ARQUEBUSIER
(Tortorel and Perissin)
The main issues of France, religious toleration and political reform, were now more obscured than ever by the rivalry of the factions around the throne. The queen mother bore the Guises greater hatred than before because of their new ascendency and had little less spleen toward the Montmorencys, but carefully dissimulated and sought on one pretext and another to remove them from around her son. For this purpose Bellegarde, who was an old attaché of the house of Montmorency and owed his popularity with the King to a handsome face and a well-turned leg, was made a special ambassador to Poland in order to get him out of the way. His comrade on the mission was Elbœuf—an ill-matched pair indeed. Their business was to carry 200,000 crowns of the Paris bourgeois to Poland to bribe the Polish diet not to elect a successor to the absent Henry. If the Poles were obdurate, Elbœuf was to advocate the election of the duke of Ferrara, who had Guisard blood in his veins. At the same time Biron and Matignon were made marshals to counterpoise the influence of De Retz who forthwith resigned his office and vowed he would “meddle no more.” There were heart-burnings, also, over the bestowal of the government of Normandy, vacated by the death of the duke of Bouillon. The duke of Nevers claimed that it had been promised him while in Poland; the duchess of Nemours demanded the post for the duke and declared that Nevers was “a foreigner.” Henry III finally sought to compromise by giving the office to his insignificant father-in-law, whereupon the duke of Nevers quit the court in a rage. Squabbles of precedence, too, vexed the King’s mind. Montpensier challenged the claims of the Guises to court precedence before the Parlement, and Madame de Nemours therefore quarreled with her daughter. “They were all bent to preparations of war,” quaintly wrote Dale to Walsingham, “but these domestic discords do tame them. It is a very hell among them, not one content or in quiet with another, nor mother with son, nor brother with brother, nor mother with daughter.”[1690]
The state of the finances was deplorable, and Henry resorted to various devices to provide himself with funds. The mission of Elbœuf and Bellegarde to Poland was delayed, while the King implored the Pope, the duke of Savoy, and Venice for the money needed;[1691] the pay of the King’s household servants was nine months in arrears and the last money wages of his guards had been paid by an assessment levied by the King upon the noblemen and gentlemen of the court. Paris, as usual, was heavily mulcted by a forced loan of 600,000 francs, besides heavy contributions extorted from the foreign merchants there. But the mass of the money had to come from the church lands. A letter-patent in the form of an edict was forced through the Parlement authorizing the alienation of 200,000 livres de rente of the temporalities of the clergy, the King reckoning to raise a million and a half of francs by the process, but few were ready purchasers. In addition to these practices the “parties casuelles” were farmed to a Florentine money-broker named Diaceto for 60,000 francs per month. Henry III resorted to worse expedients than these, though. He sold four seats in his council for 15,000 livres each; forced the collectors of the revenue to anticipate the revenue for a twelve-month and then dispossessed them of their posts after he had deprived them of the profits thereof and sold them to others; and dilapidated the forest domain by selling two trees in each arpent.[1692]
The position and conduct of Damville afforded the greatest hope for the future if Henry III could have been made to see things in the right way. Damville himself dominated all Languedoc and Provence; his lieutenant, Montbrun, controlled Dauphiné; Turenne was in possession of Auvergne; the Rochellois had agents at court seeking for a firm settlement of affairs; even the cardinal Bourbon and the duke of Montpensier leaned to the side of the Politiques. In 1575 the existence of the old party of Huguenots, the Huguenots of religion, was practically at an end. Individual radical Calvinists there were in plenty but the Protestant organization was that of the political Huguenots.
It was manifest by the spring of 1575 that the prince of Condé and Henry of Navarre on the one hand, and Damville and his brother, together with Alençon, were bound to join hands in the common purpose to establish permanent religious and greater civil liberty in France. “Liberty and reform” was the policy of the hour, if not the watchword. The declaration of the assembly of Milhau in August of the previous year had been the handwriting on the wall—a message which the misguided Henry III obdurately refused to read. On April 25, 1575, that message was repeated in even clearer terms in the form of a manifesto issued by Damville which defined the joint policy of the Politiques and the political Huguenots. It was the declaration of a patriot, and not a partisan, least of all a rebel, who, like Cromwell, found himself compelled to lead a movement for political reform against an obstinate crown that either would not or could not understand the issues.[1693]
Reading between the lines of the constitution agreed upon at Nîmes, the republican nature of the government therein provided for is noticeable.[1694] The right to exercise the sovereign rights of legislation, of justice, of taxation, of making war and peace, of regulating commerce no longer were vested in the King where the Act of Union prevailed, but in a representative body. Languedoc, Provence, and Dauphiné were de facto independent of the crown.[1695] Supplementary articles of Condé and Damville, and of the Catholics and Protestants of Languedoc, Provence, and Dauphiné demanded (1) that freedom of exercise of religion without distinction be permitted; (2) that the parlements should be composed half of Catholics, and half of Protestants, the latter to be nominated by the prince of Condé; (3) that justice be done upon the authors of the massacre of St. Bartholomew and the forfeit and attainder of the admiral be reversed; (4) that the places at present held by the Huguenots be retained besides Boulogne and La Charité, and that for additional defense the King should give them in each province two out of three towns to be named to him by the prince of Condé; (5) that the King pay 200,000 crowns for expenses of the war; (6) that neither the marshal de Retz, nor the chancellor Biragues should have any part in the negotiations for peace; (7) that the duke of Montmorency and the marshal Cossé should be set at liberty, and their innocence declared in full Parlement “en robe rouge;” (8) that the heirs of those who have been murdered should have their estates returned to them; (9) that the queen of England, the elector palatine, and the dukes of Savoy and Deuxponts should be parties to the peace; (10) that within three months after peace the States-General be assembled to establish good order in France.[1696]
For a while there seemed to be a prospect of the King yielding to these demands. He was growing jealous of the influence of the Guises, and began to perceive that coercion was impossible.[1697] At the first audience Henry received the deputies graciously, saying he “liked their speech, but their articles were hard.” The articles were debated seriatim by the King, both with the deputies and with the council. The chief hitch was upon the fourth demand. The King was willing to permit exercise of Protestant worship in one town in each bailiwick, except closed towns, whereas the deputies demanded freedom of worship in all places in the suburbs as provided by the Edict of January. As a matter of prudence, it would seem to have been better policy for the crown to permit worship in the suburbs of all towns rather than exact a provision requiring concentration of the Protestants in one place in each bailiwick; however, the King probably thought Calvinism would be less likely to spread under such a restriction than if the Huguenots enjoyed numerous places of worship.[1698] The queen mother sought to persuade Montmorency to use his influence to abate the demands with promise of release from the Bastille as his reward. But the duke replied that “if his imprisonment might do the King pleasure or profit he was content to be there all his life; but to meddle in the peace, or to write of that matter, never understanding their doings, were to make himself guilty in it, and to be thought to make himself to be an instrument to their ruin, and therefore it were ill for him.”[1699] Thereupon Henry III broke off the negotiations hoping still, as earlier, to be able to separate the Huguenots and the united Catholics.