CHAPTER FIVE

THE ROAD TO : THE GOD OF ARMIES WILL SUSTAIN HIS SO JUST AND GOOD CAUSE': JEANNE MILITANT, 1568

a. Navane, 24 March 1568

On 23 March 1568, the second war was officially declared ended by the Peace of Longjumeau. The next day, Charles de Luxe and six other Catholic barons of Jeanne's realm signed and published a man• ifesto called, 'Manifeste des Gentilhommes de la Basse Navarre ... contre l'establissement de la religion prétendue réformée faict par la Reine de Navarre.'1 The barons' manifesto claimed - as stated by Jeanne in her Mémoires - that Queen Jeanne, by her Ordonnances of July 1566, intended to carry out the extermination of the Roman Catholic reli• gion in her realm. At the height of the violence, when the de Luxe party had taken prisoner Jeanne's governor of Navarre, Queen Jeanne, with young Henry and Catherine, took refuge in her well- prepared and virtually impregnable fortress of Navarrenx. She thus escaped (so the story goes) a Jesuit plot whereby a Spanish force would enter Beam via Eaux-Chaudes, arrest Jeanne and the chil• dren, and bring them back to face the Inquisition in Spain, after which Spain would have taken over Basse Navarre and Beam.2 Although the existence of the 'Spanish plot' was without proof, the situation in Beam, Navarre, and had become so unstable that it was seen as a threat to royal France. On 2 June 1568, the young King Charles IX issued orders to Monluc, requiring him to form armed gar• risons of 'good Catholic men of quality' in towns throughout Guyenne south of the Garonne, at Bigorre, Rivière-Basse, Nébousan, Pardiac, Comminges, Astarac, Magnoac, Marsan, Tursan, and Gabaudan; but especially at Bordeaux, where the armed force was to include boats to

'Jeanne d'Albret, Mémoires, pp.50, 50 n.1, 149-164. 2 Aubigné, Universelle, vol.2, year 1568, pp.294-5. The incident and the 'plot' are also related by Bordenave, Monluc, Olhagaray, and De Thou. THE ROAD TO LA ROCHELLE 173

patrol the Gironde and the rivers Garonne and Dordogne, be overseen during Monluc's absences, and be paid for by the 'richest and easiest' of the town.3 Ostensibly, these garrisons were to maintain the Edict of Pacification, allow those of the 'Religion Prétendue Réformée' to return to the towns from which they had been expelled, and keep them peace• ful. In reality, it could be conjectured, their purpose would have been to prevent any action by Jeanne and her Reformed followers against the Catholic resurgents in Beam and Navarre, while at the same time keep• ing a close watch on Spanish opportunistic ambitions in the area. A Spanish dispatch of this time reports Jeanne ('La Duquesa de Vando- ma') as having raised an army of three thousand Gascons to oppose the rebel forces of de Luxe, and describes the menacing situation posed by the Huguenot leaders in and Saintonge.4

The previous chapter described the process by which, from her open conversion to the Reformed religion in 1560 until the end of the sec• ond War of Religion of 1567, Queen Jeanne had become an active leader in the Huguenot political cause, and had established the Reformed churches as the state religion of her realm. Now, within the single year 1568, Jeanne's political activism would evolve into direct military action, and her assumption of co-leadership in open war in wider Guyenne. It was to be a rapid evolution through the events of her daring escape from Nérac and her 'heroic march'5 to La Rochelle, particularly as displayed, declared and analysed in three of her four most important written works: the eighth, and for this book the most significant (assuming it is genuine - and, to a degree, even if it is not), of her letters to the viscount of Gourdon (Nérac, 1 Septem• ber 1568); her ^tres from Bergerac (16 September 1568) and La Rochelle (15 October 1568); and her Mémoires, originally titled Ample déclaration sur la junction de ses armes à celles des Réformés en 1568. (The fourth of her major works would be the Ordonnances ecclésiastiques, Pau, 26 November 1571, to be introduced in chapter seven.)6

3 2 June 1568, Charles IX to Monluc, in Salefranque, Histoire, vol.XLV, pp.72-76. 4 Simancas MS K. 1511, no.38, Alava to Alba, Paris, 23 June 1568, transcribed and published in Archivo documental Espanol, vol. 14, Negociaciones con Francia, 21 October 1567-30 June 1568, Madrid, Real Academia de la Historia, 1959, pp.472-474. 5 The term 'la marche héroïque' was used by Bernard Nabonne to describe Jeanne's escape, in his biography Jeanne d'Albret, Reine des , Paris, Lib. Hachette, 1945. 6 Full bibliographical details on these works are given where they are cited and analysed, in this chapter for the first three, and in chapter seven for the fourth.