The Bourbon Kings of France

by Seward, Desmond

  Then there was the conspiracy between Biron’s friend, the Comte d’Auvergne, and Henriette’s family, the d’Entragues, in 1604. Henriette had resolved to avenge herself when in the summer of 1604 her father had been ordered to surrender the Promise of Marriage (which he had concealed in a bottle). Henriette and her children were to flee to Spain, whereupon Philip III would recognize her son as King of France as soon as Henri had been assassinated. Two attempts were made on Henri’s life but failed, then her sister informed the authorities. Henriette was confined to a convent. However, the King soon forgave her, though she never quite recovered her former influence.

  Potentially the most dangerous conspirator of all was the Protestant Duc de Bouillon, who tried to stir up the Huguenots. However, Henri outmanœuvred him, sending Sully to the General Assembly of the Reformed Church in 1605, where he persuaded them to accept the status quo. The King then marched into Bouillon’s lands in the Limousin, blowing up his château. In 1606 he arrived before the Duke’s stronghold of Sedan with an army and cannon, and forced him to submit.

  The court of Henri IV has been described as a cross between a barracks and a bawdy house. It was certainly informal. When the court wine taster drained Henri’s glass to the last drop, instead of merely sipping it, the King complained, ‘You might have left some for me.’ He was on good terms with the Parisians, roaming the streets of his capital with little or no escort. He preferred to dress plainly, in grey satin without lace or embroidery, and was careless about washing: Henriette once told him, ‘You smell like carrion.’ (However, the legend of Henri’s chewing garlic like fruit, so that his breath felled an ox at twenty paces, is apocryphal.) His teeth were bad, stopped with lead and gold, and in later years he had to wear spectacles. He was so small that he always used a mounting block. Yet, for all these inelegancies, the English ambassador noted that the great lords of France trembled in King Henri’s presence. He could be stately enough, receiving embassies seated on his throne, surrounded by Princes of the Blood; on such occasions he dressed magnificently, wearing diamonds in his hat. Indeed, during his reign the Louvre and the Tuileries lacked neither grace nor splendour.

  Henri was a great builder, notably at Paris, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Fontainebleau and Monceaux. His most notable enterprise was the gallery connecting the Louvre with the Tuileries, which an English visitor described as ‘unspeakably fair’. At the Tuileries he created, in the opinion of the same visitor, ‘the fairest garden for length of delectable walks that ever I saw’. At Saint-Germain-en-Laye he built a series of terraces which overlooked the Seine. (Here he installed hidden water jets which drenched the unwary courtiers who trod on them, to the King’s joy.) There was a project to build an enormous new palace at Blois, but this came to nothing. Henri was also interested in public building. Work on the Pont Neuf commenced in 1604, and the next year the Place Royale (now Place des Vosges) was begun, with its pavillons and arcades. There was also the Place Dauphine and the uncompleted ‘Porte et Place de France’ which was intended to rehouse the Parisian poor.

  Henri has never received his due as a patron of the arts. He was responsible for the second ‘School of Fontainebleau’. (The first school, a product of the inspired patronage of François I, had lost its momentum under the last Valois.) At Henri’s request, Toussaint Dubreuil executed a large number of frescoes at Fontainebleau and at the King’s new château of Saint-Germain. Dubreuil also worked on the petite galerie of the Louvre, together with Jacob Bunel. Amboise Dubois probably painted the portraits in the great gallery, which so impressed an English tourist; Thomas Coryate refers to ‘many goodly pictures of some of the Kings and Queens of France, made most exactly in wainscot, and drawn out very lively in oil works upon the same’. Dubois also painted a portrait of Marie de Medici as Minerva. Both Henri and Marie were painted by Frans Pourbus in 1608; Henri, in formal black and wearing the Saint Esprit, looks every inch the soldier King, grizzled but still vigorous. Another artist who worked for him at Fontainebleau was Martin Fréminet, who decorated the Chapelle Royale.

  One can hardly claim that Henri IV was an intellectual. The news that James I of England had written a book horrified him. (It was he who called James ‘the wisest fool in Christendom’.) None the less, Henri was well aware that writers could play a useful political role in the presentation of the restored monarchy. The historian Jacques Auguste de Thou, who wrote a Latin History of My Own Time, was made Grand Master of the King’s library, while a Historiographer Royal was appointed, Pierre Matthieu. There was an acknowledged Poet Laureate, François de Malherbe, who was made a Gentleman of the Bedchamber. Even a Huguenot scholar, the great Isaac Casaubon, received a court appointment.

  The King sought to weaken the Huguenots, not by persecution but by encouraging a Catholic revival. The Jesuits were allowed to set up schools. He encouraged public disputations between theologians of the two persuasions. He even tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade Saint François de Sales to leave Savoy and accept a French diocese; he commented, ‘A saint. And furthermore a gentleman too.’ Throughout his reign, Catholic reform gathered momentum.

  Despite these edifying preoccupations, the King continued to keep his ménage à trois. Henriette insisted she ought to be Queen and that the Dauphin Louis was a bastard, referring to Marie as ‘your fat Florentine banker’. At the same time the Queen nagged Henri so viciously that often he had to flee from the marital bed, where he ‘found thorns’. (Yet Sully tells engagingly how, when he brought the King and Queen presents at daybreak on New Year’s Day 1606, the King told Marie, ‘Awake, you dormouse, give me a kiss, and groan no more, for I have forgotten all our little quarrels; I am anxious to keep your mind easy, lest your health should suffer during your pregnancy.’) To make life even more difficult, Marie acquired two deplorable favourites, Concino and Leonora Concini. The latter, half maid, half lady-in-waiting, was the Queen’s foster sister, who had married a foppish Florentine homosexual. Sully wrote that they deliberately worked on the Queen to make her dissatisfied with the King.

  Henri had his bastards brought up at Saint-Germain-en-Laye with his children by Marie. The Queen had two more sons, a Duc d’Orléans who died in infancy, and Gaston, Duc d’Anjou; and two daughters—Elisabeth who married Philip IV of Spain, and Henriette Marie who married Charles I of England. Henriette’s children were Gaston Henri, who was made Bishop of Metz and Abbot of Saint Germain when he was seven, and Gabrielle—both legitimized. Henri was devoted to them all. The Spanish ambassador entered an official audience to find him crawling on all fours round the throne room with children on his back.

  The King’s diversions continued to be hunting and gambling. At the latter he was a bad loser, paying his card debts grudgingly. His cronies now included François de Bassompierre, a high-spirited young soldier, while a somewhat surprising new friend was his confessor, a suave, saintly Jesuit. Henri liked Père Cotton so much that courtiers joked that the King had ‘cotton in his ears’.

  In 1605 Queen Marguerite—Henri had allowed her to retain the title—returned to Paris. She was enormously fat and wore a golden wig, employing blond English footmen for their hair. With her vast skirts she could block an entire doorway. She built an hôtel near the Louvre, filling it with gigolos and savants for she retained her conflicting tastes for vice and piety. (St Vincent de Paul was one of her chaplains.) She made fast friends with Henri’s children whom she loaded with presents—they called her Aunt.

  In 1609 Sir George Carew reported of Henri: ‘His health and strength he hath in a great proportion, his body being not only able for all exercises, but even for excesses and distempers, both in intemperance and incontinency. And though he be sometimes bitten by the gout yet ever he findeth means suddenly to shake it off. And in the four years, that I served in that court, I found him little decayed in his countenance, or other disposition of his body, but he rather grew to look younger every day than other.’ Henri’s good health may have owed something to good wine. Although he is celebrated for drink
ing enough for four, in fact he seems to have indulged in quality rather than quantity. A rousing traditional song is attributed to him in praise of ‘my old Arbois’, that rare and almost legendary wine from the Jura. Above all he enjoyed the still grey wine of Champagne, sometimes boasting that he was ‘King of Ay’, a noted Champenois vineyard.

  Yet Henri was increasingly plagued by melancholy. Sometimes he blurted it out—‘I wish I were dead’—at others he was known to dance and whistle by himself. He regretted his vices but had a pathological need of sex. To some extent his melancholy was soothed by religion. His skilled confessor, Père Cotton, realized that he was not altogether responsible for his sins.

  As late as the end of 1609, true to the tradition of British diplomacy, Carew believed that Henri was anxious to avoid war. In fact Henri had been preparing for it for many years. When Sir George wrote, Henri had an army of 37,000 men under arms, all (save 1,000 mounted noblemen) being regular troops receiving pay. The arsenal in Paris was well stocked, and money had been set aside for a war chest. The artillery had been reorganized by Sully, as Grand Master of the Ordnance, and a corps of engineers had been formed. Although the army continued to be officered by noblemen, they now served on a professional instead of a feudal basis. Two military academies were instituted as well as a hospital for veterans. If necessary the King could muster 100,000 troops.

  Henri was determined to break the encirclement of the Habsburgs, who among them ruled most of Europe. In Spain he intrigued with the persecuted Muslims and Philip III was so alarmed that in 1609 he ordered the expulsion of two million Moriscos. But it was in Germany that Henri saw most opportunity: he intended to enlist the Protestant Princes against the Emperor. His opportunity came with the death of the Duke of Cleves-Julich-Berg in March 1609; the succession was disputed and the Emperor occupied the duchies, to the alarm of the Princes. By August Henri was preparing for war.

  The King seems to have referred to his ultimate objectives as ‘a Grand Design’, and in the past many historians credited him with an inspired plan for European peace. The earliest account occurs in Sully’s memoirs, the alleged project taking a more definite shape in the revised eighteenth-century version of Sully’s memoirs. The supposed scheme aimed at guaranteeing nations and creeds by the collective agreement of a great European League led by France. Modern historians agree that the Grand Design was in large part invented by Sully, though possibly a few ideas may be ascribed to Henri. D’Aubigné limited it to confining Spain between the Pyrenees and the sea. Henri’s real foreign policy was identical with that of Cardinal Richelieu—to make France the greatest power in Europe by breaking the Habsburg hegemony.

  There now occurred Henri’s last love affair, with the fifteen-year-old Charlotte de Montmorency. He first saw her at a ballet rehearsal at the Louvre, dressed as a nymph. She raised her spear as if to stab him, whereupon the King, in his own words, ‘almost swooned away’. The King made himself a laughing-stock, dressed in scented ruffs and sleeves of Chinese satin. Sighing, he told Bassompierre, to whom she was engaged, ‘I want to talk to you as a friend. I have just fallen in love, I am bewitched and worse by Mlle de Montmorency. If you marry her and she loves you I will hate you; if she loves me, you will hate me.’ He explained that he was going to marry her to his nephew Condé, ‘as a comfort for my old age’. When the worldly-wise Bassompierre said he would break off his engagement because it gave him an opportunity of showing how fond he was of the King, Henri burst into tears and said he would make his fortune as though he were one of his own bastards.

  Condé, first Prince of the Blood, was a reserved, awkward youth of twenty, dissolute and reputed to have caught the pox. His favourite pastime was drinking in low taverns. He and Charlotte were married in May 1609. By now Henri had sunk to spying on Mme la Princesse, wearing a false beard and even hiding behind a tapestry to watch her through a hole. He persuaded her parents to petition for the annulment of her marriage. Unexpectedly Condé refused to bring his wife to court; at the end of 1609 the young couple fled to Brussels, where there was a last abortive attempt to procure Charlotte by kidnapping her and lowering her from a window by a rope.

  But by then the King had greater matters to engage him. For in August 1609 France began to arm. By the spring of 1610 40,000 men were massed in Champagne, Cleves-Julich-Berg was to be invaded in May. Instead of fighting for his own throne, Henri would take the field as ruler of a great European power.

  Yet he was in a strange mood, haunted by the fear of death. ‘By God! I’m going to die in this city, I’ll never get out of it,’ he told Sully. He expected to be murdered at Marie’s belated coronation which took place on 13 May, upsetting his intimates by constant gloomy outbursts. His fears were grounded on more than melancholy. Catholic fanatics were outraged that he should seek alliances with Protestant Germany—Leaguer France was far from dead. Undoubtedly there were many plots on his life in 1610.

  A demented out-of-work schoolmaster, François Ravaillac, who had no connection with any of these plots, dreamt that he had been summoned by God to kill Henri. The day after the coronation, gloomier than ever, the King decided to visit Sully at the Arsenal. After saying farewell three times to the Queen, he set off in his carriage. As it slowed down at the corner of the rue de la Ferronnerie, Ravaillac jumped up from the road, leant through the window and stabbed him with a broken table-knife. The King gasped, ‘I’m wounded’, whereupon Ravaillac stabbed him again. Henri fell back, dead.

  France was overwhelmed with grief. Sully feared a rebellion but his fears were groundless. Ravaillac was executed with fiendishly ingenious tortures in the Place de Grèves, amid the applause of a revengeful mob.

  Perhaps it was as well that Henri died when he did. Despite his preparations, France was not ready for a war against the combined might of Spain and the Empire; while the squalid affair with Mme la Princesse, and the paranoiac terrors which he experienced in Paris, indicate a mind on the edge of a severe breakdown. None the less, Henri Quatre was a great King; even today ‘le Vert Galant’ is still one of France’s heroes. As Mme de Staël wrote, ‘He was the most French of all French Kings.’

  ‘That Idiot’

  LOUIS XIII (1610–1643)

  _____________

  ‘God knows I never liked life’

  Louis XIII was born at Fontainebleau on 27 September 1602. It was a difficult birth, which may have been the original cause of his mother’s dislike. Through Marie, he was a quarter Italian and a quarter Habsburg. Certainly no son was ever more different from his father.

  Louis had a miserable childhood. He was a timid, unattractive little boy, and Henri tried to beat his timidity out of him. (He none the less adored his father; years later his greatest compliment about anyone was the odd remark, ‘I’m near my father—I can smell his armpit.’) Queen Marie, who seems to have lacked any maternal feeling, had him whipped every morning. He grew up neurotic and distrustful, one of the strangest and most enigmatic of all French Kings.

  The news of Henri IV’s assassination so shocked France that even the great princes rallied to the throne. The Parlement of Paris was summoned, in its capacity as first court of the realm, and the eight-year-old King presided over a lit de justice, a special Royal session of Parlement. The Duc d’Epernon, who commanded the infantry in Paris, entered the great hall of the Palais Royal where the Parlement sat. He was wearing his sword. ‘My sword is still in its scabbard,’ he shouted, ‘but if the Queen is not made Regent at once I shall draw it.’ The Parlement hastily declared that Marie’s regency was according to the wishes of both the late and the present King. Louis was crowned at Rheims on 17 October 1610. The ceremony must have been a frightening experience for a boy of eight. Four day later, at Saint-Marcoul, he touched no less than 900 persons for the Evil.

  Marie de Medici, who was as stupid as she was heartless, was quite confident that she could govern France. Her favourites, the Concini, became all-powerful. Leonora slept next to the Queen’s bedchamber, being consulted o
n all matters of state; her advice was partly dictated by astrologers, but mainly by her husband’s insatiable thirst for money and titles. For the time being Marie and this ignoble pair had the sense to retain Henri’s old ministers, although Sully soon resigned (he lived on in obscurity until 1641). Abroad, Henri’s foreign policy was reversed—French troops were withdrawn from Cleves-Julich and an alliance was sought with Spain. At home, Concini had a programme of sorts; to keep the nobles in their place and to make Lorraine part of France. In the meantime he acquired a huge fortune by peddling favours—Leonora’s speciality was selling pardons. He bought the marquisate of Ancres and then, although he had never seen a battle, took the title of Marshal.

  Rebellion was inevitable. First Bouillon tried to raise the Huguenots: Marie bought him off with an enormous bribe. But the Huguenots were not the only threat. ‘Les Grands’—the Great Ones—considered that with Henri’s IV’s death, ‘the day of Kings has passed and the day of great lords and princes has come.’ They remained almost as formidable as they had been during the Wars of Religion. Each had a large ‘household’—a retinue of armed noblemen amounting to a private army. Some had provincial governorships which provided them with fortresses—Epernon, Governor of Metz, seized its citadel as soon as Henri died, referring to his province as ‘my kingdom of Austrasia’. Condé, First Prince of the Blood, had secret hopes of the throne itself. Early in 1614 he left court, raised an army and seized the fortress of Mézières. He publicly accused the government of squandering the realm’s wealth, and inflicting hardship on the entire country. His manifesto concluded with an ultimatum that the States General (the representative body of the French nation) be summoned. He was joined by the Dukes of Mayenne, Longueville, Nevers and Vendôme, but as neither the bourgeois nor the Huguenots would support them, they allowed themselves to be bought off with the last of Sully’s treasure.