The famous association known as the Catholic League, or Holy Union, took its rise from the strangely indulgent terms granted to the Huguenots by the Peace of Monsieur, in April, 1576. Four years had scarcely elapsed since the blood-stained Eve of St. Bartholomew. It had been hoped that by means of that execrable crime the Reformation would have been finally crushed and extinguished in France; but instead of this, a treaty was concluded with the heretics, which placed them in a more favourable situation than they had ever occupied before. The free exercise of their religion throughout the kingdom, with the exception of Paris and the actual residence of the sovereign; permission to hold synods, provided that an officer of the Crown was always present; the establishment of "chambres mi-parties" in the Parliaments, to take cognizance of all causes between Protestants and Catholics; the legal recognition of the marriage of priests and monks who had seceded from the Church to the Calvinist communion; and the concession of certain cautionary towns, to be held for a specific time by Huguenot officers and troops such were the conditions imposed upon the Crown by this remarkable act of pacification.

We cannot wonder that it was regarded by the majority of Catholics as a wicked and cowardly betrayal of their most sacred interests. They ascribed it to its true source, namely, the hopeless incapacity of the reigning monarch, Henry III; a prince whose monstrous vices and gross misgovernment were destined to reduce France to a state of disorganization bordering on national ruin.

The idea of a general confederation of Catholics for the defence of the Faith against the inroads of heresy had been suggested by the Cardinal of Lorraine during the Council of Trent, and had been favourably entertained at the Court of Rome. The Duke of Guise was to have been placed at the head of this alliance; but his sudden death changed the face of affairs, and the project fell into abeyance. The Cardinal of Lorraine was now no more; he died at Avignon, at the age of fifty, in December, 1574; on which occasion the Queen Mother, imagining that the event would destroy for ever the ascendency of the house of Guise, congratulated herself and those around her, that "henceforth there would be peace in France."

She miscalculated. Henry, the third Duke of Guise, inherited in their fullest extent the ambition, the religious ardour, the lofty political aspirations, the enterprising spirit, the personal popularity, of his predecessors. The League of 1576 was conceived entirely in his interest. He was the leader naturally pointed out for such a movement;—a movement which, although its ulterior objects were at first studiously concealed, aimed in reality at substituting the family of Lorraine for that of Valois on the throne of France.

The designs of the confederates, as set forth in the original manifesto which was circulated for signature, seemed at first sight highly commendable, both with regard to religion and politics. According to this document, the Union was formed for three great purposes: to uphold the Catholic Church; to suppress heresy; and to maintain the honour, the authority, and prerogatives of the Most Christian king and his successors.

On closer examination, however, expressions were detected which hinted at less constitutional projects. "Many good Catholics," says Palma-Cayet, "saw that underneath these articles there lay hid something which was likely to produce infinite trouble and division in France." Thus, for instance, it was provided that if any of the confederates should be attacked or molested, the Union was bound to defend them, even by force of arms, against any and all persons whatsoever.

Again, the head of the League, who was not yet named, was to exercise absolute authority over all the nujmbers; any one refusing to obey him was to be punished as he might direct. He was to be the sole judge of any dispute which might arise in the society; and no one was to resort to the ordinary course of justice without his permission. Moreover, all persons refusing to join the Union were to be treated as enemies, and encountered sword in hand.

From this significant, though mysterious, language we may gather that the Leaguers contemplated from the first the establishment of a central power independent of the sovereign, and foreign to the constitution. But their secret aims became incontestably manifest soon afterwards, when one of their confidential agents, an advocate named David, happened to die suddenly on his return from Rome, and his papers fell into the hands of the Huguenots, who immediately made them public. Their contents were of so extravagant and dangerous a nature, that at first they were considered to be forgeries; but their genuineness was established beyond question by a despatch received by Henry III from his ambassador at Madrid, enclosing a copy of the most important of these documents, which had been forwarded to the King of Spain.

A change of dynasty in France was the avowed object of the scheme thus disclosed. It set forth, in substance, that the Capetian monarchs were usurpers,—the throne belonging rightfully to the house of Lorraine as the lineal descendants of Charlemagne. The Divine malediction had pursued the intrusive princes from generation to generation. Some had been deprived of reason; some had died in captivity; others had been visited with the heaviest censures of the Church. Their continual embroilments with the Holy See had given birth to the damnable form of error commonly called the "Liberty of the Gallican Church", which, in point of fact, was a mere screen for heresy. The late peace, so advantageous to the Calvinists, would have the effect of establishing that sect permanently in France, unless the opportunity were seized to restore the crown to its legitimate owners. To this end the clergy must denounce, both in the pulpit and the confessional, the concessions just made to the sectaries, and excite the people to oppose tlieir execution. Lists must be drawn up by the parish priests throughout the kingdom of all persons capable of bearing arms, and they should be prepared to take part in a general rising in defence of the Catholic religion, under the leadership of the Duke of Guise. Every effort must be made to secure, in the States-General about to be held at Blois, a preponderance of members solemnly pledged to the cause of the League.

The articles of the engagement to be subscribed by them should be submitted to the Pope, and embodied, under the sanction of his Holiness, in a formal covenant to be entered into between the see of Rome and the French nation. Any prince of the blood opposing the proceedings of the States-should be declared incapable of succeeding to the throne; if in a lower rank, they should be banished from the realm, and their property confiscated.

The three orders of the States-General should make a public profession of allegiance to the Pontiff and the ancient Church; they should promulgate the Council of Trent; they should absolutely revoke all edicts favourable to heresy. The king was to be requested to name the Duke of Guise Lieutenant-General of the kingdom. The League being thus put in possession of the supreme command of the royal forces, the Duke of Alençon was to be tried for high treason as an abettor of heretics and rebels, and decisive measures were to be taken for the total suppression and abolition of the "Pretended Reformed Religion."

After this the Duke of Guise, with the advice and permission of the Pope, was to imprison Henry for the rest of his days in a monastery, after the example of his ancestor Pepin when he dethroned the Merovingian Childeric. Lastly, the heir of the Carolingians was to be proclaimed King of France; and, on assuming the crown, was to make such arrangements with his Holiness as would secure the complete recognition of the sovereignty of the Vicar of Christ, by abrogating for ever the so-called "liberties of the Galilean Church".

Such were the particulars of this revolutionary plot;—a plot which, unhappily, was viewed with cordial sympathy, and supported with enthusiastic zeal, by many of the prelates, and a large majority of the parochial clergy of France. It was a line of conduct widely at variance with the principles and traditions of their order; but if revolt from a lawful sovereign is ever justifiable by the pressure of exceptional circumstances, some excuse may be found for it in the state of the French court and government during the disgraceful reign of Henry III.

Not only had the king made himself personally odious by his life of shameless profligacy, but the Church had been subjected of late years to a series of provocations which had seriously shaken its ancient loyalty.

The right of patronage acquired by the Concordat was more and more scandalously abused. Every rule of discipline was outraged by the practice of be- stowing bishoprics and abbeys upon laymen and others notoriously disqualified; so that it had become the exception, rather than the rule, for a bishop to reside in his diocese and discharge his pastoral duties.

Again, the taxes levied on the clergy had increased to an intolerable extent. Besides defraying, on behalf of the Government, the whole of the annuities called "rentes de l'Hôtel de Ville," they had been mulcted to the amount of sixty millions of livres (upwards of 600,000?.) between 1560 and 1576, in extraordinary subsidies. Added to this, the Church had been deeply wronged by repeated alienation of its landed property. Charles IX extorted from the clergy in this manner an annual revenue of 50,000 crowns in 1563. A similar act of confiscation, sanctioned by a bull of Pius V, took place in 1568, a proviso being added on this occasion by his Holiness, that the money should be employed in prosecuting the war against the heretics. A third alienation, to the amount of 50,000 crowns of income, was submitted to in 1576.

It was the soreness arising from these and other aggressions of the temporal power which led to the importunate demands of the French synods for the promulgation of the Council of Trent; and the pertinacious refusal of that boon by the Government became a further grievance which was bitterly resented. The lenient treatment of the heretics contrasted vexatiously with the harshness and rapacity thus shown to the dominant communion. By the treaty of 1576 the Protestants were placed, in respect both of civil and religious rights, almost, if not altogether, on an equal footing with Catholics; a stretch of liberality unprecedented in France, and deemed by many to be a grave infraction of the fundamental laws of the realm.

The exclusive profession and maintenance of the Catholic religion, it was contended, was not only a "law of the king"—not a mere ordounance of any individual sovereign—but "a law of the kingdom"; an enactment, that is, of the three Estates of the national legislature, and one which could not be repealed but by the same authority. The king was not entitled to claim allegiance from his subjects until he had bound himself, by his coronation oath, to observe this statute; it was upon this absolute indefeasible condition that he held his crown. The position now yielded to the Separatists, therefore, was a breach of the original compact made between the French crown and the French people, when Clovis was baptized and solemnly anointed by S. Remi. The reigning monarch, it was evident, could not fulfil the essential purposes for which his office existed; he could not efficiently protect the one Apostolic faith of the one Apostolic Church. Under such circumstances what was the duty of good subjects? Ought they not to take counsel and band together to uphold those great constitutional principles which a vacillating and pusillanimous prince seemed ready to abandon? What confidence could Catholics repose in one whose policy consisted in friendly negociations with the arch-heretic Henry of Navarre, and in loading the Huguenots with privileges and guarantees which made them almost independent of the central government? Was it not imperative to provide a remedy for such ruinous incapacity? Tlie moment had arrived when all true-hearted patriots must combine in defence of the institutions of their country and the religion of their ancestors. Those who held aloof would vainly reproach themselves hereafter, if they should live to see the day when throne and altar, public law and private freedom, political credit and national unity, had been demolished in one indiscriminate overthrow.

Thus argued the zealots of the League; and the most energetic and influential among them, as I have said, were priests and prelates of the Galilean Church. Some idea may be formed of the prevalence of clerical disaffection from the fact that, of all the parochial benefices in the capital, there were only three that were not held by declared adherents of the faction. Each parish, carefully organized by its pastor, became a focus of seditious agitation.

Three out of the four personages styled "the pillars of the League" were ecclesiastics;—Jean Prevost, doctor of the Sorbonne and cure of S. Severin, Jean Boucher, also a member of the Sorbonne and curè of S. Benoit, and Matthieu de Launay, a canon of Soissons. The fourth, the Sieur de Rocheblonde, was a layman, but closely connected with the Church, being "receveur des decimes" for the diocese of Paris. They were soon joined by others, among whom were two in high station, Aymar Hennequin, Bishop of Rennes, and Guillaume Rose, Bishop of Senlis; and the secret committee thus formed afterwards developed into the Council of the "Seize," which for many years held absolute sway iu the metropolis. The clerical leaguers distinguished themselves so much as preachers, that in a short time they monopolised all the important pulpits in Paris. Year after year they were appointed to deliver the Lenten course of sermons at the cathedral of Notre-Dame; which was esteemed an office of high honour, and gave unbounded facilities for exciting the fanatical passions of the multitude.

The death of the Duke of Anjou, presumptive heir to the throne, in 1584, determined the League to immediate action. In the event of the king's dying without issue, which was most probable,—the crown would now devolve upon Henry of Bourbon, the acknowledged leader of the Huguenots;—a contingency which, in the view of the ultra-Catholics (and, as we have seen, they were not without plausible grounds for maintaining it) would subvert the entire framework of the constitution. They were compelled, therefore, by the necessities of their position, to abandon the principles of Divine right and hereditary succession, and to look round for a candidate who, in default of legitimate claim by birth, possessed qualifications for the throne which they accounted even more important.

Not venturing to put forth openly the pretensions of the Duke of Guise, they fixed upon the Cardinal of Bourbon, Archbishop of Rouen, uncle of the King of Navarre ; an insignificant person, far advanced in years, whose name was evidently borrowed for mere purposes of temporary convenience. A flattering proposal was made to the cardinal, and entertained by him, that he should procure a dispensation from his vows, and afterwards marry the Duchess of Montpensier, sister of the Duke of Guise.

In January, 1585, the chiefs of the League signed a secret treaty at Joinville with the King of Spain, by which the contracting parties made common cause for the extirpation of all sects and heresies in France and the Netherlands, and for excluding from the French throne princes who were heretics, or who "treated heretics with public impunity". It was stipulated that the decrees of the Council of Trent should be received and enforced in France in their full extent. Liberal supplies of men and money were to be furnished to the insurgents by Philip from the moment that war should break out; the subsidies to be repayable on the accession of the Cardinal de Bourbon, or of his successor."

The Leaguers lost no time in seeking for their enterprise the all-important sanction of the Holy See. For this purpose they despatched as their envoy to Rome a Jesuit named Claude Matthieu, whose indefatigable activity in their service made him famous afterwards under the title of the "courier of the League".

The Jesuit fraternity in France had embraced with passionate ardour the anti-royalist cause. The sole exception was the celebrated Edmond Auger, at this time confessor to Henry III; who, being sincerely attached to his royal penitent, refused to listen to any treasonable overtures, and exerted himself to confirm the wavering fidelity of others. The General of the order, Aquaviva, testified his disapproval of this conduct by summarily removing Auger from his confidential post at court. Matthieu, in concert with Cardinal de Pelleve, Archbishop of Sens, who was then residing at Rome, did his utmost to obtain from Pope Gregory XIII an authoritative approval of the League and its proceedings. His Holiness, however, was cautious and reserved. He expressed in general terms his consent to the project of taking up arms against the heretics, and granted a plenary indulgence to those who should aid in that holy work. But he declined to countenance the deposition of the king by violence, and answered vaguely when pressed to launch a formal sentence of excommunication against Henry of Navarre. Nor did Gregory's successor, Sixtus V, show himself at all better disposed to endorse the revolutionary views of the League. He met the solicitations of the Duke of Nevers by inquiring "in what school he had learned that it was lawful to form political associations contrary to the will of his sovereign?". He sympathized with Henry in his perplexities, and predicted that, ere long, he would be compelled to resort for help to the heretics in order to emancipate himself from the tyranny of the Catholics. At length, however, Sixtus was persuaded to fulminate a bull against the King of Navarre and the Prince of Condé, in which, after expatiating in unmeasured language on the supreme power of the Apostolic See over all earthly potentates,—who, when they failed in their duty, "were to be chastised and crushed as ministers of Satan,"—he declared the two princes to be heretics relapsed, and notorious fautors and abettors of heresy; as such, they had incurred all the pains and penalties denounced by the Church on these offences; and, in consequence, the said Henry of Bourbon was deprived of his pretended kingdom of Navarre, and of the principality of Bearn, and Henry of Condé in like manner was stripped of whatever dignities, domains, fiefs, and lordships, he might possess. Both culprits, together with their heirs and posterity, were pronounced for ever incapable of succeeding to the throne of France, or any other dignity; their subjects and vassals were released from their oath of homage, and forbidden to obey them under pain of excommunication.

Lastly, the King of France was exhorted to cause the sentence to be executed, and the prelates of the realm were enjoined, on their canonical obedience, to publish it in their respective dioceses.

Such was the state of imbecility and helplessness to which Henry of Valois was reduced, that he durst not deal with this outrageous document as it deserved. The Parliament of Paris remonstrated against it with manly vigour, representing to the king that he ought to treat it as one of his royal ancestors had done with a bull of similar import—namely, to consign it to the flames in the presence of the Gallican Church, and to take such exemplary vengeance upon those who had expedited it from Rome as should serve for a lesson to all posterity.

They firmly refused to register the bull, and the king, too feeble to enforce obedience, contented himself with allowiug the matter to drop in silence. Henry of Navarre, however, published an indignant reply to the Pope's sentence, appealing against it, "comme d'abus", to the French court of peers; he retorted the charge of heresy upon Sixtus himself, and offered to prove it before a free and legitimate Council; and he concluded by threatening measures of retaliation, such as had been taken by several princes of his family in former days against similar acts of insolent aggression by the Court of Rome.

The Pope openly expressed his admiration of this exhibition of spirit and energy on the part of the Huguenot chief. The excommunication of the King of Navarre was an important boon to the Leaguers; they now increased rapidly in general credit and popularity as the champions of the orthodox faith. Their preachers began to declaim vehemently, not only against the heretics, but against Henry III, whom they persisted in representing as a partisan and accomplice of these enemies of the Church. The irregularities of the king's life, combined with his occasional paroxysms of superstitious devotion, furnished abundant food for their philippics. The grotesque processions of the "confrèries de penitents" were ridiculed without mercy by Maurice Poncet, curè of S. Pierre des Arcis, a divine of great eloquence and considerable learning, though not remarkable for refinement of taste or diction. Poncet made the walls of his church ring with denunciations of these hypocritical devotees, who, after parading the streets barefoot, arrayed in sackcloth, and displaying ostentatiously the outward signs of austere asceticism, were accustomed to pass the night in riotous feasting and gross debauchery. Henry, resenting this exposure, banished the offender to his abbey of Saint Pere at Melun; but he was released after a brief confinement, and returned to Paris by the king's permission, his Majesty remarking that "he had always believed the good doctor to have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge; and that there was much excuse for him, since he was not quick enough of apprehension to see through the artifices of those by whom he was instigated. He had plenty of scholarship, but was grievously deficient in judgment."

Poncet, unsubdued by the king's leniency, resumed his usual incisive style of pulpit oratory, and persevered in it till his death, which happened in 1586.

Guillaume Rose, one of the king's preachers in ordinary, made himself equally conspicuous by satirizing the eccentricities of his sovereign. Henry rebuked him for his insolence, and Rose sued for forgiveness ; whereupon the king sent him a few days afterwards four hundred crowns, "to help him to buy sugar and honey to sweeten his bitter words, that he might pass Lent more comfortably."

Rose was already grand-master of the college of Navarre, and in 1584 the king preferred him to the bishopric of Senlis; but, notwithstanding these marks of favour, he continued to vituperate his benefactor, and foment sedition with the utmost violence and malignity. Such was his extravagance, that it was ascribed to a sort of frenzy or delirium, to which he was said to be periodically subject.

Every day the League became more desperate in its attacks on the tottering throne of the last of the Valois. The Duchess of Montpensier, who regarded Henry with profound and deadly hatred, maintained a troop of preachers regularly in her pay, whose sole business was to inflame the minds of the populace against him, and prepare them for his forcible deposition. She was wont to say that she had done more for the good cause by means of her preachers, than her brothers had done by their treaties and their armies.

They were actively seconded by the Jesuits, the mendicant friars, the Sorbonne, the Pope's nuncio, and the secret emissaries of Philip of Spain. The Sorbonne, at a meeting on the 16th of December, 1587, passed a resolution that "it was lawful to take away the government from an ill-conducted and incompetent prince, just as a guardian who proved himself unworthy of confidence might be deprived of his office." For this piece of effrontery the doctors received a severe castigation from the king himself, who summoned them to his presence at the Louvre, and upbraided them before the whole court for assailing him with personal calumnies, and impugning his administration of the affairs of state. He was not disposed, he said, to visit their offence very seriously, considering that their resolution had been passed after dinner. He would have them know, however, that an outrage of the same kind had been promptly punished by Pope Sixtus, who had lately sent to the galleys certain Franciscan preachers who had dared to slander him in their discourses. They (the doctors) deserved a like treatment, or, perhaps, something worse; nevertheless, he was willing to forgive and forget the past, on condition that such conduct was not repeated. In case of any fresh indiscretion, he should order his court of Parliament to bring them to condign justice forthwith.

But Henry's circumstances were such that neither his acts of clemency nor his threats of severity had any practical effect. His authority soon began to be openly set at defiance. The Duchess of Montpensier, who was in the habit of promenading the streets of Paris with a pair of golden scissors at her waist, destined, as she boasted, to perform the ceremony of tonsure upon Henry when he exchanged his throne for a cloister, received a royal order to quit the capital. She treated it with utter unconcern, and continued to indulge in the same strain of insulting bravado with impunity. A preacher at St. Sévérin had delivered himself in language so inflammatory and dangerous to the public peace, that it was impossible to avoid taking notice of it ; but no sooner was it known that the myrmidons of justice were in quest of him, than the populace, incited by the clergy (especially by Boucher, who caused the tocsin to be rung from the steeple of his church of S. Benoit), rose en masse, attacked the royal archers with overwhelming numbers, and drove them out of the quartier in confusion.

This first armed collision between the Leaguers and the Government was quickly followed by the "day of the barricades" (May 12, 1588), the events of which virtually dispossessed Henry of the crown.

To say that the final downfall of the house of Valois was the work of the Gallican Church, would be an overstatement of the truth; but that it was brought about through the influence and agency of Gallican bishops and clergy is, unhappily, beyond a question. The League was now the dominant power in France. The King was compelled, as the condition of retaining even the semblance of authority, to accept the "Edict of Union," which bound him to employ the whole strength of the kingdom for the extermination of the heretics, to declare heretics incapable of succeeding to the throne, and to abandon to the chief Leaguers all important posts of trust and command. Among other promotions, Pierre d'Espinac, Archbishop of Lyons, one of the most turbulent intriguers of the time, was made a member of the Privy Council, and promised the reversion of the office of keeper of the seals. He was also recommended to the Pope for a cardinal's hat. The States-General, which met immediately afterwards at Blois, consisted almost exclusively of nominees of the Duke of Guise and ardent apostles of the League. Among them we find the names of Claude de Saintes, Bishop of Evreux; Aymar Hennequin, Bishop of Rennes; and two Parisian cures, Cueilly and Pelletier. The "Seize," who were now omnipotent at Paris, laboured on this occasion to remodel the French monarchy, and reduce it to a popular constitutional government; proposing that the King should be made amenable to the judgment of the legislature in case of abuse of power; requiring that the States- General should be consulted before any proclamation of peace or war; and prohibiting all levying of taxes without their express consent.

They also provoked an acrimonious debate on the vexed question of the reception of the Council of Trent. Commissioners were named to confer with the law officers of the crown on the subject; one of whom, the Archbishop of Lyons, reviled the "Galilean liberties" as a mere human invention, a transparent device for subverting the authority of the Apostolic See, a specious veil for people of suspected opinions in religion, eager to conceal their errors by professing extraordinary zeal for the interests of the State. He was answered at length by the Avocat-General, who did not omit to taunt him with his anomalous antecedents; for in former days this versatile prelate had been a professed Calvinist, and was accused of having sacrificed his conscience to certain prospects of preferment held out to him as the price of conforming to the established Church. The dispute was continued by St. Gelais de Lansac, ci-devant ambassador of Charles IX at Trent, who pompously eulogized the Council, and expatiated on the obligations of Catholics to submit to its decrees. He was sharply catechised by the Avocat-General as to the sentiments he had held upon these points twenty years before; and a scene of altercation followed, which became so tumultuous that it was judged necessary to close the sitting.

These undignified squabbles were cut short by the portentous tidings of the assassination of the Duke of Guise. Over-elated by his successes, that haughty noble had proceeded to intolerable lengths of audacity; and Henry, pleading the universal right of self-defence, and the impossibility of dealing with such a criminal by any of the ordinary forms of executive justice, removed him from his path by a deliberate act of murder. His brother, the Cardinal of Guise, was despatched secretly in prison the next day. Within seven months afterwards the penalty of this great crime was exacted by the avenging dagger of Jacques Clement. Its immediate fruit was the outburst of a desperate revolt in Paris and the provinces, and the organization of a rebel government under the auspices of the League. The clergy were the prime movers of the insurrection.

On the first news of the catastrophe at Blois, Guincestre, or Lincestre, curè of St. Gervais, made a furious attack upon Henry from the pulpit, calling him a "vilain Herodes" (an anagram of Henri de Valois), a poisoner, an assassin, and declaring that he had forfeited all claims to allegiance. In another discourse at St. Barthelemi, the same preacher called upon his congregation to hold up their hands and join in a solemn oath to expend the last denier in their purses and the last drop of blood in their veins in taking vengeance for the death of the two princes of Lorraine. Appealing by name to Achille de Harlai, first president of the Parliament, who was seated opposite the pulpit, Guincestre bade him raise his hand high—higher than the rest—so that all present might see it. A refusal, under the circumstances, might have been the signal for uproar and outrage, and de Harlai obeyed.

François Pigenat, curè of St. Nicolas des Champs, another incendiary orator, preached a funeral sermon for the Guises at Notre-Dame, in which he exhorted his hearers in plain terms to let nothing deter them from the righteous act of retribution which God and man alike demanded of them, namely the destruction of the tyrant who had shed the blood of the martyrs of Blois. These harangues impelled the exasperated citizens to various acts of lawless excess. Many, however, still hesitated to commit themselves to an open revolt against the royal authority; and in order to overcome such scruples, the demagogues resorted to the Theological Faculty, in which they commanded a preponderating influence through Boucher, Prevost, Pigenat, and other doctors attached to their faction.

The Sorbonne, in reply to this application, passed a decree to the effect that the people were released from their oath of allegiance and obedience to the King; and that they might with a safe conscience take arms and raise money for the defence of the Catholic Church against the wicked designs of the said king and his adherents, from the moment when he violated his faith publicly pledged to the maintenance of the Catholic religion, the Edict of Union, and the liberty of the States of the realm.

The decree was carried after a feeble resistance from a few more moderate divines; and was immediately transmitted to Rome for the approval and confirmation of the Apostolic See.

The Sorbonne now ordered the King's name to be erased from the formularies of the Church; and the customary "Domine, salvum fac Regem nostrum," was replaced by petitions "pro Principibus nostris Christianis."

Such acts on the part of the illustrious Society which for three centuries had directed the conscience and governed the ecclesiastical policy of France, had an electrical effect upon the nation at large. Besides the metropolis and the Île de France, all the large towns in the northern provinces, the whole of Burgundy and Champagne, the cities of Lyons and Toulouse, the greater part of Auvergne, Limousin, and Quercy, and, in short, the entire kingdom with the exception of a few towns on the Loire, re- nounced their allegiance to the King, and fraternized with the League and the Duke of Mayenne, its general-in-chief.

Paris was the centre of the rebellion. Here the Leaguers established their executive government, the Council General of the Union, which consisted at first of forty members, and was afterwards increased to fifty-four. Of these tribunes of the people ten belonged to the clerical order; namely, four bishops, Louis de Brézé of Meaux, Guillaume Rose of Senlis, Nicolas de Villars of Agen, Aymar Hennequin of Rennes; five parish priests of Paris, Prevost of St. Sévérin, Boucher of St. Benoit, Aubry of St. Andre, Pelletier of St. Jacques, Pigenat of St. Nicolas des Champs; and the canon of Soissons Matthieu de Launay.

The Council assumed all the attributes of sovereignty, including the disposal of ecclesiastical preferments in the gift of the Crown. The principles represented by the League were somewhat heterogeneous and contradictory. Politically, it was democratical; religiously, it was extravagantly Ultramontane. The sovereignty of the people was one of its fundamental axioms. "It is the people that makes kings," cried the mob orators of Paris, "and the people, when it pleases, can unmake them." "The crown of France is not hereditary, but elective; we obey kings, but not tyrants."

Similar sentiments had been lately broached in a work of some celebrity emanating from the school directly opposite, namely the "Franco-Gallia" of the Protestant François Hotman. In the mouth of a Calvinist they might be natural and consistent; but they were paradoxical as coming from Catholics, who up to this time had been devoted to the strict monarchical theory, divine right and hereditary succession.

Tyrants, the League proceeded to argue, may be lawfully resisted; certain delinquencies on the part of the chief magistrate of a State entail the loss of his authority; and for such failures he is responsible to public justice.

From this doctrine they further deduced, and not illogically, the lawfulness of tyrannicide,—a dogma for which sufficient vindication was found in the Scriptural example of Judith and Holofernes, and others of like character.

These republican tendencies in politics the League combined with an absolute subjection of body and soul to the autocracy of Rome. The authority of the Vicar of Christ was paramount and universal; to him it belonged to dispose at his will of all thrones and dominions of this world; it was for him to settle all disputed questions and claims of sovereignty; and any course of action, any enterprise, became infallibly legitimate and safe from the moment when it was stamped with his sanction. Hence the League abjured the "Galilean liberties," and everything else that tended to circumscribe the illimitable jurisdiction of the see of St. Peter.

It was a curious medley of two extreme currents of thought; the one originating in the freedom of judgment asserted by the Reformation, the other fraught with the spirit of Hildebrand, Innocent, and Boniface,—of mediaeval theocracy. The phenomenon may be partially explained by the fact that the position of the two great parties in this memorable struggle was now, by a singular turn of events, reversed. Henry III, finding himself forsaken and defenceless, formed a coalition with Henry of Navarre and the Huguenots, in the hope that he might thus confront the League with a superior force. The Huguenots, who till now had been regarded as the party factiously opposed to the Government, became by this step the champions of order, legitimacy, and constitutional authority; while the Leaguers, whose antecedents, as stanch Catholics, were those of firm attachment to the throne, were impelled into a course of reckless rebellion. Yet, with all its alloy of violence and cruelty, of false ethics and wild fanaticism, the League was a fight for real principles, and, as such, had attractions for earnest and superior minds.

We must not imagine that all its partisans were mere instruments of the ambition of the Guises; that their only motives were vanity and self-interest; that they wantonly and maliciously "turned faith into faction and religion into rebellion." Numbers there were to whom this description applied but too truly; but there were many of a very different stamp. There were those who conscientiously believed that the League was the only available means of obtaining reparation for the crying acts of injustice committed by the Crown against the National Church; there were those who thought the cause of true religion so grievously imperilled, that all other considerations were to be sacrificed without hesitation in its defence. Contemplating the state of affairs from the only point of view in which their education, their profession, and their convictions permitted them to regard it, such men were led to concentrate all their hopes for the salvation of France in the success of the League.

Among this class the first place must be assigned to Claude de Saintes, Bishop of Evreux. Whatever judgment we may pass upon the conduct of this great prelate in his later years, he must not be confounded with the herd of vulgar babblers who sought notoriety by pandering to the passions of a ferocious mob. Claude de Saintes was one of the most finished scholars and theologians of the age. In early life he was protected and advanced by the Cardinal of Lorraine, who sent him to study at the College of Navarre. Here he gained such a high reputation that he was chosen as one of the Catholic controversialists at the Colloquy of Poissy, and afterwards as one of the divines commissioned to represent the Sorbonne at the Council of Trent. Deeply convinced of the grave errors of Protestantism, de Saintes opposed it with all the force of a commanding intellect and an energetic will; and his success in combating heresy, together with the vast learning displayed in his elaborate treatise on the Eucharist, procured his elevation, in 1575, to the episcopal see of Evreux. It was now that he allowed himself, unfortunately for his own peace, to be carried away by the revolutionary torrent of the League. He instigated his flock to rise in arms, and it was through his personal efforts that the city of Evreux and the whole diocese engaged in the rebellion. He even sold the ancient hotel belonging to his see in the Faubourg S. Antoine at Paris, and employed the proceeds in promoting the cause of the insurgents. Evreux having been at length captured by the royal troops, the bishop fled to Louviers, where he was arrested by order of Henry IV, and sent prisoner to Caen, to take his trial before the parliament of Normandy. He was convicted of having publicly applauded the murder of Henry III, and of having intimated that his successor might lawfully be consigned to the same fate. Thereupon he was condemned to death; but, at the earnest intercession of the Cardinal de Bourbon, the king commuted the capital penalty into that of imprisonment for life. Claude de Saintes was now transferred to the chateau of Crevecoeur near Lisieux; and there, after a brief captivity, he breathed his last in October, 1591. His remains were interred in the Cathedral of Evreux.

A like example is on record in the history of Gilbert Genebrard, Archbishop of Aix. He was a man passionately devoted from his youth to learned study; profoundly versed in theological lore; an exact canonist, a renowned linguist, and Professor of Hebrew in the College de France. Such was his place in the estimation of the ecclesiastical world, that when he went to Rome, Pope Sixtus V and the Sacred College gave him a public reception, with marks of almost unexampled honour. Pierre Danès, bishop of Lavaur, the same who figured so conspicuously at the Council of Trent, proposed to resign his see in favour of Génébrard; but there were obstacles which pre- vented this arrangement. A man with such pursuits and such a character would hardly be thought likely to precipitate himself into all the turmoil and danger of a popular insurrection; yet when the League broke out, there was no one who embraced it with a more delirious enthusiasm than Gilbert Génébrard.

He published a treatise to prove that all persons joining in communion or any religious rite with Henry III, after the murder of the Cardinal de Guise, were ipso facto excommunicate. He declaimed furiously at Paris against the pretensions of Henry IV, and advocated the repeal of the Salic law, with the undisguised object of procuring the advancement of a Spanish Infanta to the throne of France. This antinational, unpatriotic policy he supported further by signing, with three other divines, a letter addressed by the "Seize" to Philip II, assuring him that all good Catholics earnestly longed to see him wielding the French sceptre, and entreating him, if he could not come to reign over them in person, to make choice of a son-in-law, whom they pledged themselves to recognize as king.

This measure was the fruit of an intrigue by a secret knot of the most desperate among the Leaguers, called the "Council of Ten", who opposed themselves to the Duke of Mayenne and the moderate party, and achieved momentary predominance by deeds of ruthless cruelty and bloodshed. This Council of Ten was headed by the Curè Boucher, who for a short time became all-powerful, and was dignified with the title of "King of the League."

Terrorism reigned for some weeks in Paris; but the effect of these excesses was to strengthen the hands of Mayenne, and ere long he succeeded in putting an end to the ascendency of the Seize. Meanwhile Génébrard was nominated by the Council of the Union to the archbishopric of Aix, in Provence, of which he took possession in September, 1592. Here he passed some years in comparative retirement, and composed one of his ablest works, a treatise on ecclesiastical elections, in which he inveighed with masterly force against the pernicious usurpations of the Concordat.

From that fatal invasion of the liberties of the Galilean Church, properly so called, the author deduces, by a regular succession of cause and effect, the whole series of calamities which befell the house of Valois. It is true that men of extreme views and headstrong temper seldom find much difficulty in making facts correspond with their foregone conclusions; but in the present instance the chain of argument was so solid and so powerfully sustained as to extort a general assent, even from sober and impartial minds. The parliament of Provence took the alarm; the book was denounced as a virtual attack on the Grallican liberties, which it undoubtedly was, according to the modern and spurious sense of that much-abused phrase; and was condemned to be publicly burned at Aix. The tide of reaction now ran strongly in favour of the Bourbon monarchy, and the democratic theories of the League were renounced and execrated on all sides. Génébrard was driven from his archbishopric, and sentenced to perpetual banishment from France. The latter punishment, however, was remitted by the clemency of Henry IV, and he was allowed to retire to an abbey which he possessed in Burgundy; here his death occurred shortly afterwards, in 1596.

Fanaticism, it appears from these and like instances, must not be identified with ignorance. It may co-exist with a high degree of mental cultivation; with learning, with experience, with genuine piety. Men of the type of Claude de Saintes and Génébrard were, after all, but fallible mortals, liable both to moral and intellectual aberration. They were betrayed into excesses which are altogether indefensible. Yet it must be acknowledged that none were better qualified than they to determine the merits of the questions in dispute; and if they were driven into rebellion—believing in foro conscientiae that the cause they had espoused was the cause of truth and of God's Church—the condition of affairs, ecclesiastical and civil, must have been desperate indeed.

The unbridled license of the popular preachers ruined the cause of the League. The rebellion reached its climax in January, 1593, when the States-General assembled at Paris, under the presidency of Mayenne, to proceed to the election of an orthodox King of France. It now became apparent that, after four years and more of ceaseless garrulity, caballing, and agitation of all kinds, the most hopeless dissension and per-plexity still prevailed upon the grand question of the future government of the country. The pretenders to the throne were numerous;—the King of Spain and his daughter Isabella Clara Eugenia; the Duke of Mayenne and his two younger brothers; two princes of the House of Savoy; to say nothing of the heretic "Bearnois", nor of those members of his family who adhered to the ancient faith. Each of these claimants had his knot of zealous supporters in the Assembly. The moderate Leaguers, who were disposed to come to terms with the king, had gained ground rapidly since the suppression of the Seize, and were strongly represented among the deputies of the Tiers Etat. Every day the royal cause gained fresh adherents in the capital. Reasonable men on all sides began to agree as to the true remedy to be applied to existing evils; and to see that, if the king could only be persuaded to declare himself a Catholic, his success was a matter of certainty. There was still, indeed, a strong party devoted to the interests of Spain; and it seems not improbable that if at this juncture Philip had frankly announced his intention to bestow the Infanta in marriage on the young Duke of Guise, and to propose them as joint candidates for the throne, the League might yet have triumphed, and Henry IV might never have reigned. The Spanish envoys made a distinct proposition of this nature to the three Chambers on the 21st of June; but it was then too late. Bishop Rose, Boucher, and other clerical demagogues, had declared in favour of maintaining the Salic law against all foreign pretensions; and this seems to have had a decisive effect upon public opinion. The friends of peace at Paris began to negociate in secret with the Politiques of Henry's temporary court at Chartres, with a view to arrange terms of accommodation; and it was not long before it became publicly known that some such project was on foot. The plan proposed was simple; it consisted in sending a deputation to invite or summon the king to reconcile himself to the Catholic Church. Those who advocated this course were styled the "semouneux"; and upon them the fanatic preachers now poured forth all the vials of their vindictive wrath. They scouted as impious all idea of pacification with the Bearnois, even though he should abjure his heresy and conform to the Church. Boucher and Pelletier excommunicated any of their parishioners who might dare to hold the slightest intercourse, even in matters of ordinary commerce, with the abhorred Politiques. But they stormed and raved in vain. Instead of inspiring fear, they excited ridicule; and it was obvious that their dominion was rapidly declining. In defiance of the Papal legate and the Spanish ambassador, of the anathemas thundered from the pulpits, and the judicial determinations of the Sorbonne (at this time completely under Ultramontane dictation), the three Chambers agreed to propose a conference to the Catholics of the king's party; the offer was accepted, and the first meeting was fixed for the 29th of April, at the village of Suresnes. Protracted discussions now ensued (into the details of which it is needless to enter) between the Archbishop of Bourges, as chief commissioner for the Royalists, and the Archbishop of Lyons on behalf of the League; and the result was that Henry intimated his intention to seek special instruction forthwith at the hands of the Catholic divines,—allowing it to be understood that this measure was shortly to be followed by his public retractation of Calvinism and submission to the Church.

It was during the conferences at Suresnes that the Parliament of Paris took the memorable step which, by counteracting the dangerous pretensions of the Court of Spain, was the means of saying the independent nationality of France. On the 28th of June, 1593, the magistrates—assembled to the number of fifty-five presidents and councillors,—voted a resolution which declared any treaty for establishing a foreign prince or princess on the throne to be absolutely null and void, as made in contra- vention of the Salic law, and other fundamental laws of the kingdom.

The Duke of Mayenne, supported by the Spaniards, the legate, Cardinal de Pellevè, and other zealots, made a show of resisting this arret, but soon found it necessary to acquiesce. The States-General determined, almost immediately afterwards, to adjourn indefinitely the project of electing a king—the very purpose for which they were convoked; and thus acknowledged that they were incompetent to direct the public councils in this difficult emergency. These were significant proofs of a revolution in the temper of the nation, which was ere long to make itself decisively manifest. Before separating, the States-General of the League voted the reception "pure et simple" of the decrees of the Council of Trent. This was done in opposition to the report of a commission headed by the President Lemaitre, which specified twenty-three articles as "contrary to the laws of the realm, the authority of the Crown, and the Gallican liberties."

The famous 'Satyre Menippée', which was circulated in manuscript in 1593, and published in the following year, may be said to have given the finishing stroke to the discomfiture of the League. Four editions of this curious work were exhausted in four weeks. It was the joint production of six ingenious authors;—Leroy, a canon of Rouen; Gillot, a canon of the Sainte Chapelle at Paris; Pierre Pithou, a well-known advocate of the Parliament; Nicolas Kapin, Florent Chrétien, and a Protestant named Passerat. Their chief object was to throw ridicule upon the meeting of the States-General lately summoned by Mayenne. The principal personages who figured there are introduced under slightly disguised names, and the harangues of the Cardinal-Legate Gaetano, Cardinal de Pellevé, Bishop Rose, and above all, of Aubray, the mouth-piece of the Tiers Etat, are parodied with infinite spirit and humour; the peculiar style of each orator being closely imitated, while at the same time they are made to commit themselves with such ludicrous simplicity, that the general effect is irresistible.

Sarcasm has ever been a weapon of peculiar potency in France; and the 'Satyre Menippée' contributed scarcely less to the ultimate triumph of Henry IV than his most brilliant achievements in the field of battle. Almost at the same moment Pierre Pithou, the parliamentary advocate just named in connection with the Satyre Menippée, published his celebrated treatise on the Liberties of the Gallican Church. In estimating the merits of this performance we must remember that it dates from an epoch when the passions of party raged on all sides with reckless violence.

The trite proverb that "extremes reproduce each other" has never been more notably verified than in the history of the conflict between Ultramontanism and Gallicanism. The League, under the pressure of a danger which seemed to threaten the very vitals of the Church, exaggerated the powers of the Roman Pontiff, both spiritual and temporal, to an extent which had never been surpassed, if it had been equalled, in days when the monarchies of Europe were comparatively feeble and insecure. But when the League lost credit, and the Bourbons were in the ascendant, there was a manifest temptation to exhibit the opposite theory in stronger colours than the facts of history precisely warranted; and Gallican writers were not slow to improve the opportunity. Pithou observes, in the dedication of his book to Henry IV, that, amid the confusion and disorders which overspread the kingdom, some men, through malice and ambition, calumniated—others, through ignorance and apathy, despised—those noble rights and that precious Palladium which had been religiously preserved by the wisest of their ancestors, under the title of the liberties of the Gallican Church. In order to refresh the memory of the existing generation, and to hand down to posterity truths which he considered so invaluable, he had undertaken to compile the present treatise ; which he humbly inscribes to the king, inasmuch as, in his capacity of "eldest son of the Church", and in an especial manner as patron and protector of the Church of his own kingdom, he had the first and principal interest in the matters therein handled.

The volume consists of a collection of traditions, precedents, and maxims, recognised by the French law courts as their rule of practice in all causes affecting the relations between the temporal and the ecclesiastical powers. These are comprised in eighty-three articles. They are all founded upon two general principles, which are thus laid down in articles IV and V.

First, the Popes have no authority in temporal concerns within the realm of France; and, should they assume any such, the subjects of the French Crown, including the clergy, are not bound to pay regard to them.

Secondly, although the Pope is acknowledged to be supreme in things spiritual, yet in France that supremacy is not absolute or boundless, but limited by the canons and decrees of the ancient Councils received in this kingdom; and it is in this, continues Pithou, that the liberty of the Gallican Church primarily consists, as the University of Paris publicly testified in opposing the reception of Cardinal d'Amboise as papal legate.

But when he proceeds to interpret and apply these two fundamental maxims, the author is conducted to certain conclusions which, however acceptable to the Crown, the Parliament, and other lay authorities, were never sanctioned by the Episcopate, and those who had a legitimate right to speak in the name of the Church. The manifest scope of many of Pithou's propositions is to intrude the secular juris- diction into the ecclesiastical sphere. This appears especially in the articles relating to the powers of provincial Councils summoned by the king, to the "regale", to the practice of "appels comme d'abus", and to the right of the civil courts to give absolution "ad cautelam", under certain circumstances, from spiritual censures. In short, the work of Pithou must be regarded as the Parliamentary version of the Gallican liberties. For the ecclesiastical view of them we must consult ecclesiastical authorities; those great masters of French constitutional law who adorned the seventeenth century—Pierre de Marca, Edmond Richer, Louis Thomassin, Bossuet, Claude Fleury, and Ellies-Dupin.

The League, even after its decisive defeat, and the formal submission of its leaders to the Bourbon Government, continued to agitate the country by means of its incorrigible preachers, and was more or less a source of disquietude throughout the reign of Henry IV. The king, though averse to severity, was compelled to take measures for repressing the outrageous scurrilities which disgraced the pulpit ; and Bishop Rose, the curé Aubry, Cueilly, Boucher, Pelletier, and Hamilton, Filleul, prior of the Carmelites, and some others, were deprived of their preferments and banished from Paris. Guincestre and Pelletier professed themselves repentant, and were pardoned. Rose was, after a time, restored to his see, but was ungrateful enough to commit fresh acts of disloyalty, for which the Parliament inflicted upon him the humiliation of a public amende. The Jesuits, who had been foremost throughout in the rebel cause, were denounced by the University to the Parliament, condemned, after a splendid display of indignant oratory by the advocate Antoine Arnauld, and sentenced to banishment from France. Two of the Order, Guignard and Gueret, were convicted, though it appears unjustly, of being concerned in an attempt on the king's life; the former was capitally punished, the latter banished from the realm for life.

But the most mischievous result of the League was this; that, long after it was extinguished as a political faction, some of its favourite doctrines were perpetuated by a race of controversialists of no small ability and zeal, and that interminable conflicts were thus provoked with the divines of the opposite school, greatly to the detriment of the Church and of religion. The transcendental theory of the Papacy as dominating over all earthly thrones—this dominion being held to include the right to depose delinquent princes on the score of heresy, schism, or other spiritual crime; the tremendous corollary that princes thus deposed may lawfully be put to death; the necessity of waging war to the last extremity for the destruction of heretics; the personal infallibility of the Sovereign Pontiff in determining matters of faith and morals;—these convictions survived the dissolution of the League, and were continually reproduced, especially in the writings and instructions of the Society of Jesus. Royalist and orthodox pens were never wanting to refute them; and the details of this chronic warfare occupy a considerable space in the history of the seventeenth century. The assaults of Mariana and Martin Bécan were repulsed by William Barclay; the great Bellarmine found a redoubtable antagonist in Edmond Richer; the University of Louvain fulminated its censures against the Jesuit Lessius; Father Garasse writhed under the scathing satire of St. Cyran. In short, the controversial history of France in the seventeenth century (and it was scarcely less controversial than the age preceding) may be characterized as that of a vigorous reaction on the one side against the pestilent fallacies of the League, and on the other of a struggle in defence of them, sustained—sometimes openly, sometimes covertly, but always substantially—by the disciples of Ignatius Loyola.

 

 

CHAPTER IV.

CONVERSION OF HENRY IV.