Volume I Part 53 (1/2)
[Footnote 967: The words in the text are those of Calvin, in a letter to Sturm, written Dec. 16, 1560, not many days after the receipt of the astonis.h.i.+ng intelligence. ”Did you ever read or hear,” he says, ”of anything more opportune than the death of the king? The evils had reached an extremity for which there was no remedy, when suddenly G.o.d shows himself from heaven! He who pierced the eye of the father has now stricken the ear of the son.” Bonnet, Calvin's Letters, Am. ed., iv.
152.]
CHAPTER XI.
THE REIGN OF CHARLES THE NINTH, TO THE PRELIMINARIES OF THE COLLOQUY OF POISSY.
[Sidenote: The death of Francis saves the Huguenots.]
[Sidenote: Transfer of power.]
If the sudden catastrophe which brought to an end the b.l.o.o.d.y rule of Henry was naturally interpreted as a marked interposition of Heaven in behalf of the persecuted ”Lutherans,” it is not surprising that the unexpected death of his eldest son, in the flower of his youth, and after the briefest reign in the royal annals, seemed little short of a miracle. Had Francis lived but a week longer, the ruin of the Huguenots might perhaps have been consummated. Conde would have been executed at the opening of the States General. Navarre and Montmorency, if no worse doom befell them, would have been incarcerated at Loches and Bourges.
The Estates, deprived of the presence of these leaders, and overawed by the formidable military preparations of the Guises,[968] would readily have acquiesced in the most extreme measures. Liberty and reform would have found a common grave.[969] But a few hours sufficed to disarrange this programme. The political power was, at one stroke, transferred from the hands of Francis and Charles of Lorraine to those of Catharine de'
Medici and the King of Navarre; and the Protestants of Paris recognized in the event a direct answer to the pet.i.tions which they had offered to Almighty G.o.d on the recent days of special humiliation and prayer.[970]
[Sidenote: Alarm of the Guises.]
[Sidenote: Funeral obsequies of Francis II.]
The altered posture of affairs was equally patent to the princes of late complete masters of the destinies of the country. In the first moments of their excessive terror, they are said to have shut themselves up in their palaces, and to have declined to leave this refuge until a.s.sured that no immediate violence was contemplated.[971] Even after the immediate danger had pa.s.sed, however, they were too shrewd to pay to the remains of their nephew the tokens of respect exacted of the constable in behalf of Henry's corpse,[972] preferring to provide for their own safety and future influence by being present at the meeting of the States. The paltry convoy of Francis from Orleans to the royal vaults of St. Denis presented so unfavorable a contrast to the pompous ceremonial of his father's interment, that it was wittily said, ”that the mortal enemy of the Huguenots had not been able to escape being himself buried like a Huguenot.”[973] A bitter taunt aimed at the unfaithfulness and ingrat.i.tude of the Guises fell under their own eyes. A slip of paper was found pinned to the velvet funereal pall, on which were written--with allusion to that famous chamberlain of Charles the Seventh, who, seeing his master's body abandoned by the courtiers that had flocked to do obeisance to his son and successor, himself buried it with great pomp and at his own expense--the words: ”Where is Messire Tanneguy du Chastel? _But he was a Frenchman!_”[974]
[Sidenote: Navarre's opportunity.]
[Sidenote: His contemptible character.]
[Sidenote: Adroitness and success of Catharine.]
Never had prince of the blood a finer opportunity for maintaining the right, while a.s.serting his own just claims, than fell to the lot of Antoine of Navarre. The sceptre had pa.s.sed from the grasp of a youth of uncertain majority to that of a boy who was incontestably a minor.
Charles, the second son of Henry the Second, who now succeeded his older brother, was only ten years of age. It was beyond dispute that the regency belonged to Antoine as the first prince of the blood. Every sentiment of self-respect dictated that he should a.s.sume the high rank to which his birth ent.i.tled him,[975] and that, while exercising the power with which it was a.s.sociated, in restraining or punis.h.i.+ng the common enemies both of the public liberties and of the family of the Bourbons, he should protect the Huguenots, who looked up to him as their natural defender. But the King of Navarre had, unfortunately, entered into the humiliating compact with the queen mother, to which reference was made in the last chapter. From this agreement he now showed no disposition to withdraw. The utopian vision of a kingdom of Navarre, once more restored to its former dimensions, still flitted before his eyes, and he preferred the absolute sovereignty of this contracted territory to the influential but dangerous regency which his friends urged him to seize. Besides, he was sluggish, changeable, and altogether untrustworthy. ”He is an exceedingly weak person”--_suggetto debolissimo_--said Suriano. ”As to his judgment, I shall not stop to say that he wears rings on his fingers and pendants in his ears like a woman, although he has a gray beard and bears the burden of many years; and that in great matters he listens to the counsels of flatterers and vain men, of whom he has a thousand about him.”[976] Liberal in promises, and exhibiting occasional sparks of courage, the fire of Antoine's resolution soon died out, and he earned the reputation of being no more formidable than the most treacherous of advocates.
Sensual indulgence had sapped the very foundations of his character.[977] It is true that his friends, forgetting the disappointment engendered by his recent displays of timidity, reminded him again of the engagements into which he had entered, to interfere in defence of the oppressed, of his glorious opportunity, and of his accountability before the Divine Tribunal.[978] But their appeals accomplished little. Catharine was able to boast, in a letter to the French Amba.s.sador at Madrid, just a fortnight after the death of Francis, that ”she had great reason to be pleased” with Navarre's conduct, for ”he had placed himself altogether in her hands, and had despoiled himself of all power and authority.” ”I dispose of him,” she said, ”just as I please.”[979] And to her daughter, Queen Isabella of Spain, she wrote by the same courier: ”He is so obedient; he has no authority save that which I permit him to exercise.”[980] The apprehensions felt by Philip the Second regarding the exaltation of a heretic, in the person of his hated neighbor of Navarre, to the first place in the vicinage of the French throne, might well be quieted after such rea.s.suring intelligence.
[Sidenote: Financial embarra.s.sment.]
[Sidenote: The religions situation.]
[Sidenote: Catharine's neutrality.]
Yet the position of Catharine, it must be admitted, was by no means an easy one. The ablest statesman might have shrunk from coping with the financial difficulties that beset her. The crown was almost hopelessly involved. Henry the Second had in the course of a dozen years acc.u.mulated, by prodigal gifts and by needless wars, a debt--enormous for that age--of forty-two millions of francs, besides alienating the crown lands and raising by taxation a larger sum of money than had been collected in eighty years previous.[981] The Venetian Michele summed up the perplexities of the political situation under two questions: How to relieve the people, now thoroughly exhausted;[982] and, how to rescue the crown from its poverty. But, in reality, the financial embarra.s.sment was the least of the difficulties of the position Catharine had a.s.sumed.
The kingdom was rent with dissensions. Two religions were struggling--the one for exclusive supremacy, the other at least for toleration and recognition. Catharine had no strong religious convictions to actuate her in deciding which of the two she should embrace. Two powerful political parties were contending for the ascendency--that of the princes of the blood and of const.i.tutional usage, and that of an ambitious family newly introduced into the kingdom, but a family which had succeeded in attaching to itself most, if not all, of the favorites of preceding kings. Catharine's ambition, in the absence of any convictions of right, regarded the success of either as detrimental to her own authority. She had, therefore, resolved to play off the one against the other, in the hope of being able, through their mutual antagonism, to become the mistress of both. Under the reign of Francis the Second she had gained some notion of the humiliation to which the Guises, in their moment of fancied security, would willingly have reduced her. Yet, after all, the illegal usurpation of the Guises, who might, from their past experience, be more tolerant of her ambitious designs, was less formidable to her than the claims of the Bourbon princes, based as were these claims upon ancestral usage and right, and equally fatal to her pretensions and to those of their rivals. It was a situation of appalling difficulty for a woman sustained in her course by no lofty consciousness of integrity and devotion to duty--for a woman who was by nature timid, and by education inclined to resort for guidance to judicial astrology or magic rather than to religion.[983]
[Sidenote: Opening of the States General, Dec. 13, 1560.]
A brief delay in the opening of the sessions of the States General was necessitated by the sudden change in the administration. At length, on the thirteenth of December, the pompous ceremonial took place in the city of Orleans. It was graced by the presence of the boy-king, Charles the Ninth, and of his mother, his brother, the future Henry the Third, and his sister Margaret. The King of Navarre, the aged Renee of Ferrara, and other members of the royal house, also figured here with all that was most distinguished among the n.o.bility of the realm.
[Sidenote: Address of Chancellor De l'Hospital.]
[Sidenote: Co-existence of two religions impossible.]