she had embraced, mingled with affectionate solicitude for her son and daughter, so soon to be left orphans. Her constancy and fortitude proved her worthy of all the eulogies that were lavished upon her.[887] On Monday, the ninth of June, she died, sincerely mourned by the Huguenots, who felt that in her they had lost one of their most able and efficient supports, the weakness of whose sex had not made her inferior to the most active and resolute man of the party. Even Catharine de' Medici, who had hated her with all her cowardly heart, made some show of admiring her virtues, now that she was no longer formidable and her straightforward policy had ceased to thwart the underhanded and shifting diplomacy in which the queen mother delighted. Yet the report gained currency that Jeanne had been poisoned at Catharine's instigation. She had, it was said, bought gloves of Monsieur René, the queen mother's perfumer[888]—a man who boasted of his acquaintance with the Italian art of poisoning—and had almost instantly felt the effects of some subtle powder with which they were impregnated. To contradict this and other sinister stories, the king ordered an examination of her remains to be made; but no corroborative evidence was discovered. It is true that the physicians are said to have avoided, ostensibly through motives of humanity, any dissection of the brain, where alone the evidence could have been found.[889] Be this as it may, the charge of poisoning is met so uniformly in the literature of the sixteenth century, on occasion of every sudden death, that the most credulous reader becomes sceptical as to its truth, and prefers to indulge the hope that perhaps the age may not have been quite so bad as it was represented by contemporaries.
The Prince of Béarn now became King of Navarre; and, as the court went into mourning for the deceased queen, his nuptials with Margaret of Valois were deferred until the month of August.
Coligny and the boy king.
Admiral Coligny, instead of returning to La Rochelle after his friendly reception at the court at Blois, had gone to Châtillon, where his ruined country-seat and devastated plantations had great need of his presence.[890] Here he was soon afterward joined by his wife, travelling from La Rochelle with a special safe-conduct from the king, the preamble of which declared Charles's will and intention to retain Coligny near his own person, "in order to make use of him in his most grave and important affairs, as a worthy minister, whose virtue is sufficiently known and tried."[891] Coligny was not left long in his rural retirement. Charles expressed, and probably felt, profound disgust with his former advisers, and knew not whom to trust. On one occasion, about this time, he held a conversation with Téligny respecting the Flemish war. Téligny had just entreated his Majesty not to mention to the queen mother the details into which he entered—a promise which Charles readily gave, and swore with his ordinary profanity to observe. And then the poor young king, with a desperation which must enlist our sympathy in his behalf, undertook to explain to Coligny's son-in-law his own solitude in the midst of a crowded court. There was no one, he said, upon whom he could rely for sound counsel, or for the execution of his plans. Tavannes was prudent, indeed; but, having been Anjou's lieutenant, and almost the author of his victories, would oppose a war that threatened to obscure his laurels. Vieilleville was wedded to his cups. Cossé was avaricious, and would sell all his friends for ten crowns. Montmorency alone was good and trustworthy, but so given to the pleasures of the chase that he would be sure to be absent at the very moment his help was indispensable.[892] It is not strange, under these circumstances, that Charles should have turned with sincere respect, and almost with a kind of affection, to that stern old Huguenot warrior, upright, honorable, pious, a master of the art of war, never more to be dreaded than after the reverses which he accepted as lessons from a Father's hands.
As for Coligny himself, his task was not one of his own seeking. But he pitied from his heart the boy-king—still more boyish in character than in years—as he pitied and loved France. Above all, he was unwilling to omit anything that might be vitally important for the progress of the Gospel in his native land and abroad. His eyes were not blind to his danger. When, at the king's request, he came to Paris, he received letters of remonstrance for his imprudence, from all parts of France. He was reminded that other monarchs before Charles had broken their pledges. Huss had been burned at Constance notwithstanding the emperor's safe conduct, and the maxim that no faith need be kept with heretics had obtained a mournful currency.[893] To these warnings Admiral Coligny replied at one moment with some annoyance, indignant that his young sovereign should be so suspected; at another, with more calmness, magnanimously dismissing all solicitude for himself in comparison with the great ends he had in view. When he was urged to consider that other Huguenots, less hated by the papists than he was, had been treacherously assassinated—as was the general opinion then—Andelot, Cardinal Châtillon, and lately the Queen of Navarre—his reply was still the same: "I am well aware that it is against me principally that the enmity is directed. And yet how great a misfortune will it be for France, if, for the sake of my individual preservation, she must be kept in perpetual alarm and be plunged on every occasion into new troubles! Or, what benefit will it be to me to live thus in continual distrust of the king? If my prince wishes to slay me, he can accomplish his will in any part of the realm. As a royal officer, I cannot in honor refuse to comply with the summons of the king, meantime committing myself to the providence of Him who holds in his hand the hearts of kings and princes, and has numbered my years—nay, the very hairs of my head. If I succeed in going in arms to the Low Countries, I hope that I may do signal service, and change hatred into good-will. But, if I fall there, at least the enmity against me will cease, and perhaps men will live in peace, without its being needful to set a whole world in commotion for the protection of the life of a single man."[894]
The dispensation delayed.
The king's earnestness.
The juncture was critical, although the future still looked auspicious. Charles was resolved that the marriage of his sister should go forward, and seemed almost as resolute, when he had thus secured peace at home between Papist and Huguenot, to embark in a war against Spain—the natural enemy of French repose and greatness. Gregory the Thirteenth—for Pius the Fifth had died on the first of May, 1572, although his maxims and his counsels were unhappily still alive, and endowed with a mischievous activity—refused to grant the dispensation for the marriage except on impossible conditions.[895] But Charles was too impatient to await his caprice. "My dear aunt," he once said to the Queen of Navarre, a short time before her death, "I honor you more than the Pope, and I love my sister more than I fear him. I am not indeed a Huguenot, but neither am I a blockhead; and if the Pope play the fool too much, I will myself take Margot," his common nickname for his sister, "by the hand, and give her away in marriage in full prêche."[896]
Charles was apparently equally in earnest in his intention to maintain his edict for the advantage of the Huguenots. Accordingly he published a new declaration to this effect, and sent it to his governors, accompanied with a letter expressive of his great gratification that the spirit of distrust was everywhere giving place to confidence, a proof of which was to be found in the recent restitution of the four cities of La Rochelle, Montauban, La Charité, and Cognac, by those in whose hands they were intrusted by the edict of St. Germain.[897] And Charles's correspondence shows still further that the projects urged by Coligny, Louis of Nassau, and other prominent patriots, had made a deep impression upon his imagination, now that for the first time the prospect of a truly noble campaign opened before him. In carrying out the extensive plan against the Spanish king, it was indispensable—so thought the wisest politicians of the time—to secure the co-operation of the Turk. The extent of Philip's dominions in the Old and the New World, the prestige of his successes, the enormous treasure he was said to derive yearly from his colonial establishments in the Indies, all gave him a reputation for power which a more critical examination would have dissipated; but the time for this had not yet arrived. Consequently Charles had sent his ambassador to Constantinople, intending through him to conclude an alliance offensive and defensive with the Moslems. And his declarations to the half-Protestant prelate were explicit enough: "All my humors conspire to make me oppose the greatness of the Spaniards, and I am deliberating how I may therein conduct myself the most skilfully that I can."[898] "I have concluded a league with the Queen of England—a circumstance which, with the understanding I have with the Princes of Germany, puts the Spaniards in a wonderful jealousy."[899] Not only so, but he instructs the ambassador to inform the Grand Seignior that he has a large number of vessels ready, with twelve or fifteen thousand troops about to embark, ostensibly to protect his own harbors, "but in reality intended to keep the Catholic king uneasy, and to give boldness to those Beggars of the Netherlands to bestir themselves and form such enterprises as they already have done."[900] If these assurances had been addressed to a Protestant prince, it would readily be comprehended that they might have had for their object to lull his co-religionists into a fatal security. But, as they were intended only for a Mohammedan ruler, I can see no room for the suspicion that Charles was at this time animated by anything else than an unfeigned desire to realize the plan of Coligny, of a confederacy that should shatter the much-vaunted empire of Philip the Second.