Revolt against the gabelle, or salt tax, in the south-western provinces — Insurrection at Bordeaux — Murder of the Sieur de Moneins, the King's lieutenant in Guienne — The Constable despatched to Bordeaux — His punishment of the city — The severities inflicted on the Bordelais defended by the Constable's biographer, M. Decrue — State entry of the King into Lyons — Glorification of Diane de Poitiers — Marriages of Antoine de Bourbon and Jeanne d'Albret, and of François de Guise and Anne d'Este — State entry of the King into Paris — Persecution of the Protestants — Henri II and the martyr
IN the midst of the festivities at Turin alarming news arrived from France: Guienne and Saintonge had risen in revolt against the gabelle, or salt tax.
Until the last years of the previous reign the inhabitants of the south-western coasts, which were covered with salt- marshes, had been exempted from a part of this impost; but in 1541 François I, finding himself at the end of his resources, had decided that thegabelle should be levied- equally in all the provinces of the kingdom. The salt of the Aquitaine marshes, on account of its superior quality, was in great demand in England, Holland, and North Germany, and had been for centuries a source of prosperity for that coast. But the increase of the tax ruined the industry and deprived thousands of poor people of their only means of livelihood; while all classes were indignant at a clause in the ordinance which compelled the head of every family to purchase at an exorbitant price a certain quantity of salt each year from the royal storehouses. So intense was their resentment that they even attempted resistance, and Rochelle became the centre of a revolt, which, however, was suppressed without bloodshed, François generously pardoning the Rochellois. But he did not revoke the fatal edict, which was confirmed by Henri II on his accession to the throne.
The tax was rendered all the more odious by the way in which it was collected. A swarm of hungry officials descended like locusts on Guienne and Saintonge, "devouring the substance of the people and only departing when they had made enormous fortunes." The "gabeleurs," as they were called, committed, under the protection of the law, all kinds of exaction and frauds, invading houses in search of contraband salt, harassing the dealers, imposing arbitrary fines for the smallest infraction of the edict, and imprisoning all who were either unwilling or unable to pay them. "Their insolence," writes Paradin, "was more intolerable than the tax itself," while, to make matters worse, "those who had charge of the salt depots were accused of mixing sand with the salt."01
Goaded to exasperation by the tyranny of the "gabeleurs," in May 1548 the inhabitants of Blansac, Barbezieux, and the neighbouring towns and villages rose in revolt, proclaimed the commune of Saintonge, and proceeded to elect "colonels" to command them. One band, led by a gentleman of Barbezieux named Puymoreau, entered Saintes and Cognac, sacked the houses of the officers of justice and the finances, murdered the receiver of the gabelle, and broke open the prisons and set at liberty a number of dealers in contraband salt who were confined there. Another captured one of the chief tax-collectors near Cognac and drowned him in the river, crying out in derision: "Go, you scoundrelly gabeleur, and salt the fish of the Charente."
By August, the insurgent forces, constantly recruited by beggars, outlaws, and other bad characters, had swollen to nearly 50,000 men, who marched up and down the country, burning, pillaging, and murdering. All well-to-do persons, we are told, were tax-collectors in their eyes, and were robbed indiscriminately, under the pretence that they were "gabeleurs"; nor were the scoundrels content with plundering, "but must needs address them familiarly in the second person singular, without any rhyme or reason. So enraged was the populace with the abuse of the tax."02
From Saintonge the movement spread to Guienne, and the commune was proclaimed on the banks of the Gironde. The governor of Guienne, Henri d'Albret, King of Navarre, had followed the King to Turin, but his lieutenant, the Sieur de Moneins, a cousin of the Constable, was at Bayonne; and, at the request of the Parlement and the jurats of Bordeaux, he proceeded thither to endeavour to re-establish order. Moneins, a courageous but imprudent man, instead of taking counsel with the Parlement and the municipal authorities as to the best means of pacifying the populace, summoned a meeting of the inhabitants at the Hotel de Ville, and informed his audience that the gibbet would be the fate of all those misguided persons who followed the example of the neighbouring towns. A rich merchant named Guillotin interrupted him, crying out that the people of Saintonge and Guienne were doing well in vindicating by arms the liberty of their ancestors; the tocsin sounded, the mob rose, seized the Arsenal, murdered a number of Government officials, tax-collectors, priests, and wealthy citizens, and sacked their houses; and Moneins and his suite had to fly to the Château Trompette, where they shut themselves up.
After a time, the First President of the Parlement, La Chassaigne, succeeded in restoring some semblance of order, and, on the assurance that the riot was at an end and that the people were prepared to listen to reason, Moneins was persuaded to quit his asylum and descend into the town. No sooner had he appeared than the tumult broke out afresh; a ferocious mob fell upon the King's lieutenant, and, despite the efforts of La Chassaigne and other magistrates to protect him, massacred him and all his people, after which the people cut open his body, filled it with salt, and left it unburied. They then, under the threat of instant death, compelled La Chassaigne, the two brothers Du Sault, the one captain of the town, the other commandant of the Château du Ha, and the jurats, to become their leaders, in order to throw on them the responsibility for the insurrection, and for some days "the greatest insolences and the most brutal cruelties were practised in the town of Bordeaux."
La Chassaigne and the other notables, though for a time they affected to sympathise with the popular cause, employed the power which had been thrust upon them in the interests of the royal authority, and were supported by the better-class citizens, who, disgusted by the excesses of the mob, went over in a body to their side. The gates of the town were closed, so as to prevent the peasants from the surrounding country coming in to reinforce the insurgents; the Parlement and the jurats were re-established in their authority, and the ringleader of the populace, one Lavergne, was brought to trial, condemned to death, and broken on the wheel. By the middle of September, the insurrection had been practically quelled, and the Parlement wrote to inform the King that, with the aid of a few troops, peace would be completely re-established, and to implore his clemency for the offenders.
The Court had been disagreeably surprised by the news from the south-western provinces; but it did not appear at first to have realised the gravity of the movement. However, on learning of the rapid spread of the insurrection, Henri II decided to return to France, and in the first week in September he crossed the Alps.
On the King's arrival in Dauphiné, effective measures were at once taken. The Duc d'Aumale was despatched to Tours, where he took command of 4,000 landsknechts and marched at their head on Poitiers, to attack the commune from the north; while Montmorency, with 1,000 men-at-arms, descended the Rhône to Nimes and advanced towards Bordeaux by way of Toulouse, being reinforced en route by levies from Languedoc and Guienne.
At Toulouse, where he arrived on October 3, he received the First President of the Parlement and the jurats of Bordeaux, who endeavoured to persuade him that there was now no longer any necessity to employ force in order to re-establish the royal authority in the guilty town. Several chroniclers state that Montmorency made use of very threatening language; but, so far from this being the case, he appears to have dissimulated his intentions. "I sent them back to the said town," wrote he to Aumale, "with the most soft and kindly words that it was possible for me to employ, in such wise that I have greatly reassured them."03
On the 7th, he left Toulouse and advanced, without encountering any resistance from the insurgents, to Pujols, where he was joined by the corps of Aumale, which had already effected the pacification of Saintonge and the Angoumois. At Langon, on the Gironde, he received a second deputation from the Bordelais, which arrived in "a large and very magnificent barge, containing rooms and salons with glass windows, and painted in gold and azure and decorated with his Arms." The deputation, after handing the Constable the keys of the town, advised him to embark in this barge and to leave his landsknechts behind him, since otherwise they would not be answerable for the conduct of the citizens. But there was no longer any need for Montmorency to dissemble, and he haughtily rejected the proposal, declaring, with a wave of his hand towards the cannon which he had brought with him, that he possessed keys which would open the most obstinate gates.
On October 19, he entered Bordeaux04 with his entire army and exacted a terrible retribution for the atrocities committed during the insurrection. The citizens were declared "attainted and convicted of the crimes of sedition, rebellion, and lèse-majesté," and deprived of all their franchises, liberties, and immunities; their charters were publicly burned; the mairie was razed to the ground; the church bells and the artillery carried away, and the Parlement replaced by a chamber of royal commissaries. The town was also condemned to pay a fine of 200,000 livres; to surrender to the Crown the income of certain lands belonging to the municipality worth 40,000 livres a year; to furnish bronze for the casting of 500 cannon; to fortify the Château Trompette, and to provide two galleys for the protection of its garrison. The body of the unfortunate Moneins was ordered to be exhumed05 and conveyed for interment to the Cathedral of Saint-André by the jurats and one hundred and twenty delegates from the municipal council, dressed in mourning and carrying lighted tapers in their hands. On passing the Constable's lodging, they were compelled to fall on their knees and ask pardon of God, the King, and Justice. On the spot where the murder had been committed an expiatory chapel was erected.
Meanwhile, the provost-marshal and his assistants were being kept busy. Nearly one hundred and fifty "makers and authors of sedition" were condemned to death, among them being the two brothers Du Sault, whom the insurgents had compelled to join them, and one of the jurats, named Lestonnac, a relative of Montaigne. La Chassaigne, notwithstanding the services which he had rendered in the restoration of order, was thrown into prison, and afterwards brought to trial before the Parlement of Toulouse, which, however, acquitted him.
The executions, if we are to believe the Vieilleville Mémoires, were marked by the most revolting brutality, and the judges and the provost-marshal showed a diabolical ingenuity in the punishments they devised for the most guilty of the offenders. The condemned were "hanged, decapitated, broken on the wheel, impaled, dismembered by four horses, and burned at the stake, and three were put to death in a manner whereof we have never heard any one speak, which was called 'mailloter.' They were attached by the middle of the body to a scaffold, face downwards, their arms and legs being left at liberty, and the executioner, with an iron pestle, broke and crushed the limbs, without touching either the head or the body."06 The peasants of the surrounding districts, who had been guilty of even worse excesses than the Bordelais, were treated with scarcely less severity, and the gibbet and the wheel continued to claim their victims for several months.
The statements of the writer and of the enemies of Montmorency, which have been readily accepted by Sismondi and other liberal historians, have caused the repression of the commune in Guienne to be regarded as one of the most odious acts of Henry II's reign, and the Constable as an inhuman monster; while the King, who subsequently expressed his cordial approval of the measures adopted, is made to share his responsibility. In the opinion, however, of Montmorency's latest biographer, the cruelties perpetrated have been much exaggerated, and severe as the punishment inflicted undoubtedly was, it was not more so than the circumstances justified.
"To judge of the events of the past from the standpoint of the present," he writes, "is absurd. If the laws of morality are immutable, their application varies according to the times and the circumstances. . . . If there had been some excess, occasionally even some injustice, was it not absolutely legal? Towns stormed, houses pillaged, officials massacred, and not only they, but priests, gentlemen, advocates, private persons; the King's representative infamously assassinated at the moment when he was lending himself to conciliation; did not all this call for vengeance? We punish, in our own day, such assassinations, such crimes of rebellion: with the stronger reason ought we to admit the right of the absolute monarchy of Henri II to show severity. The ocular witnesses of these events who do not allow themselves to be guided by hatred, the Belleforests, the Bordenaves, are more impressed by the crimes of the commune than by the repression of the Constable. Brantôme says himself of Anne de Montmorency: 'He inflicted an exemplary punishment, but certainly not so rigorous as the case required, which was such that it could not have been expiated by rivers of blood, as was said then. . . . That is why some people were disappointed with the Constable over this punishment, which it was considered he ought to have made more cruel and sanguinary.' Thus the impartial writers of the time justify Montmorency."07
The blood shed during the commune was not shed in vain, for the Estates of Poitou, Saintonge, Angoumois, Limousin, and Perigord petitioned the King that the districts in which the revolt had broken out should be permitted to purchase their exemption from thegabelle; and in September 1549, Henri II, in consideration of a single payment of 200,000 écus, decided to reduce the tax in the south-western provinces to one-quarter of that paid by the rest of France.
As for Bordeaux, the sentence which had been pronounced against it was soon revoked, for the Government felt that, in view of a probable war with England, it would be imprudent to provide a town which had for so long been an English possession with so powerful an inducement to return to its former masters. When, therefore, in the summer of 1549, the Bordelais humbly solicited the King's pardon, both the Constable and François de Guise advised his Majesty to accord it, and in October Bordeaux recovered all its rights and liberties, and was even released from the fine of 200,000 livres; while in the following January its Parlement was re-established.
While terror and mourning reigned at Bordeaux, another of the great towns of France was the theatre of the most magnificent fétés. For on September 23, 1548, Henri II, on his return from Turin, made his "superb and triumphal entry into the noble and ancient city of Lyons."
On the 21st, the King joined the Queen and Diane de Poitiers at Ainay, and on the 23rd their Majesties descended the Rhône in an immense gondola to Vaise, where a splendid pavilion had been made ready for their reception. But what was the astonishment and mortification of Catherine to perceive on entering that it was Diane and not herself whom the Lyonnais desired to honour, after the King! The doors, the windows, the walls, the very chair on which she sat, all bore the H and D interlaced: 
— the monogram of her husband and his mistress — which from the first weeks of the reign had appeared on the royal liveries, and which was to figure on the walls of the Louvre and of every public building erected in France. It was true that the cypher might be read in two ways, and, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, there are still historians who maintain that it was intended for the initials H and C (Henri-Catherine).08 But any doubt as to the significance attached to it by the citizens of Lyons was removed, when the municipal officers came to do homage to the King and kissed the hand of Diane before that of Catherine. The mistress had desired that her supremacy should be acknowledged in the provinces, and Saint-André, Sénéchal of the Lyonnais, had obligingly arranged the matter with the complaisant burghers, only too willing to gratify the King and her whom he delighted to honour. Never had Queen of France to submit to so cruel a humiliation; not even the long-suffering consort of Louis XV!09
CATHERINE DE MEDICI, QUEEN OF FRANCE, ABOUT 1555
FROM A DRAWING BY AN UNKNOWN ARTIST IN THE BIBLIOTHÈQUE SAINTE-GENEVIÈVE
And within the town, where, on passing the gates, the royal guests suddenly found themselves in an artificial forest, it was the same. Through the trees came a group of nymphs, and their leader — a girl of striking beauty — represented the goddess of the chase, with bow in hand and quiver on shoulder. She held a tame lion by a silver chain, and, leading the great beast to the King, begged him, in appropriate verses, to accept at her hands the town of Lyons.
Everywhere, too — mocking and exultant — was the monogram to be seen; on the magnificent triumphal arches and obelisks, engravings of several of which have been preserved, on the draperies which hung from the windows, on the flags which floated on the breeze. Catherine made her entry the day after her husband, borne in an open litter, and so covered with diamonds that the eye grew tired, but infinitely less remarked than the heroine of the fête, riding behind her on a palfrey, modestly dressed in black and white.
From Lyons, the King and the Court proceeded to Moulins to assist at the marriage of Antoine de Bourbon, Duc de Vendôme, with Jeanne d'Albret. Henri II had personally negotiated this affair. Renouncing the hope of obtaining the consent of his aunt Marguerite, who aspired to a far higher alliance for her only child, he had seduced Henri d'Albret by promising him an expedition to recover Upper Navarre from Spain and an additional pension of 15,000 livres, of which, however, only a single payment was ever made. The young princess was willing enough to marry in her own country, and to have a husband of whom she was graciously pleased to approve; but her mother was exasperated, and did all in her power to turn her husband and her son-in-law against the King, and also against the Constable, who had counselled the marriage.
This alliance, from which was born the future Henri IV, made Antoine heir to the crown of Navarre and materially increased the importance of the Bourbons; but they had little ambition and less capacity, and their rivals, the Guises, who possessed both, had already negotiated a marriage which was to counterbalance that of the Duc de Vendôme. This was between the Duc d'Aumale and Anne d'Este, daughter of Hercule II, Duke of Ferrara, and cousin german to the King by her mother Renée, daughter of Louis XII and sister-in-law of François I. The King provided the dowry of the bride, and the marriage was celebrated with great splendour at Saint-Germain on October 4, 1548, after the return of François de Guise from the south.
The chief public events of the year 1549 were the coronation of Catherine at Saint-Denis and the State entries of the King and Queen. Catherine was crowned on June 10, and her entry took place on the 18th. The King made his entry on the 16th, preceded by the regular and secular clergy of Paris, the University, the Corps de Ville, the civic dignitaries, the Parlement, and representatives of all the trades of the city, butchers, tailors, carpenters, and so forth, and followed by the whole Court. Prominent in the procession were "3,500 printers, dressed in black and equipped as men of war, with corselets, morions, etc." Why the printers had elected to appear in such numbers and in martial array, the chronicler does not tell us. Perhaps, however, it was intended as a gentle hint that they would be prepared to resist any undue interference with the liberty of their trade.
The King himself presented a most gorgeous spectacle. He wore "a suit of white armour, over which was a tunic of cloth of silver. The scabbard of his sword was of silver enriched with rubies and diamonds. His hat was of white satin covered with silver lace, with a white plume, sown with a great number of pearls, of which, apart from their excellence and beauty, the value was inestimable; and he rode a beautiful and mettlesome white charger caparisoned in cloth of silver." A canopy of light blue velvet, sown with golden fleurs-de-lis, fringed with gold and embroidered with his arms and monogram, was held over his head by the four sheriffs of Paris.10
In the times of the last Valois pleasure and cruelty existed side by side, and the fétés which celebrated Henri II's entry into the capital were, so to speak, illuminated by the flames which consumed the martyrs of the Reformed faith.
On the King's accession, it had seemed for a moment that an era of something approaching religious toleration was to be inaugurated, or, at least, that the new Court would decline to countenance the barbarous persecutions which had disgraced the old. Animated by the desire to condemn the work of his father's Ministers, Henri II caused proceedings to be instituted against the President d'Oppède, of the Parlement of Aix, Paulin de la Garde, and a number of other persons concerned in the massacre of the Vaudois of Cabrières and Mérindol. But, after one of the less important culprits had been condemned to death and executed, the affair was proceeded with in a very half-hearted manner, and eventually allowed to drop.
The desire to secure the friendship of Paul III, the importance of which the Guises continued to insist on, notwithstanding the events of 1548, rendered it necessary to conciliate the Papacy; and, after abandoning in favour of the Pope the right of collation to benefices in Brittany and Provence, and forbidding the Parlements to interfere with the apostolic jurisdiction in these provinces, the King proceeded to a rigorous enforcement of the decrees against heresy, and a special chamber in the Parlement of Paris, called the "Chambre ardente," was established to deal with the unhappy Huguenots.
It would be unfair, however, to judge Henri II too harshly in this matter. Although his religious views were narrow and bigoted, he was at heart a kindly man, who disliked the idea of inflicting suffering; and it is very improbable that he would have taken any such measures on his own initiative. But he was easily influenced, and, on the present occasion, the fanaticism of the Constable and the policy of the Guises both urged him in the same direction; while Diane was even more hostile to the Protestants, who had very little respect for kings' mistresses, and did not hesitate to express the opinion which they entertained of her. This, as the following incident will show, had tended to exasperate the King no less than his inamorata, and to render him pitiless.
"That same year," writes Théodore de Bèze, "the King having made his very triumphal entry into his town of Paris, a poor tailor, surprised by the provost, was brought before him, as though in derision and to make sport. Some think that the King, having heard it said that there were several prisoners of the Religion, was desirous of seeing and hearing one of them; and, learning of this, the cardinal [de Guise], who knew that some of them were learned in the Scriptures, from fear that the King, if he saw them, might be somewhat touched with compassion, selected this poor tailor, who was of no appearance, and who, he imagined, would lose the power of speech at sight of the King and of the many persons of quality who surrounded him. But he was very deceived.
For this poor man, fortified by strength from above, spoke so well and so boldly of the Religion, that every one was astonished at it. But the Sénéchale wished also to amuse herself by questioning him, which this faithful servant of God was unable to endure. ' Madame,' said he, 'rest satisfied with having corrupted France, and do not mingle your filth with a thing so sacred as the Truth of God.' This speech so greatly exasperated him who loved nothing in the world so much as this lady, that he wished to see the tailor burned alive in the Rue Saint-Antoine, at the termination of a general procession. Three others were burned on the same day, the 4th of July, and several more shortly afterwards; but never since that time did the King wish to assist at this spectacle, by which he was so horrified, that he said on several occasions since that it seemed to him that on the following night he saw this person, and that even in the daytime the fear came over him that he was following him; in consequence of which he swore that he would never again witness a burning, so dearly had he paid for this pleasure."11
Unhappily, the King did not swear to burn no more, and the "Chambre ardente" exercised the powers entrusted to it so remorselessly, that when, towards the end of 1549, an edict remitted to the ecclesiastical judges the decision in trials for "simple heresy," it was regarded by the Protestants almost as an abatement of the severity with which they were being treated.
Policy and religious intolerance were not the only motives of the persecutions. As a sentence of death was always followed by the confiscation of property, it was to the interests of the avaricious courtiers to stimulate the zeal of the authorities all over the country and to bring as many well-to-do offenders to trial as possible. According to the Mémoires de Vieilleville, it was the practice of the King's favourites to obtain from his Majesty a promise of all the confiscated estates of Protestants in certain districts, in return for which they undertook to discover and extirpate heresy therein. Unscrupulous lawyers were then entrusted with the prosecutions, and agents employed to keep a vigilant eye on suspected persons, and, where evidence was wanting, to manufacture it. Carloix relates how one day Saint-André's brother-in-law, Apchon, and several other courtiers brought his master a patent from the King, with his name at the head, conferring upon them a share in the confiscations in certain of the south-western provinces, and informed him that they were sending one Boys, a rascally lawyer of Périgueux, to the districts in question to superintend operations; and that this Boys had undertaken that each of them should receive twenty thousand crowns in less than four months. Vieilleville, we are told, indignantly refused to enrich himself by such atrocious means, declaring that "it would be to incur the pains of hell for next to nothing," and, drawing his dagger, ran the point of it through his name and left the room. Few, however, seem to have been of his opinion.
Notes
(1) Histoire de notre temps.
(2) Paradin.
(3) Letter of October 6, 1548, in Decrue, Anne, duc de Montmorency.
(4) By the Porte des Augustins, and not by a breach which his cannon had made in the walls, as De Thou, Mézeray, and several later historians state.
(5) According to De Thou, the citizens were compelled to disinter the body with their nails.
(6) Mémoires de Vieilleville.
(7) Decrue, Anne, duc de Montmorency.
(8) The arguments for the H and D are admirably summarized by Miss Hay in her monograph on Diane, "Madame Dame Dianne de Poytiers." The most conclusive is that Henri II signed his letters to Diane with the same cypher.
(9) La magnificence de la superbe et triumphante entrée de la noble et antique cite' de Lyon faicte au trèschrestien roy de France, Henri deuxiesme de ce nom et au Royne Catherine son espouse, le XXIII Septembre, 1548 (Lyon, 1549); M. Henri Bouchot,Catherine de Médicis; Brantôme.
(10) L'Ordre qui a esté tenu à la nouvelle et joyeuse entrée que le Roy Henry deuzième de ce nom, a faicte en sa cité de Paris, le seizième jour de juin, 1549 (Paris, 1549).
(11) Théodore de Bèze, Histoire ecclesiastique des Églises réformées au royaume de France. According to De Thou, Henri II witnessed the horrible spectacle from one of the windows of the Hôtel de Rochepot, belonging to the Constable's second son; and the tailor, observing the King, "proceeded to regard him so fixedly that nothing was able to divert his glance."