History of the Rise of the Huguenots Volume II Part 12

[242] Poltrot's pretended confession of Feb. 26th, at Camp Saint Hilaire, near Saint Mesmin, with the replies signed by Coligny, la Rochefoucauld, and Beza to each separate article, is inserted in full in Mem. de Conde, iv. 285-303, and the Hist. eccles. des egl. ref., ii. 176-186. Coligny's letter to Catharine, ibid., ii. 186, 187, Mem. de Conde, iv. 303.

[243] That Catharine de' Medici was no very sincere mourner for Guise is sufficiently certain; and it is well known that there were those who believed her to have instigated his murder (See Mem. de Tavannes, Pet.

ed., ii. 394). This is not surprising when we recall the fact that almost every great crime or casualty that occurred in France, for the s.p.a.ce of a generation, was ascribed to her evil influence. Still the Viscount de Tavannes makes too great a draft upon our credulity, when he pretends that she made a frank admission of guilt to his father. "Depuis, au voyage de Bayonne, pa.s.sant par Dijon, elle dit au sieur de Tavannes: 'Ceux de Guise se vouloient faire roys, je les en ay bien garde devant Orleans.'" The expression "devant Orleans" can hardly be tortured into a reference to anything else than Guise's a.s.sa.s.sination.

[244] I entirely agree with Prof. Baum (Theodor Beza, ii. 719) in regarding "this single circ.u.mstance as more than sufficient to demonstrate both the innocence of Coligny and his a.s.sociates, and the consciously guilty fabrication of the accusations."

[245] Besides the authorities already referred to, the Journal of Bruslart, Mem. de Conde, i. 123, 124; Davila, bk. iii. 86, 87; Claude Haton, i. 322, etc.; J. de Serres, ii. 343-345; and Pasquier, Lettres (OEuvres choisies), ii. 258, may be consulted with advantage. Prof. Baum's account is, as usual, vivid, accurate, and instructive (Theodor Beza, ii.

706, etc.). Varillas, Anquetil, etc., are scarcely worth examining. There is the ordinary amount of blundering about the simplest matters of chronology. Davila places the wounding of Guise on the 24th of February, his death three days later, etc.

[246] Mem. de Conde, i. 124; Hist. eccles. des egl. ref., ii. 164.

[247] Claude Haton, i. 325, 326.

[248] See Riez's letter to the king, reprinted in Mem. de Conde, iv.

243-265, and in Cimber and Danjou's invaluable collection of contemporary pamphlets and doc.u.ments, v. 171-204; Hist. eccles. des egl. ref., ii. 164.

[249] Hist. eccles. des egl. ref., _ubi supra_. There is extant an affecting letter from the aged Renee of Ferrara to Calvin, in which she complains with deep feeling of the reformed, and especially their preachers, for the severity with which even after his death they attacked the memory of her son-in-law, and even spoke of his eternal condemnation as an ascertained fact. "I know," she said, "that he was a persecutor; but I do not know, nor, to speak freely, do I believe that he was reprobated of G.o.d; for he gave signs to the contrary before his death. But they want this not to be mentioned, and they desire to shut the mouths of those who know it." Cimber et Danjou, v. 399, etc. Calvin's reply of the 24th of January, 1564, is admirable for its kind, yet firm tone (Bonnet, Lettres franc. de Calvin, ii. 550, etc., Calvin's Letters, Am. edit., iv. 352, etc.). He freely condemned the beatification of the King of Navarre, while the Duke of Guise was consigned to perdition. The former was an apostate; the latter an open enemy of the truth of the Gospel from the very beginning. Indeed, to p.r.o.nounce upon the doom of a fellow-sinner was both rash and presumptuous, for there is but one Judge before whose seat we all must give account. Yet, in condemning the authors of the horrible troubles that had befallen France, and which all G.o.d's children had felt scarcely less poignantly than Renee herself, sprung though she was from the royal stock, it was impossible not to condemn the duke "who had kindled the fire." Yea, for himself, although he had always prayed G.o.d to show Guise mercy, the reformer avowed, in almost the very words of Beza, that he had often desired that G.o.d would lay His hand upon the duke to free His Church of him, unless He would convert him. "And yet I can protest," he added, "that but for me, before the war, active and energetic men would have exerted themselves to destroy him from the face of the earth, whom my sole exhortation restrained."

Some of the composers of Huguenot ballads were bitter enough in their references to Guise's death and pompous funeral; see, among others, the songs in the Chansonnier Huguenot, pp. 253 and 257.

[250] Hist. eccles. des egl. ref., ii. 285, 286. The story is well told in Memorials of Renee of France, 215-217. De Thou (liv. x.x.x.), iii. 179, has incorrectly placed this occurrence among the events of the first months of the war. During the second war Brantome once stopped to pay his respects to Renee, and saw in the castle over 300 Huguenots that had fled there for security. In a letter of May 10, 1563, Calvin speaks of her as "the nursing mother of the poor saints driven out of their homes and knowing not whither to go," and as having made her castle what a princess looking only to this world would regard almost an insult to have it called--"G.o.d's hostelry" or "hospital" (ung hostel-Dieu). G.o.d had, as it were, called upon her by these trials to pay arrears for the timidity of her younger days. Lettres franc., ii. 514 (Amer. trans., iv. 314).

[251] Despatch to the queen, Blois, February 26, 1562/3, Forbes, State Papers, ii. 340. "Of the thre things that did let this realme to come to unity and accorde," adds Smith, "I take th' one to be taken away. How th'

other two wil be now salved--th' one that the papists may relent somwhat of their pertinacie, and the Protestants have som affiaunce or trust in there doengs, and so th' one live with th' other in quiet, I do not yet se."

[252] Mem. de Castelnau, liv. iv., c. xii.; Davila, bk. iii. 88; Journal de Bruslart, Mem. de Conde, i. 124; Letter of Catharine to Gonnor, March 3d, ibid., iv. 278; Hist. eccles., ii. 200.

[253] Rascalon, Catharine's agent, proffered the dignity in a letter of the 13th of March, and the duke declined it on the 17th of the same month.

At the same time he gave some wholesome advice respecting the observance of the Edict, etc. Hist. eccles., ii. 165-168.

[254] "La Royne ... y a si vivement procede, que ayant ordonne que sur la foy de l'un et de l'autre nous nous entreveorions en l'Isle aux Bouviers, joignant presque les murs de ceste ville, dimenche dernier cela fut execute." Conde to Sir Thomas Smith, Orleans, March 11, 1563, Forbes, ii.

355.

[255] Hist. eccles. des egl. ref., ii. 170, 171. Coupled with demands for the rest.i.tution of the edict without restriction or modification, the prohibition of insults, the protection of the churches, the permission to hold synods, the recognition of Protestant marriages, and that the religion be no longer styled "new," "inasmuch as it is founded on the ancient teaching of the Prophets and Apostles," we find the Huguenot ministers, true to the spirit of the age, insisting upon "the rigorous punishment of all Atheists, Libertines, Anabaptists, Servetists, and other heretics and schismatics."

[256] The text of the edict of Amboise is given by Isambert, Recueil des anc. lois franc., xiv. 135-140; J. de Serres, ii. 347-357; Hist. eccles.

des egl. ref., ii. 172-176; Agrippa d'Aubigne, i. (liv. iii.) 192-195. See Pasquier, Lettres (OEuvres choisies), ii. 260.

[257] Smith to the queen, April 1, 1563, in Duc d'Aumale, Princes de Conde, i. Doc.u.ments, 439.

[258] Smith to D'Andelot, March 13, 1563, State Paper Office.

[259] Journal de Bruslart, Mem. de Conde, i. 125: "de expresso Regis mandato iteratis vicibus facto." Claude Haton is scarcely more complimentary than Bruslart: "elle (la paix) estoit faicte du tout au desavantage de l'honneur de Dieu, de la religion catholicque et de l'authorite du jeune roy et repos public de son royaume." Memoires, i.

327, 328.

[260] Elizabeth of England was herself, apparently, awakening to the importance of the struggle, and new troops subsidized by her would soon have entered France from the German borders. "This day," writes Cecil to Sir Thomas Smith, amba.s.sador at Paris, Feb. 27, 1562/3, "commission pa.s.seth hence to the comte of Oldenburg to levy eight thousand footemen and four thousand horse, who will, I truste, pa.s.se into France with spede and corradg. He is a notable, grave, and puissant captayn, and fully bent to hazard his life in the cause of religion." Th. Wright, Queen Elizabeth and her Times, i. 125. But Elizabeth's troops, like Elizabeth's money, came too late. Of the latter, Admiral Coligny plainly told Smith a few weeks later: "If we could have had the money at Newhaven (Havre) _but one xiii daies sooner_, we would have talked with them after another sorte, and would not have bene contented with this accord." Smith to the queen, April 1, 1563, in Duc d'Aumale, i. 439.

[261] Letter from Orleans, March 30, 1563, MSS. State Paper Office, Duc d'Aumale, i. 411.

[262] Hist. eccles. des egl. ref., ii. 203. Theodore Beza was the preacher on this occasion, and betrayed his own disappointment by speaking of the liberty of religion they had received as "not so ample, peradventure, as they would wish, yet such as they ought to thank G.o.d for." Smith to the queen, March 31, State Paper Office.

[263] Relazione di Correro, 1569. Rel. des Amb. Ven., ii. 118-120.

[264] It appears at least as early as in Farel's Epistre a tous Seigneurs, written in 1530, p. 166 of Fick's edition.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE PEACE OF AMBOISE, AND THE BAYONNE CONFERENCE.

[Sidenote: The restoration of Havre demanded.]

[Sidenote: Fall of Havre.]

Scarcely had the Edict of Amboise been signed when a demand was made upon the English queen for the city of Havre, placed in her possession by the Huguenots, as a pledge for the restoration of Calais in accordance with the treaty of Cateau-Cambresis, and as security for the repayment of the large sums she had advanced for the maintenance of the war. But Elizabeth was in no favorable mood for listening to this summons. Instead of being instructed to evacuate Havre, the Earl of Warwick was reinforced by fresh supplies of arms and provisions, and received orders to defend to the last extremity the only spot in France held by the queen. A formal offer made by Conde to secure a renewal of the stipulation by which Calais was to be given up in 1567, and to remunerate Elizabeth for her expenditures in the cause of the French Protestants, was indignantly rejected; and both sides prepared for open war.[265] The struggle was short and decisive. The French were a unit on the question of a permanent occupation of their soil by foreigners. Within the walls of Havre itself a plot was formed by the French population to betray the city into the hands of their countrymen; and Warwick was forced to expel the natives in order to secure the lives of his own troops.[266] But no vigilance of the besieged could insure the safety of a detached position on the borders of so powerful a state as France. Elizabeth was too weak, or too penurious, to afford the recruits that were loudly called for. And now a new and frightful auxiliary to the French made its appearance. A contagious disease set in among the English troops, crowded into a narrow compa.s.s and deprived of their usual allowance of fresh meat and wholesome water. The fearful mortality attending it soon revealed the true character of the scourge. Few of those that fell sick recovered. Gathering new strength from day to day, it reigned at length supreme in the fated city. Soon the daily crowd of victims became too great to receive prompt sepulture, and the corpses lying unburied in the streets furnished fresh fuel for the raging pestilence. Seven thousand English troops were reduced in a short time to three thousand, in a few days more to fifteen hundred men.[267] The hand of death was upon the throat of every survivor. At length, too feeble to man their works, despairing of timely succor, unable to sustain at the same moment the a.s.sault of their opponents and the fearful visitation of the Almighty, the English consented to surrender; and, on the twenty-eighth of July, a capitulation was signed, in accordance with which, on the next day, Havre, with all its fortifications and the s.h.i.+ps of war in its harbor, fell once more into the hands of the French.[268]

[Sidenote: How the peace was received.]

The pacification of Amboise, a contemporary chronicler tells us, was received with greater or less cordiality in different localities of France, very much according to the number of Protestants they had contained before the war. "This edict of peace was very grievous to hear published and to have executed in the case of the Catholics of the peaceable cities and villages where there were very few Huguenots. But it was a source of great comfort to the Catholics of the cities which were oppressed by the Huguenots, as well as of the neighboring villages in which the Catholic religion had been intermitted, ma.s.s and divine wors.h.i.+p not celebrated, and the holy sacraments left unadministered--as in the cities of Lyons and Orleans, and their vicinity, and in many other cities of Poitou and Languedoc, where the Huguenots were masters or superior in numbers. As the peace was altogether advantageous to the Huguenots, they labored hard to have it observed and published."[269]

[Sidenote: Vexatious delays in Normandy.]

But to secure publication and observance was not always possible.[270] Not unfrequently the Huguenots were denied by the illiberality of their enemies every privilege to which they were ent.i.tled by the terms of the edict. At Troyes, the Roman Catholic party, hearing that peace had been made, resolved to employ the brief interval before the edict should be published, and the mayor of the city led the populace to the prisons, where all the Huguenots that could be found were at once murdered.[271]

The vexatious delays, and the actual persecution still harder to be borne, which were encountered at Rouen, have been duly recorded by an anonymous Roman Catholic contemporary, as well as in the registers of the city hall and of the Norman parliament, and may serve as an indication of what occurred in many other places. From the chapter of the cathedral and the judges of the supreme provincial court, down to the degraded rabble, the entire population was determined to interpose every possible obstacle in the way of the peaceable execution of the new law. Before any official communication respecting it reached them, the clergy declared, by solemn resolution, their intention to reserve the right of prosecuting all who had plundered their extensive ecclesiastical domain. The munic.i.p.ality wrote at once to the king, to his mother, and to others at court, imploring that Rouen and its vicinity might be exempted from all exercise of the "new religion." Parliament sent deputies to Charles the Ninth to remonstrate against the broad concessions made in favor of the Protestants, and, even when compelled to go through the form of a registration, avoided a publication of the edict, in order to gain time for another fruitless protest addressed to the royal government.

When it came to the execution of the law, the affair a.s.sumed a more threatening aspect. The Roman Catholics had resolved to resist the return of the "for-issites," or fugitive Huguenots. At first they excused their opposition by alleging that there were bandits and criminals of every kind in the ranks of the exiles. Next they demanded that a preliminary list of their names and abodes should be furnished, in order that their arms might be taken away. Finally they required, with equal perverseness, that, in spite of the express stipulation of the king's rescript, the "for-issites"

should return only as private individuals, and should not venture to resume their former offices and dignities. Meantime the "for-issites,"

driven to desperation by the flagrant injustice of which they were the victims, began to retaliate by laying violent hands upon all objects of Roman Catholic devotion in the neighboring country, and by levying contributions upon the farms and villas of their malignant enemies. The Rouenese revenged themselves in turn by wantonly murdering the Huguenots whom they found within the city walls.

[Sidenote: Protest of the Norman parliament.]

The embittered feeling did not diminish at once after the more intrepid of the Huguenots had, under military compulsion, been readmitted into Rouen.

There were daily complaints of ill-usage. But the insolence of the dominant party rose to a still higher pitch when there appeared a royal edict--whether genuine or forged has not as yet been settled--by which the cardinal demands of the Huguenots were granted. The alleged concessions may not strike us as very extraordinary. They consisted chiefly in disarming the Roman Catholics equally with the adherents of the opposite creed, and in erecting a new chamber in parliament to try impartially cases in dispute between the adherents of the two communions.[272] This was certainly decreeing but a small measure of the equality in the eye of the law which the Protestants might claim as a natural and indefeasible right. The citizens of the Norman capital, however, regarded the enactment as a monstrous outrage upon society. Charles the Ninth, happened at this time to be pa.s.sing through Gaillon, a place some ten leagues distant from Rouen, on his way to the siege of Havre; and Damours, the advocate-general, was deputed to bear to him a protest drawn up by parliament. The tone of the paper was scarcely respectful to the monarch; it was positively insulting to the members of the royal council who professed the Protestant faith. It predicted the possible loss of Normandy, or of his entire kingdom, in case the king pursued a system of toleration. The Normans, it said, would not submit to Protestant governors, nor to the return of the exiles in arms, nor to their resumption of their former dignities. If the "for-issites" continued their excesses, they would be set upon and killed. The Roman Catholic burgesses of Rouen even proclaimed a conditional loyalty. Should the king not see fit to accede to their demands, they declared themselves ready to place the keys of their city in his hands to dispose of at his pleasure, at the same time craving permission to go where they pleased and to take away their property with them.

[Sidenote: A rude rebuff.]

Truly the spirit of the "Holy League" was already born, though the times were not yet ripe for the promulgation of such tenets. The advocate-general was a fluent speaker, and he had been attended many a weary mile by an enthusiastic escort. Parliamentary counsellors, munic.i.p.al officers, clergy, an immense concourse of the lower stratum of the population--all were at Gaillon, ready to applaud his well-turned sentences. But he had chosen an unlucky moment for his oratorical display.

His glowing periods were rudely interrupted by one of the princely auditors. This was Louis of Conde--now doubly important to the court on account of the military undertaking that was on foot--who complained of the speaker's insolent words. So powerful a n.o.bleman could not be despised. And so the voluble Damours, with his oration but half delivered, instead of meeting a gracious monarch's approval and returning home amid the plaudits of the mult.i.tude, was hastily taken in charge by the archers of the royal guard and carried off to prison. The rest of the Rouenese disappeared more rapidly than they had come. The avenues to the city were filled with fugitives as from a disastrous battle. Even the grave parliament, which the last winter had been exhibiting its august powers in butchering Huguenots by the score, beginning with the arch-heretic Augustin Marlorat, lost for a moment its self-possession, and took part in the ignominious flight. Shame, however, induced it to pause before it had gone too far, and, putting on the gravest face it could summon, it reappeared ere long at Gaillon with becoming magisterial gravity. Never had there been a more thorough discomfiture.[273] A few days later the Marshal de Bourdillon made his entry into Rouen with a force of Swiss soldiers sufficient to break down all resistance, the "for-issites" were brought in, a new election of munic.i.p.al officers was held, and comparative quiet was restored in the turbulent city.[274]

[Sidenote: Commissioners to enforce the edict.]

[Sidenote: Alienation of a profligate court.]

[Sidenote: Profanity a test of Catholicity.]