The 1560s: the apogee of Huguenot power?

1. Towards the January Edict: The instability of the ruling factions after the death of Henri II

Francis II was fifteen at the time of his accession in July 1559, which meant that he was too young to rule in person. The control of government was in the hands of his uncles, the Guises - François, duke of Guise, and Charles of Guise, Cardinal of Lorraine. Their policy is not easy to disentangle, since the advancement of the house of Lorraine went hand in hand with their support for Catholicism. Francis II was married to Mary, queen of Scots, the niece of the Guises. On the advice of his uncles, the king continued to issue repressive edicts against his Protestant subjects.

The conspiracy of Amboise in the early months of 1560, a plot organized by a lesser nobleman - Jean du Barry, seigneur de la Renaudie - aimed at capturing the court for the Huguenot party and eliminating the influence of the Guise family. The weakness of the conspiracy was that support was confined to the discontented lesser nobility; it lacked firm backing from either Geneva or the great nobility in France. The first prince of the blood, Antoine of Bourbon, king of Navarre, was nominally a Calvinist, but he proved a broken reed to the Protestant cause well before his death in October 1562. His younger brother, Louis I of Bourbon, prince of Condé, was both more dynamic and more committed, but lacked Navarre's social pre-eminence. It was subsequently claimed that Condé had authorized the conspiracy of Amboise. Whatever the truth of the matter, Condé was arrested by the Guises, condemned, and might well have been executed but for the sudden death of Francis II in early December 1560. This resulted in a palace revolution. The Guises lost their predominance; since Charles IX was legally a minor, his mother, Catherine de Médicis, became regent, with Navarre as lieutenant-general of the kingdom. One of the first acts of the new regime was to reprieve Condé, who returned to the council of state in March 1561.

Catherine de Médicis was a remarkable woman. She was the granddaughter of the man to whom Machiavelli had dedicated The Prince, and she was predisposed to place the interests of the crown above the concern for religious unity. She was both tolerant and devious. She and the Chancellor, Michel de l'Hôpital, were in agreement that the policy of repression had failed and that one of the primary causes of disturbance in the kingdom was the persecution of the Huguenots. The logic of this assessment led them to seek measures of church reform and limited toleration. To this end, a national synod (colloque or colloquy) was summoned to Poissy in September 1561. This alarmed Catholic zealots and the Papacy: Laínez, the Jesuit vicar-general, was dispatched to the synod with the express intention of destroying its ecumenical atmosphere. On the other hand, a hard-line Catholic such as the Cardinal of Lorraine was apparently prepared to work towards religious compromise, which seems to be an admission that the monarchy itself would be threatened if the position of bishops was undermined and if Calvinist church discipline was imposed. A committee of five members of each faith produced a compromise formula which was rejected by the Sorbonne as 'not only insufficient, but captious and heretical'. Even without such intransigence at home, the reconvening of the Council of Trent meant that the problem of implementing the compromise would have remained. The failure of the synod at Poissy confronted the government with the choice of enforcing the laws against heresy or of granting an edict of toleration. An assembly of notables was summoned to Saint-Germain, where the Chancellor proposed, and the majority accepted, such an edict in January 1562.

Order was breaking down in the French towns before the January edict transformed the position of the Huguenots by providing a restricted legal recognition of Protestant rights of worship. Protestant preaching in the towns by day or night was expressly prohibited, but meetings at which the faithful gathered without firearms were permitted outside town walls. In many of its clauses, the edict was staunchly Catholic in tone; but even so, the government was too weak to enforce its more tolerant clauses in the localities. At the beginning of March, the duke of Guise and his retainers came across a prayer meeting held illegally inside the town of Vassy near the duke's estate at Joinville. About thirty Huguenots were killed in the ensuing 'massacre'. When the Calvinists failed to obtain redress from the crown, hostilities commenced in April. Condé denounced the attempt of the Guises to 'place... the queen in captivity' and to 'dispose of the kingdom at their own pleasure'. The third national synod of the reformed church, meeting at Orléans, declared Condé 'protector and defender of the house and crown of France' and enabled him to mobilize an army of some 6,000 infantry and 2,000 cavalry. The Guises replied with a request to Charles IX 'neither (to) approve nor suffer in his kingdom any diversity of religion' - in other words, to revoke the January edict. The Huguenot struggle for recognition had become crucially linked with a struggle for power between two opposing factions in the nobility.

2. The first civil war and the apogee of Huguenot power

The power of the Huguenots reached its apogee during the first civil war and its aftermath. However, the weaknesses in the movement soon became all too apparent. The January edict may have deluded many new converts into believing that their cause was about to triumph, and perhaps that the younger brothers of Charles IX, or even the king himself, might abjure Catholicism when they came of age. But control of the large cities was the key to governing the country, and in them Calvinism was especially weak. The Parisian Huguenots, who, for the most part had had to meet in secret until the late 1550s, were few, although they could muster significant congregations in the rue Saint-Jacques and at the Pré-aux-Clercs. The city was violently Catholic: in 1562, it obtained an exemption from the provisions of the toleration edict of January. As one of the king's most dependable sources of funds when it came to paying the costs of the wars, it was in a good position to insist on a policy of no compromise. In Rouen, the second city of France, the Huguenots comprised at most 21 per cent of the population. In Lyon, the third largest city, about a third of the citizens were Calvinists, of whom the majority had been born outside the town. During the first civil war, the Huguenot minority seized control in Rouen in mid- April 1562; but its dominance ended with the capture and violent sacking of the city by royal forces in October. In Lyon, the Huguenot minority held sway longer, a full eighteen months in 1562-3. At Toulouse, however, six days of municipal insurrection in May 1562 resulted in a Catholic victory, with 200 Huguenots dead in the street fighting and over 200 executed after the rising.

After 1563, it was clear that the Huguenot attempt to gain the large cities and thus to increase their political power had failed. Four years later, a Protestant coup failed at Lyon and persecution of the Calvinists recommenced. The fact that the peace treaties that settled each of the wars favoured the rights of the Huguenot nobility at the expense of urban Protestantism is frequently blamed on the prejudices of the Huguenot leaders. There was, it is true, a distinction between 'political Huguenots' and 'religious Huguenots', a difference in the emphasis of policy. But the fundamental reason why new cities were not gained for the Protestant cause is the fierce lobbying of delegations from fiercely Catholic cities such as Paris. The Huguenot political and military leadership could scarcely hope to win at the negotiating table what it had previously failed to secure by conversion or victory on the battlefield.

In the eight cities with provincial Parlements (Paris, Toulouse, Grenoble, Bordeaux, Dijon, Rouen, Aix and Rennes), the stubborn conservative Catholicism of these institutions (despite the crypto-Calvinist convictions of some of their members, who were gradually eliminated in the 1560s), proved decisive. They opposed not only the attempted Huguenot takeover, but also the royal policy of religious compromise. The Huguenot strongholds remained, by default, small towns well away from the watchful eyes of the local Parlement, places such as La Rochelle (the bastion of Calvinism in France from 1568 to 1628), Montauban and Nîmes. Especially after 1572, it was such towns which organized Protestant resistance: commando raids from Nîmes and Montpellier secured control of the Cévennes. The Huguenots fought a war without rules in the Midi, attacking towns on feast- days, living off the countryside and generally settling old scores. The extent to which the new religion penetrated into the countryside was limited, and most rural areas remained nominally Catholic. Since the Huguenots frowned on traditional carnivals, fetes, feast-days and the communal pleasures of dancing and the tavern, there was little to attract peasant converts wedded to a traditional rural culture. The support of the nobility for Calvinism should certainly not be underestimated, however. Though most of the great army commanders and the provincial governors remained Catholic, Condé's manifesto in 1562 was signed by La Rochefoucauld, Rohan, Soubise, Coligny, d'Andelot and '4,000 gentlemen of the best and most ancient houses of France'. In one area of Normandy, the élection of Bayeux, 40 per cent of the gentry were Protestant in the 1560s, although this number had fallen to about 13 per cent by 1597. Nevertheless, with the exception of the battle of Dreux in December 1562, the Catholic army nearly always comprised a higher number of cavalry (and thus presumably nobles) than the Huguenots, as well as a larger number of foreign mercenaries.

Why so many nobles joined the Protestant cause in the 1560s must remain largely a matter of conjecture, since few left any record of their motives. The great essayist Montaigne was by nature sceptical of the power of religion over men. 'Let us confess the truth,' he wrote, that 'those who take up arms out of pure zeal (for) religion' could hardly make up 'one complete company of gens d'armes.' Montaigne's scepticism was echoed over seventy years ago by the historian Romier, who argued that the Huguenot nobility had little understanding of doctrinal Calvinism and that their association with the movement was essentially a means of restoring their own status and wealth. Calvinist propaganda was specifically aimed at the French nobility and it used political rather than doctrinal arguments - as for example in François Hotman's Letter to the Tiger of France (1560), a justification of the Conspiracy of Amboise and a sustained attack on the Guises which was written to enlist the support of provincial gentry. The propaganda met with some success, not least because dissatisfaction with royal policy and hostility to the wealth of the church were rife among some sections of the nobility. These views were expressed by the baron de Rochefort, the spokesman of the second estate (the nobles), in an important speech to the Estates General of 1560. He attacked recent ennoblements and maintained that noble privileges were 'as ancient as the monarchy itself'. Rochefort asserted that the scandalous wealth of the church had been acquired at the expense of the nobility, who by ancient privilege had the right to worship as they pleased. Hostility to the church may have been reinforced in some areas by the hope of seizing church lands, an idea put forward by the nobility of Languedoc as early as 1561. A royal minority, following the rule of two strong kings, would naturally create a power vacuum in which the nobility enjoyed a greater degree of independence than in the previous generation. The progress of Calvinism was aided both by a weak monarchy and the royal bankruptcy of 1559, which suddenly deprived provincial governors of their normal supply of pensions and gifts and gravely weakened their clientage network. Some local Calvinist communities may actually have bribed nobles to become their 'protectors' at the precise moment that hard-line Catholic governors felt their authority to be undermined by the regency government's policy of limited toleration.

In the first civil war, the Huguenots failed to win a decisive military advantage, while their negotiating position was gravely compromised by Condé's treaty with England, signed in September 1562. Elizabeth I was too weak to offer the Huguenots any significant military assistance, but Condé's invitation to France's traditional enemy to intervene in the war appeared treasonable. The iconoclastic riots of the Calvinists, and the excesses of some of their commanders, notably the baron des Adrets, who sacked Lyon at the end of April 1562, alienated potential support. François, duke of Guise, was assassinated in February 1563 by a Huguenot, who declared under torture that Coligny, one of the Huguenot leaders, had authorized his mission. Coligny denied the charge and was acquitted; but he did not conceal his view that the assassination was 'the best thing that could happen to this kingdom and to the church of God'. He was wrong, because vendettas among the upper nobility helped to prolong the civil wars. On the other hand, the elimination of Guise, and the capture of Condé and Montmorency by the opposing armies paved the way for a truce negotiated by Catherine de Médicis in March 1563, the first of the 'edicts of pacification' which terminated each of the nine civil wars. The edict of Amboise reflected the relatively stronger position of the crown. The nobility gained the right to hold Protestant services in their homes; but for everyone else, services were restricted to the suburbs of one town in each lesser judicial area (bailliage or sénéchaussée). By resorting to arms, the Huguenots had gained a restriction, not an extension, of their rights; and for this reason alone the truce was unlikely to become a permanent peace.

3. From the peace of Amboise to the St. Bartholomew massacres, 1563-72

Catherine de Médicis's formal power as regent came to an end in August 1563 with the proclamation of Charles IX's majority. But the king was still a boy of thirteen and took little part in affairs of state before 1570. Real power remained with the queen mother, who took her son on a grand tour of France in 1564-5 in the hope of pacifying the kingdom. This culminated in the ill-advised meeting with the duke of Alba at Bayonne in June 1565. According to Alba, the idea was formulated there of eliminating five or six Huguenot leaders. News of this 'interview' aroused Protestant fears of a return to the repressive policies of Henri II and the revocation of the edict of Amboise. In an attempt to prevent this about-turn in royal policy, the Huguenot leaders tried to seize the queen mother and Charles IX at Meaux in September 1567. The coup misfired, but precipitated a second civil war. Condé was once again the leader of the revolt; his manifesto on this occasion was much more extreme, since he proclaimed the French monarchy to be 'limited from its origins by the authority of the nobility and the communities of the provinces and the great towns of the kingdom'. By October, his negotiating terms had risen to include the free exercise of Calvinism throughout the kingdom, the expulsion of Catherine's Italian entourage, the abolition of taxes imposed since the reign of Louis XII, and the assigning of four fortresses (places de sûreté) for the Huguenots. By March 1568, however, after the crucial failure of his blockade of Paris, and the withdrawal of German mercenaries under the Calvinist John Casimir of the Palatinate, Condé was prepared to settle for less - the renewal of the edict of Amboise.

The 'little peace' of Longjumeau only lasted from March to August 1568. Catherine de Médicis could not easily forgive the attempted Protestant coup the previous year, and she inclined towards the policy of the Cardinal of Lorraine, which was to eliminate the Huguenot leaders. There was widespread support among the Catholic population at large for a fight to the finish against the Huguenots, and opposition to the peace of Longjumeau. The third civil war began with the attempted arrest of Condé and Coligny, who escaped to the security of La Rochelle in September after a hazardous four-week journey. The war was much more destructive than its two predecessors, and went badly for the Protestants. In March 1569, their army was routed at Jarnac and Condé died afterwards from his wounds. In October, Coligny's forces were defeated at Moncontour. Though the Huguenots were now on the defensive, the negotiations for a new truce were not altogether against their interests, for the Catholic extremists, Henri duke of Guise and the Cardinal of Lorraine, were in disgrace as a result of a shift in the political balance between the factions at court which probably resulted from Guise's ambition to marry Marguerite, the king's sister. The treaty of Saint-Germain of August 1570 restored Protestant rights of worship and permitted the fortress towns of La Rochelle, Montauban, Cognac and La Charité to be garrisoned by them for two years. The Huguenots thus gained less extensive privileges than under the edict of 1562, but with a new guarantee of security provided by the places de sûreté.

However, there was serious Catholic hostility to the Peace of St-Germain, which has to be viewed on different levels. Firstly, there was opposition to the peace terms as such, in that the Huguenots gained for the first time a military guarantee for their security. Secondly, there was clearly anger at the apparent futility of the earlier wars: what had been achieved? The Huguenots scarcely appeared any weaker, since they now had places de sûreté. What was also clear was that the king's tax demands had increased because of the cost of the war and the need to pay off the foreign mercenaries who had come to the aid of the Huguenot armies. This was true of both the peace of 1568 and 1570: as soon as the war was over, the king turned to his capital and demanded money for this purpose; but the aim of buying off the Huguenots' mercenary captains was deeply unpopular. Matters were made still worse by the fact that the tax levies on Paris, for example, seemed to undermine the city's privileges, while on 15 June 1571 Charles IX insisted that noblemen and financiers in his retinue be excused from the share of the levy which they had been ordered to pay. The crown and the Paris municipality were still at deadlock on the full levy of the so- called 'free gift' at the time of the St. Bartholomew massacres. A final sign of the decline in the esteem of the crown, or a growing anger against the monarchy, was the wave of xenophobic riots against Italians, particuarly in the capital. Since the Italians were the revenue farmers of indirect taxes, they were the butt of popular violence at times when rioting against Huguenots was officially discouraged.

Between August 1570 and August 1572, there was a serious attempt at reconciliation between the crown and the Huguenot leaders. The first authorized national synod was held at La Rochelle in April 1571, the so- called 'synod of the princes'. It was attended by Jeanne d'Albret, queen of Navarre, her son Henri of Navarre, Henri of Bourbon, prince of Condé, Coligny, Louis of Nassau and 'divers other lords and gentlemen' who signed the resulting confessions of faith. The corner-stone of the reconciliation with the crown was the projected marriage between Henri of Navarre, the first prince of the blood, and Marguerite of Valois, Charles IX's sister, despite hardline Catholic union to this perverse union because of the intermarriage between faiths. This eventually took place in 1572, but it proved an ill-fated union (it was dissolved twenty-seven years later). Coligny returned to court in September 1571, to press the idea of a French invasion of the Netherlands in support of William of Orange. Since the kingdom was in no position to contemplate war with Spain, which would be the inevitable result of such an action, his suggestion was not acted upon, but it was perhaps only rejected once Charles IX was sure that the invasion of Hainault by a Huguenot army under Louis of Nassau, and seizure of Valenciennes and Mons, had ended in failure. Then, on the night of 23 August 1572, Charles IX finally succumbed to his mother's browbeating and ordered the murder of a selected number of Protestant noblemen, including Coligny, who had gathered at Paris for the marriage of Navarre. Coligny had earlier survived an assassination attempt on the morning of 22 August, in which Catherine de Médicis and the king's brother, Anjou, the future Henri III, were probably implicated. It should be noted that Coligny had been hanged in effigy at the place de Grève in Paris in 1569, after the Parlement of Paris found him guilty of treason (lèse-majesté). Since he was the first victim of the massacre, was dragged through the streets, mutilated and eventually hung by his feet (his head having been cut off), in a sense the mob in 1572 merely enacted in reality the sentence which had been pronounced three years earlier.

4. Conclusion: why was so little achieved by the Catholics in the wars before 1572?

Here we must draw attention to James B. Wood's article, 'The royal army during the early wars of religion, 1559-1576', Society and Institutions in Early Modern France, ed. Mack P. Holt (1991), 1-35. The Huguenot army ought, in principle, to have been much weaker than the Catholic army during the earlier wars. Yet with the exception of the two defeats in set-piece battles in 1569, the Huguenot armies performed relatively well. Why was this? We do not know as much as we need to know about the organization of the Huguenot army. It is, however, fairly clear that the centre of operations for the most part was based on a clearly defined geographical area, the base of Huguenot support in the Midi and south-west of France: the Protestant state of Béarn and the Navarre estates were a considerable asset to the cause. In contrast, the royalist army had to recruit and organize itself from a wider geographical area, and what the cause gained in theory from size and resources it dissipated through fragmentation and the logistical problems posed by distance.

James B. Wood argues that the royalist army suffered at the beginning of each war from a lack of preparedness; from difficulties of mobilization; from the large-scale nature of the conflict; from an inability to maintain armies in the field; from the effects of demobilization at the end of the previous war; and finally, over time, from the cumulative effect of casualties ont he army's leadership. The number of gendarme companies in peacetime fluctuated around the mid-60s in peacetime (apart from the year of 1564); but in wartime, the number of such companies considerably higher: there were 103 companies in 1563; 143 companies in 1568; and 180 companies in 1569. The gross disparity between the levels in peacetime and wartime suggests something of the difficulty in mobilizing an army. When it came to mobilizing the army, the crown found that its infantry forces were often garrisoned in frontier areas, well aware from the centre of operations. It was also necessary to send abroad for troops, which again would take some time to materialize. During the second civil war of 1567-8, it was not until mid- January 1568 that the royalist army reached a size of about 60,000 troops. But, as has been seen, the conflict started in September 1567 with the attempted coup at Meaux. The army's mobilization was still not complete at the end of the second war in March 1568. The fact that the Huguenots had seized towns and controlled terrain in parts of provincial France also clearly hindered mobilization of the royalist army. The distance over which men, equipment and munitions had to be brought to mount operations, and the potential for harassment by the enemy, suggest something of the difficulties faced by the Catholic cause in the 1560s. Once assembled, the royalist army suffered the usual levels of attrition of field armies in the sixteenth century. Almost inevitably, pay was insufficient and the risks of mutiny were substantial. The financial problems of the monarchy were already serious in 1559 and were clearly exacerbated by the period of civil war. By 1568, the level of royal military expenditure implied an annual expenditure of 18 million, or more than the whole of royal revenues (more than half of which were normally committed to non-military expenses).

Conditions of peace, as in 1563, 1568 and 1570 required the demobilization of the army for financial reasons and to reassure the Huguenots that the crown was serious in its peaceful intentions. As has been seen, the foreign mercenaries had to be paid before they would return home. Native soldiers were often simply dismissed from service, with the result that they committed pillage and disorder on their return home. Then the cycle repeated itself with the next war, except that there was a cumulative effect of casualties on the army's leadership. James B. Wood concludes: 'We are, it seems, a long way from Louvois (the reforming secretary of state for war under Louis XIV). Yet not only were the difficulties inherent in the level of warfare practised in France formidable, but warfare was not yet the technical and financial monopoly of the state... By ...centring war inside the kingdom, the civil wars increased the difficulties the crown had to face and over time inexorably reduced its chance to fight an effective or decisive internal war.' There were plenty of unemployed nobles ready to assume commands, at least in the earlier wars, on both sides of the religious divide. The ending of the Italian wars ensured that there was a force to be recruited. What the breakdown of central control could not ensure was that the army on one side or the other would emerge with a military ascendancy. The most obvious outcome was likely to be a military stalement, and hence a perpetuation of the conflict for nearly two generations.

History

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