The ascendancy of France, 1598-1715

by Henry Offley Wakeman

The religious wars had afforded a great opportunity to the nobles of asserting their independence. Many of them had embraced Calvinism, and so gained for their disintegrating aspirations a religious sanction and a political ideal. It is said that by the Edict of Nantes Calvinistic worship was legalised in 3500 castles. Faction is ever strong when the Crown is weak, and Henry IV. had to buy the doubtful allegiance of many of the smaller nobles by sheer bribery, before he could establish himself upon the throne. But no sooner had he made his position secure than the nobles found that they had a master. They might be courtiers but not politicians. Henry deliberately intrusted the affairs of government to men of business of inferior rank, dependent on himself, and jealous of the nobles. Rigid inquiry was made into the privileges claimed by the nobles, and those which could not be substantiated were rescinded. The institution of the paulette was intended to create a noblesse of the robe as a counterpoise to the noblesse of the sword. Duelling, that much-loved privilege of a gentleman, was absolutely forbidden, and the issue of letters of pardon to those who killed their adversary in a duel stopped. The nobles, accustomed to the licence of civil war, soon grew restive under the strong hand of Henry. The conspiracy of Biron, 1602. The maréchal de Biron, on the part of the Catholics, and the duc de Bouillon, the leader of the Huguenots, permitted themselves to enter into relations with Savoy and Spain, and to talk somewhat vaguely of a partition of France, in a way which was incompatible with loyalty to the king. When Henry struck he struck hard. The thirty-two wounds which Biron had received in the service of France failed to obtain his pardon. In 1602 he was executed, and his death gave the signal for the beginning of that war of revenge on the part of the Crown against the nobles, which was carried on with such relentless severity by Richelieu, and did not cease until the triumph of the Crown was assured under Louis XIV. The duc de Bouillon escaped to Germany, the comte d’Auvergne was imprisoned, the duc d’Epernon, frightened into submission, was pardoned. Perhaps Henry himself hardly dared to touch the former companion of Henry III., the governor of half France, and the proudest of all her proud nobility. Four years afterwards the vengeance of Henry was still awake though all the excitement and danger had long ago quieted down. In 1606 he travelled through the disaffected districts of the south and south-west accompanied by an army, destroyed several castles belonging to the nobles, and put to death, after sentences by special tribunals, those who had taken a prominent part in the late troubles.

MAP SHOWING THE TERRITORIAL GAINS OF FRANCE IN THE 17th CENTURY.

But it was in the sphere of foreign affairs that the genius of Henry IV. fully displayed itself. For many years France had played a sorry part in European politics. If Francis I. had done something to preserve Europe from falling under the yoke of Charles V., men also remembered that he was the perjured of Madrid, the abettor and the ally of the Turk. Foreign policy of Henry IV. Since his death France had fallen lower and lower in the scale of nations, until under the stress of the religious wars she seemed to bid fair to become another Italy, a plaything tossed to and fro among the nations of Europe. It was the stubbornness of the Dutch, and the craft of Elizabeth, not the patriotism of Frenchmen, which had saved France from the yoke of Philip II. in that terrible time. After the peace of Vervins Henry had to restore the national prestige, and regain the national influence which had died almost to nothing. The indefensible frontier of France. The great danger to France lay from the pressure exercised upon an indefensible frontier on all sides by the Austro-Spanish power. While Spain held Roussillon, Franche-Comté, and the Netherlands, and could reckon on the vassalage of Savoy, while the passes of the Vosges were in the hands of the Empire, the Austro-Spanish House held the gates of France. France could not breathe with the hand of her enemy on her throat. But the strength of a chain is that of its weakest link, and Henry’s eagle eye soon detected the weak place in the circle of iron which bound him. It lay in north Italy, the old battle-field of France and Spain. The Milanese was a rich open country, depending for its protection from attack upon its fortresses and its rivers. It was a fief of the Empire in the possession of Spain, and its communications with Spain by sea through the friendly port of Genoa were more easy than with Germany, through the tedious and often difficult mountain paths which connected the Valtelline with the Brenner pass and the valley of the Inn. It lay therefore invitingly open to attack from the mountains of Savoy on the west, and those of the Grisons on the north, and if once it fell into the hands of France, not only would the chain which bound her be broken, but a terrible counterblow would be dealt to the influence of the Austro-Spanish House in Europe, for through Milan ran the road by which Spain could best open communications in safety with south Germany and Franche-Comté. If that way was blocked, the only route possible for the troops and treasure of Spain was the long sea voyage by the Bay of Biscay and the English Channel to Antwerp and the Spanish Netherlands, a route fraught with peril from the storms which rage round Cape Finisterre, and from the English and French privateers which swarmed in the narrow seas.

Importance of Savoy.

In Italy, therefore, lay the opportunity of France, and Savoy held the key of the position. The duchy of Savoy, which still extended as far as the Rhone, and disputed with the king of France for the rule over Provence and Dauphiné, had been gradually pushed by its more powerful neighbour more and more towards Italy. Its duke had quite lately established himself in his capital of Turin at the foot of the mountain, and his ambition was to become an Italian prince. But though Piedmont and not Savoy had become the centre of his power, the border land of Savoy and not the Italian land of Piedmont became necessarily the centre of his policy. Situated on the mountains between France and the Milanese, Savoy held the gates both of France and of Imperial Italy. Through her mountain passes could pour, when she gave the word, the troops of France into the fertile plains of Lombardy, or those of the Habsburgs into the valley of the Rhone. A position so decisive and so dangerous rendered a consistent policy impossible. Courted by both parties, her opportunity lay in playing off one against the other as long as possible, but her safety necessitated the choice of the stronger for her ally in the end. A misreading of the political barometer at a critical moment would mean nothing less than national extinction. From the time that the rivalry between France and the Austro-Spanish power began to develop itself in Italy, the dukes of Savoy had been compelled to follow this tortuous policy. During the Italian expeditions of Charles VIII. and Louis XII. they were on the side of victorious France, but in the war between Francis I. and Charles V. Savoy veered to the side of the Emperor. Punished for this by the occupation of his country by French troops for twenty-five years, the duke was reinstated in his dominions at the peace of Cateau-Cambrésis (1559), subject to the continued occupation by France of six fortresses, including Susa and Pinerolo, which commanded the gates of important passes through the Alps. In the troubles which afflicted France under the later Valois kings, Charles Emmanuel of Savoy succeeded in obtaining possession of Saluzzo; and although it was provided in the treaty of Vervins that he should restore it, the provision remained a dead letter. This gave Henry IV. the opportunity he desired of recalling Savoy to the French alliance. In 1600, after the death of Gabrielle d’Estrées, he had procured a divorce from his first wife Marguerite de Valois, and had strengthened his influence in Italy by his marriage with Marie de Médicis, the daughter of the grand-duke of Tuscany. Cession of Bresse and Bugey to France. In the same year he marched upon Savoy and quickly overran it, but in January 1601 agreed to a treaty with the young duke Charles Emmanuel, who had succeeded Emmanuel Philibert in 1580, by which Saluzzo was left in the hands of Savoy, but France obtained instead the two small duchies of Bresse and Bugey. By this treaty Savoy was brought back into alliance with France at the price of the surrender of a distant possession, which, in the hands of France, could not but be considered a standing menace and a cause of hostility by the court of Turin.

Thus Henry IV. laid the foundations of the policy afterwards so successfully pursued in Italy by Richelieu. In fact, to both of these great statesmen the end to be attained was the same. The abasement of the Austro-Spanish House in the interests of France was the beginning and end of their foreign policy. But Henry had not the same opportunities of putting his designs into execution which were enjoyed by his successor. Attack upon the Austro-Spanish House. It is difficult to say how far the Great Design attributed to Henry in the Memoirs of Sully was ever more than a dream. The Great Design. Statesmen have often sought relief from the ennui engendered by the pettiness of diplomatic routine in the delightful task of building political castles in the air, and it is likely enough that Henry, in his more imaginative moments, conceived of a Europe in which religious wars should cease and national dissensions rest, at the bidding of an arbitration court which represented a confederacy of free states, and was the mouthpiece of a law of religious toleration. It is not less likely that his shrewd genius also foresaw that in a Europe whose unity depended on political confederacy, whose peace was secured by religious toleration, there would be no room for the Holy Roman Empire or for the monarchy of Spain. The destruction of the Austro-Spanish House was a condition precedent to the success of the Great Design. If Henry ever intended seriously to try to combine those who represented the political forces of Protestantism in a confederacy against Spain and the Empire, based on a recognition of the three religions, he must have abandoned the attempt as hopeless on the death of Elizabeth in 1603.

The Cleves-Jülich question.

A few years later, however, an opportunity presented itself of dealing a blow at the Austro-Spanish House in a less original but equally effective way. In 1609 John William,[1] duke of Cleves, Jülich, and Berg died without children, and the right of succession was claimed by two princes. John Sigismund, the elector of Brandenburg, whose wife was the child of the eldest daughter of William the Rich, brother and predecessor of the last duke, rested his wife’s claim partly on his descent from the elder branch, and partly on a will made by William the Rich in which he gave the descendants of the elder daughter preference over those of the younger. The count palatine of Neuburg had married a younger daughter of William the Rich, who claimed the inheritance as being the nearest of kin. The eldest sister of John William being dead, she made over her claim to her son Wolfgang William. The question was therefore mainly the old one of the eldest by descent against the nearest of kin, and was eminently one for the imperial courts to decide. But the matter was complicated by religious considerations. The three duchies lay along the course of the lower Rhine from the frontiers of the United Provinces nearly to Andernach, enclosing within their embraces a considerable part of the archbishopric of Köln. The population was Catholic but both the claimants were Lutherans, and on the principle of cujus regio ejus religio, laid down by the religious peace of Augsburg, if the duchies passed into Lutheran hands, there was a strong probability that they would before long not only become Lutheran themselves, but drag the vacillating archbishopric of Köln with them. The Emperor, Rudolf, in order to guard against this danger, at once claimed the right of administering the duchies until the question of the succession was settled, and sent an army to occupy Jülich. But if the Catholics could not permit the duchies to fall into Lutheran hands, still less could Protestant or French interests see unmoved the imperial armies encamped on the borders of the United Provinces, in close proximity to the frontiers of France and the Spanish Netherlands. An imperial army on the lower Rhine was a menace alike to north German Protestantism, to the hardly won Dutch independence, and to English and French jealousy.

League under Henry IV. against the Emperor, 1610.