CHAPTER 5

THE HEALING HANDS OF A KING

‘For the last kings of the house of Valois drew drye the brookes and Channells of this pleasant Meadowe, and that when the Sunne in the Lyon (I mean the Ciuill Warrs) most parched the same, and so dissipated the Mowen grasse thereof, as they left all in ruine to the succeeding house of Bourbon.’

Fynes Moryson¹

‘But as for warring any longer for Religion, the Frenchman vtterly disclaymes it, hee is at last growne wise, marry, he hath bought it somewhat deare.’

Sir Robert Dallington²

In Paris on Easter Sunday 1594 Henri IV publicly touched for the Evil—scrofula, that disease whose sores could only be healed by the consecrated hands of a King.³ For the sixteenth century there was no greater testimony to the validity of his Kingship. He now began to cure the ills of the entire realm. His first task was to reunite his divided people and bring them peace.

He had ridden quietly into his capital nearly three weeks before, at 7 o’clock in the morning of Tuesday 18 March, his troops picketing crossroads and other strongpoints. In Mayenne’s absence its governor, that hitherto staunch Leaguer the Comte de Cossé-Brissac, had sold it for the rank of Marshal, various governorships and a large down payment in cash. Henri was lucky to make himself master of Paris so easily; the garrison included five thousand Spaniards while the Seize had perhaps twelve thousand men under arms yet hardly a drop of blood was spilt. The streets were nervously silent till the King came to the Pont Notre Dame when the crowd began to cheer and cry ‘Vive le Roy!’ Henri exclaimed with emotion, ‘I can see very well that these poor people have been tyrannized.’ Dismounting at the cathedral he allowed himself to be all but mobbed by his joyful new subjects before attending a mass in thanksgiving which ended with fervent singing of the Te Deum. As former Leaguer leaders rode through the streets shouting news of a pardon for the whole city and scattering copies of a Royal proclamation which declared a general amnesty, enthusiasm rose until the bells pealed and all Paris rang with relieved cries of ‘Vive le Roy! Vive la paix!’ The King ‘returned to the Louvre where he found his Officers and his Dinner ready as if he had always remained there’.⁴ That same afternoon the Spanish troops marched out of Paris, unmolested. Henri watched them pass and when their ambassador—who went with them—saluted he raised his hat and bowed, saying, ‘My compliments to your King—go away at a good time and don’t come back!’ That evening ‘the calm was so profound that nothing interrupted it but the ringing of the bells, the bonfires and the dances which were made through all streets, even till midnight’.⁵

This must have been a sweet day indeed. ‘Is it not passing brave to be a King and ride in triumph through Persepolis?’ Yet Henri had no desire for vengeance. He pardoned everyone, even the Seize, though a hundred and twenty Leaguers were banished. Those lionesses, Mmes de Nemours and de Montpensier were understandably nervous; the latter, noted for her ‘evil, seditious and tempestuous spirit’, contemplated suicide, but Henri sent word that he had taken them under his protection. When he visited the two duchesses they were so overcome by his kindness and affability that Mme de Montpensier, who was of course Mayenne’s sister, exclaimed how she wished her brother had been in Paris to admit the King. ‘Ventre St-Gris,’ laughed Henri, ‘he might have made me wait a long time—I would not have got here so quickly!’ The Parisians’ new-found loyalty amused the King. When a former Leaguer told him gracefully that what was Caesar’s had been rendered to Caesar Henri quipped that it hadn’t been rendered (rendu) at all but sold (vendu). Pardon and purchase were his panacea.

The most fanatic Papists were gratified by the King’s edifying and unflagging observance of the Church’s feasts and ceremonies, even if to please the English ambassador he had removed from Notre Dame horrific placards which depicted the martyrdom of Catholics in England. He attended mass at all the great churches, listening to sermons with seemingly keen interest and worshipping with a fine show of reverence. Within a few weeks many of the clerical demagogues had either left Paris or been won over. When on 22 April the theologians of the Sorbonne signed a declaration recognizing the King’s orthodoxy it was with the approval of most of the Paris clergy, though in the provinces many priests remained obdurate until such time as the Papacy should absolve him, notably among the Jesuits and that most noble and disinterested of all religious orders, the Carthusians.

The mob soon began to idolize this hard-living King of great lusts and great laughter who, with his stream of jests, was so admirably equipped to be a Parisian hero; one must remember that Henri’s mots were invariably illumined by a charming grin, sometimes rueful but always comical. Within a few months Catholic Paris was able to relish the spectacle of the erstwhile heretic monster disporting himself with his mistress. Gabrielle’s child was born in June 1594, a son who was given the martial name of César. On the evening of Thursday, 15 September she and the King triumphantly entered Paris by torchlight to be welcomed with shouts of applause, Gabrielle gleaming in a litter, the King on a great grey horse and wearing grey velvet slashed with gold, and his usual white plumed hat. Preceded by marching troops, accompanied by a splendid escort of cavalry and mounted nobles, they rode to hear yet another Te Deum at Notre Dame which the members of the Parlement attended in their red robes. Henri’s somewhat brutal comment on his loving subjects, perhaps made during this occasion, was that the people are ‘an animal which lets itself be led by the nose, especially Parisians’.

But the King did more than reassure the clergy and woo the rabble. To the delight of the lawyers he speedily re-established the Parlement, the Chambre de Comptes and the Cour des Aides, in their lawful authority, besides confirming anxious appointees of the League in their posts; Henri had not forgotten the Parlement’s brave stand the previous summer when it had condemned any attempt to set aside the Salic Law. The Parlement of Paris now spoke for the capital’s entire bourgeoisie by depriving Mayenne of his title of Lieutenant-General and revoking the acts of the States General of 1593. Well-to-do bourgeois in every town of the Kingdom noted the Parisian lawyers’ confident loyalty.

As might be expected the League’s firmest adherents were the great appanagistes, including the Politiques, though by the end of 1594 Villars-Brancas, ‘l’un des plus braves hommes de ces temps là’,⁶ had traded Rouen and Leaguer Normandy for the post of Admiral and a pension, Montmorency had surrendered Languedoc to become Constable of France with lavish emolument, and Guise had yielded up Champagne for the governorship of Picardy and similar sums. However, the majority preferred to retain a defiant independence, notably Mayenne in Burgundy, Joyeuse—that former Capuchin friar—in the upper Languedoc, Nemours in the Lyonnais, Epernon in Provence and Mercoeur in Brittany: ‘As for Monsieur de Mercoeure, hee playd the good Kitchin Doctor, of whom Rablais speaketh, who gaue his patient the necke and bones to tyre upon, and kept the wings himselfe; for he left them all France tyred, and tewed, as bare as a birdes bone, and kept Bretaigne, one of the fattest wings of the Countrey to himselfe, purposing to haue entituled himselfe Duke thereof’.⁷ Most magnates had like ambitions. Henri was still weak and they were encouraged by the certainty of full-scale war between France and Spain. The fact that the entire countryside was ravaged by plundering bands of armed and murderous peasants was even more harmful to the authority of the King than it was to that of the nobles.

The sole class to rally as a whole to Henri were the bourgeoisie; his careful respect for law and favouring of the noblesse de la robe, his policy of everywhere upholding the rights and privileges of Parlements and municipalities and of confirming officials in their posts did not escape their notice while instinctively they preferred government under the ancient monarchy to arbitrary rule by upstart princelings. Steadily they undermined the magnates’ authority, town after town rebelling, as did Dijon in February 1595 where, led by their mayor, armed citizens overcame Mayenne’s troops after fierce fighting and then handed the town over to the Royalists. Their desertion of the Leaguer cause—which was now hardly more than a cloak for neo-feudalism—would continue on an increasing scale throughout 1594 and 1595, often in concert with the King’s officers. Ultimately the bourgeois destroyed the nobles’ ability to resist Henri.

Paris was still dangerous. Early in 1595 a young scholar Jean Chastel, like a second friar Clement, obtained an interview with the King at the Louvre and then, in the candlelight, struck wildly at him with a knife; always agile Henri recoiled so quickly that though pouring blood he had only received a cleft lip and a broken tooth, Chastel being seized before he could strike again. The King urged mercy but the lawyers, who had had a bad fright, were pitiless; when he had been racked, the public executioner burnt off the poor lunatic’s hand with the knife in it, and he was torn with red hot pincers, after which he was pulled in pieces by four horses—finally his mangled quarters were burnt, their ashes scattered in the wind. This excruciating agony was watched with vociferous approval by Henri’s new admirers, the Paris mob. Chastel had been a pupil of the Jesuits, who were dedicated to the service of the Papacy and therefore among the most genuine of the hard line Leaguers. They were blamed, unjustly, for the attempted murder, an accusation which resulted in their expulsion from France against the King’s wishes ‘as disturbers of the public peace and corrupters of youth’.

On 16 January 1595 Henri formally declared war on Spain. He had not done so before to avoid the onslaught of Philip II’s full military might, still directed against the United Provinces, and to leave a breathing space in which to win over as many Leaguers as possible. The King hoped for considerable advantages from this declaration; it would appeal to national pride, it would reassure the Reform that he had not made a secret pact against them with Philip, while the Leaguers would be branded as Quislings. In addition he hoped that England and the Dutch would now co-operate with him to the utmost. Money was borrowed from the Grand Duke of Tuscany, the entire muster of the nobility was summoned province by province, and his most formidable followers, the Duc de Longueville, the Duc de Bouillon (Turenne), the Admiral de Villars-Brancas, the Constable de Montmorency and the new Marshal de Biron—old Biron’s son—were ordered to make ready. True to his aggressive nature the King intended to carry the offensive into enemy territory, to invade the Low Countries and Franche Comté.

He did not neglect domestic affairs. His Council was in permanent session, while the Huguenots were to be further reassured by the Parlement’s re-registration of the edict of 1577 which had given them the maximum freedom of worship allowed hitherto. To make a show of national unity Princes of the Blood and high officers of State were summoned to discuss the proposed hostilities before the formal declaration of war.

Philip II was old, in failing health and bankrupt, but reacted fiercely. Never one to stay on the defensive he quickly found money to pay troops and, though the French had some initial successes, by the summer the Spaniards were attacking on five fronts. Philip actually hoped to wrest the throne from Henri whom he still called contemptuously ‘the man from Béarn’. Fuentes, his governor in the Netherlands, drove the French back sparing neither prisoners of war nor civilians; whole villages were put to the sword and Leaguer deserters, like Admiral de Villars-Brancas taken after his defeat at Dourlens, were butchered in cold blood. The Dutch could give little help while Elizabeth, who had no wish to see a strong France, withdrew her troops. Money to wage war and buy Leaguer magnates was almost unobtainable as the Council of Finance remained as incompetent and corrupt as ever. In Brittany and the Lyonnais Spanish troops buttressed the appanagistes while in Provence Epernon was aided by the Duke of Savoy. The most dangerous threat of all came from the east.

Don Fernando de Velasco, Constable of Castile and Governor of Milan, had brought up his troops from the Milanese to the Franche Comté and was now entering Leaguer Burgundy, Mayenne’s territory, breathing fire and slaughter. Henri advanced carefully towards him, bringing men and munitions to reinforce the young Marshal de Biron. Though the King had no intention of repeating his rash conduct of three years before at Aumâle, he was caught in a similar situation through no fault of his own. Near Fontenay-le-Français on 5 June 1595, after an apparently thorough reconnaissance had discovered only a few Spanish horse, he and Biron rode ahead with a small force of cavalry. Suddenly they found themselves facing the entire enemy army under the Constable and Mayenne. A fast Turkish horse was got ready for Henri to escape but that embodiment of thefuria francese growled, ‘I want help, not advice—there’s more danger in running than in chasing.’

Biron with a handful of men had been cut off and surrounded so the King, not even waiting to don his helmet, charged to the Marshal’s rescue. In the thick of the mêlée Henri was several times nearly shot or cut down yet nonetheless he drove back the enemy who withdrew in confusion to the main Spanish army which was a little way off. During this struggle he found time to save one of his officers, M. de la Curée, who was without armour; a shout of ‘Garde, la Curée’ caused the latter to turn just in time to parry a lance thrust which would otherwise have skewered him. Henri’s own life was saved by M. de Mainville; an enemy trooper slashing at the King was shot by this faithful gentleman with a steel bullet which went through his head and whistled past Henri with a noise the King swore he would never forget. Biron, begrimed with blood and dust but always in the front rank, also routed his opponents. Then the Marshal and Henri, who was still bareheaded, reformed their tiny squadrons of battered cuirassiers to charge a second time, against eight hundred Spanish cavalry, with less success. Luckily the vanguard of the Royal army now arrived whereupon the King advanced purposefully with fresh troops. However, the enemy retreated, harassed by Henri for some miles. Mayenne had fought well and bravely but the Constable’s inaction in the face of Henri’s pugnacious resolution lost the Spaniards their greatest opportunity of the war. That evening Velasco withdrew his troops to Franche Comté. Writing to his sister Catherine after the battle, Henri told her, ‘you were very near becoming my heiress’.⁸ Elsewhere he commented that in this fight of Fontenay-le-Français he had to fight not merely for victory but for very life itself.

In the north the Spaniards still had the advantage with their victory at Dourlens in July, where the French lost three thousand men, and with their capture of Cambrai in October after a long siege. The odds were suddenly and dramatically redressed. King Philip had ‘set the Popes on also to kindle this fire who were but Barkers, and could not bite; their leaden Buls did but butt; they could not hurt; abler to curse then to kill…’.⁹ All the same the Papacy’s hostility was a great thorn in Henri’s side. Since November 1593 the Duc de Nevers had been in Rome trying to persuade Clement VIII to absolve Henri IV. For his Most Christian Majesty was excommunicate as a relapsed heretic and had he been some humble prisoner of the Inquisition would have died at the stake. Agents of Spain and the League lobbied vigorously against absolution, enlisting theologians and canon lawyers to prove its impossibility, and claiming that Henri would renege once he was firmly established on the French throne. For two years the rival lobbies wrangled to such an extent that the exasperated Pope, who found the decision a difficult one and who was not encouraged by the expulsion of the Jesuits, cried out that they were making his life a misery. Eventually Henri prevailed. The Papacy had grown increasingly resentful of the Church’s interests being identified with those of Spanish realpolitik while Clement, forceful and independent, realized that most French Catholics supported the Bourbon. There was even a threat of schism, that he, Clement VIII, might lose France as Clement VII had lost England. Furthermore Henri was supported by the saint, Philip Neri, and by a redoubtable member of the latter’s Oratory, the historian Baronius. The Pope deeply respected St Philip’s combination of supernatural foresight with shrewd commonsense, while Baronius was his own confessor. The Spaniards could hardly hope to outgun such other-worldly artillery and on 17 September 1595 despite many protests Clement agreed to a ceremony of absolution. Henri was symbolically scourged by proxy in the persons of two French envoys kneeling at the feet of the Grand Penitentiary and his assistant who admistered the token whipping—a ritual tapping on the shoulders with wands while the penitents, who later compared the sensation to being trampled on by a mouse, recited theMiserere—after which he was absolved. The King of France was once more the Church’s Eldest Son, and the Holy Catholic League, that earlier Vichy, was stripped of its last shabby rags.

Six days later Mayenne negotiated a truce with Henri, to be confirmed in January of the following year; for his submission the would-be King of Burgundy received over three million livres—a vast sum—three places de sûreté and the governorship of the Île de France (excepting Paris). Just as Guise and Montmorency had done Henri good service against dissident lords so Mayenne was to perform prodigies against his former allies, the Spaniards. When he came to Monceaux to make his submission Gabrielle met him at the gateway and brought him in to Henri who, beaming, exclaimed ‘my cousin, is it really you or am I dreaming?’ They dined together most amicably, with Gabrielle and her sister Diane. Next day the King took the Duke for a walk in the park at such a rapid pace that the fat, gouty Mayenne began to pant, red-faced and sweating. Henri halted, embraced him, grasped his hand and said ‘this is all the vengeance you will ever suffer from me!’ After which Mayenne was installed in a summer-house to recover his breath before being taken back by Rosny to the château where two bottles of his favourite Arbois wine were waiting for him. Soon the fierce Nemours and Joyeuse had also yielded in return for money and governorships; the latter eventually returned to his friary as ‘Frère Ange’. Epernon was more stubborn but in March 1596, defeated by Guise and deserted by the towns of Provence, he too gave way for similar compensations. Of the appanagistes Mercoeur alone remained, maintained in Brittany by Spanish troops and the existence of a genuine separatist tradition. Elsewhere in France every important city had recognized Henri IV by the summer of 1596.

Philip II gave up hope of overrunning France, Henri of striking deep into the Netherlands; the war became a struggle for border towns and strong points. Accordingly, on 8 November 1595, Henri who had taken charge in Picardy invested La Fère which was the advance supply depot for Spanish troops operating in France, a town filled with artillery, munitions and stores which Philip could not afford to lose. Surrounded by a marsh and defended by a resolute garrison it was all but impregnable, so Henri began a blockade. In March 1596 the Cardinal-Archduke Albert of Austria, Fuentes’ successor as Governor of the Low Countries, tried to relieve La Fère; failing, he unexpectedly attacked Calais which he took on 17 April, much to the envy of Elizabeth of England who still hankered after her sister’s lost jewel. The wily old Queen had offered to relieve the port if Henri would let her keep it as a pledge for monies owed her but the King said he would as soon be bitten by a lion as by a lioness. Soon Ham and Guines had also fallen but Henri hung on at La Fère, even if all northern France lay open to invasion, summoning the Ban and the Arrière Ban, the old feudal muster of the nobility. At last on 22 May the town surrendered, enabling the King to reorganize the defence of his frontier provinces where he busied himself repairing city walls, installing artillery, re-stocking supplies, and relieving and reinforcing garrisons.

Meanwhile the entire country remained a prey to brigandage. The destruction wrought by ‘friendly armies was no less dreadful than that by enemies, with wholesale rape, arson and pillage.’ Roving Leaguers in Poitou liked to hang their captives from the sails of windmills but the worst atrocities were committed by men of no allegiance. When the Baron de Fontenelle took the little town of Penmarch all males had their throats cut and all women over sixteen were raped; he had an aristocratic loathing of peasants, boasting that he had killed five thousand and how he loved the smell of corpses. It was small wonder that the miserable toilers in the fields revolted. In the Limousin, in 1594 the Croquants (so called after the village of Croc) were no longer armed with just ‘stakes hardened in the fire but were nearly all arquebusiers, musketeers or pikemen’ and, led by a handful of bourgeois renegades, nursed wild dreams of setting up a democratic republic on the Swiss model; in August 1595 twenty thousand Croquants shouting ‘Liberté! Liberté! Vive le Tiers État!’ fought an inconclusive battle with an army of vengeful nobles, after which they dispersed, sadly and hopelessly. Henri himself felt sorry for them, saying that were he a peasant he would have been a Croquant. Even in those regions which were free from Spaniards, Leaguers or a jacquerie, there was still a daily threat of red ruin from swarming bandits.

The fillip which the Absolution had given to morale in the previous autumn was paralleled in the spring by the signing of an offensive and defensive alliance with England against Spain, a league later joined by the Dutch, even if in the event the French were to receive little help from these dog-in-the-manger allies. The Cardinal-Archduke was unable to mount a fresh onslaught having suffered disastrous casualties when attacking the Dutch, while Spain was further weakened by the loss of a second Armada and by the English raid on Cadiz. King Philip’s American silver had at last been overpledged and his treasury was finally exhausted. Henri now received a badly needed breathing space.

He too did not know where to turn for funds. Gabrielle’s generous nature, her love for Henri and her love for France, showed itself in these difficult days; the siege of La Fère had only been brought to a successful conclusion because of her diamonds which she gave as security for a further loan from the Grand Duke of Tuscany; later, during the siege of Amiens, she would sacrifice the greater part of her resources. A contemporary historian wrote that ‘this lady knew how to keep the affections of that great prince, so that he was as faithful to her as she was to him, for he looked at no other woman and it would be difficult to say which of the two was the fonder’.¹⁰ Her marriage with Liancourt had been annulled and Henri had created her Marquise de Monceaux in her own right. D’Aubigné noted with admiration how she reigned at court without making enemies, unlike most royal mistresses.¹¹ However, all Gabrielle’s sacrifices could not remedy the King’s poverty.

In April 1596 he had written to Rosny:

I would like to tell you of the state in which I find myself, which is such that I am facing the enemy but do not have a horse on which I can fight nor a full suit of armour to put on my back; my shirts are all torn, my doublets out-at-elbow; my saucepan is often empty and for two days I have been eating where I may, my sutlers saying they have nothing to serve at my table, all this because I have had no money for six months. So ponder well if I deserve to be treated in such a way; whether I must longer allow the financiers and treasurers to make me die of hunger while they keep their own tables dainty and well served; whether my household should be in such need while theirs are in wealth and plenty, and whether you are not surely obliged to help me loyally as I pray you.¹²

Indeed the historian Legrain saw Henri in a dirty white coat, worn and soiled by his armour and with ragged sleeves, and in stockings torn and in holes.¹³

The nobles had their own solution. They would provide a really large and well paid army on condition that their governorships should become permanent and hereditary fiefs whose possessors would owe the Crown nothing more than formal homage. It was the high watermark of French neo-feudalism. Acceptance of their offer, made in this desperate year of 1596 and supported by the entire nobility including Princes of the Blood like the Duc de Montpensier, would have reduced the King of France to a roi fainéant, his country to a mosaic of petty principalities.

After rejecting this poisoned suggestion, so terrifying in its implications, Henri knew that only Rosny could find money—if it was to be found at all in France. The financial machinery of the Kingdom was an Augean Stable, the preserve for too many years of venal officials, greedy courtiers and tax farmers of mammoth appetite, who all slandered the incorruptible Marquis with unrelenting savagery. Despite literally Herculean efforts Rosny’s success, though remarkable enough, did not produce sufficient revenue for the bottomless abyss of Henri’s needs; every sou went on war or on winning Leaguer magnates. Yet France was already groaning under terrible taxes; ‘the King’s poore people are already with these ciuill Warres so spoyled and impouerished, as there is nothing to be had’.¹⁴ To try and raise more might well break her back.

Henri dared not summon the States General whose meetings under Henri III had invariably ended in tumultuous dissension; in any case it was a purely consultative body which could do little more than voice grievances. He therefore called the old feudalAssemblée de Notables. In October they met at Rouen, nine from the clergy, nineteen from the nobility, fifty-two from the bourgeoisie, all men of genuine power and influence; the large number from the Third Estate, mostly members of the Parlements, indicates Henri’s continuing reliance on this class. His opening address made a profound impression.:

If I wanted to acquire the title of orator I would have learned some fine, long harangue and would have spoken it to you gravely enough. But, gentlemen, my desire is to attain to two more glorious titles, which are to call myself liberator and restorer of this State. For which end I have summoned you. You know to your cost, as I do to mine, that when God called me to the Crown, I found France not only almost ruined, but almost entirely lost to Frenchmen. By the grace of God, by the prayers and by the good advice of those of my servants who do not follow the soldier’s profession; by the sword of my brave and generous nobility, among whom I do not take special account of princes, but only of our finest title, the honour of a nobleman (foy de gentilhomme); by my toils and troubles, I have preserved her from this fate. Together we must now save her from ruin. Share with me, my dear subjects, in this second glory, as you have already shared in the first. I have not summoned you as did my predecessors, simply to approve their wishes. I have brought you together to hear your advice, to consider it, to follow it, in short to put myself in guardianship under your hands, an ambition which is not often found among kings who are greybeards and victorious. But the fierce love which I bear my subjects, the keen desire that I have to add those two fine titles to that of King, makes it seem to me both pleasant and honourable.¹⁵

Corisande d’Andoins, Comtesse de Guiche, with her daughter, Catherine de Gramont, later Comtesse de Lauzun

Henri IV receiving the portrait of Marie de Medicis, by Rubens

The whole tone is in striking contrast to the godlike condescension of his grandson Louis XIV. Yet Henri IV was no less of a despot. Gabrielle asked him afterwards if he had really said that he would place himself under the Notables’ tutelage, ‘Ventre St Gris,’ growled the King, ‘it’s true, but I said it with my sword at my side.’ His brand of absolutism was tempered by tact and moderation—he cared little for show, only for substance.

Even so the Notables, according to Rosny, tried to put their sovereign under tutelage. Inspired by the example of England, in January 1597 they demanded the establishment of a Conseil de Raison to superintend the expenses of government which were to be divided into two, those of the nation and those of the King, the latter to include the cost of war. This separation of revenue and prerogative would have hamstrung the Royal power at a time when an anarchic France needed the firmest hand possible. The King’s Council were horrified but, on Rosny’s advice, Henri agreed to set up the Council. After three months its members found the appalling complexity of the country’s financial system and the obstruction by officials and by taxpayers to be quite unmanageable. Humbly they went to the King, admitting that they had presumed beyond their capacity, and surrendered their powers. If, as some authorities suggest, this story is a fabrication of Rosny it is nonetheless an excellent illustration of the way in which Henri preferred to rule. He wished to establish the monarchy on a genuinely popular basis while retaining absolute power.

During 1597 Amiens, the capital of Picardy, was the focal point of the war. Henri was preparing to attack Arras and meant to use this rich market town, which was the centre of Franco-Flemish trade, as a supply base, filling it with cannon and munitions. Early in the morning of 11 March forty Spanish troopers disguised as peasants and led by a veteran officer, Don Hernan Teillo de Portocarrero, entered one of the gates at Amiens whose portcullis they blocked with a farm cart whereupon a detachment of their comrades nearby rushed into the town; the governor panicked and soon Amiens was in the hands of the Spaniards who sacked and plundered it for three days.

This appalling news reached Henri at Paris in the dark hours before dawn on 12 March when he was in a deep sleep after dancing at a ball. Leaping out of bed the King cried, ‘I will have that town back or die,’ adding, ‘I have been King of France long enough—I must become King of Navarre again.’ Gabrielle was weeping. ‘My mistress,’ he told her, ‘we must dry our tears and mount our horses to fight another war.’ Most of the Notables from Rouen were in Paris so that same morning he summoned them, together with the chief officials of the Parlement, demanding money with which to replace the supplies and armaments lost at Amiens. He spent the afternoon with the Constable de Montmorency, planning the campaign and giving orders to found new cannon. Then, in the late afternoon, ce Roy Vaillant swung into the saddle and rode out of Paris on his great warhorse at the head of his troops, banners flying, drums beating and the mob roaring applause. This day which had begun with news of a national disaster had ended with a triumphant procession.

His capital he left in charge of the Constable—‘a great Perswader of the Peace, of no real Capacitye but of greatest Swaye in Court by reason of his Place and Quallitie’.¹⁶ En route north the King calmed the terrified populace, fortifying towns and villages, and, most important, settling arrears of pay with many disgruntled garrisons. Assembling his army near Amiens he suddenly made a surprise attack on Arras but was unsuccessful. After blocking all access from the north he entrusted the siege of Amiens, which was now garrisoned by four thousand five hundred Spanish troops under the brave Teillo, to Biron. Henri then returned to Paris, in mid-April.

Here the Parlement was objecting to the new taxes. Henri made yet another impassioned speech, swearing that he preferred to die rather than to let France be destroyed: ‘I beg of you, unite, for if people will give me an army I will willingly give my life to save you and restore the State.’ But these rich and selfish lawyers remained obstinate so, after trying every possible means of persuasion he reluctantly forced them to register the necessary edicts by that ultimate legal sanction, a lit de justice or Royal session of theParlement presided over by the King in person whose presence procured automatic registration.

During the summer the Spaniards attempted, unsuccessfully, to seize other French towns as far south as Poitiers, while continuing to support Mercoeur in Brittany; at the same moment the Duke of Savoy threatened Dauphiné. No help save promises came from England and the Dutch. Henri persevered with his investment of Amiens during which he found the time to create France’s first standing army, placing the three veteran corps of Picardy, Champagne and Navarre—commonly called Gascony—on a permanent basis together with new regiments from the northern provinces and that of Piedmont, each of twelve hundred picked musketeers and pikemen, many of whom were needy scions of the nobility; there were also the Royal Guards and various regiments of mercenaries—mainly Swiss—while cavalry consisted of four thousand Gensdarmes d’Ordonnance, the precursors of the redoubtable Maison du Roi. Thus began the glorious tradition of the pre-Napoleonic Grande Armée. By July Amiens was completely blockaded by earthworks; on 17th of the month Teillo led a sortie which was repulsed, Henri himself helping to drive the Spaniards out of his trenches, fighting on foot with a pike. The garrison suffered many casualties and was further weakened by famine and disease. On 3 September the gallant Teillo was killed by an arquebus bullet. The Spanish relief force was delayed from sheer lack of money but at last in mid-September the Cardinal-Archduke reached the Somme and the alarmed besiegers prepared to defend their earthworks; the King, as on so many other occasions, prayed publicly before his troops. However, despite treacherous advice from Biron on where to attack, the Cardinal’s attempts to cross the river were beaten back by the King and Mayenne whereupon Albert retreated to the Low Countries. Henri joked that the Cardinal of Austria had come like a soldier and gone home like a priest. Amiens surrendered on 25 September; Henri was merciful to the Spanish garrison, treating them with the utmost courtesy.

Spain’s Savoyard allies then suffered several defeats at the hands of Lesdiguières—that future Marshal and Constable of France who had begun his career as a simple archer—while the Dutch were increasingly successful in the Low Countries. Yet another Armada, destined for Ireland, was destroyed by storms and everywhere the Spanish war effort faltered. It was stalemate. ‘There rested now no appearance of the League in France but only the Duke of Mercoeur, yet keeping a corner of Brittany.’¹⁷ However, by early 1598 even the Celtic Duchy had at last begun to revolt against Mercoeur who for the usual inducements surrendered in March, his daughter and heiress being betrothed to the King’s small son, César, soon created Duc de Vendôme. Gabrielle’s intervention was largely responsible for the gift of such merciful terms to the rebel whom Henri called ‘the Duke of Mercury’. For the past year the Papacy had been trying to reconcile His Most Catholic Majesty with His Most Christian Majesty; now ‘the King of Spain finding the forces both of his body and mind to diminish by a languor which afterwards degenerated into a horrible malady’ became anxious for peace. On 2 May 1598 a treaty was signed at Vervins which confirmed that of Câteau-Cambresis, France retaining the frontiers of 1559 and regaining Calais and all her other lost towns ‘which might be called the Keys of France’. It was a genuine if unspectacular triumph for Henri. Within a few months Philip II was dead after ‘a perpetual flux of blood through all the conduits of his body’, thwarted but unbroken, cursed by Europe yet a hero to all true Spaniards.

Henri had taken other steps to ensure peace, at home. On 13 April 1598 the Edict of Nantes—promulgated when the King was presiding over the Estates of Brittany—gave the Religion remarkably generous terms. The Huguenots received liberty of conscience, freedom of worship in the châteaux of Protestant lords, in every town where their faith was already established, and at the least in two towns in every bailiwick; in addition those who were royal officials or great nobles could hold services in their lodgings. They were eligible for any public office and obtained chambres mi-parties in the Parlements, their legal rights as citizens being fully guaranteed. More ominously, they retained two hundred fortified places de sûreté maintained at the Crown’s expense, though defended by their own Protestant garrisons, and the right to hold assemblies whose representatives might meet to present the King with their grievances. This was indeed a state within a state, with political and military independence.

The motives which dictated Henri IV’s religious settlement have so often been misinterpreted that the Edict is usually seen either as the triumph of common sense over bigotry or as an early essay in ecumenism. On the other hand, while Henri has been regarded as the protector of his former co-religionists from Catholic persecution in contrast to his grandson Louis XIV, some Protestants consider the Edict to be lacking in generosity. However, if Henri IV is seriously criticized for his settlement it is because he accepted the existence of a Calvinist republic within the Kingdom of France, a major political error which had to be set right by Richelieu. It is rarely appreciated how limited was the King’s freedom of action.

In fact the Huguenots, though no more numerous—there were less than eight hundred congregations where there had been two thousand in 1562—were far more formidable than in Coligny’s day; thirty years of savage war had forged an indomitable fighting tradition embodied in a large corps of dedicated and highly professional officers, of whom the majority were in no sense Politiques, while between them the three thousand five hundred noblemen of Protestant France could muster twenty-five thousand troops. Until Henri’s conversion they had looked forward to a Calvinist monarchy which would eventually impose the Reform on the entire Kingdom; England provided a reassuring blue-print. In June 1594 a general assembly of the Religion at Sainte Foy divided France into nine administrative circles which were to levy taxes and maintain troops, an organization tantamount to a Republic; there was talk of electing a Protector on the model of the Dutch Stadtholder, an office to which such potentates as Bouillon and La Trémouille aspired, no less dangerous than Leaguer magnates. ‘As for Religion, it hath onely been the cloke and shaddowe of their ambitious pretences,’ discerned the percipient Dallington.¹⁸ In 1596 during the siege of La Fère when the King refused to accept their proposed new organization these two lords rode off with their regiments. Fortunately du Plessis-Mornay, the Religion’s moral and intellectual leader, did not cease to urge restraint. By early 1598, as peace with Spain came in sight, Huguenot extremists were mobilizing to begin yet another War of Religion. It was this which finally made up Henri’s mind and extorted the Edict of Nantes, to be proclaimed perpetual and irrevocable.

He had never underestimated the danger and always taken good care to favour his Protestant nobles. Several, like Rosny, Lesdiguières, and du Plessis-Mornay, were among his most trusted servants, Bouillon owed his duchy to him as did La Trémouille while even d’Aubigné received his meed of flattery when he appeared at La Fère in mourning for his wife (he cried over her death every night for three years); Agrippa was astonished to be greeted warmly by the King who having embraced him ordered Gabrielle to do likewise and then to let him hold little César in his arms after which they listened tactfully to his enthusiastic suggestion of taking the baby back to the Saintonge to be brought up as a good Calvinist. It is, incidentally, in such a context that one must see Henri’s dramatic requests for Huguenot prayers after his conversion to Catholicism.

While it is true that the Papists were far stronger, that Henri IV was now undisputed King of France, and that the Reform’s military power might have been broken, as Richelieu was to break it thirty years later, France simply could not afford another civil war at this particular moment. Henri believed he had an alternative and his timing was perfect; most Frenchmen had had their fill of fighting for the sake of religion. There was of course a furious outcry against the Edict among the more intolerant Catholics whom the King answered when he addressed the Parlement of Paris ‘as a father of a family in ordinary clothes speaking frankly with his children’. He asked them to register the Edict for the sake of peace, reminding them that he spoke as the Eldest Son of the Church who loved the Roman faith just as much as they did. ‘I am the one upholder of religion…. I am King, I speak as King and I must be obeyed.’ He recommended the example of the Duc de Mayenne’s loyal obedience and told the Parlement that they should be grateful to their King for saving France. If they did what he asked they would be doing it not only for him but for themselves. Not even the most obstinate bigot dared resist such appeals and the Edict was duly registered on 25 February 1599 without recourse to a lit de justice, though the provincial Parlements held out longer. Henri told that of Toulouse that it still had ‘a Spaniard in its belly’.

The English traveller and pedant, Sir Robert Dallington, a future Master of Charterhouse, saw Henri on several occasions in 1598 and described him vividly in ‘The View of Fraunce’.

This King then, of whom now by course I am to relate, is about 48 yeeres of age, his stature small, his haire almost all white, or rather grisled, his colour fresh and youthfull, his nature stirring and full of life, like a true French man. One of his owne people describeth him thus: ‘He is of such an extremely liuely and actiue disposition that to what soeuer he applyes himselfe, to that he entirely employes all his powers, seldome doing aboue one thing at once. To ioyne a tedious deliberation with an earnest and pressing affayre he cannot endure: Hee executes and deliberates both together. But in Councels that require tract of time, to say the truth, hee hath neede of helpe. He hath an admirable sharpnesse of wit.’

Dallington’s informant added that ‘though by his Phisiognomy, his fashion & maner of behauiour, ye would judge him leger and inconstant, yet is no man more firmely constant than he’.¹⁹ Actually Henri was three years younger though his white hairs made him seem older. The King’s own description of himself was: ‘I am all Gray without but you shall find me Gold within’²⁰—a fair enough judgement on the contrast between his plain grey doublet and warm, emotional heart.

He was beginning to enjoy Paris. One of his more bizarre new friends was the fabulously rich tax farmer Sebastien Zamet, a naturalized Italian from Lucca who once described himself as ‘lord of 1,700,000 crowns’ when asked to state his claim to nobility; he had begun his career as Catherine de Medici’s shoemaker and then become a court money-lender. Henri liked Zamet’s ‘facetious and merry’ company and often dined and gambled or gave intimate little supper parties for his mistresses in the financier’s luxurious house in the Marais. One is reminded of Edward VII’s predilection for Jewish millionaires. L’Estoile noted that on 23 February 1597 the King and Gabrielle attended ‘a sorcerers’ masked ball’, how Henri kissed ‘his friend’ everywhere they went and how they danced all night, returning to the Louvre at 8 o’clock in the the morning.²¹

The King’s ménage with Gabrielle was now on a permanent basis, even if he had other women; a certain Mme des Essarts presented him with two bastards but he remained emotionally faithful. D’Aubigné jokingly referred to the Court as ‘La Cour de la belle Gabrielle’:

The Duchesse de Beaufort made very modest use of the power she had over the King but those near to her saw nothing to criticize in this. Here we may discuss their love so far as respect and propriety allow. Among our Kings’ mistresses there have seldom been seen women who have not brought upon themselves the hatred of the great, by taking anything they covet or bringing disfavour upon those who do not worship them or by forwarding their relatives’ interest, debts, dues and feuds. It was a marvel how this woman, in whose extraordinary beauty there was nothing lascivious, could live as a queen rather than a concubine for so many years and yet make so few enemies. The needs of the State were her only foes….²²

‘His Gabrielle’ was a familiar figure in Paris, receiving near regal honours—though asked her name by a bystander a Royal archer could reply loudly, ‘that’s no one, only the King’s whore’. She was seen everywhere with Henri who ‘went through Paris having this lady by his side; he took her with him to hunt and caressed her before all the world’. They rode together hand in hand, she riding astride like a man, especially resplendent in her favourite green, her golden hair studded with diamonds and it was she who presided over every ball and court function.²³

Yet though the King was devoted to his unwed spouse, by now Gabrielle’s looks were somewhat full blown and she had acquired that ‘lovely double chin’. Sir Henry Unton, the English ambassador, met her in February 1595 and was unimpressed. He wrote to Queen Elizabeth that ‘She was attyred in a playne Sattayne Gowne, with a Velvet Hood all over her Head (to keape away the Weather from her) which became her verie ill; and, in my Opinion she is altered verie much for the worse in her Complection and Favor, yeat verie grosselye painted …’ Upon Union’s unctuously showing his Queen’s portrait to the King, Henri beheld it ‘with Passion and Admiration’, crying, ‘I surrender’ and kissing it with gusto again and again.²⁴ A subtler diplomat than Unton—who died of the Purple Fever shortly afterwards²⁵—met her two years later, Sir Robert Cecil, Queen Elizabeth’s Secretary of State, the future Earl of Salisbury and James I’s Lord Treasurer. This grave, sensitive little hunchback, who was a coldly accurate judge of humanity, received a very different impression of Gabrielle when he saw her in March 1598: ‘She is great with child and truly a fair and delicate woman. I staid little with her; and yet she is very well spoken and very courteous …’²⁶

Unton had also reported how Henri ‘used many affectionate Wordes in her Commendation; among others, that she never intermeddled with his Affayres and had a tractable Spyrite, whearin he spake not amiss for she is heald to be incapable of Affaires and very simple’.²⁷ Gabrielle’s power over the King derived from her ability to bring him the bourgeois joys of home and family for she had born other children since César. Nonetheless she was shrewd enough to urge him to employ Rosny, despite her dislike for that farouche bureaucrat. When absent Henri continued to send her a spate of letters in his exuberant, graceful hand and curious spelling with its excess of ‘y’s. On 29 October he described a joyful afternoon that he had spent with his children and told her how much happiness she had given him. Earlier that month he had written, ‘I cannot throw off my melancholy humour and think I will take medicine on Tuesday though nothing can do me more good than the sight of you, the one remedy for all my sadnesses.’²⁸

Eventually Henri resolved to make her his Queen. He wanted a more substantial heir than little Condé or the egregious Soissons and decided to legitimize young César; it was no accident that the latter’s birth had been greeted by a Te Deum, that he had been affianced to Mercoeur’s daughter and created a duke with a title born by Henri’s father. Gabrielle was given increasingly greater rank, becoming first Marquise de Monceaux, then Duchesse de Beaufort, then Duchesse d’Étampes and a Peeress of France, in preparation for the ultimate honour. By 1598, driven on by her relatives rather than by her own ambition, she had begun to give herself indisputably regal airs. On occasions she was waited on at dinner by the young Duchesse de Guise, who might herself have been Queen had the League triumphed, while the baptism of her second son Alexandre de Vendôme was performed with honours reserved for a Son of France. Rosny’s flat refusal to pay, on the grounds that there were no Sons of France and his complaints to the King culminated in a tearful scene with Gabrielle who called him a lackey; for once she had gone too far, Henri retorting that he preferred to lose ten mistresses like her rather than one servant like Rosny. But normally her power over the King was complete. When he resisted her wishes she would weep and faint or, as when he objected to making her father Master-General of the Ordnance, threaten to enter a convent. Once Rosny brought news that her coach had been involved in an accident whereupon Henri trembled and turned pale, something which he never did in battle. Despite Rosny’s plain-spoken warnings the King was determined to marry her and asked the Papacy for an annulment from Marguerite, that worst of wives, who was living at the château of Usson in the Auvergne, in disreputable retirement after many picaresque and lecherous adventures; she had wandered the roads with strange lovers and been captured by bandits, and she too was turning fat, adding the vices of the table to those of the bed. However, though ready enough to accept an advantageous settlement should he wish to marry some foreign daughter of a Ruling House, the last French Princess of the Valois would not make way for a whore from Picardy, that bagasse (slut) as she called her.

Indeed Henri himself expected trouble from such a marriage; he actually asked Rosny if he thought the nobility would rise in revolt. While César, who much resembled his father, would have made an excellent dauphin his legal position as heir to the throne would have been even more doubtful than that of his younger brother, for he was born of a double adultery, not merely of a single like Alexandre; at his birth Gabrielle had still been Liancourt’s wife. Yet the King’s heart could rule his head in the most important matters of state and in token of betrothal he gave her his coronation ring, a great square-cut diamond.

At Sancy on Tuesday 6 April Henri took leave of Gabrielle, who was big with child, for he wished to spend Easter at Fontainebleau in a suitably edifying fashion, without scandal. His concubine was in tears as if knowing she would never see him again and the King wept from sympathy. Gabrielle had always suffered from melancholy and from wild irrational fears; she was a prey to astrologers who invariably prophesied she would die an early death unwed, predictions which caused her to lie awake whole nights in tears. After leaving Henri she went on to Paris by barge where she dined at the house of Zamet, ‘ce fameux Financier’, where she began to feel unwell. On the next day, Maundy Thursday, her labour began accompanied by terrible convulsions and on Good Friday her stillborn child had to be cut out of her while she suffered such dreadful agony that her face was horribly disfigured, turning literally black. She died on the morning of Holy Saturday. Sinister rumours of poison began to circulate but the real cause of her death was puerperal convulsions. She was buried with much sad pomp by a stricken Henri who gave her the obsequies of a Queen, the court walking in procession behind her cortège to St Denis; for a week the King wore black and then changed to the violet of half mourning. Of all his mistresses ‘Charmante Gabrielle’ brought him most happiness. To his sister he wrote that ‘the roots of love within me are dead and will never spring up anew’.²⁹

This sorrow struck while he was wrestling with the thorny problem of Savoy, which was to be further complicated by the treachery of an old and valued friend. Since 1588 Duke Charles Emmanuel I, Il Grande, a pallid hunchback who was nonetheless a tough and formidable soldier, had been occupying the Marquisate of Saluzzo which he had seized from France with no other justification than force of arms. Some years later an English ambassador wrote: ‘Among the princes of Italy may also be reckoned the Duke of Savoy; but as the chief of them, not only for the largeness of his territory and multitude of subjects (though in treasure perchance Florence exceeds him) but for the nobleness of his extraction also, the rest being descended, for the most part, either from merchants or the pope’s bastards.’³⁰ Henri dealt carefully with the wily Duke who was a long-standing ally of Spain and Philip III’s brother-in-law, and so desperately ambitious that he would one day propose himself as a candidate for the Holy Roman Empire. At Vervins the question of Saluzzo had been referred to Papal arbitration, with small result. Charles Emmanuel hoped to win Spanish support and procrastinated for as long as possible, visiting France with a great train of courtiers to negotiate insincerely while suborning French lords on whom he showered gold in the vain hope of overthrowing Henri. Without the Duke’s knowledge Savoyard agents commissioned a fashionable innkeeper to poison the King, the woman Nicole Mignon whose husband was one of the Royal cooks; the plot was discovered and Mme Nicole burnt alive in the Place de Grève. Henri indignantly rejected a suggestion that he should keep the Duke a prisoner until he surrendered Saluzzo.

Charles Emmanuel’s most dangerous ally was the King’s best general, the Duc de Biron, whom Henri described to Elizabeth as ‘le plus trenchant instrument de mes victoires’. The old Marshal de Biron le boiteux—the lame one—whom Brantôme called ‘France’s oldest and greatest captain’,³¹had frequently warned his son to keep himself under better control unless he wanted ‘to go home and plant cabbages’. This son, now in his late thirties, owed everything to Henri who had created him a Marshal in 1594, and a Duke and a Peer of France in 1598, for though a wild debauchee and greedily avaricious he was a fine soldier like his father and no less brave, only lacking the old warrior’s brutal common sense. Though a professed atheist, he had also an unwholesome weakness for the occult, consulting not merely astrologers but magicians and necromancers. Proud as Lucifer, crazed by ambition, Charles de Biron could not reconcile himself to accepting a mere fellow campaigner for his sovereign; intimacy had bred a jealous contempt instead of friendship. Even so, right to the end Henri remained attached to this strange, troubled spirit who had suffered thirty-two wounds in his cause.

By June 1600, the date stipulated for its return by the preceding February’s Treaty of Paris, Charles Emmanuel was still clinging defiantly to Saluzzo, so Henri, who ‘was not to be gulled by gilded shadows’,³² invaded Savoy, dividing his army between Biron and Lesdiguières; the former was watched by officers loyal to the King who was already suspicious of him. Rosny, having succeeded Gabrielle’s father as Master-General of the Ordnance, had cast whole batteries of cannon which now battered down hitherto impregnable castles in which the Duke had placed his trust. Throughout the campaign Biron was consistently treacherous, sending full details of the French plans to Savoy in the way that he had given information to the Cardinal-Archduke during the Spanish war. Several times he plotted Henri’s murder and once told the governor of a besieged Savoyard fortress to train his guns on a spot which he would reconnoitre with the King; at the last moment his nerve broke—and he warned Henri of the danger.

Though Charles Emmanuel had no troops, snow made it a hard campaign when winter set in, and even before that the mountain paths were bad enough. Henri grumbled in a letter: ‘Yesterday it was necessary to dismount 20 times and today the road was 20 times worse. France is much indebted to me because I work very hard for her.’³³ However, his discomfort was amply compensated; all of what would become French Savoy was almost completely overrun, as far as Lake Geneva. Spain and the Papacy did not wish to see a French invasion of Piedmont and, after arbitration by Clement VIII, peace was signed at Lyons on 17 January 1601. The Duke retained Saluzzo which was strategically worthless but surrendered all his lands on the Rhône; Bresse, Bugey, the Pays de Gex and Valromey. The King wrote that the Peace of Lyons was ‘a purge in the Savoyard entrails but thank God the hand holding the goblet is steady so he must drain it’.³⁴ Henceforward Savoy turned its attention to Italy; as Charles Emmanuel put it ‘Italy is an artichoke which the House of Savoy must eat leaf by leaf.’ Franche Comté was now isolated, and Henri’s new territories all but blocked communications between the Spanish Netherlands and Spain’s possessions in northern Italy; the ‘Spanish Road’ might be cut at will. On the other hand France could protect Lyons and menace Milan, a threat even more effective after Henri’s treaty with the Swiss Cantons in December 1601 which gave French troops free passage through the Alpine passes.

Biron now made a partial confession, a feigned repentance which so moved Henri that he merely asked him to dismiss his Savoyard agents. But the haughty Marshal spurned forgiveness, still hoping to implement his devil’s bargain with Spain and Savoy; he would murder Henri and exterminate the Bourbons, and elective monarchy would be installed in France which was to be partitioned and he, Biron, would receive his governorship of Burgundy as an independent principality. He bided his time.

The Peace of Lyons had ended a quarter of a century’s campaigning which left Henri with the outlook and habits of a soldier: ‘For his valour and princelike courage it is such, to say truly, as neuer any of his Precedessors, Kings of France, were matchable to him, who, for the space of almost thirty yeeres, hath, as one would say, neuer beene vnarmed, without his foote in the stirrop and his lance in the rest, hath beene himselfe in person, the formost in all perils and last out of the field …’.³⁸ Other monarchs have been to war and ventured their persons in battle but few have handled a pike in the trenches, taken a hand in street fighting or pistolled their way through a cavalry mêlée with such gusto. Certainly no French ruler ever fought to more lasting effect. In the teeth of fierce opposition the Bourbon had won a crown and founded a dynasty, had ended religious war and made peace between Catholic and Protestant, had expelled a foreign invader and restored his country’s boundaries, and in addition had taken the first step for a hundred years towards establishing the frontiers of modern France. For nearly half a century war had meant only humiliation for France; she had grown accustomed to being beaten in the field, invaded and occupied, or rent by sordid struggles within herself. Now she had faced her foes abroad as an equal and had overcome them. Henri IV, ‘that valiant King’ had given his country a taste of glory. This heady tonic brought new self-confidence and new vigour. He now had to show that he was a ruler who could bring prosperity as well as victory.