History of the Rise of the Huguenots

Progress of the negotiations.

The English rebellion affects the terms offered.

So true was it of the combatants in the French civil wars, that they rarely carried on hostilities but they were also treating for peace, that since the battle of Moncontour there had hardly elapsed a month without the discussion of the terms on which arms could be laid aside by both parties. Scarcely had the first startling impression made by the defeat of the Huguenots passed away before Catharine de' Medici sent that skilful diplomatist, Michel de Castelnau, to assure the Queen of Navarre, at La Rochelle, of her personal esteem and affection, as well as of her fervent desire to employ her influence with the king, her son, in effecting a pacification based upon just and honorable conditions. Jeanne replied in courteous language; but, while she insisted upon her own hearty reciprocation of the queen mother's wish, she also expressed the suspicion which all the reformed entertained of the sincerity of the leading ministers in the French cabinet, whose relations with Spain and with the Pope showed that they were intent on nothing less than the utter ruin of the Huguenots.769 In November the matter took a more definite shape, through Marshal Cossé, who appeared in La Rochelle with propositions of peace. This statesman, otherwise moderate in his counsels, was imbued with the notion that the Protestants were so discouraged by their late defeat, that they would gladly accept any terms. But the Huguenots, having understood that he was empowered merely to offer them liberty of conscience, without the right to the public worship of God, promptly broke off the negotiations.770 A month or two later they were induced to believe that the court was disposed to larger concessions, or, if not, that they might at least justify themselves in the eyes of the world by showing that they were neither unreasonable nor desirous of prolonging the horrors of war. Two deputies – Jean de la Fin, Sieur de Beauvoir la Nocle, and Charles de Téligny: the one sent by the Queen of Navarre, the other sent by Coligny and the princes, who were already far on their journey through the south of France – came to the king at Angers, and presented the demands of the Huguenots. These demands certainly did not breathe a spirit of craven submission. The Huguenots called not only for complete liberty of conscience, but also for the right to hold their religious assemblies through the entire kingdom, without prejudice to their dignities or honors. They stipulated for the annulling of all sentences pronounced against them; the approval of all that they had done, as done for the welfare of the realm; the restitution of their dignities and property, and the giving of good and sufficient securities for the execution of the edict of pacification.771 Catharine and her counsellors had undoubtedly gained some wholesome experience since Cossé's first proposals. They had already discovered that a single pitched battle had not ruined the Huguenots; and they now suspected that a number of additional battles might be required to effect that desirable result. It is not astonishing, however, that the queen mother was not yet ready to grant terms which could scarcely have been conceded even on the morrow of an overwhelming defeat. The articles sent by the king to the Protestant leaders as a counter-proposal were therefore of a very different character from those which they had submitted. Charles offered to the Queen of Navarre, the Princes of Navarre and Condé, the admiral, and their followers, entire amnesty, and consented to annul all judicial proceedings made against them during these or the late troubles. He would exact no punishment for any treaties which they might have formed with foreign princes, and would restore their goods, honors, and estates. As to the religious question, he would allow them to hold two cities, in which they might do as they pleased, the king placing in each city a capable "gentilhomme" to maintain his authority and the public tranquillity. Elsewhere in France he would tolerate no reformed minister, no exercise of any other religion than his own. Neither would he guarantee the restitution of the judicial and other offices once held by Protestants, since others had bought them, and the money proceeding from the sale had been spent in defraying the expenses of the war; especially as the clergy must look to the courts for the enforcement of their claims for indemnification for the destruction of the churches and other ecclesiastical property. The king professed himself willing to give all reasonable securities for the performance of his promises, but neglected to make any specification of the nature of those securities.772 Such were the hard conditions offered – all that Catharine and the Guises were willing to concede at a time when it was hoped that the Huguenots would lose the assistance of one of their secret supporters, Elizabeth of England; for the Earls of Westmoreland and Northumberland had risen in the north, and they had not only the best wishes, but the ready co-operation of every Spanish and French sympathizer. Charles himself was writing to his ambassador at London a letter meant to meet the queen's eye, instructing him to congratulate Elizabeth on the progress made in suppressing the insurrection; and Catharine, by the same messenger, sent a secret letter of the same date, ordering the same diplomatic agent, in case the rebellion was not at an end, to give aid and comfort to the rebels.773 Catharine and the Guises had not lost heart. Moved by repeated supplications, Pius the Fifth at last decided to excommunicate the heretical daughter of Henry and Anne Boleyn. But, as the bull of the twenty-fifth of February, 1570, had been procured solely by the entreaties of the rebel earls, enforced by the intercessions of the Guises, and as it was known that Philip the Second, so far from desiring it, was strongly opposed to the imprudent policy of the pontiff, the document, which pretended to relieve all the queen's subjects of the obligations of their allegiance, was committed to the charge of the Cardinal of Lorraine, to launch at Elizabeth's devoted head whenever the convenient moment should arrive.774

At Montréal, near Carcassonne, the admiral was again overtaken by a royal messenger, who on this occasion was Biron, equally distinguished on the field and in the council-chamber. While the Protestants replied to his offer that with heartfelt satisfaction they greeted the king's disposition to restore peace to France, and sent to Charles, who was then at Châteaubriand, in Brittany, a delegation consisting of Téligny, Beauvoir la Nocle, and La Chassetière, they distinctly stated that no terms could be entertained which should not include liberty of worship. For they declared that "the deprivation of the exercise of their religion was more insupportable to them than death itself."775 But, in fact, the Huguenot princes and nobles placed little reliance upon the sincerity of the court, and had no hope of peace so long as they treated at a distance from the capital. Accordingly, Coligny, in his march up the valley of the Rhône, when again approached in the king's name by Biron, accompanied by Henry de Mesmes, Sieur de Malassise, peremptorily declined to enter into a truce which should interrupt the efficiency of his movement.776

Better conditions proposed.

Charles and his mother for peace.

The war fruitless for its authors.

But when at last the admiral reached the Loire, and, at La Charité and Châtillon, was within a few hours of Paris, the attitude of the court in relation to the peace seemed to undergo an entire change, and it became evident that the negotiations, which had previously been employed for the mere purpose of amusing the Huguenots, were now resorted to with the view of ending a war already protracted far beyond expectation. Nor is it difficult to discover some of the circumstances that tended to bring about this radical mutation of policy.777 The resources of the kingdom were exhausted. It was no longer possible to furnish the ready money without which the German and other mercenaries, of late constituting a large portion of the royal troops, could not be induced to enter the kingdom. The Pope and Philip were lavish of nothing beyond promises and exhortations that above all things Charles should make no peace with the heretical rebels. Indeed, Philip had few men, and no money, to spare. The French troops were in great straits. The gentlemen, who, in return for their immunity from all taxation, were bound to serve the monarch in the field at their own expense, had exhausted their available funds in so long a contest, and it was impossible to muster them in such numbers as the war demanded. Charles himself had always been averse to war. His tastes were pacific. If he ever emulated the martial glory which his brother Anjou had so easily acquired, the feeling was but of momentary duration, and met with little encouragement from his mother. He had, undoubtedly, consented to the initiation of the war only in consequence of the misrepresentations made by those who surrounded him, respecting its necessity and the ease of its prosecution. He had now the strongest reasons for desiring the immediate return of peace. His marriage with the daughter of the emperor had for some months been arranged, but Maximilian refused to permit Elizabeth to become the queen of a country rent with civil commotion. Catharine de' Medici, also, from the advocate of war, had become anxious for peace – tardily returning to the conviction which she had often expressed in former years, that the attempt to exterminate the Huguenots by force of arms was hopeless. After two years she was no nearer her object than when the Cardinal of Lorraine persuaded her to endeavor to seize Condé at Noyers. Jarnac had accomplished nothing; Moncontour was nearly as barren a victory. A great part of what had been so laboriously effected by Anjou's army in the last months of 1569, La Noue had been undoing in the first half of 1570.778 The Protestants, who were, a few months since, shut up in La Rochelle, had defeated their enemies at Sainte Gemme, near Luçon, and had retaken Fontenay, Niort, the Isle d'Oléron, Brouage, and other places. The Baron de la Garde, who had lately, in the capacity of "general of the galleys," been infesting the seas in the neighborhood of La Rochelle, was compelled to retire to Bordeaux.779 Saintes had been besieged and captured, and the Huguenots were advancing to the reduction of St. Jean d'Angely, not long since so dearly won by the Roman Catholics.780 Montluc had, it is true, met with success in Béarn, where Rabasteins was taken and its entire garrison massacred.781 But what were these advantages at the foot of the Pyrenees, when an army under Gaspard de Coligny, after sweeping four hundred leagues through the southern and western provinces, was now in the immediate vicinity of Paris? His forces, indeed, were small in numbers, but would speedily grow formidable. The French ambassador sent from London the intelligence that letters of credit had been sent from England to Hamburg in order to hasten the entrance into France of some twelve or fifteen thousand Germans under Duke Casimir; that twenty-five hundred men were to be despatched from La Rochelle to make a descent on some point in Normandy or Brittany, in conjunction with the ships of the Prince of Orange; and that the English were to be invited to co-operate.782 If it had proved impracticable to prevent the Duc de Deux Ponts from marching across France to join the confederates near the ocean, what hope was there that the king would be able to hinder the union of Coligny and Casimir? Or, why might not both be reinforced by the troops of La Noue, who had been accomplishing such exploits in Aunis and Saintonge?

The princes of Germany added their intercessions to the stern logic of the conflict. During the festivities in Heidelberg, attending the marriage of John Casimir, Duke of Bavaria, and Elizabeth, daughter of the Elector of Saxony, in June, 1570, the Elector Palatine, the Elector of Saxony, the Margraves George Frederick of Brandenburg and Charles of Baden, Louis, Duke of Würtemberg, the Landgraves William, Philip and George of Hesse, and Adolphus, Duke of Holstein, wrote a joint letter to Charles the Ninth of France, in which they drew his attention to the injury which the long war he was carrying on with his subjects was inflicting upon the states of the empire, and to the necessity of speedily terminating it if he would retain their good-will and friendship. And they assured him that there was no way of accomplishing this result except by permitting the exercise of the reformed religion throughout the kingdom, and abolishing all distinctions between his Majesty's subjects of different faiths.783

Anxiety of Cardinal Châtillon.

When the war had so signally failed, it is not strange that the king and his mother should have turned once more to the advocates of peace, with whose return to favor the retirement of the Guises from court was contemporaneous. Yet the Protestants, who knew too well from experience the malignity of that hated family, could not but shudder lest they might be putting themselves in the power of their most determined enemies. The Queen of Navarre wrote to Charles urging him to use his own native good sense, and assuring him that she feared "marvellously" that these well-known mischief-makers would lure him into "a patched-up-peace" —une paix fourrée– like the preceding pacifications. The object they had in view was, indeed, the ruin of the Huguenots; but the first disaster, she warned him, would fall on the monarch and his royal estate.784 Cardinal Châtillon, when sounded by the French ambassador in England, expressed his eagerness for peace. On selfish grounds alone he would be glad to exchange poverty in England for his revenues of one hundred and twenty thousand a year in France. But he had his fears. "Remembering that the king, the queen, and monsieur (the Duke of Anjou), to confirm the last peace, did him the honor to give him their word, placing their own hands in his, and that those who induced them to break it were those very persons with whom he and his associates now had to conclude the proposed peace," he said, "his hair stood upon end with fear." All that the Protestants wanted was security. They would be glad to transfer the war elsewhere – a thing his brother the admiral had always desired; and, if admitted to the king's favor, they would render his Majesty the most notable service that had been done to the crown for two hundred years.785

Royal Edict of pacification, St. Germain, August 8, 1570.

The terms of the long-desired peace were at last decided upon by the commissioners, among whom Téligny and Beauvoir la Nocle were most prominent on the Protestant side, while Biron and De Mesmes represented the court. On the eighth of August, 1570, they were officially promulgated in a royal edict signed at St. Germain-en-Laye.

There were in this document the usual stipulations respecting amnesty, the prohibition of insults and recriminations, and kindred topics. The liberty of religious profession was guaranteed. Respecting worship according to the Protestant rites, the provision was of the following character. All nobles entitled to "high jurisdiction"786 were permitted to designate one place belonging to them, where they could have religious services for themselves, their families, their subjects, and all who might choose to attend, so long as either they or their families were present. This privilege, in the case of other nobles, was restricted to their families and their friends, not exceeding ten in number. To the Queen of Navarre a few places were granted in the fiefs which she held of the French crown, where service could be celebrated even in her absence. In addition to these, there was a list of cities, designated by name – two in each of the twelve principal governments or provinces – in which, or in the suburbs of which, the reformed services were allowed; and this privilege was extended to all those places of which the Protestants had possession on the first of the present month of August. From all other places – from the royal court and its vicinity to a distance of two leagues, and especially from Paris and its vicinity to the distance of ten leagues – Protestant worship was strictly excluded. Provision was made for Protestant burials, to take place in the presence of not more than ten persons. The king recognized the Queen of Navarre, the prince her son, and the late Prince of Condé and his son, as faithful relations and servants; their followers as loyal subjects; Deux Ponts, Orange, and his brothers, and Wolrad Mansfeld, as good neighbors and friends. There was to be a restitution of property, honors, and offices, and a rescission of judicial sentences. To protect the members of the reformed faith in the courts of justice, they were to be permitted to challenge four of the judges in the Parliament of Paris; six – three in each chamber – in those of Rouen, Dijon, Aix, Rennes, and Grenoble; and four in each chamber of the Parliament of Bordeaux. They were to be allowed a peremptory appeal from the Parliament of Toulouse. To defend the Huguenots from popular violence, four cities were to be intrusted to them for a period of two years – La Rochelle, Montauban, Cognac, and La Charité – to serve as places of refuge; and the Princes of Navarre and Condé, with twenty of their followers, were to pledge their word for the safe restoration of these cities to the king at the expiration of the designated term.787

Dissatisfaction of the clergy.

Such were the leading features of the edict of pacification that closed the third religious war, by far the longest and most sanguinary conflict that had as yet desolated France. That the terms would be regarded as in the highest degree offensive by the intolerant party at home and abroad was to be expected. The Parisian curate, Jehan de la Fosse, only spoke the common sentiment of the clergy and of the bigoted Roman Catholics when he said that "it contained articles sufficiently terrible to make France and the king's faithful servants tremble, seeing that the Huguenots were reputed as faithful servants, and what they had done held by the king to be agreeable."788 It was not astonishing, therefore, that, although the publication of the edict was effected without delay under the eyes of the court at Paris, it gave rise in Rouen to a serious riot.789 The Papal Nuncio and the Spanish ambassador were indignant. Both Pius and Philip had bitterly opposed the negotiations of the early part of the year. Now their ambassadors made a fruitless attempt to put off the evil day of peace; the Spanish ambassador not only offering three thousand horse and six thousand foot to extirpate the Huguenots, but affirming that "there were no conditions to which he was not ready to bind himself, provided that the king would not make peace with the heretics and rebels."790

"The limping and unsettled peace."

For the first time in their history, the relations of the Huguenots of France to the state were settled, not by a royal declaration which was to be of force until the king should attain his majority, or until the convocation of a general council of the Church, but by an edict which was expressly stated to be "perpetual and irrevocable." Such the Protestants, although with many misgivings, hoped that it might prove. It was not, however, an auspicious circumstance that the popular wit, laying hold of the fact that one of the Roman Catholic commissioners that drew up its stipulations – Biron – was lame, while the other – Henri de Mesmes – was best known as Lord of Malassise, conferred upon the new compact the ungracious appellation of "the limping and unsettled peace" – "la paix boiteuse et mal-assise."791

CHAPTER XVII.

THE PEACE OF SAINT GERMAIN

Sincerity of the peace.

A problem of cardinal importance here confronts us, in the inquiry whether the peace which had at length dawned upon France was or was not concluded in good faith by the young king and his advisers. Was the treaty a necessity forced upon the court by the losses of men and treasure sustained during three years of almost continual civil conflict? Were the queen mother and those in whose hands rested the chief control of affairs, really tired of a war in which nothing was to be gained and everything was in jeopardy, a war whose most brilliant successes had been barren of substantial fruits, and had, in the sequel, been stripped of the greater part of their glory by the masterly conduct of a defeated opponent? Or, was the peace only a prelude to the massacre – a skilfully devised snare to entrap incautious and credulous enemies?

The latter view is that which was entertained by the majority of the contemporaries of the events, who, whether friends or foes of Charles and Catharine, whether Papists or Protestants, could not avoid reading the treaty of pacification in the light of the occurrences of the "bloody nuptials." The Huguenot author of the "Tocsin against the murderers" and Capilupi, author of the appreciative "Stratagem of Charles the Ninth" – however much they may disagree upon other points – unite in regarding the royal edict as a piece of treachery from beginning to end. It was even believed by many of the most intelligent Protestants that the massacre was already perfected in the minds of its authors so far back as the conference of Bayonne, five years before the peace of St. Germain, in accordance with the suggestions of Philip the Second and of Alva. This last supposition, however, has been overthrown by the discovery of the correspondence of Alva himself, in which he gives an account of the discussions which he held with Catharine de' Medici on that memorable occasion. For we have seen that, far from convincing the queen mother of the necessity for adopting sanguinary measures to crush the Huguenots, the duke constantly deplores to his master the obstinacy of Catharine in still clinging to her own views of toleration. It seems equally clear that the peace of St. Germain was no part of the project of a contemplated massacre of the Protestants. The Montmorencies, not the Guises, were in power, and were responsible for it. The influence of the former had become paramount, and that of the latter had waned. The Cardinal of Lorraine had left the court in disgust and retired to his archbishopric of Rheims, when he found that the policy of war, to which he and his family were committed, was about to be abandoned. Even in the earlier negotiations he had no part, while the queen mother and the moderate Morvilliers were omnipotent.792 And when Francis Walsingham made his appearance at the French court, to congratulate Charles the Ninth upon the restoration of peace, he found his strongest reasons of hope for its permanence, next to the disposition and the necessities of the king, in the royal "misliking toward the house of Guise, who have been the nourishers of these wars,"793 and in the increase of the royal "favor to Montmorency, a chief worker of this peace, who now carrieth the whole sway of the court, and is restored to the government of Paris."794

At home and abroad, the peace was equally opposed by those who could not have failed to be its warmest advocates had it been treacherously designed. We have already seen that both Pope Pius the Fifth, and the King of Spain insisted upon a continuance of the war, and offered augmented assistance, in case the government would pledge itself to make no compact with the heretical rebels. The pontiff especially was unremitting in his persuasions and threats; denouncing the righteous judgment of God upon the king who preferred personal advantage to the claims of religion, and reminding him that the divine anger was wont to punish the sins of rulers by taking away their kingdoms and giving them to others.795 The project of a massacre of Protestants, had it in reality been entertained by the French court while adopting the peace, could scarcely have been kept so profound a secret from the king and the pontiff who had long been urging a resort to such measures, nor would Pius and Philip have been suffered through ignorance to persist in so open a hostility to the compact which was intended to render its execution feasible.

The designs of Catharine de' Medici.

If the Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day, as enacted on the fatal Sunday of August, was not premeditated in the form it then assumed – if the peace of St. Germain was not, as so many have imagined, a trick to overwhelm the Huguenots taken unawares – are we, therefore, to believe that the idea of such a deed of blood was as yet altogether foreign to the mind of Catharine de' Medici? I dare not affirm that it was. On the contrary, there is reason to believe that the conviction that she might some day find herself in a position in which she could best free herself from entanglement by some such means had long since lodged in her mind. It was not a strange or repulsive notion to the careful student of the code of morality laid down in "Il Principe." Alva had familiarized her with it, and the civil wars had almost invested it in her eyes with the appearance of justifiable retaliation. She had gloated in secret over the story of the Queen Blanche, mother of Louis the Ninth, and her successful struggle with her son's insubordinate nobles, telling her countryman, the Venetian ambassador Correro, with a significant laugh such as she was wont occasionally to indulge in, that she would be very sorry to have it known that she had been reading the old manuscript chronicle, for they would at once infer that she had taken the Castilian princess as her pattern.796 More unscrupulous than the mother of St. Louis, she had revolved in her mind various schemes for strengthening her authority at the expense of the lives of a few of the more prominent Huguenot chiefs, convinced, as she was, that Protestantism would cease to exist in France with the destruction of its leaders. But, despite pontifical injunctions and Spanish exhortations, she formed no definite plans; or, if she did, it was only to unravel on the morrow what she had woven the day before. What Barbaro said of her at one critical juncture was true of her generally in all such deliberations: "Her irresolution is extreme; she conceives new plans from hour to hour; within the compass of a single day, between morning and evening, she will change her mind three times.797"