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 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS
 
 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS, QUEEN OF FRANCE 
 From a painting in the Ufflzi Gallery, Florence
 
 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 BY 
 
 PAUL VAN DYKE 
 
 PROFESSOR IN HISTORY AT PRINCETON UNIVERSITY 
 
 VOLUME I 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 1922
 
 Copyright, 1922 by 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 Printed in the United States of America 
 
 Published November, 1922
 
 V3 
 
 V.I 67452 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 There is around the popular conception of Catherine 
 de Medicis a sort of aura of wickedness so visible that most 
 readers open a book about her with the unspoken question, 
 "Was she as bad as they say?" and expect the writer will 
 soon betray himself either as an apologete or a prosecutor. 
 The writer of this book hopes this expectation will be dis- 
 appointed. He is far from any desire to defend the char- 
 acter of Catherine de Medicis and equally far from any 
 interest in attacking it. He only desires to show her as 
 she was, and he leaves the reader to decide about the wicked- 
 ness. This does not mean that he considers it the duty of 
 a historian to be unconcerned about right and wrong or to 
 assume that they are entirely shifting and relative. Such 
 an attempt at artificial demoralization is never entirely 
 successful, and, in a writer of biography, it can result only 
 in a picture affected by a bias of which the reader has no 
 warning. But he has tried meticulously never to let Ms 
 sympathies interfere with the full and balanced presenta- 
 tion of fact. He wants to draw a portrait, not to pro- 
 nounce a judgment. 
 
 There are few great personages of the last four hundred 
 years so many of whose written and spoken words have 
 survived as Catherine de Medicis; and in addition there is 
 a very large number of opinions about her conduct or char- 
 acter recorded by people who knew her. It is on these that 
 this book is based. Of the 2,686 citations offered as proofs 
 of its narrative or its rare opinions, 1,059 are from contem- 
 porary documents printed in full in collections of documents 
 or appendices to books, 1,013 are from my own transcripts 
 of unprinted mss. in archives, 371 are from histories or 
 memoirs written by contemporaries of Catherine, 137 are
 
 vi PREFACE 
 
 from contemporary mss. cited by modern authors, and 136 
 are from the text of modern authors. 
 
 I formed the purpose of writing this book fifteen years 
 ago and it has occupied the time, not absorbed by class- 
 room duties, of ten years since. I have been able to spend 
 in European archives one period of twelve months, one 
 period of six months, and four periods of six weeks. Most 
 of this time, too little by half, was spent at the Bibliotheque 
 Nationale and at the Archives Nation ales, but I have visited 
 for longer or shorter periods the Vatican Archives, the Ar- 
 chives at Florence, Modena, Mantua, Genoa, Naples, 
 Lucerne, Basle, Berne, Zurich, Solothurn, Freibourg, and 
 the British Museum. I regret that lack of time kept me from 
 the Archives at Turin, and that the war cut me off from my 
 only chance to visit Venice. A third volume appended to 
 this work contains 484 unprinted letters of Catherine and 
 other documents gathered during these researches. In ad- 
 dition I made about three thousand extracts for my own 
 use from manuscripts, letters, and reports. 
 
 We have various reports from the French court during 
 Catherine's life from Spanish, English, Ferrarese Ambas- 
 sadors, Tuscan Agents, Papal Legates and Nuncios, and 
 Imperial Envoys. They must be used with common sense. 
 Spain became so hated that it was hard for the Spanish 
 Ambassadors to get at the inside of things and they were 
 violently prejudiced, but they give good information about 
 the councils of the extreme orthodox party and sometimes 
 report talks with Catherine. The English Ambassadors, 
 though informed about Huguenot or Politique plans, were 
 prejudiced and often misinformed about other matters. 
 The Ferrarese Ambassadors had close connections with 
 the family of Guise through the household of the Duchess. 
 The most trustworthy and the least prejudiced are the Vene- 
 tian Ambassadors, who wrote regularly every two weeks. 
 
 I have read practically every book of importance which 
 bears on the life and times of Catherine de Medicis. But 
 the publication of the admirable bibliography of Mr. Henri 
 Hauser covering the history of France during her life has
 
 PREFACE vii 
 
 made it superfluous to print a separate bibliography. An 
 alphabetical list of archives and books cited is at the end of 
 the book. 
 
 The reader may notice the absence from the list of books 
 cited of any life of Catherine de Medicis. The reason is 
 that no life of her based on first-hand evidence existed while 
 this book was being written. Indeed, before the comple- 
 tion of the edition of her letters by the Coimts Hector de 
 la Ferriere and Baguenault de Puchesse (printed by the 
 Ministry of Public Instruction in ten volumes, 1880 to 1909), 
 it was hardly feasible to attempt such a life. My book 
 was completed and in the hands of the printers before I 
 heard of the publication of the life of Catherine de Medicis 
 by Mr. Mariejol. I regret that I was not able to be guided 
 in writing it by the results of the labors of that eminent 
 French scholar and distinguished historian. 
 
 A list of 167 review articles, all of them consulted and 
 many of them cited, is given at the end of Volume II. I 
 regret that lack of time abroad prevented me from examin- 
 ing as fully as I should have liked to do the French pro- 
 vincial reviews. 
 
 It is impossible to understand what Catherine de Medicis 
 did and what she was without knowing the public events 
 in which for thirty years she was involved, but the attempt 
 has been made to let the reader see them as far as possible 
 from the center of her life outward. The absence of due 
 reference to some great social and economic changes which 
 were going on during her lifetime arises from the fact that, 
 so far as we can judge from what she wrote, said, and did, 
 Catherine was so little interested in them as to be practically 
 unaware that they were taking place. As I hope that this 
 book will be read by people who have no scientific training 
 in history, I have avoided hasty reference to things the 
 reader might not understand, preferring the risk of becom- 
 ing prosy by overmuch explanation to the risk of seeming 
 dull by being obscure. The chronological method of pres- 
 entation has been used in spite of a certain almost inevi- 
 table monotony that haunts it, because, although a larger
 
 viii PREFACE 
 
 use of the topical method might produce a book more agree- 
 able to read, it ran the risk of producing one less true. 
 
 The preceding preface was written in March 1921. Busi- 
 ness reasons rendered desirable the postponement of the 
 printing of the book. When it was taken in hand again 
 this year, my engagement in the work of the American 
 University Union in Paris compelled me to correct my proofs 
 across the Atlantic at a distance from my books and notes 
 and to abandon the publication of the third volume of 
 documents; both because of the expense and for lack of 
 leisure to verify my transcripts. 
 
 Paris, September, 1922.
 
 PAOE 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 VOLUME I 
 
 I. Birth and Childhood 3 
 
 II. Marriage 17 
 
 III. Wife of the Heir Apparent 30 
 
 IV. Queen of France 47 
 
 V. The First Taste of Real Power 64 
 
 VI. Disaster and Sorrow 86 
 
 VII. The Great European Convulsion .... 107 
 
 VIII. The Illegal Establishment of "the Reformed 
 
 Church" in France 124 
 
 IX. Under the Thumb of the Guise. The Con- 
 spiracy of Amboise. "The Huguenots" . . 138 
 
 X. Catherine Launches Her Policy of Concilia- 
 tion. The Conspiracy of Conde Puts the 
 Guise Again in Control 159 
 
 XI. The Death of Francis II. Catherine Regent 
 
 of France 180 
 
 XII. Catherine Defends Her Authority by Politics . 194 
 
 XIII. Forming Factions. The Huguenots Support 
 
 Catherine, Who Favors Them 206 
 
 XIV. Riot and Murder. The Edict of January 
 
 Legalizes the Reformed Worship .... 225 
 
 XV. The Line Drawn for Civil War. Catherine 
 
 Between Guise and Conde 237 
 
 ix
 
 x CONTENTS 
 
 PACK 
 
 XVI. The First Civil War About Religion. Cathe- 
 rine the Peacemaker. The Huguenots 
 Force the Peace of Amboise 258 
 
 XVII. Peace and Politics. England and Spain . . 281 
 
 XVIII. Catherine's Plans for France and Christen- 
 dom 300 
 
 XIX. The Interview of Bayonne and the Council 
 
 of Trent 317 
 
 XX. Feuds and Quarrels. Heresy in the Nether- 
 lands. Hatred and Suspicion of Spain . 337 
 
 XXI. The Huguenots Renew Civil War. Their 
 
 Army 351 
 
 XXII. Catherine Makes Peace. The Politiques. 
 
 Catherine Renews Civil War .... 372
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 VOLUME I 
 
 Catherine de Medicis, Queen of France Frontispiece 
 
 From a painting in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence 
 
 FACING PAGE 
 
 Francis II and his wife, Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland 
 
 Queen Catherine de Medicis in her youth when she was married to 
 Henry, Duke of Orleans, afterwards King of France 
 
 The second son of Catherine and her twin daughters who died 
 
 shortly after their birth 40 
 
 From the prayer-book of Catherine de Medicis, made to be swung 
 from a chain at the girdle— now in the Louvre 
 
 Henry II, husband of Catherine de Medicis 106 
 
 From a painting in the Louvre attributed to Francois Clouet 
 
 Charles IX, second son of Catherine de Medicis 358 
 
 From a painting in the Louvre attributed to Francois Clouet
 
 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD 
 
 Caterina de' Medici was born in Florence, on the thir- 
 teenth April, 1519, in the stately house built by her great- 
 great-great-great-grandfather Cosimo de' Medici, seventy- 
 five years before. Cosimo was at his death the greatest man 
 in Florence and one of the most distinguished figures in 
 Italy. He had inherited from his ancestors, merchants in 
 woollen goods and bankers, a large fortune and he had in- 
 creased it six fold. He had also used his inherited position as 
 leader of the democratic party which has successfully op- 
 posed the party of the aristocracy and the rich bourgeoisie, 
 to gain political control of the city. He did not seek office, 
 but he was able, years before his death, to direct elections 
 and through obedient henchmen to command the policy of 
 Florence. His wealth increased his political influence and 
 he never scrupled to use in his business as a banker the 
 knowledge he gained as a politician. His power was re- 
 garded as beneficent by his friends and adherents and at 
 his death he was hailed officially as Pater Patriae 
 
 His son Piero, nicknamed The Gouty, survived him only 
 five years and transmitted his wealth and power to his 
 grandsons Giuliano and Lorenzo. The young men shared 
 this power undisturbed for nine years and then the political 
 enemies of the Medici in Florence joined with the family of 
 Pope Sixtus IV, whose plans for conquest were interrupted 
 by the foreign policy of Florence, in a conspiracy to murder 
 them. The Pope, though he knew of the conspiracy, did 
 not approve the murder. Giuliano was killed in church but 
 Lorenzo escaped the murderers; the people rose in his de- 
 fence and henceforth he ruled the City of Florence with a 
 tyranny scaroely tempered by the fear of assassination. 
 
 3
 
 4 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 Foreign ambassadors always consulted him, he controlled 
 the tax list and the laws were seldom able to protect his 
 enemies against his vengeance. He held no office and bore 
 no title except that of il Magnifico, but he was regarded to 
 all intents and purposes as Duke of Florence. His fame 
 spread not only beyond the walls of his city but also across 
 the Alps and at his death in 1494 he was the most distin- 
 guished statesman in Italy. In addition he had merited his 
 fame as a writer both of prose and verse and the most 
 discriminating patron of literature and the fine arts in the 
 world. 
 
 Lorenzo had three sons. For his second son Giovanni 
 he obtained a cardinal's hat, and he left his fortune and 
 his power to his eldest son Piero. But the weakness of 
 Piero and the disturbance caused by the French invasion of 
 Italy in 1494 enabled the new democratic party to banish 
 the Medici and make Florence again a republic. The 
 Medici went to Rome, where they remained for seventeen 
 years, during which Piero was drowned. 
 
 In 1512 Pope Julius II formed the Holy League which 
 drove the French from Italy, and a congress of the League 
 decided that as the Florentine Republic had shown a benev- 
 olent neutrality toward the French, it should be overthrown 
 and the power of the Medici reestablished. Cardinal Gio- 
 vanni and his younger brother Giuliano were made masters 
 of their native city by Spanish soldiers. The next year for- 
 tune again smiled on the Medici. Cardinal Giovanni wag 
 elected Pope and took the name of Leo X. The new Pope 
 was not too much engrossed with the duties of his office to 
 look after the fortunes of his family. He put Lorenzo, the 
 twenty-one year old son of Piero, in charge of the Medici 
 power in Florence. He also gave the red hat to Innocenzo 
 Cybo, his sister's son and to his illegitimate cousin Giulio 
 de' Medici. The Pope's younger brother Giuliano was 
 made Captain General of the Church in spite of the fact 
 that his weak health and ways of living made him unfit 
 for war. But as fate would have it, the office proved no sine-
 
 BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD 5 
 
 cure. Francis I ascended the throne of France in January, 
 1515, at once renewed French claims to the Duchy of Milan, 
 crossed the Alps at the head of 35,000 men and 150 guns, 
 perhaps the finest army any King of France had ever led, 
 and beat the hitherto unbeaten Swiss mercenaries at 
 Marignano; a fight so fierce that one of his marshals said 
 none of the other eighteen pitched battles of his life had 
 been more than child's play beside it. 
 
 The forces which the Pope and his vassals had been able 
 to put in the field had been commanded, not by the titular 
 Captain General of the Church, but by the young Lorenzo, 
 and Leo profited by the alliance he was forced to make with 
 the French King to push Lorenzo's fortune. He conquered 
 for him the Duchy of Urbino, at an expense so great that it 
 began the bankruptcy of the papal treasury which two 
 years later gave one of the occasions for the schism of 
 Teutonic Christendom from the Universal Church. There 
 were indeed grounds for the sentence which condemned 
 the Duke of Urbino to lose his Duchy as an unfaithful 
 vassal. He had been secretly allied with the French and 
 had refused to march at the command of his overlord. 
 Nevertheless, the chief cause of Leo's war against Urbino 
 was not the offenses of the Duke but the ambition of his 
 sister-in-law who wanted to see a ducal coronet on her son's 
 head. The transaction has about it something "very hate- 
 ful and disgusting." It makes the impression (on a mod- 
 ern Roman Catholic historian as on contemporary chroni- 
 clers) that the Pope's action "was less concerned with giving 
 free course to justice than with providing a state for his 
 nephew to rule." * 
 
 After conquering a Duchy for his nephew, Leo sent him 
 to France to win an heiress, Madeleine de la Tour d'Au- 
 vergne, and she became the mother of Caterina de' Medici. 
 
 To Caterina's father therefore the election of his uncle as 
 Pope brought a duchy, a rich bride and the control of 
 Florence. He received because he was the secular head of 
 
 •Paator, IV, 103.
 
 6 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 the family of Medici other advantages which were the in- 
 herited returns for the patient and intelligent patronage 
 given to literature and the fine arts by the members of his 
 house from Cosimo to Leo. Lorenzo di Piero de' Medici did 
 not in his brief life accomplish the smallest thing worthy of 
 commemoration, but few men have had a more striking 
 monument than either of the two dedicated to him. Michel 
 Angelo made him immortal as the figure of Thought in the 
 Medicean Chapel. Machiavelli dedicated to him the Prince 
 and in the last chapter called upon him to be a "new Moses 
 to redeem Italy from the barbarians and prove that the 
 ancient valour is not yet dead in Italian hearts." 
 
 Caterina de' Medici was therefore at her birth a favorite 
 of fortune. True this distinguished inheritance brought to 
 the child some disadvantages. The name of Medici 
 was known throughout the world but, north of the Alps; a 
 family whose wealth came from trade and banking, rather 
 than from inherited feudal estates, whose ancestors had not 
 been warriors, but merchants who had gained power only 
 by ecclesiastical influence and municipal politics, would be 
 looked on askance as somewhat second rate, not at all equal 
 to the collateral branches of a royal house: not even on a 
 par with the great or the ancient families of the feudal 
 nobility. Nevertheless this heiress of the "Eredita di 
 Cosimo de' Medici il Magnifico," this "little Duchess" of 
 Urbino, this "nipota" of Leo X, was too valuable a pawn in 
 the game of international politics to fail of many distin- 
 guished suitors for her hand. The child was born to great 
 expectations, but the most sagacious political prophet could 
 not have foreseen that she would become queen and regent 
 of one of the greatest nations of the world ; the mother of 
 three kings, two queens, a sovereign duke, and a reigning 
 duchess. 1 
 
 At Caterina's birth her father was so ill that he had 
 scarcely left his bed for five months. The baby was imme- 
 diately carried to him and, in spite of some disappointment 
 
 1 Rel., II, 3, pp. 139, 312.
 
 BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD 7 
 
 that his first born was not a boy, he showed great pleasure. 
 Three days later she was baptized under the name of 
 Caterina, Maria, Romola. In her later life she used only the 
 first of these names perhaps because it had been borne by 
 her mother. Twelve days after the ceremony the mother 
 died of puerperal fever. In a letter which was dictated to 
 the Ambassador of France asking him to tell the King this 
 news Lorenzo wrote "I am in bed with a little fever, catarrh 
 and many other bad symptoms and for my evil fortune there 
 has come upon me in addition this sad blow to lose my most 
 beloved wife." Six days later he died. So far as we can 
 judge from the record of his symptoms which has survived 
 in the letters of his secretary, the cause of his death was 
 galloping consumption to whose contagion he was probably 
 rendered more susceptible by the licentious life which he 
 had led in common with most young Italian princes of his 
 day. 1 
 
 The tendency to short life noticeable among the males of 
 the House of Medici since the days of Cosimo had thus 
 brought it to the verge of extinction. Ariosto struck by 
 this spectacle of a cradle between two coffins represents the 
 City of Florence as saying "Only a branch shows a little 
 green in its leaves and I am divided between fear and hope 
 whether the winter will leave it to me or kill it." The fears 
 of the poet were nearly realized a few months later, for the 
 orphan became so critically ill that her great uncle received 
 word in Rome that she could not live. The grandmother 
 carried the infant to Rome when she was well enough to 
 travel and soon after her arrival the Pope told the Venetian 
 Ambassador that this "child of sorrow" as he called her 
 "with tears in his eyes," was "a pretty, plump, little thing." 
 The child remained in Rome for nearly six years but 
 we know nothing of her life there except that her great 
 uncle Leo X, before she was two years old, thought seriously 
 of marrying her in the future to her illegitimate cousin 
 Hippolito who was then seven. 2 
 
 1 Corsiiii refutes older stories. * Baschet, von Reumont, pntd. 263, 264.
 
 8 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 In her seventh year, when her grandfather's cousin 
 Clement VII had succeeded her uncle Leo X as Pope, 
 Caterina was taken back to Florence. Writing about this 
 time to the senate, the Venetian Ambassador says, "I will 
 not remind your magnificences of the genealogy of the 
 family of the Medici . . . but I will point out the fact that 
 the said family is extinct in the legitimate male line because 
 today there are only natural sons, i. e., Pope Clement, nat- 
 ural son of Giuliano (the murdered brother of Lorenzo); 
 Cardinal Hippolito, natural son of Giuliano (younger son 
 of Lorenzo) ; and Alessandro (illegitimate half brother of 
 Catherine). There are indeed two legitimate women, 
 Lucrezia, sister of Leo X, now wife of Jacopo Salviati, and 
 the little Duchess Caterina." * 
 
 In thus suggesting the danger that the name of Medici 
 might disappear because the family consisted of women and 
 three bastards, two of whom were priests, the writer entirely 
 forgot the existence of the little Cosimo, who was in the end 
 to restore the fortunes of the family name at Florence and 
 become the founder of the line of Medici grand-dukes of 
 Tuscany. Cosimo was the son of Giovanni delle Bande 
 Nere, a descendant in the third generation of a younger 
 brother of old Cosimo. Giovanni was, when he was killed 
 by a cannon ball in his 27th year, the only Medici who had 
 ever won distinction in arms and the most famous Italian 
 soldier of his day. Aretino, who witnessed his death and 
 wrote a celebrated letter to describe it, regarded him as the 
 possible political Messias, the longed for "Prince" of 
 Machiavelli who was to banish and liberate his countrymen 
 and "make of Italy now a slave — a queen." It was natural 
 enough that the Venetian Ambassador should overlook the 
 existence of little Cosimo, the son of this hero, for the man- 
 ager of the Medici affairs, Clement VII, persisted in doing 
 so: perhaps because, being himself in illegitimate descent 
 from the older line, he was afraid of seeming to suggest in 
 
 •Rel. II, 5, p. 410.
 
 BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD 9 
 
 any way that a legitimate descendant of a cadet had any 
 place at all in the family. 1 
 
 At all events, whatever his motive was, Clement VII did 
 concentrate his attentions on the little girl and the two 
 illegitimate little boys. Caterina lived in Florence under 
 the care of her father's sister, the wife of Filippo Strozzi, 
 one of the wealthiest of the Florentine nobles. Caterina 
 always kept a very grateful memory of her aunt, though 
 she lost her when she was still a small child, and showed 
 that gratitude in her later years by the favor she granted 
 to her cousins the Strozzi when they fled to France as 
 refugees. Hippolito, now fourteen, had been sent to Flor- 
 ence some months before Caterina and he was in train- 
 ing to succeed her father as Magnifico, the title given by 
 the Medici themselves to that one of their family who as 
 head of the house exercised their hereditary power in Flor- 
 ence. Caterina's illegitimate half-brother, Alessandro, a 
 few years older than herself, had gone with her to Florence 
 and probably at first all three lived together in the Medici 
 palace. But about a year later we know that Caterina was 
 living in a villa near the city, and her great protector had 
 renewed in his own mind the project of Leo X to marry her 
 to Hippolito. Caterina was heiress to half the fortune of 
 the Medici. Leo X had left the other half to Clement VII, 
 who now thought of giving it to Hippolito and thus re- 
 establishing the name, wealth and power of the Medici in 
 Florence. 2 
 
 But in this plan he reckoned without the people of 
 Florence. They resented the fact that a child had been 
 sent to them as untitled ruler of their city. In addition 
 the boy and his mentor, the Cardinal of Cortona, had not 
 the tact to cloak their dominion. When the councils of the 
 city met to choose magistrates the Cardinal of Cortona used 
 to send the list of candidates to Rome, where Clement VII 
 struck off the names he did not like and the election was 
 
 1 See Pastor, VII, Bk. I. 
 
 'Arch. Flor. Strowiane X, f. 31, 66; Eel. II, 3, p. 129.
 
 10 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 made out of the rest. Hippolito also lacked that distin- 
 guished courtesy for which his ancestors had once been 
 famous. He insisted upon preceding every one, claimed 
 the most obsequious sort of greetings and, in general, took 
 upon himself the airs of a lord and ruler. The Florentines 
 were a very proud and keen-witted people ; even those who 
 were content with the loss of liberty clung very hard to the 
 last shows of it and they deeply resented the boy'a in- 
 capacity, his tactlessness and his bad manners. * 
 
 In April, 1527, a sudden rising took place against the 
 House of Medici. A crowd gathered in the streets crying 
 "The People, The People, Liberty, Liberty." They soon 
 increased to six hundred armed men, including many of 
 the leading citizens of Florence. They seized the palace 
 of the government, threatened to attack the Medici palace 
 and met with such success that the Ambassador of Venice 
 felt that the power of the Medici was almost finished. But 
 the Cardinal of Cortona was finally able by the use of his 
 troops to overawe the revolters, and, on condition of a free 
 pardon to all concerned, the demonstration was quieted. 2 
 
 A month later the policy of Clement VII, who had been 
 trying to keep a middle position between France and 
 Spain, brought upon Rome one of the most terrible disasters 
 of history. The Spanish army stormed the walls of the 
 city and began a sack whose horrors sent a thrill of dis- 
 gust through the entire world. Clement VII took refuge 
 in the Castle of Saint Angelo from whose impregnable 
 walls he watched the agony of the holy city. As soon as 
 this news reached Florence the revolution broke out again 
 and from the very first the Cardinal of Cortona seems to 
 have recognized that he would not be able to resist it. He 
 began to send out of the city by night, the most precious 
 possessions of the family, and he finally concluded an agree- 
 ment with the representatives of the new government that 
 the Medici would surrender to the people the government 
 
 x Rel. II (1), pp. 73, 74; II, 3, p. 130. 
 a Rel. II, 3, p. 52.
 
 BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD 11 
 
 of Florence, on condition that no financial accounting should 
 be asked of them and that they could remain in the city 
 as private citizens with all their privileges confirmed. In 
 spite of this agreement and onfy the day after it was made, 
 the Cardinal of Cortona and Hippolito were so strongly 
 advised by their friends to leave the city that they went 
 to Lucca. 1 
 
 A few months later Niccolo Capponi, the chief magis- 
 trate of Florence, proposed in full council that Jesus 
 Christ should be elected perpetual King of the Florentine 
 people. The motion was carried all but unanimously and 
 the government coined ducats which had on one side the 
 lily of Florence and on the other the cross surmounted by 
 a crown of thorns and surrounded with the motto "Jesus 
 Rex Noster et Deus Noster." 
 
 The new government thought it better to hold the little 
 Caterina as a hostage. Accordingly they sent Bernardo 
 Rinuccini, a very distinguished citizen, with a band of 
 soldiers to bring the child into the city from the nearby 
 villa of Poggia Cajano, where she had been taken for refuge. 
 By the orders of the government he confided her to the care 
 of the Dominican nuns at the convent of Santa Lucia. 
 The child's aunt resented this seizure of her niece, went 
 to the convent, took her away from the nuns and brought 
 her to the Medici palace. But apparently fearing that 
 the palace might be attacked in some riot, she soon carried 
 her back again to the keeping of the nuns. A few months 
 later, by orders of the government she was transferred to 
 the convent of Santa Caterina of Siena. That convent 
 being in some danger of infection from the plague, the 
 Ambassador of France induced the government to transfer 
 the young daughter of Madeleine de la Tour d'Auvergne 
 to the convent of the Santissima Annunziata delle Murate. 
 Five months later, May 1528, her aunt died and the little 
 girl was left alone in a city filled with the enemies of her 
 house. The nuns must have been very kind to the friendless 
 
 *Rel. II, l, p. 66.
 
 12 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 child, because in this instance also, Catherine retained 
 grateful memories of her childhood's friends. Later in life 
 she bestowed a great many favors upon the convent of the 
 Murate and in the private diary of one of the sisters, of 
 which a fragment has survived, it is recorded that the nuns 
 were fond of the little duchess because of her friendly and 
 gracious manners. 1 
 
 A diligent search among the papers of these convents 
 preserved in the archives at Florence, reveals no traces 
 of the life of Caterina in them. That she was kept 
 in gentle confinement as a prisoner, or rather as a hostage, 
 under the kindly guardianship of the nuns, we know from 
 other sources. The Venetian Ambassador, writing home 
 on the 17th of September 1529, records "the council has 
 been discussing the message brought from Rome by a gentle- 
 man of Monsignor de Tarbes to the effect that the Pope 
 has no quarrel with them and does not want anything except 
 that they should be obedient to the church and restore to 
 His Holiness the property which belongs to him, replace his 
 arms and surrender to him the little duchess, the daughter 
 of the late Senor Lorenzo, who is under guard in a mon- 
 astery of this city. But at the suggestion of this gentleman 
 the government has decided to send two ambassadors to 
 the Pope to discuss these matters with him." 2 
 
 This negotiation came to nothing and it is doubtful 
 whether Clement VII expected that it would come to any- 
 thing except to gain time and, perhaps, to recover from 
 the hands of his enemies, the little duchess. At the end 
 of June, he had made a treaty with the Emperor Charles V 
 by which it was agreed that the Emperor's illegitimate 
 daughter Margaret, married to the illegitimate half brother 
 of Caterina, should receive as a marriage portion the City 
 of Florence. Part of the same imperial army which two 
 years before had stormed and sacked the City of Rome, 
 now invested Florence. The inhabitants defended them- 
 
 *Baschet, von Reumont, ctd. 126. 
 "Rel. II, 1, p. 217.
 
 BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD 13 
 
 selves with great courage for a year and then, forced by 
 hunger which in the end brought about the sale in the open 
 market of rats and cats at high prices, they opened their 
 gates. 
 
 During this time of heroic endurance the old partisans 
 of the Medici were naturally regarded in Florence with the 
 greatest suspicion; large numbers of them were arrested 
 and thrown into prison, and one of them who was accused 
 of having acted as a spy for the besiegers, was hanged one 
 morning from the balcony of the governmental palace. In 
 this suspicion and hatred of all friends or adherents of the 
 House of Medici, the little Caterina became involved. 
 Many of the nuns of the convent in which she was held as 
 a hostage, were secretly adherents of the Medici. They 
 were in the habit of sending baskets containing food to 
 those in prison and it was discovered that on the bottom 
 of these baskets there was formed, either in the baskets 
 themselves or by means of flowers, the representation of 
 the Medici arms which had been erased from all public 
 buildings in the city. This discovery came like oil upon 
 flame and the matter was at once reported with much 
 excitement to the governing committee of the city. Already 
 some of the more extreme opponents of the Medici had 
 made the most terrible suggestions in regard to what ought 
 to be done with little Caterina. One proposal was to expose 
 her to associations which would infallibly corrupt her 
 morals, with the hope of so ruining her reputation that the 
 Pope could never marry her to anyone who might attempt 
 to conquer the city in her interest. This new incident 
 brought up another suggestion, that she and other relatives 
 and chief adherents of the Medici should be tied to the 
 walls in places exposed to the cannon of the besiegers. But 
 such terrific outbursts of that intense partisan hatred which 
 in the past had brought upon Italy all her worst political 
 misfortunes, were not even considered by the council. The 
 only step they took was to send a distinguished citizen,
 
 14 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 Salvestro Aldobrandini, to transfer Caterina from the Con- 
 vent of the Murate back to the Convent of Santa Lucia. 1 
 
 He found the little girl dressed as a nun, with her hair 
 cut short like the sisters, and she flatly refused to go with 
 him, saying she intended to be a nun and remain her whole 
 life with these beloved mothers with whom she was now 
 staying. It was in vain that Salvestro urged upon her that 
 she would find equally kind friends in Santa Lucia, which 
 had been founded by her family. The child stood firm in 
 her refusal to go and the sisters of the convent fell upon 
 their knees and with tears called upon Heaven to help them 
 keep their charge. Salvestro Aldobrandini was unable to 
 produce any effect upon the excited women and went back 
 to the council to report his ill success. Two days later he 
 came back again and told the nuns that Caterina must go 
 with him. She wept wildly at first, but, on Salvestro's 
 assurance that she could come back again in a month, she 
 consented to be put upon a mule and followed by her maids 
 was taken to Santa Lucia, whence, shortly after the sur- 
 render of the city, she was by orders of Clement VII con- 
 veyed to Rome. A correspondent of her half-brother Ales- 
 sandro wrote to him from Rome October 13th, 1530, "The 
 Signora Duchessa arrived here last evening. She has not 
 yet been able to come to the palace but is lodged in 
 your house: she is beautiful, discreet and wise beyond her 
 years." 2 
 
 On the fifth of July, 1531, Alessandro entered Florence 
 and took possession of the city. He had recently been 
 created by the King of Spain Duke of Citta di Penna, a 
 duchy which consisted chiefly of title, and he did what his 
 forefathers had never done, took the title of Duke of 
 Florence. 
 
 This preferment of Alessandro to be the visible ruler 
 of Florence was very much resented by Hippolito, who was 
 not consoled by the fact that he had been made, a year 
 
 , Rel. II, 1, pp. 233, 274, 304, 315. 
 
 'Von Reumont, Note 43, Principi II, 203.
 
 BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD 15 
 
 before, a cardinal and endowed with very rich benefices. 
 Though he took and spent with great freedom the money 
 which came to him from his ecclesiastical position, he sel- 
 dom wore the robes of a prince of the church, but preferred 
 to dress, as he has been painted by Titian, in the splendid 
 costume of a nobleman. 
 
 The little Caterina was confided to the care of her aunt, 
 the sister of Leo X, Lucretia Salviati, whose husband, a 
 Florentine nobleman, was one of the Pope's right-hand men 
 and very influential in his councils. Of Caterina's life at 
 Rome very few notices have been found, nor is it probable 
 that, to those outside of the intimate family circle, she 
 appeared a very conspicuous personage, for when she 
 arrived there she was not yet twelve years old. She left 
 Rome to return to Florence in the end of April, 1532, and 
 we have but one account of what she did during the eighteen 
 months when she was growing into the early womanhood 
 of an Italian princess. In the reports which the returned 
 Venetian Ambassador Soriano gave about the family of 
 the Pope, he said: 
 
 "The little Duchess is of a rather vivacious nature but shows 
 an amiable disposition. She was educated by the nuns of the 
 Convent of the Murate in Florence, ladies of holy life and the 
 most excellent reputation and she has very good manners. She 
 is small and thin, her face is not refined and she has the big eyes 
 which belong to the family of the Medici. The Duke Alessandro 
 (her half-brother) shows that he has a good mind and he has the 
 tact to accommodate himself better to the nature and will of the 
 Pope than the Cardinal de' Medici. Therefore His Holiness has 
 made it evident to me that he loves the Duke more than he 
 does the Cardinal and expects very much more from him. Many 
 times in conversation with me, he has told me that he intends 
 to make the Duke the head of the family of the Medici and to 
 let him govern Florence as his ancestors have done. The Most 
 Reverend Cardinal de' Medici (Hippolito) was twenty years old 
 on the 23rd of March, 1531. He has a good mind and has given 
 some little time to study so that he cannot be considered, in 
 comparison with the other Cardinals, as ignorant. He is indeed 
 of a vivacious, one might almost say restless, nature, but perhaps
 
 16 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 it comes from his youth. Up to now he shows a very great 
 reluctance to being a priest and the Pope said to me with his own 
 mouth that when the Cardinal returned from Florence he was 
 very unwilling to take holy orders. Indeed at that time the 
 Pope used to me these very words, 'He is crazy, the devil, he is 
 crazy, he doesn't want to be a priest.' Since then it has developed 
 that he is very envious of Duke Alexander, because it seems to 
 him that the Pope did him a great injustice in putting the Duke 
 at the head of the government of Florence. He thought this 
 position belonged to him because he was older and because he 
 does not believe that he is a bastard as the Duke is. But even 
 without that consideration (that is, even if both were born 
 illegitimate) he thinks himself of a better social class than the 
 Duke, whose mother was a servant. In addition his father 
 Giuliano was Duke before Lorenzino, the father of Alessandro. 
 He also thinks that he is more beloved in Florence, because his 
 father was popular in the city and Alessandro's father was very 
 much hated. This quarrel between the two nepoti gives great 
 displeasure to the Pope, who is disgusted with the Cardinal for 
 disturbing his plans. I have also heard it whispered by some 
 that the Cardinal de' Medici wants to put off his priestly robes 
 and to take as his wife the little Duchess, his third cousin, with 
 whom he lives on the best possible terms and is also very much 
 loved by her. Indeed there is no other in whom she confides so 
 much or whose counsel she is so apt to seek about her wishes 
 and desires, as the said Cardinal. The Cardinal is also very 
 discontented with the Pope because he has not immediately paid 
 his debts and will not give him the large allowance he desires. 
 All three of these young people unite in a common hatred of their 
 uncle by marriage, Jacopo Salviati. This hate is so vehement 
 that there is danger that some day he may lose his life, and this 
 last carnival the said Cardinal came very near killing him with 
 his own hand. The cause of his hate is that the Cardinal and 
 the others think that Salviati controls the Pope in all things and 
 persuades him to keep a tight hand on the purse strings and not 
 to give them money according to their appetite for spending and 
 squandering." x 
 
 1 Eel. H, 3, p. 280.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 MARRIAGE 
 
 Although the little Duchess lived a retired life whose 
 secrets were known only to those who had the chance of 
 hearing the gossip of the most intimate circles of the 
 Vatican, she was by force of circumstances a sort of 
 international figure and the threads of diplomacy were 
 already connecting her with the affairs of the great world. 
 If her cousin Hippolito ever really wanted to put off his 
 cardinal's robes and marry her, and if her affection ever 
 turned towards him, as the Venetian Ambassador said, she 
 never had a chance of following the dictates of her heart. 
 She already had had many suitors for her hand, who cared 
 nothing for her homely little person and very much for her 
 dowry and the political advantages which might come from 
 marrying her. 
 
 The politics of Italy and indeed the politics of the entire 
 world, depended upon the rivalry between the Emperor 
 Charles V (who was also the King of Spain) and Francis I, 
 King of France. In this conflict between the Hapsburgs 
 and the Valois, Clement VII tried to hold a middle position 
 and to sell his alliance to the highest bidder. He began 
 his pontificate with a feeling of great dissatisfaction with 
 the King of France because in the conclave the cardinals 
 who acted in the French interest had very much opposed 
 his election and, in addition, the French had sympathized 
 with the republican party which drove the Medici from 
 Florence. If he seemed later to enter into a close alliance 
 with the French, it was, as the Venetian Ambassador Fos- 
 cari wrote in May, 1526, not because he liked them, but for 
 his own gain and for the gain of Italy. That alliance had 
 brought upon him the terrible disaster of the storming of 
 
 17
 
 18 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 Rome by the imperial army, and the consequent loss of 
 the family dominion in Florence. Then, as we have seen, 
 Clement turned and made terms with his conqueror and 
 again it was the Spanish arms which restored the Medici 
 to Florence. 
 
 But Clement was a man who always wanted two strings 
 to his bow, and the following undated letter belongs to 
 this time: 
 
 "Holy Father: 
 
 "I have received by the Abbott of Negres, the bearer of this, 
 the letter which it has pleased your Holiness to write to me with 
 your own hand . . . concerning the marriage of my son the 
 Duke of Orleans and of my cousin * the Duchess of Urbino your 
 niece, as also of the good feeling between us which has been and 
 is a very singular pleasure and contentment to me. Thanking 
 you with a very good heart, Most Holy Father, for the good and 
 honest proposals which they have laid before me on your part, 
 by which I have recognized and recognize more and more the 
 love and affection which your said Holiness has for me, which 
 you can believe is no less on our side than it is on yours . . . 
 and inasmuch, Most Holy Father, as upon all this I have declared 
 to the bearer . . . my final and last resolution ... it seems to 
 me that there is no need of writing to you a longer letter. 
 Leaving what remains to be said to him and praying God to 
 give to your Holiness as good and long a life as I desire for you, 
 
 "Your humble and devoted son, 
 
 "Francis." 2 
 
 As he had arranged a Spanish marriage for Alessandro, 
 Clement was now inclined to look in the direction of France 
 for the marriage of Caterina to the second son of Francis I. 
 This plan was very much opposed by Jacopo Salviati and 
 much more by his wife Lucretia, who became even violent 
 in arguing against it, perhaps, as the Venetian Ambassador 
 suggests, because her husband was inclined to the imperial 
 side, or perhaps because she felt that the blood of the Medici 
 was not really equal to that of the legitimate son of a king. 
 
 *The King addressed a young noble as "cousin"; an older one often aa 
 "uncle." 
 
 'Arch. Vat. Principi A. I, 7, p. 12.
 
 MARRIAGE 19 
 
 If she had this feeling, she imitated the founder of the 
 house, Cosimo, who was never willing to "make a marriage 
 alliance for his children with the great ones of the earth, 
 although he had offers of that kind from the King of 
 Naples." 1 
 
 The idea of this French match had been suggested to 
 Clement within four months after he had ascended the 
 pontifical throne, at a time when Caterina was only six 
 years old. Francis I, who aspired to be, and indeed seemed 
 to be, the dominant figure in Italy, had then offered Cle- 
 ment VII to make Hippolito King of Naples and to marry 
 Caterina to his second son, the Duke of Orleans, and make 
 him Duke of Milan. Since that time the child's hand had 
 been sought by a very large number of suitors, the Prince 
 of Ferrara, the King of Scotland, James V, the Duke of 
 Vaudemont (a brother of the Duke of Lorraine), the Duke 
 of Richmond (the natural son of Henry VIII of England), 
 the Duke of Mantua, the heir apparent of the restored Duke 
 of Urbino and the Duke of Milan. 2 
 
 The French marriage had been pushed by Caterina's 
 uncle, the Duke of Albany. He came to Rome in Novem- 
 ber, 1530, bringing with him costly gifts for Caterina, 
 "jewels, a bracelet and other articles of adornment to the 
 value of 10,000 ducats and besides he gave her three most 
 beautiful Achinese with the very richest sort of equipment 
 fine enough for any great queen who lived." At this time 
 she was described in a letter of the ambassador of the Duke 
 of Milan as follows: "I have seen her twice on horseback, 
 but not sufficiently well to give a complete judgment about 
 her. She seems to me rather large for her age, fairly good 
 looking without the help of any cosmetic, a blonde with a 
 rather stout face. But she appears very young and I do 
 not believe that she can be called or considered a woman 
 for a year and a half longer. It is said that she has good 
 feelings and a very acute and adroit mind for her age. She 
 
 1 Rel. II, 3, p. 303. 
 
 2 Arch. M. ctd. Baschet, von Reumont.
 
 20 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 lives in the house of Duke Alessandro. When she rides 
 abroad she is escorted by the pages of the Duke with his 
 war horses and by other gentlemen and also by the Bishop 
 of Forli, Major-Domo of the Cardinal de' Medici, who ac- 
 companies her now that the Bishop Tornaboni, who con- 
 ducted her from Florence and is so far as I hear really in 
 charge of her, happens to be unwell. Three Florentine 
 matrons of mature age also ride out with her." * 
 
 The dowry demanded of the Pope by the Duke of 
 Albany in the name of the King of France was exorbitant. 
 What was actually put into the marriage contract was quite 
 moderate, 130,000 ecus. In return for this, Caterina re- 
 nounced her rights upon her paternal inheritance. The 
 King agreed to give his son 80,000 ecus of his maternal 
 inheritance and the Duchy of Orleans with a guaranteed 
 income of 50,000 livres a year. Ten thousand of this and 
 the palace of Gien near the river Loire completely and 
 properly furnished, was to be settled on the bride. But, 
 although the dowry was moderate, certain secret articles 
 appended to the contract promised all the King could ask. 
 The Pope is to give "The cities of Pisa, Livorno, Reggio 
 and Modena to his said niece and consequently to her future 
 husband." To this Parma is to be added. The Pope prom- 
 ises also to help Francis recover the Duchy of Milan and the 
 Lordship of Genoa. And in addition he promises whenever 
 the Duchess wishes to recover Urbino "to give aid to her 
 future husband." This contract was made in 1531, but it 
 was understood that the marriage was to be delayed. It 
 was the sort of marriage engagement among princes which 
 was very easily broken, but the interests of both Francis 
 and Clement kept this firm. None of the secret articles of 
 the contract were ever fulfilled. How the Pope reconciled 
 their existence with the article of his agreement with 
 Charles V made at Bologna two years later, that in case of 
 any agreement about a marriage between his niece Caterina 
 and a son of the King of France, he would use his good 
 
 a Baschet, von Reumont, App. 282, 283.
 
 MARRIAGE 21 
 
 offices to see that the King of France would keep the general 
 peace without "stirring up intrigues to disturb Italy," it is 
 hard to understand. 1 
 
 It was finally arranged that the marriage should take 
 place at Nice. Meantime Caterina was sent back to Flor- 
 ence and the Pope told the English Ambassador he was 
 sending her "to avoid the summer heat of Rome." 2 
 
 In Florence Caterina lived under the care of her aunt 
 Maria Salviati de' Medici, widow of Giovanni delle Bande 
 Nere, and the following letter shows some of the difficulties 
 the Pope met in making arrangements for the journey of 
 his niece to France. It is from Jacopo Salviati to his 
 daughter Maria: 
 
 "I have two letters in answer to my single letter about your 
 journey with the Duchess which do not please me at all, nor 
 does it seem to me that they contain that good sense which I 
 had persuaded myself you possessed. Because it does not seem 
 to me, when you have been asked by His Holiness to go, that 
 it's any of your part to lay down conditions under which you 
 will be willing to go and the money which you think he ought 
 to spend. It seems to me that it's your duty to go anyhow as 
 well furnished as you can, although in fact you don't lack any- 
 thing, and let him think about what he wants to give you, 
 remembering that the more simply you go, so much the more you 
 will be esteemed by everyone, because that is what's fitting to 
 the station in life in which you find yourself. ... I am aston- 
 ished that, since the entire fortune of Cosimo (her son) depends 
 upon his Holiness, you don't know for yourself what you ought 
 to do. Apply yourself in the best way you can to doing what 
 you're asked to do . . . because that's the best thing for the 
 interests of Cosimo. 
 
 "And you would do well to act in such a way that I don't have 
 to write so many times and still don't get what I want done, 
 because words are not enough and I cannot be satisfied with them. 
 
 "Nee plura. Vale, Roma 2 Augustii 1533. 
 
 "Jacopus Salviati." 8 
 
 Early in the month of August, 1533, the work of pre- 
 paring the trousseau was going actively forward and the 
 
 1 Letts. X, 478, Granvelle (1). 
 s Cal. Vcn. 29 App. 1532. 
 •Arch. Florence, 5922, p. 189.
 
 22 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 Duchess of Camerino wrote to the Marchioness of Mantua 
 that she has arrived in Florence in order to accompany 
 Caterina to France by the order of the Pope. She finds 
 her "entirely unfurnished in all things that are necessary 
 . . . and because there are no artisans here who know how 
 to do embroidery of the right sort, we are forced to send 
 to your part of the country two dresses and two petticoats 
 to have them embroidered. I have become willing to be 
 guilty of the rude presumption of addressing this package 
 to your Excellency because I know that you are so courteous 
 and polite that you will pardon me and so I send the said 
 dresses and petticoats begging you to do me the kindness 
 to cause them to be given to some good master who will 
 embroider them according to the accompanying pattern, 
 and I send also three pounds of gold, two pounds of silver 
 and two pounds of silk. If by any chance these are not 
 enough for such work, I beg your Excellency to have the 
 goodness to let me know and I will send more. If by any 
 chance there is also in Mantua some good piece of work 
 of black silk or of crimson and gold, I beg that your Excel- 
 lency will do me the kindness to cause it to be given to the 
 bearer of this letter, who has money to pay for everything. 
 These are to be used for bedcoverings and curtains. And 
 I hope your Excellency will be so courteous as to forgive me 
 for being so presumptuous, because, as I have said, your 
 great courtesy and the obligation under which I am to your 
 Excellency are the reasons for it and so most reverently 
 I kiss your hand." x 
 
 The first of September, 1533, Caterina left Florence 
 accompanied by Maria Salviati de' Medici and Caterina 
 Cybo, Duchess of Camerino, and escorted by a number of 
 her relatives among the Florentine nobility. She traveled 
 by way of Pistoia to Spezia, where she spent a day in the 
 best palazzo of the town belonging to the Biassi. Her 
 uncle, the Duke of Albany, was waiting for her with a fleet 
 of twenty-seven ships. She embarked on the royal galley, 
 
 *Baschet, von Reumont, pntd. 293.
 
 MARRIAGE 23 
 
 a magnificent boat constructed at enormous expense. The 
 state salon extended from the mainmast to the rudder, 
 covered with the richest crimson damask strewn with golden 
 lilies trailing down profusely in long folds almost to the sea. 
 Around the stern were sculptures in high relief, gold on a 
 black ground, on the gilded "freccia" a lantern of polished 
 metal shone. The awnings were of purple embroidered: 
 the rooms hung with silk and cloth of gold. The rowing 
 benches were chained to the sides with silver chains and the 
 crew of three hundred rowers were dressed in damascened 
 satin in the royal colors of red and yellow. 1 
 
 The fleet carried her to Nice, where, early the next 
 month, she was joined by Pope Clement VII with a small 
 but gorgeous train of thirteen Cardinals, whose pages were 
 dressed in coats of green velvet made in the Turkish fashion 
 and carried bows. 2 He brought with him a large stock of 
 costly presents for various people at the French Court. 
 The marriage ceremonies were completed at Marseille on 
 the twenty-eighth of October, 1533, and at the age of 
 fourteen years and six months Caterina de' Medici became 
 the wife of the Duke of Orleans. 
 
 The nuptial benediction had been the culmination of a 
 splendid series of festivals and feasts which lasted for thirty- 
 four days. At the crowning ceremony Caterina wore a dress 
 of brocade with a cloak of dark blue velvet lined with ermine 
 in ducal fashion. On her head she wore a crown and coif 
 "worth a kingdom." The Queen was so richly dressed that 
 it was impossible "to tell the colour of her robe for the 
 jewels which covered it." Catherine probably wore some of 
 the jewelry sent as part of her dot by Clement VII. It 
 included a belt of gold with eight great balas rubies and a 
 diamond in the middle, a pendant set with a great diamond, 
 ruby and emerald, a string of eighty pearls, a big diamond 
 set in a ring, a valuable emerald ring and a ruby ring, a rose 
 
 * Mazzini, 11, 10. 
 
 'Baschet, von Reumont, 295.
 
 24 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 of twenty diamonds and other jewelry; the whole of the 
 value of twenty-seven thousand gold scudi. 1 
 
 The young husband was thirteen days older than the 
 bride, of a melancholy disposition, but considered very wise 
 for his age. The match was exceedingly unpopular, because 
 people thought that this daughter of rich bankers whose 
 relatives had become Popes was not a match for the son of 
 a prince and the general impression was that Francis had 
 been cheated in the matter of her dowry, which the courtiers 
 did not think large enough for the heiress of the great 
 Medici fortune. Catherine had to the full that exaggerated 
 morbid pride which was so characteristic of all the men and 
 women of the Italian Renascence. The sometimes badly 
 concealed contempt of the great lords and ladies of the court 
 who looked down upon her as a merchant's daughter married 
 for her money, whose fortune had not turned out as large as 
 it was expected to be, must have been very hard to bear 
 for the young girl who had always been a person of the 
 greatest importance in any circle where she had previously 
 lived. But the personal tact which seems to have been her 
 strongest native quality stood her now in good stead. The 
 Venetian Ambassador writes of her, "although most un- 
 popular, she shows herself exceedingly submissive and the 
 King, her husband, the Dauphin (her husband's older 
 brother) and the other royal brothers show signs of being 
 very fond of her." 2 
 
 The girl bride and her boy husband were really not of 
 enough importance to be often mentioned in correspondence 
 from the court. And therefore, for any knowledge of what 
 Catherine was at this time in her life, we are thrown back 
 entirely upon her own correspondence. Unfortunately very 
 few of her letters of these years have survived. Mr. de la 
 Ferriere has printed five written before her seventeenth 
 year, when the sudden death of the Dauphin made her 
 husband heir to the throne and Catherine the prospective 
 
 1 Baschet, von Reumont, pntd. App. 321. 
 *Rel. I, 1, p. 191.
 
 MARRIAGE 25 
 
 queen of France. Four more letters of this early period 
 previously unprinted are printed in this work. Of these 
 nine letters only the two which follow are written in her 
 own hand. Two sent before her marriage to the Duchess 
 of Savoy and the King of France are dictated notes of 
 ceremony. Of the three addressed to her uncle, the Duke 
 of Albany, two are formal letters of information and in- 
 quiry, the real message in each case being confided, as was 
 so often done in those days, to the bearer of the letter. 
 There is a touch in the third letter to her uncle which sug- 
 gests that this young girl, who had been treated as a pawn 
 on the political chessboard ever since her birth, had not 
 been deprived by that atmosphere of all natural gayety. 
 She tells her uncle that she has heard that one of the cap- 
 tains of the ships he brought with him has a tambourinist 
 who plays very well the French dances and she begs him 
 to do her the great pleasure of sending this musician in 
 order that she may have him with her. 1 
 
 The two letters written with her own hand are interest- 
 ing as showing that, at the time of her marriage, Catherine 
 was a badly educated young girl who had very little to say 
 and did not know very well how to say it. Within a few 
 months of her marriage, she wrote to her aunt Maria Sal- 
 viati de' Medici: 
 
 "My Cousin: 
 
 "This letter is only to send you some news of myself and 
 to tell you again that it's a long while since I have had any news 
 of you, which makes me wonder because I have written you letter 
 after letter and have never had a reply, which causes me to 
 wonder. 
 
 "I beg you that the things which were left to be done when 
 I came away, that if they are finished you will be good enough 
 to send them to me by some trusted person and to send me a 
 list of what they cost and also the price of the other things which 
 you sent to me a little while ago because I have lost the other 
 bill which you sent to me and also I beg you that if the collars 
 which I was having made at Mantua that if they are done that 
 
 * Letts. I, p. 1.
 
 26 CATEERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 you will send them to me together with the other things. Also 
 that you will have made for me a pair of large sleeves full of em- 
 broidery and that they shall be embroidered in black silk and 
 gold and send me word with the bill for the other things how 
 much they will cost. No more at present. I recommend myself 
 to you. From Solcile the seventh of October." [On the back 
 of the sheet is written:] "I have forgotten to tell you that I beg 
 that you will send me all these as soon as it's possible for you 
 to do it and again I recommend myself to you. 
 
 "Your good cousin, 
 
 "Catebine." * 
 
 A second letter of the young bride was addressed to 
 Clement VII: 
 
 "Most Holy Fatheb: 
 
 "This letter is only to let your Holiness know that I am well 
 and in good spirits and very well satisfied and I beg that you will 
 keep me in memory as you always have done and some time do 
 me the favor to have someone write to me because I do not 
 desire anything else except to hear that your Holiness is well. 
 No more now to your Holiness. I humbly recommend myself 
 and my Lord of Orleans [her husband] recommends himself 
 humbly to your Holiness and humbly we kiss your feet. From 
 Paris on the 22nd day of February, 1534. Your Holiness' most 
 devoted daughter, 
 
 "Caterine." 2 
 
 Another letter of this period was written to her illegiti- 
 mate half-brother, Duke Alessandro of Florence; the only 
 one written to him which has survived. It was a formal 
 note dictated to a secretary and the real message was con- 
 fided to the courier Messire Hubaldine. This is signed 
 "Your good sister, Caterine." 3 
 
 Another letter to Clement which Catherine dictated to 
 a secretary four months after her marriage seems to be a 
 little illuminative of her character and conduct: 
 
 1 Arch. Florence, Med. 5922, p. 197. 
 •Arch. Vat. Principi I, 8, p. 227. 
 8 Arch. Florence, Med. 4726, p. 11.
 
 MARRIAGE 27 
 
 "Very Holy Fathee: Very warmly and as humbly as I can I 
 recommend myself to your Holiness. 
 
 "Monseigneur the King is about to write to you in favor of 
 Master Francois Vohue, Abbe of Cernay, Dean of Tours, Grand 
 Provost of Normandy in the Church of Chartres, in the hope that 
 the good pleasure of your Holiness may be to consent that he 
 should remain and be perpetual and irrevocable coadjutor, both 
 in temporal and spiritual affairs, of the bishopric of Saint Malo, 
 whose Bishop, uncle of the said Vohue, has asked this from my 
 said lord the King, who has granted it to him as you will hear 
 more amply by his said letter. This Vohue has a brother General 
 of Finance and both of them are cousins-german of my cousin 
 Monsieur the Legate, and they are great supporters and friends 
 of Monsieur the Grand Master. Both of them are personages 
 from whom Monseigneur [her husband] and I, not only now 
 but in the future, can expect very great services not only from 
 them but also by the favor of their supporters and friends, of 
 whom they have an infinite number in this kingdom. For this 
 reason, Very Holy Father, I very humbly beg your Holiness 
 that for my sake you will treat the said Vohue so graciously in 
 the matter of the necessary papers to be sent, that he and his 
 aforesaid brother and relatives, who have begged me to intervene 
 in this affair, may be able to recognize by the results that our 
 present letters have been very valuable .to them, which will do 
 me a great favor and put me under more and more obligation 
 to your Holiness. 
 
 "Very Holy Father, I pray the Creator that it may be His 
 will to keep you a long while in health and prosperity for the 
 good guidance and government of our Holy Mother Church. 
 Written at Paris the 23rd day of February, 1533. 
 
 "Your most humble servant, 
 
 "Catebine." * 
 
 This letter shows that the young bride threw herself with 
 the utmost energy, from the very beginning, into the in- 
 trigues of the French Court. The tendency on the part of 
 powerful personalities to build up a faction by the use of 
 influence in the distribution of patronage had long been 
 dominant there. The zest in the accumulation and the use 
 of political power which afterwards became her dominant 
 passion, Catherine thus displays at the very beginning of 
 
 , Arch. Vat. Principi, I, 8, p. 227.
 
 28 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 her life. During her lifetime she wrote hundreds of letters 
 like this. Her influence was the cheapest coin she could 
 use to reward old adherents or to make new ones and she 
 found an enormous pleasure in using it. She was always 
 anxious to do a favor, even if it was only the favor of an 
 introduction or a recommendatory letter. This activity was 
 not without motives of kindness, but her desire to let the 
 recipient of this requested favor know that her intercession 
 had helped him, is typical of almost all the letters of this 
 sort. 
 
 The death of the Dauphin which made the seventeen- 
 year-old daughter of Florentine bankers a prospective queen 
 of France, was very sudden. On the 12th of August, 1536, 
 he died, probably of pleurisy. But the following document, 
 which was extensively published, shows what was thought 
 of the death at the time: 
 
 "Lyons, September 6th 1536. 
 
 "Sentence to be torn by horses of Count Sebastian de Monte- 
 cuculli for having plotted to poison the King and having suc- 
 ceeded in poisoning the oldest son of the King with arsenic 
 powder put by him into a vase of red clay in the Maison de Plat 
 at Lyons." x 
 
 The imagination of that generation and of succeeding 
 generations was obsessed with the fear of poison. For a 
 hundred years it was hardly possible for a prominent person 
 to die off the battlefield without the suggestion being made 
 that hate or interest had secretly brought about his death. 
 Charles V about three years before had suspected Henry 
 VIII of a design to poison his wife, Queen Katherine. He 
 now in turn was to feel the sting of slander. The Count 
 of Montecuculli under torture confessed; as all but a very 
 few men always did confess under torture anything they 
 were urged to confess. He said he had been sent to France 
 by two of the chief counsellors of the Emperor Charles V 
 to poison the King and his eldest son. The accusation, 
 
 , B. N. fds. fr. 3952 f. 150.
 
 MARRIAGE 29 
 
 thoroughly believed in France, 1 was considered serious 
 enough to deserve refutation in a rather long document 
 published under the form of a private letter supposedly 
 written by some one at the Imperial Court to a friend 
 abroad. This begins: 
 
 "I have received your letters by which you give me word of 
 the trial in France of an Italian accused of having poisoned the 
 late Dauphin and of the rumor the King his father ... is cir- 
 culating . . . that the poisoning was brought about with the 
 knowledge of the Emperor. I am astonished that you should 
 think such a dishonest and wicked publication, sane. You 
 know how the said King of France in order to avenge the shame 
 of having been conquered by the Emperor, keeps all Christendom 
 in strife and has even joined himself to the Turks and other 
 infidels. ... I hold that all this is false and published broadcast 
 throughout all Christendom in order that the King of France . . . 
 may have ostensible cause for continuing his enmity and war 
 . . . and for refusing with this notable reason, every suggestion 
 of peace and be able to excuse himself to all Christendom for 
 doing so." 
 
 'GranveUe (1), II, 12, 500. Rel. I, 1, p. 204.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 WIFE OP THE HEIR TO THE FRENCH THRONE 
 
 Even before the death of his brother, Henry had shown 
 signs of a strong personal ambition. He had suggested 
 claims in his wife's name to the Duchy of Florence and 
 Urbino and had openly asserted, in letters written by his 
 own hand, his claim to the Duchy of Milan. 1 He was now 
 heir to the throne of France and his ambition might take 
 a wider scope. He asked and obtained leave to go to the 
 entrenched camp skillfully situated at the junction of the 
 Rhone and the Durance; at the meeting corners of the three 
 provinces of Languedoc, Dauphiny and Provence. Here, 
 with a powerful army of more than thirty thousand men, 
 the Grand Master of France, Anne de Montmorency, was 
 holding the critical point in the French line of defense 
 against the invading army of the Emperor, who had under 
 his command more than fifty thousand men. 
 
 Anne de Montmorency was descended from a great 
 Carolingian feudatory of the tenth century. His ancestors 
 of the Middle Ages had maintained and extended the wealth 
 and power of the family so that the head of the house 
 deserved the title of Premier Baron of France. When Anne 
 de Montmorency, who was one year older than Francis I, 
 entered into his service, he rose rather rapidly and at the 
 age of thirty-nine became one of the marshals of France. 
 In the disastrous battle of Pavia, where the King was taken 
 prisoner and all his chief captains killed or captured, Mont- 
 morency showed the greatest courage until his horse fell 
 under him and he was compelled to surrender. He shared 
 the prison of his royal master and when Francis returned 
 
 "N. Granvelle (1), H, 506. 
 
 30
 
 WIFE OF THE HEIR TO THE FRENCH THRONE 31 
 
 home in March 1526, he made his companion Grand Master 
 of France and Governor of the rich province of Languedoc. 
 As Grand Master, Montmorency had regulated the mag- 
 nificent ceremonies of the interview with the Pope at 
 Marseille and the marriage of Catherine. Always quick 
 and persistent at the game by which patronage was ob- 
 tained, he secured a cardinal's hat for Odet, the oldest son 
 of his dead brother, Marshal Chatillon. The boy was only 
 fifteen and his appointment was against the canons of the 
 church, but then none of the Montmorency sons or nephews 
 was older. 
 
 Montmorency had not been, in the beginning, very much 
 of a friend of Catherine, because he thought that the 
 marriage was unwise and the dowry which came with the 
 banker's daughter too small. But the young girl had done 
 all she could to win the favor of the old courtier. Here is 
 one of her early letters to him : 
 
 "My Cousin: 
 
 "I have received the letter which you wrote me assuring you 
 that you have done me the greatest pleasure which is possible and 
 I want to ask you to send me the news and that you do not write 
 to me any more ceremoniously because you know well that you 
 ought not to write so to me; which will be the end. Recom- 
 mending myself very heartily to you, 
 
 "Your good cousin, 
 
 "Caterine." l 
 
 While her husband was at the camp Catherine wrote 
 another letter to the Grand Master whose spelling is even 
 more illiterate than this one: 
 
 "My Gossip: 
 
 "I got your letter in the night, by which I have heard that 
 Madam the Grand Mistress has given birth to a child of which 
 I am very glad, since I see what you write me that I can be a 
 god-parent, because I was in great fear that I should not be 
 and also my gossip take good care that Monseigneur [her hus- 
 
 Letts. I, p. 3, n.
 
 32 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 band] does not hurt himself, because I have heard it said that 
 he fell the other day and came very near injuring himself. 
 
 "I beg you take good care of him, which will be the end. 
 Recommending myself heartily to you, 
 
 Your good cousin and gossip, 
 
 "Caterine." x 
 
 The Dauphin had been received in the camp with every 
 demonstration of pleasure. The young nobility, who chafed 
 under the inaction which the wise caution of the Grand 
 Master imposed upon them, for he was fighting a Fabian 
 campaign, hoped that he would lead them to attack the 
 enemy. But the young prince had too much respect for 
 the experienced general to be willing to trouble his plans 
 in any way. That wise tact won the lasting loyalty of 
 Montmorency and Henry's visit to the camp was the begin- 
 ning of a confidence between the two men which ended only 
 with death. 
 
 When the strategy of Montmorency had forced the 
 disastrous retreat of the Emperor with the loss of half his 
 army, the King's favor redoubled. In 1538 he was made 
 Constable of France and for some years he really controlled 
 the policy of the King. One of the Court secretaries wrote 
 to the French Ambassador at London. "It seems to me 
 that you had better always address your dispatches to the 
 Grand Master even when he is not at court, for all the 
 other ambassadors do it, and you will do well always to 
 write to him a copy of any letter you send to the King." 
 And the Venetian Ambassador wrote in 1538 of "the Con- 
 stable who manages and governs all this kingdom alone as 
 he wishes." Although he was the favorite and practically 
 the sole minister of an ambitious and warlike king, Mont- 
 morency used his influence always in favor of peace; so 
 much so that he was regarded as a Spanish partisan and 
 falsely accused of being in the pay of the Emperor. It was 
 chiefly due to his exertions that the ten years' truce of 
 Nice (June 1538) was made between the Emperor and 
 
 1 Letts. I, 3.
 
 WIFE OF THE HEIR TO THE FRENCH THRONE 33 
 
 Francis I, in consequence of which Charles V visited the 
 King of France at Paris. Thus triumphant both in war 
 and diplomacy "with the superintendence of the affairs of 
 state in his hand," the Constable Montmorency, the most 
 powerful subject in Europe, gave more help to his friend 
 the young Dauphin than he received from him. 1 
 
 The personality of Prince Henry was of the kind that 
 needed help at a court like that of Francis I. The King 
 was a large handsome man of such tactful manners that 
 everyone who talked with him went away satisfied. His 
 personality was imposing. The Venetian Ambassador 
 wrote of him, "The King has a royal presence, so much so 
 that any one seeing him without knowing his face would 
 say at once 'That is the King.' " He dressed magnificently, 
 was never weary of pleasure and rode in a stag hunt nearly 
 every day in the week. He used to say, that, when he was 
 old and sick, he would be carried after the hounds in a 
 litter and even added perhaps he would give orders for 
 his dead body to be carried a-hunting in a coffin. His oldest 
 son, Henry, who was also large, was a tireless hunter and 
 one of the best young men in France at the dangerous game 
 of the tournament. But he seemed of a melancholy, even 
 saturnine disposition, so that there were many at court who 
 affirmed that they had never seen him smile. It was not 
 generally known that the black-haired young man of a 
 pallid, almost livid complexion, was a good fellow among his 
 intimates and the Venetian Ambassador writes: "I have 
 seen him sometimes joke and make fun with his brother as 
 if they were comrades rather than brothers." When he 
 became King a few years later he developed among his 
 intimates an occasional tendency to horseplay which made 
 him shove a page into the water in joke and trap a coun- 
 cillor into tumbling into a moat. Henry did not get on 
 very well with his father, while his younger brother Charles 
 showed openly much greater delight in all his father's habits 
 
 1 B. N. Clairambault, 5643 f., 336, ctd. Decrue (1). Rel. I, 1, P- 209. 
 B. N. fds. fr. ctd. Decrue (1), 358.
 
 34 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 and pleasures. Charles was undoubtedly the father's fa- 
 vorite, and much more popular at court and among the 
 people than the Crown Prince. The court gossips whis- 
 pered that there was jealousy and an incipient quarrel 
 between the two brothers, who were of the most opposite 
 possible natures. 1 
 
 This supposition that the Constable could help the 
 Dauphin more than the Dauphin could help him, is borne 
 out by the facts connected with the Constable's sudden fall 
 from power. The court was filled with intrigues and the 
 power of the greatest officers of the crown uncertain. The 
 Venetian Ambassador gives us a vivid picture of the 
 situation : 
 
 "There are in France three principal titles whose holders have 
 no equals. They are the Chancellor, the Constable and the 
 Admiral. The Chancellor is the head of justice and has the great 
 seal. The Constable is the first dignitary of France. He is 
 Captain-General of the army and Lieutenant-General of the 
 King. The Admiral may be called the Captain-General at sea. 
 During my mission (two years) I have seen all three of these 
 great officials at the top and at the bottom, because when I 
 arrived at Court the Admiral was a prisoner accused of the most 
 atrocious evil deeds. Two months later he was set at liberty, 
 and in less than six months he was not only restored to his former 
 dignity, but to greater authority than he ever had before, with 
 a consequent depression of the Constable, who suddenly fell from 
 that supreme influence he had with the King. The Chancellor 
 was still at the height of his greatness when I left the Court . . . 
 but when I arrived at Turin I heard that he had been sent as a 
 prisoner to the tower at Bourges." 2 
 
 The Constable was left open to his enemies by the failure 
 of his peace policy. The Emperor refused to keep his 
 promise to marry his daughter to Francis' second son, with 
 the Duchy of Milan as dot and war became inevitable. The 
 Constable accepted the situation and did his best to help 
 the King prepare, but, unfortunately for him, there was 
 
 *Rel. I, 1, p. 336, ib. 4, pp. 44, 47, ib. 2, p. 93. 
 3 Rel. I, 4, p. 36.
 
 WIFE OF THE HEIR TO THE FRENCH THRONE 35 
 
 a jealous quarrel between the two most influential women 
 at court and the power of the Constable became the bone 
 of contention in it. These rivals were not the Queen and 
 the Dauphiness, but the mistresses of their respective hus- 
 bands; the Duchesse d'Etampes and Diane de Poitiers. 
 The Duchesse d'Etampes hated the Constable so heartily 
 that one day when his name was mentioned, she cried out, 
 "He is a great scoundrel : he fooled the King by saying the 
 Emperor would give him at once the Duchy of Milan when 
 he knew all the while he would not do it." The mistress of 
 the Dauphin and her friends had no chance against the 
 mistress of the King, playing upon his disappointment and 
 ill humor with his old servant. Power was withdrawn from 
 Constable Montmorency and so many slights put upon him 
 that, in December 1540, he asked permission to retire to 
 his estates. The King granted him permission with affec- 
 tionate phrases and added as he said good-by "I cannot find 
 more than one fault in you and that is that you do not love 
 those whom I love." Braving the hostility of the King's 
 mistress the Constable reappeared occasionally at court, 
 until an unmistakable hint made it evident to him that his 
 presence was not wanted. At the ceremonies which marked 
 the engagement to marry of Jeanne d'Albret, Princess of 
 Navarre, and the Duke of Cleves, the little fiancee had so 
 long and heavy a train that she could not walk the whole 
 length of the aisle to the altar. The King, turning to the 
 Constable, ordered him to carry her. The next day he left 
 the court of Francis I forever. (May 1541.) A few months 
 later he asked for permission to return, but received a tart 
 refusal with the word that if he came without permission 
 he would be sorry for it. He kept the sword of the Con- 
 stable and the wand of the Grand Master, but he had 
 neither authority nor influence so long as Francis I lived. 1 
 
 Caught between two jealous women, both of whom 
 despised her, and without the aid of the great functionary 
 who had begun to be her friend, Catherine saw that her 
 
 *A. N. K. ctd. Decrue 400, State Papers VIII, 501.
 
 36 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 only defense was the favor of the King. Originally she 
 had not possessed it. The failure of her uncle, the Pope, 
 to carry out the secret agreements of her marriage con- 
 tract, had prejudiced her father-in-law against her. About 
 two years after her marriage the Spanish Ambassador wrote, 
 "The Duchess of Orleans is always treated according to 
 the customary honors of her rank, but some of her ladies- 
 in-waiting tell me that they heard the King say he had 
 not been well advised in marrying his son to her." * 
 
 In spite of this handicap, she succeeded in gaining and 
 keeping the liking of her father-in-law. Francis was per- 
 haps the greatest living patron of literature and art and 
 he seems to have really loved them; while with many of 
 the great patrons of the Renascence, patronage was to a 
 considerable extent a mere matter of fashion and another 
 means of expressing an exaggerated egotism. The sign and 
 symbol of the New Learning was a knowledge of Greek. 
 No one who did not possess at least a smattering of that 
 language could pretend to the title of a Humanist. Cath- 
 erine therefore began to study Greek. The Venetian Am- 
 bassador reports that she made such great progress that 
 it astonished everybody at court, but it is difficult to find 
 any sign that she ever got very much out of her study 
 of Greek except a chance to please her father-in-law. 
 
 Even greater than Francis' liking for letters and art was 
 his passion for hunting. He had formed what he called 
 "the Little Band" of the court ladies, who seemed to him 
 the prettiest and most agreeable. With these he frequently 
 went off on hunting trips. The Dauphiness begged to be 
 allowed to go along, and she proved to be such a good 
 sportswoman that he finally gave her a standing permission 
 to hunt with him whenever she wanted to. She was a bold 
 rider and looked well in the saddle. She apparently intro- 
 duced into France something like the modern side-saddle. 
 Brantome says that it was suggested to him by some of her 
 ladies in waiting, that she did this in order to make the 
 
 a Cal. Span. 1535, p. 35.
 
 WIFE OF THE HEIR TO THE FRENCH THRONE 37 
 
 best possible use of her natural advantages for the display 
 of the fine hosiery for whose quality and proper adjustment 
 she took the greatest care. But then Brantome was more 
 than a little inclined to take gossip for gospel. On one of 
 these parties her horse, which had been carelessly bitted by 
 the groom, bolted with her, broke the horn of the saddle 
 against the roof of a shed and threw her to the ground so 
 hard that she was very badly bruised. The King took such 
 affectionate care of her that Catherine could hardly have 
 regretted this first of a number of accidents which befell 
 her because of her fondness for riding. 1 
 
 Probably the ladies, who signed the following letter to 
 Francis I, were members of the "Little Band." 
 
 "To My Sovereign Lord the King: 
 
 "Monseigneur, our unspeakable joy deprives us of sense and 
 control of the pen to write to you, for, although the capture of 
 Hesdin [surrendered to Francis I by the Spaniards in the spring 
 of 1537] was confidently expected, nevertheless we have been 
 since Monday so full of fear of everything that was to be feared, 
 that we were half dead and this morning this messenger revived 
 us with such a marvellous consolation that, after running one to 
 other to announce the good news more by tears of joy than by 
 words, we have come here with the Queen to join in praising Him 
 who in all your affairs has granted you His favor. We assure 
 you, monseigneur, that the Queen embraced both the messenger 
 and all of us, who share her joy, so that we hardly know what 
 we do or what we are writing you. Please excuse us if we are 
 transported by the joy we know you feel. Praying the Eternal 
 Father, who remembered His David and His loving kindness, to 
 continue to you as He has done and will do His love and grace, 
 etc. . . . Monseigneur, before I close, the Queen has ordered me 
 to beg you with all the ladies that you would be pleased to order 
 us to come and see you whenever you may choose, because with 
 St. Thomas we shall not be content until we have seen our King 
 revived by a happy victory and very humbly we beg you for this 
 favour." 
 
 This letter was signed, "Your very humble and obedient 
 subjects: Catherine, Marguerite [the King's daughter], 
 
 1 Neg. Tosc. Ill, 140, 158, Brant. VII, 344.
 
 38 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 Marguerite [his sister], Marguerite [Marguerite of Bour- 
 bon], Anne [the King's mistress.]" * 
 
 Catherine needed the friendship of the King because the 
 greatest trial and danger of her life was close at hand. 
 When she had been married nine years without giving birth 
 to a child, it was suggested that it would be well for the 
 Dauphin to divorce her and many again in order that there 
 might be heirs for the throne. Both the King and her hus- 
 band seemed at first to listen to this suggestion enough 
 to consider seriously acting upon it. Catherine, hearing 
 of it, went first to her husband, who "because he loved her" 
 (in spite of the fact that he also loved Diane much more) 
 was easily persuaded to give up the idea. She then went 
 to the King, to whom she said: "She had heard that it was 
 his intention to give another woman as wife to her husband 
 and, since it had not, up to the present time, pleased God 
 to grant her the grace to have sons, it seemed to her quite 
 proper that he did not think it best to wait any longer 
 to provide properly for the succession of heirs for so great 
 a kingdom. Her gratitude to him because he had deigned 
 to accept her as a daughter-in-law, was so great that she 
 did not propose to resist the will of His Majesty, but rather 
 to bear that great grief. She had therefore resolved either 
 to enter into a convent, or rather, if it was pleasing to 
 His Majesty, to remain in the train of the fortunate woman 
 who was to be the wife of her husband." She said these 
 words to King Francis. He, being of a noble and generous 
 disposition, was so much moved that he said to her, "My 
 daughter, have no fear. Since God has willed that you 
 should be my daughter-in-law and wife of the Dauphin, I 
 do not wish to make any change and perhaps it will please 
 Almighty God in this matter to grant to you and to me the 
 gift we so much long for." 2 
 
 Nearly twenty years later Catherine still kept a bitter 
 memory of this great danger which she had averted by her 
 
 1 Letts. X, l. 
 'Rel. I, 4, p. 73.
 
 WIFE OF THE HEIR TO THE FRENCH THRONE 39 
 
 ready tongue. In a letter to her daughter written in 1581 
 she makes a veiled allusion to the Cardinal of Lorraine 
 and his brother the Duke of Guise as "those who wanted 
 to take away from me your father," and this accusation 
 against them passed over into the controversial literature 
 of that period. It can hardly be true. At the time when 
 this plan was discussed Charles, afterwards Cardinal of 
 Lorraine, was a brilliant lad of seventeen. So great was 
 his reputation that the King appointed him tutor to the 
 Dauphin, and although six years younger than his pupil, 
 Charles of Lorraine soon acquired great influence with him, 
 which he increased by assiduous court to Prince Henry's 
 mistress Diana. While therefore it is barely possible that 
 Catherine's suspicion was founded on fact, it is highly prob- 
 able that it was the result of her life-long hatred for the 
 Cardinal of Lorraine; a hatred which began secretly when 
 she saw him assiduously flattering the carelessly kind rival 
 who had stolen from her the husband she loved with all her 
 heart. This story is probably like that other story, circu- 
 lated when the Cardinal of Lorraine had become the best 
 hated man in France, that the dying King Francis solemnly 
 warned the future Henry II against the Cardinal and his 
 brother the Duke of Guise, in a prophecy which became 
 popular in a couplet: "The late King foresaw this point 
 that those of the House of Guise would strip his children 
 to their waistcoats and his poor people to their shirts." 
 Neither of these young men had enough power and influence 
 during the reign of Francis I to have attracted his particular 
 attention. 1 
 
 This danger, that Catherine might be repudiated by her 
 husband, like the former Dauphiness Jeanne, daughter of 
 Louis XI, and like her contemporary, Queen Katherine of 
 England, because she had not borne children, was forever 
 put aside by the birth, on the nineteenth day of January, 
 1543, of her son Francis (afterwards Francis II). His birth 
 was followed in rapid succession by that of nine other chil- 
 
 1 Letts. I, 591, Conde VI, 13, B. N. Port. Font. 299 f. 26.
 
 40 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 dren: April, 1545, Elizabeth (afterwards Queen of Spain) ; 
 September, 1547, Claude, afterwards Duchess of Lorraine; 
 1548, Louis, who died in 1550; June, 1550, Charles, after- 
 wards Charles IX of France; September, 1551, Alexander 
 Edward, who after a change of name, reigned as Henry III ; 
 May, 1553, Marguerite, afterwards Queen of Navarre; 
 March, 1554, Hercules, afterwards Duke of Anjou and Duke 
 of Brabant; twins, Victoire and Jeanne, born in 1556, one 
 of whom died immediately and the other lived but seven 
 weeks. 
 
 The first news of the chance of the fulfilment of Cath- 
 erine's pious hopes that God would send her a child to be 
 the future King of France, was sent to the great family 
 friend now in disgrace: 
 
 "To My Gossip the Constable: 
 "My Gossip: 
 
 "Because I know so well that you wish as much as I do 
 to see my children, I want to write to tell you that I hope to 
 have a child, being certain that there is no one who will be more 
 glad of it than you. As this hope is the beginning of all my 
 prosperity and happiness, so I trust to bring it to fruition: for 
 which I pray God and that He will give you what you desire. 
 
 "Your good cousin & gossip, 
 
 "Cateeine." 
 
 The Constable gave this interest in her first child which 
 Catherine bespoke before his birth. Four years later the 
 Venetian Ambassador reports that the boy and his little 
 sister are being cared for at the L'Isle Adam, one of the 
 Constable's stately houses. 1 
 
 Although she bore him ten children, Catherine did not 
 have her husband's heart. He always showed her affection 
 and outward respect, but his love was for Diana, called 
 Madame la Seneschale, afterwards made Duchess of Valen- 
 tinois, to whom he was bound by an infatuation that ended 
 only with her death. At an epoch when he was twenty- 
 
 1 B. N. fds. fr. 3952; Les Asges des enfans du Roi Henri II, Letts. I, 6. 
 Rel. I, 2, p. 179.
 
 
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 WIFE OF THE HEIR TO THE FRENCH THRONE 41 
 
 seven and Diana forty-seven, the Venetian Ambassador sug- 
 gested that many people believed the relation between them 
 was a maternal one; that Diana had trained Henry in 
 princely manners and virtue. He considered this training 
 very successful, for he said the Prince, who had been at first 
 a rather light and foolish person, was now just the contrary 
 and in particular he seemed to be much more attentive 
 to his wife than he had been before he came under the 
 influence of Diana. 1 But this information is not correct. 
 In spite of the fact that her great rival at court, the King's 
 mistress, the Duchess d'Etampes, was accustomed to 
 mention negligently the fact that she had been born the 
 day that Madame la Seneschale was married, it seemed to 
 be true of Diana as of Cleopatra that "age cannot wither 
 her nor custom stale her infinite variety." After he became 
 king, Henry visited her every day, at the close of business, 
 before he visited his wife, and it is evident from all reports 
 of the French court that, both in matters of the head and 
 matters of the heart, Diana had far more influence over him 
 than the mother of his children. 
 
 This following of the example of his father in publicly 
 installing a sort of official mistress, does not seem to have 
 been regarded as particularly shocking. Catherine herself, 
 when her husband had been dead more than twenty years, 
 writing to Henry of Navarre, who had illtreated his wife, 
 Catherine's daughter Marguerite, in connection with his 
 mistress, held up to him the example of her own husband. 
 "You are not the first husband, young and not very wise 
 in such things. But I find that you are indeed the first 
 and the only husband who after an affair of this kind could 
 talk as you have to his wife. The affair of Madame Valen- 
 tinois was like that of Madame d'Etampes in all honor and 
 he would have been very much annoyed if I had wished to 
 keep near me and in my service anyone who desired to 
 make a scandal out of it." 2 The maitresse en titre was not 
 
 s Rel. I, 1, p. 243. 
 'Letts. VIII, 36.
 
 42 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 Catherine's only rival. Henry had a child by a Scotch 
 woman, Madame Flamange or Fleming, and also by a 
 Savoyarde Nicole de Savigny and a third by an Italian 
 mistress. 
 
 Catherine was able after twenty years to look back with 
 complacence on her enforced sufferance of her husband's 
 infidelity, but she suffered at the time the tortures of a very 
 terrible jealousy. We know this, not only from the gossip 
 of Brantome, but also from what Catherine did after Henry's 
 death. She ordered the trunks and chests of Madame 
 Fleming broken open and searched, and all letters and 
 papers in them sent to her. Nicole de Savigny wrote the 
 Cardinal Granvella in October, 1564, that "she had with 
 her the little Saint Henry, that the Duchess of Savoy would 
 give testimony that he was the son of the late good King 
 Henry and also that since his death I have suffered great 
 cruelty." x 
 
 After the retirement from court of their powerful friend, 
 the Constable, neither Catherine nor her husband had been 
 able to exert any political influence. For later a Venetian 
 Ambassador writes of Henry II, "When His Majesty came 
 to the crown, he was entirely without experience in affairs, 
 because the King his father had not allowed him to take 
 any part in the government." Finding herself without 
 influence in France, Catherine used her influence in the 
 only place where she possessed any, in Italy. We have 
 fifty-seven of the letters which she wrote between the dis- 
 grace of the Constable and the death of Francis I (Sep- 
 tember, 1541, to March, 1547). Three are about her chil- 
 dren. The rest are addressed to Italy. Three of these were 
 written to her girlhood friends, the nuns of the Murate, 
 asking for their prayers; five are addressed to the Duke of 
 Ferrara and six to the Cardinal Farnese, the rest are to 
 the Duke or Duchess of Florence. 2 
 
 The first Duke of Florence, Catherine's half-brother 
 
 1 B. N. fds. fr. 6618 f. 20, Granvelle (1) VIII, 386. 
 2 30 in Letts. 27, in my copies of unprinted originals.
 
 WIFE OF THE HEIR TO THE FRENCH THRONE 43 
 
 Alexander, had been murdered in January, 1537, by his 
 young comrade and distant relative, Lorenzino de' Medici. 
 He was succeeded by Cosimo, Catherine's first cousin, with 
 whom during some years of her childhood she had been 
 brought up, but for whom she seems to have had no affec- 
 tion comparable to her love for her cousins the Strozzi. 
 Seven of these Italian letters are letters of compliment, as 
 when, for instance, she sent Cosimo six hunting dogs and 
 his wife four hackneys. The other thirty-four were written 
 to use her influence in favor of her friends and to let them 
 know it. She writes with eloquent regrets to her cousin 
 who had asked her to get something done at the Court of 
 France; "I wish that the thing had turned out differently 
 and if I had only possessed greater influence, etc.," and she 
 turned with the greatest zest to quarters where she might 
 be able to pull the wires of social and political power. Now 
 she seeks a position for a man who has passed "The greatest 
 part of his life in the service of our house and who is already 
 arrived at old age where he cannot stand the work which 
 is required in following the court here ; . . . I beg you, my 
 cousin, that . . . for my sake, you will employ him in some 
 place where he can have during the rest of his life such a 
 position as he well deserves." l Now she asks promotion 
 for some relative of one of the maids of honor who followed 
 her from Florence. Frequently she suggests an inter- 
 ference with the courts of justice; though this is always 
 veiled under decorous terms. The following specimen let- 
 ters will serve to show the bent of Catherine's mind during 
 these five or six years. 
 
 "To the Duke of Florence: 
 "My Cousin: 
 
 "I have written you several times in favor of the affairs of 
 Messire Pandolph, who carries this letter and also about certain 
 monies which he and his brothers claim are due to them from 
 us, and, although my cousin I know and hold myself assured that 
 you wish in this instance and in all others to act towards him 
 
 * Letts. I, 12, Arch. Med. 4726, f . 4.
 
 44 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 according to justice and reason, nevertheless I have desired to 
 write you the present letter and to beg you very affectionately 
 that, for my sake, you will show him all the graciousness which 
 you can and help him with your favor in such a way that he 
 may recognize that my favor has been of service to him with 
 you. If you gratify me in this, I shall esteem the pleasure which 
 you may do to him as done to me and as one which I should 
 always be ready to return to you or to your servitors whenever 
 you wish to employ me. And in this place I recommend myself 
 to you out of a very good heart; out of which I pray our Lord 
 to give you what you desire. 
 
 "Written at Evreulx this 27th day of September 1542. 
 
 "Your good cousin, 
 
 "Caterine." l 
 
 To Cardinal Farnese, Legate of Avignon : 
 
 "My Cousin: 
 
 "It is now a long time since for my sake you promised to give 
 to the prior of Vallence, brother of the procurer general of 
 Monseigneur (her husband) and also mine, the first prebend 
 which should fall vacant in your church of Saint Agricol in 
 Avignon. . . . Nevertheless you have since written to your vicar 
 of Avignon to give it to one of your own people. For this reason 
 my cousin I wish to write you and to beg you again to bestow the 
 first prebend which falls vacant upon the said Vallence. . . . And 
 in return, if I can do anything for any of your people, I will 
 employ myself in it with a very good heart; out of which I 
 recommend myself to you and pray God, etc. 
 
 "At Paris the 20th day of February 1544. 
 
 "Your good cousin, 
 
 "Caterine." 2 
 
 "To the Duke of Florence: 
 "My Cousin: 
 
 "I have written to you before to beg you for my sake to set 
 free from prison Anthoine Gazzette, brother of one of my young 
 women whom I brought with me when I came to France. Since 
 I have not had any answer from you and have heard that the 
 said Anthoine is still kept prisoner, I want to beg you again to 
 set him free for my sake. And if he has done any evil to you 
 
 'Arch. Med. 4726 f . 4. 
 
 "Arch. Nap.; Arch. Med. 4726 f. 41.
 
 WIFE OF THE HEIR TO THE FRENCH THRONE 45 
 
 . . . pardon it and you will give me very great pleasure. Pray- 
 ing God my cousin, etc. 
 
 "Written at Saint Germain en Laye the sixteenth day of 
 January 1547. 
 
 "Your good cousin, 
 
 "Caterine." 
 
 At this time Catherine counted the future Admiral 
 Coligny and his brother among her intimate friends. So 
 she wrote the following note: 
 
 "To the Duchess of Florence: 
 "My Cousin: 
 
 "The brothers Chatillon and d'Andelot, gentlemen of the 
 chamber of Monsieur and others of their company, have deter- 
 mined to make a trip to Notre Dame de Lorette and they plan 
 during this voyage to see the entire country of Italy and chiefly 
 your city of Florence, because of the good renown which it has. 
 Because they are personages whom Monsieur and I hold in very 
 high esteem, I have begged them, my cousin, to visit you and to 
 tell you all the news about me, which, thank God, is very good. 
 I assure you that you will do me a very great pleasure by 
 showing these gentlemen all the favor which you can and I shall 
 be as grateful to you as if you had shown this favor to myself. 
 Here I close, praying God, etc. 
 
 "From Argilly this 28th day of September [probably 1546]. 
 
 "Your good cousin, 
 
 "Caterine." 1 
 
 The following letter written toward the close of this 
 period suggests that Catherine was beginning to find con- 
 solation for some of her troubles in the love of her children, 
 which remained very strong up to the end of her life. 
 
 "Mons. de Humieres: 
 
 "I have received a letter which you have written me and you 
 have given me a very great pleasure in sending me news of my 
 children [these were Francis and Elizabeth, one not quite four 
 and the other less than two years old]. I am very glad that 
 Madame de Humieres has arrived because she will be able to 
 help you take care of my said infants. Monsieur and I do not 
 
 1 Arch. Med. 4726 f . 53.
 
 46 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 recommend them to your care because of the assurance that we 
 already have of the great care which you and Madame de 
 Humieres will give to them. I beg you, Mons. de Humieres, to 
 continue to send me often news of them because you cannot do 
 a greater pleasure to Monsieur and to me. 
 "Written at Compiegne the 21st day of December 1546. 
 
 "La byen vostre, 
 
 "Caterine." * 
 
 The father also wrote the same day to the governor of 
 his son: 
 
 "I have received your letter of the 9th day of this present 
 month by which I understand very fully the news of my children 
 and also the account of my son who doesn't wish any longer to 
 be dressed like a woman, for which I am glad. And it is entirely 
 reasonable that he should have trousers when he asks for them, 
 because I do not have any doubt that he understands perfectly 
 well what he needs." 2 
 
 Henry II was an affectionate father whose correspond- 
 ence was continuously occupied with the care of his children 
 and Margeret remembered afterwards with great pleasure 
 how he used to take her on his knee to talk to her. 
 
 1 Letts. I, p. 17. 
 'Letts. I, 18, n.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 QUEEN OF FRANCE 
 
 Francis I died in March, 1547, in his fifty-third year. 
 The powerful big-boned man who had once been able to 
 keep his seat in the tilting yard against any gentleman of 
 France, was worn out by worry, fatigue and evil pleasures. 
 As one of his nobles afterwards wrote, "Women rather 
 than years killed him." 
 
 At the age of twenty-eight Catherine became Queen 
 of France. Her husband, Henry II, was just her own 
 age, possessed of great strength and endurance and very 
 skillful in all fashionable games. He was still thought to 
 be of a somewhat melancholy disposition because he was 
 not much of a talker ; though it was noticed that in defense 
 of his own opinions, which he held very firmly, he spoke 
 quite freely. He had no reputation for intellectual bril- 
 liance like his father, but was considered to have a solid 
 judgment which would improve with years. He was very 
 temperate in his meats and drinks, but inclined to take an 
 excessive amount of exercise because of his love of sport. 
 He rose every day at dawn and immediately entered into 
 council upon the pressing affairs of the kingdom. He was 
 pious, for he gave himself most devoutly every morning 
 to prayer, and in spite of his love of horses he always 
 refused to ride on Sunday morning. After the morning 
 council he went every day to mass. In this way, writes 
 the Venetian Ambassador, "by his example he inspires his 
 people with the spirit of religion and shows himself worthy 
 of the name of the Most Christian King." He was at his 
 accession exceedingly popular among the common people 
 and he immediately increased his popularity by remitting 
 taxes imposed by his father and beginning to cut down 
 
 47
 
 48 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 the enormous expenses of Francis Fs court. It was indeed 
 time that some relief should come to a burdened people. 
 A few years before the Venetian Ambassador reported that 
 a friend who lived in Normandy had told him the peasants 
 were fleeing with their little children on their backs in 
 despair, not knowing where to turn because the taxes had 
 taken all they had. He asked some of them where they 
 were going and they answered "Where God wills. We 
 can't stay any longer here." * 
 
 The pity was that Henry's financial reforms lasted but 
 a short time. His reckless generosity, the renewed extrava- 
 gance of his court and his wars, soon made taxes worse 
 than before. The splendid ceremonial of Catherine's coron- 
 ation suggests how some of the money went. It took place 
 on a high scaffold built in the Church of St. Denis and car- 
 peted with cloth of gold; except the steps covered with 
 crimson damask embroidered with gold. Four other scaf- 
 folds filled the church; for the Princes, the Chevaliers of 
 the Order of St. Michel, together with the Gentlemen of 
 the King's Chamber, the Ambassadors and the Queen's 
 ladies-in-waiting. These were covered by cloth of gold and 
 violet velvet embroidered with lilies and the benches were 
 draped in cloth of gold and silver. Catherine's mantle was 
 velvet embroidered with gold lilies and lined with ermine. 
 The headdress gleamed with jewels and her waist was 
 adorned with great diamonds, rubies and emeralds. Her 
 heavy train was carried by the two Duchesses of Mont- 
 pensier and the Princess de la Roche Sur Yon and "her 
 whole costume was of such excellence and value that the 
 price was incalculable." 2 
 
 The first thing the new King did was to make a clean 
 sweep of all his father's Councillors and so far as he could 
 of the chief officers of state. The more active, important 
 officials of the late King might think themselves lucky if 
 they escaped arrest and charges of peculation. The only 
 
 'Rel. I, 1, p. 242, ib. 2, pp. 172, 279, ib. 4, p. 39. 
 *Sacre de Dame C. de M. Jean Dallier, 1549.
 
 QUEEN OF FRANCE 49 
 
 man to escape shelving or prosecution was Francis Olivier 
 the Chancellor, "A person of such rare virtue that there 
 was no office above his merit." x But there were some 
 influential people who could not be dismissed cavalierly 
 because they had a standing not entirely dependent on the 
 King who wore the crown. Twelve of the French Cardinals 
 were at court. Seven of these Princes of the Church were 
 now told that it was necessary for them to go to Rome 
 to be ready, in case the octogenarian Pope died, to elect 
 a successor friendly to France. Marshal du Biez was dis- 
 graced. The old man lost his Order of St. Michel and his 
 son-in-law his head. A second Marshal, Robert de la 
 Marck, had married Diana's daughter and could be de- 
 pended upon by the new administrators. The third, the 
 Neapolitan Prince of Melfi, also escaped enmity. 
 
 Henry, during the last two years of his father's reign, 
 had been so strongly opposed to the policy of state that 
 he refused to come to the meetings of the royal council, 
 because he thought they did everything badly and he would 
 be blamed for it afterwards. This clean sweep of the 
 crown councillors was therefore to be expected, and it was 
 equally natural that he should replace them by men who 
 had faced his father's anger and shared disgrace with him. 
 Ever since the time the Constable Montmorency had nursed 
 Prince Henry through a severe illness, the Prince had 
 cherished for him a sort of filial respect greater than that 
 he felt for his own father, and almost the first act of King 
 Henry II was to restore his old friend to the exercise of 
 all the authority implied by his titles. The seasoned states- 
 man regained under the son more power than he had lost 
 under the father six years before. The Venetian Ambas- 
 sador reports: "It seems as if the King did not know how 
 to do or say anything without the Constable and so makes 
 him do and say everything; so that it can almost be said 
 that one is the breath of the other." a 
 
 *De Thou, I, 246. 
 •Rel. I, 2, p. 176.
 
 50 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 As the Constable's own children were still too young 
 to enter into active service, the three sons of his sister by 
 her first husband, Marshal Chatillon, rose with him. Odet 
 had been made cardinal of Chatillon in 1533 at the age of 
 sixteen. He rapidly accumulated the Archbishopric of 
 Toulouse, the Bishopric of Beauvais and other rich benefices 
 which brought him in 60,000 scudi a year. 1 The next 
 brother, Gaspard de Coligny, became the Colonel General of 
 Infantry and Admiral, which gave him successively the two 
 most important positions in case of war next that of the 
 Constable. In addition he was made Governor of the border 
 province of Picardy. His brother, Francis, Seigneur 
 d'Andelot, from which Seigneurie he took his usual title, 
 succeeded his brother as the Colonel General of Infantry. 
 
 Along side of the grizzled Constable, the new King 
 placed high in his favor another counsellor, Charles of 
 Lorraine, Archbishop of Rheims, then twenty-two years 
 old. It was his duty as Archbishop of Rheims to conse- 
 crate the King and, through the King's influence with the 
 Pope, he received the red hat of a cardinal the day after 
 he had performed that ceremony. He took the name of the 
 Cardinal of Guise, and drew the incomes of four Arch- 
 bishoprics, five bishoprics and many abbeys. His younger 
 brother, Francis, Duke of Aumale, rose with him and 
 became a member of the Royal Council. These two young 
 favorites of the King were of a family which possessed 
 great ecclesiastical influence and strong backing outside 
 of France. Their father Claude, Duke of Guise, was a 
 brother of the reigning Duke of Lorraine. Their uncle, 
 Cardinal John of Lorraine, was the wealthiest ecclesiastic 
 in France, and their sister Mary, the widow of James V of 
 Scotland, was, as dowager queen, the leading influence in 
 that country, nominally ruled by her infant daughter Mary. 
 Their four brothers rapidly accumulated another cardinal's 
 hat, the office of Grand Prior, and a marquisate, which, with 
 the Duchy of Guise inherited by Francis at the death of 
 
 »B. N. It. 1727 f. 245.
 
 QUEEN OF FRANCE 51 
 
 his father and the Duchy of Aumale which he then handed 
 over to Claude Junior, made the family of Guise, although 
 inferior to the Montmorency in wealth, their rivals in 
 power. 
 
 In the early days of King Henry's reign there was, how- 
 ever, no outward sign of any rivalry between these two great 
 and rising houses, and the Constable urged the red hat for 
 the Archbishop of Rheims. But even then a shrewd observer 
 like the Modenese Ambassador foresaw trouble; for he 
 wrote within a month of Henry's accession, "The Constable 
 and the younger members of the House of Lorraine every 
 day and every hour give expression to their mutual affec- 
 tion. I have seen the Archbishop of Rheims make court to 
 his Excellency and go to meet him and accompany him to 
 the table and dine with him. Yet all are of the opinion that 
 in the end the House of Lorraine will beat him to the ground 
 though it cannot happen at once." * 
 
 Besides the two Guise and the Constable, the King also 
 put into his new Council of Affairs the Duke of Vendome, 
 head of the princely house of Bourbon which was descended 
 from the youngest son of St. Louis. The house had been 
 in the past enormously rich, Charles, Constable of France 
 and Duke of Bourbon, had been considered the richest lord 
 in all Christendom. But his treason in deserting Francis I 
 for the service of the Emperor because of wrong done to 
 him by the King's mother, had brought about the con- 
 fiscation of the largest part of the family estates. The 
 Duke of Vendome was therefore in the difficult position 
 of having a very high position and very little money to 
 support it. One brother, Charles, had indeed two bishoprics, 
 another was Count of Soissons, and the youngest was Prince 
 of Conde, but there was much more title than property 
 in this younger branch of the Royal House of France. The 
 King helped this by giving another archbishopric to the 
 ecclesiastical brother and getting for him a cardinal's hat. 
 For Antony he arranged a marriage with Jeanne d'Albret, 
 
 1 Arch. Mod. ctd. Whitehead, 32.
 
 52 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 heiress of the little kingdom of Navarre, which lay astride 
 the Pyrenees, in the western part of France. The kingdom 
 to which Jeanne was heiress was small, because the best 
 part of it, which lay south of the mountains, had been 
 seized in 1512 by the King of Spain ; but she was both Queen 
 and Princess of the Blood, for her mother was the aunt of 
 Henry II. 
 
 Besides these representatives of three great families of 
 ancient lineage, the King put into his privy council two 
 men whose name was not illustrious and whose position 
 had been very recently won, Jean de Saint Andre and his 
 son Jacques. Jacques' grandfather was the first one of 
 the family in the royal service. At his death in 1502 he 
 was counsellor and chamberlain of Louis XII. His son 
 had continued in the King's service and was made in 1530 
 chevalier of the order of St. Michel. Soon after he was 
 named one of the governors of the royal children, and 
 Henry, Duke of Orleans, the future King, was put especially 
 under his care. He introduced into the service of his young 
 charge his son Jacques, who was then about twenty years 
 old, and a very warm friendship immediately began to form 
 between the younger and the older lad. The new King put 
 both father and son into the privy council and, within two 
 months of his accession to the throne, he made Jacques a 
 chevalier of the order of St. Michel and a marshal of 
 France. 
 
 It was the general opinion at court that Diana had an 
 overmastering influence in the new King's choice of council- 
 lors. There is reason to suspect that gossip gave Diana 
 more influence in these appointments than she really had, 
 but the court was quite right in assuming that the Queen 
 scarcely counted in the matter. Catherine had little or 
 nothing to do with placing on the paths that led to power 
 the men whose lives were for many years to be so entangled 
 with her fortunes. Some of them, like Montmorency and 
 his nephews, she had long considered her friends. Some 
 of them, like the Guise, who had been too subservient to
 
 QUEEN OF FRANCE 53 
 
 her rival, she already regarded with carefully suppressed 
 dislike. 
 
 That the men the King honored should, under these cir- 
 cumstances, pay more assiduous court to the mistress than 
 to the wife, was to be expected. Francis I had made gal- 
 lantry a large part of court life and the influence of women, 
 and that means largely the vicious influence of woman, 
 never declined under his son and grandsons. The splendors 
 of the court of the last Valois Kings were fairly soaked in 
 sex appeal. That stout and savage fighting man, old 
 Marshal Monluc, who had seen fifty years of it, wrote, 
 addressing the King about army appointments, "the first 
 comer who asks of you the command of a company of 
 infantry, without considering the harm that may come of 
 it to your realm, you readily give it to him only for the 
 asking of the first lady who begs you to do it, because per- 
 haps she made herself agreeable to you at the last ball : for 
 no matter what becomes of the public business the balls 
 must be made a success. Sire, these women have entirely 
 too much influence at your court." * 
 
 To the men he put in authority the King at once began 
 to distribute large gifts, for he was possessed by a passion 
 for that hail fellow well met sort of generosity which has 
 injured so many kings and burdened so many peoples. To 
 Diana he gave immediately the right of confirmation of 
 all the offices of the kingdom, a privilege for which he had 
 refused 300,000 francs. An arrangement was made by 
 which the Constable was to receive 300,000 francs of back 
 pay and a large sum was given to the Count of Aumale to 
 pay his debts. The imperial ambassador at the French 
 Court wrote within a few weeks of the accession of the 
 new King: "They say here that the King since his acces- 
 sion to this kingdom has given away more than two millions 
 of francs including gifts made to Diana, which will amount 
 to an infinite sum." This was two-fifths of the income of 
 
 1 Monluc, Comm., Ill, 460, Soc. H. Fr.
 
 64 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 the chief taxes of France as estimated by the Venetian 
 Ambassador a few years before. 1 
 
 The new King showed a vigorous intention of getting 
 first hand information about his kingdom by starting on 
 a tour of inspection of the frontier provinces. The point 
 of danger was Piedmont, the north-western part of Italy, 
 which had been conquered by Francis I twelve years before. 
 The King's journey to and from its capital, Turin, became 
 a series of costly triumphal entries, the most splendid of 
 which was at Lyons in September, 1548. Lyons was a place 
 where great roads from Paris, the cities of the Rhine, 
 Switzerland and Rome, northwest Italy and Spain, met. 
 This great trading and mail centre was also the most im- 
 portant banking city of Central Europe, and its exchanges 
 reached from Rome and Venice to Antwerp and London. 
 
 Catherine met her husband at Lyons and the wealthy 
 city whose leading merchants and bankers were largely 
 Italian, gave the King and Queen one of the most mag- 
 nificent receptions which any King of France, or indeed 
 any ruler, had ever enjoyed. It was filled, of course, with 
 that rather pinch-beck imitation of antiquity which was 
 characteristic of those years when the impulse of the 
 Renascence was spreading and at the same time going 
 somewhat to seed. One of the most admired spectacles was 
 a combat of twelve gladiators, clothed, six in white satin 
 and the others in crimson satin, "their costumes made 
 according to Roman antiquity." They fought with two- 
 handed swords and the King liked it so much that he asked 
 to see it again six days later. Another number on the 
 program was a combat between galleys on the river, 
 exactly imitated from the galleys on the ancient Roman 
 monuments. The city also gave the King a great spectacle 
 entitled "The Hunting of Diana." The relation to contem- 
 porary history of this scene from ancient mythology could 
 not escape any spectator, and it must have been rather 
 hard for Queen Catherine to make her entry immediately 
 
 ^mp. Amb. Arch. Belg. pntd. Rev. Hist. V, 117, Neg. Fr. II, 87.
 
 QUEEN OF FRANCE 55 
 
 upon, the heels of the pageant. The Spanish Ambassador 
 wrote to Prince Philip, "I am sending your Highness a 
 printed account of the King's entry into Lyons. I was 
 present myself and I can assure you that it is accurate. It 
 is indeed true that little could be seen when the Queen 
 made her entry, because night came on. Her welcome was 
 very warm : and the people say that, as she is not good look- 
 ing, the King gave orders that her pageant should be kept 
 back until a late hour, so that her Highness should pass 
 unnoticed." 1 
 
 The court gossip, Brantome, afterwards gave a some- 
 what different account. "The Queen entered accompanied 
 by the Queen of Navarre, Marguerite, the King's aunt and 
 by several princesses, great ladies and maids of honor. And 
 inasmuch as the day was failing and the night surprised 
 that entry of the Queen, all at once in a moment one 
 saw the whole city of Lyons on fire with flambeaux, torches, 
 lights in the windows, in the shops, in the streets, so much 
 so that it was possible to see as clearly as in the daytime; 
 which was very fortunate because the beams of those 
 torches accompanied those of the eyes of those beautiful 
 ladies and rivaled each other, as it were, in making light and 
 clearness everywhere." 
 
 It is somewhat doubtful how dominant a political influ- 
 ence in the actual policy of state was exercised by the mis- 
 tress who was thus publicly acknowledged by the second 
 city of the kingdom. Contemporary observers took her 
 enormous political influence for granted, but her surviving 
 correspondence does not make it evident, and modern 
 writers are inclined to deny that there are any proofs of it. 
 Whatever may have been true of Diana, Catherine con- 
 fined herself at this time entirely and with great success to 
 the role of submissive wife, careful mother and titular head 
 of a splendid court. But one thing she did succeed in doing 
 which was of a semi-political nature. Henry began his reign 
 with a dislike of Italians. The Imperial Ambassador wrote, 
 
 1 Brant, III, 250; Cal. Span. 6 Jan. 1549.
 
 56 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 "An infinite number of new Italians is coming to this court 
 in a continuous stream, to offer their services to the King, 
 and they are received with polite speeches. But when it 
 comes to giving them a place on the pension list it is not 
 done. They don't even pay the old pensions to those of 
 that nation who have held them a long time." It was 
 probably due to the quiet and persistent influence of Cath- 
 erine that Henry's original dislike of too much Italian in- 
 fluence at court was so modified that he came to employ 
 a large number of them in subordinate civil positions as 
 well as in the army; a thing not in itself astonishing because, 
 in addition to the very close commercial, social, literary and 
 artistic relations between France and Italy which had ex- 
 isted for a long while, he had inherited the conquests made 
 by his father north of the Alps. During the last eight 
 years of his twelve years' reign, the court was often com- 
 posed of more Italians than Frenchmen, a great crowd of 
 strangers, "diplomats, soldiers, clergymen, merchants, 
 engineers, poets, artists, couriers, spies, fools and cour- 
 tisans." * 
 
 The most conspicuous of these families who had sought 
 with success their fortunes in France, were particular friends 
 with proteges of Catherine. They were the sons of an aunt 
 whose husband had been a Florentine nobleman of the 
 house of Strozzi, supposed to be, after the Fuggers of 
 Augsburg, the richest bankers in the world. Driven out 
 of Florence for political reasons, the oldest, Piero Strozzi, 
 arrived at the French court soon after Catherine's mar- 
 riage, at the head of a band of harquebusiers magnificently 
 mounted and equipped. Francis I took him into his service, 
 but Piero never rose to any very important position under 
 him. At Francis' death he and his three brothers were in 
 Italy and immediately started for France, bringing with 
 them splendid gifts for the Queen. The new King made 
 
 1 E. G. Lemonnier, Whitehead, Imp. Amb. June, 1547, pntd. Rev. Hist. 
 V, 115. Romier (1), I, 31.
 
 QUEEN OF FRANCE 57 
 
 him a gentleman of the bedchamber with a large pension 
 and, the day after the ceremony of crowning, he received, 
 together with Coligny, the collar of the order of St. 
 Michel. He was also appointed captain-general of the 
 Italian infantry and finally became a Marshal of France. 
 His brother Leone was made a gentleman of the bedchamber 
 and appointed captain-general of the Royal galleys. The 
 youngest brother, Lorenzo, was in the church. He had 
 already received, probably by Catherine's favor, several 
 abbeys in Piedmont. The King now gave him the Bishopric 
 of Beziers and wrote at once to the Pope asking for him 
 a cardinal's hat. A fourth brother, Roberto, became head 
 of the great bank and divided his time between Rome and 
 Venice, with occasional visits to Lyons. The existence of 
 this great Strozzi bank suggests, of course, that there was 
 another reason for the favor which Henry showed to the 
 Strozzi besides the influence of Catherine. The family 
 fortune was of great service to him in his finance and the 
 banker was also able by his position and influence at Rome 
 to render great services to the diplomacy of the King. 1 
 
 It is in connection with these proteges that Catherine 
 has left the first authentic record of herself as a most 
 submissive wife. Leone Strozzi, General of the Galleys, 
 had a desperate quarrel with a brother-in-law of the Con- 
 stable who was acting Admiral. Leone got the suspicion 
 that his enemy had hired one of his own followers, a man 
 whom he had ransomed from slavery, to murder him. He 
 put the suspected follower on board his galley and tortured 
 him until he compelled him to say that this accusation was 
 true. He then stabbed him and threw him overboard. 
 Soon after he deserted the fleet with two galleys and took 
 refuge at Malta. When she heard of it, Catherine wrote to 
 her husband the first of her few letters to him which have 
 survived. 
 
 1 Romier (1), etc., Chap. IV.
 
 58 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 "To My Lord the King: 
 "My Lord: 
 
 "I have heard by Brese that which it has pleased you to 
 command him to say to me and I assure you that I have never 
 had anything trouble me more, not for his sake unless it is to 
 think that he is drowned; because the greatest pleasure that I 
 could have would be to hear that it had pleased God to drown him 
 when he took that resolution, but to see the fault which he has 
 committed in your service at the very moment when I was hoping 
 that he would do you as great a service as any servitor you had. 
 . . . But My Lord I beg you very humbly that, although he is 
 so unfortunate, he may not be able to make his family unfor- 
 tunate, because I am sure that there isn't one of them who doesn't 
 want him at the bottom of the sea, and who, if he could get hold 
 of him, wouldn't make of him an example for all those who 
 should ever wish to do anything like this — and principally his 
 brother Piero, whom I recommend to you My Lord. ... I beg 
 you to forgive me if I bore you with so long a letter and excuse 
 me when you remember the chagrin I feel that a person of whom 
 I have so often talked to you and who is what he is to me, 
 should have failed you. And I do not see anything which can 
 free me of that chagrin except to hear that God has caused him 
 to drown, and that on account of all his wickedness I may not be 
 removed from your good favor; to which very humbly I recom- 
 mend myself, praying Our Lord to give you a very good and long 
 life and good success in your affairs. 
 
 Your very humble and very obedient wife, 
 
 "Caterine." x 
 
 This affair evidently troubled Catherine very much both 
 as a wife and as a cousin. She wrote another similar letter 
 to the King about her favorite cousin Piero and she wrote 
 three letters to the Constable about the matter. She tried 
 to get the Constable to ask the King to let Leone come 
 to Court and plead in his own defense, because she has 
 lain awake night after night, tormented with the thought 
 of what has happened and afraid that Leone, driven to 
 despair, will add to the crime of his desertion by taking 
 service with the King's enemies, which would be a last blow 
 she could not bear. "So far as I am concerned, my gossip, 
 
 1 Letts. I, 45.
 
 QUEEN OF FRANCE 59 
 
 you know with what affection I love the King and his 
 service; . . . and if I thought that the King would take 
 this evilly, I should rather be dead than to ask him for it, 
 . . . Therefore I pray you to talk to him about it . . . and 
 to tell me when I shall have the good luck to see the King." * 
 
 Two letters of Leone, written one to his brother and 
 the other to a reverend friend to excuse himself, give a 
 striking self-drawn picture of unspeakable pride, contempt 
 for law and reckless violence in vengeance; the passions 
 which had been bred to such an undiluted strain in the 
 factional politics of the Italian cities. He says this trouble 
 has come to him because of the desire of the Constable to 
 put some insult upon him ; a desire of which he has known 
 a long time. "As to what you tell me that many blame me 
 for the death of Corso, I answer that it isn't a thing worth 
 talking about, that I thought he was a traitor to me and 
 I punished him deservedly more quickly than I would have 
 wished, because those who were engaged with him in the 
 crime of this betrayal wanted to take him out of my hands 
 by force." ... "I took the position that there was no need 
 to get such a fellow before other judges." He then expatiates 
 again and again upon the idea that the real object of the 
 judicial action against him was to investigate his personal 
 affairs, "which are nobody's business but his own." 2 Two 
 years later Leone Strozzi made his peace with the King and 
 was restored to the royal service as general of galleys in 
 the waters of Italy. 
 
 It would be a mistake to assume that the affection for 
 her husband expressed in these letters was in any sense 
 feigned. In exchange for a small part of her husband's 
 heart Catherine gave him all hers. Her letters show also 
 that she was a most careful and loving mother. Of the 
 hundred and fifty odd letters which have survived from the 
 first six years when she was queen, twenty-five were written 
 to d'Humieres or his wife. D'Humieres was perhaps the 
 
 1 Letts. I, 46. 
 'Principi, I, 107.
 
 60 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 leading noble of Picardy, a chevalier of the order of St. 
 Michel who had served as lieutenant general of the King 
 in Dauphiny, Saxony and Piedmont. He had been chosen 
 just before the death of Francis I as the governor of Cath- 
 erine's children and they were continued under his charge. 
 These letters of Catherine to him show a constant solicitude 
 for her children. The Queen begs the Governor or his wife 
 to send her news as often as possible, for it is the greatest 
 pleasure she has to hear of her children. She gives careful 
 directions about their health and wants them no longer 
 lodged in the chateau but in the pavilion, because the 
 chateau is too near the water. When her little girl Claude 
 is ill, she writes that she and the King both think that the 
 child ought to be given bread soaked in water and not 
 bouillon, because it would be better and more nourishing 
 for her. She repeatedly asked to have her children's pic- 
 tures painted and sent to her, and she insists one time that 
 the painter shall paint the side of the face which he does not 
 usually paint, in order that she may see how they look 
 from that side. 
 
 The King shared this solicitude for his children, and 
 the Constable joined his friend in watching over them, 
 writing regular letters about them to his cousin, D'Humieres. 
 He helped to choose nurses and doctors. As he was the 
 father of eleven children, he was able to write with author- 
 ity about what to do when they had the measles. He 
 charges them to take great care that the little Dauphin who 
 was beginning to be afflicted already with the trouble in his 
 ear which finally killed him, should not go out in cold 
 weather. When they are traveling or about to travel, he 
 provided horses and coaches and litters. He even sent down 
 his wife's dressmaker to make corsages for the little princess. 
 In short, he played to perfection the combined part of 
 grandfather and bachelor uncle. This solicitude for the 
 children on the part of the parents and the old family 
 friend was shared to the fullest extent by the mistress. 
 Diana carried on a constant correspondence with D'Hum-
 
 QUEEN OF FRANCE 61 
 
 ieres and his wife, signing herself "Your perfect good ally 
 and friend/' in which she gives the most minute directions 
 about their care. 
 
 Of Catherine's remaining letters of this period, a dozen 
 are to the Duke of Guise or his wife, twenty odd to the 
 Constable or his wife, seven to the Cardinal of Bourbon 
 and seven to her husband. Seventy-five were written to 
 Italians, the bulk of them to the Duke and Duchess of 
 Florence. Of these Italian letters, about one-fifth are 
 letters of friendship or compliment; the other four-fifths 
 seek some favor for Catherine's friends or adherents. 
 Some of them may be of the sort described later (1560) 
 to her daughter the Queen of Spain. "My daughter, I am 
 often importuned to write on behalf of people I don't know 
 who want positions in your household, and I can't always 
 refuse because of my relations to those who speak to me 
 about it. I drop you this line to say that whenever you 
 receive such letters from me, unless they are written in my 
 own hand, don't pay any attention to them and do just as 
 you would have done if I had not written." * 
 
 Catherine's great personal tact, her devotion to her 
 husband and her children were not without their reward. 
 In the middle of the reign the Venetian Ambassador wrote 
 of her, "The modesty of Her Majesty the Queen is very 
 praiseworthy. She is a young woman of thirty-five years 
 but not very pretty. She has the big eyes and the thick 
 lips of the Medici, and resembles very much her great 
 uncle, Pope Leo. She loves the King her husband as much 
 as can be imagined. She dresses rather severely and 
 modestly. She is a good Catholic and very religious and 
 when the King is in camp she dresses in black and in mourn- 
 ing and has her court do the same and exhorts every one 
 to make the most devoted prayers, praying the Lord God 
 for the happiness and the prosperity of the absent King." 2 
 
 Four years later another ambassador reported of her 
 
 *Neg. Fr. II, p. 499. 
 'Rel. I, 2, p. 286.
 
 62 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 as follows: "The Queen has born ten children in thirteen 
 years. She has a very broad face, is of an excessively kind 
 nature and tries to please everyone and especially the 
 Italians as much as is possible, and she is so much loved, 
 not only by all the court but by all the kingdom, that it 
 is almost incredible. She loves the King above every other 
 thing, so much so that the object of all her thoughts seems 
 to be nothing else than how to please his Majesty and to 
 be with him. For this reason, without having any regard 
 either to the labor or to any sort of fatigue, she follows 
 him always wherever she can. This love is returned by 
 the King, His Majesty having always given her not only 
 all the honors and demonstrations of respect which are 
 fitting for a queen, but also always made her the sharer of 
 all his secrets. She loves very much Marshal Strozzi, who 
 is her cousin, and she has favored him always as much as 
 has been possible." 1 
 
 Scarcely was the new King seated upon the throne 
 before he found himself urged toward a new war both by 
 his patriotic ambition and his friendships. He had a very 
 strong desire to recover for France her two ports which 
 England held, Calais and Boulogne. In addition his young 
 favorite, the Duke of Aumale, wanted to turn the French 
 arms toward Scotland, where his sister, Mary of Guise, the 
 widow of James V, was ruling in the name of her little 
 daughter, Mary Queen of Scots. It had been a plan of 
 Henry VIII, inherited from his father, to unite Scotland and 
 England. The council he had chosen before his death to 
 rule England in the name of his little son, Edward VI, hoped 
 to carry out that plan by marrying the young prince to the 
 little Queen. The French heiress preferred a French alli- 
 ance and independence and France was of course anxious to 
 encourage this preference. From the very beginning of 
 Henry's reign, therefore, a stream of French troops poured 
 into Scotland, though it was not until the middle of 1549 
 that war was actually declared. Meantime, to avoid all 
 
 *Rel. I, 2, p. 430.
 
 QUEEN OF FRANCE 63 
 
 danger of her being carried off to England, the six year old 
 queen was brought back to France, where she became the 
 comrade and companion of the royal children. She was 
 already engaged to be married to Francis, the little Dauphin, 
 and the King wrote that she must always precede the other 
 children as the future Queen of France, and one who was 
 already "a crowned Queen." The parents were delighted 
 to hear that the boy, who was six weeks younger, gave a 
 most friendly reception to his little fiancee. A little later 
 the Venetian Ambassador wrote: "The Dauphin loves her 
 Most Serene Highness, the little Queen of Scotland, very 
 much. She is a very pretty little girl. Sometimes it happens 
 that, with their arms around each other, they go away into 
 a corner of the apartments so that no one can hear their 
 childish secrets." 1 
 
 The little Queen of Scots brought trouble in her train. 
 She had a Scotch governess, Lady Fleming, "a very pretty 
 little woman," who found favor in the eyes of the King. 
 The Constable encouraged the affair in the hope of break- 
 ing the influence of Diana. The thing reached a pass where 
 the scandal could no longer be concealed, the wife and 
 mistress united to drive the woman from court in disgrace 
 and the mistress turned in fury on the Constable, who soon 
 succeeded in making his peace with the Queen apparently 
 on the plea that his plot had been directed against Diana 
 and not against her. 2 
 
 The war with England did not long continue after the 
 child whose hand was its prize was safe in France. It was 
 ended by the peace of 1550, which surrendered Boulogne 
 to France. 3 
 
 1 Baschet ctd., 486. 
 'Baschetctd., 440. 
 3 Rymer, VI, 182.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 THE FIRST TASTE OF REAL POWER 
 
 The success of this war only whetted the young King's 
 appetite for more. Ever since as a little boy he had been 
 kept in Spain as a hostage for the fulfilment of his father's 
 treaty, he had cherished a deep hatred for Charles V, nor 
 was it "possible to wish so much evil to any enemy as he 
 always wishes for him. This infirmity is so natural that 
 no doctor will ever cure him of it except the death or ruin 
 of his enemy." * He saw now a chance for a partial ven- 
 geance. Just before Henry had acceded to the throne, the 
 Emperor Charles V had defeated the Protestant princes of 
 Germany at the Battle of Muhlberg and still kept their 
 two leaders in close captivity. In face of the suppression 
 of their religion and their independent authority by this 
 too powerful master, they turned to Henry II for help. 
 Devoted and orthodox Catholic as he was, he did not hesi- 
 tate to league with them; even as his father had leagued 
 with the Turk against the great enemy of their house. In 
 the beginning of 1552 a treaty was formed between a num- 
 ber of the German states and the King of France. He 
 promised them subsidies and in return they surrendered to 
 him the cities of Metz, Toul and Verdun, which he was 
 to hold as vicar of the empire. "This renewal of the 
 ancient friendship between the Germans and the Gauls 
 which had once made them masters of Hungary, Transyl- 
 vania, Bohemia, Poland, Denmark and of all Italy, was 
 intended to defend the state of Germany against the Em- 
 peror Charles V, who by his tyrannical exaction has made 
 himself formidable to all the Empire." 2 
 
 •Rd. I, 2, p. 286. 
 
 ■Rel. I, 2, p. 286, Rabutin 404, De Thou II, 80. 
 
 64
 
 THE FIRST TASTE OF REAL POWER 65 
 
 While the armies were getting ready to open hostilities, 
 Catherine, who was traveling to be near her husband, was 
 taken seriously ill at Joinville with the purples, a terrifying 
 epidemic disease whose most marked symptom was an erup- 
 tion of red patches all over the body. Her tongue swelled 
 so much that she could no longer speak, and it was thought 
 at one time that she was dead. The sad news was already 
 spread abroad and almost all her household had abandoned 
 her except "the Cardinal of Chatillon, who on account of 
 the sincere and respectful affection which he had for the 
 Queen, remained beside her bed with Diana of Poitiers, who 
 was much concerned for the life of that princess because 
 the King might grow cold towards her if he married another 
 woman. In the end, bleeding of the tongue restored the 
 Queen's power of speaking, but the King remained in the 
 city until she was entirely well." * 
 
 Before he left Paris he had assembled the Parlement, 
 which was the chief court of his kingdom, to explain his 
 policy and what he proposed to do in Germany. He de- 
 clared that he left the regency to the Queen, and Catherine 
 thus got her first taste of handling large affairs. She took 
 her duties very seriously, as the following extracts from her 
 letters show: 
 
 "To the Cardinal of Bourbon: 
 "My Cousin: 
 
 "I am informed that at Paris there are certain preachers who 
 have nothing else to do but talk of matters of state to rouse the 
 people to mutiny; against whom we ought to guard ourselves 
 more carefully than against fire and pestilence and among others 
 two especially. One is a Cordelier who preached in Notre Dame 
 a sermon tending toward sedition, expressing discontent with the 
 undertaking of the King and even of his alliance with the German 
 princes and the aid he is giving them; . . . which words are a 
 sufficient proof of the arrogance of such preachers who put their 
 own judgment above the prudence, goodness and religion of their 
 King and his council. The other is a Jacobin who preached at 
 St. Paul's on the text, 'The leaders of the priests made a council 
 
 'De Thou II, 60, Rabutin 406, Guiffret 97.
 
 66 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 against Jesus/ saying it was not according to the counsel of God 
 to grant the King a tax of twenty francs a steeple to be levied 
 on the buildings and jewels of the churches . . . and not the way 
 to perpetuate his title of 'the Most Christian King.' You under- 
 stand how easy it is for a people under such pretense of zeal and 
 devotion to be roused to tumult; which is easier to stop at the 
 beginning than afterward. Therefore I have written you imme- 
 diately, as soon as I was informed, waiting only to confer with 
 the Admiral and others left here by the King near me, begging 
 you, as affectionately as I can, to consult at once with the gentle- 
 men of the council established there and to take prompt action. 
 None could be better than to arrest secretly the said preachers 
 without any public scandal and put them in a safe place until 
 the King can send word what he wants done." 
 
 The Queen goes on to say that other preachers should 
 be trained to refute these attacks by setting "skilfully" 
 before the people arguments in defense of the King's course, 
 which the letter suggests in some detail. Eleven days later 
 the Cardinal answered that the offending Cordelier had 
 publicly revoked his sermon in Notre Dame. The Jacobin 
 had fled the city, and the archers were hard on his heels with 
 orders to follow him if need be to his convent at Orleans. 1 
 
 "10th of June, 1552. 
 "To the King: 
 
 "Monseigneur: 
 
 "Fumel has arrived here according to your orders. . . . We 
 
 didn't want to keep him, but before he started back I wanted 
 
 him to appear in your council where he could hear an account 
 
 of the diligence we have displayed in the matter of furnishing 
 
 your provisions. . . . We arranged yesterday another bargain 
 
 for twenty thousand loaves of bread a day, at the same time 
 
 informing you, Monseigneur, that all those who have arrived 
 
 these last days from your camp, say they have met a large 
 
 number of wagons carrying bread, flour, and wine, not only men 
 
 in the state service, but also volunteer merchants, and I hope 
 
 that, by the order which we have given to this matter, to the very 
 
 best of our ability, you will have reason to be contented; for now 
 
 everybody in the company is attending to business and they 
 
 could not, it seems to me, do better than they are now doing." 2 
 
 1 Letts. I, 50. 
 
 2 Letts. I, 558.
 
 THE FIRST TASTE OF REAL POWER 67 
 
 The zeal with which the Queen threw herself into her 
 new function of Commissary General of the army, is again 
 suggested by the following letter: 
 
 "20th of May, 1552. 
 "To my Gossip, Mons. the Constable: 
 "My Gossip: 
 
 "You will see by the letter which I am writing to the King 
 that I have not lost any time in learning the office and duties 
 of a commissary of provisions, in which, if everybody does his 
 duty and carries out and fulfills what he has promised, I assure 
 you that I shall soon become prime mistress, for from one hour 
 to another I don't study anything but that. I am impressing 
 and importuning everyone and I will not spare any trouble until 
 I know that the King and you are content." * 
 
 That Catherine was less successful in this new office of 
 Commissary General than she hoped to be, and that her 
 lack of experience caused her to make some elementary 
 blunders, is suggested by the following letter, written like 
 the others at Chalons, where she had taken up her residence 
 because it was the base of supplies for the army. 
 
 "17th of June 1552. 
 "To my Gossip, Mons. the Constable: 
 "My Gossip: 
 
 "I got your letter yesterday very late by which you inform 
 me that if Bourran, Pelocquin, Pioche and the Receiver de Vigny, 
 do what they promise, you would have enough provisions without 
 the addition of the bargain which has lately been made with 
 Jean Prevost. I advise you, my gossip, that we made the con- 
 tract on account of the fear which we have had that the King 
 might lack provisions. . . . Nevertheless some honest expedient 
 will be found to get out of the affair and break the contract with 
 the said Prevost. ... In addition, my gossip, I found it ex- 
 ceedingly strange, that of all the horses and carts which have 
 carried provisions, not a single one has arrived at the camp. And 
 I cannot imagine where the said provisions could have been 
 carried. As for understanding where the failure is, you must see, 
 my gossip, that it can be much better discovered at camp where 
 the said provisions have been carried, than it can be here. It 
 
 1 Letts. I, 56.
 
 68 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 seems to me that Bourran is wrong in having said to Blesneau 
 that he hasn't seen any provisions where he is, because we have 
 received several letters from him making mention of the fact that 
 the said provisions have been brought there; which, as you know, 
 could not fly away. Nevertheless, my gossip, following your 
 advice I shall give orders that, from now on, the said provisions 
 shall be transported in the charge of people who will be respon- 
 sible for them and who will put them in the hands of the com- 
 missaries of provisions who are there; from whom they will de- 
 mand a receipt. . . . 
 
 "My gossip, I thank you very much for the news you give 
 me of the excellent health of the King and also that the migraine 
 which he had didn't last very long. I beg you to do me the 
 kindness to continue to send me news." x 
 
 The health of the King did not remain good. He shared 
 all the hardships of the campaign, even sleeping in the 
 trenches with the soldiers. The heat was extreme and some 
 of the marches forced. Like a number of his captains he 
 became ill and was obliged to retire from the front for rest 
 at the city of Sedan. Catherine at once moved forward 
 from Chalons to Sedan and stayed with her husband to take 
 care of him until he was able to rejoin the army. She did 
 not have much time to learn her job of commissary gen- 
 eral for, in the middle of the summer, at the end of a cam- 
 paign which added to France the cities of Metz, Toul and 
 Verdun, Henry, after watering the horses of his army in 
 the Rhine as a symbol of triumph, dismissed a part of it 
 and divided the rest into garrisons. 2 
 
 The Emperor Charles V did not delay in making his 
 counterstroke. He released the two Protestant electors 
 from prison and made peace with the German princes. Then 
 he assembled a large army and advanced in the month of 
 August to retake the city of Metz. But after four months' 
 siege, his army was suffering so from disease and bad 
 weather that he was obliged to retreat. It was reported 
 that of sixty thousand men with which he began the siege, 
 
 1 Letts. X, 8. 
 
 J De Thou II, 74, Rabutin 426, Brant. Ill, 267.
 
 THE FIRST TASTE OF REAL POWER 69 
 
 only twelve thousand finally succeeded in finishing their 
 retreat. These figures are doubtless exaggerated; but cer- 
 tain it is that the condition of the retreating army was most 
 miserable. "The soldiers were in such great misery and 
 poverty that I cannot doubt that the animals themselves, 
 even the most cruel, would have had some pity for these 
 miserable soldiers crawling, staggering along the roads in 
 utter want, often dying beside the hedges or at the edge 
 of the thickets to become food for dogs and birds of prey." 
 Relieved of her labors as regent of the kingdom, 1 labors 
 which had included interviewing ambassadors, writing to 
 the Parlement at Paris, advising municipalities and many 
 other things, Catherine occupied herself with the care of 
 her children, as the following letter shows : 
 
 "To my Gossip, Mons. the Constable: 
 "My Gossip: 
 
 "Mons. Nicolo Allamanni being about to start toward the 
 King and you, has begged me to give him a letter of recommen- 
 dation, which I am very willing to do, and I beg you to be willing 
 to listen to what he has to say to you. So far as news about me 
 is concerned, I arrived Wednesday in the evening at this place 
 where I have found Madame [the King's sister Margarite] very 
 happy and growing stout, and my little daughter so well that, 
 although she has grown quite thin and a little feeble, you would 
 say to look at her face and to hear her speak that she hadn't 
 been sick at all. I won't write a longer letter after recommending 
 myself to you and praying God to give you what you desire. 
 
 "Your good gossip and friend, 
 
 "Caterine." 
 
 Her most intimate friends seem to have been the 
 Duchess of Montmorency (wife of the Constable) and the 
 young Duchess of Guise, daughter of the Duke of Ferrara 
 and granddaughter of Louis XII of France. She evidently 
 wrote to them frequently, pleasant friendly letters, and she 
 was apparently anxious not to show more attention to one 
 than to the other. For it can hardly be accidental that she 
 generally wrote to both of them on the same day or within 
 
 1 Rabutin, 405.
 
 70 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 a couple of days. Some of these letters are mere notes 
 asking for news, others are inquiries about the health of a 
 member of the family who is ill, some of them enclose let- 
 ters which have come from the front, or news which has 
 arrived from the King or their husbands. Some of them 
 simply express affection, as for instance this phrase in a 
 letter to the Duchess of Montmorency, "I wish you were 
 here and if you were I would take pains to keep you here. 
 Send me word I pray you when you are going to come." * 
 Or this to the Duchess of Guise: 
 
 "My Cousin: 
 
 "I was the angriest woman in the world to hear that you still 
 will not come. I wish you had at least passed through here, 
 because I have great fear of not seeing you for a long time. I 
 beg you to send me the real word as to when I shall have that 
 pleasure. Meanwhile at least -I hope that you will often send 
 me news of yourself." 2 
 
 She was particularly anxious about the health of her 
 friends, as this letter to the Duchess of Guise shows: 
 
 "My Cousin: 
 
 "I send you this lackey to know how you are and I beg you 
 that although you do not feel any more sickness, you will not 
 on that account stop taking care of yourself. Don't go out too 
 soon for this year the measles are very dangerous, if one doesn't 
 take care of oneself and doesn't take medicine at the end. You 
 have seen it by the case of my son who didn't take any and who 
 died of it, and his sister is cured since she has taken it and 
 without that they sent me word that she would have been in 
 great danger. Therefore I beg you to think well about this and 
 don't fail to take medicine before you leave your room." 3 
 
 This solicitude about her sick relatives and friends, to- 
 gether with an unmistakable liking for playing the part of 
 the family physician, remained characteristic of Catherine 
 even up to the end of her life. 
 
 1 Letts. I, 76. 
 
 2 Letts. I, 82. 
 "Letts. I, 39.
 
 THE FIRST TASTE OF REAL POWER 71 
 
 But after all, neither the health of her children nor of 
 her friends ever gave the Queen so much concern as to be 
 without news of her husband. During one of his absences 
 for military reasons, she wrote to the Constable the follow- 
 ing letter: 
 
 "My Gossip: 
 
 "I saw last night what you wrote me about my sickness, but 
 I must tell you that it was not the water which made me sick, 
 but not having any news of the King; for I think that he and you 
 and all the rest don't think any more that I am alive. Just be 
 sure that there is nothing in the world that can do me so much 
 harm as to think that I have lost his good grace or that he forgets 
 me. Therefore, my gossip, if you want me to live and to be well, 
 write to me as often as you can and send me repeatedly news of 
 him. That is the best regime for my health which I can have. 
 Gossip, everybody tells me that I should go to Mezieres, but I 
 don't dare to do it because I have no commandment from the 
 King. If it's true that he wants me to do it, make him send me 
 word and I will put this down on the list with all the many 
 other things that you have done for me. I recommend myself 
 to your good grace. 
 
 "Your good gossip and friend, Caterine." x 
 
 The successful defense of Metz, heroically held by the 
 Duke of Guise, and the disastrous retreat of the Imperial 
 army, were the last striking events of the war. It lingered 
 along, inflicting terrible suffering upon the people of the 
 border, but without coming to any decisive action. Armies 
 of fifty to sixty thousand men (which were considered huge 
 in those days) were raised on both sides, but they seemed 
 unwilling to put it to the hazard of a battle. The Emperor 
 was crippled with gout and worn out by the terrible labors 
 which he had endured for years. He longed for rest and 
 he had made up his mind to divide his power between his 
 brother and his son, to resign all his crowns and to retire 
 to a monastery to prepare for death. On the other hand, 
 Henry II was steadily forced toward peace by the great 
 financial exhaustion of the kingdom. Francis I had, indeed, 
 
 1 Letts. I, 66.
 
 72 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 left some cash in the treasury, but the long years of war and 
 the enormous expenses of his court had made taxes very 
 high. Henry II was an exceedingly bad manager of state 
 funds. The great contemporary publicist, Bodin, wrote in his 
 Republic: "Francis I did not give away as much money in 
 his reign of thirty-two years as his successor in two years." 
 . . . "There was an ordinance of Francis I confirmed by his 
 successor which provided that there should be four keys 
 of the great chest of the treasury, of which the King should 
 keep one and the others should be in the hands of com- 
 missaries appointed by him and that all distributions of 
 money should take place by the commandment of the King, 
 in the presence of the treasurer and the comptroller of the 
 treasury. But King Henry discharged these commissaries 
 and officers of the treasury in order not to be obliged in the 
 future to render accounts to them." In consequence of 
 the expenses of war and his wasteful habits, Henry had been 
 obliged, quite early in his reign, to raise the rate of interest 
 and he paid on loans from twelve to sixteen per cent. 1 
 There was nothing for it now but to increase taxes and the 
 people were already staggering under the burden of taxa- 
 tion. 
 
 Besides this constant pressure of poverty, there was 
 another influence which worked very strongly for peace in 
 the King's mind, and that was the Constable, who had 
 always been for reconciliation with the Hapsburgs. In 
 spite of all the opposition of the Guise, he succeeded in 
 persuading the King to offer peace and the Truce of Vau- 
 celles was signed in February, 1556. It suspended all war- 
 like operations for five years. The French were to keep all 
 that they had gained during the war, which gave them 
 Boulogne, Metz, Toul, Verdun and many places in Luxem- 
 burg, Flanders and Hainault, in addition to the portions of 
 Corsica which they had occupied, and many places in Tus- 
 cany and central Italy which they had taken. If the Truce 
 could have been made permanent, it would have been an 
 
 1 Bodin, VI. Ch. 2, p. 904.
 
 THE FIRST TASTE OF REAL POWER 73 
 
 ending to the long war between Hapsburg and Valois, 
 decidedly in favor of France. As a reward to the Constable, 
 who had not only counselled but arranged this peace, Diana 
 of France, illegitimate daughter of the King and an Italian 
 woman, was to be married to the Constable's eldest son, 
 Francis. Catherine never showed any animosity towards 
 her husband's bastards. She and the Duchess of Mont- 
 morency always remained on the best of terms and it was 
 Diana de Montmorency who, in her old age, finally carried 
 out the last wishes of Catherine by bringing her body back 
 from Blois and burying it in the tomb at St. Denis which 
 Catherine had built for herself and her husband. 
 
 Well might Ronsard sing over the Truce of Vaucelles: 
 
 "Thou hast destroyed the troubles 
 Of harmful war. 
 Flashing on us the splendour 
 Of thy victorious graces. 
 Instead of the harsh iron, 
 Threats and flames, 
 Thou bringest to us sports, 
 Dance and the love of women; 
 Labours dear and pleasant, 
 To young and ardent years. 
 Oh great King without an equal, 
 Thou givest us this gift 
 Because of Montmorency 
 And his faithful counsel." x 
 
 But the peace the poet sang with such joy was 
 threatened, even before it was made, by a secret treaty 
 negotiated by the Constable's great rivals of the House of 
 Lorraine, and it was very fleeting. 
 
 Some time in 1556 Catherine wrote to the Duke of 
 Ferrara: 
 
 "My Uncle: 
 
 "I will not tell you of the pleasure which I have received from 
 having heard through your ambassador that things are as I have 
 
 1 Ronsard II, 35.
 
 74 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 wanted them for so long a time to be and to see the good reso- 
 lutions which the King has taken to send [to Italy] Mons. de 
 Guise so well accompanied as he is, which makes me hope that, 
 with the help of God and with your help, I shall see the King 
 in the position where I have so long hoped to see him and that 
 your greatness will be increased with his. . . . 
 
 "Your good niece, Caterine." 1 
 
 This letter marks a change of policy on the part of the 
 French crown which was the result of a long struggle be- 
 tween the two factions of the French court. In this 
 struggle Catherine evidently abandoned her habitual color- 
 less attitude of humble submission to whatever her husband 
 decided to do, and took a strong stand in urging him to 
 action. She emerged very decidedly from her carefully 
 maintained neutrality and friendliness with both sides in 
 the jealousies of the Montmorency-Guise factions and threw 
 all her influence against her old friend the Constable and 
 in favor of her more recent friends, the Guise, and their 
 great ally, her husband's mistress. 
 
 It is not difficult to guess why she did this. The ques- 
 tion concerned Italy and Italy was from the beginning 
 the one sphere where she had continuously tried to use 
 political influence. The stream of correspondence regard- 
 ing patronage which we have seen beginning when she was 
 a bride, had never ceased to flow. As she says in her 
 letter to the Duke of Ferrara, she had always wanted her 
 husband to be master in Italy. This ambition of the new 
 King and Queen, looking toward Italy, had been clearly 
 recognized by the Spanish Ambassador at the beginning of 
 Henry's reign. He wrote: "It is reported that the new 
 Queen Catherine begged the Tuscan Ambassador to urge his 
 master to come to terms with the King. The Queen pointed 
 out that when the Emperor died there would be less stability 
 in Italy so that the Duke would need the help of the King 
 of France whom he would find a good and faithful ally." 
 The Ambassador replied his master would reject these pro- 
 
 1 Arch. Mod., Endorsed 1556.
 
 THE FIRST TASTE OF REAL POWER 75 
 
 posals because his entire devotion was toward the Emperor. 
 "It has been thought good to give this information to show 
 the ardent desire of the French King and his friends to get 
 the lordship of Italy and to stir up trouble there if they get 
 the chance." * 
 
 It was this ambition which led Catherine's husband to 
 stake his newly won advantage on a risky venture. The 
 Truce of Vaucelles had marked a triumph of the House of 
 Valois over Charles V, the apparently overmastering adver- 
 sary who was Emperor of Germany and King of Spain. To 
 break this truce rather than to turn it into a permanent 
 peace was not wise. For Henry II to shift the bulk of his 
 forces from the north where he had been so successful, and 
 where he fought close to his base, while the Spanish King 
 had to fight far from his, and to send an army to the south 
 of Italy in the hope of making a conquest hundreds of miles 
 from his own borders, seems now like the act of folly it was. 
 But it must be remembered that it was the favorite folly 
 of three of his predecessors upon the throne to waste the 
 resources of France in a vain attempt to make good their 
 claim upon the Duchy of Milan and the Kingdom of 
 Naples, 2 and that the change in Henry's military strategy 
 was urged upon him with vehemence by the general whose 
 exploits in the field had done so much to force the brilliantly 
 successful Truce of Vaucelles. 
 
 For if the Constable was the hero of peace, the Duke 
 of Guise was the hero of the war. In the last campaign the 
 Constable had done little with the great armies he led and 
 the Duke's successful defense of Metz had been the turning 
 point in the struggle. He was very anxious to renew the 
 war for several reasons. First, because he was the ablest 
 of the French generals; second, because the Constable and 
 his faction at court were thoroughly in favor of peace; third, 
 because he had connections and ambitions in Italy; fourth, 
 
 1 Cal. Span. 1547-1549, p. 211. 
 
 'See Note.
 
 76 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 because his brother had just made a league there which must 
 be repudiated if the Truce of Vaucelles stood. 
 
 The complicated situation in Italy which brought about 
 this league needs a few words of explanation to show how 
 the life of Catherine was affected by it. 
 
 Pope Julius III died in the spring of 1555. In the Con- 
 clave the Cardinal of Ferrara, the uncle of the wife of the 
 Duke of Guise, became one of the leading candidates for 
 the vacant papal throne. Henry II had ordered the French 
 cardinals to support the Cardinal of Ferrara as if he were 
 his own brother, and he authorized them to offer to the 
 other cardinals who might be willing to support them in 
 voting for Ferrara, benefices in the French church to the 
 value of twenty-five thousand ecus annually. The King of 
 Spain likewise sent the leader of his party among the car- 
 dinals 20,000 scudi as election funds. That maintaining 
 good connections by the distribution of patronage among 
 the cardinals was a regular policy of the French court is 
 shown by the following instructions from Catherine to her 
 agent in Rome, the Count of Tournon : 
 
 "The King is much pleased to hear of the good will of Car- 
 dinal Vitelli ... to whom he can promise all the favour to be 
 hoped from a great King with large means of showing his grati- 
 tude to his good servitors as a proof of which the King sends him 
 the procuration of the bishopric of Carcasonne, which is 'a fine 
 piece.' Give to the Cardinal of Altaemps the King's letter 
 accompanied by the most agreeable language you can invent to 
 make him understand that he has offered his services to a King 
 recognized by everyone as the least ungrateful to his servitors 
 of any monarch in the world which in time the Cardinal will 
 plainly see at the first opportunity of doing something for him. 
 So far as the Cardinal Ursini is concerned the King is very glad 
 to be assured of his good will to do him service, which will be 
 always recognized but just at the present time there is 'no piece 
 of Marque' available. As for getting the Cardinal of Ferrara to 
 transfer to him the Archbishopric of Narbonne (as has been 
 suggested) 'it is too large a piece.' It would be enough if the 
 Cardinal of Ferrara could accommodate him with one of his 
 abbeys of the value of five or six thousand livres, with the
 
 THE FIRST TASTE OF REAL POWER 77 
 
 assurance that the King will pay Ferrara back with the first 
 vacant bishopric or abbey of an equal or greater value." 'So far 
 as three other named cardinals are concerned, the envoy is 
 directed to say that the King cannot accommodate them at the 
 moment by any of the means suggested, but to assure them that 
 the King will not forget them although he is forced by necessity 
 to wait until the means of expressing his good will present them- 
 selves.' x 
 
 But patronage had no weight in the electoral conference 
 of 1555. The situation of the Church, threatened by the 
 growth of Protestantism, was so grave and the desire to 
 reform ecclesiastical abuses, complained of not only by the 
 Protestants but by the most loyal Catholics, had grown so 
 strong, that the motives which had ruled so often in elec- 
 tions were driven into the background and yielded to ideas 
 more honest and more holy. 
 
 What ideals had been prevalent in previous electing con- 
 claves are fairly explained in the report of the Venetian 
 Ambassador to the Senate in the year 1560: 
 
 "In regard to the method and the incidents which arise in the 
 election of a pope I have written so much a few months before, 
 that I think it almost superfluous to speak of it any more. 
 Nevertheless, I will say that the, under these circumstances, not 
 too sacred Holy College of Cardinals is directed and governed 
 in all things, so far as human judgment can form any decision, 
 by the will of princes and by the particular personal interests 
 of the cardinals. I have never heard it said 'such and such a 
 cardinal will be pope because he is a man of doctrine, of religion 
 and of good character,' but very often 'such a man will not be 
 pope because he is too scrupulous in religion and an enemy of 
 vices' because a large part of the cardinals want to have a good- 
 fellow for pope. Every day I have heard it said 'such and such 
 a cardinal will be, or will not be, pope because he is nominated, 
 recommended or excluded by France or by Spain and because 
 he is either the friend or the enemy of such and such a cardinal 
 or of the chief of some faction.' ... I say this because, besides 
 the fact that some of the cardinals are the subjects of the said 
 princes, which makes them obedient to them, almost all the 
 
 1 Arch. Mod., qtd. Romier (1), II, 3; Ribier II, 605; Arch. Simancas, 
 809 f. 51, qtd. Riess B. N. Nouvs. Acqs. 6001 f. 44.
 
 78 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 cardinals are under obligation to one of these two kings, either 
 because they hold abbeys of them or other beneficences, or 
 because they are in receipt of large pensions. Therefore they 
 are afraid that, if they do not obey the will of these kings, they 
 will be deprived of what they have; or they hope, on the other 
 hand, agreeing to their wishes, to receive from them still greater 
 emoluments than those which they possess." 1 
 
 The election of a pope (Marcellus II) without any 
 political connections, with the highest reputation for holy 
 living, ability and sincere religion, was an agreeable surprise 
 to honest churchmen who, like this ambassador, knew what 
 had often happened in many previous papal elections. 
 Queen Catherine and the Constable had additional reasons 
 for rejoicing over it. A correspondent of the Duke of 
 Parma wrote to him that they were glad because of "the 
 hate they bear to the defeated Cardinal of Ferrara," 2 who 
 was the uncle of the Duchess of Guise. 
 
 But the holy Marcellus II lived only three weeks and 
 after a short and stormy conclave, Cardinal Caraffa was 
 elected and took the name of Paul IV. Henry II was not 
 too much displeased, because the name of Cardinal Caraffa 
 had been on the list of the three men for whom his adherents 
 might vote in case the election of the Cardinal of Ferrara 
 was impossible. The new Pope was a man of seventy-nine 
 years, with a great reputation for learning. He had always 
 been most rigorous in the use of the Inquisition against 
 heretics. His private life was stainless. The old man soon 
 made it apparent that besides his desire to reform the 
 church and repress heretics he had two very strong passions: 
 first, a desire to secure a great deal of wealth and power for 
 his nephews, and second, a hatred of Spaniards, resulting in 
 an eager desire to destroy their dominance in Italy. This 
 latter passion was intense and the old Pope could scarcely 
 find words to express it. He told the Venetian Ambassador 
 that the Imperialists were "rogues, children of the devil 
 
 *Rel. II, 4, p. 43, Comp. ib. 3, p. 371. 
 'Arch. Nap., qtd. Romier II, 3.
 
 THE FIRST TASTE OF REAL POWER 79 
 
 and of iniquity." The agent in carrying out his political 
 policy was his younger nephew, Carlo Caraffa, whose life up 
 to this time had been spent as a soldier of fortune; a pro- 
 fession in which he had gained neither much wealth nor 
 great reputation. The man was a typical Italian condot- 
 tiere, a free liver of moderate abilities, violent passions, 
 unlimited egotism and great greed, but many both of the 
 Spanish and French cardinals, anxious to curry favor with 
 the Pope's nephew, urged Paul IV to carry out his intention 
 of appointing Carlo a cardinal. 1 
 
 In October, 1555, three months before the Truce of 
 Vaucelles, this aged Pope, whose dominant motives were 
 zeal for orthodoxy and reform, nepotism and hate of the 
 Spaniards, had signed the draft of a proposed league be- 
 tween the King of France, the Duke of Ferrara and the 
 Papacy. The allies were to create an army and a war chest 
 of five hundred thousand scudi. The army was to be made 
 up of ten thousand French troops and ten thousand Papal 
 troops and commanded by the Duke of Ferrara. The King 
 was to contribute seven tenths of the contents of the war 
 chest and the Pope the rest. The objects of this league and 
 armament were to drive the Duke of Florence from his city 
 and restore the Republican exiles ; to add Siena to the Papal 
 States or to give it as a fief of the Papacy to some lord whom 
 the inhabitants would choose; to conquer the Kingdom of 
 Naples and grant it as a fief to one of the younger sons of 
 the King of France; to make another one of the younger 
 sons of the King of France Duke of Milan, to cut out of the 
 territory of the Kingdom of Naples two independent states 
 to be given to nephews of the Pope. The King was de- 
 lighted with this suggestion and, in spite of the opposition 
 of the Constable, he sent the Cardinal of Lorraine and the 
 Cardinal of Tournon to Rome to complete the league. It 
 was modified and signed by them in the name of the King 
 of France on the 15th of December, 1555. So eager was 
 
 *Rel. II, 3, p. 379. Cal. Vcn., 11 Dec. 1556.
 
 80 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 the old Pope in this matter that he copied out with his own 
 hand the clean draft of the treaty which was to be sent to 
 France. So that while the Constable was arranging for 
 peace in the north: in the south his rival the Cardinal of 
 Lorraine had arranged for war against Spain with a joint 
 Papal and French army which was to be commanded by 
 the Duke of Ferrara. 1 
 
 But when the triumphant Cardinal got back to Paris, 
 he learned that, three days before his arrival, his great 
 adversary the Constable had arranged the Truce of Vau- 
 celles. He cried out in anger, as the Ambassador of the 
 Duke of Ferrara reported to his master, "the game is lost." 
 The old Pope, when he heard the news, also broke out in 
 wrath. But Cardinal Carlo Caraffa did not give up the 
 game yet. He finally started for France as Legate with 
 the ostensible mission of arranging a general permanent 
 peace in Europe, but really to arrange for the invasion of 
 Italy by a French army attacking Spain. The secret was, 
 however, already known to his enemies. The Spanish agent 
 in Paris wrote on the 8th of June, 1556, that the King was 
 holding continual councils on the question whether they 
 shall make a permanent peace, maintain the Truce, or re- 
 new the war. He adds: "They find it very difficult to 
 decide for several reasons : first, the Constable is in no sort 
 of agreement with the House of Guise, . . . the Guise try- 
 ing to break the Truce which the Constable had arranged 
 without them ... in order not to leave to the Constable 
 so much authority and reputation; second, the solicitation 
 of the Cardinal Caraffa, who is coming to advise against 
 peace. . . . Item, Italian fugitives who beg them to con- 
 tinue the war. . . . Item, the Protestant princes of Ger- 
 many are persuading the King that if he continues the war 
 they will back him." It shows how little the influence of 
 Catherine at court had been counted by shrewd observers 
 up to this time that the Spanish agent does not even men- 
 
 *Ancel Riess 61, Romier (1), II, 30. Cal. Vcn. VI, 343.
 
 THE FIRST TASTE OF REAL POWER 81 
 
 tion her as one of those who were urging the King towards 
 war. 1 
 
 Cardinal Caraffa arrived at the French court about the 
 middle of June, bringing from the Pope the usual gifts; for 
 the King a blessed sword and a golden rose for Catherine, 
 who had already entered into correspondence with him in 
 her usual way by asking favors for her friends. He had 
 not only granted the favors, but written a letter thanking 
 her for defending him against the calumnies of people who 
 would rather express their malignity than serve the King. 
 The Pope regarded her with especial favor, for the Vene- 
 tian Ambassador wrote to the Senate that he heard him say: 
 "The Queen of France is a little saint. She will give us 
 another little boy whom we will make a cardinal and thus 
 interest the King of France even more in the Holy See." 2 
 
 Caraffa could not add enough weight to the advice of 
 the Guise to make it prevail, but for some reason not clear, 
 Charles V, fully aware of this strife in the French royal 
 council, decided to strike first at his implacable enemy in 
 the papal chair. In September, 1556, a week before Caraffa 
 got back to Rome, after an unsuccessful mission, the Duke 
 of Alva invaded the papal states at the head of a Spanish 
 army. 3 
 
 Even this news did not at once destroy the Constable's 
 firm control of French policy. Henry II sent word to Rome 
 that "they must try to make peace as nothing more will be 
 done" (by France). The Guise-Diana-Queen combination 
 were not, however, discouraged. They renewed the struggle 
 to get the ear of the King, and Catherine for the first time 
 threw whatever influence she had with her husband defi- 
 nitely and strongly in favor of a disputed policy of state. 
 By the middle of the summer war was decided on amid the 
 general enthusiasm of the courtiers; for the French nobles 
 
 Weenie (2), 189; Arch. Mod. qtd. Romier II, 43; Duruy 108, ctd. 
 Granvelle (1), IV, 594. 
 
 'Duruy 155 N. Bib. Casantense, pntd. Duruy App. 381, Cal. Vcn. 
 12 Feb. 1557. 
 
 *Ancel corrects Duruy.
 
 82 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 at court were never averse to fighting; which meant to them 
 adventure, largess and the chance of promotion. Only the 
 Constable protested, saying, "We shall all ride across the 
 Alps, but come back on foot." 1 
 
 The Venetian Ambassador was much better informed 
 than the Spaniard about Catherine's activity in this struggle 
 over state policy between the two great factions at the 
 French court. He wrote: "Before this resolve was formed 
 by the King there were great disputes between the Con- 
 stable and the Duke of Guise. The Constable and his 
 friends, backed by general public feeling, have done their 
 utmost to prevent ratification of the league with the Pope. 
 The Duke of Guise was in favor of the league and strongly 
 supported by the Queen and her dependents because of the 
 affairs of Tuscany (Florence) and by Mme. de Valentinois 
 and her dependents because of her connection with the 
 Guise." This opposition of her old friend did not make 
 Catherine any less keen for war because just at this crisis 
 she was put out with him over a distinctly personal matter. 
 The Spanish Ambassador writes: "Between the Queen and 
 the Constable there is ill feeling on account of the marriage 
 of Montmorency." The story is so filled with the color 
 and atmosphere of the times that it is worth telling in some 
 detail. 2 
 
 Mademoiselle de Piennes was one of the Queen's maids 
 of honor: a young woman of noble family about twenty 
 years old, "as beautiful, honest and accomplished as any in 
 France." Francis de Montmorency, the oldest son of the 
 Constable, now twenty-six years old, had known her since 
 she was a little girl and had been in love with her for years. 
 Before he went to the war, when she was sixteen, they were 
 secretly engaged to be married, and on his return from 
 captivity (he had surrendered with the garrison of Terou- 
 anne) he had solemnly renewed that engagement in the 
 
 x Ribier II, 657, Ancel I, 2, pp. 464, 476, 496; Cal. Vcn., 19 Sept. 1556, 
 Pasquier (2), Bk. IV, 1. 
 
 1 Cal. Vcn., 12 Jan., 1 Feb., 1556. Arch. Belg. qtd. Romier II, 102.
 
 THE FIRST TASTE OF REAL POWER 83 
 
 Abbey Church of Vauluisant. His father, who knew noth- 
 ing of all this, had planned for him a great future. He was 
 to marry Diana, illegitimate daughter of the King, widow 
 of the Duke of Castro. Her father was to give her as 
 dowry two counties and 100,000 livres, give her husband 
 the collar of the order of St. Michel and make him governor 
 of Paris and the Isle de France. When Francis heard of 
 this plan, he was afraid to tell his father about his sweet- 
 heart and finally got his cousin Coligny, now admiral of 
 France, to tell the King. The King dropped a hint to the 
 Constable, with whom he was dining, and the next morning 
 the Constable got the secret out of Coligny. He fell first 
 into rage and then into melancholy so deep that he would 
 not leave his house for two weeks. 1 
 
 Catherine took up warmly the cause of her pretty maid 
 of honor. But the Queen's protection did not do the poor 
 girl much good. She was called before a tribunal of four 
 bishops and two lawyers, who shut her up in a convent. 
 Meantime Francis was sent to Rome to get released from 
 his promise by the Pope. Thence he wrote her a letter 
 saying that he was sorry to have offended God, the King 
 and his parents and had asked pardon of the Pope, who 
 put him in his earlier liberty, therefore he gave up all the 
 promises of marriage which had passed between them, freed 
 her from them and begged her to do the same to him. This 
 letter was read to her by a royal commission of five. With 
 tears in her eyes she said, "I see very well that M. de Mont- 
 morency would rather be a rich than an honest man. . . . 
 If he was the son of the King I would not marry him after 
 that letter. And since you have seen me in tears, I beg 
 you to tell him that it is not for any regret I have for him," 
 and so retired from the room. 2 Catherine was always in- 
 terested in the fate of her servitors and naturally felt resent- 
 ment over this piteous scene, so that if she needed any spur 
 to be active in helping to prepare for the war, she had 
 
 1 Brant. Ill, 231; Granvelle (1) IV, 749. 
 a Le Laboureur II, 388.
 
 84 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 helped to carry against the Constable's influence, it came 
 to her from this affair. 
 
 From one class of people to whom she had granted pro- 
 tection and shown great personal kindness ever since she 
 came to France, Catherine now received a grateful return. 
 During the previous discussions about war in Italy, the 
 Florentine exiles in France had offered to lend the King 
 400,000 crowns at 16% and 200,000 more without interest 
 for two years, to be used against the Duke of Tuscany. The 
 Queen now sent her maitre d'hotel, a Florentine, to the 
 exiles at Lyons to urge them to offer money to the King. 
 He came back in about six weeks with the offer to pay 2,000 
 foot and 400 horse against Tuscany. 1 
 
 The Duke of Ferrara had been appointed Captain- 
 General of the League with an enormous salary, but he 
 deputed the actual command to his son-in-law, the Duke 
 of Guise, who crossed the Alps with thirteen thousand 
 picked troops, partly drawn from the northern provinces 
 of Picardy and Champagne, thus left exposed to the enemy. 2 
 Though at one stage in the negotiations it had been stipu- 
 lated that the war should be begun in Tuscany, the aim of 
 the Guise had always been Naples. It was indeed arranged 
 in the treaty that the conquered crown was to be given to 
 one of the younger sons of Henry II, but Guise, who had 
 some ostensible hereditaiy claim upon that crown, expected 
 at least the regency. He was glad, therefore, that the 
 defense of the Pope against the Spanish General, Alva, drew 
 him to the south. 
 
 The costly and audacious enterprise whose one chance 
 of success lay in the faithful sacrifices of untrustworthy 
 allies, ended in failure. Guise was obliged to raise the siege 
 of the little town of Civitella. Habile captain as he always 
 was, he drew off his troops without disaster but Alva held 
 him stalemated near Rome, with nothing to do but nurse 
 his men attacked by disease and watch his Italian allies go 
 
 1 Cal. Vcn., 12 Jan., 14 Oct., 16 Nov., 1S56. 
 'Deerue (2), 194.
 
 THE FIRST TASTE OF REAL POWER 85 
 
 over to the enemy. From the discredit of this breakdown 
 of his military and diplomatic plans, he was called home 
 May 28th, 1558, by a polite note from the Constable of 
 France. He seems to have purposely rather delayed his 
 journey and, when he arrived, he was not met as an unsuc- 
 cessful general back from an inglorious and mistaken mili- 
 tary adventure, but as the most powerful man beside the 
 throne. He was greeted by a Latin poet as "the greatest 
 leader of the French, the only man who can raise once more 
 the fallen fortunes of France from the catastrophe which 
 has cast her prostrate never to rise unless he helps her." * 
 
 1 Mems. Journaux, Guise, 358. L'Hopital III, 232.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 DISASTER AND SORROW 
 
 The thing which gave the unsuccessful general the role 
 of national leader, was a great national misfortune. His 
 old rival, the Constable, who directed the resistance to the 
 Imperialist invasion, made a tactical blunder. The superior 
 force of the enemy had taken advantage of it to destroy 
 utterly the main army of France and this spectacular dis- 
 aster had wiped out for the moment all remembrance of 
 the fundamentally bad strategy of Guise. 
 
 The Spaniards and English invading France from the 
 north with an army of about fifty thousand men, had 
 invested Saint Quentin, heroically defended by the Con- 
 stable's nephew, Admiral Coligny. The Constable, who had 
 with difficulty gathered twenty thousand men, advanced 
 somewhat incautiously to reinforce the besieged and then 
 retreat. In this movement he was caught in a bad position 
 and his army was all but annihilated, the tenth of August, 
 1557, in the battle of Saint Quentin. He and most of the 
 French captains north of the Alps were taken prisoners by 
 the Spaniards. The policy of renewing the war which he 
 had so strenuously opposed and the diversion of a consid- 
 erable number of the French troops south of the Alps, were 
 really responsible for this national disaster, but the Con- 
 stable, whose tactical blunder was nearest to it, bore in 
 the eyes of the nation all the blame. That there were, 
 however, some who saw the whole truth the following 
 distich proves: "Henryco parcit populus, maledicet Mont- 
 morency, Dianam odit sed magis Guisardos" (The people 
 spare Henry, curse Montmorency, hate Diana, but more 
 the Guise). Many captains of the day and many historians 
 since, have blamed the Spaniards for not pushing on at once 
 
 86
 
 DISASTER AND SORROW 87 
 
 to Paris. But Paris has never been too easy to take and 
 the difficulties of provisioning a rapidly invading army 
 would have been very great. A contemporary biographer 
 of Philip II puts much wisdom in small space when he 
 writes, "Philip feared lest, like his father, he might march 
 into France eating peacocks and march out eating turnips." * 
 The alarm in Paris was great, but the King, after a 
 moment of despair and rage, showed great courage. He 
 ordered the bulk of the army in Piedmont to come back 
 over the Alps by forced marches. He diverted toward Paris 
 the 6,000 Swiss which had been raised to reinforce Guise 
 in Italy. He ordered all soldiers, gentlemen or others who 
 had ever borne arms, to rally at Laon under command of 
 the Duke of Nevers. He wrote to all his allies asking help 
 and in two days more than two hundred couriers were sent 
 riding in all directions. At the time of the disaster the 
 King was established at Compiegne, about thirty miles 
 behind the permanent entrenched camp of the French army, 
 and he had with him the Queen and the royal council. 
 Just before the battle, he had sent the Queen and the coun- 
 cil back to Paris to attend to some matters there. On the 
 12th of August the Cardinal of Sens, keeper of the Great 
 Seal of France, appeared before the Parlement of Paris. 
 He said he was come by order of the King and Queen to 
 inform them that, although the state was in danger, it was 
 not so great that it was not possible to find a remedy for it. 
 It was the first misfortune that had befallen the King since 
 he came to the throne ten years before. The King had 
 decided to be here tomorrow and meantime, following his 
 orders, the Queen had proposed to come this morning into 
 this court of Parlement, but she was worn out and ill. She 
 had therefore commanded him to give notice to the court 
 of Parlement to appoint a deputation to meet her at the 
 Hotel de Ville to take counsel concerning the state of the 
 kingdom. 2 
 
 1 Societe I Int. 47, Cordoba I, 187. 
 
 2 Societe Doc, pntd. II, 257. Rev. des. Qts. Hist., 32, p. 478. B. N. 
 Dupuy, pntd. Societe II, 264.
 
 88 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 The next afternoon the Queen appeared before Parle- 
 ment. It was the first great public occasion of her life and 
 she rose to it with extraordinary success. The Venetian 
 Ambassador wrote to the Doge and Senate on the 14th of 
 August, 1557: "Yesterday the Most Christian Queen, to 
 settle the business with the citizens commenced by her 
 during the King's absence to obtain the subsidy she had 
 caused to be demanded, went in person to the Parlement 
 house, accompanied by certain cardinals and a number of 
 princes, and in a very grave form of speech represented the 
 present need, adding that, although the most Christian 
 King had incurred such vast expenditure during the past 
 wars, yet, nevertheless, he had always had more regard for 
 the cities than for any other estate of this realm, to which 
 fact he required no other testimony but that of their own 
 consciences, reminding them of how little they had con- 
 tributed hitherto; but as the need continued, his Majesty 
 did not consider it fitting any longer to burden the people, 
 who for the ordinary expenditure were very heavily taxed 
 and yet more exorbitantly through the extra imposts. 
 Wherefore it was necessary for the cities, remembering so 
 many benefits and favors received from His Majesty, to 
 demonstrate to the whole world, in this the kingdom's 
 extreme need, their fidelity and affection for their Prince. 
 Her Majesty spoke with such earnestness and eloquence 
 that every one was moved; and she said in conclusion that 
 the Most Christian King required a vote of 300,000 francs, 
 adding that she would then retire, to leave them free, as 
 usual, to deliberate, which she did by withdrawing into a 
 room. It was immediately voted to comply with her 
 Majesty's demand, . . . and they then respectfully prayed 
 Her Majesty to use her good offices with the King in favor 
 of their privileges. The Queen thanked them in so sweet 
 a form of speech that she made well nigh the whole Parle- 
 ment shed tears from emotion. She told them that, remem- 
 bering this their demonstration towards her, she would 
 always consider them her clients, and she promised to
 
 DISASTER AND SORROW 89 
 
 appoint her son, the Dauphin, their advocate and inter- 
 cessor with the Most Christian King. Thereupon the Parle- 
 ment adjourned, greatly applauding Her Majesty, and with 
 such marks of extreme satisfaction as to defy exaggeration; 
 and all over Paris nothing is talked of but the prudent and 
 gracious manner adopted by Her Majesty in this business, 
 everybody declaring that, had it been managed by any other 
 person, there would neither have been so much liberality 
 nor so much readiness to give. The determination of this 
 city to give His Majesty 300,000 francs will yield about a 
 million and a half of gold; it being customary that when 
 Paris forms a resolve of this sort, she does so for herself 
 and for all the other towns of the kingdom, each of them 
 thus knowing her proportional quota. In a month the King 
 will have about; 60,000 men." J 
 
 Some days later the Venetian Ambassador wrote again 
 describing an interview with the Queen: "I told her Maj- 
 esty that I had heard with great satisfaction that the whole 
 of this city commended her address and mode of proceeding 
 in the Parlement, thus obtaining vast supplies for the King 
 and infinite praise for herself. She spoke of the blunder the 
 Constable had made through too great self-confidence. 
 'Oh!' she cried, 'that the Constable who has not his equal 
 in Christendom should have fallen into such an affair! 
 And I give you my word/ she went on, 'he went away 
 determined not to fight. When he took leave of me I said, 
 "Gossip, for the love of God beware, and consider the con- 
 sequences of any misfortune." He answered, "Madame, 
 I know what is needed — do not be anxious — I know how 
 to take care of myself." ' " 2 
 
 Before the end of the year the Duke of Guise was estab- 
 lished between Paris and the enemy with an army of 
 thirty-five thousand men. As a general Guise was as lucky 
 as he was skilful in handling troops. It was his good for- 
 tune that the whole blame for the mistaken policy of 
 
 * Cal. Vcn, 14 Aug. 1557. B. N. fds. fr. 15494 Montaignes Histoire, etc. 
 1 Cal. Vcn, 21 Aug. 1557, p. 149.
 
 90 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 renewing the war had fallen upon his great rival, the Con- 
 stable. It was now to be his further good fortune to get 
 the entire credit in the eyes of the world for a victory which 
 was due to the strategy of another man. 
 
 From the beginning of his reign, the King had been 
 almost possessed with the idea of recovering Calais from the 
 English. The pride of the English in holding that French 
 seaport was out of all proportion to its value to them. 
 They had cut into the arch of the gate an inscription saying 
 "the Frenchmen will take Calais when iron and lead float 
 like cork." The King forced the Duke of Guise, against 
 his continued remonstrance, to attack Calais suddenly in 
 the depth of winter. On January 9th "at the wedding ball 
 of the daughter of the Duchess of Bouillon with the son 
 of the Duke of Nevers, while the King was dancing in the 
 dusk of the evening, a messenger came from the Duke of 
 Guise to say that a flag of truce had just been raised on the 
 walls of Calais with the offer to surrender. Not only the 
 King and the court and the Queen, but this entire popula- 
 tion make such a great rejoicing that greater could not be 
 made for any other event." The Duke was covered with 
 rewards and honors. All the poets sang his praises and 
 although the truth was known to those at court, yet the 
 brilliant figure of the conqueror replaced in the popular 
 imagination the sombre personality of the King, to whose 
 wise counsel this triumph, which seemed to wipe out the 
 previous defeat, was really due. 1 
 
 But no brilliant stroke like the taking of Calais, how- 
 ever much it might humiliate the hereditary enemy of 
 France, could change the fact that those who had opposed 
 the renewal of war with Spain had been right. Even if 
 Saint Quentin had been a victory, France would not have 
 been able to maintain the struggle long. Her complete 
 financial exhaustion, as well as internal disorders which will 
 be explained later, rendered peace imperatively necessary. 
 
 'Cal. Vcn., 9 Jan. 1558. van Dyke Am. Hist. Soc, 1911. The Taking 
 of Calais.
 
 DISASTER AND SORROW 91 
 
 Spain was little less exhausted and Philip II, who had not 
 wished the renewal of the war, was really more ready to 
 make peace than he allowed it to appear in the negotiations. 
 The great advocate of the policy of peace, the Constable, 
 was indeed a prisoner in the hands of Spain. But his tradi- 
 tional friendship for the House of Hapsburg and his well 
 known and long standing desire for the policy of concilia- 
 tion, made him a very influential prisoner and, with the 
 French King also, his influence seemed to be increased 
 rather than diminished by his absence. In all his letters 
 Henry II expressed the most unbounded affection for him, 
 and no sagacious man could fail to see by the outcome that, 
 in spite of the defeat of Saint Quentin and the victory of 
 Calais, the honors of statecraft really rested with him and 
 not with his brilliant rival, the Duke of Guise. The Queen 
 did not yet see this, but she wrote her "gossip" very friendly 
 letters like the following: 
 
 "My Gossip: 
 
 "I was very glad to hear news of you by Mem, particularly 
 that your wound is doing well and I pray God that very soon you 
 will be in as good health as I desire. . . . The King and all his 
 children are very well and after Easter he will leave here to 
 attend the marriage of his son and the Queen of Scotland at 
 Paris ; where I wish that it would please God that you could be. 
 I assure you that you are much longed for out of a good heart 
 for the pleasure which I assure myself that you would have to 
 see the King and all this company in such good condition, because 
 no one talks of anything except making good cheer and joy and 
 pleasure. God by His grace be willing to continue us in this 
 condition and also be willing to remove you very soon from the 
 place where you are and, in waiting upon His pleasure, I beg 
 you not to bore yourself too much and to take pains to take care 
 ■of yourself and to recover your perfect health, in order to be able 
 to see once more your master and all the rest of us with as much 
 joy as I pray God to give you in it: which will be the place where 
 I shall recommend myself to your good grace. 
 
 "From Fontainbleau, 27th of March — your good gossip and 
 friend, 
 
 "Catebine." 1 
 
 1 Letts. I, 117.
 
 92 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 The marriage to which Catherine alluded took place in 
 April, 1558, and we know that it was not particularly pleas- 
 ing to the Constable, 1 although Catherine politely expressed 
 her sorrow that he was not to be present at the wedding. 
 The closer connection between the reigning lines of the 
 House of Lorraine and the royal House of France had been 
 discussed even before the taking of Calais, 2 and that bril- 
 liant feat of arms sealed the negotiations. This closer alli- 
 ance was to be a double one: Claude, the daughter of Henry 
 and Catherine, was to marry the Duke of Lorraine, and 
 Francis, the Dauphin, was to marry the little Queen of 
 Scots, daughter of Mary, the sister of the Cardinal of Lor- 
 raine and the Duke of Guise. This marriage of state was 
 also a marriage of affection for they had been brought up 
 together and were deeply attached to each other. The 
 ceremony was a splendid one. The Venetian Ambassador 
 thus describes it: 
 
 "Yesterday the wedding ceremonies of the Dauphin and the 
 Queen of Scotland ended, the bride having completed her fifteenth 
 year in the beginning of last December, the bridegroom being 
 fourteen years old on the eighteenth of January last. These 
 nuptials were really considered the most regal and triumphant 
 of any that have been witnessed in this kingdom for many years, 
 whether from the point of view of the company — all the chief 
 personages of the realm, both temporal and spiritual, being 
 assembled, including the Cardinal Legate and all the other 
 Ambassadors — or from the pomp and riches of the jewels and 
 apparel of the lords and ladies, or from the grandeur of the 
 banquet and the stately service of the tables, or from the 
 costliness of the masquerade and other revels. These ceremonies 
 have especially gratified and contented the Parisian people 
 (amongst whom money was thrown on entering the church as a 
 mark of greater joy) because for two hundred years and upward 
 there is no record of any Dauphin having been married within 
 the realm. All, on the contrary, had been married abroad and 
 brought their wives after the ceremony either from Spain, Eng- 
 land, Flanders or Germany. Henceforth the Dauphin will no 
 longer be styled simply the Dauphin, but the King Dauphin, and 
 
 1 Cal. Vcn. App. 1558. 
 8 Cal. Vcn. 1095, 1098, 1115.
 
 DISASTER AND SORROW 93 
 
 the Queen in like manner will be called the Queen Dauphiness: 
 the two crowns of France and of Scotland being united in their 
 arms. The King of Navarre gave me a hint in private con- 
 versation that the Constable had been among the many opponents 
 of this marriage." 
 
 How much honor and power this alliance with the royal 
 house brought to the cadet branch of the House of Lor- 
 raine is suggested by the fact that the Senate of Venice 
 wrote letters of congratulation to the groom and to the 
 bride, to the father and mother of the groom, the King and 
 Queen of France, and to the Cardinal of Lorraine and the 
 Duke of Guise, the uncles of the orphan bride. This great 
 increase of the power of the Lorraines did not make things 
 any easier at court. The Venetian Ambassador reported, 
 "They already write from court about a division between 
 these two ministers and their families and that the factions 
 have declared themselves openly." x 
 
 The natural jealousy and the rivalry of the two houses 
 was brought to a climax by the renewal of that great dis- 
 pute in regard to the policy of the crown on which they 
 had always taken opposite sides. The Constable and his 
 friends wanted peace. The Cardinal of Lorraine, the Duke 
 of Guise and their friends wanted war, or at least they 
 wanted to insist upon better terms of peace than Spain 
 was willing to grant. The pitch of intensity to which this 
 jealousy and hatred finally rose is shown in a scene which 
 took place in the midst of the negotiation with Spain, during 
 one of the times when the Constable was released on parole. 
 It was described to the Venetian Ambassador by the Prince 
 of Ferrara, who took part in it. "The Duke of Guise told 
 the Prince of Ferrara and the Duke of Nemours to be at 
 a certain place outside of the palace at St. Germain. Guise 
 then went and found Francis Montmorency, the Constable's 
 oldest son, in the Queen's room. Drawing him by the hand 
 he said with a smile that he wanted to talk with him. They 
 went out joking, but when Guise got him to the place where 
 
 *C*1. Vcn., 25 App. 1558, ib. pp. 1229-1234.
 
 94 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 he had asked his friends to wait he turned and said : 'I have 
 brought you here because I have heard you have maligned 
 me and said things to my dishonor which I resent. Draw 
 your sword and fight.' Francis denied having said anything 
 to his dishonor. But on returning to the palace he went 
 to the King and told him and his father. The King was 
 much displeased but the Constable affected to make nothing 
 of the affair." The Guises seemed to have the advantage, 
 for they were always at the ear of the King. Guise was a 
 victorious general, the Constable a defeated prisoner, and 
 Diana, always a jealous rival of the Constable for Henry's 
 affection, had become an active enemy at the time of the 
 Lady Fleming affair. For a long while they would not speak 
 to each other. Finally at the instance of the King they 
 made peace on the surface, but "in the bottom of their 
 hearts their hate is as great as ever." 1 
 
 But now the veteran courtier made a great stroke in the 
 game, which is recorded in a letter of the Venetian Ambas- 
 sador: "The conditions of the suggested peace are openly 
 blamed by many, but the Constable has written a letter to 
 the King and another letter to the Duchess of Valentinois. 
 . . . The Duke of Guise is afraid that the Constable and 
 the Duchess, who is now so united to the Constable that 
 they are one and the same, will persuade the King to peace 
 — to the great shame of the King and the universal dis- 
 content of the entire kingdom." The results of this stroke 
 of the Constable in winning the alliance of Diana are de- 
 scribed in a letter of Cardinal Trivulzio to Cardinal Caraffa 
 dated the 15th of November, 1558: 
 
 "I wrote yesterday to Your Illustrious Excellency informing 
 you that there was no hope of peace. Today I hear from a most 
 excellent source that His Majesty, returning from hunting, had 
 a long conversation with Mme. de Valentinois, who had received 
 letters, as the King had also, from the Constable, written with 
 his own hand. He went from there into the council of affairs, 
 where he said that he had come to announce his decision in favor 
 
 *Cal. Vcn., 15 Nov. 1558.
 
 DISASTER AND SORROW 95 
 
 of peace. When one of the councillors wished to continue an 
 argument against his decision, he bade him be silent." * 
 
 It was at this time the Constable received the following 
 letter: 
 
 "Monsieur: — 
 
 "I have received the letters which you have written to me, 
 for which I thank you very humbly for the trouble which you 
 have taken because I believe your work is so great that you have 
 really no leisure to write to me with your own hand and it 
 suffices me to simply receive a remembrance from you but never- 
 theless the secretary who is finishing the half of my letter and 
 I myself recommend ourselves to your good grace and we pray 
 God to give you that which you desire. This comes from your 
 
 ancient and best friends, ,, TT „ „ „ 
 
 ' "Henry — Diana." 2 
 
 A month later Strozzi wrote to a friend: 
 
 "The marriage of Montmorency [the Constable's son] with 
 the oldest daughter of Mme. Valentinois [Diana] will take 
 place soon after the return of the Constable, which is a reason 
 why a very strong confederation has been formed between the 
 two, which has caused much astonishment to many people be- 
 cause of the little friendship which they had in the past. This 
 new combination made every effort to gain the Queen and to draw 
 her from her party and it is feared that between this and her 
 fear of displeasing the King, Her Majesty will allow herself to 
 be gained, although she swears and affirms that this will never 
 happen." 3 
 
 One ambassador has told us how this quarrel among the 
 men of these two rival factions came to drawn swords. Let 
 another tell us how the quarrel between the women came to 
 .words as sharp as swords: 
 
 "The Duke of Guise says that the day before they had made 
 His Majesty promise with an oath never to surrender Piedmont, 
 ... the Queen had very bravely urged His Majesty, as far as 
 she possibly could, not to confirm his mind in a resolution so little 
 
 1 Cal. Vcn., 15 Nov., Arch. Mod. qtd. Romier II, 312 N. 
 ' Guiffret, 161. The underscored words in the King's hand; the others 
 in Diana's. 
 
 3 Mss. qtd. Romier II, 311 N. 3.
 
 96 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 honorable as to surrender it, even kneeling at his feet in order 
 to turn him from this resolution, calling out to him that the 
 Constable had never done anything but evil. To this the King 
 responded that the Constable had always done well and that they 
 had done evil who had ever counseled him to break the truce 
 and so, without being the least moved from his opinion, he left 
 her with these words. . . . The Queen, being in her cabinet after 
 this scene, reading, in order to pass the time, the history of this 
 kingdom, Madame the Seneschale [Diana] entered and demanded 
 of Her Majesty whether she was reading anything that was good. 
 The Queen answered her, 'I am reading the history of this king- 
 dom and I find that always from time to time courtesans (to use 
 the word that she used) have been influential in the affairs of 
 kings/ and left her with this word." * 
 
 Whether Catherine's long patience broke down in this 
 instance and she really flung this harsh speech in the teeth 
 of her husband's mistress or not, cannot be told for certain. 
 This may be an exaggerated report. But certain it is that 
 Catherine suffered the tortures of jealousy during those 
 thirteen years when she bore her husband ten children and 
 that, at least once, she was tempted to a protest much more 
 vigorous than any words she could have used. A strange 
 chance has preserved for us a record of an unaccomplished 
 crime, a planned revenge of the Queen against her rival 
 which shows a state of Catherine's mind which renders this 
 reported scene at least probable and makes plain that the 
 posthumous complacence with which she wrote of the situa- 
 tion to Henry IV in the letter already quoted, is the record 
 of a seeming indifference which masked a heart torn by the 
 fiercest passion. 
 
 In May, 1561 (about two years after her husband's 
 death) the Duke of Nemours wrote to Catherine: "I have 
 always been ready to employ myself to do you humble 
 service without considering, provided you were satisfied with 
 it, the good or evil which might come to me from it. If you 
 please you can remember that this is so." 2 
 
 1 Arch. Mod., qtd. Romier II, 314 N. 1. 
 
 a B. N. Fds. fr. 3159 f. 49. Letter answered by Catherine 21 May, 1661. 
 Letts. I, 197.
 
 DISASTER AND SORROW 97 
 
 The meaning of this allusion would have been lost but 
 for a curious incident. The following October the Duke of 
 Nemours fled hastily from court under suspicion of being 
 engaged in a plot to abduct one of the princes. He wrote 
 in his own excuse, a letter, which repeats this allusion to 
 some dangerous service he had been willing to do for 
 Catherine: "I recollect that you were pleased to trust me 
 and use me in many things ; which I thought a great honor 
 because they were things of great consequence to you. I 
 remember also the pleasure I took to do you favors in them 
 and the devotion and service with which I gave myself to 
 do a thing which was agreeable, without reminding you of 
 the danger and enmity which might follow for me from 
 such an action if it should become known, chiefly from him 
 or those whom it concerned." This letter was copied in a 
 selection made in the 18th century of documents concerning 
 his attempt to carry off the little prince. 1 In that copy the 
 above allusion to some unknown dangerous service which 
 Nemours had once offered to do for Catherine, was under- 
 scored and in the margin there had been written by the 
 copyist: "In the original copy sent to Mon. de Limoges 
 (Ambassador to Spain) there is, at the end of the under- 
 scored lines, a reference to a footnote at the bottom of the 
 page which is here put at the bottom of the letter." The 
 copyist preceded his record of the lost footnote with these 
 words: "Note in the hand of Claude de L'Aubespine (one 
 of Catherine's secretaries with an unmistakable hand, 
 brother of the Ambasador to Spain) : "The Queen laughed 
 heartily when she saw in the letter of Mon. de Nemours 
 the lines marked and recalled that she wanted to use him, 
 when she was so angered at Madame de Valentinois, to 
 throw a strong distilled water in her face, as if in sport, 
 which would have disfigured her for life. And so she had 
 thought to get back the King her husband ; but, on further 
 reflection, she decided not to do it. Please burn this letter 
 after you have read it." The original copy sent to Spain 
 
 * B. N. Fds. fr. 6608.
 
 98 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 is also in the Bibliotheque Nationale * but the bottom of 
 the sheet containing the original of the above note of the 
 secretary has been cut off by a knife or a pair of scissors. 
 Curiously enough this original note of Catherine's secre- 
 tary, doubtless cut off to be stolen, was repurchased in 
 1913 and returned to the Bibliotheque Nationale 1 and it 
 enables us to read her heart at this time better than almost 
 all those who lived with her at the court of France. Not 
 only this criminal impulse which never passed into action, 
 but the very active part the Queen played in the struggle 
 to win the King for peace or war, escaped the notice of all 
 the sharp-eyed and curious ambassadors resident at the 
 French court except the Ambassador of Ferrara, whose 
 relation to the Duchess of Guise, his master's daughter and 
 Catherine's intimate friend, gave him sources of secret 
 information. 
 
 That the King was more anxious for peace than he was 
 willing to confess to the importunate advocates of war who 
 backed the counsel of the Cardinal of Lorraine and the 
 Duke of Guise, is evident from the following letters written 
 to the captive Constable: 
 
 "My Friend: 
 
 "I assure you that Mons. de Guise does not want peace, 
 pointing out to me every day that I have more means for 
 continuing the war than I ever had and that I shall not make 
 so great a loss in continuing the war as I shall have if you come 
 to an arrangement. . . . Do what you can to give us peace and 
 do not show this letter to any one but Marshal St. Andre and 
 after that burn it." 
 
 And a little later he wrote: 
 
 "I would gladly suffer death which I would consider happy 
 and I would die content, if I could see a good peace." 
 
 There was«a secret pressure for peace from the Spanish 
 King as strong as that brought to bear on the Constable by 
 Henry II. He wrote to his peace commissioner : 
 
 1 B. N. Fds. fr. 6618 f. 52. Scribner's Magazine, July, 1910: "An Un- 
 finished Crime," with facsimiles, by Paul van Dyke.
 
 DISASTER AND SORROW 99 
 
 "I find myself under an absolute impossibility of continuing 
 the war. I have already spent twelve hundred thousand ducats 
 which I raised from Spain two or three months ago, and I have 
 need of another million in the coming month of March. They 
 have sent me from Spain Doctor de Lasco to assure me that they 
 cannot do anything more for me. The situation seems to me so 
 very grave that, under pain of losing everything, I must come to 
 some sort of an arrangement. I am waiting with a very active 
 impatience for news, but on no account whatever must these 
 negotiations be broken off." * 
 
 The peace which was made under these conditions, on 
 the French side chiefly by the Constable assisted by the 
 Cardinal of Lorraine, was not simply a dynastic peace, 
 between the houses of Hapsburg and Valois, or even a 
 national peace between France and Spain. As the contem- 
 porary de Thou points out, it "included the Pope, the 
 Emperor, all the princes and states of the Empire, the 
 Kings of Poland, Sweden, Denmark and Scotland, the 
 Queen of England, the Republic of Venice, Switzerland and 
 the Dukes of Lorraine, Savoy, Ferrara, Mantua, Urbino, 
 Parma, and Piacenza and the Republics of Genoa and 
 Lucca; so that it was not a peace between the French and 
 Spaniards but between all Christian princes." It remained, 
 on the whole, the base of the public law of Europe for about 
 a hundred years until the Peace of Westphalia. 2 
 
 The Treaty of Cateau-Cambresis was no such ostensibly 
 brilliant victory for France as the Truce of Vaucelles, but 
 it retained the most valuable of the conquests of Henry II, 
 the Bishopric of Metz, Toul and Verdun, Boulogne and 
 Calais; the last under the guise of a temporary occupation 
 which everybody suspected would be permanent. This re- 
 stricted France to her natural boundaries by giving up the 
 conquests which had been made in Italy at the expense of 
 the Duke of Savoy, who was restored to his estates; with 
 the exception of a few fortresses which were to be held for 
 
 'Guiffret 155. B. N. fds. fr. 3139, qtd. de Ruble (1). Granvelle (1) V, 
 453, Comp. 397. 
 
 a De Thou, II, 664.
 
 100 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 a time by France. The reinstated Duke was to marry thd 
 Princess Marguerite, sister of Henry II. France therefore 
 gained the advantage of having on its borders to the north- 
 east and the southeast, two buffer states, Lorraine and 
 Savoy, bound to it by marriage alliances. The long rivalry 
 between Hapsburg and Valois was also to be ended by a 
 marriage. Philip II, on the death of his first wife, Mary 
 Tudor, had vainly tried to persuade her successor, Eliza- 
 beth, to marry him. He now proposed that .the oldest 
 daughter of Henry II, Elizabeth, who had been engaged to 
 his oldest son, Carlos, should become the Queen of Spain, 
 and Catherine, who had seen her eldest son married at 
 fifteen, was now to see her eldest daughter married at 
 fourteen. 
 
 The Venetian Ambassador wrote home : "Both at Paris 
 and in all other towns of the kingdom, this peace, published 
 by the sound of trumpet and proclaimed by the royal 
 heralds, was received with demonstrations of universal joy 
 as shown by bonfires and public tables prepared in the 
 streets." But the states of Germany and Italy which had 
 been allied to France, and to which any peace meant an 
 increased pressure from the Hapsburgs and their friends, 
 looked upon this settlement of the long war between the 
 two houses with an evil eye. In addition the whole warrior 
 class, and that meant practically the entire nobility, re- 
 garded it as a disgrace to France. The Duke of Guise, in 
 whose hearing the King was explaining the reasons for 
 peace, broke out in great excitement: "I swear to you, 
 sire, that this is an evil road, for, even if you should do 
 nothing but lose during thirty years, you could not lose 
 what you are now giving up at a single stroke. Put me in 
 the worst and weakest city of those which you are giving 
 up and I will gain more glory holding it in the breach than I 
 shall ever be able to do, under a peace so disadvantageous." 
 When Marshal Brissac, who had held Piedmont victoriously 
 for France, heard of it, he exclaimed in despair, "Oh miser- 
 able France, to what loss and ruin hast thou allowed thyself
 
 DISASTER AND SORROW 101 
 
 to be thus reduced, Thou who wast triumphant over all the 
 nations of Europe!" * 
 
 This attitude of the Italian and German allies of France, 
 rebels against the ruling influences in their own lands, and 
 the chagrin of the French fighting men, has on the whole 
 dominated history which, in the past, has been to a great 
 extent written by men who could not escape from the 
 delusion that the strength and glory of a nation are in- 
 creased when it exercises a usurped dominion over unwilling 
 peoples and imposes its language and civilization on those 
 who hate them. But in modern times, when some historians 
 have begun to have a real sympathy for the rights of other 
 nationalities than their own, this "glory of France" attitude 
 toward the Peace of Cateau-Cambresis, has been replaced 
 by one more critical and more reasonable. That the haste 
 of the Constable to be free and the impatience of Henry II, 
 kept France from taking full advantage of the necessities of 
 Spain, seems probable. But the Treaty of Cateau-Cam- 
 bresis brought France two great advantages. It freed her 
 from the "chimera of Italian conquest," and it brought 
 her permanent defenses where they were most needed. 
 Calais against England, Metz against Germany, were "bul- 
 warks of incalculable value," worth far more than Piedmont 
 for, as Etienne Pasquier wrote at the time, "Italy was never 
 any use to us French except as a tomb when we invaded 
 it." 2 
 
 After the game whose prize was the control of the 
 King's mind, was lost, Catherine did not continue the 
 struggle or sulk over her defeat. Whatever her personal 
 chagrin may have been, the defeat of the war party could 
 not have been a very serious matter to her. Her natural 
 inclinations were all against war and if she pleaded for it in 
 this instance, it was only because of her interest in Italy, 
 strengthened perhaps by a temporary pique against the 
 Constable. For desperate fighting on the northern border 
 
 *Cal. Vcn. 18 App. 1559. Villars, 316, 318. 
 'Battifol. Ranke. Pasquier (2), Bk. IV, 1.
 
 102 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 she had no stomach and she had learned once for all the 
 untrustworthiness of the allies of France in Italy. She 
 returned to her habitual passive acquiescence in her hus- 
 band's wishes — the normal role of a Queen of France — and 
 those activities as titular head of the ladies of the French 
 court which, during her entire life, always gave her great 
 pleasure. Catherine had a very womanly delight in match- 
 making, which lasted until her seventieth year, when she 
 arranged the marriage of her favorite grand-daughter. 
 When she came to great power the best explanation of her 
 changeable policy is often to be found in this ruling passion 
 for making good marriages for her children. It probably 
 helped her at this time to accept her defeat and write a 
 graceful letter to the Duke of Savoy, one of the two bride- 
 grooms of the peace. 
 
 "My Brotheb: 
 
 "I have seen in a letter which you have written me the joy 
 and contentment which you find in this peace, which is no less 
 great on my part, knowing the good which it brings to all Chris- 
 tendom and particularly the good which it brings to you; ... as 
 I have prayed the Count of Stropian to tell you more at length 
 and to assure you that, besides the honor and the friendship 
 which I have all my life had for Madame my sister [her sister- 
 in-law Marguerite] ... I have hoped for you what I now see 
 accomplished; remembering the alliance which in other days your 
 house and mine had with one another. For, knowing her as I do, 
 I am certain that, besides the honor which this will bring you, 
 you couldn't receive a greater happiness and contentment than 
 you will receive with her. ... I recommend myself very heartily 
 to your good grace praying God to keep you in His holy keeping. 
 From Fontainebleau this 25th of April, 1559. 
 
 "Your good sister, Catektne." 1 
 
 She began at once to make preparations for the cere- 
 mony and in the end of April she wrote to the daughter of 
 the Governor-General of Piedmont asking her to get from 
 her father a passport which would enable the merchants 
 from whom "Count Theophile had bought some cloth of 
 
 1 Letts. I, 120.
 
 DISASTER AND SORROW 103 
 
 gold, some silk and other clothes while he was passing 
 through Milan, to send them quickly to France and not to 
 allow any export duty to be charged on them for fear of 
 delaying their delivery." x Catherine had need of fine 
 clothes, for any ceremonial of the French court was sure to 
 be a most elaborate affair. 
 
 No king of the sporting tendencies of Henry II could 
 possibly plan a great public ceremonial without giving him- 
 self a chance to enjoy the favorite amusement of a tourna- 
 ment. Magnificent lists were prepared for three days' 
 jousting. Henry bore himself with his usual skill and vigor ; 
 for with him a tournament was no mere formal affair. 
 When he was a young man the Venetian Ambassador 
 records that, riding against his father, Francis I, he got 
 "such a blow in the face that he couldn't forget it very 
 soon, because it took away a great piece of flesh." When 
 the jousts came he played a large part in them. He broke 
 a lance with the Duke of Savoy and another with the Duke 
 of Guise. He ran a third course with the young Count of 
 Montgomery, captain of the Scottish Guards. The shock 
 was so rude that the King lost his stirrup and was visibly 
 shaken in his saddle. Much chagrined to have been almost 
 unseated in the presence of the brilliant assemblage by a 
 young man, the King wanted to break another lance with 
 his antagonist. He had borrowed a war horse of the Duke 
 of Savoy with which he was very much pleased, and the 
 Duke and several others now begged him, as the hour was 
 late, not to ride again. His wife also sent a messenger from 
 the ladies' stand to beg him not to ride another course, for 
 she was troubled by prophecies of diviners, whom, like 
 many patrons of the Renascence, she was wont to consult. 
 But he said he would only ride this one and he mounted in 
 such haste that he did not wait to have the vizor of his 
 helmet properly adjusted. "When the trumpet sounded," 
 the English Ambassador writes, "young Mr. de Montgomery 
 gave him such a counter-buff as, first lighting on the King's 
 
 1 Letts. I, 121.
 
 104 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 head and taking away his pannage (whereupon there was a 
 great plume of feathers), which was fastened to his head- 
 piece with iron, did break his staff and with the rest of the 
 staff hitting the King's face, he drove a splinter right over 
 his eye on the right side, the force of which stroke was so 
 vehement that he had great ado to keep himself on horse- 
 back and the horse did somewhat yield." * 
 
 The King was lifted from the saddle and when they 
 took off his helmet a flood of blood covered his whole head. 
 The Queen and the Dauphin, who were on the tribune, 
 fainted and the ladies of the court uttered screams of alarm. 
 They carried him to the palace which was at the side of the 
 lists. He tried to walk up the staircase but had to be helped 
 by the Constable, the Duke of Guise and the Cardinal of 
 Lorraine. Behind him came another group carrying the 
 Dauphin, who still lay in a dead faint. They took a splinter 
 of wood four inches long from the wound, besides four other 
 smaller pieces. The King bore the painful operation with 
 extraordinary courage, and it was at first believed that he 
 would escape with the loss of one eye, but blood poisoning 
 set in and he began to sink into lethargy and show signs of 
 approaching death. Catherine watched by the bedside of 
 her husband and would not allow Diana to come near him. 
 He talked with spirit at intervals and asked to see his young 
 captain to assure him that he knew he had hurt him only 
 by accident. He even ordered that the feast and the tour- 
 nament should be begun again in a few days. But in spite 
 of these rallies he continued to sink. Better surgical knowl- 
 edge might perhaps have saved him, but he had by his bed 
 the best surgeons and doctors of the day. The feeble 
 Dauphin, as his father grew worse, wandered about the 
 palace, beating his head against the walls and crying, "My 
 God! how can I live if my father dies." The King, in a 
 lucid interval, sent for the lad, took him by the hand and 
 said, "My boy, you are going to be without your father, 
 but not without his blessing. I pray God to make you 
 
 "Rel. I, 2, p. 271. Pasquier (who was present), Cal. F. 1558-59, p. 346.
 
 DISASTER AND SORROW 105 
 
 more fortunate than I have been." A short time after this 
 scene, and eleven days after the accident, Henry II died, in 
 his forty-first year. 1 
 
 The Venetian Ambassador reports that when he went to 
 pay his visit of condolence, the Queen Mother answered in 
 a tone of voice so sad and feeble that no one, even by the 
 strictest attention, could hear what she said. Seven months 
 later Marie Stuart wrote to her mother, "She (the Queen 
 Mother), is still so grieved and suffered so much during the 
 illness of the late King that I am afraid she will have a 
 serious illness because of her sorrow." 2 That the loss of 
 this unfaithful but kind husband was a great grief to Cath- 
 erine, we know not only from what she or others said at the 
 time of his death, but in many ways. Scandal has never 
 been more common or more malignant than at the court of 
 Henry II and his three sons, but the enemies of Catherine, 
 who afterwards accused her of every possible and many 
 impossible crimes, did not accuse her of unfaithfulness even 
 to her husband's memory. She had always been accustomed 
 to dress magnificently, but though she increased the band of 
 maids of honor and gentlewomen which had made the court 
 of Henry II so brilliant and ordered them to dress in the 
 most superb fashion, she never again put on anything but 
 black; marking festival days by wearing velvet. There is 
 no picture of her after the age of forty without the black 
 headdress of a widow. It was in the taste of the time that 
 she took as her new coat of arms a heap of quick-lime on 
 which tears were falling, with the motto, "ardorem extincta 
 testantur vivere flamma. See! the glow lingers though the 
 flame be gone." 
 
 The gay and brilliant Queen, true daughter of Florence, 
 who loved to ride to hounds and shoot with the arbalest and 
 play tennis, who made the most beautiful embroidery, who 
 was fond of dances and comedies and "very ready to 
 laugh," whose quickness at repartee was often shown at the 
 
 1 Arch. Mod., Romier mss. qtd. II, 387 N. 
 *Qtd. Baschet 493, Labanoff I, 71.
 
 106 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 informal receptions enlivened by music she gave in her 
 rooms could not change that love of splendor and pleasure 
 whose indulgence she had been taught to consider as one of 
 the duties of her position. 1 It was not in the composition 
 of her nervous system, as apt for laughter as for tears, to 
 remain continuously depressed, but of all the sorrows which 
 came to her, and she saw nine of her ten children and most 
 of her friends die, none was so great or so lasting as the 
 death of her husband. All during her life she gave many 
 signs that she remembered him with pleasure and regret. 
 She loved to talk about him. Brantome writes in his gos- 
 sipy style, "I have heard the Queen say (she did me the 
 honor sometimes to talk to me) that the late King Henry 
 was, in his youth, one of the best jumpers in the Court and 
 no one could match him except Bonnivet — and sometimes 
 one would beat and sometimes the other — but never by 
 more than a couple of inches, and how he loved to jump 
 ditches of twenty-two and twenty-three feet, which they 
 often jumped, and how once Bonnivet would have been 
 drowned in a ditch he tried to jump if the King had not 
 saved him." 
 
 She remembered how he used to laugh at one of her 
 nurses whose stream of language never ceased. Many years 
 after his death, an abbe, writing to an Italian cardinal, said, 
 "the Queen does not talk of anything except of the friend- 
 ship which King Henry had for you and of the intimacies 
 which he showed you." Seventeen years after his death 
 she gave a sum of money for masses to be said at St. Denis 
 for the repose of her husband's soul. Eight years later she 
 did the same thing in the Convent of the Murate at Flor- 
 ence. Within a year of her death at seventy she wrote to 
 her son to say that she was not sorry that the King of 
 Navarre had broken an engagement with her of the greatest 
 importance, because "Friday has been for me so unhappy 
 because it was the day when the King your father was 
 wounded ; a wound which brought to me principally and to 
 
 1 Brant., VIII, Vie de Cde. M.
 
 HENRY II, HUSBAND OF CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 From a painting in the Louvre attributed to FranQois Clouet
 
 DISASTER AND SORROW 107 
 
 all the kingdom so much evil that I cannot think on that 
 day I can do anything good." 
 
 It was in sober truth that Catherine wrote to her daugh- 
 ter Elizabeth, a year and a half after King Henry's death, 
 when her oldest son had followed him to the grave: 
 
 "For this reason, my dear daughter, recommend yourself well 
 to God, because you have seen me as contented as you are, 
 without a thought of ever having any other trouble than not to 
 be loved as much as I wanted to be by the King your father, 
 who honored me more than I merited, but I loved him so much 
 that I had always fear, as you know, in many ways, and God 
 has taken him away from me. For this, my dear daughter, 
 remember me and let me serve as an example, so that you do not 
 trust so much in the love which you bear your husband and in 
 the honor and the ease which you have at this present moment, 
 as to forget to recommend yourself to Him who can continue 
 your happiness and also when it pleases Him put you into 
 the state in which I am: for I would sooner die than see you 
 there, from the fear that you could not carry so much trouble 
 as I have had and still have, which I am sure without His help 
 I would not know how to carry. 
 
 "Your good mother, Caterine." x 
 
 1 Letts. I, 568; VII, 441; IX, 187; X, 411, 494; Arch. Nap., qtd. Homier 
 (1) I, 313.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE GREAT EUROPEAN CONVULSION 
 
 The death of Henry II in his prime was hailed by some 
 of his subjects with the solemn joy with which a Hebrew 
 prophet hailed the death of an open enemy of God. Ville- 
 madon, ancient servitor of Marguerite, Queen of Navarre, 
 sister of Francis I, an old courtier who had known Catherine 
 well in her younger days, wrote to her soon after the death 
 of her husband, a long letter in which he said, 
 
 "God, deeply angered and offended, permitted the late King 
 to fall into hardness of heart so far as to make himself a . . . 
 complete enemy of His Holy Word. . . . But He has been pleased 
 to show that He knows well how to avenge Himself because in 
 the middle of your triumph . . . even in the afternoon on whose 
 morning there had been held a great council against His faithful 
 ones, He caused the said King to die by the blow of a lance. . . . 
 And, oh! extraordinary fortune, who killed him? Was it not the 
 captain who but a little while before by his commandment had 
 bound and imprisoned the innocent du Bourg, whom this poor 
 King had sworn he would see burned with his own eyes before 
 he left Paris? What has become of his eyes? What has the 
 hand of God done to them? Oh, all you who love and fear the 
 Almighty, I know that you know and see it clearly." x 
 
 In order to understand this letter we must look at the 
 nature and history of the movement among the French 
 people which had begun soon after the marriage of Cather- 
 ine and had grown in spite of the increasing severity with 
 which her father-in-law and her husband had tried to re- 
 press it. It was caused by the spread of a heresy which 
 denounced as contrary to the word of God some of the 
 ceremonies and teachings of the Universal Church of which 
 
 1 Conde, I, 627. 
 
 108
 
 THE GREAT EUROPEAN CONVULSION 109 
 
 the National Church of France was a part. Heresy was in 
 the air when Catherine was born, and the movement which 
 was to influence so deeply her life as Queen and ruler of 
 France, was only a part of a general convulsion of European 
 thought and society. This huge convulsion of European 
 society in whose vortex the life of Catherine was caught, had 
 three causes. First, the perception very wide-spread among 
 active-minded men of the deep corruption of ecclesiastical 
 institutions. Second, the intellectual movement spoken of 
 as the Renascence. Third, the advance in the process of 
 the formation of national feeling or patriotism. 
 
 The fact of the deep corruption of the Church and its 
 great influence in producing heresy and schism, is plainly 
 seen in almost the entire literature of the first two genera- 
 tions of the sixteenth century. The most convincing and 
 the only unquestionable evidence of it, is to be found in the 
 words of men who never became heretics and died in the 
 communion of the ancient mother. This is the only sort of 
 evidence upon this point that can be handled without the 
 utmost caution. The intensity of the controversies about 
 religion — controversies which soon added the sword to the 
 pen as a weapon, and plunged Europe into a hundred years 
 of intermittent war — the active, and conscientious hate 
 bred by these wars and controversies, paralyzed the moral 
 judgments of men. In the sixteenth century, no story was 
 too bad to believe, with or without proof, against the other 
 side. The champions of this great intellectual combat — the 
 greatest the world has seen since the struggle of Christian- 
 ity and paganism in the days of the Roman Empire — in- 
 herited also the bad habit of medieval polemics, made 
 worse by the passions of the Italian fifteenth century 
 Humanists, of considering attacks upon the personal char- 
 acter of any adversary as a legitimate, almost a necessary 
 part of serious controversies. Hence, Martin Luther could 
 not judge too harshly the moral conduct of that active de- 
 fender of the Protestant cause, Philip of Hesse. It is very 
 illuminating to see in the contemporary correspondence of
 
 110 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 the friends of orthodoxy that, when Mary, Queen of Scots, 
 had taken for her second husband the heretic Bothwell, 
 they were inclined to give credence to that same evidence 
 that she had murdered her second husband which in later 
 days, when she had become the pillar of Catholicism and 
 the martyr of the faith, seemed to them only the basest 
 slanders of her enemies and the foes of God's truth. Few 
 men who felt deeply in the controversies of the sixteenth 
 century could be just to their oponents or were even willing 
 to try to be. But when in such times a man gives testimony 
 to the discredit of his own side, the reader need not fear that 
 his eyes are blinded by zeal nor his judgment warped by 
 prejudice. 
 
 A few examples of utterances of men who never ranged 
 themselves among the heretics will show how widely the 
 corruption of the Church and her need of sweeping reforms 
 were accepted as facts in the first generations of the six- 
 teenth century. Guicciardini, the Florentine historian, 
 wrote, "It is not possible to say so much evil of the Court 
 of Rome that it would not be truthfully possible to say 
 more, because it is an infamy, an example of all the shames 
 and opprobriums of the world. ... I do not know which 
 displeases me most, the ambitions, the avarice or the lust 
 of the priests. For if each of these vices is odious in itself, 
 each one, and all of them together are the more unfitting 
 for the character of one who professes that his fife depends 
 upon God. Nevertheless, the position which I have occu- 
 pied in the service of several Popes has compelled me to 
 support their greatness on account of my own particular 
 interests, and if it had not been for that consideration, I 
 would have loved Martin Luther as I love myself, not to 
 free myself from the laws of the Christian religion in the 
 mode in which it is interpreted and understood generally, 
 but to see reduced to the position where they ought to be, 
 that crowd of scoundrels (the clergy) that is to say, com- 
 pelled to live either without vices or without authority." x 
 
 1 Guicciardini I, 27, 97.
 
 THE GREAT EUROPEAN CONVULSION 111 
 
 Adrian VI, the first pope elected after Luther's revolt, said 
 in his message to the German Reichstag, "We freely confess 
 that God permits this persecution of His church because of 
 human sins — especially the sins of prelates and priests . . . 
 we know very well that from the Holy See itself there has 
 proceeded much that was abominable . . . and the disease 
 has spread from the head to the members." Erasmus whose 
 chief works were sanctioned by the Pope wrote in 1521: 
 "The corruption of the church, the degeneracy of the Holy 
 See are universally admitted." * Pope Pius V wrote to the 
 King of France: "The vices of the priests were the first 
 cause of heresy. They furnished the material for the ser- 
 mons of the heretics to draw upon the Church hatred and 
 disdain and to disparage her doctrines. The ordinary 
 ignorant man considers less what the priests speak than he 
 does the manner in which they live. He is more influenced 
 by their example than he is by their words and their bad 
 morals deprive what they say of all authority." 2 The 
 Emperor of Germany in 1565 insisted that the Pope must 
 allow priests to marry, "for the people will not any more 
 accept unmarried priests, because they all keep mistresses 
 and try to seduce the wives of others." 3 The Venetian 
 Ambassador writes in 1565, "The prelates of Spain live ex- 
 ceedingly luxuriously and there are very few of them who 
 have not illegitimate children whom they do not conceal 
 and they leave nothing undone to make them rich." 4 The 
 Spanish Ambassador reported to Philip II in 1560 that the 
 Cardinal of Lorraine spoke of "scandals in the church, and 
 the abuses of ecclesiastics in words which could not be ex- 
 ceeded by any German" (Lutheran). 5 The poet, Pierre 
 Gringoire, wrote at the beginning of the sixteenth century, 
 "Simony is as much loved now as it was by Simon Magus and 
 even if a man had as many eyes as Argus it would be hard for 
 
 1 Lett, to Jonas. 
 *Qtd. Brimont I, 395 N. 3. 
 'Granvelle (1), IX, 225. 
 
 4 Rel. I, 5, p. 79. Bratli, 159, gives titles of many books written by 
 orthodox men denouncing the corruption in the Spanish Church. 
 6 A. N. K. 1493 f . 43, Comp. Forbes 338.
 
 112 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 him to see perfect pastors." Two generations later Ronsard 
 wrote, "But if Saint Paul should come back here below, what 
 would he say of our young prelates who take no care of their 
 poor flocks whose wool they shear and sometimes strip off 
 even the skins: all of whom live without labor, without 
 preaching, without praying, without giving a good example; 
 perfumed, barbered, hangers on at court, lovers, gallants, 
 hunters and sportsmen, who waste with bad women that 
 property of God of which they are nothing but the guardi- 
 ans." * ' 
 
 But this fact of corruption, though it would undoubtedly 
 in time have produced reforms, would not of itself have pro- 
 duced the great schism between northern and southern 
 Christianity which is usually and by a narrow, unprecise se 
 of words spoken of as "The Reformation." To do that two 
 other forces cooperated. One of the causes was the move- 
 ment which historians during the last fifty years, have 
 agreed to describe as the Renascence. This term has been 
 used by writers in two senses. At first it was employed to 
 denote merely the results of the revival of the influence of 
 the models of classic antiquity in literature and the plastic 
 arts. But the term has come to be used in a wider and 
 deeper sense to denote a general broadening and quickening 
 of the human spirit, forming new judgments and finding 
 new sources of pleasure and new methods of expression in 
 all branches of human activity. The effect of the Rena- 
 scence is, of course, most visible and its processes can be 
 most easily traced in the history of the plastic arts. But 
 the central and most characteristic movement of the Rena- 
 scence was the spread of a new theory of education which 
 gradually brought in a new way of looking at life, made 
 education fashionable among the classes who had the best 
 chances in the world and therefore rapidly changed some of 
 the ideas prevalent among men who had great influence 
 upon human institutions and the condition of society. 
 
 One of the springs of this central movement of the 
 
 *Gringoire I, 91. Ronsard VII, 43.
 
 THE GREAT EUROPEAN CONVULSION 113 
 
 Renascence can be clearly seen in the life and writings of 
 Petrarch, who died in the year 1374. His influence fostered 
 in Italy a movement in favor of a "New Learning/' defended 
 and carried on by a class of men who called themselves the 
 Humanists as opposed to the "Old Learning" of the Scholas- 
 tics, who were quick to oppose every suggested change in 
 the substance or methods of instruction. The traditional 
 sway of the old Scholastic Learning was hotly defended 
 by those monastic orders whose members had saved learning 
 during the Dark Ages and built up the great medieval uni- 
 versities. One chief desire of the Humanists was to restore 
 the knowledge of Greek; which, at the birth of Petrarch, 
 could be read, so far as we know, by no man born west of the 
 Adriatic. Another strong desire of the Humanists was to 
 get back, in the case of any classic author, through modern 
 comments, to the original text or manuscript of his works. 
 Humanism, which rapidly found patrons among most of the 
 princes and nobles of Italy, did not at first concern itself 
 very much with religion. A certain number of the Human- 
 ists became pagans, though preserving an outward respect 
 for the ceremonies and doctrines of the Church, and even 
 the more pious Humanists (and in 1447 Humanism incar- 
 nate ascended the papal throne in the person of Nicholas V) 
 did not apply to the sacred Scriptures that typical curios- 
 ity, that desire to get back to the original language and the 
 original manuscripts which was one of their marked traits 
 in the realm of classic literature. 
 
 But when Humanism and the New Learning spread 
 across the Alps, as it did at the end of the fifteenth century, 
 it took on a new spirit. In Spain, England, Switzerland, 
 France, and Germany, it began to devote itself at once to 
 the study of the Scriptures. The German scholar Reuchlin 
 made a revived knowledge of Hebrew one of its instruments 
 and henceforth pure Latin as opposed to medieval scholas- 
 tic Latin, Greek and Hebrew, formed the triad typical of the 
 New Learning. He and all the other northern Humanists 
 were denounced as patrons of studies tending to worldlinesa
 
 114 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 and heresy by the monks, most of whom remained pas- 
 sionate advocates of the Old Learning. The relation of this 
 movement to the ancient desire for ecclesiastical reform, 
 brought to a very acute stage by the corruption and Italian- 
 ization of the papacy in which the Italian Renascence had 
 played a large part, is evident at once. Carrying into the 
 sphere of religion, that refusal to accept the assertions of 
 mere traditional authority as a sufficient basis for truth, 
 which had characterized the Italian Humanists in the realm 
 of classic literature, the Transalpine Humanists began to 
 investigate in the light of the Scriptures read in the original 
 tongue, not only the evident corruption of ecclesiastical 
 institutions but the whole realm of the usages, doctrines, 
 and theories of the Church. In this field of Biblical inter- 
 pretation, where a man determined to apply all the details 
 of documents written in remote ages as a complete interpre- 
 tation of all the conditions of life in his own times, can 
 easily find confirmation of any of his strong beliefs, there 
 could be gathered the material for an enormous controversy 
 about religion. 
 
 The northern Humanists became almost without excep- 
 tion critics of the existing conditions of human society and 
 of the Church. They had it pretty much all their own way 
 at first, because the advocates of the Old Learning were not 
 able to stand before them at all in debate. Men like 
 Reuchlin, Erasmus, More and Ximenes swept the field. It 
 looked as if they might almost succeed in bringing about a 
 peaceful reform. But their triumph was only in words. 
 They did not at first noticeably affect the actual condition 
 of the Church and when the younger generation of trans- 
 alpine Humanism led by men like Tyndale, Farel, Luther, 
 Zwingli, Calvin and Knox took the road that led toward 
 reform through heresy and schism, this older generation of 
 Humanists who had criticised the Church so severely stood 
 by her. It was the new intellectual attitude bred by the 
 New Learning, the weapons of investigation and discussion 
 furnished by the New Learning, and the existence among
 
 THE GREAT EUROPEAN CONVULSION 115 
 
 the nobles and burghers of Western Europe of an audience 
 whose minds had been opened and their spirits quickened 
 by the New Learning, which underlay and rendered possible 
 and significant this greatest controversy which has ever 
 shaken the European world. 
 
 That controversy produced its tremendous results upon 
 European institutions because of a third force cooperating 
 with the influence of the Renascence and the scandals in the 
 administration of the Church ; the growing sense of national 
 feeling developed into the modern passion of patriotism. 
 
 The Roman had felt very strongly the passion of patriot- 
 ism and when his love of country had changed into that 
 pride of race which led him to conquer as much of the world 
 as seemed to him worth conquering, he succeeded, by his 
 skill in the art of government, in creating a vast unified 
 body of subjects of the Roman State which was informed by 
 the soul of patriotism. The mass of the inhabitants of the 
 Empire came during the second century to regard the 
 Empire with affection, or at least with gratitude, and to 
 consider the prospect of its destruction as the most dread- 
 ful of all conceivable catastrophes. But the Roman energy 
 which had created the Empire was not sufficient to main- 
 tain it and spreading corruption made it, in the fifth cen- 
 tury, a huge hulk without informing spirit. Its inhabitants 
 were no longer willing to die for an institution that had no 
 beneficent or inspiring relation to their lives. The bar- 
 barians who attempted to animate the pieces of the vast 
 machine with their own rude force, never really grasped the 
 Roman conception of a state and their kingdoms gave no 
 free fields for the regrowth of patriotism. Even the power- 
 ful personality of Charlemagne was not able to mold the old 
 Teuton loyalty to the chief as the incarnation of war lust, 
 into a respect for law and the love of country and the cen- 
 tury that followed his death was only the ever more vivid 
 demonstration of the utter failure of the Teuton desire "to 
 reestablish the Roman name and state by Gothic vigor." 
 So, because there was no real state rooted in the affections
 
 116 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 of the people, no government which expressed the life of 
 any large mass of men, there came into existence a substi- 
 tute for government, a sort of bastard political system 
 which was the child not of authority and consent, but of 
 force and necessity — feudalism. 
 
 An effort was indeed begun in the tenth century to 
 restore the Roman ideal in what came to be called the Holy 
 Roman Empire of the German Nation. But whatever else 
 it did during its long existence, the German Empire did not 
 resurrect the virtue of patriotism. It never succeeded in 
 joining the forests where the legions of Varus had perished 
 to the valley of the Tiber, whence they marched, so as to 
 form what seemed to those who lived in it, a fatherland. 
 Poets like Dante, poetical theorists like Marsilius, might 
 write of the Empire, great warriors like the Ottos, the 
 Henrys, the Fredericks, might fight for their dreams of it, 
 but it never vitally affected the mass of its subjects so that 
 they loved it and were willing to die for it. The phrases of 
 Roman law and organization used by the Imperial chan- 
 celleries, covered a congeries of jealous and hostile feudal 
 units held together by the mailed fist of a fighting overlord, 
 whose title of Emperor was almost like an extra plume on 
 his helmet. 
 
 Feudalism, which conquered the rather fantastic echoes 
 of Roman feeling throughout all western Europe between 
 the Baltic, the Alps and the Pyrenees, did not indeed remain 
 based simply upon the material necessities which had 
 brought it into being: the need of defense against savage 
 violence and the attempts by communities to assure to their 
 members at least the necessities of life. Nothing that has 
 any historic reality, nothing that gives to masses of men 
 more than a continuance of existence in time, can remain 
 based upon purely material necessities and desires. Men 
 living under feudal conditions began instinctively to form 
 what is spoken of as the feudal system and to inform that 
 feudal system with spiritual elements. Certain of the lower 
 expressions of the human spirit which are more akin to
 
 THE GREAT EUROPEAN CONVULSION 117 
 
 instinct than to reason or affection first appeared. The 
 inhabitant of the feudal village felt that local attachment 
 to the place where he had long eaten and slept and produced 
 his kind, which we see in rudimentary form even in the 
 wild beasts. This grew into local pride and became asso- 
 ciated with some of the baser parts which still survive in 
 patriotism, its jealousy and dislike of strangers and the 
 desire to conquer and exploit them. 
 
 The higher side of the human soul began to express 
 itself in the germs of what became the ideal of feudal loy- 
 alty between man and man. The Church, led by a force 
 within her that at every crisis in her history strikes a sym- 
 pathetic observer as greater than the sum of the intelligence 
 and goodness of her officers and servants, began to twine 
 about these growing nobler elements the golden threads of 
 the teachings of Christ. Chivalry, a strange mixture of 
 heathen strength, Roman virtue and the gentle manliness 
 of Jesus of Nazareth, came into existence. The ten thou- 
 sand political units which at the end of the tenth century 
 existed between the Baltic and the Pyrenees were gradually 
 combined, sometimes forcibly and sometimes by federation, 
 into larger units. Local customs were amalgamated into 
 general customs which became roughly codified and hard- 
 ened into what was in effect a series of provincial laws. 
 Great political ideas began to reappear, like the idea of 
 freedom resting on authority; though still a sort of freedom 
 which could be defended only by a reference to a particular 
 bargain recorded in a written agreement or charter. Then 
 we see the idea of a higher justice incarnate in the royal 
 person, beginning to associate in the popular mind the 
 sword of the king with the invisible sword of the justice 
 of Almighty God, which reckless barons who saw in power 
 nothing but privilege, defied. Then, compounded of loyalty, 
 a sense of right, liberty guaranteed by authority, and the 
 ideal of kingship as incarnated in a ruler like St. Louis, 
 patriotism began to form in the hearts and in the minds 
 of men.
 
 118 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 In France, the results of this formation of the passion of 
 patriotism found their clearest early expression in Jeanne 
 d'Arc. But it also became conscious of itself in literature. 
 The fifteenth century poet, Georges Chastellain, was an 
 adherent of the Duke of Burgundy, a powerful vassal of 
 the King of France, who resisted that weakening of feudal 
 authority which was the necessary step in the formation of 
 nationality. But nevertheless he begins his chronicle of the 
 wars between France and Burgundy in these words: "I 
 who am not English but French — who am neither Spaniard 
 nor Italian but French, the servant of two Frenchmen, the 
 one King, the other Duke, I have written of their deeds and 
 disputes." And in later times, Clement Marot sang the 
 passion of patriotism with a swing that prophesied the 
 Marseillaise. 1 
 
 Now in those dark days when the human race lacked 
 both patriotism and the sense of devotion to law incarnate 
 in the Empire, the Holy Roman Catholic Church, the one 
 universal institution which survived the break-up of Roman 
 unity and Roman civilization, was the carrier not only of 
 religion but of all the arts and sciences which survived. 
 As all the means of intercommunication, physical and 
 spiritual, decayed, as all the bonds that had held the world 
 together were loosed and Western Europe threatened to 
 become a mere congeries of political units always on the 
 verge of growing smaller, without common economic inter- 
 ests, without facility in recording ideas in language, without 
 common hopes and even without common fears, it was the 
 Church, and practically the Church alone, which still con- 
 served the sense of a common Christendom on which rested 
 the possibility of recovering or forming a common civiliza- 
 tion. In the service of the Church there grew up a mode of 
 expression in art common to large masses of people, a way 
 of thinking and a system of education common to all 
 Western Europe and a sense of common peril which enabled 
 the fighting men of Europe to muster at the call of the head 
 
 1 Marot. 177.
 
 THE GREAT EUROPEAN CONVULSION 119 
 
 of the Church under the banner of the cross to march 
 against their common enemy under the green banner of the 
 Prophet. These incalculable services insensibly bound 
 men's hearts to the Church as the one common heritage of 
 that portion of humanity of which they were a part and 
 made successive generations bow in awe before the ideal of 
 the Papacy as the Vicegerent of Christ, the incarnate Jus- 
 tice and Truth of God upon earth : perhaps the most daring 
 and majestic institutional ideal which has ever mastered 
 the faith and the hopes of great masses of men. 
 
 Even when the line of powerful popes from Hildebrand 
 to Innocent III, filled with a sense of the evils of the world 
 they had left their monk's cells to save, was carried beyond 
 the consciousness of being the incarnation of moral and 
 spiritual authority to the claim of a supreme unquestion- 
 able right to depose or make emperors and kings, their idea 
 was by no means rejected by the medieval world as a whole. 
 The emperors fought the claim of the popes until the 
 Papacy destroyed the great Imperial House of Hohen- 
 staufen, the Kings of France refused to acknowledge that 
 God had given the Pope the sword of temporal as well as 
 spiritual power, but outside of France, Innocent III and his 
 successors made good their claim that "Rome holds both 
 the keys of Heaven and the government of earth." l The 
 kings of Sicily, Portugal, Aragon, Castile, England, Sweden, 
 Denmark, Bohemia, Poland, Hungary, Servia, Bosnia and 
 Bulgaria, acknowledged that they held their crowns as 
 feudal vassals of the Papacy. But power brought enormous 
 wealth; for Rome became the center of the ecclesiastical 
 patronage of the world and the highest court of appeal for a 
 large part of the judicial procedure of the world. The accu- 
 mulation of patronage and wealth brought corruption and 
 by a reflex from the movement which had carried the 
 Church into politics, politics crept into the Church. The 
 attempt on the part of Boniface VIII at the beginning of 
 the fourteenth century to master the crown of France 
 
 *Qtd. Luchaire, 28, ib. 31.
 
 120 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 brought about the unexpected result that the crown of 
 France mastered the college of cardinals, who elected the 
 Popes. The Papacy left Rome and went to Avignon, where 
 it remained for seventy years and the English soldiers in 
 the Hundred Years War sang, "If the Pope is French, Jesus 
 Christ is English." 1 
 
 The international and universal genius which was in- 
 herent in the Papacy, soon began to struggle against this 
 domination and finally brought the great institution back 
 to Rome. But political and particularistic influence had 
 become too firmly rooted in the college of cardinals to 
 suffer a peaceful return to the old universalistic ideals of 
 the Church. There followed the great schism which after- 
 ward became the triple-schism, in which three colleges of 
 cardinals elected three separate lines of popes; each send- 
 ing his rivals to hell and claiming to be the only true Vice- 
 gerent of God. It seemed as if the venerable institution 
 would break to pieces of its own weight and perish. But 
 the attachment of Europe to the old ideal of their fore- 
 fathers was too deep and too strong to be destroyed even by 
 this spectacle. The delegates of the whole medieval politi- 
 cal world and of all medieval society, assembled in the 
 Council of Constance at the beginning of the fifteenth cen- 
 tury to save the papacy. They deposed or forced the resig- 
 nation of all three of the popes, burnt at the stake the 
 leaders of the Bohemian heretics for refusing to acknowl- 
 edge the absolute authority of the Universal Church, and 
 elected a new pope in a conclave where representatives of 
 the nations sat with the Cardinals. After thus reaffirming 
 their affection for the ideal of the papacy and their faith 
 in the Church, they commissioned the Pope to make a 
 detailed reform of the Church, reporting at intervals of ten 
 years to a general Council of Christendom. 
 
 But the ancient zeal which could lift great ecclesiastics 
 to the level of the magnificent ideal of the medieval papacy, 
 could not be revived by legislation. The popes never will- 
 
 'Von Reumont (1), II, 721.
 
 THE GREAT EUROPEAN CONVULSION 121 
 
 ingly called a council nor reported any general reform of 
 the Church, so that the fifteenth century demonstrated the 
 failure of the plan of Christendom assembled in its begin- 
 ning at Constance to restore the great ideal of the Church. 
 The new method of education of the Italian Renascence and 
 the new view of life of the Humanist, raised to the throne of 
 St. Peter some popes who were capable of understanding 
 the Catholic spirit, but particularistic influences were again 
 too strong for the power of a universal ideal. A cursory 
 examination of the lives of the popes from Sixtus IV to 
 Paul III (1471-1534) as they are recorded in the pages of a 
 scholarly Catholic historian is enough to assure any ob- 
 server that, as a whole, they thought more of their position 
 as rulers of the States of the Church and princes of Italy 
 than they did of their position as Vicegerents of Christ rul- 
 ing the spiritual interests of Christendom. These pontiffs 
 and many of their cardinals differed little except in dress 
 from the princes of the Renascence among whom they lived. 
 It seemed to great numbers of her sons north of the Alps 
 that the papacy had become "Italianate." ' 
 
 This second enormous distortion of that magnificent 
 ideal of the papacy which had swayed the imagination and 
 commanded the obedience of so many generations of men, 
 did not take place without violent and continuous protest in 
 all parts of Christendom. Men had not forgotten the ex- 
 ample which their forefathers had set them in the Council 
 of Constance. The failure of the abortive Council of Basle 
 did not suppress this protest and from the time of Savona- 
 rola (who should not be reckoned among Protestants) until 
 the actual assembly of the reforming Council of Trent in 
 the middle of the sixteenth century, the idea of calling 
 another general council to repeat what had been begun at 
 Constance was always in the air. If such a council as the 
 Council of Constance could have been assembled about the 
 year 1500, it is possible that the schism between Teutonic 
 
 1 "'Anglus Italizatus, demon incarnatus,' and so say French and Ger- 
 mans of their countrymen." Cal. F. 1666, p. 162.
 
 122 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 and Latin Christianity might long have been postponed — 
 perhaps altogether avoided. The papacy, by successfully 
 resisting every suggestion for general reform in head and 
 members undertaken by Christendom as a whole, brought 
 into play a new historic force and, in a way, drove its 
 harsher critics to another program of reform. 
 
 In the minds of a great number of the men of Europe 
 national ideals had now completely taken the place, in 
 every sphere except the ecclesiastical sphere, of universal- 
 istic ideals, and even there concordats gave to the Churches 
 of Spain and France a large degree of national independence. 
 When the fact that the world was confronted in the Church 
 not with a theory but a situation, became too obvious for 
 millions of men to blink it, the desire to restore the ancient 
 mother to her purity was in many hearts destroyed by 
 anger at abuses. Then the old consoling picture to which 
 generations, in spite of every disappointment, had so long 
 clung, of a Vicegerent of Christ who was the common father 
 of all Christians, began in parts of Europe to be replaced by 
 a passionate desire to revolt against one whom many had 
 come to think of as a triple-tiaraed tyrant who spent the 
 alms of the faithful in maintaining the worldly splendor of 
 an Italian potentate. So the Catholic Reformation of which 
 Erasmus and his friends dreamed, became swallowed up in 
 a great schism — or rather in a great series of schisms by 
 which the people of England, Scotland, some of the cantons 
 of Switzerland, some of the provinces of the Netherlands, 
 some States of the Empire, and the Scandinavian kingdoms 
 established their own national churches. And a part of the 
 people of Poland, and France, tried to do so. 
 
 In this world movement, the greatest revolutionary 
 convulsion which had touched western Europe since the 
 barbarian emigrations of the fifth century, the life of 
 Catherine de' Medici, who had come over the Alps twenty- 
 six years before an ignorant little girl, was, at the death of 
 her husband, inextricably involved. For the faction of
 
 THE GREAT EUROPEAN CONVULSION 123 
 
 schismatic and heretical reform had found one of its ablest 
 and most energetic leaders in the person of a Frenchman, 
 John Calvin, and the struggle between his followers and the 
 partisans of orthodoxy for the control of the French Church 
 was, for thirty years, to write the history of France in blood.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 ESTABLISHMENT OF THE REFORMED CHURCH IN FRANCE 
 
 In order to understand the spread in France of what was 
 sometimes spoken of as Protestantism, but more commonly 
 called by its friends the "Reformed" and by its enemies the 
 "Pretended Reformed" Religion, it is necessary to keep 
 clearly in mind the three elements of the general movement 
 of the Reformation of the sixteenth century suggested in 
 the preceding chapter. These elements were not strange 
 either to the family from which Catherine was sprung, or 
 to the royal house into which she married. One of the 
 most striking records of the consciousness among intelligent 
 men of the corruption of the Church, is contained in the 
 letter written by her great-grandfather Lorenzo to her 
 great-uncle, when at the age of seventeen he went to Rome 
 to take his place in the College of Cardinals. This lad, 
 when he became Pope Leo X, was an energetic patron of 
 the New Learning, continued the encouragement of the 
 study of Greek which had been planted in Italy largely 
 by the efforts of his family, and accepted the dedication 
 of Ximenes' Complutensian Polyglot and the New Testa- 
 ment of Erasmus, which were the signs and symbols of the 
 direction taken north of the Alps by the New Learning. 
 Catherine's father-in-law, Francis I, had been sure of the 
 corruption of the Church and talked of its reform: though 
 he was never willing by giving up the concordat with Leo 
 X, to lose the control of the patronage of the French Church 
 which he, his son and grandson used so profanely, to put 
 many benefices into the hands of soldiers, courtiers or 
 women, who spent their revenues and neglected their duties. 
 From the very beginning of his reign, Francis I was an 
 intelligent patron of the Renascence. This appears not 
 
 124
 
 THE REFORMED CHURCH IN FRANCE 123 
 
 only in his bringing from Italy artists and architects who 
 in the building and decorating of his chateaux influenced 
 the rise and development of the style of the French Rena- 
 scence, but even more clearly in the way he advanced in 
 France the distinctive cause of the New Learning as against 
 the Old Learning. The controversy between these two 
 methods of scholarship and instruction, which really rep- 
 resented two different ways of looking at life, became furi- 
 ous in the University of Paris soon after his accession to 
 the throne. Francis I took strong and uncompromising 
 sides with the New Learning. He appointed a learned 
 Greek refugee from Constantinople his librarian and when 
 Beda, Professor of Theology at the Sorbonne and leader of 
 the adherents of the Old Learning, told him that "Hebrew 
 and Greek would be the source of many heresies," * he 
 could not turn the King from the project of founding at the 
 University of Paris a Royal College of the New Learning. 
 He never indeed felt able to spare the money for the mag- 
 nificent building which he planned, but he did found chaira 
 in Hebrew, in Greek and in Mathematics. 
 
 Soon after the establishment of these professorships, a 
 movement which ended in revolt against the Roman author- 
 ity was launched, almost simultaneously, by Martin Luther 
 in Saxony and by Ulrich Zwingli in the Canton of Zurich of 
 the Swiss Confederation. The writings of Luther spread 
 very rapidly into other countries and in 1521 he was for- 
 mally condemned as a heretic by the Sorbonne. The new 
 doctrines found a ready reception in a circle of men, already 
 somewhat critical of the ancient usages and doctrines of the 
 Church, who gathered around Brigonnet, Bishop of Meaux, 
 not far from Paris. This little group of incipient heretics 
 soon attracted attention and by a very vigorous persecution 
 was dispersed or compelled to recant. Several of their 
 simpler disciples, persisting in the new doctrines, perished 
 at the stake as heretics. 
 
 The King's favorite sister, Marguerite of Navarre, a 
 
 ^stienne II, 150.
 
 126 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 woman of very active mind, was much interested in the 
 New Learning, and inclined to protect the men whose new 
 doctrines seemed to her so closely related to Humanism, 
 against a persecution whose zealots were found in the ranks 
 of the strongest advocates of the Old Learning. But on the 
 return of Francis I from his captivity in Madrid after the 
 battle of Pavia, the persecution became more severe. 
 Heresy seemed to grow with persecution and in 1533 the 
 Rector of the University of Paris, a certain Nicolas Cop, 
 delivered an oration which plainly advocated the new doc- 
 trines of protest. This oration had been written by a young 
 student, John Calvin, and both Cop and Calvin had to leave 
 Paris. 
 
 The conflict between the orthodox supporters of papal 
 authority and the defenders of the ecclesiastical revolts in 
 various countries, which had now developed into doctrinal 
 divergence, had become exceedingly bitter. Nevertheless, 
 there were on both sides men who believed that it might be 
 possible to proceed by way of a general council to such a 
 reformation of the Church as might remove her worst 
 abuses and concede such variations in practice, or such 
 increased breadth in formulas of belief, as might satisfy all 
 parties and effect a reconciliation. We have already seen 
 that Francis I was strongly inclined by his political necessi- 
 ties to make friends with the Protestant princes of Ger- 
 many, many of whom were not entirely committed to irrec- 
 oncilable schism; and he accepted the suggestion of the 
 learned and moderate Bishop of Paris that his brother, the 
 Sieur de Langey, who was being sent by the King as an 
 envoy to these Protestant princes, should make overtures to 
 Melancthon, Luther's closest friend, for the formation of 
 a program of reconciliation looking towards reunion. 
 Melancthon prepared a tentative program which made a 
 very favorable impression upon the mind of the King, and 
 it seems probable that the persecution of heresy in France 
 would have been much relaxed but for an action taken by 
 some of the most violent heretics.
 
 THE REFORMED CHURCH IN FRANCE 127 
 
 The posting of placards containing satires or invectives 
 had been practised by both sides in this great religious 
 controversy. A placard was now written by some of the 
 French refugees and printed in Switzerland attacking the 
 mass, which was the very center of Catholic ritual and, in 
 many ways, the center of those Catholic doctrines which 
 had been involved in the controversy with the new heresy. 
 It called the "Pope and all his vermin of cardinals, bishops, 
 monks and priests, sayers of masses, with all who consent 
 thereunto, false prophets, damnable deceivers, apostates, 
 wolves, false shepherds, idolaters, seducers, liars and execra- 
 ble blasphemers, murderers of souls, renouncers of Jesus 
 Christ, of his death and passion, false witnesses, traitors, 
 thieves and robbers of the honor of God and more detest- 
 able than devils." It goes on to say of the doctrine of the 
 mass: "Were there no other error than this in your infernal 
 theology, you would well deserve the stake. Light then 
 your fires to burn yourselves; not us, who refuse to believe 
 in your idols, your new Gods and your new Christs." 1 
 Copies of this placard were posted through the streets of 
 Paris, and one was affixed to the very door of the King's 
 bed-chamber in the Chateau at Amboise. The wrath of 
 the King was deep and it was shared by the all-powerful 
 Constable. The persecution was rekindled with greater 
 intensity than before and John Calvin, who had been living 
 quietly in the provinces, now fled across the border and 
 began that career which made him the absentee leader of 
 the French Reformed Church. 
 
 He began it by writing the first draft of his "Institutions 
 of the Christian Religion." It was preceded by an address 
 to the King in defense of his persecuted subjects which is 
 one of the monuments of early French prose. Near the end 
 of his life, in the preface of another work, Calvin explained 
 why he hastily finished this treatise in 1536, and also why 
 he wrote for the Latin work, a preface in French. His 
 purpose was to set forth, in definite theological form, the 
 
 1 Chronique, ptd. 464.
 
 128 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 system of doctrine of the French heretics. He believed that 
 they were the victims of slander. The increase in the 
 number of executions for heresy which had followed the 
 affair of the placards, had aroused a very strong protest in 
 the Protestant states of Germany and the Protestant can- 
 tons of Switzerland, and both of these places were the best 
 sources in the world from which to draw mercenary soldiers. 
 French armies had long contained contingents of Swiss, and 
 Francis I hoped to include in his army regiments of reiters, 
 or German cavalry, drawn to his standard by a common 
 enmity to the House of Hapsburg, helped by the lure of 
 French pay. The King, therefore, did not wish to break too 
 sharply, either with the followers of Luther or of Zwingli, 
 and he replied to their protests against the persecutions of 
 the French heretics, that these people had not been put to 
 death for holding what the Lutherans or the Zwinglians 
 considered to be true, but because they were Anabaptists, 
 who denied the validity of infant baptism and insisted that 
 every adult believer must be rebaptized. 
 
 In order to understand how serious a charge this was in 
 the eyes of the whole world, including the Protestants, we 
 must briefly review the history of Anabaptism. Its ad- 
 herents had been very pitilessly persecuted and repressed 
 by Roman Catholics, Lutherans and Zwinglians alike, not 
 simply or chiefly because of their teachings in regard to 
 baptism, but largely because they thought that no magis- 
 trate had any right to interfere either with the liberty of 
 conscience or the liberty of worship. The idea of religious 
 liberty seemed to almost all churchmen, whether orthodox 
 or schismatic, and to almost all writers upon politics, a very 
 dangerous idea which would result in the destruction of the 
 institutions of human society and a relapse into anarchy. 
 The first leaders of the Anabaptists were, therefore, in the 
 various countries of Europe, exterminated by the law. 
 Their place was taken by other leaders who laid aside this 
 doctrine, that the magistrates had no right to limit religious 
 liberty, for another doctrine which seemed to the rulers of
 
 THE REFORMED CHURCH IN FRANCE 129 
 
 the world even more dangerous. A set of men whose ap- 
 pearance ' and actions indicate quite plainly that they lived 
 near to the border line between sanity and insanity, because 
 of the disordering power of a fixed idea, began to proclaim 
 that the time foretold by the prophets for the establishment 
 by God's elect of the kingdom of God on earth, was come 
 and that they and their followers were the elect. Three 
 months before the placards were posted, the world had seen 
 a very striking illustration of the dangers to which the 
 growing influence of these men might lead. The city of 
 Munster, on the lower Rhine, which had revolted against 
 its bishop and become Lutheran, was mastered by a band 
 of these Anabaptists of the new school, refugees from the 
 persecutions in Holland. They seized for the common use 
 all the property of the city, forced polygamy upon all the 
 women and accepted the claim of one of their number that 
 he was sent to lay the foundation of the Kingdom of God 
 upon earth. They sent out missionaries to advise peoples 
 of the New Kingdom of God, and proclaim the extermina- 
 tion of the Godless who refused to obey this divinely in- 
 spired command. Some of the Protestants, including 
 Luther himself, had been inclined to believe that the day of 
 the Last Judgment was close at hand, but none of them felt 
 that the coming Kingdom of God would take this form, and 
 the affair of Munster struck a chill of fear and horror 
 through the world. Nevertheless, the Kingdom of God in 
 Munster maintained itself for two years, and was subdued 
 only after a long siege, in which the troops of Roman 
 Catholic and Lutheran German States joined. 
 
 To accuse the French Reformers just at this time of 
 being Anabaptists was, therefore, to suggest in the eyes of 
 all men of the day, that they were the enemies of God and 
 men. Calvin, who was "lying hidden at Basle," thought it 
 would be "cowardice and treachery" if he did not come to 
 the defense of his brethren. "You yourself, sire," he wrote 
 to the King, "can be a witness in regard to the great number 
 
 1 Gresbeck's Journal, qtd. Bezold, 710.
 
 130 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 of false calumnies by which our religion is every day de- 
 famed in your presence. That is to say, that the only 
 outcome of our doctrine is to ruin all authorities and moral 
 order, trouble the peace, abolish the laws and destroy the 
 rights of society and private property. . . . Nevertheless, 
 you do not hear more than the smallest portion of these 
 calumnies. Because among the people there are circulated 
 reports so horrible that, if they were true, the world would, 
 with right, judge the disciples of such a doctrine worthy of a 
 thousand stakes and a thousand gallows." * 
 
 This appeal had no effect upon the intention of Francis 
 I, and the persecution continued throughout his reign. 
 
 On his accession to the throne Henry II, with that 
 orthodox piety which was a marked trait of his character, 
 continued the persecutions of his father with even greater 
 zeal. He created in various parts of the kingdom courts 
 with the special function of punishing heresy, which soon 
 earned the popular name of "Burning Chambers." The list 
 of those who perished at the stake indicates that, at first, 
 the new doctrine and the new organization found their 
 adherents chiefly among the smaller bourgeoisie. But, as 
 time went on, they began to gain influence among the 
 smaller country gentry, the more wealthy and influential 
 commercial classes and the so-called noblesse de la robe: a 
 sort of inferior nobility composed of those who practised the 
 higher branches of the profession of the law and served in 
 the more important offices of diplomacy, judicature and 
 administration. 
 
 This change is plainly indicated by what is spoken of as 
 the affair of the Rue St. Jacques, toward the end of the 
 reign of Henry II in the autumn of 1557. Three or four hun- 
 dred of the new religion were assembled at a private house 
 in Paris for a secret celebration of the holy communion. 
 The neighbors became aware of it; word was spread, and 
 ths whole quarter of the city rose in arms. The people 
 barricaded the streets to prevent the escape of the heretica 
 
 1 Preface, Psalms. Pref. Institutes.
 
 THE REFORMED CHURCH IN FRANCE 131 
 
 until the police arrived. In this desperate situation between 
 the prison and the stake and the stones and weapons of a 
 mob, the assembly determined to force their way out; the 
 men "who wore swords marching first;" which means that 
 there were gentlemen among them. A large part of the 
 assembly escaped but a number of the women remained in 
 the house and were arrested by the police. The minister at 
 the head of the secret parish church wrote that "the women 
 who were taken prisoners were, with the exception of four 
 or five, all ladies of great houses." One of the first to perish 
 at the stake was the widow of a nobleman of considerable 
 estate with friends at court who tried to purchase her life. 
 The most influential of the friends who tried to save this 
 young widow was Queen Catherine herself. The friends of 
 the prisoners used every possible legal device to delay the 
 process, but seven had gone to the stake in quick succession 
 when the growth of the death roll was interrupted by the 
 intervention of the Protestant cantons of Switzerland and 
 the German Protestant princes. The King needed these 
 allies too much in his foreign policy to break with them and 
 the lives of the rest of the prisoners were spared. 1 
 
 Not long after this time, we know that the new doctrine 
 and the new organization were beginning to appeal to some 
 of the higher nobility of France. In particular, they at- 
 tracted the favorable attention of the great house of Bour- 
 bon, princes of the blood, and of the house of Chatillon, the 
 cadet branch of the house of Montmorency. In the spring 
 of 1558, the King of Navarre and a number of his gentle- 
 men appeared publicly in Paris at a large assembly which 
 met for the purpose of singing the psalms in the French 
 translation of Clement Marot: an action which, for reasons 
 not perfectly clear, was interpreted as hostile to the ortho- 
 dox doctrines and the ancient ecclesiastical institution. The 
 attention of the King had been called already to the heret- 
 ical sentiments of one of the chief officers of his army, 
 d'Andelot, Captain General of French Infantry. D'Andelot, 
 
 *Hist. Ecc, 139, 141.
 
 132 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 taken prisoner at the surrender of Saint Quentin, had 
 adopted the heretic standpoint in the Spanish prison. After 
 he came back to France, he not only had preaching on his 
 own French estate and through the towns of Brittany and 
 the Loire, but he openly attended great meetings for the new 
 worship held just outside the walls of Paris every night by 
 five or six thousand persons. The King sent for d'Andelot 
 and had with him a stormy interview. On his way out of 
 the palace, the Captain General was arrested and thrown 
 into prison. He could get released only by making some 
 sort of formal submission which, although it included no 
 explicit abjuration of his own belief, always seemed to him 
 afterward a great failure in courage. 
 
 In spite of all these attempts by Catherine's husband to 
 crush heresy, it continued to spread, and during the twelve 
 years of his reign France was covered (more thickly in some 
 provinces than in others) with a network of churches, secret 
 and illegal, organized on a model drafted by John Calvin, 
 who had taken refuge in the city of Geneva, whence he 
 sent out his scholars to act as missionaries and pastors. 
 It must not be supposed that these new churches were 
 standing for freedom of worship or even for freedom of 
 conscience. They were standing for the truth as they held 
 it and it seemed just as clear to them as it did to the King, 
 that it was the duty of church and state to repress false 
 doctrines. For instance, there was a secret church in the 
 city of Beaugency whose members were of course all in 
 danger of the stake. One of them announced the idea that 
 the magistrates had no right to punish heresy. He was 
 called before a meeting of the church consistory, which 
 included three pastors, and his error was shown him by 
 such "strong reasons founded on the word of God" that he 
 withdrew it and signed a statement that it was the Christian 
 duty of the magistrates to suppress obstinate heresy, by 
 force. Thus believing that they stood for truth which 
 scorned toleration and demanded the right of way as the 
 word of God and further encouraged by the patronage of a
 
 THE REFORMED CHURCH IN FRANCE 133 
 
 considerable number of the classes who represented the idea 
 of authority and the profession of arms, the minds of many 
 of the members of the French Reformed churches began to 
 turn from the early idea of mere passive resistance which 
 would make the blood of the martyrs the seed of the Church. 
 But for some time their idea was strenuously opposed, and 
 on the whole with success, by their intellectual leader, John 
 Calvin. He was intensely conscious of the cruel wrongs 
 suffered by his fellow believers, but his extremely logical 
 mind had not yet found for their right to defend by arms 
 the liberty of proclaiming the word of God, a statement 
 tolerable to his temperament dominated by an intense love 
 of law. 
 
 Henry II in the latter part of his life, had watched with 
 growing alarm this increase of heresy in spite of all his 
 efforts to suppress it and his alarm had been an additional 
 reason for making peace with the hereditary enemy of his 
 house in order to devote himself to his own -kingdom^ T' "^ 
 is no mere conjecture founded on what follor g0 0Den i y ^ 
 of Cateau-Cambresis. On the 26th of June, 1^ s t rono -ly the 
 of Alva wrote to Philip II a letter as follows. ^ Constable 
 stable came to talk with me and said the King sei. 1f ^ after 
 thank me many times because I had offered, on the ^ f ^hem 
 your Majesty, all the help he wanted for reformation ^Q e 
 punishment in matters of religion in this Kingdom, in whit^ e 
 every day he saw more harm being done. . . . He said 
 Geneva was the sewer of all this wickedness, whither his 
 vassals and those of your Majesty who were infected, fled 
 and from there sent emissaries to make trouble in your 
 Majesty's realm and in his — that it would be well that some 
 agreement should be made between your Majesty and him 
 to remove Geneva out of the world." x 
 
 The King, who had sought peace to suppress heresy, 
 seems to have become fully aware that this new organiza- 
 tion was consolidating and increasing its powers of resist- 
 ance. He found it undesirable and perhaps dangerous to 
 
 *A. N. K. 1492 (43).
 
 134 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 continue the attacks, which he began in the case of d'Ande- 
 lot, upon that very free class which was called the nobility 
 of the sword, because he must always depend on them for 
 the officers of his army. He determined, therefore, to carry 
 out his repression in the class of the noblesse de la robe. 
 The chief court of the kingdom was the Parlement of 
 Paris and it was reported to him that a large number of the 
 councillors of the court were at least so far favorable to the 
 new opinions and organization that they were trying to 
 check by every possible means the repression of the secret 
 Reformed church by force. This report seems to have been 
 brought to the King by the Cardinal of Lorraine, who, in a 
 general meeting of the entire Parlement, accused the chief 
 president and the bulk of the councillors of being favorers 
 of heresy. "You are the reason," he said, "why not only 
 Poitiers but all Poictou, even to the country of Bordeaux, 
 Toulouse, Provence and France in general, is completely 
 filled with this rermin which increases and swarms because 
 it puts its trust in you." 
 
 It was an ancient custom of the court to call three or four 
 times a year a meeting to consider the "morals and conver- 
 sation" of its members. Such a meeting had the name of 
 mercurial. 1 The Procurator General of the King now pro- 
 posed a mercurial for the especial purpose of asking the 
 opinion of the councillors in regard to religion. The meet- 
 ing was opened by the King, attended by all the chief 
 functionaries of church and state, most of whom were 
 members of the Parlement in the sense that they had the 
 right to be present at any of its full assemblies. Each of 
 the councillors and presidents, that is to say, the professional 
 members of the court to whom its real work was usually 
 left, was asked in turn to declare his opinion upon the mat- 
 ter of the enforcing of the royal edict in regard to religion. 
 The English Ambassador reported to Queen Elizabeth that, 
 so far as he could learn, "out of the one hundred and twenty 
 presidents and councillors at the court there were only 
 
 1 Conde I, 218.
 
 THE REFORMED CHURCH IN FRANCE 135 
 
 fourteen councillors and one president who were really in 
 favor of that policy of very strict repression which had been 
 put into the King's mind by the influence of the Cardinal of 
 Lorraine ; the rest of the court was against the policy of the 
 Cardinal." * This is doubtless an exaggeration of the 
 amount of sympathy for the Reformed church which ex- 
 isted in the highest court of France, but it is probably true, 
 as the Ambassador suggests, that the forcible resistance to 
 agents of persecution and the tumultuous interruption of 
 orthodox preachers who attacked the doctrines of the re- 
 form, taking place already in many places in France, were 
 encouraged not only by the knowledge that some of the 
 chief nobles were patrons of the new organization, but also 
 by the knowledge that it had sympathizers not willing to be 
 too hard upon it, in the chief court of the Kingdom. 
 
 A large number of the councillors, when asked to express 
 their opinion on the religious situation, gave ambiguous 
 replies, a considerable number of them were strongly in 
 favor of orthodoxy, but some of them spoke so openly in 
 favor of the new doctrines and denounced so strongly the 
 abuses in the Church, that the King ordered the Constable 
 to arrest two of them on the spot, and sent his guards after 
 the close of the meeting to arrest six others. Three of them 
 escaped by flight, but five were committed to the Bastille. 
 After an interrogatory by an ecclesiastical commission, the 
 ablest and the boldest of these men, du Bourg, of the cadet 
 branch of a wealthy and distinguished family of Languedoc, 
 was officially declared a heretic and handed over to the law 
 for punishment. 2 The learned du Bourg, while he did not in 
 the least attempt to conceal his belief, used every resource 
 of the law in his own defense and the struggle between him 
 and the authorities of church and state was watched with 
 the deepest and most excited attention by the entire secret 
 Reformed church of France and all its patrons and friends 
 both within and without the kingdom. Just at this critical 
 
 Forbes, 126. Paris, 13 June, 1559. 
 "De la Place Ed., 1565, pp. 19, 29.
 
 136 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 point, Henry II died, leaving the struggle with heresy and 
 schism to his feeble son, Francis II. 
 
 The exact strength of the Re/ormed church after forty 
 years of propaganda and persecution cannot be accurately 
 estimated. Until toward the close of the reign of Henry II, 
 the new doctrine and the new organization made compara- 
 tively little progress except among the humbler classes of 
 the population. It seemed, however, even at this time, to 
 appeal strongly to some students of the universities and to 
 a few of the higher classes because of a certain air of intel- 
 lectual freedom about it and because of its early close con- 
 nection with the movement of the New Learning. It is 
 worthy of remark that in the list of martyrs given in the 
 Book of Martyrs during the forty years from 1515 to 1555 
 there appear the names of only three nobles and two of the 
 agricultural peasants. This is not conclusive, because one 
 class may have been too humble to attract attention and 
 the other too powerful to be subject to punishment, until 
 the whole power of the state was turned in the direction of 
 persecution. But there are other indications that, just at 
 the end of the reign of Henry II, large numbers of the 
 nobles of all ranks accepted the new doctrine or joined the 
 new secret organization. This was apparent to the Spanish 
 Ambassador, who wrote, "The flower of the nation is the 
 most spoiled. The nobility especially has taken the liberty 
 they call evangelic." 1 
 
 Some things imply that not all of these new adherents 
 to the new Church were moved by purely religious consid- 
 erations. A wave of opposition to the secular influence of 
 the clergy had been for some time sweeping over all Europe. 
 Their wealth and their political and judicial power had for 
 more than a generation excited great dislike among the 
 nobles and burghers in many countries. The same motives 
 which made many of the nobles of England, Scotland and 
 the German States ready to support schism without any 
 particular religious or intellectual interest in heresy, were 
 
 1 Haton 1, 61, Crespin A. N. K. ctd. Mignet Jour, des Savants, July, 1857.
 
 THE REFORMED CHURCH IN FRANCE 137 
 
 plainly operative among the nobles of France. But when 
 all this has been said, and it has been pointed out over and 
 over again by the more modern writers upon the history of 
 the civil wars about religion in France, it still remains true 
 that the prevailing motive among the adherents and de- 
 fenders of the French Reform was the religious motive. The 
 men who, at the close of the reign of Henry II, were getting 
 ready to become the leading champions of the new doctrine 
 and organization, did not any of them die at the stake. But 
 there is no reason to accept as gospel the sneer of their 
 fierce enemy, Monluc, about "Great nobles not getting 
 themselves burnt very often for the word of God." * They 
 fell on the battlefield, many of them were assassinated, but 
 this does not prove they would not have gone to the stake as 
 the country gentleman du Bourg, nephew of a chancellor of 
 France finally did — if death had met them that way. 
 
 1 Monluc, III, 140.
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 UNDER THE THUMB OF THE GUISE — THE CONSPIRACY OP 
 AMBOISE AND THE HUGUENOTS 
 
 The new King was fifteen years and six months old and 
 therefore according to the ancient custom of France eight- 
 een months past the age when a King might be crowned 
 and rule for himself, but for Francis II to rule actually the 
 kingdom of France in such a crisis was impossible. He was 
 a boy of small intellectual ability, feeble health and un- 
 stable nervous equilibrium, immoderately given to violent 
 exercise, and very fond of the pretty little girl who was his 
 wife. From the first he was disposed to leave the business 
 of state entirely in the hands of her uncles, the Cardinal 
 of Lorraine and the Duke of Guise. This freed him as 
 much as possible from the work of governing, for which he 
 had neither ability nor inclination, and enabled him to 
 devote nearly as much time as he chose to hunting and other 
 sports. If perchance he developed a will of his own, his 
 virile little Queen was always able to control him and she 
 seems to have trusted completely to her uncles. The situa- 
 tion is briefly sketched by the English Ambassador a few 
 days after the death of Catherine's husband and the acces- 
 sion of her oldest son. "The House of Guise now ruleth, 
 with whom I am in very small grace, and the Queen of 
 Scotland, who is a great doer here, and taketh all upon her, 
 hath so small an opinion of me as I shall be able to do small 
 service withal, therefore it may like you to use means for 
 my revocation. . . . The French King hath already given 
 the Constable to understand that the Cardinal of Lorraine 
 and the Duke of Guise will manage his whole affairs." And 
 the same report of the absolute control of all things by the 
 
 Cardinal of Lorraine and the Duke of Guise is made by 
 
 138
 
 UNDER THE THUMB OF THE GUISE 139 
 
 everybody who had opportunity to know the French court 
 during the short and feeble life of Francis II. The Tuscan 
 Ambassador wrote home, "The Cardinal of Lorraine is Pope 
 and King in France." * 
 
 How the Queen Dowager Catherine really felt about this 
 complete supremacy of the faction of the Guise with whom, 
 although she disliked them, she had of late years been 
 acting, we do not know. Every outward honor was shown 
 her, the new King, her son, even insisting upon waiting 
 upon her at table, and there was a private staircase leading 
 from her room to the King's room. Financially she was 
 more than independent, for the usual allowance of 100,000 
 francs for a Queen Dowager was made 300,000. The 
 woman for whom Catherine had so long concealed her hate 
 was humiliated. "The King said today to Madame Valen- 
 tinois that because of the evil influence she had exerted 
 over the King, his father, she merited great punishment, 
 but that in his royal mercy he did not want to cause her 
 more inconvenience. Nevertheless she must restore all the 
 jewels which the King had given to her." In addition, she 
 was compelled to retire from court. 2 
 
 The Guise rivalled their nephew and niece in the great 
 outward honor which they paid to the Queen Dowager. 
 They were accustomed to say of anything of which explana- 
 tion was asked, that "if it pleased the Queen Mother to do 
 so and so, they also were pleased, because the King cannot 
 and ought not, ever to depart from the wishes of the Queen 
 Mother." It was even arranged that in all important pub- 
 lic acts this formula was to be used at the beginning: "This 
 being the good pleasure of the Queen, my Mother and Lady, 
 I also approving the things which are in accord with her 
 advice, I am content, and I command that, etc." But in 
 spite of this outward honor paid to Catherine it is quite 
 evident from the reports of the ambassadors and her own 
 correspondence, that, although she was present at all the 
 
 1 Forbes I, 160, 166, Neg. Tosc. Ill, 404. 
 8 Cal. Vcn. 1560, pp. 109, 127, Baschet 494.
 
 140 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 councils of state, the field of her activity was very limited 
 and her influence in important matters very small. 1 
 
 We have only twenty-one letters of hers written during 
 the six months after the death of her husband. Four of 
 these show that she did not abandon her old habit of trying 
 to use her influence in every way in order to help her old 
 servitors and friends. The most important of these is a 
 letter to the Duke of Florence in regard to the papal 
 election: 
 
 "I beg you, as affectionately as I can, my cousin, on account 
 of the good influence which I know you have with several of 
 the cardinals of the Holy College, to be willing to aid, so far 
 as you can, my cousin, the Cardinal of Ferrara to become Pope, 
 because, beside the fact that he is at present so closely allied 
 to you as he is, and that you may expect all possible help . . . 
 towards the greatness of your house from him, you are assured 
 that you could not do, at the present moment, any greater or 
 more agreeable pleasure to me than this, and also to the King, 
 my son. Otherwise, and in case this shall not be possible, I beg 
 you again to make every effort that you can toward the same 
 end in favor of my cousin, the Cardinal of Tournon . . . and I 
 believe that there cannot be found in the Holy College any 
 personage who is better adapted to acquit himself of the duties 
 of that position in a more holy manner." 2 
 
 This effort of Catherine's was hopeless from the start. 
 The Spanish party had twice as many votes in the conclave 
 as the French party and by the beginning of November the 
 election of Ferrara was manifestly impossible. The Bishop 
 of Viterbo wrote to Catherine asking her support for the 
 candidacy of the Cardinal de' Medici, "because all of the 
 other candidates who are more desired by the King, your 
 son, are meeting . . . probably insuperable difficulties." 3 
 
 About two months later Catherine received the following 
 letter from the Cardinal of Sens: 
 
 *Cal. Vcn. 113, Baschet 496. 
 
 'Letts. I, 124. 
 
 *Neg. Frangois II, 137.
 
 UNDER THE THUMB OF THE GUISE 141 
 
 "Madame: — 
 
 "You will hear by the letter which the Cardinal of Guise is 
 writing you, the creation of a Pope, and how all things took 
 place which concern the affairs of the King. This will prevent 
 me from writing any further to you about it in the present letter, 
 only I wish to inform you, madame, that you alone are the 
 reason why he is Pope; . . . which causes me to believe that the 
 affairs of the King and of his subjects and your own affairs will 
 have a better chance, and that in everything which depends 
 upon the will of our Holy Father, you will have a large part and 
 power, and though the two predecessors of this Pope may have 
 failed in like matters and have not given due consideration to 
 them, it appears to me that this one will not follow the mistakes 
 of the others, because he is a very estimable man." x 
 
 This letter is a good specimen of the kind of flattery to 
 which Catherine was subject, for as a matter of fact, Medici, 
 who was in no way related to her, 2 was on the King of 
 Spain's list as an alternate candidate, and had been all along 
 the real candidate of the Duke of Florence. The French 
 party had finally concurred in his election only because they 
 were wearied out by four months' discussion, and despaired 
 of electing any one of the men they really wanted. 
 
 If Catherine resented an arrangement of the French 
 government, which, while paying every outward demon- 
 stration of respect, left her no real power except the exercise 
 of personal influence in small matters of patronage, she gave 
 no sign of it. But there were people in France whose 
 resentment over the power and the policy of the house of 
 Guise was more dangerous. These opponents of the Guise 
 may be classified under three heads: first, the house of 
 Bourbon, comprising all the princes of the blood royal not 
 in the direct line, together with all their retainers; second, 
 the house of Montmorency and a large number of the 
 nobility, who regarded that house as the leading family of 
 France and looked upon the Guise as foreigners and inter- 
 lopers ; third, the secret and illegal Reformed churches, now 
 organized into a national synod. Each of these discontented 
 
 1 Neg. Francois II, 208. 
 1 Miiller, Th., 228, N. 2,
 
 142 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 parties endeavored to get the help or the support of 
 Catherine. 
 
 Not long after the death of the King the Constable 
 had a private interview with the Queen Mother, in which 
 he urged her to keep the organization of the state very 
 much as it was, in order, during the youth of the King, not 
 to offend any of the princes of the blood, and offered to use 
 the authority which belonged to him, to help her in this 
 task. The story has come down to us, through one of 
 the two men with a chance to know something of the 
 inside of things, who have written the history of the reign 
 of Francis II, that this interview between the Queen Mother 
 and the Constable was an exceedingly stormy one, because 
 Catherine accused the Constable of having said during her 
 husband's life "that no one of her husband's children looked 
 like him except his natural daughter Diana, and added that 
 if she did simple justice, she would punish him now by hav- 
 ing his head cut off." The pages of this chronicler are filled 
 with piquant anecdotes of the sort and therefore he has been 
 very extensively quoted by all who have written about the 
 reign of Francis II. But he is so intensely partisan in 
 defense of the party of opposition and so hostile to the 
 House of Guise, that he took without question many tales, 
 improbable in themselves, and either omitted or denied by 
 other sources. He is not only demonstrably inaccurate, but 
 deeply prejudiced and much less reliance ought to be put 
 upon him in the future by writers who are not willing to 
 sacrifice truth to picturesqueness. This story is unknown 
 to at least two other witnesses who had good means of 
 knowing about it, and the English Ambassador reports that 
 Catherine parted most graciously with her husband's old 
 friend. His account is borne out by three affectionate 
 letters which Catherine wrote to the Constable within four 
 months of the time this stormy interview is supposed to 
 have taken place. The first, written within a few weeks, 
 ends: "I shall be very glad when I shall have some news 
 of you, which I pray God may be as good as are hoped for
 
 UNDER THE THUMB OF THE GUISE 143 
 
 by your gossip and friend, Caterine." But if Catherine did 
 not quarrel with the Constable, the King made it plain that 
 he had no use for his services. The Constable retired to 
 his country place at Chantilly and remained for months in 
 seclusion, while his adherents were one by one quietly ousted 
 from their positions in administration. 1 
 
 According to ancient custom, Anthony of Bourbon, first 
 prince of the blood, now King of Navairre through his recent 
 marriage to the heiress of that liUle kingdom on the 
 southern border of France, would have 'had chief place in the 
 government during the minority of a king. He had not, 
 however, been in any hurry to come up to court from the 
 south, where he held in the two great provinces of Guienne 
 and Gascony the office of governor, ar ; i office filled in each 
 of the provinces of France by the K/ing, but tending to 
 become hereditary and bringing to its holders a large meas- 
 ure of almost independent authority hnd power. It was 
 three weeks after the death of the King"; before he arrived at 
 the town of Vendome, several days' /journey from Paris. 
 There he was met by his brothers, the f Cardinal of Bourbon 
 and the Prince of Conde, and his cousins, the Duke of 
 Montpensier and the Prince de la : Roche sur Yon. The 
 object of this conference of all the members of the House of 
 Bourbon was to form plans for derr^anding their due share 
 in the government and the lessenir 1 ig of the overwhelming 
 power of the Guise. They proposed to demand that the 
 Constable, head of the House of M^ontmorency, be restored 
 to the active exercise of all his ^offices, which were now 
 managed by the Duke of Guise. r IChe Constable was repre- 
 sented at the meeting by his secretary, and his nephew of 
 the House of Chatillon, the Admir a al of France. His brother, 
 d'Andelot, Captain General of il :he French Infantry, had 
 already consulted with the you] lger Bourbons. The con- 
 ference decided to begin this pi* in by demanding from the 
 Queen Mother and the King t" aat the private seal of the 
 
 'Hist, attributed to Regnier de la Ig 3 lanche. Cal. Ven. 110, 121; Letts. 
 I, 125.
 
 144 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 King should be put in the hands of the King of Navarre, as 
 long as His Majesty remained so young. Catherine heard 
 of this plan of the Bourbons to appeal to her to help them 
 weaken the power of the Guise, and she sent for the Prince 
 de la Roche sur Yon. "In gentle language she complained 
 to him of his wishing to turn the kingdom upside down and 
 rebel with the others, to the injury of the King, her son, 
 who on account of his tender age deserves support and not 
 opposition from his kinsfolk of the blood royal, adding that 
 the past misfortunes of France and this last one of the 
 King's death were more than sufficient without now adding 
 a civil war which would never end, and with many tears, 
 crying almost the whole time, she expostulated thus with 
 the Prince." 
 
 Two weeks later the King of Navarre, accompanied by 
 all the princes of the blood, arrived at Paris. He was met 
 by the King with great ceremony and greeted by the Duke 
 of Guise and the Cardinal of Lorraine with the utmost 
 respect. It is evident, however, that the Bourbons soon 
 persuaded themselves, or else were persuaded by the Queen 
 Mother, not to force their demand for a share in the govern- 
 ment and soon after the coronation of the King, all the 
 members of the family] withdrew, on various pretexts, from 
 court. 1 \ 
 
 The third element (bf discontent was the illegal secret 
 Reformed churches, upfrn whom the hand of the govern- 
 ment was laid more ^heavily than ever. Eighty-eight 
 heretics had been burned at the stake during the twelve 
 years' reign of Henry If. Two hundred perished at the 
 stake in a few months (of the rule of Francis II. As it 
 became evident that this repression was not destroying or 
 even checking the growth of the illegal churches, the King 
 issued, in the month of November, three edicts, ordering 
 the destruction of any house in which an illegal assembly 
 was held, the execution of any person attending one, and 
 a free pardon and reward for informers. The members of 
 
 *Cal. Vcn. 115, 121; Forbes 19H.
 
 UNDER THE THUMB OF THE GUISE 145 
 
 the Reformed church thought Catherine not unfriendly to 
 their cause. For instance, the secretaries of the English 
 Embassy wrote to Elizabeth early in December: "The 
 two queens have daily a sermon made before them in the 
 chapel at the court or in their dining chamber by a friar, 
 who can good skill, which some think is done by the Car- 
 dinal of Lorraine's means to keep in the Queen Mother, 
 who is noted rather to be a Protestant than otherwise." 
 It was this reputation that brought her the appeal to which 
 she wrote the following reply, in November, 1559 : 
 
 "To the Magistrates of the City of Metz: 
 
 "Gentlemen: I have seen the letter which you wrote to me 
 the fifth of this month, containing the request which you make 
 to supersede the execution of the letters which the King, my son, 
 has written to you in the matter of religion, in which I would 
 gladly have employed myself . . . except for the fact that know- 
 ing how very pernicious and dangerous a difference of religion 
 is in a city ... I am not able to give you any better counsel in 
 this matter except to obey the letter which the King, my said 
 master and son, has written to you on the subject, as a thing 
 which belongs to the honor of God and which will aid in the 
 prosperity and repose of your city." x 
 
 Whatever inclination in favor of the Reform Catherine 
 may have had was not helped by a letter which was written 
 to her about this time in favor of du Bourg, whose trial had 
 been dragging along ever since the death of the King; con- 
 stantly impeded by the efforts of his friends and by his own 
 skill as a lawyer. It said that they had been trusting to 
 her promise to end the process against du Bourg, but it 
 was now evident that his enemies intended to take his life. 
 She ought to be assured that "God would not leave such 
 an iniquity as this unpunished. . . . God had commenced 
 by the punishment of the late King . . . and the witness 
 and the testimony of His judgment would again be so mani- 
 fest that it could not be by any means disguised or hidden." 
 The procedure against du Bourg was so strange in the 
 
 1 Letts. I, Int., p. 61. Conde I, 6. Forbes, 274. Hist. Ecc, I, 241. 
 Letts. I, 128.
 
 146 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 eyes of everybody that if anything further was attempted 
 against him and the other Christians (eighteen heretics 
 had been burnt in Paris during October) there would be 
 the greatest danger of trouble and revolution. Not that 
 revolution would come from those who under their ministry 
 had embraced the Reformation of the Gospel, because she 
 could expect from them every sort of obedience, but because 
 there were a great number of others, a hundred-fold as 
 many, who, knowing only the abuses of the Pope, and not 
 having yet submitted themselves to ecclesiastical discipline, 
 could not suffer persecution. Of this fact they wished to 
 warn her in order that if any mischief came she could not 
 think that it proceeded from them. Catherine was not at 
 all a timid woman, although some superficial observers were 
 sometimes inclined to think that she was. This letter 
 enraged rather than frightened her and she is reported to 
 have said: "Well, they are threatening me, thinking to 
 frighten me, but they haven't yet got as far as they think." 
 A few days before Christmas du Bourg was burned in 
 front of the Hotel de Ville, glorying over his death in the 
 cause of Christ. This severity, however, did not produce 
 the desired effect. The Venetian Ambassador reports in 
 December: "Religion is in great disorder and has need of 
 more than ordinary care and remedy, as from all quarters 
 fresh disturbances are heard of daily. Although in Paris 
 and other cities not a week passes without many persons 
 being burned alive, and a yet greater number being im- 
 prisoned, the contagion nevertheless does not cease, but 
 spreads more and more daily." Those who preferred the 
 new religion were getting very unwilling to stand quietly 
 by and see their friends led to the slaughter. Arrested 
 heretics on their way to trial were not infrequently stopped 
 by bands of armed men and taken out of the hands of the 
 officers of the law. Near the end of December a sergeant 
 of the official charged with the investigation of the crime 
 of heresy was murdered near the Castle of Chantilly, where
 
 UNDER THE THUMB OF THE GUISE 147 
 
 the court was, and the letters he was carrying to the Car- 
 dinal of Lorraine taken from the body. 1 
 
 For a long time it had been evident to a shrewd outsider 
 that the differences of opinion about religion in France 
 and the quarrels among the nobles might easily combine 
 to produce very serious trouble, and the neighbors of France 
 had already planned to get their advantage out of this 
 trouble when it began. The day after the death of 
 Henry II the Duke of Alva wrote to Philip II from Paris 
 that one of his objects ought to be to favor the Catholics 
 of the realm: "thus while doing service to God, your Maj- 
 esty can hold such a party in this realm that, whenever it 
 seems best to you, you can change the government." The 
 English Ambassador reports, on the 25th of August, 1559, 
 that he had met the King of Navarre at eleven o'clock at 
 night three leagues outside of Paris. He assured him that 
 the Queen of England was ready to join herself in such 
 alliance and friendship with him that the true religion might 
 be properly advanced, and its enemies could not gain any 
 advantage neither against God nor against His cause, nor 
 against His ministers. The King of Navarre said there 
 was no doubt but that God meant to serve Himself by the 
 Queen of England, and ... he rejoiced that he had so 
 good a colleague and so good a cause. The Ambassador, 
 refusing an escort for his dangerous journey, lest the secret 
 of this interview might be discovered, then returned home. 
 Each of these monarchs had a special reason of state for 
 keeping in close alliance with a faction in France. Philip 
 II feared lest the heresy spreading in the Netherlands 
 should be strengthened by contagion from France and 
 Elizabeth was alarmed lest the Guise should use the power 
 of France to back the pretensions of their niece, the young 
 Queen, who served dinner to the English Ambassador on 
 plate engraved with the quartered arms of England, Scot- 
 land and France. 2 
 
 1 Barthelemy, 35; de la Planche, p. 30, sup. by Languet, qtd. Letts. I. 
 Int. 69; Cal. Vcn, 135; Conde I, 319; Forbes I, 261. 
 3 A. N. K. 1492 f. 49 Cal. F.
 
 148 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 Although the Constable quietly withdrew from court 
 and apparently allowed his power to be taken from him 
 without a struggle, it is evident that the Guise came 
 dangerously near to pushing the Montmorency too far. 
 The Constable had held the office of Grand Master of France 
 for thirty-three years, but the Duke of Guise, who had 
 inherited from his father the position of Chief Huntsman 
 and had taken away from the Duke of Longueville the 
 position of Grand Chamberlain, wished to add a third post 
 to his honor and power, so he now took the office of Grand 
 Master. The result was a situation which compelled 
 Catherine to assume the role of pacifier. She wrote a letter 
 which shows great fear of the outbreak of civil war between 
 the factions of Guise and Montmorency: 
 
 "To Marshal Montmorency, My Cousin: 
 
 "Your wife being on her way home, entirely instructed in 
 regard to the will of the King, my son, I want to take this 
 occasion to write this word in addition to what I have told your 
 wife to tell you from me; . . . that you ought to carry out the 
 will of the King on this occasion. . . . Assuring myself that if 
 you will do what is in your power, the good which we expect 
 from this arrangement will result. I beg you, do this great 
 service to yourself and to all of us, and think that you are 
 doing it for the King, your good master, who is dead, my hus- 
 band, and for your country. It is his son, who is his true 
 image in body, in spirit and in goodness. You will never be 
 deceived in such an action and so much loved and with so much 
 occasion, having done him so great a service, that it is not 
 possible to fear that you will ever lose his good graces, besides 
 the fact that, in addition, it is his natural disposition to love you. 
 If you have any trust in me, as one who has always shown to 
 you and to your house my good will, believe me this time, and 
 if you are deceived in it, keep this letter in order to denounce 
 me as the most unhappy and miserable, I will not say Queen 
 or Princess, but creature, whom God has ever created, and give 
 yourself and all your house that contentment of having been 
 the cause of the restoration of this poor kingdom, and leave this 
 beautiful memory of yourself to posterity, and not the memory 
 of having helped to ruin it. I pray God to give you the grace 
 to resolve so wisely that the King, the kingdom and all its sub-
 
 UNDER THE THUMB OF THE GUISE 149 
 
 jects will be under obligations to you. From Blois, the Third 
 of January, 1560. Your good cousin, Catering." 1 
 
 Besides the threatening protests of the heretic churches 
 and the sporadic resistance of those who favored the mar- 
 tyrs, there were other and even more dangerous signs of 
 discontent. At the end of October there had appeared a 
 pamphlet making a very serious attack upon the govern- 
 ment as it was established in the Queen Mother with the 
 advice of the Cardinal of Lorraine and the Duke of Guise. 
 It said that such an arrangement was contrary to the 
 ancient customs and laws of France which excluded women 
 from the government and put the regency for a minor King 
 in the hands of the princes of the blood royal, bitterly at- 
 tacked the Guise and demanded the assembly of the Estates 
 General. 2 
 
 Protests and attacks upon the house of Guise less 
 learned and more popular followed in ever increasing num- 
 ber. One quite widely circulated seems to be a doggerel 
 poem in praise of the two brothers, but if cut perpendicu- 
 larly at right angles not far from the beginning of the lines, 
 it produces a savage attack upon them. It cannot be trans- 
 lated, but it may be reproduced with a reasonable degree 
 of exactness, as follows : 
 
 "Oh lucky chance, nay, gift of God's own hand 
 Which gives to France, our well-loved native land, 
 
 Cardinal Lorraine, who from heresies' maw 
 
 The source of pain to all who love God's law, 
 
 The deadly blight of truth, the Church would save : 
 
 Of truth and right the hope, though Satan rave 
 
 With crafty might. Firm, just and brave, 
 
 His brother Guise, with loyal, righteous hand, 
 
 Longs to seize whoe'er resists the King, and 
 
 Everything in sight from stain of crime would lave. 
 
 Or foul or fair, they miss no plot though deep. 
 
 ^ecrue (2), p. 264, Forbes I, 274, Letts. I, 130. 
 *De Thou, II, 693; La Place, 42.
 
 150 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 By night or day, from their vigilant eye 
 
 Nothing gets away. The craftiest hide no lie 
 
 From this wise pair. These guardians never sleep. 
 
 They never spare themselves, from harm to keep 
 
 The smallest thing when traitors rouse vile strife 
 
 To gain their hope. And France with truth can say : 
 
 One to be Pcpe the Crown would not betray, 
 
 The other the King would serve with his own life." 
 
 In addition to all these general hatreds, the Guise had 
 drawn upon themselves the hatred of a class small but 
 very dangerous — the professional soldiers or captains of 
 the regular regiments of the army. They had been dis- 
 missed without a settlement after the Peace of Cateau- 
 Cambresis and had assembled at court to try to collect 
 their back pay. They had been summarily sent away by 
 the Cardinal of Lorraine and many of them left swearing 
 vengeance. 1 
 
 These men, together with some of the nobility, of good 
 lineage, though not of the highest rank, organized a wide- 
 spread conspiracy, which was given final form in a meeting 
 held in the city of Nantes on the first of February, 1560. 
 The active leader was a certain nobleman of ancient line- 
 age, the Seigneur de la Renaudie, who, after losing a 
 process at law with the chief clerk of the Parlement of 
 Paris, was condemned to prison for having produced in the 
 process forged documents: "a thing," says the contem- 
 porary historian de Thou, "which happens often enough 
 in this sort of affair." He escaped from prison by the help 
 of the Duke of Guise, then the Comte de Joinville, and fled 
 to Geneva, where he married a French lady. During his 
 banishment, his brother-in-law, who had been sent by the 
 King of Navarre as an emissary to the Protestant centers 
 of Germany, had been secretly hung after torture in the 
 garret of the Chateau of Vincennes, and "buried in the ditch 
 in a place overgrown with weeds." La Renaudie, who at- 
 
 ^ouille II, 28. Brant., Cal. Vcn., 159; Paillard qtd. Span. Amb. 7.
 
 UNDER THE THUMB OF THE GUISE 151 
 
 tributed his death to the Cardinal of Lorraine and the Duke 
 of Guise, had vengeance added to his other motives for 
 revolt. Just before the death of Henry II he obtained 
 letters of pardon with restoration of all his estates and 
 permission to live according to his conscience providing he 
 did not preach. 1 
 
 The objects of the conspiracy La Renaudie organized 
 were first and above all to remove the Cardinal of Lorraine 
 and the Duke of Guise from power (probably to execute 
 them on a charge of treason) — to put the control of the 
 government where custom required that it should be during 
 a royal minority, in the hands of the princes of the blood, 
 to restore the Constable to the exercise of all his offices — 
 to stop the persecution of the Reformed religion — and to 
 assemble the Estates General. It was not backed by any 
 of the great nobles except perhaps, secretly, by the Prince 
 of Conde. None of the Montmorency had anything to do 
 with it. It had only the partial approval of the Reformed 
 church. Calvin himself expressed his very strong dis- 
 approval of it. "If," he wrote, "a single drop of blood is 
 shed, rivers of it will flow. ... If the princes of the blood 
 should demand for the common good to be supported in 
 their good right, and if the court of Parlement, in the 
 absence of the Estates General, would join themselves to 
 them, it might then be permissible for all good subjects 
 to maintain them in arms." Calvin had a very poor opinion 
 of La Renaudie, and when the latter dared to assume that 
 he had his sanction, sent for him, violently reproached him, 
 and finally preached a sermon against him. Nevertheless, 
 a number of those who entered into this conspiracy con- 
 sidered themselves to be fighting in the cause of God. 
 
 News of the conspiracy was brought to the Cardinal of 
 Lorraine within two weeks of its formation. A Protestant 
 prince who was his friend sent him word from Germany 
 and a warning came to him from the Bishop of Arras in the 
 Netherlands. An order was sent in the middle of March 
 
 *De Thou II, 754. Read 103.
 
 152 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 to the French Ambassador in Switzerland to shadow La 
 Renaudie that he might be arrested as soon as he crossed 
 the border of France. But he had then been in France at 
 least three weeks. A full suggestion of the danger in which 
 he stood was brought to the Cardinal by a Protestant 
 lawyer from Paris with whom la Renaudie had taken 
 lodgings. This man, moved either by his fears or his con- 
 science, put the government on its guard. By the fourth 
 of March, 1560, the news that something dangerous was 
 afoot became generally known and the court was very 
 uneasy. 1 
 
 They had already made plans to spend some weeks on a 
 hunting trip among the chateaux of the Loire. Afterward 
 they intended to make the journey to Toulouse by way of 
 Bordeaux and to spend the following winter in Provence 
 and Languedoc. The news made them take refuge in the 
 defensible chateau of Amboise. Alarming dispatches con- 
 tinued to come in. For instance, on the thirteenth of 
 March they heard that one of the royal officers, acting on 
 secret information, captured, not far from Tours, two bands 
 of armed men who had with them ten trunks filled with 
 pistols. The carrying of all firearms had months before 
 been strictly prohibited by royal proclamation, which also 
 prohibited the wearing of long mantles, broad sleeves and 
 big boots in which pistols might be concealed. 2 
 
 The Cardinal of Lorraine, very much worried by the 
 situation, began to appeal to the influence and the help 
 of Catherine. This change of attitude is very evident from 
 the correspondence of the English Ambassador. Previous 
 to the time when the Guise became certain of this con- 
 spiracy, his letters contain but little reference to Catherine, 
 but from that time on it is evident that attention is paid 
 to her opinion in all matters of state. Her advice was that 
 the younger members of the house of Montmorency, 
 Admiral Coligny and his brother d'Andelot, Captain Gen- 
 
 *Mignet. Jour, des Savants, July, 1857; ib. qtd. A. N. K. Cal. Vcn. 153, 
 Forbes I, 355. 
 
 a Cal. Vcn. 156, Paillard, 28, qtd. Arch. Brussels.
 
 UNDER THE THUMB OF THE GUISE 153 
 
 eral of the French Infantry, should be called to court. 
 Coligny came and advised the Queen to issue at once an 
 edict declaring entire liberty of conscience until time could 
 be had for the assembly of a general council for the reform 
 of the Church. This advice was accepted not only by 
 Catherine, but by the Guise. An edict was issued in which 
 "the King, by the advice of his honored mother and his 
 council and not wishing that the first year of his reign 
 should seem to posterity bloody and full of the death of 
 our poor subjects however much they may have deserved 
 death," ordered the release of all people arrested for the 
 sake of religion. The edict excepted from pardon all 
 preachers of heresy and called upon all loyal subjects of 
 the King to live in the future as good Catholics. 1 
 
 This of course was not what Coligny had advised and 
 if it had been, the conspirators had probably gone too far 
 now to be willing to give up their plans. At all events, 
 small bodies of armed men continued to converge from 
 different points upon the town and castle of Amboise. They 
 were cut off and captured by the princes, nobles and gentle- 
 men of the court and, on the nineteenth of March, 1560, 
 la Renaudie himself was killed in a skirmish in the woods 
 not far from Amboise. The utmost severity was used 
 against the prisoners. One day, for instance, four men were 
 hanged in the morning and in the evening nine more were 
 hanged, some from the gates, some upon specially erected 
 gallows, some from the window-casings of the chateau. 
 Bunches of prisoners were tied up in sacks or bound to- 
 gether to long poles and cast into the river. About fifty 
 were drowned in this way. In all it is estimated by foreign 
 observers that some seventy-five were executed. A few 
 noblemen of greater importance were beheaded. 2 
 
 Many of the soldiers when asked for whom they were 
 fighting answered that they were the soldiers of God and 
 most of the captains executed died "very assuredly and 
 
 *De Thou II, 764; Conde I, 9. 
 
 'Forbes I, 378; Paillard 73, qtd. Span. Amb.
 
 154 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 constantly for religion in singing of psalms." When one 
 nobleman by the name of Villemongey mounted the scaf- 
 fold he stooped to dip his hands in the blood of his com- 
 panions and raising them to Heaven cried out, "Oh God 
 Most Good and Most Gracious, behold the innocent blood 
 of those who belong to You, whose death You will not leave 
 unpunished." The horror of these executions was increased 
 by the fact that the ladies and gentlemen of the court 
 rather made a spectacle of them, crowding the windows of 
 the chateau and treating the matter as if it were a festival. 
 To this general cruel attitude of the court two exceptions 
 have been recorded. The Duchess of Guise wept and 
 refused to witness the executions and Catherine de' Medici 
 saved from death and "caused to be sent home a great 
 number." * 
 
 Although the conspiracy of Amboise was not based en- 
 tirely upon religion, for there were orthodox Roman 
 Catholics among the prisoners, the attitude of those who 
 perished for it put them in the light of martyrs of the 
 Protestant party and the beginnings of that terrible hatred 
 which was soon to envelop all France, a hatred to which 
 both sides gave the sanction of religion, can be seen in the 
 following incident. The young Agrippa d'Aubigne, the 
 future historian, then a lad ten years old, was passing 
 through the city of Amboise with his father. The heads 
 of the more notable conspirators were still to be seen fixed 
 on spikes above the gates where, according to the custom of 
 the times, they had been placed to molder. His father took 
 him by the hand and said, "My child, you must not spare 
 your head after mine. Revenge these chieftains, full of 
 honor, whose heads you have just seen. If you spare your- 
 self in this matter you will have my curse upon you." 2 
 
 The government announced that those summarily exe- 
 cuted were traitors who had planned to kill the King, his 
 mother, his brothers and all having the management of 
 
 1 Forbes I, 378, de Thou II, 773, La Place 54, Castelnau 18 (present). 
 'Castelnau 19, d'Aubigne (2), 5.
 
 UNDER THE THUMB OF THE GUISE 155 
 
 public affairs or at least to reduce the "authority of the 
 King to the mercy of the subjects who should give the law 
 to him from whom they ought to take it." Pierre de la 
 Place, who had been appointed by Henry II the first presi- 
 dent of the Cour des Aides of Paris, after pointing out that 
 the real purpose of the conspiracy was to depose the Guise 
 from power and put them on trial and that all the con- 
 spirators were bound by solemn oath not to hurt the King 
 or any of the princes of the blood, goes on to say: 
 
 "Among the conspirators in that enterprise there were a num- 
 ber who held the doctrine called new who were named Huguenots. 
 This name began to be used in the city of Tours, a few days 
 before the conspiracy, because of the gate of the city named 
 after King Hugo, near which those of the said religion were wont 
 to go to say their prayers; taken up by the courtiers, it has 
 become universal. The said religionists, called Huguenots, said 
 that they had 'joined with the others in order to present their 
 confession of faith to get mitigation of the persecution and to 
 demand the assembly of the Estates General." 
 
 A Catholic living in Paris wrote in his diary that the 
 insurrection was got up under pretext of religion, although 
 the common report was that there was in it more "malcon- 
 tentment than Huguenoterie." x 
 
 The Guise were not at all satisfied that they had gotten 
 at the bottom of the affair. The Venetian Ambassador 
 reports that some of the prisoners confessed that they were 
 in the service of the Prince of Conde and "it has been told 
 me that the Cardinal from inability to restrain himself 
 dashed his cap to the ground in a rage, stamping upon it 
 several times." But they did not dare attack a prince of 
 the blood, a younger brother of the King of Navarre, 
 without strong and explicit evidence. Catherine evidently 
 regarded the conspiracy of Amboise both as a warning and 
 an opportunity. She was very ill at ease about it and 
 wanted to know whether or not it had been backed by the 
 heretics of France as a whole, and what were the chances 
 
 1 Conde I, 349, 8. La Place, Paillard qtd. Span. Amb. 44.
 
 156 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 that the adherents of the new secret churches might get 
 the open leadership of princes of the blood and great nobles 
 for a general rising. They had, as we have seen, previously 
 regarded her as their friend, but "seeing that they no longer 
 addressed themselves to her," she sent word to Chandieu, 
 the chief minister of the church of Paris, offering him a safe 
 conduct if he would come and talk with her. He answered 
 that he was afraid to come, but finally a letter was written 
 to her under an assumed name which assured her that the 
 forces which had approached Amboise had not been in- 
 tended to act against her or the King, but solely to get the 
 chance of presenting to the King a petition and a remon- 
 strance concerning the state of the kingdom: which related 
 chiefly to the power of the Guise and the persecution. The 
 means of escape from civil war were, first, to appoint a royal 
 council according to the ancient laws of France and not 
 according to the desires of the house of Guise. Second, 
 in order to appease the troubles of religion, to call a holy 
 and free council, preferably a general council of the whole 
 church : if not, a national council, and that meantime men 
 should be allowed to live according to the confession of 
 faith held in the Reformed churches of France. 1 
 
 Catherine had asked that the letter should be presented 
 to her secretly, so that, if she wished to adopt any of its 
 suggestions, she might put them forward as coming from 
 herself alone. This was very difficult, but a man by the 
 name of Camus undertook to do it. After watching for 
 some time, he finally found what he thought would be a 
 good chance in the abbey of Beaulieu just outside of the 
 town of Loches. He had prepared two packets, one, which 
 he was to present openly, containing papers about money 
 which Catherine owed to his late father: the other con- 
 taining the letter. He found the Queen Mother in the 
 courtyard of the Abbey and he slipped the second packet 
 into her hand without being seen by the young queen, who 
 followed her as if watching all her actions. Catherine went 
 
 *B. N. qtd. 1723 f. 3; de la Planche 152, 155, 157.
 
 UNDER THE THUMB OF THE GUISE 157 
 
 into a chamber to read the letter, but the young Queen 
 came in suddenly and saw it, so Catherine joined her in 
 reporting it to the Cardinal. The bearer was examined 
 about his knowledge of the conspiracy of Amboise and 
 particularly about "the Prince," who was, according to 
 rumor, the "mute chief." They threatened to put him to 
 torture and death if he didn't tell all he knew, but they 
 couldn't get very much out of him, although he was re- 
 peatedly interrogated by the Queen and others. 
 
 Being anxious to find out the truth, not only in regard 
 to the discontent of the persecuted heretics, but also about 
 the present state of the old enmity between the houses of 
 Guise and Montmorency, Catherine sent also for a devoted 
 adherent of the house of Montmorency, a gentleman by 
 the name of Louis Regnier de la Planche, and asked him 
 what were the real reasons for these troubles and what he 
 suggested as a remedy for them. His written account of 
 the interview is given in summary form in the book spoken 
 of on page 142, which is usually, but I think mistakenly, 
 attributed to him. He was brought into the private room 
 of the Queen Mother, and the Cardinal of Lorraine was 
 hidden behind the tapestry during the interview. He said 
 that those who were called Huguenots were made up of 
 two different sorts of people, the one were moved by their 
 conscience and the other by consideration for the condition 
 of the state. The first had joined la Renaudie because 
 they could no longer bear the persecution, the others 
 because the state was in the hands of aliens while the princes 
 of the blood were shut out from the government. The 
 first might be appeased by an assembly called on the pre- 
 tense of translating the Bible at which the differences 
 between the two parties could be composed. The second 
 could only be satisfied by putting the government in the 
 hands of the princes of the blood by means of the assembly 
 of the Estates General. He went on to denounce the house 
 of Guise as alien usurpers of power. The Queen Mother 
 answered that she would be delighted if the King of Navarre
 
 158 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 and the Prince of Conde would stay at court like the Prince 
 of Montpensier and the Prince de la Roche-Sur-Yon and 
 if they would do so she could promise them favorable and 
 honorable treatment. He was summoned to a second inter- 
 view in the afternoon, threatened a little bit and urged to 
 give help in tracing the roots of the late rebellion. He 
 replied by a new attack on the house of Guise and said 
 that he was neither a member of the police nor a spy to 
 track pretended rebels. The Queen Mother, in apparent 
 rage, ordered him into the hands of her guard, but he was 
 released after four days' imprisonment.
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 Catherine's policy of conciliation 
 
 We have very few letters of Catherine's dated in the 
 spring of 1560 and it is probable that she did not write very- 
 many. Nevertheless, we see plainly enough it marks a great 
 change in her life: the beginning of large influence over 
 public affairs. During the twenty-seven years after she 
 came to France an ignorant, friendless girl of fourteen to 
 be married to a young prince because of her dot and the 
 political influence of her great-uncle the Pope, her opinion 
 about political matters had seldom been asked and never 
 counted for very much. Now, when the Cardinal of 
 Lorraine, alarmed by the conspiracy of Amboise, asked her 
 to leave for a time the role of figurehead and help him if 
 she could in steering the ship of state, she was not content 
 simply to aid him in holding his course. She had quietly 
 made her own investigation of the facts and had drawn her 
 own conclusions. She was seriously impressed by the 
 amount of discontent of various kinds which lay behind 
 the abortive conspiracy of Amboise, and strongly suspected 
 that the Queen of England had some secret relation to those 
 who might be disposed to undertake the defense of the 
 persecuted heretics. 1 She was not, therefore, willing to 
 measure the danger of the situation by the ease with which 
 the late conspiracy had been put down. Perhaps also she 
 saw, even at this early date, that political forces were con- 
 cerned, which, if shrewdly handled, might assure her per- 
 manent power in the state. 
 
 At all events she did two things. She had already advised 
 the Cardinal to call Coligny to court and she now drew 
 closer to this old adherent of her husband's faction when 
 
 1 Letts. I, 136, Cal. Vcn. 201. See Note. 
 
 159
 
 160 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 he was only Dauphin, whom he had made Admiral of 
 France as soon as he became King. Coligny was the brains 
 of the Huguenot party and with her inclination strength- 
 ened by his advice she made up her mind that, although 
 Lorraine had called on her only for help, she would give him 
 direction and change the general character of the policy of 
 the Crown in regard to "the troubles of religion." For 
 a time she succeeded in carrying out her purpose, and 
 launched a definite policy of conciliation. 
 
 The first marked sign of this policy had been the edicts 
 lightening persecution already issued by Coligny's advice. 
 These, by the testimony of Reformed and orthodox alike, 
 had not been generally obeyed by the judges; either be- 
 cause of secret orders from the Cardinal or irrepressible zeal 
 for orthodoxy on their own part. The need of a policy of 
 conciliation was suggested more and more strongly by the 
 news which came from many parts of the kingdom. For 
 example : near Bordeaux mobs were breaking the images of 
 saints in the churches: in Normandy in some places, 
 "Preaching was going on as freely as in Geneva:" in Pro- 
 vence and Dauphiny great assemblies of armed men wor- 
 shipped in open defiance of the law. From the Bishop of 
 Montpellier in Languedoc word came to Catherine towards 
 the end of 1560 that the Pretended Reformed had seized 
 the church of St. Matthieu. He begged her to check "these 
 monsters who want to extinguish the true religion and bury 
 in one great tomb all its ministers in order to put in their 
 place the frogs of Geneva and the snakes of Zurich." In 
 May, therefore, the Crown issued the Edict of Romorantin 
 on the subject of religion and sedition, which transferred 
 cases of heresy from the King's courts to the bishops' 
 courts, and provided summary justice for armed assemblies 
 contrary to law. The Edict was somewhat ambiguous and 
 it was criticized from both sides. The Spanish Ambassador 
 wrote: "The bishops will not dare to punish heretics for 
 fear lest they rise some day and kill them all." Others
 
 CATHERINE'S POLICY OF CONCILIATION 161 
 
 thought it an attempt to bring the Spanish inquisition into 
 France. 1 
 
 Whatever other people may have thought about it, 
 Catherine intended to use the Edict to lessen persecution. 
 Soon after it was issued, there came into the service of the 
 Crown a man who was to be for some time Catherine's 
 chief instrument in the policy of conciliation upon which 
 she was determined. Michel de l'Hospital was now fifty- 
 three years old and had already made a name for himself. 
 Well known as a Latin poet, he had addressed his most 
 complimentary poems to different members of the house 
 of Guise. But he had been recommended to Catherine not 
 by them, but by her sister-in-law, the Duchess of Savoy, 
 in whose service he had been for some time. When the 
 Chancellor of France, Olivier, died, in the end of March, 
 1560, probably both the Queen Mother and the all-powerful 
 royal minister agreed in the desire to appoint l'Hospital 
 to succeed him. Thus there entered into the service of the 
 Crown a resolute and wise man who, attacked by extremists 
 of both sides, has nevertheless been praised by more his- 
 torians of more varied types than any character of those 
 troublous times, because, amid the hates and passions of 
 civil war, he kept "the lilies of France in his heart." 
 
 One striking outcome of the new policy was a letter sent 
 August 7, 1560, signed by the young King. The Catholic 
 cantons of the Swiss League had written to him in the 
 end of May expressing their dislike of the sects hostile to 
 the Church and the Christian faith which were established 
 among their neighbors. They wrote that the preachers of 
 these sects were scattering libels everywhere, and the Catho- 
 lic cantons were afraid of being compelled to change their 
 .eligion by force of arms. They were therefore considering 
 striking first. The King's reply pointed out that the evil 
 they complained of was one common to all Christendom. 
 There was no prince, republic nor community which was 
 
 ^astelnau, Bk. I, Ch. 11, p. 22, e.g. B. N. C. C. C. 27 f. 227, B. N. It. 
 1721 f. 44, A. N. K. 1493 f. 49, Neg. Fr. II, 541, 562. Zeller 385. Isambert 
 14. p. 31. A. N. K. qtd. De Croze I, 71.
 
 162 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 not in great trouble about it and doubtful of the remedy. 
 "Because, since the punishment of so many people who had 
 been put to death in order to strike terror into those who 
 were infected by these sects and heresies and to keep the 
 faithful firm in their religion had been rather a means of 
 spreading the poison throughout the world than of bringing 
 back the wanderers from the way of truth, we must confess" 
 that the only remedy left was a council of the Church. He 
 was working now with the Pope, the Emperor and the King 
 of Spain to arrange such a council. Meantime he advises 
 them to remember that union was the strength of the Swiss 
 cantons and to take everything patiently. If, after they 
 had exhausted all means of peace, their neighbors should 
 ever be so unreasonable as to try "to force them to receive 
 the law from them, the King will give them all aid and 
 assistance." This letter came out of Catherine's influence, 
 perhaps with the aid of L'Hospital, for the ideas and even 
 their expression sound like him. In July when urging the 
 Parlement of Paris to register the Edict of Romorantim he 
 had pointed out that, "Although Francis I and Henry II 
 had tried to weed out the tares from among the wheat, 
 now the tares were grown so thick that it is impossible 
 to pull them out without pulling out the wheat also," that 
 just as physicians abandon medicines which do not cure 
 the disease, so the state must give up the attempt to cure 
 its troubles by persecution. "The more so since these 
 troubles of religion are not confined to France but are also 
 found among our neighbors of England, Germany and 
 Scotland." He asked for summary justice for the rebellious, 
 but for toleration and persuasion for heretics until a general 
 council could bring peace and harmony to the Church. 1 
 
 These moves in the direction of conciliation seem to 
 have had their first effect upon the temper of the Ambassa- 
 dor of Spain. The eighth of June Catherine wrote to the 
 French Ambassador at Madrid complaining bitterly of him 
 and saying she would rejoice at his recall. Two weeks 
 
 1 Arch. Lucerne, 7 Aug. 1560. Conde I, 543.
 
 CATHERINE'S POLICY OF CONCILIATION 163 
 
 before the King had written a similar letter and the Car- 
 dinal of Lorraine accompanied this by a letter complaining 
 that "the representative of the Spanish King had not been 
 content with throwing an ordinance signed by the hand of 
 the King upon the ground and calling a royal judgment bad 
 and unhappy, but had also added that the Guise committed 
 intolerable injustice with a thousand other similar words 
 extremely insolent." The probability is that this bad 
 temper of Chantonay was due to orders from home, and 
 the probability is made almost certainty by a dispatch of 
 the Venetian Ambassador in Spain written eight years later. 
 The Ambassador predicts that Counts Egmont and Horn, 
 under arrest for protests against matters of religion and 
 administration in the Netherlands, would be executed, be- 
 cause the King had within a few days said to the Nuncio 
 about the affairs of France that "the bad situation there 
 is due to the fact that the French King and Queen had 
 not listened to him when, more than eight years ago, he 
 tried to convince them that they ought at every price 
 to seize the suspected leaders of discontent and by some 
 means put them to death : which suggests that His Majesty 
 does not intend to fall into the same error which he has 
 condemned in others." * 
 
 While Spain objected to any conciliation, the Reformed 
 churches and the Bourbon Montmorency nobility thought 
 the form of conciliation offered by Catherine's new policy, 
 which the Guise had ostensibly 2 accepted, entirely insuffi- 
 cient. The discontent of the sympathizers with the illegal 
 Reformed churches continued to appear sporadically in 
 armed resistance to the law. 
 
 Paul de Mouvans, a nephew of the Cardinal of Tournon, 
 was descended from the younger branch of a noble family 
 of Provence. He and his brother Anthony had served as 
 officers of the King in the Italian wars, and became con- 
 verted to the Reformed doctrines. Coming home at the 
 
 1 Letts., I, 138; Neg. Fr. II, 384. Gossart, I, 92. 
 
 'See Lambert, I, 115; their orders to hang a Huguenot prisoner.
 
 164 CATHERINE DE MEDICI 
 
 peace of Cateau-Cambresis, the two brothers had brought 
 a minister from Geneva and held services in a house of 
 theirs in the little city of Castellane, near Marseilles. They 
 made converts and, in February, 1559, a mob attacked the 
 house. The Mouvans and their adherents defended it, 
 killed three of the assailants and rode out of the city, 
 sword in hand. Paul went to Aix, capital of Provence, 
 to demand legal redress; for he claimed that nobles had the 
 right to listen to discourses on religion in their own houses. 
 Parlement adjourned the case and Paul went to Paris to get 
 redress. Meantime the people of Castellane set to work to 
 plunder and burn the houses of the Reformed sympathizers 
 in the city and its neighborhood. Anthony raised a band of 
 partisans and executed reprisals, plundering especially 
 churches and monasteries. Paul came back with orders 
 from the Chancellor transferring the suit of the Mouvans 
 to the neighboring Parlement of Grenoble, but the Parle- 
 ment of Aix refused to register the writ of the Chancellor 
 and put a price on the heads of the two brothers. The 
 governor of the province, anxious to end the incipient civil 
 war, proposed arbitration by a commission of three nobles 
 and the chief magistrate (viguier) of Castellane. The 
 Mouvans agreed and Anthony, on his way to the place of 
 arbitration, spent the night at the little city of Draguignan. 
 When his presence was known the mob rose, killed the 
 magistrate who tried to protect him, dragged him into the 
 street and literally tore him to pieces, carrying his heart 
 through the streets on the point of a pike. The fragment 
 of his mutilated corpse was afterwards dug up from the 
 grave where one of his friends who rescued it from the sewer 
 had laid it, and by orders of the prosecutor of the Parlement, 
 put in a barrel of salt and sent to Aix to be hung on the 
 common gallows. This was a true prophecy of the bestial 
 ferocity which was to characterize, especially in the south, 
 the civil wars whose shadow was alarming Catherine. Paul 
 de Mouvans at once turned from the law courts to the 
 sword to avenge his brother. He raised a force of two
 
 CATHERINE'S POLICY OF CONCILIATION 165 
 
 thousand men and kept the field, feeding them largely by- 
 exactions from the Catholic population and paying them 
 by melting down the gold and silver vessels of the churches. 
 Catherine ordered the Governor to conciliate him and, on 
 condition of amnesty for his soldiers, the free exercise of 
 religion in his own house and the punishment of the mur- 
 derers of his brother, Mouvans agreed to disband his force. 
 But shortly afterwards, afraid of his brother's fate, he 
 mounted and followed by a few faithful followers rode into 
 Switzerland. 1 
 
 In Dauphiny Charles, Seigneur de Montbrun, who had 
 also won distinction in the wars of Italy and afterward 
 become converted to the Reformed religion, was summoned 
 before the Parlement of Grenoble under charges of having 
 compelled the inhabitants of his estates to become Hugue- 
 nots and of having supported an illegal minister at a neigh- 
 boring town. Fearing for his life, he wrote a polite letter 
 denying the charges and refusing to come to the Parlement. 
 He supported his refusal by the edict suspending all action 
 on account of religion. The Parlement then sent the pre- 
 vost des marechaux to bring him dead or alive. Montbrun 
 met him on the road and after a stormy interview, knocked 
 him from his horse and carried him off a prisoner. He 
 then raised a force of picked men and invaded the Comtat 
 de Venaissin. This was territory on the borders of Dau- 
 phiny which belonged to the Pope and was ruled by a 
 Legate. A considerable number of the inhabitants had 
 become Protestants and the object of Montbrun's invasion 
 was to defend them against a very severe persecution. 2 
 
 In addition to these open revolts word came from 
 Gascony that many nobles had sold their estates and 
 gathered themselves together for some purpose unknown. 3 
 
 The Bourbon-Montmorency faction of the nobles showed 
 its opposition not with the sword, but with the pen. 
 
 1 Lambert, I, 86-98. 
 'Arnaud (1). 
 •Cal. Vcn., 221.
 
 166 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 Numbers of pamphlets and placards violently attacking the 
 administration continued to appear. One of the most 
 characteristic productions of this sort was entitled, "A 
 Response to all the Calumnies Heretofore Offered Against 
 the Nobility of France Which Has Set Itself Against the 
 Tyranny of the House of Guise." It is a careful argument 
 on the ground of constitutional precedent that the house 
 of Guise had no right to the management of state affairs 
 during the youth of the King, because that legally belonged 
 to the princes of the blood. Even if this were not true, 
 there were three good reasons why the house of Guise 
 could not rightfully have the management of the realm: 
 First, they were foreign and not French princes. Second, 
 they pretended to have a claim to the throne through their 
 descent from Hugh Capet. Third, they had brought ter- 
 rible losses upon the realm by their past management. 
 Before the death of the late King they had stripped France 
 of troops to make themselves great in Italy, with disastrous 
 results still fresh in the memory of everybody. Since the 
 death of the late King they had rendered Scotland useless 
 to the Crown, seized all the money of France, defaulting 
 even on the interest of the King's debts, and withholding 
 the pay of the army, while at the same time burdening the 
 poor people with enormous taxes. They had overthrown 
 the authority of the courts of Parlement ; especially by the 
 last edict, by which the jurisdiction over cases of religion 
 was taken away from these courts and given to the ecclesi- 
 astical courts of which the Cardinal of Lorraine was the 
 leader in this kingdom. In short, the bad administration of 
 the Guise had "led wise men to think of the old proverb 
 that when those of the house of Guise shall have sheared 
 the King they will take even his skin." 1 
 
 The appearance of this protest against the rule of the 
 Guise was doubly ominous of danger to the peace of France. 
 In the first place, Catherine's suspicion that those who 
 attacked the rule of the Guise were supported by the Queen 
 
 1 Conde.
 
 CATHERINE'S POLICY OF CONCILIATION 167 
 
 of England was made certainty by a proclamation Elizabeth 
 issued after Francis and Mary had joined the arms of 
 England to those of Scotland and France. Elizabeth said 
 she would keep peace with France and Scotland because 
 "these insolent attempts are but the abuse of the House of 
 Guise — who have the chief governance of the crown of 
 France during the minority of the King and Queen." 1 
 
 In the second place, this appeal to constitutional law 
 against the dominance of the House of Guise was ominous 
 because it showed the way of union between the chief 
 forces of discontent: the Bourbon-Montmorency faction of 
 the nobility and the Reformed churches. Calvin had dis- 
 approved of the conspiracy of Amboise because he distrusted 
 la Renaudie and feared anarchy, but his early humanistic 
 training had given him the dislike of "tyranny" in the 
 classic sense of unlawful power which so many of the 
 humanists learned from Cicero. He finally formed a theory 
 of constitutional resistance: "Though the correcting of 
 unbridled governments be the revengement of the Lord, let 
 us not by and by think that it is committed to us, to whom 
 there is given no other commandment but to obey and 
 suffer. I speak only of private men. But if there be at 
 this time any magistrates for the behalf of the people such 
 as the ephori of Lacedemonia or the tribunes of the people 
 at Rome, I do not forbid them, according to their office, to 
 withstand the outraging licentiousness of kings. Nay, I 
 affirm that if they wink at a king's treading down of the 
 poor commonalty, it is a wicked breach of faith, because 
 they deceitfully betray the liberty of the people whereof 
 they know themselves to be appointed protectors by the 
 ordinance of God." 2 
 
 One of these attacks upon the Guise which appeared 
 in the late spring or early summer is as striking an example 
 as can be found in history of the pitch of intensity to which 
 religious feelings, the desire for vengeance and political 
 
 1 Letts. I, 136, Cal. F. 1560, p. 472. 
 'Institutes, IV, XX, 31.
 
 168 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 passion can raise hatred. It is a short pamphlet written 
 in nervous French which reproduces with great force the 
 method and feeling of Cicero's orations against Catiline. 
 It is meant for the Cardinal of Lorraine, and is headed, 
 "A Letter Sent to the Tiger of France," and it begins, "Mad 
 tiger, venomous viper, sepulchre of abomination, receptacle 
 of unhappiness, how long wilt thou abuse the youth of our 
 King? Wilt thou never put a term to thy unmeasured 
 ambition, to thy falsehoods, to thy stealings? Dost thou 
 think that anyone is ignorant of thy detestable design and 
 fails to read in thy face the curse of our times, the ruin of 
 this kingdom and the death of our King? " x 
 
 In addition to this serious discontent from two sources, 
 showing itself by sword and by pen, the finances of the 
 kingdom were in a very grave condition. During the reign 
 of Henry II, owing to war, to excessive generosity and cor- 
 rupt administration, the debt of France had rolled up. 
 It now amounted to over forty millions of francs, which 
 was about three times the annual income of the state. 
 This in spite of the fact that the income of the Crown had 
 been doubled and the direct tax increased about fifty per 
 cent. The need of cash was so great that many salaries 
 were unpaid and the treasury had been obliged to declare 
 a sort of half-bankruptcy. An Italian banker who was a 
 large creditor of the Crown, protesting against this partial 
 repudiation, said, in the presence of the royal council, that 
 "even in Turkey they didn't do the things which were done 
 in France." But his indignation brought him nothing but 
 a threat of prison. 2 
 
 An acute consciousness of all these causes of trouble 
 was kept vivid in Catherine's mind in two ways. Direct 
 appeal was made to her. While she was at supper in the 
 chateau of Fontainebleau a note was thrown in through the 
 open window which said that if she did not quickly set 
 free some Calvinist preachers who were imprisoned in the 
 
 1 Read. 
 
 a Clamageran. B. N. It. 1721, f. 30; Val. Vcn., 222.
 
 CATHERINE'S POLICY OF CONCILIATION 169 
 
 city of Tours, "she would find herself the most unhappy 
 princess alive." Of the other sort of notice, the following 
 which has survived without address, date or signature, will 
 serve as a specimen : "A few days ago Maligny and Captain 
 Bobous, a Provengal, passed through Bergerac accompanied 
 by twenty-five men well mounted, armed with cutlasses and 
 carrying pistols at their saddle-bows, and the man who sent 
 me this word informs me that they are on the road to 
 Normandy, although it is possible that they might take 
 some other road. I wanted to send you word of this, but I 
 beg of you that, having read this letter, you would be 
 pleased to tear it up and to throw the pieces in the fire." 
 These things had determined Catherine to assert her 
 authority and to move strongly in the direction of a policy 
 of conciliation. Doubtless by the advice of Michel de 
 THospital, there was issued in July, 1560, the first of that 
 splendid series of royal edicts by which during the eight 
 years of his power he endeavored to reform the administra- 
 tion of the French state. Alluding to the intolerable bur- 
 den of taxation caused by the debts of the late King, the 
 edict forbade a practice which had become customary of 
 levying taxes in the various provinces in order to gratify 
 governors or other royal officials in those provinces under 
 the name of gifts. The penalty imposed is eight times the 
 sum of the "gift," divided between the people upon whom 
 the tax was levied and the royal treasury. 1 
 
 Catherine had already sent Admiral Coligny into Nor- 
 mandy, where the Reformed were very strong, in order to 
 find out what would remove their discontent. Following 
 the advice of both the Admiral and the Chancellor, she now 
 determined to call at Fontainebleau an Assembly of Nota- 
 bles to take council on the state of the kingdom. There 
 were summoned to it the chief nobles, all governors of 
 provinces and all who had the right to enter the privy 
 council. 2 
 
 1 B. N. It. 1721, f. 146, C. C. C. 27, f. 139; Letts., I, 153. 
 1 B. N. It., 1721, f. 50.
 
 170 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 Catherine was particularly anxious that the heads of 
 the great houses of Bourbon and Montmorency should be 
 present at this meeting and she dictated the following letter 
 to the King of Navarre: 
 
 "My brother, I have suffered so much sorrow during the past 
 year and I have seen this poor realm afflicted by so many 
 calamities, one on top of the other, that I haven't had much 
 leisure up to now but . . . seeing all the disturbances which 
 have for some months been going on in this kingdom, it has 
 seemed to me, and to all the good servants of the King, that no 
 better means can be found in the present necessity than to 
 assemble all those who have the honor of belonging to his 
 council; in order that in so large and good a company it may 
 be possible to find the remedy of the present evil situation and 
 to appease all the troubles which we see now in this realm. 
 Therefore, my brother, because you have the honor to be so close 
 to the King, my son, and because you are among the leading 
 personages of his council, I desire that the beginning should be 
 made with you, assuring myself that, because you are the first 
 who belongs to him in blood, you will be also the first in the 
 devotion you have always shown towards the late King, my lord, 
 and towards him. I pray you, therefore, to come to him imme- 
 diately, and you can assure yourself, my brother, that he and I 
 will take every pains to give you so good a welcome that.. . . 
 you will have no occasion to be sorry that you have come into 
 a company where you will be so much loved and esteemed. . . . 
 
 Your good sister, Caterine." 
 
 She wrote also to the Constable urging him to obey the 
 summons of the King and to his wife to use her influence 
 to get her husband to come. In spite of Catherine's letter, 
 backed by most flattering letters from the King, the King 
 of Navarre would not come to the Assembly, but the Con- 
 stable arrived about the middle of August accompanied by 
 his children, his nephews and a great company of his 
 friends, amounting in all to six hundred horse. 1 
 
 The Assembly met in great state. There were present 
 the King and Queen, the Queen Mother and the brothers 
 of the King, the Cardinals of Bourbon and Lorraine, the 
 
 1 Letts. 144. 146; B. N. Nouvs. Acqs. 6003, f. 3. 10, 34, It. 1721, f. 56.
 
 CATHERINE'S POLICY OF CONCILIATION 171 
 
 Dukes of Guise and Aumale, the Constable, the Chancellor, 
 the Admiral and the Marshals St. Andre and Brissac, the 
 Bishops of Orleans, Vienne and Valence, all the chevaliers 
 of the order of St. Michel and the royal secretaries. 
 Catherine opened the meeting by begging the Assembly to 
 counsel the King, her son, in such a way that "his sceptre 
 may be preserved, his subjects eased and the malcontents 
 contented, if it be possible," and it was a quiet but complete 
 triumph for her new policy of conciliation. 
 
 The Duke of Guise began the proceedings by making a 
 report as Lieutenant General of France. This was followed 
 by a report from the Cardinal of Lorraine on the finances. 
 There was no attempt to attack the two brothers in the 
 tone of any of the twenty-two libels which the Cardinal 
 said he now had upon his table, but the dislike of perse- 
 cution of the Reformed churches and the desire to employ 
 traditionary methods in the conduct of the government, 
 prevailed so strongly that the Cardinal and the Duke were 
 compelled to give way and swim with the tide. Admiral 
 Coligny presented two petitions, one to the King and the 
 other to the Queen Mother, which he said would have been 
 signed, if he had wished it, by fifty thousand adherents 
 of the Reformed churches in Normandy. The petitioners 
 reminded the King that the office of King was ordained by 
 God in order that "following the example of good kings 
 like David, Hezekiah and Josiah, You might restore in your 
 kingdom the true and right service of God and exterminate 
 all abuses." They asked for temples in each city and vil- 
 lage for their worship and professed their willingness to 
 obey all laws and pay all taxes even greater than those 
 which were now levied. They called upon the Queen 
 Mother to follow the example of Esther; to have pity upon 
 the chosen people and to deliver them. "Therefore, sov- 
 ereign princess, we supplicate you, by the affection which 
 you owe to Jesus Christ, to establish His true service and 
 to drive out all others." * 
 
 1 Conde, II, 645.
 
 172 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 The Admiral, in commenting upon these petitions, de- 
 manded the reform of the abuses of the Church and the 
 assembly of the Estates General. The Cardinal of Lor- 
 raine advised the Queen not to grant the temples for that 
 would be to approve of idolatry and to merit damnation. 
 He said, however, that as far as concerned those who went 
 without arms to heretic services, or stayed away from mass, 
 since the penalties which had been inflicted upon them had 
 up to the present moment done no good, the King ought 
 to prohibit their being touched any more by the hand of 
 justice. He was even very sorry that such severe punish- 
 ment had been inflicted before and he would that his life 
 or his death could be of some use to such poor deluded 
 people. He felt that hereafter the bishops ought to try 
 to correct their errors in evangelic ways. "Correct thy 
 brother between him and thee." He believed that the 
 Estates General ought to be called and that the reports 
 of the bailiffs and seneschals ought to be assembled in 
 order to see whether it would be better to hold a national 
 or a universal council of the Church. When all had ex- 
 pressed their opinion in turn, it was unanimously agreed 
 to call the Estates General for the 10th of December and 
 afterwards, if the Pope and the other rulers would not agree 
 to a universal council, to call a national council of the 
 Gallican Church. The decision of the King to call these 
 two assemblies was announced to the kingdom in a royal 
 edict issued on the 31st of August, 1560. 1 
 
 But although Catherine, by adroitly bringing into play 
 the anti-Guise elements in the state, could launch her new 
 policy of conciliation and an appeal to the nation, she could 
 not hold control of the situation. A mistake of some of 
 their antagonists suddenly made the Guise again masters 
 of France. 
 
 Catherine's first impression of this new event so dis- 
 turbing to her plans, has survived in a letter, written to 
 her daughter, the Queen of Spain, where the obscurity 
 
 1 Recueil, 11. Neg. Fr. II, p. 486.
 
 CATHERINE'S POLICY OF CONCILIATION 173 
 
 common to all the letters written by her own hand is in- 
 creased by the agitation of her mind: 
 
 "Madame, my daughter, you will see the reason for this dis- 
 patch by what the Ambassador will tell you about it, which 
 will be the reason why I do not tell it over again. I will only 
 say that God has helped us well, and I will put things again in 
 such a state, if it pleases Him to aid us, that we could not have 
 a greater occasion to thank and serve Him as we ought according 
 to the grace which He has shown towards us of having us 
 discover everything. For it seems that it is really a miracle, the 
 way in which we found out everything and He is certainly show- 
 ing us how much He loves us and all this kingdom, which ought 
 to make us think that, since He wishes to maintain our house, 
 He will maintain you also in your contentment and grandeur — 
 but that you should be grateful to Him and serve Him as you 
 ought, which is what I pray you never to forget." * 
 
 Catherine was agitated because a new conspiracy had 
 been discovered. Just at the close of the assembly of the 
 Notables in Fontainebleau, a gentleman by the name of 
 de la Sague was sent by the Prince of Conde to court, partly 
 to bring him back some money from his wife, partly to 
 gather news. De la Sague talked indiscreetly to one of 
 the courtiers whom he supposed to be a servitor of the 
 King of Navarre, and the conversation was reported to 
 Marshal Brissac. The Marshal advised him to go and tell 
 the Duke of Guise. Guise watched de la Sague and when he 
 started home, arrested him with a whole valise filled with 
 letters addressed to the Prince of Conde. Here they found 
 confirmation of the vague reports which had been coming 
 to them for months of a conspiracy far more dangerous than 
 that of Amboise. The conspirators were to begin by seizing 
 the cities of Poitiers, Tours, Orleans and Lyons and then 
 to advance upon the court with forces gathered from all 
 the provinces of the southern part of the kingdom, to put 
 the princes of the blood at the head of the government 
 and to arrest the Cardinal of Lorraine and the Duke of 
 Guise for treason. When the Cardinal had read the letters 
 
 1 Letts. I, 564.
 
 174 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 in de la Sague's valise, he went at once, although it was late 
 at night, to the Queen Mother. She went to the King's 
 room and summoned the Constable and the Chancellor, 
 who had long been in bed. They consulted until one 
 o'clock in the morning and then sent to Paris to arrest the 
 Vidame of Chartres, a powerful noble, who was the most 
 directly compromised in the matter. A letter was imme- 
 diately written by the King to his Ambassador to tell the 
 King of Spain what had happened and to beg him to be 
 ready in case of need to help him with military force. 1 
 
 The Prince of Conde was the head of the conspiracy, 
 but it was not possible to be certain whether the King of 
 Navarre and the Queen of England were also engaged in it 
 or not. Word was sent to the King of Navarre that a great 
 conspiracy in the name of the Prince of Conde had been 
 prepared in the realm, and he was ordered to bring his 
 brother to Court to clear himself of these dishonoring 
 charges. 2 
 
 The information obtained enabled the Cardinal and the 
 Duke of Guise to crush the revolt everywhere, the attempt 
 to seize the cities by small bodies of soldiers secretly intro- 
 duced into them, proved a disastrous failure and by October 
 the danger was over. 
 
 The King of Navarre naturally hesitated under the 
 circumstances to obey the summons to go to court and he 
 was advised by large numbers of gentlemen friendly to him, 
 either not to go at all or else to go accompanied by such 
 a train that his enemies of the house of Guise would not be 
 able to lay hands upon him. It is easy to imagine that 
 his hesitation was decreased by the following very friendly 
 letter written by Catherine with her own hand: 
 
 "My brother, the King my son is sending you Monsieur de 
 Cursol for the occasion which he will tell you and you will see 
 by the letter which he has written. Knowing how well you know 
 that I love and esteem him and the place which he holds in my 
 
 x La Place, 104, ff. B. N. It. 1721, f. 150; Neg. Fr. II, 490. 
 *Neg. Ft. 11,482.
 
 CATHERINE'S POLICY OF CONCILIATION 175 
 
 service, I will not write you any longer letter, because I assure 
 myself that you will believe what he will say to you on my part 
 as if it were myself: which is what I beg you to be willing to do 
 and I assure you that there is no person in the world who desires 
 more your peace and contentment than does your good sister, 
 Caterine." 
 
 Another letter written some weeks later finally succeeded 
 in overcoming the hesitation of the King of Navarre, and, 
 accompanied by his brother, he arrived at court, in the 
 city of Orleans on the 31st of October. They were re- 
 ceived at once by the King in the room of the Queen 
 Mother. The King would not lift his cap to the Prince 
 of Conde, although he was noted for his politeness in bow- 
 ing to the simplest gentleman of his realm. On the other 
 hand, neither Navarre nor his brother exchanged the 
 slightest greetings with the Cardinal of Lorraine and the 
 Duke of Guise. Soon afterwards the Queen Mother, the 
 King and Queen, the Cardinal of Lorraine, the Duke of 
 Guise and the Chancellor, together with the two older 
 brothers of the house of Bourbon, the King of Navarre and 
 the Cardinal of Bourbon, withdrew into a smaller room of 
 the Queen Mother and sent for Conde, who, on entering 
 the room was immediately arrested by the captain of the 
 guard; nor could his two brothers, the King of Navarre and 
 the Cardinal of Bourbon, though they knelt before the King 
 and begged to have him put in their charge, secure his 
 release from prison. Conde bore himself with dignity but 
 as he was leaving the room turned and said to his brother, 
 the Cardinal of Bourbon, "Sir, with your assurances of 
 safety you have delivered your own brother to death." 
 "Whereupon he was so much grieved that he could not 
 restrain his tears." x 
 
 Conde ought rather to have reproached Catherine, be- 
 cause it seems quite certain that, both directly and indi- 
 rectly, her assurances had been the most effective in bringing 
 him within the trap. The Venetian Ambassador reported 
 
 1 Letts. I, 148; X, 25; B. N. It. 1721; La Place, 112.
 
 176 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 a few days later: "The Prince of la Roche-sur-Yon 
 (Conde's cousin) is, as I hear from one of his confidants, 
 filled with the greatest grief, saying that he is the cause 
 why these gentlemen put themselves in the hands of the 
 King as they have done, being assured by a firm promise 
 made to him by the Queen Mother. When he complained 
 to the Queen Mother, she said it was done by order of the 
 King, but she would not fail to use all her influence for 
 them." x 
 
 This arrest seemed to paralyze the power of the enemies 
 of the Guise who began to feel free to abandon the policy 
 of conciliation that had been forced upon them by Cath- 
 erine. That she had forced it upon them we know, not 
 by conjecture, but from the Cardinal of Lorraine himself, 
 for the Spanish Ambassador wrote soon after the Assembly 
 of the Notables: "The Cardinal has lamented to the 
 Nuncio over the misery and calamities of these times . . . 
 declaring . . . that, to his great grief, it had been deter- 
 mined to call the Estates and to convoke the prelates 
 of France. But that he had not been able to stop it, for 
 the greater part of those who came to the recent assembly 
 had been adherents of the new religion." What really lay 
 behind the Cardinal's regret expressed in the Assembly at 
 Fontainebleau that such severity had been employed 
 against the heretics is shown by the following letter which 
 he joined his brother in writing, soon after the arrest of 
 Conde, to the Comte de Villars, his agent for the suppres- 
 sion of the Huguenots: "You have begun so well that there 
 is good hope that by this stroke you will completely clean 
 up what can be cleaned up of the vermin which is in this 
 country. We recommend that those whom you find in arms 
 should be punished as you know the military laws indicate. 
 . . . After having punished the leaders, send the others to 
 the galleys where there is a great need of convicts." 2 
 
 In spite of this failure of their enemies, the Guise could 
 
 1 B. N. It., 1721, Nov. 10. 
 
 »A. N. K. 1493, f. 91. B. N. Nouvs. Acqs. 6011, f. 23.
 
 CATHERINE'S POLICY OF CONCILIATION 177 
 
 not feel that they were complete masters of the situation 
 because of the continual reports of disorder which came in 
 from the provinces. There can be little doubt, however, 
 that they had determined on a policy of terror, which, if 
 it had not precipitated a civil war at once, would have led to 
 the extermination of the Reformed churches and the un- 
 questioned supremacy of the house of Guise. It is probable 
 that the Cardinal of Lorraine and his brother planned that 
 the chief noblemen of the realm, all the officers of the Crown 
 and of the royal household, together with all the members 
 of the Estates General which was shortly to assemble, 
 should be compelled to sign a written confession of the 
 orthodox faith in the presence of the King. All judges, 
 magistrates and officers of state throughout the entire realm, 
 were afterwards to be compelled to sign it and it was then 
 to be put into the hands of the priests of each parish, who 
 were to carry it from house to house, accompanied by the 
 officers of the law, to compel every subject of the King 
 to sign it under penalty of banishment, confiscation or 
 death. 1 
 
 They began this plan of violent repression at the top. 
 On the 26th of November, the Prince of Conde was con- 
 demned to death for treason by the royal council. 
 
 We know from what she afterwards did and from her 
 subsequent attitude toward the Prince of Conde, that this 
 reversal of her policy of conciliation was very distasteful to 
 Catherine, but she was afraid of the power of the Guise 
 and dared not protest openly. The Cardinal of Lorraine 
 did not make it too evident that he was acting against 
 her judgment, for a little later the Spanish Ambassador 
 reported that the Cardinal and his brother were ready to 
 support the authority of the Queen Mother with all their 
 force, but he simply began again to use the figure of the 
 King's mother as a sort of seal to give greater authority 
 to his own decisions. He expected her to feel that half a 
 
 *E. g., C. C. C. 27 f. 271, Niort; 204, Nantes; 148, Rouerge; 168, 
 Perigueux; 228, Bordeaux. See Note.
 
 178 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 loaf was better than no bread, and to accept the shew of 
 power, while he destroyed his enemies from behind the 
 shelter of her skirts. He was an old and skilful player at 
 the game of politics, a man, in the judgment of the Venetian 
 Ambassador, "without an equal in the world for knowing 
 how to dissimulate," but he was now to meet his match and 
 be beaten at his own game by this "tall, stout woman with 
 a red face, hair that looks as if it were false, pale eyes, a big 
 mouth and a rough way of speaking almost like that of a 
 peasant woman," * who hated the elegant Cardinal with 
 all her heart. 
 
 The first explicit sign that Catherine had determined 
 not to go back to exercising a mere nominal authority, 
 while a policy she disapproved of was carried out by the 
 Cardinal of Lorraine and his brother, is the following letter 
 written to the Constable: 
 
 "My Gossip: The King my son is sending you the Marquis 
 de Villars to give you the news and to tell you all that has 
 happened since you wrote, and it displeases me very much that 
 I am obliged so often to return to our troublous affairs because 
 that tires everybody. I wish that your health would permit you 
 to be with us because I believe firmly that if you were here we 
 should be wiser and you would help to bring the King out of 
 tutelage, because you have always wished that your master should 
 be obeyed everywhere. I will not trouble you with a longer 
 letter, leaving what else I have to say to the Marquis, and I 
 will close after having told you that I wish you were near your 
 King and your good gossip and friend, Caterine." 
 
 This letter was accompanied by a similar one to the 
 Constable's wife suggesting how very much Catherine 
 wanted them both at court. 2 
 
 A week later the King was confined to his room by 
 what was announced as a trifling cold, but the Venetian 
 Ambassador added ten days later, "The King is worse and 
 the Queen Mother can't help showing clear signs of trouble, 
 not being able to hide her distress, which is increased be- 
 
 1 A. N. K. 1493, Rel. I, 4, p, 132. Swiss Envoy qtd., Whitehead, 86. 
 * Letts. I, 153.
 
 CATHERINE'S POLICY OF CONCILIATION 179 
 
 cause she remembers the prognostications made by certain 
 astrologers who agreed in prophesying for His Majesty the 
 very shortest of lives." That the Ambassador had rightly 
 read the signs of Catherine's distress in spite of the public 
 announcement that the illness of the King was not serious, 
 appears from the following letter to her sister-in-law written 
 in the end of November: 
 
 "To Madame the Duchess op Savoy. 
 "Madame: 
 
 "I do not know where to commence my letter when I think 
 of the state in which I find myself because of the trouble and 
 affliction which it pleases God to send me after so many evils and 
 such unhappiness, to see the state in which the King my son is 
 from a pain in the head so extreme that, although I still hope 
 that our Lord will not do me so much unhappiness as to take 
 him away from me, nevertheless I see, Madame, that he is very 
 sick. ... I will not fail to send you word immediately if God 
 does me the grace to heal him, as I am praying Him to do, and 
 to give you as much contentment as is desired for you by your 
 very humble and obedient sister, Caterine." 
 
 On the 5th of December, 1560, the mother's fears were 
 realized. The young King died from the results of an 
 abscess in the inner ear which the surgery of the day could 
 not help. 1 
 
 'B. N. It. 1721, f. 194, 201. Letts. I, 154; Corlieu, 21.
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE DEATH OP FRANCIS II — CATHERINE REGENT OF FRANCE 
 
 Catherine was now forty-one and in that middle time 
 of life of which Dante wrote, "When I had gone half-way 
 on life's journey the path led into a thick woods and was 
 lost." The dominant trait of her character, the will to 
 power — had found circumstances so unfavorable to its de- 
 velopment and had been kept so resolutely in the back- 
 ground, that its very existence was scarcely suspected even 
 by those who stood nearest to her. She was now to show 
 what she was and during the next dozen years to develop 
 rapidly into something different. 
 
 The dangerous character of the King's illness had been 
 concealed as much as possible and when he died the expec- 
 tation was that the house of Guise would maintain their 
 dominant position in the state, for they had "not only great 
 forces in town but they have sent for more, which arrive 
 daily little by little. The Constable is on his way and the 
 Queen Mother has sent him word to hurry up. If the 
 Guises at his coming find that they have the largest force, 
 they will not fail to stand strongly for it, whatever it may 
 cost them." 1 
 
 Even if her husband had died less suddenly, it is not 
 probable that Catherine would then have made any prepa- 
 rations to assume control of the government. Her courage 
 to exercise her love of power grew with use; just as it is 
 manifest that her self-reliance grew in later years. But now, 
 warned of the danger of her son's death, Catherine was 
 ready to forestall a second usurpation of power by the Guise 
 and had made preparations to assume (equally against the 
 ancient customs) the direction of the state. The death of 
 
 *Cal. F. 6 Dec. 1560. 
 
 180
 
 THE DEATH OF FRANCIS II 181 
 
 Francis II took from the Cardinal of Lorraine and his 
 brother the strongest support of their power, because, 
 through their niece the young Queen, they had been able to 
 control the feeble will of the King even against the advice 
 of his mother. Catherine had brought up her children to 
 the most exaggerated dependence and obedience. Turenne, 
 who was educated at court with her youngest son, recalled 
 afterwards a letter in which she told the boy not to trust 
 entirely in his governor or any of his tutors but to express 
 his inmost thoughts only to her. She had very much re- 
 sented the fact that her oldest son had not looked to her as 
 his chief adviser, and her lasting dislike of Mary, Queen of 
 Scots, is sufficiently accounted for by the fact that Francis 
 II had listened more to his wife than to his mother ; without 
 assuming the truth of the common report that Catherine 
 always remembered with bitterness the fact that the young 
 girl had once spoken of her scornfully as "a merchant's 
 daughter." * 
 
 The new King, Charles IX, was only ten years old and 
 Catherine prevented the possibility of anybody stepping in 
 between them by sleeping in his room. The day after his 
 brother's death, the young King summoned the princes of 
 the blood, the Cardinals, the Dukes, the chief officers of 
 state, and the members of the privy council to his room 
 and announced that he desired them to do what his mother 
 would command them, with the advice of the council. The 
 five captains of the Guards and the Swiss were also sum- 
 moned before him and ordered to obey his mother. All 
 the chevaliers of the order of St. Michel and all the gentle- 
 men of the royal household received similar commands. 
 Four days later a royal letter announced : "The King has 
 begged his very dear and well-beloved mother to take in 
 hand the administration of the realm with the advice and 
 counsel of his beloved uncle, the King of Navarre, and the 
 royal council." The Spanish Ambassador reported to his 
 master that he had heard from one of the members of the 
 
 1 Bouillon. Cal. F. 1563, p, 278; Melville, 31; Cheruel ctd., 17.
 
 182 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 royal council, the Cardinal of Tournon, that this action had 
 been taken unanimously by the council; in which the 
 houses of Bourbon and Montmorency had again taken their 
 seats. 1 
 
 One of Catherine's first acts was to release the Prince of 
 Conde from prison. He took back his sword, cursing the 
 Duke of Guise, which was only one of the reasons why the 
 Venetian Ambassador did not believe that this seeming 
 peace would last. "There are," he wrote, "many old en- 
 mities at court, especially between members of the house 
 of Bourbon and the Guise and the Constable. . . . The 
 Constable is of a nature which will accept no equal and the 
 Cardinal of Lorraine will brook no superior . . . and the 
 Cardinal is so hated by everyone that, if the general wish 
 had anything to do with regulating the situation, not only 
 would he have no power in the government, but perhaps 
 he would not be left alive in the world." December 7th 
 there were added to the royal council of the late King which 
 had approved the command of Charles IX in regard to the 
 constitution of the government, eleven more, chiefly old 
 members of the council, under Francis I and Henry II. 2 
 
 That the houses of Bourbon and Montmorency did not 
 intend to become simply pawns in the Queen's game is evi- 
 dent from a conversation with the Constable reported by 
 the Spanish Ambassador the 8th of December, 1560. 
 
 "The Constable said that, if the Queen Mother should want to 
 use your Majesty's support and that of the Dukes of Savoy and 
 Lorraine to maintain her authority, you ought not to make any 
 move against the princes of the blood and the Constable who are 
 the only ones who can oppose and be a counterweight to the 
 Queen Mother's authority. But I do not believe that the Queen 
 Mother can possibly oppose the King of Navarre, because the 
 nobles and the people are entirely of his party. I am further 
 of the opinion that, if she aroused any suspicion that she was 
 calling in aid from outside the realm, it would be her ruin and 
 perhaps a risk for the crown of her son; for it is thought almost 
 
 "Cal. F. 9 Dec. 1560, B. N. fds. fr. 7225, f. 31, A. N. K. 1493. 
 a A. N. K., Whitehead ctd., 90; B. N. It. 1723, f. 10. Valois, 180.
 
 THE DEATH OF FRANCIS II 183 
 
 a crime of lese majeste to call in foreign troops for what concerns 
 the government of this realm." 1 
 
 These prophecies either of trouble or the second efface- 
 ment of the authority of the Queen Mother by the substi- 
 tution of Bourbon-Montmorency control for Guise control, 
 were certainly plausible. Catherine was in a situation 
 which she thus describes to her daughter, the Queen of 
 Spain, "Left with three little children in a realm completely 
 split up, without a single person sufficiently disinterested 
 for me to be able to trust him entirely," but she played her 
 cards so well that she won a complete victory. Confident 
 of retaining the affection and obedience of her little son, 
 she saw at a glance that the turning point in the whole situ- 
 ation lay in the will of the first prince of the blood, the King 
 of Navarre. She therefore entered into secret negotiations 
 with him while at the same time she manipulated the other 
 members of the royal council. The result can be best de- 
 scribed in her own words. Two weeks after the King's 
 death she wrote to the French Ambassador at Madrid: 
 
 "Monsieur de Limoges: You will have learned by the last 
 dispatch the unhappy accident which has happened to us, and I 
 assure myself that you will have already judged how much that, 
 added to my other sorrows, has increased my affliction, which I 
 could not bear without the very great grace of our Lord. But 
 as I have thought and know that He does everything for the best, 
 I am resolved ... to praise and thank Him for whatever He is 
 pleased to send to me, hoping by His aid to nourish and bring 
 up the young King whom He has left me the best way I can to 
 His honor and glory, and for the good of the people whom He 
 has put under his power. It has been found best by all the 
 princes of the blood, the lords of the council and other great 
 personages of this realm that the principal and sovereign author- 
 ity in it should remain in my hands. . . ." 2 
 
 On the same day she wrote more intimately to her 
 daughter, the Queen of Spain: 
 
 1 A. N. K. 1494, 1499, Dec. 8. 
 'Letts. I, 568, 569.
 
 184 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 "Although I am compelled to have the King of Navarre Dext 
 to me because the laws of this kingdom provide, when the King 
 is a child, that the prince of the blood should be next to the 
 mother, nevertheless ... he is obedient to me and has do com- 
 mands to give except what I permit him to give. And also I 
 am recalling to my side the Constable and all the old servitors 
 of your grandfather and father. . . . My daughter, my friend, 
 you see the afflictions which it has pleased God to send me, 
 which are greater than He has ever sent to anybody else. Never- 
 theless amidst all these sorrows He does me the grace to enable 
 me to see your brother honored and obeyed and myself also and 
 this kingdom's increase and union, which is to me a great 
 comfort; but the greatest comfort is the hope which I have in 
 you, who will surely keep the King your husband in the peace 
 in which the King your brother has left this realm with him." x 
 
 Over all this satisfaction just one shadow rested. What 
 would the Estates General do when they met? "The 
 ancient custom of holding estates had been interrupted for 
 nearly eighty years, so that the memory of man did not go 
 back to them." Catherine probably did not know that the 
 leading debater of the last Estates had denounced the flat- 
 terers "who attribute to the Prince that sovereignty which 
 is only conferred by the people," and that the whole hall 
 had resounded with murmurs of discontent when the Chan- 
 cellor spoke "badly on the subject of the liberty and power 
 of the people," but the letters partially cited show between 
 the lines an uneasy consciousness that the Estates had 
 claimed to regulate the regency for a minor King and that 
 she had exactly reversed the understood rule of law in 
 stating that the chief authority ought to come to the Queen 
 Mother and that the first prince of the blood ought to be 
 next under her. Nevertheless the desperate financial con- 
 dition of the kingdom made the meeting of the Estates 
 absolutely necessary. 2 
 
 One danger indeed which might once have threatened, 
 Catherine did not need to fear. The wild stories of the his- 
 tory attributed to de la Planche are not trustworthy, but 
 
 1 Letts. I, 568. 
 
 a Recueil, 45, 50; Masselin, 147, 391.
 
 THE DEATH OF FRANCIS II 185 
 
 there is good reason to believe that an attempt had been 
 made before the King's death to pack the Estates and over- 
 awe them. We know that some deputies had been afraid to 
 come because of the armed forces assembled in various 
 parts of the kingdom. But local feeling was still very- 
 strong in France and very recalcitrant to any pressure from 
 the center. In addition, the method of election was one 
 which would have been rather difficult to manage : so that 
 the packing of the Estates General would never have been 
 an easy matter and whatever possible danger might have 
 existed to Catherine's plans from an assembly partly packed 
 or intimidated by the Guise, was utterly destroyed by the 
 fact that they had lost by the death of Francis II the back- 
 ing of the King. For the dominant force in French political 
 life was the power of loyalty to the person of the King. 
 Fifteen years before, the Venetian Ambassador had reported 
 that "the French had put all their liberty in the power of 
 the King, so that now their title, Reges Francorum, might 
 truthfully be changed to Reges Servorum." At the time 
 of which we are now writing another Ambassador wrote: 
 "The power of the King in France is founded on a respect 
 and love which reaches almost to adoration; a thing not 
 only extraordinary, but absolutely unique, which can be 
 seen nowhere else in the whole of Christendom." The 
 Estates showed at the very beginning that they were free 
 from any overmastering Guise influence, for when the clergy, 
 who were favorable to the Cardinal of Lorraine, invited the 
 other two Estates to join them in appointing him joint 
 orator to address the King, they politely declined, prefer- 
 ring to elect their own orators. 1 
 
 The Chancellor opened the Assembly with one of the 
 greatest of his speeches, pointing out that, "although the 
 King is neither obliged to take the advice nor to grant the 
 complaints of his subjects, the purpose of the Estates is to 
 enable him to know the truth and to do justice." There 
 were three subjects on which the King wanted their advice, 
 
 *Neg. Fr. II, 489, Recueil; Rel. I, 1, p. 232.
 
 186 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 religion, debts and the reform of the administration. "The 
 realm is full of sedition, for which religion is alleged as a 
 principal cause, a thing almost incredible that such evil 
 should come out of good. It is no more permissible for a 
 subject to defend himself against his prince than for a son 
 to resist his father and it makes no difference whether the 
 prince is good or bad, we are even more bound to obey him 
 than a son his father. . . . The property of the King de- 
 mands your help, for no orphan was ever left in so piteous a 
 condition. . . . His Majesty and the Queen Mother further 
 invite you to express with entire liberty your complaints and 
 grievances." The Chancellor did not touch upon the funda- 
 mental question of the constitution of the regency during 
 the minority of the King, and Catherine was taking rather 
 a dangerous position before the Estates General, for she 
 was asking their help while ignoring their authority. 1 
 
 But here again events proved the practical wisdom of 
 her action. The question was, indeed, not altogether ig- 
 nored. The deputies from many baillages, disclaiming any 
 intention of suggesting "that the Estates should give law to 
 the King, Queen or Princes," asserted that it had been the 
 custom at all times, when there was a minor King, that the 
 government should be confirmed and authorized by the 
 Estates, and asked (as they had been elected before the 
 King's death) to be sent back to their constituents for 
 instructions. Even this timid move to claim constitutional 
 authority was speedily dropped and the supreme right to 
 speak for her son which Catherine assumed in her message 
 to the Estates, was practically endorsed in a letter to her by 
 the Third Estate recognizing "the benefits we are sure to 
 receive from the charge of the education and affairs of the 
 King which God has put into your hands." 2 
 
 But though the Estates had little to say about the 
 usurpation of authority in constituting the regency they 
 were outspoken enough about other matters. They painted 
 
 Pieces, I, 42. 
 
 'Cahiers, I, 179; Pieces, I, 189.
 
 THE DEATH OF FRANCIS II 187 
 
 in dark colors the condition of the Church and denounced 
 a large number of abuses in the administration. They com- 
 plained of intolerable taxation and described the resulting 
 misery of the people. The greater part of these suggestions 
 in regard to administration were finally embodied by 
 l'Hospital in the great Ordonnance of Orleans and the sup- 
 plementary Ordonnance of Roussillon and Moulins, estab- 
 lishing reforms in the methods of administration of church 
 and state. Of the two hundred and seventy-five articles of 
 these ordonnances, over one hundred and ninety were 
 suggested by the cahiers or complaints of the Estates of 
 Orleans. Many of these reforms were not, it is true, put 
 into practice, but no Estates General exercised a larger 
 influence on the administration of France. Catherine's 
 policy of conciliation in the matter of religion was endorsed. 
 The clergy indeed spoke in favor of a continuance of per- 
 secution. The nobility split, but two of their three cahiers 
 show sympathy with toleration to the Reformed. The Third 
 Estate demanded the stopping of persecution and charged 
 heresy to neglect of duty by the clergy, whose flocks, un- 
 cared for by their pastors, had fallen into error for which 
 they ought no longer to be punished. 1 
 
 The failure of the Estates of Orleans to speak out boldly 
 on the constitutional question of the right to constitute the 
 government during the minority of a king, was in marked 
 contrast to the utterances on this subject at the last Estates 
 held seventy-six years before at Tours. This decline of 
 boldness in asserting rights may have been the result of a 
 general process. Bodin in 1576, combating the opinion that 
 "the Estates of the people are greater than the King" says, 
 "in short, all the discourses of the Estates contain nothing 
 but subjection, service and obedience. The same thing was 
 seen at the Estates of Orleans and it can not be said that in 
 Spain there is any different usage, because the same submis- 
 sion and praises of subjection, service and obedience of the 
 whole people toward the King of Spain as their sovereign 
 
 1 Cahiers, I, 307.
 
 188 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 Lord, appear in the discourse of the Estates held at Toledo 
 in the year 1552." * Bodin's explanation of the silence of 
 the Estates of Orleans may be the right one, but it may be 
 suspected that the members who were willing to assert the 
 constitutional rights of the Estates General during a re- 
 gency preferred to do so under a direct mandate from their 
 constituents and so forced a dismissal and reconvocation of 
 the Estates. 
 
 They had little difficulty in doing this on the question of 
 supply; for the debts of the Crown were enormous and a 
 large proportion of them were at cutthroat interest. The 
 Crown asked the clergy to agree to relieve the King by 
 buying back the sources of income he had pledged as se- 
 curity and the Third Estate.to vote an increase of the taxes. 
 All over the world, wherever representative Estates met, 
 the right of consent to taxation was claimed. Even Bodin, 
 who thought both France and England absolute monarchies, 
 assumed this right. "It is not," he says, "in the power of a 
 king in the world to levy a tax on the people at his pleasure 
 any more than to take the property of another." He was 
 only echoing the idea of Commines, who at the end of the 
 fifteenth century asked rhetorically, "Is there a king in the 
 world who has the right to levy a cent of taxes on his sub- 
 jects without consent, except by tyranny or violence?" As 
 far as France was concerned, shrewd foreigners saw that 
 this theoretical right of consent was entirely illusory. Sir 
 John Fortescue, Chief Justice of the King's Bench under 
 Henry VI, pointed out with pride in his work on "The 
 Governance of England," that while an English King might 
 not levy new taxes without the assent of Parliament, "the 
 French King took upon him to set tallies and other imposi- 
 tions upon the Commons without the assent of the three 
 Estates; but yet he would not set any such charges, nor 
 hath set, upon the nobles, for fear of rebellion." A few 
 years after Commines oratorically denied the arbitrary 
 taxing power of the Crown, a man who like him knew by 
 
 x See Note.
 
 THE DEATH OF FRANCIS II 189 
 
 practice affairs of state, Niccolo Machiavelli, visited France 
 as an envoy of Florence. He writes: "The French people 
 are submissive and hold their kings in great veneration. I 
 have asked a great many people and they have all replied 
 that the revenue of the Crown depended entirely upon the 
 will of the King." It was the same a generation later when 
 the Venetian Ambassador reports: "The present King can 
 boast of far surpassing all his predecessors as well in making 
 his subjects pay extraordinary taxes to any amount he 
 wishes, etc., etc." But although the idea that consent was 
 necessary to taxation had been in France only a remarkable 
 instance of the persistence of a traditional theory of gov- 
 ernment in spite of practices which denied it, the Crown 
 dared not, in view of the temper of the realm, refuse to 
 recognize the formal assertion of it by the Estates. There 
 was nothing for Catherine, acting in the name of the boy 
 King, to do but dismiss them with orders to consult their 
 constituents and reassemble at Melun the first of May. 1 
 
 The Estates closed on the thirty-first day of January, 
 1561, and Catherine expressed her satisfaction that "they 
 have confirmed in me the government and administration 
 of the person of the King my son and of the realm." Even 
 before this she had begun to take measures to suppress 
 disorder. She wrote two letters to Tavannes, Lieutenant 
 Governor of Burgundy, telling him that Maligny, the leader 
 of the attempt to seize Lyons in the late conspiracy, was 
 lurking in his house near Tonnerre, bidding him "at any 
 price, even to battering down his house if it is necessary, to 
 put his hand upon his collar and if you can get him, send 
 him secretly to some place so safe and so hidden that no one 
 can know where he is and at the same time send me word 
 with the utmost quickness." She also wrote to the French 
 Ambassador in Switzerland a long letter enclosing a letter 
 from the King to the citizens of Geneva. The royal letter 
 said: 
 
 x Bodin Rep. I, Ch. VIII; Fortescue, Ch. HI; Machiavelli, I, 63; Bel. 
 1, 1, p. 232; Pieces, I, 166, 194.
 
 190 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 "The King has found that the terrible troubles of his king- 
 dom had their active cause in the malice of some preachers, 
 mostly sent by you or the chief ministers of your city, who have 
 not only gone from house to house secretly impressing on the 
 minds of the greater part of our subjects a pernicious and 
 damnable disobedience, but by an infinite number of defamatory 
 libels and by sermons in large assemblies have dared to incite 
 our people to open rebellion." He begged them to recall 
 these preachers and keep them from coming any more or "we 
 will consider it a treacherous war on this kingdom and a just 
 cause for quarrel before God and the world." 1 
 
 But while the Government tried to stop the importation 
 of heresy and to nip rebellion in the bud, it did not intend 
 to oppose the unanimous wish of the Third Estate, backed 
 by the sympathy of two-thirds of the nobility, that the 
 policy of conciliation endorsed by the Assembly of Fon- 
 tainebleau, but forced out of Catherine's hands for a time 
 by the Guise, should be resumed. 
 
 Catherine knew that this policy would be very displeas- 
 ing to her son-in-law, the King of Spain, whose support she 
 was very anxious to retain. Indeed, he had already sent 
 her an envoy charged to express his willingness to give his 
 entire support to her authority, but ordered, "You must 
 talk to Queen Catherine very clearly and very openly in 
 regard to religion, telling her that she must never permit 
 the new doctrines which have been planted within her 
 realm to make greater progress in it." She wrote therefore 
 a long letter to the French Ambassador at Madrid to explain 
 the reasons for her policy. 
 
 "We have during twenty or thirty years tried cautery with 
 the idea of cutting out the contagion of this evil from among us 
 and we have seen by experience that violence has not served 
 except to increase and multiply it. ... It has been said by many 
 people of good judgment that the worst means for suppressing 
 these new opinions is the public death of those who hold them, 
 because it was to be seen that they were strengthened by such 
 spectacles. ... I have been counselled by all the princes of the 
 
 1 Letts. I, 161, 164, 574, B. N. Brienne, 205 f. 203.
 
 THE DEATH OF FRANCIS II 191 
 
 blood and other princes and lords of the council of the King my 
 son to follow the way of gentleness in this matter, in order to 
 try by honest remonstrances, exhortations and preaching to lead 
 back those who are wandering in the matter of faith and to 
 punish severely those who shall be guilty of scandals or sedition. 
 . . . The evil is so deeply rooted that it is very difficult, not to 
 say impossible, to drive it out except by the remedy of a general 
 council: the only remedy left for the union of Christianity and 
 the healing of all our ills. Nevertheless you can assure the King, 
 my good son, that I will turn my hand as I ought to the support 
 of the Catholic religion, without permitting that anything in the 
 world shall be changed in it and that I will give the utmost 
 pains to keep all things in peace and tranquillity until the 
 meeting of the council." x 
 
 Catherine knew, although she gave no sign of it in this 
 letter, that Philip's dislike of the policy of conciliation in 
 the matter of religion was being used to her disadvantage 
 by the Cardinal of Lorraine and his brother, the Duke of 
 Guise, whom she had displaced from power. Her deep 
 resentment of this appears in a letter written some weeks 
 later to her daughter, the only person to whom she ever 
 wrote with entire frankness. She begs her to warn her hus- 
 band against news "sent from here by those who are 
 accustomed to be King [the Guise]." She continues: 
 
 "They will always take the utmost pains to make all my 
 actions seem evil from the fear that their false and great ambi- 
 tions might become known, as well as the fact that they are 
 strangers in this realm: because they are so much hated in it 
 that, as long as they were in sight near me in the government, 
 I could never have such obedience as I have since they have gone 
 to their own houses." Their great object is to make trouble 
 between Catherine and her son-in-law, "thinking that, if there 
 were war, I should be obliged to put myself again in their hands. 
 But I promise you I will never again do that, for they have been 
 too ungrateful to me and have ruined the realm. Instead of 
 thinking that everything is going to ruin because the Cardinal 
 is no longer at court, I assure you it ie just that [his absence] 
 which gives me a chance to put everything in good shape." 2 
 
 a Ctd. Letts. I, 163; note, 577. 
 'Letts. I, 581, Comp. 592.
 
 192 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 Catherine's deep dislike of the Guise was frankly ex- 
 pressed only to her daughter. Within a short time of these 
 letters she wrote to the Duchess of Guise to express her 
 "great trouble at hearing of the illness of her husband, 
 because she is as anxious for his health and happiness as 
 for her own." Curiously enough, therefore, she was exposed 
 to a back-fire by the accusation that she was giving them 
 too much influence in government. She had indeed gotten 
 rid of the Cardinal of Lorraine, who returned to his bish- 
 opric about the middle of February, burdened, according to 
 the Venetian Ambassador, "with the hatred of everybody 
 because of his obstinacy, his vanity in conducting affairs, 
 his changeableness and his proud and difficult manners." 
 But no sooner was he gone than the Duke of Guise, his 
 brother, began to rise in reputation and apparent influence. 1 
 
 The consequence of this was a savage outbreak of the 
 old jealousy of the Bourbon-Montmorency faction, aggra- 
 vated by the desire of the Prince of Conde to obtain, not 
 only the reversal of his late sentence to death for treason, 
 but the punishment of those who had been concerned in 
 inflicting it upon him. The consequence was that the King 
 of Navarre said that, if the Duke of Guise didn't leave the 
 court, he would, and the Constable backed him up. The 
 Duke replied that although he had been entirely willing and 
 even anxious to leave court before, now that the King of 
 Navarre said that he must go, he wouldn't go. Whereupon 
 the King of Navarre packed up his baggage, announced that 
 he intended to leave and the Constable and all his followers 
 proposed to follow him. In this desperate situation, which 
 in the eyes of everybody threatened an outbreak of civil 
 war, Catherine acted with the utmost tact. She sent the 
 little King to the Constable, and the boy, calling him "Mon 
 Compere" (the phrase which his father had always used), re- 
 minded him of how much King Henry had loved him and 
 of the oath which he had taken never to desert the little son 
 of his old master, and commanded him by his love for his 
 
 1 B. N. It. 1723, f. 13.
 
 THE DEATH OF FRANCIS II 193 
 
 father and that oath "not to leave me." Very much touched 
 by this scene, the Constable interceded with the King of 
 Navarre and persuaded him to recall the baggage which had 
 already been dispatched. The Duke of Guise took up the 
 olive-branch, said that he had always defended the inno- 
 cence of the Prince of Conde (which of course was not in 
 the least true) and recommended that all the documents in 
 that case should be burnt. In this way a sort of peace was 
 patched up. 
 
 The outcome was regarded as a complete victory for the 
 Bourbon-Montmorency faction, and the whole court fol- 
 lowed the winners. A few days later the Venetian Ambas- 
 sador wrote: "Guise is much alone. It is true he always 
 has with him some twenty men, mostly Italians, who follow 
 him at a distance and never let him out of their sight. . . . 
 It is certain that this government is full of jealousy and 
 suspicion. It is to be feared that any small occasion may 
 cause some great disturbance." * 
 
 *B. N. It. 1723, f. 15. 20 A. N. K. 1494. f. 50.
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 CATHERINE DEFENDS HER AUTHORITY BY POLITICS 
 
 We have seen already that Catherine had probably been 
 largely influenced in her decision to employ a new policy of 
 conciliation of the Huguenots by her fears that the Queen 
 of England might become involved in the civil troubles of 
 France. Her fear of Spain was much greater than her fear 
 of England and this fear, with the dislike which grew out of 
 it as the years passed, remained one of the most constant 
 secret motives of her life; in spite of the fact, perhaps 
 because of the fact, that she was obliged repeatedly to turn 
 to Philip for help. We must therefore understand the 
 abrupt change in direction, joined to a somewhat subtle 
 play of motives not obvious, of Philip's policy in regard to 
 French factions. 
 
 Previous to this time the King of Spain had been much 
 afraid of the Guise. During the lifetime of Henry II, Philip 
 had naturally supported the Montmorency party because 
 the Constable was the advocate of peace and the Guise of 
 war, with Spain. Peace and the reign of Francis II had 
 brought a new active cause for distrusting the Guise. They 
 had been anxious during all that reign not only to support 
 the authority of their niece Mary, Queen of France and of 
 Scotland, but indirectly to back her claim as the orthodox 
 and therefore only rightful heir to the throne of England. 
 Elizabeth of England had, in consequence, felt obliged to 
 support the Protestant party in Scotland against the ortho- 
 dox party which was backed by French arms. Philip, on 
 the other hand, in spite of his zeal for the ancient Church, 
 was not at all anxious to see the crowns of Scotland, Eng- 
 land and France united, lest the combination should be too 
 
 strong for him. He therefore had been rather disposed to 
 
 194
 
 CATHERINE DEFENDS HER AUTHORITY 195 
 
 stand by Elizabeth; at all events not to oppose her in 
 Scotland. This is undoubtedly the explanation of the Guise 
 action during the reign of Francis II which Catherine re- 
 ported to her daughter as trying to make her son hate her 
 son-in-law against all her efforts to keep them good friends. 
 
 But, with the year 1561, Philip began to change his 
 attitude toward the factions of the French court. He had 
 always distrusted the King of Navarre, perhaps because the 
 King of Navarre had made all sorts of advances to him 
 amounting even to treason, and he was now very much 
 alarmed at the progress of heresy which made him afraid 
 that his dominion of the Netherlands would be surrounded 
 by three heretic kingdoms, Scotland, England and France. 
 He therefore began to throw himself very heartily into the 
 plan which had been suggested to him in 1559 by the Duke 
 of Alva of making himself the head of the orthodox Roman 
 Catholic party in France. But he was obliged to act very 
 cautiously in this shift of alliance among the parties of the 
 French court. The situation was a very uncertain and dan- 
 gerous one and his political play must be very subtle if it 
 would not defeat its own object. 
 
 In the south, particularly in Guienne, the adherents of 
 reform were still acting with the utmost boldness in defiance 
 of the laws, openly establishing their own worship and 
 driving out the orthodox preachers in places where they 
 were the stronger. Indeed, before the end of January the 
 lieutenant of Guienne had written to Catherine that it was 
 not possible to stop the scandals and troubles about religion 
 by words. "The King must show himself the strongest." 
 This violence on one side was more than matched by the 
 violence of orthodox mobs in places where the Reformed, 
 although in the minority, attempted to conduct open wor- 
 ship. For example, word was sent to Catherine from Nantes 
 in February that somebody threw a stone through a window 
 where preaching was going on and a mob then attacked the 
 congregation on its way home. Seizing one man, they were 
 about to kill him, when a quick-witted captain of the royal
 
 196 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 galleys saved him by protesting that he was going to take 
 him down to the harbor to drown him. Two contemporaries 
 wrote: "Few cities in the realm are free from rioting about 
 religion." "Neither party is willing to obey the royal proc- 
 lamation forbidding all disputes about religion and all in- 
 juries one to the other either by word or deed." * 
 
 Much as Philip might object to the policy of meeting 
 such a state of affairs by conciliation, and anxious as he 
 might be to back now the faction of the Guise, who were in 
 favor of a policy of rigorous persecution, he did not dare to 
 oppose the authority of Catherine for fear it might be re- 
 placed, not by the rule of the Guise, but by the rule of the 
 King of Navarre backed by the entire Huguenot party. 
 Events showed that this fear was justified. Early in March 
 it became evident that a strong constitutional objection, 
 supported by the Bourbon and Montmorency factions and 
 the Huguenot party, was to be raised against her authority 
 with the intention of replacing her as head of the state by 
 the King of Navarre, assisted by a royal council appointed 
 by the Estates General. 
 
 The Estates General must be summoned again, for the 
 Venetian Ambassador wrote "the scarcity of money is so 
 great as to be almost incredible" and Catherine and de 
 l'Hospital dared not strain further the breaking bow of the 
 people's patience by unauthorized taxes. In the end of the 
 winter the King ordered that delegates for the Estates 
 General to meet the twentieth of March, should be elected 
 but not in the ordinary way. Each province was to choose 
 three representatives, one for each of the three orders of 
 Clergy, Nobles and the Third Estate. 2 
 
 A meeting of the Estates of the City and Provostry of 
 Paris refused to give their delegates a mandate to pay the 
 debts of the King or to buy back the royal domains "before 
 it was made plain where so great a debt as forty-three 
 
 1 B. N. C. C. C. 27 f. 27, 268, 287, 306, 308. Neg. Tosc. Ill, 447; Conde, 
 I, 2. II, 3; de la Ferriere (3), qtd., 54. 
 
 »B. N. C. C. C. 394 f. 38, 45 It. 1721 f. 289 Port. Font. 297, f. 34, 
 Clairambault 354 f. 306,
 
 CATHERINE DEFENDS HER AUTHORITY 197 
 
 millions of franca had come from. It could not have been 
 accumulated in twenty years if the finances had been well 
 administered. After restitution of the undue and immense 
 gifts which some have received to the oppression of the 
 poor people, everybody will do his duty and help the King." 
 This recalcitrant temper in the matter of finance was bad 
 enough from Catherine's point of view, but something which 
 alarmed her very much more remained behind. It is some- 
 what difficult to establish the exact terms of the resolutions 
 that were passed. What looks like the original rough draft 
 of them has survived in manuscript. A subsequent royal 
 letter to the Parlement of Paris assumes that these resolu- 
 tions were not passed, for it says, "some of the members 
 amused themselves by discussing the matter of government 
 and administration of this kingdom." But the mere dis- 
 cussion of propositions like the following threw Catherine 
 into an agony of fear. 1 
 
 "The government ought to be in the hands of the King of 
 Navarre, leaving to the Queen the care of the person of the King. 
 All the house of Guise should be not only removed from the 
 councils of the King but separated from the company of his 
 brothers, and, in order to make sure of governors for those princes 
 whose sincerity and integrity will insure for them good and pious 
 instruction, Admiral Coligny and President du Ferrier should be 
 appointed as governors. 
 
 "All cardinals, bishops and other persons who have given an 
 oath of allegiance to any other person besides the King, should 
 be deprived of the power to sit in the royal council, even the 
 Cardinal of Bourbon" (second prince of the blood). [At this 
 point another hand has written in "unless he gives up the red 
 hat."] 
 
 "The Marshal St. Andre shall not be of the royal council any 
 more and shall give account of the excessive gifts which he 
 received of the late King Henry. 
 
 "Members of the council outside of the princes of the blood 
 are the Constable, the three Marshals of France and the Admiral 
 and beyond that the Estates General should give advice. 
 
 1 B. N. C. C. C. 252, f. 219, vol. 27, f. 349; Bethune, 8676, f. 8; pntd. 
 summary Neg. Fr. II, B. N. It. 1723, f. 20, Cal. F. 1561, p. 42; A. N. K 
 1494, f. 59.
 
 198 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 "Everything done and decided at Orleans in the matter of 
 government should be revoked because done by persons who had 
 no power to act. 
 
 "Before they respond to what has been proposed to them, 
 a legitimate council should be established around the person of 
 the King and they give notice that if anything is attempted or 
 ordered otherwise than by those who are made members of the 
 council by the advice of the Estates General, they will appeal to 
 the first meeting of the Estates General legitimately assembled 
 on the ground that such action is null and void." 
 
 They asked that: 
 
 "The Chancellor should suspend the exercise of his office on 
 the ground that he had not been appointed by the princes nomi- 
 nated to the council by the said Estates, and that all those who 
 had conducted business of state since the death of Henry II 
 should give an accounting and hand over the balances to be used 
 in paying the debts of the King." 1 
 
 It is small wonder that Catherine was very much 
 alarmed. Here were requests and a tone in making them 
 no Frenchman had ever heard — a tone no Englishman was 
 to hear from any Parliament until the next century. It 
 might be supposed that this discussion and its outcome was 
 simply the result of the enormous Montmorency influence 
 in the city of Paris, where about two thousand of the chief 
 burghers were vassals of that house. 2 The Constable had 
 received huge sums from Catherine's husband and the omis- 
 sion of his name from the list of those who were to give an 
 accounting of what they had received from the exaggerated 
 generosity of Henry II looks like it. Certainly Huguenot 
 influence was behind these resolutions, because Coligny was 
 nominated as one of those who were to have charge of the 
 education of the young King. But although these influ- 
 ences undoubtedly gave the protest its form, events showed 
 that it represented a feeling, and constitutional ideas wide- 
 spread among French nobles. 
 
 Summarized from B. N. C. C. C. 27, f. 344. 
 
 a Le Livre des Marchands, 454, 464, A. N. K. 1494 (62).
 
 CATHERINE DEFENDS HER AUTHORITY 199 
 
 The effect it had upon Catherine appears in a letter 
 written the latter half of March, to Monsieur d'Estampes 
 in regard to the meeting of the provincial Estates of Brit- 
 tany. 
 
 "My Cousin: Knowing that you are now engaged in closing 
 up the Estates, where I do not doubt you have much to do to 
 bring about results necessary for the establishment of my author- 
 ity and at the same time for stopping the practices of those who 
 are opposed to it, I want to advertise you of what has happened 
 at Paris, both in the meeting of the Third Estate and in that of 
 the nobility. . . . They disavowed all that was done at Orleans, 
 on the ground that those who made that arrangement had no 
 power from their constituents, and went on from that to elect 
 a Governor of the realm, who is the King of Navarre. . . . You 
 can think, my cousin . . . what shame and dishonor is done to 
 me, to see myself deprived and dispossessed of that which was 
 accorded me. ... I have firmly determined rather than accept 
 such a thing to endure poverty and I prefer, if they are going to 
 take my honor, that they should take my life with it. And 
 because I am unwilling to believe that in all parts of this king- 
 dom the inclination is so strong for the party of those who wish 
 to injure me as it has been in this small number of little burghers, 
 I am not willing to accept as much evil treatment from all parts 
 as I have endured from Paris. In order to prevent this, I beg you, 
 my cousin, in the name of all you have always done for me and 
 . . . the friendship which you know that I have for you . . . prove 
 to me the fidelity you have toward me by preventing that diminu- 
 tion of authority and confirming what has been accorded to me 
 by the Estates of Orleans. In which matter I beg you to omit 
 nothing and do not fail to send me word at once of anything you 
 may do and of what has happened; and above all give me in- 
 formation if the written instructions for carrying on the con- 
 spiracy which have been sent everywhere throughout the king- 
 dom, have yet been sent to you." x 
 
 Catherine was fully aware that only great caution could 
 
 avoid civil war. She did not want civil war at all. She was 
 
 certainly too shrewd to enter upon it backed only by the 
 
 Guise and foreign arms. She saw that again the chief piece 
 
 in the game was the King of Navarre, the first prince of the 
 
 1 Letts. I, 173 (misdated), Comp. B. N. Bethune, 8697, f. 1 C. C. C. 
 27, f. 314.
 
 200 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 blood, under whose name and authority all elements of a 
 somewhat diverse and varied opposition were united. By 
 means of the wife of the Duke of Montpensier, she arranged 
 a compromise with him. She signed an agreement to make 
 him Lieutenant-General "as Monsieur de Guise was under 
 the late King." "To do nothing without communicating 
 with him" and that "he should be named in every letter 
 where she was named." Letters from the Crown, from the 
 King of Navarre and from Catherine setting forth the per- 
 fect accord which had now been established in the matter 
 of the government, were at once sent to the Parlement of 
 Paris and also published throughout the kingdom. Cath- 
 erine wrote saying that this accord left the victory with her 
 because "The King of Navarre consents that I should com- 
 mand absolutely everywhere without his ever being able to 
 give me any trouble or hindrance. I still hold therefore 
 the principal authority." How much of this entire satis- 
 faction with the outcome was assumed in order to impress 
 her son-in-law, is difficult to say. At all events, the Ambas- 
 sadors of Venice and Spain thought that Catherine had 
 restricted herself to dependence upon others and was in 
 danger of coming by degrees to have nothing but the care 
 of the person of the King and "God grant that she can still 
 maintain herself in that." The English Ambassador, who 
 was prejudiced on the other side, thought that Navarre had 
 "agreed out of weak courage." * 
 
 What Catherine really thought about the cause of all 
 this trouble we can see in the letter she wrote with her own 
 hand to her daughter, the Queen of Spain : 
 
 "I want to tell you plainly what is the truth, that all this 
 trouble has been for no other cause except for the hate which 
 this entire realm has for the Cardinal of Lorraine and the Duke 
 of Guise, because they thought that I wanted to put the govern- 
 ment of this kingdom again into their hands ; which I have assured 
 them is not true, because I was under no obligation to do it, 
 because you know how they treated me during the time of the 
 
 , B. N. fds. fr. 6620, f. 110, 3159, f. 8; A. N. K. 1494. Letts. X, 32; 
 I, 177, 180; B. N. It. 1732. f. 32.
 
 CATHERINE DEFENDS HER AUTHORITY 201 
 
 late King, your brother. So I have made up my mind to look 
 to the safety of your brothers and my own safety and not to 
 mix any longer their quarrels with mine, because, if they had 
 been able to do it, they would have appointed themselves to 
 power and would have left me to one side, as they always do 
 everything which can bring them any grandeur and profit because 
 they have nothing else but that in their hearts. I want to tell 
 you all this detail in order that if, for the purpose of strengthen- 
 ing themselves by the support of the King, your husband, they 
 send something secretly to make him believe that they have been 
 put out of power because of religion . . . you can tell him the 
 truth. The reason why they are disliked is because of the wrongs 
 (sottises) which they have done to all the world, trying to make 
 people believe that I was not a good Christian in order to bring 
 me into suspicion in the minds of everyone and saying that it 
 was because I wasn't a good Christian that I didn't trust them, 
 telling me on the other hand that everybody was opposed to me 
 and that without them I could not possibly remain in the author- 
 ity where I am. And now that they see that I have come to 
 know the truth, just the contrary to all that which they had 
 told me, and that I wasn't hated except because I was supposed 
 to like them, they are astonished." x 
 
 However sure Catherine felt herself, or pretended to 
 feel herself, after this quick shift of the pieces in the game 
 of court intrigue, she had no wish to see the representatives 
 of the provinces meet in their new mood. She cared little 
 for theories of government, constitutional or otherwise. The 
 assertion of a constitutional or democratic theory of gov- 
 ernment seemed to her, not something to be intellectually 
 discussed, but something like the appearance of a mental 
 disease — an outbreak of contagious fever. But although 
 she cared little for theories of government, she was glad to 
 use certain phases that might help to gain her ends. Word 
 was sent to the provincial Estates that they had no power 
 to discuss government, but only the means of paying the 
 King's debts. The provincial Estates were therefore called 
 to meet again in June because "for most of the provinces 
 the assembly which had been made was illegitimate." 2 
 
 1 Letts. I, 592. 
 'B. N. Bethune, 8676, f. 8.
 
 202 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 Under these circumstances Philip felt that the best thing 
 to do was to give Catherine his full support. He wrote 
 telling her "she might count on him as she could on her own 
 son" and did exactly what she asked him to do through her 
 ambassador. He sent letters to the chief personages of the 
 French court, the Cardinals of Tournon, Lorraine and Bour- 
 bon, the Constable, the Duke of Guise, the Duke of Mont- 
 pensier and his wife, and Marshals St. Andre and Brissac, 
 thanking them for the efforts they had made to "sustain 
 the authority of the Queen, my mother," and begging them 
 to continue such efforts whenever it might be necessary. 
 Six similar letters were sent in blank to be addressed as 
 Catherine preferred. Even before these letters could arrive, 
 events seemed to confirm the Queen's contentment in the 
 new arrangement of the government. In spite of his previ- 
 ous opinion the Venetian Ambassador reported on the 18th 
 of April "there never has been such quiet and union at 
 court. The King of Navarre recognizes the Queen Mother 
 as his superior more than ever." * 
 
 But though peace prevailed for a time in the palace, it 
 did not reign throughout the kingdom. Difference of opin- 
 ion about religion continued to make very serious and 
 widespread trouble. The Admiral Coligny had public 
 preachings in his house which were attended by large num- 
 bers of people, to the great scandal of the orthodox. This 
 ill-feeling finally broke out in a violent dispute in the royal 
 council between the Admiral and the Cardinal of Tournon. 
 The Admiral said he had as much right to have a preacher 
 in his house as the Cardinal of Tournon to have a preacher 
 in his. The Cardinal replied that the Admiral's preacher 
 was excommunicated and that the houses where such ser- 
 mons were heard ought to be burnt. The Admiral resented 
 this and the quarrel was only appeased by the intervention 
 of the Constable. Finally the Queen and his uncle the 
 Constable sternly reproved the Admiral for his conduct and 
 henceforth he held the meetings somewhat more secretly, 
 
 'A. N. K. 1495 f. 23, 30. B. N. It. 1723 f. 278.
 
 CATHERINE DEFENDS HER AUTHORITY 203 
 
 but the Prince of Conde continued to have preaching in his 
 rooms in the palace, not far from the rooms of the King. 
 About this time Coligny's brother, the Cardinal of Chatillon, 
 who although he still retained his rank of Cardinal, was 
 known to be thoroughly in sympathy with the heretics, 
 nearly lost his life in his own cathedral city of Beauvais. 
 He rescued a Protestant preacher from a mob who were 
 about to kill him and took him into his house. The house 
 was then stormed by the people, some of its defenders were 
 killed, the preacher was dragged out and burnt in the 
 market-place and it was only by hiding that the Bishop was 
 able to escape from the fury of the mob. In Paris a man 
 was killed because he interrupted the sermon and criticized 
 the preacher when he said that heretics ought to be killed. 
 Near Lyons a mob seized a preacher, cut off his nose and 
 ears and hands and hung him. In May, 1561, Calvin wrote 
 to Beza, "In twenty cities, or about that number, the godly 
 have been slaughtered by raging mobs. In only one has 
 there been judicial action by magistrates." 1 
 
 Orthodox observers were not so much impressed by 
 these murders as by the spread of heresy and the violence 
 of its adherents, who defied the law by holding public 
 worship and even by suppressing Catholic worship where 
 they were strong enough to do so. The Venetian Ambassa- 
 dor wrote in the middle of April: "The provinces, begin- 
 ning with Normandy, passing through Brittany and 
 Guienne as far as Provence, are openly professing this new 
 religion and in the rest of the kingdom, although the com- 
 mon people appear in many places to be still Catholic, as 
 they are here in Paris, nevertheless, the nobility are all, or 
 the major part of them, infected. In court, with the excep- 
 tion of the Queen, the Constable, the Duke of Montpensier, 
 the Duke of Guise and a few others, all the rest of the 
 grandees, and the women no less than the men, either are 
 of this new sect or else are of no sect." So far did the dis- 
 order go that he finally wrote home: "This once flourishing 
 
 4 B. N. It. 1721, £. 273, 276, A. N. K. 1494 ib. f. 71, Baum pntd. App. 32.
 
 204 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 kingdom has become so weak that its friends have nothing 
 to hope or its enemies to fear from it." * 
 
 In this difficult position between a party anxious to 
 persecute, whose fanatical adherents were able to act against 
 the law through blood-thirsty mobs, and a party whose 
 more extreme members were entirely unwilling to accept 
 mere toleration and were apt to riot against legal worship 
 wherever they were the stronger, Catherine tried to follow 
 a line of conduct shown in the following letter to the royal 
 prosecutor: 
 
 "I have seen by your letter of the 22d of this month that you 
 are in trouble to know what response you should make to those 
 who write to you in regard to illegal assemblies and also in regard 
 to the sedition which may follow them. You should not fail to 
 answer that the edicts and ordinances made about this matter 
 regulate it and that they should follow them . . . without too 
 curiously seeking out those who may be in their own houses, 
 nor too exactly inquiring what they are doing there. I have sent 
 the Marshal Montmorency to Paris to take steps about the 
 sedition which has happened there and to inflict upon the leaders 
 and authors of riots, without regard to their rank or their religion, 
 such a stiff punishment that the others may take warning from 
 it." 
 
 How serious she thought the situation is indicated by a 
 letter which she wrote about the same time to her Ambassa- 
 dor with the Emperor. 
 
 "I have advised with my brother, the King of Navarre, and 
 the other princes of the blood and the privy council of the King 
 my son, and after having tried various means, at one time rigor 
 and severity and at another time gentleness and clemency, I 
 am convinced there is no better expedient to remedy our troubles 
 than to assemble a national council of the Church to consider 
 what ought to be done in regard to religion, . . . because so far 
 as thinking it possible to retain this people in obedience and 
 concord while their spirits are so agitated and occupied by 
 diversities of opinion and of doctrines, there is no one in the 
 world who does not judge it impossible." a 
 
 *B. N. It. 1723. f. 24. 25. 
 •Letts. I, 193.
 
 CATHERINE DEFENDS HER AUTHORITY 205 
 
 The idea Catherine here expresses, that it was impossible 
 to allow diversities of religion in a state, was a common- 
 place of contemporary political opinion which is to be found 
 in various epigrammatic forms such as: "A new religion 
 means a new Monarch" ; "Two kings follow two religions" ; 
 "Diversity of faith has always put arms into subjects' 
 hands." * There were no rulers and practically no political 
 thinkers then alive, who would not have agreed with the 
 opinion in regard to the toleration of dissenting worship 
 which Michiele Soriano expressed in the Venetian Senate 
 on his return from the mission to Spain in 1559. "Hence 
 proceeds change of faith, the greatest revolution which can 
 take place in a realm, because, besides the offense which is 
 done our Lord God, there follows a revolution of customs, 
 laws, obedience, finally of the state itself; as it can be seen 
 has happened in Asia, in Africa, in Greece and in a great 
 part of Europe." 2 
 
 1 Brant., IV, 294. Arch. C. 22. Davila, I, 243. 
 J Rel. I, 3, p. 359.
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 FORMING FACTIONS. THE HUGUENOTS SUPPORT CATHERINE, 
 
 WHO FAVORS THEM 
 
 Although Catherine had put the administration of 
 affairs of state into the hands of the Bourbon-Montmorency 
 faction, she had not paid any attention to the demand made 
 by the Estates of Paris that those of the house of Guise 
 and all those who had been advanced by their influence, 
 should be removed from the person and councils of the 
 King. But in refusing to allow the Bourbon-Montmorency 
 and those who followed them to drive the Guise entirely 
 from court, she had kept in the game players quite capable 
 of meeting her most skilful plays. Early in April, Guise 
 made it evident that he had broken the Bourbon-Mont- 
 morency combination and was himself the center of a new 
 combination, which came to be called the Triumvirate. 
 The Triumvirate can best be defined in small space by 
 borrowing a term from American politics. It was what is 
 there called "a gentleman's agreement." Its existence was 
 rather ostentatiously made known. The Spanish Ambassa- 
 dor reported on April 7th, 1561, that Guise, the Constable, 
 Marshal St. Andre, the Duke of Montpensier (son of the 
 King's tutor), the Prince de la Roche-Sur-Yon and the 
 Cardinal of Tournon, took supper with the Constable after 
 a solemn mass. "They bound themselves together and 
 promised to seek, with a single zeal and one will, the remedy 
 for the affairs of religion." * 
 
 Guise had split up the opposite faction. He had broken 
 the Montmorency from the Chatillons; he had separated 
 the elder Bourbons from some of the other princes of the 
 
 1 A. N. K. 1494, B. 12, 73, 75, qtd. Decme (2), 303, Croze 9, App., 
 Bouille, II, Ch. 3. 
 
 206
 
 THE HUGUENOTS SUPPORT CATHERINE 207 
 
 blood, and his skilful manipulation had made it evident 
 that the chief line of cleavage for the civil war feared ever 
 since the death of Henry II, would be on religion and not 
 on politics or family jealousies. It is a proof of his political 
 aptitude that the line of cleavage remained on the whole 
 where he made it in 1561 until the formation of the Poli- 
 tique party after 1572. 
 
 Guise had carried out this great stroke by gaining the 
 Constable and he had gained the Constable through his 
 religious feelings. The stern old warrior and crafty courtier 
 was intensely orthodox and he had determined rather than 
 accept complete victory over his old enemies by the aid of 
 heresy, to go over entirely to their side. In vain had his 
 nephew the Admiral and his oldest son, the Marshal Mont- 
 morency, combated this resolution and begged him not to 
 abandon so many members of his family and faithful 
 servitors of his house. The Constable insisted, to the great 
 joy of his wife, in acting in accord with his understanding 
 of the ancient device of the arms of Montmorency, "God 
 aids the first Christian." * 
 
 The powerful Guise-Montmorency-orthodox combina- 
 tion was made still stronger because it had the real sym- 
 pathy of the King of Spain. Although Philip felt bound to 
 act in support of the authority of the Queen Mother, be- 
 cause he was afraid that if he did not the younger-Bourbon, 
 younger-Montmorency-heretic combination, might get con- 
 trol of the state, he did not at all like her policy of concilia- 
 tion and accepted it only under protest. Guise began to use 
 this influence with Spain as a lure to draw into his camp 
 the King of Navarre, whose older brother, the Cardinal of 
 Bourbon, was already strongly inclined to sympathize 
 with the Triumvirate because of the question of religion. 
 Navarre had no real convictions in regard to heresy or 
 orthodoxy. He cared for nothing except a chance to get 
 back trans-pyrenean Navarre from Spain, or to replace it 
 by some other kingdom; for he had a desire to rule which 
 
 *La Place. 183.
 
 208 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 was as strong as his ability for ruling was weak. He was 
 therefore irresolute, now inclined toward orthodoxy with 
 the Guise, the older Bourbon and the older Montmorency, 
 now backsliding toward heresy with his younger brother 
 Conde and the young Montmorency-Chatillons, but stand- 
 ing on the whole pretty steadily by the Queen Mother, 
 whose influence with her son-in-law the King of Spain he 
 still thought stronger than that of the Guise. 
 
 Catherine had not been very much alarmed by the for- 
 mation of the Triumvirate. They spent most of their time 
 away from the court and she felt, as she wrote to the 
 Ambassador at Madrid toward the end of April, "I cannot 
 say that there is nothing to be deplored in this kingdom 
 nor on the other hand that I lack power to make all things 
 go as they ought to go, and I cannot feel that my son the 
 King ought to be afraid that anything may happen which 
 would anger him so long as I hold, as I do, the two ends of 
 the strap." 1 
 
 She was well aware, however, that the Guise were trying 
 to use Spain to increase their power. One thing they were 
 trying to arrange was the marriage of their niece, the widow 
 of Francis II, Mary Queen of Scots, to Don Carlos, the heir 
 of the Spanish throne. Catherine disliked Mary, she hated 
 the Guise, she wanted very much to marry her youngest 
 daughter Margaret to Don Carlos. So her letters to Spain 
 during the spring were filled with references to "the gentle- 
 man," which was her disguise for the name of Mary. She 
 expresses herself most freely to her daughter, writing that if 
 it is not possible to bring about the marriage of the prince 
 and her sister, she ought to do all she can to arrange a mar- 
 riage between the Prince of Spain and his aunt, the Princess 
 of Portugal. Catherine urges her daughter to be sure to tell 
 the Princess of Portugal that she would very much prefer 
 the marriage to her brother, the King of France, and that 
 the Prince of Spain should marry her little sister Margaret. 
 But since that seems impossible, she is anxious to see the 
 
 1 Letts. 1, 191.
 
 THE HUGUENOTS SUPPORT CATHERINE 209 
 
 Princess of Portugal reach the highest possible rank and 
 make a marriage which will keep them together all their 
 lives. This line of conduct, Catherine points out, will have 
 the double advantage of making a close friend of the Prin- 
 cess of Portugal and blocking the marriage of her sister-in- 
 law Mary to Don Carlos. 1 
 
 Another thing which Catherine desired to prevent was 
 the Guise plan for gaining the King of Navarre. She kept 
 writing therefore to the Ambassador and to her daughter, to 
 urge the King of Spain either to return Navarre to the 
 King of Navarre, or to give him an equivalent "something 
 which isn't of importance to him, like Sardinia, or a new 
 principality to be erected in Sienna." This latter plan had 
 for Catherine the additional attraction of weakening the 
 power of her distant cousin, Cosimo, the Duke of Florence, 
 whom she always disliked, although she remained on very 
 flattering terms with him. She put the real meaning of this 
 manoeuvre about the King of Navarre in the postscript in 
 her own hand to a letter to the Ambassador she had dic- 
 tated ; for ,she was not unlike other women in her choice of 
 the place to put the most important news in her letters. 
 
 "Although the King of Navarre puts on a good appearance 
 of loving me, nevertheless I should be very glad if he could have 
 his kingdom because, if he stays here, after getting it, he would 
 then feel obliged to me and act even more in my interests and, 
 if he should go away to rule it, still better, because he wouldn't 
 trouble me any more here and there he might be of some use, in 
 some way, to one of my children. You know without being told 
 that you mustn't say this to the King when you are urging him 
 to do it; but I tell you my whole design in order that you may the 
 more readily employ all possible means to arrive at the end I 
 seek." * 
 
 On the 15th of May the little King of France was 
 crowned at Rheims. The Cardinal of Lorraine, who had 
 consecrated his brother and his father, touched him with 
 
 1 Letts. I, 591. 
 •Letts. I, 184, 596.
 
 210 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 the sacred oil and years later, when he delivered the funeral 
 oration for Charles IX, he recalled how the little boy, worn 
 out by the five hours of the ceremony, had begun to cry, 
 and when they asked why, said "The crown is too heavy." * 
 
 On their way to Rheims, Catherine and the King had 
 visited the Duke of Guise. The Queen asked him if it was 
 true that he had made a league to support religion, the King 
 and her authority. Guise answered yes. Catherine then 
 asked, "If she and her son should adopt the new religion," 
 which she hastened to add with emphasis, "they had no 
 thought of doing — would he and his confederates renounce 
 their allegiance?" Guise answered, "Yes, although as long 
 as they followed in the footsteps of their predecessors he 
 was ready to die in their service." She was soon to have 
 other signs of the effects of the opposition to her policy of 
 concession and conciliation toward the Reformed churches. 
 The King of Navarre quite openly went over to the Trium- 
 virate; evidently influenced by conversations with the Span- 
 ish Ambassador in which it was hinted that he never could 
 get back his kingdom by force, but might by an agreement 
 to keep France Roman Catholic. Encouraged by his pro- 
 tection, the straight out orthodox party began decidedly to 
 raise its head. The Parlement of Paris protested against 
 the toleration of heretics, and the Sorbonne, the theological 
 faculty of the University of Paris, declared they never would 
 consent to the kingdom becoming heretic. 2 
 
 When the King issued on the 19th of April, an edict 
 which denounced the "penalty of the gallows without hope 
 of pardon against all who were the cause of division among 
 the subjects of the King on the subject of religion," includ- 
 ing those who by use of "the words Papist and Huguenot 
 and similar expressions caused irritation," the Parlement of 
 Paris refused to register it. The Spanish Ambassador wrote 
 a long letter protesting against it and in a very forcible 
 private interview pointed out to Catherine the trouble that 
 
 ^ouille, II. 557. 
 
 J Sp. Amb. qtd. Bouille, II, 136. B. N. It. 1723 f. 26. 1721 f. 298.
 
 THE HUGUENOTS SUPPORT CATHERINE 211 
 
 would come on the kingdom "from trying to maintain an 
 equal balance between the Catholics and heretics, because 
 the heretics were increasing every day by such tolerance." * 
 
 The difficulty in carrying out any such edict is very well 
 illustrated by a letter written to Catherine by the Bishop of 
 Mans excusing the people for what, on his own showing, 
 was a very bad riot in which a Huguenot had been killed by 
 a mob attacking a heretic congregation returning from wor- 
 ship in the suburbs. He said the dead man was such a 
 worthless character that his own mother disowned him; 
 the last part of which was probably quite true because the 
 hatred between orthodox and heretic was so great that it 
 often destroyed family affection. The people had only acted 
 out of zeal for the Church and because the judges were so 
 lax in punishing heretics. "The only way to keep this city 
 in peace and union is to pardon the offense. Then the ad- 
 versaries of the Church . . . seeing that the King does not 
 avenge their injuries, will bear themselves less insolently 
 than they have; otherwise they will become too much puffed 
 up and insupportable." 2 
 
 On the other hand, letters addressed to her called for 
 the punishment of "false prophets whose false doctrines 
 poison souls" (the Roman Catholic preachers). These let- 
 ters reminded the King, who had always loved Bible stories, 
 of the young King Josias who had cleansed the land of idols 
 and the writers changed his name, Charles de Valois, into 
 the anagram, "Va Chasser l'idole." Situated between a fac- 
 tion who refused to agree that persecution should be 
 stopped, and a faction whose extreme members scornfully 
 refused to be satisfied with toleration, Catherine continued 
 as best she could her policy of conciliation. 3 
 
 The new party of strict orthodoxy and persecution were 
 playing a waiting game. For about two months its leaders 
 had been nearly always absent from court. Meanwhile 
 
 'Conde, II, 334. A. N. K. 1494. 
 
 a Conde, II, 340. 
 
 3 Conde, II, 216, 222, 229, 251, 427,
 
 212 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 there were "riots all over the kingdom," and what the 
 Spanish Ambassador called "great insolence on the part of 
 the heretics." He became more and more insistent with the 
 Queen Mother that she should abandon the policy of con- 
 ciliation, in particular that she should remove from the 
 council Admiral Coligny and his brother, the Cardinal of 
 Chatillon. The Queen refused to do this, saying that it 
 would appear to be done by the influence of the Guise and 
 would re-awaken all the old hatred against them. On the 
 other hand, "if it came to be understood that it was done by 
 the advice of the Spanish King or any other foreign prince, 
 it would ruin her influence." That she judged correctly this 
 general dislike of foreign dictation is shown by the fate of a 
 certain priest who was arrested carrying a request to the 
 King of Spain to intervene in France against the Protes- 
 tants because they were too strong for the young King. 
 The very Parlement of Paris which was protesting against 
 the policy of conciliation, condemned him to kneel in public 
 with his head and feet bare to demand pardon of the King, 
 the realm and the Parlement, while his petition to the King 
 of Spain was torn up in his presence. 1 
 
 In view of the dangerous situation, a special meeting of 
 the Parlement of Paris was called in the presence of the 
 King, the princes of the blood and the royal council, in 
 order to deliberate about what was to be done in regard to 
 religion. The conclusion was finally reached by a majority 
 of three that, until the meeting of a general council of 
 the Church, cognizance of the crime of heresy should be 
 placed in the hands of the ecclesiastical courts; but those 
 who were found guilty and handed over to the secular arm 
 for punishment could receive no greater sentence than ban- 
 ishment. 
 
 The Admiral and his friends were highly indignant over 
 the result; but Guise, on the contrary, declared that his 
 sword would never rest in his scabbard if it were necessary 
 to enforce this edict. Catherine said nothing, but she had 
 
 »A. N. K. 1496 f. 49; De Thou, III, 80.
 
 THE HUGUENOTS SUPPORT CATHERINE 213 
 
 all the written expressions of opinion brought to her and 
 burnt in her presence so that "they might not afterwards be 
 used to anyone's hurt." When the edict announcing this 
 decision appeared (the so-called Edict of July) both sides 
 began to make trouble about it. The orthodox accused the 
 Chancellor of having put in the phrase "Catholic Religion" 
 instead of "Religion of the Roman Church," objected to the 
 slight penalty inflicted on heresy and were angered at the 
 implied hope that, at the meeting of a general council of 
 the Church, more favorable terms might be obtained by the 
 Huguenots. Some of the Reformed, on the other hand, 
 demanded its revocation, although the Spanish Ambassador 
 wrote: "It doesn't hurt them very much, because it is so 
 weakly enforced." * 
 
 There was a cause for this laxity of which he knew 
 nothing; for the Spanish Ambassador was never on the in- 
 side of what went on at court except in the secret councils 
 of the extreme orthodox faction. Catherine evidently did 
 not like the edict and she sent out written secret instructions 
 to the magistrates which so pleased Merlin, the most influ- 
 ential of the Calvinist ministers in France, that he wrote a 
 circular letter to all the churches, telling them that the 
 prohibition of assemblies in the edict soon to be published 
 did not really mean there could be no preaching; for 
 small, quiet congregations would be allowed by the magis- 
 trates. Theodore Beza, Professor of Theology at the Acad- 
 emy of Geneva, who had become Calvin's right hand man, 
 was in France for the conference of theologians which Cath- 
 erine had arranged. He wrote to Calvin that "by the ex- 
 press orders of the Queen Mother" he was sending word to 
 "our people" that they would be allowed to worship quietly 
 in stated places and the governors would protect them. He 
 blames highly the unbridled zeal of some of their followers. 
 To this letter Calvin replied (Nov. 19th, 1561) : 
 
 "What you write about the preposterous zeal of our brethren 
 is exceedingly true. Everywhere I proclaim to them that, if I 
 
 'De Thou, III, 54; Pasquier (2), Bk. IV, L. 10. A. N. K. 1495 f. 62.
 
 214 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 were a judge, I should punish not less severely these furious 
 attacks than the King does by his edicts. . . . Nothing could be 
 more equitable than the letter you have obtained. ... I am 
 especially delighted to hear that the Queen wishes to go through 
 with the measure, because I think I am entitled to conclude that 
 she is not acting craftily." l 
 
 This attitude of Catherine could not be long concealed 
 and it began to be said that she favored the Huguenots 
 entirely. The advice of the Admiral and his friends mani- 
 festly carried great weight with her and several of her 
 favorite waiting women were known tojike the Reformed 
 doctrines. This atmosphere seems to have been felt by the 
 youngest members of the court, and one day, when Cath- 
 erine was in conference with the Cardinal of Ferrara in his 
 room, the door was burst open and a procession of young 
 princes poured in dressed as archbishops, bishops, abbots 
 and monks. At its head on a little donkey rode the future 
 Henry IV. The Cardinal laughed, and so did Catherine at 
 first, but then she scolded them. She foresaw trouble and 
 when the little King repeated the procession, promenading 
 through the rooms and corridors in ecclesiastical regalia, 
 there was a great scandal. The Nuncio complained to 
 Catherine, who had great difficulty in passing it off as only 
 the "foolish play of small children." 2 
 
 The Estates General assembled at Pontoise the first of 
 August in the extraordinary form of a very small number of 
 representatives of the usual delegates of the orders of the 
 provinces. Catherine had made strong efforts to control the 
 elections in her own interests, but without very much suc- 
 cess. At the beginning, the existing government was con- 
 fronted with a difficulty in the refusal of the Estates to 
 recognize a regency which had not been established by the 
 representatives of the people. The reluctance of the Nobil- 
 ity and Clergy was soon overcome, but the Third Estate 
 held out for some time, alleging that their mandate was to 
 confide the authority to the princes of the blood. Largely by 
 
 1 Delaborde pntd. 80. Lett. Calvin to Beza, 19 Nov., 1561. 
 8 A. N. K. 1495, De Ruble (2), III, 223. Arch, C, VI, 5.
 
 THE HUGUENOTS SUPPORT CATHERINE 215 
 
 the influence of Admiral Coligny, they were induced to 
 abandon this position and "praise and agree to the accord 
 made between the Queen Mother and the King of Navarre, 
 "very humbly supplicating the said lady (whose great vir- 
 tues and large experience in the affairs of the kingdom 
 they know) to continue in the government and the admin- 
 istration of the King's affairs." The nobility repeated the 
 same formula of acknowledgment. They saved, however, 
 the constitutional point that consent should not be made a 
 precedent for the unauthorized assumption of a regency, by 
 declaring that it was "only granted to the Queen Mother 
 for her worthy personal qualities," and proceeded to make a 
 series of assertions of fundamental parliamentary rights 
 becoming apparent in a period of regency, some of which 
 cannot be paralleled for strength and clearness by any utter- 
 ance of an English parliament for nearly a hundred years. 1 
 
 In answer to the question, "How to pay the King's 
 debts?" the nobility and the Third Estate agreed that 
 "since King Henry came to the throne the people have paid 
 such heavy taxes that they cannot pay any more," but they 
 recommended various plans of raising the money from the 
 Church. The most sweeping was to sell all the clerical 
 property of the kingdom, pay the debts out of the resulting 
 capital, establish a big loan fund for the use of merchants, 
 pay for the army and fortifications, and, with the remainder, 
 estimated at about forty per cent of the income of the fund, 
 support the clergy. 
 
 With such a temper as this among the representatives of 
 the nobility and burghers, it is no wonder that the Crown 
 could, after a little bickering, obtain a large concession from 
 the Assembly of the Clergy which was meeting at the same 
 time in the neighboring town of Poissy. They agreed to 
 pay sixteen hundred thousand francs a year for six years 
 and at the end of that time to begin the repayment of 
 further debts amounting to seven and a half millions to be 
 
 1 E. g. B. N. C. C. C. 27 f. 314. Bethune 8697 f. 1, Cal. F. 1561, p. 122, 
 Cahiers. B. N. Fds. fr. 3970. It. 1723 f. 76, van Dyke reviews (1).
 
 216 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 paid in ten years. This was not as much as the Queen 
 Mother asked, but it relieved the most pressing necessities 
 of the government. 1 
 
 Thus the outcome of the Estates at Pontoise which the 
 Queen Mother had so much feared, was the endorsement of 
 her joint regency and authority with Navarre, and a large 
 sum of money. 
 
 But with the outcome of the Council of the Church and 
 the colloquy with the heretics held at Poissy, Catherine was 
 very much disappointed. She had arranged this conference 
 to take measures for the reform of the Church and to come 
 to some agreement on doctrine with the heretics which 
 might be laid before a general council as a basis for the 
 reunion of Christendom, for Catherine was one of a number 
 of people of importance then quite hopeful that the schism 
 could be healed by mutual concession. 2 On the first point 
 the assembly passed a series of excellent resolutions about 
 the character and the method of election of the bishops and 
 clergy. But it was only a surface reform. "God knows how 
 all the prelates stand together and it isn't possible to make 
 them agree to touch really the root of the evil." 3 
 
 On the second point, a joint doctrinal agreement, no re- 
 sult was reached. Fourteen ministers, chiefly from Switzer- 
 land, supported by a score of delegates from the French 
 Reformed churches, appeared to present and discuss their 
 confession of faith. Before the colloquy opened, their 
 leader, Theodore Beza, had a private conference with the 
 Cardinal of Lorraine in the presence of the Queen Mother 
 and the King of Navarre. The chief difficulty was about 
 the doctrine of the mass. But at the conclusion of the talk, 
 the Cardinal expressly declared to the Queen Mother that 
 he was very well satisfied with what he heard from Beza 
 and that he had strong hopes of a happy issue out of the 
 colloquy. 
 
 Catherine never could quite understand theological dif- 
 
 1 Recueil, I, 102, 103. 
 
 ■ Neg. Fr. II, 452, 608, 618. 
 
 'Contemporary comment.
 
 THE HUGUENOTS SUPPORT CATHERINE 217 
 
 ferences or why anybody should think them important. 
 Although pious phrases appear constantly in her letters, it 
 would be impossible (except for an occasional passing men- 
 tion of the fact that she had been at mass) to tell from 
 them whether she was a Catholic or a Protestant. The 
 Venetian Ambassador, commenting on a conversation he 
 had with her about this time, wrote home: "I do not be- 
 lieve that her majesty understands what the word 'dogma' 
 means." * 
 
 Whatever hope of agreement might have been raised by 
 the friendly preliminary interview of the leaders proved 
 entirely illusory. When Beza began to explain to the whole 
 council the Reformed doctrine of the Communion and said 
 that in it "although the body of Christ was truly offered 
 and communicated in a spiritual sense, it was, nevertheless, 
 materially, as far from the bread and wine as the sky from 
 the earth," cries of "blasphemy" broke out. Tournon, the 
 dean of the cardinals, rose at once to demand of the Queen 
 either that Beza should be silenced or that he and his 
 friends should be allowed to retire from the room. When 
 Beza had finished his address, the Queen Mother explained, 
 in reply to the Cardinal of Tournon, that she had called this 
 colloquy in accord with the advice of the royal council and 
 the Parlement of Paris, not to change the doctrines of the 
 Church or to make trouble, but to appease trouble arising 
 from diversity of opinion in regard to religion, and to bring 
 those who had wandered, back in to the true fold. 
 
 At a subsequent meeting the Cardinal of Lorraine de- 
 livered an address whose eloquence and logic was univer- 
 sally applauded by the orthodox party as absolutely unan- 
 swerable. The Reformed, on the other hand, spoke of it as a 
 very defective piece of argument and the celebrated Ramus, 
 a professor of the University of Paris, wrote a letter explain- 
 ing that this speech of the Cardinal of Lorraine in favor of 
 Catholicism had converted him from Catholicism to Prot- 
 estantism. A private conference between three bishops and 
 
 1 B. N. It. 1721 f . 338.
 
 218 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 three Roman Catholic theologians and five of the leading 
 Reformed ministers, resulted in a written formula in regard 
 to the sacrament of the communion which all of them 
 signed, but, when it was laid before the assembly on the 
 4th of October, it was rejected with anger and the colloquy 
 broke up leaving the two parties more opposed to each 
 other than before. This extreme hatred found its spokes- 
 man in the Spaniard, Lainez, General of the Jesuit order 
 (newly introduced into France by the influence of the 
 Cardinal of Lorraine), who, speaking in Italian, addressed 
 to the Queen Mother reproaches which brought "the tears 
 to her eyes" and threatened her with the ruin of the realm 
 if she did not drive out these "wolves, foxes, serpents, and 
 assassins." * 
 
 It was evident that the Estates of Pontoise, like the 
 previous Estates of Orleans, had been dominated by those 
 who had at least enough sympathy with the heretic churches 
 to be unwilling to persecute them. The Third Estate had 
 demanded that persecution on account of religion should 
 cease except in the case of anabaptists, libertines and 
 atheists, and that, in each city where it was needed, a tem- 
 ple should be granted for dissenting worship under the 
 supervision of a royal officer; all secret assemblies and all 
 violence either against the orthodox or dissenting worship 
 being sternly repressed. In addition to this the General 
 Synod of the illegal Reformed churches, held in March, 
 had endorsed the fundamental proposition of the Estates of 
 Pontoise that the Estates General of France had the right 
 in case of a regency to establish the government and to 
 nominate the royal council and that the Estates General 
 ought not to take any action in regard to supply, or any- 
 thing else, until this legitimate demand was acknowledged. 3 
 
 We know exactly what Catherine thought about the 
 action taken at Pontoise from a letter she told her secretary, 
 de l'Aubespine, to write to his brother, the Ambassador at 
 
 1 Waddington, 135 ; Bouille qtd. Mas., II, 157. 
 a Cahier is B. N. fds. fr. 3970. Quick, Synodicon, 12.
 
 THE HUGUENOTS SUPPORT CATHERINE 219 
 
 Madrid. She did not see in it anything whatever except 
 the results of court intrigue, because "as you know, the 
 princes of the blood are offended and very much angered 
 with each other and the relatives of 'the gentleman' (Mary 
 Stuart) are always pushing the wheel of trouble." He pro- 
 ceeds: 
 
 "The Queen does not believe that the outward reconciliation 
 which has been patched up between Conde and Guise is very 
 strong. This poor kingdom is carrying dough to the oven and 
 the Queen is greatly to be pitied because she does not please 
 anybody and is little obeyed except when she gives people what 
 they demand. I forgot to tell you also that the Estates say that, 
 before any money is voted, those who had charge of the finances 
 in the time of Francis I and Henry II and Francis II, must give 
 an accounting of the immense gifts which they have received. 
 The Constable kicks like a horse and in spite of his league he 
 don't know where he is, because he thought to cover over every- 
 thing with the mantle of religion, as, to speak truly, the others 
 do also, and they are blowing the fire as much as they can in 
 order to strike fear to the heart of the Queen, who commanded 
 me last night to write this long letter because she hasn't time. 
 Last night at midnight Guise and the Constable tried to frighten 
 the Queen Mother about all these things, saying that it was plain 
 that the Catholics were arming and that there was immediate 
 danger of seeing the kingdom divided by civil war. God grant 
 that all may turn out well, but we live in terrible times." 
 
 The evident strength of the friends of the Reformed 
 religion in the Estates of Pontoise and the fact that the 
 influence of the Admiral Coligny among the deputies had 
 diverted the attacks upon her own authority, inclined Cath- 
 erine to let the Reformed party have their own way at 
 court. The Spanish Ambassador wrote the beginning of 
 September, 1561, "There is no hope for religion in this realm 
 and I don't know what to think of the Queen Mother, who 
 lets herself be managed at the pleasure of these heretics. 
 All who have influence with her, men and women, are of 
 these evil opinions. They don't conceal it and she can't be 
 ignorant of it." * 
 
 *B. N. fds. fr. 6618 f. 4. A. N. K. 1494.
 
 220 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 During the whole month of October, news kept coming 
 up from the provinces of the forcible seizure of churches by 
 the Reformed, accompanied by a quite widespread outbreak 
 of what historians have come to speak of under the tech- 
 nical term of "iconoclasm." This is a form of mob hysteria 
 which has repeated itself in various other times and places, 
 as for instance at the time of the French Revolution, when 
 religious zeal was not an element. It showed itself in the 
 systematic breaking and destruction, without any private 
 plundering, of all statues, pictures and other ornaments of 
 the churches. This violence was openly denounced by all 
 the leaders of the reform. Calvin insisted that a minister 
 who had led an iconoclastic mob should be expelled from 
 the church. The four thousand Huguenot gentlemen who 
 a little later signed a pact with Conde, bound themselves 
 among other things to oppose all breaking of images and 
 sacking of churches. But these exhortations were not able 
 to check the practice and many of the Reformed ministers 
 seemed to come to see in it some sort of mysterious move- 
 ment of the Spirit of God and to speak only half-heartedly 
 in reproving it. As for instance when Beza writes to the 
 Queen of Navarre that "the breaking of images has always 
 been displeasing to him — the more so because it seems to 
 him that it has no foundation in the word of God. . . . 
 Nevertheless, because the act in itself is according to the 
 will of God, who condemns idols and idolaters and because 
 it appears that in a thing so general there may be some 
 secret design of God ... I am content to reprove it in a 
 general way and to moderate such impetuosity as much as 
 I can." » 
 
 The government replied to this news of law breaking by 
 ordering all governors to go to their provinces and passing 
 other repressive measures. These orders passed unani- 
 mously without opposition from members known to sym- 
 pathize with the heretics and in many places they were not 
 
 1 B. N. fds. fr. 3158 f . 38, It. 1732 f. 93. C. C. C. X A. N. K. 1495, 
 Oct. 13. Calvin to Church of Sauve; Conde, II, 359.
 
 THE HUGUENOTS SUPPORT CATHERINE 221 
 
 at all enforced. It was therefore charged that a secret 
 understanding assured the Huguenots that, if they stopped 
 rioting, they would be quietly allowed to worship and, as we 
 have seen, such an agreement had actually been made by 
 Catherine with the leading Reformed ministers. 
 
 But no one who knows the sixteenth century can sup- 
 pose for a moment that what the Huguenot churches really 
 wanted was simply liberty to worship. They looked for- 
 ward ultimately to the substitution of their worship for 
 Roman Catholic worship and such a suppression of ortho- 
 doxy and the ancient rites as had taken place in England. 
 The Huguenot chiefs wished to break the power of the 
 Guise and to reject the claim of Spain to dominate in French 
 religious concerns. Calvinist, nationalist and anti-Spanish 
 feeling throughout the nation at large combined, therefore, 
 at the moment, to strengthen the anti-Guise faction, now 
 basking in the full light of royal favor, and the Trium- 
 virate, finding themselves decidedly overmatched, began to 
 make conciliatory movements. In the end of August Guise 
 had even yielded to the urging of the Queen Mother and 
 gone through, in the room of the Constable, a formal scene 
 of reconciliation with Conde. The Cardinal of Lorraine, 
 who was by conviction a Gallican and a liberal in theology, 
 began to throw his influence into the stream of nationalist 
 feeling. He spoke in favor of a national council. He was 
 quoted as wishing to cut off the French annates from the 
 papal treasury and he had strenuous words with the 
 Legate. A sure sign that he really faltered in unquestioning 
 support of the extreme papal party is the fact that the 
 ultramontanes did to him what they always did to any one 
 who failed to back entirely their policy, accused him of 
 secret heresy and irreligion — which is what every ultra- 
 orthodox faction in every religious organization, Christian 
 or pagan, has always been prone to do to any of their own 
 adherents who became independent enough to vary from 
 their entire program. It was whispered around that the 
 Cardinal of Lorraine was becoming a schismatic, who
 
 222 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 wanted to withdraw France from the Roman obedience and 
 a heretic who had doubts about the doctrine of transub- 
 stantiation. 1 
 
 But all these efforts of the Guise to further divide their 
 adversaries or divert their support were futile. The younger 
 Bourbon-Montmorency-Chatillon combination stood firm. 
 The King of Navarre had again changed his inclination, 
 apparently with the idea that, after all, he could get more 
 out of Catherine than anyone else. She was entirely favor- 
 able to the influences which had endorsed her authority and 
 Calvinism became the reigning fashion at court. Zealous 
 churchmen feared, and the fear was no mere unreasonable 
 panic, that the Valois might try to imitate the Tudors and 
 set up a Gallican Church like the Anglican Church. The 
 Guise gave up the struggle and made up their minds to 
 watch events. On the 20th of October they left court with 
 all their adherents in a great company of more than six 
 hundred horse. Two days later the Constable retired to his 
 Estates and the Marshals de Brissac and St. Andre went 
 with him. Spain had shown very plainly a willingness to 
 help the Triumvirate in any attempt to force the French 
 Crown back to the policy of persecution. Philip sent word 
 to Catherine that he could not allow heresy to increase in 
 France because of the danger of infecting the Netherlands. 
 He had offered her money and troops to help suppress it. 
 "She ought not therefore to take it ill if for the service of 
 God . . . and of all Christendom he assisted the Lord's 
 people and the Estates of your kingdom who are Catholic 
 . . . and he would put his life and all he had on the hazard 
 of that die." To this warning letter Philip added a phrase 
 which subsequent events made somewhat significant. 
 "Great care must be taken about the instruction of the 
 King, lest he too be infected with heresy." From the ortho- 
 dox point of view there was need of the warning. It was 
 reported to the English court that the little King himself 
 asked his heretic cousin, the Queen of Navarre, if the mass 
 
 *B. N. It. 1721 f. 334 f. 93,
 
 THE HUGUENOTS SUPPORT CATHERINE 223 
 
 was true, and suggested that his cousins need not come 
 unless they believed in it. 1 
 
 The attempt on the part of some of the Catholic party 
 to meet this danger that the princes might become Hugue- 
 nots, resulted in a plot which filled Catherine with fear and 
 anger. It was nothing less than a plan to carry off the heir 
 to the throne, her second son, perhaps with the intention of 
 bringing the boy up to serve as a future head for the ortho- 
 dox party. Catherine could never get to the bottom of the 
 affair in spite of all her efforts to do so, but it is evident 
 that there was something behind the few facts that she 
 knew. 
 
 Among the adherents of the Guise in the cavalcade 
 which followed them on their departure from court, had 
 been the brilliant Duke of Nemours, a cadet of the ruling 
 house of Savoy. A splendid man of the world and an able 
 soldier, Nemours did not depreciate his own value. He 
 was as successful with women as he was heartless. After 
 betraying his fiancee, Mademoiselle de Rohan, under prom- 
 ise of marriage, he was finally to marry a fortune with the 
 widow of the Duke of Guise. Before leaving court on the 
 20th of October he had tried to persuade the heir to the 
 throne, the future Henry III, to steal away and leave 
 France with him. The little boy told the royal council 
 what happened and signed his deposition in a big, round 
 hand. He said that Nemours had taken him near to a chest 
 in the room of the King and asked him if he was a Hugue- 
 not. He said, "No," that he was of the religion of his 
 mother. Behind the tapestry nearby were Denise and 
 Marguerite, waiting-women of the Queen. He then took 
 him to the other side of the room and said, "There's a great 
 deal of trouble in the kingdom and you're not safe here 
 because the King of Navarre and the Prince of Conde want 
 to make themselves King and want to kill you. If you like, 
 I'll take you to Lorraine or to Savoy, where you'll be safe." 
 He answered that he didn't want to leave the King nor 
 
 n Neg. Toec. Ill, 466, Cal. F. 1561, p. 397, 415. B. N. It. 1723 f. 101.
 
 224 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 his mother, the Queen. Nemours also told him, "Remem- 
 ber, when the Duke of Guise is leaving, to say to him, 'My 
 cousin, if you can't take me with you now, I beg of you to 
 come when I have need of you.' " The boy was strictly 
 charged not to say anything about this to the Queen or to 
 his tutors, and "If they ask you what it is that I have been 
 talking to you about, say that I was talking to you about 
 the comedies," and on leaving, Nemours said, "Remember 
 what I have told you." Nemours escaped arrest and Cath- 
 erine could not find him, though she looked for him high 
 and low. 1 
 
 The Duke of Guise and the King of Spain expressed the 
 utmost abhorrence of any such attempt and all Catherine's 
 efforts could get no evidence to implicate them in it, but it 
 did not increase her love for either of them. The thing she 
 feared most in the world was any attempt to weaken her 
 children's dependence on her. She had long secretly hated 
 the house of Guise and probably her deep dislike of her 
 son-in-law, the King of Spain, which she continued to mask 
 under flattering phrases, dates from this time. She was 
 willing for a while to rest completely on the support of 
 Coligny, Conde and the Huguenots. The Triumvirate kept 
 itself very carefully in the background away from court. 
 Guise wrote to the Constable that he and his brother spent 
 all of their time hunting "and my talk is of nothing but 
 dogs and hawks." 2 
 
 1 Brant., B. N. fds. fr. 6608; the original. The copy pntd. Letts. I, 246, 
 varies seriously. 
 
 »B. N. fds. fr. 6626 f. 51.
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 MURDER AND RIOT. THE EDICT OF JANUARY LEGALIZES THE 
 
 REFORMED WORSHIP 
 
 Meantime disorder increased in various parts of France. 
 Two things which happened within a week will serve as 
 specimens. On the 19th of November a mob in the city of 
 Cahors attacked a house in which Huguenots were worships 
 ping, set it on fire, killed fifty of the worshippers, dragged 
 many of the corpses through the street, and finally burnt 
 a great pile of them in the public square. On the 24th 
 of November a mob of peasants stormed the castle 
 of Baron Fumel, who had tried to prevent a Huguenot 
 minister from preaching before his vassals, killed him in the 
 presence of his wife, and plundered his chateau. Catherine 
 wrote to the widow the following letter: "Madame de 
 Fumel: Having heard of the cruel and inhumane death of 
 Monsieur de Fumel your husband, I have been filled with 
 the sorrow and regret which you can imagine, not only 
 because the King my son has lost a good servitor, but on 
 your account. For that reason you can assure yourself that 
 I will put my hand to such a cruel and rigorous punishment 
 of the authors of so evil an act that it shall never be forgot- 
 ten. So far as you are concerned, believe that I will look 
 after you and your children as his services merited. I have 
 already sent the order of the King for six hundred francs of 
 pension for your oldest son. I am satisfied that your 
 youngest son should have the Abbey of Bonneval, as you 
 demand, and so far as your daughters are concerned, send 
 them to me and I will take them to bring up in my house." 
 The accounts of this murder given by Huguenot writers half 
 excuse the act, saying that Fumel was an exceedingly cruel 
 seigneur, who was killed during the storming and the plun- 
 
 225
 
 226 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 dering of the chateau by two sons of vassals who had suf- 
 fered particularly under his tyranny: "Reserved, as it 
 seems, for that justice of God by a singular providence." x 
 
 These and a number of similar acts of violence took 
 place in the Province of Guienne, which, according to all 
 reports, was rapidly drifting into a state of desperate civil 
 war. The Queen sent down two civil commissioners and an 
 old soldier who had served under her husband in the Italian 
 wars, Blaise de Monluc, to support them with military force. 
 Their instructions were to execute even justice on both 
 sides, to appease the province and to use force only where it 
 was necessary : "The King, hoping more from prudence and 
 dexterity than from force." 2 
 
 Monluc found in Guienne an attitude among the ad- 
 herents of the Reform, to which he had previously been 
 somewhat inclined, which helped to turn him into a most 
 determined enemy of the Huguenot cause. It was a politi- 
 cal or social attitude not shared by the members of the 
 Huguenot party in general, but worthy of attention because 
 many others besides Monluc thought and charged that it 
 was not exceptional, but characteristic of the Huguenot 
 party and of Calvinism in general. He tells the story in his 
 vivacious memoirs, which, although distorted and disfigured 
 by colossal vanity, are not untrustworthy. His explanation 
 to account for his change of side, is that a minister came to 
 him and offered him, in the name of the Reformed churches, 
 a good present of money and the support of four thousand 
 paid foot-soldiers. Monluc says he refused the present and 
 then asked him who dared to enroll soldiers without the 
 express permission of the Queen Mother? "Then I com- 
 menced to swear and grabbed him by the collar, saying 
 these words, 'I don't know what keeps me from hanging 
 you myself to the bars of this window, you miserable scoun- 
 drel, because I have strangled with my own hands at least a 
 score of better men than you are.' He left me, having had 
 
 »B. N. fds. fr. 15877 f. 452. Tortorel, Letts. I, 260. Hist. Ecc, I, 886. 
 »B. N. fds. fr. 15875, f. qtd. Courteault (2), 403.
 
 MURDER AND RIOT 227 
 
 the most beautiful fear that he had ever experienced." 
 Meeting later one of his old soldiers who told him that the 
 church at Nerac had made him their captain, Monluc called 
 out, "And what the devil are these churches who make 
 captains?" 1 
 
 Monluc made up his mind that a man by the name of 
 Verdier was one of the leaders of sedition in Guienne. He 
 therefore had him arrested, together with three others. A 
 certain gentleman had told him that when he had remon- 
 strated with these men before the consuls of the city, that 
 the King would find their conduct evil, they had answered, 
 "What King? We are King. He is nothing but a dirty 
 little kinglet. We'll give him the whip and teach him to 
 earn his living as other people do." Monluc believed they 
 had repeated similar language elsewhere. When he met the 
 culprits he had two executioners behind him, with sharp 
 swords. The consuls, after some hesitation, confirmed the 
 testimony which had been given in regard to the words used 
 by these men about the King. Whereupon Monluc says he 
 called out: 
 
 " 'You miserable scoundrel, have you really dared to soil your 
 wicked tongue by speaking against the majesty of your King?' 
 He answered, 'Oh, sir, have pity on a miserable sinner!' I seized 
 him and pushed him rudely to the earth and his head fell exactly 
 upon a piece of the base of a cross which had been broken off 
 in a Huguenot riot. I called out to the executioner, 'Strike, 
 fellow.' My words and his blow followed one upon the other 
 and it carried off more than a half a foot of the stone at the 
 base of the cross. I had the other two hung to an elm that 
 stood just opposite, and because the fourth (a deacon of the 
 church) was only eighteen years old, I did not want to put him 
 to death, but I had him given so many blows of the whip by 
 the executioners that I am told he died ten or twelve days after- 
 wards. That was the first execution that I made without sen- 
 tence or putting pen to paper, because in this sort of affair I 
 have heard that it is best to commence with an execution. If 
 all of those who had authority in the provinces had done the 
 
 *Courteault (2), 390, 391; Rel. I, 4, p. 137.
 
 228 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 » 
 
 same thing, the fire would have been put out which has since 
 burnt everything." 1 
 
 While elsewhere the nobility had become the dominating 
 element in the Huguenot party, in Guienne (the only 
 province where many of the peasants were converted to the 
 Reformed doctrine) the movement took a distinctly anti- 
 feudal and anti-royal character. "The nobles became afraid 
 to go hunting, for the peasants killed their dogs before their 
 eyes and they didn't dare to say a word for fear of their 
 lives." "If a lord dared to resist, word was sent to the 
 churches and within four or five hours he was either dead, 
 hidden or flying for his life to the city of Toulouse, the only 
 place where he could be safe." 2 This tendency towards 
 democracy and social revolution in the province of Guienne 
 was much blamed by the leaders of the Reformed Churches, 
 both intellectual and political, like Calvin, Beza, Coligny 
 and Conde, but this early local tendency continued for a 
 long time to be cited in support and justification of the 
 assertion of the orthodox that revolution in the Church 
 meant revolution in the whole fabric of human society. 
 
 The members of the Triumvirate, although staying away 
 from court, were getting ready, if necessary, to wage civil 
 war in defense of the exclusive right of the old religion to 
 exist in France, and to block what they feared was the 
 intention of the Huguenot party to make France follow 
 England in the road of schism and the establishment of a 
 national Church. They very skilfully began their prepara- 
 tions by negotiations with the King of Navarre. Catherine 
 knew very well the danger that they would work upon his 
 ambition and so draw him over again to their side and she 
 again did her best to get the King of Spain to allow her 
 to promise to give him back Spanish Navarre or to replace 
 it by some other kingdom. But Philip played with the 
 offer and wasted time. 3 
 
 ^ourteault (1), I, pp. 416, 425. 
 
 1 Monluc. 
 
 »A. N. K. 1494, ff. 18, 21.
 
 MURDER AND RIOT 229 
 
 On the other side, however, Navarre was plied with 
 every sort of argument. If he would declare himself a 
 Catholic, the King of Spain would, at the intercession of 
 the Pope, give him back Spanish Navarre or else make him 
 King of Sardinia, or at least give him a new kingdom in 
 Tunis. It was even pointed out to him that the celebrated 
 soothsayer, Nostradamus, had predicted that Catherine 
 would see all her sons on the throne of France. This im- 
 plied that they were all to die in rather rapid succession 
 and, on their death, he would be the next heir. If he were 
 a heretic, he could not possibly succeed. The consequence 
 was that in the end of December the unstable King, chasing 
 his rainbow kingdom filled with castles in Spain, gave up 
 attending the preachings, began to go to mass, and bound 
 himself closely to the policy of the Triumvirate. 1 
 
 Catherine was very much worried by this defection, 
 which formed in France a solid party certainly opposed to 
 her policy, probably opposed to her authority, supported 
 by a big league of the Roman Catholic nobility in Guienne 
 and backed by the King of Spain, the Pope and certain 
 of the Roman Catholic princes of Germany. She therefore 
 did two things: first, she requested Coligny and the other 
 leaders of the Reform party to give her a list of the Re- 
 formed churches and to inquire what forces they could put 
 in the field in case she needed their support. The Admiral 
 wrote at once to all the provinces, exhorting the ministers to 
 send him a written list of all the secret churches who pro- 
 fessed the Reformed religion. The replies showed that there 
 were about two thousand five hundred such churches in 
 France, which asked to be granted places of worship and 
 offered to the King "both life and goods" if he needed them. 
 In reply the Queen secretly ordered that each minister 
 should read in his church at the hour of the sermon the fol- 
 lowing written appeal: "Inasmuch as many reports are cur- 
 rent that strangers, under pretense of the Roman religion 
 
 ^astelnau, Bk. Ill, Ch. 6; Rel. I, 4, p. 60; Cal. F., Dec, 1561, A. N. K. 
 1497, Jan., 1562.
 
 230 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 which they say they wish to maintain, are planning to enter 
 this kingdom and take possession of it, it is the duty of all 
 faithful subjects to show the entire goodwill which they 
 have to their King. But above all, because such a quarrel 
 which these aliens allege as a pretext seems to be directed 
 against those whom they call of the new religion, there is 
 the more reason that we should make a manifest demonstra- 
 tion that we would not spare either our lives or our goods 
 to maintain the state and grandeur of our King. And in 
 order to make this demonstration it is necessary that in this 
 church, we consider as soon as possible what offer it can 
 make to the King, of men, either infantry or cavalry which 
 it can support at its expense ... to maintain the Crown 
 of the realm against those who would wish to invade it un- 
 der the pretext of religion. All must be done in the fear of 
 God without any disorder ... so that even those who hold 
 another religion may not have any justification to accuse 
 us as the authors of any sedition or riot." x 
 
 The second thing that Catherine did was to write a long 
 letter to the King of Spain, in which she endeavored to 
 dissuade him from supporting the party opposed to her 
 policy of conciliation. Replying to his statement that the 
 Catholics, persecuted on all sides, had no refuge except in 
 him, she denies both the fact and the conclusion and goes 
 on : "But religion is a cover which they use to hide an evil 
 intention, and for that reason I beg you, my son, examine 
 well the real intentions of those who make use of that 
 mantle and nevertheless have nothing less than religion in 
 
 their hearts That's the whole truth, my son, which I 
 
 have wanted to write you in this letter in order that you 
 might be able to know really how little reason anybody has 
 to be malcontent." 
 
 None of this pressure succeeded in making Catherine 
 waver in her policy of conciliation, which seemed after all 
 best fitted to save her own authority and preserve the throne 
 of her infant son. But she called another Assembly of the 
 
 *Hist. Ecc. 744. Bk. IV.
 
 MURDER AND RIOT 231 
 
 Notables, consisting of the chief personages from each 
 parlement of the kingdom, the royal council and the 
 princes of the blood, which finally opened on the 3rd of 
 January, 1562. The family of Guise, the Constable and 
 their most notable adherents were conspicuous by their 
 absence. There was no unanimity of opinion. Of eleven 
 presidents of parlements who spoke, five were strongly 
 Roman Catholic, three were entirely opposed to the ortho- 
 dox doctrine and three were so neutral that no one could 
 tell exactly where they stood. The Provost of the Mer- 
 chants of Paris appeared at one meeting, accompanied by 
 two hundred of the principal burghers of the city. He 
 spoke in such a way as to make it appear that there was 
 no uniformity of sentiment among that delegation. The 
 assembly as a whole was very strongly in favor of the policy 
 of conciliation. Catherine felt obliged to moderate their 
 views and it was only her strong hand joined to that of the 
 King of Navarre, which kept them from voting that the 
 Huguenots should have churches assigned to them through- 
 out the kingdom. The Nuncio reported: "It is said no 
 orator ever expressed himself with greater eloquence, energy 
 and success than the Queen. She has since said herself that 
 it seemed to her at the time as if God was dictating to her 
 the very words she used." 1 
 
 The edict which was approved, called the Edict of 
 January, while not indeed putting the Reformed church on 
 the same basis as the orthodox church, did give it for the 
 first time a legal standing in France. It was provided that 
 those of the new religion should immediately surrender all 
 the churches they had seized and return all the ornaments 
 and other church property which they had removed from 
 them. They were permitted to select places of worship out- 
 side the walls of the cities in which they lived and the 
 magistrates were to see to it that they were not interfered 
 with, either in going to worship or returning from it. Men 
 
 1 Letts. I, 264. Hist. Ecc, 751, n. 2. Pasquier (2), I, 91; Arch. C. 
 VI, 20, 24; Nuncio. Conde, II, 20; Neg. Tosc. Ill, 472.
 
 232 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 of both religions were forbidden to irritate each other by 
 the use of reproaches and evil words, especially in sermons. 
 No synods or consistories were to be held by the new church 
 except by permission and a royal officer was to be always 
 allowed, if he desired, to attend all assemblies. No one 
 of either religion was to carry any arms except the sword 
 and dagger usual with gentlemen. 
 
 This was less than the Reformed churches would have 
 liked, but "the ministers and deputies of the churches of 
 France who were at court" received it thankfully and sent 
 it out to the churches with annotations, bidding them 
 strictly observe all its commands and agreements. The 
 Legate and the Nuncio also accepted it as better than they 
 had feared. 1 
 
 Opposition of three sorts at once began to appear. Even 
 before the deliberations of the assembly were over, the 
 Spanish Ambassador attacked the Queen Mother, saying 
 that "the proposition which had been made the day before 
 by the Chancellor FHospital would bring the total ruin of 
 the kingdom and the great displeasure of the King his 
 master and all princes who loved the ancient religion." 
 The Queen answered, after asking him how he knew so 
 much about what went on in the private council of the 
 King; "in the first place he ought to know that people who 
 would be willing to betray their royal master in that way 
 would probably not tell the truth. These busybodies were 
 trying to make trouble between his master and her and if 
 he was a loyal servant he wouldn't hesitate to tell their 
 names because they were doing as much harm to the King 
 his master as they were doing to the King their own master; 
 for the war which they were trying to stir up would be 
 equally dangerous to both. Although she was a woman and 
 the King was a young child, nevertheless France was not 
 lacking in forces and in means to defend herself and to 
 resist those who might wish to attack her." The Ambas- 
 sador replied that this was only the gossip of the pages. 
 
 1 Conde, III, 93. Arch. C. VI, 30.
 
 MURDER AND RIOT 233 
 
 The Queen said that it could not have been that because no 
 pages were present in the conference. The Ambassador 
 then ventured to animadvert upon the education of the 
 King and his brother, to whom people were allowed to say 
 anything they chose in regard to religion. The Queen 
 became furious, saying that it was none of his business. 
 She knew that his only object was to stir up trouble between 
 his master and her. Her children were so obedient that 
 they told her everything that anybody said to them . . . 
 and she would bring them up in such a way that every 
 person of a good heart would some day feel toward her the 
 greatest gratitude. But though she spoke so sharply to an 
 Ambassador she thought insolent, Catherine was evidently 
 a little nervous about the result, for she immediately wrote 
 to the French Ambassador a letter in which she insisted 
 upon her great friendship for the King of Spain and her 
 confidence in his friendship toward her. 1 
 
 It is difficult to believe that Catherine was quite sincere 
 in the assurance she gave in regard to the education of her 
 children being quite in accord with what the King of Spain 
 would like. She herself had given the little King a Hugue- 
 not book of psalms, telling him not to speak of it to any- 
 body. But the boy showed it to his tutor, Cypierre. He 
 took it away from him, telling him at the same time that 
 a man ought not to obey women. He then reported the 
 incident to the Constable. Catherine was very much en- 
 raged. She dismissed Cypierre and appointed the Prince 
 de la Roche-sur-Yon tutor of the young King and joined 
 to him the mother-in-law of the Prince of Conde and one 
 of her women-in-waiting, Madame de Crussol, two ladies 
 who were most pronounced Huguenots. Little Charles IX 
 was very much attached to his tutor and on the night when 
 the change was made would scarcely eat anything; saying 
 when his mother tried to comfort him that he didn't want 
 any other tutor except Monsieur Cypierre. The next morn- 
 ing the new tutor, after having saluted the King, asked him 
 
 1 Conde, II, 601 ; Letts. I, 613.
 
 234 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 to come and play in the grand rooms as he was accustomed 
 to do, to which he responded that he didn't want to play, 
 and went to mass. He proved very recalcitrant to the new 
 atmosphere. While preaching was going on in the room 
 of the Queen of Navarre, a most devoted adherent of the 
 Reformed religion, the King happened to pass by the door. 
 He stopped and knocked three or four times until the door 
 was opened. Standing in the doorway he said: "Don't 
 make any mistake about it; if you keep on preaching this 
 way you will every one of you be burnt." 1 
 
 But his younger brother, the future Henry III, was very 
 much less resistant to the influences which were now en- 
 tirely prevalent at Court. His governor, Carnavalet, was 
 a Huguenot and the boy formed the habit of going around 
 saying to everyone, "I am the little Huguenot, but by and 
 by I will be the big Huguenot." He did his best to convert 
 his younger sister, Margaret, who wrote in her memoirs: 
 
 "My brother, afterwards the King of France, could not avoid 
 being impressed by the unhappy Hugonoterie. He was always 
 urging me to change my religion, often threw my prayerbooks 
 in the fire and instead of them gave me psalms and Huguenot 
 prayers, compelling me to carry them. I answered his threats 
 by bursting into tears, because I was at the very tender age of 
 seven or eight years. He answered that he could have me 
 whipped or killed if he wanted. I answered him that he could 
 have me whipped or have me killed if he chose to, but that I 
 would suffer everything that could be done to me rather than 
 damn my soul." 2 
 
 While it is not probable that Catherine actually con- 
 templated bringing her children up as Huguenots, it is quite 
 certain Coligny was right when he told the English Ambas- 
 sador about this time that the Queen Mother was anxious 
 to have such modifications and liberties established in the 
 Church as might content the Protestants and bring about 
 the reunion of Christendom. It was to help this plan that 
 she restored Cypierre as one of the tutors of the King, 
 
 *Neg. Tosc. Ill, 471, Cal. F. 1562, p. 384. 
 
 ' A. N. K. 1571 f. 71, 1497 Feb. 3, 9, Margaret 6.
 
 MURDER AND RIOT 235 
 
 ordered all her waiting women to live in the same religion 
 she did or they would be dismissed and stopped all Calvinist 
 preaching in the private apartments of the palace. The 
 concessions she wished made to the schismatics are un- 
 doubtedly described in a letter whir-h was written to the 
 Pope about this time by the Bishop of Valence, entitled: 
 "Remonstrances made to Pope Pius IV by the King, 
 Charles IX." » 
 
 It besought the Holy Father, the common Father of all, 
 to help the Queen keep the realm completely under the 
 obedience of the King and at the same time retain it 
 under obedience to the Holy See. It was the easier to do 
 this because there were not in France either anabaptists, 
 or any heretics who refused to accept the first six General 
 Councils of the Church. But the consciences of those who 
 had left the Church and the consciences of many who had 
 not yet left it, were troubled by three points: First, the use 
 of images; and the Holy Father was asked to order that 
 they should be removed from the altars and put on the out- 
 side of the churches. Second, the administration of the 
 Holy Sacraments; and the Pope was asked to consent to 
 the omission of the exorcism and some of the prayers in 
 baptism. In regard to the communion, the Pope was 
 asked to consent that it should be administered in public 
 always after the recital of prayers in the vulgar tongue; 
 that the procession of the holy sacrament when the host 
 was borne in the monstrance through the streets should be 
 omitted and that an explanation should be made of the 
 mass, bringing out its spiritual meaning, emphasizing, for 
 the sake of those who doubted, the words of the mass which 
 called it the sacrifice of praise. Finally, the Pope was 
 asked to borrow from the schismatics their custom of 
 singing the psalms in public worship and making their 
 prayers in the language understood by the people. If this 
 were done twice a day, many of them would be brought 
 back. "If the Holy Father will by his authority restore 
 
 'Cal. F. 1562, p. 502, 526, 545, 546; Arch. C. VI, 35; Conde, II, 20.
 
 236 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 these ancient customs of the Church alongside those which 
 have more recently been received, this realm will always 
 remain as faithful to the obedience of the Holy See as it has 
 been in the past, and the Queen, by her vigilance, prudence 
 and goodness, will reunite in time her divided people, or 
 at least those separated from the Church will remain so 
 small in number that they will have no means of increasing 
 and it will be much easier to bring back peace and union." 
 Some even more striking concessions to the Protestants 
 than these, were to be proposed by the Emperor of Ger- 
 many, but there was little hope of getting anything of the 
 kind endorsed by the Roman curia, or accepted by the ortho- 
 dox party of France. Neither does it seem probable that 
 any conceivable concession could then have healed the 
 schism between Protestants and Roman Catholics. 1 
 
 The party of orthodoxy in France set itself to resist to 
 the utmost of its power the January Edict of concession 
 and conciliation, which, after the first flush of gratitude, 
 the Reformed churches came to regard as entirely inade- 
 quate. Before a royal edict could become law, it must be 
 registered by the parlements of the kingdom; though they 
 could not refuse to register for more than a certain time. 
 All the parlements registered the Edict of January except 
 those of Provence and Paris. A royal emissary forced the 
 Parlement of Provence to give way, and, after a long 
 struggle, the Parlement of Paris finally registered the Edict 
 under protest. 
 
 ^onde, 11,562.
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 THE LINES DRAWN FOR CIVIL WAR. CATHERINE BETWEEN 
 
 GUISE AND CONDE 
 
 The final registering of the tolerant Edict of January- 
 did not bring tranquillity, for before that time, legal and 
 diplomatic opposition to the policy of conciliation was 
 beginning to give place to armed opposition, and civil war 
 was in sight. 
 
 This civil war was not, however, between those factions 
 of the nobility of France whose zealous strife for power had 
 started at the beginning of the reign of Henry II. The 
 new element of difference of opinion about religion had 
 brought a new line of cleavage. The Bourbon-Mont- 
 morency faction was hopelessly divided. The heads of the 
 two families and a part of their adherents were opposed 
 by the younger members of the two great houses, who 
 carried with them the bulk of their friends and vassals. 
 The King of Navarre and his brother, the Cardinal of 
 Bourbon, were in sharp opposition to their younger brother, 
 the Prince of Conde, and the Constable had reached the 
 point where he was even willing to take arms against the 
 policy supported by his three nephews, Admiral Coligny, 
 the Captain General of the French infantry d'Andelot, and 
 the Cardinal of Chatillon. 
 
 While their ancient adversaries were thus divided, the 
 four brothers of the family of Guise with all their ad- 
 herents remained solidly united. They determined to carry 
 farther their successful policy of dividing possible opponents 
 of their cause. In case civil war came, the Huguenots 
 would ask help not only from the English but also from 
 the Lutheran Princes of Germany. But some of the 
 Lutheran theologians were strongly opposed to the theology 
 
 237
 
 
 238 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 of Calvin ; indeed;, some of them seemed more inclined to 
 irreconcilable hostility to Calvinists than to Roman Cath- 
 olics. The Cardinal of Lorraine had already shown his 
 willingness to make restatements of orthodox doctrines and 
 modifications of ancient practices which might render it 
 easier for Lutherans to reunite with the Church and the 
 Duke of Guise was anxious that the theological differences 
 between Calvinists and Lutherans should be deepened so 
 that, in case it came to arms in France, as many Lutheran 
 Princes as possible might refuse to allow the levy in their 
 states of mercenaries for the Huguenot army. 1 
 
 Duke Christopher of Wiirtemberg, in his youth, served 
 for eight years in the army of Francis I at the head of two 
 thousand lansquenets recruited in his father's duchy. He 
 and the young Duke of Guise had become friends during 
 the campaigns in Italy. For some months the Duke of 
 Guise had been carrying on an active correspondence with 
 his old comrade in arms, in which the Duke of Wiirtemberg 
 showed the evident hope of converting his friend to Luther- 
 anism. An interview between the Duke and the four 
 I brothers of the house of Guise was arranged at Saverne, 
 not far from their princely seat of Joinville. It was most 
 friendly and the Cardinal of Lorraine wrote to Cardinal 
 Borromeo about his hopes of bringing back some of the 
 Lutherans to the Church. Duke Christopher, in an 
 account of the interview written in his own hand, records 
 that the Cardinal of Lorraine said, "I have read tne confes- 
 sion of Augsburg and the three chief Lutheran theologians. 
 I approve entirely of their doctrines. But I must conceal 
 my opinion for a while in order to gain others whose faith 
 is feeble." The Cardinal and the Duke of Guise denied all 
 responsibility for the past persecutions and "They then 
 gave me their hands, promising, on their honor as princes 
 and their hopes of salvation, not to persecute, either openly 
 or secretly, the adherents of the new doctrine." 2 
 
 1 Montaigne, I, XXVII; de Thou, III. 128. 
 
 'Bull. Soc. Prot. 24, pp. 71, 113, 209, 499. Arch. C. VI, 59, Puchesse (2), 
 Bull. Soc. Prot. pntd. IV, 184.
 
 THE LINES DRAWN FOR CIVIL WAR 239 
 
 This absence from the center of intrigue, had emphasized 
 the fact that the Guise held the balance of power among 
 the divided families of Bourbon and Montmorency. The 
 Duke was scarcely back from Saverne before the King of 
 Navarre, irritated by the efforts of his younger brother to 
 keep up Reformed worship at Paris in spite of the desperate 
 hostility of the mass of the population, sent for Guise to 
 join him with a strong escort, "in order to take means to 
 reverse and destroy all that has been done in contravention 
 of the ('persecuting') Edict of July." Catherine heard of 
 this summons and feared that her policy of conciliation was 
 to be destroyed. She sent Guise word not to go to Paris, 
 but to come without any forces, straight to her near 
 Meaux, and her word was backed by a letter from the King. 
 Guise started, ostensibly for court, attended by a strong 
 and heavily armed escort. His journev was scarcely begun, 
 when he became involved on the first of March, 1562, in an 
 affray which started the flames of a civil war that blazed 
 or smouldered for more than thirty years. 1 
 
 The Huguenots spoke of this affray as the Massacre 
 of Vassy, carefully planned by the Duke of Guise to show 
 that the Roman Catholics of the kingdom would not permit 
 them to enjoy the liberties promised by the Edict of 
 January. The Duke of Guise said his remonstrances with 
 an illegal assembly, containing many of his vassals, had 
 resulted in a violent attack upon him, which had unfortu- 
 nately compelled his gentlemen and guards to kill a number 
 of people. The truth lies between these two accounts. It 
 is very improbable that the Duke of Guise intended before- 
 hand to attack the worshippers at Vassy. On the other 
 hand, it is equally improbable that the unarmed assembly 
 with many women and children among them, attacked the 
 Duke and his strong escort. Many episodes of his life show 
 that Francis of Guise was not a cruel man, but he had more 
 than his share of that passionate pride in resenting the 
 slightest suggestion of insult which was characteristic of 
 
 'Pasquier (2), IV, 1. 14, ctd. Bouille, II, 170.
 
 240 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 all nobles of the time. A short time before, the Huguenots 
 of Vassy had hooted and driven away the Bishop of Chalons, 
 sent by the Duke's mother to preach to them and to bring 
 them back to what she thought their duty. When Guise 
 learned that, at the very moment of his passing through a 
 city, under his brother's jurisdiction, 1 a service which he 
 regarded as insolent was being held, he sent in an imperious 
 mood to summon the heretics to his presence for reproof. 
 The Huguenots of Vassy by their own account of their 
 reception of the Bishop of Chalons, were not accustomed 
 to take reproof very humbly. A quarrel arose between the 
 worshippers and the Duke's gentlemen. When the Duke 
 arrived at the scene, fighting had begun and his autocratic 
 temper and the hatred of his guards and servitors for the 
 Huguenot heretics, account for the forty-five killed and 
 many more wounded. That the worshipping assembly 
 could not really have been very menacing is shown by the 
 fact that only one man was killed among the Duke's fol- 
 lowing. It was not a fight but a massacre. 
 
 Neither side believed that Vassy was the outcome of 
 chance and passion. It made Guise the idol of all who 
 wanted to exterminate heresy by the sword, but Duke 
 Christopher of Wiirtemberg wrote at the end of his notes 
 of the interview of Saverne, "May God be the avenger of 
 guile and perjury!" All over France, as if moved by a 
 common impulse, the Huguenot nobility began to gather 
 in armed bands. The leaders of the Huguenot churches 
 held a conference and sent Beza to demand justice from 
 the King against the Duke of Guise. When he made his 
 demand in the presence of the Queen Mother and the King 
 of Navarre, Navarre could not repress his anger. He said 
 no one should touch a finger of the Duke of Guise, and 
 accused the members of the churches of going to their 
 preachings armed, to which Beza answered, "Arms in the 
 hands of wise men bring peace." "Sire," he added, "it is 
 the part of the Church of God in whose name I speak, to 
 
 ^ouille, II. 171.
 
 THE LINES DRAWN FOR CIVIL WAR 241 
 
 endure blows and not to give them, but I beg you to re- 
 member that anvil has worn out many hammers." x 
 
 After the affray at Vassy, Guise moved slowly along the 
 roads which led both to court and to Paris, and at his 
 chateau of Nanteuil on the upper Marne he met all the 
 members of his family, the Constable and three of his sons, 
 the Marshal St. Andre and other great nobles of the anti- 
 Huguenot party. There he received another message from 
 Catherine urging him to come to Monceaux, where the King 
 was, and forbidding him to go to Paris. Guise answered 
 that he was expecting friends to visit him and could not 
 come to Monceaux. A few days later, undoubtedly by the 
 counsel of the chiefs of his party, he set out for Paris. 
 
 The ability, the reputation and the personality of the 
 Duke of Guise combined to mark him out as a splendid 
 leader for civil war. Even before Vassy he had been the 
 idol of the populace of Paris. One of his gentlemen de- 
 scribed Guise's entry into the city about a year before: 
 
 "To visit the King he rode his horse, which was called le 
 Moret, a splendid black animal with a naughty gait, covered 
 with a big horsecloth of black velvet broidered with silver. The 
 Duke wore a doublet and trousers of crimson satin, a loose cloak 
 with a cape of black, banded with crimson and a bonnet of 
 black velvet with a splendid red plume. He looked among his 
 three or four hundred gentlemen like a huge oak among the other 
 trees of the forest. When it had been noised about the city 
 that he had arrived, the people so pressed upon his path that it 
 took him nearly an hour to reach the royal palace, because the 
 crowd filled up the road. The cheers of the people applauded 
 his coming with the most extreme joy, showing the confidence 
 and trust which they had in him." 
 
 The news of the affair at Vassy raised this old popularity 
 of Guise in Paris to the highest pitch. When he entered 
 through the Porte St. Denis on the 16th of March, 1562, 
 accompanied by the chief lords of the Catholic party and 
 a train of two thousand horses, he was met by the un- 
 
 *De la Noue, 546. Hist. Ecc, II, 7.
 
 242 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 bounded enthusiasm of a huge crowd. The city magistrates 
 received him and the prevost of the merchants delivered an 
 oration, hailing him as the defender of the Faith and offering 
 him, in the name of the city of Paris, twenty thousand men 
 and as much money as he needed to save religion. 1 
 
 The next day three of the Lorraine brothers, the Con- 
 stable and the Marshals Brissac, Thermes and St. Andre 
 wrote to the Queen Mother, saying that they had intended 
 to come to kiss her hand at Fontainebleau, but the chief 
 merchants of Paris were terrorized by the Prince of Conde 
 and the Huguenots. They would therefore remain to pro- 
 tect them. They asked that the King of Navarre should 
 come to help them in restoring order and begged her not 
 to believe the false reports that they intended to do any- 
 thing against her authority. At the same time they wrote 
 the Spanish Ambassador that the King of Navarre had 
 "lifted the mask" and was acting entirely with them and 
 asked him to urge the King of Spain "to do everything to 
 gratify the King of Navarre in order to keep him faithful 
 to the good cause." Catherine found herself in an extremely 
 difficult position. The Triumvirate had finally gained the 
 King of Navarre and felt strong enough to show its hand. 
 The futile excuse of Guise only emphasized his open dis- 
 obedience to her commands and the flattery of the marshal's 
 message was so obvious as to be almost mockery. She saw 
 the prospect of falling again under the dominance of the 
 Guise. Even before the Duke came to Paris, she had been 
 very much afraid of his faction and the English Ambassador 
 reported "the Queen Mother does not trust any of the 
 papists and assists the Protestants." Indeed she went much 
 further in this direction than the English Ambassador then 
 knew, for she sent to the Huguenot chief, the Prince of 
 Conde, messengers carrying three notes. The first told him 
 "that she was not more certain of herself than she was of 
 him and that he could look upon her as if she was his own 
 mother." She begged him, in a note ending, "burn this 
 
 1 Brant. IV, 233; Bouille, II, 179.
 
 THE LINES DRAWN FOR CIVIL WAR 243 
 
 instantly," to "save the children, the mother and the realm," 
 and she added to the third note that "if it was not for the 
 trust she had in God and the assurance that he would aid 
 her to preserve the realm, she should be more cast down 
 even than she was," . . . but "I hope that we shall soon 
 remedy all these troubles with your good counsel and aid." 
 She iiad also sent word to Admiral Coligny to seize Orleans, 
 Rouen and other cities. 1 
 
 Frightened as she was, Catherine tried to carry things 
 off with an appearance of courage. She asked her waiting- 
 women one day what they were saying in Paris. They 
 replied that the whole city was against her and that every- 
 body called the Chancellor a heretic. "She laughed loudly 
 and answered that the Chancellor was the best man in the 
 world. Still laughing, she asked what was said of the Duke 
 of Guise and his followers and if he was coming to take the 
 government away from her?" So that her conduct made 
 the Spanish Ambassador, even without knowing anything 
 of the secret messages to Conde, believe that he was staying 
 in Paris by her orders to balance the power of the Guise. 2 
 For even at this early stage in her career as a politician, 
 Catherine began to follow what afterwards became the 
 dominant idea of her usual policy, the attempt to neutralize 
 factions by balancing one against the other and so trying 
 to establish her own and her son's absolute control of the 
 state. The policy of reconciliation which she cleverly forced 
 on the Guise after the conspiracy of Amboise, ought not to 
 be regarded as part of this later policy of "balance." It 
 was rather a shrewd judgment to which she hoped to rally 
 the chief elements of the state. But now that this attempt 
 at reconciliation had broken down completely, Catherine, 
 still a timid novice at the game of high politics, began to 
 see dimly the possibility of a "policy of balance." Ap- 
 parently she thought that the only practicable method of 
 
 1 B. N. fds. fr. 6611, f. 20; A. N. K. 1496, f. 52, 1500, June 21. Cal. F. 
 Mar. 9, 20. Letts. I, 282, 283. B. N. It. 1723 f. 176, 1725 f. 109, Jan. 25, 
 Mar. 8, 1563. 
 
 'A. N. K. 1497, Mar. 25.
 
 244 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 blocking the Guise from regaining that control of the 
 government from which she had suffered during the reign 
 of her oldest son, was to balance their faction by another 
 faction. 
 
 Hypothetical history is not very profitable, but it may 
 be doubted whether this policy was the only possible one; 
 certainly it may be doubted whether circumstances forced 
 it upon her as anything more than a temporary expedient. 
 Outside of the followers of the younger Bourbons, the 
 Chatillons and the Reformed churches, there were plenty 
 of people in France who distrusted the lead of the Guise. 
 Such a one, for example, was Morvillier, Bishop of Orleans, 
 and ex-royal Ambassador to Venice, who wrote in a private 
 letter the end of November, 1560, his dislike of these Italians 
 and Spaniards who were turning France aside from her true 
 national policy. There was a knot of these men, for the 
 most part old servants of the state, whose opinions can be 
 seen in the letters addressed to Bernard Bochetel, who had 
 been a secretary of Francis I and Henry II. Although unor- 
 ganized and unled, they had a certain unconscious agree- 
 ment on what might be called a national policy. They 
 were not heretics, though some of them were accused of 
 being heretics, but they were very much opposed to the 
 extreme papal claims of control over the Church of France. 
 They were strongly anti-Spanish and did not want to see 
 France weakened in the face of Spain by civil war. This 
 nationalist, or Crown, group included such men as Claude 
 de l'Aubespine, de Noailles, Bishop of Acqs, the Bishop of 
 Angouleme, the Sieur de Lisle, Herault de Boistaille, Lansac, 
 du Ferrier, Bourdin, etc. In these experienced servants of 
 the state and such of the high and the lesser nobility and 
 the burghers as could have been rallied round them, lay the 
 possibility of making the stable assertion of Catherine's 
 influence over the destinies of France constructive. To do 
 what Elizabeth did and unite against the forces that made 
 for disunion and civil war, a solid middle-of-the-road party 
 who would follow the cry "France first!" was, it may
 
 THE LINES DRAWN FOR CIVIL WAR 245 
 
 at least be suspected, an open way of safety for Catherine 
 and for France. But to take it she must have had in her 
 heart some touch of that love of country which underlay 
 all the tyranny, caprice and vanity of Elizabeth. And why 
 should Catherine, an Italian, born of an Italian generation 
 in which the passion of national patriotism was not active, 
 love France as Elizabeth loved England? If such a way 
 was open, Catherine would hardly have seen it. Her train- 
 ing and her character naturally led her to feel more and 
 more strongly that no other policy was possible for her 
 except that policy of "balance" which, according to the 
 testimony of all observers hostile or friendly, she never up 
 to the end of her life, definitely abandoned. 1 
 
 The more or less prevalent idea that she adopted this 
 policy for abstract reasons as a result of her careful study 
 of the teachings of Machiavelli on statecraft, is mistaken. 
 In the first place, if she had followed his teaching she never 
 would have adopted the policy of balance, for he distinctly 
 disapproves of it as dangerous. And in the second place, 
 although the Prince was dedicated to her father, there is 
 no sign in all her letters that Catherine ever read it. If 
 she did, certainly she profited very little by it, for she 
 repeatedly violated its fundamental maxims. She began 
 to adopt timidly the policy of "balance" because it seemed 
 to her the only possible policy. 2 
 
 For success in the coming civil war, it was evident that 
 there were two chief points to be gained at the start: first, 
 the control of the person of the King, and second, the pos- 
 session of Paris. The Huguenot party, assembling under 
 the lead of Conde, felt at this time that they had the support 
 of the King, but before Conde's correspondence with Cath- 
 erine was over, it was quite evident that they could not 
 hold the city of Paris. The entire population outside the 
 higher burghers, was strongly against them. One of his 
 captains wrote, "Conde could no more fight Guise in Paris 
 
 1 B. N. C. C. C. 394 f. 21, B. N. It. 1726 f. 81. 
 "Van Dyke, review (2), Leipziger V. J. Schrift.
 
 246 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 than a fly could attack an elephant." The bulk of the 
 nobles of the Huguenot party had estates in Normandy 
 or south of the river Loire. The Triumvirate were, there- 
 fore, able to rally quickly a much larger number of the 
 nobility of their faction than their opponents could get 
 together. Before the end of the month this fact was evident 
 to such different observers as the English Ambassador and 
 the Nuncio, and Catherine began to regret that she 
 had put herself so completely into the hands of the Hugue- 
 nots. She sent, therefore, a fourth message asking Conde 
 to withdraw from Paris and when he complied on the 23rd 
 of March, she wrote telling him that she would never forget 
 "that which you do for me and if I die before I have the 
 means of showing my gratitude as fully as I wish, I will 
 leave word to my children to show it." This feeling that 
 perhaps she had made a mistake in relying upon the Protes- 
 tant party which seemed for the present to be the weaker, 
 was strengthened by the fact that the Triumvirate sent 
 Cardinal Guise to "promise and assure the Queen that they 
 were not considering anything in regard to the government 
 nor in prejudice of her authority, but that they were only 
 anxious about the preservation of religion." * 
 
 The Catholic nobles, now secure in the possession of 
 Paris, determined to make sure also of the second great 
 card in the game, the King. They left Paris with a force 
 which they knew Conde could not face and marched to 
 Fontainebleau, where the Queen was.. Catherine knew of 
 their approach and was strongly urged by the Chancellor 
 de l'Hospital and her intimate, the Seigneur de Soubise, to 
 withdraw to the city of Orleans, some fifty miles to the 
 southwest and close to the Huguenot country, where they 
 would be able to gather forces to defend her from the other 
 faction. She apparently hesitated, talking over the matter 
 for several hours at a time in her private cabinet, until they 
 thought they were about to gain her consent. On the very 
 
 1 De la Noiie, 551, Arch. C. VI, 54, Cal. F. App. 1. Letts. I, 283. A. N. 
 K. 1497, Mar. 25.
 
 THE LINES DRAWN FOR CIVIL WAR 247 
 
 day when news came that the Triumvirate were advancing 
 from Paris, Soubise lingered at Fontainebleau as long as he 
 dared, in the vain hope of finally persuading her. The 
 Triumvirate when they arrived, were able to pay less atten- 
 tion to her hesitation. Catherine would have liked to 
 remain where she was, occupying a position independent 
 of either faction, but they insisted that the King must go 
 for his own safety to Paris, and they took him in spite of 
 his tears. Conde had lost both the capital and the King, 
 and when at last the scattered forces of the Huguenots were 
 mustered under his command it was too late to act. 1 
 
 The most important contingent that rode into Conde's 
 camp at Mans was headed by Admiral Coligny. The man 
 who was to be for ten years, not only the real leader but 
 almost the common father of the Huguenots, had long 
 hesitated before he would consent to civil war. History 
 shows no better example of the old saying that those who 
 are the last to draw the sword are often the last to sheathe 
 it. When he was finally induced by the tears and the 
 reproaches of his wife to join in the defense of his persecuted 
 brethren, the Admiral's iron will, military experience, and 
 piety, made him from the very first the soul of the party. 
 Realizing that the Huguenots had lost the chance for the 
 offensive, he made up his mind to occupy the nearest strong 
 city and stand on the defensive, until the Reformed 
 churches and the Huguenot nobility could gather an army. 
 The strategic line for them to hold was the line of the River 
 Loire, with the city of Orleans for their stronghold. His 
 younger brother, d'Andelot, was sent forward to seize the 
 gates on the second of April, 1562. Conde and the Admiral 
 were still thirty miles off and the Triumvirate was rushing 
 troops towards Orleans. Hard-riding messengers, sent one 
 after another, urged the Huguenots to hurry. A desperate 
 call met them about twenty miles from the city and the 
 Prince, with some two thousand horse behind him, masters 
 
 1 Soubise, Memoires Jeanne d'Albret is untrustworthy. Van Dyke Re- 
 view (4) ; Rev. Hist. Castelnau, 85; Conde, II, 197, 228.
 
 248 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 and valets together, "started at full gallop. Great numbers 
 of people were on the roads going to Paris and seeing this 
 mysterious race, they thought all the fools in France were 
 riding on a wager, for there was as yet no news of civil 
 war and they roared with merriment at seeing valets rolling 
 on the ground, horses broken down, valises split open, while 
 the riders themselves broke into repeated peals of laughter." 
 Meantime the general of artillery who had been sent by 
 the Triumvirate to occupy Orleans, was jogging along an- 
 other road on a mule at the rate of eighteen miles a day, 
 either, as the Spanish Ambassador suggests, because he was 
 a stupid old man, or because he was in his heart a Huguenot. 
 The greatest of the civil wars of France opened with this 
 grotesque scene. 1 
 
 In the shelter of the walls of Orleans, the Huguenot 
 leaders began to make every effort to collect forces. They 
 sent envoys and letters to England, Switzerland, Savoy and 
 Germany, explaining what they were doing and asking for 
 sympathy, but, at the beginning, Coligny was entirely 
 opposed to asking actual help from abroad. They wrote 
 to the two thousand odd Reformed churches asking for men 
 and money and they summoned the Huguenot nobility 
 from all parts of France to join them. They used the power 
 of the press to its fullest extent and poured out a flood of 
 pamphlets and declarations defending the justice of their 
 cause. Perhaps the most significant of these is the Articles 
 of Association, signed by two hundred French nobles and 
 afterwards reported to have been "assented to and signed 
 by over four thousand gentlemen of the best and most 
 ancient houses in France." It denounced the audacity, 
 temerity and ambition of some of the subjects of the King, 
 who despise his youth and have dared to take arms against 
 his edicts and put to death a good number of his poor 
 subjects when they were assembled for divine worship with 
 his permission. Against all laws, human and divine, these 
 people have seized the person of the King and of the Queen, 
 
 *De la Noue, 554. A. N. K. 1497, App. 8.
 
 THE LINES DRAWN FOR CIVIL WAR 249 
 
 and the signers, wishing to save the King and the Crown 
 and to restore the Queen to her authority, and also to save 
 for the poor faithful Christians of this realm the liberty of 
 conscience which it has pleased the King to grant them by 
 edict, have joined themselves together under the leadership 
 of the Prince of Conde (one of the protectors of the Crown) 
 for this purpose. "We promise not to suffer in our company 
 anything contrary to the commandments of God, such as 
 idolatry and superstition, blasphemy or licentiousness, 
 violence, plundering, breaking of images and sacking of 
 temples, or any other such thing forbidden by God or by 
 the last edict of January." They were willing to receive 
 into their Association anybody who sympathized with its 
 purpose, and they promised to treat as a traitor anyone who 
 betrayed it or withdrew from it. At the same time there 
 were published forged articles of a supposed agreement 
 made between the members of the Triumvirate for a de- 
 tailed plan under the leadership of the King of Spain to 
 destroy the Protestants of the world; beginning with the 
 destruction of the city of Geneva, all of whose inhabitants, 
 without distinction either of age or sex, were to be de- 
 stroyed by the sword or thrown into the lake. All French 
 Protestants were also to be put to death and then the rest 
 of Protestant Switzerland and Germany were to be reduced 
 to obedience to the Church. 1 
 
 On the other hand the Triumvirate, protesting equally 
 their loyalty to the King and their willingness to submit 
 to the authority of the Queen Mother, asserted that their 
 only objects were the restoration of the ancient Church 
 as the sole religion in France and to prevent anyone not 
 a faithful member of it from holding any office in the 
 state, to disperse all armed forces except those under the 
 command of the King of Navarre and to restore tranquillity 
 completely. 2 
 
 The Crown answered the Huguenot documents by 
 
 1 Whitehead, 111, ctd. 114; Cond6, III, 270. See Note. 
 ■Conde. HI, 338.
 
 250 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 reaffirming the Edict of January and denying that there 
 was any intention of abandoning it. A number of circum- 
 stances suggested to the associated Huguenot chiefs doubt 
 as to the sincerity of these assurances. On the 12th of 
 April a Huguenot congregation worshipping according to 
 the Edict just outside the walls of the city of Sens, of which 
 the Cardinal of Guise was Archbishop, was attacked by a 
 mob of townsfolk and peasants from the neighborhood. A 
 massacre began which lasted, according to the journal of a 
 Catholic priest of the neighborhood, until all the heretics 
 of Sens, with the exception of some who were hid by their 
 Roman Catholic friends, were killed. Those who survived 
 were so few in number that they never dared to seek redress 
 by justice "from fear that the people might throw them- 
 selves upon them and send them to swim in the river Yonne 
 after the others." The Reformed church of Sens had, 
 according to the custom which angered Monluc in the 
 south, employed a captain and a guard to protect them and, 
 if need be, to organize their resistance. He was out of town 
 when the riot began, but hurried back only to be killed 
 with all his men. The children of the city tied a rope 
 about his feet and dragged the body through the streets 
 for hours, crying, "Bring out your swine, here is the swine- 
 herd." For years to come this insulting the dead was 
 almost the normal action of the superstitious and debased 
 mobs whenever they attacked Huguenots in cities. An 
 Italian wrote home of the Paris mob, "If they find one of 
 the new religion anywhere, they kill him at once and drag 
 him around as if he were a dead dog." It was the bitter 
 preaching which helped to rouse the fanaticism of these 
 mobs, which made the Huguenot soldiers apt to kill almost 
 every monk, innocent or guilty, on whom they could lay 
 their hands. 1 
 
 Both sides were levying forces as rapidly as they could 
 and both sides were privately assuring the Queen Mother 
 that they would lay down their arms provided the other 
 
 "Conde, III, 300; Haton, I, 195; Arch. Mod. qtd. Whitehead, 130.
 
 THE LINES DRAWN FOR CIVIL WAR 251 
 
 side would do it first. The moderate Catholic, Etienne 
 Pasquier, has recorded his opinion in a contemporary letter : 
 "The Prince of Conde is unwilling to accept these offers of 
 the Duke of Guise. He is of the opinion that they are trying 
 to fool him. The others have the same judgment about him 
 and perhaps in this matter neither of the two are deceived." 
 Conde announces that his purpose is to set the King at 
 liberty and in the military commission summoning the 
 nobility to support the Crown, it is announced that the 
 purpose is to set free the Prince of Conde, who is held a 
 captive by some seditious people. "It is fair to say that 
 this is trick for trick and paying the others in their own 
 money." x 
 
 Catherine was now anxious to wash her hands of all 
 connection with the Huguenot rising. She denied that 
 Conde had ever had any suggestions from her to arm for 
 her defense and the service of the King. On the contrary, 
 she said that all she had ever urged him to do for the 
 King's service was to withdraw from Paris and to disarm. 
 When he published in Germany her letters she appended to 
 them explanations in this sense, which are exceedingly lame, 
 particularly those of the one which ends : "Burn this letter 
 instantly." And a conversation reported by the Spanish 
 Ambassador before the publication of the letters makes the 
 case against her rather complete. When she heard it said 
 that "Conde had letters signed by her asking him to arm, 
 she did not deny the existence of the letters. She said, 'It 
 might be they had forged the signatures,' which makes some 
 here say she wanted to deny in advance signatures she 
 knew they could produce." These denials of all connection 
 or sympathy with the heretic party, were made particularly 
 strong towards Spain. Catherine wrote to her Ambassador 
 at Madrid : "I have been anxious that all the Lords should 
 write to the King of Spain in regard to my attitude toward 
 religion, not that I need any testimony before God nor men 
 in regard to my faith nor my good works, but because of the 
 
 Pasquier (2), II, 100.
 
 252 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 lies which have been told of me. For I have never changed 
 in deed, will, nor habits, the religion which I have held for 
 forty-three years, and in which I have been baptized and 
 brought up." x 
 
 With all Catherine's desire not to be involved openly 
 with the Huguenot rising, now that their party seemed the 
 weaker, she was evidently very much afraid of the other 
 faction, headed by her old enemies, the Guise. Not long 
 after her return to Paris, she called the Duchess of Guise 
 and began by saying she had always been exceedingly fond 
 of her and therefore wished to confess something to her. 
 She had, at the beginning, been so suspicious that Guise 
 and his party wanted to remove her from all authority and 
 even from the person of the King, that she had played a 
 double part and had in a certain way sustained the other 
 side, but if she could "assure her that they did not desire 
 to do anything in her prejudice, she would believe it and 
 follow their advice." The Duchess and afterwards her 
 husband, assured the Queen in the name of all the con- 
 federates that if she would "really support religion, the 
 authority of the King and the safety of the kingdom, she 
 would find in them all obedience, for they never had any 
 idea of attacking her authority." 2 
 
 Both sides were now not only mustering forces in France 
 but doing their best to raise auxiliary and mercenary con- 
 tingents in Germany, Switzerland, from the Pope, England 
 and Spain. After the massacre of Sens a rapid succession 
 of risings and surprises had put into the Huguenot hands 
 a great number of the French walled cities, so that Bran tome 
 wrote, "when it was asked what cities have the Huguenots 
 taken? the answer was, 'Better ask what ones they have not 
 taken.' " 3 
 
 Catherine, however, was still determined to make peace 
 and she had around her some of the little set of men already 
 
 *B. N. fds. fr. 6611 f. 59; Letts. I, 290, 296, 596. A. N. K. 1497. 
 
 •A. N. K. 1497 Sp. Amb. 
 
 •Brant. IV, 293, Comp. B. N. fds. fr. 6620 f. 198.
 
 THE LINES DRAWN FOR CIVIL WAR 253 
 
 alluded to, for the most part moderate Catholics, who shared 
 her dismay at the prospect of civil war. Two of her secre- 
 taries wrote to their friends at this time: "If God doesn't 
 help, I am very much afraid that there will be the most 
 terrible bloodshed the world has ever seen. . . . You are 
 very fortunate that you are far enough away not to see 
 close by the evil which we are now seeing," and the French 
 Ambassador in England wrote, "I thank God that the King 
 has the stronger forces, but I would with all my heart he 
 were not compelled to try his strength against his subjects; 
 that is to say, against himself. . . . This compels me to say 
 that no conditions of peace can be suggested which are not 
 preferable to civil war." These men probably had through- 
 out the kingdom thousands of sympathizers who disliked 
 heresy but thought civil war was worse. Unfortunately for 
 France they were not yet organized as they afterwards 
 were under Coligny's cousin, the son of the Constable, into 
 the party of the so-called Politiques. 1 
 
 In spite of the suspicions and insults called out to her 
 in the streets of Paris, Catherine, with a sort of yielding 
 obstinacy, continued her negotiations for peace, even after 
 the armies were mustered and the fighting had actually 
 begun in many parts of France. She finally met Conde 
 on the 9th of June in a pouring rain in a flat, open country 
 not far from Toury. Conde refused to enter a near-by barn 
 or to dismount from his horse, and Catherine talked to him 
 without even removing the half mask of black velvet which 
 ladies of the time often wore. Under these depressing 
 circumstances, Catherine's usual merry humor did not desert 
 her. The Huguenot gentlemen had adopted the custom 
 of wearing white cloaks over their armor. Catherine said : 
 "My cousin, your followers are a lot of millers." To which 
 the dapper little prince, a typical French noble, a hard 
 fighter but always full of gaiety and gallantry to the ladies, 
 answered, "That's so they may be ready to beat your 
 donkeys, Madame." Meantime the gentlemen of their 
 
 J B. N. ids. fir. 6618 f. 170, 172. Teulet, II, 179; Pasquier (2), Bk. X, 6,
 
 254 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 escorts, a hundred on a side, had been halted at eight hun- 
 dred paces from each other. A Huguenot leader describes 
 the scene: "I had a dozen friends on the other side, each 
 of whom was as dear to me as a brother, and there were 
 many others in the same situation, so that, man after man 
 asking permission from his officer, the two lines of crimson 
 cloaks and white cloaks were soon mingled together in 
 friendly talk and when they separated it was with tears 
 in their eyes." * 
 
 Conde said that if the Triumvirate and their friends 
 would disarm and return to their homes, he and his friends 
 would do the same, and asked for the confirmation of the 
 Edict of January granting toleration to the Huguenots. 
 Catherine was unable to promise either point, the con- 
 ference dissolved and the royal army at once advanced to 
 within eighteen miles of Orleans. 
 
 Catherine was not discouraged. She continued to send 
 messengers to the Huguenot chiefs and on the twenty-fourth 
 of June, sixteen of them signed a written promise that, if 
 the Triumvirate would retire to their homes, they would 
 ask the Prince of Conde to put himself in Catherine's hands 
 'as a pledge of their obedience to the King. The rejoicing 
 Triumvirate at once withdrew from the army, but went 
 back only a few miles to the city of Chateaudun. Four 
 days later Conde was taken by Catherine to the chateau 
 of Talcy, some miles in the rear. He asked that Coligny 
 and the other chiefs might have an interview on the fol- 
 lowing day. In spite of the King of Navarre's objection 
 to this, Catherine agreed and, as Coligny positively refused 
 to enter the walls of any town, the interview was held in 
 a barn in the country. One of the chiefs who went into 
 the barn with the Admiral has recorded in his memoirs how 
 Catherine came in walking with a stick (she had been in- 
 jured by being thrown from her horse a short time before) 
 and, when the interview did not go as she wished, she beat 
 
 1 A. N. K. 1497, B. N. It. 1722 f. 353, 384, 391; d'Aubigne, II, 35, 40; 
 Haton, I, 306; Whitehead, 119; de la Noue, 558.
 
 THE LINES DRAWN FOR CIVIL WAR 255 
 
 on the ground with her cane, crying out, "Ah, my cousin, 
 you are ruining me! You are driving me madf" But the 
 end of the interview was to her satisfaction. For some 
 reason which no contemporary and no later historian has 
 ever been able to discover, Conde, finding that he could get 
 nothing but liberty of conscience without liberty of worship, 
 finally offered for himself and his friends to sell their prop- 
 erty and leave the kingdom. He and the Queen Mother 
 could not resist a joke at parting, for he said with a smile, 
 "I understand you had a little plot to keep me at Talcy as a 
 prisoner." She burst into a laugh and intimated that they 
 might, if they chose, have carried her off to Orleans. 1 
 
 No sooner were the Huguenot chiefs out of the presence 
 of the Queen, than they began to regret the rash promise 
 which had been made and the next morning, at a council 
 of all the chiefs and officers, the news of what had been 
 agreed upon raised a storm of protest. One man said, "I 
 am fifty years old and I don't quite see myself walking 
 about a strange country gnawing a toothpick, while my 
 neighbor is the master of my house and draws my rents. 
 Let anyone go who will ; I am going to stay in my country 
 and die for the defense of its altars and its hearths." The 
 Prince therefore decided to break his promise and the 
 Queen's secretary, who had arrived to close the affair, went 
 back to tell his mistress that it would take something more 
 than paper to drive the Huguenots out of France. The 
 better to excuse this action, the Huguenots published a 
 letter from the Duke of Guise to his brother, the Cardinal 
 of Lorraine, which made it plain that the Triumvirate had 
 planned treachery five days before. That document was 
 a forgery, like the supposed plan of the Triumvirate for the 
 massacre of all the Reformed of France and of Geneva. But 
 that the Triumvirate party did intend treachery is plainly 
 shown to us by the correspondence of the Cardinal of 
 Ferrara, who wrote explaining the plot with an injunction 
 
 1 Conde, III, 518; Cal. F. 1562, p. 128. Soubise, 50; Hyp. ctd. Ranke, 
 V,25.
 
 256 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 to keep it quiet. Whatever may be said in apology for the 
 withdrawal of a promise so rash, the unsuccessful attempt 
 which followed this council of the chief Huguenots, to sur- 
 prise the royal army by a night attack in the absence of its 
 leaders, who had withdrawn under agreement, was a plain 
 piece of treachery. 1 
 
 This outcome of the negotiations must have been a huge 
 disappointment to Catherine, for on the night after the 
 interview she wrote to the Duke of Montpensier that Conde 
 and his followers had promised to leave the kingdom with 
 the sole condition of liberty of conscience for the Huguenots 
 who chose to remain and she directed him to take steps to 
 receive the surrender of two of the chief cities they held. 
 But even after this disappointment, she was still anxious 
 to renew her attempts to make peace. We know from her 
 letters to her daughter that she thought both sides hypo- 
 crites. "Everything that is done on one side and the other 
 is nothing but the desire to rule and to take from me under 
 cover and color of religion, the power I possess." She 
 believed there was not, on either side, "sanctity or religion, 
 but only private passions, vengeance, and personal hatred." 
 She did not want either side to win. She thought she had 
 good reason to distrust the use the Triumvirate might make 
 of unhampered control in the state, and a letter to her 
 Ambassador at Madrid shows that one feeling in the back 
 of her mind made her fear above all things a Huguenot 
 victory: that was a deep-rooted suspicion of her son-in-law, 
 the King of Spain, to whom she was always writing such 
 affectionate letters. If the victory should turn to the side 
 of the Prince of Conde, "my son the Catholic King might 
 undertake to revenge that defeat and, under pretense of 
 aiding me to save this kingdom, would make himself the 
 tutor of my son; which would be the very greatest of all 
 misfortunes and the total rr.in of this state." Therefore 
 she begs the Ambassador, without letting it be known that 
 
 * Hist. Ecc. I; de la Noue, 562, 564; Conde, III, 509, see note. Hyp. 
 pp. 254, 256; Due d'Aumale, 116 (a descendant of Conde).
 
 THE LINES DRAWN FOR CIVIL WAR 257 
 
 he had heard from her, to tell him that she has summoned 
 six thousand Swiss and eight thousand Germans, which, in 
 case of any disaster, would be able to save the kingdom, 
 "so that, knowing this fact, you can take away from the 
 King any desire to come to my aid with huge forces. Use 
 all your five senses, because I am as much afraid as I am 
 of death to see come to my son and to myself that utterly 
 unbearable thing, knowing what are the counsels, practices 
 and plots of those who have stirred up these troubles." 
 (The Guise.) 1 
 
 1 Letts. I, 310, 341 ; X, 60, 75, 78, 330.
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 
 THE FIRST CIVIL WAR ABOUT RELIGION 
 
 The war soon became a cruel one. At first the Hugue- 
 nots attempted to hold the strictest discipline over their 
 forces. De la Noue, who fought in the army of the Loire 
 under the Admiral, and later became a chief pillar of the 
 Huguenot cause, tells the story of what happened. "Dice, 
 cards and women were banished from the quarters, plunder- 
 ing was strictly forbidden and arrangements were made for 
 religious service every day. At first the orders were ad- 
 mirably obeyed, but two months later the troops from 
 Provence, at the storming of Beaugency, showed more 
 cruelty and pillaging upon the inhabitants of the Reformed 
 religion who couldn't escape, than they showed against the 
 Catholic soldiers." There was even some violation of 
 women. Two other regiments, one of Gascons and the other 
 of Frenchmen, followed their example and the three had an 
 evil rivalry to see who could do the worst. "That was the 
 birth of Mademoiselle la Picoree, since so much increased 
 in dignity that she is now called Madame, and, if the civil 
 war continues, I do not doubt that she will even become 
 Princess." This evil infection spread until the whole army 
 was affected. The Admiral did his best to stop this and "he 
 was a very good doctor to heal that illness because he was 
 absolutely without pity for offenders. When he went into 
 Normandy he was told that a certain captain had sacked a 
 village. He sent at once but couldn't catch anybody except 
 the chief and four or five soldiers, whom he strung up on 
 the spot, booted and spurred and their cloaks on their 
 backs, with the flag for ensign. To make the trophy more 
 striking, he put at their feet what they had stolen, women's 
 dresses, sheets and table-cloths mixed with chickens and 
 
 258
 
 THE FIRST CIVIL WAR ABOUT RELIGION 259 
 
 hams, with an inscription in large letters: WARNING TO 
 ALL SOLDIERS WHO PASS BY. I must also say in 
 favor of the Catholic regiments that they were at first kept 
 in very good order and did little harm to the people, but I 
 understand that they pretty soon spread their sails to the 
 wind and took the same course that the others did. Al- 
 though sometimes such disorders gave cause for laughter, 
 yet there was more often reason for weeping to see so large 
 a number of people carrying arms who deserve, because of 
 their bad actions, the name of bandit rather than that of 
 soldier." * 
 
 The Admiral's efforts were impeded not only by the bad 
 military custom of allowing soldiers pillage as part of their 
 wages, but also because of his lack of money to pay his 
 German auxiliaries. It is a commentary on the effect of 
 war — even war which he had tried at the beginning to make 
 worthy of being called a war for the word of God — that in 
 four months the Admiral should write to his brother and 
 suggest, as a means of recruiting mercenaries in Germany, 
 to promise them "the sack of Paris," because "we do not 
 treat the Papists so badly as their beastly cruelty de- 
 serves." 2 
 
 There was one form of disorder in particular which the 
 Huguenot captains were powerless to check — iconoclasm. 
 The impulse to this seemed to be with many of the Hugue- 
 not soldiers almost an obsession. Soon after the Huguenots 
 seized Orleans, the Prince and the Admiral, hearing that 
 the ornaments of the great church of Sainte Croix were 
 being destroyed, ran to the place followed by a number of 
 their suite and began with blows of the swords and of sticks 
 to try to stop the disorder. Finally the Prince seized a 
 harquebus and took aim at a man who had climbed high 
 up to smash a statue. He calmly turned around and said, 
 "Wait a moment, sir, until I have broken down this idol 
 and then I will die if it pleases you." 3 
 
 *Dela Noue, 573. 
 'Lettenhove (1), 9. 
 'Hist. Ecc, II, 51.
 
 260 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 The war was not a war of pitched battles, but rather of 
 sieges of chateaux and small towns. Over great stretches 
 of French soil it was not possible to ride abroad without 
 fearing that "every patch of wood concealed an ambuscade." 
 In the far south the fighting took on a savage and terribly 
 desperate character. The royal general, Monluc, and the 
 Huguenot captain, des Adrets, Governor of Lyons and 
 Commander in the South by election of the inhabitants and 
 by commission of Conde, rivalled each other in cruel deeds. 
 Monluc accepted the surrender of four hundred men of the 
 garrison of Terraube under promise of sparing their lives. 
 Two days later, irritated because the garrison of a neighbor- 
 ing town he was besieging had treacherously fired upon a 
 flag of truce, he sent back for the four leading nobles among 
 his prisoners and hung them on a walnut tree in sight of the 
 city. The soldiers were all put to the sword and flung into 
 a deep well until he filled it up so that the top of the heap 
 could be touched with the hand. "A very good riddance of 
 very bad people," he wrote in his Memoirs. Des Adrets, 
 capturing several little cities in the hilly country to the 
 west of the southern course of the Rhone, varied his slaugh- 
 ter of surrendered garrisons by making some of the soldiers 
 jump from the precipices on which the citadels were built. 
 One poor fellow, hesitating to jump off, Des Adrets re- 
 marked with a sneer, "What, will it take you two jumps to 
 do it?" "Well," answered the victim, "I'll give you ten to 
 do it in." The savage captain took the wit as a ransom for 
 the man's life. 1 
 
 It is worthy of note that these two men who made the 
 most terrible names for themselves on either side, were not 
 moved by any religious fanaticism. When the troubles 
 began, Monluc, whose brother, the Bishop of Valence, was 
 not very orthodox, hesitated as to which side he should join, 
 and later he was suspected by the Cardinal of Lorraine of 
 wishing to go over to the Huguenots. Des Adrets in the 
 second war became a leader on the orthodox side. Curiously 
 
 1 D'Aubign6 (1), II, 50, 56; Monluc, V, 258, 535.
 
 THE FIRST CIVIL WAR ABOUT RELIGION 261 
 
 enough we have a record of what each of them said about his 
 own method of warfare. Monluc told the Duke of Alva, 
 two years after the war was finished, and when there was 
 fear of its renewal, "if everybody had only followed his 
 example, that is to say, to grant quarter to no one, all would 
 be now over, but, unfortunately, many brave people meet- 
 ing in war said one to another, 'my cousin,' or 'my brother' 
 and so the war would last forever; whereas there wouldn't 
 be more than enough for a single breakfast with the scoun- 
 drels if everybody would act together." Long after the war, 
 the young Huguenot captain, d'Aubigne, met des Adrets. 
 "The old man was of a strong and vigorous age. He had a 
 savage eye and an eagle-like profile. His face was thin and 
 bony and marked with spots the color of blood, as Sulla is 
 described to us; in short he had the air of a real fighting 
 man." D'Aubigne asked him "Why he had inflicted cruel- 
 ties unworthy of his great work as a soldier?" He answered, 
 "first, because it had seemed to him great cowardice to 
 suffer the cruel killing of his faithful comrades without 
 reprisals, and second, to make his men fight harder because, 
 having given no quarter, they knew they couldn't ask 
 any." * 
 
 Both of the men acted on policy and, in estimating the 
 cruelty of the Huguenot wars, it is well not to forget that 
 veteran fighting men (and general European war had 
 stopped only in 1559) had seen terrible slaughter and pil- 
 lage. Otherwise one is in danger of considering peculiar to 
 the Huguenot wars, things which had been to a large extent 
 common to the warfare of the preceding generations. The 
 history of the Franco-Spanish wars in Italy of the first half 
 of the century shows a terrible list of massacres and plun- 
 derings. Nothing done in the civil wars of France was as 
 bad in the way of cruelty, lust and sacrilege as what had 
 been done a generation before at the sack of Rome by the 
 German and Spanish regiments: and there had been little 
 
 ^ourteault (2), 391; Granvelle (1), IX, 288; De Thou (2), 228; 
 d'Aubigne, II, 73.
 
 262 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 to ehoose between those who called themselves Lutherans 
 and those who called themselves Catholics. 
 
 The moderate Roman Catholic, Etienne Pasquier, a con- 
 temporary, sums up the situation very justly. 
 
 "It would be impossible to tell you what barbarous cruelties 
 are committed on both sides. Where the Huguenot is master, 
 he ruins all the images, demolishes the sepulchres and tombs, 
 takes away all the consecrated objects in the churches. In 
 exchange for this the Catholic kills, murders, drowns all those 
 whom he knows belong to that faith and fills the rivers with 
 their corpses. Added to this there is a good deal of private 
 revenge under cover of the public quarrel. Although the leaders 
 put on the appearance of condemning such conduct, nevertheless 
 there is a good deal of falsehood and connivance hidden under 
 that attitude." 
 
 The Huguenot captain, de la Noue, in his military essays 
 already cited, echoes the Catholic writer. "The war cries 
 were 'For God — For the Gospel' and yet these children of the 
 same God pursued each other with fire and blood like savage 
 beasts." No wonder atheists increased, for "it is our wars 
 for religion which have made us forget religion." In one 
 respect both sides were equally pitiless. The slaughter of 
 priests and monks was very common after the Huguenots 
 had captured a city, and Catherine wrote to Marshal Ta- 
 vannes in Burgundy: "Do all you can to finish cleaning 
 the entire country of Burgundy of the vermin of preachers 
 and of ministers who have started this pest there." 1 
 
 Two things particularly enraged the Huguenots, first 
 the brutal murders and massacres, after the model of Sens, 
 by the debased mobs which then infested all the large 
 French cities. These mobs were intensely superstitious and 
 eager for blood and plunder. In Paris these mob murders 
 were continuous. "It was enough for a street urchin to call 
 out after a stranger, 'There goes a Huguenot' and a crowd 
 gathered, killed him, stripped him and the boys dragged the 
 body through the streets to throw it into the river. If they 
 
 1 Pasquier (2), IV, 7. My approval of this contemporary judgment is 
 based on a collation of outrages by both sides. Letts. I, 327.
 
 THE FIRST CIVIL WAR ABOUT RELIGION 263 
 
 kill a citizen, they plunder his house and generally kill his 
 wife and children." One mob would not wait for the execu- 
 tion of a heretic. They took him from the officers, literally 
 tore him in pieces and threw the fragments into the river. 
 Another day a murderer standing on the ladder was crafty 
 enough to call out, "Alas ! I must die for killing a Huguenot 
 who insulted Our Lady." The mob rescued him and set him 
 free. Second, the violation of Huguenot women by the 
 soldiers of the Crown. This crime, very common in all wars 
 of the time, was undoubtedly increased by the slanders 
 (similar to those circulated about the Christians in the days 
 of the Roman Empire) concerning the debaucheries that 
 went on in the secret assemblies of the Reformed churches. 
 A deliberate attempt had been made to circulate these 
 slanders which were widely believed. Under Francis II an 
 attempt had even been made to establish them by perjury 
 in open court. Somewhat later the old fable of "the 
 smearers" or people in a conspiracy to spread the infection 
 of the plague, for which imaginary crime fifteen women had 
 been burnt at Geneva in 1545, was revived and applied to 
 the Huguenots. During the peace which followed the war 
 we are now describing, it was reported by several corre- 
 spondents that the Huguenots were poisoning the soup at 
 the inns to spread the plague and had smeared more than 
 seven hundred Roman Catholic homes at Lyons with pest 
 salve in order to make the epidemic so bad that the King 
 could not visit the city. 1 
 
 The hatred of the Roman Catholic side was exasperated 
 not only by these horrible slanders, but also by a strange 
 form of that deliberate fury of destruction against inani- 
 mate objects which has been described under the title 
 of iconoclasm. In some places the Huguenot soldiers 
 destroyed tombs and scattered the bones of the dead: 
 an impulse which showed itself also in Scotland. The 
 strong protests of men like Beza against this barbarity 
 
 *E. g. Conde, I, 86, 90, 91; II, 89, 130, 149, 160, 193; Cal. F. 1563, 3, 
 pp. 101, 158. Hist. Ecc. 144, 272; Marcks ctd. Sp. Amb. 89, Bonnet. Cal- 
 vin's Letts. I, 428.
 
 264 CATHERINE DE MEDICI 
 
 which extended to the tombs of the ancestors of that 
 zealous Huguenot, the Queen of Navarre, and the at- 
 tempts of Conde to stop it by punishment scarcely les- 
 sened the wrath and horror it caused in the minds even of 
 moderate Catholics. These desecrators of tombs felt they 
 were imitating King Josias, of whom we are told in the 
 Book of Kings that he "burnt the bones of idolaters on the 
 altars of their idols in order to purge Judah and Jerusalem 
 of all abominations." * 
 
 When the fighting began between the main armies north 
 of the Loire, the Huguenots had decidedly the worst of it. 
 The important city of Tours was besieged and surrendered 
 on the first of September. Rouen, sometimes called the sec- 
 ond richest city in the kingdom, was taken by assault in the 
 end of October and about the same time word reached the 
 Prince of Conde that an army of five thousand Gascons, 
 marching up from the south to join him, had been surprised 
 and driven back with the loss of more than one-third of its 
 number. During the siege of Rouen the King of Navarre 
 received a mortal wound of which he died in a few days. A 
 weak man, always ready to postpone work for pleasure, he 
 counted the opportunity of saving France from mortal 
 danger to which he had been born, as of little value com- 
 pared to the title of King which he had gained by marriage. 
 He tried to use the position of champion, first of reform 
 and then of orthodoxy, as a stake in the game he was play- 
 ing to win a day-dream kingdom in Sardinia or Tunis, and 
 he lacked wit to perceive that his crafty antagonists had 
 loaded the dice. In life he cut rather a pitiable figure 
 among the astuter, more resolute or more sincere men 
 around him. As death drew near, his two physicians, one a 
 Protestant and the other a Catholic, unable to save his 
 body, fought a duel for the salvation of his soul and there 
 are good grounds for the grisly joke repeated over his coffin 
 that he finally died without being able to make up his mind 
 whether he was a Protestant or a Catholic. 
 
 homier ctd. II, 358; Neg. Tosc. Ill, 489; Conde, II, 359.
 
 THE FIRST CIVIL WAR ABOUT RELIGION 265 
 
 In spite of the loss of Rouen the Huguenots were not 
 discouraged. No disaster could break the iron will of 
 Coligny and the gay spirit of Conde made a jest of defeat. 
 "They have given us," he said, "some bad checks. They 
 have taken our two castles (Tours and Rouen), but if they 
 will fight us in the open field perhaps we will be able to take 
 their knights." He expected heavy reinforcements of mer- 
 cenaries brought by d'Andelot from Germany and he had 
 made a treaty of alliance with Elizabeth of England which 
 gave him six thousand men and one hundred and forty 
 thousand crowns. In exchange, Havre de Grace (held by 
 the Huguenots) was to be put in her hands until Calais 
 was restored to her in accordance with the treaty of 1559. 
 He also had at court a secret ally who could scarcely con- 
 ceal her unwillingness to see the Huguenot party destroyed 
 and the complete triumph of the party of Guise. The little 
 King, with the frank impulse of a boy, blurted out his 
 mother's feelings. When the Rhinegrave, leader of the 
 royal German auxiliaries, was presented to him as one who 
 had brought a notable aid to the Crown, he said aloud to 
 his mother, "I don't know why they are bringing so many 
 strangers into the kingdom. I don't need them. I know 
 perfectly well that it is against the Prince of Conde, but if 
 he was defeated and those of his company I believe that 
 they would make of you a little chamber-maid and of me a 
 little valet." * 
 
 Even before the death of Navarre the Tuscan Ambassa- 
 dor reported: "The Queen Mother becomes every day 
 more suspicious. The authority of the Triumvirate makes 
 her afraid and she trembles lest she should be removed from 
 the government." Soon after Navarre's death she sent 
 word to the Prince of Conde that she would use all her 
 power to help him succeed to his brother's rank and author- 
 ity and that "she was very desirous that the King, her son, 
 and she might either come to the Prince or the Prince come 
 to them, but she saw great difficulties in bringing that to 
 
 'De la Noue, 584. Lettenhove (1).
 
 266 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 pass." This message reached the Prince while his army 
 was in march toward Paris, taking and pillaging towns on 
 the way. On the 26th of November they pitched their 
 camp within a mile of the outskirts of the capital. A few 
 days later the Queen begged the Prince and the Admiral to 
 meet her in a windmill on the edge of the suburbs. They 
 met three times and Catherine on her return told the Eng- 
 lish Ambassador at St. Denis that peace was made. "The 
 Prince should have all his demands in regard to religion and 
 that now the Queen of England should take away her men 
 from Newhaven and other places she held. The Prince has 
 promised it and he says the Queen has agreed with him to 
 do so." 1 
 
 As a matter of fact everything had been granted that 
 the Prince asked, until it came to the matter of pledges 
 that the agreement would be carried out. The Prince de- 
 manded that the forces on both sides should be dissolved 
 and all the cities disarmed. Catherine answered "that all 
 forces which have not been assembled by the King's com- 
 mand must retire, strangers outside the realm and French- 
 men to their houses, and that the King will retain such 
 forces as seem to him good." To which the Huguenots, 
 when they published their account of this transaction added 
 this note: "And after that what would be left except to 
 lay our heads upon the block?" They added they had good 
 reason to know that the last day at the mill the Duke of 
 Guise, believing the Queen would consent to the Huguenots' 
 demands, told her that if he thought she would keep what 
 was accorded he would never consent to it, but considered 
 that what she did was simply for the purpose of dissolving 
 the Prince's forces. Thus the hope of peace vanished before 
 the suspicions of the Huguenots that Guise and his follow- 
 ers would not suffer the Queen Mother to keep any promises 
 she might make for the restoration of the toleration prom- 
 ised in the Edict of January. 2 
 
 *Neg. Tosc. Ill, 409, 497; B. N. It. 1723, f. 166; Forbes, II, 217, 409; 
 Cal. F. 1562, p. 522. 
 
 'Hist. Ecc, II, 258; Conde, IV, 144; Cal. F. 1562, p. 552.
 
 THE FIRST CIVIL WAR ABOUT RELIGION 267 
 
 Resuming their campaign, the Huguenots marched 
 toward Normandy. Queen Elizabeth was angered because 
 they had seemed to make peace without her and had appar- 
 ently agreed that she should be asked to surrender Havre de 
 Grace. The Prince of Conde, with characteristic gallantry, 
 begged the English Ambassador to ask the Queen to send 
 him a scarf of her colors to wear in this "God's quarrel and 
 yours," as her soldier, "which, he says, he will never fail to 
 be during his life. I was very loath to have mixed matters 
 of such gravity with matters of such a nature as this, but 
 very importunately the Prince pressed me thereunto and 
 therefore it may please you to consider it." * 
 
 The army of the Crown, commanded by the Constable, 
 followed in the direction taken by the Huguenots, but on a 
 somewhat shorter course and in ten days they threatened 
 the Huguenot flank and brought them to battle. The Tri- 
 umvirate had about eighteen thousand men to their enemy's 
 twelve thousand, but in cavalry the Huguenots outnum- 
 bered them more than two to one. Conde opened the battle 
 with a dashing charge upon the center. The dense battalion 
 of six thousand Swiss mercenaries which held it was shaken, 
 seventeen of their captains were killed and they were driven 
 backwards. Coligny had immediately followed by an attack 
 upon the royal left, which was completely broken and driven 
 from the field. The Constable himself was wounded in the 
 face and taken prisoner and some of the officers of his 
 routed troops did not draw rein until they had brought the 
 palace word that the Huguenots were victorious. That part 
 of the army of the King which still kept the field had been 
 pivoted backwards until the line was almost at right angles 
 to its first position. But hard fighting and this turning 
 movement had very much disordered the Huguenot ranks. 
 The Duke of Guise, who, without nominal command, really 
 led the right wing, had held his troops inactive during all 
 this earlier stage of the fight. One of the Constable's sons, 
 after seeing his brother killed by his side, had been driven 
 
 1 Forbes, II, 126, 250.
 
 268 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 back upon Guise's troops and he begged him to charge and 
 save his father from defeat. "No, my son," answered the 
 great captain, "it is not yet time." Not until fighting and 
 victory had completely disorganized the Huguenots, did he 
 advance in a charge, which drove their disordered battalions 
 from the field. The Prince of Conde's horse was killed 
 under him in the retreat, he was taken prisoner and but for 
 the Admiral the entire Huguenot army would have been 
 broken in hopeless rout. That experienced fighter made 
 mistakes in attacks, but he was always at his best in the 
 face of defeat. He had foreseen the disaster, for a short time 
 before when some of his captains had begun to shout "Vic- 
 tory!" he had checked them and pointing towards the solid 
 masses of the Catholic right motionless behind the woods, 
 said, "You are fooling yourselves, wait until that great 
 cloud bursts upon us." x 
 
 Now when the day seemed lost by such a turn in the 
 tide of victory, he, with equal suddenness, restored the for- 
 tunes of the field. Taking advantage of the shelter of a 
 little coppice, he rallied a force of cavalry and suddenly fell 
 upon the Catholic troopers disordered by their rapid charge. 
 Guise ordered the Marshal St. Andre to meet this new 
 danger but, when he tried to check the advancing Hugue- 
 nots, his men were broken, his horse was killed under him 
 and he surrendered to a young man whom a few years 
 before he had stripped of all the lands of his wife's dowry. 
 The young man, who had nourished one of those longings 
 for vengeance which in the men of that time were often as 
 strong as a hopeless passion for a woman, murdered his 
 prisoner with a pistol. Night was now falling and both 
 sides were exhausted. Guise had a reserve of Spanish in- 
 fantry which had not yet been engaged at all and it was 
 coming up into action. The Admiral therefore, in good 
 order and unpursued, withdrew from the field of battle. 2 
 
 Neither side would admit defeat. The Huguenots had 
 
 »B. N. It. 1722 f. 627; de la Noue, 394. 
 'D'Aumale, Whitehead and contemporary sources.
 
 THE FIRST CIVIL WAR ABOUT RELIGION 269 
 
 lost their infantry, but the best part of their force, the 
 French cavalry, was practically unhurt. From a mere mili- 
 tary point of view, both sides had gained because the enemy 
 had captured their commanders-in-chief, for Guise and 
 Coligny were better generals than the Constable and the 
 Prince of Conde. But the Huguenots had lost very few 
 men of mark and the slaughter and wounding of leaders on 
 the other side had been large. More than ever the Duke of 
 Guise became the prop of the cause of uncompromising 
 orthodoxy and persecution. Indeed, a moderate Catholic 
 shrewdly remarked that it seemed to him that the real 
 victor was the Duke of Guise, because the capture of the 
 Constable and the death of Marshal St. Andre left him 
 without any rival with whom to share his glory. 1 
 
 Catherine was none too well pleased with the battle or 
 the situation. When the Venetian Ambassador told her she 
 ought to thank God for so great a victory, she made rather 
 vague replies expressing her regret for the slaughter. To 
 the English Ambassador she said she knew both victories 
 and defeats hurt her son. Catherine was not alone in this 
 attitude. Her reluctance to continue the war had been 
 supported so strongly in December by the majority of the 
 royal council that the Venetian Ambassador reported: 
 "Although the royal council is composed only of those of 
 unquestioned orthodoxy, they are filled with fear and sus- 
 picion of Spain and strongly in favor of peace." In order to 
 force Catherine's hand and to free themselves from respon- 
 sibility in case of a defeat, the leaders of the army had tried, 
 five days before the battle, to compel Catherine to order 
 them to fight, but she had parried the attempt with her 
 usual quick wit. The first messenger has left an account of 
 his mission: 
 
 "I travelled all night and arrived in the morning before the 
 Queen Mother and the King were dressed. Her Majesty ex- 
 pressed her regret at seeing the interests of the Crown staked 
 on the hazard of a civil battle. The nurse of the King, who 
 
 Coligny Lett. pntd. Forbes, II, 297. Pasquier (2), IV, 19.
 
 270 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 was a Huguenot, came in, and all three went to see the King, who 
 was not yet up. The Queen Mother said, 'It's a strange thing 
 that experienced captains should send to ask the advice of a 
 woman and a child about battles' and then evidently filled with 
 great grief, she said mockingly, turning to the nurse, 'Nurse, they 
 are sending to ask women what they think about fighting. What 
 do you think about it?' The nurse, following the Queen into 
 the King's room, said several times that, since the Huguenots 
 weren't willing to accept reasonable terms, she thought they 
 ought to fight. She kept on saying this over and over again. 
 Finally the Queen made the talkative nurse go out, dismissed 
 all the others, and speaking seriously said: 'I won't send any 
 other message than what I have already said.' The second 
 messenger arrived in the afternoon, but, although he insisted 
 upon being heard by the council, he could get no other reply 
 except that the leaders of the army ought to do whatever seemed 
 best to them." x 
 
 The battle therefore left Catherine determined to make 
 peace as quickly as possible by any compromise she could 
 persuade both parties to accept. She wrote this very plainly 
 to the Cardinal of Lorraine, who was one of the French 
 envoys to the Council of Trent. 
 
 "May God grant, my cousin, that this victory for which we 
 are bound to praise and thank Him, may give us the chance of 
 a good peace which shall restore this state to the tranquillity 
 which I desire for it and which is necessary in order to save it 
 from destruction. God grant that from where you are we may 
 see arise a holy and serious reformation of the things which are 
 depraved in the Church of God, and that it may be the cause 
 of a general union and concord in religion." 2 
 
 There was indeed every reason why France should have 
 peace. We cannot suppose, indeed, that the sardonic ab- 
 surdity of a war where both sides claimed to be fighting for 
 the gospel of Christ, was evident to any of those who might 
 have had any particular influence in stopping it. That was 
 not in the spirit of the times; though there were a few 
 
 1 B. N. It. 1722 f. 653 ib. 1723 f. 166; Cal. F. 591; Castelnau, Bk. IV. 
 He was the messenger. 
 'Letts. I, 456.
 
 THE FIRST CIVIL WAR ABOUT RELIGION 271 
 
 outside the contest who felt it. For instance, a young law 
 student of Bordeaux wrote about this time in a Latin poem 
 addressed to Charles IX: "Is this the love of religion? 
 Does God really advise the accursed strife of a civil war? 
 . . . God is never pleased by a sacrifice of human blood. 
 Piety cannot be fought for with arms." But there were 
 reasons for peace which appealed to men who could not 
 place this war in the perspective of truth. Catherine's 
 dislike of it, based on her hatred of the Guise, her jealousy 
 for her own authority, her deadly fear of Spain, were only 
 strengthened by the lapse of time, and she wanted peace at 
 almost any price. In addition, the exhaustion of the treas- 
 ury was becoming so evident that even many zealous Cath- 
 olics began to see the impossibility of continuing the war. 
 
 But the members of the extreme orthodox party only 
 redoubled their opposition to any sort of compromise. In 
 Paris suspected Huguenots were daily either beaten to death 
 in the streets, or thrown into the river. The Parlement of 
 Paris prepared a list of one hundred and thirty-five inhab- 
 itants of Orleans, seven ecclesiastics, eighteen lawyers and 
 the rest shopkeepers and merchants of various sorts, who 
 were to be immediately hanged as soon as the city was 
 taken. Catherine was exceedingly hated by these ardent 
 Catholics. It was whispered around that among her wait- 
 ing-women there were not four who were orthodox Roman 
 Catholics. This opposition found a spokesman, whom 
 Catherine could not face when, early in February, Guise 
 came from the camp where he was besieging Orleans and 
 had a long talk with both the Queen Mother and his pris- 
 oner, the Prince of Conde. Returning to the camp, he 
 pushed the siege with such vigor that he hoped, with the 
 aid of ten cannon the Queen Mother sent him, to force a 
 surrender. 1 
 
 But on the eighteenth day of February, returning in the 
 first darkness of the evening to his quarters after inspecting 
 
 'Courteault (3), 51; B. N. It. 1723 f. 76; ib. 1725 f. 105, fds. fr. 3180; 
 ib. 3952 f. 57; A. N. K. 8. Feb. 1563, ib. 1500, f. 27, ib. Feb. 5 ib., f. 15. 
 Conde, II, 130; B. N. It. 1722, f. 674.
 
 272 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 a battery, he was shot in the back by an assassin and died 
 in a few days. His murderer was Jean Poltrot, Lord of 
 Merey, a Huguenot nobleman, twenty-six years old, who 
 had joined the Catholic camp as a pretended convert some 
 days before. Guise was almost unaccompanied and the 
 murderer at once galloped into the woods and escaped. A 
 huge reward was immediately offered for him. He became 
 confused in the forest, wandered in a circle, and was arrested 
 thirty-six hours later not far from the scene of his crime. 
 Among the troops of Soubise where he had served, Poltrot 
 had acquired a reputation for reckless daring, but was 
 laughed at a good deal because he was always talking of 
 how he intended to kill the Duke of Guise. 1 
 
 Catherine examined him in the presence of members of 
 her council and a few days later reported to the Duchess of 
 Savoy what the assassin said : 
 
 "He told me voluntarily and without any pressing that the 
 Admiral had given him a hundred ecus to do this evil deed, and 
 that he did not want to do it, but that Beza and another preacher 
 had persuaded him and assured him that if he did it, he would 
 go straight to heaven. Hearing that, he decided to carry out 
 the deed, and, in addition, he said that the Admiral had sent 
 sixty assassins to kill Guise, the Duke of Montpensier, Sansac, 
 Cypierre and myself ; that I should do well to keep a strict watch 
 over my children and to take great care of my person, because 
 he hated me very much and, among the others who had been sent 
 he named a certain red-headed man, who yesterday was arrested 
 in the court of the chateau at Blois. So you see, Madame, how 
 that righteous man who says that he doesn't do anything except 
 on account of religion, wants to put us out of the way. In spite 
 of all that I am trying to make a peace, because I see well that 
 during this war he will in the end kill my children and strip 
 us of all our best people, because, to tell the truth, we have 
 made a very great loss in that man (Guise), because he was 
 the greatest captain in the realm. No one can know what will 
 happen if the war lasts, because the Constable is a prisoner in 
 Orleans and we have no man to command our army, except the 
 Marshal Brissac, and he is not physically able to do it. Never- 
 theless I must make him believe that he is." 
 
 1 Soubise, 72.
 
 THE FIRST CIVIL WAR ABOUT RELIGION 273 
 
 Catherine then goes on to beg her sister-in-law to come 
 and bring her husband, because "If we have peace you will 
 be able to help us in many ways and if war lasts I leave you 
 to think how much the Duke of Savoy will be necessary to 
 us and you with him." 1 Catherine soon recovered from 
 the panic which this letter shows. The red-headed man, 
 when he was arrested, proved that he was an innocent 
 Roman Catholic, and Catherine recovered her shrewd judg- 
 ment and began to point out the absurdities in Poltrot's 
 first confession. The question of whether any of it was true 
 has been much debated. He alternately retracted and re- 
 asserted his accusations against the Admiral and his friends 
 in a way hard to explain, except as the vagaries of terror in 
 a man whose courage had completely broken down in the 
 face of torture and death. He was finally burnt with red- 
 hot irons and then torn in pieces by four horses, and in the 
 midst of that terror, and beside himself with agony, he still 
 alternately repeated and denied his accusations. 2 
 
 The enemies of the Huguenots made the best possible 
 use of Poltrot's confession. It was written out next day, 
 manifestly not in the words in which Poltrot had uttered it, 
 printed and sent to the Huguenot camp with the hope of 
 causing a revolt among the German mercenaries. Coligny 
 published a reply in which he said he had employed Poltrot 
 as a spy, giving him twenty ecus for his first mission and 
 when he brought, some news from Guise's camp he gave him 
 a hundred, in order that he might buy a good horse to go 
 back again and get more news. He had heard him say that 
 it would be easy to kill the Duke of Guise, but had made no 
 reply to the remark, considering it rather as the idle brag- 
 ging of a man in whom he had none too much confidence, 
 but whose services he was willing to use. He was glad that 
 Guise was dead because he was an enemy of God and the 
 King. After information had come to him that Guise had 
 hired assassins to kill him and his brother, whenever he had 
 
 * Letts. I, 516. 
 
 •De Thou, III, 403.
 
 274 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 heard anyone say that if he could, he would kill Guise even 
 in his own camp, he had not attempted to turn him from 
 such a design, but "on his life and his honor he had never 
 sought out or solicited anyone to do this, neither by word, 
 nor by money, nor by promises, directly or indirectly." * 
 The weightiest and most impartial modern historians have 
 seem in the very frankness of this bald statement an indica- 
 tion of truthfulness. 
 
 Coligny evidently regarded the death of the Duke as the 
 just judgment of God upon a very wicked man and neither 
 he nor Beza, who swore he had never spoken to Poltrot 
 about the subject, had a single word of condemnation for 
 the cowardly crime. It is not to be wondered at, therefore, 
 that the wife and son of the murdered man regarded 
 Coligny as the murderer. 
 
 As we have seen, Catherine, because of her own past 
 experience and the advice of many of those who were near 
 to her, feared Guise. A curious record of the attitude toward 
 him in the inner circle of her friends and servants, is found 
 in a secret letter written to her by the French Ambassador 
 in Madrid the day after Guise was assassinated. It was 
 therefore written before the news reached Madrid, for the 
 swiftest couriers from Paris to Madrid took three days for 
 the journey. He tells Catherine her daughter wants him to 
 write and tell her that the friends of France at the Spanish 
 court are much astonished to see the effort to make peace 
 given up and it makes them the more sad "because it pleases 
 those who do not love us, and we get word from France 
 that one man [he means Guise] is the cause. ... I will 
 say freely that there is only one danger: that is to say if 
 they [the Guise] attain the position they desire, it will be 
 very difficult to reduce them again as much as one would 
 want to. I beg you burn this letter." It was suspected by a 
 number of people that Catherine and her close servants felt 
 in this way about Guise and therefore the suspicion was 
 whispered at court that she had hired Poltrot. There is no 
 
 »Conde. IV. 292.
 
 THE FIRST CIVIL WAR ABOUT RELIGION 275 
 
 evidence whatever to support it and it is highly improb- 
 able. 1 
 
 Many of the Huguenots were much less restrained even 
 than Coligny. A flood of poetry celebrated the death of the 
 tyrant (Guise) and of the martyr (Poltrot). "Henry, 
 Francis, Guise and Anthony," sang one poet, "tried to ruin 
 the church of God and they are all dead by divine judg- 
 ment." Poems on Poltrot's execution called him the most 
 holy man of our time and bade him ascend to heaven where 
 God would open for him the gate. For some years at least 
 songs were written on the anniversary of Poltrot's death, 
 which hailed him "as the happy man chosen of God" and 
 "the tenth Paladin, the liberator of France." 2 L'Histoire 
 Ecclesiastique, which is a sort of official apologetic history 
 of the Reformed church and the Huguenot party, has no 
 word of blame for Poltrot, but says that just before he did 
 the deed "he prayed God very ardently to grant him the 
 grace to change his intention if what he did was not agree- 
 able to Him, or else to give him courage to kill the tyrant 
 and deliver France from so accursed a tyranny." 
 
 It is difficult for a modern reader to understand how 
 many sincerely religious people could regard acts of treach- 
 erous and cowardly murder as the glorious deeds of martyrs, 
 but he might as well give up the attempt to understand the 
 sixteenth century unless he admits the fact that it was so. 
 The killing of one of their own side was always regarded as 
 an inspiration of the devil, but the highest level to which 
 most good men of the sixteenth century on either side of 
 the great controversy on religion could rise at the news of 
 the assassination of one of the enemies of their cause was, 
 usually, the feeling that it was a mysterious providence of 
 God, inflicting His just vengeance on a tyrant or a seducer. 
 
 The funeral of the Duke was magnificent. Catherine 
 
 wrote admirable letters of condolence to his family and 
 
 showed every sign of regret for his death and honor to his 
 
 'Castelnau, II, 182, 218; Cabie (1), pntd. 116; Cal. F. 1564, p. 163. 
 See Note. 
 
 1 Chansonnier, II, 273, Hist. Ecc. II, 349.
 
 276 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 memory. She also scrupulously maintained her promise to 
 the Duchess of Guise that the office of Grand Master which 
 the Duke had taken away from the Constable should be 
 inherited by the young Duke, in spite of the Constable's 
 desire to get it back. Guise had been a soldier all his life, 
 but he had earned in youth a reputation for humanity which 
 could not be entirely destroyed even by the "Massacre of 
 Vassy." A strong critic of his family labeled him "a gentle 
 and moderate spirit" too much ruled by his "impetuous and 
 violent" brother, the Cardinal of Lorraine. A Huguenot 
 warrior historian called him "a great captain, excellent in 
 all his faculties." The Venetian Ambassador wrote that 
 among the many excellent officers of France, none equalled 
 Guise in wisdom and skill, and indeed he seems the ablest 
 general of his time. His religious zeal was pronounced, and 
 one of his bitterest enemies could only comment on it: 
 "He was so earnest in his religion that he thought nothing 
 evil that maintained it." * 
 
 There was no one now left who could oppose Catherine's 
 desire for peace. Indeed Guise himself on his death bed 
 advised her to make peace immediately on the best terms 
 she could. Apparently her first thought about the best 
 way to establish peace was an idea which very much puz- 
 zled contemporary historians. She sent an envoy to the 
 Duke of Wurtemberg, and offered him the supreme office 
 under the King, of Lieutenant-General, which had been 
 held successively by the King of Navarre and the Duke of 
 Guise, and which would now naturally fall, so long as the 
 King remained a minor, to the Prince of Conde. The idea 
 of having the function of maintaining order and the com- 
 mand of the armed forces of the state in the hands of a 
 foreigner, seemed almost as strange to Frenchmen then as it 
 would seem to Frenchmen now. But it would not seem 
 strange to an Italian. The intense violence and mutual 
 suspicion of the factions in the various states of Italy had 
 
 1 Letts. I, 512, 513, 519; de Thou, II, 682; d'Aubigne, II, 117; Tom- 
 maseo, I, 496; Cal. F. 1563, p. 157.
 
 THE FIRST CIVIL WAR ABOUT RELIGION 277 
 
 made it the custom for several generations to have a foreign 
 podesta, who was employed at a fixed salary to maintain 
 order because neither of the parties would trust an adherent 
 of the other to control the armed forces of the state. 
 Whether Catherine really intended to employ the Duke of 
 Wiirtemberg as national podesta or not we cannot be sure, 
 for it is just as probable that she only intended to create a 
 diversion which might stop the plans entertained in Ger- 
 many of taking advantage of the division of France to re- 
 cover the three bishoprics of Metz, Toul and Verdun which 
 her husband had conquered from the Emperor. If the plan 
 was serious, it failed, for the Duke of Wiirtemberg de- 
 clined to consider the offer. 1 
 
 After his brother's burial, the Cardinal of Lorraine, find- 
 ing that he had no weight whatever in the royal council, 
 left the court and retired to his archbishopric, and the Queen 
 Mother, freed from all opposition, arranged according to 
 her convenience for a conference looking toward peace. 2 
 
 The Admiral was in Normandy, where with the help of 
 the English, he had been taking towns and rapidly extend- 
 ing his mastery of the country. He could not therefore be 
 present. But each side brought its prisoners and the Con- 
 stable and the Prince conferred with each other and with 
 the Queen Mother. The interview had been arranged on a 
 barge which was moored to a little island in the river just 
 above Orleans. Catherine, with her restless love of exer- 
 cise, preferred to go ashore and walk up and down, which 
 they did for two hours. The next day they met again on the 
 island and talked for three hours in a very friendly way. 
 The Prince was in his usual merry mood and it was noticed 
 that when the Queen left him she was laughing heartily. 
 The result of these conferences was the Edict of Amboise, 
 published on the 19th of March, 1563. The higher nobles 
 were granted the free exercise of their religion for them- 
 
 a De Thou, II, 400, "leg&rete d'une femme." Hist. Eoc., Note Editor, 
 365. 
 
 9 B. N. It. 1725 £. 56, 208.
 
 278 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 selves and their dependents. Lesser nobles had liberty of 
 worship only for their families, and if they lived in a town 
 or village they must have permission from their overlord. 
 Congregations of the Reformed church which could not re- 
 ceive shelter in the castles of the nobles, might worship 
 publicly in a place appointed in any town which had been 
 Huguenot on the 7th of March, and in addition, in the 
 suburbs of one town in each senechaussee and bailliage of 
 the kingdom. 1 This limitation of the number of places 
 where the Reformed worship might be held was a restriction 
 of the liberty accorded by the Edict of January. 
 
 Although the bulk of those with political influence felt 
 that peace was necessary, this Edict was not received with 
 universal applause. Seventy-two ministers of the Reformed 
 church protested to Conde that, as he had taken arms to 
 support the Edict of January, he ought not to permit any 
 diminution of the liberty it granted. They insisted that 
 the King should receive the Reformed church under his 
 protection and "to close the door to all heresies and schisms 
 and the troubles which can arise from these things, he ought 
 to punish vigorously all atheists, libertines, Anabaptists and 
 other heretics or schismatics." The main points of this pro- 
 test were supported by the Admiral, who returned from 
 Normandy with the army a few days after the accord was 
 made. He said the Protestants were never in better condi- 
 tion than they were at that moment, whereas their enemies 
 were demoralized by the loss of their leaders. The war ought 
 to have been fought to a victory and the least that should 
 have been accepted was the entire Edict of January. Conde 
 evidently expected to obtain a very easy administration of 
 the Edict, for Catherine told him that the death of Guise 
 had no less set her free than it had him, because "by the 
 forces he had about the King and her, she was no less a pris- 
 oner than Conde had been," and the Huguenot leader wrote 
 to Elizabeth that he expected to see the Reformed doctrine 
 spread very rapidly, for "it was more probable that there 
 
 1 Cal. F. 200, Isambert 14, p. 135.
 
 THE FIRST CIVIL WAR ABOUT RELIGION 279 
 
 would be a lack of ministers to distribute the truth, than of 
 places which wished to receive it." * 
 
 The first of the nine recurrent French civil wars about 
 religion had ended in the victory of the Huguenots. It had 
 not been the result of a planned conspiracy, like the abortive 
 conspiracy of Amboise, or the still more abortive conspiracy 
 for which Conde was condemned to death at the end of the 
 reign of Francis II. Infractions of the Edict of January, the 
 seizure of churches by the Huguenots, the killing of Hugue- 
 nots by the orthodox, sometimes by mobs, sometimes under 
 cover of the law, Huguenot murders in reprisal, like those 
 of Fumel and de la Mothe Gondrin, Lieutenant-Governor 
 of Dauphiny, with sporadic local wars in the south of 
 France, brought about an almost unbearable tension. The 
 killing at Vassy made a general rush to arms, "for the 
 greater part of the nobility having heard of the execution at 
 Vassy, driven by good will and partly by fear, made up their 
 minds to come near to Paris on the chance that the pro- 
 tectors of the Church might need them. In that way the 
 gentry of highest standing left the provinces with ten, 
 twenty, or thirty of their friends, and found their way to 
 the main body, hiding their arms, sleeping at the inns or in 
 the fields, and paying their way liberally." 2 
 
 But the victory of the Huguenots in this spontaneous 
 movement of church against state was more apparent than 
 real. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that if the ad- 
 herents of the Calvinistic doctrine ever had any chance to 
 persuade the French people to renounce the Roman obe- 
 dience and establish a national church, after the model of 
 the churches of England, some of the Swiss cantons, some of 
 the German states and the Scandinavian kingdoms, they 
 lost that chance by taking arms. It is probable that the 
 influence of the Reformed church in France, either actual or 
 potential, was never as great after the 1st of April, 1562, as 
 it had been before. At least this was the opinion of the 
 
 , Hist. Ecc. II, 422; Castelnau, I, 150; pntd. App. d'Aumale, I, 312, 313. 
 *De la Noue: "I was present."
 
 280 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 Venetian Ambassador, who wrote to the Senate: "If it 
 had not been for the war, France would be at present 
 Huguenot, because the people were so rapidly changing 
 their faith and the ministers had acquired such credit among 
 them that they persuaded them whatever they wished. But 
 when they passed from words to arms and commenced to 
 rob, to ruin and to kill, employing a thousand cruelties, the 
 people commenced to say, 'What sort of a religion is this? 
 These men pretend to understand the Gospel better than 
 others and where do they find any indication that Christ 
 commanded us to take the goods of our neighbors, and to 
 murder our comrades?' " * Before the war was over, the 
 poet Ronsard called on Beza to spare his native land. 
 "Preach no more in France a gospel of arms, a Christ decked 
 with pistols, all blackened with smoke, with a steel cap on 
 his head, and in his hand a broad cutlass, red with human 
 blood." The Huguenots were fighting in self-defense, but 
 it seemed to France that they were fighting for conquest. 
 'Rel. I, 4, p. 187; Ven. Amb., 1569; Ronsard, VII, 22.
 
 CHAPTER XVII 
 
 PEACE AND POLITICS. ENGLAND AND SPAIN 
 
 No one rejoiced more heartily over peace than Cath- 
 erine. She wrote to the Marshal Montmorency, in whose 
 moderate counsels she reposed a good deal of confidence: 
 
 "Peace is a public necessity so plainly perceived by every- 
 body that there is no one who ought not to receive this good 
 as a special grace and favor from God, the weight of whose 
 hand ought to make us recognize how much He is angered with 
 us and that this peace made by His bounty is a sign that He 
 has lessened His anger and had pity on this poor people. . . . 
 And besides, I will tell you between us two that the Admiral 
 has not less than seven thousand cavalry. Think, I beg you, 
 isn't it a good reason to call this a lucky peace, knowing what 
 we know also of the forces which are getting ready in Germany, 
 beside what the kingdom of England is raising on its side and 
 the Empire is doing in order to get ready to recover Metz?" x 
 
 The foreign power from which Catherine thought danger 
 was most imminent just at this particular moment, was 
 England; for Elizabeth had already a good foothold in 
 France which she was entirely unwilling to relinquish be- 
 cause her allies, the Huguenots, had made peace. Elizabeth 
 had succeeded to the throne of England two years before 
 the death of Francis II gave Catherine the chief authority 
 in France. The young girl of twenty-five lacked Cath- 
 erine's experience, and she was confronted with very much 
 the same problem — how to save a kingdom financially ex- 
 hausted, from the horrors of a civil war caused by difference 
 of opinion in religion, which might deliver it a prey to 
 powerful neighbors. She shared Catherine's fundamental 
 indifference as to the theological questions in dispute; 
 though she knew more about them than Catherine did. 
 
 1 Letts. X, 96. 
 
 281
 
 282 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 But, unlike her sister Mary, religion was not to her the chief 
 interest of life. She rather resembled her father in desiring 
 above all things to be the strong sovereign of a great nation. 
 In spite of her inexperience, she had two enormous advan- 
 tages over her neighboring Queen in the great task which 
 lay before her. She was native to her realm and instinc- 
 tively understood and shared the feelings of her people. 
 Her power was her own and not the power of a regent. 
 Though less practised, she was as clever as Catherine at 
 cajolery and just as lacking in any scruples about truth- 
 fulness. 
 
 Elizabeth feared two things — civil war in England, 
 caused by difference of opinion in religion, and a general 
 European war to suppress Protestantism by force, in which 
 she knew she would be forced to become the chief of the 
 Protestants. She made an abrupt change in the policy of 
 her predecessor and sister Mary, but, in marked contrast to 
 Catherine's attempt to stand between the two parties, she 
 threw in her lot decidedly with one. She swept away all her 
 sister's legislation in regard to religion and reestablished the 
 national church of her father, renouncing the Roman obedi- 
 ence and adopting a creed decidedly Protestant. She aban- 
 doned not only her sister's party but also her sister's policy 
 of active persecution, and, although the Roman Catholic 
 worship was forbidden by law, in all other respects she tried 
 to make the position of quiet Roman Catholics as tolerable 
 in England as was possible. Above all, peace and order was 
 sternly maintained. The Catholic dissenters were neither 
 allowed to seize churches, nor did they suffer from mob 
 attacks as in France. This policy in meeting the first 
 danger, a policy to which her inclinations and her inherited 
 position naturally urged the daughter of Anne Boleyn, at 
 once exposed her to the second danger. As the strongest 
 Protestant power, England would naturally become the 
 great objective of any general movement to suppress Prot- 
 testantism by force, and, in the house of Guise, such a 
 movement putting forward the claim of their niece to the
 
 PEACE AND POLITICS— ENGLAND AND SPAIN 283 
 
 throne of England would find leaders who joined personal 
 interest to zeal. Almost from the beginning of her reign, 
 therefore, Elizabeth had begun, as far as her foreign policy 
 was concerned, to do three things. She formed secret con- 
 nections with the Huguenot party, and as a corollary she 
 attacked the power of the Guise. She encouraged the 
 Protestant party in Scotland in its opposition to the Crown, 
 in order to limit the availability of Mary Stuart as an 
 orthodox claimant to the English throne. Thirdly, she had 
 tried to unite the Protestant princes of Germany in a de- 
 fensive league to defend Protestantism against any common 
 attack by the Roman Catholic powers. 1 
 
 Although Elizabeth and Catherine during their whole 
 life were always exchanging honeyed words, it is quite evi- 
 dent, to anyone who reads their letters in the light of events, 
 that neither had any great confidence in the other and that 
 both were entirely justified in their suspicions. In spite of 
 her astuteness, vanity often led Elizabeth into incautious 
 speech, a mistake into which Catherine rarely fell, and just 
 about this time we have it quoted from her own lips that 
 she regarded her relations with the Queen Regent of France 
 as a sort of a game of wits. She said to a foreign envoy that 
 "she was an Englishwoman and that the Queen of France 
 was a Florentine and now it would be seen which of the two 
 would handle her affairs the better." What is more, Cath- 
 erine knew that Elizabeth did not have any too high an 
 opinion of her ability, because it had been reported to her 
 that she had said that one who was born a merchant's 
 daughter could not be altogether competent to govern a 
 kingdom. 2 
 
 Elizabeth seemed to lay her cards on the table at the 
 beginning of the game, by declaring to Catherine that the 
 origin of the war was the personal quarrel between the 
 Prince of Conde and the Duke of Guise, and that the Duke 
 of Guise, having drawn to his side all those who desired to 
 
 1 Cal. F., 1560, Dec. 
 
 'Granvelle (2), I, 552; B. N. It. 1725, f. 25.
 
 284 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 suppress dissent from the Pope, had threatened to attack 
 the Prince of Conde, whereupon the Prince of Conde had 
 prepared to defend himself by getting the allegiance of 
 those who "feared the invasion of their consciences." She 
 advised Catherine to keep out of the quarrel and try to 
 control both parties without belonging to either. The fight 
 might grow into a general war about religion and she per- 
 sonally would not suffer the House of Guise to become too 
 strong, lest they should attack her through their niece, the 
 Queen of Scotland ; "as they had tried to do in the time of 
 Francis II." Elizabeth accepted, however, the phrase of one 
 of her diplomatic agents: "Fallere fallentem non est fraus," 
 and did not show her best card in this seemingly frank 
 letter. She did not scruple to give instructions to her 
 envoys, to make the Huguenots think that she was able to 
 stand between the two parties, and to keep in mind that if 
 foreigners are to come in at all she "may as well make her 
 profit either of accord or discord as any neighbor." J 
 
 The particular profit which Elizabeth wanted to get out 
 of this trouble was the return of Calais, which had been lost 
 by her sister. She said nothing about this at first to the 
 Huguenots, though they could not have been ignorant that, 
 by the terms of the Treaty of Cateau-Cambresis, Calais 
 ought to be surrendered to England by France in five years 
 and that France would never keep the agreement unless 
 forced to do so. In October Elizabeth had landed six thou- 
 sand men at Havre de Grace, which the Huguenots handed 
 over to her, sent some money and promised more to pay 
 the German mercenaries. What she really intended is 
 shown in her letter to her envoys in Germany. "The Queen 
 has resolved to keep Havre until these troubles cease and 
 she is more assured of Calais: such reasons as the world 
 should understand, she has caused to be printed; which 
 Cecil will send to them." 2 
 
 After the loss of the battle of Dreux, Coligny, who re- 
 
 1 Forbes, II, 23; Cal. F. 1562, p. 637. 
 a Cal. F., 1563, p. 3, p. 74, p. 360.
 
 PEACE AND POLITICS— ENGLAND AND SPAIN 285 
 
 treated into Normandy, had asked Elizabeth for ten thou- 
 sand men and the money to pay his German mercenaries. 
 One of the great Huguenot nobles was sent into England 
 with a blank sheet of parchment bearing the signatures of 
 Conde, the Admiral and nine other Huguenot chiefs. On 
 that parchment there was written the so-called treaty of 
 Hampton Court, which provided among other things that 
 Elizabeth should keep the town of Havre de Grace until the 
 town of Calais was restored to her, either before or at the 
 time set for its restoration in the Treaty of Cateau-Cam- 
 bresis (1567). This provision of the treaty with England 
 had been entirely neglected by the Huguenot leaders in 
 making their peace and Elizabeth had reason to accuse them 
 of want of good faith toward her. 1 
 
 The Admiral and the Prince of Conde urged upon her 
 with perfect truth that if she should "stain this with a pri- 
 vate matter of her own and under pretense of religion seek 
 her own gain, it should be dishonor to her and how evil the 
 papists and all others would speak of her." But when she 
 refused to listen or to give up her own advantage for the 
 sake of the common cause, they were not strong enough to 
 take the stand of one "who sweareth to his own hurt and 
 changeth not." If the transaction may be so interpreted as 
 to free the Huguenots of a lack of patriotism, the charge of 
 breach of a promise made to their ally remains. The 
 truth is they had laid themselves open to the sharpest criti- 
 cism by bringing the English into France and putting the 
 port of Havre de Grace into their hands. It was a great 
 rallying cry when the King called on his subjects to "drive 
 the English and Germans from France." 2 
 
 The group of moderate men, composed largely of old 
 servants of the Crown, expressed their delight with the 
 peace, but it was exceedingly unpopular with the extreme 
 
 1 Cal. F., 1563, pp. 266-273. 
 
 'Cal. F., 1563, Mar. 30, ib. p. 253, 539; B. N. It. 1722, f. 586; Conde, 
 IV, 44; Cal. F. 1562, p. 377. See Note.
 
 286 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 orthodox party. In Paris very indecent attacks upon the 
 Queen Mother were freely posted about the city and it was 
 openly said among the nobles of the extreme faction in the 
 south of France that the Estates General had made a great 
 mistake in giving the regency to Catherine. The Spanish 
 Ambassador took it upon himself to become the mouthpiece 
 of discontent and the Queen Mother finally told him that 
 he talked as if "he were the governor and ruler of France." 
 The Venetian Ambassador had the same feeling about 
 Catherine's surrender to Huguenot influence, although 
 he did not express it to Catherine. He writes that she is 
 putting Huguenots into all the vacant places; as, for exam- 
 ple, the two new marshals she has made, Vielleville and 
 Bordillon, and he asked to be relieved because he feels sure 
 that he is no longer persona grata. "He has been obliged to 
 oppose so much the people in whose hands the government 
 is now put, that he is called a papist." * 
 
 Catherine paid but little attention to opposition and 
 criticism. She felt sure she had done not only the right, 
 but the absolutely necessary thing. She said to the Ambas- 
 sador of Tuscany, "I was forced to do what I have done. I 
 am certain that this question can never be resolved by arms. 
 Even if we had won a battle, we should have had to grant to 
 the Huguenots conditions very much like those we have 
 granted. If we were beaten, on the other hand, the 
 whole kingdom would have fallen into their hands. I have 
 therefore at any price stopped the war which couldn't be 
 anything but disastrous." 2 
 
 The war had brought great misery : the tilling of fields in 
 many places was abandoned and a great number of cities 
 and villages had been sacked and burnt. "The poor peas- 
 ants driven from their houses, held for ransom and robbed, 
 today by one and tomorrow by the other side, abandoning 
 all they possessed, were flying like wild animals through the 
 
 *B. N. Dupuy, 523 f. 2, B. N. It. 1725, f. 114, f. 105, 111 ib. 1726, f. 106; 
 Nouvb Acqs. 20598 f. 69, A. N. K. 1509, f. 106. 
 'P&landri, 104.
 
 PEACE AND POLITICS— ENGLAND AND SPAIN 287 
 
 fields in order not to be at the mercy of those who had no 
 mercy." 1 
 
 In spite of the opposition of many of the parlements to 
 registering the Edict, a flood of private and public protests 
 and the formation of associations of Catholics to support 
 religion, Catherine proceeded to do her best to enforce the 
 Edict. She wrote, for example, to Monluc to say that the 
 Prince of Conde had sent word to the Huguenots to lay 
 down their arms and go home and live in obedience 
 to the King, and she would see to it that they were 
 allowed to live in peace, without anybody attacking them or 
 troubling them. This can only be done by "strong and 
 severe justice, which I am sure you will execute upon those, 
 as much on one side as on the other, who may wish to con- 
 travene the present course, troubling the public peace and 
 desiring to bring us back to the misery and calamity from 
 which we have just escaped." When the train of the Prince 
 of Conde's wife was attacked just outside the gates of Paris 
 and one of her attendants was killed, Catherine herself 
 ordered three of the captains who were concerned in the 
 affair to be hung. When the Estates of Provence wrote that 
 the return of the Huguenots to their homes "would excite a 
 thousand vengeances and that they would sooner abandon 
 their country than associate with those from whom they 
 had received so much injury," 2 Catherine turned a deaf ear. 
 All during the year, in spite of most discouraging news and 
 terrible complaints from both sides, she tried to have the 
 Edict upheld without fear or favor. She wrote a royal letter 
 to the Ambassador in Spain that was justified by events. 
 "Peace is being established little by little everywhere, for it 
 is not possible that a trouble of such long standing could be 
 pacified in a single day, but I hope that every day things 
 will become more satisfactory." 
 
 Catherine rather skilfully turned one of her outstanding 
 
 ^astelnau, Bk. V, Ch. 1. 
 
 * Letts. I, 552; II, 29, 47, 60, 115, etc. B. N. Nouvs. Acqs. 20598, f. 84, 
 94, 97, 162. 171, 187, 195, fds. fr. 6001, f. 28, 32; 42 ib. 6627, f. 13; It. 1725, 
 f. 17, 34; Dupuy, 523, f. 27.
 
 288 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 dangers into a help. In spite of the exhausted finances of 
 the Crown, the mutual suspicions of treachery and the 
 opposition of some of her councillors, she insisted upon 
 attacking the English garrison of six thousand men in 
 Havre de Grace. She flung herself personally into the prep- 
 arations for the siege with a zeal and activity she had never 
 shown during the civil war, ordering sixteen new cannons 
 mounted "so that we can give the town a furious battery 
 with thirty or forty pieces" and buying large quantities of 
 ammunition in Lorraine and Germany. She also gave direct 
 orders for the conduct of operations during the opening days 
 of the siege. The besieging army, in which the Huguenots 
 joined the Catholics, was commanded by Conde, the Con- 
 stable and the Marshals. Catherine brought the young 
 King down the river and waited close by until the town was 
 ready to surrender in the end of July, 1563. The garrison 
 was allowed to retire to England with everything belonging 
 to themselves and their Queen and on the first of August 
 the Queen and the young King left the camp. Catherine 
 followed this victory by having her son declare his majority 
 before the Parlement of Rouen on the 17th of August, 1563, 
 and the next day he touched those afflicted with the King's 
 evil that by healing them he might prove that like his 
 ancestors he was the anointed of God. 1 
 
 The young lad of thirteen was certainly not yet anointed 
 with the spirit of mature common-sense, as is shown by a 
 curious document which has survived from this time. It is 
 a wager made between the King and one of his gentlemen, 
 Monsieur de Chaulnes, that three years from that day the 
 King would be able to kiss his own foot. If he lost, the 
 King promised to give a thousand crowns to certain named 
 valets of his wardrobe. In spite of this chance record of 
 skylarking with his attendants, he was a quiet boy and 
 exceedingly obsequious to his mother, in whose hands the 
 authority rested entirely. 
 
 1 Letts. I, 520 ("I haven't a sou"), II, 26, 56; B. N. It. 1725, f. 18; 
 Arch. C. I, p. 231; Letts. II, 85 N.
 
 PEAGE AND POLITICS— ENGLAND AND SPAIN 289 
 
 Catherine had now thoroughly developed her character- 
 istic policy of balancing the parties and standing between 
 the two so as to base her power upon their mutual jealousy. 
 The jealousy was now chiefly on the side of the extreme 
 orthodox party. Catherine and her old friend the Duchess 
 of Guise had a stormy scene. The Spanish Ambassador 
 who got his information almost entirely from the Guise 
 faction wrote that there were "many heretics around the 
 person of the King. Last Sunday his tutor sent to call him 
 to vespers and he did not come. It was found that they 
 were instructing him by reading to him a book called Pan- 
 tagruel, written by an Anabaptist full of a thousand scoffs 
 at religion and condemned as impious by the Sorbonne." 
 The Ambassador complained that the Queen Mother was 
 entirely in the hands of the Chancellor and the Admiral 
 and his brothers and it was true that Catherine was using 
 the advice and help of the Chatillon brothers as she had used 
 it in the summer and fall before the civil war. 1 
 
 The greatest of all Catherine's troubles was the insistent 
 demand of the family of the Duke of Guise that Coligny 
 should be tried for murder. In this situation the Admiral 
 had been supported not only by his old comrade, the Prince 
 of Conde, but also by his old antagonist, his uncle, the 
 Constable. The affair dragged along until the widow, 
 dressed in deep mourning, accompanied by all the ladies of 
 her house and by a large number of princes and nobles, 
 appeared before the King in church at the close of mass, 
 fell upon her knees and asked that justice should be done 
 for the death of her husband. The little King was much 
 moved; tears came to his eyes, and he promised justice. 
 Coligny refused to be tried before the Parlement of Paris, 
 which he said had always been hostile to him, and insisted 
 upon being heard only before the royal council. The rumor 
 was that both sides were secretly mustering their adherents. 
 
 1 Letts. II, 85, N. B. N. Port. Font. 305 f. 458 fds. fr. 3256; It. 1724 
 f. 31, 46, 123, 165, A. N. K. 1500, Sept. 30; ib. 1499, Nov. 23.
 
 290 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 To escape trouble, the King finally took matters into his 
 own hands by reserving the case to himself and promising 
 to announce his decision at the end of three years. But 
 hate remained unappeased. 1 
 
 Even worse, the assassination of Guise seemed to become 
 a fashionable model. During the next ten or twelve years 
 the habit of cowardly murder by attacks from behind or by 
 several men upon one, became a firmly established custom 
 in France. This custom was regarded as an imported one. 
 In 1563 the Provost of Paris, planning to hire assassins to 
 murder an enemy, writes to a friend that he proposes to 
 deal with him "in the Italian fashion." And Pasquier wrote 
 of a man who "brooded in his soul during six entire years an 
 Italian vengeance." The Protestant author of a book pub- 
 lished in 1566 explains, in a chapter on "Some Homicides of 
 our Times," what this means. 
 
 "Since France has learned the manner of Italy in the matter 
 of killings and the habit has arisen of bargaining with 'assassins' 
 (a new word, because it has been necessary to find new terms 
 for new wickedness) to go and cut the throat of such and such 
 people as one might bargain for some work with a mason or a 
 carpenter ... it would almost be a novelty to have several 
 days pass without some such thing happening, whereas previ- 
 ously, perhaps in a man's whole life, he would not have known 
 of a murder ten times. . . . We know that it was the ancient 
 custom in France, kept more religiously than in any other 
 country, to attack an enemy openly, not taking him without 
 arms or otherwise at a disadvantage, but warning him and giving 
 him the time to draw his sword, even considering it unfair to 
 attack him two to one. ... Of all which I know well that I 
 have often heard the Italians make great fun. For, when they 
 have once bitten the end of their finger by their teeth by way 
 of menace, everybody knows that, if they attack their man in 
 front, it is only because they are unable to attack him from 
 behind. They take good care not to say 'defend thyself and 
 still better care not to attack him unless they are at least two 
 to one." 2 
 
 1 B. N. It. 1724 f. 40; Conde, IV, 17. 
 
 'Cal. F., 1563, p. 92; Pasquier (1), Bk. IX, Ch. 20; Estienne, Ch. 18.
 
 PEACE AND POLITICS— ENGLAND AND SPAIN 291 
 
 Ten years later a Catholic writer paints in the darkest 
 colors the spread of this degenerate custom. 
 
 "In short, there is no sort of evil which those who call them- 
 selves nobles and gentlemen do not do nowadays and they make 
 a virtue of every wickedness and principally of assassination, 
 which is at the present so common among them, that the bravest 
 and most ready of them do not deign or do not dare any longer 
 to lay their hands on their sword against another, but they lie 
 in wait for him to whom they wish evil or they cause him to be 
 followed and ambushed by their killers, who fire upon him and 
 kill him by shots of the pistol or arquebus; or, if indeed they 
 draw their own swords, they do it without any warning to him 
 whom they wish to assassinate, running their sword or dagger 
 into him while they are saying good day to him and pretending 
 to kiss him and embrace him. Behold the virtues which now 
 stand out in our nobles and gentlemen of France! I am not 
 talking except of the bad ones, the number of which exceeds by 
 more than three to one the number of the good and virtuous." 
 
 About the same time the Estates General (1576) called 
 for special laws against those who "hire themselves out for 
 money to commit murder." x 
 
 That this evil custom of assassination which spread so 
 rapidly, was not native but an importation was not the 
 opinion of Frenchmen only; at least two Italians have 
 recorded the same impression. The Nuncio wrote to 
 the Cardinal of Como, "In France they are commencing to 
 introduce very commonly that pestiferous custom of exact- 
 ing vengeance for injuries with arquebus shots; a thing 
 which a few years before was not even known to that 
 nation." The Venetian Ambassador wrote to the Senate, 
 "I do not understand that this nation has ever used those 
 vendettas which are carried out in other countries by 
 poisons, assassinations, or other means; which are here held 
 in the very greatest abomination by all." The spread of 
 this evil custom was of course enormously helped by the 
 civil wars, in which, according to a writing dedicated to 
 
 1 Haton, II, 854; Picot, G., II, 552.
 
 292 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 Michel de FHospital, "it seemed less criminal and less dan- 
 gerous to kill a man than a sheep." x 
 
 That Catherine felt these tremendous moral dangers 
 that were pressing upon France, there is nowhere any evi- 
 dence, but, curiously enough, we have just at this time a 
 somewhat long record of her ideas about the way in which 
 France ought to be ruled. The cause of her making 
 it was as follows. She was very fond of riding, but 
 apparently she rode with more boldness than skill. At all 
 events, she had during her life a number of rather serious 
 horseback accidents and her growing weight rendered falls 
 dangerous. In September, 1563, while she was coming back 
 from hunting, her hackney fell under her, injuring her head 
 and arms. She made light of it, as she was wont to make 
 light of any of her ailments, and not only refused to rest 
 but continued to eat great quantities of melons and other 
 fruits of which she was very fond. A dangerous illness 
 followed. Others thought of the possibility of her death, 
 and perhaps Catherine was at least made mindful of mor- 
 tality, for she dictated a long letter to her son; a thing 
 otherwise superfluous; for she never had been separated 
 from him for more than a few days at a time and mani- 
 festly never intended to be. She gave him advice how to 
 reign in order to restore the kingdom to the flourishing 
 condition in which it was in the time of his father and his 
 grandfather. One half of the letter is occupied by a pro- 
 gram for the royal day. This was to be so regulated as to 
 please the nobility by allowing them access to him in the 
 morning while he is being dressed, and also by spending a 
 good part of his time with them. At least twice a week he 
 ought to give a ball after supper and twice a week or more 
 he ought to join with his nobles in some athletic sport, 
 "because I have often heard your grandfather say that two 
 things are necessary to live in peace with the French, and 
 to make them love their King: to keep them happy and to 
 occupy them in some athletic exercise." "Every two weeks 
 
 *Arch. Vat., Sept., 1573; Nuncio Bel. I, 4, p. 240; Waddington ctd. 185.
 
 PEACE AND POLITICS— ENGLAND AND SPAIN 293 
 
 or so you must give audience, for that pleases your subjects 
 extremely." In addition, he must read all dispatches which 
 arrive and receive all deputations from the provinces, taking 
 care to speak to them every time they present themselves 
 in his room. "I have seen your father and grandfather do 
 this and when there was nothing else to talk about, they 
 even went so far as to talk to them about their own house- 
 hold affairs." * 
 
 He must always carry around in his pocket two lists — 
 one containing the names of all the royal officers even down 
 to the very smallest in the kingdom, and the other the value 
 of all the offices which are in the gift of the King. The 
 instant he heard of a vacancy (and one or two of the chief 
 men in each province ought to be charged with the duty of 
 immediately notifying him of any vacancy) he should, by 
 the use of these two lists, immediately fill it, writing the 
 letter of notification himself and not handing it over to a 
 secretary. If anybody importuned him for an office he 
 never ought to be allowed to receive it. He ought to know 
 the names of the chief people in every province of the king- 
 dom and he should take pains to have in each province at 
 least a dozen, more or less, to whom he ought to give a great 
 deal of patronage. This would please them so much that 
 they would keep him constantly informed of the smallest 
 thing that stirred in their neighborhood. In every city of 
 the kingdom he ought also to have three or four of the 
 principal burghers and as many of the chief merchants who, 
 quietly and without letting anybody else know anything 
 about it, should be so favored by him that they would be 
 willing to inform him at once of anything which he ought 
 to know that happened either in the city government, or 
 even in private homes. 2 
 
 This letter is chiefly remarkable for what it leaves out. 
 It is the letter of a clever politician and not of a statesman. 
 Catherine wants her son to be careful to keep the distribu- 
 
 1 B. N. Dupuy, 525 f. 47, C. C. C. 390 f. 219, A. N. K. 1500. 
 •Letts. II, 90.
 
 294 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 tion of the patronage in his own hands, and to take meas- 
 ures to hear of everything that is going on all over the 
 kingdom without letting it be known that he was doing so. 
 But while this letter to her son on the art of reigning made 
 no allusion to the grave problems which lay before him, the 
 need of economy in administration, the reform of the ruined 
 finances, the reform of the universities, the reform of justice, 
 the establishment of a strong police, the decrease of hatred 
 and factional spirit and the very delicate and complicated 
 problems of foreign policy, it is evident by her action that so 
 far as the problems of foreign politics we r e concerned, Cath- 
 erine was not unaware of their existence. She attempted 
 to meet them in a way so characteristic, that it is worth 
 while to examine her action somewhat in detail as a typical 
 instance of the spirit and method of her statecraft; though 
 it is tiresome because of her habitual tendency to see in 
 every international situation nothing quite as important as 
 its potential relation to good marriages for her children. 
 
 The most pressing problem of foreign policy was the rela- 
 tion between France and England. Both of the women 
 who presided over the destiny of those countries were too 
 shrewd to push the war very energetically. Each under- 
 stood entirely the truth of what the English envoy wrote 
 home after he had had a talk with the Ambassador of 
 Spain. The Spanish "would fain have the English and 
 French together by the ears and they do as children do when 
 they see two dogs rend each other's coats with their teeth ; 
 clap their hands and say 'Here, take him! That's a good 
 dog!' Let him not go so; so should his master have sport 
 whosoever had the worst." x 
 
 Catherine had also a special and very much more per- 
 sonal reason for not desiring to fight Elizabeth, or even 
 weaken her. From two letters sent in the same packet, one 
 to her daughter, the Queen of Spain, and the other to the 
 Ambassador in Madrid, it appears that Catherine had got 
 possession of a letter of the Cardinal of Lorraine, who was 
 
 a Cal. F. 1563, p. 342.
 
 PEACE AND POLITICS— ENGLAND AND SPAIN 295 
 
 absent in the French delegation at the Council of Trent but 
 "anxious to get back in one way or another to control the 
 affairs of the kingdom." This intercepted letter made her 
 able to understand entirely "the prettiest trick ever seen." 
 He had talked to her in the beginning about marrying her 
 daughter-in-law, the Queen of Scots, to the Archduke 
 Charles, third son of the Emperor of Germany. She had 
 shown no sign of objection, though she wanted him for her 
 own daughter, Margaret. Lorraine again sent word that 
 the ambassador of the King of Spain and the Constable had 
 talked to him of marrying the Prince of Spain to the Queen 
 of Scots and urged him to use his influence to bring it about. 
 He commented on this offer that it was not his plan ; that he 
 preferred the marriage of Mary to the Archduke. "His 
 brother, the Cardinal of Guise here, even offered to go to 
 Scotland to persuade his niece not to accept the offer of the 
 Prince of Spain, although he thought it would be difficult 
 because being proud she would not desire, as the widow of 
 the King of France, to marry a less important prince." 
 
 All the while Catherine knew, in a roundabout way by a 
 third person, that the Cardinal of Lorraine was doing all 
 that he could in Spain to promote this marriage and that 
 the suggestion of it had come from him. She also knew that 
 the Cardinal of Lorraine was secretly trying to get the 
 Spanish prelates at the council to join in an attempt to 
 declare the Queen of England incapable of wearing the 
 crown, because she had left the Church. His object was to 
 transfer the kingdom of England to the Queen of Scots in 
 order to make her a more attractive match for the Spanish 
 prince. He had also tried to have the King of Navarre 
 declared a heretic by the Pope and his kingdom transferred 
 to Spain. 
 
 "Unaware that I knew these facts, they proposed to me by 
 a third person, that I should prevent this Spanish marriage which 
 was being urged upon the Queen of Scots, by offering to marry 
 her to one of my sons, from which you can easily see that he 
 wants to hold three cards in his hand. . . . This same person
 
 296 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 told me that the Queen of Scots had a good chance of getting 
 the kingdom of England, since the Council of Trent will declare 
 the Queen of England a heretic and incapable of ruling. It 
 won't trouble her very much if there's nothing else but words 
 to handle. So, remembering how much that vain hope of see- 
 ing their niece one day the Queen of England has already 
 cost this kingdom, I pretended that I wanted to agree to the 
 bargain suggested by my son-in-law (the King of Spam) and 
 since he wanted the Queen of Scots for his son, that I should 
 hope that God would give somebody else to my son, the Duke 
 of Orleans, because he was the one who had been named as 
 the probable husband for the Queen of Scots." 
 
 She went on to say that both the Ambassador and her 
 daughter, the Queen of Spain, ought to move with the 
 utmost cleverness and secrecy to block these plans without 
 letting anyone know that they had any word from France 
 about them. She explains that what she really wants is to 
 marry the king to the eldest daughter of the Emperor and 
 her younger son to the Princess of Spain and that the two 
 kingdoms of France and Spain should then together make a 
 kingdom for him. 1 
 
 Here was a plot to block Catherine's plan for the mar- 
 riage of her children which always occupied the chief place 
 in her thoughts, to give another and greater crown to the 
 Queen of Scots, whom she disliked, to increase enormously 
 the power of the Cardinal of Lorraine, whom she hated and 
 feared. To have Elizabeth strong and friendly to her 
 was one of the best ways to prevent the success of any 
 such plot. The strongest personal reasons, as well as her 
 general dislike of war, urged Catherine towards peace with 
 England. 
 
 Although both Queens were determined to have no more 
 war, it took a long time to make peace. Elizabeth made an 
 uncompromising demand for the restoration of Calais and a 
 large sum of money. France threatened to break off negoti- 
 ations, whereupon Elizabeth demanded a reaffirmation of 
 the Treaty of Cateau-Cambresis, by which Calais was to be 
 
 1 Letts, x, in.
 
 PEACE AND POLITICS— ENGLAND AND SPAIN 297 
 
 restored in 1567. France threatened to resume the war, 
 unless the hostages given for the ratification of the fulfill- 
 ment of that treaty were returned, claiming that Elizabeth 
 had violated all her rights under it by attacking France. 
 Then the envoy said, "Give us five hundred thousand 
 crowns and say nothing about Calais one way or the other." 
 France refused but offered a hundred and twenty thousand 
 crowns and the best diamond among the crown jewels for 
 the immediate release of the French hostages. The nego- 
 tiations were not made any smoother by the fact that the 
 English Ambassador and the English Envoy had a furious 
 quarrel with each other. Finally one day the Ambassador 
 called the Envoy "arrant knave, traitor and such other 
 names as came into his mind out of his good store and drew 
 his dagger. I drew my dagger also. Mr. Somers stepped 
 between us, but as he pressed with his dagger to come near 
 me, I bade him stand back and not come nearer to me, or I 
 would cause him to stand back, and give him such a mark 
 as his bedlam furious head did deserve." * 
 
 Elizabeth drove the thriftiest bargain possible. She 
 first bade her agents come down to four hundred thousand 
 crowns, and, if the French stood on that, she bade them 
 "use all the means they can to make the said sum at least 
 three hundred thousand crowns." In case of failure they 
 were not to break off the colloquy, but to talk about other 
 things. "And yet afterwards to do their uttermost to make 
 the sum no less than two hundred thousand crowns." But 
 Catherine was as good a bargainer as Elizabeth and the 
 money payments which finally accompanied the treaty were 
 sixty thousand crowns down and sixty thousand later. 
 There was no definite settlement about Calais but the 
 rights of both sides were reserved. 
 
 One important article in the treaty established liberty 
 of commerce between the two nations, cancelling a large 
 number of the fees and exactions which were imposed in 
 both kingdoms upon merchants, and this commercial treaty 
 
 1 Cal. F. 1564, p. 104.
 
 298 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 between France and England did a great deal to build up 
 the trade between the two countries. Whether this para- 
 graph came from Catherine or from the Chancellor or from 
 somebody else, we do not know. 1 
 
 Philip II was not very well pleased with the fact that 
 Catherine had made peace with England and with her 
 rebels. Apparently yielding to her solicitation, he had 
 withdrawn his ambassador and replaced him by another, 
 who was more agreeable to her, but not with the idea of 
 stopping his protests against her policy of conciliation. On 
 the contrary, he rather hoped his protests would be more 
 effective coming from the lips of a man she did not dislike 
 so much. He ordered the new Ambassador Alava "not to 
 fail to frighten her and to repeat to her again and again 
 that if she does not govern differently it will make me very 
 much displeased, obliged as I am to take in hand the inter- 
 ests of the King, my brother. But before acting in this 
 direction, wait until Chantonnay is gone, for the hatred 
 which the Queen has for him would spoil everything." 
 Alava carried out his directions by suggesting to Catherine 
 that she was in great danger from the Prince of Conde, 
 "for the King, my master, is afraid that his objects are clear 
 enough and in the end he and his party will not find any 
 other remedy for the dangerous situation except killing you 
 and your son." She seemed much disturbed and in leaving 
 said to him, "Tell the Constable this as plainly as you have 
 told it to me." It is, however, doubtful whether Catherine 
 was as much troubled by this sort of talk as the Ambassador 
 believed. She always showed courage in the face of any 
 physical danger and she was not to be frightened by loose 
 talk of assassination. The fear she had always had in the 
 back of her mind was the one she had already expressed to 
 her Ambassador at Madrid. She was not the only one who 
 was touched by this dread. There was in France "an opin- 
 ion and firm belief that the King of Spain wants to make 
 himself King of France under the pretense of defending the 
 
 'Dumont, V, 1, p. 126.
 
 PEACE AND POLITICS— ENGLAND AND SPAIN 299 
 
 Roman Catholic religion with the aid of the house of 
 Guise." This was only part of an increasing opinion, widely 
 spread throughout all Europe, that the Spaniards "want to 
 give law to the entire world." 1 
 
 1 A. N. K. ctd. Letts. II, 148, n.; A. N. K. 1501 f. 74; Granvelle (2) 
 VII, 23; B. N. C. C. C. 395 f. 119. The phrase was common, e.g. Eng. 
 Amb. 1723 f. 43.
 
 CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 Catherine's plans for France and Christendom 
 
 It was evident to Catherine that her danger from the 
 overmastering power of Spain was closely connected with 
 the internal difficulties of her son's kingdom and she began 
 to feel certain that the best way to meet both external 
 and internal dangers was to have an interview with her 
 two most powerful neighbors, the King of Spain and the 
 Emperor of Germany. The idea of such an interview had 
 been originally suggested by the Pope in the end of the year 
 1563 with the object undoubtedly of forming a league for 
 the extermination of heresy; although its ostensible object 
 would probably have been resistance to the Turk. Cath- 
 erine, however, had very different views about the desirable 
 outcome of such a meeting. The eldest son of the Emperor, 
 who had been elected King of the Romans or successor to 
 the Emperor, had shown himself very favorable to efforts 
 looking toward a reunion of the entire Church. Catherine 
 told her ambassador to say to him that her object in holding 
 this interview was "to see if we, who are the greatest and 
 most powerful Christian princes, can agree upon some 
 means other than arms for the pacification and repose of 
 Christianity. Knowing that his desire and mine agree in 
 that point, I hope something can be done in accordance 
 with our desires. Even though the Pope and the King of 
 Spain show themselves to be very difficult, we can work to 
 persuade them to come to this conclusion." * 
 
 But the King of Spain said he was afraid of exciting the 
 suspicions of Protestant Princes and provoking a general 
 war about religion. He bluntly refused to come to any such 
 meeting. Catherine therefore wrote to the King of the 
 
 x Letts. II, 110, 111. 
 
 300
 
 CATHERINE'S PLANS FOR FRANCE 301 
 
 Romans asking him to meet her secretly even though the 
 King of Spain refused and spoke plainly to him of what, in 
 this case as in all other phases of her foreign policy, was 
 nearly always the central motive in her mind, — the mar- 
 riages of her children. But in the beginning of the summer 
 of 1564 the Emperor and his son, who at first seemed very 
 anxious for the interview, suddenly dropped the subject so 
 decidedly that Catherine felt obliged to dismiss it. 1 
 
 Large sections of the kingdom continued to be much 
 disturbed by the zeal or the hatred of people who did not 
 in their hearts accept the peace and would not obey the 
 royal Edict of Pacification. The focus of trouble was 
 in the south, where Philip II had become mixed in very 
 serious plots with Blaise de Monluc, Lieutenant-Governor 
 of Guienne. Before the fall of Havre de Grace, Monluc had 
 complained to Catherine of the pernicious activity of that 
 strong Huguenot, the Queen of Navarre, who was undoubt- 
 edly infringing upon the Edict. He had warned her that 
 "if she stands this from the Queen of Navarre she will make 
 evident to the King of Spain that she cares more for the 
 friendship of the Queen than for his friendship." Cath- 
 erine, though ordering Monluc to make the Queen of Na- 
 varre keep within the Edict, refused to take against her 
 the severe action he advised. Somebody, probably Philip 
 II, then procured from the Pope a citation to the Queen of 
 Navarre to appear in Rome to answer a charge of heresy, 
 on pain of being deprived of her kingdom if she did not 
 obey. Catherine at once took up her cause. In a letter 
 from the King, she denounced this citation as illegal and 
 injurious to him and begged the Pope to revoke it at once. 
 She also told her ambassador to tell the Pope that he had 
 no authority or jurisdiction over those who bear the title of 
 King or Queen and that she would not protect her son's 
 relatives and vassals. 2 
 
 No action was ever taken on the citation, but a plot was 
 
 1 Letts. II, 157, 182, 187. 
 
 'Monluc, IV, 246; Conde, II, 119; IV, 680; V, 669.
 
 302 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 / 
 
 formed in France to kidnap the Queen of Navarre, carry her 
 across the mountains into Spain and present her before the 
 Inquisition. The plot was discovered through the em- 
 broiderer of the Queen of Spain, who told the French 
 Ambassador what she had heard. The Ambassador sent 
 his secretary to warn the Queen Mother and such 
 measures were taken that the plot was blocked. Monluc 
 wrote in his commentaries a denial of the fact that 
 he was engaged in this conspiracy ; but he also denied that 
 he had any questionable relations with the King of Spain, 
 which is not true. He acted as a spy for Philip and received 
 a pension from him. That was no more than was done by 
 many others, even in the royal council of France and of 
 England, but certain things we know about his conduct are 
 more ominous. A royal messenger was directed to ask 
 him what forces and cities could be put into Spain's hands 
 if they decided to invade, and whether there was any way 
 of "getting hold of the person of the King in order to carry 
 on the whole business with his authority and under his 
 name." We do not know Monluc's answers to these ques- 
 tions, but, after he had been asked them, he remained on 
 very friendly terms with the King of Spain, and his conduct 
 was worse than shady. It is entirely characteristic of the 
 dissimulation which was typical of the times that Catherine 
 accepted Monluc's excuses although she knew they were 
 suspicious, that Philip pretended to resent the citation of 
 the Queen of Navarre to Rome, and that the Queen of 
 Navarre, although perfectly well aware of the plot to carry 
 her to Spain for the stake or the dungeon, sent a special 
 messenger to thank Philip for his protests against her cita- 
 tion for heresy. 1 
 
 Almost immediately after this shock to her already weak 
 confidence in Philip, Catherine returned to the plan of an in- 
 terview with him on the border of the two countries. The 
 new Spanish Ambassador had a long talk with her about 
 
 '■Cabie (1), 182, 246; de Thou, III, 497 (He knew the embroiderer's 
 children); A. N. K. ctd. Forneron, I, 297; Marcks 111; B. N. Dupuy, 523 
 i. 71; Courteault (2), 488.
 
 CATHERINE'S PLANS FOR PRANCE 303 
 
 it in the middle of the winter of 1564. She said, "It's evi- 
 dent that the King of Spain doesn't care about seeing me." 
 He replied, "That depends on you, Madame, for you won't 
 let him know what you want to talk about at this meeting." 
 He added that the meeting would probably create great 
 suspicion, and wanted to know what good could be expected 
 from it to balance that suspicion. The Queen replied iron- 
 ically, "You seem to think, Monsieur Ambassador, that the 
 earth will tremble as soon as we meet." "Well," he an- 
 swered, "it isn't possible to shut one's eyes to the dangers 
 attending such an interview." Interrupting him she said, 
 "The affairs of religion might be arranged if we could only 
 meet" and she promised to do all in her power to bring 
 them to a proper situation little by little. "Little by little!" 
 cried the ambassador, "But that's just exactly what the 
 King doesn't want." * 
 
 It must not be supposed that, during all these trying 
 months since the close of the active operations of the Eng- 
 lish war, Catherine's thoughts and energies were entirely 
 absorbed in the dangers of the state or the pleasures of 
 statescraft. She shared to the full that love of elaborate 
 ceremony, splendid costumes and magnificent furniture 
 which was so characteristic of most of the rulers of the six- 
 teenth century. The treasury was never so empty that 
 Catherine did not feel able to spend money lavishly for 
 articles of luxury or of art. The English war was scarcely 
 ended by the Treaty of Troyes, when she bought a number 
 of enormous emeralds for a girdle and of smaller and finer 
 emeralds for a necklace, to present to her daughter, the 
 Duchess of Lorraine. She bought most of these stones 
 from the Rhinegrave, who had been in command of the 
 royal German mercenaries during the war with the Hugue- 
 nots. A sardonic touch is added to the gift by the fact that 
 the Spanish Ambassador wrote to his master that he had 
 heard the Rhinegrave say to the Count of Mansfeld (later 
 commander of the German mercenaries of the Huguenot 
 
 *A. N. K. 1601 (42).
 
 304 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 army) that he had got these emeralds from churches during 
 the war. Catherine must have known that the jewels were 
 loot and she had to shut her eyes not to see that many of 
 them must have been either stolen directly from the ortho- 
 dox churches, or bought from those who had stolen them, 
 by one of the commanders hired by the King to protect the 
 Church. Certainly she knew perfectly well the danger of 
 ecclesiastical peculation in war time, because writing of the 
 permission given to the churches of lower Normandy to 
 raise a force of harquebusiers by selling their altar orna- 
 ments, she said, "Care ought to be taken lest the clergy to 
 get one crown to pay the troops, sell a far greater value of 
 plate and jewels to put the money in their pockets." * 
 
 There were many instances of thus "stripping the altars 
 of God to clothe the ladies of the court" and if among the 
 defenders of Catholicism men were thus openly allowed to 
 make profit out of sacrilege, it was easy for Huguenot cap- 
 tains of guerilla war to persuade themselves that plunder of 
 the apparatus of the mass (which they thought idolatrous) 
 was almost a religious duty. A list of the booty 2 of the 
 famous Huguenot partisan nicknamed The Devil of Bres- 
 sault, made in the cathedral of Le Mans, contains ninety- 
 two splendid garments, a tunic of cloth of gold over crimson 
 velvet, chasubles, violet velvet over cloth of gold, of black, 
 green and red velvet, of green, white and red embroidered 
 damask, capes of crimson, embroidered black or white 
 damask, etc. Many of these splendid fabrics found their 
 way into costumes as the stolen emeralds found their way 
 to the neck of Catherine's oldest daughter. 
 
 The most persistent of Catherine's extravagant tastes 
 was building. In the beginning of the year 1564, the very 
 worst time of all these troubles, Catherine, not content with 
 the nine magnificent chateaux and palaces built a short 
 time before by Francis I, demolished the palace of Les 
 Tournelles, laid out on the banks of the Seine a magnificent 
 
 *A. N. K. 1501 f. 74; Letts. I, 316. 
 "Joubert App. 2.
 
 CATHERINE'S PLANS FOR FRANCE 305 
 
 garden and began the construction of the palace of the 
 Tuileries which was to be joined to the royal castle of the 
 Louvre by a splendid gallery. In forming these plans 
 Catherine was influenced, not only by that love of building 
 which had been so marked among the members of her own 
 family and the members of the family into which she had 
 married, but probably also by her affection for her husband. 
 The palace she demolished had been the palace in which he 
 died; the palace to which she began the adjunct and com- 
 panion had been enlarged and adorned with splendid win- 
 dows and halls by him. The outside of it was ornamented 
 with those interlaced C's and H's which formed the official 
 monogram of the King and his wife. She had continued the 
 plan of her husband to complete the great quadrangle ac- 
 cording to the design of the architect Pierre Lescot who had 
 worked upon the building under her father-in-law and her 
 husband. Catherine now wished, not only to continue the 
 work of her husband, but to build on a very magnificent 
 scale a new palace alongside of the Louvre. She was 
 granted a hundred thousand livres from the state treasury 
 to begin it and not long afterwards a hundred and fifty 
 thousand more. The garden which was a part of this plan, 
 Catherine finished in about six years. But some seven or 
 eight years after she began the palace, she stopped work on 
 the building, perhaps because she was alarmed by certain 
 predictions of the astrologers in connection with it. How 
 far she actually built on the plans before she stopped we 
 cannot be quite certain. We know that from time to time 
 she had fine marbles sent from different places to use in the 
 building. It was because she had stopped work on the 
 Tuileries years before that, at her death, there were in the 
 gardens five splendid marble columns and a quantity of 
 marbles cut and in block of a variety of colors, red, black, 
 green and red, white and black, grey-white, red and gray, 
 white blotched with yellow, white and red, etc., etc. 1 
 
 1 Battifol 111. Lenormant qtd. Topographie, 228, see Note. Du 
 Cerceau ctd. Berty, I, 249; Berty, II, 8; I, 258, e.g. Letts. II, 264; III, 1. 
 Bonnaffe, 213.
 
 306 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 Balked in her attempt to secure the promise of an inter- 
 view with Philip and her daughter, Catherine turned to 
 another plan. She determined to take the King on a circu- 
 lar journey through the provinces of France, hoping that 
 during the course of it she would be able to persuade her 
 son-in-law to meet her on the southern border. Even if 
 she could not do this, she hoped that the visit of the King 
 would pacify many local troubles. 
 
 But before she started Catherine thought it good policy 
 to rally a large part of the nobility around the Court and 
 she did this by indulging her taste for splendor in a mag- 
 nificent series of fetes at Fontainebleau. The Constable 
 opened the series by a great supper. The next day the 
 Cardinal of Bourbon gave another great supper. Two days 
 later the Queen entertained at dinner, followed by a comedy 
 played in the great ballroom of the chateau. The King's 
 younger brother then gave a dinner followed by a tourna- 
 ment where twelve gentlemen fought on foot with javelins 
 and swords. Then the King followed with a great fete and 
 masked tournament in which a castle, defended by devils 
 commanded by giants, was assaulted by the four marshals 
 of France on horseback, leading a troop made up of the 
 young gentlemen of the court. Many lances were broken 
 and armor rang with the blows of the sword, but the death 
 of Henry II seems to have had a permanent effect in 
 repressing the roughness of the game of the tournament 
 as played in the court of France. A feature of these splen- 
 did festivals of Catherine was the brilliant body of her 
 young women-in-waiting, usually from the noble families 
 of France, though some were Italian and at least one was 
 Greek. All were, if we can believe the somewhat dithy- 
 rambic statements of that veteran gallant, Brantome, beau- 
 tiful. He gives a list of sixty young unmarried women 
 whom he remembers at the court of Catherine. The 
 pleasure of the old man's recollection is so intense as to be 
 almost pathetic, when he paints the brilliant spectacle of 
 the Queen riding abroad followed by forty or fifty of these
 
 CATHERINE'S PLANS FOR FRANCE 307 
 
 women, mounted on beautiful hackneys richly caparisoned, 
 which they sat with the utmost grace, "the plumes of their 
 hats floating in the air with a provoking challenge as if to 
 war or love." 1 
 
 In connection with the brilliant band an accusation has 
 been brought against Catherine of a certain devilish pic- 
 turesqueness which has caused it to be accepted, without 
 much examination, as a part of the popular conception of 
 her life. It is, however, an accusation for which it is easier 
 to find support among her enemies than in unprejudiced 
 testimony from her contemporaries. It is hardly wise to 
 give over much weight to the leering anecdotes of Bran tome, 
 an old debauchee with a corrupted memory, or the putrid 
 satires collected by a moralist like de l'Estoile, who is too 
 much inclined to roll the evils he records like a sweet morsel 
 under his tongue. The opinion of Calvin, expressed in a 
 letter of the spring of 1561, that Navarre was "entirely given 
 over to Venus" and the Queen Mother "trained in those 
 arts," was exciting his passion by means of "her seraglio," is 
 more worthy of attention, though it refers to only one in- 
 stance and is highly prejudiced against Catherine. The 
 similar opinion of the Spanish Ambassador that Catherine 
 was deliberately using one of her maids-in-waiting to worm 
 secrets from the King of Navarre and separate him from 
 the party of the Catholics must be weighed against his 
 other statement, entirely false, that the Huguenots habitu- 
 ally used beautiful young women to draw young noblemen 
 to heresy. Later in life Sully recorded in his memoirs 
 his belief that Catherine had deliberately used her maids- 
 of-honor, without regard to the consequences to them, in 
 order to seduce her opponents. But on the whole it is 
 very astonishing to find how little direct evidence there is 
 to support the accusation which has been repeated by 
 historians of every generation from the time of Catherine's 
 death until now. We know that at least four of Catherine's 
 
 1 Jouan. Castelnau, Bk, V, Ch. 6; Letts. X, gives list of 280 court ladies. 
 Brant., VII, 399.
 
 308 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 maids-of-honor bore children to great lords of the realm, 
 but one of these liaisons was distinctly contrary to her 
 political interests and it is not at all certain that she knew 
 of the beginnings of the others; still less that she encour- 
 aged them. That adultery was more or less common at the 
 French court after the reigns of two kings who had set such 
 examples as Francis I and Henry II, is highly probable and 
 attested by contemporary opinion. Montaigne, who does 
 not conceal his own licentiousness, expresses a very strong 
 judgment on the growing licentiousness of his generation. 
 There is not the smallest reason to believe that Catherine, 
 although her own conduct in that respect is irreproachable, 
 would have cared to make any strong stand against a 
 depraved moral atmosphere, nor would her conscience have 
 been in the least troubled by taking any profit that might 
 come to her plans from it. But the charge that she de- 
 liberately and systematically corrupted the morals of young 
 people around her in order to make them the tools of her 
 politics, can be dismissed as an invention of her enemies. 
 She dearly loved a joke and one of the commonest phrases 
 in the reports of ambassadors is "the Queen Mother laughed 
 heartily," but there is no record of any double entendre 
 from her lips. Indeed, she seems to have been a pronounced 
 foe of that "filthy jesting" which was taken for granted in 
 Renascence society. The poet Baif records that, when she 
 commissioned him to translate some comedies of Terence 
 to be played at court, she ordered him to suppress inde- 
 cencies in the dialogue. And Brantome remembered that 
 any courtier who did not behave with the most extreme 
 propriety was punished by prompt exclusion from the 
 soirees in Catherine's apartments. 1 
 
 The best way of suggesting a specimen of the reasons 
 for this somewhat vague judgment in regard to a definite 
 indictment unsupported by definite evidence, is to be found 
 in the story of one of Catherine's maids-in-waiting whose 
 
 'Baum, App. 32; Conde, II, 43; Sully, 20, 27, 28, 34, 35, 36, 58; 
 
 Fremy (1), ctd. 90.
 
 CATHERINE'S PLANS FOR FRANCE 309 
 
 dishonor became evident about this time, Isabelle de 
 Limeuil was a very distant relative of Catherine's mother, 
 a beautiful blonde with blue eyes, a high complexion and 
 a vivacious wit, 1 of whom Ronsard in one of his most 
 graceful poems sang that he would like to give her as many 
 kisses as there were leaves on the trees of the forest. 
 Robertet, one of Catherine's secretaries, was her devoted 
 admirer. Soon after the Peace of Amboise the Prince of 
 Conde fell a victim to her charms. Some of his friends in 
 vain wrote to warn him of the danger to his reputation and 
 authority, but Conde, who was now rather openly courted 
 by the beautiful and enormously wealthy widow of the 
 Marshal Saint Andre (who had fallen in the battle of 
 Dreux), refused their advice to leave court. Two months 
 after Catherine began her journey through the provinces, 
 Isabelle was suddenly seized with the pains of childbirth 
 in the midst of a court reception and gave birth to a son 
 in a neighboring room. Whatever Catherine's attitude 
 toward moral delinquency may have been, we know from 
 her letter to the King of Navarre already cited, from the 
 regulations she imposed upon the life of her court and her 
 actions in a previous similar case among her maids-of-honor, 
 that any conduct that openly contravened "les convenances" 
 would receive her sternest reprobation. In this case, her 
 action against the fragile and reckless beauty was probably 
 sharpened by the fact that one of the courtiers now accused 
 Isabelle of having a short time before tried to induce him 
 to poison the Prince of La Roche-sur-Yon because he had 
 insulted her. He added that she had even hinted at 
 poisoning Catherine herself. Isabelle was at once carried 
 off and confined in a convent at Auxonne. Her lover, the 
 Queen's secretary, soon discovered where she was and found 
 means to write to her recalling their happiness of the previ- 
 ous year. He says that he did not dare to come to see her for 
 fear of the anger of the Queen Mother and added that he 
 was also afraid of the jealousy of the Prince of Conde. He 
 
 1 Brantome.
 
 310 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 said he was "willing to die for her because he loved her more 
 than anything else in the world. Bourdeille and Guitiniere 
 [two of her companions in the Queen's household] send 
 you a thousand kisses. Burn this letter: you know why." 
 The imprisoned girl replied that she could not "find words 
 to tell what pleasure his letter had brought her; that she 
 did nothing all day long except think of him because nothing 
 in the world could make her forget to love him." 
 
 Soon after, Conde, who was kept at the bedside of his 
 wife, dying of consumption, found means to write to her, 
 saying that he had heard of her through Robertet. He 
 says he does not "believe what he has been told that the 
 child was not really his and that it is a beautiful boy whom 
 he is having brought up as befits a young prince." He sends 
 her a rather curious proof of constant affection in the shape 
 of one of his night-gowns and asks her to continue to love 
 him faithfully; reminding her at the same time that he is 
 "accustomed in all things to be the only one and the first 
 one." A few weeks later Conde's wife died and not long 
 after Conde wanted to marry either the widow of the Duke 
 of Guise or Mary, Queen of Scots, offering to change his 
 religion or do whatever else was necessary to make the 
 match agreeable. Apparently they were playing with him 
 to break up the Huguenot party, for, in the end, Conde 
 was furious over the outcome of the negotiation, saying 
 the Cardinal of Lorraine had cheated him with hopes of 
 marriage to the Queen of Scots. 1 
 
 The accusation that Isabelle had planned to use poison 
 was not taken very seriously by anyone and about a year 
 after her arrest Conde had one of his gentlemen arrange 
 for her escape from confinement and transfer to the mag- 
 nificent chateau of Valery, which had just been presented 
 to him by the Marechale de St. Andre. The Protestant 
 ministers sent a deputation to wait upon him and to remon- 
 strate with regard to the scandal, but he dismissed them 
 
 1 Labanoff, I, 245, B. N. fds. fr. ctd. de la Ferriere (2), 115 A. N. K. 
 1503 f. 36.
 
 CATHERINE'S PLANS FOR FRANCE 311 
 
 brusquely. He soon got tired of Isabelle and before the 
 end of the year he yielded to the suggestions of his friends 
 and married a Huguenotte, the beautiful daughter of the 
 Marquis of Rothelin. Catherine, who was secretly much 
 relieved that the proposed alliance between Conde and the 
 house of Guise had not been accomplished in any of the 
 forms in which it had been suggested, gave her consent to 
 the marriage. Not long after Isabelle married Scipion 
 Sardini, an Italian banker settled in France, a great 
 favorite of Catherine, who had become enormously 
 wealthy, chiefly through his dealings with the Crown. She 
 presided for many years over his magnificent hotel in Paris. 
 Curiously enough her younger sister married, not long after, 
 the very courtier who had accused Isabelle of a desire to 
 distribute poison in the French court. In such an atmos- 
 phere the evil influence of woman's beauty did not need to 
 be patronized by the head of the state. 1 
 
 Catherine took a certain number of this band of beau- 
 ties with her on the long royal progress through France. 
 In explaining the objects of this journey she naturally 
 emphasized different things to different people. To Admiral 
 Coligny she wrote in April, 1564: "Although they were 
 sending expressly every day to those who have in hand the 
 administration of justice, it must be confessed that the 
 greater part of them have not, in most places, paid very 
 much attention to their duty ; which is the reason why the 
 King undertakes this journey in order to make everybody 
 so clearly understand his intention to enforce this Edict 
 (of Pacification) that nobody can be able to allege any 
 pretext nor occasion to break it." Archives in Switzerland 
 contain documentary proofs of the acceptance by Coligny 
 and his brother of Catherine's intention to maintain the 
 toleration promised by the Edict. In the summer of 1564 
 the epoch for the renewal of the alliance between the crown 
 of France and the cantons of the Swiss League had arrived 
 
 *Cal. F. 1565, p. 331; d'Aumale, I, 219, de la Ferriere (2).
 
 312 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 and French envoys were sent to arrange it. The council- 
 lors of the Protestant cantons of Berne, Basle and Zurich 
 refused to sign the alliance unless it was expressly stipulated 
 in writing that a failure of the King to maintain toleration 
 would leave them free to withdraw. Coligny and d'Andelot 
 wrote strongly urging them not to insist on this which 
 "would do more harm than good." Coligny begged them 
 "in the name of God" to accept the verbal assurances of 
 the King that he would maintain the toleration promised 
 by the Edict. The matter was finally settled by a separate 
 formal acknowledgment from the French envoys of the 
 declaration of the council of Berne that they were not 
 bound by the alliance if "those who are of the evangelic 
 profession of faith were molested or persecuted against the 
 Edict." This is an example of Catherine's frequent use 
 during the four and a half years' peace which followed the 
 Edict of Amboise, of the advice and help of Coligny. 1 
 
 Catherine explained the motives of the royal journey 
 to the King of Spain in terms quite different from those 
 she used to Coligny. She told him she was taking the King 
 through his kingdom because she had heard from all quar- 
 ters that the Huguenots were spreading the report that she 
 and the King proposed to join their religion. She had 
 therefore determined to take the King on a long voyage 
 through his kingdom "to prove to all parts of the kingdom 
 that she and her children were faithful to their religion. 
 This is the reason why wherever she has gone she has 
 always heard mass in the most solemn and public manner." 
 Whichever of these intentions was uppermost in her mind 
 — and Catherine was in the habit of working for two 
 apparently opposed ends simultaneously, or at least alter- 
 nately — she was not very successful in securing the enforce- 
 ment of the Edict about religion. The complaints which 
 had been so common before she started continued to come 
 in from both sides. The Edict was in many places openly 
 
 * Letts. II, 1, 77; Arch. Zurich, 13 Aug., 4 Nov., 1564; Arch. Basle. 
 Ft. A. 2, 8, 31 Oct., 1564, Jan. 3, 1565.
 
 CATHERINE'S PLANS FOR FRANCE 313 
 
 broken and not enforced by the magistrates. Catherine 
 promised redress for outrages and ordered the severe en- 
 forcement of the law, but the problem was a very difficult 
 one and the extreme men of both sides were unwilling to 
 keep within the strict terms of the Edict wherever they had 
 the power to encroach upon it. 1 
 
 In the matter of proving her orthodoxy Catherine met 
 with more success. Besides the zeal she showed everywhere 
 in attending Roman Catholic worship, she issued an order 
 suspending the operations of the Edict in any place where 
 the court was. When the Duchess of Ferrara and the 
 Queen of Navarre assumed that they were an exception 
 to this rule, she told them that, if they had preaching in 
 their rooms while they were in her suite, she would hang 
 the preachers if she could lay her hands on them. In 
 August, 1564, she issued the Edict of Roussillon as a supple- 
 mentary explanation of the Edict of Amboise. It explained 
 that the right to worship in their chateaux given to gentle- 
 men was meant to apply only to their vassals and their 
 households. The churches were forbidden to hold synods 
 or to raise a general fund. Monks and nuns who had 
 married during the war were ordered to put away their 
 husbands or wives or to leave the kingdom within two 
 months, on the pain of the gallows for the men and per- 
 petual imprisonment for the women. A little later the 
 royal council ordered that no man of the new religion 
 should be appointed a judge and the Queen told the 
 Nuncio they had wanted to apply the same rule to all the 
 offices of the kingdom, "but it had been thought by the 
 King that this might cause the Huguenots to revolt." 
 The Prince of Conde immediately sent to Catherine letters 
 of formal protest. Catherine, after glancing through them 
 and recognizing their ability, said with a smile to the 
 messenger, "Where was the Admiral when these letters of 
 the Prince of Conde were written?" But this policy of 
 
 ■ Monluc, V, 24.
 
 314 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 impressing Spain by a public demonstration of zeal for 
 orthodoxy gained its end, for at the close of 1564 the royal 
 council at Madrid voted that an interview should be 
 arranged at Bayonne between Catherine and her daughter, 
 the Queen of Spain. 1 
 
 Just at this time, when the discontent of the Huguenots 
 was reaching its highest pitch, an incident occurred (8 Jan., 
 1565) which showed they might have support outside their 
 own ranks in any renewal of the conflict between them and 
 the ultra-orthodox party led by the House of Lorraine. 
 When Catherine started on her journey, she had given 
 Marshal Montmorency, the eldest son of the Constable, 
 Governor of Paris, strict orders, renewed by letters at inter- 
 vals, to maintain the peace at all hazards. When she heard 
 in the end of December of some mysterious movement of 
 noblemen in the northern part of France, she sent him 
 renewed orders to allow no one to enter the city of Paris 
 followed by armed attendants. Soon after the Cardinal 
 of Lorraine came through the gates followed by fifty 
 musketeers, in spite of the fact that the Marshal 
 sent him orders not to do so. The police attempted 
 to stop him, but were obliged to come back to the 
 Marshal and report that they were not strong enough. 
 Whereupon Montmorency went out, followed by his friends 
 and servitors, and met the Cardinal in the street. Shots 
 were fired on both sides; a gentleman of the party of Mont- 
 morency and one of the servitors of the Cardinal were killed ; 
 the train was partly disarmed and dispersed and the Car- 
 dinal was compelled to take refuge in a shop. He com- 
 plained bitterly to the King and cited the Queen's per- 
 mission to have a guard of fifty arquebusiers. Mont- 
 morency replied that if that was the case he ought to have 
 sent him word and quoted the express orders of the King 
 and Queen to allow no arms to be brought into Paris. The 
 
 *A. N. K. 1501 f. 50; ib. 1502 qtd. Marcks, 101; Fontanon, IV, 279; 
 Arch. C. VI, 167, A. N. K. 1505 f. 25.
 
 CATHERINE'S PLANS FOR FRANCE 315 
 
 King was pleased with Montmorency's conduct and told 
 him so in a letter. 1 
 
 The affair made an enormous sensation not only in 
 France but throughout Europe. The Constable showed 
 the Queen a letter from the Admiral which said, "I have 
 not hesitated to send to Marshal Montmorency, my cousin, 
 offering him all my forces." This was no idle offer. The 
 Admiral gathered his adherents and started for Paris, but, 
 finding the trouble over, retired; for which the King wrote 
 to thank him. 2 
 
 Catherine tried to suppress the quarrel as she always 
 tried to compose all quarrels. Ultimately the Marshals 
 Vielleville and Bourdillon were appointed a court of honor 
 to sit upon the case. They advised the King to write to 
 the Cardinal "that he was sure Montmorency had not 
 intended any personal offense, but only to carry out the 
 King's orders and therefore he desired that they should 
 remain good friends." In the middle of the spring the 
 King sent the strictest orders to allow none of the chief 
 men of either faction to enter Paris. For he had good reason 
 to be afraid that the civil war was about to begin again, 
 not directly because of religion, but because of the old 
 quarrel between the Montmorencys and the Guise. In the 
 early spring Montmorency and the Chatillons secured an 
 intercepted letter written by d'Aumale, a younger brother 
 of the late Duke of Guise, to his brother, the Marquis of 
 Elbeuf, saying lies were being told about them in court by 
 the Admiral and the Marshal. They were getting from 
 Catherine "the most beautiful words in the world of the 
 kind which you know she is accustomed to give," but the 
 best thing to do was to bind together all the gentlemen 
 of their faction, "our good friends into a secret association 
 for self-defense and against the Admiral and the Marshal." 
 The Guises said they never wrote the letter, but there is 
 
 'E.g. B. N. fds. fr. 3204 Granvelle (1) VIII. 600 B. N. fda. fr. 3188 
 f. 6 ib. 3204. 
 
 S B. N. It. 1724 f. 249; ib. 1725 f. 66. fds. fr. 6627 f. 44.
 
 316 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 no particular reason to believe that it was a forgery. At 
 all events Catherine acted as if she thought it was genuine, 
 because the royal council drew up the formula of an oath 
 entering a royal league and renouncing all other associa- 
 tions, which was sent through the kingdom to be signed 
 by all the gentlemen of France. 1 
 
 1 B. N. fds. fr. 3194, 3243, 3950; f. 60 f. 49. B. N. It. 1725 f. 82 Bethune, 
 8686 f. 31 ib. 8717 f. 29, Marcks, 142 n. Conde, V, 274; B. N. It. 1725 f. 82.
 
 CHAPTER XIX 
 
 THE INTERVIEW OF BAYONNE AND THE COUNCIL OF TRENT 
 
 The journey on which Catherine started in the early- 
 spring of 1564 occupied twenty-six months and covered 
 nearly three thousand miles on horseback or by barges on 
 the rivers. It led her from the apple orchards of Normandy 
 to the vineyards of Burgundy and then through the orange 
 groves of Provence and the swamps of the Mediterranean 
 haunted by great flocks of flamingoes, to the clear cold 
 fountains of Angouleme, whose outlet is "entirely covered 
 with swans, bordered with crayfish, and paved with trout." 
 Thence they went on past the ninety miles of the salt 
 marshes of Marennes, through the prairies of Nantes, back 
 to the fertile basin of the Loire; whence they started south 
 again through the huge flocks of long fleeced sheep in the 
 mountains of Auvergne, down into the very centre of 
 France in the volcanic hills of Puy de Dome, from whose 
 rocky ravines terrible storms of thunder and hail sweep 
 down upon the fertile wheat fields below; then north again 
 by a different route across the rich basin of the Seine to 
 Paris. 1 
 
 Catherine bore the fatigues of the journey well and in 
 spite of the discomfort, it must have been a pleasure to her, 
 for she loved to meet people, to exercise power and to handle 
 delicate situations. On the whole it is hard to see how she 
 could have done better than she did in managing tactfully 
 the furious factions who, everywhere, told her exactly op- 
 posite stories about the wrongs they suffered from the other 
 side. The lords at whose chateaux they stopped, the cities 
 little and big and even the villages, rivalled each other in 
 
 1 Jouan, 12, 14, 17, 29, 30, 33, 37, 38, 39. Vidal. 
 
 317
 
 318 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 showing the best hospitality they could to their young King. 
 The party were probably rather tired of seeing country 
 dances of the various provinces danced by the most beau- 
 tiful young girls of the neighborhood. Frequently the King 
 and his mother were asked to hold the child of a nobleman 
 at the baptismal font and, if it was a girl, they always 
 gave it their two names joined: Charlotte-Catherine. 1 
 
 In the great city of Lyons, however, their pleasure was 
 destroyed by a terrible calamity from which they were 
 obliged to flee. The plague broke out with fearful viru- 
 lence. The English Ambassador writing from the place 
 where the court had taken refuge, said, "The dead are 
 lying in the streets all day long and at night they are cast 
 into the river because the people can not dig graves. The 
 servants who went into the city to get food, told me that 
 ■they had seen a man lying groaning in the street all 
 day long with no one to take care of him. Almost as 
 many were dying of hunger and lack of care as of the 
 plague." 2 
 
 The apex of the whole journey to Catherine was the 
 interview with her daughter, the Queen of Spain, which 
 took place in the city of Bayonne where Elizabeth stayed 
 seventeen days. On the banks of the river which separated 
 France from Spain, Catherine had erected a beautiful 
 pavilion in which there was spread "a very rich luncheon 
 of fine hams and tongues, pastries, all sorts of fruits, salads, 
 sweetmeats, and a great abundance of good wine." The 
 Queen of Spain came down to the river bank accompanied 
 by three hundred mounted archers of the royal Spanish 
 guard. While the French soldiers on the other bank fired 
 repeated salvoes, she embarked and met the royal French 
 barge in the middle of the river, where the King embraced 
 her and took her on to his boat. They spent an hour at 
 luncheon while drums, trumpets and hautboys sounded in 
 loud melody from all sides. Then the King gave his sister 
 
 1 Jouan. 
 
 ' Cal. F. 1564, p. 175,
 
 THE INTERVIEW OF BAYONNE 319 
 
 a beautiful white hackney on which she put a splendid 
 caparison worth four hundred thousand ducats, which had 
 been her husband's wedding gift and made her entry into 
 the city of Bayonne by torchlight. 
 
 A few days later Catherine gave a great picnic on an 
 island in the river whose center was a beautiful grassy 
 meadow surrounded by lofty woods. In niches formed in 
 these woods were placed round tables each for a dozen per- 
 sons. The royal table, at the head of this stately open- 
 air dining salon, was raised on a bank of turf. The tables 
 were served by groups of court ladies dressed as "peasant 
 girls in satin and cloth of gold according to the costumes 
 of the various provinces of France." When the boats of 
 the guests reached the isle from Bayonne, "after a voyage 
 accompanied by continuous music from several marine gods 
 singing and reciting verses around the royal barge," the 
 shepherdesses received them, "each troup dancing according 
 to the custom of its province, the Poitevines with the bag- 
 pipes, the Provencales dancing la Volte with the cymbals, 
 the Burgundians and Champagnoises with the little oboe, 
 violins and rustic tambourines, the Bretonnes dancing their 
 passe-pieds and branles-gais, etc. When the feast was over 
 a huge luminous rock rolled into the center out of which 
 came a group of satyrs playing instruments. After them 
 descended a band of nymphs whose beauty and whose jewels 
 dimmed the lights. They began a beautiful ballet, but 
 envious fortune, unable to bear its glory, sent such a terrible 
 rainstorm that the confusion of the night retreat by boat 
 gave the next morning as many good stories to laugh at as 
 the festival had given thrills of pleasure." A few days later 
 there was a magnificent tournament fought on either side 
 by champions commanded respectively by the King and his 
 brother. The companies entered the lists in triumphal 
 chariots drawn by four beautiful white hackneys. One 
 chariot was crowned by the figure of Venus and covered 
 with cloth of gold. The other was crowned by the figure 
 of Cupid and covered with cloth ol silver. The tourna-
 
 320 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 ment lasted for three hours and was followed by a display 
 of fireworks. 1 
 
 These continuous festivals, among the most costly ever 
 given by the splendor-loving Catherine, were meant to 
 conceal the real object of the meeting, which was a matter 
 of grave suspicion to the Huguenot party in France and to 
 all Protestants throughout the world. Philip's fear of 
 arousing by an interview dangerous Protestant suspicion 
 was fully justified by the event and some modern historians 
 have called Catherine's persistence in arranging this inter- 
 view the most shortsighted thing in the diplomacy of her 
 entire life. After the meeting was over, it continued to be 
 regarded as sinister by all dissidents from the ancient 
 church, and seven years later they concluded that their 
 suspicion had been justified by the night of St. Bartholomew. 
 Many historians have accepted this conclusion, but it was 
 wrong, for we know by documents not accessible until recent 
 years that St. Bartholomew was not planned at Bayonne. 
 We must be a little less positive in regard to the details of 
 what did take place there, but it is plain enough what 
 Catherine tried to get and what Philip did get from her. 
 She did not want to yield to her son-in-law, but she hoped 
 to become very much better friends with him. It was not 
 unnatural for her to feel that a personal interview would 
 very much help this, when she remembered the interviews 
 which Francis I had held with Henry VIII and Charles V, 
 and she wrote there were things she could only say to the 
 King of Spain himself. In addition she was not insensible 
 to the effect upon the world of the spectacle of the greatest 
 King and Queen in Christendom coming together to meet 
 their mother, "the merchant's daughter." Above all she 
 hoped finally to arrange the best possible marriages for her 
 children. 2 
 
 Philip would not come and therefore we have very full 
 reports of his representative, the Duke of Alva. Philip had 
 
 1 Jouan, Margaret. 
 
 •Letts. X 123; A. N. K. 1501 f. 29, Granvelle (1) IX, 314, 517.
 
 THE INTERVIEW OF BAYONNE 321 
 
 insisted that if Catherine brought any Huguenots in her 
 train, he would not permit his wife to cross the river to see 
 her mother. The leader of the Catholics, the Cardinal of 
 Lorraine, was absent at the Council of Trent and the people 
 of importance whom Alva considered "dependable for the 
 cause the King desires to promote" were the Constable, the 
 Cardinal of Bourbon (both of whom heTegards as orthodox 
 but unwilling to take the initiative). More energetic par- 
 tisans were the Cardinal of Guise, Damville, the Duke of 
 Montpensier and Monluc. The Cardinal of Guise told him 
 that three or four unhappy people were the only cause of 
 the trouble in the realm and that it was deplorable to see 
 some willing to support them in their evil simply because 
 they were related to them by blood. Damville, the Con- 
 stable's second son, said, "If he were cut in pieces and his 
 breast were opened, the name of Philip would be found 
 engraved on his heart." "As far as Monluc is concerned," 
 Alva writes, "knowing the great vanity of that person, I 
 determined to take hold of him on his weak side. ... I 
 said, 'Sir, this whole assembly of princes and princesses and 
 great personages is entirely your work, because it was your 
 report advocating this interview which induced the King 
 of Spain to agree to it.' ... As he listened to my words he 
 was seized by a most terrible fit of vanity and laid his whole 
 heart open to me." He promised to write out his opinion, 
 which Alva forwarded. 1 
 
 Monluc's memoir estimated that in Champagne, Bur- 
 gundy, Lyonnais, Auvergne, Provence, Languedoc and the 
 larger part of Guienne, the orthodox party were the 
 stronger. Dauphiny, Xaintonge, and the greater part of 
 Poitou were badly infected, but in Anjou and Touraine, 
 from Orleans to Paris, orthodoxy prevailed and no other 
 part of the kingdom was affected except a part of Picardy 
 and Normandy. Summing it all up, he believed that five- 
 sixths of the kingdom was held by the orthodox. The whole 
 matter could be settled by an edicx that any man who does 
 
 a GranveUe (1), pntd. IX, 281; A. N. K. 1503 f. 15.
 
 322 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 not wish to live in the King's religion, must leave France 
 within a month, with permission to sell his estates, and he 
 assured Philip that this is really what the Queen Mother 
 wants to do and intends to do. It is hard to avoid the con- 
 clusion that, just as Alva had fooled Monluc through his 
 terrible vanity, so the Queen was making a tool of the old 
 soldier to persuade Philip that this was what she meant to 
 do and so get an agreement to her real object in holding the 
 conference. As a matter of fact Catherine did not intend at 
 this time to do anything of the sort, unless she was abso- 
 lutely obliged to do it. The Duke of Montpensier suggested 
 in the name of the nobles named by Alva, that heretic 
 ministers should be given a month to leave the country and 
 heretic services forbidden, that the decisions of the Council 
 of Trent should be immediately published and enforced, and 
 that no man whose orthodoxy was suspected should be al- 
 lowed to hold an office or even be received at court. The 
 messenger who brought this opinion said to the Spanish Am- 
 bassador that it contained only the minimum of what was 
 necessary to be done, and that it would be better and simpler 
 to cut off the heads of Conde, the Admiral, d'Andelot, La 
 Rochefoucauld, and Grammont. The Duke of Alva 
 thought the little knot of nobles headed by Montpensier 
 were looking entirely to the King of Spain and as loyal to 
 him as if they were his own subjects. 1 
 
 But when he began to approach the King and Queen 
 he found things entirely different. When he told the King 
 that he was chosen of God to put his hand to a great work 
 of chastisement, the King answered, "No; taking up arms 
 is not to be thought of. I don't want to destroy my king- 
 dom as they had begun to do in the last war." He then 
 determined to force the Queen Mother to declare herself. 
 In the conversation, at which only the Queen of Spain was 
 present, Alva thought that Catherine "displayed in her 
 manner of handling the subject more tact and skill than I 
 
 1 Monlue, V, 33; Letta. II, pntd. Int. 73 Comp. Marcks, 186. A. N. K. 
 1503 f. 18.
 
 THE INTERVIEW OF BAYONNE 323 
 
 have ever found in any person under any circumstances." 
 Alva said that the two kingdoms were equally concerned in 
 this matter because the infection of France would un- 
 doubtedly spread to Spain, so that his master thought his 
 crown and perhaps his life was involved in this danger. 
 The only thing his master cared to negotiate about was 
 driving out of France that evil sect. Catherine was "ex- 
 ceedingly cold about religion and really attentive to nothing 
 except the matter of the marriages of her children. She 
 kept saying that to help the troubles of religion there is 
 nothing better than to unite the two crowns and the two 
 houses by new bonds." As, for instance, by marrying 
 Catherine's youngest daughter, Margaret, to the heir of 
 the Spanish throne and her second son, the Duke of Orleans, 
 to the Princess of Portugal, to whom the King of Spain 
 might present a state in order that the young couple might 
 set up as King and Queen. So the fencing went on; Alva 
 insisting on the extermination of heresy in France, Catherine 
 upon the marriages of her children, and neither agreeing to 
 anything the other wanted. 1 
 
 Catherine did not mean, however, to go away without 
 some visible result and when the interview was formally 
 over, she played her last card. Marshal Bourdillon, who 
 had the name of being a moderate, was sent to tell Alva 
 quietly that Catherine had said that if the King of Spain 
 would make the marriage for her second son and give him 
 a state as a marriage portion, she would arrange to fix all 
 the difficulties about religion. Alva made no comment on 
 this offer except to write in his last letter that it would be 
 time enough to talk about those marriages when something 
 has really been done in France to suppress heresy. Then, 
 believing that everything was lost "unless God helps," he 
 prepared to leave Bayonne in great discontent. 
 
 But when the conference was closed, Catherine, as she 
 often did in her letters, put the most important thing into 
 
 *Granvelle (1) IX, 307; A. N. K. 1503 f. 36, ib. 1508 f. 38.
 
 324 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 a postscript. She crossed the border with her daughter and 
 went with her a little bit into Spain. 
 
 The Spanish Ambassador wrote to Philip : "At St. Jean 
 de Luz the tears of Her Majesty's mother and brothers 
 began to flow and certainly they were many. The Con- 
 stable finally went into the King's room and told him he 
 ought not to cry for it would be much noticed by strangers 
 and his vassals, because tears were very unbecoming to the 
 eyes of a King." Weeping was suspended long enough to 
 hold a last conference in the presence of the Guise, the 
 Bourbons, the Constable and the Duke of Montpensier. The 
 Ambassador wrote of it: "If the agreement which the Duke 
 of Alva will tell your Majesty was made here, is carried out, 
 it is all that can be desired for the service of God and 
 Your Majesty." * 
 
 What was this agreement? Was it only "to take all 
 arms out of the hands of the Huguenots?" Was it to seize 
 and execute or imprison their chiefs? Or was it, as was 
 afterwards believed, the plan for their treacherous exter- 
 mination which was attempted seven years later at St. 
 Bartholomew? A study of the Spanish dispatches makes 
 the answer to these questions as certain as our knowledge 
 can be about anything of which we have no direct record. 
 
 The first means of telling what was agreed upon in that 
 conference is that we know precisely what the two points 
 were which the Duke of Alva had been trying to get from 
 Catherine. First, that the kingdom of France should accept 
 and put in force the decrees of the Council of Trent which 
 had just closed its session and second, that the King should 
 take measures for "the punishment of the rebels and those 
 astray in the matter of religion." We know also that up 
 to the very end of the formal conferences the Duke was 
 very much disgusted because Catherine would pay no atten- 
 tion to these demands and did not seem to care for anything 
 except the marriages of her children. So, even if we had 
 no other evidence, it would be fair to conclude that, when 
 
 ^ranvelle (1) IX, 30; Letts. II, 297. A. N. K. 1503 f. 47.
 
 THE INTERVIEW OP BAYONNE 325 
 
 he expressed himself as fully satisfied with the result of the 
 last interview, it must have included the granting of these 
 two points. 1 But we have other evidence. A careful study 
 of the reports of the subsequent conversations between 
 Catherine and the Spanish Ambassador when he complained 
 she was breaking her promises made at Bayonne, leaves 
 no reasonable doubt that the agreement did include these 
 two points and makes it certain that it did not include any 
 plot for what happened seven years later on St. Bartholo- 
 mew's day. 
 
 It is evident that the Spaniards feared from the first 
 Catherine would not keep her promises. A few days after 
 she left Bayonne, the Ambassador reports a conversation 
 with her. "The Queen withdrew a little from bystanders 
 who might overhear what she said and, leaning quite close 
 to my ear, said, 'Think me no true woman if I do not carry 
 out all that was agreed upon with my son, but, as you said 
 to me the other day, it is necessary that we should be 
 exceedingly secret because already many people are very 
 much alarmed over what may happen.' " The Ambassador 
 adds, "Nevertheless I must say to Your Majesty that I am 
 very much afraid of the influence upon the Queen's mind 
 of the heretics of this court and that her zeal may be cooled 
 by outside influences." The next month we find him re- 
 porting that Catherine is insisting upon the carrying out 
 of the marriages as a preliminary to fulfilling the promises 
 made in the interview, in spite of the fact that the promises 
 were not at all conditional on the marriages. 2 
 
 In January, 1566, five months later, the Ambassador 
 reported again to Philip that he had blamed the Queen for 
 allowing the Admiral to come to court and she had told him 
 that he thought he knew her affairs better than she did 
 herself. He replied, "You are not keeping a single one of 
 the promises you made to my master although, now that the 
 leading presidents of all the parlements are met together, it 
 
 'A. N. K. 1503 f. 38. 
 
 a A. N. K. 1503 f. 50, 60, 74.
 
 326 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 would be perfectly easy to recall the pernicious tolerant 
 edicts which have already been issued in this kingdom." 
 The next month he reports another conversation in which 
 he told her that the Admiral controls everything, and that 
 she had not kept her promises and was not carrying out the 
 "remedy agreed upon in the interview of Bayonne for the 
 condition of religion in this kingdom." In particular she was 
 not recalling "the pernicious edict" (Amboise). The next 
 month he reports that "since the Queen Mother is post- 
 poning to such an unbearable extent the execution of what 
 she had promised in regard to religion, Philip ought to write 
 her a strong letter or else get his wife to do it." The month 
 after that Philip wrote to his Ambassador approving his 
 activity in urging the Queen to carry out the resolutions 
 taken at Bayonne and says he cannot talk too freely about 
 it to the French Ambassador at Madrid because, "as you 
 know, he is not one of those who understand the particulars 
 of the agreement." In reply the Ambassador said that 
 the Cardinal of Bourbon had offered in the Queen's name 
 a plain bargain, that, if the marriages of her children were 
 once made, they would drive all the ministers out of France 
 and support in the strongest way the orthodox religion. 
 Then suddenly, at the end of June, the tone changes and the 
 Ambassador is evidently under the impression that the 
 Queen "had promised that within five months she would 
 publish the canons of the Council of Trent and drive the 
 ministers from the kingdom." But Catherine was only 
 playing with him. The next month he reported that the 
 Queen was again back at the old bargain, "marriages first 
 and then 'the remedy.' " When he pointed out that "the 
 remedy" was a distinct agreement on her part and the 
 marriages left as a thing to be afterwards discussed "she 
 grew very angry." 1 
 
 It is evident from their correspondence that, from 
 a year after Bayonne, neither Philip nor anyone in 
 his council expected Catherine to keep the promise she 
 
 *A. N. K. 1503 f. 2, 19, 67, 79, 96, 102.
 
 THE INTERVIEW OF BAYONNE 327 
 
 made at the end of the conference to do her utmost to 
 destroy heresy by revoking the Edict of Amboise and en- 
 forcing in France the new canons of the Council of Trent. 
 Manifestly they had never expected her to do more than 
 this. 
 
 It is true that many years later Henry of Navarre said 
 that at Bayonne (when he was between eleven and twelve 
 years old) listening to a talk between Alva and Catherine, 
 he heard Alva say, "The head of one salmon is worth the 
 heads of a hundred frogs." But the memories of a boy of 
 eleven years old are not apt to be accurate and one cannot 
 help remarking in regard to a number of the reminiscences 
 of Henry IV, that his memory after a lapse of years had 
 the habit of taking a decidedly dramatic turn. It is very 
 hard to prove a negative, but to one who keeps firmly in 
 mind the difference between history and drama, a calm 
 review of all contemporary evidence makes it so highly 
 probable as to be practically certain, that no suggestion 
 was made by Spain to Catherine at Bayonne of a general 
 treacherous massacre of the entire Huguenot party. There 
 is even more reason to believe that, if it had been made 
 she would not then have thought for a moment of carrying 
 it out. 
 
 The suspicions raised in the minds of the Huguenots 
 by the interview at Bayonne made the task of preventing 
 France from falling back into civil war even harder than 
 it had been for Catherine. She was under constant pressure 
 from Spain to revoke the Edict of Amboise because it 
 granted toleration to the Huguenots. The Huguenots were 
 continually telling her that the toleration it granted was 
 illusory, while the extreme Catholics asserted that the 
 Huguenots steadily transgressed the limits of the too ample 
 liberties there granted to them. The complaints of both 
 sides were on the whole justified. But the wrongs com- 
 plained of by the Huguenots were decidedly more intoler- 
 able, for they included such things as mobs killing Hugue- 
 nots on their way to their legally appointed places of wor-
 
 328 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 ship, or the murder and mutilation by a mob of a commis- 
 sary sent to a town to investigate the plundering of a 
 Huguenot temple, or things like this told in the journal 
 of du Maurier, son of a country gentleman of modest means: 
 "I have often heard my mother say that, just before I was 
 born, she several times had the greatest difficulty to save 
 herself from being drowned like others of all ages and sexes 
 by a great lord of the country, a persecutor of religion. He 
 had them thrown into a river close by his house saying that 
 he would make them drink out of his big saucer." For 
 these wrongs the Huguenots claimed that they could seldom 
 obtain justice and letters of protest from men like Coligny 
 and Conde recorded an ever rising number of such murders. 
 Just how widespread they were and whether the situation 
 of the Huguenots was more intolerable than the horrors of 
 civil war, is a thing which was difficult to judge at the time 
 and impossible to decide after the lapse of generations. 
 That a really strong monarch could have suppressed them 
 is probable, that a woman in the situation of Catherine 
 could have stopped them, is more doubtful. The only 
 thing certain is that the acceptance of the advice of her 
 son-in-law to cure the disorder of France by revoking the 
 Edict of Amboise and entirely forbidding Reformed wor- 
 ship in the kingdom, would instantly have renewed the 
 civil war. 1 
 
 The second thing which Philip urged upon Catherine — 
 the immediate acceptance of the canons and decrees of the 
 Council of Trent — would have been even more difficult to 
 carry out; for it would have been resisted not only by the 
 Reformed church but by many Catholics. In order to 
 understand the difficulty of this proposed action we must 
 briefly review the position of the French Church and 
 Catherine's relations to the Council of Trent. 
 
 The Council of Constance in the beginning of the fif- 
 teenth century had deposed the three contesting Popes 
 
 *La Popeliniere, Bk. X, Challe qtd. I, 112; Brimont, II, 11; (Euvre 
 6 qtd. Mss.
 
 THE INTERVIEW OF BAYONNE 329 
 
 and elected a new Pope by a method of election never 
 before used. Not content with this assumption of authority, 
 it had explicitly declared that the decision of an ecumenical 
 council was the supreme authority in the Church. It had 
 committed the reform of the Church in head and members 
 to the new Pope, Martin V, and added the decree that this 
 mandate was to be carried out in cooperation with future 
 councils meeting at intervals of ten years. This decision 
 in regard to periodical councils had never been followed. 
 When protest became too insistent, Pius II in 1460 issued 
 the bull "execrable and in early times unheard of" in which 
 he said that the doctrine of conciliar supremacy was her- 
 etical and anathematized anyone who should dare to appeal 
 from his decision to a council. But in spite of this prohi- 
 bition, the manifest corruptions of the Church made the 
 need of a council more and more manifest toward the end 
 of the fifteenth century. The real cause of the death of 
 Savonarola was his appeal to the princes of Europe to 
 summon a council to hear his complaints against Pope 
 Alexander VI. In the early sixteenth century, at almost 
 the same time the University of Paris and Martin Luther 
 demanded the summoning of an ecumenical council. When 
 the great German schism began, the emperor Charles V, 
 who desired to save the unity of the Empire, was so in- 
 sistent in his demand for a general council that the Pope 
 was obliged to call one in Italy in 1536. It was, however, 
 continually adjourned and nine years later had accom- 
 plished practically nothing. Then, in 1545, under great 
 pressure from the Emperor, the Pope finally reconvened the 
 Council in the city of Trent, on the southern slopes of the 
 Alps, but within the bounds of the Empire. Contrary to 
 the wish of the Emperor the Council at once took up, not 
 the practical reform of the Church, but the definition of 
 doctrine and proceeded to pass certain decrees in which 
 the divergences between the Church doctrine and the 
 teaching of the Protestants were emphasized as much as 
 possible. After seven years of irregular work, with long
 
 330 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 intervals of suspension, the Council went out of session in 
 1552 because it was threatened by the approach of the army 
 of the Protestant princes of Germany. It did not assemble 
 again for ten years. 
 
 Meantime the French Crown had become very much 
 interested in the Council as a means of bringing about the 
 reunion of Christendom. In July, 1560, Francis II wrote 
 to his ambassador at Madrid to urge upon Philip II the 
 need of a general council to settle the religious troubles of 
 the world. He wanted, however, not a resumption of the 
 Council of Trent, but a new council held in some place 
 accessible to all and perfectly satisfactory to the Protestants. 
 This came out of Catherine's policy of conciliation, but the 
 Cardinal of Lorraine also favored it, for he was quite 
 inclined to accept some Lutheran views; more particularly 
 in regard to the doctrine of salvation by faith. He had 
 great confidence in his own undoubted skill as a theologian 
 and a preacher and repeatedly declared that he held firmly 
 to the doctrine of the Gallican Church that a general coun- 
 cil was the supreme authority in the Church and superior 
 to the authority of the Pope. 
 
 Catherine was very strongly in favor of calling a general 
 council and hoped to get all the Protestant nations to send 
 delegates to it. When as Regent she had found the Papacy 
 recalcitrant, she prepared to summon a national council 
 of the Gallican Church, a project which was even more 
 repugnant to the supporters of the papal supremacy than 
 the idea of a general council. The Pope yielded rather 
 reluctantly to the pressure from France, Spain and Germany 
 to summon a council to Trent. His views of its object 
 were, however, very different from those of the Emperor 
 and Catherine. 
 
 They wished to reunite the Church by conciliation, but 
 within a few months of its opening the Pope wanted to 
 form a league between France, Spain and the papacy for 
 the extirpation of heresy, especially in France, and he pro- 
 posed to suspend the sittings of the Council until that could
 
 THE INTERVIEW OF BAYONNE 331 
 
 be accomplished. Though the Pope hardly felt able to 
 dissolve the Council, he was not obliged to accept decrees 
 which did not please him, because they did not vote by 
 nations, as the Council of Constance had done. Therefore 
 the preponderance of Italian bishops gave him about two- 
 thirds of the votes in general sittings, nor could anything 
 be considered by the Council unless it was brought 
 forward by a legate. France demanded a number of re- 
 forms, many of them, like vernacular prayers and public 
 exposition of the Scriptures, plainly intended to conciliate 
 the Protestants. This action was deeply resented at Rome. 
 The French Ambassador at Trent wrote Catherine in the 
 early days of its session that he had heard from Rome that 
 the Pope had said he was proposing so many novelties that 
 he seemed like an ambassador for the Huguenots. He said 
 he had not proposed anything except what the Queen had 
 instructed him to propose and that in the most restrained 
 words possible, "but there are here some evil spirits who, 
 being afraid of the reformation of the Church and desiring 
 the dissolution of the Council write continually to Rome all 
 the lies and calumnies possible." Indeed, Lansac felt so 
 strongly the lack of free decision in the Council that he 
 wrote to the French Ambassador at Rome that it was a 
 common profane saying among the ambassadors at Trent 
 that the Holy Ghost was sent to guide the Council every 
 week in a valise from Rome. More than twenty years 
 afterwards when Lansac was delivering at the Estates Gen- 
 eral of Blois a magnificent eulogy on the Council of Trent 
 and its decrees, he was much embarrassed by having the 
 royal Advocate General, who opposed the acceptance of the 
 decrees, read this letter. 1 
 
 Catherine urged her reforms and wrote to Lansac that, 
 in spite of her respect for the papal legates, she sees that 
 "their acts differ entirely from their words." She begins 
 "to fear the Council will be nothing but a brave show of 
 
 *B. N. Nouvs. Acqs. 20597, June, 1562. "The Pope is master of fhis 
 Council." De Thou, III, 432; B. N. fds. fr. 6626 f. 28; de Thou, VII, 322.
 
 332 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 blossoms without any fruit of amendment and you know 
 how much our abuses and corruptions need severe reforms. 
 ... I am afraid that in the end our dissimulation will draw 
 the anger of God on our heads and that the weight of His 
 hand will make us seek with tears and sighs the amendment 
 we now resist." * 
 
 The Pope was soon displeased also with the action of 
 Spain, for, within a few months of the opening of the 
 Council, Catherine received a letter from Rome informing 
 her that "the Pope is furious at the King of Spain and it 
 is said that he will not do anything that the King of Spain 
 asks because he will have no dealings with the Pope nor 
 acknowledge his bulls or answer his letters." The French 
 commissioners, however, were urging much more sweeping 
 reforms than the Spanish and they desired to avoid the 
 discussion of doctrines, which might make the prospect of 
 the reunion of Christendom more difficult. It was also an 
 open secret that, while they were willing not to raise the 
 abstract question of whether the Pope or the Council was 
 supreme, they would, if the question was forced, stand by 
 the doctrine of conciliar supremacy. Therefore the Pope 
 was prepared, on the whole, in case of any quarrel between 
 France and Spain, to stand by Spain. 2 
 
 The quarrel arose when the Spanish Ambassador by 
 previous agreement with the Legate, took, at one of 
 the solemn assemblies of the Council, a seat entirely by 
 himself on a chair of black velvet, placed in a position 
 which gave him ceremonial precedence over all the other 
 ambassadors. The French Ambassadors made so much 
 disturbance that they nearly broke up the service in the 
 midst of the recital of the creed. Catherine wrote about it 
 in the greatest indignation and treasured it up as a very 
 great insult done to her by the King of Spain and the Pope. 
 Both Frenchmen and Spaniards continued to discuss it with 
 the extraordinary bitterness which always, in every age, is 
 
 1 Letts. II, 41. 
 
 'B. N. Nouvs., Acqs. 20597 f. 165.
 
 THE INTERVIEW OF BAYONNE 333 
 
 apt to mark discussions of questions of precedence or pres- 
 tige. Catherine also sent ambassadors to try to persuade 
 the Council and the Pope to move the Council to some 
 city in Germany and to persuade the Germans, the English, 
 the Dutch, the Danes and the Swedes to send delegates to 
 it. But her proposal scarcely got a hearing. 
 
 Thus Catherine got so little satisfaction out of the action 
 of the Council that she sent orders (naturally in the name 
 of the King) to the Cardinal of Lorraine, who in the year 
 1563 had gone to the Council and taken the lead of the 
 French prelates, to assemble them in a separate legation 
 and make a formal demand upon the Council to satisfy the 
 request of France for the reformation of the Church. The 
 terms of the orders and the method of the action were 
 plainly meant to suggest the threat of withdrawing from 
 the Council. The Cardinal, however, delayed acting upon 
 these orders, which were not absolute and finally obtained 
 permission from the Crown to go to Rome with the French 
 bishops in order to have a conference with the Pope. 
 
 During his absence the Council proceeded to pass certain 
 resolutions which seemed to the French royal council to 
 use reformation as a pretext to decrease the power of the 
 French Crown over the French Church, while leaving other 
 abuses whose center was at Rome altogether untouched. 
 This brought Catherine's displeasure with the Council to 
 the highest pitch and a royal letter was sent ordering the 
 French prelates to demand an explicit answer to the thirty- 
 four demands made by France for the reformation of the 
 Church and, if they failed to receive it, to leave the city 
 of Trent and go to Venice to wait for orders. This letter 
 said : 
 
 'The King had never expected anything from the Council 
 except the reunion of Christendom and peace, which could not 
 be brought about except by a very serious reformation of 
 ecclesiastical discipline. But the fathers of the Council, after 
 having very superficially touched on the subject of reformation, 
 were now making every effort to destroy the rights, the liberties
 
 334 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 and the power of princes ; whereas it was no part of their author- 
 ity to mingle in the civil government of states. This was a direct 
 injury to the public peace and the King would not suffer it." 
 
 In this strained situation, the French Ambassador in 
 the month of September, 1563, delivered a most indignant 
 address before the Council. Du Ferrier said that Pope Pius 
 IV was a father without affection, who, in defiance of all the 
 form of law, had condemned his eldest son (that is to say, 
 the very Christian King) without having heard him, taking 
 from him the prerogative which he had always had not to 
 grant precedence to anyone except the Emperor. While 
 pretending to seek the unity and concord of the Church, 
 he had, as a matter of fact, broken up a firm peace between 
 two great powers by an unjust judgment which he had 
 pronounced against the King during his minority. There- 
 fore they are compelled to leave a place from which Pius IV 
 has banished afl law and where it is not possible any more 
 to have even the shadow of liberty. "For," he asked, "has 
 any conclusion ever been published before it has been sent to 
 Rome to get the approval of the Pope? It is therefore," 
 concluded the ambassador, "Pius IV alone against whom we 
 protest. We have a profound respect for the apostolic 
 creed and for the Holy Roman Church, but we refuse to 
 obey Pius IV; we reject with scorn his decrees; we do not 
 recognize him as the Vicar of Jesus Christ, as the head of 
 the Church, as the legitimate successor of Peter and, as 
 everything is done at Rome and nothing at Trent, we 
 declare that everything that has been done and shall be 
 done in this assembly should be taken as only the personal 
 action of Pius IV, that the most Christian King will never 
 approve of these decrees and that the Church will never 
 regard them as the decision of a universal council. Arch- 
 bishops, abbots, doctors of theology of France, the King 
 orders you all to leave Trent, ready to return as soon as it 
 shall please God to give to the General Council of the 
 Catholic Church its ancient liberty and when there shall
 
 THE INTERVIEW OF BAYONNE 335 
 
 have been restored to the very Christian King the rank 
 which belongs to his dignity and his majesty." 1 
 
 The Council closed on the 4th of December, 1563, leav- 
 ing a large body of decrees and canons as the result of its 
 sessions. The dogmatic canons referred chiefly to those 
 doctrines which had been attacked or discussed by the 
 Protestants. The decrees on discipline instituted many 
 very salutary reforms but did not attempt a general 
 thorough-going reform of the entire body of church law and 
 usage. 
 
 A royal letter to the French Ambassador has a phrase 
 which sounds like one of Catherine's, "The fathers of the 
 Council seem to want to pass articles which will file the 
 nails of kings and let theirs grow," and she was not at all 
 anxious to adopt the canons and decrees of a council which 
 had acted so little according to her wishes. Nor was there 
 any considerable party in the kingdom which desired to 
 adopt those decrees as they stood. The Cardinal of Lor- 
 raine indeed, although in the beginning of the Council he 
 had acted as one of the leaders of the opposition to the 
 papal party, had returned from Rome apparently converted 
 to the necessity of supporting the results of the Council. 
 But the French clergy had for many years been unshaken 
 in their devotion to the Gallican theory of the Church, 
 which looked upon the Pope as the Bishop of the bishops 
 who presided over the commonwealth of Christendom in 
 which each nation, and particularly the French Nation, 
 had large fundamental and irreducible liberties no pope 
 had a right to take away. 2 
 
 For example, in the year 1560 a certain postulant for 
 the degree of bachelor of theology had put into his thesis 
 that "the Pope, as the monarch of the Church, had sovereign 
 power over all temporal things as well as spiritual things 
 and could therefore deprive of their kingdoms princes who 
 would not submit to his decrees." The very theological 
 
 'De Thou, III, 455. See Latin text. French is glossed. 
 1 Instructions, 158.
 
 336 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 faculty of the Sorbonne, which had lit the fires of perse- 
 cution and the Parlement of Paris which had refused to 
 register the conciliating edict of Catherine, joined in com- 
 pelling the young man to retract. The Parlement solemnly 
 ordered the University not to permit in the future even the 
 abstract discussion of any such thesis. The Cardinal of 
 Lorraine himself on his first arrival at the Council of Trent 
 had said in his harangue, "I cannot deny that I am a 
 Frenchman educated at the University of Paris, in which 
 it is held that the authority of the Council is above that of 
 the Pope and those who deny it are condemned as heretics." 
 A little later he asserted, in the presence of ten bishops, 
 that the doctrine of conciliar supremacy was "for him a 
 truth as certain as that the Son of God had become man." 
 There was no university or parlement in France in which 
 the Protestants had the controlling influence, and yet there 
 was no parlement or university in France which would have 
 voted to accept the decrees of Trent as they stood, because 
 they seemed to impinge upon the prerogative of the King 
 and to destroy some of the liberties of the Gallican Church. 1 
 *Pasquier, II, 90; Conde, 60, 61, 67. Guillemin qtd. Sarpi, VIII, 696.
 
 CHAPTER XX 
 
 FEUDS AND QUARRELS. HERESY IN THE NETHERLANDS. 
 THE HATRED OF SPAIN 
 
 Before the royal progress through the provinces was 
 ended, Catherine had attempted to gather the fruit of it 
 in a solemn meeting for reform and reconciliation, held in 
 the city of Moulins in December, 1565, which included 
 all the members of the royal family, the chief nobles of 
 France and the leading members of all the parlements of 
 the kingdom. On the legal side the Assembly was extremely 
 successful. The King issued the ordinance drawn up by 
 the Chancellor de l'Hospital for the reform of the admin- 
 istration of justice, of which de Thou wrote forty years 
 later, "It is now everywhere received and justice is ad- 
 ministered according to its rules in almost all the sovereign 
 courts and the other lower jurisdictions of the realm." A 
 less successful attempt was made also to reform the corrupt 
 administration of the finances. 1 
 
 The task of administrative, legal and financial reforms 
 Catherine seems to have left entirely to THospital and his 
 associates. She kept in her own hands the task of recon- 
 ciling the quarrels between the leading families of the 
 French nobility. It was the sort of thing for which she 
 was best fitted, but it was terribly difficult. There were 
 rumors before the Assembly met that the Huguenot leaders 
 were calling upon large numbers of their friends to come 
 to Moulins and strict rules were laid down to avoid trouble. 
 Gentlemen were forbidden under any circumstances "to put 
 a hand to their swords in the city." No page or lackey 
 was to wear either sword or dagger under penalty of a 
 whipping for the page and the estrapade for the lackey. 
 
 l De Thou, III, 660, 663. B. N. It. 1726 f. 109, Cal. F. 1566, p. 187. 
 
 337
 
 338 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 Every house must show at night a lighted lantern and 
 nobody could walk the streets without a light. 1 
 
 Catherine arranged that the Admiral and Cardinal Lor- 
 raine should have rooms in the same house and told them 
 that each was responsible for the safety of the other. This 
 was to begin with the greatest danger; for the blood feud 
 of the house of Guise against the Admiral was the most 
 dangerous of all the quarrels among the French nobility. 
 The Cardinal of Lorraine on his arrival made a speech in 
 the royal council. He said that as a man of the Church 
 he did not wear a sword, but he did stand for the honor of 
 a family, which was related by blood or marriage to a great 
 number of those present including the King and Queen 
 themselves. If this affair was concluded without regard to 
 the family honor, it would not remove the danger "that my 
 brothers and my nephews, without counting those who are 
 related to me by slighter degrees of blood, may kill the 
 Admiral wherever they find him." 
 
 As soon as the Assembly was convened, accusations of 
 plots to assassinate began to be handed from one side to 
 the other. The Captain General, d'Andelot, accused the 
 Cardinal of Lorraine of attempting to procure his murder 
 and the Cardinal of Lorraine hotly demanded punishment 
 for the slanderous accusation. The Duke of Aumale denied 
 the charge of planning murder, but said to Catherine and 
 the King, "Would to God that the Admiral and I could be 
 locked up in a room together and let him who survives come 
 out." Catherine found a letter on the threshold of her door 
 threatening her with death if she did not change her policy 
 and the Guise told her that this threat was secretly insti- 
 gated by the Admiral. One of the Admiral's vassals arrested 
 by him, accused the Admiral of having tried to hire him to 
 kill the Queen Mother. In reply the Constable, accom- 
 panied by all his nephews, appeared before the royal 
 council and demanded and obtained that the slanderer 
 should be publicly broken upon the wheel. Catherine was 
 
 *B. N. It. 1724, ib. 1725 f. 102. 314, fds. fr. 3207 f. 5, ib. 3195.
 
 FEUDS AND QUARRELS 339 
 
 skilful enough to arrange, in this dangerous atmosphere, 
 stately scenes of reconciliation in the most notorious of 
 these quarrels. The result of the pressure she brought to 
 bear on both sides, was that the widow of the Duke of Guise 
 gave the kiss of peace to the Admiral whom she had accused 
 of the murder of her husband. The quarrel between the 
 Cardinal of Lorraine and Marshal Montmorency was also 
 closed by a formal scene of reconciliation. The Marshal 
 expressed his very great esteem for the admirable character 
 of the Cardinal of Lorraine and the Cardinal said that he 
 believed the Marshal in attacking him in the streets of 
 Paris had acted only from the very highest sense of duty. 1 
 In the reconciliation with Coligny, the children and 
 one of the brothers of the dead Duke of Guise refused to 
 take any part and his widow carried away from it in her 
 heart a deadly hatred. Besides these advertised hatreds 
 there were cases of jealous animosity which kept breaking 
 out in new quarrels. The Constable and the Duke of 
 Nevers said bitter things of each other and Damville and 
 the Duke of Longueville had a desperate quarrel. The 
 Spanish Ambassador reported to Philip that the widowed 
 Duchess of Guise and the Queen of Navarre "have black- 
 guarded each other like two fish-wives, in the presence of 
 the Queen Mother." It is evident that, towards the close 
 of the royal conference, there was a state of extreme nervous 
 tension among those at Moulins. The Duchess of Ferrara 
 quarreled with the Queen of Navarre in open court and said, 
 "I won't kiss as lying a mouth as yours." The Admiral and 
 the Cardinal of Bourbon had such high words in the pres- 
 ence of the King and Queen, that the Admiral's brothers 
 had to take him by the arm and lead him away, saying, 
 "Don't quarrel with a prince of the blood," and the Prince 
 of Conde when he heard of the scene was so infuriated with 
 the Cardinal, his brother, that he wouldn't speak to him 
 for a long while. 1 
 
 >Cal. F. 83; B. N. It. 1726 f. 19, 24, 36; A. N. K 1505 f. 17, 62, 76; 
 Castelnau, VI, 2; Cal. F. 1566 f. 4, 6. 
 
 *A. N. K. 1508 f. 23, ib. 1505 f. 86, 107, 112 B. N. It. 1726 f. 22.
 
 340 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 Amid all these personal animosities, the quarrel over 
 religion and the struggle between tolerance and intolerance, 
 found a dramatic expression in a wild scene in full council 
 between the Cardinal of Lorraine and his former friend and 
 adherent, Chancellor de l'Hospital. For behind all these 
 expressions of personal and factional hatred, fear and sus- 
 picion, lay the great mass of anger and fear stored up in 
 millions of hearts by the long conflict of opposed zeals, 
 bringing cruel deeds, bitter words, and ever more intolerant 
 temper. These broke out for instance in the early summer 
 of 1566 in bloody riots in the two neighboring towns of 
 Pamiers and Foix on the slopes of the Pyrenees. In one 
 the Huguenots killed many Catholics and drove the rest 
 out of the city "and the whole trouble because of a dance. 
 At Foix the Catholics have done the same." x 
 
 But on the whole it seems to be true that, in spite of 
 sporadic murder and riot, the Huguenots and Catholics 
 were, during the latter half of the year 1566 and the first 
 part of the year 1567, seeking a sort of modus vivendi. 
 Catherine had every reason therefore to refuse the renewed 
 and pressing advice of Philip II to stand by the agreement 
 she made at Bayonne to withdraw the Edict of Amboise and 
 issue another forbidding the exercise of the Reformed re- 
 ligion. She expressed this determination in a royal letter 
 to the French Ambassador at Madrid in language which 
 she doubtless expected to be repeated to the King of 
 Spain: 
 
 "So far as concerns the agreements I have made with my 
 subjects in regard to which they (the Spaniards) seem to be so 
 much troubled, after I have seen the combats so many times 
 renewed, pitched battles, cities taken by assault, all to no profit 
 except to ruin me more and more and to make me lose every 
 day the best of my subjects, I prefer, by the advice and counsel 
 of my most faithful servitors, to do what I have done rather 
 than to lose the rest of my kingdom. And God has made me 
 so happy that, instead of the ruin which I saw threatening me 
 
 bishop of Valence qtd. d'Aumale, I, 380; Arch. C, VI, 311.
 
 FEUDS AND QUARRELS 341 
 
 ... I now live in repose and my kingdom is building up again 
 more and more every day." 1 
 
 Philip, however, had more cause than ever to urge upon 
 Catherine a policy of repression of heresy. The fear which 
 had so long haunted him, that flourishing heresy in France 
 would make trouble in the richest of all his dominions, the 
 Netherlands, was now realized. Charles V, whose inher- 
 itance from his maternal and his paternal grandfather had 
 definitely united the Netherlands to the crown of Spain, 
 understood the Flemings because he had been brought up 
 among them. He had been able to accommodate himself 
 to their temper, at once practical, fond of pleasure and 
 proud of certain liberties. His son, Philip II, on the other 
 hand, had been brought up in Spain and was a true Spaniard 
 — cautious, self-restrained, careful of expense and the very 
 incarnation of that intense national pride which saw in 
 the Spanish people the chosen instrument of God to make 
 true religion and real civilization dominant in the world and 
 to do it by force of arms, — the point of view which made 
 the Spaniard see in the soldier a personage so honorable 
 as to be almost sacred. Philip at once began to replace 
 the native nobility, through whom his father had to a large 
 extent governed the Netherlands, by Spaniards. He neg- 
 lected the Estates General which had been in the habit 
 of frequently meeting. When they demanded the with- 
 drawal of the Spanish troops who had been brought there 
 because of the war with France, he first gave a promise to 
 withdraw them within four months and then, eighteen 
 months later, reluctantly summoned them home. These 
 things made him exceedingly unpopular when he left the 
 Netherlands for the last time in the year 1559. He made 
 his illegitimate sister, Margaret of Parma, Governor, but 
 she had neither the power nor the ability to allay the dis- 
 content and five years later the nobles of the royal council 
 of the Netherlands compelled Philip to withdraw from the 
 
 1 Letts. Ill, 13, note, qtd. B. N. fds. fr. 10751.
 
 342 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 Netherlands his chief minister upon whom he had the 
 largest reliance. 
 
 Meanwhile the new heretical opinions had been spread- 
 ing rapidly, chiefly by means of Calvinist books and preach- 
 ers. Ten years before his abdication, Charles V, by means 
 of a series of edicts known as The Placards, had tried to 
 purge the Netherlands of heresy by drastic persecution. 
 Philip sharpened and continued his father's policy in regard 
 to religion. He used the methods of widespread spying 
 which were giving the inquisition of Spain so terrible a 
 name and he excited the suspicion that he intended to intro- 
 duce that institution into the Netherlands. In addition he 
 proposed to create a new and more orthodox university and 
 to erect new bishoprics. These measures excited discontent, 
 not only among heretics but also among the orthodox, on the 
 grounds that they were an interference with the privileges 
 of the Church and the liberty of the Estates of the Nether- 
 lands and this sort of opposition was very much deepened 
 by the proclamation by royal edict of the conclusions of 
 the Council of Trent. These many causes of discontent 
 finally brought into being an association amongst some of 
 the nobles of the Netherlands whose object was an orderly 
 protest against this policy of the government, which seemed 
 to be an exercise of absolute power which they did not 
 believe the King of Spain rightfully possessed in the Nether- 
 lands. Philip replied to it that he intended to come to 
 the Netherlands himself the following spring, and mean- 
 while he agreed to modify his policy. When he made 
 these concessions, he solemnly declared in secret in the 
 presence of the Duke of Alva and two doctors of theology 
 that his promise of pardon to all concerned in this petition 
 was not binding upon him because it had been forced and 
 that he proposed to punish everybody who had wronged 
 either religion or his own sovereignty. 1 
 
 The news of these concessions was followed, in Flanders, 
 Holland and four other provinces of the Netherlands, by a 
 
 1 Gossart.
 
 FEUDS AND QUARRELS 343 
 
 very rapid increase in the number of heretical services held 
 in the open air, and not long after there was, from one end 
 of the Netherlands to the other, an outburst of that mob 
 hysteria known as iconoclasm. Small bands of men, while 
 the police and inhabitants looked on, sacked and destroyed 
 all the ornaments of the churches. Nothing was stolen, but 
 rich carvings, statues, pictures, tombs, baptismal fonts, all 
 went down in ruins. Many of the nobles who had been 
 engaged in the earlier protests against the policy of the 
 government, were displeased not only because of the element 
 of mob violence, but also because it made the movement 
 seem one in favor chiefly of a change in religion. 1 
 
 Philip had all along known that the discontent of the 
 Netherlands was encouraged by the Huguenots. Catherine 
 offered to issue a proclamation forbidding all Frenchmen 
 to enter the Netherlands and calling home within fifteen 
 days, under pain of death, all there, but the Spaniards sus- 
 pected her sincerity and Granvelle wrote from Rome to 
 Philip II, "The more the Queen Mother shows a desire to 
 use her good offices in this matter, the less she ought to be 
 trusted." This fear and knowledge of the influence of the 
 Huguenots in the Netherlands was the strongest motive for 
 Philip's constant pressure upon Catherine to suppress 
 heresy, as he was secretly resolved to repress it, by the 
 sword. As early as 1561 this insistence had drawn, in the 
 voice of the infant King, these words from Catherine and 
 the royal council, which the French Ambassador at Madrid 
 passed on to the King of Spain: "Let no one wish to give 
 the law to me about a thing in which I recognize no master 
 but God: that is to say, the government of this kingdom 
 and the management of my state." 2 
 
 Philip was now collecting a powerful army under the 
 command of the Duke of Alva, in order to apply to the 
 Netherlands the policy of terror, but when he asked per- 
 mission for his army to pass through France, Catherine 
 
 1 Letts. II, 385. 
 
 s Granvelle (2), I, 183, 411; Letts. I, 367, 377, 611; ib. II, 382, ctd. 
 note, 385 ctd. n.
 
 344 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 refused to grant it. In the spring of 1566 she had received 
 news of an event which raised her latent fear and suspicion 
 of Philip II to a flaming anger she could not suppress. 
 
 Ever since 1562 the French Government had been mak- 
 ing attempts to establish colonies in what is now the 
 southern part of the United States, and the second and third 
 expeditions in 1564 and 1565 built a fort on the coast of 
 Florida. Under pressure of famine, the members of the 
 second expedition had revolted against their leader, seized 
 two ships and committed extensive piracies on the Spanish 
 settlements in the island of Cuba. Although the leader of 
 the expedition subsequently executed some of the mutineers, 
 it was not, after all, very astonishing that the arrival of the 
 third French expedition was closely followed by eight 
 Spanish ships with orders to attack and destroy the new 
 settlement. The risky plan of campaign of the French 
 commander and a terrible tempest which destroyed the 
 French fleet, gave the Spaniards a complete victory. They 
 used it with the utmost cruelty. In spite of their promise 
 to spare the lives of those who surrendered they hung all 
 their prisoners or put them to the sword, except a few 
 seamen, artisans, and pilots whom they wished to use. 
 The French expeditions had been equipped and sent out 
 by the Admiral Coligny with the full consent and knowledge 
 of Catherine. His object was a double one: to extend the 
 trade of France and to find an outlet for Huguenot colonists. 
 The action of the Spaniards, therefore, was inspired not 
 simply by commercial and national rivalry, but also by 
 religious zeal and, over the scaffolds on which they hung 
 the French prisoners, they put placards bearing this in- 
 scription, "Hung not as Frenchmen but as Lutherans." 
 
 When Catherine first heard of what she called, "this 
 atrocious massacre done in Florida," she kept quiet about 
 a thing "so cruel and inhuman" until the Spanish Ambas- 
 sador asked audience of her. He informed her that a 
 commander of Spain, having found in Florida some French- 
 men commissioned from the Admiral who had in their
 
 FEUDS AND QUARRELS 345 
 
 company ministers who were engaged in planting the new 
 religion, had chastised them as he had been commanded by 
 the King his master. He would freely confess that he had 
 done this a little more cruelly than his master would have 
 desired, but after all he couldn't do less than fall upon them 
 as pirates and people who were attacking what belongs to 
 the King of Spain. He added that the King his master 
 demanded justice upon the Admiral. As Charles IX was 
 sick in bed, Catherine answered at his request. She said 
 that as the common mother she could not help feeling 
 an unbelievable pain at the heart to hear that so ter- 
 rible a slaughter had been committed upon the subjects of 
 her son. There was no reason for trying to cover such a 
 deed by an allusion to the Admiral, because it might be 
 assumed that so large a number of people had not been 
 allowed to leave the kingdom without the knowledge of the 
 King, who thought commerce and navigation everywhere 
 free to his subjects. It seemed to her that there was an 
 attempt to put a bridle in the mouth of her son, to close 
 him up in his kingdom and to clip his wings. Thanks to 
 God he was better obeyed than he ever was and it would 
 not be difficult for him to make those who wished him ill 
 know that he had no less means to defend himself than 
 his predecessors. When the Ambassador harked back 
 again to the Admiral and the presence of ministers of the 
 new religion, Catherine answered that she could wish that 
 all the Huguenots would go to that country, which "belongs 
 to us." He was forcing her to believe that Spain did not 
 want quiet in France. But however that may be, it was 
 none "of their business to punish our subjects and we are 
 not disputing whether they were or were not of the new 
 religion, but rather talking about the murder which the 
 Spaniards have committed upon them." x 
 
 Even in the midst of this undissembled anger, Cath- 
 erine's ruling passion for the marriages of her children did 
 not cease. She added to this indignant letter to her Ambas- 
 
 1 Letts. II, 353.
 
 346 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 sador a postscript which showed she hoped to make profit 
 out of the situation. "I cannot help telling you that al- 
 though some of the greatest marriages in Christendom are 
 offered for the King my son, the chief regret I have is that 
 it will be necessary in the end, because of this wrong, for 
 him to take as a wife someone who is not of our religion; 
 a thing we will not do except in the last extremity." Philip 
 never gave any real heed to this indignation about the 
 massacre in Florida. He expressed indeed some vague, 
 formal regret, but France could never get from him any 
 satisfaction except the release of the few survivors. What 
 he really thought is shown by the comment he wrote on the 
 margin of the report of the commander of the expedition: 
 "Tell him so far as those killed are concerned, that he did 
 well ; and let those he spared be sent to the galleys." l 
 
 Catherine's anger was shared by nearly all Frenchmen. 
 The Spanish Ambassador wrote a year after the massacre, 
 "I am told by a nobleman of importance that the Queen and 
 her counsellors are ready to weep with vexation that the 
 King cannot get satisfaction for the great injury done him 
 in Florida. They would sooner wreck this entire kingdom 
 than not get vengeance for it. The Cardinal of Bourbon 
 offers two years' income and most of the Catholics would 
 make similar offers. Your Majesty may guess what the 
 heretics would do." When, about two years later, a certain 
 Dominic de Gourges, a Catholic and a Guisard, raised a 
 small expedition containing Huguenots and Catholic volun- 
 teers, crossed the ocean, stormed the Spanish fort and hung 
 his prisoners under a placard reading, "Done not to Span- 
 iards nor to seamen, but to traitors, robbers and murderers," 
 all France, Catholic and Huguenot alike, rejoiced. 2 
 
 Catherine was not, therefore, very much disposed to 
 allow the King of Spain to send the Duke of Alva and the 
 Spanish troops through France on their way to the Nether- 
 lands. But she covered her own fears under other specious 
 reasons. She pointed out that the passage of the Spanish 
 
 1 Douais, I (2) Int. XVI. 
 
 a A. N. K. 1507 f. 106, Gaffarel, de Thou, Lowry, Arch. C, VI, 73.
 
 FEUDS AND QUARRELS 347 
 
 army would arouse in those of the new religion such "fright 
 as might light a fire hard to put out." It was impossible 
 to have them pass secretly through the mountainous parts 
 of France because of the lack of bridges and of provisions. 
 To build bridges and collect provisions would take three 
 months and give everybody warning of what was going on. 
 While if the Duke of Alva should try to go secretly through 
 the Kingdom without a guard of at least two hundred men, 
 he would run great danger of being killed by the Hugue- 
 nots. 1 
 
 Catherine's correspondence makes evident that her atti- 
 tude from the fall of 1566 on was one of the most anxious 
 attention to every move of Spain. She had no intention 
 of attacking Spain, but she did proceed to arm the kingdom 
 for defense. She had the more reason to do this because 
 the Emperor had just made peace with the Turks and she 
 was afraid he would turn his attention to the recovery of 
 Metz, Toul and Verdun conquered from the Empire and 
 added to France by Henry II. She proceeded therefore to 
 put in order the fortresses on the northern border, and 
 began in October 1566 to raise two small bands of Swiss 
 to reinforce the garrisons of Lyons and Grenoble. Six 
 weeks later she decided to levy a body of six thousand Swiss 
 guards. She wrote to her Ambassador in Switzerland that 
 the King was doing this for the good of Christendom and 
 because it was reasonable that he should attend with more 
 surety what use may be made of the large military forces 
 which were being prepared in so many places. But she 
 had another reason for making this levy besides the osten- 
 sible one. She had found out that the King of Spain was 
 endeavoring to make a levy of mercenary troops among the 
 Swiss. France and many of the cantons of Switzerland had 
 been bound together by a defensive alliance ever since the 
 year 1516. This had been renewed by each succeeding 
 King since Francis I, and the Swiss were bound to 
 provide, whenever asked, not less than six nor more 
 
 1 Letts. II, 408, n. 407; B. N. It. 1726 f. 110.
 
 348 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 than sixteen thousand infantry to be paid by France. As 
 a pledge of this "eternal peace the King of France promises 
 to pay to each of the thirteen cantons included in it two 
 thousand francs every year of peace." Catherine was per- 
 fectly wise in regarding this treaty as one of the corner 
 stones of the military independence of France, and the 
 secret attempts of Spain to break it in spirit by raising a 
 force of picked Swiss troops, filled her with perfectly reason- 
 able alarm. She repeatedly wrote to her ambassador to do 
 everything in his power to check "these practices," and to 
 use the levy by France as the best means of doing so. The 
 Swiss, who were also disquieted by the passage of the great 
 Spanish army along their borders, very willingly acknowl- 
 edged their treaty obligations, and the Protestant canton 
 of Zurich, which was not included in the league, and Berne, 
 which had protested about the levy against the Huguenots 
 in 1562, allowed its citizens to join the French force after 
 the royal commissioners had made a written acknowledg- 
 ment of their statement that the agreement was not binding 
 if those in France "who are of the evangelic profession are 
 molested or persecuted." 1 
 
 Catherine was embarrassed at the beginning of her 
 negotiations by the fact that part of the wages of the Swiss 
 who had fought five years before in the battle of Dreux had 
 not yet been paid. She wrote to her ambassador that she 
 had examined the muster rolls made out just before the 
 battle and that she does not send them (as he asks) for a 
 guide in concluding the bargain, "because they show more 
 men were actually in the ranks than the orders for payment 
 show" and therefore, if she should send them, the Swiss 
 would probably not lower their demand but rather increase 
 it. The best thing for him to do was, after dragging out a 
 long series of excuses about waiting for the payrolls, "to 
 make of it une cotte mal taillee with them and agree to pay 
 the smallest price you can." 2 
 
 1 B. N. It. 1726 f. 86, 87; Letts. Ill, 5, 8, 10; X, 182, 187, 188, lflO, 192, 
 200, 207, 208, Gobat, 30, 3 Jan., 1566. 
 'Letts. X, 85.
 
 FEUDS AND QUARRELS 349 
 
 When the rebellion in the Netherlands had subsided and 
 Spain still persisted in sending a very large force 
 north, the suspicion at the French court increased. There 
 was more than one man who found it difficult to speak of 
 these preparations in any other way except as "getting 
 ready to come and trouble the kingdom of France." Cath- 
 erine had already authorized d'Andelot, Captain General of 
 French infantry, to fill some of his bands up to war strength, 
 and in the end of June she summoned Conde and the other 
 Huguenots to join a general council to decide what was to be 
 done. Quarrels among the nobles made military prepara- 
 tions difficult. When d'Andelot wished to inspect the bor- 
 der province of Champagne, according to the duty of his 
 rank, the Governor sent him word that he need not trouble 
 to visit the garrisons there and a little later two of his 
 colonels actually refused to obey his orders. 1 
 
 The week before the meeting of the royal council, the 
 principal Huguenot nobles and gentlemen had met 
 at the town of Valery for the baptism of the infant 
 of the Prince of Conde. The King was god-father, but, 
 because the baptism was held according to the Reformed 
 ceremony, the Admiral actually held the child at the font. 
 There is nothing to indicate that this meeting produced 
 among the Huguenots any talk in regard to civil war, but 
 rather there was considerable discussion about the possi- 
 bilities of a war with Spain. There was a rumor, however, 
 at the court that the Huguenots were arming for civil war. 2 
 
 When the royal council assembled the Huguenots in it 
 were all for war with Spain, as the best remedy for civil 
 discord ; indeed they had urged this for some time. Conde, 
 who at his brother's death had been promised the lieu- 
 tenant-generalship of France, very much angered that this 
 promise had not been kept, now made the suggestion that 
 the Constable, who was advanced in years, would probably, 
 
 'Pntd. d'Aumale App. I, 383; Cal. F. 1567, p. 269; B. N. It. 1726 f. 27, 
 135. 
 
 * D'Aumale, pntd. App. 383.
 
 350 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 for the good of France, be willing to resign the sword of 
 Constable, which might then be given to him. The Con- 
 stable did not agree to this suggestion and Conde left court 
 visibly in a bad humor. 1 The King's sixteen-year-old 
 brother, the Duke of Anjou, resented very much this ambi- 
 tion of Conde and made a scene which Brantome remem- 
 bered with great vividness. The Prince took Conde into a 
 corner of the room after supper and talked to him very 
 earnestly. What he said could not be heard, "but we could 
 see that the young Prince was very angry, now playing with 
 the hilt of his sword, now touching his dagger, now pulling 
 his hat tight on and now taking it off again, and all with an 
 angry and proud countenance." It was easy to guess what 
 Anjou was talking about, he was telling the Prince of Conde 
 that the supreme military command in the kingdom was to 
 be kept for him. It is not necessary to assume, as Bran- 
 tome does, that the lad had been put up to making this 
 angry scene by his mother. The restless and envious ambi- 
 tion which marked Catherine's children, appeared in them 
 at a very early age. 2 
 
 In spite of the fact that the Huguenots left court in such 
 discontent, the Spanish Ambassador bitterly attacked Cath- 
 erine for endangering her son's throne by favoring them and 
 planning war against Spain. At first she cried and then she 
 laughed. Whatever the Ambassador might say for its effect 
 upon Catherine, we know that he had already sent word to 
 his master that there was no danger that she would make 
 open war against Spain because she was really unable to 
 do so. 3 
 
 'Languet, Arcana, II, 186, qtd. Gossart, I, 34; B. N. It. 1726 f. 126, 127; 
 d'Aumale App. I, 385, 386. 
 3 Brant, IV, 346. 
 8 A. N. K. 1508 f. 31, ib. 30 June, 1567.
 
 CHAPTER XXI 
 
 THE HUGUENOTS RENEW THE CIVIL WAR. THEIR ARMY 
 
 The danger was now shifted from foreign to civil war. 
 The suspicions of the Huguenots were aroused and they 
 began to fear that all these preparations had been made 
 against them. The false story that a plot to kill their lead- 
 ers had been made between Catherine and the King of Spain 
 at the Conference of Bayonne, revived with new vigor, and 
 the fact that the walls of their strong towns were being 
 destroyed, according to agreement, during the very months 
 when Catherine herself was building in many towns citadels 
 to be held by royal garrisons, increased their suspicions. 
 While murders and riots against the Huguenots seemed to 
 have been diminishing rapidly, the list of those which had 
 already taken place since the Edict was a formidable one, 
 and about a dozen of the principal noblemen of the party 
 held meetings to consider the question of renewing the civil 
 war. At the first two of these meetings it was decided, 
 largely by the influence of the Admiral, not to take up 
 arms. 1 
 
 Meanwhile warning that something was on foot came 
 from a nobleman, Michel de Castelnau, sent on a mission to 
 the Duke of Alva. He returned in company with some old 
 soldiers who had once been under him and he thought their 
 talk very suspicious. When he reported the matter to the 
 Queen, the Constable refused to believe it and the Chan- 
 cellor said he ought to be punished for arousing suspicion 
 between the King and his subjects. But when word arrived 
 from the south that an unusual number of gentlemen were 
 riding through the country and traveling by post, Catherine 
 sent for Castelnau into her own cabinet and he persuaded 
 
 1 La Pop. XI, p. 4. 
 
 351
 
 352 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 her to send one of his brothers towards the Admiral's coun- 
 try seat in order to find out what was going on. 
 
 A similar warning had been sent up earlier by Monluc 
 from the south. These warnings, however, were inaccurate 
 and based fully as much on suspicion as upon information, 
 as the following letter of the 4th of September shows: 
 
 "To My Cousin, Monsieur de Cosse, Marechal op France: 
 "My Cousin: 
 
 "We have been informed that near Montargis and Chatillon 
 (the Admiral's castle) there is the commencement of a gathering 
 of armed forces which at the present amount to twelve or fifteen 
 hundred horsemen. I don't believe it, although there are plenty 
 of rumors coming in from other parts of some movement on foot 
 for which there is no reason. But in order to get at the truth 
 of what's going on in your part of the country I have thought 
 it best to send you this messenger in all haste to beg you to take 
 the trouble to find out and to tell me at once the truth." 
 
 On the 10th of September Catherine wrote again to the 
 Marshal acknowledging his report that he had sent to the 
 places indicated and had found nothing there. The day 
 before the Huguenot chiefs, a dozen in number, had decided 
 at the Admiral's chateau that on the 28th of September 
 they would suddenly rise in arms in all parts of the kingdom 
 in order to do three things: surprise some of the most im- 
 portant cities; seize the person of the King and his mother; 
 attack the new Swiss guard and cut it to pieces. 1 
 
 How little Catherine was thinking about any danger at 
 this time is sufficiently shown by the following letter which 
 she wrote on the 9th of September: 
 
 "Monsieur de Villeroy: 
 
 "I have been informed by the Abbe Saint Serge that the 
 masons are working very hard on the walls and defenses of the 
 city of Paris at the place where my garden is, just at the spot 
 where the watercourse must pass for the fountain for which I 
 have drawn the water from Saint Cloud. ... I wish to write 
 you the present letter and to ask you to have made an arch and 
 
 1 Letts. Ill, 56, 57, De la Noue.
 
 THE HUGUENOTS RENEW THE CIVIL WAR 353 
 
 an opening, twelve feet broad, which can be locked with a key 
 and that on the side of the arch there may be very stout walls 
 and vaults as long as the ramparts are broad and of the height 
 and style which the Abbe of Saint Serge will show to the work- 
 men." 
 
 She further asks that on the other side there should be 
 an opening direct from the river into the canals of her 
 garden. 1 
 
 Not long before the appointed day, indeed, Catherine 
 received another warning which attracted her attention and 
 she sent the Admiral's cousin to his castle at Chatillon, 
 ostensibly to invite him to come to court, but really to find 
 out what he was doing. He found the great chieftain 
 dressed as a laborer and superintending the gathering of his 
 vintage. Catherine was completely thrown off her guard 
 and on the 18th of September she wrote to her Ambassador 
 in Madrid, "There have been some reports, without any 
 foundation, that those of the Reformed religion wanted to 
 make trouble, but it is nothing but a little alarm on their 
 part and the whole thing has now disappeared." 2 
 
 If anything was needed to confirm the Huguenots in 
 their resolution to rise — a resolution largely caused by fear 
 and the desire to strike first — it was the news which reached 
 France soon after the middle of September of the arrest of 
 two of the chief nobles of the Netherlands, Counts Egmont 
 and Horn. Both the treacherous way in which this arrest 
 was carried out in the midst of festivals and mutual cour- 
 tesies and the evident intention of railroading them to the 
 scaffold, .was to the Huguenot leaders a striking confirma- 
 tion of their worst fears that they might be treated in the 
 same way. Catherine told the Spanish Ambassador she 
 meant to imitate this example, but he thought she was only 
 trying to fool him and wrote to his master, "The Queen 
 has shown great signs of joy over what has happened, and 
 sent word to me that they ought to have done days ago 
 
 1 Letts. X, 214. 
 
 'Pasquier, V, L. 2; d'Aubigne, III, 284. Letts. Ill, 58.
 
 354 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 what the Duke had now done and that in a short time she 
 would have things to tell me which would give me great 
 pleasure. These words however don't arouse very much 
 enthusiasm in me." Indeed the suspicion in the Huguenot 
 mind that Catherine had arranged a plot against them with 
 the aid of the Spanish army, was entirely false. The dis- 
 patches of Alva show that, far from being in league with 
 Catherine, neither he nor his master trusted her in the 
 least. They were always accusing her of showing too much 
 favor to the Huguenots and the best they were disposed to 
 hope for was that she would keep a somewhat middle posi- 
 tion between the two parties. 1 
 
 That this was at the moment her definite intention is 
 plain from her correspondence and conduct. But one of the 
 most remarkable of her many conversations which have 
 been recorded for us — a conversation which must have 
 taken place within a few months of this time — lets us look 
 into the depths of her mind, below intention, almost below 
 definite consciousness, where people keep vague future pos- 
 sibilities with which they play in secret moments. Giovanni 
 Correro, one of the ablest of the Venetian Ambassadors, 
 with whom Catherine was on very confidential terms, told 
 the Venetian Senate how she said to him one day that 
 
 "she would think herself the most unlucky woman in the world 
 if among all the Queens of France she was the only one to whom 
 such troubles had come. It was a consolation to her that during 
 the minorities of French kings the nobles had always been 
 rebellious. On the way to Bayonne she had read at Carcassonne 
 a manuscript history which told about the mother of St. Louis 
 (IX), left a widow with a son eleven years old, and how the 
 nobles had risen in arms objecting to the rule of a woman and 
 a foreigner at that. To accomplish their ends, they had united 
 with the Albigensian heretics, who, like those of her day, did not 
 want priests, monks, masses, images in the churches, etc. They 
 also called in a King of Aragon to help them and it was neces- 
 sary to meet them in a pitched battle. Toulouse, their strong- 
 hold, was dismantled and finally, by the suggestion of the Queen, 
 a peace was made conceding many of their demands. However, 
 
 *A. N. K. 1508 f. 60 and passim.
 
 THE HUGUENOTS RENEW THE CIVIL WAR 355 
 
 the King, grown strong with the lapse of time and by the counsels 
 of his mother, finally took that vengeance on his rebels which 
 they deserved. Then she showed how all these details matched 
 her own situation. She was a widow and a foreigner with no 
 one to trust and a son eleven years old. The nobles had risen 
 under pretext of religion but really against her government, call- 
 ing in the Queen of England and the Germans to help them. 
 There was war, victory, and Orleans taken and dismantled, like 
 Toulouse. Peace was made by her advice, to the advantage of 
 the Huguenots. She confessed she had granted them the advan- 
 tage, hoping to gain by time what she could not gain by arms 
 without great bloodshed. At this point I said, 'Madam, Your 
 Majesty, ought to draw consolation from these facts which are 
 not only a picture of the events of your day but a prophecy of 
 their final outcome (I alluded to the punishment) .' She laughed 
 very loudly (as she does whenever she hears something which 
 pleases her) and answered: 'I should not want anybody to know 
 I had read that chronicle for they would say that I am imitating 
 that good lady and Queen, Blanche, who was a daughter of the 
 King of Castile.' " x 
 
 So far as this remarkable betrayal of her inmost thought 
 in an expansive moment shows any definite intention — and 
 psychologically it would be a mistake to give it too definite 
 form as an intent — it was a purpose whose execution was 
 far in the future and it required for its success a long inter- 
 val of conciliation and the disarming of suspicions. It 
 seems very strange that Catherine did not see that what 
 she was doing tended in the exactly opposite direction and 
 was apt to arouse the Huguenots' suspicion, or that she 
 could fail to understand how certain they would be, if they 
 felt themselves pushed to the wall, to do precisely what 
 they did do. The truth is that Catherine was apt to fall 
 into the mistake of trying to play too fine a game — to use 
 one of her own phrases, "to swim between two waters." 
 She had tried to make Spain think that she intended to 
 revoke the Edict of Pacification and banish heresy from 
 France. She did not long deceive Spain, but she did deceive 
 the Huguenots and the result of her efforts to trick Philip 
 
 1 Rel. I, 4, p. 180.
 
 356 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 was the second Huguenot war. This was indeed a most 
 unfortunate result, for the indications are that the peace 
 was gaining in stability and there was a chance that it 
 might become permanent. This is the opinion of de la 
 Noue, one of the bravest and the wisest of the Huguenot 
 captains. He wrote afterwards, "Concord, good conduct 
 and obedience to law had already made such progress among 
 the mass of the French people, that France was entirely 
 recovered from the waste of civil war." 1 
 
 When the Huguenots rose in arms they failed in all 
 three of their chief objects. The date of their rising had 
 been fixed for the eve of St. Michel, the 28th of Septem- 
 ber, 1567. They quietly gathered a body of nobles not far 
 from the court in order to seize the King, but on the 25th of 
 September, Catherine took alarm and sent word for the 
 Swiss guards, who were camped ten miles off, to join them 
 at once. They set out at midnight and arrived the next 
 morning at the walled city of Meaux, where the court had 
 hastily taken refuge. After two days of hesitation, it was 
 decided by the royal council that it was better for the 
 King to retreat to Paris and they started out at midnight 
 the day before the Huguenot attack had been planned. The 
 gentlemen of the court were without armor and most of 
 them rode, not their war horses, but hackneys. The bat- 
 talion of the Swiss surrounded them in hollow square for- 
 mation and the train was halfway to Paris before the first 
 Huguenots appeared, probably not over a thousand horse- 
 men, because they did not expect their full forces until the 
 next day. When they threatened to charge the Swiss closed 
 up, lowered their pikes, fell upon one knee and called on 
 God to help them according to their usual custom and then 
 rose to charge. The Constable, who was in command of the 
 retreat, stopped the charge and ordered everybody to stand 
 upon the defensive. He was pushing forward with all 
 possible speed to pass a certain narrow ford where he feared 
 that fifteen hundred Huguenot harquebusiers of whose ar- 
 
 J De la Noue, 706; Segesser, I, 449. B. N. It. 1726 f. 142.
 
 THE HUGUENOTS RENEW THE CIVIL WAR 357 
 
 rival in the neighborhood his spies had told him, might block 
 his passage. The ford was passed in safety and the retreat 
 was assured. Whenever the Swiss were threatened the 
 square "stood like a furious wild boar pursued by the 
 hounds." The Huguenot gentry, most of whom lacked 
 heavy armor, could not, so long as the phalanx stood firm, 
 ride into the mass of fifteen to eighteen foot pikes bristling 
 rank on rank. The King and his mother arrived at Paris 
 "tired and hungry" about four o'clock in the afternoon. 1 
 
 The day after Catherine briefly described what had oc- 
 curred in a letter to the Duke of Ferrara. 
 
 "My Cousin: 
 
 "By the letter which the King my son is writing to you 
 presently you will hear the reason of our distress, which is of 
 such a nature that I never could have thought that so large and 
 unhappy a design could have entered into the minds of subjects 
 in regard to their King. And I believe you will be no less 
 astonished about it than we are, when you recognize that the 
 object of the plot was the overthrow of the entire state and 
 to put our own lives in danger. But God is a just judge and will 
 provide for everything the remedy that pleases Him." 
 
 The King never forgot his anger over this day. More 
 than a year later he swore to the Venetian Ambassador he 
 would always remember how the Huguenots drove him 
 from Meaux, nor ever again allow a single Huguenot in his 
 household. Catherine was as much surprised as angered. 
 She told the Venetian Ambassador "that she didn't believe 
 anything like it has ever happened in the world before, 
 because surely it's a most astonishing thing that a huge 
 kingdom as great as France should have risen in one day to 
 arms, merely on the rumor that we were in the hands of our 
 enemies." 2 
 
 The feeling of the Huguenots was by this time very 
 hostile to Catherine. The more so because at the beginning 
 
 "Castelnau, I, 200; Segesser, I, 465; Neg. Tosc, III, 529; Pasquier, V, 
 2, p. 118. 
 
 *29 Sept., 1567, pntd. Douais (1) King's letter to Duke of Ferrara 
 Arch. Mod. B. N. It. 1726 f. 164, 312.
 
 358 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 of the first trouble they had pretty good ground for believ- 
 ing that she would side with them. When their troops took 
 the royal chateau of St. Maur they found the Queen 
 Mother's pet dog with a litter of six puppies. Before they 
 left the chateau they killed the mother and four of the 
 puppies, which everybody interpreted as a sign they would 
 like to kill the Queen and four of her children. The com- 
 mon interpretation at court was that the two they wanted 
 to spare were the Queen of Spain and the Duchess of 
 Lorraine. 1 
 
 The situation was a very serious one. Although the 
 Huguenots failed in their plans to seize several of the larger 
 cities, they had in their hands at the end of the first week 
 fourteen of the second importance and a large number of 
 smaller towns. Money was very hard to get and at the 
 end of six weeks the Huguenots had more men in the field 
 than the King. The Constable had never been a very 
 successful general and he was old. The other most con- 
 spicuous leaders of the previous war were dead, none of 
 Guise's brothers were able to take his place and his son 
 was too young. In Monluc, Catherine had a competent 
 soldier for managing the war in a province or two, but hia 
 faults of character would have made it impossible to put 
 him in supreme command. Tavannes was an excellent 
 general but he said of himself that he had neither the 
 position nor the patience to enable him to impose peace 
 upon the jealous and warring nobles of the royal party, 
 each of whom was anxious to get as much honor as possible. 2 
 
 The King, although seventeen years of age, was a mere 
 child completely under the sway of his mother. How little 
 she or anybody else, could rely on his judgment in this great 
 crisis, is plainly shown by the fact that he and his next oldest 
 brother signed, at this very time, an agreement with an 
 alchemist who claimed that he was just about to discover 
 
 l B. N. It. 1726 f. 167, Ven. Amb. 
 
 ■A. N. K. 1506 f. 99; B. N. It. 1726 f. 169.
 
 CHARLES IX, SECOND SON OF CATHERINE DE MEDK'IS 
 From a painting in the Louvre attributed to Francois Clouet
 
 THE HUGUENOTS RENEW THE CIVIL WAR 359 
 
 the secret of the transmutation of metals into gold and 
 silver. The alchemist promised to give the first proof that 
 he was on the road to this discovery in six months, the 
 second proof four months later, and in two years the com- 
 plete formula. In exchange the King and his brother prom- 
 ised the alchemist a hundred thousand livres of rent and a 
 hundred thousand livres in gold, half to be paid after the 
 first proof and half after the second. Six thousand gold 
 crowns were to be paid him in advance and twelve hundred 
 gold crowns a month were to be furnished during the experi- 
 ments. A document of this kind would not have been so 
 astonishing several generations back, but alchemy was now 
 discredited in the minds of all men of intelligence. Fifty 
 years before, Erasmus had denounced its pretensions in his 
 "Praise of Folly," which was read by all persons of educa- 
 tion in Europe. An example of the attitude taken toward 
 alchemy by educated men in the middle of the sixteenth 
 century, is afforded by a letter from the Spanish Ambassa- 
 dor in France to Philip II reporting an offer to make gold. 
 "I have told the man that alchemy is vain and uncertain 
 and that I have little confidence in it. Your Majesty will 
 believe him a fool with his babble about his secret, but 
 Your Majesty can shut him up and if at the end of four 
 months he has not done what he talks about, he can be sent 
 to row in a galley on the Barbary coast." 1 
 
 Though Catherine shared fully the weakness of many of 
 the Renascence Princes for astrology, she does not seem to 
 have had any faith in alchemy. Probably she knew nothing 
 whatever of this contract signed by her son. Her own sim- 
 ple way of raising money was to pawn the diamonds of the 
 crown to Venice for a hundred thousand ecus and the 
 rubies to Florence for a hundred thousand more. She re- 
 fused to accept an offer of five thousand horse and fifteen 
 thousand foot from Alva, but she took a small contingent 
 
 1 B. N. Dupuy, 86; copy of contract, Lett. pntd. Revue Retrospective, 
 1834.
 
 360 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 from him, asked money from the Pope and the Duke of 
 Florence and men from the Duke of Savoy. 1 
 
 After the first few weeks the royal army heavily out- 
 numbered the insurgents, but the Huguenots had in the 
 Admiral a great unifying force. The Prince of Conde as a 
 prince of the blood was the nominal chief and he did not 
 always do in military matters what the Admiral advised. 
 The thousands of Huguenot nobles big and little, who 
 flocked to his standard had for the Admiral, in spite of the 
 fact that they shared the! faults of pride and an inordinate 
 desire for honor which were common to all the French 
 nobility, a sort of filial reverence. His influence was always 
 strong enough to prevent the sort of bitter quarrels and 
 jealousies which distracted the royal army, from doing too 
 much harm in the Huguenot camp. 2 
 
 The Huguenots gave the reasons for their rising in three 
 documents. The first, sent to the King, accused the house 
 of Guise of continually slandering them. "They are even 
 now being accused of disloyalty because they dared to try 
 to come before His Majesty to present their case with arms 
 in their hands. . . . Your Majesty having been ear- 
 nestly urged to keep the promise made by you a long time 
 ago to the King of Spain to seize the leaders of the religion 
 and to exterminate all those who profess it, they have no 
 other means of safely trying to get a hearing from Your 
 Majesty, except to come in arms." In addition, they wanted 
 Metz, Calais and Havre de Grace put into their hands as 
 pledges. To these extreme demands the King did not 
 deign to reply. 3 
 
 The second manifesto, sent five days after the rising, 
 added other reasons for it. The Huguenots complained of 
 bad administration of the kingdom and that it was crushed 
 with taxation which rested heavily upon the common people 
 and even oppressed the nobility, in spite of the fact that 
 
 'Bouille, II, 388, A. N. K. 1508 f. 70, 74; Letts. I, 70, 77, B. N. It. 1728 
 f. 163. 
 
 'E. g. A. N. R., 30 Nov., 1567. 
 
 *La Popeliniere, Bk. XII, 20, B. N. It. 1726 f. 145.
 
 THE HUGUENOTS RENEW THE CIVIL WAR 361 
 
 they had, from all time, been exempt from taxation. "This 
 is brought about by the greed and avarice of certain 
 strangers, more particularly Italians, because of the credit 
 and influence which they enjoy in this kingdom." They 
 asked that all foreign troops be dismissed, that the Hugue- 
 nots should be allowed to come to court to state their case to 
 His Majesty, that the Reformed worship should be entirely 
 free with no distinction of place or person and finally that 
 the Estates General should be assembled. 1 
 
 A few days later they issued a third manifesto, in which 
 they repudiated the idea that they intended any danger 
 either to the person of the King or to the Church and based 
 their rising solely upon the need of defending themselves 
 against a plot to exterminate or drive out of the kingdom 
 all those of the Reformed religion. They added a humble 
 request that the King would consider the very heavy taxa- 
 tion of his people and, in order to do it the better, assemble 
 the Estates General. In this as in all the other Huguenot 
 wars, whatever other reasons might be alleged at the begin- 
 ning of the revolt, negotiations for peace soon made it 
 evident that, as the Venetian Ambassador reported, "the 
 chief difficulty is reduced to the single head of religion." 2 
 
 By the evident allusion to the Queen Mother and the 
 Italian favorites who surrounded her, the Huguenots won 
 what they had never had before — the decided hatred of 
 Catherine and the unfortunate consequence of their second 
 rising was that they had finally broken both with their 
 young King and with his mother, the real ruler of the 
 kingdom. 
 
 The backbone of the Huguenot armies was their cavalry, 
 made up of the lesser nobles or country gentry. The higher 
 nobility of France was not very numerous, though much 
 more numerous than the English peerage, which was not 
 simply a fighting caste but a political order of hereditary 
 members of Parliament. During the reign of Charles IX, 
 
 'La Popeliniere, Bk. XII, 21, 22. 
 J B. N. It. 1726 f. 159.
 
 362 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 1560-1574, when the English House of Lords had about 
 fifty lay members, the French peerage had ten Princes, 
 ten Dukes, a hundred counts and about a hundred 
 viscounts. But there were thousands of country gentry. 
 For instance, the single bishopric of Auxerre had four hun- 
 dred and fifty-eight country gentlemen, heads of families, 
 who by the old feudal right owed military service to their 
 Count. The small mountainous province of Auvergne 
 counted fifteen hundred families of the country gentry. 
 These lived on their estates and by their rents, aided by the 
 produce of their domain lands, and seldom went far from 
 home except for war, which was considered their chief, 
 indeed their only, calling. Hence the proverb "Gentil 
 homme sans guerre vaut autant que paysan sans terre." 
 Outside of certain limited sections public opinion was 
 strongly opposed to their engaging in business and besides 
 most of them were too proud to do so. Many of them 
 indeed managed their own domain lands, though when they 
 went to war this had to be left to their wives. 1 
 
 The first part of the sixteenth century was a time of 
 prosperity for France. The population increased and there 
 were evident signs of a great growth of agricultural pro- 
 duction. Great extents of forest land were cleared for culti- 
 vation, many new grist mills were built and France became 
 a large exporter of grain. The rental value of land rose 
 steadily and continued to rise out of proportion to the fall 
 in the value of money, which went on through the century 
 because of the increase in the quantity of precious metals, 
 for the South American mines alone sent to Europe in the 
 single year 1545 almost as much gold as had been mined in 
 the world in the fifty previous years. The nobles paid no 
 taxes and this agricultural prosperity brought wealth to the 
 country gentry, which they ought to have accumulated, for 
 their lives were simple. 2 
 
 Most of them lived in chateaux or manor houses, which 
 
 *De Stoutz, 72; Tommasco, I, 490; Brant. IV, 328; Rel. I, 2, p. 406. 
 9 De la Tour, I, 215, 220, 285, 288; Avenel, 16, 364.
 
 THE HUGUENOTS RENEW THE CIVIL WAR 363 
 
 were a complex of buildings containing in one group every- 
 thing necessary for the management of the domain and the 
 life of the master. A writer on agriculture describes in 1565 
 a typical old-fashioned manor house. It was surrounded by 
 a stout wall some ten feet high with a gate on the south 
 side large enough to admit a loaded hay wagon. Against 
 the left wall were built the lodgings for the farmer and his 
 hands, and sheds for the farm implements surmounted by 
 lofts for the crops. On the side of the court were the stables 
 for the horses and cattle with their forage overhead. At 
 the bottom of the court directly opposite the gate was the 
 master's house, usually raised on a platform reached by 
 steps. At the edge of the platform was built an elaborate 
 fowl house, ducks and geese on the ground floor, chickens 
 above, with separate compartments for the turkeys and 
 pheasants, the peacocks being allowed to range the prem- 
 ises. The sties for the pigs and the pens for the sheep and 
 goats were on the north wall of the great court. Behind the 
 house were the gardens, the pot herbs on the right and the 
 flower beds and vegetables on the left. Here were also the 
 bee-hives. The grand allee, a double row of trees, led 
 between the two gardens to the wall of the orchard and in 
 the middle of the allee was the well. Through the orchard 
 a door opened on the pasture meadow. 1 
 
 The manor was not luxuriously furnished, and one of its 
 chief rooms was always the kitchen, where the whole fam- 
 ily, master and domestics, met more or less frequently. 
 Many of the smaller gentry dined in the kitchen and in the 
 cold winter evenings the gentleman and lady of the manor 
 often sat in their high backed arm chairs under the hood of 
 the great chimney. But the manor houses all had a salon 
 on whose walls were fixed a couple of swords, a couple of 
 pikes and halberds, two or three mail coats, some bows, 
 arbalests, and hackbuts. The hawk sat on his perch, in the 
 corridor, the nets for hunting were thrown down in the 
 
 1 Charles Estienne, qtd. Vaissiere (1), 63.
 
 364 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 corner and under the great bench against the wall the hunt- 
 ing dogs lay on fresh straw. 1 
 
 Secure in the distinction of his rank the country gentle- 
 man ordinarily lived as a good fellow among his neighbors 
 of lower position and was usually on familiar terms with 
 the freeholders and peasants. At fetes or markets he drank 
 at the village inn and danced with the peasant girls and his 
 own domestics. Very few of the gentry took any interest in 
 things of the mind and adventurous spirits could always 
 escape by military service from any sense of monotony 
 which might seem to them to haunt the ancestral courtyard 
 filled with the placid life of the farm. When the Italian 
 wars had ended just before the death of Henry II and during 
 the intervals of the civil wars beginning with the reign of 
 Charles IX, some of these more active spirits travelled 
 abroad, so that twenty years later it was estimated that 
 "three or four hundred young men, mostly of good houses, 
 leave France every year for foreign lands to see and to 
 learn." 2 
 
 In spite of his placid existence, the country gentleman 
 had his strong pride and sense of class honor which led to 
 more or less violence and attempts to take the law into his 
 own hands when the incessant law suits which vied with 
 hunting as his chief amusements, did not turn out to his 
 satisfaction. But up to the reign of Henry II duels were 
 not common in France. From that time on the habit of 
 duelling spread, so that about a generation later a fighting 
 man of letters wrote "the slaughter of soldiers in duels in a 
 single year is greater than that of a pitched battle" (1580- 
 1585). And another said: "There is no family in this 
 kingdom that has not had two or three duels in the past 
 generation." Pride and the spirit of vengeance roused in 
 the civil wars caused most of these, but among the courtiers, 
 the bulk of whom were from the families of the country 
 gentry, bloody duels arose on the most frivolous pretext; as 
 
 l Noel du Fail, Contes d' Eutrapel, II, 38, 40, qtd. Vaissiere (1), 77. 
 'Maulde, I, 87; de la Tour, I, 377, de la Noue.
 
 THE HUGUENOTS RENEW THE CIVIL WAR 365 
 
 when two of these young gamecocks quarreled over the 
 question whether the embroidery on a lady's dress repre- 
 sented a border of the letter X or the letter Y. 1 
 
 This habit of duelling was only one phase of a marked 
 change in the condition and conduct of the lesser nobility 
 which began in the reign of Henry II. Their prosperity 
 declined so that forty years later one of them could write, 
 "it does not need many words to make everyone recognize 
 how thoroughly the gentlemen of France have lost the 
 prosperity and abundance in which they lived up to the 
 accession of Henry II." Some observers charged this wholly 
 upon the ruinous effects of the civil wars following the 
 foreign wars of Henry II, but the gentry were well paid in 
 the Italian wars and the civil wars, ruinous as they were, 
 affected less than half of them. The decline of their pros- 
 perity seems therefore to have been most largely due to 
 abandoning the old simple patriarchal life of the lord and 
 lady, to change fustian for silk and to adopt more and more 
 luxurious habits until finally even the pages and lackeys 
 were clad in cloth of gold. 2 
 
 For this more sumptuous life the country gentleman 
 began to seek a more elegant setting. "It seemed to him 
 that the cage was too small for so beautiful a bird." The 
 new manner of domestic architecture suggested by the Ital- 
 ian craftsmen called to the courts of Louis XII and Francis 
 I, was slowly taken up and adapted to its new setting by 
 French skill. Many a country gentleman became discon- 
 tented with the plain ancestral house and remodelled it in 
 the newer and more stately fashion. Some of them began 
 to build without sitting down to count the cost and the 
 second and third generations of the sixteenth century saw 
 many "follies" erected to impoverish once flourishing estates 
 and make a splendid setting for a pinched existence in man- 
 sions whose owners, when they received their fathers' old 
 friends, were obliged to regale them chiefly by discourses on 
 
 *De la Noue, Discours, 244; Duplessis Mornay, Arch. C, X, 93; 
 Mouton, 85. 
 
 2 De la Noue, 157, 159, 160.
 
 366 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 architecture. There was a well-known monk, welcome in 
 many manors and chateaux because of his charming social 
 qualities, whose ready wit found a favorite subject in this 
 situation. "He was wont to say, 'Oh what is the use of 
 these beautiful towers, salons and cabinets where the cook- 
 ing pots are so cold and the cellars so empty? By the 
 worthy slipper of the Pope (his usual oath), I like better to 
 lodge under a low roof and to hear from my room the music 
 of turning spits and smell the fragrance of roasts and to see 
 the sideboard well covered with goblets and bottles than to 
 visit in these grand palaces, to take beautiful walks through 
 stately halls, breaking a fast with a toothpick.' " * 
 
 In the days of Francis I and his son, the nobles feared 
 the expense of court service and those who had court duties 
 established the custom of serving by quarters, which left 
 them for nine months in the cheap abundance of the manor. 
 The King's household had only one hundred and sixty 
 officers. But from the reign of his son there was a steady 
 increase in this roll of courtiers up to its apogee under 
 Louis XVI when the household of the King was four thou- 
 sand and of each prince of the royal family two thousand. 
 As the gentry began to feel the attraction of court life, many 
 of them tired of an isolation where they were "free as the 
 Doge of Venice" and gave mortgages to enable them to 
 carry their "mills, forests and meadows on their backs." 
 They became avid for court appointments as the court be- 
 came larger and larger, until, as one of them said, his fellows 
 were "chasing offices like swallows after flies." 2 
 
 The Calvinist preachers, outside of very limited areas, 
 never had very much success among the peasants. They 
 first found a hearing in the towns, beginning among the 
 humbler artisans and gradually spreading their doctrines in 
 many places among the higher burghers' families whose 
 members were apt to be chosen to civic offices. Their in- 
 fluence then extended rapidly among the gentry, especially 
 
 l De la Noue, Discours, 166. 
 
 'Tommasco, I, 488; Montaigne, I, 42; du Bellay, Vielleville.
 
 THE HUGUENOTS RENEW THE CIVIL WAR 367 
 
 south of the Loire and in the populous and wealthy province 
 of Normandy. Even with so brief a description of the 
 character and life of that class of the population, it requires 
 but little imagination to see how quickly formidable armies 
 could be raised among the lords of the manor and their sons 
 and servitors, embittered by long persecution and sometimes 
 maddened by the loss of a friend or relative in the frequent 
 mob massacres of the orthodox peasants or superstitious 
 city proletariats, which so often preceded the outbreaks of 
 the intermittent civil war. As the rallying word spread 
 from manor to manor, the horses were saddled, the arms 
 taken down from the wall, purses filled from the strong box 
 under the master's bed and, in little groups of relatives or 
 neighbors, the elements of what was probably the best 
 cavalry then in the world, filled with a reckless native 
 courage and leavened with veterans of the old wars, flowed 
 rapidly from all directions toward the mustering place. In 
 this way a single gentleman of the south travelling from 
 chateau to chateau raised over five hundred cavaliers during 
 his journey, and on one occasion, at the call of Coligny and 
 his brothers, three thousand horsemen mustered in six days. 1 
 At the beginning of the civil wars the nobles of France 
 were by no means an individualistic body. They formed 
 sections whose numbers were more or less closely bound to 
 each other. The provincial feeling was strong and each of 
 the nobles of Burgundy, for instance, was conscious of a 
 certain solidarity which distinguished the whole body from 
 the nobles of Picardy. The influence of the old feudal ties, 
 even though service could no longer be exacted, made the 
 nominal vassals of great houses still apt to sustain their 
 quarrels and follow their lead. When the Prince of Conde 
 married the daughter of the Due de Thouars the nobility 
 allied by blood or vassalage to the important family of 
 Tremoille came over to his side. The old Seigneur de la 
 Vergne rode into the battle of Jarnac in the midst of twenty- 
 five descendant's and nephews and fell in the heap of fifteen 
 
 ! De Ruble ctd. (1), I, 194; Marcks, 154.
 
 368 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 of them killed together. But the civil wars broke up some 
 of these geographical, legal or family groups. No province 
 was solidly orthodox and royalist, though in some the num- 
 ber of Huguenots was inconsiderable and even in the 
 provinces which were the Huguenot strongholds, the Catho- 
 lic nobility rose in arms and made provincial civil war. 
 The ties of vassalage, friendship and blood, though they 
 held in many cases, proved not strong enough to resist the 
 divisive influence of difference of opinion about religion. 
 Many of the families of the country gentry split like the 
 great noble houses of Bourbon and Montmorency. Even 
 the sons did not always follow their fathers and in the 
 slaughterous cavalry charges which were the turning points 
 of most of the battles, the swords of friends and of brothers 
 must often have been crossed. 1 
 
 The great majority of the French gentry remained 
 orthodox and of the orthodox gentry many, in the succes- 
 sive wars, rallied to the royal standard. But the appeal to 
 support their cause in arms was apparently not as quickly 
 effective in their case as in that of their heretic neighbors, 
 for the Huguenots started the first three wars with more 
 cavalry than the King. Nor is it to be supposed that all the 
 gentry were extremely zealous, eager to take part in the 
 fighting, or even very much interested in public affairs. 
 When the German was at the gates of Paris in 1914, fisher- 
 men still sat quietly on the quais, absorbed in watching 
 their tiny floats on the current of the Seine. Gilles de 
 Gouberville, a country gentleman of Normandy, has left a 
 very detailed journal from 1553 to April, 1562, covering 
 therefore the outbreak of the first Huguenot war, and, dur- 
 ing that critical period, it records a hundred times as many 
 observations on good or bad weather as on the prospects of 
 peace or war and displays far more interest in the killing 
 of his pigs or the felling of his trees than in the massacres 
 
 1 Letts. Missive Henri IV, Vol. II, p. 11, 128; d'Aubigne, III, 51; 
 Romier, Rev. Hist. 1917, pp. 1, 255; Letts. I, 325, de la Noue. Brant. 
 V, 350; d'Aubigne, III, 39, 154, IV, 324, V, 295, VII, 84, etc. Lambert, II, 
 42, A. N. K. 1497 B. N. fds. fr. 3951 f. 42.
 
 THE HUGUENOTS RENEW THE CIVIL WAR 369 
 
 of Huguenots or the plundering of churches, which we know 
 was going on all around him. A considerable proportion of 
 the gentry of France were like him and kept out of the whole 
 business so far as they could. In time of stress a large 
 number, perhaps the majority, of any nation, are drawn 
 from their habitual routine of living and thinking, if at all, 
 only by the inescapable pressure of circumstances set in 
 train by more ardent, more adventurous, more interested or 
 more conscientious personalities. 
 
 The second element of the Huguenot forces came from 
 the burghers of the towns. The Huguenot armies did not 
 usually make their base in any city. They were apt to keep 
 the field and fight an open campaign. As one of the old 
 captains put it, he liked better "to hear the lark sing than 
 the mouse squeak." But their leaders saw from the first 
 the enormous importance of the towns in any war waged in 
 France. Since the general use of artillery, fortresses were 
 not, it is true, of the overwhelming military importance 
 they had been in feudal times. But cannon were still very 
 hard to transport and neither very plentiful nor very effi- 
 cient. There was, of course, a sort of refuge for a defeated 
 and scattered army in old chateaux and deserted manors. 
 Thirty years after the outbreak of the first Huguenot war 
 there were in the single province of Poitou more than two 
 hundred chateaux belonging to Huguenots "capable of 
 standing cannon" and so delaying somewhat a victorious 
 force and giving time for a broken army to rally. But the 
 Huguenot leaders needed something stronger and larger to 
 fall back on. There were in France about four hundred 
 chartered towns, the greater part of them more or less 
 strongly fortified, and in addition there were a number of 
 fortified villages. In some towns the Huguenots were the 
 stronger and these declared for the party whenever war 
 began. In addition the outbreak of every war was signalled 
 by simultaneous attempts to seize a number of others, 
 either with or without the aid of Huguenots within the 
 walls. An English Ambassador pointed out that a civil war
 
 370 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 in England would be much shorter than in France because 
 of the absence of a large number of defensible walled towns 
 in England. 1 Most of the walled towns possessed arms, 
 particularly firearms and at least a few cannon, and from 
 among their inhabitants there could readily be raised 
 bands of harquebusiers which formed the infantry of the 
 Huguenot armies. They also furnished such field pieces or 
 siege guns as the Huguenot forces had and the artillerymen 
 to handle them. The Huguenot churches, organized by 
 presbyteries and synods, came to undertake the formation 
 of much of this city infantry and many congregations had 
 captains in their employ. In the later wars the synods 
 voted men and money for the Huguenot armies much as 
 modern states might do and from time to time these synods 
 elected leaders of the Huguenot nobility "Protectors of the 
 Churches." In addition a local church or group of churches 
 often had a noble as "protector." 
 
 The Huguenot war chest was never any too full, but it 
 was saved from emptiness by the contributions of nobles, 
 some of whom made great financial sacrifices for the cause, 
 by money collected by the Reformed churches, by presents 
 sent from sympathizers abroad, by melting down the gold 
 or silver vessels of captured churches, by impositions levied 
 in captured cities and so called "taxes" collected from the 
 peasants. Their war expenses were decreased by the fact 
 that their cavalry were expected to furnish their own fight- 
 ing equipment, while their armies lived to a considerable 
 extent on the country where they campaigned. In addition 
 the sympathy of many of the German princes and nobles 
 whose business was the raising of mercenary troops for 
 service in foreign armies, made them more ready than they 
 would have been in other cases to serve the Huguenot 
 leaders on credit. In the later wars the party found a large 
 resource in a tax of ten per cent levied on the gains of 
 privateers sailing from La Rochelle to prey on French 
 
 1 B. N. Nouvs. Acqs. 20600 f . 175, e. g. Quantin. ptnd. 36, 39, Cal. F. 
 1571, p. 437.
 
 THE HUGUENOTS RENEW THE CIVIL WAR 371 
 
 commerce or the ships of Spaniards, whom they treated as 
 enemies. In accordance with a practice which continued to 
 be a recognized method of warfare down to the nineteenth 
 century, these privateers were granted letters of marque 
 which authorized them to attack enemy commerce on their 
 own charges and for private gain.
 
 CHAPTER XXII 
 
 CATHERINE MAKES PEACE. THE POLITIQUES. CATHERINE 
 
 RENEWS THE CIVIL WAR 
 
 The Huguenots, after the entire failure of their plan to 
 seize the King and surprise many cities, shifted quickly and 
 adopted very bold strategy. They started to starve out 
 Paris. Within three days of their rising they were raiding 
 the suburbs and burning all the windmills on one side of the 
 city. They then seized bridges on all the rivers by which 
 provisions were brought by boat and blockaded the roads. 
 With this grip upon the capital they waited till their forces 
 could come up from Poitou, Guienne, Dauphiny, Auvergne, 
 Languedoc and other provinces of the south, which was 
 the true Huguenot country. They sacked every church 
 and clergyman's house for leagues around. The linens and 
 velvets and silks of the church treasuries they took for 
 their own use and made of them trousers, vests and hand- 
 kerchiefs, but for all the precious metals and jewels of the 
 altar furnishings and ornaments they were obliged to give a 
 strict accounting and to turn them into a common fund for 
 the expenses of the army. They ill-treated a number of the 
 priests, chiefly by way of brutal mockery. And they some- 
 times put to the torture church officers whom they sus- 
 pected of concealing precious vessels or jewels. 1 
 
 They did not have a large enough force to beleaguer 
 Paris and the army of the Constable kept steadily increasing 
 until, early in November, he had twenty thousand well- 
 armed men. Conde's headquarters were at the city of St. 
 Denis close to the gate of Paris in a carefully intrenched 
 camp where he could rally about four thousand infantry 
 and two thousand cavalry. On the 10th of November the 
 
 'La Popeliniere, XII, 19; Haton, I, 144. 
 
 372
 
 CATHERINE MAKES PEACE 373 
 
 Constable marched out of the Porte St. Denis to form line 
 of battle in the plain between the two cities. Conde had 
 just sent off d'Andelot with five hundred horse and a good 
 body of harquebusiers to block the supposed advance of the 
 Spanish auxiliaries. The Admiral was in favor of skirmish- 
 ing and retiring, but the Prince wanted to fight. The fiery- 
 charge of the Huguenot gentlemen, led by the Admiral, on 
 the right wing, was entirely successful. They broke through, 
 attacked the six thousand Parisian militia held in reserve 
 and drove them in headlong panic back to Paris. Mean- 
 while Conde, charging the center, forced their ranks to give 
 way. The Constable was in his seventy-fifth year, but, 
 bleeding from four or five wounds, he stood to it in the melee 
 till his horse was knocked down. He struggled to his feet 
 and an old enemy, Robert Stuart, formerly of the Scotch 
 guard, called on him to surrender. For answer the indomi- 
 table old man drove the hilt of a broken sword into his foe's 
 mouth, knocking out two of his teeth, and the same instant 
 fell mortally wounded by a pistol ball. But the Catholic 
 line was so much longer than the Huguenot that their un- 
 broken squadrons still outnumbered them. They rallied 
 and fell upon Conde, driving him back in his turn. The 
 Admiral had been riding a hard-mouthed horse which bolted 
 with him and carried him so far that his men were left with- 
 out a leader. In consequence, the night fell with the 
 Catholic army in great confusion, but practically masters of 
 the field, and the Huguenots slowly retreating toward the 
 city of St. Denis. 1 
 
 The mortal wound of the Constable was a great blow to 
 the Catholics, who at midnight retired within Paris, and the 
 next morning the Huguenots reoccupied their battle line. 
 D'Andelot, who had hurried back too late to join in the 
 fighting, made an unopposed raid, burning and laying waste 
 up to the very walls of the city. Both sides claimed the 
 victory, but it is evident that but for the fall of night the 
 Huguenots might have been completely overwhelmed. 
 
 x Castelnau, Bk. VI, Ch. 7, Cal. F. 1568, p. 370, d'Aumale, Whitehead.
 
 374 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 Nevertheless the victors were not too much elated, for the 
 Huguenot gentry, heavily outnumbered, had again demon- 
 strated their dangerous fighting power and Conde had main- 
 tained a favorable position. Three days after the battle, 
 while the commanders of the royal army were still quarrel- 
 ing over who should succeed to the position of the Constable, 
 the Huguenots started on a march eastward, which enabled 
 them to form a junction with considerable reinforcements 
 from the south (10,000 men). Then, swinging toward the 
 north, they met on the banks of the Moselle ten thousand 
 German mercenaries, provided with a few field pieces and 
 commanded by the young son of the Elector Palatine. This 
 was a large corps of mercenaries, equal to the combined 
 German and Swiss contingents under Anjou's command. 
 
 For in the midst of the jealous and quarreling nobles of 
 the army Catherine saw nothing better to do than to make 
 the King's younger brother, Henry, Duke of Anjou, then 
 sixteen, Lieutenant-General of the King. But this appoint- 
 ment did not stop the quarrels and five great nobles de- 
 manded the leading of the vanguard and the position of 
 lieutenant for the young Prince. Catherine had already 
 summoned the Duke of Nevers with royal troops from 
 Piedmont and she urged him again and again to hasten his 
 arrival. She ordered that her son's command of the army 
 should be exercised by the advice of the Duke of Montpen- 
 sier, the Duke of Nemours and Marshal Cosse, to whom she 
 added the Duke of Nevers when he arrived. This council 
 was to exercise very strict control. It was probably the best 
 arrangement possible, but it worked very badly. The jeal- 
 ousies seemed to grow worse from day to day. Catherine 
 did her best by letters to put some energy into the camp 
 and visited it in the hope of appeasing quarrels. But this 
 very visit provoked discontent. The Duke of Nemours pro- 
 tested angrily, and Catherine was obliged to write to him 
 that she had no intention of interfering in the campaign, 
 "for war can only be waged by one on the spot." In one 
 case the quarrel even went so far as the lie, a blow and a
 
 CATHERINE MAKES PEACE 375 
 
 drawn dagger, with Anjou and his suite holding the men to 
 prevent bloodshed and the Swiss guards afterwards threat- 
 ening to fight the Breton regiments to avenge the dishonor 
 to their colonel. 1 
 
 In addition to this discord the poverty of the Crown was 
 so extreme and its credit so low that the King, who had 
 announced a loan from the city of Paris at 8y 3 %, was 
 obliged to bid the notaries stop all investments of money in 
 mortgages until the loan was taken up. 2 
 
 The military situation was a very serious one. The 
 Huguenot army, after their junction with their German 
 auxiliaries, had recrossed the Moselle and made a skilful 
 retreat to their old center, Orleans, a position in touch with 
 the provinces where their chief strength lay. Conde, who 
 had threatened the court five months before with less than 
 two thousand men, now had thirty thousand under his 
 command and the royal army did not feel strong enough 
 to take the field against him. 
 
 Catherine was evidently anxious not to have matters 
 pushed to an issue upon the field of battle. She had been 
 intensely angered as well as frightened by the second 
 Huguenot attack upon the court, wrote of it with the great- 
 est indignation, and returned to her old habit of alluding to 
 the heretics as "that vermin." But before the year was 
 over she had suppressed her anger and was actively engaged 
 in negotiations for peace. The Huguenots demanded that 
 all noblemen should have the right of worship in their 
 houses and that anyone might come to it who wished. They 
 wanted the edict regarding religion made perpetual and 
 irrevocable instead of a mere royal proclamation and they 
 asked that Huguenot judges and municipal officials who had 
 been removed should be replaced in their offices. Catherine 
 sent the first of these articles to her son with the request 
 that the princes and leading officers of the camp should 
 
 'B. N. It. 1726 f. 169, A. N. K. 30 Nov., 1567, B. N. Bethune, 8730; 
 Letts. Ill, 103, B. N. It. 1726 f. 187, 196, A. N. K. 1509 f. 10; Letts. Ill, 99; 
 Cal. F. 1568, p. 407. 
 
 J B. N. It. 1726 f. 215, 220; Cal. F. 1568, p. 433.
 
 376 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 express their opinion upon it. They voted unanimously 
 that it ought to be granted, and, although the King was 
 unwilling to grant the other Huguenot demands, negotia- 
 tions continued with hope of a successful issue. This 
 roused the anger of the Spanish Ambassador, who had a 
 most stormy interview with Catherine in which he accused 
 her of being the only person who wanted a thing so per- 
 nicious not only to this kingdom but to all Christendom as 
 peace with heretics. He told her that she "really wanted 
 what she said she didn't want." "He got angry," she re- 
 ports, "and I got furious." x 
 
 Before the end of March the peace was made. But the 
 Edict of Longjumeau, which recorded the terms, was more 
 the beginning of suspicion than the end of hatred and the 
 peace which followed it was worse than war. The royal 
 officers found it impossible, at first, to enforce the 
 Edict at all. The German mercenaries of both sides, as they 
 retired, plundered right and left, the peasants in revenge 
 killed stragglers and in turn the reiters burnt villages. The 
 Huguenot regiments from the south, before they left Tou- 
 raine, destroyed churches and killed priests. In Orleans, 
 when the Catholics according to the Edict prepared to say 
 mass, the Huguenots stopped them and overturned the 
 altars. At Rouen and Amiens where the Catholics were 
 the stronger they hung some Huguenots and killed others 
 in the streets. Amid the continual flood of reports of dis- 
 orders, it seemed to one observer at court that "wherever 
 one side found itself strong it would not grant the privileges 
 of the peace to the other side." Six weeks after the procla- 
 mation of the Edict, news reached the court that the 
 Catholics of Vienne had killed many Huguenots and nearly 
 every day reports came from some place of importance that 
 the law had been broken by one side or the other. In Paris 
 Huguenots were killed by the mob, dismembered and 
 dragged about the city by boys. The Venetian Ambassador 
 reports: "I saw this twice before my house. I was stupe- 
 
 a B. N. It. 1726 f. 178; Letts. Ill, 60, 62, 75, 81, 89.
 
 CATHERINE MAKES PEACE 377 
 
 fied to see boys not more than three palms high standing 
 around a bloody corpse, beating it with sticks and stamping 
 on the face; finally it was thrown into the river." The 
 Duke of Montpensier reported that the city of La Rochelle, 
 the great Huguenot stronghold, had refused to allow the 
 royal commander to bring any troops past their gates and 
 that a score or more of priests had been publicly put to 
 death. After long hesitation most of the Huguenot towns 
 received royal garrisons, but La Rochelle continued to 
 refuse, saying that for three hundred years they had never 
 had a garrison and that the garrisoned cities like Lyons, 
 Orleans, Bordeaux, Limoges, Angers, received every day ill 
 treatment from the King's soldiers. They also refused to 
 pay the sum of one hundred thousand livres which had been 
 levied upon them, saying they were too much impoverished 
 by the late war. 1 
 
 It is small wonder therefore that more than two months 
 after the publication of the Edict of Pacification, the King 
 began a letter to one of his marshals as follows: "Inasmuch 
 as up to the present time my Edict of Pacification has not 
 been observed and kept according to my intentions, etc." 
 Against the wrongs inflicted upon their followers the lead- 
 ing Huguenots like the Queen of Navarre, the Cardinal of 
 Chatillon, the Admiral and the Prince of Conde made for- 
 mal and bitter protest, emphasizing particularly the con- 
 tinual murders by which "more were being slain in peace 
 than had fallen in war." So that "if the King would really 
 do justice for these outrages, the trees would have more men 
 hanging on them than leaves." 2 
 
 As time went on these complaints grew more bitter and 
 more like threats and just before the tension broke again 
 in open war, a passionate summary of them was written to 
 Catherine with a deep tone of menace from a new source. 
 At the end of August, Elizabeth of England sent her Ambas- 
 
 *B. N. fds. fr. 6611 f. 59 A. N. K. 1509, Mar. 27; B. N. It. 1726 f. 223, 
 228, 238, 247, Nouvs. Acqs. 6001 f. 21 C. C. C. 24 f. 330, 355. 
 
 a B. N. fds. fr. 3207 f. 59 C. C. C. 24 f. 146, 178, 329, 346; d'Aumale 
 pntd. App. II, 281, 282; Cal. F. 1567, p. 516.
 
 378 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 sador a long written message to be delivered to the King of 
 France and his mother in the presence of the royal council 
 about the 
 
 "violations of the royal Edict throughout France and that not 
 by private persons, but also by governors of your provinces, 
 castles and cities and frequently by your soldiers in garrison. 
 . . . And what is more horrible before God, these murders are, 
 as everybody knows, maintained, incited and rewarded by those 
 who have great influence under Your Majesty. . . . Reports of 
 horrible plunderings by fire and sword, drowning or strangling 
 your subjects in monstrous, barbarous, brutal and horrible ways, 
 men, women and children, noble and ignoble, rich and poor, are 
 sent to the Queen of England every day by people worthy of 
 belief, merchants and others of her subjects doing business in 
 France. ... If the King will inquire through impartial persons, 
 he will find that his realm is more weakened and wasted in six 
 months since the edict of peace than in nine months of civil war 
 before. ... In conclusion, Sire, ... if those who thus kill and 
 plunder are avowed and maintained, as if it was done by an 
 ordinance of the Church of Rome in order to exterminate those 
 who do not agree to the doctrines of Rome, the Queen of England 
 sees clearly, although perhaps very late, the danger which 
 threatens her and her state, and also she does not doubt that 
 other princes and potentates agreeing with her against the unity 
 of the Bishop of Rome, will see plainly how necessary it is for 
 them to provide promptly against such a danger. The Queen 
 of England now feels herself discharged before God and her 
 honor and toward you, her good brother and ally for any steps 
 she may take for her own safety." * 
 
 To this protest Catherine replied firmly, "The King will 
 not admit any judge or mediator between himself and his 
 subjects . . . and he begs the Queen and all other princes 
 not to thrust themselves into this affair." But while Cath- 
 erine strongly resented Elizabeth's remonstrance about the 
 sufferings of the Huguenots, she sent conciliatory answers 
 to the complaints of her own subjects and frequently wrote 
 to the royal officers to enforce the Edict of Pacification. 
 Outrages, however, did not stop and the Huguenots began 
 
 'E.g., Conde to King, Aug., 1568, B. N. C. C. C. 24 f. 178; pntd. 
 in French, Letts. Ill, 179, Cal. F. 1568, summary.
 
 CATHERINE MAKES PEACE 379 
 
 to suspect that worse things had been planned against 
 them. It is not surprising therefore that by the middle of 
 the spring the report was circulated that a privy councillor 
 of the Queen Mother had on his death bed told his physician 
 that the Queen "had made this peace for no other end than 
 that those of the religion, being now exhausted by long 
 expense and scattered to their houses, might with greater 
 facility be dispatched." * 
 
 Three things very much increased the suspicion and 
 fears of the Huguenots. The first was the fact that since 
 the beginning of the civil war, a whole network of orthodox 
 leagues, similar to that formed earlier by Monluc in the 
 south, had been spread over France. These were sometimes 
 provincial and sometimes municipal. By the middle of the 
 summer they existed in Burgundy, Berry, Champagne, Brie, 
 Maine, Anjou, Touraine, Limousin, Agenois and at Chalon- 
 sur-Saone, Beauvais, Toulouse, Anduze and Perigord. 
 Their members were sworn to maintain "the law and faith 
 of which we make profession in our baptism and to render 
 all friendship and fraternity one to the other, to aid each 
 other reciprocally against all attempts of the opposite party 
 without regard to friends, or any relationship which we may 
 have with those who undertake the contrary." The exist- 
 ence of these associations without any government author- 
 ity suggested of itself the chances of a renewal of the war, 
 and the Huguenots could hardly have been ignorant of the 
 fact that by the middle of the summer the King had under- 
 taken an enumeration of "all the good and faithful Catho- 
 lics of the various provinces so that he can know what 
 forces he can rely on if occasion presents itself, because the 
 will of His Majesty is to live and die in the same religion as 
 his predecessors and he wants to know the number of those 
 who will follow his will and die in that religion." 2 
 
 The second thing which increased the Huguenot suspi- 
 
 1 Letts. Ill, 142, 145, 147, 149, 153, 157, 182; Cal. F. 1568, 470, 501. ' 
 
 2 Thompson, 351, 353. B. N. Port. Font. 316 f. 41; B. N. It. 1726 f. 259, 
 A. N. K. 1509; Lestrade pntd., 19.
 
 380 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 cions was what they saw going on in the Netherlands. The 
 Duke of Alva was terrorizing the population with his army 
 and preparing for those sittings of the "Council of Blood" 
 of which he wrote in the middle of the spring to his master, 
 "the execution of those already arrested and those I am go- 
 ing to arrest will amount to more than eight hundred 
 heads." x 
 
 The third thing which increased the suspicions of the 
 Huguenots was the situation at court. Their bitterest 
 enemy, the Cardinal of Lorraine, had larger power in the 
 state than he had exercised since the time of Francis II, and 
 he was particularly close to the King's brother, the young 
 Duke of Anjou, now Lieu tenant-General. As soon as this 
 was known the Huguenots began to protest against it in the 
 strongest possible way. Conde answered publicly a mes- 
 senger of the King inviting him to court, "the reason why 
 the King's subjects cannot live in peace and liberty of con- 
 science as he wants them to do, is the friendship between 
 the Duke of Anjou and the Cardinal of Lorraine and you 
 can assure the King that I will not enter his court so long 
 as the Cardinal of Lorraine remains there." To a message 
 from the Cardinal himself to make friends with him Conde 
 replied that he would never even be reconciled to him 
 unless he would leave the court and under no circumstances 
 would he ever admit him to the circle of his friends. The 
 strong dislike of the Cardinal's influence was not confined 
 to the Huguenots, the four marshals resented it exceedingly 
 because, through the Duke of Anjou, who was Lieutenant- 
 General of the King, it took all military power out of their 
 hands, and all those moderate Catholics, counsellors and 
 secretaries whom Catherine had gathered around her, were 
 opposed to the Cardinal of Lorraine's policy and disliked his 
 personality. 2 
 
 The truth was that the able Cardinal had a genius for 
 
 1 Gachard, II, 23. 
 
 2 Eng. Ven. Ferr. Ambs. Arch. Mod., May 8: B. N. It. 1726, Cal. F. 
 1568, pp. 455, 470, 472, 474; A. N. K. 1509 f. 60.
 
 CATHERINE MAKES PEACE 381 
 
 exciting dislike, and like many proud, passionate men was 
 exceedingly sensitive to the dislike his pride provoked. 
 When the Cardinal of Bourbon, one of his two surviving 
 associates of the group which surrounded the Triumvirate 
 in the first civil war, advised him to retire from court be- 
 cause he was so much hated, he complained bitterly to an 
 assembly of the heads of his family held in the room of the 
 Duke of Nemours, who had married his brother's widow. 
 He said he had never given anybody reason to hate him so 
 much and begged the Duke of Nemours to stand by him. 
 His sister-in-law broke in, saying that to speak freely, he 
 himself was entirely to blame for all this, because when he 
 might have made friends without any difficulty he had, on 
 the contrary, irritated everybody against him by turning the 
 cold shoulder to everybody and caring for nothing but his 
 own advantage: that she herself had often begged him to 
 do things for them and for others which he was unwilling 
 to do: that she and her husband were willing enough to 
 stand by him but that he must do differently from what he 
 had done, because his past conduct had infuriated every- 
 body against him. 1 
 
 The result of this renewal of opposition and animosity 
 to the Cardinal of Lorraine was the beginning of the forma- 
 tion of a third party in France, the Party of the Politiques. 
 They were orthodox, but their fundamental principle as 
 later expressed by their leader, Montmorency, was that "one 
 year of civil war does more harm to the Catholic religion in 
 France than ten years of peace with the heretics." The 
 English Ambassador thus describes the beginning of the 
 party: 
 
 "There be two kinds of the people whom the Papists term 
 Huguenots ; that is to say, Huguenots of religion and Huguenots 
 of state. The one of these, perceiving that the Cardinal works 
 to ruin them and their own peculiar force being not sufficient to 
 withstand his malice, having shown appearance that they will 
 
 ^aulnier, 28, Arch. Mod., 9 May, 1568. Duchess of Nemours was 
 sister of Duke to whom dispatch was sent.
 
 382 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 join with the other, who seeing themselves excluded from all 
 government, and those of Guise to be first to usurp the whole 
 authority, presently practise a firm faction and league between 
 themselves, either part promising to support the other." * 
 
 The head of the forming Party of Politiques was the 
 Marshal Montmorency. This eldest son of the old Con- 
 stable had never approved his father's joining with the 
 Guise in the Triumvirate against his nephews, the Chatil- 
 lons; and indeed the Constable had been driven into that 
 unnatural alliance only by zeal for his religion and only for 
 a short time. One recorded utterance of his was distinctly 
 prophetic of the Politique attitude his sons were now taking. 
 In 1565 when the Nuncio demanded that his red hat 
 and his benefices should be taken from Cardinal Chatillon, 
 the Constable said, "I am a Catholic, but if the Pope and 
 his ministers go about again to trouble the realm, my sword 
 shall be Huguenot." 2 
 
 Marshal Montmorency now revived in a different form 
 an ancient project of the Huguenot Party to unite the 
 houses of Valois and Tudor. In 1563 Conde had proposed 
 to Queen Elizabeth to marry the King, in spite of the fact 
 that he was thirteen and the Queen thirty. Montmorency 
 now secretly proposed to the English Ambassador that, in 
 order to break up the influence of the Cardinal of Lorraine 
 with the young Duke of Anjou, it would be well for the 
 Queen of England "not to take in ill part an overture of a 
 treaty of marriage proposed between her and the Duke." 
 The Ambassador commented, "though the Queen never 
 meant that the same should take place, yet he thinks there 
 would thereof arise great commodity, because Montmorency 
 could thereby in such sort creep into credit with Anjou, as, 
 in the end, to work the Cardinal of Lorraine out of favor." 8 
 
 Nothing came of this suggestion at the time, and, just at 
 this juncture, the house of Guise won its long lawsuit with 
 
 *Cal. F. 470, Arch. Vat. ctd. L'Epinois, 30. 
 
 'Cal. F. 1565, p. 524. 
 
 *Oal. F. 1568, p. 263, 156S, p. 487,
 
 CATHERINE MAKES PEACE 383 
 
 the house of Montmorency over the County of Dammartin 
 which had been running for eight years. The old quarrel 
 between the two houses, which dated back to the time of 
 Francis I, reached, therefore, the greatest pitch of intensity 
 and the Venetian Ambassador, even in the face of the 
 Huguenot peril, could write that "it is now become a great 
 danger to the King and the kingdom." x 
 
 Between these three factions, the extreme orthodox 
 headed by the Cardinal of Lorraine and the heir apparent, 
 who demanded the extermination of heresy at any cost; the 
 Huguenots threatening to renew the civil war; and the new 
 party of the Politiques driven by their quarrel with the 
 house of Guise towards alliance with the Huguenots, Cath- 
 erine found herself in great danger of losing all voice in the 
 government. The Modenese Ambassador, a shrewd ob- 
 server, thought she was trying to work "by her usual method 
 of standing well with both parties in order to keep her 
 power." The English Ambassador described her policy in 
 detail as follows : 
 
 "The end of the war brings no end to this mortal hatred 
 between the houses of Guise and Montmorency. The Queen 
 Mother, perceiving these factions and not assured of either, hopes 
 by her uncertain dealings to nourish their enmity to her gain 
 without profit to either and so proceeds, giving countenance some- 
 times to the Guisians and otherwhiles to the Montmorency. And 
 although the principal affairs of the realm be dealt with in the 
 body of the council, yet is not that propounded which is meant, 
 nor that executed which there is determined, but, every man's 
 opinion heard, she makes her profit thereof and resolves what 
 she thinks best to serve her turn." 2 
 
 That this policy of balancing between parties was Cath- 
 erine's favorite and usual policy has been asserted by so 
 many different observers who knew her well that it cannot 
 be doubted, but this time the two ambassadors were mis- 
 taken. Catherine had determined not to pursue her usual 
 
 1 B. N. It. 1726 f. 243. 
 
 3 Arch. Mod., 15 June, 1568; Cal. F. 474.
 
 384 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 middle policy of balancing between parties, but to act 
 strongly after the model of Alva in the Netherlands; to 
 seize the leaders of the Huguenots and to railroad them to 
 the scaffold. This plan, of course, had been urged upon her 
 by the leaders of the extreme Catholics at the interview of 
 Bayonne and by Spain ever since. She had previously 
 turned a deaf ear to these plans, but two things had made 
 her change her mind. The first was the attempt to seize the 
 King at Meaux. The Admiral had warned his friends when 
 they insisted on making peace that Catherine would never 
 forget this and the event showed he was right. Catherine 
 regarded it as an unforgivable piece of treachery — not in- 
 volving her life — but certainly the complete destruction of 
 her influence in government and, as she had written in 1561 
 when it was proposed to destroy her power by the Estates 
 General, she preferred "that if they were going to take her 
 honor they should also take her life." * 
 
 In the second place she strongly suspected that the 
 Huguenots were planning to renew the war. Early in May 
 the Duke of Montpensier wrote from central France that 
 he had sent to different places to find out what was going 
 on and that the most common report was of a new move- 
 ment on the part of the Huguenots with a rendezvous either 
 at Paris or at Orleans. Large numbers of ex-Huguenot 
 soldiers were said to have arrived in the suburbs of Paris 
 and the Queen and her children were heavily guarded by 
 special detachments of harquebusiers. The story was started 
 and believed in Catholic circles that a former lieutenant of 
 the Admiral, being at the point of death, sent for a confessor 
 and told him that, at the last assembly of the Huguenot 
 chiefs in Orleans before they surrendered, they had sworn 
 to murder the Queen and all her children. It was even 
 said that at the suggestion of the father confessor the dying 
 man had sent for two notaries, dictated a confession and 
 signed it. At the end of June one of her trusted agents 
 wrote to Catherine from Orleans, "Diligence and vigilance 
 
 1 Letts. I, 174.
 
 CATHERINE MAKES PEACE 385 
 
 were never so much needed as now. . . . Our enemies do 
 not sleep. The signs of their activity appear every day. 
 God grant that I may turn out to be more of a liar than a 
 prophet. If you show my letters outside the royal council 
 I shall be called a fool or a coward, but I should be unworthy 
 of my charge if I didn't tell you what I think." A little 
 later it was reported from England that Conde had written 
 to say that "the peace was not being kept, though he did not 
 blame the King but his bad counsellors. He would take 
 arms very soon with twelve thousand men." In August the 
 Duke of Montpensier wrote repeatedly to Catherine and the 
 King if "the warnings which came to me regularly from 
 several different places are true, we are veiy close to war." 
 About the same time the Lieutenant-General of Languedoc 
 wrote to his Governor, "the Huguenots are assembled in 
 arms in the mountains and those of Dauphiny and Provence 
 are on the march for La Rochelle." x 
 
 These fears were much increased by the suspicion 
 that the Huguenots had an understanding with the Dutch 
 insurgents. When Alva about two weeks before the Hugue- 
 not rising at Meaux had arrested Egmont and Horn, the 
 richest and the ablest of all the Dutch nobles had escaped 
 his hand. Just before Alva arrived, William, Prince of 
 Orange, had crossed the border into Germany after vainly 
 urging Egmont and Horn to go with him. In the spring of 
 1568, by pledging all his great estates, he gathered a force 
 of German mercenaries and Dutch refugees and threw them 
 suddenly in three places across the border. With these 
 invasions a body of Huguenots coming from the South was 
 to cooperate and the Seigneur de Cocqueville actually ap- 
 peared on the border with some thousand disbanded Hugue- 
 not soldiers. Conde repudiated this action and said it was 
 done without authority from him, but he was not believed. 
 The project of an alliance between Conde, Coligny and the 
 
 J B. N. Nouvs. Acqs. 6001 f. 21, 23. 33, ib. 599, f. 170; St. Petersburg 
 24 It. 1726 f. 226, 234 fds. fr. 3179 f. 25. Arch Mod., May 6, Nee. Tosc., 
 Ill, 574.
 
 386 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 Prince of Orange "having before their eyes loyalty to their 
 princes led into tyranny by bad counsel, to help each other 
 as far as they could for the glory of God, the public good 
 and the liberty of religion," x which was drawn up by 
 someone in August, 1568, was never signed, but there was 
 the greatest sympathy between the two insurrections. 
 Huguenot soldiers fought in the ranks of Orange and later 
 he and his brother joined the Huguenot army. 
 
 Urged therefore by resentment for the attack at Meaux 
 and fear of its renewal, Catherine, whose earlier impression 
 that the real cause of these wars was "ambition and desire 
 for revenge rather than religion" never changed, deter- 
 mined to retaliate on the Huguenot leaders in kind by 
 seizing them as they had tried to seize her — to nip their 
 scheme in the bud. Whether she had formed this plan 
 before making peace we cannot say. Some people thought 
 so. At all events, by the end of the spring of 1568 
 she definitely planned to treat Conde and the Admiral as 
 Alva had treated the confederates in the Netherlands; a 
 resolution urged on her by letters from Philip II. 2 
 
 It was very difficult to conceal from the Huguenots for 
 very long any resolution formed at court. They had spies 
 among the under-secretaries and also many friends even at 
 the royal council board. The news which came from them 
 was very alarming, though it is questionable whether any 
 of these informers got hold of the actual thread of the plot. 
 In addition, they knew that guards had been put at all fords 
 and bridges consisting of a captain and twelve men. They 
 were to allow nobody to pass without knowing where he 
 came from and where he was going. The King was gath- 
 ering troops which were being disposed in such a way as to 
 cut off the Huguenot leaders, Conde and the Admiral, who 
 were in Burgundy, from their followers in the South. A 
 spy was captured at Noyers, the small but well fortified 
 
 *Groen, III. 
 
 *"As she has often said to me." Rel. I, 4, p. 180; A. N. K. 1511, 
 May 4, 1568.
 
 CATHERINE MAKES PEACE 387 
 
 town in which Conde had taken refuge, who confessed he 
 had been sent to measure the height of the walls and to 
 count the number in the garrison. They could not help but 
 see the effect of Catherine's secret plan to appoint none but 
 Catholics as governors of cities and to get the command of 
 the captaincies of men at arms so far as possible in the 
 hands of "marked" Catholics. They did not know that 
 early in June Ruscellai had been sent to Rome by Catherine 
 at the instance of the Cardinal of Lorraine to ask the Pope 
 to give three hundred thousand scudi to make strong war 
 against the Huguenots. Fifty years later the Memoirs of 
 Tavannes, written by his son, said that "in the month of 
 August, the Queen determined with the assistance of the 
 Cardinal of Lorraine to carry out the objects for which she 
 had made peace. She sent therefore to Tavannes the 
 command to arrest the Prince (of Conde) in Noyers." The 
 Queen, he goes on to explain, was counselled more by pas- 
 sion than by reason and he replied to her that "the under- 
 taking was dangerous and proposed by excited and inex- 
 perienced men. ... If it pleased His Majesty to declare 
 open war, he would then prove that he knew how to serve 
 him, but if he should be willing to carry out this command, 
 Conde and the Admiral, having good horses, would save 
 themselves and . . . the princes of this party would always 
 remain his mortal enemies." The Memoirs continue: 
 "Tavannes thought it best to give the alarm to the Prince 
 of Conde, therefore he sent a messenger with a letter which 
 contained this sentence : 'The stag is in the net, the hunt is 
 ready.' Conde suddenly left in alarm, with all his family." 1 
 The Memoirs of Tavannes were written so long after 
 the events they described and contain so much of his son 
 and so little of himself, that careful historians have used 
 them with suspicion, but this story, told long afterwards, is 
 confirmed in the most striking way by three contemporary 
 
 'D'Aumale, pntd. II, App. 280, 287. Serres, 19; Pasquier, Bk. VI, 6; 
 Hug. Envoy to Council of Berne, Frankreich D 473; A. N. K. 1511, Sp. 
 Amb. reports talk with Catherine, Arch. Mod. 13, 18 June. Tavannes, 35.
 
 388 CATHERINE DE MEDICIS 
 
 documents which the man who told it had never seen. 
 These documents so far as I know have escaped the notice of 
 historians. The Spanish Ambassador reports in two dis- 
 patches that Catherine told him so cautiously that she drew 
 with her own hand the curtains of the gallery in which they 
 were walking, that Tavannes had been ordered to capture 
 or kill Conde and the Admiral and he had refused. The 
 Legate, who had every chance to know the facts, 
 writing a year later about these events, said, "The peace (of 
 Longjumeau) was made to catch the heads of the cursed 
 sect after they had laid down their arms, but the traitors 
 who gave this counsel, or at least joined in it, let the foxes 
 out of the trap and those in charge of carrying out the plan 
 gave such timely warning to the rebels that they left Noyers 
 and got safely to La Rochelle." x 
 
 Although the Huguenots did not know these facts, which 
 prove to us the intentions of Catherine, they knew enough 
 to be alarmed and on their guard. "The Prince of Conde 
 was warned by some of the greatest nobles of France and 
 members of the royal council that they were preparing to 
 besiege Noyers with an army in order to take him or to kill 
 him and the Admiral and others who were with him, while 
 forces from two other directions were to cut off their re- 
 treat." -' Early in the morning of the 23rd of August, 1568, 
 the Prince and the Admiral, with their families, and friends, 
 set out on a forced march through the midst of their ene- 
 mies across France to reach the Huguenot stronghold of 
 La Rochelle. Before starting Conde issued a declaration and 
 justification of war. This and subsequent declarations gave 
 the reasons why the Huguenots believed there was a plot on 
 the part of the Catholics to seize their chiefs and suppress 
 their religion in France and throughout all Europe. They 
 also pointed out the violence and assassinations which they 
 had suffered in many places and alleged that commissions 
 
 1 A. N. K. 1511, 1509 f. 4; Arch. Vat. 5269 f. 63. Pntd. Thompson, 553. 
 Ranke says is by Legate. 
 
 a Areh. Berne Frankreich, D. 473. Statement of Huguenot Envoy.
 
 CATHERINE MAKES PEACE 389 
 
 had been sent to all governors to seize the leading Hugue- 
 nots in order that "the wolves might have an easier time 
 with the sheep when the sheep dogs were taken away." 
 As they had no such plain proof of the intended treachery 
 of Catherine as we now possess, somebody in the party 
 prepared a forged document which contained false proof 
 of what they rightly suspected. It was in the form of 
 a letter supposedly written by the agent of the Car- 
 dinal of Crequy at the court to his master. He wishes to 
 explain how it is that the King is sending out letters to his 
 officers to assure the chiefs of the Huguenot nobility that 
 he intends to keep the Edict and to maintain their liberty 
 of worship. This is only to "amuse and put them to sleep," 
 and to catch all the leaders "in order that we may be able 
 to exterminate this vermin without leaving a single person 
 in the realm who is infected, because that will be a seed 
 to renew the evil, unless we follow this way in which our 
 neighbors (allusion to Alva in the Netherlands) are showing 
 us such a good example." 1 
 
 In reply to the Huguenot manifesto, the King accused 
 them of having broken the Edict because some of the cities 
 which were to be surrendered to the King had not been 
 surrendered; like Sancerre, Montauban and the smaller 
 places of Dauphiny and Languedoc. La Rochelle not only 
 refused to receive her garrison, but was building fortifica- 
 tions and equipping vessels of war without the permission 
 of the King. The Admiral and Conde were accused of 
 making alliance with the Flemings and the Germans for the 
 ruin of the Catholics and the establishment of their pre- 
 tended Reformation. 2 
 
 1 Pntd. Histoire de Nostre Temps. See N. 
 
 'Summary of reasons, both sides, La Popeliniere, Bk. XIV, 51.
 
 
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