When the King sent the cardinal of Bourbon to talk with him, Damville sent back word that he thought the example of his brother “too dangerous to come to court where they who sought the ruin of his house had too much credit,”[1675] and advised the King to remove the strangers within his gates, meaning Biragues and De Retz.[1676] Henry III could accomplish nothing at Avignon and yet knew not how to get away. He could not go up-river on account of the current. The Huguenots at Livron barred the road on the left bank; Montbrun was in the hills in Auvergne; La Noue’s men were stopping the King’s post daily and Damville controlled Provence and Languedoc; La Haye, King’s lieutenant in the séné-chaussée of Poitou seceded to the Politiques.[1677] Vivarais declared its neutrality and refused to side with King or Politiques. The people of Tulle refused to pay taxes either to Catholics or Protestants until overpowered by the latter, and thus the country continued to endure a war which it hated. Henry truly was in a plight. He was without money, too, and could not hope to get any so far from Paris. He even feared that the soldiery with him might be bribed to desert.[1678] To crown the royal anxiety Damville’s declaration was so public and so bold that the King feared that foreign aid would soon be forthcoming in the Protestant service. The fear was not without ground. For the marshal actually proposed to make a league with the Sultan and introduce a Turkish fleet into the harbor of Aigues-Mortes.[1679] Coupled with this possibility was a projected enterprise against Spain in Franche-Comté in which the Huguenots of Champagne and Burgundy were interested, but which was primarily the project of the elector palatine and the prince of Orange.[1680]
It is a significant fact that the war has now lost almost all confessional character and become a factional conflict between the rival houses of Guise and Montmorency. Catholicism and political corruption on the one hand were opposed to administrative reform and religious toleration. After the creation of the Politique party, the Huguenots of state had merged with them. Except in the case of radical Calvinists and bigoted Catholics, religion had become a minor issue with the French unless it were artificially exaggerated.[1681] It was a mortal enmity on either side, and one which there was slight hope of settling. The hostility of the Guises and the Montmorencys was the real seed of the civil war.[1682] It depended upon the individual in almost every case whether his participation one way or the other was motived by convictions as to the public good or by private interests. The number of those who directly or indirectly were attached to the warring houses almost divided the realm between them and the wretched people were badly treated by both parties.[1683] So widespread and deep rooted was this mutual enmity throughout France, that the Venetian ambassador, no mean observer, wondered when it would end, because it was to the interest of each to sustain it. The King was a shuttlecock in this game of political battledore. The ruin of the crown, instead of being feared by them, was regarded as a possible way to give their enmity freer rein. Each party counted not only upon paying its debts, which were enormous, by victory, but in establishing the power of its house more permanently than ever for the future. While the war cost the King and the country écus par milliers, it cost them nothing, at least of their own. The weakness of the crown was the strength of the rivals. They fattened on war, for peace deprived them of their authority, their power, and their partisans. Until one or the other faction was crushed, the hostility was certain to endure, and thus the war seemed doomed to last indefinitely. If, as the result of fatigue or a truce, a respite was made, the time was brief, and was terminated as soon as one or the other side had accumulated some substance again. The only remedy for such a state of affairs was to be found in a foreign war, either in Flanders or Italy.[1684]
The union of the Huguenots and the Politiques made them very strong, especially in the south. But on the other hand the duke of Guise received much assistance from Flanders. When the successor of Alva, Requesens, learned of the death of Charles IX, he had offered the aid of Spanish troops to Catherine de Medici.[1685] Although the proffer was declined, the practical result was the same, for owing to lack of pay in the Low Countries, thousands of reiters and Walloon and German footmen flocked across the border in the summer and autumn, where they were welcomed by the duke of Guise, who, somewhere and somehow, found the means to pay them.[1686] But below the stratum of professional soldiers in France there was another class in arms which feudal society was not used to see in such a capacity. This was the people; not town militia, for town and provincial leagues had made men familiar with them, but the peasantry. The protracted wars by economically ruining and morally debauching this class had generated a breed of men who sprang from the soil like the dragon’s teeth of Greek fable, men who by observation and practice were used to the matchlock and the sword, brutalized by oppression, long made desperate by burdensome taxes and the wrongs of war.[1687]
PIKEMAN AND COLOR-BEARER
(Tortorel and Perissin)
The weariness of vigil in the depth of winter and overconfidence seem to have relaxed the alertness of Henry III’s foes. At any rate, having extorted 50,000 francs from the noblemen and gentlemen in his train in order to pay the soldiery around him, the King, raising the siege of Livron on January 24, 1575, managed to slip through the defiles to Rheims for his coronation. The coronation was a triumph of the Guises. For far from being set back by the death of the cardinal of Lorraine on December 29, at Avignon[1688] their star seemed to be higher than before. The cardinal of Guise took the place of his deceased uncle as primate of Rheims; the duke of Guise was grand chamberlain; and the duke of Mayenne and the marquis d’Elbœuf were the chief lay peers. The sole outsider was De Retz who officiated as constable for the occasion. The crowning took place on February 15. Shortly after the event, apparently in a sudden whim of passion, Henry III married Louise de Vaudmont, whose father was uncle of the duke of Lorraine and whose mother had been sister of the unfortunate Egmont. But the marriage was without political significance—indeed the new queen was of so little station that Catherine de Medici, in a letter to Queen Elizabeth, expressed her humiliation at her son’s marriage.[1689]
