EARLY LOCAL AND PROVINCIAL CATHOLIC LEAGUES

Thanks to her own enterprise in pushing the war which had culminated with so much honor to France, and partly also to her skilful handling of the factions at court, Catherine de Medici was now in enjoyment of supreme power. The entire weight of the government rested on her shoulders, there being no longer any other person who controlled public affairs. The Guises and ChÂtillon factions were full of animosity toward one another, for Madame de Guise refused to recognize the admiral’s acquittal for the murder of her husband;[733] Montmorency was deeply offended because the young duke of Guise received the grand-mastership and the gift of the duchy of ChÂtellerault, and so feigned to have the gout in order to avoid service before Havre; CondÉ was doubly angry at the queen, both because she withheld the promised lieutenant’s commission and because the daughter of Marshal St. AndrÉ, who left a great fortune, was not permitted to marry his son. The parties were, therefore, in a triangular relation toward one another and Catherine’s art was bent upon maintaining the balance in order to hold her own.[734]

The population of the wittiest city in Europe was quick to perceive the animosities and paradoxes that existed. “The Parisians have three things to wonder at,” the saying went, “the constable’s beads, the chancellor’s mass, and the cardinal ChÂtillon’s red cap. One is ever mumbling over his beads and his head is ever occupied with other affairs; the other hears mass daily and is the chief Huguenot in France; the third wears a cardinal’s cap and defies the Pope.”[735] The queen mother had hoped that religious animosities would be forgotten in the course of the war with England. But she was disappointed. The peace of Amboise could not be enforced. Even in Paris armed troops and armed guards had to patrol the streets to prevent outbreaks of violence.[736] It was impossible to disarm the Catholics, who made house-to-house searches to ferret out Huguenots.[737] Under the terms of pacification the Protestants were permitted to return to Paris, but who dared avail himself of so precarious a liberty? Instead, they were compelled to sacrifice their property.[738] In the provinces the same condition of things prevailed—in Languedoc, in the OrlÉannais, in the Lyonnais.[739] In Languedoc the association of the Huguenots maintained its organization, raised money, levied troops.[740] Yet in spite of its failure to enforce pacification, the government required the demolition of the walls of towns known to be Huguenot strongholds, as Orleans, Montauban, and St. LÔ, a procedure which the Protestants strongly resisted; so that a condition of petty civil war existed throughout much of France, the Edict of Amboise notwithstanding.[741] Summarized, the troubles of France at this time may be said to have been the feud between the house of Guise and that of ChÂtillon—a feud which compromised the crown and most of the other great families of the kingdom; the queen’s ambition to govern, which led her to nourish the quarrel; religious intolerance; the poverty of the crown; the uncertainty of its foreign relations; and finally the detriment to its commerce on account of the war with England, which deprived France of four or five millions of gold.[742]

Even before peace was made between France and England it had been decided that the King should make a tour of the provinces for the better pacification of the country.[743] A programme of administrative and financial reform was developed at the same time. The army was to be reduced; in place of the royal garrisons there was to be a “belle milice” of forty ensigns of footmen, ten each in Picardy, Normandy, Languedoc, and DauphinÉ. These troops were to be supported partly by the crown, partly by the provinces. The Scotch Guard was to be cut down. Through the church’s aid twelve millions of the public debt, including the unpaid balance of the dowries of Elizabeth of Spain and the duchess of Savoy, were to be paid off within six years and the alienated domains of the crown redeemed.[744] Already Charles IX’s majority had been declared at Rouen, during the course of the siege of Havre[745]—a dexterous stroke of the queen mother to thwart the ambitions of the factions.[746]

In the early spring of 1564 the court set out from Fontainebleau, and thence went to Sens and Troyes, where the peace was signed; from Troyes the way led to Bar-le-Duc and Nancy. But the journey of the King, instead of allaying the disquietude of the Huguenots, alarmed them still more. For the strongest overtures were made to the King to break the peace of Amboise, not only by provincial authorities[747] but also through the ambassadors of certain of the Catholic powers.

The Council of Trent had finished its labors with somewhat unseemly haste on December 4, 1563, on account of the anticipated decease of Pius IV,[748] and strong pressure was brought upon the French and Spanish governments to accept its findings.[749] The Pope, in consistory, accepted them in their integrity, on January 26, 1564.[750] But various European governments, especially France, strongly objected to the findings as prejudicial to the interests of monarchy.[751] On the first Monday in Lent the cardinal of Lorraine presented the decrees of Trent to the King in council and others of the Parlement, urging that their adoption was necessary for the repose of the kingdom. The debate which followed, in a certain sense was a test of strength between the moderate Catholic party, led by the chancellor L’HÔpital and the Guises. Much objection was made to the findings, especially by the chancellor, who asserted that they were contrary to the privileges of the Gallican church, and that the cardinal’s party was now trying to compass by craft what they had failed to do by force of arms. The cardinal rejoined with words to the effect that L’HÔpital was unmindful of the benefits he had received of them (the Guises), using the word “ingrate” (ingrat). To this the chancellor haughtily returned that he had never received any benefits from the cardinal or his family, that he had only filled the post of maÎtre de requÊtes, which was not a high office, and that he did not desire to pay his debts at the expense of the King’s sovereignty by voting in favor of the decrees. In the end, France refused to accept all of the findings.[752]

With the closing of the Council of Trent, the representatives of the ultra-Catholic powers, notably Spain and Savoy, intimated to Charles IX that their sovereigns would assist him in the extirpation of heresy in France. The offer was both a promise and a menace, the implication being that the Catholic world at large would not tolerate the recognition of Protestantism accorded by France and that a joint action of the powers most concerned might compel the king of France to live up to his title of Most Christian King. The cardinal of Lorraine had carried the idea of the Triumvirate to Trent with him,[753] and on the floor of the Council had proposed the formation of an association to be called “The Brotherhood of Catholics in France.” He offered to secure the co-operation of his nephews, relatives, and friends, and returned to France with the consent of the Pope for that purpose.[754] The Triumvirate, as we have seen, had already made overtures to Spain, to which Philip II had responded with cordial, if no very definite sentiments, and from the time of the promulgation of the Edict of January and the formation of the Triumvirate, the idea of a Catholic league in which the Pope and the king of Spain were to be the chief pillars, begins to take shape.[755] The mission of Louis de St. Gelais, sieur de Lansac, to Trent and Rome in this month, was partly to prevent the formation of such a league, and partly to persuade the Pope to approve the French government’s appropriation of the property of the church. Granvella was not unfavorable to the idea, though in his eyes such a league should be formed, not for the purpose of intervening in France, but as a defensive measure, lest Catherine endeavor to profit by the critical situation prevailing in the Spanish Netherlands and interfere there in order to divert the discontent of the French from home affairs, and to prevent the Protestants of the Netherlands from assisting their coreligionists in France.[756]

The outbreak of civil war after the massacre of Vassy and the seizure of Havre-de-Grace by the English had convinced Philip II that the time to act had come in France, and Spanish troops and Spanish money were put at the disposal of the Guises, although Philip denied to England that he was giving succor to Catholic France.[757] In May, and again in August of 1562, the Triumvirate appealed to Philip II,[758] and on June 6 the Spanish King wrote to the regent in the Netherlands to send the Triumvirate assistance. But the order was easier to give than to execute, and exactly a month later (July 6) both Margaret and Granvella replied, asserting the impracticability of carrying out Philip’s wishes on the ground that no money could be procured from the estates for such a purpose.[759] In the meantime, the cardinal-legate in France, convinced that “in order to lay the ax at the root of the evil, there was no shorter way and no better expedient than recourse to arms,”[760] and impatient of Spain’s slow reply to the petition of the Triumvirate,[761] stirred up both the Vatican and the court of Madrid to livelier action.[762] As a result, although it was against their better judgment, Margaret and Granvella prevailed upon the Council of State in August to appropriate 50,000 Écus for the war in France, and in September 3,000 Italians were sent from Franche ComtÉ to the aid of Tavannes in Burgundy.[763]

The elements of the future Holy League are here manifest as early as 1561-62. But apart from the course being followed out in high political circles, at the same time, popular associations for the maintenance of the Catholic religion were being formed within France. The years 1562-63 witnessed the formation of several provincial leagues and town associations, which were the real roots of the Holy League.

The people of the capital had begun to manifest their prejudices in an organized military form as early as 1562, and the government, instead of suppressing this tendency, encouraged it. On May 2, 1562, the Parlement of Paris passed an ordinance ordering the Échevins and all loyal Catholics in each quarter of the city to organize under arms, with captains, corporals, and sergeants.[764] But the preponderance of Paris in the formation of the Holy League has been exaggerated. When it became a national affair, Paris, as the capital and most Catholic city of France, seized hold of it and made it her own. But it is inverting things to say that Paris gave the League to the provinces. Rather Paris identified herself with their interests, and reflected their passions and their character, “fierce in Languedoc, sullenly obstinate in Brittany, everywhere modified in its nature and its devotion by the politics of the towns.”[765]

The south of France was far more aggressive than the north in this particular, and anti-Protestant associations were formed in many provinces to the disquietude of the government, which knew not how to control them.[766] The earliest of such local associations formed by the Catholics seems to have been one of Bordeaux, where the people were organized after the Protestant attempt to gain possession of the ChÂteau Trompette in Francis II’s reign.[767] This association formed in Bordeaux is the germ of the Catholic League which later expanded over the Bordelais and Gascony. Other portions of France followed suit. In November, 1562, the Association of Provence was formed at Aix and terrorized the Huguenots.[768] Toulouse was notoriously Catholic, and street wars between Catholics and Protestants were of common occurrence. A more than usually violent outburst of popular fury here culminated on March 2, 1563, in the formation of a Catholic League, of which the cardinals Armagnac and Strozzi, lieutenants of the King in the sÉnÉschaussÉes of Toulouse and Albi, the president of the Parlement, Du Faur, who was advocate-general of the crown, certain eminent knights of the Order, and the famous Montluc, were sponsors. The immediate occasion of this outbreak at Toulouse seems to have been the combination of fury and fear of a plot which the Catholics felt when they learned of the duke of Guise’s assassination. When the outbreak began, the president of the Parlement of Toulouse hastily dispatched a messenger to Montluc entreating him to come to their assistance. Upon Montluc’s arrival at Toulouse the leaders prayed him to put himself at the head of the troops in the province against the Huguenots.

Montluc at first made some difficulty about consenting to this request, because he had no permission from Damville, the governor of Languedoc, in which province Toulouse was located, and who, moreover, was not one of his friends.[769] Finally, however, he yielded to their request, and measures were taken to put an army on foot in thirty days. Those who composed this assembly drew up the compact of a league or association on March 2, 1563, which was to be observed by the clergy, the nobility, and the third estate in the towns and dioceses within the jurisdiction of the parlement of Toulouse, both in Languedoc and Guyenne. According to the articles of this association the members engaged to bear arms, and to make oath between the hands of those commissioned by the Parlement, or by the King’s lieutenant in the country, to march whenever required for the defense of the Catholic religion. The parlement of Toulouse approved and authorized this association on March 20, provisionally and without charges, “subject to the good pleasure of the King.” In the name of this league taxes were laid, men were levied, and an inventory of arms made in every gÉnÉralitÉ and diocese.[770]

Montluc had come to Toulouse, fresh from the formation of another and earlier league for the preservation of the Catholic faith, in Agen, which had been organized on February 4, 1563. This league was a direct consequence of the siege of Lectoure and the battle of Vergt. Montluc had received orders to report, with the marshal Termes, to the King in the camp before Orleans. But the Agenois was not quite pacified and the gentry of the country were so filled with alarm, that they concluded, so Montluc naÏvely says, “that in case I should resolve to go away to the King, as his Majesty commanded, and offer to leave them without a head, they must be fain to detain me in the nature of a prisoner.”[771] The upshot of things was that the “Confederation and Association of the town and city of Agen and other towns and jurisdictions of Agen” was formed and organized on February 4, 1563, with a captain, lieutenant, sergeants, corporals, and other necessary officers, in order to extirpate the Huguenots from the region. It was an oath-bound covenant.[772]

The examples of Agen and Toulouse were contagious, and the popular hatred of the Huguenots, on account of the assassination of the duke of Guise, induced the spread of these local leagues. On March 13, 1563, the Catholic lords of Guyenne also entered into a league at Cadillac on the same plan and for the same object as that of the Catholics of Agen and Languedoc.[773] Like the earlier ones, the league of Guyenne was organized by parishes, districts, sÉnÉschaussÉes and provinces, under the direction of one supreme chief assisted by a council chosen from the third estate. In the north of France, as has been observed, the tendency of the Catholics to associate was not so strong as in the south. There is evidence of a weak association of the Catholics in the towns of the Rouennais and the lower part of the Ile-de-France in 1563,[774] and of a town league in Anjou and Maine.[775] But no formidable Catholic association was formed north of the Loire, until the appearance of the ConfrÉrie du St. Esprit in 1568, under the marshal Tavannes.

The nucleus of many of these Catholic associations, before they expanded into provincial leagues, in most cases seems to have been a local guild or confraternity[776] of some nature. These were closely connected with the body of tradesmen, each trade having its patron saint, its sacred banner, and devoted bands; but some of the more aristocratic people were joined with the artisans. The members had fixed places of meeting and certain days on which to assemble, common exercises, and often a common meal. They swore to use their wealth and their life, if need be, for the defense of their faith.[777]

The new rÔle now begun to be played by these ancient guilds is an interesting phase of the religious wars. If France in the sixteenth century was laboring in the throes of a religious revolution, she was also in a state of industrial transformation. In origin the economic revolution was independent of the Reformation, yet so influential were its social and economic effects upon the Reformation that in a very true sense the religious movement may be said to have been the subordinate one.[778] The identity and fulness of this change in the old order of things coincides with the Reformation, which in large part became the vehicle of its expression. The crisis coincides with the reign of Charles IX and Henry III, although the beginnings of it are very manifest in the time of Louis XI (cf. the ordinances of 1467, 1474-76, 1479). The change particularly involved the guilds, whose traditional practices had now reached the point of an industrial tyranny. More and more, from the middle of the fifteenth century, control of the guilds had tended to fall into the hands of a few. This growth of a social hierarchy within the guilds had serious political and economic results. For inasmuch as city government was so largely an out-growth of guild life, this exclusiveness threw political control of the cities into the hands of a “ring” composed of the upper bourgeoisie, who formed an oligarchy and gradually squeezed the lower classes out of all participation in the government. The general body of the commonalty everywhere, in France, in Germany, in England, tended to disappear or to be replaced by a select group from the inner circle of the guild. The lower bourgeoisie was shut out of the council at Nevers in 1512, at Sens in 1530, at Rheims in 1595.

But the economic revolution implied in this change was of far greater importance than the political. The gens de mÉtier became a monopolist, a capitalist class, controlling the “hoards” of the guilds as well as being the ruling class in local politics. The old guild was transformed into a mercantile association, operated in favor of a few rich families who were possessed of capital and regulated wages and fixed the term of apprenticeship to their own advantage. In order to secure cheap labor the masters increased the number of apprentices, lengthened the time of service, raised the requirements of the chef-d’oeuvre, made membership in the guild increasingly difficult, and reduced wages by employing raw, underpaid workmen in competition with skilled labor. The result was that the distance widened continually between the upper and lower working classes.[779] The social democracy and honorable estate of guild life, as it had been in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, passed away and was replaced by a strife between labor and capital, between organized labor and free labor, which brings the sixteenth century, remote as it is in time, very near to us in certain of its economic conditions.

To be sure there were some things which partially neutralized this antagonism, such as better facility in communication, the increase of production, the activity of exchange, the invention of new industrial processes, and the opening of new industries, notably printing and silk manufacture.[780] But nothing compensated the workman for the rise in the price of necessities of life due to the influx of gold and silver from America, for his wages did not rise in proportion. In consequence the cleavage grew more and more sharp. The result of this tendency was that poor workmen, despairing of getting economic justice from the guilds, took to working in their own quarters. So common was this practice in the sixteenth century that a new word was coined to define this unapprenticed class—- chambrelons. These plied their trades in their own houses and sold the product of their handicraft anywhere. As early as 1457, and again in 1467, the masters complain of this practice.[781] It is easy to understand the disastrous influence of this new form of industry upon guild labor, since the new class of workmen was not subject either to the same money charges or to the same restrictive regulations. It was “unfair” competition for the old order of things which reposed upon the maintenance of an economic equilibrium between demand and supply, between labor and capital, was upset by the new tendencies.

To the toiling masses trodden down by the masters and economically tyrannized over, the Reformation came as the first organized movement of discontent, and hosts of dissatisfied workmen throughout Germany and France hastened to identify themselves with Protestantism, not for religious reasons, but because the Reformation constituted exactly that for which they were seeking—a protest. The situation was further aggravated by the influx of foreign workmen, chiefly from Germany, where this economic revolution was earlier and more fully developed than elsewhere in Europe, in great industrial centers like NÜrnberg, and where small German workmen were more completely shut out than was the case in France or England. These men—such as cobblers, shoemakers, carpenters, wool-carders, and other simple artisans—wandered over the country from one province to another, carrying the economic gospel of free labor and the religion of Lutheranism with them. Naturally they imbued their French fellow-workmen with their sentiments—and to such an extent that for years, during the early course of the civil wars, the Huguenots were commonly called “Lutherans.” Before 1560, the greater portion of the Protestant party was made up of woolcombers, fullers, drapers, weavers, shoemakers, hosiers, dyers, tailors, hatters, joiners, glaziers, bookbinders, locksmiths, cutlers, pewterers, coopers, etc.[782] Even as late as 1572, when the Huguenot movement had for twelve years been led by noblemen like the ChÂtillons and the Rohans, the Venetian ambassador still characterized the Huguenots as “a sect which consists for the most part of craftsmen, as cobblers, tailors, and such ignorant people.”[783]

Coupled with this religious and economic revolution, went also a change in the manners of society, which pervaded all classes—a change which began in the reign of Francis I and was continued under Henry II. The new internationalism of France, due to the Italian wars, was probably the initial cause of this. Returned soldiers, laden with the pay of booty of warfare, brought back into France the manners and customs of Italy, which commingled with the manners and customs introduced by wandering workmen from Germany and Switzerland.[784]

The revision of the statutes of the guilds was one of the minor features of the reform programme of the political Huguenots in the States-General of Orleans, and the Cahier-gÉnÉral of the third estate which was compiled from the local cahiers presented by the deputies shows traces of the interest of France at large in the issue. Unfortunately these fuller local records are lost.[785] But this revision only looked to a modernizing of the mediaeval language of the ordonnances, which chiefly dated from the fourteenth century, and did not contemplate an entire recasting of them, so as to make them harmonize with the new industrial conditions. Only one man in the assembly seems to have appreciated the real condition of things. This was the chancellor L’HÔpital. Not content with the mild reorganization of the guilds recommended by the third estate, on the last day of the session, January 31, 1561, the chancellor drew up the famous ordinance of Orleans.[786] The intent of this statute was indirectly to restrain the enlarged economic tyranny of the guilds, to lessen the burden of apprenticeship, and to establish freer laboring conditions. This purpose the government aimed to attain by dissolving the confraternities, for by striking at these it really struck the guilds, since many of these associations were one and the same. No distinction was made between associations whose character was religious or charitable, and those composed of patrons and workingmen; all the confraternities were grouped together and governmental supervision was provided for. They were not legislated out of existence by the new action, but reduced to a partial dissolution. Their accumulated hoards of capital were ordered to be expended for the support of schools and hospitals and similar institutions in the towns and villages where these various guilds were, and only a limited amount of money was left in their hands. The municipal officers, in co-operation with those of the crown were made personally responsible for the execution of this measure in every bailiwick. It is important to notice the significance of this course. The government, in fact, was pursuing a policy of partial secularization of the property of these confraternities for the benefit of the people at large, and compelling distribution of the great sums locked up in the hands of the guilds in much the same way that the church had come to possess enormous sums in mortmain. This legislation, if it had really been effective, would have destroyed the guilds.

The guilds thus put upon the defensive, owing to the reforming policy of the crown and the political Huguenots, sought to save themselves by pleading that they were religious associations. By this adroit movement they gained the support of the Catholic party. But the crown refused to yield, and we find the ConfrÉries de mÉtiers directly supervised in letters-patent of February 5, 1562, and December 14, 1565. Coupled with these measures, we find others forbidding banquets, festivals, and like celebrations (edicts of December 11, 1566, and of February 4, 1567) which by this time had become centers of religious agitation among the Catholics. But the government could not maintain its course. The identification of the guilds and confraternities with the Catholic party gave them great and unexpected support. Under the new order of things they became the nuclei of local and provincial Catholic leagues.[787] In other words, the labor party became identified with the Huguenots, while the upper bourgeoisie, controlling the guilds, adhered to the Catholic cause—at Rouen in 1560 the merchants actually declared a lock-out against workmen who attended preachings[788]—and became the nuclei of the provincial leagues, exactly as in France in 1793 every Jacobin club became an arm of the Terror government.

It was said at the time, and has often been asserted since, that these local Catholic leagues were but protective associations in the beginning and formed to repel Huguenot violence.[789] The Huguenots practiced as violent methods as their religious opponents and their offenses were as numerous; but with the exception of the Huguenot association in DauphinÉ, there is no early example of a Protestant association similar to the leagues of the Catholics in the provinces. The Protestant local organizations were not so highly developed, in a military sense, as early as this, nor were they of the same form as those of the Catholics. Montluc himself, than whom there is no better judge, testifies that in the war in Guyenne in 1562 “they showed themselves to be novices, and indeed they were guided by their ministers.” The Protestants had a sort of triumvirate, it is true, in the two ChÂtillon brothers, and the prince of CondÉ, but their work only remotely partakes of the policy of the real Triumvirate; even their appeal to Elizabeth did not contemplate such radical conduct as the Triumvirate displayed.[790]

No Huguenot leader ever thought of subordinating the government of France to a foreign ruler for the maintenance of the faith he believed in,[791] as the Guises, Montmorency, and St. AndrÉ did. CondÉ’s declaration that the civil war was caused by the Triumvirate’s action had much truth in it. The rules of the association which the Huguenots formed at Orleans, on April 11, 1562, were as much a body of military regulations for the discipline of the army as they were a political compact, as a reading of the articles will prove.[792] There was little of the politico-military character of the Catholic leagues about it. It is not until after the Bayonne episode that we find a solid federation of the Reformed churches beginning to form, and the first test of the Protestant organization was made at the beginning of the second civil war.[793] This is not the place, however, to dwell upon its development. In due time the subject will be taken up.

The edict confirming the act of pacification (March 19, 1563) in its sixth article forbade the formation of any leagues in the future, and ordered the dissolution of those already in existence.[794] This prohibition was a dead letter from the beginning. The government not only was unable to prevent the formation of new leagues; it was even unable to suppress those already in existence.[795] When the first civil war ended, there were three well-organized Catholic leagues in southern France, namely those of Provence, of Toulouse, and of Agen. Catherine de Medici, who, for some months to come, continued to give substantial manifestation of her desire for peace,[796] in announcing the act of Amboise to Montluc, demanded the dissolution of these associations. Instead of so doing, however, Candalle, Montluc’s chief agent in Guyenne, continued his activities. On March 13, 1563, as has been noticed, in defiance of the impending edict of pacification (which was completed and only awaited promulgation) the Catholic seigneurs of Guyenne, at Cadillac (near Bordeaux) entered into a league identical in purpose and in form with those of Agen and Languedoc.[797] This league, which is the germ of that which spread over Gascony, seems to have been denounced to the government by Lagebaston, the president of the parlement of Bordeaux, between whom and Montluc there was friction, partly because of Montluc’s preference for Agen as a working capital for the region, partly because of his notorious dislike of the lawyer class, whose disposition to regard forms of law and vested right interfered with Montluc’s high-handed and arbitrary management of affairs.[798] This new league in such glaring violation of the edict, called forth a sharp letter of rebuke from the queen mother to Montluc on March 31. After alluding in a general way to “les maulx” due to the existence of “les partialitez et les associations, qui se sont faictes” she says:

J’ay estÉ advertye qu’il s’en est faicte une autre en la Guyenne dont est chef Monsieur de Candalle, laquelle encores qu’elle ayt estÉ faicte À bonne intention durant la guerre, si n’est-ce que, cessant la dicte guerre et se faisant la paix, elle n’est plus nÉcessaire et ne la peult ung roy trouver bonne, ny que ceulx qui veullent estre estimez obÉyssans ne peuvent soustenir sans encourir le mesme cryme de rebellion dont ilz ont accusÉ leurs adversaires. Et pour ceste cause, et que le Roy monsieur mon filz n’est pas dÉlibÉrÉ d’en souffrir plus aucun, de quelque costÉ qu’elle procedde ny permectre plus À ses subjectz, de quelque religion qu’ilz soient, d’avoir autre association qu’avec luy et selon son obÉyssance, il fault, Monsieur de Monluc, que, pour le bien de son service, comme il le vous commande expressÉment par ses lettres, que vous, qui estes son lieutenant-gÉnÉral par delÀ, faciez rompre celle qui s’est faicte sans permectre qu’ilz ayent aucune force, puissance ou authoritÉ que celle que vous leur baillerez, ny aucune voluntÉ que d’obÉyr À ce que par vous, pour le bien du service du Roy monsieur mon filz, leur sera commandÉ; pour lequel effect j’en scriptz, comme faict le Roy monsieur mon filz, une lectre audit s^r de Candalle et À tous ceulx qui y sont comprins, comme nous en avons estÉ bien amplement advertiz.[799]

Until the ambition of the Guises created an opposition to them among the old-line nobility, and so identified the Huguenot movement with the interests of the aristocracy,[800] the French Reformation found its chief support among the lower bourgeois class in the towns. The proportion naturally varied from place to place. Lyons, partly from its proximity to Geneva, but more because of its strong commercial position and its great manufacturing interests, among which the silk industry was of most importance, was the greatest Huguenot city in France.[801] Where we find Protestantism prevailing in feudal districts, it is largely to be ascribed to the influence of Protestant gentleman-farmers, often retired bourgeois, who purchased the county estates of the older nobility who had been bankrupted by the wars in Italy and Flanders, or else preferred to live at court. The strongholds of French Protestantism were the river towns, on the highways of trade, or sea-ports like Rouen and La Rochelle. DauphinÉ, which fattened on the commerce out of Italy through the Alpine passes, and Provence which bordered the Mediterranean, both of which “cleared” through Lyons; Lower Poitou, where La Rochelle was, and Normandy on the Channel were the chief Protestant provinces of France. Normandy was probably the most Protestant province of all, for here Calvinism not only obtained in the ports and “good” towns, but in the country areas as well.[802]

But there are evidences of the penetration of Protestantism into the country districts elsewhere as well—in OrlÉannais, Nivernais, BlÉsois, the diocese of NÎmes and even in isolated parts of Champagne and Gascony.[803] In general, however, the French peasantry were strongly Catholic.

The reason for this is, first, a social one: while the revolution of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was ruinous for the artisan, it was profitable to the peasant. The rent paid to the landlord, immutably fixed in the twelfth or thirteenth century, represented under the new values of money a very light burden, while the fall in the price of silver considerably raised the nominal worth of the products of the soil, when the villein sold them. The price of land was falling rapidly at the very time when the French gentry, ceasing to be an aristocracy of gentlemen-farmers and becoming a court-nobility, were compelled to sell their estates to meet their expenses and, as was said, to put their mills and meadows on their shoulders. When a lord wished to sell at any price a part of his estates, there was always, in the parish, a countryman who had been, as one may say, saving money for centuries, and who, realizing at last the dream of bygone generations, bought land. Thus did the French villein become a landowner. The reign of Louis XII and the beginning of that of Francis I was for the French peasants an epoch of real prosperity; his situation presented a striking contrast with that of the German peasant who, at the same date, was in danger of relapsing into bondage. We may easily understand why there was not in France, as in Germany, a peasants’ revolution both social and religious.[804]

But there are other reasons for the religious growth of the Huguenot cause among the people not so hard to find. Their ministers preached in the French language and avoided the use of Latin, which tended to mystery and obscurity; after sermons the service was continued with prayer and the singing of psalms in French rhyme, with vocal and instrumental music in which the congregation joined. In their church polity, the Huguenots had carried changes farther than had the Reformation elsewhere in Europe. In Germany and England the Reformation still adhered to many of the institutions of the mediaeval church, retaining the episcopate and inferior clergy, as deacons, archdeacons, canons, curates, together with vestures, canonical habits, and the use of ornaments.[805]

No reliable estimate can be made of the proportion between Catholics and Huguenots in the sixteenth century. A remonstrance of 1562 to the Pope declared that one-fourth of France was separate from the communion of Rome.[806] The Venetian ambassador thought “hardly a third part of the people heretical” in 1567.[807] The Échevins of Amiens declared three-quarters of the inhabitants of Amiens were Protestant in the same year.[808] Charles IX in a remonstrance to Pius IV asserted that a fourth part of France was Protestant.[809] Montluc, no mean observer, estimated that one-tenth of the population of Guyenne was Protestant.[810] If this proportion be applied to France at large, the Huguenots would have numbered something like 1,600,000. Beza, who presided over the synod of La Rochelle in 1571, claimed that the Huguenots had 2,150 congregations, some of them very large, as in the case of the church of Orleans, which was said to have 7,000 members. At the time of the Colloquy of Poissy, Normandy was said to have 305 pastors, Provence 60.[811] But the number of Huguenots in Normandy, Provence, or the OrlÉannais was exceptionally large. The average congregation must have been small. If we assume that the population of France was sixteen millions[812] and that one-tenth of the people were Calvinist, we would have a total of 1,600,000 Protestants for all France, which would give an average of about 750 members to each congregation on the basis of Beza’s statement as to the number of the Huguenot churches. This is certainly much too high a figure. Personally I believe the average was less than half of this. If the congregation averaged 400 members each, on Beza’s calculation there would have been 860,000 Huguenots in France. A Venetian source of the year 1562 sets the number at 600,000.[813] This may be too low, but all things considered, I believe it not far from the truth. The total Protestant population of France I do not believe to have exceeded three-quarters of a million before 1572, and after that date it is often difficult to distinguish between Huguenots and Politiques.

Such was the state of things when the first civil war came to an end.