king," replied Sancy, "must expect neither alliance nor effectual aid on
your part, he will be much obliged to the queen to let him know what
course she takes, because he, on his side, will take that which will be
most expedient for his affairs."  Some of the king's councillors regarded
it as possible that he should make peace with the King of Spain, and did
not refrain from letting as much be understood.  Negotiations in London
seemed to be broken off; the French ambassadors had taken leave of
Elizabeth.  The news that came from Spain altered the tone of the English
government; threats of Spanish invasion became day by day more distinct
and the Grand Armada more dreaded.  Elizabeth sent word to the
ambassadors of France by some of her confidants, amongst others Sir
Robert Cecil, son of the high treasurer, that she was willing to give
them a last audience before their departure.  The result of this audience
was the conclusion of a treaty of alliance offensive and defensive
between France and England against the King of Spain, with a mutual
promise not to make, one without the other, either peace or truce, with
precise stipulations as to the number and pay of the troops which the
Queen of England should put in the field for the service of the King of
France, and, further, with a proviso establishing freedom of trade
between the two states.  The treaty was drawn up in London on the 24th of
May, 1596, ratified at Rouen by Henry IV. on the 19th of October
following, and on the 31st of October the States-General of Holland
acceded to it, whilst regulating, accordingly, the extent of their
engagements.

Easy as to the part to be played by his allies in the war with Spain,
Henry IV. set to work upon the internal reforms and measures of which he
strongly felt the necessity.  They were of two kinds; one administrative
and financial, the other political and religious; he wished at one and
the same time to consolidate the material forces of his government and to
give his Protestant subjects, lately his own brethren, the legal liberty
and security which they needed for their creed's sake, and to which they
had a right.

He began, about the middle of October, 1596, by bringing Rosny into the
council of finance, saying to him, "You promise me, you know, to be a
good manager, and that you and I shall lop arms and legs from _Madame
Grivelee,_ as you have so often told me could be done."  _Madame Grivelee
(Mrs. Pickings)_ was, in the language of the day, she who presided over
illicit gains made in the administration of the public finances.  Rosny
at once undertook to accomplish that which he had promised the king.  He
made, in person, a minute examination of four receiver-generals' offices,
in order, with that to guide him, to get a correct idea of the amount
derived from imposts and the royal revenues, and of what became of this
amount in its passage from collection to employment for the defrayal of
the expenses of the state.  "When he went on his inspection, the
treasurers of France, receivers, accountants, comptrollers, either
absented themselves or refused to produce him any register; he suspended
some, frightened others, surmounted the obstacles of every kind that were
put in his way, and he proved, from the principal items of receipt and
expenditure at these four general offices, so much and such fraudulence
that he collected five hundred thousand crowns (one million five hundred
thousand livres of those times, and about five million four hundred and
ninety thousand francs of the present date), had these sums placed in
seventy carts, and drove them to Rouen, where the king was and where the
Assembly of Notables had just met."

It was not the states-general properly so called that Henry IV. had
convoked; he had considered that his authority was still too feebly
constituted, and even too much disputed in a portion of the kingdom, to
allow him to put it to such a test; and honest and sensible patriots had
been of the same opinion D'Aubigne himself, the most independent and
fault-finding spirit amongst his contemporaries, expressly says, "The
troubles which were not yet extinguished in France did not admit of a
larger convocation; the hearts of the people were not yet subdued and
kneaded to obedience, as appeared from the excitement which supervened."
[_Histoire universelle,_ t. iii.  p. 526.]  Besides, Henry himself
acknowledged, in the circular which he published on the 25th of July,
1596, at this juncture, the superior agency of the states-general.
"We would gladly have brought them together in full assembly," he said,
"if the armed efforts of our enemies allowed of any longer delay in
finding a remedy for the plague which is racking us so violently; our
intent is, pending the coming of the said states, to put a stop to all
these disorders in the best and quickest way possible."  "The king,
moreover," says Sully, "had no idea of imitating the kings his
predecessors in predilection for, and appointment of, certain deputies
for whom he had a particular fancy; but he referred the nomination
thereof to them of the church, of the noblesse, and of the people; and
when they were assembled, he prescribed to them no rules, forms, or
limits, but left them complete freedom of their opinions, utterances,
suffrages, and deliberations."  [OEconomies royales, t. iii.  p. 29.]
The notables met at Rouen to the number of eighty, nine of the clergy,
nineteen of the noblesse, fifty-two of the third estate.  The king opened
the assembly on the 4th of November, 1596, with these words, full of
dignity, and powerful in their vivid simplicity: "If I desired to win the
title of orator, I would have learned by rote some fine, long speech, and
would deliver it to you with proper gravity.  But, gentlemen, my desire
prompts me towards two more glorious titles, the names of deliverer and
restorer of this kingdom.  In order to attain whereto I have gathered you
together.  You know to your cost, as I to mine, that when it pleased God
to call me to this crown, I found France not only all but ruined, but
almost entirely lost to Frenchmen.  By the divine favor, by the prayers
and the good counsels of my servants who are not in the profession of
arms, by the sword of my brave and generous noblesse, from whom I single
out not the princes, upon the honor of a gentleman, as the holders of our
proudest title, and by my own pains and labors, I have preserved her from
perdition.  Let us now preserve her from ruin.  Share, my dear subjects,
in this second triumph as you did in the first.  I have not summoned you,
like my predecessors, to get your approbation of their own wills.  I have
had you assembled in order to receive your counsels, put faith in them,
follow them, in short, place myself under guardianship in your hands; a
desire but little congenial to kings, graybeards, and conquerors.  But
the violent love I feel towards my subjects, and the extreme desire I
have to add those two proud titles to that of king, make everything easy
and honorable to me."

L'Estoile relates that the king's favorite, Gabrielle d'Estrees, was at
the session behind some tapestry, and that, Henry IV. having asked what
she thought of his speech, she answered, "I never heard better spoken;
only I was astonished that you spoke of placing yourself under
guardianship."  "Ventre saint-gris," replied the king, "that is true; but
I mean with my sword by my side."  [_Journal de Pierre l'Estoile,_
t. iii.  p. 185.]

The assembly of notables sat from November 4, 1596, to January 29, 1597,
without introducing into the financial regimen any really effective
reforms; the rating board (_conseil de raison_), the institution of which
they had demanded of the king, in connection with the fixing of imposts
and employment of public revenues, was tried without success, and was not
long before, of its own accord, resigning its power into the king's
hands; but the mere convocation of this assembly was a striking instance
of the homage paid by Henry IV. to that fundamental maxim of free
government, which, as early as under Louis XI., Philip de Commynes
expressed in these terms: "There is no king or lord on earth who hath
power, over and above his own property, to put a single penny on his
subjects without grant and consent of those who have to pay, unless by
tyranny and violence."  The ideas expressed and the counsels given by the
assembly of notables were not, however, without good effect upon the
general administration of the state; but the principal and most salutary
result of its presence and influence was the personal authority which
Sully drew from it, and of which he did not hesitate to make full use.
Having become superintendent-general of finance and grand master of the
ordnance, he exerted all his power to put in practice, as regarded the
financial department, a system of receipts and expenses, and as regarded
materials for the service of war, the reforms and maxims of economy,
accountability, and supervision, which were suggested to him by his great
good sense, and in which Henry IV.  supported him with the spirit of one
who well appreciated the strength they conferred upon his government,
civil and military.

His relations with the Protestants gave him embarrassments to surmount
and reforms to accomplish of quite a different sort, and more difficult
still.  At his accession, their satisfaction had not been untinged by
disquietude; they foresaw the sacrifices the king would be obliged to
make to his new and powerful friends the Catholics.  His conversion to
Catholicism threw into more or less open opposition the most zealous and
some of the ambitious members of his late church.  It was not long before
their feelings burst forth in reproaches, alarms, and attacks.  In 1597,
a pamphlet, entitled _The Plaints of the Reformed Churches of France_
[_Memoires de la Ligue,_ t. vi.  pp. 428-486], was published and spread
prodigiously.  "None can take it ill," said the anonymous author, "that
we who make profession of the Reformed religion should come forward to
get a hearing for our plaints touching so many deeds of outrage,
violence, and injustice which are daily done to us, and done not here or
there, but in all places of the realm; done at a time, under a reign in
which they seemed less likely, and which ought to have given us better
hopes.  .  .  .  We, sir, are neither Spaniards nor Leaguers; we have had
such happiness as to see you, almost born and cradled, at any rate
brought up, amongst us; we have employed our properties, our lives, in
order to prevent the effects of ill will on the part of those who, from
your cradle, sought your ruin; we have, with you and under your wise and
valiant leadership, made the chiefest efforts for the preservation of the
crown, which, thank God, is now upon your head.  .  .  .  We do beseech
you, sir, to give us permission to have the particulars of our grievances
heard both by your Majesty and all your French, for we do make plaint of
all the French.  Not that in so great and populous a kingdom we should
imagine that there are not still to be found some whose hearts bleed to
see indignities so inhuman; but of what avail to us is all they may have
in them of what is good, humane, and French?  A part of them are so soft,
so timorous, that they would not so much as dare to show a symptom of not
liking that which displeases them; and if, when they see us so
maltreated, they do summon up sufficient boldness to look another way,
and think that they have done but their duty, still do they tremble with
fear of being taken for favorers of heretics."

The writer then enters upon an exposition of all the persecutions, all
the acts of injustice, all the evils of every kind that the reformers
have to suffer.  He lays the blame of them, as he has just said, upon the
whole French community, the noblesse, the commons, the magistracy, as
well as the Catholic priests and monks; he enumerates a multitude of
special facts in support of his plaints.  "Good God!" he cries, "that
there should be no class, no estate in France, from which we can hope for
any relief!  None from which we may not fear lest ruin come upon us!"
And he ends by saying, "Stem, then, sir, with your good will and your
authority, the tide of our troubles.  Direct your counsels towards giving
us some security.  Accustom your kingdom to at least endure us, if it
will not love us.  We demand of your Majesty an edict which may give us
enjoyment of that which is common to all your subjects, that is to say,
of far less than you have granted to your enemies, your rebels of the
League."

We will not stop to inquire whether the matters stated in these plaints
are authentic or disputable, accurate or exaggerated; it is probable that
they contain a great deal of truth, and that, even under Henry IV., the
Protestants had many sufferings to endure and disregarded rights to
recover.  The mistake they made and the injustice they showed consisted
in not taking into, account all the good that Henry IV. had done them and
was daily doing them, and in calling upon him, at a moment's notice, to
secure to them by an edict all the good that it was not in his power to
do them.  We purpose just to give a brief summary of the ameliorations
introduced into their position under him, even before the edict of
Nantes, and to transfer the responsibility for all they still lacked to
the cause indicated by themselves in their plaints, when they take to
task all the French on the Catholic side, who, in the sixteenth century,
disregarded in France the rights of creed and of religious life, just as
the Protestants themselves disregarded them in England so far as the
Catholics were concerned.

One fact immediately deserves to be pointed out; and that is the number
and the practical character of meetings officially held at this period by
the Protestants: an indisputable proof of the liberty they enjoyed.
These meetings were of two sorts; one, the synods, were for the purpose
of regulating their faith, their worship, their purely religious affairs.
Between 1594 and 1609, under the sway of Henry IV., Catholic king, seven
national synods of the Protestant church in France held their sessions in
seven different towns, and discussed with perfect freedom such questions
of religious doctrine and discipline as were interesting to them.  At the
same epoch, between 1593 and 1608, the French Protestants met at eleven
assemblies, specially summoned to deliberate, not in these cases upon
questions of faith and religious discipline, but upon their temporal and
political interests, upon their relations towards the state, and upon the
conduct they were to adopt under the circumstances of their times.  The
principle to which minds, and even matters, to a certain extent, have now
attained, the deep-seated separation between the civil and the religious
life, and their mutual independence, this higher principle was unknown to
the sixteenth century; the believer and the citizen were then but one,
and the efforts of laws and governments were directed towards bringing
the whole nation entire into the same state of unity.  And as they did
not succeed therein, their attempts produced strife instead of unity, war
instead of peace.  When the French Protestants of the sixteenth century
met in the assemblies which they themselves called political, they acted
as one nation confronting another nation, and labored to form a state
within state.  We will borrow from the intelligent and learned _Histoire
d'Henri IV.,_ by M. Poirson, (t. ii.  pp. 497-500), a picture of one of
those assemblies and its work.  "After the king's abjuration, and at the
end of the year 1593, the French Huguenots renewed at Mantes their old
union, and swore to live and die united in their profession of faith.
Henry was in hopes that they would stop short at a religious
demonstration; but they made it a starting-point for a new political and
military organization on behalf of the Calvinistic party.  They took
advantage of a general permission granted them by Henry, and met, not in
synod, but in general assembly, at the town of Sainte Foy, in the month
of June, 1594.  Thereupon they divided all France into nine great
provinces or circles, composed each of several governments or provinces
of the realm.  Each circle had a separate council, composed of from five
to seven members, and commissioned to fix and apportion the separate
imposts, to keep up a standing army, to collect the supplies necessary
for the maintenance and defence of the party.  The Calvinistic republic
had its general assemblies, composed of nine deputies or representatives
from each of the nine circles.  These assemblies were invested with
authority to order, on the general account, all that the juncture
required, that is to say, with a legislative power distinct from that of
the crown and nation.  .  .  .  If the king ceased to pay the sums
necessary to keep up the garrisons in the towns left to the Reformers,
the governors were to seize the talliages in the hands of the king's
receivers, and apply the money to the payment of the garrisons.  And in
case the central power should attempt to repress these violent
procedures, or to substitute as commandant in those places a Catholic for
a Protestant, all the Calvinists of the locality and the neighboring
districts were to unite and rise in order to give the assistance of the
strong hand to the Protestant governors so attacked.  Independently of
the ordinary imposts, a special impost was laid on the Calvinists, and
gave their leaders the disposal of a yearly sum of one hundred and twenty
thousand livres (four hundred and forty thousand francs of the present
day).  The Calvinistic party had thus a territorial area, an
administration, finances, a legislative power and an executive power
independent of those of the countr;y; or, in other words, the means of
taking resolutions contrary to those of the mass of the nation, and of
upholding them by revolt.  All they wanted was a Huguenot stadtholder to
oppose to the King of France, and they were looking out for one."

Henry IV. did not delude himself as to the tendency of such organization
amongst those of his late party.  "He rebuffed very sternly (and
wisely)," says L'Estoile, "those who spoke to him of it.  'As for a
protector,' he told them, 'he would have them to understand that there
was no other protector in France but himself for one side or the other;
the first man who should be so daring as to assume the title would do so
at the risk of his life; he might be quite certain of that.'"  Had Henry
IV. been permitted to read the secrets of a not so very distant future,
he might have told the Huguenots of his day that the time was not so far
off when their pretension to political organization and to the formation
of a state within the state, would compromise their religious liberty and
furnish the absolute government of Louis XIV. with excuses for abolishing
the protective edict which Henry IV.'s sympathy was on the point of
granting them, and which, so far as its purely religious provisions went,
was duly respected by the sagacity of Cardinal Richelieu.

After his conversion to Catholicism, and during the whole of his
reign, it was one of Henry IV.'s constant anxieties to show himself
well-disposed towards his old friends, and to do for them all he could do
without compromising the public peace in France, or abdicating in his own
person the authority he needed to maintain order and peace.  Some of the
edicts published by his predecessors during the intervals of civil war,
notably the edict of Poitiers issued by Henry III., had granted the
Protestants free exercise of their worship in the castles of the
Calvinistic lords who had jurisdiction, to the number of thirty-five
hundred, and in the faubourgs of one town or borough of each bailiwick of
the realm, except the bailiwick of Paris.  Further, the holding of
properties and heritages, union by marriage with Catholics, and the
admission of Protestants to the employments, offices, and dignities of
the realm, were recognized by this edict.  These rights, in black and
white, had often been violated by the different authorities, or suspended
during the wars; Henry IV. maintained them or put them in force again,
and supported the application of them or decreed the extension of them.
It was calculated that there were in France eight hundred towns and three
hundred bailiwicks or seneschalties; the treaties concluded with the
League had expressly prohibited the exercise of Protestant worship in
forty towns and seventeen bailiwicks; Henry IV. tolerated it everywhere
else.  The prohibition was strict as regarded Paris and ten leagues
round; but, as early as 1594, three months after his entry into Paris,
Henry aided the Reformers in the unostentatious celebration of their own
form in the Faubourg St. Germain; and he authorized the use of it at
court for religious ceremonies, especially for marriages.  Three
successive edicts, two issued at Mantes in 1591 and 1593, and the third
at St. Germain in 1597, confirmed and developed these signs of progress
in the path of religious liberty.

[Illustration: The Castle of St. Germain in the Reign of Henry IV.--107]

The Parliaments had in general refused to enregister these decrees a fact
which gave them an incomplete and provisional character; but equitable
and persistent measures on the king's part prevailed upon the Parliament
of Paris to enregister the edict of St. Germain; and the Parliament of
Dijon and nearly all the other Parliaments of the kingdom followed this
example.  One of the principal provisions of this last edict declared
Protestants competent to fill all the offices and dignities of the
kingdom.  It had many times been inserted in preceding edicts, but always
rejected by the Parliaments or formally revoked.  Henry IV. brought it
into force and credit by putting it extensively in practice, without
entering upon discussion of it and without adding any comment upon it.
In 1590 he had given Palleseuil the government of Neuchatel in Normandy;
he had introduced Hurault Dufay, Du Plessis-Mornay and Rosny into the
council of state; in 1594 he had appointed the last a member of the
council of finance; Soffray de Colignon, La Force, Lesdiguieres, and
Sancy were summoned to the most important functions; Turenne, in 1594,
was raised to the dignity of marshal of France; and in 1595 La Tremoille
was made duke and peer.  They were all Protestants.  Their number and
their rank put the matter beyond all dispute; it was a natural
consequence of the social condition of France; it became an habitual
practice with the government.

Nevertheless the complaints and requirements of the malcontent
Protestants continued, and became day by day more vehement; in 1596 and
1597 the assemblies of Saumur, Loudun, and Vendome became their organs of
expression; and messengers were sent with them to the camp before La
Fere, which Henry IV. was at that time besieging.  He deferred his reply.
Two of the principal Protestant leaders, the Dukes of Bouillon and La
Tremoille, suddenly took extreme measures; they left the king and his
army, carrying off their troops with them, one to Auvergne and the other
to Poitou.  The deputies from the assembly of Loudun started back again
at the same time, as if for the purpose of giving the word to arm in
their provinces.  Du Plessis-Mornay and his wife, the most zealous of the
Protestants who were faithful at the same time to their cause and to the
king, bear witness to this threatening crisis.  "The deputies," says
Madame du Mornay in her Memoires, "returned each to his own province,
with the intention of taking the cure of their evils into their own
hands, whence would infallibly have ensued trouble enough to complete the
ruin of this state had not the king, by the management of M. du Plessis,
been warned of this imminent danger, and by him persuaded to send off and
treat in good earnest with the said assembly."  "These gentry, rebuffed
at court," says Du Plessis-Mornay himself in a letter to the Duke of
Bouillon, "have resolved to take the cure into their own hands; to that
end they have been authorized, and by actions which do not seem to lead
them directly thither they will find that they have passed the Rubicon
right merrily."  It was as it were a new and a Protestant League just
coming to a head.  Henry IV. was at that time engaged in the most
important negotiation of his reign.  After a long and difficult siege he
had just retaken.  Amiens.  He thought it a favorable moment at which to
treat for peace with Spain, and put an end to an onerous war which he had
been for so long sustaining.  He informed the Queen of England of his
intention, "begging her, if the position of her affairs did not permit
her to take part in the treaty he was meditating with Spain, to let him
know clearly what he must do to preserve amity and good understanding
between the two crowns, for he would always prefer an ally like her to
reconciled foes such as the Spaniards."  He addressed the same
notification to the Dutch government.  Elizabeth on one hand and the
states-general on the other tried to dissuade him from peace with Spain,
and to get him actively re-engaged in the strife from which they were not
disposed to emerge.  He persisted in his purpose whilst setting before
them his reasons for it, and binding himself to second faithfully their
efforts by all pacific means.  A congress was opened in January, 1598, at
Vervins in Picardy, through the mediation of Pope Clement VIII., anxious
to become the pacificator of Catholic Europe.  The French
plenipotentiaries, Pomponne de Bellievre and Brulart de Silleri, had
instructions to obtain the restoration to the king of all towns and
places taken by the Spaniards from France since the treaty of peace of
Cateau-Cambresis, and to have the Queen of England and the United
Provinces, if they testified a desire for it, included in the treaty, or,
at any rate, to secure for them a truce.  After three months' conferences
the treaty of peace was concluded at Vervins on the 2d of May, 1598, the
principal condition being, that King Philip II. should restore to France
the towns of Calais, Ardres, Doullens, Le Catelet, and Blavet; that he
should re-enter upon possession of the countship of Charolais; and that,
if either of the two sovereigns had any claims to make against one of the
states their allies in this treaty, "he should prosecute them only by way
of law, before competent judges, and not by force, in any manner
whatever."  The Queen of England took no decisive resolution.  When once
the treaty was concluded, Henry IV., on signing it, said to the Duke of
Epernon, "With this stroke of my pen I have just done more exploits than
I should have done in a long while with the best swords in my kingdom."

A month before the conclusion of the treaty of peace at Vervins with
Philip II., Henry IV. had signed and published at Paris on the 13th of
April, 1598, the edict of Nantes, his treaty of peace with the Protestant
malcontents.  This treaty, drawn up in ninety-two open and fifty-six
secret articles, was a code of old and new laws regulating the civil and
religious position of Protestants in France, the conditions and
guarantees of their worship, their liberties, and their special
obligations in their relations whether with the crown or with their
Catholic fellow-countrymen.  By this code Henry IV. added a great deal
to the rights of the Protestants and to the duties of the state towards
them.  Their worship was authorized not only in the castles of the lords
high-justiciary, who numbered thirty-five hundred, but also in the
castles of simple noblemen who enjoyed no high-justiciary rights,
provided that the number of those present did not exceed thirty.  Two
towns or two boroughs, instead of one, had the same religious rights in
each bailiwick or seneschalty of the kingdom.  The state was charged with
the duty of providing for the salaries of the Protestant ministers and
rectors in their colleges or schools, and an annual sum of one hundred
and sixty-five thousand livres of those times (four hundred and
ninety-five thousand francs of the present day) was allowed for that
purpose. Donations and legacies to be so applied were authorized.  The
children of Protestants were admitted into the universities, colleges,
schools, and hospitals, without distinction between them and Catholics.
There was great difficulty in securing for them, in all the Parliaments
of the kingdom, impartial justice; and a special chamber, called the
edict-chamber, was instituted for the trial of all causes in which they
were interested.  Catholic judges could not sit in this chamber unless
with their consent and on their presentation.  In the Parliaments of
Bordeaux, Toulouse, and Grenoble, the edict-chamber was composed of two
presidents, one a Catholic and the other a Reformer, and of twelve
councillors, of whom six were Reformers.  The Parliaments had hitherto
refused to admit Reformers into their midst; in the end the Parliament
of Paris admitted six, one into the edict-chamber and five into the
appeal-chamber (enquetes).  The edict of Nantes retained, at first for
eight years and then for four more, in the hands of the Protestants the
towns which war or treaties had put in their possession, and which
numbered, it is said, two hundred.  The king was bound to bear the
burden of keeping up their fortifications and paying their garrisons;
and Henry IV.  devoted to that object five hundred and forty thousand
livres of those times, or about two million francs of our day.  When the
edict thus regulating the position and rights of Protestants was
published, it was no longer on their part, but on that of the Catholics,
that lively protests were raised.  Many Catholics violently opposed the
execution of the new law; they got up processions at Tours to excite the
populace against the edict, and at Le Mans to induce the Parliament of
Normandy to reject it. The Parliament of Paris put in the way of its
registration retardations which seemed to forebode a refusal.  Henry
summoned to the Louvre deputies from all the chambers.  "What I have
done," he said to them, "is for the good of peace.  I have made it
abroad; I wish to make it at home. Necessity forced me to this decree.
They who would prevent it from passing would have war.  You see me in my
closet.  I speak to you, not in royal robe, or with sword and cape, as
my predecessors did, nor as a prince receiving an embassy, but as a
father of a family in his doublet conversing familiarly with his
children.  It is said that I am minded to favor them of the religion;
there is a mind to entertain some mistrust of me.  .  .  .  I know that
cabals have been got up in the Parliament, that seditious preachers have
been set on.  .  .  .  The preachers utter words by way of doctrine for
to build up rather than pull down sedition.  That is the road formerly,
taken to the making of barricades, and to proceeding by degrees to the
parricide of the late king.  I will cut the roots of all these factions;
I will make short work of those who foment them.  I have scaled the
walls of cities; you may be sure I shall scale barricades.  You must
consider that what I am doing is for a good purpose, and let my past
behavior go bail for it."

Parliaments and Protestants, all saw that they had to do not only with a
strong-willed king, but with a judicious and clearsighted man, a true
French patriot, who was sincerely concerned for the public interest, and
who had won his spurs in the art of governing parties by making for each
its own place in the state.  It was scarcely five years ago that the king
who was now publishing the edict of Nantes had become a Catholic; the
Parliaments enregistered the decree.  The Protestant malcontents resigned
themselves to the necessity of being content with it.  Whatever their
imperfections and the objections that might be raised to them, the peace
of Vervins and the edict of Narrtes were, amidst the obstacles and perils
encountered at every step by the government of Henry IV., the two most
timely and most beneficial acts in the world for France.

Four months after the conclusion of the treaty of Vervins, on the 13th of
September, 1598, Philip II. died at the Escurial, "prison, cloister, and
tomb all in one," as M. Rosseeuw St. Hilaire very well remarks [_Histoire
d'Espagne,_ t. x.  pp. 335-363], situated eight leagues from Madrid.
Philip was so ill, and so cruelly racked by gout and fever, that it was
doubted whether he could be removed thither; "but a collection of relics,
amassed by his orders in Germany, had just arrived at the Escurial, and
the festival of consecration was to take place within a few days.  'I
desire that I be borne alive thither where my tomb already is,' said
Philip."  He was laid in a litter borne by men who walked at a snail's
pace, in order to avoid all shaking.  Forced to halt every instant, he
took six days to do the eight leagues which separated him from his last
resting-place.  There he died in atrocious agonies, and after a very
painful operation, endured with unalterable courage and calmness; he had
ordered to be placed in front of his bed the bier in which his body was
to lie and the crucifix which his father, Charles V., at his death in the
monastery of Yuste, had held in his hand.  During a reign of forty-two
years Philip II. was, systematically and at any price, on the score of
what he regarded as the divine right of the Catholic church and of his
own kingship, the patron of absolute power in Europe.  Earnest and
sincere in his faith, licentious without open scandal in his private
life, unscrupulous and pitiless in the service of the religious and
political cause he had embraced, he was capable of any lie, one might
almost say of any crime, without having his conscience troubled by it.
A wicked man and a frightful example of what a naturally cold and hard
spirit may become when it is a prey to all the temptations of despotism
and to two sole passions, egotism and fanaticism.

After the death of Philip II. and during the first years of the reign of
his son Philip III., war continued between Spain on one side, and
England, the United Provinces, and the German Protestants on the other,
but languidly and without any results to signify.  Henry IV. held aloof
from the strife, all the while permitting his Huguenot subjects to take
part in it freely and at their own risks.  On the 3d of April, 1603,
a second great royal personage, Queen Elizabeth, disappeared from the
scene. She had been, as regards the Protestantism of Europe, what Philip
II. had been, as regards Catholicism, a powerful and able patron; but,
what Philip II. did from fanatical conviction, Elizabeth did from
patriotic feeling; she had small faith in Calvinistic doctrines, and no
liking for Puritanic sects; the Catholic church, the power of the pope
excepted, was more to her mind than the Anglican church, and her private
preferences differed greatly from her public practices.  Besides, she
combined with the exigencies of a king's position the instincts of a
woman; she had the vanities rather than the weaknesses of one; she would
fain have inspired and responded to the passions natural to one; but
policy always had the dominion over her sentiments without extinguishing
them, and the proud sovereign sent to the block the overweening and
almost rebel subject whom she afterwards grievously regretted.  These
inconsistent resolutions and emotions caused Elizabeth's life to be one
of agitation, though without warmth, and devoid of serenity as of
sweetness.  And so, when she grew old, she was disgusted with it and
weary of it; she took no pleasure any more in thing or person; she could
no longer bear herself, either in her court or in her bed or elsewhere;
she decked herself out to lie stretched upon cushions and there remain
motionless, casting about her vague glances which seemed to seek after
that for which she did not ask.  She ended by repelling her physicians
and even refusing nourishment.  When her ministers saw her thus, almost
insensible and dying, they were emboldened to remind her of what she had
said to them one day at White-Hall, "My throne must be a king's throne."
At this reminder she seemed to rouse herself, and repeated the same
words, adding, "I will not have a rascal (vaurien) to succeed me."  Sir
Robert Cecil asked her what she meant by that expression.  "I tell you
that I must have a king to succeed me; who can that be but my cousin of
Scotland?"  After having indicated the King of Scotland, James Stuart,
son of the fair rival whom she had sent to the block, Elizabeth remained
speechless.  The Archbishop of Canterbury commenced praying, breaking off
at intervals; twice the queen signed to him to go on.  Her advisers
returned in the evening, and begged her to indicate to them by signs if
she were still of the same mind; she raised her arms and crossed them
above her head.  Then she seemed to fall into a dreamy state.  At three
o'clock, during the night, she quietly passed away.  Some few hours
afterwards, her counsellors in assembly resolved to proclaim James
Stuart, King of Scotland, King of England, as the nearest of kin to the
late queen, and indicated by her on her death-bed.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century Henry IV. was the only one
remaining of the three great sovereigns who, during the sixteenth, had
disputed, as regarded religion and politics, the preponderance in Europe.
He had succeeded in all his kingly enterprises; he had become a Catholic
in France without ceasing to be the prop of the Protestants in Europe;
he had made peace with Spain without embroiling himself with England,
Holland, and Lutheran Germany.  He had shot up, as regarded ability and
influence, in the eyes of all Europe.  It was just then that he gave the
strongest proof of his great judgment and political sagacity; he was not
intoxicated with success; he did not abuse his power; he did not aspire
to distant conquests or brilliant achievements; he concerned himself
chiefly with the establishment of public order in his kingdom and with
his people's prosperity.  His well-known saying, "I want all my peasantry
to have a fowl in the pot every Sunday," was a desire worthy of Louis
XII.  Henry IV. had a sympathetic nature; his grandeur did not lead him
to forget the nameless multitudes whose fate depended upon his
government.

He had, besides, the rich, productive, varied, inquiring mind of one who
took an interest not only in the welfare of the French peasantry, but in
the progress of the whole French community, progress agricultural,
industrial, commercial, scientific, and literary.  The conversation of an
independent thinker like Montaigne had, at the least, as much attraction
for him as that of his comrades in arms.  Long before Henry IV. was King
of France, on the 19th of December, 1584, Montaigne, wrote, "The King of
Navarre came to see me at Montaigne where he had never been before, and
was there two days, attended by my people without any of his own
officers; he permitted neither tasting (essai) nor state-banquet
(couvert), and slept in my bed."  On the 24th of October, 1587, after
winning the battle of Contras, Henry stopped to dine at Montaigne's
house, though its possessor had remained faithful to Henry III., whose
troops had just lost the battle; and on the 18th of January, 1590, when
the King of Navarre, now become King of France, besieged and took the
town of Lisieux, Montaigne wrote to him, "All the time through, sir, I
have observed in you this same fortune that is now yours; and you may
remember that even when I had to make confession thereof to my
parish-priest I did not omit to regard your successes with a kindly eye.
Now, with more reason and freedom, I hug them to my heart.  Yonder they
do you service by effects; but they do you no less service here by
reputation.  The report goes as far as the shot.  We could not derive
from the justice of your cause arguments so powerful in sustaining or
reducing your subjects as we do from the news of the prosperity of your
enterprises."

Abroad the policy of Henry IV. was as judicious and far sighted as it was
just and sympathetic at home.  There has been much writing and
dissertation about what has been called his grand design.  This name has
been given to a plan for the religious and political organization of
Christendom, consisting in the division of Europe amongst three
religions, the Catholic, the Calvinistic, and the Lutheran, and into
fifteen states, great and small, monarchical or republican, with equal
rights, alone recognized as members of the Christian confederation,
regulating in concert their common affairs, and pacifically making up
their differences, whilst all the while preserving their national
existence.  This plan is lengthily and approvingly set forth, several
times over, in the _OEconomies royales,_ which Sully's secretaries wrote
at his suggestion, and probably sometimes at his dictation.  Henry IV.
was a prince as expansive in ideas as he was inventive, who was a master
of the art of pleasing, and himself took great pleasure in the freedom
and unconstraint of conversation.  No doubt the notions of the grand
design often came into his head, and he often talked about them to Sully,
his confidant in what he thought as well as in what he did.  Sully, for
his part was a methodical spirit, a regular downright putter in practice,
evidently struck and charmed by the richness and grandeur of the
prospects placed before his eyes by his king, and feeling pleasure in
shedding light upon them whilst giving them a more positive and more
complete shape than belonged to their first and original appearance.
And thus came down to us the grand design, which, so far as Henry IV. was
concerned, was never a definite project.  His true external policy was
much more real and practical.  He had seen and experienced the evils of
religious hatred and persecution.  He had been a great sufferer from the
supremacy of the house of Austria in Europe, and he had for a long while
opposed it.  When he became the most puissant and most regarded of
European kings, he set his heart very strongly on two things--toleration
for the three religions which had succeeded in establishing themselves in
Europe and showing themselves capable of contending one against another,
and the abasement of the house of Austria, which, even after the death of
Charles V. and of Philip II., remained the real and the formidable rival
of France.  The external policy of Henry from the treaty of Vervins to
his death, was religious peace in Europe and the alliance of Catholic
France with Protestant England and Germany against Spain and Austria.  He
showed constant respect and deference towards the papacy, a power highly
regarded in both the rival camps, though much fallen from the substantial
importance it had possessed in Europe during the middle ages.  French
policy striving against Spanish policy, such was the true and the only
serious characteristic of the grand design.

Four men, very unequal in influence as well as merit, Sully, Villeroi,
Du Plessis-Mornay, and D'Aubigne, did Henry IV. effective service, by
very different processes and in very different degrees, towards
establishing and rendering successful this internal and external policy.
Three were Protestants; Villeroi alone was a Catholic.  Sully is beyond
comparison with the other three.  He is the only one whom Henry IV.
called my friend; the only one who had participated in all the life and
all the government of Henry IV., his evil as well as his exalted
fortunes, his most painful embarrassments at home as well as his greatest
political acts; the only one whose name has remained inseparably
connected with that of a master whom he served without servility as well
as without any attempt to domineer.  There is no idea of entering here
upon his personal history; we would only indicate his place in that of
his king.  Maximilian de Bethune-Rosny, born in 1559, and six years
younger than Henry of Navarre, was barely seventeen when in 1576 he
attended Henry on his flight from the court of France to go and recover
in Navarre his independence of position and character.  Rosny was content
at first to serve him as a volunteer, "in order," he said, "to learn the
profession of arms from its first rudiments."  He speedily did himself
honor in several actions.  In 1580 the King of Navarre took him as
chamberlain and counsellor.  On becoming King of France, Henry IV., in
1594, made him secretary of state; in 1596, put him on the council of
finance; in 1597, appointed him grand surveyor of France, and, in 1599,
superintendent-general of finance and master of the ordnance.  In 1602 he
was made Marquis de Rosny and councillor of honor in the Parliament; then
governor of the Bastille, superintendent of fortifications, and surveyor
of Paris; in 1603, governor of Poitou.  Lastly, in 1606, his estate of
Sully-sur-Loire was raised to a duchy-peerage, and he was living under
this name, which has become his historical name, when, in 1610, the
assassination of Henry IV. sent into retirement, for thirty-one years,
the confidant of all his thoughts and the principal minister of a reign
which, independently of the sums usefully expended for the service of the
state and the advancement of public prosperity, had extinguished,
according to the most trustworthy evidence, two hundred and thirty-five
millions of debts, and which left in the coffers of the state, in ready
money or in safe securities, forty-three million, one hundred and
thirty-eight thousand, four hundred and ninety livres.

Nicholas de Neufville, Lord of Villeroi, who was born in 1543, and whose
grandfather had been secretary of state under Francis I., was, whilst
Henry III. was still reigning, member of a small secret council at which
all questions relating to Protestants were treated of.  Though a strict
Catholic, and convinced that the King of France ought to be openly in the
ranks of the Catholics, and to govern with their support, he sometimes
gave Henry III. some free-spoken and wise counsels.  When he saw him
spending his time with the brotherhoods of penitents whose head he had
declared himself, "Sir," said he, "debts and obligations are considered
according to dates, and therefore old debts ought to be paid before new
ones.  You were King of France before you were head of the brotherhoods;
your conscience binds you to render to the kingship that which you owe it
rather than to the fraternity that which you have promised it.  You can
excuse yourself from one, but not from the other.  You only wear the
sackcloth when you please, but you have the crown always on your head."
When the wars of religion broke out, when the League took form and Henry
de Guise had been assassinated at Blois, Villeroi, naturally a Leaguer
and a moderate Leaguer, became the immediate adviser of the Duke of
Mayenne.  After Henry III.'s death, as soon as he heard that Henry IV.
promised to have himself instructed in the Catholic religion, he
announced his intention of recognizing him if he held to this engagement;
and he held to his own, for he was during five years the intermediary
between Henry IV. and Mayenne, incessantly laboring to reconcile them,
and to prevent the estates of the League from giving the crown of France
to a Spanish princess.  Villeroi was a Leaguer of the patriotically
French type.  And so Henry IV., as soon as he was firm upon his throne,
summoned him to his councils, and confided to him the direction of
foreign affairs.  The late Leaguer sat beside Sully, and exerted himself
to give the prevalence, in Henry IV.'s external policy, to Catholic
maxims and alliances, whilst Sully, remaining firmly Protestant in the
service of his king turned Catholic, continued to be in foreign matters
the champion of Protestant policy and alliances.  There was thus seen,
during the sixteenth century, in the French monarchy, a phenomenon which
was to repeat itself during the eighteenth in the republic of the United
States of America, when, in 1789, its president, Washington, summoned to
his cabinet Hamilton and Jefferson together, one the stanchest of the
aristocratic federalists and the other the warm defender of democratic
principles and tendencies.  Washington, in his lofty and calm
impartiality, considered that, to govern the nascent republic, he had
need of both; and he found a way, in fact, to make both of service to
him.  Henry IV. had perceived himself to be in an analogous position with
France and Europe divided between Catholics and Protestants, whom he
aspired to pacificate.

He likewise succeeded.  An incomplete success, however, as generally.
happens when the point attained is an adjournment of knotty questions
which war has vainly attempted to cut, and the course of ideas and events
has not yet had time to unravel.

Henry IV.  made so great a case of Villeroi's co-operation and influence,
that, without loving him as he loved Sully, he upheld him and kept him as
secretary of state for foreign affairs to the end of his reign.  He
precisely defined his peculiar merit when he said, "Princes have servants
of all values and all sorts; some do their own business before that of
their master; others do their master's and do not forget their own; but
Villeroi believes that his master's business is his own, and he bestows
thereon the same zeal that another does in pushing his own suit or
laboring at his own vine."  Though short and frigidly written, the
Memoires of Villeroi give, in fact, the idea of a man absorbed in his
commission and regarding it as his own business as well as that of his
king and country.

Philip du Plessis-Mornay occupied a smaller place than Sully and Villeroi
in the government of Henry IV.; but he held and deserves to keep a great
one in the history of his times.  He was the most eminent and also the
most moderate of the men of profound piety and conviction of whom the
Reformation had made a complete conquest, soul and body, and who placed
their public fidelity to their religious creed above every other interest
and every other affair in this world.  He openly blamed and bitterly
deplored Henry IV.'s conversion to Catholicism, but he did not ignore the
weighty motives for it; his disapproval and his vexation did not make him
forget the great qualities of his king or the services he was rendering
France, or his own duty and his earlier feelings towards him.  This
unbending Protestant, who had contributed as much as anybody to put
Henry IV. on the throne, who had been admitted further than anybody,
except Sully, to his intimacy, who ever regretted that his king had
abandoned his faith, who braved all perils and all disgraces to keep and
maintain his own, this Mornay, malcontent, saddened, all but banished
from court, assailed by his friends' irritation and touched by their
sufferings, never took part against the king whom he blamed, and of whom
he thought he had to complain, in any faction or any intrigue; on the
contrary, he remained unshakably faithful to him, incessantly striving to
maintain or re-establish in the Protestant church in France some little
order and peace, and between the Protestants and Henry IV. some little
mutual confidence and friendliness.  Mornay had made up his mind to serve
forever a king who had saved his country.  He remained steadfast and
active in his creed, but without falling beneath the yoke of any
narrow-minded idea, preserving his patriotic good sense in the midst of
his fervent piety, and bearing with sorrowful constancy his friends'
bursts of anger and his king's exhibitions of ingratitude. Between 1597
and 1605 three incidents supervened which put to the proof Henry IV.'s
feelings towards his old and faithful servant.  In October, 1597, Mornay,
still governor of Saumur, had gone to Angers to concert plans with
Marshal de Brissac for an expedition which, by order of the king, they