If the Huguenots had been dispirited after Jarnac, they had reason to feel elated after the capture of La Charité. Although the duke of Anjou kept the field in Saintonge, Angoumois, and Limousin, the army was so mutinous for want of pay, so depleted by desertion and disease, that it was far from formidable.[1343] Paris was in consternation after the capture of La Charité and anticipated seeing the high hats and great feathers of the reiters before long.[1344] The échevins of the city were ordered with all speed to make sale of the property of the Protestants to provide means for a new army, which had to be made up of peasant levies, “all their soldiers and men of the greatest value being already abroad.”[1345] The queen mother, having received letters complaining of lack of funds and mutiny in his army, bitterly reproached Aumale for negligence and cowardice in letting the duke of Deuxponts capture La Charité, and hastily started for the army in Saintonge, in company with the cardinals of Lorraine and Bourbon, where she went right among the soldiers with words of encouragement.[1346]
BATTLE OF LA ROCHE-L’ABEILLE, JUNE 25, 1569
(Tortorel and Perissin)
But mutiny of the army, and the capture of La Charité, with the prospective union of Coligny and the duke of Deuxponts, was not all that worried the queen and the cardinal. Casimir of the County Palatine was reported to be coming with 6,000 horse and as many foot; moreover, the Emperor was hostile.[1347] The extremity of the government was so great that compromise was necessary, and Catherine had in mind to patch matters up by offering her daughter Marguerite of France in marriage to the young Henry of Navarre—a plan whose consummation three years later precipitated the massacre of St. Bartholomew.[1348] Marshal Damville, the second son of the old constable, whose Politique leanings already had made him conspicuous, was significantly appointed the King’s lieutenant in Languedoc. Toleration was in the air once more.
But all of a sudden the Catholic cause revived for an instant.[1349] Coligny fell ill, and the progress of the Huguenot army was thereby impeded. Worse still, the duke of Deuxponts was stricken with a burning fever, so that he died the very day of his arrival in La Marche.[1350] Strozzi with some Italian forces attacked Coligny at La Roche-L’Abeille on June 25, when the rain was pouring in such torrents that the matchlocks of the Italians were useless, so that the soldiers on both sides clubbed their weapons—in the expressive words of D’Aubigné, “rompre croce sur cap”—that is, broke the crosses of their arquebuses over the heads of their antagonists.[1351] In the conflict Strozzi was taken prisoner. From this time forth the army of the King was simply a disorderly mass of men. Famine and fever so reduced it that the duke of Anjou was not able to defend himself, let alone invading the enemy’s territory. To increase his forces, he put arms in the hands of the peasantry of Limousin, with the result that a local jacquerie prevailed in the province. Lansac was repulsed in assaulting La Charité; Châtellerault (July 12) and Lusignan (July 20) were taken by the Huguenots.[1352] The Catholics failed before Niort, to whose relief the brilliant La Noue came after his own seizure of Luçon.[1353]
Under these circumstances the government was compelled to content itself with maintaining the line of the Loire save at La Charité, while it sought foreign succor.[1354] But the Swiss could not be expected until the middle of September, and Coligny sought to profit by the situation to take Saumur and thus secure a crossing on the lower Loire also, and Poitiers, for which purpose he divided the Protestant army,[1355] to the intense alarm of the government, which tried, through the queen mother, to delay action by drawing the admiral into an empty parley. This is the moment when the marriage of Henry of Navarre with Marguerite of France was first broached. But the admiral and Jeanne d’Albret were not to be deceived, and the siege of Poitiers was resolutely continued. (It lasted from July 25 to September 7, 1569.) The Catholic party fully appreciated that the importance of the war depended upon the success or failure of the Huguenots before this city, into which the young duke of Guise, then but nineteen years of age, had thrown himself on July 12 with all the ardor of his father before Metz. If Coligny took the town, some notable prisoners of war would have fallen into his hands, the dukes of Guise and Mayenne and the abbess of La Trinité, a sister of the cardinal of Bourbon[1356] and the ill-starred prince of Condé, the ransom of whom would have abundantly provided for the reiters in the service of the Protestants.
