Volume II Part 3 (1/2)

The long period of comparative inaction was now succeeded by a spasmodic effort at energetic conduct. The six days' truce had scarcely expired when the prince resolved to throw himself unexpectedly upon the neighboring camp of the Roman Catholics, before Montmorency, Guise, and Saint Andre had resumed their accustomed posts. One of those nocturnal attacks, which, under the name of _camisades_, figure so frequently in the military history of the period, was secretly organized, and the Protestant soldiers, wearing white s.h.i.+rts over their armor, in order that they might easily recognize each other in the darkness of the night, started with alacrity, under D'Andelot's command, on the exciting adventure. But their guides were treacherous, or unskilful, and the enterprise came to naught.[142] Disappointed in this attempt, and unable to force the enemy to give battle, Conde turned his attention to Beaugency, which the King of Navarre had failed to restore, and carried it by storm. He would gladly have followed up the advantage by laying siege to Blois and Tours, which the triumvirate had taken and treated with the utmost cruelty; but heavy rains, and the impossibility of carrying on military operations on account of the depth of the mud, compelled him to relinquish his project, and reduced the main army to renewed inactivity.[143]

The protracted delays and inexcusable sluggishness of the leaders had borne their natural fruits. Many of the Protestant gentlemen had left the camp in disgust at the mistakes committed; others had retired to their homes on hearing that their families were exposed to the dangers of war and stood in need of their protection; a few had been corrupted by the arts of the enemy. For it was a circ.u.mstance often noticed by contemporaries, that no envoy was ever sent from Orleans to the court who did not return, if not demoralized, yet so lukewarm as to be incapable of performing any good service in future.[144] Yet the dispersion of the higher rank of the reformed soldiers, and the consequent weakening of Conde's army in cavalry, were attended with this incidental advantage, that they contributed greatly to the strengthening of the party in the provinces, and necessitated a similar division of the opposing forces.[145]

[Sidenote: Huguenot discipline.]

Never, perhaps, was there an army that exhibited such excellent discipline as did the army of the Protestants in this the first stage of its warfare.

Never had the morals and religion of soldiers been better cared for. It was the testimony of a soldier, one of the most accomplished and philosophical writers of his times--the brave ”Bras de Fer”--that the preaching of the Gospel was the great instrument of imbuing the army with the spirit of order. Crimes, he tells us, were promptly revealed; no blasphemy was heard throughout the camp, for it was universally frowned upon. The very implements of gambling--dice and cards--were banished.

There were no lewd women among the camp-followers. Thefts were unfrequent and vigorously punished. A couple of soldiers were hung for having robbed a peasant of a small quant.i.ty of wine.[146] Public prayers were said morning and evening; and, instead of profane or indelicate songs, nothing was heard but the psalms of David. Such were the admirable fruits of the careful discipline of Admiral Coligny, the true leader of the Protestant party; and they made a deep impression upon such enthusiastic youths as Francois de la Noue and Teligny. Their more experienced author, however, was not imposed upon by these flattering signs. ”It is a very fine thing,”

he told them, ”if only it last; but I much fear that these people will spend all their goodness at the outset, and that, two months hence, nothing will remain but malice. I have long commanded infantry, and I know that it often verifies the proverb which says: '_Of a young hermit, an old devil!_' If this army does not, we shall give it a good mark.”[147] The prediction was speedily realized; for, although the army of the prince never sought to rival the papal troops in the extent of its license, the standard of soldierly morality was far below that which Coligny had desired to establish.[148]

[Sidenote: Severities of the parliament.]

So far as cruelty was concerned, everything in the conduct of their antagonists was calculated to provoke the Protestants to bitter retaliation. The army of Guise was merciless. If the infuriated Huguenots selected the priests that fell into their hands for the especial monuments of their retribution, it was because the priesthood as a body had become the instigators of savage barbarity, instead of being the ministers of peace; because when they did not, like Ronsard the poet, themselves buckle on the sword, or revel in blood, like the monks of Saint Calais,[149] they still fanned, as they had for years been fanning, the flame of civil war, denouncing toleration or compromise, wielding the weapons of the church to enforce the pious duty of exterminating every foul calumny invented to the disadvantage of the reformers. No wonder, then, that the ecclesiastical dress itself became the badge of deadly and irreconcilable hostility, and that in the course of this unhappy war many a priest was cut down without any examination into his private views or personal history. Parliament, too, was setting the example of cruelty by reckless orders amounting almost to independent legislation. By a series of ”arrets” succeeding each other rapidly in the months of June and July, the door was opened wider and wider for popular excess. When the churches of Meaux were visited by an iconoclastic rabble on the twenty-sixth of June, the Parisian parliament, on the thirtieth of June, employed the disorder as the pretext of a judicial ”declaration” that made the culprits liable to all the penalties of treason, and permitted any one to put them to death without further authorization. The populace of Paris needed no fuller powers to attack the Huguenots, for, within two or three days, sixty men and women had been killed, robbed, and thrown into the river. Parliament, therefore, found it convenient to terminate the ma.s.sacre by a second order restricting the application of the declaration to persons taken in the very act.[150] A few days later (July, 1562), other arrets empowered all inhabitants of towns and villages to take up arms against those who molested priests, sacked churches, or ”held conventicles and unlawful a.s.semblies,” whether public or secret; and to arrest the ministers, deacons, and other ecclesiastical functionaries for trial, as guilty of treason against G.o.d as well as man.[151] Not content with these appeals to popular pa.s.sion,[152] however, the Parisian judges soon gave practical exemplifications of their intolerant principles; for two royal officers--the ”lieutenant general” of Pontoise, and the ”lieutenant” of Senlis--were publicly hung; the former for encouraging the preaching of G.o.d's word ”in other form than the ancient church” authorized, the latter for ”celebrating the Lord's Supper according to the Genevese fas.h.i.+on.”

These were, according to the curate of St. Barthelemi, the first executions at Paris for the simple profession of ”Huguenoterie” since the pardon proclaimed by Francis the Second at Amboise.[153] A few days later, a new and more explicit declaration p.r.o.nounced all those who had taken up arms, robbed churches and monasteries, and committed other sacrilegious acts at Orleans, Lyons, Rouen, and various other cities mentioned by name, to be rebels, and deprived them of all their offices.

Yet, by way of retaliation upon Conde for maintaining that he had entered upon the war in order to defend the persons of the king and his mother, unjustly deprived of their liberty, parliament pretended to regard the prince himself as an unwilling captive in the hands of the confederates; and, consequently, excepted him alone from the general attainder.[154] But the legal fiction does not seem to have been attended with the great success its projectors antic.i.p.ated.[155] The people could scarcely credit the statement that the war was waged by the Guises simply for the liberation of their mortal enemy, Conde, especially when Conde himself indignantly repelled the attempt to separate him from the a.s.sociates with whom he had entered into common engagements, not to add that the reputation of the Lorraine family, whose mouthpiece parliament might well be supposed to be, was not over good for strict adherence to truth.

Meanwhile the triumvirs were more successful in their military operations than the partisans of the prince. Their auxiliaries came in more promptly, for the step which Conde now saw himself forced to take, in consequence of his opponents' course, they had long since resolved upon. They had received reinforcements from Germany, both of infantry and cavalry, under command of the Rhinegrave Philip of Salm and the Count of Rockendorf; while Conde had succeeded in detaching but few of the Lutheran troopers by a manifesto in which he endeavored to explain the true nature of the struggle. Soldiers from the Roman Catholic cantons had been allowed a free pa.s.sage through the Spanish Franche-Comte by the regent of the Low Countries, Margaret of Parma. The Pope himself contributed liberally to the supply of money for paying the troops.[156] But the Protestant reinforcements from the Palatinate and Zweibrucken (Deux-Ponts), and from Hesse, which D'Andelot, and, after him, Gaspard de Schomberg, had gone to hasten, were not yet ready; while Elizabeth still hesitated to listen to the solicitations of Briquemault and Robert Stuart, the Scotchman, who had been successively sent to her court.[157]

[Sidenote: Military successes of the triumvirs.]

[Sidenote: Fall of Bourges.]

After effecting the important capture of the city of Poitiers, Marshal Saint Andre, at the head of a Roman Catholic army, had marched, about the middle of August, toward Bourges, perhaps the most important place held by the Protestants in central France. Beneath the walls of this city he joined the main army, under Navarre's nominal command, but really led by the Duke of Guise. The siege was pressed with vigor, for the king was present in person with the ”Guisards.” To the handful of Huguenots their a.s.sailants appeared to be ”a marvellous army of French, Germans, reiters, Spaniards, and other nations, numbering in all eighty or a hundred thousand men, with the bravest cavalry that could be seen.”[158] And, when twenty or twenty-five cannon opened upon Bourges with b.a.l.l.s of forty or fifty pounds' weight, and when six hundred and forty discharges were counted on a single day, and every building in the town was shaken to its very foundations, the besieged, numbering only a few hundred men, would have been excusable had they lost heart. Instead of this, they obstinately defended their works, repaired the breach by night, and inflicted severe injury on the enemy by nocturnal sallies. To add to the duke's embarra.s.sment, Admiral Coligny, issuing from Orleans, was fortunate enough to cut off an important convoy of provisions and ammunition coming from Paris to the relief of the besiegers.[159] Despairing of taking the city by force, they now turned to negotiation. Unhappily, M. d'Ivoy, in command of the Huguenot garrison, was not proof against the seductive offers made him. Disregarding the remonstrances of his companions in arms, who pointed to the fact that the enemy had from day to day, through discouragement or from sheer exhaustion, relaxed their a.s.saults, he consented (on the thirty-first of August) to surrender Bourges to the army that had so long thundered at its gates. D'Ivoy returned to Orleans, but Conde, accusing him of open perfidy, refused to see him; while the Protestants of Bourges shared the usual fate of those who trusted the promises of the Roman Catholic leaders, and secured few of the religious privileges guaranteed by the articles of capitulation.[160]

With the fall of Bourges, the whole of central France, as far as to the gates of Orleans, yielded to the arms of Guise. Everywhere the wretched inhabitants of the reformed faith were compelled to submit to gross indignities, or seek safety in flight. To many of these homeless fugitives the friendly castle of Montargis, belonging to the d.u.c.h.ess of Ferrara, to which reference will shortly be made, afforded a welcome refuge.[161]

[Sidenote: Help from Queen Elizabeth.]

The necessity of obtaining immediate reinforcements had at length brought Conde and the other great Huguenot lords to acquiesce in the offer of the only terms upon which Elizabeth of England could be persuaded to grant them actual support. As the indispensable condition to her interference, she demanded that the cities of Havre and Dieppe should be placed in her hands. These would be a pledge for the restoration of Calais, that old English stronghold which had fallen into the power of the French during the last war, and for whose restoration within eight years there had been an express stipulation in the treaties Cateau-Cambresis. This humiliating concession the Huguenots reluctantly agreed to make. Elizabeth in turn promised to send six thousand English troops (three thousand to guard each of the cities), who should serve under the command of Conde as the royal lieutenant, and pledged her word to lend the prince and his a.s.sociates one hundred and forty thousand crowns toward defraying the expenses of the war.[162] On the twentieth of September the Queen of England published to the world a declaration of the motives that led her to interfere, alleging in particular the usurpation of the royal authority by the Guises, and the consequent danger impending over the Protestants of Normandy through the violence of the Duke of Aumale.[163]

The tidings of the alliance and of some of its conditions had already reached France, and they rather damaged than furthered the Protestant cause. As the English queen's selfish determination to confine her a.s.sistance to the protection of the three cities became known, it alarmed even her warmest friends among the French Protestants. Conde and Coligny earnestly begged the queen's amba.s.sador to tell his mistress that ”in case her Majesty were introduced by their means into Havre, Dieppe, and Rouen with six thousand men, only to keep those places, it would be unto them a great note of infamy.” They would seem wantonly to have exposed to a foreign prince the very flower of Normandy, in giving into her hands cities which they felt themselves quite able to defend without a.s.sistance.

So clearly did Throkmorton foresee the disastrous consequences of this course, that, even at the risk of offending the queen by his presumption, he took the liberty to warn her that if she suffered the Protestants of France to succ.u.mb, with minds so alienated from her that they should consent to make an accord with the opposite faction, the possession of the cities would avail her but little against the united forces of the French.

He therefore suggested that it might be quite as well for her Majesty's interests, ”that she should serve the turn of the Huguenots as well as her own.”[164] Truly, Queen Elizabeth was throwing away a glorious opportunity of displaying magnanimous disinterestedness, and of conciliating the affection of a powerful party on the continent. In the inevitable struggle between Protestant England and papal Spain, the possession of such an ally as the best part of France would be of inestimable value in abridging the contest or in deciding the result. But the affection of the Huguenots could be secured by no such cold-blooded compact as that which required them to appear in the light of an unpatriotic party whose success would entail the dismemberment of the kingdom. To make such a demand at the very moment when her own amba.s.sador was writing from Paris that the people ”did daily most cruelly use and kill every person, no age or s.e.x excepted, that they took to be contrary to their religion,” was to show but too clearly that not religious zeal nor philanthropic tenderness of heart, so much as pure selfishness, was the motive influencing her.[165] And yet the English queen was not uninformed of, nor wholly insensible to, the calls of humanity. She could in fact, on occasion, herself set them forth with force and pathos. Nothing could surpa.s.s the sympathy expressed in her autograph letter to Mary of Scots, deprecating the resentment of the latter at Elizabeth's interference--a letter which, as Mr. Froude notices, was not written by Cecil and merely signed by the queen, but was her own peculiar and characteristic composition. ”Far sooner,” she wrote, ”would I pa.s.s over those murders on land; far rather would I leave unwritten those noyades in the rivers--those men and women hacked in pieces; but the shrieks of the strangled wives, great with child--the cries of the infants at their mothers' b.r.e.a.s.t.s--pierce me through. What drug of rhubarb can purge the bile which these tyrannies engender?”[166]

The news of the English alliance, although not unexpected, produced a very natural irritation at the French court. When Throkmorton applied to Catharine de' Medici for a pa.s.sport to leave the kingdom, the queen persistently refused, telling him that such a doc.u.ment was unnecessary in his case. But she significantly volunteered the information that ”some of his nation had lately entered France without asking for pa.s.sports, who she hoped would speedily return without leave-taking!”[167]

[Sidenote: Siege of Rouen, October.]

Meanwhile the English movement rather accelerated than r.e.t.a.r.ded the operations of the royal army. After the fall of Bourges, there had been a difference of opinion in the council whether Orleans or Rouen ought first to be attacked. Orleans was the centre of Huguenot activity, the heart from which the currents of life flowed to the farthest extremities of Gascony and Languedoc; but it was strongly fortified, and would be defended by a large and intrepid garrison. A siege was more likely to terminate disastrously to the a.s.sailants than to the citizens and Protestant troops. The admiral laughed at the attempt to attack a city which could throw three thousand men into the breach.[168] Rouen, on the contrary, was weak, and, if attacked before reinforcements were received from England, but feebly garrisoned. Yet it was the key of the valley of the Seine, and its possession by the Huguenots was a perpetual menace of the capital.[169] So long as it was in their hands, the door to the heart of the kingdom lay wide open to the united army of French and English Protestants. Very wisely, therefore, the Roman Catholic generals abandoned their original design[170] of reducing Orleans so soon as Bourges should fall, and resolved first to lay siege to Rouen. Great reason, indeed, had the captors of such strongholds as Marienbourg, Calais, and Thionville, to antic.i.p.ate that a place so badly protected, so easily commanded, and dest.i.tute of any fortification deserving the name, would yield on the first alarm.[171] It was true that a series of attacks made by the Duke of Aumale upon Fort St. Catharine, the citadel of Rouen, had been signally repulsed, and that, after two weeks of fighting, on the twelfth of July he had abandoned the undertaking.[172] But, with the more abundant resources at their command, a better result might now be expected. Siege was, therefore, a second time laid, on the twenty-ninth of September, by the King of Navarre.

The forces on the two sides were disproportionate. Navarre, Montmorency, and Guise were at the head of sixteen thousand foot and two thousand horse, in addition to a considerable number of German mercenaries.

Montgomery,[173] who commanded the Protestants, had barely eight hundred trained soldiers.[174] The rest of the scanty garrison was composed of those of the citizens who were capable of bearing arms, to the number of perhaps four thousand more. But this handful of men inst.i.tuted a stout resistance. After frequently repulsing the a.s.sailants, the double fort of St. Catharine, situated near the Seine, on the east of the city, and Rouen's chief defence, was taken rather by surprise than by force. Yet, after this unfortunate loss, the brave Huguenots fought only with the greater desperation. Their numbers had been reinforced by the accession of some five hundred Englishmen of the first detachment of troops which had landed at Havre on the third of October, and whom Sir Adrian Poynings had a.s.sumed the responsibility of sending to the relief of the beleaguered capital of Normandy.[175] With Killigrew of Pendennis for their captain, they had taken advantage of a high tide to pa.s.s the obstructions of boats filled with stone and sand that had been sunk in the river opposite Caudebec, and, with the exception of the crew of one barge that ran ash.o.r.e, and eleven of whom were hung by the Roman Catholics, ”for having entered the service of the Huguenots contrary to the will of the Queen of England,” they succeeded in reaching Rouen.[176]

These, however, were not the only auxiliaries upon whom the Huguenot chief could count. The women were inspired with a courage that equalled, and a determination that surpa.s.sed, that of their husbands and brothers. They undertook the most arduous labors; they fought side by side on the walls; they helped to repair at night the breaches which the enemy's cannon had made during the day; and after one of the most sanguinary conflicts during the siege, it was found that there were more women killed and wounded than men. Yet the courage of the Huguenots sustained them throughout the unequal struggle. Frequently summoned to surrender, the Rouenese would listen to no terms that included a loss of their religious liberty. Rather than submit to the usurpation of the Guises, they preferred to fall with arms in their hands.[177] For fall they must. D'Andelot was on his way with the troops he had laboriously collected in Germany; another band of three thousand Englishmen was only detained by the adverse winds; Conde himself was reported on his way northward to raise the siege--but none could arrive in time. The King of Navarre had been severely wounded in the shoulder, but Guise and the constable pressed the city with no less decision. At last the walls on the side of the suburbs of St. Hilaire and Martainville were breached by the overwhelming fire of the enemy. The population of Rouen and its motley garrison, reduced in numbers, worn out with toils and vigils, and disheartened by a combat which ceased on one day only to be renewed under less favorable circ.u.mstances on the next, were no longer able to continue their heroic and almost superhuman exertions.

[Sidenote: Fall of Rouen.]

[Sidenote: The Norman parliament.]