by Will Durant
Guise himself met death in the aftermath of victory. While deploying his army to besiege Orléans he was shot in ambush by Jean Poltrot de Méré (February 18, 1563), a nineteen-year-old Huguenot. The Duke died after six days of pain. Poltrot, brought before Catherine, asserted that Coligny had hired him, for a large sum, to murder Guise, and that Bèze had promised him Paradise if he succeeded. Catherine wrote to Coligny asking for his answer to the charge. He denied any part in the assassination plan; he had often warned the Duke to beware of assassins; he admitted that he had heard Poltrot declare his intention, and had done nothing to deter him; he had given Poltrot one hundred crowns, but for other purposes; however, he was not sorry that the plot had succeeded, “for … fortune can deal no better stroke for the good of the Kingdom and the Church of God, and most especially it is good for myself and my house.”40 Poltrot was torn apart by horses on March 18; in his dying agony he renewed his accusation of Coligny.41 Henry, now third Duke of Guise, swore to avenge his father’s death.
Catherine continued to work for peace; it was quite clear that either faction, if decisively victorious, would set her aside and possibly depose her son. She called L’Hôpital back to her Council, arranged a meeting of Montmorency and Condé, and persuaded them to sign the Edict of Amboise, ending the First Religious War (March 19, 1563). The terms were a victory for the Huguenot nobles only: liberty of conscience and practice of the religion “called reformed” were granted “for all barons and lords high justiciary in their houses, with their families and dependents,” and “for nobles having fiefs without vassals and living on the King’s lands, but for them and their families personally.” The Huguenot worship was to be allowed in towns where it had been practiced before March 8, 1563; otherwise it was to be confined to the outskirts of a single town in any seneschalty or bailiwick; in Paris it was altogether forbidden. Coligny charged Condé with having sacrificed the Huguenot rank and file to protect his class.
On September 15 Charles IX, who was not yet fourteen, was declared of age; Catherine surrendered her regency, but not her leadership. In March 1564 she led the King and the court on a progress through France, partly to show the nation its new monarch, partly to consolidate the fragile peace. At Roussillon she issued an edict of partial toleration, calling upon each faith to respect the liberty of the other. After fourteen months of royal touring, the party reached Bayonne (June 3, 1565), where Catherine greeted with joy her daughter Elizabeth, now Queen of Spain, and conferred with the Duke of Alva in secret parleys that alarmed the Huguenots. They rightly suspected that Alva counseled full forcible measures against them, but his extant letters to Philip make it clear that Catherine rejected his proposals, refused to dismiss L’Hôpital, and still clung to her policy of peace.42 Soon after her return to Paris (December 1565) she used all her influence to reconcile Coligny, Montmorency, Condé, and the Guises.
In 1564 the Jesuits entered France; their sermons roused the ardor of the Catholics, and in Paris especially they converted a number of Huguenots. In the provinces a strong Catholic reaction nullified many Protestant gains. The edicts of toleration were repeatedly violated, and barbarity flourished under both dispensations. It was not unusual for Catholic magistrates to hang citizens merely for being Huguenots.43 At Nîmes the Protestants massacred eighty Catholics (1567).44 Between 1561 and 1572 there were eighteen massacres of Protestants, five of Catholics; and there were over thirty assassinations.45 Catherine imported mercenaries from Switzerland and gave no satisfactory answer when Condé asked for what use she intended them. Believing that their own lives were in danger, Condé and Coligny, with armed followers, tried to seize the King and the Queen Mother at Meaux (September 1567), but Montmorency foiled the attempt. Catherine now feared Coligny as once she had feared Guise.
Coligny and Condé felt that a second war was needed to restore even the limited rights of the Huguenots. They in their turn imported mercenaries, chiefly from Germany, to reinforce their depleted armies; they captured Orléans and La Rochelle and marched on Paris. Catherine asked Alva for reinforcements; he sent them at once, and at St.-Denis, just outside the capital, Montmorency led sixteen thousand men against Condé’s troops in one of the bloodiest and least decisive battles of these wars. Montmorency died of his wounds. France again wondered what religion was this that led men to such slaughter; and L’Hôpital seized the opportunity to arrange the Peace of Longjumeau (March 23, 1568), which restored the modest toleration granted in the Edict of Amboise.
The Catholics denounced the treaty and refused to carry out its terms. Coligny protested to Catherine; she pleaded impotence. In May 1568 the Spanish ambassador at Rome, Juan de Zuñiga, reported that he had heard from Pope Pius V that the French government was considering the assassination of Coligny and Condé.46 The two Huguenot leaders may have had similar information. They fled to La Rochelle, where they were joined by Jeanne d’Albret and her son, now fifteen years old and itching for action. A new Huguenot army was formed, a fleet was collected, the walls were fortified, and all attempts of government forces to enter the city were repulsed. English private vessels accepted Condé’s commission, flew his flag, and made a prey of any Catholic property they could seize.47 Condé was now virtually sovereign south of the Loire.
Catherine looked upon this Third Religious War as a revolution, as an attempt to divide France into two nations, one Catholic, the other Protestant. She reproached L’Hôpital for the failure of his conciliation policies; he resigned; she replaced him as chancellor with an uncompromising partisan of the Guises. On September 28, 1568, the government repealed the edicts of toleration and outlawed the Reformed faith from France.
All that winter the rival forces prepared for a decisive engagement. On March 3, 1569, they met at Jarnac, near Angoulême. The Huguenots were defeated; Condé, exhausted with wounds, surrendered, but was shot from the rear and died. Coligny took command and reorganized the troops for an orderly retreat. At Moncontour the Huguenots were again defeated, but Coligny recovered by strategy what had been lost in battle; and without victories, almost without food, the undiscourageable Huguenots advanced to within a few hours’ march of Paris (1570). Despite subsidies from Rome and Spain, the government found it difficult both to finance its armies and to keep the Catholic nobles in the field for more than a month or two at a time. Meanwhile hordes of mercenaries devastated the country, pillaging Catholics and Protestants indiscriminately, and killing all who dared resist.
Catherine offered Coligny a renewal of the Treaty of Longjumeau; he refused it as inadequate and continued his advance. At this point the youthful Charles IX suddenly asserted his authority and signed at St.-Germain (August 8, 1570) a peace that gave the oft-defeated Huguenots more than they had ever gained before: freedom of worship except in Paris or near the court, full eligibility to public office, and, as a guarantee that these terms would be honored in practice, the right to hold four cities under their independent rule for two years. The Catholics fumed and wondered why such a surrender followed so many victories. Philip and the Pope protested. Catherine turned them off with the assurance that she was only biding her time.I
Nevertheless she proceeded to strengthen the new peace by offering to marry her daughter Marguerite of Valois to Henry, King of Navarre, now, since Condé’s death, the titular head of the Huguenots. It was Catherine’s last and boldest stroke. No matter that she and Jeanne d’Albret were sworn foes; no matter that Henry had already slain his quota of Catholics in war. He was young and malleable; perhaps the magic of a beautiful and vivacious princess would woo him from his heresies. There would be a magnificent wedding feast at Paris; men and women of either faith would be invited. The gay Renaissance would revive amid the bitter Reformation; there would be a moratorium on theology and war and massacre.
IV. MASSACRE
But would Henry’s mother consent? Jeanne d’Albret was Huguenot in body and soul. Coming to the court in 1561, she declared that “she would not go to Mass if they killed her; she would soone
r throw her son and her kingdom into the sea than yield”;48 on the contrary, she had her Huguenot chaplain preach to her with all doors open, and defiantly ignored the recriminations of the Parisian populace. When her husband was converted to Catholicism she left him and the court (1562), returned to Béarn, and raised money and troops for Condé. After her husband’s death she made Protestantism compulsory in Béarn (which included the cities of Pau, Nérac, Tarbes, Orthez, and Lourdes); Catholic clergymen were dispossessed and were replaced by Huguenot ministers;49 for fifty years thereafter no Mass was heard in Béarn.50 Pope Pius IV excommunicated her and wished to depose her, but Catherine dissuaded him.51 When Jeanne accepted the offer to bind Valois and Bourbon in marriage she may have remembered this, and Catherine’s long struggle for peace. Besides, Catherine’s sons were sickly; might they not all die and leave the throne of France to Henry of Navarre? Had not the soothsayer Nostradamus prophesied that the Valois dynasty would soon end?
The sickliest of the sons, Charles IX, might have been a lovable youth except for occasional fits of cruelty and temper that blazed out at times into a passion verging on insanity. Between such storms he was a reed in the wind, seldom having a mind of his own. Perhaps he weakened himself by sensual indulgence. He was married to Elizabeth, daughter of the Emperor Maximilian II; but his illicit and lasting love was for his Huguenot mistress, Marie Touchet. He was sensitive to art, poetry, and music; he loved to recite Ronsard’s lyrics, and he wrote in Ronsard’s honor verses as pretty as Ronsard’s own:
Tous deux également nous portons des couronnes,
Mais roi je la reçus; poète, tu la donnes;
Ta lyre, qui ravit par de si doux accords,
Te soumet les esprits, dont je n’ai que les corps;
Elle amollit les coeurs, et soumet la beauté;
Je puis donner la mort, toi l’immortalité.II
When Coligny joined the court at Blois (September 1571), Charles took to him as weakness welcomes strength. Here was a man all the world away from so many who had been pirouetting around the throne: a gentleman, an aristocrat, but quiet and sober, carrying half of France in the power of his word. The young King called the aging commander “mon père,” appointed him commander of the fleet, gave him from the royal purse a grant of 100,000 livres to reimburse him for his losses during the wars. Coligny joined the Council and presided over it in the absence of the King.52 Charles had always been jealous and fearful of Philip II; he resented the dependence of Catholic France upon Spain. Coligny proposed to him that a war with Spain would give France a unifying cause, and would rectify that northeastern boundary upon which Spain was encroaching. Now was the time, for William of Orange was leading a revolt of the Netherlands against their Spanish overlord; one good push, and Flanders would be French. Charles listened sympathetically. On April 27 he wrote to Count Louis of Nassau, who was leading the Protestant rebellion in Hainaut, that “he was determined … to employ the powers which God had put into his hands for the deliverance of the Low Countries from the oppression under which they were groaning.”53 Louis and his brother William of Orange offered to surrender Flanders and Artois to France in return for decisive aid against Spain.54 In the fall of that year Charles negotiated with the Elector Augustus of Saxony for a defensive alliance of France and Protestant Germany.55
Catherine condemned Coligny’s proposals as fantastically impracticable. Now that she had the peace that France so needed, it would be folly to unleash the hounds of war so soon again. Spain was as bankrupt as France, but she was still the strongest power in Christendom; she had just covered herself with glory in the defeat of the Turks at Lepanto; she would have all Catholic Europe—and most of Catholic France—to support her if France entered a Protestant league. In such a war Coligny would be commander in chief, and, through his influence on the impressionable Charles, he would in effect be king; Catherine would be relegated to Chenonceau, if not to Italy. Henry of Guise and Henry of Anjou—brother of the King—learned with dismay that Charles was allowing Coligny to send Huguenot troops to join Louis of Nassau; Alva, forewarned by his friends at the French court, overwhelmed this force (July 10, 1572). A full meeting of the King’s Council heard Coligny defend his proposals for war with Spain (August 6–9, 1572); they were unanimously rejected; Coligny persisted. “I have promised on my own account,” he said, “my assistance to the Prince of Orange; I hope the King will not take it ill if, by means of my friends, and perhaps in person, I fulfill my promise.” He said to the Queen Mother, “Madame, the King is today shunning a war which would promise him great advantages; God forbid that there should break out another which he cannot shun.”56 The Council broke up in excited resentment of what seemed a threat of another civil war. “Let the Queen beware,” warned Marshal de Tavannes, “of the King her son’s secret counsels, designs, and sayings; if she do not look out the Huguenots will have him.”57 Catherine took Charles aside and reproached him for having surrendered his mind to Coligny; if he persisted in the plan for war against Spain she would ask his leave to withdraw with her other son to Florence. He asked her forgiveness and promised filial obedience, but he remained Coligny’s devoted friend.
It was in this atmosphere that Jeanne d’Albret came to Blois to prepare for the marriage that was to unite Catholic and Protestant France. She insisted that Cardinal de Bourbon should perform the ceremony not as a priest but as a prince, not in a church but outside it, and that Henry should not accompany his wife into the church to hear Mass. Catherine agreed, though this would raise more trouble with the Pope, who had refused dispensation for Marguerite to marry the Protestant son of an excommunicated Protestant. Then Jeanne went on to Paris to shop, fell sick of pleurisy, and died (June 9, 1572). The Huguenots suspected that she had been poisoned, but this hypothesis is no longer entertained.58 Despite his own suspicions and grief, Henry of Navarre came from Blois to Paris in August, accompanied by Coligny and eight hundred Huguenots. Four thousand armed Huguenots followed them into the capital,59 partly to see the festivities, partly to protect their young King. Catholic Paris, aroused by this influx and a hundred inflammatory sermons,60 denounced the marriage as a surrender of the government to Protestant force. Nevertheless the ceremony took place (August 18), without papal dispensation; Catherine took measures to prevent the post from bringing a papal prohibition. Henry led his wife to the portals of Notre Dame, but did not enter with her; Paris was not yet worth a Mass. Provisionally he lodged with Marguerite in the Louvre.
Seldom had Paris seethed with such excitement. Coligny, still pressing for open aid by France to the revolting Netherlands, was believed ready to leave for the front. Some Catholics warned Catherine that Huguenots were planning another attempt to kidnap her and the King.61 The hammering of anvils throughout the city revealed the hurried forging of weapons. At this juncture, according to her son Henry, Catherine gave her consent to the murder of the Admiral.62
On August 22, as Coligny was walking from the Louvre to his house, two shots from a window cut off the first finger of his left hand and ripped his arm to the elbow. His companions rushed into the building, but found only a smoking arquebus; the assailant had escaped by the rear. Coligny was carried to his rooms. The King, informed, cried out angrily, “Am I never to have any peace?” He sent his personal physician, the Huguenot Ambroise Paré, to treat the wounds, assigned royal guards to Coligny’s house, commanded the Catholics to leave the adjoining premises, and allowed Huguenots to move in.63 The Queen, the King, and his brother Henry came to comfort the wounded man, and Charles swore the “most terrible oath” to revenge the attack. Coligny again urged Charles to enter the war for the acquisition of Flanders.64 Taking him aside, he whispered some secret. As the royal family returned to the Louvre, Catherine insisted that the King reveal the secret. “Very well, then, by the death of God,” he answered, “since you will know, this is what the Admiral said to me: that all power has gone to pieces in your hands, and that evil for me would come of it.” In a state of frenzy the King shu
t himself up in his private apartment. Catherine brooded in fearful resentment.65
Henry of Navarre came to Coligny and discussed measures of defense. Some members of the Admiral’s retinue wished to go at once and assassinate the Guise leaders; he forbade them. “If ample justice be not done,” said the Huguenots, “they would certainly do it themselves.”66 All that day Huguenots moved about the Louvre; one of them told the Queen that if justice were not soon executed they would take the law into their own hands.67 Bands of armed Huguenots passed repeatedly by the Hôtel de Lorraine, where the Guises were staying, and shouted threats of death.68 The Guises appealed to the King for protection and barricaded themselves in their house. Charles, suspecting them of having hired the assassin, arrested several of their servants and menaced the Duke of Guise. Henry and his brother the Duke of Aumale asked permission to leave Paris; it was granted; they went as far as the Porte St.-Antoine; then they turned back and secretly made their way to the Hôtel de Lorraine.