“We came to Pau,” she wrote, “where no exercise of the Catholic religion is tolerated. However, I was allowed as a favour to hear Mass in a little chapel three or four paces in length, and so narrow that seven or eight persons filled it. At the hour of Mass, the drawbridge was raised to prevent the Catholics of the place from attending; for they were most desirous to do so, having been debarred from it for several years. But, it being Whit-Sunday, some of the citizens succeeded in slipping in before the drawbridge was raised. They were not detected till the end of the service, when some Huguenots who were spying perceived them. They instantly informed the king’s secretary, and in my presence were dragged out, whipped, and cast into prison, and were not released for long, and then not till they had paid a heavy fine.”
When Henry IV came to the throne of France the care of his hereditary dominions in Gascony was confided to his sister Catherine. In the Castle of Pau at that time was brought up Antoine de Bourbon, Count of Moret, Henry’s son by Jacqueline de Bueil. There he studied, but proved a sorry scholar. In later days he ventured on criticizing the works of Gombaud, whereupon this latter retaliated with an epigram.
“Vous chocquez la nature et l’art,
Vous qui n’êtes né que d’un crime;
Mais pensez vous que d’un bastard
Le jugement soit légitime?”
Antoine fell in the battle of Castelnaudary, in 1631. Half a century later, there appeared in Anjou an old hermit, who called himself John Baptist, and whose face resembled Henri Quatre markedly. Moreover, he admitted having been in the battle of Castelnaudary, and showed himself to be intimately acquainted with Pau and with every part of the castle; but he would never say who he was. Louis XIV, having heard of him, sent to demand whether he was the Antoine de Bourbon, son of Henry IV, who had been reported dead. He refused to answer, and on his death-bed, when again questioned on this point, returned an evasive answer.
In matters of religion Henry IV was tolerant. He wrote in 1594:—
“I have in my kingdom of Béarn two parishes separated only by a river. In one of these there has never during my reign been any (Calvinist) preacher; in the other, never a Mass said, yet the inhabitants of these parishes have not wronged one another to the value of a sou. You will see, that I will bring about such concord in my kingdom that there will be no further squabbles.”
But before this, when in Paris, under the surveillance of Catherine de Medici, he was obliged to send the Count de Grammont and a commission into Béarn to restore Catholic worship. D’Aubigné relates an incident relative to this attempt that is characteristic of the temper of the times. When the Baron d’Arros, who had been appointed after Montgomery, by Jeanne d’Albret, to enforce the sole exercise of Calvinistic worship in her states, heard of the coming of De Grammont, he happened to encounter his father, aged eighty, and blind, coming out of the Huguenot meeting-house. The old man led his son home, placed in his hands a drawn sword, and bade him slay and spare not the Lord’s enemies. Arros and thirty-seven followers went to Hagetmau, where Grammont and the commissioners were, and entered the castle unperceived. Then they fell upon and slaughtered officers, soldiers, and servants, indiscriminately. De Grammont alone was spared. His wife—Corisande d’Andouins, one of the loveliest women of the time—threw herself between her husband and Arros, and with tears implored the latter to spare Grammont.
When the Baron d’Arros returned to his father to receive a blessing after this exploit, the old man bitterly reproached him for having spared even one. “My son,” said he, “how, as a valiant Maccabee, have you allowed this Nicanor to live? The crow you have spared will pluck out your eyes.”
Calvinism, after having had complete mastery for over half a century, seems not to have taken firm root. At the present day, out of a population in Béarn of 426,350, there are but 5000 Protestants.
In one of his bear-hunting expeditions, when a lad, Henry of Navarre had visited the church of Bielle in the Val d’Ossau, and had noticed the columns of Italian marble in the church, the spoils of a Gallo-Roman villa. When he was king he sent to Bielle to have these pillars forwarded to him in Paris. The reply of the villagers was: “Sire, our hearts and our properties are yours, dispose of them as you will; but as to these columns, they belong to God. Entendez vous-en avec lui.”