The Bourbon Kings of France (2 page)

‘That Man from Béarn’

HENRI IV (1589–1610)

_____________

‘I rule with my arse in the saddle and my gun in my fist’

Henri IV is certainly the most colourful of French Kings. The
Vert Galant
killed mountain bears with a knife, fought on foot with a pike at the head of his men, ate and drank enough for ten, had sixty-four mistresses, and wished every peasant to have a chicken in the pot on Sundays. At first sight this laughing, swaggering little hero seems quite different from the Bourbons who followed him. In fact he bequeathed a surprising number of his qualities to his descendants.

Henri of Navarre was born at Pau in Béarn, on 13 December 1553. At his christening the Navarrese King, Henri d’Albret, rubbed his grandson’s lips with garlic and made him sip some wine. He enjoyed it and the old King, laughing, said, ‘You’re going to be a real Béarnais!’ Philip II always referred to Henri as ‘That Man from Béarn’. The baby was taken to a remote castle in the Pyrenees where he grew up with the local peasant children on a diet of bread, cheese and garlic, running barefoot in the mountains. He kept his southern accent—and his common touch—throughout his life. Of all the Kings of France he was the only Southerner.

His mother brought him up in the faith of Geneva. When, in 1561, Henri was taken to Paris on his father’s orders and given a Catholic tutor, he refused to go to Mass. After his father’s death, Jeanne reinstated the Protestant tutor; by the time he was ten Henri had changed his religion twice. He remained in Paris, attending classes at the Collège de Navarre. Eventually he was able to speak as well as write Latin and Greek with some fluency; he also acquired a knowledge of Spanish and Italian. In addition he learnt to write very beautiful French (Proust credits the Duchesse de Guermantes with writing
‘le français exquis de Henri IV’
.) In 1567 he rejoined his mother and his sister Catherine at Pau. His education continued, including no doubt instruction in fencing and the military arts. Relaxations were tennis—there was a magnificent court at Pau—swimming, hawking and, above all, hunting, which was one of the great passions of his life. He also learnt to dance, though, so his earliest biographer informs us, ‘with more spirit than grace’.

The First War of Religion had come to an end in 1563 but the Second broke out in 1567, to be followed by the Third in 1568. There were between half a million and a million Huguenots in France, including a large number of experienced soldiers. But the vast majority of Frenchmen were Papists and when the Counter-Reformation began, a new, fanatical Catholicism came into fashion. Apart from a few rare eccentrics who were known as the
Politiques
, most people thought that the only solution was conversion or extermination.

The situation was made worse by the lack of any proper royal authority. From 1559 until 1589 France had inadequate Kings—François II (the husband of Mary, Queen of Scots), Charles IX and Henri III. These three decadent sons of Henri II left the government of the realm to their mother, Catherine de Medici, whose intrigues earned her a sinister name. Years later, when she and her brood were dead, Henri had some kind words: ‘I ask you, what could she have done, poor woman, left at her husband’s death with five small children and two families in France—ours and the Guises—who hoped to get the Crown for themselves? Wasn’t it necessary for her to play some strange games, to deceive everybody, in order to protect her sons who reigned only because of her cunning? You may say she did harm to France—the marvel is she didn’t do worse!’

When the Third War of Religion broke out, King Charles threatened to invade Béarn, and Queen Jeanne and her two children had to take refuge at La Rochelle. Jeanne’s brother-in-law, Louis, Prince de Condé, commanded the Huguenot army; in March 1569 he was taken prisoner at Jarnac and shot. Although Condé’s real successor was the Admiral de Coligny, the Huguenots hailed Henri as their champion; the fifteen-year-old boy and his mother were presented to the Protestant host who cheered them heartily. However, in 1570, when both sides had fought each other to a standstill, the Huguenots’ right of public worship was restored, in a settlement guaranteed by four
places de sûreté
—towns with Huguenot garrisons.

Later, as a further guarantee, a marriage was arranged between Henri and the King’s sister, Marguerite de Valois. Queen Jeanne died in June 1572, before it could take place (probably of tuberculosis, though it was rumoured that she had been poisoned by Catherine de Medici’s perfumer, with gloves whose scent entered the brain).

Everyone believed that the marriage would bring peace and the great nobles of the realm, Protestant and Catholic, assembled in the capital. Henri’s bride, Marguerite de Valois, was nineteen. Brantôme wrote, ‘If in all the world there has ever been anyone perfect in beauty, it is the Queen of Navarre … and I think that all women who were, who are and who shall be are ugly next to her.’ Portraits are less flattering. None the less, ‘Margot’ danced exquisitely, spoke Greek with astonishing fluency and was an excellent theologian. She was also a byword for promiscuity. The couple did not take to each other. On 18 August they were married at Nôtre-Dame, Marguerite wearing a royal crown and an ermine cape, with a long train of royal blue borne by three princesses. The marriage was the prelude to one of the most ghastly crimes in European history.

During the wedding, Catherine de Medici was deeply distracted by matters of state. Admiral de Coligny had persuaded Charles IX to attack Spain, a war which could only be disastrous. Catherine was in despair; Catholic nobles urged the Queen to agree to Coligny’s assassination; reluctantly she yielded. The Guises, who had a father’s murder to avenge, arranged the details. On 22 August one of their henchmen shot at the Admiral from a window, but only wounded him. The Huguenots were enraged. Catherine, terrified, accepted that a general massacre was the only solution. After much browbeating, King Charles, unbalanced at the best of times, agreed, screaming, ‘Kill them all’. It was the eve of the feast of St Bartholomew.

Before dawn on Sunday 24 August 1572, the Duc de Guise’s swordsmen broke into Coligny’s bedroom. He was skewered with a pike, then his corpse was thrown out of the window to be hanged by its heels from the public gibbet. The tocsin sounded and the Paris mob was unleashed. Neither children nor pregnant women were spared—whole families had their throats cut. The Louvre was turned into a slaughterhouse, its floors and staircases strewn with dead or dying Protestants. Henri and his cousin Condé were spared only because of their royal blood; they passed a terrifying night listening to the screams of their friends. The butchery continued for several days, at least 4,000 dying in Paris. Similar massacres took place in the provinces, 10,000 more Huguenots being killed by the end of September. But their strongholds held out and the Catholic ‘final solution’ merely precipitated the Fourth War of Religion.

Henri was forced to change his faith for a third time. He remained a prisoner at court for nearly four years. During this time he played the part of a simple, self-indulgent squire, hunting and whoring. Among those of other mistresses, he enjoyed the favours of Charlotte de Sauve, a beautiful blonde whom the Queen Mother had ordered to spy on him.

In 1575 a Venetian diplomat wrote a detailed description of the young King of Navarre. Henri was ‘of medium height but very well built, with no beard as yet, brown skinned, and zestful and lively as his mother was; he is pleasant, affable and friendly in manner, and generous too, so people say. He is obsessed by hunting in which he spends all his time.’

In May 1574 Charles IX died in agony, of pulmonary tuberculosis—blood vessels burst all over his body. He was succeeded by his brother, Henri III, who for a few months had been a reluctant King of Poland. The last Valois monarch was an extraordinary figure; intelligent, cultivated and brave, he was also a homosexual and a religious maniac—transvestist orgies alternated with flagellant processions. This epicene psychopath surrounded himself with catamite
‘mignons’
whose shrill quarrels often ended in lethal duels. On the whole he left government to his adored mother.

Two attempts at escape by the King of Navarre failed. A third scheme, in February 1576, was more carefully planned, but at the end of a day’s hunting near Saint-Germain, news came to Henri that he had again been betrayed. Changing his plans, he galloped into the forest with only a few friends, though it was a freezing winter’s night. They hardly drew rein for three weeks, until they reached Protestant Saumur and safety.

In May 1576 Henri III made peace with the Huguenots of the ‘Calvinist Union’. They were given freedom of worship everywhere save Paris. A popular reaction saw the foundation of the ‘Catholic League’;
La Ligue
mobilized the Faithful by parishes just as the Huguenots were by presbyteries. Between these two armed camps France sank into bloody anarchy.

Henri of Navarre, now the acknowledged leader of the Huguenots, ruled almost all south-western France. However, he seldom ruled it in peace, for there were five more ‘wars of religion’. His armies were the Protestant lords and squirearchy on horseback. Until the fall of La Rochelle in 1628 these
‘razats’
rode out to do battle for the soul of France, their cropped heads and Biblical speech (the ‘patois of Canaan’) anticipating the Roundheads of the English Civil War.

Henri held his court mainly at Nérac in Armagnac—the setting of
Love’s Labour’s Lost
, ‘a park with a palace in it’. According to that dour Puritan, Agrippa d’Aubigné, the entire Huguenot court gave itself up to the pleasures of love. Henri could hardly be expected to remain content with one mistress. Mlle d’Ayelle, a Cypriot refugee, was succeeded by Mlle de Rebours and then by Xainte, one of Margot’s women of the bedchamber. There were also tales of a girl who starved herself and her baby to death because of Henri’s desertion, of another unreasonable lady who threw herself out of a window, and of a baker’s daughter who drowned herself. In addition there was a charcoal burner’s wife, and his groom’s doxy whom he surprised in the stable (and who gave him a mild dose of gonorrhoea). Undoubtedly there was a pathological element in his insatiable sexuality. His chief passion at Nérac, Françoise de Montmorency-Fosseuse, was only fourteen when she became his mistress in 1579, and the honour went to her head when she found herself with child. But her baby died. In 1583 Marguerite left Henri for good.

By now Henri was fully mature, a stocky, jaunty little man with a fan-shaped black beard, upturned moustaches, hair
en brosse
and a tanned face with a great hooked nose and an invariable grin. His clothes were stained and shabby, he spoke broad Gascon and swore horribly, and he looked altogether more like a common soldier than a King. Ebullient, mercurial, laughing or weeping as the mood took him, he joked unceasingly, relying on charm rather than majesty. During the unending cavalry raids and sieges which occupied this period of his life, he developed remarkable powers of leadership. Yet in some ways he had inherited the lack of balance of his father, King Antoine. His moods of melancholy were so extreme as to be pathological; he may well have been a manic depressive.

In January 1583 Henri at last met a woman worthy of him—Diane de Gramont, Comtesse de Guiche, known to history as
‘la grande Corisande’
. A widow, she was twenty-six years old, a brunette with black eyes and a high forehead. Her friend, Montaigne, said there were few ladies in France who were a better judge of poetry. Corisande gave Henri intellectual as well as physical companionship. To her he wrote his most delightful letters, written as André Maurois says ‘with a mixture of country warmth and Gascon poetry’. Sometimes he describes the landscape and the birds, sometimes he descends to the price of fish. He sent her passionate messages, ‘loving nothing in the world so much as you … my soul, I kiss a million times those beautiful eyes which all my life I shall hold dearer than anything else in the world … I will live as your faithful slave. Good-night my soul.’ He also wrote revealingly of his savage melancholia: ‘all the Gehennas where a spirit can go are busy with mine’, or ‘until the tomb which is nearer than perhaps I realize’. He was incapable of being faithful, despite assurances that ‘believe me, my fidelity is pure and stainless—there was never its like’. Corisande can hardly have relished his sorrow at losing little Gédéon, his son by Esther Imbert (daughter of a Protestant pastor)—‘Think what it would have been like had he been legitimate.’ With his letters he sent gifts—bird’s feathers, fawns and wild boar piglets. The sheer number of his letters to Corisande shows how often he was away on campaign.

On 27 October 1587, at Coutras, Henri was forced to give battle to a greatly superior Catholic army. Henri III’s favourite, Anne, Duc de Joyeuse, had 2,500 horse and 5,000 foot—the Huguenots numbered 2,000 horse and 4,000 foot. Navarre with a river at his back could not retreat. The two armies made a strange contrast; the Catholics in gilded armour and nodding plumes; the crop-headed Huguenots in leather jerkins and plain steel. Joyeuse launched a headlong frontal attack, his glittering cavalry only two deep. Henri had mixed musketeers with his cavalry and sited his three cannon where they could do most damage. The enemy were mown down, then three Huguenot squadrons, each six deep, rolled them back. Henri, with his white plume and white scarf, led one squadron—his sword was red with blood. His followers were not so merciful; 5,000 Catholics were slain, including Joyeuse himself. The victory cost Henri only forty casualties.