Henri II: His Court and Times (41 page)

On the King's arrival in Dauphiné, effective measures were
at once taken. The Duc d'Aumale was despatched to Tours,
where he took command of 4,000
landsknechts
and marched at
their head on Poitiers, to attack the commune from the north;
while Montmorency, with 1,000 men-at-arms, descended the
Rhône to Nimes and advanced towards Bordeaux by way of
Toulouse, being reinforced
en route
by levies from Languedoc
and Guienne.

At Toulouse, where he arrived on October 3, he received the
First President of the
Parlement
and the jurats of Bordeaux,
who endeavoured to persuade him that there was now no
longer any necessity to employ force in order to re-establish
the royal authority in the guilty town. Several chroniclers
state that Montmorency made use of very threatening
language; but, so far from this being the case, he appears to
have dissimulated his intentions. "I sent them back to the
said town," wrote he to Aumale, "with the most soft and kindly
words that it was possible for me to employ, in such wise that
I have greatly reassured them."
⁰³

On the 7th, he left Toulouse and advanced, without encountering any resistance from the insurgents, to Pujols, where he
was joined by the corps of Aumale, which had already effected
the pacification of Saintonge and the Angoumois. At Langon,
on the Gironde, he received a second deputation from the
Bordelais, which arrived in "a large and very magnificent
barge, containing rooms and salons with glass windows, and
painted in gold and azure and decorated with his Arms." The
deputation, after handing the Constable the keys of the town,
advised him to embark in this barge and to leave his
landsknechts
behind him, since otherwise they would not be
answerable for the conduct of the citizens. But there was no
longer any need for Montmorency to dissemble, and he
haughtily rejected the proposal, declaring, with a wave of his
hand towards the cannon which he had brought with him,
that he possessed keys which would open the most obstinate
gates.

On October 19, he entered Bordeaux
⁰⁴
with his entire army and exacted a terrible retribution for the atrocities committed
during the insurrection. The citizens were declared "attainted
and convicted of the crimes of sedition, rebellion, and
lèse-majesté
," and deprived of all their franchises, liberties, and
immunities; their charters were publicly burned; the
mairie
was razed to the ground; the church bells and the artillery
carried away, and the
Parlement
replaced by a chamber of royal
commissaries. The town was also condemned to pay a fine
of 200,000 livres; to surrender to the Crown the income of
certain lands belonging to the municipality worth 40,000 livres
a year; to furnish bronze for the casting of 500 cannon; to
fortify the Château Trompette, and to provide two galleys for
the protection of its garrison. The body of the unfortunate
Moneins was ordered to be exhumed
⁰⁵
and conveyed for
interment to the Cathedral of Saint-André by the jurats and one hundred
and twenty delegates from the municipal council, dressed in mourning and
carrying lighted tapers in their hands. On passing the Constable's lodging, they
were compelled to fall on their knees and ask pardon of God, the
King, and Justice. On the spot where the murder had been
committed an expiatory chapel was erected.

Meanwhile, the provost-marshal and his assistants were
being kept busy. Nearly one hundred and fifty "makers and
authors of sedition" were condemned to death, among them
being the two brothers Du Sault, whom the insurgents had
compelled to join them, and one of the jurats, named
Lestonnac, a relative of Montaigne. La Chassaigne,
notwithstanding the services which he had rendered in the restoration
of order, was thrown into prison, and afterwards brought
to trial before the P
arlement
of Toulouse, which, however,
acquitted him.

The executions, if we are to believe the Vieilleville
Mémoires
, were marked by the most revolting brutality, and the judges
and the provost-marshal showed a diabolical ingenuity in the
punishments they devised for the most guilty of the offenders.
The condemned were "hanged, decapitated, broken on the
wheel, impaled, dismembered by four horses, and burned at
the stake, and three were put to death in a manner whereof we
have never heard any one speak, which was called '
mailloter
.'
They were attached by the middle of the body to a scaffold,
face downwards, their arms and legs being left at liberty, and
the executioner, with an iron pestle, broke and crushed the
limbs, without touching either the head or the body."
⁰⁶
The peasants of the surrounding districts, who had been guilty of
even worse excesses than the Bordelais, were treated with
scarcely less severity, and the gibbet and the wheel continued
to claim their victims for several months.

The statements of the writer and of the enemies of Montmorency, which have been readily accepted by Sismondi and
other liberal historians, have caused the repression of the
commune in Guienne to be regarded as one of the most odious
acts of Henry II's reign, and the Constable as an inhuman
monster; while the King, who subsequently expressed his
cordial approval of the measures adopted, is made to share his
responsibility. In the opinion, however, of Montmorency's
latest biographer, the cruelties perpetrated have been much
exaggerated, and severe as the punishment inflicted undoubtedly was, it was not more so than the circumstances
justified.

"To judge of the events of the past from the standpoint of
the present," he writes, "is absurd. If the laws of morality
are immutable, their application varies according to the times
and the circumstances. . . . If there had been some excess,
occasionally even some injustice, was it not absolutely legal?
Towns stormed, houses pillaged, officials massacred, and not
only they, but priests, gentlemen, advocates, private persons;
the King's representative infamously assassinated at the moment
when he was lending himself to conciliation; did not all this
call for vengeance? We punish, in our own day, such assassinations, such crimes of rebellion: with the stronger reason
ought we to admit the right of the absolute monarchy of
Henri II to show severity. The ocular witnesses of these
events who do not allow themselves to be guided by hatred,
the Belleforests, the Bordenaves, are more impressed by the
crimes of the commune than by the repression of the Constable. Brantôme says himself of Anne de Montmorency:
'He inflicted an exemplary punishment, but certainly not so
rigorous as the case required, which was such that it could
not have been expiated by rivers of blood, as was said then. . . .
That is why some people were disappointed with the Constable
over this punishment, which it was considered he ought to
have made more cruel and sanguinary.' Thus the impartial
writers of the time justify Montmorency."
⁰⁷

The blood shed during the commune was not shed in vain,
for the Estates of Poitou, Saintonge, Angoumois, Limousin,
and Perigord petitioned the King that the districts in which
the revolt had broken out should be permitted to purchase
their exemption from the
gabelle
; and in September 1549,
Henri II, in consideration of a single payment of 200,000 écus,
decided to reduce the tax in the south-western provinces to
one-quarter of that paid by the rest of France.

As for Bordeaux, the sentence which had been pronounced
against it was soon revoked, for the Government felt that, in
view of a probable war with England, it would be imprudent
to provide a town which had for so long been an English
possession with so powerful an inducement to return to its
former masters. When, therefore, in the summer of 1549, the
Bordelais humbly solicited the King's pardon, both the
Constable and François de Guise advised his Majesty to
accord it, and in October Bordeaux recovered all its rights
and liberties, and was even released from the fine of 200,000
livres; while in the following January its
Parlement
was
re-established.

While terror and mourning reigned at Bordeaux, another of
the great towns of France was the theatre of the most magnificent fétés. For on September 23, 1548, Henri II, on his return
from Turin, made his "superb and triumphal entry into the
noble and ancient city of Lyons."

On the 21st, the King joined the Queen and Diane de
Poitiers at Ainay, and on the 23rd their Majesties descended
the Rhône in an immense gondola to Vaise, where a splendid
pavilion had been made ready for their reception. But what
was the astonishment and mortification of Catherine to
perceive on entering that it was Diane and not herself whom
the Lyonnais desired to honour, after the King! The doors,
the windows, the walls, the very chair on which she sat, all
bore the H and D interlaced:
— the monogram of her
husband and his mistress — which from the first weeks of the
reign had appeared on the royal liveries, and which was to
figure on the walls of the Louvre and of every public building
erected in France. It was true that the cypher might be read
in two ways, and, despite the overwhelming evidence to the
contrary, there are still historians who maintain that it was
intended for the initials H and C (Henri-Catherine).
⁰⁸
But any doubt as to the significance attached to it by the citizens of
Lyons was removed, when the municipal officers came to do
homage to the King and kissed the hand of Diane
before
that
of Catherine. The mistress had desired that her supremacy
should be acknowledged in the provinces, and Saint-André, Sénéchal of the Lyonnais, had obligingly arranged the matter
with the complaisant burghers, only too willing to gratify the
King and her whom he delighted to honour. Never had
Queen of France to submit to so cruel a humiliation; not
even the long-suffering consort of Louis XV!
⁰⁹

C
ATHERINE DE
M
EDICI
, Q
UEEN OF
F
RANCE
,
ABOUT
1555
FROM A DRAWING BY AN UNKNOWN ARTIST IN THE BIBLIOTHÈQUE SAINTE-GENEVIÈVE

And within the town, where, on passing the gates, the royal
guests suddenly found themselves in an artificial forest, it was
the same. Through the trees came a group of nymphs, and
their leader — a girl of striking beauty — represented the goddess
of the chase, with bow in hand and quiver on shoulder. She
held a tame lion by a silver chain, and, leading the great beast
to the King, begged him, in appropriate verses, to accept at her
hands the town of Lyons.

Everywhere, too — mocking and exultant — was the monogram
to be seen; on the magnificent triumphal arches and
obelisks, engravings of several of which have been preserved,
on the draperies which hung from the windows, on the flags
which floated on the breeze. Catherine made her entry the
day after her husband, borne in an open litter, and so
covered with diamonds that the eye grew tired, but infinitely
less remarked than the heroine of the fête, riding behind her
on a palfrey, modestly dressed in black and white.

From Lyons, the King and the Court proceeded to Moulins
to assist at the marriage of Antoine de Bourbon, Duc de
Vendôme, with Jeanne d'Albret. Henri II had personally
negotiated this affair. Renouncing the hope of obtaining
the consent of his aunt Marguerite, who aspired to a far
higher alliance for her only child, he had seduced Henri
d'Albret by promising him an expedition to recover Upper
Navarre from Spain and an additional pension of 15,000 livres,
of which, however, only a single payment was ever made.
The young princess was willing enough to marry in her own
country, and to have a husband of whom she was graciously
pleased to approve; but her mother was exasperated, and did
all in her power to turn her husband and her son-in-law
against the King, and also against the Constable, who had
counselled the marriage.