THE HOUSES OF VALOIS AND BOURBON.
The House of Valois.—Luxury of the Court and the Nobles.—Insurrection.—Jaques Bonhomme.—Henry III.—Henry IV., of Navarre.—Cardinal Richelieu.—French Academy.—Regency of Anne of Austria.—Palaces of France.—The Noble and the Ennobled.—Persecution of the Protestants.—Edict of Nantes.—Its Revocation.—Distress of the Protestants.—Death of Louis XIV.
In the year 1328 the direct line of the Capets became extinct by the death of Charles IV., who left no male descendant. The nobles, assembled in parliament at Paris, assigned the crown to Philip, Count of Valois, a nephew of the former king. He was crowned at Rheims, in May, 1328, as Philip VI. The nobles, having thus obtained a king according to their wishes, complained to him that they had borrowed large sums of money from wealthy merchants and artisans, which it was inconvenient for them to pay, and that it was not consistent with the dignity of the French nobility that they should be harassed by debts due to the low-born. The king promptly issued a decree that all these debts should be cut down one fourth, that four months grace should be allowed without interest, and then, that these plebeian creditors might be reduced to a proper state of humility, he ordered them all to be imprisoned and their property to be confiscated. The merciless monarch doubled the taxes upon the people, and created a court at Paris of such magnificence that the baronial lords abandoned their castles and crowded to the metropolis to share its voluptuous indulgences. Even neighboring kings, attracted by the splendor of the Parisian court, took up their abode in Paris. The nobles needed vast sums of money to sustain them in such measureless extravagance. They accordingly left stern overseers over their estates, to drive the peasants to their toil and to extort from them every possible farthing.
The king, to replenish his ever-exhausted purse, assumed the sole right of making and selling salt throughout the realm. Each family, always excepting the nobles, who were then exempted from every species of tax, was required to take a certain quantity at an exorbitant price.
Vincennes was then the great banqueting-hall of Europe. In its present decay it exhibits but little of the grandeur it presented four hundred years ago, when its battlements towered above the forest of oaks, centuries old, which surrounded the castle—when plumed and blazoned squadrons met in jousts and tournaments, and when, in meteoric splendor, hunting bands of lords and ladies swept the park. Brilliant as was this spectacle, no healthy mind can contemplate it but with indignation. To support this luxury of a few thousand nobles, thirty millions of people were plunged into the extreme of ignorance, poverty, and misery.
Again the king and the nobles had empty purses, and were greatly in debt. By an arbitrary decree all the coin of the kingdom was called in. It was then passed through the mint greatly debased. With this debased coin the debts were paid, and then an order was issued that the coin should be regarded at its depreciated value.
With the lapse of centuries intelligence had gradually increased, and there was now quite a growing middling class between the peasants and the nobles—artisans, merchants, manufacturers, and literary and professional men. These outrages had at length become intolerable. Human nature could endure no more. This middle class became the leaders of the blind and maddened masses, and hurled them in fury upon their foes. The conspiracy spread over the kingdom, and in all the towns and throughout the country the signal for revolt was simultaneously given. It was a servile insurrection, accompanied by all the horrors inevitable to such a warfare. The debased populace, but little elevated above the brute, were as merciless as the hyena or the wolf. Phrensied with rage and despair, in howling bands they burst upon the castles, and the wrongs of centuries were terrifically avenged. We need not tell the story. Violence, torture, flame, and blood exhausted their energies. Mothers and maidens suffered all that mortals can endure in terror, brutal indignities, shame, and woe. In war even the refined and courteous often become diabolical; but those who have been degraded by ages of ignorance and oppression, when they first break their fetters, generally become fiends incarnate.
The nobles so thoroughly despised the peasants that they had not dreamed that the starving, cringing boors would dare even to think of emerging from their mud hovels to approach the lordly castle of rock, with its turrets and battlements and warlike defenders. The sheep might as well conspire against the dogs and the wolves. The peasant had hardly individuality enough even to receive a name. He was familiarly called Jack Goodman, Jacques Bonhomme. This insurrection of the Jacks, or of the Jacquerie as it is usually called, was, after much devastation and bloodshed, quelled. Barbaric phrensy can seldom long hold out against disciplined valor. One half of the population of France fell a prey to the sword, or to the pestilence and famine which ensued.