CHAP. VIII.] HENRY DEPOSED BY THE POLES.

277

The King abandoned to the Guises the conduct of the war in 1575. After his return Henry sunk lower and lower in a despicable profligacy and imbecility, and his only serious pursuit seemed to be the study of the Latin grammar. He was entirely engrossed by youthful favourites, or mignons, of whom there were about a dozen that vied with him in dress and foppery. Four of these, St. Luc, D'O, Arques, and Caumont were remarked gradually to obtain the ascendancy, and were called the four Evangelists. Arques became Duke of Joyeuse and Governor of Normandy and Havre de Grâce; Caumont was made Duke of Epernon and successively governor of Metz, Boulogne, Calais and Provence. By these favourites Henry was entirely governed, and he affected not to obey his mother, although he is said to have been the only person for whom she had ever felt any affection.

As Henry would not return at the summons of the Poles, they passed a decree to depose him July 15th 1575. The French envoy persuaded the Diet to defer the election of another king till December; yet Henry took no steps to second the wish of his mother and procure the election of the Duke of Alençon. The suffrages of the Poles were divided between the Emperor Maximilian and Stephen Bathori, Voyvode of Transylvania; but the latter obtained the preference, on condition of his marrying Anne Jagellon, sister of Sigismund II., the last king of that race; and a civil war was on the point of breaking out which was arrested by the death of Maximilian (1576). Bathori, after returning to the Catholic faith, was then generally recognised as king.

In the autumn of 1575 the German auxiliaries began to enter France. On the 10th of October Guise and his brother Mayenne defeated at Dormans their advanced guard of 4000 or 5000 men under Montmorenci de Thoré, who had embraced the Protestant faith at Geneva. In this encounter Guise received a wound in the cheek, which entitled him like his father to the surname of the Balafré. The Court hung undecided between the parties. The King feared the exploits and the popularity of Guise, and dreaded at the same time the triumph of the Protestants. Under these circumstances, Marshals Montmorenci and Cossé were dismissed from custody to mediate a peace, and they succeeded in effecting a truce of seven months-from November 21st 1575 to June 25th 1576-on conditions which excited the anger and jealousy of the ultra-Catholics. The King undertook to provide a large sum for .the payment of the Count Palatine's troops; to grant the Hugonots and Politicians six cautionary towns, Angoulême, Niort, La Charité, Bourges, Saumur and Mezières; and to pay the garrisons which

278

PEACE OF MONSIEUR.

[BOOK III. Alençon and Condé might place in them, as well as a Swiss guard for his brother. But the truce was observed by neither party. The commandants of Bourges and Angoulême would not obey the King's orders to surrender those towns to Alençon, who received instead Cognac and St. Jean d'Angéli. In February 1576 Condé and John Casimir, at the head of 18,000 German troops, marched through Champagne and Burgundy, crossed the Loire and Allier, and formed a junction with the allied army under Alençon in the Bourbonnais. At the same time the King of Navarre, on the pretence of a hunting party, contrived to escape from court, and succeeded in reaching his government of Guyenne. It was several months, however, before he returned to the Hugonot confession, nor would he join the generalissimo, Alençon; but he sent deputies to a congress which met at Moulins to consider of the conditions to be prescribed to the King. These amounted to an almost complete surrender of the royal authority; yet a peace was concluded, and on the 14th of May the King in person laid before the Parliament an edict embodying its conditions, the fifth that had been promulgated in the short space of thirteen years. This peace, called LA PAIX DE MONSIEUR, was the most advantageous one the Hugonots had yet made. The exercise of their religion was to be freely allowed throughout the kingdom, except at Paris and in the precincts of the court, till a general council should be assembled; mixed chambers (chambres mi-parties), or courts composed of an equal number of Catholics and Protestants, were to be instituted in all the Parliaments of France; and the massacre of the St. Bartholomew was disavowed. The interested aims of the Protestant leaders appeared in the advantageous conditions which they secured for themselves. Each strove to turn the King's embarrassment to his own advantage. Alençon obtained as an apanage the provinces of Touraine, Berri and Anjou, with complete jurisdiction both in civil and military affairs, the right of presentation to all royal prebends, and a pension of 100,000 crowns. From this time he assumed the title of Duke of Anjou, formerly borne by his brother. The King of Navarre, the Prince of Condé, and Marshal Damville were re-established in their offices and governments; John Casimir received a sum of money and the promise of a still larger one, and other leaders were gained by assurances of future favours.

The Court was not sincere, as the ultra-Catholics must have known, in their negociations with the Hugonots. But Guise and

The title of Monsieur began in the latter half of the sixteenth century to be

given to the king's eldest brother or youngest son.

CHAP. VIII.]

ORIGIN OF THE LEAGUE.

279

his party had gained nothing, and the conditions of the peace afforded an excellent theme by which the Jesuits might arouse the fanaticism of the people. The question of the succession to the crown was also a good handle for exciting jealousy and alarm. The King was childless, and as many believed, impotent; his brother, the Duke of Anjou, the next heir, had declared himself the protector of the Protestants; and if he also should die without children the crown devolved to the House of Bourbon, the heads of which, the King of Navarre and Condé, were Hugonots. But what gave the ultra-Catholics the most immediate cause of offence was a secret article in the treaty by which Condé was to have the government of Picardy; and it was principally this that called the LEAGUE into existence. Picardy had again become completely Catholic, and one of its principal nobles, the Baron d'Humières, governor of Roye, Montdidier, and Peronne, was not only a zealous Papist, but had also a personal feud with Condé.

There can be no doubt that the first foundations of the great Catholic League may be traced back to a much earlier period." Some associations to protect the old religion had been formed as early as 1563 by the guilds and other civic unions, and especially by the spiritual brotherhoods, which attracted the court and the nobility by their religious mummeries, their penances, and church goings, and the populace by the spectacle of their splendid processions. But the League was now first formally organised by the Baron d'Humières with the assistance of the Jesuits. The neighbouring nobility and the principal citizens of the towns of Picardy were convened in secret meetings, and an act of union was framed which was intended to be submitted to the King. A still more important document however, drawn up apparently by the Duke of Guise and his friends, and addressed not only to the leaguers of Picardy but to all the Catholic nobility of the kingdom, must be regarded as the real constituent act of the League. act, which begins like a formal treaty, "In the name of the Holy Trinity," and concludes with the formula of an oath to be taken by all those who joined the League, professes its object to be to restore the entire word of God, and to uphold the service of the holy Roman Catholic Church; to maintain the King in his authority, but as subordinate to the States-General; to restore the ancient liberties enjoyed under Clovis; and to assert these objects to the death against whomsoever it may be.10

Michelet ascribes its real origin to the year 1561, when the King having formed a resolution to sell some church property, the Parisian clergy addressed

This

themselves to the King of Spain and the Duke of Guise (La Ligue, p. 89).

10 The act is in La Popelinière, t. ii. fol. 320; Cayet, Chronol. Noven. Introd.

280

SCHEMES OF THE DUKE OF GUISE.

[Book III. Thus it is plain that the Catholic chiefs had taken a leaf from their adversaries' book, and designed to entice the people by the hope of a political revolution combined with the maintenance of the ancient religion. The League soon acquired numerous adherents. It was eagerly signed by the Parisians, who were followed by the people of Picardy, Poitou and Touraine; and it had already received the signatures of considerable towns and even whole provinces, before the King was aware of its existence, except perhaps in Brittany. The moment had been well chosen, as the States were to assemble at Blois early in the winter. But before they met, a Hugonot publication acquainted the King with his real situation.

The papers of an advocate named David, a man of ill reputation who had died at Lyon on his return from Rome, fell into the hands of the Hugonots, and were immediately published by them. Their contents were of the most extraordinary kind, and contained a plan for exterminating the Hugonots, and seizing and bringing to trial the King's brother. When this had been accomplished, the Duke of Guise, as rightful heir to the crown by descent from Charlemagne, was with the Pope's sanction to shut up the King in a monastery, in like manner as the Duke's ancestor Pépin had formerly treated Childeric. Guise was then to be proclaimed King, and the authority of the Holy See was to be fully restored, through the abolition by the States of the liberties of the Gallican Church.

How far the Duke was connected with the origin of this paper does not appear; he probably merely connived at the plan; but it is certain that the Cardinal de Pellevé, a creature of the Guises, who was then staying at Rome, cordially promoted David's project, spoke of it in the Consistory, and communicated it to Philip II. It is by no means improbable that the Guises had formed an ulterior plan of seizing the crown. They had hoped to enjoy a large share of the government under Henry III., especially as that monarch had chosen his consort from their house; yet they found themselves elbowed out by the King's minions. They were fond of tracing the antiquity of their descent, as superior to that of the reigning dynasty; yet, even if their pretensions be allowed, it was not the Duke of Guise, but the Duke of Lorraine, of the elder

sub init. One of the best authorities for the history of the League is Simon Goulart, a Protestant minister, whose Mémoires de la Ligue were published from 1589 to 1599.

"In 1580 the genealogist François de Rosières published a book at Paris in which the Guises were derived from Antenor! Ranke, Franz. Gesch. B. i. S.

404.

CHAP. VIII.]

HENRY III. JOINS THE LEAGUE.

281

branch of the family, who would have been entitled to the crown of France. Henry III. at first deemed the papers of David to be a Hugonot forgery, till St. Goard, his ambassador in Spain, sent him another copy which had been forwarded to Philip II.

These discoveries tended to increase the alarm of Henry III., who forgetting that it ill becomes a King to declare himself the leader of a party among his subjects, could think of no other means of combating the League than by placing himself at the head of it. The assembly of the States-General was a stormy one. The cowardly act of which the King had been guilty in subscribing the League deprived him of all respect. All that he gained by it was that everything militating against the royal authority should be struck out of the document; which was then laid before the States for their acceptance, and ordered to be signed throughout the kingdom. The new act excluded the Bourbons from the throne by limiting the succession to the House of Valois. Many of the deputies signed it, while others refused. The States forbore to vote the King any supplies, and would not even consent to the alienation of the crown lands; but they insisted on the extirpation of Protestantism.

As the conditions of the peace had not been observed the Hugonots were still in arms, and had been making conquests while the States were sitting. The King of Navarre, who had been declared chief of the counter-league, and Condé his Lieutenantgeneral, had subdued and occupied many places in Guyenne, Poitou and the neighbouring provinces, while Marshal Damville had done the like in Languedoc. The King had sent deputies from the States to negociate with them, but without effect. Condé and Damville at once refused to recognise the assembly at Blois. The answer of the King of Navarre was somewhat milder and more politic. "Tell the assembly," said he, "that I constantly pray to God to bring me to a knowledge of the truth, and, if I am in the right way, to maintain me in it; if not, to open my eyes. Inform them that I am prepared not only to renounce error, but also to stake my possessions and my life for the extirpation of heresy out of the kingdom, and if possible out of the world." Thus even at this period we see Henry of Navarre, who had already been twice a Catholic and twice a Protestant, wavering between the two religions, and prepared to accept either as circumstances might direct. answer was highly unpalatable to the Calvinist ministers.

His

The Court had fulfilled its engagements with the Duke of Anjou, who not only deserted his former friends but also took the command of an army to act against them, although he owed every