The miserable effects of the war were everywhere evident. Agriculture had almost ceased in a country famous for its fertility, and the whole country had been so plundered and harassed by both parties that the poor people, being stripped of all their substance, often preferred to fly to the forests rather than to remain continually exposed to the mercy of their enemies. Wandering soldiers and dissolute women, with stolen goods in their possession, infested the roads.[833] As to trade and manufacturing, the mechanic arts still were plied only in the largest and strongest towns; even here merchants and tradesmen had shut up shop and gone off to war, not always out of religious zeal, but in the hope of enriching themselves by spoliation. The nobility were divided; the clergy incensed. The civil war had been accompanied by the attendant aids of violence, robbery, murder, rape, and justice had not been administered in the courts for months. The very methods resorted to for the preservation of religion rendered it hateful in the eyes of many men of both parties. Both parties were bigoted in belief and in practice. The iconoclasm of the Protestants, who tore down church edifices hoary with age and sanctified by tradition, expelling the inmates, both male and female, if doing them no worse injury, familiarized society with changes wrought by violence and made the people callous to one of the most precious possessions of a nation—a reverence for tradition.[834]
To all these difficulties the prevalence of the plague must be added. Since the century of the Black Death Europe had not so suffered from this scourge as in the sixteenth. It recurred intermittently, being especially violent in the years 1531, 1533, 1544, 1546, 1548, 1553, 1562-64, 1568, 1577-80.[835] No part of Europe was spared. France, England, Spain, the Low Countries, Germany, and Italy, all suffered. But certain portions of France suffered more than others, as Bas-Languedoc, Provence, the Lyonnais, Burgundy, Champagne, the Ile-de-France, and Normandy. The west and especially the southwest were relatively exempt. Apparently the disease followed the trades-routes along the river valleys, for Toulouse, Lyons, Châlons-sur-Saône, Macon, Châlons-sur-Marne, Langres, Bourges, La Charité, Orleans, Tours, Moulins, Sens, Melun, Dijon, Troyes, Château-Thierry, Soissons, Beauvais, Pontoise, Paris, Rouen, and the Norman ports suffered most.[836] As always, Italy was the immediate source of the epidemic, which was communicated from place to place by the movements of trade. Lyons paid dearly for its commercial pre-eminence, for the ravages of the plague were terrible there.[837] It was at its height when the court was there in July, 1564. The English ambassador, Smith, gives a fearful picture of the state of the city. Men died in the street before his lodgings. His servant who went daily for his provisions sometimes saw ten and twelve corpses, some naked, lying in the streets where they lay till “men clothed in yellow” removed them. A great many bodies were cast into the river, “because they will not be at the cost to make graves. This day,” he writes on July 12, “from break of day till ten o’clock there laid a man naked in the street, groaning and drawing his last breath, not yet dead. Round the town there are tents of the pestiferous, besides those which are shut up in their houses.”[838] Almost every third house was closed because of the plague. The city authorities vainly tried to combat the disease by providing that visits were to be made twice a day by those appointed; but as there were but five “master surgeons” in the whole city, medical attention must have been slight. Persons affected with the plague were to be removed to the hospital—the oldest and one of the best in Europe at that time. Corpses were to be buried at night and the clothes of the dead burned.[839] “About the Rhone men dare eat no fish nor fishers lay their engines and nets, because instead of fish they take up the pestiferous carcasses which are thrown in.” New sanitary regulations were made. All filth was to be cast into the river and not allowed to pollute the streets or the river banks. Fires of scented wood were kept burning between every ten houses in the street. Pigs and other animals were not allowed at large. Meat, fish, and vegetable stalls were to be inspected and all decayed provisions destroyed.[840]
It is interesting to observe the efforts made by local authorities to prevent the spread of the disease and the relief measures that were taken. As soon as the plague was discovered, the town authorities usually set guards to watch the houses of those stricken and appointed barbers and gravediggers to treat ill and to inter the dead. These attendants were supported and paid by a tax laid upon the town. Those who were ill were sent to a house of isolation appointed to be a hospital, which was often upon the walls of the town, remote from the people. In Provins the church and cemetery were immediately adjacent to the hospital! The mortality was great. In Provins in 1562 there were eighty persons stricken, of whom sixty died, among them four of the attendants. Two of the barber-surgeons refused to serve and were proceeded against by the town bailiff and were hanged in effigy because the principals in the case had made their escape. Diseased houses were sprinkled with perfumes and aromatic herbs were burned in them in order to purify them.[841] As always, the dislocation of society and the depravation of morals worked havoc in the community. Crimes of violence were common.[842]
Little by little, however, this picture of misery faded into the background of the queen’s mind and the question of political expediency, which was always the lodestar of her policy, became her primary consideration.[843] The Catholics plucked up courage as the court progressed[844] and Huguenot suspicion of the queen’s course was early aroused. Shortly after the tour of the provinces had begun, and while the court was still at Troyes pending the signature of the treaty of peace, there was a jar between D’Andelot and the queen mother, who would not permit him to choose his own captains and other officers as was customarily permitted to colonels. Partially in consequence of this affront, and partially to avoid being compromised more with Queen Elizabeth, D’Andelot, the prince of Condé, and the cardinal Châtillon all remained away from the sessions of the council while the terms of peace were under consideration, and when the court resumed its migration, no one of these attended it.[845] Indeed, after the court left Châlons-sur-Marne, so wide was the breach between the prince of Condé, the admiral and all of that faction, and the court, that the chancellor L’Hôpital was the only official who continued to treat them with deference.[846] The consideration shown Jeanne d’Albret only partially relieved the suspicions of the Protestants.[847]
We find the anxiety of the Protestants over the situation reflected in the proceedings of the provincial synod of the Reformed churches of the region through which the court had been traveling during this season, namely the churches of Champagne, Brie, Picardy, the Ile-de-France, and the French Vexin.[848] This synod assembled on April 27, 1564, at La Ferté-sous-Jouarre, and was composed of forty-five ministers. Letters were read from many parts of France and abroad, among which was one from Beza bidding the Huguenots to be on their guard as the priests were contributing money for the purpose of rooting out the truth. It was agreed by the body to reply that the Protestants were suspicious of the intentions of the queen mother.[849] In its resolutions the synod condemned the policy of the magistrates who cloaked their religious animosity under the guise of the law,[850] and complained that the Catholics were carrying the King about the country in order to show him the ruin of their churches.[851] The moderate La Roche even went so far as to declare that the Reformed church never could have peace while the queen mother governed.
Justice and historical accuracy, however, require that it be said that the Huguenots’ own conduct was sometimes in violation of the privileges granted them by the Edict of Amboise. Their iconoclasm toward the images and the pictures which the Catholics considered sacred was outrageous; they failed to confine their worship to authorized places, so that the magistrates were acting within their rights in so far repressing Protestant worship; their provincial synods not infrequently were inflammatory political assemblies.[852] On the other hand, the Catholics wilfully molested the Huguenots, interfering in their congregations, and compelling them to pay tithes and other dues for the support of the Catholic poor and even—Castelnau says—to support their provincial leagues.[853]
But the Huguenots went too far in their suspicion of the government. Beza, at the synod of La Ferté-sous-Jouarre had been apprehensive of a joint attack of France and Savoy upon Geneva, not knowing that the French aim was to renew the alliance with the Catholic cantons in order to prevent Spanish ascendency there.[854] Bern and Zurich were the pillars of French ascendency in the Alpine country. France counted upon them more than upon all else to prevent Spanish recruiting, and to close the Alpine passes to Spain’s army. To this end Bellièvre, the marshal Vieilleville, and the bishop of Limoges, who had returned from Madrid, where he was succeeded by St. Sulpice, were sent into Switzerland in the early spring of 1564 to penetrate the designs of Spain, and to promise an early payment of the French debts due to the cantons in return for their military support in the wars of Henry II.[855] Bellièvre’s particular mission was to the Grisons. The position of the Grisons was a precarious one, for Spain could attack them from the Valteline, or starve them by prohibiting the exportation of grain into the country from Lombardy. By using such threats the Spanish governor of Milan hoped to compel the adherence of the Grisons to a treaty which would open to Spanish and imperial arms the great Alpine routes of the Splügen, the Bernina, and the Stelvio, thus connecting the territories of the two branches of the Hapsburg house and shutting France out from eastern Switzerland. Bellièvre fraternized with the popular element, and by May, 1564, had almost completely neutralized the success of his Spanish rival in spite of Spanish gold. Fortunately for France the Ten Jurisdictions declared in her favor and the Grisons, though very Spaniardized, luckily had a French pensioner as its chief magistrate, the Swiss captain Florin.
Meanwhile the negotiations of the bishop of Limoges and the marshal Vieilleville had progressed so far that the treaty of alliance was all but signed. Late in October Bellièvre received from Freiburg the text of the articles of alliance which the bishop of Limoges and the marshal Vieilleville proposed to submit to the Swiss diet. Encouraged by this success, he went to Glarus in order to overcome the influence of the Zurich preachers who were outspoken enemies of the French alliance, and if possible to settle the difference between that state and Schwytz. By great dexterity he prevailed upon the two cantons to accept a uniform treaty. But he could not push negotiations to a conclusion until hearing from his colleagues.
Spain made a supreme effort to secure the opening of the passages between the Tyrol and the Milanais, but failed because the Grisons promised France that they would accept the principle of a renewed alliance, leaving the settlement of details pending, so that although the supremacy of France in Switzerland was not absolutely assured, at least the adherence of the three leagues to her seemed assured.
But the Escurial and the Vatican were leagued to destroy French influence in Switzerland. Spain gave up hope of compelling the cantons to make a direct alliance with her, but by means of commercial threats and commercial inducements counted on still keeping the Alpine passes open to her arms. Her maxim was, where the grain of Lombardy goes, there Spain’s armies may go, too. To neutralize this danger the French energetically opposed any renewal of an alliance between the Vatican and the Swiss cantons. The Grey League, later won by the commercial promises of Spain, separated from the other two in the end, but its defection was not so serious as it might have been, since according to the joint constitution the vote of two leagues in matters of foreign policy compelled the adherence of the third. But in order further to strengthen the hold of France, the French ambassadors had recourse to a sort of referendum in order to secure an approval of the majority of all the Swiss towns in favor of the French alliance, in addition to the official action of the three leagues. The success of this stroke was complete and the general diet of the three leagues gave its adherence to the treaty of Freiburg concluded by the bishop of Limoges and the marshal Vieilleville on December 7, 1564.[856] The poverty of France, however, seriously endangered the continuance of this alliance. When it was concluded, France tried to stave off payment of her debts, which amounted to more than 600,000 livres, yet demanded the execution of the articles of Freiburg. Glarus, Lucerne, Schwytz, Appenzell, Valais, the Grisons, Schaffhausen, and Basel bitterly complained, the last also because of the burdens laid upon the importations of her commerce into France through Lyons.