in the “peace of Monsieur,” signed at Beaulieu on the 6th of May Peace of Monsieur (1576). 1576, the duke of Alençon receiving the appanage of Anjou, Touraine and Berry, the king of Navarre Guienne, and Condé Picardy, while the Protestants were granted freedom of worship in all parts of the kingdom except Paris, the rehabilitation of Coligny and the other victims of St Bartholomew, their fortified towns, and an equal number of seats in the courts of the parlements.
This was going too fast; and in consequence of a reaction against this too liberal edict a fourth party made its appearance, that of the Catholic League, under the Guises—Henry le Balafré, duke of Guise, and his two brothers, Charles, duke of Mayenne, and Louis, archbishop of Reims The Catholic League. and cardinal. With the object of destroying Calvinism by effective opposition, they imitated the Protestant organization of provincial associations, drawing their chief supporters from the upper middle class and the lesser nobility. It was not at first a demagogy maddened by the preaching of the irreconcilable clergy of Paris, but a union of the more honest and prudent classes of the nation in order to combat heresy. Despite the immorality and impotence of Henry III. and the Protestantism of Henry of Navarre, this party talked of re-establishing the authority of the king; but in reality it inclined more to the Guises, martyrs in the good cause, who were supported by Philip II. of Spain and Pope Gregory XIII. A sort of popular government was thus established to counteract the incapacity of royalty, and it was in the name of the imperilled rights of the people that, from the States of Blois onward, this Holy League demanded the re-establishment of Catholic unity, and set the religious right of the nation in opposition to the divine right of incapable or evil-doing kings (1576).
In order to oust his rival Henry of Guise, Henry III. made
a desperate effort to outbid him in the eyes of the more extreme
Catholics, and by declaring himself head of the League
degraded himself into a party leader. The League,
furious at this stroke of policy, tried to impose a council
The States of Blois (1576).
Sixth War and peace of Bergerac (1577). Seventh War and peace of Fleix (1580).
of thirty-six advisers upon the king. But the deputies
of the third estate did not support the other two orders, and
the latter in their turn refused the king money for making war
on the heretics, desiring, they said, not war but the
destruction of heresy. This would have reduced
Henry III. to impotence; fortunately for him, however,
the break of the Huguenots with the “Malcontents,”
and the divisions in the court of Navarre
and in the various parties at La Rochelle, allowed
Henry III., after two little wars in the south west,
during which fighting gradually degenerated into
brigandage, to sign terms of peace at Bergerac (1577),
which much diminished the concessions made in the edict of
Beaulieu. This peace was confirmed three years after by that
of Fleix. The suppression of both the leagues was stipulated
for (1580). It remained, however, a question whether the Holy
League would submit to this.
The death of the duke of Anjou after his mad endeavour to establish himself in the Netherlands (1584), and the accession of Henry of Navarre, heir to the effeminate Henry III., reversed the situations of the two parties: the Protestants again became supporters of the principle of Union between the Guises and Philip II. heredity and divine right; the Catholics appealed to right of election and the sovereignty of the people. Could the crown of the eldest daughter of the Church be allowed to devolve upon a relapsed heretic? Such was the doctrine officially preached in pulpit and pamphlet. But between Philip II. on the one hand—now master of Portugal and delivered from William of Orange, involved in strife with the English Protestants, and desirous of avenging the injuries inflicted upon him by the Valois in the Netherlands—and the Guises on the other hand, whose cousin Mary Stuart was a prisoner of Queen Elizabeth, there was a common interest in supporting one another and pressing things forward. A definite agreement was made between them at Joinville (December 31, 1584), the religious and popular pretext being the danger of leaving the kingdom to the king of Navarre, and the ostensible end to secure the succession to a Catholic prince, the old Cardinal de Bourbon, an ambitious and violent man of mean intelligence; while the secret aim was to secure the crown for the Guises, who had already attempted to fabricate for themselves a genealogy tracing their descent from Charlemagne. In the meantime Philip II., being rid of Don John of Austria, whose ambition he dreaded, was to crush the Protestants of England and the Netherlands; and the double result of the compact at Joinville was to allow French politics to be controlled by Spain, and to transform the wars of religion into a purely political quarrel.
The pretensions of the Guises were, in fact, soon manifested
in the declaration of Péronne (March 30, 1585) against the foul
court of the Valois; they were again manifested in a
furious agitation, fomented by the secret council
of the League at Paris, which favoured the Guises,
The committee of Sixteen at Paris.
Eighth war of the three Henries.
and which now worked on the people through their
terror of Protestant retaliations and the Church’s peril. Incited
by Philip II., who wished to see him earning his pension of
600,000 golden crowns, Henry of Guise began the war in the end
of April, and in a few days the whole kingdom was on fire. The
situation was awkward for Henry III., who had not
the courage to ask Queen Elizabeth for the soldiers
and money that he lacked. The crafty king of Navarre
being unwilling to alienate the Protestants save by an
apostasy profitable to himself, Henry III., by the treaty of
Nemours (July 7, 1585), granted everything to the head of
the League in order to save his crown. By a stroke of the pen
he suppressed Protestantism, while Pope Sixtus V., who had
at first been unfavourable to the treaty of Joinville as a purely
political act, though he eventually yielded to the solicitations
of the League, excommunicated the two Bourbons, Henry and
Condé. But the duke of Guise’s audacity did not make Henry III.
forget his desire for vengeance. He hoped to ruin him by
attaching him to his cause. His favourite Joyeuse was to defeat
the king of Navarre, whose forces were very weak, while Guise
was to deal with the strong reinforcement of Germans that
Elizabeth was sending to Henry of Navarre. Exactly the
contrary happened. By the defeat of Joyeuse at Coutras
Henry III. found himself wounded on his strongest side; and
by Henry of Guise’s successes at Vimory and Auneau the Germans,
who should have been his best auxiliaries against the League,
were crushed (October-November 1587).
The League now thought they had no longer anything to fear. Despite the king’s hostility the duke of Guise came to Paris, urged thereto by Philip II., who wanted to occupy Paris and be master of the Channel coasts whilst he launched his invincible Armada to avenge the death of Day of the Barricades. Mary Stuart in 1587. On the Day of the Barricades (May 12, 1588) Henry III. was besieged in the Louvre by the populace in revolt; but his rival dared not go so far as to depose the king, and appeased the tumult. The king, having succeeded in taking refuge at Chartres, ended, however, by granting him in the Act of Union all that he had refused in face of the barricades—the post of lieutenant-general of the kingdom and the proscription of Protestantism. At the second assembly of the states of Blois, called together on account of the need for money (1588), Assassination of the Guises at the second states-general of Blois. all of Henry III.’s enemies who were elected showed themselves even bolder than in 1576 in claiming the control of the financial administration of the kingdom; but the destruction of the Armada gave Henry III., already exasperated by the insults he had received, new vigour. He had the old Cardinal de Bourbon imprisoned, and Henry of Guise and his brother the cardinal assassinated (December 23, 1588). On the 5th of January, 1589, died his mother, Catherine de’Medici, the astute Florentine.
“Now I am king!” cried Henry III. But Paris being dominated by the duke of Mayenne, who had escaped assassination, and by the council of “Sixteen,” the chiefs of the League, most of the provinces replied by open revolt, and Henry III.
