CHAPTER 8

THE GRAND DESIGN

‘… le grand dessein, se contentant le Roi de reduire
l’Espagne aux frontieres des Pirénées et de la mer.’

Agrippa d’Aubigné¹

‘He desired perfectly to unite all Christendom, so that it should be one body, which had been and should be called the Christian Commonwealth.’

Péréfixe²

So far little has been said of Henri’s foreign policy and in fact it was not until almost the very last year of his reign that he revealed his intention of destroying the Habsburg imperium by force of arms. As late as the end of July 1609 the informed English view was that the French King ‘studiously avoideth all occasions of war, especially where he doubteth find any strong opposition’³ even if the French were clearly aware that ‘their most potent borderer, and with whom for the present they are in most opposition and greatest struggling, is the king of Spain. The contention between them resembleth those fights, of which the writers of romance talk, between a well proportioned knight and a huge unwieldy giant’. But though Sir George Carew understood that where France and Spain were concerned ‘there appeareth a mutual settled disdain and hatred between the two nations’ he did not realize that Henri was now ready to take the field.⁴

Hitherto his policy had been one of defence and discreet cold war. As has been seen, he had reorganized his army and amassed an impressive war chest while, as he carefully told Carew, fortifying twenty-eight frontier strongholds. He had also improved his strategic position by the conquests in Savoy, by the control of ‘the Spanish Passage’, and by the acquisition of Sedan. In Italy new alliances had weakened Habsburg dominance, notably a growing rapprochement with Charles Emmanuel of Savoy and the continuing friendship of Tuscany. French prestige soared in 1607 when Henri’s mediation averted war between Venice and the Papacy after Paul V had laid the Serene Republic under an interdict for asserting its authority over Venetian clergy. In October 1604 the commercial Treaty of Paris with England improved relations between the two kingdoms; it was unfortunate that James I should ultimately decide in favour of an alliance with Philip III despite Henri’s claim that the Gunpowder Treason had been devised by Spain. The touchy Scot must have been considerably irritated by Henri’s part in the ‘Flight of the Earls’ from Ulster in 1607, an early instance of French kindness to the Irish; when Tyrone and Tyrconnell and their families fled to Normandy in a French ship Carew demanded that they be held until James’ pleasure was known but Henri insisted on giving them a safe passage to Brussels, adding with some truth that ‘it appears not, for any thing that he knew, but that they were retired out of their country for matter of religion, and private discontentment’.⁵ Henri also fished in the war between Spain and the United Provinces, committing himself to neither side. At all costs he wished to avoid any serious confrontation until France had been restored to full health. But now in 1609, as d’Aubigné put it: ‘After the cruel travail of war slumber is sweet and grateful; this long sleep renewed the strength of the King and that of his kingdom which had enjoyed ten years of his rule.’⁶

The Habsburgs appeared as formidable as ever. Despite the failure to crush the Dutch after so many years of costly war, despite Spain’s growing economic miseries, and despite the small but hurtful diplomatic triumphs of Henri Philip III commanded daunting might. His Most Catholic Majesty ruled the Five Spains (including Portugal), the entire South American continent (with a large part of North America), the Two Sicilies and Milan, and the Burgundian lands of Franche Comté and Flanders. His armies retained an unchallenged superiority; Spanish pikemen were still accounted the best infantry in the world. His cousins possessed Austria, Bohemia and much of Hungary besides, as Holy Roman Emperors, controlling if not ruling much of Germany. Finally the Habsburgs, both Spanish and German, could claim to be the chief secular champions of the Counter-Reformation. Indeed in France herself there were many exponents of an entente cordiale with Spain, especially Jesuits and ex-Leaguers; among these were the Secretary of State, Villeroy, and Père Coton who was always whispering in the King’s ear about the virtue and glory of a Spanish alliance. Their case was strengthened in 1607 when Spain and the United Provinces negotiated a truce. Next year the former proposed an alliance to Henri by the terms of which France was to declare war on the Dutch and which was to be sealed by marriages between the two dynasties. However, nothing came of it and in October 1608 Spain at last recognized Dutch independence. Then in April 1609 a twelve years’ truce was concluded between France and Spain.

Such a truce meant little to Henri who never wavered in his determination to break the Habsburgs’ encirclement of France. He might make empty diplomatic gestures to gain time yet secretly he never ceased to wage an unrelenting cold war on Spain. This is dramatically apparent from his negotiations of 1602–5 with the Moriscos, the persecuted Muslims of southern and western Spain, who offered him Navarre in return for arms and advisers. This was not just fanciful thinking on Henri’s part for the Moriscos numbered two million, were desperate and might possibly obtain help from Turkey or North Africa. Unrest was rife in Portugal and Catalonia, while there were grandees who nursed separatist ambitions; the whole rickety edifice of Habsburg rule could well have come crashing down (as it very nearly did in 1640), but the negotiations were betrayed in 1605 by Villeroy’s secretary who was a spy in Spanish pay. Philip III was so frightened that in 1609 he ordered the expulsion of all Moriscos from Spain. France was more successful in economic warfare. Like Carew, Henri ‘must have heard it reported by some of our Spanish merchants, that after the arrival of the Indian (i.e. American) fleets, the treasure they bring in is suddenly dispersed, and most of it carried into France in lieu of the corn which hath been brought thence’.⁷ A good Mercantilist like the King must have been smugly aware of the damage inflicted by this trade.

It was in German affairs that Henri showed himself most perceptive, foreseeing the Thirty Years War which would end with French primacy in Europe. In Germany as in France, Protestantism, both Lutheran and Calvinist, was on the defensive against the Counter-Reformation. The Protestant princes and their Landes-kirchen feared that a strong Habsburg might reimpose imperial authority and Catholicism by force (as in fact would happen in Bohemia after the battle of the White Mountain). But the present Emperor was the half-crazy Rudolf II, obsessed with astrology and the occult, and at odds with his brother Matthias who had wrested the larger part of his domains from him. The crisis came a month before the signing of the twelve years’ truce with Spain, when in March 1609 Duke Johann-Wilhelm of Cleves-Julich-Berg died; the succession was disputed, and the Emperor, pending a decision, occupied the duchies, to the horrified alarm of the princes. This was the opportunity for which Henri had been waiting as the duchies, being on the Rhine frontier of the Netherlands, constituted a key military position. Now was the time for him, a proven champion of religious co-existence, to free the princes of the Reich from Habsburg tyranny; if it was hardly likely that he would become the first French Emperor since the Carolingians, he still had great hopes of dealing the Habsburgs a cruel blow. He had recourse to a fiery old friend whom he had shabbily treated and who was living in obscure retirement, Agrippa d’Aubigné; the King commissioned him to be his ambassador extraordinary in Germany and visit each tiny court to enlist Protestant princes. By August 1609 Henri was arming for war.

In talking to his intimates the King seems to have referred to his ultimate objectives as his grand dessein, and in the past many historians credited him with a great plan for European peace, a Grand Design which anticipated the United Nations. The earliest account occurs in the memoirs of Sully who appears, ostensibly, to have reconstructed it from conversations with his master. In Louis XIV’s reign Péréfixe seized upon it to credit his idol with the intention of founding ‘a Christian Commonwealth’, while in the eighteenth century the alleged project took more definite shape in the revised version of Sully’s memoirs. The scheme was aimed at guaranteeing nations and creeds by the collective agreement of all European states upon a general reorganization; ‘those who speak Spanish should remain under the rule of the King of Spain, those who speak English under the rule of the King of England, but I ought to rule those who speak French’. Europe was to have six hereditary monarchies: France, England, Spain, Denmark, Sweden and Lombardy (under the house of Savoy); five elective states, Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, the Empire (Germany only) and the Papacy (which would rule the greater part of Italy); four republics, Switzerland (to include the Tyrol), the Netherlands, Venice and Genoa-Florence. This new Europe would constitute an overall republic with a supreme council to arbitrate and prevent wars. ‘There was onely the house of Austria which would suffer any loss, and which was to be despoiled to accomodate others.’⁸ Anticipating their role in the later seventeenth and subsequent centuries, the deprived Habsburgs were to be compensated by strengthening their kingdom of Hungary to fight the Turks more effectively. Modern historians agree that the Grand Design was in large part invented by Sully in the vain hope of gaining influence with Richelieu when he published his memoirs in 1636; possibly a few ideas may be ascribed to Henri—plainly his determination that French-speaking lands should be ruled by France is among these. D’Aubigné, who was first to use the expression grand dessein (in 1620, in the final volume of his Histoire Universelle), limited it to confining Spain within the bounds of the Pyrenees and the sea. Yet Henri hoped for more than this. Probably his true foreign policy was identical with that of Richelieu—to make France the greatest power in Europe by breaking the Habsburg hegemony.

It has been seen that Henri was a gambler. He was now preparing to put his entire life’s work to the hazard. Though well preserved he was not young and he was impatient for action. Ironically, as his thirst for battle waxed so did his lust. D’Aubigné noticed the coincidence: ‘But then there appeared a remarkable change in his old age, warmed (as people say) by a violent love whose fire made his desire burst into flame, blowing away timidity and its attendant melancholy.’⁹ Agrippa was referring to Henri’s shameful passion for the pretty little daughter of the Constable de Montmorency whom he met in early 1609 when she was only fifteen. According to Tallemant he first laid eyes on Charlotte de Montmorency by unexpectedly attending a ballet rehearsal at the Louvre. All the ladies including Mlle Charlotte were clad as nymphs, carrying javelins. Finding herself face to face with the King the pert young jade raised her spear as if to stab him at which Henri immediately became infatuated; in his own words he ‘almost swooned away’. He was determined to secure possession of this exquisite vision though at first he deluded himself into believing that his affection was platonic. She was engaged to François de Bassompierre who thought that ‘under heaven there was nothing so beautiful as Mlle de Montmorency, nothing more graceful or more perfect’.¹⁰ Bassompierre saw at once that the King was deeply smitten; in his memoirs he remembered dryly how Henri ‘hardly slept, because love and gout affect the rejuvenated in this way when they smite them’.¹¹Henri began to make himself a laughing stock; he who had once said he liked his nobles plainly dressed but well mounted was sporting scented neckwear and ‘sleeves of Chinese satin’ besides vying with his young gentlemen in the court game of ‘running the ring’.¹² Soon he took Charlotte’s betrothed aside and, heaving a deep sigh, said

Bassompierre, I want to talk to you as a friend. I have not just fallen in love, I am bewitched and worse by Mlle de Montmorency. If you marry her and she loves you I will hate you; if she loves me you will hate me. It is better this business should not end by destroying the good understanding between us because I am naturally disposed to like you. I have decided to marry her to my nephew, the Prince de Condé, and keep her near my family. She will be a consolation and a support in the old age which I am about to enter. I shall give my nephew, who is young and vastly prefers hunting to ladies, 100,000 francs a year to amuse himself, and shall want no other thanks from her than affection, asking nothing more.¹³

Bassompierre, ‘always a servant of those who rule’, replied smoothly that he was only too glad to break off the engagement because it gave him an opportunity of showing how fond he was of the King, whereupon Henri, bursting into tears, embraced him and cried that he would make his fortune ‘as though you were one of my own bastards’.¹⁴ The desolate fiancé consoled himself by pretending that as it was an arranged marriage he did not mind too much and by making fierce love to Henriette’s sister, Marie, whom he got with child.

It was now that Henri at last ceased to sleep with Henriette who had shared his bed so tumultuously for nearly eleven years. The little hell cat who had first captivated him began to grow into a fat, malevolent old puss wholly given up to the grossest kind of gluttony. Nothing had come of her fine ambitions; she had failed to find even a husband, let alone marry the King of France.

Condé, the first Prince of the Blood who had been heir to the throne until the birth of the Dauphin, seemed an excellent choice for a complaisant husband, a reserved, awkward youth of twenty. Carew, who had plainly received an unfortunate personal impression, commented that though the Prince had ‘a comely countenance and able body’ he possessed ‘many imperfections natural, as want of hearing, together with weakness of speech and understanding, and withal being without hope of issue…. His education hath been so disordered and ignoble, as he is noted for one of the most dissolute young men of France, both for lasciviousness in women’s matters and the disease accompanying the same; and besides for delighting in drinking of wine, and frequenting taverns to that end among base company’.¹⁵ Condé and the Montmorency were betrothed in March and married on 17 May 1609. But Henri had underestimated his nephew whose pride would not allow him to be cuckolded though it was some time before the King discovered this odd prejudice.

He had become obsessed by ‘Madame la Princesse’ with the insane passion of green old age for golden youth. ‘Monsieur le Prince seeing that the King’s love was so violent took his family off to Muret near Soissons. The King could not stay long without seeing her. Wearing a false beard he went to a hunt in which she was to take part; Monsieur le Prince learnt of this and postponed the meet to another occasion. Some days after that, the King ordered M. de Traigny, a local squire, to invite Monsieur le Prince and Madame la Princesse to dinner so he could hide behind a tapestry where he watched them through a hole at his pleasure.’¹⁶ Charlotte, no more than a spoilt and giddy child, was exhilarated rather than alarmed by these attentions and was persuaded to sign a petition that her marriage be annulled. ‘The King had obliged her parents to draw up this petition and the Constable was a knave who hoped that this love of the King would shower him with money and dignities. The household of Madame la Princesse, who was very young, made her think she would be queen. Once must realize what that meant! It would have been necessary to poison Queen Marie de Medici because she had children. [i.e. the Papacy would therefore refuse an annulment.] Monsieur le Prince could never bring himself to forgive his wife for having signed the petition.’¹⁷ When the King reprimanded Condé for not bringing his wife to court, the Prince called him a tyrant, at which Henri reacted violently. Carew was probably referring to this occasion when he commented ‘his birth hath many exceptions against it, the King having reproached it bitterly to his teeth, that he was in doubt, whether he was his kinsman or not; and that by his means, and favour only, he came to be declared a prince of the blood. And the count Soissons still affirming among his familiars, that he is not his brother’s son, but bastard of that page, who was called in question for poisoning of Henry the late prince of Condé’.¹⁸ It was no doubt after the same incident that the King wrote to Sully, in June 1609, asking him to stop Condé’s quarterly allowance and grumbling that ‘Monseiur le Prince is here and playing the devil. You would have been angry and ashamed at the things he said about me’.¹⁹ But Condé could not be brought to heel. Sir George thought there were ‘such jealousies, scandals and indignities as it is doubtful whether that matter will end in a tragedy or a comedy’.²⁰

For a time relations between Henri and the young couple kept some veneer of propriety, at least in public. Condé attended the wedding of Mlle de Mercoeur, the greatest heiress in France, to the Duc de Vendôme in July. Carew described the latter as ‘in shape the most handsome, in age the most mature and in affection the best beloved of this king’s natural children. His fashion and manner of entertainment is discreet and agreeable’.²¹ The ceremony was very splendid, the bride wearing a cloak of crimson velvet, fastened at the shoulders by jewelled clasps and lined with ermine, over a dress of cloth of silver. ‘These nuptials were both triumphant and magnificent, where people did nothing but laugh and dance. His Majesty seemed as much above the other guests as the sun is above the stars, glittering in pearls and precious stones of incalculable value, with a suit of the utmost richness and dressed (so people say) as a lover …’. Henri and the Queen attended the happy pair’s coucher. As L’Estoile gleefully recounts, the King had forgotten nothing which might impede their wedded bliss. Fearing that Vendôme because of his extreme youth—he was only sixteen—‘might be taken short and make a fool of himself’, Henri had arranged for him to be tried out a week before by an expert professional lady ‘on whom he might sharpen his knife’. Proudly he told the bride’s astounded mother of his thoughtful precaution, adding, ‘And you, Madame, who have known for a long time how to perform this business, I leave you to guide your daughter and show her the place best suited for the execution and accomplishment of such work.’²²

In the end Condé fled with his wife to Brussels where they arrived in December 1609. The King’s gentleman-in-waiting, that prim poet Malherbe who must have made a somewhat bizarre procurer, took part in a tardy and unsuccessful pursuit, reporting untruthfully that Madame la Princesse had been reluctant to accompany her husband. In Brussels French agents actually tried to kidnap the Princess; one abortive scheme entailed lowering Charlotte out of her window by ropes. The King raved and stormed, even threatening war. Eventually the Prince found refuge with this wife in Milan. Henri never saw her again. Throughout this shabby business, crazed by unseemly desire and losing all sense of honour or dignity, he had shown unsuspected depths of spite and pettiness. There were undertones of self-destruction; it was as though all Henri’s past lusts and lecheries had at the end of his life culminated in one final gross act of egotism when total sensuality at last consumed what had been a great man, leaving nothing more than a doting old satyr. Yet, like David after his sin with the wife of Uriah the Hittite, Henri was still a great King. His subjects found his frailty endearing rather than otherwise; it may have been now that they named him le Vert Galant—the Evergreen Gallant. Though he consoled himself with other mistresses the Princesse de Condé was the last of his loves.

His threats of war were genuine enough, for he was setting in motion his great plan against the Habsburgs, which until that August he had skilfully concealed. George Carew had left France in July 1609 after four strenuous years. Henri’s ministers were glad to see the ambassador go, regarding him as a friend of Spain and an intriguer. But, keen observer though he was, Sir George had not managed to discover the King’s design on the Empire, even at this late date. Next month Henri at last showed his hand and throughout the winter of 1609–10 France was arming, the great war machine so carefully prepared operating at full throttle; troops were mobilized and grouped, garrisons relieved, fortresses revictualled, munitions and supplies brought up to depots. By the spring of 1610 Henri had massed forty thousand men with powerful artillery in Champagne near the frontier while ensuring the Pyrenees and his eastern flank were adequately guarded by other forces; these latter also watched the Spanish Passage, the strategic link between the Habsburg domains. In May he intended to invade the Empire and drive the Imperial troops out of Cleves-Julich when, he confidently hoped, the Protestant princes of Germany would join him for the ensuing conflict. The soldier king who had not ridden out to battle for almost a decade longed to be back in the saddle. The coming struggle would be very different from those of the 1590s when he had had to fight not only Spaniards but his fellow countrymen with a handful of unreliable troops, without money or adequate supplies. Now the war lord of a rich and united kingdom was going to crush his enemies with a mighty steamroller of an army. So he must have dreamed, in his sanguine moods.

Yet Henri was not a happy man.

Every hour of delay seemed to him a year, as if he had presaged some misfortune to himself, and certainly both Heaven and Earth had given but too many Prognosticks of what arrived. A very great Eclipse of the whole body of the Sun which happened in the year 1608: A terrible Comet which appeared the year preceding: Earthquakes in several places: Monsters born in divers Countries of France: Rains of blood which fell in several places: a great Plague which afflicted Paris in the year 1606: Apparitions of Fantosms and many other Prodigies kept men in fear of some horrible event.²³

The Queen’s astrologers foretold death and ruin with gloomy regularity. ‘Himself, who was not over-credulous, gave some faith to these Prognosticks, and seemed as one condemned to death. So sad and cast down he was, though naturally he was neither melancholy nor fearful.’²⁴

Everyone was uneasy, and sensed some impending evil. It would have been odd if they had not. To many this war was thoroughly disquieting. Politiques feared with justice that Henri was jeopardizing his entire reconstruction in a reckless gamble, while Catholics were horrified by his championship of heretics; the loyal wondered whether he was endangering the Counter-Reformation—the ill-affected thought that the ally of Turks and Moriscos meant to attack Catholicism itself. Religious faith, still a warmer tie than nationality, induced covert opposition in almost every quarter. Even members of his Council had Habsburg sympathies and Père Coton who understood Henri so well must have intimated disapproval gently but tellingly. Probably he himself doubted his own judgement, in certain moods. Meanwhile ‘by furbishing his weapons the King had aroused fear where friendship no longer existed’,²⁵ at home as well as abroad. It was chillingly clear that there was danger in France, above all in Paris, danger from knife or pistol. The capital seethed with enemies, not merely the spies and secret agents of Spain and Austria, but vengeful irreconcilables from Leaguer days who claimed they had at last been vindicated in refusing to believe in Henri’s conversion and who now began to make fresh recruits. Nearly every year of the reign there had been a plot on his life; it was said that nineteen attempts had been unsuccessful, that the twentieth would be fatal. Less than five years before, England’s Gunpowder Treason had shocked France, and no one had forgotten how the King’s predecessor had been assassinated by a Papist zealot; no one—friend or foe. There was some hope of anticipating feudal conspiracies like that of Biron but none of unearthing the grub like scheming of obscure bigots deep in the murky tumult of the Paris mob. Most dangerous of all, because least detectable, was the solitary, crazed fanatic.

Such a man was living in Paris, a lawyer’s hack lodging at cheap hostelries such as ‘Les Rats’ or Les Trois Pigeons’. François Ravaillac was what would nowadays be called a victim of society, and probably a schizophrenic. Thirty-two years old, tall, bulky, ‘red haired, down looked and melancholy’,²⁶ he was a bankrupt schoolmaster from Angoulême where his parents lived on alms and where he had been in prison for debt. He had recently tried to join the Feuillant Franciscans but the friars hastily turned him out when they learnt about his ‘visions’. Miserably poor, religious to the point of mania and dreaming strange dreams, he roamed the underworld of Paris. Just after Christmas 1609 he attempted to give Henri, jolting through the streets in his coach, a petition for the expulsion or forcible conversion of Huguenots, but the King brushed him aside with his stick. Then one day he had a terrifying revelation, that King Henri was an evil tyrant whom he must kill. Frightened and bewildered the unhappy madman decided to return home but the visions continued and halfway to Angoulême he turned back to Paris where, alone in his garret, half starved, a figure at once sinister and pathetic, Ravaillac brooded in a state of exaltation and indecision, nursing a bag in which he kept a broken table knife.

By the spring of 1610 Henri himself was in a strange, morbid mood. The business of Madame la Princesse had hurt him badly, damaging his mental equilibrium and command of self no less than it struck at his self-respect. Prone to gloomy reflection, no longer soothed by hunting, gambling or whoring, kinder to the Queen, always worried and pensive save for odd fits of feverish gaiety, the hero of so many battlefields lived in constant apprehension. A premonition of violent, unexpected death haunted him, sapping the energy and vitality of this least cowardly of men. Public ceremonies became occasions of dread, like the Queen’s coronation on 13 May. Marie herself was fearful; some months before she had dreamt of the King’s murder, that he had been stabbed twice, and it was her own wish that she should be crowned, as though feeling it would enhance her stature in an imminent widowhood. ‘By God! I’m going to die in this city, I’ll never get out of it,’ he told Sully, nervously tapping his spectacle case. ‘They will kill me because the only remedy for their peril is my death. Ah! This cursed coronation is going to be my death’!²⁷ However, according to Bassompierre, when the Queen was crowned at St Denis with great splendour ‘the King was extraordinarily gay’.²⁸ Comic relief was provided by Margot in fantastic robes and wearing a crown. And the royal armies would march within the week; as Sully reminded him, once outside Paris he would be safe.

But next day Henri’s gloom returned. He burst out to Guise and Bassompierre in the morning: ‘You don’t understand me now, you people, but I’m going to die one of these days and when you’ve lost me you’ll realize just how much I was worth, what a difference there was between me and other men.’²⁹ That day, 14 May, was ‘A daye which many Astrologians have iudged fatall to his Maiesty, whereof he was aduertised both by the Queene, and by Monsr. de Vendosme, with request not to goe abroad that day. But hee (not belieuing Predictions) sayd, that it was an offence to God to giue credit vnto them, and that hauing God for his guarde hee feared no man …’.³⁰ Sully was ill. The King decided to visit him at the Arsenal, then muttered several times, ‘I do not know what is amiss with me but I cannot leave this place’.³¹ Three times he said goodbye to the Queen, coming back each time with a worried look. Marie grew even more frightened, begging her husband to postpone his visit till the following day. Henri insisted he could not rest easy until he had spoken to Sully. Finally, one of his guards said the air would do the King good whereupon Henri donned his breastplate, though leaving it unfastened because the weather was hot, and called for his carriage. This was a huge, lumbering waggon with open windows, covered in velvet, suspended by leather straps on enormous wooden wheels and drawn by eight horses, as much like the royal coaches of modern England as a brewer’s dray. Seven courtiers sat inside with him while for escort he only had a few outriders and walking footmen.

The clumsy vehicle rumbled and lurched over the cobbles of the rue St Honoré till it was held up by a jam of carriages at the corner of the rue de la Ferronerie. Ravaillac had followed the royal coach from the Louvre. When it halted he jumped on to a small pillar at the side of the road, leant through the window—whose leather curtains were undrawn—and stabbed the King. Henri whispered, ‘I am wounded,’ raising his arm, at which Ravaillac stabbed him again, thrusting the knife into his ribs, cutting the aorta and piercing a lung. The King coughed, spat out some blood, then fell back dead. The murderer did not try to escape—those who arrested him only saved him with difficulty from a howling mob.

As the great coach trundled home to the Louvre the dismal news ran through Paris: ‘For the poore people were so confused with sorrowe, that a man could see them doe nothing else but goe wayling up and downe the streetes, lamenting the losse of their King.’³² Sully, informed that Henri was mortally wounded, cried, ‘This is what he always feared: God have pity and mercy upon us and upon the state. For he would not have died had not God let so strange a thing befall to make known his anger and to punish France, France which must now pass into strange hands.’ Barricading himself in the Bastille, he sent to his son-in-law, the Duc de Rohan, to hurry from Champagne with his six thousand Swiss. However, Sully’s fears were unfounded; the capital was so stunned that Marie was quickly established as Regent.

Ravaillac, bewildered, rambling and haltingly penitent was tried by the Parlement of Paris; despite strong suspicions he maintained, even in the torture chamber, that he had no accomplices. To the crowd’s joy, his execution was unusually protracted. Having burnt off his hand with flaming brimstone and torn flesh with glowing pincers from his chest and limbs, the executioners then poured boiling oil on the wounds and molten lead into his navel after which four strong horses were set to rend him in four, without success; throughout he prayed and ‘yelled out with such horrible cryes euen as it had beene a Diuell or some tormented soule in hel’³³ but he also screamed that he alone was guilty. After a long hour he died whereupon the mob paid Henri their own special tribute in their own bestial way; rushing on the poor, broken quarters with knives and sticks they tore them in pieces which they then burnt in the streets. Popular opinion refused to accept that there had not been a plot. Wild rumours circulated; the Spaniards were accused, Henrietta, Coton and the entire Society of Jesus, even the Queen. Perhaps there had been some scheming, in Leaguer circles, but it was never more than talk and had no link with Ravaillac.

For a final assessment of Henri IV and his achievement one must realize he was a product of the later Renaissance inheriting a ruined kingdom whose needs precluded long term measures; his reign over an undivided France lasted little more than a decade. To complain that instead of giving France a new, sounder system of government he simply restored the traditional structure and built the Ancien Régime which perished in 1789, is to ask that he should have been a man before his time. No contemporary ruler achieved more than Henri, who made a bankrupt and discredited crown the most powerful in Europe, bequeathing a government which would endure for the better part of two centuries; whereas in England, by contrast, the monarchy came to grief within fifty years of Elizabeth’s death. He allowed France to exploit her natural wealth, laying foundations for Louis XIV. Once in control of his kingdom he exorcized the Spanish menace, making valuable additions to French territory. Though the Cleves-Julich business never reached fruition it shows that, anticipating Richelieu, he would have begun the Thirty Years War a decade earlier; no ruler of what was starting to feel itself the most powerful state in the world could have done otherwise. That Sully even imputed to him such a scheme as the Grand Design illustrates how imaginative was his approach to foreign affairs. During his early career as a prisoner of the Valois and then as war lord of Guyenne, whether in court intrigue, faction fighting or civil war, he proved himself a master of politics, escaping liquidation as Huguenot champion and the ruling dynasty’s most dangerous rival, enlisting every possible ally at home and abroad. He made mistakes, like the Lovers’ War, but they were few. In his struggle for the throne he never deviated from an inspired advocacy of fundamental law while running Calvinist zealot, Papist bigot and godless adventurer in harness together. Nor was he less successful in winning over rebel magnates and then, when peace arrived, in governing both them and the Huguenot state within the state. The Edict of Nantes was not the masterpiece of toleration which has been claimed yet it was essentially realistic. Nonetheless, if he seldom put a foot wrong in matters of state or politics it was not so in war where he showed himself a bonny fighter but a poor strategist whose victories were largely due to luck or to inferior opponents. For Henri, war was a passion, and where his passions were concerned he was always at his worst. Indeed it is as a man that he is most open to criticism.

He soon became a legend, a figure from another age. France was ceasing to be the land of religious war and robber barons, and entering the Grand Siècle. As Pascal says: ‘Time heals griefs and quarrels, for we change and are no longer the same persons. Neither the offender nor the offended are any more themselves. It is like a nation which we have provoked, but meet again after two generations. They are still Frenchmen, but not the same.’³⁴ It was Henri IV’s glory to be the eternal Frenchman. In 1661 Bishop Péréfixe published a eulogistic yet highly readable Histoire du Roy Henry le Grand in tribute to his totally dissimilar grandson, Louis XIV. This was speedily translated into English by ‘John Dauncey, Gent., Souldier in His Majesties Regiment of Guards’ for a public anxious to know more of their new sovereign, Charles II; selections from Péréfixe were being published in England during the reign of another grandson, James II. In 1728 Voltaire brought out, first in London and then in Paris, his Henriade (which owed much to Péréfixe), a turgid epic surprisingly popular in its own day. By now the Bourbons had canonized their progenitor who even in official documents was referred to as ‘Henry the Great’. In 1790 Edmund Burke, addressing ‘a gentleman in Paris’, wrote, ‘I have observed the affectation, which for many years past, has prevailed in Paris even to a degree perfectly childish, of idolizing the memory of your “Henry the Fourth”.’³⁵ Under the Empire the one monarch of the Ancien Régime whose statue Napoleon retained at the Tuileries was Henri who had been his precursor in so many things. He was the solace of the émigrés, the symbol of the Restoration and, within living memory, the inspiration of French royalists. In the France of La Belle Epoque, of Charles le Coq, of Proust, the gay, stirring old tune of Vive Henri Quatre still had power to rouse ancient loyalties.

Even today Henri IV is the epitome of France. Sir John Neale has said, ‘He was a great and charming man,’³⁶ and what is so remarkable about his legend, what makes it so different from that of any other hero king, is that it preserves the memory of his failings as well as of his virtues. It is the most human of all royal legends.