Volume II Part 58 (2/2)
We shall not dwell upon the pomp attending their reception. The banquet held in the new palace of the Tuileries was brilliant. In the pageant succeeding it was displayed a ma.s.sive rock of silver, with sixteen nymphs in as many niches, personating the provinces of the French kingdom. When, after some verses well sung but indifferently composed, these nymphs descended from their elevation, and took part in an intricate maze of dance, the Polish spectators remarked, in the excess of their admiration, that the French ballet was something that could be imitated by none of the kings of the earth. ”I would rather,” dryly adds a contemporary historian, ”that they had said as much respecting our _armies_.”[1314]
[Sidenote: Discontent of the south with the terms of peace.]
The Protestants of Southern France had been included in the Edict of Pacification. In fact, Nismes and Montauban were as distinctly referred to by name as La Roch.e.l.le.[1315] But the terms of peace were not to the taste of the enterprising and self-reliant Huguenots of Languedoc and Guyenne.
They had learned, during the last ten years, to distrust all a.s.surances emanating from the court, even when claiming the authority of the king's name. Experience had taught them that previous edicts were framed simply to secure the destruction of those whom open warfare had failed to destroy.[1316] Without, therefore, either definitely accepting or rejecting the terms offered them, the Protestants of Nismes applied to Marshal Damville, who, at the conclusion of the peace, found himself with the royal troops at the hamlet of Milhaud, a league or two from their gates,[1317] for a fortnight's suspension of hostilities. The request being granted, a truce was established which was extended by successive prolongations beyond the beginning of the next year.[1318]
[Sidenote: a.s.sembly of Milhau and Montauban.]
Meantime the Protestants, notified by the Duke of Anjou of the conclusion of the peace, sent messengers to his camp requesting that as the matter was one vitally affecting the entire Protestant population, they might receive permission to meet, under protection of the royal authority, and deliberate respecting it. The king's consent having been obtained, Protestant deputies from almost all parts of the kingdom came together, late in the month of August, 1573, in the city of Milhau-en-Rouergue, from which they shortly transferred their sessions to Montauban.
[Sidenote: Military organization of the Huguenots.]
This important a.s.sembly resolved to accept no peace unless based upon equitable terms and secured by ample guarantees. In view of the possibility of the recurrence of war, provision was made for a complete military organization of the Huguenot resources in the south of France.
For this purpose Languedoc was divided into two ”generalites” or governments--the government of Nismes, or Lower Languedoc, placed under command of M. de Saint Romain, and that of Upper Languedoc, with Montauban for its chief city, to which the Viscount de Paulin was a.s.signed as military chief. Both governments were in turn subdivided into dioceses or particular governments, each furnished with a governor and a deliberative a.s.sembly. It was provided that in Nismes and Montauban respectively a council should be convened consisting of deputies from all the dioceses of the government, and that to this council, together with the governor, should be intrusted the administration of the finances, with authority to impose taxes alike upon Protestants and Roman Catholics. The organization, it was estimated, could readily place twenty thousand men in the field.[1319]
Such were the first attempts to perfect a system of warfare forced upon the Huguenots by the treacherous a.s.saults of their enemies--a fatal necessity of inst.i.tuting a state within a state, foreboding nothing but ruin to France.
[Sidenote: Pet.i.tion to the king.]
One of the chief results of the deliberations at Montauban was the preparation of a pet.i.tion to be laid before the king. This paper, which has come down to us with the signatures of the viscounts, barons, and other adherents of the Huguenot party, was intended to be an expression not only of their own individual views, but also of the sentiments of the churches they represented.[1320] The language is sharp and incisive, the demands are unmistakably bold. For a sufficient justification of their recent words and actions, the Huguenots of Guyenne point the monarch to his own letter of the twenty-fourth of August, 1572, by which constraint was laid upon them to a.s.sume arms. They call upon Charles, in accordance with the promise contained in that letter, to follow up the traces there alleged to have been found regarding the murder of Gaspard de Coligny, to appoint impartial judges for this purpose, and to execute exemplary justice upon the guilty. Not satisfied with claiming the annulling of all judicial proceedings, the destruction of all monuments erected to perpetuate the memory of the Ma.s.sacre of St. Bartholomew's Day, and the abolition of processions inst.i.tuted by the parliaments of Paris and Toulouse with the same end in view, they call on Charles to make a declaration ”that justly and for good reasons have 'those of the religion' taken arms, resisting and warring in these last troubles, as constrained thereto by the violent acts with which they have been a.s.sailed and driven to distraction.” They next demand those concessions which alone can make the position of the Protestants in France secure and endurable--freedom of wors.h.i.+p and church discipline established by perpetual provision, irrespective of place or time; the right of honorable burial; immunity from taxation for the support of Roman Catholic ceremonies; admission to schools and colleges; just regulations as to marriage; amnesty; the power to hold civil office, etc. They request permission to levy a sum of one hundred and twenty thousand livres among themselves to pay off the indebtedness incurred by them in past wars. And they go so far as not only to stipulate that the King of France shall renounce all leagues he may have contracted with the enemies of his Protestant subjects for their destruction, but even to propose that he shall conclude a defensive alliance with the Protestant states of Germany, Switzerland, England, and Scotland. Meanwhile, in order to prevent the recurrence of ”a conspiracy and Sicilian Vespers,” of which the Huguenots would be the victims, they ask to be permitted to hold forever the guard of those cities which they now have in their possession, and in addition some other cities in each of the provinces of the realm. The Protestant cities, it is stipulated, shall retain their walls and munitions, and the royal governors shall enter them accompanied only by a small retinue. The observance of these articles the Huguenots insist shall be solemnly sworn in privy and public council, and by the inhabitants of all places, the oath to be renewed every five years.[1321]
Such stout demands did the Protestants of the south and south-west address to Charles the Ninth on the first anniversary of the fatal matins of Paris. They were, it must be admitted, somewhat different from what might have been expected, a brief year before, from the fugitives who made their escape from the b.l.o.o.d.y sword of their enemies. Moreover, the terms laid down by the Huguenots of Lower Languedoc and Nismes were conceived in the same brave language, and their demands were virtually identical. Huguenot troops, paid by the king, to garrison both the cities now in the hands of the Protestants, and two cities in each of the sixteen provinces required for additional protection; free wors.h.i.+p irrespective of place; new parliaments in all the provinces, with Protestant judges to administer justice to Protestants; liberty to levy t.i.thes for the support of reformed churches; punishment of the instigators and perpetrators of the atrocities of the Ma.s.sacre of St. Bartholomew's Day, as robbers and disturbers of the public peace.[1322] The Tiers etat of Provence and Dauphiny added to the demands of Languedoc and Guyenne an urgent pet.i.tion in favor of the reduction of the onerous imposts under which the country was groaning.[1323]
[Sidenote: ”Les fronts d'airain.”]
[Sidenote: Catharine's bitter reply.]
The bearers of these demands were well able to give them forcible and fearless enunciation--Yolet, Philippi, Chavagnac, and others of the men known by the expressive designation of ”Les fronts d'airain.”[1324]
a.s.suredly a brow of bra.s.s was not out of place, when the Protestant deputies, after a delay of some weeks, were reluctantly admitted to an audience. Charles the Ninth and his court were at this time at Villers-Cotterets, on their way to the eastern frontiers of France, accompanying the newly elected King of Poland as he slowly and unwillingly journeyed toward the capital of a kingdom regarded by him in the light of a detestable place of exile. Contemporary writers inform us that Yolet and his companions were in no degree overawed by the splendor of the scene, and made no weak abatement in the terms they had been instructed to propose. Charles heard them through with patient attention. He was not a little astonished at the extent of their demands, we may be certain; but he made no comment upon the courageous a.s.sertion of Protestant rights. Not so with the queen mother. When the deputies had at length finished their harangue, Catharine could no longer contain her indignation. ”Why,” she exclaimed with marked bitterness of tone, ”if your Conde himself were alive and in the heart of the kingdom with twenty thousand horse and fifty thousand foot, and held the chief cities in his power, he would not make half so great demands!”[1325]
[Sidenote: The Huguenots firm.]
Despite the unwelcome character of the claims of the Huguenot deputies, some answer must be given. It was found impossible to induce the envoys to modify them. They denied that they had the power, even if they had the inclination, to alter the action of those who had sent them. They were therefore dismissed with expressions of good-will and the a.s.surance that two royal commissioners, the Duc d'Uzes and the Chevalier de Caylus, would be sent to treat with the delegates whom the Huguenots might choose.
Marshal Damville, governor of the province, was to partic.i.p.ate in the negotiations and to appoint some city in the vicinity of Montauban where they might be held. Charles was to hear the result of their conference on his return from the German borders. Meanwhile he promised to instruct Damville to put an end to all hostilities, provided the Huguenots should desist from everything tending to provoke retaliation.[1326] The Tiers etat received the answer to their pet.i.tion more promptly. It was naturally to the effect that a return to the meagre scale of imposts under Louis XI.
was utterly impracticable, in view of the burdens of the treasury arising from recent wars and the pensions yearly payable to various members of the royal family.[1327]
[Sidenote: Progress of the court to the borders of France.]
[Sidenote: Decline of the health of Charles IX.]
It would be out of place to describe here at any length the slow progress of the French court as it escorted the King of Poland to the borders of the realm. To none of the princ.i.p.al personages taking part was it the occasion of much satisfaction. Catharine was as reluctant to part from Henry, her favorite son, as he was himself averse to exchange the pleasures of the Louvre and Saint Germain for the crown of an unruly and half-civilized kingdom. As for Charles, the gratification he could not conceal at the prospect of being soon freed from the presence of a brother whom he both disliked and feared was more than counterbalanced by the rapid decline of his own health. The boy of eleven, whom the Venetian amba.s.sador had described about the time of his accession to the throne as handsome, amiable, and graceful in appearance, quick, vivacious, and humane--in short, as possessing every quality from which a great prince and a great king might be expected,[1328] was now a man of twenty-three.
But his const.i.tution, never robust, had gained nothing. The violent exercises to which he had been addicted even as a child, and which, though princely, had been p.r.o.nounced dangerous by the amba.s.sador, had been incessantly practised--the ball, horsemans.h.i.+p, arms--and bodily feebleness, not strength, had been the result. Other excesses had contributed to hasten the catastrophe. More than all, if we may believe the testimony of those who were familiar with the young monarch's later life, the mental and moral experience of the last eighteen months left their impress on his physical system. Charles, with the Ma.s.sacre of St.
Bartholomew's Day, had lost all the elasticity of youth. Remorse for complicity in the crime then perpetrated co-operated with the persuasion of the uselessness and complete failure of the attempt to exterminate the Huguenots, and the consciousness of having incurred the indelible mark of hatred and detestation of an impartial posterity. Even in his sleeping hours the curse of the murdered victims pursued him and disturbed his rest. Neither by day nor by night could he banish the remembrance of the time when blood ran so freely in the streets of Paris.
No attentive observer could doubt that the end was drawing near. The court had gone no farther on its way to Lorraine than the little town of Vitry-le-Francais, on the river Marne, when Charles fell so seriously ill as to be unable to prosecute his journey. As was usual in such cases, while the physicians alleged as a sufficient explanation of the attack the king's immoderate exercise in the chase and in blowing the trumpet, the more suspicious frequenters of the court and the credulous people did not hesitate to invent the story that he had been poisoned. But by whom the crime had been committed was not settled. Some ascribed it to Catharine, others to Henry of Anjou, while others still laid the guilt at the door of a person of less note, whose honor the licentious king had offended.[1329]
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