The great design of Henry IV, from the Memoirs of the Duke of Sully, and The united states of Europe

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'^ THE GREAT DESIGN

OF HENRY IV

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Introduction, by Edwin D. Mead vii

The Great Design of Henry IV i

Introduction

The " Great Design " of Henry IV of France was the first practical plan of a comprehensive character in modern history for the federation of Europe. Europe in 1600 was the civilized world ; and this was the great inaugural vision in a series of visions, which, thus beginning, rapidly grew, of an organized and peaceful world. Dante in his Monarchia had made his fervent plea for a revived and idealized Roman Empire, as the ground and guarantee of European unity ; but the three centuries between Dante and Henry of Navarre had made it plain that the reconstruction of the Roman Empire would never come, and that the unity of which the great poet -patriot dreamed could only come through the federation of independent states.

A forgotten and almost unknown plan for organizing the European powers for the sake of peace deserves here at least passing notice ; for it antedated by almost a century the design of the great French king, and by much more than a century the publication of his design. We get the knowledge of it from Erasmus, who was the greatest apostle of peace in his time.^ There is an old letter from Erasmus to a friend, written probably about 1 5 1 7, or having reference to that period, alluding to an effort at that time in behalf of the peace of Europe, which is so

1 For more complete notice of this significant historical incident, see article by the present waiter on " An Early Scheme to organize the World," in the Independent, August 29, 1907.

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comprehensive and definite in its character that it may almost be considered a " Great Design " previous to the famous scheme of Henry IV. Erasmus says in this letter :

It was a favorite project about that time to assemble a Congress of kings at Cambray. It was to consist of Maximilian the Emperor, Francis the First, King of France, Henry the Eighth of England, and Charles, the sovereign of the Low Countries, of which I am a native. They were to enter, in the most solemn manner, into mutual and indissoluble engagements to preserve peace with each other, and consequently peace throughout Europe. This momentous business was very much promoted by a man of most excellent character, William of Ciervia ; and by one who seemed to have been born to advance the happiness of his country and of human nature, John Sylvagius, chancellor of Burgundy. But certain persons who get nothing by peace and a great deal by war threw obstacles in the way, which prevented this truly kingly purpose from being carried into execution. After this great disappointment I sat down and wrote, by desire of John Sylvagius, my Querela Pads.

The Complaifit of Peace, although the most important essay by Erasmus in behalf of international justice and peace, was not his only nor his first impeachment of the war system. He discussed the same subject in his panegyric to Philip, Duke of Burgundy, at Brussels, in 1504, and repeatedly afterwards. It is a thing to be remembered that it was from the same land in which, at The Hague, the Parliament of Man was in our own time to hold its first memorable sessions for the definite inauguration of the organization of the world, that the first conspicuous and well-considered plea came for the supplanting of the war system of nations by the methods of reason.

The world's great plans for order and peace have been born often of the severe experience of disorder and war and the burden of the loss and cost of war. Dante's

INTRODUCTION ix

Monarchia was prompted by the anarchy rife everywhere in Italy in the thirteenth century. The time of Erasmus was the time when the great centrahzed monarchies were rising upon the ruins of the feudal states, and the standing army, a thing then new in history, was making its appearance as a regular institution. Grotius's Rights of War and Peace was published in the midst of the Thirty Years' War. ' ' The continued danger which lies in the heaping up of war material transforms the armed peace of our time into a crushing burden which peoples find it harder and harder to bear," — to avert "the calamities which threaten the whole world " from this was the necessity which drove the Czar of Russia to call the first Peace Conference at The Hague. The very name of Henry of Navarre suggests the long civil conflict between the Catholics and the Huguenots in France ; and the chapters of the history of Spain, Austria, the Netherlands, and England which were coincident with his stormy career were chapters no less tragical, and often yet more tragical, than those of the history of France. If ever there was a time to prompt rulers and statesmen to great designs for checking the war system, it was this time.

Henry was born in 1553, the year that Mary Stuart became queen of England, three years before Charles V abdicated in favor of Philip II, and when William the Silent was just entering public life. He succeeded to the throne of France in 1589, the year after the destruction of the Invincible Armada, and five years after the assassination of William of Orange ; he fought the battle of Ivry in 1590, and promulgated the Edict of Nantes in 1598. His illustrious reign — for greatest of all the kings of France Henry surely was — and his life were ended by

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the hand of the assassin in 1610, seven years after the death of Queen EHzabeth, Such is the barest chronology of the Hfe of the author of the '' Great Design "; but it is sufficient to recall to the reader with knowledge and imagination the character of the period in which he worked and thought.

Henry's great minister was the Duke of Sully. Sully played a part in the reign of the French king hardly inferior to that played in the reign of Elizabeth — who, if we may believe Sully, is to be looked on as joint author with Henry of the ''Great Design" itself — by Cecil, Lord Burleigh. Unlike Burleigh, he wrote voluminous memoirs ; and it is in these Memoirs of Sully that we are given the account of the '' Great Design." The Memoirs cover the whole reign, and indeed almost the whole life, of the great king. Henry was on his way to visit Sully when he was assassinated. Sully lived until 1641. He began to dictate his Memoirs to his secretaries shortly after Henry's death, these Memoirs being based largely upon journals and notes which he had been preparing for many years. Only the first two volumes, covering the years 1570 to 1605, were completed in his lifetime, being printed in 1634. The unfinished portion was transcribed by his secretaries, and the third and fourth volumes were published at Paris in 1662, more than twenty years after Sully's death. It is at the end of the last volume that the special chapter devoted to the '' Great Design " appears, although many references to it are scattered through preceding pages, and the two long passages reprinted in the present volume after the " Great Design " itself are of special significance.

The authenticity of the '' Great Design " as the work of Henry himself has been the subject of long and heated

INTRODUCTION xi

controversy, a controversy that still goes on. Many have charged Sully not only with casting the " Great Design " in the shape in which we have it, but with its sheer fabrication, for some purpose of his own. To me no adequate motive for this appears ; and the respective qualities of the minds of Henry and Sully make the conception of the scheme the more natural for Henry, while the considerable elaboration of it in some respects by Sully — who, in the interview with James I, which he reports, professed to have a leading part in developing it — as he came to put it into literary form seems not unlikely. The settlement of this vexed question does not concern us here. Whether Shakespeare or Bacon wrote Hamlet, our chief interest is in the possession of Hamlet. Whether the king or his minister conceived the ''Great Design," our chief interest is in the fact that this broad and bold programme of world organization was worked out in that critical period of history. The controversy, however, has been so notable and began so early that I incorporate here, as of probable interest to many, the note relating to the matter appended by the Abbe de 1' Ecluse to the chapter upon the " Great Design " in his edition of Sully's Memoirs, published in 1747:

The Memoirs of Sully are the only monument which has preserved to posterity an account of the great design of Henry IV. We find no traces of it in any of the historians, authors of memoirs, or other writers, who were contemporary with that prince ; their silence in this matter proceeded, no doubt, from their not knowing enough of it to say anything with certainty about it. The world did not begin to descant upon it till the '' Memoirs of Sully," wherein it is so clearly described, were published ; and among all those who have considered it ever since about the middle of the seventeenth century, I find scarcely any who have questioned the possibility of executing it :

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doubtless, because they lived near enough to the times in which it was formed to be convinced, even from the mouths of those who had been witnesses of the preparations and dispositions which were made, that all the measures had been taken precisely in the same manner as related by the Duke of Sully ; and consequently, that it would have had but few of those obstacles to encounter which have since been raised against it. The author of a manuscript discourse in the King's Library, which to me appears to be the most ancient memoir we have of that time, seems not in the least to have doubted of success in its execution. And M. de Perefixe, who, in the third part of his history of Henry the Great, has given a short but very accurate account of the scheme, says positively that it would have succeeded ; and further confirms his assertion by proofs, which he gives (p. 388 and following). The continuator of Thuanus, in what little he has said of it (anno 1609-10), does not appear to have been of a different sentiment. The Marshal de Bassompierre also, in his Journal (tom. i.), seems to be in its favour. To these authorities we may also join that of the author of the Life of the Duke of Epernon, and some others, who all seem to be of the same opinion. Indeed, until the beginning of the present century, all authors appear to have been unanimous on this point ; and several of our modern historians have joined them herein. Vittorio Siri (Mem. Recond. tom. i. pp. 29, 514; tom. ii. p. 45, &c.) is the first that I know of by whom this great enterprise has been treated as absurd and impossible ; but the ignorance which he shows in the whole affair, even in those points which are the least contested, his attachment to the Spanish politics, and his distance from the persons of Henry IV. and his minister, which is every way apparent in all he says on the subject, render him, in this respect, very justly exceptionable ; his sentiments have been adopted by the author of the History of the Mother and Son (tom. i. p. 44), and for a similar reason of attachment to the queen, mother of Louis XIII. But this writer, such as he is, producing no better authority for his opinion than the age of Henry IV., who was then near sixty, appears also to have been so entirely unacquainted with the affair, that we may, without scruple, pronounce he was ignorant of the disposition which had been made for the complete execution of it within the space of three years, and that he condemns the design without understanding it. I have much

INTRODUCTION xiii

greater reverence for the authority of some modern pohticians, who consider it as a kind of impossibility thus to change the face of all Europe in the manner proposed by Henry IV., and who imagine that in our days a much more happy expedient has been discovered whereby to obtain the equilibrium of Europe, than by reviving the ancient council of the Amphyctions ; what I mean is the precaution now observed of having all the principal powers of Europe accede to, and become the guarantees of, every particular treaty. But all those calamities which we have suffered in consequence of war do but too plainly evince its insufficiency. In regard to the main stress of the question, I agree with them that Europe could not now, but with great difficulty, be constituted in the manner proposed by Henry the Great; nevertheless I believe, without pretending to subject any one to my opinion, that those who treat this prince's design as a chimera do not pay all the necessary attention to the circumstances of those times, wherein Europe, from her frequent dangers of being subjected to the house of Austria, and by the bloody wars which a difference of religion had excited, and continued daily to excite, found herself in a manner compelled to have recourse to extraordinary means to put a period to her miseries. I cannot finish this remark better than in the words of M. I'Abbe de Saint- Pierre, in his Discours sur le Grand Homme : " From hence we may perceive, that if Henry IV., King of France, had executed his celebrated and well-projected design, whereby to render peace perpetual and universal among the sovereigns of Europe, he would have procured the greatest possible benefit, not only to his own subjects, but to all the Christian kingdoms, and even, by a necessary consequence, to the world in general ; a benefit of which all generations, present and to come, would have participated down to the latest time ; a benefit by which we should have been exempted from those terrible and numerous evils which are the effects of foreign and domestic wars; a benefit which would have been the source of all those sweets which naturally flow from an uninterrupted and universal tranquillity ; — if, I say, he had been so happy as to have executed this great design, it would have rendered him, beyond all comparison, the greatest man the world ever has produced or probably ever will produce." After some further reflections upon the means still more practicable, this judicious author adds : " This prince,

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however, has always had the honour of being considered as the author of the most important invention, and most useful discovery for the benefit of mankind, that has yet appeared in the world ; the execution of which may, perhaps, be reserved by Providence for the greatest and most capable of his successors,"

. With the great body of controversial Hterature upon the subject which has followed are associated the names of Cornelius, Ritter, Kiikelhaus, Philipson, and Pfister. The critical view is sufficiently stated for the general reader by Kitchin, in his Histoiy of France, as follows :

French historians are much divided respecting the problem of the Christian Republic ; for while they wish to believe in so splendid a conception of the international position of France, as the great central figure round which all the rest are grouped, their historic sense and judgment compel them to doubt, if not to deny, the genuineness of the document on which it rests. . . . No other writer of the age alludes to the scheme. It would have been communicated, more or less fully, to several of the Cabinets of Europe, yet dead silence prevails ; no minister, for example, of either Elizabeth or James alludes to it. This, taken with the weakness of the evidence in the CEcoiiomies, is conclusive against the genuineness of the scheme with its magnificent chimera of an European Amphictyonic assembly. . . . It must not be supposed that Henry IV. had any such plan neatly drawn out, and ready for execution, when he made his preparations for appearing in Germany ; on the contrary, he was not at all the man to have worked out any such elaborate design, for he had neither knowledge nor inclination for it. And besides this, there is internal proof which shows that it did not come from his hand. How could he, the tamer of the noblesse, who knew them so well, and was ever on his guard against them, have dreamt of proposing to carve out ten principalities on his northern frontier for ten great Lords of France?

Yet we must not absolutely deny the existence of any " great design " of the kind. It was an age of political speculations ; men's attention was called to international questions, or invited to study the nature of states within their own borders ; the classical examples

INTRODUCTION . XV

were much in vogue ; men asked themselves as to Empires, as to Republics ; the pen kept pace with the sword, and showed its new power in swaying public opinion. " Learning," as Hallam says of this time, " was employed in systematic analyses of ancient or modern forms of government"; these were the days of Bodinus' great work De Repiiblica J now came out that singular collection of httle books, the "Elzevir Republics"; the minds of men had passed from the Utopias of the previous age to more practical speculations as to what State-systems existed, or might exist. They were conscious that Europe had entered on an entirely new phase of being, and were eager to see how she would group herself, what would be the form of equilibrium to which they hoped she was tending. The great struggle of the Thirty Years' War in Germany is heralded by these anxious speculations ; for the true decision of the form of European politics could never be come to, till Germany had fought out the still unsettled questions which vexed her from the Alps to the Baltic. The temper of mind corresponds to that which, in a somewhat similar age, agitated the French nation under Napoleon III., and led to maps of reconstructed Europe, and speculations on the equilibrium of states, and wars made " for an idea." Therefore there is nothing improbable in the existence of the scheme of a Christian Republic before 1610; rather, it is very credible; and if we may trust Sully (in the earlier part of the (Economies) we may trace the genesis of some plan of the kind, though doubtless not so elaborate, in the sagacious speculations of Queen Elizabeth. Sully states distincdy that he and the Queen discussed the great project in 1 60 1, and that she first sketched out the plan of it, which in oudine answers to that of the Christian Republic. On her death the matter seems to have been re-opened to King James, who characteristically shrank from anything so large and decisive; though the young prince Henry, perhaps with an eye to a French marriage, professed his hearty liking for it. But James drew off from the French side, and in 1 604 made a separate peace with Spain.

We shall not be far wrong if we say that during the last years of the life of Henry IV. he cherished hopes of overthrowing the Austro- Spanish dominion in Europe, by means of a combination of French with Dutch and North German interests ; that England failed him, through her insular views, and the temper of her new monarch ; that xvi THE GREAT DESIGN OF HENRY IV

this led him all the more to watch the movements in Germany and to strive to settle the outstanding Dutch struggle in favour of the Provinces ; and in the end made him once more buckle on his armour for what might have been a decisive war. We may even go farther, and beheve that Henry had formed large plans for the aggrandisement of the crown, not in the least plans of the lofty and disinterested kind attributed to him by Sully. Of this we have an account, which is probably correct, in Richelieu's Memoirs. The Cardinal describes him as opening out his plans in 1 6 1 o to the Queen : to reduce to his obedience Milan, Montferrat, Genoa, Naples ; to present most of Milan and Montferrat to the Duke of Savoy, taking in exchange Nice and Savoy ; to make Piedmont and the Milanese a kingdom ; to call the Duke of Savoy (having lost his old territories) King of the Alps ; and thus to secure the approaches of France into Italy ; on the other side, having shown himself to the Italian princes as their friend (one fancies one hears the voice of Napoleon the Third !), to pass into Flanders and Germany, in order to wear out his enemies by fanning into flame the smouldering variances between North and South Germany, perhaps to make the Rhine his frontier, with three or four strong fortresses on it. We may conclude, finally, that the Christian Republic is not a formed scheme of Henry's planning, but a romance, based on facts, and encouraged by the bold projects of Queen Elizabeth, and the war-loving energy of the Duke of Sully.

This is the extreme critical view, and much that might be said to counteract it is obvious. It is not necessary here, however, to say it ; for our primary concern is not with the authorship of the '' Great Design." The work of the Abbe de I'Ecluse is to Dean Kitchin "audacious.'.' That work was the very bold editing and rearrangement of Sully's Memoirs, to make the work more consecutive and readable. Many liberties were certainly taken with the text, from which confusions have resulted. L' Ecluse's edition was published in 1747 ; and Mrs. Charlotte Lenox made her English translation in 1755. This was revised in 1 8 10, the text of L'Ecluse being modified through

INTRODUCTION Xvii

comparison with the original edition of the Memoirs ; and the various editions which have followed in England and America have been reprints of this London work of 1810. The edition used for the present volume is that published in Bohn's Library in 1856. The notes are chiefly the notes of L' Ecluse, although it will be seen that certain notes are those of the English editor.

The prime object of the " Great Design," as Sully states, was to reduce the House of Austria. It was therefore essentially a political scheme, however great its general virtues. The first plan for the federation of Europe which was at once comprehensive and disinterested was that of William Penn, published in 1693, thirty-one years after the publication of the '' Great Design. " It is noteworthy that at the close of his essay Penn appeals for reinforcement of his plan to Henry's similar scheme :

I confess I have the passion to wish heartily that the honor of proposing and effecting so great and good a design might be owing to England, of all the countries in Europe, as something of the nature of our expedient was, in design and preparation, to the wisdom, justice and valor of Henry the Fourth of France, whose superior qualities raising his character above those of his ancestors or contemporaries deservedly gave him the style of Henry the Great. For he was upon obliging the princes and estates of Europe to a politic balance, when the Spanish faction, for that reason, contrived and accomplished his murder by the band of Ravilliac. I will not then fear to be censured for proposing an expedient for the present and future peace of Europe, when it was not only the design but glory of one of the greatest princes that ever reigned in it. This great King's example tells us it is fit to be done.

In 1623, in Sully's lifetime, and forty years before the account of the " Great Design" was published in the last volume of his Memoirs, Emeric Cruce published in Paris xviii THE GREAT DESIGN OF HENRY IV

his little book entitled Le Novean Cynee, which contained the first distinct proposal for substituting international arbitration for war. It was long believed that the only existing copy of this remarkable work was that in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. There was a copy, however, in the library of Charles Sumner, bequeathed by him to Harvard University ; and this copy, long overlooked, has, during the last year, been brought to light, and a translation of it will be published immediately in the International Library. It is noteworthy as the first flowering of the peace cause on French soil, the creation of one who was living in Paris during the reign of Henry the Fourth. We cannot forget either that it was as an exile in France that Grotius prepared his Rights of War and Peace, and that this appeared at almost the same moment that Cruce published his Noiiveau Cynee.

Four years before the appearance of the last volume of Sully's Memoirs, containing the account of the '' Great Design," was born the Abbe Saint-Pierre, who, not long after the appearance of William Penn's Plan for the Permanent Peace of Europe, published his famous Project for settling Perpetual Peace in Europe, in three volumes, the most comprehensive and thorough presentation of the subject of the better organization of the world which had ever, up to that time, been made. Saint- Pierre owed the inspiration of his effort directly to the ''Great Design," viewing his plan as an elaboration of that. ''It falls out happily for this project," he wrote, " that I am not the author of it. It was Henry the Great who was the inventor of it." Leibnitz, who in 171 5 made the "Project" of Saint-Pierre the subject of an important paper in which he developed his own thoughts upon international organization, wrote

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personally to the author, and took satisfaction in the fact that the project was supported by the practical authority of Henry the Fourth. Later Rousseau revived the project of Saint-Pierre, devoting a book to it ; and in a subsequent pamphlet on Perpetual Peace he wrote :

I require only, in order to prove that the project of the Christian Republic is not chimerical, to name its first author ; for assuredly Henry IV. was no fool, nor was Sully a visionary. The Abbe Saint- Pierre felt himself warranted by these great names in reviving their system. But what a difference in the times, the circumstances, the proposal, the manner of doing it, and in the author! To judge of this difference let us glance at the general situation of affairs at the moment chosen by Henry IV. for the execution of his project. . . . But without anything transpiring of these grand designs, everything marched on in silence towards their execution. Twice Sully went to London ; the party was united in alliance with King James I., and the King of Sweden was pledged on his side ; the league was concluded with the Protestants of Germany ; they were even sure of the Princes of Italy ; and all contributed towards the great object without being able to say what it was, just like the workmen who labour separately at the parts of a new machine of which they do not know the form or the use. ... To so many preparations add, for the conduct of the enterprise, the same zeal and the same prudence as had gone to its formation, quite as much on the part of Henry's minister as on his own ; at the head of the enterprise a captain such as himself, while his adversary had nothing more to oppose to him, and you will be able to judge whether anything which might be deemed favourable to success was absent from the promise of his. Without having penetrated his views, Europe, attentive to his immense preparations, awaited their results with a kind of terror. A slight pretext was to give rise to this great revolution ; a war, which was to be the last, was preparing an immortal peace, when an event, whose horrible mystery must deepen the terror of it, banished for ever the last hope of the world. The same blow which cut short the days of the good King plunged Europe anew into the eternal wars which she could no longer hope to see come to an end. Be that as it may, these are the

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means which Henry IV. collected together for forming the same establishment that the Abbe Saint-Pierre intended to form with a book. Beyond doubt permanent peace is at present but an idle fancy; but given only a Henry IV. and a Sully, and permanent peace will become once more a reasonable project.

The work of Saint-Pierre and Rousseau met with a wide and warm response throughout Europe. One fruit in Germany was the work of Totze at Gottingen in 1763, entitled Permanejit mid Universal Peace, according to the Plan of Henry the Fotirth.