FIVE
Rally around my white plume— you’ll find it on the road to victory and glory.
—Henri IV
HENRI’S PHYSICAL TORMENTS after his mortal wounding were nothing compared with what occurred as a consequence— a violent turning point in the history of both the Valois dynasty and France herself. Now began the grim period of European struggles between Catholics and Protestants known as the Wars of Religion. “There is nothing so much to fear in a Republic as civil war, nor among civil wars, as that which is fought in the name of religion,” wrote Étienne Pasquier in 1562. Charles V, then Philip II of Spain, equipped with the sixteenth century’s most powerful military force, gave the Inquisition full reign. Under Charles the most zealous Catholicism, hardened and sharpened by centuries of struggle against the Moors, and subsidised by looted gold from the New World, flowed into the Spanish Netherlands. Then, when indebtedness to his German financiers brought Charles to the brink of bankruptcy, Spain progressively plundered the Netherlands, one of the richest mercantile territories of Europe, a great banking centre as well as the heartland of the Renaissance in northern Europe. By the time of Philip II, Spain was deriving four times as much revenue from the Netherlands as from all the melted-down bullion of the Indies. Her hand rested with the utmost brutality on the people of the Low Countries, who in turn found in the Reformation a kind of “Resistance.” In the words of the nineteenth-century American historian J. L. Motley, “The splendid empire of Charles the Fifth was erected upon the grave of liberty.”1 In his attempts to stamp out Protestantism, in 1535 Charles had ordered that all unrepentant males were to be burned, and even repentant females buried alive. By the time he abdicated, between 50,000 and 100,000 inhabitants of the Netherlands had been put to death one way or another by the Inquisition.
Under Philip worse was to come. Horrendous massacres were perpetrated by the Spanish soldiery in Antwerp, endeavouring either to extort gold from the citizenry or to maintain order; Protestant mobs responded by comprehensively sacking its superlative medieval cathedral. In return the city was brutally sacked in the “Spanish Fury” of 1576. The Duke of Alba and the Inquisition jointly drove many of its leading citizens—like the fathers of Franz Hals and Rembrandt—out to the safety of Amsterdam and Rotterdam. Hunger and misery reigned in these once prosperous territories; roadside gallows were to be seen everywhere. By 1572, under Protestant William (“the Silent”) of Orange, the burghers of the Netherlands were in full revolt against a cruel occupying force.
Inevitably, France, with Spain on one side and the Netherlands and Lutheran Germany on the other, was drawn into the religious mayhem and caught between the factions. French fear of political disintegration fanned the flames of religious zeal.
For years François I had vacillated between indulgence and harshness, finally coming down in favour of the latter, and on the side of the Catholics. Yet, for all their martyrs roasted cruelly over slow fires, the Protestants of France probably were less repressed under his stern rule than under the weak kings that were to follow him. His son, Henri II, did succeed—with a heavy hand—in maintaining a degree of interreligious peace in France. But under his widow, Catherine de’ Medici, le déluge. The three decades from 1559 to 1590 were like a Gallic version of William Shakespeare’s History Plays—the disorder which follows when strong rulers give way to weak ones. Only it was infinitely more savage.
Of notable Italian lineage, Catherine de Medici was well versed in the art of Machiavelli and unyielding in her ambition. Apparently barren for the first nine years of her marriage, Catherine then went on to produce ten children, three of whom became the next kings of France. Coming to the throne aged fifteen, her eldest son, François II, married to Mary Queen of Scots, had one of the shortest and most wretched reigns in French history (1559–60). Into the vacuum created by the sequence of three feeble kings moved the powerful and formidable Guise family. A branch of the princely house of Lorraine, tough men from the borderlands of France and fanatical Catholics, the Guises emerged as nobles in the early fourteenth century and, for military prowess, were promoted dukes under François I. The current duke, François, was judged a hero for his recapture of Calais from the English, and—as a Councillor—had the ear of Henri II. He was later assassinated, in 1563, by a Protestant Huguenot,21 Poltrot de Méré—the murder was a significant landmark in France’s Wars of Religion. His younger brother, Charles (1524–74), became the influential Cardinal of Lorraine, while his sister married King James V of Scotland and was the mother of Mary Stuart. This made the Guises uncles to the fifteen-year-old King of France—they were the real force behind the throne, and leaders of the campaign against the Protestants. Henri (1549–88), the eldest son of François, would be assassinated by the King for amassing too much power. His younger brother, Louis, was killed at the same time.
During these turbulent and bloody times, oppression of the French Protestants, or Huguenots, reached new heights. As an excuse for the excesses to follow, the fear provoked by their threat to established Catholic orthodoxy must have resembled something like that of the West to Soviet Marxism from 1917 onwards. In 1560, after summary trials, a number of their leaders were hanged from the battlements of the beautiful Château d’Amboise—with François and Mary, reputedly, gloating over the hanged men by torchlight.22 A few months later, François died of meningitis; Mary Stuart returned to Britain, and her own tragic end. The next king, Charles IX (1560–74), was only ten. Under Catherine as regent, a confused series of civil wars broke out between Protestants—now becoming numerically threatening—and Catholics. Multiple murders of the rival leaders, and massacres of their supporters, exhibited a gruesomeness that seemed incomprehensible to foreigners of the time such as Lord Burghley. It compares with the Balkan “ethnic cleansing” of our own times, and was every bit as nasty.
Seldom was there heard any plea for toleration, on either side. Fear, hatred, suspicion and counter-suspicion stalked and rent the country, like a snake writhing through the land, setting Frenchman against Frenchman.
ABROAD, Philip II of Spain spurred on the Catholics; Elizabeth of England the Protestants. “Everyone has his gang” was the cynical saying of the time. After a deceptive respite, the killings in France culminated with the infamous “Saint Bartholomew’s Eve” massacre of 24 August 1572. In the atmosphere of confusion and mutual denunciation that prevailed in Paris, who was actually responsible for the massacres is regarded as unproven by modern historians.2 The view long held was that Charles IX, acting on the advice of his mother, Catherine, to resolve France’s dilemma by a mass purge of Protestants, gave the terrible order: “Kill them all, so that not one will be left to reproach me for it.” Possibly the court only intended the liquidation of a few ringleaders, gathered in Paris for the wedding that day of Protestant Henri of Navarre to Catherine’s daughter, Marguerite (Margot)—a marriage supposedly of reconciliation, but the mob then ran amok. The Protestant leader, Admiral Coligny, an elderly man of high character, was butchered and flung out of his window in the Rue Béthizy, near the present-day Rue de Rivoli— his corpse disembowelled and castrated by ghoulish children.
Some 15,000 were slaughtered that night, most of them in Paris; which, according to witnesses “looked like a conquered city.” Surviving Huguenots began to leave France in legions. Over the next century, culminating with Louis XIV, the loss of their talents was to result in something akin to what Hitler achieved for Germany in his twentieth-century persecution of the Jews. Another religious war ensued, then a fourth and a fifth, and a sixth; but shortly after “Saint Bartholomew’s Eve” Charles, too, died of a mysterious illness. Tuberculosis was suspected, but it has been suggested that he was poisoned by his ruthless mother.
Charles’ younger brother, another son of Catherine de’ Medici, now became king as Henri III (1574–89). On account of his effeminacy and occasional habit of appearing at ceremonies in drag, he earned the nickname of “The King of Sodom.” Surrounded by a mincing entourage known as hismignons, it was clear that Henri—though married—would produce no heir, and a serious dynastic crisis ensued. The end of the Valois dynasty loomed. The obvious, and most promising, successor was his distant cousin and brother-in-law by marriage to Margot, Henri of Navarre. The only trouble was that Henri was a Protestant. The forceful reigning Pope, Sixtus V, promptly proclaimed a virulent bull nullifying his rights to the throne of France, and gaining the support of Philip II’s Spain. Exploiting Elizabeth’s execution of Mary Queen of Scots, François’ widow, as a pretext, an eighth war of religion now engulfed France—and Europe. It was only the weather and Sir Francis Drake that saved Elizabeth’s England from the Spanish Armada in 1588.
BY THE 15708,the Guises had come to control the army, much of the Church and whole provinces of France. Paris itself lay under the power of the Catholic League, directed by the second all-powerful Henri Duc de Guise. More dangerous than anything preceding it in mobilising fanaticism, in 1588 the League organised a “Day of Barricades,” virtually taking over the city. Henri III fled his capital but ordered the assassination of Henri de Guise in Catherine’s bloody Château de Blois. The terrible Catherine herself died the following January. “It is not a woman,” observed a contemporary, “it is Royalty which has just expired.”3
In August of that same year, 1589, Henri III, still fleeing from his enemies, was stabbed in the stomach (while sitting on his commode at Saint-Cloud) by a fanatical monk, Jacques Clément.23 It was a killing in revenge for the Duc de Guise, carried out on behalf of the League. (Clément was promptly killed, so his precise motives were never known.) At the news, in some ultra-Catholic strongholds tables were set up in the street to celebrate. With his dying breath, Henri sent for the other Henri (of Navarre) to be his successor: “Mon frère, I can feel clearly that it is for you to possess the right which I have worked for, to preserve for you what God has given you.” He urged his successor to embrace Catholicism. The powerful Ligue in Paris, however, declared the murder of Henri III to be “legitimate,” and insisted that the excommunicated King of Navarre should be barred from the throne of France.
OVER THE COURSE of her long history, Paris has been occupied by the English during the Hundred Years’ War, and by the Germans in 1940; and besieged at least four times. In the year 885, those terrifying Norsemen had sailed up the Seine in 1400 longboats, to submit Paris to a merciless siege lasting ten months. In 1870, Paris was to be besieged by Bismarck’s Prussians, bringing the city to its knees the following January, after nearly four bitter months. Within weeks, Paris was besieged again—this time by fellow Frenchmen. Between the Norsemen and the Prussians a thousand years later, Paris was in fact besieged once more— also by her own countrymen—in 1590, under Henry of Navarre (Henri IV, 1589–1610). As with Philippe-Auguste before him, the fate of the capital during his reign was prefaced by a great battle outside the city—this time at its very portals, but it was a battle the King did not win.
FOR THIS SECOND SIEGE of Paris, Henri of Navarre set out from Tours with a motley force of 10,000 men, to claim his right to the throne bestowed on him by the dying Henri III. Though Nostradamus had predicted his accession to Catherine de’ Medici with remarkable accuracy back in 1564,24 it was a fairly distant right in that Henri was the nearest blood descendant along the line from thirteenth-century Louis IX, “Saint Louis.” Nevertheless, he was enormously popular, especially down in Navarre, where he already ruled. Aged thirty-five, of average height, wiry and nervous, Henri was at the peak of his physical and mental powers. Though miserably married to the highly sexed and unfaithful “Reine Margot,” daughter of Catherine de’ Medici and sister to the last three kings, he was an immensely attractive figure, both to women and to men—despite it being said that he was economic with bathing and smelled strongly of goat! Tastes vary. A warm-hearted Gascon from the south-west of France, he was always in love (usually inconstant), sending his current mistress(es) passionate—and indiscreet—letters full of details of his military and political operations. As, in all probability, they had meanwhile been dumped, the scorned women tended to hand over valuable intelligence about his intentions to his enemies.
This may be one good reason why, eventually, unable to win on the battlefield, he was forced to change his religion to obtain the crown of France. Nevertheless, he was personally fearless in battle. “I rule with my arse in the saddle and my gun in my fist” was his fighting motto. He had already revealed his qualities as a soldier in 1580, at the siege of Cahors, and again in 1587 at Coutras, the first major Protestant victory against the Catholic League, which gained for him the south-west of France.
Perceptively Henri noted how, in this murderous age, “All men want me to string the bow of my business with the cord of their passion.” But it was not a game he was prepared to play. Repeatedly he appealed to the French for unity, and union, declaring: “We are all Frenchmen and fellow-citizens of the same fatherland; therefore we must be brought to agreement by reason and kindness, and not by strictness and cruelty, which serve only to arouse men.” His instincts were, for the times, surprisingly liberal, but assertive. “I have leaped upon the ramparts of cities,” he challenged the Leaguers in Paris, and “surely I shall gladly leap upon your barricades” he warned them.
RANGED AGAINST HIM was the fanatical League of Sixteen in Paris, purging not only Protestants and those loyal to the late Henri III, but in addition those aspiring only to remain neutral. In command of the Catholic forces was Cardinal Charles de Lorraine, Duc de Mayenne, avenging brother of the assassinated Henri of Guise. Mayenne had an eye on the throne himself, while supporting him were Philip II of Spain and the Italian Duke of Savoy—both sworn enemies of France—and the Vatican, all-powerful in those days. Arbitrarily Mayenne proclaimed the aged Cardinal de Bourbon (uncle of Henri of Navarre) to be King under the title of “Charles X”25—though in fact the Cardinal had already fallen into the hands of his nephew.
Chaos ensued, with France virtually ceasing to be a state, and threatening to splinter into territories loyal to one or other armed party. The Parisian bourgeois middle class, weary of conflict, were reluctant in their support of Mayenne: “The merchants,” he wrote, “think only of their business, will have nothing to do with war, and advise peace.”
WITH MOST OF THE BIG CITIES SUPPORTING THE LEAGUE, Henri of Navarre decided, in August 1589, to move with his force of 10,000 into the friendly lands of Normandy. From Paris Mayenne pursued him, boasting that he would bring Henri back in a cage, like a bear; which, at the time, looked highly probable. In a confused fight in the mist, Henri narrowly escaped capture but Mayenne threw away his numerical superiority. A triumphant Henri dispatched a message, immortal in French history, chiding his favourite commander who had failed to arrive on the scene of battle: “Go hang yourself, brave Crillon, we fought at Arques—and you weren’t there!”26 He then headed back towards the capital, instructing Harambure, one of his more colourful captains, nicknamed “Borgne” or “One Eye”: “Borgne, take forty or fifty musketeers (maîtres) and go right to the gates of Paris.”4 His forces attacked the suburb of Saint-Jacques, on the Left Bank, but at the same time troops under Mayenne managed to enter the city by the Right Bank.
Henri himself reached the ancient abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. But surveying the vast city from its belfry, he realised that the four-centuries-old walls built by King Philippe-Auguste were too strong for him to contemplate a frontal assault. His royalists were forced to abandon their attempt to encircle Mayenne, not having the numbers to “make a city and an army succumb at the same time.” On 11 November 1589, Henri of Navarre’s troops disengaged from Paris, retiring anew to Normandy for the winter, and preparing to lay siege to the city. To a friend, Geoffroy de Vivans, he wrote:
If Fortune will only smile at us, I guarantee you that neither poor weather nor bad roads will prevent me from pursuing her in whatever place she appears, without begrudging the Duke of Mayenne his rest for the moment in Paris, where I hope to rest myself in turn one of these days.
Henri lost time by deploying his limited forces to mop up behind him, and as was his wont, rashly communicated full and glowing details of his strategic movements to his mistress of the moment—a lively widow nicknamed “Corisande.” He wrote boasting:
I’ve taken the cities of Sens, Argentan, and Falaise. Tomorrow I’m leaving to go and attack Lisieux. Certainly, I’m covering a lot of ground, and I go wherever God leads me, since I never know exactly what I must do in the end; nonetheless, my accomplishments are miraculous; also, they must be in the hands of the Great Master himself. 5
Such careless talk ended in enemy hands.
By the spring, both sides were ready for a new campaign, in which the first engagement was fought on 14 March at Ivry, just four days’ march due westwards from Paris. Mayenne had received substantial reinforcements from Spain: many of them mercenaries paid for by Philip II. The Spanish King justified this first military intervention in French affairs by declaring that there was “an imminent danger to the Holy Catholic Church.” It was his intention to extirpate all heresy from France and to install the Catholics’ favoured king, “Charles X,” on the throne.
At Ivry, Henri de Navarre, turning towards his men, uttered words of a consummate knight:
Mes compagnons, God is for us. Before us are his enemies and ours; before you, you see your king. Get at them! If you lose your coronets, rally around my white plume—you’ll find it on the road to victory and glory.
Though the royalists were outnumbered by 8000 cavalry and 12,000 infantry to 2000 and 8000 respectively, after some ferocious hand-to-hand mounted combat, the day again ended in clear-cut victory for Henri. Following the battle, he showed the less pleasant side of the Renaissance warrior; mercenaries accused of past treachery at Arques had their throats cut without mercy, together with many French foot-soldiers. Mayenne fled with his cavalry towards Mantes.
Henri made sure he played up this victory, sending an official communiqué to bring the happy news to friendly countries: “It has pleased God to grant me that which I so ardently desired: to be given the means to engage my enemies in battle.” Verses were composed by his supporters on the theme: “You have justly put my enemies to rout.”
By 7 May 1590, the King’s army was divided into separate corps to commence a blockade of the capital. Writing to Corisande, from Chelles, on 14 May, he boasted:
I am before Paris, where God will assist me. Taking the city, I will finally begin to exercise the attributes of the Crown. I’ve taken the Charenton bridge and the bridge of Saint-Maur with cannon, and hanged all who were hiding there. Yesterday, I took the outskirts of Paris, by force; the enemy lost many and we only a few; although it is true that M. de La Noue was injured, but he will survive.
He had burned all the windmills, essential to producing bread, that lay outside the city walls so that “it must happen that within twelve days, they are either rescued or they surrender.” Henri was convinced that the divided Parisians would capitulate, but he had given them ample time to bolster up the city’s defences and fill the stores with food.
The ancient city walls, however, had become seriously dilapidated; one stretch had been in such a state during the time of Rabelais that, as described in his habitually earthy words, “a cow farting has knocked down plus de 6 brasses!” (a brasse equals 6 feet). Little had been done to improve it since. It was at this weakest point where Henri launched one of his first assaults, but the scaling-ladders failed to reach to the top of the walls. Another effort came on 12 May, when Henri tried to take the Faubourg Saint-Martin on the Right Bank; the League’s arquebusiers defended it so well that the assault had to be called off. Following this repulse, the League spin-doctors assured Paris that “God would never permit a heretic king to walk their streets.” The siege extended to three months, as Paris held on like a mad person. Henri now sat down to starve it into submission.
BESIEGING ARMIES generally require a large numerical advantage over the defending force, but to besiege this large walled city of 220,000, the biggest in Europe, Henri IV had only some 12,000 to 13,000 men.27 Against this the Leaguers could muster a 50,000-strong international garrison of French arquebusiers, Swiss foot-soldiers and elderly German Landsknecht (national guard), while men from each of the sixteen quartiers formed a well-armed but unreliable militia “National Guard.” Pigaffetta, a veteran Italian captain in the Vatican’s entourage, scornfully viewed this force on the ramparts as resembling “dogs that bark furiously on the threshold of a house, but never venture outside.”6 In addition, however, there lurked in the background the potential relieving force of Mayenne (defeated at Ivry), and in the Spanish Netherlands the formidable Spanish infantry and Italians of the redoubtable Duke of Parma.
Henri’s royal army, spread around Paris, possessed only a handful of heavy siege cannon and lighter culverins, or field pieces; the heaviest guns of the period, muzzle-loaded, fired round balls of 50 lb and 32 lb, and had an effective range against fortifications of not more than 340 paces, with no great accuracy or penetrating power against thick city walls. Moreover, as of 1590, the Huguenots were not renowned either for their weaponry or for the art of their gunnery. Therefore Henri was faced with winning Paris by attrition. Inside Paris news of the defeat at Ivry had provoked much “annoyance and astonishment” among Mayenne’s supporters. As Henri tightened his grip outside, a mood of violent defiance prevailed in Catholic circles, with priests taking to the streets with cries of “Au meurtre! Au feu! Au sang! À la vengeance!” (“Murder! Fire! Blood! Vengeance!”) against the King. Other factors, though, gave rise to a strong sense of foreboding, and depression. Poor peasants whose stores had been consumed by the besiegers flooded into the city. It was reckoned that there was just enough food within the city for one to one-and-a-half months of siege, and there were fears at Henri’s ability to infiltrate and stir up an insurrection.
Orders were taken to expel refugees and the sick, and other “useless mouths” in order to save food—but then, mistakenly, the orders were rescinded. In a kind of “scorched earth” strategy, houses on the perimeter that might prove useful to the besiegers were demolished, while, because of the shortage of soldiers, it was decided to make little attempt to defend the faubourgs, or outlying suburbs.
The Paris defenders were placed under command of the twenty-two-year-old half-brother of Mayenne, the Duc de Nemours—described as being full of zeal and energy, but inexperienced. Then, upon the scene there suddenly arrived their deus ex machina—in the shape of Enrico Caetani, the Papal Legate, sent by Pope Sixtus, perhaps the most determined of all the Counter-Reformation Popes.28 Caetani’s journey was dogged with misfortune; all his baggage was lost, and at Sens the ceiling of the Archbishopric had collapsed on top of him. Nevertheless, for the next four months—and with considerable personal courage—Legate Caetani was to provide an inestimable boost to Parisian fighting morale, acting as the Pope’s personal representative. 7 Furnished with a papal credit note expressly for negotiating the release of the Cardinal, he promptly spent it on providing the besieged with arms and foodstuffs. He established his spiritual leadership with a sermon before the Sorbonne, declaring that, “whether Catholic or not,” Henri was to be excluded for ever from the throne of France. The Cardinal in fact died during the siege, never to be recognised in the history of France as Charles X.
The fierily Catholic Sorbonne promised a “Martyr’s Palm” to any who died in combat against the “heretics,” while—a little comparable to the Red Army’s political commissars in the Second World War—priests and monks bearing a miscellany of arms were attached to each civilian militia unit, to bolster its valour. As the siege began in May, bread was already rationed to 1 lb a day. In June, prices at the bakers began to soar. Several suspects, accused of planning to open the city gates, were executed pour encourager les autres. The defenders attempted a sortie but were repulsed, and Henri retaliated by burning all the fields round the city. Without cavalry, Nemours’ forces found it virtually impossible to mount foraging expeditions.
To weaken their morale further, Henri set up two batteries of cannon on the heights of Montmartre, bombarding Paris indiscriminately. The Parisians, according to contemporary accounts, “just laughed.”8 But hunger began to bite, harder and harder. “At nightfall there were only to be seen men and women displaying their misery in words and actions, demanding bread with loud cries, and often refusing money that was offered them, because many had one and lacked the other.” Plate from the churches was melted to fund provisions. Legate Caetani set up great cauldrons of soup, bran and oats in the streets, while the Spanish Ambassador, Bernadino de Mendoza, distributed 120 écus of bread daily—to be acclaimed with grateful shouts of “Vive Le Roi d’Espagne!”29 There were religious processions, of barefoot penitents, with preachers promising relief within days.
It did not come; with July, there was a minor miracle in that an early hot summer produced a premature ripening of the wheat harvest within the walls of the city, but this was not enough to avert starvation. Donkeys, then (as would happen in 1870) cats and dogs, and rats began to disappear. Rations were reduced to 4 ounces per day of repugnant bread baked from bran. One man was reported eating candle tallow; there were, reputedly, experiments in milling bones out of the graveyards for flour, and there was more than one account of cannibalism—“little children disguised as meat.”9 A mother was discovered to have eaten her two deceased children, both ostensibly interred according to due Catholic rites; but a thigh was found in an armoire and her maid confessed all, after the mother’s own death. Thus “everyone universally, and each according to his burden, faded away in the worst extremities of famine.” Suffering brought with it more brutal murders of those suspected of sympathising with Henri, while by the end of July some of the League troops began to desert.
At first Henri showed himself hard-hearted, determined to punish citizens who had prevented him from “enjoying the benefits of the Crown.” His soldiers, however, were not beyond selling food to the Parisians, at grossly inflated prices, while officers with grandee relatives in the city (and, indeed, Henri himself ) managed to breach the blockade to succour the rich. As always, it was the poor who suffered most, while, so it was claimed, religious establishments maintained provisions to last a year. According to Captain Pigaffetta, in the affluent quarters there were shops offering game and a wide choice of foods—at astronomic prices. On 9 July, still battering away at the walls with his inadequate cannon, Henri captured the Right Bank faubourg of Saint-Denis. To improve his image with the Parisians, his future subjects, on 24 July Henri allowed 3000 “useless mouths” to quit the city, and on 6 August—once privation had become all but intolerable—he accepted a parley with a deputation from the League. (Before they could even engage in talks members of the deputation had to receive special absolution from the Papal Legate, Caetani, since Pope Sixtus V had decreed that any Catholic negotiating with heretic Henri would be excommunicated.) In the meantime, Henri’s force, now increased by reinforcements to 25,000 men, had taken in one day all the remaining suburbs and brought their guns up to the ramparts.
The fall of Paris seemed but a matter of time. Pacifist sentiments gathered strength. The ultra-Catholic leaders of the League braced themselves for a terrible night-of-long-knives, in revenge for Saint Bartholomew’s Eve. But Henri, with his usual acumen, realised that clemency was in his interest. On 6 August, Henri declared to the Archbishop of Lyons and Bishop Gondi of Paris, sent to negotiate with him at the Abbey of Saint-Antoine:
I speak straightforwardly, without any hesitation, what it is I have in my heart. I would be in the wrong to say to you that I do not want a general peace; I do want such a peace . . . I love my city of Paris, and as if she were my eldest daughter . . . I want to do her more good, grant her more grace and mercy than she would ask of me; but I want that she should show gratitude and that she should know my clemency, and not express her gratitude to the Duc de Mayenne or the King of Spain.
He told the envoys that if they were to accept his terms, within eight days there would be peace. But, if the League leaders planned to hold out to the last, “I will be constrained by my duty, as their king and their judge, to have some hundred or more of them hanged who by their malice have made many innocents and persons of quality die from hunger.” Subsequently he promised that he would impose no changes on the Roman Catholic religion, “except by the determination of a legitimately assembled council,” to which he undertook to conform his personal beliefs.
The League rejected Henri’s terms. The siege continued. A conspiracy broke out to facilitate Henri’s entry into the city. As they seized the gates of Paris, they yelled: “Either peace or bread!” and “Vive le Roi” while they waited for reinforcements. De Nemours, however, was warned in time. One of the National Guard colonnelz de la ville, named Le Gois, supposedly an honneste marchand, was killed by a conspirator—a merchant jeweller, who was executed. German Landsknecht mercenaries were reported to have inaugurated a hunt in pursuit of small children—of whom three were eaten. It seemed as if capitulation had to be but a matter of days away.
THEN TWO THINGS HAPPENED far away from Paris which determined events there. First, on 27 August, the uncompromising Pope Sixtus died. During his last months his enthusiasm for the League had already grown tepid. He was followed by more liberal pontiffs, three in just over a year; then came Clement VIII (1592–1605), described as “saintly but realist,” who was to alter radically Vatican policy towards France, and come to terms with Henri of Navarre. In contrast and with far more immediate consequences for the starving Parisians was the news, reaching the city on 30 August, of the approach of a powerful liberating army commanded by Alexander Farnese, Italy’s Duke of Parma. Commander of Philip II’s northern forces and one of Europe’s ablest generals, Parma had received orders from Madrid to abandon his current campaign against the Dutch and to march south with all speed to save Paris. At Meaux, some 25 miles east of Paris, close to the Marne, Parma linked up with Mayenne.
Henri made one final attempt on the southern ramparts, but a defence was mounted by four Jesuits, a librarian and a lawyer, who ran to the threatened sector with pickaxes. He was now forced to lift the siege and defend himself against Parma and Mayenne combined. To a new lover, he confided (on 31 August), ever the romantic fatalist:
Mistress, I am writing this to you the day before a battle. The issue is in the hand of God, who has already decided what will come of it and what he deems to be expedient for his glory and for the salvation of my people. If I lose the battle, you will never see me, because I am not the kind of man to flee or to retreat. I can assure you, however, that if I die, my penultimate thought will be of you and that my last will be of God.10
It suggested the closeness of priorities in Henri’s mind. But, manoeuvering more skilfully, Parma denied him either battle or a glorious death, instead seizing and consolidating the approaches to Paris. On 1 September a first convoy of foodstuffs reached the desperate city. By the 7th, Parma was in possession of both banks of the Marne at Lagny—close to where the French would try to break out from Bismarck’s siege in 1870, and only a few hundred metres east of where the Boulevard Péripherique now runs. He was now able to rush provisions down the Seine, the age-long lifeline of Paris. In the last days of fighting, it was reported that Henri “risked that charmed life of his a hundred times”; but it was now clear that he was not going to win Paris by military means.
Proud Paris was liberated amid frenzied rejoicings. Henri had failed, at massive cost to himself and the people. Out of its pre-siege population of 220,000, as many as 40,000 to 50,000—or one in five—are estimated to have died of starvation or disease. (By comparison, during the siege of 1870–1 by the Prussians, which also lasted four months, deaths from all causes—including military casualties, disease and starvation— are reckoned to have totalled little more than 6000, out of a population roughly seven times as large.) Economic life had been damaged by the most crippling siege of any major city since that of Constantinople by the Turks in the previous century. After all their suffering and with their habitual impatience, Parisians became disenchanted with the League and dismissive of its leaders. Of the discredited Mayenne it was crudely said that he “chose to reside in the city suburbs rather than endure the preachers’ hostility” and that “he was only a big pig who slept with his whore [and] could only fight a war with flagons [of wine].” 11
After four months of privation while he had organised the beleaguered city, the Papal Legate, Enrico Caetani, could not wait to get back to his native city, Rome. One of his entourage, the Bishop of Asti, Monsignor Panigarole, was to recall the horrors of 1590: “there was no meat, no fish, no milk, no fruit, no vegetables. I would almost say there was no sun, no sky, no air . . . One thinks of the Siege of Jerusalem, one thinks of Titus and Sennacherib! It was a miracle. . . .” It was indeed, as was remarked by one eminent French historian of the early twentieth century, Jean Mariéjol, “a miracle of fanaticism.”