History of the Rise of the Huguenots, Vol. 2

by Henry Martyn Baird

Meantime, in the south-eastern part of France, the provinces of Dauphiny, Provence, and Lower Languedoc, the Huguenots had not been slow in responding to the call of the Prince of Condé. The difficulty was rather in assembling their soldiers than in raising them; for there was little lack of volunteers after the repeal of the royal edicts in favor of the Protestants. With great trouble the contingents of Dauphiny and Provence were brought across the Rhône, and at Alais the Baron d'Acier[609] mustered an army to go to the succor of the Prince of Condé at La Rochelle. A Roman Catholic historian expresses his profound astonishment that the Huguenots of this part of the kingdom, when surprised by the violation of the peace, should so speedily have been able to mass a force of twenty-five thousand men, well furnished and equipped, and commanded by the most excellent captains of the age—Montbrun, Mouvans, Pierre-Gourde, and others.[610] The abbé's wonder was doubtless equalled by the consternation which the news spread among the enemies of the Huguenots. The Roman Catholics could bring no army capable of preventing the junction of D'Acier's troops with those of Condé; but the Duke of Montpensier succeeded, on the twenty-fifth of October, in inflicting a severe loss upon one of the divisions at Messignac, near Périgueux. Mouvans and Pierre-Gourde, who were distant from the main body, were attacked in their quarters, by a force under Brissac, which they easily repulsed. D'Acier, suspecting the design of the enemy, had commanded the Huguenot captains to make no pursuit, and to await his own arrival. But brave Mouvans was as impatient of orders as he was courageous in battle. Disregarding the authority which sat so lightly upon him, he fell into an ambuscade, where he atoned for his rashness by the loss of his own life and the lives of more than a thousand of his companions. After this disaster, D'Acier experienced no further opposition, and, on the first of November, he met the advancing army of Condé at Aubeterre, on the banks of the Dronne.[611]

With the new accessions to his army, the prince commanded a force very considerably larger than any he had led in the previous wars. Among the conflicting statements, we may find it difficult to fix its numbers. Agrippa d'Aubigné says that, after the losses consequent upon the defeat of Messignac and those resulting from camp diseases, Condé's army consisted of only seventeen thousand foot soldiers, and two thousand five hundred horsemen.[612] A Huguenot bulletin, sent from La Rochelle for the information of Queen Elizabeth and the Protestants of England, may have given somewhat too favorable a view of the prince's prospects, but was certainly nearer the truth, in assigning him twenty-five thousand arquebusiers and a cavalry force of five or six thousand men.[613] On the other hand, Henry of Anjou, who had been placed in nominal command of the Roman Catholic army, had not yet been able to assemble a much superior, probably not an equal, number of soldiers. The large forces which, according to his ambassador at the English court, Charles the Ninth could call out,[614] existed only on paper. The younger Tavannes, whose father was the true head of the royal army, gives it but about twenty thousand men.[615]

It was already nearly winter when the armies were collected, and their operations during the remainder of the campaign were indecisive. In the numerous skirmishes that occurred the Huguenots usually had the advantage, and sometimes inflicted considerable damage upon the enemy. But the Duke of Anjou, or the more experienced leaders commanding in his name, studiously avoided a general engagement. The instructions from the court were to wear out the courage and enthusiasm of Condé's adherents by protracting a tame and monotonous warfare.[616] The prince's true policy, on the contrary, lay in decided action. His soldiers were inferior to none in France. The flower of the higher nobility and the most substantial of the middle classes had flocked to his standard so soon as it was unfurled. But, without regular commissariat, and serving at their own costs, these troops could not long maintain themselves in the field.[617] The nobles and country gentlemen, never too provident in their habits, soon exhausted their ready funds, with their crowd of hungry retainers, and became a more pitiable class than even the burgesses. The latter, whom devotion to their religious convictions, rather than any thirst for personal distinction, had impelled to enter the service, could not remain many months away from their workshops and counting-rooms without involving their families in great pecuniary distress. It was not, however, possible for Condé and Coligny to bring about a combat which the duke was resolved to decline, and the unparalleled severity of the season suspended, at the same time, their design of wresting from his hands the city of Saumur, a convenient point of communication with northern France. Early in December the vines were frozen in the fields,[618] disease broke out in either camp, and the soldiers began to murmur at a war which seemed to be waged with the elements rather than with their fellow-men. While Anjou's generals, therefore, drew off their troops to Saumur, Chinon on the Vienne, and Poitiers, Condé's army went into winter quarters a little farther west, at Montreuil-Bellay, Loudun and Thouars, but afterward removed, for greater commodity in obtaining provisions, to Partenay and Niort.[619]

Huguenot reprisals and negotiations.

It was while the Huguenots lay thus inactive that their leaders deliberated respecting the best means of providing for their support during the coming campaign. Jeanne d'Albret, whose masculine vigor[620] had never been displayed more conspicuously than during this war, was present, and assisted by her sage counsels. It was determined, in view of the cruelties exercised upon the Protestants in those parts of the kingdom where they had no strongholds, and of the confiscation of their property by judicial decisions, to retaliate by selling the ecclesiastical possessions in the cities that were now under Huguenot power, and applying the proceeds to military uses. The order of sale was issued under the names of the young Prince of Navarre, of Condé, Coligny, D'Andelot and La Rochefoucauld, and a guarantee was given by them. As a reprisal the measure was just, and as a warlike expedient nothing could be more prudent; for, while it speedily filled the coffers of the Huguenot army, it cut off one great source of the revenues of the court, which had been authorized both by the Pope and by the clergy itself to lay these possessions under contribution.[621]

Already the temper of the Protestant leaders had been sounded by an unaccredited agent of Catharine de' Medici, who found Condé at Mirebeau, and entreated him to make those advances toward a peace which would comport better with his dignity as a subject than with that of Charles as a king. But the prince, who saw in the mission of an irresponsible mediator only a new attempt to impede the action of the confederates, had dismissed him, after declaring, in the presence of a large number of his nobles, that he had been compelled to resort to arms in order to provide for his own defence. The war was, therefore, directed not against the king, but against those capital enemies of the crown and of the realm, the Cardinal of Lorraine and his associates. All knew his own vehement desire for peace, of which his late excessive compliance was a sufficient proof; but, since the king was surrounded by his enemies, he intended, with God's favor, to come and present his petitions to his Majesty in person.[622]

William of Orange attempts to aid the Huguenots.

Abroad the Huguenots had not been idle in endeavoring to secure the support of advantageous alliances. So early as in the month of August, after the disastrous defeat of Louis of Nassau, at Jemmingen, the Prince of Orange had contemplated the formation of a league for common defence with the Prince of Condé and Admiral Coligny. A draft of such an agreement has been preserved; but it is unsigned, and may be regarded rather as indicative of the friendly disposition of the French and Dutch patriots than as a compact that was ever formally adopted.[623] That same autumn William of Orange had undertaken an expedition intended to free the Netherlands from the tyranny of Alva. He had been met with consummate skill. The duke refused to fight, but hung remorselessly on his skirts. The inhabitants of Brabant extended no welcome to their liberator. The prince's mercenaries, vexed at their reception, annoyed by the masterly tactics of their enemy, and eager only to return to their homes, clamored for pay and for plunder. Orange, outgeneralled, was compelled to abandon the campaign, and would gladly have turned his arms against the oppressors of his fellow-believers in France; but his German troops had enlisted only for the campaign in the Netherlands, and peremptorily declined to transfer the field of battle to another country. However, the depth of the Meuse, which had become unfordable, furnished more persuasive arguments than could be brought forward by Genlis and the Huguenots who with him had joined the Prince of Orange, and the army of the patriots was forced to direct its course southward and to cross the French frontier.

Consternation and devices of the court.

Declaration of the Prince of Orange.