Part 81 (2/2)
Since Pope Sixtus V., who had a weakness for Henry, there had been several popes. Urban VII., his immediate successor, had reigned but thirteen days. Gregory XIV. (Sfondrato) had died 15th October, 1591, ten months after his election. Fachinetti, with the t.i.tle of Innocent IX., had reigned two months, from 29th October to 29th December, 1591. He died of ”Spanish poison,” said Envoy Umton, as coolly as if speaking of gout, or typhus, or any other recognised disorder. Clement VIII. (Aldobrandini) was elected 30th January, 1592. He was no lover of Henry, and lived in mortal fear of Philip, while it must be conceded that the Spanish amba.s.sador at Rome was much given to brow-beating his Holiness. Should he dare to grant that absolution which was the secret object of the Bearnese, there was no vengeance, hinted the envoy, that Philip would not wreak on the holy father. He would cut off his supplies from Naples and Sicily, and starve him and all-his subjects; he would frustrate all his family schemes, he would renounce him, he would unpope him, he would do anything that man and despot could do, should the great shepherd dare to re-admit this lost sheep, and this very black sheep, into the fold of the faithful.
As for Henry himself, his game--for in his eyes it was nothing but a game--lay every day plainer and plainer before him. He was indispensable to the heretics. Neither England, nor Holland, nor Protestant Germany, could renounce him, even should he renounce ”the religion.” Nor could the French Huguenots exist without that protection which, even although Catholic, he could still extend to them when he should be accepted as king by the Catholics.
Hereditary monarch by French law and history, released from his heresy by the authority that could bind and loose, purged as with hyssop and washed whiter than snow, it should go hard with him if Philip, and Farnese, and Mayenne, and all the pikemen and reiters they might muster, could keep him very long from the throne of his ancestors.
Nothing could match the ingenuousness with which he demanded the instruction whenever the fitting time for it should arrive; as if, instead of having been a professor both of the Calvinist and Catholic persuasion, and having relapsed from both, he had been some innocent Peruvian or Hindoo, who was invited to listen to preachings and to examine dogmas for the very first time in his life.
Yet Philip had good grounds for hoping a favourable result from his political and military manoeuvre. He entertained little doubt that France belonged to him or to his daughter; that the most powerful party in the country was in favour of his claims, provided he would pay the voters liberally enough for their support, and that if the worst came to the worst it would always be in his power to dismember the kingdom, and to reserve the lion's share for himself, while distributing some of the provinces to the most prominent of his confederates.
The sixteen tyrants of Paris had already, as we have seen, urged the crown upon him, provided he would establish in France the Inquisition, the council of Trent, and other acceptable inst.i.tutions, besides distributing judiciously a good many lucrative offices among various cla.s.ses of his adherents.
The Duke of Mayenne, in his own name and that of all the Catholics of France, formally demanded of him to maintain two armies, forty thousand men in all, to be respectively under command of the duke himself and of Alexander Farnese, and regularly to pay for them. These propositions, as has been seen, were carried into effect as nearly as possible, at enormous expense to Philip's exchequer, and he naturally expected as good faith on the part of Mayenne.
In the same paper in which the demand was made Philip was urged to declare himself king of France. He was a.s.sured that the measure could be accomplished ”by freely bestowing marquisates, baronies, and peerages, in order to content the avarice and ambition of many persons, without at the same time dissipating the greatness from which all these members depended. Pepin and Charlemagne,” said the memorialists, ”who were foreigners and Saxons by nation, did as much in order to get possession of a kingdom to which they had no other right except that which they acquired there by their prudence and force, and after them Hugh Capet, much inferior to them in force and authority, following their example, had the same good fortune for himself and his posterity, and one which still endures.
”If the authority of the holy see could support the scheme at the same time,” continued Mayenne and friends, ”it would be a great help. But it being perilous to ask for that a.s.sistance before striking the blow, it would be better to obtain it after the execution.”
That these wholesome opinions were not entirely original on the part of Mayenne, nor produced spontaneously, was plain from the secret instructions given by Philip to his envoys, Don Bernardino de Mendoza, John Baptist de Ta.s.sis, and the commander Moreo, whom he had sent soon after the death of Henry III. to confer with Cardinal Gaetano in Paris.
They were told, of course, to do everything in their power to prevent the election of the Prince of Bearne, ”being as he was a heretic, obstinate and confirmed, who had sucked heresy with his mother's milk.” The legate was warned that ”if the Bearnese should make a show of converting himself, it would be frigid and fabricated.”
If they were asked whom Philip desired for king--a question which certainly seemed probable under the circ.u.mstances--they were to reply that his foremost wish was to establish the Catholic religion in the kingdom, and that whatever was most conducive to that end would be most agreeable to him. ”As it is however desirable, in order to arrange matters, that you should be informed of everything,” said his Majesty, ”it is proper that you should know that I have two kinds of right to all that there is over there. Firstly, because the crown of France has been usurped from me, my ancestors having been unjustly excluded by foreign occupation of it; and secondly, because I claim the same crown as first male of the house of Valois.”
Here certainly were comprehensive pretensions, and it was obvious that the king's desire for the establishment of the Catholic religion must have been very lively to enable him to invent or accept such astonis.h.i.+ng fictions.
But his own claims were but a portion of the case. His daughter and possible spouse had rights of her own, hard, in his opinion, to be gainsaid. ”Over and above all this,” said Philip, ”my eldest daughter, the Infanta, has two other rights; one to all the states which as dower-property are joined by matrimony and through females to this crown, which now come to her in direct line, and the other to the crown itself, which belongs directly to the said Infanta, the matter of the Salic law being a mere invention.”
Thus it would appear that Philip was the legitimate representative, not only of the ancient races of French monarchs--whether Merovingians, Carlovingians, or otherwise was not stated but also of the usurping houses themselves, by whose intrusion those earlier dynasties had been ejected, being the eldest male heir of the extinct line of Valois, while his daughter was, if possible, even more legitimately the sovereign and proprietor of France than he was himself.
Nevertheless in his magnanimous desire for the peace of the world and the advancement of the interests of the Church, he was, if reduced to extremities, willing to forego his own individual rights--when it should appear that they could by no possibility be enforced--in favour of his daughter and of the husband whom he should select for her.
”Thus it may be seen,” said the self-denying man, ”that I know how, for the sake of the public repose, to strip myself of my private property.”
Afterwards, when secretly instructing the Duke of Feria, about to proceed to Paris for the sake of settling the sovereignty of the kingdom, he reviewed the whole subject, setting forth substantially the same intentions. That the Prince of Bearne could ever possibly succeed to the throne of his ancestors was an idea to be treated only with sublime scorn by all right-minded and sensible men. ”The members of the House of Bourbon,” said he, ”pretend that by right of blood the crown belongs to them, and hence is derived the pretension made by the Prince of Bearne; but if there were wanting other very sufficient causes to prevent this claim--which however are not wanting--it is quite enough that he is a relapsed heretic, declared to be such by the Apostolic See, and p.r.o.nounced incompetent, as well as the other members of his house, all of them, to say the least, encouragers of heresy; so that not one of them can ever be king of France, where there have been such religious princes in time past, who have justly merited the name of Most Christian; and so there is no possibility of permitting him or any of his house to aspire to the throne, or to have the subject even treated of in the estates. It should on the contrary be entirely excluded as prejudicial to the realm and unworthy to be even mentioned among persons so Catholic as those about to meet in that a.s.sembly.”
The claims of the man whom his supporters already called Henry the Fourth of France being thus disposed of, Philip then again alluded with his usual minuteness to the various combinations which he had formed for the tranquillity and good government of that kingdom and of the other provinces of his world-empire.
It must moreover be never forgotten that what he said pa.s.sed with his contemporaries almost for oracular dispensations. What he did or ordered to be done was like the achievements or behests of a superhuman being.
Time, as it rolls by, leaves the wrecks of many a stranded reputation to bleach in the suns.h.i.+ne of after-ages. It is sometimes as profitable to learn what was not done by the great ones of the earth, in spite of all their efforts, as to ponder those actual deeds which are patent to mankind. The Past was once the Present, and once the Future, bright with rainbows or black with impending storm; for history is a continuous whole of which we see only fragments.
He who at the epoch with which we are now occupied was deemed greatest and wisest among the sons of earth, at whose threats men quailed, at whose vast and intricate schemes men gasped in palefaced awe, has left behind him the record of his interior being. Let us consider whether he was so potent as his fellow mortals believed, or whether his greatness was merely their littleness; whether it was carved out, of the inexhaustible but artificial quarry of human degradation. Let us see whether the execution was consonant with the inordinate plotting; whether the price in money and blood--and certainly few human beings have squandered so much of either as did Philip the Prudent in his long career--was high or low for the work achieved.
Were after generations to learn, only after curious research, of a pretender who once called himself, to the amus.e.m.e.nt of his contemporaries, Henry the Fourth of France; or was the world-empire for which so many armies were marshalled, so many ducats expended, so many falsehoods told, to prove a bubble after all? Time was to show. Meantime wise men of the day who, like the sages of every generation, read the future like a printed scroll, were pitying the delusion and rebuking the wickedness of Henry the Bearnese; persisting as he did in his cruel, sanguinary, hopeless attempt to establish a vanished and impossible authority over a land distracted by civil war.
Nothing could be calmer or more reasonable than the language of the great champion of the Inquisition.
”And as President Jeannin informs me,” he said, ”that the Catholics have the intention of electing me king, that appearing to them the gentlest and safest method to smooth all rivalries likely to arise among the princes aspiring to the crown, I reply, as you will see by the copy herewith sent. You will observe that after not refusing myself to that which may be the will of our Lord, should there be no other mode of serving Him, above all I desire that which concerns my daughter, since to her belongs the kingdom. I desire nothing else nor anything for myself, nor for anybody else, except as a means for her to arrive at her right.”
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