The dauphin, who had now become Charles V., came to the throne with the determination of restoring France to herself. His attention had been drawn to the military talents of a Breton youth—Bertrand du Guesclin. Poor, diminutive in stature, deformed, he had raised himself to military positions usually reserved as a reward for sons of nobles. In the reopening of a war with England, which Charles was planning, du Guesclin was to be the sword and he the brain.

The Black Prince had gone to Spain to fight the battles of Peter the Cruel, in a civil war in which the Prince was involved by inheritance, and was levying taxes for this Castilian war upon his new subjects in Aquitaine. The people in this province turned to Charles to deliver them from this oppression. He immediately summoned Prince Edward before the Court of Peers; to which the Black Prince replied that he would accept the invitation, but would come with his helmet on his head and sixty thousand men in his party.

So successfully did Charles and du Guesclin meet this renewal of the war that Prince Edward and his sixty thousand men were gradually driven north until the English possessions were reduced to a few towns upon the coast. The Black Prince, under the weight of responsibility and defeat, succumbed to disease, and died, 1377. The death of Edward III. occurred soon after that of his son, and Richard II. was King of England.

The expulsion of the English was not the only benefit bestowed by Charles V. The revolting States-General were restrained and were firmly held in the king's hand. Still more important was the reorganization of the military system, by placing it under the command of officers appointed by the Crown, who might or might not belong to the order of nobility. No more effective blow could have been aimed at feudalism, which was nothing if not militant. Indeed, every act of this brief reign was a protest against the purposes and ideals of his father, King John, who was the embodiment of the ancient spirit. It was a needed breathing-spell between a half-century of disaster behind and another half-century of still greater disaster before.

The death of Charles V. (1380) left the throne to a delicate boy of twelve years, who was to reign under the successive regencies of three uncles. These brothers of Charles, and sons of the romantic King John, seem to represent all the traits and passions which can degrade humanity. The oldest, the Duke of Anjou, was driven from the regency after stealing everything which was movable in the king's palace and vaults. The Duke of Burgundy, who succeeded him, had nobler objects, and needed a larger field for his ambitious soul. He had an eye on the throne itself. And when he and the Duke Berri, at the instigation of the archbishop, were compelled to resign the reins to the young King Charles VI., they carried with them to their own castles all that Anjou had left. Of course the archbishop was mysteriously murdered, and then the boy king was married to Isabella of Bavaria, said to be the most beautiful and the wickedest woman in Europe.

Charles had always been a frail, delicate boy. As he was riding one evening, a strange, wild-looking being sprang out of the darkness and seized the bridle of his horse, crying, "Fly, fly! you are betrayed." The astonished youth after the shock, became melancholy; then was suddenly seized with a fit of frenzy, in which he killed four of his pages. A mad king was on the throne of France, the worst woman in Europe regent, and three uncles waiting like vultures around a dying man, ready to seize anything from a golden candlestick to a throne!

In the chaos of misrule and villainy into which France was falling, the determining factor was the deadly feud which existed between the house of Burgundy and that of Orleans. Upon the death of the first Duke of Burgundy, his son John seized the regency for himself, snatching it from the Duke of Orleans, the king's brother. At this point started the feud which was to tear France asunder from end to end. While the Orleanists were gathering their adherents to drive him out, John was intrenching himself in Paris. Like many another villain, this Duke of Burgundy posed as the friend of the people. He could doff his cap and speak smilingly to starving men. He knew how to work upon their passions, and to please by torturing and executing those they believed had wronged them. He told them how he pitied them for the extortions of the Duke of Orleans and Queen Isabella, kindly giving them pikes to defend themselves, and iron chains to barricade their streets, if they should be needed. Then, extending his hand to his enemy of Orleans, brother of the king, they were reconciled: the past was to be buried.

Then it is a pleasant picture we behold of the period: the two friends partaking together of communion, and dining, and then embracing at parting with effusive words and promises to meet at a dance on the morrow, the unsuspecting Duke of Orleans going out into the dark, where hired assassins were waiting to hack him in pieces. Then a court of justice trying and acquitting this confessed murderer of the king's brother, upon the ground that tyrannicide is a duty; the sad, crazed wraith of a king saying the words he had been taught: "Fair cousin, we pardon you all." And the tragedy and comedy were over!

There was now no check upon the Burgundian power. In the worst days of English occupation of her land, France had been in less danger from Edward III. than she now was from the Duke of Burgundy, champion and defender of the people! The immediate object of the Burgundian or people's party, and the Orleans and aristocratic party, was the possession of the person of the king, and control of his acts during his few lucid moments.

There was civil war in a land divested of every vestige of government. England would have been blind had she not seen her opportunity; but, too much occupied with her own revolution, she had to wait. And when Henry IV., the first Lancastrian, was king, he needed both hands to hold his crown firmly on his head. But when the young Henry V. came to the throne, with the energy and ambition of youth, the time was ripe for the recovery of the lost possessions in France.

The battle of Agincourt (1415) reopened the war with a great defeat for the French chivalry, which represented the Orleanist party. The wholesale slaughter of princes, bishops, and knights on this fatal day was clear gain for the traitor Burgundy, the champion of the people! The climax of his villainy was at hand.

Henry V., at Rouen, was openly holding his court as King of France. John, Duke of Burgundy, accompanied by Queen Isabella, presented himself to the invading king, and formally pledged his support and that of his followers to the cause of the English!

The infamous treaty of Troyes was signed, 1420. It provided that Henry should act as regent to Charles VI. while he lived; that upon the death of that unhappy being he should be Henry V. of England and Henry II. of France; and that the two kingdoms should thereafter exist under one crown. The romantic marriage of Henry with the Princess Katharine, daughter of Charles and Isabella, which was part of the agreement, was solemnized in that old palace on the island in the Seine. And the same vaulted ceilings which we may see to-day, looked down upon this historic marriage, as they also did upon the condemnation of Marie Antoinette, three and a half centuries later. We know of this union of Henry and the fair Katharine chiefly through the pen of Shakespeare, in his play of Henry V.

But Henry was destined never to wear the crown of France, nor even to see his own land again. There were only two more years of life for him. His death occurred in his palace of the Louvre, a few weeks before that of Charles VI., and the crown he expected to wear upon this event passed to his infant son, who was by the Burgundian party recognized as King of France.

A careless, pleasure-loving dauphin, just twenty, apparently indifferent to the loss of a kingdom, was a frail support at such a time. Only a fragment of the country was held by his followers, the Orleanists; Scotland had come to his aid with a few thousand men, but what did this avail with the greater part of the kingdom held by the Burgundians, while town after town was declaring its allegiance to the English Duke of Bedford, whom his dying brother, Henry V., had named as regent for his infant son.

The city of Orleans, held by the dauphin's adherents, was besieged. It was the key to the situation. Its fall meant the fall of the kingdom, the conquest of France. When this happened, that infant at the Louvre would really be the wearer of the crown. So hopeless was the situation that the spiritless Charles was only in doubt whether to take refuge in Scotland or in Spain.

But although towns and cities had deserted him, the heart of the people had not. Patriotism, dead everywhere else, still lived in the heart of that forgotten multitude lying silent and humble under the feet of its masters. The monarchy had been their friend, their only friend. The Church had deserted them, and joined their enemies the nobles. But to the people, the name King expressed gratitude and hope; and they loved it.

If a great spreading tree full of verdure had arisen in a day out of the barren breast of Mother Earth, it would scarcely have been a greater miracle that what really happened when a child of the soil, a girl, rising triumphant over the disabilities of age, sex, birth, and condition, saved France from destruction. Summoned by celestial voices, by angels whom she not only heard but saw, Joan of Arc started upon her mission of rescue for France!

When this daughter of the people, this peasant from Domremy, was admitted to the presence of the dauphin, it is said that in amusement and in order to test the reality of her mission, Charles exchanged dress with one of his courtiers. But the maid going straight to him, said: "Gentle dauphin, I come to restore to you the crown of France. Orleans shall be saved by me. And you, by the help of God and my Lady St. Catharine, shall be crowned at Rheims."

On the 29th of April the maid did enter the fainting city. And she did lead the dauphin to Rheims for his coronation. And then, kneeling at his feet, asked the "Gentle King" to let her go back to her sheep at Domremy. "For," she said, "they love me more than these thousands of people I have seen."

Unhappily, she did not return to her sheep, but remained among those wolves, and was captured and a prisoner of the English.

What should they do with this strange being, claiming supernatural powers? The Regent Duke of Bedford denounced her as a rebel against the infant king; and the Bishop of Beauvais as a blasphemer and child of the devil. Nothing could be clearer than her guilt upon both of these charges! And on the 13th of May, 1431, this mysteriously inspired child was burnt by a slow fire in the market-place of Rouen. And the "Gentle King," where was he while this was happening?

It must ever remain a mystery that a peasant girl, a child in years and in experience, should have believed herself called to such a mission; that conferring only with her heavenly guides, or "voices," she should have sought the king, inspired him with faith in her, and in himself and his cause, reanimated the courage of the army, and led it herself to victory absolute and complete; and then, have compelled the half-reluctant, half-doubting Charles to go with her to Rheims, there to be anointed and consecrated; this simple child in that day bestowing upon him a kingdom, and upon France a king!

Was there ever a stranger chapter in history! Alas, if it could have ended here, and she could have gone back to her mother and her spinning and her simple pleasures, as she was always longing to do when her work should be done. But no! we see her falling into the hands of the defeated and revengeful English—this child, who had wrested from them a kingdom already in their grasp. She was turned over to the French ecclesiastical court to be tried. A sorceress and a blasphemer they pronounce her, and pass her on to the secular authorities, and her sentence is—death.

We see the poor defenceless girl, bewildered, terrified, wringing her hands and declaring her innocence as she rides to execution. God and man had abandoned her. No heavenly voice spoke, no miracle intervened as her young limbs were tied to the stake and the fagots and straw piled up about her. The torch was applied, and her pure soul mounted heavenward in a column of flames.

Rugged men wept. A Burgundian general said, as he turned gloomily away, "We have murdered a saint."



And Charles, sitting upon the throne she had rescued for him, what was he doing to save her? Nothing—to his everlasting shame be it said, nothing. He might not have succeeded; the effort at rescue, or to stay the event, might have been unavailing. But where was his knighthood, where his manhood, that he did not try, or utter passionate protest against her fate?

Twenty-five years later we see him erecting statues to her memory, and "rehabilitating" her desecrated name. And to-day, the Church which condemned her for blasphemy is placing her upon the calendar of saints.



CHAPTER X.

CHARLES VII. in creating a standing army struck feudalism a deadly blow. His son, Louis XI., with cold-blooded brutality finished the work. This man's powerful and crafty intelligence saw in an alliance with the common people a means of absorbing to himself supreme power. Not since Tiberius had there been a more blood-thirsty monster on a throne. But he demolished the political structure of mediaevalism in his kingdom; and when his cruel reign was ended the Middle Ages had passed away, and modern life had begun in France.

There was no longer even the pretence of knightly virtues in France. It was time for the high-born robbers and ruffians in steel helmets to give place to men with hearts and brains. It is said that of those thousands, that chivalric host, which was slaughtered at Agincourt, not one in twenty could write his name. All alike were cruel and had the instincts of barbarians. While the Duke of Burgundy, the richest prince in Europe, was starving his enemies in secret dungeons in the Bastille, his Orleans rival, Count of Armagnac, not having access to the Bastille, was decapitating Burgundians till his executioners fainted from fatigue.

It is almost with relief that we read of the slaughter of these knightly savages at Agincourt. If the shipwreck of a mighty kingdom was to be averted, two things must be done. The decaying corpse of feudalism must be thrown overboard, and the Church must be purified. Both had fallen from the ideals which created them; the ideal of truth, justice, and spotless honor, and the ideal of divine love and mercy. Even the semblance of truth and justice and honor had departed from the one; and unspeakable corruption had crept into the other. From the day of the Albigensian cruelties, the heart of the Church had turned to stone, and the spark of life divine within seemed extinguished. Once the guardian of the helpless, it had deserted the people and made common cause with their oppressors. One pope at Rome, and another at Avignon, was a heavy burden to carry. But when three infallible beings were hurling anathemas at each other, the University of Paris led Christendom in rejecting them all.

So the two great classes for which the State existed were overweighting the ship at a time when it was being torn and tossed by a storm of gigantic proportions.

Well was it for France that Charles VII., as king, developed unexpected firmness and ability. The creation of a standing army, and the disbanding of all military organizations existing without the king's commission, at one sweeping blow completed the wreck of feudalism. It only remained for Charles's cold-blooded son, Louis XI., to finish the work, and mediaevalism was a thing of the past in France.

The reign of Charles was imbittered by the conduct of this unnatural son, whose undisguised impatience to assume the crown so alarmed him that it is said he shortened his own life by abstaining from food in the fear that the dauphin might lay the guilt of parricide upon his soul.

This heart-broken, desolate old man died in 1461. And Louis XI. was King of France.

The son of Charles VII. was a composite of the wisest and the worst of his predecessors. Indeed, it is to the Roman emperors we must look for a parallel to this monster on a throne. And yet, to no other king does France owe such a debt of gratitude. His remorseless hand placed a great gulf between the new and the old, in which were forever buried the men and the system which had fed upon her life.

The antagonism between the son and the father aroused great hopes of a reversal of policy and a rehabilitation of feudalism. These hopes were soon undeceived. So inscrutable and so tortuous was the policy of this strange being, so unexpected his changes of direction, so false and inconsistent his words and acts, and so unspeakably cruel the means to his ends, that a cowed and bewildered nation was soon crouching at his feet, not knowing whither he was leading them.

Warfare played no part in this reign. Invasion was met by diplomacy, and slaughter and bloodshed were relegated to the executioner. Incredible as it seems, it is said that from his windows this king could look out upon an avenue of gibbets upon which hung the bodies of his enemies. The humorous spirit in which he disposed of obstructive nobles is illustrated by a note to an unsuspecting victim. "Fair cousin, come and give us your advice. We have need of so wise a head as yours." And in the morning the fair cousin's wise head was in a basket filled with sawdust!

When all was done, a town council meant more than the "Order of the Golden Fleece"; and, pari passu, with the humiliation of the noble came the elevation of the bourgeois. A nameless adventurer would be admitted to confidential intimacy when a Montmorenci could not get beyond his antechamber.

In fact, this levelling up and levelling down was the object of all this king's odious crimes and the central purpose of his cold-blooded reign. If a patent of nobility was a pretty good passport to the scaffold, good service in a town council was an open door to elevation.

So, judged by results, Louis XI. was a better king than many a better man had been. He buried the ideals of the past fathoms deep and then stamped them down with remorseless feet. He demolished the political structure of mediaevalism in his kingdom, and when his terrible reign was ended, in 1483, the Middle Ages had passed away and modern life had begun in France.

Almost any reign would have seemed colorless after that of Louis XI. But that of his son, Charles VIII., was made memorable by one event, an invasion of Italy, which brought to France a long train of disastrous consequences.

It will be remembered that in the thirteenth century, Charles, Duke of Anjou, of Sicilian fame, or infamy, and brother of Louis the Saint, occupied the throne of Naples by invitation of the pope.

The family of Anjou having recently become extinct, Charles was now the rightful heir to that throne. So as there was nothing in especial for him to do at home, and as his new army, created and equipped by his father, was a very splendid affair for that day, and as Charles was young and ambitious of a name, he determined to take forcible possession of his inheritance in Italy.

The success of the enterprise was quite dazzling. Milan, Florence, Rome, were successively occupied, and finally Charles was actually seated upon the throne in Naples (1495).

But the seat was not comfortable. The Neapolitans did not want him; and, what was more important, Spain, England, and Austria talked of uniting to drive him out. And so he and his army returned to France, and all that had been gained by the enterprise was a wide-open door between France and Italy at the very time when it might better have been kept closed, and the discovery by Europe that the Italian peninsula was an easy prey to any ambitious European power. What Charles had done might also, and more effectually, be done by England, Spain, or Austria. All of which bore bitter fruit in the next century.

But for France the fruit was of a more deadly kind. The princely and noble blood of Italy began to be mingled with hers, bringing a vicious and corrupt strain at a critical period.

Old as she was in centuries, France was but a child in civilization. An uncouth, untutored child, just emerging from barbarism, was suddenly brought under the influence of a fascinating, highly developed civilization, old in wickedness. A nation in which the ruling class had only recently learned to read and write was naturally dazzled by this sister nation, saturated with the learning and culture of the ages, mistress of every brilliant art and accomplishment; who after having run the whole gamut of human experience, drunk at every known fountain, had arrived at the code summed up by Machiavelli as the best by which to live! It was an easy task for the Medici to control the policy, as they did for generations, of such simple barbarians.

Italy presents a strange spectacle in this closing fifteenth century: All the concentrated splendor from the fall of Byzantium hanging over her like a luminous cloud before dispersing as the Renaissance; Lorenzo de' Medici, at Florence, directing the intellectual currents of Europe; Angelo and Raphael creating the world's sublimest masterpieces in art; her great Genoese son uncovering another hemisphere; Savonarola, like an inspired prophet of old, calling upon men to "repent, repent, while there is yet time"; Machiavelli instructing the nations of the earth in villainy as a fine art; and Alexander VI., the basest man in Europe, poisoner, father of every crime, claiming to be Vicegerent of Christ upon earth!

But the currents were moving swiftly toward a crisis which was to change all this. One more pope, that magnificent patron of art, Julius II., creator of the Vatican Museum, with the recently found Apollo Belvedere, and the Laocooen as a splendid nucleus, and projector and builder of St. Peter's. And then Leo X. (Medicean Pope) and Luther!

The year 1492 contained three important events: the discovery of a new world, the expulsion of the Moors from Spain, and the death of Lorenzo de' Medici. Spain's crusade of seven hundred years was over. We must search in vain for any struggle to match this in singleness and persistence of purpose. Commencing one hundred years before Charlemagne created a Holy Roman Empire, it ended triumphantly under a king and queen who were to play a leading part in the Reformation.

The stage was making ready, and the characters were assembling for the great modern drama, in a century even more significant than the one then closing.

The reign of Charles VIII. ended in 1498. And as he left no son, the succession once more passed to a collateral branch: Louis XII., of the House of Orleans, wore the crown of France. It is interesting to recall that these two kings, Charles and Louis, were respectively grandsons of those two ambitious dukes whose personal feud brought France to the verge of ruin a few decades earlier: Louis XII. being the descendant of that Duke of Orleans, brother of Charles VI., the reigning king, who was murdered in the streets of Paris; while Charles VIII. was the descendant of his slayer, the terrible Duke of Burgundy, evil genius of France at that time.

The principal event in the reign of the new king was the reopening of the Italian War by the combined and successful action of Spain and France. But this proved a barren triumph for Louis, who, when all was done, found that he had been simply aiding that artful diplomatist, Ferdinand, in securing the whole prize for Spain. The disagreement growing out of the distribution of the spoil resulted in a war between the late allies; and it was in this wretched conflict that Bayard, chevalier sans peur et sans reproche, was sacrificed.

Louis died in 1515, also without an heir; and so the crown passed to still another collateral branch of the main Capetian line. The Count of Angouleme, cousin of the dead king, was proclaimed Francis I.

The fall of Constantinople in the East, and the discovery of a new world in the West, were changing the whole aspect of Europe. The art of printing, coming almost simultaneously with these transforming events, sent vitalizing currents reaching even to the humblest. France partook of the general awakening and was throwing off the torpor of centuries. New ambitions were aroused, and her slumbering genius began to be stirred. This was a propitious moment for an ambitious young king who aimed not only at being the greatest of military heroes, but also the splendid patron of art and letters, and wisest of men! The role he had set for himself being, in fact, a Charlemagne and a Lorenzo de' Medici in one. All that was needed for success in this large field was ability. Personal valor Francis certainly possessed. His reign opened brilliantly with a campaign in the Italian peninsula, which left him after the battle of Marignano, master of the Milanese and of northern Italy. He need not trouble himself as had his predecessors about recalcitrant and scheming nobles. They had never been heard from since Louis XI. took them in hand. Neither were the States-General going to annoy him by assertion of rights and demands for reforms. They too had become almost non-existent; it having been well established that only the direst emergency would ever call them into being again. So kingship held sole and undisputed sway, and Francis was looking about to see where he might make it even stronger.

The residence of the popes, at Avignon, during the period of the Great Schism, had led to the establishment by Charles VII. of an ordinance called the Pragmatic Sanction; its object being the limitation of the papal power in France. The pope by this ordinance was cut off from certain lucrative sources of income; to offset which the king was deprived of the right of appointing officers for vacant bishoprics and abbeys.

Francis I. and Leo X. came together, and, after conferring, determined that the Pragmatic Sanction should be repudiated; Leo, because he must increase his revenues, and Francis, because he desired to use appointments to rich vacancies as rewards for his friends. Leo's tastes, as we know, were magnificent, and needed much more money than he could command; a fact which led to grave results, and changed the course of events in the world!

In 1516 Ferdinand I., King of Spain, died, leaving his enormous possessions to his grandson, Charles, a youth not yet twenty. The mother of this boy was Joanna, the insane daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, who was married to the son and heir of Maxmilian I., Emperor of Germany.

The young Charles, by the death of his father, had already inherited the Netherlands and Flanders; to which by the death of his maternal grandfather there was now added Spain, the kingdom of Naples, Mexico, and Peru. A heavy enough burden, one would think, for young shoulders. But it was to become still heavier. In 1519 his other grandfather, Maximilian I., died, leaving the throne of the empire vacant.

This office by ancient custom, established by Charlemagne, was elective, and theoretically was open to any prince in Europe. But with the seven princes known as electors, with whom rested choice of the successor, hereditary claim had great weight. Europe saw with dismay the imminent creation of an empire greater than that of Charlemagne—an empire which would cover a large part of the map of Europe and of America. For none was this so alarming as for France, which would in fact be enveloped upon almost every side by this giant among the nations. A French king would indeed have been dull and spiritless not to realize the magnitude of the danger, and Francis was neither. There was only a youth of nineteen standing between him and the greatest dignity in Europe. It was not alone an opportunity to save France from this overshadowing power, but to reunite the crowns of France and the empire as originally designed by Charlemagne. No role could have better pleased Francis I. He announced himself a claimant for the vacant throne (under the clause opening it to European princes), claiming that his ownership of the adjacent territory of Northern Italy made him the natural successor to the imperial throne.

Then another ambitious young king appeared as another rival claimant, Henry VIII. of England, with his astute Minister Woolsey to fight the diplomatic battles for his master. It was a brilliant game, played by great players for a great stake: Francis lavishly bribing and dazzling by theatrical displays of splendor; Henry arrogant, ostentatious, vain, and Charles silent, inscrutable, cold-blooded, and false, whispering to Woolsey that he might make him pope at the next election. From that moment the powerful influence of the Cardinal was used for this sedate youth, this wise youth, who saw that the fitting place for him (Woolsey) was the chair of St. Peter!

The diplomacy of the boy of nineteen won the prize. The electors gave the crown to Charles V. Leo X. died soon after. Woolsey waited in hourly expectation of the summons to Rome. But it never came!

Then Francis resolved to win by force what he had lost by diplomacy. Charles succeeded in winning the pope to his side of the contest with the purpose of driving the French out of Italy. The attempt quickly ended in the defeat of the French, and for Francis capture, and a year's imprisonment in Madrid; his release only obtained by abandoning all claims upon Italy; and in 1547 the showy and ineffectual reign of Francis I. was terminated by his death, which occurred almost immediately after that of Henry VIII. in England.

While these events were taking place, a less conspicuous but vastly more significant conflict had developed. In 1517, Martin Luther, the obscure monk, had hurled defiance at the Church of Rome, arraigning Leo X. for corrupt practices; especially the enrichment of the Church by the sale of indulgences. Germany was shaken to its centre by Protestantism, and the reign of Charles V. was to be spent in ineffectual conflict with the Reformation, which would ultimately tear the Empire asunder.

The new heresy had found congenial soil in France. England was openly and avowedly Protestant, while Spain and Italy remained unchangeably Catholic.

For Francis, destined to spend his life in fruitless contest with the more able, wily, and astute Charles V., the religious question upon which Europe was divided meant nothing except at he could use it in his duel with the emperor. He was in turn the ally of Henry VIII. or the willing tool of Charles V. If he needed the English king's friendship, the Protestants had protection. If he desired to placate Charles V., the roastings and torturings commenced again.

In 1547 Francis and Henry VIII. each went to his reward, and a few years later Charles V. had laid down his crown and carried his weary, unsatisfied heart to St. Yuste. The brilliant pageant was over; but Protestantism was expanding.



CHAPTER XI.

The conversion of Henry VIII., because the pope refused to annul his marriage with Catharine, aunt of Charles V., was not the proudest, but one of the most important triumphs of the new faith. Had Catharine's charms been fresher, or Anne Boleyn less alluring, the course of history would have been changed. Henry VIII., as persecutor of heretics, would have found congenial occupation for his ferocious instincts, and the triumph of Protestantism would have been long delayed. But no such cause existed for the success of the Reformation on French soil. The slumbering germs of heresy, left perhaps by Abelard, or by the heretics in Toulouse and Provence, were quickly warmed into life. It may be also that the memory of her desertion by the Church, once her only friend and champion, gave such intensity to the welcome of a "Reformation" by the people. At all events, whatever the explanation, a religious war was at hand which was going to stain the fair name of France more even than the treacheries of her civil war.

The question at issue was deeper than any one knew. Neither Luther nor Leo X. understood the revolution they had precipitated. Protestants and Papists alike failed to comprehend the true nature of the struggle, which was not for supremacy of Romanist or Protestant; not whether this dogma or that was true, and should prevail; but an assertion of the right of every human soul to choose its own faith and form of worship. The great battle for human liberty had commenced; the struggle for religious liberty was but the prelude to what was to follow. There was abundant proof later that Protestants no less than Papists needed only opportunity and power to be as cruel and intolerant as their persecutors had been. Before the Reformation was fifty years old, Servetus, one of the greatest men of his age, a scholar, philosopher, and man of irreproachable character, was burned at Geneva for heretical views concerning the nature of the Trinity; Calvin, the great organizer of Protestant theology, giving, if not the order for this odious crime, at least the nod of approval for its commission.

France had known many tragedies. But when Francis, in pursuance of his Italian policy, secured the hand of Catharine de' Medici for his son and heir, Henry II., he prepared the way for the most tragic event in her history. Powerless to win the affection, or even confidence, of Henry while he lived, Catharine remained unobserved; but, as the event proved, not unobservant. Her astute mind had been studying every current in the kingdom.

Two families had come into prominence during this reign which were to play leading parts in the immediate future: the family of Guise, of the house of Lorraine, represented by Francis, Duke of Guise; and that of Chatillon, of which Admiral Coligny was the head, both of whom Catharine hated and had marked for destruction.

Mary, of the house of Guise, was the wife of James VI. of Scotland; and through the powerful influence of the Guises, the brothers of the Scottish queen, a marriage was arranged between her daughter—her most serene little highness, Marie Stuart—and the dauphin, who would some day be Francis II.

In order to be prepared for this high destiny, the little maid when only five years old was brought to the Court of France to be trained under the direct influence of the accomplished queen-mother, Catharine—undoubtedly, although unsuspected then, the worst woman in Europe! Poor little Marie Stuart, predestined to sin and to tragedy! What could be expected of a woman with the blood of the Guises in her veins, and with Catharine de' Medici as her model and teacher?

In 1559 Henry II. was killed by an accident at a tournament. The marriage of the two children had taken place. The sickly boy, with only a modest portion of intelligence, was Francis II., King of France. Marie, his beautiful and adored queen, controlled him utterly, and was herself in turn controlled by her uncles of the house of Guise. In fact, the family of Guise, which was the head of the Catholic party in the kingdom, ruled France, with the strange result that if Catharine looked for any allies in her fight with this ambitious family, she must make common cause with the Protestants, led by Admiral Coligny, whom she hated only a little less than the uncles of Marie Stuart.

The princes of the house of Bourbon, a remote branch of the royal family, which, next to Francis, were the nearest to the throne, had been extremely jealous of the growing power of the Guises. Now they saw them, as the advisers of the young king, actually usurping the position which was theirs by right of birth.

Two factions grew out of this feud in the court, and there developed a Bourbon party, and the party of the Guises; one identified with the Protestant and the other with the Catholic cause.

Antony de Bourbon, the head of the family of this name, whether from conviction or from antagonism to the Guises, had openly espoused the Protestant side. It was the rich burghers of the towns, in combination with the smaller nobles, which composed the Protestant party in France. And although the impelling cause of the great movement was religious, political wrongs had become a powerful contributing cause; as is always the case, the discontented and aggrieved, for whatever reason, casting in their lot with those who had a deeper grievance and a more sacred purpose.

Whether the conversion of the Bourbon prince was of that nature or not, who can say? But the movement swelled, and France was divided into two hostile camps: one under the Protestant banner of Antony de Bourbon, father of Henry of Navarre, and the other under that of the Catholic, Francis, Duke of Guise; and two children were on the throne of France while the ground was trembling beneath their feet with a coming revolution.

Francis I. had been too much occupied with his own plans to take in hand systematically and seriously the prevailing heresy. Henry II., son of Francis, had also temporized with the religious revolt, probably not realizing the powerful element it contained. Now, with the Guises firmly in power, there would be no more half-way measures.

But a crisis was at hand which would change the whole situation. The discovery of a plot to seize the person of the young king and place a Bourbon prince upon the throne, led to a general slaughter. Fresh relays of executioners in Paris stood ready to relieve each other when exhausted, and the Seine was black with the bodies of the drowned.

During this preliminary storm the frail young king, Francis II., suddenly died. Marie Stuart passed out of French history, and the power of the Guises was at an end. The fates were certainly fighting on the side of Catharine.

There are hints that the fine Italian hand may be seen in this event which at one stroke removed every obstacle from her path! However this may be, Catharine wasted no regrets upon the death of a son which made her queen regent during the minority of her second son, Charles, now ten years of age (1560).

There was no time to lose. Her control over the feeble Charles IX. before he reached his majority must be absolute. Every impulse toward mercy must be extinguished.

What can be said of a mother who seeks to exterminate every germ of truth or virtue in her son; who immerses him in degrading vices in order to deaden his too sensitive conscience and make him a willing tool for her purposes? Inheriting the splendid intelligence as well as genius for statecraft of the Medici, nourished from her infancy upon Machiavellian principles, cold and cruel by nature, this Florentine woman has written her name in blood across the pages of French history.

There were two main ends to be kept in view: the destruction of the Guises, and the extermination of the Huguenots, as the Protestants were now called. These were difficult to reconcile, but both must be accomplished.

Coligny, the splendid old admiral and Huguenot, hero of the nation, he, too, must go. And Henry of Navarre, the adored young leader of the Huguenots, of course was high on the list marked for destruction; but there might be other uses for him before that time.

Never had the Huguenots received such gentle treatment. Disabilities were removed and privileges bestowed. Never was the beautiful queen-mother as smiling, gracious, and witty. A letter to her uncle, Pope Innocent III., written, it is said, between a dinner and a masquerade, asked if men might not be good enough Christians even if they did not believe in transubstantiation, and useful subjects even though they could not accept the Apostolic succession!

Then this excellent woman declared her admiration for the intelligence of the Huguenots, whom until now she had believed were mere fanatical enthusiasts. Then Henry of Navarre, the brave, generous, accomplished Protestant leader, was urgently invited to the court, and finally even offered the hand of Margaret of Valois, her daughter, as a compromise which would heal the rivalry between the two faiths.

And so, on the 18th of August, 1572, Notre Dame, grim but splendid, looked down upon the marriage of Margaret and Henry, in the presence of all the leaders of Huguenot and Catholic in France.

The Protestants wept for joy at the reconciliation accomplished by this union. And all were to remain and partake of the week of festivities which were to follow.

Then, the pageant over, a secret council was held in Catharine's apartment in the Louvre, in which her remaining son, Henry, participated, but from which his brother the king was excluded; some wishing to include the Guises in the approaching massacre, some urging that Henry of Navarre be spared, but all agreeing that Coligny must go; it being, in fact, the influence of this magnetic man over the young king which was the danger-point compelling haste and the uncertainty as to what her son might do endangered the success of the whole plot.

Charles, who was now king, was impressible, easily influenced, yet stubborn, intractable, incoherent, passionate, and unreliable; sometimes inclining to the Guises, sometimes to Coligny and the Huguenots, and always submitting at last, after vain struggle, to his imperious mother's will, in her efforts to free him from both. We see in him a weak character, not naturally bad, torn to distraction by the cruel forces about him, who when compelled to yield, as he always did in the end, to that terrible woman, would give way to fits of impotent rage against the fate which allowed him no peace.

The time had arrived when Catharine feared the influence of Coligny more than that of the Guises. Brave, patriotic, magnetic, he had succeeded in winning Charles's consent to declare war against Spain. Philip II. of Spain was Catharine's son-in-law and closest ally. Her entire policy was threatened. At all hazards Coligny must be gotten rid of. The young King of Navarre, adored leader of the Protestants, was a constant menace; he, too, must in some way be disposed of.

There were sinister conferences with Philip of Spain and with his minister, that incarnation of cruelty and of the Inquisition, the Duke of Alva.

To the honor of France it may be said that the initiative, the inception of the horrid deed which was preparing was not French. It was conceived in the brain of either this Italian woman or her Spanish adviser and co-conspirator, the Duke of Alva. We shall never know the inside history of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. It must ever remain a matter of conjecture just how and when it was planned, but the probabilities point strongly one way.

Charles was to be gradually prepared for it by his mother. By working upon his fears, his suspicions, by stories of plottings against his life and his kingdom, she was to infuriate him; and then, while his rage was at its height, the opportunity for action must be at hand. The marriage of Charles's sister Margaret with the young Protestant leader Henry of Navarre, with its promise of future protection to the Huguenots, was part of the plot. It would lure all the leaders of the cause to Paris. Coligny, Conde, all the heads of the party, were urgently invited to attend the marriage feast which was to inaugurate an era of peace.

Admiral Coligny was requested by Catharine, simply as a measure of protection to the Protestants, to have an additional regiment of guards in Paris, to act in case of any unforeseen violence.

Two days after the marriage, and while the festivities were at their height, an attempt upon the life of the old admiral awoke suspicion and alarm. But Catharine and her son went immediately in person to see the wounded old man, and to express their grief and horror at the event. They commanded that a careful list of the names and abode of every Protestant in Paris be made, in order, as they said, "to take them under their own immediate protection."

"My dear father," said the king, "the hurt is yours, the grief is mine."

At that moment the knives were already sharpened, every man instructed in his part in the hideous drama, and the signal for its commencement determined upon. Charles did not know it, but his mother did. She went to her son's room that night, artfully and eloquently pictured the danger he was in, confessed to him that she had authorized the attempt upon Coligny, but that it was done because of the admiral's plottings against him, which she had discovered. But the Guises—her enemies and his—they knew it, and would denounce her and the king! The only thing now is to finish the work. He must die.

Charles was in frightful agitation and stubbornly refused. Finally, with an air of offended dignity, she bowed coldly and said to her son, "Sir, will you permit me to withdraw with my daughter from your kingdom?" The wretched Charles was conquered. In a sort of insane fury he exclaimed, "Well, let them kill him, and all the rest of the Huguenots too. See that not one remains to reproach me."

This was more than she had hoped. All was easy now. So eager was she to give the order before a change of mood, that she flew herself to give the signal, fully two hours earlier than was expected. At midnight the tocsin rang out upon the night, and the horror began.

Lulled to a feeling of security by artfully contrived circumstances, husbands, wives, sons, daughters, peacefully sleeping, were awakened to see each other hideously slaughtered.

The stars have looked down upon some terrible scenes in Paris; her stones are not unacquainted with the taste of human blood; but never had there been anything like this. The carnage of battle is merciful compared with it. Shrieking women and children, half-clothed, fleeing from knives already dripping with human blood; frantic mothers shielding the bodies of their children, and wives pleading for the lives of husbands; the living hiding beneath the bodies of the dead.

The cry that ascended to Heaven from Paris that night was the most awful and despairing in the world's history. It was centuries of cruelty crowded into a few hours.

The number slain can never be accurately stated, but it was thousands. Human blood is intoxicating. An orgy set in which laughed at orders to cease. Seven days it continued, and then died out for lack of material. The provinces had caught the contagion, and orders to slay were received and obeyed in all except two, the Governor of Bayonne, to his honor be it told, writing to the king in reply: "Your Majesty has many faithful subjects in Bayonne, but not one executioner."

And where was "his Majesty" while this work was being done? How was it with Catharine? We hear of no regrets, no misgivings; that she was calm, collected, suave, and unfathomable as ever; but that Charles, in a strange, half-frenzied state, was amusing himself by firing from the windows of the palace at the fleeing Huguenots. Had he killed himself in remorse, would it not have been better, instead of lingering two wretched years, a prey to mental tortures and an inscrutable malady, before he died?

Europe was shocked. Christendom averted her face in horror. But at Madrid and Rome there was satisfaction.

Catharine and the Duke of Alva had done their work skilfully, but the result surprised and disappointed them. Tens of thousands of Huguenots were slain, which was well; but many times that number remained, with spirit unbroken, which was not well.

They had been too merciful! Why had Henry of Navarre been spared? Had not Alva said, "Take the big fish, and let the small fry go. One salmon is worth more than a thousand frogs."

But Charles considered the matter settled when he uttered those swelling words to Henry of Navarre the day after the massacre: "I mean in future to have one religion in my kingdom. It is the Mass or death."

All the events leading up to that fateful night, August 24, 1572, may never be known. Near the Church of St. Germain d'Auxerrois, which rang out the signal and was mute witness of the horror, has just been erected the statue of the great Coligny, bearing the above date.

The miserable Charles was not quite base enough for the part he had played. Tormented with memories, haggard with remorse, he felt that he was dying. His suspicious eyes turned upon his mother, well versed in poisons, as he knew; and, as he also knew, capable of anything. Was this wasting away the result of a drug? Mind and body gave way under the strain. In 1574, less than two years from the hideous event, Charles IX. was dead.

Catharine's third son now wore the crown of France. In Henry III. she had as pliant an instrument for her will as in the two brothers preceding him; and, like them, his reign was spent in alternating conflict with the Protestants and the Duke of Guise. At last, wearied and exasperated, this half-Italian and altogether conscienceless king quite naturally thought of the stiletto. The old duke, as he entered the king's apartment by invitation, was stricken down by assassins hidden for that purpose.

Henry had not counted on the rebound from that blow. Catholic France was excited to such popular fury against him that he threw himself into the arms of the Protestants, imploring their aid in keeping his crown and his kingdom; and when himself assassinated, a year later, the Valois line had become extinct.

By the Salic Law, Henry of Navarre was King of France. The Bourbon branch had left the parent stem as long ago as the reign of Louis the Saint. But as all the other Capetian branches had disappeared, the right of the plumed knight to the crown was beyond a question. So a Protestant and a Huguenot was King of France.



CHAPTER XII.

After long wandering in strange seas, we come in view of familiar lights and headlands. With the advent of the house of Bourbon, we have grasped a thread which leads directly down to our own time.

The accession of a Protestant king was hailed with delirious joy by the Huguenots, and with corresponding rage by Catholic France. The one looked forward to redressing of wrongs and avenging of injuries; and the other flatly refused submission unless Henry should recant his heresy and become a convert to the true faith.

The new king saw there was no bed of roses preparing for him. After four years of effort to reconcile the irreconcilable, he decided upon his course. He was not called to the throne to rule over Protestant France, nor to be an instrument of vengeance for the Huguenots.

He saw that the highest good of the kingdom required not that he should impose upon it either form of belief or worship, but give equal opportunity and privilege to both.

To the consternation of the Huguenots, he announced himself ready to listen to the arguments in favor of the religion of Rome; and it took just five hours of deliberation to convince him of its truth. He declared himself ready to abjure his old faith. Bitter reproaches on the one side and rejoicings on the other greeted this decision. It was not heroic. But many even among the Protestants acknowledged it to be an act of supreme political wisdom.

Peace was restored, and the Edict of Nantes, which quickly followed, proved to his old friends, the Huguenots, that they were not forgotten. The Protestants, with disabilities removed, shared equal privileges with the Catholics throughout the kingdom, and the first victory for religious liberty was splendidly won.

An era of unexampled prosperity dawned. Never had the kingdom been so wisely and beneficently governed. Sincerity, simplicity, and sympathy had taken the place of dissimulation, craft, and cruelty. Uplifting agencies were everywhere at work, reaching even to the peasantry, that forgotten element in the nation.

The formal abjuration of the Protestant faith was made by the King in the Church of St. Denis in 1593. This church also witnessed the marriage of Henry with Marie de' Medici, after his release from her debased relative, Margaret of Valois, daughter of Catharine de' Medici. Henry IV., great although he was, was not above the ordinary weaknesses of humanity, and, captivated by the beauty of Marie, was a willing party to the Italian marriage which was urged upon him, which marriage was the one mistake of a great reign.

It was not to be expected that any minister would rise to the full stature of Henry IV. at this time. But in the Duke of Sully he had a wise and efficient instrument for his plan, which was out of the chaos left by the devastation of thirty years of religious wars, to evolve peace and prosperity; and to create economic conditions upon a foundation insuring growth and permanence.

The royal authority, impaired by the successors of Francis, must first be restored. And to that end all political elements, including the States General, must be held firmly down; and that body, representing the Tiers Etat, was never summoned after France was well in hand by the king who was par excellence the friend of the people!

It is the Edict of Nantes which stands preeminent among the events of this reign, and which is Henry's monument in the annals of France. His foreign policy was controlled by a desire to check the preponderance of the Hapsburgs; that being, in fact, the dominant sentiment in Europe at that time. But a remarkable proof of the breadth of his treatment of this subject is the plan he formulated of a European tribunal composed of the five great powers, which should insist upon the maintenance of a balance of power—a phrase common enough now, but heard then for the first time; and which had for its immediate purpose the separating of the crown of Spain and the empire, by forbidding their being held by members of the same family, and of course designed as a check upon the Hapsburgs.

This was a pet theory with Henry, and the subject of much discussion with Sully and of negotiation with Elizabeth, Queen of England, at the very time when Philip II. of Spain, in pursuance of a precisely opposite policy, had been moving heaven and earth to bring about a marriage with that extraordinary sister of his dead wife Mary. Henry did not witness the realization of his dream. But time has justified its wisdom, and modern statesmanship has been able to devise no wiser plan than that conceived in the mind of this enlightened king nearly three centuries ago.

How much France lost by Ravaillac's dagger can only be surmised, and when Henry, fatally stricken (1610), was carried dying into the Louvre, a cry of grief arose from Catholic and Protestant alike throughout the kingdom. After a reign of twenty-one years, the sagacious ruler, who had done more than any other to make the country great and happy, was the victim of assassination. And France once more was the sport of a cruel fate which placed her in the hands of a woman and a Medici. Marie, the widow of Henry IV., was appointed regent during the minority of her son Louis aged ten years.

The regency of this woman is a story of cabals and the intrigues of aspiring favorites. If Marie had not the ability of her great kinswoman Catharine, it must be confessed neither had she her darker vices. She was simply intriguing and vulgar, and the willing instrument for designing people cleverer than herself. So powerful was the influence of Eleonora Galigai and her husband, Concini, both Italians like herself, that in that superstitious age it was ascribed to magic. Marie became the mere secretary to record the wishes of these parasites. Concini was made marquis, then minister. Whom he commended was elevated, and whom he denounced was abased. Public indignation reached its climax when this adventurer was finally created Marshal of France, before whom counts and dukes must bow. So furious was the storm raised by this, that Marie declared her willingness to surrender the regency, and after summoning the States General she presented her son, Louis XIII., thirteen years of age, declaring that he was qualified to reign.

Only once again was this body to be called together. That was in 1789, by Louis XVI., when it was transformed into a National Assembly.

But when it was discovered that the power of the detested pair was as great behind the boy king as it had been behind his mother, the storm gathered again from all parts of the kingdom. It was France in struggle with Concini, the man who was audaciously sending princes of the blood and dukes to the Bastille.

But a counter-influence was weaving about Louis. He was made to realize the indignity to himself in letting two vulgar Italians usurp his authority. Thus Albert de Luynes, his adored friend, procured his signature to a paper ordering the immediate destruction of Concini and his wife. And when Louis had seen Concini despatched by his own agents in the court of the Louvre, and the arrest, trial, and execution of Eleonora (upon the charge of sorcery), he completed the work by banishing his mother, only to fall immediately into the power of Albert de Luynes, himself an intriguing parasite, who intended to play the very same role as the pair he had overthrown.

The clever Eleonora, when arraigned on the charge of sorcery, replied, "The only magic I have used is that of a strong mind over a weak one." Albert de Luynes's head was never carried about Paris on a pike, as was hers. But he experimented with the same kind of magic.

This wretched period after the death of the great Henry had occupied twelve years. But in 1622 Cardinal Richelieu took his seat among the advisers of the king. The true man had been found. King, nobles, people of all ranks and religions, realized that a master had appeared in the land; a master inscrutable in his purposes, and clothed with a mysterious power.

The foundations of this man's policy lay deep, out of sight of all save his own far-reaching intelligence. Pitiless as an iceberg, he crushed every obstacle to his purpose. Impartial as fate, with no loves, no hatreds, catholics, protestants, nobles, parliaments, one after another were borne down before his determination to make the king, what he had not been since Charlemagne, supreme in France.

The will of the great minister mowed down like a scythe. The power of the grandees, that last remnant of feudalism, and a perpetual menace to monarchy, was swept away. One great noble after another was humiliated and shorn of his privileges, if not of his head.

The Huguenots, being first shaken into submission, saw their political liberties torn from them by the stroke of a pen; and even while the Catholics were making merry over this discomfiture the minister was planning to send Henrietta, sister of the king, across the channel to become queen of Protestant England, as wife of Charles I. But the act of supreme audacity was to come. This high prelate of the Church, this cardinal-minister, formed an alliance with Gustavus Adolphus, the great leader of the Protestants in the war upon the emperor and the pope!

He allowed no religion, no class, to sway or to hold him. He was for France; and her greatness and glory augmented under his ruthless dominion. By his extraordinary genius he made the reign of a commonplace king one of dazzling splendor; and while gratifying his own colossal ambition, he so strengthened the foundations of the monarchy that princes of the blood themselves could not shake it.

It was great, it was dazzling, but of all his work there is but one thing which revolutions and time have not swept away: the "French Academy" alone survives as his monument. Out of a gathering of literary friends he created a national institution, its object the establishing a court of last appeal in all that makes for eloquence in speaking or writing the French language. In a country where few things endure, this has remained unchanged for two hundred and thirty years.

But this master of statecraft, this creator of despotic monarchy, had one unsatisfied ambition. He would have exchanged all his honors for the ability to write one play like those of Corneille. Hungering for literary distinction, he could not have gotten into his own Academy had he not created it. And jealous of his laurels, he hated Corneille as much as he did the enemies of France.

The feeble King Louis XIII. manifested wisdom in at least one thing. He permitted this greatest statesman of his time, and one of the greatest perhaps of all time, to have a free hand in managing his kingdom. And whatever the pressure from the queen-mother, from cabals and intriguing nobles, he never yielded the point, but kept his great minister in his service as long as they both lived. This was especially commendable in Louis because they were personally antagonistic, and also because the queen-mother constantly used her powerful influence over her son for his downfall.

Marie had been permitted to return to Paris, where her son, perhaps to console her for the loss of the Concinis, had built for her the Palais de Luxembourg, intended as a reminiscence of her dear Italy, with its Medicean architecture and Italian gardens and fountains. Here she held her little court in great splendor, and here she wove her ineffectual webs for Richelieu's defeat and downfall. It is said that at one time Louis at her instigation had actually taken the pen in hand to sign the order for his minister's disgrace, when that vigilant and omniscient being, perfectly aware of what was occurring, appeared from behind the curtains. And Louis, quailing before the superior will of a master, sent his vicious, intriguing mother into perpetual banishment. And we are told that Marie, the subject of those immortal canvases now at the Louvre, was actually sheltered and fed by the great painter at his own home in the day of her disgrace and poverty.

It is not strange that Peter the Great pronounced Richelieu the model statesman! Their ideals were the same. The minister intended that everything in France should lie helpless at the feet of royalty; that kingship should absorb into itself every source of power. While Cromwell was tearing down a throne in England and leading a king to a scaffold, Richelieu, facing every class, current, and force, was making the throne impregnable in France, and preparing a magnificent inheritance for the infant Louis XIV., then in his cradle.

Queen-mother, nobles, parliaments, and Protestants must be taught to obey. The Huguenots at the siege of La Rochelle, lasting fifteen months, learned their lesson. The punishment for their revolt was the loss of every military and political privilege. But although there were to be no more political assemblies, the edict of Nantes was to be rigidly enforced, and their rights and immunities under it made inviolable. Louis the King saw his most intimate friend, Cinq Mars, sent to the scaffold; his brother Gaston, Duke of Orleans, thrown into the Bastille like a common prisoner; his mother in exile and poverty. But he also saw himself without the trouble of governing, surrounded by homage and adulation, towering high above everything else in France, and was content.

The growing power of Austria and the ascendency of the Hapsburgs was, as we have seen, the nightmare of Europe at this period. But the Reformation was tearing the empire almost asunder. A Protestant Prussia was trying to struggle away from a Catholic Austria. Richelieu cared nothing for Catholics nor for Protestants. His aim was to weaken the hands of the Hapsburgs. And if he joined the Protestant leader Gustavus Adolphus in a religious crusade, it was with this end in view.

The marriage of Louis with the Infanta of Spain, known as Anne of Austria, was doubtless a part of the same line of policy, and was the beginning of many attempts to draw the Spanish peninsula under the control of France.

When the end of all these schemings arrived, on the 4th day of December, 1642, Richelieu calmly laid down to die in his princely residence known at that time as the Palais Cardinal. But as it was his dying gift to the king, the name was changed to the Palais Royal. Upon the death of Louis XIII., which occurred in 1643, only a few months after that of his minister, the widowed Queen Anne, with her infant son, Louis XIV., removed from the Louvre to the Palais Royal, which continued to be the residence of the Grand Monarch for some time after his majority.

Anne was appointed regent for her son, not yet five years old, and, to the surprise of everyone, immediately called to her aid as her adviser not a Frenchman, as was expected, but an Italian, Cardinal Mazarin. So the fate of the kingdom was in the hands of two foreigners, a Spanish queen-regent and an Italian minister.

Richelieu's and Mazarin's methods were the opposite of each other. One was direct, the other tortuous and indirect. In true Italian fashion Mazarin overcame by seeming to yield; and what he said was the thing he did not mean. Intrigue and bribery were his implements and weapons.

The situation awoke distrust. It was a time to recover lost privileges, and to struggle out of the chains riveted by Richelieu. A civil war known as the Fronde was the result.

As all classes had grievances, all were represented in this general undoing of the last minister's great work. But as no two classes desired the same thing, the miserable war, without genius and without system, miserably failed. The royal cause triumphed; and Richelieu's political structure was not even shaken. Mazarin stood inflexibly by the work of his great predecessor. Turenne and Conde were the military heroes of this, as well as of the subsequent foreign wars, resulting in the acquisition of Alsace (1648) and other great territorial expansion.

When Cardinal Mazarin died in 1661, the young king was asked to whom the ministers should bring their portfolios. To which came the unexpected reply, "To me."



CHAPTER XIII.

The wily Italian was gone, and Louis XIV. settled himself upon the throne which Richelieu had rendered so exalted and immovable.

Cardinal Mazarin had said of the young Louis that "there was enough in him to make four kings, and one honest man." His greatness consisted more in amplitude than in kind. Nature made him in prodigal mood. He was an average man of colossal proportions. His ability, courage, dignity, industry, greed for power and possessions, were all on a magnificent scale, and so were his vanity, his loves, his cruelties, his pleasures, his triumphs, and his disappointments.

No king more wickedly oppressed France, and none made her more glorious. He made her feared abroad and magnificent at home, but he desolated her, and drained her resources with ambitious wars. He crowned her with imperishable laurels in literature, art, and every manifestation of genius, but he signed the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and drove out of his kingdom 500,000 of the best of his subjects.

The marriage of the Dauphin with the Infanta of Spain had occurred before he attained his majority. It was planned by Mazarin, and was a part of the policy left as a fatal bequest to Louis XIV. by that minister.

The Salic Law was not recognized in Spain. Hence, the crown might descend to an heiress, and by her be transmitted to her husband. Such was the hope in the marriage of Louis with the Infanta; the hope of some happy turn of fortune, some break in the line of succession whereby the Spanish kingdom might be absorbed into a Bourbon empire, as it had once been in the empire of the Hapsburgs. This was the ignis fatuus which was to control the policy of this stormy reign, and which was to envelop it at last in the clouds of defeat and disaster.

The secret of Louis' greatness was his instinctive recognition of greatness in others. His new minister, Colbert, to whom he owed so much, was a man of the people, and a protestant. He it was who discovered the peculations of Fouquet, the magnificent Minister of Finance, who was building a palace at Vaux greater than the king himself could afford, and who was suddenly swept from this princely residence into the Bastille, where he spent the remaining years of his life with plenty of leisure in which to think upon the forty thousand pounds he had expended upon that fete he gave in honor of his royal master; and to recall the splendors of the supper and the size of the banqueting-hall, which Mansart, Le Brun, and the best that Italy could furnish at that time had made beautiful.

It is said that the unfortunate visit of the king to his minister's abode resulted in the creation of Versailles as a suburban residence. From the Palais de St. Germain, on the heights in the suburbs of Paris, Louis could see the Cathedral of St. Denis, where were the royal vaults and the ancestors he must some day join. So depressing was this view to him, and so charmed was he with the plan of Fouquet's palace and gardens, that artists were immediately set to work to make one more royal at Versailles, where his father, Louis XIII., used to have his hunting-box; the place where that much-governed king used to go to hide away from his scheming mother and his argus-eyed minister. The genius of Colbert was severely taxed to supply the means for Louis' magnificent tastes and for his foreign wars, at the same time. Even Colbert could not create money out of nothing. The burden must rest somewhere, and just as surely must ultimately be borne by the people.

The choice of Louvois as Minister of War was no less happy than that of Colbert in Finance. And with Vauban to build his defences, Turenne and Luxembourg and the great Conde to lead his armies, it is not strange that there were victories.

The four great wars of Louis' reign were not for theatrical effect, like that of the fanciful Charles VIII. in Italy. They were all in pursuance of a serious and definite purpose. Just or unjust, wise or unwise, they were planned in order to reach some boundary, or to secure some strategic position essential to France. These wars were:

First—The war upon the Spanish Netherlands, ending with the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, 1668.

Second—The invasion of the Dutch Republic, ending with the peace of Nymwegen, 1678.

Third—War with the coalition of European States, closing with the Treaty of Ryswick, 1697.

Fourth—War of the Spanish Succession, closed by the Treaty of Utrecht, 1713.

The first of these wars, undertaken because Louis believed and intended that Flanders should belong to France, to which it was geographically allied, was ostensibly undertaken in order to recover the unpaid dowry which had been promised by Spain in exchange for Louis' renunciation of any claim upon the throne of Spain which might result from his marriage with the Infanta Maria Theresa. His conquest of the Spanish possessions in Flanders might have been supposed to set at rest forever the question of a claim upon the Spanish throne. But we shall hear of that again. The success of this war made Louis, at twenty-nine years of age, the most heroic figure in Europe. Every one bowed before him, and everything seemed to be gravitating toward him as toward a central sun. Not alone nobility, but even genius put on his livery and became sycophantish, Bossuet and even Moliere, hungering for his smile, and in despair if he frowned.

This was the time of the supremacy of the beautiful Louise la Valliere. Her reign was brief, and, the king's infatuation being passed, she was to spend the rest of her dreary life in a Carmelite convent, hearing only the far-off echoes from the brilliant world in which she was once the central and envied figure.

The Dutch Republic had come under Louis' displeasure and was marked for his next foreign campaign. This (to his mind) insignificant nation of fishermen and small traders had presumed to stand in his path. So the most magnificent army since the Crusades in 1672 invaded the peaceful little state of Holland. As one after another of the cities helplessly fell, someone asked why Louis came himself—why he did not send his valet? Louis insolently demanded as the price of peace the surrender of all their fortified cities, the payment of twenty million francs, and the renunciation of the Protestant faith.

The answer of William of Nassau was an unexpected one. The history of modern times has nothing more heroic than this little mercantile state defying the greatest potentate in Europe. William of Nassau knew perfectly well that every battle meant defeat. The thing to do was to make battles impossible by inundating their fertile fields. When he saw the destruction of life and property in one scale and political slavery in the other, he did not hesitate. The dikes were quietly opened. Turenne and Luxembourg and Vauban were baffled as completely as Napoleon in Russia. And when the magnificent army had evacuated the flooded country, the dikes were quietly closed again and time and windmills restored their fields to fertility.

In the meantime William had been drawing to himself powerful allies. Half of Europe was in league with him in the battles he now fought upon the Rhine. But the French were victorious. And after the peace of Nymwegen, 1678, Louis had reached the zenith of his power.

Human pretension and arrogance could go no farther. He began to feel that France was his own personal possession and that Europe might be. It was the combination of a great king with a small man which produced this composite being. He had built Versailles, a palace unmatched since the Caesars. He not only commanded the presence, but the obsequious presence of all that was illustrious and great at a time when France was in the full flower of her splendid genius. Corneille, Racine, Moliere, if permitted to be, must pay him an almost idolatrous homage. The beautiful Valliere was sent away, and de Montespan's reign had commenced.

But when Colbert died in 1685, Louis fell under an influence which was to be transforming. He had been burning the illuminating oil of youth at very high pressure. Perhaps it was exhausted. He grew serious. De Montespan was sent away—the orgies at Versailles ceased, the court became decorous, almost austere, and with the awakening of conscience, of course, the king became more sensitive to the heresies of the Huguenots!

He was drifting toward the fatal mistake of his life. He revoked the Edict of Nantes. Two millions of people by the stroke of his pen, at the bidding of de Maintenon, were disfranchised; prohibited under severe penalties from any observance of their religion; their property confiscated, an attempt to flee from the country punished by the galleys.

The prisons were full of Protestants and the scaffolds dyed with their blood. Two hundred thousand perished by imprisonment, by the galleys, and the executioner; while two hundred thousand more managed to escape to America and to the lands of the enemies of France, which they would enrich with their skill.

Not a word of protest came from a person in France. Not even from Fenelon or Bossuet! Madame de Maintenon told him it was the "glorious climax of a glorious reign." Madame de Sevigne said it was "magnificent!" And Bossuet, greatest of French divines, exclaimed, "It is the miracle of the century!"

France at one stroke was impoverished. The skill, the trained hand, the element which was at the foundation of her excellence, and of that which was to constitute her future supremacy in the world, had gone to enrich her enemies. And whether in Germany, in England, or America, no foreign people have had such glad welcome as was given to the Huguenots.

Then came the rebound in a form not expected. William of Orange was now King of England. James had been driven off his throne, and his daughter Mary and her husband, William of Orange, wore the double crown. All the hostile European states, under William's leadership, sprang together for the common defence of Europe from this detested foe.

The smothered hatred of Holland and every protestant state burst into flame, and the great War of the Coalition commenced. Beginning with the League of Augsburg, in 1688, it continued until the peace of Ryswick, 1697, with the defeat of France all along the line.

Humiliated and broken, there remained for the king an opportunity to retrieve the past by attaching the Spanish peninsula to France. There was a vacant throne at Madrid which his grandson Philip, through the neglected Queen Maria Theresa, might claim as his inheritance. Such were the conditions which might still change defeat into triumph. The fact that the right to the succession had been waived by the king was easily disposed of. Philip, Louis' grandson, presented his claim in competition with that of the son of Leopold I., Emperor of Germany. When the pope, with whom the decision lay, decided in favor of Philip, grandson of the great Louis, all Europe sprang to the aid of the Austrian archduke in the war of the Spanish succession.

It was a little side play in the opening of this great drama, which brought the kingdom of Prussia into existence. Frederick, elector of Brandenburg, when called upon to arm by the emperor, refused to do so except upon one condition: that he might wear the title of king instead of elector; which condition was granted, with the stipulation that the name of Prussia, a detached piece of territory the ancestors of Frederick had cut out of the side of Russia, be substituted for Brandenburg. So out of this war of personal ambition there had sprung a new kingdom, the kingdom of Prussia, of which France was to hear much in the future.

England was not eager to join the new coalition in defence of the Hapsburg, whom in common with the rest of Europe she had for years been trying to pull down. But when Louis insolently espoused the cause of the exiled King James, and promised by force to place the pretender on the throne, then she needed no urging, and sent Marlborough and the flower of her army to join Prince Eugene in Germany.

It was Marlborough at Blenheim (1702) who drove the iron of defeat into the soul of Louis XIV. When the war was ended he had made every concession demanded; had given up a vast extent of territory; banished the English pretender from his kingdom; and acknowledged Anne as queen of Great Britain.

By the provisions of the treaty (the Peace of Utrecht) Gibraltar passed to England; Spain ceded the Netherlands and all her possessions in Italy to the German empire. And so the fine threads diplomacy had been spinning over the Continent for two centuries were ruthlessly brushed away as a spider's web.

An imbittered, broken old man, shorn of his omnipotence, who had outlived his fame and his worshippers, was dying in his great palace at Versailles; his only solace the austere woman who had inspired the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and who upon the death of his unhappy queen he had privately made his wife. Marie Therese had borne his mad infatuation for Louise la Valliere; la Valliere had carried her broken heart to a convent, and been superseded by de Montespan, and de Montespan had invited her own destruction by bringing into her household Madame de Maintenon, the pious widow of the poet Scarron, in order that the austere virtues of that lady might be engrafted upon the children of the royal household. Grave, ambitious, talented, the governess of de Montespan's children was not too much absorbed in her duties to find ways of establishing an influence over the king.

This man, who had absorbed into himself all the functions of the government, who was ministers, magistrates, parliaments, all in one, this central sun of whom Corneille, Moliere, Racine were but single rays, was destined to be enslaved in his old age by a designing adventuress; her will his law. The hey-day of youth having passed, he was beginning to be anxious about his soul. She artfully pricked his conscience, and de Montespan was sent away, but de Maintenon remained.

She next convinced him that the only fitting atonement for his sins was to drive heresy out of his kingdom, and re-establish the true faith. At her bidding he undid the glorious work of Henry IV., signed the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and brutally stamped out Protestantism.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the stake in the great game played in Europe was the headship, the pre-eminent position held by the house of Hapsburg. The entire reign of Louis XIV. had had this for its ultimate object. He seemed many times near it; but was never to reach the goal. The absorption of Spain was a last and desperate attempt. It had failed. France had not won the leadership of European civilization.

In the coming reign, new forces, new conditions, were to widen the field of national ambitions. And it was the nation across the channel which would grasp these forces and distance her rivals in an advance along the untried paths of commerce and a world-wide expansion.

With a strange apathy France had seen herself mistress of a large part of the American Continent, won for her by adventurous Frenchmen and Catholic missionaries. She did practically nothing to develop this magnificent colonial empire. Failing to comprehend changing conditions, the same old problem, with a towering house of Hapsburg, obscured her view, and remained the great unchanging fact about which her policy revolved.

Louis XV. was five years old when, in 1715, he became heir to a throne absolutely rigid. The best work of Richelieu and Mazarin and Louis XIV. had been expended upon it. Absolutism could go no farther. The king was all; next below him a fawning, obsequious nobility, and then that vague entity known as "the people," a remote invisible force, sustaining the weight of the splendid pyramid, the apex of which was this boy of five.

The young Louis was being prepared to sit upon this giddy elevation. The Duke of Orleans, his accomplished cousin, a competent instructor in vice, was chosen as regent, and the royal education began. The best and rarest of the world's culture was at his service. Fenelon, the polished ecclesiastic, fed him the classics in tempting form from his own Telemaque, written for the purpose. Although this work was later suppressed by the boy's royal father under the suspicion of being a covert satire upon his own reign, in which Madame de Montespan was represented by Calypso; and other famous or infamous members of his court also appeared in thin disguise.

The handsome boy was breathing the atmosphere of genius created by an age which compares well with those of Pericles and Augustus and the Medici, and nourished at the same time by the exhalations from a new crop of vices growing out of the decaying remains of those left by the old court.



CHAPTER XIV.

Such was the preparation for a supreme crisis in the life of the Kingdom.

The enormous debt left by the last reign taxed the ingenuity of the regent to its utmost. Then it was that John Law, the Scotchman, presented his great financial scheme of making unlimited wealth out of paper, which was just what the regent needed. The collapse came quickly, in 1720, bringing ruin to thousands, and leaving the country in more desperate need than before.

When declared of age, in 1723, a marriage was arranged for Louis with Marie Leczinska, daughter of the exiled Polish King Stanislas. Europe at this time was agitated over the succession to the throne of Austria, as the empire was now called. The Salic Law excluded female heirs, and the emperor, Charles VI., had died in 1718, leaving only a daughter, Maria Theresa, one year old. But a pragmatic sanction, once more invoked, seems to have covered the necessities of the situation by providing that the succession in the absence of a male heir might descend to a female, and so there was a young and beautiful empress on the throne at Vienna, who was going to make a great deal of history for Europe; and who would open her brilliant reign by a valiant fight for possession of Silesia, which the young king of Prussia intended to seize as an addition to his own new kingdom. This young King Frederick was also making history very fast, and after a stormy career was going to convert his Kingdom into a Power, and to be the one sovereign of his age whom the world would call Great! But at this particular period of his youth, Frederick and his nobility, still blinded by the splendors of the reign of Louis XIV., were mere servile imitators of the court at Versailles, and the culture and the civilization for which they hungered were French—only French; and for Frederick, an intimate companionship with Voltaire was his supreme desire. But a closer view of the witty, cynical Frenchman wrought a wonderful change. The finely pointed shafts of ridicule when aimed at himself were not so entertaining. And his guest, no longer persona grata, was escorted over the frontier to France.