CHAPTER 7
‘Thus, as bright sunshine by its radiance and its heat lights up the skies, warms the earth, makes plants green again, gives colour to the flowers and ripens fruit, so do true kings by the wisdom of their rule and by their bounty hearten men’s spirits, spread confidence, cause sweet hope to be reborn everywhere, protect their peoples from foreign invaders, and fructify and multiply their goods.’
attributed by Sully to Henri IV.1
‘… he even took delight in balls and sometimes danced, though, to speak the truth, with more spirit than gracefulness.’
Péréfixe2
Though he came from the ancient line of Capet and was a Son of St Louis, Henri IV was nonetheless the founder of a new dynasty. By nature unceremonious he yet knew that if the advent of the Bourbons was to be dignified with fitting majesty he could not afford to neglect the trappings of royalty; ceremony, fine buildings and martial pomp were indispensable. For the first ten years of his reign France was at war, so that his courtiers were sabre-rattling cavaliers, while a Parisian monarch had been succeeded by one whose accent and tastes were markedly provincial; the Béarnais retained his southern tones, spoke Gascon to his Gascons, loved Jurançon wine and the cuisine of Pau. Often he rode in from the field, without bothering to change clothes which were tattered and sweaty after days in the saddle, to what was in spirit a cavalry mess whose habitués delighted in Rabelaisian wit, drank hard, swore hard, laughed, swaggered and boasted uproariously. Some ladies found the atmosphere so overpoweringly masculine as to be distasteful, even if a lusty heterosexual activity had ousted transvestist divertissements. When peace came and armour gave place to ermine the King’s courtiers were still ‘his gallant Men for War’, his old captains and marshals who like their master felt most at ease in jackboots and a leather coat, the entourage of a Napoleon rather than a Louis XIV.
Many historians have stigmatized this court as a bear garden, a cross between barracks and bawdy house. That staunch champion of Henri III, M. Philippe Erlanger, maintains that ‘the survivors of the old reign found it hard to accustom themselves to the violence and vulgarity which had replaced the former refinements. There was no trace, nowadays, of courtesy and politeness. Feasts degenerated into orgies, banquets into drunken brawls, masquerades gave rise to pitched battles, and even court ballets were full of ribaldry’.3 Critics are fond of citing the Italian Marquise de Rambouillet’s flight to the rue Saint Thomas du Louvre where her hôtel became Paris’ first true salon. But Valois affectation or bluestocking preciosity are hardly good yardsticks. Other European courts of the period were far more debauched or else ludicrously pompous. The drunken buffoonery of that of England under James I was notorious while the Elector of Saxony could sit gorging at his table for eight hours with no comment other than emptying a stein over a page’s head; brass bands were invented at this time to drown the noise of eating at German courts. At the other extreme, courtiers of Elizabeth I or Charles I knelt when their sovereign passed by, while the ridiculous etiquette of Spain actually caused the death of Philip III who died from erysipelas made fatal by the heat in his chamber; it was beneath any grandee’s dignity to open a window.
The Louvre and Tuileries of Henri IV lacked neither grace nor splendour; in some ways his court was remarkably like that of his grandson Charles II at Whitehall. Hunting and whoring did not preclude balls, ballets or the play. Though the exquisite conceits and exotic manners of the Valois had departed and though Henri was irrepressibly friendly and informal, the monarch’s public actions were performed with glittering mediaeval ceremony, gilded by the last rays of the Renaissance, a symbolic ritual indispensable to a hierarchic society. Also, sinner that he was, the King attended Mass with decorous pomp, The essential rhythm of court life remained unchanged; there had simply been a violent and somewhat self-conscious reaction against the effeminate or the perverse, a reaction which if a trifle over virile must have seemed no more than a fresh healthy breeze sweeping through some stuffy, scented, overheated boudoir. The Valois pantomime was remembered only as a feverish, noxious dream.
Some found the King’s lack of stateliness disconcerting. A dowager who had known the disdainful Henri III sniffed when she first met his successor: ‘I have seen the King but not His Majesty.’4 Dallington was quite shocked:
Hee is naturally very affable and familiar, and more (we strangers thinke) then fits the Maiesty of a great King of France…. Familiarity breeds contempt and contempt treason…. You saw here in Orleans, when the Italian Commedians were to play before him, how himselfe came whifling with a small wand to scowre the coast and make place for the rascall Players (for indeed these were the worst company, and such as in their owne Countrey are out of request): you have not seene in the Innes of Court, a Hall better made, a thing, methought, most derogatory to the Maiesty of a King of France.5
Yet on occasion Henri could be stately enough, for he understood the magic of pomp. With republicans it was especially effective. When the forty ambassadors of the Swiss Cantons were received by him on 16 October 1602 an awed L’Estoile noted how: ‘The great chamber of the Louvre was guarded by two ranks of Scots in line, and each flight of the Louvre’s staircase was similarly guarded by two ranks of Archers in line, and outside, as far as the rue St Honoré, by companies of the Regiment of Guards.’ The ambassadors found Henri on his throne, surrounded by Princes of the Blood and great officers of state, all richly dressed but outshone by the King:
His Majesty was magnificently and sumptuously dressed, more so than anyone had ever seen him, with an aigrette of diamonds of incalculable value in his hat, which was black and white, with a scarf of the same colours completely covered in diamonds. On seeing them enter His Majesty rose, doffing his hat to them, and then sat down and replaced his hat whereupon they came forward, bowing, to kiss the hand which His Majesty rested on his knee while with the other he shook their hands in turn and clapped them on the shoulder.6
Henri never practised the hauteur of his grandson Louis XIV. Anyone who saluted him received an affable nod, the King raising his hat with a ‘Serviteur Jacques, Serviteur’; he always employed the old fashion of Christian or family name instead of ‘Monsieur’. He liked to dress plainly: ‘For he ordinarily wore gray Cloaths, with a Doublet of sattin or Taffata, without slashing, Lace or Embroydery.’ The famous white plume of Navarre in his wide brimmed hat was his sole affectation. He had no use for a hairdresser and like James I of England was careless about washing, for this was an unclean age. He stank abominably; on her wedding night, Marie drenched herself in scent but nonetheless suffered horribly while Henriette once told him, ‘You smell like carrion.’ Years later Louis XIII’s friendliest compliment was, ‘I’m near my father—I smell his armpit.’7 However, the legend of Henri’s chewing garlic like fruit so that his breath felled an ox at twenty paces is apocryphal even if he had a fondness for onion soup. His teeth were bad, stopped with lead and gold, and in later years he had to wear glasses, crudely ground crystal lenses with clumsy silver frames. Indeed his appearance must have been far from impressive for he was so small that despite his agility he always needed a mounting block to climb on to his horse.
Yet this rough, shabby, bespectacled, garrulous little man with his provincial accent and his clowning was renowned for both irresistible charm and a power of terrifying. He fashioned his manners towards his subjects with careful precision. Carew understood him very well:
For his parts of manners and conversation, they are very sweet and pleasing, nothing sanguinary, not swollen with pride but with an excellent temperament he seemeth to equal himself to the meanest of his subjects in hearing and talking with them, and with the greatest and most potent he retaineth such a majesty, as makes them tremble, not only at his words, but also at his looks and countenances.8
If he gave his word it was as ‘Foy de Gentilhomme’; ‘we are all noblemen’, he would say to his lords and gentry, even in the presence of Princes of the Blood. Undoubtedly he played to the gallery. When an aged nonentity, M. de la Vieuville, a former maître d’hôtelto the Duc de Nevers, unctuously lamented his unworthiness to receive the St Esprit which his patron had obtained for him, the King answered, ‘Yes, I know very well, I know very well, but my nephew begged me.’ A dignitary sinking on his knees to deliver a graceful harangue knelt on a sharp-pointed cobblestone and shrieked out, ‘F——!’ ‘Good! that’s the best thing you could say; I don’t want any more speeches—you’ll spoil what you’ve just said,’ interrupted Henri.9 Orators who referred to heroes of antiquity were reminded that like the King himself at that particular moment such heroes had suffered from hunger and he wanted his dinner. And when some great lady came upon Henri relieving himself in a flower bed in the gardens of the Louvre the monarch greeted her with ‘Passe, ma belle, je le tiens!’ However, he met his match in his confessor, Fr Coton. ‘What would you do if one put you into bed with Mme la Marquise?’ asked Henri, grinning and pointing at Henriette. ‘Sire, I know what I ought to do but I don’t know what I would do,’ countered that subtle Jesuit. The King was on excellent terms with the Paris mob and roamed the streets of his capital—which he once described as ‘a nest of cuckolds’—with little or no escort.
He could laugh at himself. The bad relations between Henri and Marie frequently erupted into noisy squabbles, to the joy of gossip mongers. L’Estoile records how on 26 January 1607 ‘there was played at the Hôtel de Bourgogne a pleasant farce which was attended by the King, the Queen, and most of the princes, and lords and ladies of the court. It was about a husband and wife who were always quarrelling….’ Everyone understood the unsubtle allusions in what was obviously a riotous performance which ended with three lawyers who had been called in to arbitrate being carried off to Hell by three devils. The legal fraternity were unamused by this dénouement and committed the entire cast to prison but Henri ordered their release commenting that, ‘If one must speak of insult he had received more than anyone yet he pardoned them all and pardoned them willingly because they had made him laugh till he cried.’10
Once, hearing that he had been called a miser, Henri retorted, ‘I do three things very unlike a miser—I make war, I make love, and I build.’ Carew accounted ‘his buildings at Paris, St Germains, Fountainebleau, Monceaux and other places very huge and stately’ to be among those things which contributed to the court’s ‘chiefest splendour’. His most famous structures were the beloved château ‘in our delightful wilderness of Fontainebleau’ and the great gallery of vast length between the Louvre and the Tuileries. At Fontainebleau there were two courtyards, a ‘gallery of Diana’, a ‘gallery of the deer’, and many gardens beside the great canal which were furnished with bronze statues and fountains. English travellers particularly appreciated these gardens. Of Fontainebleau Fynes Moryson wrote: ‘And it is built (with Kingly Magnificence) of Free stone, diuided into foure Court-yards, with a large Garden which was then [1595] somewhat wild and vnmanured.’11 Another English traveller visited it, in 1608, the eccentric Thomas Coryate, by trade courtier, scholar and buffoon, that ‘Odcombe leg stretcher’ from Somerset who hung up his shoes in his parish church after his first great journey. He told his readers that ‘This Palace hath his name from the faire springs and fountaines, wherewith it is most abundantly watered that I neuer saw so sweete a place before; neither doe I thinke that all Christendome can yeeld the like for abundance of pleasant springs.’ He was more taken with the gardens than Moryson: ‘For most of the borders of each knot is made of Box, cut very low, and kept in very good order. The walkes about the gardens are many, whereof some are very long and of a conuenient breadth, being fairely sanded, and kept very cleane. One among the rest is inclosed with two very lofty hedges, most exquisitely made of filbird trees and fine fruits, and many curious arbours are made therein. By most of these walkes there runne very pleasant riuers, full of sundry delicate fishes.’ Coryate wondered at the tame storks and ostriches and also when ‘I was let in at a dore to a faire greene garden, where I saw pheasants of diuers sorts, vnto which there doth repaire at some seasons such a multitude of wild pheasants from the forrest, and woodes, and groues thereabout, that it is thought there are not so few as a thousand of them.’12 Henri himself loved to stroll in his gardens.
However, it was the Louvre which such travellers admired most. In 1599 Dallington marvelled: ‘From this Palace the King is building a Galery, which runnes along the riuer East and West, and his purpose is, it shall passe ouer the towne ditch with an Arch, and so continue to the Twilleries … so both these buildings shall bee vnited into one: which if euer it be done, will be the greatest and goodliest Palace of Europe.’13 Coryate, who saw the gallery when it had been almost completed was no less impressed:
After this I went into a place which for such a kind of roome excelleth in my opinion, not only al those that are now in the world, but also whatsoeuer were since the creation thereof, euen a gallery, a perfect description whereof wil require a large volume. It is deuided into three parts, two sides at both the ends, and one very large and spacious walke. One of the sides when I was there, was almost ended, hauing in it many goodly pictures of some of the Kings and Queenes of France, made most exactly in wainscot, and drawen out very liuely in oyle workes vpon the same. The roofe of most glittering and admirable beauty, wherein is much antique worke, with the picture of God and the Angels, the Sunne, the Moone, the Starres, the Planets, and other Celestiall signes. Yea so vnspeakably faire it is, that a man can hardly comprehend it in his mind, that hath not first seene it with his bodily eyes.14
Henri also finished the Louvre’s little gallery, begun by Catherine de Medici. At the Tuileries he created an orangery besides, in Coryate’s opinion, ‘the fairest garden for length of delectable walkes that euer I saw, but for variety of delicate fonts and springes much inferior to the Kings garden at Fountaine Beleau’.15 The Parisians were especially impressed by his palace outside the capital, at St Germain-en-Laye, where he built a succession of magnificent terraces overlooking the Seine.
Henri’s measures to enhance the new dynasty’s majesty went further than building palaces and embraced town planning and public health. Streets were widened and paved; indeed Coryate had thought that ‘many of the streetes are the durtiest, and so consequently the most stinking of all that euer I saw in any citie in my life’.16 The water supply was improved and a number of hospitals built, notably the Charité, the Aide Dieu and the Samaritaine. (These measures, together with stringent by-laws and nursing by religious orders, so abated the hitherto chronic menace of plague that in 1705 a Parisian wrote that there had been no serious outbreak of endemic disease for a century.)17 Attempts were made to raise the standard of ordinary housing. The most revolutionary project, begun in 1605 was a great new square on a grid pattern, the Place Royale, which had thirty-fivepavillons and arcades. On a similar scale was the Place Dauphine which contained a bourse or exchange. In the last two years of his reign Henri was busy with a plan for an entire new district, the immense ‘Porte et Place de France’, which was to have twenty-four streets (named after the provinces and regions of France), food markets, and public gardens open to all; the King wished to rehouse the poor of Paris and give them work, but the project was abandoned at his death though Richelieu later built eleven of the streets. Henri’s most enduring monument is the Pont Neuf on which work commenced in 1604.
The family life of Henri IV might have been decorous enough for The Grand Turk—for His Most Christian Majesty it was a scandal. Not only did he avail himself of many women but, markedly philoprogenitive, rejoiced at the birth of each new child whosoever its mother. One is again reminded of Charles II who would drive through a disapproving London with his Queen and his mistress in the same coach. However, Charles possessed a more docile wife than his grandfather for Marie was no Catherine of Braganza; Henri ‘found thorns even in his Nuptial bed’.18 Between them Marie de Medici and Henriette d’Entragues made the royal ménage a perfect hell; the marriage of two strong personalities often leads to friction—the marriage of three produced an impossible situation. Henriette continued to insist that she should have been Queen and that the Dauphin was a bastard, pretensions which infuriated Marie: ‘These scandalous disorders extremely offended the Queen; and the Pride of the Marchioness more furiously incensed her: for she spoke alwaies of her in terms either injurious or disdainful: sometimes not forbearing to say, that if she had Justice, she should hold the place of that fat Banker …’.19 As for Marie: ‘She had so great an aversion for the marchioness of Verneuil, that she would hardly deign to pronounce her name.’20 Sully condoled with ‘this unhappy prince exposed to the fury of two women, who agreed in nothing but in separately conspiring to destroy his quiet’.21 The two termagants’ frequent pregnancies exacerbated these storms of feminine savagery which overshadowed every aspect of court life. Thus when the Queen wished to dance a ballet with her ladies Henriette insisted on taking part, to Marie’s tearful fury. (This spectacle, ironically named ‘Ballet of the Virtues’, was described as both beautiful and dangerous by the Papal Nuncio who added smugly that he dared not look at it, but only blink as one does at the sun.) So late as 1609 Henriette was making ‘her continual constant profession, that she never intended to live with this king as his concubine but as his wife (and accordingly suffereth him not now to have any further use of her body)’.22
It seems that Henri’s dependence on Henriette, which Sully analysed as ‘one of those unhappy diseases of the mind that, like a slow poison, preyed upon the principles of life’, was as much mental as physical; if in a fit of revulsion she could refer to herself as la beste du Roy, he nonetheless delighted in her amusing company. In fact her power stemmed from the combination of a fascinating personality with sexual expertise. Yet, like a true whore, Henriette however skilled in bed, was fundamentally cold; her sole passion was greed, greed for money and place. Even so there were many occasions when she broke with the King, having quarrelled bitterly, and left court only to return after furious remonstrances. Thus ‘… this prince suffered all the insolence, the caprices, and any qualities of temper, that a proud and ambitious woman is capable of showing’.23 In addition he underwent such torments of jealousy that she once told him: ‘As you grow older you are becoming so mistrustful and so suspicious that there is no means of living with you.’24
Unfortunately Henriette’s allurements, ‘the charms of her conversation, her sprightly wit, her repartees so poignant yet so full of delicacy and spirit’ were not exactly emulated by Marie as Henri once explained, rather pathetically, to Sully: ‘I find nothing of all this at home,’ said he to me, ‘I receive neither society, amusement, nor content from my wife; her conversation is unpleasing, her temper harsh, she never accommodates herself to my humour, nor shares in any of my cares; when I enter her apartment, and offer to approach her with tenderness, or begin to talk familiarly with her, she receives me with so cold and forbidding an air, that I quit her in disgust, and am obliged to seek consolation elsewhere.’25 Péréfixe draws a picture no less dismal: ‘She was alwaies in contention with the King: she exasperated him continually by her complaints, and by her reproaches: and when he thought to find with her some sweetness to ease the great labours of his spirit he encountered nothing but Gall and Bitterness.’26 She wept and nagged to such an extent that on some nights Henri had to flee from their bed and take refuge in that of one of his Gentlemen. Sometimes she even made a truce with Henriette who would then refuse to sleep with him, to his rage and consternation for her physical hold remained strong for many years; in 1608 he was writing, ‘Good-night my soul, I kiss your breasts a million times.’27
With all this strife Marie was nevertheless the Queen and mother of the Dauphin and therefore enjoyed Henri’s loyalty if not his fidelity. In his own eccentric way he seems to have been quite fond of her. Sully tells how when he went to bring their Majesties presents early in the morning of New Year’s Day 1606, the King gently pushed Marie, saying, ‘Awake, you dormouse, give me a kiss, and groan no more, for all our little quarrells are already forgot by me; I am solicitous to keep your mind easy, lest your health should suffer during your pregnancy …’.28 To so shrewd an observer as Carew Marie could seem wholly decorous:
The queen is a lady adorned with much beauty and comeliness of body, and with much beauty and virtue of mind; very observant in all exercises of her religion; and very charitable in performing towards the poor works of mercy; governing the young women and ladies about her with gravity, and causing them to spend their time in works of their needle, and thereby containing them from those disorders, which commonly follow idleness and vanity. Her main and sole opposition is against the marquise de Verneuil, who being of an excellent, pleasant and witty entertainment, maintaineth still a strong hold in the king’s affections; and the queen by her eagerness doth work herself some disadvantage….29
Marie was no paragon, however, and if Sully was an ally against their common foe, the Queen’s wilfulness and stupidity were nevertheless only too evident in her chief friends and favourites. These were the Concini ‘who were continually filling her ears with malicious stories and giving her bad advice’. Marie had brought from Florence a scrawny, black avised, hysterical young woman, Leonora Galigai, daughter of a prostitute and a carpenter, together with a foppish pederast, Concino Concini, who was hardly less plebeian and quite as illiterate and unscrupulous. This precious pair, clinging like greedy leeches, contrived to make themselves indispensable to the Queen and obnoxious to everyone else, including Henri—‘just as a little but vexatious Mouse may furiously trouble and turmoile the noble Lyon’.30 He insisted that they return to Italy but Marie made a devil’s bargain with Henriette who, in return for the post of Mistress of the Robes, persuaded the King to let them stay. Leonora had married her Concino and the two embarked upon a career which would culminate with his assassination when Marshal and virtual ruler of France and her own burning as a witch in the Place de Grève. ‘The Common opinion was that these two persons conjoyntly laboured so long as the King lived, to conserve a spleen in the spirit of the Queen, and to make her always troublesome and humoursome towards him; in such manner, that for seven or eight years together, if he had one day of peace and quiet with her, he had ten of discontent and vexation.’31
One, two or even half a dozen women could never have satisfied Henri IV. There was Jacqueline de Beuil, a pink and white blonde doll in her early twenties who was ‘something of a glutton but agreeable’32 and quite brainless. An orphan, this young lady belonged to that over-sexed family, the Babou de la Bourdaisière and was therefore related to poor Gabrielle d’Estrées. According to L’Estoile, when in 1604 by the King’s connivance she married a complaisant courtier, Philippe de Césy, she slept with her husband the first night and then with Henri the night after while her spouse lodged above them in an attic over the Royal bedchamber. Tallemant has a still more scandalous version: ‘They were married in the morning. The King, being impatient and not relishing the idea that someone else should take a maidenhead for which he himself was paying, would not let Césy sleep with his wife that evening or see her henceforward.’33 The new acquisition, now known as the Comtesse de Moret, slept with the King—intermittently—for several years and bore him a son. Bishop Péréfixe, who could hardly approve what he termed ‘excessive voluptuousness’ and to which he attributed Henri’s gout, declared with half-hearted bravado that there were ‘many other Ladies who held it a glory to have some charm for so great a King’.34 Indeed tradition credits him with more than sixty conquests though it would need a Leporello to list them all. It is sometimes said cynically in France that when a man is young he explores the physical mysteries of woman but when he is older he explores her spiritual mysteries. Certainly Henri never reached the second stage.
The King adored his children. He caused an uproar in 1604 when he insisted that his bastards by Henriette should be brought up at St Germain-en-Laye with the Dauphin and his issue by Marie. Though he worshipped his father, the future Louis XIII resented such an affront from a very early age, refusing to recognize his half-brothers. Sometimes it was necessary to chastise this solemn young prince and on one occasion the Queen rebuked Henri for beating Louis, whom normally she herself treated with unnatural coldness and severity, crying: ‘Ah! You don’t smack your bastards like that!’ ‘As for my bastards,’ replied the King, ‘anyone can smack them when they play the fool but nobody but me can smack him!’ (This may have been the occasion when Louis had fired a pistol—fortunately loaded only with powder—at a nobleman he disliked.) Henri was not altogether happy with his heir even if he was fond of him. Carew reported of the Dauphin: ‘He is yet heavy and dull in conceit and discourse, and timorous and dastardly in his courage; at which the king hath been much troubled, when he hath seen or heard the tokens of it, saying, “Fault il donc que je soy père d’un poltron?” but his education is like to polish and amend both these faults’.35 Coryate has a particularly colourful portrait: ‘The Dolphin … was about seuen yeares old when I was at the Court. His face full and fat-cheeked, his haire black, his looke vigorous and courageous, which argues a bold and liuely spirit. His speech quick, so that his worde’s seeme to flow from him with a voluble grace. His doublet and hose were of red Sattin, laced with gold lace.’36 There were three sons by Marie, the second being the Duke of Orléans—‘a maruailous full faced child’—who died in infancy, and the third the worthless, pusillanimous Gaston d’Orléans who would live to plague his brother and who, of course, was Marie’s favourite; of the daughters Elizabeth became the consort of Philip IV of Spain and Henriette Marie married Charles I of England. Mme de Verneuil’s children were Gaston Henri, born a month after the Dauphin and created Bishop of Metz and Abbot of St Germain at seven years old, and a daughter Gabrielle; both were officially legitimized. The King’s enjoyment of this lively brood is best illustrated by the famous audience of the Spanish ambassador who found him on all fours crawling round the presence chamber with some tiny babes on his back; asked, ‘Have you children of your own?’, the outraged grandee admitted that this was so, whereupon His Most Christian Majesty laughed, ‘Then you’ll understand’ and continued to crawl round the room. It was a far cry from the Escorial of Philip II, indeed from the Versailles of Louis XIV.
The King had need of full-blooded diversions. Like Gargantua, ‘Then would he Hunt the Hart, the Roe-buck, the Bear, the Fallow Deer, the Wild Boar, the Hare, the Phesant, the Partridge and the Bustard.’ And no doubt the peasant girl too. Péréfixe who had spoken with those who remembered him well says:
That in Feasts and Merriments he would appear as good a Companion and as Jovial as another: That he was of a merry humour when he had the glass in his hand, though very sober: That his Mirth and Good Discourses were the delicatest part of the good Chear: That he witnessed no less Agility and Strength in Combats at the Barriers, Courses at the Ring, and all sorts of Gallantries, than the youngest Lords: That he took delight in Balls, and Danced sometimes; but to speak the truth with more spirit than good grace. Some carped that so great a Prince should abase himself to such follies, and that a Greybeard should please to act the young man. It may be said for his excuse, that the great toiles of his spirit had need of these divertisements. But I know not what to answer to those who reproach him with too great a love to playing Cards and Dice, little befitting a great King and that withal he was no fair Gamester, but greedy of Coin, fearful at great Stakes and humorous [bad tempered] upon a loss.37
Dallington also heard tales how Henri was a bad loser: ‘If you remember when we saw him play at dice, here in Orléans, with his Noblesse, he would euer tell his money very precisely, before he gaue it backe again’.38 And Carew noticed this weakness ‘in his play, where he sheweth extreme passion in small losses, and is content to gain by all kinds of shifts and devices’.39 Sometimes he played billiards or pall mall (a sort of croquet) but as he grew older and stiffer he gave up tennis. He liked strolling in his gardens just as Charles II loved to saunter, he swam in the Seine, he hawked, and he hunted more than ever; on at least one occasion he was nearly killed by an enraged stag. The Bourbon lusts for lechery, gluttony, violent exercise and the chase, excesses which so awed the courtiers of Louis XIV and Louis XV, were already evident in their ancestor.
Henri could not bear to be alone. Bellegarde reminisced about old campaigns while Zamet continued to give amusing dinners, and if the Constable de Montmorency was brutish and illiterate he shared the King’s taste for hunting and horses. Another companion was Charles, fourth Duke of Guise, the young son of the murdered Henri le Balafré but unlike his father in being small, snub-nosed and of mediocre intellect; he was famed as a liar yet nonetheless amiable and generous. The King regarded him with mixed feelings; at one time it was rumoured that he had secretly married Henriette. Then there was a wild young protégé of Henri, François de Bassompierre from Lorraine, a future Colonel of the Swiss Guard and Marshal of France, who had fought in Savoy, and also in Hungary against the Turk; this needy, impudent, philandering, duelling adventurer, twenty-five years younger than himself, with irrepressible high spirits and excessively bawdy humour, may well have reminded the King of his own youth. Above all Henri enjoyed visiting Sully at the Arsenal where he delighted in the craggy eccentricity of that strange minister. On one occasion the latter was told by the King: ‘I went to the kitchen while waiting for you where I saw the finest fish possible and spiced stews in the way I like them and, because you were so long in coming, I ate eight of your little “huntsman’s oysters”, the finest one can eat, and drank some of your Arbois wine, the best I’ve ever drunk.’40 Perhaps the man who quipped, ‘Les Anglais s’amusent tristement selon leur façon’ was not such bad company. Henri wrote to old cronies far away from court, like Crillon who was living on his estate in Provence, to ask how they were. A new and rather surprising friend was his confessor, Fr Pierre Coton. This suave yet saintly Jesuit belonged to a spiritual coterie which included Mme de Bérulle and her son (the Cardinal, who established the French Oratory) together with Mme Acarie, a disciple of Teresa of Avila, who introduced the Carmelite reform into France. Fr Coton, something of a theologian, Italian trained, and a protégé of St Charles Borromeo, was first sent by his Order to plead that it might be allowed to return to France. Henri took such a fancy to Coton that he made him Preacher to the Court in 1603, and his own Confessor in 1608 with responsibility for the Dauphin’s education; he wished to make him Archbishop of Arles and a Cardinal but the Jesuit refused. Though Henri was irritated by this Counter-Reformation champion’s advocacy of a Spanish alliance he liked him so well that it was said that the King ‘had Cotton in his ears’. For all his politics Père Coton seems to have genuinely understood and sympathized with the emotional, physical and spiritual vagaries of his Royal patient—one can hardly say ‘penitent’.
In 1605 a very old friend indeed returned to Paris, Henri’s former wife. Margot in middle age was a spectacle neither graceful nor dignified. She had grown monstrously fat from gluttony and her rouged face with its pendulous cheeks was crowned by a bushy golden wig; blond footmen were kept specially for this purpose, their heads being shaved whenever she needed a new coiffure. In addition she retained the clothes of the Valois court which now seemed ludicrously old-fashioned, with clumsy farthingales, great puffed sleeves and scandalous décolletages: her vast skirts and huge figure could block an entire doorway. Eventually she built a magnificent hôtel opposite the Louvre where she took up residence with her various lovers (whom she was rumoured to beat) among which was a musician known as ‘le Roy Margot’. Queen Marguerite—Henri had allowed her to retain the title—overspent wildly, giving splendid banquets and balls, dispensing extravagant charity, marching in religious processions with showy piety, and became one of the sights of Paris, whose inhabitants delighted in circulating obscene tales about ‘Queen Venus’. She had preserved her strangely conflicting tastes; learning, vice and religion in equal proportion—St Vincent de Paul was one of her chaplains while savants frequented her house no less than gigolos. Oddly enough Marie de Medici, who perhaps felt a certain inferiority, made firm friends with her predecessor, who soon grew devoted to Henri’s children, loading them with presents, and they learnt to call this extraordinary but amiable apparition ‘Aunt’.
The court enjoyed the play, the Queen importing the very best companies from Italy who presented many comedies at the Louvre besides displays by acrobats and jugglers. The court also visited the theatre at the Hôtel de Bourgogne though here the acting, by a French troupe, was so bad that Henri often fell asleep. Sometimes there were concerts by the Royal orchestra. At balls lively country dances were danced besides more formal galliards in which the gentlemen had to wear hats and swords; when partnering the Queen they were only allowed to touch the hem of her long sleeve. However, Marie took most enjoyment in elaborate court ballets played by exotically attired lords and ladies against a background of rich and wonderful tableaux and transformation scenes in the hall of the Louvre or some other great palace and illuminated by a thousand candles in silver brackets. Even on the most ordinary occasions the courtiers’ magnificent clothes glittered and flashed in torch or candle light which also shone upon the fine cabinets, statuary, silken tapestries, hangings of cloth of gold and silver, and crimson velvet furniture with which the King had furnished his palaces. Fynes Moryson explained: ‘In France as well men as women, vse richly to bee adorned with jewels. The men weare rings of Diamonds and broad Iewels in their hats, placed vpon the roote of their feathers. The Ladies weare their Iewels commonly at the brest or vpon the left arme, and many other waies, for who can containe the mutable French in one and the same fashion?’41 Carew likewise commented on ‘the multitude of their pearls, stones, broderies and such like’, corroborating Moryson: ‘In the court the riches partly appeareth in the sumptuousness of the attire and furniture for the houses and persons of the lords and ladies of the same.’42 If the court of Henri IV was without the over refined grace of that of Henri III it did not lack for splendour.
It is well to remember that in many ways the tastes of the early Seventeenth century were little removed from those of the Middle Ages. Jousting was not yet extinct. On Sunday, 25 February 1605, François de Bassompierre and Charles de Guise, who disputed the favours of Henriette’s sister Marie, tilted at the barrier in the courtyard of the Louvre before the King and Queen, Bassompierre in silver armour with pink and white plumes, Guise in an armour of black and gold. The Duke broke his lance against Bassompierre’s helmet but then lowered the butt instead of raising it, so that a splinter as long as a man’s arm pierced his adversary’s stomach. Bassompierre nonetheless bravely rode forward to break his own lance correctly against Guise’s helmet before collapsing from his horse, his entrails falling through a gaping wound. Miraculously he survived and was on his feet again within a fortnight.43
The wealth of Henri’s court was beginning to impress all Europe. Sully remembered how by 1605 ‘the government had already an appearance of opulence and strength, which banished all remembrance of its former indigence’, while that calculating observer, George Carew, was genuinely awed and most of all by ‘the great reserve, which (all charges defrayed) he puts up every year in his Bastille. So as though he came to a broken state, and much indebted, yet in few years he hath gathered more treasure than perchance any other king of Europe possesseth at this day’.44 Henri’s new army demonstrated this wealth even more formidably than did his court.
As Péréfixe said, Henri ‘was by constraint a Man of War and of the Field’ and it was obvious to all who met him that here was a soldier as well as a sovereign. ‘The king … hath in the course of his life run through the most hazards of any great personage that now liveth, or of whom mention is to be found in almost any histories,’45 wrote Carew, noting that Henri had been in 125 battles and 200 sieges. When the Papal Nuncio tactfully asked Henri how many times he had made war the King replied, with Gascon licence: ‘All my life—and my armies never had any general other then myself.’ Many of his personal habits were the result of a lifetime’s campaigning, such as his irregular sleeping and eating; his meals were either snacks or Gargantuan gorging while like Napoleon most of his sleep consisted of occasional catnaps—he rarely took a full night’s rest. It was therefore hardly surprising that he did not neglect his army; the King’s majesty must manifest itself in both fighting power and martial pomp.
George Carew marvelled at ‘the number of his guards and men of war, which attend him (wherein he exceedeth all the other courts in Christendom)’.46 Until now the kingdom’s cavalry had consisted mainly of noblemen who paid their own way—or lived on plunder even in time of peace—while its infantry were hired mercenaries. Henri was determined to replace this ill-ordered mob of feudal volunteers and foreign hirelings by a professional force, properly disciplined, forbidden to live off the country and paid on a regular footing. As Carew realized this was no easy task: ‘… most of the French busying themselves now in handling the pen, and then the sword. So as their kings may more easily levy at this day 200,000 penmen and chicaneurs than 30,000 men of war.’47However, Henri had achieved his aim by the end of 1609 when in an army of thirty-seven thousand only one thousand were mounted nobles serving at their own expense (in the cornette blanche du Roy); four thousand were regular cavalry (i.e. serving on a paid basis), twenty thousand were French regular infantry and no more than twelve thousand were Swiss or German mercenaries. During the reign’s peaceful years a much smaller establishment had been maintained, but with a vast arsenal of arms and munitions and a steadily growing war chest. Sir George was fully aware of the military potential of Henri’s treasure ‘whereof also he ceaseth not to vaunt, when he walketh in his garden between the Arsenal and the Bastille, saying that none other hath such an alley to walk in, having at the one end thereof armour for 40,000 men ready prepared; and at the other end money to pay them, even to the end of a long war’.48 The artillery was given its own commissariat under Sully—still Grand Master of the Ordnance—to organize the manufacture of powder and shot and the founding of cannon. A corps of engineers was formed, sappers trained in the latest techniques of siege warfare. The new army continued to be officered by noblemen, who now served on a professional instead of a feudal basis. Two military academies were instituted for cadets largely recruited from penniless noble families. An earlier ‘Invalides’ was founded, the ‘House of Christian Charity’ in the rue d’Oursine, for veterans or those incapacitated by wounds (who hitherto had to beg in the streets), pensions were given at the King’s discretion to aged officers and funds made available for the widows and orphans of soldiers who fell in action. The career of arms had become a true profession, not just an excuse for brigandage. Henri was always anxious to recruit good men; on one occasion he recognized the Leaguer who had wounded him at Aumâle and promptly enlisted the nervous ex-trooper in his own Guards. At the end of his reign he could muster one hundred thousand men and France had become a first-class military power.
If this new might was not apparent until Henri’s last years, throughout the reign his splendidly uniformed and accoutred household brigade impressed all who saw it. Coryate was full of admiration despite his envy as an Englishman:
The French guard consisteth partly of French, partly of Scots, and partly of Switzers. Of the French Guarde there are three rankes: the first is the Regiment of the Gard which consisteth of sixteene hundred foote, Musketeers, Harquebushers and Pikemen, which waite always by turns, two hundred at a time before the Lou(v)re Gate in Paris or before the Kings house wheresoeuer he lieth. The second bee the Archers, which are vnder the Captaine of the Gate, and waite in the very Gate, whereof there be about fiftie. The third sort bee the Gard of the body, whereof there are foure hundred, but one hundred of them be Scots. These are Archers and Harquebushers on horsebacke. Of the Switzers, there is a Regiment of fiue hundred, which waite before the Gate by turnes with the French Regiment, and one hundred more who carie onely Halberts and weare swords, who waite in the Hall of the Kings house wheresoeuer he lyeth. The Archers of the Garde of the body weare long-skirted halfe-sleeued Coates made of white Cloth, but their skirts mingled with Red and Greene, and the bodies of the Cotes trimmed before and behind with Mayles of plaine Siluer, but not so thick as the rich Coates of the English Garde.
However, he found the Swiss Guard a little ridiculous, with their ‘motley’ uniforms—rather like those of the present Papal Guard—and ostentatious virility:
The Switzers weare no Coates, but doublets and hose of panes, intermingled with Red and Yellow, and some with Blew, trimmed with long Puffes of Yellow and Blewe Sarcenet rising vp betwixt the Panes, besides Codpieces of the like colours, which Codpiece because it is by that merrie French vvriter Rablais stiled the first and principal piece of Armour, the Switzers do vveare it as a significant Symbole of the assured seruice they are to doe to the French King in his Warres … I obserued that all these Switzers doe vveare Veluet Cappes vvith Feathers in them, and I noted many of them to be very cluster-fisted lubbers. As for their attire, it is made so phantastically that a nouice newly come to the Court, who neuer saw any one of them before, would halfe imagine, if hee should see one of them alone vvithout his vveapon, hee vvere the Kings foole.49
‘Some there are who would insinuate that he did not love Men of Learning but they are much deceived.’50 Though a soldier in his tastes Henri was directly involved in the cultural life of his time if only as a lavish patron. The penniless Malherbe was made a Gentleman of the Bedchamber with a pension of one thousand livres and became court poet, Pierre Matthieu was appointed Historiographer Royal while another historian, Jacques Auguste de Thou (author of a Latin History of My Own Time) was made Grand Master of the King’s Library. Then there was the Huguenot theologian and classical scholar Isaac Casaubon whom Coryate so admired, ‘that rare ornament of learning Isaac Casaubonus … the very glory of the French Protestants’.51 who was created a Librarian to the King in 1606; it is significant that Casaubon found the court so hostile after Henri’s death that he emigrated to England. Unlike Napoleon’s the Henrician reconstruction was not a cultural desert. The poets of the Pléiade were still singing; Desportes only died in 1606. Meanwhile Agrippa d’Aubigné, the Huguenot Don Quixote who has been called an Ezekiel on horseback, was composing his masterpiece Les Tragiques, ‘seven songs of blood and fury’, an epic of French Protestantism which rivals Isaiah and Jeremiah in its defiance and whose sombre music has sometimes an almost Shakespearian grandeur. Others were preparing the ground for the great period of classical French literature which, unlike the Romantic flowering of the early nineteenth century, was not a reaction against sterility. Malherbe, that destroyer of the Renaissance and harbinger of the Baroque, defined the versification and vocabulary to be used by Corneille and Racine, while Alexandre Hardy, a French Lope de Vega, composed a spate of comedies and tragicomedies which if somewhat mediocre nevertheless stimulated interest in the theatre. Lamartine and Victor Hugo had no such heralds.
Henri also introduced reforms in education and religion. The Jesuits, pioneers of new teaching methods, were allowed to return and set up schools; soon the education of the French nobility was in their hands. At the University of Paris, where the Order was given a college, measures were taken to improve discipline and studies. Though he retained the pernicious practice of appointing absentee bishops the King was anxious for the Church to renew itself. Such spiritual giants as the Oratorian Pierre de Bérulle, Jean Pierre de Camus and St Vincent de Paul began their ministries in his reign while St François de Sales, whose Introduction to the Devout Life influenced a number of courtiers, preached before him; characteristically Henri commented, ‘A saint! And, more surprising, a gentleman too.’ The King tried without success to persuade the Savoyard to leave his mountain diocese for an opulent French see. In almost all religious orders a movement for reform was springing up while flocks of zealous preachers evangelized the peasantry; it was this latter work which marked the real turn of the tide against Calvinism. Admittedly there remained many black spots. A particularly lurid instance came to light later in 1618, when Angèle d’Estrées, Gabrielle’s sister and abbess of the ancient Cistercian abbey of Maubuisson, was discovered to have borne twelve children by twelve different men; her nuns were hardly less sinful than their Mother Superior who was sent to the Convent for Fallen Women. At the end of Henri’s reign Carew sneered: ‘I have heard some, who have come papists out of England, say that to see the manner of the papists living here hath almost perswaded them to abandon that religion.’52 Nevertheless the Counter-Reformation was reaping a rich harvest.
By now, though politically still formidable, the Huguenots had not merely lost the battle for the soul of France but were in rapid decline. Intellectually Catholicism had regained the advantage, mustering a great army of expert theologians. This polemical revolution was symbolized by a public disputation in May 1600 at Fontainebleau, in the King’s presence, between du Plessis Mornay, the intellectual leader of the French Protestants—he was known as the Huguenot Pope—who had recently published a treatise attacking the eucharistic doctrine of the Real Presence and identifying the Papacy with Anti-Christ, and that same Cardinal du Perron who had reconciled the King to Rome; the former was cunningly deprived of books and papers and given insufficient time to prepare so that the silver-tongued Cardinal, the Bossuet of the age, had an easy triumph—the debate is said to have finally removed any doubts from Henri’s mind about Catholic dogma. Though du Plessis Mornay’s academy at Saumur continued with distinction for many years, attracting students from Scotland in particular, more and more French Calvinist divines were turning Papist; significantly du Perron was himself a convert, the son of a minister. It was clear that the Reform was very much on the defensive. Fynes Moryson gave a typically English explanation: ‘… the reformed are very strict in the Censure of manners, forbidding daunces and restrayning the peoples liberty in sports and conversation. To conclude, great and wise men of that Reformed Church haue freely sayd, that this striktnes in manners, the taking away of all Ceremonyes, and the disallowing of Bishopps, haue greatly hindred the increase of the Reformed Church, which was like ere this tyme to haue prevayled throughout all Fraunce, if in these thinges they had followed in some good measure the Reformation established in England.’53 Carew surmised grimly that Henri ‘seeketh gently to supplant them’. It was indeed a different era from the days of Beza and Coligny.
By 1609 the King suffered from gout, appalling indigestion, catarrh, influenza, and occasionally the nervous prostration to be expected from such a misspent life, but nothing worse; he was lucky not to have contracted syphilis, having escaped with merely a mild dose of gonorrhoea in his youth (which he had caught from his groom’s doxy after surprising her in the stable). In fact he was astonishingly well and vigorous for his fifty-six years. Sir George observed: ‘His health and strength he hath in a great proportion, his body being not only able for all exercises, but even for excesses and distempers, both in intemperance and incontinency. And though he be sometimes bitten by the gout yet ever he findeth means suddenly to shake it off. And in the four years, that I served in that court, I found him little decayed in his countenance, or other disposition of his body, but he rather grew to look younger every day than other.’54
Henri’s worst affliction was the melancholy to which he had always been subject and which now plagued him increasingly. He could astound courtiers by blurting out ‘I wish I were dead’, suffered from bouts of sleeplessness, evil dreams and restless nerves, knowing too well both the fear at night-time and the noonday devil. Yet he also experienced such wild moods of gaiety as to be heard dancing and whistling by himself in his private cabinet. The miseries were intensified when he fell in love or quarrelled with a mistress or the Queen, but usually, though not always, his judgement in matters of state remained unaffected. While much of his jesting came from a genuine sense of fun together with an unfeigned zest for life, like so many men who joke incessantly he did so partly to keep the demon of depression at bay. This was why he dreaded solitude and was so pathetically dependent on the company of such cronies as Bassompierre.
To some extent he could be soothed by religion, for he had become a convinced if sinning Catholic; when he abstained from adultery to receive the Sacraments it was from genuine piety. Near the Louvre one day he met a priest carrying the Host and immediately dismounted to kneel in the gutter with a devotion which was obviously unfeigned. Sully, who was with him, asked, ‘Sir, is it possible that you can believe in this after the things which I have seen?’ The King answered, ‘Yes, by the Living God, I believe, and he must be a Madman who believes not. I would willingly lose a Finger, that you also believed as I do.’55 Undoubtedly he regretted his vices and even consulted theologians for some condoning doctrine, to no avail. For him sex was a consuming, dreaded need, mental and physical, and his skilled confessor, Père Coton, no sycophant but a true spiritual director, realized that Henri was less guilty than the majority of adulterers. Indeed it was rumoured most cruelly by Calvinists that Coton had told the King that he was ‘in the assured way to Salvation; in respect of his merits for those being balanced with his crimes are in the proportion of 8 to 4’.56 The modern historian who has shown most understanding of Henri IV, Raymond Ritter, writes: ‘So, if Henri had once been able to be a Protestant in all honesty, his entire mental make-up and all his instincts led him towards that poets’ garden which lies within Catholicism where, apart from paths reserved for ascetics, there seem to be so many refuges and props for the weaknesses of men as well as havens for their dreams.’57
A portrait painted by Pourbus towards the close of the reign shows Henri after he had ‘arrived’, formally dressed in a suit of rich black, with the period’s ungainly breeches, shoes with great clocks, and the jewelled cross of the St Esprit hanging from his neck by a broad ribbon. Yet above the starched ruff his face remains tanned, his hair—almost white now—is cropped en brosse, and his beard still bristles. The impression, though unmistakably regal, is that of a royal general in court dress rather than that of a First Gentleman, the hand on the hip expressing martial swagger rather than gracious hauteur. Here, if not a self-made man, is one who has known what it is to face heavy odds before succeeding. But, far from being worn out and despite already legendary achievements, the ‘Restorer of the French State’ who was by general consent the richest and most admired ruler in Europe, wished in his late middle age to attempt one last, Herculean labour.