THE THIRD CIVIL WAR.

Having narrowly escaped falling into the hands of their treacherous enemies, and finding themselves compelled once more to take up arms in defence of their own lives and the liberties of their fellow-believers, the Prince of CondÉ and Admiral Coligny resolved to institute a vigorous contest. A single glance at the situation, the full dangers of which were now disclosed by the tidings coming from every quarter, was sufficient to convince them that in a bold and decided policy lay their only hope of success. The Roman Catholics had, it is true, enjoyed rare opportunities for maturing a comprehensive plan of attack; although the sequel seemed to prove that they had turned these opportunities to little practical use. But the Huguenots possessed countervailing advantages, in close sympathy with each other, in fervid zeal for their common faith, as well as in an organization all but perfect. Simultaneously with their flight from Noyers, the prince and the admiral had sent out a summons addressed to the Protestants in all parts of the kingdom, and this was responded to with enthusiasm by great numbers of those who had been their devoted followers in the two previous wars. Multitudes of young men, also, with imaginations inflamed by the recital of the exploits of their fathers and friends, burned to enroll themselves under such distinguished leaders. Many were the stratagems resorted to by these aspirants for military honors. Among others, the eminent historian, Theodore Agrippa d'AubignÉ, has left an amusing account of the adventures he passed through in reaching the Huguenot recruiting station. His prudent guardian had taken the precaution to remove Agrippa's clothes every evening, in order to prevent him from carrying out his avowed purpose of entering the army; but one night, on hearing the report of the arquebuse—which a number of his companions, bent on the same course, had fired as a signal near his place of confinement—the youth boldly lowered himself to the ground by the sheets of his bed, and, with bare feet and no other clothing than a shirt, made his way to Jonzac. There, after receiving an outfit from some Protestant captains, he jotted down at the bottom of the receipt which he gave them in return, the whimsical declaration "that never in his life would he blame the war for having stripped him, since he could not possibly leave it in a sorrier plight than that in which he entered it."[587]

The resolution and enthusiasm of the Huguenots were greatly augmented by the imprudent course of the court. Notwithstanding their own guilty designs, Catharine and the Cardinal of Lorraine were taken by surprise when the news reached them that CondÉ and Coligny had escaped, and that the Huguenots were everywhere arming. So sudden an outbreak had not been expected; and, while awaiting the muster of that portion of the troops that had been dismissed, but was now summoned to assemble at Étaples on the 10th of September,[588] it was thought best to quiet the agitated minds of the people. A declaration was accordingly published, assuring all the adherents of the reformed faith who remained at home and furnished no assistance to the enemy, of the royal protection, Charles promising, at the same time, to give a gracious hearing to their grievances.[589] But, as soon as the Roman Catholic forces began to collect in large numbers, and the apprehension of a sudden assault by the Huguenots died away, the court threw off the mask of conciliation, and Charles was made to sign two laws unsurpassed for intolerance. The first purported to be "an irrevocable and perpetual edict." It rehearsed the various steps taken by Charles the Ninth and his brother Francis in reference to the "so-called reformed religion," from the time of the tumult of Amboise. It alluded to the edicts of July and of January—the latter adopted by the queen mother, by advice of the Cardinals of Bourbon and Tournon, of the constable, of Saint AndrÉ, and others, because less objectionable than an edict tolerating the worship of that religion within the walls of the cities. None of these concessions, it asserted, having satisfied the professors of the new faith, who had collected money and raised troops with the intent of establishing another government in place of that which God had instituted, the king now repealed the edicts of toleration, and henceforth prohibited his subjects, of whatever rank and in all parts of his dominions, on pain of confiscation and death, from the exercise of any other religious rites than those of the Roman Catholic Church. All Protestant ministers were ordered to leave France within fifteen days. Quiet and peaceable laymen were promised toleration until such time as God should deign to bring them back to the true fold; and pardon was offered to all who within twenty days should lay down their arms.[590] The second edict deprived all Protestant magistrates of the offices they held, reserving, however, to those who did not take part in the war, a certain portion of their former revenues.[591]

In order to give greater solemnity to the transaction, Charles, clothed in robes of state and with great pomp, repaired to the parliament house, to be present at the publication of the new edicts, and with his own hands threw into the fire and burned up the previous edicts of pacification. "Thus did his Royal Highness of France," writes a contemporary German pamphleteer with intense satisfaction, "as was seemly and becoming to a Christian supreme magistrate, pronounce sentence of death upon all Calvinistic and other heresies."[592]

Nothing devised by the papal party could have been better adapted to further the Huguenot cause than the course it had adopted. The wholesale proscription of their faith united the Protestants, and led every able-bodied man to take up arms against a perfidious government, whose disregard of treaties solemnly made was so shamefully paraded before the world. "These edicts," admits the candid Castelnau, "only served to make the whole party rise with greater expedition, and furnished the Prince of CondÉ and the admiral with a handle to convince all the Protestant powers that they were not persecuted for any disaffection to the government, but purely for the sake of religion."[593]

Efforts were not spared by the Guisard party to make capital abroad out of the new proscriptive measures. Copies of the edicts, translated from the French, were put into circulation beyond the Rhine, accompanied by a memorial embodying the views presented by an envoy of Charles to some of the Roman Catholic princes of the empire. The king herein justified himself for his previous clemency by declaring that he had entertained no other idea than that of allowing his subjects of the "pretended" reformed faith time and opportunity for returning to the bosom of the only true church. Lovers of peace and good order among the Germans were warned that they had no worse enemies than the insubordinate and rebellious Huguenots of his Very Christian Majesty's dominions, while the adherents of the Augsburg Confession were distinctly given to understand that Lutheranism was safer with the Turk than where Calvin's doctrines were professed.[594]

To influence the princes the offices of skilled diplomatists were called into requisition, but to no purpose. When Blandy requested the emperor, in Charles's name, to prevent any succor from being sent to CondÉ from Germany, Maximilian replied by counselling his good friend the king to seek means to restore concord and harmony among his subjects, and professing his own inability to restrain the levy of auxiliary troops. And from Duke John William, of Saxony, the same envoy only obtained expressions of regret that the war so lately suppressed had broken out anew, and of discontent on the part of the German princes at the rumor that Charles had been so ill advised as to join in a league made by the Pope and the King of Spain, with the view of overwhelming the Protestants.[595]

On the other hand, the new direction taken by Catharine met with the most decided favor on the part of the fanatical populace, and the pulpits resounded with praise of the complete abrogation of all compacts with heresy. The Roman Catholic party in Toulouse acted so promptly, anticipating even the orders of the royal court, as to make it evident that they had been long preparing for the struggle. On Sunday, the twelfth of September, a league for the extermination of heresy was published, under the name of a crusade. A priest delivered a sermon with the consent of the Parliament of Toulouse. Next day all who desired to join in the bloody work met in the cathedral dedicated to St. Stephen—the Christian protomartyr having, by an irony of history, more than once been made a witness of acts more congenial to the spirit of his persecutors than to his own—and prepared themselves for their undertaking by a common profession of their faith, by an oath to expose their lives and property for the maintenance of the Roman Catholic religion, and by confession and communion. This being done, they adopted for their motto the words, "Eamus nos, moriamur cum Christo," and attached to their dress a white cross to distinguish them from their Protestant fellow-citizens. Of success they entertained no misgivings. Had not Attila been defeated, with his three hundred thousand men, not far from Toulouse? Had not God so blessed the arms of "our good Catholics" in the time of Louis the Eighth, father of St. Louis, that eight hundred of them had routed more than sixty thousand heretics? "So that we doubt not," said the new crusaders, "that we shall gain the victory over these enemies of God and of the whole human race; and if some of us should chance to die, our blood will be to us a second baptism, in consequence of which, without any hinderance, we shall pass, with the other martyrs, straight to Paradise."[596] A papal bull, a few months later (on the fifteenth of March, 1569), gave the highest ecclesiastical sanction to the crusade, and emphasized the complete extermination of the heretics.[597]

The faithful, but somewhat garrulous chronicler, who has left us so vivid a picture of the social, religious, and political condition of the city of Provins during a great part of the second half of this century, describes a solemn procession in honor of the publication of the new ordinance, which was attended by over two thousand persons, and even by the magistrates suspected of sympathy with the Protestants. Friar Jean Barrier, when pressed to preach, took for his text the song of Moses: "I will sing unto the Lord, for He hath triumphed gloriously: the horse and his rider hath He thrown into the sea." His treatment of the verse was certainly novel, although the exegesis might not find much favor with the critical Hebraist. The Prince of CondÉ was the horse, on whose back were mounted the Huguenot ministers and preachers—the riders who drove him hither and thither by their satanic doctrine. Although they were not as yet drowned, like Pharaoh and his army in the Red Sea, France had great reason to rejoice and praise God that the king had annulled the Edict of January, and other pernicious laws made during his minority. As for himself, said the good friar, he was ready to die, like another Simeon, since he had lived to see the edicts establishing "the Huguenotic liberty" repealed, and the preachers expelled from France.[598]

Similar rejoicings with similar high masses and sermons by enthusiastic monks, were heard in the capital[599] and elsewhere. But the jubilant strains were sounded rather prematurely; for the victory was yet to be won. The Huguenot nobles, invited by CondÉ, were flocking to La Rochelle; the Protestant inhabitants of the towns, expelled from their homes, were generally following the same impulse. But others, reluctant, or unable to traverse such an expanse of hostile territory, turned toward nearer places of refuge. Happily they found a number of such asylums in cities whose inhabitants, alarmed by the marks of treachery appearing in every quarter of France, had refused to receive the garrisons sent to them in the king's name. It was a wonderful providence of God, the historian Jean de Serres remarks. The fugitive Huguenots of the centre and north found the gates of VÉzelay and of Sancerre open to them. Those of Languedoc and Guyenne were safe within the walls of Montauban, Milhau, and Castres. In the south-eastern corner of the kingdom, Aubenas, Privas, and a few other places afforded a retreat for the women and children, and a convenient point for the muster of the forces of Dauphiny.[600]

Meantime, the Queen of Navarre, with young Prince Henry and his sister Catharine, started from her dominions near the Pyrenees. The court had in vain plied her with conciliatory letters and messages sent in the king's name. Gathering her troops together, and narrowly escaping the forces despatched to intercept her, she formed a junction with a very considerable body of troops raised in PÉrigord, Auvergne, and the neighboring provinces, under the Seigneur de Piles, the Marquis de Montamart, and others, and, after meeting the Prince of CondÉ, who came as far as Cognac to receive her, found safety in the city of La Rochelle.[601]

From an opposite direction, FranÇois d'Andelot, whom the outbreak of hostilities overtook while yet in Brittany, was warned by CondÉ to hasten to the same point. With his accustomed energy, the young ChÂtillon rapidly collected the Protestant noblemen and gentry, not only of that province, but of Normandy, Touraine, Maine, and Anjou, and with such experienced leaders as the Count of Montgomery, the Vidame of Chartres, and FranÇois de la Noue, had reached a point on the Loire a few miles above Angers. It was his plan to seize and hold the city and bridge of Saumur, and thus secure for the Huguenots the means of easy communication between the two sides of the important basin intervening between the smaller basins of the Seine and the Garonne. His expectations, however, were frustrated principally by the good fortune of M. de Martigues, who succeeded in making a sudden dash through D'Andelot's scattered divisions, and in conveying to the Duke of Montpensier at Saumur so large a reinforcement as to render it impossible for the Huguenots to dream of dislodging him.[602] For a time D'Andelot was in great peril. With only about fifteen hundred horse and twenty-five hundred foot,[603] he stood on the banks of a river swollen by autumnal rains and supposed to be utterly impassable, and in the midst of a country all whose cities were in the hands of the enemy. He had even formed the desperate design of retiring twenty or thirty miles northward, in hope of being able to entice Montpensier to follow him so incautiously that he might turn upon him, and, after winning a victory, secure for himself a passage to the sources of the Loire or to his allies in Germany. At this moment the joyful announcement was made by Montgomery that a ford had been discovered. The news proved to be true. The crossing was safe and easy. Not a man nor a horse was lost. The interposition of heaven in their behalf was so wonderful, that, as the Huguenot troopers reached the southern bank, the whole army, by common and irresistible impulse, broke forth in praise to Almighty God, and sang that grand psalm of deliverance—the seventy-sixth.[604] Never had those verses of Beza been sung by more thankful hearts or in a nobler temple.[605]

Full of courage, the exultant troops of D'Andelot now pressed southward. First the city of Thouars fell into their hands; then the more important Partenay surrendered itself to the Huguenots. Here, according to the cruel rules of warfare of the sixteenth century, they deemed themselves justified in hanging the commander of the place, who had thrown himself into the castle, for having too obstinately insisted upon standing an assault in a spot incapable of defence, together with some priests who had shared his infatuation.[606] Admiral Coligny now met his brother, and the united army, with three cannon brought from La Rochelle, forming his entire siege artillery, demanded and obtained the surrender of Niort, the size and advantageous position of which made it a bulwark of La Rochelle toward the east. AngoulÊme, Blaye, Cognac, Pons, and Saintes, were still more valuable acquisitions. In short, within a few weeks, so large a number of cities in the provinces of Poitou, Angoumois, and Saintonge had fallen under the power of the Protestants, that they seemed fully to have retrieved the losses they had experienced through the treacherous peace of Longjumeau. "In less than two months," writes La Noue of his fellow-soldiers, "from poor vagabonds that they were, they found in their hands sufficient means to continue a long war."[607] And the veteran Admiral Coligny, amazed at the success attending measures principally planned by himself, was accustomed to repeat with heartfelt thankfulness the exclamation attributed to Themistocles: "I should be lost, if I had not been lost!"[608]

Meantime, in the south-eastern part of France, the provinces of Dauphiny, Provence, and Lower Languedoc, the Huguenots had not been slow in responding to the call of the Prince of CondÉ. The difficulty was rather in assembling their soldiers than in raising them; for there was little lack of volunteers after the repeal of the royal edicts in favor of the Protestants. With great trouble the contingents of Dauphiny and Provence were brought across the RhÔne, and at Alais the Baron d'Acier[609] mustered an army to go to the succor of the Prince of CondÉ at La Rochelle. A Roman Catholic historian expresses his profound astonishment that the Huguenots of this part of the kingdom, when surprised by the violation of the peace, should so speedily have been able to mass a force of twenty-five thousand men, well furnished and equipped, and commanded by the most excellent captains of the age—Montbrun, Mouvans, Pierre-Gourde, and others.[610] The abbÉ's wonder was doubtless equalled by the consternation which the news spread among the enemies of the Huguenots. The Roman Catholics could bring no army capable of preventing the junction of D'Acier's troops with those of CondÉ; but the Duke of Montpensier succeeded, on the twenty-fifth of October, in inflicting a severe loss upon one of the divisions at Messignac, near PÉrigueux. Mouvans and Pierre-Gourde, who were distant from the main body, were attacked in their quarters, by a force under Brissac, which they easily repulsed. D'Acier, suspecting the design of the enemy, had commanded the Huguenot captains to make no pursuit, and to await his own arrival. But brave Mouvans was as impatient of orders as he was courageous in battle. Disregarding the authority which sat so lightly upon him, he fell into an ambuscade, where he atoned for his rashness by the loss of his own life and the lives of more than a thousand of his companions. After this disaster, D'Acier experienced no further opposition, and, on the first of November, he met the advancing army of CondÉ at Aubeterre, on the banks of the Dronne.[611]

With the new accessions to his army, the prince commanded a force very considerably larger than any he had led in the previous wars. Among the conflicting statements, we may find it difficult to fix its numbers. Agrippa d'AubignÉ says that, after the losses consequent upon the defeat of Messignac and those resulting from camp diseases, CondÉ's army consisted of only seventeen thousand foot soldiers, and two thousand five hundred horsemen.[612] A Huguenot bulletin, sent from La Rochelle for the information of Queen Elizabeth and the Protestants of England, may have given somewhat too favorable a view of the prince's prospects, but was certainly nearer the truth, in assigning him twenty-five thousand arquebusiers and a cavalry force of five or six thousand men.[613] On the other hand, Henry of Anjou, who had been placed in nominal command of the Roman Catholic army, had not yet been able to assemble a much superior, probably not an equal, number of soldiers. The large forces which, according to his ambassador at the English court, Charles the Ninth could call out,[614] existed only on paper. The younger Tavannes, whose father was the true head of the royal army, gives it but about twenty thousand men.[615]

It was already nearly winter when the armies were collected, and their operations during the remainder of the campaign were indecisive. In the numerous skirmishes that occurred the Huguenots usually had the advantage, and sometimes inflicted considerable damage upon the enemy. But the Duke of Anjou, or the more experienced leaders commanding in his name, studiously avoided a general engagement. The instructions from the court were to wear out the courage and enthusiasm of CondÉ's adherents by protracting a tame and monotonous warfare.[616] The prince's true policy, on the contrary, lay in decided action. His soldiers were inferior to none in France. The flower of the higher nobility and the most substantial of the middle classes had flocked to his standard so soon as it was unfurled. But, without regular commissariat, and serving at their own costs, these troops could not long maintain themselves in the field.[617] The nobles and country gentlemen, never too provident in their habits, soon exhausted their ready funds, with their crowd of hungry retainers, and became a more pitiable class than even the burgesses. The latter, whom devotion to their religious convictions, rather than any thirst for personal distinction, had impelled to enter the service, could not remain many months away from their workshops and counting-rooms without involving their families in great pecuniary distress. It was not, however, possible for CondÉ and Coligny to bring about a combat which the duke was resolved to decline, and the unparalleled severity of the season suspended, at the same time, their design of wresting from his hands the city of Saumur, a convenient point of communication with northern France. Early in December the vines were frozen in the fields,[618] disease broke out in either camp, and the soldiers began to murmur at a war which seemed to be waged with the elements rather than with their fellow-men. While Anjou's generals, therefore, drew off their troops to Saumur, Chinon on the Vienne, and Poitiers, CondÉ's army went into winter quarters a little farther west, at Montreuil-Bellay, Loudun and Thouars, but afterward removed, for greater commodity in obtaining provisions, to Partenay and Niort.[619]

It was while the Huguenots lay thus inactive that their leaders deliberated respecting the best means of providing for their support during the coming campaign. Jeanne d'Albret, whose masculine vigor[620] had never been displayed more conspicuously than during this war, was present, and assisted by her sage counsels. It was determined, in view of the cruelties exercised upon the Protestants in those parts of the kingdom where they had no strongholds, and of the confiscation of their property by judicial decisions, to retaliate by selling the ecclesiastical possessions in the cities that were now under Huguenot power, and applying the proceeds to military uses. The order of sale was issued under the names of the young Prince of Navarre, of CondÉ, Coligny, D'Andelot and La Rochefoucauld, and a guarantee was given by them. As a reprisal the measure was just, and as a warlike expedient nothing could be more prudent; for, while it speedily filled the coffers of the Huguenot army, it cut off one great source of the revenues of the court, which had been authorized both by the Pope and by the clergy itself to lay these possessions under contribution.[621]

Already the temper of the Protestant leaders had been sounded by an unaccredited agent of Catharine de' Medici, who found CondÉ at Mirebeau, and entreated him to make those advances toward a peace which would comport better with his dignity as a subject than with that of Charles as a king. But the prince, who saw in the mission of an irresponsible mediator only a new attempt to impede the action of the confederates, had dismissed him, after declaring, in the presence of a large number of his nobles, that he had been compelled to resort to arms in order to provide for his own defence. The war was, therefore, directed not against the king, but against those capital enemies of the crown and of the realm, the Cardinal of Lorraine and his associates. All knew his own vehement desire for peace, of which his late excessive compliance was a sufficient proof; but, since the king was surrounded by his enemies, he intended, with God's favor, to come and present his petitions to his Majesty in person.[622]

Abroad the Huguenots had not been idle in endeavoring to secure the support of advantageous alliances. So early as in the month of August, after the disastrous defeat of Louis of Nassau, at Jemmingen, the Prince of Orange had contemplated the formation of a league for common defence with the Prince of CondÉ and Admiral Coligny. A draft of such an agreement has been preserved; but it is unsigned, and may be regarded rather as indicative of the friendly disposition of the French and Dutch patriots than as a compact that was ever formally adopted.[623] That same autumn William of Orange had undertaken an expedition intended to free the Netherlands from the tyranny of Alva. He had been met with consummate skill. The duke refused to fight, but hung remorselessly on his skirts. The inhabitants of Brabant extended no welcome to their liberator. The prince's mercenaries, vexed at their reception, annoyed by the masterly tactics of their enemy, and eager only to return to their homes, clamored for pay and for plunder. Orange, outgeneralled, was compelled to abandon the campaign, and would gladly have turned his arms against the oppressors of his fellow-believers in France; but his German troops had enlisted only for the campaign in the Netherlands, and peremptorily declined to transfer the field of battle to another country. However, the depth of the Meuse, which had become unfordable, furnished more persuasive arguments than could be brought forward by Genlis and the Huguenots who with him had joined the Prince of Orange, and the army of the patriots was forced to direct its course southward and to cross the French frontier.

Great was the consternation at the court of Charles. Paris trembled for its safety, and vigorous were the efforts made to get rid of such dangerous guests. Marshal CossÉ, who commanded for his Majesty on the Flemish border, was too weak to copy successfully the tactics of Alva; but he employed the resources of diplomacy. His secretary, the Seigneur de Favelles, not content with remonstrating against the prince's violation of the territory of a king with whom he was at peace, endeavored to terrify him by exaggerating the resources of Charles the Ninth and by fabricating accounts of Huguenot reverses. CondÉ, he said, had been forced to recross the river Vienne in great confusion; and there was a flattering prospect that he would be compelled to shut himself up in La Rochelle; for "Monseigneur the Duke of Anjou" had an irresistible army of six thousand horse and twenty-five or thirty thousand foot, besides the forces coming from Provence under the Count de Tende, the six thousand newly levied Swiss brought by the Duke d'Aumale, and other considerable bodies of troops.[624] Gaspard de Schomberg[625] was despatched on a similar errand by Charles himself, and offered the prince, if he came merely desiring to pass in a friendly manner through the country, to furnish him with every facility for so doing. In reply, William of Orange, although the refusal of his soldiers to fight against Charles[626] left him no alternative but to embrace the course marked out for him, did not disguise his hearty sympathy with his suffering brethren in France. In view of the attempts made, according to his Majesty's edict of September last, to constrain the consciences of all who belonged to the Christian religion, and in view of the king's avowed determination to exterminate the pure Word of God, and to permit no other religion than the Roman Catholic—a thing very prejudicial to the neighboring nations, where there was a free exercise of the Christian religion—the prince declared his inability to credit the assertions of his Majesty, that it was not his Majesty's intention to constrain the conscience of any one. He avowed his own purpose to give oppressed Christians everywhere all aid, comfort, counsel, and assistance; asserting his conviction that the men who professed "the religion" demanded nothing else than the glory of God and the advancement of His Word, while in all matters of civil polity they were ready to render obedience to his Majesty. He averred, moreover, that if he should perceive any indications that the Huguenots were pursuing any other object than liberty of conscience and security for life and property, he would not only withdraw his assistance from them, but would use the whole strength of his army to exterminate them.[627] After this declaration, the prince prosecuted his march to Strasbourg, where he disbanded his troops, pawning his very plate and pledging his principality of Orange, to find the means of satisfying their demands. Great was the delight of the royalists, great the disappointment of the Huguenots, on hearing that the expedition had vanished in smoke. "The army of the Prince of Orange," wrote an agent of CondÉ in Paris, "after having thrice returned to the king's summons a sturdy answer that it would never leave France until it saw religion re-established, has retreated, in spite of our having given it notice of your intention to avow it. I know not the cause of this sudden movement, for which various reasons are alleged."[628] William the Silent had not, however, relinquished the intention of going to the assistance of the Huguenots, whose welfare, next to that of his own provinces, lay near his heart. Retaining, therefore, twelve hundred horsemen whom he found better disposed than the rest, he patiently awaited the departure of the new ally of the French Protestants, Wolfgang, Duke of Deux-Ponts (ZweibrÜcken), in whose company he had determined to cross France with his brothers Louis and Henry of Nassau.[629]

The Prince of CondÉ received more immediate and substantial assistance from beyond the Channel. When Tavannes undertook to capture CondÉ and Coligny at Noyers, it was in contemplation to seize Odet, Cardinal of ChÂtillon, the admiral's elder brother,[630] in his episcopal palace at Beauvais. He received, however, timely warning, and made his escape through Normandy to England, where Queen Elizabeth received him at her court with marks of distinguished favor.[631] His efforts to enlist the sympathies and assistance of the English monarch in behalf of his persecuted countrymen were seconded by Cavaignes, who soon arrived as an envoy from CondÉ. Cavaignes was instructed to ask material aid—money to meet the engagements made with the Duke of Deux-Ponts, and ships with their armaments to increase the small flotilla of privateersmen, which the Protestants had, for the first time, sent out from La Rochelle. Soon after appeared the vice-admiral, Chastelier-Pourtaut de Latour, under whose command the flotilla had been placed, bearing a letter from the Queen of Navarre to her sister of England, in which she was entreated to espouse a quarrel that had arisen not from ambition or insubordination, but from the desire, in the first place, to defend religion, and, next, to rescue a king who was being hurried on to ruin by treacherous advisers.[632] To these reiterated appeals, and to the solicitations for aid addressed to them by other refugees from papal violence who had found their way to the shores of Great Britain, the subjects of the queen returned a more gracious answer than the queen herself. The exiled Huguenot ministers were received with open arms by men who regarded them as champions of a common Christianity,[633] and some Protestant noblemen had in a few weeks after their arrival raised for their relief, the sum—considerable for those days—of one hundred pounds sterling. Not only the laity, but even the clergy of the Church of England, took a tender pride in receiving the "few servants of God"—some three or four thousand—whom Providence had thrown upon their shores. They welcomed them to their cities, and resented the attempts of Pope and king to secure their extradition. Could the Pope, who harbored six thousand usurers and twenty thousand courtesans in his own city of Rome, call upon the Queen of England to deny the right of asylum to "the poor exiles of Flanders and France, and other countries, who either lost or left behind them all that they had—goods, lands, and houses—not for adultery, or theft, or treason, but for the profession of the Gospel?" "It pleased God," wrote Bishop Jewel, "here to cast them on land: the queen of her gracious pity hath granted them harbor. Is it become so heinous a thing to show mercy?" "They are our brethren," continued their noble-minded advocate, "they live not idly. If they have houses of us, they pay rent for them. They hold not our grounds but by making due recompense. They beg not in our streets, nor crave anything at our hands, but to breathe our air, and to see our sun. They labor truly, they live sparefully. They are good examples of virtue, travail, faith, and patience. The towns in which they abide are happy, for God doth follow them with His blessings."[634]

Queen Elizabeth was less decidedly in their favor. Her court swarmed with creatures of the Spanish king, who openly gloried in the victories of the Guises. The ambassadors of Charles and Philip strove to the utmost to render the Huguenots odious to her mind, and to give a false coloring to the war raging in France. Her jealousy of the royal prerogative was appealed to, by the repeated declaration that the Protestants of France were turbulent men, who, for the slightest occasion and upon the most slender suspicion, were ready to have recourse to arms—enthusiasts, who could not be dissuaded from rash enterprises; sectaries, who employed their consistories and their organized form of church government to levy men, to collect arms, munitions of war, and money—rebels, in fine, who could at any moment rise within an hour, and surprise his most Christian Majesty's cities and provinces. The abrogation of religious liberty was, therefore, not merely advisable, but absolutely necessary. Elizabeth was reminded, also, of her own intolerant measures toward the Roman Catholics of her dominions; and she was assured that her fears of a combined attack on all the Protestants were devoid of foundation—that Charles had neither taken up arms, nor revoked the edicts of toleration at the desire of any other prince, still less because of the instance of any private individuals, but of his own free will, in order to secure his kingdom.[635] These arguments, if they did not convince Elizabeth, gave her a fair excuse for trying to maintain an appearance of non-intervention, which the perilous position of England seemed to her to dictate. With the problem of Scotland and Mary Stuart yet unsolved—with a very considerable part of the lords and commons of her own kingdom scarcely concealing their affection for the Romish faith—she deemed it hazardous to provoke too far the enmity of Philip the Second, her brother-in-law, and a late suitor for her hand. As if any better way could be found of warding off from her island the assaults of Philip than by rendering efficient aid to CondÉ and Orange! As if England's dissimulation and refusal to support the "Huguenots" and the "Gueux" in any other than an underhand way were likely to retard the sailing of the great expedition that was to turn the Pope's impotent threats against the "bastard of England" into fearful realities! As if Protestantism, everywhere menaced, could hope for glorious success in any other path than a bold and combined defence![636] Unfortunately Elizabeth was fairly launched on a sea of deceitful diplomacy, and not even Cecil could hold her back. She gave La Mothe FÉnÉlon, the French envoy, assurances that would have been most satisfactory could he have closed his eyes to the facts that gave these assurances the lie direct. At one time, with an appearance of sincerity, she told the Spanish ambassador, it is true, that she could not abandon the family of ChÂtillon, who had long been her friends, whilst she saw the Guises, the declared enemies of her person and state, in such authority, both in the council and the field; that she could not feel herself secure, especially since a member of the French council had inadvertently dropped the hint that, after everything had been settled at home, Charles would turn his arms against England. She had rather, consequently, anticipate than be anticipated.[637] But to La Mothe FÉnÉlon himself she maintained unblushingly that, so far from helping the French Protestants, "there was nothing in the world of which she entertained such horror as of seeing a body rising in rebellion against its head, and that she had no notion of associating herself with such a monster."[638] And again and again she protested that she was not intriguing in France—that she had sent the Huguenots no assistance.[639] At the same time Admiral Winter had been despatched with four or five ships of war and a fleet of merchantmen, to carry to La Rochelle, in answer to the request of CondÉ and of the Queen of Navarre, 100,000 "angelots" and six pieces of cannon and ammunition.[640] When the ambassador was commissioned to lay before the queen a remonstrance against this flagrant breach of neutrality, and to demand an answer, within fifteen days, respecting her intentions,[641] Elizabeth, in declaring for peace, had the effrontery to assert that the assistance in cannon and powder (for she denied that any money was left at La Rochelle) was involuntary, not only with her, but even with the admiral himself. Having dropped into the harbor to obtain the wine and other commodities with which his fleet of merchantmen were to be freighted, Admiral Winter was approached by the governor of the city, who so strongly pressed him to sell or lend them some pieces of artillery and some powder, which they could not do without, that, considering that he, as well as the ships, were in their power, he thought it necessary to comply with a part of their requests, although it was against his will.[642] Such were the paltry falsehoods to which Elizabeth's insincere course naturally and directly led. La Mothe FÉnÉlon was well aware that Admiral Winter, besides his public commission, had been furnished with a secret order, authorizing him to assist La Rochelle, signed by Elizabeth's own hand, without which the wary old seaman absolutely refused to go, doubtless fearing that he might be sacrificed when it suited his mistress's crooked policy. What the order contained was no mystery to the French envoy.[643] Neither party in this solemn farce was deceived, but both wanted peace. Catharine would have been even more vexed than surprised had Elizabeth confessed the truth, and so necessitated a resort to open hostilities.[644] As the honor of the government was satisfied, even by the notoriously false story of Winter's compulsion, there was no necessity for pressing the question of its veracity to an inconvenient length.

The cold winter of 1568-1569 passed without signal events, excepting the great mortality among the soldiers of both camps from an epidemic disease—consequent upon exposure to the extraordinary severity of the season—and the fruitless siege of the city of Sancerre by the Roman Catholics. Five weeks were the troops of Martinengo detained before the walls of this small place, whose convenient proximity to the upper Loire rendered it valuable to the Huguenots, not only as a means of facilitating the introduction of their expected German auxiliaries into central France, but still more as a refuge for their allies in the neighboring provinces. The bravery of the besieged made them superior to the forces sent to dislodge them. They repulsed, with great loss to their enemies, two successive assaults on different parts of the works, and, at last, gaining new courage from the advantages they had obtained, assumed the offensive, and forced Martinengo and the captains by whom he had been reinforced to retire humiliated from the hopeless undertaking.[645] Meantime, in not less than three important cities which the Huguenots hoped to gain without striking a blow, the plans of those who were to have admitted the Protestants within the walls failed in the execution; and Dieppe, Havre, and Lusignan remained in the power of the Roman Catholic party.[646]

At the opening of the spring campaign the Prince of CondÉ found his position relatively to his opponents by no means so favorable as at the close of the previous year. His loss by disease equalled, his loss by desertion exceeded, that of the Duke of Anjou; for it was impossible for troops serving at their own expense, however zealous they might be for the common cause, to be kept together, especially during a season of inaction, so easily as the forces paid out of the royal treasury. Besides this, the Duke of Anjou had received considerable reinforcements. Two thousand two hundred German reiters, under the Rhinegrave and Bassompierre, had arrived in his camp. They were the first division of a force of five thousand six hundred men who had crossed the Rhine, near the end of December, under Philibert, Marquis of Baden, and others. The young Count de Tende brought three thousand foot soldiers from Provence and Dauphiny, and smaller bodies came in from other parts of France.[647] CondÉ, on the contrary, had received scarcely any accessions to his troops. The "viscounts," whose arrival had turned the scale at the conclusion of the last war, lingered in Guyenne, with an army of six thousand foot soldiers and a well-appointed cavalry force, preferring to protect the Protestant territories about Montauban and Castres, and to ravage the lands of their enemies, as far as to the gates of Toulouse, rather than leave their homes unprotected and join CondÉ. A dispute respecting precedence had not been without some influence in causing the delay, and M. de Piles, who had been twice sent to urge them forward, had only succeeded in bringing a corps of one thousand two hundred arquebusiers and two hundred horse.[648] It was now expected, however, that realizing the vital importance of opposing to Anjou a powerful Protestant army, the viscounts would abandon their short-sighted policy; and it was the intention of CondÉ and Coligny, after effecting a junction, to march with the combined armies to meet the Duke of Deux-Ponts. Anticipating this plan, the court had despatched the Dukes of Aumale and of Nemours to guard the entrance into France from the side of Germany. There seemed to be danger that the precaution would prove ineffectual through the jealousy existing between the two leaders; but this danger Catharine attempted to avert by removing the royal court to Metz, where she could exert her personal influence in reconciling the ambitious rivals.[649] In order to prevent the threatened union of CondÉ and the viscounts, the Duke of Anjou now left his winter quarters upon the Loire and moved southward. On the other hand, the Prince of CondÉ left Niort, and, pursuing a course nearly parallel, passed through St. Jean d'Angely to Saintes, thence diverging to Cognac, on the Charente.[650]

The Charente, although by no means one of the largest rivers of France, well deserves to be called one of the most capricious. For about a quarter of its length it runs in a northwesterly direction. At Civray it abruptly turns southward and flows in a meandering course as far as AngoulÊme, receiving on the way the waters of the TardouÈre (Tardoire), and with it almost completely inclosing a considerable tract of land. At AngoulÊme, the old whim regaining supremacy, the Charente again bends suddenly westward, and finally empties into the ocean below Rochefort, through a narrow arm of the sea known as the Pertuis d'Antioche. The tract of country included between the river and the shores of the Bay of Biscay, comprising a large part of the provinces of Aunis and Saintonge, was in the undisputed possession of the Huguenots. They held the right bank of the river, and controlled the bridges. Here they intended to await the arrival of the viscounts. Jarnac, an important town on this side, a few miles above Cognac, Admiral Coligny with the advance guard of the prince's army had wrested from the enemy. They had also recovered ChÂteauneuf, a small place situated higher up, and midway between Jarnac and AngoulÊme.

In pursuance of his plan, the Duke of Anjou, after crossing the Charente near Ruffec, had moved around to the south side, determined to prevent the junction of the two Huguenot armies. Once more ChÂteauneuf fell into his hands; but the garrison, after retreating to the opposite bank, had destroyed the bridge behind them. This bridge the Roman Catholics set themselves at once to repair. At the same time they began the construction of a bridge of boats in the immediate vicinity. While these constructions were pushed forward with great vigor, the royal army marched down as far as Cognac and made a feint of attack, but retired after drawing from the walls a furious cannonade. It was now that prudence demanded that the Protestant army should withdraw from its advanced position with only the Charente between its vanguard and the far superior forces of the enemy. This was the advice of Coligny and of others in the council of war. But CondÉ prevented its prompt execution, exclaiming: "God forbid that it should ever be said that a Bourbon fled before his enemies!"[651]

The bridges being now practicable, almost the whole army of Anjou was thrown across the Charente under cover of the darkness, during the night of the twelfth and thirteenth of March, only a small force remaining on the left bank to protect ChÂteauneuf and the passage. So skilfully was this movement effected that it escaped the observation even of those divisions of the Protestant army that were close to the point of crossing. When at length the admiral was advised that the enemy were in force on the northern bank, he at once issued the order to fall back toward CondÉ and the main body of the Huguenots. Unfortunately, the divisions of Coligny's command were scattered; some had been discontented with the posts assigned them, and had on their own responsibility exchanged them for others that better suited their fancy. The very command to concentrate was obeyed with little promptness, and the afternoon was more than half spent before Coligny, and D'Andelot, who was with him, could begin the retreat. Never was dilatoriness more ill-timed. The handful of men with the admiral, near the abbey and hamlet of Bassac, fought with desperation, but could not ward off the superior numbers of the enemy. La Noue, in command of the extreme rear, with great courage drove back the foremost of the Roman Catholics, but was soon overpowered and taken prisoner. His men were thrown in disorder upon D'Andelot, who, by an almost superhuman effort, not only sustained the shock, but retook and for a short time held the abbey. D'Andelot was, however, in turn forced to yield the ground.

Meantime Coligny had called upon CondÉ for assistance, and the prince, leaving his infantry to follow, had hurried back with the few horse that were within reach, and now took position on the left. But it was impossible for so unequal a struggle to continue long. The Huguenots were outflanked and almost enclosed between their adversaries and the Charente. It was a time for desperate and heroic venture. Coligny's forces had lost the ground which they had been contesting inch by inch about a raised causeway.

CondÉ himself had but three hundred knights. One of his arms he carried in a sling, because of a recent injury. To render his condition yet more deplorable, his thigh had just been broken, as he rode up, by a kick from the unmanageable horse of his brother-in-law, La Rochefoucauld. The prince was no coward. Turning to his little company of followers, he exclaimed: "My friends, true noblesse of France, here is the opportunity we have long wished for in vain! Our God is the God of Battles. He loves to be so called. He always declares Himself for the right, and never fails to succor those who serve Him. He will infallibly protect us, if, after having taken up arms for the liberty of our consciences, we put all our hope in Him. Come and let us complete what the first charges have begun; and remember in what a state Louis of Bourbon entered into the combat for Christ and for his native land!" Thus having spoken, he bent forward, and, at the head of his devoted band, and under an ensign bearing for device the figure of the Roman hero Marcus Curtius and the singularly appropriate motto, "Doux le peril pour Christ et le Pays," he dashed upon a hostile battalion eight hundred strong.[652]

The conflict was, in the judgment of that scarred old Huguenot warrior, Agrippa d'AubignÉ, the sharpest and most obstinate in all the civil wars.[653] At last CondÉ's horse was killed under him, and the prince was unable to extricate himself. The day was evidently lost, and CondÉ, calling two of the enemies' knights with whom he was acquainted, and the life of one of whom he had on a former occasion saved, raised his visor, made himself known, and surrendered. His captors pledged him their word that his life should be spared, and respectfully endeavored to raise him from the ground. Just at that moment another horseman rode up. It was Montesquiou, captain of Anjou's guards, who came directly from his master, and was charged—so it was said—with a secret commission. He drew a pistol as he approached, and, without inquiring into the terms of the capture, shot CondÉ in the back. The shot penetrated between the joints of his armor, and caused almost instantaneous death.

So perished a prince even more illustrious for his courage and intrepidity than for his exalted rank—a prince who had conscientiously espoused the reformed faith, and had felt himself constrained by his duty to his God and to his fellow-believers to assert the rights of the oppressed Huguenots against illegal persecution. "Our consolation," wrote Jeanne d'Albret a few weeks later, "is that he died on the true bed of honor, both for body and soul, for the service of his God and his king, and the quiet of his fatherland."[654] So magnanimous a hero could not be insensible to the invasion of his claims as the representative of the family next in the succession to the Valois; but I cannot agree with those who believe that, in his assumption of arms in three successive wars, he was influenced solely, or even principally, by selfish or ambitious motives. His devotion to the cause which he had espoused was sincere and whole-souled. If his love of pleasure was a serious blot upon his character, let charity at least reflect upon the fearful corruption of the court in which he had been living from his childhood, and remember that if CondÉ yielded too readily to its fascinations, and fell into shameful excesses, he yet bore with meekness the pointed remonstrances of faithful friends, and in the end shook off the chains with which his enemies had endeavored to bind him fast.[655] As a soldier, no one could surpass CondÉ for bravery.[656] If his abilities as a general were not of the very first order, he had at least the good sense to adopt the plans of Gaspard de Coligny, the true hero of the first four civil wars. The relations between these two men were well deserving of admiration. On the part of CondÉ there was an entire absence of jealousy of the resplendent abilities and well-earned reputation of the admiral. On the part of Coligny there was an equal freedom from desire to supplant the prince either in the esteem of his followers or in military rank. Coligny was inflexible in his determination to accept no honors or distinctions that might appear to prejudice the respect due by a ChÂtillon to a prince of royal blood.[657]

The Prince of CondÉ was, unfortunately, not the only Huguenot leader murdered in cold blood at the battle of Jarnac. Chastelier-Pourtaut de Latour, who, having lately brought his flotilla back in safety to La Rochelle, had hastened to take the field with the Protestants, was recognized after his capture as the same nobleman who, five years before, had killed the Sieur de Charry at Paris, and was killed in revenge by some of Charry's friends. Robert Stuart, the brave leader descended from the royal house of Scotland, who was said to have slain Constable Montmorency in the battle of St. Denis, was assassinated after he had been talking with the Duke of Anjou, within hearing and almost in sight of the duke, by one of the constable's adherents.[658]

These flagrant violations of good faith incurred severe animadversion. A letter is extant, written by young Prince Henry of Navarre, or in his name, to Henry of Anjou, on the twelfth of July, 1569, about four months after the battle of Jarnac. He begins by answering the aspersions cast upon his mother and himself, and by asserting that, if his age (which, however, is not much less than that of Anjou) disqualifies him from passing a judgment upon the present state of affairs, he has lived long enough to recognize the instigators of the new troubles as the enemies of the public weal. It is not Henry of Navarre, whose honors and dignities are all dependent upon the preservation of France, who seeks the ruin of the kingdom; but, rather, they seek its ruin who, in their eagerness to usurp the crown, have gone the length of making genealogical searches to prove their possession of a title superior to that of the Valois, "and have learned how to sell the blood of the house of France against itself,[659] constraining the king, as it were, to make use of his left arm to cut off his right, so as more easily to wrest his sceptre from him afterward." In reply to the statement of Anjou that Stuart alone was killed in cold blood, Henry of Navarre affirms that he can enumerate many others.[660] "But I shall content myself with merely reminding you of the manner in which the late Prince of CondÉ was treated, inasmuch as it touches you, Sir, and because it is a matter well known and free of doubt. For his death has left to posterity an example of as noted treachery, bad faith and cruelty as was ever shown, seeing that those, Sir, who murdered him could not be deterred from the perpetration of so wicked an act by the respect they owed to the greatness of your blood, to which he had the honor of being so nearly related, and that they dealt with him as they would have done with the most miserable soldier of the whole army."[661]

The Huguenot loss in the battle of Jarnac was surprisingly small in the number of men killed. It is probable that, including prisoners, they lost about four hundred men, or about twice as many as the Roman Catholics.[662] But the loss was in effect much more considerable. The dead and the prisoners were the flower of the French nobility. Among those that had fallen into the enemy's hands were the bastard son of Antoine of Navarre, FranÇois de la Noue, Soubise, La Loue, and others of nearly equal distinction. Of infantry the Huguenot army lost but few men, as the regiments, with the exception of that of Pluviaut, did not enter the engagement at all. Coming up too late, and finding themselves in danger of falling into the hands of the enemy's victorious cavalry, they evacuated Jarnac, crossed to the left bank of the Charente, and, after breaking down the bridge, retreated leisurely toward Cognac. Admiral Coligny, meantime, upon whom the command in chief now devolved, diverged to the right, and conducted the cavalry in safety to Saintes. The Roman Catholic army, apparently satisfied with the success it had gained, made no attempt at pursuit.

The Duke of Anjou entered Jarnac in triumph. With him was brought the corpse of the Prince of CondÉ, tied to an ass's back, to be afterward exposed by a pillar of the house where Anjou lodged—the butt of the sneers and low wit of the soldiers.[663] In the first glow of exultation over a victory, the real credit of which belonged to Gaspard de Tavannes,[664] Anjou contemplated erecting a chapel on the spot where CondÉ fell. The better counsels of M. de Carnavalet, however, induced him to abandon a design which would have confirmed all the sinister rumors respecting his complicity in the assassination.[665] The prince's dead body was given up for interment to the Prince of Navarre, and found a resting-place in the ancestral tomb at VendÔme.[666]

Henry of Anjou was not inclined to suffer his victory to pass unnoticed. Almost as soon as the smoke of battle had cleared away, a careful description of his exploit was prepared for circulation, and it was no fault of the compiler if the account he gave was not sufficiently flattering to the young prince's vanity. CondÉ's body had not been four days in the hands of the Roman Catholics, before Anjou wrote to his brother, the King of France, announcing the fact that he had already despatched messengers with the precious document to the Pope and the Duke of Florence, to the Dukes of Savoy, Ferrara, Parma, and Urbino, to the Republic of Venice and the Duke of Mantua, and to Philip of Spain; while copies were also under way, intended for the French ambassadors in England and Switzerland, for the Parliaments of Paris, Bordeaux, and Toulouse, the "prÉvÔt des marchands," and the "Échevins" of the capital, and others.[667]

The exaggerated bulletins of the Duke of Anjou were received with great demonstrations of joy by all the Roman Catholic allies of France. Pope Pius the Fifth in particular sent warm congratulations to the "Most Christian King" and to Catharine de' Medici. But he was very careful to couple his expressions of thanks with an earnest recommendation to pursue the work so auspiciously begun, even to the extermination of the detested heretics. "The more kindly God has dealt with you and us," he promptly wrote to Charles, "the more vigorously and diligently must you make use of the present victory to pursue and destroy the remnants of the enemy, and wholly tear up, not only the roots of an evil so great and which had gathered to itself such strength, but even the very fibres of the roots. Unless they be thoroughly extirpated, they will again sprout and grow up (as we have so often heretofore seen happen), where your Majesty least expects it." Pius pledged his word that Charles would succeed in his undertaking, "if no respect for men or for human considerations should be powerful enough to induce him to spare God's enemies, who had spared neither God nor him." "In no other way," he added, "will you be able to appease God, than by avenging the injuries done to God with the utmost severity, by the merited punishment of most accursed men." And he set as a warning before the eyes of the French monarch the example of King Saul, who, when commanded by God, through Samuel the Prophet, so to smite the Amalekites, an infidel people, that none should escape, neither man nor woman, neither infant nor suckling, incurred the anger and rejection of the Almighty by sparing Agag and the best of the spoil, instead of utterly destroying them.[668]

Two weeks later the pontiff received the unwelcome tidings that some of the Huguenot prisoners taken in the battle of Jarnac had been spared. La Noue, Soubise, and other gentlemen had actually been left alive, and were likely to escape without paying the forfeit due to their crimes. At this dreadful intelligence the righteous indignation of Pius was kindled. On one and the same day (the thirteenth of April) he wrote long letters to Catharine, to Anjou, to the Cardinal of Lorraine, to the Cardinal of Bourbon, as well as to Charles himself.[669] Of all these letters the tenor was identical. Such slackness to execute vengeance would certainly provoke God's patience to anger; the king must visit condign punishment upon the enemies of God and the rebels against his own authority. To the victor of Jarnac he was specially urgent, supplicating him to counteract any leanings that might be shown to an impious mercy. "Your brother's rebels have disturbed the public tranquillity of the realm. They have, so far as in them lay, subverted the Catholic religion, have burned churches, have most cruelly slain the priests of Almighty God, have committed numberless other crimes; consequently they deserve to receive those extreme penalties (supplicia) that are ordained by the laws. And if any of their number shall attempt, through the intercession of your nobles with the king your brother, to escape the penalties they deserve, it is your duty, in view of your piety to God and zeal for the divine honor, to reject the prayers of all that intercede for them, and to show yourself equally inexorable to all."[670]

Was it in consequence of the known desire of the occupant of the Holy See that the policy of the French courts of justice became more and more sanguinary? We can scarcely doubt that the Pope's injunctions had much to do with these increasing severities. Beginning in March, 1569, the Parliament of Bordeaux issued a series of decrees condemning a crowd of Protestants to death. The names that appear upon the records within the compass of one year number not less than twelve hundred and seventeen. The victims were taken out of all grades of society—from noblemen, military men, judges, priests and monks, down to humble mechanics and laborers. The lists made out by their enemies prove at least one fact which the Huguenots had long maintained: that they counted in their ranks representatives of the first families of the country, as well as of every other class of the population. Happily sentence was pronounced generally upon the absent, and the barbarous punishment of beheading, quartering, and exposing to the popular gaze, remained unexecuted. But the incidental penalty of the confiscation of the property of reputed Huguenots, which, so far from being a mere formal threat, was in fact the principal object contemplated by the prosecution, proved to be sober reality, and the goods of the banished Protestants afforded rich plunder to the informers.[671]

Upon Elizabeth of England the first effect of the reported victory at Jarnac was clearly marked. Her favorite, the Earl of Leicester, assured the French ambassador that, although the queen was sorry to see those professing her religion maltreated, yet, as queen, she would arm in behalf of Charles when fighting against his own subjects.[672] Her own declarations, however, were not so strong, or perhaps, after a little reflection, she took a more hopeful view of the fortunes of the Huguenots. For, although she exhibited curiosity to hear the "true" account, which a special messenger from Charles the Ninth was commissioned to bring her, and received the tidings in a manner satisfactory to the French ambassador, she would not rejoice at the death of CondÉ, whom she held to be a very good and faithful servant of his Majesty's crown, and deplored a war which, whether victory inclined to one side or the other, must lead to the diminution of Charles's best forces and the ruin of his noblesse.[673]

In point of fact, however, the defeat which the royalists had flattered themselves would terminate the war, and over which they had sung Te Deums, weakened the Huguenots very little.[674] The Queen of Navarre, on hearing the intelligence, hurried to Cognac, where she presented herself to the army, and reminded the brave men who heard her voice that, although the Prince of CondÉ, their late leader, was dead, the good cause was not dead; and that the courage of such good men ought never to fail. God had provided, and ever would provide, fresh instruments to uphold His own chosen work. Her brief address restored the flagging spirits of the fugitives. When she returned to La Rochelle, to devise new means of supplying the necessities of the army, she left behind her men resolved to retrieve their recent losses. They did not wait long for an opportunity. The Roman Catholics, advancing, laid siege to Cognac, confident of easy success. But the garrison, which included seven thousand infantry newly levied, received them with determination. Sallies were frequent and bloody, and when, at last, the siege was raised, the army of Anjou had sacrificed nearly as many men before the walls of a small provincial city as the Huguenots had lost on the much vaunted field of Jarnac.[675]

The events of the next two or three months certainly exhibited no diminution in the power or in the spirit of the Huguenots. St. Jean d'Angely, into which Count Montgomery had thrown himself, defied the entire army of Anjou, and the siege was abandoned. AngoulÊme, an equally tempting morsel, he tried to obtain, but failed. At Mucidan, a town somewhat to the south-west of PÉrigueux, he was more successful. But he effected its capture at the expense of the life of Brissac, one of his bravest officers—a loss which he attempted to avenge by murdering the garrison, after it had surrendered on condition that life and property should be spared.[676] Within a month or two after the battle of Jarnac the Protestants at La Rochelle wrote, for Queen Elizabeth's information, that they were more powerful than ever, that Piles had brought them 4,000 recruits, that D'Andelot was soon to bring the viscounts with a large force.[677]

But the course of that indefatigable warrior was now run. D'Andelot's excessive labors and constant exposure had brought on a fever to which his life soon succumbed. There were not wanting those, it is true, who ascribed his sudden death, like most of the deaths of important personages in the latter part of this century, to poison; and Huguenot and loyal pamphleteers alike laid the crime at the door of Catharine de' Medici.[678] But there is no sufficient evidence to substantiate the accusation, and we must not unnecessarily ascribe this base act to a woman already responsible for too many undeniable crimes.[679] The death of so gallant and true-hearted a nobleman, a faithful and unflinching friend of the Reformation from the time when it first began to spread extensively among the higher classes of the French population, and who had amply atoned for a momentary act of weakness, in the time of Henry the Second, by an uncompromising profession of his religion on every occasion during the reigns of that monarch's two sons, was deeply felt by his comrades in arms. As "colonel-general of the French infantry," he had occupied the first rank in this branch of the service,[680] and his experience was as highly prized as his impetuous valor upon the field of battle. The brilliancy of his executive abilities seemed to all beholders indispensable to complement the more calm and deliberative temperament of his elder brother. It was natural, therefore, that the admiral, while pouring out his private grief for one who had been so dear to him, in a touching letter to D'Andelot's children,[681] should experience as deep a sorrow for the loss of his wise and efficient co-operation. He might be pardoned a little despondency as he recalled the prophetic words that had dropped from D'Andelot's lips during a brief respite from his burning fever: "France shall have many woes to suffer with you, and then without you; but all will in the end fall upon the Spaniard!"[682] The prospect was not bright. Peace was yet far distant—peace, which Coligny preferred a thousand times to his own life, but would not purchase dishonorably by the sacrifice of civil liberty and of the right to worship his God according to the convictions of his heart and conscience. The burden of the defence of the Protestants had appeared sufficiently heavy when CondÉ, a prince of the blood, was alive to share it with him. But now, with the entire charge of maintaining the party against a powerful and determined enemy, who had the advantage of the possession of the person of the king, and thus was able to cloak his ambitious designs with the pretence of the royal authority, and deprived of a brother whom the army had appropriately surnamed "le chevalier sans peur,"[683] the task might well appear to demand herculean strength.

Henry of Navarre had, indeed, just been recognized as general-in-chief, and he was accompanied by his cousin, Henry of CondÉ; but Navarre was a boy of little more than fifteen, and his cousin was not much older. Nothing could for the present be expected from such striplings; and the public, ever ready to look upon the comical side of even the most serious matters, was not slow in nicknaming them the "admiral's two pages."[684] Coligny, however, was not crushed by the new responsibility which devolved upon him. No longer hampered by the authority of one whose counsels often verged on foolhardiness, he soon exhibited his consummate abilities so clearly, that even his enemies were forced to acknowledge that they had never given him the credit he deserved. "It was soon perceived," observes an author by no means friendly to the Huguenots, "that the accident (of CondÉ's death) had happened only in order to reveal in all its splendor the merits of the Admiral de ChÂtillon. The admiral had had during his entire life very difficult and complicated matters to unravel, and, nevertheless, he had never had any that were not far below his abilities, and in which, consequently, he had no need of exerting his full capacity. Thus those qualities that were rarest, and that exalted him most above others, remained hidden, through lack of opportunity, and would apparently have remained always concealed during the lifetime of the Prince of CondÉ, because the world would have attributed to the prince all those results to whose accomplishment it could not learn that the admiral had contributed more than had the former. But, after the battle of Jarnac had permitted the admiral to exhibit himself fully on the most famous theatre of Europe, the Calvinists perceived that they were not so unhappy as they thought, since they still had a leader who would prevent them from noticing the loss they had experienced, so many singular qualities had he to repair it."[685]

Wolfgang, Duke of Deux Ponts, had at length entered France, and was bringing to the Huguenots their long-expected succor. He had seven thousand five hundred reiters from lower Germany, six thousand lansquenets from upper Germany, and a body of French and Flemish gentlemen, under William of Orange and his brother, Mouy, Esternay and others, which may have swelled his army to about seventeen thousand men in all.[686] In vain did his cousin, the Duke of Lorraine, attempt to dissuade him, offering to reimburse him the one hundred thousand crowns he had already spent upon the preparations for the expedition. Even CondÉ's death did not discourage him. He came, he said, to fight, not for the prince, but for "the cause."[687] When about entering his Most Christian Majesty's dominions, he had published the reasons of his coming to assist the Huguenots. In this paper he treated as pure calumnies the accusations brought by their enemies against CondÉ, Coligny, and their associates, and proved his position by quoting the king's own express declaration, in the recent edicts of pacification, "that he recognized everything they had attempted as undertaken by his orders and for the good of the kingdom."[688] The point was certainly well taken. Charles's various declarations were not remarkably consistent. In one, CondÉ was "his faithful servant and subject," and his acts were prompted by the purest of motives. In the next, he and his fellow-Huguenots were incorrigible rebels, with whom every method of conciliation had signally failed. But Charles did not trouble himself to attempt to smooth away these contradictions. He is even said to have replied to the envoy whom Deux Ponts sent him (April, 1569), demanding the restitution of the Edict of January and the payment of thirty thousand crowns due to Prince Casimir, that "Deux Ponts was too insignificant a personage (trop petit compagnon) to undertake to dictate laws to him, and that, as to the money, he would deliberate about that when the duke had laid down his arms."[689]

The secret of this arrogant demeanor is found in the fact that the court believed it impossible for the Germans to join Coligny. Even so late as the middle of May, when Deux Ponts had penetrated to Autun in Burgundy, Charles regarded the attempt as well nigh hopeless. The fortunes of the Huguenots were desperate. "There remains for them as their last resort," he wrote to one of his ambassadors, "but the single hope that the Duke of Deux Ponts will venture so far as to go to find them where they are. But there is little likelihood that an army of strangers, pursued by another of about equal strength—an army destitute of cities of its own, without means of passing the rivers, favored by no one in my kingdom, dying of hunger, so often harassed and put to inconvenience—should be able to make so long a journey without being lost and dissipated of itself, even had I no forces to combat it." "The duke," continued the king, "will soon repent of his mad project of entering France, and attempting to cross the Loire, where such good provision has been made to obstruct him."[690]

Charles had not exaggerated the difficulties of the undertaking; but Deux Ponts, under the blessing of Heaven, surmounted them all. The discord between Aumale and Nemours rendered weak and useless an army that might, in the hands of a single skilful general, have checked or annihilated him.[691] Mouy and his French comrades were good guides. The Loire was reached, while Aumale and Nemours followed at a respectful distance. Guerchy, an officer lately belonging to Coligny's army, discovered a ford by which a part of the Germans crossed. The main body laid siege to the town of La CharitÉ, which was soon reduced (on the twentieth of May), the Huguenots thus gaining a bridge and stronghold that proved of great utility for their future operations. Six days after the king had demonstrated the impossibility of the enterprise, Deux Ponts was on the western side of the Loire.[692] Meantime, Coligny and La Rochefoucauld were advancing to meet him with the Élite of their army and with all the artillery they had. On approaching Limoges on the Vienne, they learned that the Germans had crossed the river and were but two leagues distant. Coligny at once took horse, and rode to their encampment, in order to greet and congratulate their leader. He was too late. The general, who had conducted an army five hundred miles through a hostile country, was in the last agonies of death, and on the next day (the eleventh of June) fell a victim to a fever from which he had for some time been suffering. "It is a thing that ought for all time to be remarked as a singular and special act of God," said a bulletin sent by the Queen of Navarre to Queen Elizabeth, "that He permitted this prince to traverse so great an extent of country, with a great train of artillery, infantry, and baggage, and in full view of a large army; and to pass so many rivers, and through so many difficult and dangerous places, of such kind that it is not in the memory of man that an army has passed through any similar ones, and by which a single wagon could not be driven without great trouble, so that it appears a dream to those who have not seen it; and that being out of danger, and having arrived at the place where he longed to be, in order to assist the churches of this realm, God should have been pleased, that very day, to take him to Himself; and, what is more, that his death should have produced no change or commotion in his army."[693]

Duke Wolfgang of Deux Ponts was quietly succeeded in the command of the German troops by Count Wolrad of Mansfeld. A day later the two armies met with lively demonstrations of joy. In honor of the alliance thus cemented a medal was struck, bearing on the one side the names and portraits of Jeanne and Henry of Navarre, and on the other the significant words, "Pax certa, victoria integra, mors honesta"—the triple object of their desires.[694]

The combined army, now numbering about twenty-five thousand men, soon came to blows with the enemy. The Duke of Anjou, whose forces were somewhat superior in numbers, had approached within a very short distance of Coligny, but, unwilling to risk a general engagement, had intrenched himself in an advantageous position. A part of his army, commanded by Strozzi, lay at La Roche Abeille, where it was furiously assaulted by the Huguenots. Over four hundred royalists were left dead upon the field, and Strozzi himself was taken prisoner. The disaster had nearly proved still more serious; but a violent rain saved the fugitives by extinguishing the lighted matches upon which the infantry depended for the discharge of their arquebuses, and by seriously impeding the pursuit of the cavalry.[695]

Although the Duke of Anjou had recently received considerable reinforcements—about five thousand pontifical troops and twelve hundred Florentines, under the command of Sforza, Count of Santa Fiore[696]—it was now determined in a military council to disband the greater part of the army, giving to the French forces a short furlough, and, for the most part, trusting to the local garrisons to maintain the royal supremacy in places now in the possession of the Roman Catholics. In adopting this paradoxical course, the generals seem to have been influenced partly by a desire to furnish the "gentilhommes," serving at their own expense, an opportunity to revisit their homes and replenish their exhausted purses, and thus diminish the temptation to desertion which had thinned the ranks; partly, also, by the hope that the new German auxiliaries of the Huguenots would of themselves melt away in a climate to which they were unaccustomed.[697]

Meanwhile, the admiral, whose power had never been so great as it now was, exhibited the utmost anxiety to avert, if possible, any further effusion of blood. Under his auspices a petition was drawn up in the name of the Queen of Navarre, and the Princes, Seigneurs, Chevaliers, and gentlemen composing the Protestant army. A messenger was sent to the Duke of Anjou to request a passport for the deputies who were to carry it to the court. But the duke was unwilling to terminate a war in which he had (whether deservedly or not) acquired so much reputation, and reluctant to be forced to resume the place of a subject near a brother whose capricious and jealous humor he had already experienced. He therefore either refused or delayed compliance with the admiral's demand.[698] Coligny succeeded, however, in forwarding the document to his cousin Francis, Marshal of Montmorency—a nobleman who, although he had not taken up arms with the Huguenots, virtually maintained, on his estates near Paris, a neutrality which, from the suspicion it excited, was not without its perils. Montmorency laid the petition before Catharine and the king.

The voluminous state papers of the period would possess little claim to our attention, were it not for the singleness of purpose which they exhibit as animating the patriotic party through a long succession of bloody wars. The Huguenots were no rebels seeking to undermine the authority of the crown, no obstinate democrats striving to carry into execution an impracticable scheme of government,[699] no partisans struggling to supplant a rival faction. They were not turbulent lovers of change. They had for their leaders princes and nobles with interests all on the side of the maintenance of order, men whose wealth was wasted, whose magnificent palaces were plundered of their rich contents,[700] whose lives, with the lives of their wives and children, were jeoparded in times of civil commotion. Even the unauthorized usurpations of the foreigners from Lorraine[701] would not have been sufficient to move the greater part of them to a resort to the sword. Their one purpose, the sole object which they could not renounce, was the securing of religious liberty. The Guises—even that cruel and cowardly cardinal with hands dripping with the blood of the martyrs of a score of years—were nothing to them, except as impersonations of the spirit of intolerance and persecution. Liberty to worship their God in good conscience was their demand alike after defeats and after successes, under Louis de Bourbon or under Gaspard de Coligny. They did, indeed, sympathize with the first family of the blood, deprived of the position near the throne to which immemorial custom entitled it—and what true Frenchman did not? But Admiral Coligny, rather than the Prince of CondÉ, was the type of the Huguenot of the sixteenth century—Coligny, the heroic figure that looms up through the mist of the ages and from among the host of meaner men, invested with all the attributes of essential greatness—pious, loyal, truthful, brave, averse to war and bloodshed, slow to accept provocation, resolute only in the purpose to secure for himself and his children the most important among the inalienable prerogatives of manhood, the freedom of professing and practising his religious faith.

The present petition differed little from its predecessors. It reiterated the desire of the Huguenots for peace—a desire evidenced on so many occasions, sometimes when prudence might have dictated a course opposite to that which they adopted. The return they had received for their moderation could be read in broken edicts, and in "pacifications" more sanguinary than the wars they terminated. The Protestant princes and gentlemen, therefore, entreated Charles "to make a declaration of his will respecting the liberty of the exercise of the reformed religion in the form of a solemn, perpetual, and irrevocable edict." They begged him "to be pleased to grant universally to all his subjects, of whatever quality or condition they might be, the free exercise of that religion in all the cities, villages, hamlets, and other places of his kingdom, without any exception, reservation, modification, or restriction as to persons, times, or localities, with the necessary and requisite securities." True, however, to the spirit of the age, which dreaded unbridled license of opinion as much as it did the intolerance of the papal system, the Huguenots were careful to preclude the "Libertines" from sheltering themselves beneath this protection, by calling upon Charles to require of all his subjects the profession of the one or the other religion[702]—so far were even the most enlightened men of their country and period from understanding what spirit they were of, so far were they from recognizing the inevitable direction of the path they were so laboriously pursuing!

It scarcely needs be said that the petition received no attention from a court not yet tired of war. Marshal Montmorency was compelled to reply to Coligny, on the twentieth of July, that Charles refused to take notice of anything emanating from the admiral or his associates until they should submit and return to their duty. Coligny answered in a letter which closed the negotiations; protesting that since his enemies would listen to no terms of accommodation, he had, at least, the consolation of having done all in his power to avert the approaching desolation of the kingdom, and calling upon God and all the princes of Europe to bear witness to the integrity of his purpose.[703]

The Huguenots now took some advantage of the temporary weakness of the enemy in the open field. On the one hand they reduced the city of ChÂtellerault and the fortress of Lusignan, hitherto deemed impregnable.[704] On the other, they despatched into BÉarn the now famous Count Montgomery, who, joining the "viscounts," was successful in wresting the greater part of that district from the hands of Terrides, a skilful captain sent by Anjou, and in restoring it to the Queen of Navarre.[705] Respecting their plan of future operations a great diversity of opinion prevailed among the Huguenot leaders. Admiral Coligny was strongly in favor of pressing on to the north, and laying siege to Saumur. With this place in his possession, as it was reasonable to suppose it soon might be, he would enjoy a secure passage across the river Loire into Brittany, Anjou, and more distant provinces, as he already had access by the bridge of La CharitÉ to Burgundy, Champagne, and the German frontier. Unfortunately the majority of the generals regarded it as a matter of more immediate importance to capture Poitiers, a rich and populous city, said at that time to cover more ground than any other city in France, with the single exception of Paris. They supposed that their recent successes at ChÂtellerault and Lusignan, on either side of Poitiers, and the six pieces of cannon they had taken at Lusignan would materially help them. Coligny reluctantly yielded to their urgency, and the army which had appeared before Poitiers on the twenty-fourth of July, 1569,[706] began the siege three days later. It was a serious blunder. The Huguenots succeeded, indeed, in capturing a part of the suburbs, and in reducing the garrison to great straits for food; but they were met with great determination, and with a singular fertility of expedient. The Count de Lude was the royal governor. Henry, Duke of Guise (son of the nobleman assassinated near Orleans in 1563), with his brother Charles, Duke of Mayenne, and other good captains, had thrown himself into Poitiers two days before Coligny made his appearance. It was Guise's first opportunity to prove to the world that he had inherited his father's military genius; and the glory of success principally accrued to him. He met the assailants in the breach, and contested every inch of ground. Their progress was obstructed by chevaux-de-frise and other impediments. Boiling oil was poured upon them from the walls. Burning hoops were adroitly thrown over their heads. Pitch and other inflammable substances fell like rain upon their advancing columns. They were not even left unmolested in their camp. A dam was constructed on the river Clain, and the inundation spread to the Huguenot quarters. To these difficulties raised by man were added the ravages of disease. Many of the Huguenot generals, and the admiral himself, were disabled, and the mortality was great among the private soldiers.

In spite of every obstacle, however, it seemed probable that Coligny would carry the day. "The admiral's power exceedeth the king's," wrote Cecil to Nicholas White: "he is sieging of Poitiers, the winning or losing whereof will make an end of the cause. He is entered within the town by assault, but the Duke of Guise, etc., are entrenched in a stronger part of the town; and without the king give a battle, it is thought that he cannot escape from the admiral."[707] Just at this moment, the Duke of Anjou, assembling the remnants of his forces, appeared before ChÂtellerault; and the peril to the Huguenot city seemed so imminent, that Coligny was compelled to raise the siege of Poitiers, on the ninth of September, and hasten to its relief. Seven weeks of precious time had been lost, and more than two thousand lives had been sacrificed by the Huguenots in this ill-advised undertaking. The besieged lost but three or four hundred men.[708] Great was the delight manifested in Paris, where, during the prevalence of the siege, solemn processions had gone from Notre Dame to the shrine of Sainte GeneviÈve, to implore the intercession of the patron of the city in behalf of Poitiers.[709]

Meanwhile the Huguenots had been more fortunate on the upper Loire, where La CharitÉ sustained a siege of four weeks by a force of seven thousand Roman Catholics under Sansac. Its works were weak, its garrison small, but every assault was bravely met. In the end the assailants, after severe losses experienced from the enemy and from a destructive explosion of their own magazine, abandoned their enterprise in a panic, on hearing an ill-founded rumor of Coligny's approach.[710]

It was fortunate for the Protestants of the north and east that they still had Sancerre and La CharitÉ as asylums from the violence of their enemies. Far from their armed companions, there was little protection for their lives or their property. The edict of the preceding September, assuring to peaceable Protestants freedom from molestation in their homes, was as much a dead letter as any of its predecessors. The government, the courts of justice, and the populace, were equally eager to oppress them. At Orleans the "lieutenant-general" placed all the Huguenots of the city, without distinction of age or sex, in the public prisons, upon pretext of providing for the public security. A few days after (on the twenty-first of August) the people, inflamed to fanaticism by seditious priests, attacked these buildings. They succeeded in breaking into the first prison, and every man, woman, and child was murdered. The door of the second withstood all their attempts to gain admission. But the bloodthirsty mob would not be balked of its prey. The whole neighborhood was ransacked for wood and other combustible materials, and willing hands kindled the fire. As the flames rose high above the doomed house, parents who had lost all hope of saving their own lives sought to preserve the lives of their infant children by throwing them to relatives or acquaintances whom they recognized among their persecutors. But there are times when the heart of man knows no pity. The laymen who had been taught that heretics must be exterminated, even to the babe in the cradle, now put into practice the savage lesson they had learned from their spiritual instructors. Fathers and brothers took a cruel pleasure in receiving the hapless infants on the point of their pikes, or in despatching them with halberds, reserving the same fate for any of more mature age who might venture to appeal from the devouring flames to their merciless fellow-men. The number of the victims of sword and fire is said to have reached two hundred and eighty persons.[711]

The tragic end of the Huguenots at Orleans warned the Protestants of the villages and open country of the dangers to which they were exposed. Many fled with their wives and children to Montargis, where the aged RenÉe of Ferrara was still living, the unwilling spectator of commotions which she had foreseen and predicted, and which she had striven to prevent. Her palace was still what Calvin had called it in the time of the first war, "God's hostelry." RenÉe's royal descent, her connection by marriage with the Guises—for Henry, the present duke, was her grandson—her well-known aversion to civil war,[712] and, added to these, that demeanor which ever betrayed a consciousness that she was a king's daughter, had thus far protected her from direct insult, staunch and avowed Protestant as she was, and had enabled her to extend to a host of fugitives for religion's sake a hospitality which had not yet been invaded. But, the rancor entertained by the two parties increasing in bitterness as the third conflict advanced, it became more and more difficult to repress the impatience felt by the fanatics of Paris to rid themselves of an asylum for the adherents of the hated faith within so short a distance—about seventy miles—of the orthodox capital. Montargis was narrowly watched. Early in March the duchess was warned, in a letter, of pretended plans formed by the refugees on her lands to succor their friends elsewhere in the vicinity—the writer being no other than the adventurer Villegagnon, the former vice-admiral, the betrayer of Coligny's Huguenot colony to Brazil, who was now in the Roman Catholic service, under the Duke of Anjou.[713] But the fresh flood of refugees to Montargis rendered further forbearance impossible. The preachers stirred up the people, and the people incited the king. RenÉe was told that she must dismiss the Huguenot preachers, or submit to receiving a Roman Catholic garrison in her castle; that the exercise of the Protestant religion could no longer be tolerated, and the fugitives must find another home. The duchess could no longer resist the superior forces of her enemies, and tearfully she provided the miserable Huguenots for their journey with such wagons as she could find. The company consisted of four hundred and sixty persons, two-thirds women and infants in the arms of their mothers. Scarcely knowing whither to direct their steps, they fled toward the Loire, and hastened to place the river between them and their pursuers. The precaution availed them little. They had barely reached the vicinity of ChÂtillon-sur-Loire,[714] when the approach of Cartier with a detachment of light horse and mounted arquebusiers was announced; and the defenceless throng, knowing that no pity could be expected from men whose hands had already been imbrued in the blood of their fellow-believers, and being exhorted by their ministers to meet death calmly, knelt down upon the ground and awaited the terrible onset. At that very instant, between the hillocks in another direction, and somewhat nearer to the fugitives, a band of cavalry made its appearance. They numbered some one hundred and twenty men, and, as they rode up, were taken for the advance guard of their persecutors. But, on coming nearer and recognizing some of the kneeling suppliants, the knights threw off their cloaks and displayed their white cassocks, the badge of the adherents of the house of Navarre. They were two cornets of Huguenot horse, on their way from Berry to La CharitÉ, under the command of Bourry, Teil, and other captains. In the midst of the tearful acclamations of the women, their new friends turned upon the exultant pursuers, and so bravely did they fight that the Roman Catholics soon fled, leaving eighty men and two standards on the field. The Huguenot knights, who had so providentially become their deliverers, escorted the fugitives from Montargis to Sancerre and La CharitÉ, where they remained in safety until the conclusion of peace.[715]

Meantime the courts of justice emulated the example of cruelty set them by the government and the mob. In May they began by sending to the gallows on the Place Maubert, in Paris, a student barely twenty-two years of age, for having taught some children the Huguenot doctrines (huguenoterie), "without any other crime," the candid chronicler adds. After so fair a beginning there was no difficulty in finding good subjects for hanging. Accordingly, on the thirtieth of June, three victims more were sacrificed on the old Place de GrÈve, "partly for heresy and for celebrating the Lord's Supper in their house; partly"—so it was pretended—"for having assisted in demolishing altars." In the great number of similar executions with which the sanguinary records of Paris abound, the fate of Nicholas Croquet and the two De Gastines—father and son—would have been forgotten, but for the extraordinary measures taken in respect to the house where the impiety had been committed of celebrating the Lord's Supper according to the simple scheme of its first institution. The Parisian parliament ordered that "the house of the Five White Crosses, belonging to the De Gastines, situated in the Rue Saint Denis," should be razed to the ground, and that upon the site a stone cross should be placed, with an inscription explanatory of the occasion of its erection. That spot was to serve as a public square for all time, and a fine of 6,000 livres, with corporal punishment, was imposed upon any one who should ever undertake to build upon it.[716] It was not foreseen that military exigencies might presently render imperative a reconciliation with the Huguenots, and that the "perpetual" decree of parliament, like the "irrevocable" edicts of the king, might be somewhat abridged by stern necessity.

The work of blood continued. In July two noblemen were decapitated—the Baron de LaschÊne and the Baron de CourtÈne—and denunciation of reputed heretics was vigorously prosecuted, by command of parliament and of the city curates.[717] Two months later a cowardly but impotent blow was struck at a more distinguished personage. Parliament undertook to try Gaspard de Coligny, and, having found him guilty of treason (on the thirteenth of September), pronounced him infamous, and offered a reward of fifty thousand gold crowns for his apprehension, with full pardon for any offences the captor might have committed. Lest the exploit, however, should be deemed too difficult for execution, a few days later (on the twenty-eighth of September) the same liberal terms were held out to any one who should murder him. As it was not so easy to capture or assassinate a general who was at that moment in command of an army not greatly inferior to that of the Duke of Anjou, the court gave the Parisian populace the cheaper spectacle of a hanging of the admiral in effigy. It was the eve of the festival of "the Exaltation of the Cross"—Tuesday, the thirteenth of September—and the time was deemed appropriate for the execution of so determined an enemy of the worship of that sacred emblem. While Coligny's escutcheon was dragged in dishonor through the streets by four horses, the hangman amused the mob by giving to his effigy the traditional tooth-pick, which he was said to be in the habit of continually using—a facetious trait which the curate of St. BarthÉlemi, of course, does not forget to insert in his brief diary.[718] Nevertheless, that the decree of parliament setting a price upon the admiral's head was no child's play, appeared about this time from the abortive plot of one Dominique d'Albe, who confessed that he had been hired to poison the Huguenot chief, and was hanged by order of the princes.[719] Nor was it without practical significance that the decree itself had been translated into Latin, Italian, Spanish, German, Flemish, English, and Scotch, and scattered broadcast through Europe by the partisans of Guise.

Meantime the condition of the rival armies in western France promised again, in the view of the court, a speedy solution of the military problem. The Duke of Anjou had of late been heavily reinforced. With the old troops that had returned to his standard, and the new troops that poured in upon him, he had a well-appointed army of about twenty-seven thousand men, of whom one-third were cavalry. Coligny, on the contrary, had been so weakened by his losses at the siege of Poitiers, and by the desertion of those whom disappointment at the delays and the expense of the service had rendered it impossible to retain, that he was inferior to his antagonist by nine or ten thousand men. He had only eleven or twelve thousand foot and six thousand horse.[720] The Roman Catholic general resolved to employ his preponderance of forces in striking a decisive blow. This appeared the more desirable, since it was known that Montgomery was returning from the reduction of BÉarn, bringing with him six or seven thousand veterans—an addition to the Huguenot army that would nearly restore the equilibrium.

Leaving Chinon, where he had been for some time strengthening himself, the Duke of Anjou crossed the swollen river Vienne, on the twenty-sixth of September, and started in pursuit of the Huguenots. Coligny had been resting his army at Faye, a small town about midway between Chinon and ChÂtellerault. It was here that the attempt upon his life, to which allusion has just been made, was discovered. And it was from this point that the Prince of Orange started in disguise, and undertook, with forty mounted companions, a perilous journey across France by La CharitÉ to MontbÉliard, for the purpose of raising in Germany the fresh troops of which the admiral stood in such pressing need.[721]

The Huguenot general had moved westward, secretly averse to giving battle before the arrival of Montgomery, but forced to show a readiness to fight by the open impatience of his southern troops, and by the murmurs of the Germans, who openly threatened to desert unless they were either paid or led against the enemy. Within a couple of leagues of the town of Moncontour, soon to gain historic renown, Coligny, believing the Roman Catholics to be near, drew up his own men in order of battle (on the thirtieth of September); but, receiving from his scouts the erroneous information that there were no considerable bodies of the enemy in the neighborhood, he resumed his march toward the town of which La Noue had rendered himself master. The army was scarcely in motion before Mouy, commanding the rear, was attacked by a heavy detachment of the Duke of Anjou's vanguard, under the Duke of Montpensier. Mouy's handful of men stood their ground well, now facing the enemy and driving him off, now slowly retreating, and gave the rest of the Huguenot army the opportunity of gaining the opposite side of a marshy tract, through which there flowed a small stream. Then they themselves crossed, after losing about a hundred of their number. Anjou neglected the chance here afforded him of gaining an entire victory; and Coligny, after halting for a short time, drew off toward Moncontour, which he reached on the next day without further obstruction. The duke spent the night on the battle-field in token of victory, and then started in pursuit; but, in order to avoid attack while crossing the short, but deep river Dive, a tributary of the Loire which flows by the walls of Moncontour, he turned to the left, and, rapidly ascending to its sources, descended again on the opposite bank.

The admiral might still have succeeded in avoiding a capital engagement, and in reaching Partenay or some other point of safety, had he not been again embarrassed by the mutiny of the Germans, who, as usual, were most urgent for pay on the eve of battle. As it was, before they could be quieted, the duke had made up for his considerable dÉtour, and overtook the Protestants a short distance beyond Moncontour. Coligny, having given command of the right wing to Count Louis of Nassau, interposed the left, of which he himself assumed command, between the main body and the enemy, hoping to get off with a mere skirmish.[722] In this he was disappointed. Attacked in force, his troops made a sturdy resistance. The fight resembled in some of its incidents the conflicts of the paladins of a past age. The elder rhinegrave rode thirty paces in front of his Roman Catholic knights; Coligny as far in advance of the Protestants. The two leaders met in open field. The rhinegrave was killed on the spot. The admiral received a severe injury in his face. The blood, gushing freely from the wound, nearly strangled him before his visor could be raised. Reluctantly he was compelled to retire to the rear of the army. Still the tide of battle ran high. The Swiss troops of Anjou displayed their accustomed valor. It was matched by that of the Huguenots, who several times seemed on the point of winning the day, and already shouted, "Victory! Victory!" The Duke of Anjou, who, however little he was entitled to the credit of planning the engagement, certainly displayed great courage in the contest itself, was at one time in extreme peril, and the Marquis of Baden was killed while riding near him. On the other side, the Princes of BÉarn and CondÉ, who had come to the army from Partenay, to encourage the soldiers by their presence, endeavored by word and example to sustain the courage of the outnumbered Huguenots.[723] But at the critical moment, when the Roman Catholic line had begun to give way, Marshal CossÉ, who as yet had not been engaged, advanced with his fresh troops and changed the fortunes of the day. The personal valor of Louis of Nassau was unavailing. The German reiters, routed and panic-stricken, fled from the field. Encountering their own countrymen, the lansquenets or German infantry, they broke through their ranks and threw them into confusion. Into the breach thus made the Swiss poured in an irresistible flood. Inveterate hatred now found ample opportunity for satisfaction. The helpless lansquenets were slaughtered without mercy. No quarter was given. One of the German colonels, who had been the foremost cause of the morning's mutiny, and who had prevented his soldiers from fighting until their wages were paid, now made them tie handkerchiefs to their pikes to show that they surrendered; but they fared no better than the rest.[724] Others kneeled and begged for mercy of their savage foes, crying in broken French, "Bon papiste, bon papiste moi!" It was all in vain. Of four thousand lansquenets that entered the action, barely two hundred escaped with their lives. Three thousand French, enveloped by Anjou's cavalry, were spared by the duke's express command, but not before one thousand of their companions had been killed. In all, two thousand French foot soldiers and three hundred knights perished on the field, while with the valets and camp-followers the loss was much more considerable. La Noue was again a prisoner in the enemy's hands. So also was the famous D'Acier. His captor, Count Santa Fiore, received from Pius the Fifth a severe letter of rebuke for "having failed to obey his commands to slay at once every heretic that fell into his hands."[725]

The battle of Moncontour, fought on Monday, the third of October, 1569, was a thorough success on the side of the Guises and of Catharine de' Medici. Compared with it, the battle of Jarnac was only an insignificant skirmish. Although, under the skilful conduct of Louis of Nassau and of Wolrad of Mansfeld, the remnants of the army drew off to Airvault and thence to Partenay, escaping the pursuit of Aumale and Biron, the Huguenot losses were enormous, and the spirit of the soldiers was, for the time, entirely crushed.[726] The Roman Catholics, on the contrary, had lost scarcely any infantry, and barely five hundred horse, although among the cavalry officers were several persons of great distinction.

Fame magnified the exploit, and exalted the Duke of Anjou into a hero. Charles himself became still more jealous of his brother's growing reputation. Pius the Fifth, on receipt of the tidings, sent the latter a brief, congratulating him upon his success, renewing his advice to make thorough work of exterminating the heretics, and warning him against a mercy than which there was nothing more cruel.[727] To foreign courts—especially to those which betrayed a leaning to the Protestant side—the most exaggerated accounts of the victory were despatched. A "relation" of the battle of Moncontour, with which Philip the Second was furnished, stated the Huguenot loss at fifteen thousand men, eleven cannon, three thousand wagons belonging to the reiters, and eight hundred or nine hundred horses.[728] For a moment the court believed that the Protestants were ruined, and that their entire submission must inevitably ensue.[729] The Parisian parliament, in the excess of its joy, added the third of October to the number, already excessive, of its holidays, declaring that henceforth no pleadings should be held on the anniversary of so glorious a triumph.[730] About the same time, in order to exhibit more clearly the spirit by which it was animated, the same dignified tribunal gave the order that the bodies of Francis D'Andelot and his wife should be disinterred and hanged upon a a gibbet![731]

The Roman Catholics were, nevertheless, entirely mistaken in their anticipations of the speedy subjugation of their opponents. The latter were disheartened for a few days, but not in the least disposed to give over the struggle. "The reformed were too numerous," a modern historian well remarks, "too well organized, and had struck their roots too deeply, to be subdued by the loss of a few pitched battles."[732] The prospect at first was, indeed, very dark. It seemed almost impossible for the Huguenots to maintain themselves in the region which for a whole year had been the chief field of operations. As Anjou advanced southward, Partenay was abandoned without a blow, and after occupying it he pushed on toward Niort. Of this important place the intrepid De Mouy had been placed by Coligny in command. Not content with a bare defence, he sallied out and repulsed the enemy. But his boldness proved fatal to him. There was a Roman Catholic "gentilhomme," Maurevel by name, who, allured by the reward of fifty thousand crowns offered by parliament for the capture or assassination of Admiral Coligny, had entered the Protestant camp with protestations of great disgust with his former patrons the Guises, and had vainly sought an opportunity to take the great chieftain's life. Three years later that opportunity was to present itself in the streets of Paris itself. Loth to return to his friends without accomplishing any noteworthy exploit, Maurevel joined De Mouy, with whom he so ingratiated himself that the general not only supplied him from his purse, but made him a companion and a bed-fellow. As the Huguenots were returning to Niort, the traitor found the conjuncture he desired. Chancing to be left alone with De Mouy, he drew a pistol and shot him in the loins; then putting spurs to his horse, reached with ease the advancing columns of Anjou. De Mouy was taken back to Niort mortally wounded. His friends, contrary to his earnest desire, insisted on taking him by boat down the SÈvre to La Rochelle, where he died. Meanwhile Niort, in discouragement, surrendered to the Roman Catholic army.[733] The assassin was well rewarded. A letter is extant, written by Charles the Ninth to the Duke of Anjou, from Plessis-lez-Tours, on the tenth of October, 1569, in which the king begs his brother to confer on "Charles de Louvier, sieur de Moureveil, being the person who killed Mouy," the collar of the royal order of Saint Michael, to which he had been elected by the knights companions, as a reward for "his signal service;" and to see that he receive from the city of Paris a present commensurate with his merits![734]

Catharine de' Medici and the Cardinal of Lorraine came from Tours, where they had been watching the course of the war, Niort, and the plan of future operations was discussed in their presence. Almost every place of importance previously held by the Huguenots toward the north and east of La Rochelle had fallen, even to the almost impregnable Lusignan. Saint Jean d'Angely, on the Boutonne, was the only remaining outwork, whose capture must precede an attack on the citadel itself. Should the victorious army of the king lay siege to Saint Jean d'Angely, or should it continue the pursuit of Coligny and the princes, who, in order to divert it from the undertaking, had retired from Saint Jean d'Angely to Saintes, and thence, not long after, in the direction of Montauban? This was the question that demanded an instant answer. Jean de Serres informs us that the Protestant leaders were extremely anxious that their enemies should adopt the latter course;[735] yet the best military authorities on both sides declare without hesitation that the failure of the Roman Catholics to follow it was the one capital error that saved the Huguenots, perhaps, from utter destruction. "Hundreds of times have I been amazed," says the Roman Catholic Blaise de Montluc, "that so many great and wise captains who were with Monsieur (the Duke of Anjou) should have adopted the bad plan of laying sieges, instead of pursuing the princes, who were routed and reduced to such extremities that they had no means of getting to their feet again." And the Protestant FranÇois de la Noue devotes an entire chapter of his "discourses" to the proof of the assertion that "as the siege of Poitiers was the beginning of the mishaps of the Huguenots, so that of Saint Jean was the means of arresting the good fortune of the Catholics."

What, it may be asked, led to the commission of so fatal an error? The memoirs of Tavannes, who advocated the immediate pursuit of the admiral, ascribe it to the reluctance of the Montmorencies to permit their cousin to be overwhelmed; to the jealousy felt by Cardinal Lorraine of the military successes which threw his brother, the Duke of Aumale, and his nephew, the Duke of Guise, into obscurity; and to the suggestions of De Retz, the king's favorite, who persuaded Charles that it was dangerous to permit the renown of Anjou to increase yet further.[736] It must, however, be remembered that the younger Tavannes is not always a good authority; and that where, as in the present instance, the glory of his father is affected, he becomes altogether untrustworthy. If we reject his account as apocryphal, which apparently we must do, there still remains good reason to believe that the siege of Saint Jean d'Angely was agreed to by the majority of the Roman Catholic leaders from the sincere conviction that its reduction, to be followed by the still more important capture of La Rochelle, would annihilate the Huguenot party in the west, its stronghold and refuge, and that it could then subsist but little longer in other parts of the kingdom.

The defence of Saint Jean d'Angely had been intrusted by Coligny to competent hands. De Piles had found the fortifications weak and imperfect; he completed and strengthened them.[737] With a small garrison of Huguenots he repaired by night the breaches made by the enemy's cannon during the day, and repelled every attempt to storm the place. When the siege had advanced about two weeks, Charles himself, who was resolved not to suffer Henry of Anjou any longer to win all the laurels of the war, made his appearance in the Roman Catholic camp, on the twenty-sixth of October, and summoned the garrison to surrender. De Piles, however, declined to listen to the commands of the king, even as he had disobeyed those of the duke, taking refuge in the feudal theory that he could give up the place only to the Prince of Navarre, the royal governor of the province of Guyenne, at whose hands he had received it. Yet the position of the Protestants was growing extremely perilous. During one of the assaults upon the wall, De Piles himself became so thoroughly convinced that Saint Jean would be carried, that he caused a breach to be made in the fortifications in his rear, in order to facilitate the withdrawal of his troops. Happily, he had no need of this mode of escape on the present occasion. Meanwhile the most honorable terms were offered him. These he refused to accept; but, finding his stock of ammunition rapidly becoming exhausted, he agreed to a truce of ten days, that he might have time to send a messenger to the princes to obtain their orders; promising, in case he received no succor in the interval, to surrender the city on condition that the garrison should be permitted to retire with their horses, arms and personal effects, and that religious liberty should be granted to all the residents. But, before the armistice had quite expired, Saint Surin, and forty other brave horsemen from AngoulÊme, succeeded in piercing the enemy's lines, and relieved De Piles from an engagement into which he had entered with great reluctance. The hostages on both sides were given up, and the siege was renewed with greater fury than ever. In the end, seeing no prospect of sufficient reinforcement to enable him to maintain his position, De Piles capitulated (on the second of December) on similar terms to those that he had before declined, and the garrison marched out with flying banners. Seven weeks had they detained the entire army of the victors of Moncontour before an ill-fortified place. More than six thousand men had died under its walls, by the casualties of war and by the scarcely less destructive diseases that raged in the camp.[738] One of the ablest and most enterprising of the royal generals—Sebastian of Luxemburg, Viscount of Martigues and governor of Brittany—had been killed.[739] Of the Protestants, only about a hundred and eighty persons perished, nearly the half of them inhabitants of the town; for the men of Saint Jean d'Angely, and even the women and children, had labored industriously in defending their firesides.

It was a part of the compact, that, while neither De Piles nor his soldiers should serve on the Huguenot side for four months, they should be safely conducted without the Roman Catholic lines. The Duc d'Aumale and other leaders seem to have endeavored conscientiously to execute the stipulation; but their followers could not resist the temptation to attack the Huguenots as they were traversing the suburbs. Nearly all were robbed, and a considerable number—as many, according to Agrippa d'AubignÉ, as fell during the siege—were murdered. De Piles, on his arrival at AngoulÊme, wrote to demand the punishment of those who had committed so flagrant a breach of faith, and, when he could obtain no satisfaction, sent a herald to the king to declare that he held himself and his fellow-combatants absolved from all obligations, and that they would at once resume their places in the Huguenot army.[740]

Nearly three months of precious time elapsed since the disastrous rout of Moncontour before the royalists completed the reduction of the region adjoining La Rochelle. Outside of that citadel of French Protestantism only the little town of Tonnay, on the Charente, still held for the Prince of Navarre. Yet so long as La Rochelle itself stood firm, the Duke of Anjou had accomplished little; and La Rochelle had made good use of the respite to strengthen its works. Every effort to gain a lodgement in its neighborhood had signally failed. The end of December came, and with it cold and discouragement. Anjou's army was dwindling away. The King of Spain and the Pope recalled their troops, as if the battle of the third of October had ended the war, and Santa Fiore, the pontifical general, sent to Rome twenty-six standards, taken by the Italians at Moncontour—a present from Charles the Ninth, which Pius accepted with great delight, and dedicated as a trophy in the Basilica of St. John Lateran.[741] Henry of Anjou himself was ill, or was unwilling any longer to endure separation from a court of whose pleasures he was inordinately fond; and, resigning the command of the army into the hands of the eldest son of the Duke of Montpensier, FranÇois de Bourbon—generally known as the prince dauphin—he hastened, at the beginning of the new year, to join Charles and Catharine de' Medici at Angers. The French troops, meantime, were either furloughed or scattered, and the generals condemned to inaction, while the German reiters and lansquenets and the Swiss pikemen were permitted to return to their own homes.[742] Such was the suicidal policy of the Roman Catholic party—a policy which saved the Huguenots from prostration; for it may with truth be affirmed that the errors committed in the siege of Saint Jean d'Angely, and in disbanding the powerful army of Anjou, completely obliterated the advantage which had been won on the bloody field of Moncontour.[743]

While the Protestants had been forced to abandon one important place after another in Poitou, Saintonge and Aunis, they had in other parts of the kingdom been displaying their old enterprise, and had obtained considerable success. VÉzelay in Burgundy, the birthplace of the reformer Theodore Beza, passed through a fiery ordeal. This ancient town, built upon the brow of a hill, and strong as well by reason of its situation as of its walls constructed in a style that was now becoming obsolete in France, had been captured at the beginning of the war by some of the neighboring Huguenot noblemen, who scaled the walls and surprised the garrison. One of the few points the Protestants held in the eastern part of the kingdom, it was regarded as a place of the greatest importance to their cause.

Within a few weeks VÉzelay was twice besieged by a Roman Catholic army under Sansac. A vigorous sortie, in which the Huguenots destroyed almost all the engines of war of the assailants, on the first occasion caused the siege to be raised. When Sansac renewed his attempt he fared no better. The soldiers who had thrown themselves into the place, with the enthusiastic citizens, repelled every attack, and promptly suppressed treacherous plots by putting to death two persons whom they found engaged in revealing their secrets to the enemy. Sansac next undertook to reduce VÉzelay by hunger; but the Huguenots broke his lines, aided by their friends in La CharitÉ and Sancerre, and supplied themselves abundantly with provisions. When, on the sixteenth of December, Sansac finally abandoned the fruitless and inglorious undertaking, he had lost, since October, no fewer than fifteen hundred of his soldiers.[744]

The Huguenots of Sancerre in turn made an attempt to enter Bourges, the capital of the province of Berry, by promising a large sum of money to the officer second in command of the citadel; but he revealed their plan to his superior, M. de la Chastre, governor of the province, and the advanced party which had been admitted within the gates (on the twenty-first of December) fell into the snare prepared for them.[745] The capture of Nismes—"the city of antiquities"—more than compensated for the failure at Bourges. Rarely has an enterprise of equal difficulty been more patiently prosecuted, or been crowned with more brilliant success. The exiled Protestants, a large and important class, had now for many months been subjected to the greatest hardships, and were anxiously watching an opportunity to return to their homes. At last a carpenter presented himself, who had long revolved the matter in his mind, and had discovered a method of introducing the Huguenots into the city which promised well. There was a fountain, a short distance from the walls of Nismes, known to the ancients by the same name as the city itself—Nemausus—whose copious stream, put to good service by the inhabitants, turned a number of mills within the municipal limits. To admit the waters a canal had been built, which, where it pierced the fortifications, was protected by a heavy iron grating. Through this wet channel the carpenter resolved that the Huguenots should enter Nismes. It so happened that a friend of his dwelt in a house which was close to the wall at this spot; with his help he lowered himself by night from a window into the ditch. A cord, which was slackened or drawn tight according as there was danger of detection or apparent security, served to direct his operations. The utmost caution was requisite, and the water-course was too contracted to permit more than a single person to work at once. Provided only with a file, the carpenter set himself to sever the stout iron bars. The task was neither pleasant nor easy. Night after night he stood in the cold stream, with the mud up to his knees, exposed to wind and rain, and working most industriously when the roar of the elements covered and drowned the noise he made. It was only for a few minutes at a time that he could work; for, as the place was situated between the citadel and the "porte des Carmes," a sentry passed it at brief intervals, and was scarcely out of hearing except when he went to ring the bell which announced a change of guard. Fifteen nights, chosen from the darkest of the season, were consumed in this perilous undertaking; and each morning, when the approach of dawn compelled him to suspend his labors, the carpenter concealed his progress by means of wax and mud. All this time he had been prudent enough to keep his own counsel; but when, on the fifteenth of November, his work was completed, he called upon the Huguenot leaders to follow him into Nismes. A detachment of three hundred men was placed at his disposal. When once the foremost were in the town, and had overpowered the neighboring guards, the Huguenots obtained an easy success. The clatter of a number of camp-servants, who were mounted on horseback, with orders to ride in every direction, shouting that the city was in the hands of the enemy, contributed to facilitate the capture. Most of the soldiers, who should have met and repelled the Protestants, shut themselves up in their houses and refused to leave them. In a few minutes, all Nismes, with the exception of the castle, which held out a few months longer, was taken.[746]

When Admiral Coligny, wounded and defeated, was borne on a litter from the field of Moncontour, where the hopes of the Huguenots had been so rudely dashed to the ground, his heart almost failed him in view of the prospects of the war and of his faith. Two persons seemed at this critical juncture to have exercised on his mind a singular influence in restoring him to his accustomed hopefulness. L'Estrange, a simple gentleman, was being carried away in a plight similar to his own, when, having been brought to the admiral's side, he looked intently upon him, and then gave expression to his gratitude to Heaven, that, in the midst of the chastisements with which it had seen fit to visit his fellow-believers, there was yet so much of mercy shown, in the words, "Yet is God very gentle!"[747]—a friendly reminder, which, the great leader was wont to say, raised him from gloom and turned his thoughts to high and noble resolve.[748] Nor was the heroic Queen of Navarre found wanting at this crisis. No sooner had she heard of the disaster than she started from La Rochelle, and at Niort met the admiral, with such remnants of the army as still clung to him. Far from yielding to despondency, Jeanne d'Albret urged the generals to renew the contest; and, having communicated to them a part of her own enthusiasm, returned to La Rochelle to watch over the defence of the city, and to lend still more important assistance to the cause, by writing to Queen Elizabeth and the other allies of the Huguenots, correcting the exaggerated accounts of the defeat of Moncontour which had been studiously disseminated by the Roman Catholic party, and imploring fresh assistance.

As for Coligny, his plans were soon formed. The troops of Dauphiny and Provence, always among the most reluctant to leave their homes, had long been clamoring for permission to return. It was now impossible to retain them. On the fourteenth of October they started from AngoulÊme, whither they had gone without consulting the Protestant generals, and, under the leadership of Montbrun and Mirabel, directed their course toward their native provinces. In two days they reached the river Dordogne at Souillac, where a part of their body, while seeking to cross, was attacked by the Roman Catholics, and suffered great loss. The rest pushed forward to Aurillac, in Auvergne, which had recently been captured by a Huguenot captain, and soon found their way to Privas, Aubenas, and the banks of the RhÔne.[749] Thence, after refreshing themselves for a few days, they crossed into Dauphiny to renew the struggle for their own firesides.[750]

On the eighteenth of October, four days after the departure of the Dauphinese troops from AngoulÊme, Coligny set forth from Saintes upon an expedition as remarkable for boldness of conception as for its singularly skilful and successful execution—an expedition which is entitled to rank among the most remarkable military operations of modern times.[751] In the face of an enemy flushed with victory, and himself leading an army reduced to the mere shadow of its former size, the admiral deliberately drew up the plan of a march of eight or nine months, through a hostile territory, and terminating in the vicinity of the capital itself. As sketched by Michel de Castelnau from the admiral's own words in conversation with him, the objects of the Protestant general were principally these: to satisfy the claims of his mutinous German mercenaries by the reduction of some of the enemy's rich cities in Guyenne; to strengthen himself by forming a junction with the army of Montgomery and such fresh troops as "the viscounts" might be able to raise; to meet on the lower RhÔne the recruited forces of Montbrun and Mirabel; thence to turn northward, and, having reached the borders of Lorraine, to welcome the Germans whom the Elector Palatine and William of Orange would hold in readiness; and, at last, to bring the war to an end by forcing the Roman Catholics to give battle, under circumstances more advantageous to the reformed, in the immediate vicinity of Paris.[752]

Coligny's army was chiefly composed of cavalry; of infantry he had but three thousand men.[753] The young Princes of Navarre and of CondÉ, whom he wished to accustom to the fatigues of the march and of the battle-field, while endearing them to the Huguenots by their participation in the same perils with the meanest private soldier, were his companions, and had commands of their own. He had left La Rochefoucauld in La Rochelle to protect the city and the Queen of Navarre. The admiral's course was first directed to Montauban, that city which has been the stronghold of Protestantism in southern France down to the present time. But the difficulties of the way, and, particularly, the improbability of finding easy means of crossing so near their mouths the successive rivers, which, rising in the mountainous region of Auvergne and the Cevennes, all flow westward and empty into the Garonne, or its wide estuary, the Gironde, compelled Coligny to make a considerable deflection to the left. He effected the passage of the Dordogne at Argentat, a little above the spot where Montbrun had sustained his recent check, and, after making a feint of throwing himself into Auvergne, crossed the Lot below Cadenac, and reached Montauban in safety.[754] The Count of Montgomery, returning from his victorious campaign in BÉarn, had been ordered to be in readiness in this city. But learning that, by an unaccountable delay, he was still in Condom, south of the Garonne, Coligny marched westward to Aiguillon, at the confluence of the Lot and the Garonne. Near this place he constructed, with great trouble, a substantial bridge across the Garonne, with the intention of transporting his army to the left bank, and ravaging the country far down in the direction of Bordeaux. This bold movement was prevented by Blaise de Montluc, who, adopting the suggestion of another, and appropriating the credit due to the sagacity of this nameless genius, detached one of the numerous floating windmills that were moored in the Garonne, and having loaded it with stones, sent it down with the current against Coligny's bridge. Not only were the chains that bound the structure broken, but the very boats on which it rested were carried away as far as to Bordeaux itself. It was with great difficulty that the admiral brought back to the right bank the division of his army that had already crossed, and with it the troops of Count Montgomery.[755]

The united army now returned to Montauban, where, in the midst of a rich district in part friendly to the Huguenots, it spent the last days of 1569 and the greater part of the month of January, 1570. Its numbers had by this time received such large accessions, that Coligny wrote to Germany that he had six or seven thousand horse and fifteen thousand foot.[756] As the reformed population of Montauban had contributed enough money to satisfy the prince's indebtedness to the importunate reiters and lansquenets,[757] the troops were enthusiastic in their devotion to the cause, and pushed their raids under the intrepid La Loue south of the Garonne toward the Bay of Biscay, as far as Mont de Marsan and Roquefort in the "Pays des Landes."[758]

The Huguenots now proceeded towards Toulouse, but that city was too strongly fortified and garrisoned to tempt them to make an attack. They inflicted, however, a stern retribution upon the vicinity, devoting to destruction the villas and pleasure-grounds of the members of a parliament that had rendered itself infamous for its injustice and blind bigotry. The cruel fate of Rapin, murdered according to the forms of law, simply because he was a Protestant and brought from the king an edict containing too much toleration to suit the inordinate orthodoxy of these robed fanatics, was yet fresh in the memory of the soldiers, and fired their blood. On ruined and blackened walls, in more than one quarter, could be read subsequently the ominous words, written by no idle braggarts: "Vengeance de Rapin!" Leaving the marks of their passage in a desolated district, the Huguenots swept on to the friendly city of Castres, and thence through lower Languedoc, by Carcassonne and Montpellier, which they made no attempt to reduce, to UzÈs and Nismes. Meanwhile Piles had from Castres made a marauding expedition with a body of picked troops to the very foot of the Pyrenees, and, in retaliation for the aid which the Spaniards had furnished Charles the Ninth, had penetrated to Perpignan, and ravaged the County of Roussillon.[759]

Thus the Huguenots—of whom Charles had contemptuously written to his ambassador at London, in January, that they were in so miserable a plight that, even since Anjou had dismissed all his men-at-arms after the capture of Saint Jean d'Angely, they dared not show their faces[760]—had pushed an army from the mouth of the Gironde to the mouth of the RhÔne. If Viscount Monclar had fallen mortally wounded near Castres, and brave La Loue had been surprised and killed near Montpellier, the Protestants had, nevertheless, sustained little injury. They had been largely reinforced on the way, both by the local troops that joined them and by chivalric spirits such as M. de Piles, who followed them so soon as he was forced to surrender Saint Jean d'Angely; or, like BeaudinÉ and Renty, who had been left with La Rochefoucauld to guard La Rochelle, but who, impatient of long inaction, at length obtained permission to attach themselves to the princes, and caught up with them at Castres, after a journey full of hazardous adventures. The Huguenot army, says La Noue, had been but an insignificant snow-ball when it started on its adventurous course; but the imprudence of its opponents permitted it to roll on, without hinderance, until it grew to a portentous size.[761] The jealousy existing between Montluc and Marshal Damville, who commanded for the king—the former as lieutenant-general in Gascony, and the latter as governor in Languedoc—undoubtedly removed many difficulties from the way of Admiral Coligny; and Montluc openly accused his rival, who was a Montmorency, of purposely furthering the designs of his heretical cousin. The accusation was a baseless fabrication; yet it obtained, as such stories generally do, a wide currency among the prejudiced and the ignorant, who could explain Damville's failure to impede Coligny's progress in no more satisfactory way than as the result of collusion between the son and the nephew of the late constable.[762]

Coligny had not yet accomplished his main object. Turning northward, and hugging the right bank of the RhÔne, he prosecuted his undertaking of carrying the war to the very gates of Paris. The few small pieces of artillery the Protestants possessed, it was now found difficult to drag over rugged hills that descended to the river's edge. They were, therefore, at first transported to the other side, and finally left behind in some castles garrisoned by the Huguenots. The recruits that had been expected from Dauphiny came in very small numbers, and it was with diminished forces that Coligny and the princes, on the twenty-sixth of May, reached Saint Étienne, at that time a small town, which modern enterprise and capital has transformed into a great manufacturing city.[763] A little farther, at St. Rambert on the Loire, an incident occurred which threatened to blight all the fair hopes the Protestants had now again begun to conceive of a speedy and prosperous conclusion of the war. Admiral Coligny fell dangerously ill, and for a time serious fears were entertained for his life. It was a moment of anxious suspense. Never before had the reformed realized the extent to which their fortunes were dependent on a single man. The lesson was a useful one to the young companions of the princes, who, in the midst of the stern discipline of the camp, had shown some disposition to complain of the loss of the more congenial gayety of the court.[764] Louis of Nassau, brother of William of Orange, and next in command, was the only person among the Protestants that could have succeeded to Coligny in his responsible position; but even Louis of Nassau could not exact the respect enjoyed by the admiral, both with his own troops and with the enemy. Indeed, it was the conduct of the Roman Catholics at this juncture that furnished the clearest proof of the indispensable importance to the Huguenots of their veteran leader. The negotiations, which must soon be adverted to, had for some time been in progress, and the court displayed considerable anxiety to secure a peace; but the moment it was announced that Coligny was likely to die, the deputies from the king broke them off and waited to see the issue. Being asked to explain so singular a course, and being reminded that the Huguenots had other generals with whom a treaty might be formed in case of Coligny's death, it is said that the deputies replied by expressing their surprise that the Protestants did not see the weight and authority possessed by their admiral. "Were he to die to-day," said they, "to-morrow we should not offer you so much as a glass of water. As if you did not know that the admiral's name goes farther in giving you consideration than had you another army equal in size to that you have at present!"[765]

But Gaspard de Coligny was destined to die a death more glorious for himself, and to leave behind him a name more illustrious than it would have been had he died on the eve of the return of peace to his desolated country. He recovered, and once more advanced with his brave Huguenots. And now the distance between the Protestant camp and the Roman Catholic capital was rapidly diminishing. To meet the impending danger, the king ordered Marshal CossÉ, who had succeeded the prince dauphin in command of the new army, to cross into Burgundy, check the admiral's course, and, if possible, defeat him. The two armies met on the twenty-fifth of June, in the neighborhood of the small town of Arnay-le-Duc.[766] Great was the disparity of numbers. CossÉ had four thousand Swiss, six thousand French infantry, three thousand French, German, and Italian horse, and twelve cannon. Coligny's army had lost so much during its incessant marches through a thousand difficult places, and in a country where desertion or straying from the main body was so easy, that it consisted of but twenty-five hundred arquebusiers and two thousand horsemen, besides a few recruits from Dauphiny.

The Germans, who constituted about one-half of the cavalry, were ill-equipped; but the French horse were as well armed as any corps the Huguenots had been able to set on foot. All were hardened by toil and well disciplined. Of artillery the admiral was entirely destitute.

The armies took position upon opposite hills, separated by a narrow valley, in which flowed a brook fed by some small ponds. CossÉ made the attack, and attempted to cross the stream; but, after an obstinate fight of seven hours, his troops were compelled to abandon the undertaking with considerable loss. Next the entrenchments thrown up by the Huguenots in the neighborhood of the ponds were assaulted. Here the Roman Catholics were subjected to a galling fire, and began to yield. Afterward, receiving reinforcements, they seemed to be on the point of succeeding, when Coligny brought up M. de Piles, the hero of Saint Jean d'Angely, who, supported by Count Montgomery, soon restored the superiority of the Huguenots. The enemy was equally unfortunate in the attempt, simultaneously made, to turn the admiral's position; and, foiled at every point, he retired for the day. On the morrow, both armies reappeared in the same order of battle, but neither general was eager to renew a contest in which the advantage was all with those who stood on the defensive, and, after indulging in a brief and ineffective cannonade, the order was given to the Roman Catholic troops to return to camp.[767]

After this indecisive combat, Coligny, who had no desire to bring on a general engagement before receiving the considerable accession of troops of which he was in expectation, slipped away from CossÉ, and though hotly pursued by the enemy's cavalry, made his way to the friendly walls of La CharitÉ upon the Loire. Here he busied himself with preparations for further undertakings, and was engaged particularly in providing his army with a few cannon and mortars, of which he had greatly felt the need, when activity was interrupted by a ten days' truce, dating from the fourteenth of July, the precursor of a definite treaty of peace.[768] At the expiration of the armistice, Coligny advanced, toward the end of July, to his castle of ChÂtillon-sur-Loing, and distributed his troops in the vicinity of Montargis, still nearer Paris. Marshal CossÉ, at the same time, moved in a parallel line through Joigny, and took up his position at Sens, where he could at once protect the capital and prevent the Huguenots from making raids in that fertile and populous province, the "Île de France," from which the whole country had derived its name. Leaving the admiral and his brave followers here, at the conclusion of an adventurous expedition of over twelve hundred miles, which had consumed more than nine months, let us glance at the negotiations for peace which had long been in progress, and were now at length crowned with success.

So true was it of the combatants in the French civil wars, that they rarely carried on hostilities but they were also treating for peace, that since the battle of Moncontour there had hardly elapsed a month without the discussion of the terms on which arms could be laid aside by both parties. Scarcely had the first startling impression made by the defeat of the Huguenots passed away before Catharine de' Medici sent that skilful diplomatist, Michel de Castelnau, to assure the Queen of Navarre, at La Rochelle, of her personal esteem and affection, as well as of her fervent desire to employ her influence with the king, her son, in effecting a pacification based upon just and honorable conditions. Jeanne replied in courteous language; but, while she insisted upon her own hearty reciprocation of the queen mother's wish, she also expressed the suspicion which all the reformed entertained of the sincerity of the leading ministers in the French cabinet, whose relations with Spain and with the Pope showed that they were intent on nothing less than the utter ruin of the Huguenots.[769] In November the matter took a more definite shape, through Marshal CossÉ, who appeared in La Rochelle with propositions of peace. This statesman, otherwise moderate in his counsels, was imbued with the notion that the Protestants were so discouraged by their late defeat, that they would gladly accept any terms. But the Huguenots, having understood that he was empowered merely to offer them liberty of conscience, without the right to the public worship of God, promptly broke off the negotiations.[770] A month or two later they were induced to believe that the court was disposed to larger concessions, or, if not, that they might at least justify themselves in the eyes of the world by showing that they were neither unreasonable nor desirous of prolonging the horrors of war. Two deputies—Jean de la Fin, Sieur de Beauvoir la Nocle, and Charles de TÉligny: the one sent by the Queen of Navarre, the other sent by Coligny and the princes, who were already far on their journey through the south of France—came to the king at Angers, and presented the demands of the Huguenots. These demands certainly did not breathe a spirit of craven submission. The Huguenots called not only for complete liberty of conscience, but also for the right to hold their religious assemblies through the entire kingdom, without prejudice to their dignities or honors. They stipulated for the annulling of all sentences pronounced against them; the approval of all that they had done, as done for the welfare of the realm; the restitution of their dignities and property, and the giving of good and sufficient securities for the execution of the edict of pacification.[771] Catharine and her counsellors had undoubtedly gained some wholesome experience since CossÉ's first proposals. They had already discovered that a single pitched battle had not ruined the Huguenots; and they now suspected that a number of additional battles might be required to effect that desirable result. It is not astonishing, however, that the queen mother was not yet ready to grant terms which could scarcely have been conceded even on the morrow of an overwhelming defeat. The articles sent by the king to the Protestant leaders as a counter-proposal were therefore of a very different character from those which they had submitted. Charles offered to the Queen of Navarre, the Princes of Navarre and CondÉ, the admiral, and their followers, entire amnesty, and consented to annul all judicial proceedings made against them during these or the late troubles. He would exact no punishment for any treaties which they might have formed with foreign princes, and would restore their goods, honors, and estates. As to the religious question, he would allow them to hold two cities, in which they might do as they pleased, the king placing in each city a capable "gentilhomme" to maintain his authority and the public tranquillity. Elsewhere in France he would tolerate no reformed minister, no exercise of any other religion than his own. Neither would he guarantee the restitution of the judicial and other offices once held by Protestants, since others had bought them, and the money proceeding from the sale had been spent in defraying the expenses of the war; especially as the clergy must look to the courts for the enforcement of their claims for indemnification for the destruction of the churches and other ecclesiastical property. The king professed himself willing to give all reasonable securities for the performance of his promises, but neglected to make any specification of the nature of those securities.[772] Such were the hard conditions offered—all that Catharine and the Guises were willing to concede at a time when it was hoped that the Huguenots would lose the assistance of one of their secret supporters, Elizabeth of England; for the Earls of Westmoreland and Northumberland had risen in the north, and they had not only the best wishes, but the ready co-operation of every Spanish and French sympathizer. Charles himself was writing to his ambassador at London a letter meant to meet the queen's eye, instructing him to congratulate Elizabeth on the progress made in suppressing the insurrection; and Catharine, by the same messenger, sent a secret letter of the same date, ordering the same diplomatic agent, in case the rebellion was not at an end, to give aid and comfort to the rebels.[773] Catharine and the Guises had not lost heart. Moved by repeated supplications, Pius the Fifth at last decided to excommunicate the heretical daughter of Henry and Anne Boleyn. But, as the bull of the twenty-fifth of February, 1570, had been procured solely by the entreaties of the rebel earls, enforced by the intercessions of the Guises, and as it was known that Philip the Second, so far from desiring it, was strongly opposed to the imprudent policy of the pontiff, the document, which pretended to relieve all the queen's subjects of the obligations of their allegiance, was committed to the charge of the Cardinal of Lorraine, to launch at Elizabeth's devoted head whenever the convenient moment should arrive.[774]

At MontrÉal, near Carcassonne, the admiral was again overtaken by a royal messenger, who on this occasion was Biron, equally distinguished on the field and in the council-chamber. While the Protestants replied to his offer that with heartfelt satisfaction they greeted the king's disposition to restore peace to France, and sent to Charles, who was then at ChÂteaubriand, in Brittany, a delegation consisting of TÉligny, Beauvoir la Nocle, and La ChassetiÈre, they distinctly stated that no terms could be entertained which should not include liberty of worship. For they declared that "the deprivation of the exercise of their religion was more insupportable to them than death itself."[775] But, in fact, the Huguenot princes and nobles placed little reliance upon the sincerity of the court, and had no hope of peace so long as they treated at a distance from the capital. Accordingly, Coligny, in his march up the valley of the RhÔne, when again approached in the king's name by Biron, accompanied by Henry de Mesmes, Sieur de Malassise, peremptorily declined to enter into a truce which should interrupt the efficiency of his movement.[776]

But when at last the admiral reached the Loire, and, at La CharitÉ and ChÂtillon, was within a few hours of Paris, the attitude of the court in relation to the peace seemed to undergo an entire change, and it became evident that the negotiations, which had previously been employed for the mere purpose of amusing the Huguenots, were now resorted to with the view of ending a war already protracted far beyond expectation. Nor is it difficult to discover some of the circumstances that tended to bring about this radical mutation of policy.[777] The resources of the kingdom were exhausted. It was no longer possible to furnish the ready money without which the German and other mercenaries, of late constituting a large portion of the royal troops, could not be induced to enter the kingdom. The Pope and Philip were lavish of nothing beyond promises and exhortations that above all things Charles should make no peace with the heretical rebels. Indeed, Philip had few men, and no money, to spare. The French troops were in great straits. The gentlemen, who, in return for their immunity from all taxation, were bound to serve the monarch in the field at their own expense, had exhausted their available funds in so long a contest, and it was impossible to muster them in such numbers as the war demanded. Charles himself had always been averse to war. His tastes were pacific. If he ever emulated the martial glory which his brother Anjou had so easily acquired, the feeling was but of momentary duration, and met with little encouragement from his mother. He had, undoubtedly, consented to the initiation of the war only in consequence of the misrepresentations made by those who surrounded him, respecting its necessity and the ease of its prosecution. He had now the strongest reasons for desiring the immediate return of peace. His marriage with the daughter of the emperor had for some months been arranged, but Maximilian refused to permit Elizabeth to become the queen of a country rent with civil commotion. Catharine de' Medici, also, from the advocate of war, had become anxious for peace—tardily returning to the conviction which she had often expressed in former years, that the attempt to exterminate the Huguenots by force of arms was hopeless. After two years she was no nearer her object than when the Cardinal of Lorraine persuaded her to endeavor to seize CondÉ at Noyers. Jarnac had accomplished nothing; Moncontour was nearly as barren a victory. A great part of what had been so laboriously effected by Anjou's army in the last months of 1569, La Noue had been undoing in the first half of 1570.[778] The Protestants, who were, a few months since, shut up in La Rochelle, had defeated their enemies at Sainte Gemme, near LuÇon, and had retaken Fontenay, Niort, the Isle d'OlÉron, Brouage, and other places. The Baron de la Garde, who had lately, in the capacity of "general of the galleys," been infesting the seas in the neighborhood of La Rochelle, was compelled to retire to Bordeaux.[779] Saintes had been besieged and captured, and the Huguenots were advancing to the reduction of St. Jean d'Angely, not long since so dearly won by the Roman Catholics.[780] Montluc had, it is true, met with success in BÉarn, where Rabasteins was taken and its entire garrison massacred.[781] But what were these advantages at the foot of the Pyrenees, when an army under Gaspard de Coligny, after sweeping four hundred leagues through the southern and western provinces, was now in the immediate vicinity of Paris? His forces, indeed, were small in numbers, but would speedily grow formidable. The French ambassador sent from London the intelligence that letters of credit had been sent from England to Hamburg in order to hasten the entrance into France of some twelve or fifteen thousand Germans under Duke Casimir; that twenty-five hundred men were to be despatched from La Rochelle to make a descent on some point in Normandy or Brittany, in conjunction with the ships of the Prince of Orange; and that the English were to be invited to co-operate.[782] If it had proved impracticable to prevent the Duc de Deux Ponts from marching across France to join the confederates near the ocean, what hope was there that the king would be able to hinder the union of Coligny and Casimir? Or, why might not both be reinforced by the troops of La Noue, who had been accomplishing such exploits in Aunis and Saintonge?

The princes of Germany added their intercessions to the stern logic of the conflict. During the festivities in Heidelberg, attending the marriage of John Casimir, Duke of Bavaria, and Elizabeth, daughter of the Elector of Saxony, in June, 1570, the Elector Palatine, the Elector of Saxony, the Margraves George Frederick of Brandenburg and Charles of Baden, Louis, Duke of WÜrtemberg, the Landgraves William, Philip and George of Hesse, and Adolphus, Duke of Holstein, wrote a joint letter to Charles the Ninth of France, in which they drew his attention to the injury which the long war he was carrying on with his subjects was inflicting upon the states of the empire, and to the necessity of speedily terminating it if he would retain their good-will and friendship. And they assured him that there was no way of accomplishing this result except by permitting the exercise of the reformed religion throughout the kingdom, and abolishing all distinctions between his Majesty's subjects of different faiths.[783]

When the war had so signally failed, it is not strange that the king and his mother should have turned once more to the advocates of peace, with whose return to favor the retirement of the Guises from court was contemporaneous. Yet the Protestants, who knew too well from experience the malignity of that hated family, could not but shudder lest they might be putting themselves in the power of their most determined enemies. The Queen of Navarre wrote to Charles urging him to use his own native good sense, and assuring him that she feared "marvellously" that these well-known mischief-makers would lure him into "a patched-up-peace"—une paix fourrÉe—like the preceding pacifications. The object they had in view was, indeed, the ruin of the Huguenots; but the first disaster, she warned him, would fall on the monarch and his royal estate.[784] Cardinal ChÂtillon, when sounded by the French ambassador in England, expressed his eagerness for peace. On selfish grounds alone he would be glad to exchange poverty in England for his revenues of one hundred and twenty thousand a year in France. But he had his fears. "Remembering that the king, the queen, and monsieur (the Duke of Anjou), to confirm the last peace, did him the honor to give him their word, placing their own hands in his, and that those who induced them to break it were those very persons with whom he and his associates now had to conclude the proposed peace," he said, "his hair stood upon end with fear." All that the Protestants wanted was security. They would be glad to transfer the war elsewhere—a thing his brother the admiral had always desired; and, if admitted to the king's favor, they would render his Majesty the most notable service that had been done to the crown for two hundred years.[785]

The terms of the long-desired peace were at last decided upon by the commissioners, among whom TÉligny and Beauvoir la Nocle were most prominent on the Protestant side, while Biron and De Mesmes represented the court. On the eighth of August, 1570, they were officially promulgated in a royal edict signed at St. Germain-en-Laye.

There were in this document the usual stipulations respecting amnesty, the prohibition of insults and recriminations, and kindred topics. The liberty of religious profession was guaranteed. Respecting worship according to the Protestant rites, the provision was of the following character. All nobles entitled to "high jurisdiction"[786] were permitted to designate one place belonging to them, where they could have religious services for themselves, their families, their subjects, and all who might choose to attend, so long as either they or their families were present. This privilege, in the case of other nobles, was restricted to their families and their friends, not exceeding ten in number. To the Queen of Navarre a few places were granted in the fiefs which she held of the French crown, where service could be celebrated even in her absence. In addition to these, there was a list of cities, designated by name—two in each of the twelve principal governments or provinces—in which, or in the suburbs of which, the reformed services were allowed; and this privilege was extended to all those places of which the Protestants had possession on the first of the present month of August. From all other places—from the royal court and its vicinity to a distance of two leagues, and especially from Paris and its vicinity to the distance of ten leagues—Protestant worship was strictly excluded. Provision was made for Protestant burials, to take place in the presence of not more than ten persons. The king recognized the Queen of Navarre, the prince her son, and the late Prince of CondÉ and his son, as faithful relations and servants; their followers as loyal subjects; Deux Ponts, Orange, and his brothers, and Wolrad Mansfeld, as good neighbors and friends. There was to be a restitution of property, honors, and offices, and a rescission of judicial sentences. To protect the members of the reformed faith in the courts of justice, they were to be permitted to challenge four of the judges in the Parliament of Paris; six—three in each chamber—in those of Rouen, Dijon, Aix, Rennes, and Grenoble; and four in each chamber of the Parliament of Bordeaux. They were to be allowed a peremptory appeal from the Parliament of Toulouse. To defend the Huguenots from popular violence, four cities were to be intrusted to them for a period of two years—La Rochelle, Montauban, Cognac, and La CharitÉ—to serve as places of refuge; and the Princes of Navarre and CondÉ, with twenty of their followers, were to pledge their word for the safe restoration of these cities to the king at the expiration of the designated term.[787]

Such were the leading features of the edict of pacification that closed the third religious war, by far the longest and most sanguinary conflict that had as yet desolated France. That the terms would be regarded as in the highest degree offensive by the intolerant party at home and abroad was to be expected. The Parisian curate, Jehan de la Fosse, only spoke the common sentiment of the clergy and of the bigoted Roman Catholics when he said that "it contained articles sufficiently terrible to make France and the king's faithful servants tremble, seeing that the Huguenots were reputed as faithful servants, and what they had done held by the king to be agreeable."[788] It was not astonishing, therefore, that, although the publication of the edict was effected without delay under the eyes of the court at Paris, it gave rise in Rouen to a serious riot.[789] The Papal Nuncio and the Spanish ambassador were indignant. Both Pius and Philip had bitterly opposed the negotiations of the early part of the year. Now their ambassadors made a fruitless attempt to put off the evil day of peace; the Spanish ambassador not only offering three thousand horse and six thousand foot to extirpate the Huguenots, but affirming that "there were no conditions to which he was not ready to bind himself, provided that the king would not make peace with the heretics and rebels."[790]

For the first time in their history, the relations of the Huguenots of France to the state were settled, not by a royal declaration which was to be of force until the king should attain his majority, or until the convocation of a general council of the Church, but by an edict which was expressly stated to be "perpetual and irrevocable." Such the Protestants, although with many misgivings, hoped that it might prove. It was not, however, an auspicious circumstance that the popular wit, laying hold of the fact that one of the Roman Catholic commissioners that drew up its stipulations—Biron—was lame, while the other—Henri de Mesmes—was best known as Lord of Malassise, conferred upon the new compact the ungracious appellation of "the limping and unsettled peace"—"la paix boiteuse et mal-assise."[791]

[587] MÉmoires d'Agrippa d'AubignÉ (Ed. Buchon), 475.