Volume IV Part 12 (2/2)

”At my departure,” he says in his will and testament, ”I prayed of the king and queen this thing, that, as they had determined to break the peace, and proceed by war against those with whom they had previously made peace, and as they were driving me from the court because they had heard it said that I was opposed to and ill content with their enterprise, I prayed them, I say, that if they did not acquiesce in my counsel, they would, at the very least, some time after they had glutted and satiated their hearts and their thirst with the blood of their subjects, embrace the first opportunity that offered itself for making peace, before that things were reduced to utter ruin; for, whatever there might be at the bottom of this war, it could not but be very pernicious to the king and the kingdom.” During the two years that it lasted, from August, 1568, to August, 1570, the third religious war under Charles IX.

entailed two important battles and many deadly faction-fights, which spread and inflamed to the highest pitch the pa.s.sions of the two parties.

On the 13th of March, 1569, the two armies, both about twenty thousand strong, and appearing both of them anxious to come to blows, met near Jarnac, on the banks of the Charente; the royal army had for its chief Catherine de' Medici's third son, Henry, Duke of Anjou, advised by the veteran warrior Gaspard de Tavannes, and supported by the young Duke Henry of Guise, who had his father to avenge and his own spurs to win.

[Ill.u.s.tration: HENRY OF LORRAINE (DUKE OF GUISE)----332]

The Prince of Conde, with Admiral de Coligny for second, commanded the Protestant army. We make no pretension to explain and discuss here the military movements of that day, and the merits or demerits of the two generals confronted; the Duke of Aumale has given an account of them and criticised them in his _Histoire des Princes de Conde,_ with a complete knowledge of the facts and with the authority that belongs to him. ”The encounter on the 13th of March, 1569, scarcely deserves,” he says, ”to be called a battle; it was nothing but a series of fights, maintained by troops separated and surprised, against an enemy which, more numerous to begin with, was attacking with its whole force united.”. A tragic incident at the same time gave this encounter an importance which it has preserved in history. Admiral de Coligny, forced to make a retrograde movement, had sent to ask the Prince of Conde for aid; by a second message he urged the prince not to make a fruitless effort, and to fall back himself in all haste. ”G.o.d forbid,” answered Conde, ”that Louis de Bourbon should turn his back to the enemy!” and he continued his march, saying to his brother-in-law, Francis de la Rochefoucauld, who was marching beside him, ”My uncle has made a 'clerical error' (_pas de clerc,_ a slip); but the wine is drawn, and it must be drunk.” On arriving at the battle-field, whither he had brought with him but three hundred horse, at the very moment when, with this weak escort, he was preparing to charge the deep column of the Duke of Anjou, he received from La Rochefoucauld's horse a kick which broke one of the bones of his leg; and he had already crushed an arm by a fall. We will borrow from the Duke of Aumale the glorious and piteous tale of this incident.

”Conde turned round to his men-at-arms, and showing first his injured limbs and then the device, 'Sweet is danger for Christ and for fatherland!' which fluttered upon his banner in the breeze, 'n.o.bles of France,' he cried, 'this is the desired moment Remember in what plight Louis de Bourbon enters the battle for Christ and fatherland!' Then, lowering his head, he charges with his three hundred horse upon the eight hundred lances of the Duke of Anjou. The first shock of this charge was irresistible; such for a moment was the disorder amongst the Catholics that many of them believed the day was lost; but fresh bodies of royalists arrive one after another. The prince has his horse killed under him; and, in the midst of the confusion, hampered by his wounds, he cannot mount another. In spite of all, his brave comrades do not desert him; Soubise and a dozen of them, covered with wounds, are taken; an old man, named La Vergne, who had brought with him twenty-five sons or nephews, is left upon the field with fifteen of them, 'all in a heap,'

says D'Aubigne. Left almost alone, with his back against a tree, one knee upon the ground, and deprived of the use of one leg, Conde still defends himself; but his strength is failing him; he sees two Catholic gentlemen to whom he had rendered service, Saint-Jean and D'Argence; he calls to them, raises the vizor of his helmet, and holds out to them his gauntlets. The two hors.e.m.e.n dismount, and swear to risk their lives to save his. Others join them, and are eager to a.s.sist the glorious captive. Meanwhile the royal cavalry continues the pursuit; the squadrons successively pa.s.s close by the group which has formed round Conde. Soon he spies the red cloaks of the Duke of Anjou's guards. He points to them with his finger. D'Argence understands him, and, 'Hide your face!' he cries. 'Ah D'Argence, D'Argence, you will not save me,'

replies the prince. Then, like Caesar, covering up his face, he awaited death the poor soul knew only too well the perfidious character of the Duke of Anjou, the hatred with which he was hunting him down, and the sanguinary orders he would give. The guards had gone by when their captain, Montesquion, learned the name of this prisoner. 'Slay, slay, mordioux!' he shouted; then suddenly wheeling his horse round, he returns at a gallop, and with a pistol-shot, fired from behind, shatters the hero's skull.” [_Histoire des Princes de Conde,_ by M. le Duc d'Aumale, t. ii. pp. 65-72.]

The death of Conde gave to the battle of Jarnac an importance not its own. A popular ditty of the day called that prince ”the great enemy of the ma.s.s.” ”His end,” says the Duke of Aumale, ”was celebrated by the Catholics as a deliverance; a solemn Te Deum was chanted at court and in all the churches of France. The flags taken were sent to Rome, where Pope Pius IV. went with them in state to St. Peter's. As for the Duke of Anjou, he showed his joy and his baseness together by the ign.o.ble treatment he caused to be inflicted upon the remains of his vanquished relative, a prince of the blood who had fallen sword in hand. At the first rumor of Conde's death, the Duke of Montpensier's secretary, Coustureau, had been despatched from headquarters with Baron de Magnac to learn the truth of the matter. 'We found him there,' he relates, 'laid upon an a.s.s; the said sir baron took him by the hair of the head for to lift up his face, which he had turned towards the ground, and asked me if I recognized him. But as he had lost an eye from his head, he was mightily disfigured; and I could say no more than it was certainly his figure and his hair, and further than that I was unable to speak.'

Meanwhile,” continues the Duke of Aumale, ”the accounts of those present removed all doubt; and the corpse, thus thrown across an a.s.s, with arms and legs dangling, was carried to Jarnac, where the Duke of Anjou lodged on the evening of the battle. There the body of Conde was taken down amidst the sobs of some Protestant prisoners, who kissed, as they wept, the remains of their gallant chief. This touching spectacle did not stop the coa.r.s.e ribaldry of the Duke of Anjou and his favorites; and for two days the prince's remains were left in a ground-floor room, there exposed to the injurious action of the air and, to the gross insults of the courtiers. The Duke of Anjou at last consented to give up the body of Conde to the Duke of Longueville, his brother-in-law, who had it interred with due respect at Vendome in the burial-place of his ancestors.”

When in 1569 he thus testified, from a mixture of hatred and fear, an ign.o.ble joy at the death of Louis de Conde, the valiant chief of Protestantism, the Duke of Anjou did not foresee that, nearly twenty years later, in 1588, when he had become Henry III., King of France, he would also testify, still from a mixture of hatred and fear, the same ign.o.ble joy at sight of the corpse of Henry de Guise, the valiant chief of Catholicism, murdered by his order and in his palace.

As soon as Conde's death was known at La Roch.e.l.le, the Queen of Navarre, Jeanne d'Albret, hurried to Tonnay-Charente, whither the Protestant army had fallen back; she took with her her own son Henry, fifteen years old, and Henry de Bourbon, the late Prince of Conde's son, who was seventeen; and she presented both of them to the army. The younger, the future Henry IV., stepped forward briskly. ”Your cause,” said he, ”is mine; your interests are mine; I swear on my soul, honor, and life, to be wholly yours.” The young Conde took the same oath. The two princes were a.s.sociated in the command, under the authority of Coligny, who was immediately appointed lieutenant-general of the army. For two years their double signature figured at the bottom of the princ.i.p.al official acts of the Reformed party; and they were called ”the admiral's pages.”

On both of them Jeanne pa.s.sionately enjoined union between themselves, and equal submission on their part to Coligny, their model and their master in war and in devotion to the common cause. Queen, princes, admiral, and military leaders of all ranks stripped themselves of all the diamonds, jewels, and precious stones which they possessed, and which Elizabeth, the Queen of England, took in pledge for the twenty thousand pounds sterling she lent him. The Queen of Navarre reviewed the army, which received her with bursts of pious and warlike enthusiasm; and leaving to Coligny her two sons, as she called them, she returned alone to La Roch.e.l.le, where she received a like reception from the inhabitants, ”rough and loyal people,” says La Noue, ”and as warlike as mercantile.”

After her departure, a body of German horse, commanded by Count Mansfeld, joined Coligny in the neighborhood of Limoges. Their arrival was an unhoped-for aid. Coligny distributed amongst them a medal bearing the effigy of Queen Jeanne of Navarre with this legend: ”Alone, and with the rest, for G.o.d, the king, the laws, and peace.”

With such dispositions on one side and the other, war was resumed and pushed forward eagerly from June, 1569, to June, 1570, with alternations of reverse and success. On the 23d of June, 1569, a fight took place at Roche l'Abeille, near St. Yrieix in Limousin, wherein the Protestants had the advantage. The young Catholic n.o.blemen, with Henry de Guise at their head, began it rashly, against the desire of their general, Gaspard de Tavannes, to show off their bravery before the eyes of the queen-mother and the Cardinal of Lorraine, both of whom considered the operations of the army too slow and its successes too rare. They lost five hundred men and many prisoners, amongst others Philip Strozzi, whom Charles IX. had just made colonel-general of the infantry. They took their revenge on the 7th of September, 1569, by forcing Coligny to raise the siege of Poitiers, which he had been pus.h.i.+ng forward for more than two months, and on the 3d of October following, at the battle of Moncontour in Poitou, the most important of the campaign, which they won brilliantly, and in which the Protestant army lost five or six thousand men and a great part of their baggage. Before the action began, ”two gentlemen on the side of the Catholics, being in an out-of-the-way spot, came to speech,” says La Noue, ”with some of the (Protestant) religion, there being certain ditches between them.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Parley before the Battle of Moncontour----337]

'Sirs,' said they, 'we bear the marks of enemies, but we do not hate you in any wise, or your party. Warn the admiral to be very careful not to fight, for our army is marvellously strong by reason of re-enforcements that have come in to it, and it is very determined withal. Let the admiral temporize for a month only, for all the n.o.bles have sworn and said to Monseigneur that they will not wait any longer, that he must employ them within that time, and they will then do their duty. Let the admiral remember that it is dangerous to stem the fury of Frenchmen, the which, however, will suddenly ooze away; if they have not victory speedily, they will be constrained to make peace, and will offer it you on advantageous terms. Tell him that we know this from a good source, and greatly desired to advertise him of it.' Afterwards they retired.

The others,” continues La Noue, ”went incontinently to the admiral for to make their report, which was to his taste. They told it also to others of the princ.i.p.als; and some there were who desired that it should be acted upon; but the majority opined that this notice came from suspected persons, who had been accustomed to practise fraud and deceit, and that no account should be made of it.” The latter opinion prevailed; and the battle of Moncontour was fought with extreme acrimony, especially on the part of the Catholics, who were irritated by the cruelties, as La Noue himself says, which the Protestants had but lately practised at the fight of La Roche l'Abeille. Coligny was wounded in the action, after having killed with his own hand the Marquis Philibert of Baden; and the melley had been so hot that the admiral's friends found great difficulty in extricating him and carrying him off the field to get his wound attended to. Three weeks before the battle, on the 13th of September, Coligny had been sentenced to death by the Parliament of Paris, and hanged in effigy on the Place de Greve; and a reward of fifty thousand gold crowns had been offered to whosoever should give him up to the king's justice dead or alive, words added, it is said, to the decree at the desire of Charles IX. himself. Family sorrows were in Coligny's case added to political reverses; on the 27th of May, in this same year 1569, he had lost his brother D'Andelot, his faithful comrade in his religious as well as his warlike career. ”He found himself,” says D'Aubigne, ”saddled with the blame due to accident, his own merits being pa.s.sed over in silence; with the remnant of an army which, when it was whole, was in despair even before the late disaster; with weak towns, dismayed garrisons, and foreigners without baggage; himself moneyless, his enemies very powerful, and pitiless towards all, especially towards him; abandoned by all the great, except one woman, the Queen of Navarre, who, having nothing but the t.i.tle, had advanced to Niort in order to lend a hand to the afflicted and to affairs in general. This old man, worn down by fever, endured all these causes of anguish and many others that came to rack him more painfully than his grievous wound. As he was being borne along in a litter, Lestrange, an old n.o.bleman, and one of his princ.i.p.al counsellors, travelling in similar fas.h.i.+on, and wounded likewise, had his own litter, where the road was broad, moved forward in front of the admiral's, and putting his head out at the door, he looked steadily at his chief, saying, with tears in his eyes, 'Yet G.o.d is very merciful.' Thereupon they bade one another farewell, perfectly at one in thought, without being able to say more. This great captain confessed to his intimates that these few friendly words restored him, and set him up again in the way of good thoughts and firm resolutions for the future.” He was so much restored, that, between the end of 1569 and the middle of 1570, he marched through the south and the centre of France the army which he had reorganized, and with which, wherever he went, he restored, if not security, at any rate confidence and zeal, to his party.

On arriving at Arnay-le-Duc, in Burgundy, he found himself confronted by Marshal de Cosse with thirteen thousand men of the king's troops.

Coligny had barely half as many; but he did not hesitate to attack, and on the 13th of June, 1570, he was so near victory that the road was left open before him. On the 7th of July he arrived at Charite-sur-Loire.

Alarm prevailed at Paris. A truce for ten days was signed, and negotiations were reopened for a fresh attempt at peace.

”If any one, in these lamentable wars, worked hard, both with body and mind,” says La Noue, ”it may be said to have been the admiral, for, as regards the greatest part of the burden of military affairs and hards.h.i.+ps, it was he who supported them with much constancy and buoyancy; and he was as respectful in his bearing towards the princes his superiors as he was modest towards his inferiors. He always had piety in singular esteem, and a love of justice, which made him valued and honored by them of the party which he had embraced. He did not seek ambitiously for commands and honors; they were thrust upon him because of his competence and his expertness. When he handled arms and armies, he showed that he was very conversant with them, as much so as any captain of his day, and he always exposed himself courageously to danger. In difficulties, he was observed to be full of magnanimity and resource in getting out of them, always showing himself quite free from swagger and parade. In short, he was a personage worthy to re-establish an enfeebled and a corrupted state. I was fain to say these few words about him in pa.s.sing, for, having known him and been much with him, and having profited by his teaching, I should have been wrong if I had not made truthful and honorable mention of him.” [_Memoires de La Noue, in the Pet.i.tot collection,_ 1st series, t. x.x.xiv. p. 288.]

The negotiations were short. The war had been going on for two years.

The two parties, victorious and vanquished by turns, were both equally sick of it. In vain did Philip II., King of Spain, offer Charles IX. an aid of nine thousand men to continue it. In vain did Pope Pius V. write to Catherine de' Medici, ”As there can be no communion between Satan and the children of the light, it ought to be taken for certain that there can be no compact between Catholics and heretics, save one full of fraud and feint.” ”We have beaten our enemies,” says Montluc, ”over and over again; but notwithstanding that, they had so much influence in the king's council that the decrees were always to their advantage. We won by arms, but they won by those devils of doc.u.ments.” Peace was concluded at St.

Germain-en-Laye on the 8th of August, 1570, and it was more equitable and better for the Reformers than the preceding treaties; for, besides a pretty large extension as regarded free exercise of their wors.h.i.+p and their civil rights in the state, it granted ”for two years, to the princes of Navarre and Conde and twenty n.o.blemen of the religion, who were appointed by the king, the wardens.h.i.+p of the towns of La Roch.e.l.le, Cognac, Montauban, and La Charite, whither those of the religion who dared not return so soon to their own homes might retire.” All the members of the Parliament, all the royal and munic.i.p.al officers, and the princ.i.p.al inhabitants of the towns where the two religions existed were further bound over on oath ”to maintenance of the edict.”

Peace was made; but it was the third in seven years, and very shortly after each new treaty civil war had recommenced. No more was expected from the treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye than had been effected by those of Amboise and Longjumeau, and on both sides men sighed for something more stable and definitive. By what means to be obtained and with what pledges of durability? A singular fact is apparent between 1570 and 1572; there is a season, as it were, of marriages and matrimonial rejoicings. Charles IX. went to receive at the frontier of his kingdom his affianced bride, Archd.u.c.h.ess Elizabeth of Austria, daughter of the emperor, Maximilian II., who was escorted by the Archbishop of Treves, chancellor of the empire; the nuptials were celebrated at Mezieres, on the 26th of November, 1570; the princes and great lords of the Protestant party were invited; they did not think it advisable to withdraw themselves from their asylum at La Roch.e.l.le; but Coligny wrote to the queen-mother to excuse himself, whilst protesting his forgetfulness of the past and his personal devotion. Four months afterwards, Coligny himself married again; it was three years since he had lost his n.o.ble wife, Charlotte de Laval, and he had not contemplated anything of the kind, when, in the concluding weeks of 1570, he received from the castle of St. Andre de Briord, in Le Bugey, a letter from a great lady, thirty years of age, Jacqueline de Montbel, daughter of Count d'Entremont, herself a widow, who wrote to him ”that she would fain marry a saint and a hero, and that he was that hero.” ”I am but a tomb,” replied Coligny.

But Jacqueline persisted, in spite of the opposition shown by her sovereign, Emmanuel Philibert, Duke of Savoy, who did not like his fair subjects to marry foreigners; and in February, 1571, she furtively quitted her castle, dropped down the Rhone in a boat as far as Lyons, mounted on horseback, and, escorted by five devoted friends, arrived at La Roch.e.l.le. All Coligny's friends were urgent for him to accept this pa.s.sionate devotion proffered by a lady who would bring him territorial possessions valuable to the Protestants, ”for they were an open door to Geneva.” Coligny accepted; and the marriage took place at La Roch.e.l.le on the 24th of March, 1571. ”Madame Jacqueline wore, on this occasion,”

says a contemporary chronicler, ”a skirt in the Spanish fas.h.i.+on, of black gold-tissue, with bands of embroidery in gold and silver twist, and, above, a doublet of white silver-tissue embroidered in gold, with large diamond-b.u.t.tons.” She was, nevertheless, at that moment almost as poor as the German arquebusiers who escorted her litter; for an edict issued by the Duke of Savoy on the 31st of January, 1569, caused her the loss of all her possessions in her own country. She was received in France with the respect due to her; and when, five months after the marriage, Charles; IX. summoned Coligny to Paris, ”to serve him in his most important affairs, as a worthy minister, whose virtues were sufficiently known and tried,” he sent at the same time to Madame l'Amirale a safe-conduct in which he called her my fair cousin. Was there any one belonging to that august and ill.u.s.trious household who had, at that time, a presentiment of their impending and tragic destiny?

At the same period, the Queen of Navarre, Jeanne d'Albret, obtained for her young nephew, Henry de Bourbon, Prince of Conde, son of the hero of Jarnac, and companion of Henry of Navarre, the hand of his cousin, Mary of Cleves; and there was still going on in London, on behalf of one of Charles IX.'s brothers,--at one time the Duke of Anjou and at another the Duke of Alencon,--the negotiation which was a vain attempt to make Queen Elizabeth espouse a French prince.

Coincidently with all these marriages or projects of marriage amongst princes and great lords came the most important of all, that which was to unite Henry of Navarre and Charles IX.'s sister, Marguerite de Valois.

There had already, thirteen or fourteen years previously, been some talk about it, in the reign of King Henry II., when Henry of Navarre and Margaret de Valois, each born in 1553, were both of them mere babies.

This union between the two branches of the royal house, one Catholic and the other Protestant, ought to have been the most striking sign and the surest pledge of peace between Catholicism and Protestantism. The political expediency of such a step appeared the more evident and the more urgent in proportion as the religious war had become more direful and the desire for peace more general. Charles IX. embraced the idea pa.s.sionately. At the outset he encountered an obstacle. The young Duke of Guise had already paid court to Marguerite, and had obtained such marked favor with her that the amba.s.sador of Spain wrote to the king, ”There is no public topic in France just now save the marriage of my Lady Marguerite with the Duke of Guise.” People even talked of a tender correspondence between the princess and the duke, which was carried on through one of the queen's ladies, the Countess of Mirandola, who was devoted to the Guises and a favorite with Marguerite. ”If it be so,”

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