In 1557, Spain, now ruled by Philip II, son of Charles V, and France, whose king was Henri II, were about to enter their fortieth year of war.  Both kings, despite their great financial resources, had mortgaged their kingdoms to the hilt.  In that year, they reached their limit.  Philip was the first to go bankrupt.  Two of his governments, the one in the Netherlands and the one in Castile, unilaterally declared that they would not pay the 12 or 16% interest they owed, but only 5%.  This ruined Philip's creditors, of course.  A few months later, Henri too reneged on his debts.  Bankers in Antwerp, Lyon, Augsburg, Florence and Genoa were caught in a great international crash.

Of course no one could foreclose on the kings, they simply had to swallow their loses.  But the kings were left without cash to pay their armies or their suppliers.  Neither man had been enthusiastic about the last round of fighting, which had been provoked by the pope, so it was relatively easy for them to come to terms.  In 1559, the treaty of Cateau-Cambresis brought the long war between the Hapsburgs and the Valois kings of France to a halt.

 What Western Europe needed at this point was a generation of peace to rebuild.  The common people were suffering from over-population and the inflation caused by it and aggravated by war and the influx of American silver.  Nobles were suffering, too. But this very economic crisis made stability and peace unlikely.

Those who had suffered from princely greed were getting restless.  Some wanted the simple restoration of customary restraints on their rulers.  Others were outraged by injustice and oppression, and many of these gave their feelings a religious twist.  For them, the problems of the world were not problems of policy, but of ungodliness.

Both the moderates and the radicals wanted a reform of the church of some sort, a thing that necessarily involved an alteration of the power structure.  At the same time, the monarchs, who had worked so hard to bring local communities and privileged classes under their control, were still determined to press on.   That determination also had a religious aspect, which was reflected in the agreement between Henri and Philip.  They stated that a major motive for their peace treaty was to free themselves to fight heresy in their own dominions, to resist that pressure from below.

So instead of an end to war, these monarchies saw an intensification of conflict that lasted for the rest of the century.  In today's lecture we will look at developments in France; later we will look at the Netherlands, one of the jewels in Philip's crown.  In both places, the clash between local custom and privilege and strong monarchy, and between godly reform and the established church produced long, bitter wars, conflicts that were part civil war, part international ideological conflict, and part social revolution.

France was the strongest and richest single European monarchy.  For the past century, since the end of the Hundred Years' War, the king's control of his nobles and the various provinces, not to mention the French church, had been pretty secure.

But by 1559, a limit had been reached.  Everyone was hurting from inflation and taxation.  Even peace made some people unhappy.  In France, unlike England, everyone in a family, and not just the title-holder, was noble, and so there many nobles who were poor.  In the words of a recent historian, "[their] whole wealth each was a horse, a sweord, a ragged cloak and a few rocky acres to starve on [Mattingly, 341]."  Such men had for two generations made their livings in the king's wars, and had
nothing to fall back on.  In the towns and in the chateaux of the nobility, discontent made people willing to listen to travelling preachers from Geneva, who spread the Calvinist Gospel.

The situation was destabilized when Henri II was killed in a joust celebrating the recent peace treaty.  A system that depended on the talents of the man at the top was inherited by an unhealthy and not very forceful fifteen year old, Francis II.  Immediately factions grew up at court.
 

• One faction was that of the king's closest royal relative, Antoine, the Duke of Bourbon, who was also the King of Navarre.  He and his brother, the Prince of Conde, thought that they should have an important role in their young and inexperienced cousin's government.
• A second faction was that of Francois, the Duke de Guise and his brother the Cardinal of Lorraine.  These men were the uncles of Francis's queen, Mary of Scotland, and their sister, Queen-Mother of Scotland, was ruler of that country.
• Other nobles followed a final family, the Montmorencys, was which led by the best general of the past war.
• A faction all to herself was the king's mother, Catherine de Medici, unpopular personally and as a foreigner, who showed a great determination to run the shop for her son.

But a century of successful monarchy, and the changes in warfare, meant that all the power was in the court and the royal bureaucracy. Nobles wanted a share of the central government's power; they wanted governorships, army commands, pensions, and influence at court, not independence. The factional fights were conflicts for the control of the entire government apparatus, and the money and power that went with it.  This accounts for some of the ferocity of the wars that eventually resulted.

 A lot of the competition was purely personal, but everything was immensely complicated by religious affiliations.  The Bourbons and most of the Montmorencys had gone over to the Calvinists, while the Guises posed as champions of the ultra-orthodox.

 The same religious conflict existed in the country at large. Propaganda from and the example of other countries stirred up those who were dissatisfied with the corruption of the French church.  From about 1555, when Calvin had secured his power in Geneva, he had been able to give support to sympathizers in his home country.  Secret Calvinist congregations were springing up all over France.  The reformers were also creating regional, provincial and even a national organization.

During the short troubled reign of Francis II, many nobles joined the movement, giving it a military organization parallel to the religious one.  The reformers (commonly known as Huguenots) were creating an armed party able to defend itself and even to seize power in the right circumstances.  This fact made the maneuvering at court all the more frenetic.  Catherine de Medici tried to head religious conflict, as a threat to her power, but she merely earned the distrust of all sides.   The crown was further weakened by the death of Francis II and succession of the nine-year-old Charles IX.

In the spring of 1562, the Duke of Guise came across a group of Huguenots at worship in the town of Vassy, and enraged, had them massacred.  The war that followed, the first of nine numbered French religious wars was not so big, by contemporary standards, nor did it last very long.  But it was savage.  One notorious incident was the assassination of the Duke of Guise.  In normal times this would have been a heinous crime.  But many Protestant nobles went out of their way to say that it was just what an enemy of God deserved.  The same spirit led Huguenots to kill ordinary Catholics and Catholics to kill ordinary Huguenots.  They were the death squad killings of their day.  Each atrocity spurred others, until peace treaties between the noble leaders of each faction became almost meaningless.

The biggest massacre, an anti-Huguenot one, took place in Paris on St. Bartholemew's day August 24, of 1572.  It took place in the middle of a truce.  Catherine de Medici had agreed to marry her daughter, who was the king's sister, to Henri of Navarre, a leading Protestant.  This was to mark an alliance between the Huguenots and the royal family against the ultra-orthodox Guises.  But then she had second thoughts.  She was afraid that the Huguenots would start a war with Spain.  So she plotted the assassination of Coligny, the elder statesmen of the Protestant cause and a real hawk.  The attempt on Coligny, which took place in Paris a couple of days after the royal wedding, was unsuccessful.  Catherine, in a panic that her part in the plot might be exposed, immediately planned a more ambitious attack on the Huguenots, and got her sons to agree to it.  When
the killing started, frenzied Parisian Catholics slaughtered every Protestant they could get their hands on.  About 4000 were killed in Paris, and as the news spread, 4000 more in the provinces.  One Parisian butcher was proud to claim he had killed 400 all by himself.

Until the Reign of Terror, the St. Bartholomew's day massacre was the most famous European political atrocity since the assassination of Julius Caesar.  There had been plenty of massacres in the last few years, but this incident was so shocking that it made many people reconsider their political positions.

The first group to reconsider was the Huguenots.  Up until now, the Huguenots had always presented themselves as loyal subjects of the king.  They had wished, for both religious and political reasons, to limit the power of the crown, but they did not think of themselves as political radicals.

Now Huguenot thinkers and writers took a different tack.  The involvement of  the royal family in the massacre threw monarchism into disrepute.  The right of the kingdom to resist an unjust ruler was discussed, as were alternatives to monarchy.

Huguenots retreated to the south of France, where they had a lot of power, and a year to the day after the massacre, delegates from the southern churches created what Salmon has called a federal republic.  Under the new constitution, each town and region was to elect its officials annually without any regard for hereditary claims.  The regions sent representatives to a central assembly, which would chose a legislature, an executive council, and a chief executive, or elder.  Military offiecers were to be elected, too, and be responsible to the central and local councils.

Soon enough local and noble privileges were restored, but a fair amount of republicanism remained at the local level, and this Huguenot commonwealth became an independent rebel state within the  kingdom of France, armed and ready to defend itself.

The Massacre had also turned many moderate Catholics against the fanatical orthodoxy promoted by the Guises.  They began to seek a compromise with the Huguenots, who looked comfortable by comparison.  The moderates were called politiques, and it was said of them that they would rather have the kingdom at peace without God than at war for him.  King Henri III, who succeeded his brother in 1574, was a politique at heart.  He spent most of his reign trying to bring politiques and Huguenots together under his leadership so that he could avoid the domination of the Guises, who were powerful in the north.

The Guise family was now led by Henri Duke of Guise, the son of the duke assassinated in 1563, and his brothers, who included not one but two cardinals.  The Duke's party had also solidified in the aftermath of St. Bartholomew's.  In 1576, they formed a party called the Holy League, which was sworn to destroy Protestantism throughout France.  Under the leadership
of Guise, the Holy League was soon just as powerful in most northern cities, including ultra-Catholic Paris, as the Huguenots were in most of the south.  Like the Huguenots, the Leaguers felt little loyalty to a king who was not on their side.  Both the League leadership and the Guises themselves were in in close communication with a king they considered much more reliable, the Most Catholic Monarch (an official title), Philip II of Spain.

Philip had been watching France with interest from the beginning.  His feelings were ambivalent.  France was potentially his most dangerous enemy, and he was glad to to see France weak.  For the ten years before 1576, Philip had been fighting Protestant rebels in the Netherlands, and it was important to him to keep the French out of that war.  On the other hand, he did not want France to fall into the hand of Protestants, either.  So Philip was willing to feed money to the Guises, but not too much.  Henri de Guise was so obviously a man of limitless ambition that Philip would not have been happy to see him win.

In the 1580s, however, a new crisis blew up that threw the Guises and the Spanish king closer together.  In June of 1584, Henri III, who had no sons and was unlikely to produce any, lost his last brother, the Duke of Anjou.  That left, as heir to the throne of France, Henri de Navarre, who was now the foremost French Protestant leader.  Navarre, who was well-liked by many Catholics, and a man whose fellow-Huguenots and soldiers were devoted to him, would be in a good position to unite most of France behind him.  One of the problems of the monarchy was that the last three kings had been such inconsequential people.  This Navarre was not.  For this very reason, he worried the Guises and all members of the League.

The death of the king's brother, put new life into the League, which had been inactive recently.  Paris became its most active center.  Here, prominent clergymen, important lawyers, and some lesser members of the Paris bourgeoisie formed a Council of Sixteen, which represented the sixteen districts of the city.  This council had the backing of zealots all over the city, who themselves formed into clubs, often based on existing guilds and religious fraternities.  The Paris League was closely connected
to revivified branches in other cities.  The League was allied openly with the Guises and secretly with Spain.  The Spanish ambassador, Mendoza, was in constant communication with the Paris Sixteen, giving them money and information.  Mendoza was also able to suggest tactics to the Sixteen, and use them for his own purposes.  The Jesuits, too, cooperated with the Paris
League.  Henri III's capital was being taken over by forces hostile to him.

The Holy League of 1584, in fact, was as radical as the Huguenots had been back in 1574.  They could not be legitimists, because by ancient French custom, a heretic would be the next king.  League pamphlets and sermons by league priests proclaimed that only a Catholic could be king.  The king was not a sovereign or absolute ruler.  His office was a gift from
God bestowed by the Church at his consecration [Jean de Caumont Champenois; Jensen, 47].  A king was an elected official, and could be deposed if he betrayed his trust.  There is a touch of republicanism in that idea; some Leaguers went further, to state that kings existed to serve the will of God and of the people, which ideally were the same thing [Rossaeus; Jensen,
49].  At the same time, ironically, the Huguenots were having a sudden conversion, and were upholding the old law and the old ways as hard as they could.  After all, the old law would make their man king.

Early in 1585, the domestic and foreign opponents of Navarre finally struck a formal pact to oppose him.  Philip II did not want a warlike, Protestant king in France.  Philip was winning his war in the Netherlands, and feared with good reason that Navarre would support his own rebels.  So Philip signed a secret treaty with the Duc de Guise.  This treaty recognized Navarre's cousin, a Catholic caridinal, as heir to the throne, and committed both Spain and the League to fight Navarre.  When the League won, it would ally France with Spain to stamp out Protestantism.  In the meantime, Philip promised a large monthyly subsidy for the expenses of the war against Navarre.

     So by 1585, Philip was preparing to intervene in France to secure Catholicism there.  But to fight Protestantism effectively, Philip would have to fight England too.  Queen Elizabeth was not willing to let Philip dominate her nearest neighbor.  A world war was about to break out.  But before we can talk about the main confrontation, we have to travel north to the Netherlands, which in 1585 was in the middle of its own religious war.

     BIBLIOGRAPHY

De Lamar Jensen,  Diplomacy and Dogmatism:  Bernardino de Mendoza and the
 French Catholic League.

J.H.M. Salmon,  Society in Crisis: France in the Sixteenth Century.

Copyright (C) 1999, Steven Muhlberger.