Events thereafter thickened rapidly. Narbonne, Perigueux, and Tournon in Lyonnais were taken by the Huguenot-Politique armies. The last place was got by Damville himself. Tournon was an especially strong town on the Rhone about three leagues from Valence, with Livron to the south of it. The capture so discouraged the duke d’Uzes that he requested leave to resign on account of the desertions among his following.[1700] Instead command was given him, “to spoil Languedoc in order to famish them against winter.” But the duke was too wise to obey and Damville was permitted to gather in the harvest without molestation. For if the King had tried ravaging, the whole country would have risen against him. St. Jean-d’Angély, Angoulême, and Nérac revolted so far as to expel the garrisons in the town. In Burgundy, where Tavannes had founded the League of the Holy Spirit, a Politique league was formed.[1701] The narrow escape Damville had at this time from death by poison drew men more than ever to him. As a climax to the woes of Henry III on July 15, 1575, the Polish diet declared the throne vacant, absolving all from allegiance to him.[1702]
The spontaneous nature of the rising of the country in the summer of 1575 is an interesting historical phenomenon. It was by no means confined to the south of France. In Champagne, the nobles, some of them vassals of Guise, and peasants united to fall upon the reiters. Madame de Guise fled from Joinville in fear of being surprised by a sixteenth-century Jacquerie. In Brittany there was a similar stir when the King attempted to confiscate the extensive lands of the duke of Rohan upon his death. Certain things remind one of happenings in the French Revolution. Many in Champagne left the land and went into the borders of Germany like the “émigrés” after August 4, 1789. In Paris there were house-to-house visits not unlike those of September, 1793. There was universal feeling against the reiters. In Normandy an association of gentlemen was formed for the special purpose of protecting the country from them.[1703]
The anxiety of the government was all the greater because it was not exactly known what relations existed between the Huguenots and Politiques and the English. The treaty which had obtained between Charles IX and Elizabeth was renewed by the latter on April 1, 1575, and confirmed by Henry III on May 4.[1704] But Elizabeth was not the person to be bound by official word. On the Picardy-Flemish border mutual distrust prevailed. In December, 1574, Requesens had advised Philip II of his fear of the renewal of Huguenot activity in the Low Countries, which had been dead since the Genlis disaster,[1705] and the garrisons on the frontiers had been increased accordingly. The marriage of Henry III to Louise de Vaudemont gave the Spanish governor great inquietude, for the unfortunate Egmont was her uncle, and Egmont’s eldest son, in March, visited his royal cousin of France.[1706] Requesens was apprehensive, too, of a marriage between the duke of Alençon and the daughter of William of Orange,[1707] and over the fact that the French envoy in Flanders, the sieur de Mondoucet, prudently avoided using the official post, but employed his own couriers in dispatching missives to Paris.[1708] “All the neighboring states are actuated by malicious intentions,” he wailed to Philip II. “The French and the English are in correspondence, and both are inspired by the same spirit of hostility against the Catholic religion and against your majesty, as the sole protector thereof.”[1709]
The arrest of a secretary of Montmorency at Boulogne in March, as he arrived from England, and who admitted he was going to find Damville,[1710] coupled with the absence of the prince of Condé and Charles de Meru, the youngest Montmorency, in Germany, so disquieted the King that early in June Schomberg was dispatched across the Rhine to discover what Condé was doing; if he found that levies of cavalry were being made for service in France, he was instructed to enroll 8,000 soldiers for the service of the King.
Schomberg proved a good agent, for he shortly afterward wrote that he believed a secret engagement existed between Queen Elizabeth, some of the German princes, and the enemies of the French King at home; and that Condé, having expended 30,000 crowns, had raised 8,000 cavalry which might be expected to arrive at the frontier by the middle of August, although it was given out, and believed by some, that these reiters were intended for service in the Netherlands.[1711] On the strength of these suspicions, especially when the duke of Guise sent word in the first week of September that 2,500 reiters had crossed the Rhine, the English ambassador, Dr. Dale, who hitherto had lodged in the Faubourg St. Germain, was advised to remove into the city, ostensibly for his greater security, but really to prevent him from receiving unknown persons secretly at night, as was possible where he resided.[1712]
At this juncture, when everything was tense and everybody was on edge, the duke of Alençon managed to make his escape from the court (September 15). While not actually confined, like the duke of Montmorency, he and Henry of Navarre had both been kept under continuous surveillance for months and various efforts made by them to get away had failed. Dismay prevailed at court when the escape was known. The King was “as a man out of courage,” and betook himself to extravagant religious demonstration, as before, when at Avignon, “going from church, as though deserted by all his people.”[1713] He knew that his brother’s presence would draw many of the gentry, who were yet hesitating, to the ranks of the Politiques.[1714] He had no means to levy an army, nor the resources to sustain it.
In this crisis Catherine de Medici kept the clearest head of all at the court. While she sought to wheedle the runaway prince with smooth words, going as far as Dreux to meet him, detachments were ordered out from Rouen, Orleans, and Chartres to surround him. But Alençon was not to be trapped and rode swiftly off toward the Loire in the hope of falling in with La Noue or the viscount of Turenne. At the same time the duke of Guise was ordered to make a vigorous resistance against the coming of Condé’s reiters. But even his army was in a bad state on account of the defection of officers and men, who had gone over to Alençon, so that new troops had to be sent him.[1715] Almost all the soldiery in the service of the King was withdrawn from Dauphiné and Languedoc and concentrated in Burgundy and Champagne.[1716] Much depended upon the result of the coming battle with the reiters. If the King’s troops were beaten, Paris would be in a serious strait between the King’s enemies. Already, in consequence of the withdrawal of troops, all Auvergne, Bourbonnais, Nivernais, Gâtinais, and the Beauce were in arms, and the gentlemen of these regions had gone over to the duke of Alençon. Only the vigilance of the garrisons at Orleans and Tours, Moulins and Nevers, enabled the crown to maintain the line of the Loire river.
The reiters attempted to evade Guise and find another way of entrance into France, so that the duke left his artillery in Lorraine and by forced marches went to Sedan, with the intention of giving battle there. But the reiters, about 2,500, under Thoré, avoided an engagement and maneuvered to join a Protestant force of 2,000 Picards, and Guise fell back on Rheims in order to hold the crossing of the Aisne, meantime asking the King for reinforcements which were so slow in coming that the duke was compelled to retire to the Marne. On October 9 he established his headquarters between Château-Thierry and Epernay, near Port-à-Pinson. The encounter took place near Fismes, on the Marne, above Dormans, on October 10. Not more than fifty were killed on either side and the combat did not deter the reiters from continuing their course and crossing the Seine near Nogent-sur-Seine, which they were able to do on account of low water. Their chief loss was of two or three cornets of reiters whom Guise bribed to desert. De Thoré owed his easy escape, however, to the serious wound which the duke of Guise sustained. For a bullet struck him in the side of the face, tearing his ear clear away and so mangling the cheek that he was fearfully scarred for the rest of his life and always wore a velvet mask.[1717]
The insignificance of the victory of the duke, however, did not deter the King from proclaiming a solemn procession and Te Deum in honor of the day. The “victory” also was made the justification of a new tax. On October 12, 1575, by command of the King, the burgesses of Paris assembled in the grand room of the Hôtel-de-Ville where the provost of the merchants, Charron, made known a new demand of the King for aid in the form of a capitation tax upon the burgesses of the city and other places in the prévôté of Paris for the payment of 3,000 Swiss, making half of the 6,000 which the King required for defense of the realm, in addition to the sum of 15,000 francs expected for each of the ensuing months.
Once again were the people of Champagne made the victims of the spoiler. All the horses of the poor laborers whom the reiters encountered on the road were forcibly seized, as was also the case in the hostelries where they lodged. A single parish lost thirty horses. The only payment the poor peasantry got was to be beaten for their protests.