An Introduction to the History of Western Europe

by James Harvey Robinson

The queen mother, Catherine de' Medici.

The Bourbons.

173. The new king, Charles IX (1560–1574), was but ten years old, and his mother, Catherine de' Medici, of the famous Florentine family, claimed the right to conduct the government for her son. The rivalries of the time were complicated by the existence of a younger branch of the French royal family, namely, the Bourbons, one of whom was king of Navarre. The Bourbons formed an alliance with the Huguenots,[319] as the French Calvinists were called.

The Huguenots and their political ambition.

Many of the leading Huguenots, including their chief Coligny, belonged to noble families and were anxious to play a part in the politics of the time. This fact tended to confuse religious with political motives. In the long run this mixture of motives proved fatal to the Protestant cause in France, but for the time being the Huguenots formed so strong a party that they threatened to get control of the government.

Catherine grants conditional toleration to the Protestants, 1562.

Catherine tried at first to conciliate both parties, and granted a Decree of Toleration (1562) suspending the former edicts against the Protestants and permitting them to assemble for worship during the daytime and outside of the towns. Even this restricted toleration of the Protestants appeared an abomination to the more fanatical Catholics, and a savage act of the duke of Guise precipitated civil war.

The massacres of Vassy and the opening of the wars of religion.

As he was passing through the town of Vassy on a Sunday he found a thousand Huguenots assembled in a barn for worship. The duke's followers rudely interrupted the service, and a tumult arose in which the troops killed a considerable number of the defenseless multitude. The news of this massacre aroused the Huguenots and was the beginning of a war which continued, broken only by short truces, until the last weak descendant of the house of Valois ceased to reign. As in the other religious wars of the time, both sides exhibited the most inhuman cruelty. France was filled for a generation with burnings, pillage, and every form of barbarity. The leaders of both the Catholic and the Protestant party, as well as two of the French kings themselves, fell by the hands of assassins, and France renewed in civil war all the horrors of the English invasion in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.