Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/598

562 FRANCE [HISTORY. 1572-76. assassination was a recognized part of her way of dealing with Huguenots ; only she was too fine to do it in the coarse and wholesale way of the St Bartholomew. It is from her that the taste for murder in France chiefly sprang. The Guises may well share with her ; they planned and executed the hasty act ; they too had long dabbled in murder. The king s share in it was, like himself, weak and impulsive ; he was the last to come in, the first to repent. The evil deed was highly applauded as a master-stroke by pope and Spanish king. Yet it soon became clear that the crime was a blunder also. The effects of it, startling for the moment, enabled the middle party to take the lead. The duke of Alen90ti never approved of the massacre ; the moderates throughout France were shocked and outraged ; the Huguenots, weakened for a while, were content to unite with the Politiques, and place themselves under their lead ing ; Catherine lost her power of balancing between the parties, for they are now but two, that of the League, and The that of the rest of France. A short war followed, a revolt fourth o f the southern cities rather than a war. They made wai> tenacious and heroic resistance ; a large part of the royal forces sympathized rather with them than with the League ; and in July 1573, the edict of Boulogne granted them even more than they had been promised by the peace of St Germains. The 3. We have reached the period of the "Wars of the Wars League," as the four later civil wars are often called. The Leazue ^ ast ^ fc1 ^ e ^ our ^ s a ^ one f an Y rea ^ importance. Just as the peace of La Rochelle was concluded, the duke of Anjou, having been elected king of Poland, left France ; it was not long before troubles began again. The duke of Alengon was vexed by his mother s neglect; as heir pre sumptive to the crown hs thought he deserved better treat ment, and sought to give himself consideration by drawing towards the middle party ; Catherine seemed to be in triguing for the ruin of that party ; nothing was safe while she was moving. The king had never held up his nead since the St Bartholomew ; it was seen that he now was dying, and the queen-mother took the opportunity of laying hands on the middle party. She arrested Alengon, Mont- morency, and Henry of Navarre, together with some lesser chiefs; in the midst of it all Charles IX. died (1574) in misery, leaving the ill-omened crown to Henry of Anjou, king of Poland, his next brother, his mother s favourite, The fifth the worst of a bad breed. At the same time the fifth civil war. war broke out, interesting chiefly because it was during its continuance that the famous League was actually formed. Henry Henry III,, when he heard of his brother s death, was 1H- only too eager to slip away like a culprit from Poland, though he showed no alacrity in returning to France, and dallied with the pleasures of Italy for months. An attempt to draw him over to the side of the Politiques failed com pletely ; he attached himself on the contrary to the Guises, and plunged into the grossest dissipation, while he posed himself before men as a good and zealous Catholic. The Politiques and Huguenots therefore made a compact in 1575, at Milhaud on the Tarn, and chose the prince of Condd as their head ; Henry of Navarre escaped from Paris, threw oft his forced Catholicism and joined them. Against them the strict Catholics seemed powerless ; the queen - mother closed this war with the peace of Chastenoy (May 1576), with terms unusually favourable for both Politiques and Huguenots: for the latter free worship throughout France, except at Paris ; for the chiefs of the former great governments, for Alenc_on a large central district, for Condc" Picardy, for Henry of Navarre Guyenne. The To resist all this the high Catholic party framed the Catholic League they had long been meditating ; it is said that the League. car( ji na | O f Lorraine had sketched it years before, at the time of the later sittings of the council of Trent. Lesser com pacts had already been made from time to time ; now it was 15ft proposed to form one great league, towards which all should gravitate. The head of the League was Henry, duke of Guise, the second " Balafre"," who had won that title in fighting against the German reiters the year before, when they entered France under Conde. He certainly hoped at this time to succeed to the throne of France, either by deposing the corrupt and feeble Henry III., "as Pippin, dealt with Hilderik," or by seizing the throne, when the king s debaucheries should have brought him to the grave. The Catholics of the more advanced type, and specially the Jesuits, now in the first flush of credit and success, sup ported him warmly. The headquarters of the movement were in Picardy, its first object opposition to the establish ment of Conde as governor of that province. The League was also very popular with the common folk, especially in the towns of the north. It soon found that Paris was its natural centre ; thence it spread swiftly across the whole of France; it was warmly supported by Philip of Spain. The States- General, convoked at Blois in 1576, could bring no rest to France; opinion was just as much divided there as in the country ; and the year 1577 saw another petty war, The counted as the sixth, which was closed by the peace of six t Bergerac, another ineffectual truce, which settled nothing. wai It was a peace made with the Politiques and Huguenots by the court ; it is significant of the new state of affairs that the League openly refused to be bound by it, and continued a harassing, objectless warfare. The duke of Anjou (he had taken that title on his brother Henry s accession to the throne) in 1578 deserted the court party, towards which his mother had drawn him, and made friends with the Calvinists in the Netherlands. The southern provinces named him "Defender of their liberties"; they had hopes he might w : ed Elizabeth of England ; they quite mistook their man. In 1579 "the Gallants War" Th; broke out; the Leaguers had it all their own way; but sev ! Henry III., not too friendly to them, and, urged by his ^ brother Anjou, to whom had been offered sovereignty over the seven United Provinces in 1580, offered the insurgents easy terms, and the treaty of Fleix closed the seventh war. Anjou in the Netherlands could but show his weakness ; nothing went well with him ; and at last, having utterly wearied out his friends, he fled, after the failure of his attempt to secure Antwerp, into France. There he fell ill of consumption, and died in 1584. This changed at once the complexion of the succession question. Hitherto, though no children seemed likely to be born to him, Henry III. was young and might live long, and his brother was there as his heir. Now, Henry III. was the last prince of the Valois, and Henry of Navarre in hereditary succession was heir presumptive to the throne, unless the Salic law were to be set aside. The fourth T son of St Louis, Robert, count of Clermont, who married <* Beatrix, heiress of Bourbon, was the founder of the house N of Bourbon. Of this family the two elder branches had died out : John, who had been a central figure in the war of the Public Weal, in 1488 ; Peter, husband of Anne of France, in 1503; neither of them leaving heirs male. Of the younger branch Francis died in 1525, and the famous Constable Bourbon in 1527. This left as the only repre sentatives of the family the counts of La Marche ; of these the elder had died out in 1438, and the junior alone sur vived in the counts of Yendome. The head of this branch, Charles, was made duke of Yendome by Francis I. in 1515 ; he was father of Antony, duke of Yendome, who, by marry ing the heroic Jeanne of Albret, became king of Navarre, and of Louis, who founded the house of Cond6 ; lastly, Antony was the father of Henry IV. He was therefore a very distant cousin to Henry III.; the houses of Capet, of Alen^on, of Orleans, of Angouleme, of Maine, and of