The Bourbon Kings of France

by Seward, Desmond

  When the Third War of Religion broke out, King Charles threatened to invade Béarn, and Queen Jeanne and her two children had to take refuge at La Rochelle. Jeanne’s brother-in-law, Louis, Prince de Condé, commanded the Huguenot army; in March 1569 he was taken prisoner at Jarnac and shot. Although Condé’s real successor was the Admiral de Coligny, the Huguenots hailed Henri as their champion; the fifteen-year-old boy and his mother were presented to the Protestant host who cheered them heartily. However, in 1570, when both sides had fought each other to a standstill, the Huguenots’ right of public worship was restored, in a settlement guaranteed by four places de sûreté—towns with Huguenot garrisons.

  Later, as a further guarantee, a marriage was arranged between Henri and the King’s sister, Marguerite de Valois. Queen Jeanne died in June 1572, before it could take place (probably of tuberculosis, though it was rumoured that she had been poisoned by Catherine de Medici’s perfumer, with gloves whose scent entered the brain).

  Everyone believed that the marriage would bring peace and the great nobles of the realm, Protestant and Catholic, assembled in the capital. Henri’s bride, Marguerite de Valois, was nineteen. Brantôme wrote, ‘If in all the world there has ever been anyone perfect in beauty, it is the Queen of Navarre … and I think that all women who were, who are and who shall be are ugly next to her.’ Portraits are less flattering. None the less, ‘Margot’ danced exquisitely, spoke Greek with astonishing fluency and was an excellent theologian. She was also a byword for promiscuity. The couple did not take to each other. On 18 August they were married at Nôtre-Dame, Marguerite wearing a royal crown and an ermine cape, with a long train of royal blue borne by three princesses. The marriage was the prelude to one of the most ghastly crimes in European history.

  During the wedding, Catherine de Medici was deeply distracted by matters of state. Admiral de Coligny had persuaded Charles IX to attack Spain, a war which could only be disastrous. Catherine was in despair; Catholic nobles urged the Queen to agree to Coligny’s assassination; reluctantly she yielded. The Guises, who had a father’s murder to avenge, arranged the details. On 22 August one of their henchmen shot at the Admiral from a window, but only wounded him. The Huguenots were enraged. Catherine, terrified, accepted that a general massacre was the only solution. After much browbeating, King Charles, unbalanced at the best of times, agreed, screaming, ‘Kill them all’. It was the eve of the feast of St Bartholomew.

  Before dawn on Sunday 24 August 1572, the Duc de Guise’s swordsmen broke into Coligny’s bedroom. He was skewered with a pike, then his corpse was thrown out of the window to be hanged by its heels from the public gibbet. The tocsin sounded and the Paris mob was unleashed. Neither children nor pregnant women were spared—whole families had their throats cut. The Louvre was turned into a slaughterhouse, its floors and staircases strewn with dead or dying Protestants. Henri and his cousin Condé were spared only because of their royal blood; they passed a terrifying night listening to the screams of their friends. The butchery continued for several days, at least 4,000 dying in Paris. Similar massacres took place in the provinces, 10,000 more Huguenots being killed by the end of September. But their strongholds held out and the Catholic ‘final solution’ merely precipitated the Fourth War of Religion.

  Henri was forced to change his faith for a third time. He remained a prisoner at court for nearly four years. During this time he played the part of a simple, self-indulgent squire, hunting and whoring. Among those of other mistresses, he enjoyed the favours of Charlotte de Sauve, a beautiful blonde whom the Queen Mother had ordered to spy on him.

  In 1575 a Venetian diplomat wrote a detailed description of the young King of Navarre. Henri was ‘of medium height but very well built, with no beard as yet, brown skinned, and zestful and lively as his mother was; he is pleasant, affable and friendly in manner, and generous too, so people say. He is obsessed by hunting in which he spends all his time.’

  In May 1574 Charles IX died in agony, of pulmonary tuberculosis—blood vessels burst all over his body. He was succeeded by his brother, Henri III, who for a few months had been a reluctant King of Poland. The last Valois monarch was an extraordinary figure; intelligent, cultivated and brave, he was also a homosexual and a religious maniac—transvestist orgies alternated with flagellant processions. This epicene psychopath surrounded himself with catamite ‘mignons’ whose shrill quarrels often ended in lethal duels. On the whole he left government to his adored mother.

  Two attempts at escape by the King of Navarre failed. A third scheme, in February 1576, was more carefully planned, but at the end of a day’s hunting near Saint-Germain, news came to Henri that he had again been betrayed. Changing his plans, he galloped into the forest with only a few friends, though it was a freezing winter’s night. They hardly drew rein for three weeks, until they reached Protestant Saumur and safety.

  In May 1576 Henri III made peace with the Huguenots of the ‘Calvinist Union’. They were given freedom of worship everywhere save Paris. A popular reaction saw the foundation of the ‘Catholic League’; La Ligue mobilized the Faithful by parishes just as the Huguenots were by presbyteries. Between these two armed camps France sank into bloody anarchy.

  Henri of Navarre, now the acknowledged leader of the Huguenots, ruled almost all south-western France. However, he seldom ruled it in peace, for there were five more ‘wars of religion’. His armies were the Protestant lords and squirearchy on horseback. Until the fall of La Rochelle in 1628 these ‘razats’ rode out to do battle for the soul of France, their cropped heads and Biblical speech (the ‘patois of Canaan’) anticipating the Roundheads of the English Civil War.

  Henri held his court mainly at Nérac in Armagnac—the setting of Love’s Labour’s Lost, ‘a park with a palace in it’. According to that dour Puritan, Agrippa d’Aubigné, the entire Huguenot court gave itself up to the pleasures of love. Henri could hardly be expected to remain content with one mistress. Mlle d’Ayelle, a Cypriot refugee, was succeeded by Mlle de Rebours and then by Xainte, one of Margot’s women of the bedchamber. There were also tales of a girl who starved herself and her baby to death because of Henri’s desertion, of another unreasonable lady who threw herself out of a window, and of a baker’s daughter who drowned herself. In addition there was a charcoal burner’s wife, and his groom’s doxy whom he surprised in the stable (and who gave him a mild dose of gonorrhoea). Undoubtedly there was a pathological element in his insatiable sexuality. His chief passion at Nérac, Françoise de Montmorency-Fosseuse, was only fourteen when she became his mistress in 1579, and the honour went to her head when she found herself with child. But her baby died. In 1583 Marguerite left Henri for good.

  By now Henri was fully mature, a stocky, jaunty little man with a fan-shaped black beard, upturned moustaches, hair en brosse and a tanned face with a great hooked nose and an invariable grin. His clothes were stained and shabby, he spoke broad Gascon and swore horribly, and he looked altogether more like a common soldier than a King. Ebullient, mercurial, laughing or weeping as the mood took him, he joked unceasingly, relying on charm rather than majesty. During the unending cavalry raids and sieges which occupied this period of his life, he developed remarkable powers of leadership. Yet in some ways he had inherited the lack of balance of his father, King Antoine. His moods of melancholy were so extreme as to be pathological; he may well have been a manic depressive.

  In January 1583 Henri at last met a woman worthy of him—Diane de Gramont, Comtesse de Guiche, known to history as ‘la grande Corisande’. A widow, she was twenty-six years old, a brunette with black eyes and a high forehead. Her friend, Montaigne, said there were few ladies in France who were a better judge of poetry. Corisande gave Henri intellectual as well as physical companionship. To her he wrote his most delightful letters, written as André Maurois says ‘with a mixture of country warmth and Gascon poetry’. Sometimes he describes the landscape and the birds, sometimes he descends to the price of fish. He sent her passionate messages, ‘loving nothing in
the world so much as you … my soul, I kiss a million times those beautiful eyes which all my life I shall hold dearer than anything else in the world … I will live as your faithful slave. Good-night my soul.’ He also wrote revealingly of his savage melancholia: ‘all the Gehennas where a spirit can go are busy with mine’, or ‘until the tomb which is nearer than perhaps I realize’. He was incapable of being faithful, despite assurances that ‘believe me, my fidelity is pure and stainless—there was never its like’. Corisande can hardly have relished his sorrow at losing little Gédéon, his son by Esther Imbert (daughter of a Protestant pastor)—‘Think what it would have been like had he been legitimate.’ With his letters he sent gifts—bird’s feathers, fawns and wild boar piglets. The sheer number of his letters to Corisande shows how often he was away on campaign.

  On 27 October 1587, at Coutras, Henri was forced to give battle to a greatly superior Catholic army. Henri III’s favourite, Anne, Duc de Joyeuse, had 2,500 horse and 5,000 foot—the Huguenots numbered 2,000 horse and 4,000 foot. Navarre with a river at his back could not retreat. The two armies made a strange contrast; the Catholics in gilded armour and nodding plumes; the crop-headed Huguenots in leather jerkins and plain steel. Joyeuse launched a headlong frontal attack, his glittering cavalry only two deep. Henri had mixed musketeers with his cavalry and sited his three cannon where they could do most damage. The enemy were mown down, then three Huguenot squadrons, each six deep, rolled them back. Henri, with his white plume and white scarf, led one squadron—his sword was red with blood. His followers were not so merciful; 5,000 Catholics were slain, including Joyeuse himself. The victory cost Henri only forty casualties.

  He at once galloped off to present Corisande with the captured standards, disappearing for three weeks. He then informed his horrified followers that he had promised to marry her. Fortunately his gentleman-in-waiting, Agrippa d’Aubigné, made him realize that such a match would destroy any chance of inheriting the throne. Henri agreed not to see Corisande for two years. In the event he never saw her again. It was one of the very few occasions when Henri brought himself to resist a mistress.

  After losing his army at Coutras, Henri III was at the mercy of the Catholic League. The Seize, a junta of fanatic Catholic bourgeois, controlled Paris. Against the King’s express orders, Henri, Duc de Guise, made a triumphant entry into Paris in May 1588. The Duke was the hero of the Catholic mob—among the League it was openly argued that he would make a better King than the Valois, that he had a better right to the throne by virtue of his descent from Charlemagne. Henri III fled to Blois. He saw only one solution: at dawn on 23 December 1583, Henri de Guise was stabbed to death in the royal bedchamber, by the King’s personal bodyguard, the Forty-five; the following day his brother, the Cardinal de Guise, was hacked to death by halberdiers. The League reacted with fury, mobs howling for revenge. King Henri discovered that he had alienated the greater part of his subjects and now ruled only a few towns in the Loire valley.

  Inevitably he turned to his cousin of Navarre. They joined forces, after a public reconciliation and soon controlled the entire area between the Loire and the Seine. On 30 July they besieged Paris, with an army of 40,000 men. But on 1 August a Dominican friar, Jacques Clément, obtained an audience of the King and then stabbed him in the stomach, with a knife which he had concealed in his sleeve. The wound did not at first seem mortal. However, the King died during the night, after ordering his followers to take an oath of allegiance to Henri of Navarre.

  Henri was King of France, but only in name. Most of the country was ruled by warlords, and everywhere the nobles robbed the bourgeois and harried the peasants, while the countryside swarmed with bandits. The League proclaimed as king Henri’s uncle, the aged Cardinal de Bourbon, and struck coins in the name of ‘Charles X’; but their real champion was the Duc de Mayenne (Guise’s brother) who secretly hoped for the throne. A mere sixth of France supported Henri. His army dwindled every day—not many Catholics would fight for a heretic King who had been excommunicated. His only chance was to be a Politique, to appeal to those who preferred peace to religious war. Some years before, he had written to a friend, ‘those who follow their conscience belong to my religion—my religion is that of everyone who is brave and true.’ But while the Baron de Givry might fling himself at Henri’s feet, crying, ‘You are the King for real men—only cowards will desert you’, there were not many men like Givry.

  Meanwhile, Henri withdrew to Normandy with 7,000 troops, from where he could control the districts on which Paris depended for food, setting up his headquarters at Dieppe. Here he could obtain supplies and munitions from England. Mayenne pursued him, with 33,000 men. The odds were nearly five to one, and Henri’s staff advised him to sail for England. Instead the King prepared an impregnable position. The road from Paris approached Dieppe through a marshy gap between two hills—on one side was the castle of Arques, on the other earthworks and trenches. Henri placed his arquebusiers and Swiss pikemen in the trenches and drew up his cavalry behind them; heavy cuirassiers armed with pistols but accustomed to charging home with the sword.

  The Catholic cavalry were old-fashioned lancers who charged in widely spaced lines. Their commander, the Duc de Mayenne, was a strange figure, enormously fat, too fond of food and wine, gouty and tortured by venereal disease, who passed his days in a sluggish torpor, frequently retiring to bed. His staff were as idle and unbusinesslike as their commander. None the less, he lacked neither ambition nor courage.

  The morning of 21 September 1589 was misty. When Mayenne attacked the trenches in the Arques defile, the mist prevented the castle’s guns from firing. The Catholic pikemen overran Henri’s first line of trenches and the Catholic cavalry attacked on both flanks. When his front was on the point of disintegrating, Henri galloped up, shouting ‘Are there not fifty noblemen of France who will come and die with their King?’ His cavalry held the enemy—the Royalist foot rallied. Then the mist lifted and the castle batteries opened fire. The Leaguers withdrew hastily and Henri retook all the lost ground. Mayenne realized that he was facing a most formidable general. Some days later, news came that reinforcements were on their way to Henri—more Huguenot troops and an English expeditionary force. After another halfhearted engagement, the Duke withdrew.

  Having taken the measure of his opponent, Henri was anxious to bring him to battle again. As bait he laid siege to Dreux. Mayenne advanced to its relief with 15,000 foot and 4,000 horse, and on 14 March 1590 engaged the King at Ivry. Henri had 8,000 infantry and 3,000 cuirassiers. A white plume in his helmet and a white scarf round his armour, he prayed before his troops—then he told them that, whatever happened, they must follow his white scarf. In the centre, he led his cuirassiers to crash into Mayenne’s lancers, through whom they hacked and pistolled their way. All along the line the Royalists hurled back the enemy cavalry until they disintegrated, fleeing, abandoning their infantry to be shot down by Henri’s arquebusiers. In his flight, Mayenne ordered the bridge at Ivry to be broken down behind him, cutting off many of his men from any hope of escape. The King ordered his exultant followers to spare Frenchmen but to give foreigners no quarter. Three thousand Leaguer foot and 800 cavalry died—nearly a hundred standards were taken.

  In May he besieged Paris with 15,000 men, but the capital remained fanatically Catholic—even monks and friars took up arms. Rather than shed Parisian blood, Henri decided to starve the city into submission. (He is said to have passed his time debauching two young nuns, whom he afterwards made abbesses.) By July Paris was starving, horribly. There were cases of cannibalism—children were chased through the streets. People ate dead dogs, even the skins of dogs, together with rats and garbage. Some made flour from bones; those who ate it died. Thirteen thousand perished of hunger. At midnight on 27 July the King launched a general assault on the suburbs, but it was beaten back; despite its sufferings, Leaguer Paris was not prepared to surrender to a heretic King. Early in September it was relieved by the Duke of Parma, who ferried food acros
s the Seine to the stricken city. Disconsolately the King withdrew, to winter in northern France. Many Royalist squires rode home.

  It was in these gloomy days that Henri met Gabrielle d’Estrées. She was seventeen (Henri was thirty-seven), the daughter of a Picard nobleman, a plump, round-faced pink and white blonde who liked to dress in green. Gabrielle already had a lover, the sallow-faced Duc de Bellegarde (known as feuille morte—dead leaf). Rivalry drove the King into a frenzy. He showered letters on his ‘belle ange’—‘My beautiful love, you are indeed to be admired, yet why should I praise you? Triumph at knowing how much I love you makes you unfaithful. Those fine words—spoken so sweetly by the side of your bed, on Tuesday when night was falling—have shattered all my illusions! Yet sorrow at leaving you so tore my heart that all night long I thought I would die—I am still in pain.’ He wrote a poem, Charmante Gabrielle, and had it set to music. Eventually the affair went more smoothly. In the autumn of 1593 Gabrielle found herself enceinte with the King’s child, the future Duc de Vendôme.

  Meanwhile, after the setback at Paris, Henri’s star had begun to rise again. In the summer of 1591 he was reinforced by English troops. For a time these were commanded by Queen Elizabeth’s young favourite, the Earl of Essex, to whom Henri showed himself especially amiable. Sometimes relations were strained: Sir Roger Williams, being rebuked for his men’s slow marching pace, snapped back that their ancestors had conquered France at that same pace. Even so, many Englishmen took a strong liking to Henri IV. In 1591 Sir Henry Unton, the English ambassador, wrote of him: ‘He is a most noble, brave King, of great patience and magnanimity; not ceremonious, affable, familiar, and only followed for his true valour.’