It has been too generally taken for granted that the reconciliation of Henry IV with the Church of Rome was a mere act of political expediency—an act of violence to conscientious conviction. Any step of this kind, taken at a moment when it manifestly coincides with worldly interest, inevitably excites suspicion; and it must be confessed that the juncture at which the King announced his conversion was ill-chosen for inspiring belief in his sincerity. But it were hard measure to charge him with deliberate hypocrisy; to suppose that he knelt at the altar of St. Denis with a lie in his mouth and double-dealing in his heart. The truth was probably this. Henry could not help sympathizing to a great extent with the Huguenot cause; he was bound to it by early education, by the memory of many a gallantly-contested field of battle, and by close ties of personal friendship. But Protestantism as a system of doctrine was, to say the least, indifferent to him. In renouncing it, therefore, he cannot be said, religiously speaking, to have violated the law of conscience. On the contrary, it would seem that his religious instincts attracted him strongly towards Catholicism. PalmaCayet tells us that he remarked to one of his domestic chaplains, before his abjuration, "I cannot see either order or devotion in this religion (the Reformed). It consists in nothing but a preachment, and this only means a tongue which can speak good French. Now, I have a notion that we ought to believe that the Body of our Saviour is actually present in the Sacrament; otherwise all that one does in religion is no better than a bare ceremony." The same annalist mentions that "God had long previously impressed the king's mind with regard to the reality of the Eucharistic Presence," and that "the only points upon which he was still in doubt were those of the invocation of saints, auricular confession, and the authority of the Pope." It was accordingly on these three latter doctrines that Henry consulted the Catholic divines at the conference held at Mantes on the 23rd of July, 1593. The clergy who took part in it were the Archbishop of Bourges, the Bishops of Nantes, Le Mans, and Chartres, Duperron bishopdesignate of Evreux, and the curès of Paris Benoit, Morennes, and Chavagnac, who, from the first, had steadily supported the Bourbon cause in opposition to the League. The royal catechumen is said to have astonished these professed theologians by the acuteness of his questions and the ability with which he sustained the argument. They remained in deliberation for seven hours; at last the king said, "You have not altogether satisfied me; but the state of the case is this: I now place my soul in your hands; take good care how you deal with it; for wherever you conduct me, there I shall stay till the hour of my death, and that I most solemnly protest to you." There is nothing in such language that savours of levity, far less of cant or conscious duplicity.

The sagacious Sully (himself a Protestant), who had better opportunities than any other person of knowing the real state of the king's mind, has recorded his belief that, while Henry was doubtless influenced at first by political considerations, he became persuaded in the end that the Catholic religion was the surer way of salvation. He adds that, from the natural ingenuousness of the king's character, he would ill have supported, had the case been otherwise, such a disguise of his true sentiments for the rest of his life.

Henry made his public abjuration of Calvinism in the Abbey Church of St. Denis on Sunday the 25th of July, 1593; and was thereupon absolved provisionally and restored to the communion of the Church, by the Archbishop of Bourges. But although this event gave him at once a prestige and a vantage ground which nothing else could have procured, he found himself still surrounded by manifold embarrassments. The Pope's Legate declared the proceedings at St. Denis null and void, inasmuch as the French prelates had acted without authority from Rome. Clement VIII spoke of the king's conversion in terms of bitter contumely : "I would not believe Navarre to be a Catholic," said he to the Duke of Nevers, "unless an angel should come down from heaven and whisper it in my ear. As for the Catholics of his party, they are disloyal to religion and to the Crown; they are but the bastards of the bondmaid; the Leaguers are the legitimate children, the true pillars and buttresses of the Catholic religion." The Court of Rome showed extreme reluctance to grant the absolution which was humbly craved on behalf of Henry by his envoys ; and the protracted delays in this affair were seriously injurious, since a plausible justification was thus given to the continued enmity of the King of Spain and the fanatics of the League. Upon this pretext the king's life was twice attempted by assassins. The deed was openly defended on the ground that he was no true member of the Church, and not recognised by the Pope; consequently his murder was a lawful and a meritorious act.

Of the rancorous hatred borne to Henry by the fanatical priesthood, even after his restoration to Catholic communion, we have a curious proof in the series of nine sermons "Sur la simulée conversion de Henri de Bourbon," preached by Jean Boucher in the Church of St. Merry.

These were published with the official approbation of the Sorbonne, in which it is stated that, "besides being grave and learned, they contain a wholesome doctrine, and an able exposure of false Catholicism and impious Politicism, and thus confirm in a wonderful manner the wavering faith of numbers of Catholics in these unhappy times". The discourses abound with the foulest and most malignant abuse, intermixed with passages of considerable eloquence, and with a certain display of erudition. The main object of the preacher is to establish, from every possible point of view, the illegality and invalidity of the absolution pronounced by the Archbishop of Bourges. Collaterally he embraces a wide range of topics; he defends the principle of insurrection; asserts the plenary power of the Estates of the realm to regulate the succession to the throne and the form of government; identifies the action of the League with that of the Church; exalts the Pope to an absolute supremacy, not only in spirituals but indirectly in temporals also; and combines an extravagant advocacy of the rights of the people with maxims of religious intolerance involving the duty of active persecution.

A reply to Boucher's Sermons was published by Claude d'Angennes, Bishop of Le Mans; in which he proved, by copious references to ecclesiastical canons and tradition, that the power of absolution in cases of heresy has been reserved in all ages to the bishops, independently of the See of Rome.

It was a special object with the Roman curia that Henry should solicit, not only absolution, but rehabilitation, that is, the restitution of his rights as a temporal sovereign; which, of course, would have implied the admission that the Pope had power to deprive him of those rights, and restore them when he thought proper. This point the French commissioners, Cardinal d'Ossat and Du Perron, positively declined to concede. Clement insisted on it with great pertinacity, but, at length, found it necessary to yield, and ended by waiving it. It was represented to him that if he showed himself obdurate and intractable, Henry of Bourbon might lose patience, and France might be provoked to withdraw altogether from the obedience of Rome, after the melancholy example of England. It appears, indeed, that Henry had already been urged by some of his ablest counsellors to establish the Galilean Church upon the footing of national independence, under the presidency of a patriarch, nominated by himself. These and other considerations induced the Pope to take a more reasonable tone; and, after some further discussion, the conditions of the Absolution were finally arranged. They were as follows: —That the Catholic religion and worship should be re-established in Bearn, and other localities where it had been suppressed since the year 1585. That all ecclesiastical benefices and property which had been conferred upon heretics, laymen, and other disqualified persons, should be restored to the orthodox clergy. That the young Prince of Condé (at that time heir-presumptive to the throne, the king having no legitimate children) should be educated in the Catholic faith. That the king should give the preference to Catholics in the distribution of public offices and dignities, and should let it be plainly seen that he desired the true Church to be dominant throughout the kingdom. That the decrees of the Council of Trent, as well of discipline as of doctrine, should be received and executed in France. To this latter stipulation the French ambassadors annexed a noticeable modifying clause;—"with the exception of any article which could not be executed without causing disturbance in the kingdom."

Henry further promised, by way of works of satisfaction, to hear mass regularly every day, and recite certain specified prayers; to approach the sacraments of penance and the Eucharist at least four times a year; and to establish convents and nunneries in different parts of the kingdom. According to Sully's account, it was moreover secretly covenanted that the banished Jesuits should be recalled to France.

All preliminaries being adjusted, the ceremony of the absolution took place with great parade and solemnity on the 17th of September, 1595. The Pope seated himself on a throne raised on a lofty platform in front of St. Peter's, the doors of the cathedral being closed. Henry's representatives Cardinal d'Ossat and Du Perron, Bishop of Evreux, prostrated themselves at the feet of the Holy Father, and in the name of their Sovereign abjured all heresy, swore upon the Gospels to maintain the true faith inviolate, accepted the above-named conditions of penitential discipline, and promised the same submission and obedience to the Sovereign Pontiff that had always been paid by the Most Christian kings.

The choir then intoned the Miserere; and during the performance the Pope administered to the kneeling prelates a gentle symbolical chastisement with a slender staff. At its conclusion he pronounced the impressive words of absolution in due form; whereupon the great multitude who thronged the square of St. Peter's rent the air with acclamations. The Pope, turning to the French envoys, charged them to tell their master that, since he was now re-admitted into the fold of the Church Militant, it remained for him to merit, by soundness of faith and fruitfulness in good works, a glorious entrance hereafter into the Church triumphant.

This authoritative recognition of Henry of Bourbon as the eldest son of the Church deprived the Leaguers, the Tiersparti, and all other malcontents among the Catholics, of every conceivable pretext for further disturbing the peace of France. They accordingly laid down their arms, and signified their adhesion to the king's government, on all sides; and within four months after the absolution at Rome, the definitive treaty was signed with the Duke of Mayenne at Folembrai, which formally put an end to the existence of the League.

But with the Huguenots Henry had much more difficulty. They continued to show themselves sullen, jealous, factious, unreasonable. Their leaders—Rohan, Bouillon, La Tremoille,—had abandoned the court, and were agitating in various parts of the country for a renewal of the civil war. In some of the most critical emergencies of the struggle with Spain—such for instance as the siege of La Fère and the capture of Amiens—the Protestants remained stubbornly deaf to the appeals of their sovereign for assistance; indeed his moments of embarrassment and distress were precisely those which they chose for worrying him with fresh demands and exorbitant pretensions. No sooner was it known that Henry had opened negociations for peace with the King of Spain, than the Huguenot synod appointed delegates to proceed forthwith to England and Holland, for the purpose of intriguing with Elizabeth and the Prince of Orange to defeat the proposed treaty. Such conduct was the more unjustifiable, inasmuch as the Reformers had in reality very little to complain of at this period. The edict of 1577, which was legally in full force, secured to them substantial toleration, and even a considerable share of political power; and if that edict was not always perfectly observed, the cause lay, for the most part, in the violent proceedings of the Huguenots themselves in those districts where their creed predominated, and in the general distrust which they inspired as dangerous revolutionary agitators.

Further concessions, however, were indispensable under the pressure of existing circumstances. In March, 1597, Henry appointed as his commissioners Count Gaspard de Schomberg, the historian Jacques Auguste de Thou (one of the Presidents of the Parliament of Paris), and the Councillors of State De Vic and Calignon; who immediately proceeded to treat for a final settlement with the Protestant Assembly sitting at Loudun. Several months elapsed before a satisfactory understanding could be arrived at; and it was not till the 15th of April, 1598, that Henry was enabled to put the seal to this great work of national pacification by publishing the Edict of Nantes.

The preamble to this most important document, the Magna Charta of Protestant liberty in France, specifies, curiously enough, as the royal motive for issuing it, the necessity of completely and securely re-establishing the Catholic religion in those localities where it had been abolished during the last troubles; viz., Béarn, La Rochelle, Nismes, Montauban, &c. "Now that it had pleased God to grant repose to the kingdom from the destructions of civil war, the king felt it his duty to make provision for the public worship and service of God among all classes of his subjects; and if it was impossible at present that all could be brought to agree in one and the same external form of worship, at all events there might be uniformity of spirit and purpose; and such regulations might be adopted as should obviate all danger of public disturbance or collision. Accordingly he had determined to enact and promulgate a law upon this subject—universal, distinct, positive, and absolute—a perpetual and irrevocable edict, and he prayed God that his subjects might be led to accept it, as the surest guarantee of their union and tranquillity, and of the re-establishment of the French empire in its ancient power and splendour."

Then follow the enacting clauses, comprised in ninety-two articles. Those who professed the "so-called Reformed Religion" were to enjoy henceforth full and complete liberty of conscience, and the free exercise of their public worship throughout the realm of France, though not without certain restrictions.

All seigneurs possessing the right of "haute justice" might assemble for worship with their families, their tenants, and any others whom they chose to invite; land-owners of a lower grade were not to hold meetings consisting of more than thirty persons. Huguenots were to be freely admitted to all colleges, schools, and hospitals; they might found, endow, and maintain, educational and charitable institutions; and their religious books might be published in all places where their worship was authorized. They were to be eligible to all public employments on equal terms with Catholics, and on accepting office were not to be bound to take any oaths, or attend any ceremonies repulsive to their conscience. A new court, called the "Chambre de l'Edit," was instituted in the Parliament of Paris, composed of a president and sixteen councillors, of whom one, or two at the most, were to be Protestants. Other similar courts were established in Guienne, Languedoc, and Dauphine. These were to take cognizance of all cases arising between Protestants and Catholics.

Besides the privilege granted to the holders of fiefs, the Reformed worship was legalised in one town or village in every bailliage throughout France. In certain specified places, however, it was altogether prohibited; at the court, or residence of the sovereign for the time being; at Paris, and within a radius of five leagues round the capital; and in all military camps, with the exception of the personal quarters of a Protestant general. It was also excluded from Reims, Dijon, Soissons, Beauvais, Sens, Nantes, Joinville, and other towns, in virtue of separate arrangements made by Henry with the local nobles. The Huguenots were enjoined to show outward respect to the Catholic religion, to observe its holy-days, and to pay tithes to its clergy. They were to desist from all political negociations and cabals, both within and beyond the realm; their provincial assemblies were to be forthwith dissolved; and the king engaged to license the holding of a representative synod once in three years, with the privilege of addressing the Crown on the condition of the Reformed body, and petitioning for redress of grievances.

There were, in addition, fifty secret articles, which did not appear on the face of the edict. By one of these the king confirmed the Huguenots in possession (for eight years) of all the cautionary towns which had been granted to them by the treaty 1577. Several of these were places of considerable strength and importance; including La Rochelle, Montauban, Nimes, Montpellier, Grenoble, Lectoure, Niort, &c. The expense of maintaining the Huguenot garrisons was to be defrayed by a royal grant of 80,000 crowns per annum.

That the Edict of Nantes should have excited keen dissatisfaction and determined opposition among the Catholic subjects of Henry, is, of course, no matter of surprise. The prelates, the clergy, the University, and the parliaments both of Paris and the provinces, remonstrated against it in the most energetic and unmeasured language; and it required all the authority, resolution, judgment, and eloquence of Henry, together with the support of his most enlightened counsellors, to bring the affair to a successful conclusion. The Parliament of Paris persisting in its refusal to register the edict, the magistrates were summoned to the Louvre, where the king addressed them in an admirable speech, full of mingled dignity, pathos, and cogent reasoning, not without occasional touches of menace and reproach. This, it may be hoped, produced conviction; at any rate it was followed by speedy compliance. The edict was registered, and thus became part of the statute law of France, on the 25th of February, 1599.

There can be no question that, in publishing the Edict of Nantes, Henry IV. was actuated to a great extent by anxiety to secure to his Huguenot subjects the blessings of a real, effectual, and permanent toleration. But at the same time it is certain that this was not his only motive in taking that step. His views of policy were broader, more comprehensive, more truly statesmanlike. He knew that Protestantism in France was a struggle even more for political, than for religious, power and predominance; and his grand object was to bring the contest to an end, by depriving the Reformers of every reasonable pretext for disaffection. If they were once content as to their civil pretensions, he was convinieed that they would be comparatively harmless as a sect of dissenters from the established creed.

So long as they were persecuted, so long as they were burdened by vexatious disabilities, and separated by invidious distinctions from the mass of their fellow-citizens; so long had the Huguenots steadily increased and multiplied, until their existence had become a standing and most serious peril to the tranquillity of France. Henry's plan was to reduce them to submission, loyalty, and insignificance, simply by giving them nothing to complain of. He had witnessed the wretched results of bigotry, tyranny, unjust legislation, sectarian rancour and hatred; and he was resolved, now that he had the opportunity, to try the effects of an opposite system—of charity, equity, forbearance, and impartial respect for the rights of conscience. In taking this course, the king believed that he was consulting the true interests of the French monarchy, of society at large, and of the Catholic Church itself.

He was quite prepared, however, to find the proposed measure vehemently censured and resisted in certain quarters, and especially by the Court of Rome.

In his communications with the Pope at this period he took especial pains to justify himself beforehand for a measure which must naturally appear so suspicious in the eyes of the Holy Father, and to dispel the apprehensions excited by it. "If I am compelled," he writes in March, 1598, "to make greater concessions to the Huguenots than those of the edict of 1577, let his Holiness be assured that I do it solely for the purpose of avoiding a more serious evil, and with a view to protect and strengthen the Catholic Church to a corresponding extent; that I do it to appease and satisfy the so-called Reformers, and by that means to defeat the more easily the designs of the ambitious and factious among them, who are doing their utmost to make the rest despair of my protection, and to stir them up against the Catholics who still live in great numbers in the towns which they occupy, and from which they would already have expelled them by force if I had not interfered."

Again, a few weeks after the publication of the edict;—"I have well considered what his Holiness has said to you with reference to the edict which I have issued in order to restore peace to my kingdom; and I trust that time will convince him that the assurances you have given of my real intentions are more to be relied on than the reports which he has heard from others to my disadvantage." And some months later he writes to the Pope himself: —"I shall take care so to manage the edict which I have published for the tranquillity of my kingdom, that its most important and most solid results shall he in favour of the Catholic religion; and this indeed is already be- ginning to appear."

These anticipations were remarkably fulfilled. Within a year after the appearance of the edict we find Henry congratulating himself on having recovered the confidence of the Sovereign Pontiff, with regard to his designs "for the glory of God, and the restoration of his Church". The wisdom of his tolerant policy had quickly become manifest, not only by the entire cessation of civil strife, but by an extraordinary revival of zeal and vigour which sprung up internally in the French Church, and by a no less wonderful reaction towards Catholicism proceeding simultaneously among the Huguenots themselves. No sooner did the sectaries find themselves fully protected by the law, and admitted to the free enjoyment of all the rights belonging to French citizens, than their religious bigotry began sensibly to abate. Their prejudices gradually melted away before the fervid exhortations, the unwearied energy, the acute and weighty reasonings, of the Catholic clergy and missionaries; and the result was seen in a long series of memorable conversions. In short, if Henry IV had needed any justification of his indulgence to the Protestants in granting them the Edict of Nantes, he had only to point to the prosperous aspect of the Church, and the general strengthening of the Catholic interest throughout France. The ambassador d'Halincourt, on proceeding to Home in 1605, was instructed to call the special attention of the Pope to this encouraging fact. "The Catholic religion, fostered as it is by the authority and solicitude of his Majesty, is visibly regaining its ancient strength and splendour. It is notorious to all men that it has made greater progress during the six or seven years since the re-establishment of peace, by the wise measures taken by his Majesty, than it ever did during the wars of the late kings Cliarles and Henry; France having discovered, to her cost, that the evils arising from diversity of religious opinions, when they have taken deep root in a nation, are to be assuaged rather by gentleness and moderation than by harshness and violence."

The Edict of Nantes, then, must not be regarded merely as an act of arbitrary indulgence to the Calvinists; it must not be separated from the general scheme of Henry's far-sighted and well-balanced policy. The grant of religious freedom to the Protestants formed part, but only a part, of that which was the paramount object and work of Henry's reign—the restoration of peace, security, unity,—social, political, and ecclesiastical,—to France. His peculiar antecedents enabled him to pursue a path which to his predecessors had been impracticable; to maintain a powerful State Establishment without violating the rights and liberties of dissentient sects; to protect the Church without irritating or oppressing the Nonconformists. In no other way could he have stanched the bleeding wounds of his country; nor could any one have accomplished it but himself. Neither of the two rival camps of the wars of religion had its councils exclusively prevailed, could have saved France from ruin. The Leaguers were in arms against their lawful sovereign; the Huguenots, apostates from the ancient faith, were offensive to the religious instincts of the great mass of the nation. But Henry, when once he had become a Catholic prince, the "eldest son of the Church", combined in himself all the required elements of mediation and reunion. He annihilated the League by satisfying the very principle for which the League had been all along professedly contending; he silenced the Huguenots by redressing their grievances, and raising them to a degree of political importance of which their most sanguine partisans had scarcely dreamed.

With regard to his external and international relations, Henry availed himself in like manner, and with equal success, of these happy circumstances of his position. Only a few weeks after issuing the Edict of Nantes, he signed the scarcely less important Peace of Vervins with the Spanish branch of the House of Austria. Spain and the Empire had hitherto been regarded as the main bulwarks of Catholicism in Europe; and so long as France was distracted and enfeebled by the wars of the League, their predominance was indisputable. But, under the skilful guidance of Henry IV, France speedily recovered her just influence. Not only did he conclude an advantageous peace with Spain, but he contrived, with admirable tact, to attach to himself and to France all the principal States which were adverse to the Spanish and Austrian interest; and the confederacy thus formed was so powerful as to make him virtually the arbiter of Eurojie.

The Holy See acknowledged him as its most strenuous defender. He charmed the minor powers of Italy with the dazzling prospect of Italian unity and independence. He maintained a confidential correspondence with Maurice of Hesse and other Lutheran princes of Germany. He negociated on terms of friendship with Elizabeth and James . of England. Above all, he entered into a treaty of strict alliance with the United Provinces of Holland; he upheld their cause with unflagging zeal and ability through a long labyrinth of tedious negociations; and it was in no small degree owing to him that they triumphed in the end, by the formal recognition of their independence in the treaty of April, 1609.

Thus auspiciously did the seventeenth century dawn for the interests of France. After the destructive tempests of the civil wars, the nation began to revive and to breathe freely; and men of all parties joined in heartfelt aspirations for the blessings of settled peace, social order, and legitimate government. Even the most thoughtless of that generation had learned lessons amid the calamities of their youth which brought forth wholesome fruit in their maturer years. The conciliatory spirit and patriotic example of Henry IV won by degrees a widespread sympathy throughout the nation. His clemency rebuked the fierceness of religious partisanship; his long experience, his remarkable success, the sincerity of his character, were appreciated even by those who had opposed him the most bitterly, and influenced public opinion in a thousand ways.

In all directions Religion was now invoked as the true source and most certain pledge of tranquillity and happiness, public and private. During the first quarter of the seventeenth century France was thoroughly penetrated by the spirit of religious enterprise. The mere catalogue of public institutions of different kinds which originated in this memorable movement is long enough to fill several printed pages; men of all ranks and professions vied with each other in forming associations for various purposes of beneficent exertion, spiritual and temporal. Colleges, schools, hospitals, missions at home and abroad, congregations for the systematic training of the clergy, diocesan seminaries, the reformation of many monastic orders and con- ventual houses—societies devoted to the education of the young, to the relief of the poor, to the support and consolation of the aged, to the visitation of prisoners, to the redemption of captives—such are some of the characteristic undertakings of the times we are about to contemplate.

 

CHAPTER V.

THE WARS OF RELIGION