Henri II: His Court and Times (39 page)

After the choir had sung the
Te Deum
, "to the accompaniment of organs and other music," the archbishop celebrated
Mass, and having absolved the King, administered to him
the Holy Sacrament, which was received "in great humility
and perfect devotion." The Comte d'Enghien — the second
Prince of the Blood — then came forward, removed the great
crown and replaced it by the smaller one; and the procession
was reformed and returned to the palace in the same order as
it had quitted it, save that it was now headed by Enghien,
bearing the great crown on a cushion.

We have an interesting portrait of Henri II at the time of
his coronation, from the pen of Matteo Dandolo, who had
been selected by the Republic of Venice to felicitate the King
on his accession to the throne. Dandolo was already acquainted
with Henri, since he had been sent on a mission to the French
Court five years earlier, on which occasion, it will be remembered,
he had described him as a taciturn and melancholy prince, who had
never been known to laugh heartily.
¹⁰
According to the account which he now despatched to the
Senate, however, it would appear that the Crown of France
had operated a complete transformation in its present
possessor:

"His Majesty is in his twenty-ninth year, and although I
once represented him to your Excellencies as a prince of a
pale, livid countenance, and so melancholy that many of those
about him said that they had never known him laugh heartily,
to-day I ought to assure you that he has become gay, that he
has a ruddy complexion, and that he is in perfect health. He
has but a scanty beard, but nevertheless, he shaves it; his eyes
are rather large than otherwise, but he keeps them lowered;
his countenance, from one side of the jaw to the other, and
the forehead, lack breadth; his head is not too large. His
body is very well proportioned, rather tall than otherwise.
Personally, he is all full of valour, very courageous and enterprising; he is very addicted to the game of tennis, to such a
degree as never to miss a day, for less than rain, for he plays
under the open sky, and sometimes even after having hunted
at full speed one or two stags, which is one of the most
fatiguing of exercises, as your Excellencies know. The same
day, after having undergone such exertions, he will practise
martial exercises for two or three hours, and at these he is one
of the most celebrated. At the time of my first embassy, I
assisted at jousts of this kind, and I can say that they are not
without danger. Indeed, running one day at the barriers
without looking too closely at them, the father and son were
overturned, and the former gave the latter such a blow on the
head that he removed a good deal of flesh. It should be said,
also, that he behaves not less as a good soldier than as a good
captain; and a person whom I believe to be trustworthy has
told me that he found himself with him in an extremely perilous
position, and that he did not wish to leave it, but, on the
contrary, bravely to remain there."

On the conclusion of the official fetes which followed the
Coronation, the Court proceeded to Fontainebleau, where it
remained during the rest of the year 1547 and the first months
of 1548, save for visits to Montmorency's Châteaux of Écouen
and Chantilly, for a series of grand hunting-parties organised
by the Constable in honour of his Majesty. At the beginning
of the spring, however, it set out upon a journey to Piedmont.

For Henri II desired to be King in Italy as well as in France,
or, at any rate, he wished to show that he had not renounced
the heritage of Charles VIII, Louis XII, and François I beyond
the Alps, and that he was determined to retain his hold on
Piedmont, and to continue the friendly relations of his House
with those Italian States which resented the Imperial domination
of the peninsula. And it was certainly an opportune moment
for France to assert herself, for Italy was seething with intrigue
and discontent, and in the previous autumn the antagonism
of the Papacy to the Emperor had all but caused another
conflagration.

The Emperor had pledged himself to advance the interests
of the Farnesi, and had married his natural daughter Margaret
of Austria to Ottavio Farnese, the elder of the two sons of
Paul III's rascally son Pierluigi; but he hesitated to invest his
son-in-law with Parma and Piacenza, and in 1545 the Pope,
losing patience and feeling confident that the Emperor could
not afford to quarrel with him, conferred these territories upon
Pierluigi, whom Charles detested. At the beginning of the
following year, a commission appointed to inquire into the
question of the suzerainty over Parma and Piacenza, which
was claimed both by Pope and Emperor, decided that
Pierluigi must not bear the title of duke without Charles's
investiture; and the chagrin of the Farnesi at this decision
was increased when, three months later, the Emperor appointed
their enemy, Ferrante Gonzaga, to the governorship of the
Milanese, which they had coveted for themselves. Pierluigi
thereupon threw himself into the arms of France; a marriage
was arranged between his younger son, Orazio, and the
Dauphin's natural daughter, Diane de France; and insurrections, which were only with difficulty suppressed, were
stirred up at Genoa and Naples. The Imperialists retaliated
by intriguing against Pierluigi in Parma and Piacenza, where
he was cordially hated, and inciting the nobles of those cities
to rise against their tyrant.

Meanwhile, the Pope remained the professed ally of Charles V,
though France did not despair of gaining him over; and, after
the accession of Henri II, no time was lost in making advances
to his Holiness through the Ambassador to the Vatican and
the French cardinals who were residing at Rome. Paul,
however, did not seem in any great hurry to respond to them,
and it was not until August that he consented to accord
the new King the "
indult
," or right of nomination to vacant
benefices, which François had enjoyed by the terms of the
Concordat of 1516, sending, at the same time, a rosary which
he had blessed to Catherine de' Medici and a string of pearls
to his future grand-daughter. However, a few weeks later, an
event occurred which precipitated the desired
rapprochement
.

On September 10, the nobles of Piacenza rose against
Pierluigi Farnese and assassinated him, and on the following
day Gonzaga occupied the city in the name of the Emperor.
Paul III, outraged at once in his affections and his ambition,
accused the viceroy of having incited the crime, and angrily
demanded that the murdered man's elder son, Ottavio, should
be established at Piacenza. This was refused, whereupon the
Pope, vowing that he would suffer martyrdom rather than
renounce his vengeance, declared himself ready to conclude
an alliance with Henri II, the Swiss, and Venice; and at the
end of October Charles de Guise, who had come to Rome
under the pretext of receiving his cardinal's hat from his
Holiness's own hands, but really to confirm him in his bellicose
dispositions, signed with him, in the name of France, a defensive
treaty.

But for the interposition of Montmorency, war must certainly
have followed, for the treaty just concluded was defensive in
name only, and Paul III made desperate efforts to induce the
King to invade the Milanese or to attack Genoa and Naples,
and even recommended an alliance with the Turks and the
Algerines. The respect, however, which the Constable always
professed for the spiritual authority of the Holy See did not go
so far as the sacrifice of the interests of the State in order to
promote the temporal aggrandizement of its present occupant;
and he foresaw that Paul III would in all probability be the
sole gainer by the adventure in which he was so anxious
to engage France. Nor was he altogether sorry to have an
opportunity of thwarting his rivals, the Guises, and of procuring
the condemnation of the work of the new cardinal. He
accordingly pointed out to the King that it was impossible to
place any confidence in the Pope, whose conduct had up to
the present been one long tissue of dissimulations, and who,
while demanding that France should take the offensive in
order to recover Piacenza, refused to enthrone Orazio Farnese,
his Majesty's future son-in-law, at Parma, instead of Ottavio,
the son-in-law of the Emperor.

The Constable's task was facilitated by the reports of
Morvilliers, the French Ambassador at Venice, who represented
the Senate as but little inclined to engage in a league
with a Pontiff of eighty-four, and on account of a quarrel
more private than public; and the Guises being themselves
compelled to admit the imprudence of beginning a war with
such feeble support, Charles de Guise returned to France, and
all armed interference in the affairs of Italy was for the moment
abandoned, although an attempt was made to persuade the
Pope to renew the league on a purely defensive basis.

In view of the troubles which were agitating Italy, Henri II
resolved to lose no time in going in person to secure the
recognition of his authority beyond the Alps, and in April
1548, he set out for Piedmont. With the idea of impressing
the Piedmontese and his Italian allies, he was accompanied
not only by the greater part of the Court, but by a considerable
army, the objections of the Imperial Ambassador being met by
an assurance that the troops were merely intended to relieve
the French garrisons in Savoy and Piedmont.

The King journeyed by easy stages through the eastern
provinces, accepting the hospitality of the Constable's eldest
nephew, the Cardinal de Châtillon, at the Abbey of Vauhusant,
near Sens, and that of the Guises at Joinville. Magnificent
receptions awaited his Majesty in every town through which
he passed, perhaps the most interesting being that at Beaune,
where he arrived on July 18, and where the decorations
were on so sumptuous a scale that we are assured by the
secretary of the Chapter that "the greatest nobles raised cries
of delight, declaring that they had never beheld anything so
beautiful."
¹¹

A few days before the arrival of the King, the principal
inhabitants of the town had met in solemn conclave to decide
upon some
divertissement
for the amusement of his Majesty.
Aware that military exercises and manoeuvres were preferred
by Henri II to all other spectacles, it was finally decided that
it should take the form of a mimic combat; and the Sieur Denys
Berardier,
greffier
to the Chancery, was accordingly charged
with the construction of a wooden fort on the Champagne
Saint-Nicolas, which one party of the citizens was to defend,
and another to escalade.

The worthy
greffier
published in the following year an
account of this mimic combat, which makes very entertaining
reading.
¹²
The fort, he tells us, was fifty feet square,
with a tower at each angle; the walls were fifteen feet high,
and the ditches ten feet wide. Several pieces of cannon
were mounted on the ramparts, which were manned by
arquebusiers and pikemen. The attacking party, to the
number of some 1,500 men, armed
de pied en cap
, advanced
to the assault, and a Homeric struggle ensued, which bore
much too close a resemblance to actual warfare to suit the
feminine portion of the spectators, who prayed fervently that
their husbands and sons might emerge from it scathless.
At first, the assailants had the advantage, and planting their
scaling-ladders against the walls, swarmed up them and
sprang over the ramparts; but the garrison greeted them
with a hail of stones, "so large that they could scarcely be
raised in both hands," and drove them back in confusion.

Then, Henri II, who had been an interested spectator of
the combat, rode up to a body of pikemen who were
marching to the assistance of the stormers, and cried out:
"Courage, courage, my lads! Succour your comrades!
Are you going to allow yourselves to be beaten to-day?" 
"And the said assailants," continues the writer, "hearing
the words of the prince, received so great an accession of
energy and were inspired with such boldness, that they
entered and won the said fort, though this was not accomplished
without effusion of blood and many concussions
and broken limbs."

It is a relief to learn, however, that, "owing to the intercessions
and prayers which the wives of the assailants and
the defenders made during the combat, no deaths supervened,"
and that "the lord King, the princes, and the
gentlemen of the Court were very delighted and satisfied
with the capture of the said fort."

The royal
cortège
, continuing its journey, passed through
Dauphine and Savoy, both Chambéry — the ancient capital
of the Dukes of Savoy — and Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne being
honoured by state entries,
¹³
crossed the Alps by the pass of Susa, and in the middle of August arrived at Turin, where
his Majesty was received by the Prince of Melfi, governor of
Piedmont.

Brilliant fétés followed the arrival of the Court at Turin, for
Henri, on the advice of the Constable, had resolved to surround
himself with all possible magnificence, "in order to give at the
beginning a lofty idea of his reign to foreigners, and particularly
in Italy."
¹⁴
He ennobled
a number of prominent persons, doubled the pay of the troops, and
distributed the soldiers who had been disabled in the recent war among the abbeys
of France, where they were maintained for the rest of their
lives. This arrangement, which was called at that time
"
ung donné
," and was continued by the successors of
Henri II, was the first formal recognition of the duty of the
State towards the soldier who had suffered in its service.
¹⁵

The King did not make himself less welcome among the
inhabitants of Piedmont than among the troops, for he
charged himself with all the debts owing to the Piedmontese
by soldiers who had died or disappeared, which amounted
to a very considerable sum.