CHAPTER 3

THE LORD OF GASCONY

‘… Nérac on nostre Cour estoit si belle que nous n’envions point celle de France.’

Marguerite de Valois¹

‘Ceulx qui suivent tout droict leur conscience
sont de ma religion; et moy je suis de celle
de tous ceulx-là qui sont braves et bons.’

Henri of Navarre in 1577²

Henri joined forces with Monsieur and Condé. Together they commanded an army of thirty thousand men but Monsieur could not muster the courage to march on Paris though his brother had neither the troops nor the money to withstand them. In May 1576 France returned to the Middle Ages with ‘the Peace of Monsieur’ when the King bought off the three princes with feudal appendages; as Michelet says ‘Henri III’s first regal act was to re-create Charles the Bold’.³ Monsieur obtained Anjou, Touraine and Berry with his brother’s old title of Duc d’Anjou, while Henri had the governorship of Guyenne and Condé that of Picardy. For the first time the Béarnais was a great prince in truth as well as name; now he could set up his own court and learn to rule. However, he must also learn to be a soldier, to become ‘un prudent et hasardeux capitaine’.⁴

The Huguenots had not only kept their places de sûreté but had also secured hitherto unheard of concessions; freedom of worship everywhere save Paris, and chambres mi-parties in all parlements which meant that in every important law court in the Kingdom any Protestant could demand a tribunal which was half Huguenot. This last privilege aroused the fury of Catholic townsmen throughout France and the Peace of Monsieur welded Papist zealots into a force far stronger than the Huguenots. The Catholic League was born at Péronne in Picardy, a staunchly Papist town which refused to be handed over to the Religion as a place de sûreté, and quickly spread over the entire Kingdom. Appropriating the para-military organization of the Protestant League, the Catholic Faithful were mobilized by parishes just as the Religion was by presbyteries, each one with its own armoury and magazine, while supporters swore, on pain of ‘anathematization and eternal damnation’, to uphold it ‘till the last drop of my blood’.⁵ This ‘Holy Union’ was a genuine outburst of popular religious feeling which, if supported by many nobles and bourgeois, was strongest in the towns and among the mob. They demanded the revocation of all concessions made to the heretics.

A leader was waiting. At twenty-five Henri, Duc de Guise, was accomplished, ambitious and unscrupulous, but though he had seen plenty of fighting and was balafré like his father he lacked the brutal drive of that harsh, proud warrior. Duc Henri, very much a ladies’ man, was an erratic politician and mediocre in the field. Even so he was formidable enough, being both bloodthirsty and treacherous, and with his gracious manner and tall, handsome presence, admirably equipped to be a popular idol. Papist France began to rally to him, grandees as well as rabble.

The Crown was in no position to curb this new challenge. Now that Henri of Navarre and Politique lords like Damville had left Paris, apart from the universally mistrusted Monsieur only the Guise faction remained at court and there was no other power grouping with which the King could oppose it. Admittedly Henri III had his own party, more effective than might be expected; if his mignons were effeminate they were nonetheless brave and pugnacious, frequently able, and above all, as young men of obscure family who owed everything to him, they were loyal—Henri’s special bodyguard of such favourites, called the Quarante-Cinq, was notorious for blind and bloody obedience. But an almost bankrupt King, too frivolous for sustained effort, could hardly hope to resist a combination of the Guises and popular fanaticism. Suddenly Henri III saw that were he to wrest the League’s leadership from Guise he would have a King’s party with which he might bring France to heel; moderation had failed the Valois, now they would try extremism. The States General was summoned at Blois to provide a convenient rostrum for the King to proclaim himself the Catholic Joshua. He hoped that the estates, delighted by his conversion, would hail him as head of the League and vote subsidies for a final war. The plan was feasible, for Henri III could look every inch a King, with an air of real if disdainful majesty, and was also an impressive orator. But he had not reckoned with the Politiques. Jean Bodin, avocat de Laon,⁶ a firm believer in peace, persuaded his fellow bourgeois to refuse the subsidies. The King revoked his concessions to the Religion on 1 January 1577 but without money he could do nothing. More hopeless and disordered than ever, France embarked upon its Sixth War of Religion.

As Governor of Guyenne Henri of Navarre ruled all Gascony. The south-west, ethnically Gallo-Roman and Basque instead of Frankish, still thought of itself almost as a separate nation, distinct from the French of the north, and spoke its own Gascon tongue, while the regional temperament was noted for exuberance and pugnacity expressed in its taste for bullfighting and bragging. Henri was a typical Gascon, of the same mould as Dumas’ d’Artagnan and Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, and his countrymen instinctively understood and loved him. If Bordeaux, the greatest city of Guyenne, would not open its gates for fear he might outlaw Catholicism, when he arrived at Pau in the autumn of 1576 he was received with wild enthusiasm. Ostensibly he had come to see his sister Catherine who welcomed him with joyous balls and divertissements; a very young but very serious M. de Rosny—the future Sully—was made to dance, most unwillingly, in a ballet which lasted for eight days. Henri’s real motive in visiting Béarn was to pursue his new mistress, ‘la jeune Tignonville’, daughter of Jeanne d’Albret’s maître d’hôtel. D’Aubigné, his First Gentleman of the Bedchamber, declined to intercede with her despite his master’s frantic appeals and the coldness which ensued was not assuaged by this unfeeling young woman’s continued refusals to grace the royal bed. But Henri was soon on the move again, and he quickly came to know Gascony from one end to the other, not just his own southern mountains but the wild hills of the Dordogne and the marshy wastes of the Landes, riding through innumerable little towns with yellow walls and red roofs. Though he never stayed long in one place, Nérac in Armagnac was his favourite residence.

The Béarnais’ position was not altogether enviable as he was short of both money and men while among his officers the Huguenots squabbled continually with the Catholics. Naturally the latter felt insecure in the Religion’s territory, so Henri reassured them by saying that he owed them the most, for prejudicing their own faith. Indeed he delayed his reconciliation with the Reform as long as possible; d’Aubigné observed grimly that for three months after his escape his court was without religion and that only two of its gentlemen took the Communion. Now that the crisis of his captivity had passed Henri’s Politique sentiments reasserted themselves; in early 1577 he wrote to a friend that ‘those who genuinely follow their conscience are of my religion—as for me, my religion is that of everyone who is brave and true.’ Protestant zealots could hardly be expected to relish such opinions: ‘Henri de Navarre, attaché par raison à la paix, n’était le maître ni de son parti ni de son entourage, ni même de ses sentiments.’⁷

The year 1577 was occupied by the Sixth War of Religion, in which the Huguenots were on the defensive; the Queen Mother’s relentless diplomacy had succeeded in detaching Monsieur, Damville and many of the Malcontent allies. Henri fought countless little campaigns and skirmishes with growing skill and panache. When the town of Eauze in Armagnac turned against him Henri rode in with a small troop disguised as a hunting party. The garrison dropped the portcullis, trapping him inside with only fifteen men, and leaving the main body outside. Cries of ‘Kill! Kill!’ rang out as fifty mutineers rushed to attack them, someone shouting, ‘Fire at the scarlet jacket and white plume—it’s the King of Navarre.’ Henri kept his head, saying, ‘Now my friends, my comrades, show your courage and your steadiness—our safety depends on them.’ He ordered his men to close with the enemy before firing as their pistols had too short a range. This tactic was successful but the little band was soon besieged in a gate tower by two hundred angry troops and townsmen. Fortunately Henri’s followers outside managed to force the gate and the town was quickly taken. He was merciful, hanging only four prisoners who had deliberately shot at him.

Just how bestial this warfare could be is evident from Sully’s account of some soldiers who were executed for ‘a most villainous debauch’ in which they had raped six local girls, filled them up with gunpowder and set light to it.⁸ The peasants suffered terribly; some begged the Duc de Montpensier for peace on their knees. Languedoc suffered the worst, from bands of Huguenot and Papist partisans who preyed on travellers, raided villages and plundered châteaux, torturing and killing. Nor was Gascony immune from such scourges.

The royal troops had some successes, mainly in Languedoc under Monsieur, but outright victory was an impossibility. The Crown’s finances were collapsing despite such desperate expedients as a prodigal sale of offices and titles, defaulting on loans and devaluing the currency, so that it could no more afford a long war than the Religion. In 1582 Francis Bacon wrote that the French King was ‘very poor through exacting inordinately by all devices of his subjects…. The division in his country for matters of religion and state, through miscontentment of the nobility to see strangers advanced to the greatest charges of the realm, the offices of justice sold, the treasury wasted, the people polled, the country destroyed, hath bred great trouble and like to see more’.⁹ Henri III was hardly the man to effect a cure.

When, in February 1577, that monarch received news that the Swedish and Danish Kings, together with the Queen of England and the Protestant Princes of Germany, had allied against him with the Huguenots, His Most Christian Majesty was diverting himself at balls and tournaments en femme, his doublet thrown open to reveal the Royal throat on which lay a pearl necklace. Clothes and jewellery were more important than any matter of state. When the only woman he ever really loved, the young Princesse de Condé, had died in 1574 he had appeared in black embroidered with white skulls instead of in the violet which French Kings traditionally wore for mourning. To hide his baldness his head was invariably covered by a little velvet cap with an aigrette and he was festooned with rings and bangles. His mignons could be distinguished by similar hats, on top of curled and frizzed ringlets, and by enormous ruffs which made their heads look like that of ‘St John the Baptist in a charger’. The King’s passion for monkeys and parrots was supplemented by one for poodles, a menagerie accompanying him everywhere so that a Royal progress had the appearance of a travelling circus while pious frenzies of remorse, expressed in spectacular flagellant processions, made his antics seem all the more bizarre. Indeed this ‘androgyne passing from Sodom to Gomorrah’ was by now wholly given up to ‘les délices de la France’, yielding to every frivolous impulse.

Henri III only kept his throne because of his mother who was always ready to take the reins; the régime of the last Valois has been described as a diarchy with occasional interludes of monarchy. Peace came for a time in September 1577, when all Leagues, whether Protestant or Catholic, were proscribed. But war could easily flare up again, so in the autumn of 1578 the Queen Mother went on a pacificatory progress through the south-west, bringing inducements for her son-in-law in the forms of Mme de Sauve, ‘his Circe’,¹⁰ Mlle d’Ayelle, a Cypriot refugee who had also been his mistress, and Queen Marguerite herself. Henri had quite enough amusing feminine company but wanted his wife back if only for the sake of prestige. Marguerite took pains to look her best; on one occasion, says Brantôme, people would have thought her to be a ‘goddess from heaven rather than a queen on earth’.¹¹ She was reunited to her unappreciative spouse in October 1578. Next month the two courts joined in gay festivities at Auch where, wrote Sully, making a ponderous jeu de mots, one heard no more ‘d’armes mais seulement de Dames’.¹² The Queen Mother was busy sowing ‘divisions and dissensions’ and one of her ladies brought off a spectacular coup; old M. d’Ussac, the governor of La Réole and a battle scarred pillar of the Religion, fell violently in love with her, turned Papist and handed his town over to Catherine. The news was brought to Henri in the middle of a ball at which the Queen Mother was also present. Betraying no emotion he gave orders for his men to assemble within the hour and that same night captured the Catholic town of Fleurance. Catherine laughed when she was told—she always respected a really able opponent.

The negotiations and the entertainments continued. However, nothing would persuade the ladies of either court to go up into the mountains when a bear hunt was arranged. ‘There were two bears which disembowelled some fair sized horses, others which slew ten Swiss pikemen and ten musketeers, and one—the biggest ever seen—which, riddled by several volleys and with half a dozen broken pikes and halberds sticking in it, grasped seven or eight men it caught on a high peak and threw itself down to the ground where they were all crushed and broken in pieces.’ The European bear, which still survives in the Pyrenees today, is hardly so formidable and one may suspect that the solemn young M. de Rosny, to whom we owe this horrific account, had stayed behind with the ladies and was victim of Henri’s Gascon wit.¹³

The Peace of Nérac, which it was hoped would prevent further hostilities, was signed in February 1579 and enabled the King and Queen of Navarre to organize their life on a more permanent basis. After a brief, triumphant visit to Pau they returned to Nérac where the Court remained for several years. Though small it was sufficiently gay and splendid to inspire the setting of Love’s Labour Lost¹⁴—‘a park with a palace in it’. One one side of a pleasant river was the mediaeval château fort with its courtyard and flanking towers; Jeanne d’Albret had added a more graceful wing built with stone from plundered monasteries. Tapestries, plate and rich furnishings were brought from Pau including, perhaps, those black taffeta sheets between which la reine Margot loved to disport herself.¹⁵ There was a charming formal garden with rows of laurels and cypress trees and a park with a Pavillon d’Amour and long wooded alleys ran beside the river where the Queen would stroll with her ladies while their lords played at tennis and quoits. In the evenings there were balls and Italian ‘enterludes and commedies’. Indeed Nérac was ‘florissante en brave Noblesse, en Dames excellentes’ though most of them had to live in somewhat cramped quarters across the river, in the sleepy little town’s stone houses. Long afterwards Marguerite wrote that, at Nérac, ‘our Court was so fine we did not envy that of France.’

According to Agrippa d’Aubigné ‘ease hatched vice as heat does serpents’¹⁶ and the entire court gave itself up to the pleasures of love. The Queen, who told her husband that ‘a cavalier without a mistress is without a soul’,¹⁷ took the Vicomte de Turenne for her lover, while even young M. de Rosny acquired a mistress and Agrippa himself was hopelessly in love with the girl he later married. But no one outdid Henri’s too abundant virility; he resembled the Duke of Mantua in Rigoletto. Mlle d’Ayelle was succeeded by the delicate Mlle de Rebours who in turn gave place. Legends tell of one girl who, because of Henri’s desertion, starved herself and her baby to death, of another who threw herself out of a window from shame, and of Fleurette, a baker’s daughter, who drowned herself in the river for similar reasons, while there seems to be some truth in the story of the charcoal-burner’s wife whose husband was ennobled when the Béarnais became King.¹⁸ There was also Xainte, one of the Queen’s women of the bedchamber.

However, Henri’s chief passion at this period was Françoise de Montmorency-Fosseuse, ‘jeune fille de quatorze ans’,¹⁹ for whom Henri had abandoned Rebours when the latter fell ill at Pau in 1579. Scandalized biographers have suggested she was older but there is no reason to doubt d’Aubigné. The Béarnais, a patriarch of twenty-five, is known to have called her ‘my daughter’ and plied her with marzipan and other childish sweets; probably Fosseuse was well developed for her age as Henri was no pervert. It was certainly a strange court for the Puritan champion.

News of the goings-on at Nérac caused considerable amusement in Paris and some of Henri III’s jokes so infuriated Marguerite that, through the still biddable Fosseuse ‘craintive pour son age’²⁰ and abetted by Xainte, ‘cette femme artificieuse’ is supposed to have incensed her husband against his brother-in-law; ‘the peace and war of France lay between their arms’.²¹ Such, claims Agrippa, was the origin of ‘the Lovers’ War’ which only concerned a small section of the Huguenots. However, ‘the only proper and essentiall forme of our nobility in France is military vocation’²² and it is far more likely that the soldier gentlemen of Gascony, greedy for profitable employment, persuaded Henri who had himself developed a taste for war to re-open hostilities in the spring of 1580.

In June Henri decided to capture the wealthy town of Cahors which was staunchly anti-Huguenot. He attacked at midnight; the heat was oppressive, there was thunder but no rain. However, though he managed to storm his way in, the garrison and armed townsmen, twelve hundred all told, took to the rooftops from where they hurled down stones, wooden beams and tiles. Henri and his troops, slightly more in number and mostly musketeers, fought from street to street. The battle lasted for five days and nights, the combatants snatching mouthfuls of food and drink whenever they could and sleeping on their feet, leaning against the shop shutters. Always in front, Henri’s armour was scratched and dented by bullets and by sword and pike thrusts and he himself broke two halberds, but despite the pleas of his officers he refused to retreat, saying he would enjoy dying with his men better than giving way. At last reinforcements arrived and the town surrendered, yielding rich plunder. The conqueror wrote cheerfully to a friend’s wife that he was ‘tout sang et poudre’.²³ Marguerite commented that her husband had ‘shown his judgement and valour, not like a Prince of high rank but like a shrewd and daring Captain’.²⁴ The affair gained him a well deserved reputation of being a bonny fighter. Though he had to go over to the defensive the status quo was restored in November by the Peace of Fleix. As d’Aubigné wrote, this war had been no more than ‘un feu de paille’.²⁵

Brutish anarchy was now France’s habitual condition in this time of ‘blood and ruin’. Society had simply collapsed. Squires turned robber barons preyed on their tenantry; peasants, fighting by communes, attacked each other in their jacqueries while the raiders who sacked abbeys or conventicles were no less merciless to co-religionists. Taxes were not collected or else levied twice over at the point of the sword. Nor were those enclaves ruled by appanagistes immune; despite their private armies even such great lords as the King of Navarre were attacked. Henri III’s frivolity and the excesses of a catamite court were bad enough but it was ‘le malaise économique qui a rendu les peuples sensibles aux vices de Henri III’;²⁶ the Crown was bankrupt, morally and financially. However, though Huguenots were on the defensive—even at La Rochelle rich bourgeois were for peace when the mob was for war—Catholics could only find energy for a concerted onslaught if Holy Church was in real danger.

Freedom and power affected Henri to an extent which cannot be exaggerated. The Béarnais, maturing, experienced an extraordinary access of energy. He acquired his fabled air of virility, and grew his famous fan-shaped beard. Yet after setting what little of his domains he really controlled in order, there was not enough to do, and, understandably, he had recourse to the same outlets he had employed when a captive; hunting and women. His affections were usually centred on one particular mistress. After several years little Fosseuse grew conceited and even hoped to displace Marguerite as Queen of Navarre. The latter’s failure to give Henri an heir made the wretched slut lose all sense of reality on finding herself with child in 1581 and she became unpleasantly arrogant; it was hardly tactful of Henri to ask his wife to nurse Fosseuse during the delivery and Marguerite was thankful when her would-be rival bore a blind girl who lived only a few hours.²⁷ After this Fosseuse began to lose her hold and next year Henri was to meet one of the most famous of his concubines.

His marriage had so far survived the absence of physical ties and when in the summer of 1580 he had been dangerously ill with a high fever Marguerite had nursed him devotedly, day and night, not even changing her clothes. However, the business of Fosseuse’s delivery finally dissipated any remnants of affection and the Queen tired of Nérac, pined for the splendours of a Valois court. In 1583 she deserted Gascony for Paris in pursuit of her latest lover. Oddly enough she took Fosseuse, who had now been discarded by Henri, with her as a companion.

Henri III had always disliked his sister, if only because of her strange affection for Monsieur, and was far from pleased by her return. A few months after, in early August, when, in the absence of the Queen, Marguerite was presiding over a ball he fell into one of his hysterical rages and publicly upbraided her, screaming that she was an adulteress and ordering her to leave court at once; on the way to her place of banishment the guards treated her with studied discourtesy by the King’s explicit instructions. It was the worst humiliation of Marguerite’s sad and misspent life.

Her husband was infuriated when he heard the story, not for the injury done to Marguerite as his wife but for the insult to her as Queen of Navarre. Henri III wrote explanatory and apologetic letters to his cousin and for months messengers travelled to and fro between the two courts; the King had no wish to antagonize Henri, who like a wily Gascon exploited the situation with relish to obtain control of various royal strongholds in Guyenne, laughing that in one letter he had been called cuckold, in another the son of a whore. With diabolical irony, he sent d’Aubigné to defend Marguerite’s honour; when Henri III shouted that he would take a stick to his master for trying to play the Grand Seigneur, the pugnacious poet replied with such insolence that the enraged Valois clutched his dagger. Eventually Marguerite was allowed to return to Gascony in 1584, but her reputation was now so bad that Henri had small use for her and in 1585 she installed herself in her dowry town of Agen which she tried to rule as an independent fief. She claimed that her husband’s new mistress had been plotting to murder her.

Henri, surfeited with youthful femininity and easy women, was ready for something more mature and stable. In January 1583 he met the twenty-six-year-old Diane de Gramont, Comtesse de Guiche, known to history as ‘la grande Corisande’ after the heroine inAmadis of Gaul. Her husband, a formidable Papist warrior to whom she had been married at thirteen, had been killed in battle some years before. It is clear that this young widow, a brunette with black eyes, a pink complexion and a high forehead, had learnt how to manage men. During a relationship which would last for the remainder of the decade Corisande was to exercise remarkable power over Henri, due as much to her intelligence as to her beauty. Hitherto his relations with his mistresses had been purely physical but now, for the first and perhaps the only time, he enjoyed complete companionship with a woman, a companionship which was no less intellectual and spiritual than it was physical. That she was a devout Catholic was no barrier though he could sometimes say harsh things about her co-religionists, claiming on one occasion that all poisoners were Papists; indeed Corisande’s influence may well have made possible his ultimate conversion to Catholicism.

Henri’s delightful letters with their natural grace and infectious enthusiasm, redolent of ‘country warmth and Gascon poetry’²⁸ give him some title to be considered as a writer in his own right. Indeed, even Proust admired his prose.²⁹ Henri wrote often to Corisande, on every conceivable subject. Thus, in June 1586:

This place is more to your taste than any I’ve ever seen. For that reason alone I’m trying to obtain possession of it. It is an island wholly surrounded by marshes and trees in which every hundred paces there are canals so that one can pass through the woods by boat. The water is clear and seldom still, the canals wide and the boats large. In this wild place there are a thousand gardens which one can only reach by boat…. It [the river Sèvre] is a canal, not a river. Up it go great ships as far as Niort which is twelve leagues away. There are all kinds of birds which sing and every kind of seabird. I’m sending you some of their feathers. As for fish, they are extraordinary both for size and price; a large carp costs three sous, a pike five.³⁰

He sent her other presents besides feathers: ‘I have captured two little wild boars and two doe fawns. Command me if you want them.’³¹ He wanted to share every experience. Corisande must have read with somewhat mixed feelings of his sorrow in November 1588 at the death of Gédéon, his son by Esther Imbert: ‘I am deeply upset at losing my little fellow who died yesterday. He was just beginning to talk. Think what it would have been like had he been legitimate!’³² Physical faithfulness was an impossibility for Henri even if he might assure Corisande ‘believe me, my fidelity is pure and stainless—there was never its like’³³ or ‘my heart, do you still remember your Petiot (her pet name for him)? Certes, his fidelity is a miracle’.³⁴ Nonetheless his letters always ended on a note of passion: ‘loving nothing in the world so much as you … my soul, I kiss a million times those beautiful eyes which all my life I shall hold dearer than anything else in the world …’;³⁵ ‘Until the grave, to which I am perhaps nearer than I know, I will live as your faithful slave. Goodnight, my soul’;³⁶ ‘Your slave adores you violently. My heart, I kiss your hands a million times’.³⁷ In the end he would want to marry her.

Among her friends was the Sieur de Montaigne who dedicated ‘Nine and twentie sonnets of Steven de la Boetie, to the Lady of Grammont, Countesse of Guissen’, telling her that ‘I have deemed this present fit for your Ladiship, forsomuch as there are few Ladies in France, that either can better judge of Poesie, or fitter apply the use of it, than your worthy selfe: and since in these her drooping daies, none can give it more life, or vigorous spirit, than you, by those rich and high-tuned accords, wherewith amongst a million of other rare beauties, nature hath richly graced you’.³⁸ He also counselled ‘this glorious Corisanda of Andoins’ on how to help Henri: ‘I had advised her not to engage the interest and fortune of this prince in her passions but, since she had so much power over him, to look more to his advantage than to her personal inclinations.’³⁹ The essayist was a keen supporter of Henri who returned his respect and almost certainly read his works. In 1577 Montaigne was made a Gentleman of the King of Navarre’s Bedchamber and in 1580 Henri used his influence, successfully, to procure his fellow Gascon’s election as Mayor of Bordeaux. Henri visited Montaigne in his château at least twice and met him on many other occasions.⁴⁰ The legend of the Béarnais’ lack of religious faith rests largely upon this shrewd, perhaps too shrewd, observer’s impressions of Henri and Guise:

That religion, which is alleged by both, is used speciously as a pretext by those who follow them; for the rest, neither one regards it. For Navarre, if he did not fear to be deserted by his followers, would be ready to return of his own accord to the religion of his forefathers; and Guise, if there were no danger, would not be averse to the Augsburg Confession [i.e. Lutheranism], of which he had once had a certain taste under his paternal uncle Charles, the cardinal. These were the feelings that he had observed in them both when he was conferring between them.⁴¹

Even so, for both Henri and Corisande it was something of an honour to be claimed as a kindred spirit by the keenest mind in France.

The First Gentleman of the Bedchamber ascribed Henri’s passion for an idolatress to witchcraft. Though Agrippa d’Aubigné was now happily married he remained incapable of half-measures and publicly stated his considered opinion that this new mistress was a witch, even asking the court doctor for philtres to cure Henri of her spells. He jeered at her attending Mass accompanied by only ‘an errand boy, a fool, a blackamoor, a lackey, a monkey and a spaniel’.⁴² It is hardly surprising that Mme de Guiche soon conceived a deadly loathing for her waspish foe, who having left court learnt that she had made son Amoureux promise to have his First Gentleman put to death. Returning by a secret staircase he caught them tête-à-tête and rebuked Henri for his ingratitude, after which he was forgiven. Even Agrippa’s admirers have to admit that he must have been an infuriating servant.

Since 1578 Monsieur had been pursuing the hand of Elizabeth of England and also a throne in the Low Countries where William the Silent had invited him to become Duke of Brabant. Henri had always been sceptical about his unattractive cousin’s prospects. In 1583 rioting French troops were driven out of Antwerp by angry burghers, a débâcle which finally ruined the ‘thousand agreeable hopes’ of Monsieur who soon had to return to France ‘furieux, mélancolique et malade’.⁴³ Within a few months he had fallen ill of the same terrible consumption as his brother Charles IX, blood streaming through every pore in his body as though all his veins had burst. The Valois Catiline died in agony on 10 June 1584. Some believed that a lady with whom he had recently slept had murdered him with a poisoned nosegay which she made him smell,⁴⁴ but even Agrippa d’Aubigné subscribed to the generally accepted view that Monsieur died of sorrow at the failure of all his great hopes.⁴⁵ Shortly afterwards William the Silent was assassinated. Henri of Navarre had become both heir to the Crown of France and ‘the most prominent champion of Protestantism on the Continent’.

By the mid-1580s Henri was fully mature, a stocky, jaunty little man with a black beard and a tanned face, in stained, shabby clothes who looked more like a common cavalry captain than a great prince. He joked unceasingly in his broad Gascon accent—he used to say he would have been hanged as a thief had he not been born a King⁴⁶—and swore horribly, his mildest oath being the fabled Ventre Saint-Gris (‘Grey Friar’s Belly’). He relied on familiar charm rather than majesty and gave orders as one asking favours rather than as a sovereign who commanded: ‘My old ruffian. Put wings on your best horse; I’ve already told Montespan to founder his. Why? You will learn from me at Nérac so run, hasten, fly—it’s your master’s command and your friend’s plea.’⁴⁷ Vows of affection, compliments and promises overwhelmed his followers who found it hard to refuse anything to this delightful companion who had such infectious zest and gaiety. Yet his good comradeship and amiability were deceptive for, like his grandson Charles II, Henri of Navarre was without either gratitude or bitterness to friend or mistress; he could forget a service no less easily than a grudge. A true Gascon, if he flattered he was niggardly in his praise though prone to brag himself. Yet even his critics agreed ‘that no one ever saw a prince more human or who loved his people more’. His faults may all be ascribed to an over-riding sense of kingship. As Bacon puts it: ‘The referring of all to a man’s self is more tolerable in a sovereign prince because themselves are not only themselves, but their good and evil is at the peril of the public fortune.’⁴⁸

Ebullient and mercurial, crying as easily as he laughed, his forehead, over the big hooked nose and sparkling eyes with their charming smile, was deeply lined and the daunting prospect of the road he must follow could plunge him into desperate sadness. Sometimes he wrote to Corisande in this mood: ‘until the tomb which is nearer than perhaps I realize’;⁴⁹ ‘all the Gehennas where a spirit can go are busy with mine’;⁵⁰ or ‘Those who trust in God and serve Him will never be confounded.’⁵¹ While he campaigned with ferocious energy, going for twenty-four hours without sleep or sleeping on the ground for a fortnight at a stretch, his health was surprisingly poor; highly strung, he was often prostrated by fever, catarrh, gravel, stomach pains, gout—the penalty of an exclusively meat diet—or sheer nervous exhaustion. Cynical despite his humanity, secretive despite his candour, and sceptical despite his enthusiasm, all these vices and virtues were employed in the service of a freshly discovered and consuming passion, France. He had found his destiny.

He was sure of the succession; though the last Valois still prayed that the long-suffering Queen Louise might yet give him an heir, popular opinion discountenanced any such likelihood in view of an illness the King was supposed to have contracted during that abandoned sojourn in Venice.⁵²Understandably the reaction was violent, both at home and abroad. The Holy League which had been flagging derived new vigour from this threat of a heretic sovereign, while Philip II saw the Low Countries and the entire Counter-Reformation in jeopardy. The Duc de Guise, who had never ceased to cherish a vast ambition in secret realized that here was his great opportunity and his propagandists feverishly circulated the tale, quite without foundation, of his descent in the direct male line from Charlemagne; were it true his right to the French throne was better than that of Henri III himself. Nonetheless Guise, wholly in the pay of Spain, had sufficient subtlety to propose as interim candidate Henri’s uncle, Cardinal Charles de Bourbon, who was weak, stupid and prematurely aged. Yet despite his extraordinary faults Henri III loved his country, venerated his dynasty and genuinely sought peace. Shortly before Monsieur’s death he begged his cousin to be reconciled to Rome and to come to Paris where he would be recognised as heir presumptive. Henri of Navarre declined. Had he accepted he would have alienated both Huguenots and Politiques and probably failed to gain the League’s support.

The Papist reaction gained furious momentum. Throughout Catholic France the League sprang up again to begin a reign of savage terror and in December 1584 at the Treaty of Joinville with Philip II became far more of a state within a state than ever the Religion had been; Guise and the Leaguers swore that the vain old Cardinal de Bourbon should be heir to the throne of France while Philip gave them money to hire troops. The crusade escalated, overwhelming Henri III. In July 1585, by the Treaty of Nemours the League obtained his word that the entire north-east of France was to remain in Guise hands while all Huguenots must go to Mass or leave the Kingdom within six months. Henri of Navarre declared that the side of his moustache which he twirled turned white when he heard the news. In the autumn of the same year the Pope debarred him from the succession by a special edict which Henri in his public reply dismissed as ‘an idiotic thunderbolt’ (fulmen brutum). Thus began ‘the War of the Three Henries’.

A seventeenth-century panegyrist admits that until the League’s resurrection his hero had been ‘endormi en voluptez’, meaning dalliance with Corisande. But Henri of Navarre woke with a vengeance. Before war broke out he had challenged Guise to a trial by battle in which the two of them were to settle France’s future by personal combat. This bloodthirsty solution did not appeal to Duc Henri. It must be admitted that scanty resources rather than archaic romanticism prompted Henri of Navarre to make his challenge, for he was crippled by lack of troops. He spent the winter of 1585–86 cutting enemy supply lines, mopping up their stragglers and relieving his own beleaguered garrisons.

In January 1586 he issued a moving appeal in which he took his stand upon the fundamental laws of the Kingdom. ‘We believe in one God, we recognize one Jesus Christ, we accept the same Gospel,’ he told the clergy, ‘I believe that the war you prosecute so keenly is unworthy of Christians, unworthy between Christians, above all of those who claim to be teachers of the Gospel. If war pleases you so much, if a battle pleases you more than a disputation, a bloodthirsty plot more than a Council, I wash my hands. The blood which flows will be upon your heads.’ Likewise the nobility were told that ‘the blood would be on those responsible for these miseries’.⁵³

His position became desperate when three Catholic armies marched into Gascony; some courtiers advised him to seek refuge in England. However, the storm passed and the same year his mother-in-law made another of her peace-making progresses, to begin again ‘la batterie assiduelle de cette puissante femme’.⁵⁴ Henri met her in Cognac where, among other things, it was agreed that he might divorce Marguerite, now an enthusiastic Leaguer. Desperately Catherine begged him to turn Catholic but ‘the most crafty and cunning prince in the world’ refused, repeating that he and he alone was heir to France, consciously identifying himself with peace and the old laws. Many Catholics, sick of war and bloodshed, were beginning to listen to him, among them the Maréchal de Montmorency, ‘King of Languedoc’. In 1587 he went over to the offensive, invading Poitou where town after town succumbed; his aim was to join forces with a German Protestant army advancing from the north as he had less than two thousand horse and four thousand foot.

Henri III intervened, sending half the royal army to catch Henri of Navarre and destroy him. The King hoped that the Germans would defeat Guise who had gone to meet them; with the elimination of both his cousin and Duc Henri he would have little to fear. He appointed a mignon as commander, Anne, Duc de Joyeuse, not without ability but over-confident. Joyeuse outnumbered the Huguenots and his two thousand five hundred cavalry and five thousand infantry were better armed. The Béarnais retreated until on 27 October 1587 at Coutras, a town on the borders of Périgord, he was forced to give battle. The river Dronne cut off any hope of retreat.

The Catholics seemed ‘as though clad in gold’⁵⁵ with showy, damascened weapons, gilt armour, nodding plumes, richly embroidered sashes and the velvet tunics in which each magnate dressed his followers. The Huguenots made a drab contrast in their buff jerkins and plain steel; as usual Henri wore a white cockade so his men could recognize him. As he drew his troops up to receive the enemy onslaught he shouted to his cousins, Condé and the Comte de Soissons, ‘I have only one thing to say to you which is that you are of Bourbon blood and, Vive Dieu, I will show you who is your senior.’ Condé shouted back, ‘And we will show you that there is a good younger branch.’⁵⁶ Like Cromwell’s Roundheads the Religion and its champion fell to prayer, singing their Battle Psalm—verses 24 and 25 of Psalm 118: ‘This is the day which the Lord hath made: we will rejoice and be glad in it. Help me now, O Lord: O Lord send us now your prosperity.’ Joyeuse, who was ‘a Papist of the fiercer and more violent sort’, thought that these razats were making ready to die, but an older campaigner knew better.

At first Joyeuse’s headlong frontal attack looked as though it would carry all before it. Turenne’s men broke and ran; the entire Huguenot army began to falter. Then, at point blank range, the arquebusiers Henri had mixed with his cavalry together with his artillery—three cannon but perfectly sited and loaded with grape and chain shot—opened up crimson swathes in the enemy ranks which were only two deep. Men and horses fell by the dozen at each fusillade, while three squadrons, six deep, led by Condé, Soissons and Henri himself, after smashing the enemy formation all along the line, charged again and again. Little quarter was given, though the exultant Henri, fighting recklessly as always at the head of his troops, his sword red with blood, took several prisoners; disarming one of these he shouted, ‘Yield ye, Philistine,’ like a true Protestant David. Five thousand Catholics died, including Joyeuse who was shot as he surrendered, and five hundred were captured. In little more than an hour Henri of Navarre had annihilated the royal army, losing only forty men himself. Yet his joy was not unmixed with sadness. Four days before he had written, ‘it angers me much that blood should flow and that only I can staunch it, though all know I am innocent of it’.⁵⁷ The League had made the painful discovery that its opponents were led by a prince who was not only a wily politician but also a most formidable general. So had the Politiques.

To the bewilderment, and afterwards the amusement, of all France Henri instead of advancing ‘donna toutes ces paroles au vent et sa victoire à l’amour’⁵⁸ and galloped off to present Corisande with the standards captured at Coutras. After a triumphant idyll he rejoined his anxious followers. Strolling with Turenne and d’Aubigné he confided ‘the anguish and perplexity in which he found himself over his intention of marrying the Comtesse de Guiche to whom he had already given a firm promise of marriage; he asked us to spend all night on the advice for which he was going to ask next day on this thorny problem’. The following morning Agrippa, always ready to give good advice however unwelcome, lectured his master on the theme aut Caesar aut nihil:⁵⁹ ‘In a word Sire if in these present circumstances you marry your mistress you will bar for ever the road that could one day lead to the throne of the French monarchy.’ Henri agreed not to see Corisande again for at least two years and stuck to his resolve with surprising firmness though he continued to write to her.

Condé died on 5 March 1588. He was popularly supposed to have been poisoned at his wife’s instigation, his steward being convicted of the crime and pulled to pieces by four horses. Henri of Navarre was deeply upset, giving loud cries of grief, weeping, bemoaning ‘a lost right arm’ and reciting the Psalm ‘God is my refuge and my strength, in Him will I trust’. Yet his cousin, besides being a poor general had, politically, never been wholly reliable, so that if anything his death strengthened the position of Henri of Navarre, both as leader of the Huguenot party and as heir to the throne; now there was no alternative to the Béarnais.

‘For whosoever esteemeth too much of amorous affection, quitteth both riches and wisdom.’ Yet if many of Henri of Navarre’s friends thought him irresponsible the next move after Coutras was not his but Henri III’s. Instead of being beaten as planned, the Duc de Guise had twice defeated the Germans so that the King who had lost much of his own army was at the League’s mercy. Paris was now controlled by Les Seizes, a junta of fanatic Catholic bourgeois which anticipated the Revolution’s Committee of Public Safety and which zealously obeyed Guise. For Henri also events had reached a climax. In March 1588 he wrote to Corisande, ‘Soon I will either be mad or a very clever man. This year will be my touchstone….’⁶⁰

Henri III had become even more eccentric; he had developed a passion for cups-and-balls and Rosny once met him ‘with a basket hanging from his neck by a ribbon, rather like an itinerant cheesemonger, in which were two or three puppies no bigger than one’s fist’.⁶¹ The Paris mob ‘enyvrez d’estime pour luy’ thought that their idolized Guise, handsome and soldierly, looked far more of a King than this painted, mincing sodomite. When Duc Henri entered Paris on 9 May 1588 Henri III knew that both his throne and his life were in danger. He dared not trust Guise while any alliance with Henri of Navarre would set the League against him in murderous earnest. Having ordered Guise not to come to Paris the King was pale with anger when he had to receive ‘the Scarred One’ who, during a tumultuous entry, had been acclaimed by the mob with cries of ‘Hosanna to the Son of David’ and ‘Long live the pillar of the Church’. The Hôtel de Guise now became more important than the Louvre. At the Sorbonne professors were arguing that ‘it is lawful to remove government from princes who are unfitted to rule just as one takes away the stewardship of any other untrustworthy guardian’. Every day Paris grew tenser as clerical demagogues ranted with waxing frenzy against their sovereign and an excited rabble hunted down heretics. Finally, three days later on 12 May, the King’s ill-executed attempt to seize the city’s strongpoints failed when the trained bands deserted and the mob crying ‘Vive Guise’ and led by the Comte de Brissac set up barricades and humiliated the royal troops. Guise quelled the uproar and then demanded concessions which would have left Henri III a mere figurehead; whereupon the despairing Valois fled from his capital. Duc Henri, with his wolfish smile, was now ‘le beau Roy de Paris’.

Eventually His Most Christian Majesty was to decide that there was no remedy other than assassination. Meanwhile, in his refuge at Blois, he plumbed the depths of humiliation appointing this ‘Carolingian’ pretender Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom and summoning the Estates General which, being an exclusively Leaguer assembly, was promised that the King would not rest until he had extirpated heresy and that no Protestant would ever succeed to his throne. Even so, haughty words about overmighty subjects caused an outcry that Guise should be made Constable of France and Henri III immured in a monastery like the last Merovingian; one enthusiastic duchess hung a pair of golden scissors at her waist so that she could tonsure him.⁶² Despite repeated warnings Guise and his brother, the Cardinal de Guise, stayed at Blois; even for them Paris had become dangerously demagogic, and they could not believe that the King would dare to commit murder.

They were sadly mistaken. The Valois and his mignons plotted coldly and implacably, deriding suggestions that the arch-enemy be merely seized and imprisoned; ‘one does not net wild boar’. The King’s special bodyguard, the Quarante-Cinq, were adventurers with few qualms about killing. Sinister rumours began to circulate and secret warnings were sent to Guise who dismissed them with his usual arrogance. The plotters decided on the days just before Christmas and, true to his Italian tastes, Henri III chose the knife rather than the pistol. On Friday, 23 December 1588, the King was late for his Council which had been called for seven o’clock that morning. Then the waiting Duc Henri, suddenly grown nervous in these cold hours before dawn, was summoned to the royal bedchamber where in the guttering candlelight he was struck down by ten of the Forty-Five, staggering the entire length of the great room, pouring blood and dragging his murderers with him, before falling at the foot of the King’s empty bed. Two hours previously Henri III had personally presented each assassin with a dagger after which he had piously ordered Mass to be said for their intentions, to make certain of success. ‘Mon Dieu, qu’il est grand—il paroist encor plus grand mort que vivant,’⁶³ said the King, gazing on the Duke’s mangled corpse. Next day, in an attic, the Cardinal de Guise fell beneath the halberds of the royal guard. The two bodies were burnt and their ashes scattered in the wind.

Henri III’s judgement had been poisoned by his thirst for revenge. Now that its champion was dead he expected the League to collapse—‘morte la bête, mort le venin’—but instead it gained strength from the ‘martyrdom’, reacting with terrible violence. From Christmas Day onwards vast processions marched through Paris at night to quench hissing torches in tubs of water as they cried, ‘So may God quench the Valois’ race’ while preachers denounced ‘M. de Valois’ as another Herod, ‘a perjurer, an assassin, a murderer, a perpetrator of sacrilege, a spreader of heresy, a simoniac, a magician, an infidel and a man accursed’. The Guises were mourned as saints whom tearful congregations swore to avenge; it seemed as though the Papacy had blessed the League’s holy cause when it excommunicated Henri III for murdering a Cardinal. The Seize ruled Paris more firmly than ever, repudiating the King and sending for Guise’s brother the Duc de Mayenne. It was rumoured that Catherine de Medici, on her deathbed, realizing that her son was doomed, gave way to despair. When the Queen Mother died three weeks later, enjoying no more respect than ‘a dead goat’, he had lost his chief support. Not only had Henri III forfeited all hope of making peace between Huguenot and Papist but he had alienated the greater part of his subjects. Politiques and all those Catholics who abominated war rejected a murderer as the symbol of law and order, even if they continued to support him in his vain attempts to check the triumph of total anarchy.

Certainly Henri III, beginning in adversity to rediscover both his innate courage and his political sense, had no illusions as to who was his heir. His rule extended little further than a few towns in the Loire valley so, inevitably, he summoned his cousin, giving him Saumur with its citadel for safe conduct. On 13 April 1589 Henri of Navarre, wearing armour, rode into Plessis-les-Tours with a small troop of horsemen to throw himself at his King’s feet. This was not just a flattering gesture or even an act of formal homage but a calculated piece of political showmanship to demonstrate his reverence for the ancient monarchy. Henceforward Henri III always addressed him as mon frère, recognizing him as his indisputable successor. The two armies joined forces. The struggle was now between Royalists and Leaguers, between the Crown and the people of France.

The King summoned the Parlement of Paris to Tours to underline the legality of his cause—no laws were valid within its jurisdiction unless it registered them—while Henri of Navarre began a furious campaign, storming town after town. Lord Burghley, Queen Elizabeth’s Lord High Treasurer, wrote at the end of May: ‘At this time the French King’s party, by the true subjects of his Crown, both Catholic and Protestant, doth prosper in every place.’⁶⁴ Soon they controlled the entire area between the Loire and the Seine and on 30 July Paris was invested by an army which including foreign troops numbered forty thousand. A vengeful Henri III sent a message to Guise’s sister, the limping little Duchesse de Montpensier and the same virago who had sworn to tonsure him, that he was going to burn her, whereupon she gaily retorted that the stake was not meant for people like her but for sodomites like him. However, the capital was panic-stricken and though fanatics tried to rally the defence it was plain that only a miracle could save it from falling at the first assault which was planned for Thursday, 1 August.

Dominicans have always been noted for extremism, Savonarola and Pope Pius V, who excommunicated Elizabeth of England, belonged to this Order which staffed the Inquisition and in France formed one of the pillars of the League. A young friar, Jacques Clément, resolved to save his Catholic city from its ungodly foes, in particular from Henri III. On 1 August he obtained access to that haughty and disdainful presence by means of a forged letter; drawing close, on pretext of communicating a secret message, he stabbed the King in the stomach below the navel with a knife which he had concealed in his sleeve. Henri III screaming, ‘Oh, this wicked monk has killed me—kill him!’⁶⁵ dragged it out and struck the friar in the face before falling. The assassin was immediately cut down; later his body was burnt and his ashes cast into the Seine. The King’s wound did not seem mortal but during the night violent pains and fever set in—some contemporaries believed the knife had been poisoned—and he sent for his successor. However lamentable his reign Henri III had too much good taste not to die well. He ordered his courtiers to take an oath of allegiance to his cousin: ‘I beseech you as friends and I command you as your King to recognize my brother after my death.’ Then he made a prayerful and dignified end. Withal, there was an element of truth in d’Aubigné’s sarcastic epitaph: ‘He was what you might call a real Frenchman.’⁶⁶ Some years later Sir Walter Raleigh expressed the age’s wonder at the extinction of the Valois dynasty: ‘For after Henry [II] was slaine in sport by Montgomerie we all may remember what became of his foure sonnes, Francis, Charles, Henry and Hercules. Of which although three of them became Kings and were married to beautifull and vertuous Ladies, yet were they, one after another, cast out of the world, without stock or seed.’⁶⁷

Henri of Navarre arrived too late, learning that the King was dead only when the Scots Guard flung themselves at his feet crying, ‘Sire, now you are our King and our master!’ Though he did not shed many tears for his strange predecessor Henri was so shaken at ‘finding himself King sooner than he had expected’ that he retired to a privy where d’Aubigné steadied him.⁶⁸ If two Capetians had acknowledged each other’s majesty and Henri III of Navarre was now Henry IV of France most Frenchmen would not recognize him as such. Yet no monarch was ever surer of his divinely appointed right even though, to proclaim it, he now had to ride from battlefield to battlefield.