The terms of the Peace of Monsieur[1746] were exceedingly unpopular in Paris, whose citizens had been the heaviest contributors to the expenses of the war thus closed and who had made strenuous military preparations in defense of the capital, and the unpopularity of Henry III was not enhanced in the eyes of the Parisians by the King’s repudiation of a part of the rentes, the incomes of which were the chief means of support with many. But when Charron, the provost of the merchants, and the counselor Abot, at the head of a deputation of the foremost citizens of the capital protested against this high-handed action to the King’s own face, Henry III with a sneer which carried with it a covert threat rejoined: “Hang a man and he tells no tales.”[1747]
The camps of the duke of Alençon and the Protestants were broken up when the peace was published. The soldiery around La Rochelle and in Poitou, Anjou, and Berry, returned home, except some troops which were reserved until it was seen what Casimir and his reiters, who were near Langres, would do. These marauders with many French of Champagne and Brie, crossed the Yonne above Sens and arrived in Champagne between May 10 and 11 and remained there for a week, living on the land. After having sojourned six or seven days between the Seine and the Vauluisant, on the 16th they moved on to a place between Troyes and the village of Mery-sur-Seine, where they remained for fifteen days to the distress of the people and absolutely destroyed the little village of Marigny, which had but two persons left in it. In order to find food they foraged for miles. The peasantry turned their cattle loose or drove them, together with their possessions, into the fortified towns or châteaux. But the gentry were less safe than the peasantry even, for the latter had already been so despoiled that nothing was left to be taken. Out of this frightful state of affairs rose an organized resistance which is very interesting to observe, for the nobility and gentry of the region and the local peasantry, forgetting their class antagonism, made common cause together. Whenever these “vigilance committees” found themselves to be stronger or happened upon stragglers from the main band, they threw themselves upon them; sometimes the victims were bound and cast alive in the river Aube or Seine. Between St. Loup-de-la-Fosse-Gelane and St. Martin-de-Bossenay, a group of ten or twelve reiters were thus set upon and only one escaped. But the vengeance their comrades meted out upon the offenders was terrible, for the troopers, numbering over a hundred horsemen, the next night burned all the villages round about.[1748]
Not until September was this scourge removed from the land. By that time they were bought off and were conducted to the frontier by Bassompierre, the Alsatian gentleman in the King’s service, who was well rewarded, as he deserved to be, for the accomplishment of the perilous task. But the licensing of the regular troops immediately afterward still prolonged the agony of the province for a season.[1749]
The Peace of Monsieur may fittingly be said to have terminated the period of the religious wars of France. The dominant issue of the succeeding years of conflict from 1576 to 1598 was not a religious, but a political one. Why permanent peace did not result it is not the work of this volume to narrate. Suffice to say that Spain and Spain’s instrument, the Holy League, were to blame for the ensuing years of strife.
The germ of the provincial Catholic leagues had been the desire, on the part of the Catholics of France, to resist the progress of Calvinism. But in the hands of the French nobles these local leagues, controlled by the aristocracy and welded into one mighty organization under the leadership of the duke of Guise, backed by Spanish gold, became a new league of the public weal, which, under the cloak of religion revived the feudal ambition of the French nobility to acquire power at the expense of the crown.
