The flame of civil wars, of which Francis II. had beheld the first sparks, had set all France in a blaze during the minority of Charles IX. Religion was the motive of these wars among the people, and the pretext among the great. The queen-mother, Catherine de Medici, who joined to the most boundless ambition the artful policy of her country, had more than once hazarded the safety of the kingdom to preserve her authority; arming the Catholics against the Protestants, and the Guises against the Bourbons, that they might destroy each other. In this age of troubles, the great, who had become too powerful, were factious and formidable; and the French, animated by that party fury which a false zeal inspires, were, for the most part, fanatics and barbarians. Passions or interests armed every hand: one-half of the nation made war against the other half. The greatest cities were taken, retaken, and sacked, in turn. Prisoners of war were put to death in a manner till that time unheard of. The churches were reduced to ashes by the Reformers, the temples by the Catholics. Poisonings and assassinations were looked upon as only the legitimate vengeance of clever enemies. The crowning horror of all these excesses was the massacre of St. Bartholomew. On that ever-execrable day, a young king of twenty-three commanded, in cool blood, the death of more than a million of his subjects, and himself set the example of murder. Charles IX. did not long survive this abuse of sovereign power. Henry III. quitted furtively the throne of Poland, to return to his country and plunge it once more into troubles. Of the two brothers, notwithstanding what we have said of Charles IX., Henry III. was the worse: there is no more detestable character in history than this prince, who rather resembles a Heliogabalus or a Commodus, than a king of chivalric France: in the great massacre he had been, if possible, more active than his brother.
He found in his states two dominant parties; that of the Reformers, reviving from its ashes, more violent than ever, and having at its head Henry the Great, then king of Navarre; and that of the League, a powerful faction, formed by the princes of the house of Guise, encouraged by the popes, fomented by Philip II. of Spain, whose dangerous policy procured him the name of the Demon of the South, increasing every day by the artifices of the monks, under the veil of zeal for the Catholic religion, but whose principal aim was rebellion. Its leader was the duke of Guise, surnamed le Balafré, from a scar on his cheek, a prince of a brilliant reputation, and who, having more shining qualities than good ones, seemed, in this season of confusion, born to change the destinies of France. Henry III., who perhaps might have crushed both these parties by a judicious exercise of the regal power, absolutely strengthened them by his own weakness. He thought to exhibit a great feat of policy by declaring himself the head of the League; whereas he only proved himself the slave of it. He was forced to make war for the interests of the duke de Guise, whose object was to dethrone him, against the king of Navarre, his brother-in-law and presumptive heir, who only wished to re-establish him in all the rights of his rank. Some successes against the Reformers carried the credit of the too-powerful Balafré to its height. This prince, inflated with his own glory, and strong in the weakness of the king, came to Paris in opposition to the royal command. Then arrived the celebrated day of the barricades, in which the people defeated the guards of Henry, and obliged him himself to fly from his capital. Guise did still more; he forced the king to hold the States-General of the kingdom at Blois, and took his measures so well, that he was near sharing the royal authority, with the consent of the representatives of the nation, and with an appearance of the most respectable formalities. Roused by a danger so pressing, Henry III. caused this redoutable enemy, and the cardinal de Lorraine, his brother, still more violent and ambitious than the duke, to be assassinated at the castle of Blois. That which happened to the Protestant party after the St. Bartholomew, now happened to the League; the death of the leaders reanimated the faction. On all parts the Leaguers threw off the mask. Paris closed its gates: nothing was thought or talked of but vengeance. Henry III. was considered as the assassin of the defenders of religion, as an odious, insupportable tyrant, and not as a king who had punished too audacious subjects. The king, pressed on all sides, was at length obliged to seek a reconciliation with Henry of Navarre; in the course of 1589 these two princes encamped in conjunction before Paris.
We cannot describe without a groan the excesses to which the capital gave itself up on learning the death of the duke de Guise: the shops closed, the people in crowds in the streets, arms in hand, seeking everywhere the duke d’Aumale, to place him at the head of the League, knocking down the king’s arms wherever met with, and imprisoning every one suspected of fidelity to him. A kind of vertigo or spirit of fury took possession of all the citizens without exception; they willingly allowed themselves to be dragged into the most detestable rebellion. The churches were hung with mourning, and the depositaries of the Word of God proclaimed aloud the martyrdom of the Balafré and his brother. “Those unworthy ministers,” says an historian of the time, “only mounted the pulpit to put forth, instead of the Scriptures, a series of bitter insults against the sovereign, and by the vomitings of an iliad of maledictions, they increased the fury of revolt. The people never came out from their infamous sermons without their brain being on fire, their feet prepared for running, and their hands for fighting, like so many wild beasts, against all who did not wear the badge of the League. The colporteurs of the palace cried nothing but an execration of the life of Henry III., the self-called king. They said that France was sick, and that she could never be cured without giving her a draught of French blood.”
The leaders of the sedition sought, however, to colour the public excesses with some specious pretexts. They caused a request to be presented to the faculty of Theology at Paris, in which it was said “that the princes of the house of Lorraine had always deserved well of the Catholic church during their lives, and that, being protectors of the faith, the king had put them to death; that the monarch must be declared to have forfeited his crown, and his subjects be released from their fidelity; that that prince was a hypocrite, a favourer of heresy, a persecutor of the Church, having bathed his hands in the blood of a cardinal, without respect to his person or his sacred character.” The Sorbonne, on the 7th of January, issued a decree, which allowed and even ordered all that this request stated. Lefebvre the dean, and several other doctors, refused to sign this abominable sentence; but the majority prevailed, and gave it all the authority that was desired. The principal Leaguers, armed with this fatal document, tried to lay the foundations of an authority, which the same caprice which gave it to them might deprive them of an instant after. The heads of the sixteen quarters of Paris, all scoundrels, and for the most part the issue of low families, were revered like so many sovereigns. These monsters governed Paris; they were its oracles, and put in motion the arms of all the rebels. They also determined to have the Parliament. Bussy le Clere, governor of the Bastille, who had been a master-at-arms, took upon himself the task of ordering that august company to enregister the decree of the Sorbonne. On the 16th of January he entered the assembly of French senators with fifty of his satellites, and, pistol in hand, presented to them a request, or rather an order, no longer to recognise the royal house. The refusal being unanimous, he selected the most conspicuous and led them away at once to the Bastille, where the barbarous manner in which he treated them procured him the sobriquet of “Grand Penitentiary of the Parliament.”
Very shortly, the duke de Mayenne, brother and heir to the power of the duke de Guise, arrived in Paris with a reinforcement of troops. This prince, intrepid and intelligent, but indolent, was still employed in placing the capital in a state of defence, when the two kings of France and Navarre appeared at its gates with an army of forty thousand men. Henry III. took possession of the bridge of St. Cloud, and formed the blockade of the faubourg St. Honoré and the whole quarter of the Louvre as far as the river; the king of Navarre, on the other side, besieged the faubourg St. Marceau to that of St. Germain. The consternation and the fury of the Parisians were extreme when they found themselves surrounded in this manner by the royal troops. The priests recommenced their seditious declamations; to strike the vulgar, they caused little figures of wax to be made, representing the two monarchs, which they placed upon the altar during mass, and pricked them with knives. All priests carried arms, and mounted guard with the other citizens. But this aimless and blind fury could not have protected the capital from the just anger of the king, had it not been prevented by the most infamous of crimes. Jacques Clement, a priest and Dominican, devoted himself, as he said, to the task of killing the tyrant. He communicated his project to the doctors, the Jesuits, the leaders of the League, and the principals of the Sixteen; all encouraged him, all promised him the greatest dignities, if he survived this generous action; and if he became a martyr to it, a place in Heaven, above the apostles. On the 31st of July he went to St. Cloud, where the king’s quarters were. He was arrested by the sieur de Coublan, and conducted to the procureur-général De la Guesle. This magistrate introduced him the next day into the king’s apartment. With a simple and respectful air he presented the king an intercepted letter to the president De Harley. The monarch having read it, and being separated from the Dominican by La Guesle, asked him if he had nothing else to say to him. “I have many important things to reveal to the king,” replied Clement, “but I can only do it in a whisper to his own ear.” “Speak out!” cried the procureur-général two or three times, as he began to mistrust the good father. “Speak aloud, and before me; there is no one here in whom the king has not confidence.” Henry then told him to approach. The villain obeyed, and instead of communicating secrets, plunged a knife, expressly forged for the purpose, into his bowels, and left it sticking in the wound. The astonished king immediately drew out the knife, and springing upon the assassin, stabbed him in the forehead. La Guesle put the finishing stroke with his sword. His body was thrown out at the window, torn in pieces, burnt, and his ashes cast into the Seine.
In proportion as this parricide spread consternation in the army, so did it give cause of triumph to the Parisians. A relation of the martyrdom of Brother Jacques Clement was printed; he was canonized, and lauded at Rome from the very pulpit in which the funeral oration of Henry III. ought to have been pronounced. The object was by such means to incite fresh assassinations. The king died of his wound on the 2nd of August, at two o’clock in the morning; and Henry of Bourbon, king of Navarre, whom he had proclaimed his successor as he was dying, was acknowledged by a part of the army, and by all who deserved the name of Frenchmen. The new monarch was obliged to interrupt the attacks upon Paris to disperse the different armies of the League; and it was not till after he had rendered himself master of the places which served as magazines to the capital, that he formed the blockade of it with less than twenty thousand men. He commenced by attacking the faubourgs: his army, divided into ten bodies, attacked ten different quarters of Paris. In order to witness the operations, he placed himself in the abbey of Montmartre, and at midnight gave the signal. The artillery was immediately heard to roar on both sides. “There is nobody,” says Sully, “who would not have supposed that that immense city was about to perish by fire, or by an infinite number of mines ignited in its entrails; there perhaps never was a spectacle more capable of inspiring horror. Dense masses of smoke, through which pierced at intervals sparks or long trains of flame, shrouded all the surface of that sort of world which, by the vicissitudes of light and darkness, appeared either plunged in black night or covered with a sea of fire. The roar of the artillery, the clash of arms, the cries of combatants, added everything to this scene that can be imagined that is terrifying; and the natural horror of night redoubled it still more. This lasted two whole hours, and ended by the reduction of all the faubourgs, even of that of St. Antoine, though, from its extent, it was obliged to be attacked from a great distance.”
The king’s success did not relax the mad courage and the blind fury of the Parisians; the leaders set the same springs to work that had been employed the preceding year: sacrilegious sermons, the confirmation of the Sorbonne, and the excommunication of the king.
As soon as Henry IV. had closed all the issues from the city, provisions began to fail, and more than two hundred thousand persons of all conditions were reduced to the most awful extremity, but without losing any of that factious ardour which had seized all minds. To animate the people still further, a kind of regiment of ecclesiastics was formed, to the number of thirteen hundred; they appeared on the bridge of Notre Dame in battle-array, and made a general review, which was called the Procession of the League. The leaders carried in one hand a crucifix, and in the other a halbert, the rest having all sorts of arms.
The Pope’s legate, by his presence, approved of a proceeding at once so extraordinary and so laughable; but one of these new soldiers, who was no doubt ignorant that his arquebuss was loaded with ball, wishing to salute the legate in his carriage, fired into it, and killed his almoner. The legate, in consequence of this accident, made as speedy a retreat as possible; but the people exclaimed that it was a great blessing for the almoner to be killed in such a holy cause. Such was the frightful persuasion of this populace, whom impunity had rendered formidable. They believed themselves invincible under the orders of the duke de Nemours, a skilful, courageous, and prudent general, whom the duke de Mayenne, his brother, had left in Paris during his absence; they were backed by three or four thousand good troops, and by several nobles of high courage. They every day skirmished against the royal army, or fought small battles; the Chevalier d’Aumale, of the blood of Lorraine, being always at the head of their sorties, and imparting his impetuous valour to his followers. Henry IV. satisfied himself with repulsing these attacks, convinced that famine would soon open the gates of the capital to him.
In fact, this terrible scourge began to make rapid progress; there was neither wheat, barley, nor oats left; more than fifty thousand persons had already died of want; the sad remains of this numerous population, nobles, plebeians, rich or poor, languidly crawled through the streets to seek for and devour the grass and weeds that grew in them. Mules, horses, cats, dogs, all the domestic animals,—even beasts that are reckoned unclean,—served for food. The leather of shoes was sold for its weight in gold; it was boiled and devoured in secret, for fear some wretch, stronger and more hungry, should tear it from the mouth of the purchaser. Mothers were seen feeding upon the flesh of their children, and miserable beings flew like vultures upon a newly-dead body that had fallen in the streets. The Spanish ambassador to the League advised that bread should be made of the ground bones of the dead, and his plan was eagerly adopted; but this shocking aliment cost the lives of most of those who partook of it. In this general desolation, the priests and monks enjoyed the comforts of abundance; on visiting their abodes, there was generally enough for the present discovered, and, in many instances, a good provision for the future. At length the leaders of the League, to appease the people, who now never ceased crying, “Bread or peace!” charged the bishop of Paris and the archbishop of Lyons with proposals to the king. “I am no dissembler,” said the monarch, “I speak plainly and without deceit what I think. I should be wrong if I told you I did not wish for a general peace; I do wish for it, I ardently desire it, that I may have the power of enlarging and settling the limits of my kingdom. For a battle I would give a finger, for a general peace I would give two. I love my city of Paris; it is my eldest daughter; I am jealous of her. I am anxious to confer upon her more good, more kindness, more pity than she could ask of me; but I desire that she should owe them to me and to my clemency, and not to the duke de Mayenne or the king of Spain. When you ask me to defer the capitulation and surrender of Paris till a universal peace, which cannot take place till after many journeys, backwards and forwards, you ask for a thing highly prejudicial to my city of Paris, which cannot wait so long. So many persons have already died of hunger, that if a further delay of ten or twelve days took place, vast numbers must die, which would be a great pity (une éstrange pitié). I am the father of my people, and I am like the mother of old before Solomon, I would almost prefer having no Paris at all to having it ruined and dissipated by the death of so many Parisians. You, Monsieur le Cardinal, ought to have pity on them; they are your flock. I am not a remarkably good theologian; but I know enough of divinity to be able to tell you that God is not pleased that you should treat thus the poor people he has consigned to you. How can you hope to convert me to your religion, if you set so little store by the safety and lives of your flock? It is giving me but a poor proof of your holiness; I am but little edified by it.”