French Wars of Religion
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The French Wars of Religion (1562 to 1598) were a series of conflicts fought between Catholics and Huguenots (Protestants) from the middle of the sixteenth century to the Edict of Nantes in 1598, including civil infighting as well as military operations. In addition to the religious elements, they involved a struggle for influence over the ruling of the country between the powerful House of Guise (Lorraine) and the Catholic League, on the one hand, and the House of Bourbon on the other hand.
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[edit] Protestants in France
Lutheranism was introduced in France after about 1520. Initially, King Francis I was tolerant of religious reformers, but after the Affair of the Placards in 1534, he began to view Protestants as a threat and persecuted them severely. One French Protestant, John Calvin, found refuge in Geneva, where he came to hold great influence on the reform movement. During the reign of Henry II (1547 - 1559), Calvinism gained numerous converts in France.
In 1559, delegates from 66 Protestant churches in France met at Paris in a national synod which drew up a confession of faith and a book of discipline. Thus was organized the first national Protestant church of France. Its members were thereafter commonly known as Huguenots.
[edit] The early conflicts
In 1560, Catherine de Medici became regent for her young son Charles IX. Her inexperience and lack of financial support created a "political vacuum" and Catherine felt that she had to steer the throne carefully between the powerful and conflicting interests that surrounded it. Although she was a sincere Roman Catholic, she was prepared to deal favourably with the Huguenot House of Bourbon in order to have a counterweight against the overmighty House of Guise. She nominated a moderate chancellor, Michel de l'Hôpital, who urged a number of measures providing for toleration of the Huguenots.
She therefore was led to support religious toleration in the shape of the Edict of Saint-Germain (1562), which allowed the Huguenots to worship publicly outside of towns and privately in towns. On March 1, however, a Guise-led faction attacked a Huguenot service at Wassy-sur-Blaise in Champagne massacring the innocent worshippers there. The Edict was revoked, under pressure from the Guise faction.
This provoked the First War. The Bourbons, led by Louis I de Bourbon, Prince de Condé, organised a kind of protectorate over the Protestant churches and began to garrison strategic towns along the Loire. Here, at Battle of Dreux and at Orléans, there were the first major engagements; at Dreux, Condé was captured by the Guises and Montmorency, the government general, by the Bourbons. In February 1563, at Orléans, Francis, Duke of Guise was assassinated, and Catherine's fears that the war might drag on led her to negotiate a truce and the Edict of Amboise (1563).
This was generally regarded as unsatisfactory by all concerned, the Catholics in particular being uneasy about what they regarded as unwise concessions to the heretics. The political temperature of the surrounding lands was rising, as unrest grew in the Netherlands. The Huguenots became suspicious of Spanish intentions when the latter reinforced their strategic corridor from Italy north along the Rhine and made an unsuccessful attempt at taking control of the king. This provoked a further outburst of hostilities (the Second War) which ended in another unsatisfactory truce, the Peace of Longjumeau (March 1568).
In September of that year, war again broke out (the Third War). Catherine and Charles decided to throw in their lot with the Guises. Religious toleration was once more at an end, and the Huguenot army, under the command of Louis I de Bourbon, prince de Condé and aided by forces from south-eastern France led by Paul de Mouvans and a contingent of fellow Protestant militias from Germany — including 14,000 mercenary reiters led first by the Duke of Zweibrücken,[1] who was killed in combat and then succeeded by the Count of Mansfeld — and from the Netherlands, led by William of Orange and his brothers Louis and Henry,[2] and co-financed by Elizabeth of England [3] fought the Catholics, who were led by the Duke d'Anjou (future Henry III) and assisted by troops from Spain, the Pope and the Duke of Tuscany.[4]
The Protestant army laid siege to several cities in the Poitou and Saintonge regions (to protect La Rochelle), and then Angoulême and Cognac. At the Battle of Jarnac (16 March 1569), the Prince de Condé was killed, forcing Admiral de Coligny to take command of the Protestants. The Battle of La Roche-l'Abeille was a slight victory for the Protestants, but they were unable to take Poitiers and they suffered a defeat at the Battle of Moncontour (October 30, 1569). Coligny and his troops retreated to the south-west and regrouped with Gabriel, comte de Montgomery, and in spring of 1570 they pillaged Toulouse, cut a path through the south of France and went up the Rhone valley up to La Charité-sur-Loire.[5] The staggering royal debt and Charles IX's desire to seek a peaceful solution[6] led to the Peace of Saint-Germain (5 August 1570), which once more allowed some religious toleration of the Huguenots.
[edit] St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre
Despite this shaky truce, massacres of Huguenots at the hands of Catholic mobs continued in 1571, in cities such as Rouen, Orange and Paris. Matters became complicated thereafter as Charles IX warmed to the Huguenot leaders — especially the Admiral of France, Gaspard de Coligny — while Charles' mother became suspicious and eventually alarmed. When it became clear that the king was bent on a full-scale alliance with England and the Dutch rebels, Catherine plotted the assassination of Coligny.
Coligny along with many other senior Huguenots came to Paris for the wedding of Marguerite de Valois to Henry of Navarre on August 28. An assassin made a failed attempt on Coligny's life, shooting him in the street from a window and causing the loss of a finger on his right hand and a broken left arm. Catherine and her supporters believed the Huguenots would react violently, so they decided, with the approval of Henry, to make a preemptive strike by massacring all of the Huguenot leadership in the city. This got out of control and became a full-scale massacre of all Huguenot men, women and children. Over the next few weeks it spread to cities across France. This event became known as the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre. On the night of August 23, perhaps 2,000 Huguenots were slaughtered in Paris and, in the days that followed, thousands more in the provinces.
Both Philip II of Spain and Pope Gregory XIII declared themselves pleased with the outcome, which was naturally viewed with horror by their religious opponents throughout Europe. In France, it solidified Huguenot opposition to the crown.
The massacres set off the Fourth War, which included Catholic sieges of the cities of Sommières (by troops led by Henri I de Montmorency), Sancerre and the La Rochelle (by troops led by the Duke d'Anjou). The end of hostilities was brought on by the election (11 - 15 May 1573) of the Duke of Anjou to the throne of Poland and by the Edict of Boulogne (signed in July 1573) which severely curtailed many of the rights previously granted to the French Protestants. Based on the terms of the treaty, all Huguenots were granted amnesty for their past actions and the freedom of belief. However, they were permitted the freedom to worship only within the three towns of La Rochelle, Montauban, and Nimes, and there only privately within their own residences; Protestant nobles with the right of high-justice were permitted to celebrate marriages and baptisms, but only before an assembly limited to ten persons outside of their family. [7]
[edit] Henry III
Three months after Henry of Anjou's coronation as King of Poland, his brother Charles IX died (May 1574). Henri secretly raced back to France, where he was crowned King Henry III in 1575, at Rheims, but hostilities – Fifth War – had already flared up again.
Henry soon found himself in the difficult problem of trying to maintain royal authority in the face of the competing factions. In 1576, Henry signed the Edict of Beaulieu, granting minor concessions to the Huguenots, but his action resulted in the Catholic extremist, Henry I, Duke of Guise, forming the Catholic League. The Guise family had the unwavering support of the Spanish superpower and were therefore in a very strong position throughout the 1580s. The Huguenots, however, had the advantage of a regional power base in the southwest; they were also supported in principle by outside Protestant forces, but in practice the other Protestant powers, such as England or the German states, could bring no useful forces to bear. At the end of the Sixth War (1576-1577), after much posturing and negotiations, Henry III was forced to rescind most of the concessions that had been made to the Protestants in the Edict of Beaulieu with the Treaty of Bergerac (also known as the "Edict of Poitiers"). Two years later, further hostilities — the Seventh War (1579-1580) — ended in the stalemate of the Treaty of Fleix.
The fragile compromise came to an end in 1584, when the King's youngest brother and heir presumptive, François, Duke of Anjou, died. As Henry III had no son, under Salic Law, the next heir to the throne was the Protestant prince Henri of Navarre, a descendant of St. Louis IX whom Pope Sixtus V had excommunicated along with his cousin, Henri Prince de Condé. Under pressure from the Duke of Guise, Henri III issued an edict suppressing Protestantism and annulling Henri of Navarre's right to the throne.
In December 1584, the Duke of Guise signed the Treaty of Joinville on behalf of the League with Philip II of Spain, who supplied a considerable annual grant to the League over the following decade hoping to destabilize the French Monarchy. The House of Guise had long been identified with the defence of the Catholic Church and the Duke of Guise and his relations — the Duke of Mayenne, Duke of Aumale, Duke of Elboeuf, Duke of Mercoeur and the Duke of Lorraine — controlled extensive territories that were loyal to the League. The League also had a following among the urban middle classes.
The king at first tried to put himself at the head of the Catholic League, while remaining in favour of a moderated settlement. This was anathema to the Catholic extremists, who wanted the Huguenots completely suppressed. The situation degenerated into the Eighth War (1585-1589), which (as the head of the Guise family was also a Henry), is sometimes called the "War of the Three Henrys".
Henry of Navarre sought foreign aid from the German princes and Elizabeth I of England. Meanwhile, the people of Paris, under the influence of the Committee of Sixteen were becoming dissatisfied with Henriy III and his failure to suppress the Protestants. On 12 May 1588, a popular uprising raised barricades on the streets of Paris and Henry III fled the city. The Committee of Sixteen took complete control of the government and welcomed the Duke of Guise to Paris. The Guises then proposed a settlement with a cipher as heir and demanded a meeting of the Estates-General, which was to be held in Blois.
On December 23, 1588, at the Château de Blois, Henry of Guise and his brother, the Cardinal de Guise, were lured into a trap and assassinated, on the orders of the King. The Duke of Guise arrived in the council chamber where his brother the Cardinal waited. The Duke was told that the King wished to see him in the private room adjoining the royal bedroom. There guardsmen murdered the Duke, then the Cardinal. To make sure that no contender for the French throne was free to act against him, the King had the Duke's son imprisoned. The Duke of Guise had been highly popular in France, and the citizenry turned against King Henry for the murders. The Parlement instituted criminal charges against the King, and he fled Paris to join forces with Henri of Navarre.
It thus fell upon the younger brother of the Guise, the Duke of Mayenne, to become the leader of the Catholic League. The League presses began printing anti-royalist tracts under a variety of pseudonyms, while the Sorbonne proclaimed that it was just and necessary to depose Henri III, and that any private citizen was morally free to commit regicide (a declaration reminiscent of the Papal bull Regnans in Excelsis against Elizabeth I). In July 1589, in the royal camp at Saint-Cloud, a monk named Jacques Clément gained an audience with the king and put a long knife into his spleen. On his deathbed, Henry III called for Navarre and named him his heir.
[edit] Henry IV
The situation on the ground in 1589 was that King Henry IV of France, as Navarre had become, held the south and west, and the Catholic League the north and east. The City of Paris supported the League and had Mayenne appointed as Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom. He and his troops controlled rural Normandy. However, in September 1589, Henry inflicted a serious defeat on Mayenne at Arques. Henry's army swept through Normandy, taking town after town that winter.
The new king knew that he had to take Paris if he stood any chance of reuniting the kingdom. The Battle of Ivry, fought on March 14, 1590, was a decisive victory for Henry against the Catholic League forces led by the Duc de Mayenne. Henry's forces went on to lay siege to Paris, but the siege was lifted with Spanish support. Realising that there was no prospect of a Protestant king succeeding in fanatically Catholic Paris, Henry, with the famous phrase Paris vaut bien une messe (Paris is worth a mass), announced his conversion to the old faith and was crowned at Chartres in 1594.
[edit] War theater in Brittany
In 1582 Henry III of France, the last living male-line grandson of Claude, Duchess of Brittany, had made Philippe Emmanuel, Duke of Mercoeur, a leader of Catholic League, governor of Brittany. Mercoeur put himself at the head of the Catholic League in Brittany, and had himself proclaimed protector of the Roman Catholic Church in the province in 1588. Invoking the hereditary rights of his wife, Marie de Luxembourg, who was a descendant of the dukes of Brittany and heiress of the Blois-Brosse claim to the duchy as well as Duchess of Penthievre in Brittany, he endeavoured to make himself independent in that province, and organized a government at Nantes, proclaiming his son "prince and duke of Brittany". He allied with Philip II of Spain, who however sought to put his own daughter, infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia, to the throne of Brittany. With the aid of the Spaniards, Mercoeur defeated the duc de Montpensier, whom Henry IV of France had sent against him, at Craon in 1592, but the royal troops, reinforced by English contingents, soon recovered the advantage. The king marched against Mercoeur in person, and received his submission at Angers on March 20, 1598. Mercoeur subsequently went to exile in Hungary. Mercoeur's daughter and heiress was married to César de Bourbon, duc de Vendôme, an illegitimate son of king Henry.
[edit] Towards peace
The League fought on, but enough moderate Catholics were won over by the King's conversion to make their party ultimately one of extremists only. The Spanish withdrew from France under the terms of the Peace of Vervins. Henry was faced with the task of reuniting France under a single authority. The essential first step in this was the negotiation of the Edict of Nantes, which, rather than being a kind of genuine toleration, was in fact a kind of permanent truce between the religions, with guarantees for both sides. The Edict can be said to mark the end of these civil wars.
Henry IV and his advisor Sully then led France into new more prosperous age.
[edit] Chronology
- January 1562 - Edict of Saint-Germain, often called the "Edict of January"
- March 1562 - Massacre at Wassy-sur-Blaise
- 1562-1563 First War, ended by the Edict of Amboise
- December 1562 - Battle of Dreux
- 1567-1568 Second War, ended by the Peace of Longjumeau
- November 1567 - Battle of Saint Denis
- 1568-1570 Third War, ended by the Peace of Saint-Germain-en-Laye
- March 1569 - Battle of Jarnac
- June 1569 - Battle of La Roche-l'Abeille
- October 1569 - Battle of Moncontour
- 1572 - St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre
- 1572-1573 Fourth War, ended by the Edict of Boulogne
- November 1572 - July 1573 - Siege of La Rochelle
- May 1573 - Henry d'Anjou elected King of Poland
- 1574 - Death of Charles IX
- 1574-1576 Fifth War, ended by the Edict of Beaulieu
- 1576 - Formation of the first Catholic League in France
- 1576-1577 Sixth War, ended by the Treaty of Bergerac (also known as the "Edict of Poitiers")
- 1579-1580 Seventh War, ended by the Treaty of Fleix
- December 1584 - Treaty of Joinville
- 1585-1598 Eighth War, ended by the Peace of Vervins and the Edict of Nantes
- October 1587 - Battle of Coutras, Battle of Vimory
- December 1588 - Assassination of the Duke of Guise and his brother
- August 1589 - Assassination of Henry III
- September 1589 - Battle of Arques
- March 1590 - Battle of Ivry, Siege of Paris
- 1593 - Henry IV abjures Protestantism
- 1594 - Henry IV crowned in Chartres.
- June 1595 - Battle of Fontaine-Française
[edit] See Also
[edit] Notes
[edit] References
Books
- H. M. Baird, History of the Rise of the Huguenots of France, v1 (1889), History of the Rise of the Huguenots of France, v2 (1889). New edition, two volumes, New York, 1907.
- H. M. Baird, The Huguenots and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, (1895).
- E. M. Hulme, The Renaissance, the Protestant Revolution, and the Catholic Reaction in Continental Europe, (New York) 1914
- (French) Arlette Jouanna and Jacqueline Boucher, Dominique Biloghi, Guy Thiec. Histoire et dictionnaire des Guerres de religion. Collection: Bouquins. Paris: Laffont, 1998. ISBN 2-221-07425-4
- R. J. Knecht, The French Wars of Religion 1559–1598 (Seminar Studies in History) ISBN 0-582-28533-X
- T. M. Lindsay, A History of the Reformation, V1 (1906). A History of the Reformation, V2 (1907).
- J. W. Thompson, The Wars of Religion in France, 1559-1576, (Chicago, 1909)
- Tilley, Arthur Augustus, The French wars of religion, (1919)
[edit] External links
- The Wars of Religion, Part I
- The Wars of Religion, Part II
- The Wars of Religion at The Virtual Museum of French Protestantism
