Already in April, 1561, Montmorenci had been reconciled to the Guises. They now succeeded in gaining over the unstable King of Navarre by offering him the island of Sardinia and a kingdom in Africa, or possibly a divorce from his Protestant wife, Jeanne d’Albret, and the hand of Mary, Queen of Scots, with the crown of Scotland, and some day that of England. In the south, massacres and outrages occurred; and finally,The massacre of Vassy. March 1, 1562. on Sunday, March 1, the Duke of Guise coming across some Huguenots who were worshipping in a barn at Vassy, in Champagne, ordered his followers to disperse the meeting as being contrary to the law. The Huguenots, though unarmed, probably made some resistance, and the affair ended in the massacre of some fifty or sixty men and women, while two hundred more were seriously wounded. As the town of Vassy was apparently not a ‘walled’ one, the Huguenots were probably within their rights. In any case, the Duke had no authority to take the execution of the law into his own hands. It may be true that he had not intended his followers to proceed to such extremities, but at least he never denounced or punished the perpetrators. For the rest, the massacre of Vassy was not the only one that had occurred since the Edict, and it is important only because it was committed with the acquiescence of one of the great party leaders, and because in thus transferring the quarrel from the country to the court, it rendered war inevitable. The question was, Who should secure the person of the King? The Duke advancing rapidly, entered Paris (March 16) in spite of the order of Catherine to the contrary.Duke of Guise enters Paris, March 16; and secures the person of the king. April 6. On her retiring with the young King to Fontainebleau he followed her; and the Queen-mother, seeing no other alternative, consented to return to Paris (April 6), Charles IX. crying ‘as if they were taking him to prison.’ Catherine, after attempting to support the weaker party, had ended, as was her wont, in siding with the stronger.
Meanwhile, Condé had retreated from Paris (March 23) to Orleans. Being joined there by Coligny and d’Andelot he published a manifesto in which he justified his appeal to arms,Condé’s Manifesto. March. and declared that he did so to free the King from unlawful detention by the ‘Triumvirate’—Guise, Montmorenci, and the Marshal St. André. Thus, if the Catholics were the first to break the peace at Vassy, the Huguenots were the first to appeal to arms. Many have blamed them for want of patience, and held that, if they had refrained from raising the standard of rebellion, they would in time have gained toleration. Calvin had always been opposed to war, and Coligny only consented after much hesitation, overborne, it is said, by the entreaties of his wife. But it is extremely doubtful whether they could thus have disarmed persecution; the Catholic party were determined to crush out heresy; and, as it was, the victims of 1562 exceeded those of the massacre of St. Bartholomew. A more serious charge is that the Huguenots, under the garb of religion, were pursuing political objects; but this assertion may be brought with equal truth against all parties in the religious struggles of the century. In France, as elsewhere, the religious disaffection furnished a rallying-point for, and a creed to, all the smouldering discontent in the country. With some the religious, with others the political, and even the personal element was strongest. ‘The grandees,’ says a Venetian observer, ‘adopted reform for ambition, the middle classes for Church property, the lower classes for Paradise.’ Moreover, the accusation would be equally true of the Catholics. If Condé was fighting for the control of the government, he had a juster claim thereto than the half-foreign Guises. The political aims of the Huguenots, as represented at Orleans, were more worthy of support than the absolutist opinions of the Guises. If the Huguenots may be charged with reviving feudalism at one moment, and of being republicans at another, the Guises at first fought for political as well as religious tyranny, and latterly masqueraded as the champions of pure democracy. Finally, the cause of the Huguenots, although that of a minority—and, it must be confessed, an unpopular minority—was yet the cause of national independence, which was threatened by the ever-tightening alliance of the Guises with Philip of Spain. Nor must it be supposed that there was nothing deeper on either side; indeed, it was the presence of religious convictions which gave to the struggle at once its earnestness and its ferocity.
The geographical distribution of the two parties does not bear out the idea that there is a natural affinity between Protestantism and the Teutonic races, and between the Celtic and Romance nations and Catholicism.The geographical and social distribution of the two parties. It is true that the lower classes in Celtic Brittany were strongly Catholic, but so was the north-east of France, in which the Teutonic element was strong, while the Huguenots found their chief support in the south-west, which was Romance. The main stronghold of the Huguenots may be described as a square enclosed between the Loire, the Saône, and the Rhone on the north and east; the Mediterranean, the Pyrenees, and the Bay of Biscay on the south and west; while Dauphiné and Normandy were their outposts. Yet even here it was only in Eastern Languedoc and in Dauphiné, and later, at La Rochelle, that they solidly held their own, or that they were supported by the majority of the population, both noble and non-noble. Elsewhere, in those provinces where the nobles inclined to Protestantism, the peasants generally remained Catholic. While the Huguenots had, with the exception of Condé and his relations, few adherents among the grandees, they found their main support in the smaller nobility and in the trading classes of the towns. Of these, the nobility formed, at their own charges, a most admirable light cavalry, and, in spite of the inferiority of their arms, proved in many a battle that they were more than a match for mail-clad men-at-arms. Unfortunately their poverty, their dislike of discipline, and their local interests rendered them unfit for a long campaign, and this accounts for the fact that their victories often led to such poor results.
On the side of the Catholics were ranged the mass of the greater nobles, the Church, and the official classes of the magistracy and bureaucracy, the peasants of the rural districts, except in the Cevennes and Dauphiné, and the lower classes in the towns, more especially of Paris, and later, of Orleans and Rouen. The intense Catholicism of these and other towns is to be explained by the influence of the religious houses, and in Paris of the University which, with its sixty-five colleges, formed almost a town of itself, and, together with the monasteries, owned a large part of the city and its suburbs. The moral strength of Catholicism depended on the conservative instincts of the people and on their religious traditions, which were so closely intertwined with the business and pleasures of life, and which were shocked by the iconoclasm of the Huguenots; while the feudal, separatist, and republican tendencies of the Huguenots at once prevented harmony among themselves, and opened them to the charge of being enemies to unity and centralisation—always dear to the French mind. The Catholics had also the possession of the King’s person and of the financial resources of the government and the Church, and were assisted by the subsidies of Philip II. Finally, the Catholics were able to recruit their troops by mercenaries not only from the Catholic states of Germany, but also from the Lutherans, who gave but scant support to their Calvinistic brethren. That under these circumstances, coupled with the fact that they never numbered more than one-tenth of the population, the Huguenots maintained the struggle so long as they did must be, in the main, attributed to the zeal and devotion of many—notably of the ministers—to the stubbornness of the bourgeoisie, the superiority of their cavalry, and the ability of their leaders, especially of Condé and of Coligny.
The war began in August by the taking of Poictiers by St. André, and the surrender of Bourges, which gave the centre of France, up to the gates of Orleans, to the Catholics.First Civil War. Aug. 1562–March 1563. In September, the Huguenots secured the alliance of Elizabeth of England, who feared lest the triumph of the Guises might mean that the whole of the resources of France would be used to place Mary Queen of Scots on the English throne. Yet with her usual caution, Elizabeth demanded the cession of Dieppe and Havre as the price of her assistance. The indignation, however, caused by the cession of these towns was scarcely balanced by the niggardly help which the Queen vouchsafed to the Protestants;Rouen taken by the Catholics. Oct. 26, 1562. and on the 28th of October, the Catholics gained a brilliant success by the capture of Rouen, the capital of Normandy, which henceforth became ‘one of the eyes of the Catholics.’ The loss of the town was, however, sufficiently compensated for by the death of the fickle Antony of Navarre of a wound received at the siege, for thereby the headship of his house devolved on Condé, and on his own son the future Henry IV., a boy of ten years old. In December, the attempt of Condé to neutralise the effect of the loss of Rouen by an attack on Normandy led to the battle of Dreux,Battle of Dreux. Dec. 19, 1562. on the Eure, which was really a victory for the Catholics. The losses on their side were indeed the heavier; the Marshal St. André was slain, and the Constable Montmorenci taken prisoner. Nevertheless, Condé himself fell into the enemy’s hands, and Coligny was forced to retire on Orleans. In February of the following year, Coligny again returned and took several towns of importance in Normandy.Assassination of Francis, Duke of Guise. Feb. 18, 1563. But the Duke of Guise had taken advantage of his absence to besiege Orleans (February 5), and the city seemed doomed, when the Duke was assassinated by a fanatic named Poltrot, who believed that it was the will of God that he should rid the world of ‘the butcher of Vassy.’
The death of the leader of the Catholics revived the hopes of Catherine that she might succeed in keeping the balance between the two parties.Pacification of Amboise. March 12, 1563. Accordingly, on March 12, the Pacification of Amboise was signed. By that treaty, Condé and Montmorenci were exchanged; nobles were permitted to hold Protestant services in their houses; in each sénéchaussée,[81] one city was to be granted, in the suburbs of which the Huguenots might worship; and in every town where the Protestant service had been held in the preceding March one or two places were to be designated by the King, where it might be continued inside the walls. From these provisions, however, Paris was to be excepted. The treaty was followed by a united attack on Havre, from which the English were driven on the 25th of July, and Elizabeth was forced to surrender her claim to the restitution of Calais. Coligny was opposed to the treaty. It did not, in his opinion, give sufficient security to the Protestants; but Condé, who was as rash in making peace as he had been in declaring war, had fallen under the fatal influence of Mdlle. de Limeuil, one of the ladies of Catherine’s suite, and was deluded with the promise that he would be appointed Lieutenant-general, and could then watch over the interests of his party. In this he was disappointed; for Catherine, to escape from her promise, had Charles, who was now thirteen, declared of age; and although she herself was anxious to prevent any further hostilities, such was not the wish of the Pope, of the Guises, or of Philip.
At a conference held at Bayonne in June, 1565, Alva, in his master’s name, urged the Queen-mother to dismiss the chancellor L’Hôpital, to ‘show herself a good Catholic,’ and to proceed to stringent measures against the Huguenots. Very possibly she might have complied if Philip had consented to further her dynastic aims by giving the hand of Don Carlos to her second daughter, and that of his sister, the widowed Queen of Portugal, to her favourite son, Henry of Anjou; Philip, however, rejected the proposal, and Catherine refused to follow his advice. Nevertheless, the alarm of the Protestants was natural; it was rumoured that a League had been made and a massacre of the Protestants decided upon, and finally, the levying of some Swiss Catholic troops,The Conspiracy of Meaux, and the Second Civil War. Sept. 1567–March 1568. ostensibly to watch the march of Alva from Piedmont to the Netherlands (cf. [p. 332]), led to the conspiracy of Meaux in September, 1567. The Protestant leaders proposed to seize the person of the King, to insist on the removal of the Cardinal of Lorraine, and to demand that unrestricted liberty of conscience should be conceded. The court, warned at the last moment of its danger, escaped with difficulty to Paris, escorted by the Swiss troops; and the Cardinal, after a hair-breadth escape, fled to Rheims. Condé then advanced on St. Denis, where he was attacked by the Constable with an overwhelming force (November 10, 1567).The battle of St. Denis. Nov. 10, 1567. But the Huguenots fought so stubbornly, and the Parisian levies so badly, that the battle was indecisive. On the Huguenot side, more men of note fell, yet on the Catholic side, the Constable Montmorenci was mortally wounded. The death of Montmorenci for the moment strengthened the hands of Catherine and the influence of L’Hôpital.The Edict of Longjumeau. March 1568. Accordingly, in March, 1568, the Edict of Longjumeau confirmed the Treaty of Amboise, which was to last ‘till by God’s grace all the king’s subjects should be reunited in the profession of one religion.’
Catherine hoped that the Catholic party would be weakened by the death of Montmorenci. She kept the office of Constable vacant, and conferred on the Duke of Anjou, the brother of the King, the less ambitious title of Lieutenant-general. But her hopes of thus maintaining peace were not to be realised. The ‘Parlements’ throughout France had opposed the Edict of Longjumeau, and that of Toulouse went so far as to execute the King’s messenger on the charge of heresy. The Huguenots, not unnaturally, refused to surrender all the cities, as they had promised in the treaty. The Cardinal of Lorraine returned, and, in August, 1568, a plot was formed to seize Condé and the Châtillons, who only succeeded in effecting their escape to La Rochelle owing to a sudden flood in the Loire. L’Hôpital, in despair, retired; and Catherine was once more forced to adopt the policy of the Guises.Third Civil War. Sept. 1568–Aug. 1570. The Edicts of Toleration were revoked, and the ‘Patched-up Peace,’ as it was called, was at an end. In this, the third Civil War, Orleans, which had been surrendered at the last truce, became one of the Catholic outposts; while La Rochelle, which only declared for the Huguenots in February 1568, was the chief Protestant stronghold. No serious battle, however, occurred till the spring of the year 1569.Battle of Jarnac. March 13, 1569. Then the Duke of Anjou, a young man of eighteen years, won the battle of Jarnac on the Charente (March 13th), in which Condé was slain after he had surrendered. The death of Condé was looked upon as a serious blow to the Huguenot cause. But it is doubtful whether they lost much, for, although Condé was popular, and did not, like his brother, sacrifice his religious convictions to his personal interest, he was an ambitious man, and his aims had been chiefly political. His moral character was, moreover, weak; and, though a brave soldier, he was not a general of the first order, while as a statesman his conduct often verged on foolhardiness.
The expectation of the Catholics that the victory of Jarnac would put an end to the war was not fulfilled. The battle was not much more than a cavalry skirmish. The death of Condé left Coligny in supreme command, and served, as a contemporary says, ‘to reveal in all its splendour the merits of the admiral,’ who was in every way, except as a diplomatist, the superior of his predecessor. Even the loss of d’Andelot, who at this juncture died of fever, did not prevent the Huguenots from meeting at first with considerable success.
In May, 1569, Wolfgang, Duke of Zweibrücken (Deux Ponts), entered France at the head of ‘reiters’ from lower, and of ‘landsknechts’ from upper Germany,Expedition of the Duke of Zweibrücken and William of Orange. May 1569. and a force of French and Flemish troops under William of Orange and Louis of Nassau. Forcing their way to the Loire they seized La Charité, a place of considerable importance as commanding the passage of the river from Burgundy and Champagne, and, although Wolfgang himself died of fever during the campaign, his troops effected a union with Coligny near Limoges (June 12). Unfortunately, instead of attacking Saumur, which commanded the road to Anjou and Brittany, they turned south against Poictiers. The city was bravely held by Henry, Duke of Guise, the young son of Francis, who here first displayed his military genius; and, after seven weeks, Coligny was forced to abandon the siege by the advance of the Duke of Anjou. Coligny was anxious to avoid a battle, for William of Orange had departed to raise fresh troops in Germany; his losses before Poictiers had been considerable; and, as usual, he had found it difficult to keep his forces long in the field. But the Germans demanded pay, which he could not give, or to be led against the enemy; and Coligny, forced to accept the challenge of Anjou with far inferior forces,Battle of Moncontour. Oct. 3, 1569. suffered a serious defeat at Moncontour (October 3), where he was severely wounded. Had Anjou at once pursued, the Huguenots might have been completely crushed; fortunately, whether owing to the jealousy of the Guises at this success of Anjou or no, it was decided first to reduce Saint Jean d’Angély. The city fell, indeed, after seven weeks’ siege, but ‘as the siege of Poictiers was the beginning of the mishaps of the Huguenots, so that of Saint Jean d’Angély was the means of wasting the good fortune of the Catholics.’ La Rochelle still held out; the winter came on; the Duke of Anjou resigned his command, while his successor, the Duke of Montpensier, retired to Angers.