EARLY LOCAL AND PROVINCIAL CATHOLIC LEAGUES
Thanks to her own enterprise in pushing the war which had culminated
with so much honor to France, and partly also to her skilful handling
of the factions at court, Catherine de Medici was now in enjoyment
of supreme power. The entire weight of the government rested on her
shoulders, there being no longer any other person who controlled public
affairs. The Guises and Châtillon factions were full of animosity
toward one another, for Madame de Guise refused to recognize the
admiral’s acquittal for the murder of her husband;[733] Montmorency
was deeply offended because the young duke of Guise received the
grand-mastership and the gift of the duchy of Châtellerault, and so
feigned to have the gout in order to avoid service before Havre; Condé
was doubly angry at the queen, both because she withheld the promised
lieutenant’s commission and because the daughter of Marshal St. André,
who left a great fortune, was not permitted to marry his son. The
parties were, therefore, in a triangular relation toward one another
and Catherine’s art was bent upon maintaining the balance in order to
hold her own.[734]
The population of the wittiest city in Europe was quick to perceive
the animosities and paradoxes that existed. “The Parisians have three
things to wonder at,” the saying went, “the constable’s beads, the
chancellor’s mass, and the cardinal Châtillon’s red cap. One is ever
mumbling over his beads and his head is ever occupied with other
affairs; the other hears mass daily and is the chief Huguenot in
France; the third wears a cardinal’s cap and defies the Pope.”[735] The
queen mother had hoped that religious animosities would be forgotten
in the course of the war with England. But she was disappointed. The
peace of Amboise could not be enforced. Even in Paris armed troops
and armed guards had to patrol the streets to prevent outbreaks of
violence.[736] It was impossible to disarm the Catholics, who made
house-to-house searches to ferret out Huguenots.[737] Under the terms
of pacification the Protestants were permitted to return to Paris,
but who dared avail himself of so precarious a liberty? Instead, they
were compelled to sacrifice their property.[738] In the provinces the
same condition of things prevailed—in Languedoc, in the Orléannais,
in the Lyonnais.[739] In Languedoc the association of the Huguenots
maintained its organization, raised money, levied troops.[740] Yet in
spite of its failure to enforce pacification, the government required
the demolition of the walls of towns known to be Huguenot strongholds,
as Orleans, Montauban, and St. Lô, a procedure which the Protestants
strongly resisted; so that a condition of petty civil war existed
throughout much of France, the Edict of Amboise notwithstanding.[741]
Summarized, the troubles of France at this time may be said to have
been the feud between the house of Guise and that of Châtillon—a feud
which compromised the crown and most of the other great families of
the kingdom; the queen’s ambition to govern, which led her to nourish
the quarrel; religious intolerance; the poverty of the crown; the
uncertainty of its foreign relations; and finally the detriment to its
commerce on account of the war with England, which deprived France of
four or five millions of gold.[742]
Even before peace was made between France and England it had been
decided that the King should make a tour of the provinces for the
better pacification of the country.[743] A programme of administrative
and financial reform was developed at the same time. The army was to
be reduced; in place of the royal garrisons there was to be a “belle
milice” of forty ensigns of footmen, ten each in Picardy, Normandy,
Languedoc, and Dauphiné. These troops were to be supported partly by
the crown, partly by the provinces. The Scotch Guard was to be cut
down. Through the church’s aid twelve millions of the public debt,
including the unpaid balance of the dowries of Elizabeth of Spain and
the duchess of Savoy, were to be paid off within six years and the
alienated domains of the crown redeemed.[744] Already Charles IX’s
majority had been declared at Rouen, during the course of the siege
of Havre[745]—a dexterous stroke of the queen mother to thwart the
ambitions of the factions.[746]
In the early spring of 1564 the court set out from Fontainebleau, and
thence went to Sens and Troyes, where the peace was signed; from Troyes
the way led to Bar-le-Duc and Nancy. But the journey of the King,
instead of allaying the disquietude of the Huguenots, alarmed them
still more. For the strongest overtures were made to the King to break
the peace of Amboise, not only by provincial authorities[747] but also
through the ambassadors of certain of the Catholic powers.
The Council of Trent had finished its labors with somewhat unseemly
haste on December 4, 1563, on account of the anticipated decease
of Pius IV,[748] and strong pressure was brought upon the French
and Spanish governments to accept its findings.[749] The Pope, in
consistory, accepted them in their integrity, on January 26, 1564.[750]
But various European governments, especially France, strongly objected
to the findings as prejudicial to the interests of monarchy.[751]
On the first Monday in Lent the cardinal of Lorraine presented the
decrees of Trent to the King in council and others of the Parlement,
urging that their adoption was necessary for the repose of the kingdom.
The debate which followed, in a certain sense was a test of strength
between the moderate Catholic party, led by the chancellor L’Hôpital
and the Guises. Much objection was made to the findings, especially by
the chancellor, who asserted that they were contrary to the privileges
of the Gallican church, and that the cardinal’s party was now trying
to compass by craft what they had failed to do by force of arms. The
cardinal rejoined with words to the effect that L’Hôpital was unmindful
of the benefits he had received of them (the Guises), using the word
“ingrate” (_ingrat_). To this the chancellor haughtily returned that he
had never received any benefits from the cardinal or his family, that
he had only filled the post of _maître de requêtes_, which was not a
high office, and that he did not desire to pay his debts at the expense
of the King’s sovereignty by voting in favor of the decrees. In the
end, France refused to accept all of the findings.[752]
With the closing of the Council of Trent, the representatives of
the ultra-Catholic powers, notably Spain and Savoy, intimated to
Charles IX that their sovereigns would assist him in the extirpation
of heresy in France. The offer was both a promise and a menace, the
implication being that the Catholic world at large would not tolerate
the recognition of Protestantism accorded by France and that a joint
action of the powers most concerned might compel the king of France to
live up to his title of Most Christian King. The cardinal of Lorraine
had carried the idea of the Triumvirate to Trent with him,[753] and on
the floor of the Council had proposed the formation of an association
to be called “The Brotherhood of Catholics in France.” He offered to
secure the co-operation of his nephews, relatives, and friends, and
returned to France with the consent of the Pope for that purpose.[754]
The Triumvirate, as we have seen, had already made overtures to Spain,
to which Philip II had responded with cordial, if no very definite
sentiments, and from the time of the promulgation of the Edict of
January and the formation of the Triumvirate, the idea of a Catholic
league in which the Pope and the king of Spain were to be the chief
pillars, begins to take shape.[755] The mission of Louis de St. Gelais,
sieur de Lansac, to Trent and Rome in this month, was partly to prevent
the formation of such a league, and partly to persuade the Pope to
approve the French government’s appropriation of the property of the
church. Granvella was not unfavorable to the idea, though in his eyes
such a league should be formed, not for the purpose of intervening in
France, but as a defensive measure, lest Catherine endeavor to profit
by the critical situation prevailing in the Spanish Netherlands and
interfere there in order to divert the discontent of the French from
home affairs, and to prevent the Protestants of the Netherlands from
assisting their coreligionists in France.[756]
The outbreak of civil war after the massacre of Vassy and the seizure
of Havre-de-Grace by the English had convinced Philip II that the time
to act had come in France, and Spanish troops and Spanish money were
put at the disposal of the Guises, although Philip denied to England
that he was giving succor to Catholic France.[757] In May, and again
in August of 1562, the Triumvirate appealed to Philip II,[758] and
on June 6 the Spanish King wrote to the regent in the Netherlands to
send the Triumvirate assistance. But the order was easier to give
than to execute, and exactly a month later (July 6) both Margaret and
Granvella replied, asserting the impracticability of carrying out
Philip’s wishes on the ground that no money could be procured from the
estates for such a purpose.[759] In the meantime, the cardinal-legate
in France, convinced that “in order to lay the ax at the root of the
evil, there was no shorter way and no better expedient than recourse to
arms,”[760] and impatient of Spain’s slow reply to the petition of the
Triumvirate,[761] stirred up both the Vatican and the court of Madrid
to livelier action.[762] As a result, although it was against their
better judgment, Margaret and Granvella prevailed upon the Council of
State in August to appropriate 50,000 écus for the war in France, and
in September 3,000 Italians were sent from Franche Comté to the aid of
Tavannes in Burgundy.[763]
The elements of the future Holy League are here manifest as early as
1561-62. But apart from the course being followed out in high political
circles, at the same time, popular associations for the maintenance
of the Catholic religion were being formed within France. The years
1562-63 witnessed the formation of several provincial leagues and town
associations, which were the real roots of the Holy League.
The people of the capital had begun to manifest their prejudices in an
organized military form as early as 1562, and the government, instead
of suppressing this tendency, encouraged it. On May 2, 1562, the
Parlement of Paris passed an ordinance ordering the _échevins_ and all
loyal Catholics in each quarter of the city to organize under arms,
with captains, corporals, and sergeants.[764] But the preponderance of
Paris in the formation of the Holy League has been exaggerated. When it
became a national affair, Paris, as the capital and most Catholic city
of France, seized hold of it and made it her own. But it is inverting
things to say that Paris gave the League to the provinces. Rather
Paris identified herself with their interests, and reflected their
passions and their character, “fierce in Languedoc, sullenly obstinate
in Brittany, everywhere modified in its nature and its devotion by the
politics of the towns.”[765]
The south of France was far more aggressive than the north in this
particular, and anti-Protestant associations were formed in many
provinces to the disquietude of the government, which knew not how to
control them.[766] The earliest of such local associations formed by
the Catholics seems to have been one of Bordeaux, where the people
were organized after the Protestant attempt to gain possession of the
Château Trompette in Francis II’s reign.[767] This association formed
in Bordeaux is the germ of the Catholic League which later expanded
over the Bordelais and Gascony. Other portions of France followed
suit. In November, 1562, the Association of Provence was formed at
Aix and terrorized the Huguenots.[768] Toulouse was notoriously
Catholic, and street wars between Catholics and Protestants were of
common occurrence. A more than usually violent outburst of popular
fury here culminated on March 2, 1563, in the formation of a Catholic
League, of which the cardinals Armagnac and Strozzi, lieutenants of
the King in the sénéschaussées of Toulouse and Albi, the president of
the Parlement, Du Faur, who was advocate-general of the crown, certain
eminent knights of the Order, and the famous Montluc, were sponsors.
The immediate occasion of this outbreak at Toulouse seems to have
been the combination of fury and fear of a plot which the Catholics
felt when they learned of the duke of Guise’s assassination. When the
outbreak began, the president of the Parlement of Toulouse hastily
dispatched a messenger to Montluc entreating him to come to their
assistance. Upon Montluc’s arrival at Toulouse the leaders prayed him
to put himself at the head of the troops in the province against the
Huguenots.
Montluc at first made some difficulty about consenting to this request,
because he had no permission from Damville, the governor of Languedoc,
in which province Toulouse was located, and who, moreover, was not
one of his friends.[769] Finally, however, he yielded to their
request, and measures were taken to put an army on foot in thirty days.
Those who composed this assembly drew up the compact of a league or
association on March 2, 1563, which was to be observed by the clergy,
the nobility, and the third estate in the towns and dioceses within
the jurisdiction of the parlement of Toulouse, both in Languedoc and
Guyenne. According to the articles of this association the members
engaged to bear arms, and to make oath between the hands of those
commissioned by the Parlement, or by the King’s lieutenant in the
country, to march whenever required for the defense of the Catholic
religion. The parlement of Toulouse approved and authorized this
association on March 20, provisionally and without charges, “subject
to the good pleasure of the King.” In the name of this league taxes
were laid, men were levied, and an inventory of arms made in every
_généralité_ and diocese.[770]
Montluc had come to Toulouse, fresh from the formation of another and
earlier league for the preservation of the Catholic faith, in Agen,
which had been organized on February 4, 1563. This league was a direct
consequence of the siege of Lectoure and the battle of Vergt. Montluc
had received orders to report, with the marshal Termes, to the King in
the camp before Orleans. But the Agenois was not quite pacified and the
gentry of the country were so filled with alarm, that they concluded,
so Montluc naïvely says, “that in case I should resolve to go away to
the King, as his Majesty commanded, and offer to leave them without a
head, they must be fain to detain me in the nature of a prisoner.”[771]
The upshot of things was that the “Confederation and Association
of the town and city of Agen and other towns and jurisdictions of
Agen” was formed and organized on February 4, 1563, with a captain,
lieutenant, sergeants, corporals, and other necessary officers, in
order to extirpate the Huguenots from the region. It was an oath-bound
covenant.[772]
The examples of Agen and Toulouse were contagious, and the popular
hatred of the Huguenots, on account of the assassination of the duke of
Guise, induced the spread of these local leagues. On March 13, 1563,
the Catholic lords of Guyenne also entered into a league at Cadillac
on the same plan and for the same object as that of the Catholics of
Agen and Languedoc.[773] Like the earlier ones, the league of Guyenne
was organized by parishes, districts, sénéschaussées and provinces,
under the direction of one supreme chief assisted by a council chosen
from the third estate. In the north of France, as has been observed,
the tendency of the Catholics to associate was not so strong as in
the south. There is evidence of a weak association of the Catholics
in the towns of the Rouennais and the lower part of the Ile-de-France
in 1563,[774] and of a town league in Anjou and Maine.[775] But no
formidable Catholic association was formed north of the Loire, until
the appearance of the Confrérie du St. Esprit in 1568, under the
marshal Tavannes.
The nucleus of many of these Catholic associations, before they
expanded into provincial leagues, in most cases seems to have been a
local guild or confraternity[776] of some nature. These were closely
connected with the body of tradesmen, each trade having its patron
saint, its sacred banner, and devoted bands; but some of the more
aristocratic people were joined with the artisans. The members had
fixed places of meeting and certain days on which to assemble, common
exercises, and often a common meal. They swore to use their wealth and
their life, if need be, for the defense of their faith.[777]
The new rôle now begun to be played by these ancient guilds is an
interesting phase of the religious wars. If France in the sixteenth
century was laboring in the throes of a religious revolution, she was
also in a state of industrial transformation. In origin the economic
revolution was independent of the Reformation, yet so influential
were its social and economic effects upon the Reformation that in a
very true sense the religious movement may be said to have been the
subordinate one.[778] The identity and fulness of this change in the
old order of things coincides with the Reformation, which in large
part became the vehicle of its expression. The crisis coincides with
the reign of Charles IX and Henry III, although the beginnings of
it are very manifest in the time of Louis XI (cf. the ordinances of
1467, 1474-76, 1479). The change particularly involved the guilds,
whose traditional practices had now reached the point of an industrial
tyranny. More and more, from the middle of the fifteenth century,
control of the guilds had tended to fall into the hands of a few. This
growth of a social hierarchy within the guilds had serious political
and economic results. For inasmuch as city government was so largely
an out-growth of guild life, this exclusiveness threw political
control of the cities into the hands of a “ring” composed of the upper
bourgeoisie, who formed an oligarchy and gradually squeezed the lower
classes out of all participation in the government. The general body of
the commonalty everywhere, in France, in Germany, in England, tended to
disappear or to be replaced by a select group from the inner circle of
the guild. The lower bourgeoisie was shut out of the council at Nevers
in 1512, at Sens in 1530, at Rheims in 1595.
But the economic revolution implied in this change was of far
greater importance than the political. The _gens de métier_ became
a monopolist, a capitalist class, controlling the “hoards” of the
guilds as well as being the ruling class in local politics. The old
guild was transformed into a mercantile association, operated in favor
of a few rich families who were possessed of capital and regulated
wages and fixed the term of apprenticeship to their own advantage.
In order to secure cheap labor the masters increased the number of
apprentices, lengthened the time of service, raised the requirements
of the _chef-d’œuvre_, made membership in the guild increasingly
difficult, and reduced wages by employing raw, underpaid workmen in
competition with skilled labor. The result was that the distance
widened continually between the upper and lower working classes.[779]
The social democracy and honorable estate of guild life, as it had
been in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, passed away and was
replaced by a strife between labor and capital, between organized labor
and free labor, which brings the sixteenth century, remote as it is in
time, very near to us in certain of its economic conditions.
To be sure there were some things which partially neutralized this
antagonism, such as better facility in communication, the increase of
production, the activity of exchange, the invention of new industrial
processes, and the opening of new industries, notably printing and
silk manufacture.[780] But nothing compensated the workman for the
rise in the price of necessities of life due to the influx of gold and
silver from America, for his wages did not rise in proportion. In
consequence the cleavage grew more and more sharp. The result of this
tendency was that poor workmen, despairing of getting economic justice
from the guilds, took to working in their own quarters. So common was
this practice in the sixteenth century that a new word was coined to
define this unapprenticed class—- _chambrelons_. These plied their
trades in their own houses and sold the product of their handicraft
anywhere. As early as 1457, and again in 1467, the masters complain of
this practice.[781] It is easy to understand the disastrous influence
of this new form of industry upon guild labor, since the new class of
workmen was not subject either to the same money charges or to the same
restrictive regulations. It was “unfair” competition for the old order
of things which reposed upon the maintenance of an economic equilibrium
between demand and supply, between labor and capital, was upset by the
new tendencies.
To the toiling masses trodden down by the masters and economically
tyrannized over, the Reformation came as the first _organized_ movement
of discontent, and hosts of dissatisfied workmen throughout Germany
and France hastened to identify themselves with Protestantism, not for
religious reasons, but because the Reformation constituted exactly
that for which they were seeking—a protest. The situation was further
aggravated by the influx of foreign workmen, chiefly from Germany,
where this economic revolution was earlier and more fully developed
than elsewhere in Europe, in great industrial centers like Nürnberg,
and where small German workmen were more completely shut out than was
the case in France or England. These men—such as cobblers, shoemakers,
carpenters, wool-carders, and other simple artisans—wandered over the
country from one province to another, carrying the economic gospel
of free labor and the religion of Lutheranism with them. Naturally
they imbued their French fellow-workmen with their sentiments—and
to such an extent that for years, during the early course of the
civil wars, the Huguenots were commonly called “Lutherans.” Before
1560, the greater portion of the Protestant party was made up of
woolcombers, fullers, drapers, weavers, shoemakers, hosiers, dyers,
tailors, hatters, joiners, glaziers, bookbinders, locksmiths, cutlers,
pewterers, coopers, etc.[782] Even as late as 1572, when the Huguenot
movement had for twelve years been led by noblemen like the Châtillons
and the Rohans, the Venetian ambassador still characterized the
Huguenots as “a sect which consists for the most part of craftsmen, as
cobblers, tailors, and such ignorant people.”[783]
Coupled with this religious and economic revolution, went also a change
in the manners of society, which pervaded all classes—a change which
began in the reign of Francis I and was continued under Henry II. The
new internationalism of France, due to the Italian wars, was probably
the initial cause of this. Returned soldiers, laden with the pay of
booty of warfare, brought back into France the manners and customs
of Italy, which commingled with the manners and customs introduced by
wandering workmen from Germany and Switzerland.[784]
The revision of the statutes of the guilds was one of the minor
features of the reform programme of the political Huguenots in the
States-General of Orleans, and the _Cahier-général_ of the third
estate which was compiled from the local _cahiers_ presented by the
deputies shows traces of the interest of France at large in the issue.
Unfortunately these fuller local records are lost.[785] But this
revision only looked to a modernizing of the mediaeval language of
the _ordonnances_, which chiefly dated from the fourteenth century,
and did not contemplate an entire recasting of them, so as to make
them harmonize with the new industrial conditions. Only one man
in the assembly seems to have appreciated the real condition of
things. This was the chancellor L’Hôpital. Not content with the mild
reorganization of the guilds recommended by the third estate, on the
last day of the session, January 31, 1561, the chancellor drew up
the famous ordinance of Orleans.[786] The intent of this statute was
indirectly to restrain the enlarged economic tyranny of the guilds, to
lessen the burden of apprenticeship, and to establish freer laboring
conditions. This purpose the government aimed to attain by dissolving
the confraternities, for by striking at these it really struck the
guilds, since many of these associations were one and the same. No
distinction was made between associations whose character was religious
or charitable, and those composed of patrons and workingmen; all the
confraternities were grouped together and governmental supervision was
provided for. They were not legislated out of existence by the new
action, but reduced to a partial dissolution. Their accumulated hoards
of capital were ordered to be expended for the support of schools and
hospitals and similar institutions in the towns and villages where
these various guilds were, and only a limited amount of money was left
in their hands. The municipal officers, in co-operation with those of
the crown were made personally responsible for the execution of this
measure in every bailiwick. It is important to notice the significance
of this course. The government, in fact, was pursuing a policy of
partial secularization of the property of these confraternities for
the benefit of the people at large, and compelling distribution of the
great sums locked up in the hands of the guilds in much the same way
that the church had come to possess enormous sums in mortmain. This
legislation, if it had really been effective, would have destroyed the
guilds.
The guilds thus put upon the defensive, owing to the reforming policy
of the crown and the political Huguenots, sought to save themselves by
pleading that they were religious associations. By this adroit movement
they gained the support of the Catholic party. But the crown refused
to yield, and we find the _Confréries de métiers_ directly supervised
in letters-patent of February 5, 1562, and December 14, 1565. Coupled
with these measures, we find others forbidding banquets, festivals,
and like celebrations (edicts of December 11, 1566, and of February
4, 1567) which by this time had become centers of religious agitation
among the Catholics. But the government could not maintain its course.
The identification of the guilds and confraternities with the Catholic
party gave them great and unexpected support. Under the new order
of things they became the nuclei of local and provincial Catholic
leagues.[787] In other words, the labor party became identified with
the Huguenots, while the upper bourgeoisie, controlling the guilds,
adhered to the Catholic cause—at Rouen in 1560 the merchants actually
declared a lock-out against workmen who attended preachings[788]—and
became the nuclei of the provincial leagues, exactly as in France in
1793 every Jacobin club became an arm of the Terror government.
It was said at the time, and has often been asserted since, that
these local Catholic leagues were but protective associations in the
beginning and formed to repel Huguenot violence.[789] The Huguenots
practiced as violent methods as their religious opponents and their
offenses were as numerous; but with the exception of the Huguenot
association in Dauphiné, there is no early example of a Protestant
association similar to the leagues of the Catholics in the provinces.
The Protestant local organizations were not so highly developed, in
a military sense, as early as this, nor were they of the same form
as those of the Catholics. Montluc himself, than whom there is no
better judge, testifies that in the war in Guyenne in 1562 “they
showed themselves to be novices, and indeed they were guided by their
ministers.” The Protestants had a sort of triumvirate, it is true, in
the two Châtillon brothers, and the prince of Condé, but their work
only remotely partakes of the policy of the real Triumvirate; even
their appeal to Elizabeth did not contemplate such radical conduct as
the Triumvirate displayed.[790]
No Huguenot leader ever thought of subordinating the government of
France to a foreign ruler for the maintenance of the faith he believed
in,[791] as the Guises, Montmorency, and St. André did. Condé’s
declaration that the civil war was caused by the Triumvirate’s action
had much truth in it. The rules of the association which the Huguenots
formed at Orleans, on April 11, 1562, were as much a body of military
regulations for the discipline of the army as they were a political
compact, as a reading of the articles will prove.[792] There was little
of the politico-military character of the Catholic leagues about
it. It is not until after the Bayonne episode that we find a solid
federation of the Reformed churches beginning to form, and the first
test of the Protestant organization was made at the beginning of the
second civil war.[793] This is not the place, however, to dwell upon
its development. In due time the subject will be taken up.
The edict confirming the act of pacification (March 19, 1563) in its
sixth article forbade the formation of any leagues in the future,
and ordered the dissolution of those already in existence.[794] This
prohibition was a dead letter from the beginning. The government not
only was unable to prevent the formation of new leagues; it was even
unable to suppress those already in existence.[795] When the first
civil war ended, there were three well-organized Catholic leagues in
southern France, namely those of Provence, of Toulouse, and of Agen.
Catherine de Medici, who, for some months to come, continued to give
substantial manifestation of her desire for peace,[796] in announcing
the act of Amboise to Montluc, demanded the dissolution of these
associations. Instead of so doing, however, Candalle, Montluc’s chief
agent in Guyenne, continued his activities. On March 13, 1563, as has
been noticed, in defiance of the impending edict of pacification (which
was completed and only awaited promulgation) the Catholic seigneurs of
Guyenne, at Cadillac (near Bordeaux) entered into a league identical
in purpose and in form with those of Agen and Languedoc.[797] This
league, which is the germ of that which spread over Gascony, seems to
have been denounced to the government by Lagebaston, the president of
the parlement of Bordeaux, between whom and Montluc there was friction,
partly because of Montluc’s preference for Agen as a working capital
for the region, partly because of his notorious dislike of the lawyer
class, whose disposition to regard forms of law and vested right
interfered with Montluc’s high-handed and arbitrary management of
affairs.[798] This new league in such glaring violation of the edict,
called forth a sharp letter of rebuke from the queen mother to Montluc
on March 31. After alluding in a general way to “les maulx” due to the
existence of “les partialitez et les associations, qui se sont faictes”
she says:
J’ay esté advertye qu’il s’en est faicte une autre en la Guyenne dont
est chef Monsieur de Candalle, laquelle encores qu’elle ayt esté
faicte à bonne intention durant la guerre, si n’est-ce que, cessant
la dicte guerre et se faisant la paix, elle n’est plus nécessaire
et ne la peult ung roy trouver bonne, ny que ceulx qui veullent
estre estimez obéyssans ne peuvent soustenir sans encourir le mesme
cryme de rebellion dont ilz ont accusé leurs adversaires. Et pour
ceste cause, et que le Roy monsieur mon filz n’est pas délibéré d’en
souffrir plus aucun, de quelque costé qu’elle procedde ny permectre
plus à ses subjectz, de quelque religion qu’ilz soient, d’avoir
autre association qu’avec luy et selon son obéyssance, il fault,
Monsieur de Monluc, que, pour le bien de son service, comme il le
vous commande expressément par ses lettres, que vous, qui estes son
lieutenant-général par delà, faciez rompre celle qui s’est faicte
sans permectre qu’ilz ayent aucune force, puissance ou authorité que
celle que vous leur baillerez, ny aucune volunté que d’obéyr à ce que
par vous, pour le bien du service du Roy monsieur mon filz, leur sera
commandé; pour lequel effect j’en scriptz, comme faict le Roy monsieur
mon filz, une lectre audit s^[r] de Candalle et à tous ceulx qui y sont
comprins, comme nous en avons esté bien amplement advertiz.[799]
Until the ambition of the Guises created an opposition to them among
the old-line nobility, and so identified the Huguenot movement with
the interests of the aristocracy,[800] the French Reformation found
its chief support among the lower bourgeois class in the towns. The
proportion naturally varied from place to place. Lyons, partly from
its proximity to Geneva, but more because of its strong commercial
position and its great manufacturing interests, among which the silk
industry was of most importance, was the greatest Huguenot city
in France.[801] Where we find Protestantism prevailing in feudal
districts, it is largely to be ascribed to the influence of Protestant
gentleman-farmers, often retired bourgeois, who purchased the county
estates of the older nobility who had been bankrupted by the wars in
Italy and Flanders, or else preferred to live at court. The strongholds
of French Protestantism were the river towns, on the highways of trade,
or sea-ports like Rouen and La Rochelle. Dauphiné, which fattened on
the commerce out of Italy through the Alpine passes, and Provence which
bordered the Mediterranean, both of which “cleared” through Lyons;
Lower Poitou, where La Rochelle was, and Normandy on the Channel were
the chief Protestant provinces of France. Normandy was probably the
most Protestant province of all, for here Calvinism not only obtained
in the ports and “good” towns, but in the country areas as well.[802]
But there are evidences of the penetration of Protestantism into the
country districts elsewhere as well—in Orléannais, Nivernais, Blésois,
the diocese of Nîmes and even in isolated parts of Champagne and
Gascony.[803] In general, however, the French peasantry were strongly
Catholic.
The reason for this is, first, a social one: while the revolution of
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was ruinous for the artisan,
it was profitable to the peasant. The rent paid to the landlord,
immutably fixed in the twelfth or thirteenth century, represented
under the new values of money a very light burden, while the fall
in the price of silver considerably raised the nominal worth of
the products of the soil, when the villein sold them. The price of
land was falling rapidly at the very time when the French gentry,
ceasing to be an aristocracy of gentlemen-farmers and becoming a
court-nobility, were compelled to sell their estates to meet their
expenses and, as was said, to put their mills and meadows on their
shoulders. When a lord wished to sell at any price a part of his
estates, there was always, in the parish, a countryman who had been,
as one may say, saving money for centuries, and who, realizing at last
the dream of bygone generations, bought land. Thus did the French
villein become a landowner. The reign of Louis XII and the beginning
of that of Francis I was for the French peasants an epoch of real
prosperity; his situation presented a striking contrast with that of
the German peasant who, at the same date, was in danger of relapsing
into bondage. We may easily understand why there was not in France, as
in Germany, a peasants’ revolution both social and religious.[804]
But there are other reasons for the religious growth of the Huguenot
cause among the people not so hard to find. Their ministers preached
in the French language and avoided the use of Latin, which tended
to mystery and obscurity; after sermons the service was continued
with prayer and the singing of psalms in French rhyme, with vocal
and instrumental music in which the congregation joined. In their
church polity, the Huguenots had carried changes farther than had the
Reformation elsewhere in Europe. In Germany and England the Reformation
still adhered to many of the institutions of the mediaeval church,
retaining the episcopate and inferior clergy, as deacons, archdeacons,
canons, curates, together with vestures, canonical habits, and the use
of ornaments.[805]
No reliable estimate can be made of the proportion between Catholics
and Huguenots in the sixteenth century. A remonstrance of 1562 to the
Pope declared that one-fourth of France was separate from the communion
of Rome.[806] The Venetian ambassador thought “hardly a third part of
the people heretical” in 1567.[807] The _échevins_ of Amiens declared
three-quarters of the inhabitants of Amiens were Protestant in the
same year.[808] Charles IX in a remonstrance to Pius IV asserted
that a fourth part of France was Protestant.[809] Montluc, no mean
observer, estimated that one-tenth of the population of Guyenne was
Protestant.[810] If this proportion be applied to France at large,
the Huguenots would have numbered something like 1,600,000. Beza,
who presided over the synod of La Rochelle in 1571, claimed that the
Huguenots had 2,150 congregations, some of them very large, as in the
case of the church of Orleans, which was said to have 7,000 members.
At the time of the Colloquy of Poissy, Normandy was said to have 305
pastors, Provence 60.[811] But the number of Huguenots in Normandy,
Provence, or the Orléannais was exceptionally large. The average
congregation must have been small. If we assume that the population
of France was sixteen millions[812] and that one-tenth of the people
were Calvinist, we would have a total of 1,600,000 Protestants for
all France, which would give an average of about 750 members to each
congregation on the basis of Beza’s statement as to the number of the
Huguenot churches. This is certainly much too high a figure. Personally
I believe the average was less than half of this. If the congregation
averaged 400 members each, on Beza’s calculation there would have
been 860,000 Huguenots in France. A Venetian source of the year 1562
sets the number at 600,000.[813] This may be too low, but all things
considered, I believe it not far from the truth. The total Protestant
population of France I do not believe to have exceeded three-quarters
of a million before 1572, and after that date it is often difficult to
distinguish between Huguenots and Politiques.
Such was the state of things when the first civil war came to an end.