1

The Religion of king and kingdom in 16th century France

In early 1560, the French monarchy suddenly entered a long period of crisis and diminished authority, of which an early casualty was the policy of repressing heresy that it had pursued with increasing intensity during the previous twenty years. It now offered an amnesty to its Protestants, thereby provisionally decriminalising heresy. Yet at that juncture – and indeed for many years thereafter – few people on either side of the religious divide could imagine that there would be no return during their lifetime to the pre-1560 principle of ‘one faith, one king, one law’.1 In taking this step, the monarchy moved into unfamiliar territory, and found itself without a road-map or a ready-made script for action. The precedents – not always successful – for resolving religious conflict by peaceful means elsewhere in contemporary Europe, especially in the neighbouring Empire and Switzerland were not, as France’s élites well knew, promising, and if anything they suggested that even face-to-face discussion served mainly to further harden existing convictions among the rival confessions. Above all, these experiences simply did not ‘fit’ the unified political geography of western Europe’s largest monarchy, which was quite unlike the mostly microscopic Swiss-German neighbours in question. Still seeing itself as God’s elect-nation, France had no prior experience at all of the inter-confessional colloquies of its eastern neighbours, so when holding discussions with its own Protestants was finally proposed in 1560-1, conservatives fiercely – and not surprisingly – objected to it as tantamount to admitting that heretics were equals with something potentially acceptable to say. Convening either an Estates-General, an assembly of notables, or a national council of the gallican church now seemed the best – and perhaps the only – way to defuse the increasingly dangerous hostilities between Catholics and Protestants. Not for the last time in modern history, the solution of simply suspending repression was quickly overtaken by events: it soon created a void that encouraged unilateral action by rival groups across France ready to mete out their own kind of summary justice, now that the ‘normal’ forms of justice in relation to religious dissent had been discontinued. How had things come to such a pass, which saw France experiencing religious upheaval and its

1 William Monter, Judging the French Reformation (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), 212. 2 consequences almost a full generation later than most of northern and central Europe? A brief backward look at the major developments since the 1520s and 1530s is essential if we are to understand how this came to be. I As is well known, the impact of the Lutheran reformation on France had been relatively small, especially when it is remembered that the term ‘Lutheran’ was attached to many of those seeking religious reform of an Erasmian-humanist kind within the existing church. Where the Sorbonne and the parlements, especially those of Paris or Toulouse, saw heretics to be prosecuted and punished, others saw eager, non-sectarian evangelicals who presented no real danger. François I and many of the political and even ecclesiastical elite held the second view, until a first change of heart occurred in the mid-1530s. Even after that shift, the king continued to believe that scholars and nobles were, for possibly different reasons, largely immune to the attractions of heresy, which he saw as appealing only to the lower ‘mechanical sorts’ within society. His successor, Henri II, held broadly the same views, at least in respect of the nobility. Such a persistent misconception – alongside several others – proved to be a major blind spot when the crown found itself having to deal with serious religious dissent in the 1540s and 1550s. France’s un-readiness in the face of the challenges posed by sixteenth-century religious dissidence may seem surprising at first, especially when it is realised how many medieval ‘heresies’ had either originated or gained adherents there. Both intellectually and organisationally, the ‘persecuting society’, which was arguably the outcome of these earlier experiences, owed a great deal to French responses to them; the Inquisition, after all, first saw the light of day during the Albigensian crisis in southern France. But several centuries later, historical memory – or rather, forgetting – had virtually blanked out such precedents and had given way to the myth of a nation of indefectible Catholic believers which had always triumphed over ‘heresy’. The Inquisition still notionally existed, especially in southern France, though only in its medieval form of a local official (usually a Dominican friar) within each diocese or church province. In reality, the inquisitors’ powers had shrunk so considerably over time that the office seemed largely redundant by 1520. France had not been affected by Europe’s late-medieval religious wars that preceded its own wars of religion, unless we include Joan of Arc’s crusade to rid France 3 of English occupation as such a war2. When heresy did erupt again on a large scale in the 1550s and 1560s, the first parallels drawn by Catholics were between France’s Protestants and the Albigensians, with the intention of shaming the crown into dealing with them as resolutely as Saint Louis had done in his time; but as with so many historical comparisons of its type, it failed adequately to measure the novelty of the present situation3. France’s sense of enjoying God’s special protection against the contamination of heresy did not preclude taking positive action of several kinds that, for a few decades at least, had seemed more than enough to sustain the true religion. Thus, the Paris theology faculty vigorously condemned Luther’s teachings as early as 1521, and the parlements (those of Paris and Toulouse, at least) showed their vigilance by arresting and executing individual dissidents either side of 1530. In addition, the rash of provincial church councils held in 1528 (duly followed by diocesan synods) and the continuing efforts by the Paris theology faculty, which drew up a set of twenty-six articles of faith (1543) and Europe’s first index of prohibited books (1544), signalled that firm action was being taken well before the Council of Trent began its deliberations in 1545. The French church’s leaders, its bishops, scarcely saw things any differently, contenting themselves with legislating in a way that often resembled the contemporary campaigns by the crown to codify the customary laws and secular legislation. It would fall to later generations of church leaders to discover – or rediscover – the need for a much wider range of pastoral- administrative activities to reinvigorate Catholicism4. Meanwhile, the measures just cited enabled both church and monarchy to believe that France, having done what was required of her, had no urgent need of a general council, especially one dominated by the pope or the emperor, to heal the wider church’s ills. Gallican solutions seemed more than adequate in dealing with gallican problems, not least because after the affair of the Placards (1534), which led François I to recognise the dangers of religious dissent, the

2 See Norman Housley, Religious Warfare in Europe, 1400-1536 (Oxford, 2002). 3 Luc Racaut, ‘The Polemical use of the Albigensian crusade during the French wars of religion’, French History, 13 (1999), 261-279. 4 J Michael Hayden and Malcolm Greenshields, 600 Years of Reform. Bishops and the French church 1190-1789 (Montreal, 2005), ch 3. 4 monarchy seemed determined to prosecute those attacking the true religion5. A series of royal decrees from 1539 to 1559 defined and amplified the measures to be taken for this purpose and the penalties for infringing them. Royal law-courts rather than ecclesiastical courts were entrusted with enforcing these increasingly draconian provisions, something that was considerably facilitated by focusing on the seditious dimensions of heresy – ‘the public scandal, popular commotion, sedition or other crimes which involve public offence’, as the Edict of Châteaubriand put it in 1551. France may have been the last major country of northern Europe officially to move the crime of heresy to its secular courts, but the move, and the form that it took, caused relatively little surprise when it did occur6. This meant that France’s approach to dealing with religious dissent differed significantly from Italy and Spain, whose relatively recent Inquisitions were much better equipped to deal with religious dissent as a religious rather than a political issue. Precisely because they were ecclesiastical courts enjoying powerful royal support, these Inquisitions could probe people’s consciences and offer the prospect of pardon and ‘grace’ to the repentant. It is, therefore, worth noting that when, in 1551, Pope Julius III formally denied lay magistrates in Italy the right to deal with cases of heresy, France had already moved in a diametrically opposite direction, effectively ‘laicising’ the handling of such cases7. The idea of a Spanish-style Suprema with jurisdiction over everyone, high and low, secular and clerical, was already quite unacceptable in France by the 1550s and it would remain so, even when the Catholic League was in the ascendant in the late 1580s8. When responsibility for heresy cases was indeed returned to the church courts in 1560, it did not signify that France was about to imitate its neighbours. On the contrary, it was a clear signal that the monarchy was giving up, for the time being at least, on pursuing heretics; the shift was emphatically neither reinforcement nor vindication of ecclesiastical jurisdiction within France.

5 Alain Tallon, La France et le concile de Trente, for the most exhaustive study of this question: see esp part 2, chs 1-3 for the shifts in attitude towards Trent. 6 Monter, Judging the French Reformation, 85. 7 See Elena Brambilla, Alle origini dello Sant’Uffizio. Penitenza, confessione e giustizia spirituale dal medioevo al xvi secolo (Bologna, 2000), ch 15, for a comparative discussion of the laicisation of heresy cases in France. 8 Alain Tallon, ‘Inquisition romaine et monarchie française au xvie siècle’, in Gabriel Audisio, ed., Inquisition et pouvoir (Aix-en-Provence, 2004), 311-24. 5

The successive legislative measures of the 1550s both extended and sharpened the earlier provisions against heresy, but the growing severity of the repressive legislation seems to have been illusory. The machinery employed to implement it became gradually less effective – a salutary reminder to historians not to take even the most punitive royal declarations at face value. William Monter’s figures for the actual punishment of heresy by the French royal courts seem incontrovertible, even when allowing, as he does, for the limitations of the archival record. Alongside the 450 individuals executed for heresy before 1560, there were at least two or three times as many who were condemned to perform the less feared amende honourable – a shaming ritual of the abjuration of heresy, usually performed by the condemned in their local church before the assembled fellow- parishioners – and who were then either sent to the galleys or banished from where they lived for a number of years9. Proportionately low by (demographic) comparison with other European countries, what these figures suggest is that during the 1550s, the agents of repression (which had briefly included the Paris parlement’s notorious ‘burning chamber’) proved increasingly incapable of deterring growing numbers of French people from adopting the new ‘Genevan’ faith or preventing large quantities of banned books from flooding into France from Geneva and elsewhere. There are many possible reasons for this mismatch of ‘challenge and response’. Some magistrates (and their socio- professional milieu) were either ‘adepts’ of the new creed, or were at least increasingly disenchanted with the policy of repression itself10. Whether the gallican-inspired exclusion of the church courts and clergy from the judicial riposte to Calvinism weakened the church’s response to heresy before 1560 is harder to say, if only because so many of the ‘heretics’ themselves were themselves members of the clergy who took the lead in preaching the new gospel. But it is quite possible that this exclusion made it easier, from the 1560s and especially the 1570s onwards, for the more active elements of the Catholic clergy to join battle with their Calvinist adversaries on different conditions of engagement. By then they had learned to use preaching and pamphleteering rather than the law-courts as their main weapons of combat against the threat of Protestantism,

9 Monter, Judging, 54. Most of executions occurred before Henri II’s reign which seems to have been less ‘bloody’ than is usually imagined. 10 William Monter, ‘France: the failure of repression 1520-1563’, in Philip Benedict et al, eds, La Réforme en France et en Italie (Rome 2007), 465-79. 6 in which they proved to be more effective than their counterparts in the Netherlands and elsewhere around Europe11. Whatever the reasons, as the 1550s advanced, the numbers of those attending Calvinist services and joining the new assemblies grew exponentially. For the first time, organised churches began to take shape in more or less clandestine fashion across the country, a significant change from the largely invertebrate Lutheran-evangelical ‘circles’ of the 1520s and 1530s. They gained far greater organisational cohesion from the fact that they were now overwhelmingly Genevan-Calvinist in inspiration12. Where religious dissent took on such dimensions, ‘sedition’ on a correspondingly growing scale was likely, but how could it be contained? The crown showed little sign of changing its methods and Henri II even threatened in 1559 that rivers of ‘Lutheran’ blood would run in France as soon as he had disengaged from his foreign entanglements! But the promised blow never fell. Coming only weeks after he had issued the most draconian of all French edicts (that of Écouen) against heresy, his sudden death by accident in mid-1559 triggered a political crisis of major proportions and one with unforeseeable implications for the campaign against religious heterodoxy. That campaign was not effectively abandoned until early 1560, when the distinction between heresy and sedition – the religious and the political – was reinstated. As we have seen, heresy was now left to the church courts to deal with, but in reality it signalled little more than that the machinery of repression had come to a standstill13.

II

It has often been pointed out that regimes are at their most vulnerable when, having long resisted calls for reform or change, they finally embark on it. The experience of France during the years (1559-1562) immediately preceding the first of the wars of religion is a prime example of this phenomenon. What seems like a characteristic torrent of events and belated efforts at negotiation and compromise followed each other so breathlessly

11 Judith Pollmann, ‘Countering the reformation in France and the Netherlands: clerical leadership and catholic violence 1560-1585’, Past and Present, 190 (2006), 83-120. 12 Denis Crouzet, La Génèse de la réforme en France 1520-1562 (Paris, 1996), ch 4. 13 Studies of these critical years are numerous, beginning with the magnum opus of Lucien Romier, Les Origines politiques des guerres de religion, 2 vols (Paris, 1913). For two recent mises au point, see Crouzet, Génèse de la réforme française and Olivia Carpi, Les Guerres de religion 1559-1598. Un conflit franco-français (Paris, 2012), part 1, esp chs 4-5. 7 that it is not clear that anyone could control the country’s political and religious trajectory during these pivotal years which were to set the stage for so many later developments. Battered by the problems arising from military defeat, financial default and two royal successions in as many years (1559-60), the monarchy was also damaged by the manifest failure of its previous ‘thorough’ policy of religious repression. By the early 1560s, that policy only seemed to have the opposite of the desired effect, as exemplified by the ever- growing attraction of the new churches to high-ranking nobles and town-dwellers. Political struggles for control of the monarchy after Henri II’s death pitted the leading aristocratic factions against each other, but such ‘normal’ political competition was now overlaid and complicated by the religious choices made by high-ranking individuals and families, who were sometimes imitated by their clients and ‘friends’ far beyond the court14. Yet the situation in these years (1559-1563) was far too fluid for religious allegiances to be written in stone; some ‘conversions’ were short-lived because, uncertain of what joining the new churches really meant, many people, both high and low, hesitated or even reverted after a while to the old church. As Blaise de Monluc aptly wrote, ‘there was no son of a good mother who was not tempted to taste the new fruit’15. Even the much criticised ultra-Catholic Guises were far less ‘ultra’ at this point than they would subsequently become. However, what made them stand out, then and later, was that they never showed any signs either of abandoning the old church or of fragmenting into different confessional branches like their main aristocratic rivals16. Changing tack on how to deal with questions of religion after years of repression and in a context of severely diminished authority inevitably spelt serious risks for the crown. The measures taken to ‘reform’ the established church in previous decades now seemed woefully inadequate, while the long-suspended Council of Trent, which had been largely ignored in France, seemed to promise little better. Not surprisingly, then, when the Estates-General met at Orleans and Poissy in December 1560 and June 1561 respectively, the deputies – many of whom were Protestants – brought with them some quite radical

14 For a concise account, see Didier Boisson and Hugues Daussy, Les Protestants dans la France moderne (Paris, 2006), chs 2-3. 15 Quoted in Arlette Jouanna, La Saint-Barthélemy (Paris, 2007), 301. 16 See the revisionist study by Stuart Carroll, Martyrs and murderers. The Guise family and the making of Europe (Oxford, 2009). 8 ideas for an overhaul of the existing church17. Had merely the proposals made for selling off its property and creating a quasi-salaried clergy been adopted, they would have led to structural and financial changes not to be witnessed anywhere in Catholic Europe until the Revolution of 1789. But these and numerous other suggestions were much too new- fangled for the majority of the deputies, and the senior clergy at the Estates-General and at court found a way of effectively thwarting them by offering to help with paying off the crown’s debt-mountain. Out of these wholly fortuitous but dangerous circumstances were born the regular assemblies of clergy which, in subsequent centuries, did so much to define the practical terms of church-state relations in France18. By 1560-2 the agenda for religious reform was inherently difficult to control, and talk of a national council only emboldened those with new ideas. Over several weeks in September-October 1561 an inter-confessional colloquy rather than the previously touted national council was held at Poissy near Paris, precisely so that Theodore Beza, Calvin’s future successor at Geneva, and other Calvinists invited by Catherine de Medici, the regent, could attend it; as envisaged at this juncture, a gallican national council would have been less ‘inclusive’ a forum than this German-style colloquy. But when leading Catholic figures like the Cardinal of Lorraine and the moyenneurs – literally, those holding or seeking the middle ground – gambled on using the thirty-year old Lutheran confession of Augsburg as a basis for negotiation and religious compromise within the framework of gallican Catholicism, the Calvinists present flatly rejected the formula. In reply, they emphasised the radical nature of the true gospel and called on the monarchy to support a godly, root-and-branch reform of the church along Genevan lines. Despite the obvious chasm between the two sides, it is quite clear that nobody at Poissy envisaged more than one church on French soil19. Lorraine’s via media option was also opposed by

17 Tallon, La France et Trente, 283-315. See also Noël Valois, ‘Les États de Pontoise (août 1561)’, Revue d’Histoire de l’Église de France 29 (1943), 237-56. 18 See below, ch 6, for the origins of the assemblies. The political and financial context of the Poissy contract of 1561 is analysed in Claude Michaud, L’Église et l’argent sous l’ancien régime (Paris, 1991). 19 In addition to Tallon, La France et Trente, 301-15, see Donald Nugent, Ecumenism in the age of Reformation: the colloquy of Poissy (Cambride, Mass., 1974), which is the only full-scale study. See the brief, more recent summaries in Le Roux, Le Roi, la cour, l’état, ch 7; Carpi, Guerres de religion, ch 8, esp 208-12; Boisson and Daussy, Les Protestants, 114-19. The talks foundered on the issue which had defeated every assembly, council or colloquy since the diet of Augsburg in 1530 – the nature of the Eucharist. Even a smaller meeting of the leading figures from both sides at Poissy made little progress, and the full colloquy disowned their proposals when they were put to it for its acceptance. 9 many within French Catholicism, including leading participants in the colloquy. Critically, its failure weakened not only him but above all the search for a negotiated compromise of a religious kind20. Within a year, Lorraine and others like him would finally come round to seeing the much-disparaged but newly re-convened Council of Trent as the best hope of a reinvigorated gallican church. In their minds, it was another means towards the same end – the preservation of the one, true church21. Despite all the efforts made at Poissy to find common ground and avoid issues of fundamental disagreement, the hard edges of irreconcilable difference, doctrinal and practical, lurked around every corner. One of the many spheres of Calvinist thought likely to alienate the monarchy was its conception of the church – its ecclesiology. The Calvinist conception of the church as essentially non-hierarchical, self-governing and anti-ritualistic contained a barely concealed political sub-text, though it would have probably seemed even more subversive had it adopted Jean Morély’s controversial proposal, first made in 1562, to replace the Genevan formula of individual local churches governed by an oligarchy of elders and pastors with a form of church democracy. In addition, Calvinist thinking at this juncture also made scant provision for rulers dominating the church and religious issues; the drama of salvation itself seemed so far beyond the reach of political arrangements that political power was relegated to a secondary sphere. Despite these tenets and their corrosive implications for French ideas of monarchy, the Calvinists tried hard to present themselves as the ultimate gallicans, who would finally liberate France from the clutches of the papacy. But this message fell on truly deaf ears, even at a time when the French monarchy and church were often exasperated with the papacy22. At this juncture, however, France’s Calvinists still felt confident that God and time were on their side and that, despite the failure of negotiation, their reformation would soon triumph across France. This expectation clearly entailed the mise en place of Calvinist churches nationwide which would replace outright the old church and its

20 Carroll, Martyrs and murderers, ch 5. See also Mario Turchetti, Concordia o tolleranza? François Bauduin (1520-1573) e i ‘moyenneurs’ (Geneva, 1984). 21 Tallon, France et le Concile de Trente, ch. 10, ‘guerre civile et concile’. 22 Philip Benedict, ‘The Dynamics of Protestant militancy 1555-63’, in Benedict et al, eds, Reformation, revolt and civil war in France and the Netherlands 1555-1585 (Amsterdam, 1999), 39-40; Denis Crouzet, ‘Calvinism and the uses of the political and the religious (France, ca 1560-1572)’, in ibid, 99-115. 10 religious practices. By 1562 they may have accounted for one-tenth of France’s population, and there was still no sign of the rise in numbers abating. That a considerable proportion of their adherents were of noble, or at least ‘notable’, social status was much more significant than their overall numbers. Having also worked hard to produce a French confession of faith and a basic organisational structure of Genevan inspiration capable of giving their churches real coherence, they understandably remained as firmly opposed to the prospect of mutual toleration as the old church did. And wherever they took power locally in these years, as in the Dauphiné or parts of Languedoc, they engaged in ‘thorough’ reformation which involved exiling the existing clergy, dismantling the old church, and outlawing non-Calvinist forms of religious practice. Beza’s tart repudiation around this time of liberty of conscience as ‘a thoroughly diabolical dogma’ left no room for the possibility of liberty of worship or religious practices generally23. It was only later, when their hopes of religious victory had been blunted, that France’s Calvinists would have to rethink that position. When the decriminalisation of heresy and subsequent attempts at negotiated religious compromise failed, the levels of disorder and violence involving local confrontations between Catholics and Protestants began to rise in the early 1560s. Although the worst of the ‘rites of violence’ was yet to come, the need to devise some kind of political fix, however provisional in nature and duration, became increasingly urgent. The numerous assemblies of the years 1560-2 acted, in effect, as sounding boards for such efforts, during which the new chancellor, Michel de l’Hôpital, supported by the Queen Regent, Catherine de Medici, best articulated the crown’s shifting approach to dealing with religious conflict. At the outset, like virtually everyone of his age, l’Hôpital could see no virtue at all in religious plurality, but he gradually changed his mind and accepted the need for some form of temporary confessional co-existence. While deploring the dangers of two religions within one kingdom, he began to argue that preserving the public peace might require departing from historic principles and allowing provisional co-existence until such time as a council, whether general or national, could resolve the religious

23 As quoted by William J Stankiewicz, Politics and Religion in Seventeenth-Century France (Los Angeles, 1960), 17-18. 11 divisions of France24. The edict of Saint-Germain, published in January 1562, was the first of many royal edicts to deal with the political ramifications of religious division in a manner that contrasted sharply with those of the 1540s and 1550s. It only allowed a severely limited form of freedom of worship to France’s Protestants, and its main clauses retained much of the previous obsession with religious difference serving as a cloak for seditious activities. The struggle to come to terms with the wider consequences of religious division is clearly evident throughout the entire document, even in its more innocuous-looking clauses, one of which may be quoted here: ‘those of the new religion shall be required to observe our politic laws, even those which are received in our Catholic church concerning feast-days and non-working days, and those concerning marriage and the degrees of consanguinity and affinity, in order to avoid the disputes and lawsuits which might arise as a result, and which would lead to the ruin of most of the leading families of our kingdom and to the dissolution of the ties of friendship which are created by marriages and alliances among our subjects’25. This ‘naive’ evocation of what we might call the ‘society-religion compact’ manages to convey the scale of the moral disarray of France’s Catholics, both in 1562 and later, in the face of a development whose logic remained genuinely incomprehensible to most of them – namely, the Calvinists’ determination to withdraw from the body of believers that was the church of their ancestors. Meanwhile, in February 1562, with the parlements stubbornly resisting the registration of legislation which broke with the ‘one faith, one king, one law’ trilogy, the crown felt compelled to issue a brief but revealing ‘interpretative declaration’ concerning the new Edict. It insisted that it did not ‘intend to approve two religions in our kingdom, but rather one only, which is that of our Holy Church, in which the kings our predecessors have ever lived’26.

24 See the brief summary Carpi, Guerres de religion, 212-16. Among the more comprehensive studies of L’Hôpital, see Denis Crouzet, Le Malheur et la sagesse. Michel de l’Hôpital, chancelier de France (Seyssel, 1998) and Loris Pétris, La Plume et la tribune. Michel de l’Hôpital et ses discours (1559-1562) (Geneva, 2002). 25 For the most accurate text of the 1562 edict see ‘L'édit de Nantes et ses antécédents (1562-1598)’, edited by Bernard Barbiche et al at: http://elec.enc.sorbonne.fr/editsdepacification/edit1. The quotation is from article 13. Italics here are mine. 26 Quoted in David Potter, ed., The French wars of religion, selected documents (Houndmills, Basingstoke, 1997), 33. 12

In fact, this attempted back-track, which contradicted some of L’Hôpital’s claims, had no practical impact, since within less than a month after its publication the first of the eight wars of religion erupted, and a pattern was soon set that would be repeated for a whole generation. We need not enter the bewildering detail of these successive conflicts here. Suffice it to say that each successive war would begin, at least in part, as a (hostile) response from one party to the terms of the most recently negotiated settlement, framed as an edict of pacification; while the conclusion of each subsequent war would be accompanied by a new edict whose terms were dictated by calculations based on the politico-military balance of the moment. Because successive arrangements for restoring civil peace were triggered by short-term events, rather than on any long-term ambition among the parties involved to disentangle politics and religion, we should not be surprised to find at times substantial differences of scope and tone in the edicts where questions of liberty of conscience and worship were concerned; they demonstrated little consistency, let alone a visible developing trend, precisely because they could not possibly satisfy equally the rival confessions whose aspirations were so diametrically opposed to each other27. Judged purely in terms of royal legislation, which in turn was determined in large part by negotiation, France experienced both expanding and contracting degrees of religious co-existence from 1562 to 1585, while the years from 1585 to 1598 were, in law at least, ones of religious exclusivism that coincided with the arrival of the Catholic League. Within these two broad cycles, there was further variation again, so that, for example, we find the ‘generous’ (to France’s Protestants) edicts of 1562 or 1576 being followed in relatively quick succession by others which sought to curtail these concessions in order to register – but also to restrain – the powerful Catholic backlash against them. Of course, it need hardly be said that such periodisation, based purely on the contents of royal legislation, is woefully inadequate as a guide to the actual experience of the provinces and localities. Philip Benedict has, however, suggested that cessations of Protestant worship did indeed occur in many places when it was banned by law during the 1560s

27 See the analysis of the successive edicts in N M Sutherland, The Huguenot struggle for recognition (New-Haven-London, 1980), and the individual summaries in the appendix, ‘the edicts of religion 1525- 1598’. 13 and early 1570s, but less so during the reign of Henri III (1574-89)28. That said, local experience ranged all the way from vicious enmities to a willingness to find workable mechanisms for communal co-existence, exemplified in some places by the ‘pacts of friendship’ which operated largely according to their own local logic29. It is quite probable that the ‘rites of violence’ of the 1560s and early 1570s owed as much in practice to local pre-histories as they did to some universal or generic set of attitudes, Catholic or Protestant, towards the use of violence against religious enemies30. As a result, the royal commissioners despatched to the provinces to implement the successive and often mutually inconsistent terms of pacification – which the local parlements and law-courts were either unwilling to do, or were debarred from doing – frequently found themselves powerless to enforce the king’s will; they often had to engage in extensive local diplomacy to achieve even modest results which frequently did not work for very long anyway31. It is impossible to convey how much was altered in such attempts at translating the national into the local, but not hard to imagine the confused patchwork that actually resulted from the process. Implementing legislation arising from confessional division across the entire realm was by far the biggest test of the sixteenth- century monarchy’s authority, since the demands of upholding Charles IX’s own royal motto of ‘piety and justice’ pulled it in essentially opposite directions32. Montaigne’s pithy summary of the history of these years hit the nail plumb on the head: the kings of

28 Philip Benedict, ‘Les Vicissitudes des églises réformées de France jusqu’en 1598’, in Michel Grandjean and Bernard Roussel, Co-exister dans l’intolérance (Paris-Geneva 1998), 65, 29 Benedict, ‘Vicissitudes des églises réformées’, 53-73, for the calculations. Olivier Christin, La Paix de religion. L’autonomisation de la raison politiques au xvie siècle (Paris, 1997). (Paris, 1997), for the mechanisms of religious peace. Pierre-Jean Souriac, Une Guerre civile. Affrontements religieux et militaires en Midi toulousain (1562-1596) (Seyssel, 2008), for an excellent regional study of the military and political conflicts. 30 Mark Greengrass, ‘La Grande cassure; violence and the French Reformation’ in Robert von Friedeberg and Luise Schorn-Schütte, eds, Politik und Religion: Eigenlogik oder Verzahnung? (Munich, 2007), 71-92, at 89. 31 Mark Greengrass, Governing passions. Peace and reform in the French kingdom 1576-1585 (Oxford, 2007) is the most comprehensive study of these problems. See also Jérémie Foa, ‘Making Peace: the commissions for enforcing the pacification ddicts in the reign of Charles IX (1560- 1574), French History 18 (2004), 256-74; idem and Ronan de Calan, ‘Paradoxes sur le commissaire. L’exécution de la politique religieuse de Charles IX (1560-1574)’, Histoire, Économie, Société, 27 (2008), 3-19. 32 Penny Roberts, ‘Royal Authority and Justice during the French Religious Wars’, Past and Present 184 (2004), 3-32, at 12. 14

France, he noted, ‘not having been able to do what they wished, have made a show of wishing to do what they could’33. As we have just seen, the monarchy never thought of the problem that it faced in terms of the equality of the confessions, any more than did the latter themselves. Such a renunciation of centuries of congruence between religion and politics was not on anyone’s agenda. The established medieval tradition of tolerantia, which had made it possible to ‘put up with’ Jews and Muslims as the lesser evil in the pursuit of a higher good, constituted a familiar starting-point for thinking about, and dealing with religious divisions within Christianity itself34. Thus, the concessions made to the Protestants were announced as temporary and provisional, made solely in order to prevent a greater evil and pending a reunion of all people in the one true church, an objective which it was still quite possible to sustain in a gallican environment even after the Council of Trent’s doctrinal pronouncements had seemed to put paid to any such chances; one powerful reason for the crown’s firm refusal formally to ‘receive’ the Council’s decrees into French law was to leave that particular door ajar. Chancellor l’Hôpital may have concluded that it was futile to coerce individual consciences, but he was nevertheless committed to long-term religious unity35. It remains hard to measure the strength or sincerity of such objectives over time, but for the rest of the century at least, the notion of a re-union of the churches within a gallican framework, which would not be bound by Trent’s most contentious decrees, remained alive.

These developments are perhaps easier to grasp because the terms traditionally used by historians to understand the shifting relations of politics and religion as a result of Europe’s reformations have been re-examined in recent years. The thorniest question for contemporaries to deal with was, as already intimated, liberty of conscience. We have already seen what Theodore Beza thought of such a concept. Across the sixteenth century, only a very few esprits forts, such as Sebastian Castellio in his Conseil à la

33 Quoted in Richard Bonney, ‘Obstacles to religious pluralism in early modern France’, in Keith Cameron, Mark Greengrass and Penny Roberts, Penny, eds, The Adventure of Religious Pluralism in Early Modern France (Frankfurt, 2000), 216, n 41. See also ibid., p. 5, note 1. 34 See István Bejczy, ‘Tolerantia, a medieval concept’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 58 (1997), 365-84, and the discussion in Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred. Tolerance and intolerance in England 1500- 1700 (Manchester, 2006), ch 5, ‘loving one’s neighbour: tolerance in principle and practice’. 35 Loris Petris, ‘Faith and religious policy in Michel de l’Hôpital’s civic evangelism’, in Cameron, Greengrass, Roberts, The Adventure of religious pluralism, 129-42. 15

France désolée (1562), defended liberty of conscience and the open-ended religious pluralism that it logically entailed as a matter of principle rather than as a necessity dictated by immediate circumstances. Calvin himself had demanded – and secured – the execution of Michael Servetus for precisely this form of heresy, exactly as the old church would have done in the same circumstances. For the vast majority of Calvinists and Catholics alike, the only acceptable conscience was the one that adhered to the truth; a conscience in manifest error could not claim any such rights. The prolonged experience of religious strife in France would lead a small, if distinguished number of individuals to adopt a ‘neither Rome nor Geneva’ position, deploring the excesses of confessional conformity36. But in many instances, even for such a famously free spirit as Montaigne, this position was reached only very gradually, and it owed as much to the cumulative experience of religious violence and inconclusive civil war as to principled thinking on the subject in its own right.

Meanwhile, the status of France’s Protestants remained consistently ‘unequal’ in another sense. They began life in the 1520s as ‘the sect of the Lutherans’, a term still being widely used to describe them in the 1540s and early 1550s. Calvinists themselves used the term ‘the church of Jesus Christ’ as a key theological concept, while describing their own actual creations on the ground as ‘our churches’. But neither the Catholic church nor the French monarchy would consent to describe them as a properly constituted church (or churches). The term ‘the new religion’ was used in royal legislation, around and after 1560, but that was emphatically not a compliment, since anything labelled as ‘new’ in religion was deeply suspect to contemporaries. Gradually, one of the most enduring and gratuitous forms of condescension in French public language came into almost universal usage. France’s Protestants became officially known as the ‘religion prétendue réformée’, namely the self-proclaimed or so-called reformed religion (usually abbreviated to R.P.R). Formally used as early as the Edict of Roussillon (1564), the term was actually made official by 1576 (‘Peace of Monsieur’, article 16), and it became so established thereafter that even Henri IV saw nothing wrong in using it to describe his former co-religionists in the Edict of Nantes and elsewhere!

36 On the uncommitted and non-confessional options of these decades, see the exhaustive study by Thierry Wanegffelen, Ni Rome ni Genève. Des fidèles entre deux chaires en France au xvie siècle (Paris, 1997). 16

Such language and habits conveyed the unmistakable message that the Protestants were indeed a nuisance which had, for the time being, to be ‘tolerated’37. Indeed, it is hard to avoid the impression that the more substantial the concessions that were made to them over the years, the more the crown (and the majority of the population) were determined to disqualify them by using the label of ‘the so-called reformed’: there would be no equivalence between the concessions they enjoyed and the language used to describe them. In the next century, as we shall see, the R.P.R. would find themselves being increasingly referred to as ‘schismatics’, a label that identified them as religious rebels who should be treated as such, and who certainly did not constitute an authentic separate church.

In the early 1560s, however, the unresolved tensions about how to put an end to religious discord showed in the measures taken by the crown. The Edict of January 1562 was the most generous towards the Huguenots, as they themselves later realised, since they were allowed relatively extensive freedom of worship, so long as their services were conducted outside walled towns and during daylight hours. Most of the subsequent edicts were, as a result of the ensuing Catholic backlash, far less generous in this regard. Thus, the edict of Amboise (March 1563), issued at the end of the first war of religion, contained the first public recognition of the notion of liberty of conscience itself, while simultaneously reducing the actual liberty of worship accorded to Protestants the year before. Moreover, the terms in which liberty of conscience was phrased in 1563 – ‘each person may live freely in their house anywhere without being investigated, vexed, forced or constrained in connection with their conscience’ – clearly show that such liberty, in addition to being temporary, was also both individual and private, and conferred no automatic right to speak or worship freely with others outside – or perhaps also inside – one’s private space38. But such startling (to the modern mind) combinations of liberty of conscience and refusals of the right to worship were emphatically not confined to the early 1560s, when such ‘inconsistency’ might seem at least understandable, as a brief glance at the record shows. Thus, although later royal edicts in 1568, 1577 and 1598

37 See Michel Péronnet, ‘Religion prétendue réformée’ in Lucien Bély, ed., Dictionnaire de l’ancien régime (Paris, 1996), 1077. 38See http://elec.enc.sorbonne.fr/editsdepacification for the most scholarly edition of these edicts by Bernard Barbiche. 17 reiterated this recognition of liberty of conscience, they connected it quite emphatically to hopes that the Protestants would ‘return and reunite with us and our other subjects in the union of the holy, Catholic church’. And whereas the 1563 edict of Amboise, and many others that followed it, indicated the kinds of place where Protestant worship might legally occur, those of 1568 and 1585 placed a total ban on the practice of the Protestant religion and expelled Protestant ministers from the kingdom, while explicitly preserving liberty of conscience! If the crown was so inconsistent in handling the problem of freedom of worship, it suggests that it clung for much longer than is usually imagined to its hopes for religious concord based on a reunion of the warring confessions39. Nor should it be forgotten that in France after 1560, religious toleration was limited in other respects, too: it was conceded only to ‘those of the R.P.R.’. All other religious sects (e.g. Anabaptists, Swiss Brethren) were openly excluded from its terms, as were, a fortiori, free-thinkers, libertins or unbelievers.

III

The decoupling of sedition and heresy, the painful but limited acceptance of the freedom of conscience, and the continually shifting terms of the much less acceptable civil toleration of a minority confession – all were bound to generate serious repercussions in France’s body politic. This would have been true even without the repeated civil wars, the unprecedentedly high levels of intra-communal violence, and the gruesome character of massacre and counter-massacre that characterised the 1560s and the 1570s, when repeated pleas for oubliance, friendship, and the control of the passions were drowned out by the mutually hostile propaganda being pumped out by the rival churches. Yet the relative falling-off in religious violence after 1572-4 did not herald a return to peace, and if anything the long decade that followed saw the kingdom lurch towards ever higher levels of near-systemic un-governability40. In the wake of the 1572 massacres, the Huguenots not only published inflammatory justifications of resistance to tyranny and of killing kings who had become tyrants, but those of southern France went as far as drawing up a republican ‘constitution’ designed (but never really implemented) in order to remove them from subordination to royal rule altogether. Political disorder was also

39 Benedict, ‘Vicissitudes’, tables 1-5 for the chronology. 40 Crouzet, Guerriers de dieu, ii., chs 13-15 in particular; Carpi, Guerres de religion, part 3. 18 fanned by the formation of ‘parties’ (such as the aristocratic Malcontents in 1574-5) which a seriously weakened monarchy was not well equipped to contend with. In addition, numerous leagues, associations and confraternities– some purely local, some more widely federated – were already establishing themselves as potentially alternative power structures, especially for Catholic self-defence, in several provinces. The brief existence of the first Catholic League of 1576-7 illustrates the dangers that such initiatives represented, with Henri III’s decision to impose himself as its chief in order to control it (and even to snuff it out altogether) only advertising the crown’s desperation41. Instead of steering clear of such an obviously partisan organisation, the crown allowed itself to be sucked into the factional arena, as it already had done by assuming responsibility for the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre.

In their own way, the increasing length and detail of the successive edicts, treaties and declarations of the years from 1570 onwards highlight the ever-widening ramifications of the religious conflicts. Not only did they contain further concessions on the conditions and permitted places of religious worship for France’s Huguenots, but more and more articles were devoted to the civil, military and political consequences of the deepening confessional identities. These included many hotly disputed questions – the tenure of office in the king’s service by Protestants, the creation of special chambers in the parlements to hear lawsuits involving Protestants, the maintenance of garrisoned ‘places of security’ for Protestants, the provisions for Protestant burials, the observance of Catholic festivals by Protestants, to mention only a few of the most intractable of them. But the social and political experience of hardening religious identities was always a step ahead of the efforts to capture them in legislation or negotiation. Increasingly, the pressure to consider an expanding spectrum of demands from all sides, some of which unashamedly involved the interests of individual ‘party’ leaders, shows just how far religious issues and conventional politics had become entwined with each other. The rival confessions had also come to depend heavily on aristocratic figures who were certainly not averse to exploiting them as canon-fodder to pursue their own objectives42.

41 See Carpi, Guerres de religion, chs 13-14. 42 See Sutherland, Huguenot struggle, for a detailed exposition of the successive settlements. 19

If it has not been difficult to identify the aristocratic Malcontents of the mid-1570s, the existence and role of another stalwart of this period in French history, the politiques, is much more problematic43. Generations of historians argued that a relatively small but coherent party of politiques, beginning with Chancellor L’Hôpital, directed their efforts initially to establishing confessional co-existence between Catholic and Protestant, and then to defining royal power in the face of religious and factional self-interest. An influential French variant of ‘whig’ history, this account easily located precursors of political liberalism among the politiques who were seen as adopting a precociously ‘modern’ agenda of preserving the civil order in the face of religious division, insisting that the state should seek to transcend such ultimately ‘private’ concerns by developing an alternative, proto-secular conception of its own raison d’être. As might be expected, this search for a genealogy of modern politics was highly teleological in its approach, succumbing all too readily to the temptation to pit progressives against reactionaries in an epic struggle. In addition, it was particularly prone to latch onto phrases or statements which seemed to encapsulate such ‘modern’ thinking, while paying scant attention to their historical context or the possibly different meanings that they held for people of another age. The result was to systematise and modernise what was not much more than a political tendency, and certainly not a recognisable party44.

The term ‘politique’ itself was not much used until the 1570s, and even then it conveyed little or no sense of a continuity of ideas or groups over time. It was during Henri III’s reign (1574-89) that the label began to acquire a more consistently negative meaning, especially in the mouths and pens of those Catholic intransigents who would later form the Catholic League. The term had significantly more to do with suspicion than with a clear political ideology. In particular, it enabled the League retrospectively to pin the responsibility for all the misguided religious policies pursued by the monarchy since 1560 on a third party of hypocrites and dissimulators whose agenda of civil peace

43 See Mack P Holt, The Duke of Anjou and the politique struggle during the wars of religion (Cambridge, 1986); Arlette Jouanna, Le devoir de Révolte. La noblesse française et la gestation de l'Etat moderne (1559-1661) (Paris, 1989), ch 6, ‘la guerre des Malcontents’; eadem, La Saint-Barthélemy, ch 8, ‘les lectures politiques du malheur français’; Carpi, Guerres de religion, 208-19, for a brief survey. 44 Edmond M Beame, ‘The Politiques and the historians’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 54 (1993), 355- 79, for a valuable guide to the successive meanings and affiliations of the term used by contemporaries and historians. 20 and religious co-existence made them de facto allies of the Protestant minority. Until at least the late 1580s politique was essentially a term of abuse for an ill-defined but highly useful bogey-man; with the rise of the League, those identified as politiques became targets for attack and ran the risk of assassination or execution45.

IV With the assassination of the still-young Henri III on 1 August 1589 by a Dominican friar, the question of the king’s own religion became a subject of nationwide consequence, immediately exacerbating existing problems. Could France be governed by a Protestant king who, on the evidence from elsewhere in Europe, would surely seek to compel his subjects to adopt his religion? Would the vast majority of his subjects be content to be governed by a king whom they regarded as a heretic? Such questions had been widely, but of course hypothetically, discussed, especially since Henri of Navarre became the heir apparent to the throne in 1584. Five years later, they were no longer avoidable, and the divisions they produced showed how uncomfortable contemporaries were with anything but a religious ‘union’ between ruler and subjects. But the question of the king’s religion did not suddenly arise, ex nihilo, in 1584 or 1589, as the allusions already made to it suggest. It requires further attention here so that the predicament of Henri IV in and after 1589 can be placed in its proper context. Historians have usually contrasted the inherited religion royale of the French monarchy that we have already briefly encountered with the tenets of the Protestant movements of the sixteenth century, in order to show the impossibility of an entente between them. Denis Crouzet has argued that France’s Renaissance kings, and especially François I, were warrior-kings, whose violence and valour were also God’s instruments against disorder, which might, of course, include heresy46. Such a confident self-image did not sit well with the core principles of French Calvinism as they were revealed before

45 In addition to Beame, ‘Politiques and the historians’, see Mario Turchetti, ‘Une question mal posée: l’origine et l’identité des politiques au temps des guerres de religion’, in Thiery Wanegffelen, ed., De Michel de l’Hôpital à l’édit de Nantes. Politique et religion face aux églises (Clermont, 2002), 357-90; idem., ‘Middle parties in France during the wars of religion’, in Benedict et al, Reformation, revolt and civil war in France and the Netherlands, 165-83. See also Nancy L Roelker, One King, one faith: the Parlement of Paris and the religious reformations of the sixteenth century (Los Angeles, 1996), 326-8. 46 Denis Crouzet, ‘Violence and the state in sixteenth-century France’, in Marguerite Ragnow and William D Phillips, jr., eds, Religious conflict and accommodation in the early modern world (Minnesota, 2011), 83-99, at 83-88. 21 and after the colloquy at Poissy in 1561. François I had been happy to see himself as patron and protector of Erasmian-evangelical circles attempting to generate religious reform, and they, in turn, eagerly sought royal support for their efforts. By the 1550s and early 1560s, this cumulative experience of dealing with heresy as seditious and disorderly had seriously stacked the odds against the prospect of the crown abandoning its Catholicism, least of all for a Calvinist confession that seemed to possess so many unpalatable traits. As already pointed out, several features of Calvinist thinking were always likely to alienate the French monarchy and threaten its ideological foundations. Its emphasis on God’s total sovereignty and on the misery of the human condition, that of princes included, offered scant comfort to a monarchy accustomed to seeing itself as quasi-sacerdotal in character and living in close communion with God. For France’s Calvinists the sacred was not to be found in human actions, material objects or institutions, but was transcendent and otherworldly; rulers were as fallibly human as mankind in general, and their elevated rank could not ultimately disguise this. Moreover, Calvinism’s non-sacramental form of worship and its aversion to all forms of liturgical and iconographic embellishment cut directly across the religious culture of the French monarchy. That Calvin insisted that subjects owed an absolute duty of obedience to rulers did little to counterbalance the actual disorder that his followers generated in their pursuit of a godly church. As early as 1536, in his dedication of the first edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion to François I, Calvin had vigorously defended France’s evangelicals against accusations of seeking to overthrow kingdoms, but at the same time he called on the King to adhere to the true gospel and institute it throughout his realm47. Every subsequent edition of the Institutes carried this forceful preface, but the royal response to it remained unchanged. The colloquy of Poissy in 1561 would show just how far apart not only the theologians but also the wider cultural world of the French monarchy and its court were from the Calvinist message48. Yet, the fact that the colloquy had occurred at all, with leading Calvinist figures invited to court, soon gave rise to suspicion about the monarchy’s intentions. As efforts at diplomacy continued and the crown sought a way of dealing with France’s religious

47 Bruce Gordon, Calvin (New Haven-London, 2009), 58-60. 48 Gordon, Calvin, 316-17. 22 divisions, rumours circulated concerning the court, not least because after Poissy Catherine de Medici had asked Beza to remain in Paris, where he also preached. With princes of the blood like Condé and the Bourbon-Albret of Navarre organising their own Calvinist religious services at court, it was easy enough to imagine that the royal family as a whole, led by the Queen Mother, was somehow dabbling in ‘heresy’. The early edicts of pacification which soon followed added to such suspicions within the Catholic fold, and they were not seriously dispelled until the royal tour of France of 1564-6 showed that the king and his mother were practising Catholics who visited Catholic holy places and pilgrimage sites as they progressed around the country49. Yet suspicion on this question was not so easily killed off, and whenever a king – from Charles IX to Henri IV – made what seemed like unacceptable concessions to France’s Protestants, doubts about his religious fidelity invariably returned in force, and with them the urge to step into the king’s place and cleanse the realm of heresy. Charles IX’s perceived dependency on the Huguenot leader, Admiral Coligny, in the lead-up to the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572, was the most notorious instance of such easily-triggered suspicion, which may have played a part in the king’s declaration that he had personally ordered and sanctioned the massacre50. Such doubts about the monarchy’s religious commitment to the true religion were almost certainly compounded by the gradual abandonment, during the decade after 1560, of the warrior-king image by the monarchy, and its gradual replacement by that of a king of justice and peace. Violence, like the passions generally, was now to be repressed, beginning with those of the king himself, who should also seek to control those of his subjects51. Nowhere was this transition, and the misunderstanding that it generated among contemporaries, more evident than in Charles IX’s younger brother and successor, Henri III, whose religious behaviour left Catholics even more puzzled and exasperated52. As duke of Anjou he had been one of the most prominent Catholic military leaders before 1572-3, yet as king after 1574 he behaved quite differently to what his contemporaries

49 Jean Boutier, Alain Dewerpe, Daniel Nordman, Un Tour de France royal. Le voyage de Charles IX (1564-1566) (Paris, 1984). 50 Jouanna, La Saint-Barthélemy, chs 1-2 for a balanced analysis of Coligny’s position in the crucial period from mid-1570 to 1572. 51 Crouzet, ‘Violence and the state in sixteenth-century France’, 88-96. 52 Carpi, Guerres de religion, chs 14 (‘le problème Henri III’) and 15 (‘une oeuvre en demi-teinte’). 23 were expecting of him. The extensive concessions which he made to Protestants and other malcontents as early as 1576 re-kindled those earlier gnawing doubts about his reliability as the defender of Catholicism. His later attempts, either side of 1580, to reform the realm, the church included, did not suffice to negate his reputation for prodigality, especially towards his closest favourites, and the increasingly onerous fiscal demands that it generated. In this context, his sometimes highly public religiosity – which included walking barefoot on pilgrimage and flagellating himself with fellow members of a confraternity of Penitents – simply could not compensate for failing in his royal duty to protect the true religion. This critical stance shows how well contemporaries could distinguish, not so much between religion and politics, but between the kinds of obligation in regard to religion that differentiated rulers from their subjects. The religion royale was emphatically not meant to be confused with that of private dévots, even when it took the form of the disciplinary and penitential practices which became so widespread within French Catholicism during the 1580s53. Paradoxically, religious practices which attracted stinging criticism as being misplaced and unseemly for a king of France were a godsend after 1584 to the revived Catholic League, which proved far more successful in instrumentalising them – especially via its elaborate processions – in its revolt against both Henri III and his successor54. Henri III’s policies and actions were also – and above all – the focus of a radical de- sacralisation of monarchy during his last years. With the possible exception of Louis XVI, no French king before or after Henri III was subjected to such vilification in public or in print. A degree of royal de-sacralisation, at least at the theoretical level, had already been delivered, mainly by Huguenot political writers, in the wake of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, but during the late 1580s a much more personalised form of de-sacralisation was directed against the king himself, but this time with radical Catholic League rather than Protestant preachers and pamphleteers in the vanguard. The paroxysm of such attacks came during the months that followed Henri III’s ‘execution’ of the Guise brothers at Christmas 1588, when pamphleteers regularly compared him to the ‘vilain Herod’ and other tyrants. They even began refusing to refer to him as Henri III,

53 Nicolas Le Roux, Un régicide au nom de Dieu (Paris, 2006), 72-4. 54 Crouzet, Guerriers de Dieu, ii, chs 16-17. 24 calling him merely ‘Henry de Valois’ – as the later revolutionaries would call Louis XVI ‘Louis Capet’55. When Henri III in turn fell to the assassin’s knife on 1 August 1589 and thus become the first French king to be murdered since Childeric II (675), it was his assassin, Jacques Clément, that the Catholic League swiftly proclaimed to be a martyr for the true religion56. With the assassination of Henri III, the burning question of Henri IV’s own religion, and whether he was in any sense acceptable as the next king of France, finally became unavoidable. For the committed Leaguer, the answer was quite simple, but for everyone else it became increasingly complicated during the months and years after August 1589. In Henri IV’s own case, the question of the king’s religion already had a long and hotly contested history. Brought up a Calvinist from the age of eight by his mother, Jeanne d’Albret, he had converted in extremis to Catholicism in August 1572 in order to avoid possible murder during the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, only to return to Calvinism on his escape from court a few years later57. That first conversion, about whose precise form and content very little was known at the time, became a subject of controversy when he emerged as a possible future king of France in the 1580s. His supporters, Catholic as much as Protestant, tried to explain it away: performed in private and under duress, it was therefore devoid of validity. But his adversaries branded it as proof of Navarre’s unprincipled opportunism, and considered his subsequent apostasy as a demonstration of his fundamental commitment to the Calvinist cause. Either way, they argued, it was impossible to trust someone who had already changed his religion three times (1562, 1572, 1576); yet another conversion to Catholicism could be nothing more than a travesty. The fact that Pope Sixtus V, in his bull Brutum Fulmen of 1585, had not only excommunicated him but also obligingly declared him incapable of the royal succession

55 David Bell, ‘Unmasking a King: The Political Uses of Popular Literature under the French Catholic League, 1588-89’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 20 (1989), 371-386; Annie Duprat, ‘La Caricature, arme au poing: l’assassinat de Henri III’, Sociétés et Représentations, 10 (2002), 103-16; Le Roux, Un regicide au nom de Dieu, 90ff; Sydney Anglo, ‘Henri III: some determinants of vituperation’, in Cameron, ed, From Valois to Bourbon, 5-20, for the wider context; David Potter, ‘Kingship in the wars of religion: the reputation of Henri III of France’, European History Quarterly 25 (1995), 485-528. 56 Le Roux, Un regicide, 312-15. 57 The best account is in Michael Wolfe, The Conversion of Henri IV. Politics, power and religious belief in early modern France (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), chs 1-2. 25 on the grounds of ‘manifest’ heresy, was additional ammunition for the Catholic League in its campaign to place an alternative king on the throne58. V It is not necessary to follow in detail the confused chain of events between August 1589 and Henri IV’s final conversion to Catholicism – a prospect feared by many, increasingly wished for by others – in July 1593. But several interlocking developments merit attention, given how much they would shape the politico-religious alignments and convictions of later generations; they deposited enduring ‘memories’ which became points of historical reference for subsequent confrontations59. Henri IV knew perfectly well in August 1589 that for most of his subjects he was king in name only, but also that any premature attempt to convert to Catholicism would be greeted as pure opportunism by most Catholics and as treason by his own Huguenot followers, whose support he simply could not afford to lose. This being the case, it is obviously impossible to say at what point he accepted that conversion to Catholicism was the only possible outcome if he truly wanted the crown60. In August 1589 (the Declaration of Saint-Cloud) and subsequently, he went as far as he felt he could without risking the loss of Huguenot support, to retain the loyalty of those French Catholics who already supported him, especially in the army, and to dissuade those French Catholics not already committed to the Holy Union from doing so. Despite successive declarations that he would fully preserve Catholicism throughout the kingdom, he was only partly successful on both counts, and his use of the language of bon français patriotism to rally all of his subjects to a common cause produced few tangible results in the short term. Significant figures, both Catholic and Protestant, promptly withdrew their support for him; military victories did little enough to generate irresistible political momentum in his favour, while even a single setback always threatened to undo whatever progress had been made towards gaining control of the kingdom61. In the case of Paris and other cities, the king’s major adversaries in the Catholic League mobilised the religious fears

58 Wolfe, Conversion of Henri IV, 35. 59 In addition to Wolfe, Conversion of Henri IV, see N M Sutherland, Henry IV of France and the politics of religion, 1572-1596, 2 vols ( Bristol, 2002) and Ronald S Love, Blood and Religion. The Conscience of Henri IV 1553-1593 (Montreal, 1993). 60 Mark Greengrass, France in the age of Henri IV, 2nd ed. (London, 1995), 75-6. 61 Wolfe, Conversion of Henri IV, chs 4-5. 26 and energies of the populations against ‘the heretic’ – as they usually dubbed Henri IV – notably through elaborate processions and other penitential activities designed to produce the mystical union of God and his people. But with each passing year, the grind of war and ever-rising taxes ensured that ‘union’ was increasingly difficult to find, which in turn led to different factions openly emerging within the Catholic League. Some extremist Leaguers were prepared to advocate the succession of Philip II of Spain’s daughter – and niece of Henri III – rather than Henri of Navarre, despite the obstacle of the ‘Salic’ law which debarred royal succession in the female line. These divisions ensured that Estates- General of the League that was intended to elect a successor to Henri III had to be postponed more than once; when it did finally meet, in early 1593, many of its members sensed that it was already too late, and were ready to engage in negotiation with Henri IV62. Such deepening fractures created the opportunity for the latter to appeal more strongly to Catholic moderates and to make the first tentative moves which would culminate in his conversion to Catholicism at Saint Denis in July 1593. This ‘second’ conversion was nothing if not singular, despite efforts to compare Henri IV with France’s first royal convert, Clovis63. The event itself was prepared, organised, and orchestrated by a committed group of royalist figures within the higher Catholic clergy; despite promises to the contrary, Calvinist ministers were excluded from the process. The king had announced more than once since 1589 that he intended to seek ‘instruction’ in the Catholic faith with a view to conversion, but that prospect only became real in early 1593. The need for this conversion to be a public event was obvious enough, given the attacks on his previous one, though such ‘publicity’ was itself no guarantee that it would be well received throughout France. The experiences of Henri III’s reign were perhaps an additional warning against trying to focus too much on the content of the king’s religion, while his continuing need of his Protestant supporters also urged caution as to precisely what he was renouncing and what he was adopting in its place. For these overlapping reasons, the abjuration itself consisted of an oath to live and

62 Greengrass, France in the age of Henri IV, 70-2. Strictly speaking, the Estates were to elect a successor to ‘King’ Charles X, uncle of Henri IV whom the Catholic League had recognised as king after Henri III’s assassination and who had died in captivity in 1590. 63 Wolfe, Conversion of Henri IV, especially chs 6-7; de Waele, Réconcilier les françcais, ch 6; Greengrass, France in the age of Henri IV, 75-82 See also Mark Greengrass, ‘The Public context of the abjuration of Henri IV’, in Keith Cameron, ed, From Valois to Bourbon, 107-26. 27 die in the Catholic faith, protect it against all-comers, and renounce all heresies hostile to it. What the king assented to beyond that promise for the future was not disclosed. This extreme discretion was interpreted by a famous contemporary and former ligueur, Guillaume du Vair, as showing that ‘the hearts of kings are in the hand of God’. Yet if the king’s personal convictions belonged henceforth to the arcana imperii and were thus not open to scrutiny by mere subjects, there was nothing to prevent scoffers and doubters in the mid-1590s from construing them more sceptically – and perhaps more dangerously – or from concluding that the conversion itself had been yet another charade. The immediate response of the League’s ultras, preachers and pamphleteers to the royal abjuration was predictably combative and withering, indicating that the opposition to Henri IV was not about to collapse of its own accord64. After a virtually secret and decidedly un-transparent ‘instruction’ in the Catholic faith, designed to spare the king’s royal dignity, the highly public abjuration with its minimal commitments gave these critics plenty of ammunition. Thus the format and content of the conversion raised at least as many questions as they answered. One effect of all this was that it was not until a full six months later, in early January 1594, that the first Leaguer town, Meaux, timidly opened its gates to, and recognised Henri IV as king. His subsequent coronation in late February 1594 at Chartres – the normal place for royal coronations, Reims, was unavailable because it was still under Guise control – was timed to capitalise on his recent military and political gains, and especially to trigger further acts of recognition65. Yet after nearly five years of continuous effort and with Paris still in Leaguer hands, the overall slowness of the League’s collapse made Henri IV increasingly conscious of the need to take a further critical but contentious step – to seek the papal absolution that would bury remaining Catholic doubts and opposition to his legitimacy. Gallican distaste for such overtures to Rome had been strengthened by recent papal interventions in French affairs – which included, inter alia, the 1585 bull against Henri IV himself and the disastrous ‘invasion’ by a papal army in 1591. Despite that, misgivings about the validity of the 1593 absolution granted by self-appointed French clerics remained widely shared and did not seem to be diminishing. Moreover, as the conversion occurred during an

64 Wolfe, Conversion of Henri IV, 159ff; de Waele, Réconcilier les Français, 138-9, 140. 65 De Waele, Réconcilier les Français, 131-2. 28 interruption in Franco-papal relations, it was accompanied by rumours of the convening of a gallican national council and suggestions for the establishment of an autonomous patriarchate within France. Such ideas had a long past and usually surfaced in times of overt conflict with Rome, when they tended to be orchestrated by the crown in order to browbeat the papacy66. In the early to mid-1590s, it was historically-aware gallicans, mostly magistrates, who canvassed them, but in a context of acute political uncertainty which hardly offered the best prospects for their effective realisation. Henri IV was not the first French king to grasp that direct negotiation with the papacy could resolve problems, actual or potential, that might otherwise remain intractable if kept within France itself; by strengthening his own legitimacy, such a pact would further weaken remaining opponents and detractors, and close off alternative courses of action. In envisaging this, he was responding to the desires of moderates in both the royalist and Leaguer camps, neither of whom had been fully convinced by the conversion itself. But it was not until 1594 that the papal curia finally began to drop its previous hostility to overtures from Henri IV, who had made all of the diplomatic running since as early as October 159267. Even when he did begin to envisage reconciliation with the king, the ultra-cautious Clement VIII faced some formidable opposition, which came as much from the Roman Inquisition as from pro-Spanish forces in Rome. The ensuing royal absolution was a victory for the Pope and his circle over the would-be curial hegemon, the Inquisition; to that extent it mirrored the king’s own decision to ignore opposition at home in order to seek papal approval. Because the absolution was long in coming (17 Sept 1595) and Henri IV was cast in the role of supplicant of the pope’s grace, its every detail was painstakingly negotiated. A major reason for the delay will not come as a surprise: the French negotiators sought to ensure, firstly, that the papal absolution complemented rather than superseded the 1593 absolution by French clerics and, secondly and critically, that the lifting of the King’s earlier excommunication contained no implication that the pope was in some way exercising the power to rehabilitate him and was not enabling him to legitimately succeed to the throne. Gallican sensitivities on

66 See J H Burns, Lordship, kingship and empire: the idea of monarchy 1400-1525 (Oxford, 1992), 134-44, for an instance of this in 1511-12. 67 This account of the absolution is based mainly on the excellent essay by Alan Tallon, ‘Henri IV and the papacy after the League’, in Alison Forrestal and Eric Nelson, eds, Politics and religion in early Bourbon France (Houndmills, 2009), 21-41. 29 these precise issues were exceptionally acute by the mid-1590s, and were shared by many of the clergy, not least by those (the future cardinals Ossat and Du Perron) who were sent to negotiate the terms of the absolution in Rome68. But the papacy was equally intent on seizing what was a rare opportunity where France was concerned to press its own accumulated demands. As both an individual and as king of France, Henri IV was subject to a set of conditions for absolution – as he would in a ‘normal’ rite of penance. The papacy’s list of conditions ran to thirteen headings in all. The principal ‘public’ ones were considerable in their scope: restore Catholicism in his patrimonial principality of Béarn; raise the prince of Condé, then heir to Henri IV’s throne, as a Catholic; apply the Concordat of Bologna faithfully; and ‘receive’ the decrees of the Council of Trent in France. Additional papal demands – revoke the edict of pacification of 1577 (which Henri IV had restored in 1591); permit only one religion within France; recall the Jesuits expelled in 1594; ratify the decisions of papal legates and nuncios made during the League years; and join a league against the Turks – proved far more difficult to agree upon. They were finally excluded from the ‘public’ list, but they were accepted by Henri IV as personal commitments69. These and other related issues would figure on the agenda of the rest of Henri’s reign. VI The royal conversion and its sequels, it need hardly be said, had wider consequences, some relatively immediate, others more long-term. Between them, they secured the Bourbon succession to the throne which had been in some jeopardy and which, in their absence, might not have lasted very long. In addition to copper-fastening the Salic law for the royal succession, which the Catholic League was prepared to overturn, the conversion established another fundamental law of the kingdom, that of the catholicity of the monarchy itself, which henceforth was constitutionally inaccessible to non-Catholic claimants. Strongly promoted since the 1580s by the Catholic League, this new law defining the religious affiliation of all future kings was the most permanent result of the uncertainty of Henri IV’s religion. When it was proclaimed by the Paris parlement alongside the Salic law, in June 1593, the magistrates already knew that a royal

68 See the analysis in Sutherland, Henri IV, ii. 554ff. 69 In addition to Tallon, ‘Henri IV and the papacy’, see Sutherland, Henri IV, ii. 586-8, for the text of the articles under discussion. 30 conversion was imminent, yet they could still not bring themselves to recognise Henri IV as France’s legitimate king, only weeks before he actually returned to Catholicism70. Historians have long discussed the wider consequences, political and ideological, of the change. Their verdicts have diverged widely, as did those of contemporaries and posterity generally, for whom the king’s own authentic or supposed quips – such as ‘Paris is worth a mass’, or ‘taking the dangerous leap’ (i.e. the conversion) – have long served as all too facile ‘prompts’. What is increasingly clear is that the inherited notion of Henri IV as a cynical opportunist or hard-nosed realpolitiker does not fit the case, but that for him religious choice and political obligation as king of France created acute dilemmas of decision and action which could not be easily or quickly reconciled. All the evidence that we have suggests that he ‘grew’ into Catholicism after his conversion, especially its ceremonial and ritual elements, while retaining some healthy Calvinist scepticism about individual elements of its teaching. Attempts to explore either his conscience or his individual beliefs, whether in 1589, 1593 or later, seem pointless. As far as his public identification with Catholicism is concerned, his championing of Cardinal du Perron in his defence of the Mass against the criticism of his own former political advisor, Duplessis-Mornay, during the conference of Fontainebleau in 1599, appears to have been a decisive moment; precisely because it concerned the Mass, to which France’s Protestants were so hostile, his stance was taken as proof that his conversion was complete and irreversible71. For some historians the royal conversion was a decisive step towards absolute monarchy, since it enthroned the king of France above the confessional fray in which everyone else was mired. The fact that the king’s personal religion was placed beyond scrutiny was a necessity to begin with, but in due course it became part of a royal

70 Sylvie Daubresse, ‘Autour de l’arrêt Le Maistre’, in Olivier Descamps et al, eds, Le Parlement et sa cour (Paris, 2012), 149-70; Michel de Waele, ‘La Fin des guerres de religion et l’exclusion des femmes de la vie politique française’, French Historical Studies, 29 (2006), 199-230; Wolfe, Conversion of Henri IV, 133; Eli Barnavi, ‘Mythes et réalité historique: le cas de la loi salique’, Histoire, Économie, Société, 3 (1984), 323-37. 71 See Hugues Daussy, Les Huguenots et le roi. Le Combat politique de Philippe Duplessis-Mornay (1572- 1600) (Geneva, 2002), 589-95, ‘le sacrifice de Fontainebleau’. The ‘sacrifice’ refers to the fate of Mornay. For later Catholic perceptions of this moment, see Barbara Diefendorf, ‘Henri IV, the dévots and the making of a French Catholic Reformation’, in Forrestal and Nelson, eds, Politics and Religion in early Bourbon France, 157-179, at 174. 31 mystique which would form a leitmotif of absolutist rule, French-style72. In a similar vein, the conversion has been viewed as the ultimate triumph of ‘political reason’. ‘The religious pacification of France brought about by Henri IV’, writes Denis Crouzet, ‘was the result of a veritable revolution in political ideology’. This revolution installed him as a ‘king of reason’, which meant that the age of the primacy of religious reason was over, and the religious angst that had culminated in the politico-religious crisis of the succession was overcome by such a leap of reason73. Olivier Christin offers a similarly broad version of the outcome of the religious conflicts, inside and outside of France, which he characterises as ‘the autonomisation of political reason’, emancipated by the imperative of dealing with the otherwise insoluble political problems of religious provenance; in the course of these tasks political reason became detached from its religious moorings and its previous subordination to higher, religious priorities74. The plausibility of such arguments relies on a large dose of hindsight and on ignoring certain counterfactuals. Henri III’s efforts to sacralise the monarchy had failed disastrously because his wider political record undermined those efforts. Likewise, Henri IV’s conversion might have been ‘stillborn’ had he not managed to deal with an accumulated raft of challenges, political and military as well as religious and diplomatic which, once they had been resolved, even temporarily, then became elements of an emerging political stability in subsequent years. Certainly, the conversion offered a valuable starting-point for the re-sacralisation of the monarchy during the following century, but this was a process that would only become fully visible under Louis XIII75. Whatever Henri IV contributed to it was limited by the fact – and the memory – that he had been a Protestant until his fortieth year. And the idea that the king alone had privileged access to God’s secret designs for his subjects was not to everyone’s taste,

72 Michael Wolfe, ‘The Conversion of Henri IV and the origins of Bourbon absolutism’, Historical Reflexions, 14 (1987), 287-309. 73 Quotation from Denis Crouzet, ‘Henri IV, king of reason?’, in Cameron, ed, From Valois to Bourbon, 73-106, quotation at p. 73. For a more detailed analysis, see Crouzet, Guerriers de Dieu, ii, ch 20, ‘face à l’angoisse collective, le roi de la Raison’, and, more recently, the same author’s Dieu en ses royaumes. Une histoire des guerres de religion (Seyssel, 2008), ch 17, ‘cinquième acte: la royauté du désangoissement’. 74 Olivier Christin, La Paix de religion (Paris, 1997), 203-05. 75 Monod, The Power of kings, 33-6, 69-80, 110-21. 32 especially among the highest echelons of the monarchy – the royal family, the grands and the parlements, for example76. There is no doubt that pamphlets, sermons and other texts urged the new king’s subjects to abandon their passions and hatreds, which had proved so destructive, and to submit entirely to a restored royal authority which would spare them the horrors of the previous generation if only they put their complete trust in the king as God’s anointed. But measuring their impact is as difficult as evaluating earlier efforts to stir people into a crusading frenzy against ‘the heretic’. It has been shown that even the politiques who promoted a strong monarchical power were still reticent in the 1590s, despite the experience of the wars of religion, to accept the idea of ‘absolute’ royal power as ‘normal’. The much-touted ‘absolute’ monarchy was ‘fragile’ and ‘work-in-progress’, where serious mistakes and setbacks were always possible. The notion that from 1593-5 onwards France was on a ‘high road’ to absolutism – rather like Stuart England being on a similar ‘high road to civil war’ – hinders rather than helps us to understand subsequent developments; and it does so because so much of the impetus behind the shifts in political ideology was itself a consequence of recent religious divisions77. It is evident that in his remaining years as king between 1595 and 1610, Henri IV benefited from numerous favourable circumstances, such as war weariness and a yearning for civil peace. But that was hardly new in the mid-1590s, and it took political skill to maximise the opportunities to repair royal authority without re-opening the ‘troubles de religion’. The next chapter will explore both that challenge and the royal responses to it during Henri IV’s reign.

76 Jouanna, Pouvoir absolu, ch 13, ‘Henri IV, le roi choisi par Dieu’. 77 Jouanna, Pouvoir absolu, 308-16, 321-2.