CHAPTER 6

LA BELLE ET DOUCE FRANCE

‘Je feray qu’il n’y aura point de laboureur en mon Royaume qui n’ait moyen d’avoir une poule dans son pot.’

Henri IV¹

‘The Noble Kingdom of France shall prosper and triumph this Year in all Pleasures and Delights, so that Foreign Nations shall willingly retire thither. Presents of Nosegays and Feasts on Birth-days, and Saints-days, Treats, Pastimes and a thousand Sports, shall keep up the Mirth. There will be plenty of delicious Wines; many Radishes in Lymosin; store of Chestnuts in Perigord and Dauphiné; a deal of Olives in Languedoc; whole shoals of Sand in Olone; a world of Fish in the Sea; swarms of Stars in the Firmament; abundance of Salt at Brouage; and prodigious quantities of Corn, Pulse, Kitchen Herbs, Flowers, Fruit, Butter, Cheese, Milk, and other Dairy Goods. No Plague, no War, no Vexation. A Fart for Poverty, hang Sorrow, cast away Care. Old Gold, such as your Double Ducats, Rose-Nobles, Angels, Spankers, Spur Royals, and Well-wool’d Sheeps of Berry will once more be in fashion, with plenty of Seraphs and Crowns with a Sun upon them …’.

Rabelais’ ‘Pantagruelian Prognostication’²

So early as 1580 a contemporary had reckoned that eight hundred thousand Frenchmen had died in battle or massacre, that nine cities had been razed to the ground, that two hundred and fifty villages had been burned down, that a multitude of dwellings had been destroyed. This was before the advent of the League and the Spanish invasions. Nearly twenty years of civil strife and bloodshed had considerably increased the terrible account when peace came in 1598. Those whose lives and property had survived staggered beneath the back-breaking taxation which the King was forced to impose, and were bled white by robber barons, brigands, or armed mobs of desperate peasantry, while trade, agriculture and industry had been everywhere disrupted. On his return to England in 1598 Dallington wrote confirming that La Noue’s lament of some years previously was still justified: ‘More then halfe the Noblesse is perished, the people diminished, the Treasure exhausted, the debts increased, good Order ouerthrowen, Religion languished, maner debauched, Iustice corrupted, and the men diuided.’³

The impact of this frightful devastation was sharpened for all classes by chronic and perennial inflation. Between the late fifteenth century and 1600 prices throughout western Europe rose at least six times, a spiral which accelerated in the last decades of the sixteenth century. Without realizing what was happening, noblemen found themselves suddenly impoverished overnight; it has been estimated that one half of seignorial land in France changed hands by purchase during the Wars of Religion. The King himself publicly mourned the decline of a nobility whose proper function was to serve the Crown in arms, declaring that many ‘good and ancient families’ had been ruined. The bourgeoisie suffered equally though at least its members were not debarred from ‘vile trade’ and had a chance to recoup their losses. For the poor, the artisans and the peasants, even the bare necessities of daily life were almost beyond reach.

Yet France was nearly the most populous country in Europe, with a population estimated at about 16 millions, compared with 20 millions in the German speaking lands, 13 millions in Italy, 10 millions in Spain and Portugal, and 4½ millions in England.⁴Further, it was an especially sad irony that every Frenchman knew his country, ‘lovely, gentle France’, to be the most beautiful and richly endowed in all Christendom. Half a century before, Rabelais had painted his picture of her as she should be in ‘The most Certain, True and Infallible Pantagruelian Prognostication for the Year that’s to Come, and Ever and Aye’ which Henri may well have read. Like every man of the Renaissance the King believed in a past Golden Age which might come again. Before describing his greatest achievement it is vital to examine in some detail his attitude towards the problem of restoring France to her full health.

Henri IV saw his role as that of healer rather than rebuilder. The task has in retrospect a superficial resemblance to that of Bonaparte after the Revolution. But the Revolution made a clean sweep of the old institutions and administrative machinery, displacing the social classes upon which they rested, so that Napoleon could build from the ground up; in addition he controlled a mighty military machine, his authority being unchallenged. Henri was in a very different position. First, the traditional establishment and its institutions were still in working order and irremovably entrenched, staffed by those lawyers and municipal officials whom he could not afford to alienate. Each of the privileged Estates (or social classes), nobles and clergy as well as the so-called ‘fourth Estate’ of lawyers, believed that its organization and functions were sacrosanct, in much the same way as politicians, trade unionists and the Press in modern Britain. Secondly, he was far from being undisputed master of his Kingdom, even if he was undisputed King. He had pacified, not conquered his enemies; they had been fought into submission or bought but not destroyed. Magnates remained powerful: ‘Gouernours and Lieutenants generall of Cities and Prouinces, are as it were Viceroyes & Regents of these places committed to them.’⁵ Many of these were the great Leaguer lords who had large funds at their disposal being the price of their submission. Others like Biron and Bouillon still dreamt of independent principalities. At the same time there was a latent threat of aggression from the Religion with its para-military organization. Not least there remained a residue of Leaguer fanatics who had gone underground, dangerous bigots who could never accept that Henri was genuine in his Catholicism; in each year of his reign there would be a plot to murder him, and the wings of that strong life were always plumed with the feathers of death. To have tried to reconstruct the Kingdom in a new form would have ended in the disintegration of France.

Moreover he was tied by what amounted to an unformulated but far more binding Magna Carta, the Fundamental Law of France, which ordained the inviolability of these traditional institutions and of the rights and privileges of the Estates, a concept which was tantamount to an unwritten constitution. Though Absolutism would not be defined (by Bossuet) until the end of the seventeenth century, by 1600 there already existed a tacit distinction between absolute monarchy and despotism; even if he was above the law a King must still respect it and must always honour his subjects’ legal rights. For this reason, however much of an autocrat he may have been in his secret heart and however often he may have unobtrusively overridden obstructive local franchises, Henri was scrupulously careful to observe the letter of the law and to avoid any appearance of acting arbitrarily. Hence his most undespotic pleadings with the Parlements and his perfectly sincere reluctance to resort to the ultimate sanction of a lit de justice; thus, to ensure the registration of the Edict of Nantes with as little discord as possible he personally addressed each Parlement with strong but flattering words. Not only did he never once act illegally, but he was a stickler for legal form. Henri IV knew very well that if the dauntingly complex and antiquated machinery of the divinely ordained state was to function at all it was necessary for the King himself to be the first lawyer in the land and himself be seen to keep the law.

There is a certain parallel with the Tudor system of managing and co-operating with the Houses of Parliament in England instead of coercing them, a system whose abandonment by the Stuarts later led to the overthrow of the English monarchy; indeed the French monarchy’s despotic, and therefore illegal, treatment of the Parlements in the eighteenth century would be one of the root causes of the Revolution. Unfortunately the French Crown’s unchallengeable position—for there was no means of withholding taxes—ensured a steady petrification which must inevitably end in self-destruction. However, while it worked, and particularly when Henri made it work, the Ancien Régime gave France a remarkable sense of national unity with the soundest foundation possible, that of mutual self-interest; chairman and shareholders alike were determined that their company should show a profit. If the Parlements could not resist the Royal demands they were nevertheless safety valves for opposition and were operated as such by the King because the law which they enshrined was very much a reality, even if indefinable; the concept was a rationalization of tradition, a tool to preserve the living, organic continuity of government and society which, like the British constitution, had quite as much strength as any carefully expounded written code. The Bourbon had won his throne by his championship of this law; he could only hope to retain it by faithfully adhering to the same law. The Henrician Restoration therefore precluded any radical change, let alone revolution.

Throughout the reign taxes were levied with impeccable legality. Henri has been criticized for not keeping his promise to summon the States General and for having recourse instead to the Assembly of Notables, but he was within his rights in not doing so; it cannot be too strongly emphasized that the States General was an extraordinary assembly which was only to be called in times of national crisis, which was never a French equivalent of the English Houses of Parliament or of the Spanish Cortes and which, as has already been shown, possessed no authority either to grant or withhold taxes. The States simply constituted a safety valve for popular grievances, a cumbersome and dangerous safety valve moreover, which frequently exploded. For the King to have summoned it would have served no purpose whatever, constitutional or administrative, national or popular, but would have merely hindered the recovery of France.

Finally it should never be forgotten that however modern the appeal of his personality, Henri’s education and outlook were essentially those of the Renaissance, not of the Enlightenment; the sixteenth century produced no ‘benevolent despots’, even though Voltaire might later claim him as one, no revolutionary monarchs like Peter the Great or Frederick II in the eighteenth century, for the Renaissance always looked back, never forward. Its very name defines it as a re-birth of something old, not the introduction of something new. Taught to prefer the art and letters of Antiquity, bred on Plutarch and Livy, great rulers of this period such as Philip II, Elizabeth of England or Henri IV, regarded themselves as upholders and maintainers, never as innovators or founders. All saw their reforms as a return to some pristine model of the past. It was such an attitude of mind which caused Henri to describe himself to the Assembly of Notables as ‘Liberator and Restorer of the French State’.

He had always possessed the knack of picking a good staff. In the field it had been the Birons, La Trémouille, Crillon—‘braves des braves’—with other redoubtable warriors, and now in time of peace he showed the same flair. Ability, regardless of past loyalties, was the sole criterion for membership of Henri’s Council, whose number he reduced to twelve, together with four Secretaries of State in charge of correspondence; the latter’s principal function was to expedite, to ensure that the King’s commands were carried out with the maximum speed. Throughout the period of reconstruction which began in 1598 and only ended with Henri’s death, the key men in the Council were Villeroy, Jeannin, Bellièvre, Sillery and of course Rosny. Sir George Carew, who was British ambassador in France from 1605 until 1609, drew up ‘a relation of the state of France’ for James I when he returned, an early example of a valedictory dispatch which contains shrewd comments on these men; most of them were lawyers, and as a legal man himself Carew was particularly well qualified to appraise their capabilities.

Nicolas de Neufville, Seigneur de Villeroy, ‘by his long experience in matters of state is held to be the dean in chapter of all the statesmen in Christendom, having attained to a great age, still vigorous and healthy, not decaying in his judgement or senses anything … upon his advice and counsel the king chiefly relieth …’. A Secretary of State, Villeroy who looked after all diplomatic correspondence was largely responsible for the successful negotiations at Vervins and Lyons, although he had once been a ferocious Leaguer, remaining ‘in matters of religion very obstinate and very ignorant, a great friend to the see of Rome’.⁶ Pierre Jeannin, another foreign affairs expert and formerly President of the Dijon Parlement, had likewise been a staunch member of the League. The Chancellors were Pomponne de Bellièvre, also a man of great age (for the time)—he had been born in 1529—and Nicholas Brulart de Sillery who succeeded him in 1605; the latter, a former Councillor of the Paris Parlement, was another diplomat whose ‘plausible proceedings with all men, and his obsequious secondings of the king’s humours hath brought him to the height of authority’.⁷ Finally there was the Huguenot Rosny who dominated the Council and was cordially disliked by his colleagues. Maximilien de Béthune, Baron and then Marquis de Rosny, and finally in 1606 Duc de Sully and Peer of France, had been born in 1560. He belonged to a modest if ancient family of the petite noblesse of Picardy but was inordinately proud of his birth; Sir George could class him with the obviously bourgeois Sillery as ‘being raised to their greatness from very mean estate’.⁸

Sully (as he will be called henceforward) was a singularly unappealing figure in his private life. Avaricious to the extent that he jilted his fiancée to marry a richer girl, he had been enabled by a miser’s fanaticism for small economies to amass a considerable fortune in the Wars from systematic plunder supplemented by shrewd dealing in horses. Bald, bearded like a patriarch, he affected extraordinary headgear of the sort which must have inspired Ben Jonson’s line—‘Thou look’st like anti-Christ, in that lewd hat.’⁹Tallemant, embalmer of scandal, imputed even more ludicrous eccentricities: ‘One of his follies was dancing. Each evening until Henri IV’s death a man named Le Roche, valet of the Chamber to the King, played the dances of the day while M. de Sully danced them by himself with I don’t know what extravagant hat upon his head which he normally wore when he was in his private closet,’ all this in front of a few privileged spectators.¹⁰ His vanity extended to altering, in his notoriously untrustworthy memoirs, letters the King had written him so that they should seem more intimate and flattering, though an English historian overstated this weakness when he wrote ‘Of the fantastic and discredited imaginations of Sully little use could be made’.¹¹ Like Malvolio, his coxcomb’s pride made him quarrelsome, and his vile manners won him a host of foes to whom he showed himself malicious and vindictive.

Yet Henri saw through this unpromising mixture of faults, discerning the gold which underlay all the vanity, greed and boorishness, for he had known Sully since he was a boy; when only sixteen he had escaped with the King from Paris, and after that had fought in most of his major campaigns, showing himself a steady if hardly dashing soldier. Henri had grown accustomed to asking his blunt but always excellent advice, and where his master’s interests were involved Sully was indefatigable and unshakeably loyal. During the war with Spain he had wrung desperately needed funds out of the treasury, in the teeth of corrupt officials, while the triumphant conquest of Savoy was due to the cannon he had manufactured as Master-General of the Ordnance, an early example of his flair for productive organization in which he could show the dynamism of a Beaverbrook. Since 1598 he had been Grand Voyer or Master of the Posts and Highways which would soon show a remarkable improvement. In 1599 Henri IV made the most important appointment of his reign; the unwieldy Council of Finance was abolished and the Kingdom’s financial affairs placed under the control of a single Superintendent—Sully.

Henri now had a gifted and reliable team of administrators to whom he could delegate power with complete confidence. As a man of action he disliked any ‘tedious deliberation’ and so, according to the invaluable Dallington, ‘In affayres of Iustice, of his Reuenues, forayne Negotiations, Dispatches and gouernment of the State, hee credites others, and meddles little himselfe.’¹² He would always listen to unwelcome arguments; ‘his Maiestie hath generally this commendation, which is very laudable in a Prince, he can endure that any man should tell him the truth though of himselfe,’ continued Dallington, while Carew noted ‘those councellors of his who are the most potent with him, as Villeroy and Sully, govern him by terror rather than by obsequiousness’.¹³ The most frequent criticism of his lieutenants was social. Thus Dallington again: ‘And sure, it is a lamentable case, or at least misbeseeming in a goodly Countrey, and full of Nobilitie, that the State should be gouerned, and all matters managed by them of the robba longa, Aduocates and Procureurs, and Penne & Inkehorne Gentlemen, and the Noblesse themselues for want of learning, not to haue imployment.’¹⁴ Alas, all too many French noblemen were incapable of desk work having been educated in the belief that ‘A man of War should haue no more learning than to bee able to write his owne name’.¹⁵ But the King’s ministers were all the better for being novi homines who owed everything to the Royal favour.

However, the problems posed by the noblesse had to receive Henri’s personal attention. The turbulent, not to say murderous, temper of ‘our warlike nobility’ was savagely expressed in duels which were not the smallsword minuets of eighteenth-century affairs of honour but brutish combats to the death whose ferocity was bloodily demonstrated by the classic ‘duel of the hat’ between Messieurs Bazanez and Lagarde Vallon. The former having sent the latter a fine hat and dared him to wear it, Lagarde Vallon donned it immediately, rushed out and, after finding Bazanez and giving him the lie, slashed his skull open with a broadsword before running him through and through, shouting each time ‘for the tassel!’ ‘for the plumes!’ Though weakened from loss of blood Bazanez suddenly rallied to cut his opponent down and then stab him fourteen times with a poignard as he lay on the ground while Lagarde Vallon managed to crack his skull with his sword pommel and bite off half his chin. At last they fainted but, amazingly, both survived, Lagarde Vallon continuing to challenge enemies with such insults as, ‘I have made ashes of your house, raped your wife, and hanged your children, and am at your service.’ Often these combats were miniature pitched battles, like those of The Three Musketeers, for the seconds usually joined in as well. What might be described as ‘the officer class’ was seriously depleted; during 1607 not less than four thousand noblemen perished in duals of this sort.¹⁶ This might well be considered a blessing, but tradition and contemporary social thought still insisted on regarding the noblesse de épée as the most valuable members of society. Hence in 1602, badgered by Sully, the King issued the Edict of Blois whereby duellists were declared guilty of ‘lèse majesté’, incurring the death penalty. Even so Henri’s sentiment that he was the first nobleman of France as well as its King, caused him to issue no less than seven thousand pardons for this peccadillo, an attitude reminiscent of Kaiser William II’s ruling that any officer who fought a duel would be court martialled while any officer who refused to fight one would be cashiered. However, Henri had at least shown that he knew how to control such perennial bloodletting.

His real concern was that the nobility should not harm the community at large, that affairs of honour should not burgeon into small scale civil wars when the lords began to prey on farmers and townsmen. In 1607 the King lent cannon to the Sieur de Fontange whose daughter had been abducted by a neighbouring lord so that he could batter down the walls of her kidnapper’s château. Likewise Henri was merciless to robber barons. Some of these, like Captain Guillery, whose elegant slogan was ‘Peace to noblemen, death to provosts and archers, and a purse from the merchants’, lived in richly furnished castles deep in the forest from where they emerged to slay and plunder; Guillery was only defeated in 1604 after a full-scale cavalry battle, and similar bands of outlaw noblemen continued to ravage the countryside throughout the reign. The true significance of the Croquantshad been to show the fundamental hostility between seigneur and peasant. One of the King’s more responsible gestures was to prohibit nobles to ride over ripening crops when they were hunting; he would not allow them any pretensions to be above the law. During the Wars such lords had acquired a taste for life at court, for entertainment and Valois luxuries, and the King welcomed their dancing attendance on him at the Louvre rather than disrupting local society or challenging his authority. This formula was, of course, carried to excess at Versailles by his grandson, who ultimately ruined the French nobility.

Above all, Henri imposed his will upon the greater magnates. Formerly, provincial governorships had been tantamount to semi-independent fiefs ruled by princely warlords. Henceforward the King insisted on appointing every town governor and garrison commander, controlling all troop movements and military supplies. No longer would he pay for private armies, and even Marshal de Lesdiguières was forced to relinquish many of his powers as Lieutenant-General of the infantry regiments. Henri was determined to be obeyed even if he still preferred to lead rather than to drive. To the truculent Duc d’Epernon he wrote: ‘Your letter is that of a manwho is angry—I am not so yet and I pray you don’t make me.’¹⁷ By the end of his reign the nobility were tamed, including the magnates. Henri had overcome if not eradicated neo-feudalism.

Fear of the overmighty subject dictated his harsh treatment of his sister. Catherine was now an eccentric old maid of over forty, a tiresome, sickly bluestocking who lacked both her mother’s beauty and her mother’s steel, though she clung stubbornly to her Protestant faith and enabled Huguenot courtiers to hold services in the Louvre. In 1598 Robert Cecil described her thus: ‘She was well painted, ill dressed and strangely jewelled.’¹⁸ Péréfixe recalled that she was ‘more agreeable than fair, having one leg a little short. She was very spiritual, loved learning, and knew much for a woman; but was an obstinate Huguenot.’¹⁹ Yet if odd and frustrated she genuinely loved her brother whom she addressed as ‘mon bon et brave Roy’. However she still held with pitiful obstinacy to her love for the worthless Soissons whose own fidelity was purely venal. In 1599 her loyal friend, the formidable Vicomtesse de Rohan—who had once told Henri she was too poor to be his wife and too well born to be his mistress—secretly published a sharp attack on the King’s heartless treatment of his sister in refusing to let her marry Soissons: ‘And still this diamond of firmness, this Béarnais marble, opposes it without the least sign of changing, of sorrow or of pity.’ At last Henri decided to marry off the unhappy woman and his eye lit upon the Catholic Duc de Bar, heir to Charles III of Lorraine and a most eligible prince—politically. The Pope thereupon insisted on Catherine turning Papist, an impossibility. However, Henri promised her she could keep her faith and then browbeat his bastard half-brother, Antoine de Bourbon, the somewhat disreputable Archbishop of Rouen, into marrying the couple in his private chamber. Alas, once at Bar Catherine’s unsympathetic father-in-law tried to force her conversion, sending away her beloved ministers and ladies. Callously Henri refused to intervene; he had to think of his image as Eldest Son of the Church. So, ‘This Princess died three years after with sadness and melancholy to see herself live in a discontented manner with her husband who daily pressed her to turn Catholic.’²⁰ Undeniably Henri’s treatment of his poor sister was unkind but he could never forget the patient, vulpine Soissons who waited grimly for Catherine like la Fontaine’s fox who waited for the crow to drop the piece of cheese. For similar reasons the King prevented children of the Guise clan from contracting profitable marriages and had their parents ‘live in court, so they practise not in other places; and there by play and other unthriftiness they grow poor’.²¹

The loss of Gabrielle’s services drove Henri into a frenzy of whoring; in the days that followed her death he rutted with at least two ladies of the court and one lady of the town, a professional prostitute called La Glandée—the Glandered One. While a slave to sensuality Henri was far from being the Great Lover of legend. The sad truth is that for all his charm and warmth he did not know how to love properly or to make women love him which was why he was so often cuckolded by his mistresses; with the possible exception of Corisande, now growing fat and red faced in her forgotten retirement, he showed that he was almost incapable of loving a woman for herself. It was inevitable that he would one day fall victim to his own lust and be caught by a thoroughly dangerous woman. This happened less than two months after Gabrielle’s burial when he met the last of his three great concubines.

He had fallen into a real wasp’s nest. Henriette d’Entragues was eighteen years old, daughter to François d’Entragues, Governor of Orléans, a ruthless adventurer who had married Marie Touchet, once mistress of Charles IX. This simple baker’s daughter was known for her soft, amiable nature—her motto was ‘je charme tout’—but her bastard Valois son, Charles d’Auvergne, was no less ferocious than his terrifying father. His beautiful half-sister Henriette was almost as savage in her own way. A slim brunette, with a disturbing bosom and a small round face whose greatest charm was a pair of flashing black eyes, she at once infatuated Henri with her sulky yet lively grace, provoking airs and cruel, amusing wit. Instinctively this youthful combination of Anne Boleyn and Becky Sharp, an archetypal gold-digger, knew how to exploit the King’s wild jealousies. He had been ready to marry Gabrielle d’Estrées so there was no reason why he should not make Henriette his Queen instead. Advised and encouraged by her father she laid careful plans.

Everything went as she hoped. She had already taken lovers, the Prince de Joinville and the Duc de Bellegarde, Henri’s old rival for Gabrielle’s favours, who despite his yellow face—he was known as Feuillemorte (Dead Leaf)—was famed for his conquests. The King caught the Prince and the Duke fighting a duel over Mlle d’Entragues, much to his fury and her delight. The seductive young termagant played him like a salmon till he was ready to be gaffed: ‘She had certainly many charms, nor had she less spirit and cunning. Her refusals did more and more provoke the King’s passion.’²² Thus on 5 August 1599 he visited her in Paris bringing a gift, a magnificent pearl necklace, but Henriette who was playing for really high stakes refused it with hauteur whereupon Henri—obviously to the secret amusement of those who told the story to L’Estoile—carefully replaced the necklace in its case; next day he sent her a big box of crystallized apricots. She continued to blow hot and cold until at last, as planned, the desperate King literally bought her from her fond father who asked for the title of Marshal although he had never seen a battle, a large sum in cash to be paid down immediately, and a document promising that should Henriette have a son by the King he would marry her as soon as he was divorced and then legitimize the child. As Sully put it, ‘The Lady was no novice … she demanded no less than one hundred thousand crowns for the price of her favours.’ In the face of Sully’s frantic disapproval, Henri agreed to everything save the title of Marshal; the document, in which Henri swore to keep the bargain ‘before God on our faith and word as a King’, was dated 1 October 1599.²³ This sordid transaction was perhaps the most disgraceful and irresponsible in his entire career—to satisfy his lust he had once more jeopardized the future of the French monarchy.

However, he was just as capable of playing a double game in love as in war. When news of his annulment from Margot arrived on 17 October he allowed his envoys to proceed with negotiations for the hand of a Tuscan princess, not so much from a sense of duty to the nation as from a need to arrive at an advantageous agreement over the vast sums he owed to Grand Duke Ferdinand de Medici who had financed his campaigns against the Spaniard. The Florentine marriage took on even more financial importance when further debts were incurred to subsidize the campaign against Charles Emmanuel of Savoy. During the latter’s visit to Henri in late 1599 and early 1600 Henriette was among those whom he tried to bribe, giving her presents and promising to stop the Medici marriage. Henri got wind of this and on 21 April 1600 wrote angrily to the woman he now called ‘my own heart’ demanding that she send back both his ring and his promise and reproaching her with a wicked nature and with ingratitude—he had made her Marquise de Verneuil, a title which was accompanied by a splendid château. Despite this disillusionment they were soon living together again and only the longed for pregnancy prevented the new Marquise from accompanying him on the Savoy campaign.

Henriette might well have become Queen but for a thunderbolt—in the literal sense. Far gone with child, she was resting in her bedchamber at Fontainebleau in June 1600 when the room was struck by lightning which actually passed under her bed. Terror and shock made her miscarry, dropping a dead boy who had he lived would have been Dauphin. The King now regarded his promise as invalidated, even if Mme de Verneuil did not, and in October he was married to Marie de Medici, the twenty-seven-year-old daughter of His Serene Highness, the late Francesco I, Grand Duke of Tuscany, by an Austrian Archduchess. It was a sound choice. Her uncle, the present Grand Duke, was anti-Spanish, respected by the Pope, and fabulously rich besides being able to exert invaluable pressure on the Florentine money market. The wedding was celebrated by proxy at Florence; ironically the Duc de Bellegarde deputized for Henri; some years after his death the occasion was portrayed exuberantly and inaccurately—the King is shown as present—by Rubens. Marie then sailed for France, accompanied by a fleet of Tuscan galleys. All this time her husband was living with Henriette, as though nothing had happened, while writing graceful and apparently love-sick letters to the Queen he had never seen.

Although thoroughly desirable from a political point of view, Queen Marie was less desirable for her personal charms. Fortunately among the multitude of female types for which the King had a weakness was one for fat goddesses of the sort immortalized by Rubens, steatopygous charmers with deep, dimpled rolls of silky pink flesh and bright golden tresses—there is a certain kinship with the old English barmaid. Marie de Medici was of this kind with wits and character to match, those of a vulgar mare, selfish, overbearing, opinionated and irredeemably stupid; she had inherited none of that Medici subtlety and brilliance which had been so evident in her formidable relative and predecessor. However, at first her true qualities were not apparent. By 8 December she had reached Lyons where the King arrived on the evening of the next day, having galloped through the pouring rain after saying a fond farewell to Henriette. As soon as he had supped he was in bed with his spouse. Marie, who was at least a full-blooded Italian and had waited too long for a husband, performed so well during the consummation that afterwards the King boasted of her prowess to his appreciative cronies. After a month’s marital bliss he left Lyons and rode hard for Paris where he lovingly rejoined Henriette. Here with some apprehension he waited for his Queen who was making a slow and leisurely state progress towards her new home.

The horrified noblewoman whom Henri had entrusted with the task of informing Queen Marie that Mme de Verneuil would be one of her ladies-in-waiting, took to her bed with a feigned illness. By now an angry Queen had learnt all about Henriette and the Royal sex life. When the dread moment finally came and a spitting Henriette was introduced by some intrepid dowager Henri blurted out, ‘She has been my mistress—now she is going to be your most biddable and obedient servant.’ Unfortunately ‘the most biddable and obedient servant’ continued to scowl viciously at the Queen, whom she later described as ‘your fat Florentine banker’, who had ruined all her fine hopes, refusing to curtsey whereupon the King had to push her down by main force to kneel before an infuriated Queen. This did not bode well for Henri’s naïve belief that he might obtain a harmonious ménage à trois. He also appointed another old friend lady-in-waiting, the Marquise de Guercheville, who had once refused to sleep with him, saying, ‘I’m making you a lady of honour because you really are one.’

He continued to sleep with both Marie and Henriette who both gave him children. However, after a year of this strenuous relationship the Queen triumphed, and on 27 September 1601 she bore a Dauphin; ‘the birth was very hard and the infant laboured till he was all of a purple colour’.²⁴ The King was beside himself with happiness and the child was given the name of Louis, ‘so sweet and dear to France for the memory of the great St Lewis and of the good King Lewis XII, father of the people’.²⁵ Throughout France cannon roared, Te Deums thundered and a delighted country danced and sang with joyful relief that the dynasty’s future was secure. It is ironical in view of his legendary lack of interest in sex that the future Louis XIII should have had such a begetting. Marie went on to give Henri a legitimate quiverful, while Henriette continued to produce proofs of his affection.

With all these distractions the King did not neglect his cares of state. He and Sully laboured to increase the Royal revenues. It is impossible to exaggerate the nightmare complexity of the Ancien Régime taxation system with its crazy mosaic of regional and social variations in assessment and imposition, its host of levies, dues and tariffs, ordinary and extraordinary, direct and indirect, sometimes nominal, sometimes crushing and frequently self-defeating, and its hydra-headed multitude of exemptions, the whole administered by a battening host of greedy officials; Dallington shuddered at ‘the infinite number in all France, vpon which they lye, as thicke as the Grassehoppers in Aegypt’.²⁶ Why this chaotic system could not be simplified was of course a question of fundamental law; the rights of those who levied taxes had to be protected no less than the rights of those who were exempt from them, official posts being sacrosanct. All that Henri and Sully could hope to do was to try to work this fantastically cumbersome and antiquated engine: it was a question of oil rather than spare parts, let alone of new machinery.

They had first to combat the now almost traditional practices of embezzlement and plain theft which devoured the greater part of the revenue, and to force those who collected monies due to the King to pay them into his treasury. Much of the Royal income from indirect taxes reached him through the agency of ‘farmers’ whom the impossible system made indispensable; at least they had an incentive to extract the maximum from the unfortunate taxpayer. By cutting their percentage Sully made an immediate profit without impairing the tax farmers’ greedy industry. Unlawful exemptions were set aside and corrupt assessments readjusted. In the words of Péréfixe the Superintendent of Finance ‘had so well bridled both the gatherers and the farmers that they could no longer devour those great morsels they did heretofore’.²⁷

Sir George Carew was full of admiration:

When Sully came first to the managing of the revenues, he found (as he himself told me) all things out of order, full of robbery, of officers full of confusion, no treasure, no munition, no furniture for the king’s houses and the crown indebted three hundred million; that is three millions of pounds sterling. Since that time, that in February 1608, he had acquitted one hundred and thirty millions of that debt, redeeming the most part of the revenues of the crown that were mortgaged; that he had brought good store of treasure into the Bastille, filled most of the arsenals with munition, furnished most of the king’s houses with tapestry and other movables; and where the farms of the whole realm amounted then but to 800,000 1. sterling, this year 1609, he had let them out for 1,000,000 1. and that without exacting any more upon the people than was paid before, but only by reducing that to the king’s coffers which was embezzled by under-officers.²⁸

To appreciate the true magnitude of Sully’s achievement it is necessary to know a little about the cumbersome machinery which he had to use. The principal direct tax was the Taille. In the misleadingly named pays d’élection this was an arbitrarily assessed percentage of farm income, but in thepays d’état, where taxes were voted by the province’s Estates, a specified percentage of a man’s actual property. As the nobility and clergy were exempt and many of the richer bourgeois managed to purchase exemption theTaille fell almost exclusively on the bowed backs of the peasantry, causing much misery and hardship. Carew must have had this most hated of all taxes in mind when he accused the French King of ‘sharing the booty gotten from the common people … with the clergy, nobility, gentry and officers of justice…’.²⁹

Yet, while he proudly proclaimed himself to be the first nobleman in France, Henri was also conscious that he was ‘father of his people’; he cared for his peasants genuinely if unsentimentally. In 1600 the King told Charles Emmanuel of Savoy: ‘Should God let me live longer I will see that no peasant in my realm is without the means to have a chicken in his pot.’³⁰ Indeed this wish for a chicken in every pot every Sunday is one of the most enduring of the legends of Henri IV. He knew that France depended on thelaboureur; hearing, in 1610, that Royal troops in Champagne were pillaging a district he shouted with fury. ‘Leave at once, give the orders—you’ll answer for it.’ Henri told his officers wildly, ‘What! if you ruin the people who feed me, who supply the needs of the state, who then is going to pay your pensions, gentlemen? Vive Dieu! to rob my people is to rob me.’³¹ This is why in the eighteenth century Henri IV was described as the only French King whose memory was kept green by the poor.

The most important of the indirect taxes was the Gabelle, a duty on salt which for no reason save tradition varied widely from province to province; in some regions prices were twenty-five times the cost of production while the salt had to be purchased from licensed warehouses who provided two qualities—one for the table, the other for pickling. The collection of this infuriating tax was organized by the ‘Farmers-General’ who in turn employed subfarmers, each deducting a handsome profit. The farmers also collected another tax similar to the Gabelle, the Aides or duties on wine and cider. In addition there were the Douanes, customs levied at internal as well as external frontiers; merchandise entering a province, and sometimes certain towns, had to pay duty—goods from the Kingdom’s borders might be mulcted as much as forty times before reaching Paris. Assessment and collection of all these taxes was dictated by no fixed standards or practice and often decided by such irresponsible factors as opposition from local magnates—or the lack of it—or, more usually, sheer crass inefficiency.

Another source of revenue was the much decried Paulette. Offices and titles were already being sold, just as in Jacobean England one could buy a peerage or a baronetcy. However, in 1604, on the advice of a lawyer named Paulet, the French Crown decreed that in future any office which was bought became the buyer’s absolute property in return for an annual payment of one sixtieth of the purchase price and could then be re-sold, bequeathed or inherited; such property also conferred the privileges of nobility including tax exemption. Many contemporaries were horrified by this apparently spendthrift measure. Dallington considered it ‘a very dangerous & hurtfull Marchandise, both for the Prince and subiect’³² while ‘touching this selling of offices’ commented Sir George Carew, ‘many suppose that the king receives greater prejudice therein than the profit or gain he draws thereout is worth’.³³ No doubt Henri regarded the Paulette as a temporary expedient. Yet there were at least some arguments in its favour. A new nobility of hereditary magistrates was created to balance the old feudal nobility, an innovation which also furthered Henri’s policy of favouring the lawyers and the upper bourgeoisie. In addition it made for social mobility. Before the Revolution almost every rich self-made man could and did buy a title; professional pedigree forgers provided him with impeccably feudal ancestors. Indeed the class structure of the Ancien Régime was far less rigid than is generally supposed, the aristocratic origins of perhaps most of the nobility resting on make believe rather than genuine blue blood. This was a direct consequence of the Paulette.

Sully was responsible for implementing reforms; most of these were simple economies of which his talents as a miser made him the ideal enforcer. He combined the functions of Minister of Finance, Minister of the Interior, Minister of Transport and Minister of Works and was regarded as a sort of Prime Minister, although unlike Richelieu or Mazarin he did not control foreign policy. A glutton for work, rising at four in the morning to begin an exhausting day, he never spared himself. Nor did he spare others in his demands for properly audited accounts and detailed returns. His committees of privilege examined the nobles’ rights to pensions and exemptions, to Crown lands and revenues, demanding full restitution where these had been usurped. These, together with his sternness, his meanness and his gauche arrogance made him the most hated man in France. Soissons thought to dispose of him by a duel but Henri ‘caused it to be notified that whosoever should attempt Sully should find the king’s own person for his second’.³⁴

Henri’s employment of this unpleasant minister enabled him to avoid much of the odium incurred by unpopular policies, as Carew understood very well: ‘… the King supporting Sully in all his rough courses, which he hath taken for the encreasing of the revenues of his crown, he hath found great profit thereby himself. But Sully hath thereby made himself extremely odious to great and small …’. ³⁵ In fact Henri was surprisingly thrifty. Carew wrote:

He is excellent also in his oeconomical faculty, or looking into matters of profit; omitting no means or advantage of enriching his realm generally, nor of drawing the best offices and inheritances to his children both legitimate and natural. In way of liberality he payeth more pensions than ever any of his predecessors did; and therein also he useth great art and need to furnish the sums requisite thereto, out of means little burdensome to himself, and distributeth them with great choice to persons of importance who may either serve him in his occasions or at least be concerned by the means thereof, from being busy in attempting against himself.³⁶

Dallington was almost shocked by this thriftiness: ‘For my part, I thinke he giues S.P.Q.R. not Senatus populoque Romano: that is, to all sorts of people, but Si Peu Que Rien, so little, as scarse any at all. They say, that the chamber of Accounts, is to examine the Kings gifts: and if they find any vnmeasurable, to shorten them.’ Henri ‘makes money with his teeth saith the Frenchman, meaning his sparing of great and superfluous expence at his table’.³⁷ In fact like so many of his fellow countrymen he was careful rather than mean.

By 1602 the French nobility was angrily discontented. Powers which it had to come to consider as a right during the last forty years were being whittled away so that its members could no longer live like princes. Not only had they lost their private armies and their fiefs but tax reforms, examination of privileges and the enforcement of the laws were seriously, indeed ruinously, hurting their pocket while the price rise still continued; every magnate was affected, finding it harder each day to maintain his lordly state. Insult went with injury. If the King’s measures were irksome, as implemented by Sully and his minions they were outrageous. Moreover, great nobles resented their exclusion from the King’s Council and from centres of influence in time of peace, together with the unpalatable fact that positions of real power were kept for upstarts like Sully or for those pretentious, grasping bourgeois who came from nowhere yet whom the King so obviously favoured. Therefore if the end of anarchy also meant the end of neo-feudalism they preferred anarchy. No doubt Henri was a great King, but a nobleman had to live, and live furthermore in the style to which he was accustomed. There was a leader to weld their hot, fierce resentment into a really dangerous opposition which would strike back at the tyrant—Biron. With malevolent industry that implacable though secret enemy approached every disaffected element in France, every foe of Henri at home and abroad; Spain, Charles Emmanuel, intransigent Leaguers, the Huguenots and their chieftains, independent-minded towns, and even Henriette, that little viper in the King’s bosom who wished to spite her lover for jilting her. Above all the Marshal sought to rouse the entire nobility, whether a Prince of the Blood like Soissons, an overmighty Protestant lord like Bouillon, or some hedge-squire’s ragged cadet reduced to beggary by the disappearance of his sole income—loot. The nobles were about to turn on Henri and rend him, about to destroy France as a nation. It was the crisis of the restoration.

Biron’s chief abettor was his bosom friend, that picturesque ruffian, Charles, Comte d’Auvergne, a violent, malicious but subtle intriguer. The son of Charles IX was always in need of money to pay for his vices and dissipations. Not only did he make life a hell for his neighbours in Paris by his practical jokes and outrages but he never paid his lackeys who instead were told to go out into the streets and rob passers-by. An adventurer like this was only too pleased to help topple a King from his throne.

However, the plotters misjudged both the temper and the unity of the disaffected nobility. While the mood of its members was undeniably savage and though their nostalgia for the old, undisciplined days was keen enough, they were not prepared to risk their necks against so formidable an opponent as Henri IV without some tangible prospect of success. Not only were the firmness and efficiency which they so detested forbidding but his position was growing steadily stronger. As early as 1598 Dallington had noted that ‘ye daily heare his owne Subiects speake of him more liberally’,³⁸ and the birth of the Dauphin in 1601 had been another powerful psychological asset. In addition there were certain magnates who appeared to be wholeheartedly loyal. Such odds were far too great for a cautious trimmer like Soissons while the Protestant lords would never move unless they had the entire Religion behind them. In 1601 the Duc de Bouillon summoned the nine commanding officers of the Huguenots’ military organization to meet him secretly and then put forward Biron’s plan, an unholy alliance of the disaffected, which would share France between its members once Henri had been overthrown; the realm was to be divided into a number of principalities and free towns. D’Aubigné who was one of the nine spoke passionately against the proposal, arguing that idolaters never kept their bargains and that the Religion might well find itself in worse case than it was at present. (Henri once said that the word of d’Aubigné discontented was as good as another man’s gratitude.) The nine rejected the Duke’s proposal outright; he was given to understand that no support would be forthcoming from his co-religionists.

Nonetheless, Biron, encouraged by Spanish agents, was undeterred. During a mission to England in 1601, with ill-mannered effrontery he lamented the death of Elizabeth’s favourite, the Earl of Essex—who had been executed the previous year for an attempted coup d’état—to the Queen’s face, whereupon the angry old woman gave him a sharp lecture on presumption and told him to take warning by the fate of Essex, pointing at the Earl’s weathered mask which was still rotting on Tower Bridge.³⁹ But the Marshal blundered arrogantly on to his doom until his bubble burst in the spring of 1602. His former private secretary, the Sieur de La Fin, ‘a lively cunning intriguing fellow’, took fright and laid damning evidence before the authorities. He had kept drafts of the Marshal’s most treasonable correspondence by burning blank sheets of paper in their place in the fire in Biron’s bedchamber; his master, lying on the bed, was too lazy to supervise the burning. The plot which these revealed was capable of becoming a dangerous reality, despite the general lack of support from the nobility; when the time came Spain and Savoy would mass troops on the frontiers while Biron and Auvergne with their friends and relatives would raise disaffected areas of France.

Yet even now the King was reluctant to destroy the old comrade who had so often played Marshal Ney to his own Napoleon. In June Biron was invited to Fontainebleau where Henri walked him round the great garden, in all the soothing beauty of early summer, offering him a pardon if he would confess his treason. The Marshal refused violently, shouting he had no need of forgiveness as he had not committed any crime. Next morning, that of Thursday 13 June, the King again took him into the gardens for the same purpose and was again rebuffed. Just before midnight Biron and Auvergne, who had finally realized their peril and were trying to escape, were arrested. For the last time Henri tried to save his friend, saying, ‘Marshal, remember what I told you!’ But the traitor whom pride had brought to the brink of insanity remained coldly silent. ‘Good night, Baron de Biron,’ ended the King grimly; his use of the Marshal’s old title implied that he had meant to strip him of all his dignities.

His trial on 17 July 1602 was both grandiose and horrific, the last act in a fallen hero’s self-destruction publicly played out against a backcloth of splendid pageantry. He was brought before the Great Chamber of the Parlement of Paris to which his fellow Peers of France had been summoned, an assembly which, as well as being the highest court of law in the land, was also the French equivalent of the House of Lords and no less dignified or daunting. However, the Marshal-Duke’s fellow Peers refused the summons (a precedent which lost them their legal and political voice for ever) so Biron was tried before twenty-seven judges, red robed, befurred and bonneted; it was an eloquent confrontation between the old and the new nobility; He rallied sufficiently to make a moving speech which owed more to art than to logic for he accused La Fin of having set on paper what he had merely pondered, in a hellish plot to bring him to his doom. But the judges, coldly dispassionate, were not to be deflected from that damning indictment. The Marshal was found guilty of High Treason and sentenced to be beheaded in the Place de Grève. Instead of showing a veteran’s cool indifference Biron raved and ranted, shrieking that the King owed his throne to him. The spectacle was as embarrassing as it was tragic. He had been destroyed by pride but his pride was that of a man who was mentally ill. His execution on 31 July was macabre to a degree. Henri spared him the torment of a death in public so the end came in the courtyard of the Bastille. Here, the half-crazed Marshal was led out to die at 5 o’clock in the afternoon. He behaved like a maniac, raging against fortune and refusing to have his eyes bandaged or his hair bound up; when at last he was dragged to the block the unnerved headsman struck him on the base of the skull and finally his head when hacked off bounced three times, spurting out far more blood than did his trunk.⁴⁰ This frightful scene was an oddly fitting end for a devotee of witchcraft. The King commented sadly, ‘I would have given 200,000 crowns that he had left room to pardon him. He did me good service though I saved his life three times.’

Auvergne was soon released, and escaped scot free. Henri was much criticized for this leniency to the bastard Valois who was hardly less guilty than Biron; it was said that he could not resist Henriette’s pleading for her half-brother. However, it is much more likely, as the Marshal de Bassompierre suggested, that Henri had not forgotten the deathbed of Charles IX who had commended his son to his protection. The King only killed when it was unavoidable. And Biron’s lurid end had caught the popular imagination, deterring many disaffected noblemen.

It even caught the popular imagination in England where a parallel was drawn with the fall of Essex. In 1608 George Chapman—whose translation of Homer was one day to be so admired by Keats—published his masterpiece: ‘The Conspiracie and Tragedie ofCharles Duke of Byron, Marshall of France. Acted lately in two playes.’ Biron was cast as a figure of Satanic grandeur, a fallen archangel whom the King does his best to save. Thus, he warns the Duke against an Iago-like La Fin:

Why suffer you that ill aboding vermin
To breed so near your bosom? be assured
His haunts are ominous; not the throats of ravens
Spent on infected houses, howls of dogs,
When no sound stirs, at midnight; apparitions
And strokes of spirits, clad in black men’s shapes,
Or ugly women’s; the adverse decrees
of constellations, nor security
In vicious peace, are surer fatal ushers
of femall mischiefs and mortalities
Than this prodigious fiend is, where he fawns;
Lafiend, and not La Fin, he should be call’d.

But in the end the King cries:

Come you are an atheist, Byron, and a traitor
Both foul and damnable. Thy innocent self?
No leper is so buried quick in ulcers
As thy corrupted soul.

Not only did Chapman tell the story with remarkable accuracy, but he also portrayed the French court, even Henriette. After a masque Henri exclaims:

This show hath pleased me well, for that it figures
The reconcilement of my Queen and mistress.

Indeed, when the two plays were first performed in 1607—before the English court—the horrified French Ambassador had its actors arrested whereupon various offending passages, which included an entire act, were removed. Nevertheless. ‘The Conspiracie and Tragedie’ shows that Henri had his admirers in Jacobean England, Chapman depicting him as a model sovereign, wise and humane, with an exalted concept of kingship and its responsibilities:

He should be born grey-headed that will bear
The sword of Empire.⁴¹

Henri IV knew that if France were to prosper much more was needed than more efficient methods of taxation. Mercantilism, the theory of economics then universally accepted and to which Henri and Sully both subscribed, had an oddly modern flavour except that capital was identified exclusively with gold and silver of which it was necessary for a country to earn and keep the greatest possible share. The maximum of goods must be exported, the minimum imported; hence though little importance was attached to internal, domestic trade, home industries were keenly fostered. To achieve prosperity state aid was therefore essential, together with high customs walls and a numerous and hardworking population. Few financial ministers of the period were able to put the theory into practice with such devotion and success as Sully. That he was able to do so was in large part due to his Royal master.

Sully gave French agriculture a golden encomium: ‘le labourage et le pastourage estoient les deux mamelles dont la France estoit alimentée et les vrais mines et trésors du Pérou’—tillage and pasture were the two paps from which France took her nourishment and the true mines and treasures of Peru. Undeniably the Kingdom’s greatest source of wealth lay in its crops and livestock but its unscientific husbandry left much to be desired. In 1600 Olivier de Serres published a revolutionary treatise on agriculture, the Théâtre d’agriculture des champs. On his model farm at Pradel in Languedoc this Huguenot squire tried to make better use of the soil, sowing grass where normally land was left to lie fallow, introducing root crops for winter fodder, and importing hops from England and maize from Italy. His book caused a sensation and so impressed Henri (who shared his grandson Charles’ enthusiasm for science) that to popularize it a part was read to him every day at dinner; as he always dined in public, when not only courtiers but any curious sightseer might watch him, no more effective promotion exercise could be imagined. Disappointingly, de Serres’ innovations were adopted by only a few enthusiasts; too many nobles took no interest in their domaines while the peasants, conservative as always, clung stubbornly to the old, wasteful ways. In certain areas Dutch experts were engaged to drain fen and march land but this too was on a very limited scale. Even so peaceful conditions and the natural industry of the French peasant were quite sufficient to win abundant harvests from their country’s rich earth. Thus Carew could write that by 1608 France was exporting grain to the extent that it ‘robbeth all Spain of their silver and gold that is brought thither out of their Indies’.⁴²

To encourage trade communications were improved. Waterways—the period’s railways—received special attention, locks and quays being installed along the rivers while canals were dug, notably the junction between the Seine and the Loire. Roads were repaired and provision made for maintenance; as Grand Voyer Sully ordered elms to be planted at the roadside—like Napoleon’s poplars—trees which the peasants called ‘Rosnys’ for many years. Such measures increased the yield from internal tariffs, for Sully was not sufficiently daring to give trade a far more powerful stimulus by abolishing them. Nevertheless his measures gave considerable benefit to both external and internal trade; though the latter was of small interest to the government it nonetheless flourished, adding to the Kingdom’s general prosperity.

Like all good Mercantilists the King and Sully were anxious to limit imports of manufactured goods as well as of raw materials. During the recent breakdown of society there had been a widespread collapse in the production of many indispensable articles; in the 1590s the English had exploited the situation, sending shiploads of old hats and cast-off boots into Normandy where they sold at exorbitant prices. With the advent of peace French crafts and industries quickly re-established themselves, but this was not enough for the government who wished to reduce the import of foreign luxuries. Many new ideas came from Henri’s former valet-de-chambre, Bartelemy de Laffemas, another Huguenot who in 1601 founded a Chamber of Commerce: ‘It was said that under his leadership the Commission de Commerce had 150 meetings in little more than two years between 1601 and 1604. Silk manufacture, horse breeding, linen and fustian manufacture, gilt leatherwork on the Spanish model, glass, tiles, tapestry, rich textiles in the south, river and canal works, shipbuilding and general inventions were only a few of the matters investigated.’⁴³ The King summoned Olivier de Serres to Paris to discuss the revival of the silk industry; mulberry trees were introduced from Italy as well as skilled Florentine silk weavers, and if progress was small it was substantial, forming a foundation for the great French silk industries of Louis XIV’s reign. Other luxury industries which were founded during this period were the Gobelin tapestry looms—in those days tapestry took the place of wallpaper—and the Savonnerie carpet manufactory, besides glass blowing and pottery. Mirror glass and lace making also prospered. Such basic products as wool and cloth likewise received attention, as did the primitive iron and steel industry, lead piping and even fresh water fisheries. Mineral resources were scientifically investigated and after deposits of gold, silver, lead, copper, iron and tin had been founded Henri created the office of Grand Master of the Mines. Royal forests were reclaimed and replanted. A flood of edicts issued from the King’s Council, dealing with a bewildering multitude of projects. None of the country’s natural resources was neglected. While it must be admitted that many of these schemes never reached fruition they were nonetheless the basis of much prosperity in later reigns.

Nor was commercial diplomacy neglected. A spectacularly profitable treaty with Turkey obtained special privileges for French traders in the rich Levantine ports, including resident consuls, besides allowing French smacks to fish in North African waters. In 1604 a tariff war with Spain, who desperately needed French imports closed very much in France’s favour, while treaties with James I put an end to English piracy in the Channel and gave French and English merchants equal rights in each other’s country. In Germany an understanding was reached with the still powerful Hansa. By the strict Mercantilist creed these were no mean gains.

There is a tendency to regard Sully as an earlier Colbert—Louis XIV’s financial wizard who created the prosperity which made possible the Grand Siècle—and therefore to underestimate Henri’s contribution. As David Ogg says, ‘In comparison with Colbert Sully was little better than a painstaking clerk.’ On the other hand, unlike Louis, Henri IV did far more than merely support and encourage his minster. While one must not make the mistake of belittling the latter’s role, it is nonetheless true that, despite his brilliance as organizer and administrator, Sully undeniably lacked his Royal master’s fertile, creative imagination, his enthusiastic response to new ideas. In fact the economic achievements of Henri’s reign were the product of a joint effort, of a partnership between King and minister. Thus it was Henri whose interest was largely responsible for the re-establishment of the silk industry, who preached the agricultural revolution of Olivier de Serres. Indeed in the matter of colonies the King showed himself to be a more enterprising and at the same time more orthodox Mercantilist than Sully who regarded them as a waste of money.

The French had been visiting Canada for fish and furs since 1534 but they had never settled. Then, in 1597 Henri gave the Marquis de la Roche a commission as Lieutenant-General with orders to found a colony but the expedition was unsuccessful. Other attempts proved equally fruitless until 1608 when the heroic explorer Samuel de Champlain, who had fought in the Royal armies against Spain and whom the new King knew personally, managed to establish a tiny but lasting settlement of fur traders at Quebec. Throughout all the failures and setbacks Henri continued to encourage the would-be colonists in the face of Sully’s dour scepticism. This foundation of what eventually became a Franco-American culture was certainly no mean achievement. Its immediate significance, however, is to show that the King was sufficiently open minded to adopt and further economic projects which were not those of his great minister.

Many books discuss the economic restoration of France under Henri IV, but few convey the immense extent and feverish tempo of the sheer work involved, nor the surprisingly modern degree of state intervention; commissions sat constantly to investigate problems of finance, administration and technology, new laws were enacted every month, laws which the King, that natural lawyer, not only read but helped to draft. If he disliked long debates, nevertheless it was he who ultimately had to take all the decisions; despite his women and his hunting Henri IV was his own first minister, his own Richelieu or Mazarin. Indeed in many respects he was strikingly like a modern Prime Minister or President. The only other French ruler to possess his thoroughness and his capacity for work, and perhaps too his legal sense, was Napoleon.

Henri was nonetheless deeply appreciative of Sully’s loyal service, rewarding his bearish henchman with the highest dignities; he was made Governor of the Bastille in 1602, Governor of Poitou in 1603 and at last Duke and Peer of France. These honours were accompanied by suitable emoluments while the new Duke was allowed to indulge his avarice to the full, amassing a vast fortune; no one can deny that he earned every sou. Indeed some of Henri’s panegyrists were inclined to eulogize Sully, like Péréfixe who described him as ‘a man of good order, exact, a good husband, a keeper of his word; not prodigal nor proud, nor carried away by vain follies or expenses, or play, or women, or any other things not convenient for a man Entrusted with such an Employment’.⁴⁴Tallemant’s sneers were nearer the mark: ‘There was never any Superintendent so crabbed and surly.’⁴⁵ Sully’s lack of personal charm makes all the more commendable the support of Henri, that lover of good fellowship.

Certain magnates still dared to plot against the King. First, there was the amateurish scheme of the Prince de Joinville, youngest of the sons of Guise and of whom Sully commented ‘nothing could be more light, more whimsical and more unsteady’. The King was contemptuously merciful, merely banishing this foolish young lord: ‘Here is the prodigal son himself, I shall use him like a child and pardon him for yours and Monsieur de Rosny’s sake,’ he told his parents. The conspiracy of 1604 between the Comte d’Auvergne and the d’Entragues, father and daughter, was a much more dangerous business; their project was that Henriette and her children would flee to Spain whereupon Philip III would recognize Henriette’s son as King of France as soon as Henri had been assassinated. The King’s she-wolf mistress resolved to avenge herself in this way when in the summer of 1604 her father was ordered to surrender that infamous Promise of Marriage (which had been concealed in a bottle). Two attempts were made to ambush Henri but both failed and then Henriette’s sister informed the authorities. Auvergne and Entragues were condemned to death in February 1605 while Henriette was confined to a convent. However, the King could never be stern with women for very long, even if his mistress’s perfidy must have wounded him cruelly. Yet the true extent of her involvement was uncertain and for all her malice it is unlikely that she would have connived at murder; indeed, infuriated by her half-brother’s attempts to incriminate her this woman ‘whom disgrace could not humble, whose insolence detection could not abate’, demanded ‘justice for myself, mercy for my father, and a rope for my brother’. Moreover it had been a very ineffectual conspiracy. Soon, fond as ever of her ‘beauty, wit and sprightliness’, Henri forgave Henriette though she never quite regained her old influence.

Much more formidable were the intrigues of the Duc de Bouillon who was not only supported by a swarm of relatives and vassals in the Limousin but had some hope of stirring up his co-religionists in 1605, the year in which the Edict of Nantes stipulated they must surrender their places de sûreté. The Huguenots were neither so realistic nor so tractable as they had been in 1601. When their general assembly met at Châtelherault at the end of July 1605 it was proposed that future meetings should be held in camera, that resolutions should be kept secret, and that members of the Religion should strive to implement such resolutions whatever the cost to their own lives or property. The proposal was motivated by a determination to retain the places de sûreté which formed the foundation of the Reform’s para-military organization; its implementation would have made the Protestants of France more of a state-within-a-state than ever, removing all Royal influence. The King immediately recognized the danger, while realizing that the proposal stemmed from fear and insecurity rather than from any genuinely aggressive intent. He therefore sent Sully, himself a sound if flexible Calvinist, to the assembly as Royal commissioner. This plain-spoken advocate argued bluntly enough but was all the more persuasive for his rough realism; the assembly rejected the proposal in return for Henri’s guarantee that the Reform might continue to occupy its places de sûreté for a further seven years. Mishandled, Huguenot apprehensions could have resulted in yet another War of Religion; they were to do so during the next reign. As it was Carew noted in 1609, ‘The body of those of the reformed religion is a great thorn in his foot, being not only constrained to tolerate them as a different regiment from the rest of his realm, but to give fortresses into their hands also, and to pay for keeping them against himself.’⁴⁶

There remained Bouillon. The King marched into the Limousin in the autumn of 1605, blowing up his strongholds and hanging his adherents. The Duke had taken refuge in his town of Sedan, which then constituted an independent principality, but at the end of March 1606 Henri arrived there with an army and fifty cannon, to receive Bouillon’s humble submission and surrender. The last challenge to the Royal authority had been successfully averted; the Bourbon had completed his political restoration of the French monarchy.

The magnitude of Henri’s achievement in restoring good government and prosperity to France may be judged by comparing it with the legacy of Philip II in Spain and of Elizabeth and James I in England. Of the three great national monarchies of western Europe France alone managed to adapt her traditional administrative system to the problems of the price rise, and this after thirty years of war and destruction. In contrast Philip II ruined Spain while the Tudor and Stuart failure to ‘live of their own’ kept England weak until the final overthrow of monarchical government in 1689. Only France weathered the adverse economic conditions of the period, so that she was able to exploit her resources fully and reach that plateau of splendour which was the Grand Siècle, a grandeur which might never have been achieved but for the restoration of the French state by Henri IV.

These are the dry bones of his achievement. But he had done something more. Any student of French history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is familiar with all too many accounts of the peasant’s miserable existence, of their brutish life of hunger and of backbreaking toil. Yet Henri’s reign does seem to have been kinder to them, at any rate in some parts of France. Years later an old abbé could write with a naïve lyricism of the countryside of Touraine as it had been in 1609, a description which is vividly at variance with the stark scenes depicted by La Bruyère or painted by Le Nain:

The picture I keep of things as they were in those days still fills me with happiness. I see again, with the keenest pleasure, the beauty of the countryside as it was then; it seems to me that meadows were greener than they are now, that trees bore more fruit. Nothing was so sweet as to listen to the cooing of the birds, the lowing of kine, or the songs of the shepherds. Flocks were driven to the fields in safety while the peasants ploughed the land to sow wheat which tax gatherers and soldiers never plundered. They had goods and possessions sufficient enough and slept in their own beds. When it came to harvest time how pleasant it was to see troops of reapers, each one stooped by the other, working the furrows and garnering bunches of corn which the stronger tied for the rest to load as sheaves into the carts; afterwards children who had been watching the flocks far away were able to glean ears of corn which a feigned carelessness had left for them. Rosy village maidens cut the corn side by side with the boys and from time to time their toil was broken by a rustic meal taken in the shade of some apple or pear tree whose branches were laden with fruit to fill their laps…. After the harvest the peasants chose a holiday when they could all meet which they called ‘the harvest gosling’ (such was its name in the district). They invited not just friends but their masters too and were overjoyed if these took the trouble to come…. When our good people celebrated their children’s marriages it was a delight to see how they dressed; for beside the bride’s finery, never less than a red gown and a head-dress trimmed with tinsel and glass beads, the parents were clad in their own pleated blue dresses which they had taken out from chests scented with lavender, dried roses and rosemary. I speak of men as much as of women for they too had their pleated cloaks which they wore over their shoulders with high stiff collars like those of certain monks. Peasant girls, their hair neatly arranged, flaunted parti-coloured petticoats. Nor were wedding favours lacking; everyone wore them at his belt or on his shoulder. Then there was a concert with bagpipes, flutes and hautboys and, after a sumptuous banquet, country dancing which lasted until nightfall…. No one grumbled about unjust taxes; everybody paid his due cheerfully and I never remember hearing of soldiers plundering a parish, let alone laying waste entire provinces as merciless enemies have so often done since…. Thus it was at the close of the reign of good Henri IV, whose end was the end of so many good things and the beginning of so many bad, for an angry demon took away the life of that great prince.

Perhaps the idyll of the abbé de Marolles existed only in an old man’s nostalgia, perhaps it was some chimera from a long mourned youth. Nonetheless the French folk memory undeniably looked back—and still does—to Henri’s reign as an oasis of plenty. It, like the good abbé, realizes that here was a King who did at least try and did partially succeed in making come true that golden dream which was and is la belle et douce France.⁴⁷