Volume II Part 58 (1/2)
[Sidenote: Beginning of the siege of Sancerre.]
But it was Sancerre which, next to La Roch.e.l.le, occasioned the court the greatest annoyance, both because of its central position[1294] and because of its comparative proximity to Paris. Here the Protestants of Berry and the adjacent provinces had found a welcome refuge. Citizens and refugees refused to admit a royal garrison, and foiled the attempt to capture the place by escalade. Treachery was at work, and, as usual, it was most rife among the richer cla.s.s. By their connivance the citadel or castle was surprised by the troops sent by the governor of the province, M. de la Chastre; but it was retaken on the same day.[1295] Notwithstanding this warning, the people of Sancerre took none of the precautions which their situation demanded, apparently unable to believe that, when such a city as La Roch.e.l.le was in revolt, the king would undertake to subdue so small a place as Sancerre. There were no stores of provisions, and the buildings in proximity to the walls, from which an enemy could incommode the city, had not been torn down, when, between the third and ninth of January, 1573, a force of five thousand foot and five hundred horse, under La Chastre, besides many n.o.bles and gentlemen of the vicinage, made its appearance before the walls. The inhabitants now discovered their capital mistakes, but it was too late to remedy them. Hunger began almost immediately to make itself felt, while the places they had neglected to destroy or preoccupy proved very convenient to the royalists for the next two or three months, during which it was attempted to take Sancerre by a.s.sault. Yet the direct attack proved a failure, and, on the twentieth of March, the siege was changed to a blockade. Forts were erected in the most advantageous spots, and a wide trench was dug around the entire city.[1296] Sancerre was to be tried by the severe ordeal of hunger; and certainly the most frightful among ancient sieges can scarcely be said to have surpa.s.sed in horror that of this small city.[1297]
[Sidenote: The incipient famine.]
Did not the sufferings of the heroic inhabitants claim our sympathy, we might read with entertainment the singular devices they resorted to in grappling with a terrible foe whose insidious advances were more difficult to oppose than the open a.s.saults of the enemy. For the famine of Sancerre boasts of a historian more copious and minute than Josephus or Livy. In reading the narrative of the famous Jean de Lery[1298]--the same writer to whom we are indebted for an authentic account of Villegagnon's unfortunate scheme of American colonization--we seem to be perusing a great pathological treatise. Never was physician more watchful of his patient's symptoms than Lery with his hand upon the pulse of famis.h.i.+ng Sancerre. It would almost seem that the restless Huguenot, who united in his own person the opposite qualifications of clergyman and soldier, desired to make his little work a useful guide in similar circ.u.mstances, for a portion of it, at least, has been appropriately styled ”a cookery book for the besieged.”[1299]
Early in the siege, not without some qualms, the inhabitants made trial of the flesh of a horse accidentally killed. Next an a.s.s, and then the mules, of which there was a considerable number, were brought to the shambles.
The butchers were now ordered to sell this new kind of meat, and a maximum price was fixed. For a fortnight the supply of cats held out, after which rats and mice became the chief staple of food. Dog-flesh was next reluctantly tasted, and found, as our conscientious chronicler observes, to be somewhat sweet and insipid.[1300] And so the spring of 1573 pa.s.sed away, and summer came; but no succor arrived for the beleaguered city. On the contrary, there came the disheartening tidings from the west that a peace had been concluded by the Huguenots of La Roch.e.l.le, in which no mention was made of Sancerre.
[Sidenote: Losses of the royal army before La Roch.e.l.le.]
[Sidenote: Roman Catholic processions.]
So successful had been the defence of the citadel of Protestantism on the sh.o.r.es of the ocean, so unexpectedly large the royal losses, that the court was only waiting for a decent pretext to abandon the unfortunate siege. Pestilence added its victims to those of the sword, and it was currently reported that forty thousand of the besiegers were swept away by their combined a.s.saults.[1301] A more careful enumeration, however, shows that, while the Roch.e.l.lois, out of thirty-one hundred soldiers, lost thirteen hundred, including twenty-eight ”pairs,” the king, out of a little more than forty thousand troops, had lost twenty-two thousand, ten thousand of whom died in the breach or in engagements elsewhere. Nor was the loss of officers trifling; two hundred had died, including fifty of great distinction, and five ”maitres de camp.”[1302] And, with all this expenditure of life, and with the heavy drafts upon the public treasure, little or nothing had been accomplished. Meanwhile, in other parts of France there existed a scarcity of food amounting almost to a famine; nor had the solemn processions to the shrines of the saints--processions for the most part rendered contemptible by the irreverent conduct both of the clergymen and the laity that took part in them[1303]--averted the wrath of heaven. The poor suffered extremely. Selfishness gained such ascendancy in some towns, that cruel ruses were adopted to remove the dest.i.tute that had taken refuge within their walls. It was not strange that the extraordinary mortality which soon fell upon the well-to-do burghers was viewed by many as a direct punishment sent by the Almighty.[1304]
[Sidenote: Election of Henry of Anjou to the crown of Poland.]
The event which came just in time to free the court from its embarra.s.sment was the election of Henry of Anjou to the vacant throne of Poland. We have already witnessed the perplexity of Bishop Montluc when the tidings of the ma.s.sacre first reached him.[1305] If he could have denied its reality, he would have done so. This being impossible, he was forced to content himself with misrepresenting the origin of the slaughter, slandering the admiral and the other victims, and circulating the calumnies of Charpentier and others who prated about a Huguenot conspiracy. A judicious distribution of French gold a.s.sisted his own eloquent sophistry; and the Duke of Anjou, portrayed as a chivalric prince and one who was not ill-affected to religious liberty, was chosen king over his formidable rivals. Charles and Catharine were alike delighted. The former could scarcely find words to express his joy[1306] at the prospect of being freed from the presence of a brother whom he feared, and perhaps hated; while the queen mother's gratification was even more intense at the peaceful solution of the prophecy of Nostradamus, than at the elevation of her favorite son.
[Sidenote: Edict of Pacification, Boulogne, July, 1573.]
The peace between the king and the Roch.e.l.lois was concluded in June, and was formally promulgated in July, 1573, in a royal edict from Boulogne.
The chief provision was that the Protestants in the cities of La Roch.e.l.le, Montauban, and Nismes should enjoy entire freedom of public wors.h.i.+p, while their brethren throughout the kingdom should have liberty of conscience and the right to sell their property and remove wherever they might choose, whether within or without the realm. Only gentlemen and others enjoying high jurisdiction, who had remained constant in their faith, and had taken up arms with the three cities, were to be allowed to collect their friends to the number of ten to witness their marriages and baptisms, according to the custom of the Reformed Church. Even this privilege could not be exercised within the distance of two leagues from the royal court or from the city of Paris; nor did the edict confer the right to preach or celebrate the Lord's Supper.[1307] La Roch.e.l.le, Nismes, and Montauban gained their point, and were to be exempted from receiving garrisons or having citadels built, with the condition that they should for two years constantly keep four of their princ.i.p.al citizens at court as pledges of their fidelity. All promises of abjuration were declared null and void. Amnesty was proclaimed, and, to cap the climax of absurdity, the brave Huguenots who had defended their homes for months against Charles were solemnly declared to be held the king's ”good, loyal, and faithful subjects and servants.”
[Sidenote: Meagre results of the war.]
The results of the war on the king's side were certainly very meagre. To have fought for the greater part of a year with the miserable Huguenots that had escaped the ma.s.sacre of St. Bartholomew's Day, and then to conclude the war by such a peace, was certainly ignominious enough for Charles and his mother. For the Huguenot party was now, more than ever, a recognized power in the state, with three strongholds--one in the west and two in the south. Into no one of these could a royal garrison be introduced. La Roch.e.l.le, in particular, having repulsed every a.s.sault of the best army that could be brought against it, was acknowledged invincible by the exemptions accorded to it in common with Nismes and Montauban. It was hardly by such expectations that Charles had been prevailed upon to throw down the gage of war to his subjects of the reformed faith.
[Sidenote: The siege and famine of Sancerre continue.]
Meanwhile, the inhabitants of Sancerre, not even named in the edict,[1308]
had been sustained under appalling difficulties by the confident hope of a.s.sistance from the south. But the hope was long deferred, and they grew sick at heart. The prospect was already dark enough, when, on the second of June, a Protestant soldier, who had made his way into the city through the enemy's lines, brought the depressing announcement that no aid must be expected from Languedoc for six weeks. As but little wheat remained in Sancerre, the immediate effect of the intelligence was that liberty was given to some seventy of the poor to leave the city walls. At the same time the daily ration was limited to half a pound of grain. A week later it was reduced to one-quarter of a pound. Not long after only a single pound was doled out once a week, and by the end of the month the supply entirely gave out. The beginning of July reduced the besieged to the necessity of tasking their ingenuity to make palatable food of the hides of cattle, next of the skins of horses, dogs, and a.s.ses. The stock of even this unsavory material soon became exhausted; whereupon, not very unnaturally, parchment was turned to good account. Ma.n.u.scripts a good century old were eaten with relish. Soaked for a couple of days in water, and afterward boiled as much longer, when they became glutinous they were fried, like tripe, or prepared with herbs and spices, after the manner of a hodge-podge. The writer who is our authority for these culinary details, informs us that he had seen the dish devoured with eagerness while the original letters written upon the parchment were still legible.[1309] But the urgent necessities of their situation did not suffer the half-famished inhabitants to stop here. With the proverbial ingenuity of their nation, they turned their attention to the parchment on old drums, and subjected to the skilful hands of cooks the discarded hoofs, horns, and bones of animals, the harness of horses, and even refuse sc.r.a.ps of leather. There seemed to be nothing they could not lay under contribution to furnish at least a little nutriment.
And yet ghastly hunger little by little tightened her relentless embrace.
Almost all the children under twelve years of age died. In the universal reign of famine there were at last found those who were ready to repeat the horrible crime of feeding upon the flesh of their own kindred. It was discovered that a husband and wife, with a neighboring crone, had endeavored to satisfy the gnawings of hunger by eating a newly dead child.
Their guilt came speedily to light, and was punished according to the severe code of the sixteenth century. The father was sentenced by the council to be burned alive; his wife to be strangled and her body consigned to the flames; while the corpse of the old woman who had instigated the foul deed but had meanwhile died, was ordered to be dug up and burned. But the feeling of the great majority of the besieged was far removed from that despair which prompts to an inhuman disregard of natural decency and affection. Near the close of July a boy of barely ten years, as he lay on his death-bed, said to his weeping parents: ”Why do you weep thus at seeing me die of hunger? I do not ask bread, mother; I know you have none. But since G.o.d wills that I die thus, we must accept it cheerfully. Was not that holy man Lazarus hungry? Have I not so read in the Bible?”[1310]
The catastrophe could not much longer be deferred. Within the city speedy death stared every man in the face. Permission had, we have seen, been accorded to the poor, early in June, to go forth from the city walls; but the besieging force had mercilessly driven them back when they attempted to gain the open country. Numbers, unwilling to accept a second time the fatal hospitality of the city, preferred to remain in their exposed situation, miserably dragging out a precarious existence by subsisting upon snails, buds of trees and shrubs--even to the very gra.s.s of the field.
[Sidenote: Sancerre capitulates.]
Happily for Sancerre, the political exigencies of the royal court insured for the besieged Protestants, in the inevitable capitulation, more favorable terms than they might otherwise have obtained. As early as the eighteenth of July, Lery had been informed at a parley, by a former acquaintance on the Roman Catholic side, that a general peace had been concluded, and that Henry of Anjou had been elected to the throne of Poland. This first intimation was discredited by the cautious Protestants, not unused to the wiles of the enemy. But when, some twenty days later (on the sixth of August), the statement was confirmed, and the Sancerrois received the additional a.s.surance that they would be mildly treated, their surprise knew no bounds. The terms of surrender were easily arranged. A ransom of forty thousand livres was to be exacted from the city. On the thirty-first of August, M. de la Chastre made his solemn entry into Sancerre, accompanied by a band of Roman Catholic priests chanting a _Te Deum_ over his success. As was too frequently the case, the promise of immunity to the inhabitants was but poorly kept. Scarcely had two weeks pa.s.sed before the ”bailli” Johanneau,[1311] summoned from his house by the archers of the prevot, on the plea that M. de la Chastre desired his presence, was treacherously murdered on the way to the governor's house.
Besides a.s.sa.s.sination, other infractions of the capitulation were committed; the gates of the city were burned, the walls dismantled, many of the houses torn down. In fact, so unmercifully was Sancerre harried, partly by the troops, partly by the peasantry of the neighborhood, and by the ”bailli” of Berry, that the reformed church of this place seems to have been, for the time, completely dispersed.[1312]
Thus ended a siege which had lasted some eight months. The besieged had lost only eighty-four men by the direct effects of warfare; but more than five hundred persons perished during the last six weeks of sheer starvation.[1313]
Sancerre owed its release from the horrors of the siege in great part to the same causes that had powerfully contributed to the conclusion of the peace. The Polish amba.s.sadors, coming to proffer the crown to the king's brother, Henry of Anjou, were about to reach the French court. They were already not a little surprised at the discovery that the statements and promises made in the king's name by that not over-scrupulous negotiator, Montluc, Bishop of Valence, were impudent impostures, fabricated for no other purpose than to secure at all hazards the success of the French candidate for the Polish throne. To exhibit to them at this critical juncture the edifying spectacle of a royal governor of the province of Berry engaged in the reduction of a city the only crime of which was its desire to enjoy religious liberty--this would have been a dangerous venture. Consequently it was no fortuitous coincidence that Sancerre capitulated the very day the Polish amba.s.sadors made their appearance.
[Sidenote: Reception of the Polish amba.s.sadors.]