VOLUME X SLICE VII Fox, George to France (continued 6)

There was nothing noble about Louis XI. but his aims, and nothing great but the results he attained; yet however different he might have been he could not have done better, for what he achieved was the making of France. Charles VIII. and Brittany (1483-1498) This was soon seen after his death in the reaction which menaced his work and those who had served him; but thanks to himself and to his true successor, his eldest daughter Anne, married to the sire de Beaujeu, a younger member of the house of Bourbon, the set-back was only partial. Strife began immediately between the numerous malcontents and the Beaujeu party, who had charge of the little Charles VIII. These latter prudently made concessions: reducing the taille, sacrificing some of Louis XI.’s The Mad War, 1483. creatures to the rancour of the parlement, and restoring a certain number of offices or lands to the hostile princes (chief of whom was the duke of Orleans), and even consenting to a convocation of the states-general at Tours (1484). But the elections having been favourable to royalty, the Beaujeu family made the states reject the regency desired by the duke of Orleans, and organize the king’s council after their own views. When they subsequently eluded the conditions imposed by the states, the deputies—nobles, clergy and burgesses—showed their incapacity to oppose the progress of despotism. In vain did the malcontent princes attempt to set up a new League of Public Weal, the Guerre folle (Mad War), in which the duke of Brittany, Francis II., played the part of Charles the Bold, dragging in the people of Lorraine and the king of Navarre. In vain did Charles VIII., his majority attained, at once abandon in the treaty of Sablé the benefits gained by the victory of Saint-Aubin du Cormier (1488). In vain did Henry VII. of England, Ferdinand the Catholic, and Maximilian of Austria try to prevent the annexation of Brittany by France; its heiress Anne, deserted by every one, made peace and married Charles VIII. in 1491. There was no longer a single great fief in France to which the malcontents could fly for refuge.

It now remained to consolidate the later successes attained by the policy of the Valois—the acquisition of the duchies of Burgundy and Brittany; but instead there was a sudden change and that policy seemed about to be A policy of “magnificence.” lost in dreams of recapturing the rights of the Angevins over Naples, and conquering Constantinople. Charles VIII., a prince with neither intelligence nor resolution, his head stuffed with chivalric romance, was scarcely freed from his sister’s control when he sought in Italy a fatal distraction from the struggle with the house of Austria. By this “war of magnificence” he caused an interruption of half a century in the growth of national sentiment, which was only revived by Henry II.; and he was not alone in thus leaving the bone for the shadow: his contemporaries, Ferdinand the Catholic when delivered from the Moors, and Henry VII. from the power of the English nobles, followed the same superficial policy, not taking the trouble to work for that real strength which comes from the adhesion of willing subjects to their sovereign. They only cared to aggrandize themselves, without thought of national feeling or geographical conditions. The great theorist of these “conquistadores” was Machiavelli. The regent, Anne of Beaujeu, worked in her daughter’s interest to the detriment of the kingdom, by means of a special treaty destined to prevent the property of the Bourbons from reverting to the crown; while Anne of Brittany did the like for her daughter Claude. Louis XII., the next king of France, thought only of the Milanese; Ferdinand the Catholic all but destroyed the Spanish unity at the end of his life by his marriage with Germaine de Foix; while the house of Austria was for centuries to remain involved in this petty course of policy. Ministers followed the example of their self-seeking masters, thinking it no shame to accept pensions from foreign sovereigns. The preponderating consideration everywhere was direct material advantage; there was disproportion everywhere between the means employed and the poverty of the results, a contradiction between the interests of the sovereigns and those of their subjects, which were associated by force and not naturally blended. For the sake of a morsel of Italian territory every one forgot the permanent necessity of opposing the advance of the Turkish crescent, the two horns of which were impinging upon Europe on the Danube and on the Mediterranean.

Italy and Germany were two great tracts of land at the mercy of the highest bidder, rich and easy to dominate, where these coarse and alien kings, still reared on medieval traditions, were for fifty years to gratify their love of conquest. Italy was their The wars in Italy. first battlefield; Charles VIII. was summoned thither by Lodovico Il Moro, tyrant of Milan, involved in a quarrel with his rival, Ferdinand II. of Aragon. The Aragonese had snatched the kingdom of Naples from the French house of Anjou, whose claims Louis XI. had inherited in 1480. To safeguard himself in the rear Charles VIII. handed over Roussillon and Cerdagne (Cerdaña) to Ferdinand the Catholic (that is to say, all the profits of Louis XI.’s policy); gave enormous sums of money to Henry VII. of England; and finally, by the treaty of Senlis ceded Artois and Franche-Comté to Maximilian of Austria. After these fool’s bargains the paladin set out for Naples in 1494. His journey was long and triumphant, and his return precipitate; indeed it very nearly ended in a disaster at Fornovo, owing to the first of those Italian holy leagues which at the least sign of friction were ready to turn against France. At the age of twenty-eight, however, Charles VIII. died without issue (1498).

The accession of his cousin, Louis of Orleans, under the title of Louis XII., only involved the kingdom still further in this Italian imbroglio. Louis did indeed add the fief of Orleans to the royal domain and hastened to divorce Louis XII. (1498-1515). Jeanne of France in order to marry Anne, the widow of his predecessor, so that he might keep Brittany. But he complicated the Naples affair by claiming Milan in consideration of the marriage of his grandfather, Louis of Orleans, to Valentina, daughter of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, duke of Milan. In 1499, appealed to by Venice, and encouraged by his favourite, Cardinal d’Amboise (who was hoping to succeed Pope Alexander VI.), and also by Cesare Borgia, who had lofty ambitions in Italy, Louis XII. conquered Milan in seven months and held it for fourteen years; while Lodovico Sforza, betrayed by his Swiss mercenaries, died a prisoner in France. The kingdom of Naples was still left to recapture; and fearing to be thwarted by Ferdinand of Aragon, Louis XII. proposed to this master of roguery that they should divide the kingdom according to the treaty of Granada (1500). But no sooner had Louis XII. assumed the title of king of Naples than Ferdinand set about despoiling him of it, and despite the bravery of a Bayard and a Louis d’Ars, Louis XII., being also betrayed by the pope, lost Naples for good in 1504. The treaties of Blois occasioned a vast amount of diplomacy, and projects of marriage between Claude of France and Charles of Austria, which came to nothing but served as a prelude to the later quarrels between Bourbons and Habsburgs.

It was Pope Julius II. who opened the gates of Italy to the horrors of war. Profiting by Louis XII.’s weakness and the emperor Maximilian’s strange capricious character, this martial pope sacrificed Italian and religious interests alike in order to re-establish the temporal power of the papacy. Jealous of Venice, at that time the Italian state best provided with powers of expansion, and unable to subjugate it single-handed, Julius succeeded in obtaining help from France, Spain and the Empire. The league of Cambrai (1508) was his finest diplomatic achievement. But he wanted to be sole master of Italy, so in order to expel the French “barbarians” whom he had brought in, he appealed to other barbarians who were far more dangerous—Spaniards, Germans and Swiss—to help him against Louis XII., and stabbed him from behind with the Holy League of 1511.

Weakened by the death of Cardinal d’Amboise, his best counsellor, Louis XII. tried vainly in the assembly of Tours and in the unsuccessful council of Pisa to alienate the French clergy from a papacy which was now so little Louis XII. and Julius II. worthy of respect. But even the splendid victories of Gaston de Foix could not shake that formidable coalition; and despite the efforts of Bayard, La Palice and La Trémoille, it was the Church that triumphed. Julius II. died in the hour of victory; but Louis XII. was obliged to evacuate Milan, to which he had sacrificed everything, even France itself, with that political stupidity characteristic of the first Valois. He died almost immediately after this, on the 1st of January 1515, and his subjects, recognizing his thrift, his justice and the secure prosperity of the kingdom, forgot the seventeen years of war in which they had not been consulted, and rewarded him with the fine title of Father of his People.

As Louis XII. left no son, the crown devolved upon his cousin and son-in-law the count of Angoulême, Francis I. No sooner king, Francis, in alliance with Venice, renewed the chimerical attempts to conquer Milan and Naples; Francis I. (1515-1547). also cherishing dreams of his own election as emperor and of a partition of Europe. The heroic episode of Marignano, when he defeated Cardinal Schinner’s Swiss troops (13-15 of September 1515), made him master of the duchy of Milan and obliged his adversaries to make peace. Leo X., Julius II.’s successor, by an astute volte-face exchanged Parma and the Concordat for a guarantee of all the Church’s possessions, which meant the defeat of French plans (1515). The Swiss signed the permanent peace which they were to maintain until the Revolution of 1789; while the emperor and the king of Spain recognized Francis II.’s very precarious hold upon Milan. Once more the French monarchy was pulled up short by the indignation of all Italy (1518).

The question now was how to occupy the military activity of a young, handsome, chivalric and gallant prince, “ondoyant et divers,” intoxicated by his first victory and his tardy accession to fortune. This had been hailed with Character of Francis I. joy by all who had been his comrades in his days of difficulty; by his mother, Louise of Savoy, and his sister Marguerite; by all the rough young soldiery; by the nobles, tired of the bourgeois ways of Louis XI. and the patriarchal simplicity of Louis XII.; and finally by all the aristocracy who expected now to have the government in their own hands. So instead of heading the crusade against the Turks, Francis threw himself into the electoral contest at Frankfort, which resulted in the election of Charles V., heir of Ferdinand the Catholic, Spain and Germany thus becoming united. Pope Leo X., moreover, handed over three-quarters of Italy to the new emperor in exchange for Luther’s condemnation, thereby kindling that rivalry between Charles V. and the king of France which was to embroil the whole of Europe throughout half a century (1519-1559), from Pavia to St Quentin.

The territorial power of Charles V., heir to the houses of Burgundy, Austria, Castile and Aragon, which not only arrested the traditional policy of France but hemmed her in on every side; his pretensions to be the head of Rivalry of Francis I. and Charles V. Christendom; his ambition to restore the house of Burgundy and the Holy Roman Empire; his grave and forceful intellect all rendered rivalry both inevitable and formidable. But the scattered heterogeneity of his possessions, the frequent crippling of his authority by national privileges or by political discords and religious quarrels, his perpetual straits for money, and his cautious calculating character, almost outweighed the advantages which he possessed in the terrible Spanish infantry, the wealthy commerce of the Netherlands, and the inexhaustible mines of the New World. Moreover, Francis I. stirred up enmity everywhere against Charles V., and after each defeat he found fresh support in the patriotism of his subjects. Immediately after the treaty of Madrid (1526), which Francis I. was obliged to sign after the disaster at Pavia Defeat at Pavia and treaty of Madrid. and a period of captivity, he did not hesitate between his honour as a gentleman and the interests of his kingdom. Having been unable to win over Henry VIII. of England at their interview on the Field of the Cloth of Gold, he joined hands with Suleiman the Magnificent, the conqueror of Mohács; and the Turkish cavalry, crossing the Hungarian Puszta, made their way as far as Vienna, while the mercenaries of Charles V., under the constable de Bourbon, were reviving the saturnalia of Alaric in the sack of Rome (1527). In Germany, Francis I. assisted the Catholic princes to maintain their political independence, though he did not make the capital he might have made of the reform movement. Italy remained faithful to the vanquished in spite of all, while even Henry VIII. of England, who only needed bribing, and Wolsey, accessible to flattery, took part in the temporary coalition. Thus did France, menaced with disruption, embark upon a course of action imposed upon her by the harsh conditions of the treaty of Madrid—otherwise little respected—and later by those of Cambrai (1529); but it was not till later, too late indeed, that it was defined and became a national policy.

After having, despite so many reverses and mistakes, saved Burgundy, though not Artois nor Flanders, and joined to the crown lands the domains of the constable de Bourbon who had gone over to Charles V., Francis I. should Further prosecution of romantic expeditions. have had enough of defending other people’s independence as well as his own, and should have thought more of his interests in the north and east than of Milan. Yet between 1531 and 1547 he manifested the same regrets and the same invincible ambition for that land of Italy which Charles V., on his side, regarded as the basis of his strength. Their antagonism, therefore, remained unabated, as also the contradiction of an official agreement with Charles V., combined with secret intrigues with his enemies. Anne de Montmorency, now head of the government in place of the headstrong chancellor Duprat, for four years upheld a policy of reconciliation and of almost friendly agreement between the two monarchs (1531-1535). The death of Francis I.’s mother, Louise of Savoy (who had been partly instrumental in arranging the peace of Cambrai), the replacement of Montmorency by the bellicose Chabot, and the advent to power of a Burgundian, Granvella, as Charles V.’s prime minister, put an end to this double-faced policy, which attacked the Calvinists of France while supporting the Lutherans of Germany; made advances to Clement VII. while pretending to maintain the alliance with Henry VIII. (just then consummating the Anglican schism); and sought an alliance with Charles V. without renouncing the possession of Italy. The death of the duke of Milan provoked a third general war (1536-1538); The truce at Nice. but after the conquest of Savoy and Piedmont and a fruitless invasion of Provence by Charles V., it resulted in another truce, concluded at Nice, in the interview at Aigues-mortes, and in the old contradictory policy of the treaty of Cambrai. This was confirmed by Charles V.’s triumphal journey through France (1539).

Rivalry between Madame d’Etampes, the imperious mistress of the aged Francis I., and Diane de Poitiers, whose ascendancy over the dauphin was complete, now brought court intrigues and constant changes in those who held Fourth outbreak of war. office, to complicate still further this wearisome policy of ephemeral “combinazioni” with English, Germans, Italians and Turks, which urgent need of money always brought to naught. The disillusionment of Francis I., who had hitherto hoped that Charles V. would be generous enough to give Milan back to him, and then the assassination of Rincon, his ambassador at Constantinople, led to a fourth war (1544-1546), in the course of which the king of England went over to the side of Charles V.

Unable in the days of his youth to make Italy French, when age began to come upon him, Francis tried to make France Italian. In his château at Blois he drank greedily of the cup of Renaissance art; but he found the Royal absolutism under Francis I. exciting draughts of diplomacy which he imbibed from Machiavelli’s Prince even more intoxicating, and he headed the ship of state straight for the rock of absolutism. He had been the first king “du bon plaisir” (“of his own good pleasure”)—a “Caesar,” as his mother Louise of Savoy proudly hailed him in 1515—and to a man of his gallant and hot-headed temperament love and war were schools little calculated to teach moderation in government. Italy not only gave him a taste for art and letters, but furnished him with an arsenal of despotic maxims. Yet his true masters were the jurists of the southern universities, passionately addicted to centralization and autocracy, men like Duprat and Poyet, who revived the persistent tradition of Philip the Fair’s legists. Grouped together on the council of affairs, they managed to control the policy of the common council, with its too mixed and too independent membership. They successfully strove to separate “the grandeur and superexcellence of the king” from the rest of the nation; to isolate the nobility amid the seductions of a court lavish in promises of favour and high office; and to win over the bourgeoisie by the buying and selling and afterwards by the hereditary transmission of offices. Thanks to their action, feudalism was attacked in its landed interest in the person of the constable de Bourbon; feudalism in its financial aspect by the execution of superintendent Semblançay and the special privileges of towns and provinces by administrative centralization. The bureaucracy became a refuge for the nobles, and above all for the bourgeois, whose fixed incomes were lowered by the influx of precious metals from the New World, while the wages of artisans rose. All those time-worn medieval institutions which no longer allowed free scope to private or public life were demolished by the legists in favour of the monarchy.

Their master-stroke was the Concordat of 1516, which meant an immense stride in the path towards absolutism. While Germany and England, where ultramontane doctrines had been allowed to creep in, were seeking a remedy The concordat of 1516. against the economic exactions of the papacy in a reform of dogma or in schism, France had supposed herself to have found this in the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges. But to the royal jurists the right of the churches and abbeys to make appointments to all vacant benefices was a guarantee of liberties valuable to the clergy, but detestable to themselves because the clergy thus retained the great part of public wealth and authority. By giving the king the ecclesiastical patronage they not only made a docile instrument of him, but endowed him with a mine of wealth, even more productive than the sale of offices, and a power of favouring and rewarding that transformed a needy and ill-obeyed king into an absolute monarch. To the pope they offered a mess of pottage in the shape of annates and the right of canonical institution, in order to induce him to sell the Church of France to the king. By this royal reform they completely isolated the monarchy, in the presumptuous pride of omnipotence, upon the ruins of the Church and the aristocracy, despite both the university and the parlement of Paris.

Thus is explained Francis I.’s preoccupation with Italian adventures in the latter part of his reign, and also the inordinate squandering of money, the autos-da-fé in the provinces and in Paris, the harsh repression of reform and free thought, and the sale of justice; while the nation became impoverished and the state was at the mercy of the caprices of royal mistresses—all of which was to become more and more pronounced during the twelve years of Henry II.’s government.

Henry II. shone but with a reflected light—in his private life reflected from his old mistress, Diane de Poitiers, and in his Henry II. (1547-1559). political action reflected from the views of Montmorency or the Guises. He only showed his own personality in an egoism more narrow-minded, in hatred yet bitterer than his father’s; or in a haughty and jealous insistence upon an absolute authority which he never had the wit to maintain.

The struggle with Charles V. was at first delayed by differences with England. The treaty of Ardres had left two bones of contention: the cession of Boulogne to England and the exclusion of the Scotch from the terms of Henry II. and Charles V. peace. At last the regent, the duke of Somerset, endeavoured to arrange a marriage between Edward VI., then a minor, and Mary Stuart, who had been offered in marriage to the dauphin Francis by her mother, Marie of Lorraine, a Guise who had married the king of Scotland. The transference of Mary Stuart to France, and the treaty of 1550 which restored Boulogne to France for a sum of 400,000 crowns, suspended the state of war; and then Henry II.’s opposition to the imperial policy of Charles V. showed itself everywhere: in Savoy and Piedmont, occupied by the French and claimed by Philibert Emmanuel, Charles V.’s ally; in Navarre, unlawfully conquered by Ferdinand the Catholic and claimed by the family of Albret; in Italy, where, aided and abetted by Pope Paul III., Henry II. was trying to regain support; and, finally, in Germany, where after the victory of Charles V. at Mühlberg (1547) the Protestant princes called Henry II. to their aid, offering to subsidize him and cede to him the towns of Metz, Toul and Verdun. The Protestant alliance was substituted for the Turkish alliance, and Henry II. hastened to accept the offers made to him (1552); but this was rather late in the day, for the reform movement had produced civil war and evoked fresh forces. The Germans, in whom national feeling got the better of imperialistic ardour, as soon as they saw the French at Strassburg, made terms with the emperor at Passau and permitted Charles to use all his forces against Henry II. The Defence of Metz. Truce of Vaucelles. defence of Metz by Francis of Guise was admirable and successful; but in Picardy operations continued their course without much result, owing to the incapacity of the constable de Montmorency. Fortunately, despite the marriage of Charles V.’s son Philip to Mary Tudor, which gave him the support of England (1554), and despite the religious pacification of Germany through the peace of Augsburg (1555), Charles V., exhausted by illness and by thirty years of intense activity, in the truce of Vaucelles abandoned Henry II.’s conquests—Piedmont and the Three Bishoprics. He then abdicated the government of his kingdoms, which he divided between his son Philip II. and his brother Ferdinand (1556). A double victory, this, for France.

Henry II.’s resumption of war, without provocation and without allies, was a grave error; but more characterless than ever, the king was urged to it by the Guises, whose influence since the defence of Metz had been supreme Henry II. and Philip II. Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis. at court and who were perhaps hoping to obtain Naples for themselves. On the other hand, Pope Paul IV. and his nephew Carlo Caraffa embarked upon the struggle, because as Neapolitans they detested the Spaniards, whom they considered as “barbarous” as the Germans or the French. The constable de Montmorency’s disaster at Saint Quentin (August 1557), by which Philip II. had not the wit to profit, was successfully avenged by Guise, who was appointed lieutenant-general of the kingdom. He took Calais by assault in January 1558, after the English had held it for two centuries, and occupied Luxemburg. The treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis (August 1559) finally put an end to the Italian follies, Naples, Milan and Piedmont; but it also lost Savoy, making a gap in the frontier for a century. The question of Burgundy was definitely settled, too; but the Netherlands had still to be conquered. By the possession of the three bishoprics and the recapture of Calais an effort towards a natural line of frontier and towards a national policy seemed indicated; but while the old soldiers could not forget Marignano, Ceresole, nor Italy perishing with the name of France on her lips, the secret alliance between the cardinal of Lorraine and Granvella against the Protestant heresy foretold the approaching subordination of national questions to religious differences, and a decisive attempt to purge the kingdom of the new doctrines.

The origin and general history of the religious reformation in the 16th century are dealt with elsewhere (see Church History and Reformation). In France it had originally no revolutionary character whatever; it The Reformation. proceeded from traditional Gallican theories and from the innovating principle of humanism, and it began as a protest against Roman decadence and medieval scholasticism. It found its first adherents and its first defenders among the clerics and learned men grouped around Faber (Lefèvre) of Étaples at Meaux; while Marguerite of Navarre, “des Roynes la non pareille,” was the indefatigable Maecenas of these innovators, and the incarnation of the Protestant spirit at its purest. The reformers shook off the yoke of systems in order boldly to renovate both knowledge and faith; and, instead of resting on the abstract a priori principles within which man and nature had been imprisoned, they returned to the ancient methods of observation and analysis. In so doing, they separated intellectual from popular life; and acting in this spirit, through the need of a moral renaissance, they reverted to primitive Christianity, substituting the inner and individual authority of conscience for the general and external authority of the Church. Their efforts would not, however, have sufficed if they had not been seconded by events; pure doctrine would not have given birth to a church, nor that church to a party; in France, as in Germany, the religious revolution was conditioned by an economic and social revolution.

The economic renaissance due to the great maritime discoveries had the consequence of concentrating wealth in the hands of the bourgeoisie. Owing to their mental qualities, their tendencies and their resources, the bourgeoisie had been, if not alone, at least most apt in profiting by the development of industry, by the extension of commerce, and by the formation of a new and mobile means of enriching themselves. But though the bourgeois had acquired through capitalism certain sources of influence, and gradually monopolized municipal and public functions, the king and the peasants had also benefited by this revolution. After a hundred and fifty years of foreign war and civil discord, at a period when order and unity were ardently desired, an absolute monarchy had appeared the only power capable of realizing such aspirations. The peasants, moreover, had profited by the reduction of the idle landed aristocracy; serfdom had decreased or had been modified; and the free peasants were more prosperous, had reconquered the soil, and were selling their produce at a higher rate while they everywhere paid less exorbitant rents. The victims of this process were the urban proletariat, whose treatment by their employers in trade became less and less protective and beneficent, and the nobility, straitened in their financial resources, uprooted from their ancient strongholds, and gradually despoiled of their power by a monarchy based on popular support. The unlimited sovereignty of the prince was established upon the ruins of the feudal system; and the capitalism of the merchants and bankers upon the closing of the trade-gilds to workmen, upon severe economic pressure and upon the exploitation of the artisans’ labour.

Though reform originated among the educated classes it speedily found an echo among the industrial classes of the 16th century, further assisted by the influence of German and Flemish journeymen. The popular Transformation of religious reform into party politics. reform-movement was essentially an urban movement; although under Francis I. and Henry II. it had already begun to spread into the country. The artisans, labourers and small shop-keepers who formed the first nucleus of the reformed church were numerous enough to provide an army of martyrs, though too few to form a party. Revering the monarchy and established institutions, they endured forty years of persecution before they took up arms. It was only during the second half of Henry II.’s reign that Protestantism, having achieved its religious evolution, became a political party. Weary of being trodden under foot, it now demanded much more radical reform, quitting the ranks of peaceable citizens to pass into the only militant class of the time and adopt its customs. Men like Coligny, d’Andelot and Condé took the place of the timid Lefèvre of Étaples and the harsh and bitter Calvin; and the reform party, in contradiction to its doctrines and its doctors, became a political and religious party of opposition, with all the compromises that presupposes. The struggle against it was no longer maintained by the university and the parlement alone, but also by the king, whose authority it menaced.

With his intrepid spirit, his disdain for ecclesiastical authority and his strongly personal religious feeling, Francis I. had for a moment seemed ready to be a reformer himself; but deprived by the Concordat of all interest in the Royal persecution under Francis I. and Henry II. confiscation of church property, aspiring to political alliance with the pope, and as mistrustful of popular forces as desirous of absolute power and devoted to Italy, he paused and then drew back. Hence came the revocation in 1540 of the edict of tolerance of Coucy (1535), and the massacre of the Vaudois (1545). Henry II., a fanatic, went still further in his edict of Châteaubriant (1551), a code of veritable persecution, and in the coup d’état carried out in the parlement against Antoine du Bourg and his colleagues (1559). At the same time the pastors of the reformed religion, met in synod at Paris, were setting down their confession of faith founded upon the Scriptures, and their ecclesiastical discipline founded upon the independence of the churches. Thenceforward Protestantism adopted a new attitude, and refused obedience to the orders of a persecuting monarchy when contrary to its faith and its interests. After the saints came men. Hence those wars of religion which were to hold the monarchy in check for forty years and even force it to come to terms.

In slaying Henry II. Montgomery’s lance saved the Protestants for the time being. His son and successor, Francis II., was but a nervous sickly boy, bandied between two women: his mother, Catherine de’ Medici, hitherto kept in the Francis II. (1559-1560). background, and his wife, Mary Stuart, queen of Scotland, who being a niece of the Guises brought her uncles, the constable Francis and the cardinal of Lorraine, into power. These ambitious and violent men took the government out of the hands of the constable de Montmorency and the princes of the blood: Antoine de Bourbon, king of Navarre, weak, credulous, always playing a double game on account of his preoccupation with Navarre; Condé, light-hearted and brave, but not fitted to direct a party; and the cardinal de Bourbon, a mere nonentity. The only plan which these princes could adopt in the struggle, once they had lost the king, was to make a following for themselves among the Calvinist malcontents and the gentlemen disbanded after the Italian wars. The Guises, strengthened by the failure of the conspiracy of Amboise, which had been aimed at them, abused the advantage due to their victory. Despite the edict of Romorantin, which by giving the bishops the right of cognizance of heresy prevented the introduction of the Inquisition on the Spanish model into France; despite the assembly of Fontainebleau, where an attempt was made at a compromise acceptable to both Catholics and moderate Calvinists; the reform party and its Bourbon leaders, arrested at the states-general of Orleans, were in danger of their lives. The death of Francis II. in December 1560 compromised the influence of the Guises and again saved Protestantism.

Charles IX. also was a minor, and the regent should legally have been the first prince of the blood, Antoine de Bourbon; but cleverly flattered by the queen-mother, Catherine de’ Medici, he let her take the reins of government. Charles IX. (1560-1574). Hitherto Catherine had been merely the resigned and neglected wife of Henry II., and though eloquent, insinuating and ambitious, she had been inactive. She had attained the age of forty-one when she at last came into power amidst the hopes and anxieties aroused by the fall of the Guises and the return of the Bourbons to fortune. Indifferent in religious matters, she had a passion for authority, a characteristically Italian adroitness in intrigue, a fine political sense, and the feeling that the royal authority might be endangered both by Calvinistic passions and Catholic violence. She decided for a system of tolerance; and Michel de l’Hôpital, the new chancellor, was her spokesman at the states of Orleans (1560). He was a good and honest man, moderate, conciliatory and temporizing, anxious to lift the monarchy above the strife of parties and to reconcile them; but he was so little practical that he could believe in a reformation of the laws in the midst of all the violent passions which were now to be let loose. These two, Catherine and her chancellor, attempted, like Charles V. at Augsburg, to bring about religious pacification as a necessary condition for the maintenance of order; but they were soon overwhelmed by the different factions.

On one side was the Catholic triumvirate of the constable de Montmorency, the duke of Guise, and the marshal de St André; and on the other the Huguenot party of Condé and Coligny, who, having obtained liberty The parties. of conscience in January 1561, now demanded liberty of worship. The colloquy at Poissy between the cardinal of Lorraine and Theodore Beza (September 1561), did not end in the agreement hoped for, and the duke of Guise so far abused its spirit as to embroil the French Calvinists with the German Lutherans. The rupture seemed irremediable when the assembly of Poissy recognized the order of the Jesuits, which the French church had held in suspicion since its foundation. However, yielding to the current which was carrying the greater part of the Edict of tolerance. nation towards reform, and despite the threats of Philip II. who dreaded Calvinistic propaganda in his Netherlands, Michel de l’Hôpital promulgated the edict of January 17, 1562—a true charter of enfranchisement for the Protestants. But the pressure of events and of parties was too strong; the policy of toleration which had miscarried at the council of Trent had no chance of success in France.

The triumvirate’s relations with Spain and Rome were very close; they had complete ascendancy over the king and over Catherine; and now the massacre of two hundred Protestants at Vassy on the 1st of March 1562 made Character of the religious wars. the cup overflow. The duke of Guise had either ordered this, or allowed it to take place, on his return from an interview with the duke of Württemberg at Zabern, where he had once more demanded the help of his Lutheran neighbours against the Calvinists; and the Catholics having celebrated this as a victory the signal was given for the commencement of religious wars. When these eight fratricidal wars first began, Protestants and Catholics rivalled one another in respect for royal authority; only they wished to become its masters so as to get the upper hand themselves. But in course of time, as the struggle became embittered, Catholicism itself grew revolutionary; and this twofold fanaticism, Catholic and Protestant, even more than the ambition of the leaders, made the war a ferocious one from the very first. Beginning with surprise attacks, if these failed, the struggle was continued by means of sieges and by terrible exploits like those of the Catholic Montluc and the Protestant des Adrets in the south of France. Neither of these two parties was strong enough to crush the other, owing to the apathy and continual desertions of the gentlemen-cavaliers who formed the élite of the Protestant army and the insufficient numbers of the Catholic forces. Allies from outside were therefore called in, and this it was that gave a European character to these wars of religion; the two parties were parties of foreigners, the Protestants being supported by German Landsknechts and Elizabeth of England’s cavalry, and the royal army by Italian, Swiss or Spanish auxiliaries. It was no longer patriotism but religion that distinguished the two camps. There were three principal theatres of war: in the north Normandy and the valley of the Loire, where Orleans, the general centre of reform, ensured communications between the south and Germany; in the south-west Gascony and Guienne; in the south-east Lyonnais and Vivarais.

In the first war, which lasted for a year (1562-1563), the triumvirs wished to secure Orleans, previously isolated. The threat of an English landing decided them to lay siege to Rouen, and it was taken by assault; but this First religious war. cost the life of the versatile Antoine de Bourbon. On the 19th of December 1562 the duke of Guise barred the way to Dreux against the German reinforcements of d’Andelot, who after having threatened Paris were marching to join forces with the English troops for whom Coligny and Condé had paid by the cession of Havre. The death of marshal de St André, and the capture of the constable de Montmorency and of Condé, which marked this indecisive battle, left Coligny and Guise face to face. The latter’s success was of brief duration; for on the 18th of February 1563 Poltrot de Méré assassinated him before Orleans, which he was trying to take once and for all. Catherine, relieved by the loss of an inconvenient preceptor, and by the disappearance of the other leaders, became mistress of the Catholic party, of whose strength and popularity she had now had proof, and her idea was to make peace at once on the best terms possible. The egoism of Condé, who got himself made lieutenant-general of the kingdom, and bargained for freedom of worship for the Protestant nobility only, compromised the future of both his church and his party, though rendering possible the peace of Amboise, concluded the 19th of March 1563. All now set off together to recapture Havre from the English.

The peace, however, satisfied no one; neither Catholics (because of the rupture of religious unity) nor the parlements; the pope, the emperor and king of Spain alike protested against it. Nor yet did it satisfy the Protestants, Peace of Amboise (1563). who considered its concessions insufficient, above all for the people. It was, however, the maximum of tolerance possible just then, and had to be reverted to; Catherine and Charles IX. soon saw that the times were not ripe for a third party, and that to enforce real toleration would require an absolute power which they did not possess. After three years the Guises reopened hostilities against Coligny, whom they accused of having plotted the murder of their chief; while the Catholics, egged on by the Spaniards, rose against the Protestants, who had been made uneasy by an interview between Catherine and her daughter Elizabeth, wife of Philip II. of Spain, at Bayonne, and by the duke of Alva’s persecutions of the reformed church of the Netherlands—a daughter-church of Geneva, like their own. The second civil war began like the Second civil war. Peace of Longjumeau. first with a frustrated attempt to kidnap the king, at the castle of Montceaux, near Meaux, in September 1567; and with a siege of Paris, the general centre of Catholicism, in the course of which the constable de Montmorency was killed at Saint-Denis. Condé, with the men-at-arms of John Casimir, son of the Count Palatine, tried to starve out the capital; but once more the defection of the nobles obliged him to sign a treaty of peace at Longjumeau on the 23rd of March 1568, by which the conditions of Amboise were re-established. After the attempt at Montceaux the Protestants had to be contented with Charles IX.’s word.

This peace was not of long duration. The fall of Michel de l’Hôpital, who had so often guaranteed the loyalty of the Huguenots, ruined the moderate party (May 1568). Catholic propaganda, revived by the monks and the Third war. Jesuits, and backed by the armed confraternities and by Catherine’s favourite son, the duke of Anjou, now entrusted with a prominent part by the cardinal of Lorraine; Catherine’s complicity in the duke of Alva’s terrible persecution in the Netherlands; and her attempt to capture Coligny and Condé at Noyers all combined to cause a fresh outbreak of hostilities in the west. Thanks to Tavannes, the duke of Anjou gained easy victories at Jarnac over the prince of Condé, who was killed, and at Moncontour over Coligny, who was wounded (March-October 1569); but these successes were rendered fruitless by the jealousy of Charles IX. Allowing the queen of Navarre to shut herself up in La Rochelle, the citadel of the reformers, and the king to loiter over the siege of Saint Jean d’Angély, Coligny pushed boldly forward towards Paris and, having reached Burgundy, defeated the royal army at Arnay-le-duc. Catherine had exhausted all her resources; and having failed in her project of remarrying Philip II. to one of her daughters, and of betrothing Charles IX. to the eldest of the Austrian archduchesses, exasperated also by the presumption of the Lorraine family, who aspired to the marriage of their nephew with Charles IX.’s Peace of St Germain (1570). sister, she signed the peace of St Germain on the 8th of August 1570. This was the culminating point of Protestant liberty; for Coligny exacted and obtained, first, liberty of conscience and of worship, and then, as a guarantee of the king’s word, four fortified places: La Rochelle, a key to the sea; La Charité, in the centre; Cognac and Montauban in the south.

The Guises set aside, Coligny, supported as he was by Jeanne d’Albret, queen of Navarre, now received all Charles IX.’s favour. Catherine de’ Medici, an inveterate matchmaker, and also uneasy at Philip II.’s increasing Coligny and the Netherlands. power, made advances to Jeanne, proposing to marry her own daughter, Marguerite de Valois, to Jeanne’s son, Henry of Navarre, now chief of the Huguenot party. Coligny was a Protestant, but he was a Frenchman before all; and wishing to reconcile all parties in a national struggle, he “trumpeted war” (cornait la guerre) against Spain in the Netherlands—despite the lukewarmness of Elizabeth of England and the Germans, and despite the counter-intrigues of the pope and of Venice. He succeeded in getting French troops sent to the Netherlands, but they suffered defeat. None the less Charles IX. still seemed to see only through the eyes of Coligny; till Catherine, fearing to be supplanted by the latter, dreading the results of the threatened war with Spain, and egged on by a crowd of Italian adventurers in the pay of Spain—men like Gondi and Birague, reared like herself in the political theories and customs of their native land—saw no hope but in the assassination of this rival in her son’s esteem. A murderous attack upon Coligny, who had opposed the candidature of Catherine’s favourite son, the duke of Anjou, for the throne of Poland, having only succeeded in wounding him and in exciting the Calvinist leaders, who were congregated in Paris for the occasion of Marguerite de Valois’ marriage with the king of Navarre, Catherine St Bartholomew, August 24, 1572. and the Guises resolved together to put them all to death. There followed the wholesale massacre of St Bartholomew’s Eve, in Paris and in the provinces; a natural consequence of public and private hatreds which had poisoned the entire social organism. This massacre had the effect of preventing the expedition into Flanders, and destroying Francis I.’s policy of alliance with the Protestants against the house of Austria.

Catherine de’ Medici soon perceived that the massacre of St Bartholomew had settled nothing. It had, it is true, dealt a blow to Calvinism just when, owing to the reforms of the council of Trent, the religious ground had been The party of the politiques. crumbling beneath it. Moreover, within the party itself a gulf had been widening between the pastors, supported by the Protestant democracy and the political nobles. The reformers had now no leaders, and their situation seemed as perilous as that of their co-religionists in the Netherlands; while the sieges of La Rochelle and Leiden, the enforced exile of the prince of Orange, and the conversion under pain of death of Henry of Navarre and the prince of Condé, made the common danger more obvious. Salvation came from the very excess of the repressive measures. A third party was once more formed, composed of moderates from the two camps, and it was recruited quite as much by jealousy of the Guises and by ambition as by horror at the massacres. There were the friends of the Montmorency party—Damville at their head; Coligny’s relations; the king of Navarre; Condé; and a prince of the blood, Catherine de’ Medici’s third son, the duke of Alençon, tired of being kept Fourth War. Edict of Boulogne (1573). in the background. This party took shape at the end of the fourth war, followed by the edict of Boulogne (1573), forced from Charles IX. when the Catholics were deprived of their leader by the election of his brother, the duke of Anjou, as king of Poland. A year later the latter succeeded his brother on the throne of France as Henry III. This meant a new lease of power for the queen-mother.

The politiques, as the supporters of religious tolerance and an energetic repression of faction were called, offered their alliance to the Huguenots, but these, having formed Fifth War. themselves, by means of the Protestant Union, into a sort of republic within the kingdom, hesitated to accept. It is, however, easy to bring about an understanding between people in whom religious fury has been extinguished either by patriotism or by ambition, like that of the duke of Alençon, who had now escaped from the Louvre where he had been confined on account of his intrigues. The compact was concluded at Millau; Condé becoming a Protestant once more in order to treat with Damville, Montmorency’s brother. Henry of Navarre escaped from Paris. The new king, Henry III., Henry III. (1574-1589). vacillating and vicious, and Catherine herself, eager for war as she was, had no means of separating the Protestants and the politiques. Despite the victory of Guise at Dormans, the agreement between the duke of Alençon and John Casimir’s German army obliged the royal party to grant all that the allied forces demanded of them in the “peace of Monsieur,” signed at Beaulieu on the 6th of May Peace of Monsieur (1576). 1576, the duke of Alençon receiving the appanage of Anjou, Touraine and Berry, the king of Navarre Guienne, and Condé Picardy, while the Protestants were granted freedom of worship in all parts of the kingdom except Paris, the rehabilitation of Coligny and the other victims of St Bartholomew, their fortified towns, and an equal number of seats in the courts of the parlements.

This was going too fast; and in consequence of a reaction against this too liberal edict a fourth party made its appearance, that of the Catholic League, under the Guises—Henry le Balafré, duke of Guise, and his two brothers, Charles, The Catholic League. duke of Mayenne, and Louis, archbishop of Reims and cardinal. With the object of destroying Calvinism by effective opposition, they imitated the Protestant organization of provincial associations, drawing their chief supporters from the upper middle class and the lesser nobility. It was not at first a demagogy maddened by the preaching of the irreconcilable clergy of Paris, but a union of the more honest and prudent classes of the nation in order to combat heresy. Despite the immorality and impotence of Henry III. and the Protestantism of Henry of Navarre, this party talked of re-establishing the authority of the king; but in reality it inclined more to the Guises, martyrs in the good cause, who were supported by Philip II. of Spain and Pope Gregory XIII. A sort of popular government was thus established to counteract the incapacity of royalty, and it was in the name of the imperilled rights of the people that, from the States of Blois onward, this Holy League demanded the re-establishment of Catholic unity, and set the religious right of the nation in opposition to the divine right of incapable or evil-doing kings (1576).

In order to oust his rival Henry of Guise, Henry III. made a desperate effort to outbid him in the eyes of the more extreme Catholics, and by declaring himself head of the League The States of Blois (1576). Sixth War and peace of Bergerac (1577). Seventh War and peace of Fleix (1580). degraded himself into a party leader. The League, furious at this stroke of policy, tried to impose a council of thirty-six advisers upon the king. But the deputies of the third estate did not support the other two orders, and the latter in their turn refused the king money for making war on the heretics, desiring, they said, not war but the destruction of heresy. This would have reduced Henry III. to impotence; fortunately for him, however, the break of the Huguenots with the “Malcontents,” and the divisions in the court of Navarre and in the various parties at La Rochelle, allowed Henry III., after two little wars in the south west, during which fighting gradually degenerated into brigandage, to sign terms of peace at Bergerac (1577), which much diminished the concessions made in the edict of Beaulieu. This peace was confirmed three years after by that of Fleix. The suppression of both the leagues was stipulated for (1580). It remained, however, a question whether the Holy League would submit to this.

The death of the duke of Anjou after his mad endeavour to establish himself in the Netherlands (1584), and the accession of Henry of Navarre, heir to the effeminate Henry III., reversed the situations of the two parties: the Protestants Union between the Guises and Philip II. again became supporters of the principle of heredity and divine right; the Catholics appealed to right of election and the sovereignty of the people. Could the crown of the eldest daughter of the Church be allowed to devolve upon a relapsed heretic? Such was the doctrine officially preached in pulpit and pamphlet. But between Philip II. on the one hand—now master of Portugal and delivered from William of Orange, involved in strife with the English Protestants, and desirous of avenging the injuries inflicted upon him by the Valois in the Netherlands—and the Guises on the other hand, whose cousin Mary Stuart was a prisoner of Queen Elizabeth, there was a common interest in supporting one another and pressing things forward. A definite agreement was made between them at Joinville (December 31, 1584), the religious and popular pretext being the danger of leaving the kingdom to the king of Navarre, and the ostensible end to secure the succession to a Catholic prince, the old Cardinal de Bourbon, an ambitious and violent man of mean intelligence; while the secret aim was to secure the crown for the Guises, who had already attempted to fabricate for themselves a genealogy tracing their descent from Charlemagne. In the meantime Philip II., being rid of Don John of Austria, whose ambition he dreaded, was to crush the Protestants of England and the Netherlands; and the double result of the compact at Joinville was to allow French politics to be controlled by Spain, and to transform the wars of religion into a purely political quarrel.

The pretensions of the Guises were, in fact, soon manifested in the declaration of Péronne (March 30, 1585) against the foul court of the Valois; they were again manifested in a furious agitation, fomented by the secret council The committee of Sixteen at Paris. Eighth war of the three Henries. of the League at Paris, which favoured the Guises, and which now worked on the people through their terror of Protestant retaliations and the Church’s peril. Incited by Philip II., who wished to see him earning his pension of 600,000 golden crowns, Henry of Guise began the war in the end of April, and in a few days the whole kingdom was on fire. The situation was awkward for Henry III., who had not the courage to ask Queen Elizabeth for the soldiers and money that he lacked. The crafty king of Navarre being unwilling to alienate the Protestants save by an apostasy profitable to himself, Henry III., by the treaty of Nemours (July 7, 1585), granted everything to the head of the League in order to save his crown. By a stroke of the pen he suppressed Protestantism, while Pope Sixtus V., who had at first been unfavourable to the treaty of Joinville as a purely political act, though he eventually yielded to the solicitations of the League, excommunicated the two Bourbons, Henry and Condé. But the duke of Guise’s audacity did not make Henry III. forget his desire for vengeance. He hoped to ruin him by attaching him to his cause. His favourite Joyeuse was to defeat the king of Navarre, whose forces were very weak, while Guise was to deal with the strong reinforcement of Germans that Elizabeth was sending to Henry of Navarre. Exactly the contrary happened. By the defeat of Joyeuse at Coutras Henry III. found himself wounded on his strongest side; and by Henry of Guise’s successes at Vimory and Auneau the Germans, who should have been his best auxiliaries against the League, were crushed (October-November 1587).

The League now thought they had no longer anything to fear. Despite the king’s hostility the duke of Guise came to Paris, urged thereto by Philip II., who wanted to occupy Paris and be master of the Channel coasts whilst he Day of the Barricades. launched his invincible Armada to avenge the death of Mary Stuart in 1587. On the Day of the Barricades (May 12, 1588) Henry III. was besieged in the Louvre by the populace in revolt; but his rival dared not go so far as to depose the king, and appeased the tumult. The king, having succeeded in taking refuge at Chartres, ended, however, by granting him in the Act of Union all that he had refused in face of the barricades—the post of lieutenant-general of the kingdom and the proscription of Protestantism. At the second assembly of the states of Blois, called together on account of the need for money (1588), Assassination of the Guises at the second states-general of Blois. all of Henry III.’s enemies who were elected showed themselves even bolder than in 1576 in claiming the control of the financial administration of the kingdom; but the destruction of the Armada gave Henry III., already exasperated by the insults he had received, new vigour. He had the old Cardinal de Bourbon imprisoned, and Henry of Guise and his brother the cardinal assassinated (December 23, 1588). On the 5th of January, 1589, died his mother, Catherine de’Medici, the astute Florentine.

“Now I am king!” cried Henry III. But Paris being dominated by the duke of Mayenne, who had escaped assassination, and by the council of “Sixteen,” the chiefs of the League, Assassination of Henry III. most of the provinces replied by open revolt, and Henry III. had no alternative but an alliance with Henry of Navarre. Thanks to this he was on the point of seizing Paris, when in his turn he was assassinated on the 1st of August 1589 by a Jacobin monk, Jacques Clément; with his dying breath he designated the king of Navarre as his successor.

Between the popular League and the menace of the Protestants it was a question whether the new monarch was to be powerless in his turn. Henry IV. had almost the whole of his kingdom to conquer. The Cardinal de Bourbon, king The Bourbons. according to the League and proclaimed under the title of Charles X., could count upon the Holy League itself, upon the Spaniards of the Netherlands, and upon the pope. Henry IV. was only supported by a certain number of the Calvinists and by the Catholic minority of the Politiques, who, however, gradually induced the rest of the nation to rally round the only legitimate prince. The nation wished for the establishment of internal unity through religious tolerance and the extinction of private organizations; it looked for the extension of France’s external power through the abasement of the house of Spain, protection of the Protestants in the Netherlands and Germany, and independence of Rome. Henry IV., moreover, was forced to take an oath at the camp of Saint Cloud to associate the nation in the affairs of the kingdom by means of the states-general. These three conditions were interdependent; and Henry IV., with his persuasive manners, his frank and charming character, and his personal valour, seemed capable of keeping them all three.

The first thing for this soldier-king to do was to conquer his kingdom and maintain its unity. He did not waste time by withdrawing towards the south; he kept in the neighbourhood of Paris, on the banks of the Seine, within Henry IV. (1589-1610). reach of help from Elizabeth; and twice—at Arques and at Ivry (1589-1590)—he vanquished the duke of Mayenne, lieutenant-general of the League. But after having tried to seize Paris (as later Rouen) by a coup-de-main, he was obliged to raise the siege in view of reinforcements sent to Mayenne by the duke of Parma. Pope Gregory XIV., an enthusiastic supporter of the League and a strong adherent of Spain, having succeeded Sixtus V., who had been very lukewarm towards the League, made Henry IV.’s position still more serious just at the moment when, the old Cardinal de Bourbon having died, Philip II. wanted to be declared the protector of the kingdom in order that he might dismember it, and when Charles Emmanuel of Savoy, a grandson of Francis I., and Charles III., duke of Lorraine, a son-in-law of Henry II., were both of them claiming the crown. Fortunately, however, the Sixteen had disgusted the upper bourgeoisie by their demagogic airs; while their open alliance with Philip II., and their acceptance of a Spanish garrison in Paris had offended the patriotism of the Politiques or moderate members of the League. Mayenne, who oscillated between Philip II. and Henry IV., was himself obliged to break up and subdue this party of fanatics and theologians (December 1591). This game of see-saw between the Politiques and the League furthered his secret ambition, but also the dissolution of the kingdom; and the pressure of public opinion, which desired an effective monarchy, put an end to this temporizing policy and caused the convocation of the states-general States-general of 1592. in Paris (December 1592). Philip II., through the duke of Feria’s instrumentality, demanded the throne for his daughter Isabella, grand-daughter of Henry II. through her mother. But who was to be her husband? The archduke Ernest of Austria, Guise or Mayenne? The parlement cut short these bargainings by condemning all ultramontane pretensions and Spanish intrigues. The unpopularity of Spain, patriotism, the greater predominance of national questions in public opinion, and weariness of both religious disputation and indecisive warfare, all these sentiments were expressed in the wise and clever pamphlet entitled the Satire Ménippée. What had been a slow movement between 1585 and 1592 was quickened by Henry IV.’s abjuration of Protestantism at Saint-Denis on the 23rd of July 1593.

The coronation of the king at Chartres in February 1594 completed the rout of the League. The parlement of Paris declared against Mayenne, who was simply the mouthpiece of Spain, and Brissac, the governor, surrendered Abjuration of Henry IV., July 23, 1593. the capital to the king. The example of Paris and Henry IV.’s clemency rallied round him all prudent Catholics, like Villeroy and Jeannin, anxious for national unity; but he had to buy over the adherents of the League, who sold him his own kingdom for sixty million francs. The pontifical absolution of September 17, 1595, finally stultified the League, which had been again betrayed by the unsuccessful plot of Jean Chastel, the Jesuit’s pupil.

Nothing was now left but to expel the Spaniards, who under cover of religion had worked for their own interests alone. Despite the brilliant charge of Fontaine-Française in Burgundy (June 5, 1595), and the submission of the Peace of Vervins. heads of the League, Guise, Mayenne, Joyeuse, and Mercœur, the years 1595-1597 were not fortunate for Henry IV.’s armies. Indignant at his conversion, Elizabeth, the Germans, and the Swiss Protestants deserted him; while the taking of Amiens by the Spaniards compromised for the moment the future both of the king and the country. But exhaustion of each other, by which only England and Holland profited, brought about the Peace of Vervins. This confirmed the results of the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis (May 2, 1598), that is to say, the decadence of Spanish power, and its inability either to conquer or to dismember France.

The League, having now no reason for existence, was dissolved; but the Protestant party remained very strong, with its political organization and the fortified places which the assemblies of Millau, Nîmes and La Rochelle Edict of Nantes, 1598. (1573-1574) had established in the south and the west. It was a republican state within the kingdom, and, being unwilling to break with it, Henry IV. came to terms by the edict of Nantes, on the 13th of April 1598. This was a compromise between the royal government and the Huguenot government, the latter giving up the question of public worship, which was only authorized where it had existed before 1597 and in two towns of each bailliage, with the exception of Paris; but it secured liberty of conscience throughout the kingdom, state payment for its ministers, admission to all employments, and courts composed equally of Catholics and Protestants in the parlements. An authorization to hold synods and political assemblies, to open schools, and to occupy a hundred strong places for eight years at the expense of the king, assured to the Protestants not only rights but privileges. In no other country did they enjoy so many guarantees against a return of persecution. This explains why the edict of Nantes was not registered without some difficulty.

Thus the blood-stained 16th century closed with a promise of religious toleration and a dream of international arbitration. This was the end of the long tragedy of civil strife and of wars of conquest, mingled with the sound of Results of the religious wars. madrigals and psalms and pavanes. It had been the golden age of the arquebus and the viol, of sculptors and musicians, of poets and humanists, of fratricidal conflicts and of love-songs, of mignons and martyrs. At the close of this troubled century peace descends upon exhausted passions; and amidst the choir of young and ardent voices celebrating the national reconciliation, the tocsin no longer sounds its sinister and persistent bass. Despite the leagues of either faith, religious liberty was now confirmed by the more free and generous spirit of Henry IV.

Why was this king at once so easygoing and so capricious? Why, again, had the effort and authority of feudal and popular resistance been squandered in the follies of the League and to further the ambitions of the rebellious Guises? Why had the monarchy been forced to purchase the obedience of the upper classes and the provinces with immunities which enfeebled it without limiting it? At all events, when the kingdom had been reconquered from the Spaniards and religious strife ended, in order to fulfil his engagements, Henry IV. need only have associated the nation with himself in the work of reconstructing the shattered monarchy. But during the atrocious holocausts formidable states had grown up around France, observing her and threatening her; and on the other hand, as on the morrow of the Hundred Years’ War, the lassitude of the country, the lack of political feeling on the part of the upper classes and their selfishness, led to a fresh abdication of the nation’s rights. The need of living caused the neglect of that necessity for control which had been maintained by the states-general from 1560 to 1593. And this time, moderation on the part of the monarchy no longer made for success. Of the two contrary currents which have continually mingled and conflicted throughout the course of French history, that of monarchic absolutism and that of aristocratic and democratic liberty, the former was now to carry all before it.

The kingdom was now issuing from thirty-eight years of civil war. Its inhabitants had grown unaccustomed to work; its finances were ruined by dishonesty, disorder, and a very heavy foreign debt. The most characteristic The Bourbons. France in 1610. symptom of this distress was the brigandage carried on incessantly from 1598 to 1610. Side by side with this temporary disorder there was a more serious administrative disorganization, a habit of no longer obeying the king. The harassed population, the municipalities which under cover of civil war had resumed the right of self-government, and the parlements elated with their social importance and their security of position, were not alone in abandoning duty and obedience. Two powers faced each other threateningly: the organized and malcontent Protestants; and the provincial governors, all great personages possessing an armed following, theoretically agents of the king, but practically independent. The Montmorencys, the D’Epernons, the Birons, the Guises, were accustomed to consider their offices as hereditary property. Not that these two powers entered into open revolt against the king; but they had adopted the custom of recriminating, of threatening, of coming to understandings with the foreign powers, which with some of them, like Marshal Biron, the D’Entragues and the duc de Bouillon, amounted to conspiracy (1602-1606).

As to the qualifications of the king: he had had the good fortune not to be educated for the throne. Without much learning and sceptical in religious matters, he had the lively intelligence of the Gascon, more subtle than Character of Henry IV. profound, more brilliant than steady. Married to a woman of loose morals, and afterwards to a devout Italian, he was gross and vulgar in his appetites and pleasures. He had retained all the habits of a country gentleman of his native Béarn, careless, familiar, boastful, thrifty, cunning, combined since his sojourn at the court of the Valois with a taint of corruption. He worked little but rapidly, with none of the bureaucratic pedantry of a Philip II. cloistered in the dark towers of the Escurial. Essentially a man of action and a soldier, he preserved his tone of command after he had reached the throne, the inflexibility of the military chief, the conviction of his absolute right to be master. Power quickly intoxicated him, and his monarchy was therefore anything but parliamentary. His personality was everything, institutions nothing. If, at the gathering of the notables at Rouen in 1596, Henry IV. spoke of putting himself in tutelage, that was but preliminary to a demand for money. The states-general, called together ten times in the 16th century, and at the death of Henry III. under promise of convocation, were never assembled. To put his absolute right beyond all control he based it upon religion, and to this sceptic disobedience became a heresy. He tried to make the clergy into an instrument of government by recalling the Jesuits, who had been driven away in 1594, partly from fear of their regicides, partly because they have always been the best teachers of servitude; and he gave the youth of the nation into the hands of this cosmopolitan and ultramontane clerical order. His government was personal, not through departments; he retained the old council though reducing its members; and his ministers, taken from every party, were never—not even Sully—anything more than mere clerks, without independent position, mere instruments of his good pleasure. Fortunately this was not always capricious.

Henry IV. soon realized that his most urgent duty was to resuscitate the corpse of France. Pilfering was suppressed, and the revolts of the malcontents—the Gauthiers of Normandy, the Croquants and Tard-avisés of Périgord The achievements of Henry IV. and Limousin—were quelled, adroitly at first, and later with a sterner hand. He then provided for the security of the country districts, and reduced the taxes on the peasants, the most efficacious means of making them productive and able to pay. Inspired by Barthélemy de Laffémas (1545-1612), controller-general of commerce, and by Olivier de Serres (1539-1619),31 Henry IV. encouraged the culture of silk, though without much result, had orchards planted and marshes drained; while though he permitted the free circulation of wine and corn, this depended on the harvests. But the twofold effect of civil war—the ruin of the farmers and the scarcity and high price of rural labour—was only reduced arbitrarily and by fits and starts.

Despite the influence of Sully, a convinced agrarian because of his horror of luxury and love of economy, Henry IV. likewise attempted amelioration in the towns, where the state of affairs was even worse than in the country. But the Industrial policy of Henry IV. edict of 1597, far from inaugurating individual liberty, was but a fresh edition of that of 1581, a second preface to the legislation of Colbert, and in other ways no better respected than the first. As for the new features, the syndical courts proposed by Laffémas, they were not even put into practice. Various industries, nevertheless, concurrent with those of England, Spain and Italy, were created or reorganized: silk-weaving, printing, tapestry, &c. Sully at least provided renascent manufacture with the roads necessary for communication and planted them with trees. In external commerce Laffémas and Henry IV. were equally the precursors of Colbert, freeing raw material and prohibiting the import of products similar to those manufactured within the kingdom. Without regaining that preponderance in the Levant which had been secured after the victory of Lepanto and before the civil wars, Marseilles still took an honourable place there, confirmed by the renewal in 1604 of the capitulations of Francis I. with the sultan. Finally, the system of commercial companies, antipathetic to the French bourgeoisie, was for the first time practised on a grand scale; but Sully never understood that movement of colonial expansion, begun by Henry II. in Brazil and continued in Canada by Champlain, which had so marvellously enlarged the European horizon. His point of view was altogether more limited than that of Henry IV.; and he did not foresee, like Elizabeth, that the future would belong to the peoples whose national energy took that line of action.

His sphere was essentially the superintendence of finance, to which he brought the same enthusiasm that he had shown in fighting the League. Vain and imaginative, his reputation was enormously enhanced by his The work of Sully. “Économies royales”; he was no innovator, and being a true representative of the nation at that period, like it he was but lukewarm towards reform, accepting it always against the grain. He was not a financier of genius; but he administered the public moneys with the same probity and exactitude which he used in managing his own, retrieving alienated property, straightening accounts, balancing expenditure and receipts, and amassing a reserve in the Bastille. He did not reform the system of aides and tailles established by Louis XI. in 1482; but by charging much upon indirect taxation, and slightly lessening the burden of direct taxation, he avoided an appeal to the states-general and gave an illusion of relief.

Nevertheless, economic disasters, political circumstances and the personal government of Henry IV. (precursor in this also of Louis XIV.) rendered his task impossible or fatal. The nobility remained in debt and disaffected; and the clergy, more Criticism of Henry IV.’s achievement. remarkable for wealth and breeding than for virtues, were won over to the ultramontane ideas of the triumphant Jesuits. The rich bourgeoisie began more and more to monopolize the magistracy; and though the country-people were somewhat relieved from the burden which had been crushing them, the working-classes remained impoverished, owing to the increase of prices which followed at a distance the rise of wages. Moreover, under insinuating and crafty pretexts, Henry IV. undermined as far as he could the right of control by the states-general, the right of remonstrance by the parlements, and the communal franchises, while ensuring the impoverishment of the municipalities by his fiscal methods. Arbitrary taxation, scandalous intervention in elections, forced candidatures, confusion in their financial administration, bankruptcy and revolt on the part of the tenants: all formed an anticipation of the personal rule of Richelieu and Louis XIV.

Thus Henry IV. evinced very great activity in restoring order and very great poverty of invention in his methods. His sole original creation, the edict of La Paulette in 1604, Edict of La Paulette. was disastrous. In consideration of an annual payment of one-sixtieth of the salary, it made hereditary offices which had hitherto been held only for life; and the millions which it daily poured into the royal exchequer removed the necessity for seeking more regular and better distributed resources. Political liberty and social justice were equally the losers by this extreme financial measure, which paved the way for a catastrophe.

In foreign affairs the abasement of the house of Austria remained for Henry IV., as it had been for Francis I. and Henry II., a political necessity, while under his successors it was to become a mechanical obsession. The peace Foreign policy of Henry IV. of Vervins had concluded nothing. The difference concerning the marquisate of Saluzzo, which the duke of Savoy had seized upon in 1588, profiting by Henry III.’s embarrassments, is only worth mentioning because the treaty of Lyons (1601) finally dissipated the Italian mirage, and because, in exchange for the last of France’s possessions beyond the Alps, it added to the royal domain the really French territory of La Bresse, Bugey, Valromey and the district of Gex. The great external affair of the reign was the projected war upon which Henry IV. was about to embark when he was assassinated. The “grand design” of Sully, the organization of a “Christian Republic” of the European nations for the preservation of peace, was but the invention of an irresponsible minister, soured by defeat and wishing to impress posterity. Henry IV., the least visionary of kings, was between 1598 and 1610 really hesitating between two great contradictory political schemes: the war clamoured for by the Protestants, politicians like Sully, and the nobility; and the Spanish alliance, to be cemented by marriages, and preached by the ultramontane Spanish camarilla formed by the queen, Père Coton, the king’s confessor, the minister Villeroy, and Ubaldini, the papal nuncio. Selfish and suspicious, Henry IV. consistently played this double game of policy in conjunction with president Jeannin. By his alliance with the Grisons (1603) he guaranteed the integrity of the Valtellina, the natural approach to Lombardy for the imperial forces; and by his intimate union with Geneva he controlled the routes by which the Spaniards could reach their hereditary possessions in Franche-Comté and the Low Countries from Italy. But having defeated the duke of Savoy he had no hesitation in making sure of him by a marriage; though the Swiss might have misunderstood the treaty of Brusol (1610) by which he gave one of his daughters to the grandson of Philip II. On the other hand he astonished the Protestant world by the imprudence of his mediation between Spain and the rebellious United Provinces (1609). When the succession of Cleves and of Jülich, so long expected and already discounted by the treaty of Halle (1610), was opened up in Germany, the great war was largely due to an access of senile passion for the charms of the princesse de Condé. The stroke of Ravaillac’s knife caused a timely descent of the curtain upon this new and tragi-comic Trojan War. Thus, here as elsewhere, we see a vacillating hand-to-mouth policy, at the mercy of a passion for power or for sensual gratification. The Cornette blanche of Arques, the Poule au pôt of the peasant, successes as a lover and a dashing spirit, have combined to surround Henry IV. with a halo of romance not justified by fact.

The extreme instability of monarchical government showed itself afresh after Henry IV.’s death. The reign of Louis XIII., a perpetual regency by women, priests, and favourites, was indeed a curious prelude to the grand age of the The regency of Marie de’Medici. French monarchy. The eldest son of Henry IV. being a minor, Marie de’ Medici induced the parlement to invest her with the regency, thanks to Villeroy and contrary to the last will of Henry IV. This second Florentine, at once jealous of power and incapable of exercising it, bore little resemblance to her predecessor. Light-minded, haughty, apathetic and cold-hearted, she took a sort of passionate delight in changing Henry IV.’s whole system of government. Who would support her in this? On one side were the former ministers, Sillery and president Jeannin, ex-leaguers but loyalists, no lovers of Spain and still less of Germany; on the other the princes of the blood and the great nobles, Condé, Guise, Mayenne and Nevers, apparently still much more faithful to French ideas, but in reality convinced that the days of kings were over and that their own had arrived. Instead of weakening this aristocratic agitation by the see-saw policy of Catherine de’ Medici, Marie could invent no other device than to despoil the royal treasure by distributing places and money to the chiefs of both parties. The savings all expended and Sully fallen into disgrace, she lost her influence and became the almost unconscious instrument of an ambitious man of low birth, the Florentine Concini, who was to drag her down with him in his fall; petty shifts became thenceforward the order of the day.

Thus Villeroy thought fit to add still further to the price already paid to triumphant Madrid and Vienna by disbanding the army, breaking the treaty of Brusol, and abandoning the Protestant princes beyond the Rhine and the Louis XIII.(1610-1643). trans-Pyrenean Moriscos. France joined hands with Spain in the marriages of Louis XIII. with Anne of Austria and Princess Elizabeth with the son of Philip III., and the Spanish ambassador was admitted to the secret council of the queen. To soothe the irritation of England the duc de Bouillon was sent to London to offer the hand of the king’s sister to the prince of Wales. Meanwhile, however, still more was ceded to the princes than to the kings; and after a pretence of drawing the sword against the prince of Condé, rebellious through jealousy of the Italian surroundings of the queen-mother, recourse was had to the purse. The peace of Sainte Menehould, four years after the death of Henry IV., was a virtual abdication of the monarchy (May 1614); it was time for a move in the other direction. Villeroy inspired the regent with the idea of an armed expedition, accompanied by the little king, into the West. The convocation of the states-general was about to take place, wrung, as in all minorities, from the royal weakness—this time by Condé; so the elections were influenced in the monarchist interest. The king’s majority, solemnly proclaimed on the 28th of October 1614, further strengthened the throne; while owing to the bungling of the third estate, who did not contrive to gain the support of the clergy and the nobility by some sort of concessions, the states-general, the last until 1789, proved like the others a mere historic episode, an impotent and inorganic expedient. In vain Condé tried to play with the parlement of Paris the same game as with the states-general, in a sort of anticipation of the Fronde. Villeroy demurred; and the parlement, having illegally assumed a political rôle, broke with Condé and effected a reconciliation with the court. After this double victory Marie de’ Medici could at last undertake the famous journey to Bordeaux and consummate the Spanish marriages. In order not to countenance by his presence an act which had been the pretext for his opposition, Condé rebelled once more in August 1615; but he was again pacified by the governorships and pensions of the peace of Loudun (May 1616).

But Villeroy and the other ministers knew not how to reap the full advantage of their victory. They had but one desire, to put themselves on a good footing again with Condé, instead of applying themselves honestly to the service Concini, Marshal d’Ancre. of the king. The “marshals,” Concini and his wife Leonora Galigai, more influential with the queen and more exacting than ever, by dint of clever intrigues forced the ministers to retire one after another; and with the last of Henry IV.’s “greybeards” vanished also all the pecuniary reserves left. Concini surrounded himself with new men, insignificant persons ready to do his bidding, such as Barbin or Mangot, while in the background was Richelieu, bishop of Luçon. Condé now began intrigues with the princes whom he had previously betrayed; but his pride dissolved in piteous entreaties when Thémines, captain of the guard, arrested him in September 1616. Six months later Concini had not even time to protest when another captain, Vitry, slew him at the Louvre, under orders from Louis XIII., on the 24th of April 1617.

Richelieu had appeared behind Marie de’ Medici; Albert de Luynes rose behind Louis XIII., the neglected child whom he had contrived to amuse. “The tavern remained the same, having changed nothing but the bush.” De Luynes was made a duke and marshal in Concini’s place, with no better title; while the duc d’Epernon, supported by the queen-mother (now in disgrace at Blois), took Condé’s place at the head of the opposition. The treaties of Angoulême and Angers (1619-1620), negotiated by Richelieu, recalled the “unwholesome” treaties of Sainte-Menehould and Loudun. The revolt of the Protestants was more serious. Goaded by the vigorous revival of militant Catholicism which marked the opening of the 17th century, de Luynes tried to put a finishing touch to the triumph of Catholicism in France, which he had assisted, by abandoning in the treaty of Ulm the defence of the small German states against the ambition of the ruling house of Austria, and by sacrificing the Protestant Grisons to Spain. The re-establishment of Catholic worship in Béarn was the pretext for a rising among the Protestants, who had remained loyal during these troublous years; and although the military organization of French Protestantism, arranged by the assembly of La Rochelle, had been checked in 1621, by the defection of most of the reformed nobles, like Bouillon and Lesdiguières, de Luynes had to raise the disastrous siege of Montauban. Death alone saved him from the disgrace suffered by his predecessors (December 15, 1621).

From 1621 to 1624 Marie de’ Medici, re-established in credit, prosecuted her intrigues; and in three years there were three different ministries: de Luynes was succeeded by the prince de Condé, whose Montauban was found at Return of Marie de Medici Montpellier; the Brûlarts succeeded Condé, and having, like de Luynes, neglected France’s foreign interests, they had to give place to La Vieuville; while this latter was arrested in his turn for having sacrificed the interests of the English Catholics in the negotiations regarding the marriage of Henrietta of France with the prince of Wales. All these personages were undistinguished figures beyond whom might be discerned the cold clear-cut profile of Marie de’ Medici’s secretary, now a cardinal, who was to take the helm and act as viceroy during eighteen years.

Richelieu came into power at a lucky moment. Every one was sick of government by deputy; they desired a strong hand and an energetic foreign policy, after the defeat of the Czechs at the White Mountain by the house of Cardinal Richelieu 1624-1642. Austria, the Spanish intrigues in the Valtellina, and the resumption of war between Spain and Holland. Richelieu contrived to raise hope in the minds of all. As president of the clergy at the states-general of 1614 he had figured as an adherent of Spain and the ultramontane interest; he appeared to be a representative of that religious party which was identical with the Spanish party. But he had also been put into the ministry by the party of the Politiques, who had terminated the civil wars, acclaimed Henry IV., applauded the Protestant alliance, and by the mouth of Miron, president of the third estate, had in 1614 proclaimed its intention to take up the national tradition once more. Despite the concessions necessary at the outset to the partisans of a Catholic alliance, it was the programme of the Politiques that Richelieu adopted and laid down with a master’s hand in his Political Testament.

To realize it he had to maintain his position. This was very difficult with a king who “wished to be governed and yet was impatient at being governed.” Incapable of applying himself to great affairs, but of sane and even acute Louis XIII. and Richelieu. judgment, Louis XIII. excelled only in a passion for detail and for manual pastimes. He realized the superior qualities of his minister, though with a lively sense of his own dignity he often wished him more discreet and less imperious; he had confidence in him but did not love him. Cold-hearted and formal by nature, he had not even self-love, detested his wife Anne of Austria—too good a Spaniard—and only attached himself fitfully to his favourites, male or female, who were naturally jealously suspected by the cardinal. He was accustomed to listen to his mother, who detested Richelieu as her ungrateful protégé. Neither did he love his brother, Gaston of Orleans, and the feeling was mutual; for the latter, remaining for twenty years heir-presumptive to a crown which he could neither defend nor seize, posed as the beloved prince in all the conspiracies against Richelieu, and issued from them each time as a Judas. Add to this that Louis XIII., like Richelieu himself, had wretched health, aggravated by the extravagant medicines of the day; and it is easy to understand how this pliable disposition which offered itself to the yoke caused Richelieu always to fear that his king might change his master, and to declare that “the four square feet of the king’s cabinet had been more difficult for him to conquer than all the battlefields of Europe.”

Richelieu, therefore, passed his time in safeguarding himself from his rivals and in spying upon them; his suspicious nature, rendered still more irritable by his painful practice of a dissimulation repugnant to his headstrong character, making him fancy himself threatened more than was actually the case. He brutally suppressed six great plots, several of which were scandalous, and had more than fifty persons executed; and he identified himself with the king, sincerely believing that he was maintaining the royal authority and not merely his own. He had a preference for irregular measures rather than legal prosecutions, and a jealousy of all opinions save his own. He maintained his power through the fear of torture and of special commissions. It was Louis XIII. whose cold decree ordained most of the rigorous sentences, but the stain of blood rested on the cardinal’s robe and made his reasons of state pass for private vengeance. Chalais was beheaded at Nantes in 1626 for having upheld Gaston of Orleans in his refusal to wed Mademoiselle de Montpensier, and Marshal d’Ornano died at Vincennes for having given him bad advice in this matter; while the duellist de Boutteville was put to the torture for having braved the edict against duels. The royal family itself was not free from his attacks; after the Day of Dupes (1630) he allowed the queen-mother to die in exile, and publicly dishonoured the king’s brother Gaston of Orleans by the publication of his confessions; Marshal de Marillac was put to the torture for his ingratitude, and the constable de Montmorency for rebellion (1632). The birth of Louis XIV. in 1638 confirmed Richelieu in power. However, at the point of death he roused himself to order the execution of the king’s favourite, Cinq-Mars, and his friend de Thou, guilty of treason with Spain (1642).

Absolute authority was not in itself sufficient; much money was also needed. In his state-papers Richelieu has shown that at the outset he desired that the Huguenots should share no longer in public affairs, that the nobles should Financial policy of Richelieu. cease to behave as rebellious subjects, and the powerful provincial governors as suzerains over the lands committed to their charge. With his passion for the uniform and the useful on a grand scale, he hoped by means of the Code Michaud to put an end to the sale of offices, to lighten imposts, to suppress brigandage, to reduce the monasteries, &c. To do this it would have been necessary to make peace, for it was soon evident that war was incompatible with these reforms. He chose war, as did his Spanish rival and contemporary Olivares. War is expensive sport; but Richelieu maintained a lofty attitude towards finance, disdained figures, and abandoned all petty details to subordinate officials like D’Effiat or Bullion. He therefore soon reverted to the old and worse measures, including the debasement of coinage, and put an extreme tension on all the springs of the financial system. The land-tax was doubled and trebled by war, by the pensions of the nobles, by an extortion the profits of which Richelieu disdained neither for himself nor for his family; and just when the richer and more powerful classes had been freed from taxes, causing the wholesale oppression of the poorer, these few remaining were jointly and severally answerable. Perquisites, offices, forced loans were multiplied to such a point that a critic of the times, Guy Patin, facetiously declared that duties were to be exacted from the beggars basking in the sun. Richelieu went so far as to make poverty systematic and use famine as a means of government. This was the price paid for the national victories.

Thus he procured money at all costs, with an extremely crude fiscal judgment which ended by exasperating the people; hence numerous insurrections of the poverty-stricken; Dijon rose in revolt against the aides in 1630, Provence against the tax-officers (élus) in 1631, Paris and Lyons in 1632, and Bordeaux against the increase of customs in 1635. In 1636 the Croquants ravaged Limousin, Poitou, Angoumois, Gascony and Périgord; in 1639 it needed an army to subdue the Va-nu-pieds (bare-feet) in Normandy. Even the rentiers of the Hôtel-de-Ville, big and little, usually very peaceable folk, were excited by the curtailment of their incomes, and in 1639 and 1642 were roused to fury.

Every one had to bend before this harsh genius, who insisted on uniformity in obedience. After the feudal vassals, decimated by the wars of religion and the executioner’s hand, and after the recalcitrant taxpayers, the Protestants, Struggle with the Protestants. in their turn, and by their own fault, experienced this. While Richelieu was opposing the designs of the pope and of the Spaniards in the Valtellina, while he was arming the duke of Savoy and subsidizing Mansfeld in Germany, Henri, duc de Rohan, and his brother Benjamin de Rohan, duc de Soubise, the Protestant chiefs, took the initiative in a fresh revolt despite the majority of their party (1625). This Huguenot rising, in stirring up which Spanish diplomacy had its share, was a revolt of discontented and ambitious individuals who trusted for success to their compact organization and the ultimate assistance of England. Under pressure of this new danger and urged on by the Catholic dévôts, supported by the influence of Pope Urban VIII., Richelieu concluded with Spain the treaty of Monzon (March 5, 1626), by which the interests of his allies Venice, Savoy and the Grisons were sacrificed without their being consulted. The Catholic Valtellina, freed from the claims of the Protestant Grisons, became an independent state under the joint protection of France and Spain; the question of the right of passage was left open, to trouble France during the campaigns that followed; but the immediate gain, so far as Richelieu was concerned, was that his hands were freed to deal with the Huguenots.

Soubise had begun the revolt (January 1625) by seizing Port Blavet in Brittany, with the royal squadron that lay there, and in command of the ships thus acquired, combined with those of La Rochelle, he ranged the western coast, intercepting commerce. In September, however, Montmorency succeeded, with a fleet of English and Dutch ships manned by English seamen, in defeating Soubise, who took refuge in England. La Rochelle was now invested, the Huguenots were hard pressed also on land, and, but for the reluctance of the Dutch to allow their ships to be used for such a purpose, an end might have been made of the Protestant opposition in France; as it was, Richelieu was forced to accept the mediation of England and conclude a treaty with the Huguenots (February 1626).

He was far, however, from forgiving them for their attitude or being reconciled to their power. So long as they retained their compact organization in France he could undertake no successful action abroad, and the treaty was in effect no more than a truce that was badly observed. The oppression of the French Protestants was but one of the pretexts for the English expedition under James I.’s favourite, the duke of Buckingham, to La Rochelle in 1627; and, in the end, this intervention of a foreign power compromised their cause. When at last the citizens of the great Huguenot stronghold, caught between two dangers, chose what seemed to them the least and threw in their lot with the English, they definitely proclaimed their attitude as anti-national; and when, on the 29th of October 1628, after a heroic resistance, the city surrendered to the French king, Peace of Alais, 1629. this was hailed not as a victory for Catholicism only, but for France. The taking of La Rochelle was a crushing blow to the Huguenots, and the desperate alliance which Rohan, entrenched in the Cévennes, entered into with Philip IV. of Spain, could not prolong their resistance. The amnesty of Alais, prudent and moderate in religious matters, gave back to the Protestants their common rights within the body politic. Unfortunately what was an end for Richelieu was but a first step for the Catholic party.

The little Protestant group eliminated, Richelieu next wished to establish Catholic religious uniformity; for though in France the Catholic Church was the state church, unity did not exist in it. There were no fixed principles in the Richelieu and the Catholics. relations between king and church, hence incessant conflicts between Gallicans and Ultramontanes, in which Richelieu claimed to hold an even balance. Moreover, a Catholic movement for religious reform in the Church of France began during the 17th century, marked by the creation of seminaries, the foundation of new orthodox religious orders, and the organization of public relief by Saint Vincent de Paul. Jansenism was the most vigorous contemporary effort to renovate not only morals but Church doctrine (see Jansenism). But Richelieu had no love for innovators, and showed this very plainly to du Vergier de Hauranne, abbot of Saint Cyran, who was imprisoned at Vincennes for the good of Church and State. In affairs of intellect dragooning was equally the policy; and, as Corneille learnt to his cost, the French Academy was created in 1635 simply to secure in the republic of letters the same unity and conformity to rules that was enforced in the state.