XXV. CHAP. He, at the same time, used every diplomatic effort to dissuade the Pope from countenancing the renascent League.* It was not the first time that the future Henry the Fourth, since he was free, had received a mingled summons and advice to recant. Philip the Second once sent envoys to him to urge this, and to promise alliance with the Prince of Bearn, as he called the King of Navarre, in at once dethroning Henry the Third. Though neither enthusiastic nor resolute in his religious tenets, the Bearnois declared that 'he could not change his creed as he did his chemise;' nor could he demean himself by making his religious profession the means of political advantage. This offer of Philip the Second testifies the hatred which he bore the Valois. Never, indeed, was the malignity of this prince more active. Assassin after assassin was despatched from the European Old Man of the Mountain against Elizabeth and against the Prince of Orange. One of these, Salcede, had, a year or two before, been commissioned to murder the Duke of Anjou; the deposition of the ruffian previous to his fearful execution seriously alarmed and perplexed Henry the Third.‡ When in the spring of 1584 it became known that the Duke of Anjou's illness was likely to terminate fatally, Guise, under Spanish orders, held meetings of his friends and family at Bassompierre near Nancy, and there arranged the preliminaries for the resuscitation of the League. In June and July, the Spanish monarch had to record a double triumph; the Duke of Anjou expired, some say under the effects of poison, and, within a few weeks, the Prince of Orange fell under the hand of an assassin, whom Philip and the Prince of Parma had expressly employed. The latter *The relations of the French court with the Popes are elucidated in the king's letters to St. Goard, preserved in the collection of M. Lucas Montigny. See the catalogue by Laverdet, 1860. † Mémoires de Duplessis-Mornay. Discours Veritable of Salcede's crime, printed at Bruges, 1582. . immediately laid siege to Antwerp in order to put a finishing stroke to the cause of Reform in the Low Countries, and Guise resuscitated the League in a solemn meeting held at Joinville on the last day of 1584. The envoys of Spain and of the Cardinal of Bourbon were present. Here it was agreed that the extinction of heresy should be actively pursued in France and in Flanders. All Protestants pretending to the throne of France being set aside, the Cardinal of Bourbon was to be considered the legitimate heir, and he was to renew the conditions of the Treaty of Cateau Cambresis, and to execute the decrees of the council of Trent. He was to restore Cambray to Spain, and suffer no aid to reach the Flemish rebels from France; Philip in turn promising to support the League, by paying 600,000 crowns in six months, and 400,000 at the end of the year.* In the same month (December 1584) was signed, at Magdeburg, a concordat, as it was called, between Queen Elizabeth, Henry of Navarre, the Prince of Condé, John Casimir, the Swiss, and the Rochellois, to maintain the French Edicts of Pacification, and summon Henry the Third to respect them. Elizabeth promised to furnish 12,000 English, 5000 reistres, and 4000 Swiss. Thus were the great European parties of Spain and Rome, absolutism and ultra-Catholicism, ranged against the North of Europe, including England. Henry the Third received a summons from both to join them. The Flemings besought him once more to save them, and with them the independence of Europe. The Estates of Flanders offered to recognise him as their sovereign. Ashamed to refuse, Henry and Catherine affected difficulties, and were so preposterously exigent as to require Holland and Zealand as well as Flanders. * MS. Bethune, 8860. CHAP. XXV. XXV. CHAP. Well aware of the puissant enemies that menaced and paralysed them at home, they knew themselves to be in no condition to accept either the whole or the half sovereignty of the Low Countries. They merely sought to cover, by a decent pretext, their apparently pusillanimous refusal. The pretext was not given them; for the Estates of Ghent, and even those of Holland, offered themselves to the puny French monarch, sadly ignorant of his capabilities or his position. Elizabeth supported their demands, and backed them by the Order of the Garter. The latter was a welcome gift. But a crown to grasp and to defend surpassed his power, and the king publicly declined the proffer. Spain was more peremptory, and the Prince of Parma made an instant demand of Cambray. Catherine of Medicis thought to parry it by declaring it her own especial and private property. Spain and the leaguers did not wait for the conclusion of their mutual treaty to commence operations. On the 20th of August a pilgrim was captured with letters from Guise, with orders to his officers to seize Nantes, Brest, and St. Malo.† Tidings that the Rouergue, Quercy, and Auvergne were leagued, reached the court about the same time, Henry‡ sending La Foret to forbid them assembling. But the provinces and the leaguers were already up in arms, when the Cardinal of Bourbon, as heir presumptive to the crown, pub *Motley, United Netherlands, vol. i. close of c. iii., charges the French king and his mother with pusillanimity for declining so magnificent an offer. But these or similar proposals were not made for the first time, nor was it the first time that Catherine or one or other of her sons had listened to them; but events had proved the utter incapacity of French princes or of the French monarchy taking advantage of them. It could only be done by a frank alliance with England and the Huguenots, and with the cordial aid of the former power. But there was no counting upon Elizabeth to aid the French sincerely in Flemish conquests, and what the Huguenots were unable to effect twelve years before, they were still less able to accomplish then. † MSS. Colbert, 9. Henry's letter. MSS. Bethune, 8859. lished his manifesto at Peronne, detailing the causes which prompted him and his party to take arms.* The reasons assigned for the Cardinal of Bourbon raising a standard hostile to the Government, was the speedy extinction of the House of Valois; the pretensions of a Huguenot prince to succeed to the throne; and the necessary oppression, in consequence, of the Catholic religion. At such a crisis the king, instead of trusting the national noblesse, advanced new men to power who were ready to favour the Huguenot prince, and, in so doing, wrong every class in the State. To prevent such evils, the Cardinal of Bourbon had leagued with the Pope, the King of Spain, the Princes of the House of Austria, the Republics of Venice and Genoa, the Grand Duke of Florence, the Houses of Lorraine, of Savoy, of Nevers, of Cleves, of Nemours, the Bishops of Cologne and Mayence, all of whom agreed to maintain the Papal religion in France, to restore to the noblesse its privileges, to abolish all new taxes, give parliaments their rights, and see that the states-general should henceforth be freely held. No doubt there was in this an apparent respect of popular opinion. But at the very time, and for many years previous, a slow system of persecution had been directed against the Protestants, and even against those who favoured them, forbidding their books, and excluding them from municipal authority, and even from residence; so much so, that those professing the reformed religion were obliged either to abandon their belief or return to those towns or districts where their creed exclusively prevailed. The only way of resisting and remedying this was war- -war carried on as it was at a later period in Germany, until such time as the Roman Catholics could be brought by necessity to fair toleration. But toleration at so early a period as this could only have been observed * Mémoires de la Ligue. СНАР. XXV. XXV. CHAP. by sects living apart in different provinces and districts, thus avoiding mutual irritation and inspiring mutual awe. This, however, was no less than a division of the kingdom, and a destruction of its unity and strength, to which, indeed, the treaty of Monsieur palpably led. These necessities and results begat a political hatred of Protestantism in the breasts of men who were patriotic Frenchmen and zealous loyalists. Did such a sentiment animate the Duke of Guise, he would command our respect. But he evidently cared little for the unity of France or the dignity of its crown, aiming rather at the suppression of both, and the substitution of separate principalities, probably under the suzerainty of Spain. He was an iracund and energetic man, but with no large or definite views as a politician. And one indeed is not sorry to perceive that those who adopted assassination as licit and even honourable, were, like Philip the Second and Guise, men of narrow intellect and low views.* The commands of the Duke of Guise were now obeyed by many more discontented and more honest than himself; men who looked upon the Huguenots as the disturbers of political and religious order, whose continued existence was incompatible with the unity, with the greatness and prosperity, of the country. The Protestants, no longer objects of interest to the Catholic population, for they were no longer burned at the stake, rendered themselves abhorred by retaliating the cruelties inflicted formerly on them. They had no longer either the monopoly of teaching or of preaching. The Jesuits had sprung up, and insinuated themselves and their establishments everywhere, denouncing the weakness, the variations, and squabbles of the reformers, In the numerous letters of Guise there is not to be found a single particle of talent,-not a scintilla of that mingled nobleness and sagacity which marked almost everything that fell from the mouth or pen of the King of Navarre. |