The war between Catholics and Protestants in France finally erupts in earnest. Catherine travels across France with Charles IX to try to calm the volcano, but her own patience with the increasingly desperate Protestants is wearing thin…
Transcript
So a word of warning, the French Wars of Religion are one of the most complicated events in the history of Europe, if not the history of the world. There were multiple factions, power plays, and, of course, lots of battles at play. Also something I should have noted is that historians don’t even agree about when the wars started, although the majority agree that it began with the Massacre of Wassy. So while it’s hard to avoid a lot of narrative involving the Wars because, well, Catherine de’ Medici ruled France for most of the wars’ duration, I’m going to try to simplify things and leave out detailed descriptions of certain phases of the war and certain players in events, and focus on Catherine and her family. Since you’re listening to the Medici Podcast and not the French History podcast or a war history podcast, I doubt this makes you too unhappy.
But I do think it’s important to take a look at what’s going on in Europe and how conflicts within the religion established by the man who preached “Love thy neighbor” were leading most of Europe into apocalyptic wars. The biggest development was the Council of Trent, that general council of the Church that Emperor Charles V had tried bullying various popes into calling for years. Finally it started meeting in 1545 and concluded its last session in 1563. It seems impossible in hindsight now, but at the time many across Europe, including perhaps Catherine herself, hoped that the Council of Trent would lead into some grand reconciliation with most Protestants returning to the fold. Instead, the Council of Trent ended up a fairly conservative affair. True, it would see some significant changes, like a crackdown on rural priests who were badly educated in their own religion and clergy who kept mistresses. However, on some of the issues that were right at the heart of the Protestant Reformation – like the authority of the Pope, the question of whether faith alone or faith and good works were necessary for one’s salvation, whether the clergy should be allowed to marry or required to be celibate, and the whole matter of saints, relics, and religious icons – the Church didn’t budge. In fact, several doctrines that had been more or less ambiguous in places were now completely set in stone. For reformist Catholics like Marguerite d’Angouleme and the philosopher Erasmus this left little space to maneuver. If anything, it just set solid boundaries between Catholicism and Protestantism for the first time. Even a religious hardliner like Charles V, who was if nothing else a political pragmatist first and foremost, was appalled at how quickly and thoroughly the Council locked out any real chance of any doctrinal concession to the Protestants.
Meanwhile in England, the new queen Elizabeth I forged her own way. She was a political survivor in the truest sense; before she became queen her Catholic half-sister Mary had her imprisoned and nearly killed when she was accused of treason. Her approach to religion was just as savvy and cautious. The new Church of England would adopt some of the key doctrinal points shared by many Protestant sects. But it also mirrored the Catholic Church in its hierarchy, calendar of saints, and use of icons. Oh, and instead of the Pope, the monarch of England was the head of the Church. Still, Elizabeth I identified with the Protestant cause, and as religious tensions in France and the Netherlands heated up, she would prove to be a somewhat reliable friend to her fellow Protestants. But even though the Anglican Church was in many ways “Catholicism lite” or perhaps “Diet Protestantism”, Elizabeth’s government began to crack down on Catholicism. This was in response to various plots by radical Catholics to depose or even assassinate her after Pope Pius V called for Elizabeth to be overthrown. By 1581, for example, converting an English subject to Catholicism became equivalent to an act of treason.
Just to the north from England, Mary Queen of Scots had sailed back to Scotland in the fall of 1561. Not the religious fanatic seen in the TV series The Serpent Queen, Mary instead adopted Catherine de’ Medici’s own policy of trying to find peace and reconciliation. Recognizing now that Protestants in Scotland greatly outnumbered Catholics, one of Mary’s first major acts was to proclaim that there would be no interference with the religious practices established since she first became queen, while also commanding that no one interfere with her and her courtiers’ practice of the Catholic religion. Sadly, even that would prove too much for the Protestant hardliners in Scotland. And in the years to come Mary Queen of Scots would prove far less wily than her cousin Queen Elizabeth or her former mother-in-law. In fact, she probably should have stayed in her estates in France, leaving Scotland to be ruled by a series of Protestant regents, and happily married some obscure duke or prince, but that’s another story.
Now let’s turn far to the east. The Principality of Transylvania found itself with a religiously diverse population. But since it was on the cusp of a total invasion by either the Austrian Hapsburgs or the Ottoman Empire, it didn’t have the luxury of religious persecution. So at an assembly held in 1568, the nobles of Transylvania voted to extend religious tolerance to not only Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox Christians, but also to a new Christian movement brewing in Hungary that completely rejected the core Christian doctrine of the holy trinity, a decision that paved the way for modern Unitarianism.
Near Transylvania, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, on top of holding the largest Jewish communities in Europe, had also become a haven for German Protestants and religious radicals fleeing persecution in neighboring Russia. After a half-hearted and mostly ignored attempt to persecute Protestants by his predecessor, since he came to the throne in 1548 King Sigismond II of the Commonwealth encouraged a degree of official religious tolerance that was unknown to all of western Europe.
But the one event that would prove the most consequential for France and Catherine herself was the Eighty Years War, also known as the Dutch Revolt. Like the French Wars of Religion, the event is unfathomably complicated, with historians debating over when the revolt began. In any case, the revolt was really begun by both Protestants and Catholics. Philip II had gotten used to treating the Netherlands like a child actors’ parents would treat their kid’s bank account. As the Spanish Empire’s economy struggled so badly Philip defaulted on his loans no less than four times over the course of his reign, he raised exorbitant taxes on the Dutch and trampled over cities’ and towns’ rights and privileges that had been in place since the days of the dukes of Burgundy. The rebellion that followed quickly took on a Protestant characteristic, especially in response to the harsh religious persecution that had been a characteristic of Charles V’s and Philip’s reigns.
Finally, in the Holy Roman Empire itself, after a series of clashes with the Protestant princes of Germany even Emperor Charles V had to compromise. In 1555, the Diet of Augsburg established a new political principle – cuius regio, eius religio, “whose realm, their religion”, meaning the religion of whoever ruled a principality the inhabitants were expected to follow their ruler’s religion or leave. However, a provision was added allowing for Protestants and Catholics to live together in German cities and regions where Protestant communities had existed since the 1520s.
So, overall, the seeds of modern religious pluralism were already being planted, at least in hindsight, but religious fanaticism and hatred were getting mixed up inexorably with politics and national rivalries, a trend that would culminate in decades of destructive religious wars, and not just in France.
Speaking of which…after the Massacre of Wassy, the Duke of Guise was welcomed as a hero by the overwhelmingly Catholic city of Paris while the Prince of Conde fled. Citing fears that her son King Charles might be abducted, Catherine and the king left Paris, covertly to meet with Conde at a town near Paris. Catherine tried to talk Conde down, but it was much too late. The provincial nobility and local magistrates had been preparing and recruiting militias for this very moment. At the same time, there had been peasant revolts that only grew once word of the Massacre of Wassy got out. These revolts were explosions in resentments that had been building up over decades, but attempts by Catholic nobles to persecute Huguenot peasants were the spark. Nonetheless, these revolts tended to involve both Protestant and Catholic peasants acting out long-held frustrations that had nothing much to do with religions. This did not stop Catholics from blaming these unruly peasants entirely on Huguenot pastors whipping them up. After all, such a thing happened within living memory in Germany in 1524 when peasants excited by the sermons they were hearing from Martin Luther’s followers went to war against their noble overlords.
So the story of the French Wars of Religion was not just another story of nobles and their armies killing each other. Nor were the only atrocities committed by the people in charge. Stories of massacres and brutality committed by the other side spread rapidly. Huguenot peasants were accused of beheading a Catholic noble before his horrified wife while a group of monks were said to have had their throats cut. Catholics meanwhile were accused of killing a widow along with her four children and two servants and drowning 200 Huguenots at Tours. But it should be noted, as often happens with civil wars, that the people involved were not always enemies. During the war one Huguenot soldier lamented, “Each one of us thought to himself that the men coming towards him were either his companions, his relatives or friends and within the next hour they would be killing each other.”
It’s easy to just think of this period of French history as one long dirge of misery and bloodshed, but in many places life went on. Catherine’s royal court was one of them. As queen mother, Catherine still spent lavishly on daily entertainments. True, she had cut the court’s budget, but as a monarch in early modern Europe entertaining the court and trying to overawe foreign dignities was part of the job description. To help her do this, Catherine recruited a number of young, attractive, aristocratic ladies to form her “flying squadron.” Likely inspired by the inner circle of educated and beautiful women King Francois I kept around him, Catherine’s flying squadron was much more extensive, with anywhere from eighty to three-hundred women in it at a time. They had to dress in gold silk and dance, sing, and play cards for the high-ranking men and ambassadors at court. The prudish Jeanne d’Albret disapproved of the royal court under the sway of the flying squadron and complained, “It is not the men who invite the women but the women who invite the men.” I imagine the women of the flying squadron kept tabs on the men they entertained and reported back anything of interest to Catherine. While Catherine seems to have been fairly tolerant of the antics of her flying squadron, she did have her limits. When she learned one of the flying squadron who had been having an affair with no one other than the Prince of Conde himself and gave birth to a child, Catherine was furious and had the poor woman imprisoned for a time in a convent, which was the traditional punishment in France for a woman found guilty of adultery or who was allegedly promiscuous.
I can’t help but suspect Catherine, the woman mocked for supposedly coming from a mere upstart bourgeoisie family, enjoyed flaunting the wealth of the country she ruled. The writer, the seigneur de Brantome, experienced Catherine’s court first-hand and described it as a “paradise on earth.” Catherine was also an avid animal lover and was something of an expert on the care of and the breeding of horses and kept a large number of dogs and birds. True to her Florentine heritage, she also kept several lions at Amboise. But Catherine especially liked bears and could be seen accompanied by muzzled and trained bears.
Now it’s time to leave the alleged paradise that was Catherine’s court and return to the war. Despite Catherine’s attempts to talk him down, Conde and his forces seized power in the city of Orleans, one of the largest cities in France and a strategic threat to nearby Paris. He issued a manifesto, calling for aid from Protestant rulers and declaring his intent to quote-unquote free the royal family, including Catherine herself, from the Triumvirate. Catherine’s hand was now forced, and she unleashed the royal army on Conde’s Huguenot forces. Reluctantly, she entrusted command of the army to the Triumvirate. As royalist forces besieged the town of Rouen (ROO-AHN) which had been captured by Conde’s forces, she was at a nearby fortress, walking on the battlements as she inspected the royal army and artillery fired nearby. When Montmorency warned her to get back to a safer position, she only laughed, answering, “My courage is as great as yours.”
As often happens in civil wars, foreign forces stepped in. The Triumvirate’s forces were backed by the papacy, Spain, and the duchy of Savoy while England sent money and actual soldiers to help Conde. An English battalion even invaded and occupied the port city of Le Havre, although on the promise to Elizabeth I that once Conde had control of the government and after an eight-year period the port city of Calais, whose loss had long been a bruise on English national pride, would be handed over. The first major casualty of the war was the turncoat Antoine de Bourbon, who was fatally shot during a campaign while he happened answering nature’s call. He left behind an eight-year-old son named Henri, who will play a major role in our story soon enough.
He would not be the only high-profile fatality on the Catholic side. The Duc of Guise was shot and killed during the siege of Orleans by Jean de Poltrot, a Huguenot nobleman who had been recruited by Guise as a spy but for reasons lost to history turned against him. Poltrot shot the Duke while he was inspecting a military camp during the siege of Orleans. Poltrot was promptly executed and his body torn apart by the people of Paris, who were enraged by the death of their hero. Under torture Poltrot claimed he was following orders from Montmorency’s nephew Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, one of Conde’s lieutenants, which Coligny and Poltrot himself before his execution denied. The Guises blamed Coligny though, and Coligny himself didn’t help the case by calling Guise’s assassination a blessing for the Huguenots of France. Another suspect was Catherine, especially as her black legend grew. Catherine would also be suspected of having Guise killed. She allegedly said, “If Monsieur de Guise had perished sooner, peace would have been achieved more quickly.” Even if she had said that, that’s not very good proof at all. The duke of Guise was succeeded, both as duke and eventually as a new leader of the Catholics, by his son who is also named confusingly Henri. For the sake of convenience I’ll just also call him the Duke of Guise.
At last, though, Catherine managed to convince Conde to help her draft a peace treaty. It was issued in March of 1563 in the form of a new Edict of Amboise. Protestant worship was now restricted to the suburbs of one town in each district of France, although Protestant nobles and their servants and families were allowed to worship freely on their own estates, and an amnesty for any crimes committed during the war on both sides were allowed. Unfortunately, the new edict was unpopular with the general public who found it too kind to the Huguenots who dared raise arms against Catholics and the monarchy itself. Town criers who announced the edict and its terms were pelted with mud. Even Huguenots hated it and blamed Conde for shaping the treaty in a way that it actually gave more religious rights to the nobility. It actually did make sense, in a way. Most of the armed support for the Huguenot cause came from the Protestant nobles and magistrates of the provinces, after all, so for Catherine and Conde this aspect of the Edict made it more palpable to the people actually funding the Huguenot resistance. But it would also be a public relations disaster. The Catholics of France already tended to view Protestantism as a subversive foreign movement. Now it was also going to be seen as a destructive fad among out-of-touch aristocrats. Aware of its unpopularity, Catherine and the king appeared with Conde in public in Paris. The next day, however, his wife was accosted by a mob of Parisians who killed one of her servants, an incident that was an ominous sign of things still to come.
The parlement of Paris and all eight provincial parlements initially refused to register the Edict of Amboise. The Parlement of Paris eventually complied, but only after attaching a number of complaints to the official registration of the edict and an amendment that kept the Edict from taking full effect until the king reached his majority. Catherine refused to back down. Before the Parlement of Rouen, she both had a lit de justice ceremony and had Charles, who had just turned fourteen, declared of age. Although she would not quite relinquish her control over the state, she did write a document with guidelines for the king. She advised Charles to make himself accessible to the nobles at court and the general public at events, to deal with administrative matters quickly while keeping a watchful eye against corruption, and to keep a daily routine. As usual, Catherine liked to impress upon her sons examples of past kings. In this case, she claimed Louis XII always carried with him a list of open offices so he could offer these positions to qualified applicants on the spot, and Francois I had agents tasked with keeping him informed of all the developments in all the provinces.
The now fourteen-year-old King Charles IX was not an inspiring figure. Like his deceased brother Francois II, he had some kind of lifelong ailment, possibly some form of asthma. Although observers generally agreed that Charles was handsome, despite a large birthmark above his lip that he would later hide by growing a moustache, they also remarked that he was physically frail, to the point he looked younger than his years. Also like Francois II, he tried to compensate for this through rigorous horse riding, which again like Francois II may have only made his symptoms worse. Unlike his older brother, he had more of an interest in the arts, and he loved music and wrote his own poetry. He was also anxious, which is perhaps unsurprising since he grew up with the fear of getting kidnapped, and prone to fits of rage that worsened as he got older. Between his bad temper and his underdeveloped appearance, detractors referred to Charles IX as the “Brat King.”
Still, this was a time when a monarch, whether or not he looked like Chris Hemsworth, was considered a semi-divine figure. Their very body had symbolic power, and as I covered before in France the king could force his subjects into compliance. So Catherine decided to take an extended tour of France, what she called “le grand voyage de France.” This wasn’t too unusual for a time when even though all kingdoms at this time had capital cities, monarchs were still mostly mobile, having to travel across their domains. Charles V spent most of his life just going from Austria to the Netherlands to Spain and back again. But Catherine decided this vacation would be a bit more elaborate than the usual travels a monarch took in their kingdom. Charles and the entire royal court would journey to every corner of France. This would give Catherine a chance to use Charles cow the remaining parliaments that still refused to register the Edict of Amboise. Also by showing off the monarchy to provincial nobles and other local elites, Catherine hoped to inspire more loyalty. This grand voyage would last for two years, from January 1564 to May 1566. Coming along for the trip were the entire royal family, members of the privy council, foreign ambassadors, and thousands of courtiers and their servants, entertainers, and soldiers.
Knowing that they were going to be close to the Spanish border, Catherine wrote to King Philip of Spain and her daughter Elizabeth, asking if they could meet. Philip refused on the excuse that two monarchs meeting went against custom – never mind that that’s exactly what Henry VIII and Francois I did. Likely Philip’s real motive was over anger with the Edict of Amboise. However, he would let Elizabeth visit her mother. Catherine was so pleased that she erupted into laughter and then started crying. Unfortunately, their actual reunion at the Bidasoa River on the border was strained. Elizabeth had adapted many of her husband’s views and had adopted the more formal and cool ways of the Spanish court. “How Spanish you have become, my daughter,” Catherine remarked after her own daughter lectured her on how she should persecute the Protestants. Also at the meeting was Philip’s right-hand man, Fernando Alvarez, the Duke of Alba. He flatly rejected all of Catherine’s proposals for another marriage alliance between Spain and France. But what really enraged Catherine was Alba’s not-so-subtle hints that unless she handled the Protestant problem Spain might intervene militarily. Nor did Catherine have much luck with a prominent Huguenot, in this case Jeanne d’Albret. When Catherine met with Jeanne, refused to listen to Catherine’s pleas that she ease up on the mistreatment of Catholics within her own territory. Without getting the necessary permission from the king, Jeanne left for her own lands in Navarre and southwest France. Jeanne would ensure that Henri, next in line for the throne after Charles and his younger brothers, would be raised a staunch Protestant.
The meeting ended with nothing accomplished, and Catherine’s relationship with the Spanish would only get worse. During the trip at the start of 1566, she heard news concerning a small colony of French Huguenots named after Admiral Coligny, Fort Coligny. Spanish forces in Florida slaughtered everyone at Fort Coligny except a group of survivors who managed to escape. Catherine was so furious to hear the news that, according to the Spanish ambassador, “growled like a lion.” Still, she did not dare make any demands for compensation from Spain. The most she could do was fund the erection of stone pillars recording the names of those killed.
There were two achievement during the Grand Voyage. The king made speeches to the parlements no doubt prepared by Catherine herself, calling them out for their disobedience. This did get the Edict of Amboise fully registered across France. While the court was at Moulins in central France she held an Assembly of Notables, a gathering of France’s top nobles, clergy, and important city officials. They approved a proposal to enact reforms to deal with issues of local corruption and overlapping and confused jurisdictions. It was far, far from a total reorganization of the government and most of the proposals could not actually go into effect because of the coming resumption of hostilities, but it was a foundation for later attempts to reform the government.
By the time the royal court was back in Paris, the civil war was about to break out yet again. In response to the revolt in the Netherlands, King Philip sent the Duke of Alba at the head of an army. The Huguenots dreaded that there was a secret plot for the Duke of Alba to divert his army to join up with the Guise’s forces and march on every town in France with a Huguenot majority. Indeed, against Catherine’s own wishes, the Cardinal of Lorraine had written to the Duke of Alba with a proposal very similar to that. It didn’t help the Huguenot paranoia that Catherine herself had met with the Duke of Alba personally during the trip or that accurate reports of the Duke’s brutal persecution of Dutch Protestants reached France.
The pressure finally released when Admiral Coligny and the Prince de Conde attacked Paris itself in a desperate attempt to kidnap King Charles. Exactly what they intended with this isn’t clear, especially since they didn’t stand much of a chance against the number of troops stationed in and around Paris or against Charles’ bodyguard of Swiss mercenaries, which had been raised to 6,000 soldiers. Despite the bad odds, the Huguenots did score something of a victory when Catherine’s old rival, Anne de Montmorency, was killed in the fighting. The Huguenots were forced to relent by March of 1568 with another peace treaty in the form of a royal edict, the Edict of Longjumeau, which just reiterated the terms of the Edict of Amboise. But it did not hold back the war for long, as the ongoing chaos in the Netherlands spilled over into France. Catherine even had to bribe the Dutch Huguenot leader, William of Orange, to leave the country with his army. This third outbreak of war ended with another Edict of St. Germain, proclaimed on August 8, 1570. Catherine’s attitude toward the Huguenots seems to have become more jaded since the attempt to attack Paris and kidnap her son, but in a desperate attempt to finally end the fighting, she was willing to make more concessions. With the 1570 Edict of St. Germain, Protestants could now freely worship within two designated towns in each of France’s twelve administrative regions. They were also allowed to keep control of three southern towns – La Rochelle, Cognac, and Montauban – where they had a majority and which they seized during the wars. For the first time, the Edict also protected the civil rights of Huguenots, such as the right to hold political offices and the right not to be taxed unfairly.
It seemed perhaps a lasting compromise had finally been achieved. However, Catherine did not forget that the Huguenots, who once seemed so loyal despite the whole heresy thing, had raised an army to try to kidnap her son.
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