The ascendancy of France, 1598-1715

by Henry Offley Wakeman

Henry IV. seized the opportunity. He at once declared himself the protector of the rights of the elector of Brandenburg and the count of Neuburg, and put himself at the head of an alliance of the enemies of the Austro-Spanish House. England, the United Provinces, the German Protestant Union, Venice and Savoy responded to his call. Three French armies were set on foot, one was directed to the Pyrenees, the second under Lesdiguières was to co-operate with Savoy and Venice in the conquest of the Milanese, while the third, under the command of the king himself, attacked Jülich and occupied the duchies in conjunction with the Dutch and English contingents and the German Protestants. It seemed as if the death-knell of the Austro-Spanish power had sounded. Rudolf II., ignorant of politics and half-crazed in intellect, was implicated in serious quarrels with his unwilling subjects of Bohemia and Hungary. In Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola, Ferdinand, the nephew of the Emperor, was, with the help of the Jesuits, waging an ardent and determined war against the Calvinism which threatened to take a strong root even in the hereditary dominions of the Habsburgs. Wanting in money, wanting in leadership, wanting in unity, the power of Austria had no troops on which it could depend, no subjects which it could trust. Nor was Spain in much better plight. Exhausted by the ambition of Philip II., misgoverned by a weak king and an incapable minister, she had chosen this very time gratuitously to deal a serious blow to her own prosperity by expelling from her borders the Moriscoes, the most laborious and intelligent of her working population. It was clear that she could do little more to help the cause than to defend her own frontiers, and hold the Milanese against the attacks of the allies. The forces of the Catholic League, the resources of Maximilian of Bavaria, and the genius of his general Tilly, were in fact all that Catholicism and the Austro-Spanish power had to rely upon in the death duel in which she had almost by inadvertence engaged herself. Assassination of Henry IV. Help came from a quarter the least expected. A terrible crime struck France with tragic suddenness to her knees and saved the House of Austria. As Henry IV. passed through the streets of Paris to visit his minister Sully, but two days before the date fixed for his departure for the campaign, a fanatic named Ravaillac plunged a dagger into his heart. With Henry IV. died the combination of which he was the head and soul, and the capture of Jülich from the imperialists by Maurice of Nassau, aided by a small English contingent, was the only step taken in the direction of realising the Great Design of the first of the Bourbons.

Marie de Medicis declared Regent.

The dagger of Ravaillac not only saved the Austro-Spanish House but plunged France into fifteen years of misery and dishonour. The young king Louis XIII. was but nine years old and a regency was inevitable. The duc d’Épernon was the only man who showed the necessary energy and presence of mind to deal with the crisis which had so suddenly arisen. Surrounding the palace and the Hôtel de Ville with his own troops and those of the other nobles on whom he could rely, he entered the chamber where the Parlement was assembled, and demanded that they should at once recognise the queen-mother as regent. Pointing significantly to his sword he said: ‘This sword is as yet in its scabbard, but if the queen is not declared regent before this assembly separates, I foresee that it will have to be drawn. That which can be done to-day without danger cannot be done to-morrow without difficulty and bloodshed.’ There were many in the Parlement who were not sorry to see that body thus suddenly raised into the unaccustomed position of the arbiter of the government of France. There were many more who found the arguments of Épernon too powerful to be resisted, and Marie was without further question recognised by a decree of the Parlement as regent of the kingdom during the minority of the king, and invested with the full powers of the crown. A Council of Regency was at once formed from among the leaders of the nobility, and thus fell in a moment the whole structure of government which Henry IV. and Sully had laboured so hard to erect. The nobles resumed their place at the head of affairs. Sully, who alone might have had influence enough to stop this disastrous counter-revolution, lost his courage, thought only of securing his own safety, and after a few ineffectual protests retired into private life. The treasure which he had so painfully amassed was squandered among the nobles to buy their adherence to the new government. Reversal of the policy of Henry IV. The regent, devoted in her inmost heart to Spain, and dreading the risk of foreign war, hastened to disband the larger part of the troops which Henry IV. had collected, and to set on foot secret negotiations with the court of Spain. After the capture of Jülich, on September 1st, 1610, by which all danger of Imperial aggression in the lower Rhineland was taken away, she openly announced her intention to withdraw altogether from the war, and to ally herself with Spain through the double marriage of her daughter Elizabeth to the heir to the Spanish crown, and of Anne of Austria, the eldest daughter of Philip III., to the young king of France. Six months after the murder of Henry IV. his whole policy at home and abroad had been reversed. The great combination against the House of Austria fell to pieces when France retired. The German Protestants and the Dutch made their peace with the Emperor by the truce of Willstedt, signed in October 1610. The duke of Savoy, betrayed by France, had to make his peace as best he could with Spain, and the key of Italy was once more thrown away. At home, disorder corruption and anarchy raised their heads again, and the selfish and factious nobility tore France in pieces in a struggle in which their desire for places and money was hardly disguised by a thin veneer of political ambition.

Influence of the maréchal d’Ancre.

For seven years Marie held the reins of government. She was a vain, irritable, and intriguing woman with little of the talent for rule hereditary in her family, and much of the dependence upon stronger natures characteristic of her sex. They were years of discord and disgrace. The real rulers of France were the Italian adventurers Leonora Galigai and her husband, whom the weakness of Marie actually raised to the dignity of a marshal of France, although he had never seen a shot fired in earnest. The nobles were justly enraged at the prostitution of an office, which they considered one of the chief prizes of their order, and bitterly jealous of the influence of a parvenu like the maréchal d’Ancre. Twice they rose in rebellion under the leadership of the worthless prince de Condé,[2] but d’Ancre and Marie knew well the sop to throw to that Cerberus. A quarter of a million of livres purchased the treaty of Ste. Menehould on May 15th, 1614, and six million that of Loudun in May 1616, and the Regent and her minister quietly pursued their policy unmoved by demands for reform which died in the presence of gold. The feeble ray of dying constitutionalism alone sheds a pale gleam of interest over the dreary years. Partly in the hopes of strengthening her own position, partly to take a cry, always dangerous, out of the mouth of Condé, Marie de Médicis consented to summon once more the States-General of France and ask their advice upon the grievances of the kingdom.

The melancholy interest which surrounds a deathbed attaches to this the last meeting of the States-General of monarchical France. Meeting of the States-General, 1614. The Estates assembled at Paris on the 14th of October 1614, according to their three orders. There appeared 140 representatives of the clergy, 132 of the noblesse, 192 of the Tiers État, but these last were not in any real sense representatives of the commonalty of France. The name of a merchant or a farmer or a small landowner does not appear among them. They were for the most part of the official and professional classes, officers of the petty districts into which France was divided, financial and municipal officers, with a sprinkling of lawyers and citizens, and they at once assumed the rôle which their composition marked out for them, and organised themselves as the official order in opposition to the other orders of the clergy and the noblesse. Quarrels between the orders. From the beginning the jealousy of the three orders among themselves, and the fatal determination of the Tiers État to defend the privileges of their own official class against the nobles, instead of urging the grievances of the country upon the Crown, rendered the possibility of obtaining any real check upon the Crown absolutely hopeless. The nobles not unnaturally looked with jealous eyes on the gradual formation of an hereditary privileged class of officials, by means of the purchase of offices and the right of transmission secured by the paulette, which could not fail to grow in a little time into a second noblesse, and they directed their efforts mainly to procuring the abolition of purchase in the civil services. The Tiers État on their side, numbering as they did but comparatively few of the privileged ‘exempt’ among their ranks, fixed their eyes on the inordinate pensions enjoyed by the great nobles, and demanded the abolition of the pension list and the reduction of the taille. This was to hit the nobles in their weakest place, and the contention between the two orders became so keen that the court had to interfere and bring about a reconciliation. Hardly however had the Tiers État finished their controversy with the nobles, than they became involved in a quarrel with the clergy. The magistracy, especially the lawyers, were strongly Gallican in their views of ecclesiastical government, that is, they maintained the right of the national authorities to govern the Church in France in all matters which were not directly spiritual in their nature, and repudiated interference from the Pope. Especially they disliked the Jesuits, and wished to avoid the recognition of the decrees of the Council of Trent, which had not as yet been formally accepted by France. The Tiers État accordingly drew up an article in their cahier, or list of grievances, which, under the form of asserting the right divine of the French kings, and denouncing the crime of regicide, impliedly denied the right of the popes to depose kings and absolve subjects from their allegiance. At once the whole question between the Gallicans and the Ultramontanes was raised, and for more than a month no other matter was discussed among the Estates. The nobles sided with the clergy, and agreed with them on twenty-four articles representing their common views, among which the recognition of the decrees of Trent and the maintenance of the authority of the Holy See assumed an equal place of importance with the union of Navarre and Béarn to France, and the abolition of the paulette and the purchase system. The Parlement supported the Tiers Etat, and by its interference introduced one more cause of dissension. Finally, the court had again to interfere and order the Tiers Etat to omit the objectionable article from their cahier. Reforms brought about by the States-General. Yet in spite of these suicidal quarrels, which proved the unfitness of the States-General to undertake constitutional responsibilities, their meeting was not wholly useless. Differing on almost all other questions, the three orders were agreed upon an attack upon the financial administration. Jeannin, the finance minister, was, in spite of the efforts of the court, forced to produce accounts, which, when produced, showed clearly enough that none had been kept which were fit for production. The consent of the Crown was obtained to a considerable reduction of the pension list, the suppression of the paulette, and the erection of a special court to control the finances. Endowed with no legislative power, all that the Estates could do in the way of ameliorating the government was to make representations and extort promises, and this they did as effectively as circumstances permitted in the most important department of administration. If it must be allowed that they did much to destroy their own influence and render themselves ridiculous by their jealousy and quarrelsomeness, it must also be remembered that no king ever dared to summon them again until monarchy was tottering to its fall.

Fall of the maréchal d’Ancre. Ministry of Luynes, 1617.

Louis was declared of age just before the meeting of the States-General in 1614, when he had reached his fourteenth year. In 1616 the hated double marriage with Spain was celebrated, and Marie’s triumph was complete. It was short-lived—Louis himself shared the universal hatred felt for the maréchal d’Ancre. Urged on by his friend and fellow-sportsman the count de Luynes, he determined to take the government into his own hands. A third rising of the nobles at the beginning of 1617 professed as its object the saving of the king from the hands of a foreigner. Only the queen-mother supported her favourite, but she was powerless against her son. As the maréchal entered the Louvre on the 25th of April 1617, he was ordered in the king’s name to surrender his sword. On his refusal the guard fired and he fell dead. His wife was not long in following him. Condemned on an absurd charge of sorcery, she was executed shortly after. The queen-mother was obliged to retire to Blois, and Louis, seeing his oppressors so successfully disposed of, felt that at last he was king. He was mistaken. He had only exchanged one master for another. Luynes, who succeeded to the power formerly exercised by the maréchal d’Ancre, soon proved neither more capable or honest in administration, nor more agreeable to the nobles. The queen-mother never ceased her intrigues to regain her power, intrigues which became daily more dangerous as they were directed by the unseen hand of Richelieu. In 1619 the old duke of Epernon, in 1620 the dukes of Mayenne and Vendôme, in alliance with the Huguenots under Rohan and La Tremouille, rose in her favour, and Louis and his favourite found themselves obliged to come to an arrangement with her.

Rising of the Huguenots, 1620.

But no sooner had the treaty of Angoulême, made in February 1619, and confirmed in 1620, restored harmony between Louis and his mother and the nobles, than the Huguenots, who wished to take advantage of the troubles of the court in order to increase their political independence, threw all the south of France into a blaze. Frightened by the forced restoration of Catholicism in Béarn in 1620, they struck boldly for independence, dreamed of a Huguenot republic in the south of France, and were content to see the dismemberment of the nation, if by it they could satisfy their personal ambition. Wherever the eye turned among the various interests of which France was composed, whether upon Luynes and the courtiers, upon the queen-mother and her rival court, upon Condé and the nobles, upon Rohan and the Huguenots, the same picture of self-seeking ambition and personal aims was everywhere presented. Each one for himself and no one for the country was the motto of all among the leaders of France with two exceptions. The king himself and Richelieu the young bishop of Luçon, at that time in disgrace with his patroness Marie de Médicis, were the only ones in whose breasts the love of France burned with a pure and unsullied flame, and the hour had not yet struck which was to bind them together in a common work for the common weal. Meanwhile the crisis was a serious one, and Louis set himself manfully to meet it. The clash of arms, and the threat of danger, always brought out the stronger parts of his nature. He confirmed the Edict of Nantes, then at the head of a large army, after quieting the north, he marched towards the great Huguenot stronghold of La Rochelle and captured S. Jean d’Angely in spite of the efforts of Soubise. Leaving the due d’Epernon to form the siege of La Rochelle, he directed all his energies to the capture of Montauban, the great Huguenot stronghold of the south, while Montmorency subdued the Cevennes. For three months the stout city resisted all the ill-directed efforts of the royal army, and in November 1621 the king sullenly withdrew the remnants of his perishing troops. The death of Luynes from a fever caught in camp did much to make peace possible, and the victory of Louis and Condé over Soubise in the marches of Rie in April 1622 brought it near. The Huguenots had come to see that without foreign assistance their cause was hopeless. The duc de Bouillon remained immovable in the north. Lesdiguières, the old Huguenot leader, became a Catholic and received the bâton of Constable. La Force, the heroic defender of Montauban, accepted the rank of marshal of France and a gift of 200,000 crowns. Rohan alone remained steadfast, but he too was forced to accept the inevitable, when it became clear that Montpellier, the last Huguenot fortress of the south, must surrender. The peace of Montpellier, 1622. Entry of Richelieu into the Ministry. The peace of Montpellier, signed on the 19th October 1622, marks the first great step taken by the Crown towards the destruction of the Huguenots as a political organisation. By it religious toleration was secured to them, but they were forbidden to hold political assemblies of any kind whatever. All fortifications recently raised by them were to be demolished, and La Rochelle and Montauban were to be for the future the only guaranteed towns. The victory of France over the Huguenots had results far more extended than appeared upon the surface. The restoration of civil order in the country naturally led to an attempt to restore personal harmony at court, and under the auspices of La Vieuville, who now exercised the chief influence in the ministry, a settlement of the questions still at issue between the king and his mother was effected. One of the conditions of this settlement was the entry of Richelieu into the royal council. From that day a new era dawned for France.