1661-79] Mlle. de La Vallière and Mme. de Montespan 19

closer relationship with the other parts of the army. An uniform was not yet insisted on for the whole army, but much was done to improve and regularise the appearance of the troops. Much thought also was devoted to the question of victualling. The slowness of the movements of earlier armies was often explained by the impossibility of procuring supplies. By Louvois' orders magazines were established, which greatly improved the mobility of the armies in the earlier wars of the reign. He carried on the work of Richelieu too by abolishing certain posts whose occupants held an almost independent position. The position of colonelgeneral of the infantry was suppressed; and, though the colonel-general of the cavalry and the grand maître of the artillery still remained, their powers were so reduced that they no longer conflicted with Louvois' chief aim of concentrating all military power in the hands of the King. A reform of a different kind must also be mentioned. He made generous provision for disabled soldiers by the establishment of the Hôtel des Invalides.

In sum, Louvois was efficient in the highest degree; as energetic as Colbert, and capable of infusing his own energy into his subordinates; ready to take responsibility and usually able to justify it by success. Without the efficiency of the French War Office under Louvois it is impossible to conceive of all the triumphs dating from the earlier part of Louis XIV's reign.

Before the death of Colbert another influence besides that of Louvois had begun to be strong with the King. Orthodox pietism had triumphed over him in the person of Madame de Maintenon. The political marriage, which had been arranged for him at the Peace of the Pyrenees, was not likely to retain exclusive control of his heart. The licence which had become traditional with the kings of France would not be checked by loyalty to Maria Teresa, who was a true and virtuous wife, but neither intellectual nor attractive. The King had been strongly attached in the first instance to Maria Mancini, the niece of Mazarin, and it needed all the power of the Cardinal to induce Louis XIV to carry out the stipulated treaty and marry Maria Teresa. Immediately after the marriage gossip was busy with the King's infidelities, and soon it was known that Louise de La Vallière was the chosen favourite. The King felt for her probably the purest passion of his life. She was only seventeen at the time of their first acquaintance, and her great beauty, charm of manner and sweetness of disposition sufficed to maintain her influence for many years. But she was in many ways singularly unfitted to maintain her position at Court. Her conscience was not easy; the religious life was always attractive to her; and, when at last she found her power waning and a rival preferred to herself, it was chiefly her genuine love for the King that made her regret the change. In 1674 she retired to a Carmelite nunnery. Her successor was Madame de Montespan, who had intrigued desperately against Mademoiselle de La Vallière and held the first place in the King's affections from 1670 to 1679,

20

Madame de Maintenon

[1683-4

though not without occasional rivals. She was in point of character and person almost the antithesis of her predecessor, haughty, domineering, proud of her position, striking and imperious in her type of beauty. She had innumerable enemies at Court, both among the nobles and the clergy; but she out-faced them and for nearly ten years she triumphed over them. Her eclipse came from a strange quarter. She had borne the King several children, and it was necessary to find a discreet person to attend to their education. She met Madame Scarron at the house of a friend, induced her to accept the charge of the children, and thus introduced to the King the woman who was destined to be her successful rival.

Madame Scarron, who soon received at the King's hands the title of Marquise de Maintenon, is perhaps the most interesting figure in the Court of Louis XIV. She was the grandchild of Agrippa d'Aubigné, the famous Protestant leader of the sixteenth century. Her father had been a worthless spendthrift, and she had passed through many remarkable changes in life before she came to be the unacknowledged wife of the most splendid of the French kings. She was born in the ante-chamber of a prison; had spent some portion of her early life in Martinique, had been left an orphan at the age of seven, and, following the tenets of her protectors, had passed from Catholicism to Protestantism and from Protestantism back to Catholicism. In her seventeenth year she had married Scarron, a comic dramatist of reputation in Paris, preferring, as she has told us, such a marriage to the cloister; at twentyfive years of age she was left a widow, and lived for some time an obscure life, until an accidental meeting with Madame de Montespan made her the governess of the King's children. In her new task she came into contact with the King and soon became a well-known figure in the Court. She played a part of extraordinary difficulty with the utmost adroitness. Though she was in name the servant of the King's mistress, she gained great influence with the King himself. It was partly due to her that he severed himself from Madame de Montespan and was reconciled to his much-injured wife. After the death of Maria Teresa in 1683, Madame de Maintenon was secretly married to the King in January, 1684, in the presence of Harlay, Archbishop of Paris, and Louvois. She was a woman of great charm and dignity of manner; demure, self-restrained, and even cold in temperament; loving sobriety and reason both in thought and action; a character apparently little fitted for so romantic a destiny. She was, too, a woman sincerely, if not passionately, religious, and it was the religious element in her mind and character which contributed much to her conquest of Louis XIV.

The religious vein had never been wanting in Louis XIV even in his careless and licentious youth, and his confessor had always been one of the chief influences upon him. But under Madame de Maintenon the whole tone of the Court had changed. The splendid gaiety of the early years was thrown aside, and the practices of religion became the

1661-6] Ecclesiastical opposition to Protestant liberties 21

mode at Versailles. Madame de Maintenon's influence co-operated with this religious development and did much to make the once brilliant Court of Versailles decorous and dull. As Louis XIV drew near to the Church, his personal morality underwent a most welcome improvement; but the new influence was unfortunately answerable for the worst political mistake in his reign, which contained so many. For, unfortunately, the conversion of Louis XIV was one which "had no root in reason and bore no fruit of charity." The Church had never abandoned her desire for uniformity, or her belief that physical coercion might be legitimately used to enforce it. And thus Louis XIV was led on to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

The attack upon the Protestants of France which culminated in the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes was due, almost entirely, to religious intolerance, little complicated by the political and social motives which had intensified the religious struggles of the sixteenth century. The Huguenots of France had lost the political ambitions and aristocratic connexions which made them a serious danger in the days of the League and perhaps in the time of Richelieu. They had taken no part in the wars of the Fronde, and Louis XIV in 1666 publicly acknowledged the vigour and success with which they had resisted the party of rebellion during that period. They supported the commercial schemes of Colbert with a force out of proportion to their numbers. Nor did they threaten the Church any more than the State. There were fine orators and some scholars of distinction in their ranks, but their propagandist zeal had waned. They only needed to be left alone to provide France with a great source of strength both moral and material.

Two forces drove France down the fatal descent, from being the foremost representative of religious toleration to becoming a belated exponent of religious persecution in its most odious character. First, the King's personal feelings counted for something. Religion had come to be a strong and genuine motive with him, and, together with his vanity, impelled him towards the establishment of religious unity. But the Church in France was the strongest driving force. She was at the zenith of her power: her clergy were distinguished by sincerity, learning, and even by social sympathies. But they had always regarded the Edict of Nantes as an insult, and passionately desired its withdrawal, or, if that were not attainable, its restriction within the narrowest possible limits. The assemblies of the clergy, held every five years, continually demanded fresh measures of persecution. The fact that the clergy of France were about the same time engaged in a serious controversy with the Papacy as to the question of Gallican liberties made them all the more anxious to prove their orthodoxy by measures against the Protestants; and it is upon them that the chief responsibility must fall.

had

The end of the struggle was not foreseen. Neither King nor clergy intention of abolishing the Edict from the first. They desired

any

22

Curtailment of the rights of Protestants

[1655-80 merely to harass the Protestants by the most rigid interpretation of the Edict and by the withdrawal of all royal favour from the despised sectaries. This course had been suggested so early as 1655 by Gondrin, Archbishop of Dhoras, and the King began to act on it in the first year of his personal reign; for, in 1661, commissioners were sent round France to enquire into the administration of the Edict, and henceforth the liberties of the Huguenots were curtailed at every point. Thus, in 1661, toleration was withdrawn from the Pays de Gex (conterminous with Geneva) on the ground that it had not been a part of French territory at the time of the issuing of the Edict. Yet in that territory there were 17,000 Protestants, while the Roman Catholics numbered only 400. During the following year the action of the State troubled the Huguenots in many ways; but in 1666 a notable and open attack upon their privileges ensued. The General Assembly of the Clergy in 1665 had drawn up an address to the King suggesting certain liberties of which it might be possible to deprive the Huguenots, while still maintaining the letter of the Edict. Most of the proposals of the clergy were accepted by Louis XIV in the Edict of 1666, which may be taken as opening the era of persecution. It professed to maintain the Edict of Nantes; but each of its sixty clauses embodied some unjust decision against the Huguenots.

but

Henceforth the liberties of the Huguenots were curtailed by a hundred different methods, open and secret. Two may be taken as representative. In 1666 those of the Huguenots who accepted Catholicism were allowed three years in which to pay their debts; and in 1669 the "Chambers of the Edict," established in 1598, were suppressed. The position of the Protestants became grievous in the extreme; for the present Louis XIV was not prepared to go further. The Elector of Brandenburg had protested against the Edict of 1666, and in 1669 Louis XIV withdrew many of its clauses. The Protestants were still oppressed by indirect persecutions of every kind; but the years between 1669 and 1680 were a period of comparative peace. During much of it, foreign affairs were claiming the King's attention; Colbert's influence was still strong; and thus no positive legislative enactments of importance are recorded against the Huguenots. But signs of coming danger were not wanting. The clergy maintained a war of pamphlets against them, and demanded "the destruction of the hydra." Turenne's conversion was a serious blow; for, so long as the first soldier in France was one of them, his fellow-Huguenots felt secure from the worst. The Government, moreover, was rigorously excluding from its service, even from the lowest grades of it, all Protestants. Even Colbert had to bow to this policy, the danger of which he realised. But the most important move in these years of comparative peace was the institution, in 1677, by Pélisson, himself a renegade Huguenot, of the "treasury of conversions."

A considerable sum of money was put at the disposal of the

1665-85]

Measures against the Protestants

23

agents of the Crown wherewith to purchase the adhesion of Huguenots. It was claimed that this means had been successful in procuring over 58,000 conversions by the year 1682.

The year 1681 marks the beginning of the end. The Peace of Nymegen had left the King's hands free to attend to domestic concerns. About the same time Madame de Montespan's influence with the King came to an end; and, though there is no evidence to connect Madame de Maintenon with the policy of the Revocation, her rise meant the strengthening of religion and the weakening of political interests in the King's mind. It is the special characteristic of the tragedy of the Revocation that so many good men and good impulses contributed to induce the King to commit his criminal and suicidal blunder. In June, 1681, was issued an Edict unsurpassed in the history of religious persecution for its mixture of hypocrisy and cruelty. It declared that children of Protestant parents might declare themselves converted to Catholicism at the age of seven. The Edict, which at first sight seemed merely ridiculous, proved in its working a terrible weapon of religious coercion. Any trivial acts or words could be interpreted as implying adhesion to Catholicism; then came the invasion of Protestant households and the forcible abduction of children. All appeals to the King were in vain. He had perhaps not yet determined on the revocation of the Edict; but he told Ruvigny, "the deputy-general of the Reformed Churches," that he was henceforth "indispensably bound to effect the conversion of all his subjects and the extirpation of heresy." The attack became hotter during the following years, and the violations of the words of the Edict itself grosser. In 1682 a pastoral from the leaders of the Church in France was ordered to be read in all places of Protestant worship, in which the continued obstinacy of the Huguenots was threatened "with evils incomparably more terrible and deadly" than they had suffered up to the present. Protestants were excluded from most trade-guilds, from the financial service of the State and from the King's household. Their places of worship were closed in great numbers, usually on the plea that they had received back converts to Catholicism. Their colleges and schools were abolished. When they attempted to meet on the sites of their ruined temples, this was interpreted as rebellion and punished with barbarous severity. It is reckoned that, by 1684, 570 out of the 815 French Protestant churches had been closed. Between 1665 and 1685 nearly 200 edicts were issued dealing with "la religion prétendue réformée, and nearly all of these curtail some liberty or impose some new constraint: here they destroy a church; there they compel midwives to baptise the children of Huguenots in the Catholic faith, if their life is uncertain. One edict orders that a seat shall be placed in all Protestant "temples" for the accommodation of Catholic officials; another, that no Protestant minister may reside for more than three years in the same place. Already the Huguenots had begun to

L