CHAP. XXVI.

XXVI.

HENRY THE FOURTH, FROM HIS ACCESSION TO HIS
RECANTATION.

1589-1593.

СНАР. HENRY OF NAVARRE was with his advanced troops before the Faubourg St. Germain, into which some of his cavaliers had even penetrated, when he heard what had befallen the king. Hurrying to St. Cloud, he found the monarch under the care of his physicians, and not without hopes of recovery.* Still he had misgivings of the worst, and took the opportunity to order all present to acknowledge his cousin of Navarre as his successor, should his wound prove mortal.† He at the same time warned that prince of the difficulties he would have to encounter unless he changed his religion. The King of Navarre withdrew to his quarters at Meudon, and was at supper, when another messenger brought word that the king's death was imminent.‡ Putting on their cuirasses under their cloaks, Henry of Navarre and thirty of his followers rode to St. Cloud. It was too late; Henry the Third had expired.

The night was spent by the Huguenot prince in council with his friends. The following morning he again repaired to St. Cloud, and sent his chief confidants to demand and secure the adhesion and alliance of the troops. Sully went on this errand to the

* D'Aubigné.

† Mémoires du Duc d'Angoulême. D'Aubigné, Sully.

St. C

Maréchal D'Aumont, who was besought to exert him-
self with the noblesse. Sancy proceeded to bargain
with the Swiss. The Scotch apparently did not want
solicitation, but fell at once at the feet of Henry the
Fourth and saluted him king. He did not meet with
the same reception in the chamber where the remains
of the late monarch lay, tended by two friars. The
more immediate friends of Henry the Third were
there, D'Antragues being in the act of holding the
deceased monarch's chin. The others, D'O, Chateau-
vieux, and Dampierre, vented their indignation on be-
holding the new claimant of the throne. Flinging
their hats on the ground, all declared they would pre-
fer surrendering to the League to the recognition of a
Huguenot sovereign.*

Religion was not the sole, or indeed the chief, cause
of this repugnance. The contrast was extreme between
the two courts. Henry the Third's was the scene of
splendour and extravagance, in which the large sums
raised by the ingenuity of his financiers were lavished
in fêtes, in gifts, and banquets. The king spent
240,000 livres annually-an enormous sum-on the
officers around his person.† Henry of Navarre's thread-
bare courtiers were objects, not of derision, to these
gallants in silks and velvets-Coutras had stopped
their mockery-but of hatred. There was no money
in the Gascon camp, and its king was sparing of what
he did grasp.
He promised his followers plenty of
hard service and hard blows, a great deal of honour
and of glory, but money, he said, was beneath their
consideration. Henry of Navarre, too, was a soldier,
and kept no state, lived on terms of personal familiarity
with his followers, such friendships being almost the
only guerdon he had to bestow for the meed of loyalty

Daubigné, Discours de Sanci,
dans les Mémoires de Nevers.
+ State of Henry's household in

1571, from S mancas Papers, b.
31.

CHAP.

XXVI.

XXVI.

CHAP. and devotion. Such a master and such a life had no charms for the minions of Henry the Third, for a rapacious treasurer like D'O, or a dissolute epicurean like Villequier. Henry the Fourth's weakness for the fair sex was animated by enthusiasm and redeemed by chivalrous sentiments. His amours were those of the knight. Henry the Third and his court imitated apparently the most flagitious of the pagan emperors, whilst covering their dissoluteness by the most regular observance of fasting, pilgrimages, and processions. Henry the Fourth despised the religious bigotry as he abhorred the unmanly licentiousness. He did not

pretend to be a saint, but merely aspired to be the gentleman, and the chief achievement of his life and reign was to restore what Montesquieu proclaimed as the true principle of monarchy-honour.

The courtiers of Henry the Third could not abide the thought of submitting to his successor. And it is probable that they looked on Henry the Fourth as utterly unable to resist the House of Lorraine and the League, aided by Rome and by Spain. It being repeated in the camp that Henry the Third in dying had recommended them to recognise Henry of Navarre as his lawful successor, they published an account of his dying words, omitting such declaration.* They then sent D'O to demand in their name, of the new sovereign, his abjuration of Calvinism, without which his coronation at Rheims could not take place.

This demand, accompanied by insults addressed to the Huguenots, rendered Henry pale, says D'Aubigné, either from anger or apprehension. He replied by asking if that was the way in which they proposed to revenge their murdered sovereign. The Protestants had shown they knew how to die. When they braved the stake for their faith, was he, their prince, to aban

* Published in Michaud's collection, t. xiv.

He CHAP.

XXVI.

don them when he was taken by the throat?
declined considering their opinion as that of their
order of the noblesse, among whom he had friends;
and to them he would appeal. They might go. Such
Catholics as loved their country and respected their
homes would follow him. The rest might look for
salary from a more insolent master.*

When the courtiers of the late reign were shrinking under this rebuff, the soldiers of their party, "who had learned to appreciate the merits of Henry of Navarre in the field, came to rally to him. Guitry entered to announce that the nobles of the Isle de France had given their adhesion. He himself folded his arms around Henry's thigh, and exclaimed that he was king, not only by right of birth, but as the brave of braves, whom none could forsake save poltroons. D'Humières promised the allegiance of two hundred gentlemen of Picardy, D'Aumont that of the nobles of Champagne. These were the very provinces which had given birth to the League, of which D'Humières had been the parent. Sancy was equally successful with the Swiss. But their adhesion did not amount to the majority of the army, of which the ultra-Catholics, real or pretended, held council. Some of these proposed to elect a new king altogether†, others to appoint Henry captain-general, until he should declare his conversion.

Notwithstanding his first indignant refusal to change his religion, Henry saw even thus early the necessity of that extreme step. The harsh vicissitudes of his life had made him alternately a Protestant and a Catholic; and regarding both religions, as a prince, a politician, and a man of the world, rather than as a conscientious Christian, he did not feel the mutual abhorrence which the sects entertained of each other.

*

Meaning the King of Spain. † Mathieu, Hist. de France.

CHAP.

XXVI.

He was also politician enough to have a keen sense of his interest, and of the exigencies of his position. The religious struggles, which had now lasted nearly thirty years, had not terminated to the advantage of Protestantism. Instead of being gradually progressive, it had, after a very large extension, been driven back into narrow limits, and had come to form a diminutive portion of the kingdom. In these days was far from prevailing that degree of security, respect for law, and observance of order, which could permit two sects to inhabit harmoniously the same districts and the same towns. Protestant and Catholic, where they intermingled, lived in a state of contention and war, which ended always by one of them being compelled to quit the place.* The Protestants thus became parked in certain towns and districts, which were walled and defended as fortresses of surety; and even treaties of pacification were but truces establishing rules, by which the hostile creeds were prevented from crushing and slaughtering each other.

Tolerance, in fact, was a thing that, however raved by the philosopher, had not yet been realised by the politician. And Protestants, instead of forming a tranquil and admitted portion of the French population, were but an armed band in the midst of it, declaring war against its institutions, its grades, its society, and its prejudices. If Henry claimed and seized the crown as the chief of this sect, he could not do less than promote its interests, favour its partisans and its doctrines, which must be done with a certain degree of violence, and by making use of the absolute power which the possessor of the crown acquired. It was impossible to play such a part without reviving and perpetuating

* Claude Haiton gives a lively description of the way in which Protestant and Catholic lived together, the former prohibiting the mass as rigidly as the Catholics for

bad the prêche. One of the first pieces of advice that Duplessis-Mornay gave Henry on his accession was to re-establish the liberty of Catholic worship in Niort.