223 Angoulême. He at the same time dismissed all his old counsellors and secretaries, as he had no longer need of any minister in his confidence; he no longer wanted counsellors to advise him. His sole want lay in those staunch fellows who could wield sword and dagger. Of these he had a body-guard of fifty-five, to whose service and presence he now exclusively trusted. Nor could Guise immediately demand their dismissal, which would seem as if he had a sinister design on the king's person. What creates the greatest prejudice against the Duke of Guise in the minds of the readers of his history, is the fact, that whilst he was thus reducing his sovereign to a state of helplessness, he was not only confiding all his acts and plans to a foreign monarch, the King of Spain, but receiving his pay, and professing all attachment and allegiance to him. There can be little doubt, indeed, that the ulterior views of Guise extended to the crown. Villeroy has preserved the advice tendered to him by his intimate counsellor and friend, D'Epignac, Archbishop of Lyons, which was, that he should at first play merely the part of mayor of the palace, but still make use of that position to place, like Charles Martel, the crown upon his own head.* It was not probable that with these views he would have awaited the natural death of Henry. His present object, however, was to secure his power by means of the Estates, the members of which he had spared no efforts to have chosen and selected in his interest. The Estates, consisting of upwards of 200 members of the commons, 100 nobles, and 134 of the clergy, assembled at Blois in October 1580; the dissidence between them and the king appearing from the very first. They were proceeding to elect their president * MSS. Colbert, 16. Henry's Instructions to De Fresne,on sending him to Philip II., contains a full account of Guise's designs. MSS. CHAP. XXV. CHAP. XXV. and officers, as well as to decide upon the validity of their own election, when Henry sought to interpose his authority. The Duke of Guise was mortified to learn, that not only the king, but the Pope, had extended pardon to the Count of Soissons, a brother of Condé's, who had commanded a squadron at Coutras, but who now abandoned Henry of Navarre, because that prince refused him his sister in marriage. Soissons, an orthodox Catholic, was in the succession to the throne, and might claim it, if the Huguenot princes, elder to him, were set aside. Guise saw in the restoration of Soissons a rival and an obstacle, and excited the commons to protest against this reception at Blois. But the nobles would not support such an outrage, and Guise was obliged to submit. The sitting of the assembly was solemnly opened on the 16th of October, 1588.* The king, in his address, venturing to mention the league and association of the nobles as a thing that his generosity pardoned, Guise was as exasperated at the allusion as if he were the monarch and Henry the bold subject. He insisted on the obnoxious expression being expunged from the printed speech, and it was so. The clergy demanded that the monarch should swear once again in solemn assembly the edict of union, the proscription of the King of Navarre and the Protestants. Henry objected to the mistrust which this implied. Intolerance of any religion save the Roman might, he said, be erected into a fundamental law of the state; but treason against the royal person was no less so; and he proposed, simultaneous with the proscription of the Protestants, an oath to this effect for the league to take. But neither the duke nor the commons would consent. The most effective mode of neutralising the royal power was to deny the king any revenue. Henry per * Etats Généraux, t. iv. Procès Verbal du Tiers Etat. The hall in which the assembly met still exists, with the king's private entrane. XXV. sisted in placing the Duke of Nevers-who, though CHAP. coquetting with the League, still held aloof from it-at the head of the army of Poitou. He asked the estates for funds to pay it, as well as the army of Mayenne; but they replied by claiming that the taille should be reduced to the rate levied in the reign of Louis the Twelfth; and they at the same time threw obstacles in the way of Henry's farming out the salt tax as usual. Not content with thus cutting off every source of revenue, the states insisted on establishing a court of justice to inquire into the king's past prodigality, and to punish the agents of it. At every indication of resistance by the monarch they threatened to separate. Such extreme and unreasonable demands convinced the king that he had nothing to hope from the assembly or from Guise, and that he must expect little short of dethronement. He, therefore, turned his views to the only mode of self-defence left him, that of treating Guise as he himself had treated Coligny and the Huguenots in the festival of St. Bartholomew. Henry sought, at the same time, to make friends amongst the grandees. The Dukes of Nevers and Montpensier were in his interests; and the noblesse in general, though not prepared to break with the League, gave manifest symptoms that they considered the king too harshly treated, and that they would not sanction any further humiliation of the royal authority. They strongly disapproved, says Mathieu, of the outrage offered to the monarch in the barricades of Paris, and viewed with jealousy the independent spirit and newborn arrogance of the town and lower classes, in which Guise and the League came more and more to trust. Whilst the nobility was thus disposed, tidings arrived that the Duke of Savoy had invaded the marquisate of Saluzzo and taken Carmagnola. In an instant the war-spirit was alive. The nobles immediately declared for a military expedition against Savoy, and were for postponing the VOL. III. CHAP. civil war. Guise had the utmost difficulty in overcoming their determination.* XXV. The duke, indeed, had made the same political fault which the Huguenots had done. In giving the preponderance in their party to the towns, to delegates and functionaries of the civic class, they had disgusted the nobility, and driven many of them from their cause. And now, the League, by its manifest re liance on the town population and their deputies in the estates, disgusted the nobles, many of whom protested with eloquence against it in the assembly at Blois.† Nor was it merely the noblesse of birth which thus rallied to the royal cause, and displayed aversion to the seditious turbulence of the lower class. The nobility of the robe, as the French style the dignitaries of law and of the judgment-seat, boldly displayed the same sentiments. The example of Achille de Harlai, who maintained the king's authority against Guise, was not solitary. And at this time a meeting was held in Paris of the captains of the companies raised from the legal professions, who voted unanimously, that the first thing requisite was an accord with the king. ‡ It is remarkable that the Duke of Guise could not command the talents even of his own party. He had almost the selection of the states at Blois, he and his brother the cardinal, yet they brought not one man either of eloquence with the tongue or readiness with the pen. Even the hostile acts of the assembly against Henry were stupidly managed. In the writings and prints of the day the Huguenots had incontestably the advantage. There were none in the ranks of the League to compete with Duplessis-Mornay or Rosny. And yet there were not wanting men of high authority * His letters, published by Bouillé. † Etats Généraux. Registres de la Ville de Paris. MSS. Colbert, 252. XXV. attached to the Catholic cause, such as Pasquier, if the CHAP. Duke of Guise had known how to discover or make use of them. Montaigne himself was present at the estates of Blois. No one has expressed a stronger aversion for the license and contempt of authority shown by the Huguenots. No one was a more rigid Catholic in a political sense. He would allow no singing of psalms, no reading of the Bible, no inquiring or reasoning by the common herd. Ignorance was with him the proper state for a people, and the best foundation for religion. True, his religion, like that of augurs, though wholesome for others, was merely a source of derision for the better informed. Montaigne not only proclaimed this selfish and arrogant indifference to be his own mode of belief, but he declares such to have been the sentiments of the greater portion of the ultraCatholics, "from whose whole army, if one was to cull those who entertained a sincere belief, you could not be able to complete a single company of gendarmes." The commons, indeed, were attached to Guise and the League for the unlimited powers which they developed and favoured in the town municipalities, and the almost total exemption from taxation which he promised them. To hold out such hopes was nothing less than revolution, and would have embarrassed no government more than that of Guise himself, had he lived to establish one. But recklessness of the future and of all consequences, provided he humbled Henry the Third and dethroned the Bourbons, marked the policy of Guise. The monarch was allowed no respite, and so evident and so great was his impatience and ill humour, that Guise was warned he would provoke some severe act of retaliation. At the same time the duke's own Felatives seem to have deprecated his severity, and both Mayenne and Aumale are said to have interfered to |