The Huguenots 9780300196191

Citation preview

T H E H U G U E NOTS

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The H u g u e nots geoffre y treasure

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS N E W H AV E N A N D L O N D O N

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Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Oliver Baty Cunningham of the Class of 1917, Yale College. Copyright © 2013 Geoffrey Treasure All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press) without written permission from the publishers. For information about this and other Yale University Press publications, please contact: U.S. Office: [email protected]   www.yalebooks.com Europe Office: sales @yaleup.co.uk   www.yalebooks.co.uk Set in Adobe Caslon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd Printed in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Treasure, G.R.R. (Geoffrey Russell Richards)   The Huguenots/Geoffrey Treasure.    pages cm   ISBN 978-0-300-19388-6 (cl : alk. paper)   1.  Huguenots—History.  I. Title.   BX9454.T74 2013   284’.509—dc23

2013005792

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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Contents

List of Illustrations Preface Acknowledgements



1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9



10 11 12 13 14 15 16



s

part one: europe falls apart

The Native Land: People and Institutions Renaissance Kingship and Noble Subjects The Special Relationship The Power of the Word Every Man His Own Priest The French Church, Humanism and the Pre-­Reform ‘God Will Change the World’ Calvin: The Way, the Truth and the Life Geneva: The Experiment and the Experience

part two: a church forms

Persecution and Growth Why Be a Huguenot? A Party Forms Towards War A Kingdom Divided Battle, Murder and Deadly Consequences The Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day

part three: religious wars

17 A Failing State 18 The Struggle Intensifies

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vii x xiii

3 12 24 31 42 51 63 75 84

99 107 122 134 146 156 167

179 195

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19 20 21 22 23 24



25 26 27 28



29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

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CONTENTS

Henry IV, King of France The Edict of Nantes The Regime of the Edict Catholic Reformation Ventures Too Far The Great Siege

part four: 1629–1661. a golden age

‘The Little Flock’ The Eye of the Storm: Huguenot Lives and Conditions A Pastoral and Spiritual Crisis Revision or Reunion?

part five: revocation

208 224 236 244 254 262

271 283 301 307

Uncertain Times Mars Ascendant Temptations and Trials Towards Resolution Force Majeure Aftermath Diaspora Huguenotism Recovers its Soul: War in the Cévennes Sous La Croix

317 326 336 343 353 359 369 376 384

Afterword: Strangers and Citizens Glossary Notes Further Reading Index

388 392 396 441 451

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Illustrations

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  1 Unknown artist, portrait of the young Calvin, c. 1540s. BGE, Centre d’iconographie genevoise.   2 Title page of the Institutio Christianae religionis, 1559. BGE, Centre d’iconographie genevoise.   3 Jean Clouet, portrait of Francis I, 1525–30. Louvre, Paris, France/Giraudon/ The Bridgeman Art Library.   4 Unknown artist, portrait of Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, sixteenth century. Bibliothèque nationale de France.   5 Masacro Sucedido alos Hugenotes en Paris, c. 1670. © The Trustees of the British Museum.   6 A.R., portrait of Marguerite d’Angoulême, seventeenth century. Bibliothèque nationale de France.   7 Unknown artist, portrait of Jeanne d’ Albret, seventeenth century. Bibliothèque nationale de France.   8 Henri IV qui fait abjuration en 1590, from Maimbourg’s Histoire de la Ligue, 1683. © The Trustees of the British Museum.   9 Le Renversement de la Grand Marmite, 1585. Bibliothèque nationale de France. 10 The Edict of Nantes, 1598. Grands Documents de l’Histoire de France, Archives nationales. 11 Ambroise Dubois, engraving of Maximilien de Béthune, duc de Sully, 1614. Bibliothèque nationale de France. 12 Barthélemy Tremblay, bust of Henri IV, 1604. Musée Jacquemart. 13 Unknown artist, portrait of Agrippa d’ Aubigné, 1622. BGE, Centre d’iconographie genevoise. 14 Unknown artist, portrait of Jean Bodin, sixteenth century. Bibliothèque nationale, Paris, France/The Bridgeman Art Library.

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I L L U S T R AT I O N S

15 Unknown artist, portrait of Philippe Duplessis-Mornay, seventeenth century, in Raoul Patry, Philippe Du Plessis-Mornay: un huguenot homme d’État, 1549–1623, Paris, 1933. Archives départementales de la Vendée. 16 Peter Paul Rubens(?), portrait of Sir Théodore Turquet de Mayerne, c. 1631. © The Trustees of the British Museum. 17 The Siege of La Rochelle, engraving after Callot, 1628. akg-images/Erich Lessing. 18 La Justice et la Clémence sont agenouillées devant Louis XIII assis sous une tente, 1628. 19 Philippe de Champaigne, Cardinal Richelieu at his Desk, 1641. akg-images. 20 Philippe de Champaigne, portrait of Louis XIII, seventeenth century. Prado, Madrid, Spain/The Bridgeman Art Library. 21 Clément Marot and Théodore de Bèze, Les Pseaumes de David mis en rime Françoise, 1675. Courtesy of the Huguenot Library. 22 Unknown artist, portrait of Raymond Gaches, 1666. The French Hospital, Rochester. 23 Title page of the first edition of the full revised French Geneva Bible, 1588. 24 Abraham Bosse, Les vierges sages s’entretiennent des felicities célestes, 1635. Bibliothèque nationale de France. 25 Gérard Edelinck, Paul Pelisson, Maistre des Requestes et de l’Academie françoise, engraving, 1660. Bibliothèque nationale de France. 26 Gérard Edelinck, after Jean de la Haye, engraving of Louis XIV, seventeenth century. Private collection/The Bridgeman Art Library. 27 Pierre Giffart, portrait of Mme de Maintenon, 1687. © The Trustees of the British Museum. 28 Le Temple de Charenton proche de Paris, 1708. The French Hospital, Rochester. 29 Gérard Jean Baptiste Scotin, after Sébastien Leclerc, Demolition du temple de Charenton en Novembre 1685, 1702­–16. © The Trustees of the British Museum. 30 Jean Perrissin, Innenansicht der Kirche von Paradis, c. 1565. BGE, Centre d’iconographie genevoise. 31 The Humble Petition of the Protestants of France, lately presented to his most Christian Majesty, by the Mareschal Schomberg, and the Marquis of Ruvigny. A true Copy in English, 1685. © British Library Board (3902.i.7.(2.)). 32 Medal, Religio Victrix, 1685. © 2013 Sammlung Prisard/Bibliothek für Hugenottengeschichte, Bonn (Germany). 33 Medal, Révocation de l’Édit de Nantes, 1685. Private collection. 34 Jan Luyken, Het weg vlugten der Gereformeerde uyt Vrankryk, 1696. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

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35 Godefroy Engelmann, Caricature des missions évangéliques sous Louis XIV, lithograph based on a drawing of 1686, 1819. Bibliothèque nationale de France. 36 Godefroy Engelmann, Moyens seurs & honneste pour ramener les hérétiques à la foy catholique, lithograph based on a drawing of 1686, 1819. Bibliothèque nationale de France. 37 La Destruction de L’heresie Par la Piété et le Zele de Louis le Grand et les Soins de Nos Seigneurs du Clergé de France, 1686. Bibliothèque nationale de France. 38 Unknown artist, portrait of Denis Papin, 1696. University of Marburg. 39 Sir Godfrey Kneller, portrait of Thomas Papillon, 1698. National Portrait Gallery, London. 40 Pierre Mignard, portrait of Jacques de Gastigny, c. 1680. The French Hospital, Rochester/The Bridgeman Art Library. 41 Jean Bion, Relation des Tourments, 1708. © British Library Board (700.f.24). 42 Jeremias Frescarode, Liste des protestans qui souffrent actuellement les peines des galeres de France . . . pour la vérité de la Religion Reformée, le 9. de Novembre 1711, c. 1712. Leiden University Library: Bibwal A 57:2. 43 L. Bellotti, after J.J. Storni, Essemblée dans le désert, 1775. Société de l’histoire du protestantisme franÇais, Paris/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library. 44 Corniche des Cévennes. Photo by Henri Moreau. 45 Tour de Constance, Aigues-Mortes. Photo by P.G.

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Preface

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t is the late autumn of 1685, leaves falling, rain and mud; the first snow falling in Alpine passes; hard going for travellers up and down the land; gales along the coast, fishermen reluctant to put out to sea. As ever there is much traffic, some taking advantage of the new tree-­lined roads being built by enterprising intendants, most of it on the old Roman routes and the tracks that from time immemorial have linked village to village. All of France is represented in this scene, from the greatest – noble and entourage and high official – to the ragged peasant, tinker or beggar. There are coaches, carts, horses, mules, but most are on foot. There are merchants, lawyers, students, clerics travelling about the parish or between religious houses and, most commonly, peasant farmers market-­bound. In this season, the harvest completed, barns full for winter provision, there are bands of migrants, typically from the uplands of the Massif Central or the hills of Provence seeking work in the cities, Lyons, Marseilles; above all, Paris. Yet not all the wayfarers look as if they are seeking work. Nor are they anxious to be seen. There will always be outlaws, fugitives from justice, army deserters – but now so many? They have the appearance of refugees. A feature of this autumn is the intense military activity: in itself not unusual, at least for the north and east, in wartime; or the sight of refugees fleeing from the zones of conflict, from ravaged towns and villages. But for the past year there has been no foreign war. Nor has there been a serious famine to drive families to the cities. Moreover, there are soldiers across the land, patrolling roads and rivers, setting up checkpoints at crossings and at the entrance to ports, pushing into remote valleys usually left in peace. What is least to be expected, indeed extraordinary, is that the direction of so many travellers appears to be outwards, towards the frontiers. They are refugees. You may also observe, with the privileged eye of posterity, among the mainly small groups, evidently families, that they have an air of respectability,

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P R E FA CE

xi

in bearing and conversation, not downtrodden, not typical, their speech quiet and civil, the women bonneted. Some, however, are in disguise: men as women, gentlemen and their wives as peasants or as servants. There are fewer young children than might be expected. They may travel mainly by night, finding daytime shelter off the road. Field tracks are generally preferred to roads. They are widely dispersed and there will be some in every province but it seems that there are a few main threads and that they form thicker knots near frontier towns and seaports. If the prevailing mood seems to be that of resolve, not that of hopeful adventurers, but sombre, guided by duty where not absolute necessity, it is because they are leaving homes, often substantial town houses or manors, and often their children. Some men are leaving wives, or wives husbands. If they are tense and apprehensive it is not surprising. If captured, the fearsome ordeal of the royal galleys awaits the men, prison the women; a severe convent regime the children; for a few of the lower class transportation to the Antilles. Few Catholics along the way have shown much sympathy for their plight. They have faced derision and there is a risk from informers. If they make it to a seaport, manage to slip past the frontier guards, find a sea captain or fisherman ready to take the risk of stowing them in the hold; or if, taking a mountain route, they find a trusty guide to lead them by little-­known tracks to safety, most still face an uncertain future. We are witnessing, in so many cases across the land, amounting in the end to some 200,000 Christian subjects of Louis XIV, a serious act of faith. Commitment to their religion takes precedence over other considerations. So is the king of France waging war on his own subjects? How has it come to such a pass? Such questions have been asked of other governments and of those who have suffered persecution at the hands of the state on no grounds beyond difference in creed and culture. It could have been asked in 1609 of Philip III of Spain, Louis XIV’s father-­in-­law, after the expulsion of 300,000 Moriscoes, for motives as much racial as religious. Opposed as a policy by many leading Spaniards there was at least a Spanish rationale – if you start with the premise limpieza de sangre. The decision carried an immense weight of Spanish history with it – the Reconquista. So Spain was to be entirely Christian – and Catholic. France was already, in one way or another, entirely Christian. Louis XIV, the Elder Son of the Church, as successive kings termed themselves, would not have seen it as a precedent, though, unlike Richelieu at the time, he could have approved the act. His own act would have echoes in the next century in the actions of several German Catholic rulers. But in scale, in numbers affected, in apparent defiance of the trend of European opinion, in outrage, in its effects, political, cultural, economic, it stands alone. It has to be explained in French terms: a long history, a unique tradition, the theory, though limited practice,

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P R E FA C E

of absolutist rule; a monarchy bound to the Gallican tradition, a French Catholicism that would deny the Pope all but spiritual authority. The story of the Huguenots has a particular resonance beyond family tradition and pride whether it is told of those who left, or the larger number who stayed. I believe it to be one of great interest and wide significance. It is the subject of this book. In the process of learning and writing I have discovered, as I might have expected, that to write about French Protestants must be to write about the history of France in the years when they were a significant element in the body politic. From the 1540s when sustained persecution began, to 1685, when Louis revoked the Edict of Nantes that had afforded them rights and security since 1598, at no point were Huguenots but a small minority of the French population. To do justice to their distinctive character, while setting them in the wider frame of French history, has been a challenge. My journey through a century and a half has exposed a long flank to the attention of the very many specialists along the way. There is hardly a city of importance, hardly an institution, hardly an ounce of the achievement of talented émigrés, hardly an aspect of Calvinist theology that has not been studied by some of the best historians – British, French, of course; above all, American. Grateful for all that I have learned from them I must count on the forbearance of experts in particular areas of the subject. They are best able to appreciate the difficulties in writing a book on the whole Huguenot experience; how painful at times to exclude some of what I have found most interesting; also how inspiring the task has been and how much I have enjoyed it. It is a great story, featuring men and women worthy of our respect, a story of high relevance for our times.

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Acknowledgements

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My first interest in the Huguenots stemmed from an Oxford post-graduate attempt at a prize essay on the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. It remained incomplete under the dual pressures of rowing and a ‘temporary’ post at Harrow School – where I was to stay for nearly forty years. But my interest in French history thus aroused, with my first acquaintance with printed sources and with French writing on the subject, led to my writing books on SeventeenthCentury France. The last one, Louis XIV, left me wondering at the absence of a comprehensive study of the Huguenots in their native land. Surely it would be of great interest, not least to the many descendants across the world of the 200,000 forced by persecution or the claim of conscience, to seek new lands and opportunities. The history of the Huguenots is embedded in that of France across the best part of two centuries. It is also the story of religious belief, of conflicting interpretations of scripture and of church tradition. Since distant Oxford days, with an ever increasing number of books and articles on particular aspects of the Huguenot story, together with studies that have transformed our understanding of French society and government, the need to draw all together has seemed to be more pressing, the achievement more difficult. It was with some relief, with a keen awareness of the shortcomings of my study, that I came to my ‘Postscript’, revealing by reference to some of the talented Huguenot refugees in just one country, the sheer scale of France’s loss, and the host country’s gain. ‘Postscript’ is so named because my subject is the Huguenots in France. If it adds to understanding of their overall experience, with its significant effect on the politics and culture of Europe, and leads some to explore further, then I shall be content. The bibliography reveals how many paths the student can take; also my huge debt to those whose researches have transformed our understanding of Huguenots in war, politics, church and community. They have influenced my study at every point. They come first in my acknowledgement of debts beyond conventional words to describe.

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ACKNOWLED GEMENT S

Several years ago, working on early French Protestantism, and wondering whether I could, or should go on, I was sustained by the interest of Heather McCallum, my editor for previous books at other houses. It made all the difference at moments of doubt. In the last stages I have been saved from careless mistakes and my shaky grasp of modern publishing technology, by the copyeditor Beth Humphries, the proofreader Lucy Isenberg and Tami Halliday and Rachael Lonsdale. With help from her husband Paul, my daughter Magdalen found time in a busy life to compile the index with a system that would otherwise have left me floundering. With eagle eye and discerning scholarship Susan Wood offered reassurance by reading the only part of the book that was then complete. Considering what has led me to this point I must be thankful for a privileged environment. I taught in the panelled room in which the name Byron was prominently carved: an oak doorway in my house bore the name of George Otto Trevelyan; inescapable in the Headmaster’s, of which I had previously been house master, was the memory of Winston Churchill. It was the Harrow governor, Gerald Rivington, who accepted a proposal for a history of France in the seventeenth century. My projected co-author Roger Ellis had to drop out; without him I would not have started. With his interest and friendship of many years, and latterly co-authorship, I was encouraged to keep going. Another name is constantly in mind. Francis Pearson is no longer with us. Co-author in ventures into British history, artist and art-historian, he was lifelong friend to my wife Melisa and myself. All who knew him will recognise the force of my tribute. How much I would have valued his opinion of this work. With him, with other Harrow colleagues, with Melisa’s selfless work on several manuscripts, I recognise how much I have been helped along the way. From wonderfully idiosyncratic teaching of Murray Senior at Shrewsbury School, to the tutoring of the mediaevalist and church historian Billy Pantin at Oriel; through to the stimulating – though often sobering – experience of form room teaching, and to precious afternoons in the French History room in the Institute of Historical Research, I realise how fortunate I have been. It is in that spirit that I offer my heartfelt salute to the faith and courage of the Huguenots who have provided me with the material for this book. From past to future in an uncertain world where it will ever be important to statesmen to study their history, I add a final privilege: that of dedicating it to my nine grandchildren, Claudia, Thomas, Jemima, Polly, Felix, Arabella, Henry, Rose, Soloman.

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1 ‘A bow highly strung.’ Calvin portrayed by an unknown painter as he might have appeared in early Geneva days before overwork and medical problems aged him prematurely.

2 ‘It had begun as an oratory, ended as a Cathedral.’ The Institutio in its final form, bearing the device of Robert Stephanus. Former royal printer he fled to Geneva in 1550. Seldom has the art of printing been put to more significant use; few books have been more influential.

3 King Francis I, portrayed by Jean Clouet as the epitome in style and aspiration of Renaissance kingship. He saw no need to imitate Henry VIII of England and lead the Gallican church to a break with Rome. So French Protestants faced an uncomfortable future as a minority within a Catholic state.

4 Gaspard de Coligny. The artist (unknown) conveys the sturdy character that fitted him for leadership in France and a high place in international Calvinism. The bungled assassination attempt and subsequent massacre ensured his posthumous fame as the most prominent martyr for the cause.

5 One of several engravings that informed the world of the orgy of violence that left thousands of Huguenots dead in Paris and across the land. In mood and action it reflects the extremism infecting Catholicism under the pressures of civil war and led to an equally radical and militant trend in the Huguenot camp.

6 Intellectual adventurer and accomplished poet Marguerite d’Angoulême, wife of Henri d’Albret and queen of Navarre, remained a Catholic, but through patronage and protection of reformers helped prepare the ground for the Protestant harvest.

7 Jeanne d’Albret, queen of Navarre, was foremost among the strongminded women on whom Calvin could count for the furtherance of reform. She did not live to see her son accede to the throne and was spared the pain of his conversion.

8 On Sunday 25 July 1593, at St Denis, alongside the tombs of former kings, dressed in white doublet and hose, before the archbishop of Bourges, Henry IV formally abjures the Protestant faith. At last there is ground for a settlement, but France has to wait another five years for peace.

9 In this engraving, laden with Protestant message and widely hawked, the marmite (the word also means hypocrite), containing the riches of Rome, is tipped over despite the efforts of its guardians to keep it upright. Truth, in form of Holy Scripture, descends upon the improving scene.

10 The preamble to the Edict of Nantes gives Huguenots a privileged place in the state with rights and guarantees defined in a way that gives them a standing position unique for its time. The king offers to both parties ‘One general law, Clear, Pure and Absolute by which they shall be regulated’. The articles are ‘perpetual and irrevocable’. It only means that they can be countermanded by another edict registered by Parlement.

11 The engraving, from a painting attributed to Ambroise Dubois, portrays the duc de Sully, Henry IV’s devoted companion, heroic soldier, a notably strong and purposeful minister. He inspired confidence in Huguenots who enjoyed his patronage and saw that it was possible to be a Huguenot and a patriot.

12 Barthélémy Tremblay’s bust of Henry IV conveys the balance between the man, sensuous, self-indulgent, at times recklessly irresponsible, and the king whose experience, power to command and gift for engaging with people so well suited the needs of France after decades of civil war. His short reign was to become a powerful legend; the golden age of nostalgic memory.

13 Théodore Agrippa d’ Aubigné, soldier, poet, chronicler, lived to see his Histoire buried by the common hangman, testimony to its importance as a record of Huguenot suffering and to his own, unwavering commitment to strict Calvinist principles.

14 Law, for Jean Bodin, portrayed here by an unknown artist, was ‘nothing more than the command of the sovereign in the exercise of his power’. Although he qualified the ruler’s mandate and did not go so far towards royal absolutism as Le Bret or Bossuet, he expresses here what Huguenots knew to be true: what a king grants a king may revoke.

15 Portrayed here at a time of heady but dangerous days for international Protestantism, Philippe Duplessis-Mornay, was a doughty fighter in the war of ideas. Steering his own difficult course between loyal service to Henry IV and adherence to strict Calvinist principle he felt acutely the pain for Huguenots, the fermes, for whom compromise was intolerable and Henry IV an apostate.

16 As ‘Europe’s physician’, Sir Théodore Turquet de Mayerne was worthy of a portrait by Rubens. His extraordinary career, embracing diplomacy and political intrigue, took him from successful practice at the court of Henry IV, among other Huguenots in responsible positions, to England and the courts of James I and Charles I of England.

17 The siege of La Rochelle presented a formidable challenge to any army. Its successful conclusion, followed by further victories in the south, left the Huguenots defenceless and Richelieu more secure in his ministry. It was to prove a landmark in the evolution of the absolutist state.

18 This engraving is made from a picture by Jacques Callot, best known for his series Les Misères de la Guerre. Some 4,000 wretched survivors of the prolonged siege may have been scantily aware of the king’s ‘justice and clemency’.

19 Huguenots generally would have more cause for gratitude to Richelieu. In and following the Grace of Alès he steadily resisted pressure from dévots to reduce their civil rights.

20 Louis XIII’s reputation long suffered from the impression that he was entirely subservient to the Cardinal. He had, however, a mind of his own and was prepared to take drastic action to maintain his authority. Huguenots benefited from his support of Richelieu and rejection of an alternative foreign and domestic policy more to the taste of Catholic zealots.

21 The psalms, in the vigorous translation of Clément Marot, were central in Huguenot worship and of stirring effect. They reinforced the sense of being God’s chosen people, when need arose God’s warriors, and under persecution, justification and comfort.

22 Wearing the black cloak and white collar that was the usual dress of Huguenot ministers Raymond Gaches served at Charenton from 1654–60, with responsibility for welcoming visitors from England and other Protestant countries. His contacts were important when in voluntary exile in England. He did not live to see the Revocation (died in 1681) but as vicar of Barking, he offered a precedent to other Huguenots to accept episcopacy and Anglican orders.

23 The title page of the first edition of the full revised Geneva Bible, 1588. Huguenots honoured and treasured their bibles. Representing its status as guide and guardian of faith, it would have pride of place in many homes, all the more valuable when persecution limited the possibility of temple worship.

24 The engraver and academician, Abraham Bosse, portrays the ‘wise virgins’ who find ‘delectable entertainment in the high Mysteries of the Cross.’ These gentle blue-stockings who can afford to declare that ‘the world is nothing’ may be envisaged as part of the cultural milieu in which Catholics could be comfortable with Huguenots, in which Mme des Loges could write that ‘We no longer pass for monsters and savages.’

25 Paul Pellisson, depicted in an engraving by Gérard Edelinck (1660). A Huguenot, with a rising reputation as academician and writer, enjoying the dangerous patronage of Fouquet and about to pay for it with a spell in the Bastille. Following his release, conversion and service as historiographer royal, he initiated the scheme of ‘compensation’ that brought many to abjure the religion but compromised both parties, with questions about sincerity.

26 Louis XIV figures here as the all-conquering soldier, a role envisaged as entirely compatible with that of God’s lieutenant on earth. ‘I cannot doubt but that it is the Divine Will that I should be His instrument in bringing back to His ways all those who are subject to me.’ There is no reason to doubt his sincerity, nor the warm approval of most of his Catholic subjects.

27 Françoise d’Aubigné, marquise de Maintenon, was unjustly vilified in Protestant Europe as an evil influence over the king, her morganatic husband. When she voiced distress at the treatment of Huguenots Louis sharply told her to ‘keep out of state affairs’. Her prime concerns were for the education of children and about church appointments.

28 ‘My House shall be called a House of Prayer’. The temple at Charenton, grand epicentre of seventeenth-century Huguenot Paris, was burned down in 1621, then rebuilt to the design of its former architect, Salomon de Brosse. From its mid-century sense of security and Parisian pride, one of several serving ministers, Jean Daillé, wrote proudly of the Two Jerusalems, equally to be cherished: the Church of Christ at large and the Reformed church of France.

29 In Daillé’s time Charenton was sustained, as a beacon for other Huguenots, by social acceptance and the relative weakness of monarchy. In 1685 social confidence was ebbing fast, the king all-powerful. The day following the Revocation the temple was razed to the ground.

30 The late sixteenth-century temple of Lyons, serving after 1572 a diminished but still important community, was more typical than Charenton (though grander than most) of temples serving town communities. The painting by Jean Perrissin (probably the architect) depicts a sparse gathering for, perhaps, a wedding or baptism. Plain wooden benches are typical, as is the central pulpit. The men retain their hats, the women sit apart.

31 In their capacity as delegates at court for the Huguenot community, Schomberg and Ruvigny offer the king a resumé of the ‘many aggrievances heaped upon us’ followed by a reminder of the rights and guarantees granted to Huguenots by his royal predecessors. Matters had gone so far that they can have had little hope that the king would check, let alone reverse the process. However it was leaked the document translated makes a strong case to foreign governments for the protection of refugees.

32 (left) and 33 (right). Medals played an important part in the ever active war of propaganda. In the first of these examples the typically classical image is used to convey a powerful religious message: the king, standing with heresy prostrate at his feet, is crowned with laurel by Catholic Religion personified, cross in hand. In the second, against a background of shattered temples, she holds aloft the cross. Statistics matter little for no official reports could support the boast: ‘two million brought back to the church’. The headline was all – enough to stay in the memory. One cannot underplay the impact of these creations, French baroque at its most impressive. Yet the more grandiloquent the message the more dispiriting when the policy failed.

34 ‘My realm is being purged of bad and troublesome subjects’. Louis affected to be indifferent to the emigration of so many found to be valuable citizens wherever they settled. This famous engraving by Jan Luyken conveys through a panoramic depiction, the varying kinds of experience: escape, frustration and detection, the obstacles and hazards faced by those subjects for whom faith was paramount, flight a duty.

35 (above) and 36 (below) Godefroy’s two lithographs offered to a receptive Protestant market, a memorable critique of ‘missionary method’. Not perhaps the ugly face of the soldier and priest but the very idea of forced conversion would be as unacceptable to many churchmen as it was to the ‘converted’.

37 This almanac for 1686 would reach many homes. The scene is far removed from the messy reality in the provinces. The Revocation is portrayed as a supreme act of piety. Chancellor Le Tellier holds out the Edict of Fontainebleau. Archbishop Harlay looks on, the royal confessor La Chaise beside him. Religion offers Louis the chalice. He looks out – to his subjects? As if for approval? Beneath, heresy is unmasked, the misguided people discomfited.

38 Denis Papin is depicted by an unknown artist, holding the plan of his ‘digester’, complete with safety valve. He had been in England since 1676, a member of the Royal Society since 1680. Intellectuals, used to the exchange of ideas between nations, might choose to settle abroad before persecution began in earnest. In more dangerous times others found encouragement, even material help, from compatriots abroad.

39 Sir Godfrey Kneller’s portrait of Thomas Papillon points to the importance of the trading networks that crossed state boundaries. Long resident in London, and active in the lucrative East India trade, he traced his family to early Huguenots of Troyes and Dijon. He served on the committee supervising the distribution of funds to refugees. Such well established Protestant families had a significant role in helping Huguenots make a new home.

40 Pierre Mignard’s portrait of Jacques de Gastigny was painted around 1680. From French service his career blossomed as an officer in William III’s army. One of many Huguenot soldiers lost to France, invaluable to their new commanders, Gastigny has a special place in Huguenot tradition as the founder of the French Hospital.

41 Jean Bion was chaplain on the French galley ‘Superbe’. Affected by the sufferings of the Huguenots condemned to serve in the galleys, he was converted to Protestantism and came to England to minister at the French church in Chelsea. His unsparing account brings home the risk taken by Huguenots, ministers and worshippers in the church of the Desert.

42 The list of 18 Huguenots arrested for clandestine worship, in age from 17 to 60, relating to February–March 1716, indicates that the authorities did not let up on surveillance. Worshippers understood the danger. By 1775 three thousand had been condemned to the galleys.

43 As this depiction of a Huguenot ‘assembly in the desert’ shows, many were undeterred by official harassment. Guards would be posted but such meetings, however remote the place, were vulnerable to determined raids. ‘Blessed are those who hear the word of the Lord’ runs the inscription. Brave too we might add.

44 ‘Ideal resistance country.’ With its remote settlements and mule tracks threading the mountains, known only to local folk, the Cévennes proved to be a haven for Huguenots, a secure base for guerilla warfare and a severe challenge to regular soldiers.

45 Tour de Constance, AiguesMortes. In this grim fortress, along with other Huguenot women, Marie Durand, born in 1715, was sent there at fifteen and confined for 38 years. She left her mark carved on the prison wall, in southern patois, the single defiant word register (résister). It serves as epitaph and prophecy: from a bleak present, a better future, toleration; an enduring faith.

PA RT O N E EUROPE FALLS APART

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chapter one

s

The Native Land

people and institutions I hold it to be the principal cause of preservation of this monarchy that only with difficulty might subjects come to dissension and discord. (Claude de Seyssel)1

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rotestants in a Catholic country, Huguenots were only for a short time more than a tenth of the French population. By 1598 they had settled to being under a million. Yet in one way or another, in faithful lives, in persecution, in rebellion reluctant or eager, in arts, crafts and skills of great value to their society, in heroic acceptance of sacrifice, they were influential beyond their numbers as, eventually, they would be beyond the borders of France. The transformation of separate households and communities into a close-­knit organisation with the capacity to defend itself and, after the ‘Religious Wars’, to secure unique rights and guarantees, came to be of crucial importance for the development of the French state. The story of French Protestantism is part of the larger story of the European Reformation and of political consequences. The evolution of a distinctive French church and community owed much to humanist critics within the church preparing the ground; then to Luther and fellow reformers; but most to Calvin, the haven at Geneva for French refugees, and the missionary enterprise launched from that city. With varying degrees of intensity and periods of remission, French Protestants were persecuted from the start. To appreciate their unique and uncomfortable position we must see them first in the context of French society, of royal government and its traditions, in particular the special relationship that existed between king and pope. From the outset the Huguenot would be faced with the question of divided loyalty. It would be set aside, not resolved by the Edict of Nantes which, in 1598, brought a peace of grudging and measured compromise after a series of civil wars. The Edict reflected military stalemate and exhaustion. Toleration,

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as an active principle, could hardly be imagined. When, in 1685, Louis XIV issued the Edict of Fontainebleau, revoking his grandfather’s Edict of Nantes, the issue of loyalty became again painfully acute as the remaining Huguenots were required to abjure or were driven by conscience to leave their native land. So why, defying tradition, risking life, had Frenchmen become Protestant in the first place? What sort of people responded to the appeal of the reformed faith? But if it was so powerful, and the church in the sorry state that is generally portrayed, why not more of them? That there are no neat answers becomes apparent when we look beyond church and state to the very composition of France: the country where Huguenots proclaimed their faith and lived their distinctive lives. In 1500, in the reign of Louis XII (1498–1515), a cluster of diverse regions, a slow, uneven accretion through centuries of conquest and inheritance, the realm consisted of around 460,000 square kilometres, of which nearly a quarter had been gained in the previous fifty years; 27,000 parishes, supporting in some fashion around 15 million people.2 To any Frenchman who could even envisage France as a whole country, that was vast. It was customary to talk of twenty-­two days at least journeying from furthest north to south. Most would have narrower horizons, bounded by their pays, or more narrowly still the area, some dozen kilometres’ radius, around their market town. Though there was a steady trickle from country to towns, especially to the larger ones, France was, and would long remain, a largely rural society. Peasants, some relatively independent, with more substantial means, but mostly poor, lived at best a little above mere subsistence. Typically they were in some degree subject to feudal dues and tithe, or bound to some form of métayage, share-­cropping, liable to pay taxes, taille and gabelle, the lucrative salt tax, always subject to the vagaries of nature, chronically vulnerable, likely after a bad harvest or other mishap to fall into debt. More closely examined, the picture is one of the infinite variety that has given rise to the observation that by rights France should not exist; that from such multiple peoples, France had to be invented. ‘France is not a synchronised country: it is like a horse whose four legs move in different time.’3 Between north and south a broad distinction can be made that would prove significant in the Huguenot story. It was evident in every aspect of culture, from farming practice to housing, to law and language; between the northern ‘yes’ of oil and the southern, of oc, where, staying in Languedoc, the northerner Racine, finest master of the official language, would declare that he needed an interpreter. Further afield, to Brittany, Flanders or the Basque lands of the western Pyrenees, he would need others. For travelling he would need stamina. From Paris to Lyons at least four days should be allowed; from Lyons across to Nice another four.4 The river, in this case the Rhône, was to be preferred to bandit-­ infested roads; the mountain passes and the rugged uplands of the Massif

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Central were especially dangerous. The same conditions went for correspondence. Even in Colbert’s time the minister would be replying a fortnight later to an intendant’s dispatch. All made for separatism, and yet within literate society there was a strong sense of a single country and of one singularly blessed by divine providence. In the years of domestic peace and economic recovery, after the plagues and wars of the previous century, many would have approved the eulogy of a chancellor of France: ‘the beauty of the country, the fertility of the soil and the healthiness of the air outdo all the other countries of the world’.5 The picture may not bear close examination but it fairly represents a pride and optimism, sustained well into the sixteenth century by rising incomes for those who had a substantial estate, trading opportunities or royal office, that add emphasis to the tragedy to come. To an English visitor, no doubt less favourably inclined, who travelled on stony tracks, dusty in summer, deep rutted in winter, through the champaign north of the Loire and east of the Seine, the France that he would first experience would look impoverished. Huddled around château and church, with possibly the houses of a few more substantial fermiers and laboureurs, would be the simple cabins of the journaliers, or that majority of villagers who owned a few strips of land but could barely survive without some other employment. Then beyond the great open fields stretched the meadows, rough pasture, scrub, marsh, heath or woodland, the fringe so valuable for grazing and wood but always shrinking before the plough and the remorseless need for more grain.6 As he went south beyond the Loire, towards Languedoc or Provence he would see a quite different landscape: more stone in the building, vines and olive trees, wheat in small enclosures and on terraced hillsides; goats and sheep grazing. On the face of it a more balanced regime and one likely to induce independence. There are, of course, not two but many distinct geophysical areas of France, every variation between mountain and lowland, of climate and kinds of agriculture. In the north the Normandy of the bocage; in the centre and towards the south the high, stony lands of the Massif Central; in the west the poor enclosures and Atlantic climate of Brittany; in the east the vineyards of Burgundy – such diversity reminds us of the limited value of a general description. It is the same with the province. Within each there were distinct pays. In Gascony, for example, Braudel names thirty-­seven, the result of barriers, physical or political, to communication; of historic pressures and immigration; even of the magnetic force of larger towns. In Champagne he finds ‘a coral reef of pays set at greater or lesser intervals – at least thirty altogether’.7 There are at least two distinct Normandys: Haute looking to Rouen and the sea, Basse towards Caen and its rich countryside, and within them twenty or so different pays: each ‘engenders a type of inhabitant and way of life. Every pays imposes

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its own history’; or, as Braudel reverses Gaussen’s observation: ‘every history also creates a kind of inhabitant, a type of landscape, and ensures the survival of a pays’.8 When we come to the story of Protestantism in Normandy we should not be surprised to find, as in other provinces, that the scene is patchy, that there were many reasons why a Norman should become, or resist becoming, a Huguenot. It will appear that by and large this mass of people lies outside the Huguenot story. Peasant culture was inherently hostile to novelty, inclined to suspect the outsider, the unfamiliar. Only where there was a local tradition of independence or dissent, as in the Vivarais, or, as happened on some estates, peasants were given a strong lead, even demand, would they desert the traditional faith. The general illiteracy was a crucial factor.9 Though barely 15 per cent of the people lived in towns, they do figure disproportionately in the Huguenot story. There were to be found the majority of those who subscribed to the faith. Though beneath the haute bourgeoisie, the élite of birth, education and wealth, the petit bourgeois or superior artisan was still more likely than his country cousin to be literate, therefore at least open to the Word and to Protestant teaching. That could even be true of the many, servants and labourers, at the base of the urban pyramid. At one level or another it is the urban mentalité that we have to take most into account. Yet peasant France cannot be ignored; nor can French Protestants be treated as living wholly apart from the mass, a separate, mainly urban culture. They were affected, like everyone else, by the health of the economy, levels of demand, trading activity and prices; by peasant action when times were hard, by the response of government. As successive ministers, notably the great Huguenot Sully, well understood, power at all levels, from the crown to the municipality, was limited by the condition of the rural economy, the prime source of wealth and the taxes that could be levied, which determined what government could achieve. That is the essential premise to establish before the recurring question. How could it be, in successive bouts of war, even by what was meant to be the final act, the Revocation, that the state was unable to suppress the minority of Protestant subjects who defied the fundamental principles upon which its authority was held to rest? A comprehensive view of the institutions through which the crown sought to govern is beyond the scope of this book. Yet the reader will have a limited picture of Huguenot life and the challenges that could face church and community if it is read without reference to the political setting: royal government, its values, laws and institutions. The Huguenot was before all a Frenchman, a subject of the crown. What, in effect, did this mean? How can we envisage Huguenot society as it evolved towards a settled condition? The picture will become clearer. Meanwhile we may start with dots and patches, so

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many communities of faith, living hugger-­mugger with Catholic neighbours mainly within the walls of congested towns, except where the control of a seigneur has brought villagers into the religion. Buying or selling at the same market, using the same services, though preferring to find at need a Protestant, say for apothecary or lawyer, they could only live in as separate and self-­ contained a way as conditions allowed. The growth of Protestantism into a cohesive body can be understood only against the background of a fragmented country, a mosaic, infinitely various in its laws, rights and customs. In due course, when granted rights as a body, their position would indeed be remarkable, but only as enjoying the largest and, because of its religious aspect, most prominent, among examples of corporate privilege. The Protestant ideology was one of certainties, of self-­assurance fortified in spirit by a sense of adventure, of the fresh start, of being children of God, enjoying His special favour. The social reality was inevitably one of compromise, requiring caution, if not absolute secrecy. For Protestant and Catholic alike, royal government was remote, respected vaguely in the person of the king, more likely resented when it came to tax; anyway irrelevant to everyday concerns. Authority was embodied in the royal governor or his deputy; in the province’s parlement;10 in ways more likely to affect ordinary lives, in a bailli or some other officer of the provincial or town government; most relevantly for villagers in the seigneur and his court. Law for the majority in the north and centre was customary, with numerous local variations or, in the Midi, based on Roman law. Differences were most significant in the disposition of property: whereas in the south, through his will, the father could leave most to a chosen son, elsewhere property was divided equally between heirs.11 Dues and services were as various as the circumstances which had shaped the history of the province or the rights of the seigneur.12 Even a noble would be likely to look to his immediate superior or patron, and be as ready to serve him in arms as he would the distant king – or it might be against the king. In the south, land of Occitan, only the higher officials, clergy (not all) or nobles who went to court, would readily speak the French language of the north, of government and of high culture. Brittany was virtually closed to the French language. Catholic missions were to be conducted there, as if to a colony, by priests who had first to learn the language. As late as 1708 it could be said of religious education that there were needed as many different catechisms as there were parish schools. Up and down the land most people would find that the patois of their region served their daily needs. In political terms this land of France may be envisaged as several countries around a central core. Brittany was loosely attached and would retain distinctive institutions after its formal annexation in 1532.13 Burgundy had only been French since the death of Duke Charles the Bold in 1477, and then only the

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western part of the original duchy, leaving to the Habsburgs the Franche-­ Comté. Recovery of the whole of his Burgundian inheritance would be an obsession of Emperor Charles V and, with rival claims to Milan and Naples, a prime source of conflict more deadly as it came to subsume that of Catholic against Protestant. Provence was annexed in 1481, after the death of its count but it was still as count that the king ruled there; as dauphin that he was sovereign in the Dauphiné. These differences were the result of the way in which the state had evolved through conquest and inheritance. Even when it came to the essential business of raising revenue, along with local variations we find two distinct regimes, pays d’états and pays d’élections, each requiring different treatment by government. At the heart of society and government in the pays d’états was the representative body, the Estates, of which seven survived: Languedoc, Provence, Dauphiné, Auvergne, Brittany, Burgundy and Normandy. With the exception of Normandy, its Estates progressively enfeebled and destined to fade away in 1655, their most valued privilege was the right, in response to government’s annual demand, to vote a contribution. In Languedoc, typically, this involved a ‘complex mixture of ritual, social interaction and hard bargaining’.14 Dominated by the First Estate, though with a substantial input from bishops, the body was responsible for assessment and collection of the taille réelle15 and ministers had to accept limits on what could be raised by this tax on property. The four southerly provinces were the furthest from the capital; they were also in due course those where Huguenots were most numerous. So the authority of the crown rested more on goodwill, the fostering of alliances, and arrangements of mutual benefit through self-­constituted power brokers than on the more direct and forceful methods that could be employed elsewhere. A momentous development, as early as 1439, had been the collecting of the taille as a direct tax. A limited concession by the Estates was turned into a lasting practice that enabled the crown, for long periods, to govern without its counsel or its traditional authority to sanction taxes. In the pays d’élections the direct tax on income raised by its agents, the élus, was more profitable to government than that raised in the pays d’ états, and also more open to abuse. Its steady increase from the 1500s to peak levels in the reign of Louis XIV reflects the crown’s insatiable need of funds for war and the lack of any representative means by which the masses could resist the increasingly brutal methods employed, notably the seizure of goods and livestock. Collectors might find themselves in prison if they failed to secure the amount demanded; so they exploited the contrainte solidaire, which made the community responsible for the failure of individuals to pay. They might protest, as in the not unusual murder of an official, frequent local émeutes and, most seriously, take part in a general rising like that of the Croquants in 1636. But the people were on a hiding to nothing when it came to facing royal troops, as in the

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‘battle’ of La Sauvetât in the following year that brought their insurrection to a bloody end. The innumerable little republics of town and village experienced a sense of unity, if at all, through common allegiance to a distant king. He was known, his authority felt, through the teaching of the church and the occasional edict or pronouncement given out commonly at mass or in the marketplace. In practical terms his power was felt through his officers of justice and finance with increasing effect after the end of the Religious Wars. The authority of the king came to mean more as it was exercised by commissaires acting in his name in their constant struggle with the community’s sense of its rights and traditions. However, as they became more intrusive, with the development of intendants, empowered by the crown to act as agents of royal policy, local officers and mayors were as likely to be defending their own rights and interests as collaborating with the dreaded ‘man from Paris’. The Parlement of Paris, the highest court in the land, its different branches having both original and appellate jurisdictions, exercised the crown’s right as supreme justiciar. It had jurisdiction over a third of France, the mediaeval heart of the kingdom, and enjoyed unique authority, with powers over a wide range of social, administrative and ecclesiastical concerns. From its beginnings in the late thirteenth century, it had never been in any way representative; it was a court of law, staffed by lawyers. However, it acquired a political role in the registration of royal edicts that gave it influence, if only a negative one, in the evolution of royal government and was always liable to be a source of conflict.16 It had the right of remonstrance by which magistrates could point out to the king faults in a law, or a law that clashed with precedent or was harmful to the state. If objection to an edict was disregarded Parlement gained nothing but delay, or possibly tactful reconsideration of some small point. The sovereign’s wish was paramount. Yet it was in his interest to gain consensus and he would be aware of tradition and those laws that Frenchmen held to be fundamental. In general the outlook of Parlement was conservative: few were to support the Catholic League, fewer the Protestant reform, though esprit de corps acted as a curb to extreme measures.17 The authority and effectiveness of Parlement always stood in inverse ratio to the power of the crown. Having ebbed during the Religious Wars that power would be severely tested by the Edict of Nantes, whose concessions to the Huguenots went further than most parlementaires found acceptable.18 By 1500 there were five provincial parlements, reflecting successive extensions of royal authority – at Dijon, Aix, Bordeaux, Toulouse and Grenoble – with powers of registration and enforcement of edicts.19 Keenly aware of the value of offices that they had purchased or inherited, many having noble status and large properties, parlementaires in Paris and the provinces were jealous of

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their authority and a potential check on the absolutist policies of the crown. The major issue, coming to a head in the time of the cardinals, would be the crown’s use of intendants. In one way or another but chiefly as foe to any kind of innovation, and effective when allied to church leaders, parlements figure largely in the Huguenot story. So, eventually, do the intendants, as direct agents of the crown – and invariably Catholic. In that capacity they would encroach upon the rights of those who had long governed provinces in the name of the king. Sympathetic or not, and of crucial importance to Huguenots at every stage, royal governors enjoyed quasi-­regal rights and honours and exercised valuable patronage in a gouvernement that still had much of the independent fiefdom in its political and social aspects.20 With authority to raise troops for defence, they answered to the king and enforced royal government, with their lieutenants and officials of bailliage and sénéchaussée. They were generally recruited from princes of the blood or high nobility, a force for unity when the king had the character and backing to enforce justice, attract support and lead in war, but for disruption when he was weak or a minor. Again there were areas exempt, mainly in the centre and west, survivals of former apanages. Everywhere the provinces were armoured against central government by layers of privilege, in town and countryside, competitive and potentially obstructive. From the senior level of parlements and the cour des comptes; to the officials of élections, prévôtés, bailliages, sénéchaussés, présidiaux; right down to the numerous groups of minor office-­holders, each group had an interest in preserving its members’ status and the perquisites of the office which they had probably bought. The weight of tradition and the fruits of privilege were from the start a formidable barrier to the advance of radical faith. Protestants in some towns would make inroads, secure or hold offices; not often, then sometimes briefly, would they have the numbers to secure a commanding height. The prime interest of institutions, provincial and urban, regardless of religion, whether acting with or against the crown, would be to maintain their rights and privileges. So the crown had to proceed with caution, even where problems of communication and local lawlessness did not make royal government impracticable. Respecting perforce local rights and priorities, with the scope for obstruction that would so madden the seventeenth-­century intendant, crown policy generally was to work with the grain, allowing local institutions and customs to survive, trusting that they would weaken or die out. In the crown’s constant search for money the creation of new offices for sale could lead to tussles with those whose own office was devalued. That they often resulted in compromise does not mean that the king’s right to create such offices, and to sell them, was open to doubt. Francis I exploited it to the full. Its consequences would be far

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reaching, beyond the apparent short-­term advantage, in leverage and control. By the seventeenth century venality had become an essential element in the political and social structure of the realm. When Colbert came to consider the possibility of reform in a memorandum of 1664, he claimed that there were 46,000 offices in the departments of justice and finance of which 40,000 were unnecessary. As to consequences, no one would be in a better position to judge than the cardinal-­minister whose policies depended heavily on money raised through sale of offices. Reflecting on his experience Richelieu justified his failure to reform the system on the grounds of the prudence required in ‘an old monarchy whose imperfections have passed into custom and whose disorder forms part of the order of the state’.21 He conceded that it created a vested interest in misgovernment that was ‘prejudicial to your [Louis XIII’s] authority and to the purity of justice’. The cost would be measured in the everyday defaults of efficiency and justice, in friction, favouritism, bribery and delay; also in the Fronde, in one of its several aspects, and initially, a revolt of the office-­holders. Such a serious revolt would have been beyond the comprehension of Francis I; so too the monstrous empire of venal office that had its comparatively modest beginnings in his reign. It was an integral part of the civic world of the Huguenots, sharpening the edge of competition in which they were increasingly disadvantaged, adding to the tensions that arose everywhere from religious difference.

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c h a p t e r t wo

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Renaissance Kingship and Noble Subjects The kings of France were so pleasing unto God that he chose them to become his lieutenants on earth. (André Duchesne)1

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he rule of Francis I (1515–47) and Henry II (1547–59), those splendid exemplars of Renaissance kingship, gaining by contrast with the faltering grip of the later Valois kings, had been at times brutally autocratic and had seen advances in authority and outreach. It benefited from favourable economic conditions following the recovery that had begun with the end of war against England in 1453 (leaving only Calais in English hands). It led, with a rise in population, to a degree of prosperity that made the first years of the sixteenth century seem to later generations like a golden age.2 The crown also had the means to tap the wealth. Beside the taille, the aides, a sales tax, was another for which the king did not have to gain consent. With the gabelle, its variations and exemptions reflecting the history of the province more than any rational basis for assessment, the yield overall gave weight to absolutist theorising about the rights of the king. One influential writer, Guillaume Budé, proceeded from a fanciful view of history to the conclusion that the only limit on the sovereign’s absolute power was the judgement of posterity.3 Francis I, for whom Budé’s book was written, laced with advice to heed good counsellors, respect his predecessors’ ordinances and abstain from war, certainly took a high view of the king’s powers, and his right to change the institutions and govern as necessity dictated. He saw no need to summon the one body that could claim through its three estates to represent the nation, the États-­généraux: given its later history he was justified in seeing it as a potential source of trouble. He only once summoned the more informal body of prominent subjects, the Notables, in 1527. By enlarging his council he was able to claim that he consulted the subjects who mattered. He was served by an

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administrative cadre larger than that of any comparable power. His chosen chancellor Duprat maintained that Parlement had no right to oppose the king’s will: ‘We owe obedience to the king and it is not for us to question his commands.’4 Such statements reflect a new cultural dimension in discussion of the state, expressed in the increasingly familiar language of classical writers and devoted to the idea of the prince as hero. In a society where war had a central place as the main interest of the dominant noble families, the idea had a powerful impact. High in self-­esteem, agile in thinking as in sport and war, Francis tended to be impatient with the rules and restraints of the feudal state, with its disparate, autonomous parts. In the reign that saw Reformation unfold, with fateful consequences for Europe, France would make some progress from the centri­ fugal state that was apparent in extreme form in the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire, towards the unitary model of the England of Henry VIII. It has therefore been seen as a period when in France, as in England and Spain, there began to evolve a ‘modern state’. The term ‘modern’ is not meaningless but, like the much-­used ‘Renaissance’, it raises more questions than it answers. It will be more helpful to our understanding of the position of the Huguenot minority to identify what the crown could achieve, and the ways in which it managed to impose its authority. Certainly, in institutional terms the direction was one way, towards absolutism. There was a strong foundation in the divinely ordained authority of the monarch, and it had been strengthened in practice by the performance of the early Valois kings. At official levels the language was respectful, praise not yet turning to adulation. The germ of a patriotic idea of France as more than a dynasty, even having elements of the sacred, may be traced to the great jurists and political philosophers of the sixteenth century. Their language is typically of subject rights and rulers’ responsibilities. It took a brave man, however, to stand up to Francis I in autocratic mood. One such was Premier Président Charles Guillart who, in 1527, sought to justify past actions held by Francis to exceed the authority of Parlement and to be derogatory to that of the crown. ‘We do not wish to challenge your authority for this would be a kind of sacrilege and we are well aware that you are above the law . . . but we wish to say that you should not wish to do all that lies within your power but only that which is reasonable and just.’5 The words are discreet, nudging rather than defiant, but Francis would read the veiled meaning. He was receiving a lecture about balance; between the absolute powers that were his in theory and the traditional restraints of the fundamental law and the rights of his subjects. He would have been familiar, no doubt, with the language of ‘restraint’ and its principal and respected source. In the view of Claude de Seyssel,6 writing at the start of the sixteenth century the king was subject to three main restraints:

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religion, those established ordinances for the conservation of the kingdom summed up in the word ‘police’, and justice. Executing justice in the king’s name, parlements had been ‘instituted principally . . . in order to bridle the absolute power which the kings were willing to use’. Seyssel held that the acceptance of such restraints was the mark of a good king, très chrétien, ‘well-­ beloved’, ‘father of the people’. No French king could fail to be aware of the reality of limits to his power to act as he might have wished. Francis did not like to be reminded of them. He had returned from imprisonment, following catastrophic defeat at Pavia (1525) and he needed to assert himself in no uncertain terms. An edict was issued defining Parlement’s authority. It was forbidden to meddle in affairs of state and confined to its judicial role. It was allowed to submit remonstrances at the time of registration of an edict but forbidden to amend it at any point. Parlement had no option but to accept. In settled times the royal authority was paramount. But even in such times, the age to which many looked back with nostalgia from the horrors of civil war, there were grounds for unease. Among some who had a proprietary interest and pride in traditional ways there was dismay at the pace and temper of advances in royal government. It was compounded by concern about the effect of prolonged war. The impact of the Italian wars, which began with Charles VIII’s invasion of 1498, pursuing his claim to Naples, and were renewed by his successors, Louis XII and Francis I, who claimed Milan, was greater when they merged with the wider struggle between Valois and Habsburg. At issue throughout was the fate of the Burgundian lands that divided king from Emperor. Events in Germany showed that the spread of Protestantism after 1517 had serious implications. The Reformation weakened Imperial authority and made Protestant German princes convenient allies of the French king. So long as questions of religion were unresolved, as they were in France and the Netherlands, any diplomatic settlement, like the grandly celebrated Peace of Cateau-­Cambrésis in 1559, could only be provisional. Soldiers generally, whether on grounds of honour or of trade, would be reluctant to sheath their swords. War was the métier of the nobleman and could have a salutary effect, evoking loyalty to king and country when pursued with vigour – and success. One source of domestic stability, in the short term, was the prospect, appealing especially to nobles of limited means, and to younger sons, of employment in the sequence of foreign wars that had begun with Charles VIII’s invasion of Italy. Conversely, failure in battle, even when less dramatic than Francis’ defeat at Pavia or that of the Constable Montmorency at St Quentin in 1557, could be seriously unsettling. The prestige of the crown suffered; the resentments and jealousies of the commanders came to the fore. Always war cost more than bargained for and loans and taxes did nothing for the reputation of the

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financiers when they built magnificent châteaux out of what were assumed to be ill-­gotten gains. The crown needed the entrepreneurs of the money world; it could only placate opinion (and recoup some money) by periodic show trials or other drastic measures. Inevitably, in inflationary times, interest rates rose in proportion to the needs of the crown. ‘The sport of kings’ could not be pursued indefinitely; the longer war went on, the greater the need for peace and the less stable that peace was likely to be. In several ways the French political experience anticipates what was to come: even in the heyday of Louis XIV, when he felt strong enough to revoke the Edict of Nantes, government was severely limited in areas where the modern state is competent. Until the Revolution exemptions and privileges limited its freedom to tax and influenced its policies. The ambitious ordonnance of Villars-­Cotterets in 1539 required that French should be used in legal documents, but it was widely disregarded. It abolished confraternities, the associations of master-­journeymen and apprentices. They would, of course, survive and prove, in places, to be just what government feared: a dangerous source of political and religious dissent. Yet enough was done to leave us questioning. If there had been another strong adult sovereign and, as in Elizabeth’s fortunate England, no civil war, would the crown have become more effectively absolute, without need for the drastic measures that characterise the early Bourbon reigns? To suggest such an outcome may be to underestimate the entrenched conservatism of the possessors of land and office. The divisive power of Protestantism was such that one might need also to imagine that the king would have followed the Tudor example and brought reformation under royal headship and control. Such speculation apart, it is remarkable what Francis and his son Henry II did achieve. The latter’s reign saw the development of the financial administration through intendants des finances and the creation of a new level of higher courts, the présidiaux, to reduce delays in justice. Parts of the kingdom, parti­ cularly in the south, but even Brittany and Burgundy, were becoming more closely integrated into the central nucleus of the kingdom. A vast correspondence between the council and provincial governors and towns testifies to the effort to bring royal influence to bear on the affairs of the province. As Francis and Henry spent more time in the châteaux around Paris, notably Saint-­ Germain, Fontainebleau and Vincennes, the crown became focused more on the capital and its important institutions of law and finance. From all this it may be predicted that Francis was unlikely to be moved by events across the Channel where Henry VIII enlarged the authority of the state by declaring royal supremacy over the church. Through all this period power was being concentrated in the hands of a small council. The main reason, however, why the kings were able to maintain

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the stability first achieved, with notable gains of territory, under Louis XI, was that nobles were becoming, in a sense, complicit in their rule, seeing that to be in their interests. Through pensions, office and other favours, the crown drew towards royal service the leading families and their clients in provincial networks. If he played his cards well a Montmorency or a Guise could have the best of both worlds: immense local power compounded by influence at the centre.7 In this favourable situation there was no guarantee for the future for it depended on the standing of one man: the king. Where Louis XI had faced hostility and feared, with reason, the conspiracies of leading subjects, Francis and Henry could usually bask in approval. Amid intrigues and rivalries they kept a firm grip on business. Aware of the weakness of royal authority in the more distant provinces Henry II started to interest himself in the composition of governors’ councils. That royal government intruded forcibly into the fabric of feudal society is undeniable; yet that is what in many respects France remained. Indeed, the overall picture looks distinctly mediaeval: more a world of estates than a single state; its people tied more by notions of personal service than to an abstraction, the state. For all the advances in the machinery of government it was far from resembling the modern bureaucratic model. That would be a long time in the making, and not fully realised till after the Revolution.8 Meanwhile what courtiers could observe of the practice of government could be summarised in three words: faction, feud and the female. Leading families competed for power. A royal mistress, most notoriously in the early 1540s the duchesse d’Etampes, could play an active part in turning the king’s mind and affecting the fortunes of courtiers and ministers.9 To be effective, and remain in control, the sovereign had to come to terms with his principal subjects, to exploit the patterns of fidelity and clientage that served them in the provinces.10 This fundamental condition, with all its ramifications, accounts for elements in the practice of ministers that would otherwise look unprincipled, venal, even shoddy. Without this dimension, it must be added, there is much in the early spread of Protestantism in France that will be hard to explain. One way into the world of patron and clientèle is through the letters, private and official, with the words ‘friendship’, ‘loyalty’, ‘zeal’, ‘esteem’ and ‘devotion’, that recur so often that they might be taken for mere formality. Ami and amitié are words commonly used by patrons and clients to describe their relationship. They express, however, the vital part that it could play in the client’s life, the spirit that lifted it above a mere business arrangement to become more like an extension of family, with the warmth, gratification or disappointment that it could bring. In its two main but intertwined types, the great noble and the administrative, the clientele represents an arrangement of mutual support and benefit that, at its best, could ensure security besides a way

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forward for the aspiring. Crucially it offered opportunities for the crown to gain some control over its furthest lands. The creation and sale of office was becoming part and parcel of the process. It was the means by which the king extended his power directly, and indirectly through patronage, beyond what could be achieved through the feudal relationship of mutual service. Inevitably, with local knowledge and the overwhelming interest of the great man, office creation was effected through him. So ‘indirectly’ is the key word. Those among les grands whom the king favoured and who secured the right to put their clients into offices were likely to remain loyal so long as they profited by the opportunity to build their own networks of patronage and when the crown’s authority was sufficient to command allegiance. When it was not, as during the last Valois reigns after 1559, the involvement of magnates’ client-­ followers, always potentially a subversive force, ensured that civil wars were more deadly and far reaching. Loyalties were often ambiguous, allegiance could change, great families could be extinguished.11 There were always floaters looking to move for further advantage. Office tended to tie a man down. But the Reformation introduced a new motive for changing allegiance. Then the religious issue, as principle or pretext, added its unsettling, potentially toxic intensity. There could be genuine religious commitment, among soldiers particularly the comradeship of the field and camp, family alliances and friendships and at every level the possibility of common interest. In their different circumstances Henry IV, Richelieu and Mazarin would prove to be virtuosos in the essential skills of diplomacy and management, their sticks and carrots a vital part of the constant struggle to secure influence, raise money and impose order. Their lessons, derived from the Religious Wars, had been hard learned. Then it had become clear that the glue that bound the clientèle, that in a sense bound society, was not sufficient to bind the fragile polity in absolute loyalty to the king. Something else was needed. It was not enough, though necessary, to make plain to every subject of the king that the price of treason was death. More creatively, it was vital to fashion a setting for kingship that would impress men and draw them to it. The court was to be a place that represented power and wealth. It was meant to dazzle. Think of court in the ancien régime and it is likely that the heavy image of Versailles comes to mind. Louis XIV was to go beyond his predecessors’ practice in furthering the institution, already familiar to those who frequented Spain’s Escorial palace, of a settled court with a strict etiquette and precisely organised programme. Versailles would be, by the 1680s, the centre of society and government from which there would be no more prolonged departure than seasonal excursions, mainly for hunting, and, of course, in Louis’ more active days, for campaigning. The final fateful Edict of Fontainebleau would

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take its name from the royal château most favoured for sport. It was Versailles, so much admired and imitated by other sovereigns, that would come to be the ultimate expression of a supreme authority, divinely ordained, glorified in the imagery of classical history and myth. Francis I’s style of life and kingship might appear to belong to a different world from that of le Roi-­Soleil and Versailles. The cramped quarters of the Louvre continued to serve the Valois monarchs as their base in the capital but they still adopted the traditional itinerant style of the mediaeval sovereign. Their favoured ground lay between the well-­guarded game forests of the Île-­ de-­France and the delectable valley of the Loire. There, though he seldom visited it, the wonderfully original château-­palace of Chambord witnessed to the ambition and taste of Francis I. His court reflected his genuine humanist concern for art and scholarship and was the place where he could be seen to advantage, at the apex of patronage. Fontainebleau, where Francis most liked to be, was described as ‘a kind of new Rome’.12 It certainly had an international flavour. Benvenuto Cellini worked there for some years. It housed the great royal library supervised by Guillaume Budé. Francis I’s court had indeed several of the features that would be prominent at Versailles. It conveyed a message: this king, who could draw such talents around him, and create such a splendid setting for his person and government, would brook no opposition. But he, the succeeding Valois kings, and the first two Bourbons, would surely have found the formalities of Versailles oppressive; Henry IV seemed content with the notoriously louche manners and casual arrangements of his court; Louis XIII was less self-­confident and correspondingly stiffer, demanding more outward respect for majesty. Too much of Spanish etiquette in the ritual of Versailles, its disproportionate size and cost, they could hardly have approved. Yet their more modest courts anticipated in some degree the values of Versailles. Nor would they have dissented seriously from its essential purpose and business. Supreme source of political authority and chief dispenser of office and honour, the king was constantly on display, if not, like Louis XIV, on punctilious parade. In his assumptions and language the king was an autocrat – and was expected to be. Here converged his interests and those of his leading subjects, political, economic, artistic and, not least, religious. From early times the court had existed to protect and elevate the sovereign, an aspect of great concern to Henry III; also – where that last Valois king would largely fail – to enable him to connect with his subjects. When he had recourse to promoting a small group of young men who were expected to serve him with gratitude he alienated further his grandest subjects. Losing touch and losing grip: it would be an object lesson to his successors. For in all situations the court was the prime locus for decisions concerning the state. In the links that stretched from

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courtier and minister to the further networks of patronage the potential was always there for increasing the sovereign’s control of his country. In the dire conditions of civil war, with new grounds for questioning the nature of royal authority, the messages became confused. It would prove to be a serious disadvantage to Huguenots during long periods after the outbreak of civil war that they were virtually excluded from court: from direct influence on the sovereign or regent, from the prime market for preferment and from the site of the ‘royal religion’. In the sphere of ideas and impressions – what subjects saw and heard about majesty at court and in royal progresses – the evolution of ‘a royal religion’ is hard to define. There was conscious policy at work, but also a discriminating taste and genuine enthusiasm. Francis I plainly enjoyed the fruits of his patronage of architects, painters, sculptors, musicians and writers. To the traditions that provided such patronage’s emotional capital, lavishly staged ceremonies added messages derived from classical history and legend. So Very Christian King becomes Roman Emperor. Retaining, in more grandiose form, the essential spiritual attribute, such images would lead to those so potent for the seventeenth-­century ideologue: ‘God’s lieutenant on earth, his very image’, as he was described at the General Assembly of the Clergy in 1625. Meanwhile festivities and pageants at the Valois court, diplomatic encounters like that of the Field of Cloth of Gold in 1520, staged with the greatest magnificence, were designed to speak of power.13 The processional pomp of a royal entrée conveyed to the favoured town the benefits of subservience. Legitimate monarchy was reinforced by public display. The king needed to be highly visible. His prestige depended on his being in good health, vigorous, as much at home in a suit of armour as on the hunting field; and, to reassure the court, supplied with male heirs. When a jousting accident led to the death of Henry II in his prime, and to years of civil disorder, it could be seen how important had been the image-­building and the demonstration of kingly prowess. For the relation between the crown and its greatest subjects still had something of the conditional nature of feudalism. The king had the first claim to loyalty. But he must inspire respect; and he must also deliver. He must find money for soldiers and salaries. That was another alarming aspect of the situation in 1559. Political authority was suddenly weakened at a time when the coffers were emptier than they had been at any time in the century. While monarchy had developed greater powers les grands had been building their own provincial empires: client nobles and officials could wield political influence and provide the men and materiel for what, at need, could be a private army. After halcyon years of easy credit and military success the 1550s had already brought some disillusion, a souring relationship between king and Parlement and the first substantial critique of royal authority. Étienne de La

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Boétie, a conservative parlementaire, enunciated a reasoned argument against tyranny; he also showed the potential for analyses more radical, and, during the Religious Wars, more appealing. Arguments for resistance, derived from selective reading of Scripture, would then be taken to the point of justifying tyrannicide. When he argued that ‘the country should not submit to servitude’14 and, more specifically, that the people should no longer pay tax to tyrants, he anticipated the disruptive power of the popular émeutes of the next hundred years. They would be mainly anti-­fiscal. But a religious message could add danger, as is revealed in the example of the preacher of Limoges, arrested in 1559. In words that might have been penned by La Boétie he declared that ‘as long as the house of Valois reigns the people will never be free of oppressions since it is too given to tyranny’. The same year saw the first national synod which marked the coming of age of French Protestantism. A feature of the early stages of French Protestantism, one that affected the church that evolved and contributed to the extreme violence of religious war, was the heavy engagement of nobles. They brought many with them who were probably vague about the religious issues; consequently it is hard to estimate ‘Protestant’ numbers. There were enough men keen to bear arms to provide substantial forces for both sides in civil war. Noble Protestantism, however lightly worn, was so widespread across the country that it cannot be explained solely in terms of loyalty to grandees who adopted the cause, still less as an expression of religious conviction. It has led historians to look to material motives and assert that nobles did not share in the general rise in incomes. Inflation was severe, rising during the sixteenth century at an annual rate of 2 per cent; but noble incomes were generally rising with the price of grain.15 Their counterparts in Tudor England would recognise the stresses that came with the culture of extravagance. Noble values, particularly if one aspired to be a courtier, encouraged the general tendency to live beyond one’s income. The subdivision of inheritance, the spending of resources in provision of masses for the dead, and other charitable works account for some family difficulties. There were black sheep, keen to exploit any opportunity for riot and violence. Louis, one brother of the prudent Norman sieur de Gouberville, so well known to us through his journal,16 slew a local prior; another, François, ran through his inheritance and deserted his family. The future Cardinal Richelieu grew up with lurid stories from his family’s history. One great-­uncle, Antoine ‘the Monk’, having been relieved of his orders, became a captain in the Catholic forces of the duc de Guise and was the author of several massacres of Huguenots; he died in a street brawl in Paris in 1576. His grandfather had married Françoise de Rocheouart, proud and ill-­tempered, early left a widow with five children. The eldest was murdered in the parish church following a squabble about precedence with the head of the rival family of Mausson.

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Second son and a page at court, François was recalled by his mother to avenge the family. He bowled a cartwheel at Mausson’s horse as he crossed a ford and killed the man as he struggled in the water. Throughout the Religious Wars there were nobles that put the chance to live off ill-­gotten gains, with party allegiance a cloak for banditry, before any sense of responsibility for their neighbours or their own peasants, let alone the wider community. So there were sorry tales behind the grievances that would tempt some to adopt the Protestant cause, others to fight back. It was a violent society, where knives flashed at any insult, where murder might be the end of a quarrel about an inheritance or a woman. The heated language of much religious discourse that offends the modern ear only reflects the temper of the times.17 The evidence for the argument for noble ‘decline’ in inclusive and individual cases makes shaky ground for generalisation. But it mattered what people thought and there was a common perception that nobles were losing ground, certainly estates, sometimes titles, to new prosperous bourgeois, some office-­holders, with ready cash and lawyers to hand. The sale of office, with its privileges, leading at the upper end to noble status, was a constant grievance. For some the end of the Italian wars meant enforced idleness; some would return diseased, expecting a short life. Soldiers anyway would look to fresh opportunity to fight and forage – and might not be particular about the camp they chose. Within the order there were disparities of income that challenge the idea of a single nobility. At the highest level was the duc et pair, likely to be powerful at court, to govern a province, and to have the means from estates and from royal favour and pension to live in princely style. When the Constable Montmorency attended a meeting of the royal council at Fontainebleau in 1560, 800 followers attended him: a private army to make a show against the rival House of Guise. It included many sprigs of the noblesse who saw in his service as good a prospect as in that of the king. Less ostentatious but able to support a large clientèle were the great men of the robe nobility, a premier président for example. Between them and the mere écuyer – by far the most numerous among nobles – there was a gulf bridged only by shared tokens and values. The nature of service to a great man, proof of the écuyer’s fidelité, was commonly military; it might lead him to change his religion. The écuyer might have a fief or two, a few rents and dues, a wood or a vineyard; he could wear a sword, have a coat of arms, at least aspire ‘to live nobly’, the acknowledged mark of a noble. To find a dowry for his daughter, a commission for a son, a fee for a lawsuit, he must seek a patron – or a loan.18 Borrowing might lead him to the slippery slope of debt and the sale of land. Many, perhaps most, like Gouberville, could thrive, at a modest level, by careful management. To be reputed noble was enough for him, his documents

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going back no earlier than 1473. He still needed them. To be found to be faux noble, as many evidently were, mere chancers, was to lose status and tax privilege. The periodic government recherches, along with the ban, touching pride and pocket, were among the grievances that seem to have pushed a number of nobles towards the adventure of Protestantism. There was a high rate of extinction. New men, financiers, creditors or office-­holders, were constantly pushing up to the point where they could secure recognition as noble. Louis XI had ennobled some to win support in the towns. It became apparent that France could only be governed by fostering an élite of service by judicious promotion:19 here church preferment was invaluable. When the king had authority he could afford to be generous without fear of creating the ‘over-­ mighty subject’ that sovereigns had cause to dread. At its best government could look like a common enterprise, with a workable balance between the crown and its leading subjects. So Francis was barely shaken by the treason, in 1526, of the influential Constable of Bourbon. It enabled him to make an example and confiscate lands to reward the loyal. A prominent nobleman could still see his interest as lying in retaining the king’s favour. Until 1559 the crown – from 1547 in the resolute person of Henry II – was able to use its patronage to keep some order at court and to extend its powers in the state. In that fateful year, of European peace and of Henry II’s premature death in the joust, it became evident how much the equilibrium of the state depended on the authority of an adult king. Let a boy accede, and the country would soon be shaken by civil commotion, its resources dissipated between the heads of parties, fighting for influence, soon under the banners of religion. Thirty years on and we will look back at a history unthinkable to the men who attended the fatal tournament: a sequence of civil wars, the power and reputation of monarchy greatly reduced; then the nadir with a bitter end to a year of desperate measures. When Henry III, last of the Valois, fell to an assassin’s dagger at Blois in August 1589, his Protestant cousin, Henry of Navarre, became king. For four more years he fought for his realm before taking the decisive step. In July 1593 he was received into the Catholic Church. After later absolution by the Pope he would be, in official language as well as in the hearts of most of his Catholic subjects, ‘His Most Christian Majesty’. Civil war dragged on for three years but the heart had gone out of the opposition. Here was the king desired by the politiques, those who put interest of state before that of religious confession: one ‘already made by nature, born in the real garden of the flowers of France, a straight green shoot from the stem of Saint Louis’.20 By converting to Catholicism, Henry had tapped into a prime source of loyalty to the crown. It was the same calculation that Francis I had made in the 1530s when he saw the advance of Protestantism in Germany and England, and its material

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advantages. France too had wealthy abbeys and convents, ripe for the picking; as later, by the Huguenots, for looting. But Francis was unimpressed by the actions of his fellow sovereign Henry VIII, which led to schism and the establishment of an English church under the crown. He already had influence over the church through the control of most appointments. He was not inhibited by his faith in his diplomatic dealings with German Protestants – or indeed Ottoman Muslims. But there were also positive reasons, apart from personal conviction, why Francis, with such momentous consequences, should reject the Protestant alternative. From the way in which monarchy had evolved over the centuries there had come to be a special relationship between church and crown. It would affect the conditions in which Huguenotism struggled to survive; it would determine the Huguenots’ eventual fate. So long as the crown remained Catholic the Huguenot would be more than a heretic. He was guilty of lèse majesté, a rebel. By force he might achieve a kind of security; but it rested ultimately on the goodwill of the crown. Could that be expected to last? The traditions and resources of the French crown suggest that it could not.

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chapter three

s

The Special Relationship Let every soul be subject to the higher powers. (St Paul)1

I

n the organic image of commonwealth, as outlined by John of Salisbury and since proved durable to the point of truism – the prince being the head, the senate the heart – the church was the soul of monarchy, the animating principle of the whole.2 The sacre, or coronation, at Reims symbolised the mystique. The state, represented by princes of the blood and peers ecclesiastical and lay, was assembled around the king as he swore the ‘oath of the church’: ‘I shall protect canonical privilege, due law and justice, and I shall exercise defence of each bishop and each church committed to him, as much as I am able, with God’s help, just as a king ought properly to do in his kingdom.’ It could not be more explicit; nor could the following ‘oath of the kingdom’: ‘To this Christian populace subject to me I promise in the name of Christ: first that by our authority the whole Christian populace will preserve at all times true peace for the church of God . . . Also that in good faith to all men I shall be diligent to expel from my land . . . all heretics designated by the church.’3 Could Francis I or any succeeding king forget the sacred promises? When a king, faced by the logic of events, adopted some formula for the protection of ‘heretics’, might he not have private words to say to God? As much as the words it was the symbolism that would stay in mind. He put on coronation robes, a blue gown embroidered with gold fleur-­de-­lis. Thus in contemporary understanding he was relinquishing ‘the worldly estate’, with the clothing of a mere layman, and adopting the ‘royal religion’. The archbishop then anointed him as if consecrating a bishop, making the sign of the cross with the holy oil from the sacred ampulla. The king took communion in two kinds, bread and wine. Along with the royal insignia – ring, sceptre and hand of justice – the sword, as symbol of the king’s military power, was blessed

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by the archbishop. On the royal head was placed the crown of Charlemagne. There followed a ceremonial healing of patients afflicted by scrofula. The ‘royal touch’ completes the picture of le roi thaumaturge. The special relationship that was to prove so crucial in the Huguenot story had its origins in times when ‘in compensation for its haziness of outline France was fortified by a dawning sense that those who dwelled within its confines constituted one people’.4 As the royal estates grew through inheritance and conquest, and during the dark days of the Hundred Years War, when there was little else to offer effective government, only the person of the king had stood for the unity of the realm. Sentiment and necessity elevated the institution above the human being. The idea of a cohesive state was conveyed in the word patrie or even pays. Embodied in a strong sovereign, a Philip Augustus or, in his devious but effective statecraft, a Louis XI, the idea could become formidable, at home and abroad. There was substance as well as sentiment behind the tradition. From the first days of the Frankish monarchy, following the deterioration of Roman rule, Christianity played a leading role. Many German tribes had been converted to an Arian form of Christianity condemned as heretical by the Council of Nicaea.5 The Franks, coming from lands far removed from Roman influence, were still pagan as they established themselves across northern Gaul, and open to conversion in orthodox fashion. Greatest of Frankish conquerors, Clovis the Merovingian overcame neighbouring tribes before offering himself for Christian baptism. The date traditionally given is 496. He may not have known of the conversion of Constantine, who had also claimed victory in battle after appeal to the Christian God. Married to a Christian he would have noted the authority of Catholic clergy. Hazy maybe, the facts concerning Clovis and early successors were enough to sustain a potent tradition. Catholic Christianity would be the rock on which the French monarchy could properly and proudly stand. The king would wield the sword of God against pagans and heretics alike. With the apparent decline of commerce and town life monasteries and episcopal townships became the centres best positioned to offer protection to scholars and libraries. Church support eased the promotion of the Carolingian line, in the person of Pepin the Short, sole effective ruler in 747 of all the Franks. He established tithing and promoted the spread of monasteries under the Benedictine rule through whose aegis Christianity was brought to the countryside. Their allegiance strengthened the ties to Rome, whose status had gained by the loss to militant Islam of eastern centres, Alexandria, Damascus and, most painful, Jerusalem. Rome was ever a violent city where spiritual claims and certainties were tested by the uncertainties of daily living. For backing successive popes in their claim to supremacy the king could be

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anointed, with biblical precedent in Samuel’s anointing of David in preference to Saul. In 800, Pope Leo III set the Imperial crown on Charlemagne’s head.6 Charlemagne’s empire would disintegrate, the title would go, but the idea remained to be used: between pope and king a viable alliance was established that would experience vicissitudes but survive and would have a crucial effect on Huguenot fortunes.7 The image of the Christian ruler, caring for widows and orphans, purging the church from error, upholding its authority, would be part of the royal inheritance. ‘Let peace, concord and unanimity reign among all Christian people . . . for without peace we cannot please God.’ There was a world of difference between the language of St Augustine and the campaigning warlord; but the notion of a Christian culture, patronised by the sovereign, would survive. Louis XIV, challenging heresy, would be, in fervent Catholic language, a second Charlemagne. In the oath of fealty sworn to Hugh Capet by Archbishop Arnulf of Reims in 987 we see the feudal bond: lord to vassal. As anointed of the Lord, Hugh was seemingly having the best of both worlds. In his restricted realm the trust he earned through the church was invaluable. As patrons of monasteries, each requiring a royal charter, and defenders of bishops and abbots, successive kings created a supportive network across the country, with some power to protect the farmer and the trader. Faced by feudal vassals with little sense of the commonweal, it was invaluable to have the other hierarchy of allegiance: layman to priest, priest to bishop, bishop to king. When French masons of the twelfth century perfected the soaring arches of the Gothic cathedrals they created man’s boldest, most glorious images of faith. Their heavenward thrust conveys more than their patrons’ long views and deep purses, or their builders’ skill. Their imagery witnesses also to a new spiritual vision. Christ, the aloof and stern figure of the Romanesque, might be in bearing an emperor. In Gothic sculpture he seems rather to represent compassion; he stands for love and forgiveness. First among the female saints whose cults enriched religious life, the Virgin Mary became the object of devotion, followed in popular esteem by her mother St Anne. Nowhere would Huguenots offend more deeply than in scorn for saints and their shrines. Preachers, notably from their commissioning in 1216 the friars, found audiences receptive to their evangelical message, with a bitter edge when they denounced worldly leaders of the church. Meanwhile established patterns were turning ragged at the edges. Theologians emerged from cloister and library on to a more public stage. Aristotelian logic encouraged debate; universities provided a forum; students carried afield the virus of doubt and enquiry. Four distinct schools of theology wrestled for acceptance. Thomism took its name from the brilliant Dominican St Thomas Aquinas and created a synthesis of theology and Aristotelian philosophy. Duns Scotus moderated, without

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renouncing, Thomist rationalism; the sceptical, anti-­rationalist nominalism first expounded by the Franciscan William of Occam led to a theology favoured by German monks before the Reformation. Most important for understanding French Protestantism under Calvin’s sway was the earlier teaching of St Augustine. It was still strong among the Augustinian friars and would come to the fore as reformers used it to destroy the increasingly sterile forms of scholasticism.8 Meanwhile monarchy lost little in authority and ambition by the turmoil in the schools. In one area, contentious throughout Europe, a notable king won a significant victory. There was a trend in church circles to ‘political Augustinianism’, its principles taken from Augustine’s City of God: the primacy of the spiritual sword over the temporal; ecclesiastical sovereignty in all domains – plena potestas. ‘Both swords,’ St Bernard of Clairvaux had written, ‘belong to the church.’ As the Papacy under Innocent III (1198–1216) became ever more absolutist the French monarchy emerged stronger from the struggle against the Plantagenet kings that culminated in the conquest of Normandy (1213). King Philip Augustus then rejected the Pope’s claim to be mediator in his quarrel with King John: ‘This is a question of feudal law. Matters in dispute between kings are no business of the Pope.’9 It is the feudal voice but we may already detect the belief in a distinctive ‘Gallican’ Catholicism which would be so significant in the nation’s religious history – and provide a home for those opposed to Rome but chary of Protestantism. Pope and king could still find common ground, as when faced with the threat posed by the Cathar heresy and the resulting ‘crusade’. Earlier the Waldensians had shown how to live in ways of simplicity and poverty that represented for them the experience of the early church.10 They preached without licence and translated parts of the Bible. They were condemned by the Pope but no action was taken as he was diverted by the greater challenge of the Cathars.11 Their ideas were not so much a Christian heresy as an alternative, dualist, version of the Christian story. Their world was a stage for the war between good and evil. The crucifixion of Jesus was a triumph for evil. Man was inherently corrupt and there could be no victory for goodness until the human race had perished. In this world the leaders, the ‘perfect ones’, lived almost like monks, frugal, chaste and charitable, giving time to teaching their followers: a living reproach to priests who fell short of their standards. It was all sui generis, more a portent than precedent for future movements, having little in common with early Protestantism, though leaving a rooted suspicion of church authority. Louis IX (1215–70), creator of La Saint-­Chapelle, unsuccessful crusader, was to be the good St Louis of nostalgic myth, his reign a golden age. Undoubtedly pious, he was also statesman enough to be concerned about his fragile position in the south. Authorised by the king, blessed by the

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Pope, Guy de Montfort waged ruthless war on the Cathars and their noble protectors. What started as holy war became, for both sides, a blatant political contest. The eventual defeat of the powerful Raymond of Toulouse taught a bloody lesson. Ecclesiastical and secular authority had been challenged. The value of alliance to both sovereigns was once more proved. By Louis’ death in 1270 orthodoxy had been restored, a lesson learned. Heresy endangered the state; its destruction would strengthen it. The king who came to enjoy iconic status was able to reconcile his role as son of the church with that as sovereign; each way led him to God. But the steady growth of his realm, his own authority and international reputation as arbiter, engendered a confidence that came to be reflected in political theory and judicial pronouncements. The assertion of rights went with an idea of France as the apex of civilisation. It would have a long life. Was not France the chosen land of the holiest relics in Christendom? Did not the University of Paris attract students from all of Europe? Did not its nobility offer a pattern of knighthood? All the more shattering was defeat at Agincourt.12 After the debacle and its aftermath the idea of the kingdom of the fleur-­de-­lis as being particularly favoured by heaven would offer a spur to recovery. Gallicanism is coloured by differing emphases reflecting the principles of the contending parties.13 The theologian would argue in his terms for the restriction of papal power, the royal minister might stress the ‘ancient liberties’ of the church and the status of the king as first person in the church after the Pope, the parlementaire’s first concern was rights of jurisdiction. Differing lines of argument provided an armoury upon which French kings could draw to secure rights over the church with which to enhance their authority at home. As a set of principles amounting to the idea that the French church had special rights and a French king a duty to uphold them, Gallicanism became a serviceable weapon in the hands of Louis IX’s successor. The way in which Philip the Fair (1285–1314) dealt with Pope Boniface VIII threw the Papacy into a prolonged period of disarray. Boniface widened the concept of Papal rights, plena potestas, already asserted by his predecessors over church appointments, to the more sensitive issue of taxation of church property. He under­ estimated his secular-­minded opponent and died in 1305 after the shock of Philip’s unsuccessful attempt to have him kidnapped on his own territory. Once Philip had effected the transfer of papal government to Avignon it remained there for seven pontificates. The election of Urban VI as pope in Rome in 1378 led to what was virtually a war of succession between the followers of the ‘English pope’ and those of the ‘French pope’, Clement VII. There arose in response a movement within the church to establish the authority of councils over popes. After a time when there were three ‘popes’ the acceptance of the third, Martin V, in 1417, at the Council of Constance,

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ended the schism. When the French came to back the conciliar movement the bargaining power they secured contributed to the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges in 1438: it provided for French bishops to be nominated, in effect appointed by the king. From then till the Concordat of Bologna (1516), when Francis I gained goodwill by ceding much of the Pope’s power to tax the clergy, appointments would go on being a potential battleground, source of scandal and focus for reformers. Conciliarism, pointing to the ideal of collective leadership, caused tensions between those who saw it as vital to the process of reform within the church, claiming that it came ‘immediately from Christ,’14 and Papalists, who sought to recover power for Rome in the face of a new challenge to Christendom. In 1453 the Ottoman Turks captured Constantinople and were thought unlikely to stop there. In 1460 Pope Pius II, in the bull Execrabilis, formally forbade appeals from a Papal decision to a general council. With its assertion of primacy Rome claimed the right to arbitrate in territorial matters. In 1493 Alexander VI issued bulls adjudicating the claims of Spain and Portugal, in effect dividing the world beyond Europe between them. No less remarkable was the commission he issued to preach the Gospel to the heathen they found there. In the following year, claiming Naples, Charles VIII invaded Italy and posed a new challenge to popes to assert themselves, as a major territorial power within Italy, above the other competing states. The subsequent wars brought little gain to the states involved. With the collateral damage to the spiritual authority of the Papacy they form part of the background to the Reformation. Meanwhile the conciliar movement would have an extended life, both as providing an arena for French church leaders to flex their muscles and as a recourse for moderate Catholics who wanted to find common ground between Catholic and Protestant. At the Council of Constance the theologian Jean Gerson had led for France. Faced by the challenge of squaring conciliar claims with those of the French monarchy he rewrote the history of the church in terms that had a marked effect on the thinking of reformers. From early heroic days, and primitive simplicity, he argued that the church had come, in a process starting with Hildebrand,15 to a phase of excess in its claims and demands upon the faithful. He called for purity and humility in high places and supported the rights of parish clergy against the intrusive activities of monks and friars. Reformers would take from these views what fitted their idea of the church. Meanwhile the monarchy he served in extremis began to recover its power and confidence. Writers played their part. ‘In their efforts to claim legitimacy for the Valois . . . in the midst of civil war, the men of letters created or enhanced the various elements of an idea of a ruler virtually untouchable by man.’16 After 1429 the French had recovered the initiative in the war which had begun so disastrously and were making inroads into the Anglo-­Burgundian

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position. Joan of Arc has come to occupy a unique place in the sacred ground where facts are embellished by patriotic myth. After she was captured by the English, tried as a witch and burnt (1431), the ‘Maid of Orléans’, ‘saviour of France’, would embody patriotism at times of peril and be, for all seasons, an icon of innocence and strength, religious faith and moral authority. The sheer improbability of a country girl’s advising king and generals; her inspiring presence; her courage and lucidity under trial – it is a wonderful story. For Joan, the coronation of Charles VII at Reims was the all-­important act: legitimacy was restored. The English king Henry VI was seen to be a usurper; God would therefore be fighting for France. ‘My mission is finished,’ she said. The duke of Bedford feared the effect of the sacre. As the lines became clearer, the sense, for many, was of country above all. In face of the pragmatism of the towns, especially of Paris, of Parlement, and the Sorbonne and the private ambitions of some great feudatories, so vivid a demonstration of the bond between church and crown was of lasting importance. So throughout its history, from early days of ‘Lutherans’, individuals and scattered communities, to its consolidation as an alternative church with a military power sufficient to bring about some security, French Protestantism was to be at a crucial disadvantage. It had its own sources of inspiration, principally in the Bible. There was compelling theology behind its claim to be a model for Christian life and government. But so long as the king remained true to his inherited tradition, in which there was no contradiction between his being a good Frenchman and a good Catholic, the Huguenot was worse than a heretic. He was a disloyal subject, a renegade, no true Frenchman, an outsider. Enmities hardened during the civil wars; again in later revolts. For long periods, after the Edict of Nantes, at least in sophisticated bourgeois circles, and in military service, the charge of disloyalty would not be pressed too hard. But the implication was always there: that the Huguenot did not belong to the France of Clovis, Charlemagne, St Louis, Philip the Fair and the Maid. There was indeed a great depth and appeal in the idea behind the title: le roi très chrétien. In the end it would prove fatal to the Huguenots.

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chapter four

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The Power of the Word I opposed indulgences and all papists, but never by force. I simply taught, preached, wrote God’s Word: otherwise I did nothing. (Martin Luther)1

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painting of the coronation of Louis XII (1498) was superscribed: ‘Ung Dieu, Ung Roi, Ung Foi’. By mid-­century it had become a standard heraldic device. The coronation oath of his successor Francis I (1515) had a sharper emphasis: conventionally he pledged to promote peace and justice in Christendom; now specifically to expel heretics from his dominions. Within a year he had won a crucial struggle with Parlement over the registration of the Concordat of Bologna. Parlement’s main concern was for the Gallican liberties and the independence of which the court was the natural guardian. The Sorbonne,2 though often through personal connections and a common interest in religious order the ally of Parlement, had other concerns. It would prefer a more ultramontane approach, suspecting that the king would see his responsibility to the church in terms of political advantage. Bologna only sealed what had long been, in effect, a joint hegemony of king and pope. It was still possible for the Papacy to insert Italian bishops (in 1557 amounting to a quarter of the total) and to draw revenue from its taxes; the king could continue to use church preferment in the wider strategy of patronage that enabled him to cement support for the regime. It did not prevent the crown from using the threat of schism when it wanted to gain further concessions. But Pope Julius III could write to Henry II, in 1551, during one of their periodic spats, ‘in the end you are more than pope in your kingdoms . . . I know no reason why you should wish to become schismatic.’3 Why should a French king exchange certain benefits and the approval of the majority of his most influential subjects for the uncertain venture of Protestant kingship?

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The king might take seriously – Henry II certainly did – his duty to guard church and state against heresy. But by treating its wealth as a bank to be drawn upon to further his ends, he ensured that the church would be regarded as a scandal and reproach, ill-­equipped to counter the appeal of evangelical religion. Francis was apparently well placed to exert discipline over the church in France. But how would he see his role? Four years into his reign Luther’s challenge over indulgences opened the way to the German Reformation. After 1521 it was the Imperial authority as well as the Papal that Luther defied; so Francis would have seen potential advantage there as well as domestic embarrassment. What would ‘heresy’ have meant to the young king? Humanist scholars venturing too far in textual criticism? Devout communities seeking new ways to God beyond that offered by the church? An eccentric radical or two? Stirrings in former Cathar regions? Such ‘heretics’ he could certainly envisage. What he could hardly have expected was that during his reign heresy would become an active presence in communities throughout his land. Meanwhile he would start to hear the word ‘Lutheran’ as merchants and other travellers brought their news and views to France’s cities. The religious upheaval that affected, in some way, every part of Europe, that would expose the greatest fault line in Christian thinking since the quarrels of Latin and Greek and would lead to irrevocable schism, began with earnest but dissatisfied custodians of the spiritual estate. As yet the Vatican might feel confident that it had coped with the major challenges to its authority. Nominalism4 has been seen as a doctrine corrosive of the accepted principles of Western Christianity, raising questions about what actually happens when bread and wine are consecrated in the Eucharist. It was strong particularly in German universities but would generally be seen as a matter for academic dispute. After Wyclif the pursuit of Lollards had soon reduced them to a handful, more households than communities, scattered and secret.5 Hus had become a martyr for his creed after his betrayal and execution in 1415, and the church that evolved, Utraquist in theology and strongly flavoured by Czech national sentiment, was set to survive. It was traditionalist in some practices, in Marian devotion, in images and processions, but radical in its use of Czech in worship. Having eventually no archbishop of its own it sent its candidates for priesthood to be ordained in notoriously anti-­Papalist Venice. The nationalist spirit that made it strong in Bohemia weakened its potential influence elsewhere. Yet advance a hundred years, and one can see in this eruption a trend set to continue: the transfer of power from the centre to civic dignitaries, the ‘magisterial revolution’ that would shape the churches of the Reformation. It would have required exceptional foresight – and insight – at the Vatican to see danger to the structure of the church in a local matter and one dealt with by the execution of Hus. Still less troubling was the separate sect of Bohemian

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Brethren, which eschewed all forms of violence and the very idea of a separate priestly order. There would always be movements on the fringe. Was it not in the nature of religion to excite the weaker mind, to raise false hopes, to tempt the deluded away from the safe confines of Mother Church? So might reason a bishop, thinking perhaps of the revivalist sects led by men who claimed to be God’s elect and aroused fear and greed with prophecies of the imminent end of the world. The millenarian peasants of south Germany, followers of the Drummer of Niklashausen;6 the poor townsfolk of the industrial cities of the Netherlands, roused by wild expectations of equality, were surely a social problem, to be dealt with by the local authorities. As for the drummer and his like, there was always the fire (1476). On the face of it the least likely place for anything like a serious schism with much effect beyond its locale was a university: and not an Oxford or Paris but obscure Wittenberg, of which some at Rome would not have heard. Shock and dismay were to come. Meanwhile the church contributed to the catastrophe by its complacency, its endorsement of corrupt practices and slow and insensitive reaction to the initial challenge. With wisdom of hindsight we can see more clearly what was at work in church and society. The continuing and active theological debate brought unease into monastic cloisters. Vocations were tested by the contrast between the church’s unbending official stance on celibacy and the relaxed interpretation of the rule in Rome where cardinals flaunted their mistresses. Germans resented paying taxes to Rome and the sale of indulgences inflamed opinion. Humanism and, in particular the influence of Erasmus, may await further treatment in the context of the early French reform movement.7 Indeed, it may be argued that Luther’s protest, coming as it did out of close study of the Bible and intensely personal in his sense of sinfulness and special need of grace, was sui generis; it owed most to his experience of liberation and ability to communicate that to others. But it was humanist scholarship that was drawing attention, through revised editions of the Bible, to the need for unfettered examination of the text, in the process sapping at the intellectual foundations of the church and contributing learned views to anticlerical voices. Among the preachers and teachers of Germany and Switzerland the most famous names are those of Martin Luther, Augustinian friar and professor in Wittenberg, and Huldrych Zwingli, ‘people’s preacher’ of Zurich. There were other significant figures in the German reformation, notably Karlstadt, Luther’s wayward disciple; Melanchthon, his lifelong friend, the main caretaker for Lutheranism after Luther’s death, and Bucer.8 Each moved in a new direction: Karlstadt towards radical innovation, Melanchthon resourcefully to find middle ground but failing to convince, Bucer seeking to contain the damage and, when attacked for that, finding a congenial home in Cambridge and the

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opportunity to influence the evolving state church. Luther and Zwingli claim special attention in what must necessarily be the simplest of outlines of the most complex of movements, because each signalled a radically new direction in answer to perennial questions: how should human beings interpret the will of God and exercise His power in the world? In a world in which traditional authority, in society as in church, was already being threatened? Contemporaries, German as well as French, may at first have been uncertain about the dramatic sequence of events from 1517 to 1521 that led to Luther’s appearance at Worms in that year before the Emperor Charles V. First had come an academic statement, made in the conventional form of theses proposed for debate, in the small university town of Wittenberg. More for discussion in the lecture room and beer cellar than for the high councils of the church? The occasion – the resourceful Dominican Tetzel’s commission to sell indulgences in Saxony9 – and the nature of Luther’s argument ensured that it would have a wider impact, indeed turn out to be a catalyst of momentous significance. For when, in October 1517, Dr Luther issued his 95 theses concerning mainly the authority of papal indulgences, specifically those issued for souls in purgatory, he was, in effect, challenging central tenets in church teaching. He was doing so at a time when the church, in its presence and practices, nowhere more than in England, was richer and more appealing than ever before. Yet some aspects were coming under critical fire, satirical but serious and backed by scholarship. Foremost was the issue of indulgences to ensure an easier ride through purgatory. Luther came to see that purgatory stemmed from fundamentally false thinking about man’s relation to God. With much that was humane and reasonable in its origins it had been developed by creative thinkers to soften the harsh logic that led to a choice between heaven and hell, and to meet the practical objection that a deathbed confession would not leave time for penitential works. Souls destined for salvation were sent there, for severe trials akin to those of hell, and for a period, as some taught, to match heaven’s scale of eternity. The very fact that it could be measured meant that men were encouraged to secure remission, winning ‘merit’, through ‘indulgences’. By an extension of the idea which made good sense at Rome but appeared to reformers as a palpable fiction, there was postulated a fund, ‘surplus merit’, available to the Pope to dispense, like so much preventive medicine, through indulgences. So folk went on pilgrimage to earn them, or simply bought them; prayed to the saints, above all to Mary, but increasingly to the newly popular St Anne; paid for masses to be said for them. If rich enough they endowed the chantry chapels that would be a prime target of the reformers. Such practices reflected the climate of fear that seems to have pervaded late mediaeval Christendom. Though the population had recovered eventually

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from the great pandemics of the fourteenth century and was growing fast at the start of the sixteenth century the perception, strengthened in France during seemingly interminable wars, was that life was more than ever precarious. There was apprehension, particularly in Germany, about the threat of resurgent Islam. The defeat and death of the king of Hungary at Mohács in 1526 would show that the danger was real. A succession of wars in Italy shone a new light on the activities of popes as rulers of a large secular state. The scourge of syphilis spread with the movement of armies. If the message of religious artists is to be believed – none more appalling than Michelangelo’s Last Judgement fresco in the Sistine Chapel – men’s fancies ran readily to the morbid and apocalyptic. For one school of thought this tormenting of the human spirit came to a point in the early years of the sixteenth century that could not fail to have radical effects.10 At the storm’s centre was the conviction that the world was soon to come to an end. In these last days a holy power was everywhere engaged in struggle with the powers of darkness. Astrology, the staple of the cheap almanacs that reached many homes – and many others in sermon or by word of mouth, losing nothing of foreboding on the way – was used to prepare the anxious mind for the predestined end. The conscience eschatalogique thus described can be made to reverse the traditional verdict on Protestantism, and notably Calvinism: not prime cause of France’s religious disorder; but a response to it. For Calvin would reject astrology and millenarianism with all that flowed from it. He taught a view of world order that was derived from the laws of nature imposed by the Creator, with a providence that predestined our future, saved or not, in ways that we could neither understand nor alter. Holiness lay in the Word of God alone. How this was developed in his radical theology and system of government will emerge. Meanwhile it is enough to leave it as theory; at the least a challenge to our imagination to put human psychology at the heart of the action and to see religion in terms of individual sensibility. Much that Luther would challenge, all that Calvin would discard, was what on the eve of the Reformation reinforced the psychological control exercised by the church as the unique source and privileged interpreter of Scripture, and as mediator in the sacraments that were the means of salvation. In churches all over Europe the figures of the Rood, Christ, Mary and John represented the mystery of the conquest of death; doom paintings conveyed the fate of souls, some towards heaven and eternal bliss; others to the everlasting torments of hell. The effect might be to turn men’s minds to the ministrations of the priest, to the saving mystery of the mass, and the desirability of taking out such insurance as was offered in indulgences. Or, given a lead, to turn their back on the old theology.

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The self-­confidence and ambition of some princes and towns, the xenophobic spirit aroused when German money was extracted from the gullible for the coffers of the Papal State, ensured an interest that went beyond theology. People saw a German priest and teacher standing up to Rome. Further, that neither Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz, on behalf of his man Tetzel, nor the learned Dr Eck, commissioned to tackle Luther in open debate, had a convincing answer to Luther’s main assertion: that no indulgence could have any relevance to the issue of personal salvation.11 Those who came to follow the ‘reformed’ way and appealed to lay concerns could expect a warm response, for they tapped into long-harboured grievances. There was nothing new about Luther’s assault on ‘the deceit and hypocrisy’ of those who maintained that the clergy should be a separate legal estate. Taxation was always a sensitive issue, the clergy’s exemption a grievance much aired, from Reichstag to city council. To that extent we may see a link between socio-­ economic factors and the Reformation. They should not be mistaken for the root causes of what was essentially a matter of religious belief. Luther’s message was strengthened by the perception that he was following in the steps of Erasmus in criticising the emptiness of scholastic theology, superstition and hypocrisy.12 He might fire at similar targets to those of Erasmus but he arrived by a quite different route: a teacher’s deep and prayerful study of particular texts for which he did not, at first, have the benefit of Erasmus’ New Testament. He went further, moreover, after coming to his conclusions, in openly advocating action. Erasmus was content to make his points, then stop short of open repudiation of the church’s authority. Luther called for the destruction of shrines where supposed relics drew money from the gullible. He was more forthright, more bullish than Erasmus, more disposed to see things as black or white. But the difference went further than temperament. Crucially, Luther set out in a different direction because he started from a different place. ‘St Anne save me and I will become a monk.’ A lightning flash on a June day in 1505, and the young man’s belief that he had been saved for service to God brought him to the house of Augustinian canons in Erfurt, the sympathetic care of his superior, Staupitz, and his belief in the grace and mercy of God. Professor from 1512 at the young university of Wittenberg,13 he agonised over the problem of salvation, with the nagging sense that he fell short of what God wanted him to be. A near-­mystical sense of personal mission drove his intense desire to get to the truth. When he had the ‘experience in the tower’14 that he was later to date to the winter of 1517, around the time of the 95 theses, he was working on St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. He said that he ‘lashed at the texts’ to find the meaning. Romans 1:17 specially teased him till the sense of it became overwhelmingly clear. ‘The just shall live by faith.’ The build-­up

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over years, the circumstances of the moment, the nature of the vision must elude precise description beyond what Luther recorded. It may be that something that his mind had long accepted now suddenly reached his heart and soul. The justice of God could now be seen in a different light. He had wanted to love God the Supreme Being but had found that he feared, even in dark moods hated God, the Supreme Judge who had given laws in the Old Testament that could not be kept and that blocked the way to salvation. The life-­changing revelation was that the justice of God is not a demand upon the soul but a pure gift, free and unconditional. From this insight, his ‘enlightenment’, together with his reading of the New Testament, particularly the teaching of Paul, Luther deduced that God accepted sinners and forgave them despite their continuing sins. This was startlingly opposed to the teaching of mediaeval theology: that God intervened in human life to save souls through Holy Church, an event that was universally represented, and its message renewed, in celebration of the mass. In its re-creation of the Last Supper, through the mediation of the priest, men could witness (though not, Protestants would stress, share) what human beings brought to God and what God, through Christ offered humanity. The church, the body of Christ, was God’s institution, existing to mediate between Him and man, supplying His means of grace. ‘Grace’, so Catholics were taught, could be earned by actions (‘works’, in theological shorthand). Like some Catholic critics Luther and his followers saw that the developed doctrine of purgatory encouraged inflation in the squalid commerce of indulgences. Indeed, it was actually irrelevant, since the forgiveness offered to sinners for Christ’s sake was free, not to be earned; a gift of unique value, unconditional: man could have it through faith alone. Augustine and others had come close to such insight without following it to its logical conclusion. Following Luther, Zwingli and Calvin would develop and reformulate the doctrine. Meanwhile Luther’s essential assertion, justification by faith, changed the practice of religion for the millions who found themselves swayed by the cause of the Gospel, ‘evangelical’ as it was starting to be called. If those ‘works’ that a man might do to improve his standing with God were the consequence, not the cause, of his being forgiven, nothing that man might do to procure salvation could affect the issue. Christ’s redeeming death on the cross was ‘a full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world’.15 It was what man believed that mattered. So the ritual acts that he performed, going on pilgrimage, venerating relics, praying to saints, were useless, even blasphemous if they derogated from the power of God and His unique gift to mankind. See how the authority of the priest is diminished when he loses his place as mediator, hearing confession, giving absolution, imposing penance, authorising indulgences.

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By the time Luther was summoned to appear before the Emperor at Worms, in the spring of 1521, essential features of his theology were already in place. At the prolonged and much publicised disputation with Dr Eck at Leipzig that had been set up in June 1519, Luther had declared that the Pope could err – even General Councils, could err – and that the only unerring authority was that of the Bible. It was on this basis, still much troubled in spirit, that he moved from being a critic of papal authority and corrupt practices to the conviction that the Pope was God’s enemy; so to his self-­image as instrument of God against Satan; so to the evangelical programme that forced the young Emperor to take the matter into his own hands. Yet it was to the Emperor that Luther dedicated his tract To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, summoning the princes to reform the church. It had become clear that most Germans agreed with Luther’s protest as it was laid out in his first German pamphlet, Of Indulgences and the Grace of God (March 1518). So one can imagine, with the later tract’s appeal to German grievances against Rome, another course for Protestantism if Charles had decided to put his weight behind reform. Luther advanced a cogent case. He urged that princes had a duty to care for their subjects’ welfare and found in Scripture the words to justify their right to uphold the church.16 Could Luther have stopped there? Everything conspired to keep debate warm. With printers keen to exploit an exceptional opportunity, sermon and pamphlet provoked both sides to justify positions taken and to advance beyond them. And Luther soon found that half Germany was waiting on his words. Theology had never been so popular – and it was dramatic, the issues urgent. At the heart of debate was the broad-­featured Saxon depicted by Lucas von Cranach, his stubbornness and his convictions plain for all to see. He was ‘prepared to live dangerously’ because he believed that the world was running towards its end and that time was short for his work to be accomplished. Meanwhile the Devil was loose in the world, working through enemies within (the Papacy, with its poisonous doctrines) and without (the Turk). Luther declared that only three sacraments were to be found in the Bible: Baptism, Holy Communion and Confession. Confirmation, marriage, ordination and extreme unction were not in the same way outward signs of God’s grace. As for the mass, Luther’s view was radical. It was not a sacrifice of Christ re-­enacted by the priest but a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving by the people. Private masses, said for the souls of the dead, were at best an irrelevance. Luther’s idea of sacrament was the act of a congregation, truly a communion. Laypeople should hear the words of consecration and receive the wine as well as the bread.17 All this was shocking enough, as expounded in the book of October 1520 that crowned Protestantism’s annus mirabilis. A Preface to the Babylonian

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Captivity of the Church introduced a new idea of the priesthood. Since there was no definition of the role in the Bible the early church had devised its own rules for ordination and priestly life and they had been developed to meet changing circumstances. To Luther they were man-­made, unscriptural and, in the case of the rule of celibacy, relatively recent, much evaded, indeed unnatural. So he proposed that priests should be free to marry, should be elected and should regard their chief work, even before saying mass, as the study of and preaching from the Bible. Also in October arrived the bull from Rome threatening excommunication. It was thrown into the river by the students of Erfurt, burned in Wittenberg, and in many other places mocked or ignored. By steps that he could never have foreseen Luther had become a symbol of freedom for the people. In his response to the bull, Of the Freedom of a Christian, it was spiritual freedom that he envisaged. To Imperialists the Word was dangerous; to Frederick, Elector of Saxony, an opportunity, as it would soon be to other princes, notably Philip of Hesse. As Luther went to Worms under the Elector’s protection, and left it for the security of his castle, the challenge to Charles V was political as well as theological. Luther’s last words at Worms, dignified and carefully chosen, convey the clean break with the old church order, the power of the new to transform man’s understanding of God, His will and message as conveyed in Scripture, and the supreme right of the individual conscience. Rarely in human history have so few words come to mean so much: ‘So long as my conscience is held prisoner to the Word of God, I can recant nothing, because to do something contrary to my conscience would endanger my salvation. So help me God.’18 The word ‘Protestant’ was not in general use till after 1529 and the ‘Protestation’ at the Diet of Speyer of those who sympathised, princes and cities, with the evangelical cause. But the essence of Protestantism was there from 1521, its message being carried throughout Europe. Legitimacy and inspiration alike came from the Bible. Protestantism in its German, evangelical form, was already a cultural force of lasting significance. From the secure but frustrating months of refuge in the Wartburg castle came the inception of Luther’s German Bible, whose style has shaped the language. His special gift, like that of the English pioneers, Coverdale and Tyndale, was for choosing the right words, apt and vigorous, from the rich vernacular store. Considering other prayer books Luther remarks: ‘Ah, there is not the juice, the strength, the passion, the fire which I find in the psalter.’19 Psalms were at the heart of monastic liturgy and would remain so for Protestants, not least in France. Soon there would follow hymns, including the justly famous ‘Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott’ for which he also wrote the tune. Nothing more forcefully conveys the author’s mood – reaching out too to the people’s concerns – than the idea

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of perpetual war against ‘the ancient prince of hell’ and ‘his purpose fell’ and of trust in ‘the safe stronghold’ of faith.20 For the followers of Luther, respect for the ministrations of the church was transferred to ministers inasmuch as they were judged faithful and competent stewards of the Word. Without the images that could be such powerful teachers of the unlettered, and the language of ritual and gesture that was thought sufficient for Catholic congregations to watch, new modes of worship were plainer, appealing more to the mind. They framed an intensive programme of religious education. As other priests followed Luther’s lead it became clear that schism, long feared, was a reality. In a movement of revolutionary potential, the ground of authority shifted from the institutions of the church to the words of the Bible. There would ensue a new conflict, schism following schism, as individuals and communities sought to remake the church to suit their needs, sometimes to do without ‘church’ at all. Grappling with the question of proper authority Luther’s enlightenment became his headache, the more painful because he saw himself as preacher before all Printing with moveable type was barely a century old. Now, in fateful conjuncture, an expanding market in universities and a literate bourgeoisie coincided with advances in metallurgy and in paper manufacture. In every field of literary endeavour printing enlarged the opportunities for the dissemination of knowledge and theory. Of the books, not least translations of the Bible, pamphlets, letters and broadsheets, many came from Luther’s prodigiously active pen.21 For a thousand years the Word had belonged to religious institutions; the church had offered proof of its doctrines from texts and stressed their absolute authority. Now that increasing numbers could read it for themselves the church was vulnerable: you could accept the authority of the Bible but question the monopoly of its traditional teachers. Even the great Gutenberg Latin Bible (1453–55) was a book for the wealthy few. Within a century, taking a lead from Luther’s translation, bibles in the vernacular had reached thousands across Europe: a cherished possession of many households and a feature of daily life and thought. In September 1522 Das Neue Testament Deutzsch appeared, followed, within two years, by forty-­seven editions of different parts of Luther’s translation, an ongoing process until, by 1534, the whole Bible was translated. Luther could work from newly edited texts in Greek and Hebrew. He perused them line by line with the Greek expert Melanchthon. He was fortunate in his timing. Catholics were forced on to the back foot, defending the Vulgate, when under more propitious circumstances they could have benefited, as Luther did, from the latest textual criticism. Luther’s aim was simple faithfulness to the apostolic original. Since he was offering the Bible as the sole valid basis of Christian authority it mattered that he worked from the most reliable sources.

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Clearly expressed in idiomatic contemporary German it appealed immediately to the ordinary German whether reading or just listening.22 Nietzsche, no friend to orthodox religion, would call it the finest work in the German language. It did not weaken its impact that Luther’s book was embellished by woodcuts that explicitly linked the text to the vices of Rome. In the Book of Revelation the city of Babylon was Renaissance Rome. The beast from the bottomless pit, the dragon spewing out demons like frogs, the blasphemous Whore of Babylon, all wore the Pope’s triple tiara. Already the stock images of propaganda were set to take their dreadful hold on the Protestant imagination, soon to be countered by equally vivid images from the other side.

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chapter five

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Every Man His Own Priest Lord keep us steadfast in thy word. (from Luther’s hymn, 1541)1

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lthough it was Radical in theology, it became clear that Lutheranism was socially conservative when Luther, confronted by a vacuum, came to look to traditional authority in the form of ‘the godly prince’. When, in 1525 the peasants of south Germany rose against their masters Luther, though sympathetic at first, denounced them for their misunderstanding of his doctrines. He never believed in a theocracy, preferred secular to priestly power and urged that ‘strict, hard, temporal government’ was essential for the sake of peace.2 Of course peace did perish as Germany divided into opposing camps, the Imperial and the Protestant leagues. Meanwhile the fear that the language of spiritual freedom could lead men astray, into paths of rebellion against their masters, would continue to embarrass Protestant leaders. The world had changed for good. Scholars and preachers aired their differences and encouraged people to think for themselves. An educated laity was able, through printing, to follow the debate; was prepared to enter into it and, under certain circumstances, to act. The magisterial Reformation would respond with every weapon it could find when men like Thomas Müntzer explored radical ways of communal living, one aspect of which gave rise to the name Anabaptism.3 For Luther social war was an aberration and a tragedy. Of this complicated, crude but godly man, often angry, ever wearing his heart on his sleeve, the best can be seen in his ideal of religious peace. War would come and spread – but it is not what he wanted; only in war with the Devil was he bellicose. Peace was to be won through spiritual conversation, driven by the trust that truth might be discerned through interpretation of the Bible. It was to inspire the discourse of French Calvinists. Luther died in 1546, his last years troubled by the political problems involved in any attempt to draw up a confession of faith on which the

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evangelicals could agree and which the Emperor could at least recognise, if not accept. Without it ministers could not ensure that they were following the right line at the Lord’s Table or in the pulpit. The product of a committee, but essentially the work of Melanchthon, was the Augsburg Confession, prepared for the Imperial diet of 1530, attacked by Eck then restated and refined by Melanchthon. Charles V rejected it, antagonising the Protestant princes who formed the Schmalkaldic League. So religious difference led to religious war; so Lutheranism as a body came to depend more overtly on the support of individual princes. For security in those states where the ruler was Protestant or tolerant of dissidence, Lutheranism paid a price. It was vulnerable to a ruler’s change of heart and allegiance and it could be discredited, as in the notorious case of Philip of Hesse’s bigamous marriage, by a patron’s moral lapses. Yet, in default of an independent system of government, there was no realistic alternative. As dissatisfied reformers worked out new modes of church government a common front of evangelical Christians, already divided on central questions of theology, became harder to achieve. There was the opening for Calvin. Meanwhile the initiative rested with the princes. In expectation of the general council that would eventually be the Council of Trent, Elector John Frederick of Saxony secured from Luther a confession of faith that came to be regarded with reverence as his last testament. Eventually, though not formally approved by the League of Protestant Princes, there appeared in 1539 the Schmalkaldic Articles. More precise and detailed than the Confession, essentially not a creed but personal statements of Luther and Melanchthon, after discussion accepted by others they would provide the common ground of doctrine on which the Evangelical church, in its several areas, could stand. A minister must know that man was justified by faith alone, that the Pope no longer had authority and that with that went purgatory, relics, indulgences, pilgrimages, the invocation of saints, and monasteries. Luther was spared by death the worst consequence of political schism: open war between the Emperor and the Schmalkaldic League. In titles the most powerful of sovereigns, Charles V combined in his person the kingdoms of Spain, with Milan and Naples, most of the former duchy of Burgundy, the seventeen Netherlands provinces, the Habsburg family lands and the moral authority of Holy Roman Emperor. Beset by the problems that arose from his different responsibilities he was unable to focus steadily on Germany and heresy. For nine years after Worms he had to concentrate on thwarting French designs on Italy; in the 1530s on the Ottoman threat in the Mediterranean and to what was left of Hungary;4 in 1543 on war to subdue Guelders. Of course much of government devolved upon viceroys; in the family lands on his brother Ferdinand. But Germany demanded his presence for there real power lay with the individual princes and cities and with them he had to negotiate or,

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when they proved recalcitrant, go to war. Hesse and Saxony broke the earlier truce by attacking the duke of Brunswick, the last important Catholic in the north. Charles decided that he must act. At the battle of Mühlberg in April 1547 the Saxon army was defeated; peace followed the next year. But Charles was unable to turn it into a lasting religious and constitutional settlement. The Interim of Augsburg (1549) proved unacceptable to both sides. It was essentially a Catholic text but there was to be no restitution of church property. John Frederick of Saxony refused to abjure and was deprived of his Electorate. His successor John Philip formed a new league and secured a formidable ally in France. King Henry II had no time for Lutherans yet, as ever, French policy was guided by strategic concerns. The growing military power of Spain, the encircling ring of Habsburg lands and the possibility of an Austro-­Spanish family partnership were sufficient threats to prompt Henry to intervene in what the Emperor viewed as a domestic quarrel. As the balance of power changed Charles suffered humiliating reverses. In the summer of 1552 he was forced to escape Maurice’s attack by retreating across the Brenner Pass into Carinthia. Meanwhile Henry had seized Metz. Forced to give up his subsequent siege Charles began to consider abdication. It was left to Ferdinand, as his designated successor in the family lands, to come to terms with the princes. At Augsburg, in September 1555 he concluded ‘the peace of eternal duration’ which he, unlike the Lutherans, regarded as just another temporary arrangement, pending the settlement of the religious issue at a general council of the church. Meanwhile France’s war with Spain continued for four years. To Henry, Germany was no longer of prime importance except as the source of France’s ‘Lutherans’ whom he meant to destroy. He might have learned from the Emperor’s chastening experience how hard, if not impossible, that would be. As his successors would soon discover, it was a short step from religious protest to open defiance, the formation of parties, their manipulation by rival magnates – and civil war. If Protestantism looked strong in 1555 it was not because of unity of doctrine. At Marburg in 1529, persuaded of the need for a single evangelical front, Luther, with Melanchthon, had met other leading theologians, among them Bucer from Strasbourg, Oecolampadius from Basle, and Zwingli from Zurich. The nature of the Eucharist was the main topic and stumbling block. The meeting was fruitless. But the pioneer work of Zwingli points to the other challenge to a faith based essentially on individual experience, that of church authority. Luther would never accept sectarian notions that limited the true church to the self-­identified chosen of God and held over church members the threat of excommunication. In the Saxon model, developed after 1525, supervision of faith and conduct was assigned to the Visitation, a committee of two electoral councillors and two theologians. Bishops still existed but were called

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superintendents. Their authority, like that of the Visitation, came from the secular arm. Luther’s ideal of the Christian magistrate, responsible for the good order of the church, meant that the church in Saxony was in effect a state church. Wherever the Lutheran reformation was established, as, with distinctive characteristics, in England, the church enhanced rather than challenged the authority of the ruler. A large flaw in Luther’s reliance on the secular ruler is that rulers were several and differed in their priorities. City-­states had their own concerns and these were becoming urgent with the spread of Anabaptist ideas and communities.5 Within their smaller frame there was room for experiment and the search for a new model. What Luther did not provide, because he was unfitted for it by temperament and training and did not see it as his responsibility, was a way forward to a new kind of church, having elements both biblical and magisterial, that would provide its own discipline and sufficient means of protection. In Zurich, in 1523, the circumstances were propitious. Before getting his first cure of souls Huldrych Zwingli had been influenced by humanism in early studies at Vienna and Basle. He experienced the rough life of the soldier as a chaplain to Swiss troops in Italy, learning not to take authority at face value. Like Luther he had early disillusioning experience of the Papacy and its modus vivendi: now hiring mercenaries for war. Parish experience confirmed his dislike of superstition. He used to assert that he came to his theology independently of Luther, though by 1518, when he was appointed ‘common preacher’ in Zurich Cathedral, he would have been well aware of the debate raging in Germany. A plague of 1519 killed a third of the people of Zurich. Considering the fierce tone of religious debate, we have to be reminded that men lived then precariously, on the edge; days were fearful, the future uncertain. Zwingli wrote some brief prayerful lyrics, revealing not so much a natural poet as an emotional man, driven by the need to fathom the mysteries of suffering and death. His own expositions of Scripture dug to the roots as he worked towards a theology that plainly subverted the existing order. At its heart was his insistence on a direct relationship between God and man. It followed that there was need for the simplification of worship. His zeal for purification led him to the main points of difference with Luther. Salvation to Zwingli was an inner experience in which even sacrament was irrelevant, imagery abhorrent. At a public disputation, arranged by the city authorities in 1523, he presented theses for discussion before the burghers of the city. Most present had come ‘out of love for God’s will’ and God wanted him to speak by giving him His spirit. In his ‘Israel’ Zwingli was deliberately offering a new view of church authority derived from the Bible.6 Zwingli and supporting pastors won the day. He went on to effect his own reformation, abolishing the mass, instituting services in the vernacular,

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re-­ordering baptism and communion to fit his views. Crucially he got the council to endorse change and enforce conformity. City authorities would find themselves having to handle the disputes among clergy and laymen. They had recourse to the scriptures and demanded that preachers adhere to them: clergy might claim to be the best judge but had to bow to civic authority or leave. They were living in a new world – theological, political, social: the pass had been sold. Zurich was one of a number of city-­states in Germany and Switzerland whose structure would determine the way in which a ‘reformed’ church would take shape.7 But there were significant differences between the two countries. It was no accident that this second revolution occurred in a Swiss city-­state. It can only be understood in the Swiss context. The unique confederacy was a loose association of mainly self-­governing states, ranging from the peasant republics of the forest lands to the wealthy city-­states, notably Berne, Basle and Zurich. Rivals for power and influence, they posed a constant threat to their neighbours. Within the walls the restless craft guilds threatened disorder. Whereas some of the larger German cities were still flourishing and stable, Switzerland as a whole was poor, victim of falling trade and reliant on the export of its renowned pikemen for sale to the highest bidder. So the conjuncture of a political system becoming more unstable, an economy in decline and a ferment of new ideas suggests that the Swiss reformation was no accident. Among those to whom Zwingli preached there was a mood for change, even revolution. As later, in Calvin’s Geneva, religion and civic politics were interactive parts of a single process. Readings from the vernacular Bible, catechising, and sermons, like psalms, in the native language turned the church into a house of learning. Those who rejected the rituals of the old church and subscribed to the new did not have an easy life. In a world of evolving ideas much was left to individual interpretation. In particular there was room for debate about church order. The Zurich pattern reflected town politics. Luther too had held that the civil magistrate had a duty to supervise the ruling of the church. Zwingli turned the idea into a system, in effect another state church. Luther did not create, in place of the old church structure, a radical alternative body. In Zurich the ruler was the city council with whom Zwingli had to work. Individuals were subject therefore to double pressure: morals and conduct were subject to a court containing both councillors and pastors. It could initiate reforms, check behaviour and, if necessary, excommunicate. When Anabaptists began to infiltrate the city Zwingli was happy to call on the ‘Godly magistrates’. The scale was small, the result impressive. The state church in some form would be adopted by other evangelical cities of the Swiss reformation, notably Berne and Basle. No more than in Germany could the Emperor turn a blind eye. Fearing an alliance between Austria and the Catholic cantons, Zwingli worked at

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constructing a league of cities and attracting support from Germany where reform had spread. Crucial in this notional alliance was Strasbourg. Lying in a strategic position on the greatest of Europe’s highways, a vital stage in what would come to be called the Spanish road,8 the city was a religious entrepôt, a natural centre for evangelical preachers and laymen seeking their ‘New Jerusalem’. From 1524 it was to all appearances reformed, but in a flexible manner since the council was not directly involved. There was less rigidity, less willing acceptance of dogma, more of a centuries-­old spirit of independence. Other cities in southern Germany varied in reformed style and outcome but took their line generally from the Swiss model. So the differences between the Lutheran and the south German regions hardened into two distinct reformations. Around the later 1520s supporters of ‘the cause of the Gospel’ started to see themselves as defending it against the conservative and Imperialist reaction. The central issue that divided reformers was the nature of the Lord’s Supper. Alike in rejecting transubstantiation they differed profoundly over what was actually present in the elements of the Lord’s Supper. Lutherans saw in the words of Christ, ‘This is my Body’, a real presence: not the effect of human action or ‘priestly magic’ but achieved through a process called ‘consubstantiation’. The sacrament is held to contain the substance of Christ’s body and blood coterminous with the substance of the bread and wine. The one is imparted to the other by the action of saving grace responding to faith. Zwingli, by contrast, saw nothing in bread and wine but symbols. Salvation came by faith. In the act of receiving the sacrament grace entered the believing soul but only through the spirit. He still saw a spiritual ‘real presence’ but he was generally held to have reduced communion to mere commemoration. Where Luther saw in the consecrated bread is he saw signifies, no ‘priestly magic’ but scriptural support, for ‘it is the spirit that quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing’.9 The debate divided reformers, baffled the efforts of would-­be mediators like Melanchthon, and weakened the Protestant position. Meanwhile Catholicism had begun to recover its nerve, the Emperor to reassert his authority. The struggle would not be speedily resolved, certainly not by the Interim, nor by the more substantial Peace of Augsburg. Its course, fatally affected by dynastic concerns, would last, with intervals of ‘cold war’, until the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 enshrined the principle cuius regio, eius religio. Along the way there was what a milder age might call continuous dialogue; in the reformers’ world intense, principled argument, expressing belief so deeply held that opposition must stem at best from ignorance, at worst from the Devil. Debate knew no political bounds and its furies affected the attitude of successive French sovereigns towards the threat of dissidence and rebellion. Luther held to his original principle, that nothing could justify armed resistance to the Emperor. Among Protestant cities Nuremberg, with its interests in

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international trade, held to this view. But some German princes had no such inhibitions. Philip of Hesse had early shown himself ready to fight and sought allies among Swiss cities with memories of struggle against the Habsburgs. At the Colloquy of Marburg, Philip, with representatives of reformed German towns, failed to find common ground over now hardening views of doctrine. It was at this point that Zwingli lost credibility. He found that he could not carry the Swiss with him and his hectoring manner provoked a hostile alliance of cantons. He went to war as a Christian soldier. At Kappel, in 1531, he died, not in crusading tradition against the infidel, but fighting against fellow Christians divided as much by politics as by their interpretation of Scripture. His reformation lived on, led by Zurich’s Bullinger,10 whose pacific temperament and immense labours would give him an authority parallel to that of Calvin in Geneva. Peace left the Swiss Confederation divided into reformed and Catholic parts but in 1536 the Helvetic Confession, followed by the Agreement of Zurich, created the Swiss Reformed Church of modern times. Shaped by its Zwinglian respect for the free working of the spirit among individuals, it modified the rigidity of doctrine and discipline that was to be found in Geneva’s new model of church community and government. That would be the achievement of the young Frenchman who, more than any other, was the maker and moulder of the French Protestant church. Calvin’s definitive work, Institutio Christianae religionis was published in 1536. Setting out to outline for his king what he believed to be essential beliefs, he claimed that he stated nothing new but was simply returning to the purity of early Christianity. Others too were making the same claim but interpreting Scripture in disconcerting fashion. Indeed, Calvin was motivated at first by his concern to defend the evangelicals of Paris against the charge of Anabaptism. Recent events, notably in Münster, the threat of religious anarchy, even the breakdown of civil order as they knew it, worried spiritual leaders of the magisterial reformation as much as the secular authorities. King Francis, now aware of the influx of heretics, would make little distinction between ‘Lutheran’ and ‘Anabaptist’ but the latter was a convenient label, like ‘communist’ in recent times, suggestive of revolutionary intent. In reality Anabaptism, starting in several places independently, mainly in south Germany, Moravia and Switzerland, took as many forms as there were leaders capable of raising a following. A broad distinction may be made between the militant tendency and the quietist tradition, notably those that came to be known as Hutterites.11 They were notable for plain living, for eschewing profit and living ideally, as in Moravia, in separate communities, seeking not to provoke. They suffered by being associated with the violent and apocalyptic, those who sought to achieve the kingdom of heaven by force. The authorities fastened the name ‘Anabaptist’ indiscriminately on any dissident

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group; originally they had been labelled simply ‘Late Baptisers’. They preferred to call themselves Children of Light, Saints Elect, or some such name that would express their unique vision. All were sure that they should live apart from the world. Given, as many in all camps believed, that its end was nigh, Luther’s and Zwingli’s magisterial systems fell woefully short of what was required. Anabaptists saw in the Bible no foundation for infant baptism; the rite was valid only for those able to make a free choice. They had no time for tradition and custom in a church so far from universal that each church of true believers was a legitimate congregation. Invariably, to some degree, they held views subversive of society and citizenship. They were opposed to military service and they rejected the taking of oaths that underpinned all civil arrangements. They were perfectionists, shunning contact with parish churches because they might contain sinners. They had some educated leaders.12 Most, however, were poor, peasants or town labourers. Rulers might have been indifferent, thinking them harmless, had it not been for their prominent role in the peasant uprisings of 1524–26. With the spread northwards of dissident groups grew the expectation of disorder. In the beliefs of its leaders we see how far men could go in the quest for the New Jerusalem – and be believed and followed. Melchior Hoffman sought to establish an alternative theological position to that of Luther. Churches were to be controlled by prophets; they in turn to be subject to ‘apostolic messengers’. Citing early Christians he held that a true believer must accept persecution; indeed, that there was merit in tribulations. This strain would last: it can be traced in numerous sects and, at the worst times of duress, among Huguenots.13 The clear lines of authority, the balance of minister, elders and congregation in Calvin’s Geneva, that provided the model for French Protestantism, reflected the founder’s logical mindset but also the fear that Bible-­inspired individualism would run out of control. In the mind of Jan Matthijsz all religious and secular authorities were enemies of the kingdom of God. Holy congregations of the ‘last days’ must take up the sword. His millenarian views spread through north Germany and the Netherlands, where fugitives joined existing groups. One mark of admission to a church was re-­baptising and it was made a criminal offence under Imperial law. One young Dutchman, Jan Beukelz, re-­baptised by Matthijsz, found in Münster a community ripe for exploitation. With some radical councillors he established a theocratic tyranny of the most bizarre kind. He was the ‘King of Israel’ and he governed through the twelve elders of the tribes. The death penalty was common, adult re-­baptism was required and polygamy was encouraged – the example set by King Jan. No less disturbing were reports of a kind of communism: food, clothing and wealth to be shared. The prince-­bishop eventually besieged and captured the city in June 1535. So outrageous an experiment was bound to acquire symbolic character for

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Protestants and Catholics alike, and Jan stood for all that was dangerous in private revelation. Church authority was now the main issue, its resolution no less urgent because for Catholic, Lutheran, Zwinglian and now Calvinist it would rest on differing interpretations of Scripture and would take distinctive forms and appearances. Jean Calvin was only eight years old in 1517. His background, education and early career were far removed from that of Luther. He would come independently to his conclusions and they were quite different from Luther’s, both on the central issue of the Eucharist and in his ideas about church government. There is ‘nothing harder than the retrospective study of sentiments which by their very nature conceal themselves from curiosity, while all one sees of them are their outward manifestations’.14 However, it can be argued that there would have been a distinctive French reformation even if Luther had never lived. But that would be to underestimate his influence (not to mention Zwingli’s) in challenging the Catholic church at its most vulnerable points, repositioning the laity in relation to the priest and putting the Word at the heart of religious life. That was the starting point, the assumption, for Calvin, the lawyer and humanist. The Bible was his armoury when he came to write about worship, morals and religious society. Indeed, all was grounded in his reading of the scriptures, of which he had not ‘knowingly corrupted or twisted a single passage’. Furthermore Calvin’s spiritual odyssey was determined, at critical points, by circumstances arising directly out of the religious ferment of the age. He was forced to spend time in the two places, Basle and Strasbourg, where he was most likely to experience it. He was the child of the new schismatic Europe yet he was also, impressionable but independent-­minded, the product of French Catholic humanism, its probing scholarship and its challenge to traditional authority in college or church. In aspects of the German and Swiss reformations we have seen the background, the fast-­changing world of Calvin’s spiritual apprenticeship. Before pursuing his further career and developed theology it is time to return to his native land, to its distinctive ‘Pre-­reform’ culture and early heretical stirrings.

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chapter six

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The French Church, Humanism and the Pre-­R eform 1

‘No one blames a man who flees from captivity by pirates.’2

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ing Francis was slow at first to turn his mind to France’s ‘Lutherans’, as they would continue to be called till after mid-­century and to the evolution of a new church, taking its structure and theology from Calvin. He acted, at first reluctantly, but without apparent misgivings about his duty to execute or expel. The Pope was constrained by the terms of the Concordat of Bologna and faced diplomatic and legal obstacles before he could act; so church discipline was, in effect, in the hands of the king. At the outset, however, what was a heretic? What of those who sought reform within the church? That the church in France was in great need of reform was recognised widely and long before the Reformation. Criticisms of its faults had long been a favourite blood sport of French writers. The sixteenth-­century reformer would identify with the onslaughts of Nicolas de Clamanges, writing at the beginning of the fifteenth century: ‘Not a single word nowadays, when people take upon themselves the cure of souls . . . , of the salvation and edification of their subjects . . . No men learned in holy writ, no upright, just, virtuous men arrive at the supreme heights . . .’3 Clamanges noted the prevalence of lawyers over theologians and pastors and the mercenary spirit that was to be a prime target of reformers. And below the ecclesiastical heights many curés had the status of a humble villager, exemption from tax or from prosecution in civil courts alone marking the curé out as different. A hundred years on and it might seem at first that little had changed and that the anticlerical spirit had gained ground. Debate at the General Council of the French Church in 1492 centred on the issue of reform, whether it should be gradual or radical. The very word, said Michel Bureau, ‘so resounded in the ears of the people that when you speak to any man the subject frequently arises’.4 The arguments started to acquire a greater depth. In the commission

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set up by the council Jean Standonck denounced ‘ignorant preachers of ill-­ repute’, the traffic in benefices and ecclesiastical judges who ‘only pillage and vex the poor people’. Traditional words again but Standonck’s career and credentials as a spiritual guide show something else. Protected at court by Admiral de Graville, he seems to have been actively promoting groups of scholars and clergy, devout and aware of the need for reform.5 Alongside the reaction against well-­documented abuses, there is evidence for an organic movement within the Western church: men and women looking for an honest understanding and a more vital faith, scholars prepared to examine texts without prejudice. It can be recognised in the work of Cardinal Francisco Ximénez de Cnisneros, as a reforming archbishop of Toledo. His sponsorship of scholars was responsible for the magnificent Complutensian Polyglot, a six-­volume text of the Vulgate Latin Bible with parallel Greek and Hebrew versions alongside, and commentaries in Latin. Ironically, the last volume appeared in 1517. The year before had seen the publication of Erasmus’ version of the New Testament that so profoundly influenced reformers, distracting attention from a remarkable achievement of humanist scholarship. In France reform was less a party, indicating the kind of concerted, campaigning effort later seen in the dévots, than the witness, teaching and godly lives of some charismatic individuals, which anticipated the ‘age of souls’, the French ‘counter-­reformation’.6 To be in fit shape to generate a programme of reform, to benefit from humanist scholarship, to see it not as a threat but as an ally and to welcome the spirit of evangelism, the church required institutional reform. The new emphasis on personal faith was a source of hope to individual Christians but a threat to the structure of the church. There is the heart of the matter: the failure of the institutional church to match the spirit of the hour. It would result in a double failure: to check the advance of Protestantism before it became an alternative church, on the way to being a virtual state; and to manage some outcome other than civil war. The failure is highlighted by a marked rise in communal devotion and the efforts of heroic individuals: indications of what men and women aspired to but failed to find in the ministrations of the church. An early pioneer in evangelism, directing processions and preaching about the last days, Vincent Ferier had striven to bring home to the sinner the urgency of moral reform. He was canonised in 1455. In Brittany, around 1450, friar Pierre Morin had found support for his campaign against luxury and depravity. In the same vein the Florentine Dominican Girolamo Savonarola showed the potential for a preacher who could make hellfire seem real, moral reform essential. Excommunication was Pope Alexander VI’s predictable response; Florentines first applauded the friar, then hanged him (1498). The Cordelier Antoine Fradin was a French version of Savonarola. He got Paris

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prostitutes coming repentant to the doors of convents but was silenced when he ventured to censure the court: a salutary lesson for future reformers. The stock-­in-­trade of men like the vicar-­general of the Observant Franciscans, Olivier Maillard, and the Cordelier Michel Menot, preaching just before Luther opened up the field, was the violent denunciation of abuses. Buzzing like wasps round a rotting apple they could expect counter-­attack, charges of heresy that would become more serious after Luther and schism. Members of the religious orders, especially Augustinians, then became prime targets for the courts. Meanwhile, in the relatively relaxed atmosphere before 1517, we can see that there was more to anticlericalism than the almost ritual abuse and mockery. Along with it, notably in bourgeois circles, can be seen devout lives with serious, even passionate Christian commitment. As elsewhere in Christendom, men and women looked for a more vital faith. Some found it in the new cult of the Rosary and devotion to the Stations of the Cross. The last years before the Reformation were also the golden age of confraternities, usually devoted to the cult of the Virgin Mary, and generous patrons of religious art. In invocation and imagery Mary was honoured as never before. Associations like the Puy d’Amiens were devoted to her celebration. In 1497 the Sorbonne set its seal on Marian devotion by imposing an oath on its Bachelors of Arts that they would profess the Franciscan doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. Other lay fraternities were set up around the turn of the century under the aegis, typically, of the Passion and Corpus Christi. Solidarity within the group, communal action, a desire to be independent – in different ways they could pose a serious challenge to the hierarchies of church and city. It does not follow that France could have experienced a distinctive Catholic reformation without external – and heretical – stimulus. However, when heresies spread and parties formed, lay associations would be found at the heart of popular resistance – and of Catholic reaction. At first bishops seem generally to have feared lay initiatives that they could not control – especially when linked to the name of some grandee or court clique. It became the fashion among the greatest in the land to look for spiritual counsel from Observant friars, those who adhered strictly to the Rule. The protection given to the new order of the Hermits of St Francis, the Minims, suggests pious concerns in high places. In the person of Louise of Savoy the crown set an example. It was her request, when childless, for the prayers of François de Paule, founder of the Minims, that led royal efforts, equally successful, to secure his canonisation. Spiritual aspiration was expressed, in orthodox manner but almost to folly, in the Cathedral of Beauvais, whose loftily disproportionate nave rises above the plain, its very incompleteness eloquent of a changing world. New churches in the flamboyant style, religious art ever more ambitious, images devoutly

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fashioned, the burgeoning sale of religious storybooks, all speak of spiritual impulse. Reality for many would have been an untrained priest, a church unplastered, rush strewn, not so far apparently from the peasant’s barn. A place it might be where he would take his ease, spit on the ground, gossip with a neighbour, keep an eye on the priest at the altar and respect the holy mumble – but jeer at him if he ventured on a matter deemed beyond his province. But there was another reality beyond present circumstances, human failings and primitive manners: in innumerable sites about the country the sense of sacred space. It would lie at the heart of conflict when Protestant communities introduced a different idea of the sacred and a hurtful disrespect for cherished sites and shrines.7 Faith among the mass of people, still animist at heart, found expression in the plethora of shrines. Country occupations and needs had long been expressed in popular cults. There were saints for most purposes, from health to harvest, wooing to witch-­spotting; fraternities for rites of passage, masses to cover purgatory and beyond. With recurring plagues and popular almanacs to promote the idea of an angry God and impending Apocalypse, people’s fears were ripe for exploitation – or for a gentler, responsibly guided, course of reform. Could the church not encourage and use the popular piety that was so evident? What might have been achieved by more reform-­minded or prescriptive bishops is shown by those few dioceses where they took a lead. One such was the bishop of Nantes, Antoine de Créqui, who did much to restrain early Protestant advance after his arrival in 1554, ensuring that the seaport did not become another La Rochelle.8 None could equal the remarkable record of the diocese of Rodez. It benefited from a succession of zealous bishops. By the early sixteenth century, when François d’Estaing was bishop, only 2 per cent of the churches were ruinous and church ornaments were kept in good order; there was a priest to every forty souls and they had available an impressive amount of liturgical material; relatively few lived with concubines. There, as in a few other dioceses, can be observed the promoting of Eucharistic worship which, with its theatrical aspects, might be faith-­enhancing but, to the evangelical, objectionable. He came with a different idea of what was fitting for the Lord’s Supper. A bishop’s attitude to discipline, rigorous in the case of d’Estaing, relaxed under his more typical successor Georges d’Armagnac, would count for much in the checking or spreading of dissent. At Rennes the attachment of Bretons to their own language and saints meant anyway that the province would be stony ground for ‘Lutherans’. The uncompromising attitude of Bishop Mayeuc ensured that they would gain no significant foothold outside the port of Nantes, the capital, Rennes, and a few private estates like that of the Rohans. By contrast it was the slackness of officials in the diocese of Rouen that allowed

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Protestants to seize the initiative during the 1550s. Reforming efforts, like those in the 1490s in Meaux by Bishop Jean l’Huillier, with stress upon the sacramental life and responsible priesthood, were not by themselves a sufficient defence against heresy. There was always the fundamental problem, familiar to all students of revolution: to cleanse, or worse, alter the house was to risk opening the door to those who would pull it down. When Guillaume Briçonnet became bishop, with his evangelical emphasis, though arguably still entirely Catholic, Meaux became a notable refuge of Protestants. By mid-­century the concerns of government about the spread of heresy had reached every parish and cloister. A visitation was carried out in 1551 for a projected church council. Fourteen surviving diocesan records provide snapshots of clerical behaviour but overall convey only a patchy idea of the state of the church before the most intense period of Protestant growth. Of course, for the parishioner everything depended on the quality of the priest, whether resident rector or vicaire. Among parishioners’ complaints of shortcomings drunkenness features widely; parishioners minded less the priest who had a mistress. There was a general concern that the priest should meet their needs, in regular service and decent conduct. It was the hunger for the good shepherd that, if not satisfied, left the field open to the Protestant. Some bishops were concerned particularly with the fabric of the church and with outward decency. Others, of Gallican tendency, were against anything overtly Roman and desired, like Vicar-­General Louis de Bouteiller of Beauvais, a liturgy and breviary suited to ‘a religion purified of superstition’, rid of cherished legends. This would be a significant strand in the attitudes of the Counter-­Reformation, with orthodoxy and discipline going hand in hand. In others again the emphasis was on the strict teaching of traditional doctrine, as restated by the doctors of the Sorbonne and translated into law by Francis I in 1543. Beyond the preferences of individual churchmen we see distinct expressions of what it meant to be Catholic in France. In the resulting pockets and fissures of the church establishment the seeds of Protestantism could find soil and space to grow. Quis custodiet custodes? What a visitation does not reveal is what priests thought of those above them; nor the chronic grievances, commendation or the appropriation of tithes. In a potentially revolutionary situation a critical point is reached when those best placed to see what is wrong and who have the energy to effect change are blocked from promotion – of themselves or of their cause. The curés, monks and friars who feature prominently among early renegades saw that the upper clergy were excessively privileged and remote from pastoral concerns. With 114 bishoprics and 800 abbeys and priories and a remarkable number of canonries9 at their disposal kings continued to use their patronage to secure the loyalty of the nobility and to reward high

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officials. In the reign of Francis I, of 129 bishops appointed, 93 were either princes of the blood or nobles of the sword. Under Henry II, of 80 bishops appointed just three had theological degrees; only 15 had studied canon law. There were 101 incumbent bishops in 1559; only 19 resided regularly in their dioceses. Some bishops were neither ordained nor consecrated. To a man like Cardinal de Tournon,10 the bishopric was just one piece in the pattern of landed wealth and power – and he was able to exploit it. To the king he was an invaluable agent of government. The church was an arm of the state. Chancellor Duprat, chief negotiator for Francis at Bologna, was ordained just before his elevation to the archbishopric of Sens; his first appearance there was at his burial. A worthy candidate of relatively humble family might be fortunate to get a poor southern see. Particularly offensive to critics in Parlement was the advancement of Italians to reward military or financial service, or to strengthen diplomatic links with the Papal and other Italian states. Of the various arrangements designed to promote the mutual interest of crown and nobility, those, for instance, designed to keep a see or religious house ‘in the family’,11 the most indefensible was that of commendation. When the bishop or abbot was unqualified or unwilling to perform his duties but willing to receive the revenues he paid a surrogate. Unusual at the grandest level was Georges d’Amboise, who gave up his other dioceses when he became archbishop of Rouen in 1494 and began to promote reforms. More typical was his nephew Georges II, archbishop in turn from 1511 to 1550 and notoriously slack at a time when Protestantism was starting to make significant inroads. So reformers challenged a church still serving a regime that depended for effective rule on loyalty purchased largely by church revenues. As an institution, whose prevailing values appeared to be those of the market, it failed to respond adequately to the needs of those who sought their own salvation, within or without the church. Meanwhile the life of most religious houses mirrored the faults of the church as a whole, all the more unattractive by contrast with the professed aims of prayer, learning and the discipline of the cloistered life. Jean de Cirey, abbot of Cîteaux, saw that reform was required ‘where there was deviation from the first form of religion’.12 But an insider’s voice was still rare. Abuse at the highest level was carried down the line to the lesser benefices, as patrons, lay or ecclesiastical, used their right to reward their clients. It did not escape the author of the Book of Merchants (1534) who compared the bourgeois dealing in merchandise with the nobleman trafficking in benefices. What this could lead to is illustrated by one situation, that of the Cotentin in Normandy, described in the journal of Gilles de Gouberville.13 His uncle, sire de Roussy, drew the revenues from three cures, leased for a song to vicars. Gilles, who was sympathetic to the Huguenots but remained a conventional Catholic, had a share in the revenues of his own parish, whose cure was in the

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gift of the abbot of Cherbourg. The incumbent never appeared; the priest he employed was frequently drunk. He was lucky to have a post; many had no living and subsisted by manual labour. This was not the most remote of regions; nor is there a hint of spiritual concern in Gouberville’s complacent account. The competent and conscientious parish priest was to be found, but he was uncommon. At all levels the French church appears to have been often scandalous in example and unfit for God’s purpose. Positions in the hierarchy often reflected local influence. At Calvin’s Noyon the de Hangest family monopolised ecclesiastical posts and enjoyed a large patronage – vital to Calvin’s father, and subsidising his own student career. The world he entered was abuzz with gossip and views, critical and subversive. Lacking a coherent policy, the church was unable to enforce orthodoxy even when it was sure what that was. We see only random strikes at vulnerable individuals. Flaws were being exposed by critical examination of texts, leading to a new understanding of the Bible. Now the central, urgent issue was the perversion of theology and sanctioning of practices which had more to do with raising money than with the salvation of souls. Long before Luther posed his fateful theses one can see a broadening area where Gallican principles, prejudice against Italians – and humanist scholarship – could find common ground. Prejudice was well founded. After Julius II, the warrior pontiff whom Erasmus imagined finding, exclusus, at heaven’s gate, the church needed probity and vision: it got the cultured Medici Leo X (1513–22) and a new dimension in the patronage of art; St Peter’s and indulgences to pay for its magnificence. Crudely advertised as offering instant release from the pains of purgatory, indulgences were condemned as ‘false and scandalous’ by the Sorbonne. Could that have been the start line for a French, institution-­led reformation? Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith made the cleaner decisive cut – and in the process diverted the professors’ concern: more serious than the faults of Rome was the heresy of Germany. Luther apart, the failure of Rome to respond adequately to the real shifts within Christendom, in religious sensibility as in intellectual re-­evaluation, meant that the desire for reform became infused with urgency and fuelled by indignation. The challenge was immense. The brief pontificate of Charles V’s former tutor, the gently devout Pope Adrian IV (1521–23) shows him torn between the scheming politicians of Rome and the ambition of the dynasts. He was ineffectual and brought to an early grave. Those who would have preferred to bring about renewal within the structures of the church came to see them as the main obstacles. Humanists, essentially loyal to the church, were frustrated. So, in some cases, with pain and risk, reformers became revolutionaries. Humanism: the term is used broadly to convey a movement or an attitude. In some ways it was both. Leading humanists corresponded and some

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envisaged a common enterprise, the search for truth. Scholarship was at its heart, enquiry its message, print its means. By 1500 there are known to have been some 27,000 printed titles. Nearly three-­quarters were in Latin, but there were also vernacular books of devotion and prayer, alongside romances and almanacs. In France, by 1500, there was already a profitable business in abridged bibles or selected stories: enough to stir interest and provide a standard against which to judge the performance of the priest. Wherever printed books were becoming available there was excitement at new learning; at coming to the springs of ancient knowledge that would encourage readers to go further on modern tracks. The clergy’s monopoly of learning was broken; adult literacy was becoming a desirable accomplishment: it would lead to a fuller life for women as well as men. Library catalogues, like those of Amiens studied by Lucien Febvre,14 appear to show that those who could afford to buy books favoured vernacular translations of the scriptures, expositions and devotional works. How startling to the reader must have seemed the contrast between the conduct of the contemporary stewards of God’s city and the words and actions of Jesus! As individuals and groups sought new ways to salvation they saw possibilities outside the church. A religion used to defining and expressing itself in external forms was rediscovering the appeal to the individual that had animated the early Christians. Paul and Augustine were studied avidly. Two distinct currents, from south and north, can be envisaged as flowing into the European mainstream and towards France by the start of the sixteenth century. First was the essentially secular approach, with scholars engaged in the revival and study of classical texts using methods that could be applied equally to Scripture. Second was the religious revival in northern Europe, the Devotio Moderna,15 tending towards mysticism and expressed in contemplation, prayer, devotion, all with an emphasis on the individual and on groups of like-­minded Christians, men and women, seeking a personal way. It found its finest expression in Thomas à Kempis’ Imitation of Christ that still reads freshly and cogently as a guide to a Christian life. ‘Back to the sources, learn Greek, study the texts’ was the cry of the humanists. They were experiencing, and through their studies and editing of texts transmitting, a new vision, and at its heart a new set of values: man at the centre of the universe, still needing God but serving Him best when serving truth; discovering it through research. That meant discarding the glosses that encrusted received texts, obscuring their original purity and force; exposing the teaching that conspired to preserve vested interests; looking, it might seem, for a new way of being the church. In the first years of the sixteenth century, the period when change did not inevitably imply schism, several individuals stand out for their work and influence.

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Towering above all, specially well placed to take advantage of printing, and a truly international figure was Erasmus. Son of a Dutch priest, influenced by the Devotio Moderna, frustrated and miserable as a monk – all that he would reject as he made a name for himself in the world of scholarship. His Adages, a collection of proverbs with his commentaries culled from Scripture and the classics, was the first international best-­seller in print. With its scholarship went the light touch and the note of irony that men came to recognise as Erasmian. A welcome guest at courts, universities and the private homes of scholars, far from scornful of life’s comforts, he was unremittingly industrious, a scholar with an ideal and a mission. More than any man he contributed to the liberation of thought from the constraints of traditional authority; to the stimulus to the private study and judgement that nourished Protestant souls. He managed, at times precariously, to stay on the right side of the line that divided the liberal from the heretical. It meant temporising in ways that attracted scorn from both sides of the hardening theological debate. He was no stranger, however, to spiritual ardour, to disciplined rule, or an austere life. He had encountered them during his uncomfortable stay in Paris at the Collège de Montaigu where Standonck advocated the Brethren’s devotional way, Christ-­ centred and Pauline, with frequent religious exercises. Here was something different from the humanists’ approach. It had a strong flavour of mediaeval pietism, radical as much in what it held irrelevant – the structure of the church and the authority of the priest – as in what it offered in prayer and praise. The mature Erasmus may have turned his back on the severe ideals of the Brethren; yet he acquired much of their attitude to life. He hated abstract speculation, the intellectual pride based on flawless logic. He came early to the conclusion that the goal of learning is the good life. He remained a Catholic but lived to see schism and to know that several of his books were put on the Papal Index. ‘If in doubt, laugh’ might have been his motto. Leo X was sophisticated enough to laugh with him. But Erasmus’ ironic spirit entered with corrosive effect into criticism of social order and institutions. Monks and friars were traditionally fair game for popular jest. They offered a prime target for the lubricious wit of François Rabelais. They did not come well out of the humanist audit. It is possible to see several areas where Erasmus’ attacks weakened the walls of the citadel. Most attractive and influential on the religious sensibility of the time was Enchiridion, or the Manual of a Christian Soldier. Published in 1503 it soon became a best-­seller. Conceived as a layperson’s guide to Scripture it advanced the appealing idea that the church could be reformed through regular recourse to the scriptures and to the Fathers, notably Jerome and Augustine. The approach gained authority from his seminal publication of the New Testament in its original Greek, alongside the Latin text. For the first

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time, scholars could compare the later and sometimes faulty Vulgate Latin of St Jerome with the original. Critical scholarship in the hands of a master was disturbing to those who regarded the Vulgate as sacred text, authoritative for succeeding generations. In the case of certain texts that underpinned Catholic theology and practice it was earth-­shaking. A theology of the sacrament of penance was challenged by the re-­translation of a single word.16 Mariolatory was a powerful feature of church practice. Erasmus did not scorn devotion to Mary but said that it should not be bolstered by prophetic utterances. Where there was no plain authority for a practice in the Bible, then church practice over millennia could support it. He was anticipating a crucial issue at the heart of debate, raised but not resolved in the Reformation: was the Bible all of sacred truth, all that was authentic, all needful? Or should men look to tradition, with equal respect for what could simply not be found in Scripture? So Erasmus could believe in the virginity of Mary though it was not expounded in sacred text. The ‘farmer at plough, and weaver at shuttle’, Erasmus’ imagined readers, may not have gained much directly. But the way was open to more vernacular translations so that those who could read – an increasing number – could go to the source. They could tremble before the Law and the Prophets, thrill to the poetry and soul-­searching insights of the Psalms, and learn about the life of Christ and the experiences of the first Christians. They could find challenging doctrine in St Paul and judge for themselves whether they needed the mediation of a priest. If Calvin’s training was humanist in character, he and early French Protestants were to be, above all, a people of the Word. There is a telling story about Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples (c. 1455–1536), the greatest French humanist of the time, classicist and biblical scholar. He was engaged in making a harmony of four Latin translations of the Psalms when he asked the monks of St-­Germain in Paris how they felt about reciting the psalms. They said that they had not understood what they were singing and found the routine discouraging. Lefèvre’s biblical studies, based on Greek and Hebrew originals, may even have influenced Luther. In a commentary on Paul’s letters addressed to Marguerite d’Angoulême,17 Lefèvre hinted at the potentially revolutionary idea of justification by faith alone. Author of a student textbook on science and of a commentary on Aristotle, he reached out beyond academe to the ‘Evangelicals of Meaux’ and other reform-­minded clerics with his message for the church: it should recover the spirit of early Christians. Elements arising from humanist writing and teaching would combine to form a doctrine of expectation and hope for a purer church, nearer to that of the first apostles. Erasmus repudiated the Lutheran reformation, ‘this stupid and pernicious tragedy’, and ‘the odious dissensions’ that followed it. Lefèvre sought only quiet and space for his scholarly and pious pursuits. But the

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former’s witty sallies, coming as they did from the most prominent citizen of the international world of letters, had done much to hearten reformers. Lefèvre’s translations into French, of the New Testament in 1523 and the Old in 1528, encouraged private study, sharpened debate, lit for a growing number of his fellow countrymen the first candles of an evangelical spirituality. For them, as for him, these were dangerous times; other candles were flickering. The Sorbonne had declared the writings of Luther heretical in 1521. The Luther effect was to expose Catholic, authentic, inspiring work to the charge of heresy. Sound ideas were associated with the extremes of behaviour believed to result from the initial challenge to the established order – of society as of church. How alarming Anabaptism was held to be may be judged by the fierce response to any of the humbler sort who might speak rashly; also the more subtle undermining of those considered dangerous because of high place and influence. As abbot of St Germain, Guillaume Briçonnet sheltered Lefèvre and co­­­ operated with him in the reform of his monastery. When in 1516 Briçonnet was made bishop of Meaux and started to promote reform, that word did not have its later meaning, with its overtones of schism, the formation of party, and militancy. He had enjoyed a good start: his father, also Guillaume, a royal counsellor, was ordained after his wife’s death, became a cardinal and exerted huge influence to secure backing for the archbishopric of Reims.18 As they advanced along the privileged fast track the family represented much that reformers deplored. But a spirit was abroad and who could tell where it might be felt? Guillaume fils did valuable work for the king at Rome, dealing with questions that arose from the Concordat. He came to Meaux as a capable royal servant, beneficiary of the family’s trade in high office, but known to be pious. He soon gathered like-­minded men around him, ‘the Evangelicals of Meaux’, drawn by his preaching, writing and example. Protecting them he incurred suspicion. He was twice summoned before Parlement after the Sorbonne ruled Lefèvre’s doctrines heretical, to defend himself against charges of heresy. The main thrust of Briçonnet’s pastorate was reform within the church. He visited every parish and encouraged priests to deliver short homilies with a commentary on the Epistle and Gospel. Parishes were grouped in circuits with teachers allotted to each. The programme was novel enough to alert the Sorbonne. There, observing events in Germany and the passage from gospels in the vernacular to social radicalism, they misread its essential purpose. It did not help the reformers of Meaux that translation of Scripture was at the heart of their enterprise. Nor, at another level of cause and effect, that a sequence of bad harvests threatened famine. Hearing of unrest among famished weavers, Briçonnet came to see the delicacy of his position. After Jean Le Clerc had been whipped through the streets for having put up posters attacking

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indulgences19 he required his preachers to affirm their validity and that of prayers to Mary and the saints. He was an earnest reformer but cautious, seeing the danger of misrepresentation. No more than Lefèvre would he cross the line. The authorities were egged on by Noel Bédier, the learned and reactionary principal of the Collège de Montaigu and from 1520 syndic of the Sorbonne. In his view ‘Luther’s errors enter more through the works of Erasmus and Lefèvre than any others.’ His accusations were wild and inconsistent; indeed, Protestantism was stimulated as much by the censures of the authorities as by any ideas that strayed beyond orthodoxy.20 If more bishops had been like Bríçonnet would it have made such headway? When Briçonnet denounced ‘Lutheranism’ (1523) his group started to go their separate ways, Farel for example towards an overt and proselytising Protestantism; he features strongly in the chain of connections and causes that led to Geneva.

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chapter seven

s

‘God Will Change the World’ Sects of Zwinglians and Oecolampadians that they commonly call Lutherans.1

G

uillaume Farel (1489–1565) was for a time regent of the Collège Cardinal Le Moine in Paris. Impatient with the constraints of academic life, he left Paris to join the congregation at Meaux. From around 1520 he was one of the most fervent advocates of reform. From personal conversion to preaching missions, with temporary stays at Strasbourg, Berne and Geneva, his career reveals something of the dynamics of early Protestantism. Looking back from middle age he described to a friend how he had been converted. He had been faithful to Catholicism, read the Bible ‘because the Pope gave it authority’ and thought, when he saw apparent absurdities, that they lay in his own lack of understanding. Then he met Lefèvre who showed him how merit is nothing; all is of God’s grace. The short, red-­bearded, fiery-­eyed Farel had wrestled with texts with the intensity of a man who, once enlightened, has to tell the world. ‘God will change the world,’ Lefèvre once told him, ‘and you will be there to see it.’ He made contacts with other dissidents, notably Vaudois, adherents to the old Waldensian heresy.2 Like the Lollards in England, families with surviving traditions of dissent and persecution were likely to respond to a new generation of missionaries. Farel wanted only that ‘the soul shall be on fire’. In Calvin’s words, ‘he burned with an extraordinary zeal to advance the gospel’. His treatise on the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed was widely read. He was a tremendous preacher. One can imagine his force among people, at first in the French-­speaking parts of Switzerland, near his native Dauphiné, who had heard nothing like it: vivid imagery, homely tales and a stern message for those who exploited or tricked the simple. The story of his missions reads like the journal of John Wesley or – surely his inspiration – the Acts of the Apostles. He was thrown out of towns, escaped a stoning, a would-­be drowning, imprisonment – altogether a Pauline

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experience. In one church he preached to such effect that the people drove out the priest and tore down the images: a warning of what was to come. His extreme language and simple faith did not appeal to all. Erasmus thought him crude and persuaded the council to throw him out of Basle. He fetched up eventually in Geneva. In 1536 he persuaded Calvin to join him; with Calvin, two years later, he was expelled from the city. Calvin returned and thereafter Farel was to be overshadowed by his more talented colleague. His most important work had already been achieved. For many years he ministered in Neuchâtel as a bachelor, before, at sixty-­nine, he caused scandal by marrying his housekeeper’s daughter, aged seventeen. By then the reaction against ‘Popish’ celibacy had come to the point where it was felt that a good Protestant should marry. A priest’s desire for a woman; a layman’s desire for church property: these were to be standard charges against Protestants. Among first recruits, appearing among early victims of the chambre ardente, were renegade monks and friars. To such men the ideas of Erasmus came as a tonic, mind-­broadening and exciting. In Strasbourg Farel met the ex-­Dominican Alsatian Martin Bucer3 before renouncing his orders and turning to Luther. Here men of the northern reformation could debate with the more radical Zwinglians. It was Calvin’s preferred place of refuge; at first more influential than Geneva on French Protestantism. We have seen that until the mid-­1540s Bucer played a leading part in efforts to find a basis for compromise between the parties, German and Swiss, with their distinct views on church and sacraments. Eventually he suffered the fate of the moderate in a climate of extremes: discredited at Strasbourg he moved to England and to an unofficial role as adviser to Thomas Cranmer. He gave more to the evolution of English Protestantism than to the style and theology of the French whose more vulnerable situation would call for a clearer message, a narrower focus than was offered by Bucer’s vision of moral reformation. After Henry VIII’s break with Rome and assumption of supremacy the church was of, not simply in England and his archbishop could direct the course of the church under the eye of the king. It follows that the progress of Protestantism, briefly interrupted during the reign and Catholic interlude of Mary, towards the Elizabethan settlement of an episcopal church, avowedly both Protestant and Catholic, was markedly different from that of the Huguenot minority in Catholic France. Interesting possibilities are raised, however, by the position of the Pyrenean principality of Navarre brought to prominence in 1527 by the marriage to its king of Francis I’s sister, Marguerite of Angoulême, after a childless first marriage. In early widowhood she had established her own household near Lyons then continued, as queen, to provide shelter in her court at Nérac and Pau, to writers, theologians and preachers.

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A woman of fine sensibility, guided in her early spiritual life by Briçonnet, Marguerite’s writing strayed towards the heterodox; Queen Elizabeth, recognising a kindred spirit, had her Mirror of the Christian Soul translated into English. Her many letters and poems reveal deep piety and an imagination not to be constrained by sex or status, or indeed convention. Her remarkable Boccaccio-­style Heptameron was voluptuous in the refined manner characteristic of the time; it was also suffused with deep religious emotion. She was sufficiently self-­confident to spurn the pedantry and conservatism of those, notably at the Sorbonne, who sought to eradicate anything that might be subversive. There is no simple connection between her court – her following – and Calvinism, whose moral discipline would not appeal. But the evangelism, gracious, Meaux-­style, that inspired her in the 1520s, was always at the heart of her spiritual odyssey. The patronage she extended to men of evangelical bent encouraged them to think at large, even to break bounds. After the dissolution of the community at Meaux Lefèvre spent his later years under her protection. Like him she remained a Catholic, which, with her rank, and her brother’s support, enabled her to continue to offer a refuge to humanists and reformers. Calvin, briefly, was among them. The contrast between the growth of Protestantism in England, where Parliament provided a public forum for religious debate, and in France, is also to be seen in the theological conservatism entrenched in the capital’s two dominant institutions. The professors of the Sorbonne, serving the interest of the king and matching the declining authority of Rome, came in matters of doctrine to fulfil the role of inquisitors and judges. From their college windows they looked apprehensively towards the east and to ‘Lutheranism’. Keepers of the temple, they judged it their duty to be vigilant; and they suspected the motives of their native evangelicals. There were some in their own ranks, 15 out of 80 apparently, who contributed heterodox ideas to their periodic discussions. More visibly Lefèvre and Briçonnet were helping to shape a Pauline faith that led, though they did not wish it, to a selective reception of Luther. An important role of Parlement, exercising justice on behalf of the king, was the defence of public morals and of religion; trustee, as it were, for the king’s coronation oath. On its own initiative, or on application by the Sorbonne, it might censor books, ban the sale of those already printed, or have them seized and burned. When, as in this period, Sorbonne and Parlement acted together, they constituted a formidable obstacle to free thought. At all stages of the Huguenot story the Sorbonne would have a significant, if largely negative influence. However, Francis had a mind of his own and admired Lefèvre. When, in the summer of 1523, the Sorbonne summoned him to appear to defend certain propositions, Francis vetoed the proceeding. While he was in Italy, dealing with the crisis caused by the defection of the Constable

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de Bourbon, his mother, Louise of Savoy, anxious to reassure the church, listened more sympathetically to the Sorbonne and supported a mission to combat ‘Lutheran heresy’. When Lefèvre’s New Testament appeared (1523), with its evangelical preface, Parlement prepared to condemn it; but Francis, back at home, stopped the process and praised the author in terms that alarmed the theological and legal establishment. They feared his free-­ranging intellect and his patronage of independent-­minded scholars. Notable among them was Guillaume Budé, a royal secretary and versatile scholar who mastered Greek and wrote about Roman law. He enlarged the royal library and was instrumental in persuading Francis to found lectureships that became the Collège de France, as a centre of humanist studies outside the control of the university. He never came out as Protestant but on his deathbed declined Catholic rites. Like other crown servants in his position Budé relied on the king’s goodwill – and that depended, for all his independence of mind, on diplomatic considerations. Supporting German Protestant princes against the Emperor Charles V, Francis had to balance their views against the need to appear a good Catholic at home. From the outset the fate of Protestantism in France was to be determined largely by the attitude of successive kings. Diplomacy was affected by tactical considerations and the fortunes of war. At the deepest level, where the sense of heritage and awareness of royal duty came into play, the argument for orthodoxy was compelling. However much Francis may have sympathised with individual patrons of reform, including family members, there was too much at stake for any venture into the unknown. Unlike Henry VIII he was not thwarted, in any essential matter, by the authority of the Pope. He would remain Catholic; it did not yet mean that he would lend his authority to persecution. He was challenged by one of his toughest subjects, who led the conservatives of the Sorbonne. Noel Bédier was a theological terrier, a type to be found on both sides of the eventual divide. He hunted with relish, flushed out numerous books and authors, and persuaded the Faculty to condemn them. The humanists of the Cercle de Meaux again became his target when Francis protected and Marguerite favoured them. Marguerite went on her private way, taking what she found best. Bédier probably approved the students’ play that lampooned her as a housewife who became demented on reading the Bible. He yapped too much when he censured her book, Miroir de l’âme pêcheresse, sought to discipline her evangelical almoner, Gérard Roussel, and finally criticised Francis himself for being too easy-­going. He was then disgraced, lost his offices, and was banished for life. Meaux was Bédier’s prime target and early casualties there included some unassuming bibliens. The bishop himself appeared less than heroic when, tried

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by Parlement’s Faith Commission, he affirmed his orthodoxy and condemned Luther. His early career had taught him to make political judgements about the well-­being of the realm. Fear too is understandable. At Metz, in 1522, two men were tortured and burned for impiety. In 1523 the Augustinian monk Jean Vallière was burned in Paris for having read and commented on Luther’s works. In 1526 a young man, recently returned from Scotland, was burned for ‘Lutheranism’. Another, having disparaged the Virgin, had his tongue slashed, before being strangled and burned. Five more were burned in the next three years. Loose talk, it seemed, could cost a life. Persecution was ferocious but haphazard and patchy. That was only partly because targets were hard to identify. It was also because the church authorities could not be sure of the king. The young Francis had favoured openness, especially among nobles like Louis de Berquin, translator of Erasmus’ letters, and he resisted the conservatives. He tried to protect Berquin before his third, loaded trial and summary execution in 1529. With his educated intelligence, social status and admiring friends, could Berquin have been the man to lead an effective reform movement? Beza reflected on the possibility: ‘France might have had another Luther in Louis de Berquin.’4 The story of Meaux, the sheer diversity of reforming efforts, the understandable reluctance of leaders to sacrifice much that they cherished in Catholicism, the power of the institutions that guarded it, militated against the possibility. Reform must come with a coherent theology, a viable form – and from the outside. The only hope otherwise, now fast fading, was a lead from the top: the king. Francis would have appreciated Erasmus’ comment: ‘France has always smiled on me’5 but he found him elusive, valuing his freedom. The king would soon, moreover, begin to see the dangerous side of scholarship, committed to freedom in the search for accuracy, free to range where truth would lead. His ‘royal lecturers’ were to teach Greek and Hebrew, in addition to the traditional Latin. Other institutions, notably the universities of Orléans and Bourges, had a reputation for independent scholarship and would become nests of heresy. Even less likely to take its tone from Paris was the University of Grenoble, influenced both by Italian humanists and Swiss evangelists. It was no accident that the Dauphiné was to become an early, and lasting, haven for Huguenots. The kingdom was so far from being a centralised entity that anything like a single policy, enacted uniformly, was inconceivable. That was also the case with the church: here an energetic bishop, there an indifferent one. Effective rule in the provinces lay with feudal magnates; in towns with councils looking primarily to local concerns. As Protestantism started to make inroads into towns, coercion and punishment were the fate of the relatively few individuals or groups who attracted attention by open defiance, were betrayed, or otherwise fell foul of zealous officials. Communications were primitive; even close

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to the capital a man might lie low. After Nicolas Cop’s challenging evangelical sermon of All Saints’ Day, November 1533,6 Calvin felt it wise to leave the capital. He spent time in the country with friends and pursued his studies unmolested but he was back before the furore over the Placards7 (October 1634) meant that he must go further. Michael Servetus was more actively pursued, but he went to ground in the Rhône Valley under a pseudonym and went on writing.8 The reformers continued to hope that the king would favour them. Calvin wanted to engage the king’s mind in serious study of the reformers’ case. Ten years before, he might have succeeded. Whatever advantages Francis perceived to lie in an alliance with German Protestant princes they could not be allowed to deflect him from his orthodox stance. In the early 1530s he was still ready to listen to individual pleas for mercy. But he was turning his mind to the problem of maintaining order. It was now the disruptive potential of Protestantism that concerned him. In the early days French Protestantism would have been wide open, without clear shape: in Febvre’s words ‘magnificent religious anarchy’ before precise confessions of faith were worked out.9 One could encounter it, join in meetings and hear preachers, without necessarily believing that one had left Catholicism. After all, had this subtle scholar, that young friar, that earnest layman, said anything so radical that there was no going back? Friars had long been seen by church and lay authorities as a mixed blessing, prone to playing to the gallery, competing with the parish priest for an audience. There could lie grounds for a heresy charge. Among laymen the wider availability of the scriptures gave anticlericalism a sharper, Rabelaisian edge. With no shortage of time-­servers and predators the target was broad enough; for many, the aim was more likely to be reform of church practice than change of doctrine. A typically hazy view was expressed by Arnauld Fabrice when he wrote in 1535 of ‘sects of Zwinglians and Oecolampadians10 that they commonly call Lutherans’. Such uncertainties were one reason why the authorities were slow, at first, to react. That began to change with the publication of the French version of Calvin’s Institutio and the training of missionaries to bring to the mother country a coherent evangelical message. Whatever the difficulties it is worth asking what it was in the new religious teachings that attracted ordinary people. What was it that the weavers of Amiens heard that might tempt them? Did they nod their heads when Vicar-­General Jean Morand told them that salvation lay in faith not in works, that the authority of the church was not founded on Scripture, that excommunication was not valid? He was condemned in 1534, though declaring that he still believed in the mass; subsequently he went to Geneva and became a minister. Protestantism surged in Amiens, owing much to local circumstances, then fell away before a church could be established, with systematic teaching.11 Early seed fell mainly on

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poor soil; the plants would wither. Meanwhile the hungry could pick and choose those that appealed without caring much about their source. When did their opponents begin to have an idea of Protestantism as being in some way typical? And what was it? From a study of the records of the protracted trial of the Genevan merchant and leading citizen of Lyons, Baudichon de la Maisonneuve (April–July 1534) that drew in many of the presumably informed and influential citizenry in one capacity or other, come conclusions that may have wider application.12 With the exception of preaching, demonstrably subversive, Protestants were seen in a largely negative light: as those who scorned or attacked cherished Catholic beliefs and practices. Lower down the scale of reference came anticlericalism, the rejection of confession and scripture in the vernacular. Unrepresented among those who claimed knowledge of ‘Lutherans’ are the central ideas of Lutheranism, scriptura, fide, gratia. So much for understanding – yet it is plain that they saw Protestantism as a threat to the entire fabric of their lives. With this idea implanted so early in the Catholic mind, with further provocation in the later Religious Wars the attitudes and conduct of their descendants are easier to grasp. One day French Protestants might look back to these early years with nostalgia. Lefèvre died in 1536, the year of the Institutio and we may wonder what the old scholar would have thought of it. By then zealous academics and magistrates had done enough to warn of what could happen to would-­be reformers. Those who sought refuge beyond the frontier, in places like Strasbourg and Basle, found fellow Christians confident in their beliefs. As part of a wider European movement those who stayed in France might still feel chosen and blest, having something of Luther’s ideal of ‘holy brotherhood’. So long as they did not go out of their way to provoke, they might even feel secure. They could not, however, restrain the enthusiasm of those beyond the reach of the royal officers. One such was Antoine Marcourt13 who had fled from Lyons to Switzerland and there devised a new direct style of attack. On the morning of 17 October 1534, Parisians and citizens of other towns, notably in ‘the royal country’ of the Loire, woke to find placards prominently displayed, attacking all aspects of Catholicism. Their production was the work of Pierre de Vingle, printer of Lyons, now operating safely from French-­ speaking Swiss Neuchâtel. Smuggled in by a group of dissenters keen to warn reformers not to compromise, the widespread diffusion of the placards suggests teamwork. There was no novelty in the use of such broadsheets in controversy. It was an effective way of spreading a message to the curious but illiterate as they gathered round to listen to the one who could read. But there had been nothing so violent in terms: ‘the horrible, great and insufferable abuse of the proud Papal Mass’; ‘the vermin of cardinals’. Bishops, priests and monks were ‘liars and blasphemers’. It was the typical vehemence of religious

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polemic. Does the abuse, the crudity of language lead inevitably to a coarsening of sensibility? From disparaging an opponent’s views to attacking the person? Being contemptuous in words, ultimately callous towards suffering? Examples from our world would seem to bear this out. Most deadly was Marcourt’s main thrust at the church’s most precious belief and practice: ‘it is idolatry to believe the bodily presence of Christ in the Eucharist.’ Christ’s sacrifice was perfect and sufficient: it ‘never can nor should be repeated by any visible sacrifice’. The placards ended with a grim warning to priests: ‘Truth menaces, compels, follows and chases them and it will find them out. By it shall they be destroyed. Fiat. Fiat. Amen.’ The gauntlet so crudely thrown down, the insult deliberate, the challenge unmistakable: retaliation was to be expected and it would not be confined to words. For evangelicals the timing could not have been worse. Francis I was engaged in the negotiations that led to the marriage of his son Henry to Catherine de Medici. He had sent envoys to Germany to hold talks with Bucer and Melanchthon. He was ready to offer support to German princes in their quarrel with the Emperor. But he needed to remain in good standing with the Pope. He had already ordered Parlement to take firm action against heresy. In Paris the battle lines hardened. For most Parisians the offence was mortal: injury to the most sacred article of belief, the most cherished rite. From the outset the Huguenot story, essentially about faith, is also to be one of politics and personalities. Crucial throughout will be the situation and character of successive kings. For Francis there was a real dilemma. How could he sustain the humanists while preserving his authority and the peace of the realm? He was stung by the placards, one reputedly stuck to the door of his own chamber in his château of Amboise. The rest of his reign saw mounting repression and with it the end of the humanist dream: unfettered scholarship in the pursuit of truth and in the best interests of the church. It was the beginning of the slow descent towards civil war. The immediate, outraged reaction of Parisians gave notice of what was to come. Rumour fed the terrible anger: the reformers planned to sack the Louvre, murder the faithful at mass, burn down churches. Anyone foreign became a target. A Flemish merchant was lynched by a mob. ‘He’s a German!’ they shouted. ‘His death will gain us indulgences.’ One sees the heady mix of phobia, righteous anger and the credulity that could lead to violence. It was the Paris that men would come to recognise, its citizens volatile, emotional, at times bloodthirsty, quick to denounce a neighbour. Parlement acted with selective rigour; Francis set up a commission of magistrates to judge heresy cases, a sub-­commission to examine potential Protestants. Jean du Bourg, a rich draper and five others were burned. In January copies of Marcourt’s Petit traité, reinforcing the argument of the placards, were distributed about the

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streets. It was as if certain hotheads were determined to bring matters to a head. Francis was sufficiently offended to order a general procession. Paris, like other cities and villages, was used to processions.14 In honour of their patron saint, parishes would stage one every year. The spectacle of banners and images as it wound through the narrow streets, the chanting, the emotional effect, may be imagined. A general procession, headed by the king, was rare, a special response to a perceived threat to the good order of city and realm. It was designed to emphasise the orthodoxy of the city’s corporate hierarchy; also, crucially, to portray the king as at one with his people. Representing crown and court, sovereign courts, university, religious orders, town government and guilds, displaying precious relics, including, a rare sight, the crown of thorns from the Sainte-­Chapelle, it demonstrated solidarity: church, state and people at one in defence of the faith. Behind the Blessed Sacrament, carried by the bishop of Paris, under a canopy held up by his three sons, walked Francis, bareheaded, dressed in black and holding a lighted torch. He was sharing in a rite of purification for a city sullied by heresy. After High Mass in Notre-­Dame he called on his subjects to denounce all heretics. To reinforce the message six more were burned, their tongues first cut out to prevent a scaffold speech. Lutherans in hiding were named by proclamation. Those who sheltered heretics were made liable to the same penalty and informers offered a share in the victim’s property. All of this played to the mentality of the witch-­hunt. It offers an early demonstration of the alliance of church and crown and its place in people’s hearts, a power with which Huguenots would have to contend. Always unsure in support, Francis was now lost to the cause of reform. In the preamble to royal edicts Francis justified his new severity. He had acted to exterminate error and had thought his kingdom ‘purged and cleansed’; now he found backsliding and must have recourse to the lay authorities. Accordingly, in 1540, judicial officers were granted the right of inquisition over all, barring only those in holy orders. As to the latter, the crown would support prelates in the enforcement of discipline. Further measures defined the jurisdiction of royal courts and restricted publication. Francis might still exercise the prerogative of mercy; but generally he encouraged magistrates to use their powers. All the time the definition of heresy was being broadened: schoolmasters who taught from Scripture, iconoclasts, sellers of heretical books, those who attended secret meetings or ‘spoke words contrary to the Holy Catholic faith and the Christian religion’. Beyond such words – and they could depend on hearsay – orthodoxy was being judged increasingly by behaviour. Far from serving as a deterrent it seems that the public burnings inspired others to explore the scriptures. Evidently the matter was important to the authorities: so was it not a Christian duty to find out why? Protestantism began to spread more rapidly than before, nourished by ever-­busier printing presses15

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and soon by the first missionaries of Geneva. The teaching and leadership of Calvin proved a match for the coercive powers of the crown. Meanwhile, however, what such power could achieve, when used by unscrupulous local officers, was shown by the assault upon the Vaudois. The systematic theology of Calvin had all the greater impact because it reached mainly virgin territory. France had experienced no major recent heretical movement to provide ‘a critical springboard’ for the early advance of Protestantism. Catharism had been effectively exterminated.16 The thirteenth-­ century heresies of the Waldensians, so named after their leader Peter Waldo, had received less attention. Condemned at the time by the Pope, the Waldensians had gone to ground in remote Provençal hills. Simple living after the fashion of the early church, frequent preaching, apostolic poverty, even the demand for scriptures in the vernacular, remained in some families a cherished tradition. An attempt, in 1487, by French authorities to suppress them only served to disperse these tiresome heretics. The episode raised doubts about the efficacy of Inquisition; also about the motives of those who promoted it. ‘Their heresy was in their wallets and if they had been poor they would never have been accused of such things.’17 In the 1520s Farel’s fiery preaching found a ready response among the Vaudois and some of their leaders made contacts with other reformers. In the 1530s they made changes in their old rites and commissioned Olivetan to produce a French Bible for them.18 It might seem that they were openly aligning themselves with the Swiss reformation but it was not so simple. In their generally closed communities, with a high level of intermarriage, the faith that evolved had much of folk wisdom about it. They were used to the homilies of itinerant holy men, their ‘oncles’, and to leadership by certain traditional families, but resented outside pressure, no less when it came in the 1550s from Calvinist ministers seeking to impose rational belief and moral supervision. First the enemy was the legal establishment of Aix. Punitive judicial forays led to burning (seventeen in one episode) and banishment, but made little impact. Then, in April 1545, the Parlement’s president, Jean Meynier, baron d’Oppède,19 decided to force the issue. It would be alleged that he had an eye on the lands of a neighbour, the dame de Cental. Acting on behalf of the absent governor, he sent in regular troops, veterans of Italian wars, in a campaign of systematic destruction. Several towns and some twenty villages were torched. Hundreds were killed, women and children dragged out of a church in which they had taken refuge. There were numerous later executions; more than 600 were sent to the galleys, their womenfolk raped. A few survivors fled to Switzerland. Even in the crowded annals of religious persecution the massacre of the Vaudois earns a place. Francis formally approved the action and snubbed Swiss councils when they protested. The Vaudois, he said, had obstructed his authority in an important border

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province. He was content to put matters in the hands of Parlement, who supported their colleague of Aix against the dame de Cental. Oppède alleged that she had protected heretics. The Pope awarded him a papal knighthood. Finding communal heresy in its direct jurisdiction Parlement was no less resolute. In September 1546 sixty-­one worshippers in a private house in Meaux were arrested and tried. It was to be an example, to the people but also to the church authorities who let heresy thrive under their noses. There were to be special sermons and processions to mark the serious nature of the event. The house was razed and a Catholic chapel built in its place. Fourteen men were tortured and burned alive. A fifteenth was sentenced to witness the executions, hung by his armpits, then flogged and imprisoned. Others, men and women, roped together by the neck, had to witness the spectacle bareheaded, submit to whipping, and make public confession. If the episode leaves a foul taste is it because we sense an unholy relish in these precise arrangements: priest, lawyer and executioner setting up as God’s schoolmasters? Lessons must be learned. They could remove a few brave Protestants from the scene. They could not do much about the printed word. Étienne Dolet (1509–46), university lecturer, poet and printer-­publisher, evokes admiration for his enterprise and courage.20 But he belongs to the Reformation’s awkward squad, a passionate individualist who would publish the Institutio, but be condemned by Calvin as a blasphemer. He announced that he belonged to no party, being satisfied with his native religion; he condemned ‘a foolish sect, led away by passion for notoriety’; yet he would be secured eventually by Parlement to be tortured and burned. A native of Orléans, he had studied in Paris and in Italy, then taught in Toulouse. After denouncing edicts aimed at student organisations he fled to Lyons. He wrote an influential manual on Latin but it was his profile as publisher that caught the government’s eye. His correspondents included Rabelais and he published his Pantagruel. Fugitive from the cloistered life that he would so memorably lampoon, physician, free spirit, scatological jester, blasphemer; as bold in print as he was guarded in life; by some admired, by others detested – Rabelais cannot be claimed for the evangelical party; nor, even less plausibly, for atheism.21 He died as a priest, curé of Meudon. But he had done the church some harm (and equally offended Geneva), teaching men to laugh at Bible stories and to question the wilder tales of the supernatural, much that they might have held sacred. In 1537 Dolet was convicted of murder but got a royal pardon. He was twice imprisoned, twice released by the king’s order. In the end the king could not, or would not, protect him. His taste for aggression endeared him to neither Catholic nor evangelical.22 In some respects he was ahead of his time, as when he challenged the inquisitors and judges of Toulouse after the burning

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of Jean de Caturce (1532): ‘I may have deserved punishment for heresy. Yet when inclined to repent ought the way of salvation for both body and soul have been closed against me?’ It took different personalities to make the French reformation and Dolet’s was an idiosyncratic voice, fearing the hard clarity of ‘new doctrines and systems’ that led to persecution. His printer’s mark was an axe chopping wood. Such diversity of mind and message made it hard for the authorities to combat ‘Lutheran’ heresies that appeared to them as less a movement than a widespread disorder: essentially foreign though fomented by resolute Frenchmen, some trained abroad, returning to spread the word. Changing their names to evade detection they preached mainly in remote country houses, in forest clearings, even in caves if the tradition of Poitiers is to be believed. Only gradually, when assured of sufficient support, did they venture into towns. Following the ‘Night of the Placards’ Francis I ordered that all book shops be closed and all publishing cease. A knee jerk perhaps, ‘the most bizarre decree ever issued by a French government’,23 shows how seriously, verging on panic, he took the new power of the press. Paris vied with Venice and Antwerp in the number of titles coming from its printers, nearly 300 in the year of 1530. Publishing was resumed when Parlement created a system of censorship. In December 1547 the new king Henry II reinforced the system but revealed its limitations when he railed against illegal imports from Geneva, Germany and other foreign places. Unlike Spain, whose geography ensured that censorship could be relatively effective, French borders were long and permeable, a patchwork of lands and lordships rather than the later linear, defensible frontier. Administrative rules banned the import of publications without licence; the Sorbonne censured undesirable ones; ‘dangerous books’ were publicly burned. Illicit material continued, however, to circulate widely, some printed secretly in the country, some smuggled in from foreign presses. There were seizures of books, and subsequent bonfires. In Toulouse, where officials were notoriously intrusive, courts strict and sentences cruel, a bookseller and his brother-­in-­law were executed for handling banned books.24 These were as likely to be some work of Erasmus, or a translation of the Psalms, as overtly Protestant texts. Theatres were now controlled as regulations required scripts to be submitted to officials before performances were licensed. The new puritanism might drive mockery into the privileged spaces of tavern and market but would continue to be a weapon in the reformers’ armoury. Meanwhile, earnest or disillusioned clergy were well represented among the first Protestant generations.

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chapter eight

s Calvin

the way, the truth and the life The one law of liberty, the holy word of the Gospel1

I

n this confusing scene the only source of unity and coherence of thought and action was the untiring pen of John Calvin. The prime instruments of conversion, alone exhibiting anything like a common purpose, were the missionaries and pastors he trained for service and continued to direct when they returned to their native land. From 1542 the Institutio was available in a French edition. Between then and 1559, the year of the first French synod, with representatives from many parts of the country, French Protestantism moved unevenly, but in one direction: towards the foundation of a single church, accepting a common Confession of Faith and a common set of ‘Rules of Discipline’. Most of the ministers at the synod were Calvin’s Geneva trainees. The French Reformed Church was Calvin’s extraordinary personal achievement. ‘If Calvin had not written his book there would have been no counter-­ church in France . . . and “the religion” as they called it, would hardly have had corporate existence.’2 In comparable extent of theoretical vision and organising genius, in influence exercised from a position of exile, Karl Marx comes to mind. Both men created a new system out of existing materials, free-­standing, self-­sustaining, having universal appeal; a system that would change the face of Europe. In both cases there were essential preconditions: a vulnerable system to attack and a relatively free market in the exchange of ideas. The parallel may be suggestive; but other differences apart, Calvin’s work had one crucial, unique feature. He was in a position, in a city-­state, to turn theory into practice, to create a working model. The theocracy of Geneva was as important as the theology that his agents imbibed. How did a young lawyer arrive at a position of such exceptional authority? John Calvin was born in 1509 at Noyon, a northern city second only to Amiens among the towns of Picardy.3 His father, Gérard Cauvin, had risen

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from modest origins, through ability and a rather pig-­headed determination, to be a legal officer serving the bishop and chapter. His mother, Jeanne Le Franc, was the daughter of an innkeeper of nearby Cambrai. John, who early adapted the family name to the Latin Calvinus, was trained, with other protégés of the bishop, then with a subsidy from the diocese, in colleges in Paris, Orléans and Bourges, before eventually acquiring a doctorate in law. Little is known for certain, not even precise dates, about his early and student life. There is no evidence of his having any radical views as a student. In Paris, according to one tradition, he started at the Collège de Sainte-­Barbe under the formidable Latinist Mathurin Cordier. He certainly ended up at the Collège de Montaigu for the later part of the customary four to five years in the arts faculty where he was briefly contemporary with Ignatius Loyola.4 Principal Bédier would have challenged him to think for himself. A determination to hold his own, toughened in the disputatio, the public defence of a given thesis, and the ability to write lucidly and logically, were to be characteristics of the mature theologian. It is possible that he never studied theology in Paris. But he must have been affected by the cross-­currents of religious opinion that dominated the proceedings of the Faculty of Theology and led to its Determinatio of 1521: an attempt to contain debate within the bounds of traditional Catholic theology. Nor could he have been indifferent to the central questions posed: how does an individual enter fellowship with God? How to find justification? How to be saved? And yet the progressive, radical cast of mind that is Calvin’s hallmark as reformer probably owed less to Paris than to his later experience, at Orléans and Bourges. There he made friendships with lively-­minded fellow students, several among them already attracted to evangelical ideas, and studied under some of the finest of humanist scholars. Most notable in the avant-­garde of scholarship was Guillaume Budé, already noticed as the foremost French classical scholar of his day. His concern was to strip off the coats of pious varnish to recover the original text in spirit and in shape. Here surely was something new and fresh after the close world of Paris theology where Greek was still regarded with suspicion. Calvin would later show a mastery of the humanist linguistic methods for interpreting Scripture. He could also draw on his experience of studying law at Orléans and Bourges, where the emphasis was on the search for universal principles. When professors of law went direct to classical sources their approach was parallel to that of scholars working on the Bible. Meanwhile in Paris the traditionalists of the Sorbonne were rallying round the Latin Bible, the Vulgate. In April 1530 it declared to be scandalous the view ‘that Holy Scripture cannot be understood correctly without Greek, Hebrew and other similar languages’. It was a direct challenge to Lefèvre, Budé and fellow humanists. It is an indication of a more oppressive climate that when Budé died, in 1542, his wife and children felt unsafe and fled to Geneva.

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Calvin’s early interests had resulted in his first book, a scholarly commentary on Seneca’s De clementia (1532). In retrospect a blind alley? Or can we see emerging, from the critic’s training in exposition, the future theologian: from the pupil of the renowned civil lawyer (and probable Lutheran) Pierre de l’Étoile at Orléans the author of the Institutio Christiani religionis; from the open-­minded enquirer the lawmaker of Geneva? It is unlikely that Calvin had a part in composing the address of his friend Nicolas Cop that had raised such a storm. Since his papers were confiscated after a police raid we know little of his thinking at this time. But he was sufficiently close to Cop to decide to leave town. He was sympathetically received by Marguerite of Navarre. He then went on studying as the guest of his friend Louis de Tillet, a canon of Angoulême. Up to this point he still ‘wore the mask of a Catholic’, living under the strain of a double life. The book he was writing in Tillet’s library to refute the Anabaptists, which was to become the Institutio, says nothing overtly anti-­Catholic. The mature Calvin’s keen insight into political motives and his ability to manage people may be traced to experiences on his home ground. After a quarrel with the Noyon Cathedral chapter his father died excommunicate, in 1531. His elder brother maintained the fight – and also died unshriven. Neither gentle nor pliable these Calvins, nor was Jean. In May 1534 he returned to Noyon. It was assumed that he was to be ordained, but he was by then a virtual Protestant, emotionally if not intellectually. The infighting and rancour within the chapter, the effect on his father and brother, may have prompted questions about church government; about the requirements of a Christian life. He resigned his benefices. He had ‘come out’ and his career as reformer would start with a clean slate. If Calvin was still uncertain as to his next move the ‘Night of the Placards’ forced his hand, compelling flight: the moment of no return. He first found sanctuary at Basle.5 There he wrote a preface for Olivetan’s French translation of the Bible, and the first parts of the Institutio. Calvin could surely see that God was changing his life. As in other avowedly God-­directed lives, there arises the possibility of self-­delusion. But that is to read from the outside, from a distance. No prominent evangelical in these early years of reformation was born so. There had to be a conscious decision to break with the past, an act of deliberate will to be a different kind of Christian. The convert could relate to the experience of Paul abruptly breaking with Judaism or of Augustine turning from pagan superstition. Calvin would refer much later to his ‘sudden conversion’. He described an intervention from the outside liberating him from the hold of orthodox Catholicism. ‘At last God turned my course in a different direction by the hidden bridle of his providence.’6 The equestrian image suggests that Calvin saw himself as singled out by God for drastic action, but

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as if he was passive, even worthless except as servant of God. Was there any human agency in the process? Nicolas Cop? Or Marguerite, and the impact of her powerful personality? Or, earlier, his kinsman Olivetan, under whose influence, Beza would record, Calvin ‘began to devote himself to reading the Bible, to abhor superstitions and so to separate himself from those rites’?7 Melchior Wolmar, his friend and Greek teacher at Orléans when already openly committed to the Reformation, is also in the frame. If he still needed a jolt, did the burning (February 1535) of another friend, Étienne de la Forge, provide it? Did he, like Luther, compress into a dramatic episode the insights and emotions of months or years? Possibly encouragement came from the visit to Duchess Renée’s court at Ferrara early in 1536; there, among other protégés, he encountered Antoine de Pons, future patron of Protestants in the Saintonge, and his wife Anne de Parthenay. He returned to Paris to settle some business but did not trust the amnesty granted by the Edict of Lyons. So it happened that he came to Geneva at a crucial Reformation moment. The ‘way’ is thought-­provoking; but it is ‘the truth and the life’ that were important. For Calvin the truth was ‘a steady and certain knowledge of the divine good will towards us which, being grounded upon the truth of the gracious promise in Christ, is both revealed to our minds and sealed in our hearts by the Holy Spirit’.8 The life evolved in ways that justified his believing that God had chosen him to serve in what must first have seemed an unpromising place. Worse – it was objectionable. For in heart and mind Calvin was a Frenchman. He resented his enforced flight, missed the beautiful cities and lively conversation and would soon be planning the French mission. Absent, he could yet be present if his ideas were represented and acted upon. They were embodied in the Institutio. The first words of the title are revealing enough. The next part reveals the originality and sheer audacity of the work: ‘The basic teaching of the Christian Religion comprising almost the whole sum of godliness and whatever it is necessary to know on the doctrine of salvation.’ Calvin dedicated the work to the king and proceeded to demand that Francis take up ‘the whole knowledge of this case, which has so far been treated without any legal order, with uncontrolled passion rather than judicial gravity’. Calvin did not assert that there could be more than one church in a state. Evangelicals should be repressed if they stood outside the Christian religion; but they were ‘legitimate heirs of Christians of early centuries and were therefore the one holy, Catholic and apostolic church, in France legally established’. If their faith appeared alien it was because conventional theology had drifted away from its origins in the early church. Francis I, anxious not to offend the Protestant princes of Germany, justified his measures by claiming that his Protestants were Anabaptists. Calvin had set out to refute this. In the process he presented a remarkably complete

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exposition of evangelical Christianity. Over the next quarter-­century, in successive editions, the Institutes would quadruple in size; but his great themes were already there. It has been called a great work of Catholic theology, comparable to the Summa theologiae of Thomas Aquinas. Some, indeed, have assented to Calvin’s claim that he had not knowingly misused or misread a single passage of the scriptures. Christianity had been distorted through scholastic disputes and obscured by the pretensions and politics of Rome. He had sought to restore its pure message. There he stood on common ground with Luther who had found his chief source of inspiration in the Gospel and the teaching of Paul: the purpose of God revealed in history, and the possibility of a personal faith based on the certainty of salvation by faith alone. Calvin desired to teach those he envisaged as hungering and thirsting after Christ, the way of salvation. Through Christ God had set before them the treasures of His grace. The first edition of the Institutio was actually modelled on Luther’s Lesser Catechism of 1529. Luther’s work had been terse, meant to be learned by rote; Calvin’s was more of an exposition. Luther had written about the Creed in three sections: Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Calvin, significantly, added a fourth, the church. He was careful in his choice of words. Institutio meant the structure of Christianity but also its schooling and indoctrination. Religio was not generally used at the time; Calvin used it to indicate a public stance: his followers should exhibit the true pietas that would lead to salvation. At once they were set apart from the generality of people who would come to refer, not sympathetically, to those of ‘the religion’. In his measured presentation Calvin was moving towards the definitive statement of the Christian faith that would be completed in later and fuller editions: in the words of his subtitle, ‘Whatever it is necessary to know.’ A second Latin edition, much fuller, with seventeen chapters instead of six, suggests that he felt responsible for covering all areas of dispute; there was more on the knowledge of God, predestination and providence. It was for use as a ‘textbook’ for ‘candidates in theology for the reading of the divine Word’. Calvin had progressed, as Luther, Melanchthon and Zwingli had been unable to do, from being an authority to being the authority. In 1541 came the translation into French and with it a vital extension of its influence. With an eye to his readership he included some French proverbs and idioms. The final edition of 1559 had little new material but was completely recast, in four sections and with shorter chapters for easy reading. The Institutes had grown in scope with his experience of teaching and mission; its greatest strength remained its clarity and precision. Throughout his object remained the same: ‘so to prepare students of sacred theology for the study of God’s word that they might have easy access into it and be able to proceed in it without hindrance’. For Huguenot ministers, along with the Bible it was to

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be the foundation text. For them Calvin would be, beyond question, the master, his teaching the standard by which faith and conduct must be tested. Sustaining all was the underlying principle of Calvin’s philosophy: that the chief purpose of man is to know and to do the will of God. Starting from the fresh experience and Pauline theology of the early church, as he wrote in his address to the king, Calvin wanted ‘to hand on some rudiments by which anyone touched with an interest in religion might be formed to true godliness’. With this as his aim Calvin considered man in his standing with God. The relationship is direct, as the phrases constantly remind us: coram deo, apud Deum. On man’s side there is duty: with responsibility, informed by conscience, it would be a powerful Huguenot theme. Like Luther, Calvin saw as irresistibly true the significance of the words in Paul’s epistle to the Romans: ‘The just shall live by faith’ (1:17). For Calvin, Augustine was ‘doctor gratiae’ and his idea of grace was all-­important: an unmerited gift of God by which He voluntarily breaks the grip of sin upon humanity. The means of salvation were to be found outside humanity. In current Catholic practice they were plainly assembled around humanity, offering material inducements for fearful souls. Above all, for Calvin, was the transcendent majesty of God.9 His will must necessarily be without limit and involved in every event. God must therefore have foreknown, so in a sense determined, from the day of creation, the fate of every human being: who was to be saved, who damned, through all eternity. Man was corrupted through original sin, not by association through responsibility for the sin of Adam. Instead this was an individual curse, lying on each individual from birth. No one can merit redemption. Some, however, the elect, are saved, by God’s mercy through Christ: a grace beyond explanation – and free. Being, in Anglican language, of ‘unspeakable comfort’ to many believers, but a stumbling block, even repellent, to others, the issue of predestination was bound to remain prominent in Calvinist thinking, more indeed than it is in his sermons and letters. In the context of his evangelical zeal for the well-­being of individual Christians, was it the intellectual, the logician who could not avoid the awful conclusion? The pastor saw it as a gift to anxious man, liberating him from the uncertainties induced by Catholic emphasis on works. Since sin had plainly marred their faith and so their standing with a God from whom they expected a stern if not vengeful judgement, Catholics could cling to St Jerome’s ‘second plank’, the sacrament of penance.10 Still that did not give peace of mind. How could they ever be sure? The Catholic could answer that the constant challenge led to lives as good as could be expected among fallen humanity. Yet there was another strand in Catholic theology represented chiefly by Gregory of Rimini.11 The third edition of his work in 1520 was widely discussed and it is likely that a student of enquiring mind would at least have

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been aware of its main conclusions. They offered a bridge between those who held, like Augustine, that all was decided out of human time in the mind of God – predestined – and those who held that there were necessary intermediates between God and salvation. It was a bridge of hope for anxious souls, a bridge of sighs for later ‘enlightened’ critics. For Gregory, of his time in believing that there must be a truth to be expressed in precise terms, the value of an offering was determined solely by divine will. In the Institutes Calvin adopted an identical view. God decided to accept Christ’s offering of himself; therefore that offering was of sufficient merit for the salvation of mankind. Even Christ, apart from God’s good pleasure, could not merit anything. If not Christ, then could ordinary sinful mortals? The question was not new; with all its implications it would continue to tease and torment. In the difficult balance of his life, between interests pastoral and political, Calvin’s views would evolve. Indeed, predestination was not the dominant idea in his theology though for some ‘Calvinists’ it was to become so. It was but part of his unwavering conviction that he must proclaim the providence of God in every area of human life. It was bound up with his idea of the nature of the church and his growing realisation that the reformed faith, in his version, was not everywhere winning the day. So he came, in the last version of the Institutes, to suggest a very human bafflement, seeming to accept human limitations: ‘The covenant of life is not preached equally among all men, and among those to whom it is preached, it does not gain the same acceptance either constantly or in equal degree.’12 Calvin never expressed predestination in such a way as to preclude the duty of Christians to show their worth by good works. In the course of a life thus lived, the proof that it seemed to offer, ipso facto, that a faithful Christian must be one of the elect, would empower and motivate Calvin’s followers all over the world. At its worst it could produce an ugly intolerance. In some sensitive souls it could cause crippling doubt. As Consistory records reveal, the ‘old Adam’ could still overcome the ‘new man’.13 At best, however, it was the mainspring of the sober, purposeful lives led commonly by Huguenots, feeding the resolve to hear God’s word and to live by its precepts. Faith effectively joins man to Christ and leads to justification – not earned but imputed by participation in the righteousness of Christ. In union with the Son of God the fortunate ones, the elect, find a confidence – though never absolute certainty – in redemption and forgiveness. The gift of faith is nurtured and affirmed through Holy Communion, which Calvin taught should be taken frequently as food for the soul, just as bread and wine were ordinarily taken to sustain the body. Swept aside here are both Catholic and Zwinglian doctrines: the miracle in transubstantiation; or simple commemoration. The Lord’s Supper is not a conversion of material elements into the Body and Blood of

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Christ but that of the persons who receive them: signs of sacrifice to support and inspire their own sacrificial lives. Calvin invited the church to go back to a time before Eucharistic doctrine was fixed and to forgo the question: how was the Body of Christ present in the bread? Since the matter ‘cannot be resolved by Scripture’ he then asks ‘the essential question: how do we possess the whole Christ crucified and become partakers of all his blessings?’14 That, he declares, is the theme of the New Testament and is answerable in terms of Christ’s teaching. Regular, reverent sharing in the Lord’s Supper, in that spirit, would prove to be the mainstay of Calvinism, at the beating heart of Huguenot worship. It would be a source of unity, inspiring those who received the bread and wine at the table to take with them to their homes and communities the love, peace and concord that they learned from the life of Christ and the letters of Paul to the early church. Calvin’s church exists in two forms. God’s true church is the elect of all time; they cannot be sure about others, nor even about themselves. The visible church at any time is therefore for all that profess, to whom it offers sacrament, prayer and moral teaching. This church on earth can exist under any government. Calvin realised that forms of government might change. He also asserted, crucially, that rulers were legitimate only if they provided for ‘true’ religion. Of this ministers must be the final judges. Here was the political dynamite, the reason, before all others, why no French king could be expected to tolerate a church formed upon Calvin’s prescription.15 A few sentences cannot do justice to Calvin’s theology, as first defined, then enlarged upon in successive versions of the Institutes. Its spiritual message apart it was a towering intellectual achievement, placing him among the supreme doctors of the church. It was rational, modern in method but traditional in its grounding in Scripture and the experience of the early church. It matched expression of the sublime and transcendent to the needs of ordinary lives, providing rule, guidance and encouragement. Inevitably there is much that will puzzle, if not repel a modern reader, not least the convinced Christian: if, in essentials, it can still persuade, it was also, notably in understanding of the Bible, of its time. Humanist scholarship had barely dented the church’s view of the world, its creation, its place in the universe. Hell and Satan were real, as were heaven and God. The lurid pains of hell, the hope and radiance of heaven, were the preachers’ regular pabulum – Catholic and Protestant alike. In its day Calvin’s work was striking more for its ruthless logic than for its entire novelty. It was the context in which it was written as much as the theology that made it so subversive. When Calvin made his home in Geneva and faced up to the need for a working relationship between church and state, the theocratic system that emerged became the model for Calvinist communities elsewhere. In a Catholic

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monarchy they could only be separate, tending to resemble a state within a state. When there were causes other than religious to rouse ambition, the Calvinist community, with its own pyramid of authority and imbued with the spirit of election, would provide the pattern for a party and for armed resistance. Meanwhile the crucible of international Calvinism, Huguenots’ mother city, was to be Geneva. It faced an uncertain future after its recent experiment in citizen power and religious self-­determination: its independence was fragile, its French connections crucial. Calvin had given dogmatic shape and clarity to the radical ideas of the Reformation and created orthodoxy out of a miscellany of teachings and aspirations. He had issued a challenge to the Catholic church to reform, or if it would or could not, then to Christians to renounce its authority and to build afresh. Theology was at its heart but it is only part of the Calvinist story. Timing was crucial, and so was locality. French Protestantism was shaped by the proximity, trade links and French culture of Geneva, but also by the independence and security Calvin needed to make a reality of his vision of the City of God. How was this? How did he find himself in a position to create a working model of a separate self-­governing Protestant church? Given the outcome, the place and the circumstances could hardly be more important. Events there contributed directly to the special character of the French Protestant experience.

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chapter nine

s Geneva

the experiment and the experience The most perfect school of Christ that ever was on earth since the days of the Apostles. (John Knox on Calvin’s Geneva)1

A

t the eastern end of Lake Geneva, the city had a busy commercial past. A German-­style prince-­bishopric, in the early fifteenth century it came under the sway of Savoy when its duke acquired the right to appoint its bishop. To counter Savoyard control Geneva formed links with neighbouring cantons, Fribourg and Berne that led eventually to joint citizenship in the Swiss Association. In the association Geneva was suspect as an outpost of French influence, arising out of common language and old ties between churches. When, however, Louis XI established quarterly trade fairs at Lyons money talked and the Medicis transferred their Geneva bank to Lyons. Before the Reformation Geneva was a city-­state in decline. Some Genevans still saw the remedy as lying with the Swiss Confederacy. In 1519 the first alliance was made with Fribourg but under Savoyard pressure it was revoked and the chief instigator executed. The pro-­Swiss party eidgenoss (confederates) regrouped. They appear as aguynos in the council’s minutes, eyguenots in 1520, being the Genevan patois version. The word would have far to go.2 In 1526 some merchants negotiated terms for an alliance, or combourgeoisie: as the word suggests, economic interests were still the motor of change. Already, however, Lutheran pamphlets were invading; also more radical ideas from Zurich. As Germany shows, Reformation was essentially a city phenomenon, affecting 50 out of 65 Imperial Free Cities. In France it would be the larger cities, Lyons, Poitiers, Orléans and Rouen that would first see significant congregations established. After 1517 it was always likely that Geneva would change its religious allegiance. But in what direction?

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Special circumstances affected the way in which evangelicals gained the upper hand in Geneva. The early reformers had been united in their determination to proclaim justification by faith and to be rid of the idea of purgatory. But Calvin’s situation was wholly different from Luther’s. The German’s theology reflected his preoccupation with the individual and his salvation: he was not concerned with communal life and discipline. Like Zwingli’s idea of the church, Calvin’s was derived from the historic interrelation of urban and church communities. Farel’s experience had suggested that no reformer could turn a city’s mind by preaching alone. In 1528 Berne voted for the evangelical model after its council had heard Zwingli, Bucer and others expound. From 1523 Zwingli’s Zurich had been a proselytising Protestant state, in every way the senior partner: so religion, economics and politics weighed uncomfortably on the Genevans, who were still uncertain and insecure. In 1526 they elected a Council of Two Hundred; it elected a smaller Council of Sixty for administrative control. With a modest property qualification a fair number of citizens could vote and they were challenged to think hard about religion. Crucial issues were to be fought out among people who were capable of relatively mature debate and action. Farel found ready listeners – and angry hecklers. In April 1533 Garin Muète publicly celebrated Communion according to Farel’s reformed rite. The bishop was expelled in that year; most Catholic clergy then left. In November 1535 the city government proclaimed the abolition of the mass and confiscated church property. Catholic Fribourg threatened retaliation. The French offered help but Genevans feared that it would lead to an increase in French influence; so did Berne. Berne had already intervened by sending Pierre Viret to support Farel in a public disputation with Forbity, a Dominican from Fribourg.3 Geneva was left dependent on Berne and its evangelical bankers. While the council wavered Farel and Viret called for adoption of the complete Reformation. Savoy lost patience and sent troops to besiege the city. In January 1536 Geneva’s situation was dire. It appealed to Berne, whose army moved west to occupy most of the country round Geneva. But with a French army in the vicinity Berne moderated its initial demands. Essentially Geneva was allowed independence, subject to some treaty requirements. There was relief and apprehension but the new republic faced bankruptcy. To secure loans the city had to commit itself decisively to the Reformation. All church properties were confiscated. A public assembly, on 25 May, voted to ‘live henceforth according to the law of the gospel and the Word of God, and to abolish all papal abuses’.4 What they did not, and could not, do was to create a reformed church and church government. The vacuum spelt danger. Calvin’s arrival in Geneva was therefore, and literally, a godsend to Farel. Calvin had

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intended only a short visit but Farel persuaded him to stay to organise the new evangelical church-­state. It was welcome aid to the city government alarmed by the spread of Anabaptism.5 Calvin had feared that his rational – as he saw it traditional and biblical – theological system would be tarred by the Anabaptist brush. It now worked to his advantage. For on this matter Calvin and the councillors were as one: they needed a pastor with a sense of the paramount need for order, able to impose the discipline to control the aggrieved and disruptive. Polity and church – it had to be a symbiotic relationship. The politicians had the ultimate power and they had no desire to exchange the tyranny of the Catholic bishop for that of the reformer. In nature an intellectual, happiest apparently in his library, Calvin wanted first to be seen as tutor. He started with a series of lectures on St Paul’s Epistles in the church of St Pierre. His knowledge of the Fathers gave him authority at a disputation at Lausanne to persuade that city to become Protestant and he was soon drawn into more active leadership. He was licensed (not ‘ordained’) by the council to be pastor of St Pierre’s and composed a short Instruction in Faith. He helped Farel to draft rules for the new church, expounded theology to the people and acted as representative of the city in debates with other towns. The pace of change invited reaction. The reformers’ persistent complaints about immorality suggest that efforts to mould a godly community had a mixed reception. Those who swore, gambled, or simply enjoyed dancing, would not readily change their ways. Keepers of inns and brothels had a vested interest. Education would take time to have an effect. Some resented being forced to attend Calvin’s sermons. Some sighed for easy days, the mass, its mystery and familiarity. Some even thought that Calvin’s regime fell short of the purity of the early church. Religious issues had political implications because they raised questions about proper authority. Who should decide in a matter that had theological implications, such as the use of the baptismal font? Exclusion from communion (not from sermons) was the reformers’ ultimate sanction but effective only in the case of the religious man; it was a matter for ministers, not for the secular arm. Calvin and Farel took the theocratic view but the city was not ready for it. A small majority favourable to reform in the elections of 1537 brought about the compulsory acceptance by citizens of the Confession of Faith. In 1538 the council forbade ministers to exclude anyone from communion, whereupon they refused to administer the sacrament on Easter Sunday. The council then decreed the banishment of leading ministers: Farel went to Neuchâtel, Calvin, with a sense of ‘calamity’, first to Basle, then to Strasbourg to await the Lord’s ‘clear and manifest call’.6 There he ministered for three years to a congregation of some 300 French refugees. Ever reasonable and constructive, Martin Bucer became a valued

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friend. As representative for Strasbourg at a religious conference, Calvin met the celebrated Melanchthon, whose efforts to find grounds for reunion he would later deplore. Did it appear to some that Calvin’s was a tunnel vision that drove him towards a light of his own imagining, to him the only truth about God’s word for the church? They might note that he did not learn German, the language of most reformers and their debates He married a local widow, Idelette de Bure; she had two children by her previous marriage but their son died in infancy; she would accompany him to Geneva and suffer much before her death in 1549. Calvin never lacked for supporters but he had few friends; remaining single after bereavement he would later seem to be lonely. Meanwhile his work sustained him, compensating somewhat for exile. These years saw him at full stretch, a driven man, inspired by his prophetic sense of calling: there emerged the enlarged and revised Institutio, then the Commentary on Romans, Paul’s letter that was for Calvin ‘the key’ that opened up the whole Bible. His writing was the fruit of constant reading of Scripture and classical philosophy, the church Fathers, the mediaeval doctors. Then, in 1541, came the French version of Institutio that would afford Calvin a significant place in the evolution of the French language, with all its grace and clarity. This noble work proclaimed his paramount, apostolic concern for the truth-­seekers of his native land. Even in exile he maintained close contact with supporters in Geneva and with France through letters to the growing number of believers. At Strasbourg too he experienced what he had hoped to see introduced at Geneva and expressed for him an aspect of the church as community: the congregational singing now based on the first French metrical psalter. ‘Everyone sings, men and women, and it is a lovely sight . . . No one could imagine what joy there is in the singing of praises and wonders of the Lord in the mother tongue.’7 In those words of a refugee from the Netherlands is anticipated what was to prove such a vital feature of Huguenot worship. In 1541 the Evangelicals regained power in Geneva and invited Calvin to come back. Only after several deputations did he consent to return to what he knew would be an arduous life. It would be his home for his remaining twenty-­ three years. His achievement could have served as example for Toynbee’s motif of the transforming effect on individuals of ‘withdrawal and return’.8 At first his fellow ministers faced opposition, but he was determined and patient; necessarily, since he had to take the lay majority with him. On issues of principle he was implacable. Believing that all authority derived from God he was frustrated when the city council blocked efforts to implement what he believed to be His will. In 1541 Calvin’s Ecclesiastical Ordinances embodied his fourfold idea of ministry, with separate offices but a shared task in upholding the Body of

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Christ in a fallen world. Ministers were to preach the Word and celebrate the two sacraments, Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. The role of the doctor, that he envisaged for himself, was to nourish ‘sound doctrine’ and teach in the languages of Scripture, Hebrew, Greek and Latin. Lay elders were to regulate the life of parishes; deacons to tend to their welfare. A consistory of six ministers and twelve elders was to act as the ruling body of the church. The three main committees of the council chose the elders; pastors could suggest names but had no control over the result. Before an election Calvin would preach, urging the choice of some moral person. In this interlocking system his personality and views were the strongest influence; his strongest weapon was the threat to leave. The significance for the future of Calvin’s model, faithful, in his view, to that of the early church, becomes clear in his disagreement with Wolfgang Musculus, Professor of Greek at Berne. Musculus proposed an alternative model, derived from his reading of the Old Testament, in which he made no distinction between the powers of state and church. There was no question, any more than there was for Calvin, of bishops, but kings and magistrates had a role as spiritual guardians. His government would have wide responsibilities; it would sanction laws about religion and appoint and supervise religious leaders. Only the ministry of sacraments, teaching and the judging of cases before the consistory court were reserved to the church. This was emphatically not acceptable to Calvin who saw, in what would later evolve into Erastianism,9 a threat to the independence of the church and the purity of its teaching. He could not have foreseen the damaging way in which French Protestantism would be split between conflicting views of the role of the state. Meanwhile he was creating the possibility of a self-­governing and self-­sustaining body within the state: potentially a force for revolution. However loyal to the crown Huguenots professed themselves to be, that would be the lasting impression and perceived threat. Calvin’s consistory was also a court of morals; members of congregations were encouraged to inform. Normally it could do no more than remonstrate or, in some cases, excommunicate; the most serious cases were referred to the councils to incur civil penalties. Calvin’s growing prestige helped ensure that ministers usually had their way in the consistory; it assumed an ever-­larger place in the government of the city. One prominent case illustrates the way in which the balance was changing. In 1552, the consistory excommunicated Philippe Berthelier; on appeal the council quashed the sentence; Calvin threatened to leave and the pastors refused Berthelier communion. The subsequent election affirmed Calvin’s authority. Meanwhile the flow of French refugees provided a favourable climate and moral support for his regime. Calvin’s direction of the government of Geneva is a heroic episode in the history of Christianity. To grasp his achievement it is revealing to compare it

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with the work of another reformer in a comparable situation. Vadian rose to prominence as a citizen of the Swiss city of St Gall. Implementing a programme of moral reform he encountered little opposition. Calvin saw the target as existing practices and doctrines of the church; for him reform had universal implications, transcending local issues. Vadian’s works were generally of a humanist character; he was relatively weak on substance though eloquent in exposition; his target audience was Swiss-­German. Calvin the lawyer could promote and defend interesting, sometimes novel ideas; his publishing was energetically directed towards winning converts. He aimed directly at France; he used printers in Basle, Strasbourg and Geneva; he understood the need for structures and a discipline that could be exported and would survive persecution. Advising in his letters to French followers how to ‘gather’ a church, he still counselled caution.10 They should meet quietly and in secret, read the Gospel, sing psalms, hear the Word. But they would separate themselves from the true faith if they did not also elect a minister, ‘chosen by you all in common, to distribute the sacraments and baptise children’. Calvin understood French society well enough to realise that he should look to nobles for pastoral leadership. He had an early experience of the hazards of ministry imposed from outside. A young man, raw or tactless might find himself in trouble with a church. Jacques l’Anglois, dispatched to Poitiers in 1557 arrived to find division between his supporters and those of a local man who favoured the liberal teaching of Castellio, Calvin’s former adversary. Ministers could not expect an easy ride. Generally, however, the men matched the hour. At the Paris synod of 1559,11 the initiative came from Antoine de la Roche-­Chandieu; the young François de Morel succeeded him as president; Calvin’s own representative, briefed to guide proceedings, was Nicolas des Gallars. Pastoral advice and direction absorbed much of Calvin’s time. His stamina was impressive. His sermons, every other weekday and twice on Sundays, were delivered without notes, with only the Greek and Hebrew texts before him. There was little room for anecdote or humour but he spoke quietly, with clarity of expression and arrangement, and with a compelling sincerity. French refugees found a shorthand writer to take notes that were later developed and bound: Calvin was then astonished by the accuracy of his quotations. This was Bible ministry at its most effective, a model and inspiration for future generations. But Calvin recognised that it needed support. Music he saw as a gift of God for human pleasure. It was blessed with the power to move hearts, enabling mortals to join in praise with the angels. It was not to be light but sober and majestic: harmony he saw as frivolous, unison was to be preferred. Organists had wept when they were turned out of the churches at Zurich. Calvin too saw organs as a piece of theatre rather than an aid to devotion: musicians invading the proper world of prayer and teaching.

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However, lay folk were involved through the use of metrical psalms, which Calvin added to his liturgy from 1638, beginning with his version of Luther’s Psalm 46, Nostre Dieu nous est ferme appui. In 1539 he arranged Creed and Commandments for musical accompaniment with melodies composed by Strasbourg musicians, Matheis Greiter and Wolfgang Dachstein. Greiter wrote the lyric to Psalm 68 that was to resonate so powerfully over Huguenot battlefields. Calvin also took sixteen of the settings of the Psalms arranged by Clément Marot.12 Here was to be another lasting influence – that of another Frenchman – on the character of French Calvinism. Marot was, on the face of it, an unlikely person to leave such a legacy. The humanist court poet had returned after the Placards to recant, receive a ceremonial whipping and be installed as a chamberlain at the royal court. Some of his psalms were by then already in print but banned by the Sorbonne. He fled to Geneva but was uncomfortable there – he later described it as hell – betook himself to Savoy, then to Ferrara under the protection of Duchess Renée.13 The Inquisition removed all traces of Marot’s tomb but his legacy was secure. Beza completed the publication of the remaining two-­thirds of his psalms. They were loved for their simple use of the vernacular and came into French homes as universally as the Bible. What Calvin’s theology was to the mind, providing the backbone of faith, Marot’s psalms were to the spirit of worship. In temple, field and home they were to be a vital element in the morale of French Protestants, with verses for every mood and need, for joy and sorrow; for peace – and inevitably for war. Old priest, new pastor; old church, new chapel: all was different. The minister typically taught in the long black cassock adapted from the academic gown, with ruff round the neck. Whether they simply cleared out images, the superstitious clutter as they would see it, and whitewashed the walls, or, as in much of Catholic France, had to build anew, the setting for worship was designed for the ministry of the Word: ‘a powerful corrective of humanistic piety . . . the self-­disclosure of the eternal.’14 The chapel (‘temple’ it would be called in France) was for learning, from the pulpit, and for light, through plain glass. All was to be open, clear, without mystery or distraction for the senses. There was to be no organ, no choir. For constant reminder and attention a table of the Ten Commandments was set up above where the altar would have been. It was brought away from the east wall, a plain table as befitted the understanding of the Lord’s Supper as commemoration (though not that alone, as in Zwingli’s theology) and of the presence of Christ as being real – but symbolic, not substantial. There were no ceremonial acts or gestures to divert the mind and no hymns but those derived from a biblical source, in effect psalms. The people sat ranged around the pulpit and in galleries, men and women separately.

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Parallel and complementary to the ‘liturgy of the Word’ was the ‘liturgy of the upper room’. Calvin wished that la sainte cène should be celebrated once a week; in practice it became monthly, even four times a year. As instituted in his Ordinances15 the rite has more of agape, Christian love feast, than of Eucharist, partaking of consecrated elements. Yet the simple service, culminating in the fellowship of the table, men and women sharing in the bread broken from hand to hand, still reflects his intense religious feeling, displayed in his profound veneration for ‘ce sainct mystère’. As if to complete an experience essentially supernatural, after the final thanksgiving, the congregation was directed to sing the Nunc Dimittis. Through generations of pastors the spirit of Calvin was to be transmitted to Huguenot congregations, a source of strength that would only be lost in places where the formal and primarily didactic spirit prevailed.16 Pre-­eminent as pastor, Calvin managed to function at the same time as a kind of minister for home affairs. From high matters of law to petty crime and drains, there was little that escaped his notice. He taught with the conviction that he represented faith and truth against the many-­headed monster of error and sin. Cantankerous, at times harsh in judgement, especially when an individual’s weakness appeared to compromise the well-­being of the community – or, no less cogent, his own soul’s salvation – Calvin frequently professed humility as the instrument of God’s will; but a critic may see spiritual pride. Yet how many, wielding such power, with men looking to him for moral and practical guidance, would have remained so level? How many scholars would have given so generously of their time to management and the bread and butter issues that arose out of his dual mission: at home, to maintain, with the city government, the desired moral standard, and abroad, to promote the evangelical cause in France? He would have been a rare man indeed in his age, if he had not been prepared to enforce his idea of religious truth – in the last resort by sword and fire. The myth of the ‘dictator of Geneva’ supposes a political regime dominated by the clergy. In fact Calvin was constantly frustrated by the way in which city authorities blocked his efforts to implement what he believed to be the will of God: the model Christian state, an example for others to follow. Was the Geneva rule then anything more than an example of the futility of moral policing? Or a successful experiment – successful in reformers’ terms – in theocracy? Some undoubtedly saw Geneva as a sanctified city. Sanitised might be a more appropriate term. On the surface it was a well-­ordered city. Beggars were removed, pickpockets unknown, prostitutes invisible. The courtesy enjoined in church was noticeable in the conversation of the street, as surprisingly heard by an Italian Jesuit, Luca Pinelli. A reluctant visitor in 1580, he thought it wise at first ‘to tuck his soutane into linen trousers and wear a

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German cap’. He became bolder in argument but met only politeness.17 The schools and colleges were good. If thieves, blasphemers, had to watch their step, so did secret Catholics; so did adulterers when the death penalty could await them (the bar, typically being set higher for women than for men). Yet there was always a fringe of outsiders. Observers reported taverns full at service time. Skittles and dancing were prohibited – but citizens played and danced. Even within this close society l’homme moyen sensuel may have been less tractable than the Puritan would want. Such doubts arise when we consider the sumptuary laws that Calvin wished consistory and town council to enforce.18 Referring always to the Bible for authority he defied resentment and ridicule by asserting the need for modesty in dress, as in social behaviour. Two key ideas lie behind the vehemence of his teaching. He marvelled at God’s ‘wonderful workmanship’ in the creation of the human body, ‘so fair and lively an image of his majesty’.19 Yet it was ‘the prison of the soul’ in and around which war was waged between the forces of evil and the Holy Spirit. He writes constantly of ‘clay’, ‘dirt’, ‘mire’ to convey the sin, corruption and ‘all our filthiness that makes us loathsome to God’. Eyes are held to be especially dangerous, ‘enticers to beguile us and work our destruction’; all the more important that the ears hear good preaching. He is relatively moderate, indeed realistic, when he counsels the Christian ‘to keep good watch, seek forgiveness from God and pray for the Holy Spirit to reign’. Eternal vigilance – such is the believer’s duty when it comes to appearance. Modesty required that clothes should not be for ‘allurement’. The sexual honour of women is closely related to their appearance. ‘The dress of a virtuous and Godly woman must differ from that of a strumpet.’ Variety of colours, perfumes, jewellery, hair uncovered or ‘wantonly curled and decked’ are among the adornments condemned. All of this will be recognisable in the diatribes of Puritans wherever a preacher finds licence for his prejudices. To the modern ear it may reek of patriarchy and misogyny but Calvin’s teaching should be taken in the context of his age and finds parallels there in much of Catholic moral teaching. It reflected a view of God’s relations to man that was noble in conception and splendid in its generosity of spirit. Calvin simply could not bear that God’s creation should be in any way spoiled. Nor did men escape censure: for they too should avoid extravagance, incline towards the fuscous: too much concern for dress, excessively long hair, was effeminate. The minister above all should set an example of plainness, eschewing the vestments that had their origin in the Levite priesthood. Only the sleeveless black gown was seemly, as befitting an authority as much didactic as pastoral. Calvin practised what he preached, that the Christian life should be so frugal and sober, in dress as in other ways, that ‘the whole course of it should present some appearance of fasting’. The door was left ajar for his followers to interpret his teaching in ways that fitted

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their own style and idiom. In church discipline as in individual conduct France’s Protestants were offered the guidelines constantly reiterated in Calvin’s correspondence; in turn they were kept under surveillance by their consistories. Yet had there been no more to Calvin’s teaching than the negative and the restrictive we would hear little from Huguenots about the liberation of spirit and the joyful confidence that was expressed in their worship and became a defining characteristic of their church. Control of morals and beliefs would naturally pose less difficulty for the faithful who had chosen to submit to the discipline of minister and elders; the range of punishments was correspondingly less harsh. Within the framework of the whole new church, raw and under pressure, when an individual was deviant, judgement could be harsh. In 1547 Gruet, formerly Secretary of State and Calvin’s political rival, was executed for blasphemy, scepticism and the possession of infidel and immoral books, amounting supposedly to atheism. In October 1555 Miguel Servetus was burned, with his book on the Trinity tied to him, on the hill of Champel outside Geneva. Self-­taught theologian, mild-­ mannered if somewhat eccentric, Servetus gained notoriety from books that, if taken seriously, would have offended Rome, Wittenberg and Geneva alike. Theologians regarded his Christianismi restitutio as worthless but the inquisitors could not ignore his rejection of the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity. He was arrested, tried and imprisoned. He escaped from Toulouse so easily that it might have been arranged to save the judges embarrassment. If not by then deranged, he was apparently bent on self-­destruction. Calvin, or someone close to him, had already supplied evidence to convict him. En route for Italy he stopped at Geneva – and was arrested. After ten weeks of examination and consultations with other Swiss cities, the Geneva council decided unanimously that Servetus should die. They were persuaded that the Evangelical church would be discredited if its enemies could say that it was soft on heresy. Servetus had argued that the state – Calvin, in effect – had no business to prosecute for he had done no harm in Geneva; and that the church had no right to be prosecutor in a state court. Calvin felt obliged to defend the verdict. Under pressure he wrote a defence of the orthodox doctrine of the Holy Trinity – as a shepherd defending his sheep against wolves: that was the gist of his argument. He received support from most Protestant leaders. A famous letter from Nicolas Zurkinden of Berne, a nobly expressed plea for lenience, survives as an exceptional text. Posterity would condemn Calvin for his part in the Servetus affair and be offered a hostage in the form of a considered and implacable defence of the execution: Declaratio orthodoxae religionis. Soon afterwards appeared Sebastien Castellio’s startling plea for toleration of theological differences within Christendom.20 Like Zurkinden’s his was a rare, individual voice, but it helped sustained

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debate. The Reformation was preparing public opinion to accept eventually a degree of tolerance, not intentionally but by smashing religious unity. That could not yet be foreseen as each camp guarded its position for which, like the Huguenots, it had to fight so hard. All appeared to agree that the best place for Jews was the ghetto.21 Once established at Geneva as chief pastor Calvin saw the city as a natural haven for refugees from France. There was no language barrier. Newcomers could readily identify with their respected compatriot, magisterial but plainly sympathetic to their needs. They would rub shoulders with other foreigners, notably, during Mary’s reign, Englishmen fleeing from persecution but soon to return (in 1558), hoping to influence Elizabeth’s church, looking for bishoprics and deaneries, a rather separate group, Calvinist only in theology. Anticipating less material recognition in their native field of mission the French community grew fast. In 1549 the city council started to keep a record of those coming along the main routes to apply for the status of habitant. Allowing for under-­ registration and informal entry the total of 5,000 by January 1560 can be doubled to get a true picture of the impact on the city.22 The French community had its own strong esprit de corps. Calvin saw refugees as an opportunity rather than a problem and, where possible, trained them to return to France to preach and proselytise. For their schooling he established the Geneva College in 1558, followed by the Academy of 1559 more specifically as a seminary for training ministers, which he entrusted to Beza.23 They were the seedlings of the Geneva hothouse, to be transplanted and grow in native soil. With them we come to the story of Huguenotism, and its growth from just a number of individuals and communities of evangelical persuasion to become a coherent force in French life. To be a Huguenot was to be a Calvinist. In observable ways it was to be a different kind of Frenchman, to belong to a distinctive, largely separate community. Take the doctrine, the manner of worship, and all the nuances of thought, styles of speech and conduct – and it was to be a stranger in one’s own land. Calvin remained to the end the first port of call for would-­be pastors, the authority to consult, in matters of theology, morality and organisation, as they struggled to establish their churches. They were his chief and constant care. Weary, often ill, forcing himself on, he answered letters, rarely refused an interview. The burden of the French churches, on top of his other commitments, may have contributed to his early death, in 1564. There was a two-­way process of demand and supply. Much of Calvin’s correspondence was with French communities seeking a pastor. Pastors would return to France with the strong sense that they belonged to a wider world, both French and international. They would also know how to offer consistent teaching and the discipline they had learned in the theocracy of Geneva. They would need it.

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Before he died Calvin was mortified to see that there were limits to what he could direct – and what he could prevent. He was shocked by the rash actions of the plotters of Amboise24 and disturbed by the outbreak of civil war, with the moral and political dilemmas that then faced the young church. At least he could have confidence in his successor. Devout, scholarly and principled, effective head of the church after Calvin, second only to Calvin in his influence on the evolving Huguenot movement, Beza took the Calvinist mission into the seventeenth century.

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PA RT T WO A CHURCH FORMS

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chapter ten

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Persecution and Growth One martyr is worth ten missionaries. (Florimond de Raemond)1

W

ith the accession of Henry II in 1547 came a more consistent and relentless policy towards his deviant subjects. He was orthodox, shrewd, but narrower than his father in his conception of royal duty. His experience of imprisonment as Charles V’s hostage for six years had left scars. He seems to have had two overmastering concerns: to defeat the man who had so humiliated him; and to root out the heretics who defied the tradition of the realm and threatened its security. To try them he established a special tribunal in Parlement, the Chambre Ardente. There were as yet no organised churches though there were already signs of a popular movement that was to transform the religious scene. Brave souls ready to embrace a new faith and the risks it entailed were still a small proportion of a population of around 16 million, and scattered and diverse in status. Early martyrs included a lawyer, a monk, a surgeon, a cobbler, a mason, a schoolmistress and a servant. Here surely was no threat to church or state. But from the late 1540s the Geneva connection started to take effect as French refugees learned Calvinist theology and discipline and prepared for mission. In 1555 the Company of Pastors began its training programme while in French cities where Protestants were already active they found fellowship in clandestine meetings and services. The prospect of martyrdom may have deterred some; the example stiffened the resolve of others. French Protestantism as a party was born in the charred bones of the Place Maubert and other public sites of punitive torment. Soon there would be less need of the umbilical cord that tied it to Geneva, but the relationship would remain vital. Calvin, always a Frenchman at heart, saw the nurturing of the party as his personal responsibility. His attitude and message were crucial. He called on

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evangelical Christians to stand firm. In an early treatise, pointing to the example of Nicodemus,2 he had dealt with the complaint that he was too extreme, unsympathetic to those whom we might call fellow travellers. In terms that well illustrate the uncertainties of the time he singled out for scorn les délicats, courtier clergy looking for charm and culture in religion. With them were the time-­servers who move only so far as to ensure that they will not be debarred from promotion, and those reforming bishops whose well-­ meaning efforts actually strengthened the case for Rome.3 They should listen, like him, to Scripture, be obedient to the Word. They need not seek persecution, behave irresponsibly, but must aim for total obedience, not hide themselves behind outward conformity. Arguing for truth, as it was to be found in honest perusal of Scripture, he defined the challenge and offered the choice: his was no easy way but that which generations of Huguenots would have to follow. The difficulty for them was compounded by Calvin’s clearly stated belief that the authority of the state came from God and that the state had the right, even the duty, to intervene in spiritual matters. Of course his vision of the relations of church and state was wholly different from that of Frenchmen for whom they were fused in the person of the king to whom all owed allegiance, whose duty it was to destroy heresy. Very well then for Calvin, some might say, writing from his safe haven to recommend a choice that must, in itself, declare a subject to be disloyal. In Geneva a man could serve two masters; in France he could not. Calvin could not fail to understand this but was constrained by the need to show a neutral face to the French government, always capable of reprisals. His French followers, returning to pursue their mission at home, were, ipso facto, subversive. Operating from safe houses, ministering secretly, they would be under no illusions. St Paul and his fellow evangelists were their models, the early church their ideal, Calvin their mentor. And he was a man who understood the cost of faith. His personal integrity, the compelling force of his writing, the clarity of his teaching and his posthumous reputation ensured that French evangelicals would be Calvinist in theology and organisation, would cohere in a disciplined way that would ensure that they were strong beyond their numbers and durable in persecution and war.4 The story of Poitiers, ‘mother congregation’ of French Protestantism,5 pioneering but not alone, illustrates the way in which a church could grow and how ambivalent might be its relations with Geneva. The town was within Parlement’s jurisdiction but on its margin. Calvin had stayed there in 1534 and believed that he contributed to a lively interest in reformed faith. Centring on the university, there were sizeable Protestant communities in and around Poitiers by the end of the 1540s. According to local tradition some, like early Christians, sheltered in nearby caves. They had reason to hide, for fifty-­six altogether were called before the Chambre Ardente, the largest number from

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any region outside Paris. At first Calvin, with lingering hope for a French reform from the top, seems to have had little to do with them. After 1554 he took a keen interest: his advice suggests that he wanted the Poitevins to be a model for the wider church. They must understand the need for discipline based on respect for the pastor, ‘chosen by you all’. Unfortunately Jacques l’Anglois, the first to be commissioned by the Company of Pastors and elected by the congregation, proved one of the most controversial. At once the community was split between his supporters and those of a local man who favoured the more tolerant beliefs of Castellio.6 He later roused opposition by arriving uninvited at the new church at Tours and challenging the authority of their minister. Plainly, faced by uncertainty and danger, Geneva and France had a common interest in creating a united front and viable constitution. It would be from Poitou, in 1557, that the initiative would come for the synod of 1559.7 Need we be surprised, with later episodes in French history in mind, that official coercion was a squalid business? That local feuds and rivalries prompted accusation and counter-­accusation, that they could reflect designs on property? That mouchards flourished, and that torture was employed to secure confessions? Nor that some seemed to bring a relish to the duty of interrogation? Nor yet – for it was a feature of the conscientious spirit of the day, the ardour for souls – that the majority escaped death at the stake or by the noose? Of the nearly three years, April 1547 to March 1550, before its duties were transferred to ecclesiastical courts, the records of the Chambre have survived for only two-­ thirds of the sessions, 323 persons, and of the occupations of just 160 of them. They show that clergy bore the brunt of the attack: a third of victims though a twentieth of the population. Members of religious orders were well represented: Cordeliers, Jacobins, Carmelites, Augustinian canons and others. They brought to the nascent church an element of informed religion and a kind of professionalism, along with conviction and the spirit of adventure. The authorities saw them as especially reprehensible – and dangerous. There were only six nobles. It would soon become apparent, however, that there were many around the country ready to espouse the cause. Meanwhile it was easier for nobles to prevent exposure or secure protection. For the rest, the tally of merchants (10 per cent), artisans and small shopkeepers (together 37.5 per cent) prefigures roughly the later social composition of the Huguenots, predominantly urban and bourgeois. There were none of the lowest class, ouvriers nor any peasants. Thirty-­seven of the 323 were executed but only six were burned, as unrepentant heretics, the others being hanged. Penalties included banishment, the confiscation of property, fines, chastisement and public penance. Severe and threatening it might be, but by comparison with the Spanish onslaught soon to be unleashed in Flanders, which caused many Protestants to emigrate, it was small beer – and plainly ineffectual.

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The royal officers and lawyers (14. 4 per cent) came mostly from a modest level, those who walked about the lobbies of the law courts, young, un-­propertied and with relatively little to lose. It would be different in the provincial capitals, away from the social pressures of Paris. Everywhere men from the overcrowded law faculties would be prominent in early Huguenot circles, maybe with more ambition than opportunity, used to contention and to testing new ideas. Notable among them was François Hotman, jurist and future Huguenot publicist, who found himself arraigned before his father in the Chambre Ardente and fled to Lyons. The two sons of Guillaume Budé became Protestant. Some more senior, and established in office, might follow the Gallican route towards Protestantism taken most notably by the great jurist Charles Dumoulin.8 From rejection of the Pope’s temporal authority to querying the spiritual it would seem to be a short step. But the fact that the Pope’s judicial rights were already severely confined seems generally to have had a different effect. Most parlementaires were satisfied with the status quo, concerned about retaining their position, open to crown pressure and more likely to be disturbed by the potential for disorder than impressed by the evangelical case for radical change. They would balk, however, at the establishment of a Roman-­style Inquisition. Between the rival authorities guarding their own jurisdictions, there was always tension. The heresy laws were modified in November 1549 and a role returned to church courts. Then the Edict of Chateaubriand, in June 1551, declared war on ‘the Lutheran heresy’, as it was still envisaged, and on those presumed to be infected. They were ‘fomenters of sedition, schismatics, disturbers of public harmony and tranquillity, rebels and disobedient evaders of our ordinances . . .’ It deployed a full array of weapons and attacked heresy on all fronts in forty-­six articles.9 It proscribed the printing and sale, even possession, of Protestant literature. Lesser courts, présidiaux, were allowed to proceed against heretics without appeal to the sovereign courts. Calvin was shocked into the comment that Christians were denied the right opened to convicted thieves. Seven articles dealt with illicit assemblies and incentives for informers, pardon for previous attendance at meetings, and a mean bribe – a third of the victim’s confiscated property. It remained an offence to shelter heretics; now magistrates were empowered to search private homes. In further clauses Protestants were barred from public office while Parlement was required to hold regular sessions to investigate possible heresies among its members. The need for such legislation suggests that the authorities were baffled. Striking at random where some activity was open, or informed on; concerned as much with sedition as with heresy, they would be uneasily aware of what they were missing. Passing from the stage of individuals and small groups to church-­like communities the spread of evangelical faith was gaining momentum. Influenced by the cardinal of Lorraine,10 Henry hoped to check

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it and circumvent judges disposed to leniency, especially for their own sort, by establishing an Inquisition. Président Séguier argued that it would infringe secular jurisdiction and the rights of the crown: for the clergy there were already the ecclesiastical courts; for laymen there already existed the Edict of 1551. So Henry drew back. When, in 1557, he returned to the idea the Pope was gratified but Parlement blocked the relevant edict for six months. Jealous of Papal intrusion it objected to the creation of French cardinals, Lorraine, Bourbon and Châtillon (the latter with good reason)11 who had a brief to act as inquisitors-­general. Their four deputies were eventually sanctioned but had power only to consider matters of doctrine. They had no time to work effectively before the death of Henry II created a new situation. The persecution of Protestants had continued meanwhile to be patchy: sufficiently ferocious to test Protestant resolve, not sufficiently thorough to be an effective deterrent. In the mass of devotional literature the borderline between the acceptable and heretical was hazy. No doubt some publishers had an evangelical agenda. Others simply responded to the insatiable demand for vernacular bibles and the cheaper popular books of verse paraphrases, illustrated with woodcuts, of biblical stories and scenes. Editions in Italian and Spanish show that they were as uncontroversial as they were popular. More surprising were some publications that could be regarded as overtly Protestant, like Antoine Vincent’s edition of psalms in French, with accompanying music; it was registered by the Lyons senéchaussée as ‘necessary because of the edification that these psalms can bring to our people’. When the understanding of what constituted heresy was so vague, when church and Parlement were at loggerheads and the crown between them, how could there be an effective policy of repression? One case of several illustrates the hazards of life on the heresy trail. Thibault de Brosses, canon of Tours, was condemned in 1548 following a visit to Geneva. He secured a royal pardon, was re-­arrested, but escaped: guards were not always too vigilant. Others were less fortunate. The leading Protestant in Orléans, Jérôme Groslot, was condemned to death by the inquisitor Jacques Gueset. The blood of martyrs continued to feed the legends that, in France as in England, Scotland and the Netherlands, nourished the spirit of Calvinism and gave it the potential to be a revolutionary force. It also fed the spirit of revenge. The same Gueset would be a Catholic victim in I562, seized saying mass and hanged in the main square: just one story that suggests the spirit of religious war. ‘One martyr is worth ten missionaries,’ wrote Florimond de Raemond.12 He was an early convert who recanted before writing a history that, while too near the events to be objective, is more even-­handed than might be expected. With pastors travelling often incognito between towns to offer ministry, and Protestants, even in Paris, persisting in their meetings, there was bound to be an open clash. As certain quartiers, like that of St Germain

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favoured by merchants, came to be associated with the mysterious new religion, communities were divided, vigilantes on guard. When students surprised a Protestant meeting in the Rue St Jacques in the Latin quarter on 4 September 1557 they provoked riots that would set a pattern for religious violence. What Parisians did today the country might not necessarily do tomorrow; but what they thought and felt affected the deliberations of crown and council and set the tone for events in other cities. If true under the heavy hand of Henry II how much more would it be when there succeeded a frail adolescent, under Guise tutelage; and then a boy, with years of regency? In the month before the fateful meeting the people had been shaken by the news of the defeat of Constable Montmorency followed by the loss of St Quentin, a few days’ march away: Paris feared a Spanish attack. The conjuncture of defeat, panic and the search for the ‘traitor within’ was to recur, notably in 1567, when the Huguenot army sought to disrupt supplies.13 A city of court, government and its most important institutions, Paris was also, after St Quentin, a frontier city, now tense and expectant of some coming ordeal. In its densely crowded streets and tenements feelings could rise dangerously high; rumour could be deadly, a mob could form in hours. The people respected the authority of the priests: as natural guardians of the community, its shrines and its spiritual well-­being, they were qualified to offer what they would receive as the official line, the voice of God. When, in critical moments, they preached inflammatory sermons invoking the metaphors of sickness and corruption, urging the necessity of cleansing, or of an alien, unnatural presence that required a drastic purge, a single provocative act could bring their parishioners onto the streets. So the city authorities had to act fast and with severity to contain the situation. Of 130 arrested in the Rue Saint Jacques, 37 were women; about half of those were noble. Nor were they spared on that account. Altogether, eventually, only a few were executed. Prominent among them was Philippa de Luns, dame de Graverons: she went to her end in her finest gown ‘to honour her spouse Jésus-­Christ’.14 Feminine grace, aristocratic pride, devout martyrdom – it was a formidable challenge to the city authorities. They seem to have been concerned most with the danger of unruly plebeians to civic order. It had long been so. Now, with religion at issue, and the example of important families, it was alarming. As the prisoners were marched to the Châtelet bystanders tore at their clothes and bespattered them with filth. Local youths took to setting up images of the Virgin and attacking any who did not pay her respect, light a candle or give money for one. Protestants met in small groups and in secret. Pastor Macaud wrote to Calvin that he had to preach five times a day. Like others, he visited the prisoners. The spirit remained generally resolute though some prisoners secured release by recanting. Under family pressure and the threat to cut out their tongue

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before being burned alive it is not surprising. Meanwhile temperature was kept at boiling point by the polemical exchange of rival champions, doctors of the Sorbonne answered by ministers who witnessed the persecution. After the city guard had surprised one meeting, a random shot startled the crowd outside and enabled the Protestants to escape through a hole in the city wall. Much still depended on the protection that Protestants could claim and that the authorities respected. The marquis de Longjumeau had property in the Pré aux Clercs outside the Porte St Germain and crowds met there to sing psalms until forced to desist – but were allowed to disperse peacefully. Sometimes spectators showed respect for the courage of victims, but there was little sympathy for their position; it offended that profound instinct of the citizen for solidarity, expressed typically in the now flourishing confraternities, the processions and in the communal rite of the mass. On occasion residents of the Place Maubert would gather the wood for a burning. All the time particular atrocities and steadfast and defiant conduct on the part of victims were building, stone by stone as it were, the great monument to self-­sacrifice that would take shape as Jean Crespin’s Histoire des martyres.15 There figures, for example, the bookseller’s wife, Marguerite Le Riche, who, in August 1559, was put to the question extra­ ordinaire to make her reveal her accomplices and to identify the house in the Faubourg St Victoire where Protestants had met. Unaware that her execution was intended in any case, she still held out. At execution, a small mercy, she was gagged, her tongue not cut out. Confronted with such stories one feels a respect beyond words. The effect on fellow believers can only be imagined. Beyond Paris and heartened by word and example the evangelical message spread fast; with it the persecution. There can be no certainty as to numbers for most records are patchy, where they survive. Two examples give an idea of the lawyers’ diligence and scruple before conclusion on scaffold or pyre. The parlement of Bordeaux investigated 477 suspects between 1541 and 1559 of whom only 18 died by fire. The records of the parlement of Toulouse reveal however, the accelerating pace of prosecution, the effect surely of fear and rumour, but also of a real surge in Protestant numbers. Since they tended, like those in other towns, to live in certain districts, here around the university, the town hall and the artisan riverside, they were not hard to identify. With the well-­attested connivance of city magistrates, they could expect tip-­offs before preparing for one of the meetings that occurred typically in the courtyard of some grand hôtel. But the number of prosecutions rose steadily. Fuelled by personal antagonisms and ambition, now by religion, it was urban civil war, warning of worse to come. From 1541 to 1550 there were 257 cases; from 1551 to 1560, 684. The religious scene began to crystallise, anticipating its eventual shape. The synod of 1559 confirmed and gave institutional form to what was already happening. In 1560 Coligny estimated that there were 2,150 Protestant churches

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and communities in the country.16 He exaggerated to make his point to Catherine about the need for toleration but the number of adherents was growing remarkably fast. Given that nearly all relevant birth registers have disappeared an estimate must be an informed guess based on the numbers of ‘gathered’ churches; it must then be checked against later and more reliable evidence. One well-­considered estimate of what would prove to be the peak, before growth was rudely checked in 1572, is 1,200 churches and around 1.8 million members.17 For a few years more than one in ten of the population were Huguenot. Some of the larger congregations already had their own ‘temples’. How can we account for this sudden expansion? Is it enough to attribute it to the blood of martyrs, or the sheer power of the evangelical message, convincing individuals that they were saved by the free gift of grace? Should we stress the confidence and competence of the new wave of ministers, in learning and understanding so evidently superior to all but a handful of parish priests? Should we even consider the impetus of fashion, the appeal of novelty to bored or restless nobles and their wives? Look for a cause in adverse economic conditions, at least as they affected some places and trades? Or note the attraction to some nobles of church property, its seizure ostensibly justified when its guardians were corrupt or slack? There is evidence to take us further along each of these lines of enquiry. But with such different motives for a personal choice – to enquire into Protestant ideas, to make a formal commitment in a worshipping community; even to take up arms – it is fruitless to devise a single formula or even give special prominence to one cause over others. There were bound to be different angles of vision, different accounts of what was happening, from the excited or impressed, to the bemused and horrified; different social interests; and differences between towns, provinces, even pays. The preference of a noble would be affected by the faith of his patron or local grandee; the choice of a townsman by the existence of a parlement, university, even a resident or effective bishop; of a peasant by the faith of the seigneur. It is futile to seek a single predominant reason for the remarkable surge of evangelical faith. Interpretation couched in terms of class antagonism is better suited to later industrial society. Rather, celebrating difference, recognising the element of chance in belief or disbelief, the excitement of novelty, even the opportunity to register some kind of protest against ‘them’, authority, we may note the diversity of place and experience and be content to identify, from individual stories some common features.

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chapter eleven

s

Why Be a Huguenot? ‘Reform enabled them to cast off social restraints’1

T

he protestant message could appeal in crowded cities where employment failed to match the needs of a rising population and the expectations of skilled workers. Such places were Senlis, Orléans, Rouen and Tours. ‘It was not solely against doctrinal corruptions and against ecclesiastical abuses but also against misery and iniquity that the lower classes rebelled,’ wrote Hauser. ‘They sought in the Bible not only for the doctrine of salvation by grace but for proofs of the primitive equality of all men.’2 But who were these ‘lower classes’? Surely not those at the bottom, the illiterate and chronically indigent, though some such may have joined in the action when riot followed preaching or other provocation. It is easier to see the attraction of religious dissent to certain groups of artisans, those most likely to be basically literate, mobile, aware of rights; to belong perhaps to a guild or confrérie. ‘Those whose trades contain a certain nobility of spirit were the easiest to ensnare,’ in Raemond’s revealing phrase.3 The word imagination comes to mind as one considers the crafts – of the jeweller, silver and goldsmith, leather worker, painter or printer – that had most art about them. Special skills, novelty, even claims for prestige affected an artisan’s mentality, his readiness to think at large.4 Belonging to an élite of workers with some special skill could make for solidarity akin to family, like that of the ten velontiers of Avignon recorded as settling in Geneva.5 Physical horizons should not be discounted. In Lyons Protestantism was to be found particularly among recent migrants whose idea of the world was less parochial than that of long-­standing residents. The printer was in a special category, having direct, intimate contact with new ideas, and might have found Protestantism appealing; yet he would want to be free to take orders from either side of the religious divide. In proportion to relative numbers in the population, the largest Protestant social group, though not in every case the

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most influential, was commonly that of urban craftsmen, used to a degree of independence, seeking to improve their lot but still close to the life and rituals of the streets. Febvre went further than Hauser and looked to the bourgeois, merchants, magistrates and royal officers who found in Calvinism a faith suited to their needs and taste, ‘more in agreement with the changed conditions of their social life’.6 Motivated and equipped to benefit from books and homilies they were the most likely, once convinced, to stand fast; least likely to be swayed by traditional loyalties. However, Febvre looked also at ‘all those who, in exercising precise trades and minute techniques, developed within themselves a temperament inclined to seek practical solutions . . . All had equal need of a clear, reasonably human and gently fraternal religion.’ That Febvre was close to the mark appears to be borne out by the experience of two cities, after Paris the largest in France. With some 70,000 inhabitants, open to the trafficking of foreign seamen and merchants, Rouen was early exposed to Protestant ideas.7 It was also an administrative centre, the seat of a parlement and an archdiocese. From sophisticated parlementaires and experienced merchants at the summit, down through a range of bourgeois and artisans to the cloth workers and the casual labour of the docks, Rouen proved to have zealous converts in all classes. Here, as in Paris, there was scope for disorder and violence; here it was predictable that Protestantism would become organised and that its opponents would react with equal vigour. Moreover, Rouen’s influence across the province, along with the free intermingling of traders and seamen in the ports of Le Havre, Dieppe and others, ensured that Protestantism would gain a foothold there. As early as 1530 Bucer called Normandy ‘a little Germany’.8 Investigations and executions failed to halt the spread of ideas but Rouen’s parlement and church courts managed at first to prevent the regular meetings and resulting consolidation of a Protestant community. That eventually occurred with the arrival in 1557 of the Calvinist minister de la Jonchée. His congregation had to remain underground, moving its meetings from house to house, but it was sustained by systematic teaching and the consistorial discipline recommended by the master: an early case of the Geneva effect. Those who stayed showed courage: death was the penalty for a minister, confiscation for any house in which Calvinist worship was reported. Not surprisingly, many left for Geneva. The total of 139 such emigrants recorded for the years 1549–56 was higher than for any other city. Yet in 1560 ‘the Gospel began to be strong’.9 Less appreciatively a Catholic recalled that the Huguenots ‘began to rear their heads’. They held open meetings, perceiving safety to lie in numbers, especially in the numbers of citizens influential in trade and office; groups of people were reported to be singing psalms in the streets. Visiting in July 1560 the Spanish

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ambassador was dismayed to find 3,000–4,000 Protestants assembling in front of the cathedral. The scene points to a feature observable across the land: a thrilling sense of imminent victory and desire to be part of it, along with a throwing off of disguise, even a desire to be recognised that had been unthinkable a few years before. There was talk of ‘an abundant harvest for Christ’. Was God’s favour not plain to see? We may see the spirit abroad. Can we come closer to the thinking, or to the particular interests? At Rouen the higher the status of the artisan, the more likely he was to be a Protestant; the more literate and self-­confident, the more likely to reject the tutelage of the clergy and take to the idea of the priesthood of all believers. That is also the picture in Lyons,10 where financial and trading links with Germany and Switzerland again ensured the two-­way flow of travellers and news; where new trades, like printing and silk-­weaving, brought immigrants, and where Protestantism made early inroads. With eighty printing works by 1500, the city attracted government’s attention as the main source, after Geneva, of evangelical books and a base for the colporteurs who distributed them around the country. It was easier to intercept the small fry than to reach the sources, author or printer. The city was a staging post for refugees. A royal ordinance of 1524 reveals early concern: ‘For five years the Lutheran sect have been breeding in the city of Lyons.’ ‘False doctrines’ were noted; also ‘pernicious sermons’ and ‘reprehensible books’. There were converts in every class and group but there is evidence of particular appeal to those whose specialist skills, and patient, solitary hours, may have encouraged the reflective frame of mind envisaged by Febvre. They were ready to study the Protestant case, might indeed be setting it up in print, and they were used to collective action. There were fewer converts from the older, less skilled occupations. The notorious Rebeine of 1529, when a mob of loom-­workers looted convents and smashed images, had much to do with hunger; little apparently with religious zeal. Humane motives apart, mob violence and the threat to property would always concern the city authorities; it led them to set up the pioneering Aumône-­générale for poor relief. The Protestants of Lyons had the advantage of being overlooked by neither parlement nor university. Hoping for a quiet life and favourable conditions for commerce, and anyway divided in opinion, the authorities were not disposed to look too closely, for example, into the opinions of teachers at the Collège de la Trinité. Heresy could, however, be as risky here as elsewhere in Henry II’s France. The preacher Claude Monier was executed in 1551. ‘The five scholars of Lausanne’, executed in 1553, came to have a special place in the Huguenot martyrology in the ever-­growing record of Jean Crispin. The details may owe something to the sympathetic imagination but there can be no doubt about the

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sustaining message over the years. Huguenots could see the heroic days of the early church in their stand against persecution. Gradually they would see themselves as victims, not just of the Gallican church and the law courts but of Catholicism, its false beliefs, as in the case of the Albigensians,11 reinforcing the spirit of persecution. Selective strikes, such as that against the ‘scholars’, with the clandestine letters from prison and the other communications that were to prove so vital in developing the network, strengthened the resolve of the evangelicals. Their number grew spectacularly in the 1550s. The council’s main concern, and that of the more conservative-­minded pastors, was to demonstrate loyalty to the crown. So when, in 1551, Protestants, some armed, staged a noisy demonstration, chanted psalms and shouted insults against the canons of the Cathedral of St-­Jean, they clamped down. There were no more such public displays. But Protestantism grew apace. Nowhere is the failure of government to contain the movement more striking. By 1561 up to a third of the people may have undergone some ‘conversion’. Caution is necessary as to numbers and the nature of the experience. Though elements of the story may be found in other large cities, that of Lyons is exceptional. It was a frontier city with a cosmopolitan culture. Economic and social patterns ensured that the reform movement grew in diverse ways. Somewhere in the picture there were convinced, persuasive individuals and dedicated pastors. There were printers, like Antoine Vincent, keen to profit from a growing market. Already established in Geneva he was able to get a licence in 1561, on the eve of war, to print a French edition of the Psalms with accompanying music. There were educated people interested in the new ideas; there were the avid readers of popular books; others at work or hanging round the printers’ workshops, listening, although illiterate, to the verse paraphrases of Scripture, studying the crudely illustrative woodcuts. Prisoners of conscience, the words and striking images of Scripture – the seeds were there for growth. So were the sowers. What then of the ground? The crucial factor was the existence, at several levels, of social networks favourable to the spread of ideas, to the spirit of comradeship that could make of individuals a potentially radical community. In Lyons’ microcosm can be seen something of the looser, diffuse world of the Huguenot culture soon to spread countrywide. At its core would be an understood and shared theology, a confidence in God, a personal sense of relationship to Christ and a sense of common cause and brotherhood. It would be a new, distinctive phenomenon but it belonged none the less to the corporate culture of the cities. Many of Lyons’ artisans had a tradition of secret meeting; they lived in a closed world, with rites of initiation, passwords, indications of belonging to a club which both protected and empowered them. Such men were likely to be quick learners, enterprising and bold.

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Educated Lyonnais had their own networks. City fathers might make a common front when it came to ensuring that no ill reports got to the ears of the king. Younger sons climbing the ladder towards office and property met local writers and teachers to discuss the latest ideas. This was a bourgeoisie confident, finely housed, proud of their city, open to novelty. A number of those who emerged as Huguenot leaders would have encountered some aspect of evangelical faith in college or counting house. Between the affluent and the artisans, in the years leading up to national crisis and war, there was enough interest to suggest a large movement, yet not enough common understanding to see it become a coherent church. As elsewhere, the numbers affected in the 1550s were extraordinary; the challenges of the 1560s would expose the divisions, the differing priorities. What came together so quickly would as readily fall apart. It may be that many valued the social harmony that was threatened by sectarian conflict. Trade, employment and food came before creed. The Aumône-­générale established for the succour of the poor was also envisaged as a means of maintaining unity and fellowship in a city early divided by religion. It did not become an instrument of conversion. Though Protestants could point to cases where Catholics were given precedence and Protestants excluded it is notable that when the latter controlled the city they maintained the Aumône.12 While convinced Calvinists would work towards establishing a church on the model of Geneva, many of the people would revert to older Catholic ways. The psalm-­singing journeymen who turned out with their families to build the new temple fell away when they found that leadership went to the masters, the lawyers and academics; that ‘rank and order’ were not disturbed. They resented the correction, as bad French or dubious theology, of the homilies they laboured to produce, and found irksome the discipline of ‘good life and conversation’ that could lead to their being banned from the Lord’s Table. The concept of ‘class’ may be unsatisfactory as a guide, let alone determinant of religious choice, but when it implies attitude and the nuances of speech and conduct it can be helpful. The artisans and journeymen of Lyons might find they missed the comradeship of the secular brotherhood that fought for wages not for souls. One could at least be a Griffarin13 and a Catholic without much discomfort. On the other side of the country, in the hinterland of La Rochelle, can be seen the same openness to new ideas from a position on the margin in this case the Atlantic Ocean, with its growing trade and something of the free spirit – and competition – of the seagoing fraternity. There were a number of individual cases of heresy following the early example of Guillaume Joubert, burned in 1526. In 1544 Francis was warned that many in the region of La Rochelle were infected by ‘Lutheranism’: 118 people were arrested there and 25 sentenced to death. The marshes around Arvert and Marennes provided a

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safe refuge for dissidents, among them young monks dissatisfied with the confines of the cloistered life. Secret gatherings were reported until the point when Protestants had the numbers and spirit to meet in open defiance and a preacher found them eager to establish a congregation. Jeanne d’Albret first funded a minister; then Geneva sent one in 1558, with a brief to set up a consistory. In the first civil war the municipality was captured by the Protestants and La Rochelle was set on its course to become the unofficial capital of the Huguenot party, the secure stronghold and base for the operations of Huguenot forces in successive civil wars. La Rochelle was sui generis but studies of other towns and provinces have shown differences of allegiance and outcome that further challenge any overarching explanation in economic or social terms. Close to Geneva and with road links to Paris and Lyons, Dijon had a large group of merchants, lawyers and office-­holders and plenty of literate artisans.14 But reform got no purchase here in the face of wine-­growers and merchants, with all who worked for them on land largely owned by the church. For them, it seems, material interests, the dominant presence of the Guise affinity, and even, possibly, a cultural bias in the land of vineyards towards the sacramental, ensured loyalty to the old faith. There were vineyards too round Montpellier, though of less fame than those of the Côte d’Or.15 The city would continue to be more evenly balanced between Catholic and Protestant than any other, the competition for control fierce, but generally won by the latter. Here, contributing to tensions, the peasantry around the city remained Catholic while the equally poor textile workers, following their masters, became mostly Protestant. Containing 69 per cent of all Protestants recorded the artisan category was exceptionally high, twice that of much larger Toulouse.16 Though the latter had still a considerable body of artisans and merchants in the grain and woad trades, Catholics resisted the great advance of 1562, maintaining and increasing their dominance. Here surely the size and reputation of the legal establishment, with many dependent on it, affected the outcome. An early Protestant bastion, Montpellier also had its prevailing interest to tilt the religious balance. For the lawyers of Toulouse see the doctors of Montpellier. Besides the advantages it shared with other towns in Languedoc, remoteness from the capital, the interest of the queen of Navarre and later the political ambition of Languedoc’s governor Montmorency-­Damville, it enjoyed a commanding position and international reputation as a school of medicine. Here, in early days, heretics were pursued as rigorously as anywhere. When Felix Platter visited he received a rude introduction to the harsher side of city life: severed limbs and heads hanging from olive trees beyond the walls.17 During his stay in 1552–56 they would include an increasing number of heretics. Yet within a few years the city was under Protestant control and

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would long remain so. In the university that was in effect the medical school a succession of Protestants held the principal posts.18 In a population of around 15,000, without important judicial or administrative offices, the religious choice of medical scientists of high repute, such as the committed Calvinists Guillaume Rondelet and Laurent Joubert,19 must account for the sustained ascendancy of the Huguenots in the city. They enjoyed an influence on private lives comparable to that of a priest. It was not diminished when Henry of Navarre became king and brought his Huguenot doctors to Paris, though with them came intense argument over medical theory and the professional jealousy of the capital’s medical élite.20 At Amiens there was no such solid base for the maintenance of Protestantism. Textile workers seem to have embraced the new faith with enthusiasm. Are we seeing here an expression of solidarity in the face of rich guild masters and merchants, almost universally Catholic? Or the influence of neighbouring Flanders and its Lutherans? Many of the Amiens workers belonged to the first generation in a recently established industry. The authorities did not allow the textile workers to organise or regulate themselves like other workers. Lacking a corporate identity they were more likely to find fellowship and empowerment in the Protestant faith. That did not mean that they would stay with it for long.21 We may wonder what teaching they were getting. Heads might have nodded when they heard Vicar-­General Jean Morand say that faith was the way to salvation, not works; that the authority of the Pope and the church was not founded on Scripture and that excommunication was not valid. He was condemned in 1534; at this point he still believed in the mass, thought of himself as Catholic; later he became a minister in Switzerland. The records of the Conciergerie of Paris reveal families divided by religious choice, wives defying husbands, children their fathers. A survey of the Protestant community in 1559 shows a membership predominantly of middling to upper rank: petty nobles, academic lawyers, merchants and financiers. Protestantism seen to be élitist, Catholicism of and for the ordinary citizens: it is of course not so simple but this may have been the common perception. Paris, proud of capital status and institutions, was however, will always be, sui generis: the city, it will be shown repeatedly, of militant Catholicism, readily inflammable. There, as in other cities, notably Bordeaux and Toulouse, where parlements were vigilant in the pursuit of heresy, the artisans remained predominantly Catholic. In Bordeaux the fear instilled by the royal onslaught of 1548 may account for the fact that there were few converts there, although plenty in neighbouring Saintonge and Agenais. A map of France on the eve of religious war shows most Protestant churches in the crescent of southern provinces curving downwards from La Rochelle, up again towards Lyons. The towns of the Loire Valley, Normandy,

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the west and the south-east had been the earliest to harbour Protestant groups. From early days, however, it became clear that security lay in distance from the capital – from government action though not reliably from a hostile mob. Troyes and Tours were two places where Protestantism appeared to take root but both proved vulnerable to counter-­attack. After years of civil war the concentration in the Midi becomes more evident, though a number of churches north of the Loire, notably in Normandy, survived. Was that merely down to the logistics of sixteenth-­century war? May it also have been a matter of culture? The Midi, embracing the provinces of Guienne, Languedoc, Provence and the Dauphiné, had indeed a distinct culture and language: the langue d’oc. But that hardly accounts for the geography of Protestantism, for little effort was made to translate the scriptures or the liturgy into Occitan, or by ministers to preach in the local language. Whether in the first generation from Geneva, or later and local, they came from an educated background – and education meant being versed in French. French was the language of officialdom; it affected profoundly the culture of Calvinism. The luminous style of the French version of the Institutio would influence the language, as well as the faith, of Calvin’s homeland. Regional factors could still be important. In Languedoc there was an ongoing struggle between the Estates and the crown over taxes. Church land was an issue, expropriation a tempting aim. The Third Estate, representing the urban bourgeoisie, therefore most heavily taxed, had Protestant members and affinities. When regional pride, economic interests and a religion that had no room for bishops and abbots appear together, a plausible explanation emerges.22 It may be applied also to two other pays d’états, Provence and the Dauphiné. But Burgundy and Brittany were also pays d’états. There, regional traditions and interests appear to have had a quite different effect. Burgundy took its line from Dijon where the church was seen as an integral part of its identity: what it still meant to be Burgundian. When, as the western part of the former duchy of Burgundy, it passed to Louis XI, the Estates exacted a promise that he would defend their Catholic faith. For reasons already suggested and because of the continuing influence of the Guise, there would be fewer Huguenots in Burgundy than in any other province of comparable size. Brittany can be thought of as France’s Ireland. There was a larger proportion there of priests to population than anywhere else; people might complain about them – but they were deeply attached to their pardons, saints and legends. They showed little inclination to embrace Calvinism except where, as in Rennes, there were more than a few educated families, or, as in Nantes, the fresh air of the seaport and reports from the wider world; or, as under the surveillance of the Rohans and (for Nantes) François d’Andelot, on

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a great estate. By 1560 there were perhaps around 1,500 Protestants; not a large group in a city of more than 20,000, but with the potential for growth and decidedly aggressive, insults and physical violence inviting retaliation. An energetic bishop, Antoine de Créqui took early counter-­measures. At a carefully staged colloquy in Nantes two Huguenot pastors, Antoine Bachelard and Philippe de Saint-­Hilaire were challenged and, so the Catholics thought, came off worst. The bishop promoted baptism (with re-­baptism of Protestant or ‘infidel’ children where that could be done) as a public way of defining religious allegiance, ‘a holy weapon in the Catholic ritual armoury’.23 There was one conspicuous case of widespread peasant Protestantism. In the Cévennes there was scant respect for royal government, indeed a long tradition of hostility to outsiders. Even there, and elsewhere in the south, as in parts of Provence,24 and the Dauphiné, where Protestantism penetrated the countryside (and would prove around 1685 the most tenacious), it still seems that the main influence stemmed from towns, particularly the small market towns close to surrounding villages. That was the view of the baron de Fourquevaux,25 Catholic governor of Narbonne, who saw two groups tempted by Protestant ideas: young, educated men, ‘lawyers, bourgeois, merchants, young men with a taste for literature and freedom’; along with them ‘artisans of a spirited cast of mind’. It was among such men, typically cobblers and blacksmiths, that de Fourquevaux found violent activists, the most cruel brigands of all. Of course every concerned Catholic had some particular group in his sights. Blaise de Monluc, stern Catholic commissioner and general in southern campaigns, blamed civilian enemies among the lawyers and financiers of Bordeaux.26 In many reports there is an emphasis upon youth. In one later reflection Raemond held that schoolmasters were to blame for teaching pupils to think for themselves! The exceptional experience of the Cévennes does not weaken the case for viewing the spread of Protestantism in cultural terms. Huguenots were People of the Book. They found guidance and inspiration in the Word of God. There is an unsurprising correlation found, for example in Lyons and in Avignon, between Protestantism and rates of literacy. This approach supports other evidence: not only that Protestantism was primarily an urban phenomenon but that, even in cities, though it may have touched them, it held relatively few of the unlettered majority, the menu peuple. They were those most likely to be attached to the folk religion, to their favoured saint and cherished shrine; most resentful of any questioning of cherished practices. They were likely to be far removed from orthodox Christianity as the educated Catholic might understand it. Customary faith could be called semi-­ Manichaean in that the world was envisaged as a theatre for struggle between the forces of good and evil. It was animist in instinct and open to belief in the

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power of magic. It reflected the natural concerns of a peasant whose crops could be destroyed by hailstorms, who could easily see the Devil at work in the maladies that could destroy his livestock. Into this scheme of things, at least in popular perception, witchcraft fitted all too easily, though ‘witches’ might be valued more for their remedies than feared for their spells.27 Religious practice was commonly reduced to formal attendance and anxious confession when disaster threatened. Then the priest had an array of weapons, from procession and display of the Holy Sacrament to resounding anathema: words to placate a supposedly angry God, to end drought, destroy insects or whatever threatened a vulnerable people. The Protestant by contrast drew a clear line between true faith and superstition. When the priest could offer superior magic, and the pastor apparently only fine words, the latter could expect to find country people unresponsive, if not actually hostile. Between Protestantism, as it took on Calvinist shape, and contemporary aspects of Catholicism the differences seem to be sufficient to explain both the appeal of Protestantism to some among the literate and independent-­minded, and the lasting adherence of the masses to Catholicism. It was strong enough to resist Protestant propaganda about the tithe, burdensome though it commonly was. This was not in any case a crucial issue, for Huguenot leaders did not oppose the principle; they just wanted payment to go to them. Protestantism did not figure disproportionately or distinctly in popular émeutes. Where, however, there were serious grievances against seigneurial oppression and, as in the Croquant uprisings of the 1590s a general cry to government for relief from intolerable conditions, Catholic and Protestant peasants might make common cause. As de Fourquevaux makes plain, it was not as if Catholics lacked grounds for complaint about their spiritual mentors. He cites Narbonne where it was fifty-­seven years since the archbishop had been seen. ‘The bishop of Saint Papoul is in Rome, that of Lavaur in Paris, that of Montauban at court.’ ‘The abbots, priors and priests avoid living among their flocks, preferring to leave the work to younger friends.’ The sacraments were administered by hired curates ‘who did not understand what they were saying’. The bishop of Vienne, at the Assembly of Notables at Fontainebleau, put more stress on the weaknesses of the church at every level than on the supposed wickedness of the Protestants, to whom he gave credit for sincerity and desire for truth. Yet such slackness did not lead the unlettered majority to question beliefs as more careful exposition might have done. Their demand typically was not for the abolition of the mass but for its more devout and regular observance. It may even have been that the main obstacle to Protestant conversion, in a society where all the emphasis was on communal social action, was what reformers most deplored. The bishop might draw a line between the true

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miracle, notably transubstantiation, and popular magic; the curé had to compromise if he were to keep his people’s respect. Paradoxically therefore it was the light touch of clericalism that left room for the folk religion, with the practices that consoled, healed, and rendered tolerable lives of toil and want. All the more understandable was the rejection of what folk heard (and in cities could observe) of Protestant innovations and prohibitions: was Calvin not the enemy of ‘lewd dancing’ and ‘pagan tales’? The true Calvinist would not be comfortable in the veillées of winter nights, among peasant families huddled for warmth in the barn, listening to traditional tales. Nor would he have approved the piping and dancing of summer evenings, times of delight and release from impoverished lives. He would have dismissed as absurd, unscriptural, the legendary trials and exploits of the popular saints. It was surely the apparent threat to a way of life, to a people’s sense of their corporate spiritual identity that aroused communities to resist, like those peasants of the Limousin who expelled Huguenots ‘with pitchforks to their backsides’. In England uprisings in the West Country, and the Pilgrimage of Grace, reveal the same spirit of outrage. How dare these interlopers tell us what we should believe and in what language we should worship! When Protestant ideas turned from words to action, to the desecration of shrines; to conflict in a public space, to the insults and garbage thrown at religious processions, the reaction became more violent, the conflict self-­sustaining. As was shown after the murderous spasms that shook many communities following reports of the Conspiracy of Amboise (March 1560), the potential for violence was there from the start. Analysis in terms economic, social, even cultural provides material for reflection about motives and actions. Does it allow sufficiently for the spiritual element in conversion? Huguenots could readily identify with the Old Testament’s central theme of a covenant between God and chosen people; with the idea that they were the Children of God, the obligation and the assurance that are conveyed by the common inscription on their temples: ‘Dieu est avec nous, qui sera contre nous’. They responded to the New Testament’s picture of the early church as a distinct community in an indifferent or hostile world; and above all with St Paul’s heroic life and mission. In letters they saluted each other as ‘brothers in Christ’. They found inspiration in the rich language of the Psalms; the timeless impact of the Gospels; the exhilarating sense of discovering life-­saving truth through a sermon or one’s own reading; not least the influence of some charismatic individual. Besides the faith of the individuals there remains to be considered, though harder to explain, what lay behind the communal actions that could tilt the confessional balance. Contemporary accounts bring us closer to reading the mind and emotions of ordinary Frenchmen and women. They might have no part in the making of policy, normally have no voice; but when they acted in

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concert, spontaneously or under direction, they could effect dramatic change. As ever, in public festivals, in the tradition of charivari and subversive humour, mockery and vandalism were potent weapons. In both camps there were two worlds: the devout, studious Catholic or Calvinist might have little in common with the cruder sort, the Catholic who stuffed a bible into his victim’s mouth, the Huguenot who left human excrement in the holy water stoup. But it was the crudities and insults that fanned the temper of the crowd. And there was little that the most ingenious or depraved might do that did not have its echo, or incitement, in the pamphlet literature of the time, in official pronouncements, even in sermons. The further story of Rouen28 conveys the turmoil from which Huguenotism could gain momentum, could take hold of a city but also be resisted and counter-­attacked, to emerge, a church and party smaller than it had promised to be, but tougher, more compact and equipped for survival. In the Norman capital there were at least nine incidents, variously described as ‘tumults’ or ‘seditions’, in the two years between the botched Conspiracy of Amboise and the Massacre of Vassy (March 1562), the last months of peace that were crucial for the growth of the movement. Protestant pressure was experienced at all levels. On 7 May 1560 a copy of the Confession of Faith was slipped anonymously under the door of the parlement. There followed a petition that the court live by the precepts of the scriptures. Protestants liked to make their point by public singing of the Psalms. One might jump up and openly contradict points in a sermon. Such was an acceptable form of protest, an expression of sincere belief, conducive to an independent spirit. It could turn easily to insult. As a generally absentee archbishop of Rouen the cardinal of Bourbon was fair game. Above his pulpit was suspended a placard showing a flock of geese, the festival prize traditionally given to the king of liars. Calvinist verses derided ‘the god of paste’, the consecrated bread as a plain wafer that the communicant chewed, digested, like any other food. On the feast of Corpus Christi Huguenots refused to drape their houses in honour of the customary procession. Priests were showered with muck. A statue of the Virgin on the wall of the archbishop’s palace was frequently attacked. A minister might warn his flock against violence, urging the special merit of martyrdom. For them it was more likely to be a matter of loyalty, calling for a show of solidarity. A bookbinder was thus saved from the stake. A baker condemned for his part in a bloody riot and a condemned image-­spoiler were among those rescued. There had been, inevitably, much that was covert and nocturnal about Protestant gatherings. They were vulnerable therefore to pulpit allegations, for example, of orgiastic lovemaking, recounted, no doubt, with relish. Protestants denied the need for a priest to be celibate, affirmed the right to marry: would

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polygamy come next? No need to observe fast days? They could then more plausibly be portrayed as gluttons. Refusal to participate in church ceremonies could be interpreted as a seditious attitude to authority as a whole: as on the civic, so on the national scale, as the Conspiracy of Amboise would seem to confirm. As the parties took up ever-­harder positions, each portraying the other as potential rebels, the scares and calumnies became self-­fulfilling prophecies. The warning became the signal to act; the action brought retaliation. The distinction between righteous defence and the offensive strike became increasingly blurred. It may be that some Catholics planned a massacre. In view of later events Huguenot fears may not have been groundless. Where spiritual absolutists are in contention the terrorist is not far behind. One such was Pierre Quictart of Bourges, executed in September 1561 after being found to have papers listing prominent Huguenots and their wealth. The formation of confraternities in honour of the Eucharist, like Rouen’s Confrérie du Saint-­Sacrement (1561), was not, in itself, a novelty. But the timing of this body, and the response it evoked, suggests that enthusiasts were mobilising against those who assaulted what Catholics held to be most precious. Another kind of action may have deterred the potential ‘heretic’. In 1560 some Rouennais drapers decided to deny work to any journeymen who had attended a Protestant service. Was it Protestants, fired by evangelical zeal or, more crudely, seizing the chance to get at ‘fat priests’ and to denounce ‘superstition’, who were most likely to be the aggressors? They learned from Calvin that Catholic ritual was grounded in idolatry. Like Protestants elsewhere they aimed to destroy images, stained glass, roods, crucifixes, relics. Did Catholics, shaken by the abuse, scorn and destruction, naturally see themselves as victims? As the situation had been created in the first place by the new theology, that can be understood. The Huguenot might plead that all he wished was to be allowed to worship in peace. He took his stand on freedom of conscience. So why then, Catholics asked, are you setting up an alternative church with a structure that lends itself to political separatism? And why do you feel the need to rage and scoff at our practices? To the Catholic the consecrated host was Christ’s Body: really present, it offered salvation. When a Huguenot mocked it because he thought it a fraud, a false reading of the Saviour’s sacrifice, he did not just raise a question of theology. He touched a most sensitive nerve, challenged the traditional faith at its very foundation. The feast of Corpus Christi was the occasion for the most important of processions. In adoring the body of Christ, the Catholic was performing more than a meritorious act: it was one necessary for his salvation. To that end the Virgin was the most honoured intermediary. Her representation was more than a work of pious art. It lived as the sign of hope and comfort in a fearful world. When her image was desecrated, when the host was

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thrown to the dogs, the offence cut to the heart of faith. It was seen as a ‘pollution’ – with ‘plague’ the recurring word – that stained the community, even endangered it, exposed it to God’s punishment. After each serious incident of iconoclasm the authorities, taking their lead from the king himself,29 were expected to mount a procession around the chief churches of the city: an act of expiation, a rite of purification, a communal defiance. City fathers needed to lower the temperature. A constant concern was to control prices and ensure a supply of bread. A failure of crops, a time of disette, an inadequate response by the authorities – and protest could turn ugly. There were plenty of lawyers but insufficient enforcers. A looting and ransacking mob was bad enough. Worse might come when royal troops had to be called in to aid the civil authorities. Some hundred years before the existence of what might pass for a regular army, adequately paid and disciplined, military aid, accompanied by billeting, was the last, unwelcome resort. Men and women were then inured to a level of violence that may still astonish. The impulsive blow leading to a violent affray, the argument settled by a sword thrust or a hammer, a feud maintained in successive generations by treachery and murder, are typical topics of contemporary diaries and judicial records. Religious division led quickly to violence because there were vital issues at stake; but also because men and women were used to settling differences by force. As in the Huguenot’s beloved Psalms, as in the Catholic’s tales of saints, there is a nobility of aspiration, an exalting of the good, of heroic action for the just cause. There are also – as again in the Psalms – recurring notes of anger, calls for vengeance, prophecies of destruction, even torture, for those who do not recognise the true God. The often crude, abusive language of religious debate stems from, as it helped to incite, the violence of the streets and fields. It played, at a deeper level, on people’s dreads and insecurities. Given also a political philosophy that allowed no room for toleration, and the tradition of monarchy as guardian of the faith, it is hard to see how radically opposed religious views could have been resolved without, at best, bloody episodes of aggression and repression, at worst prolonged civil war. Some were indeed doves, having from the start a mind to seek compromise. However, at the heart of faith on both sides was such absolute assurance in the rectitude of the cause that the hawks were bound to prevail. The hawks could tear savagely at the very fabric of the rival confession. Orléans was one of France’s holy cities, with a glorious cathedral, many churches and more sacred relics.30 Its repeated experience as a prime strategic target in 1562 and 1568 foreshadows the horror to come. The iconoclastic mob was not content with stripping the churches of relics and ‘superstitious’ images but went on to damage, even destroy the buildings themselves. Behind the theology, the intelligible argument against false ways of worship one sees the irrational rage and greed

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that would evoke a terrible revenge. Dark times lay ahead for the Catholic church. There would be further appalling damage to churches and monasteries, religious observance would be disrupted, land would be alienated to finance the royal armies. Tithes would be evaded by Catholics as well as by Huguenots. There is much here to bear in mind when considering the implacable temper on both sides of ‘the fatal war’.31 Meanwhile the church was slow generally to implement the Tridentine reforms that would make it stronger and more attractive to potential converts.

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c h a p t e r t w e lv e

s

A Party Forms The world’s a stage that’s topsy-­turvey now. . . (Erasmus)1

T

here were as many different experiences as there were Protestant communities; yet increasingly there was regularity and a common order. So what was it coming to mean to be a Huguenot? It was around 1560 that French Calvinists seem generally to have adopted the name.2 In official state parlance, as in the Edict of Beaulieu in 1576, they would be RPR – réligion prétendue réformée. The word Huguenot is of uncertain origin; as often with such party names, accidental, even abusive, later assumed with pride. One possible source, already noticed, was the Eidgenossen, Genevan confederates bound together by oath. It introduces the idea of the covenant that was to be so significant in Calvinist communities, people set apart and uniquely favoured by God. The spelling, Huguenot, could have emerged through the Genevan leader, Besançon Hugues. Or, more likely, it could have originated as a nickname current in mediaeval Touraine, derived from a romance about a wicked king Huguet, whose ghost ran nightly about the streets of Tours. A gate in the city was named after him; Protestants met nearby and so were called Huguenot. Since there is no agreement, even among modern descendants of the original Huguenots, we are free to choose. Most important in the community was the minister. The early ones can be identified because they were part of an organised, documented movement, French refugees, trained, after 1555, by the Genevan Company of Pastors for service in France.3 They came from all over the country but were sent generally to Paris, Lyons, some Norman towns, the Loire Valley and the south – Guienne, Languedoc, the Dauphiné and Provence. One in five went to the south-­west to exploit the Bourbon influence there. Calvin corresponded regularly with the king of Navarre, whom he saw as the potential leader of the

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party. Equipped with false passports, often disguised as merchants, they had often to move hastily, when identified, to another congregation. Of forty-­four whose background can be identified, fourteen were sons of seigneurs. One such was Beza, most important in the training programme at headquarters, as Huguenots came to think of Geneva. Another was Antoine de la Roche-­ Chandieu, who began to organise the first national synod after it had been proposed by the consistory of Poitiers; another François de Morel, who presided at the synod. Their prominent role is not surprising. The bourgeois would naturally have looked to a nobleman for leadership. Twenty-­four of the sample were bourgeois, which reflects the balance of the movement for while, from the start, it attracted the patronage of great families, and soon many lesser nobles, the majority of its early adherents were from the urban classes. Most were young: six formerly clergy, eight students. Of the six artisans, three were printers and three textile workers. It had become apparent to Calvin that the expanding congregations needed some kind of national framework. We have seen that he had exercised leadership mainly through personal contact and individual commissions. Was it with mixed feelings that he saw conversion gaining momentum and congregations becoming more self-­sufficient? The question is relevant since the way in which the French Protestant church evolved in the years before the outbreak of civil war proved decisive for its future. Expanding or contracting, fully or barely recognised, embattled or peaceful, it would last. Take any landmark – St Bartholomew’s, the Edict of Nantes, even indeed its revocation – and the state of the church at that point, and it becomes clear: whatever the changes wrought by time, it would be essentially the same church as that which emerged from the formative years. They were not easy times. Tensions besides those within Geneva itself were resolved under the leadership of Calvin and Beza. Behind the question of theology – and inseparable – was that of authority. When early schooling and direction came from outside the country, while deep differences emerged between – and among – the French congregations, it could not be otherwise. When those involved were men of faith, with the independence of mind, the conviction and sense of mission that had led them to ‘come out’, there was bound to be tension over priorities. Between individuals and their supporters there were more than enough quarrels to show just how extraordinary would be the evolution of a disciplined, cohesive, alternative church. In November 1557 Calvin had sent to Henry II the Confession of Faith in which he argued once again that Calvinism did not deviate from essential Catholic principles. Despite the potential advantage of alliance with German Protestant princes Henry was not to be persuaded. Only then, it seems, did Calvin turn his mind to the Protestant churches in France. At first he was

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sparing in advice. He feared the conflict which, from German precedent, he had reason to expect. First approaches from French ministers about the need for an assembly were coolly received. But when they took the initiative and called representatives to an informal meeting in Paris, he sent three delegates, led by Nicolas des Gallars. They were not formally briefed, yet the outcome showed that there was much to gain for the faith but some problems with it. Realising this, he would give tirelessly to his role as godfather and guide to the French Reformation. In sum his role was to encourage initiative and vitality while maintaining conformity, zeal for the Gospel with the spirit of obedience. The synod of April 1559, held outside the city walls in the relatively safe Faubourg St Antoine, was attended by representatives of twelve churches.4 The forty-­two articles on church discipline followed the Genevan pattern. The governing body was to be a consistory of lay elders and deacons. It was responsible for choosing the minister and presenting him to the congregation for their approval. He was required to sign a confession of faith on election. The consistory could dismiss him for a secular offence but he had the right to appeal to a provincial council. The roles of deacon and minister were precisely defined: the deacon could not trespass on the ecclesiastical fields of preaching and sacrament. He was to minister to the sick and the poor; if required, to say prayers and read Scripture. Like ministers and elders he could lose his place through misconduct. In spiritual matters the minister held the reins. Only he could initiate the process that led to the ultimate sanction, excommunication. As necessary when creating a new church, rules were laid down for the celebration of marriages and baptisms. Synods were to consist of clerical and lay representatives of the churches. Only another national synod could sanction any alteration in discipline or in the Confession of Faith drawn up in Paris. Necessarily covert and incomplete as representative of the scattered Protestants of France, the work of the synod provided the basis of a national church and made possible an orderly expansion, a common discipline and an acceptable modus vivendi.5 It would transpire that some articles were open to different interpretations, and that led to intense debate concerning the independence of congregations and the powers of ministers and synods. The structure and the thinking behind it were better suited to towns than to rural society. Doctrine, however, was clear enough to allow no room for equivocation and its guardians would allow no exceptions. At Poitiers the Protestants had earlier invited a mediator from Paris to settle a dispute over predestination. Having come early into the Protestant field some Poitevins were reluctant to accept outside rule. Now their deputy who suggested that the synod should tolerate theological differences was expelled forthwith. As for the heretic, he should be burned; no doubts there.

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The fact that a synod was possible, even representative, witnesses to the rapid spread of Protestantism through the land. It imposed the formal structure that was the precondition for future growth. There was much in the doctrine and discipline to ensure stability. With fifteen provinces (sixteen including independent Béarn) and over fifty colloquies, with some southern colloquies boasting over forty churches, that in itself is remarkable. But however valuable the lay contribution to its governance, in spirit and practice the religion would only be as good as its pastors. In the first years, the 1550s and ’60s, before Huguenots could rely more on their own colleges,6 the training of ministers in Geneva, the links forged there, with the sense of community that led naturally to supportive networks among pastors at home, were crucially important.7 It was a matter of morale as much as of expertise. In the records of correspondence to and from what could still be seen as ‘headquarters’ there is much evidence of the problems that beset the French churches and of the high value of the Genevan connection. For ‘workers in the vineyard’ and, the constant refrain in letters, ‘for the glory of God and the edification of His church’,8 resources were never sufficient. There was a limit on residence, with other demands on space within the overcrowded city (English exiles for example from the Catholic rule of Mary, 1553–58). The Company of Pastors was over-­subscribed and under-­resourced. Town congregations, sometimes with municipal support, might finance aspiring students; small towns and villages usually could not. When training was deemed sufficient where should the minister go? Requests from the larger communities, like those of Toulouse, might carry most weight. But Geneva was aware of the strategic necessity of reaching the rural hinterland. There were never enough men to go around. Nor was it easy always to find the right man for a particular church: in one an intellectual might be uncomfortable, if not wasted; in another a simpler man might not impress the sophisticated. The young Pierre Perron of St Jean-­d’Angély expected to return to be its minister but was found to have ‘limited abilities’ and dispatched to the Haute Savoie. Much of the correspondence was pastoral in tenor, conveying the discomfort of some ministers; for others ‘ordeal’ is not too strong a word for a man who found himself isolated and lonely, harassed by friar, Jesuit, or most likely by the hostile actions of Catholic neighbours. He might be compromised by the demands of a noble patron, or be under pressure from the strains of what was, in effect, a shared ministry requiring tact as well as firmness. Lay elders too might have grounds for complaint: this man was a firebrand, unreasonable, or just not attuned to local conditions; that man dull and uninspiring. A recurring problem for the consistory was that of the coureur, an unauthorised or unqualified minister whom a community, for want of another, had accepted, who then became an embarrassment. During these teething times it was

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fortunate that there was no challenge to Calvinist theology comparable to that arising from the Erastianism of the next century.9 There were, however, internal debates and damaging rows enough to worry Geneva and lead Beza and the Company of Pastors to urge the churches to proceed ‘faithfully and in edification’ and to avoid ‘all factions and dissension, . . . pride, avarice and ambition, following instead simplicity and charity’.10 For such concerns the case of Jean Morély provides chapter and verse. It is also important since a different outcome could have affected the management of the church and therefore the informal networks that contributed to solidarity in testing times. His book, the Traicté de la Discipline et Police Chrestienne, published in 1562, proposed a shift in authority within churches from consistory to community. Letters that he wrote to Hugues Roseu, the contentious pastor at Orléans, were found and used against him. Heresy was hard to prove but offence against the spirit enjoined on pastors of ‘benevolence’ and ‘good conversation’ was all too evident. Des Gallars was a liar and a fake, Beza was the ‘Jupiter of the lake of Geneva’ and, shockingly, ‘this new antichrist’. He confessed to a loss of temper, apologised and promised not to pursue his alternative plan for the church. But Jeanne d’Albret dismissed him from his influential position as tutor to her young son Henry. Beza found revealing words for his sense of outrage in a final letter: ‘It is you who have violated the virginity of the French churches.’11 Above all ministers must avoid conflict over the central issue of authority. Stemming from the consistory, stretching out to colloquy and synod, supported informally by the personal contacts and letters that strengthened the sense of belonging, the hierarchy of believers was vital to a church that could not rely on tradition but only on the Word of God. Confident in the morality that the English would learn to call Puritan and in the literal interpretation of the scriptures and application to every aspect of life, French Calvinism represented a formidable threat to the authority of the Gallican church, and of the crown. Given the power of Catholic tradition supported by the crown, and the fragmented nature of the country, it could hardly be ignored. The structure of the church was readily adaptable to the needs of war. Did it mean that civil war was inevitable? That would depend largely on les grands who had their own dynastic interests to consider and on the soldiers who would follow them. It would reflect the numbers of Frenchmen prepared to go to war against their fellow Frenchmen; also the many priests and pastors ready to offer theological justification and moral support. It may be that the same inclination to return to the spirit of the primitive church, as later envisaged by François Hotman,12 appealed to disgruntled nobles who, thinking on parallel lines, yearned for a return to imagined ‘good old days’. Then feudal relationships were held to have been secure before new money invaded seigneurial lands and rights. There is wishful thinking here of

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course, a nostalgic view based on some hard cases. No doubt, from petty squire to great noble, there was widespread debt, much enforced selling of land; throughout Europe it lent attraction to the resort to arms. Though many showed no appetite for soldiering, the ‘sword’ nobility was what the word implied. In garrison or on campaign nobles lived soldiers’ lives, imbibed soldierly values: at best courage, honour, loyalty. They lost the opportunities and profits of war by the peace of 1559 but not the appetite that had grown with the feeding; with the virtues, also the vices – heavy drinking, casual violence; and emancipation from civil restraints. Could they easily settle down to the management of a small estate, a life often little different from the farmer’s, when there were other avenues of advancement and prizes to be won? That is certainly the tenor of the nobles’ cahiers of the Estates of 1560, demanding that the ancien noblesse be restored to its rightful position in church, government and society. The sense of devaluation, even exclusion, was enhanced by what they could observe in society, and the tone set by the court. Should they not contend for what could be wrested from the crown, or some grandee, in estates, offices and pensions? In this age of ruffs and rapiers, slashed doublets and jewelled cloaks, when entertaining, above all building, was fiercely competitive, there is enough evidence in contemporary accounts of men duelling and brawling, holding life cheap, to suggest uncertainties of purpose. If that is typical of a post-­war society affected by war experience it may also point to another characteristic: a searching for new ground in faith and morals. That offers further clues to the spectacular post-­war growth in Huguenot congregations. Hotman’s Francogallia would become immensely influential. Calling for the return to a supposed original constitution of the fifth century, it could be dismissed as fantasy if it did not also represent an existing sense that the world was out of joint. ‘Everything’ wrote Louis Le Roy, ‘is out of place and in confusion and nothing is as it should be.’13 Everything then conspired to strengthen the ties that bound the petty noble to a powerful patron and to foster the growth of private armies. Anne de Montmorency came to a meeting of the royal council at Fontainebleau in 1560, attended by 800 men, mainly young, mainly noble.14 The message to the crown was ‘ignore me at your peril’; to the follower: ‘you could do better in my service than in that of the king’. If that meant following his preference in religion, so be it. Montmorency was Catholic but it was the patronage of other great families that transformed the Huguenot churches into a political faction and a military force. It brought in noble clients who would follow wherever their patron led, whether through the sense of obligation that permeates feudal language, or because they wanted diversion, excitement, no doubt some material advantage. Anticlericalism took on a covetous tinge among nobles who had status with little to support it: it could easily lead to, or be mistaken for, Protestantism.

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From student days at Bourges, where Calvin had studied and where at least one of the lecturers, François le Douaren, was a crypto-­Calvinist, Noel du Fail, had evidently picked up the prevalent anticlerical spirit.15 In one story he regrets that to contrast the wealth of the church with the poverty of worshippers was likely to be seen as heresy. Other observers, weighing motives, tended to rate noble values above religious conviction. Monluc held that ‘the martial sort of men are not very devout’; but they took sides and ‘being once engaged, stick to their party’.16 And yet, among the large number of country nobles who appeared to be throwing over the faith of their fathers, one should not think that it was always a light matter. Patrie could of course mean less in emotional sway than province, pays or seigneurie. Yet it is remarkable that so many should risk all by fighting their countrymen, or worse, the crown. Many in the Huguenot camp would find it a hazardous commitment. There were to be bleak, disheartening days. But a significant number stayed loyal to their chiefs, their pastors and their faith. The Protestant message of salvation through divine grace alone could so thrill those who heard it that it became the great empowering force of the age. How fresh and inspiring, in an age when so much of life was squalid and precarious, the message of the redeeming love of the Saviour! Some no doubt listened to the voice of the woman in their life, wife – mother, sister – who convinced them; or whom they wanted to please. At a time when aristocratic women could enjoy wide educational opportunities, some scope for action and influence, besides the estate management required during a husband’s absence at war or at court, examples of conversion suggest the importance of women’s role in fostering a revolutionary movement. There were some strong and confident women among the leaders committed to the evangelical cause. With them, through their example and nurture, an élite of Huguenot nobles came into being. Some of their names would continue to resonate through the Huguenot story. Did others less notable also find a sense of self-­worth in a faith that placed such stress on an individual’s judgement? In the matter of personal salvation, men and women were equal. Faith could be nourished in study and devotion in the privacy of the home. Such questions prompt another, more fundamental one – and lead to an objection, strong in appearance although not, it seems, in human experience. Should not the belief that salvation is entirely in God’s hands, predestined, encourage people to think that conduct does not matter since nothing can affect the outcome? On the contrary, Calvinists everywhere will be noted for sober, purposeful lives since they take seriously the issue of salvation and strive in their prayers to detect, and in their behaviour to prove, that they are of the elect. Instead of relying on ‘works’, fallacious ways, they are told, of earning grace, those who follow Calvin are exhorted to live pious and honest lives. Thus they may convince others, as well as themselves, that what they profess

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is true: the proof being in the pudding. They may simply be so seized by the grandeur and joy of faith that they find the inclination and strength to live in a manner becoming. One need not follow the matter further into the realm of psychology. Nor enter much ploughed ground to consider the supposed connection between Calvinist faith and business success beyond stating the obvious – that the more Huguenots were excluded from other avenues the more likely they were to be merchants, manufacturers or financiers and to form networks with others of the religion.17 It is enough that the spirit in which Huguenots took the teaching of Calvin provided a substantial number of dedicated, disciplined lives, prepared to endure persecution, if need be to fight; or hearten those able to fight. Doyenne among women sympathetic to reform if not overtly Protestant, as already noticed, was Marguerite d’Angoulême, patron of the reformers of Meaux. Another of the royal family was Marguerite de France, Henry II’s sister, married to the duke of Savoy. He had no time for them but she protected Protestants as patron of the university of Bourges in her duchy of Berry. A hotbed of bold teaching and enthusiastic, often rowdy student action, it was there that Michel l’Hôpital, formerly her chancellor, later chancellor of France, got a Chair of Jurisprudence for François Hotman. Other women of her generation, intellectual adventurers – already evangelical in study and feeling but yet to be identified with the emerging French Calvinist church, with its precise theology and constraining rules – were Louise de Montmorency, sister of the Constable Anne, and Michelle de Saubonne, wife of Soubise. Another was Jacqueline, duchesse de Montpensier, but she was perhaps less comfortable as a friend of Catherine de Medici – and her husband remained Catholic. To follow the histories of such families is to see the enlargement, along family lines, of a party and a military power. Also, however, that family solidarity could not be taken for granted. Calvin’s correspondence shows how much he relied on prominent women to further the cause. They were left in no doubt about conduct. There must be no wavering, no flirtation with ‘libertinism’.18 Calvin’s own view was double-­ edged. He saw the subjection of wife to husband as guarantee of the subjection of both of them to the authority of the Lord: a kind of equality. That apart, it seems that the spiritual and emotional appeal of the new religion offered to women opportunity within and potentially beyond the domestic sphere. It may be, however, that noblewomen were already quite independent, used to managing large households and estates in the absence of their husbands in war or travel, or after the latter’s death.19 They were therefore more venturesome; also prepared, more often than their husbands, to give time to reading and study. Possibly the elimination of clerical celibacy and the promotion of marriage as a school of character enabled a more equal partnership between

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Protestant spouses than was possible between Catholics. As we peer into the shrouded chambers of a vanished domestic world a contemporary voice is welcome, especially when it is that of the fair-­minded, much travelled, Erasmus. He surely goes to the heart of the matter. In one of his Colloquies a lady learned in Latin and Greek is chided by an asinine abbot. ‘Geese,’ she says, ‘may do the preaching sooner than put up with your tongue-­tied pastors. The world’s a stage that’s topsy-­turvy now, as you see. Every man must play his part – or get out.’20 Patriarchy, patronising attitudes, even misogyny, were not unknown in Protestant circles. But the hierarchical structure and authoritarian traditions of Catholicism ensured that it would be less amenable than Protestantism to the claims of women who wished to think for themselves. Such women would be disinclined to accept, as gospel, the words of a priest when they could go home and measure them against what they could read: the whole and authentic Gospel. Erasmus’ feisty lady would undoubtedly have appealed to Marguerite of Angoulême’s daughter, the redoubtable Jeanne d’Albret,21 early-­widowed wife of Antoine. She had already sponsored the mission of Pastor Boisnormand in her lands in Béarn and Navarre before coming out as a Calvinist in 1560. One of the great women of her time, she would have shone on any stage. Her invaluable gift to the Huguenot cause was her nurturing of the young Henry IV and the example she set him – to which he responded in courage if not consistency. The religious vocation of Louise de Montmorency’s daughter, Madelaine de Mailly, had a great effect on her family. One daughter, Éleanore, married the prince de Condé; another, Charlotte, married the comte de la Rochefoucauld who with Condé was a leading protagonist in the early civil wars. The son of Michelle de Saubonne pleased her by marrying a zealous Protestant, Antoinette Bouchard d’Aubeterre; their son, seigneur de Soubise, later became a notable Huguenot leader. One is left wondering what led Anne de Pisseleu, duchesse d’Étampes, Francis I’s influential mistress, to staunch Protestantism in later life. Like Marguerite of Navarre, sympathetic to humanist reform, she would have found it impolitic, or embarrassing to her lover, to declare herself openly. Charlotte de Bourbon escaped from the convent in which she had been brought up, then became its abbess by inheritance from her aunt – even though she was under the age of consent. She fled to the Calvinist Palatinate, and subsequently served the cause by becoming the third wife of William of Orange. The conversion of Charlotte de Laval preceded that of her husband, Admiral Coligny. No less significant was Isabeau d’Albret, sister-­in-­law of Marguerite and wife of the vicomte de Rohan. Françoise du Bec-­Crespin deserves notice as the mother of ‘the Huguenot Pope’, Philippe DuplessisMornay. Among other notable Huguenot families, those of Gramont, Le

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Trémoille and Bouillon all had influential wives and mothers. Women like these exhibited the virtues expected of a Calvinist convert: they were staunch as well as pious. They played a vital part in establishing an élite at the head of the Huguenot movement, in sustaining the armed struggle. The case of Louise de Clermont-­Tonnére, duchesse d’Uzès is unusual but illustrates the countervailing influences within an unstable court. She became the confidante of Catherine de Medici and acted for her in discussions with Huguenot leaders. Her husband Antoine de Crussol at first supported the Huguenots though, said Monluc, ‘more out of some discontent than for any devotion’.22 When he abjured, Louise followed him. Her brother-­in-­law Jacques, a naked opportunist, in 1562 accepted the protectorate of the Protestant churches of Languedoc. His cruelties disgraced his name and discredited his cause. When Antoine died Jacques became Catholic to secure his brother’s title of Uzès. For him a duchy was worth a mass. There were others like him, alert to the main chance. But it was the wanton cruelty of some noble soldiers in whom pastors and elders perforce put their trust, that did most harm to their church. History has dealt harshly with two principal actors in the early Huguenot story, Antoine, king of Navarre, and, less deservedly, his younger brother, Louis, prince de Condé. Neither was deeply religious; neither very intelligent; neither in their conduct worthy of their wives. Condé was the stronger, more decisive character, better instructed in the faith, brave in battle and valuable to the Huguenots as their leading general. Pastor La Roche-­Sandieu failed to get Antoine to use his position to help the reformers. He seemed mainly to care about his Pyrenean kingdom, which had been truncated by the loss of its Spanish part in 1512. At one point, to regain it, he planned to let the Spanish into his gouvernement of Guienne. He was already regarded at court as unsafe, like his uncle, the Constable of Bourbon. He was also objectionable to the Guise – as they were to him – since Jeanne d’Albret had chosen his hand in preference to François, the future duc de Guise. They could label him a Protestant and he did appear at first to flaunt it. He corresponded with Calvin, received his rebukes for inconstancy and loose living but let him believe that he would lead the cause. He allowed the foundation of Calvinist churches in Béarn and in 1557 engaged the Genevan pastor Boisnormand. In March 1558 he took the former monk David with him to court. He went to hear psalms sung in the Pré-­aux-­Clercs and got La Roche-­Chandieu released from prison. At the same time he was attending mass at court and proclaiming his orthodoxy. His understanding of the issues seems to have been shallow, his main motivation hatred of the Guise. So long as he vacillated so publicly, while his own beliefs remained uncertain, no one could rely on his politics. Huguenots looked to him at a critical juncture and were bitterly disappointed. He

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eventually died fighting for the Catholic side in the first civil war.23 Condé, already more overtly Calvinist, then took over the Huguenot leadership. Pastor Jean Macar, from whom Condé took instruction, was a key figure in the sequence of conversions that provided the Huguenot leadership. He counselled each of the Châtillon brothers, Gaspard de Coligny, François Dandelot, colonel-­general of Infantry and, surprisingly, Odet de Châtillon, bishop of Beauvais and cardinal. Châtillon’s appointments signified little of spiritual import or pastoral responsibility; his alignment with the Huguenot party had everything to do with politics and family loyalty, much no doubt with his Calvinist wife, Elizabeth d’Hauteville; little that can be measured in religious terms. More impressive as a man of faith was Dandelot. He sent a pastor to preach to his Breton peasants and helped lead the Paris demonstration of May 1558. Imprisoned by the king, he followed Châtillon’s advice, heard mass and gained his release. But he was soon back in the Huguenot camp. The most important of the brothers, and the one to have an international reputation, was Coligny. Ten years would pass between the start of civil war and his murder on St Bartholomew’s Eve. As a principal figure in the evolving tragedy of those years he has been variously assessed. To Protestants everywhere he became a hero. It was indicative of the widening ideological conflict that his daughter should become the fourth wife of the other great Protestant champion, William of Orange. There remain questions about his role at several junctures and in one crucial incident, the assassination of François, duc de Guise. There is no doubt about his religious commitment and commanding personality; one can see statesmanship in his willingness to attempt the most difficult task: to serve the interest both of his party and of the crown. His career was brutally foreshortened; so, as with other leading figures, we are left with questions. Perhaps in the end the lesson of his death was that Huguenots would have to fight for rights that they could not expect to gain through political manoeuvres. One can only guess what would have been the response of the higher clergy if the king had broken with Rome. The English example suggests that many would have found it possible to follow him, if only in a Gallican schism. The Calvinist alternative might have appealed to some – its theology but hardly its church structure. Meanwhile few of the higher clergy went beyond a reforming, tolerant or neutral approach. One who did found himself on a see-­saw. Antonio Caracciolo was of the circle of Marguerite d’Angoulême and already suspected of heresy when he became bishop of Troyes in 1551. Ten years later he declared for Calvin without renouncing his bishopric. When he did local Huguenot churches rejected his services as pastor. Before the Inquisition he recanted, then offered himself again to the Huguenots; again to be rebuffed. He was perhaps fortunate to end under the wing of the widowed Princess

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Renée at her court at Montargis. To be unable to show total commitment was to invite a cold shoulder from the Calvinist. Another bishop, Jacques Spifame of Nevers, was more consistent in protest: he fled to Geneva in 1559. In 1562 he attended the Imperial diet at Frankfurt to argue on behalf of Huguenots for the authority of the States-­General during the minority. Not all had the highest motives for staying or leaving though few were as blatant as the bishop of Montauban, Jean de Lattes. He went with his mistress to Geneva, sold his benefices and built himself a villa beside the lake. Jean de St Chamand, archbishop of Aix, surely revealed his true vocation in 1566 when he denounced the Pope at Christmas mass, in his own Cathedral of Aix, and joined the Huguenot army. He proved to be one of its ablest commanders. There were reputable bishops who sought a middle way. At the Colloquy of Poissy, in September 1561, Jean de Monluc of Valence and Jean de St-­Gelais of Uzès joined Châtillon in a special service. The colloquy’s failure and subsequent drift to civil war showed, however, that there was no room for the via media. Marked differences in theology were matched at the summit by apparently irreconcilable private feuds. As the conflicting systems, Calvinist and Catholic, lent their authority to the rival camps of Guise, Montmorency and Bourbon, the politicisation of the religious issues was complete. How had this come about? The story is sensational and tragic. It does not belong to France alone. For this period, as for his twentieth-­century, Marc Bloch’s words are apt: ‘There is no such thing as French history; only European history.’24 Up to its climactic phase, in the years around 1588 and the Spanish Armada to England, the issues, confessional and dynastic, were international. The Huguenot experience in the crucible of the Religious Wars was linked inextricably to that of fellow Protestants abroad.

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Towards War O Lord God, to whom vengeance belongeth . . . show thyself. (Psalm 94)

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fter 1552 and the successful Lutheran rebellion led by Maurice of Saxony, aided by France, Emperor Charles V had suffered humiliating defeats and checks. He appeared to be a broken man. After Lutheranism had taken hold of much of Germany it had been the great business of his reign to avoid being party to a settlement by which the faith held by all Christians for a thousand years might be injured, or disgraced: a heartfelt elegy for a past world.1 His brother Ferdinand was more realistic. His prime concern was with holding back the Turks from his eastern frontiers. He saw as necessary the treaty of Augsburg (1555), which ended the German war by granting princes the right to be, in faith, what they wanted, and their subjects therefore with them. The formula – cuius regio eius religio – was proposed as a temporary solution until the Council of Trent should resolve the issue. Charles was unable to prevent the partition of his inheritance by successive abdications, leaving the Empire to Ferdinand and to his son Philip his Spanish kingdoms, with Flanders, Milan, Naples and the American colonies. Within the family the Spanish branch would now have the military power and Catholic leadership. The notable victory of Spanish troops at St Quentin confirmed the military superiority which would last until the later years of the Thirty Years War. Philip II had sufficient means to play a leading international role, whatever his priorities. Since they turned out to be those of a Catholic crusader, in the spirit of Counter-­Reformation directed at the Protestant enemy within, as much as Islam challenging around the borders of the Habsburg, he would be a main player in the French Religious Wars. The civil conflict would be enmeshed from the start with his dealings with England and the Netherlands. He would prove to be less effective than he might have been because of his costly commitment,

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first to suppress heresy in the Netherlands, then to victory in the face of rebellion; concurrently after 1587, to the overthrow of Elizabeth of England. The Peace of Cateau-­Cambrésis in 1559 was viewed as disappointing by most French, though it secured them a deeper eastern frontier with the acquisition of the Three Bishoprics, Metz, Toul and Verdun. They gave up their claims to Naples and Milan, and had to withdraw their troops from Savoy and Piedmont. The Italian dream was over and the Papacy had to accept unwelcome Spanish dominance in the peninsula. Henry II had been anxious for peace. He suffered like other princes from the steep inflation, particularly in military supplies, but lacked the credit enjoyed by Charles V and Philip II with the bankers, backed by American bullion. He wanted a free hand to deal with heresy. He needed to assert his mastery over the factions, principally that of the Guise. Stemming from Lorraine, like most of France’s leading families, the Guise had lands and interests outside the country’s borders. The family was favoured by the Pope and by the king’s mistress, Diane de Poiters, from long service experienced in the ways of courts. The cardinal of Lorraine aspired to be the statesman of Counter-­Reformation, tempering its demands with the needs and conditions of France. His brother François had earned laurels at the successful siege of Calais. They had secured a strong diplomatic position by the marriage of two children, the dauphin Francis and Mary Stuart. Mary’s mother, Mary of Lorraine, was regent in Scotland where Calvinism was gaining ground. At court the influence of Constable Montmorency, more cautious than the Guise, had declined after his defeat at St Quentin. He remained Catholic but his nephews, Coligny and Andelot, taken captive and left with time for reflection, had declared their allegiance to the reformed faith. Already the struggle for power, which would soon take on the bitterness of a personal feud, was assuming religious colour. The dogmatic differences that were being publicised ever more loudly made it tempting to ambitious men to resort to violence and to theologians to justify it. Both sides reached for the sword of God. In honoured theory it belonged to the king alone. Elizabeth of England, in her smaller state, would show what could be done by the prestige and patronage of monarchy and clever policy to use the rivalries of ambitious men to her advantage. The situation was potentially more dangerous in France, the country much harder to control. But the king still had enormous prestige and he was in hale middle age. On 30 June 1559 a tournament was held to celebrate the royal marriages arranged as part of the peace of Cateau-­Cambrésis: two princesses, Henry II’s daughter Elizabeth and her sister Marguerite were respectively pledged to the king of Spain and the duke of Savoy. Henry took part. His opponent’s lance shattered and a splinter entered the king’s left eye.2 Ten agonising days later, he

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died. Measured by any criterion it was a catastrophe. French Protestants had reason to be apprehensive, expecting the worst from a Guise-­dominated regime. Did some, however, see it as an opportunity, if the crown were too weak to enforce conformity? Henry had already shown his impatience with Parlement where a moderate group was forming out of those who resented intrusion upon its traditional jurisdiction: a few were sympathetic to Protestantism; some were Catholics of Erasmian disposition; some just anti-­Roman. It would take years of civil war to create anything resembling a party out of the politiques.3 At its core would be those who held that the claims of unity under the crown should override those of religious affiliation. Meanwhile the term was used generally by critics who saw them as weak or temporising Catholics. On 10 June, accompanied by several French cardinals and senior crown officers, Henry strode into the Grand Chambre to hear the debate on the measures proposed to combat heresy. He would by then have known of the meeting of the informal synod in the Faubourg St Antoine. With remarkable courage, Anne du Bourg, son of a former chancellor, opposed the measures. He went further: ‘I denounce the persecution of those whose only crime is the dauntlessness of their faith. They compare favourably with those who commit grave offences against religion and go unpunished.’4 Adultery was mentioned; Henry chose to take it personally and du Bourg was sent to the Bastille. In December 1559 he was burned. The king’s death in July had not saved him. It meant, for Huguenots, that there was worse to come. Henry II’s son, Francis II was fifteen but already a husband. His wife, Mary Stuart, was the daughter of James V of Scotland and Marie de Guise, and niece of François de Guise and the cardinal of Lorraine. Within days the family moved to take over the key offices in government, treasury, diplomatic corps and army. They predominated but did not go unchallenged. Catherine, now queen mother, could do little overtly to counter their influence. But she could do something to moderate a policy of indiscriminate persecution of heresy that was palpably failing in its objective. An edict issued in March 1560 just before the discovery of the fatal plot, maintained the ban on illicit assemblies and ‘conventicles’ but granted the essential right to petition the crown. It allowed the accused to make use of the traditional means of appealing against injustice, in a sense legitimising their claim to be treated on an equal footing with Catholics. The Guise were outraged. To Catherine it was a matter of practicability. The crown had to rely on local officials who varied widely in their sympathies and competence. They were faced by a dramatic rise in the numbers of avowed Protestants. Navarre was unwilling to assume openly the Protestant leadership but Huguenot nobles flocked to meet him on his way to court. Coligny wanted him

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to negotiate a political union between the Bourbon, Montmorency and Châtillon groups, and to adopt a moderate religious policy that Catherine would support and the Guise be unable to overturn. It was what she worked for over the years, with tenacity but increasing disillusion. At this point, when few of les grands had yet aligned themselves with the pastors, and pastors were the main influence on congregations, political differences were not insoluble. The failure of Navarre to seize the chance was therefore disastrous. Betrayed by his indecision Huguenots all over France began to look beyond their consistories for protection. Opponents of the Guise saw Huguenots as their allies and military action as their natural recourse. So evolved a mainly political Protestantism. Its leaders would coexist with and at times try to control the Calvinist church of consistory and colloquy but damage its original character and distort its message by linking it with political and social objectives. ‘Once there existed two identifiable parties publicly professing opposed religions, floating elements could be aligned and the preconditions of civil war were established.’5 A direct consequence of Navarre’s failure of nerve, and foretaste of future horrors, was the botched coup that came to be known as the Conspiracy of Amboise. Navarre had left court at the end of 1559 to escort Elizabeth of Valois to the frontier and to her future husband Philip II. It was an act of political suicide; the betrayal, as Huguenots saw it, of their cause. In Calvin’s treatment in the Institutes of the subject of resistance to the ‘powers that be’ he affirmed that it was sinful to resist them as they were ordained by God. But if the Guise had usurped the legitimate royal powers was it not a duty and just cause to resist? In a letter of August 1560 to Pastor François Morel he allowed that forceful resistance to the Guise was acceptable if led by a prince of the blood. Meanwhile Condé had stepped into his brother’s shoes. Explicitly or not he seems to have given his backing to Jean du Barry, seigneur de la Renaudie, the leading figure in the conspiracy. Actions that were to prove of critical importance stemmed from personal grievance and ambition. La Renaudie studied revenge. He was in exile in Switzerland, after the adverse sentence of the parlement of Dijon deciding a suit over the control of some benefices. The leading representative of the successful party was Jean du Tillet, registrar and historian of Parlement, and La Renaudie loathed lawyers as, probably, did many of the seigneurs, mostly of old family, who responded to his call. He visited Calvin who expressed horror at his ‘bragging’ and his ‘utter abhorrence for his conspiracy’.6 It did not stop him claiming that he had Calvin’s support. Navarre was not in the picture. La Renaudie was backed by noble exiles who had little to lose. Some pastors were implicated, one, La Roche-­Chandieu, being brother of one of the plot’s leaders. The conspirators mustered at Nantes, where some effort was made to behave as if it were a preliminary meeting before a States-­ General, so as to confer legitimacy. The plan was to gather around Amboise,

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where the court was spending winter, before making off with the king. In early March the plot was leaked and parties of conspirators were seized before they could gather in sufficient force. Many were killed at once, some drowned in the Loire, others hanged from the castle walls. When the eight-­year-­old Agrippa d’Aubigné visited eight months later they were still there. His father, another Hamilcar,7 recognising former friends, made the soldier-­to-­be and poet vow to avenge their deaths. Whatever it might have achieved the failure of the coup was a disaster, for the party and the country. It made good Catholic propaganda: clearly these Huguenots were rebels first and foremost. Jean de la Vacquerie of the Sorbonne had already appealed to the king to take seriously his coronation oath. Now he declared that heresy was ‘the most dangerous and stinking crime there is in a city or commonwealth’. Protestants endangered society when they incited subjects ‘to forsake the obedience . . . they owe to their masters and seigneurs’.8 Beza had been more encouraging than Calvin and had given La Renaudie his translation of Psalm 94: ‘O Lord God to whom vengeance belongeth show thyself.’ Now, however, Geneva could see the damage to the cause. François Hotman did his best in a pamphlet justifying the nobles’ conspiracy as a legitimate demonstration by a loyal nobility against a family of foreign usurpers. Standing on the moral high ground as defenders of the peace the Guise ascribed blame to ‘some preachers of the new doctrine’.9 Most pastors and congregations had, however, taken Calvin’s advice and held back. The conspiracy was essentially noble, incidentally Protestant; the nobles had not rebelled against the crown; their argument against the Guise, as usurpers of the crown’s authority, was sound and traditional. In the event the violence had come from the Guise; the conspirators’ punishment was disproportionate. Yet Huguenots were tarred – the brush would be applied repeatedly – as rebels and traitors. Condé swore that he had had no part in the plot but went south to join Navarre at Nérac. Beza came from Geneva, Hotman from Strasbourg. The idea of securing the south-­east as a base for rebellion is unlikely to have gone beyond talk. At Lyons, however, some of Condé’s followers prepared to start a rising, but were foiled. Elizabeth’s ambassador Throckmorton, usually well informed, thought that 30,000 men would be in the field by the end of June. The Guise were assailed by rumours and hostile pamphlets. Lorraine warned the Pope about the unexpected strength of the heretics and asked him to send a legate to investigate church corruption and convene an assembly of bishops. Meanwhile he had to accept the Edict of Romorantin (May 1560). It was designed by the new chancellor, L’Hôpital,10 to restore the distinction between heresy and treason. He was ahead of his time, rare, and destined to be disappointed, in envisaging the separation of politics and religion. Cases of heresy were assigned to the bishops; civil offences arising from it, not to parlements

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but to royal cours présidiaux. In effect that meant the end of the death penalty imposed by previous edicts. The edict fairly represents the thinking and policy of the queen mother. It can be called humane; it was certainly sensible. She respected L’Hôpital and his reforming zeal, tempered by his awareness of limits and obstacles. He would not be the last French statesman to come up against the vested interests of office and property and the delaying tactics of Parlement. The impact of civil war and financial difficulties made reform appear the more urgent to Catherine and L’Hôpital. As shown by the negligible result of successive royal ordonnances, concerned with the reformation of justice, its delays and chicaneries, they also made it harder to achieve. Meanwhile the chancellor recommended that all should lay down their arms. The Guise resolved to strike first at the Huguenot leadership. They thought that they could handle Navarre but were determined to get Condé. He was lured to court, then imprisoned. He was awaiting execution, in December 1560, when news came that made Huguenots wonder if God did not, after all, favour their cause. ‘Most providential’ was Calvin’s verdict. The young king died suddenly of an abscess in the ear. Condé was saved and the situation transformed. Was there now a last chance to preserve peace? It was for Catherine, with her new authority as regent, to show her hand. It is instructive to compare Catherine’s performance with that of the young queen of England. Both were talented politicians; both clear about their prime obligation, to maintain the authority of the crown; both suffered, although able too to derive advantage, from being a woman in a man’s world. For each there were financial constraints on policy. Yet Elizabeth started with one great asset: the legacy of her father. Henry VIII had died in the same year as Francis I. In a few crucial years, as Francis turned decisively away from the very idea of schism, Henry had brought England’s ecclesiastical apparatus under his control. Jurisdiction, revenues and authority were transferred from pope to king, ‘supreme head on earth of the Church of England’. Bishops became servants of the king; monasteries and friaries were dissolved; chantries followed. In a process directly related to the breach with Rome a series of statutes tightened his control over his subjects. In 1534 it was declared treason to state that the ‘king our sovereign lord should be heretic, schismatic, tyrannical, infidel or usurper’. The image of monarchy acquired an unprecedented grandeur. It was strong enough to survive a minority during the reign of Edward VI; also the brief reign of Mary, who sought to reverse Henry’s achievement by reconciliation with Rome. Elizabeth had to effect a lasting church settlement. We know that it proved durable against the assaults of Puritans and Catholics. Yet if she had died young can we be sure that there would have been no civil war? She lived to be the great queen, with a record to support the legend; and England

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enjoyed domestic peace. When it suited her, and given sureties, a seaport or two, she would be a friend to the Huguenots. How different the life and reputation of Catherine! Yet, judged by the disadvantages inherent in her position, forced generally to bargain rather than to command, she deserves credit for political skills that merited a happier outcome. She had suffered under the Guise but she had no time for the conspirators of Amboise. Passionately devoted to her remaining sons, concerned to maintain their inheritance, conventionally pious but uninterested in theology, sceptical about the motives of les grands, sympathetic to the moderate views of her chancellor, she was concerned above all to maintain the crown’s authority. Along her chosen way, pursuing peace, the matriarch would show stamina and courage. Her first move was to appoint Navarre lieutenant-­general of the realm, in recognition of his status as first prince of the blood. It meant he was second in command of the army, under the old Constable Montmorency. Coligny had sensibly refused to become involved in Amboise. Catherine was impressed by his moderate Protestantism, respected his character and now heeded his counsel. She had faith in L’Hôpital, a wise man, profoundly patriotic, unlucky to live in turbulent times. A States-­General was traditionally convoked at the start of a regency. The chancellor’s speech at Orléans, on 13 December 1560, calls for remark as a sustained plea for peace and as a memorial to the sober statecraft that was to be eclipsed by the passions of war. From the conventional assertion that Christianity prescribed ‘above all peace and friendship among men’ he went on to assert that ‘God’s cause cannot be defended with arms.’ L’Hôpital urged the need for a council to consider reform of the church whose decline had led to heresies. ‘We must henceforth . . . assail our enemies with charity, prayer, persuasion and the Word of God . . . Let us banish those devilish names – “Lutheran”, “Huguenot”, “Papist”, which breed only faction and sedition; let us retain only one name: Christian’.11 Noble words – and they suggest an alternative history and point up the tragedy when, after two meetings, the States-­ General failed to resolve the religious dispute. It is not surprising since, to judge from the rhetoric of Jacques de Silly, spokesman for the nobility, the main issue for the Second Estate was the devaluation of their status, specifically through ennoblement by office. On one issue Second and Third Estates could agree. Their strident anticlericalism only strengthened the fears of clergy of the First Estate that their property was at risk. Catherine persisted nonetheless and summoned a national council to meet at Poissy (September 1561). Catherine even invited Calvin and Beza to come from Geneva. Calvin refused but Beza presented the Protestant case. From Zurich came the Italian Peter Martyr Vermigli, a Protestant acceptable to Catherine. For the Catholics were 36 bishops and numerous clergy; uninvited came Diego Lainez, General

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of the Society of Jesus. Twelve Protestant ministers and 22 representatives of provincial churches supported Beza. Among ministers was Nicholas des Gallars from London, representing the English interest, but significant in his own right as theologian and confidant of Calvin.12 After a careful expression of Calvinist doctrine it was only when he came to the Real Presence that Beza’s speech roused antagonism: ‘the Body of Christ truly offered and communicated to us therein is as far removed from the bread as are the heavens from the earth’.13 It laid bare the argument that would be pursued more violently in the streets across the land. Its temper is conveyed by Protestant verses and prints. A poem that appeared from Lyons in this year, À Monstre des Archers au Papegay, described workmen led by Calvin and Viret bombarding the Catholic popinjay, jeering as they watched it fall. At Poissy emotions ran high, with shouts of blasphemy from the Catholic bench. The cardinal of Tournon responded predictably by urging the king to remain loyal to the faith of his forebears since Clovis. Evidently attitudes on both sides were hardening to the extent that compromise was unattainable. Failure to agree upon a Eucharistic formula proved fatal. Among those apparently disappointed were Lorraine,14 who hoped that the Calvinists would accept the Lutheran formula, and the Protestants who declared that they wished only to be left in peace. The basis of debate for each side was that there could be no possibility of agreement unless the other could be brought to see the truth; and the truth must be expressed in precise definition. But there was a sense of danger, a real demand for a settlement and serious debate; so it is hard to judge that the idea was not worth trying. Catherine did not give up. Meanwhile she declared that she had acted in accordance with the advice of Parlement and the decision of the council. But the main effect of the colloquy was to convince the Guise that she was under the sway of Coligny and meant to grant legal recognition to the Huguenots. Thwarted in efforts to control the council, the Guise turned to Spain, seeking Philip II’s support for the unofficial political association known as the Triumvirate. It illustrates the still vague idea that such magnates had of national interest; but also the reckless nature of dynastic ambition and the self-­ importance so readily reinforced by their assumed role as defenders of the faith. Their action effectively licensed Spain to intervene in French affairs. It also set a precedent that the Huguenots were not slow to follow when they looked to England and to German Protestant princes. Originally the Triumvirate consisted of Guise, Montmorency and another soldier, Marshal Saint-­André. With the Spanish ambassador in blatant support they threw their weight about at court. Guise lectured Catherine, accused her of ‘drinking at two wells’ in her religious policy and boasted of his intention to fight the Protestants. As L’Hôpital wryly observed, they thought it a profitless waste to serve a child. Guise was admired as a soldier; he could boast of great

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services to the state. As lieutenant-­general, with emergency powers, he had a crucial role in maintaining order; and he could charm when he wanted to. His cards were usually on the table. The cardinal of Lorraine kept his close to his chest. How was Catherine to read him? Was he primarily the ecclesiastical grandee with an interest in securing religious peace in France; keeper of the Catholic conscience; or Rome’s Inquisitor at a time when popes appeared to be in the pocket of Spain? Aware of his vast wealth and potential influence Huguenots regarded him as a sinister figure, bent on their destruction. The truth is more complex. He was clever and committed to the resolution of the religious problem. He seems also to have been keenly aware of the poor state of the church in France, so much of which, as grandest of all pluralists, came directly under his authority. When it came to the question of a general council he faced a genuine dilemma. The Pope wanted to follow up earlier Councils of Trent, but with the main object of defining Catholic doctrine and furthering Catholic reform. It is what was eventually achieved at the final sessions of the Council in 1563. Representative, predominantly, of Spain and Italy and of the regular orders, it was conservative in its definitions and requirements. Transubstantiation, purgatory, the efficacy of prayers for the dead, the Latin Vulgate Bible – all was as if the Reformation had never happened, or as if it had been merely a wake-­up call to put the house to rights, to rebuild where necessary, and on traditional lines. For the French representatives it was not so simple. The cardinal of Lorraine would be a leading figure at Trent, to all appearances orthodox. Faced by the uncomfortable reality of French Protestantism, his emphasis had been on the reform of the Gallican church, to make it more appealing to would-­be heretics. To that end he was prepared to invite a Lutheran contribution. Possibly the cardinal saw the Lutheran confession as the soft belly of a Protestantism that was plainly weakened by its dependence on secular authority – the ‘godly prince’ – and, in his terms, by their halfway position over the Eucharist: that of accepting the Real Presence while rejecting the idea that it represented a new and distinct sacrifice, further to that offered by Christ on the cross. By making that a topic for debate he could isolate the Genevans and discredit their alternative church model. He had wanted a French council, but not Catherine’s colloquy, a device that gave the Huguenots an opportunity to state their case for the right to worship freely and organise themselves according to the principles of Calvin. He became isolated between the ultramontanes who were opposed to any negotiation with heretics and those of his fellow bishops who wished to leave theology to the projected General Council. If he signed a Lutheran formula without first getting the Calvinists to assent he could have been denounced as a heretic. He antagonised them at Poissy by requiring them to sign while refusing to do so himself. So the project collapsed.

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Men rode away from Poissy with heavy hearts if they had hoped to persuade others of their truth; some were bracing themselves for war. Lorraine hurried to Trent to find that he had been forestalled by a decree on sacrifice in the mass. Designed to remove ambiguity and prevent any possible accommodation with reformed theology, it was subsequently given authority by the Pope and would become orthodoxy among the other canons of faith. The Protestant idea that there had been only one ‘complete and sufficient sacrifice’ on the cross was pushed to the sidelines of debate. There was now a deep trench between Catholic and Calvinist; fading into the distance was the possibility of a deal with the Lutherans. Left without option, Lorraine defended the Tridentine formula and was thus estranged from Catherine’s court and her policy of pluralism. There was a further lasting effect. Gallican Catholicism, tending towards suspicion of Rome, has been held to have offered a bridge for Protestants uneasy about the political implications of heresy, about being bad Frenchmen. Some would cross that bridge, particularly after the St Bartholomew massacre. However, if they did so, it was likely to be to a Catholicism that was becoming in spirit Tridentine long before the official acceptance of the decrees by crown and Parlement. Along with the sporadic fighting went conflicts on the ideological front: of course between Catholic and Calvinist but also between Catholic and Catholic, between the new orthodox and the diminishing number of the moyenneurs. Gallican theologians looked forward to a greater teaching advantage when they could offer a faith based less on tradition and sentiment than on clear exposition and firm rules. It would be reassuring to be told unequivocally what it meant to be Catholic. As the confessional lines hardened under the pressures of war many came to see that they could be both good Frenchmen and good Catholics.15 They were encouraged by writers like Jean du Tillet to view their duty in terms of crusade, evoking the iconic St Louis and his crusade against the Albigensians while the Protestant leaders should note the dangers of rebellion against Catholic monarchy.16 For others there was pain and disquiet as France appeared to be drifting towards civil war. In his mémorandum Etienne La Boétie, who had already made his name as champion of Parlement and critic of royal government, expressed his horror at the massacre of Protestants at Cahors but also his doubts about Catherine’s policy of conciliation. He was opposed to the open practice of a dissident faith that would need an army to defend it and, inevitably, a political constitution. His preferred alternative was reform sufficiently radical to draw Protestants back to the church. In his earlier Platonist tract De la Servitude voluntaire (1549), starting from the lofty position of natural law that would make us ‘subject to reason and slaves to none’, he had already shown where Protestants might expect support but also how it might be

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limited. Was it realistic to hope that the intellectual, official élites, steeped in humanist culture, might be won for Protestant reform when a foremost protagonist of liberty could counter the case for freedom of worship, good in itself, by that of the greater good of society, envisaged in terms of classical philosophy and, no less potent, French tradition? La Boétie died in 1563. Meanwhile events had appeared to bear out his worst fears. Religion and faction fused in the uncompromising declaration of the triumvirs. They meant not only ‘to extirpate all those of the new religion’ but also ‘to obliterate completely the name of the family and race of the Bourbons’. ‘Obliterate completely’: the language of the vendetta, the ultimate solution; and already we can foresee the violence to come as the feud widens from family to party, from château to province and each calls God to aid. ‘Party’ itself suggests a situation more clear-­cut than the volatile reality. ‘Ultra-­Catholics, like all factions, were a broad church built on the constantly shifting foundations of individual and family interests. Appeals to religious belief and attempts to control the royal patronage network were different ways of strengthening and broadening support.’17 Rarely at a loss, seeking to keep the initiative, Catherine moved into the new territory that La Boétie and others so mistrusted. The Edict of St ­Germain, in January 1562, often called ‘the Edict of Toleration’, was to be a benchmark for future settlements as the first official recognition of the right of Huguenots to practise their religion without interference. In itself such a right was something extraordinary for its time and it would be maintained in all but three of nine subsequent edicts. The freedom was, of course, circumscribed quite narrowly: they could not worship in towns, assemble at night, or raise arms. That reflected the government’s concern for public order. Most towns were small, densely inhabited, with narrow streets and contained within walls. ‘Country’ could be within a kilometre of the town hall, and anywhere in the countryside Calvinist congregations could meet. Nobles could offer hospitality and protection. Indeed, Huguenots had gained much but under terms that emphasised their separation. As they trooped out of town, passing their fellow citizens en route for Sunday mass, whatever they might feel, they looked like outsiders. On both sides it was a perception that mattered. Other Catholics besides the Guise found these concessions unacceptable. There was serious doubt about Catherine’s intentions. In Geneva Beza was optimistic enough to be thinking about the conversion of the royal family. Parlement, supported by du Tillet and his Albigensian precedent for the suppression of heresy, at first refused to register the Edict and issued a solemn remonstrance. It questioned Catherine’s right to act thus for the boy who would one day take an oath to protect the Catholic church. ‘As in a family where there is difference of religion it will produce nothing but contention,

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rancour and division, and one cannot say that God resides there.’ It took two lettres de jussion to make Parlement register; then only with a clause stating that they did so unwillingly, at the king’s command. For Huguenots, powerfully represented by Coligny, it was the first step towards full rights and royal protection. For that however, for many years and with many setbacks, they would have to fight. A few days after Parlement registered the Edict, on 1 March 1562, the first shots of civil war had been fired in a barn outside a village in Champagne.

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c h a p t e r f o u rt e e n

s

A Kingdom Divided All one talks about now is war . . . I would tell you it is the beginning of a tragedy1

O

n 1 march 1562 the duc de Guise was returning from Württemberg when his troops came across 300 Huguenots worshipping in a barn just outside the wall of the small town of Vassy. Ordered to disperse, the worshippers refused and were then fired on; a number were killed. Guise denied having ordered the attack and issued his version of events. Huguenots apparently pelted him with stones; one struck him on the face. Who fired first? In this case, as in other ‘Bloody Sundays’, it has been impossible to determine. For reputation’s sake, or from genuine remorse, Guise later sought to distance himself from the massacre. The importance lay anyhow in the event, its emotional impact and the Huguenot response. For Étienne Pasquier, hearing war talk everywhere, it was ‘the beginning of a tragedy’. It was indeed the signal for war. For this and for ‘the kingdom divided’ Huguenots were already prepared. Their churches were forming a strategic network, suited as much to military action as to ecclesiastical government. With the other triumvirs Guise was received in Paris as a triumphant hero: no mistaking then the mind of the capital. Condé was already there; the antagonism was deep and undisguised. With two private armies in the city Catherine acted quickly, appointing the cardinal of Bourbon, Condé’s lukewarm Catholic younger brother, as lieutenant-­general: a grandee acceptable, she hoped, to both sides. At this point, virtually imprisoned by the Guise at Fontainebleau, she inclined towards the Huguenots; so Condé could have gone straight there and taken charge of the young king. He had other plans: he let the triumvirs take the initiative and escort her back to Paris. On 2 April Huguenot nobles, directed by Condé, seized Orléans. His initiative reflected the urgent need to gain control when, across the country,

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interpreting government policy in their own fashion, men were taking the law into their own hands. Academic debate about government, whether ministers and elders Geneva-­style should have the deciding voice or congregations have greater say, faded before the exigencies of the hour. It was the start of a concerted attempt to stage uprisings in all the bonnes villes, major centres strategically placed along the main lines of communication. Now we are witnessing the birth pangs of an alternative state; a new kind of rebellion, neither merely feudal nor provincial, nor urban, nor the sum of individual ventures. In some noble households, some cities, even in some country parts, along with private or communal concerns, can be found a notion of common purpose, a shared sense of being the true church. The body was still nourished by Geneva but the umbilical cord had been cut. The spirit was essentially, proudly French. The body was being translated into a political entity with military resources sufficient to defy the crown. How, so quickly, had this occurred? Who rode to war with Condé? On 11 April 1562 a Traité d’Association was signed by ‘four thousand gentlemen of the best and most ancient houses of France’.2 They range from les grands, Condé himself, Andelot, Coligny, Porcien and the Vidâme de Chartres whose property stretched beyond a single province and whose fidèles figure largely in the list, to chevaliers and titled nobles, to most of whom are allocated gentlemen (2,520) and hommes d’armes. With the personal followings of others who had local commands in provinces and fortresses the total comes to well over the 4,000 widely reported, but with the fluctuations to be expected with changing fortunes. Loyalties to the cause of Condé appear to be the usual mixture of kinship, fidelity, friendship, adventure, opportunism and religious conviction. The Association was built on an oath, so those who defected were obliged to renounce it formally. Reflecting the dominance there it is not surprising that 41 per cent of the names attributable to a province were from Picardy; again, following the spate of gentry conversions, 30 per cent were from Normandy, 10 per cent came from Poitou with Saintonge and Angoumois. So the north predominates, by contrast with later developments but understandably, given the logistics of communication and assembly problems. There is some representation from the south (Guienne 6 per cent, Languedoc 4 per cent), still therefore the potential for a national movement. Yet the question remains: how so rapidly did Condé’s force come together? One answer lies in the development of synods, provincial and national. They were to prove to be Calvinism’s seminal contribution to the evolving science of political revolution. Since the first clandestine meeting in Paris, Calvinists had become bolder. Their second national synod at Poitiers in March 1561 formally adopted the hierarchy of conference and control, rising from consistories to colloquies, surmounted by the synod. The concerns were

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still doctrine and discipline. Nothing in the arrangement, little in government edicts, ensured protection against persecution. Already, however, the line between ecclesiastical structure and the politico-military was being crossed in response to local pressures. At the provincial synod of Clairac, in November 1560, deputies from six colloquies – Agenais, Béarn, Bordelais, Condomois, Landes and Quercy-­Rouerge – appointed for each church a captain, for each colloquy a colonel. Whilst churches formed their own cadres, to make effective use of them they had to call for the protection of local seigneurs. Some, like the infamous Jacques de Crussol, ‘protector of the churches of Languedoc’, and Paulon de Mauvans, took the opportunity to raise private armies. Political priorities were clear when, at the third national synod at Orléans, in April 1562, Condé was saluted as protector of the French Calvinist churches, but also, by the leading nobles there, as ‘protector and defender of the house and crown of France’. In this marriage of convenience, between the religious system, Geneva-­ style, grounded in consistories, and the noble, with power harnessed through the fidelity of client to patron, the latter was bound to be the dominant partner. In war conditions, when security was the main consideration, Calvinist merchants and office-­holders, commonly, though not without protest, took a back seat. Ministers mostly followed instructions, if not their instincts, in mobilising, exhorting and disciplining. The more militant rode with the soldiers. Beza became Condé’s chaplain: no safe place to be but Beza was no desk warrior. Pastors might look to a higher authority, before which even princes must submit. So might some nobles but that was not usually enough, in their world, to justify armed resistance. They might claim to be defending the sovereign against the usurpation so flagrantly demonstrated by the triumvirs. They might also profess a concern for local rights. The case of the appalling baron des Adrets shows how rapidly the assumed support of Huguenots could translate into a regional power largely out of the control of the church in whose name he exercised authority. Here was the weakness in French Protestantism even at the fastest point of its growth; also the violence waiting to be unleashed when the bonds of civil society were cut. Personal grievances spurred des Adrets. He had rescued his sister from a convent where she had been placed against her will and been condemned for it by the parlement of Grenoble. He had been abandoned in a besieged Italian city by the Guisard vîdame d’Amiens and forced to pay a ransom to gain his freedom. Church, law and the Guise, represented in the Dauphiné by the governor La Motte Gondrin: they were enemies sufficient to turn a soldier into a terrorist. The governor had executed a Huguenot pastor at Romans, that volatile city, soon to become notorious for rites of violence. Des Adrets let his

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men murder him and he then led them in an orgy of iconoclasm in churches in Lyons and Grenoble. He banned Catholic rites in every place he occupied. Surrender did not save their garrisons; typically they were pushed over cliffs or walls. Eventually he negotiated a private truce with the Catholic duc de Nemours. His lieutenants prevented him from betraying his army to the enemy but in later wars he would fight on the Catholic side. One lieutenant was Charles de Puy de Montbrun, a convinced Protestant but no less a terrorist for that. He was neither the first Calvinist nor would he be the last to find precedent and text in the Bible to order the slaughter of his opponents. After accepting the surrender of the garrison of Mornas he ordered its execution along with that of 120 women and children. Such atrocities, committed on both sides, would make ever harder the settlement of religious questions. When finally achieved it would be born of exhaustion, tinged often with mutual loathing and with memories that would not soon fade. The case of Monluc, veteran of the Italian wars, shows how arbitrary could be the choice of party. Catherine entrusted him with the governorship of Guienne where he was brutally effective in maintaining a kind of peace. Lawless atrocities were committed on both sides so in that respect he saw little to choose between them. He had at first leaned far enough towards the Huguenots for Beza subsequently to call him a renegade. To judge by his cynical comments on those who claimed otherwise, religion actually weighed little with him. What seems to have concerned him most was the radical and socially subversive aspect of Protestantism. There is a telling passage in his memoirs when he describes the visit of the minister La Barelle, offering to raise 4,000 men ‘of this country and the churches’ to see justice done for the victims of Catholic atrocities.3 Nobles were of course arrogating to themselves the same right. But this he saw to be something else: ‘What the devil churches are those that make captains?’ he demanded. Was not the Protestant aim ‘to set divisions in the kingdom and ’tis you ministers that are the authors of this godly work under colour of the gospel’.4 If it had been one of the great Protestant nobles that had approached the crusty warrior would his response have been different? And would not then the balance of power in the south, that he fought so ruthlessly to maintain, have tilted fatally against the crown? Many others, nobles or robins, would come to share Montluc’s concerns. Protestant gains would be accompanied by widespread destruction of images. Several pastors led the mob. At Lyons Jacques Roux set an example by cutting off the head of the cathedral’s great silver crucifix. But others, and some noble commanders, tried to restrain their followers. It is always hard to attribute motive to a mob. But in places men seemed to have grasped the chance to thumb their nose at all authority, past and present. At Cléry Protestants destroyed the tomb of Louis XI; at Orléans the heart of Francis II was burned:

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the former identified as tyrant, the latter the tool of the Guise. But why should the tombs of William the Conqueror and Queen Matilda have attracted the wrath of the Protestants of Caen? There is not enough material to indicate a social agenda at the heart of the Protestant surge but enough to show why Montluc and others should smell danger to their rank. Whatever the motives and impulsion, the startling Protestant successes at the outset of civil war may suggest ‘the falling domino principle’,5 that is ‘the beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound consequences’. Whether achieved by military action or internal rising, the score of Protestant takeovers was remarkable. Orléans, Angers, Tours, Blois on the Loire; Sens on the Yonne; Rouen and Le Havre in Normandy; Lyons at the confluence of the Rhône and the Saône; Valence; Grenoble and Vienne in the Dauphiné; Nîmes, Montpellier, Montauban with most of the towns of Languedoc, were only the principal towns. In Normandy it might look as if a whole province was lost when, following Rouen and Dieppe, Saint-­Lô, Bayeux, Falaise, Vire, Lisieux, Carentan, Pont de l’Arche and Le Havre fell under Huguenot control. ‘All of Guienne save Toulouse and Bordeaux was lost,’6 according to Monluc – but the exceptions were to prove significant. A spirited effort by the Protestant capitouls of Toulouse to effect a coup failed in the face of stern resistance by its parlement. It was not the end of the story there, as Huguenots felt cheated, the Catholic authorities vengeful. One should not, in any case, project too much, certainly not a wholesale change of heart, from the startling successes. A coup was one thing; advantage lay in surprise and boldness, and town sergeants and watchmen were notoriously incompetent. To maintain control or defend a city against a determined enemy was quite another. With Catherine in train the triumvirs mounted a vigorous campaign. At this stage they could claim the authority of the crown and employ its forces. Fighting was as intense and casualties as heavy as in any of the subsequent eight wars. Before the siege of Rouen (October 1562) and the battle of Dreux (19 December) the outcome was uncertain. Had the siege failed and had Dreux been lost by the Catholic army would Catherine not have been compelled to grant the Huguenots more rights? But it is hard to see that being the end of civil war. Matters had gone too far, injuries called for vengeance. The experience of each city was affected by local circumstances and there is no typical case. Yet from several distinctive stories may emerge better understanding of the motives, the actions and reactions on both sides that would affect the future course of Huguenotism, monarchy and France. By November 1561, encouraged by the crown’s conciliatory measures, the Protestants of Rouen felt strong enough to hold their prêche in the markets. By now it seems that there were 15,000 of them. If the beginnings had been slow

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and tentative, the growth in these years was dramatic. Had the tipping point been reached, when the prospects of success were sufficiently rosy to draw in the bystander? It was Rouen especially which provided the evidence that influenced Catherine’s temporising policy. Here a successful coup looked as if it might end in lasting Huguenot control. On the night of 15 April 1562 armed Rouennais Huguenots seized the convent of the Celestines, the hôtel de ville and the château of the Guisard bailiff, Villebon d’Estouteville. They expelled him and took over the city gates. On 3–4 May a mob rampaged through the city, destroying ‘idols’. Catholics fled, even judges and magistrates, leaving the city in the hands of the Huguenots, pastors and the remaining magistrates. It became a test case for government, seeking to control events. Many citizens would regret the coup when the duc d’Aumâle began his siege of the city. Nor would his success be the end of the story. After heady days Rouen’s Huguenots would know much trial and suffering. Meanwhile the Catholics of Orléans had to endure the occupation of the city by Condé and his considerable force. The mass was abolished; bishop and clergy fled or hid. No city outside Paris better illustrates the importance in the civic scene of the sacred and holy places and objects. The cathedral treasury contained among its reliquaries, besides body parts of local saints, the Blood of Christ, a thorn from the crown of thorns, myrrh offered by the Three Kings, palms on which Christ trod as He entered Jerusalem, part of the head of John the Baptist, the right arm of St Andrew, and St Philip’s finger. On major feast days 113 men were required to carry the reliquaries in the processions that linked the sacred places to the people. Whether or not the canons believed them to be genuine they would see them as aids to devotion and to understanding the Christian story. To Huguenots they were worse than fraudulent and blasphemous. So they were destroyed. Most of the gold and silver in casket, chalice and plate was seized to finance the campaign. Churches were ransacked, in several cases made plain for Protestant assembly but in others deliberately destroyed, as were statues and crosses around the city. Condé and Coligny took part in the sack of the cathedral, the former being observed firing at a statue. A dancing, singing crowd watched the symbols of faith and historic allegiance burning in the market square. The hurt was immense and their rejoicing would be short-­lived. The Catholic bishop would soon be supervising the restoration of the city’s ‘sacred space’. Nîmes will figure largely in these pages since, with Montauban and La Rochelle it would remain a bastion of reform. By 1562 a narrow majority among the consuls but most of the barreau and local nobles were Protestant. Nobles had hitherto taken little part in town government. Confronted, however, with the realities of Calvinist discipline, resentful of the role of

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consistories, they took command of the militia and sought to direct affairs through their council. After protests at the provincial political assembly in December 1562 they secured the establishment of an advisory commission nominated by the consulate. Between the first and second wars the city experienced a degree of harmony. It was to be rudely shattered in 1568 by the Huguenot massacre of Catholics, the Michelade. One of its authors, Guillaume Calvière, assumed direction of a ruling council of eight nobles, the military captains, and thirteen Protestant magistrates. Catholic property was confiscated, to the benefit of well-­placed Huguenots. Safe within its walls and beyond the reach of royal forces, developing its Huguenot life and creating its own academy, Nîmes would be one of those little military republics that formed the southern redoubt. That would not exempt it from the fierce, continuous struggle for status and advantage between the parties. Meanwhile its security and prosperity would ensure that the crown would eventually have to come to terms with the fact that there could be no military solution. Very different and more ominous for the Huguenot future was the experience of Tours.7 The city had a lustrous past as ‘principal and most continuous residence’ of the crown, home to financiers and a prosperous silk industry. It had neither parlement nor university but was still regarded as the principal city of Touraine. It was an archiepiscopal see with, besides its cathedral, two abbeys that attracted pilgrims from near and far. The strong ecclesiastical presence was reflected in seats in the corps de ville. Nothing, apparently, could be done in Tours without the compliance of the clergy. Yet there had been a Protestant church in Tours since 1556. After early disputes about beliefs and discipline it was orthodox, growing among all social groups, actually dominant in the présidial. Its président, Jean Bourgeau, ensured that a request for a Protestant place of worship was included in the cahiers of the Third Estate presented at the States-­General. But where should it be? How should the rights of worshippers be protected? With the policy of government in flux and local opinion fiercely divided, the questions would remain at the heart of inter-­church relations. A decade of tension began in October 1561 when a body of Huguenots took over the Franciscan church. That brought in the duc de Montpensier, unwavering Catholic and governor of Touraine. Huguenot officials were obstructive and he pulled out. Condé’s agents arrived from Orléans to direct affairs. Their presence helped ensure that there was no orgy of iconoclasm but the treasures of St Martin were melted down to pay Condé’s troops. They were elsewhere engaged when the triumvir Saint-­André arrived in July 1562 to besiege the town. The Huguenots surrendered in return for safe passage out of the city. Many were massacred nonetheless in what seems to have been the kind of street rage that would become a feature of the wars. There followed the

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near-­obligatory cleansing ritual – here it meant the fast-­flowing waters of the Loire. Some that had got out to a safe haven, under the protection of a Huguenot lord, attacked visiting Catholics as ‘noyeurs de Tours’, avenging the drowned. A central thread in a messy story is provided by the efforts of commissioners appointed after the Edict of Amboise (March 1563) to apply its terms to the local situation. There was then peace in the land, at least a lull in formal military operations. In Tours it was fragile. The Catholic commissioner Myron set the pattern widely followed by interpreting the terms of the Edict in the narrowest possible way. Huguenots had chronic grievances, over the hazards of the journey to their church and over their right to be buried in ground they bought outside the walls, a scene of constant skirmishes. Catholics, still controlling the city, complained about the Huguenot ascendancy in the présidial. Huguenot officers knew that every word would be monitored, every opportunity taken to distort or invent. After further violent episodes, by 1568 Catholic control was firmly established and more Huguenots had left. The remainder worshipped out of town at Maillé under seigneurial protection until they were given right of worship by the Edict of St Germain in 1570. They had suffered much but they were not eliminated. In the end they survived essentially because the council was more concerned with debt and with securing its privileges so ‘in the end politics won out over religion and defence of the city over the crusading spirit’.8 Near Vassy was the important city of Troyes, the historic capital of Champagne, famous for its great fairs and the troy weight that became standard for much of Europe.9 Its cathedral and twenty-­five churches witnessed to a strong church presence. Protestant activity was furthered by trade contacts with evangelicals on both sides of the frontier. Stirring doubt must have been the ambiguous witness of Bishop Antonio Caracciolo, imbued with the spirit and practice of Meaux, ‘cradle of reform’. He was charged with heretical teaching, soon after his arrival in 1552, then forced to retract. He lasted till 1662 but not until he had gone to Rome, hoping to be made cardinal, and visited Geneva to propose that he became a minister there. However judged, as self-­promoting or sincere in his evangelical endeavour, he was surely naïve. Yet his story reflects at the highest level the hopes and uncertainties of many who looked for assurance and uplift beyond what they found in the church. In 1552 Troyes received its first minister, the wool-­carder Michel Poncelet, from Meaux. Another minister, Jean Gravelle, was responsible for setting up the church in nearby Vassy where his success may have provoked the fateful attack. In 1561 Protestant services were being held openly. Pithou claimed that as many as 8,000–9,000 gathered for a Pentecost communion service outside the city walls. Protestants complained in council about inflammatory preaching

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from Catholic pulpits; Catholic clergy were allowed to wear beards so that Protestants could not identify them for attack. Both sides employed armed guards to defend their activities. Unsurprisingly the town guard and watchmen tended to lie low, or to panic at the sight of a mob. As elsewhere, Huguenots were concentrated in one part of town; here the Rue Moyenne. That did not save private behaviour from becoming public knowledge, and there were always hotheads to raise the temper. It was from here mainly that a Catholic procession, or group of pilgrims to the cathedrals’ relics, might be attacked; here suspicion and malice stretched nerves to breaking point. Once a trail of feathers in the street was enough for a neighbour to report a man for breaking the rules of Lent. There was undoubtedly a brutal element in popular Huguenotism that marred the image of Calvinism. It was of its time and place. Whether from factional rivalries or the unwelcome attention of the tax collector, organised or spontaneous, there was nothing new about sudden outbreaks of violence.10 Urban life for all but a privileged few, with families living above their workplace – and that might be an open stall, only shuttered and locked at night – was hugger-­mugger to an extent that might today be envisaged as ‘third world’ – or a scene from Zola’s fin de siècle Paris. Privacy was hard to achieve; the community and its rules had a coercive force. Where private prejudice and family feuds obscure the motives behind the actions, little could remain secret from busybody or informer. Not discovered in Troyes, however, was the person who left a statue of the Virgin in the street, with a dead cat tied round the neck. A Catholic procession of absolution scattered when it was rumoured that Huguenots were about to attack them; in fact they were locked into their houses fearing reprisals. Rumour and fear made a poisonous brew. A Huguenot goldsmith who was challenged by priests for failing to doff his hat as he passed the church of Notre Dame, and declared that the church was ‘no more than a pile of stones’, was followed by jeering children. Attracted by their cries – ‘Lutheran, heretic’ – a mob attacked him; he was taken to prison, and there beaten to death by fellow prisoners for refusing to go to mass. After his body had been recovered and decently buried it was dug up and cast into a pit: a potent sign of rejection. Two lawyers, Pierre Clément and Nicolas Beau were hanged in the marketplace in September 1562. The crowd cut them down and mutilated them before throwing them into the river. Trivial episodes apparently in the larger scheme of things; grubby and street-­soiled they might sound to folk of substance, learning or discretion. Yet an Erasmus, a Montaigne, would understand them well. They bring one closer to the realities of life for ordinary Catholics and Huguenots than do government decrees, theological debate or military encounters. And there is a link between the mob and the pulpit. Ringing in the ears of the Huguenot were

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surely the pastors’ homilies, about the mass as travesty; images as superstition, diverting minds from the vital matter of Christ’s redeeming sacrifice. Behind Catholic outrage at the desecration of all that they held dear was a sense that the community was dishonoured by the very existence of Huguenots – in a way that might incur God’s wrath? They did not belong. If they must sing their psalms it must be outside the city. In the abusive behaviour of both sides, but particularly among Catholics envisaging themselves as natural guardians of the body politic, can be read the prevailing idea that heresy – that is, the other faith – was a sickness, a deformity. Along with it went the need to purge and cleanse; the desire to humiliate and so to devalue. That it is easier to murder when you have come to see the object as less than human, or otherwise repellent, is the message, de nos jours, of genocide.11 The Huguenots of Troyes steadily lost ground. They tried, without success, to come to terms with the Catholic council. News of a second massacre, following the capture in August 1562 of the Huguenot refuge of Bar-­sur-­Seine, heightened their sense of insecurity. They were not reassured when, following the end of the first war, in 1563, the city council, needing material to support a plea to the crown to ban Huguenot worship, commissioned a household survey of opinions. Some Huguenot men absented themselves on the day of the survey;12 others were evasive or defiant. Inevitably most answers were of Catholic tenor. It was probably easy for some to say that ‘they would rather die than see Huguenots allowed to hold services in or near the city,’ but there are some opinions so ferocious that one can see the potential recruit for the bande meutrière. ‘All Huguenots should be hanged whatever the king should decide’ was one considered view. A shoemaker’s wife vowed that if her five children should become Huguenot she would ‘break their necks – all’. Several saw ‘la peste de Genesve [sic]’ as the source of infection, so ‘why don’t they go and worship there?’ Some, mainly the better-­off, were concerned that the authorities should not pre-­empt the issue; it was ‘better left to the king’. A vain hope, as the ensuing years would show. After one spirited rising it was a losing struggle. The Huguenots faced impossible odds when they were a minority in a province that was overwhelmingly Catholic and, after 1563, under Guise government. Their isolated situation was further compromised when refugees from war and famine crowded the city, begging for relief. Associated with the Empire and Geneva, it was Protestants who came to be seen as the outsider, the enemy. It was not the fact but the perception that mattered.

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chapter fifteen

s

Battle, Murder and Deadly Consequences What the devil churches are those that make captains?1

A

s reports arrived, post-­Vassy, of Huguenot insurrections all over the country, fearing the collapse of royal authority and considering her choices, Catherine had chosen that which was probably most objectionable to her: war, under the Triumvirate.2 It was to be the first of nine civil wars over thirty-­six years. Each had distinct causes and each had certain new features, with new men at the head of parties. Underlying all, however, was the same intractable problem: how to reconcile Catholic monarchy with the existence of a Calvinist church and regime that came, increasingly, to look like a separate state, in some respects a French version of the United Provinces, the eventual progeny of the revolt of the Netherlands. Since monarchy was weak, its leading subjects factious, the whole period can be viewed as one of civil disorder, with intermittent periods of open warfare. For clarity’s sake in the bigger picture should we pass quickly by the incidents of these years, the campaigns, the tensions of the ‘cold war’, the conspiracies, assassinations and occasional battles, to the cumulative effect and conclusion: the confirmation of Huguenot rights and institutions in the Edict of Nantes? Tempting – and yet the chronology matters. The way in which the struggle was waged, and the political philosophy engendered by sustained resistance to royal authority, formed the character of the Huguenot church and community in the century to come. The two main objects of the Catholic armies were to break the Protestant front along the Loire Valley and to recapture Rouen. By this strategy they hoped to disrupt communications between Condé’s headquarters at Orléans and the other towns, and to recover the province of Normandy. It was not merely that the province normally produced a substantial part of the crown revenues. It also offered a port of entry to an English army. These were realistic

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targets, within reach. South of the Loire geography and logistics ensured that the Huguenots could consolidate their hold. In the north it could be broken. The Huguenots resisted stoutly but old walls, small garrisons and inadequate stocks were no match for the superior Catholic forces. Blois and Tours were recaptured in August 1562. Poitiers and Angers followed in quick succession. La Rochefoucauld, Condé’s chief lieutenant, fell back into Saintonge. Already the pattern of successive wars and outcomes was being determined. So too, in a way that responsible leaders might deplore, sometimes authorise but rarely control, was the pattern of massacre and reprisal. Their auxiliaries, pitiless through religious conviction or soldier’s habit, were all too ready to adopt the weapon of terror. In Provence where rival captains needed no signal from Guise or Condé to pursue their ends, Catholics had already been massacred at Barjols. In June Sommerive ordered the killing of Protestants in Orange; in their areas Montbrun, and des Adrets would follow suit. The loose-­jointed state seemed to be falling apart as local warlords fought to secure their territory and, alarmingly, called in foreign aid. Tavannes received Swiss and German mercenaries; Monluc welcomed Spaniards into Guienne. The Pope, as if flaunting before the Protestant world the essence of their case – that he was a secular power usurping spiritual authority – sent 2,500 soldiers to aid Joyeuse in Languedoc. So, from the start, the French religious wars had an international dimension. Calvin’s agents worked on the sympathies of German Protestant princes. Dandelot managed to evade Aumâle’s blockade and lead 4,000 German Reiters into Orléans. Protestant activists contended with Queen Elizabeth’s instinctive caution. Her ambassador in France3 urged her to intervene on behalf of the embattled Huguenots. In September she authorised the dispatch of soldiers, with some money, to Le Havre, in return for its occupation, with Dieppe, as guarantees for the recovery of Calais. Restricted by terms of engagement they were of little material aid. Elizabeth’s criterion would always be English national advantage. Towards the end of October the duc d’Aumâle, Guise’s brother, captured Rouen whose defenders received no English support. To prevent pillage his soldiers were offered a bonus: in vain. A local chronicler described a scene that was to become the norm wherever a city resisted a siege: ‘The entry of the soldiers unleashed the cruelty of war on anyone whom the soldiers happened to encounter in the streets, men and women, Huguenots and Catholics. It took two days to recover the bodies from among the garbage on the pavement . . .’4 Catholicism was at once restored to its dominant position within the city. In most other Norman towns Huguenots voluntarily relinquished power. In Rouen they slipped into a passive phase, relying on successive government edicts to preserve their right to worship. Conversion had ‘brought the convert into a new cultural universe, and often produced in him a new self-­image’.

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With conversions now less common and the Protestants increasingly set in their ways, the degree of Protestant ‘otherness’ became marked.5 To Catholics ‘other’ still meant potential rebel. The Catholic recovery was achieved at high cost. Antony of Navarre was fatally wounded at the siege of Rouen. At the battle of Dreux, in December 1562, Guise won the day but lost fellow triumvir and successful general, Saint-­André. Montmorency was captured by the Huguenots, Condé by the Catholics – but most of his defeated army got away, under the command of Coligny. The Catholic party sustained a further significant blow, fraught with deadly consequences. In February 1563, directing the siege of Orléans, François de Guise was stabbed and subsequently died. The man responsible was a Huguenot seigneur, Poltrot de Méré. Under prolonged examination and torture, he exonerated Condé but declared that Coligny had authorised his attempt and that Beza had assured him of the merit of the deed. Having family links with the plotters of Amboise, and his own motives for revenge, Poltrot had no need of further inducement. It was anyway out of character for Coligny to license murder and he always denied it, though it did him no good that he openly expressed his delight at the news. There is evidence, on the other hand, for the complicity of Condé. To maintain their hold over the monarchy the Guise had the strongest motive for detaching Condé, a prince of the blood, from the Huguenots and for impugning Coligny; that they did loudly and continuously. Nothing can be proved. What mattered was the significant impact on the family’s collective mind, the posthumous elevation of François to iconic status, which called for revenge. So with the insidious spirit of vendetta the weapon of assassination entered the political culture. In an atmosphere of fear and rumour, there would always be some, with itching resentments and nothing to lose, willing to kill for rewards both mundane and celestial. The murder is ‘a supreme illustration of the manner in which the ideological conflict poisoned the relations of the nobility’.6 It facilitated peace; it ensured the future war. It is in this light that the terms of the Peace of Amboise (March 1563) should be viewed: as a pause rather than a peace. The absence of the cardinal of Lorraine left Condé and Montmorency, both released to negotiate, with a relatively free hand. The Edict of Amboise allowed Protestantism the protection of law but worship was restricted to those towns held by Huguenot garrisons; otherwise to the suburbs of one town in each bailliage or senéchaussée. That meant about seventy-­five places. Huguenot nobles, however, could exercise the right whether at home or on their estates. The Huguenots benefited less than might appear. The crown could do no more in its edicts than state the principles and, in general terms, the rules. That left scope for interpretation and recourse to law, for which Huguenots generally had less money and interest where it counted. So the conditions were

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established for continuing struggle over the sites designated for worship. Much would depend on the Huguenots’ standing with municipality and magistrates, and with the provincial governor. He could make it very hard for them. The Guise governor of Champagne moved the site allocated in Chaumont-­en Bassigny to the furthest part of the gouvernement, some forty miles away. In the numerous cases where they were offered a place a few miles out they might be ‘condemned to wander on dangerous roads, haunts beyond the pale of law and God,’7 where they could be abused, ambushed, robbed. One voice may speak for many. The path Nicholas Pithou had to use ran through ‘an extremely desolate, hilly and wooded area, surrounded by impoverished people who were ill-­ disposed to Huguenots’.8 They fared better where the governor was a Protestant, like Louis de Condé who obtained for those in Montdidier the right to worship in the suburbs. Proximity could then create other problems as the Catholics saw the procession to service, heard their psalms and listened with disgust to descriptions of their practices, such as the baptisms, and burial rites.9 Generally Catholics had the upper hand in the contests over space that there were the most vexatious cause of bad blood and periodic violence. They were fought at two levels: outside the walls, at places for worship and burial; and within the domestic space, supposedly safe, a refuge, but also a kind of arrest. In a town where buildings, signs and images everywhere spelt out Catholicism, they were bound to feel that the space did not belong to them; that they shared in it but by tolerance, and that generally grudging and resented. Only within their own domestic space could they be Huguenots, say their prayers, quietly sing their psalms. That, at a time when neighbourly sociability was characteristic of urban life, was indeed a limited life. It is not surprising that facing such hazards, deprived of much that as citizens they naturally valued, some Huguenots gave up the struggle well before the shock of St Bartholomew’s. Moreover, the separateness was becoming visible in communities across the land before the harder lines and institutional arrangements that followed the massacre. Huguenot leaders might have been aware of the plight of so many of their people but unlikely to lose sleep over it. Their interest was in high politics and, when opportune or enforced, in war. Since the Edict did not allow for any new Huguenot churches the effect was to tilt further the balance in leadership, from bourgeois to noble. This might be Condé’s idea of the faith; it might even sit comfortably within Montmorency’s idea of what was proper. It was far from Geneva’s vision of a Protestant church in France. Few were satisfied, few reconciled. This was a peace that the crown could neither implement nor guarantee. The wonder is that it lasted as long as it did. French monarchs took it for granted that royal edicts would be registered by parlements. Without such registration no edict would be enforceable. Judges could record their opposition in the form of a remonstrance; but they were

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required to register as a duty of office. The initial refusal of several parlements, notably Dijon and Bordeaux, following the lead of Paris, was therefore a serious challenge to the authority of the crown as well as to Catherine’s policy. When Paris registered, it was with a formal remonstrance and condition: the Edict should have authority only till the king should attain his majority, when a national council would decide the religious issue. Behind the constitutional issue was the view, firmly held by most of the judges, that Calvinism should have no legal right to exist in France. When the parlement of Dijon eventually registered it attached a remonstrance that might be taken as a summary of Catholic views and fears, a manifesto for the Guise: ‘The consequence of the said edict of pacification was so great that it could lead to the destruction of the Christian and Roman religion, division among the population and civil war.’10 Catherine’s response was robust. At the parlement of Rouen, in August 1563, using the procedure of a lit de justice, she staged a formal declaration of Charles IX’s majority.11 He was just fourteen. With his mother he had been sidelined during the war. She must assert his authority. The lit was rarely used. Normally a lettre de jussion was sufficient. It had, in any case, never taken place outside Paris. The event served therefore to remind its senior court of its proper place and duty. The words the king were given to speak were explicit and brusque. He did not intend to endure any longer the disobedience shown by many ‘since these troubles began’. On pain of imprisonment he required ‘that all our subjects observe and maintain completely and perfectly the declaration . . . concerning the pacification of the said troubles’. To make it plainer still, he added: ‘You have heard my will . . . and I want to tell you that you ought no longer to behave as you have been accustomed during my minority.’12 For many of his listeners there remained the fundamental objection: the king who was granting legal status to Huguenots was the king who, at his coronation, had vowed to defend the realm against heresy. A lasting dilemma – but for Catherine there was no solution besides recognition of the Huguenot body and its right to worship. The forces of the crown were not strong enough to crush a well-­armed minority. That would be the lesson of repeated wars. It was not simply a matter of military logistics; nor of the country becoming a battlefield for outside powers. Catherine may have lacked deep spiritual insight, but she could appreciate that there was a spiritual strength in the Huguenot communities that would not wilt under pressure. Her next move may be seen as a tactical ploy in a desperate situation. Yet it was neither unprecedented nor unwise to take the monarchy to the people – specifically to that senior element that she needed to impress: the hierarchy of law and office. During a royal progress both conciliatory and coercive, around every province over a period of two years (March 1564 to March 1566), the young king and chancellor L’Hôpital visited each parlement to repeat the charge already

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delivered at Rouen. L’Hôpital rammed home the royal message: ‘The king has not come to this region simply to see the world . . . He has discovered a number of faults in this parlement . . . and chief is the disobedience that you demonstrate to your king.’13 By ensuring also that the king met as many of the provincial nobles as possible Catherine hoped to build a body of moderate support. She could not weaken significantly the clientèles of the greatest men. But she could hope to gain support from the undecided, those who would one day be labelled politique. At present the crown lacked the resources and the prestige to bring about the eventual remedy; service to the crown was yet to be the natural resort of the ambitious. Catherine’s sustained effort anticipated the central strategy of royal absolutism – but how different were the conditions from those after the Fronde, nearly a hundred years later, when another queen mother took every chance to display to the country another royal minor. The monarchy then guarded by Anne of Austria would be immeasurably stronger. However, the essential change was that religious difference then offered no motive or excuse for faction. Now it would only need one rash move to end Catherine’s precarious peace. The royal progress extended to his furthest subjects the opportunity at court to petition the king. The Huguenots’ right to petition had been granted by François II in 1560. Huguenots, like others, ‘couched their demands in traditional language of supplication and deference and were dependent on the goodwill of the crown in recognising the validity of their claims’.14 Yet their use of remonstrance reflected the ‘conservative rather than radical nature of the movement’. From outlaws to recognised participants in the political process: it was a considerable step. Yet it was of limited practical value, for the records show a yawning gap between royal intentions and actions on the ground. Parlements, under duress, might assent to the royal provision for a limited tolerance; their members’ feelings are more accurately reflected in the numerous tales of prejudice and persecution. Huguenots evidently worshipped in more places than those authorised. Catholics disrupted Huguenot services and lives. A remonstrance of fifty-­six printed pages presented to the king by Huguenot nobles from Maine reveals some startling cases. In one such, Marguerite de Hurtelon, widow of the sieur de la Guynadière ‘was murdered in her house in the parish of St-­Georges; along with Charles her son, aged eleven; her three daughters, the oldest of whom was not eighteen years old; and two chambermaids’.15 Religion as pretext for robbery and sadism: in this case pigs were led into the house ‘to make them eat all those poor dead corpses.’ Catholics were regularly told that Huguenots were garbage. Huguenots too could readily hear God’s call to kill, but Catholics were generally more responsive to the demand for purification. From both camps come the tales of atrocity so likely when the absolute claims of faith have attracted the fanatic, deluded or criminal.

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For Catherine’s policy to have any hope of success she needed more than the compliance of parlements and the sage advice of L’Hôpital. It was essential for her to have support in council. There she had to contend with the cardinal of Lorraine, at the height of his reputation in the Catholic world, resolved to pursue the campaign against Huguenotism and, as an immediate object, the vendetta against Admiral Coligny. Catherine observed with dismay that he was winning the ear of the young Anjou.16 Meanwhile Condé and Coligny, preferring sea air and security, stopped attending council. La Rochelle, already swollen uncomfortably by refugees from the earlier wars, who came from all parts of France but mainly from Poitou, Aunis and Saintonge, with business gains and social problems, became the alternative capital.17 A stripped church, whitewashed, with only pulpit, lectern, pews and, unadorned, the holy table – following the destruction of ornaments it was the bare face of Calvinism. In the summer of 1566 cities in the southern Netherlands suffered an iconoclastic orgy incited by Calvinist preachers that recalled the excesses of the Anabaptists. Philip II responded by sending an army under Alva to punish culprits and restore order.18 In early summer 1667 it marched down France’s eastern frontier, the ‘Spanish road’ that was now the main line of supply to the Netherlands. Catherine had previously met Alva at Bayonne during her tour of the country. Huguenots feared that there was a secret Guisard plan; that this army, larger and better trained than any comparable French force, would be diverted to crush them. There had been no deal at Bayonne; Alva was focused on the Netherlands where his bloody purge led to a large-­scale emigration; ‘the first Refuge’, it has been called, with many going to England. Yet Condé and Coligny thought the threat sufficiently severe to risk a pre-­emptive strike. In September 1567, they failed in an attempt to ‘liberate’ the king. By its crude disregard for the respect due to an anointed king the Surprise de Meaux seriously damaged the reputation of the Huguenot leaders at court and lessened the chance of reconciliation. Frustrated, they managed to seize some fortified towns, Orléans, Valence and Nîmes among them. Guise called on Alva for aid in what became the second civil war. He did not respond but German troops under John Casimir reinforced the Huguenots. The king meanwhile had enlisted 6,000 Swiss guards for protection. They had foiled the palace coup; they proved their value as they escorted Charles and his mother back to Paris. The Huguenot army besieged Paris, without success and with serious consequences. Out of resentment and hunger many Parisians were coming to think of Huguenots as natural, incorrigible enemies. The war that had begun with a reckless miscalculation petered out after just one battle of note. At St Denis, outside the gates of the capital, the veteran Constable Montmorency defeated Condé, but afterwards died from his wounds. After only six months neither side could see

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profit in further fighting so they reached a settlement, the Peace of Longjumeau (March 1558), that broadly repeated the terms of Amboise. Parlements were ordered to register, and it was also sent direct to governors for implementation. Since Lorraine, ‘arch-­priest of the Papacy’, was determined to overthrow it by a campaign of harassment the Edict was generally held to be provisional, and further war inevitable. It came within months. The third civil war began in September 1568 with another plot, intended to oust the rival party and bound seemingly to miscarry. A court was no place for secrets. In this case it was planned by Lorraine and aimed at the Huguenot leaders, notably Condé and Coligny. With de la Noue19 and others they escaped to La Rochelle and summoned their supporters to arms. The war looked to contemporaries like part of a rapidly escalating international crisis. There was an evolving Protestant front to match the Catholic. Mary Stuart fled from her Scottish Calvinist subjects and John Knox’ loud mouth – and was promptly imprisoned by her cousin Elizabeth. Remembering heady days when she was married to Francis II, Lorraine saw his niece as the champion of English Catholics, potential queen of England, husband of Henry of Anjou and his instrument in uniting the crowns of England and France. Alva’s reign of terror in the Netherlands reached a climax with the execution in Brussels of sixty Netherlands nobles. Among them was Coligny’s cousin, the count of Hoorn. In August 1568 William of Orange signed a formal treaty of mutual support with Condé and Coligny: each was to aid the other to defeat the ‘evil counsellors’ who sought the destruction of the Protestant religion. Under the circumstances it was a natural union and it would last, in some form, for sixteen years. The fighting in the third war was protracted. Both sides could call on foreign troops. The Huguenots adopted a realistic strategy, abandoning hope of controlling central France from strongholds along the Loire in favour of a south-­western redoubt that would stretch their opponents’ resources. The small private armies of the Protestant captains had been locked into a destructive sequence of raids and reprisals which the leading nobles and church authorities seemed powerless to control but they proved their worth when, after combining their forces, they recovered Béarn and Navarre.20 Coligny and the young princes had troops from Orange and Louis of Nassau, and German mercenaries under the duke of Zweibrücken. Yet they lost two battles, at Jarnac near Angoulême in March 1569 and Montcontour, near Poitiers, in October. Nominally in command at the first, a dashing leader in the second battle, Anjou earned respect that he would not lose till he became king. Catherine felt hopeful when she compared him with the frail and moody Charles IX. Prominent on the field, a target for the assassin, commanders in these civil wars lived dangerously. Condé was killed at Jarnac, leaving Coligny, another marked man, in charge. The proud-­spirited Jeanne d’Albret, grooming her

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young son Henry, might be relied on for moral support. Deeply committed to the cause since her husband’s death, her objective now was the recovery of Béarn. Accomplished by her chosen general Montgomery in 1569 with his ‘army of the viscounts’ it was followed by her ordinance establishing the reformed religion ‘in all the places of my sovereign territory, that all superstitions be banished from it’. She setup an Ecclesiastical Council with far-­reaching powers to direct and protect the Protestant establishment that would survive till 1618.21 She did not live to see her son fulfil her hopes. Meanwhile his leadership, with that of young Condé, preserved the tradition that resistance was no treason when led by a prince of the blood. But Coligny may have been relieved when Anjou turned from pursuit to besiege the fortress of St Jean d’Angély. Failing there it was with a weakened force that he turned east to confront the now larger Protestant force. In June 1570 at Arnay-­le-­Duc, west of Dijon, Coligny defeated the royal army in what might have proved a decisive victory if he had gone on to be chief royal minister. That did not happen. Meanwhile, however, he was able to secure peace on the most favourable terms yet offered to the Huguenots. It is a moment to reflect on a situation of special privilege that was already quite exceptional among European states. Had not the RPR achieved the most, in law, that it could hope for? The Edict of St Germain, signed in 1570, provided for the first time a legal basis for the existence of Protestants in the Catholic state. It established a crucial precedent and a goal for future negotiation. Huguenot leaders would never, except in extremis, settle for less. It licensed worship in two towns in each of the twelve gouvernements of France. In was vital. No more would they have to worship outside the walls of those towns. To ensure there was no wilful misunderstanding the Edict named the towns. In the further right to garrison four fortified towns for two years we see the precursor of the places de sûreté of the final settlement. Cognac and Montauban helped secure the south-­west, La Charité22 gave a bridgehead on the Loire, La Rochelle was to be the Huguenot capital, and the vital link to England and Holland. In these strongholds the Huguenots could store their arms and shelter refugees from less favoured places. Also offensive to Catholics was recognition of the right of Huguenots to hold offices and pay equal taxes. Property and offices confiscated during the wars were to be restored. In this combination of armed security and civil rights is visible, not the integration of Huguenots into civil society, or complete toleration, but novel features, as of a state within the state and – soon to come and its central feature – a church alongside a church. For St Germain would be followed up by the work of the national synods of 1571 and 1573 in drawing up the Discipline ecclésiastique, consolidating the first attempt by the synod of 1559.23 It was a code of church law with regulations

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for the discipline and business of Huguenot churches. How were such outcomes possible? How was it that the royal army, after sixty years of engagement in wars in Germany and Italy, was unable to defeat rebellious and, in numbers overall, inferior forces?24 In early modern times battles were rarely decisive. Even a comprehensive peace like Cateau-­Cambrésis had arisen from the exhaustion of the contending states. The most that any single battle could achieve was to lend weight to the bargaining of the victorious party. Sixty years on and it would take the main royal army, concentrated for the purpose and without serious distraction, under the direction of a king of undoubted authority, over a year to break the resistance of La Rochelle to Louis XIII (1627–28).25 Yet the siege of Montauban, a few years before, had ended in costly failure. Disease was as great a threat to a besieging army, in unsanitary lines, as to the besieged. Sieges were, however, a special case and La Rochelle, because of its sea communications, was unique. Only the greatest of fortresses were likely to withstand a resolute siege once – an important rider – a sufficient army could be mustered. In most cases, a prudent commander, aware of anxious civilians, would be ready to make terms. It was in open warfare, in the typical summer campaign of a few months between field forces, that the inadequate resources of the crown were regularly exposed. Even if the army that served the Valois kings had been twice the size it might not have prevailed. As it was, the ‘royal army’ was, by any later standard, only part-­royal, far from regular, and far from able to impose order. Meanwhile, a sign of the times perhaps, churches and monasteries in some areas were fortifying themselves, with walled enclosure and watchtower, to protect the building and give shelter to the community and livestock.26 The crown was responsible for the defence of the realm; that meant the concentration of forces in the east. It had to be maintained, even increased during civil war, to guard against opportunistic attack. Even when that did not occur the threat from Holland, Germany and England was of service to the Huguenots. The gendarmerie, heavy cavalry, was the main permanent force at the crown’s disposal, part of the army. Typically a garrison was provided by a company of some 200 gendarmes. In 1564, 28 were stationed in Picardy and Champagne, the remaining 63 in nineteen other provinces. This arrangement made it difficult to mobilise a force for field operations. The crown had long relied on detachments of foreign mercenaries, mainly Swiss, German and Italian: about a third of the 70,000 soldiers in the second civil war while another third came from further provinces, Brittany, Guienne and Piedmont. Some were still arriving after the end of the war. Concentration was always slow and highly visible. It was reckoned to take six weeks to travel from Calais to Provence, four weeks from Gascony to Paris. Water communications were hard to use; there were few river crossings, and those were likely to be guarded.

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When the Huguenots began hostilities by seizing key towns, and with them control of local resources, fighting was never concentrated in one region. Several of these towns might be recaptured, as during the first war, but that did not completely cripple the Huguenots’ capacity to fight. They could always withdraw south to their heartlands. Behind every peace treaty were financial constraints. When 40 per cent of royal income went on pay and provision, funds were never sufficient; during the wars the debt, already considerable at the outset, rose inexorably. By 1676 the initial debt of 40 million livres had risen to 100, with an increasing proportion of revenue committed to interest payments. War, even the movement of armies, brought disrupted lives and reduced tax yield. In the areas they controlled, Huguenot leaders normally levied and kept the taxes for their party’s use. Peace concluded, troops were disbanded or returned to garrisons; so the next war began with frustrating delays, with efficiency impaired by lack of training and operational experience. The crown could live, for a time, with mounting debt. Even after the defection of many to the Huguenot camp it could count on a core of officers, loyal, even fervently so, when they served God and king under a commander who could promote their career and family. The stakes were high; so were the risks, especially to those most prominent in the field. In 1573, at the siege of La Rochelle, of 155 officers 66 were killed, 47 wounded. Meanwhile hunger and sickness ravaged the lines. In these campaigns of attrition, recruiting, requisitioning and foraging for man and beast were unrelenting, the quartermaster’s nightmare – and no less horrible for the surrounding countryside and towns; ill-­discipline, looting, desertion set a limit on operations. The crown could never maintain an army in the field for more than a few months. By 1576 most of the initial leaders were dead or retired. For several generations soldiers’ only military experience would be gained by fighting fellow countrymen, sometimes their own relatives. For even the keenest it could be frustrating. The Huguenots did not have to defend a long frontier. Their southern bastions eventually gave them the crucial advantage of interior lines. Their church structure facilitated communication and the efficient raising of supplies. So it seems that Catholic aggression in the later wars represented a triumph of hope over experience – or faith over logic. That is, however, to be wise after events that appeared repeatedly to confront the Huguenots with a threat to their survival.

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chapter sixteen

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The Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day A poor little girl unable to speak.1

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he silence of Gillette, sole survivor of her Huguenot family, says much, if not all, about a dreadful event. The massacre that started in Paris in the early hours of St Bartholomew’s Day, 24 August 1572, continued for three days and was then repeated in a dozen other towns, has a special place in Huguenot history.2 The effect on so many families; the horrors revealed in individual stories; the psychological impact; the apparent ascendancy of sectarian passion over human feeling; for Huguenots the sense of betrayal; for some of them the loss of confidence in a righteous cause; the crippling blow to the leadership – all contribute to that unhappy distinction. They ensure that the events have been studied minutely to establish causes for the massacre, if not to fasten blame. As ever, those best placed to record such events have the strongest motives to conceal or to gloss.3 The revulsion of Protestants and of some Catholics was balanced by the exultant tone of much Catholic opinion, taking its cue from the Pope, the king of Spain and the Guise. One has to start from the circumstances – the hot temper of the people after three civil wars, the problems faced by leaders at a critical juncture, the special case of Paris, a tinderbox at the best of times – and these many thought the worst of times. In 1572 the struggle for political ascendancy, already embittered by personal antagonisms, was acquiring new force in the light of international developments. After the Peace of St Germain, each party faced urgent questions. Huguenots might be reassured by its legal provisions, yet their leaders wondered what use they would be in cities, notably Paris, where the people saw Huguenots returning to the city, claiming the rights conceded by the crown and were in no mood to tolerate them. What would be Alva’s next move: against Netherlands rebels – or against them? Was there a secret plan? If the opportunity arose should they not now align themselves with their fellow Protestants in what was

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widely perceived to be a common cause? For their part the Guise were affronted by the Edict of St Germain, ‘the Calvinist charter’, and alarmed by the apparent influence of Coligny over an impressionable king. They wanted him dead. Was the projected marriage of Anjou to England’s queen part of a wider plan, to secure peace at the cost of recognising the civil rights of French Protestants? As for Catherine, sitting uncomfortably between Guise and Coligny, seeking to influence her son but unable to control him, how could she curb the Huguenot hotheads without placing herself at the mercy of the Guise?4 The stakes were high. She had no illusions about Alva or Philip II. She had been warned, as early as 1564, that Granvelle, Alva’s predecessor, would try to reignite the civil wars. The queen mother also felt keenly the danger of Calvinism: the Guise approach was surgical; Catherine’s therapeutic; in an emergency they would converge. Did it seem to Catherine that she had no resort but the traditional, dynastic marriage? The alliance of her daughter Marguerite to the young Henry of Navarre, since Condé’s death the nominal leader of the Huguenots, might divert him, and other Huguenots, from intervention in the Netherlands. Precarious peace might be; the need was desperate. The third civil war had affected civilians even more than its precursors. Many had fled from sacked homes and farms for towns where they might be secure but were certainly unwelcome. That could only add to existing tensions. The rhetoric was mounting, nowhere more reckless and inflammatory than from the pulpits of Paris. Catholics were urged to cleanse the land; the people primed to denounce. Priests like Simon Vigor, ‘bellows of Satan’ as a Huguenot minister described him, had their own distinctive apocalyptic agenda. He portrayed Protestantism as the enemy within the city, an infection in the body: Parisians owed it to themselves to eliminate it.5 ‘Wild beasts from Geneva’, heretics ‘should be exterminated by a bitter death’. Self-­appointed prophets, pulpit terrorists, empowered by the authority of sacred texts – those that fitted their message – such priests needed little prompting by their superiors. But they had an essential part, as they would later have in the League, in the strategy of the House of Guise. Lorraine’s object was to control crown and council so as to ensure that France contributed to the crusade against Protestantism, in which Spain should not have all the glory – or political advantage. In 1572 he could not have envisaged that the Netherlandish rebels would prove a match for Spain. With the first object of thwarting the English marriage he worked on the young Anjou. When, in January 1571, he announced that he did not wish to marry Elizabeth Catherine had to fall back on the younger brother, Alençon, as her candidate. Elizabeth was unimpressed. The exposure of the Ridolfi plot, on behalf of Mary Stuart, emphasised the danger posed by French interest in her cousin as a rival for the throne.

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Meanwhile, in their professed concern for the tradition of sacral monarchy the Guise were offered a gift in the recent writing of Calvin. Studying the defiance of Daniel to King Darius he declared that when kings defy God ‘they automatically abdicate their worldly power’. In 1565, in the same context, he was even more explicit: ‘When they raise themselves up against God . . . it is necessary that they should in turn be laid low.’ Following the master, but selecting sentences out of their original context, several Huguenot writers developed a theory of resistance. One widely circulated pamphlet published in Lyons in 1564 cited another respected authority: ‘When they [sovereigns] lost the love that they [subjects] owe to them and when they abuse their authority, Aristotle said that they are no longer kings but tyrants.’6 Beza’s classic statement of the subject’s right of resistance would not appear until 1574 but Huguenots were already being offered theoretical justification for the armed struggle. St Bartholomew’s hardened that view; it did not cause it. From their unofficial capital, La Rochelle, came, in 1568, an unequivocal message: ‘When they [kings] attack and turn themselves against God and His church they are no longer kings but private persons whom it is no longer necessary to obey.’7 His church: the claim was bold. The idea that authority resided in ‘the people’, who existed long before monarchy, was further subversive. When the wisely anonymous writer compared the struggle of the Huguenots to those of the Israelites against Pharaoh, and so linked the idea of popular sovereignty to the Old Testament idea of a chosen people, he offered a revolutionary manifesto that any ruler might fear. Meanwhile such writing served as evidence to support the Catholic charge of a Huguenot conspiracy to take over the monarchy. Their pamphlets developed the theme: Huguenots were hypocrites who used religion as the instrument of a purely temporal policy; Coligny was a monster of iniquity, violent, self-­righteous; slaying the old, deflowering the maiden, desecrating the holy places. Catherine might see through the ritual language of denunciation. But she must also be made to see that the admiral was the principal enemy of the crown. In October 1571, at the king’s invitation, Coligny returned to court and council. There followed, early in 1572, news of the forthcoming royal wedding. An alliance and a healing through a royal marriage: it was the recognised formula; that they were cousins was no bar. Neither was attracted to the other, but duty called. In May a Huguenot force, commanded by William of Orange’s younger brother Louis of Nassau, seized the fortresses of Valenciennes and Mons. All appeared to point to a decisive shift in royal policy. In fact Coligny had little to do with the queen’s marriage initiative, had doubts about supporting the rebels, was only occasionally in Paris and had little influence on the council. Often some apparently minor incident confirms what men are already disposed to believe. So Coligny’s hand was seen in the decision to remove the

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Gastines cross.8 The sequence of events reveals much of current attitudes: the civil wars in miniature. Philippe de Gastines and his son Richard were arrested for holding illicit assemblies and the Lord’s Supper in their house in the rue St Denis. In July 1569 they were hanged in the place de Grève. Catholics tore down the house and erected there a stone pyramid surmounted by a wooden cross. By the terms of St Germain Huguenot property was to be restored and monuments relating to an act of persecution destroyed. A threefold tussle ensued. The crown was committed to enforcing the terms, the city authorities reluctant (several had benefited from the confiscations), the people were in truculent mood. After the cross had been removed under guard to the cemetery of the Holy Innocents they rampaged. Houses belonging to the Gastines family were sacked; fifty people altogether were killed. The authorities were seen to be ineffectual in the face of popular emotion. No one at the hôtel de ville could be unaware of the potential for disorder. How would it be if violence were to be sanctioned by the highest authority in the land? On 21 August the marriage of Marguerite and Henry was celebrated and among the large number of Huguenot nobles present the spirit was indeed celebratory. Were they not fellow Frenchmen, Catholics and Protestants? Yet to many Parisians surely the latter were an alien presence, invaders even, differences marked particularly in their attendants, soberly dressed, self-­ confident but to their unwilling hosts sounding uncouth in their southern or Norman patois. Coligny had first opposed the match, fearing that Henry would abjure, but then accepted it as a step towards war with Spain. On the 22nd the sieur de Maurevert, aiming from an upper-­floor window of a house that belonged to the duc de Guise, shot at Coligny, but managed only to wound him in the arm. To all appearances it was another move in the Guise vendetta against the House of Châtillon, now prompted by the threat perceived in the relationship between the admiral and the king. With it went the possibility of war against Spain that Coligny urged, that the king might find tempting but that Catherine had reason to fear. Coligny’s argument was that she faced a choice: either war against Spain or civil war. By the end of 1571 his hand had been forced by Louis of Nassau and those in the Netherlands and beyond who envisaged an international Protestant cause. It was a pressure that Elizabeth would well understand. But she was better placed to stand up to her more militant councillors. Several of Catherine’s argued the need for peace on the grounds that the country was vulnerable to Spanish attack. So it is possible that she had sanctioned the incident. Whether she was guilty or not, the botched attempt had now left her and Charles in the worst of all worlds. Coligny refused to leave Paris; his judgement was at fault if he counted on the king’s protection. A judicial enquiry quickly established the involvement of Guise and Charles promised that he would take action against him. In reality he was

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in a spin. Hysterical rage betrayed his frustration and fear as Huguenots talked of revenge. Nearby was an army under Coligny’s brother-­in-­law Teligny. Would it march towards Flanders – or Paris? Councillors meeting on 23 August were embarrassed: for Catherine’s state, panic may be the right word. There was a sense of urgency. The enemy was within and without the gates. Individuals would settle scores; there might be a full-­scale and coordinated assault; even an attempt to seize the king. Somehow there emerged the decision to carry out a pre-­emptive strike against Coligny and some two to three dozen Huguenot leaders. For the Guise it was the logical development from their stated policy of elimination. Catherine and Charles may not have conceived the scheme but they sanctioned it. Murder was to be committed in the king’s name. Charles, deprived of his war, may well have grabbed the chance to display a mastery of events to which he was not generally accustomed. As it turned out, he created a monster that he could not control. As for Catherine, far from its being in character, as Protestants maintained, it was an aberration and a calamitous misjudgement. A tired, desperate woman fell in with the Guise because she peered into the abyss, feared for her son, could see no other way out. The city authorities were alerted. The gates were closed, boats secured, cannon posted at the hôtel de ville. If it was a gross error to imagine that the selective cull could be contained it was compounded by the decision to call out the militia, disbanded the previous year, and now recalled with a sharpened sense of grievance. Giving an official appearance to the proceedings it virtually guaranteed, indeed appeared to license, what it was intended to prevent: the general slaughter. The militia – with radicals in their ranks and with further allegiance to their own confraternities, more Catholic vigilantes than impartial enforcers – was itself a significant part of the problem of order. Their processions to Notre-­Dame or Sainte-­Geneviève were the routines and advertisements of holy war. To ensure an accurate strike officials in each quartier were to see that every Catholic house had an armed man, wearing a white scarf on his left arm, and a lighted torch in the window. Involving citizens can only have heightened anticipation. In the early hours of St Bartholomew’s Day they were roused by the ringing of the great bell of the Palais. The militia guarded the streets while the soldiers, some from the king’s Swiss Guard, some from Anjou’s, some from the household of Guise, dispatched their victims. Honouring his duty to his father, with Aumâle and Angoulême making it a family affair, young Guise killed Coligny himself, wiped the blood from his face, then kicked the body away. Perhaps that was enough for him. Like some other Catholics he gave shelter to a number of Huguenots; among them, the daughter of the former Chancellor L’Hôpital; three girls too, but he planned Catholic baptism for them.

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With sunrise the people took a hand, looking for victims. Some evidently believed that the king licensed them, that it was their duty to kill.9 Some clearly did so with relish. The gates remained locked as the authorities tried, to no avail, to regain control. It took three days. Heads of noble families had been the government’s limited objectives. Roaming about the university quarter, the commercial right bank and the Faubourg St Germain, the mob was less particular. The young Rosny, just arrived in Paris to study ‘scientific subjects’, was ‘awakened about three hours after midnight by the sound of all the bells and the confused cries of the populace’ and turned out of his lodgings by his fearful host. He put on a scholar’s gown, tucked a Catholic prayer book under his arm, survived several encounters before arriving for sanctuary at the Collège de Bourgogne. ‘I would if it were possible, bury for ever the memory of a day for which divine vengeance punished France by six and twenty years of disasters, carnage and horror.’ For the future minister of Henry IV St Bartholomew’s was a start, not a finish.10 He was lucky; neither of his Protestant tutors survived. A notable victim was Ramus, Pierre de la Ramée as he had been before assuming the scholar’s name that had become internationally famous. As a radical humanist and latterly an open Protestant, he might have been considered a marked man, and not only at the Sorbonne.11 After his conversion he had fled Paris for congenial havens in Switzerland and Germany but had believed it safe to return in 1571. The murder of the man renowned throughout Europe as the Christian philosopher for whom ‘reason’ was more powerful than ‘authority’ reverberated around the academic world. So, with wider consequences did the horrified witness of the young Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s ambassador and soon to be her Secretary of State. Some Parisians were undoubtedly targeted for past offence. Richard de Gastines’ widow was an early victim, with other members of the family. Among the slaughtered were royal office-­holders, bankers, booksellers, printers, goldsmiths and jewellers. To have been known as a confessing Protestant was enough for the killers. Easiest to spot as outsiders were gentlemen come up to town for the wedding. Their losses were proportionately high; one such family lost five members.12 Bodies were stripped, sometimes mutilated, dragged along the street and thrown into the Seine. When Coligny’s corpse was found in the street a mock trial was held ‘just as if they were judges and officers of the court’;13 his head, hands and genitals were cut off; the trunk was burned, then thrown into the Seine. Again we see the perversion of religious imagery and language, the purifying rite, as if the deed were not sufficient without conclusion in fire or water. There were also degrading, sadistic scenes. The young Agnes Mercier was immersed naked in her parents’ blood with horrible threats that if she ever became a Huguenot the same would happen to her. Neither pregnant women

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nor small children were spared. The wife of Mathurin Lussault broke her legs trying to escape over the roof after her husband had been killed. She was caught, dragged by the hair through the streets, her hands cut off at the wrist to secure her bracelets; she was impaled on a spit before being dumped in the Seine. There are a number of such stories. When the person was seen as less than human, sex or age was irrelevant, natural feeling suspended.14 More ordinary motives need not, however, be discounted; where killers broke in, looters were not far behind. The massacre had exposed the savagery below the surface of a great city. Forlorn, unnerved if not unhinged, Charles was always reacting, not directing. The traditional picture of a king haunted to the end by the horror may not be far wrong. He first blamed the initial murders on the Guise– Châtillon feud. Writing to provincial governors, he accepted responsibility but excused his decision on the grounds of a plot against him. At first he ordered them to take strong measures against the Huguenots. Soon he was urging officers in the Midi to ensure strict observance of the Edict of St Germain lest Huguenots should rise in revenge. Some Guise nobles let it be known that the king wished to see the extermination of the Huguenots. When the royal policy was so uncertain, its transmission so haphazard, what happened on the ground was largely determined by local interests and passions.15 All twelve cities where massacres occurred over the two months following St Bartholomew’s had one common feature: all had Catholic majorities but still a substantial, therefore obnoxious Huguenot presence. Seven of them, Rouen, Orléans, Lyons, Meaux, Bourges, Angers and La Charité had been taken over after Protestant coups at the start of the civil wars. Anger had not abated with the resumption of Catholic control; vigilance and occasional scraps over territory and conduct had meant continued tensions. The few cities where the Huguenots were still in control, notably La Rochelle, Nîmes and Montauban, were not affected; nor those, like Dijon where the Huguenot community had been reduced to insignificance. So it was the still perceived threat, the accumulation of grievances, the desire for revenge, that in some measure seem to have caused these local massacres. In places the influence of a prominent local figure may have been decisive. The comte de Montsoreau, governor of Saumur, was informed by one of Anjou’s men that it was Anjou’s wish as well as the king’s that he should go to Saumur and Angers ‘to kill any Huguenots you find there’.16 Montsoreau did as required. In Troyes the zeal of his agent Belin may have exceeded that of Guise himself. In most towns it was the ordinary people who called the tune. In Orléans there was something of charivari, the mob chanting to the accompaniment of lutes and guitars, slaughtering and drinking to keep up the spirit of carnival. In ever-­restless Toulouse, the parlement tried to maintain order, even imprisoning some Huguenots for their protection. But when two merchants

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announced that they had verbal orders from the king to extend the massacre a mob stormed the prison and slew the prisoners, including three Huguenot judges. In Rouen also the authorities imprisoned leading Huguenots. Some others fled the city. On 17 September the Catholics seized the city, locked the gates, and set about an orgy of killing that lasted for four days and left up to 400 dead. In Bordeaux the people were excited to hatred by the eloquent Jesuit Edmond Augerby; yet the city might have escaped a pogrom. It occurred when Montferrand marched in with six companies of soldiers, claiming the royal mandate. At the very least, two thousand Huguenots were killed in Paris; three to four thousand in the provinces.17 The figures are shocking enough but convey little of the overall effect. French Protestantism was decapitated. Of the principal leaders only Henry of Navarre, now the king’s brother-­in-­law, had been spared – and he thought it prudent to renounce his faith. Many humbler Huguenots followed suit, fearing for themselves and their families, seeking Catholic baptism. Rouen had had the largest reformed community in France: 16,000 before the massacres; barely 3,000 avowed Huguenots after. Defection on this scale reflected the ferocity of the attack there – but it was mirrored throughout the land, even where there had been no assault. The rapid growth of the movement, which had continued through the first civil wars, was abruptly checked. After the first sharp fall, and no doubt some quiet and circumspect returning to the Huguenot fold as panic subsided, numbers settled down at around a million and a quarter. Many, even among those relatively safe, in places like La Rochelle, Nîmes or Montauban, must have felt that they were in a different world. After such messianic hopes; after enjoying the rousing spirit of a community of faith; after confidence in the promises of the crown, they now lived sober, apprehensive lives. Was it a sign of God’s displeasure that He allowed the massacres to occur? Were Protestants simply in the wrong? That appears to have been the self-confessed thinking of the minister Hugues Sureau who abjured – a rare case among ministers. The massacre was ‘an expression of God’s indignation, as though he had declared by this means that he detested and condemned the profession and exercise of our religion’.18 Different individual choices elude generalisation. It is clear, however, that there was a significant change in French Protestantism as a political and military force. In the first three civil wars, in all the confusion of motives and varying interests of family and locality, there can be seen a residual loyalty to the crown: it was surely not the crown, as an institution, that was amiss but its policies. The enemy was the House of Guise and its associates, seen as aliens, indifferent to the traditions of France. So influence over the crown was still worth fighting for and much hope had been invested in Coligny. But now the

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crown was the enemy. Future wars would be fought first against the authority of the king who had sanctioned the massacre, then against his successor. Henry III would be suspect or damned in Huguenot eyes by association with the House of Lorraine, its Tridentine theology and avowed part in the Spanish crusade against Protestantism, whether Dutch, English or French. Resistance acquired a sterner tone, a more radical mindset. The more the crown pressed, the more determined would be the response. With consolidation in the south came the appearance of a self-­sufficient organism, an armed camp, separate in spirit and strategy, linked overtly to other Protestant powers. The future of French Protestantism would continue to be affected, if not decided, by the outcome of the international struggle.

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PA RT T H R E E RELIGIOUS WARS

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chapter seventeen

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A Failing State ‘The faithful, the true children of light’ 1

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t was evident to foreign observers, and of deep concern to the king’s loyal Secretaries that the massacre of St Bartholomew’s was leading to a loosening of the traditional bonds of authority, if not yet by complete disintegration. Revolutionary ideas gained credence and publicity. New political liaisons formed, short-­lived, unstable, and so doubly dangerous. More evident than at any time since the end of the English wars was the determination of territorial magnates, reckless or simply realistic, to create their own empires of authority and influence. After 1572 French Protestants, shocked and angry, were openly at war with the crown. In mood and intent we can see a definite transformation. Charles IX was seen as contemptible, at best a weak instrument of his mother’s will; she had lost credibility as peacemaker, let alone guardian of Huguenot rights. Scattered, vulnerable communities of Huguenots, dismayed and betrayed, tended to keep their heads down. The militants, now concentrated in strongholds in the southern crescent, and with several independent enclaves within or on the edge of France offering refuge and support,2 openly repudiated the king’s authority and began negotiations for aid from the Dutch and English. The fourth civil war was therefore bound to be different from the first three. It did much to restore the situation and morale of the Huguenots but reinforced the division between the wider Protestant community and the more compact virtual state of the south. The differences mattered and affected policy. But there was an underlying unity that contributed to resilience in adversity and to the survival and integrity of the religion. Reasons besides noble patronage and armies capable of combat on equal terms lie, of course, in the faith of numerous individuals. All-­ important therefore was the structure and discipline that gave each church the

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assurance that it did not stand alone, which brought a sense of fellowship and the means to provide mutual support. In their timing, the codes of church law issued at the national synods of La Rochelle in 1571 and Nîmes, in 1572, three months before the Massacre, were of significant value.3 They built on the work of the first synod of 1559 and subsequent revision; notably that of 1563 which reorganised the text into chapters. The Discipline of La Rochelle, as it would be called, divided into twelve chapters, with four times as many articles as the original, would rule Huguenot life until it was finally disrupted in 1685. In several ways, and in retrospect, it can be seen as a summit. In the numbers it represented, in aspiration, in recognition by Geneva in the person of Beza as moderator, in the presence and witness of patrons of high rank, it sent out a confident signal: independence but with implicit trust in the crown. The queen of Navarre and her son Henry, Condé, Louis of Nassau, Admiral Coligny, a political party as much as a church – and the attention given to the structure of the church would look to Catherine like a party preparing for war. The model of Geneva was copied at local level – but with two significant differences: the French consistory included deacons; the minister, not, as in Geneva the syndic (representing civil authority), presided. Before 1572 there had been informal meetings between ministers. Now there were to be regular colloquies. As it turned out their main role would be pastoral and diplomatic, mediating in conflicts between ministers and congregations. Consistories were also charged with sending a minister and elder to the provincial synod which determined policy for the churches, heard appeals and had certain powers to enforce its decisions. This body sent representatives – ministers and elders, one or two of each – to the national synod that had competence over the whole country. It was indeed a power in the land, a final court of appeal with authority to interpret and clarify the Confession of Faith, to enforce discipline and, not least, to regulate relations with Protestants in other countries. The national synod provided the leadership with which Henry of Navarre would have to deal, as head of the party then as king; never with greater difficulty than when he became a Catholic, to Huguenots a renegade. It was there that the harassed king would see some meaning in the phrase – ‘a state within a state’. Huguenots were offered rules and guidance for the conduct of nearly every aspect of their lives: for Baptism, for the Lord’s Supper, for marriage (a civil ceremony, not a sacrament), for schooling and for Christian conduct in different professions and areas of life. Particular responsibilities were addressed, distinction being made between gentilshommes and commoners: for relations with Catholics, for the use of money and loans with interest, for dress and recreation, and much else that might constrain but also empower the individual in family and church. Comprehensive and prescriptive, the Discipline can be called Pauline in spirit though beyond anything that even the Protestants’

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favourite saint might have recognised as the proper way of life for the follower of Christ. It should be kept in mind as we follow the Huguenots in war and intervals of uneasy peace. Their distinctive lives and ways of managing their communal business will be further studied in the context of peace and the stable conditions following the Edict of Nantes.4 Meanwhile, tracking the vicissitudes of the party’s struggle to survive, the reader may want at least to glimpse the Huguenot world, within the structure that bound them in one party, the many temples of the spirit that inspired and resourced the warriors of the Lord.5 For many the building was likely to have a makeshift or temporary feel: a converted church, seigneur’s hall or simple barn. But for an increasing number there was a new temple, purpose built after an accepted pattern, circular, with three entrances at ground level, an interior gallery, all converging on the central pulpit. There see the congregation sitting on plain wooden benches without back-­rest, the elders behind. Soberly dressed, the men keep their hats on, the women, black bonneted, sit apart. They hear readings from Old and New Testaments, sing psalms, hear the minister’s homily and prayers. If it is a day notified for the Lord’s Supper, typically the recognised festivals and major saints’ days but sometimes more frequently, following prayers and sermon the people come up to sit around the long table in the nave. The minister and elders bring bread in wooden trenchers, with jugs of wine. The people will bring up a token signifying worthiness, and show it before receiving the bread and wine. In this way the consistory discipline reaches to the heart of worship. Reverent but homely it was meant to be, fulfilling in action the theology of the master. After the service the consistory will meet in the temple to manage church affairs, resolve disputes in family or congregation, examine an individual believed to have sinned: all decisions meticulously recorded as we know from surviving records.6 The theology, the worship, with the social conventions that informed it and the regimen of minister and elders that to an extent controlled it, might, in retrospect, have a look of permanency. Meanwhile, however, it had to be fought for – and the outlook was far from certain. As Huguenots took up arms across the south and a number of cities closed their gates to royal officers they showed they had not lost the confident spirit of the general synods; now with an angry commitment to guerre à l’outrance. La Rochelle, the Huguenots’ alternative capital and military headquarters, provoked the crown to act when it refused to allow their governor, Marshal Biron, to enter the city. Nor would they negotiate with the Protestant de la Noue7 whom the king sent to broker an agreement. In February 1573 Biron set about the reduction of the city, with Henry of Anjou in attendance. In May, after mounting losses, he called off the siege. He would not be the last general to find that the city was too strong to fall to open assault while, as long as it

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could be supplied from the sea, it would not be starved into submission. Anjou may have thought himself fortunate to escape the debacle when he was summoned to offer himself for the elective crown of Poland. That prospect, along with the mounting cost of the war, led Catherine to negotiate. Hastily drafted, the Peace of La Rochelle ended one futile war with terms that were palatable to neither side. Inevitably the Huguenots lost the more important privileges and guarantees of St Germain. The terms were not enforceable. It was this aspect that was now becoming the main obstacle to a lasting peace, however much moderates might yearn for it. Not only moderates, of course, but those of the strongest, but increasingly intolerant views for whom the only acceptable peace was that which fitted their view of crown, state and religion. Through all the violence and vicissitudes of religious war the ideal, and with it the language of paix et repos that dignified the transactions of parties at all levels, remained constant.8 Faithful, at least in language and intent in desperate times, to the Valois tradition of maintaining harmony and unity in the kingdom through lasting peace, Catherine, Charles IX and Henry III would each have recognised it as a royal duty – and a vital aim. Successive royal edicts of pacification, like that of La Rochelle, were couched in the language of peace that came naturally to officers of the crown. Chefs de partie, ideologues of desk and pulpit, could still embrace it, while continuing to promote their cause. The inherently shaky settlement allowed Huguenots freedom of conscience in theory but the right to worship only in the private homes of three towns, La Rochelle, Montauban and Nîmes. Public worship was everywhere banned. Some in the south defied the ban; soon they would fight for formal recognition of their rights. To do so effectively they needed a leader of stature sufficient to create a united front. The position of Henry of Navarre had been distressing at the time of the Massacre and embarrassing and dangerous since. Nominally, he was now a Catholic, having been forced to convert after the Massacre, but virtually a prisoner at court, his every move watched. Charles IX’s youngest brother, Alençon, was in the same position. In April 1574 an attempt to liberate them miscarried and security was increased. Then in May the king died with a suddenness that encouraged speculation about his state of mind as well as his physical frailty. Alençon became heir to the new king, Navarre next in line after him. As he started for home from Poland, though slowly enough and with a diversion to Italy that suggested reluctance to return to a troubling scene, Henry III’s proven bravery on the battlefield and every indication of devout faith raised Catholic hopes. Would the new king rise to be worthy of his role, linked in his person, as Frenchmen were inclined more than ever to see him, to the evolving idea of the state, a state now in danger?9 If circumstances allowed he would surely be, at least in those terms, a satisfactory king, restoring order and unity.

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For Huguenots there was nothing to allay fears, to alter fundamentally the mindset of resistance. It is to this time that we can trace a trend in the Huguenot community towards the dual character that was to become more distinct with the years and persist into the next century. On the one hand the majority around the country, town-­dwellers, some of them substantial bourgeois, wanted above all a peaceful life. Their main aim was to secure acceptance by Catholic neighbours, the tolerance, as well as the formal right, to allow them to worship together undisturbed and – not least – the chance to acquire legal and administrative office. In particular they feared the bandit fringe which had its own agenda, more to do with loot than religion; also the ever-­present threat of peasant or urban mobs and attacks on property. But since they were neither fitted nor willing to be part of the armed struggle there was no avoiding the need, however unreliable or demanding they might be, for powerful protectors. The minority – some pastors but mainly soldiers or those, including women, who saw in the Bible justification, even merit in fighting for their God – were ready, even eager to fight. They were predominantly noble, but in La Rochelle and some southern towns found backing in the stern resolution of citizens who believed in a righteous cause. So far from being at odds with the militancy associated with the ambitions and values of the high nobility the fermes (to adopt d’Aubigné’s term for militants) expressed the essential spirit of Calvinism that had gone into the creation of the paramilitary system that they now sustained.10 Without their continuing resistance, and the assured Calvinism at its heart, fellow Huguenots, more pacifically inclined, would not have achieved the substantial rights of the Edict of Nantes. On the other hand the militant strain evoked its Catholic counterpart, the uncompromising spirit which ensured that any settlement achieved would be grudged and contested at every level. Meanwhile Huguenots were being given a new basis for cohesion by radical new thinking about government. For redress of grievances they were being encouraged to look beyond the customary way. Petitioning the crown assumed the traditional relationship of monarch to subject; it was now found wanting.11 The extent of what the author Innocent Gentillet12 regarded as corruption and betrayal was spelt out in one of the most influential works of the time. Ostensibly the exiled Huguenot’s treatise on the influence of Machiavellian principles was just that: a work of political theory which might now be seen as crude and unfair to the great Florentine. In fact it was a sustained analysis of the political and moral sickness of the French king and his court. Machiavelli’s doctrines were treated as the root cause of the moral climate that led to the St Bartholomew massacre, to the crown’s forsaking the traditional French ways of government. Gentillet’s Machiavelli also stands for Italy and its alleged vices which were already a constant theme, not least among soldiers returning from the wars,

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some with the dread ‘Italian pox’: typically, disloyalty, treachery, cowardliness, greed, sexual depravity, cruelty, vengefulness. Italians, according to Gentillet, have always had a strong inclination to murder Frenchmen. Risible it might be but effective as propaganda because it was what men thought they could see around them. The Florentine queen mother was an obvious target, though she strove to her death to work for her conception of a crown above party. Another, and more fairly, was the court climate fostered by Henry III, his evident liking for Italian culture and manners, the suggestion of homosexuality about him and his mignons, favoured young men with whom he felt at ease, and the new and deadly fashion of duelling with the Italian rapier. Traditional objects of loathing were the financiers, ever more hated as inflation soared and interest rates with it, as taxation hurt more with the decline of trade and desolation in large parts of the country and as the government slid towards bankruptcy. The Guise were not Italians, of course, but foreigners and Papalists: that was enough. Prejudice as much as theory would play into the new Gallicanism, enlarging the base upon which the politiques could work for peace. Above all, Gentillet found ready listeners among those who were stunned by the massacres then repelled by the loud and widespread rejoicing and boasting that followed the ‘Matines parisiennes’. The pamphleteer Claude Nouvellet praised Charles IX for having ‘erected his crown upon the twin columns of Piety and Justice’ and then had God address his readers, urging that the king should finish the work he had only just begun. So were more massacres to be expected? Another writer seems to have been urging assassination: it was the king’s duty to punish as a matter of urgency and without tarrying for due legal methods. Typically the Old Testament is brought into play, Moses, in the person of the first of the prophets to take up the knife to kill those who turned the Israelites away from God. Huguenots would recognise the source and be as ready as their opponents to engage in argument over texts. But in the light of St Bartholomew’s, and the triumphalism of their enemies, they had to see that the war had gone beyond words. They faced annihilation. How could such cruel misuse of Holy Scripture be explained other than by a total perversion in theology and morals, leading to a political view which the king, by his actions, had endorsed? We can see that the king’s role was more ambivalent, the situation more complex than that. Yet it was with this sense of betrayal by the king, who embodied the institution which Frenchmen were accustomed to honour and expected to obey, in this climate of disillusion and fear, that Huguenots were offered a new kind of authority based on election. The defensive alliance of the remaining Huguenot fortified towns had been an early reaction to the Massacre. It was followed by a constitution proposed in an anonymous document of forty articles in late 1572, hammered out in private conclaves and put into effect

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(though not to the letter) at two assemblies, at Montauban in 1573 and Millau in 1574. Its tone was defiantly anti-­monarchical and with the crown went out its main institutions: the church, of course; also courts of law and administration; inevitably the army. Huguenots had grown weary of waiting ‘till it pleased God (who has the hearts of kings in his hand) to replace the one who is their king and restore the state of the nation to good order’. Might not God ‘inspire a neighbouring prince, one distinguished by his virtue, to be the liberator of this poor, afflicted people’?13 The invitation was as explicit as it was treasonable. In this unprecedented situation Huguenots plainly felt bound to be Protestants before they were Frenchmen.14 They were on their way to being strangers in their own land. It was this that made the role of Henry of Navarre so important. As their protector, king of Béarn (though few could have imagined that he would be king of France), as the hitherto missing element, un roi could cement together ‘une église’ and ‘un parti’.15 Each Protestant church was to elect an elder as much for war as for civil government. He then should select 24, either noble or commoner, to assist him and to elect a maieur or president. The 25 thus established were to select 75 others, ‘as many from towns or countryside’ to hear appeals and criminal cases. The small council could make war and administer justice but ‘matters of the greatest importance’ required the approval of the 100. The elders and councils together elected the young prince of Condé as ‘general head’ to command the army. As he was de facto ruler and protector, civilians must obey him for their security and for their faith. They, ‘the faithful, the true children of light’, must ensure the continuance of the Calvinist discipline for ‘the reign of God and the sceptre of his word established and implemented’. Pluralism and the sale of office were banned; all officials were to be elected annually and on the basis of merit. Corresponding to the civil government at every level was an elective military structure, subject to the same principles of behaviour, expressed in a disciplinary code that was as high-­minded as it was optimistic, with severe penalties for pillage. When the constitution was published in Le Réveille-­Matin des français (1574)16 it shook even those Catholics who had wondered about the Huguenots’ next move, to realise that they were openly renouncing the traditional political and social order, the sacral monarchy. They were establishing a state within the royal state. It was what de Thou called ‘a raw kind of republic’.17 Its council lived up to its pretensions with remarkable confidence and ambition, negotiating not only with foreign princes but with their king, as on the footing of fellow sovereign. It must have stung Catherine and her councillors but also brought a grudging respect. They came to see that they had to deal with a formidable alternative government able both to raise large sums of money to subsidise foreign mercenaries and to exercise a degree of control

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over their own commanders. ‘Gens de la boutique’ scoffed Montmorency-­ Damville18 amazed that mere bourgeois could show themselves so adept at the politics of resistance, yet ready to use this new model of Huguenot government for his own ends. Bearing in mind modern examples of successful resistance movements we are in a better position to judge the bracing influence of a shared ideology. These men, with their passion for order and control, in public as in private affairs, knew what they were about. They diverted royal taxes for their own treasury and secured loans at a better rate of interest than those that the crown could secure. The funds raised were sufficient in 1576 to finance the invading army of John Casimir. Against this background it is not surprising that some Protestant writers exploited the bridgehead into new territory, took advantage of the weapons provided by Renaissance philology and legal studies and took political theory to more daring lengths. François Hotman’s Francogallia had been written largely before the Massacre.19 He was a weighty and influential figure, living in exile since 1548, widely respected for his intellect and his diplomatic service to the cause. He could expect readers to take seriously his claim that the book was a ‘work of history, the history of a fact’. Few might know or care whether there was more fiction than fact in his account of the early history of France. His central argument was therefore persuasive, and particularly attractive to those, not only Protestants, who had reason to oppose the monarchy. It also tapped into the Gallican tradition. ‘France’ – Gaul – had, supposedly, been a free land whose elective institutions had been eroded under successive tyrannies, the Roman Empire and, its spiritual heir, the Roman Church. Earlier Valois kings had become increasingly Roman, imperial, unchecked by parlements because they were only law courts which could be relied on to ratify the sovereign’s ‘Roman’ edicts. Yet the Franks and Gauls had elected their first king and ‘a public assembly’ had continued to elect the king until the custom ended with Louis XI. The ‘Spider King’ had been skilled in the political arts and successful in adding to the web of his territories. Hotman’s idea that there had been a break in hallowed tradition was a constitutional invention and groundless but it acquired a new potency when St Bartholomew’s raised concerns about the potential in kingship for such arbitrary action and, in that situation, the rights of subjects. ‘Bloody tyrants’, as Hotman dared to call the Valois kings, might now seem apt enough. Hotman’s appeal to the classical principle, Salus populi suprema lex, was hardly radical in itself since the sixteenth-­century ruler would readily claim that he ruled in the interests of his people. But the massacres had plainly not been in the interest of Charles IX’s Protestant people. So they were not bound to obey. And they and others disaffected should look to a States-­General, the summit of those bodies that could speak for the people, ‘something sacrosanct’ in Hotman’s view, for representation and redress. If

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they were not satisfied they should recall that the king was only a magistrate, responsible to the people. As they could elect, so they could depose. ‘The supreme power of deposing kings was that of the people.’ Hotman’s argument was driven further in the relative safety of Geneva by Beza, Calvin’s lieutenant and now successor, taking seriously his role of command and control of French Protestants. He declared that it was the duty of ‘inferior magistrates’ to overthrow tyrants who offended God and the faith.20 The ‘inferior magistrates’ were assumed to be the Estates-­General which – and here historical precedent was sound – was customarily convoked at times of crisis. In France authors were wise to remain anonymous when they urged resistance to the crown. In one pamphlet it was claimed that ‘the sovereign community of the people is superior to that of the king’.21 It could revoke the power it had given if the king had abused it. The author was not content to stay in the realm of theory. It was the responsibility of the greatest in the land, princes, peers, royal officers and parlementaires, to indict, and depose if convicted, a tyrannical king. The author of Vindiciae contra tyrannos, most probably Philippe Duplessis-­ Mornay,22 extended the field of responsibility to include foreign princes. The case for resistance was now international in its message, sanctioned by the Calvinist God, justified by the assault of the crown on its own subjects and expressed with the fervour of men committed beyond recall. It became the moral shield and willing sword of the Huguenot community. It only stopped short, as yet, of the ultimate threat, the argument for tyrannicide. Meanwhile the Huguenots found that there were others, outside their camp but willing, for reasons principled or opportunistic, to join forces to resist the crown. In 1576 the new king faced a challenge to his authority which was wider and more dangerous than that posed by the Huguenots of the south. It illustrates the complexity of political issues, the impossibility of separating the Huguenot question from the wider one of royal authority in a state still knit together by personal deals and loyalties and liable in crisis to fall apart. Henri de Montmorency-­Damville23 was the son of the Constable Anne and a powerful magnate in Languedoc. Coligny was a first cousin but Damville was not tempted to follow him to Protestantism. Now, however, he pledged support for the Huguenots. With many of them in his province the move could be seen as realistic or as a temporary means of bringing pressure on the crown. Was it for his own interests or that of the community? To suggest the one does not mean that he was necessarily without care for the other. He may have feared the anarchy that would make France prey to the foreign ruler, but he should not be seen as a founding father of the politiques. That name was given first by the hardliners among Catholics to those who were so lukewarm in their faith that they were prepared to compromise. It has been taken to describe a party with a distinct agenda. Rather it should denote the existence of individuals

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loosely associated, straddling the religious parties, growing in number as the wars proceeded, who would put the interests of the state before those of religion – at least while the state was weak. The qualification is important because there were few indeed who did not believe that the state was stronger when there was unity of faith. As for the duc d’Alençon, little can be seen in his erratic conduct beyond naked ambition fuelled by personal resentment. In September 1575 he escaped from the court. At Dreux he issued a proclamation which might have been inspired by Gentillet and dictated by a Protestant pamphleteer. Presenting himself implausibly as an ‘inferior magistrate’, he declared that God ‘often raises up when it pleases him heroic and worthy persons to oppose the tyranny of those who only seek to render all things in disorder.’ Heavy taxes and subsidies made an easy target. So did the foreigners, Lorrainers as well as Italians, ‘who have monopolised the king and principal offices and governments of the kingdom’. He aimed ‘to restore this kingdom to its former splendour, glory and liberty by a general and free assembly of the three estates of this kingdom, convoked in a secure and free place’.24 That tied him firmly to the Huguenot programme but he was using it for his own ends and he would soon be bought off. Meanwhile, however, the Huguenot leaders could use his ambition to complete an alliance and secure the most favourable terms of any treaty to date. In February 1576 Alençon’s small force joined those gathering in the south under Condé and, after his escape from court, the young king of Navarre. More dangerous was ‘the neighbouring prince, distinguished by his virtue, to be the liberator . . .’ in the person of John Casimir25 now, after negotiation with Condé, and with English money in his wallet, approaching the frontier with 20,000 mercenaries. Deputies from the rebel leaders presented a detailed remonstrance to the king demanding ‘the full, general, public and complete exercise of the Reformed religion . . . without any modification or restriction to time, place or person’. They also demanded chambres mi-­parties26 in the parlements, and some fortified towns to maintain their defences. The crown must pay off John Casimir’s unruly army, which was already in a position to cross the Loire. Henry had no option but capitulation. Hardly a shot had been fired in this fifth war when he issued the Edict of Beaulieu, in May 1576. It was at once called ‘the peace of Monsieur’, as representing the pressure Anjou had brought to bear on his brother and the huge price he exacted for coming to terms.27 In a settlement of sixty-­three articles the crown took note of Catholic concerns. It required the Huguenots to restore Catholic worship in those towns where it had been barred, forbade Protestant worship in Paris and, unrealistically, required Huguenots to celebrate Catholic feast days. In all public acts and documents the phrase religion prétendue réformée had to be used. It would become official

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usage in state documents. However, the Huguenot position had been transformed. We are looking at the Edict of Nantes in embryo – but it would take three more decades of strife to achieve it in substance. Meanwhile, in theory, Huguenots could worship openly in any city except Paris and they could build churches anywhere except in the capital. The chambres mi-­parties were created in all sovereign courts for litigants of different religion. The crown was also committed to calling a States-­General. Secret articles provided substantial compensation for the efforts of the princes. Alençon’s gains were spectacular; correspondingly the crown was further weakened, in authority and revenue. Beaulieu would be the benchmark for future negotiations, a point from which Huguenots would seek to build, from which they would not willingly retreat. Meanwhile the concessions won proved hard, in some places impossible, to secure or police. Having no illusions about the situation on the ground, Catherine openly declared that she had made the peace to win back her wayward son and not to re-­establish the Huguenots. Official Catholicism was as militant as ever. Parlement refused to register the Edict. Some of the fortified towns ceded to the Huguenots refused to admit their troops. The Huguenots might never succumb to military onslaught. They would consolidate their hold on the south. But they were as far as ever from securing genuine freedom to worship throughout the land. The road ahead looked as hard and stony as ever. The Estates-­General met at Blois in November 1576 but proved, for Huguenots, to be a disappointment. The elections were rigged; the time and place were often announced at Catholic mass. In some parts Protestants were not allowed to vote. In consequence it was an almost entirely Catholic assembly: the ecclesiastical order, of course, the nobles more surprisingly, were solid for the church. Protestants were thinly represented and powerless to influence the outcome. The Estates demanded the renewal of war, the clergy most vociferously; the other estates soon cooled off when the crown called for the approval of new taxes. Some nobles broke ranks to assert that the king ‘ought to maintain his subjects in peace’. One, with impeccable Catholic credentials and reputation for taking a hard line, the duc de Montpensier, was surprisingly outspoken. Speaking of ‘the ruin and desolation of this poor kingdom . . .’ he was ‘constrained to advise their Majesties to make peace’. He advised ‘the toleration of those of the new opinion for a short time until by means of a council, another meeting of the Estates or by any other means, their Majesties having thus reunited and reconciled their subjects, God can bless us with only one religion, the Roman Catholic faith’.28 A number of other nobles made the same case and ended with a striking plea: ‘Your Majesty will be aware that we no longer approve of the so-­called reformed religion . . . but we beseech you very humbly, Sire, to believe that any one who favours civil war is

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ungodly’.29 It must always have been there, this voice of sanity, to be heard in parlour and bedchamber throughout the land, yet so often drowned out by the intemperate clamour of public discourse. At the same time, on his other flank, Henry’s authority was being undermined by other nobles, prompted by Guise, who were busy setting up a Catholic association (it would later take shape as the Holy League) to deal with heresy if the king were unable to do so.30 In the Third Estate Jean Bodin advocated a restrained form of absolute government, and argued that it would be unwise to support an increase in taxes.31 In a fine sentence he had summed up his view of the proper relationship between king and people as one of harmony: ‘the prince reconciles his subjects to one another, and all alike to himself ’. He was not now proposing a constitutional check on monarchy but making the political point that the crown should not further burden an already suffering people. The dilemma was becoming obvious: uniformity of religion could be enforced only by military might; that required approval of higher taxes but those, apparently, the country could not bear. The alternative, open to militants on both sides, was to seek foreign aid. Spain had its hands full dealing with Dutch rebels. Elizabeth was under pressure from Protestant councillors to give conditional aid. It would be modest in scale but the threat was enough to bring Henry to make terms after the next, short-­lived war that started in January 1577 when he abrogated the ‘peace of Monsieur’. He would have liked to further Catholicism and to maintain the peace. He could only achieve the one by breaking the other. Henry only went to war to appease Guise and Nevers, and to maintain some semblance of authority. With Nevers directing, though Anjou was nominally in charge, a small royal force managed to capture two Huguenot towns before running out of supplies. With his troops billeted on unfortunate villages in the Auvergne and with Navarre and Condé coming up from the south Nevers advised the king to make terms. The treaty of Bergerac, in September 1577, was in essentials a reissue of the terms of the ‘peace of Monsieur’. To reassure Catholics, however, the general freedom of Protestants to worship was limited to one town in each généralité. In terms as vague as they were unenforceable all Leagues and Associations were outlawed. On both sides the peace was honoured more in breach than in observance. One sees a growing contempt for royal authority. Henry could neither sustain war, nor keep peace. Much has been written about Henry III’s failings as man and ruler, drawing on caustic comment from Catholic and Huguenot, and from less committed, but scandal-­loving observers like the outspoken Parisian L’Estoile.32 Allowance may be made for his painful situation. Intelligent enough to be aware of it, sensitive enough to feel it, Henry fell back on the company of young men whom he could still reward and feel that he could trust. Nor was his confidence wholly misplaced. Épernon in particular was to show himself a

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formidable contender in the power stakes though eventually disappointing to Henry.33 Some of the mignons, so loathed and despised, exploited his favour: lavish display, bravado, reckless partisanship – in several cases to the point of murder – were more in evidence than the homosexual tendency commonly hinted at. Along with precious obsession with honour and precedence, duelling entered a new and deadly phase. One spring day in 1576 six mignons fought with rapiers against Guise duellers: all died on the spot, or subsequently of their wounds. Councillors were not impressed to hear that the grief-­stricken king had kissed the bodies, cutting their locks for keepsakes, and had them buried in a marble tomb. Henry’s personal conduct became increasingly erratic and exhibitionist, eventually desperate. He did serious work at times. He showed an interest in political reform culminating in an assembly of notables at St Germain-­en-­Laye in 1583 to consider a wide range of measures. ‘The most thoroughly conceived measure of reforming endeavour undertaken during the civil wars’,34 it could also be seen as a propaganda exercise. There could be no doubt that there was urgent need. From corruption at the heart of government to the breakdown of order in the country; from deficit and interest rates that crippled the finances to the brigands who preyed on the people: the scene conveys a sense of helplessness. Did there exist the means or will to reform? Was France ungovernable? Was it bound to fall apart? It is only when allowance is made for the widespread mood of pessimism, and the evidence that justified it, that the achievement of Henry’s successor, occupant of the most dangerous throne in Europe, gains a just perspective. At stake for the Huguenots was not just their survival as a large-­scale canton, effectively independent, but their integration with adequate rights into the state to which most still owed allegiance. Undoubtedly Henry was sincere in his wish for reform, but there is insufficient evidence to suggest that, given a better hand, served though he was by successive Secretaries both loyal and able,35 he could have played it with more success. Those, of course, who had most to lose by the breakdown of royal government were the ordinary townsfolk and peasants. A feature of the late 1570s and into the ’80s was a series of savage popular insurrections. Mainly in the south-­east, in areas where there was a substantial Huguenot presence, they are therefore generally seen in the context of the religious struggle, collateral damage as it were after fifteen years of civil wars. Undoubtedly differences of religious allegiance fuelled emotions, provided pretext, identity and the belief in a higher mandate that has so often justified the extremes of terrorist behaviour. Yet the common elements in the risings in Provence and the Dauphiné seem not to have been religious but social.36 Their violence bore out the arguments of Montpensier and others that peace was imperative. A still growing population meant a constant struggle for the bare necessities of life; declining

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trade hit all classes; feudal dues were the more resented when owed to a seigneur turned warlord. The billeting of troops was always a lively grievance. Often peasants became refugees and beggars. Treaties that sought to give Huguenots protection by allowing them to garrison certain towns were interpreted locally as licence to both sides to grab control where they could. In 1575, in the Vivarais, Huguenots seized and garrisoned twenty-­six places; Catholics elsewhere many more. As can be seen in failed states today, to be a soldier meant too often licence to kill, rape and steal. In the words of a local chronicler ‘the countryside was despoiled by soldiers of both religions’.37 So it is not surprising to find that the Razats of Provence who, in 1579, attacked at night and murdered 600 clients and followers of the hated count of Carcès, were composed of peasants both Huguenot and Catholic. In February 1579 Jean la Rouvière, a local lawyer, petitioned the king for redress. After giving examples of savagery and sadism, he described ‘burnings, ransoms, sacking, levies, tailles and tolls with seizure of goods, grain and livestock’. Leading nobles and their clients were held responsible but his main target was ‘the vermin’, the soldiers whom they supported. In this situation Catherine had to resort to the man with most local influence. Her hope was still that Henry of Navarre would be brought back to court and to conversion. What could she offer that would outweigh the advantage of staying where he was safe, with committed allies and friends? The office of Constable? At court he might rely on Catherine, his mother-­in-­law. But Henry III would be at best an uncertain ally and the Guise would be implacable. All Catherine could secure was the truce of February 1579. It strengthened Navarre’s hand and paved the way for the gradual restoration of a semblance of order. The remarkable, if exceptional, case of Romans shows how difficult it would be to achieve. Romans38 was a Dauphinois textile town where sharp antagonisms between the elite of merchants and office-­holders, and the mass of artisans, tended to surface during the town’s annual pre-­Lent festivities, theatrical charades, with rival troupes mimicking politics and war, forming ‘kingdoms’. In February 1579, on the feast day of St Blaise, patron saint of drapers, carders and wool-­ combers, traditional mock battles turned ugly when a combined force of artisans and peasants under ‘king’ Jean Paumier stormed the town hall and took over the administration. They demanded suspension of the taille and the indirect taxes on goods bought and sold in the town; also an end to the tyranny of the local chieftains. The peasants kept up guerrilla operations and sacked the châteaux of two of the most notorious. In the following February, under the resolute leadership of Antoine Guérin, who had sufficient influence to secure the aid of royal troops, the town notables fought back. On Mardi Gras, the high day of carnival, the peasant militia was driven out, then pursued about the

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countryside until trapped and destroyed in Moirans. In Romans the town’s ruling class was restored. In the vivid language Guérin used to justify his ruthless action we see two main elements fused in one: the rebels sought to kill the nobility, judiciary, magistrates, clergy, all notable bourgeois and merchants of the town. And then ‘they would kill their own wives and marry those of the said notables whom they had killed . . .’39 After all that they would bring in the Huguenots. Huguenots were named as the ultimate threat – yet in Romans they had generally been inactive; in the peasant bands they mixed with Catholics. But they were seen, by Catholic leaders terrified of social revolution, as enemies of good order: subversive and disloyal. Society was polluted by the existence of such enemies within; hence much of the savagery in acts of reprisal. The war that started in the south-­west in the spring of 1580 hardly deserves the name. In this case Henry of Navarre was the prime mover. He used the failure of the crown to fulfil his marriage contract and to hand over Marguerite’s dowry as a reason for laying siege to towns in the valleys of the Lot and Garonne. There was only one small fight, when he gained possession of Cahors. Anjou supervised the inevitable negotiations and a treaty at Fleix, in November, which restated the terms of Bergerac but with as little prospect of acceptance or enforcement as before. Anjou had his own reasons for securing domestic peace. For two years he had been promoting himself on the international stage. Threatened by Spanish power in the Netherlands both Queen Elizabeth and William of Orange made overtures, the queen considering marriage, William offering the sovereign title in place of Philip II. They were using him, a Catholic pawn, in their serious Protestant game; he, vainly, imagined that he was using them to advance his own position. To the world, as lieutenant-­ général, he represented the crown. Henry III did not want to see the Dutch collapse and the Habsburgs dominant along the vulnerable eastern frontier. He was also concerned by the prospect of English aid to the Huguenots. He could not afford to provoke Spain into intervening – but that eventually is what happened. The nightmare – Spanish troops in Champagne, English in Normandy – would become a reality. Meanwhile Henry gave his brother cautious support. Deceived, then rebuffed by Elizabeth her ‘frog’ won the prominence he desired in September 1580 when deputies from the Dutch northern provinces made him sovereign prince. In February 1581 he was invested as duke of Brabant; the following July the deputies formally repudiated the rule of Philip II. The Dutch would have preferred Protestant Elizabeth but she had refused, ever chary of committing herself beyond her means. Now they offered a large sum (never paid) and an array of titles in return for the promise of troops from Anjou and Henry. The restraints placed on the duke’s rule, political misjudgements, an act of treacherous folly in January 1583,

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when he tried to seize Antwerp, and his military incompetence, all contributed to his humiliating failure. But it was militant French Catholics as well as Calvinist Dutch who were galvanised by his sudden death, in June 1584. For it meant that the issues became clear, beyond anything that wily diplomacy, Catherine’s or Elizabeth’s, could do to obscure them. Henry III and his neglected wife being childless and thought likely to remain so, Henry of Navarre was heir to the French throne. Or was he? Problems of succession haunted the dreams of most rulers at this time; an untimely death could threaten the equilibrium of any state. When religion was an issue the situation was toxic, as Elizabeth knew all too well. To the Catholic League the idea of a Protestant king was intolerable. They could produce a tradition beyond that of Catholicity – or indeed known fact: that the House of Lorraine was directly descended from Charlemagne. The Salic law had been virtually invented by French jurists in the Hundred Years War to counter the Plantagenet claim. It was open to different interpretation of the law of inheritance when it went into a collateral line. By strict primogeniture, Navarre was the first in line, followed by his uncle, Charles cardinal of Bourbon. But by consanguinity the cardinal had a prior claim since he was only twenty degrees removed from the king. Navarre commissioned Hotman to argue his case; the product was long and weighty. It was countered by Matteo Zampinis, with no less ingenuity. The Italian’s impressive case rested on the fact that Navarre’s father Anthony, being a collateral, had never been first prince of the blood and could therefore never be recognised as dauphin; for Navarre therefore there was no right to succeed. Add to this the case for Catholicity, compelling enough if taken in the context of the role and mystique of Le roi très catholique. It would seem to be reinforced by the notorious bull of Sixtus V, in September 1585, excommunicating Navarre and Condé and declaring Navarre ineligible for the throne. But that brought the Gallican question to the fore. Even without Hotman’s savage attack on the Pope, ‘stupid cuckoo’, ‘purple whore’ and much else, the idea of the Pope’s interfering in a crucial matter of domestic politics was damaging to the Guise – and would become more so as Henry continued to fight for his throne. Theories would count for less than the verdict of war. As Henry began to reveal his qualities as soldier and politician it became clear, slowly and painfully to Catholics of any stripe except those irrevocably committed to the Guise, that there was no credible alternative.

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chapter eighteen

s

The Struggle Intensifies Half my moustache turned white . . . (Henry of Navarre anticipating the worst)1

T

he priest who gave Anjou absolution was in no doubt about the significance of his death: ‘the 10th of June will forever bear witness to our misfortune . . . the year 1584 is indeed a year of revolution’. The Guise, as Pierre l’Estoile noted, ‘took great heart. The Sainte Union, from that moment, began to grow stronger as France grew weaker.’2 The League, as it was generally known, composed of cells for local activists to control the city and promote Catholicism, would provide precedents for future agents of revolution; now it was set to play a crucial role in the last and most deadly phase of the religious wars. It filled the vacuum created by the inability of Henry III to rule as firmly as the League would wish. And it was formidable. It would not, officially, outlast the religious wars of which it was the product. But its spirit, dévot, irreconcilable, would find expression in new ways and challenge to the end the very idea of a legitimate Huguenot body within the state. The formation and activities of the League are crucial to our understanding of this phase in the Huguenot story. Its origins lay in the informal groups that formed to thwart the provisions of the ‘peace of Monsieur’. When revived in 1584 it had two layers, the aristocratic and the urban. Within the urban following there was a predictable variety between cities; within each there were special interests, reasons for competition and conflict.3 With leadership coming generally from magistrates and other officials the cells had a weight beyond their numbers in shaping opinion and raising support for the Guise. Why did some cities join the League while others stayed aloof? It could be a matter of individual interest and sentiment as men struggled to decide where their prime allegiance lay: between loyalty to the faith, as it was championed by the Guise, to a patron, Guise or

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other, or to the crown. At first the League was a powerful ally of the Guise; only when local cells started to act independently or veered towards social radicalism could it become an embarrassment. The relationship could be expressed in simple terms of the difference between the urban, essentially parochial concerns of a Toulouse, a Dijon, a Rouen, and the dynastic and national aspirations of the Guise. During the last years of Henry III and the first of Henry IV, the League was a vital element in the family’s strategy: the home party as it were, providing authenticity, countering resentment of the foreign, Spain, the necessary ally abroad. Not since the reign of Francis II had the Guise been so strong. Client nobles from Champagne, where Guise was governor, and from his extensive lands beyond the border, in Lorraine, were the nucleus of a private army of several thousand. His brother Charles, duc de Mayenne, governor of adjoining Burgundy and his cousin, duc de Mercoeur, governor of Brittany had many clients in those overwhelmingly Catholic provinces. Two ducal cousins, Aumâle and Elbeuf had influence and followers in Picardy and Normandy respectively. With Spanish money and soldiers we see a formidable military power, capable of rapid concentration: something that Henry III, for lack of resources had not been able to muster. In Paris, predictably, the League evolved beyond Guise control, exploiting the Catholic fervour of the city to create a political machine independent of the city government, and eventually of the crown. Known as the Seize, because it had a cell in each of the sixteen quartiers of the city, it became a law unto itself.4 Predominantly recruited around 1584 from the fairly well off, merchants, lawyers and other officials, it came, after 1588, to be regarded as an alternative city government. Though below the highest social level they were certainly not ‘the men of low condition’ sneered at by their opponents. They did, however, constitute a threat to the city’s élite. Their stern Catholicism appealed to the ordinary Parisian. In constitutional terms the Seize was already a revolutionary body, having no legitimate mandate from the crown. Under the pressure of events, culminating in the ordeal of two sieges, it became a revolutionary social force. Barricades debarred a legitimate king from his capital; purges and judicial murders forced many parlementaires out of the city to establish a legitimate court. Losing patience, in November 1591 Mayenne moved in and hanged or exiled its leading members. That is to anticipate. Meanwhile we have to account for the spirit that animated the League in Paris and other leading cities. Of crucial importance in the decade following the assassination of Henry III it would contribute significantly to the climate, spiritual and political, of the years of Counter-­Reformation, the world in which Huguenots would have to ‘live, move and have their being’. In tone and action it reflected and contributed to ‘the spirituality of sacrifice’ which was, in Crouzet’s view, the product of a mood of fear, of a world

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disordered, of retribution to come, ‘an eschatological angst’.5 Acute anxiety about the imminent end of the world was induced by astrological almanacs that warned of a planetary conjunction identical to that which had preceded the birth of Christ. So preachers tended to see God’s judgement in every misfortune: murder in high places, the accession of a Protestant king, the miseries of the people – each topic carried a message. Against lurid depictions of depravity might be set a longing for the renewal and the transformation of God’s world. ‘The crisis of contrition’ was apparently a collective experience; reform a collective responsibility. The urge to show penitence was demonstrated in processions carrying the Corpus Christi to the shrines of Mary. The rhetoric of hate that assailed Parisians in these years coloured their religious understanding. Churches destroyed or desecrated, ministers of pretended religion (whose father was the Devil), were staple topics of sermon and pamphlet. The author of De l’estat de ce Royaume (1583) saw father set against son, son against father, so that it was ‘better for a mother to nurture monkeys and dogs than her own children’. That might sound like barking on the lunatic fringe of social comment, yet it expressed the view (commonly held and later voiced in terms by the Huguenot soldier-­historian Agrippe d’Aubigné)6 that since man turned his back on God he had become worse than an animal. Moreover, the same author proceeds to the central, oft-­repeated and most serious charge against the Huguenot, becoming in the Catholic mind a settled conviction: that ‘he read holy scripture in the light of his own fantasies, abandoning Apostolic and Roman traditions to follow and maintain his false and lying opinion’. Such wilful heresy must be confronted, not just with argument but with commitment of life, in the spirit of crusade, under leaders who spoke and acted for God. At the heart of the League were les zélés who called for union with God. In their view Paris was the New Jerusalem, bracing itself for struggle against evil and its personification, the Anti-­christ of the day, the king. After the assassination of Henry of Guise, Henry III was to become the enemy to be engaged in spiritual warfare. There followed two months of penitential processions, deeply serious affairs, priests and soldiers marching along with women and children. The obsessive course that would lead the young monk Jacques Clément to regicide was undertaken in the spirit of those days. He was not mad but exalté: a recognisable type, not an isolated individual but representative, doing what many wished to see done. His confessor absolved him in advance. The object of revulsion was the traitor king, Catholic but unfaithful to God, unworthy of his sacred office, no father to his people; then after his death, with greater intensity, the Protestant king, Henry IV. From the outset the Guise enjoyed an uneasy relationship with the League, needing its support but fearing its radicalism. Devout burghers might wish to

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demonstrate their piety and close ranks against heretics, but they could not envisage financing campaigns. That would become apparent at the States-­ General. To secure the necessary resources the Guise were prepared to go to Spain. In December 1584 they signed a formal treaty. Both parties committed themselves to a combined effort to destroy Protestantism in France and the Netherlands. In return for a monthly subsidy for action against the Huguenots the Guise undertook to return Cambrai (Anjou’s sole gain from his adventure in the Netherlands) and Béarn, where Navarre’s lands adjoined Spain. They would also publish and promote the decrees of the Council of Trent which the crown and Parlement had resisted as encroaching upon the Gallican liberties. All this would be held against them as putting foreign interests before those of France. Meanwhile they had the upper hand. By the treaty of Nemours, in July 1585 King Henry conceded all their demands, revoked all previous edicts of pacification and forbade Protestant worship throughout the land. The Huguenots were stripped of legal rights, the chambres mi-­parties, and military protection, their garrisoned towns. They were declared ineligible for public office. ‘Half my moustache turned white,’ wrote Henry of Navarre, ‘with apprehension of the evils I anticipated for my country.’7 Two months later, Pope Sixtus V slammed the lid down on remaining Huguenot hopes by excommunicating Navarre and Condé and barring them from succession to the crown. In this critical situation, with some Huguenots in the north and east abjuring the faith, fleeing south or abroad, and Catholic forces under League direction and with Spanish support seeking to follow up their initial advantage, civil war took on a new complexion. Since the king tried to maintain a central position between Guise and Navarre it was soon called the ‘War of the Three Henries’. This time there would be no quick peace. Each side had resources from outside to keep going. With no scope for compromise and the Huguenots fighting for their very existence, much depended on Henry of Navarre. He faced a severe test of competence and character. What kind of man was he becoming? The upbringing of a future French king must always be of interest. Few have had so hazardous and disturbed an apprenticeship as Henry. Essentially he was the outsider who found himself, to his discomfort, at the feverish centre of affairs. At birth Henry had been six places from the throne. Even in 1572 there were three before him – but none with children. From both father and mother he derived his strong attachment to his own kingdom and lands, and they were considerable.8 The young man would often chat in the patois of Béarn. Navarre and the Huguenot south provided him with a secure base, when he was able to use it; also a sense of having an identity and importance quite apart from that he gained as successive deaths brought him nearer to the throne of France. From his father Antony he derived recognisable traits. In

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the 1570s people might wonder which would prove to be uppermost: the courage in battle, the fickleness, or his eye for women. From his devoted mother Jeanne d’Albret came the Protestantism that she made it her business to nurture and sustain. Yet, to the end of his life, after tactical changes in religious allegiance and, in 1593, a final and crucial conversion, there was uncertainty about his private convictions that he made no effort to dispel. Aged eight, the quick-­witted boy had had his first experience of religious conflict when his father dismissed his Protestant tutor. Antony had to overcome stout resistance before Henry would consent to attend mass. After his death Henry attended court, where Catherine allowed him to have a Protestant tutor and to hold a Protestant service in his chamber. He accompanied Catherine on her grand tour but in January 1567 Jeanne got him away from court to the relative security of his southern lands. During the third war he was with her as she held diminished but defiant court in La Rochelle as the Huguenots’ queen. His thoughtful side is reflected in his reading, during these years, of classical writers like Pliny and Plutarch from whom, he would later say, he derived guidance ‘for his private conduct and the regulation of public affairs’.9 Perhaps more important at this stage was the tutelage, in war and politics, of his cousin Condé,10 ambitious but uncomplicated warrior for Calvin’s God. He would not always submit readily to the seniority of Navarre, nor be a reliable ally. Jeanne died in June 1572, after negotiating with Catherine the terms of Henry’s marriage to Marguerite. In the massacre that followed the wedding Henry was protected from the killers; after it he was effectively a prisoner at court. His forced conversion was held by some Catholics to have been insincere. There ensued inglorious years, as Henry chafed at the bit and intrigued with Alençon. As soon as he had managed to escape from court, in March 1576, and to complete the rebel alliance that led to the treaty of Bergerac, he formally abjured. Nérac became his base for a regime of even-­handed compromise. His political skills became more evident. Catherine came to Nérac in 1578 to woo him back to Paris, but she failed. The propaganda of these years reflected the influence of the young Duplessis-­Mornay, Philip Sidney’s friend and already respected as a leading Huguenot intellectual, but it accorded too with Henry’s own realistic view of his prospects. If the Guise, with Spain, held the upper hand then the best way forward was not to make too much of Calvinist principles but beat the patriotic drum, exposing the Guise as foreign traitors, appealing to moderate men who wanted an end to civil strife. Meanwhile, besides the fidèles on his own extensive estates he was building up a devoted inner circle of like-­minded Protestants. Duplessis-­Mornay contributed to such strategic planning as Navarre would tolerate and – no easy task – to fashioning the image of the Protestant hero. Henri d’Albret, sieur de Miossens, and Jacques de Caumont, sieur de la Force were prominent, along

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with the young Maximilien de Béthune, sieur de Rosny, the future duc de Sully. After Guise had declared his Spanish hand, Henry had powerful allies: in Poitou Condé, in Languedoc Montmorency, in the Dauphiné Lesdiguières.11 But to what extent could they be relied on? Their game was not disinterested. The young sieur de Châtillon (Coligny’s grandson) was prominent among those who played with the idea of supplanting Henry as Protector by a foreign prince, such as John Casimir, Elector Palatine. With their agents in the Huguenot colloquies and assemblies they could pursue their own agenda: essentially it was the maintenance of an independent power and of their own status as its guardians. To a man like Turenne, heir to Sedan, it came naturally to think in international terms and of his status among Protestant princes.12 Even before Henry’s accession the Huguenot chiefs suspected him of temporising, of being lukewarm in his Protestantism; after it they saw him making concessions to secure his throne. He was, after all, a Bourbon prince: his natural aim was to be king at whatever cost. For his temporary allies the cost might be too high. For example Navarre made no bones about recruiting Catholic officers to his army. To one he said: ‘those who unswervingly follow their consciences are of my religion, as I am of all those who are brave and virtuous’.13 His easy manner with soldiers and servants began to win confidence, though hardliners were yet to be convinced. The tensions would remain. Meanwhile Henry provided ammunition for critics and doubters. In May 1580 he led the raid on Cahors, braving all dangers in the four-­day street battle that secured the place. Men remarked on his energy and dash – yet he did not follow up his success. An opportunist and a survivor, he did not appear to have a wider strategy. Meanwhile, there would always be a mistress to return to, currently Charlotte de Sauve. Duplessis-Mornay was concerned with his ‘open and time consuming love’ and urged him ‘to begin loving all Christianity and specially France herself ’.14 There would be furious activity between self-­indulgent spells, reckless bravery in battle and, as the next decade would reveal, a shrewd political intelligence at work. The legend of the Vert Galant was well founded; the statesman was in the making. Did Henry wobble again when, in 1584, he was pressed by the king’s personal envoy to renounce the faith? One of his Catholic followers suggested that it was a choice between ‘the crown of France on the one hand and a few psalms on the other’.15 He knew it was not so simple and stayed his ground. He would still have had to fight the Guise; meanwhile he risked losing his main support in the south. In a characteristic parade of scruple he had written to the archbishop of Rouen: ‘Tell those who advocate my conversion that religion, if they have even known what it is, is not something you discard like a shirt, for it dwells in the heart’.16 It might be his mother speaking. In an equally characteristic ploy which he would repeat as a delaying tactic after he became king,

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he offered ‘to be instructed in a free and properly established council in which religious controversy might be duly debated and decided’.17 As the parties went to war again in 1585, following the treaty of Nemours, France can be envisaged as being dominated by great blocks of party interest supported by large territories, with numerous clients and the authority of a royal governor. The essential divide was between north and south. In the north from east to west was Guise territory: Champagne, Burgundy, Picardy, Normandy, Brittany. In the south, Henry of Navarre’s base – stretching beyond Bordeaux and the line of the river Garonne to the Pyrenees – contained Basse-­ Navarre, Béarn and Foix. With Henry of Guise in open alliance with Spain and Navarre sending ambassadors to Protestant courts, and with both men operating from well-­protected zones where the king’s writ was of little account, Henry III was in an unenviable position. He was still well served by men who strove to protect him from his failures and follies. He was not idle, when available, but he attended to work in fits and starts. It seemed to his detractors that he preferred the consolations of piety to the challenge of high politics. He fasted and took part in religious processions. This might have appealed more to Parisians had he not seemed to be behaving in an un-­kingly fashion by walking bareheaded as an ordinary penitent. He founded new orders, notably the aristocratic order of the Holy Spirit, intended to attract men to royal service, and two orders of penitents, the White, dedicated to the Annunciation, and the Blue, dedicated to St Jerome. ‘He seemed to be living more like a Capucin than a king,’ wrote L’Estoile, ever disparaging.18 In a manner that recalls England’s devout Henry VI during the Wars of the Roses, he appears to be looking for flight into a private world from a political process that he could no longer control. Sutherland sees Henry in his thirties as ‘a phantom king’,19 his hair already white. He appeared to shrug off misfortunes, as if he habitually expected the worst and was wholly disillusioned with political conduct; then, if driven too far, he reacted with savage fury. In February 1587 Cavriana, the Florentine envoy, saw the danger in a poisoned atmosphere when the king could neither work with, nor defeat the other Henries: ‘If it does not come to assassination of certain of the great it will be a miracle.’20 The king may have hoped to salvage a semblance of royal authority by adopting wholesale the programme of the Guise. Yet the treaty of Nemours amounted to capitulation. Its only justification could have been the final defeat of Protestantism; then the king would have savoured the applause and left Guise to enjoy the military honours. His true mind, if it can be read, may be revealed by his mother’s journey south, from July 1586 to March 1587. Catherine made a last effort to win over Henry of Navarre. She failed. He had better prospects in the Huguenot camp than as ally to a discredited, near-­ bankrupt king.

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In this last, longest and deadliest of the civil wars the outcome remained for some time uncertain. The League purged remaining Huguenots from a number of northern cities, Amiens, Soissons and Dijon the most important. Henry of Navarre and Condé secured support from abroad and in the summer of 1587, repeating the effective contribution of 1576, a German mercenary force entered eastern France. In November Guise crushed it outside the walls of Chartres. In the previous month, however, Navarre had won a notable victory over Joyeuse at Coutras. Henry’s artillery was better managed, his dispositions were superior, his personal leadership was inspiring. A note of religious exaltation was sounded when, at the outset, facing the Catholic charge, the Huguenot ranks broke into their battle hymn: ‘La voici l’heureuse journée / Que Dieu a faite à pleine désire.’ Le Moine’s painting shows Henry afterwards, astride his white horse, pardoning the defeated troops.21 He had proved himself and was urged to follow up the victory. Instead he returned to Béarn to present the captured standards to his mistress Corisande d’Andoins. The Germans might have fared better if Henry had marched north to join them. Without foreign aid he suffered further serious blows with the deaths of Condé and Bouillon, his principal allies. In 1588 the League was in the ascendant. But its extremism, particularly in Paris, alarmed many Catholics. Fearing a coup, in the event of Guise coming to the city to exploit his popularity, the king ordered him to stay away. The Spanish ambassador meanwhile wanted Guise to hold the attention of the king and Navarre while the great Armada sailed up the English Channel – to its doom. Invited by the Seize Guise chose to defy the king, rode into the city and demanded that he exclude Navarre from the throne and appoint him, Guise, Lieutenant-­général. He found that a house to house search was under way, that key points in the city, like bridges, were defended, on the king’s orders, by 4,000 Swiss. It was the idea that the city was to be suppressed by a foreign garrison that infuriated the Parisians. This king had already forfeited trust and respect. Was there to be another royal massacre? To restrict the movement of the soldiers, the people used chains and barrels to make barricades across the streets. The Swiss awaited orders; the king gave none; after anxious hours, with a few chosen followers, he slipped out through the stables behind the Tuileries and rode for St Cloud, then for Chartres. He had lost his capital. It was time for desperate measures. In May 1588, Villeroy, staunch Catholic but a man of moderation and instinctive loyalty, had written an eloquent letter to Navarre. After telling his tales of woe he begged him to declare himself Catholic and come to the aid of the crown. Navarre did not respond. The appeal was strong but the time was not ripe, the king’s support not to be relied on. In July the king was obliged to sign the Edict of Union which confirmed the treaty of Nemours and granted the further demands of the Guise. He renewed his coronation vow against

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heretics and excluded Navarre from the succession. As Constable and Lieutenant-General, Guise had vice-­regal powers. In October 1588, under Guise management, the Estates met at Blois. The ecclesiastics were in militant mood; the nobles mostly Guisards, clients or sympathisers. The Leaguer mayor of Paris, La Chapelle-­Marteau, presided over the Third Estate. Its demands reached further than war on the Huguenots (for which they were not prepared to pay) and struck familiar notes. As articulated in the comprehensive cahier drawn up by the Seize, they included an overhaul of the system of justice and an end to the sale of office. There were to be regular meetings of the Estates, the corps of France as it was envisaged, to which ministers were to be accountable. The resemblance to earlier Huguenot ideas indicates how much of the programme, apart from the ambition of individual grandees, had its source in, and derived its energy from the discontents among men of property, noble or bourgeois. Suspicion of a swollen, alien and irresponsible court, reflecting a sense of dispossession, and an emphasis on the change of morals in church and state are characteristic of such reforming initiatives. It would be seen in Parliamentary opposition to the English crown. Indeed, the Puritan strain is striking. And are we seeing another manifestation of la grande peur?22 Certainly men saw themselves living, if not in the last times, yet in times that were seriously out of joint. They demanded that duelling nobles be hanged, the live with the dead. Games of dice, darts, cards and chequers must be banned ‘because they rendered youth useless to the republic’.23 Moral concerns cut across party allegiance. Calvin would have couched his reasons in his own religious terms; otherwise he would surely have approved. Henry III found it politic to accept. He would ‘do it all’. But his advisers warned him that he would, under such conditions, be little better than a doge of Venice, a figurehead. The last of the Valois was left to contemplate a crisis in the condition of monarchy, the most severe since the Hundred Years War. The monarchy was no longer recognised by leading subjects as either sacred or efficient. At the same time, in December, Navarre was attending a Protestant assembly at La Rochelle. All was far from plain sailing for him. ‘Another such and I shall go mad,’ he afterwards confided to ‘la belle Corisande’.24 The prospect of power did nothing to resolve the fundamental differences between the parties, in religious understanding and social priorities. Huguenotism was still as much a cause as a church, and a cause open to widely differing interpretations. Navarre had to endure criticism of his diplomacy, financial management, personal life, even military tactics. In return for further support he had to swear to observe the Confession of Faith, accept an enlarged council and agree to choose financial officers only from those it nominated. His erratic past and present associations worried strait-­laced pastors and elders. They noticed his friendship with

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Catholics of politique cast, like Arnaud de Ferrière, his chancellor in Navarre, and Michel de Montaigne,25 that master of philosophic detachment. He doubted that faith, being God-­given, could be overcome by human means, certainly not by the execution of heretics, for it penalises people whose only ‘heresy’ is the determination to think for themselves. He had first held that religious pluralism eroded belief but he found that in Protestant Germany and Switzerland belief became more fervent, by contrast with the dumb acceptance of Catholic Italy. Yet he did not allow sympathy with the Huguenots to outweigh his sense of tradition, or his revulsion at the hard lines of Calvinist orthodoxy. He came to realise that the gulf between the Tridentine decrees and the Calvinist confession was too great to be bridged; it was therefore necessary to find a political solution. As mayor of Bordeaux he (1581–85) he initiated talks with Henry of Navarre. Had he lived he would surely have approved of the Edict of Nantes. As for himself, ‘Come wife, let us worship in the old way’ was his conclusion.26 Despairing of conciliation Henry dreamed of a society in which believers of different faith could live peacefully together. That was not good enough for the purists of Calvinist persuasion. For all its trials and hazards theirs was a simpler, narrower world. They looked for the holy warrior to represent their unyielding faith; they saw the politician that he had to be. For them unity, in larger terms than that of their church, was an unreal aspiration; for Henry it was something to be cherished, at the heart of his political vision. In that he was fundamentally serious but his behaviour seemed at times to belie it. Ever his own man, a natural risk-­taker, he did little to improve his image. The immodest behaviour of some of his household and his own amorous escapades suggested a frivolous approach to religious matters. Hinting at the possibility of conversion he played for time. His proposal for a ‘free and legitimate’ national council, with the implication that truth must be accepted wherever it was to be found, disturbed those for whom truth was already found – and sure. Was it for them as for Paul before the ‘men of Athens’?27 Henry and advisers like Rosny, Claude Clairville, in charge of his household, and Raymond de Viçose, his long standing Secretary, saw clearly that effective rule in a Catholic country must involve a degree of compromise. Viçose is interesting as a prototype intendant (though not so designated), invaluable for all weathers and tasks. Of course there were those among the faithful, lawyers, office-­holders, traders, who would understand the political imperatives. But the prime interest of the consistory activists – consistoriaux as they were labelled – was in the worship and discipline of churches. They wanted secure temples, whether new or rebuilt, and educated ministers, properly remunerated. They spurned the idea of supping with Catholics, however long the spoon. They knew that they would need military protection and some doubted whether the present Protector was the best man to represent them, let alone protect them.

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The great nobles saw Henry as one of them and respected him as a soldier, but he had to contend with their conflicting ambitions. Their support was indispensable but had to be bargained for. Adapting to church politics their normal way of creating a party they had clients among pastors and elders whose first loyalty was to their patron. With much uncertainty, with critics and rivals threatening his political base, the importance of Rosny and Duplessis-­ Mornay cannot be overstated. The latter, often critical and sometimes intemperate but fundamentally loyal, was a statesman by instinct, able to see the bigger picture; and he could sway the assembly. After 1584, like Hotman, he had abandoned theories of legitimate resistance and constitutional monarchy and come to champion France’s royal tradition – but without its Catholic character. He wanted Henry to exploit the power of religious commitment represented by the assembly and urged him to persuade deputies ‘to set their hand to this crown of thorns and turn it into a crown of lilies’.28 Henry III found himself stranded on the middle ground between the parties. From Blois came the demand for the total extirpation of the Huguenots – for which, however, delegates declined to approve new taxes. From La Rochelle sounded the call for religious freedom. Neither could be achieved without war. After the destruction of the Armada in July–August 1588 the stakes were higher; Spain needed to make up in France what it had lost over England. With Spanish troops on French soil and English soon to come, Henry had reason to anticipate the fragmentation of his realm, the collapse of what remained of his authority. In September he summarily dismissed his Secretaries and chancellor. Did he hope to avoid the indignity of being required to dismiss them by the Estates? One weapon was left, though that least suited to a Christian sovereign. His sense of being trapped and humiliated, his injured pride, overcame scruples; all somehow came together in a mind sickened by fear, bafflement and injured pride. On 23 December Henry and his brother the cardinal, were summoned to the king’s chamber in the château of Blois. The duke was murdered; so next day was the cardinal. The duke’s mother and son were arrested, along with other prominent nobles, prelates and Leaguers. The Guise brothers’ bodies were burned, their ashes scattered; for there must be no martyrs, no relics for veneration. Nor could there be peace. ‘You can cut,’ Catherine is supposed to have said, ‘but you cannot sew.’ She died oppressed by a sense of complete failure but clear to the end in her judgement: ‘what do you think you have done? You have killed two men who have many friends.’29 In life steady in aim, ruthless in execution, Guise had been a standing reproach to the king’s inconstant whims and fears; his death unleashed the spirit of vengeance.30 Paris erupted in fury. The barricades had spelt revolution. Tyrannicide was now the clergy’s theme. An ingenious anagram made of Henri de Valois ‘Vilain

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Herodes’. ‘Fire, Blood, Vengeance’ was the cry in the streets. Demonstrations were carefully marshalled. A procession of young children carried candles to the door of Sainte-­Geneviève where they dashed them to the ground. The Seize appointed Aumâle as governor. The Sorbonne had already accepted a proposition that the king could be dismissed in the same way as a child’s guardian for improper behaviour; it now declared Henry deposed. League propaganda became more extreme. To justify the claim of the cardinal of Bourbon as heir presumptive pamphlets had already pronounced the superiority of the Law of Catholicity, which sustained the uniquely sacred nature of monarchy, over the Salic law derived from a pagan Frankish king. Subjects might legitimately oppose a king who had broken his coronation oath to defend the realm against heretics. The theory of justifiable resistance was thus extended. A curé with a notable line in vituperation and a founder member of the Seize, Jean Boucher argued in an influential pamphlet that it was just and lawful for the church to depose Henry; also for the people to depose him.31 Lawful too – Boucher ventured further – to take up arms against, even to kill the tyrant before the Pope had excommunicated and deposed him. Huguenots had so far limited the right to resist evil rulers to other princes, or other divinely ordained officials. Boucher extended it to any individual. The people were the commonwealth ordained by God, above the monarch. Anyone was justified, indeed required, to take arms against a tyrant who violated the laws of God. All was argued with detail with texts from the Bible and classical writers; the message was stark. It encouraged the would-­be assassin to sharpen his dagger; it offered a salve for his conscience: the prospect of heavenly reward for a just and meritorious deed. Meanwhile the king faced the army of the League commanded by Mayenne. There was only one possible response. In April 1589 he signed a year’s truce and pact with Navarre. It was skilfully drafted to reassure moderate Catholics, that growing number who were alarmed by the radical policies and violent language of the League, even more by the intrusion of Spain. There was no suggestion that the king was sympathetic to heresy, indeed he expressed the hope that Navarre would soon return to Catholicism. The pact appeared to restore much of what the Huguenots had lost since Nemours, but in words, no more, for there was no guarantee of rights, no inviolable edict. For the duration of the truce Huguenots were not to be persecuted so that they could fight alongside the royal troops. They could keep any towns already under their control. Navarre was granted an additional town in each bailliage along with the fortified town of Saumur. It all meant little unless the two kings could win their war. They joined forces, received reinforcements in the shape of Swiss and German mercenaries and advanced towards Paris. On 1 August they were at St Cloud, poised to attack the capital. The young monk Jacques Clément came

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up to the king with a request – and stabbed him in the belly, to fatal effect. Clément was cut to pieces but his corpse was retrieved, pulled apart by horses and burned; the ashes were thrown into a river. For him it was as it had been for Coligny and numerous other victims but this went beyond a ritual cleansing. Clément had to be wholly annihilated because, in traditional royal terms, he had murdered the sacral monarch, personification of the body politic. The Guise, of course, saw it differently, as a godly act and wonderful release. Guise’s alarming sister, Mme de Montpensier, rode around the streets of Paris crying ‘Bonnes nouvelles, bonnes nouvelles’,32 and claimed credit for planning the assassination of the tyrant. The message was clear: in his dealings with the Protestant heretic, accepting him as his heir, Henry had betrayed his oath and led the kingdom into impurity.33 There followed celebrations in all the towns controlled by the League. Appearing days afterwards, Boucher’s appalling treatise offered posthumous justification for the most meritorious deed.

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chapter nineteen

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Henry IV, King of France No one who likes to relax inside his armour should trouble to make war.1

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t once Henry would have been aware of the ambivalence of his situation. With France he inherited its Gallican Catholic tradition. To his Huguenot followers he owed loyalty and protection – if not some sign that he was genuinely of their faith. He temporised; his priority was to fight the League. Meanwhile the most he could do for the Huguenots was to offer a sign of blessings to come. Guided by Duplessis-­Mornay he issued in July 1591 the Letters Patent of Mantes broadly imitating the pacification of 1577,2 re-­establishing the bipartisan courts and, in principle, payment to pastors. It was not an edict so not registered as law, and parlements, led by Paris, simply ignored it. Henry continued to be trapped between attachment to his party, many of them fellow warriors, and the absolute necessity of satisfying the Catholic officers of justice and finance. Leaguers would never recognise a king who had been excommunicated by the Pope. For the majority who lay beyond the reach or influence of the League the matter was less simple. For some of Henry’s Catholic allies the choice was painful. Neutrality was the way out for Épernon and Nevers.3 Biron and Montpensier, however, recognised Henry as the legitimate king and fought on with him.4 The fraught relations between Henry and some of his leading subjects undoubtedly stayed in the Bourbon memory, to be revived by future revolts: even Louis XIV would be wary and considerate towards the sensibilities and values of les grands. As a leading exponent of absolutist theory Jean Bodin’s case is of interest: he supported the League, though admittedly its more moderate wing.5 By contrast parlementaire Étienne Pasquier, also Catholic though no friend to the extremists, came, after much thought, to accept Henry as true king. ‘Since he is the one whom God has given us, we must accept him. God knows better

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than us what is necessary.’6 In his train of thought we can see something of the spirit that was coming slowly to the fore, expressing itself in the language of religion but not committed to a dogmatic or partisan interpretation of the duty of the subject. Leaning instinctively towards the Salic idea of legitimacy, such men still lived in hope that Henry would resolve the crucial question by personal conversion. Few expected that it could happen soon. Meanwhile the war dragged on and Henry IV, victorious warrior-­king, came increasingly to figure as the champion of French interests against the foreigner. The destruction and cost of the war added to the concerns of those who wanted, above all, to see a lasting peace. One consequence of the murder of the Guise had been the spread of League cells to cities all over France. Amiens, Dijon, Bourges, Poitiers, Rouen, Toulouse – it is a roll call of leading cities; only Lyons held out – and that for just a few years. At the same time, as in Paris, the more radical and militant citizens, typically merchants, lawyers and officials of the middling sort, gained control from the aristocrats of office. They tended to pursue local objectives. In several leading cities, Rouen, Toulouse and Dijon, terrorist tactics were employed to win and hold power. Events in Paris were the most important. Here the Seize was openly hostile to the nobles and patricians. In January 1589 Premier Président Achille de Harlay was arrested, with twenty-­two other judges. Besides his pre-­eminent office, others were taken over by League activists. ‘Never in any age of memory or history,’ wrote one Leaguer, ‘has the court of Parlement received such a bad blow . . .’7 Senior judges then formed a royalist parlement in exile at Tours. Through the various agents of administration and government, Parlement, the Châtelet, the Milice, the Hôtel de Ville and the Bastille, the Seize gained control of the capital. It reached every level. The city’s many printers found business in partisan pamphlets ranging from serious theology to those that made the flesh creep; the more lurid the better for sale. Watermen and butchers were always ready to turn out for a parade or funeral – or to investigate a bit of property allegedly Huguenot. Anyone suspected of royalist or politique sympathies was liable to be beaten up, if not executed, and his property confiscated. In November 1589 there was a new phase of terrorism when nearly fifty ‘politiques’ were publicly hanged in marketplaces across the capital. It reflected the unease of the radicals about the failure of Mayenne8 to defeat the king. Already, before news of the king’s victories over League forces, there was a widening rift between the magnates of the League and the city radicals. But Mayenne needed moral and material support from the cities. Fanaticism had had its use but he found that it was turned increasingly against fellow citizens. Animosities came to a head in the spring of 1590 when King Henry set about the siege of the capital without which he could not rule his country.

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By then he had proved himself as a soldier in two actions which had shown him at his best, recklessly brave, lifting the morale of his soldiers without apparently losing tactical control of the battle. His first decision, risky but, as it turned out, vital, was to make his base in Normandy, ignoring the advice of some who wanted him to fall back south of the Loire. As one follower put it, ‘who would take a royal edict seriously if it came from Limoges?’9 In tax yield Normandy was still the most productive province. There too Henry could keep open his line to England. Meanwhile Mayenne boasted that he would throw him into the sea. At Arques, however, in September 1589, thanks largely to the stout defence of his Swiss troops and well-­placed artillery, the king threw the duke’s much larger force back from his entrenchments. At Ivry, on 14 March 1590, he fought the more testing open battle against the larger force of the League, with a substantial element of experienced Spanish troops. Now he had with him a loyal band of comrades who would fight like fury for their king, for his inheritance and their future. For Rosny, that hung in the balance after he had been wounded in the calf by a lance, on head and hand by a sword and in hip and thigh by a musket ball. Everywhere in the thick of action, recognisable by the famous white plume, Henry showed himself a man to follow. The battles would be remembered in Huguenot circles with vibrant tales to strengthen family tradition and enhance the sense of solidarity in dark times. Meanwhile he was a king without a capital, ruling a country without order, except in parts with the order that suited the local lord, Catholic or Huguenot. Populist, fervent Catholicism was stirred and exploited by radicals now fearful of the outcome if the king should gain control. The portrait of Jacques Clément appeared on Catholic altars. Henry did not shrink from the challenge. From April to August 1590, reinforced by an English contingent 5,000 strong, he secured the towns and villages around the capital so as to cut off the city’s food supplies. By July many were starving: 30,000, around a tenth of the population, was one estimate of the death toll. Sacrificing his prospects in the Netherlands Parma changed course and headed for Paris. While Henry braced himself for battle Parma slipped behind the besieging force and entered the city with supplies, and the promise of more as Henry withdrew towards Normandy. Deprived of the chance to avenge St Bartholomew’s his men sacked the houses around Saint-­Denis. It was a low point for the king: his capital city further alienated by its terrible ordeal, Parma’s skilled direction of formidable troops a reminder of what lay between him and a secure crown. He had succeeded only in hardening the temper of the people and feeding the fanaticism of the preachers. Yet it may have been as well for Henry that he did not break into the city: the citizens, with priests beside them, would surely have raised the barricades again and fought him in the streets. He would have succeeded only at

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great cost to his reputation – and the subsequent history of the city suggests that he would have failed. Time was on his side. The League appeared formidable in their urban strongholds. But after the death of the cardinal of Bourbon in May 1591 they could produce no candidate for the crown who could claim legitimacy or present himself as anything other than a creature of Spain. The evidence for links between cells and for the appearance of a common ideology comparable to Calvinism is misleading. The various League governments constituted neither a unified party nor a political basis for sustained resistance. Henry would have to fight on against the League and the Spanish and count on time, war-­weariness and the growing desire to see, in the words of the Satyre Ménippée, that prolonged diatribe against Spain and Rome, ‘a natural, not an artificial king, one already made and not still to be made . . . a straight green shoot from the stem of St Louis’.10 Meanwhile France had not changed. If anything the differences of law, custom and attitude had hardened after thirty years of ineffective government. Sauve qui peut had become the natural response. Only residual loyalty to the crown remained to counter it. Henry had to find the way and means to exploit that loyalty. Divisions within Paris itself illustrate the problems that faced the League chiefs. In mid-­November 1591 Mayenne was forced to act against the radicals after the summary execution of Président Barnabé Brisson. Their leaders were hanged or exiled. There was little talk now of a Catholic republic. The Seize looked beyond the Guise to Philip II to find – in their terms – a proper candidate for the throne. But royalist opinion was finding expression in ways that promised a new direction because they reflected a wholly different philosophical standpoint. The ideology of the internal crusade, the mystical yearning to identify with the Passion of Christ, had been validated for the zealous by the successive murders of Guise and Henry III, and further tested in the hardships of siege. But its excesses provoked a reaction, not only among those directly threatened in status and property but among writers whom they patronised and who were prepared to think afresh about the legitimacy of royal authority. There was nothing new in the study of the classics as a prime source of political wisdom – it had been the pabulum of the humanists, the inspiration of L’Hôpital. Its resurgence reflects political necessity: the search for a new grounding for what had to be, in some respects, a new kind of monarchy. One notable voice was that of Le Caron, Catholic author of a seminal work, De la tranquillité de l’esprit (1588). The veteran Platonist was one of several who turned to Seneca and classical Stoicism for their premises and conclusions. Seneca’s teaching of morality based on universal reason spoke powerfully, through the neo-­Stoics, to those fated to endure a disordered, apparently threatened world. Men should seek inner peace by pursuing the idea that there

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is a reason for all things; that those things which may appear to be bad may be sent to us for our own good and as necessary for the public good of individual or society. Evident disturbance or decline in a state may be a natural process and one to which God alone has answers. When man intervenes in political life he does so at his peril, for the conflicting passions make for disunity and distress – and thus a further incentive to intervene. Le Caron offered a rational guide to a way out of the vicious cycle. First the monarch should be above the warring factions so as not to be seen ‘as party to their passions, hates and disputes’. The aim of political power was to compel men to live in harmony. Not only was it the duty of the subject to obey; it would be to his advantage to do so. Many Huguenots would see it in this way. In the significant treatise of Pierre Charron,11 a practical man of affairs, obedience was elevated to the status of principle as partaking fully of the kind of authority that God desired. It was rational because God was reason; Christian because it was through obedience that the Christian encountered the will of God and was enabled to live a life of virtue. The liberty of the individual, his capacity to reach his full potential, must consist in accepting as a fact of life the system of domination. Nothing, argued Guillaume du Vair,12 happened in this world except by the just action of God, and that should be accepted without hesitation or fear. Writers of this neo-­Stoic persuasion contrasted their conception of civil government with the frenzy, the unbalanced judgement of those who opposed the crown. The League was evil because it was born out of unreason, a rebellion against divine law. Its violence must be self-­defeating. To call such reasoning ‘modern’ may be thought premature though there are plainly modern elements. In the idea of Divine Right that was to evolve in the new century there was more of traditional thinking, albeit stretched to the furthest possible point, than of the assumptions of the Age of Reason. Future writers like Le Bret13 or Bossuet14 would, in effect, manage to have the best of both worlds, the theocentric and the rational. The rational approach would be there for future development, when the assumptions of Divine Right would be challenged. That development was to be profoundly influenced by Louis XIV’s repressive policy towards the Huguenots, and towards Catholic deviants, as he saw them, the Jansenists.15 So we can see how, out of the crucible of civil war, the future was being shaped. The idea of God as embodiment of reason can lead to the necessity of obedience in a way that provides stronger legitimacy for royal absolutism. We cannot know how seriously such theoretical arguments weighed with citizens who had been used to more robust appeals, couched in traditional religious language, to their principles, instincts – and interests. Theory may have been more important in the long term than in immediate effect. But in taking out of the frame of political discourse Christ’s supposed teaching about the end of

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time, the new breed of royalists aimed to take the drama out of eschatological fear and the poison out of ritual gestures of defiance. The idea of withdrawal from party activism had its counterpart in some Huguenot thinking, so furthering the possibility of alliance between Protestant moderates and Catholics primarily concerned for the unity of the state. There was no need of a revised theology or new political theory to suggest the overwhelming need for peace. Across the land, and not only in Brittany and the Auvergne, brigands and their irregular companies operated with impunity and contempt for royal authority. The long anticlimax of the years that followed the barricades, the military stalemate, and the bitter conflict of factions within the city, would underline the impropriety – royalists would term it treason – of resisting a rightful sovereign. Meanwhile Henry had to secure his main base, Normandy, and an alternative capital, Rouen. A League coup in February 1589 had led to a complete takeover of Rouen’s city government.16 Its leaders were drawn from the highest legal and official ranks, predominantly older men, who had bad memories of the earlier Protestant coup. While they continued to support Mayenne, around half their colleagues, mostly younger, chose to follow the example of the Parisian judges and set up a royalist court in Caen. Royalist citizens, ‘politiques’, and virtually all the English, left or were expelled from Rouen but there was relatively little violence. In November 1591, reinforced by an English force under the earl of Essex, Henry besieged the city, but was thwarted by stout resistance, led by the Burgundian Jean de Saulx-­Tavannes and supported by the zeal of priests and laymen gathering in religious confraternities, before the timely arrival, in April 1592, of Parma.17 Plainly Henry could not expect, as a Huguenot deploying a force insufficient to carry out one successful siege, to win round the League cities. Could he afford to wait for the groundswell of resentment towards foreign troops to translate into solid support for the new royalism, politique in conviction that country and peace should come before ideology and war? Could religious allegiance be left out of the reckoning? The experience of two resolutely independent cities shows what he was up against. Toulouse was far removed from the main campaigning areas in the north and east but it lay in Huguenots’ territory, surrounded by their strongholds. Ever since the failure of the Huguenot coup in 1561 and subsequent bloody reprisals the Catholic élite had maintained its position. After the massacre of 1572 the Huguenot element was small; those who did not escape to more congenial places kept their heads down. After the Guise murders the city council established a bureau of eighteen members, representing equally clergy, parlement and bourgeois.18 It was a variant of the League takeovers of other cities, but effected peacefully. The avowed object was to maintain Catholic

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solidarity but there were some who suspected it of being a front for the ambitions of the premier président of the Toulouse parlement, Jean-­Étienne Duranti. Leading the charge was a clerical representative on the bureau, the bishop of Comminges, Urbain de Saint-­Gelais. He accused some fellow members of being ‘politiques’; as elsewhere, in the mouth of the ‘true’, that is Tridentine Catholic, this meant ambivalent, little better therefore than a Huguenot. Typically a religious procession was the occasion for the confraternities to show their zeal and excite the crowd. They demanded the execution of politiques, especially those of parlement who ‘care more for the cause of the Valois than that of Jesus Christ’. Saint-­Gelais consented to become governor ‘until such time as Mayenne should appoint a proper prince.’19 It was revealed that Duranti was seeking help from the royal governor of Guienne but parlement refused to try him. A mob of thousands broke into the Jacobin church where he and colleague had taken refuge and murdered them. As in Paris, the underlying tensions exposed by the initial challenge of the League found expression in the language of religion but were grounded in the aspirations of bourgeois, generally those functioning at levels beneath the high magistracy. Always there were more lawyers than substantial offices for them to fill; always too the potential mob, susceptible to religious rhetoric and to apparent empowerment in the spiritual confraternity, here that of the Holy Sacrament, but with their own material concerns. When Mayenne’s commander in Languedoc, Guillaume de Joyeuse, appeared in the city and demanded the abolition of his confraternity, Saint-­Gelais refused, urged the citizens ‘to arm themselves for Jesus Christ’ and with an armed band tried to storm the governor’s house. However, Toulouse differed from other cities of similar complexion in the solidarity of its magistracy; there was at first no move to set up a royalist parlement outside the city. That helped Mayenne to do a deal with a sufficient number of the city’s leaders to ensure the bishop’s exclusion and the return of the League, under his control, to the main alignment. It did not signify much in practice, for Toulouse was remote from the main action and contributed little to the cause of the League and the Guise. It was to the advantage of Henry IV that he did not encounter anything like a unified resistance drawing strength from across the country. But local Huguenots could derive little comfort from the story of Toulouse. Its Catholics were deeply divided in social aims and religious concerns yet Catholicism was solid. Sternly resistant to further Huguenot advance the city was to play a major part in the legal constriction and oppression of later years. In likewise staunchly Catholic Dijon Mayenne was on friendly ground. He had been governor of Burgundy since 1573 and had a loyal clientele with a presence in all the important institutions. Even here, however, he had to make

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a show of force before the royalists were forced out. After that his efforts to establish complete control were countered by the manoeuvres of ambitious local politicians. Mayenne was forced, eventually, to execute Jacques le Verne whose last move was to hold on to his mayoral office, offering allegiance to the king. By then, August 1594, the king was a Catholic. For the future, the ascendancy of the Holy League, the conviction that it must combat not only heresy but the torpor of nominal Catholics, matched by the concern of ‘the godly warriors’ of Calvin for a purer, stricter, more zealous faith, served notice of a greater threat to come. For the spirit of the League would prove to be no transient phase, nor exclusively a French phenomenon but an aspect of the Catholic Counter-­Reformation (better termed Revival), post-­Trent, international and led by the religious orders, new or reformed. Their extremism might drive some away; but today’s Leaguers would be tomorrow’s dévots. Their influence would be all the greater when their programme came to be taken up by a significant part of the episcopate and, though with caution in the time of the cardinals, by the crown. However different the experiences of League cities they had in common a will to independence that negated any chance of Mayenne’s sustaining an effective national force. The different cells had grown out of a sense of being let down by authority, that of the crown or sometimes that of the local elite. They evinced a corporate pride that had found traditional expression in Catholic faith and practice. They were bound less by loyalty to the House of Guise or by a single purpose or programme than by their hatred of Protestants, ‘ravaging wolves’, and their fervent desire to see a Catholic monarch on the throne. They might be vulnerable in particular cases to the politique argument. They would only succumb en masse when a Frenchman with an entirely valid claim to the throne proved also to be one of them, true to French royal tradition. It was something that became increasingly clear to the soldier king. Thwarted in his efforts to win his capital by force, should he not turn to the one way that he could win its heart? The answer might be plainer to us than it would have been to him. We cannot enter the mind or judge the conscience of Henry IV in the months before his conversion. It was an option before he became king; an increasingly tempting one as he battled against Spain and the League and failed again in his siege of Paris. Against it he had to weigh the claims of loyalty that bound him to fellow Huguenots, companions in arms; the knowledge that some of them would be impressed by no reasoning other than that of belief; the anticipation that they would neither take him seriously, nor ever forgive him. With his conversion would go the already fading dream of a Protestant king presiding over the evangelisation of France. Not to be ignored was his sense of the merits of the reformed faith as he had learned it from his mother;

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and – harder to ascertain – his personal conviction. So we may envisage his choosing the lesser of evils, the lower level of risk: the criterion being that of peace. His dilemma is illustrated by the conflicting views being advanced by two men whom he had reason to respect. In 1591 François de la Noue warned Huguenots not to resist the king should he consider conversion lest they provoke war and create conditions that would make it impossible for the king to decide on grounds of conscience. To the old warrior civil obedience was paramount, sincerity the issue at stake, a strong monarchy the desirable end. Nearer to Montaigne than to his fellow Huguenot Duplessis-­Mornay, and a realist above all, La Noue argued that Huguenots had no right, even if they had the power, to force Henry not to become Catholic. From a different angle, Henry’s old comrade, the pastor Gabriel Namours, in a letter of June 1593, addressed the king at his most tender spot. He recalled past fights and deaths for the cause, their giving thanks together under an oak tree on the field of Coutras, and he appealed to Henry’s sense of loyalty, honour and manhood. Was he now to succumb to female domination in the person of that slut Gabrielle d’Estrées? The moralising, censorious tone conveys the political problem; it also suggests why Henry found himself increasingly out of sympathy with the consistoriaux, preferring the more balanced advice of Rosny. During long consultations in February 1593 Rosny seems – by his account – to have put the case for crown and conscience: the king could be saved as a Protestant and lose his crown, or be saved as Catholic and reunite his realm. So let him see whether he could become Catholic in good faith. It may sound worldly-­wise – or wise after the event – but when Henry, once converted, tried persistently to persuade Rosny to follow suit, he refused. His faith was unencumbered by theological niceties. He would let God show him the way and use his influence to protect, where possible, his fellow Huguenots and to reconcile them to the new order. Henry’s decision can be seen exclusively in political, secular terms, as one of timing rather than principle. It is likely, however, that it was both anxious and painful. He surely realised that both Leaguers and consistoriaux would think him a hypocrite. ‘Paris is worth a Mass’: if he said the words attributed to him by Leaguers, it would be typical of his light way of treating serious questions. They had to justify their continuing to fight, for if his conversion was genuine, sincere, arrived at by reason, an expression of true faith, and accepted as such by Parlement, they were committing treason. If the Pope who had excommunicated the heretic now blessed the convert then they had no grounds for further resistance. So the emphasis shifted to his attitude to his co-­religionaries. At stake in the last years of the war, until 1598, were the terms of the eventual settlement, the conditions under which Huguenots could live and worship, the extent of their civil rights.

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Whatever his motives Henry’s announcement was timed, apparently, at a moment of relative strength, to gain the greatest advantage. On Sunday 25 July 1593, at Saint Denis, the burial place of former kings, dressed in white doublet and hose, Henry abjured the Protestant faith. Watched by sixty senior churchmen and by a large crowd – but with some Leaguer priests notably absent – he made a brief act of penance. The idea of contrition was played down as being derogatory to the dignity of a king who needed above all to restore the mystique of the crown.20 He simply handed to the presiding cleric, the archbishop of Bourges, a short statement composed by the archbishop. He listened to a tactful sermon by René Benoist on the boundless mercies of God, vowed obedience to the Catholic church and took communion in royal fashion, both bread and wine. Of course many Leaguers wanted to hear a fuller statement as to the heresies that he was renouncing and a commitment to repress them. They saw it as a political fix, relying heavily on Gallican sentiment, having scant regard for the authority of the Pope. For absolution Henry would have to wait until August 1595. By then his position had been strengthened by coronation and by his subsequent peaceful entry into Paris. He was consecrated and crowned king at Chartres on 27 February 1594. The event, the place, its beauty, its holy history, speak of the strength of royal tradition and the flexible approach that was typical of Henry and his advisers. It also suggests that the balance of opinion had tilted far enough towards the king for this enforced departure from cherished tradition to be hailed as right and proper. Reims was out of the question since it was in League hands; so the holy oil of Clovis could not be used. However, the oil once presented by the Virgin to the soldier-­saint Martin of Tours was thought appropriate; its efficacy unquestioned. Henry IV’s entry into Paris, at dawn on 22 March, was carefully prepared.21 Although Mayenne had recently appointed him to replace a suspected royalist governor, Brissac had proved amenable to Henry’s overtures.22 As royalists moved into strategic sites, Brissac and the prévot des marchands ordered the gates to be opened and the king proceeded through the Porte Neuve to Notre-­ Dame, there to hear mass and a Te Deum. The Spanish garrison was allowed to leave in good order; only a few of the most extreme members of the Seize were expelled. The emphasis throughout was on reconciliation. Parisians saw a pious as well as generous king. He remained to celebrate Holy Week and took part in a procession to Notre-­Dame bearing, among other holy relics of Sainte-­ Chapelle rarely seen, a splinter of the true cross. As if to expunge from citizen memory the offensive words of League preachers he worshipped in each of the capital’s parish churches. He visited the sick in the Hôtel-­Dieu, washed the feet of the poor on Maundy Thursday and, on Easter Day, blessed with the royal

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touch hundreds of sufferers from scrofula. As he seized the chance to show himself true king by performing the customary rite need we doubt that he was moved by the emotion aroused and displayed? Brissac received a marshal’s baton and a huge payment, pour encourager les autres, the necessary price in a market dominated by substantial players whom it was easier to bribe than to fight. One after another the main League towns had submitted by the end of 1594. Henry was able to prove to them the value of compliance while warning of harsh measures against those that held out. In 1595 even Dijon submitted: writing on the wall for its governor and League chief, Mayenne. In October Pope Clement VIII granted absolution to the king, and the duke, despondent and discredited, was deprived of the last shred of excuse for continuing resistance. His submission was timely, for Henry faced a renewed threat from Spain and there were still League diehards, notably Épernon and Mercoeur, strong respectively in Provence and Brittany and ready, if only to secure the best terms for themselves, to continue the fight. With typical boldness Henry decided on declaring pre-­emptive war. It offered a way forward out of domestic stalemate. Alienated by his policy of appeasement, resolved to win more concessions, successive assemblies, reinforced by increasing numbers of nobles, had adopted more militant policies, urged the withholding of taille, even threatened a renewal of war. At least, fighting to drive Spanish soldiers from French soil, Henry could claim loyal service from both camps. It was desperately needed. In 1596 Spanish troops seized Cambrai, then Calais; early in 1597 it was the turn of Amiens, unequivocally a French city. That could not be borne, but it would take a long and expensive siege to recover the town. Henry was realist enough to know that a line must be drawn and that, for the first time since 1562, it was in the interest of all Huguenots, and the wish of most, to achieve a settlement. Inevitably they had misgivings. How were they to trust the king to protect their position? In religious terms he had committed apostasy. In party terms he was a renegade. Only so can we understand their continuing militancy and appreciate the king’s statecraft in the testing years between his conversion to Rome and the Edict of Nantes. Henry had been under no illusions about the impact of his conversion on Huguenot opinion. Rosny, by his own account, thought that most Huguenots would come to accept it as the necessary price of peace. Ministers and activists in consistory and colloquy might not so readily forgive their king. After so many years of hope and disappointment they would certainly use what bargaining power they had left. The Calvinist rhetoric was still fierce and vituperative. Yet on the ground of daily coexistence, alongside the strains, there is evidence of some flexibility where, as in Nîmes, Catholics and Huguenots confronted the realities of government and sharing of office. Indeed, the

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argument that Nantes created a virtually separate state is weakened by such cases where compromise at the official level became the virtue of necessity. Nîmes deserves further notice as being rare among cities of middling size, around 12,000 and growing; since the 1560s it had had a large majority, around four in five, of Huguenots. It was a vibrant community, relatively well balanced between the more affluent, officers, lawyers, merchants, gentilshommes, and artisans in the many trades that sustained its moderate prosperity. It affords us a picture of the grave effects of civil war and banditry, highlighted by two notorious Catholic massacres, at Marvejol and Aubenas, in 1586 and 1587 respectively, which added to the flow of desperate refugees arriving at the city gates pleading for shelter and food. The distressing backcloth to the narrative of war and politics, well understood by contemporaries, keenly felt by those who had to decide whether to offer relief or to close their gates, the last murderous phase of civil war in the south tested to crisis point the city’s ability to cope. Pastors reported the wretched people crowding around temple doors at times of worship. There is ample evidence from consistory records which shows how seriously Nîmois Huguenots took their Christian duty to succour the poor.23 The temple, as it were, reached out to the streets. Typically Nîmes had inherited from the Middle Ages a number of small, church-directed hospices. Before Reformation had its impact there were significant changes in approach to the evils of poverty and disease. A spirit of civic commitment encouraged amalgamation and lay control. Protestants would come to share with Catholics a desire for greater social discipline. Ever-­ present, as in all towns, was the fear of vagrants, beggars, mobs, riots. Protestants surely derived from their theology and church structure, exemplified by Geneva, the propensity to order and control matters so as to do the greatest good to those most in need. In this sphere the record of the consistory of Nîmes is impressive, complementing the role of the Hôtel-­Dieu, responding to the individual cases always more than could be helped and reaching well beyond the care of the sick and the destitute that was the prime concern. Assistance was found for education, the provision of dowries, clothes and sums of money to meet a wide range of needs. Prisoners were not excluded, nor the homeless who cluttered the streets. A funeral shroud was purchased for the body of a young woman; a boy whose father had died in war was apprenticed to a shoemaker; a swordsmith was paid to train Zacharie, of uncertain parentage. Women shared in the work. All was directed by the consistory and the elder who acted as reçeveur des pauvres, after receiving reports from district supervisors; aid was provided by taxable members listed in the church rolls. The elders drew up the lists of the poor among whom the most needy were to be helped. At least 5 per cent of the community received aid; that probably understates the extent of giving; but it could never be

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enough. Individual grants were targeted after careful assessment of individual need, and decided at the quarterly meeting for communion. In this matter, as in the management of finance and the regulation of behaviour, laymen had a prominent role. There were limits to the scope of charity. Injunctions forbidding begging were often repeated, so probably ineffective. Beggars were unwelcome as carriers of disease and a threat to good order. Outsiders in every sense, they offended decency and the Calvinist work ethic; only the labourer deserved his hire. Like all systems that aim to be fair and comprehensive that of Nîmes could appear bureaucratic to the modern eye. But it was a worthy attempt to live by gospel values. Charity depended upon individual conscience and a sense of personal responsibility under God. In that, and in its practical effect, there is no reason to believe that Nîmes was untypical of Huguenot communities. In the bigger picture of high politics and war it is the militant character of men of faith struggling to survive that attracts notice. It is therefore worth emphasising the altruism within numerous communities of faith, reflecting the sense of justification under God. It led to a natural match between the Huguenot’s sense of privilege, a personal blessing, and his works of mercy. The morale of temples, consistories and families was reflected in the high resolve of the leaders. Even in his most exasperated moments Henry could not fail to know it. Unfortunately for him it was the hard face, a harsher tone, matching that of the extremists of the League, that he encountered in the deliberations of colloquies and synods. In the closing stage of a life and death struggle much depended on three men, linked in Protestantism but in little else. Henry’s trusted comrade and trusted adviser, already by instinct a man of government, Rosny saw matters from his own perspective, that of honourable royal service, in prospect creative and enriching. Much grander and more equivocal in position, Turenne was now a Protestant magnate of international standing. He had just married Charlotte de la Marck, heiress to the duc de Bouillon, whose title he acquired, along with his principality on the north-­east frontier. The claim was disputed and he might need the king’s support; or he could exploit a delicate situation and his new resources to further the wider Protestant cause. Bouillon had to choose between loyalties and between courses of action, each with potential advantage or disaster for his family and faith. Henry had managed him with skill, first persuading him to serve at the siege of Paris, then dispatching him abroad on missions to Protestant powers. The soldier in him was impressed by Henry’s ability in the field, the Protestant welcomed the chance to fight against Spain. War once joined, he would have further leverage. With fellow nobles he therefore influenced the assemblies to step up their demands. Their input to a fraught situation is a foretaste of troubles to come when the words and actions

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of the militant wing would enable its enemies to portray the religion, prétendue réformée, as inherently and irredeemably factious. It would in any case be hard for Henry to placate the Huguenot rank and file. And he had to protect his other flank. Could he offer sufficient guarantees of their future security without antagonising those Catholics who still doubted the sincerity of his conversion? Much depended throughout on Duplessis-­Mornay,24 trusted by Henry as publicist and mediator, acceptable to ministers for his intellectual gifts and orthodox Calvinism, and to grandees as a nobleman of large property. Unfortunately he had been upset by the manner and timing of the king’s conversion. He had been told to convene a Huguenot assembly at Mantes and he had managed the preliminaries with care, inviting distinguished foreigners to attend. Then, before it met, and after only the briefest meeting with Huguenot leaders, the king announced his conversion. Any chance of persuading delegates to moderate their demands was therefore lost. Duplessis-­Mornay felt that Henry had moved too far away from his spiritual and political base. He warned him that Huguenots were saying that it was ‘more tolerable to live under Henry III’ and that they were looking for a true ‘protector.’ When the assembly eventually met, in November 1593, it made demands for guarantees and payments that Henry could not possibly meet and that were certain to offend even moderate Catholics.25 He declined to attend the assembly, to receive a deputation or even to offer any written replies. Since at that point Henry was still negotiating with the Pope and no major League city had yet accepted him his hands were tied. It would take another four years and more to reach a definitive settlement of the Huguenot question. Meanwhile he had to fight a war against Spain without the assurance of Huguenot support, overcome the resistance of cities still dominated by the League, and win back or at least neutralise its aristocratic leaders. In that, we have seen, by diplomacy and bribery, he eventually succeeded. It was a messy business, with more of compromise than outright victory, more, in some quarters, of grudging, suspicious compliance than enthusiastic support. In difficult circumstances Henry did well, as much by keeping his nerve and temper as by any notable actions. Weaving his way between the parties, Henry was sorely tried by the Huguenots, ‘an infinite number of little tyrants’. ‘Little tyrants’, he knew, meant bigger ones behind them: the patrons, capable of carrying significant numbers with them, with some key members of their church communities. It was the effect of decades of self-­help under wartime conditions that had taught them that they could only gain concessions by force or blackmail. In the process Huguenots had learned to be a party with all that it entailed: the gathering of intelligence, the informal meetings and the flow of correspondence that preceded the choice of delegates at colloquy and synod.26 Decisions made

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there authorised the raising of troops and money and now, under conditions both threatening and promising, the petitions and demands. After 1593 the support that Henry needed, but was probably too experienced to expect, was grudging, if not actually withheld. Prompted by an annual series of national assemblies, each better attended than the last, the Huguenots perfected their provincial organisation in ways which made it clear that they could fight their corner until they had achieved a satisfactory settlement. At Châtellerault, in 1597, over 200 delegates, many of them soldiers, refused to disperse until they had a new edict. The king used Catholic deputies to negotiate, but in a low key and with instructions to make no concessions. He understood that a deep fissure ran through the outwardly formidable body. The Huguenot soldier and chronicler La Popelinière, moderate and unusually fair-­minded, had some earlier experience of assembly politics as a deputy at Millau in 1574.27 He had found that the ‘mentality of traders’ was wholly different in method and purpose from that of the soldiers: the liberties of nobles ‘were not compatible with the equality of the Third Estate.’ La Popelinière had no illusions about the motivation of the average soldier on both sides: for ‘un million de bandoliers fleurdelizé’ (his words) the religious choice was less important than the opportunities that political disorder provided to form an armed band, to fight for themselves and live off the country. ‘All vagabonds, thieves and murderers . . . the flotsam of war, riddled with the pox and fit for the gibbet. Dying of hunger they took to roads and villages to pillage, assault and ruin the people.’ Claude Haton, soldier-­priest of Brie, may stand for many as witness to les misères de guerre.28 Between 1560 and 1598 some 130 separate engagements, with thirteen major battles, have been recorded. Villagers would note less the formal end of one of the nine ‘wars’ and start of another; more the recurring menace of local terrorists. It is no small part of Henry IV’s claim upon the generous judgement of posterity that he recognised the suffering of his people and wished to ameliorate it. Of course he could do little till he had secured peace, and that depended on the Spanish, in default of a decisive victory, reaching the point of exhaustion. There were still Huguenots everywhere arguing for the hard line, suspicious of what they heard of the negotiations for religious peace, but the bourgeois had most to gain from peace and the lesser and dependent nobles would generally follow the lead of the grandees. They, like their Catholic counterparts, had their price. Meanwhile Henry understood that he had to look strong and retain the confidence of Parlement – at least until he really was strong and in a position to secure registration of an edict. While he campaigned in the north Bouillon and La Trémouille stayed in their provinces, refused Henry’s repeated summons, sent soldier-­delegates to the political assemblies and even started talks with the Catholic pretender Charles d’Auvergne.29 By refusing to

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pay taille, even threatening to collect it for their own purposes, Huguenots found another useful bargaining point. Henry dispatched Schomberg to reason with the assembly but he went beyond his brief in signing an agreement that conceded the Huguenots’ right to keep their fortified towns.30 Henry was shocked but had to back his envoy and sent delegates to negotiate with those of the assembly.31 Prolonged and tenacious argument ensued. Meanwhile Huguenot grandees ‘sulked in their tents’ – or set the highest price on their allegiance. In terms of international power politics, as it would be understood by the leading practitioners, not least England’s queen and Robert Cecil, it made sense. In the face of near-­treason, as he saw it, Henry showed resilience but he yearned for peace; fortunately for him, so did the Spanish. Henry needed a decisive victory. It came with the recovery of Amiens and the start of the negotiations that would lead, in May 1598, to the Peace of Vervins.32 Henry meanwhile had marched his army towards the Loire to reduce the remaining League cities. Finally the king, with his envoys treating with the Spanish, could turn his mind to the settlement of religion. Huguenot deputies at last saw that he meant business and hastened to accept his terms.

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chapter t went y

s

The Edict of Nantes

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One general law, Clear, Pure and Absolute.2

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he king knew that he could not hope to satisfy both Catholics and Huguenots, that all but the most moderate would leave Nantes with reservations and resentments. Many might be relieved that there was peace but they would surely assume that this was another provisional settlement, made under duress, a position from which to make further gains. Like England’s Elizabeth, in a situation of comparable difficulty, Henry liked to talk ambiguously, if at all, about his private religious views. He should not, however, be reinvented as a secular-­minded monarch who, in some prescient modern way, viewed the salvation of the state as taking precedence over religious unity. He was of his time – but a realist. The gambler saw a safe bet. The facts of the situation, according to the census conducted for the national synod of Montpellier in 1598, were that the Huguenots had 759 churches, 257 of which were attached to manors, and around 800 ministers. That suggests a partial recovery from St Bartholomew’s, the fall in numbers in other parts of the country being balanced by an increase in some parts of the south, to a level edging back over a million.3 The large noble element, the solid commitment of those living in the relative security of the south, the hierarchy from consistory to synod that had proved adaptable to the needs of war, and the militant tone of Huguenot debate, together convinced Henry that the party could not be defeated. Appeasement was forced upon him, in the religious sphere as it had been in the political. His pragmatic approach is conveyed in a number of practical measures: each was as far as he could go to satisfy Huguenots without alienating Catholics beyond endurance. He understood what his sovereign office implied in tradition and required in duty. As a soldier he had fought for power and meant now to test it to the limit. Both conviction and experience are reflected in the words of the preamble to the main, open part of the Edict:

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‘Given at Nantes in the Month of April in the year of Grace 1598 and of our Reign the ninth.’ First came a moving and comprehensive account of the ‘Dreadful Troubles, Confusions and Disorders’ that he found on accession. There followed a formal, if none the less powerful expression of God’s aid in enabling him to go beyond ‘what was our duty and our power’ in ‘reducing this Estate to Peace and Rest’. After reference to the complaints received from both parties he offered ‘One general law, Clear, Pure, and Absolute by which they shall be regulated’. But before that passage he made it plain how he viewed and lamented their divisions. He could not do better than ‘to provide that He [God] may be adored and prayed unto by all our Subjects; and if it hath not yet pleased him to permit it to be in one and the same form of Religion, that it may at the least be with one and the same intention . . . [my italics]’. The articles were ‘perpetual and irrevocable’ but the words simply mean that they could only be countermanded by another edict registered in Parlement. We must note that the possibility was not excluded. Viewing the Edict retrospectively, from the standpoint of its later revocation, when there was already a different climate of thought, some have seen it as a landmark in the history of religious toleration. It is indeed noteworthy that the articles contain nothing about belief or doctrine. Belief was of fundamental importance, implicit and acted upon in institutions, modes of worship and public ceremonies. But religion was envisaged by government, and treated for the purposes of legislation, in social rather than intellectual terms. Authority, royal, provincial, civic, had to be concerned with faith in its public, communal appearance since it was there that conflict arose. The problem that Henry faced was how to integrate a corporate Protestant body, sustained by an extensive network of ministers, laymen and those they empowered to serve in colloquy and synod, into a state that was officially, and in number of believers overwhelmingly, Catholic. His intention was to set up a process of pacification with the institutional mechanisms to ensure that it was maintained. The Edict stated the rules and conditions; the royal commissions and the special chambers of justice were the instruments needed to ensure that peace became a reality in the towns and villages of France. Had Henry then been led by the experience of having to fight for his throne to a politique notion of the needs of the state quite different from that of his successors? The reign was to see a development in the power of the state that would continue through the century. Bourbon absolutism proved to be innovative, as well as traditional in the way it clawed back the authority lost through the civil wars. The way in which Henry IV stated his general intention in the Edict, in particular in the significant yet, may not in itself be enough to make us see him as wedded securely to the principle ‘One king, one law, one

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faith’. It would be more explicit in the mentality and actions of the rigidly pious Louis XIII. In a conversation with the cardinal of Florence Henry explained that the garrison towns allotted to the Huguenots were temporary as he hoped to see all Protestants abjure and return to the Catholic church by 1606. Easy words perhaps for the Pope’s ear – but his actions did not wholly belie them. He allowed the Jesuits to return in defiance of Parlement and braving Huguenot disapproval: Huguenots would soon experience Catholic apologetic at the higher level of expertise offered by the Jesuits as teachers and missionaries. Henry wanted them to be on side and chose one, Père Coton, to be his confessor. The suppression of heresy was a prime aim of the Jesuit order. By the end of the reign Henry was listening to sermons denouncing the Huguenots. The Edict of Nantes, the collective name for the settlement of the religious question, actually consisted of four separate and distinct components. Ninety-­two general articles reproduced in many cases the terms and language of earlier edicts, notably that of Beaulieu. Fifty-­six secret articles contained particular concessions to meet particular cases and to bring into harmony with the general provisions the various deals with cities and individuals made during the prolonged process of pacification. It was not intended that these articles should remain secret. Two royal brevets, issued within weeks of the secret articles, reveal the devious way in which Henry had to proceed. For all the reassurance and guarantees offered to Catholics it would prove hard to overcome the resistance of parlements to the main Edict. The more contentious concessions secured by the Huguenots in the brevets could not be disputed because, as personal royal grants, they did not come within the purlieu of parlements. They were meant to be provisional measures of convenience and subject to withdrawal after eight years. So what did the Huguenots secure from the articles and the brevets, beyond the general amnesty which the Edict was designed to be? Article 6 granted complete freedom of conscience. Articles 7 to 10 allowed the right to worship in towns controlled by Huguenots in August 1597; elsewhere, besides towns named in earlier edicts in what was termed culte de permission, in two places in each bailliage; and in the private homes of Huguenot nobles. Also in places they controlled they could build their own temples (article 16). To the English observer articles 22 and 27 may have seemed remarkable (and, if a Catholic, enviable) for Huguenots were accorded full civil rights: eligibility to enter schools, colleges and universities; the right to hold public or royal office, even in parlements. Of course the lawyer delegates to the political assemblies, anticipating after Henry’s accession the chance to enter royal service, would have expected no less. But how, in practice, were they to overcome the prejudice they would encounter in the courts? The fact that 40 per cent of the general articles dealt with the area of justice and the problem of enforcement to ensure

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fair treatment shows how vexatious it was and how conscientiously Henry’s commissioners subsequently sought to resolve it. In the interest of justice, ‘without any suspicion, fear or favour’ and as ‘a principal means for maintaining peace and concord’, chambres mi-­parties were created in three parlements, Bordeaux, Grenoble and Toulouse. Also, but with only one Protestant judge to represent the interests of the scattered communities of the north, in the fiercely resentful parlements of Paris and Rouen. The judges who staffed the chambres, in the southern parlements Catholics and Protestants in equal number, had jurisdiction over all proceedings involving Protestants. Gradually, with precedents building up into a useful body of law, the chambers were secure in the king’s favour till his death; after that sufficiently well established to have a valuable working life until finally abolished in 1679. Overall, and inevitably, the articles fell short of granting the entire and universal freedom of worship that Huguenot assemblies demanded; but they went further than any Catholic had envisaged. To have left both sides equally aggrieved may be thought a fair measure of Henry’s diplomatic success – for the Catholic also was offered all that was necessary to confirm his superior status while being compelled to allow the heretic his space. The mass was restored ‘in all places and quarters of this Kingdom’: that meant places like La Rochelle or Montauban where it had been unknown for many years. Huguenots were obliged to observe the feast days and holidays of the Catholic church – and they were many. They were not to work on those days. Strict censorship was imposed on all Huguenot writing and they were forbidden to sell books outside the areas they controlled. They had to accept Catholic rules on marriage, as on other contracts. Like Catholics they had to pay tithes. These were severe limits – and ground for much testing and contesting. Among the secret articles the most significant was number 34 for it ran counter to the open article that forbade Huguenots to hold any further political assembly. The concession was judiciously phrased, as applying overtly to religious assemblies. Henry knew, however, that such assemblies could easily provide a forum for political ideas and rallying point for military action. At the outset the assembly that had been convened at Châtellerault proved awkward. It remained in being, its leaders declared, to supervise the execution of an edict that had prohibited such assemblies! Making no allowance for the restraints on the king from Catholics themselves unreconciled to it the assembly breached the Edict while complaining about breaches on the other side. In view of what had gone on before, this was not surprising; as a glimpse of the future it was ominous. Successive assemblies, authorised or not, continued to vex the king and enrage the dévots. The grievances declared were not generally issues in contention between the Huguenots and the crown; inevitably under the circumstances they were beyond the power of the king to prevent. In matters

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of seventeenth-­century government there would usually be a big difference between what the crown ordered and what the people actually did: between the rhetoric and the reality. When memories and attitudes are coloured by powerful religious sentiments this was bound to be painfully so. The practice of the cult, the rights of pastors, eligibility for office, justice, places de sûreté, cemeteries and burial rights, processions – so many spots for the waging of a kind of cold war that would require local solutions: inevitably it was a gradual process. In practice there was little in the short term that the two Huguenot representatives at court (allowed by another secret article) could do. Their presence gave the Huguenots some leverage. Time might heal. The brevets dealt with the hottest issue, evidently in that form because while wholly unacceptable to Catholics they were necessary to bring the Huguenots to heel. Indeed, they should be seen, as in any such settlement following civil war, to be a case where principle has to be sacrificed to expedience. To compensate for payment of tithes an annual subsidy of 135,000 livres was to be paid to support Huguenot pastors. That would have stuck in the throat of the Catholic representatives.4 The other concession would have choked them. The Huguenots were to be allowed to maintain garrisons and soldiers: in effect an alternative army in part paid for by the crown. Besides the main designated 50 places de sureté there were another 150 temporary forts, places de refuge; they were also allowed 80 other forts to be maintained at their own expense. The whole deal would cost around 540,000 livres a year. Sums of that order were paid, as single payments, to leading Catholic magnates; money was always available for royal mistresses, gambling debts, diplomatic presents. So it was not the amount but the implication that might seem to be significant – that the Huguenots were in some respects a separate political entity. In any case the provision was meant to be temporary and was to prove so. Rather than as some kind of independent power it is more accurate to envisage the dispersed Huguenot minority as just another special case, privileged to an unprecedented degree, maybe, in Mousnier’s term ‘a shadow state’,5 but still not, properly speaking, a state. Sovereignty remained in theory and in potential with the French crown though in some practical respects it was limited: the sovereign’s intention could be thwarted. That becomes evident in the aftermath of the Edict and in Henry’s dealings with parlements. That of Paris bridled at being required to register the two sets of published articles. Processions and demonstrations organised by clergy were banned on the charge of sedition. In January 1589 the proven loyalist, politique in the eyes of his critics, Achille de Harlay, premier président, was yet persuaded to lead a delegation to the Louvre to petition the king in person and provoked a memorable response. Henry addressed them ‘not dressed in royal attire like my predecessors . . . but like the father of a family, in his doublet, to speak freely

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to his children.’6 He reminded them that they were obliged to obey him but gave them good reason for doing so. They owed it to him that they had been restored, that the kingdom was at peace. They should not insinuate that he was not a good Catholic: as eldest son of the church he was a better Catholic than they were. He admitted that he had formerly declared that he would not give any Huguenot office in parlements. Time and circumstances had changed since then but he would ensure that anyone so appointed would conduct himself properly. In its entirety his response reads like a stern lecture but he ended with honeyed words. He would issue no threats: ‘Simply do as I command you, or rather what I beg you. You will do it not only for me but also for yourselves and for the fair cause of peace.’7 ‘Peace’: for the remaining Catholic hardliners it was the strongest argument; however much they might rail against the Huguenots they knew that the military option was neither feasible nor desirable. So did the Pope. He claimed of the Edict that it was as if he had been slashed across the face and he threatened to revoke his absolution. Yet he was sufficiently aware of the importance of good relations with France to sanction the annulment of Henry’s marriage to Marguerite in 1599 and bless his subsequent marriage to Marie de Medici in 1601, after a diplomatic tussle that reveals much about Henry’s position and needs.8 On 25 February 1599 Parlement registered the Edict but not before they had modified article 2 to exclude places de concession from any episcopal towns. This had the effect of excluding Huguenots from worshipping in most of France’s main towns. Provincial parlements quibbled and delayed. It was widely feared that the Huguenots would take advantage of the Edict to promote their cause. Aix and Rennes held out until August 1600; Rouen refused to register until August 1609. Once Paris had given way such delays should not have made much practical difference, but they did sour the atmosphere and encourage troublemakers on both sides to delay implementation of the Edict. It was bound to be a slow process. It is a recurring lesson of history, never more observable than in the contemporary world, that people’s memories of civil war are more potent and lasting than any fine words or formulae devised ‘to save face’. Henry always had to contend with the allegation that he was a secret Calvinist. Even those who most clearly approved of him, like de Thou, a main architect of the Edict, thought that he had given the Huguenots too much. Catholics could point to examples of Henry’s apparent backsliding. They saw Agrippa d’Aubigné welcomed at court, an act of politic forgiveness – though he remained wary, ungracious.9 They saw the growing power of Rosny: it was he that persuaded the king to let the Parisian Huguenots move their temple to Charenton. Generally Henry managed to avoid such provocative decisions. Tact was high among his qualities. He strove to show an even

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hand. So he supported the Jesuit college at La Flèche, then allowed the Huguenots a college at Die. As befitted a Catholic sovereign he appointed the Jesuit Père Coton to be his confessor, and showed an open mind when he made Pierre du Moulin his almoner. There was one area that he might otherwise not be able to control: the influence of noblewomen more concerned to promote their faith than to respect his political design. He could be ruthless. So the princesse de Condé had to stay in prison. Her son, limited in understanding but high in pride, would break with the family tradition and become Catholic and one of the Huguenots’ most relentless foes. In general Henry felt bound to protect his former co-­religionaries, so it was difficult for him to convince Catholics that his goal was theirs: to reunite all subjects within the Gallican church. There is some positive evidence to support his claim: he had backed an earlier effort by his court historian and moderate Calvinist Jean de Serres to find grounds for reunion; also the more promising initiative of Jean Hotman de Villiers in 1607.10 L’Estoile, whose journal reveals his desire for unity, but on Catholic terms, recorded that de Villiers had found the king ‘strongly in favour of this project’ and that he had ‘asked Cardinal Barberini to present to His Holiness a book on this subject written by one of his archbishops.’11 Henry’s ecumenical task would have had better chance of success if he had managed to persuade leading Huguenots to follow his path to Rome. It would certainly not have damaged their worldly prospects. Rosny, of course, was well established, advancing to a key position in government, and, after first attempts to persuade deemed not worth further argument. Henry’s sister Catherine de Bourbon would have been a prize, evidence from the family of the strength of his new faith. His confessor, Père Coton, reasoned with her but to no avail. Here one encounters – and it is not unusual – the true strength of the reformed faith, the personal conviction of a special grace that would remain proof against any argument, theological or political. The conversion of the seigneur de Jovyac, captain in Henry’s army at the successful siege of Rochemaure in 1591, among others in whom Henry evinced a personal interest and took trouble to reward, may have been just as principled. But every act of abjuration served to harden the spirit of those who remained true to the faith. And some could still go the other way, like Gilles de Maupeou, an intendant des finances, in 1600. Sometimes men came over, in fellowship – or by infection their critics would claim – as, in 1607, did a number of Franciscans and Carthusians. There was great appeal to the thoughtful man in Protestantism as it was presented, with reason and scriptural authority, by preachers like Pastor du Moulin. The physician Monginot was converted, in 1601, following a disputation between du Moulin and a Jesuit. But other more strident voices had a different effect.

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One to whom Henry had owed much in his early years was Duplessis-­ Mornay.12 No one had done more to support the war for the crown, to fight the war of ideas. But, as Henry found after his conversion, his politics were still directed by his theology: conviction was reinforced by experience. It had been painful to him to persuade fellow Protestants that they could remain independent in their church while being loyal to the crown. He never lost sight of the wider cause of Protestantism or the dangers it faced if leaders temporised over fundamental beliefs. He now threw his weight on to the side of the fermes, hard and fast in their Calvinism, unwilling to give an inch to the Catholic side. Only months after the Edict he produced a huge tome on the history and nature of the Eucharist. In more than 1,000 pages and with five times as many references to the Bible and the church Fathers, he sought to prove that the mass had no grounds in Scripture and that it was just ‘a heap of words and a variety of gestures’, that it was said by priests without regard for the recipient’s faith or understanding, ‘just as it is thrown out to dogs and swine’. Catholics, he declared, ‘neither eat nor drink either corporally or spiritually. They simply stare and gaze at the priest, who eats and drinks [for them], remaining all the while both deaf and dumb as they ponder this so-­called mystery.’13 Such language was offensive in the style of the crudest polemic of the time, an old man’s folly, deliberately aimed at emphasising difference and rousing the Protestant spirit of resistance: providing chapter and verse for Catholic counter-­attack and so damaging hopes of peaceful coexistence. The book was significant because it came from a leading Huguenot authority, formerly close to the king, a man of international status. It was, of course, condemned by the Sorbonne. Some Huguenots were embarrassed by its tone and recognised that it did their cause no favour. A former Huguenot, now bishop of Evreux and a notable champion of orthodoxy and morality, Jacques Davy du Perron, claimed to have found 500 errors among Mornay’s references. The latter accepted the challenge to debate. Nine ‘errors’ out of all those alleged were selected for the challenge; only two were found to be inaccurate. It was enough, however, for the king to declare that du Perron had proved his case. It was essentially a political trial, for Henry needed to prove his Catholic credentials, and Mornay had to retire to his castle at Saumur. He had done nothing but harm to his cause. If they were to live in peace and worship freely Huguenots had to learn to eschew needless provocation. But there were always some who would see any weakness in the crown’s position as an opportunity to advance. A second minority would open up that opportunity. It became a convention in later decades to look back on Henry IV’s reign as a golden age of peace and prosperity. The idea grew out of sheer relief at the ending of civil war and was fed by later and prolonged experiences of war: rising taxes, with arbitrary and brutal measures to secure them; several major

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peasant revolts; the five years of unrest and rebellion known as the Fronde. So there was an element of myth in the retrospective view, as there was in the glorification of Henry IV as the king who truly cared for his people, notably, for example, by Colbert, for whom he was always ‘the great king’. There was also substance. Given that at one point Henry had promised marriage to Gabrielle d’Estrées, who suddenly died, and, allegedly, to Henriette d’Entragues, who lived to push and plot for the advancement of her family, he could be counted fortunate to be able to arrange marriage with the Florentine Marie de Medici. It was to the benefit of his finances and relations with the Pope. The succession was ensured by the birth of the future Louis XIII in 1601, followed by two other children. They had to share a nursery with six illegitimate children, the troupeau as it was known at court, ‘an old French custom’ as Henry assured the queen. Indeed, she had much to put up with. Self-­centred, promiscuous to the end, he also knew how to flatter; indeed, he could be charming, the bonhomie unforced, the body language apparently natural, his language of esteem. Bassompierre noticed that ‘he always leaned on somebody’.14 One scene of many such depicts the man: Premier Président Charles Groulart was taken for a stroll in the park, Henry holding him by one hand, Gabrielle d’Estrées by the other. Manners matter in a king. Before it was sealed by premature death, the myth was already in the making: the southerner who could play the scruffy squire, slip easily into the patois of his boyhood, who could present himself as comrade in arms; the statesman who knew how to listen, to instil confidence; the autocrat who could find the words and tone to crush recalcitrant parlementaires; the sovereign whose slovenly ways defied the conventions of polite and courtly behaviour, who knew well – and took – what he held to be his due. Henry had always lived dangerously and there was an element of luck. But he can also be credited with sound political management after as well as before the Edict that, with its subsequent provisions, remains his greatest achievement. After the civil wars, seeing a stronger monarch, the greatest among nobles were slow to adapt to new circumstances, turn to more obliging ways. As Henry had risen so could they. With human and material resources spread over a wide area but grounded usually in the governorship of a province, these men claimed a pre-­eminent role in government. If they saw it given to an outsider, a Concini or a Luynes, they claimed the right to rebel. Religious allegiance might then count for less than family pride and interest. Attitudes would not be changed fundamentally in one short reign. Henry was acutely aware that he lived in an uncertain world, that the best he could do was to allay discontent, contain the potential rebel. When required he showed nerve, a degree of ruthlessness and, where necessary, some finesse. All were

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called for in the complex cases of intrigue and defiance associated with the names of Biron and Bouillon. Henry might have said of Charles de Contaud, baron de Biron: if not him whom can I trust? His father, though Catholic, had fought alongside the king at Arques and Ivry. Charles had excelled in the later campaigns against the Spanish, received a marshal’s baton, been made a duke and governor of Burgundy. It was apparently not enough. Aware of his ambition Spanish and Savoyard agents tempted him with a plan to resurrect the larger Burgundy, with the Franche-­Comté. It was leaked to the king. Biron was arrested in June 1602, promptly tried by Parlement and executed. Biron may have been more gullible than guilty, more dreamer than traitor. Many were shocked by the king’s action, which was seen as ungrateful, cold and calculating. The latter it was – and intended to deter. The duc de Bouillon could not be dealt with so easily. Sovereign in Sedan, Bouillon was at the centre of a network of leading Calvinists united in a sense of common cause. The Elector Palatine was his brother-­in-­law. Sedan appealed to Protestant sentiment as a haven for refugees. Bouillon had ambitions for a new Academy there as the resort of leading scholars and training ground for the Protestant élite of the future. He was sufficiently confident of his status, independent of both Emperor and France, and was not to appeal to the former as suzerain at any time in his three-­year stand-­off with Henry. For both men the stakes were high. From the safety of his great fortress Bouillon could take a lofty view. He took seriously his role as a Protestant leader with vision and responsibilities beyond the church in France. At the same time his prime sympathies and much of his earlier life had been with the Huguenots and he could see that their cause could be damaged by a prolonged dispute. Henry IV’s nature inclined to rashness; but he was aware of the potential damage to his relations with German states from any precipitate move. As before Bouillon could use his numerous connections and clients in and out of Huguenot colloquies and synod to make trouble and exact further concessions. The main issue in protracted negotiations, with huffing and bluffing on both sides, was his right to appoint a royal governor. Henry needed to assert his authority within the realm and his first move was indirect but forceful. In September 1605 he marched south to Poitiers, then made a solemn entry into Limoges, the nearest town of any size to Bouillon’s vicomté of Turenne. With the display of royal magnificence went a selective purge of local nobles known to have ties with Bouillon. In April 1606 he went to the eagle’s nest, with soldiers and forty cannon. Bouillon recognised the force behind the gesture, opened his gates and subsequently accompanied the king back to Paris. For Henry honour was satisfied, his prestige enhanced. But it was hardly the ‘triumph’ lauded by myth-­makers then and later.15 Bouillon had made concessions but he had

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achieved his main objects: recognition of his sovereignty and a further opportunity to assert his leadership of the Huguenots – against the wilder spirits, also against the appeasers; either way potentially against the crown.16 As much as the blessings of peace, the more benign economy and the even-­ handed patronage of the crown, it is the looming presence of over-­mighty subjects that provides the context for the next phase in the Huguenot experience. Huguenot or Catholic, too great to fit comfortably into the evolving pattern of royal absolutism, they might be accommodating – but for how long? So long as Henry IV was on the scene? Yet the blessings were tangible and the more appreciated because of the severe disruption and suffering from disease and famine of the last phases of the war. The feast of St John Baptist in 1598 saw the traditional bonfires across the land. Into the flames in the Place de Grève, which had seen so many Huguenots suffer, now went the drums and weapons that had called out and armed the mob. Relief was general. The Catholic jubilee of 1600 attracted many thousand French pilgrims to Rome, far more than from any other nation, devout, one noticed, ‘as survivors from shipwreck’. By contrast with years of war and waste there was a more secure life for most of the population; the recovery in afflicted areas of agriculture, assisted by some years of good harvests; and everywhere improved conditions for travel and trade. It brought an increase in the revenue from the indirect taxes and made possible the reduction of the taille. Sully’s innovation of the paulette17 brought short-­term gain to the treasury. Huguenots, as much as Catholics, would take advantage of the device to entrench their families in the hereditary office now available to them. The crown came to be less dependent on loans, able to deal drastically with its creditors and so reduce the burden of interest. The king liked to parade his credentials as the protector of his people and it is possible that he did say on some occasion that he wished that every peasant should have ‘a chicken in the pot’. Some may have appreciated, while others endured his salty lectures on royal rights and his periodic assaults on privileged bodies. An indication of what was to come was his harsh treatment of Guienne, where elections were imposed in the face of fierce opposition from vested interests in the province, political and financial. Here Huguenot and Catholic could make common cause. Interestingly the groundwork for that exercise in arbitrary power was laid by the ambitious dévot, Michel de Marillac, former Leaguer and future garde des sceaux.18 Increased use of the ill-­defined powers of the royal council and of royal commissioners, notably at first to deal with problems arising out of the Edict, pointed significantly towards later, more effectively absolutist regimes. Meanwhile the king would use, from necessity but without qualms about previous record or current religious stance, any office-­holder whose ambition did not conflict with the interests of

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the state. What, in this apparently favourable situation, was the Huguenot experience of the reign? First – the essential precondition – how secure could they be, and feel? Some indications are to be found in the work of the bipartisan commissions set up by Henry IV to see to the execution of the Edict.19 Predominantly, Catholic members came from the ranks of the judiciary. Huguenots generally were men of stature in the province they served, judges, governors and nobles among them. Confronted by different stories and situations, by past bereavements and present grievances, memories suppressed, not forgotten, they had to publicise the Edict, explain its terms, eventually secure a collective oath to maintain and observe it. What counted in these meetings, often prolonged and fraught, was the mood of the people and the weight of the commissioners. Their achievement over the years was impressive, without precedent in the nature of the task and the infinite variety of local problems to be resolved. So many bad memories, so many open sores: compromise was often not possible, an imposed solution bound to leave resentment. It helped that there was an overwhelming longing for peace; for conditions in which men could farm and trade without fear of marauding soldiers; also that the commissioners represented a king who clearly meant business – and meant to do it with an even hand. Oubliance was the keynote of the Edict; future harmony the goal; harvesting the fruits of peace the common ground on which the king could stand with Catholic and Huguenot subject alike. Fine words – and yet, as they rode away from some scene of tense negotiation, the king’s commissioners must have wondered whether time would really heal.

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The Regime of the Edict Not so much under the edict as under the king’s good favour.1

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f the partisan spirit was temporarily subdued, if the crown was strong, neither condition could be guaranteed for the future. In both camps, as ever in matters of religion, there were men for whom truth was absolute, action imperative; who saw the Edict as a point of departure for new missionary activity. Even those who accepted that schism was irremediable commonly deplored it. We can see that the achievement of a settlement that allowed for, and afforded protection to, a religious minority surprised contemporaries, not least in England where Catholics, subject to recusancy fines, endured a more restricted and costly status.2 It did not mean that the Huguenots were at once, and everywhere comfortable, nor Catholics in towns where the Huguenots held sway. The chambres de l’Édit were to be kept busy for years with claim and counter-­claim. The prime concern of Catholics was the restoration of the mass where it had been abolished, and the return of priests, monks and nuns. Greeted with scowls and jeers in Montauban or La Rochelle did they feel, as Huguenots did elsewhere, that they were in a foreign land? Not only worship was concerned but also property. They must reclaim the land, buildings; also the right to tithe and revenues lost to the Huguenots. For their part Huguenots demanded the strict application of the articles that assured Protestant worship; predictably they were opposed at every point. The commissioners had to negotiate a site for the construction of a temple, typically just outside the town wall or in a nearby hamlet. They had to ensure access to cemeteries and the right to schooling. They might have to get down to such practical matters as the sale of meat during Lent or the common use of municipal bells. They could pronounce for the present; they could not ensure harmony for the future: that was the work of the chambres mi-­parties. Nowhere was it more difficult than in Paris where Huguenots had to be content at first

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with a site for their temple in the village of Ablon in the chemin des bannis – the name apt enough to greet the footsore. In 1606 Sully secured a nearer site for the worshippers, five kilometres down the Seine at Charenton. Their procession of boats would be a regular Sunday sight, a target for catcalls, sticks and stones.3 There they would be until the Revocation, as notable a body in intellectual weight and serious faith as could be found in any congregation in Europe. The records of one chambre, that of Castres,4 may be typical in the kind of incident or grievance that polarised the magistrates, who could not agree upon the simple need to maintain peace or punish criminal activity. Huguenots conduct public business on a feast day; a pastor preaches a provocative sermon; his congregation sing psalms in a loud and offensive manner; Catholics make difficulties over the building of a temple, teach the faith in school in a Huguenot town. Since Castres was clearly not unique the records convey the impression of a cold war across the land, as much social as ideological. But its weapons were, generally the snowball not the stone, the insult not the sword; and crucially the petition and the writ. That such matters could be negotiated and that further conflicts could be treated fairly through due legal process amounts, for its time, to a political achievement of a high order. Given the endless possibilities for misunderstanding and mischief reflected in the contentions viewed by the magistrates of the chambres mi-­parties we can surely account it a success, however modest in absolute terms, of the principle of even justice. Their position in the chambres gave men like Soffrey de Calignon in Languedoc and Charles du Cros in the Dauphiné extra weight when they appealed to their fellow Huguenots for moderation. Yet those magistrates knew that in many communities there remained a deep sense of outrage. At best perhaps there was a willingness to leave well alone, at worst a mutual abhorrence. From the start therefore there was a temporary, provisional look to proceedings. In many Catholic minds the belief persisted that it was only weakness (in the king’s case half-­heartedness?) that allowed the heretics to coexist. Some Huguenots too believed that if they lost their evangelising spirit the Edict would ‘close on them like a tomb’.5 Indeed, that seemed to one historian to be their fate as ‘a civility, a worldliness, a cult of royalism and intellectual tastes killed . . . the soul of Anne du Bourg, the Martyr, and the spirit of Calvin, the Master.’ 6 Considering the trials of faith that were to come, readers may arrive at a different view. Paris became, with the advent of peace, the social and political centre that it had never been under the Valois, in their strongest days more ambulatory, in their latter weakness powerless to create the necessary concentration of authority in the city. A feature of Henry IV’s reign, after he had regained his capital, was the revival of confidence in the city and its growing prosperity.

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Civic pride rested still in its institutions, the Hôtel de ville and its guilds, Parlement, the Sorbonne. Though some had reservations, some treasonable thoughts, simmering at times as ever, Paris identified once more with monarchy. Through enthusiastic patronage of arts and crafts, and notably of new building, Henry fostered this loyalty. With more money about, those in position to take advantage of new offices and other opportunities to better themselves formed, with those already well placed in high office, a widening élite. It was a time of exceptional opportunity for the man who became, in effect, though keen rivalry with other ministers kept him under some restraint, Henry’s chief minister. As the state recovered its authority and its scope for patronage it signified much that he was a Huguenot. The sieur de Rosny, after 1606 duc de Sully, commanded the widest range of office and powers yet given to a minister. From his youthful adventure in Paris to his active, still combative retirement, writing his tendentious memoirs, proposing the Grand Dessein,7 no single Huguenot life comprises so much of self-­assurance, practical piety and service in battle as in the council chamber; in all matters he was his own man. Does he not exemplify what has been called the ‘inner republicanism’ of the Huguenot, self-­contained and self-­sustaining? It was his, and France’s, good fortune that he was able to serve as minister under a master to whom he had proved his worth, with powers that enabled him to do much to mend the state and give hope for the future. He was sur­­ intendant from 1598 to the end of the reign, grand voyer (in charge of roads and bridges), surintendant des fortifications and grand mâitre d’artillerie. He brought to state policy the mind and method of the keen estate manager, thorough in the management of his own domain but ready to embark on new projects if they showed potential for growth and profit. For Henry his devotion and persistence under sometimes trying circumstances were invaluable – though he groaned at having to find money for the king’s gambling and mistresses. For much that was most impressive about the regime, Sully was responsible: the new or revived manufactures, improved communications, and the steps taken to bring the country up to date in military matters, engineering, fortresses, artillery. Though eyebrows might have been raised at some of his personal peccadillos,8 more seriously at his immense landed fortune and grandiose building plan, to Huguenots his commanding presence in council was re­­­ assuring. From his own theological studies and perusal of the Institutes he found reasons to resist the arguments of the convertisseurs that would have been persuasive to one less secure in his faith. For some Huguenots his extensive powers and ambitious projects meant valuable commissions. We are entering a period when Huguenots found numerous opportunities to exercise their skills and were prominent in professions and across a wide range of other activities.

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Max Weber famously described a ‘Protestant ethic’ as playing midwife to the modern capitalist world.9 A case may indeed be made (but be hard to prove) for the theory that Protestant beliefs and values, in particular the austere discipline of Calvinism, are conducive to enterprise and to lives of probity and hard work. But where Protestants were in a minority there were special conditions to take into account. They may be said to apply to other minority groups, disadvantaged in some way but particularly by exclusion from some conventional career paths. A British reader may think, among other immigrant examples, of the exceptional contribution of Jews to the economy and culture of the host country. For the Huguenots of the diaspora exile from the native land was to act as a challenge to them to re-­make their lives. They had every incentive, besides economic necessity, to make their mark. The Huguenots of Henry IV’s France had the opposite experience. Against all precedent they were allowed to live with security in their own land. Here, surely, a sense of vocation at least partly fulfilled, of a kind of liberation and of a widening field of opportunity, was the refreshing, impelling force in many lives. Sully’s case is of course exceptional. He had survived, as a soldier, against the odds. He proved himself a statesman, one of the most important in France’s history. Other lives strengthen the impression of men resolved to benefit from the new situation, the fortunate conjuncture of security and economic recovery under a political regime more concerned with employing talent than with religious discrimination. It does not follow that they were inherently different from Catholics in their view of investment and enterprise in business; rather that circumstances provided them with challenge and opportunity; also, in trades as in professions, they would tend to favour and work with fellow Protestants. Indeed, Parisians might well think that Huguenots were in the ascendant in places where it counted. The king’s personal entourage was largely Protestant. Among the grandees, always able to gain his ear, and so favoured with office and pension that they managed to resist the temptation to rebel both in and after his reign, were the duc de Thouars, and the duc de Bouillon. The latter’s international ambitions, we have seen, would always cause anxiety; the more reason for keeping him alongside. Two other grandees, Lesdiguières and la Trémouille, governors respectively of the Dauphiné and Poitou, testified to his influence beyond the grave when they distanced themselves from the fermes during the regency. Huguenots filled many household offices. Gabriel de Polignac, besides his Chamber duties, held the vital court post of deputy-­general for Protestants. Jacques Palot and Paul Petan were royal secretaries; Antoine de Loménie was secretary to the king’s cabinet. At a humbler level – but as important as any in access to the king – were Benjamin Aubéry du Maurier, provost in ordinary to

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the king’s bedchamber and Pierre de Béringhen, first valet de chambre. The latter remained in post after his master’s assassination. So attached to him was the young Louis XIII, future hammer of the Huguenots, that he would object violently when he heard any general criticism of the faith. Jean Ribet, sieur de la Rivière, was Henry’s physician-­in-­chief. The king professed to think that Protestants would be less likely to poison him! (Was it for this reason that he employed Huguenot cooks?) Responsibility for the king’s health ensured that the question of religion would be a particularly sensitive one for physicians, closely watched by the Catholic authorities. An extra dimension came with the bitter struggle within the world of medicine between the school of Paracelsus, heterodox in chemical remedies, palliative drugs and surgical methods, and the conservative, Galenist, school to whom Paracelsians were quacks.10 Spread from its German origins largely through the patronage of Protestant grandees and now entrenched in the Huguenot Academy of Montpellier, Paracelsian medicine became a political issue through the interest of the king, who had first encountered it at Nérac. The king invited controversy when he appointed de la Rivière, trained at Montpellier, ‘that stinking bog of prejudice and ignorance’, according to the leading Parisian doctor of the old school, Guy Patin. He was soon joined by Joseph du Chesne, whose past included diplomacy and troop recruitment for Henry, chemical research, and much learned writing. Henry was further pleased to secure the services of du Chesne’s friend, the Genevan Théodore Turquet. The Faculty of Medicine at the University of Paris saw the three men getting a hold over the king and establishing a practice in the city among Catholics as well as Huguenots, successful not least because of their well attested skill in curing venereal disease. With the fury of academics challenged on their own turf, the Faculty launched a fierce attack on du Chesne and Turquet. Its net effect was to enhance their reputation and following. Huguenots closed ranks. Turquet’s defence of chemical remedies, the Apologie, was printed by a Huguenot in La Rochelle, but to play safe Turquet dedicated the work to Achille de Harlay, premier président of Parlement. La Rivière died in 1605, du Chesne in 1609. The king wanted to appoint Turquet his chief physician. The convertisseurs, Père Coton, the king’s Jesuit confessor, and Cardinal du Perron, demanded that he become a Catholic. Turquet would have none of it; nor would the king but the Jesuits persuaded Queen Marie to intervene. A Catholic doctor was appointed and Turquet went off to pursue an extremely successful international practice, leading to the court of Charles I. The episode is revealing as a foretaste of what was to be, following the assassination of the king, when the dévots came into their own. In their political strategy influence at court was all-­important. It mattered less to them what Huguenots were achieving in the mundane world of finance.

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It is a myth, fostered by their enemies, that Huguenots dominated the financial administration of the first half of the century. But under Sully key positions in financial administration were held by Gilles de Maupeou (a convert) and Claude Arnaud, trésorier-­général. Bizot was Général des gabelles; Thomas Turquen Général de monnaies. The paulette was entrusted to Bénigne Saultier and Jean Palot. Guillaume Dupin, who was also a sculptor, was comptroller-­ general of the Mint. In the evolving military establishment, reflecting Sully’s natural reliance on men whom he had seen in action, there were numerous Huguenots, notably Massicault de Beaumont, commissaire of artillery and Jean Evard, creator of the forts system and chief engineer. The tradition of military service would last, to the mutual advantage of crown and subject. In army or navy Huguenots could serve without question of faith; the king would rather have them serve him than the client of some disaffected grandee. Restlessly active in this, as in other fields of creative endeavour, the king called in Protestant experts from Flanders and Languedoc to produce goods of high quality: weavers, makers of pastels, designers of tapestries, dyers – wherever there was need, it was the king’s instinct to find the best men available. Henry well understood the value of grand buildings to advertise the health and permanency of what was, in some respects, a new regime. Androuet du Cerceau was ‘architect to the king’. It was his idea to join the Louvre to the Tuileries, linking the Pavillon de Flore to Catherine’s former apartments. In 1609 came the Grand Gallery. The Louvre had already become a cluster of studios and workshops, with an emphasis on innovation and work of high quality to repay royal sponsorship and reach an international clientele. Here, to name a few, the king might see at work the Huguenots Jacques Alleaume, mathematician and engineer, Jacob Bunel, painter, Abraham de la Garde, clockmaker, Barthélemy Prieue, sculptor, and Guillaume Dupré and Nicolas Briot, designers of coins for the Mint. With men wanting to turn their back on experiences so dreadful and costly it was a time for novel theories and schemes. Foremost in a class of projectors who swarmed about Paris and lobbied at court was the Dauphinois Barthélemy de Laffemas (1545–1611). He had lost his business through war but found occupation at Henry’s court in Navarre, for a time as hairdresser, then financial adviser. With his master in power, and with a ready pen, his inventive spirit found greater scope. At the Assembly of Notables in 1596 he argued for a great national drive to increase manufactures. Sully was impressed and persuaded the king to make him controller of commerce. Protection for native manufactures (though he failed against the financial interest of the Lyons merchants to secure the exclusion of foreign silks), monopolies, removal of duties from imports of raw materials were conventional and attainable goals. Some other

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ideas and experiments were too daring or impracticable for Sully. But the general message – that the country with such resources and strategic opportunities could be both wealthy and powerful – was one that would appeal to Richelieu and Colbert as it did to Sully. With the reforms that were carried out, and the questing spirit that sought to break down barriers, the example of Laffemas suggests an alternative course for France, different from that taken towards sustained aggression, the glorification of absolute monarchy, uniformity in religion – and eventually the expulsion of the Huguenots. Another of exceptional interest, more political theorist than practitioner, was the Norman Huguenot Antoine de Montchrétien (1575–1621), enriched by marriage to a wealthy widow. His depiction of the state of France was more colourful than one expects from an economist but the message was as clear as it was eloquent. France is a beautiful woman, laden with jewels, ‘gold in her hair’; so everyone comes to make love to her and attempts, while caressing her, to rob her of something. So France should build ships to recover her Turkish markets, drive the Spanish out of her American colonies and fish for her own herrings. Again one sees the alternative vision for the future, that which was to be lost in the smoke of war. Montchrétien’s sounds like a Protestant voice and nowhere would it be heard more enthusiastically than in La Rochelle. Indeed, much the same ‘mercantilist’ message was coming out of contemporary England. But it was also to be Colbert’s fifty years on – and no one was more appreciative than Louis XIV’s great minister of the typically ‘Protestant’ virtues of hard work and enterprise that he saw notably in the Dutch. A book published in 1600 became for a time improbably fashionable at court. Its influence owed much to the interest of the king who, for four months, read it every day after dinner. The Théâtre d’Agriculture et Mesnage des Champs was the work of a Huguenot gentilhomme content, as some undoubtedly were, to live peaceably on his estates and cultivate the land – and his garden. It showed how different crops affected the land on which they were grown and could have been the forerunner, a hundred years before it was taken up by English landowners, of the rotation of crops without waste. The English would be readier than their French counterparts to stay on their estates and devote time to improvement. In France, bourgeois owners, some now moving into the lands of impoverished nobles or buying strips from hopelessly indebted peasants, tended to bring with them short-­term notions of profit. Only taxation relief could have stimulated a genuine interest in the improvements that would have brought real benefit to the peasant. De Serres’ book remained in circulation till the reign of Louis XIV. It vanished then, only to be hailed as a discovery in the 1770s. It offers another tantalising suggestion of an alternative way for France, which might have found firmer foundations if Henry had lived another twenty years. In respect of foreign policy it was to be

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supported by Marillac and the dévots. But then one must recall that Henry was preparing for war against Spain, his head turned it seems by his frustrated desire for the young princesse de Condé and the protection afforded her at the archduke’s court in Brussels, when he was cut down. One moment his domineering presence; the next a frightening void. Le roi est mort; vive le roi. Did the time-­honoured formula count for much when the country faced its second minority and regency in fifty years – and when some fundamental issues, the cause of civil wars, had been not so much resolved as shelved?

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c h a p t e r t w e n t y - ­t wo

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Catholic Reformation The great age of souls.

O

n 14 may 1610, halted in his carriage by the congestion in a narrow Parisian street, the king was stabbed to death by François Ravaillac. A poor teacher from Angoulême, after years of rejection and hardship he had become obsessed with the idea that Huguenots planned a massacre and that the king was failing in his duty to protect his Catholic subjects, indeed planning to make war on the Pope. So he seems to offer a classic case of hallucinatory killer. He also witnesses to the effect on a disordered mind of political theories that condoned tyrannicide, and the unceasing clamour of voices insisting on the dangers of heresy to the individual and to the realm.1 All accounts confirm that Henry’s subjects were shocked and that grief was fervent and real. There were, however, some Catholics who had never accepted that Henry’s conversion was sincere, saw the hand of God in his punishment and looked forward to the reign of a boy who had been born Catholic and who would become fully aware of his duty to destroy heresy. In the meantime they could find assurance in the regency of Marie, reliably devout and patron of the Jesuits, and more astute and determined than she has usually been assumed to have been.2 Conversely, Huguenots had reason to be fearful. Henry’s balancing act had not impressed all. The war of ideas continued, with constant assault, in tract and sermon, from the Jesuits, provoked, in fact matched, by the Huguenots’ narrow focus on Rome as the source of persecution and on the Pope as Antichrist. That had long been the depiction, indeed the official line since it had been affirmed by the national synod of 1603. That body had also commissioned from Nicolas Vignier a work on the subject, as well as, from Jean-­Paul Perrin, a second book on the Albigensians.3 Huguenots who had tended in the earlier Religious Wars to equate their suffering with those of the early church

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were now taking a broader view of their history, particularly that of their martyrs, as a phase in Rome’s long, continuing repression of ‘the true church’. Into this fitted the history of the Albigensians and Waldensians still much alive in the memory in southern parts where potential rebels could still be found. Meanwhile Huguenots everywhere continued to be reminded of their past by successive editions of the Histoire des martyrs.4 It was essentially a French past of which they could be proud but they could also identify with a longer, international story and with the experience of Wyclif, Hus and Luther. The sense of identity varied between different parts of France, according to their history; and between individuals and communities according to current circumstances. A faint heart, a mind to compromise – of course they were not unusual. There would be defections. But of the body as a whole the story is one of resilience, fortified in each succeeding generation by the double sense of belonging: to their part of the kingdom, and to a true church. It would be tested. For all the peace and relative security of the Edict, conditions had remained uncomfortable, especially so in the places where Huguenots were a wary handful. But where there were hardships and grievances, Henry’s rule had offered the possibility of redress. In this situation Marie’s swift guarantee that she would honour the terms of the Edict brought some relief. She was prompted, of course, by fear of civil war. After the experience of previous minorities there were grounds for apprehension. During the minority that lasted till 1617 and the downfall in that year of Marie’s favourite Concini;5 after the king’s assumption then of personal rule, and up to the fall of La Rochelle in 1628, the fate of the Huguenots was inextricably bound up with the king’s political aspirations. To him, as to the formidable cleric Cardinal Richelieu, whom, in 1624, he brought into his council, the Huguenots might offend as Protestant heretics; but it was as rebels, actual or potential, alongside some disaffected Catholic magnates, that they brought down on themselves the military power of the state. So it was that the fall of La Rochelle would come to be seen as a crucial episode in the evolution of absolute royal government. There is much here to be explained. The belated reception of the principles of Catholic reform was starting to affect the French church, priests and laity. We are entering what has been called the ‘great age of souls’.6 To concerned Catholics of the time the blemishes and shortcomings might have seemed more obvious than the signs of vitality. Looking back, however, from mid-­ century, it will be seen that they did not deceive. Improved discipline and training for the clergy, new agencies of mission, education and reform, a remarkable expansion in the religious orders – all could be seen. Possibly less obvious but no less real was the change in these years in the tone of religious discourse and activity. Strident Catholic voices and extreme demands could

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still be heard, typically at meetings of the church assembly when the crown’s demand for money offered some bargaining power to the dévot. If the heroic posturing and rhetoric of the Religious Wars are held to indicate a fearful sense of the fragility of the church, the gentler, more reflective tone, and the new emphasis of some on charity and persuasion, surely point to confidence and certainty. The Huguenots were less of a threat. As Vincent de Paul saw them they were ‘separated brethren’. The reception of the reforms proposed by the Council of Trent had been delayed by Gallican prejudice and the vested interest of noble ecclesiastics in the preservation of the system to which they owed their promotion. At the States-­General of 1614 a different spirit prevailed, with enough of ambition in it to alarm Huguenots. The bishops resolved upon the strict implementation of the Tridentine reforms. So they were enjoined to reside in their sees, carry out visitations, catechise and insist upon higher moral standards among their clergy. Education and training of priests still lagged, for seminaries were rare but there was an improvement, modest at first but marked under the aegis of Louis XIII and Richelieu in the quality of bishops and abbots. Richelieu himself, as bishop of Luçon (in the family’s gift), though absent for long periods, was otherwise a model pastor.7 If the state of the diocese when he arrived in 1608 fairly represents the state of the church, from his own roofless ‘palace’ and damaged cathedral down to neglected villages and ignorant curés, his work there shows what could be done. Huguenots in the diocese and nearby La Rochelle might observe less emphasis on coercion, more on exposition, on mission and conversion through debate and example. Was Richelieu fired by concern for souls, driven by his taste for order and propriety, or principally by his ambition? Nothing in his subsequent career, though his anti-­ Habsburg policy was disturbing to dévots, suggests that he abandoned the principles of his youth. No such questions arise over the career of another reformer, first and foremost an ecclesiastic, another Carlo Borromeo as he has been called. From one of the greatest of noble families (his uncle was a Huguenot leader killed on St Bartholomew’s) Cardinal de la Rochefoucauld epitomises, for Catholic Reformation, ‘the range and diversity of interests of virtually every one of its leading figures’ and in his long, dedicated life the aspirations of Trent.8 A product of the Jesuit college of Clermont, he became the lifelong supporter of the teaching, missionary order. Consistently ultramontane in his view of the church he was nonetheless acceptable to the crown. He owed his early promotion, in 1584, to the diocese of Clermont, in the benighted recesses of unreformed Catholicism, to court connections and local influence: the combination that underwrote many ecclesiastical careers and did little for the health of the church. In his case it was the start of a lifetime’s course of reform, stern and

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thorough, which he later pursued in Senlis, conveniently close to the capital. He is notable for the diversity of interests that can also be seen in other spiritual leaders of the time. He wrote substantially about the authority of the church and the vocation of the priesthood; as Grand Almoner he promoted reforms at court, in hospices and, at the behest of Richelieu, as commissioner for monasteries. Some monasteries were indeed Augean stables, beyond the reach of reformers, encouraged in defiance by the fact that abbots in commendam were commonly absentee, the income being of more interest than the life of prayer. A trickle of monks from cloister to Huguenot pastorate had been an early indication of discontent. Efforts to improve discipline could founder on disputes about authority. Since Richelieu was promoting reform, opponents saw it as part of his absolutist agenda. The nature and source of the problem were illustrated when, on the death of Richelieu, the prince of Condé persuaded Anne of Austria to accept the election of his young son, Conti, as abbot-­general of Cluny. However, there was a new earnestness abroad, with initiative for change sometimes coming from within the house or order, sometimes from Rome. Orders like the Augustinian canons-­regular remained virtually untouched. But the Feuillant congregation had already emerged from within the Cistercians before 1600. The main thrust was to revive older forms of observance, fuelled often by a renewed interest in the life of the early church. The most visible effects, according to the priorities in different orders, were in more regular observance of the liturgical day, more effort in learning and teaching, and more care in the training of novices. Richelieu was an early supporter of Pierre Bérulle and of his Oratory, founded in 1611 to establish a new ideal of spiritual life and a model for the priesthood. In his theocentric spirit, in what he called ‘adherence to Christ’, lay his greatest significance. It informed the personal odyssey of Madame Acarie, who was primarily responsible for the introduction, in 1602, of the Carmelite order into France and whose Parisian house became a centre – a religious salon it might be called – for the dévots. The word has been met in the context of the League, having the imprint of fanaticism from the days of the Seize, at war with the politiques. Those battles were too recent to forget – least of all by Mme Acarie whose husband had been a prominent Leaguer. Now in gentler times the piety was no less intense, but it was more optimistic in spirit and practical in intention. There were aspects of the dévot mentality that were to be called precious, especially by those unsympathetic to the calling of the mystic; the taint of hypocrisy would be noticed by Molière. Its preoccupation with morality, intensified after the foundation, in 1630, of the Compagnie du Saint-­ Sacrement, was seen as intrusive, naturally by those who were its targets. The abiding impression is likely to be of a spiritual élite, of rare souls in an age of

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faith, of men and women as diverse as St Vincent de Paul, St François de Sales, St Jean Eudes, the organiser of country missions, St Louise de Marillac, pioneer of Monsieur Vincent’s nursing sisters, and St Jeanne de Chantal, founder of the Visitandines, an order of nuns, in the words of St François ‘for strong souls with weak bodies’. The roll call could be longer. People noticed, some Huguenots among them, the impressive way in which an ardent faith was channelled into practical works. Two lives, in particular, and writing and work that bridged confessional lines, illustrate the new look. François de Sales and Vincent de Paul were more effective missionaries for the church than any number of polemicists striving to prove the correctness of their doctrine. The former wrote for Mme de Chantal the spiritual masterpiece Traité de l’amour de Dieu. His devotional manual, Introduction à la vie dévote, published in 1609, ran to forty editions by 1656. His conception of the mystical experience of God as being open to all good Catholics was a Catholic version of Luther’s priesthood of all believers. Its effect has been compared to that of John Law’s Serious Call (1728) on eighteenth-­century England. François was a saint in the popular reckoning before his death. His books would figure in many Huguenot libraries. A peasant’s son from the Landes, de Paul was a more radical figure, formed in extreme situations. At different times he was a chaplain to the galleys, a curé in a miserable village where he saw the neglect of the rural poor, and spiritual adviser to the powerful family of Gondi. He is famous for his Dames de la Charité, better known in their later form as Les Filles de la Charité after he had recruited peasant girls to do the rougher work to which noble ladies were unused. In their grey dresses and white cornettes they took charity to streets and homes. Their founder’s approach to life is revealed by his instructions: ‘For your monastery use the houses of the sick, for your chapel the parish church, for your cloister the streets of towns or the rooms of hospitals.’ Huguenots, whom zealous friars might simply offend, could find more appealing the generous side of Catholic spirituality. In the work of ‘Monsieur Vincent’s’ college of priests, the Lazarists, trained to go into the countryside in squads, catechising and preaching, they saw where they might be falling short. When the Edict of Nantes has been seen as inhibiting Huguenots’ capacity for growth it is not only because its strict provisions confirmed their minority status and limited habitat. It is also because conditions uniquely favoured Catholic evangelism. Another aspect of the Counter-­Reformation in France is the remarkable spread of the religious orders through the country. Almost every order flourished. In 1631 the parlement of Rouen declared that ‘in the last twenty years more religious orders have been founded than in the last thousand’. In the single diocese of Coutances there were six foundations in twelve years. Almost

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every order flourished, Franciscans, Dominicans, Capuchins, Calvarists, Premonstratensians, Carmelites, and most conspicuously, the Jesuits; even the most severe of orders, the Trappists and the Carthusians, found recruits. Nor was this principally a male phenomenon. It is possible to view the Catholic reform movement as going beyond institutional patriarchy to misogyny, insistence on the celibate accompanied by the discrediting of sexuality and, not uncommonly, branding of women as agents of the Devil. Yet the language and the attitudes it undoubtedly represents offer a distorted picture of the Catholic spirituality of the early seventeenth century when ‘the Gallican church was prised open, to admit women into its spiritual life’.9 A principal influence was the writing of St Teresa of Avila. In 1601 a small group of Spanish Carmelite nuns appeared in Paris. In the next forty years fifty-five more convents had been founded. Even more surprising was the growth of the Ursulines, the dedicated specialists in girls’ education. By 1700 there were 320 Ursuline communities across the land with some 12,000 members. Along with the insistence on male authority which remained a feature in church and society went a significant feminisation of spirituality. It can be seen in de Sales and, towards the end of the century, the important writer and spiritual director, Fénelon.10 By mid-­century there were more nuns in France than monks and friars. Among the motives that led so many women to embrace the life of prayer, and its complement in teaching, nursing and catechising, may have been the unattractive prospect of marriage, with the perils of childbirth. For many fathers the convent provided a means – as respectable as marriage and, in dowry terms, less expensive – of providing for daughters. No doubt some nuns were reluctant to embrace the spiritual life; some convents were notoriously slack. The case of the ‘possessed’ nuns of Loudun shows how hysteria could overtake a community.11 The difference between the ideal and the fashionably relaxed could be seen when Mère Angélique became the reforming abbess of Port Royal.12 But when social pressures, anxiety or convention are discounted there remain enthusiasm and a sense of mission. Here were outward-looking women, finding fulfilment in service, appreciated, often loved for what they were doing, influential at every level of society. One aspect of Huguenotism in its early stages had been the enhanced role of some women, with the opportunity to pursue lives of learning and devotion in the domestic sphere. That remained the case and played its part in sustaining the faith of families in the time of persecution. But the surge in Catholic women’s religious vocation, with the evident signs of its good effect in society, was starting to remove – where women had any choice in the matter – some of the appeal of Protestantism to the woman who sought a devout and useful life. Convinced Huguenots were, however, unlikely to appreciate the theology that underlay the enclosed life of prayer and contemplation. They

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might also be nervous of the motives of the Jesuits and the several orders of friars who were increasingly visible in the Huguenot areas of the south. When that led to efforts to secure the allegiance of the young there was potential for open conflict. Religious revival in France had an international dimension. All parties would be aware, even before the suppression of the Bohemian revolt and the renewed onslaught of Spain on the United Provinces, of the widening context of their struggle – the Catholic Reconquista. Enhanced Habsburg power, the close strategic alliance between the Austrian and Spanish branches, the missionary zeal of the religious orders, notably the Jesuits, constituted a threat to Protestants everywhere. For the Catholic monarchy of France it created a dilemma. How it was resolved would affect the history of Europe for a hundred years. The question, broadly stated, was whether to work with the Habsburgs for the glory of the church or to consult the traditional interest of the patrie in the advance and consolidation of her land frontiers. The former course would be that espoused by the dévots for whom there was no question about priorities. It was, however, a troubling question for Richelieu, whose devout Catholicism did not preclude a keen sense of the strategic interests of the monarchy he served. He had not been long in power before the success of the Vienna– Madrid axis raised the question in the most acute form. It would have been easier for the French statesman to think of the greater glory of God if it had not been so evidently envisioned by the Habsburgs in terms of Hausmacht – and if the Vatican too had not been concerned about the extent of Spanish influence in Italy. It would, of course, be safer to oppose the Habsburgs, if only by limited military action, such as the occupation of the Val Telline, if the domestic front had been secure. It should therefore seem to have been in the interest of Huguenots, as Sully had argued, to refrain from any action that might provoke the crown. It could, however, be politic for the crown to establish its Catholic credentials by launching an assault on the Huguenots. In the real political world choices are never so simple. Events take over, incidents matter; so do the personal motives of the main protagonists. For explanation of the tangled sequence of events that would lead ultimately to the fall of La Rochelle we should look to the rival factions around the royal council and the Huguenot assemblies. It was there that it would be decided whether the provisions of the Edict of Nantes were to remain intact and religious peace to last. At court the leadership changed. As the regent placed her trust in Catholic ministers like the veteran Villeroy and former Leaguers, Jeannin and Sillery, Sully, who had been accustomed, even in that company, to having the ear of the king, found himself isolated and virtually powerless. Early in 1611 he resigned. Another who felt excluded was Condé.13 Barely literate and of erratic temper but as prince of the blood only two steps away from the throne, he

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expected to have a voice in government. He had renounced the faith of his father and grandfather and would be foremost among those who demanded strong action against the Huguenots. In his rebellious moves of 1614 and 1615, he could claim justification in the meteoric rise and excessive influence of Concini. He then showed no compunction in appealing to Bouillon and other Huguenot grandees, for support. Their conduct overall (although they rarely acted together), besides that of Condé, Vendôme14 and others among Catholic nobles, leads one to see Huguenot militancy primarily in terms of noble ambition. The reality is more complex. As Huguenotism came under new pressure existing differences came into sharper focus. It may be that most Huguenots desired nothing more than to be able to live in peace with their neighbours and to be able to meet for worship in some not too distant place. That, in the main, is what they could still do. However, the intemperate language of their representatives and the general mood of the assembly that met in August 1611 at Saumur could be interpreted by Marie as a bid to exploit her temporary difficulties. It would not be forgiven. She had sanctioned the Saumur assembly, ostensibly to elect two deputies to represent Huguenots at court, to negotiate with her over the renewal of the provisions of Nantes and to deal with Huguenot grievances. She envisaged a religious assembly but it quickly proved to be political in composition and concerns. The debate at Saumur shows plainly that the tradition of Huguenot militancy was not dead; nor confined to a few ambitious nobles; rather it reflected the theological principles for which so many had fought. There still survived, though tempered by the experience of civil war, much of the spirit that had sustained the paramilitary system of the civil wars. Duplessis-­Mornay, ‘Huguenot pope’, well understood, as he shared, the principles and the spirit that led men to fight to promote the cause of Christ. If he pursued a political path it was not for lack of conviction. Now his aim of reconciling the needs of the church, pastoral and institutional, with obedience to the crown was jeopardised by the confrontational spirit welling up in the provinces. As voiced typically by d’Aubigné, prompted by pastors and elders especially of the south-­ west, Guienne, Saintonge, Poitou, and reflecting no doubt the influence of La Rochelle, the language of obedience gave way to that of assertion and demand. It served notice that Huguenots would hold assemblies whether sanctioned or not; that when sanctioned they would not confine their activities to nominating two deputies-­general. An assembly would be an opportunity to petition the crown, to push for its reading of the terms of the Edict and in the process to maintain some kind of national political presence. If it be judged that the Huguenots brought about their own destruction by their actions in the years following the death of Henry IV the charge should be laid not only at the door of their noble leaders, or at that of the government of La Rochelle. For a

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variety of reasons, but with Calvinist faith at the heart of action, significant numbers were prepared to take up arms against the crown or when attacked, as at Montauban, to fight to the death. The assembly at Saumur served warning; that of Nîmes in 1615 sanctioned involvement in the rebellion of nobles, Catholic as well as Protestant. No wonder some of its members were alarmed. The main issue at Saumur was that of leadership, implicitly the direction of the movement. Duplessis-­Mornay still had influence, particularly over the pastors, but not the military clout that the times apparently demanded. Bouillon saw himself as the natural leader, having imperial titles, princely contacts and extensive lands: within France the virtually independent vicomté of Turenne; on the frontier the important fortresses of Metz and Sedan. His strategy was to encourage Huguenots to press for concessions while assuring Marie that he was the man with authority to deal with them. But his record was against him. For more than twenty years he had treated Henry less as his subject than as fellow sovereign with loyalty and favours to bargain for. So when he urged moderation on the assembly to win the Regent’s favour they turned from him to a more appealing candidate. Aged thirty-­two, Henri duc de Rohan had wealth and high family in his favour. Before the birth of the dauphin, he had been heir presumptive to the throne of Navarre.15 When Henry had made him duc et pair in 1603 his mother had been indignant. Was not the family motto ‘Roi je ne puis, duc ne dédaigne, Rohan je suis’? Just as important, he had character. A small, wiry man, a proven campaigner, he preferred to live plainly, as he claimed ‘in Breton fashion’. He was also intelligent, much travelled and well known abroad, a student of mathematics, geography and history, and the author of a commentary on Caesar’s Gallic Wars. Under more favourable circumstances he might indeed have been, as some were starting to see him, another William of Orange. But he rarely had a free hand. Between the rash actions of a minority of his party and the pressure from the court, markedly more aggressive when Louis asserted his right to rule, he would sometimes find himself catching up with rather than directing events. That was the case in 1614 when the meeting of the States-­General gave the dévots their chance to bring the Huguenot issue to the fore. The proposed Spanish marriage, that of Louis XIII to Anne of Austria, provided further grounds for Condé to rebel. He mounted a series of challenges, gatherings of followers to demonstrate independent power rather than revolts, but sufficiently threatening to secure eventually, by the ‘treaty’ of Loudun in May 1616, important concessions, a large subsidy and the titular position of head of Marie’s councils. It would not last long. In September 1616 he was imprisoned; he would be out of action for three years. To Richelieu,

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himself insecurely placed as the protégé of the queen mother, the treaty was a necessary if disgraceful concession to noble blackmail. It was part of the larger picture of a state hamstrung at a time of international tensions, threatening a new phase of religious wars. Richelieu would fall with Concini. When he returned to power in 1624, his prime concern, with that of the king, would be to lift the authority of the crown above that of over-­mighty subjects and privileged bodies. Foremost among them were the Huguenots.

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Ventures Too Far Let it be your care to attempt nothing not warranted by his word.1

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rudence might have suggested that this was not a time for Huguenots to be involved in the cause of Condé, the man whom they regarded as the supreme renegade and their sworn enemy. To exert maximum pressure on the regent Condé had enlisted leading Huguenots, notably Bouillon and La Force. Huguenots could now be stigmatised as rebels, as some undoubtedly were. After Louis XIII’s bold coup of April 1617 and the murder of Concini the king, having always at his elbow the man who had prompted the coup, his firm favourite, the duc de Luynes, made no secret of his resolve to curtail their power. He was beset by a further rebellion, this time under the patronage of his mother. After the victory of the royal army against the nobles of the queen mother’s party at Ponts de Cé, in July 1620, he was free to make his strike. Against the advice of cautious counsellors he marched south to the Pyrenees. For one historian a new period in the history of France, that is to say ‘the crucial phase’ in the development of ‘absolutism’, begins not, as traditionally, in 1624, with Richelieu, but in 1620, with the double victory, over rebel nobles and the defiant Huguenots of Béarn.2 It was around this time that a number of Huguenots, mainly nobles, abjured the faith. Sometimes it was lightly held; sometimes traded for office, especially for promotion in the army. Some soldiers, now that they no longer felt loyal obligation to their once-­Huguenot king, saw in Louis a worthy successor, earnest and resolute, one who meant business. There are cases too of Huguenots being impressed, spiritual converts, by the evidence of Catholic reform, the example of Catholic lives. The small sovereign state of Béarn, one of five cisalpine provinces of the kingdom of Navarre (along with Navarre, Bigorre, Comminges and Foix), linked only in the person of the king to the French state, has been compared to Scotland – also since 1603 experiencing a union of crowns. Its mountainous

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terrain, its independent institutions and traditions, its small but proud capital, Pau, its tough, uncompromising brand of Calvinism imposed from above, its warrior nobles, all suggest it.3 An office-­holding élite was tied the more closely to the faith by their acquisition of former church lands. Where Scotland could turn to France, Béarn could to Spain. Even without that threat the location of Béarn ensured that it was regarded as a strategic prize. Louis was determined to see that it was subject to him. Success there would send a strong signal to Huguenots elsewhere. Achieved, by the mailed fist of the royal soldier and the velvet glove of the royal patron, it illuminates current issues and suggests what Huguenots could expect. The Béarnais had grown over-­confident. The restoration of Catholic worship and all church property had been one of the Pope’s conditions for granting Henry absolution in 1595. The territory was not covered by the Edict of Nantes but Catholicism was reintroduced into Béarn by a further edict and bishops were installed at Oleron and Lescar. There were several Catholic councillors but the Huguenot monopoly of legal and financial offices remained otherwise complete. When the Huguenot assembly decided to include the Béarnais in the organisation of the church, morale was further lifted. But when put to the test a significant division was exposed. One of Louis XIII’s first acts, in June 1617, after the end of the regency, was to issue an Edict of Restitution requiring all church property seized since 1569 to be restored to the church. Militants in the Estates of Béarn couched their resistance to the edict in terms of fundamental law and popular sovereignty. After the parlement of Pau also opposed the edict, Louis had to bide his time as he faced up to a further rising of nobles, on behalf of the queen mother. Meanwhile, however, anticipating assault, a party of moderates emerged, directed by Jacques de Gassion. He was accused of supporting the return of church lands and of caring more for his office than for the religious and political rights of Béarn. On a diplomatic mission to court, pursued by hostile rumour, he was refused the Lord’s Supper by the Huguenots of Paris. Back in Béarn, he joined with the Catholic councillors in demanding that its reformed church break off relations with the French assembly of churches. His actions offer us a cameo of the larger scene where the attractive force of Bourbon absolutism combined with realistic appreciation of the power of royal patronage to promote understanding and cooperation between moderates of both confessions. So Béarn was not only a relatively easy target for the crown; it was also weakened by schism at the heart of its establishment: as in the rest of the country, the fermes could not have it all their way.4 After the battle of Ponts de Cé, in July 1620, Louis did not hesitate. He had seen that Condé had found support in Huguenot territory in 1615–16, while in 1620 nearly all the

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Huguenot leaders, including Rohan, had placed their fortresses and followers at the service of the rebel grandees. Had he also taken note of events in Prague, where in 1618 a Protestant-­led rebellion brought about the overthrow of Habsburg rule in Bohemia? He would certainly have been impressed by the Emperor’s victory at the White Mountain in November 1620 that restored his rule at a stroke. By that time Louis had enforced his will on the authorities in Béarn. The royal force was small and in poor shape after its long march south. But the prestige of the crown, reinforced by recent victory and Louis’ startling energy, was enough to persuade the Huguenot governor La Force to submit. The magistrates of Pau hastily registered the Edict and handed over the great church of St Martin to Catholic worship. Five days after his arrival Louis attended mass and followed the sacrament in procession through the city. It was a significant royal moment. Huguenots in the rest of France were not directly affected but they could read the message driven home in pamphlets extolling the king’s patriarchal regard for his subjects, his willingness to confirm local privilege in return for acceptance of his God-­given and absolute authority. ‘What divine punishment awaits those who rise up in rebellion against God’s anointed.’5 They were all too aware, following the defeat of the Bohemian rebels and the renewed Spanish onslaught on the United Provinces, of the widening context of their struggle. If Louis XIII was determined to attack them, they were equally determined to resist. They were prepared for it. The Huguenot assembly that met illegally over Christmas 1620 at La Rochelle planned for the operations of the coming year. The civil wars had exposed two main weaknesses in the structure of the Huguenot ‘state’, and the provisions of the Edict of Nantes, in establishing the places de surêté, had done nothing to remedy them. Provincial councils, reflecting local conditions and needs, worked independently, even sometimes at odds with one another. The military potential was reduced by the dispersion of soldiers – and, crucially, guns – in the mostly small garrisons of the places de sûreté. In effect only those towns that had a substantial Huguenot population and where the garrison was an integral part of the town and supported by the citizens could mount an effective resistance. Rohan understood this. He soon showed that he could act decisively when, in 1612, to protect nearby La Rochelle, he seized St Jean-­d’Angély. Approaching the problem from a military angle, and possibly with German practice in mind, he presented the assembly with a plan for the regrouping of Huguenot provinces into eight circles, each assigned to a prominent Huguenot noble. They were not to replace existing councils but to provide more rapid support when called upon. In accepting his proposal delegates insisted that the circle assemblies should be non-­political and mandated only to give moral support. They reserved a

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measure of direct authority including the right, which was to prove contro­ versial, to nominate certain officers. No peace could be signed without the assembly’s consent. Levying taxes, organising the armed struggle – here surely the assembly had crossed the line that separated the fiscal, military role from the accepted right to represent and petition. That is how the court would view the matter, and it would point to the rebellious spirit of Calvinist hotheads to persuade nobles like Lesdiguières that their interest lay with the crown. Yet assembly members saw themselves as loyal subjects, resorting to arms in self-­defence. In the process they had to work with the different provincial assemblies, with the towns which provided the funds, and with individual noble leaders. It was significant that cooperation worked notably well in dealings with La Rochelle when there was a common interest, strategic and economic, in the formation of a fleet. It was to control the Atlantic sea lanes, promote the profitable activity of privateering and, to that end, keep management of naval affairs out of the hands of the duc d’Épernon who, as governor of Guienne, claimed jurisdiction over the port. A fund was set up to develop the fleet and an admiral chosen from the city’s council. In June 1621 an Admiralty court was established and letters of marque issued to privateers authorising them to attack ‘enemies of the religion’. This was in the first degree lèse-­majesté. Though the leaders were to command ‘under the authority of His Majesty’, he could not be expected to tolerate an independent naval authority. If not exactly a declaration of war the court was an affront to the crown which, if maintained, must lead to war. It was due mainly to Rohan’s drive and talent for organisation that there was a Huguenot army of any size to meet the challenge. His main recruitment area was the Cévennes. By 1621 he had about 8,000 under arms of a sort, mostly ancient arquebuses and muskets: hardy mountain folk but inexperienced, readier for a quick skirmish than a prolonged campaign. They were seasonal warriors, liable to slip away at harvest time. He had experienced officers, however, and, as would be proved by a later generation of Huguenots,6 good terrain for resistance. The tracks along the ridges and through the forests of the Cévennes provided safe lines of communication between his main headquarters, Alès in the west, Millau and Castres in the east. His main activity, during the siege of Montauban, apart from recruitment and provisioning, and directing the occasional skirmish, was in protecting the land round the Huguenot towns from the burning of crops and stealing of livestock that were the usual recourse of soldiers, regular and irregular. Plainly the crown had deeper resources to call upon and, potentially, the authority to exploit them. But that did not mean a foregone conclusion to the campaigns of 1621 and 1622. On the one hand the king was resolved to fight

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to the finish. By affirming that he fought against the Huguenots as rebels rather than as Protestants, and explicitly confirming their right to worship, he isolated the southerners from the rest. Before he left the assembly of La Rochelle – and the faith – Lesdiguières put it fairly and succinctly: The only hope and consolation which is left to us is that his Majesty has made it known very clearly that he has no more desire to tamper with our consciences than the pupil of his eye . . . Nevertheless it is his intention to put affairs in such an order that neither Catholics nor those of the Religion will be able to trouble his realm.7

It was a fair assessment of Louis’ view. The king had to work hard to secure Lesdiguières’ conversion. The ‘king of the Dauphiné’ bargained hard; he also cared about the Protestants. Eventually he would cross over, a move especially ominous to the Huguenot cause. In the cathedral at Grenoble, like La Trémoille’s in camp before La Rochelle, his public rite of conversion was received with acclaim.8 Rohan gained relatively few volunteers from the cities, indeed from any part of France outside Languedoc and the south-­west. The king could rely on divisions, not only in the Huguenot leadership, but also between the soldiers and the mainly bourgeois members of the assemblies and councils. There were defections besides that of Lesdiguières and, throughout, a peace party within Huguenot ranks. In the view of most delegates, Rohan was only the military agent of their administration: they served the church, he served them. Like them he was concerned to secure the provisions of the Edict of Nantes. Militant voices were usually loudest but increasing numbers inclined towards appeasement, eschewing provocation, seeking negotiation. He held that it would only be fruitful if conducted from a position of strength. And he believed that time – and the Habsburgs – were on his side. For his part Louis was convinced that the drive against the Huguenots was not only right; it was also urgent. After the recovery of Bohemia the Habsburgs were on the offensive in Germany, the Netherlands and Italy. While Louis engaged the Huguenots the Spanish occupied the Val Telline, vital link in ‘the Spanish road’, the supply line from Milan to Flanders. The pretext was to give protection to Catholics against the Protestants of the Grisons. For ‘Catholics’ read ‘forts’ for as the Papal Nuncio wrote in December 1621, ‘religion is the cloak under which the Spanish conceal their designs on Italy’. Spain would take advantage of any perceived weakness or check in Louis’ assault on the Huguenots. The stakes were high. Rohan was less glamorous or effective than Gustav Adolf of Sweden would be at another dark hour for Protestantism,9 but he knew the

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international scene well enough to understand that his heroic efforts would have consequences beyond the realm. The irony here is that when he distracted the royal government from mounting an effective challenge to Spain, at least by cutting the supply line to the Netherlands, he damaged the Protestant cause. The crown’s first objective, after the occupation of Saumur and removal of its veteran governor, Duplessis-­Mornay, was St Jean-­d’Angély, heavily fortified since 1612 and resolutely defended by Rohan’s brother the duc de Soubise. Noble officers vied for the glory of storming the ramparts. It would have been better if they had worked to a single plan. In this period of the ‘military revolution’, notable for developments in the theory and practice of siege warfare, among other departments of the art of war, the French were relatively inexperienced. Their failings were to be brutally exposed after 1635 when France engaged in war on her eastern frontier. It was two months before the city was taken; then the walls were razed and the moat filled; it would become the standard practice as the royal troops took a series of small Huguenot towns. As Louis observed, the place for fortresses was on the frontier. St Jean-­d’Angély’s heroic resistance had not, however, been in vain: it meant that the siege of Montauban was delayed. It was superbly placed for defence, high above the river, and the French were unable to close the ring about the city. Again the management was inefficient. Constable Luynes was unfairly mocked: ‘Constable for peace, Keeper of the Seals for war’.10 On one occasion Huguenots detonated a mine in the besieging trenches and destroyed one of their main forts. Within the city there was hunger and debate. Some leading citizens wanted to make peace. As commonly in such situations, those who had most to lose had least appetite for the fight. But Rohan managed to get more troops and supplies into the town. The defiant spirit of the citizens was typified by the woman who lost an arm to a cannonball; with her other arm she was seen hurling stones against the enemy. The royal troops suffered heavy casualties but lost more from disease. In early November Luynes called off the siege. He died in December, a discredited figure, leaving Louis to try doing more by himself. He would soon find that pious resolve, sense of duty and strategic purpose were not enough. Of several ministers La Vieuville’s experience in finance seemed best to qualify him for the prime position. Meanwhile Richelieu, ostensibly serving the queen mother, waited in the wings. After the failure of the siege of Montauban, which exposed the weakness of an army still feudal in outlook, as much the preserve of its leading officers as instrument of the king, it took nerve in Louis to renew his operations. By the end of 1621 all Alpine strategic points were in Habsburg hands. The Grisons had been forced to sign a treaty giving the Val Telline to Milan. France had to retaliate; it was just a question of when. Louis’ generals would rather fight in Italy, and against the Spanish, than against fellow Frenchmen; indeed,

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Lesdiguières made it a condition on entering royal service that he would not be required to fight against the Huguenots. At first therefore Louis appeared to be keeping his options open. Troops were concentrated at Lyons whence they could move into north Italy or to Languedoc. Rohan meanwhile lost no time in strengthening his position: his soldiers seized several Huguenot towns lost the previous autumn. In Nègrepelisse and St Antonin the townsfolk massacred the royal garrison. Rohan had long been impatient with the assemblies of La Rochelle and Languedoc. The latter had replaced Châtillon by an obscure soldier more amenable to their wishes. Coligny’s proud grandson responded by abandoning the cause, turning to Catholicism and to royal service. Like Lesdiguières, he might have abjured anyway. But such incidents convinced Rohan that he must take control as chef et général.11 He proceeded to levy taxes, secure forced loans from wealthier citizens and choose the men he wanted for his army council. Even if Louis had been wavering, the attitude of the Huguenot militants would have convinced him. He could not risk a foreign campaign with the likelihood of an active revolt behind him. Any terms he might offer to the Huguenots would have been too much for the dévots to swallow. He must first strike a decisive blow against them. In April he was heartened by news of an important victory in Poitou. There the dominant personality was Soubise, brave but headstrong, an unfortunate influence. He had brought off a notable coup when he had occupied the Ile de Ré, a spit of land between marshes and sea, guarding the flank of La Rochelle. However, in April 1622, after a bold night march round the Ré marshes, royal troops attacked and completely defeated the Huguenots. Soubise lost three thousand or more, killed or prisoners. His defeat meant the loss of Poitou, with its food and revenue; also the ability to harass the enemy and keep them clear of their defensive walls. Exultant royal propaganda suggests how significant the battle was seen to be at court – and meant so to be seen by the Huguenots. Work was begun on the notorious Fort Louis, just within range of La Rochelle’s walls. By midsummer, 8,000 soldiers were encamped in the vicinity. Soon the Rochelais command of the seas was challenged when five of their ships were sunk by a fleet hastily assembled by the duc de Guise. The French were belatedly realising that they should devote resources to building ships. The project was to be carried on with great energy by Cardinal Richelieu. The first major trophy of Louis’ southward march was the town of Royan. With it the Huguenots lost the capacity to control the Gironde and impose taxes on trade. Fearing to lose their houses as well as their walls smaller towns surrendered without a fight. Nègrepelisse and St Antonin were singled out for punishment; they were completely destroyed. Knowing that he must concentrate his forces Rohan made no effort to save the towns. Louis arrived before

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the walls of Montpellier at the beginning of August. We are reminded again of the balance of advantage in this phase of European warfare. Commanders everywhere recognised what the great Wallenstein was forced to acknowledge before the walls of Stralsund: that a determined garrison of a well fortified town could expect to repel assault – especially when, like La Rochelle, it could be supplied by sea. As for starvation, by October it was Rohan’s calculation that the royal troops would give up before the supplies ran out. In the event politics determined the issue. Louis was acutely aware of the growing threat from Spain. He rightly suspected that Rohan would not reject aid from that quarter. Rohan believed that he would not have a better chance of making peace and secured leave from the assembly of La Rochelle to negotiate. The resulting Peace of Montpellier, in October 1622, was more of a declaration than a treaty; as such it announced the collapse of the illegal Huguenot state. It might, however, have seemed to the assembly to have consoling features. Huguenots kept essential rights. But they were made to surrender all the towns that had submitted, about half of those nominally controlled; the right to garrison the remainder would expire with the royal brevet that had first authorised them, in 1625. All Protestant political assemblies were forbidden. The Huguenots had been stripped of their military and political organisation. One great stronghold remained. But it was ominous for the future that – before the news of peace had reached him – Jean Guiton, legendary sailor and future mayor of La Rochelle, had fought Guise and the royal fleet, and suffered a second and more severe defeat.

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The Great Siege The first man in the world. (Buckingham on Richelieu)1

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fter the peace of Montpellier it was not inconceivable that La Rochelle would be left in peace. Several developments determined otherwise, as did the timing of operations against it: the arrival to power of Cardinal Richelieu in 1624; his abortive attempt to secure the Val Telline; the Huguenot rising that contributed to that failure; and politics within the city. How these worked together towards royal triumph and Huguenot disaster becomes clear as the story unfolds. Events rather than theory determined the minister’s policy. As Tapié puts it: ‘While the traditional theory credits Richelieu with the intention of destroying the Huguenot party as a state within the state . . . perhaps his attitude was uncertain . . . more subject to events than responsible for them.’2 He certainly would have preferred not to besiege the Huguenot stronghold before he had dealt with the crisis arising out of the disputed succession to Mantua. Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal Richelieu, has an immense place in French, therefore European history. His career is extraordinary not least by contrast with what had gone before. After the death of Luynes, several ministers, each able enough but lacking sufficient backing among colleagues, in clientèle or – always the vital factor – the confidence of the king, enjoyed a period of dominance while never looking as if they could stay the course. ‘Stay the course’: over eighteen years that certainly was an extraordinary achievement. We do not need to follow Richelieu all the way. The impact on the Huguenot question belongs to the first five years of his ministry, a period when he was most influential but did not dominate the council. Following it, in 1630, was the critical showdown with his rivals and critics from which he emerged secure in the favour of the king, more confident in suppressing the plots and

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revolts of frustrated grandees and the widespread disorders arising from a brutally demanding tax regime. Those stories, along with that of the statesman who guided France towards open war against the Habsburgs, need only concern us in so far as they affect the state in which Huguenots moved, had their being and hoped to be left in peace. Up to 1629 it was altogether different. Their future depended to a disturbing degree on the cardinal: his faith, philosophy, purpose and political skill. They were offered clues as to what he intended but in a fluid international situation could not be sure if or when the axe would fall. The reforming bishop of Luçon; the clear-­sighted political strategist, the intellectual, physically frail but mentally tough, concerned always for reputation; heir to a noble estate much reduced who was resolved to become ‘considerable’, who could relish power with its unprecedented opportunities for personal gain yet remain essentially uncorrupted by it; untiring servant of king and state – they were one and the same man. In his policy towards the Huguenots his character and ambitions found focus. Public policy and personal ambition pointed the same way and found expression in the famous memoranda of May and October 1625. Experience had taught him that ‘as long as the Huguenots have a foothold in France, the king will never be master at home nor be able to undertake any glorious action . . . His Majesty may give [some temporary] satisfaction to the Huguenots. He will thus be able to create unity for the war against the Spaniards.’3 ‘Temporary satisfaction’ was necessary because ‘prudence does not permit the undertaking of two wars at the same time’. Moreover, ‘the occasion to deal with the Huguenots will return’.4 A painful early experience informed these thoughts. Because of the uncertain situation around La Rochelle and the danger threatened to the rear if the French armies were sent over the Alps Richelieu was forced to rely on diplomacy to gain the essential points in the matter of the Val Telline. Despite apparent concessions in the treaty of Monçon, eventually ratified in March 1626, he found that Spain had secured what mattered most: free passage for its troops to the Netherlands. Meanwhile, to underline the problem, Soubise had been busy trying to raise backing in England, while at the same time putting out feelers to Spain; no indication in him of any desire for peace. In January 1625 he succeeded in capturing all but two of the royal fleet being made ready for a crusade by the duc de Nevers, compelling Richelieu to hire Dutch and English ships. He then landed on the islands of Ré and Oléron, thus easing the way for foreign intervention. So one of the conditions for the marriage of Charles I, the new English king, to Henrietta Maria was that he would desist from any further negotiations with the Huguenots. However, under the influence of Buckingham, Charles’ favoured friend as he had been of his father, James I, Anglo-­French relations soon deteriorated. The posturing Buckingham, in charge of the English fleet, enjoyed the applause of English Protestants for

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his apparent sympathy for their Huguenot counterparts and sought a new opportunity for glory. Skilfully managed by Richelieu English envoys prevailed on the Huguenots (who had also to accept that their few remaining ships no longer promised security) to accept his offer of a truce. Soubise was offered pardon in return for the promise of service in the royal army. With the prospect of joining with their peers in the honourable, traditional role – from which all rank and privilege ultimately derived – it was the lure that detached one great noble after another from the Huguenot cause. The Edict of La Rochelle, in February 1626, restored Catholic worship in the city and returned church property seized by Huguenots. The merchant oligarchy, which had been ousted from power in January by Huguenot militants, was restored. It was the latest phase, but would not prove final, in the bitter struggle for control that had invited external interference, complicated the relations between nobles and city, and was now to play into Richelieu’s hands.5 The privileges of the town, amounting to a rare degree of independence, had come to be equated with the dominance of a self-­perpetuating group with a natural interest in self-­preservation. That attitude brought them to thwart, when possible, the principled, but inherently risky policies that emanated from the Huguenot assembly. The assembly was located generally at La Rochelle, because the city had been the prime refuge, unofficial capital for a time, since 1572, and was now again the most secure place to meet. Its concerns were for the movement as a whole; they might also be a cause of division within the assembly, commonly between nobles and bourgeois, with pastors often torn between allegiance to faith or to noble patron. However expressed or acted upon they were unlikely to be the prime interests of the city: shipping and trading. To complicate matters the city did not speak with one voice. The assembly of the bourgeois, representing substantial citizens excluded from the corps de ville, had succeeded, in 1614, after a violent coup, in gaining a place in the ruling hierarchy and key positions in the town’s administrative and military posts. One episode of several reveals how difficult, indeed exasperating, it was for the crown to deal with the city. In 1618 Louis wrote to express his concerns over the divisions in the city which were prejudicial to his authority. He ordered the corps de ville and the bourgeois to send deputies to court. The bourgeois refused. A subsequent joint commission of the two parties produced a letter that the corps then rejected. It dragged on until the effort was abandoned. In November the corps decided to write on their own behalf – but failed to do so. The militants had won – and the city had taken further steps to self-­ destruction. In the final ordeal the resistance was to be legendary for its heroism and self-­sacrifice. Along the way there must have been some on both sides who wondered how it had come to it: a vast military operation engaging

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the main resources of the state and costing eventually 40 million livres. a prolonged and costly siege with the certainty of bitter hardship, but not of the final outcome. Answers lie first in the crumbling of civic authority. When Soubise had seized Oléron and the Île de Ré the bourgeois offered support but the corps hastened to disown the action. Under pressure, in May 1625, it called a general assembly of inhabitants. But notables left the assembly when they saw, in the words of one, ‘that the opinion of a porter was considered of equal worth with that of a man of quality’. Calvinism’s democratic structures often sat awkwardly with the interests of property and the prejudices of rank. The corps despised the populace but was visibly weakened when it came to negotiation. Beyond La Rochelle support was failing. The southern noble and friend of Rohan, Bouffard de Madiane persuaded the assembly of Upper Languedoc and Guienne to accept the government’s terms. Richelieu sent him to negotiate with the city. Subsequent events made this unnecessary. A large fleet under the duc de Montmorency approached La Rochelle, cutting off communication with Soubise and his ships off Ré. To support him there were ships and soldiers in the town; yet, for some reason, none were sent either to Ré or to the fleet. Did Mayor Godefroy simply lose his nerve or was he happy to see Soubise embarrassed? Since the first clause in the terms subsequently imposed by Richelieu restored the Présidial, his motives may have been simply parochial. Paralysed by their divisions the Rochelais had neither worked realistically for peace nor prepared for the war. Did they trust overmuch in their ships? In September 1626, in a running battle of two days Guiton was at last vanquished, with the loss of eleven ships. It had been shown that French galleys were of little use in Atlantic waters – the victorious ships were Dutch and English. They were manned mainly by French sailors since the others refused to fight against fellow Protestants. In that sense of fellowship one sees the wider impact of the Huguenot struggle. ‘La Rochelle is without land, without islands, without sea, without soldiers, without vessels; there remains only six months without real fighting. She is yours.’6 So Condé wrote after the battle. Richelieu proceeded cautiously. The Assembly of Notables, called for December 1626, heard his wide-­ranging proposals for the formation of trading companies and the building of a fleet. Twenty-four ships had been ordered by the end of the year. One can see there the cardinal’s plan for the immediate future and his vision of the place of La Rochelle in the commercial, colonising France that was to come. He would still have preferred to gain his ends without military action. The king was infuriated when Soubise offered help in resolving differences over the interpretation of the peace terms, but it was English intervention that forced his hand. In one of those brash ventures into delicate foreign situations to which

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English politicians have been prone, pandering to the Puritan interest, Buckingham persuaded Charles to sanction an expedition to aid La Rochelle – or, as it could now seem, the cause of the Rohans. In July 1627 it attacked the royal garrison on the Île de Ré but Marshal Toiras conducted a skilful defence based on the fort of St Martin. Meanwhile, by the end of August, the king’s pikemen and musketeers, about 15,000 in total, had assembled and had begun to invest the city. The mayor had begged Soubise to leave them; a messenger bore a letter to the king pledging loyalty. It was too late. The militant Huguenots seized control of the city, elected Guiton mayor, signed a treaty with England and waited for Buckingham to succeed on the Île de Ré. It was a very near thing. Toiras was already parleying for surrender terms when, on 7 October, a royal squadron, laden with men and supplies, slipped past the English to relieve the city. Buckingham’s subsequent attack failed and he sailed for home. ‘The first man in the world’ Buckingham is supposed to have said of Richelieu.7 Before he could return he would be assassinated. Forty-­four English standards were displayed in Notre-­Dame. It had been a significant victory. Buckingham may not have been exaggerating when he said that if he captured St Martin the Huguenot south would rise in general revolt. The subsequent debacle cleared the way for the siege of La Rochelle to begin in earnest. How could it fail, now that the king was committed with a major part of his army? Only surely if the city could be relieved by sea. The city was not relieved – and yet it held out till 26 October 1628. The community that had been so bitterly divided in interests and policy offered the world an epic example of courage and endurance. La Rochelle stands on an outcrop of rising ground above marshland that protected about two-­thirds of its circumference. The vulnerable remaining part was covered by earthworks and flooded trenches. The siege lines extended to ten metres, protected by eleven forts and eighteen redoubts. No fleet of the day, let alone what the French so hastily assembled, could sustain a blockade, so engineers, under the royal architect Méteseaux, built a vast mole across the harbour. In its centre, to allow for the tides, they placed a floating barrier of old ships secured by cables. It was damaged by a great storm in July, but held firm. It was enough of an obstacle to dissuade the English fleet from attacking and relieving the city. On the second occasion that the fleet appeared, at the end of September, despite a gesture with fireships, it seems to have made no serious attempt. Hopes were raised and flags flown before the starving Rochelais realised that they were being left to their fate. ‘Starving’ is no exaggeration. At first there was some fraternising between city and camp. Some desperate women offered their bodies for food. A wealthy young woman secured a marriage – and release – offering a dowry of 30,000 livres, promptly accepted, with the king’s approval, by one of his officers.

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Cruelly different was the fate of a poor woman and two children; begging to be allowed to pass they were callously killed. Atrocity, however, is not the keynote of the siege; rather, on both sides endurance and resolve – and awareness of high stakes. In this Guiton and the duchesse de Rohan were a match for king and cardinal. Guiton had already threatened to kill anyone who spoke of surrender. When, to avoid more murderous incidents, the king ordered that civilians be driven back to the city with whips and sticks, they were likely to be hanged there as deserters. As the royal commanders enforced their orders about smuggling and fraternising, the inhabitants were reduced to eating anything that moved, scouring the beaches for the most minute of shellfish, making a kind of soup from boiled leather and herbs. As ever, the poor fared worst. Authorised searches revealed some hoarding. With her carriage horses to kill the duchess and her household may not have starved but her prestige and example helped sustain morale. When the king first suggested negotiation Guiton spurned the offer. When, on 28 October the council made terms, there were only 5,000 inhabitants left alive. Of the 20,000 gone in a year, some had managed to escape but most had died of starvation or disease. The royal troops, bringing supplies, were confronted by heaps of putrefying corpses. ‘A city of ghosts not people,’ someone said. The survivors were too weak to bury the dead. Some now died gorging on the fresh bread. The once proud, independent city, effectively capital of the Huguenots in war, in peace the epitome of Calvinist spirit and integrity now brought so low: whatever some Huguenots elsewhere might think of the pride and folly that had brought it about, it was a calamity that would affect them all. The king, with the cardinal, had commanded the siege. Only once had he been absent – to attend the funeral in Paris of his devoted doctor, diarist and confidant since childhood, Jean Hérouard, a Huguenot! On All Saints’ Day Louis made his formal entry, his pride surely tempered by compassion for fellow Frenchmen and respect for their leaders. Richelieu was at hand to urge the wisdom of clemency. Handing Louis his sword, Guiton declared that he would rather offer it to the king of France, who had defeated him, than to the king of England who had betrayed him. He would soon be at sea again – under the fleur-­de-­lis. When he died in 1654 portraits of Louis XIII and Richelieu were listed among his possessions. The townsfolk were assured that their lives and property were safe and that they were free to worship. But churches were handed back to Catholic use, a new bishopric was established and the city’s land-ward walls were destroyed. The city had to accept a new constitution: a présidial under a local sénéchal; a royal governor and garrison. It had lost its cherished independence. It could hope for a revival of trade and a modest prosperity; it could expect the full impact of royal taxes.8

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Rohan was able to fight on for a time since Louis moved his army on to Italy. That in itself suggests that the government saw little danger in the south. Rohan was encouraged to keep going there by promises of aid from England; empty they would turn out to be. English Parliamentarians could mourn for their fellow Protestants; they could not secure aid from a king resolved to extricate himself from a fruitless war and to rule in future without Parliament. Necessity overcame scruple and Rohan turned to Spain. The arrangement seems to hint at the creation of a separate state in the Midi. Spain had not shared the Pope’s joy at the fall of La Rochelle, anticipating correctly that France would now strike across the Alps. The episode provides an early example of the way in which state interest would come before that of religion when Habsburg and Bourbon considered their options. Sancta Maria had been the Imperialists’ shout for the day on the battlefield of the White Mountain; fourteen years later at Nordlingen it was Viva España. In the event Rohan’s defiance was unimportant. When the royal army was brought back to Languedoc it took only one stern action, the siege of Privas, ten days long and followed by a fearful rampage, to persuade the remaining cities to surrender and for the leadership to sue for peace. Richelieu deplored the sack of Privas, but it was enough to bring about the desired end. On 28 June Louis XIII issued the Edict of Alès.

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PA RT F O U R 1629–1661. A GOLDEN AGE

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c h a p t e r t w e n t y - ­f i v e

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‘The Little Flock’ ‘The ways of gentleness I believe to be the most suitable’1

O

ften called a peace, for that was its effect and one that lasted for fifty-­six years, Alès actually took the form of a remission or act of grace, a royal pardon. It confirmed the Edict of Nantes but only in its original and basic text. The extra provisions that had guaranteed the Huguenots’ political and military rights were cancelled. They were allowed to hold assemblies for the airing of social or political concerns but only with royal permission: it would generally be withheld. All their remaining fortifications were to be demolished. Richelieu stayed in Languedoc to supervise the work. A deputation from Montauban pleaded with him for reprieve but he threatened them with a siege and took hostages to show he was serious. He entered the proud city at the head of soldiers and watched the removal of the first stones. Walls defined a city and the rights of its inhabitants. Where Huguenots controlled a city the walls had represented security and freedom. Their destruction was a wound to their pride and self-­confidence – as it was meant to be. The Huguenots now found themselves living in a new world. The English ambassador at Henry IV’s court had commented that ‘the body of the Reformed religion is a great thorn in his foot’.2 The thorn had not been removed but there was no poison, little pain; yet inescapably painful memories. It had been possible to think, up till 1629, that ‘the Catholic future of France was neither solidly, nor irreversibly assured’.3 Some Huguenots had continued to imagine the triumph of their religion, some in the south to think in terms of cantonisation, Swiss-­style, leading to a separate Calvinist republic. Such enthusiasm was now more likely to turn in on itself, feeding in rare souls a private, apocalyptic vision. Huguenots had always been a minority. They were now a defenceless one, still privileged but dependent on the royal will; in effect, on the priorities and policies of the cardinals, premier ministres:

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Richelieu till 1642, Mazarin till his death and the start of Louis XIV’s personal rule in 1661. Judged against the background of the past seventy years or alongside the dreadful experience of Germany and neighbouring lands, the Grace of Alès shines as an act of humanity and good sense. It was also an act of policy, necessary, as Richelieu saw it, because of the international situation: above all the continuing threat to frontiers and security from the Habsburg powers. On that criterion subsequent events appear to justify Richelieu’s handling of the Huguenot issue. It is not inconsistent with his earlier statements and actions. He was a devout and principled Catholic, but bon français above all. In the face of Huguenot militancy there had been no question about it for faith and interest of state pointed the same way: ‘the faction of the Huguenot party is intolerable, diversity of religion in a state is dangerous’. Now, that danger past, he could recover the vision offered when, as speaker for the church at the States-­General of 1614, he had envisaged the Huguenots as ‘blinded by error’ but living, for the most part, ‘peaceably under the authority of the king’. He held that ‘our example, our instruction, our prayers . . . are the only weapons one would wish to use against them’. He was content to suffer them, not as a menacing whole but as misguided individuals; Vincent de Paul’s ‘separated brethren’. Alès expressed the hope that they would ‘return to the fold of the church’. In his will Richelieu left a large sum for a missionary effort to this end. It is hardly conceivable that he would have used force as a weapon for conversion. Nor indeed would Mazarin. There will be much to explain in the difference of temper fifty years on. It will be again to do with political priorities; yet with more than that. It will become apparent that Huguenots did not pose a serious threat at times when, if inclined to exploit the difficulties of government, they could well have done so. It is not surprising however, given recent history, that dévots saw matters differently both as to risk, the continuing offence of heresy per se – and opportunity. After the Grace of Alès the cardinal was severely tested by their furious reaction, with his right-­hand man Father Joseph among them,4 talking of the opportunity lost to apply further pressure on the heretics. Richelieu was opposed by a faction who continued to see the country’s interests in a radically different frame. Broadly the difference is conveyed by the terms dévot and bon français. What would be called the Thirty Years War had been overtly religious in its origins when Bohemian rebels elected the Calvinist Elector Palatine to their throne after deposing their Catholic king – and future Emperor.5 Dévots now hailed the defeat of Calvinism; bons français were troubled about the mounting power of the Habsburgs. Gustav Adolf ’s soldiers entered Germany in 1631 with godly intent, psalms and the prayers of Protestant Europe. Huguenots were glad when he won the battle of Breitenfeld and wintered on

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the Rhine. But the Swedes had been subsidised by the cardinal. By that time he had emerged triumphant from his most dangerous trial. Much hung, it would transpire, on the outcome of the Day of Dupes (November 1630). After apparently wobbling, Louis XIII had then rebuffed the queen mother and her protégé, the Garde des Sceaux Michel de Marillac, and confirmed Richelieu in office. Most probably Marillac would have made peaceful overtures to the Habsburgs; certainly devised more severe conditions for the Huguenots. That would have reflected the orthodox Catholic view that there could be no accommodation with heretics, the zeal of some in the religious orders, notably the Jesuits, and the pressure coming from lay circles like that of the Compagnie de Saint Sacrement.6 Further than that there was envisaged a whole alternative policy. Ironically, in terms of religion, in their view of society and economic objectives Richelieu and Marillac were of one mind. Unity of faith, the abolition of venal office, curtailment of the power of parlements, financial reform and development of commerce, were broadly common ground. In maintaining domestic order it is unlikely that Marillac would have operated differently from the cardinal, who refrained from a frontal assault on the system of patronage and chose to exploit it on behalf of the crown.7 Apart from the ambition of rival statesmen the fervour of the dispute arose from the issue of war. For Marillac and the dévots behind him peace was essential before reforms could be achieved. There was profound unease about the prospect of war against Catholic Spain. For some at least, ultramontane in direction and inclined to give priority to the ideals of the Counter-­Reformation, there was more concern about the need to stamp out heresy across Europe than about the shape of France’s eastern frontiers. They noted that Richelieu, to promote France’s interests in the war, had recourse to Protestant allies, notably the Calvinist Dutch and Lutheran Swedes. There was much in the ‘alternative’ policy that spoke of a longer tradition, of monarchy as guardian of good order and rights, individual and corporate. Power was to be used for the good of subjects. Between Marillac and Richelieu the difference was essentially between interpretation of the tradition and the political imperatives. For Richelieu, with the king behind him but bearing the ultimate responsibility for policy, the frontiers did matter. The Religious Wars had shown how vulnerable were the northern and eastern provinces to Habsburg invasion. The year of Corbie, 1636, when invading forces came to within sixty miles of Paris, brought home the danger. There was continuity in Richelieu’s thinking and in the ideology of absolutism, between the siege of La Rochelle and his decision to intervene in north Italy and then in the German war: both necessary and potentially enhancing to royal authority. The cost would be felt in higher taxes, the imposition of billeting, damage to commerce, and not least through the diversion of capital towards the sale of offices.

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The ever-­expanding world of office drew in Catholic and Huguenot investors alike: still tempting to the latter though religious conformity, real or outward, was often part of the price to be paid. The status and security that came with office undoubtedly weakened the resolve of the more worldly. They could practise in business and some professions, in law especially at the lower levels, without the pressing need to convert. They had a place in royal administration that may have seemed in itself to give security. Indeed, right up to the Revocation there are cases where Louis seemed to be respecting the office of a Huguenot as his property, conferring a certain obligation on the crown. Of course Huguenots could serve in army or navy, and it was generally the soldiers and sailors who were most staunch even at the cost of promotion.8 But beyond observable barriers there were material considerations for families to weigh. For some nobles it might be the assurance that they could keep any land formerly belonging to the church that had most weight. There had always been a worldly element in family strategy. The Huguenot grandparents of Father Joseph, with four baronies in the family, were not alone in their prudent arrangement for their daughter. She was brought up as a Catholic so that she could enter a convent and save the family a dowry. Instead she married and had three sons of whom the eldest was to be the leading dévot and scourge of the Huguenots. So there were defections, a flaking away from the solid face that the religion presented to the world. Yet, allowing for regional differences (Normandy at one end of the scale with a high rate of loss, Languedoc at the other with some growth), ‘solid’ would still be the usual view from congregation or colloquy, defections to be regretted, not seen as crippling. The security of Huguenots as a temporary blessing, always threatened – that is surely a retrospective view. At the time, living and practising the faith without serious molestation, their communities seem to have been acquiring a sense of permanence sufficient for most to resist the pressures and to stay firm, content with the privileges afforded by the Grace. After the long years of rivalry and emulation, with attitudes hardening in war and persecution, they had reached the mature stage of ‘confessionalisation’,9 ‘the process whereby barricades were erected around each church group’.10 Up to the death of Mazarin and the start of Louis XIV’s personal rule, for all the local niggling about rights and serious assaults on their standing in parlements, Provincial Estates and over a wide range of offices, the evidence points to stability. There were places with relatively few conversions, few emigrants and, if anything, a small increase in numbers, where Huguenot officials worked peacefully with their Catholic counterparts. This realistic approach to civic life, with other aspects of confessional coexistence, is explored in a study in depth of a small southern town, revealing aspects of life and behaviour likely to be replicated in similar situations.11 In Layrac in

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1600 rather under half of the population of around 700 was Huguenot. Membership of the consulate and town council reflected the confessional balance. Issues of tax, local privilege and – inevitably – precedence generally counted for more than differences of religion. Servants and apprentices could be hired regardless of faith. Mixed marriages were quite common though as the century wore on were more likely to be between Catholic husbands and Protestant wives than the other way round. There were pressures for conformity but they were countered by the traditional ways of negotiating and arranging that brought material advantage and status to families. All points to a less clear-­cut separation of the churches than was to be expected after the fierce partisanship of civil war. It does not follow that folk memory was the less strong or that tensions might not return with an enhanced Catholic presence (in this case the establishment of a penitential brotherhood in 1633), or later of more rigorous royal policy. Some Huguenot towns notably in the south, and others where the religion was a substantial presence, experienced disorder; but violent contests and riots were generally a feature of urban life. In places religion may have added venom when the breakdown of order left scope for personal attacks. Yet accounts of the violent émeute of 1645 in Montpellier,12 where there was still a large Huguenot presence and a consistory, reveal that the killing and pillaging were set off by protest against new taxes, directed at the partisans and their superiors held responsible, and involved mainly men and women of ordinary families. Communal solidarity was more in evidence than religion. Had Huguenots been identifiable in the crowd we may be sure that the intendant’s report would have made the most of it. They were not mentioned among ‘the scum of the people’ he described.13 Overall the confessional geography remained the same. Outside Normandy and Paris Huguenot communities north of the Loire were small and fragmented; yet it does not seem that they felt threatened. With hindsight come questions. Were they safe only as long as the cardinals, Richelieu until December 1642, Mazarin until March 1661, were absorbed in the practical concerns of government: foreign policy, war and the raising of money? Could the scars of civil war be so easily healed, the uncompromising rhetoric expressed on both sides so readily forgotten? Was the religious peace only an interlude, ‘the eye of the storm’ as it has been called? Did it represent an aberration in royal policy, or was it the policy leading up to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes that was the real aberration? Part of the answer will be seen to lie in the political behaviour of Huguenot communities and their leaders during these restless times. After 1629 there were a number of noble rebellions, the most notable before the Fronde and the most dangerous being that of Montmorency in

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1632.14 Like others it involved Gaston of Orléans as figurehead, claiming of course to be loyal subject to his brother the king and concerned only about the tyranny of Richelieu and the sufferings of the people. Since Montmorency was governor of Languedoc it might be expected, so soon after the Rohan rising, that some Huguenots would be involved. A few unimportant nobles apart, it does not seem to have been the case. In some regions, notably the Aunis, the attachment of nobles to Protestantism remained firm. But here, and generally elsewhere, as a reason for taking up arms against the crown it was negligible. Indeed, like ordinary Catholic nobles, unless bound by family or patronal ties, they tended to keep their distance from the wrangles and revolts of les grands. If disposed to stir from their estate they would be more likely to serve in the ranks of the royal army where religious allegiance was irrelevant. The steady militarisation of the regime during the period of open war that lasted from 1635 to 1659 did not lessen in some of the greatest nobles the appetite for faction that led, along with the grievances of Parlement, to the Fronde, the sequence of rebellions that started in 1648.15 But in the regions where again fidélité might have been expected to draw lesser Huguenot nobles into supporting the frondeurs, there is little sign that it happened. In the south-­ west where the arch-­frondeur duc de la Rochefoucauld was governor of Poitou and had allies among other notables, the Huguenot nobles remained generally loyal. In Cognac they formed an alliance with the bourgeois and forced La Rochefoucauld to besiege the town. At La Rochelle a war council composed of royal officers, nobles and bourgeois held firm against the frondeur comte de Daugnon until the loyalist comte d’Harcourt arrived to drive him away. If Huguenot faith was an insignificant factor in aristocratic revolts should we expect any greater involvement in the popular, anti-­fiscal uprisings of 1636–37 and 1639? Surely so since those of the Croquants affected, at different times, nearly all the south-­western provinces from the Garonne to the Loire;16 that of the Nu-­Pieds was limited to Normandy. Towns had their own grievances and were affected in any case by the impoverishment of the peasantry. There was also some sympathy among nobles for the plight of peasants driven to desperation by heavy taxes. In 1643, in Poitou, Saintonge and Angoumois local meetings of nobles led, in December, to a general assembly at Lusignan. It was of little consequence to government because no magnates took up their cause and it was easily dispersed by royal troops. Some individual Huguenots would have been involved in these affairs but for no apparent party. The crown showed no unease on that score: rebels were rebels, and to be treated as such. Local grievances brought men out into the field: peasants, even some nobles. Townsfolk tended to be alarmed for their security and no more sympathetic to the insurgent crowd without the walls than they were to troublemakers within. In Beik’s wide-­ranging study of urban protest there is only one reference to the

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Huguenots and that to Rennes, where there was a tradition of making a scapegoat of the small Huguenot community.17 Should we therefore see religion as largely irrelevant in urban politics, perceived as such by those who took up arms; never exploited by government to divert attention from the conditions that caused the revolts? Can one assume that their allegiance to the religion led Huguenots, notable or small fry, to keep their heads down and avoid any action that might lead to retribution? That was not the view of intendant of Languedoc, Baltazar.18 During the Fronde, Baltazar contributed weightily to Mazarin’s assessment of the Huguenot threat when the minister’s chief concern was to win friends where he could and secure the quiescence of those whom he could not trust. Mazarin was later to write that ‘if they fed on bad grass at least they did not stray’.19 In May 1652, at a critical juncture in the last, most deadly phase of the Fronde, a low point in the crown’s authority, when there was anxiety about the south, Mazarin’s ‘little flock’ was formally praised for its loyalty with which ‘We [the king] are highly satisfied’.20 The Edict of Nantes was reaffirmed. All judgments made by parlements since 1629 that conflicted with its letter and spirit were annulled. This answered a number of Huguenot concerns. Plainly there was anxiety at court. In the first year of Mazarin’s ministry Baltazar had argued against permitting the Huguenot synod to be held in Montpellier since it would allow the consistory of that city, ‘the best known in France’,21 the Huguenots’ ‘papacy’, to be reinforced by the colloquies of Nîmes and Uzès. That would give them the equivalent of ‘a national synod’ at the start of an insecure regency. Baltazar assumed that Huguenots, having recently yielded some ground to royal agents, would look to win concessions from the crown. Synods met with royal authorisation and their business was reported in moderate and respectful language. Evidently, however, they meant to regain lost rights, sites of worship and the restoration of several banned ministers. Baltazar certainly heard alarming reports. There were illegal assemblies at Aubenas on the day appointed by the national synod for a general fast. Groups of villagers were said to be gathering for informal worship or – for this is how popular uprisings could begin – was it for concerted action? There were traditional targets. Huguenots of Uzès attacked the palace and servants of the bishop. One case in particular evokes more violent times and the militancy of the aggrieved. Huguenots returned to the quarter in Privas from which they had been expelled in 1629, built a circle of houses to replace the flattened wall, used the ruins of their temple as a prison and taunted Catholic neighbours with their psalms and the smell of meat on Fridays. In Nîmes a series of demonstrations, figuring prominently Jacques de Vignolles and Maurice Baudan, sieur de Vestric, culminated in 1650 when Baudan’s minister son, wielding a hammer, led an angry crowd into

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the bishop’s palace and kidnapped a converted Protestant boy. Old and familiar grievances, hardly pointing to a general uprising – and yet we can see, from his thoughtful analysis, why Baltazar, writing about ‘conspiracies’, should be thinking more as politician than policeman. ‘The combat we must engage in against them will not be bloody . . . it will be a war of tongues, of pens, of the communication of ideas’.22 It was a forecast that was not entirely reassuring to the Huguenots. They, meanwhile, served notice that they were prepared to fight for their rights. For the first time since 1629 ministers and soldiers made common cause as church militant in an act of virtual rebellion. The occasion, in 1653, in the Vivarais, was the expulsion by a Catholic landowner, the comte de Rieux, of the minister Durand, illegally installed seven years before, The consistory of Uzès decided to raise troops – a considerable number. Some 6,000 assembled at Vallon under the command of the agitators of Nîmes, Vestric and Vignolles. Rieux, with a hastily assembled force, came up to confront the Huguenots with near-­ equal numbers. The Huguenot bluff was called. No shots were fired and the rebels dispersed. Had they succeeded they would have found some other place to assert their rights. It was a formula for religious war, an echo of more violent times, but in the outcome an indication of how much had changed. One constant remained. The war of factions continued in the bigger cities, Montpellier, Nîmes and Uzès. Whatever the justification, Huguenot aggression invited a royal response that was sought and would be welcomed by Catholic officials and people. The year 1654, with the end of the Fronde, saw a royal commission to investigate alleged breaches of ‘edicts of pacification’ in Languedoc, Haute-­Guienne and Foix. It was the start of a hardening of attitudes on the part of government. How different from Mazarin’s conciliatory measures it would become in 1656: the Fronde over, the crown’s authority everywhere being re-­established and Louis’ own voice being heard. A much cooler document then proposed the appointment at a future date of two commissioners for each province, one Catholic, one Protestant. Sure as he had been of the appeal of traditional Catholicism and of the potent idea of loyalty to the sovereign, along with the possibility of distinction in royal service or profit in office, Richelieu would have assumed that the RPR would be weakened by the defection of les grands. He would have realised that there was a significant fall in numbers – and one that would prove permanent – in the war regions of the south-­west.23 Of course, some may simply have moved elsewhere. Like most statesmen he heard what he wanted to hear. It may be that he took too little account of the vitality of Protestant faith. As ever nourished by the Bible, it was sustained now, some five generations on perhaps from initial conversion, by family connections and tradition, by tales of righteous

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struggle and martyrdom, by a strong church structure and discipline, and by resourceful measures to secure the integrity of their communities. By mid-­century the alternative faith and practices that had set them apart from their neighbours from the start, though having features in common with Protestantism elsewhere, had been moulded, through the experiences of a long-­beleaguered minority, into a unique culture, a French Protestantism, with some distinctive customs. There was even among some a way of talking, with much biblical reference, the ‘patois of Canaan’. There was a preference for names drawn from the Bible, especially from the Old Testament, the time of heroic struggle for God’s tribe, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Gideon, Daniel, David and Solomon being likely to be preferred to Jean, Michel, André, even Pierre or Paul. For girls Marie, Madeleine, Anne, associated with Catholic worship, were generally eschewed for Ruth, Rachel, Hannah and Rebekah. In all there was undoubtedly a pride in difference, the very fact of being set apart, having something of the Hebrew ideas of the chosen people, and the covenant. There was also for some Huguenots the sense of belonging to an international community of Protestant faith now relatively secure after the United Provinces had gained recognition as an independent state and the Peace of Westphalia24 had formally recognised the end of the era of religious wars. Was it not the leading Protestant powers, Sweden and the United Provinces, that had done best out of the Thirty Years War? The decline of Spain would eventually suggest that Protestants had little to fear from Habsburg aggression. That was not, however, evident until 1643 and the French victory at Rocroy, or confirmed until 1659. If the cardinals, Richelieu trusting to time and Catholic truth, Mazarin taken up with diplomacy and personal survival, were apparently well disposed it was not that they tolerated heresy or no longer saw it as a potential source of danger to the state. It was because effectively from 1630 to 1648 France was locked in exhausting conflict with the Habsburgs and was still at war with Spain until the Peace of the Pyrenees in 1659. The period, so grim in many ways for the French people, can also be seen as safe years for most Huguenots (though vexatious for some) as they benefited from the security that had been jeopardised by the rashness of the militant minority. Living and practising the faith their communities were free to acquire a sense of tradition and permanence to match that of their Catholic neighbours. It is illustrated in the widespread building and improvement of their temples, so long the main site of contention. Allocation of places of worship would continue to depend on the Huguenots’ standing with municipality and magnates; also on the money they could raise for legal costs. ‘Beyond the pale’ was still how many Catholics perceived the Huguenots, out of town, out of sight and mind. Living often under constricted,

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if not actually ghetto conditions, they were a standing provocation; worshipping beyond sight and sound they could not further pollute the city. Across the land the contests would continue, commonly a factor in the defection of those who could not bear being deprived of their natural place in the community. Domestic space by contrast might be an asylum, generally respected but also amounting to house arrest. That they could not, qua Huguenots, walk abroad displaying their faith, could mean a diminished life in a culture of sociability in street and square. Where the temple was within the town walls, in the congested space where every building was known, it was both presence and symbol, objectionable and challenging to the Catholic, valued and vital to the Protestant. Catholic hostility was most intense where Huguenots were in the majority. To the detested bishop of Uzès, Huguenot temples were ‘synagogues of Satan’.25 After the Edict of Nantes Huguenots grew more confident in their notices and inscriptions. Typically confrontational were the words inscribed over the door of a village temple in the Cévennes: ‘Qui est de Dieu oit la parole de Dieu’. The bishop of Montpellier complained understandably to the king about the inscription on the new Petit Temple: ‘Verae religioni sacrum.’26 ‘The Word of God’, ‘true religion’: it was what the Huguenot looked to hear in the minister’s sermon, and to express in his psalms and prayers. The temple had a central place in his life: here took place baptism, marriage and catechising and four times a year, solemnly convivial, the Lord’s Supper. Commonly the consistory would meet there. With memories of the obstacles and hazards that they had experienced when meeting in barn, private house, desecrated church or new makeshift temples, Huguenots naturally set great store by the buildings that embodied their rights and provided their most heartening experiences. Calvin had envisaged the church of God as being where the Word was ‘purely preached and heard’. But it was not to be a ‘temple’ in the biblical sense; nor like a Catholic church consecrated for worship ‘by some secret. It had a sanctity of its own to make prayers more holy.’ His emphasis was on convenience, a place where ‘without any consideration of place we worship God in spirit and in truth’.27 The building of a new temple or restoration of an old one could, however, be an emotional experience, whether it arose from right of possession, concession, or haute justice.28 Relief, hope and joy might be expressed in building plans proportionally as ambitious in a village as in a major centre. Though some temples had been constructed after the Peace of Bergerac in 1577 Huguenots had tended before 1598 to adapt existing buildings. Ordered then to hand back former Catholic churches, they built anew. With the emphasis on the spoken word went the need to provide pews and build galleries in capacious buildings. Rouen’s temple at Quévilly and Orléans’ at Bionne were

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constructed immediately after the Edict. Representing his interpretation of the Edict, Sully’s new town of Henrichemont had Catholic and Protestant buildings of equal size and design. Whether destroyed by Catholic opponents, as at Rennes, where Huguenots always struggled and saw their temple burned down four times, or by government order where there was an alleged infringement of the Edict; by natural causes, as at Dieppe in a storm in 1606, or by a fire such as that which destroyed the town of Mense-­en-­Trièves in 1650, there was no hesitation in rebuilding. La Rochelle’s Grand Temple was handed over in 1629 to be adapted as a cathedral after the siege but Huguenots were permitted to build another in the suburbs, with government funds. Montpellier’s Petit Temple and Montauban’s Temple Neuf were allowed to stand after the Rohan wars. Witnessing to the conciliatory intention of government an edict sanctioned the rebuilding of temples after their destruction in the Cévennes, Foix, Guienne and Languedoc. Catholics might be scandalised but the crown had permitted it. Where they could afford it Huguenots commissioned leading architects, Jacques II du Cerceau at Ablon and Charenton, later there the renowned Salomon de Brosse; Pierre Leveshulle at Montauban. Modern, even fashionable in restrained classicism and well suited to Huguenot sensibilities, such buildings conveyed a message of permanence that might reassure Huguenots but affronted and challenged Catholics. Grandest of temples in architecture and congregation, Charenton naturally drew English Protestant visitors to Paris. Among them was the young John Evelyn, scholar, keen-­eyed diarist and devout Anglican. His precise and sympathetic description deserves quotation in full. Through his eyes we can virtually participate in the Huguenot experience at its most impressive: March 6, being Sunday, I went to Charenton 2 leagues from Paris, to heare and see the manner of the French-­Protestant Churches service: The place of meeting they call the Temple, being a very faire and spacious roome built of Free-­stone, and very decently adorn’d within with payntings of the Tables of the Law, the Lord’s Prayer and Creede: the Pulpit stands at the upper end in the middle, having a parque or Enclosure of seates about it, where the Elders, and persons of greatest quality & strangers sit: the rest of the Congregation on formes and low stooles, but none in Pewes, as in our churches, to their great disgrace and nothing so orderly as here, where the stoles and other comber are removed when the Assembly rises: I was greately pleased with their harmonious singing the Psalmes, which they all learn perfectly well from the tablature, which, I heard, their children are as duely taught, as their Catechisme.29

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Charenton was, of course, exceptional. So in its way was Montpellier where Locke was not alone in finding large numbers attending temple worship, and also a degree of informality and boisterous conduct that Parisians would put down to provincial manners or, like Locke’s informant the pastor, Charles Barbeyrac, to impiety.30 We might add the sheer numbers, thousands at Montpellier or Rouen, the crush and a natural restlessness. The Catholic might see the lack of focus upon the priest’s administration at the altar, and the sense of divine mystery that could induce respect in worship. It may be, the Protestant would urge, that there was at best a close attentiveness to the Word, in reading and sermon such as could be experienced in the simplest temple and smallest gathering. As the pastor would probably recognise, in the words of Monica, mother of St Augustine, ‘No place is distant for God’. The majority of temples were likely to resemble that attended by the Royalist exile John Reresby at Blois: ‘as to shape . . . a barn, nor is it much better adorned; all that is allowed to be painted or written within being only the ten commandments’. As others noted, ‘the women sit separate from the men and the ministers preach covered’.31 Of course some communities experienced frustration or harassment. Particular stories reveal pressure points and tensions. Charenton was burned down in 1621. Tempers were running high then. But nobles again felt for their swords one Sunday in 1645 when they heard reports of an approaching mob. The congregation was escorted home by a military guard. The crown, as represented by the regent Anne, was on their side – at least on the side of the law. But Huguenots could not take their security for granted. After the Fronde and into Louis XIV’s personal reign Huguenots could detect a shift in mood and policy, with a sharper definition of the Edict. If investigation showed that a temple had been built where there had been no Protestant worship before 1596 it had to be demolished; likewise if there were verifiable complaints about disturbance caused by the proximity of temple to church so that ‘divine service could be interrupted by the singing of psalms or the sound of bells’. It was an ill omen for the Huguenots when a royal arrêt ordered the destruction of Élie Benoist’s temple at Alençon. But the future, and scathing, chronicler of royal persecution was still allowed to build another one, 600 metres from the town.32 When the physical embodiment of heresy in a Catholic city was so repellent Huguenots were surely living – they would come to realise – in the eye of the storm.

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huguenot lives and conditions ‘We no longer pass for monsters and savages.’ (Mme des Loges)1

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torms past – so what of the future? Or was the present sufficiently comfortable? Whatever misgivings some may have felt, for the majority of Huguenots in the middle years of the century the situation was more or less stable, life had much of normality; the bad days of war were a receding memory, and early days, the time of the ‘martyrs’, belonged to family history, a matter of pride or sustaining myth. Is it then a time to pause, before looking further at their lives to decide how many there were that still professed the religion? It is no straightforward matter. Though they must be used, ‘decline’ or ‘stability’ are of limited use to describe the Huguenot experience overall because it varied so much between regions, broadly between north and south – the Huguenot ‘crescent’ – and between town and country. Within towns it depended much on the nature of the Huguenot community, whether preponderantly official, mercantile, financial or artisan; also on its size as a proportion of the town’s population. It seems that the larger the proportion, the more evident was the decline.2 In some places there was ‘interpenetration’ as the minority sought acceptance, Protestants for example observing Lenten and other Catholic customs, Catholics delaying baptism of children as Calvinists insisted. Superstitions, the target of both Calvinist ministers and episcopal reformers, could prove stronger than dogma: both Catholics and Protestants, for example, were staunchly opposed to marrying in May. Difference is all. This surely implies the need for caution before assessment of Huguenot numbers overall. There are, however, good reasons to rely on recent calculations to provide a total within a margin of error of about 5 per cent: a significant number of surviving records, periodic government inquests and contemporary testimony. In

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France, as in England, church registers recorded baptism, marriage and death. In this regard Huguenot ministers were generally conscientious and it is from their records that the pioneering pastor Samuel Mours3 derived the total: 856,000, which subsequent research into specific communities whittled down to 796,000. After 1661 intendants took to reporting the Huguenot presence in their province but they were not disinterested. Nor might Protestant foreigners be, relying on pastors for information, but two turn out to have been close to the mark as established by recent scholarship. With their contacts in colloquy and synod and the lively correspondence that helped counter the sense of isolation, pastors could stay well abreast of the situation in other parts of the country. So Overbury, in 1609, was told a ‘seventeenth or eighteenth part of the people’: that would mean around a million.4 Locke in 1676, at Montpellier, as ever taking pains to get the facts straight, was told ‘a sixteenth’.5 That could be slightly on the generous side, noted at a time just before the pressures to convert began to mount but when churches in northern France were already in the phase of ‘demographic crisis’ postulated by Benedict,6 with a long-­ drawn-­out decline in prospect. With patience, scientific precision, examination of no fewer than 118 congregations representative of every region, and consideration of such influences as age of marriage, even the possibility of birth control, Benedict has tested Mours’ figures, as later reduced, and further refined the method of calculation. There seems no reason to question his figure of 730,000 in 1681, on the eve of the dragonnades that were to test further the Huguenots’ will to resist.7 Confronted by seemingly inexorable, if slow and uneven, decline over most of France, it may be that little need be ascribed to emigration or to the impact of political and military events. More significant was the grim fact that cities, where most Huguenots lived, were especially vulnerable to disease and dependent on incomers, typically Catholic peasants, to maintain life and business. The congregation at Metz, for example, lost 20 per cent of its number to the plague of 1635–36. As we have seen, a constant feature of the Huguenot scene, responsible for slow erosion in most communities, was pressure to conform, through the missionary spirit and enterprise of revived Catholicism, or action by the authorities to tempt or bully Huguenots into giving up. Benedict’s analysis of the condition of the religion, decade by decade, area by area, reveals varieties of experience, including several cases of growth or stability,8 but little to alter the whole picture of a slow, irregular decline. In the first two decades, with confidence stemming from the Edict of Nantes, it may have been barely noticeable, with a number of individuals but few significant groupings beyond the clientele of some defecting grandee. Any decline for such or local reasons, as in Normandy, was offset by gains in Paris

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and some regions in the south. In the 1620s decline was more marked, the natural consequence of revolt, war, the siege of La Rochelle and the subsequent curtailment of Huguenot rights by the Grace of Alès. From that date, in the next five decades, the latter two being those of Louis XIV’s personal rule, the rate of decline slowed markedly. It is possible to view those years as a plateau, with a slight downward slope matching that of the population as a whole in the worst of war years (and civil war), but not sufficient to affect the impression of stability. The 1660s even brought a modest increase in numbers overall, in line with the general population, most likely reflecting the general recovery in numbers and well-­being, the economic benefits of peace. Still, in many churches, especially in northern France, burials consistently outnumbered baptisms: defectors and emigrants outnumbering new adherents. To the broad, for many Huguenots dispiriting, experience there was a large and significant exception. In the area of concentrated Huguenot strength from Montpellier and Nîmes up to the Cévennes, including the Dauphiné, the Protestant population was virtually unchanged between 1600 and 1685 with a fall of just 2 per cent in recorded baptisms. The contrast will be reflected in the different reactions to the pressure to convert, missionary, material and coercive, experienced by Huguenot communities in the build-­up to Revocation. To estimate the importance of the Huguenot community, given its unique status after the Edict of Nantes, mainly in terms of numbers, whether by percentage or fraction, can leave a misleading impression. When it was so measured by officials in the prelude to Revocation they had a rude shock. The overall figure represents the sum of committed persons, the visible, mostly literate, many substantial in the community, regular in worship, serious and active in practical Christianity, distinctive, we have seen, in their way of life. They had made or inherited a conscious decision; they were unafraid to advertise their difference by the mere fact of choosing to worship God in their own way. In that sense they counted for much. Of course, considering numbers, the Catholic activist had to question the validity of the Huguenot confession. If they were right in the eyes of God why did He allow Catholic missions to succeed? Why did He not more evidently favour the ‘so-­called reformed’? Why did their numbers not grow? Perhaps these were questions that Huguenots, not so mission-­minded as Catholics, were less likely, even afraid, to ask. Meanwhile several factors account for variations between provinces. In the southern heartlands, notably in Guienne, the Cévennes and the Dauphiné, earlier local increase can be attributed to the Rohan effect, the loyalty generated in war, the relative safety of places deemed to be beyond the reach of royal armies and immigration from more vulnerable areas. Poitou had been influenced specially by the proximity of La Rochelle; correspondingly it suffered after its fall. Numbers there were said to have increased by a third up to the

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time of Richelieu; according to the same report they had then been sharply checked. As elsewhere, one sees in the south-­west the overweening authority of some seigneurs, possibly responsible for a more passive, less informed Protestantism in their dependants and communities, vulnerable therefore to the defection among the petit noblesse that was increasingly common as the century wore on. It is the impression given by a caustic Catholic observer who, in 1618, described the type: ‘sieurs particulières of the villages of the so-­called Reformed religion constrain their subjects to go to the presche, most of them with the stick’.9 However, there remained in Poitou solid communities, notably resistant to persuasive methods of conversion until in 1681 they incurred the full force of the dragonnades.10 Poitou, like the rest of Protestant France, shows us a patchwork, composed of different experiences, indeed different kinds of Huguenot. Given its unique history as a centre of rebellion, at times the locus of an alternative government, and following its siege, La Rochelle was bound to be a special case; a test alike of Huguenot resilience and of government intentions.11 The intentions were made plain in the rule that no Protestant could become a citizen unless he had lived in the town before 1625. There were few conversions on either side. As the population recovered it was immigration that altered the balance. By 1648 the number of Catholics had risen from 4,000 to 10,500, slightly outnumbering the Protestants. Catholics held 90 per cent of the judicial and municipal offices, a small coterie linked by intermarriage to the présidial that had been established in place of the old corps de ville. All was under the eye of the newly instituted intendant. The decisive change came in 1661 when 2,200 Protestants who had entered the city since 1628 were ordered to leave. More Catholics moved in and the process that started with the great siege was complete. Though Protestants continued to dominate the town’s commerce, in confessional numbers, in office and in most social aspects La Rochelle was a Catholic city. This had been achieved via the deliberate pursuit of religious reform through the close, interlocking partnership between civic authorities and the church. A unique situation – but did it represent the true mind of government, a paradigm for the future? Meanwhile La Rochelle served as a model for the continuing process of Counter-­Reformation. It had lost its capital status in 1628. With under 5,000 Protestants by 1681 it had become for the rest of the country more a symbol of past glories than of present inspiration. In the flourishing state of some leading families it also witnesses to aspects of Huguenot society that would be disquieting to some of its traditional leaders and strait-­laced pastors. An important consequence of this new situation was the town’s leading role in trade with Nouvelle France.12 At first sight this is surprising. Why should the town associated above all with militant Protestantism enjoy the lion’s share

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of trade with colonies that were designed to be exclusively Catholic and were becoming bases for Catholic missionary enterprise? In harbour facilities, in transport to the hinterland beyond its malarial marshes La Rochelle was less suited to oceanic shipping than rivals, notably Bordeaux and Nantes. Its favoured position was therefore the product of deliberate crown policy. After the thorough Catholicisation of the city, with compliant officials and a watchful intendant, there was little of the unrest that affected other cities in the years leading up to the Fronde as officials of law and finance defended their corner against intrusive royal government. Those who counted in the city were content with the Catholic regime, and Protestants kept their heads down; so the authorities could afford to be relaxed about their adherence to the religion. Much would still depend on the fortunes of the network of wealthy Protestant shipowners and merchants and on government policy towards those who contributed vital funds and expertise. So long as economic interest was to be the sole criterion such men could feel secure, and with them their clients and workers. To the cardinals, as to Fouquet and even Colbert, it was plain that the state would continue to need their services. The dependence of the crown on financiers, irrespective of religious allegiance, in what was, for most of the seventeenth century, a wartime economy, is illustrated by some notable family histories. The Tallemants had originally been refugees from Flanders before settling in La Rochelle in 1561 as traders, marine brokers and insurers.13 In 1604 the brothers Pierre and Gédéon Tallemant went into lucrative partnership with their brother-­in-­law. Private initiative as investors and moneylenders led seamlessly to public office and social cachet. Success in business created the capital needed to purchase office – and the influence required for a leading role in the city. Gédéon made a strategic move to Paris and office as trésorier of the domaine of Navarre. Pierre’s marriage to Marie Rambouillet, of the leading banking family of Rouen, sealed the family’s move from provincial business to high finance, with all its contacts and opportunities, from counting house to court. Nicolas Rambouillet managed part of Richelieu’s private assets. In 1632 the Tallemants moved into the field of indirect taxation by securing the lease of the Cinq Grosses Fermes. The story and its effect on La Rochelle show how the pursuit of office and the diversion of energy from trade and manufactures towards finance could stultify economic growth. The shortage of capital for manufacturing, shipping and colonising projects so dear to Richelieu’s heart was directly related to the cost of wars – his wars, as his critics would insist – that ensured the prosperity of the Tallemants, Rambouillets and the like. In 1623 Pierre had moved his headquarters to Bordeaux. By the time of the siege he was openly opposed to his former fellow citizens and acted as

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intermediary for the crown. The career of his son Gédéon adds a familiar tailpiece, of wealth so assured that it removes the incentive to work for more. He too married a Rambouillet, received an ample estate, took his name from it and adorned society as Tallemant des Réaux. Spurning the financial world he gave time to writing his Historiettes. Neat, witty and malicious, they have value in so far as gossip conveys something of the interests and tone of fashionable society. He was bitterly opposed to Mazarin although, ironically, the minister was perforce a friend to the Huguenots. But his world was by then far removed from the Protestant piety of his forebears. It represents much of what earnest Huguenots saw as the main threat to their values and ultimately to their security. Although Protestants were never more than a small minority among leading financiers their prominence played into the hands of critics. They might be too valuable to dislodge from the interconnecting corridors of economic power but they came to stand for much that the dévot found detestable. If they made themselves indispensable they could survive and flourish.14 One who did was Olivier Bidé of Nantes who had shares in twenty-­five tax-­ farming syndicates between 1639 and 1658 when he bought nobility with the office of sécretaire du roi. Georges Pelissari of Lyons, connected by marriage to the Tallemants and the Bibauds of La Rochelle, controlled the valuable administration of the navy. Louis Pagés was the most prominent among the Calvinist shipowners of La Rochelle and, in association with the Formont brothers of Rouen, the leading merchant in trade with Northern Europe and the Baltic. Biggest of all was Barthélemy Hervart, war contractor and loan-­monger, of German family, who had first come to prominence through his services to France’s ally Bernard of Saxe-­Weimar.15 His fund-­raising in the crisis of 1649 was acknowledged in a decree that praised him ‘for saving France and preserving the crown for the king, service which should never be forgotten’.16 As intendant des finances from 1650, and Mazarin’s contrôleur-­général from 1657, he was a key figure in the years when, living from hand to mouth, the crown borrowed recklessly to keep armies in the field. He profited enormously from a range of illegal expedients. He helped Fouquet to survive a plot in 1658 by his fellow Huguenot, Fouquet’s premier commis, Jacques Delorme. Colbert who did accomplish the overthrow of Fouquet at the start of Louis XIV’s personal reign was under no illusions about Hervart’s methods but he thought it expedient to keep him in office as a member of his new conseil des finances. He had shown the value of connections with the international financial market when traditional sources of credit from Paris and Lyons were drying up. It evidently did him no harm that he was known to be a zealous Protestant who refused to improve his standing with the crown by abjuring his faith and employed around thirty Huguenots in his clientèle.

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It has been shown to be a myth that Protestants were excessively represented among leading financiers: of 101 studied only nine were avowed Protestants. But it was to be a potent myth, when the crown became stronger, the finances better regulated and the pressure on Huguenots increased. Men such as Hervart, who flourished, and Delorme who was disgraced, though exceptional among Huguenot financiers in their scope and ambition, could still be pilloried by those who wanted to see a natural connection between Protestantism and financial sharp practice. The perception of the years before 1661 (and the start of his ministry) as wholly discreditable, anarchic in politics and corrupt in financial practice, was exploited by Colbert in his self-­ projection as honest reformer. The ‘bloodsucker’ who battened on the suffering body of France had always been an easy target. Along with the persistent appeal of church assemblies to Louis to restore unity to the realm, honest finance came naturally to be part of the king’s idea of good governance. When the religious arguments appeared to outweigh or be reinforced by practical considerations Huguenots would indeed have reason to fear. Meanwhile the same Colbert needed entrepreneurial skills, connections and capital from whatever source. The group round Nicholas Formont, Hervart’s brother-­ in-­law, was well placed to enter Colbert’s clientèle when in 1661 he staged the coup that brought about the fall of Fouquet. Their funds and the facilities of La Rochelle were essential, for example, for his new Compagnie du Nord (1669). Colbert could not do without a man like Samuel Daliés de la Tour, originally of Montauban, whose interests ranged from textiles and armaments to the Levant Company. It is over-­simple to assert that a Huguenot was safe in Louis XIV’s France if he was rich enough. But there was inevitably an element of double thinking in government policy that would persist even after the death of Colbert in 1683.17 Business interests played a large part in the experience of the Huguenots in Normandy. The province entered the seventeenth century with the largest number of Huguenots north of the Loire. After the vicissitudes of the Religious Wars they were well represented among seigneurs and had strong leadership from wealthy bourgeois in the larger towns. But from around 1630 there was a decline that was in marked contrast to the experience of the south. In the généralité of Caen, in 1666, its intendant reported that there were only 74 Huguenot seigneurs out of 877; in the city itself numbers had fallen in sixty years from 7,000 to 4,000. Among dependants on country estates or in trading, shipping and manufacturing concerns, the fall is likely to have been proportionate. One reason may have been the aversion of ordinary folk to the business culture of Calvinist employers, especially when they were wealthy, successful and seen to be mutually supportive, Freemason-­like in a close-­knit group. However, it was among such men that some of the defectors were to be

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found, such as incurred the censure of Pastor Pierre du Bosc of Caen. He warned his congregation in 1658 against the temptations of office and land that led them to abandon their sovereign, the King of Kings, ‘preferring thirty pieces of silver to all the treasures of God’s grace’.18 However, God’s grace might also have been seen in the life and witness of another Norman, St Jean Eudes. The impact of his missionary labours speaks volumes about Catholicism at its most persuasive and the Huguenots at their most vulnerable. When, in 1643 Eudes founded his society of missionary priests he instructed them to address the poor and their concerns. He practised what he preached. After the revolt of the Nu-­Pieds four years earlier, he had interceded with Chancellor Séguier on behalf of the peasant prisoners. His priests were told that when they heard the confession of a tax collector they should ask him if he had made excessive demands. He insisted on the discipline of regular confession; he also encouraged the penitents to enjoy themselves in village fêtes and seek inspiration in pilgrimage. Both in his concern for ordinary folk and in appreciation of their culture he drew attention to what seemed to be lacking in Calvinism. In Normandy, as elsewhere, it was a matter of standpoint. Within the close confinement of a ship under a Huguenot captain, religion was part of what bound men together. From the angle of the peasant, weaver or dock worker the Huguenot master might appear prim, complacent in his respectability, exclusive and discriminatory where not excessively hard in business. To some Huguenots too that would be the unacceptable face of the faith. To the literate mind there was appeal in the vitality of a culture that could embrace both the tremendous sermons of du Bosc, reputedly the finest in the land, the scholarship of his fellow pastor, Hebraist and Orientalist Samuel Bochart, and the enterprising mind of his brother-­in-­law, Jacques de Briaux. Membership of the club that de Briaux founded for the discussion of current affairs and literature was not confined to Protestants and he assured the intendant that religion would be discussed only in terms of the Christian principles to which all were expected to subscribe. Yet in the retrospective (and by some contested) judgement of a leading Protestant historian it was this very open-­mindedness, together with the lack of proselytising zeal that left the field open to the missionary priests, that created the climate of le Protestantisme en lethargie,19 ill-­prepared for the onslaught to come. Is that the view from the big city? Lethargy is not the impression given by the historian of the Dauphiné who found, in the record of the synod of 1661, the decision to act with other southern synods to ‘resist the adversaries of truth under obedience to the king and fidelity to his service’. One hundred and fifteen pastors attended that synod (114 in 1657); 45 out of 65 examined were under the age of forty; it looks like a strong body in numbers and morale.20

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In Paris everything was, of course, on a larger scale: the opportunities and the problems. Like all capitals Paris had a magnetic effect. After Henry IV recovered his capital Huguenots flocked back. At one time there were as many as 30,000. They were of all kinds but the predominant tone, reflecting the values and patronage of court and high office, was sophisticated; justifiably cautious from local experience, nervous about excessive zeal. They refused to back the revolts of La Rochelle and Rohan. Of course they had to avoid anything provocative. They cherished their right to worship – even at the prescribed distance from the city. All the more reason to show that they were good Parisians – and Frenchmen. They were not untouched by the Parisian mentality, as ever disdainful of anyone who had the misfortune to live south of the Loire. Were they not citizens, Protestant no less than Catholic, of the queen of cities, the seat of kings, prime mover in all matters of state, pre-­eminent in authority as in culture? It would not have been hard for the worshippers at Charenton, the nobles, office-­holders, financiers, merchants, goldsmiths, artists and architects, to see themselves as part of the governing élite, in no way disadvantaged by their faith. That was the perception of Mme des Loges, the staunch Calvinist mistress of a notable salon of the 1620s. She sounds witty and assured when she comments on the altered tone of religious debate: ‘We have now reached the point that even amongst our greatest adversaries we no longer pass for monsters and savages. We are regarded not only as reasonable persons, but also as Christians.’21 She was therefore optimistic about the future. Calvin insisted that each church should have an equal footing. Yet it was inevitable that Charenton should have weight and influence. It was served by four or five pastors. One of them, Jean Daillé, is known to us through his son’s biography. In a sermon that rings out from the depths of the Fronde he declared that there were two Jerusalems. One was the church of Christ, the other, equally to be cherished, was France and Paris itself. The year was 1652; from the turbulence of the Fronde Daillé and his listeners had grounds for hope that order would be restored under the young king and they had good reason to be devoutly loyal to him. In national crisis Huguenots did well to echo the prayers of the church for peace and unity. Royalist rhetoric had yet to turn ugly; unity was not a threatening word. It soon would be. The younger Daillé would write nostalgically of the years of the cardinals as a golden age for the Huguenots of Paris, when Charenton shone as a beacon for the provincial temples. Social acceptance was an important element in the situation. The relative weakness of the crown was another. It is plain that there is a variety of Huguenot experience that defies generalisation; but also that there was a strengthening trend towards the replacement of noble leadership by that of bourgeois élites. The Norman experience had much in common with the Parisian. Important Rochelais were linked to

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the centre by commercial ties. Even in the Midi, where government had learned to tread warily, there were individuals whose business interests ensured them a voice and opportunity for advancement. One we have seen was Colbert’s entrepreneur extraordinary, Daliés de la Tour. Another was Pierre Dalibert, from Languedoc, a trésorier de France who came to hold, after 1660, the lucrative farm of gabelles in the Lyonnais, Provence and Dauphiné. Special cases apart, its unique experience of resistance and war ensured that the Huguenotism of the south maintained a solid presence in cohesive and confident communities under the control of consistories disinclined to allow any watering down of doctrine or bending of rules. Erosion of support was most evident in places where the appeal of royal office proved stronger than traditional loyalties. The textile town of Montauban, following its siege, was the target of a double-­pronged assault. Richelieu sought here, as elsewhere, to undermine Huguenot control by ordering that the senior magistrate should be Catholic. With its demolished walls went its capacity to resist attack – but not the defiant spirit. The bishop, who professed at first to fear for his life, worked with the minister to encourage the settlement of colonies catholiques. Jesuits and Capuchin friars laboured to convert. But immigrants found it hard to secure work in the face of Huguenot-­controlled guilds and the heretic was unmoved. The Landgrave of Hesse visited the city at Easter 1647 and estimated that there were some 6,000 worshipping in its two temples and in services spread over two days. That would represent about half of the known Huguenot population, reckoned to be 70 per cent of 18,000 citizens.22 Passionate commitment to their faith, attachment to their communal history, resentment of immigrants – indeed the civic solidarity that usually worked for Catholics – all made for a closing of ranks. One case suggests the smouldering grievances always liable to blaze up in violent affray. Jeanne Moisse had converted on marriage but recanted on her deathbed and was seized for burial in a Protestant cemetery. In the subsequent riot the mob demanded that the clergy be expelled and the Jesuits thrown into the river. Immigration was also an issue in Nîmes where Protestant numbers held steady at around 12,000 while the Catholic more than doubled, to 8,000. Here an Englishman’s comment is valuable (1676). ‘Notwithstanding their discouragement’, Locke did not ‘finde that many of them goe over. One of them told me . . . that the Papists did noe thing but by force or mony.’23 Here the consistories kept records of conversions from Catholicism. From 1632 to 1672 there were 809 altogether, 509 of them in the second twenty years. The rising trend contrasts with the experience of Normandy24 – another example of the difficulty of generalising, but emphasising the north–south divide. In Nîmes the ascendancy of rich textile merchants and the extent of their hold over the

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markets and employment of the surrounding region seem to have played in their favour. Less tolerant or neutral than in the north, the consistories encouraged discrimination. Catholics complained but to little effect. With attitudes if anything hardening they looked for a day of reckoning. Serious grievances fuelled the demands of the southern bishops in church assemblies. Sponsoring missions and rebuilding their churches, they yet made little headway. Meeting the challenge with energy and guile the Jesuits were especially detested by those they sought to convert. The resistance of one small town in the orbit of Nîmes shows what the Jesuits were up against. At Anduze they were expelled after a month and their few converts at once relapsed. They scored a notable success, however, when they took over the Huguenot academy of Nîmes, with half the appointments and subsidies from the cathedral and the gabelles of Languedoc. Such official connivance was a recipe for trouble. The consistories urged parents to remove their children from Jesuit indoctrination. In 1650 Nîmois Huguenots reacted with destructive fury to a report that a schoolboy convert had sought shelter in the bishop’s palace. The climate of fear and aggression was eventually too much for the conscientious bishop and he departed in 1658, lamenting his failure to make an impression. Notoriously, and publicly in the following year the curé of St Hippolyte openly renounced his faith before a temple gathering and proceeded to marry a Protestant. None of the foregoing supports the alarmist view of the notary of Nîmes who wrote in his diary (1657) that ‘poor Catholics can hardly go into the streets for fear of being killed’ and foresaw a new war of religion.25 It suggests, however, that there was no true religious peace, more a cold war. On the one hand a vital Protestant faith, deeply entrenched, prepared even to counter-­attack; on the other a Catholic offensive, sufficiently intrusive to arouse an equally robust resistance. Preaching and teaching were only one arm of the offensive: the ecclesiastical. At the highest official level the state had means to inflict serious damage. Through local challenge, discriminatory action by parlements and royal decrees, the rights secured by the Edict of Nantes to hold judicial and administrative office and to be represented in the bipartisan chambers were continuously tested and eroded. As Protestants were barred from an increasing number of royal offices, the value of positions in the chambres de l’Édit grew to a point where a Huguenot might pay a third more than a Catholic to secure the office. The Paris chambre encountered difficulties as the Huguenots came to be ostracised by Catholic colleagues though it continued to perform valuable service as an alternative court of law.26 From study of two provincial capitals and the bureaucratic development resulting from the crown’s selling offices to finance the war, different patterns emerge but also a trend unfavourable to the Huguenots.

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In Castres, through manipulation of the paulette, Huguenot officers managed affairs as effectively as their Catholic counterparts so that ‘veritable judicial dynasties’27 emerged, with eight of eleven offices in the hands of the same families for sixty-­six years. But the relentless bullying and – in Huguenot eyes – chicanery had its effect. In 1638 a decree of the parlement of Toulouse gave Catholics the exclusive privilege of presiding over the chambre and with it effective control. Other measures to exclude Huguenots from new or important office and to make other offices less remunerative had the desired deterrent effect. Seeing an alternative field of opportunity the sons of the Huguenot robe turned increasingly to military service or to a quiet life on the family estate. Pau was small compared to Castres though dominant within Béarn. Possibly for that reason or because of the shattering experience of conquest and subsequent draconian measures, or the special position, already noted, of the moderate Jacques de Gassion,28 Huguenot officers proved less robust in fighting their corner. There are special circumstances but the verdict holds good for other places: ‘a growing political and cultural chasm’ opening up within the Huguenot élites.29 After de Gassion converted, others followed. By publicly conforming to the religious policy of the crown they preserved their office and enhanced their family interest. Those who held out had to accept that their children would have, at best, some minor office: the accumulation of wealth, estates and nobility would not be for them. By 1663 only two Huguenots were left in high position. The contraction at this level reflects the general experience of the reformed community. The figures reveal the crucial difference between genuine conversion and nominal acceptance. Béarn’s Protestantism had been, uniquely, imposed by its sovereign. There was no alternative path and baptism had to be in the temple. When the option of Catholic practice came with Louis XIII’s assault on the province,30 Protestant numbers fell at once and continued to decline faster than in other parts. In 1665 the census ordered by the intendant showed that numbers, though hotly contested by pastors, were down to about 20 per cent of Béarn’s population of 130,000.31 Eurich’s conclusion about southern towns has a wider significance: ‘As brokers of royal power in the provinces, Huguenot office-­holders struggled to speak the language of the king in word and deed while remaining loyal to their family and religious identities.’ Their integration into the larger apparatus of the Bourbon state, with the accompanying ‘marginalisation and transformation’ of Huguenot magistracies ‘signalled the inexorable disappearance of the Reformed communities they served’.32 How, with the slow erosion of the official base, could Huguenot communities protect their integrity and way of life and worship? Evidently experiences varied. Consistories were swayed by local considerations, the attitude of Catholic neighbours, the policy of the bishop,

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the activity of religious orders. The essential difference was between those few towns like Montpellier33 where the Huguenots controlled or at least retained some influence in town government and those many places where they were in a minority, sometimes only a few hundred strong, where they had to avoid provocation. In all situations Huguenots naturally looked after their own. They were assiduous in care for their weaker members, the poor, sick and elderly. Deacons were instructed to visit Catholics as well as Protestants, but they were likely to discriminate against those ‘not from the church’. It was a chance to spread the word, to catechise and to demonstrate the benefits enjoyed by ‘the believing faithful’. Resources were limited so preferential treatment was inevitable. Like Catholics, Huguenots had a theology of giving: an obligation – but one with less emphasis on the direct act of mercy, money to the outstretched hand of the beggar; more on the communal need, with the ever-­present concern to maintain the coherence and well-­being of the community. So money was to be given not to the individual but to the bourse des pauvres where, like other expenses, it could be monitored and the person’s case carefully weighed. Again there could be discrimination, between the apparently worthy and unworthy. Life as a minority, which was a reality for most Huguenots, strengthened the idea of the church as a collection of families, imbued with the morality of the good neighbour. Personal belief and a sense of duty called them to true religion as they learned it in Scripture and from their pastors: ‘to defend the fatherless and widows’ and ‘to pursue the things that make for peace and build up the common life’. The spirit of loving care is reflected in pastors’ writings. It can even touch the official register: in that of St-­Jean du Gard its keeper prays that ‘God may guide my hand’. Most moving is the long prayer composed by an elder of Richechouart, a church troubled by internal quarrels and the hostility of the local seigneur: he prays for ‘faithful pastors and a flock wholly filled with zeal and concord’.34 The common life had to be defended. So there was another motive for charity – to protect vulnerable people from the missionary zeal of Catholics, whether by the sickbed, in the schoolroom or, after bereavement, when children might be left to a Catholic guardian. One significant story shows a consistory taking up a case on behalf of a widow, a servant and mother of three, fighting all the way through the courts, eventually to the governor – and winning it. An elder who was also an avocat of the parlement of Grenoble recorded the outcome as a consolation to the church and the poor mother that came from God alone.35 ‘From God’ – and also the law to which Huguenots could still look for justice. No doubt the elders were keen to establish a principle and a precedent against Catholic pressure and enticement to their schools and hospitals. But we should also see the moral imperative, for Magdelaine Bergerand was a servant and might need help to bring up her

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children. Solidarity, the Gospel teaching, persistence in the right course: all characterise the best of Huguenot culture and explain why so many would stand firm in the coming ordeal. Yet the same synod was discussing its financial plight, its inability to pay a minister.36 In their temples, bare and unadorned, Huguenots did not have to bear the costs of Catholic ornaments and ceremonies. Without benefit of tithe or, generally, resources from church endowments or civic funds, their income was derived mainly from church collections, and increasingly from bequests, and allocated by consistories. In a society characterised by ‘chronic morbidity’, when ‘medicine was helpless in the face of even the most common ailments’,37 care for the sick and crippled was a heavy charge. Hospitals were usually under Catholic control and more attractive after the arrival, as in Montauban, in the late 1660s, of the filles de la charité. Catholic teaching was integral to their devoted care: it was medicine with mission, sans frontières. So Huguenot money went in fees to barber-­surgeons and apothecaries, on medicines and on the provision of hospital beds and nursing in unofficial hospitals, usually houses adapted for the purpose. Of course demands on the consistory purse were always greater than could be met and there were other claims besides the usually meagre salary of the minister. Confessional difference within a household could lead consistories to intervene to protect family members. Literacy and learning were vital parts of the Huguenot’s equipment for life. Schooling was a prime concern and source of tension, especially where the Jesuits were dominant and provided a prestigious alternative; then payments might be made for children. Another way of guarding against the erosion of the community was to pay for apprenticeships. Indeed, practical assistance took many forms. For women applying for domestic service suitable clothes might be provided. Always we see the paramount necessity – to keep the community together. In one case in Bordeaux,38 each of twenty elders was required to visit each sick person within a fortnight; in effect that ensured a daily visit. Elders were usually aware too of their obligation to the wider Protestant community. Hospitality for visiting Protestants was a regular charge on funds, as was subsidy for essential travel, to college or colloquy. Legal aid became a growing consideration as Huguenot rights came under attack. Altogether, records studied reveal the strength of personal conviction and, within families and the wider community, the determination that was to be tested under mounting pressure until the point came when many of those who could make the choice would rather give up their homes than their faith. The Huguenot version of church discipline had always been paternalist and prescriptive. Consistory registers reveal an impressive degree of control over church members.39 They also seem to reveal a startling level of misdoing that

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justified the vigilance of the consistory. They put in perspective the aim of putting into practice in a new church the best that its teachers and pastors could create from study of the communities of the early church; hence the determination of Calvin’s disciples to censor where they must and amend where they could, ‘Anger, passion, malice, cursing, filthy talk’ – St Paul’s words addressing the Colossians serve as a résumé of a consistory’s dealings with erring members. At Layrac, one community examined, Jean Bere clubbed David Gimet on the head; another miscreant was hauled up for threatening a stable boy with a lighted torch. A barber-­surgeon ‘whacked a widow in the stomach’; a disagreement between two businessmen led to fists, then swords. Just samples from a copious selection of misdemeanours (and made from the 1590s) but salutary in correcting two possible illusions about Huguenots: that they, the ‘children of Israel’, lived in a manner quite apart from contemporary behaviour; and that the prime concern of Calvinist discipline was with sexual mores. Typically, as in Montauban in the mid-­1590s,40 the investigation of fornication and adultery amounted to just 7.5 per cent of the cases investigated. In every consistory it was disputes arising out of quarrelsome, competitive behaviour that predominated. Scurrilous verbal abuse figured largely, with many variations on the themes of cheat, liar, thief, coward, false pretences; for women, on whore, slut, drunkard. It should not surprise us that precedence, particularly in seating in temple, mattered intensely to the extent that pews could be destroyed and groups formed around the aggrieved parties. It emerges that the behaviour of Huguenots mirrored that of the high-­tempered, in many respects crude and brutal society around them. It is also plain that, as in other fields of positive social endeavour, the Calvinist discipline had largely beneficial effects, providing, within its system of constant vigilance, the good example and expectation of decent conduct that stemmed from a fundamental tenet of its theology. Man was responsible for his conduct, as an individual saved by grace, belonging to a community of the Elect, under the eye of God his Saviour. For its part the consistory, exercising discipline, would generally prefer the way of mediation and go to great pains to secure reconciliation. The words used speak of the Christian ideal of love, peace and neighbourly fellowship. A name or two may help us enter their Huguenot world. Anne Amalrique was a servant in the household of Damoiselle Anne Pairine, wife of the first consul of St Amans. Dismissed for a theft, her honour slighted, her pay docked, she appealed to the consistory – and got an amicable settlement such as a law court, even if affordable, could not have provided. At Pont-­de-­Camarés Étienne Sabatier and Jean Biroy had fought with words and fists. When reconciled it was only required that they ‘dismiss all thoughts of revenge’.41 Often an arbitration process was set up, typically over property where the evidence

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might be scanty or confusing, each side being asked to name an arbiter. Only if this or other process failed would a consistory use the ultimate weapon, that of excommunication. If the parties had recourse to the law a lasting animosity could result, the possibility of revenge and a family feud with damaging effect on a close community. No wonder pastors and elders set great store by the route of reconciliation. When the outcome was favourable it would be witnessed and celebrated formally by ‘the hand of reconciliation’, the shaking of hands, as in the closing of a business transaction, or the kiss of peace that signified the placing of their cause in the hands of God. Care and control extended to the crucial act of the worshipping community. Individuals could be debarred from joining the procession to the Lord’s Table – and from early days, following the Geneva model, consistories had set the bar.42 It was a matter of spiritual life and death. In the unofficial assembly at Poitiers in 1557 ministers had urged repentance on anyone barred from the Lord’s Table since ‘outside the church there was no salvation’. Catholics, of course, would say the same on the strength of their traditional, entirely different understanding of church. Salvation was always the fundamental theological issue. The death of the body was both an end and, potentially, a beginning – but how and for what? To those questions, we have seen, Catholic and Protestant answers were radically different. Their understanding of theology was reflected in their manner of burying the dead. Nowhere else, if only because it was open for all to see, is the gulf between the confessions more strikingly revealed, or more constantly a source of mutual hostility, than at Huguenot funerals.43 What Catholics would see was a simple line of plainly dressed people walking to a graveyard ‘to bury properly the body of the deceased’. For them the lit de repos was just that: a bed afforded by mother earth in which to rest. The Catholic, seeing no ceremony, no service, no prayers, often no minister by the grave, only quiet, restrained mourners, thought it worse than unbecoming; indeed quite pagan and an affront to his community. The Protestant, with purgatory taken out of the reckoning, with no inferno awaiting the body, no trial or even testing time, saw no need for ‘superstitious ceremonies’. With belief in purgatory, with the soul in uncertain territory, went the obligation for the mourner to pray for it. Purgatory abolished, the Protestant declares that God alone saves; so he does nothing but attend and – a very Protestant expression – ‘pay his respects’. He is content to follow Pierre Viret’s recommendation of appropriate bearing and moderate conduct to show that the faithful ‘do not grieve like pagans and infidels who have no hope of resurrection’. From much testamentary evidence one early case may stand for many. In 1553 Marie Montsaujou of Troyes, a lawyer’s wife and committed Protestant, stipulated that ‘her body be buried at night, by lantern light, without torches or funerary

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pomp, rejecting the showy displays customary among papists’.44 Such a funeral needed – in this case was given – the authorisation of a local magistrate. The Huguenots would ever be reminded that their unorthodox practices, with no outward sign of mourning, threatened propriety and peace. Protestants, it was widely held, blasphemed because they had no respect for the corpse; they endangered the dead because they did not pray for the soul. The offence against God compounded the threat to social order. The threat was real. Obstructive rules reinforced popular prejudice, led to covert burials or, if defied, to scandalous scenes, rioting, the desecration of tombs and exhumation of bodies. To throw a carcass to the dogs, or to rebury it in wasteland, was to make a crudely effective point. Huguenots might be generally on the defensive, but here they were resolute in standing their ground. Why should they not? With the abolition of prayer for the dead and the mediation of saints, they had worked out and held to a rite of burial which, like the Supper, reflected Calvin’s reading of Scripture and was regularly prescribed in his Disciplines. That drawn up in the Lyons synod of 1563 stated baldly: ‘ministers will offer neither prayer nor sermon at the interment’. The human soul is immortal. After death it ascends to its Saviour, eventually to be reunited with the body. Death meant the separation of body from soul. Repeatedly Protestant prisoners, soon to become martyrs, would describe a kind of disjunction between suffering body and immortal soul and their longing to move on, to be with Christ. Given this understanding of death, whatever the personal grief, believers should make little ceremony of the actual burial. If the body was the ‘temple of the Holy Spirit’, when the soul left the body in death or, as was often stressed, to sleep, the only requirement was for decent consignment to earth. The beliefs and practices of Huguenot congregations, their mettle tested by war, had already set them apart well before the Edict of Nantes secured their rights as a minority. It did not follow that they were content to be viewed by the majority as being outsiders, indifferent to the mores of the community, unfit to share in its space. As over the provision and siting of temples, there was a territorial element in the disputes that arose as Huguenots claimed ground for their dead in places envisaged by opponents as theirs by tradition and right. Inevitably there continued to be clashes even after Huguenots created their own cemeteries: a convenient resting ground it might be but it also deserved the status proper to the citizen who held office, belonged to guild or corporation; at least paid taxes and was clearly a loyal subject. The nobleman was best placed in this respect when a monument in his private chapel could bring honour to the family. Others too could hold their heads high. ‘Blessed are those who die in Jesus Christ’: so read the inscription beneath the royal arms in blue and gold at the entrance to a burial ground at Le Puy. A Catholic observer

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watched a body being carried draped in a black cloth with the royal arms: ‘a very strange thing and scandalous to behold’.45 Of course Huguenots wanted the best of both worlds: the respect due to those whose rights had been formally recognised by the crown, and their freedom to be different, to honour the dead in their own way. Unfortunately ‘the way’ was seen to challenge the cherished beliefs of their fellow citizens, to denigrate as idolatrous the very idea that their sacred, familial space was more than ordinary ground. When bishops at church assemblies expressed outrage and demanded action they represented pretty accurately the views of their priests and people – particularly those living where Huguenots were numerous. When the crown started to listen to the rhetoric and Huguenots to lose rights few of their Catholic neighbours had much sympathy.

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c h a p t e r t w e n t y - ­s e v e n

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A Pastoral and Spiritual Crisis They are enforced to a necessity of book-­learning to maintain the cause.1

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he future of Protestantism in France will come to depend ultimately on the attitude and policies of the crown. Ministers take their cue from information from the provinces, as relayed by intendants and, less objectively, by bishops; but also from their reading of the royal mind. For Louis XIV there will be high political and diplomatic considerations. But sentiment in the country will not be irrelevant. How Catholic France views matters, in those parts especially where there is daily interaction with the alternative confession, will carry weight at Versailles. In March 1661 Mazarin’s death prompted Louis to assume the direction of state affairs. Few then thought he would sustain the burden – he declared it to be his ‘delight’ – but it proved to be the guiding principle and form of government for the remaining fifty-­four years of his life. Huguenots, at the outset, expected and got a more stringent regime. They had reaped dividends from loyalty during the Fronde but in ensuing, calmer times, experiencing the first flush and rhetoric of the new royalism, hearing the change of tone, those more politically attuned might be uneasy. The change was noticeable, to some painful, with loss of temple, or constricted rights.2 But it did not turn out to be too drastic. Content with domestic peace, basking in adulation from all quarters, more pragmatic, even unsure, than his pronouncements might suggest, Louis intended to make his mark on the international stage. He was well aware of the mood among some dévots for whom patience, in the matter of heresy, was not a virtue. Missionaries, teachers, magistrates had pressed on the Huguenots, one way or another, but casualties were relatively few. There was no evident collapse in morale. Yet, it may be that all was not well. With a view of life permanently affected by memories of war and persecution, armed with a theology that translated readily into the strict, for some too

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inflexible discipline of the consistory, Huguenots had acquired a stoical, unadventurous, in some ways introverted mentality. The grander conflicts and the local struggles for rights and sites might be generally resolved, but there were bad memories, some festering wounds. They were kept open in various ways, but regularly by reminders of the past in the form of historical calendars. Published throughout the seventeenth century up till 1685, starting with landmarks of Christian history, they recalled particularly the events of the Religious Wars and the persecution and atrocities that preceded them. In one that has been studied,3 which the congregation of Charenton in 1652 would have found inserted within the covers of the Psalms of David, 81 out of 127 events deemed noteworthy are of the sixteenth century. Nine refer to ‘cruel massacres’, and there are reminders of subversive acts on the Catholic side. Catholics meanwhile were treated everywhere to another appeal to collective memory in the form of processions, celebrating one of the great feasts or commemorating a specific event, a highly visible way of affirming solidarity in the face of Protestant subversion, iconoclasm and sacrilege. Huguenots might count their blessings as they saw listed past assaults upon the very existence of le petit troupeau, having its centrepiece in St Bartholomew’s Day; reminded of the past they could not be sure about the future. At the same time the calendar reinforced the memory bank upon which successive generations would draw. The selective chronicle of oppression sitting in many Huguenot households, ritual Catholic processions in every town – not to mention their own partisan calendars: what hope was there for the ‘snuffing out and setting aside’ of bad memories that had been required of both sides in successive royal edicts?4 In this climate of partisan commemoration it became natural for the faithful to see themselves more as guardians of the temple than evangelists for the Gospel. Were they more concerned about protecting their rights and their property than about presenting a generous, amiable face to the world? Again being wary of generalisation one can leave it as a question. It does seem that going quietly about their business most wanted above all to be left alone. Consistories may have been rather less censorious than in the sixteenth century when they marked their distance from Catholicism and popular culture by the prohibition of fêtes, carnivals, dancing, gambling, even drinking in taverns. It seems that they were becoming more at ease with local custom. They would also have been aware that there were limits to what they could achieve. They could only impose moral sanctions and would have known that excessive rigour might drive the delinquent out of the fold. At the same time there was a controlling tendency in the work of Catholic reformers bent on strengthening faith and improving lives. Mazarin had disapproved of the secretive activities of the Compagnie du Saint-­Sacrement, fearing their political influence. They were as keen to check moral delinquency as to stamp out

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heresy. One day it was a demand that any candidate for entry into a guild should affirm ‘the Catholic and Roman faith’; the next, concern about a fashionable lady’s low-­cut dress or the immorality of dancing. Some notable reforming bishops also campaigned against superstitious aspects of folk religion. Huguenots might therefore find common ground with the curé who thought it his duty to condemn the junketing and randiness associated with traditional festivals. With the puritan trend that crossed the confessional divide it might be expected that Huguenots would find themselves less exposed to popular prejudice. If they were still killjoys they were not usually in a position to police beyond their own communities. Here too on occasion one sees principle counting for more than an instinct for survival. They could still infuriate Catholic neighbours by closing their shutters, refusing to decorate their houses in honour of Catholic processions or sometimes, risking assault by local youths, declining to honour image or cross carried in those processions. They evidently felt at least sufficiently secure to emphasise their separateness, in daily life as in the observances surrounding death. Sobriety in manners and simplicity of dress remained cherished values in Huguenot families. Among the wealthier it may be that the domestic scene is fairly represented in the genre paintings of the Huguenot Abraham de Bosse. They probably stood in the same relation to most Huguenot homes as do the comfortable scenes depicted by Louis le Nain to the life of the average peasant. Even in the more substantial families there seems to have been a persisting habit of mind that we may call puritan: discreet, scrupulous and chary of the world’s pleasures, especially where women were concerned. The founder of the Academy of Caen, Moissant de Brieux instructed in his will that his daughter should not go to comedies and balls, read novels or wear low-­necked dresses. Even among nobles Protestant principles could outweigh social obligation. When the comte d’Harcourt gave a ball in Normandy to celebrate the end of the Fronde, the very Huguenot nobles whose loyalty had helped ensure the victory of the crown declined to attend. Did Huguenot pastors generally lack inspiration, tending to play safe in sermons, instructing rather than uplifting? Here the view of a Royalist Englishman and devoted Anglican is interesting. Broadly sympathetic and comparing the typical minister favourably to the ‘blockish priest’, Peter Heylin wondered whether they were mistaken in their tactics in seeking to win over Catholics: ‘to deal with them by main force of argument, and in the fervent spirit of zeal, as the Protestants too often do, is not the way’. But ‘questionlesse it behoveth them so to be, for living in a country full of opposition they are enforced to a necessity of book learning, to maintain the cause’.5 Too didactic – and, to the Anglican, too austere – in worship, prejudiced for example against the representation of the cross, had Huguenotism become, through its emphasis

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on the rational, a religion of works rather than of faith? The questions are easier to ask than to answer. They are prompted by Léonard’s description of the ‘pastoral and spiritual crisis in [French] Protestantism’ besides, already noticed, its ‘lethargy’.6 As its committed historian Léonard had a close rapport with the Protestant spirit; the judgement has weight. For his view allows that a preacher dwelling on the backslidings of the ‘people of Israel’ and the necessity of civil obedience might induce sober reflection but do little to lift the spirits. But there arise two further questions. First, to what extent is the crisis theory affected by knowledge of subsequent events, leading to Revocation, and beyond? That apart, can any such generalisation be valid for French Protestantism as a whole when there were such large differences between Huguenot communities? Even if one makes the broad distinction between north and south, or focuses primarily on the south, treating Charenton as a special case, it must be allowed that there were different interests within each community, reflecting rank, occupation, means – and sex. A hellfire sermon that stirred some might embarrass others. An academic discourse to engage the more literate would be over the heads of many – even at Charenton. If one concludes that ‘crisis’ is an inappropriate word for imperfections in ministry and wasted opportunities in the middle and quiet years of the century, there remain further questions. Huguenots entered the personal reign of Louis XIV with little but a king’s word and their protestations of loyalty to safeguard their future. Does this mean that they lacked vitality as a worshipping community? Or were they generally making the best of what had been for many, from 1629, a kind of open imprisonment, where warders always watched, where discreet behaviour was, and would continue to be their best hope? Some notable individuals maintained, in culture as in society, a respected position in the upper, opinion-­forming, knowledge-­hungry ranks, looking for enlightenment – in itself to prove an exposed, risky place to be. In general, however, Huguenots felt constrained to live cautiously, on their guard, some more comfortable than others, in all aspects of life prudent. Relying on God’s Word and their witness to it, they had never been true missionaries. They did not seek to convert though were happy when a convert came, attracted by their plain sincerity and sober living: the Gospel without frills. The main venture into controversy was on home ground, where academics fought over rival interpretations of Calvinist doctrine. Catholicism as it was expressed in the writing and preaching of François de Sales and the charitable labours of Vincent de Paul offered the smiling face of Christianity, Port Royal7 its palatable theology, Bossuet its apparent moderation. The Jesuit system of education appealed to many, Huguenots included, as the best available. Valuing the austerity of their temples, Huguenots had nothing to compare with the prevailing style of the baroque. They might find repellent the exuberance and

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triumphalism of the baroque style, especially the gaudy confection of some provincial imitation, but they could see that as art and theatre it had undoubted effect. For music they were starved, by comparison even with fellow Protestants in Germany. The Psalms offer an incomparable range of human emotions and aspirations; they were well served by Marot. Yet to some they may have seemed to offer thin fare compared to the rich heritage of Lutheran hymns. Does it follow that Huguenotism, by comparison, was arid, unappealing except to the habitués? Or was the plainness to their taste, giving ease of mind, consonant with the logic and clarity of their beliefs? Beliefs, we will see, for which many were to abandon home and risk life. Plain and clear was the Huguenot Bible. Calvin had commissioned a translation by Pierre Olivetan, like him a native of Noyon. Printed at Neuchâtel in 1535 it was based largely on that of Lefèvre (1530) though it claimed originality. In its final version Lefèvre’s Bible was the model for the Louvain Bible that ran into many editions. Olivetan’s was further corrected and reprinted. As divisions hardened, both sides in the religious conflict claimed unique authenticity for their version. In fact there were insignificant differences in the telling of the story and only a few between the terms employed to convey the different understanding of church and minister. Robert Estienne’s Bible of 1553 was the first text to offer numbered verses. Catholic and Protestant alike had access to sound translations of the Bible. To the Huguenots it naturally mattered more for it had a central role in worship and teaching. Huguenots honoured and cherished their Bible. As in England, it would be prominent in many Protestant homes, representing its status as the guardian and guide of faith. But in one respect, by comparison with those across the Channel, French Protestants were deprived. The English Bible, from Tyndale’s, then the ‘Geneva Bible’ version, to the King James Bible of 1611, reflected in every page the richness of language that helped to impress its narratives and teaching on the mind and imagination. The narrower range of vocabulary and classical restraint of the French Bibles reflected the divide between the French of officialdom and of polite society and that spoken by most Frenchmen. Huguenots did not have in their Bible the Englishman’s opportunity to read what has been called the greatest book in the language, capable of high eloquence yet not far removed from the talk of kitchen, forge or marketplace. There may not have been, by 1661, enough defections to support the idea of a faith in crisis. Yet, as we have seen, for material, even cultural, reasons some were giving up. They might be genuinely attracted to the faith as it was presented by Arnauld or Bossuet, gently pared down to essentials, stripped of some of its more contentious elements but not of the emotion of spiritual experience. And that experience they might compare with the plainness of Huguenot worship. One common factor surely was the desire to be a part of

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the larger community, able to bring up a family or pursue a career without discrimination. Locke was sufficiently touched by such a case to make a note of it. The marquis de Malause was ‘the most considerable man of the Religion in these parts [near Castres]’. There were family considerations here; Turenne was his maternal great-­uncle. Already a seasoned soldier he wanted to purchase a regiment ‘but the king refused to confirm the bargain unless he would change his religion; but if he would do that he promised him great matters. He refused to change and was retired to his estates.’8 Two years later, in 1678, Bossuet received his abjuration. One can imagine the personal pain, the family debate around issues of faith, honour, loyalty, ambition, that had preceded the decision. He served in the army for a further twelve years. The state of the pastorate is central to the debate about ‘crisis’. There were some exceptional pastors, learned and pious men who could have been eminent in any field. Among such were Jean Gigord of Montpellier, Pierre du Moulin of Charenton and Sedan,9 Daniel Chamier of the Dauphiné and Montauban,10 Jean Claude of Charenton, stern opponent of Port Royal and, different in approach, the redoubtable Paul Ferry of Metz, who showed himself in his later years sympathetic to reunion and corresponded with Bossuet.11 But if, as in Léonard’s regretful view, most pastors were unadventurous professional men, conscientious but lacking in vocational zeal they were ill-­rewarded for their pains. The salary for the lesser posts was small. They had to work under the eye of elders and, though their respective roles were precisely defined, according to Calvin’s precepts, it could be an uncomfortable position. It was assuredly, however, a position of honour, commanding respect; one that may compare, not unfavourably, to the status and lot of the average curé. Most ministers in the first decades of the seventeenth century would have experienced, along with vocational training in theology, at least some of the wider culture of a university. But there were signs ominous for the future health of French Protestantism. Already a fundamental difference between two schools of thought was undermining one of its greatest strengths: the clarity and consistency of the Calvinism that had long sustained the faithful. Its loss, especially for those touched by the wider culture of the time, was advertised loudly by the protracted dispute within the academies about essential theological issues; more subtly and politely by the proposals and debates that were features of the chequered history of the movement for reunion. Also, by mid-­century, the training ground was contracting.

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Revision or Reunion? Holy Religion torn apart by so many texts. (D’ Huisseau)1

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he questioning of core beliefs was not limited to France. At the start of the century followers of Arminius, ‘Remonstrants’ as they were called in Holland, believed that Christ died for all believers; they had given up predestination and accepted the right of the ruler to control religion.2 In so doing they seriously qualified Calvin’s essential tenet: the single and absolute nature of God’s sovereignty. These liberal views were condemned at the synod of Dordt (1619) but they had continued to gain ground at the expense of Calvinist orthodoxy. In its French theatre Calvinist theology was further tested by the prolonged experience of civil war and its aftermath; no less by the steady growth of royal authority. Huguenots were faced by a painful question. If reform had been a providential act of God, as Protestants should not doubt, why in France should it have had such grave consequences? Could it be true after all that to be a Huguenot was to be a bad Frenchman? Among many texts to consider, one stood out. St Paul had written in his letter to the Romans: ‘Every person must submit to the supreme authorities . . . Anyone who rebels against authority is resisting a Divine institution’ (Romans 13:1). Could the people of the Bible disregard the injunction? Such questions tested morale and for some already pointed the way to conversion. The scholarly humanist Moise Amyraut, director of the seminary of Saumur, had come close, in his language and argument, to the gentler and more reasonable of Catholics. In his Apologie pour ceux de la réligion in 1647, he maintained that the Huguenots had never wished to set up a separate state; it had been forced upon them. In his desire to take some of the pain out of the Catholic perception – that these heretics threatened the integrity of the realm – he only

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strengthened the argument of the absolutist. It was one of that school, Guez de Balzac, who paid him the telling compliment that he showed the qualities more of the court than of the consistory. Of course the consistory fought back. To the rigorous pastor du Moulin, Amyraut was a ‘deviationist’, his views harmful to the church. We are close here to the theme of Bossuet’s Variations and the argument that counted most for Turenne: the inevitably fissile tendency of Protestantism. The issue of authority remained unresolved. Prominent among Huguenot intellectuals was Isaac d’Huisseau of Saumur. After forty years’ ministry at Saumur, three times elected rector of its Academy, and author of the standard work on church discipline, he found his reputation compromised by the publication, in 1670, of a book, supposedly anonymous but widely recognised as his. Its title conveys his intention but hardly the shock caused by his radically new approach to the question of reunion.3 He called on men to lay aside prejudice and vested interest and look only to the glory of God and the salvation of souls. They must discard preconceptions, accept only what can be verified or seen to be reasonable, and work back to a foundation on which all could agree. They would find it in Scripture, in moral precepts derived from the Commandments and in the example and teaching of Christ and the Apostles. There was little here for Protestants to object to. D’Huisseau was on more dangerous ground when he suggested a new criterion for selection of essential truth, eliminating the narrative and prophetic parts of the Bible. Seeking to distinguish between the essential (the plainly accepted Word of God) and the rest (the elaboration of theologians) he was following Erasmus, in spirit at least, but more directly the Arminian Grotius4 and the Lutheran Calixtus,5 in what was surely a new chapter in the Reformation story. Or was it a new Reformation? There was novelty in d’Huisseau’s approach, plainly influenced by the philosophic method of Descartes that, as Locke noted on a visit to Montpellier and its professor Pierre Régis,6 was becoming fashionable. It did not commend him to conservative circles. But the outcry that ensued was caused first by what he rejected as inessential: predestination, any exclusive claim upon the operation of the Holy Spirit, a precise definition of the Trinity. Retained were the uniqueness of God, the redeeming mission of Christ, his death, resurrection and return. D’Huisseau’s object was not to devalue particular insights and practices but to recover the simple vision and teaching of the evangelists. It seemed that in place of the visible church he was envisaging a blank sheet on which to draw anew. It could hardly be treated as an academic exercise, for d’Huisseau was too prominent and influential. Also he had rivals in Saumur and they seized their chance to discredit him. He proposed an ecumenical strategy based on the distinction between those beliefs he held necessary for salvation and those that reflected ‘the faults and imperfections of the human

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spirit’. With startling audacity, anticipating in this respect the analytical spirit of the Enlightenment, d’Huisseau hoped, by concentrating on the essential, to challenge the view, still generally accepted, that to be tolerant was to be indifferent. He was excommunicated by his consistory and condemned by synods across the land but continued to press his case until his death in 1671. Foremost against him, championing orthodoxy, was Pierre Jurieu. The young professor at Sedan, already noted for his devotional works, would have time in exile, campaigning against Louis XIV, to give further thought to these issues. Meanwhile, with strong personalities engaged in a public war of words, the dispute threatened the coherence of the Huguenots and provided ammunition to their opponents. An immediate casualty was the plan of Turenne, a convert still prestigious among Huguenots but suspect to some as a renegade, to convene a synod composed of the unity-­minded on both sides, ministers and bishops, to consider reunion. In the opinion of Benoist7 a significant number of pastors from the more important communities were ready to come over in return for concessions that Bossuet, for example, would not have thought impossible (though Rome might be bound to reject). But the more some pastors might seem to respond, the more the true followers of Calvin, as they would see themselves, resisted the siren appeal to the secular ideal of national unity. And in this respect Turenne could no longer be considered a fair arbiter. For some years, fortified at the end by Bossuet’s Exposition and Nicole’s Perpetuité (both offered him in manuscript) he had been pondering the bad effects of disunity. He saw them illustrated notably in England, where ‘every person creates a sect to suit himself ’8 and, from personal experience, in the dangerously independent notions of southern pastors. It is hard to gauge the effect of these fissures cutting deep into the rock face of Calvin’s theology. On the Catholic side there were differences too. Here, there could be interesting initiatives but no single representative voice or accepted leader. There could be no significant concession that would not at once be questioned. Throughout the story, as opposed as they had been during the time of Pascal, Jesuits and Jansenists contended for the heretic soul. The Jesuits’ main advantage lay in their excellent schools, a standing temptation to the Huguenot parent. Port Royal9 had sufficient funds from some leading parlementaire and noble families, most prominent among them the duchesse de la Rochefoucauld, to mount its own missionary effort to instruct the nouveaux convertis in the faith. Translations of the liturgy, notably Nouveau Testament de Mons (1667), and handbooks of popular devotion, such as that of Le Tourneau, confessor to the community, were designed to show that the liturgy offered deep spiritual consolation to the raw convert. Their very success created problems. The moral example of Port Royal, the puritanical, purposeful lives of its members, appealed particularly to the sober

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bourgeois Huguenot. Their reasonable and sympathetic approach, suggesting that they understood the good there might be in Protestantism and the pain a Huguenot might feel in giving it up, aroused the suspicion of the regular orders, whose approach tended to be more combative, less compromising. There were two main charges, to which the king would listen seriously when they were voiced in the conseil de conscience by confessor Père la Chaise and Archbishop Harlay: the theological and political. First, Jansenists held a view of the role of grace in salvation that was indistinguishable from that of Geneva. Second, even more toxic in its effect on the king was the suggestion that they saw themselves as a spiritual élite, in effect a church within the church. Along with this, if generally unspoken, but as old as the history of Christianity, went the suspicion of the professional towards the amateur, laymen (and women) presuming too much, encroaching, as it were, on the temple. Pierre Nicole, humanist, rationalist, moralist, for a prime example, was a layman but the leading teacher at Port Royal and deservedly influential. Pellisson’s little empire reflected lay presumption; what the orthodox saw as the impurity of his methods pointed to the danger.10 There was a common slur, that Jansenists were Catholic Calvinists. When in 1683 Bishop Coislin of Orléans ordered the removal of a popular statue of St Anthony he was accused by the village people of prejudice ‘because he came from a family of Huguenots’.11 The Society of Jesus was still smarting from the strictures of Pascal: ‘the Jesuits have tried to combine God and the world and have only succeeded in gaining the contempt of both’.12 Now his successors, by interpreting Catholic truth in their distinctive way, sought to increase their influence. Already there was a growing number of bishops who could be labelled Jansenist, among them the revered Le Camus. So the Jesuits came to press hard, with a sense of urgency, and unequivocally, for a tougher line. It helped their cause that Pellisson, despite his most ingratiating efforts, was unable to secure a formal mandate from the Pope for his scheme for financing the conversion of Protestants. A crucial figure in the story was Jacques-­Bénigne Bossuet, the one man who had the intellect, reputation and standing at court to find a middle way. As France’s leading theologian and political philosopher, the absolutism of the bishop of Meaux was grounded in his reading of Scripture. It was with his Exposition de la doctrine Catholique that he had made his name.13 His erudition was formidable, his prose majestic, his arguments, at least within the terms of contemporary debate, difficult to refute. The Exposition was so reasonable in tone that he was accused of watering down doctrine to suit heretic taste. It did him no harm at court. As a regular preacher before the king he was well placed to influence opinion. He showed courage when he dwelt on the sin of adultery; however, Louis showed appreciation and trust when he

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made him tutor to the dauphin. Interested in projects of reunion he saw no contradiction between his Gallican sympathies and his concern for Catholic orthodoxy. In his correspondence with Leibniz it became apparent that even his rational approach could not build a bridge between Rome and the Lutheran Confession which all could cross. The Tridentine decrees blocked the way. Bossuet was foremost among those who thought that the soundest approach to Protestantism was through teaching and debate. He met the Huguenot case by deploying their own weapons. Catholics generally did not much care to read their bible but for Bossuet it was un livre parfait. It was bible in hand that he conducted his celebrated dialogue (1666) with Pastor Paul Ferry, the doyen of Metz, chosen as much for his irenic inclination as for his influence over other pastors.14 Despite this episode, and though he conceded that the points in dispute left intact ‘the foundations of salvation’, Ferry drew back when he encountered pressure from colleagues and recoiled, it seems, from the impatience of Louis’ then confessor, P. Annat. In another much ­spoken-­of case Pastor Claude was held by Catholics to have been worsted in the celebrated debate with Bossuet before Turenne’s niece, Mlle de Duras. It led to her conversion, albeit after significant concessions that could be made to an individual of stature more easily than in a general way. But it was palpably absurd to say, with exultant Catholics, that only embarrassment prevented Claude from admitting his error. We can only begin to imagine the effect of such contention in the world of theology. Of more certain impact on communities and their pastors was the contraction of the training ground. After 1559 the Geneva Academy, providing consistency and inspiration, had been the first choice for aspirants to ministry. Later ministry had been sustained by academies on, or close to, French soil. On their viability and the quality of their teaching depended the health of the pastorate and the morale of congregations.15 Eight academies had been founded in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Matching the confessional balance six were in the south: Orthez, Montauban, Montpellier, Nîmes, Orange and Die. In the north were Sedan and Saumur. As the Reformation had gained hold Huguenots realised that existing universities were unfit for their distinctive religious purpose. In theory accessible to all, whether operating under royal or Papal aegis and charter, in practice they were locked into Catholic culture. Pope Pius IV decreed in 1564 that only Catholics could receive degrees. Protestants worried about Catholic influence even in apparently neutral subjects such as law. In any case they could not provide anything resembling the vocational training of the Genevan academy. It had been invaluable in the early years but could not train sufficient numbers for the expanding church. It set its sights high, expecting much of ministers and wanting to have more direct control over their training.

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At the fifth national synod delegates from the wealthier parishes were urged to support young men, future pastors, at university. Some undoubtedly valued learning for its own sake but the motive would always be vocational. The ninth national synod in 1579 called for the establishment of schools to train ministers to serve the church of God in future by entering the holy ministry. In one form or other ministers looked for a university that was also a seminary. A wide humanist schooling should fit the candidate for leadership in a largely literate church community; from Calvinist theology he should gain the understanding and sense of calling to direct, teach and hearten his flock. Finance was a problem where Catholics dominated urban administration and would not supply funds. Higher education could be provided outside official institutions through occasional courses of public lectures. These had started in Orléans when the Huguenots secured the city, but stopped in 1568 when the city returned to Catholicism. The academy of Montpellier developed from an informal base for Protestant lecturers to become part of the university enlarged in 1596, under royal favour, to include a faculty of arts. It was to be half Catholic, half Protestant; its salaries to come from the gabelle. When the Huguenots added chairs in Hebrew and Theology it received support from the national synod. It counted among early professors the notable Calvinist Greek scholar and, from 1598, royal librarian, Isaac Casaubon.16 But it remained small, receiving only half the subsidy granted by synod to Montauban and Saumur. In nearby Nîmes, the college originally endowed by Francis I had come under Huguenot control. Despite having chairs in Hebrew, Greek and Law it came by the seventeenth century to be primarily a Calvinist theological college. That was also the case of Die, in a largely Protestant and rather poor part of the Dauphiné. It was insufficiently funded by the city and provincial synod, and remained small. Benefiting from its autonomy under the great Protestant family of Bouillon, the ancient university of Orange had become by 1573 a Protestant college, attracting students from other provinces, notably from Provence, in flight from the Jesuits. More important and privileged, again under Bouillon patronage, was Sedan. With professors in all principal subjects except medicine it enjoyed an international reputation and strong support from the national synod. Another ideal location for a specifically Protestant college was Montauban, in origin typical of the municipal collèges founded in the early sixteenth century and reflecting prevalent humanist values. It soon became one of the network of grammar schools that met the needs of Calvinist families. Statutes of 1600 provided for an impressive range of professorships in its joint collège and academy. It seemed to be poised to become a leading centre of higher education, but it never recovered from the effects of the siege. Even worse was the fate of Orthez in Béarn, which had benefited from the autonomy of the province and patronage of the House of Navarre. Generous provision

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from the proceeds of secularised bishoprics had drawn in prominent Calvinists, notably Pierre Viret and Lambert Daneau. But after the conquest of Béarn in 1620 it was closed down. The very idea of a formal institution imitating Catholic colleges but teaching doctrine was anomalous in Catholic eyes, offensive to the Catholic devout. After the death of Henry IV this came to be the view of government. Unsurprisingly, the founding and subsequent condition of a university generally reflected the faith and influence of a powerful protector. Saumur had in some ways the most promising start, owing to the support of Henry IV and Sully but it was vulnerable after the death of Duplessis-­ Mornay, its presiding spirit. He intended it to be on the model of the flourishing Protestant university of Leiden but it turned out to be much narrower in scope, teaching only the humanities, ancient languages and theology. Whether Protestantism or more worldly motives were uppermost, the decision of Bouillon to turn the established collège of Sedan into an academy (1602) and to fund it amply from sequestered church lands, provided an attractive alternative, with its international flavour, for French Protestant students. The ducal lands lay outside the frontier but successive synods recognised the Academy as French and important and offered substantial grants. Beyond reach until 1648, when Sedan was ceded to France, it remained in fair condition until the Revocation. Only then, with Saumur, was it abolished. Sedan and Saumur were left as the last bastions of French Protestant theology and pastoral training, after a relentless process of reduction. From the start the academies suffered from insufficient endowment and resources. Professors needed conviction, for they were lucky to receive regular pay. Several academies were too small to be viable and would have fared better by amalgamation. In 1617 Montpellier was joined to Nîmes. In 1620 Orthez was closed. As in other aspects of Huguenot life, the middle years appeared to be stable. Examined more closely the stories show tensions as Huguenots fought to maintain their independence against Jesuit opportunism and encroachment. Royal authority backed the Jesuits: the view was that their schools would deal effectively with dissidence – and provide a better education. By 1633 Montpellier, Montauban and Nîmes were mi-­parties, with parallel classes. Huguenots saw injustice as the colleges had been set up, and subsidised, for their children. Unfortunately for them the Jesuit system was similar to their own, the schools were well funded and the teachers zealous and efficient. Consistories might call for a boycott but some parents, braving condemnation, even possibly excommunication, put educational advantage before religious conviction. Government was never neutral. Funding, Henry IV’s deniers du roi, was abandoned after 1610. Successive prohibitions were designed to convey disapproval and limit opportunity. Huguenots were not allowed to attend the

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important Synod of Dordt17 or consistories to recruit foreign pastors. Pastors were forbidden to travel or take up posts abroad. In 1644 it was the turn of students, who were prohibited from going to foreign universities, specifically Geneva, the rest of Protestant Switzerland, the Netherlands and England. Republicanism was alleged to be the danger to young minds; heresy assumed. So young men were deprived of the fruitful interchange of ideas, their lifeblood at a time of intellectual ferment and scientific advance. The hand of government began to fall more heavily. In 1659 Montauban was ordered out of the city (still mainly Protestant) to relocate in the small town of Puylaurens. In 1664 Nîmes-­Montpellier was closed down. In 1681, following the French occupation of the city, Sedan was closed. Montauban and Saumur survived precariously until the Revocation. By 1685 there was little left of the Huguenot dream of an educated élite, the spread of the tree of international Calvinism and, for service at home, a trained pastorate. The last branches were cut, the mutilated trunk hewn down, the very roots dug up. Pastors who had not already left made their perilous way to the frontiers; a few went underground to minister as best they could to the scattered faithful. No wonder there was a general spirit of nostalgia for the vanished ‘golden age’. The reader may wonder how ‘golden’ it ever was but see how the relative tranquillity of life, the freedom to worship, might come to represent the ideal: the spirit that had to be recovered in foreign lands, or in the perilous, secret assemblies of ‘the desert’.

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PA RT F I V E REVOCATION

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Uncertain Times We depend on the king’s tolerance. (Pierre Bayle)1

T

he traditional affection for the monarchy survived the Fronde; if anything, it was strengthened by the experience. By 1661, when Mazarin’s death left Louis XIV in sole control, it had become a powerful force for order and justice. Louis had been severely tested in the dangers and humiliation of civil war and carefully schooled by the cardinal to profit by the experience. Courtiers saw a handsome young man, relishing his first taste of independent power, shorter than portraits would show, robust, energetic, evidently unconstrained by his diplomatic marriage to Spain’s Infanta Maria Theresa and not averse to sexual adventure. They might note that he had the manner of a king, confident in bearing, terse and decisive in speech. Within months he had asserted his authority by arranging, with Colbert, the overthrow of his most powerful subject, surintendant Fouquet. Soon, in the Jours d’Auvergne,2 in the Massif Central, where no Protestant churches had taken root, lawless nobles would discover that no region was too remote, no subject too influential, to escape the hand of royal justice. Courtiers did not, however, expect that Louis would live up to his stated intention of taking charge of the state in person, with all the self-­discipline, regular routines and close attention that would be required. How could they envisage his profession of kingship as being ‘delightful’ – unless it become so from the gathering of laurels earned by other men? What if they had been told that he would stick to his last, maintaining energy and command to the end, for fifty-­four years? It is natural, in the context of the Huguenot experience and with benefit of hindsight, to interpret Louis’ personal version of royal absolutism in the light of Versailles: the manners and values of the court and the system of government that had evolved by the middle years of the reign. There were, however,

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pointers from the start. Gilbert Burnet, who first saw Louis in 1663, admired him for his passion for work, finding him ‘diligent in his own counsels and regular in the despatch of his affairs’. But he noticed Louis’ inclination to view himself as something more than mortal; it helped establish the young historian in his ‘love of law and liberty’.3 Already can be seen the idea that the king represented the state in his person; in his concern for reputation; urge to win plaudits at home and abroad; pride of family and insistence on its rights. This is illustrated by his quarrel with the Papacy over the affair of the Corsican guards (1662)4 and by the War of the Queen’s Rights (1667–68).5 The pupil of Mazarin would be aware of the need to strengthen the eastern frontiers, by conquest if by no other means; also of the costs and hazards of war. Spain’s decline may be more obvious to us than it was to contemporaries, at least before the invasion of 1667 had shown that France was incapable of defending its Flemish fortresses. Thereafter Louis’ claim to the Spanish throne would be high on the diplomatic agenda, with successive plans for partition, until 1700, when the death of the childless King Charles II forced the issue. This king would tread warily, listen to advisers, and need reassurance. He was essentially the child of the Fronde, when France had been at war, not only with Spain but with one group or another of his subjects. Pillage, terror, the disruption of trade, the collapse of law were recent memories. Beneath the studied public style was a caution, even uncertainty, born of the experience of betrayal. Most rankling had been the insolence of some of his greatest subjects now flocking to pay their court. Anne had suppressed all mention of her husband’s governance from his son’s formal education. However, his striving for self-­command surely reflected his awareness of years when his father was sovereign but not entirely ruler and men spoke more of the cardinal’s regime and achievements than of his father’s. In crucial boyhood years his mother’s position as regent had been made intolerable during the Fronde by defiance and insult. His own first minister, Mazarin, had then been forced into exile, and his own nominal power flouted. His idea of authority, with its stress on the need for subjection and order, was conditioned by his knowing the potential for disorder. As he learned the history of his country, under the future archbishop of Paris, Hardouin de Péréfixe, with examples to be avoided, the fainéant kings, he promised to follow the lead of the most conscientious of his ancestors. Particularly he abhorred ‘Louis the Idle’. In his own Vie de Henry le Grand his tutor Péréfixe presented him with a sanitised picture of his grandfather, the restorer of peace and order. With it went a stern lesson from the greatest and most prolonged of disorders, the Religious Wars; from the incapacity of monarchy during those years. Péréfixe condemned outright the massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day. On the edict that ‘factious and powerful Huguenots’ had obtained from Henry IV, he was carefully objective. The king

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had had to satisfy them because of ‘reason of state and the great obligations he owed them’.6 ‘Reason of state’ – the cardinals’ guiding principle: for the young Louis it was a political lesson in a phrase. Nor was he likely to forget that Henry had been assassinated, like Henry III, before him, albeit both by Catholic fanatics. In the arguments of some authors of the Mazarinades7 there had been reminders of the temper of the League. Catholic fervour was now unequivocally royalist. But where stood the Huguenots? Outwardly it would seem that they were loyal subjects. They had pointedly refused to take advantage of the government’s embarrassment during the Fronde. Yet there were alarming reports from intendants in the Midi: ‘a powder keg about to explode’,8 was one description. Visiting Languedoc in 1660 Turenne was startled to find pastors talking nostalgically of ‘the wars of M de Rohan’ that he thought ‘incompatible with the tranquillity of a state such as this’.9 Rohan had been treated with politic generosity after 1629 but that did not prevent his supporting Condé in the Fronde; few then followed him. As the country’s grandest Protestant, briefly a frondeur before he came back to serve the crown, Turenne was expected to share their sentiments. It was as if, years on from the ’45, some English parsons were waxing warm about old Jacobite days. But Turenne, already wavering in his allegiance, about to busy himself with schemes for reunion, had long been more royalist – and realist – than sectarian. Most bourgeois Huguenots, indeed some pastors, would think like him. In many towns, whether the Protestant community was substantial or insignificant, there did not appear to be a problem or tension that could not be relieved by negotiation. This was especially the case where the leading Huguenots were merchants, the Catholics mainly office-­holders. They had a common interest in good order. There were still some mixed marriages and cosy family and official arrangements. In Montpellier Locke gathered from his Huguenot friend Barbeyrac that ‘they and the papist laity live together friendly enough’. Then, more surprisingly, ‘they sometimes get and sometimes loose [sic] proselytes. There is nothing done against them that come over to the reformed religion unless they be such as have [earlier] turned papist and relaps: these sometimes they prosecute.’10 Some Catholics were perturbed by the activities of the missionary orders; sober northern Huguenots deplored the fanaticism of their brethren of Lower Languedoc. Intendants, now being commissioned with ever more wide-­ranging powers, were based usually in the provincial capital. They would be aware of such sentiments but also likely to be pressed by the bishop to act with rigour. If they had thought that the king wanted more pressure to be brought to bear on the Huguenots they would have responded – as eventually some did. As it was, they had their hands full implementing the instructions of Colbert. Their prime interest was in the well-­being and good order of the province.

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So it would appear that the king had everything to gain in maintaining the policy of tolerance, the Huguenots in avoiding offence. They, like others, welcomed the emergence of this impressive young man. With few exceptions, and those from personal, not ideological reasons, their bourgeois leaders took every opportunity to emphasise their loyalty – and would continue to do so. To the more thoughtful it may have been clear that history was against them, that they had no defence beyond the royal word, expressed in the terms of Nantes and Alès. The latter, it should be emphasised, was a Grace, offered to subjects, not a treaty between equals.11 Bayle, ever the realist and a Protestant as much from revulsion against his Jesuit teachers as from Calvinist conviction, warned that ‘we depend on the king’s tolerance’.12 He would be an early leaver and his Jesuit instructors would have cause to regret their failure. According to his Mémoires13 Louis had resolved to respect Henry IV’s edict and explicitly rejected the path of violence. However, he ‘would try to restrict its execution within the narrowest possible limits’ and would reserve ‘the graces which he could personally grant’ for those who showed ‘submissiveness’. He admitted that ‘changed times and circumstances could produce a thousand alterations in his plans’. He would recognise the necessity behind the treaty, for peace and civil order, even the unseemly bargaining behind the terms. But circumstances had changed – and would change again. Louis’ conception of order was grounded in the ideal of unity, the ‘sacred bond’ of the preacher’s rhetoric. It was inevitable that he should view any exception to the ideal as a personal affront. Recall what had gone into shaping the mentality of the young king: the devout piety of his Spanish mother; the traditions of the Gallican church; his quite limited schooling and selective reading of the lessons of history. His coronation oath was unequivocal as to his duty to suppress heresy. Huguenots could only hope that he would have thoughts and concerns more pressing than religion and the status of a harmless minority. In simple terms the place of the Huguenot question in the royal mind, the degree of priority, would depend on the state of affairs at home and abroad. In time foreign policy considerations would be uppermost; in 1661 that was not yet the case. The situation as he considered it with his advisers, and described retrospectively in his Mémoires, was far from ideal. He began with the striking phrase: le désordre regne partout. The disorderly state of the court and the unhealthy influence of the clientèles, with the patronage enjoyed by great nobles, came first. He had learned that no one interest, not that of Orléans, Condé, Conti, Turenne, Longueville or Rochefoucauld among les grands, could be satisfied without upsetting another of them and so endangering the throne. By 1661 not one of them appeared disposed to resist royal authority; on the contrary they could be seen to be vying with one another in zeal to

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serve and be suitably rewarded. To enhance the image of the court and the attraction of service was therefore a prime aim. Resources were lacking, so reform of the finances was vital. For that he put full and justifiable trust in Colbert. The ambitious contrôleur-­général took a consistently pragmatic view. He needed moneyed Huguenots to fill key positions and wanted to attract capital and skilled immigrants for commercial projects, regardless of their religion. Protestants like the Dutchman Van Robais, presiding over his most modern cloth factory at Abbeville, could be sure of the minister’s protection. Louis was also concerned about the state of the church. Though generally indifferent to questions of theology, he followed the cardinals in taking seriously the threat of ‘Jansenism’.14 It was still a live issue, inflamed by the reworking of old arguments about grace and will and new focus on the practice of casuistry, by the vengeful spirit of some Jesuits and the equally partisan counter-­assault of Pascal.15 Its rigorous Augustinian theology, the ‘Neo-­ Calvinism’ alleged by its enemies, the moral seriousness of ‘Messieurs de Port Royal’, might allow Jansenism a place in the campaign to win Huguenot hearts and minds; but it was the taint of the Fronde, the patronage of duchesses, that nagged at Louis. When Jansenists came to appeal to Rome and in Innocent XI find favour and protection, they caused further offence. Meanwhile Port Royal was a constant reminder of his dilemma. He needed, like previous kings, to control the church; he also needed, for his status in Catholic Europe, to have the approval of Rome. Cardinal de Retz was no Jansenist but his rebellious career had given ecclesiastical faction a high profile.16 Louis clearly saw clerical sedition, whether or not reinforced by Papal authority, as a serious threat to royal authority. Tradition and material interest pointed to the Gallican church as the mainstay of the crown. Until it was shown to be united and loyal, and the ‘Peace of the Church’ had time to run, to show whether a ‘peace’ was real, the Protestant issue was secondary.17 Huguenots were not mentioned among Louis’ early reflections on the church. Nor did they figure significantly in his detailed description of the structure of government. Most revealing is the passage in the Mémoires in which Louis finally addresses the Huguenot question. He says that Huguenots are no longer to be feared though he regrets that they are still present in a Catholic kingdom. There is a vague statement of intent: he has plans to bring them into the true church. But he rejects emphatically the advice of those who would use violent means. It is as if he relegates the matter to history when he concedes that the Protestants of Europe had had some wise things to say about a corrupt church. They had also been a useful resource and ally for an ambitious ruler (like Francis I?). Louis further allowed that Huguenots still had an honourable place in many offices; there were some notable soldiers, and others made an essential contribution to manufacturing and commercial enterprise as well as – Colbert

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would remind him – to science and the arts. Men like Ruvigny, representative of Huguenot interests at court, he could respect for their principled stand.18 So he then believed that persuasion was the proper course if heretics were to learn the error of their ways: the nudge rather than the boot. The significance of these comments is not reduced by the fact that the Mémoires were compiled around 1666 when Louis’ thoughts were turning towards war for ‘The Queen’s Rights’.19 He wrote to reassure the Elector of Brandenburg (whose alliance he needed): he took care ‘that they be maintained in all privileges . . . to this I am engaged by my royal word’.20 The later part reflects the king’s thoughts on the eve of the Dutch war. There had by then been a number of declarations regarding the rights of the Huguenots. Their main tenor seems to have been towards clarity and the drawing of boundaries, locally vexatious and damaging to individuals rather than generally threatening. In 1661, in response to clerical demand, with bishops excited by the king’s taking personal control, official teams, typically including an intendant and a priest, had been commissioned to investigate loopholes and infringements. One target was the proliferation of temples in areas and places not specified in the Edict. In so far as a concerted strategy can be seen, appealing both to church and rival interests, it was to constrict opportunity for the Huguenots by closing doors to offices of profit and prestige. In Languedoc they were excluded from the Estates. In Montpellier and other towns they were banned from holding municipal office. Huguenots had undoubtedly taken advantage of extensions to rights and innovations that had crept in since Nantes and Alès. Curtailed or cancelled, they would not be allowed in future. So one can see, building up across the Midi, the tensions between two worlds: that of the solidly Catholic official establishment, like the parlement of Toulouse, and of the Huguenot communities, represented at every level from affluent merchant down to artisan. Resourceful and self-­confident they would still be powerless to protect their temple against an intendant armed with royal decree. The vigilantes of the Compagnie du Saint-­Sacrement had already prepared the way, compiling evidence for the casebooks of the Jesuit Père Meynier, and the lawyer Pierre Bernard21 who actually suggested that the Edict could be revoked as and when appropriate. Meanwhile their comprehensive work on the Edict was designed to limit privilege by precise, sometimes pedantic interpretation. Since there was no explicit statement that Huguenots should be buried by day they must be buried early or late: between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. in summer; 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. in winter. One sees the same concern for Catholic sensibilities in the regulation banning clerical garb outside the temple, banning the singing of psalms except during service, and then only softly and not if a Catholic procession was passing outside. The reason for closing the temple at Uzès in 1664 was ‘the proximity of the parish church’.22 There was always work for

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pettifogging lawyers, vigilantes and informers. It only needed one objection to stop a minister marrying a Catholic to a Protestant. Huguenots might not persuade a Catholic servant to become Protestant. Only twenty guests could attend a wedding: what chagrin there would be, what family pride offended and what subterfuges devised to evade the law! Sometimes local regulations were in force. In several cities it was required that councillors be Catholic. Certain measures suggest a private interest, as in Calais where both inns were owned by Huguenots; one was forced to sell to a Catholic. Though a few held on to high positions Protestants entering the field must be content with lower office.23 In an overcrowded legal profession young Catholics would not be distressed by new rules banning Protestants from higher offices. They might prefer them not to be in the market at all. Huguenots might find too that they were excluded from craft guilds, as masters, or as apprentices. In Paris Huguenot master-­ embroiderers were forbidden to take apprentices of their faith. Schooling and preaching were the lifeblood of the religion. Schools were permitted under the Edict wherever its exercise was allowed, but the subjects to be taught were not laid down nor the number of masters who might teach them: so they could be restricted to the three Rs; one master to a school, one school to a community. When a pastor wanted to teach at home he was not allowed to have more than two pupils. Where, as in Languedoc, the Huguenots had broken new ground, after typically biased inquests temples were destroyed. In the formerly Genevan pays de Gex this meant all except two since the province had been gained two years after the Edict. In the 1660s half the temples in the Dauphiné were laid flat but Huguenots there were not discouraged; the province would prove particularly obdurate when constriction turned to coercion. Visiting Nîmes, in January 1676, where Protestants were still in a majority, Locke found that the smaller of two temples had been demolished by royal order. He also conveys a meaner kind of oppression. ‘The Protestants had built them here too an hospital for their sick, but that is taken from them. A chamber in it is left for their sick, but never used, because the priests trouble them when there.’ Altogether, across the country, Locke recorded, at least 160 temples had been demolished by the time of his visit.24 It does not seem that the Huguenot deputies at court tried to prevent the process. Whether indicating their instinctive loyalty in response to royal orders or their inability to mount an effective defence of the Huguenots it augured ill for their future. Meanwhile the crown would usually legislate in favour of local Catholic interests but its approach was empirical, its actions ad hoc. Law and order were prime concerns, as shown by the stunningly effective inquest, Les Grands Jours d’Auvergne. Protestantism had little hold in that part of the Massif Central where the judicial process unearthed extraordinary cases of extortion, rape and murder, noble misconduct that reminds us of the beneficial aspect of the

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advance of royal government. Yet Louis cancelled the grands jours projected for Languedoc.when it became clear from concerns voiced by the Huguenots of Castres, through their chambre de l’édit, that proceedings would be dominated by the fiercely anti-­Huguenot parlement of Toulouse. With his care not to provoke Huguenot opinion in this sensitive area Louis thought the matter sufficiently important to explain it in his Mémoires. So the royal council and Catholics in the provinces were not always of one mind: Catholics wanted momentum, ministers applied brakes; Louis generally preferred not to be bothered. The process of checking and curbing went on all the time nonetheless to create a template for the future: schools, congregations, the professions, workshops were under constant scrutiny. Their enemies attacked Huguenots on a broad front. Yet a surprising number managed to hang on to offices, their property by inheritance and purchase; plainly they benefited from the crown’s experience of the Fronde, when its interference with the rights of those who had bought their office had brought revolt. Huguenots also retained for the most part the freedom to worship after their own fashion and to enjoy their basic rights. If life became more uncomfortable, or impoverished, it was a price they must pay for this measure of independence. The evidence from most colloquies is that relatively few yet found that it was a price too high.25 There were still some who kept a high profile, as in Castres, where Locke found that ‘they of the religion, who are above half of the inhabitants, have two temples and have a bell to call them to church’.26 At Aigues-­Mortes only a quarter were Protestant but ‘they were all formerly soe’; the three temples that Locke found there witnessed perhaps to decline in that unhealthy place.27 In the long run most damaging to the movement as a whole was the refusal of the crown to allow the convocation of a national synod. General assemblies had long been forbidden; the last was in 1659 and closely monitored. After 1669 provincial synods were not allowed to communicate with each other. The Huguenots were left therefore without central organisation or scope for fellowship wider than that of the colloquy that had been so vital in growth and defence. It would be harder for their leaders to devise any concerted strategy while provincial differences were enhanced: between north and south – crucially, between town and country – as local interests became more prominent, individual communities felt isolated and the more vulnerable to hostile action. Until 1679 Louis stood by his commitment to uphold the main rights ceded by his predecessors. He would not allow the church assembly to push him further. In October 1665, supposing that Louis was listening to them, heartened by what had already been done, and knowing that he expressed mainstream Catholic sentiment, the assembly’s orator had praised him effusively, if conventionally, as ‘the invincible hero destined by eternal wisdom to destroy the terrible monster of heresy’.28 To be sure, in April 1666 it looked as

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if Louis was moving towards the assembly’s goal when, to please his dying mother, he signed a declaration that renewed all earlier restrictions on Huguenots. Yet in February 1669, the year of the ‘Peace of the Church’, he withdrew that declaration and forbade the proselytising of Protestant children. Plainly at this stage, if ever indeed, there was no long-­term plan; more a pragmatic approach to decision-­making. The assembly of the following year expressed their ‘consternation’ at this ‘extraordinary transformation’.29 But they had to accept it for the king was planning for war; part of the preparation was the treaty of Dover with Protestant England (1670). He was capable of taking an objective, secular view and diplomatic needs counted in his calculations and could still intervene to check excessive zeal for conversion. Louis knew how many Huguenots served in his army. Louis had no love of the spiritual police of the Compagnie or of the more clamorous among Jesuits and friars, whose efforts tended mainly to make Protestants more stubborn. He liked to deal with individual cases, rather than issue general statements. In this spirit he would sometimes offer monetary aid to an individual who might consider conversion and whose career might benefit. He did make an open offer: that where he had the right to present an oblate to a convent he would give precedence to a girl who had forsaken her Protestantism: no small inducement for Protestant parents of slender means and more daughters than money for their dowries. There is a first glimpse here of a tactic – that of appealing openly to material interest – which was to be more extensively employed.30 Another, fiscal favour – or discrimination if the subject were not amenable – can also be seen in embryo. Colbert informed an intendant that the relief from certain taxes, to be granted to parents of large families, should not apply to Protestant households. But he made no reference to it in the declaration that offered such relief. It was some way from the ‘compensation’ – bribery, to its critics – soon to be offered and of a different moral order from the use of troops to ‘encourage’ conversion.

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Mars Ascendant Ambition and glory are always pardonable in a prince so young and blessed by fortune. (Louis XIV)1

F

or all the early flurry of restrictive edicts there is little to suggest, in the first two decades of rule, that Louis thought the Huguenot question of prime importance. War was on his mind, and with it domestic security. He was aware too that there were numerous Huguenots serving in his armies. For the time being their families and friends could be left alone. It was enough that in war against the Dutch, their leading provinces dominated by Calvinists, Louis would prove his Catholic credentials. There were other, more material causes for the invasion of August 1672 and they should be taken into account. The six years of the ‘Dutch war’ had a significant effect on Louis’ approach to government and first postponed the Huguenot issue, then, with its sequel, the process of annexations called Réunions, brought it to the fore.2 It was not primarily a religious war but religion figured in his propaganda – the ‘cheesemongers’ were heretics. A line was observable; it would soon become clearer. Some Huguenots had important trading and financial links with Holland that they were later to find invaluable. Contacts made in colleges and salons ensured that leading Huguenots regarded themselves as being part of a wider Protestant front. William III of Orange was a hero to many Huguenots. His namesake and ancestor had long enjoyed the mythical status that can come with assassination; and his fourth wife Anne, from whom came the ruling Orange line, was the daughter of that other great Huguenot hero, Admiral Coligny. In his time, fighting to survive, Huguenots had envisaged a common Protestant front; to them the survival of the United Provinces was of critical importance. Now it was a world power, an obstacle apparently to the growth of French trade; it might be defeated but there was no question of its

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collapsing. The Dutch war proved to be a more serious test of Huguenot opinion than previous wars against Spain and Austria. Some were undoubtedly uneasy though there was little evidence of treachery. Ruvigny’s secretary, suspected of passing on diplomatic secrets, was a rare case, though much was to be made of it as a pointer to Huguenot sympathy with the enemy.3 The main offence of the Dutch was their opposition to Louis’ efforts, in the course of the War of the Queen’s Rights, to annex the southern Netherlands, and their insolence in forming, with England and Sweden, the Triple Alliance. That he could hardly state, as he already had an alliance with England, following the treaty of Dover of 1670. So there was heavy stress in the declaration of war (August 1672) on the ingratitude of the Dutch ‘after great favours’; that he could ‘no longer ignore except to the detriment of his glory’.4 The war brought out, and on a more intense level, the rivalries that Louis liked to believe he could use to his purpose: between the soldiers, notably Condé and Turenne; and crucially, when it came later to deciding policy towards the Huguenots, between Colbert and Louvois. Undoubtedly, however, it was Louis’ war, bearing in all aspects the conceit of a king who was to offer hostages to fortune in his subsequent account in the Mémoires. He was yet to learn the ‘uses of adversity’ – to which William of Orange would become too well accustomed. Within months he thought that his armies had done enough for glory and a good peace. He was ‘in a position to instil fear in his enemies, astonishment to his neighbours . . .’5 He pitched his demands unreasonably high and dressed them up in language calculated to humiliate. The Dutch too had their pride. Invited to send an envoy annually to Versailles with a medal recording their defeat, and observing that the French were outrunning their frontier magazines, they opened the sluice gates. Like the Spanish a hundred years before, the French army was checked by faith, flood and, as the years went on, by sound finance. Like the Spanish, the French settled for a long war. The Dutch looked around for allies and found them in Spain, the Emperor and Brandenburg. That, at first, did not concern Louis for he expected further gains in Spanish Flanders and the Spanish half of former Burgundy known as Franche-­Comté. The war did indeed eventually bring significant gains. But it lasted for six years and established the pattern for the coalition wars of the future. The Dutch were by no means mortally damaged and, in the person of Stadholder William of Orange, were committed to revenge. That would have the most serious consequences when, following the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of November 1688 he became king of England, Scotland and Ireland. It would change, at a stroke, the balance of power. Meanwhile the peace treaties of Nijmegen in 1678–79 appeared to leave Louis master of Europe. If he had misgivings he chose not to reveal them. He

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was untroubled by decisions which had prolonged the war for self-­confessed ‘ambition and glory’. Though not irreparably, the state finances had been damaged, as Colbert knew. It would be relevant to the Huguenot question when the cost of compensation came to be considered. Some lessons at least had been learned. At the peace talks all was pared down to France’s permanent territorial interests. There was no mention of religion or of the ‘tokens of submission’6 that had been demanded in 1672. The essential lesson, however, had not been learned. In retrospect it appears that it was Louis’ last chance to change course, to moderate his aggressive style. Given the climate of court opinion and the mood of the king it is not surprising that it was lost. When, twenty years later, having the great prize of the Spanish succession still before him, a chastened king turned conciliatory, it would be too late. Meanwhile the temptation was considerable. Louis hardly needed Louvois at hand to remind him that the army, now over 200,000 strong, was there to be used; nor Vauban to suggest that a defensible eastern frontier was now a practical proposition. The policies of the next few years were designed to exploit a favourable situation: the collapsing power of Spain, the Emperor’s preoccupation with his eastern frontier and the Ottoman threat, and the compliance of England. From 1681 Charles II was happy to receive subsidies to ensure that he could rule without Parliament; the succession of his Catholic brother James was assured. There were encouraging reports about projects of reunion in several German Lutheran states.7 So Louis was led to believe that the future was Catholic. Yet, when the fleur-­de-­lis flew over the walls of Strasbourg and the Lutheran city was proclaimed Catholic, the Emperor – and not he alone – saw not a triumph for the faith but a French bridgehead on to German soil. The Catholicism vaunted by the king was visibly imbued with the spirit of mastery, of a piece with the assertion of royal rights in his ongoing quarrel with the Pope that was fuelled rather than settled by the Gallican Articles of 1682.8 As plainly emerges from the teaching of Bossuet, Frenchmen were becoming habituated to the thought of Louis as effective head of the church in France. It added a further dimension to the doctrines of Divine Right and would seem to make Louis more confident than ever in pursuing his expansionist policies. It also helped to confirm the image received by Germans, of a king ruthless in pursuit of territorial gain and indifferent to the wider interest of the faith. Along with the need to reassure Catholics that perception was to weigh heavily with Louis when the fate of the Huguenots came to be considered in council. Meanwhile his actions served to confirm his neighbours’ apprehensions. Between the Peace of Nijmegen and the truce of Ratisbon in 1684 the French occupied a swathe of territories on the eastern frontier. As seen from Versailles the process, known collectively as the Réunions, was necessary to bring order to a medley of conflicting rights and in so doing to strengthen the

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frontier. Order and good governance: conveyed in the very word ‘reunion’ it was of its time, the spirit that animated intendants in their dealings with the Huguenots. The crown was simply mopping up the loose pieces of feudal society dotted about ill-­defined borders. The process was driven by the lawyers who wanted to extend their jurisdiction and by the military, bruised by their recent experience of making war in frontier lands where allegiance was patchy, security and supplies uncertain. There was unanimity in council, with Louvois and Foreign Minister Colbert de Croissy (formerly intendant in Alsace) strongly in support.9 In Alsace Louis had inherited scattered holdings more like a landowner’s estate than an integrated province. Each of the places ‘reunited’ had some military value. But Alsace was worth little without Strasbourg. Expecting that the Emperor would oppose him over this Imperial Free City, in October 1681 Louvois cut negotiations short by issuing an ultimatum to the citizens: ‘open your gates or lose your privileges’. Those privileges were to be important for with Alsace Louis acquired 100,000 Protestant, mainly Lutheran subjects.10 For Luxembourg, as Louis intended, Spain was bound to fight; and as certain to lose. The truce of Ratisbon ensued, in August 1684.11 Louis made a few small concessions but they did nothing to mollify the Emperor or sway German opinion. In October the previous year the siege of Vienna had been lifted by John Sobieski and the Turks were being driven back – a long way, as it would turn out. The Polish King had been hailed by the Pope as a Catholic hero. Louis had refused the Pope’s request to send troops, but they had been available for his own frontier operations. That looked bad. The Emperor’s triumph was a diplomatic disaster for the French king. It brought a significant new element into the Huguenot question, that of Louis’ reputation in Catholic Europe. The French frontier had been brought to the Rhine, in French eyes a strategic necessity. Would the French stop there? On the same day that the troops marched into Strasbourg others occupied Casale, capital of Montferrat, on the Po and near to Turin. They were established in north Italy: another porte closed. Was Italy then to be the stage for the next war? Was Louis going to revive the Valois policy of intervention? In his handling of Italian affairs Louis was at his least sensitive, neglectful, as he had been over the Papacy, of the usual diplomatic courtesies. In Savoy he played off the young duke against his mother and compelled him finally to accept the ‘protection’ of 3,000 French troops. In 1684 Genoa was bombarded for reasons that looked more like the protection of the trade of rival Marseilles than its alleged dealings with Spain. By pushing France’s interests without regard for the sensitivities of his neighbours, Louis had seriously misjudged international opinion. Already at odds with the Pope, having lost the goodwill of the United Provinces and now of the

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majority of German princes, Catholic as well as Protestant, he had squandered the legacy of the cardinals. In this necessarily brief résumé of his foreign policy is to be found the context of Louis’ evolving strategy towards the Huguenots. It is no coincidence that, with the conclusion of the Dutch war, Louis’ approach changed abruptly. On the surface it might appear to be simply a matter of priorities and resources. With peace came the opportunity to concentrate on the domestic issue: if needed, whole regiments were available. Yet it was not until the summer of 1685, when some had already left,12 that even the most optimistic Huguenots began to think that their fate was sealed. The record of the intervening years is by no means straightforward but one thing is certain. Ultimately it was the king who would decide. He was influenced, both by those around him and by events beyond his control. There is room for debate about interests and lobbies in the months leading up to the king’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes.13 When so much remains uncertain and when strong personalities are involved, the challenge to arrive at a balanced judgement is testing, proportionate to the significance of the outcome. It matters, as it would come to matter intensely to Huguenots who could not believe that their sovereign would have failed them unless misinformed or subject to some malign influence. One may start with the seat of government, where a few men studied the reports of intendants and ambassadors, listened to the voices and lobbies of court – counselled – and the king decided.14 The central and engrossing feature of the middle years of the reign was the building of the palace of Versailles and the establishment there of a style and iconography conducive more to flattery than to the honest statement of opinion. By the 1680s it was the settled place of government. The scaffolding was being removed, its splendours revealed, its theme explicit: the sun ascendant, the king’s motto everywhere: nec pluribus impar. Foreigners might not see it as courtiers did. Visiting the ‘hangings at the Goblins’ (sic) that were intended for the palace Locke was impressed but caustic: ‘In every piece Lewis le grand was the hero, and the rest the marks of some conquest’.15 It was meant to impress but was mostly for home consumption. In this setting ministers may have been more affected than they could realise, when it came to counselling. Louis, who was a good listener when advice did not conflict too much with his own view, prided himself on keeping in balance the two main ministerial families of Colbert and Le Tellier. In their rivalry and concern to maintain their power and their clientèles lay, in theory, his control of the conseil en haut, and his decisive voice. In some respects, notably in Colbert’s direction of the economy, the enhanced role of intendants, and in the development of the navy and army, royal government was efficient. Running through all there was a consistent theme: control

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from the centre. Continuing on the path prepared by the cardinals his ministers took pains to strengthen their links with the provincial élites. Allowing for the chasm that separated idea from reality, there was a trend towards unification that could only be to the Huguenots’ disadvantage. Look from the principles and mechanics of government to the values that affected decision-­making and we see the inherent flaw, the risk that power would be misused – or abused. In some respects it may be that Louis was now the prisoner of the system and its propaganda that, to all appearances, suited him so well. He was an unusually conscientious sovereign, assiduous in council as in the rituals that marked the courtier’s day and played such an important part in commanding respect: for the king as person and as a source of patronage. Great nobles whose fathers had been unruly were content to serve at court. As the highest in rank and acclaimed for military prowess the case of Condé is most striking.16 By no means emasculated, he was apparently willing to forgo the old aristocratic world of semi-­autonomy for that of unconditional service. Was it the promise of order and stability that appealed, with the chance of enhanced satisfaction in the prospect of command under a respected sovereign, or more simply a share in the glory that was the leitmotif of the regime? Where Condé led others would certainly follow. Viewed from the harmonious world of Versailles, or from its wartime extension, the campaign headquarters, the wider world may have seemed less complicated than it was, the grand idea of France reduced to the interest of the House of Bourbon. If Louis had been more imaginative, had possessed the mental agility of his grandfather, then he might have been proof against the influences that restricted vision and could distort judgement. But such a ruler is rare in history, the exceptional product, perhaps, of an arduous passage to the throne, capable of thinking beyond the conventional. Louis XIV subscribed to the prevailing political philosophy and gave it his own stamp of authority. The consensus was that there must be a supreme authority capable of suppressing the forces of disorder. They took many forms; still their visible and persisting embodiment was Huguenot. The absolutist case, powerfully argued by Richelieu’s client Le Bret, had now been given an impressive, theological foundation in the writing of Bossuet.17 From ‘the very words of Holy Scripture’ he derived his understanding of the indisputable case for monarchy that should be, not arbitrary, but absolute. The study of Hebrew and knowledge of Jewish history had prepared people to accept the monarch who was divinely appointed to be God’s instrument on earth as the highest possible form of human government. The royal throne was ‘the very throne of God’. It followed that resistance to a power thus established by God was resistance to God; to question the will of the hereditary king was to commit a form of blasphemy. Others might see the

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blasphemy to lie in the bishop’s formula. Yet there were Huguenots who accepted fully the reasoning from Holy Writ. The celebrated pastor du Bosc of Caen declared that before Louis, ‘enfant de miracle’, close scrutiny of the rights of God and Caesar was irrelevant for they belong alike to him.18 In their idea of the state it would seem that little separated the Calvinist in his Norman bunker, under threat of extinction, from the high priest of Catholicism, the prophet of divine providence.19 France benefited from ‘la protection particulière de Dieu sur ce royaume’. Given Bossuet’s standing, and the solemnity of that event, it is not hard to see the impact of such statements, consistent with the whole body of Bossuet’s writing, and with the message everywhere conveyed in Versailles, of a king in tune with destiny. Louis’ Versailles, so admired and widely copied by other sovereigns, was not all pride and pomp. Sponsored art and ample resources created there an image of kingship that fulfilled both the specifications of the political philo­ sopher and the needs of the nobility. Under the ceiling and frescoes of the salon de la Guerre or the salon de Mars, the courtier would need no reminding that war was his métier and that his role was to strive for la gloire, for his family, his king and for France. To Protestants such as Schomberg and Ruvigny that was as true as ever, but some noble defections in the years before Revocation suggest that loyalty and convenience pointed more strongly to conformity. Bent on serving, to the best of his ability, his dynasty and people, Louis came to have a lively sense of his moral responsibility, under God but representing His will. In an age that was keenly conscious of the immanence of God, this obligation was no empty form of words: the idea of rule as a sacred trust was central to his whole philosophy. But it should be considered alongside the idea of sovereignty that he expressed in the Mémoires. ‘Kings are absolute lords and have by natural right the complete and free disposition of all goods, both of church and people, to use them according to the needs of the state.’ Divine Right and the blank cheque to act ‘for the needs of the state’: at the very least would it not give him the confidence to make the big decisions? Was not prevarication the ruler’s greatest temptation – and weakness? The royal day was framed by religious observance. It was noticed that the king became more concerned with spiritual issues in the 1680s. Middle age, painful intimations of mortality, the influence of Mme de Maintenon20 have been suggested. But the king had always been, in his apparently unreflective way, regular in devotion. Attending the king’s levée, at St Germains, in December 1678, Locke saw him kneel down to his prayers, ‘severall priests kneeling by him, in which posture he continues for a pretty while’. His devotion, hardly private since the chamber was ‘full of people standing and talking to each other’,21 was followed invariably, after some hours in council, by mass, where he would be observed saying his rosary. To Locke, the unprejudiced

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witness, his piety was ‘very exemplary’. Decisions made for God by his royal servant would not be impulsive; they would be conscientious. So we may envisage the king in council, fully aware of the validity of his grandfather’s edict, but mindful too of his coronation oath and of how it empowered him; constantly reminded by the church assembly of his duty to act. As to his duty as roi très chrétien he must be guided by his confessor. If Père La Chaise22 reminded him that his duty was also to the Pope, surely he would think about mending his bridge to Rome – and demonstrating his faith to Europe. And that might appeal to his idea of himself as conqueror not only on the battlefield but now also in the war against heresy. It would be the way to recover the prestige lost in 1683 through his failure to back Austria’s resistance to the Turk. As to practicalities he would be influenced by what he understood to be happening in the country. Take all together and we can see that the balance was tilting: from honouring the Edict; from accepting his responsibilities to all loyal subjects; to satisfying the Catholic majority, doing what would undoubtedly appeal to them, restoring the ‘sacred bond’. By 1685 there can be little doubt about his direction. Everything in his life began to point to the glory of a bold stroke. Prudent or well-­informed Huguenots, with funds, connections or special skills to offer, had begun to leave. Much still depended on Louis’ reading of the international situation, of foreign opinion. Did it give him excessive grounds for confidence? France was a military state, with an army and now navy23 far greater than had formerly been thought possible. Louis relished the operations of war, particularly sieges, timed to the moment of final assault for the satisfaction of king and court. When plums had been apparently ripe for the picking, he had not stopped to consider that they might be in his neighbour’s orchard. For all his competence Louis had revealed, in the Dutch war and its aftermath, that he lacked the ability, as vital in a statesman as in a general, to read his opponent’s mind or to weigh opinion. His increasingly narrow vision of the world precluded serious understanding of governments, in particular those of the United Provinces and England, that he imagined must be weaker because less absolute in governance. The military and naval record of the Dutch, and proven economic strength, should have given him pause. The case of Charles II was another matter: hamstrung by Parliament, modestly financed and housed, dependent on French subsidy, he cut a sorry figure alongside his French cousin. The peaceful accession of the Roman Catholic James II in February 1685 Louis could however read as a favourable sign of the times, fitting his world-­view: Protestantism in disarray, Catholicism triumphant, France its principal champion. Louis assumed that James was capable of delivering tangible benefits to his Roman Catholic subjects; perhaps he allowed too little for the strength of Protestant opposition. Considering the options before

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deciding to revoke the Edict of Nantes Louis was to commit a more serious error of judgement. He knew that the demand for action welled up from Catholic congregations across the land. He rightly gauged that Revocation would be well received in court and country. He took insufficient account of unfavourable reactions abroad, among Catholic as well as Protestant states, ranging from scepticism about his motives to downright abhorrence. Revocation did not, of course, come out of the blue. It would be the culmination of a story with two sides. On the one hand efforts across Europe as well as in France to find ground and process for reunion, the course of persuasion. On the other hand, still less consistent but with a recognisable trend, a sequence of actions, intrusive, threatening and in places brutal, the course of coercion that reveals the hardening attitude of the king. He was sure that he was right in principle; so gradually it became a matter, not so much of if as of when. It may be that the council was shifting its ground, as material considerations added weight to the argument for decisive action. Debt had risen alarmingly. The war that Colbert had first welcomed because it would hurt the Dutch had undone the effect of his financial reforms and begun to damage his plans for manufactures and trade. When the Huguenot question was discussed in council financial matters were raised. Colbert subscribed to an exalted view of monarchy and the creation of a palace that should advertise the magnificence of the king – and the arts and crafts that served him. Yet, had he lived beyond 1683 would he not have argued for caution? To him, more even than Louvois, concerned for his army, the king might have listened. Colbert’s son Seignelay also represented the pragmatic view, thinking, for example, about the future of the navy, but he did not enjoy his father’s influence over the king. Also, in the new circumstances, the immediate issue of expense was becoming relevant. Was it any longer necessary to spend money to compensate and persuade when there were other more efficacious means to hand? The question takes us back from the political high ground, and from the brink, to an earlier phase of the struggle for Huguenot hearts and minds: from, as it were, the king’s head to the other side of the coin: the Huguenot, his morale. What state were they in by 1685? How could Versailles gauge the mood around the country? Was it true that large numbers, as reports claimed, were simply giving up? It was never easy for seventeenth-­ century governments to obtain reliable information: about matters of belief virtually impossible. So ministers had to rely on appearances and the reports of the intendants and the governor of the province. They could be both honest and conscientious – but they would have their own local concerns. They would see the Huguenots, particularly in the south, as an obstacle to sound government. They were likely to be influenced by the Catholic authorities in the province, and by the views, as reported by bishops and curés, of the vieux

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catholiques. To appreciate the groundswell of Catholic opinion across the country, to understand why many Catholics had come to think that Revocation was the only viable and honest solution, we should pause to consider the outcomes of the alternative, softer route to conversion. ‘Compensation’ had produced unintended consequences.

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Temptations and Trials We have viewed with admiration the triumph of Louis over the Vaudois. Gazette 16781

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scheme tried out in 1676 by Le Camus, the earnest, evangelising bishop of Grenoble, backed conversions among the Vaudois by a fund to compensate ministers for their loss of livelihood. It was managed by Le Camus’ friend Paul Pellisson, first using the revenues of abbeys St Germain-­de-­Prés and Cluny, of which he was treasurer, then expanded into the caisse de conversions, with other benefices vacant following the régale dispute between king and Pope. Several strands in the contemporary religious scene can be picked out from the story of this talented Huguenot convert who did so much to bring about the destruction of the church in which he had been reared – at least in the form that he had known. There was Jansenist influence on his conversion and subsequent thinking; an illustration of the way in which Port Royal could offer an appealing way out of Protestantism via Augustinian theology, Puritan manners and, on a limited scale, schools to rival those of the Jesuits. Yet Huguenots who could accept common ground in Augustine, the denial of free will and the value of translations of the scriptures remained absolutely opposed to the Eucharistic view of Jansenists; they, in turn, were at pains to stress their orthodoxy against the criticism of the Jesuits; Pastor Claude of Charenton attacked them vehemently on this score but also as ‘the acceptable face’ of Rome. The Gallican issue, leading to the impasse between crown and Pope, gave Pellisson his chance to promote his career – and a cause dear to the king’s heart. But it also came to compromise his preferred way of moderation, when Louis, trapped by his own intransigence and loss of face in Europe, had to present himself as a model of Catholic orthodoxy. Principled, or as critics alleged opportunist, Pellisson’s ascent to high place under the crown also

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illustrates the appeal of the royalist ethos of these years, undermining loyalty to family and faith. He was born into a leading Huguenot family of the robe. His father envisaged for him a career in the chambre de l’Édit in Castres that he had been instrumental in setting up. He was precocious and ambitious, passionate about language.2 ‘An ageable companion who knew how to flatter’, he found his milieu in the coterie of intellectuals and poets who gathered in the salon of Mlle Madeleine de Scudéry and sought the patronage of wealthy financiers. In his case it was Midas himself, surintendant Nicolas Fouquet, for whom, like other Huguenots, he performed financial services. It did him no harm that he wrote a successful account of the Académie where the rich Protestant, Valentin Conrart, appointed Secretary by Richelieu in 1634 and still there at the start of Louis XIV’s personal reign, had used his influence to bring in a number of Protestant friends. Huguenots he would not call them since he found the term derogatory.3 Moreover Pellisson had frondeur friends. The fall of Fouquet (1661) brought disgrace and five years’ imprisonment. From the Bastille he contributed eloquently to the defence of the disgraced minister. His plea was as bold as it was subtle: true glory would lie in clemency to the minister who had been loyal to the king when his throne was tottering. Released in January 1666 he started to write for the king, playing on the preoccupation of the young Louis with personal immortality. There was flattery à la mode but like others in the literary circus of those heady days, not least Racine, he seems to have been stirred by the idea of serving le Roi-­Soleil. Pellisson’s appointment as royal historiographer coincided with his conversion. There was certainly an incentive. Perrot d’Ablancourt had been strongly recommended – but rejected, as a Huguenot. With other conversions, that of Turenne in 1667 being crucially important, the government wanted to create the impression that the Huguenot élite was dissolving. Turenne had been staunch; he had held out against the offer of the Constable’s sword. It took conscientious study and the teaching of Bossuet before he was convinced. The loss of a towering figure in international Protestantism was a terrible blow to the Huguenots. He was persuaded that Protestantism, in which ‘every individual wishes to found a faith after his own inclinations and everyone who reads the Word of God wishes to interpret it according to his own fantasy’,4 had no further theological justification. That reflects Bossuet’s view and takes no account of Huguenot discipline exerted in the consistory, theological as well as pastoral; indeed, it is a travesty of Calvin’s ideal. Louis was gratified by the marshal’s action but disappointed that relatively few of the nobles followed him.5 Perhaps he did not allow for the influence of devout Huguenot women. There are numerous examples of staunch conduct, not least in the sacrifice and courage displayed after the Revocation, to suggest that it continued to be an

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important part of family decision-­making. One notably clever woman, brought up a strict Protestant, pursuing her interest in mathematics and astronomy and drawing writers like La Fontaine to her modest salon, Mme de Sablières chose a different path. Becoming Catholic in 1680, she lived ascetically, maintained her salon but devoted time to the poor and sick. We should beware allowing too much influence to worldly motives. In no society has the spiritual appeal of Catholicism been stronger. That does not detract from the firm stance of Huguenots; it makes all the more impressive their confidence in Calvinist belief and practice. Whatever his subconscious motivation Pellisson appears also to have been sincere and conscientious: the great-­nephew of Anne du Bourg found it hard to accept what he saw as the idolatrous aspects of Catholicism. Jansenists too rejected them and their influence was vital, as on other wavering Huguenots. Like other Jansenists he could see little that differed fundamentally from Augustine in the contentious work of Bishop Jansen. After a five-­week retreat with the Trappist brothers he vowed to serve his God and king to the end of his days. First, alongside financial office, it was as historiographer at court and on campaign, more reportage and propaganda than history. Then, in 1677, he found his métier, developing the caisse de conversions, combining financial and administrative expertise and exploiting his contacts, at court and at Port Royal, to such effect that he became virtually an extra minister for religious affairs. He was never, of course, to have influence comparable to that of Archbishop Harlay; nor to that of his colleague in the conseil de conscience,6 P. La Chaise, who had the ear of the king when it came to episcopal appointments. But the quantifiable impact of the policy of ‘compensation’ gave him a vital place in the direction of religious policy. Pellisson was encouraged to extend his fund until he was a director of a network with agents in nearly every province and a set tariff for payments. Ranging from six livres for a peasant to 3,000 livres for a nobleman it was a considerable inducement to the poor in either class. The average recipient could expect around 12 livres. His principal collaborator was another convert, Samuel de la Tour des Alliés. His is another interesting case. Converted through the mission of Le Camus in Grenoble, he was ordained priest and became the favoured preacher to nouveaux catholiques. Informed by his agents, Pellisson prepared regular statistical reports for the king. As he was a channel for patronage, even ministers had to apply through him. One entry in the Gazette for April 1678 conveys the tone, religious conversion presented as royal achievement: ‘We have viewed with admiration the triumph of Louis over the Vaudois who have for centuries banned the Holy Church from their mountains.’ Bossuet and Fénelon approved the scheme as being preferable to violence, material inducements preparing the field for the

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operation of God’s grace. With many Huguenot soldiers under his command Vauban had practical reasons for approving his way of peaceful persuasion. Arnauld championed the purity of Pellisson’s intentions in his Apologie pour les Catholiques (1681): a Jansenist arguing against Jesuit critics that the end justified the means! To the evident discomfiture of some in the religious orders, who would see it as their particular role, the Jansenists led in missionary effort, with translations of the liturgy and manuals of devotion to offer spiritual nourishment for raw converts. There was a moral case to set against critics of hypocrisy: was it not fair to compensate for the loss of employment or office, for the loss of family support? Inevitably results were uneven, depending on local factors, the cooperation or otherwise of governor or intendant. That might be affected by rivalries between the ministers to whom they reported, the different priorities of Colbert and Le Tellier. Statistics were only reliable as to the number of payments, but are no guarantee of real intent nor security against corruption. At the start of 1682 Pellisson offered the Pope his view of the situation: the state was calm, with peace at home and abroad; Huguenots were now bereft of their natural leaders. The parish clergy, whose deficiencies had left the field open to the spread of heresy, were now in the main exemplary (in reality they were in short supply in Huguenot areas). By contrast, he alleged, Calvinists, as the Pope could see from trends in Germany, were losing the theological arguments and their theory of the Eucharist was generally rejected. He estimated that there had been 50,830 conversions to date. Apart from the wishful thinking and absurdity of so precise a soul count it included the exceptional case of Poitou and those presumed by then to have been converted by the dragoons.7 Even assuming something like that number and the rate of conversions implied, it would be forty years before there were no Huguenots left! Of course the calculation is meaningless. What was becoming obvious is that the method, by itself, would produce diminishing returns, as openly practising Huguenots were reduced to the committed core of believers. Meanwhile Catholic as well as Protestant voices were raised against venality and hypocrisy. It became harder to maintain that the fund served only to assist those who had already resolved to give up heresy. Catholics, convinced of the validity of their faith and needing no material inducement, wondered why there were not more conversions.8 A reason suggested was the ascendancy of ministers and their vested interest, pride, apathy or ignorance. Pride, perhaps – but ignorance? Those who knew Huguenots could see that they were relatively well informed and conscientious in religious and social duties. But what were they thinking? That is of course impossible to gauge since ‘they’ were of many communities and concerns. Yet the question is worth asking – as it was then.

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Typically there was a strong community spirit, with some families going back four or more generations, bound by a culture that instilled a sense of solidarity in God’s chosen people, and made difference a point of pride. It induced a sense of mutual obligation, as in a club. A Huguenot who became a Catholic might find himself lonely, a social reject, and no more welcome among ‘old Catholics’ if they saw material inducement or insincerity in the conversion. It is noteworthy that there is no evidence for numerous conversions following one family’s example – at least until the dragonnades brought fear, with some faux convertis into the reckoning. Add mere livelihood for many in humbler situations and we may understand why some did receive their ‘compensation’, some with private reservations – but why many still did not. Huguenot leaders had to accept the evidence that some of their number had been falling away. Typically, however, Benoist expressed his scepticism about the mass ‘conversions’ – as some bishops were starting to do.9 Many perhaps frail, but only one in a hundred sincere, was his estimate. Particularly in Paris, where it was hard to check, officials feared that some abjured more than once! Rich Huguenots, like Mme Hervart, provided funds for indigent Huguenots who might be tempted. Pellisson’s scheme was never entirely discredited. It continued to operate in a modest way after the Revocation. It is hard to assess its overall effect since there were other government measures and initiatives. Between 1661 and 1679 there were only ten edicts relating to the Huguenot question; from 1679 it started to be a major topic in the correspondence of ministers and intendants. So we may assume they realised that the king was giving his mind to the matter. There was a flurry of pronouncements and edicts, altogether eighty-­ five before the Revocation. Legal sniping became a concerted offensive. In sequence the principal measures suggest a ratchet, turning in one direction: from harassment to persecution; discomfort to danger. Huguenots felt oppressed and isolated in their communities as rights were abrogated, props removed. In July 1679 the remaining chambres mi-­parties, in the parlements of Grenoble and Toulouse, were abolished. In November magistrates were required to visit Protestant sickbeds to effect conversion. Pastors throughout were a main target. They were forbidden to go abroad without permit and so left to cope in ever more restrictive and insecure conditions. In June 1680 an apparently superfluous prohibition, on the conversion of a Catholic, was designed to facilitate the eviction of a pastor and destruction of a temple which such a person, perhaps only a nominal Catholic, might have attended. In November, the marriage of Catholic to Huguenot was forbidden. In June 1681 the age at which a child could be removed from the family and brought up a Catholic was lowered to seven. May 1682 saw the imposition of tougher sanctions against emigration. Artisans came into the frame of prohibition, then

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sailors, though they were best placed to evade capture. One sees ministerial anxieties here: Colbert’s perhaps for the loss of skilled workers and for the means by which they might make their escape. It was a first shot across the bows for sympathetic ship captains, or those keen to profit from the pleas of would-­be emigrants. To encourage some Huguenots that might be tempted a three-­year moratorium on debt was offered. In March 1683 an edict decreed an amende honorable, a public apology, followed by banishment, for any minister who accepted a Catholic convert into his church. That it was also thought necessary to order that children of nouveaux convertis be brought up as Catholics suggests misgivings about the sincerity of such conversions. All the time temples were being closed. It became pretext enough that the minister had been heard to say something derogatory about Catholics. One can only imagine the oppressive effect on worship of the declaration of May 1684 creating a special place in each remaining temple for a police inspector. Among other restrictive measures in that year was one renewing the ban on private worship; another banning ministers from serving more than three years in the same place. It was ever the Catholic perception: no temple, no pastor, therefore no church. A Protestant could more easily envisage the church as the Body of Christ and find its model in the history of the first disciples and early church. He could take strength from what had come before – trial, crucifixion and resurrection – a constant source of inspiration to the Christian and in their language and correspondence from the start. There was always the sense of being the Lord’s chosen, of living under judgement; some could even take pride in persecution. Was it not ever so, in biblical testimony, for the righteous? Yet this was France, not Israel and most, even where there was no physical abuse, must have been hurt by the continued assault on essential practices of the faith. Reflecting concern about baptism Protestant midwives were forbidden to practise; at the other end of life magistrates were instructed to visit sick Huguenots to encourage conversion. For many families the toughest challenge must have been the progressive exclusion from entry into offices of finance and administration and from the legal profession right down to the most insignificant offices, those of procureur or huissier. At the highest level one can conceive the blow to family pride in the edict of January 1684 obliging ten sécretaires du roi to give up their office. So far as a pattern can be discerned it is more in the nature of a series of experiments, designed to test morale, to reach what might be seen as the breaking point, than a settled purpose, let alone timetable, to destroy the réligion prétendue reformée. The reason is not far to find. Throughout there were discordant voices, alternative strategies. There were those Catholics who believed that the RPR was false in foundation, belief and practice; so it must succumb. There were those who still believed in peaceful persuasion. There

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was the view, typically that of the administrator, impatient or cynical, who thought that it was too slow and untidy: either deliver one sharp blow or let sleeping dogs lie. There were those who dragged their feet. There was concern about the double cost of ‘conversion’: direct to the exchequer in the funds being applied and indirect loss in receipts from the taille when remissions to nouveaux catholiques increased the burden on the rest. There were still to be found those among high officials in court and country who doubted the feasibility of the unfolding policy, whether indeed it was relevant to the country’s main concerns. Foremost among them was Louvois, long seen as a prime mover behind the process10 but more fairly to be regarded as a reluctant instrument of royal policy. It indicates the true mind of the king, swayed by the Jesuit and dévôt counsellors at his side, that neither Colbert nor Louvois was able to deflect him towards what they regarded as the prime concerns of government. Meanwhile there had been an experiment in outright force whose repercussions could have persuaded the king to be more cautious, if not to change tack.

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Towards Resolution Why has thou cast us off forever?1

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n March 1681 Louvois authorised Marillac, intendant in Poitou, to billet a regiment of dragoons on Huguenot families. He would soon regret it. There were precedents for such billeting. It had been tried in Gex, in 1661. In Brittany, following the serious rising there in 1675, it served as a brutal warning against repeating such an offence. It was generally acknowledged to be the worst fate that could befall a community. In September 1678 Locke was told by ‘a poor bookseller’s wife’ (Protestant) at Niort that there were 1,200 quartered in the town the previous winter: the two allocated to her family demanded four meals a day ‘which it was better to give them, and fifth if they desired rather than to deny them’.2 After the death of the Jansenist bishop Caulet of Pamiers, in 1680, intendant Foucault had lodged cavalry on families in the diocese opposed to the régale. Marillac had tried out selective taxation in Poitou, when taille rolls had been drawn up in three columns: ‘Old Catholics’, discharged in part; ‘New Catholics’ wholly exempt; Huguenots, making up the deficit. It had some effect but it was resented by ‘Old Catholics’, jealous of the nouveaux, suspicious of their motives. Soldier-­missionaries might win their approval and promised better returns. By the end of the year Marillac reported 38,000 conversions. He overplayed his hand. The figure must be questioned; also the sincerity of the ‘conversions’. Louis had not ordered the action. He did not like what he heard, nor the fact that reports of atrocities soon circulated. Benoist admitted that terror was more widespread than the violence that caused it. It did not prevent him retailing tales, some verifiable, of robbery, rape and – that which probably caused the greatest outrage – forced conversions. Military occupation offers free play to soldiers cut off from the moral restraints of family or community. Some of these soldiers would not have been French; few would have been from the province.

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Their service conditions were harsh and they were used to brutal treatment of civilians. They realised that they had not been sent there to fraternise. Potentially these Huguenots were simply prey. Just being treated as such, and as rebels, would have been a shocking experience. So Benoist’s readers would not doubt his stories. Catholics were disturbed to hear of women being dragged screaming to the mass, to have holy water sprinkled over them by the priest; of people queuing to sign a document recording a ‘conversion’ that would rid them of soldiers; in all likelihood returning home to their bibles. Some stood firm. Poitevin schoolmaster Jean Migault, eventual émigré, would record, for his children to understand, in a moving memoir of ‘his beloved wife’, the ‘pains she had endured and suffered with me at the beginning of the persecution’. One August day in 1681, Migault left his temple of Mougon, where he was secretary, to be confronted by a troop of dragoons. Their quarter­­master first demanded exorbitant payment, then sent soldiers, eventually twelve, insolent, threatening and insatiable. The curé and neighbours connived at their first escape, but not before Elizabeth had been set before a blazing fire and told she would be burned alive if she did not convert. With twenty others they took shelter in the woods, then with their twelve children they risked returning; the dragoons reappeared and the house was ransacked, left in ruins. They found temporary protection with local gentry but after his wife’s death (1683) and news that three elder sons had managed to escape (two by land to Germany, the third by sea to Holland), Migault decided, with his remaining family, that he must emigrate. Force, brutality, theft and an intolerable financial burden were the price paid by the Migaults and others who refused even the formal act of submission that could save them.3 Claude Brousson, advocate in the chambers of Castres, Castelnaudary and Toulouse, bravely defended Huguenot pastors. A typical case concerned a charge against the minister and elders of the remaining temple in Nîmes, that the minister Peyrol had administered the sacrament to a Catholic country girl. Perhaps she was a ‘plant’. The defence was that the pastor could not have known but it did not save his temple from subsequent demolition. With such stories, Pierre Jurieu, exiled since 1681 and already noted and valued for his devotional works and pastoral letters, roused feeling in England and Holland with his work, Derniers efforts de l’innocence affligée (1683). It was to be the model for a flood of such propaganda. The word dragonnades entered the language. The Elector of Brandenburg, anticipating his later ‘open door’ policy, declared that he ‘looked with anguish at the persecution of people whom he regarded as brothers and the world as innocent’. Louis answered evasively that ‘only chapels built since the Edict have been destroyed’.4 Louvois’ brief, his passion and the main source of his influence, was the well-­being of the army. After the bad experience in Poitou, and the odium he

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incurred as the minister responsible, he was more cautious. Ever the pragmatist, he was concerned about the reputation of the troops, their discipline and morale, and would have preferred them to be fighting the Spanish – as they were soon to be, some, as he well knew, under Huguenot officers. Not until after the truce of Ratisbon would he be reconciled to the use of soldiers as missionaries – and then with reservations.5 Meanwhile the rivalries between the two ministerial factions continued to affect policy. Colbert’s priorities were the health of manufactures, trade and the revenues that might accrue. His son Seignelay halted the proselytising efforts of De Muin, intendant at La Rochelle which were causing sailors to emigrate. Having the power to decide, Louis was content to hold the balance and see policy evolve, zigzag, with individual measures showing its direction. He recalled Marillac at the end of 1681 but noted that dragonnades were persuasive. Père La Chaise would suggest that the apparent collapse of Poitevin Huguenots showed that a little force could still be efficacious. There ever dwelt somewhere in the Jesuit mind, countering humane concerns, the deciding principle: the end justified the means. It did not make the ‘means’ easier to choose. The king’s quarrel with the Pope was unresolved and he needed to show himself neither schismatic nor a bad Catholic. The détente was more than an irritant and it had to be resolved. Gallicanism, whether parlementaire or episcopal, had been useful to him; but with this stubborn Pope holding his ground, it had become an embarrassment. So far from his being obsessed at this stage with a supposed grand dessein, Louis was uncertain. He wanted an end to the Huguenot problem but he continued to look around, tread warily. Le roi dévôt was also perforce politique, compelled as ever to adjust to circumstances. He was heartened by the seizure of Strasbourg in 1681, trumpeted as a victory for the faith but a shock to the Emperor. Moreover, in the war of opinions he stood to gain from what was happening in England. From 1679 Catholics were being tried and executed, on flimsy evidence produced by arrant knaves concerning an alleged ‘Popish plot’ that was manipulated by Whig aristocrats to secure the exclusion from the succession of James, the king’s Catholic brother. The treatment of Huguenots, it was pointed out, was lenient by comparison with that of the English Catholics. The last speech of the venerable earl of Stafford was reported verbatim in the Gazette. A nobleman – then a bishop: in May 1681 the execution of the saintly Oliver Plunket brought outrage. For once ecclesiastical rhetoric was fairly aimed: England’s ‘counsellors of Babylon’ were contrasted with the French king’s ‘zeal for the House of God’. Arnauld exposed the absurdity of the ‘plot’ but urged that the plight of the English Catholics should not be seen as grounds for violent retaliation. Many, however, did so see it. Those who argued the case for moderation and compromise over matters not vital – like communion in both kinds – were now at a crucial

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disadvantage. After the victims themselves, Huguenots would be the losers by the squalid political manoeuvres, Whig rabble-­rousing and the cynicism and duplicity of Charles II, who was now again content to receive French subsidies. With several of the faults of his cousin Louis, Charles had little of his integrity – though he did after a fashion stand by his brother. The accession of James II in February 1685, after it had long seemed that he would be excluded, would help shape Louis’ view of the world, an unexpected event that he would now come to see as part of a pattern. The Catholic trend it seemed to confirm may not have been the decisive argument but it would influence him on the way to Revocation. Meanwhile as tempers rose and the quarrel between king and Pope threatened to turn ugly, Pellisson’s costly method of proceeding, along with tentative approaches to reunion, lost credibility and royal favour. Pope Innocent XI, elected in 1676, was a strong, austere personality, admired by some Protestants, who combined a stubborn resolve to uphold the claims of Rome with the imagination to see beyond the walls of the Vatican: east towards the swelling threat of Islam, west towards Germany and the possibility of reunion. The Papacy had further lost ground since the Peace of Westphalia that it had condemned – without noticeable effect on the responsible powers. The future would see the leading sovereigns, including the Emperor, conducting their business with scant reference to the Pope’s authority except as the head of a substantial but ill-­governed Italian state. However, Innocent’s bold initiatives could still make a difference; his obstinate stand against Louis XIV’s aggressive interpretation of the Gallican tradition, the king’s determination to resolve unilaterally the issue of the régale, proved costly on both sides. After the Four Articles of 1682,6 realising that Innocent would not give way, and then counting the cost of his refusal to assist in the defence of Vienna, Louis felt that he must assert his claim to be a good Catholic. The incorrigible archbishop de Cosnac assured a sceptical Europe that Holland and Germany served as a theatre, not for his victories alone but for those of Jesus Christ. William of Orange, a hostile but perceptive critic, believed that Louis was already thinking in terms of a previous century, when his ancestor Philip II had assumed the leadership of the Catholic party in Europe: ‘There is no doubt that it is the intention of the king of France to make himself the master of Europe.’7 In this capacity Louis decided he must block the ecumenical initiative of the Franciscan Rojas y Spinola.8 It was incompatible, he informed the Pope, ‘with the purity of our faith and our principles’. Then he would disavow or reject local initiatives for reunion or at least those seeking concessions that would lead individual Huguenots to cross the divide. That part of the story enhances the sense of tragedy, whether read from the perspective of Christian faith or of the well-­being of France. It also adds emphatically to the conclusion that the Revocation was the work, in the last resort, of Louis XIV. He was, up

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to a point, trapped within the constraints of high politics and diplomacy, but for those too, arising out of his aggression, he must bear some responsibility. Above all he had managed to be out of favour with both Pope and Emperor. He could take comfort in the evidence of zeal and loyalty in the French church. Here too, as in council, he could see different vested interests, privileged corners to fight. Bossuet’s impressive case for the essentially fissiparous nature of Protestantism, Histoire des Variations (1686), could have been made also about Catholicism. Innocent had some reason to fear schism; Louis did not want it but had his own domestic reasons for keeping alive the possibility. Because he was embroiled with the king over Gallicanism Innocent could not approve a conversion scheme financed by the proceeds of the régale. Both men played for high stakes. ‘Of what use,’ asked the Pope, in 1682, ‘was the demolition of so many temples if all the bishops are schismatic?’ For him it was a damaging diversion from his main interest: a crusade to halt the advance of the Ottoman Turks. When, in October 1683, it was halted before the walls of Vienna it was Louis who was the obvious loser, John Sobieski the Catholic hero, ‘the man sent from God’. Louis’ resolve to strike hard for the faith was stiffened by reports of the success of the Imperial armies in the plain of Hungary, the first indication of change in the balance of power. In each twist and turn of Louis’ diplomacy, complementing the efforts of Colbert de Croissy can be seen the hand of Archbishop Harlay.9 He had been archbishop of Paris since 1671 and established a role in policy-­making, through the conseil de conscience and through personal contacts, far greater than any of his predecessors. He was a sound administrator, a tenacious negotiator; the quintessential church politician. Inevitably, taking different views of the interest of the church, he and Bossuet were rivals. To Harlay, with his friends in Parlement and the Sorbonne, Bossuet smelt uncomfortably of Port Royal. To Bossuet Harlay was a courtier, too close to the Jesuits: his skilful management of his diocese and the church assembly was ultimately for the benefit of the crown, whose interests he would put before those of his brother clergy. Eventually, before his death in 1695, they would turn against him.10 Harlay and Bossuet each sought to preserve his own empire and to undermine the other’s. Each had his own agenda, his preferred ways of forwarding the Catholic cause. Each worked to the end to secure a peaceful resolution through negotiation if not by significant compromise. Neither man was extreme, heartless, anything less than realistic. But neither, when it came to the crunch, would want to see the other more forward than him in securing the unity of the church – or in praising, once fait accompli, the decisive action of the king. Harlay, not Bossuet, had been responsible for the manipulation of the assembly that had led to the Four Articles of 1682 defining the Gallican position. But it was Bossuet who had the prime role in so drafting the Articles that

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while affirming the king’s independence in matters temporal they left no doubt about the Pope’s authority in matters spiritual. Yet the second article added the phrase: ‘accepting the superior authority of councils of the church’. It left open that tempting route by which the Pope’s authority could be curtailed. The fourth article allowed the Pope ‘the principal role in matters of faith’ but added that ‘his decrees are not unalterable unless they have the consent of the whole church’. One can imagine a Huguenot clutching at straws when he considered these nuanced statements of what were surely incompatible views. When there was a fundamental difference among Catholics about the nature of church authority, and the crown was committed to the Gallican view, could not they be left in peace, with what remained of their rights? False hope – though the struggle was certainly not over when Louis issued a lettre de cachet ordering the closure of the assembly in August 1682. He wanted closure of the debate since he was becoming aware of disquiet among those sympathetic to Rome. Others too were repelled by the self-­ importance of certain parlementaires and a faction of bishops who found scope, otherwise denied, in the politics of the assembly. Piety and power; service to God and to king: even at this distance the motives of the different actors cannot be defined as clear alternatives. Prominent in the inner circle was the Le Tellier clan. The aged chancellor Michel, former war minister, set his heart on a final act of piety: the climax of a career of nearly fifty years in royal service. Louvois, his elder son and successor in the war office, had more reason to be cautious but generally supported the other son, Charles-­Maurice, archbishop of Reims. Their policy in church matters invites comparison with that, ongoing, of the Réunions. Contempt for foreign opinion, exploitation of legal documents, a brutal haste to secure the desired results, the use, if necessary, of armed force, are characteristics, both of the foreign policy of these years and of the campaign (it seems the appropriate word in the context) leading to the Articles. They, it seemed to the Le Telliers, did not go far enough. They wanted a General Council of the Church. With their strident emphasis on the unity and security of the realm and independence from foreign, potentially subversive powers, there was little of substance in the Articles to reassure the Huguenots. Divided counsels in state and church did not enhance their security when they were the one target at which the parties, by whatever approach, could agree to aim. The prelates’ Avertissement of July 1682, a postscript as it were to the Four Articles, proclaimed their orthodoxy and served notice to Huguenots of severe measures to come. Using their apparent independence, and prepared to be flexible, to make concessions on matters like communion in both kinds, they would seek unity by all possible means with or without the approval of the

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Pope. No wonder Innocent saw a double game, success in winning over Huguenots only reinforcing the schismatic tendency of the Gallican church. By 1685 royal ministers were concerned about the continuing cost of delay: in the ‘treasury view’ the cost of ‘compensation’ and tax privileges for the nouveaux convertis; with broader implications for good order because of the resentment of vieux catholiques who suspected that Huguenot neighbours were exploiting the system. Ministers were also alarmed at the level of emigration. Few Huguenots who had the means, or the contacts abroad, were not considering it as an option. Some seeing the writing on the wall had already left. One early leaver had been Salomon de Foubert, écuyer du roi. After his well-­patronised establishment had been closed down in 1679 he transferred it to England where he would be no less fashionable. Another in 1680 was Moise Charas, the notable pharmacist and teacher of chemistry at the Jardin des Plantes, but for him the professional sacrifice was too much and he later, and unusually, returned to Catholicism, to Paris and the Académie des Sciences. The departure of the noted savant Henri Justel in 1681 would have been regarded with concern by sympathetic Catholics since his salon and library had drawn in prominent men of different interests, but enquiring minds.11 A stream of foreign visitors over the years had included Christopher Wren, Robert Boyle and John Locke. Justel was as great a loss to France as gain to his host country and he may be seen as a significant indicator, pointing to the shift to London as the epicentre of the scientific and cultural activity that was leading to the Enlightenment. Others left as the liberal professions experienced the shock of rejection, from the Académie de Peinture, for example in 1682. Notable names include the physician Lémery, mathematician Le Moivre, scientist Denis Papin and Chardin, the great traveller.12 Membership of the French church of London rose fourfold after the first dragonnades, to around 1,200. Amsterdam drew in even more than London. Up to the end influence could secure permission to leave. It was probably Mme de Maintenon who procured a passport for her distant relative M. Morin, minister of Châteaudun, eight days before the Revocation. It was signed by the king, countersigned by Colbert de Croissy and endorsed at Calais to ensure a trouble-­free journey: all indications of special favour – and its rarity. For those in government who had to consider ways and means, notably the intendants, logistics were important, affecting the timing, if not the ultimate decision to leave. The twenty-­year truce of Ratisbon in 1684, which Louis seems to have hoped would be converted into a lasting peace, had left troops available for billeting, indeed requiring it. A retrospective view of state interest might be that the king should still tread carefully, taking a long view. Within that twenty years the king of Spain would surely die: Louis was well placed to be a major beneficiary. Future negotiations would involve serious bargaining

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with the other major parties and a degree of trust. He had already seen that he was regarded with suspicion in Germany; William of Orange and Emperor Leopold were not natural allies but they had made common cause against him – and could do so again. It is at this point, pivotal not only in the reign but, as it would turn out, in the history of Europe, that one sees at its most insidious the Versailles effect: the blinkered vision, the appeal of the grand gesture, the naïvety in judgement that came with over-­confidence. An arrogant disregard of foreign opinion could be seen in the king’s treatment of the doge of Genoa, disproportionate to the offence.13 It had always been Louis’ inclination, upheld by the Jesuits, who tended to rely on and to support the absolute ruler, to regard any challenge to the established order in theology, as in politics, as a kind of rebellion. It is understandable that he saw a favourable trend across Europe and that England should provide him with the evidence he wanted. He could not have foreseen of course that James II would manage to lose his throne in under four years, or that Stadholder William would succeed him. But in the French situation he could be called naïve to believe in the intendants’ reports – those that he wanted to hear – about the collapse of the religion. They had long been relied on, faute de mieux, for intelligence from the provinces, particularly those furthest from the capital. He could have stayed his hand, relying on the religion to atrophy for want of nourishment. Undoubtedly the wisdom of hindsight suggests that he would have done better to have listened more carefully to ministers who knew about the realities of provincial life and were apprehensive about the effects on army and navy, and to the concerns of the more experienced intendants. Louvois had taken over Colbert’s responsibilities for manufactures and the arts and understood how valuable was the contribution of Huguenots in those fields.14 He had for some time written to Protestants, soldiers or other citizens deemed valuable, to assure them that they would be protected. In 1685 he was writing to ambassadors to persuade refugees to return home where they would be treated generously. Governors, intendants, generals and bishops were exhorted to convert soldiers – if they had to – by the most conciliatory means. Louis’ most important minister was becoming resigned to the fact that the king was in thrall to courtly and clerical advisers who did not appreciate, or chose to ignore, the difference between what they desired and what was possible. To the minister it was plain that Louis was being encouraged to issue regulations that could not be enforced. It seems that the king could not see it. Here we come down to character and ability: a man so admirable in important elements of kingship, yet so limited in imagination and vision. Anticipating the plaudits, tempted by the prospect of a new kind of renown, he lacked the patience, maybe the moral courage, to rein in the zealots, as Richelieu had done in 1629, and let time do the work for him. That

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broadly is the case against Louis, whether the Revocation be presented as a crime, as an abuse of power or, more moderately, as a blunder of great consequence. Enough has been said to exonerate him from the harshest of verdicts. How serious were the consequences had yet to be revealed. It should contribute to fair judgement to recognise that he was under great pressure, whether from those around him or, less obviously, from Catholic opinion around the country as it was reported by intendants. Hopes had been raised by what had been done so far, but old Catholics tended to mistrust the nouveaux, were angry at concessions made to them and impatient of further delay. Incoherent in application, untidy and uncertain in effect, it was the bureaucrat’s nightmare. Above all he feared uncertainty. However Louis is judged he certainly did not rush to decision. Through the summer and early autumn of 1685 debate in council revolved around numbers, costs, tactics, and possible outcomes. The eyes of many, at this time, turned to the woman who had come, from 1683, to play a prominent part in the life of the king as his wife, though by secret, morganatic marriage: Mme de Maintenon. It was the view of Versailles insiders, and widely reported, that the king had found a new, remorseful and pious way back to the confidence of the Pope, to recover from the fall of his stock in Germany, and to position himself once more as Catholic champion. It can be argued that, by winning the heart of the king, offering what he had not before found – or possibly sought – in one woman, physical satisfaction with domestic companionship, that Mme de Maintenon was to an extent responsible for the change of style at court. Undoubtedly it had become by the 1690s a more decorous, religious – some naturally said duller – place. One should not, however, underestimate the contribution of Louis. He had always taken seriously the practice of religion; he listened intently to sermons and he was constantly reminded of the sacred obligations of his unique position. Maintenon’s influence was to become more marked as time went on and she gathered her own entourage among those who sought her patronage and those amenable to her pronounced views on religion and education. They came to include high officials, even ministers. But it is unlikely that she had much say in policy in the first years. On one occasion, when Maintenon voiced her distress at the rough treatment of Protestants she was sharply told by Louis to keep out of state business. She was intelligent and sensitive in a position of potential authority but less secure at first than would later appear. Some at court transferred to her their disapproval of the king: had not Louis demeaned himself in choosing to love the widow Scarron, former Huguenot and the governess of his children? It was the same instinct not to criticise the king directly that can be seen in the response of Huguenots. After the Revocation she would become a convenient scapegoat, along with Père La Chaise, for how else, asked Huguenots, except

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by female (and Jesuitical) wiles, could their just and merciful king have chosen to drive his loyal subjects underground, to false conversions, or out of the country? The ‘black legend’ need not surprise us, but it is only legend. This woman, in a position resented by many at court, represents in her devotion to the best interests of the king, her decency and moderation, a marked contrast to much that was meretricious and corrupt in the court.15 If, in 1685, she had a particular interest it was in the education of Huguenot children. Misinformed, like him, about the extent of Huguenot defection, she would express her joy at the Revocation. When it became clear that it was not the end, only the beginning of the real task of conversions, she was distressed by the violence used and supported those bishops who called for gentler ways. At the heart of the action throughout was Archbishop Harlay, in a contemporary view ‘the sole minister of the king in ecclesiastical affairs and repository of royal authority.’ By July it is possible to see something like concerted action towards an agreed end, with Harlay shuttling between church assembly, conseil de conscience and Le Tellier, but also keeping lines open to Charenton. There he had hopes, right to the end, that a group of elders, from principle or desperation, would come to some sort of accommodation, which Harlay could then advertise as a lead for other Huguenots to follow. Thus he would maintain his standing in the Gallican church, check the Jesuits, and postpone the need for a formal revocation. Personal initiatives could still be important. For instance Governor Noailles had long been urging bishops to reform church practice and to use undemanding tests to prove conversion.16 He engaged in constructive dialogue with the Huguenots of Languedoc, where they had been, and were to prove again to be, the most stubborn in adherence to the religion. He recognised that the mountains that protected the Huguenots of the Cévennes would make a mockery of orders from Versailles and urged diplomacy before coercion. But looking at the events of the last months before the Edict of Fontainebleau one has the impression of a process gathering momentum: one decision leading inexorably to another, and all the time a building up of expectation that created its own pressure on the king. So he came to see that what had long been desirable was now becoming possible. He now vaunted his orthodoxy. He repudiated the negotiations in Languedoc that smacked of southern separatism. The time was past for concessions to special interests. Already much whittled down, the provisions of the Edict of Nantes, once necessary, now seemed to him redundant, unworthy of a great king.

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Force Majeure The king has done in a single year what others have been unable to do in a century.1

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ach year since 1679 had seen harsher measures against what remained, outwardly, of Protestantism. The state had already intruded on the home with the ban on private worship. Fewer temples were left where Huguenots could meet for public worship. In December, on the feast of St Stephen men might have noted, all services where the local community had fewer than ten families were forbidden. In February 1685 penalties were announced for pastors who ‘have allowed people into their place of worship to whom the king had already required them to forbid entry’.2 After 16 June marriage abroad was no longer to be permitted. Two days later a declaration authorised the demolition of temples where ministers had conducted mixed marriages or used words that might be held to be offensive to Catholics: this offered so wide a range of offence that any official so disposed now had carte blanche to act. The summer saw temples closed across the land; in Poitou, by Revocation, only 15 were left out of 80. On 9 July Huguenots lost their right to employ Catholic servants. In the following days they lost their remaining chance of entering the legal profession through training as clerks. Medicine was soon to follow. The last edicts in the sequence of prohibitions suggest a government scanning the field for any remaining rights or liberties. So ministers were not allowed to reside within fifteen miles of places where worship was forbidden. The children of Protestants had to be taught by Catholic tutors. It was their wish to keep their families together that impelled some to leave at this stage. Appealing to the lowest of motives was the offer to reserve half the goods of emigrants to those who denounced them. The question arises: if government had already decided to revoke the Edict what was the purpose of these measures? Was it so that Louis could finally act on the evidence that Protestantism was collapsing?

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That may be the case but we should see here the hand of the lawyers. Once there were no more areas to be covered by prohibition it could be argued that there must be no more Huguenots residing in the kingdom. Plainly that was not the case – but laws that had allowed them rights had no longer any rationale. Revocation could therefore be envisaged as the legal statement of ‘an already established fact’.3 Chancellor Le Tellier might have been swayed, if his mind were not already shut to anything but his longing to see the matter closed before he died. The king’s decision to revoke the Edict was probably influenced above all by the reports that he had been receiving in the preceding months. Their general tenor was that repression had worked, that the morale of Huguenots had plummeted; they were abandoning the faith in droves; some had already left the country. So Revocation would only be recognition of a fait accompli. Intendants generally tended to euphemism, reporting what they saw – anxious faces, queues to sign documents of renunciation, families making a show of attendance at mass – as a triumph of royal policy when they knew it was a shabby, unconvincing process. Developments after the Revocation will suggest that many Huguenots were more resolute in faith than the king had been led to believe. He would soon be surprised by the willingness of so many to sacrifice home and possessions for their faith; of others, who stayed, whatever their public profession, to hold on to their faith. Should we too be surprised? Law and its assumptions aside, what evidence is there for the supposed collapse of Protestantism in the months before Revocation? Here we may note opinion at court where defections among leading nobles would have disproportionate influence. The names of families already converted resonate with memories of heroic days past: La Trémoille, Sully, Coligny, Bouillon, La Rochefoucauld. Faced by the alternative, between loyalty and the prospect of preferment, with the sense of truly belonging to court and crown at the height of its splendour, or disgrace, other notable figures succumbed. The marquis de Ciré was among others of equal rank, contrôleur-­général d’infantrie Jacques Bigot de la Rainville, mestre de camp de Vivans, l’amiral Forant. Where there had been indifference among the sophisticates at court Huguenots now breathed a chill air. To be a Huguenot was to be in every sense out; out of fashion, favour and standing at the heart of affairs where personal and family business could be done. The more admirable, then, those who held out to the end. Secure in Louis’ regard were Schomberg, whom the king tried hard to keep, Ruvigny, official representative of the RPR, now unafraid to air its sufferings or express his pain. There remained some notable names, a Rochefoucauld, a de la Roche-­Giffard, the comte de Roye. Among women of strong character we may note de Roye’s wife Elizabeth, Esther daughter of Barthélemy Hervart who gave money to sustain destitute Parisian Protestants, Anne de Machecoul,

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widow of Comte Louis de Montgommery; not least in the roll of honour Mlle de Bourbon-­Malause, great-­niece of Turenne and sister of the marquis de Miremont, the last Protestant in the Bourbon (bastard) line. Family histories will show prominent opiniâtres, the unyielding, taking one of several courses. Suffice it that Louis allowed several to stay in France, at least temporarily; some would later be imprisoned, men and women; some emigrated; some left isolated went underground; protected by family name, estate or by officialdom’s blind eye. They could be an example to others of faith, an embarrassment to government but neither threat nor rallying point for a more general resistance. That possibility would depend on the government’s next attempt to bring matters to a head. In the spring of 1685 the dragonnades had been resumed. This time there was no attempt by government to check or to moderate the zeal of intendants. From Béarn Foucault announced the conversion of 22,000 Huguenots. The number was exaggerated. Were there even as many still left there by then? Possibly there was the appearance of a general collapse, leaving an insignificant rump. Béarn was not typical. Fewer, in total or proportion, left there for exile than from any other synodal province.4 The court tended to believe the figures and Marshal Boufflers was sent south with an army. Now off the leash, intendants competed to provide the most exciting news. In Grenoble it was reported that conversion was wholesale, though helped evidently by the appealing image of Catholicism projected by Le Camus and his accommodating measures.5 In Montauban and Poitou there were mass abjurations though gained by the rougher methods that encouraged the short-­term gesture, the shrug of the shoulders, the scribbled signature, perhaps a private disclaimer or prayer for forgiveness. Louvois cannot have been unaware of the superficial aspect when he wrote to Seignelay in September of 60,000 converts in the généralité of Bordeaux where there had been 150,000 Huguenots: ‘there are not enough priests to receive them. Everywhere people demand new churches to hold the new Catholics.’6 To his brother the archbishop he took the same line: ‘The last reports from the Saintonge and Angoumois convey that all is Catholic.’ Did he really believe it, let alone welcome it? Or was he simply powerless to do more than bewail the damage to the army and, now, having taken over Colbert’s responsibility for manufactures and the arts, the loss of the many Huguenots throughout the field? There was a sensible afterthought to his letter. ‘His Majesty recommends that you be accommodating to the bankers and manufacturers.’7 The words have been taken to imply the cynicism of a brutal advocate of aggression in foreign policy and conformity at home, making him a prime culprit for generations of historians. But Louvois was ever adept in the language of conformity required of ministers. Once the decision had been taken he was keen to deal with resistance as thoroughly as possible. Meanwhile, however,

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fearful of the outcome, his actions speak louder than words. The rules of Les Invalides, under his direct authority, were plain. Retired soldiers must be Catholic. Actually there were numerous Huguenots there; nor was any ever pressed to convert. For forty-­seven days before the Edict of Fontainebleau Louvois was away from court preparing contingency plans. For years he had been privately reassuring Huguenots that they would be protected. Now it was a matter of damage limitation. Intendants were urged to be lenient. Ambassadors were to tell Huguenots that they were welcome to return. He could not be sure that Louis would accept the presence of Huguenots in his army so he proposed a generous tariff for conversion: private soldiers 24 livres, a sergeant 48: officers were offered annual pensions ranging with seniority from 200 to 600 livres. The poor response to these measures no doubt contributed to the subsequent sense of failure and waste felt by Louvois and fellow ministers. Even if intendants’ reports were taken at face value, the council had one other possibility to consider. The conscientious Bâville,8 sent to Languedoc to supervise the dragonnades, carried out his orders but had reservations about the policy and afterwards complained that he had not been consulted. One declaration in August had forbidden Protestants, deprived of their pastor, to assemble outside the temple. And if there was no temple, where else? It followed that to continue to tolerate the remaining Huguenots would be to encourage illegal gatherings. If they were now subversive, as they had not been before, it was because of the way in which they had been cut off progressively from the opportunity to serve in official positions or to worship legally. The continued presence of Protestantism would not only be dangerous to the state and offensive to the church; it would also be prejudicial to Catholics who had to live alongside the remaining Huguenots. As Bâville saw it, it seems regretfully, the government’s acts had created a situation in which it would be illogical and actually risky to delay dealing the coup de grâce. Like other officials he knew that the crown had already issued regulations that could not be enforced and led to contempt for the law. Even Seignelay, who had opposed discriminatory measures, accepted the argument. With everything else, it brought Louis to the point of decision. He disregarded the last-­minute negotiations of Archbishop Harlay with the elders of Charenton where he claimed to find support for meaningful concessions and hoped for the éclat of some public gesture of conversion. Louis could have noted that other churchmen, concerned about impenitence and sacrilege among the convertis, still wanted to encourage an element of free choice. He listened instead to his chancellor, preparing for his personal Nunc Dimittis. Crafted largely by Le Tellier and crowning his lifetime of royal service, the Edict of Fontainebleau was issued on 18 October 1685. ‘I cannot doubt but that it is the Divine Will that I should be his instrument in bringing back to His ways all those who are subject to me.’ The tone is

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paternalist, dutiful within Louis’ own frame of reference, caring, indeed in tune with his people – nearly all of them. There is no doubt that his action was greeted with enthusiasm by the mass of his subjects. The words of the Edict expressed the king’s identification with the people’s will: The best and greatest part of our subjects of RPR have embraced the Catholic faith and as by reason of this the execution of the Edict of Nantes is useless, we have judged that we cannot do better, to efface entirely the memory of the troubles, the confusion and the evils that the progress of the false religion have caused in our realm . . . than to revoke entirely the above edict.9

The Edict, so reasonable sounding if not positively emollient in tone, assumed that the religion, that is the body, no longer existed. For the time being, however, Versailles had to allow that Huguenots, as persons, did exist. It was implicit in clause 14 of the Edict: ‘On condition that they do not practise their religion Huguenots may live in the realm without abjuring until it please God to enlighten them.’ A triumph of wishful thinking, a sop to those of sensitive conscience who believed in true conversion of mind and heart? However regarded, it could only mean a postponement of the issue that would continue to divide the leadership in state and church. There would be from the start, and soon widening, a gulf between the advocates of persuasion by teaching and example, and those more cynical or impatient, typically intendants, who recognised what they were up against and looked for a tidy solution – or a short sharp shock. Louvois ordered that ‘those who want the stupid glory of being the last to resist be pushed to the last extremity’.10 By way of example Huguenots on his estate were to be ‘properly maltreated’. In December he ordered the destruction of all emigrants’ houses in La Rochelle. In Languedoc, Bâville, who had understood from the outset the enormity of the task, was now implacable. His fierce measures brought 60,000 ‘converts’ in three days. He had support from some bishops who were confronted by compact, resolute communities, not amenable to missionaries and capable of taking up arms. It was soon clear that the Huguenots had no intention of giving up and that they were still far more numerous, in one guise or another, ‘convert’ or covert, than had been assumed. The next stage was to cut off the fount of heresy. Ministers were ordered to convert within two weeks or leave the country. All Huguenot children were to be baptised, brought up and educated in the Roman faith. Émigrés were given four months within which to benefit from an amnesty and recover their confiscated property. The previous ban on emigration was renewed. It was reinforced, with the ban on sending goods abroad, by fearsome penalties: for men the galleys; for women the confiscation of all worldly goods, or prison.

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Vauban had a soldier’s independence of mind and knew that he was indispensable to Louvois. His was a rare voice of open dissent: ‘Kings are masters of the lives and the goods of their subjects but never of their opinions.’11 It was rarely the view that was heard. Whether genuinely dazzled or merely obsequious, institutional France was unrestrained in praise of the ‘new Constantine’. Lamoignon spoke for Parlement: ‘the king has done in a single year what others have been unable to do in a century.’ For the Jesuit Robert it was done, ‘not by fire and sword but by his gentleness and wisdom’.12 Mme de Sévigné, not naturally given to criticising the official line, may have written with a straight face, echoing perhaps what was said at court: ‘many people have been converted without knowing why’. Never mind, for Père Bourdalue would ‘explain it to them and make them good Catholics. Up till now the dragoons have been good missionaries. The teachers that are being sent out will complete the work.’13 Complacent or ironic, she was exactly describing the earnest side of government policy, a missionary drive supported by government funds. After his efforts to build bridges it might have been expected that Bossuet would have had mixed feelings about the Revocation.14 If he did he kept them to himself. His language was effusive. Of Le Tellier, in his funeral oration, he said that ‘God had reserved for him the accomplishment of the great work of religion.’ He saluted ‘this miracle of our times’ and invited all to dote upon the piety of Louis: ‘let our acclamations soar to heaven.’ Afflatus more courtly than divine – and the words sit uncomfortably with his previous efforts to secure reunion and to temper the zeal of Jesuits and friars. But it may be that he was genuinely moved by the idea of unity restored and was able to ignore uncomfortable facts. These soon became apparent.

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c h a p t e r t h i rt y - ­f o u r

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Aftermath It is an awesome fount for future ferment within the realm.1

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fter the Edict of Fontainebleau the remaining Huguenots were left with several options, each painful. They could join the ranks of the nouveaux convertis, despised by those who remained ferme; resented by the vieux catholiques, not least for their tax privileges and other inducements real or imagined; assumed by both sides to be in some degree hypocritical. In some parts they would soon have to pay for their own police protection. If they had held out this long, or been persuaded finally by the dragoons, it was unlikely that ‘conversion’ would mean more than observance of outward forms, superficial at best, leaving the possibility of discreet family devotions. They remained vulnerable to the zealous priest or denunciation by a suspicious neighbour. ‘Until it pleases God to enlighten them’: clause 14 of the Edict of Fontainebleau offered hope to the procrastinators and those who clung to the hope that government would reconsider its policy. In parts of the Midi, where Huguenot communities had remained strong, were even in a few places a majority, they could resist, either passively or more boldly by attending clandestine services. This was hardly an option where Huguenot communities were relatively small, in large, mainly Catholic towns, a highly visible, vulnerable presence, or where, as in much of the north, they were few and scattered. Even after the years of persuasion, compensation and dragooning there were still left up to 700,000 Huguenots, open or closet, by October 1685; around 200,0002 had left by the end of the decade. Of that number a large proportion came from the bigger towns, from the north and from seaports. Again – a further broad generalisation allowing for numerous exceptions – they were substantial bourgeois, petty noble, artisans with some special skills to offer: men and women of mature faith, sufficiently self-­confident to envisage making something of life in exile. Some, through trade or financial contacts, had the expertise and capital to

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ensure a good start in a foreign land. If any stayed without even the gesture of nominal conversion it was because they were too valuable – a protected species. Seamen, particularly privateers, had long sailed loose to conventional loyalties. Soldiers could expect to be greeted with open arms by Protestant generals, already used to handling polyglot armies and aware of the high reputation that made Louvois and Vauban so anxious not to lose them. Nor would there be much to deter intellectuals, doctors, writers; some were already known and respected abroad. A number of those best placed to read the writing on the wall, the cosmopolitan, the sophisticated, those who were at home in the wider world of letters, had already left. The case of Henri Justel is exceptional for he was a well-established figure well known to savants abroad and expected a rewarding life in London.3 Most could not leave with such good prospects but there had always been economic migrants, especially to places where established industries, like glass-­making in England, printing and publishing in Holland, offered scope for the enterprising specialist. There were several cases of an entire craft community deciding to leave, like weavers from Sedan. Group solidarity, or fear for their future employment in an uncertain market, might be motives besides religious conviction. Some pastors, of course, were already familiar travellers around the international Protestant world. They faced the greatest peril if they decided to stay, and most left. One such was Jean Armand Dubordier who left in 1681 after the destruction of his family’s temple at Montpellier; in London he acquired a high reputation as preacher and controversialist and used his influence to aid other Huguenots to leave.4 Generally of course those who decided that they must leave chose the nearest, most convenient point of departure, or that deemed least risky. Taking France as a clock face and moving from Calais at 6, clockwise, Flanders, with its generally unobservant Catholic authorities on both sides of a notoriously porous frontier, provided the most common routes. From Metz and Neuchâtel refugees went to Germany, from Lyons to Geneva, not usually to stay there but to spread around Switzerland or Protestant parts of Germany. From Grenoble the way led typically through the Durance valley to Turin; others headed there from Nice, with further hazard as Louis decided to block the route and further harass the Savoyard Protestants.5 Those who could reach San Sebastian might find ships for English ports, Falmouth, Dover or Southampton. From Bordeaux, La Rochelle and Nantes lay the busiest, and most fiercely guarded routes to those, and smaller English ports. From Norman ports Jersey was a common first stop. The experience of the Migault family was not unique.6 For more than two years they had lived penurious, hidden lives under the conditions imposed by the Revocation. With others, in January 1688, Jean arranged for an English ship to pick them up from a beach near La Rochelle; after a hazardous night’s tramp, fifty-­one Huguenots were rescued but the Migaults were

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reckoned too large a family to be brought off safely. Dawn revealed patrolling guard boats cutting off the rescue ship. Three months later, undeterred, this time covered by a crowd gathering for Easter celebrations, they successfully embarked. After nineteen days they arrived at Brill, Holland. Even thus barely recounted the plain facts convey enough of the resolve, the hazards involved in the great gamble: one outcome imprisonment or death; the other freedom but an uncertain future. It is not surprising, if heart-­rending, that some parents decided to leave younger children behind, or to split the risk, travelling separately. From Granville and Dieppe many Normans left for Jersey before going on to England. The bald outline of routes of escape hardly begins to convey the diversity of experience. We should consider the numbers involved, the anxious planning, the last-­minute doubts alongside a strength of faith to be wondered at. Then the grief of departure, the broken families, some to be separated for good; the last look back at cherished garden and field; the hardships and fears of travel through dense forests, malarial marshlands, deep snows. For the unlucky there was the shock of detection, sometimes at guarded river crossings, perhaps at the last minute, even on board ship – the holds inspected; wine barrels broached, bales of cloth turned over. Beyond the indifference of neighbours, the contempt of officialdom, the penalties and pains, like that perhaps experienced by Huguenots seeing their temple destroyed before a jeering crowd, lay the uncertain future, maybe the early embarrassments and obstacles of a first foreign experience. For those who failed to get away, or stayed to be caught in secret worship, the prisoner’s chains were to be expected, the splintering of family, an awful loneliness, the toil and squalor of the royal galley; for some, the hangman’s noose. ‘My realm is being purged of bad and troublesome subjects.’7 Seeing the matter in traditional terms of faith and loyalty, speaking thus no doubt for the mass of his subjects, trusting in the efficacy of mission and education, Louis affected at first to be indifferent to the emigration of so many of his most useful subjects. Ministers and officials had to put a brave face on things. There are cases where they found themselves seriously at odds with over-­zealous clerics. An apparently minor example illustrates the ambiguities at the heart of policy. At Villiers-­le-­Bel, in the outskirts of Paris and under the authority of the abbey of St Germain-­des-­Prés, a number of Huguenots had long maintained a profitable textile business. The curé-­prieur had chosen to harass nouveaux-­convertis among them so that those who might have stayed resolved to leave. He thwarted Seignelay’s efforts to entice them back until the minister, in September 1686, resorted to demanding that the archbishop of Paris remove him. Three years later came a general instruction to intendants that illustrates the impasse: they were to regulate each case before them according to the letter

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of the Edict of Nantes and to pursue the strict measures ordained by later edicts. But they were also to be patient, to leave it to time and to ensure that nothing was done to push more to the point of exile.8 The first, most glaring judgement on the policy of coercion is that it failed even within its own confessional terms. Large numbers of Huguenots remained in the country: four or five for every one who sought refuge. The convertis of the last wave, such as those of Montauban, whose intendant boasted much of the high rate of conversion, included some whose nominal adherence, increasingly casual as the pressure lifted, infuriated ‘old Catholics’ and their curés. One at Montauban wrote that conversions were the result of imprisonment, fines, frequent insults and continual threats used by M. le Gendre. For Bluche, ‘The Most Christian king’ was ‘godfather to tens of thousands of sacrilegious acts.’9 Writing to Bossuet, Fénelon found striking words to express his concern about the conversion of the timid and fearful. ‘If we wished to make them abjure Christianity and follow the Koran we would merely have to send in the dragoons . . . It is an awesome fount for future ferment within the realm.’10 It may be – but naturally it is impossible to know – that most of the nouveaux treated Catholic propaganda with indifference, read their bibles, said their psalms and kept to the faith in the privacy of their homes. An affront and an embarrassment indeed – but to government the more serious challenge, and the object of fierce counter-­measures, was the number of resolute communities and families who took advantage of remote places in rugged country, some travelling far to worship together in clandestine assemblies. If it had been the expectation of the government that without pastors the religion, prétendue reformée, would wilt and die it shows a complete misunderstanding of Protestantism, the power that lay in the individual’s belief in salvation, and the support he could expect from the community of the like-­minded. The opposite was soon seen to be happening as groups found new ways to worship and evolved their own communal discipline. Persecution only hardened the spirit of resistance and made them more determined to maintain the faith. Enthusiasm, ‘prophesying’, encouragement from abroad, were warning signs. The vitality, discipline and resourcefulness could not be ignored. Louvois wrote that the king was resolved ‘to transplant all the people in the Cévennes if they continue to hold meetings’.11 Could he have been serious? It looks like a brutal jest in the face of real frustration. Meanwhile repressive action brought nearer the danger of civil war. The difficulty of enforcing royal policy had been anticipated by some of those churchmen with most experience of conditions on the ground and most zeal for conversion. It would turn out that Revocation was the prelude to a tragedy on both sides of the divide: for the Huguenots, of course; but also for the devout, and the active evangelists on the Catholic side. For there is another

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side to the story, the sincere desire to persuade errant souls to return through genuine understanding of Catholic faith. It was recognised that outward ‘conversion’ was not enough. The Edict was the signal for more intense efforts to convince and convert. The old rivalries in the Catholic camp, not only between Jesuits and Jansenists but at a personal level between Bossuet and Harlay, did not end with Revocation and there were different views as to what should be done next. The king’s letter to Harlay in November 1685 evokes the earnest mood behind the rhetoric: ‘We must give every consideration to nouveaux convertis of good faith, arouse the ardour of the indifferent through education, and use the law against those who relapse.’12 Harlay directed the missionary campaign; the crown provided funds. Translations of the New Testament, catechisms and breviaries were distributed; half a million volumes in all, received generally without enthusiasm. Squads of priests were recruited to aid curés who might be woefully deficient in the knowledge or skills for teaching; but the outsider might find that he lacked the patois required to get on terms with the people. Le Camus, whose promotion to cardinal had already signified Innocent’s approval of his non-­violent approach to conversion, produced an undemanding formula for the remaining Huguenots of his diocese, was challenged by the Jesuits, but upheld at Rome. Fénelon instructed his priests in the Saintonge ‘not to rouse the Huguenot by argument but to expound the gospel with authority at once gentle and persuasive’.13 A third of ministers in his area stayed to be converted. But generally the pace was slow, the results patchy. Less well known than Fénelon, a churchman of exceptional ability, highly favoured at court, was abbé Fléchier, later bishop of Nîmes. His experience cast further light on the problem posed by Huguenot recalcitrance. He had no illusions about its nature: ‘they will always be as different races at war within the bosom of Church and Country: two bodies rather than one.’ Selected, with Fénelon and Bourdalue, to conduct missions he was later (1687) sent to Nîmes where, as bishop, he ‘championed a purified, reflective religion that avoided extremes’.14 There he proved possibly too moderate and reasonable to understand the passions of Camisards. In that he was not alone. Paris represented a particular problem since the government was anxious that important merchants and financiers should stay but was not willing to see them defying the law. Protestant embassies offered hospitality and the chance to worship. In December 1685, 300 of the most prominent Huguenots in the business world, in five categories of importance, were invited to meet to be offered terms of reunion. Many refused to attend; of those who did, just 63 promised conversion. With only 21 out of 175 in the lowest and largest category of five pledging conversion (categories 1 and 2 mustered 25 out of 47), it is clear that resistance was strongest among the less affluent. Or was it that

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those who had most to lose were most likely to be ‘converted’? Like Villars, men may have wondered what that meant. The blunt soldier, thinking of the country at large, though exaggerating for effect, learned from ‘the well informed, ecclesiastics, vicars-­general and others that of some 10,000 there were perhaps two who were sincere.’15 Euphoria soon faded as the authorities came to terms with the uncomfortable reality that there were plenty of Huguenots still around, not all even hiding their faith. Some, believing that the Edict meant the end of violence, even renounced their sword-­point conversion. A party formed round bishops shocked by reports of continued violence and sacrilege.16 Matignon, bishop of Condom, protected the local Huguenots from the soldiery. At Orléans, De Coislin lodged soldiers at his own expense. Émigré writers abroad seized every chance to show a government in disarray, a policy failing. In February 1686 Jurieu published two letters of the bishop of Saint-­Pons, condemning the order to drive all without exception to the altar, even those who ‘spit and trample on the Eucharist.’17 Jansenists, whose methods were grounded in their view that the sacraments should be taken seriously, not as mere form, condemned the dragonnades. Harlay responded with hints about Jansenist sympathy with the converted – and unconverted. He banned Le Tourneau’s translation of the Breviary. So Jurieu, turning round the argument of Bossuet about Protestantism, could ask: was this ‘Catholic unity’?18 As serious from the king’s perspective, and in relation to his standing abroad, was the equivocal attitude of Pope Innocent XI. When Christina, former queen of Sweden and most remarkable of converts, declared that the dragonnades were worse than St Bartholomew’s, he reproached her but with tears of embarrassment.19 He was undoubtedly relieved that the king had chosen this way rather than the Gallican; or even, his recurring nightmare, accommodation with the heretics. Now, so far from yielding ground on the contentious issues he took the high ground, refused to make any of Louis’ candidates cardinals, or concede anything over the régale. As he came to realise that there was little hope for a peaceful reunion of churches he returned to his original view that Louis ‘looked more to the advantages of his realm than to the kingdom of God’ and prevaricated for months before giving his official approval.20 Of course Louis considered that as defender of the faith he deserved as much as those who had saved Vienna but German Catholics were impressed more by the Emperor’s continuing campaigns and the recovery of Hungary. Leopold also sought to create a union of German princes: a precondition was that the Pope disavow the persecution in France. Innocent could not go so far. He could only wring his hands at the failure of his great project. By 1688, when France was at war with William of Orange and the Emperor, the German

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princes had lost interest in both reunion and the crusade that was meant to follow. In Holland, which by then had a substantial Huguenot presence, the Jesuits were threatened with expulsion and appealed to Père La Chaise to use his influence to re-­establish the Edict of Nantes! Even in the short term the diplomatic fallout was damaging to France. How long that would continue may be judged in the light of what followed from the accession of William of Orange to the English throne. Louis XIV was not directly responsible for James II losing his crown. The latter’s policies and tactics had fatally offended just those men, bishops and noblemen, who had the authority and means to effect a coup. But the Revocation had ensured that James’ Catholic sympathies would appear in the most alarming light. To make the connection between James’ faith and his absolutist tendency it hardly needed the gleefully reported observation of the bishop of Valence: ‘God seemed to raise the French king to this power and magnanimous action, so that he might be in a capacity to assist in doing the same there [England].’21 To the Royalist John Evelyn, who knew France well, ‘the French persecution of the Protestants raging with the utmost barbarity seemed to exceed even what the heathen used’.22 More persuasive even than the literature of protest and the atrocities described were the refugees, individuals and families bringing with them little but their faith, skills – and stories. Consider two cases out of many. Jean François de Portal was a conseiller du roi in Poitiers, an office that he managed to hold on to until the dragoons arrived in town. Before Revocation he had secured the safety of his two sons, Henri and Pierre Guillaume. They were concealed in a bread oven, smuggled to Bordeaux and then made their still perilous journey in an empty wine cask on a ship bound for Southampton. Isaac Minet attempted to leave Calais with his mother when the church had been demolished and dragoons occupied the town. She was disguised as a porter’s wife but recognised and with her son taken to a Catholic church and forced to abjure. They returned to find their house still occupied by three soldiers. His brother, already in England, arranged for their escape at midnight from a point along the coast. Evading soldiers, coastguards and patrol vessels, with his mother, sister and another brother, Minet arrived in Dover on 1 August 1686, a day that Isaac kept as a fast until his death in 1745. Theirs were among the more dramatic of tales of deliverance, but there were many hundreds more not dissimilar, both in the pressures that compelled the people to flee and in the efforts made by the authorities to prevent them.23 In Holland the Revocation had already helped William to heal the serious rift between him, as stadholder, and the regents of Amsterdam, on whose mercantile interests and conservative instincts Louis had relied to keep the Dutch neutral. The burgomaster of Amsterdam testified that it was the

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Huguenots who persuaded them to come to terms with William of Orange. Throughout his wars he was able to command support, not only as the defender of frontiers but as guardian of Protestantism. That he found himself after 1688, as much by good fortune as by judgement, in a position to use the financial and military resources of England for his war, is one measure of the calamity for France that was Louis’ assault upon the Huguenots. Had Louis been able in 1685 to see into the future, would he have stayed his hand? He was at war with the League of Augsburg, transformed into the Grand Alliance, from 1689 to 1697; again from 1701 to 1714. In the second phase, from 1702 to 1705 one of his armies was engaged in suppressing a serious revolt in the Cévennes that was the direct consequence of action against the Huguenots. Of course the Revocation was only one factor among several in the formation of an Anglo-­Dutch-­Imperial alliance that left Louis almost isolated in Europe, the most important before the second phase being his grandson’s inheriting the entire Spanish empire by will of its last Habsburg king. Yet it affected profoundly the image of Louis in Europe, his diplomatic relations with fellow sovereigns and the tone of public discourse. Less obviously at first, but with significant long-­term effect, it contributed to the intensifying and very public debate about faith. For, if nothing else, the spirit of intransigence that coloured the claim to a monopoly of Christian truth, the frustration of those who had worked in a spirit of rationality for the cause of reunion, brought some to question both the Catholicism of Trent and the Calvinism of Geneva. The Revocation stung rival apologists into a fury of activity. A significant consequence had been to bring together, in common exile, the pastor Jean Claude of Charenton, with whom Locke had once conversed about a cure for gout and who had had serious dialogue with Bossuet, Gilbert Burnet, another earlier observer of the French scene,24 and John Locke. The last two found Holland a convenient refuge during the years of Royalist reaction; Locke would stay till the end of James II’s reign, imbibing the theological liberalism of the leading Remonstrant Jean Le Clerk.25 The influence of events in France on Britons is typified by Burnet. Already his History of the Reformation (1679, 1681) had justified the English schism; now he enlarged on the dangers of Romanism. His work brought retaliatory rumbles from the Oratorian Joachim Le Grand, then a thunderbolt from Bossuet. In the Histoire des variations (1688), at once both history and apologetic, he condemned the ‘variations’, ‘equivocations’ and ‘artifices’ with which Protestants tried to repair their divisions and hide the error of their doctrines when confronted by immutable truth. His charge could be answered in like terms: the jealousies between Jansenists and Jesuits were only the latest of conflicts to show that Rome too had its ‘variations’.

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Burnet declared that the Protestant church had not varied in essentials and Le Vassor pointed out that ‘disunity was necessary to penetrate to the depths of truth.’26 The Catholic ideal, presented with such grandeur and logic, was undermined by the imposition of revealed truth upon a defenceless minority. So the Huguenots’ ordeal fertilised new religious and political ideas. Exiles like Claude and Basnage left France with a sense of grievance, not only against a church but against the establishment of which it was so plainly a part.27 It went beyond the king who seemed to have abandoned his subjects to the ideal of the unified state implicit in his view of monarchy. So the exiles became organs of heterodoxy and resistance took on new meaning. Liberalism stirred in the womb of religious thought. The Revocation was an act of faith but it was also an act of state. Measured against this fact the career and work of Pierre Bayle take on special significance. He was foremost among those who contributed to the paper war that set the sufferings of the Huguenots into the wider context of debate around religious faith and authority. The younger son of the pastor of a village near Foix he had early shown an independence of mind that took him from the Protestant academy of Puylaurens to the Jesuit College of Toulouse, where he lodged with a Catholic priest. Eighteen months later he was back to Protestantism. In his words ‘the variations within Protestantism sent him to Rome; reason back to Geneva’.28 Forced into exile as a relaps he was there anyway for five years before becoming Professor of Philosophy at Sedan. When the academy was closed down he found a lifetime’s base at Rotterdam, teaching philosophy and history alongside Pierre Jurieu whom he had known as pastor, later professor at Sedan. Jurieu continued to teach theology in the exclusive and orthodox way that would lead to their lasting estrangement. Meanwhile Bayle made a mark in 1682 with a critique of Louis Maimbourg’s tendentious history of Calvinism. His critical rigour proved more effective than Jurieu’s impassioned onslaught in reducing the book to its level as a work of propaganda rather than history. Calling attention to the divisions within the Catholic church Bayle forestalled Bossuet’s weightier Histoire des variations. Though La Reynie, lieutenant de police, enjoyed the argument, court pressure led to the book’s being condemned and burned.29 Beyond reach of the authorities Bayle returned to the attack with a discussion of a recent work of the Jansenist Nicole.30 One sentence is memorable: ‘In matters of religion the criterion is not in the understanding but in the conscience.’ Bayle could be urbane, even detached, but after 1685 it would prove harder. On the renewal of dragonnades his elder brother Jacob was arrested and imprisoned; in November he died ten days before the arrival of an order for his release. His father and younger brother had died in the previous year. Had his relapse and exile drawn attention to the family? Remorse, grief and outrage

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informed the title and theme of a short pamphlet. Driven increasingly by the spirit of enquiry he would turn thereafter to the vocation for which he is justly famous, disseminating through knowledge the values of intellectual freedom and religious tolerance. The fluent pen of Bayle the publicist and encyclopaedist and the genius of Locke served similar ends. The coincidence of the Huguenot dispersion and the Whig revolution against arbitrary monarchy sanctioned by Divine Right gave rise to renewed speculation about sovereignty in church as in state. The idea of contract was potent in debate. The avant-­garde of the Huguenots came to accept that the people had sovereign power and that the sovereign was merely a delegate.

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s Diaspora

So many victories of the human spirit, so many witnesses to the power of faith.

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heory apart, in the arena of power politics, the effect of the Revocation on diplomatic relations would one day be seen to have been momentous. Meanwhile it was bound to take time for Louis and his ministers, preoccupied with the campaigns of the war of the League of Augsburg1 and heartened by the victories of Luxembourg,2 to come to terms with the alteration in the balance of power. The costs of war apart, as measured in interest on soaring debt, fiscal expedients and higher taxes, the emigration of so many Huguenots had observable effects on the economy. Observable through a thousand examples of direct loss in individuals and productive activities – but is it quantifiable? Here views differ widely but they lie beyond our subject and need not detain us. A country so large, with such resources in almost every sphere of human activity, could not be crippled; temporary setbacks could be overcome, shortages in certain skills made up, capital investment could gain fresh momentum. Continuing war, high taxes and mounting debt were always more significant in effect on the economy than the emigration of Huguenots. That and the underlying resilience of the economy would be demonstrated with the return of peace in 1714. Yet as Colbert could have foreseen, knowing how valuable the contribution of Protestants had been, not least those foreigners encouraged by subsidy and other incentives to come to France, the loss of skilled workers had to be damaging. Bearing in mind that in a mercantilist3 economy the loss of one country’s assets, human and material, was directly another country’s gain some examples may suffice to show that Louis’ greatest minister would have had much to lament. Towns like Dijon, Tours, Nîmes and Rouen lost more than half of their workers, Lyons all but 3,000 of 12,000 silk workers. Textile workers were the largest single element; often recruited from abroad, they were usually a

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cohesive group, tending to act together to protect their interests, and now they left in groups, sustaining one another, knowing that their skills would ensure work. Abraham Valéry of Languedoc was able to set up a large factory as soon as he reached Halle. He was not unusual in having the capital to start a new enterprise. One Paris merchant took 100,000 livres with him when he went to Holland – and he was welcomed. In Holland, ‘la grande Arche des fugitifs’ in Bayle’s phrase, refugees were given rights of citizenship. Amsterdam accorded commercial privileges and three years’ exemption from tax. A French agent estimated that 65,000 had arrived, principally textile workers: some of these moved on, to Germany or further. Gradually more followed the initial wave to England where Parliament voted funds and people gave subscriptions. French families or Walloon families already established might provide aid but England was not the first choice for many as James II, looking nervously to Versailles, was reluctant to help. Even William III, after 1688, was thwarted by Parliament in his desire to offer citizenship. And they did not achieve it fully, as opposed to denizen rights,4 until 1701. By then 10,000 had settled in London with smaller communities in Exeter, York, Canterbury and Southampton among other cities. Geneva was naturally for many, around 20,000, the first port of call but most had to move on. Under the shadow of French power and threats the Swiss could only shelter a few thousand. A handful of clockmakers stayed at Geneva and Lausanne to found a great tradition. Louis was determined to stop southern Huguenots fleeing across the border into Piedmont where they found refuge among the Vaudois, small Protestant communities in valleys south-­west of Turin. In spring 1686 he bullied Duke Victor Amadeus into dealing with them,5 with French troops from his fortress of Pinerolo, under Marshal Catinat, to support the Savoyard army. The Vaudois, ‘barbons’ as the French contemptuously called them, resorted to guerrilla tactics but were eventually overcome, their villages razed, their lands despoiled. Worse was to come after they were herded into camps, with families numbering around 12,000. Most died of malnutrition and disease. The survivors were handed over to Berne for relocation in Germany. Meanwhile the story reverberated around Europe, showing Louis and his policy in the worst possible light and providing Huguenot apologists with further powerful propaganda. Scandinavia was a natural destination for seamen accustomed to Baltic waters. A party of La Rochellais took service in a corps raised by the Swiss Lefort in Peter the Great’s Russia. Only the rigid policy enforced by the crown in the French colonies that had stifled the earlier efforts of Protestants to set up their own communities prevented them finding in Quebec and Montreal a natural home. To emphasise the loss there, emigrants soon found their way, and continued to do so, to Protestant Massachusetts, the Carolinas, Boston

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and New York, to bring new life to Calvinism in the New World. At one such congregation Benjamin Franklin would recall from boyhood the preacher denouncing Louis as Antichrist. With influence on its later history some from the United Provinces went on to the Dutch colony of the Cape of Good Hope. By 1691, 13,000 were settled there, planting their vines, reinforcing the Calvinist ethos and the sense of being a chosen people that would affect their relationship to the natives. The foregoing examples have touched on the fringe of the main emigration, the enterprise of the boldest among the emigrants. So how many went altogether? Estimates have shrunk over the years, from half a million, the number bandied around in the first years after the Revocation, to 200,000, or slightly more, which is now accepted. The larger figures reflect the initial shock to opinion outside France, the impression of a mass exodus, the tales of ministers, the response of those already living abroad, and the tendency of propaganda towards exaggeration. It was not only those outside the country who exaggerated. Saint Simon may have been in a fit of spleen when he confided to his diary that the Revocation ‘without the least pretext or any necessity depopulated a quarter of the kingdom, ruined its commerce and weakened it in all parts.’ Nonsense of course – but is that how others were starting to think? A modern view of numbers reflects research into particular situations and takes into account the considerable number known to have stayed in France and, among other obstacles to precise calculation, multiple registration, as Huguenots travelled about, some settling, others moving on more than once. For many the destination would be Germany, where Protestant opinion had been roused by the Réunions and was then further inflamed by the devastation of the Palatinate (in 1688).6 Pamphlets and broadsheets described the atrocities of these ‘Huns’ who had reduced warfare to armed robbery. Louis XIV, it was alleged, claimed to act for God but ruled by the principles of Machiavelli and the morals of the Turk. Outraged proto-­nationalist feeling merged with and reinforced the propaganda of exiled Huguenots. They were further encouraged by inclusion in the war aims of the League, soon to become the Grand Alliance, of a clause allowing for their return to France. In parts of Germany where the population had not fully recovered from the calamitous effects of the Thirty Years War there were many opportunities for the skilled and enterprising. Hesse-­Kassel, Brunswick, Hanover and the Palatinate all received some. The largest number of individuals, with some pre-­ concerted groups, went to Brandenburg whose Elector Frederick William condemned Louis’ action and advertised the welcome they would receive: no wonder, since his lands cried out for skilled labour and offered attractive opportunities to professionals of all kinds. In Berlin 4,000, many weavers among them, settled alongside the bleak garrison town, beginning its

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transformation into a great capital city. In Magdeburg, barely recovered from destruction in the Thirty Years War, a complete community settled, with pastors, doctors, lawyers – and army officers. So Prussia, a kingdom after 1701, gained invaluable citizens and enough experienced soldiers to bolster and sharpen up the Prussian war machine. Since most immigrants were relatively young there was added benefit in future growth of population. Look ahead and it is possible to see many of their descendants (and several renowned names)7 in successive wars against the country that should have been their homeland. By far the largest number went at first to Holland, a relatively easy journey through the porous north-­eastern frontier. With their ‘lively sense of self-­ achieved identity’,8 and their hostility to France and to Louis, personifying the arrogance and aggression that they had experienced, with accounts pouring from their printers of the ‘Great Turk’s assaults on their fellow Protestants, they could readily identify with his latest victims. A republic with a burgher upper class and federal structure, the United Provinces was a large and successful model or portent for the separate Huguenot state that the crown had feared would evolve during the Religious Wars. Aiming for one of the cities of the northern provinces Huguenots would be following a path trodden by successive waves of immigrants, by far the largest being that of the southern Netherlanders in the 1570s fleeing the repression of Alva and the Inquisition. From the first refuge the northern provinces had developed a stable network of institutions where the refugee could find shelter, practical help and spiritual comfort. These had long been a haven for religious or political exiles, notably Englishmen coming or going with each change in the regime. Here they would find a society more open, diverse and enterprising than any in Europe, and a privileged Calvinist church.9 As many as 60,000 made their home in the United Provinces; many more passed through en route for Germany or further afield. They came from almost every French town, though mainly from the north: Rouen, La Rochelle, Sedan, Paris especially, figured in the city lists, but there were also groups from the south. The largest number, around 5,000, went to Amsterdam, the bustling city that had benefited most from the flight of the Walloons who had left mighty Antwerp with just half of its former population. Other cities – Utrecht, Zutphen, Arnhem, Nijmegen – competed to attract refugees who could bring skills and vitality to an economy drained by war and taxes. The gain to the host cities cannot be measured in simple material terms; no more the loss to France. The record of manufactures introduced is patchy. On the credit side one may cite Abraham Legrand’s factory at Haarlem employing Huguenot silk workers from Lyons, Tours and Nîmes and supported by tax concessions. Holland became a leader in the production of silk and, with their dressmakers, hatters, wig-­makers, gold – and

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silversmiths, vied for a time with Paris for dominance in the ever growing world of fashion. In other parts of the economy, especially where an industry was already well established, like paper-­making, or glass, the immigrants had a harder ride. Possibly the main impact, in the short term, when new enterprises survived, was in reducing competition from France. A positive gain to both immigrants and their hosts might have been expected in financial institutions where the deposits were large enough to cause the Bank of Amsterdam to lower its discount rate. But the crash of the Amsterdam Exchange in 1688 hurt most those enterprises with the shallowest roots. It may be that some found the protected manufacturing culture of Colbertist France unsuited to the cold winds of competition. Pierre Baille had been director-­general of the royal textile manufactory of Clermont-­de-­Lodève in Languedoc. He started with an interest-­free loan and the cheap labour of orphan children. First the city had to take over; then in 1695 the business failed altogether. It was a major setback but not exceptional. Without a sufficient market and with inadequate capital Huguenots began to look elsewhere and during the next decade there was a steady exodus to England. Huguenots who had had the enterprise and resource to make the initial journey were literate: People of the Book. As we would expect, there were few craftsmen who could not read or write, were not versed in the Bible. Marking this immigration, even more than that to England, was the high proportion of intellectuals, some traders, financiers and nobles; more teachers, printers, booksellers. They found in the culture that had produced a Huygens, a Spinoza, a natural attraction and further opportunity. So they came to add writers and a widening readership to a public, international debate that had origins in the theological rift within Calvinism and now ranged into issues political and moral well beyond the events that had first motivated Jurieu, Bayle and numerous lesser luminaries. This refuge, in its spiritual character, was top heavy: its unique feature. Along with a fragment, at most a quarter, of the church that had survived in some form to 1685, went nearly the entire pastorate, some 600; of them 363 are known to have come to the Netherlands, many poor, without means of livelihood.10 The States voted special funds for their maintenance. ‘In the Huguenot refugee community religion, politics and letters came together to form a true communicative society that was able to play efficiently with the public opinion of their new country.’11 Of course the chief beneficiary in political terms was Stadholder William of Orange, after 1688 king of England and chief architect of the Grand Alliance. From the impact of Huguenot opinion on the Dutch and the continuing support of those who dominated the politics of Holland and Zeeland resulted the long continuance of a war that, with its severe effect on the economy, was increasingly hard to justify in terms of national interest.12

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Indeed, it can be argued that any gains brought to the United Provinces by the Huguenot immigration were more than balanced by the constricting effect on their foreign policy; also that England was the principal beneficiary in almost every field. It is in England too that the greatest benefits of the Huguenot diaspora were to be felt. To England had come, by 1700, more than 40,000, a fifth of the entire refugee population. With them too we pass beyond the bounds of this study. Yet even to list some of the most notable, with their profession or trade, is to recall the troubled past, see the loss to the land they left behind them and the corresponding gain to England, France’s rival, when not enemy, in successive wars in Europe and beyond. In sheer diversity and value they must count among the most successful of immigrants, whether judged by integration or achievement in almost every field of endeavour. They will probably be those with whom the British reader, perhaps with a personal or family experience of immigration, is most likely to identify. To anyone who has followed the story of France’s Protestants from early days it will not come as a surprise that they represent the sterling character of Huguenot life. They also provide the strongest evidence for the way in which the experience of being a minority, often disadvantaged, and of living by the Calvinist precepts grounded in the Bible, could cohere to create strong homes and to reward ambition and endeavour. A common characteristic is that, in proportion to relatively modest numbers, in workshop, studio or counting house they delivered high value with the prospect of advancement through special, sometimes unique skills. From creative endeavour in many fields the name Huguenot came to be associated with excellence. Also at a time when England was poised, benefiting from the Dutch model and from its natural resources, to take a leading position in capitalist enterprise and industrial productivity, Huguenots were coming to a land of opportunity. They brought their work ethic with the entrepreneurial spirit that enabled them to found family firms and to respond to increasing demand. They found and catered for the growing taste of the prospering classes for the decorative and luxurious.13 Among their number were artists, engravers and print-­sellers; printers, paper-­makers, booksellers and bookbinders; furniture makers, wood carvers, sculptors; gun-­makers, goldsmiths, silversmiths and jewellers; clock-and watchmakers; painters, glass-­ makers, ceramists, ivory turners; silk and other textile workers. Professional men joined some already established – doctors, savants of differing bent and speciality, science, literature, history; merchants, bankers and entrepreneurs. This recital of trades and professions – it is not complete and it pertains only to one, if the most fortunate, of several destinations – should serve to bring home the severe loss to France in so many of its most estimable, intelligent and

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motivated subjects. The corresponding gain to England is borne out by my sample of refugees, matching the recital above, with their origins and individual stories. Since it amounts to a powerful tribute to what they had already achieved and contributed in the homeland it should be seen as an integral part of the Huguenot story. Not without pathos, it points us, as we ponder the balance sheet, to so many victories of the human spirit over adversity, so many witnesses to the power of faith. It is only because flight has taken them beyond their native country, and the bounds of our story, that I am treating their subsequent achievements as a postscript.14

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Huguenotism Recovers its Soul war in the cévennes

Très obstinés dans leur religion.1

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ich indeed was the contribution of Huguenots to the rest of the Protestant world. But most stayed, struggling to survive, in their native land, resisters of two kinds: the bold, even desperate, resorting to arms; the passive majority, more cautious, not necessarily less courageous. With them we reach the last pages in our story. Whether they were known to the authorities and left alone as hopeless cases, harassed to the point of seeking to escape, or undergoing a nominal conversion (or being offered teaching that could lead to a sincere change of mind), Huguenots coped in ways that lead to only one conclusion: that the religion was far from extinguished. Moreover, that it entered the eighteenth century with the presence that was to recover a degree of organisation as ‘the church of the desert’. Can we go further, towards any reliable kind of measurement? For some regions it has been done. An inquest in the pays de Caux in 1698 revealed that a surprising number in all classes, though with bourgeois the most prominent, had remained faithful, typically described in official reports as ‘très obstinés dans leur religion’, though unable to worship together except in private groups and gatherings.2 Sometimes it was fellow workers in a trade, with a strong sense of common interest, who had some immunity. Sixty-­five master wool-­combers of Caen described by an inspector in 1700 had found it possible to stay, in their case because of the value attached by government to the master draper Pierre Massieu.3 Nobles were still quite prominent among the non-­leavers, as in the Norman countryside and Languedoc, where in 1698 there were 447 Huguenot heads of family for 4,146 Catholic in 1698. They tended to give up town life for the relative security of their country estate where they were able to offer protection and the chance to worship to others less fortunate. Evidence from the Norman towns, Rouen and Caen, suggests this; but also that some, like leading bourgeois, had

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the means, enterprise and connections to emigrate. That was especially the case with the seaports, Le Havre and Dieppe, each recorded as having but one Huguenot noble left. For most of those of any class who opted to stay the situation can be described as one of necessary vigilance, comfort within limits, dangerous moments and the cruel reminder, when officials decided to swoop, that prison, the galleys, even the noose, awaited them. It was not only for the émigré that the invocation Exsurgat Domine (Psalm 68) still had power and promise: ‘Let God arise and let his enemies be scattered’. As early as 1685 Le Camus complained about the entry into France of the Pastorales of Jurieu, ‘undoing in a day the work of months’.4 Smuggled in, passed from hand to hand, read in illegal gatherings, they sustained morale among the faithful by the assurance of foreign interest and the promise of support. From the presses of Holland and Germany came a flood of pamphlets, ammunition for the greatest paper war since the Reformation.5 In the spirit of his new calling, to observe impartially, inform and instruct, Bayle wrote in magisterial style: ‘if people only knew the force and present significance of the expression, no one would envy France the distinction of being “wholly Catholic” under Louis the Great’.6 But passion lay under the surface. ‘The Roman church is nothing but a fury and a whore.’ While Bayle stirred men to think at large about reason and authority, in tune with Locke and his empirical school of philosophy,7 Jurieu, the partisan and activist, was uncompromising on the issue of church authority and bitterly opposed the liberals within his church. Among his activities he organised a spy ring to operate in France and smugglers to bring clandestine literature to the faithful: censorship was one area where the government plainly failed. The widespread distribution of pamphlets from abroad helped to maintain morale and strengthen the will to resist. True to the tradition founded by his grandfather Pierre du Moulin, Jurieu’s contribution in the prophetic vein was incendiary and to the authorities treasonous, inciting revolt through the prophecy that the reign of Anti-­ christ was soon to end, the true church would conquer and the exiled Huguenots return to France. The date of the forecast tended to change but the expectation of the event sustained morale.8 Jurieu’s vision of apocalypse further excited men and women prepared to resist to the point of martyrdom. A school of prophecy was established in a glassworks in the Dauphiné. With so much to sustain them Huguenots in that province, ever suspect at Versailles, where the numbers had remained stable up to the Revocation, now proved exceptionally troublesome to the authorities. They hung on, went to ground, attended illegal gatherings or went through a formal process of conversion, often risibly false; nevertheless, they were reviled for it by sterner colleagues. Under duress they were influenced by ‘prophesyings’; in particular by the appearance of child prophets numerous enough to give credence to

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official reports that they had been schooled. But there were sufficient witnesses and examinations to suggest a true gift of the spirit. One of a number, Isabeau Vincent, her father converti, her mother dead, was baptised Catholic. At sixteen she returned to the fold, began to have visions, heard voices and fell into trances. In February 1688 she started to cry out in her sleep. On repeated occasions, with Huguenots in the room she sang, preached and prayed, while asleep, in words that she could not have known. The Ten Commandments in rhyme might be followed by a psalm, then by fluent preaching on themes typically of repentance before the prospect of eternal life to follow persecution. She awoke refreshed, without memory of the experience. She was imprisoned but had done enough to start a movement. In her home village over sixty people, many younger than her, received the Spirit. Isabeau’s room became a temple where the faithful could hear, then go out to spread the Word. ‘They can be seen as symbolic figures for the complex anxieties of the Desert, for the spiritual conflict of the nouveaux convertis, for the wrenched relations between the faithful and the apostate.’9 For followers, however, there was reality. From the sites of their ruined temples marvels were reported – angelic choirs, voices in the wind, sad songs – but also, in more militant strain, tambourines beating to the rhythm of marching soldiers, trumpets calling the charge. Endurance, transformation, a sense of deliverance from earthly bonds: yet there were real bonds and the Dauphinois suffered greatly. On occasion royal troops fired indiscriminately on worshippers By 1701 there were 350 in prison, 40 in the galleys. By then they appeared to be crushed but could take wry satisfaction in reports of Catholic remorse in high places. They held on to the idea that their trials were but a prelude to a spiritual revolution, a new expression of faith, the Church of the Desert as they termed it in metaphorical allusion to the sufferings of the Israelites in exile. The name would stay but the church would take different shape from that they could envisage. They had first been told to look to 1689 for the ‘fall of the Beast’ and had been encouraged by that of James II, the accession of William to the English throne and the formation of the League of Augsburg. The year 1697 then came to be designated as the great year of delivery from the rule of Antichrist. Meanwhile the fermes had been sustained by the Pastorales, and by a military stalemate followed by enough success for William to show that Louis was not invincible.10 They trusted to the League but received a lesson in realpolitik. Hopes were dashed when peace terms included no guarantee of Huguenots’ rights, let alone provision for their return.11 They saw, at least in the south, no relaxation of the crown’s policies on the twin fronts of coercion and mission. The focus of conflict, with a new surge of spiritual excitement and ‘prophesyings’ by those confident illuminés or inspirés, now shifted to Languedoc where Bâville was confronted by strong communities in remote, hilly country

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fissured by deep valleys and densely forested. ‘The king of Languedoc’ had by now a formidable reputation. ‘Thorough’: the term might have been coined for him.12 He had been reluctant to engage but now, faced with the spread of ‘prophesying’, he was committed to press on. He knew the mind of the king. The overall picture was by now uneven. For most of the country, while it was unsatisfactory, even galling, that pockets survived and remained defiant, ministers had to accept that Huguenotism posed no general threat. Yet the south was troubling, with the possibility that rebels could provide a second front or base for an allied invasion, and there was still uncertainty at the heart of government. For Louis it was a matter of amour propre. He would rather lose, than seem to tolerate, his recalcitrant subjects. In one ministerial view ‘the king will never renew the Edict of Nantes even if the enemy are at the Loire’.13 Louis was supported by the dévôts at court and by Burgundy, his serious-­minded elder grandson, protégé of Fénelon and heir, after the dauphin, to the throne.14 In his view, ‘the recall of the Huguenots now would offer to the whole of Europe a pitiful inconstancy of principle.’15 With time and a new generation brought up as Catholic, with Huguenots bereft of temples and pastors, isolated, leaderless, would not the cult wither to the point of invisibility, or at least insignificance? It was bound to be hard for Catholic leaders to think beyond the institution, the formal framework of church, to envisage lay preachers filling the vacuum. Yet that was what they were doing, creating the Church of the Desert. Confronted by this new phenomenon, at the instigation of Chancellor Pontchartrain and Cardinal Noailles, the council opened an inquest into the experience and process: before and after Fontainebleau. In January 1699 secret injunctions were given to intendants and clergy to eschew all violent methods. But the injunctions were too late and now irrelevant for Bâville and the troops, fiercely mopping up after the first serious rising in the Cévennes. On one occasion a manhunt ended with over a hundred killed as troops surprised a ‘Desert’ meeting at prayer. Yet even after the Peace of Ryswick the faithful could see that they had benefited from the war, into which royal troops had been drawn from the provinces and royal funds for ‘compensation’ had dried up. Did salvation now lie in their own hands? The wild country of the Cévennes, with its remote settlements and mule tracks leading up to the mountains known only to local folk, was ideal resistance country, a haven for Huguenots and a secure base for guerrilla warfare. Cévenols were not for conversion; only a few for emigration. Curés were awkwardly placed but could not ‘lose the habit of browbeating their parishes’. They, Bâville saw, were part of his problem. In the sequence of oppression, defiance and retaliation any single act of provocation could lead to war. Abbé François de Chayla was prominent among Bâville’s agents, building roads into the mountains to facilitate access and control of the Huguenot villages.

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Control had already passed beyond the stage when patrols and occasional raids could maintain a kind of peace. Illuminés now appeared. As Jurieu noted, and with sympathy, some Huguenots, women among them and some remarkable girls, as before in the Dauphiné, displayed the charismatic gifts, visions, voices and ecstatic states that have been marks of extreme spiritual enthusiasm and ‘holy war’ since the first days of the church.16 In a sense out of body, in the absence of a controlling self-­consciousness, these young people prophesied in the manner of those they read or heard of in the Bible. A recurring theme was the ruin of Babylon and the restoration of Jerusalem. More alarming to the authorities, in a bizarre reworking of the Joan of Arc story, several now claimed to advise, even direct the insurgents’ tactics. One such, la Grande Marie, attached herself to Jean Cavalier. At the same time pastors were returning to lead their flocks, not in temples but in covert gatherings advertised by word of mouth. One of them, Claude Brousson, was hunted down. Staunch in his trial for treason,17 he was condemned, like others in similar case, to be broken on the wheel. Most hideous of deaths, it was intended for public spectacle and warning. In early 1702 Chayla had hanged a young prophetess who, among other things, had predicted his early death. With tempers boiling he took a risk when he arrested ten adolescents, including two daughters of a local noble and a reluctant converti, bound for the convent of Meude to ensure their Catholic education. A mob broke into Chayla’s château of Pont-­de-­Montvert, and rescued the prisoners. After he had spurned their offer to spare him if he converted, they killed him, then went on to kill two curés, castrate a schoolmaster who kept a mistress, and burn the château of a nobleman who had allegedly thrown young inspirés into his pigsty to stop them prophesying.18 Convinced that their acts are authorised by a higher power, men like the early leader, the woolcomber Abraham Mazel, can feel released from the normal constraints. Tight bonds of fellowship under duress and the exaltation of their gatherings for clandestine worship confirmed their Calvinist understanding of justification in the eye of God and blurred the lines that limited, though unreliably, the conduct of open warfare. Given long-­standing grievances, tempers running high on both sides and rumour at work, the violence could have been predicted. Within days there was general and open defiance and resort to arms, leading to the civil war. It would last for nearly three years and would prove a damaging distraction from the main French operations in the War of the Spanish Succession from which Huguenots again had high hopes.19 Wearing for recognition the long white smocks that they pulled over their clothes and that gave them their name, and as if to proclaim to the world that theirs was a holy war, in the spirit they imbibed from the chronicles of Israel and the Psalms of David, the Camisards were confident in their mission to

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purge and purify. As revenge for the destruction of their temples, they burned down 200 churches. Their ‘generals’ wrote to Bâville from Le Camp de l’Éternel. They called only for the restoration of their religious liberties but in terms sufficiently prophetic to convince the intendant that he faced no ordinary insurrection. ‘The father of mercy . . . has spread his spirit upon his manservants and maidservants, as he promised us by the mouth of his prophet Joel, in order to teach us to return to the bosom of his Church, which we had abandoned out of the fear of men.’20 Bâville may have wondered what the spirit could achieve against such odds. At most the Camisards had a force of around 2,000 men and women; at the height of the war the royal army outnumbered the rebels by ten to one. At first that availed little against rebels who believed that they were guided to their camps at night by celestial lights, protected from ambush by guardian angels and, in more prosaic fashion, knew the mountains, caves and tracks well enough to thwart attack. Theirs was resistance country par excellence (as it would prove to be in the German occupation), resistance spirit to match. Hardy and frugal, able to subsist largely on a diet of chestnuts, they trusted in the Lord to provide; also in the prospect of foreign aid when contacted by an agent from England. But Admiral Shovel was too prudent to risk more than two ships from his fleet and they received neither men nor supplies. Led by young men, supported by some of their parents’ generation who were ashamed of their ‘conversion’, counselled by prophets, along with mere children, the Camisards won some small victories that led for a time to control of the plains of Bas Languedoc and sent shock waves to Versailles. Heroism and ardent faith redeemed aspects of an untidy and vicious war, a typical operation when guerrillas, operating on familiar terrain, fight regular soldiers who are frustrated by their inability to get to grips. Old scores were settled, nouveaux convertis renounced their vows and three commanders in succession sought to end the affair and relieve the king of an embarrassing burden. Acting on orders from Versailles Marshal Catinat, in 1703, ordered the burning of 400 villages. It was brutally effective, the turning point of the war, as the Camisards recognised that nothing would deflect the king, that they could not hold out for ever. Marshal Villars, in 1704, impatient to get back to the main war,21 preferred the diplomatic alternative and negotiated a settlement with Jean Cavalier. He had arrived days after the Camisard leader had incurred a costly defeat and found him ready to negotiate. Cavalier was in his twenties, a hero to many Camisards, a man humbly born but destined to lead. His self-­ confident bearing and good manners impressed Villars, who saw him as a man with whom to do business. Cavalier had to accept the inevitable for his Camisards could not match indefinitely the resources of the crown. His fellow general, the legendary Rolland, was not so fortunate. Trusting in foreign

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support to uphold resistance he was hunted down and killed. By order of Bâville his corpse was dragged by oxen through the streets of Uzès to the pyre. In this merciless struggle both sides understood the power of example. Villars stretched a point to gain Cavalier’s submission and he secured a fair bargain for himself and his followers: a pardon tied to the offer to lead and raise troops for royal service. The deal did not survive the cold reception he received at Versailles and he went off to raise a regiment from Huguenot refugees in Holland. In 1707, at the battle of Almanza, under their fellow Huguenot Ruvigny (now earl of Galway), they recognised the opposing regiment as old opponents in the Cévennes. Casting aside their fusils, drawing bayonets, they fought hand to hand with rare ferocity. For Voltaire the episode showed ‘what madness there is in civil wars and how religion adds to this fury’.22 Cavalier had told Voltaire that it had been his personal prophetess, la Grande Marie, who had given him the mastery over his men. He had lost her – with perhaps his faith in that direction. Severely wounded, Cavalier went to recuperate in Amsterdam where he was persuaded to denounce as impostors several of the prophets now established in London. After Cavalier’s departure resistance in the Cévennes gradually petered out. Elie Marion and fellow prophets sought direction from the Spirit. They could not abandon a fight that was divinely inspired without the kind of specific divine edict that had hitherto guided their actions. In the end they accepted silence as a directive in itself. Marion left for good; Abraham Mazel kept up sporadic guerrilla operations but to little effect. The prophets found more congenial work and company in London, now the epicentre of millennial speculation and war against Antichrist.23 In mundane terms, continuing military and financial support for the Grand Alliance, and successive victories – to which Huguenots made an important contribution – held out promise for the eventual return of Huguenots under tolerable conditions. It was not to be. Royal policies had succeeded in destroying institutional, clerical Protestantism in France. They had destroyed much else. In the remnant of believers,24 there was no longer that respect for authority, embodied in the king, that had been so noteworthy; nor any lingering desire for a rapprochemont with Rome. The hypocritical gestures that sufficed apparently for ‘the converted’ dismayed those Huguenots who had been attracted by the devotional and pastoral side of the church but were wary of the miraculous elements in its teaching. What did Catholic veneration for the Real Presence amount to if the sacraments could be treated as a civil test?25 So Huguenots regained that element of protest, so strong in Calvinism’s early militant phase, against the mechanical and formal aspects of ritual that de Sales, Bérulle and the Jansenists had done so much to reduce. They had escaped from the comfort of a theology of compromise. Long ago they had learned to be self-­sufficient. Now in the

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scattered households and clandestine gatherings of ‘the desert’ they were back in the heroic age; the very act of being apart and reckoning the social cost led them all the more to value such worship as they could manage and its message of salvation.26 A sect grounded in assurance of personal salvation, drawing its vitality and code of conduct from the Bible, could not be blotted out by the destruction of buildings or the removal of pastors. It was in a mood of resignation, in March 1715, that the crown made a face-­ saving and almost meaningless gesture of recognition: ‘the Huguenots’ long stay in France is sufficient proof that they have embraced the Catholic faith, without which they would neither have been suffered nor tolerated’. It reminds us of the phrase of Labrousse: ‘the fiasco of the Revocation.’ It was a limp formula and few can have been deceived. In any case most Catholics would have lost interest since Huguenots made little impact on their lives. Nor would many have known that Antoine Court, on 21 August 1715, presided over a stealthily assembled provincial synod. Nor is it likely that the king would have been informed of this initiative. Four days later he woke to the sound of drums and oboes saluting the feast of St Louis and asked for the viaticum. He died on 30 September, three weeks short of the thirty years that had passed since the Edict of Fontainebleau. It was a different world and one being shaped, in different ways, by Protestants of the Refuge. Suffice it that they, Frenchmen but no longer his subjects, like the many more remaining in France, would contrive to bear with pride the name of Huguenot.

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c h a p t e r t h i rt y - ­s e v e n

s

Sous La Croix Register (Marie Durand)

T

he witness of the Huguenots who stayed, under cover of some kind, ranged from household worship, beneath the outward conformity that was bound to be the recourse of the majority, to the clandestine open air gatherings that still attracted some in the more remote regions. It was now a scattered church for which the term Désert, with its biblical image, was appropriate and a source of pride. In a body now compelled to find new ways of worshipping and maintaining community there was also a visible, if temporary change in the balance of authority. Typically, though specially among the larger numbers in the south, along with some seigneurs, backwoodsmen counting for little outside their neighbourhood, it was rural artisans and lesser folk, more used to roughing it than their superiors, more radical in temper, who predominated in early assemblies. Few among the women could match the heroic example of Anne Montjoye who went about Périgord for two years, leading services in woodland clearings, caves and private houses, before she was seized by the authorities, in 1688, and promptly hanged. But women were prominent in preserving family traditions. In Poitou, where the defections had appeared to be so numerous, assemblies might be led by returning ministers or again by simpler souls, prêcheur or prêcheuse. They also baptised and even administered the cène. Those women caught attending or found dissenting in some other way were commonly sent to a convent for ‘re-­education’: the word may suggest the practice of a modern tyranny but the nuns would have seen it as means to save a soul. It was otherwise with imprisonment, the fate of some brave leaders, though to the judge or intendant the case would be simple enough: the law was broken, an example must be set. A number were incarcerated in the Tour de Constance at Aigues-­Mortes. Among them was Marie

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Durand, born in 1715, sent there at fifteen, confined for thirty-eight years. She was then released; others died there. Marie left her mark carved on the prison wall and on the conscience of posterity: the single defiant word register. In its patois the northerner would read résister. Women at the convent of Saint Clare at Montauban carved similar words and phrases into the attic beams. Such women, with the galley slaves, represent the noble, sacrificial element in the Désert: impossible to weigh the effect, but right to keep in mind the power of prayer and the inspiration of lives modelled on the trial and sacrifice of Christ. Along with the example of the leavers, the French experience of Huguenots in the century before the Revolution, and restoration to full citizenship, strengthened their self-­perception: as victims, but true to tradition; keeping faith, right to be proud. For daily lives much would continue to depend on the attitude of the local authorities, intendants and law courts, not least the local curé. Penalties remained fearful and were renewed: an edict of 1724 forbade ‘heretical religious associations’ threatened perpetual galley service for men, prison for women. Punitive action was, however, increasingly patchy, depending on the attitude of local authorities and most common in the south. In 1749 the parlement of Bordeaux ordered 46 Huguenots to separate for having been married by Protestant rites. So their children were illegitimate, incapable of receiving property. In May 1751 a meeting in the Cévennes was fired on and dispersed by royal troops. In March 1752 a preacher was hanged at Montpellier. In the same year there was a small jacquerie and a new wave of emigration. There was always the temptation to give up, particularly in the small isolated communities left in northern towns. There were subtle pressures as family needs and social aspiration contended with the claim of faith. To be an open, practising Catholic freed the way to full membership of the community, access to its societies, with their reassuring rites and customs; with the possibility of office, or simply the recognition by neighbours that meant so much in city life. The more affluent the family the more property was likely to be an issue. To maintain family ties and to ensure the legal transmission of property there needed to be – some surely wanted it – a Catholic marriage and baptism. At the end to heed conscience, refuse the last sacraments, confession, the host, extreme unction, might be to resist family persuasion at the most difficult time. The family had more to suffer if the deceased had once made a false conversion: the body of a relaps could be dragged through the streets before being pitched on to the town rubbish dump. Shameful in appearance and ignominious, like the last journey of such a respected figure as conseilleur Paul Chenevix of Metz, the performance might please the crowd yet be of little account to the Huguenot, even an occasion for pride. Had not the deceased stayed faithful to the core belief that the outward ceremony mattered less than the reality of burial?1

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However strong the power of example, the emotional attachment, and the theology of salvation that spoke to Huguenots from the pages of the Bible, it is surely less remarkable that some, for whatever reason, decided to become fully Catholic than that most did not; that the numbers overall remained stable.2 That even small Huguenot communities could feel that they still belonged to a body beyond their town walls was the extraordinary achievement of Antoine Court in recreating the semblance of the system that had formerly bound the churches together. When Court presided over the first ‘synod’ of the Desert he was twenty, but already a seasoned veteran of protest and resistance. He had attended prophetic assemblies and served as a guard for the prophetess Claire. Armed resistance he now saw to be futile, prophetic leadership misleading, if not miscreant. His object and achievement was to restore a federate structure to the clandestine churches. Pastors were already trickling back; aspiring recruits to ministry were sent to train, usually in Switzerland, before being assigned to communities, with specific duties. Women had to step back from the ground they had gained, as preaching and prophesying were repudiated. The scale was small but the system was complete and it reached beyond the areas where Huguenots had been relatively numerous. The aim was clear: orthodox Calvinism and traditional structure. The first national synod for seventy years met in Vivarais in 1726. In 1727 Court established a seminary at Lausanne. Two years later he retired there but maintained control through correspondence. Recalling Beza in equally challenging but more hopeful circumstances, he saw it as his role to sustain morale and deepen faith. It is possible to see in the church of the Desert, a poor replica of the church of happier times, defiant indeed but furtive in spirit, limited in opportunity. It was indeed impoverished by the loss of the temple, with open worship, much of a minister’s teaching, pastoral care, consistory discipline and the good works that validated Calvin’s idea of a true church. What would the master have thought of the kind of Huguenot community emerging, mainly in cities and sea ports, controlled by the well-­to-­do, typically business men who stood well with the local authorities, benefiting from, perhaps sharing, enlightened views about toleration. Were they too comfortable, too compromising, too cautious? That may be for their descendants, and those of the Refuge, to debate. There remains a strong case, grounded in the fact of survival, for praising the witness, the staying power of the Huguenots of the Desert. They had to wait till 1787 and the restoration of valued rights,3 to come out into the open. Then they could contribute, as indeed they have, in public service, in their ‘inner republicanism’, and in patterns of behaviour consistent with their training and tradition.4 Meanwhile survival was the firm intention, morale stiffened by the sense of being still a chosen people, still under covenant, to find ways and means to

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practise the true faith. Nor should one discount the enduring power of tradition, recalled in the calendars,5 no doubt carefully hidden, all the more valuable for their marking of significant events, recording times heroic as well as easeful. For the present there was the comfort of domestic piety, all that was sacred in the pages of the family Bible, the poetry of their beloved psalms. By the standard of what had gone before such a church life might appear muted, incomplete. It should not for that reason be devalued. As the spirit of enlightenment spread abroad life did gradually become more comfortable for the Huguenots of the Desert. If bourgeois leaders had useful connections through commerce, or if government thought them worth protecting, they could be more or less open in their faith. They were alarmed at any thought of armed resistance and avoided doing anything that might be regarded as provocative and might jeopardise their security. In this increasingly comfortable scene, the more shocking instances of persecution stand out. Huguenots continued to toil in the galleys. The conditions so disgusted one royal chaplain that he became a convert to Protestantism and campaigner for reform. Those who attended the kind of open air services, mainly in the wilder south, that could still attract large numbers, took their life in their hands. To government they were ‘Fanatics’, resisters, potentially dangerous: they could be shot, women and children among them. As for the early Christians of the Roman catacombs, caution and discretion were the necessary condition for the persisting life of the church of the Desert. So were conviction and courage. If they had not been sure that they were right to hold on to their beliefs, that their church, attenuated as it had become, was a true church; if they had not had the will and courage to be, even the most privileged of them, a people apart, then our story would indeed have ended on a note of regret. Rather, I suggest that the reader will find impressive, even inspiring, the record of these men and women of faith. From the elation of early days, followed by the stern tests of persecution and civil war; to the conditional rights enjoyed under the regime of the Edict; to the renewal of persecution and its shocking climax; to the creation of the church of the Desert, the mindset is constant. Huguenots were not afraid to be strangers in their own country.6 Faith was all.

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Afterword: Strangers and Citizens

s

I

n each category mentioned the names of Gribelin, Basire, de Vaux, Portal, Vaillant, Marot, Bonneau, Monlong, Harache, Motteux, Seigneuret, Leman, Ogier, Misaubin, Papin, Desaguliers, Dollond, de Moivre, Maty, Rapin, Houblon, Bouverie and Castaing may be chosen to represent a range of individual or family experiences. They offer us a retrospective, as it were camera shots of individuals in a society that has been described so far in more general terms. They are not necessarily the most famous or talented of Huguenots but they tended to establish dynasties. They convey together the value, material and cultural, that accrued to the country that would be for two decades, with Holland, the main protagonist in war against France. They came from all over France and they had in common a refugee’s experience or memory. They reproduced in the host country, like their compatriots elsewhere, the Huguenot beliefs and way of worship for which they had abandoned their homes. Simon Gribelin, maker of exquisite ornamental snuffboxes was the son of Jacob, engraver of Blois. His grandfather had been watchmaker to Louis XIII. The engraver Isaac Basire’s father had come from Rouen; his elder son was to be the master of William Blake. Gerard de Vaux, paper-­maker, came from Castres in Languedoc. He took on Henri Portal as an apprentice. The white paper for which James II had granted a patent had formerly been imported. Portals still produce the banknotes for which Henri first got the order in 1724. Paul Vaillant, goldsmith was one of two sons of François, refugee from Saumur. Daniel Marot, jeweller, responsible for introducing the Louis Quatorze style to England, came to England from first refuge in Holland. Jacob Bonneau, wood-­ turner was the son of Pierre who escaped to Jersey in 1689, there renouncing the Catholicism that he had first adopted in order to survive. Pierre Monlong, Angevin, gun-­maker, had been from 1664 ‘Arquebusier de la Maison du Roi’. In 1684 he was in England with his wife and two children. Granted denization in 1688 he was appointed Gentleman Armourer to William III. The pair of

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pistols he made for him have been called the finest engraved pistols ever produced. The name of Pierre Harache, Rouennais, silversmith, is mentioned in denization papers in 1682 as ‘lately come from France for to avoid persecution and live quietly’. Pierre Motteux came to England from Rouen in 1685 to manage a shop specialising in ‘China and Japan Wares, Teas and Fans’. From 1691 he edited the Gentleman’s Journal which preceded The Spectator by nearly twenty years. Stephen Seigneuret, silk merchant from Lyons, brought with him the secret of imparting to lustring the gloss valued in black silk. He is a prime example of the immigrant tycoon, bringing flint to steel in the exchange of ideas with foreign systems and people; the advance of capitalism was boosted by those with special aptitudes and incentive to money-­making. Methods might be unconventional. He used his expertise, in partnership with René Baudouin, to run a smuggling ring, for which he was fined. Out of his considerable wealth he subscribed largely to the Bank of England and the East India Company. He raised funds for refugees and sent money secretly to Huguenot galley slaves. The family of Jacques Leman, noted for his designs for woven silk, had gone first to Amsterdam, then to Canterbury, another common passage. The Ogier family, stemming from Pierre, of Chassais-­l’Église in Bas Poitou, arriving in successive generations, entered almost every branch of the silk industry. Their story emphasises the importance of connections in the Huguenot world. They were directly linked with twenty-­five other Huguenot families, Courtauld among them and through these with many other master weavers and throwsters. Jean Misaubin, a prominent physician, from the Dordogne, graduated at Cahors university in 1687. At that point he must have been outwardly Catholic but he is recorded, in 1701, with his father, reaffirming his Protestantism in the Threadneedle Street church. Among scientists Denis Papin, originally from Blois, assistant to Robert Boyle, published an account of a ‘Digester’ or pressure cooker with his own vital invention, a safety valve. He is better known for his design for the first steam engine with a piston and his experiments with an air pump. Jean Desaguliers was born in La Rochelle in 1683 and brought to England by his father, minister at the temple, after its destruction. He played a vital part in the dissemination of the ideas of experimental science, Newtonian physics and mechanics. He invented the planetarium and designed the first air conditioning system for the House of Commons. Jean Dollond, whose family fled Normandy at the Revocation, was originally a weaver but turned to experiments in optics. His experiments on lenses were to revolutionise the construction of optical instruments. But out of this remarkable gallery of scientists the palm may go to Abraham de Moivre who, at eighteen, in 1685, left his home in Vitry, Champagne, to pursue his interest in mathematics. Friend of Newton and Halley, with the latter he founded the science of life-­contingencies, still valid for the actuarial

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profession. ‘In the long list of men ennobled by genius, virtue and misfortune who have found asylum in England, it would be difficult to name one who has conferred more honour on his country.’1 The cultural legacy can be further observed in the record of Jacques Maty, eighteenth-­century librarian, descended from a family of ministers who had left the Dauphiné, first for Utrecht. In 1740 he came to England where he engaged in 1750 to produce single-­handed the monthly Journal Britannique, introducing to French readers the best of English literature.2 An equally valuable service was rendered by Paul Rapin de Thoyras. Born at Castres, son of an advocate who practised in the chambre de mi-­parties there, his course was very different from that of his uncle Paul Pellisson, convert and Louis XIV’s historiographer. He served in the French contingent of William III’s army in Ireland and was wounded before settling to writing the six volumes of his French history of England (1723–25).3 The Houblon family had achieved a leading position in trade and finance by the time that Sir John Houblon, grandson of the original refugee from Lille, became Governor of the Bank of England in 1695. Another Lilleois, Laurens de Bouveries, master silk weaver, had come to England defying his aristocratic Catholic family in 1568. Wealth and enterprise secured recognition and title. The grandson Edward was knighted by James II. A great-­grandson, Jacob, was elevated to the peerage as Viscount Folkestone. Later with the earldom of Radnor, and the family name altered to Bouverie, they came to enjoy senior status among Huguenot families and the virtually hereditary governorship of the Huguenot Hospital. Jean Castaing was sufficiently well established after flight in 1685 to found, in 1697, the twice-­weekly list of market prices in government loans which still appears, in extended form. The third oldest continuously published newspaper in the world, it contributed much to development of the stock market and the wider economy. The Huguenot Hospital’s founder, with an endowment of £1,000, Jacques de Gastigny was a noble whose military service after the Revocation reminds us of the crucial part played by Huguenot officers and rankers, 12,000 altogether, exceptional in their experience and commitment, in the armies of William and Marlborough. Even those figures do not convey the loss overall to the French army or to the war strategy of Versailles. It is hard to see, for instance, how James II could have been defeated in Ireland, in a finely balanced struggle, without the stiffening of the English army by Huguenot regiments and the generalship of Schomberg. Vauban’s estimate of Huguenots serving in the French army before the 1680s was around 20,000, of whom more than 500 were officers. It had become the chosen career for Huguenots, deprived of most others. One notable civilian career broadens the picture. Marlborough’s Secretary, Adam Cardonnel, from a Huguenot paper-­making family long

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established in Southampton, was an invaluable aide and confidant on all his campaigns. With their deep sense of estrangement from Catholic France Huguenots brought with them their tradition of care for their own. The charter for La Providence was granted in 1718. In its Islington site, by 1760, it sheltered 234 poor, for whom France can have been but a tradition and a tale told.

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Glossary

s The reader may find useful the following list of terms not explained in the text or notes, requiring precise definition or having a special sense. Abbé. Abbot; also general designation of priest. Aumône-­générale. Central urban agency for distribution, management of charity. Bailli. Head of royal administrative district, bailliage. Ban. Traditional summons to muster nobles for military service. Barreau. (in judicial sense) Bar. Bon français. Term used in ideological context denoting patriot. Bourgeoisie. Non-­noble members of upper échelons, (cp. habitants, possessing privileges). Brevet. Warrant, commission. Chambre des comptes. Sovereign court: registers royal marriages, peace treaties, etc. Chambres mi-­parties (also chambres de l’Édit). Courts attached to parlement, having an equal number of Catholic and Protestant judges for cases between parties. Châtelet. Containing two courts, Grand and Petit, of the royal prévôte in Paris. Co-­adjuteur. Ecclesiastical title denoting assistant to bishop. Commissaire départi. Official given special commission; so term for intendants. Confession of Augsburg. Definitive statement of Lutheran belief (1630). Conseil en haut. Evolved from original conseil d’état: from 1661 small executive council. Contrôleur-­général. Financial officer: supervisory powers greatly enlarged under Colbert Créature. Term for person (not derogatory) in dependent, recognised relation to patron.

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G lossary

393

Curé. Parish priest. Disette. Between local shortages and famine: a time of scarcity and hunger. Duc et pair. Nobleman of highest rank below princes of the blood. Écuyer. Title, often usurped, at the lowest and broadest level of the order of nobility. Élection. Court in fiscal area, under élu, for apportioning taille on personal income. Émeute. A serious riot or uprising, typically violent; short of full-­scale revolt. États-­généraux. Occasional national assemblies, representatives of three orders États. Faubourg. A suburb, outlying part of town, like Faubourg St Antoine. Gabelle (s). Salt taxes levied on basis varying regionally: caused much smuggling. Généralité. Major administrative area (23 in 1643); seat of an intendance. Gouvernement. A royal provincial governorship. Grands, les. Collective, informal name for highest nobles. Hobereau. Poor country écuyer: in court parlance uncouth; no doubt sometimes Huguenot. Hôtel de ville. Town hall; centre of government In commendam. Practice of reserving church office for a client or relation. Intendant. Royal officer commissioned to oversee finance, and administration in géneralité. Laboureur. A substantial peasant farmer. Lettre de cachet. Royal letter, signed by secrétaire d’état, with order relating to individual. Lieutenant du roi. Deputy of provincial governor. Lieutenant-­général du royaume. Royal appointment conferring command of the kingdom. Lit de justice. Special session enabling king, attending parlement, to enforce registration of edicts. Livre. Money of account comprising twenty sous, each sol containing twenty deniers. Maître des requêtes. A royal judge attached to the Parlement’s the conseil du roi. Manant. Villager: collective term for peasantry below level of laboureur. Menu peuple. Common people, often used in derogatory sense. Métayage. A farm held on system of share-cropping by métayers. Ministre. Secrétaire du roi or other royal officer with conciliar, executive responsibilities. Noblesse d’épée. Nobles, not necessarily ancien, privileged supposedly by military service.

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G lossary

Noblesse de robe. Title derived from office in higher levels of judiciary or administration. Notables: meeting convoked by crown of prominent Frenchmen in church and state. Office. Permanent government post; generally for sale or inherited (see paulette below). Parlement (of Paris). Sovereign, final court of appeal with wide powers of police. Parlements in provinces: in 1643 nine: Toulouse, Bordeaux, Grenoble, Dijon, Rouen, Aix, Rennes, Pau and Metz. Besançon and Douai were added during Louis XIV’s reign. Paulette. Form of premium enabling officier to transmit office in return for annual payment. Pays. An area, often small, having its own identity: e.g. pays de Caux. Pays d’états, d’élection. Respectively, provinces paying taille on property or income. Place de surêté: fortified Protestant town allowed the right to garrison. Politique. Moderate in religion, often putting political concerns before religious allegiance. Premier Président. Presides over plenary meeting of Parlement. Nominated by king. Prévôt des marchands. Principal official of the municipality of Paris; like a mayor. Quartier. District within town. In Paris sixteen. Hence Seize, revolutionary council. Régale. Royal right of disposing of revenues of vacant bishoprics. Rentes. Government bonds issued on security of municipal revenues Rentier. One who lives on (or partly on) interest on rentes. Robe (see Noblesse de) gown conveying legal profession. Robin. Lawyer, man of the robe. Pejorative, ‘mere commoner’ when used by noble. Roturier. Of the common people. Salic Law. The ‘fundamental law’ excluding women from succession to the crown Sécretaire d’État. Evolving from royal secretarial role to conciliar, ministerial. Seigneurie. Basic economic, juridical unit in most of rural France: service to seigneur was a complex of rights, services and dues. He had rights of justice subject to appeal. Surintendant des finances. Heads financial administration: from 1661, under contrôleur-­géneral.

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Taille. Main direct tax, levied on income, personelle, or property, réelle (see above). Traitant. Financier who makes a traité with the crown usually to raise taxes or sell offices. Tridentine. Describing Catholic principles and reforms promoted by the Council of Trent.

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Notes

s 1 The Native Land: People and Institutions   1. La grand monarchie de France (1541 edn) vol. 1, ch. 8. The experienced jurist writes from the relative security of the reign of Francis I.   2. These examples come from Fernand Braudel, The Identity of France, vol. 1 (1986; English trans. London, 1988), valuable for its maps, charts, and Braudel’s special expertise as geographer turned historian. The population figure for any given date must be treated as proximate since calculation is an uncertain science, dependent on patchy local records, ecclesiastical and fiscal, and on government reports of which the most reliable, that of Vauban, had to wait till the end of the next century. The population had largely recovered from the ravages of war and disease to the pre-­Black Death level of around 15 million and was still rising, but would soon reach a ceiling by 1600, at around 17 million. It could fall in times of extreme dearth by a million or more and take a decade to recover.   3. Sanche de Gramont, Les Français (Paris, 1970) p. 454.   4. The estimate of an intendant in 1706 quoted by William Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc (Cambridge, 1985) p. 99. By then roads had been improved and were safer. Two centuries earlier and travelling light, it might have been prudent to allow a fortnight. The distance from court to Languedoc is central to Beik’s thesis: it will be significant in the story of the Huguenots.   5. Quoted by Colette Beaune, The Birth of an Ideology: Myths and Symbols of Nation in Late Mediaeval France, trans. Susan Ross Huston (Berkeley, 1991) p. 296.   6. The grain yield declined from the sixteenth century’s 6.8: 1 to the end of the seventeenth century’s 5.8. It reflects the imbalance between the arable and the marginal waste and grazing land to sustain animals and provide manure.   7. Braudel, Identity of France p. 49.   8. Ibid., and quoting Gaussen.   9. A sample of marriage certificates studied by Maggiolo (c. 1877) from the years 1686–90 show that 71% of the male population and 86% of the women were illiterate. A hundred years before the figures would have been higher. Nearly all peasants were functionally illiterate. It put them at crucial disadvantage in dealing with the agents of crown or seigneur. 10. For this and all other French institutions see Glossary, p. 392. 11. However, the nobility benefited from the privilege of droit d’ainesse, the right of the eldest son to two-­thirds of the estate. 12. With at least some, if not all of the following selection, and other customary rights but typically over mill, winepress or oven, taxes on transfers of land and other transactions,

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levies on crops, monopolies of hunting, fishing and river use, the corvée – (obligatory labour), the average peasant might see 15–20% of his income go to his seigneur – before tithe and royal taxes. Whatever they observed in other ways, English travellers all commented on what they saw as exploitation. One factor was the tendency of new seigneurs, landowners, who had a background in law or finance, to treat an estate as a business enterprise. In parts of the south, where there were more substantial Huguenot proprietors, there persisted allodial tenures, free of feudal dues. In the seventeenth century métayage, a share-­cropping system, became widespread. As evidenced in minutely detailed accounts, the emphasis was on immediate payment: neither side had the incentive to invest in improvements. First joined in personal union by the marriage of Charles VIII to Duchess Anne of Brittany in 1491; then after Anne’s death, in 1514, by her daughter’s marriage to the future king Francis I. It was finally incorporated into the kingdom in 1532. Beik, Absolutism and Society, p. 121. Beik’s focus is on Languedoc. His influential study has led to a generally accepted view of royal government as being forced to respond to, and negotiate with, the powerful interests in the province. Complementary to and extending Beik’s argument is Sharon Kettering, Patrons, Brokers and Clients in Seventeenth-Century France (Oxford, 1986). See also p. 277. For tailles, personal or on property, and gabelle (salt tax), and for French terms and institutions, see Glossary. See p. 229. See for example p. 211. For a comprehensive treatment of the subject see Nancy Lyman Roelker, One King, One Faith: The Parlement of Paris and the Religious Reforms of the Sixteenth Century (Berkeley, Calif., 1996). See p. 224. Toulouse, Dijon, Bordeaux, Aix and Grenoble. In 1515 Normandy’s high court was elevated to the status of parlement. That of Rennes served for Brittany. Lyons housed another, created for the principality of Dombes, annexed in 1523; Chambéry’s lasted only until 1559 – as long as the French occupation of Savoy. Mainly in the vulnerable border provinces. Francis I, increasingly confident, installed them in Anjou, the Bourbonnais and Auvergne, and La Rochelle and Poitou. When absent, at court or on other duties, the governor’s powers were often exercised by proxy. His titles usually included that of lieutenant-­général, but another such might be appointed in times of emergency, with powers over several provinces. For example, in 1543, to coordinate defence, Henri d’Albret was commissioned lieutenant-­général for Guienne, Languedoc, Poitou and Provence. Testament Politique, ed. Louis André (Paris, 1947) pp. 14–15. And for the discussion of the paulette and its consequences see J. Russell Major, From Renaissance Monarchy to Absolute Monarchy (Baltimore, 1904) pp. 174–80.

2 Renaissance Kingship and Noble Subjects   1. Antiquités et recherches de la grandeur et de la majesté des rois de France (1609); quoted by Marie Madeleine Martin, The Making of France (orig. Histoire de l’unité français, 1948; trans. London, 1951) p. 170.   2. Principally the effect of rising foreign trade in a largely self-­sufficient economy. There was growth but there were many victims. Most striking was the rise of Lyons through import trade, textiles and spices. Mediterranean trade expanded. The Atlantic ports were developed. But future patterns could be seen in the fragmentation of peasant holdings, with many falling into destitution and, as a result of mounting inflation, urban wages lagging behind grain prices. This, with resulting unrest, would be a factor in early Protestant movements. See p. 127.   3. In l’Institution du Prince (1518).   4. Antoine Duprat (1461–1535), archbishop of Sens, was an ecclesiastical statesman in the Wolsey class. His programme of economic reform has been called ‘Colbertism before

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Colbert’ though cruder and more negative, bullionist rather than ‘mercantilist’. Before he died he had lent his authority to the early persecution of Protestants. Robert Knecht, Francis I (Cambridge, 1982) pp. 200–1. La-­Grande Monarchie de France, ed. J. Poujel (1961) pp. 113–20. Landowner, office-­holder and pensionary on the grandest scale, Constable Anne de Montmorency is the foremost example of the great subject whose power enabled him, if not to dictate royal policy, to head resistance in a way that could render it ineffective. The extraordinarily revealing article by M. Greengrass, ‘Property and Politics in Sixteenth-Century France: The Landed Fortune of Constable Anne de Montmorency’, French History, vol. 2, no. 4 (1988) pp. 371–8, leaves one pondering the possible outcome if he had decided to adopt the Protestant cause. See also p. 141. Broadly speaking there are two lines of argument about the rule of Francis I: the tendency towards absolutism and the extent to which it was more theory than accomplishment. For G. Pagés, La Monarchie d’ancien régime en France (Paris, 1946) p. 3, ‘Francis I and Henry II were as powerful as any other kings of France. It was at the beginning of the sixteenth century that the absolute monarchy triumphed.’ Some followed him in that view though with qualifications, stressing the difference between then and the more advanced model of Louis XIV. An alternative view is that of J. Russell Major, in Representative Institutions in Renaissance France (Madison, 1960): ‘Popular, consultative’, legitimate because of its ‘feudal, dynastic structure, tolerating decentralisation because of the limitations on its power’. The argument is a central thread through the book but see particularly pp. 3–20 and 126–44. Limits are beyond doubt; feudal and dynastic elements would indeed persist. But in the hands of Francis and Henry II, the king’s will was expressed in no uncertain terms. Once expressed, there was no room for discussion or interpretation. Absolutism was implicit in intention if not always realisable on the ground. When the king wanted something done, as for example about Protestantism, he expected to be obeyed. One can judge the effectiveness of royal government by one simple test: how often, and for how long, did a parlement object or delay before registering an edict? By this test Francis and Henry, anticipating the more consistently authoritarian (its opponents would say arbitrary) monarchs of the next century, were absolutist kings. Another test, impossible to answer except through local examples, is that of compliance. The further the matter from the royal court, and the higher in status the aggrieved party, the more likely it is that particular interests could secure a reprieve, or a compromise. The debate is summarised, along with a masterly account of the institutions and practice of government, in Knecht, Francis I, pp. 342–61. ‘Complete in theory, limited in practice’ is Knecht’s summary of royal absolutism. She held audiences with foreign envoys, like the papal nuncio who described the king as ‘totally in the control of Mme d’Etampes’. She had a large part in the eclipse (1540– 41) of Constable Montmorency and in Francis’ wavering foreign policy. See ‘Politics and Faction in the Court of Francis I: The Duchesse d’Etampes, Montmorency and the Dauphin Henry’, French History, vol. 21, no. 2 (June 2007) pp. 127–46. There is an extensive literature about this subject which has led to a large shift in understanding of the nature of royal government in early modern France. See for its continuing relevance O.A. Ranum, ‘Courtesy, Absolutism and the Rise of the French State, 1630–1660’, Journal of Modern History, 52 (1980). William Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France (Cambridge, 1985) bibliography. For the practice and manners of client relationships see Sharon Kettering, ‘Friendship and Clientage in Early Modern Europe’, French History, vol. 6, no. 2 (1992). Also her ‘Gift-­giving and Patronage in Early Modern France’, French History, vol. 2, no. 2 (1988) pp. 131–51. Seminal in this debate is Arlette Jouanna, Le Devoir de révolte et la gestation de l’État moderne, 1559–61 (Paris, 1989), who distinguishes between amitié, characterised by free and equal association in small groups, and clientage, where dependence and domination witness to an unequal power relationship. In practice, with so many variables it is hard to distinguish between friendship and clientage: but, she argues, where a

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11.

12. 13.

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hierarchical network, with its inequalities, can be identified, it is plainly the latter. It is these that are most relevant to religious affiliation. In Word of Honor: Interpreting Noble Culture in Sixteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY, 1989) the cultural historian Kristen B. Neuschel examines the links between the prince de Condé and the nobility of Picardy in the mid-­sixteenth century to show how brittle their loyalties could be, how shifting ‘patron–client’ relationships, and how much influenced by considerations of honour, family interest and, potentially, religion. She argues that sixteenth-­century nobles, even if literate, lived mentally in a pre-­literate warrior society that ‘weighted incidental performance over continual states’. The usual assumptions concerning clientage are inappropriate since honour and courtesy are the defining characteristics of personal relationships. She concludes that there is no meaningful distinction between verbal courtesies and the material favours and obligations that characterise patron–client relations. The debate seems likely to continue. I find most interesting the details that emerge from studies of behaviour, the individual’s belief and choice of side. By Vasari, quoted by R.J. Knecht, Francis I (Cambridge 1982) p. 268. For this subject see Olivier Chaline, ‘The Valois and Bourbon Courts’ in John Adamson, ed., The Princely Courts of Europe, 1500–1750 (London, 1999). Also, a wide-­ ranging study by the leading authority on Francis I, Robert J. Knecht, The French Renaissance Court (New Haven, 2008). In De la Servitude voluntaire (1561 but first drafted in the 1550s). The cost of living index for the typical noble rose about half as fast as grain prices. So ‘country gentlemen prospered during these years’. Major, Renaissance Monarchy, his conclusion following detailed analyses of typical families, pp. 71–86 and 123–9. L’abbé Tollemer, Un sire de Gouberville, 1553–1562 (Paris, 1982). Travelling in the south Locke noticed that everyone on the road carried pistols. In Montpellier ‘severall murders committed here since I came hither and more attempted, one by a brother on his sister in the house where I lay’: Locke’s Travels in France, 1675–1679, ed. John Lough (Cambridge, 1953) p. 58 The evidence of feudal levies after 1560 shows that under 10% were in the upper echelon of nobility: of 25,000 gentilshommes summoned in that year only 600 were titled. The duchy of Longueville, for example, was created ‘so that those called to assist the king in great affairs should be raised in dignity’. Martin, Making of France, p. 142, is quoting from the Satire Ménippée of Pierre Pithou (see p. 211). She clearly strikes a patriotic chord when she describes sixteenth-­century animosity towards the Italian and the Spaniard. Her readers, having experienced the shame and disunity of the years 1940–44, would understand her references to the foreign intruder.

3 The Special Relationship   1. Bishop Bossuet, in his weighty defence of divine right absolute monarchy, Politique tirée des propres paroles de Écriture Sainte, trans. and ed. Patrick Riley as Politics Drawn from Holy Scripture (Cambridge, 1990), quotes this passage from St Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, ch. 13, no fewer than 22 times.   2. John of Salisbury in the Policraticus, c. 1155. He presents a moral view of rule, derived from the teaching of the church. Though God’s law is sovereign in the secular sphere the monarch possesses absolute authority.   3. There are a number of accounts and versions of the coronation oath. Here I follow R.J. Knecht, Francis I (Cambridge, 1982) pp. 16–18. For definitions see Marcel Marion, Dictionnaire des Institutions de la France aux XVIIe et XVIII siècles (Paris, 1968) pp. 464–6.   4. Jean Dunbabin, France in the Making 843–1180 (Oxford, 1985) p. 376.   5. The teaching of the Alexandrian priest Arius (d. 336), Arianism was the doctrine that the Son of God was created by the Father. Its opponents – who called themselves

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catholic, meaning universal, and eventually won the day – taught that Father, Son and Holy Spirit were co-­eternal and co-­equal. The prolonged debate about the Trinity was resolved by the formulation of the Nicene Creed enjoined on all Christians in 380. He needed support: in the previous year he had been attacked by thugs upholding a rival claim. So did Charlemagne. The significance of this event is emphasised in J. M. Wallace-­Hadrill, The Barbarian West, 400–1000 (London, 1952) pp. 109–10. For the tension between ultramontane and Gallican approaches to Rome see p. 211 and p. 346. The reader not versed in theology may wish to know more. To his aid has come Diarmaid MacCulloch, The History of Christianity (London, 2009). For Aquinas, pp. 412–15; for Occam, pp. 559–60 (and see also my p. 27 and n. 8). For Augustine, particularly in the context of his teaching about grace, and its effect on Luther, pp. 306–9. Quoted in M-­M Martin, The Making of France (orig. edn 1948; trans. London, 1951) p. 88 They took their name from Peter Waldo or Valdes. See also p. 27. Katharoi, pure ones in Greek. The name provides a clue pointing towards the origins of their dualism in the several heretical movements in the Byzantine east: the crusades could have provided opportunity for contacts. The English king Henry V followed up his victory by marriage to Princess Catherine of France. Their son would be proclaimed king of France and for a time English rule over northern France was successfully maintained. See also p. 30. The claim would long outlast subsequent defeats and the reduction of English lands in France to Calais; and to its loss in 1558. See also pp. 143 and 347–8. ‘Everyone, of every rank and condition, including the Pope himself, is bound to obey it in matters concerning the faith, the abolition of the schism and the reformation of the church of God in its head and its members.’ In 1096, kneeling in the snows of Canossa, king and future Emperor Frederick IV performed his impressive act of penance and subordination, acknowledging the claim of Rome to plena potestas embodied in the person of Pope Gregory VII. It was the beginning of the prolonged struggle, the Investiture Controversy, centring on the right or otherwise of sovereigns to invest bishops with the sacred insignia of office. The fateful outcome was that western Europe did not become a single spiritual state, comparable to the early Muslim Caliphate, but a number of jurisdictions primed to work out their own terms for relationship with Rome or – in the sixteenth century – to break altogether. P. S. Lewis, Later Mediaeval France (London, 1968) p. 80.

4 The Power of the Word   1. Apparently he said this frequently. In this form quoted in Ulinka Rublack, Reformation Europe (Cambridge, 2005) p. 50.   2. In its origins an endowed residential college of the university for poor students of theology, the Sorbonne was now, in effect, the university’s theological faculty. It had grown in function and stature with the development of Gallicanism and the periodic spats with Rome in which its role was to guard Catholic orthodoxy against extremists in Parlement who might challenge Papal authority altogether.   3. Nominalists denied that there was any individual reality behind the nomen, as signifying the universal idea of a particular phenomenon. As it was just a word to organise thinking about similar phenomena it was impossible to construct systems of thought – as Aquinas sought to do – by the use of reason. For nominalism in the Protestant context see p. 27.   4. John Wyclif, Oxford philosopher, attacked the contemporary church, not only for institutional faults but for its false foundations. He contrasted it with the universal reality (he was no Nominalist) of the invisible, true church. The essential question concerned dominium: who should have authority to rule?

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  Rulers chosen by God would be better placed for salvation and for that reason fitter to govern the church. This radical conclusion anticipates the Lutheran ideal of the godly prince. He also taught, in terms that explain why he has been called ‘the morning star of the Reformation’ that the Bible, not the church, was the source of Divine truth. Political protection saved him from being brought to trial. Decades after his death his bones stood proxy. His ‘Lollard’ followers kept going in small, secret groups, insignificant in the larger picture. But his ideas influenced Hus and had further life.   5. Jan Hus, dean of the Faculty of Philosophy, later chancellor of Prague University, was affected by the example of Wyclif, possibly by negative experiences of diplomacy and by frustrated ambition. Nobles, opposed to German influence, supported him in what became a popular movement, distinct in theology, patriotically Czech in sentiment.   6. Or ‘piper’ by some accounts. Following the appearance of the Virgin Mary to a shepherd, Hans Behem, Behem embarked on a mission, populist and pilgrim style, with support sufficiently wide-­ranging to alert the authorities to the social danger in radical interpretation of Scripture.   7. For more on Humanism see p. 57ff.   8. Andreas Karlstadt (c.1482–1541) went too fast for Luther, advocating iconoclasm and getting involved in the Peasants’ War. After its suppression he went to Switzerland and became Professor of Theology at Basle. Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560) was Professor of Greek at Wittenberg, a profound scholar and author of Loci communes, the first major Protestant work of dogmatic theology. Moderate by inclination he found himself between two fires: Luther saw a Swiss tendency in his view of the Lord’s Supper; other Protestants attacked his search for common ground with Rome. His conditional consent to the regulations about the conduct of worship imposed by the Emperor at the Interim of Augsburg in 1549 led to painful controversy. Martin Bucer (1491–1551), former Dominican, adopted a middle course in disputes between Luther and Zwingli. He was criticised for refusing to sign the Interim; then came to England at Cranmer’s invitation and found a congenial home at Cambridge. See also p. 44. For his influence on and support of Cranmer at the time of the First Prayer Book of 1549, see Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer (New Haven and London, 1996) pp. 399–403.   9. The commission was shocking to German opinion at several levels. It was issued by the 26-­year-­old Albrecht Hohenzollern, archbishop of Mainz (and bishop of Magdeburg and Halberstadt), who enjoyed the right to act as agent for the Pope in Germany for the sale of indulgences to pay for the rebuilding of St Peter’s. By a secret agreement half the money raised was earmarked for the Fuggers, the bankers who had loaned the money that Albrecht needed to pay the huge fees demanded by Rome for dispensation from its own law relating to pluralism and the minimum canonical age (30) for a bishop. Here in one man and his transactions is much of what Germans found objectionable and the case for reformation on nationalist and religious grounds. 10. The argument is developed in the compelling work of Denis Crouzet, Les Guerriers de Dieu: la violence au temps des troubles de religion, 2 vols (Paris, 1990). See also the comments of M. Greengrass, ‘The Psychology of Religious Violence’ French History vol. 5, no. 4 (1991) pp. 467–75. 11. Luther did not at once go from attacking indulgences to questioning purgatory. Around 1530 he realised that his soteriological (concerning grace) revolution had ruled it out of play. He had to edit some early writing to accommodate this extension of his theology. 12. Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (c. 1467–1536), humanist and scholar, satirist, educator, textual critic, theologian. Escaping his obscure past he presented himself to the world of letters as a new man, starting with his own name, ‘Desiderius’ being supposedly a Greek synonym for Erasmus. For his career and influence, particularly on the French reformation see p. 59ff. 13. Its foundation in 1502, by Frederick the Wise. He was deemed ‘Wise’ because he spent in ways that were valued – including accumulating an enormous collection of

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relics – the fortune that came to the Wettin dynasty from silver mining. The university was controversial because it did not have the blessing of the church and claimed to offer a new kind of humanist schooling. When he recalled the Turmerlebnis (which probably happened after 1517) he was rethinking his personal struggle in the light of subsequent earth-­shaking developments. The evolution of an evangelical movement into a Protestant church required a coherent story that made sense to him as well as to others. Lutheran doctrine, Cranmer’s words in his Prayer Book’s order for Holy Communion. 1 Peter 2:9. ‘You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a dedicated nation and a people claimed by God for his own, to proclaim the triumphs of him who has called you out of darkness into his marvellous light.’ For his developed view of the sacrament, the difference between that and Zwingli’s, and its divisive effect see p. 44. Or as summarised, after his death, by a pious editor, in words that he did not actually use: ‘Here I stand; I can do no other.’ For the text of Luther’s address see G. Rupp and M. B. Drewery, eds, Martin Luther (London, 1970) pp. 58–60. The sentence is quoted aptly by one of Luther’s greatest spiritual heirs, Friederich Bonhoeffer. Lines from the version of Thomas Carlyle, the Victorian seer well equipped to render the force of the original. It has been calculated that he published, at the rate of one a fortnight, pieces ranging from the combative and rebarbative to the devout and pastoral; always vigorous, from the heart. Supplementing his prodigious output were some fifty other writers of pamphlets, typically twelve quarto pages: a total of 630 in the 1520s. It was expensive and most copies probably went first to pastors. It would have cost a Saxon carpenter about a month’s wage.

5 Every Man His Own Priest   1. ‘Enhalt uns Herr ei deinem Wort’, written 1541. It was written for children to sing at a time of fear from Turkish invasion.   2. This is the theme of a fine essay by C.V. Wedgwood, ‘Martin Luther’ in Velvet Studies (London, 1946) pp. 64–70.   3. Thomas Müntzer (1489–1525), scholar and pastor, was one of the first to devise a service in the German language. He took from the Bible ideas about property and communal living that made him sympathetic to peasant demands and he organised and led them in the great rising of 1525 before his death at the battle of Frankenhausen in October. For some characteristics of Anabaptism see pp. 48–50.   4. After the catastrophic defeat and death of Louis, the last Jagellon king, at Mohács in 1525 Vienna came into the front line of Christendom. Germans had good reason to fear the Turk.   5. For Anabaptists see pp. 48ff.   6. For Zwingli’s use of Old Testament precedent see Owen Chadwick, The Early Reformation on the Continent (Oxford, 2001) pp. 325–7.   7. In 1521 there were 85 Imperial Free Cities. Four out of five of them became, or were for a time, Protestant.   8. From Milan to the Netherlands, through Habsburg or friendly territories, it would be the vital link for supplies and troops after the revolt of the Netherlands.   9. For the eucharistic debate see Chadwick, The Early Reformation, pp. 236–40. 10. Heinrich Bullinger (1504–75), Zwingli’s successor, is now chiefly remembered for his history of the Reformation and for his work on the Helvetic Confessions. The latter rejected the disciplinary system of the theocratic state and supported Thomas Erastus for the rights of the state in church matters. For ‘Erastianism’ as an issue in Huguenotism see p. 307ff.

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11. So called after Jacob Hutter (d. 1536). His martyrdom bore seed. By 1600, mainly in Moravia and Transylvania, there were some 20,000 Hutterites, usually protected by a local lord. For details of their monastic way of life and further history see Chadwick The Early Reformation, pp. 373–5. 12. Of 167 known in the 1520s in Switzerland, Austria and Germany, 38 were clergy, eight schoolteachers. 13. See pp. 379 and 382–3. Also in the language of well-­known Protestant hymns; as ‘Oft in danger, oft in woe’. 14 Peter Burke, ed., trans. K. Folka, A New Kind of History: From the Writings of Lucien Febvre (London, 1973) p. 60. For the argument, and aspects of the Pre-­Reform, see his seminal essay ‘The Origins of the French Reformation, a Badly Put Question’, ibid., pp. 44–107. For those Frenchmen whose scholarship and spirituality support the idea of a distinct French reformation see pp. 61–6. 6 The French Church, Humanism and the Pre-­Reform   1. The term is unfashionable though useful as shorthand for a many-­sided movement. It gained currency after A. Renaudet: Préréforme et humanisme à Paris pendant les premières guerres d’Italie (1494–1517) (Paris, 1953).   2. Erasmus, quoted by Owen Chadwick, The Early Reformation on the Continent (Oxford, 2001) p. 42, on being accused of being an apostate monk.   3. A. Coville, ed., La Traite de la ruine de l’église et la traduction français de 1564 (Paris, 1936) p. 131.   4. Quoted in David Potter, A History of France, 1460–1560 (London, 1995) p. 209. See pp. 207–50 for his survey of the church and heresy before Calvinism.   5. Best known as a teacher of Erasmus, Jan Standonck, educated in the evangelical mysticism of the Brethren of the Common Life and the popular pietism of the devotio moderna, abbé of Cîteaux, set out to make Montaigu an educational monastery, with strict rules and emphasis on regular devotion and austere living. See p. 58.   6. A view that is argued convincingly by J. Bossy, ‘The Counter-­Reformation and the People of Catholic Europe’, Past and Present, vol. 47 (1970) and in his Christianity in the West, 1500–1800 (Oxford, 1985) and by J. Delumeau, Catholicism from Luther to Voltaire: A New View of the Counter-­Reformation (London, 1977).   7. For this important topic see also p. 151.   8. See p. 114–15.   9. Toulouse had 90. 10. For pluralism Cardinal François de Tournon (1489–1562) may take the palm. Provincial governor, councillor and crown financier, he was archbishop simultaneously of Auch, Bourges, Embrun and Lyons, and commendatory abbot of 13 large monasteries. 11. Family arrangements persisted. The Polignacs enjoyed successive reigns at Puy. The young Richelieu gave up thoughts of a military career after his elder brother became a Carthusian monk and he decided to take on Luçon, the Poitevin diocese that had long been ‘in the family’. See J. Bergin, The Rise of Richelieu (Manchester, 1991) p. 78 ff. 12. Potter, A History of France, p. 209. 13. For him and his journal see p. 20 and n. 16. 14. A New Kind of History: From the Writing of Lucien Febvre, ed. Peter Burke (London, 1973), pp. 193–207. 15. The first notable name in the movement, the Dutch theologian Geert Groote, founded an informal community of friends that after his death in 1384 took formal shape as the Brethren of the Common Life. Others pursued the ideals of the Devotio without enrolling in any formal body. 16. John Baptist cries out ‘metanoeite’. For Jerome this was poenitentiam agite (do penance); for Erasmus it meant rather ‘repent’ from his preferred word resipiscite. ‘Bad grammar,’

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he would say, ‘makes bad theology.’ He pointed out, as Orthodox theologians had long done, that the word ‘purgatory’ does not occur in the Bible. Sister of Francis, future wife of Henri d’Albret, king of Navarre (1527), herself a humanist scholar and writer. For her role in early Protestantism see p. 129. His election was delayed by one chapter member who offered his vote to Standonck: futile, but the episode serves to highlight issues of simony and pluralism. He was supported by his mother shouting ‘Long live Jesus Christ and his disciples’. Histoire ecclésiastique, ed. G. Baum and G. Kunitz (Paris, 1883) p. 14. This early case points to a sometimes neglected factor in the spread of Protestantism: materfamilias – her role, private and public. Briçonnet could hardly be at once ‘Pelagian’ on the subject of free will and ‘Lutheran’ on predestination!

7 ‘God Will Change the World’   1. Quoted by R.J. Knecht, Francis I (Cambridge, 1982) p. 390, from a contemporary letter illustrating the uncertainties of the early Reformation in France.   2. For this heresy and early history see p. 72ff.   3. For Bucer and Lutheranism see p. 64 and n. 3.   4. Quoted in M. Mann, Érasme et les débuts de la Réforme française (1517–36) (Paris, 1934) p. 114.   5. Knecht, Francis I, p. 137.   6. For its further significance see p. 68.   7. For this crucial incident see pp. 69–70.   8. Erratic but talented, Servetus would have done well to concentrate on the law he first studied, or medicine. He supposedly anticipated Harvey’s discovery of the pulmonary circulation of blood. For his venture into theology, and its consequences, see pp. 93–4.   9. Lucien Febvre, Au Coeur religieux du XVIe siècle (Paris, 1957) p. 66. 10. Hebraist and reformer in Basle. Latinised name of Johann Hauschwein (1482–1531). At the Marburg debate in 1529, with Zwingli, and opposed to Luther and Melanchthon, he urged that the words Hoc est corpus meum should be read as metaphor. Luther said that Christ’s command had made a bodily eating a spiritual event. Bucer, supported by Melanchthon, found a way to compromise and peace within Protestantism, suggesting that in (the bread) be replaced by with: so two simultaneous gifts: bread and wine to the body, spiritual gift to the soul. Oecolampadius, representing the Swiss school further encouraged coexistence, if not unity, by recalling that the early church had more than one definition of the Eucharist. 11. The example comes from David Nicholls, ‘Heresy and Protestantism, 1520–1542: Questions of Perception and Communication’, French History, vol. 10, no. 2 (1996) pp. 193–4. 12. For the trial and the conclusions drawn from detailed analysis of the participants’ views see W.G. Naphy, ‘Catholic Perceptions of Early French Protestantism: The Heresy Trial of Baudichon de la Maisonneuve in Lyons, 1534’, French History, vol. 9, no. 4 (1995) pp. 451–77. 13. Author of Le Livre des marchands (1533), a list of the defective goods supposedly sold by the church of Rome. 14. For the part played by processions in marking the territory, refreshing memory, sustaining morale and, in many cases, challenging the heretic, see Philip Benedict, ‘Divided Memories? Historical Calendars, Commemorative Processions and the Recollection of the Wars of Religion during the Ancien Régime’, French History, vol. 22, no. 4 (2008) pp. 381–97. 15. Between 1530 and 1540, 42 titles were printed in the city; between 1540 and 1550 there were 193; between 1550 and 1564, over 500. The 40 presses working there by then employed immigrants from France under publishers like Jean Crespin and Antoine Vincent: Mark Greengrass, The French Reformation (Oxford, 1987) p. 32.

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16. For the Cathars and Albigensian ‘crusade’ see pp. 27–8. 17. Quoted by Greengrass, French Reformation, p. 6. For Waldensians over a longer period see E. Cameron, The Reformation of the Heretics (Oxford, 1984); here chapters 2 and 3. 18. Pierre Robert, known as Olivetanus. For his influence on Calvin see p. 78. 19. The provincial status of a man of the robe nobility like Oppède illustrates the power that could be wielded when high office was backed by rank, landed estate, often financial office and clientele. As ‘absolutist’ theory took hold, the reality on the ground, especially where there was both parlement and Estates, was usually some form of compromise with the local power-­brokers. 20. See Febvre, Au Coeur religieux, pp. 108–60, ‘Dolet, propagator of the Gospel’. 21. The question is explored with much else about the religious and intellectual history of the time in Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: the Religion of Rabelais, trans. B. Gottlieb (Cambridge, Mass., 1982; orig. Paris, 1942). 22. See Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, Calif., 1965) p. 12 for the possibility that he was handed over to the Inquisition by other master printers in revenge for his support of the journeymen, and pp. 189–226 for the printing industry and its effect on popular culture. 23. Owen Chadwick, The Early Reformation on the Continent (Oxford, 2001) p. 7. Ruinous to the valuable book trade, the decree was modified six weeks later. 24. Records around the country are patchy and estimates for investigations of heresy up till the start of the civil wars vary between 5,000 and 8,000. In Toulouse the records are nearly complete and they show the rising trend: from a dozen in the two decades 1611–30 to 121, 257 and 684 in the three following. 8 Calvin: The Way, the Truth and the Life   1. Quoted by T.H.L. Parker, John Calvin (London, 1975) p. 58, from Opera Selecta, ed. P. Barth et al. (Munich, 1926–52) 5 vols (hereafter cited as op. sel). I, p. 233. It represents the heart and essence of his teaching.   2. Hilaire Belloc, writing from an avowed Catholic stance but here surely right. He concluded: ‘From that a whole train of consequences would have arisen which would have meant a completely different history for Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.’ Joseph Pearce, Old Thunder. A Life of Hilaire Belloc (London, 2002) p. 229.   3. The arguments for dating, or re-­dating the main events in Calvin’s early life are summarised in Parker, Calvin, pp. 156–61.   4. After military service and a disabling wound, the Spaniard Loyola (1491–1556) studied theology before creating the Society of Jesus as a teaching and missionary body of exceptional esprit de corps. With its quasi-­military structure and discipline and single-­ minded service to the Pope it was to prove Protestantism’s most formidable enemy. See also p. 226.   5. Site of the only university in Switzerland, favoured by Erasmus (who wrote there his repudiation of Luther), home to Froben and other notable printers, it was brought violently into the Reformation by an iconoclastic mob. See also Oecolampadius, p. 44; also p. 46.   6. Originally in a private letter to a friend in Lausanne, in Guillaume Farel, 1489–1565, by various authors (Neuchâtel, 1930) p. 104 ff.   7. Quoted by Parker, Calvin, p. 18.   8. Ibid. p. 59.   9. As emphasised by Evelyn Underhill in Worship (London, 1936) p. 286. For Calvin ‘the supreme religious fact was God’s unspeakable Majesty and Otherness’. 10. St Jerome (c. 340–420) was the most learned, eloquent and influential of the Latin Fathers and a live force in the 1500s. His letters, treatises, scriptural commentaries and revision of former versions of the Bible (the Vulgate) were edited by Erasmus in 1516. 11. Gregory (d. 1358), appointed a Doctor of the Sorbonne by Pope Clement VI during the Avignon ‘captivity’, was a philosopher and theologian of sternest Augustinian hue.

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Actions performed without grace are sinful. Unfortunately the logic led him to maintain that unbaptised babies were condemned to eternal damnation. Hence his reputation: ‘Tortor infantium’. Parker, Calvin, p. 113. Common ground between Catholic and Protestant but given new force in Protestant theology was the idea of original sin as expressed in the baptism service in the Book of Common Prayer: ‘O merciful God grant that the old Adam in the Child may be so buried that the new man may be raised up in him.’ Parker, Calvin, p. 44, quoting from Op Sel I, 139. Or indeed English king. It was anathema to Elizabeth as it challenged her sovereignty over the church.

9 Geneva: The Experiment and the Experience   1. The harsh, uncompromising voice of John Knox (1512–72), exiled and resident in Geneva during the reign of Catholic Mary, has come to be associated with the stern version of Calvinism that took shape after his return to his native Scotland.   2. For eyguenot as the possible origin of the later Huguenot, and other possibilities see p. 122.   3. Pierre Viret (1511–71), a Vaudois, earnest but gentle; pastor at Lausanne, subsequently Lyons. He was notable in urging restraint during the outbreak there of iconoclasm. Independent by preference from Geneva, he sympathised with Morély (q.v.) and his plan for popular church government.   4. T.H.L. Parker, John Calvin (London, 1975) p. 57.   5. Jan Beukelsoon (1509–36), with Jan Matthys, took control of the city and after the latter’s death was crowned ‘king of Sion’. For his innovations see pp. 49–50. He was killed in the battle fought by Catholics and Protestants for the recovery of the city.   6. Parker, Calvin, p. 67, quoting from op. sel. I. 37.   7. Ibid. p. 69, quoting from op. sel. I. 69.   8. Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History (abridged by D. C. Somervell, New York, 1946) book III, pp. 217–30. See there, for example, St Benedict, Dante.   9. Thomas Erastus, a Swiss, born in Baden, was appointed in 1558 to the Chair of Medicine in Heidelberg. In Explicatio gravissimae quaestionis, he contended that the civil authorities should exercise authority in all matters, including religion. See also p. 308. 10. The following is based on Calvin’s letter to the faithful of Poitiers, for the text of which see G.R. Potter and M. Greengrass, John Calvin (London, 1983) p. 152. 11. For the pioneering synod see pp. 124–5. 12. Clément Marot (1496–1544) entered the service of Marguerite of Navarre. Wounded at the battle of Pavia, pursued by victims of his satirical poems, he relied on her for protection, later on the duchess of Ferrara. His psalms, from 1538 on, sung to secular airs, helped make the new ideas fashionable and were condemned by the Sorbonne. Though named by Parlement as a Protestant, it seems that he had no definite theological position. 13. Duchess Renée of France (1510–76), Louis XII’s daughter, continued to support reformers after the duke’s death and her return (1560) to establish a court at Montargis. 14. Evelyn Underhill, Worship (London, 1936) p. 287. 15. Recommended, not ordained; so giving rise to a central Catholic criticism: with the abandonment of obligatory church order comes dependence on the inclination and capacity of the minister. The movement stemming, in part, from revolt against priestly power giving such spiritual responsibility to an individual: an irony apparently? The Calvinist might answer with questions: how are your priests trained and what authority should they have when it rests on false claims? 16. For this phase and trend in the seventeenth century see pp. 301–2.

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17. In three days he ‘never heard any blasphemy, swearing, or indecent language’ but felt bound to attribute it to ‘diabolical cunning in order to deceive the simple-­minded by having the appearance of a reformed life’. By 1580 neither side could see good in the other. From Lynn Martin, The Jesuit Mind (Ithaca, NY, 1988) pp. 84–5. 18. The subject, so important for understanding Huguenot lives and behaviour, is explored by Graeme Murdock, ‘Calvin, Clothing and the Body’, Proceedings Huguenot Society, vol. 28, no. 4 (2006), pp. 481–94. 19. Ibid., p. 482. 20. Sebastien Castellio was an early pupil and for a time colleague of Calvin. In 1554, in De haereticis, published under a pseudonym but soon recognised, using passages, including Calvin’s, that argued for toleration, he pointed out that heresy, doctrinal difference, was being treated as more heinous than moral crimes such as murder or adultery. As a Protestant he had to acknowledge that many doctrines were obscure or contradictory. 21. This requires qualification. Calvinism, as it evolved, in Huguenot life and practice is less inherently anti-­Semitic than Lutheranism or Catholicism. Huguenots could identify with Israel under persecution. The contribution of exiles, particularly in Holland, to ‘enlightened’ ideas would even exhibit a kind of philosemitism. Huguenots were prominent in Occupied France in offering shelter to Jews. 22. From Rouen alone, 139 were listed in Geneva’s livre des habitants for the years 1549–59; more than from any other French city, but few were unrepresented. 23. Théodore de Bèze (1519–1605), usually known in Geneva as Beza, from a minor noble family of Vézelay in Burgundy, was a product, like Calvin, of the law schools of Orléans and Bourges. He settled in Paris, lived fashionably and wrote witty poems. After a serious illness he married his mistress and in 1548 went with her to Geneva. Thereafter he was in the mainstream, eventually becoming a leader, of the evolving Huguenot church, and, on occasion, attending Condé, in war. 24. See pp. 137–8. 10 Persecution and Growth   1. A trite but apt observation by Montaigne’s friend and chronicler of his times, with reference to ‘this hydra headed heresy’. He is the author of L’Histoire de la naissance, progréz et decadence de l’heresie divisée en huict livres (Rouen, 1623).   2. In Excuse de Jehan Calvin à Messieurs les Nicodémites (1544) he commended the example of Nicodemus who ‘came to Jesus by night in the time of his ignorance. After he had been taught he confessed him openly by day, even at the hour of his greatest peril.’   3. Was he thinking, for example, of Jean de Montluc, bishop of Valence, who sought compromise at the Colloquy of Poissy and who, with several other bishops was called to a commission of inquiry at Rome in 1563?   4. For much of the ensuing and on his collation of figures from various sources, I rely on the account in Mack P. Holt, French Wars of Religion (Cambridge, 1995) pp. 27–30 and for the narrative in Frederick J. Baumgartner, Henry II, King of France, 1547–1558 (Durham, NC, 1988) pp. 114–32.   5. So described by R. M. Kingdon in Geneva and the Coming of the Wars of Religion in France, 1553–1563 (Geneva, 1956) p. 2. See also p. 120 and n. 30.   6. See p. 89 for his rivalry with Calvin.   7. For the Paris synod of 1559 see p. 124.   8. Respected for his treatises on usury, the limitations of Papal authority and feudal and customary law. His extreme Gallican views led to accusation of heresy and he spent some time in exile. Returning to Paris in 1557 he continued to support royal authority and rejected Calvinist resistance theory. He claimed to write history ‘for the good and honour of the French people’. For his role in the dispute over congregationalism and for his wider importance see J.H.M. Salmon, Society in Crisis, France in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1975) pp. 180–1.

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  9. For this edict (pp. 44–7) and for the subsequent course of events, see N.M. Sutherland, The Huguenot Struggle for Recognition (New Haven, 1980). 10. Charles, cardinal of Lorraine (1525–74), younger brother of duc François de Guise and the statesman of the family. With his brother he will figure largely in the early Huguenot story. See p. 142. 11. Charles, cardinal de Bourbon was the third brother (eldest Antoine de Navarre, second Louis, prince de Condé). He did not follow his brothers to Protestantism. Odet de Châtillon was younger brother of Coligny (see below) and François Dandelot, colonel-­ general of infantry. He never took clerical orders but was bishop of Beauvais as well as a cardinal. His Protestantism sat oddly with his title: was it a matter of family loyalty? He married Elizabeth Hauteville, a Calvinist protegée of Marguerite de France. 12. Timothy Watson, ‘The Reformed Church in Lyon’, in Raymond A. Mentzer and Andrew Spicer eds, Society and Culture in the Huguenot World, 1559–1685 (Cambridge, 2002) p. 16. For the importance of psalms in Huguenot society and worship see also p. 281 and p. 305. 13. One may think of 1588–93 (before Henry IV regained his capital: see p. 209), 1871 and the ‘Commune’ or 1940, the regime of Vichy, and the Resistance. 14. J.B. de La Fosse, Journal d’un curé Ligeur de Paris sous les très derniers Valois, ed. E. de Barthèlemy (Paris, n.d.) p. 31. 15. For the evolution of this seminal work see also p. 245 n. 4. 16. Gaspard de Coligny (1572), soldier and Huguenot leader. From 1552 amiral de France (though he never went to sea). Converted to Protestantism during imprisonment following his heroic though unavailing defence of St Quentin (1557). 17. Mark Greengrass, The French Reformation (Oxford, 1987) p. 43. ‘Protestants’ – but one may wonder what later generations, schooled more thoroughly in the faith, would have made of some of them. The question cannot be answered. 11 Why be a Huguenot?   1. The view of La Popelinière, quoted by J.H.M. Salmon, Society in Crisis, France in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1975), p. 131. La Popelinière, is usually held to be a relatively objective witness see p. 222.   2. Henri Hauser, ‘The French Reformation and the French People’, American Historical Review, vol. 4 (1899) pp. 217–27.   3. Philip Benedict, Rouen during the Wars of Religion (Cambridge, 1981) p. 80.   4. This line is developed, with particular reference to the printing trade, in fascinating detail in Natalie Z. Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, Calif., 1975) pp. 6–10.   5. Recorded, with other such cases, in Gabriel Audisio, ‘The First Provençal Refugees in Geneva’, French History, vol. 19, no. 3 (2005) p. 396.   6. Lucien Febvre, seminal essay, ‘The Origins of the French Reformation: A Badly Put Question’, in A New Kind of History ed. P. Burke (London, 1973) pp. 44ff. (orig. article in Revue historique, vol. 161 (1929) pp. 1–73.)   7. For the rise of Protestantism in Rouen see Benedict, Rouen during the Wars of Religion, pp. 49–95.   8. Ibid. p. 50.   9. Ibid. p. 52. 10. For Protestantism in Lyons in this period see Timothy Watson, ‘Preaching, Printing, Psalm-­singing: The Making and Unmaking of the Reformed Church in Lyon, 1550–72’, in R. Mentzer and A. Spicer, eds, Society and Culture in the Huguenot World, 1559–1685 (Cambridge, 2002) pp. 10–28; pp. 1–16.) Also Davis, Society and Culture, pp. 6ff. and 189ff. 11. For whom see pp. 27–8. Quite different circumstances and idiosyncratic beliefs – but it was the persecution that fed into Huguenot legend and reinforced their sense of the ‘true church’ fighting for its life. It was also used by Catholics as an example of zealous

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12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

24.

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proselytising (p. 7). See Raymond A. Mentzer ‘Introduction: Étre protestant,’ in Mentzer and Spicer, eds, Society and Culture, p. 7. ‘The fact that reform in poor relief cut across religious boundaries and that Protestants and Catholics could work together shows that it rested on values and insights common to both groups.’ Natalie Zemon Davies is a prime authority on this as on other aspects of French society in the sixteenth century: here ‘Poor Relief, Humanism and Heresy’, in Society and Culture, pp. 59–60. Ibid., p. 4. Griffarins (corruption of old French word for glutton) were a secular brotherhood that turned eagerly to a style of worship in which they could participate. For the case of Dijon see James A. Farr, Hands of Honour: Artisans and their World in Dijon, 1550–1650 (Ithaca, NY, 1988). Also Mack P. Holt, ‘Wine, Community and Reformation in Sixteenth Century Burgundy’, Past and Present, vol. 138 (Feb. 1993) pp. 58–93. See Philip Benedict, ‘Faith, Fortune and Social Structure in Seventeenth-Century Montpellier’, Past and Present, vol. 152 (1996) pp. 54–6. For later Montpellier and Catholicisation see p. 282. From a table in M. Greengrass, The French Reformation (Oxford, 1987) p. 81. Toulouse in 1562–63 had a high proportion (35.3%) in the liberal professions, reflecting its status as a parlement town and government centre; Montpellier (1560) only 15.4%, but centring on the most influential Medical Faculty. At the other end of the scale there were many indigent for whom provision was made reflecting civic values before Protestantism. See Barbara Beckman Davis, ‘Reconstructing the Poor in Toulouse’, French History, vol. 7, no. 3 (1993) pp. 249–85. Her analysis points to the difficulty of relating Protestant sympathies to class or occupation. Beloved Son Felix. The Journal of Felix Platter, a Medical Student in Sixteenth-Century France, trans. S. Jennall (London, 1961) pp. 43, 59, 72. Lawrence Brockliss, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Huguenot Physician in Early Modern France’, H.S.P., vol. 28, no. 1 (2003) pp. 36–55; here pp. 37–8. With its 10 physicians, 11 surgeons and 27 apothecaries, it attracted and trained students from all over Europe. Brockliss suggests (pp. 38–9) that some doctors may have found Calvinism congenial because they came from Maran (Spanish converted Jew) families and found Spanish Catholicism repugnant. Leading anatomist Rondelet is noted for his anatomical study of fish; Joubert, more controversially, for his assault on the therapeutic ideas of midwives and traditional remedies. For the conflict between its school of Paracelsian, and orthodox, medicine see p. 240. There is a helpful review of recent and earlier theories about religious motivation in Holt, The French Wars of Religion, Mack P. (Cambridge, 2005) pp. 30–39. For the story in Amiens he draws on an unpublished thesis of David L. Rosenburg, ‘Social Experience and Religious Choice: The Protestant Weavers and Woolcombers of Amiens in the Sixteenth Century’, pp. 36–7. For this issue see Philip Connor, Huguenot Heartland: Montauban and Southern French Calvinism during the Wars of Religion (Aldershot, 2002). Elizabeth. C. Tingle, ‘The Conversion of Infidels and Heretics: Baptism and Confessional Allegiance in Nantes during the Early Wars of Religion (1550–1570)’, French History, vol. 22, no. 3 (2008) p. 255. The infidels would be Moriscoes, slaves or free men in the substantial Spanish colony in Nantes. Their presence may have promoted the use of baptism as a mark of identification. The bishop adopted a new rite in 1555, which suggests that he saw it as a valuable way of encouraging Catholics to hold firm. As elsewhere it went with an increasing emphasis on processions and on the Eucharist as a way of appealing to God’s favour in war. For Protestantism in Brittany see p. 54. G. Audision, ‘First Provençal Refugees, in Geneva (1545–1571)’, French History, vol.19, no. 3 (Sept. 2005) pp. 384–400, revising figures derived conventionally from the Livre des habitants de Genève, exploring origins and ‘networks of sociability’, argues that out of a total of 582 who settled before 1562, the majority were peasants. His

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estimate – about 70% – is weighted by large numbers from the Luberon, the area of the Waldensian persecution (see p. 72ff). For the case of Languedoc and the socio-­geographical and religious factors in play there see Le Roy Ladurie, Les Paysans de Languedoc, 2 vols (Paris, 1966) I, 333–6. Blaise de Monluc: Commentaries, ed. Ian Roy (1971; modernised trans. of 1674 of 1st edn 1592) has two reputations: as Gascon soldier and loyalist and ‘hammer of the Huguenots’. His references to other episodes and description of those in which he had been principal reveal much about the savage temper of civil war in the south. Compared to parts of Germany, and Lorraine, the incidence of witch trials was relatively low. Between 1565 and 1625 Parlement, as high court of appeal for half of France, sentenced 57 witches to death, but 625 women to death for infanticide. In each case it was the obsession of the ruler or the local demonologist that was the chief factor, colluding with people’s fears. In Lorraine (population approx. 400,000), in approx. 3,000 trials between 1580 and 1630, 90% ended in conviction. For the earlier phase of Rouennais Protestantism see pp. 108–9. See p. 71. Andrew Spicer, ‘Rebuilding the Sacred Landscape: Orléans, 1560–1610’, French History, vol. 21, no. 3 (2007) pp. 247–68, reveals the scale of destruction, outrage and determination to rebuild the sacred space. Ibid. p. 250. A phrase from the epitaph of Mathurin de la Sanssaye, bishop of Orléans, active in restoration. Further words convey the violation: ‘J’ai trouvé, hélas, ce temple renversé et ses autels, ses chapelles; j’ai trouvé les calices, les ornaments sacrés et les croix au pillage, les reliques des saints arrachées de leur chasses d’or et argent: partout l’image horrible de l’impiété sacrilege, partout des décombres entassées plus haut que les montagnes.’

12 A Party Forms   1. Desiderius Erasmus, The Colloquies of Erasmus, trans. Craig R. Thompson (Chicago, 1965) pp. 217–23. In her fine essay ‘City Women and Religious Change’ Natalie Zemon Davis in R. Mentzer and A. Spicer, eds, Society and Culture in the Huguenot World 1559–1685 (Cambridge, 2002) explores women’s opportunities – and initiatives. See also p. 104 and n. 14.   2. For its early use evidence from the Huguenots’ keenest opponents may be revealing. The first use of ‘Calvinist’ by a Jesuit of the French mission was in Jan. 1560; the first literary reference to a ‘Huguenot’ was that of Fr. Pierre Canal in April 1561. By then it was to be heard in the streets of Paris. The jibe ‘Huegenard’ was enough to get one unfortunate, Robert Delors, seized and executed. It quickly gained currency. Lynn Martin, The Jesuit Mind (Ithaca, NY, 1988) pp. 95–8.   3. For Geneva and its continuing importance in the history of French Calvinism see particularly Robert M. Kingdon, Geneva and the Coming of the Wars of Religion in France, 1555–1563 (Geneva, 1956). See also p. 94.   4. For the unsettled background to the synod see p. 104.   5. The process, culminating in the protectorship of Henry of Navarre from 1576, is described in J. Garrisson, Les Protestants au XVI siècle (Paris, 1988), chs 7–9.   6. From 1559 to 1574 about half were trained in France; from then it rose to about three-­ quarters. Ibid. p. 211.   7. Mark Greengrass, ‘Informal Networks in Sixteenth Century French Protestantism’, in Mentzer and Spicer, eds, Society and Culture, pp. 78–97, pp. 78–97, illustrates the importance of such networks when provincial synods met only once a year and colloquies twice. Letters could be a lifeline when travelling was costly, even dangerous.   8. For the characteristic language of greeting and encouragement, ‘the moving dialect of Canaan’, with its use of biblical places and scenes, which Protestants could assume or forgo according to the letter’s recipient, see Garrisson, Les Protestants, p. 203.   9. For Erastianism and the resulting schism within French Calvinism see p. 307ff.

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10. Quoted by J.H.M. Salmon, Society in Crisis: France in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1975) pp. 179–81. 11. Ibid. pp. 180–1. 12. Huguenot jurist and polemicist, François Hotman had already made his mark with a treatise, The Status of the Primitive Church (1557). For his breach with his parlementaire father see p. 102. For his important work, Francogallia (1573) see pp. 186–7. For a fuller analysis of the condition of the nobility see pp. 20–1. 13. In De l’Excellence du gouvernement royale (Paris, 1975) Le Roy, Professor of Greek but also energetic in writing about government, defended monarchy against Hotman’s brand of ‘constitutional fundamentalism’. See Salmon, Society in Crisis, pp. 216 ff. 14. The Constable could well afford his large household and private army. The family had been exceptionally successful in amassing lands and exploiting their potential for income and influence. See Mark Greengrass, ‘Property and Politics in Sixteenth Century France: The Landed Fortune of Anne, Constable Montmorency’, French History, vol. 2 (1988) pp. 371–88. 15. Known for his popular tales of Breton life, client of the Protestant duc de Rohan, du Fail served Rohan in Italy before settling to a career in law 16. Blaise de Monluc: Commentaires, ed. Ian Roy (London, 1971) p. 200. He was caustic, however, about Crussol, who ‘was no more of this new religion than I and without doubt turned to it more out of some discontent than from any deep devotion’. 17. See p. 239 for the Weber thesis. 18. They should not be confused with Calvin’s opponents in Geneva. They were antinomian, advocating freedom from religious forms, including the scriptures. Calvin had written a tract condemning them. Marguerite of Navarre, leaning towards their spirituality, sheltered two of them at her court. She was offended to receive a broadside from Calvin. His subsequent letter, and others like it, have a consistent message. Women, like others, must follow the Word, wherever it led. No compromise: his stark message did not always take account of the difficulties the recipients might experience. 19. The debate about women and Calvinism, following the seminal article of Nancy L. Roelker in the Journal of Inter-­disciplinary History (1972), pp. 391–418, ‘The Appeal of Calvinism to French Noblewomen in the Sixteenth Century’, has been broadened to include, for example, the role of women in estate management. See particularly Kristen B. Neuschel, ‘Noblewomen and War in Sixteenth-Century France’ in Michael Wolfe, ed., Changing Identities in Early Modern France (Durham, NC and London, 1977). One caution: as Barbara Diefendorf points out in ‘Gender and the Family’, in Mack P. Holt, ed., Renaissance and Reformation France (Oxford, 2002) pp. 99–112, relatively few women could read the Bible; those who could might be discouraged by their pastor from interpreting it for themselves. ‘Protestants helped valorise married life as a praiseworthy occupation for women’ – while they ‘closed off the celibate life of the cloister as a valid option’. But note the advance of the next century in women’s education, in noble and bourgeois households. Evidence for the years around the Revocation reinforces the impression of a feminine role that was both staunch and heroic. 20. Colloquies, pp. 217–18. 21. For her see Nancy Roelker, Queen of Navarre: Jeanne d’Albret, 1528–1572 (Cambridge, Mass., 1968). 22. Monluc, ed. Roy, p. 204. Monluc continues: ‘for he was no great divine, any more than I was’. 23. See, with reference particularly to his political role, N.M. Sutherland, ‘Antoine de Bourbon, King of Navarre and the French Crisis of Authority, 1559–1562’, in Princes, Politics and Religion, 1547–1589 (London, 1984). 24. Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft (London, 1949; 1954 trans.) p. 89. No one was better qualified to say it. Jew, soldier 1914–18, lover of France, its people and history; scholar of wide-­ranging interests, best known for Feudal Society and French Rural History, founder member of Annales, he joined the Resistance in Lyons and was shot just before the Liberation.

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13 Towards War   1. Charles expressed at Worms in 1521 the sense of duty, not necessarily to the Pope, but to the church. He had resolved ‘to set my kingdoms and dominions, my friends, my body, my blood, my life and my soul upon it.’ Karl Brandi, The Emperor Charles V, trans. C.V. Wedgwood (London, 1939) p. 133.   2. Little scope here for conspiracy theorists. It was an accident though his opponent, Gabriel de Montgomery, Captain of the Scots Guard, fled the court, decided for the Huguenots and was followed by a number of his Norman fidèles. He fought ruthlessly in several campaigns, notably against Monluc in Béarn.   3. For the changing meaning of the term and the evolution of something resembling a party see pp. 187–8.   4. J.H.M. Salmon, Society in Crisis: France in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1975) p. 133. Shortly after du Bourg’s execution, president Minard, one of the judges, was assassinated.   5. N.M. Sutherland, ‘Catherine de Medici and the Ancien régime’ in Princes, Politics and Religion, 1547–1589 (London, 1984) is a sympathetic but balanced analysis of her character and difficulties. Also, ibid., a robust defence: ‘Catherine de Medici: The Legend of the Wicked Italian Queen’, pp. 237–50. Her article, ‘Calvinism and the Conspiracy of Amboise’, History, 47 (1962) pp. 111–38, makes plain the complicity of some Huguenot pastors, though not of Calvin.   6. T.H.L. Parker, John Calvin (London, 1975) p. 148.   7. It is likely, living in a society familiar with classical history, that d’Aubigné was aware of the symbolism of the Carthaginian story. For his later importance as Huguenot chronicler see p. 219 and n. 9.   8. Quoted by Mack P. Holt, The French Wars of Religion (Cambridge, 1995) p. 43. He makes very clear the critical importance of the conspiracy making probable, if not inevitable, the civil war to come.   9. Ibid. p. 43–4. 10. Ibid. p. 45. Michel l’Hôpital, former conseilleur in Parlement and chancellor of Marguerite de France in Berry, was nominated on the recommendation of Catherine’s friend, the duchesse de Montpensier, enemy to the Guise. For the study of a lawyer-­ statesman, reverent towards the past but active in legal reform; not sympathetic to Protestantism but concerned above all for the safety of the state, see Robert Descimon, ed., and his introduction to Discours pour la majorité de Charles IX et trois autres discours (Paris, 1993). Seong–Hak Kim, ‘The Chancellor’s Crusade: Michel l’Hôpital and the Parlement of Paris’, French History, vol.7, no. 1 (1993) pp. 1–30. Her contention is that L’Hôpital’s prime concern was to restore the integrity of royal justice. 11. Michel l’Hôpital, Document 1, in R.J. Knecht, The French Wars of Religion, 1559–1598 (London, 1989) p. 102. 12. Respected member of the Company of Pastors and theologian, des Gallars had worked with Calvin on translations and wrote biblical commentaries. Throckmorton, acting for Elizabeth and Coligny, aware of the importance of English support, wanted him at Poissy. His correspondence is a prime source for proceedings at the colloquy. See Jeannine Olson, ‘Nicholas des Gallars and the Colloquy of Poissy’, H.S.P., vol. 28, no. 5 (2007). 13. Philip Benedict and Virginia Reinburg, ‘Religion and the Sacred’, in Holt, ed., Renaissance and Reformation France, p. 146. 14. ‘The Cardinal of Lorraine and the Colloquy of Poissy: A Reassessment’, in Sutherland, Princes, Politics and Religion, pp. 113–38. See also pp. 142–3. 15. These issues are explored by Luc Racaut in ‘The Sacrifice of the Mass and the Redefinition of Catholic Orthodoxy during the French Religious Wars’, French History, vol. 24, no. 1 (Feb. 2010) pp. 20–39. He points out that the characteristic Late Mediaeval devotion was to the sacrifice of the cross in the mass, not, as Trent affirmed, a distinct and further sacrifice. 16. Du Tillet’s history of the Albigensian crusade and the destruction of Cathar heresy was only the foremost instance of a writer using the crusade as an argument against

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toleration. On this topic see Luc Racaut, ‘The Polemical Use of the Albigensian Crusade during the Wars of Religion’, French History, vol. 13, no. 3 (1999) pp. 261–79. Protestant martyrologists would turn the tables on the Catholics by defending the validity of some of their ideas, including the naming the Pope as Antichrist, that would be adopted by the Huguenot synod of 1602. See pp. 222, 227. 17. Stuart Carroll, Noble Power during the French Wars of Religion (Cambridge, 1998) pp. 112–13. He is writing specifically about the Guise affinity and the Catholic cause in Normandy but these words elegantly define the complex interrelation of religious and secular interests characteristic of France. 14 A Kingdom Divided   1. Étienne Pasquier, Lettres historiques pour les années 1556–1594, ed. Dorothy Thickett (Geneva, 1966) pp. 98, 100. Parisian lawyer and historian Pasquier is a valuable witness to opinion in the capital.   2. David Potter, ‘The French Protestant Nobility in 1562’, French History, vol. 15, no. 3 (2001) pp. 307–28, has drawn on the list given to Cecil – to whom it was of high interest as he weighed the question of intervention – and compares it with another list that has been mainly used, drawn up principally by Beza, which gives fewer names. From 232 entries listed he offers some basic information about 178 and identification by region for 134. His calculation of followers and others more or less independent leads him to the figure 4,272.   3. Blaise de Monluc: Commentaires, ed. Ian Roy (London, 1971) p. 205.   4. Ibid. p. 206.   5. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Public Papers, 7 April 1954 (Washington DC, 1960) p. 383.   6. Monluc, ed. Roy, p. 202.   7. For the experience of Tours see David Nicholls, ‘Protestants, Catholics and Magistrates in Tours, 1562–15: The Making of a Catholic City during the Religious Wars’, French History vol. 8, no. 1 (1994) p. 143.   8. Ibid. p. 33. Like other studies, that of Tours shows that each one is quite different: if there is a common feature among cities where Huguenots dwindled to an oppressed minority it is that mutual hatred and suspicion would last and continue to fuel conflict over civic space and religious customs.   9. For much of what follows see Penny Roberts, A City in Conflict. Troyes during the French Wars of Religion (Manchester, 1996) and her absorbing picture of a city in religious conflict. 10. In a wider context and longer time frame see W. Beik’s account of the phenomenon in Urban Protest in Seventeenth-Century France: The Culture of Retribution (Cambridge, 1997). 11. Among numerous pieces elaborating on the metaphor of the body that of Jean Boucher may be thought more than sufficient: heresy was ‘this contagion that stinks everywhere, this cancer that invades everything, this gangrene that devours all, this leprosy that infects everything’. 12. Not usually women. Sometimes they were left for long periods, being deemed more likely to be accepted or just less visible. This pattern would become familiar and survive up to and after the Revocation. For a comparative case see J.M. Davies, ‘Persecution and Protestantism: Toulouse 1562–1575: Commentaires’, Historical Journal, 22 (1979) pp. 48–9. 15 Battle, Murder and Deadly Consequences   1. Blaise de Monluc, ed. Ian Roy (London, 1971) p. 205. His view of matters was that of many Catholics: ‘’Tis you ministers are the authors of his godly work under colour of the gospel’.   2. ‘The collapse of royal authority’ is no empty phrase. The title page of Parlement’s remonstrance addressed to Catherine after the Edict of St Germain carried Christ’s words in St Matthew’s Gospel (12: 25): ‘Every kingdom divided against itself is brought

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  3.

  4.   5.   6.   7.

  8.   9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20.

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to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand.’ Quoted and translated in Anne Finley-­Crosthwaite, ‘Henry IV and the Diseased Body Politic’, in Princes and Princely Culture, 1450–1650, ed. M. Gosman, A. Macdonald and A. Vanderjagt (Leiden, 2003) p. 134. Nicholas Throckmorton (1515–71) wrote to Cecil, for Elizabeth to see: ‘You must animate and solicit the Princes Protestant with speed by all means you can, not to suffer the Protestants to be in this realm suppressed.’ (In Penry Williams, The Later Tudors, England 1547–1603, Oxford, 1995, p. 241.) The costly failure of the English to assist materially to relieve the siege of Rouen would be enough to persuade Elizabeth to hold out against future pressure from her Protestant councillors. N. Sutherland, The Huguenot Struggle for Recognition (New Haven, 1980) is valuable for a succinct account of the wars and detailed analysis of the successive settlements. Philip Benedict, Rouen during the Wars of Religion (Cambridge, 1981) p. 102. Ibid. p. 104. The comment applies more generally to Huguenot communities. N.M. Sutherland, ‘The Assassination of François duc de Guise’, in Princes, Politics and Religion (London, 1984) p. 139. A closely reasoned essay (pp. 139–55) it is commensurate with the significance of the event Jérémie Foa, ‘An Unequal Apportionment: The Conflict over Space between Protestants and Catholics at the Beginning of the Wars of Religion’, French History, vol. 20, no. 4 (2006) pp. 356–68 with case histories that show the disadvantages commonly faced by Huguenots; also, the implications: the struggle over space meant more than petty disputes for ‘what was at stake was not only security in this world and survival in the next but also the social reproduction of the group’ (p. 385). From his Chronique de la ville de Troyes et de la Champagne durant les guerres de religion (1524–94), 2 vols (Reims, 2000) II, 539. For which see pp. 298–9. Mack P. Holt, The French Wars of Religion (Cambridge, 1995) p. 57. For a comprehensive account of the lit see Sarah Hanley, The lit de justice of the Kings of France: Constitutional Ideology in Legend, Ritual, and Discourse (Princeton, 1983). For this episode p. 154. Holt, The French Wars of Religion, pp. 59–60. Ibid. p. 60. Penny Roberts, ‘Huguenot Petitioning during the Wars of Religion’, in Raymond A. Mentzer and Andrew Spicer, eds, Society and Culture in the Huguenot World, 1559–1685 (Cambridge, 2002), p. 62. Holt, The French Wars of Religion, p. 62. Henri, duc d’Anjou, Catherine’s third son, next in line of succession and (1574–89) future Henry III. Pascal Rambeaud, ‘The Refugees in La Rochelle during the Third War of Religion, 1568–1570’, French History vol. 14, no. 1 (2000) shows that they mainly came from the Huguenot élite and their servants: predominant were merchants, noblemen, lawyers, sailors, pastors and artisans. Their presence, he concludes, made it likely that they would have conveyed to the Rochelais ‘a deep sense of belonging to a reformed religious community and a reinforcement of their faith’. Ferdinand Alvarez de Toledo, duke of Alva (1508–82), had a military record second to none by 1567 when Philip II sent him to Flanders with a large army to restore order. When he left, in 1573, he had not succeeded. Brutal repression had achieved a plainer division between northern and southern provinces and the former were in open revolt. Meanwhile a large number of Protestants had emigrated to England, establishing a precedent for later waves of emigrants from religious persecution. For this redoubtable warrior see p. 201. The papers of the notable family of Saint-­Sulpice, whose lands lay between Cahors and Figeac, are revealing about the scale of depredations, the cruelty of seigneurs and the wretched state of the peasants. For which, and for the details of military operations in

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21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

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this extended war see J.H.M. Salmon, Society in Crisis: France in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1975) pp. 174–7. Insights into her character are offered through her correspondence with a fidèle and warrior the vicomte de Gourdon. They have been dismissed as later forgeries but a strong case is made for them as genuine expressions of her biblical mindset and zeal for the cause by David M. Bryson in ‘The Vallant Letters of Jeanne d’Albret: Fact or Forgery?’, French History, vol. 13, no. 2 (1999) pp. 161–86. The visitor to this small town, typical of others affected by the wars, will find that the Huguenots still figure largely in Catholic guides, notably for the sacking of the Cluniac abbey. For the synod of 1559 see p. 124. For the Discipline see pp. 125 and 295ff. Some answers to this question will be found in James B. Wood, The Army of the King: Warfare, Soldiers and Society during the Wars of Religion in France, 1562–1576 (Cambridge, 1996). See p. 262ff. See Philippa Woodcock, ‘The Fortified Parish Church: Pacification, Protection or Provocation during the French Wars of Religion’, French History, vol. 24, no. 4 (2010) pp. 501–24. Her research related to the diocese of Le Mans where Huguenots in retreat towards Normandy, in 1562, left a trail of destruction.

16 The Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day   1. The words, unsourced, stay in my mind. They may stand for all the innocent victims of war and the most cruel to families – civil war.   2. The issues have been intensively explored and debated. I find convincing N.M. Sutherland’s revisionist view, based on her unrivalled knowledge of contemporary diplomacy, of Catherine as innocent at least of the main charge of instigating the murder of Coligny: The Massacre of St. Bartholomew and the European Conflict, 1559–1572 (London, 1972). Standing in the long line of those who have seen Catherine as culpable, jealous of Coligny’s influence and fearful of the possibility of a French invasion of the Netherlands is Janine Garrisson-d’Estèbe: Tocsin pour un massacre: la saison de Saint-­Barthélemy (Paris, 1968) and her view has received support from several French historians, notably Marc Venard, ‘Arrêtez le massacre’, Revue d’histoire modern et contemporaine, vol. 39 (1992) pp. 645–61. For Denis Crouzet, La Nuit de la Saint-­ Barthélemy: un rêve perdu de la Renaissance (Paris, 1994) the important question should not be who needed to have Coligny killed but why. He extends the familiar idea of a cleansing to that of a spirit akin to that of crusade against Huguenots perceived as a deformity within the body politic. In that light the massacre becomes an intelligible, even virtuous act. Perhaps the story should be left to speak for itself and readers to draw their own conclusions. There is no lack of contemporary evidence of fanaticism and ‘virtuous’ killing.   3. Or to piece a story together from necessarily scrappy impressions. Jacques-­Auguste de Thou, a moderate Catholic was sickened by the sight of blood. He admitted that it was four days before he ventured out of his house. Mémoires depuis 1553 jusqu’en 1601. Nouvelle collection des mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de France, ed. Michaud et Poujoulat, series I, vol. VII (Paris, 1838) p. 276. The prime source for Huguenots would be Jean Crespin, Histoire des martyrs persecutez et mis à mort pour la Verité de l’evangile depuis le temps des apostres jusque à present (Geneva, 1619). Like the Protestant memoirist Simon Goulart, Mémoires de l’état de France sous Charles IX (Middleburg, 1578), he would be well informed about the victims, reliable about names and, allowing for exaggeration and bias, at least about some of the stories he retails. On the other side the priest, Claude Haton, Mémoires contenant le récit des événéments accomplis de 1553 à 1582, ed. Félix Bourquelot, 2 vols (Paris, 1857) offers valuable insights into the Catholic mentality and the urge to purify the polluter, as in his account of the treatment of Coligny’s body, Mémoires contenant, II, pp. 680–1.

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  4. These questions are addressed by N.M. Sutherland, ‘Coligny in the French Civil Wars’, in Princes, Politics and Religion (London, 1984) pp. 157–81.   5. As prédicateur au Roi, Vigor was blamed by Huguenots as being especially responsible for renewed persecution. They noted that his reward was to be made archbishop of Narbonne. For his role in the Massacre see Barbara B. Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-Century Paris (New York and Oxford, 1991) pp. 152–8.   6. Quoted in Mack P. Holt, The French Wars of Religion (Cambridge, 1995) p. 79.   7. Denis Crouzet, Les Guerriers de Dieu: la violence au temps des troubles e religion (vers 1525 vers 1610), 2 vols (Paris, 1990) pp. 40–1.   8. For this incident and its significance (and for a good account of events in Paris) see Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross, pp. 85–8. Also her ‘Prologue to Massacre: Popular Unrest in Paris, 1557–72’, American Historical Review, vol. 90 (1985) pp. 1061–91.   9. Charles IX appeared to support this view when he went to Parlement on 16 August and assured them that everything that had been done was by his express command. 10. Recounted by him, Memoirs of Sully (English trans., London, 1812) I, pp. 29–34. Subjective but as authentic as those of an eyewitness in much of what is described, the memoirs provide an invaluable commentary on the period of civil war and of his subsequent ministry. 11. He had been censured by the Sorbonne, despite the protection of the cardinal of Bourbon, for views held as lecturer in Classics at the Collège Royale. 12. Family tradition: retailed to me by Maurice Balme. 13. Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross, quoting Haton, Mémoires II, 680. Three years earlier, after sentence had been pronounced by Parlement it had been carried out in absentia on a straw dummy dressed in his colours and painted to resemble him. 14. The reader may also think of the Crouzet thesis (see p. 196 and n. 5) with the perpetrators inspired by some private vision of acting as God’s avenging angels against heretics, considered as less than human and as agents of the Devil. 15. See Philip Benedict, ‘The Saint Bartholomew’s Massacres in the Provinces’, Historical Journal, vol. 21 (1978) pp. 205–25. Beyond doubt many thought that the king ordered the Massacre and that it was a public duty to carry it through. 16. Mack P. Holt, The Duke of Anjou and the Politique Struggle during the Wars of Religion (Cambridge, 1986) p. 20. 17. Ibid. Three thousand is Benedict’s estimate for the provinces but in his essay ‘The Wars of Religion’ in Mack P. Holt ed., Renaissance and Reformation France (Oxford, 2002) p. 156, he concludes that ‘perhaps 10,000 victims died in all’. Twenty-­five years on and a larger estimate. The discrepancy also conveys the difficulty of computing when there was much random killing and hysteria on both sides. Those affected were in no position to judge. Wrote one terrified escapee in Geneva, ‘fifty thousand have been slaughtered in France in the space of these last ten days’. It was the kind of message that was spread abroad. In an age less precise about statistics, such a figure was widely accepted and – with gruesome tales that needed little invention and natural Protestant colouring – left much to be modified by later historians. 18. Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross, pp. 142–3. Sureau, a prominent minister who had already been arrested, then exiled to the provinces, was a man of conscience who agonised over the faith. In 1574, blaming himself for the damage he had done, he abjured again. But he did not return to ministry. 17 A Failing State   1. Quoted from Huguenot constitution of 1572: ‘the reign of Satan . . . destroyed, extirpated and abolished among the faithful, the true children of light’.   2. Orange and Navarre were the most notable; other valuable sources of supply and shelter were Gex, Bouillon’s Sedan, Metz, even the Channel Islands.

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  3. See the article by Glenn S. Sunshine, ‘French Protestantism on the Eve of St Bartholomew: The Ecclesiastical Discipline of the French Reformed Churches, 1571–1572, French History vol. 4, no. 3 (1990) pp. 340–77.   4. See pp. 236ff.   5. I venture on the metaphor since the evidence from letters and sermons suggests that this is characteristic of Huguenot self-­perception and language. They could look to St Paul, Corinthians, 3: 16, ‘You are God’s temple, where the spirit of God dwells’ (New English Bible).   6. See p. 229ff and n. 295.   7. Of La Noue, Sir Roger Williams, Elizabeth’s Welsh commander, said that he had taught him all he knew. He was ‘known to be one of the worthiest and most famous that Europe bred in those days’. Howell A. Lloyd, The Rouen Campaign, 1590–1592 (Oxford, 1973) p. 73, no. 60.   8. The topic is explored fruitfully, with a wealth of illustrative quotation, by Penny Roberts, in ‘The Languages of Peace during the French Wars of Religion’, Cultural and Social History, vol. 4, no. 3 (2007) pp. 297–315.   9. In another valuable article, ‘The Kingdom’s Two Bodies? Corporeal Rhetoric and Royal Authority during the Religious Wars’, French History, vol. 21 (2007) pp. 147–64, Penny Roberts explores the way in which the debate about the nature of the body politic acquired a new urgency in the Religious Wars because of the way in which the king was associated with the well-­being of the kingdom, in traditional patriarchal style but now, with corporeal imagery, as physician to the realm. 10. For this view see P. Benedict, ‘The Dynamics of Protestant Militancy,’ in P. Benedict, G. Marnef, H. van Nierop and M. Venard, eds, Reformation, Revolt and Civil War in France and the Netherlands, 1565–1585 (Amsterdam, 1999) pp. 233–54. 11. On petitioning see also p. 161. 12. In Anti-­Machiavel (1576). 13. Holt, The French Wars of Religion, p. 99. 14. For the ensuing summary I have followed the account in ibid. p. 99 ff. See Doc 7 in R. Knecht, The French Wars of Religion (Harlow 2010) 108–9, for extracts from the Constitution. 15. It is put in this way by Garrisson, Les Protestants. 16. The author was almost certainly Nicolas Barnaud. 17. Mark Greengrass, France in the Age of Henry IV (London, 1984) p. 14. 18. For his significant role see p. 187 and n. 23. 19. Published in 1573. For early development of resistance theory see pp. 19–20. 20. In Du droit des magistrats sur les sujets (1574). 21. Entitled Discours politiques des diverses puissances establies de Dieu au monde. Also see Sarah Hanley, ‘The French Constitution Revised: Representative Assemblies and Resistance Right in the Sixteenth Century’, in Mack P. Holt, ed., Society and Institutions in Early Modern France (Athens, GA, 1991) pp. 36–58. 22. Already seen to be in the European mainstream of Protestant political theory. See also pp. 221 and pp. 231. 23. Before his elder brother’s death known as Montmorency–Damville, duc Henri (1534– 1614) was probably motivated more by antagonism towards the Guise and Henry III than by sympathy for Protestantism. But his support of and friendship with Henry of Navarre would be vital after 1589, in his capacity of governor of Languedoc, in securing the south for the king. Henry rewarded him in 1602 with his father’s office of Constable. 24. Holt, The French Wars of Religion, p. 104. 25. Son of Frederick, Count Palatine, more mercenary than knight-­errant, prepared for a price, to lend his army to Protestant paymasters, English or Dutch. 26. see pp. 236–7 for the later development and practice of this institution. 27. The duchies and revenues of Anjou (with the ducal title), Touraine and Berry, with an annual pension of 300,000 livres. Holt, The French Wars of Religion, pp. 106–7. Also, for a further revision of the proceedings, Holt, Duke of Anjou (Cambridge, 1986) pp. 63–7.

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418 28. 29. 30. 31.

32.

33.

34. 35.

36.

37. 38. 39.

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Holt, The French Wars of Religion, p. 109. Ibid. p. 110. See p. 195ff for the future history and significance of the League, La Sainte-­Union. Jean Bodin (1530–96) had spent formative years in the household of Alençon. The central idea of the Commonwealth is that there has to be a single authority in the state, in which are united legislative, executive and judicial powers. In the long term the theory would prove to be prophetic and his work the foundation and text of absolutism. Immediately his argument sustained those of politique persuasion in government who looked for a strong monarchy capable of directing institutional reform. For a helpful translation, selection and commentary on the Commonwealth see Bodin, Six Books of the Commonwealth, trans. and selected by M.J. Tooley (Oxford, 1967). Pierre L’Estoile, Parisian, clerk in Parlement, moderate Catholic of conservative and politique inclination, chary of extremes and stern critic of Catherine, later supporter of Henry of Navarre, kept a diary of events, with pungent comments, that has been a valuable source for events and mentalités during the period of League ascendancy, then the reign of Henry IV. Journal de l’Estoile pour le règne de Henri III, ed. Louis-­Raymond Lefèvre (Paris, 1943) and Journal de l’Estoile pour le règne de Henri IV, ed. Louis-­ Raymond Lefèvre and André Martin, 3 vols (Paris, 1948–60). Jean-­Louis Nogaret, duc de L’ Epernon, was, with Joyeuse, the favourite – archi-­mignon – on whom Henry III placed greatest reliance for the creation of a third, court party to combat the factions. His rivalry with Joyeuse inhibited the effective action that the king expected and he moved towards supporting Navarre. Greengrass, France in the Age of Henry IV, pp. 18 and 19. Most notable among reform-­minded ministers, besides Philippe Huraut de Cheverny, chancellor from 1583, were Nicolas de Neufville, seigneur de Villeroy, Claude Pinart, confidant of Catherine, and Pierre Brûlart. As mountains of correspondence record, they worked extremely hard, both in successive negotiations and treaty-­making and in reforms like that of the guilds in 1581. The failures of government lie in the political sphere, at the summit. The administrative expertise available to the sovereign encouraged activists in the Notables and Estates to press for reform. Villeroy would be Henri III’s confidant, serving him with outstanding ability and loyalty but increasing exasperation until his dismissal in 1588. For his later career see N.M. Sutherland, The French Secretaries of State in the Age of Catherine de Medici (London, 1962) p. 185 ff. For the Razats in Provence see J.H.M. Salmon, Society in Crisis: France in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1975) pp. 238–9; for the Vivarais, J.H.M. Salmon, ‘Peasant Revolt in Vivarais, 1575–80’, in Renaissance and Revolt: Essays in the Intellectual and Social History of Early Modern France (Cambridge, 1987) p. 217 ff. For the Dauphiné, E. Le Roy Ladurie, Carnival in Romans, trans. Mary Feeney (New York, 1979). Quoted by Holt, French Wars of Religion, pp. 113–15. For a full description of atrocities, thefts and all kinds of evils’ and the cruel conduct of nobles, see Salmon, Society in Crisis, pp. 208–16. Le Roy Ladurie, Carnival, offers a wide-­ranging social and cultural picture out of events at this city. Ibid. p. 254.

18 The Struggle Intensifies   1. In 1585, following the treaty of Nemours. One of a number of remarks that would contribute to the legend.   2. L’Estoile, Journal de l’Estoile pour le règne de Henri III, ed. L.R. Lefèvre (Paris, 1943) p. 357.   3. The spiritual aspirations and political ideas of the Holy League have been intensively studied (see Further Reading). Recently scholars have focused on the social composition, the nature and aspirations of the bourgeoisie seconde, the reasons for joining, as between lawyers and merchants, or different levels in the legal profession. See French History, vol. 17, no. 4 (2003), pp. 343–424, and the articles there by Hilary. J. Bernstein, Mack P. Holt

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  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.   8.

  9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

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and Sara Beam, based on research into families and, weighty, pp. 388–424, by Robert Descimon, a specialist in this field, writing about the bourgeois of Paris. The main issues are clearly explained in Mack P. Holt, The French Wars of Religion (Cambridge, 1995) pp. 123–55. For a local case see Mark Greengrass, ‘The Sainte-­Union in the Provinces: The Case of Toulouse,’ Sixteenth Century Journal vol. 14 (1983) pp. 467–93. The questions raised lie in the margin of Huguenot history, so here are reduced to a footnote. It was how the League acted that would concern the average Huguenot. But its degree of militancy, its willingness in the end to come to terms with the rule of Henry IV, its persisting attitudes, affected the Huguenot experience. Seize. For analysis of this radical movement see J.H.M. Salmon, ‘The Paris Sixteen, 1584–1594: The Social Analysis of a Revolutionary Movement’, Journal of Modern History, 44 (1972) pp. 540–76. The Seize were far from being the bourgeois fanatics and troublemakers of L’Estoile and Pasquier’s description. As their more substantial members dropped out they did, however, become more radical to the point of suggesting, as in one pamphlet (1593), that the hereditary nobility should be replaced by an élite of uncompromising Catholics. For Crouzet’s views and arguments, developed with convincing evidence from the rhetoric and folk language of the time, may be explored in Denis Crouzet’s Les Guerriers de Dieu: La violence au temps des troubles de religion (vers 1525–vers 1610), 2 vols (Paris, 1990) vol. 2. Théodore Agrippe d’Aubigné (1552–1630), of noble family of Saintonge, soldier, poet, chronicler, satirist, was a severe judge of what he lamented as deviation from strict Calvinist principles. He became an outspoken critic of compromising aspects of Henry IV’s rule. Sa Vie à ses enfants, with Les Tragiques, a poetic, emotional account of Huguenot troubles and, of most value as a source for Huguenot history, his Histoire universelle 1550–1601 (Amsterdam, 1616–20) form a triptych whose panels together provide an entrée into understanding of Huguenot lives and mentalités. Since he wrote the Histoire in retirement in Geneva, allowance should be made for nostalgia and prejudice. In France it was burned by the common hangman. See also p. 138. It is revealing that ‘country’ in his comment was pays not patrie. From Navarre and Béarn he could call on 300 nobles and 6,000 foot. He had several counties south of the Loire, notably Armagnac and the duchy of Albret. North of the Loire he had, with various titles, Vermandois and Beaumont, Marly and Châteauneuf. His strategic position was reinforced by the inherited governorship of Guienne. David Buisserat, Henry IV: King of France (London, 1984) p. 5. Henri I, prince de Condé became head of the family in 1568 at the age of fifteen when his father was killed at the battle of Jarnac and commander-­in-­chief of the Protestant army after 1574. Disgruntled at not securing the governorship of Picardy, in 1579, he considered joining the Guise. His son was to be an early convert to Catholicism and forcible in promoting it. Did religion ever weigh in last resort against the interest of family? François de Bonne, duc de Lesdiguières (1543–1626), head of the Dauphiné Protestants, played a vital part in Henry’s efforts to secure and defend his authority, particularly after the king’s conversion, when he remained loyal. The future duc de Bouillon, his title came from his independent seigneurie in the Auvergne. Buisserat, Henry IV, p. 10. Ibid. p. 12. Ibid. p. 17. Ibid. L’Estoile, Journal de L’Estoile pour le règne de Henri III, p. 446. N.M. Sutherland, The French Secretaries of State in the Age of Catherine de Medici (London, 1962) p. 271. Ibid. p. 273. Ibid.

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21. Sebastien le Moine (1688–1737) painted this romantic portrait at a time when the myth of the great king had been reinforced by disillusion following military defeat and financial loss. 22. See p. 168 for earlier manifestation. 23. Greengrass, p. 49. 24. Ibid. p. 70. 25. His views are considered, along with those of his friend Etienne La Boétie (for whom see p. 143–4) in a revealing study by Malcolm C. Smith, Montaigne and Religious Freedom: The Dawn of Pluralism (Geneva, 1991). 26. Quoted in M.M. Martin The Making of France (orig. edn 1948; trans. London, 1951) p. 137. 27. St Paul addressing the men of Athens (Acts 17: 3 ff.). Paul had noticed an altar bearing the inscription; “ ‘To an unknown God”: what you worship but do not know, I now proclaim.’ 28. Greengrass, p. 71. 29. Holt, The French Wars of Religion, p. 133, from L’Estoile, Journal de l’Estoile pour le règne de Henri III, p. 604. 30. With so much of tragedy in the story of Henry III it is not surprising that there have been efforts towards understanding if not rehabilitation. See, in Keith Cameron, ed., From Valois to Bourbon. State and Society in Early Modern France (Exeter, 1989), Sidney Anglo, ‘Henri III: Some Determinants of Vituperation’ where much blame is shifted on to the Italian influence. Reliably N.M. Sutherland stands by the common view of Henry as feckless and inconsistent, outmanoeuvred by the other leaders. She sees a form of manic depression, with extreme episodes that severely tried his ministers. 31. De justa Henricii Tertii abdicatione de Francorum regno (Paris, 1589). 32. Some lively pages in Barbara Diefendorf, ‘An Age of Gold: Parisian Women, the Catholic League and the Age of Renewal’, in Wolfe, ed., Changing Identities, in Early Modern France, offer a striking portrait of the duchesses, Nemours, Guise widow, Montpensier, her daughter. They financed the League, vilified the king and rejoiced at his death. L’Estoile reported that Nemours climbed into the pulpit of Notre Dame ‘to harangue the people about the death of a tyrant’. 33. The murder had conformed reassuringly to biblical precedent: had not the deliverer Ehud stabbed an idolatrous king Eglon in the belly? The case is cited by Thomas Aquinas but not wholly commended: ‘It is the patience of the innocent sufferer that wins credit in God’s sight’. R. Mousnier, The Assassination of Henry IV (Paris, 1964, trans, 1973) p. 76. 19 Henry IV, King of France   1. D. Buisseret, Henry IV: King of France (London, 1984) p. 12.   2. The most favourable to date to the Huguenots. See p. 190.   3. Louis de Gonzague, duc de Nevers had inherited the title via his Italian wife after the main line had become extinct in 1566. For J. Russell Major, the family’s story illustrates the follies associated with the high nobility: ‘expensive entertainment, gambling, large dowries, and conspicuous consumption were coupled with participation in foreign wars when no domestic conflicts were available’. From Renaissance Monarchy to Absolute Monarchy: French Kings, Nobles and Estates (Baltimore, 1994) pp. 85–6. From grateful service to Charles IX to League sympathies but never wholesale commitment, to cautious support of Henry IV, a diplomatic role in his conversion and an executive role in the conseil des finances, consistent only in Catholicism, Nevers, followed by his son Charles, would be loyal to the crown – but on his terms. ‘Like the Leaguers whom he personally despised, Nevers made the welfare of his soul central to his dealings with Henry IV’s supporters.’ From Michael Wolfe, ‘Piety and Political Allegiance: The duc de Nevers and the Protestant Henry IV’, French History, vol. 2, no. 1 (1988) pp. 1–22. A. Wolfe’s article ranges beyond the particular dilemma of this notable dévot to the whole

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  4.

  5.   6.   7.   8.   9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

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question of conflicting loyalties: his stress on conscience offers a salutary corrective to facile comment (mea culpa) on aristocratic motives and conduct. Armand de Gontaut, maréchal de Biron, was foremost among those experienced soldiers who came over to Henry IV on his accession and served him well on the battlefield. For his son Charles see p. 233. The support of Henri de Bourbon, duc de Montpensier was no less important: with him came the family name and the support that he hoped to assure from the nobles in Normandy. See p. 195ff. Étienne Pasquier’s Lettres historiques pour les années 1556–1594, ed. Dorothy Thickett (Geneva, 1996) p. 448. Mack P. Holt, The French Wars of Religion (Cambridge, 1995) p. 134. Charles, duc de Mayenne (1554–1611) became head of the League after the assassination of his elder brother the duc de Guise and led the fight against Henry IV until 1595. See pp. 210–11. Buisseret, Henry IV, p. 29. Martin, Making of France, p. 142. He was, for a time, prévôt des marchands. Guillaume du Vair was a humanist and conservative parlementaire, admired for his oratory, whose opposition to the Seize was influential and whose later assertion of the Salic law against the party of the League contributed to its final defeat. Le Bret’s Souverainté du roi (1632) was nearly as extreme a statement of Divine Right as anything that came later. Bossuet figures later, see pp. 331–2 and p. 358, as the most influential in the school of Divine Right absolutism and, crucially important, as theologian and courtier in Huguenot fortunes in the years around the Revocation. For whom see pp. 309–10. For the Sainte Union and the city’s experience of its activities see P. Benedict, Rouen during the Wars of Religion (Cambridge, 1981) pp. 168–232. For the siege and its wider implications see Howell A. Lloyd, The Rouen Campaign, 1590–1592: Politics, Warfare and the Early Modern State (Oxford, 1973). For the experience of Toulouse see Mark Greengrass, ‘The Sainte-­Union in the Provinces: The Case of Toulouse’, Sixteenth Century Journal, vol. 14 (1983) pp. 467–96. Holt, The French Wars of Religion, p. 146. This and other questions of conscience and statecraft are explored in Michael Wolfe, The Conversion of Henry IV: Politics, Power and Religious Belief in Early Modern France (Cambridge, Mass., 1993). For the importance of the royal entry – right up to De Gaulle! – see Michel de Waele, ‘Paris est libre. Entries as Reconciliations: From Charles VII to Charles de Gaulle’, French History, vol. 23, no. 4 (2009) pp. 425–45. Charles de Cossé, comte de Brissac, offers a good example of the potential rewards going for the better connected or more energetic among nobles. He was to receive 1.5 million livres; according to Sully. Joyeuse got nearly as much. As in Matthew 25 and James 1: the latter echoes Christ’s commands ‘to go to the help of orphans and widows in their distress and keep oneself untarnished by the world’. For the case of Nîmes see Raymond A. Mentzer, ‘Organisational Endeavour and Charitable Impulse in Sixteenth-Century France: The case of Protestant Nîmes’, French History, vol. 5 no. 1 (1991) pp. 1–29. See also p. 200. For example certain royal offices to be open to nomination by Protestants, not just purchase by individuals. For the ‘informal network’ described by Greengrass that sustained morale as well as the party’s practical concerns see p. 279. Lancelot Voisin de La Popelinière, gentilhomme, soldier, had been close enough to events and Huguenot personalities to provide interesting evidence for the conduct of the war. Early editions of his Histoire de France had been dedicated to Catherine and

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Henry III. Some of his Huguenot friends at La Rochelle thought his account unhelpful to their cause, and forced him to make public confession and revisions. His ideal was that of the humanist: to seek the truth without prejudice. He believed that historical truth contributed to political stability. His independence did not commend him to Henry IV but, thanks to Sully, he was given a pension in old age. For the conflict between contrasting ideas of the historian’s responsibility, for the good of the public or for the prestige of monarchy, see Orest Ranum, Artisans of Glory (Chapel Hill, 1980) pp. 91 ff. Mémoires de Claude Haton . . . 1553 à 1582, ed. Felix Bourguelot (Paris, 1857). Les Misères de guerre is the apt title of Jacques Callot’s series of engravings based on Lorraine in the 1630s. Little change there. Charles, of an illegitimate Valois line, was a focus for successive conspiracies’ eventually paid for that of 1605 and had to endure the Bastille till 1616. Gaspard de Schomberg, comte de Nanteuil, had been Lutheran but recently become Catholic. His credibility with the Huguenots came from his military reputation and personal service to the king. Two, Soffrey de Calignan and Méric de Vic, were moderate Catholics, typical of the men who saw in service to a reviving monarchy the main hope for society, and for their careers. They had already served well in negotiations with the League towns. The voluminous chronicles of a third, Jacques Auguste de Thou, Histoire universelle depuis 1543 jusqu’en 1607 (16 vols, London, 1684) are a prime source for the period. Henry admired his work but accepted Papal censorship in 1603 as the price to pay for good relations with Rome. It restored the north-­eastern frontier by cession of Calais, Amiens, Metz, Toul and Verdun.

20 The Edict of Nantes   1. The full text of the Edict, taken from E. Everard, The Great Pressures and Grievances of the Protestants in France (London, 1681) may be read in Roland Mousnier, The Assassination of Henry IV (London, 1973) pp. 316–63.   2. Ibid., from the preamble to the Edict.   3. Certainly reaching the million (if Béarn is included), but not much exceeding it, never again approaching the one and a half million, pre-1572. Also for later trends Philip Benedict, The Huguenot Population of France, 1600–1685: The Demographic Fate and Customs of a Religious Minority (Philadelphia, 1994). Following, whether confirming or in parts moderating, the dedicated work of Pastor Samuel Mours, summarised in Essai sommaire de géographie du Protestantisme réformé français (Paris, 1966), Benedict’s wide-­ranging work on baptismal and other records (118 churches examined), with analysis of the various trends that might affect the figures, ensures him prime place among those who have sought to estimate Huguenot numbers.   4. Payments were late and irregular from the start before being discontinued under the regency.   5. Mousnier, Assassination of Henry IV, p. 157. For his discussion of the Edict see ibid., pp. 144–51.   6. Ibid. p. 364.   7. For the full text of this speech see ibid. pp. 364–7. Defying the opposition of Parlement, on Gallican and moral grounds, he would later defend the reinstatement of the Jesuits in a skilful and persuasive speech, from which Huguenots could draw no comfort. Mousnier, Assassination of Henry IV, pp. 368–74.   8. Henry and Marguerite had been separate for some years. Marie de Medici was the daughter of Ferdinand I, Grand Duke of Tuscany. He was owed 3.5 million livres by Henry, who hoped that it would be wiped out, as a dowry. In the end around half that sum was agreed after Henry had jolted the Grand Duke by threatening to marry his mistress, the marquise de Verneuil!

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  9. Agrippa d’Aubigné, soldier and poet had been one of the foremost opponents of Henry’s leadership and was thought by Sully to have wanted to replace him as Protector by a foreign prince. His dilemma reflects that of other party loyalists. He was a patriot who had been distressed to see France tearing itself apart: ‘Vous avez, félons, ensanglantés / Le sein qui vous nourrit et qui vous a porté.’ Yet he found it hard to see that unity and peace required compromise on the king’s part. See also p. 138 and n. 7. 10. Reflecting Henry’s preference for the moderate: others so inclined serving him were his law officers Michel Hurault and Jean de Sponde. 11. Son of François Hotman (p. 127). The proposal for a colloquy (1607) was rejected by both sides as inviting apostasy. 12. Pierre de l’Estoile, Journal pour le règne de Henri IV, I, p. 521. For his views see p. 192 and n. 32. 13. See p. 183 for his earlier life, European reputation and influence. 14. Mack P. Holt, The French Wars of Religion (Cambridge, 1995) p. 176. 15. D. Buisseret, Henry IV King of France (London, 1984) p. 140. 16. As it has been by most historians, seduced perhaps by those embellishing the tradition of Henry the Great. The episode has always been thought significant, for example by Sutherland, The Huguenot Struggle for Recognition (New Haven, 1980) pp. 283–328, if only as an example of the advance of royal power at the expense of an inveterate conspirator and malcontent. E. H. Dickerman and A. M. Walker, ‘The Politics of Honour: Henry IV and the duc de Bouillon, 1602 to 1606’, French History, vol. 14, (2000) pp. 383–406, interpret the affair in the light of the period’s code of honour and (plausible for Henry IV) notions of masculinity. More balanced is the interpretation of Simon Hodson, ‘Politics of the Frontier: Henry IV, the Maréchal-­duc de Bouillon and the Sovereignty of Sedan’, French History, vol. 19, no. 4 (2005) pp. 413–39 which places more stress on Bouillon’s stature as a sovereign prince and on the just (in contemporary terms) and reasonable aspects of his conduct. 17. Annual payment of a sixtieth of estimated value to secure an officier’s right to transmit his office 18. For his critical struggle with Richelieu see p. 273. 19. For the working of the commissions see Raymond A. Mentzer, ‘The Edict of Nantes and its Institutions’, in Raymond A. Mentzer and Andrew Spicer, eds, Society and Culture in the Huguenot World, 1559–1685 (Cambridge, 2002) pp. 101–16. 21 The Regime of the Edict   1. Mark Greengrass, France in the Age of Henry IV (London, 1984) p. 81. Masterly compression of a large subject and a stimulating guide to the reign and to the monarch whose religion remained, in his words, ‘one of the mysteries of Europe’.   2. After the failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605 they could expect little sympathy from government. ‘No Popery’ was established as an enduring tradition of political and social life. In France the plot strengthened Huguenot prejudice, and the terrorist image. Religious war might end. There persisted the idea of a common Protestant front, to be strengthened after the revolt of Bohemia and the renewal of Spain’s war against the United Provinces.   3. For incidents see p. 281. For later history of the temple see pp. 280–1.   4. See Amanda Zeurich, ‘ “Speaking the King’s language”: The Huguenot Magistrates of Castres and Pau’, in Raymond Mentzer and Andrew Spicer, eds, Society and Culture in the Huguenot World, 1559–1685 (Cambridge, 2002) pp. 117–39.   5. A. Strowski, quoted in E.G. Léonard, Le Protestant Français (Paris, 1953) p. 33.   6. Léonard’s own similar view. In light of later events, see p. 304ff, and controversy round the subject, this judgement should be qualified. However, there is an interesting analogy in another situation where security seemed guaranteed – that of the Church of England after 1688 to which Léonard’s words seem pertinent.   7. The Grand Dessein owes its fame to the eighteenth-­century edition of his memoirs edited by abbé de l’Écluse des Loges which welds a variety of schemes, some

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contradictory and ill-­thought-­out, into a fairly coherent whole. His plan for the political reorganisation of Europe was unoriginal and impracticable. Most interest lies in this and other writings in his use of patrie as an indication of his vision of France. By contrast with the typical dynastic view, Henry’s of course, Sully was ‘beginning to visualise France as political entity independent of the monarchy; she was becoming a fatherland as well as a realm’ (David Buisseret, Sully, London, 1968, pp. 196–8).   8. A fragment survives of a scabrous novel. He liked dressing up, dancing, mauvais contes, and clandestine appointments: perhaps he enjoyed teasing his more staid fellow Huguenots. There was probably more snobisme, observes Buisseret than political motivation in his ambitious building at Rosny and other estates. He was also a great builder for France. He needed, like Richelieu, to show that he was considérable. And he was a great patron.   9. ‘The God of Calvinism demanded of believers not simple good works but a life of good works . . . The moral conduct of the average man was thus deprived of its planless and unsystematic character and subjected to a consistent method of conduct.’ From Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London, 1967) p. 117. 10. For further exploration of this subject of ‘Chemical Challenge’ to the Galenist orthodoxy of the Paris school that inhibited progress through experiment and observation, and its relevance to the Huguenot story, see Hugh Trevor-­Roper, Europe’s Physician: The Various Life of Sir Theodore de Mayerne (New Haven and London, 2006) pp. 60–83. A ‘various life’ indeed, and one of fame and large fortune. Not confining himself to medicine, he courted suspicion through the restless ambition, unofficial diplomacy and intrigues that made him a significant figure in the international Protestant movement. France first knew him as Turquet. He preferred Mayerne, and an English knighthood confirmed the noble status he always claimed. 22 Catholic Reformation   1. For the episode, its place in the wider political and religious context, particularly the question of tyrannicide, see R. Mousnier The Assassination of Henry IV (London, 1973), here pp. 21–6.   2. For a sympathetic view see Robin Briggs, Early Modern France (Oxford, 1977) pp. 86–9.   3. For more on this theme see Luc Racaut, ‘Religious Polemic and Huguenot Identity’, in Raymond Mentzer and Andrew Spicer, eds, Society and Culture in the Huguenot World, 1559–1685 (Cambridge, 2002) pp. 29–43.   4. Full title Histoire des martyrs persecutez et mis à mort pour la vérité de l’Evangile, depuis le temps des Apôtres jusques à l’an 1574 (Geneva, 1582). It was edited and extended in subsequent editions by Simon Goulard. For its origins and significance see also p. 000.   5. Concino Concini, husband of Leonore Galigai, Marie’s foster sister and confidante, rose with dizzy speed to the title of maréchal d’Ancre and a strategic position as lieutenant-­ général of Picardy that raised questions about his pro-­Spanish policy. He was assassinated after a palace coup in April 1617.   6. As by Henri Brémond. Vol. II of A Literary History of Religious Thought in France: The Coming of Mysticism (Paris, 1916; trans. London, 1930) is a wide-­ranging, enthusiastic, uncritical account.   7. For all aspects of Richelieu’s early life and work as a bishop the indispensable source is Joseph Bergin, The Rise of Richelieu (New Haven, 1991). For Luçon pp. 79–116.   8. For the definitive life Joseph Bergin, Cardinal de la Rochefoucauld: Leadership and Reform in the French Church (New Haven, 1987) pp. 270.   9. Elizabeth Rapley, The Dévots: Women and Church in the Seventeenth Century (Quebec, 1990) p. 20–1. She maintains convincingly, with much evidence, that religious women secured a real advance. They came to enjoy ‘opportunities for organisational activity far beyond what Protestant women were allowed’. But for the latter see my pp. 129–31. 10. Ibid., p. 5. François de La Mothe Fénelon: eventually archbishop of Cambrai and critic of Louis XIV’s government: for his dealing with Huguenots see p. 363.

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11. Canon Urbain Grandier of London was condemned for sorcery and burned. Nuns had named him as the author of their alleged possession by the Devil. Local Huguenots would have seen much in the case to confirm their view of Catholic beliefs and the cloistered life. 12. The house in Paris, not, of course that for male solitaries, Port Royal des Champs. For further history of Jansenism see p. 309–10. 13. Henri II, prince de Condé, Catholic son of Henri I, the king’s Huguenot cousin and fellow soldier, had no reason to honour the king. Charlotte, his wife had caught the king’s eye. To protect her Condé fled to the Habsburg court at Brussels. It was among the pretexts for the war prevented by Henry’s assassination. 14. César, duc de Vendôme was one of the illegitimate sons of Henry IV who could not find a satisfactory role or rewards to meet their demands. 15. From his grandmother, Isabella d’Albret. Since 1589 Béarn was part of the kingdom. 23 Ventures Too Far   1. Calvin’s fundamental principle (T.H. Parker, John Calvin (London, 1975) p. 147) but open to individual interpretation, as by Huguenot rebels convinced that they were justified in resisting the unjust ruler. For which theories see p. 206.   2. A. D. Lublinskaya, French Absolutism: The Crucial Phase, 1620–1629 (1965; trans. Cambridge, 1968) pp. 163–219. The Huguenot question is analysed in the context of her Marxist interpretation of the General Crisis in Europe, itself a contentious and much debated concept.   3. For its establishment under Jeanne d’Albret as a Protestant state see p. 164.   4. In his essay in Calvinism in Europe, ed. Andrew Pettegree, Alistair Duke and Gillian Lewis (Cambridge, 1994) p. 145ff, Mark Greengrass emphasises the vigour of the Calvinist state following its magisterial reformation but also its failure to create a lasting Huguenot community.   5. Anon. Quoted in Christian Desplat, ‘Louis XIII and the Union of Béarn to France’, pp. 68–83 in Mark Greengrass, ed., Conquest and Coalescence (London, 1991). Desplat sees the appeal of the absolutist rhetoric – and argument. Huguenots were offered conformity as an attractive option.   6. For the risings in the Cévennes after the Revocation see p. 379ff. The reader may think too of a modern resistance movement and the exploits of the Maquis.   7. David Parker, La Rochelle and the French Monarchy (London, 1980) p. 141.   8. And for the attitude of Louis XIII, see Lloyd Moote, Louis XIII: The Just (Berkeley, 1989) pp. 116–25.   9. Gustav Adolf ’s entry to Germany and subsequent victory of Breitenfeld, in October 1631, reversed the balance of power and made him – another William of Orange – the hero of Protestant Europe. 10. The duc de Luynes was the influential royal favourite, following the murder of Concini (in which he may not have been implicated). His reputation as being shallow and incompetent owed much to the hostile judgement of Richelieu. In Power and Reputation at the Court of Louis XIII: The Career and Reputation of Charles Albert, duc de Luynes, Sharon Kettering asserts that he did not turn Louis XIII against his mother, did not need to urge the king to attack the Huguenots (it was Louis’ own policy) but was a conscientious father figure to the young king. 11. To complete his title: général des églises réformées du royaume ès provinces de Languedoc et Haute Guienne et gouverneur de Montpellier. 24 The Great Siege   1. G.R.R. Treasure, Cardinal Richelieu (London, 1972) p. 102. Said to his prisoner Beaulieu-­Persac.   2. Victor L. Tapié, La France de Louis XIII et de Richelieu (Paris, 1967) p. 169. He continues: ‘was he not hesitant in his thinking, contradictory, swayed by events?’

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  3.   4.   5.

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Principle, logic, consistency may belong to propaganda. But once started on the siege he was focused, relentless. It was a great achievement – and it was his. Later (October): ‘It is certain that as long as the Huguenot party subsists in France, the king will not be absolute in his kingdom, to which his conscience obliges him and which the necessity of his people requires.’ Extracts from memorandum of May 1625 in Richard Bonney, ed., Society and Government in France under Richelieu and Mazarin, 1624–1661 (London, 1988) pp. 4–6 For the commercial and social life and its politics, David Parker, La Rochelle and the French Monarchy: Conflict and Order in Seventeenth-Century France (London, 1980) is valuable. As his subtitle suggests, his theme is wider: the siege as a landmark in the evolution of French absolutism. Quoted in Parker, La Rochelle and the French Monarchy, p. 15. Holt, Wars of Religion, quoting ‘a contemporary’, p. 191. For the later history of La Rochelle see pp. 286–7.

25 ‘The Little Flock’   1. Quoted by Joseph Bergin, The Rise of Richelieu (Manchester, 1991) p. 105. The context (1617) was an appeal by Huguenots against an attack on them by the Jesuit Père Arnoux.   2. A Relation of the State of France under Henry IV in 1609, ed. T. Birch (London, 1749) p. 441.   3. P. Chaunu, ‘Le XVIIe Siècle religieux. Réflexions préables’, Annales ESC (1967) p. 291.   4. François Leclerc du Tremblay (1577–1638), Capuchin friar as Father Joseph. Richelieu’s loyal friend and right-­hand man, he worked for him on diplomatic missions and was forced to live the same double life, between dévot conviction and a foreign policy involving alliance with a Protestant king.   5. Ferdinand II, Emperor from 1619. Pupil of the Jesuits, he was single-­minded in his drive to recover Protestant Germany for the faith and its secularised ecclesiastical states for the Empire.   6. For the Company’s oppressive initiatives in Huguenot communities see pp. 310 and 325 n. 30.   7. See Sharon Kettering, Patrons, Brokers and Clients in Seventeenth-Century France (New York, 1986) p. 142. Creating and using ministerial clientèles to govern distant provinces he anticipated the tactic which later enabled Mazarin to retain control of Provence during the Fronde’.   8. See p. 306, for example.   9. The term is variously used with reference to different experiences of Protestantism: from identity linked to social disciplining and (a German view) state-­building, to that more appropriate to the French experience, defining and enforcing particular versions of orthodoxy and building group cohesion and identity. With its implications for Huguenot communities the topic is explored by Philip Benedict in ‘Confessionalisation in France? Critical Reflections and New Evidence’, in R. Mentzer and A. Spicer, eds, Society and Culture in the Huguenot World (Cambridge, 2002) pp. 44–61. 10. Gregory Hanlon, Confession and Community in Seventeenth-Century France: Catholic and Protestant Co-­existence in Aquitaine (Philadelphia, 1993), p. 193. 11. Ibid. A central theme in Hanlon’s study. 12. Vividly retailed by William Beik, Urban Protest in Seventeenth-Century France: The Culture of Retribution (Cambridge, 1997) pp. 117–26. In his broader study, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc (Cambridge, 1985) pp. 168–72, he addresses the Huguenot issue in the framework of institutions and shows why the authorities regarded the religion as a potential menace. The consistory was forward in pursuing its goals though those Huguenots who held office tended to keep their heads down, avoiding offence. 13. Beik, Urban Protest, pp. 29ff. For graphic detail about obscenity and violence. 14. Dangerous indeed – but more if he had turned Huguenot. The family of Henri, duc de Montmorency claimed the title of premier baron chrétien. Enjoying vast patronage and

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16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

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25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

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high personal repute, presiding over a virtual court at Toulouse, he was affronted by his recent removal from the office of Admiral. His execution sent a powerful signal about the danger of rebellion. The Fronde parlementaire began in May 1648 with the union of the sovereign courts to protect the material interests of officiers and rentiers in face of what has been called ‘fiscal terrorism’, with the increasing use of intendants to extend royal authority in the provinces. It became still more serious when Paul de Gondi drew leading nobles into an oath of union with Parlement (January 1649). With a stated enemy in premier ministre Mazarin, it developed into a prolonged civil war between royal government and leading magnates, notably in the latter stages, the prince de Condé. After the coming of age of Louis XIV the crown gradually regained control. By February 1653 Mazarin was back from exile. With the full support of the king he was effectively in charge till his death in March 1661. Much has been written (see Further Reading) about the Fronde, its distinct phases, parlementaire and noble, the upheavals, the effect of civil wars and the ups and downs in the career of Mazarin. Most accessible perhaps are Lloyd Moote, The Revolt of the Judges (Princeton, 1971) and Geoffrey Treasure, Mazarin (London, 1995). Valuable is R. Mousnier’s succinct analysis, ‘Some Reasons for the Fronde’, pp. 169–200, in P.J. Coveney, ed., France in Crisis, 1620–1675 (London, 1977) and the latter’s wide-­ranging introduction, pp. 1–63. Saintonge, Angoumois, Poitou in 1636, Périgord in 1637. Beik, Urban Protest, pp. 161–2, describes the burning of their temple – a ‘culture of retribution’ – but these were folk on the defensive. For earlier Protestantism, and opposition, in Brittany see pp. 114–15. The career of Jean-­Baptiste Baltazar, sieur de Malherbe, is a prime example of a local power-­broker, maintaining control for the crown through his clientèles and highly profitable connections in the financial and official world. Geoffrey Treasure, Mazarin (London, 1995) p. 222. Ibid. Beik, Absolutism and Society, pp. 169–70. Ibid. p. 170. For the effect on La Rochelle for example, see p. 267. On Montauban, p. 242. For the wider picture, constructed with meticulous care for detail, Philip Benedict, The Huguenot Population of France, 1600–1685: The Demographic Fate and Customs of a Religious Minority (Philadelphia, 1994) pp. 50–55. He notes the contrast between the war regions and, for example, the Dauphiné, where the Huguenot population was stable or, as in Bordeaux, actually increased. In the spirit of the principle accepted there of cuius regio eius religio, princes were granted ‘territorial superiority’ (not sovereignty) ‘in matters ecclesiastical as well as political’. The ruler could determine his subjects’ religious allegiance; he was not, in Anglican mode, head of the church. For the central role of the temple in Huguenot life see Andrew Spicer, ‘Qui est de Dieu oit la parole de Dieu: the Huguenots and their Temples’, in Mentzer and Spicer, eds, Society and Culture, pp. 175–92. The full text deserves quotation. It is the quintessence of Catholic rhetoric: ‘chaires de pestilence . . . heresie, mensonge, audace, monstre et autres semblables’. Ibid. p. 179. See pp. 82–3 for further on Calvin’s views. For the significance of these terms see p. 226. E.S. de Beer, ed., The Diary of John Evelyn, 6 vols (London, 1955) II, p. 115. John Lough, ed., Locke’s Travels in France, 1675–1679 (Cambridge, 1953) p. 28. Locke’s journal is a rich source of information about French life from a keen observer – objective, meticulous, statistics-­minded. His information can often be verified from other sources though anti-­Catholic bias should be allowed for in caustic comments. A. Ivatt, ed., Memoirs and Travels of Sir John Reresby (London, 1904) p. 22. For Benoist’s later and influential role in informing the world about persecution see p. 340 and n. 9.

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26 The Eye of the Storm: Huguenot Lives and Conditions   1. Léonard, quoted in Histoire-­générale du Protestantism, 2 vols (Paris, 1961) II, p. 333.   2. As in Alençon or Loudun. Benedict, The Huguenot Population of France (Philadelphia, 1994) pp. 34–5.   3. For the diligent pastor-­historian see ibid., pp. 7–9.   4. Sir Thomas Overbury, Observations on the State of France, 1609 (1626), p. 23.   5. Locke’s Travels in France, 1675–1679, ed. John Lough (Cambridge, 1953) p. 89.   6. Benedict, Huguenot Population, p. 5.   7. Ibid. p. 77. For their continued resilience see pp. 359, 376. And bear in mind the perhaps numerous hidden ones, Protestant in mind and private practice, unwilling to be counted, more numerous after the dragonnades.   8. Ibid. p. 55. For which there is usually a particular reason: it could come down to personal influence, even an outstanding pastor. Nîmes was stable at 62% of a steadily growing city (14,000 to 18,000) between 1655 and 1684. Less significantly, Bordeaux Huguenots doubled in number, to 4% between 1630 and 1675.   9. Anon., may be biased, in Estat de la Religion en Poictou quoted by Benedict, Huguenot Population, p. 70. 10. See pp. 343–4. 11. Kevin C. Robbins, ‘Counter-­Reformation in La Rochelle, 1618–1560’, French History, vol. 9, no. 3 (1995) pp. 273–93. He observes that verdicts in the municipal police court ‘promulgated an all-­encompassing paternalism characteristic of Counter-­Reformation theology’. 12. I rely for the following summary on J.F. Bosher’s thesis, ‘The Political and Religious Origins of La Rochelle’s Primacy in Trade with New France, 1627–1685’, French History, vol. 7, no. 3 (1993) pp. 286–312. 13. For their story see Menna Prestwich ‘The Huguenots under Richelieu and Mazarin’, in Irene Scouloudi, ed., Huguenots in Britain and their French Background, 1550–1800 (London, 1986) pp. 181–2. 14. Ibid. p. 177. ‘The Protestant moneyed interest in these years anticipated the legendary haute société protestante of the Third Republic.’ 15. For his extensive operations see Julian Dent, Crisis in Finance: Crown, Financiers and Society in Seventeenth-Century France (Newton Abbot, 1975) pp. 97–8. 16. G.B. Depping, Un Banquier protestant en France au XVIIe siècle, Barthélemy Herwarth, Revue historique vol. X (1879), pp. 285–338, vol. XI (1880), pp. 63–80. 17. For Louvois’ ambiguity on the subject see pp. 355–6. 18. Quoted by Prestwich, ‘The Huguenots’, p. 179. 19. E.G. Léonard, Histoire générale du Protestantisme, 2 vols (Paris, 1961), II, p. 331. The validity of his judgement is disputed. 20. Pierre Bolle, Le Protestant dauphinois et le république des synodes à la vieille de la Révocation II (Lyons, 1985) p. 333. 21. Léonard, Histoire-­générale, II, p. 333. 22. Benedict, Huguenot Population, p. 55. 23. Lough, ed., Locke’s Travels, p. 15: 13 Jan. 1676. 24. See p. 274. 25. See p. 323. 26. For this subject see Diane C. Margolf, Religion and Royal Justice in Early Modern France: The Paris Chambre de l’Édit, 1598–1668 (Kirksville, 2003). 27. Amanda Eurich, ‘Speaking the King’s Language: The Huguenot Magistrates of Castres and Pau’, in Mentzer and Spicer, eds, Society and Culture, p. 121. 28. See p. 235. 29. Eurich, ‘Speaking the King’s Language’, p. 129. 30. See p. 255ff. 31. Benedict, Huguenot Population, pp. 71–6, with a discussion of the issues raised by this ‘failure of a magisterial reformation’. 32. Eurich, ‘Speaking the King’s Language’, p. 138.

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33. Locke was here in Feb. 1576. Dr Barbeyrac told him that ‘they and the papist laity live together friendly enough’; that their number ‘neither increases nor decreases much’. Another assured him that the number ‘within these twenty or thirty last years are manifestly increased & doe dayly, not withstanding their losse every day of something, some priviledge or other’, Lough, ed., Locke’s Travels, pp. 28, 41. Dr Barbeyrac was an esteemed doctor but his Protestantism prevented his holding a chair in the faculty. 34. From Benedict, Huguenot Population, p. 12. A voice for Huguenot piety, eloquent but on the evidence from pastors’ correspondence surely characteristic: some may appreciate a fuller quotation: ‘Mon seigneur et mon Dieu, mon Createur, mon Redempteur et mon Consolateur, je te prie de tout mon coeur, pour l’amour de ta gloire et ton fils nostre Seigneur Jesus, qu’il te plaise de recueillir tousjours en ce lieu une Eglise jusqu’a la fin de la monde . . . et renverse les desseins de ceux qui ont resolu la ruine et la persecution de ton troupeau . . .’ 35. Martin Dinges, ‘Huguenot Poor Relief and Healthcare in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, in Mentzer and Spicer, eds, Society and Culture, pp. 157–9. The daughters were entrusted to the widow’s father-­in-­law and legal guardian. He, a recent convert, entrusted them to a nobleman. But he was not guardian in law: on that hung the consistory’s case. 36. A year’s revenue uncollected. We are reminded of the context of Huguenot poor relief – a story familiar to church members today! – that the viability of Huguenot communities (here around 200 out of 700), was often jeopardised by shortage of funds. 37. R. Mandrou, Introduction to Modern France (London, 1975) p. 34. 38. Dinges, ‘Huguenot Poor Relief ’, p. 165. 39. Raymond A. Mentzer, ‘Sociability and Culpability: Conventions of Mediation and Reconciliation in the Sixteenth-Century Huguenot Community’, in Bertrand van Ruymbeke and Randy J. Sparks, eds, Memory and Identity: The Huguenots in France and the Atlantic Diaspora (Columbia, SC, 2003) pp. 45–57. There is some evidence for an improvement in morals and manners in the next century – but Mentzer’s cases illustrate the essential practice of church discipline. 40. Mentzer, ‘Sociability and Culpability’, pp. 47–8. 41. Cases cited ibid. p. 51. 42. For a prominent case see p. 255. 43. For much of the following see Bernard Roussel, ‘Ensevelir honnestement les corps: Funeral Cortèges and Huguenot Culture’, in Mentzer and Spicer, eds, Society and Culture, p. 193 ff. Also Keith P. Luria, ‘Cemeteries, Religious Difference and the Creation of Cultural Boundaries in Seventeenth-Century French Communities’, in Ruymbeke and Sparks, eds, Memory and Identity, pp. 58–72. 44. Roussel, ‘Ensevelir . . . les corps’, p. 195. 45. Ibid. p. 207. 27 A Pastoral and Spiritual Crisis   1. Peter Heylyn, A full relation of two journeys: the one into the main-­land of France: the other into home of the adjacent islands (London, 1656) p. 228.   2. See p. 323.   3. Philip Benedict, ‘Divided Memories? Historical Calendars, Commemorative Processions and the Recollection of the Wars of Religion during the Ancien Régime’, French History, vol. 22, no. 4 (Dec. 2008), pp. 382–405. See also Afterword.   4. As phrased in the Edict of Beaulieu (1576): ‘The memory of all that has happened on both sides since the troubles began in our kingdom . . . to be snuffed out and set aside as if they had never happened.’ That edict added articles forbidding processions to be held ‘because of the death of our later cousin the prince de Condé, or St Bartholomew’s Day, or other events that might revive memory of the troubles’.   5. Heylyn, Relation, p. 228.   6. E.G. Léonard, Histoire générale Protestantisme français (Paris, 1953) pp. 161–2 develops the view. See also p. 306ff.

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  7. For Port Royal and Jansenism see pp. 321.   8. John Lough, ed. Locke’s Travels in France, 1675–1679 (Cambridge, 1953) p. 113 (20 Oct. 1676).   9. See p. 321. 10. For his work there and for other notable Huguenot pastors a prime source is Hubert Bost, Ces Messieurs de la RPR. Histoires et écritures de Huguenots, XVII–XVIII siècles (Paris, 2001). 11. See p. 311. 28 Revision or Reunion?   1. See pp. 308 and 430, n. 3.   2. Jacob Arminius (1560–1609) was a student of Beza in Geneva before returning to ministry in Holland. From his Chair in Theology (1603) he worked for the revision of the official Calvinism of the Dutch church.   3. La Réunion du Christianisme ou la manière de rejoindre tous les Chrestiens sous une seule confession de foy:   4. As a leading theologian of the moderate Remonstrant school of Calvinism Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) had to live most of his life outside his native Holland. In his most influential work, De jure belli et pacis he argued, from the principles of natural law, separating it from revealed religion, that a sovereign state was subject to no human authority outside itself. A humane man, pacific in diplomacy he could yet be seen as clearing a theoretical path towards the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.   5. Georg Calixtus (1586–1656), theological professor, disturbed fellow Lutherans by apearing to veer first to Catholic, then to Calvinist dogma in his pursuit of truth. Posthumously his De tolerantia reformatorum (1658) had offended Catholic and Lutheran alike but pleased moderate Calvinists. His controversial career gave notice of the difficulties that faced proponents of church reunion.   6. John Lough, ed., Locke’s Travels in France, 1675–1679 (Cambridge, 1953) p. 60 (22 March 1676).   7. Élie Benoist was minister at Alençon before emigrating to settle in Holland to write his vast and influential history, L’Histoire de l’ Édit de Nantes, 5 vols (Delft, 1693–5). See also p. 340.   8. Jean Orcibal, Louis XIV et les Protestants (Paris, 1951) p. 33.   9. Port Royal des Champs to which a community of laymen moved was the original abbey in a swampy valley from which the nuns, under the strict regime of Jacqueline Arnauld, moved, in 1626, into healthier quarters in Paris in the Faubourg St Jacques. For a summary of the story, the links with the Arnauld family and the contentious issues see my account in Seventeenth-Century France (London, 1981) pp. 116–30; also Robin Briggs, Communities of Belief: Cultural and Social Tensions in Early Modern France (Oxford, 1989) pp. 339–64. 10. For the caisse de conversion see p. 338ff. 11. Briggs, Communities of Belief, p. 341. Coislin was no Jansenist but typical among rigorous Catholic bishops, foes to superstition. 12. Quoted by Geoffrey Treasure, Louis XIV (London, 2001) p. 221. 13. For Bossuet and political theory see p. 332, n. 19. 14. For this episode and successive efforts to achieve reunion see Orcibal, Louis XIV pp. 29–41. 15. This important topic is the subject of Karin Maag, ‘The Huguenot Academies Preparing for an Uncertain Future’, in Mentzer and Spicer, pp. 139–56. 16. After 1610 he seems – unusually for that time – to have felt that he was at risk as a Huguenot; or London, with a Canterbury prebend, may have been better suited to his frail health. He died in 1614. 17. At Dordt the Arminian controversy led to fierce and divisive debate before the decision to confirm orthodox Calvinist teaching.

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29 Uncertain Times   1. Quoted by Jean Orcibal, Louis XIV et les Protestants (Paris, 1951) p. 20, n. 42. Bayle is writing to his brother (April 1670) expressing his fears for the future and uncertainty about the king’s intentions. See note 12 below.   2. The most remarkable of a number of inquests, staffed by a special tribunal from Parlement, mandated to investigate the behaviour of local nobles, revealed high levels of disorder, banditry and some shocking crimes. A century on from the Religious Wars – and plus ça change . . . With draconian punishments the crown was stating that royal justice extended to all. Protestantism was not an issue here: the area was largely resistant to Protestant missionaries, and a blank space on maps of Huguenot churches. But the crown’s drive for control provides the political context in which Huguenots faced the future   3. G. Burnet, History of My Own Time (London, 1724–34) p. 207.   4. A diplomatic incident arising out of brawls between embassy guards that Louis used to exact humiliating redress and apology from the Pope. An early play in the politics of prestige.   5. The rights of Maria Teresa, based pedantically on the property law of Brabant, provided the pretext for Louis and his commander, Turenne, to make easy conquests, to secure at least part of her succession and extend and strengthen the northern frontier.   6. Geoffrey Treasure, Louis XIV (London, 2001) p. 5. But ‘a king must be taught to perform decisive actions’.   7. A stream of pamphlets, inventive and scurrilous, attacking Mazarin on many counts: typically personal immorality and political chicanery. He appears an Italian, degenerate, usurping power by favour of the queen.   8. Quoted by M. Prestwich, ‘The Huguenots under Richelieu and Mazarin’, p. 193 in Huguenots in Britain and the French Background, ed. Irene Scouloudi (London, 1986), pp. 175–98.   9. Ibid. 10. John Lough, ed., Locke’s Travels in France 1675–1679 (Cambridge, 1953) pp. 27–8. 11. Witness the key statement in the Resolution of the 1657 Paris synod: ‘Any favour granted by the sovereign should be regarded as an act of grace on his part; a subject who expected a reward would be guilty of insolence.’ 12. Pierre Bayle (1647–1706) was born in Foix, the son of a minister, intellectual, journalist, encyclopaedist. Tending from an early age to a free and critical spirit he left the Protestant academy of Puylaurens (Castres) for a spell with the Jesuits at Toulouse. He left there ‘in the absence of an infallible living guide’. ‘Variations sent me to Rome; reason back to Geneva.’ For his role in relation to the Revocation see pp. 367–8. 13. This part, though ascribed to 1661, was dictated and compiled first in 1666, then in 1671, when it represented his further thoughts on the eve of the Dutch war. The birth of the dauphin seems to have prompted thoughts on the situation he found at the start of the personal reign, with his notion of kingship and pride in achievement. Pellisson had a finished version ready by 1672. For this important topic see Paul Sonnino, ‘The Dating and Authorship of Louis XIV’s Mémoires’, French History Studies, vol. 3, no. 3 (1964) pp. 303–37. He is the author of an English translation of the Mémoires (New York, 1970). 14. Louis, in his concern for the unity and obedience of the church, applied the term loosely, to embrace critics and those zealots who reminded him of past history – the assassination of Henry IV, perhaps? For the origins of Jansenism and its significance see p. 338. For relevance to the Huguenot question see p. 366. 15. De la Fréquente Communion was published in 1643. 16. Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz and co-­adjuteur to the archbishop of Paris, ‘had made a science of the arts of faction’. The Fronde came to a serious point in January 1649 when he drew leading nobles into an oath of union with Parlement against Mazarin. On

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every count bête noire to Louis, after later imprisonment and escape he cut an unlikely figure as champion of the rights of the church but has subsequently entertained many with his Mémoires (Treasure, Louis XIV, pp. 10ff.). The ‘Peace of the Church’ (1669) was only a truce in the struggle between the church, led here by Archbishop Péréfixe, and the extruded nuns of Port Royal. It was achieved by a form of words that allowed them to sign the Formulary that was supposed to end the dispute over the meaning of passages in Jansen’s Augustinus and return to their convent. Henri de Massue, marquis de Ruvigny followed his father (formerly Louis XIV’s ambassador in London) as Deputy-­General for Huguenots at court. In military terms a walkover. For the claim see above, n. 4. With their surrounding pays a number of towns were gained, of which Lille was the most important. Orcibal, Louis XIV, p. 99. See Paul Sonnino, ‘Louis XIV and the Dutch War’ in Louis XIV and Europe, ed. Ragnhild Hatton (London, 1976) pp. 153–78 for Louis’ attitudes during this period. Meynier, L’ Édit de Nantes exécuté selon les intentions de Henri le Grand (1670); Bernard, Explication de l’Édit de Nantes (1666). Andrew Spicer in Mentzer and Spicer, eds, Society and Culture, p. 19. See p. 000 for the working of the paulette and p. 000 for an example of high office held to the Revocation. Lough, ed., Locke’s Travels, pp. 15 and 28, Jan.-­Feb. 1676. The most intense period of temple demolition had been in 1663–65, for which Haag (x. 378–80) gives 200. The process slowed down but did not stop. Meanwhile Locke had varying information. In April 1679, in Paris, he was told that the Protestants ‘within these twenty years have had above 300 churches demolished and within these two months 15 more condemned’ (Locke, p. 271). The uncertainty reflects the effect of the ban on synods; increasingly isolated communities were relying on hearsay. For supporting figures for the years 1661–81 see pp. 284–5 and for different regions Benedict, The Huguenot Population of France, 1600–1685: The Demographic Fate and Customs of a Religious Minority (Philadelphia, 1994) pp. 35, 55 and 61. Lough, ed., Locke’s Travels, p. 128. Ibid. p. 61. The surrounding marshes bred malaria-­carrying mosquitoes. Orcibal, Louis XIV, p. 23. Ibid. See p. 338. for the caisse de conversion.

30 Mars Ascendant   1. Quoted from the Mémoires, by R.M. Hatton ‘Louis XIV and his fellow Monarchs’ in ed. Reginald Hatton, Louis XIV and Absolutism (London, 1976) p. 26. For the Mémoires see p. 320, n. 13.   2. For the tensions arising out of different views and personal ambitions see Paul Sonnino, Louis XIV and the Origins of the Dutch War (Cambridge, 1988). Of particular interest is his study of Turenne at the time of his conversion, pp. 20–1 and 41–2.   3. In 1676 he informed William of Orange of the terms of the secret treaty between France and England.   4. Geoffrey Treasure, Louis XIV (London, 2001) p. 169.   5. Ibid.   6. Ibid. p. 174.   7. The initiatives of Rojas y Spinola.   8. For this landmark in the perennial conflict between crown and papacy see pp. 347–8.   9. One target case of several shows why: the county of Montbéliard linked the Franche-­ Comté to Alsace and allowed an enemy to invade either. 10. They would be specifically exempted from the terms of the Revocation. 11. The twenty-­year truce recognised French gains such as Luxembourg and Strasbourg. For the Emperor it provided a breather enabling him to turn his attention to the Turks;

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to Louis it was as good as a treaty; now his officials could integrate the new lands; his engineers build the fortresses to secure a more defensible frontier. The army would be free for domestic use. In the four years 1681–84, 729 were received in l’Église française, Threadneedle Street (Benedict, The Huguenot Population of France (Philadelphia, 1994) p. 45). Much has been written about the Revocation. J. Orcibal, Louis XIV et les Protestants (Paris, 1951), has magisterial authority (though his view of Louvois as a prime mover is now generally rejected), as do two books marking the tercentenary, J. Garrisson, L’Édit de Nantes et sa révocation: Histoire d’une intolerance (Paris, 1985) and E. Labrousse, La Révocation de l’Edit de Nantes (Paris, 1985). See also Further Reading for other books and articles that have affected judgement around issues and about the role of individuals. In the conseil d’en haut, so called because it met on an upper floor of the palace, three of the leading ministers would meet most mornings with the king to advise on the main issues of policy. There was a separate conseil des finances, Colbert’s domain as contrôleur-­général. As understanding grew between Louis and Colbert it tended to take important decisions informally before Colbert presented them to the conseil d’en haut. Colbert was never, in the cardinals’ mould, premier ministre, but closer to Sully, with a wide range of responsibilities but leaving overall direction to the king. In his great influence over the king, although his family interest was balanced by that of the Le Telliers (whose stock rose in wartime), he can be considered as first among ministers. John Lough, ed., Locke’s Travels in France 1675–1679 (Cambridge, 1953) 17 June, 1677, p. 150. Locke’s keen interest, access to reliable informants and eye for detail make his observations on Louis and Versailles, as on the situation of the Huguenots, particularly valuable. It is the argument of Mark Bannister, Condé in Context: Ideological Change in Seventeenth-Century France (Oxford, 2000). Intellectual and scientific interests pursued at his private court of Chantilly set him apart from other noble warriors. In Politique tirée de l’Écriture Sainte. See Orcibal, Louis XIV, p. 18 and n. 36. The theme of Christian passivity in the face of arbitrary power is developed, with reference to another pastor, Merlat, in Emile Léonard, Le Protestant français (Paris, 1965) pp. 215–19. In his superb oraison funèbre of 1683 for the funeral of Queen Maria Teresa, Bossuet compounded the lessons of French history by proposing that the union of crowns, Bourbon and Habsburg, confirmed the role of providence in the government of human affairs. Françoise d’Aubigné, grand-­daughter of Agrippe (see p. 229, n. 9) and widow from 1660 of the poet and satirist Scarron, ‘the Indian princess’ as she was known from her early Indian years, had found refuge from Huguenot taint and a niche at court as governess, in 1669, of Louis’ illegitimate children by Louise de la Vallière. Lough, ed., Locke’s Travels, 28 Dec. 1678, p. 252. Following P. Annat (1654–70) and P. Ferrier (1670–74), Pierre La Chaise was confessor from 1675 to 1709. The consensus among Catholics seems to have been that he was courteous and flexible and a better man, gentler and more discerning than his successor, P. Le Tellier. They were equally objects of abhorrence to Huguenots, who saw both men as exercising a malign influence on the king. Had the battle of La Hogue (1692) gone the other way – as well it might – the world would have woken to a new naval balance of power with significant impact on the wider war.

31 Temptations and Trials   1. Gazette de France, April 1678. Quoted J Orcibal, Louis XIV et les Protestants (Paris, 1951) p. 55.   2. Aged nineteen he produced a French translation of Justinian’s Institutes.   3. Menna Prestwich, ‘The Huguenots under Richelieu and Mazarin’, ed. Irene Scouloudi, Huguenots in Britain and Their French Background, 1550–1800, p. 191. An elder at

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Charenton, himself no mean writer (he translated Marot’s psalms into modern classical French), he represented the sophistication, with unqualified subscription to the cult of monarchy, that some Protestant historians, notably Léonard, have thought decadent and harmful to the cause. (See pp. 304–6 and p. 307, n. 1 for that aspect.) Orcibal, Louis XIV, p. 55. Among the more notable: 1670, marquis de Montlouet, marquis de Maintenon; 1671, prince de Taranto; 1678, marquis de Malause; 1679 (of the Ségur family) Mlle de Théobon; 1683, marquis de Ciré; 1684, comte de Roncy. See also pp. 354–5 for the eve of Revocation. An informal body, Regent Anne’s council reborn, it served throughout the reign, dealt mainly with ecclesiastical appointments, but was at the heart of policy in the 1680s. For Harlay and his role in Revocation see pp. 347, 352. See pp. 343–4. Except for areas subjected to dragonnade numbers held up surprisingly well in the years immediately before Revocation in the south and in parts of the north. In Rouen, for example, 1680–84, Huguenots were 5.3% of the population. In 1600–09 it had been 6.2%; the highest reached since had been 6.9%. In 1660–69, 5.8%. But contrast, to show the difficulty of generalisation, Blois, 1660–69: 4.7%; 1680–84: 2.6%: out of a population of 14,800 barely hanging on. For other figures see Benedict, Huguenot Population of France (Philadelphia, 1994) pp. 35 and 55. Élie Benoist (1640–1728), pastor in Alençon, found refuge as a minister in Delft where he wrote his Histoire de l’Edit de Nantes (1695). A prime, of course partisan source for the period, it was compiled through his contacts with refugees and some Huguenots still in France, from letters, pamphlets and personal papers. Its severe tone was enhanced by the forceful engravings of Jan Luiken, showing scenes of persecution and terror that had an indelible effect on European opinion. as by Orcibal, Louis XIV.

32 Towards Resolution   1. Psalm 74 continues magnificently: ‘Why doth thine anger smoke against the sheep of thy pasture?’   2. John Lough, ed., Locke’s Travels in France 1675–1679 (Cambridge, 1953) pp. 229–30.   3. For their story and further ordeals see pp. 360–1 and n. 6.   4. J. Orcibal, Louis XIV et les Protestants (Paris, 1951) p. 713, n. 151.   5. The case for Louvois as being a moderating influence, more brake than spur, on the crown’s religious policy (rejecting the prime role allotted him by Orcibal) is made by R. Mettam, ‘Louis XIV and the Persecution of the Huguenots’, pp. 205–16 in Irene Scouloudi, ed., Huguenots in Britain and their French Background (London, 1987).   6. For the Articles see pp. 348–9.   7. Orcibal, Louis XIV, p. 106.   8. Rojas y Spinola, Franciscan bishop, worked on behalf of the Emperor and, after 1678 commissioned by Pope Innocent XI, on projects of reunion in Germany. He reported too optimistically in May 1679 that many princes were considering conversion. The main concern of Pope and Emperor was to build a united front against the Ottoman threat. Innocent’s chosen instrument in France was Bossuet. The chief Protestant figures in dialogue were Leibniz, whose ecumenism expressed his search for philosophic unity, and Gerhard Molanus, abbot of a Lutheran monastery. For different reasons neither Louis nor Innocent could alter their position to make corporate conversions a possibility. For the German dimension see R.J.W. Evans, The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy (Oxford, 1979) pp. 305–6.   9. François Harlay de Champvallon (archbishop of Paris 1671 till his death in 1707), was ‘the most impressive, purely clerical politician of the century’ (Robin Briggs, Communities of Belief, Oxford, 1989, pp. 211–12). In a contemporary view he was ‘the Pope this side of the mountains’.

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10. He went too far and lost their respect when it was revealed that he had concealed from the Assembly the king’s willingness to accept a lower don gratuit. (And for his political and ecclesiastical role see Briggs, Communities of Belief, p. 212 ff.). 11. Henri Justel (1620–93) was the son of Christophe Justel, a learned Calvinist and canonist whose prestigious office of sécretaire du roi ensured him a high place in Parisian Huguenot society. He was a cultivated man of the world, a bibliophile who was especially generous to foreigners. He was soon at home in London where he became a Fellow of the Royal Society and Keeper of the Royal Manuscripts. 12. For Chardin and others see Afterword. 13. The Genoese had fitted out Spanish warships in defiance of Louis’ prohibition. The city was bombarded by French ships and more than half were destroyed. In May 1684 before a formal assembly of the court, the Doge and four senators begged forgiveness and were rewarded by the king’s reply: he ‘would forget all that the republic of Genoa had done against his interests and its duty [my italics]’. 14. Roger Mettam in Scouloudi, ed., Huguenots in Britain, pp. 213–15. 15. That is not to say that she was unworldly. She found time to advise her brother that it was a good time to buy up Huguenot estates. ‘They are going for a “song”.’ 16. Anne-­Jules, duc de Noailles, a competent soldier, stands out as a realist, ready to negotiate and aware of the risks of imposing conformity by force. Initiatives such as his were bound to raise hackles at Versailles, with memories perhaps of previous attempts in the south to ‘go it alone’. 33 Force Majeure   1. Lamoignon, Premier President quote by Orcibal, Louis XIV et les Protestants (Paris, 1951) p. 113.   2. F. Bluche, Louis XIV (Paris, 1984; trans. M. Greengrass, Oxford, 1990) p. 405. Bluche supplies a valuable corrective to the tendency of Anglo-­Saxon historians to view events in France from the standpoint of Protestant politics and, in retrospect, from the success of the ‘Glorious revolution’. However, with breaches of faith and promise there was much that was tawdry – as well as dangerous – to Versailles.   3. Ibid. p. 405.   4. After the failure of magisterial reformation there, numbers had gone down steadily, leaving a resolute rump. See Benedict, The Huguenot Population of France, 1600–1685 (Philadelphia, 1994) pp. 73–5.   5. Orcibal, Louis XIV, p. 119 ff. Rural Dauphiné was soon to show that the capital was not typical of sentiment in the province.   6. G. Treasure, Louis XIV (London, 2001) p. 224.   7. Ibid. p. 225   8. Nicolas Lamoignon de Bâville was intendant from 1685 to 1719. He replaced the compromise-­minded d’Aguesseau. The exceptional spell shows that ministers relied on his expertise and knowledge of the large province. He was under no illusions. Typically he pointed out that missionaries from outside could have little impact if they could not speak or understand Occitan.   9. The full text is to be found in O. Douen, La Révocation de L’edit de Nantes à Paris (Paris, 1894). 10. Orcibal, Louis XIV, p. 127. 11. Ibid. p. 156. He recommended return to the edict of Nantes. 12. Ibid. p. 113. 13. Monmerqué, eds, Lettres de Mme de Sévigné (Paris, 1818–62), VII, pp. 469–70, 28 Oct. 1685. She also called the Edict ‘sublime’ and ‘memorable’. The value of Sévigné’s observations is that she seems in other cases to have reflected typical views of the court and was a close, if sometimes dazzled, observer of the king. P. Bourdalue’s name had become almost synonymous with pulpit eloquence.

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14. Bossuet’s role in the aftermath to Revocation is assessed in Orcibal, Louis XIV, p. 114ff. 34 Aftermath   1. J. Orcibal, Louis XIV et les Protestants (Paris, 1951) p. 166.   2. This is at the lower end of estimates, nearer too to the real number. Voltaire, following some contemporary guesses (Louis XIV, 1751), reckoned half a million. That says more for the perceived impact on the mother country than for the infant science of statistics.   3. See p. 349 and n. 11. And my article ‘That Great and Knowing Virtuoso’, in From Strangers to Citizens, ed. Randolph Vigne and Charles Littleton (London, 2001) pp. 205–13.   4. His grandfather Isaac and father Pierre were ministers. Like a number of other Huguenot ministers he acquired a chaplaincy, to the duke of Devonshire, and a living, as rector of Sawtrey. Opinion among Huguenots was sharply divided as to the propriety of accepting Anglican ordination from a bishop; critics declared that they were denying the validity of Calvinist ordination to ministry.   5. For their brutal treatment see p. 344.   6. See p. 344 for their earlier suffering from the dragonnades.   7. André, Louis XIV et l’Europe (Paris, 1950) p. 220.   8. Case quoted in Robert Mandrou, Louis XIV en son Temps (Paris, 1973) p. 359.   9. François Bluche, Louis XIV, trans. Mark Greengrass (Oxford, 1990) p. 417. Though an unusually sympathetic biographer, Bluche writes with understanding of Louis’ position. He does not defend his decision but sees some subsequent benefits. 10. John McEwen, Fen´elon Letters, trans (London, 1964) p. 53. 11. Orcibal, Louis XIV, p. 132, n. 31. 12. Ibid. p. 117. Surely prompted by Harlay himself, if through the good offices of P. La Chaise. 13. Ibid. p. 122, he continues ‘for people nourished in heresy will only be converted by the word.’ 14. Joseph Bergin, Church, Crown and Episcopate under Louis XIV (New Haven, 2004), p. 412. Interestingly, like Bossuet’s, Fléchier’s were unusually modest origins in family trade, his, candlemakers, Bossuet’s, wheelwrights. Like Bossuet he was notably eloquent, effective in court circles but sincere in missionary endeavour. As Bergin further comments, he was not really ‘up to’ the job of dealing with the Huguenot problem in Nîmes. Bergin’s comprehensive study of the episcopate helps redress the balance as it is too often crudely expressed: Huguenot good sense and piety as against Catholic dogmatism and insensitivity. 15. Quoted in Emile Léonard, Le Protestant Français (Paris, 1953), who records the result of the government overture, p. 57. Villars’ later judgement was perhaps affected by his experience in the Cévennes? 16. For the reactions to the Edict among the bishops and the dissension that brought heart to émigrés see Orcibal, Louis XIV, pp. 130–2. 17. Ibid. p. 131. Bishop Percin de Montgaillard was outspoken in criticism of the war minister and his instructions to curés to enforce communion. Louvois ordered that a curé accused of being too sympathetic to Huguenots be thrown into prison. 18. Ibid. p. 135. 19. Ibid. p. 139, n. 64. 20. Ibid. p. 110–11. 21. Ibid. p. 105. 22. Diary entry 3 Nov. 1685. A few sentences convey the emotion overriding judgement: ‘France almost dispeopled, the bankers so broken, that the tyrant’s revenue was exceedingly diminished, manufactures ceased and everybody there, save the Jesuits, abhorred what was done.’ Wrong of course on all counts, and absurd, but before his pen runs away with him he expresses what seems to have been the common opinion: ‘plundering the common people, and exposing them to all sorts of barbarous usage by soldiers sent

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to ruin and prey on them; taking away their children; forcing people to the Mass, and then executing them as relapsers; they burnt their libraries, pillaged their goods, ate up their fields and substance, banished or sent the people to the galleys, and seized upon their estates.’ Close to the establishment, friend of Justel and the minister Peter Allix, Evelyn’s view matters: all these things happened somewhere and the intellectual world, now Protestant, but soon wider in belief, was taking stock. E.S. de Beer, ed., The Diary of John Evelyn, 6 vols (London, 1955). Minet’s story in Proceedings Huguenot Society of London vol. 2, p. 428. The Portals, in Sir Francis Portal, the Church, the State and the People Leading to 250 Years of Papermaking (London, 1962). Their successful later careers were in papermaking and insurance respectively. See p. 318 for his observations about Louis XIV and Versailles. Professor of Philosophy at the college of Amsterdam. Remonstrant Calvinists were those on the liberal, Arminian side of the divide following the synod of Delft (1619): see p. 307. Geoffrey Treasure, Louis XIV (London, 2001) pp. 232–3. Henri Basnage de Beauval was one of the more influential of Calvinists who veered towards theological liberalism. In exile his Histoire des ouvrages des Savants and the Journal Litteraire de la Haye were important in the dissemination of the critical scholarship of the Huguenot diaspora. See p. 373, and in I. Scouloudi, ed., Huguenots in Britain and the French Background (London, 1986), Hugh Trevor-­Roper, ‘A Huguenot Historian: Paul Rapin’, pp. 4 and 9–23. Basnage ‘acted as a kind of secretary to the republic of letters’. Les prétendus réformés convaincus de schisme (1690). Bayle had a point: ‘You cannot expect simple folk to suspend their judgement till they have reached the certainty required by M. Descartes.’ La Reynie actually had 3000 copies distributed over Paris, a good advertisement for Bayle. Ce que c’est que la France Tout Catholique sous le règne de Louis le Grand.

35 Diaspora   1. Members were the Emperor, Brandenburg, Hanover, Saxony, Hesse-­Kassel and the United Provinces; after 1689 England; after 1690 Savoy. Diversity of aim could be expected.   2. Notably Steenkirk and Neerwinden. The war lasted from 1689 to 1697 and was characterised by great field actions dominated by the masterly Luxembourg, tapissier de Notre Dame, but each indecisive and stubbornly contested by William. The Peace of Ryswick was little more than a truce between exhausted parties, with the looming issue of the Spanish succession to be decided, whether by partition or, as eventually, by the king of Spain’s will.   3. The term was first used by Adam Smith to convey policies that he rejected. A ‘mercantilist’ (a convenient label for government programmes based on the assumption that there was a fixed fund of wealth, measurable in precious metal) believed that the prosperity and revenues of the state could only be increased by securing a larger share of bullion through increasing trade. In its most sophisticated and creative form it might better be called ‘Colbertism’. Underlying such thinking was the shortage of capital and inadequacy of financial instruments to ensure its circulation. Loss of capital as well as skills to ensure a growing export trade would have been considerations that might have led Colbert, had he lived, to oppose the Revocation.   4. Denizenship denotes the right to stay, with limited rights; naturalisation admits to full citizenship.   5. ‘Bullied’ is the right word for his treatment of the young duke, who was in no position to resist the French demands. Later he would be and he played an effective role, with Vaudois to the fore, in coalitions against the French. A case of unintended consequence, it is not least among those that Louis would regret.

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  6. When war was resumed against the League of Augsburg in October 1688 it was decided that the front must be shortened so that the French armies could be concentrated in Flanders. The deliberate destruction of Heidelberg, Mannheim, Spier and Worms, some fifty castles and many villages, was effective in strategic terms but put paid to what was left, after the réunions, of German goodwill towards France.   7. Von François, for one: he commanded an army corps in the battle of Tannenburg in 1914.   8. Willelm Frijhoff, ‘Uncertain Brotherhood: The Huguenots in the Dutch Republic’, in B. van Ruymbeke and R. Sparks, eds, Memory and Identity: The Huguenots in France and the Atlantic Diaspora (Columbia, SC, 2003) p. 129ff.   9. The Union of Utrecht (1579) had not imposed a single authorised religion but Calvinism, though it had no formal identification with the state, had become the recognised public religion. 10. Frijhoff, ‘Uncertain Brotherhood’ p. 142. Some states paid salaries, others found ways of supporting them, offering redundant churches or building new and endowing professorships. Most were poor; many tried to get into print. 11. Ibid. 12. The harsh, indeed vengeful terms offered by the Dutch and their English ally in 1708–09 ensured rejection and led to a revival of French arms. Between the battle of Malplaquet in 1709 and the peace settlements of Utrecht (1713) and Rastadt (1714), the Dutch had time to regret an opportunity missed – as did the Huguenots, who looked in vain for recognition of their right to return to France. 13. These bold claims can be verified in the comprehensive and lavishly illustrated catalogue of the tercentenary London exhibition of 1985, Quiet Conquest, compiled by Tessa Murdock. I am indebted to it for much of the following. It leaves no doubt as to the value of the Huguenot contribution to one country, and the corresponding loss to France. 14. See Afterword. 36 Huguenotism Recovers its Soul: War in the Cévennes   1. The phrase recurs in official correspondance as minister, intendants and bishops express their frustration.   2. According to figures quoted by Emile Léonard, Le Protestant Français (Paris, 1953) pp. 58–66, with analysis of the different social categories.   3. His father had lifted from the Dutch the secret process of weaving fine cloth from Spanish wool. Louis XIV patronised him and his was one of the five manufactures royales de drap. (ibid., and for following examples, p. 64 and ff.).   4. Jean Orcibal, Louis XIV et Les Protestants (Paris, 1951), p. 155.   5. Though approached in quantity by the publication of pamphlets during England’s interregnum. Nor were the essential issues around religion and authority then so different. Much of the writing – as about the role of the elect approaching the millennium, the destruction of ‘the Beast’, and the rule of ‘the Saints’ (the elect of God) – was to have lasting influence. The Book of Revelation, for example, was the life study and massive commentary (published) of the Huguenot turned Anglican rector Daubuz (see my article in New D.N.B.).   6. ‘The more I study philosophy the more I find uncertainty. The difference between sects [sic] only amounts to a greater or lesser degree of probability.’ In discussion of compelle intrare in his Commentaire philosophique (1690) Bayle went further than Locke or even Milton in proposing toleration for atheists. The stakes had been raised by the publication in November 1685 of Bossuet’s defence of the principle: ‘La Conformite de la conduite de L’Église de France pour ramener les protestants avec celle de L’Église d’Afrique pour ramener les donatistes à l’Église Catholique.’   7. The Essay on Toleration was written in 1690.   8. For ‘prophesyings’: Hillel Schwartz, The French Prophets (Berkeley, 1980) pp. 14–22. And see below, n. 18.   9. Ibid. p. 18.

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10. In 1695 William recaptured the fortress of Namur. 11. Victor Amadeus of Savoy, no friend to Huguenots, was a main gainer from the terms (Sept. 1697) after he had deserted the coalition in the previous year. Recovering lost land, he was poised to expand in north Italy; by the marriage of his daughter to the duke of Burgundy he was placed in the French camp. Louis held on to Strasbourg, whose Lutherans he had excepted from the terms of Revocation. Concessions of other places recently gained reflected his main concern, the impending Spanish succession. He recognised William III as king ‘by the grace of God’. In Parliament William was saluted as the man ‘given to England to hold the balance of Europe’. Huguenots still looked to him to turn fine words into action on their behalf. 12. ‘Thorough’ was the coercive policy adopted by Charles I’s minister Strafford towards Ireland in the l630s. Loyal, practical, with no illusions about the difficulties of the task, severe rather than cruel: in comparable situations the two men seem to have much in common. 13. Orcibal, Louis XIV, p. 156. 14. For Burgundy, guided by Fénelon, envisaging an alternative policy, see Geoffrey Treasure, Louis XIV (London, 2001) pp. 281–2 and 309–10. Peace was a priority, but not toleration for Protestants. 15. Orcibal, Louis XIV, p. 167, n. 152. 16. The inspirés could claim good authority from the scriptures: quoting from Peter’s speech on the day of Pentecost: ‘This is what the prophet [Joel 2: 28–32] spoke of. God says: “This will happen in the last days: I will pour upon everyone a portion of my spirit; and your sons and daughters will prophesy; your young men shall see visions and your old men shall dream dreams.” ’ Paul, following Joel, also spoke of heavenly portents, ‘blood, fire and drifting smoke, the sun turned to darkness, the moon to blood’. Such signs were eagerly looked for, and commonly reported among the Huguenots of the Desert. Joel’s terrible vision of the despoliation of Israel, of the coming day of the Lord, led to his call to arms: ‘Declare a holy war, call your troops to arms.’ One can imagine the effect on young enthusiasts, rebellious against conforming parents, scornful of compromise. 17. The authorities had intercepted his letter to Schomberg calling for military aid. 18. There are several versions of the events leading up to Chayla’s death. The sequel is more certain. 19. They had been disappointed by the terms of the Peace of Ryswick that made no provision for their return. Having previously negotiated partition treaties with the interested powers, Louis accepted the terms of the will of King Charles II, last of the Habsburg rulers of Spain on behalf of his grandson Philip of Anjou. As Philip V his throne was secured. But Louis faced the Grand Alliance in a war (1701–14) that was in part caused by provocative measures in the months following the publication of the will. Again Huguenots welcomed the war and hoped for a measure of relief. They would be disappointed by the terms of peace in 1713 after Tories had replaced the Whigs who favoured the restoration of Huguenot privileges with external guarantees. 20. Schwartz, The French Prophets, pp. 23–4. 21. Where he would distinguish himself, in 1709, commanding at the battle of Malplaquet, inflicting such loss on the enemy that it marked a turning point. There ensued, for France, a successful effort to secure the main gains of the previous half century, but no relief for the Huguenots. 22. The French commander and victor Berwick liked to tell of his seeing the rival regiments cast aside their fusils to fight hand to hand with a fury that he had never seen on any battlefield. The story is recounted by Voltaire who knew and admired Cavalier in his old age. By then he was governor of Jersey. 23. England was well used to prophecy and millennial speculation. The abolition of episcopacy and intense study of the Bible led to a proliferation of sects under the Commonwealth. Cults were driven underground after the restoration of church and monarchy. But millennial theory became respectable through the writing among others of James Ussher, archbishop of Armagh, while a Buckinghamshire vicar, John Mason, author of

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Spiritual Songs (1683), would be influential for the next hundred years. The inspirés, prophesying out of war and suffering, with a strong female element, touched a nerve of interest and sympathy and soon French were outnumbered by English millenarians. But they were suspect, both as foreigners as subversive of church and state and to established French churches, like those of Threadneedle Street and the Savoy. Theological issues were coloured by questioning of authenticity. The particular Cévenol contribution became insignificant within the wider movement to which it had given stimulus. But it has a place in the movement of the spirit that led to the powerful evangelical revival of the eighteenth century. The subject may be pursued in Schwartz, The French Prophets. 24. The intendants’ figures for 1698 amounted to 597,829 (excluding Alsace and Le Pays de Montbéliard). They would have included some whose conversion was suspect. Figures compiled by the pastors of the Desert in 1760 came very close (including Lorraine): 596,302 but it was a smaller percentage of the whole population: it had increased overall by about 4 million. Some allowance may be made for exaggeration: intendants stressing the extent of the problem, and of what they were achieving and having an eye to outside funding – mainly from the Swiss. 25. Some Huguenots, coming to England, would find that the same test applied in England to exclude Nonconformists. A rift would develop between those pastors who sought ordination to serve in the Church of England and those, at first the majority, who saw it as apostasy. 26. Brother Roger of Taizé, the great reconciler, drawing inspiration from his Protestant grandmother, relates her family tradition and the secret room where her family hid their minister: a case among thousands. 37 Sous La Croix   1. For Huguenot burial practice see p. For the ‘reality’ note Calvin’s words about ‘the sleep provided by mother earth for the body while the soul departs to live with the Saviour.’   2. See p. 382, n. 26.   3. After delays and disappointments, following the downfall of the enlightened minister, Turgot, the Edict of Toleration granted Protestants civil rights, including entry into hitherto barred professions and trades. The Assembly of Clergy that had fought bitterly against it now had to accept the legitimacy of Protestant marriages registered with local authorities. Revolution was in the air.   4. For example, during the Occupation, in resisting Nazism and sheltering Jews.   5. See p. 362.   6. Another, perhaps surprising modern voice, is that of André Gide. He saw and valued a strong and distinct culture. He rejected Calvinist orthodoxy but regretted, in the fall of France in 1940, ‘what we most lacked, the Puritan rigour.’ He attributed to his Protestant upbringing his ‘horror of comfort’. André Gide, Diary (English edn, single vol. from original four, London, 1967), pp. 207, 654. Afterword: Strangers and Citizens   1. Quoted in Tessa Murdock, compil., Quiet Conquest, London exhibition catalogue (1985) p. 182.   2. Maty belongs more to the Enlightenment than to the immediate experience of Huguenots. See Uta Janssens, Mathieu Maty and the Journal Brittanique, 1750–1755 (Amsterdam, 1975).   3. H. Trevor-­Roper, ‘A Huguenot Historian: Paul Rapin’, in I. Scouloudi, ed., Huguenots in Britain and the French Background (London, 1986) pp. 3–19.

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Further Reading

s

The following list is far from comprehensive. In selecting I have had in mind less the specialist than the student. Readers who come to the book through interest in history or family tradition, may want to know more about the period, or about particular aspects of the story. Except where there is no comparable book in English, or where the French work has special importance, I have listed English books and translations from the French. ‘There is no such thing as France; there is only Europe.’ For the European dimension there are four volumes that have worn well. G.R. Elton, Reformation Europe, 1517–1559 (London, 1979), J.H. Elliott, Europe Divided, 1559–1598 (London, 1975), N.G. Parker, Europe in Crisis, 1598–1648 (London, 1979), J.W. Stoye, Europe Unfolding, 1648–1688 (London, 1978). See also Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided, 1490–1700 (London, 2003) and H. Koenigsberger and L. Mosse, Europe in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1968). For the long view: Norman Davies, Europe: A History (Oxford, 1996); excellent and comprehensive, within a narrower compass: Richard Bonney, The European Dynastic States, 1494–1600 (Oxford, 1991); also Thomas Munck, Seventeenth-­ Century Europe, 1598–1700 (London, 1990) and Geoffrey Treasure, The Making of Modern Europe, 1648–1780 (revised edn, London, 2003). Several collections introduce specialist scholarship: J.H.M. Salmon, Renaissance and Revolt: Essays in the Intellectual and Social History of Early Modern Europe, 1500–1648 (Cambridge, 1987); P. Clarke, ed., The European Crisis of the 1590s (London, 1985); Euan Cameron, ed., Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 1999). Subjects highly relevant to Huguenot history are covered by Geoffrey Parker, The Dutch Revolt (London, 1977); P. Zagorin, Rebels and Rulers, 1500–1650, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1982) and Jeremy Black, European Warfare, 1600–1815 (London, 1994). Also see Quentin Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought: The Reformation (Cambridge, 1978); Colette Beaune, The Birth of an Ideology: Myths and Symbols of Nation in Late Mediaeval France, trans. S Huston (Berkeley, 1991); Timothy Hampton, Literature and Nation in the Sixteenth Century: Inventing the French Renaissance (Ithaca, NY, 2001); Julian H. Franklyn, Jean Bodin and the Rise of Absolutist Theory (Cambridge, 1973); Jean Bodin: Six Books of the Commonwealth, trans. and ed. J. Tooley (Oxford, 1967); and N. Henshall, The Myth of Absolutism: Change and Continuity in Early Modern European Monarchy. The imagery and presentation of monarchy have also received attention. Seminal works were E. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, 1957) and M. Bloch, The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France, (trans. London, 1973). For a wider view see Paul Kléber-­Monod, The Power of Kings: Monarchy and Religion in Europe, 1589–1715 (New Haven, 1999). Coronation procedures are the subject of R. Jackson, Vive le Roi! A History of the French Coronation from Charles V to Charles XI (Chapel Hill, 1984). See also Charles G. Nauert, Humanism and the

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Culture of Renaissance Europe (Cambridge, 1995) and Christopher R. Friedrichs, The Early Modern City, 1450–1750 (London, 1995). The religious history of the years covering Reformation and Counter-­Reformation has been intensively studied. A good modern study is James McConica, Erasmus (Oxford, 1991). Also see C. Augustijn, Erasmus: His Life, Works and Influence, trans. J.C. Grayson (Toronto, 1991). For the background: Anthony Goodman and A. Mackay, eds, The Impact of Humanism on Western Europe (London, 1990). Also R.N. Swanson, Religion and Devotion in Europe, c.1215–c.1515. Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1997), draws on anthropological methods. More traditional is Owen Chadwick’s masterly The Early Reformation on the Continent (Oxford, 2001). Also good accounts: Euan Cameron, The European Reformation (Oxford, 1991), Alister E. McGrath, The Intellectual Origins of the European Reformation (Oxford, 1993) and, with emphasis on the cultural, Ulinka Rublack, Reformation Europe (Cambridge, 2005). For a vital factor see E.M. Eisenstein, The Printing Reformation in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1983). Still helpful is E. Léonard, Le Protestant français (Paris, 1953). The doyen’s longer work has a broader span: Protestantism, 2 vols (London, 1965, 1967), trans. from original Histoire générale du Protestantism, 2 vols (Paris, 1961), although his stern view of the Huguenots in the seventeenth century is not generally shared (see p. 176); for example by Elizabeth Labrousse, ‘Calvinism in France’, in Menna Prestwich, ed., International Calvinism, 1541–1715 (Oxford, 1985), where other essays provide the wider context of the French Reformation. There are stimulating essays in Hugh Trevor-­Roper, Religion, the Reformation and Social Change (London, 1967). Likewise in Andrew Pettegree, Alastair Duke and Gillian Lewis, eds, Calvinism in Europe, 1547–1620 (Cambridge, 1996). Also Barbara Diefendorf and Carla Hesse, eds, Culture and Identity in Early Modern Europe (Michigan, 1993). For relevant insights: P. Collinson, The Religion of Protestantism: The Church in English Society, 1559–1625 (Oxford, 1982). For mentalités: Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London, 1971) and R. Forster and O. Ranum, eds, Ritual, Religion and the Sacred: Selections from the Annales (Baltimore, 1982). Different aspects of the Reformation are covered by T.A. Brady, Ruling Class, Régime and Reformation in Strasbourg, 1520–1555 (Leiden, 1978); Alastair Duke, Reform and Revolt in the Low Countries (London, 1990); P.M. Crew, Calvinist Preaching and Iconoclasm in the Netherlands, 1540–1569 (Cambridge, 1978); C.M.N. Eire, War against the Idols: The Reform of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge, 1986); C.P. Clasen, Anabaptism: A Social History, 1523–1618 (Ithaca and London, 1972); M.G. Baylor, ed., The Radical Reformation (Cambridge, 1991). Breaking conventional bounds: Henry Kamen, The Rise of Toleration (London, 1967); Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 1997), with much in Robin Briggs, Communities of Belief (Oxford, 1989). A seminal study: Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century, trans. B. Gottlieb (Cambridge, MA, 1982). With important material for the Reformation: Merry E. Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1993); as for later in Wendy Gibson, Women in Seventeenth-­Century France (London, 1989). Biographies of Luther, parti pris, have suffered from adulation or denigration. For balanced scholarship see Heiko A. Oberman, Luther: Man Between God and the Devil, trans. Eileen Walliser-­Schwarzbart (New Haven, 1990). Also Gordon Rupp, The Righteousness of God: Luther Studies (London, 1947), Luther’s Progress to the Diet of Worms (London, 1964) and Patterns of Reform (London, 1969). Two general accounts are R.W. Scribner, The German Reformation (New York, 1986) and G.R. Potter, The German Reformation (London, 1986). Zwingli is well catered for by G.R. Potter, Zwingli (Cambridge, 1976). Around Calvin there is a large literature: Bruce Gordon, Calvin (New Haven, 2009), T.H.L. Parker, John Calvin: A Biography (London, 1975) and W.J. Bouwsma, John Calvin: A Sixteenth-­Century Portrait (Oxford, 1988) stand out, as does Alister E. McGrath, A Life of John Calvin (Oxford, 1990). The ground is there in Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. F.L. Battles, ed. J.T. McNeill (Philadelphia, 1961). Of crucial importance is Philip Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism (New Haven, 2002). There is a Genevan focus in R.M. Kingdon, Church and Society in Reformation

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Europe (Geneva, 1985). For Counter-­Reformation, the whole scene: J. Delumeau, Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire: A New View of the Counter-­Reformation, trans. J. Moiser (London, 1977); narrower, A.G. Dickens, Counter-­Reformation (London, 1969). Brief but valuable, M. Mullett, The Counter-­Reformation (London, 1984); a classic is H.O. Evenett, The Spirit of the Counter-­Reformation, ed. J. Bossy (London, 1968). See also Alain Tallon, La France et le Concile de Trente, 1518–1563 (Rome, 1997). Huguenot history is embedded in that of France. A lot of modern research has enriched understanding. For background P.S. Lewis, Late Medieval France: The Polity (London, 1968) is valuable; so is the classic of Marc Bloch, French Rural History: An Essay on its Basic Characteristics, trans. J. Sondheimer (Berkeley, 1966). Also R. Mousnier, The Institutions of France under Absolute Monarchy, trans. A. Goldhammer, 2 vols (Chicago, 1979, 1984) and J.H. Shennan, The Parlement of Paris (London, 1968). Clever compression adds value to R. Briggs, Early Modern France, 1560–1715 (Oxford, 1977). David Potter, A History of France 1460–1560: The Emergence of a Nation State (London, 1995) is important for early French Protestantism. R.J. Knecht, The Rise and Fall of Renaissance France (2nd edn, Oxford, 2001) covers the period from 1483 to 1610 in more detail. Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (2nd edn, London, 1965) is still the best treatment of the subject. For the century also H.A. Lloyd, The State, France and the Sixteenth Century (London, 1983); and Frederick J. Baumgartner, France in the Sixteenth Century (New York, 1995). Also essays in C. Allmand, ed., Power, Culture and Religion in France, c. 1350–c. 1550 (Cambridge, 1989). D. Bitton, The French Nobility in Crisis (Stanford, 1969) covers controversial ground. J. Michael Haydon, France and the Estates-­General of 1614 (Cambridge, 1974) explains much about subsequent events. See also A. Jouanna, Le Devoir de révolte: la noblesse française et la gestation de l’état (Paris, 1989) and her La France du XVIe siècle (Paris, 1996). Madeleine Foisil, Le sire de Gouberville: un gentilhomme Normand au XVIe siècle (Paris, 1981) is a lively study of a lesser rural nobleman. For Gouberville’s world, J.B. Wood, The Nobility of the Election of Bayeux, 1463–1666 (Princeton, 1980), and J.M. Constant, La vie quotidienne de la noblesse française aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles (Paris, 1985). See also K. Neuschel, Word of Honor: Interpreting Noble Culture in Sixteenth-­Century France (Ithaca and London, 1989). For another approach, Ellery Schalk, From Valor to Pedigree; Ideas of Nobility in Sixteenth-­ and Seventeenth-­Century France (Princeton, 1986). Nancy Roelker, ‘Family, Faith and Fortuna: The Châtillon Brothers in the French Reformation’, in Leaders of the Reformation, ed. Richard L. DeMolen (Selingsgrove, PA, 1984). N.M. Sutherland, ‘Antoine de Bourbon, King of Navarre and the French Crisis of Authority, 1559–1562’, in French Government and Society, 1500–1850, ed. J.F. Bosher (London, 1973). Absorbing – and influential: Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, 1976); also her The Gift in Sixteenth-­Century France (Oxford, 2000). James R. Farr, ‘Hands of Honor’: Artisans and their World in Dijon, 1550–1650 (Ithaca, NY, 1988) is a revealing case study. E. Le Roy Ladurie, Carnival; A People’s Uprising at Romans, 1579–1580 (London, 1980) is sui generis as a study of southern small town life. J. Dewald, The Formation of a Provincial Nobility: The Magistrates of the Parlement of Rouen, 1499–1610 (Princeton, 1980) touches on Huguenot territory. For power at the centre, J.H. Shennan, The Parlement of Paris (2nd edn, Stroud, 1998). Sarah Hanley, ‘Assemblies and Resistance Right in the Sixteenth Century’, in P. Mack, ed., Society and Institutions in Early Modern France (Georgia, 1991). J. Russell Major, Representative Government in Early Modern France (New Haven, 1980) has been influential; also his Renaissance Monarchy to Absolute Monarchy (Baltimore, 1994) consolidated his reputation. More recent scholarship is represented in Renaissance and Reformation France, 1500–1648, ed. Mack P. Holt (Oxford, 2002), R.J. Knecht, The French Civil Wars (Harlow, 2000), Nicolas Le Roux, Les guerres de religion (Paris, 2009) and Olivia Carpi, Les guerres de religion (Paris, 2012). For the capital, O. Ranum, Paris in the Age of Absolutism (New York, 1968); changing modes of government are explored in Y. Durand, ed., Hommage à Roland Mousnier: clientèles et fidèlités en Europe à l’époque moderne (Paris, 1981). Also R. Harding, Anatomy of a Power Elite: The Provincial Governors of Early Modern France (New Haven, 1978) and D. Hickey, The Coming of French Absolutism: The Struggle for Tax Reform in the Province of

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Dauphiné, 1540–1640 (Toronto, 1986). For two kings well served by biographers, see R.J. Knecht Renaissance Warrior and Patron: The Reign of Francis I (Cambridge, 1994) and R. Baumgartner, Henry II (Durham, NC, 1987). A re-­evaluation is offered by Keith Cameron, Henry III: A Maligned or Malignant King? (Exeter, 1978). Also Sydney Anglo, ‘Henry III: Some Determinants of Vituperation’ and N.M. Sutherland, ‘Henry III, the Guises and the Huguenots’, in From Valois to Bourbon: Dynasty, State and Society in Early Modern France, ed. Keith Cameron (Exeter, 1989). P. Chevallier, Henri III (Paris, 1985) is the standard biography. More detailed studies are Jacqueline Boucher, La cour de Henri III (Rennes, 1986) and Henri III et son temps, ed. R. Sauzet (Paris, 1992). Of major importance is Nicolas Le Roux, La Faveur du roi (Seyssel, 1991) and his Un régicide au nom de Dieu (Paris, 2006). Also important is Mark Greengrass, Governing Passions: Peace and Reform in the French Kingdom, 1576–1585 (Oxford, 2007). J.H.M. Salmon, Society in Crisis: France in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1973) remains useful as an overall survey. For preceding years see D.L. Potter, War and Government in the French Provinces: Picardy, 1470–1560 (Cambridge, 1993). H. Heller views Calvinists in terms of class and economics in The Conquest of Poverty: The Calvinist Revolt in Sixteenth-­Century France (Leiden, 1986). Different views are promoted in essays in J.H.M. Salmon, ed., The French Wars of Religion: How Important Were Religious Factors? (Boston, MA, 1967). Also J. Black, ed., The Origins of War in Early Modern Europe (Edinburgh, 1987). Putting religion decisively back into the frame, Denis Crouzet, Les guerriers de Dieu: La violence de temps des troubles de religion vers 1525–vers 1610, 2 vols (Paris, 1990) is a work of major significance based on vast knowledge of contemporary pamphlet literature. Also by the same author Dieu en ses royaumes: Une histoire des guerres de religion (Seyssel, 2008). A study of prime Huguenot country: E. Le Roy Ladurie, The Peasants of Languedoc, 2 vols (Paris, 1966), trans. J. Day (Urbana, OH, 1974). Mack P. Holt’s valuable account, The Wars of Religion, 1562–1629 takes the long view to the Grace of Alais. Also, more concise, R.J. Knecht, The French Wars of Religion, 1562–1598 (London, 1989) and Mark Greengrass, The French Reformation (Oxford, 1987). For prelude and gestation see Robert M. Kingdon, Geneva and the Coming of the Wars of Religion in France (Geneva, 1957) and Geneva and the Consolidation of the French Protestant Movement (Geneva, 1967). For the martyrologist: Jean-­François Gilmont, Jean Crespin, un editeur réformé du XVIe siècle (Geneva, 1981). Nancy L. Roelker describes a great personality in her Queen of Navarre: Jeanne d’Albret, 1528–1572 (Cambridge, MA, 1968). J. Shimizu does justice to Jeanne’s male counterpart in Conflict of Loyalties: Politics and Religion in the Career of Gaspard de Coligny, Admiral of France, 1514–1572 (Geneva, 1970). F.C. Palm, Politics and Religion in Sixteenth-­Century France: A Study of the Career of Henry of Montmorency-­Damville (Boston, MA, 1927) needs to be supplemented by Mark Greengrass, ‘Noble Affinities in Early Modern France: The Case of Henri I Montmorency’, in European Quarterly Review, 16 (1986). For different phases, sites and characters see: N.M. Sutherland, The Huguenot Struggle for Recognition (New Haven, 1980); also valuable are her collected essays in Princes, Politics and Religion, 1547–1589 (London, 1984); D. Nugent, Ecumenism in the Age of Reformation: The Colloquy of Poissy (Cambridge, MA, 1974); P. Benedict, Rouen during the Wars of Religion (Cambridge, 1981); Hilary J. Bernstein, Crown and Community: Politics and Civic Culture in Sixteenth-­Century Poitiers (Ithaca, NY, 2004); Philip Conner, Huguenot Heartland: Southern French Calvinism during the Wars of Religion (Aldershot, 2002); Penny Roberts, A City in Conflict: Troyes during the French Wars of Religion (Manchester, 1996); Mark W. Konnert, Civic Agenda and Religious Passions: Châlons-­sur-­Marne during the French Wars of Religion, 1560–1594 (Kirksville, MO, 1997); Janine Garrisson, Les Protestants du Midi, 1559–1598 (Toulouse, 1980); Robert Schneider, Public Life in Toulouse, 1463–1789: From Municipal Republic to Cosmopolitan City (Ithaca, NY, 1980); Kevin. C. Robbins, City on the Ocean Sea: La Rochelle, 1530–1650 (Leiden, 1997); Robert Descimon, ‘Paris on the Eve of St Bartholomew’s: Taxation, Privilege and Social Geography’, in Urban Society in Ancien Régime France, ed. P. Benedict (London, 1989); N.M. Sutherland, The Massacre of St Bartholomew’s and the European Conflict, 1559–1572 (London, 1972); Robert A. Kingdon, Myths about the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacres, 1572–1576 (Cambridge, MA, 1988). By far the best work on the massacre is Arlette

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Jouanna, La Saint-­Barthélemy (Paris, 2007). Barbara Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-­Century Paris (Oxford, 1991) is convincing; also her ‘Houses Divided: Religious Schism in Sixteenth-­Century Parisian Families’, in Urban Life in the Renaissance, ed. S. Zimmerman and R. Weissman (Newark, DE, 1989); Mack P. Holt, The Duke of Anjou and the Politique Struggle during the Wars of Religion (Cambridge, 1986); Howell Lloyd, The Rouen Campaign, 1590–1592 (Oxford, 1973); Scott M. Manesch, Theodore Beza and the Quest for Peace in France, 1572–1598 (Leiden, 2000); Luc Racaut, Hatred in Print: Catholic Propaganda and Protestant Identities in the French Wars of Religion (Aldershot, 2002); Donald R. Kelley, François Hotman: A Revolutionary’s Ordeal (Princeton, 1973); François Hotman, Francogallia, trans. and ed. R.E. Giesey and J.H.M. Salmon (Cambridge, 1973); Frederick Baumgartner, Radical Reactionaries: The Political Thought of the French Catholic League (Geneva, 1976); E. Barnavi and R. Descimon, La Sainte Ligue, le juge et la potence (Paris, 1985); and, for a soldier’s view, The Valois-­Habsburg Wars and the French Wars of Religion: Blaise de Monluc, ed. Ian Roy (London, 1971). After 1598 Huguenots lived in a different world. With peace and a degree of tolerance the focus came to be more on the authority of the crown. Following the suppression of revolts and the Grace of Alais (1629) Huguenots depended more on the policy of the crown. Much has been written about absolute monarchy; also on the culture of Huguenots in this situation. For the Edict of Nantes, Michael Wolfe, The Conversion of Henry IV (New Haven, 1980) is a good point of departure. See also his Politics, Power and Religious Belief in Early Modern France (Cambridge, MA, 1993); Ronald S. Love, Blood and Religion: The Conscience of Henry IV, 1553–1598 (Montreal, 2001); N.M. Sutherland, Henry IV of France and the Politics of Religion, 1572–1596, 2 vols (Bristol, 2002); with its retrospective analysis and full text of the Edict, R. Mousnier, The Assassination of Henry IV, trans. Joan Spencer (London, 1973); and both Denis Crouzet, ‘Henry IV, King of Reason’ and Mark Greengrass, ‘The Public Context of the Abjuration of Henry IV’ in From Valois to Bourbon, op. cit. A good study of the reign is Mark Greengrass, France in the Age of Henry IV: The Struggle for Stability (London, 1994). Seen through French eyes, J.-­P. Babelon, Henri IV (Paris, 1982). For his conciliatory methods see Annette Finley-­Croswaite, Henry IV and the Towns (Cambridge, 1999); for his life and work, D. Buisseret, Henry IV King of France (London, 1984); also his life of Henry’s comrade in arms and government, Sully and the Growth of Centralised Government in France (London, 1968). Representing the irreconcilable: J.A. Clarke, Huguenot Warrior: The Life and Times of Henry de Rohan, 1579–1638 (La Haye, 1966). A.D. Lublinskaya’s important study of (and contribution to) the ‘General crisis’ debate, French Absolutism: The Crucial Phase 1620–1629, trans. Brian Pearce (Cambridge, 1968), is important. For the nature of royal government: Sharon Kettering, Patrons, Brokers and Clients in Seventeenth-­Century France (New York, 1986); R.J. Bonney, Political Change under Richelieu and Mazarin, 1624–1661 (Oxford, 1978) and, with wider implications than his title suggests, The King’s Debts: Finances and Politics in Seventeenth-Century France: 1589–1661 (Oxford, 1981); also his documents-­based Society and Government in France under Richelieu and Mazarin (London, 1988); James B. Collins, The Fiscal Limits of Absolutism: Direct Taxation in Early Seventeenth-­ Century France (Berkeley, 1988); also Classes, Estates and Order in Early Modern Brittany (Cambridge, 1994) and his admirable overview, The State in Early Modern France (Cambridge, 1995). Vital for understanding the travails of southern Huguenots, William H. Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-­Century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc (Cambridge, 1985) and his Urban Protest in Seventeenth-­Century France: The Culture of Retribution (Cambridge, 1997); David Parker, La Rochelle and the French Monarchy: Conflict and Order in Seventeenth-­Century France (London, 1980). Orest Ranum, Richelieu and the Councillors of Louis XIII: A Study of the Secretaries of State and Superintendents of Finance in the Ministry of Richelieu 1635–1642 (Oxford, 1963); A. Lloyd Moote, Louis XIII: The Just (Berkeley, 1989) filled a conspicuous gap, as did Ruth Kleinman, Anne of Austria: Queen of France (Columbus, OH, 1985). Another yet to be filled is the large-­scale life that Richelieu deserves; Joseph Bergin’s two fine volumes, Cardinal Richelieu: Power and the Pursuit of Wealth (New Haven, 1985) and The Rise of Richelieu (New Haven,

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1991) point the way. Meanwhile R.J. Knecht, Richelieu (London, 2000) draws a sound ‘profile in power’. David Parrott, Richelieu’s Army: War, Government and Society in France, 1624–1642 (Cambridge, 2001) deals with a crucial element in the development of government; A. Lloyd Moote, The Revolt of the Judges (Princeton, 1971) and Orest Ranum, The Fronde: A French Revolution, 1648–1653, with protest and rebellion. See also Geoffrey Treasure, Mazarin: The Crisis of Absolutism in France (London, 1995). For an aspect of opposition that profoundly affected Louis XIV, C. Jouhaud, Mazarinades: la Fronde des Mots (Paris, 1985); for concerns about Huguenot collusion with England, Philip A. Knachel, England and the Fronde: The Impact of the English Civil War and Revolution on France (Ithaca, NY, 1967). Social unrest and disorder are comprehensively covered in Yves-­Marie Bercé, History of Peasant Revolts, abridged, trans. Amanda Whitmore (Ithaca, NY, 1990). There are valuable insights in his short text, The Birth of Absolutism, trans. Richard Rex (London, 1996). Joseph Bergin and Lawrence Brockliss, eds, Richelieu and his Age (Oxford, 1992) contains instructive essays. In another composite work, Society and Institutions in Early Modern France, ed. Mack P. Holt (Athens, GA, 1991), the focus is mainly on problems of rule: see there James B. Wood, ‘The Royal Army during the Early Wars of Religion, 1559–1576’, William Beik, ‘The Parlement of Toulouse and the Fronde’, Mack P. Holt, ‘Popular Political Culture and Mayoral Elections in Sixteenth-­Century Dijon’, and Annette Finlay Croswhite, ‘Absolutism and Political Economy; The 1602 Pancarte Revolt in Limoges’. In Conquest and Coalescence: The Shaping of the State in Early Modern Europe, ed., with introductory essay, Mark Greengrass (London, 1991), see Christian Desplat, ‘Louis XIII and the Union of Béarn’. P.J. Coveney, ed., France in Crisis, 1620–1675, has a particularly good introductory essay. O. and P. Ranum, eds, The Century of Louis XIV (New York, 1972) is a good selection of documents. Anne of Austria is well treated by R. Kleinmann, Anne of Austria, Queen of France (Columbus, OH, 1987). Louis XIV has not lacked biographers, some mesmerised by Versailles. Two rise amply to the challenge: J.B. Wolf, Louis XIV (London, 1968) and F. Bluche, Louis XIV, trans. Mark Greengrass (London, 1970). P. Goubert, Louis XIV and Twenty Million Frenchmen (1966; trans. London, 1970) is, predictably, less respectful. More recent assessments are Geoffrey Treasure, Louis XIV (London, 2001), and, more concise, J. Sturdy, Louis XIV (London, 1998), P.R. Campbell, Louis XIV, 1661–1715 (London, 1993). P. Sonnino, ed., The Reign of Louis XIV: Essays in Celebration of Andrew Lossky (London, 1990) adds detail to the picture offered by Lossky’s own summation, Louis XIV and the French Monarchy (New Brunswick, 1994). See also J.C. Rule, ed., Louis XIV and the Craft of Kingship (Columbus, OH, 1969). R. Mettam, Government and Society in Louis XIV’s Reign (London, 1977), with supporting documents, was followed up by his Power and Faction in Louis XIV’s France (Oxford, 1988), a robust re-­evaluation of the king, with stress on flaws in the regime. The king’s priorities are revealed in his Mémoires, available in translation by P. Sonnino, titled Mémoires for the Instruction of the Dauphin by Louis XIV (New York, 1970). Louis XIV and Europe is the topic of a special issue of Dix-­Septième Siècle, no. 23 (1979). The dominant figure in Catholic and Absolutist philosophy is well served by J.B. Bossuet, Politics Drawn from the Very Words of Holy Scripture, trans. and ed. Patrick Riley (Cambridge, 1991). War was long a central concern and prime influence on government (and in the lives of many Huguenots). The context is provided by G. Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 1988). See also D. Potter, Renaissance France at War: Armies, Culture and Society, c. 1480–1560 (Woodbridge, 2005) and David Parrott, Richelieu’s Army: War, Government and Society in France, 1624–1642 (Cambridge, 2001). André Corvisier’s work, for example Louvois (Paris, 1983), becomes further accessible in Armies and Societies in Europe, 1494–1715, trans. A. Siddall (Bloomington, 1979). J.A. Lynn’s important work, Giant of the Grand Siècle: The French Army, 1610–1715 (Cambridge, 1977) was followed by the narrower but well documented volume, The Wars of Louis XIV (London, 1999). See also David Chandler, The Art of Warfare in the Age of Marlborough (New York, 1976). Louis’ arch-­enemy, who was more of a soldier than he was, is described by S.B. Baxter, William III (London, 1961). For the navy, in which many Huguenots served, see D. Dessert, La Royale: vaisseaux et marins du Roi

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Soleil (Paris, 1996). For the transition of the fleet from regular to privateering warfare see G. Symcox, The Crisis of French Sea Power, 1688–1697: From guerre d’escadre to guerre de corse (The Hague, 1974). The importance of Fouquet is recognised by an expert on ancien régime finance, D. Dessert, Fouquet (Paris, 1987), and that of Colbert, by I. Murat, Colbert (Paris, 1980) and J. Meyer, Colbert (Paris, 1981). The exhibition catalogue to celebrate his tercentenary (1983) is a biography in itself. It was accompanied by a collection of essays, R. Mousnier, ed., Un Nouveau Colbert (Paris, 1985). Among books that place the reign, its values and style are: D. Kertzer, Ritual, Politics and Power (London, 1988); L.M. Bryant, The French Royal Entry Ceremony (Geneva, 1985); P. Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (London, 1992) – like G. Walton, Louis XIV’s Versailles (London, 1986), this makes telling use of illustration. A. Adam, Grandeur and Illusion 1600–1715 (London, 1972) is comprehensive and enjoyable, as is A. Blunt, Art and Architecture in France, 1500–1700 (London, 1955). Still valuable for the literature of the later years is A. Tilly, The Decline of the Age of Louis XIV (Cambridge, 1929). Highly influential has been La Crise de la conscience Européenne, 1680–1715 (Paris, 1935), trans. by J.L. May as The European Mind (London, 1953). E.J. Kearns, Ideas in Seventeenth-­Century France (Manchester, 1979) studies the intellectual climate through leading thinkers. L.W.B. Brockliss, French Higher Education in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: A Cultural History (Oxford, 1987) shows Huguenots to be disadvantaged in a system requiring conformity to religious and political orthodoxy. Nor could they benefit from government funding and research projects described by R. Hahn, The Anatomy of a Scientific Institution: The Paris Academy of Sciences (Berkeley, 1971). Much ground in the war of ideas had been lost since the activity described in R. Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France (Princeton, 1988) and the campaign of state propaganda described by Orest Ranum, Artisans of Glory: Writers and Historical Thought in Seventeenth-­ Century France (Chapel Hill, 1980). Joseph Klaits, Printed Propaganda under Louis XIV (Princeton, 1976) is concerned with the effort after 1685 to recover goodwill in Europe. The religious issues that came to matter so much to Louis XIV and the church hierarchy have received much attention. Beside those already listed the following may be noted: for a narrative, E. Préclin and E. Jarry, Les Luttes politiques et doctrinales aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, vol. 19 in Histoire de l’Église (Paris, 1955); essential for the century, though dealing with the first half, J. Bergin, The Making of the French Episcopate, 1589–1661 (London, 1996) and his Church, Society and Religious Change in France, 1580–1730 (New Haven, 2009); Eric W. Nelson, The Monarchy and the Jesuits: Political Authority and Catholic Renewal in France, 1590–1615 (Aldershot, 2005); breaking new ground, Elizabeth Rapley, Women and Church in Seventeenth-­Century France (Montreal, 1990). Reforms (and limitations) are the theme of Joseph Bergin, Cardinal de la Rochefoucauld: Leadership and Reform in the French Church (New Haven, 1987). Pressures for conversion are described by Odile Martin, La Conversion protestante à Lyon, 1659–1687 (Geneva, 1986). Also H. Phillips, Church and Culture in Seventeenth-­Century France (Cambridge, 1997). Essays in R. Briggs, Communities of Belief (Oxford, 1989) have much to say about religious and social attitudes, Jansenism and – his phrase – ‘agencies of control’, episcopal and otherwise. L. Cognet, Le Jansénisme (Paris 1961), precise and informative, is a good starting point for that teasing subject. See also A. Sedgwick, Jansenism in Seventeenth-­Century France (Charlottesville, 1977). For Gallicanism, P. Sonnino, Louis XIV’s View of the Papacy (Berkeley, 1966). For the Huguenots’ strongest opponents, A. Tallon, La Compagnie du Saint-­Sacrement, Spiritualité et Societé 1629–1667 (Paris, 1990). Fénelon is the subject of a special issue of Dix-­Septième Siècle, nos 19–21 (1951–2). The Huguenots acquired an early history from three main and naturally partisan sources: chronicles, memoirs and martyrology. Foremost in the first category, and with wider pretensions are Théodore Agrippa d’Aubigné, Histoire universelle, ed. A de Ruble, 10 vols (London, 1734); a retrospective, predictably one-­sided account of the civil wars is offered by Phillippe Duplessis Mornay, Mémoires et correspondence, 12 vols (Paris, 1824–5). His wife Charlotte completed the picture with Mémoires sur la vie de Duplessis-­Mornay, trans. and ed. Lucy Crump as A Huguenot Family in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1922). In the

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second category (like De Thou a moderate Catholic) Pierre de l’Estoile, Journal, ed. L.R. Lefèvre (Paris, 1948–60) 3 vols from the original Mémoires-­journaux de Pierre de Lestoile, 11 vols (Paris, 1875–83); and Maximilien de Béthune, duc de Sully, Oeconomies royales, ed. D. Buisseret and B. Barbiche, vol. 1 (Paris, 1970). In the third category, the monumental – and up to 1560 regularly accruing – record of martyrs, Jean Crespin, The Book of Martyrs, was early translated into several languages. The Geneva edition under the original title, History of the True Witnesses to the Truth of the Gospel (1570) was published in facsimile at Liège in 1964. Another kind of record, Eugène and Emile Haag, La France Protestante, 2nd edn, ed. Henri Bourdier (Paris, 1877–88), is a prime source for Huguenot lives. The serious student will find much to glean from J.J.F. Poujoulat and J.F. Michaud, eds, Nouvelle collection des mémoires à l’histoire de France, 34 vols (new edn, Paris, 1854). In Collection des documents inédits sur l’histoire de France, starting with the valuable Venetian reports, the reader will find much relevant to the Huguenots in the letters of Catherine de Médici, Henry IV and Cardinal Mazarin. A starting point for seventeenth-­century Huguenotism, with impressive statistical evidence, is Philip Benedict, The Huguenot Population in France, 1600–1685: The Demographic Fate and Customs of a Religious Minority (Philadelphia, 1994). He builds on the pioneering work of Samuel Mours, ‘Essai d’évaluation de la population protestante réformée aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles’ in Les églises réformées en France (Paris, 1958). See also, following intensive archival research, his essays in The Faith and Fortune of France’s Huguenots, (Aldershot, 2001). Pastors are described in the essays of Hubert Bost, Ces Messieurs de la R.P.R. Histoires et écritures de huguenots, XVIIe à XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 2001). Valuable for their time were the accounts of A.J. Grant, The Huguenots (London, 1934) and, more amply, George A. Rothrock, The Huguenots: A Biography of a Minority (Chicago, 1979). One brief study may be noted: D. Parker, ‘The Huguenots in the Seventeenth Century’, in A.C. Hepburn, ed., Minorities in History (London, 1978). Much of Huguenot Paris in the early 1600s, and the wider Protestant world, can be learned from Hugh TrevorRoper’s remarkable Europe’s Physician: The Various Life of Sir Theodore de Mayerne (New Haven, 2006). In I. Scouloudi, ed., Huguenots in Britain and their French Background, 1550–1800 (London, 1987), see N.M. Sutherland, ‘Huguenots and the Edict of Nantes’ and Menna Prestwich, ‘The Huguenots under Richelieu and Mazarin’. For sympathetic but objective reporting of Huguenot life, John Locke’s Travels, ed. J. Lough, (Cambridge, 1953) is valuable. Two older books deserve notice. For the lasting spirit of French Protestantism essays in the volume Protestantisme français in the series ‘Présences’ are revealing (Paris, 1945). Fifty years ago I read A. Bailly, La Réforme en France jusqu’à l’Édit de Nantes (Paris, 1960). It still has much to offer in straightforward narrative. For varied Huguenot experience see notably Gregory Hanlon, Confession and Community in Seventeenth-­Century France: Catholic and Protestant Coexistence in Aquitaine (Philadelphia, 1993); Raymond A. Mentzner, Blood and Belief: Family Survival and Confessional Identity among the Provincial Huguenot Nobility (West Lafayette, IN, 1994). Much of the latest work on Huguenot lives is to be found in collections, typically following conference addresses. In Changing Identities in Early Modern France, ed. Michael Wolfe (Durham, NC, 1997), note, for the ‘readiness of Catholic women to assert themselves politically and religiously’ (Wolfe), though not only Catholic: Kristen B. Neuschel, ‘Noblewomen and War in Sixteenth-­Century France’; Charmarie Blaisdell, ‘Religion, Gender, and Class: Nuns and Authority in Early Modern France’; Barbara Diefendorf, ‘An Age of Gold? Parisian Women, the Holy League, and the Roots of Catholic Renewal’; and, exploring, through one case, obsessive popular interest in demonization and its appeal to – and use by? – spiritual partisans, Denis Crouzet, ‘A Woman and the Devil: Possession and Exorcism in Sixteenth-­Century France’. In B. van Ruymbeke and Randy J. Sparks, eds, Memory and Identity: The Huguenots in France and the Atlantic Diaspora (Columbia, SC, 2003), Diana C. Margolf, ‘Identity, Law and the Huguenots of Early Modern France’ considers how much law and endless infractions and suits shaped Huguenot lives and self-­perception. The Huguenot tradition of communal discipline was formed in the activity of consistories: the subtitle of Raymond A. Mentzner, ‘Sociability and Culpability: Conventions of Mediation and Reconciliation within the Sixteenth-Century

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Huguenot Community’, is self-­explanatory. Keith P. Luria, ‘Cemeteries, Religious Difference and the Creation of Cultural Boundaries’ looks for evidence for rational tolerance between communities. Also for further questioning of received wisdom, Bernard Cottret, ‘Frenchmen by Birth, Huguenots by the Grace of God’. Pursuing complementary themes, each essay representing recent and well researched approaches to the world defined in its title, Society and Culture in the Huguenot World, 1559–1685 (Cambridge, 2002), the editors Raymond A. Mentzner and Andrew Spicer start with the question: ‘What did it mean to be a Huguenot?’ Answers come from Timothy Watson, ‘The Reformed Church of Lyon, 1552–1572’; Philip Benedict, ‘Confessionalisation in France?’; Luc Racaut, ‘Religious Polemic and Huguenot Identity’; Penny Roberts, ‘Huguenot Petitioning during the Wars of Religion’; Mark Greengrass, ‘Informal Networks in Sixteenth-Century French Protestantism’; Raymond A. Mentzner, ‘The Edict of Nantes and its Institutions’; Amanda Eurich, ‘Speaking the King’s Language: The Huguenot Magistrates of Castres and Pau’; Karin Maag, ‘The Huguenot Academies: Preparing for an Uncertain Future’; Martin Dinges, ‘Huguenot Poor Relief and Health Care in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’; Andrew Spicer, ‘The Huguenots and their Temples’; Bernard Roussel, ‘Funeral Corteges and Huguenot Culture’; and Alan James, ‘Huguenot Militancy and the Seventeenth-­Century Wars of Religion’. Complex issues of motivation and responsibility ensure that debate around the Revocation will continue. Respected accounts besides those in aforementioned books include: J. Orcibal (for religious rather than political issues), Louis XIV et les Protestants (Paris, 1951); two tercentenary volumes, E. Labrousse, La Révocation de l’ Édit de Nantes (Paris, 1985) and J. Garrisson, L’Édit de Nantes et sa Révocation: Histoire d’une Intolerance (Paris, 1985). Also, in the special volume of XVIIe Siècle, nos 76–7 (1967), Daniel Robert, ‘Louis XIV et les Protestants’; and in the commemorative volume, Scouloudi op. cit. Roger Mettam, ‘Louis XIV and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes’. For persecution in one area, O. Martin, La conversion protestante à Lyon (1659–1687) (Geneva, 1986). The economic consequences were assessed (exaggerated?) by W.C. Scoville, The Persecution of Huguenots and French Economic Development, 1680–1720 (Berkeley, 1960). Also, T.J. Shaeper, The Economy of France in the Second Half of the Reign of Louis XIV (Montreal, 1980) and The French Council of Commerce, 1700–1715: A Study of Mercantilism after Colbert (Columbus, OH, 1983). Arguments about authority and policy are pursued in L. Rothkrug, Opposition to Louis XIV: The Political and Social Origins of the Enlightenment (Princeton, 1965); also G.H. Dodge, The Political Theory of the Huguenots of the Dispersion (New York, 1947). For the Diaspora, M. Magdelaine and R. von Thadden, Le Refuge Huguenot (Paris, 1985). For the Cévennes, C. Almeras, La Révolte des Camisards (Paris, 1960) and P. Joutard, La Révolte des Camisards (Paris, 1977). The following are among a number of articles that are relevant or of special interest: F. Bayard, ‘Les financiers et la Fronde’, XVIIe Siècle, 145 (1984). W. Beik, ‘Urban Factions and the Social Order during the Minority of Louis XIV’, French Historical Studies, 15 (1987). P. Benedict, ‘La Population reformée française de 1600’, Annales E.S.C., 42 (1987). ——, ‘Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-­Century Rouen: The Demographic Effects of the Religious Wars’, French Historical Studies, no. 9 (1975). ——, ‘The Saint Bartholomew’s Massacre in the Provinces’, Historical Journal, 21 (1978). N.J. Davies, ‘Persecution and Protestantism: Toulouse, 1562–1575’, Historical Journal, 22 (1979). ——, ‘The Sacred and the Body Social in Sixteenth-­Century Lyon’, Past and Present, 190 (Feb. 1981). Robert Descimon, ‘Paris on the Eve of Saint Bartholomew: Taxation, Privilege and Social Geography’, in Urban Society in Ancien Régime France, ed. Philip Benedict (London, 1989), pp. 69–104. Pierre Deyon, ‘Sur certaines formes de propaganda religieuse au XVI siècle’, Annales E.S.C., 36 (1981).

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B. Diefendorf, ‘Prologue to a Massacre: Popular Unrest in Paris, 1557–1572’, American Historical Review, 90 (1985) Past and Present. ——, ‘Simon Vigor: A Radical Preacher in Sixteenth-­Century Paris’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 18 (1987). Janine Estèbe (Garrisson), ‘Debate: The Rites of Violence: Religious Riots in SixteenthCentury France – a Comment’; N.Z. Davis, ‘A Rejoinder’, Past and Present, 67 (1975). ——, ‘Vers un autre religion et une autre église, 1536–1598?’ in Histoire de Protestants en France, ed. P. Wolfe (Toulouse, 1977). Jérémie Foa, ‘An Unequal Apportionment: The Conflict over Space between Protestants and Catholics at the Beginning of the Wars of Religion’, French History, 20(4). Mark Greengrass, ‘The Anatomy of a Religious Riot in Toulouse in May 1962’, Journal of European History, 34 (1983). ——, ‘The Sixteen: Radical Politics in Paris during the League’, History, 69 (1984). Ann H. Guggenheim, ‘The Calvinist Notables of Nîmes during the era of the Religious Wars’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 3 (1972). S. Hanley, ‘Engendering the Family: Family Formation and State Building in Early Modern France’, French Historical Studies, 16 (1988). Robert Harding, ‘The Mobilisation of Confraternities against the Reformation in France’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 11 (1980). S. Kettering, ‘Patronage and Kinship in Early Modern France’, French History Studies, 16 (1989). R. Kleinman, ‘Changing Interpretations of the Edict of Nantes: The Administrative Aspect, 1643–61’, French Historical Studies, 10 (1978). H.G. Koenigsberger, ‘The Organisation of Revolutionary Parties in France and the Netherlands during the Sixteenth Century’, Journal of Modern History, 27 (1955). G. Moreau, ‘Un Colporteur Calviniste en 1563’, Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français (1972). Graeme Murdock, ‘Calvin, Clothing and the Body’, Proceedings of the Huguenot Society 28(4) (2006). David Nicholls, ‘Social Change and Early Protestantism in France: Normandy, 1520–1562’, European Studies Review. W.S.F. Pickering, ‘The Responses to Persecution of the Vaudois in the French High Alps’, Proceedings of the Huguenot Society 28(3) (2005). ‘J.B. Stouppe, Cromwell’s Secret Agent’, Proceedings of the Huguenot Society 27(4) (2001). J.H.M. Salmon, ‘The Audijos Revolt: Provincial Liberties and Institutional Rivalries under Louis XIV’, European History Quarterly, 14 (1984).

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Index

s Abbeville, factory at, 321 Ablon, village of, 237, 281 absolutism, 12, 15, 212, 234, 331; and Bodin, 190; development of, 254, 331; ideology of, 273 Académie française, 337; des Sciences, des Peintures, 349 Académies, characteristics of, 311–12; closure of, 313–14 Acarie, Madame, 247 Agenais, 113 agriculture, 5 aides, 12 Aigues-Mortes, 384 Albigensians, 110, 143–4, 244–5, 412 n.16 Alençon, François de Valois, duc de, 168, 182, 188, 193, 194, see Anjou; policies of, 188, 193–4; death of, 194; becomes heir to throne as Anjou, 182 Alès, 9, 72–3; Edict of (also Grace of), 268, 272, 285; Catholic differences over, 272; provisions of, 271 Alleaume, Jacques, 241 Almanza, battle of, 382 Alsace, 329; and Protestantism, 329 Alva, duke of, 162, 167–8, 372, 414 n.18 Amboise, 137, 140, 412 n.2; château of, 70; conspiracy of, 117–19, 137, 140; Edict of, 153, 158 Amboise, George d’, II, 56 American colonies, immigration to, 370 Amiens, 58, 209, 218, 223 Amsterdam, 68, 113; benefits most from immigration, 372; privileges to immigrants, 370 Amyraut, Moise, 307–8 Anabaptism, 42, 48, 61; ideas, 45

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Anabaptists, 46, 48–9, 77–8, 402 n.3 Angélique, Mere, abbess, 249 Angers, 150 Angoumois, 147; conversions, 355 Anjou, Henri de Valois, duc de see Henry III, 162, 168, becomes king, 182 Anne of Austria, queen, and regent, 161, 282; and Louis, 318 Antichrist, 382 Apocalypse, 54, 377 Arianism, 399 n.5 Armagnac, Georges d’, 54 armies, 85, 136, 171, 223, 259, 285, 327, 330, 334, 350, 355, 390, 415 n.15, 417 n.7, 432 n.1, and Louvois, 328 Arminius, 307 Arminians, 308 Arnaud, Claude, 241 Arnauld, Antoinne, 305, 339, 345 Arnay-le-Duc, battle of, 164 Arques, battle of, 210, 233 assembly, church, 124, 185, 191, 200, 218, 221, 223, 251–2, 258, 260–1, 264–5, 325, 347, 384, 434 n.9; Louis XIV closes, 348; Huguenot, Montauban and Millau, 185, 227, 251 Aubenas, illegal assemblies at, 277; massacres at, 219 Augsburg, Confession of, 43 Augsburg, Interim of, 44 Augsburg, League of, 215, 378 Augsburg, Peace of, 44, 47 Augustine, St, 37, 59, 77, 80–1, 338, 400 n.8 Augustus, Philip, king of France, 25 Aumône-générale, 109; at Lyons, 409 n.12 Aunis, 162, 276

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452

INDEX

Auvergne, 8 Auvergne, Les Grandes Jours d’, 317, 323, 431 n.2 Avignon, 115 Baille, Pierre, 373 Baltasar, Jean Baptiste, intendant, 277; ‘the war of tongues, of pens’, 278 Balzac, Guez de, 308 Barbeyrac, Charles, 282; pastor, 282 barricades, 196, 210 Barry, Jean du, seigneur de la Renaudie, 137 Basle, 46, 64, 69, 77, 89 Basnage, 367 Bastille, 136, 337, 422 n.29 Bâville, Nicholas Lamoignon de, intendant, 357, 378–9, 381–2, 435 n.7; and Huguenots, 356; ‘king of Languedoc’, 379; in Languedoc, 356 Bayeux, 150 Bayle, Jacob, 367; Pierre, 317, 320, 367, 373, 377, 431 n.1, 431 n.12; 438 n.6; career, and family, of, 367; exile of, influence of, liberal theology of, 367, 377; philosopher, 367; publicist, encyclopaedist, 368; at Rotterdam, 367 Bayonne, 162 Béarn, 130–1, 198, 201–2, 254–6, 294, 312–13, 355, 414 n.20; Catholic worship restored, 255; church property restored, 255; Louis XIII conquers, 255; Protestant establishment in, 164; province of Navarre, 254 Beaulieu, Edict of, 122, 188 Beaumont, Massicault de, 241 Beauvais, cathedral of, 53 Bédier, Noel, 62, 66 Benoist, Élie, minister, chronicler of persecution, 282, 340, 343–4, 427 n.32, 434 n.9 Bergerac, Treaty of, 190 Béringhen, Pierre de, 240 Berlin, Huguenots in, 371 Bernard, Pierre, 322 Berne, 46, 63, 84–5, 88, 93 Berquin, Louis de, 67 Berry, duchy of, 129 Bérulle, Pierre, 247, 382 Beza, (Bèze) Theodore de, 67, 78, 90, 94–5, 123, 126, 138, 140, 144, 148–9, 158, 180, 407 n.23; and resistance, 169; and ‘tyrants’, 187

4101.indd 452

Bible, 27, 30, 33, 38–40, 42, 45–6, 49–50, 57, 60, 63, 66, 76–9, 82, 87, 90, 92, 107, 118, 149, 231, 279, 305, 308, 311, 344, 362, 374, 387; in dialogue, 311; Estienne’s, 305; Huguenot, 305; King James, 305; Louvain, 305; new versions of, 52, 336; political use of, 184; and Protestant faith, 278, 383; Vulgate, 60; Wyclif 401 n.5 Bidé, Olivier, 288 Biron, Armand de Gontaut, Marshal, 181, 208, 233, 421 n.4 bishops, 8, 24, 26, 33, 54–6, 62, 66, 69, 84–5, 88, 100, 116, 132–3, 140, 151, 214, 231, 246, 280, 334, 340, 345, 352, 357, 363–4, 392, 400 n.15, 401 n.9, 407 n.3, 409 n.23, 410 n.31, 424 n.7, 436 n.14, 438 n.6 Blois, 22, 150 Bochart, Samuel, pastor and scholar, 290 Bodin, Jean, 190, 208, 418 n.31 Boisnormand, Pastor, 130 Bologna, Concordat of, 29, 31, 51, 56 Book of Merchants, 56 Bordeaux, 9, 113, 115, 150, 174, 287, 360; parlement, 105 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, 338; and divine right, 328, 331, 433 n.19; and Gallicanism, 311, 328; Histoire des variations, 366; and Louis XIV, 358; mistrusts Harlay, 347, 363; political theory of, 331–2; and Protestantism, 347, 364; and Revocation, 358, 399 n.1; sermons of, theology of, 309–10, 337 Boucher, Jean, curé, 206 Boufflers, Louis- François, duc de, marshal, 355 Bouillon, Henri de Turenne, duc de, ambiguous role, 220; and Calvinism, 233, 423 n.17; family of, 131, 312; and new academy, 233; 200, 202, 220, 233, 239, 251–2, 423 n.16; becomes duc de Bouillon, 220 Bourbon, family of, 133, 144; house of, 331; Charles, cardinal of, claim to throne, 194; death of, 211 Bourbon, Charlotte de, 130 Bourbon-Malause, Mlle de, 355 Bourdalue, Père, 358 Bourg, Jean du, 70 Bourgeau, Jean, 152 Bourges, 128–9, 209 Brandenburg, 327; Frederick William, elector of, 322, 344; welcomes Huguenots, 371

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INDEX

bread, 24, 32, 38, 47, 81–2, 91, 181, 217, 404 n.10 Briaux, Jacques de, 290 Briçonnet, Guillaume (Bishop of Meaux), 55, 61–2, 65, 404 n.18 Brieux, Moissant de, 303 Brill, 361 Briot, Nicholas, 241 Brissac, Charles de Cosse, comte de, 217–18, 421 n.22 Brisson, Barnabé, president, 211 Brittany, 4–5, 7–8, 15, 52, 114, 218; rising in, 343 Brousson, Claude, 344; broken on the wheel, 380 Bucer, Martin, 33, 64, 86, 108, 401 n.5 Buckingham, George Villiers, duke of, 262–3, 266 Budé, Guillaume, 12, 18, 76, 102 Bullinger, Heinrich, 48, 402 n.10 Bunel, Jacob, 241 Burgundy, duke of, Charles the Bold, 7; province of, 5, 7–8, 15, 114, 201, 233, 327, 379; Burgundy, duc de, on Edict of Nantes, 379; and Fénelon, 379 Burnet, Gilbert, 318, 366–7, 431; on Louis XIV, 318 Caen, 5, 213, 303, 376 Cahors, raid on, 200 Calais, 12, 135, 157, 218 calendars, 387 Calignon, Soffrey de, 237 Calixtus, Georg, 308, 430 n.5 Calvière, Guillaume, 152 Calvin, Jean, 3, 27, 35, 37, 43, 48, 50–1, 64–5, 68, 72–3, 75–83, 85–95, 99–100, 102, 104, 117, 119, 122–3, 128–9, 132, 137–8, 140–1, 203, 215, 237, 280, 47, 405 n.2, 406, n.16 and Anabaptism, 48; and bible, 89, 92; Institutio Christianae religionis, 48; correspondence, 93–4, 129, 131, 411 n.18; family and schooling, 50, 57, 75, 128; and women, 411 n.18; French mission, 78, 94, 100, 102; Geneva, 49, 75, 84; humanist, 50, 60, 76; idea of true church, 386; lawyer, 50; moral reform, 89; and music, 89; quoted, 63; and resistance, 169; and rulers, 137; and Servetus, 93; spiritual development, 50, 77; Strasbourg, 64; teaching, 92–3; theology, 50, 75, 82, 90; worship, 90, 406 n.12 Calvinism, 35, 65, 82, 103, 108, 114, 117, 123, 135, 168, 231, 255, 272, 290, 373;

4101.indd 453

453

and business, 129; common cause, 233; communities, 82–3, 122; covenant idea, 122; culture, 114; defeated? 272 discipline, 151, 185, 297; doctrine, 123, 129, 14; Dutch, aids Huguenot immigration, 372; ethos of, 371; Eucharist, 50, 141, 403 n.14; face of, 162; and faith, 129, 252, 374; and militancy, 183, 215; ministers, 72, 108, 283; and morality, 128, 239; schism within, 307; synods, importance of, 147; theology, 126, 312, 380; thinking, 80; and values, 239 Cambrai, 218 Camisards, 381; demand religious freedom, 381; initial victories, 381; rebellion of, 363; smocks, 380; their camp, 381; their forces, 381; their ‘generals’, 381; their spirit, 381 Cape of Good Hope, immigration to, 371 Capet, Hugh, king, 26 Caracciolo, Antonio, bishop, 132, 153 Carmelite order, 247 Casimir, John, 162, 186, 188, 200 Castellio, Sebastien, 89, 93, 101, 407 n.20 Castres, 237, 294, 306, 324, 337, 344, 388, 390, 431 n.12 Castres, Huguenots of, 324 Castres, office holders, 294 Cateau-Cambrésis, 165 Catherine de Medici, 70, 106, 129, 131, 140, 144, 150, 163, 168–9, 199, 201, 241, 412 n.5, 413 n.2, 415 n.2, 418 n.32; queen mother, 136–7, 139–42, 149–50, 156, 160, 162, 168, 170–1, 180, 182, 189, 192, 194, 199, 205; strategy, 161, 415 n.2 Catholic, missions, 7 Catholic League, 194 Catholicism, see also Rome, 163; abuses of, 51; and anti-clericalism, 51; approach to education, 361; culture of, 26; divisions within, 363; English, 163, 345, 423 n.2; French, 30, 51, 53; damaged from Revocation, 382; and heresy, mission to Huguenots, 361; reform, 52; restored, 255, 277, 280, 380–1, 410 n.30; revival, 47; theology, 26; in Nîmes, 293; massacre of, 157 catholiques, vieux, 349, 359 Catinat, marshal, 370, 381 Caturce, Jean de, 74 Caulet, bishop, 343

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454

INDEX

Caumont, Jacques de, sieur de la Force, 199 Cavalier, Jean, Camisard leader, 380; bargains with Villars, 382; defeated, 381 Cental, Dame de, 72 Cerceau, Jacques II de, 281 Cévennes, 115, 257, 285, 352, 382, 425 n.6, 436 n.15, 438 n.8 Cévennes, Camisards in, 380 Cévennes, Illuminés in, 380; meetings in, 362; mountainous country, 379; resistance of, 362, 379; war in, 376, 379 Chambre Ardente, 64, 99–100, 102; records of, 101 chambres de l’Édit, 101, 227, 236–7, 293, 324, 337, 390, 392 chambres mi-parties, 189, 227, 237; abolished, 340 Chamier, Daniel, 306 Champagne, 5, 145, 153, 165, 201, 389, 414 n.7 Chantal, St Jeanne de, 248 Chapelle-Marteau, Michel, 203 Charas, Moise, 349 Charenton, village of, 229, 237, 281–2, 291, 302, 304, 306, 336, 352, 356, 366, 433 n.3 Charlemagne, Emperor, 25–6 Charles II, king of England (1660–85), 328, 333; king of England, compared to Louis XIV, 346 Charles IX, king, (1574–89), royal progess, 160, 163, 179, 182, 184, 186, 412 n.10, 416 n.9, 420 n.3; death of, 182; unnerved, 173 Charles V, Emperor (1519–56), 8, 34, 38, 43–4, 47, 66, 70, 134–5, 149, 170–1, 173, 263; and lands, 43 Charles VII, king (1422–61), 30, 421 Charles VIII, king (1483–98), 29 Charron, Pierre, treatise of, 212 Chartres, Cathedral of, 217 Chateaubriand, Edict of, 102 Châtelet, 104, 209 Châtellerault, 227; national assembly of, 222 Châtillon, house of, 137, 170 Châtillon, François de, 200 Châtillon, Odet de, bishop, 132 Châtillon, Sieur de, marshal, 103, 132, 170, 200, 408 n.11 Chayla, François de, abbé, killed, 379 Chenevix, Paul, conseilleur, 385 Christianity, Catholic, 25 Christina, Queen of Sweden, 364

4101.indd 454

Church, abuses of, 52; assemblies of, 246, 289, 293, 300, 324, 333, 352; and crown, 347; councils, 28, 51; government, 43, 137; peace of the, 52 ‘Church of the Desert’, 376, 378–9, 385–7, 440 n.25, 440 n.6; biblical image of, 384; bourgeois leaders, 387; ‘fanatics’, 387; compared to Israelites, 378; gradual security, 385; more emigration, 385; penalties renewed, 385; temptation to convert, 385; women serving, 384 Cirey, Jean de, abbot, 56 civil war, 126; starts, 146 Claire, prophetess, 386 Clairville, Claude, 204 Clamanges, Nicolas, de, 51 Claude, Jean, pastor, 306, 311, 336, 367; dialogue with Bossuet, 366 Clément, Jacques, 210; monk, 197; stabbed Henry III, 206 Clement VII, pope, 28 Clement VIII, pope, 218 Clermont-Tonnére, Louise de, 131 clientage, 16, 398 n.10 Clovis, Merovingian king, 21, 25, 30, 217 Cnisneros, Francisco Ximénez de, Cardinal, 52 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste (1619–83), 11, 232, 287, 289, 317, 319, 321, 325, 341, 345, 347, 349–50, 369, 392, 397–8 n.4, 433 n.14, 437 n.3; career and personality of, 288; and finance, 328, 334 Colbert, Jean-baptiste (1619–83), and Huguenots, 288, 289, 327; and Versailles, 334 Coligny, Gaspard de, 132, 135–6, 140, 147, 151, 158, 162–4, 168–71, 174, 207, 260, 326, 354, 408 n.16, 412 n.12, 415 n.2; influence of, 168; ‘iniquity of ’, 169; murder of, 172; wounded, 170 colloquies, 148, 218, 220, 410 n.7 Comminges, bishop of, 214 Conciergerie of Paris, members of, 113 Concini, Concino, 232, 245, 251; downfall of, 253 Concordat of Bologna, 61, 99, 101, 125–6 Condé, Louis de Bourbon, prince de, 105; 130–2, 137, 139, 146–8, 151, 157–9, 162–3, 180, 185, 413 n.3; Henri I de Bourbon, prince de, 164, 185, 188, 190, 194, 198, 202, 419 n.10; Henri II, de Bourbon, 230, 243, 247, 250–2, 254–5,

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INDEX

265, Louis I, prince de 319–20, 327, 331; serves Louis XIV, 331 Confession of Faith, 86, 123–4, 180 Conrart, Valentin, his influence, 337 conseil de conscience, 338, 352 Constable of Bourbon, 65, 131 Constance, council of, 28–9 constraints, financial, 166 Cop, Nicholas, 68, 77 Corbie, year of, 273 Cordier, Mathurin, 76 coronation, 24, 30–1, 217 Coton, Père, 226, 230, 240 Counter-Reformation, 52, 55, 134–5, 196, 215, 248, 286, 403, 428; ideals of, 273; reform of monasteries, 247; rise of Carmelites, 249; role of women, 249 court see Versailles Court, Antoine, and 1st ‘synod’ of ‘Desert’, 386; and ‘Church of the Desert’, 383; recalls Beza, 386 Coutras, battle of, 202 Créqui, Antoine de, bishop, 54, and Nantes, 409 n.23 Crespin, Jean, 109, 404 n.15, 415 n.3 Croissy, Charles de, marquis Colbert de, 105, 347; Réunions, 329 Croquants, 8, 276; uprisings, 116 Crown, 6, 8–10, 13–17, 19, 22–3, 25, 30–1, 56, 71–2, 103–4, 114, 126, 128, 136, 152, 163, 165, 167, 169, 175, 183–4, 198, 228, 231, 250–2, 259, 281, 287–8, 303, 319, 329, 354, 394–6, 427 n.15, 430 n.4, 431 n.2, 434 n.3, 436 n.14; authority of, challenged, 160; debt, 166; rights of, 9, 12, 15 Crussol, Antoine de, 131 Crussol, Jacques de, 148, 329 Daillé, Jean, pastor, 291 d’Albret, Henri, sieur de Miossens, 199 d’Albret, Isabeau, 130 d’Albret, Jeanne, 112, 126, 130–1, 163, 180, 199, 415 n.21; death of, 199 Dalibert, Pierre, 292 Daliés de la Tour, Samuel, arms dealer, 289 Damville, Henri, de Montmorency, 112, 186–7 Dandelot, François, 114, 132, 135, 147, 230, 249 d’Andoins, Corisande, 202 Daneau, Lambert, 313 d’Aubigné, Agrippa, 138, 197, 229, 251, 419 n.6, 423 nn.9, 10 d’Aumâle, Claude, duc de, 157, 196

4101.indd 455

455

Dauphiné, 8, 63, 67, 114, 122, 148, 150, 285, 306, 312, 323, 390, 418 n.36, 427 n.23; marvels, choirs, voices, 378; prison, galleys, 378; prophesyings, 377, 439 n.16; Protestantism in, 115, 290, 377 D’Amboise, Georges, 403 n.11 d’Auvergne, Charles, duc de, 222 de Bosse, Abraham, 303 de Brosse, Salomon, 281 de Brosses, Thibault, 103 de Coislin, bishop of Orléans, 364 de Cosnac, archbishop, 346 de la Garde, Abraham, 241, 389 de la Jonchée, minister, 108 de la Roche-Chandieu, Antoine, 123 de la Tour des Alliés, Samuel, 338 de la Vacquerie, Jean, 138 de Luns, Philippa, 104 de Machecoul, Anne, 355 de Raemond, Florimund, 103, 408 n.15 de Serres, gentilhomme, 242 de Serres, Jean, 230 de Vivans, mestre de camp, 354 Delorme, Jacques, 288 d’Entragues, Henriette, 232 des Gallars, Nicholas, 89, 412 n.12 des Loges, Mme, 283 d’Estrées, Gabrielle, 216, 232 de Thou, Nicolas, 185 d’Harcourt, comte de, 276, 303 d’Hauteville, Elizabeth, 132 d’Huisseau, Isaac, 307–8; excommunicated, 309 Devotio Moderna 403 n.15 Die, Academy, 311 Dieppe, 108, 150, 157, 281, 361, 377 Dijon, 9, 112, 114, 209, 214, 369 Divine Right, 212, 328, 331, 433 n.19 Dolet, Étienne, 73–4; 212, 328, 332, 368, 405 n.22 Dordt, synod of, 307, 314, 430 Dover, treaty of, 327 dragonnades, 284, 286, 340, 343–5, 355–6, 358–9, 362, 364, 428 n.7, 436 n.6; resumed, 355 Dreux, battle of, 150, 158 du Bec-Crespin, Françoise, 130 du Bosc, Pierre, pastor, 290, 332 du Bourg, Anne, 136, 237, 338, 423 n.6 du Chesne, Joseph, 240 du Cros, Charles, 237 du Fail, Noel, 128 du Maurier, Benjamin Aubéry, 239 du Moulin, Pierre, pastor, 230, 306, 308, 377, 407 n.8

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456

INDEX

du Perron, Jacques Davey, cardinal, 231, 240 du Vair, Guillaume, 212 Dubordier, Jean Armand, minister in London, 360 duellers, 191 Dumoulin, Charles, 102 Duns Scotus, 26 Dupin, Guillaume, 241 Duplessis-Mornay, Philippe, 130, 187, 199, 205, 208, 216, 221, 251–2, 259; death of, 313; debate over book, 231; relationship to Henry IV, 221 Duprat, Chancellor, 13, 56 Dupré, Guillaume, 241 Durand, Marie, prisoner, 385 Duranti, Jean-Étienne, 214 Dutch, 175, 242, 327, 334, 417, 438 Dutch War, 322, 326–7 Eck, Dr, 43 Edicts (see St Germains etc) 9, 14, 103, 139, 160, 222, 225–6, 236, 255, 318, 320, 357, 385, 387, 393, 398 ‘Edicts of pacification’, breached, 278 education, 6, 50, 86, 245, 249, 304, 312, 352, 361, 363; schools, 27 Edward VI, king (1547–53), 139 Elbeuf, Charles, duc de, 196 elders, 49, 88, 93, 181, 251, 356 élections, 8, 10, 393–4; pays d’, 8 Empire, Holy Roman, 14, 327 Enchiridion, 59 England, 13, 64–5, 103, 135, 139, 163, 263, 266, 328, 345, 349–50, 361, 365, 370, 374–5, 388–90, 401, 414, 423, 432, 437–40, 445; denizen rights, 370; immigrants to, 370 Épernon, Jean-Louis, de Nogaret, 190, 208, 218, 257, 420 n.3 Erasmus, Desiderius, 57, 62; influence of, 33, 130; life of, 59; scholarship of, 36, 52, 67 Erastianism, 88, 126 ‘eschatological angst’, 197 Estates general, at Blois, demands of, 203 Esther, daughter of Barthélemy Hervart, 354 Estienne, Robert, Bible of, 305 Etampes, duchesse d’, 16 états, pays d’, 8, 114 États-généraux, 12 Eucharist, 47 see also Zwingli, Calvinism Eucharist, Calvinist view, 54 Eudes, St Jean, priest, 290

4101.indd 456

Europe, population of, 34 Evelyn, John, persecution of Protestants, 365, 436 n.22; visits Charenton, 281 Evreux, bishop of, 231 faith, the Catholic and Roman, 303; communities of, 7; personal, 79; reformed, 4, 81; traditional, 6, 119 families, leading, 16, 135, 286 Farel, Guillaume, 62–4, 85–6 Febvre, Lucien le, 108–9, 403 n.14, 405 n.20 Fénelon, François, de la Mothe, de Salignac, archbishop, 249, 379; and gentle methods, 363; and Huguenots, 338, 362 Ferdinand, Archduke, 43–4, 134 Ferdinand II, Emperor, 272 Ferier, Vincent, 52 fermes, 183, 231, 239, 255, 359, 378 Ferrière, Arnauld de, 204 Ferry, Paul, pastor, 306, 311 feudalism, 16; feudal vassals, 26 Flanders, 4, 360 Fléchier, abbé, bishop, champions moderation, 363, 436 n. 14 Fleix, treaty of, 193 Foix, 278 Fontainebleau, Edict of, 4, 15, 17, 21, 116, 127, 146, 352, 356, 379, 383; aftermath, 359; clause 14, 359; effect on children, 357; emigration following, 357; penalties, 357; preface to, 357; terms of, 357 Fontainebleau, Palace of, 15, 18 Forant, l’amiral, 354 Formont, Nicolas, 289 Foubert, Salomon de, 349 Foucault, intendant, 343; mass conversions of, 355 Fouquet, Nicolas, finance minister, 337; character and methods of, 287–9, 337, 446; his circle, his downfall, 289 Fourquevaux, baron de, 115 Fradin, Antoine, 52 France, culture, 4; kings of, 12, 398 n.8; northern, 400 n.12; population of, 4–5 Franche-Comté, province of, 8, 233, 327 Francis I, king (1513–47), 10–16, 12, 18–19, 22–4, 29, 31–2, 48, 51, 55–6, 64–8, 70–2, 78, 111, 130, 139, 312, 321, 396 n.1, 397 n.20, 398 n.8, 404 n.17; character of, 13; powers of, 12 Francogallia, 127 Frederick, Elector Palatine, 233 French church of London, 349

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INDEX

French Religious Wars, 3, 9, 17, 20–1, 69, 133–4, 156 ff, 162 ff, 179 ff, 190, 195, 244, 246, 253, 273, 279, 289, 302, 318, 372 Fribourg, 84–5 Fronde, 232, 275, 276–8, 282, 303, 317–19, 324, 427 n.15; causes of, 11 Gallars, Nicholas des, 89, 124, 126, 141, 412 n.12 galleys, 387; service in, 385 Gallicanism, 28, 55, 57, 132, 143, 184, 194, 198, 336, 345; articles of 1682, 328, 346–8 Gallicanism, Catholic tradition, 208, 412 n.15 Gallicanism, church, 110, 142 Gallicanism, Protestantism from, 102 Gallicanism, tradition of, ix, 31, 186, 346 Garrisson, Janine, 410 n.8, 417 n.15, 432 n.13 Gassion, Jacques de, 255, 294 Gastines cross, issue of, 170 Geneva, 48, 62–3, 68, 72, 74, 76–8, 82–5, 87–91, 93, 99–101, 103, 107–10, 112, 114, 125, 133, 138, 219, 310, 360, 370, 407 nn.17, 5, 408 n.5, 410 n.3, 416 n.17, 419 n.6, 424 n.4, 430 n.2, 431 n.12 Geneva, Academy of, 311 Geneva, and Calvin, 46, 48 Geneva, Academy of; and Calvin, 46, 48; and Calvinism of, 366; church model copied, 180; college and academy of, 94; confirms Huguenot discipline, 180; council, 64, 94; and France, 112, 122–3, 125, 138, 147, 159, 410 n.7; immigrants to, 370; missionary enterprise, French refugees, 3; model copied in France, 180; and morals, 92; tensions within, 123 Gentillet, Innocent, 183–4 Germany, immigration to, 371 Gerson, Jean, 29 Gigord, Jean, 306 Gillette, 167 ‘Glorious Revolution’, 327 Gondi, Paul de, cardinal de Retz, 321 Gondrin, La Motte, governor, 148 Gouberville, Gilles de, 20–1, 37, 56–7, 80–1, 89, 399 n.16 government, royal, 3, 6–10, 10, 14–18, 35, 43, 55–6, 82, 88, 104, 110, 116, 136, 151–2, 185, 209, 251, 259, 272, 275–7, 281, 286, 292, 313–14, 321, 324, 330–1, 337, 353, 362–4, 377, 393, 397 n.20, 398 nn.8, 10, 418 n.13, 423 n.16, 423–4 n.7, 425 n.10, 426 n.7, 433 n.14, 443–6; hardening attitudes, 278

4101.indd 457

457

Gramont, family of, 130 Grand Alliance, 366, 371, 373; Louis XIV isolated in Europe by, 366 Granville, 361 Gravelle, Jean, minister, 153 Grenoble, 67, 148, 150, 360; conversions in, 355 Grève, Place de, 234 Groslot, Jérôme, 103 Grotius, Hugo, 430 n.4, and Christian reunion, 308 Groulart, Charles, premier Président, 232 Gruet, secretary of state, 93 Guérin, Antoine, 192 Gueset, Jacques, 103 Guienne, government of, 131; province of, 147, 149–50 Guillart, Charles, premier président, 13 Guise, family, power of, 136; family interest, 16, 104, 112, 133, 135, 137–9, 144, 148, 155, 157, 168, 184, 195–6, 199–200; brothers, 205, 209; and Spanish treaty, 198 Guise, François, duc de, 20, 131–2, 135, 146, 158; Guise, Henri duc de, 170, 190, 197, 420, n.30; constable, 203; assassinated, 197, 205; vengeance for, 206 Guise, territories of, 201 Guiton, Jean, mayor, 265–6; mayor, manages defence, 267; mayor, surrenders and enters royal service, 267; mayor of La Rochelle, 261 Guyenne, 285 Habsburgs, 8, 14, 48, 134, 250, 259, 272, 402 n.2, 433 n.19; offensive in Germany and Netherlands, 258 Harlay, Achille de, 209, 228, 240 Harlay, François de, archbishop, 310, 347, 352, 363–4; and Huguenots, 338; last moves pre-Revocation, 352, 356; missionary campaign, 363; rivalry with Bossuet, 347, 363 Haton, Claude, priest, 222 Haute-Guienne, 278 Henri de la Tour d’Auvergne, and reunion, 309 Henry II, king (1547–59), 12, 15–16, 19, 22, 31–2, 44, 56, 74, 99, 103–4, 109, 123, 135–6, 198, 398 n.4, 407 n.4; death of, 22, 103 Henry III, king (1574–89), 18, 22, 163–4, 168, 171, 173, 175, 181–2, 188–90,

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458

INDEX

Henry III, king (cont. . .) 192–9, 203, 211, 221, 282, 417 n.9; decline of, 191; dismisses secretaries, 205, 418 n.35; extreme behaviour, 201; loses Paris, 202; promise of, 182; temperament of, 184 Henry IV, king of Navarre, king of France (1589–1610), 17, 18, 22, 64, 77, 113, 122, 130–1, 136–40, 158, 163–4, 168, 174, 180, 182, 185, 188, 190, 192–5, 196–7, 198–204, 206, 208–9, 222, 225, 252, 254, 237, 239, 271, 287, 312–13, 318; abjures, 217; absolution of, 218; becomes king, 206; brave soldier, 210; and consistoriaux, 216; conversion of, 22, 200, 215; crowned, 217; death of, 243–4, 313; entry into Paris, 217; ecumenical task, 230; excommunicated, 198; and great nobles, 205 and fellow Huguenots, 215; and first seige of Paris, 209; Huguenot protector, 185; and Jesuits, 230; joins Henry III, 206; legends about, 200; marriage of, 170; marries Marie de Medici, 229; and Parlement, 228–9; political vision of, 204; portrait of, 202; represses Bouillon, 233; renounces faith, 174; and royal touch, 218; title by primogeniture, 194; upbringing, youth, religion, and reading, 198; war against Spain, 221; and women, 216 Henry VIII, king (1509–47), 13, 15, 64, 66, 139 heresy, 23–6, 28, 30, 32, 43, 48, 51, 53, 55, 57, 61, 67, 70–4, 93, 99, 102, 109, 111–13, 119, 124, 126, 128, 132, 135–6, 138, 143, 154–5, 168, 198, 203–4, 206, 215, 217, 237, 244, 272–3, 282, 302, 314, 322, 324, 326, 333, 339, 357; executions for, 101; genocide, 413 n.11; Netherlands in, 135 Hérouard, Jean, Dr, death of, 267 Hervart, Barthélemy, 155; war contractor and financier, 288 Hervart, Mme, 340 Hesse, Philip, of, 39, 44, 48; bigamous marriage, 43 Hildebrand, 400 n.15 Histoire des martyrs, 245, 415 n.3 Histoire des variations, 347, 366 Holland, 344, 360–1, 370, 372, 388, 407, 430; and Huguenots, 365; largest immigration to, 372; political impact of Revocation, 365; as refuge, 366 Holy League, 168, 190, 195–7, 202, 206–12, 214–15, 217, 220, 247, 371, 378, 418 n.3; evolution of, 196; in Paris, 196, 202;

4101.indd 458

spirit of, 215; in Toulouse, Dijon, Rouen, 196 hôtel de ville, 151, 170–1, 209, 238, 393 Hotman, François, 102, 126, 129, 138, 411 n.12 Hotman, Jean, 138, 186, 194, 205, 230 Huguenotism, 23, 118, 251, 376, 402 n.10, 438 n.13; calendars, 387; charity, 295; and gospel teaching, 295; communal solidarity, 275; and international community, 279; and Louis XIV, 332; ministers urge repentance, 298; story of, 94; temples, purpose and value of, 237; temples, site for, 236 Huguenots, v–vi, ix, 3–4, 6, 8–11, 19–20, 23, 30, 49, 56, 67, 71, 81, 83, 93–4, 100–1, 106–8, 110, 113–15, 117–23, 125, 129–33, 136–42, 144–6, 148–52, 154–5, 158, 198, 202–3, 209, 212–14, 216, 218–19, 221, 223–4, 226–7, 229, 231, 234, 236, 238–40, 244–6, 250–2, 254–6, 258, 260, 262–3, 271–4, 276–84, 288–9, 294–7, 299, 302, 304–5, 309, 313, 321–32, 337, 339, 343–6, 348, 351–7, 359–63, 365–9, 372–4, 377–80, 382–3, 385–8, 390, 393, 396 n.4, 406 n.2, 407 n.21, 408 n.16, 410 n.2, 412 n.5, 413 n.2, 414 n.7, 415 n.2, 416 n.5, 419 n.6, 421 n.27, 422 n.3, 424 n.3, 425 n.11, 426 n.9, 427 n.25, 429 n.34, 430 n.10, 433 n.20, 434 nn.8, 9, 435 nn.11, 15, 436 n.4, 437 n.27, 438 n.8, 439 n.19, 440 n.25; areas of, 7, 250; army, 104, 222, 257; artists and architects, 241, 360; assemblies, 252; avant-garde, 368; bible, 305, 373; bishops, sympathetic towards, 364; and business, 287, 361, 374; calendars, 302, 429 n.4; and Calvinism, 94; cemeteries, sites for, 236; at Charenton temple, 229; ‘Church of the Desert’, 376; ‘Church of the Desert’, bourgeois leadership, 387; churches, 127, 156, 165, 224; churches, in London, in Amsterdam, 349; citizenship restored, 385; clandestine worship, 362, 380, 383; and class, 111; colleges, 312; colloquies, 200, 233; communities, 219–20, 275, 283, 285, 295, 304, 322, 359, 414 n.17, 425 n.11, 426 n.9, 429 nn.34, 35; communities, Desert, witness of, 386; communities, in Midi, 359; congregations, 91, 127; consistories, 81, 88, 93, 125–6, 137, 147–8, 152, 180, 218–20, 224, 275, 278, 280, 296, 302, 308, 313–14, 406 n.13, 429 n.35; constitution of, 184–5; contest over space, 159; contribution of, 350, 438 n.13; control

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INDEX

over, 150–1, 312; conversions of, 340, 434 n.8; cosmopolitan, 360; and covenant, 279; craftsmen, 107, 241, 360, 369; craftsmen, as emigrants, 372–4; ‘crescent’, 283; culture, 110, 280, 296, 302, 429 nn.39, 43; debarred from office, 341; defeated on lle de Ré, 260; defection of, 174; defenceless, 271; ‘demographic crisis’? 284; discipline, 164, 296; discipline, St Paul’s example, 297; and dragonnades, 339–40; during Fronde, 277, 319; and Edict of Nantes, 4, 9, 15, 156, 181, 183, 224, 226, 248, 275, 293, 299, 322–3, 357; education, restriction on, 313–14; education and apprenticeships, 296; élite, 337, 414; emigration, 349, 357, 369, 374, 435 n.2, 437 n.27; emigration, economic effect, 369; emigration, and liberalism, 367; emigration, success of, 374; and European Protestanism, 326; and exile, 239; faith, 124, 276; faith, issues of, 306; families, 343, 389–90; and finance, 26, 289; fortifications demolished, 271; funeral practice, 298; and Gallicanism, 348; and Geneva, 94; government of, 147; grim experiences of, 361; hard masters? 290; histories, 419 n.6; hope to return, 371, 380; hospitality, 296; iconoclasm, 23, 149, 151; identity, 424 n.3; immigrants, financial difficulties, 373; immigrants, intellectuals among, 373; intendants, 362; intendants report collapse, 350; leaders, 111, 116, 131, 163, 221, 256, 340, 408 nn.11, 16; leadership, bourgeois to noble, 159; legislation against, 340; lethargy? 290, 334; and literacy, 107, 396 n.4; ‘little tyrants’, 221; magistrates, 423 n.4, 428 n.31; of Maine, remonstrance, 161; massacre by, 152; massacres of, 20, 173; mediation, 297; medical care, 112, 296, 409 n.18; militancy, 251, 272; as a military force, 127, 185; ministers, 79, 115, 148, 224, 228, 284, 303–4, 306, 313, 360, 412 n.12; ministers, final measures against, 354; ministers, main emigration to Netherlands, 373; ministers, return to France, 386; mixed marriages of, 275; naval and mercantile interests, 288, 360; nobles, 128, 136, 146, 223, 254, 276, 354, 376, 411 n.19; in Normandy, decline of, 289; numbers of, 283, 334, 359; officers, 390; opinion of, 327; oppression of, 294, 323, 435 n.2; origin of name, 122, 410 n.2; as outsiders, and ‘scandalous’,

4101.indd 459

459

299–300; in Paris, sophistication of, 291; peaceful, 272; pedantic treatment of rights, 322; population of, 3, 64, 99, 256, 275, 283–4, 292, 396 n.2, 422 n.3, 428 n.8; professionals, 349, 360, 374; propaganda against Louis XIV, 372; as rebels, 138, 147; as rebels, Camisards, 363; and refugees, 365, 383; remaining post Revocation, 362, 384; rights lost, 198; rights of, 144, 158, 161, 163–4, 188, 285, 296; rights curtailed by Alès, 271; rules for life, 180; seigneurs, 289; soldiers, 356, 382; soldiers, to Prussia, 372; solidarity among, 340; in South, 198; story, 4, 6, 10, 25, 70, 128, 195, 375; strangers in their own country, 387; and Sully, 239; synods, 277, 413 n.16; temples, 90, 106, 117, 226, 237, 279–82, 292, 294, 296–7, 299, 301–2, 304, 310, 322–4, 344, 353, 356, 361, 378, 386, 389, 417 n.15, 427 n.25; temples, architects designing, 281; temples, building of, use of, 280; temples, closures, 323, 341, 353; temples, destruction of, 323, 381; temples, rebuilding, 281; those who stayed, 376; towns, 190, 237, 260, 275; violence and mediation, 296; virtual state, 179; vulnerable to mission, 272; worship, 82, 87, 181, 281–2, 305, 324 Huguenots, Bible, 305 Huguenots, Caen, woolcombers, 376 Huguenots, Christian names, 279 Huguenots, Edict of Nantes, 226 ff; and Revocation, 330, 357 ff Huguenots, Paris, 323 Huguenots, St Bartholomew’s, 171ff humanism, 3, 18, 33, 50, 57–60, 65–6, 70, 76, 211, 421 n.27 Hus, Jan, heretic, 32, 401 n.5 iconoclasm, 23, 149, 151, 162, 169 illiteracy, 6 images, biblical, 384 immigration, 5, 286, 373 Imperial Free Cities, 84 indulgences, 32, 34–8, 43, 57, 62, 70, 404 n.19 inflation, 20 Innocent XI, character of, 346; and Gallicanism, 364; ideals of, 346; and Louis XIV, 346–7, 364; pope, 321, 346–7, 349, 434 n.8; supports Le Camus, 363; unhappy about Revocation, 364 Institutio, 69, 73, 75, 77–9, 87, 114 intendants, 5, 9–10, 15, 230, 322, 325, 330, 339–40, 343, 349–50, 381, 384,

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460

INDEX

intendants (cont. . .) 392–3, 396 n.4; and good order, 319, 379; and Huguenots, 301, 319, 322, 329, 357, 362; report Huguenot numbers, 284, 294 Islam, 25, 134 Italians, 56–7, 184 Ivry, battle of, 210, 233 James II, king of England (1685–88), 328, 345–6, 366, 370, 378, 388, 390; accession of, 333, 346; loses throne, 365 Jansenism, 321, 338–9; and Huguenots, 336; theology of, 212, 321 Jansenists, 212, 309–10, 321, 336, 338–9, 363, 382, 430; condemn dragonnades, 364 Jarnac, battle of, 163 Jean de Ferriers, Vidâme de Chartres, 147 Jeannin, Pierre, 250 Jerome, St, 59 Jersey, 360–1 Jesuits, Society of Jesus, 125, 226, 230, 240, 244, 249–50, 273, 292, 309–10, 312, 321, 325, 347, 350, 363; and education, 313; in Holland, 365 Joan of Arc, 30, 380 Joubert, Guillaume, 111 Joubert, Laurent, 113 Joyeuse, Guillaume de, 214 Jurieu, Pierre, 309, 364, 367, 373; exile of, 344; and ‘Holy War’, 380; polemics of, 344, 377; prophesies, 377; spy ring, 377 Justel, Henri, 349, 360, 435 n.11 L’ Estoile, Pierre de, 8, 114, 190, 195, 201, 230, 418 n.32 La Barelle, minister, 149 La Boétie, Étienne de, 19–20, 143–4 La Chaise, Pierre, Père de, 310, 333, 345, 351, 433 n.22 La Fontaine, Jean de, 338 La Grande Marie, 380, 382 La Noue, François de, 163, 216 La Popelinière, Lancelot, sieur de, 222, 421 n.27 La Renaudie, seigneur de, 137–8 La Réveille-Matin des français: constitution, 185 La Reynie, lieutenant de police, 367 La Roche Chandieu, Antoine de, pastor, 89, 131, 137 La Roche Giffard, de, comte de Roye, 354 La Rochefoucauld, 354 La Rochelle, 54, 111–13, 151, 163–5, 169, 173, 180, 182–3, 199, 227, 236, 245,

4101.indd 460

250–1, 256–8, 260–6, 268, 276, 285–9, 345, 360, 372, 389, 397 n.20, 414, n.17 La Rochelle, assembly of, 258; discipline of, 180; Huguenot capital, 181; isolated, 265; peace of, 182; preliminary campaigns, 260; Protestant numbers decline, 286; Protestantism, 111; Richelieu in charge, 260; the siege, 260–67 La Sauvetât, battle of, 9 La Trémoille, Henri de, 222, 258, 354; conversion of, 258 Laffemas, Barthélemy de, 241 Lainez, Diego, Jesuit, 140 Lamoignon, Guillaume de, premier president, 358 L’Anglois, Jacques, 89, 101 Languedoc, 4–5, 8, 112, 114, 122, 147–8, 150, 187, 241, 258, 260, 277–8, 322–3, 356, 376, 378, 388, 396 n.4, 397 nn.14, 20; governor’s dialogue with Huguenots, 352; illuminés in, 378 Latin Vulgate, 142 Lattes, Jean de, bishop, 133 Lausanne, five scholars, 109; seminary at, 386 Laval, Charlotte de, 130 law, 4, 6–7, 9, 13, 15, 24, 35, 37, 76, 85, 91, 147, 194, 227, 293, 312, 323, 356, 363, 397 n.19, 404 n.12, 411 n.12, 429 n.35 law courts, 9, 102, 186, 293 Layrac, 274, 297 Lazarists, 248 Leopold, Emperor, 14, 38, 43–4, 46–7, 70, 233, 272, 327–9, 345–7, 364; opposed to Louis XIV, 364 Le Bret, Cardin, 212 Le Camus, 331; bishop, 310, 338, 355, 377; bishop, and conversions, 336; bishop, formula for Huguenots, 363 Le Caron, Jean, 212; De la tranquillité de l’esprit, 211 Le Clerc, Jean, 61 Le Clerk, Jean, remonstrant, 366 Le Franc, Jeanne, 76 Le Havre, 108, 150, 157, 377 Le Nain, Louis, 303 Le Riche, Marguerite, 105 Le Roy, Louis, 127 Le Tellier, Charles-Maurice, archbishop, 348; Le Tellier, Michel, chancellor, 330, 348, 352, 354; death of, 358; and Edict of Fontainebleau, 356, family of, 348 Le Tourneau, Jansenist, 309; translation of Breviary, 364

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INDEX

Le Trémoille, family of, 131 League, Catholic, 9 Leaguers, 208–9, 215–17, 247, 250, 420 Lefèvre, Jacques d’Étaples, humanist, 60–3, 65–6, 69, 76, 305 Legrand, Abraham, manufacturer, 372 Leiden, university, 313 les Grands, problem of, 320 Lesdiguières, François de Bonne de, 200, 257–8, 260 L’Huillier, Bishop Jean, 55 Limoges, 138–41, 160–2, 211, 233; preacher of, 20 Limousin, 117 lit de justice, 160 Locke, John, 284, 292, 306, 308, 319, 323–4, 332, 343, 349, 366, 399 n.17, 427 n.30, 428 n.5, 429 n.33, 432 n.24, 433 n.15, 438 n.7; genius of, 368, 377; at Versailles, 330 Loire, 5, 18, 69, 114, 138, 150, 153, 188, 223, 275, 419 Loire Valley, 113 Loménie, Antoine de, 239 London, 141, 349, 382; and Huguenots, 360; prophets in, 382 Longjumeau, marquis de, 105 Longjumeau, Peace of, 163 Lord’s Supper, 47, 54, 81–2, 88, 90, 170, 180–1, 401 n.8 Lorraine, Charles de Guise, cardinal of, 102–3, 135, 138, 141–3, 162–3, 175, 194, 408 n.10, 412 n.14 Loudun, Treaty of, 252 Louis IX, king (1215–70), St Louis, 27–8, 30, 143, 399 n.20 Louis XI (1461–83), 16, 22, 25, 84, 114, 149, 186 Louis XII (1498–1515), 4, 14, 31, 406 n.13 Louis XIII (1610–43), 11, 18, 165, 255, 273, 388, 425 n.5; birth of, 232; boyhood, 240; commands the siege, 267; conquest Béarn, 256; coup against Concini, 254; marriage of, 252 Louis XIV (1643–1715), viii, 4, 15, 17–18, 26, 212, 242, 272, 274, 282, 285, 288, 318, 331, 333, 337, 346, 365, 390, 394, 398 n.8, 424 n.10, 427 n.15, 431 n.14, 433 n.14, 434 n.8, 435 n.13, 436 n.9, 438 n.3, 439 n.11; absolutism, 317, 331; accession of, 301; amour propre, 379; ‘Antichrist’, 371; appearance of, 317; asserts authority, 317; and church, condemned, 371; controls council, 330; death of, 383; debate in council: revoke?

4101.indd 461

461

351; and Dutch war, 322, 326; and emigration, 361; and Europe, 329, 333; and foreign policy, 326, 329; and Gallicanism, 346; and glory, 326, 330; and Huguenots, 301, 324–5, 330, 363; ideal of unity, 320; and Jansenism, kingship of, 317, 350; and Maintenon, manner of, 317; marriage of, 317; mémoires, 320, 322, 327, 332; and ministers, 330; and Père La Chaise, 333; politique, 345; pride of, 327, 379; and propaganda, 331; and religion, 326, 332, 358; Revocation, 334, 346; and Rome, 329, 333, 345–6; schooling of, 317; and Spanish succession, 318; Versailles, 317, 330; and war, 8, 326; and war, against Grand alliance, 366; and war, against League of Augsburg, 327, 369; and war, suppressing Cévennes revolt, 366 Louvois, Michel le Tellier, marquis de, 327, 329, 348, 350, 358, 428 n.17, 434 n.5, 436 n.17; and army, 327–8, 344, 360; and Colbert, concern about emigration, 355; and dragonnades, 343; and Huguenot soldiers, 356; and Huguenots, 327, 342, 357, 362; and mass conversions of, 355, Louvre, Palace of, 18, 70, 228, 241 Loyola, Ignatius, 76, 405 n.4 Luçon, 246 Luther, Martin, 3, 31–40, 42–7, 49–50, 53, 57, 64–5, 67, 69, 78–80, 245, 400 n.8, 401 n.8, 402 n.15, 403 n.6, 404 n.10, 405 n.5; challenge of, 39, 57; and Christian magistrate, 45; church, 44; death of, 42–3; at Leipzig, 38; portrayal of, 38; and social war, 42; theology of, 34, 85, 142; works of, 38, 40; writing 402 n.21 Lutheranism, 33, 42–3, 62, 65, 67, 69, 111, 134, 404 n.10, 407 n.20 Lutherans, 30, 32, 44, 47–8, 50–1, 54, 63, 68–9, 71, 77, 113, 140, 143, 154, 401 n.8, 404 nn.3, 10, 422 n.30, 430 n.5 Luxembourg, marshal, 369, 437 n.2 Luynes, duc de, 254; constable, death of, 259, 425 n.10 Lyons, vii, 4, 64, 69, 73, 84, 102, 109–11, 113, 115, 122, 141, 150, 209, 260, 288, 360, 369, 389, 396 n.4, 397 nn.19, 2, 409 n.12 Lyons, Edict of, 78 Lyons, printing in, 109 Lyons, Protestantism in, 109 Macar, Jean, pastor, 132 Macaud, Pastor, 104 Machiavelli, doctrines of, 183

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462

INDEX

Maillard, Olivier, 53 Maimbourg, Louis, 367 Maintenon, Françoise d‘Aubigné, marquise de, 332, 349, 433 n.20; ‘black legend’, 352; education of Huguenots, 352; and influence over policy, 351; marriage to Louis XIV, 351; views on religion, 351 Maisonneuve, Baudichon de la, 69 Manichaean heresy, 115 Mantes, letters patent of, 208 Marguerite d’Angoulême, queen of Navarre, 60, 64–6, 77–8, 129–30, 132, 170, 199, 229, 406 n.12, 408 n.11, 411 n.18, 412 n.10 Marguerite de Valois, 168; marriage annulled, 229; marriage of, 170, 422 n.8 Maria Theresa, Infanta, 317 Marie de Medici, 229, 232; marries Henry IV, 229; regent, 136, 229, 244, 251–2, 422 n.8, 424 n.5 Marillac, Michel de, 234, 243, 273 Marillac, René de, and billetting, 343; dragonnades, 343; recalled, 345 Marillac, St Louise de, 248 Marion, Elie, prophet, 382 Marot, Clément, 90, 305, 388 Marvejol, massacres at, 219 Mary, queen (1552–8), 64 Mary, virgin, devotion to, 34–5, 60, 62, 64, 135, 197 Massieu, Pierre, 376, 438 n.3 Massif Central, vii, 4–5, 317, 323 Matignon, bishop of Condom, 364 Maupeou, Gilles de, 241 Mauvans, Paulon de, 148 Mayenne, Charles, duc de, 196, 206, 209–11, 214–15, 217–18, 421 n.8 Mayerne, Théodore, Turquet de, 240, 424 n.10 Mayeuc, bishop, 54 Mazarin, Jules, cardinal, 17, 272, 274–5, 279, 288, 302, 427 n.15, 428 n.13, 431 n.7; death of, 301, 317; and Huguenotism, 277; and ‘little flock’, 277; and Louis XIV, 318; reaffirms Edict of Nantes, 277 Mazarinades, 319 Mazel, Abraham, woolcomber, 380; and guerrilla, 382 Meaux, 55, 61, 63, 66–7, 73, 129; bishop of, 310 mediation, 60–1 medicine, 296, 353, 404 n.8, 406 n.9, 409 n.17, 424 n.10 Melanchthon, Philip, 33, 43–4, 47, 70, 79, 401 n.8, 404 n.10

4101.indd 462

Mémoires of Louis XIV, 320–2, 324, 327, 332; of de Thou, et al., 415 n.3, 422 n.28, 432 n.16 Menot, Michelle, 53 mercenaries, foreign use of, 165, 202 Mercoeur, Louis de Bourbon, duc de, 196, 218 Méré, Poltrot de, 158 Metz, 44, 67, 135, 284, 360 Meynier, Jean, baron d’ Oppède, 72–3 Meynier, Père, 322 Midi, 7, 114 Midi, Huguenots in, 359 Midi, separate state? 268 Migault, family of, 360–1 Migault, Jean, eventual emigration of, 344 Milice, 209 military operations, limits on, 166 Minet, Isaac, and family, 365 Miremont, marquis de, 355 monarchy, ix, 3, 11, 19, 22–3, 120; early days, 25, 27; symbolism of, 24 Monginot, physician, 230 Monier, Claude, 109 Monluc, Blaise de, 115, 128, 131, 149–50, 157, 410 n.26, 411 n.22, 412 n.2, 413 n.1 Monluc, Jean de, bishop, 133 Montaigne, Michel de, 154, 204, 216; his philosophy, 204 Montaigu, Collège de, 59, 62, 76, 403 Montauban, 116, 150–1, 165, 173, 182, 227, 236, 252, 259, 289, 296–7, 306, 312–14, 362, 385; Academy of, 311; mass abjurations, 355; siege of, 165, 257, 259; struggle for control, 292 Montbrun, Charles de Puy de, assassin, 149 Montchrétien, Antoine de, 242 Montcontour, battle of, 163 Montjoye, Anne, of Périgord, 384 Montmorency, Anne de, Constable, 14, 21, 127, 133, 137; clientage, 16, 398 n.7; captured, 158; death of, 162 Montmorency, François duc de, 200 Montmorency, Henri, duc de, 275; rebel, 276, 417 n.23, 426 n.14 Montmorency, Louise de, 129 Montpellier, 112, 150, 224, 240, 275, 277–8, 280, 282, 284–5, 306, 308, 312–13, 322, 360; Academy 240, 311, 312, 314; bishop of, 280; émente in, 275; factions in, 278; Huguenot life in, 280, 282, 284–5, 306, 308, 322; national synod in, 224; peace of, 261–2; school of medicine, 240, 312 Montpensier, Jacqueline, duchesse de, 129

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INDEX

Montpensier, Louis de Bourbon, duc de, 152, 189, 208, 420 n.32 Montsoreau, comte de, 173 Morel, François, pastor, 89, 113, 123, 137 Morély, Jean, 126 Morin, M, minister, 349 Morin, Pierre, 52 Moriscoes, expulsion of, viii Mours, Samuel, 284 Mühlberg, battle of, 44 Münster, 48 Müntzer, Thomas, 42 Musculus, Wolfgang, 88 Namours, Gabriel, pastor, 216 Nantes, ix, 115, 360; Edict of, 4, 9, 15, 30, 54, 115, 156, 189, 204, 218–19, 224, 250–1, 275, 277, 318, 322–3, 357, 360, 379, 409 n.23; brevets, 226; commissions, 235; concession of religious assemblies, 227; four components of, 226; general intention, 225; Huguenot representatives at court, 228; Huguenots gain from, 226; introduction to, 225; ‘like a tomb’, 237; Parlement, resist registration, 228; Parlement registers edict, 229; places de sureté, 228; problems to be resolved, 225; and Revocation, 275, 330; Royal brevets, 226; secret articles of, 226; security for Catholics, 227; separate parts of, 225; subsidies for pastors, 228 Nantes, Protestantism in, 114 Narbonne, 115–16 Nassau, Nassau, Louis of, 163, 169–70, 180 Navarre, 163; kingdom of, 64, 130; province, 254; Navarre, Antoine, king of, 122, 131, 136–9, 199; fatally wounded, 158 Navarre, Marguerite of, 77, 130 Nègrepelisse, destroyed, 260 Nemours, 201–2, 206 Nemours, Jacques de Savoie, duc de, 149 Nemours, Treaty of, 198, 201–2 Nérac, 64, 138, 199 Netherlands, 14, 33, 49, 87, 103, 198, 259, 263, 373 Neuchâtel, 360 Nevers, Jean-Louis, de Nogaret, 133, 190, 208, 263 Nevers, Louis de Gonzague, duc de, 190 New Catholics, 343, 355 Nice, 4, 360 Nicole, Pierre, Jansenist, 309, 367 Nijmegen, Treaty of, 327–8

4101.indd 463

463

Nîmes, 150–2, 173, 180, 182, 218–20, 277–8, 285, 292, 313, 323, 369; Academy, 293, 311; assembly of, 1615, 252; college under Huguenot control, 312; consistory of, 219, 421 n.23 Noailles, Anne-Jules, duc de, 352, 435 n.16 Noailles, Louis-Antoine de, cardinal, archbishop of Paris, and Huguenots 379 nobles, 7, 14, 16, 20–2, 56, 67, 89, 106, 127, 138, 152, 209, 222, 255, 276, 282, 376, 393; Huguenot, 147; Protestant, 20; and war, 127, women, 411 n.19 nominalism, 400 n.4 Normandy, 5–6, 8, 108, 113–14, 150, 196, 201, 210, 213, 274–6, 290, 303, 376, 397 n.19, 413 n.17, 415 n.26; conquest of, 27 Normandy, Protestantism in, 6, 147 Notables, Assembly of, 12, 116, 241 nouveaux convertis, 309, 341, 351, 356, 359, 362–3, 378, 380–1; cost of compensation, 349; harrassed, 361 Nouvelle France, 286 Nouvellet, Claude, 184 Noyon, 77 Nu-pieds, revolt of, 290; uprising of, 276 Occam, William of, Franciscan, 27 Occitan, 7, 114, 435 n.8 Oecolampadius, 44, 63, 68, 404, n.10 offices, 9–11, 15–18, 66, 87, 102, 111, 140, 238–9, 273–4, 278, 286–7, 290, 294, 324, 341, 365, 394–5 Olivetan, Pierre, 78; and French Bible, 72, 305 Orange, Academy, 311 Orléans, 67, 73, 76–8, 84, 103, 107, 120, 126, 140, 146, 149–50, 152, 157, 173, 280, 312, 364 Orléans, Gaston, duc de, chronic rebel, 276 Orthez, Academy, 312–13 Ottoman Turks, 23, 347; threat of, 43, 328 Overbury, Sir Thomas, 284 Pagés, Louis, shipowner, 288 Palatinate, devastation of, 371, 438 n.6 Palot, Jacques, 239 Pantagruel, 73 Papin, Denis, 349 Paracelsus, school of, 240, 409 n.20, 424 n.10 Paris, vii, 4, 9, 15, 20, 28, 30, 48, 60, 63, 67, 70–1, 73–4, 76, 78, 101, 103–5, 108, 113, 116, 122, 124, 147, 151, 165, 172, 174, 196, 202, 207, 209, 211, 214, 217, 227–9, 237–8, 240–1, 249, 273, 281, 318, 340, 347, 361, 363, 372, 392, 394, 396 n.4,

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464

INDEX

Paris (cont. . .) 397 n.17, 406 n.12, 410 n.25, 415 nn.2,3, 418 n.32, 419 nn.3, 32, 427 n.15, 431 n.16, 434 n.9; 1st siege of, 162; 2nd siege of, 210 Paris, 2nd siege of, 210; Charenton, weight of, 282, 291; demonstrations in, 205; Holy League in, 196; Huguenots return to, 291; potential violence of, 167; preachers in, 168 Parisian Women, 420 Parisians, 69–70, 104, 172, 213, 418 n.32 parlement, provincial, 9–10, 105–6, 108–9, 113, 118, 138, 150, 152, 159–63, 173, 186, 213–14, 226, 277, 294, 322; parlement, of Paris, 9–10, 14, 31, 65–6, 73, 102, 103, 136, 189, 198, 209, 229, 338, 347, 392; anti-Huguenot, 324; damaged, 209; in exile, 209; faith commission, 67; in opposition to crown, 145; powers of, 9; pressure on Huguenot officials, 293; provincial, 229; registration by, 159 Parma, Alexander Farnese, duc of, 213 Parthenay, Anne de, 78 Pascal, Blaise, Jansenist, 309–10, 321 Pasquier, Étienne, 208 pastors, company of, 99, 125–6; conditions of, 306 Patin, Guy, 240 patronage, 17–19, 22, 31, 55, 57, 65–6, 123, 127, 238, 240, 331, 337–8, 398 n.10, 426 n.7 Pau, 64, 255, 294 Paul, Vincent de, ‘Monsieur Vincent’, 246, 248; Les Filles de la Charite, 248 Paule, François de, 53 paulette, 294 Paumier, Jean, ‘king’, 192 Pavia, battle of (1525), 14 pays d’états, 8 ‘Peace of the Church’, 321, 325, 432 n.17 peasantry, 5, 276, 393; generally Catholic, 112 Pelissari, Georges, 288 Pellisson, Paul, 340; and caisse de conscience, 310; and caisse de conversion, 310, 338; and Huguenots, and Jansenism, 336, 338; loses credibility, 346; reports conversions, 339; royal historiographer, 337; tariff for compensation, 338 Pepin, the Short, 25 Péréfixe, Hardouin de, archbishop, 318 Périgord, 384 Petan, Paul, 239 Philip Augustus, king, 27–8, 30, 48

4101.indd 464

Philip II, king of Spain, 134–5, 141, 162, 168, 193, 211, 414 n.18 Philip III, king of Spain (1598–1691), viii philosophy, 28, 30 Pithou, Nicholas, 159 placards, 68–70, 90; tenor of, 69 place de Grève, 170 Place Maubert, 99, 105 Platter, Felix, 112 Poissy, 140–3, 407 n.3, 412 n.14; colloquy of, 133 Poitiers, 84, 89, 123–4, 233, 298 Poitiers, Protestantism in, 100 Poitou, Protestantism in, 147; province of, 101, 162, 251, 260, 276, 285–6, 343–4, 353, 397 n.20, 427 n.16; assemblies in, 384; dragonnades, 339; dragonnades in, 343; mass abjurations, 355; ‘a patchwork’, 286; Polignac, Gabriel de, 239 politiques, 22, 136, 187, 204, 209, 213–14, 247 Poncelet, Michel, 153 Pons, Antoine de, 78 Pont de Cé, battle of, 254 Pontchartrain, Louis, Phelypeaux, comt de, 379 Popes, Adrian IV, Julius II, Leo X, 57; Alexander VI, 29, 52; Boniface VIII, Urban VI, 28; Innocent III, 27; Innocent XI, 321, 339; Julius III, 31; Leo III, Urban VI, 26; Leo X, 59; Martin V, 28; Pius II, 29 Sixtus V, 194, 198 Pope’s authority, 346 Popish ‘plot’, 345 popular uprisings, 191 Porcien, Antoine de Croy, prince de, 147 Port Royal, 249, 304, 306, 309–10, 321, 336, 338, 347, 430 n.9, 432 n.17 Portal, Jean François de, 365 Pre-Reform, 51, 403 n.1 predestination, 79–81, 124, 308, 404 n.20 présidiaux, 15, 102 Prieu, Barthélemy, 241 printers, printing, 40, 58, 69, 74, 109–10, 123, 172, 209, 372, 374 professions, 238, 374 prophesyings, 362, 377–80, 386, 438 n.8, 439 n.16 Protestant, faith, 113, 217; heretics, 207, 245; ideology of, 7; numbers of, 20, 105–6; princes, 43; reform, 9, 144; theology of, 30; world of, 157; worship, 40, 236, 282; Europe, 272, 411 n.24; women, influence of, 128

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INDEX

Protestantism, 6, 14–16, 22, 27, 35, 38–9, 52, 62, 66, 68–9, 72, 102, 105, 107–10, 113–16, 125, 127, 136, 149, 152, 175, 199, 203, 230, 301, 304, 308, 336, 347, 353, 364, 367, 387, 389, 398 n.8, 402 nn.14, 3, 404 n.17, 408 n.17, 409 n.12, 412 n.10, 413 n.2, 417 n.3, 426 n.9, 427 n.23, 428 n.7, 431 n.29; annus mirabilis, 38; appeal to women, 130 Protestantism, Confession, 42–3; conversion to, 6, 116, 310; disunity, 44; French, 68, 142, 279; government’s misunderstanding, 362 Protestantism, Germany, 39, 57; growth of, 7, 16, 55–6, 65, 67, 71, 106; ideology of, 15, 106, 108, 115, 117; and La Rochelle, 111; origin of word, 39; and Rohan, duc de, 258; theology, 43, 128 Protestants, massacres of, 143; population of, 99 Provence, vii, 5, 8, 114–15, 122, 218 psalms, 39, 46, 60, 74, 90, 103, 110–11, 117–18, 120, 134, 138, 155, 159, 272, 277, 280, 282, 302, 305, 322, 362, 377–8, 380, 387, 406 n.12, 408 n.10, 434 n.1; banning of, 322; and Manot, 406 n.12 purgatory, 34, 37, 43, 54, 57, 85, 142, 298, 401 n.11, 404 n.16 puritan strains, 203 puritans, 92, 126, 139, 303, 336 Pyrenees, Peace of, 279 Queen’s Rights, War of the, 142, 318, 322, 327 Quévilly, 280 Quictart, Pierre, 119 Rabelais, François, 59, 73 Racine, Jean, 4 Raemond, Florimond de, 99, 103, 107, 115 Rainville, Jacques Bigot de la, de Vivans, 354 Rambouillet, Marie, 287 Rambouillet, Nicolas, 287 Ramus, Pierre de la Ramée, 172 Ratisbon, Truce of, 328–9, 345, 349, 432 n.11 Ravaillac, François, and tyrannicide, 244 Razats, 192 Rebeine, 109 Reconquista, the Catholic, 250 reform, moral, 52, 89 Reformation, 13–15, 17, 32, 35–6, 51, 60, 77–8, 83–5, 94, 400, 400 n.1, 401 n.8, 402 nn.18, 10, 405 n.5, 409 n.21, 417 n.3; background of, 29

4101.indd 465

465

Reformation, French, 74, 124, 401 n.12, 403 n.14, 404 n.15, 405 n.17, 408 n.6, 409 n.16 Reformation, German, 32–3, see also Buces, Luther, Melanchthon Reformation, pre-, 27, 53 Régis, Pierre, 308 Reims, 24, 30, 61 religion, Huguenot see Huguenot; language of, 209; pollution of, 120; popular, 54, 115–17; reformed, 164, 271; reformed, in France RPR: réligion reformé pretendu, 286; reunion of churches, 328 religious, art, 53; choice, 21, 111, 113, 409; orders, vii, 53, 71, 101, 245, 248–50, 273; peace, 42; persecution, 72, 414 nn.7, 17; polemic, 424 n.3; reforms, 397 n.17; revival in France, 250 Religious Wars, 195, 253; 1st, 156; 2nd, 162; 3rd, 163; 4th, 179; 5th, 188; 6th, 190; 7th, 193; 9th, 198, 202; ‘the fatal war’, 410 n.31; international dimension, 157 Renaissance, aspects of, 13 Renaissance, and Reformation France, 411 n.19 Renaissance Kingship, 12, 397 n.8 Renée, duchess, 78, 133 Rennes, 9, 54, 114 Reresby, John, ‘the barn’ at Blois, 282 resistance, 169, 175, 216, 331, 362–3, 367, 411 n.12; theory of, 20 Réunions, process of, 87, 230, 306–7, 319, 334, 346, 363, 365, 371 Revocation, Edict of Nantes, 6, 123, 225, 237, 304, 315, 330, 332, 334–5, 340, 353, 360, 362–3, 365, 367, 369, 389, 411 n.19, 413 n.12, 421 n.14, 422 n.3, 425 n.6, 430 n.4, 431 n.12, 432 n.23, 433 n.13, 434 n.8, 435 n.9, 437 n.3; bishops criticise, 357; and Bossuet on, 358; Catholic pressure for, 351; crime or blunder? 351; damage to religion, 382; emigrant numbers, 371; ‘an established fact’, 354; ‘the fiasco of ’, 383; impact on England, 365; and Louis XIV, 334, 346; rival apologists, 366 Revolution, the French, 385 Rhône, 4, 150, 396 n.4 Ribet, Jean, 240; sieur de la Rivière, 240 Richelieu, Armand-Jean du Plessis cardinal-duc de, viii, 11, 17, 20, 246–7, 250, 252–4, 259–60, 262–8, 271–3, 275–6, 278–9, 286–7, 292, 337, 350, 403 n.11, 423 n.18, 424 n.7, 425 n.10,

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466

INDEX

Richelieu (cont. . .) 427 n.23, 428 n.13; besieges La Rochelle, 262; as bishop, 247; delayed by Val Telline crisis, 263; enters council, 245; fall of, 253; Huguenot navy destroyed, 265; La Rochelle cut off and starved, 266; peace secured by Edict of Alés, 268; receives surrender, 267; secures Huguenot nobles’ support, 264; statesmanship of, 250 Rieux, comte de, 278 Robert, Jesuit, 358 Rochefoucauld, cardinal, François de, 246; comte de la, 130 Rochemaure, siege of, 230 Rodez, diocese of, 54 Rohan, family of, 130 Rohan, Anne, duchesse of, 267 Rohan, Henri duc de, 114, 252, 256, 258–61, 265–8, 276, 285, 291, 319, 411 n.15; champion of Protestanism, 258; character and intelligence, 252; duc et pair, 252; fights on (1629), 268; generalship, 257; political career of, 53; rebellion of, 256 Rohans, family of, 54, 114 Rojas y Spinola, and ecumenism, 346 Rolland, Camisard general, 381 Roman Church, 377 Romans, 36, 55, 80, 87, 148, 192, 418 n.18 Rome, ‘Antichrist’, 378, 382; attacked, 377; and Louis XIV, 329; politics of, 79 Rome (see also Popes), ix, 22, 25–9, 31, 33–6, 38–9, 41, 43, 51, 57, 61, 63–6, 70, 72–3, 79, 100, 102–3, 133, 135, 138–9, 142–3, 157, 206, 208, 217, 244–5, 310, 321, 329, 333, 336, 339, 345–8, 351, 363–4, 382, 400 nn.15, 2, 401 n.8, 404 n.13, 405 n.4, 407 n.3, 412 n.1, 413 n.16, 422 n.31, 431 n.12, 434 n.8; affair of Corsican guards, 318 Romorantin, Edict of, 138–9 Rondelet, Guillaume, 113 Rosny, baron of, see also Sully, 172, 200, 204, 216, 218, 220, 230, 238, 416 n.10; growing power of, 229; wounded, 210 Rouen, 5, 9, 54, 84, 107–10, 118, 150–1, 157, 161, 173–4, 196, 209, 213, 227, 229, 282, 287, 369, 372, 376, 388–9, 394, 408 n.3, 421 n.16, 434 n.8; archbishop of, 56; carnage in, 157; Catholicism restored, 157; Holy League in, 213; Huguenot control, 151; Huguenots suppressed in, 152; Protestantism in, 108; siege of, 150; take over, 151 Roussel, Gérard, 66 Roux, Jacques, pastor, 149

4101.indd 466

royal council, 15, 21, 64, 127, 141, 234, 250, 324 royalists, 209, 215, 217, 319 Russia, La Rochellais to, 370 Ruvigny, marquis de, 104, 322, 327, 332, 354; earl of Galway, 382 Ryswick, peace of, 379 Sablières, Mme de, 338 St Antonin, destroyed, 260 Saint-André, Marshal, 141, 152; killed, 158 St Bartholomew’s, massacre of, 123, 132, 167, 179 St Bartholomew’s Day, 167, 318, 415 nn.2, 3, 416 n.17 St Chamand, Jean de, archbishop, 133 Saint Clare, convent of, 385 Saint-Gelais, Urban de, bishop, 214 Saint-Germain, palace of, 15 St Germain, Edict of (1570) 144, 153, 164, 168, 170, 173 St Germain, Peace of, 167 St Germain, quartier, 103 St Germain-des-Prés, abbey of, 361 St Jean d’Angély, captured, 259 St Quentin, 14, 104, 134–5, 408 n.16; battle of, 14 Saint-Sacrement, Compagnie du, 113, 147, 162, 247, 273, 302, 322 Saint Simon, Louis de, Vouvray, duc de, diary of, 371 St Teresa of Avila, influence of, 249 Saintonge, conversions, 355, 363 Sales, François de, bishop, saint, 248–9, 304, 382 Salic Law, 194; idea of, 209 Salisbury, John of, 24 salon, 332, 337–8, 349 Saône, river, 150 Satyre Menippée, 211 Saubonne, 129–30, 240 Saubonne, Michelle de, 129–30 Saulx-Tavannes, Jean de, 213 Saumur, 206, 231, 251–2, 259, 308, 312–14, 388 Saumur, Academy, 311; assembly of, 252; seminary of, 307; significance of, 313 Savoy, Duchy of, 84–5, 90, 360 Savoy, Louise of, 52–3 Saxony, 34, 43–5, 437 n.1 Saxony, Maurice of, 134 Scandinavia, immigration to, 370 Schmalkaldic League, 43 Schomberg, Gaspard de, 223, 332, 354, 422 n.31

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INDEX

schools, 27, 35, 92, 308, 312–13, 323, 336, 377 Scotland, 67, 103, 135–6, 255 Scudéry, Mlle Madeleine de, salon of, 337 Sedan, 200, 233, 252, 309, 312–14, 360, 367, 372, 423 n.16 Sedan, Academy, 311 Sedan, collège, ‘last bastion’, 313 Séguier, Jean, chancellor, 103, 290 Seignelay, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, marquis de, minister, 361; and navy, 334, 345; and Revocation, 334 seigneurs, 7, 106, 130, 137, 230, 289, 384, 394, 396 n.9, 397 n.20, 414 n.7; authority of, 286; feudal, 7, 396, n.12; Seine, 5 Seize, 196, 202, 206, 209, 211, 419 n.4 Senlis, 107 Sens, 150 Sévigné, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de, and Huguenots, 358; letters of, 358, 435 n.12 Seyssel, Claude de, 13–14 Shovel, Cloudesley, admiral, 381 shrines, 54, 104; of Mary, 197 sieges, 151, 166, 196, 211, 213, 230, 257, 268, 271, 273, 285–6, 329, 421 n.17, 426 n.5 Sillery, Nicolas Brulart, sieur de, 250 Sobieski, John, king of Poland, 329, 347 soldiers, 16; and banditry, 192 Sorbonne, 30–1, 53, 55, 57, 61–2, 65–6, 74, 76, 90, 105, 138, 231, 238, 347, 400 n.2, 405 n.11, 406 n.12, 416 n.11; censorship, 74 Soubise, Benjamin de Rohan, duc de, 259–60, 263–5; defeated at Ile de Ré, 260 Soubise, Jean de, seigneur de, 130 sovereignty, 9, 18–19, 22, 26, 28, 232, 290, 332, 394, 399 n.2, 400 n.15, 418 n.31, 431 n.11 Spain, viii, 13, 29, 44, 74, 170, 201, 215, 218, 250, 255, 259, 263, 268, 318, 327–9, 437 n.2; king of, 135, 167 Spanish, 131, 259, 327, 345 Spanish Succession, issues and politics, 328; in question, 366; war of, 380 St Quentin, battle of, 134 Standonck, Jean, 59, 403 n.5 States-General, 140, 246, 252; of Blois, demands of, 189; ‘sacrosanct’, 186 Strasbourg, 44, 47, 50, 63–4, 69, 86–7, 89, 138, 328–9, 432 n.11; siezure of, 345 Sully, Maximilien de Béthune, comte de Rosny, duc de, achievements, 238; and buildings, 238, 281; devotion to king,

4101.indd 467

467

238; finances, and paulette, 238, 423 n.7; resigns, 250; and soldiers, 241–2; value to Huguenots, 238 synod, national, 75, 101, 105, 123–6, 147, 164, 180, 220–1, 224, 233, 244, 277, 307, 312, 324, 386, 410 n.4, 432 n.24; 1st of ‘Desert’, 386; 2nd, national Poitiers, 147; 3rd, Orleans, 148 taille, 8, 12 Tallement, Pierre and Gédéon, 287 Tallement des Réaux, Gédéon, 288 Tavannes, Gaspard, de Saulx, marshal, 157 taxes, 4, 8, 12, 14–15, 20, 29, 31, 114, 210, 275, 325, 396–7 n.12 Teligny, Charles de, 171 temples, 322 Tetzel, Johann, 34, indulgences, 34, 401 n.9 Thou, Jacques-Auguste de, 229 Throckmorton, Sir Nicholas, 138, 414 n.3 Tillet, Jean du, 143 Toul, 135 Toulouse, 28, 73–4, 93, 112–13, 125, 150, 173, 196, 209, 213–14, 227, 394, 409, n.16; parlement of, 105, 214, 294, 322, 324 Tour de Constance, prison, 384 Tours, 101, 103, 107, 114, 122, 150, 209, 369, 413 n.8; Huguenots in, 152 towns, characteristics of, 144; fortified, 162, 164, 184, 206, 223, 261 Tremblay, Francois Le clerc de, ‘Father Joseph’, character and aims of, 274, 426 n.4 Trémouille, Henri de, 239 Trent, council of, 43, 121, 134, 142–3, 198, 246, 395, 412 n.15; Catholicism of, 366; formula of, 143, 175, 214 Triple Alliance, 327 Triumvirate, 141, 156, 413 n.2 Triumvirs, 144, 146, 148, 150 Troyes, 114, 132, 153–5, 173, 298; communal violence, 154; Huguenot life in, 153–5; Huguenots lose ground, 155; Marie Montsaujou, 298 Turenne, Henri de la Tour d’Auvergne, marshal, 306, 308–9, 319, 327; conversion of, 309, 337 Turquen, Thomas, 241 United Provinces, 250, 279, 326, 329, 371–2, 374, 423 n.2, 437 n.1 universities, 26, 28, 33, 40, 59, 66–7, 71, 100, 105–6, 109, 129, 311–12, 400 n.2, 402 n.13, 405 n.5

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468

INDEX

Ursulines, 249 Utraquist, 32 Uzès, Louise, duchesse de, 131; temples, 90, 117, 160, 226, 237, 279–89, 292, 294, 296–7, 299, 301–2, 304, 310, 322–4, 344, 353, 356, 361, 378, 386, 389; architects designing, 281; building of, 280; closures, 323, 341, 353; destruction of, 323, 381; rebuilding, 281 Val Telline, 250, 259, 262–3; supply line, 258 Valence, 150 Valéry, Abraham, 370 Vallière, Jean, 67 Valois, Elizabeth of, 137 Valois kings, 12, 18, 22 Vassy, massacre of, 118, 146 Vauban, Sebastien, marshal, 328, 339, 360; challenges Revocation, 360; and army, 328, 339, 358, 360, 396 n.2; and frontier, 328 Vaudois, 63, 72, 336, 338, 370; genocidal oppression, 370 Vendôme, Cesar de, 251, 425 n.14 Verdun, 135 Vermigli, Peter Martyr, 140 Versailles, message of, 332; palace of, 17, 350 Vervins, Peace of, 223 Viçose, Raymond de, secretary, 204 Victor Amadeus, duke of Savoy, 370 Vienna, siege of, 329, 346–7 Vigor, Simon, priest, 168 Villars, Claude, duc de, marshal, suppresses Camisards, 381 Villars-Cotterets, ordinance of, 15 Villeroy, Nicolas, de Neufville, 151, 170, 202, 209, 238, 250, 393 Villiers, Jean Hotman, de, 230 Vincennes, 15

4101.indd 468

Vincent, Antoine, 103, 110; Isabeau, her visions, 378; imprisoned, 378 Vindiciae contra tyrannos, 187 Viret, Pierre, 298, 313 Vivarais, province of, 6, 192, 418 n.36; 1st Desert national synod in, 386 Voltaire, François Marie, Arouet de, 382 Waldensians, 72, 245 Waldo, Peter, 72 ‘War of the Three Henries’, 198 warfare, nature of, and the ‘royal army’, 165–6 Weber, Max, 239, 424 n.9 Westphalia, Peace of, 47, 279, 346 William of Orange, prince, stadholder of Holland, 130, 132, 163, 193, 252 n.9 William III of Orange, stadholder of Holland, king William III of England, 327, 364–6, 378, 425, 437–8; accession of, 365, 373; becomes king, 327; and Emperor Leopold, 350; general, 390; and Huguenots, 326; and Louis XIV, 346; statesman, 327, 378 wine, 24, 32, 38, 47, 81–2, 181, 217 Wittenberg, 33, 93 Word, the, 6, 280 Worms, 39, 43 worship, 32, 40, 45, 90, 93–4, 117, 119, 144, 183, 204, 251, 277, 282, 305, 353, 356, 362–3, 388 Zurich, 33, 44–6, 48, 84, 89; and Zwingli, 44–6 Zurkinden, Nicholas, 93 Zwingli, Huldrich, 37, 44–7, 50, 79, 85; death of, 48; life of, 45; preacher, 46; reformer, 33–4, 45, 48; and theology, 45; view of Eucharist, 44; and worship, 45 Zwinglians, 64, 68

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