* * *
As king, Henri IV also developed a distinctive style of governance. Here again, Champlain would be deeply influenced by his example. Both men were remarkable for their energy and stamina, and they had an infinite capacity for taking pains. They knew well the importance of tact and generosity in dealing with others. Henri IV wrote, “un Roy pour estre grand ne doit ignorer rien; to be great, a king should not ignore the smallest thing.” Champlain led others by the same rule.40
By temperament, Henri of Béarn and Champlain of Saintonge were in some ways very different from one another. Henri IV lived for pleasure. He delighted in good food, great wine, and boon companions. Most of all, he loved the company of beautiful women. The pursuit of beauty became an obsession that got in the way of other things, and his closest friends complained to him about it. His faithful supporter Philippe Duplessis wrote, circa 1582, “Sire … these open and time-consuming love affairs no longer seem appropriate. It is time for you to begin loving all Christianity, and specially France herself.” Henri preferred to love all the ladies of France, seriatim.41
Samuel Champlain also enjoyed food and drink, good companions and good times, as did the king. But Champlain was more austere in his private life and he lived by a different creed. Later, those who knew him best in America remarked on his “chastity” in the face of invitations from Indian women who offered themselves to him. In that way Henri IV and Champlain could not have been more different. But in their politics and religious ideas they were very much alike.
Altogether, historians count nine civil wars of religion in France in the years from 1562 to 1598. By comparison, the United States suffered one civil war that lasted four years and its wounds still scar the great republic. The French wars of religion continued for nearly forty years. One scholar reckons the toll at “between two and four million.”42
Henri IV and Samuel Champlain lived most of their lives in a nation at war with itself. They reacted against the troubles of their age, and learned from them. Both became men of humanity in a world of cruelty and violence. Henri IV worked tirelessly to unite his kingdom, not primarily by force but by persuasion. He appealed to the altruism of his subjects and also to their material interest. He invited all the people of France to share his dream of abundance and prosperity. Every order and estate was offered inducements. Henri began by buying outright the loyalty of former opponents. Enormous sums were paid to Catholic noblemen who agreed to join the king and recognize the House of Bourbon. Some of the largest payments went to the House of Guise. The duc de Lorraine and the duc de Guise received more than a million écus. Military leaders were paid for their support. The maréchal de Brissac in Paris received 492,800 écus. Maréchal le Châtre, who held the fortresses of Orléans and Bourges, was paid 250,000, and others nearly as much. Henri IV remarked that their loyalty was pas rendu, vendu; not given, but bought. But most served the king faithfully.43
The cost of this policy was heavy. Henri was severely chastised by other European monarchs, who thought that he set a very bad example by paying his subjects for their loyalty. But Henri told his minister the duc de Sully that it would have cost him ten times as much to do it by the sword, and he was probably right.44
Henri’s policies impinged directly on the life of Champlain and the community in which he came of age. The town of Brouage came under the control of the Saint-Luc family, a dynasty of Catholic noblemen. After having opposed the Huguenots, François d’Espinay Saint-Luc rallied to Henri IV and was generously rewarded for his loyalty. His family became in effect hereditary governors of the town. In 1596, he was succeeded by Timoléon d’Espinay Saint-Luc, “un esprit plutôt libertin,” a libertine who preferred to live at Court. Peace and prosperity returned to Brouage, as to many towns in Saintonge and throughout France. The idea of national unity began to gather strength.45
Henri IV also appealed to the material interest of the middle class. He paid large sums of money to Catholic towns for their allegiance and signed treaties of reconciliation that recognized franchises, privileges, and institutions of self-government. Amnesty was granted for past acts. The Catholic Church was established as the religion of the realm, but rights of worship were granted to Protestants. Families who supported the king were rewarded.46
Peasants and even day laborers were promised prosperity and abundance. In a conversation with the duc de Savoie, Henri IV is said to have remarked “there will be no laborer in my kingdom who lacks the means to have a chicken in his pot.” Others remembered the king as promising “the poorest peasant in the land a chicken in his pot on every Sunday.” Henri IV’s phrase would reverberate through the ages. The tutors of Louis XIV quoted it to their Royal master, without much effect. In the United States, President Herbert Hoover borrowed the phrase and made a campaign promise of “a chicken in every pot” in the election of 1928.47
Henri had a dream of prosperity and abundance for all the people of France. He also became a great builder and vastly improved the city of Paris. Many of the most beloved parts of the city today were his work: the embankments and quais along the river Seine, the graceful Pont Neuf, the gardens of the Tuileries and their linkage to the Louvre, the Champs Elysees, the Place Royale, and the rue Dauphine. A distinctive architecture of brick and stone, the style Henri IV, set a tone for Paris. Henri also laid the foundations for a great royal library.48 The beautiful palace and grounds of Fontainebleau were developed by him, and the royal residences of Monceaux and Saint-Germain were in part his work.
He loved to meet and talk with friends at Fontainebleau, walking with them in the vast wooded park that surrounded the palace, deep in intimate conversation. The king formed the habit of holding his favorite companions by the hand. Other kings created distance as an instrument of power; Henri IV cultivated intimacy. Many people commented on this habit. His biographer David Buisseret believes that it was a cultural style among the méridoniaux, the people of southwestern France who had moved into the center of power with the rise of the House of Bourbon.49
Henri worked to unite the regions of France in a network of roads and canals. With his chief minister Sully (no friend of Champlain), his projects included canals between the Garonne and the Aude, which promised to link the Bay of Biscay with the waters of the Mediterranean. He maintained a strong army in France, but kept it on a short leash. His soldiers were forbidden to prey upon the civilian population. He told several captains who allowed their troops to pillage the peasantry, “Qui payera vos pensions, messieurs? Vive Dieu, s’en prendre à mon peuple, c’est s’en prendre à moi!; Who will pay your pensions, gentlemen? By God, to plunder my people is to plunder me!”50
His foreign policy won broad support in France. In the words of a leading French historian, Henri’s diplomacy created “a new equilibrium” in the affairs of Europe. He sought to end many years of confrontation between France and Spain, with treaties that were ratified by other European states. Henri IV was a man of large plans, some of them very forward-looking. He envisioned a European Union that could bring an end to violence on that war-ravaged continent. In the late twentieth century he would be rediscovered by French Europeanists as a kindred soul.51
This breadth of spirit inspired many young Frenchmen, Catholic as well as Protestant, and they rallied to the causes that Henri le Grand espoused. After a century of violence and cruelty, Henri IV offered an ideal of peace, generosity, and humanity. Champlain was one of many young men of his generation who looked to the king as their model. And for reasons that nobody has been able to explain from the historical record, young Champlain was privileged to know this great king in another way, as a mentor, sponsor, patron, and friend. Whatever its cause, its consequences were a fundamental fact of his life.
4.
A SOLDIER IN BRITTANY
Learning to Lead in the Army, 1594–98
To Samuel de Champlain, aide to Sieur de Hardy … the sum of nine écus for a certain secret voyage in which he has made an important service to the King.
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br /> —pay records from the Army of Henri IV, Brittany, 15951
EVEN AFTER HENRI IV converted to the Roman Church, a hard core of leaders in the Catholic League continued to oppose him. As the young king gained strength, his enemies resolved to stop him by any means. When all else failed, they took up arms. The result was yet another civil war in France—the ninth and largest of them all, called the War of the League. The fighting spread to every part of the kingdom and became a general European war.2
Once again the Catholic party invited Spanish and Italian armies into France, and recruited volunteers from Ireland and other countries. Foreign troops invaded France from the north, south, and west. A large Spanish force landed in Brittany and fortified some of its strategic towns. Another Spanish army crossed the southern Alps and entered Burgundy in 1595. In the northwest, Spanish infantry seized Calais on the English Channel. A mixed force of Spanish, Italian, and Walloon Catholics under the count de Fuentes, a very cruel commander, took the town of Amiens the following spring. These foreign armies plundered, raped, and ravaged many parts of France. One of them advanced nearly to the gates of Paris.3
This invasion was a mortal challenge to the monarchy of Henri IV and to the sovereignty of France. It brought much suffering throughout the country. The result was an outpouring of patriotism in France. Protestants strongly supported the king, and this time they were joined by many good Catholics who were sick of religious strife and appalled by the conduct of the League. Ordinary people rallied to Henri IV. They turned to him as a leader who could unite their ravaged country and expel foreign armies that plundered friend and foe alike.
The king attracted to his cause the best military leaders in the kingdom. The marshals of France, many of them Roman Catholic, strongly supported him against the League. Henri took the field himself and led from the front. He acted with decision, moved with energy, out-generaled his opponents, and his armies began to win. First he dealt with the southern threat. In 1595, he won a brilliant victory at Fontaine-Français and shattered his enemies in the south. He turned to the north and, after a hard siege, recovered the important fortress of La Fère in 1596. On September 15, he liberated the town of Amiens. With each victory his support increased. Then Henri sent an army to the west of France to confront the largest threat to his kingship. The Catholic League had great strength there, and Spanish troops held some of the major seaports in Brittany. The Spanish monarchy poured men and money into the campaign. They built massive fortifications at Crozon in the west of Brittany, and Blavet on the south coast. The forces of Henri IV attacked them in five years of bitter campaigning from 1594 to 1598.4
Among the many young Frenchmen who fought for the king in Brittany was Samuel Champlain. He joined the royal army as a volunteer and first appeared on the army’s pay records in 1595, serving on the staff of Jean Hardy, an officer in the logis du Roy, the service of supply for the royal army. The earliest pay record listed him as a fourrier, which historians have understood as quartermaster sergeant (its later meaning). Young Champlain began in the rank of a noncommissioned officer and received the modest but not inconsiderable pay of 33 écus a month.5
Champlain was able to make himself useful to senior officers in the logis du Roy. In the Brittany campaign, much of the army’s supplies came by water. Champlain knew the business of commerce and he had sailed the waters of western France. His skills were well suited to the difficult task of supplying a sixteenth-century army.6 He appears to have pleased his superiors, as he rose rapidly in his rank. Within a year he was promoted from fourrier to an “ayde du sieur Hardy.” A little later he described himself as a maréchal des logis, a commissioned officer in the supply service.7 Special assignments came to him. In 1595, he received extra pay for a “certain secret voyage in which he had made an important service to the King.”8 Whatever that “secret voyage” and “important service” may have been, the army’s paymasters were now referring to him as the sieur de Champlain.9
He came to the attention of the highest commanders in the army. Champlain tells us that he served as an aide or staff officer to three of them: Jean d’Aumont, François d’Espinay seigneur de Saint-Luc, and Charles de Cossé-Brissac, a brother-in-law of Saint-Luc. These men were marshals of France, very close to the king. They were in the thick of very heavy fighting throughout the Brittany campaign.10
Champlain was in combat too. He was not a man who would have been content to remain in the rear echelon. A sixteenth-century army worked differently that way from a modern force. When a day of battle arrived, aides and staff officers of the logis du Roy put down their pens and picked up their swords. An engraving of a fortified camp that was attacked in a combat zone shows the logis du Roy in the center of the action.11
Champlain served in one of the most hard-fought campaigns of the war: the siege of Crozon on the west coast of Brittany. At stake was a strategic peninsula that commanded the entrance to Brest, and control of western rivers. The tip of the peninsula was high ground, with steep rocky cliffs that made it a natural fortress. Today it is a quiet place, with long views across the water toward the French naval base at Brest. In the summer, French families picnic there, and children play among ruined fortifications.
In the last war of religion, the high escarpments of the Crozon Peninsula were a key to the port of Brest and control of western Brittany. Here in 1594 French and English troops defeated a Spanish force in heavy fighting. For Champlain, these barren cliffs were bright with laurels.
In 1594, the Crozon peninsula was the scene of savage fighting. A very able Spanish officer, Don Juan de Aguila, led 5,000 troops there. His engineers built a massive fort called El Leon, with an outer wall 37-feet thick. Don Juan installed a battery that commanded the approaches to Brest, and protected it with a strong force of Spanish infantry.12
In the last war of religion, the high escarpments of the Crozon Peninsula were a key to the port of Brest and control of western Brittany. Here in 1594 French and English troops defeated a Spanish force in heavy fighting. For Champlain, these barren cliffs were bright with laurels.
The Spanish fort El Léon at Crozon in a field sketch by English officer John Norreys (1594). After many repulses Martin Frobisher led English troops from the right side of this map and fell with a mortal wound. Champlain and the French attacked from the left, and won the day.
England’s Queen Elizabeth I sent a strong force to support the army of Henri IV in a combined operation against the Spanish at Crozon. A hard campaign followed, in which Champlain saw action. The French army was commanded by his own superior, Marshal Jean d’Aumont. The English fleet of eleven ships was led by the great Elizabethan explorer Martin Frobisher.
The allied forces tried to take the Spanish fort by storm, and were thrown back several times with heavy losses. An attempt was made to tunnel under the wall of the fort and destroy it with a mine. On November 7, the mine was exploded and opened a small breach. English and French troops rushed in, led by Frobisher and d’Aumont, perhaps with his aides at his side. Champlain was said to have conducted himself with great gallantry.13
The 400 Spanish defenders fought with dogged courage. They retreated to the edge of the cliffs behind them, and resisted nearly to the last man. The British leader wrote that they “never asked for mercy, so all were put to the sword.” After the battle five or six Spanish soldiers were found alive in the rocks below. They were taken prisoner and returned with honor to their Spanish commander, who hanged them for not having fought to the death. The French, in tribute to the courage of the defenders, called the place the Pointe des Espagnols. It still bears that name.14
The fighting in Brittany continued for five years. Two of Champlain’s commanders were killed in action: Marshall d’Aumont in the summer of 1595, and Marshall Saint-Luc at Amiens to the north. Champlain soldiered through the entire campaign.15 In 1597, he appeared in army records as “capitaine d’une compagnie,” a line officer with command responsibility for troops in the garrison of Quimper, a fo
rtified river town in southwestern Brittany, midway between Brest and Blavet.16
In the course of his service, Champlain rose steadily in rank and responsibility. He went from being a volunteer to a noncommissioned officer, became an aide to a supply officer, was soon an officer himself entrusted with a secret mission in the king’s service, then an aide to the highest ranking marshals in the royal army, and finally got his own command. It was exactly the same sequence that would later occur in his American career. Some of his opportunities might have come from the king himself. Royal favor may have opened doors for this promising young man; but merit took him through them.
For Champlain, the royal army in Brittany became a school of leadership. He learned about fidelity to comrades, obedience to superiors, responsibility for others, loyalty to a cause, and endurance in a long struggle. That experience taught him to master himself, which was the first step in learning to lead others. He also learned the importance of strength, stamina, and steadfast purpose. A good captain, he wrote, “must be hardy and active,” and “untiring at his work.”17 Most of all he learned about courage, honor, and duty. Many years later he wrote that a “captain must give proof of a manly courage, and even in the face of death make light of this, and issuing his orders in a calm voice incite each to be courageous and to do everything to clear the danger.”18
Champlain was learning other things as well. Some of the men who soldiered with him in Brittany had long experience of America. Among them was the English commander at the siege of Crozon, Martin Frobisher. He was older than Champlain but they had much in common. Both were men at arms and men of the sea. Both were employed in the 1590s on secret missions for their monarchs. Both fought at Crozon.19 They may have had opportunities to meet when Frobisher worked with the French commander, Jean d’Aumont, and Champlain was on d’Aumont’s staff. They probably fought together in the final assault at El Leon, when the English and the French charged side by side across a narrow causeway into the Spanish fort. Frobisher was shot in the leg and mortally wounded.20
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