SIX
France is so populous and fertile that what war damaged in a year is restored in two.
—Discours, F. de la Noue, 1586
THE SIEGE OF PARIS was raised in the autumn of 1590, yet outside the city the war continued fitfully, with Henri striving to isolate the city from the rest of France. In January 1591, he made another attempt on Paris, a Trojan-horse guile with soldiers disguised as peasants carrying sacks of flour, but this too was driven off. France had arrived at a kind of stand-off; it was plain that neither Counter-Reformation Catholicism, nor Protestantism, would be acceptable to the country, or offer it a stable future. After all the killings of the thirty-year-long sequence of religious wars, the moral and physical exhaustion imposed by the grim siege, the unforgiving orthodoxy of the Leaguers and the deadly tit-for-tat of political factions, the people longed for peaceful compromise. Unable to win a clear-cut military victory, sensing the mood in the capital and taking advantage of the new, emollient position of the Vatican, Henri prepared to play his supreme card.
He had come to realise that he must abjure his Calvinist faith if he wished to become King of France. His personal salvation preoccupied him little, but he appreciated that, if he were to move too quickly, his Catholic subjects would doubt his sincerity. Since 1589 he had accepted the principle of conversion, but had—wisely—refused to proceed until the Catholic League recognised him. In the spring of 1592, there were negotiations between representatives of Henri and Mayenne, the Ultra Cardinal of Lorraine and titular head of the League, who embodied the spirit of Catholic resistance in France. These talks led nowhere. Then, in January 1593, the Estates-General of the League assembled in Paris. Mayenne manipulated to have himself made king, but fresh compromises were in the air, it being put forward by both Catholic and Protestant supporters of Henri that “the difference between the two religions was only great as a result of the animosity of the preachers [and] by his own authority, one day he [Henri] would be able to reconcile them.”1 On 17 May it was reiterated first, that no one had ever denied the legitimate rights of the first Bourbon to the Crown of France, and secondly, like a bombshell, Henri announced that he had resolved to convert, “having recognised and judged that it was good to do so.” He entered negotiations with the League at La Villette, while continuing to press for a military advantage round the capital.
On Sunday, 25 July 1593, at Saint-Denis, the resting place of past kings of France, the vigorous forty-year-old Henri of Navarre solemnly abjured Protestantism to become a Catholic. The appalled Leaguers ordered requiem masses to be held to mark the dark day. Parish priests declared the excommunication of anyone who dared to take part in the “comedy of the conversion,” while Mayenne ordered the guards along the walls to shoot anyone leaving the city during the next twenty-four hours. The Church’s sanctions did not prevent several hundred Parisians escaping under cover of darkness to witness the ceremony at Saint-Denis. Crowds of thousands lined the streets and the square as the King progressed upon a thick carpet of flowers thrown by well-wishers who cried “Vive le Roi!” with his every step. Henri was dressed in the white he favoured, a simple doublet with gold brocade and white stockings set off by black cape and black plumed hat—symbols of purity and innocence, chosen by the King to reflect his readiness as a penitent to receive God with an open heart. He bore none of the grand insignia of office— such as fleurs-de-lys or a crown. Even his sword, a sign of justice testifying to the righteousness of his conversion, he relinquished on the church steps.
In many respects this royal procession resembled other triumphant royal entries of the Renaissance. The Prévôt de l’Hôtel du Roi led the way as master of ceremonies, his baton raised. Then 200 archers, each wearing green jerkins trimmed in gold, marched by, followed in turn by nearly 500 royal guardsmen. Ahead of the King, twelve trumpeters signalled his arrival. The King walked along among princes, grandees and knights of the Orders of Saint Michel and of the Holy Spirit, lords and other noblemen and officers. He stopped in front of Archbishop Beaune, and there knelt to the ground.
The prelate would not cede this throne to Henry IV until he had received absolution—an unprecedented expression of the Church’s supremacy over the Crown. Henry IV remained kneeling before the enthroned Beaune, who asked him, “Who are you?”
Henri IV, although bereft of all the outward signs of royalty, responded, “I am the King.”
“What do you want?” the Archbishop asked.
“I wish to be received into the bosom of the Roman Catholic Church,” Henri solemnly replied.
“Do you wish to do so freely?”
“Yes, I desire it freely.”
Following this brief interview, Henri delivered into the Archbishop’s hands the texts of the abjuration and profession of faith he had signed the previous day. With tears reportedly in his eyes, either a sure sign of contrition or a testimony to his abilities as an actor, he turned to the crowd in the square and, with his hand on a Bible, recited a short version of his abjuration and profession of faith:
I, Henri, King of France and Navarre by the grace of God, do hereby recognise the Roman Catholic Church to be the true Church of God, holder of all truth and without error. I promise before God to observe and uphold all decrees established by its saintly Councils and all canons of the Church, following the advice given to me by prelates and doctors as contained in statements earlier agreed to by me wherein I swear to obey the ordinances and commands of the Church. I also hereby disavow all opinions and errors contrary to the holy doctrines of the Church. I promise as well to obey the Apostolic See of Rome and our Holy Father, the Pope, as have all my predecessors. I will never again depart from Catholicism, but instead persevere in its profession with the grace of God until I die. For this I implore his assistance. 2
Inside the church, Henri knelt before the altar and reaffirmed his pledges, then walked behind the altar to the confessional that had been moved there especially for the occasion. He confessed his sins to Beaune, which reportedly took about twenty minutes. Beaune imposed penitential exercises and then absolved him for his past offences against God.
Henri’s soul “cleansed” following communion, a flock of white doves flew from the abbey’s belfry, a “miracle” planned to coincide with the King’s reception of the Host. As the doves still circled, Henri IV and all his dignitaries returned to the King’s lodgings at the Hôtel de Ville. He took up his sword again, exchanged his plain black cape for a crimson one emblazoned with fleurs-de-lys, and distributed some 400 silver écus as alms to the crowd. At five o’clock, after attending vespers, Henri IV left Saint-Denis and went by horse with an escort up to Montmartre, where he rendered thanks to God among the martyrs’ tombs. From the hill overlooking Paris he surveyed the rebellious capital which still defied him, only a quarter of a mile away, as cannonades and fireworks lit up the sky in his honour. Paris, Henri is famously said to have observed that day, was “well worth a mass.”30
It could be said that such spiritual flexibility was dictated by Henri’s lack of military success before Paris—exacerbated by that total inability to keep a secret. But for all his earthy cynicism Henri IV, founder of the Bourbon dynasty, might have proved one of France’s greatest monarchs—had he but lived. The fervent cheers that day at Saint-Denis drowned out the preachers in Paris who were fulminating from the pulpits that Henri’s abjuration was null and void, and the Papal Legate’s vain attempt to declare that the prelates at Saint-Denis had no power to release him from the ban of excommunication. (Papal absolution was finally granted by Pope Clement VIII on 17 November 1595.) Their cause was crumbling, the ground cut out from under it by Henri’s conversion. There now began a steady stream of desertions to Henri’s camp, and in August 1593 a general truce was concluded with Mayenne. Henri was set for his final progress towards the throne of France.
ON 22 MARCH of the following year, having already been formally crowned in Chartres, he entered his turbulent and problematic capital in triumph as Henri IV, the first of a 250-year sequence of Bourbon kings. He did so thanks to a coup, organised secretly the previous night by the Duc de Cossé Brissac, the newly appointed Governor of Paris— eager for a marshal’s baton from a grateful ruler—with two representatives of the Paris bourgeois échevins. It was typical of the deep distrusts still manifest in Paris that the occupying Spanish commander attached two Spanish captains to Governor Brissac in his quarters outside the city gates, with orders to kill him at the least indication of treason. But in the small hours of the 22nd, the officers, discovering nothing untoward, took themselves off to bed. Then, with a small posse of troops, Brissac seized the Porte Saint-Denis, to enter the city via the Rue Saint-Honoré. Reaching the Louvre, they were halted by a guard of some twenty German Landsknecht; but these were dispersed, killed or thrown into the Seine.
That was the sum of resistance. The Grand Châtelet was taken without a shot, and at 6 a.m. Brissac opened the gates of Paris to Henri. It was cold and raining, but the King nonetheless removed his ornate headdress (“la salade de la tête”) as he headed, diplomatically, to Notre-Dame to sing a Te Deum. The pealing of the cathedral bells was the first warning the sleepy Leaguers received that the enemy they had so resolutely held at bay three years previously was now in their midst. Henri’s champions ran through the city, proclaiming a general amnesty and instructing all to wear a white scarf as a sign of loyalty.
In the past, joyeuses entrées into Paris of kings newly anointed, or at their marriage, had been lavish affairs. Marked was the contrast with the simple spontaneity that now greeted this far more historic entry of Henri of Navarre as he left Notre-Dame for the palace of the Louvre. With some courage the King took himself on a walkabout through the streets, jostled and greeted by the curious who poured out to see him. Many were surprised to find Henry quite human, physically normal and friendly; the League preachers had never portrayed him that way.
That afternoon Philip II’s Spanish garrison left the city in good order. They filed past, saluting the King. To their leaders he responded, “Recommend me to your master, but never come back.”3 The party attached to the Papal Legate had already decamped. The standing corporations of the city and individuals who had collaborated with the League sought an audience so as to be forgiven. Only 120 to 140 people were banished from the city; allowed to rejoin Mayenne in Meaux, should they so desire. There were no executions, no confiscations of property. On the other hand, Henri erected a gallows near the Porte Saint-Antoine, “to hang any person who should be found so bold as to attempt anything against the public peace.”
In these days when victory seemed secure, the King at home in his capital was a gracious victor. When his council tried to bring him back to reality and obtain his opinion on political matters he reportedly said, “I have to admit that I am so drunk with ease to see myself where I am that I do not know what you are saying to me, nor what I am supposed to say in reply.” Given the bitterness of recent history, Henri’s clemency was supremely wise, for, as France saw that the King desired no reprisals, it followed Paris’ suit in acceptance.31
THE COUNTRY COULD HARDLY AFFORD otherwise—it was in a terrible state. “Destruction everywhere,” reported the Venetian Ambassador: “A great part of the cattle has disappeared, so that ploughing is no longer possible.” Peasants were to be seen pulling the plough themselves, serving “as animals, with ropes over their shoulders.” In the towns, populations had decreased sometimes by as much as two-thirds. Looms had stopped weaving. “All my shirts are torn,” even the King himself admitted: “my doublet is worn through at the elbow; I often can entertain no one, and for the last two days I have taken my meals now with one, now with another.” 4
After all the years of bitter internecine fighting, followed by the deprivations of the 1590 siege, the capital that Henri IV inherited was indeed a sad city. Mob violence and the continual guard duty imposed on many citizens had caused shopkeepers to shut their doors, and workers to cease producing even the necessities of life. Commerce had ceased when the siege made land and river traffic impossible. One of Henri’s first acts had been to order that trade should be resumed.
Still, the uncobbled thoroughfares became impassable during rains, and even on the paved streets the holes were so deep and full of mud that horses risked breaking their legs in them. If the paving originated by Philippe-Auguste was in a terrible state, so were the bridges; in December 1596, one of the wooden bridges spanning the Seine, the Pont-au-Meunier, collapsed. Lack of funds blocked even essential projects. Sanitation in this overcrowded city of already 220,000 was worse than it had ever been. The streets were covered with a thick slime of decayed garbage, ashes, urine and faeces, animal and human. Over the course of a decade and a half there were no fewer than three plague epidemics; 30,000 had died in 1580, and two years after his entrée, in 1596, Henri was forced to retire to Rouen to flee la peste. To the multiplicity of street cries was added that of a much sought-after vendor of patent rat-traps:
La mort aux ratz aux souriz
C’est une invention nouvelle!
There were only eighty doctors in all Paris; yet the King was enraged to find, in 1594, one noble marquis who was sick of urine retention being tended by sixteen doctors.
TO KEEP THE HORDES of militant beggars at bay, householders were allowed to have only one street door, and never to leave their homes uninhabited. Many of the beggars joined murderous bands such as the “Tire-Laine” and “Mauvais Garçons.” Punishments were draconian; the Italian Ambassador recorded, in 1577, hangings every day, “at every point.” Paris, still fundamentally the city Charles V had created 200 years previously, remained essentially medieval, with the Île de la Cité still at its heart. At the western end of the island stood the Palais, a chaotic maze of chiefly Gothic buildings. Since the King and court had departed, it now housed the Parlement, Chambre des Comptes, Cour des Aides, and Cour des Monnaies, together constituting the highest functions of government. Saint Louis’ Sainte-Chapelle still remained at its heart, its delicate spire rising sublimely, much as now, over a bustling and scurrying population of some 4000–5000 magistrates, clerks, copyists and minor officials. Merchants, book-sellers, paper and ink sellers, prostitutes, singers, letter writers and beggars daily set up shop or frequented the dozens of stalls tacked on to the buildings. The focus of all this maze was the grande salle, a universal meeting place between its marble floor, heavy columns lined with statues of French kings, and gold ceiling.
Connecting the Île with the Left and Right Banks were bridges crowded with overhanging wooden buildings. In December 1596 the Pont-au-Meunier, having been swept away by currents before, collapsed and deposited its 160 or more inhabitants into the Seine. On the Right Bank, the Hôtel de Ville was an unfinished palace in the French Renaissance style, but it served as the meeting place for elected officials and visiting dignitaries. The registers and the seals of Paris, and its official weights and measures, were kept there. Outside, the Place de Grève was then much lower than the present square and was frequently flooded by the Seine. Residents profitably rented out their windows on days of public execution. Eastwards, the Marais, despite its insalubrious odours, remained the most fashionable quartier.
On the western fringe of the Right Bank stood the Louvre. After demolition of the donjon under François I, access to it was gained from the east side. After crossing the drawbridge over the moat and passing under the east wing, one entered a public courtyard crowded with carriages and the less well-to-do—drawn either by curiosity or to beg, steal or otherwise seek their fortunes. Beyond the city walls, in the faubourgs, monasteries had sprung up to gird Paris with a belt of cloisters, refectories, churches and gardens. On the Left Bank at the abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the richest and largest of these, a fair was held beginning a fortnight after Easter and lasting for three weeks or more. It was a fashionable and “very wild place to go.” Parisians showed off their new clothes, while young noblemen would gallop through the fair on horseback, upsetting carts and picking up girls. It was a favourite haunt for pickpockets and prostitutes to prey on Parisians and hapless provincials alike.
HENRI OF NAVARRE was to prove one of the most important and attractive (a rare combination) of France’s rulers, able to combine elements of both England’s Henry VII and Elizabeth I. He brought unification after the bloody civil wars, and his unified country into the modern world. Not always a successful soldier, as seen, it was always the statesman and planner that was uppermost. With his characteristic energy, Henri began a deluge of orders for the capital’s physical repair and reconstruction: “As soon as he was master of Paris, one saw nothing but stone-masons at work,” recorded the Mercure Française in the year of his death. To new ambassadors returned since the days of the League, “When the master is absent, all the house is in disorder. But when he returns, it is adorned by his presence, and everything is the better for it.” But building was also a personal passion for Henri: “I love my city of Paris, she is my eldest daughter. I’m jealous of her. I want to do her more good, grant her more grace and mercy than she would ask of me...”5
Within a year of his arrival, sweeping aside all obstacles and objections, Henri was extending the Louvre with the magnificent Galerie de Bord de l’Eau, stretching for 500 yards along the Seine, and the Pavillon de Flore to link up with the Tuileries Palace laid down by Catherine de’ Medici.32On its ground floor Henri set up his own school of fine and applied arts. Three years later, he was ordering completion of the Pont Neuf, the wonderfully elegant structure that still spans the Seine across the western tip of the Île. It was to be Paris’s first stone structure, unencumbered by houses and able to withstand the unruly river. Funded by a new tax on every barrel of wine brought into the city, the Pont Neuf was an immense hubbub, permeated by music, where a permanent carnival seemed to take place and where you could purchase a parasol, or a tart.
Ô rendez-vous de charlatans
wrote a contemporary poet:
Of master crooks and lowly gangsters.
Of quacks with the newest drug sensation,
And specialists curing constipation,
Of musicians whose tinkling quickens,
And of people selling chickens...6
Mirroring the love of life and bawdy tone set by the “Vert Galant” himself, it was a microcosm of a city at last released from anxiety, fear and deprivation.
Next followed an attack on the city’s historically atrocious water supplies and in 1607, Henri launched a visionary scheme to develop the area between the Pont Neuf and the old Palais of Philippe le Bel. Named the Place Dauphine—after his infant son—its houses were of red brick with festoons of stonework (the style was borrowed from provincial architecture, and then recopied in the ensuing years in the many charming Louis XIII châteaux of the Île de France). All of a pattern, they were to form a great symmetrical triangle, open at the top by the Pont and framing a vista of the Palais at its base, in the first unified piazza to be constructed in Paris. Houses in the Place Dauphine swiftly filled with diplomats and provincials pursuing lawsuits in the courts, and the arcades below with shops, workshops and restaurants.
Henri was delighted by his handiworks; to a cardinal he wrote in May 1607:
At Paris, you will see my large gallery which runs to the Tuileries now finished . . . at the end of the Pont Neuf a beautiful new street runs to the Porte de Bussy . . . more than two or three thousand workshops are employed here and there for the embellishment of the city, so it is impossible that you will not notice a change.
The same year he launched an even grander scheme for the Marais, on the site of the razed Hôtel des Tournelles, scene of the tragic joust that killed Henri II. It was to be known as Place Royale—and finally, the Place des Vosges.33 However, Henri’s original intent for his Place Royale was, rather than the quartier chic into which it evolved, to create a low-rent development that would “house the workers whom we would attract here in the greatest possible numbers, and to serve as a promenade for those citizens of the town who were most crowded in their houses.”7 As the Place des Vosges, it remains perhaps the most lasting tribute to his reign, with its symmetrical perfection. Its construction now confirmed the Marais, until Louis XIV, as the fashionable residential area of Paris.
Grander still was Henri’s plan of 1609 to build nearby a vast semicircular piazza to be called the Place de France, of the most modern design, to outdo Rome’s Piazza del Popolo in splendour. It would radiate outwards into the city eight ramrod-straight thoroughfares, each bearing the name of a French province. Thus visitors entering through its gate would be instantly impressed by the unity of the capital and the country beyond under Henri’s flag of reconciliation. Alas, Henri’s death the following year aborted his Place de France, and his Place Royale was not completed till two years later, in 1612. Nevertheless, as one modern writer8 comments, had he lived, Henri IV would be known today as the greatest early town planner. As it was, Henri gave Paris the pattern for three centuries of urban design. At last, the city had left the Middle Ages, and the way to a French urban classicism was open.
On top of all these vast building schemes, Henri had to find time—and money—to house his ex-Queen, the demanding Margot, and a new Queen, Marie de’ Medici, not to mention the regiments of mistresses and their royal bastards he continued to accumulate. “La Reine Margot,” meticulous in her personal habits and sensitive to smells, had swiftly become disenchanted by Henri’s slovenliness and goatlike attributes. Almost immediately after their wedding night, each had found a plethora of lovers. Nevertheless, Henri and Margot remained curiously devoted to each other, but by the time of his coronation, the marriage had in practice broken down, and Henri was living with Gabrielle d’Estrées. Beautiful and intelligent, she represented probably the most serious attachment in the philandering life of the “Vert Galant”; Gabrielle, however, was not universally loved in Paris. Malicious pamphlets were circulating on the street as early as 1598, blaming her for the heavy burden of taxes and the political uncertainty. She was nicknamed, uncharitably, “la Duchesse d’Ordure.”
In 1599, Henri had decided to ask Pope Clement VIII for an annulment from Margot in order to marry Gabrielle. This would have made their illegitimate son, the Duc de Vendôme, heir to the throne—not a step likely to please the powerful Medicis. Preparations for the wedding were already under way that spring; Henri had placed a conspicuously large diamond ring on her finger, provoking Gabrielle to remark publicly: “Only God or the King’s death can put an end to my good luck!”
One evening in April, while Henri was at Fontainebleau, Gabrielle was awaiting his return in one of their favourite trysting places, a little palace in the Marais in the romantically named Street of the Cherry Orchard (which still exists). It belonged to a rather sinister figure called Sebastiano Zametti, alias Zamet, an Italian banker who also served as a kind of court jester—and probably procureur—to the King. A gambling companion, he was owed vast sums of money by the King and many of the French nobility. Zamet was even said to have been a lover of Gabrielle. Renowned for his table, that night he treated her to one of his famous dinners. Almost immediately Gabrielle suffered nervous convulsions, gave birth to a stillborn son and, aged only twenty-six, died in terrible pain before Henri could reach her side the following day, 10 April 1599. It was widely believed that Zamet had slipped her one of the notorious Medici poisons.
Henri was inconsolable, but the worldly Baron de Rosny (later Sully), though a life-long Protestant, urged him to consider another of those rich Medicis, Marie. His country, impoverished by war, his building projects, gambling and amours, badly needed Florentine money. Annulment papers were dispatched. But in the meantime the King’s amorous instincts had been aroused by a dangerous twenty-year-old brunette, Henriette de Balzac d’Entragues. Her mother had been mistress of a former king, Charles IX, and she was reputed to be “beautiful enough to bring damnation to men.” (Spurned, she was later implicated in various plots to assassinate the King, and was exiled.) Henriette gave herself to Henri for 100,000 écus, managing to acquire in exchange the title of Marquise de Verneuil—plus a written promise of marriage if she bore him a son. Sully promptly tore it up; Henri rewrote it. In fact she produced a stillborn infant, which gave Henri and Sully an excuse to consider the deal void.
Marie arrived in Lyons (with a dowry wiping out France’s debts to her banking family, plus 600,000 écus) to be met by the King—and Henriette who, having just given birth to his dead child, refused to leave him. Marie was enraged when Henri insisted on bedding her in advance of the marriage ceremony on 17 December 1600. (Napoleon I was to follow the example of Henri in his second nuptials, to Marie-Louise in 1810.) Unkindly called “the fat banker,” twenty-eight-year-old Marie was no beauty—but she produced an heir, the future Louis XIII, whose birth solved the problem of succession, and then settled down to an annual pregnancy. She also added to the architectural inheritance of Paris—most notably in the shape of the superlative Palais du Luxembourg, built in her widowhood in the style of her native Florence. Meanwhile, Henriette, Marquise de Verneuil, remained in the wings, producing more royal bastards, returning as Henri’s mistress from time to time, and finally—in the anticipation that, with Henri dead and his marriage to Marie annulled, her own son (born just a month later) could replace the Dauphin—becoming implicated in the assassination plot that killed him.9
All these royal families, legitimate and not, had to be housed or financed to build sumptuous quarters. Above all, there was ex-Queen Margot, of whom her mother, Catherine de Medici, once remarked that “heaven had given her Margot to atone for her sins.” Exiled for eighteen long years to Provence, where she occupied herself with numerous lovers, at fifty-two, Margot was obese and balding. Still entitled to call herself queen (part of the annulment deal with Henri), she was—so the royal family thought—safe to allow back into Paris. With typical generosity, Henri gave her a stretch of land along the Seine on the Left Bank, with an unrivalled view over her childhood home in the Louvre, where she built a magnificent mansion; long since disappeared, it would have stood roughly where the Beaux Arts is today, with an entrance on the corner of the present Rue de Seine and the Quai Malaquais. While work was in progress, the Archbishop of Sens let her have as a temporary lodging his handsome Hôtel in the Marais, whose pointed turrets and Gothic windows are still a reminder of medieval Paris today.34 Coarse Parisian wags nailed cruel verses to the door:
Commes reine tu devois estre
Dedans ta royale maison;
Comme putain, c’est bien raison
Que tu log’ au logis d’un prebstre!
(As Queen, you ought to be
In your royal palace;
But as a whore, it’s quite right
That you lodge in the lodgings of a preacher!)
Here in the Hôtel de Sens there ensued a grim tragedy, suggesting that old Margot was by no means past it. She had two young lovers among her pages—Comte de Vermond, aged eighteen, and Dal de Saint-Julien, aged twenty. In a fit of jealousy Vermond shot his rival just as he was handing Queen Margot down from her carriage in front of the present gateway. Saint-Julien was the current favourite, and the murder drove Margot insane with rage, vowing that she would neither eat nor drink until the murderer was executed. Henri gave his assent, and two days later she watched from a window in the Hôtel as Vermond mounted the scaffold, unrepentant. Margot is said to have “roared like a lioness”: “Kill him, kill him! If you have no arms, take my garter and strangle him with it.” Depleted, d’un seul coup, of two young lovers, Margot left the Hôtel de Sens for ever that same night of 1606.
Across the river, one would like to think that she declined into a happier old age in the last decade of her turbulent life. But her gardens, on which she lavished almost equal passion, soon aroused the jealousy of her successor, Queen Marie, gazing at them from the Right Bank. To trump Margot, she laid out the superb Cours la Reine, the tree-lined quai a mile long, reaching to the present-day Place de l’Alma. Her son, Louis XIII, later had to sell off the property to pay off Margot’s debts.
INDEBTEDNESS WAS A CONSTANT PROBLEM for Henri throughout his reign. Henri had incurred massive costs in putting an end to strife, within and without the kingdom—but this was something only he, with his immense moral stature, could achieve. In 1595, Henri persuaded Pope Clement VIII to lift the ban of excommunication, which had been placed during the 1590 Siege of Paris. At a stroke the main weapon of the Catholic extremists of the Paris Leagues was removed. In the spring of 1598, the Peace of Vervins ended the debilitating war with Spain, and the historic Edict of Nantes granted France an armistice in the Wars of Religion that had paralysed her over the past half-century. Until Henri’s grandson, Louis XIV, misguidedly revoked it in 1685, the Edict bestowed on France’s one million Protestants freedom of worship, rights to all state offices, and concessions such as special Chambres de l’Édit to hear cases involving Protestants.
By the standards of the time, it was a visionary act of reconciliation and liberalism for France. It was not to be emulated by the other European nations in the Thirty Years’ War that was about to engulf them; and, as with other historic attempts to find a formula to end sectarian violence, Nantes was unpopular with Catholics and Protestants alike. Only Henri’s authority could swing it, and enforce it. Meanwhile, openhandedly and despite considerable opposition, the King summoned back into France the Jesuits who had been banished as his enemies in 1594. “I hold them necessary to my state,” he declared. “If they have not been such under tolerance, I want them to be such by edict.” Both a dreamer and a doer, Henri proved that—once the day was won—he was also a man of outstanding compassion.
Many, possibly the majority of both sides, wished for the annihilation of their adversaries; but, at least on the surface, there was peace in which to reconstruct France. Henri went unchallenged—but for one major conspiracy by an old comrade-in-arms (in fact, his best general) and gambling partner, whom he had made maréchal de France, Duc de Biron and Governor of Burgundy. These honours were evidently not enough for the ambitious Biron, and (offered the hand of a sister of the King of Spain) he fell for Spanish designs on the King. Acting with ruthless speed and deaf this time to pleas from all sides for clemency, Henri had his old friend decapitated after a rushed trial, in July 1602. The execution caused the country’s leading nobles to kneel in fealty, trembling before the King. Henri’s absolutism was now complete.
TO BE CONSIDERED TRULY GREAT, a leader of men needs to be able to attract the best of talents to his side. If it was true of Napoleon, it was certainly true of Henri IV in his choice of Maximilien de Béthune, Baron de Rosny, Duc de Sully (1559–1641), to run his affairs. One of the most remarkable administrators ever produced by France, Sully was a friend of long standing, who had followed Henri since the age of sixteen. Being a dedicated Protestant, it was not until the settlements of 1598 that he could be brought forward as Henri’s grand voyer35—to become, in effect, his finance minister at the age of thirty-nine. That rare combination, a soldier-financier, Sully was a man of ruthless zeal and, crucially, was found trustworthy by Catholics and Protestants alike. Henri was possessed of rather more than genius; he also had good sense and a vast capacity for work. “Here I am,” he wrote, “locked up in my office, where I examine minutely and with the greatest attention all the abuses which remain to be rooted out.” He got up at 4 a.m. and worked through the day till 10 at night. Like Napoleon, he thrived on the reading of intelligence reports, observing: “I shall always maintain that without this guide, you can act only as a blind man or a rascal.”
There was no time to worry about the state of the exchequer. When Sully took over, so he told the British Ambassador (Sir George Carew), he found “all things out of order, full of robbery of officers, full of confusion, no treasure, no munition, no furniture for the King’s houses.” France had a debt of over 300 million livres (£3 million at the prevailing rate), and only 23 million in annual income, which only supplied 7 million as the King’s net revenue—all of which went on to warfare, pensions and gifts (not least to his legion of women). By 1608, ten years later, Sully had redeemed 130 millions of the debt, and had accumulated a reserve of cash in hand of 15 million livres.
Sully’s most famed saying was “Le labourage et le pastourage, voilà les deux mamelles de la France, les vraies mines et trésors du Pérou” (“Tilling the soil and keeping flocks—these are France’s paps, the real mines and treasures of Peru”). These words were to resound down through the history of agricultural France. They were to be echoed in Henri’s equally famed, populist utterance about his ambition for the poorest peasant to have “a chicken in his pot every Sunday.”
It was the time of the scramble for colonies in the New World—for the trésors du Pérou—by Spain in Peru and Mexico, and England in North America; but Sully was little interested in the heroic voyages to Canada of Cartier and Champlain. He would have echoed Voltaire’s dismissive scorn when Canada was lost to Wolfe—“a few acres of snow”; like Bismarck (and like de Gaulle, many years later) he saw France’s map of the world lying entirely in Europe. “Things which remain separated from our body by foreign lands or seas will only be ours at great expense and to little purpose” was Sully’s view, while he invested prodigiously to repair the damages of war, repairing bridges, improving roads (and lining them with trees), laying out a network of canals, draining marshes and reorganising afforestation. Modern France is indebted to him for the ordered beauty of her countryside, as well as the conception of industries making carpets, tapestry and glass.
To finance all this, Sully without hesitation devalued the currency so that it lost a third of its value, reduced payment of interest on government bonds (a highly unpopular measure), and introduced an innovative range of indirect taxes. One of these was thepaulette; introduced in 1604 and named after a provincial financier called Charles Paulet, it was a kind of hereditary tax whereby, in order to ensure their heirs should continue to enjoy royal office, holders had to pay the Crown an annual tax of one-sixtieth of the capital value of each office. Though it helped the monarchy out of its cash crisis, the paulette did little to tackle the root corruption of the “tax-farmer” system, which was to become one of the most insidious and wasteful institutions of the ancien régime— “the great destroyers of the kingdom’s revenue,” so Sully described them. In fact, the administration of Sully and Henri IV may be criticised for not tackling basic reform; but, given the delicate balances the King had inherited, there was a haunting fear that anything too radical could return France to the nightmare anarchy from which it had only so recently escaped.
Sully was something of a puritan, opposed to the idle and pleasure-loving ways of court life, and Henri’s wanton extravagances. The King’s favourite form of gambling was a card game called “Reversin” in which the Jack of Hearts took all. He gambled nearly every day; and almost always lost. In the early days, losing to influential subjects made a good bond of friendship, and it has been said that he may have won more Leaguers to his cause this way than on the battlefield. Unfortunately, the court imitated the King, with the Duc de Biron losing 500,000 écus in a single day. Many were the letters to Sully from Henri, begging for help to pay his debts. He was a source of despair to the frugal minister, who would write back fearlessly, chiding: “I beg his Majesty most humbly . . . to avoid all expenses on luxuries, not to waste money destined to advance his glory and to divert all expenditures on pleasures and distractions, of whatever sort, to purely military expenditures.”10
With his hot and lusty Pyrenean blood, the Vert Galant is said to have collected at least fifty-six mistresses identified by name in the course of his career. Many, like the Marquise de Verneuil, were extremely expensive, but if stuck without Verneuil or some other regular, any girl would do: genteel daughters, bourgeois girls, barmaids or simple peasant girls all might be requested to share the King’s bed. His need for women knew no bounds, with neither age nor political crisis, nor a new wife diminishing his earthy sensuality. Perhaps he had carried it too far; “They will do me to death,” he grumbled. Parisians even complained openly to the Queen, Marie de’ Medici, about her husband’s philandering. What might have been alluring in a young hero became offensive in a beard that was turning white. His subjects now tended to see instead the cost of it all—the women, the gambling and the vast national debt accrued by all the monumental building schemes. By 1610, Henri’s popularity was distinctly waning, Catholics chafed under the terms of Nantes, and the League began again to raise its head.
SINCE 1601 France had prospered in the peace that had been maintained on her borders. Now Sully began to talk ominously about “the grand design” whereby a kind of EU would rule the continent via a council of sixty elected members, which might even contemplate a joint invasion of India. More specifically, the “design” looked to Flanders and the Rhineland. There the death of the Duke of Jülich-Cleves had left control of this important principality in a vacuum, enticing to Spain. But, in the eyes of Parisians, there was far more to it than mere power politics. Aged fifty-six, Henri had unbecomingly fallen in love with a fifteen-year-old girl, Charlotte, daughter of the Constable of France, no less, from the powerful house of Montmorency. She had captured his imagination, dancing before him in a fête as one of the nymphs of Goddess Diana. Suspicious (rightly) of the King’s intentions, her fiancé, the Prince de Condé, fled with Charlotte across the border to Brussels, in November 1609, escaping the King’s men by only a few hours.
Stricken, the lovelorn King wrote that “I am now nothing more than skin and bone. Everything displeases me; I run away from company and if I permit myself to be brought into any gathering, instead of cheering me up, it succeeds in killing me...”11 Shocking to the French body politic, it looked as if Henri was prepared to go to war to get Charlotte back. A war threatened completely to redraw the map of Europe, placing France squarely in the camp of the Protestant nations. By May 1610 a powerful (and costly) French army 50,000 strong, backed by English and Dutch troops, was indeed poised to invade. On the 14th, on the eve of Henri’s departure for the front, something unimaginable occurred.
AT 4 P.M. ON 14 MAY 1610, Henri was travelling from the Louvre to meet Sully at the Arsenal when his coach was stuck in congested traffic in the narrow Rue de la Ferronnerie. Between his accession in 1593 and then there had already been twenty-four known plots to assassinate him, but Henri by now had become dismissive of the danger. Nevertheless, already in recent months, he had had several premonitions of his death. After going to mass at the Church of Saint Roch that morning, he had met with Maréchal de Bassompierre, who had found him morbid and “strange in his manner.” Bassompierre chided him for his uncharacteristic gloom, remarking that he was just in the prime of life; “had he not the finest kingdom in the world, a beautiful wife, a beautiful maîtresse and two lovely children?” It was to no avail. “Mon ami,” said the King, “I’ve got to leave it all!”
Bassompierre had just received from Italy a remarkable invention: a heavy coach enclosed by glass windows, the equivalent of an armoured limousine of its day. But on account of the cramped Paris streets, Henri was travelling that day in a small, light phaeton with its sides open to the street. Irony it was that the king who had improved the city so much should now be a vulnerable target because of its remaining imperfections.
Just like Gavrilo Princip in the Sarajevo of July 1914, a thirty-two-year-old with red hair, François Ravaillac, was awaiting his opportunity. Ravaillac was a rejected monk and failed schoolteacher from Angoulême who had done time in a debtors’ prison—and a fanatical Catholic, given to hallucinations and delusions about his role as a deliverer of France. Wishing to see all heretics subjected to fire and brimstone, he had come to Paris in December 1609 seeking, in vain, an audience with the King in order to tell him to banish the Protestants, or else force conversion upon them. Returning to Paris in April 1610, Ravaillac was appalled to learn of the preparations for war, which was a war against the Pope and against God. He stole a short kitchen knife from an inn, deciding to kill the King, but changing his mind at least once.
In Rue de la Ferronnerie, Henri’s coach was blocked by a broken-down haycart in collision with a waggon laden with provisions, while another cart had collapsed under the weight of barrels. The King’s attendants rallied around to help. Ravaillac, having stalked the King all morning, now saw his chance, leaped on to the running-board of the coach and stabbed the King violently three times, just as he was reading a letter. Heroically Henri murmured “Ce n’est rien,” but Ravaillac’s second blow had severed the King’s aorta. Ravaillac made no attempt to flee, and was seized by Henri’s travelling companion, the Duc d’Épernon. Henri was rushed to a neighbouring apothecary, but there was no hope. His body was taken back to the Louvre, while overnight Paris was reassured that he had only been wounded.
When the truth finally got out on the 15th, misery and vengeance took over the city. For a moment the weight of taxation and sexual scandal was forgotten; the ill-conceived expedition to Jülich swiftly put on hold. But who was to blame? Who, apart from the madman Ravaillac, could be rooted out and punished? It seemed inconceivable that he had acted alone. Ravaillac, under the most appalling torture ever suffered, remained insistent that he had. Most of Paris refused to believe this; there was proof that there were several plots in hand, Henri having earned the hatred of extremists on both sides for his efforts of religious reconciliation. Heavily under suspicion was the Marquise de Verneuil, known to hope that, upon Henri’s death, their bastard son would succeed. (After a lengthy, and incriminating, examination and after a principal informant had been found strangled in prison, the ambitious schemer, Henriette, was absolved—for raison d’état. ) And there was always the sinister hand of Spain. Paralysing fear spread that, after two decades of peace, there would be a return to civil war. The Jesuits, for one, fearful that they would be blamed, hastened to praise the King and acquired his heart to bury in their chapel at La Flèche, on the Île de la Cité; while the Huguenot leaders rushed forward to acclaim him the best king Providence had granted.
On 27 May, still protesting that he had acted as a free agent on a divinely inspired mission, Ravaillac was put to death. Before being drawn and quartered, the lot of the regicide, on the Place de Grève scaffold he was scalded with burning sulphur, molten lead and boiling oil and resin, his flesh then torn by pincers. Then his arms and legs were attached to horses which pulled in opposite directions. One of the horses “foundered,” so a zealous chevalier offered his mount; “the animal was full of vigour and pulled away a thigh.” After an hour and a half of this horrendous cruelty, Ravaillac died, as the mob tried to prevent him receiving last rites. When he finally expired, the entire populace, no matter what their rank, hurled themselves on the body with their swords, knives, sticks or anything else to hand and began beating, hacking and tearing at it. They snatched the limbs from the executioner, savagely chopping them up and dragging the pieces through the streets.
Children made a bonfire and flung remnants of Ravaillac’s body on it. According to one witness, Nicholas Pasquier, one woman actually ate some of the flesh. The executioner, supposed to have the body of the regicide reduced into ashes to complete the ritual demanded by the law, could find nothing but his shirt. Seldom, even at the height of the Terror, was the Paris mob to be seen acting with greater ferocity, born as much of fear as of grief. If nothing else it attested to the powerful loyalty to the Crown that Henri in his person had rekindled in France.
The King’s embalmed corpse was placed on open display in the Louvre up until 29 June, then conducted solemnly to Saint-Denis, where he had first made his vows as a Catholic monarch just seventeen years before.
Of Henri’s all-too-brief reign, it would be hard to improve on André Maurois’ assessment. The results may have been “less astonishing than legend would have them,” he wrote:
But at least Henri IV and Sully gave France ten years’ truce, and the country remembered it as a golden age . . . “You cannot be a Frenchman,” said Henri de Rohan, “without regretting the loss to its well-being France has suffered.” Ten generations have confirmed this judgement, and Henri IV remains, together with Charlemagne, Joan of Arc and Saint Louis, one of France’s heroes. He typifies not France’s mystical aspect, but its aspects of courage, good sense and gaiety.
Henri of Navarre was the second in a row of French kings to die by the knife of a religious zealot. What would have happened in Paris if Ravaillac had proved to be Huguenot, or the tool of a Protestant conspiracy, instead of a lone, deranged Catholic fanatic, is frightening to contemplate. As it was, throughout the country renewed civil war was widely predicted. Waiting in Milan, fêted by the Spanish envoys there, was the self-exiled Prince de Condé, the last would-be cuckold of the murdered King, short on both charm and resolve, and a prince of the blood.
But Henri had at least planned a legitimate succession. For all the rival claims of the mistresses, he had left an heir by Queen Marie de’ Medici, Louis XIII.