Henri De Navarre And Catherine De Medici example essay topic

The Religious Wars History Essay The attempts by Catholic monarchs to re-establish European religious unity and by both Catholic and Protestant monarchs to establish strong centralized states led to many wars among the European states. Spain's attempt to keep religious and political unity within her empire led to a long war in the Netherlands, a war that pulled England over to the side of the Protestant Dutch. There was bitter civil war in France, which finally ended with the reign of Henry of Navarre and the Edict of Nantes in 1598. The Thirty Years War in Germany (1618-1648) had both religious and political roots, and left that area in political and economic ruins. "Une foi, un loi, un roi". (one faith, one law, one king). This traditional saying gives some indication of how the state, religion, and society were all bound up in people's mind and experience.

There was no distinction between public and private, between civic and personal. Religion had formed the basis for social consensus in Europe for a millennium. Since Clovis, the French monarchy in particular had closely tied itself to the church and the church sanctified it's right to rule. France was "the first daughter of the church" and it's king "The Most Christian King", and no one could imagine life any other way. "One faith was viewed as essential to civil order. How else would society hold together?

And without the right faith, pleasing to god who upholds the natural order, there was sure to be disaster. Heresy was treason and vice versa. Religious tolerance, which to us seems such a necessary virtue, was considered tantamount to letting drug dealers move next door and corrupt your children. A view for the cynical and world-weary who had forgotten god and no longer cared about the health of society. Innovation caused trouble. The way things were is how they ought to be, and new ideas would lead to anarchy and destruction.

No one wanted to admit to being an "innovator". The Renaissance thought of itself as rediscovering a purer, earlier time and the Reformation needed to feel that it was not new, but just a "return" to the simple, true religion of the beginnings of Christianity. These fears of innovation certainly seemed justified when Henry the Second died suddenly in 1559, leaving an enormous power vacuum at the heart of social authority in France. The monarchy had never been completely absolute and had always ruled in an often-uneasy relationship with the nobility. The nobles's else of their own rights as a class, and the ambitions of some of the more talented, was always there to threaten the hegemony of the crown. When the vacuum appeared, the House of Guise moved in.

Francois the Second, although only fifteen, was married to Mary Queen of Scots, a niece of Duc de Guise. The Guise was a cadet branch of the house of Lorraine that was raised to the peerage by Francois the First. They were ambitious and had already produced at least two generations of exceptional leaders. During Francois the Second's brief reign, Guise power was absolute. This greatly threatened the House of Montmorency, an ancient line that had enjoyed great political prominence under Henri the Second, as well as the Bourbons, who as the first princes of the blood had the rights of tutorship over a minor king.

Francois was not officially a minor, which was fourteen, but he was young and sickly and no one expected much from him. These dynastic tensions interweave with the religious and social ones. The Bourbon princes were protestant, and although the Constable de Montmorency was Catholic, his nephews, and the Chatillon brothers were Protestants. The Guise identified themselves strongly as defenders of the catholic faith and formed an alliance with Montmorency and the Mare chal St. Andre to form the "Catholic Triumvirate". They were joined by Antoine de Bourbon, who flip flopped again on the matter of his religion. His wife, Jeanne d'Albert, the Queen of Navarre, remained strictly Protestant and established Protestantism completely in her domains.

Catherine de Medici tried to promote peace by issuing the "Edict of Toleration" in January '62, which made the practice of Protestantism not a crime, although it restricted preaching to open fields outside the towns and to private estates of Huguenot nobles. This was not well received by many Catholics. The First War (1562-1563) The first religious war was provoked by the massacre at Vassy in 1562. The Duc de Guise traveling to his estates stopped in Vassy to hear mass.

His servants got into a scuffle with some Huguenots who were attending a service. It escalated until the Guise faction had fired on the unarmed Huguenots, set the church on fire, and killed a number of the congregation. The national synod for the reformed church met in Paris and appealed to the Prince de Conde to become the "Protector of the Churches". His clients, and their respective client networks took on the tasks, and from here on in the leadership of the Huguenots moved away from the pastors towards the noble "protectors". Conde mobilized his forces to capture the strategic lands along the waterways, highways, and crossroads of France. He made his headquarters at Orleans.

He also contracted with Protestant leaders of Germany and England for troops and money. The royal forces were slow to respond, as the permanent garrisons were located along the Habsburg frontiers. Catherine de Medici was forced to turn to the Guise to deal with this alarming development. The Guise in turn sought help from the Pope and Phillip the Second of Spain. The Protestants were dug-in in their garrisons, and the siege efforts were long and costly. Only one open pitched battle was fought: at Deux, a Catholic victory.

There, the Protestants captured Montmorency. The young Admiral de Coligny managed to withdraw most of the Protestant forces to Orleans, which was then besieged during the winter of 62-63. At Orleans, an assassin killed the Duc de Guise. Antoine de Bourbon had been killed at the siege of Rouen, and this last casualty eliminated the first generation of Catholic leadership. With the Huguenot heartland in the south untouched and the royal treasury becoming impoverished, the crown's position was weak and Catherine leaned towards a settlement. The noble prisoners were exchanged, and the Edict of Amboise issued in March 63.

This restricted Protestant freedoms somewhat, allowing worship outside the walls of only one town per hailliage, although the nobility still had the freedom to do as they would on their estates. This increased the resentment and tension in the towns and was generally unsatisfying to most. The Second War (1567-1568) Even though the Duc de Guise had died, the Guise faction remained powerful and the Cardinal de Lorraine consolidated his power even more. He argued for vigorous suppression of the Huguenots in response to Protestant insurrection in the neighboring Low Countries, where outbreaks of iconoclasm were met with fierce repression by Spain.

Catherine began a two-year tour of the provinces with her son Charles the Ninth, in an effort to establish unity with the nobility. During this tour, she passed through Bayonne and met with the Duke of Alva, the King of Spain's "hard man" in the subjugation of the Netherlands. This spread alarm through the Protestant community. When the Spanish marched troops along the "Spanish Road", their presence on the Eastern borders added to the panic. The rumor that Catherine was plotting with Spain to exterminate them caused the Huguenots to attempt a coup at Me aux, to seize the person of the king and get him away from the Guises.

This provoked the second war, which was much a repeat of the first. At the end of it, Montmorency was dead, the crown was more in debt, and the Peace of Longjumeau was pretty much the same as the Peace of Ambrose. The Third War (1568-1570) It was destined to be short-lived. The Cardinal de Lorraine fashioned a plan to overturn the peace and capture Conde and Coligny. They instead escaped to La Rochelle and raised an army to begin the third war.

Conde and Coligny made an alliance with William of Orange in the Netherlands. The Cardinal de Guise also saw in Mary Stuart Queen of Scotts, a tool for unseating Elizabeth and putting a Catholic monarch on that throne as well. (As long as Elizabeth was childless, Mary was next heir in England.) The third war therefore involved an even larger number of foreign interests, and lasted from 1568-1570. The Protestant strategy was to fortify the southwest and create a stand off with the crown.

This was successful for a fairly long time. However, at Jarnac, under the leadership of the king's younger brother, Henri de Anjou, the Protestants suffered a defeat and the Prince de Conde was killed. Coligny met the Catholics at Moncoutour and suffered another defeat. However, he collected his forces and made a "long march" across the south of France, depriving the crown of their chance to break the Protestant hold on the south.

The cost of the army in the field was again telling on the crown and yet another peace was negotiated at St. Germain. This peace was more favorable to the Protestants then the previous, naming specific towns as secure strongholds, returning confiscated property to the Huguenots, and guaranteeing some equality before the law. This third war was more prolonged, and brought the war to the rural areas in central and southern France, spreading the suffering to the population and raising the cultural tensions between Catholics and Protestants. The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre (1572) After the peace of St. Germain, Catherine exerted a great deal of diplomatic effort trying to establish harmony between Catholic and Protestant leaders.

Admiral de Coligny, was welcomed into the king's council, Elizabeth of England entertained the prospects of marriage to one of King Charles' younger brothers, and Catherine negotiated with Jeanne d'Albert, Queen of Navarre, to marry her daughter Margot to Henri de Navarre, the ranking Huguenot prince of the blood. However, the common people felt no such harmony, and tensions grew in the towns and countryside. Protestant beliefs had become increasingly revolutionary in the late 60's, with thinkers advocating that Christians did not have the obligation to obey leaders when they themselves defied god. Calvin himself came to the conclusion, after advocating for many years that obedience to the authorities was a Christian duty that a prince who prosecuted the church had given up his right to be obeyed.

Francois Hotman's Franco gallia was written during this time. It advocated the existence of a mythical Frankish constitution whereby the kings of France were elected by the people and governed only through their consent. This was all very frightening and served to unite the Protestant faith with treason in the mind of the average person. Along with these more abstract issues, tensions between Catholics and Protestants had some more everyday economic and social elements.

Protestants were often represented in the more lucrative trades, such as printing, out of proportion to their numbers in the general population. The Protestant emphasis on literacy as the basis for understanding the Bible made for a better-educated group. Protestantism was more an urban than a rural phenomenon, one well suited to capitalists and merchants. For example the 100 or so Catholic feast days that they didn't celebrate made for more days to do business. This wasn't viewed as being much of an advantage by the peasants, but was viewed as an unfair advantage by other Catholic townsmen. The years of persecution had created a cell-like structure of congregations, where people in the group stuck together and helped each other, both in matter of religion and everyday business.

Like that other minority in Europe, the Jews, this engendered a feeling of suspicion about their "secret" organization. The participation of women in the church, with men and women singing and studying the bible together, was viewed with a range of emotions: from a sign that society was imploding when cobblers and women could debate the meaning of the Bible, to a conviction that Protestant worship must involve some kind of orgiastic rituals. Prices had risen very sharply between the beginning of the century and the 1560's, especially the prices of food, fuel, and shelter. This seems irrelevant to matters of religion, but the stress of making ends meet, increasing homelessness, poverty in the towns, anxiety about the future, and all other factors that go with these economic pressures made for a fearful society looking for scapegoats.

Catholics felt that tolerance of heresy was like a disease in the body of Christ that threatened the very bond between god and his people. There was an increasing rhetoric among the preachers to purge this infection and restore god's favor. This tension is important background to a history changing event which occurred the evening of August 23, 1572 -the feast of St. Bartholomew. Henri de Navarre and Margot de Valois were married in Paris on August 17 and the festivities were still going on. The entire Huguenot leadership came to Paris for this wedding. Henri himself brought 800 mounted noblemen.

On August 22, as Admiral Coligny was returning to his lodgings, after a meeting with the king, an assassin shot him, breaking his arm and wounding him severely. The Huguenots were outraged and demanded justice from the king. Everyone suspected the Guises of the attack. At this time they could have easily made to the safety of a Protestant city. Feeling that it would show a lack of trust in the king, Coligny refused to flee. However, Huguenots were threatening riots in the streets if something wasn't done.

During the night of August 23, the decision was made to kill Coligny and the Huguenot leaders gathered around him. Charles the Ninth was certainly there, Catherine de Medici, Henri de Anjou. It may not have been intended to be a general massacre. Charles the Ninth was reputedly badgered into this decision by Catherine and his councilors, and when he broke he is alleged to have said, "Well then, kill them all let no man be left to reproach me". Sunday morning, a troop of soldiers came to Coligny's door. They killed the guard at the door and rushed through the house.

Coligny was stabbed and thrown out the window to the pavement below. Reputedly the Duc de Guise mocked the body, kicking him in the face and announcing that this was the king's will. Rumors ran thick and fast, somehow the militia and the general population went on a rampage, believing themselves to be fully sanctioned by the king and the church. Catholics identified themselves with white crosses on their hats, and went around butchering their neighbors. The neighborhood militias played a significant role in the slaughter. The killing went on for three days or so, with the city councilors and even the king not able to bring the whole thing under control.

There are numerous tales of atrocities, some of courage and heroism. Historians will never know what exactly happened and why. The Louvre itself was not immune. Henri de Navarre slept in his bridal suit with an entourage of 40-armed men, all of whom were killed.

Henri and his cousin the Prince Conde, were dragged before the king and threatened with death if they didn't convert. They did, and Navarre became a prisoner of the court for the next four years. Over the next few months the massacres spread to the provinces. Some thought they had orders from the crown to kill all Protestants, others thought there was no such thing. The actions of the governors and mayors depended on the individuals and the circumstances in their area. The St. Bartholomew's day massacre destroyed an entire generation of Huguenot leadership.

Henri de Navarre was a prisoner, not yet known as a quality leader. Conde escaped to Germany, and Ande lot, Coligny's younger brother was exiled to Switzerland. Although it wasn't clear at the time, this was the beginning of the decline of the Protestant Church in France. In spite of the wars the 60's had seen growth in the religion. Over the following months many Protestants despaired and abjured their faith. The experience changed many of the survivors, created distrust in the king, an unwillingness to disarm, and an upsurge in the political rhetoric of resistance.

The Huguenot "state within a state" became solidified, as the churches organized themselves into an efficient hierarchy for communications and self- protection. They collected their own tithes, maintained their own army and garrisons, and provided for the governance and social welfare of the protestant communities. The Fourth War (1572-1573) The fourth war started when the city of La Rochelle, which by default became the capital of the Protestants, refused to pay taxes to the king because of the massacre and refused admittance to the royal governor. The king declared war on the town in November '72 and sent an army to besiege it in February. The army was led by Henri de Anjou, and included Henri de Navarre as a hostage. Being a port city that was resupplied by sea with a near impregnable harbor, La Rochelle was not easily beaten.

There were high casualties on both sides, and the royal treasury began to feel the strain. The siege was called off in May, as Catherine began to prepare for the election of the Duc de Anjou to the throne of Poland. The treaty of La Rochelle was disadvantageous to the Protestants, and left them certain to break the treaty when they were strong enough. The Fifth War (1576) In 1574, Charles the Ninth died, sweating blood and reputedly tormented with the guilt of the massacre.

His brother, Henri, now installed as the king of Poland, lost no time trying to head toward the borders. He took a tour of Italy and then arrived in France to take up the crown. The people remembered him as the "young eagle" of Jarnac and Mon contour, and were waiting for him to settle things in the country. Yet, Henri the Thirds reign was tormented by the impossibility of peace. Meanwhile Conde was raising troops, money, and support from the Germans. In February '76 Navarre escaped and headed toward his own territory, raising an army behind him.

The Duc de Alen con began to play to the anti-royalist factions. This was an alliance for which Catherine had no counter at the time. When 20,000 troops invaded France under Jan Casimir in the spring of '76 and were within striking distance of Paris, the crown had to negotiate. The Edict of Beaulieu was signed in May and was favorable to the Protestants. The Sixth War (1577) In the spring of '76 a gathering of the Estates General was held. The Protestants had been pushing for this for some time, but when it came, there were almost no Protestant delegates.

The Estates advocated establishing one religion in the country. Henri the Third demanded new taxes and revenues in order to finance such a project. The Estates wanted this to be done without spending any money. The cost of the wars was driving up the national debt beyond the level of endurance.

These made the absolutists question the royal goals at such a cost. This year saw the first attempt at formation of a Catholic league to oppose the Protestants if the king would not. To put down this threat to his authority, Henri the Third declared himself the leader. However, somehow a royal force was established to take back some of the Protestant towns along the Loire. La Charity fell in May of '77, but most of the Protestant forces were in the south and there was no hope of a victory over them. The peace of Bergerac was signed in July.

It was more restrictive in allowing places of worship than the previous peace, but was still mostly more of the same. The Seventh War (1580) This was the smallest of the wars, the most notable part occurring when Henri de Navarre took the city of Ca hors. After some funding between Henri de Navarre and the crown, Henri de Navarre and Catherine de Medici signed The Treaty of Nera c. The Duc de Anjou spent this time trying to acquire ruler ship of the Netherlands.

When Anjou died in '84 it precipitated a new crisis. With Henri the Third childless and Anjou dead Henri de Navarre looked to be their next ruler. The Wars of Religion, Part Two The War of the Three Henries (1584-1589) When the Duc de Anjou died in 1584, Henri de Navarre became the presumptive heir to the throne. The Catholicity of the crown, and the special sacral role of "The Most Christian King", were principles fundamental to the constitution of France.

The threat of a Protestant crown was very disturbing. The Pope, Sixtus the Fifth, immediately excommunicated Navarre and his cousin, Henri Prince de Conde saying that as heretics they were unworthy of the throne. There were Catholics who disapproved of this interference by the pope in the internal affairs of France, but there were others who viewed it as a sanction to seize the throne of France. The chief opportunist was the Duc de Guise, who somehow managed to find a family line that could be traced to Charlemagne. The House of Guise had been strongly identified with the defense of the Catholic Church.

Guise was the son and grandson of heroes, and was a military hero himself. Henri the Third tried to convince Henri de Navarre to convert to Catholicism, as this would remove the cloud over his succession and make for a legitimate transition. Navarre was not ready to do this, as he would lose his current base of support. Guise revived the Catholic League with the goal of preventing any heretic from ascending to the throne. In December of 1584 the Guises signed the treaty of Joinville on behalf of the League with Phillip the Second of Spain. Spain poured a huge annual subsidy into the League and Guise pockets for a decade in an attempt to destabilize the government of France.

The royalist, Protestant, and League forces, all lead by men named Henri, were to engage in the longest of the wars. The Duc de Guise and his relations, the Duc de Mayenne in Burgundy, the Duc d'Aumale in Picardy, the Duc de Elboef in Normandy, the Duc de Mercoeur in Brittany, and the Duc de Lorraine controlled vast amounts of land that were claimed for the League. In addition to this noble base, the League had a growing urban following among the bourgeoisie, especially in Paris where the government was eventually in the hands of the League Committee of Sixteen. Henri the Third tried to trick the League as he had done a decade ago, by putting himself at its head. The treaty of N amours, signed in 1585, revoked all the edicts of pacification; banning the practice of the reformed religion throughout the kingdom, declaring Protestants unable to hold royal office, ordering all garrisoned towns to be evacuated, and requiring all Protestants to change their faith within six months.

The League under the leadership of the Guise, managed to dominate the north and east. Navarre and Conde entrenched in the south and went looking for foreign aid from the German princes and Queen Elizabeth. In 1587, an army of German mercenaries entered France. Guise took a League army to deal with them, and Henri the Third sent the Duc de Joyeuse to cut Navarre off in the southwest.

Navarre won the first spectacular victory at the battle of Cours, killing Joyeuse. Guise in turn sent the Germans home battered. Meanwhile the people of Paris, under the influence of inflammatory League preachers and the Committee of Sixteen, were becoming more dissatisfied with Henri the Third and his failure to put down the Protestants. To be a moderate Catholic was almost as bad as being heretic to the Leaguers. In May of 1588, a popular uprising where barricades went up in the streets of Paris for the first time caused Henri the Third to flee the city. The Committee of Sixteen took complete control of the government and welcomed the Duc de Guise to the city.

The League asked for a meeting of the Estates- General, which was held in Blois in the fall. Their proposed heir to the crown was the Cardinal de Bourbon, Navarre's uncle. He was an old man and would have been a puppet figure for the Guises. There was even a fear that Henri the Third would be forced to resign and that the people might proclaim Guise king. On Christmas Eve 1588, when the Guise was at Blois for the meetings, Henri the Third invited him to his quarters. Guise should have been suspicious from the row of archers lining the stairwell to the king's apartments, and of the forty gentlemen waiting in the anteroom.

When he entered, the doors were bolted and although he struggled heroically, he was cut to pieces, his body burnt, and the ashes scattered to the wind. The same happened to his brother the Cardinal de Guise. This removed the two preeminent leaders from the House of the Guise, but it left the younger brother, the Duc de Mayenne, who now became leader of the League. Henri's triumph over the House of Guise was short-lived.

The League took over printing revolutionary tracts, exceeding by far in vitriol the earlier anti-royalist tracts of the Huguenots. The Sorbonne proclaimed that it was just and necessary to depose Henri the Third, and that any private citizen was morally free to commit regicide. And in fact, one of them eventually did. The League sent an army against Henri the Third, and Henri the Third asked Navarre for an alliance. The two kings joined forces to reclaim Paris. In July 1589, in the royal camp at St. Cloud, a monk named Jacques Clement begged an audience with the king and put a long knife into his spleen.

At first it looked as though he would recover, but the wound worsened. On his deathbed, Henri the Third called for Navarre and named him his heir. The Wars of the League (1589-1598) Henri the fourth's position was delicate. Some of the late Henri the Third's followers gave their loyalties to their new leader, and others just melted away. The League staged coups in many of the principal cities of France.

In a reign of terror, they kept a watch on the political correctness of the citizens, hanging moderates, Protestants, and suspicious persons. Well financed with Spanish money, Mayenne took to the field; Henri the Fourth brought the war out of the south and into the north, which was critical if he wanted to be king of France and not just king of Gascony. In September of 1589, Henri met Mayenne and dealt him a serious defeat at Argues. His army swept through Normandy, taking town after town that winter, and then he inflicted an even more crushing defeat to the League in the March of 1590 at Ivy.

The League pretender, the Cardinal de Bourbon, died, weakening the League position even further. Henri laid siege to Paris in the spring and summer of 1590. Although he reduced it to severe hunger, he made humanitarian gestures such as letting women and children leave. This is not militarily wise by a besieger, as it allows the remaining food in the city to be consumed solely by combatants. The situation alarmed Phillip the Second of Spain, who ordered the Duc of Parma to divert from suppressing the Dutch to relieving the siege.

Parma was able to get supplies into the city. Soon after Henri the Fourth was obliged to withdraw. In 1593, the League held an Estates-General in Paris, to name a candidate for the throne of France. The Spanish proposed the Infanta, the daughter of Phillip the Second by Elizabeth de Valois, the late Henri the third's sister, who would be married to a French noble like the Duc de Guise.

This was a departure from the Salic Law, and Parliament passed a law that the throne can't go to any foreigner, At this point Henri the Fourth changed his faith, reputedly with the famous witticism that "Paris is worth a mass". This was a blow to the League, as it removed the chief objection of many of the more moderate Catholics to Henri the Fourth. A coronation was set up at Chartres, rather than at the traditional Reims, which was in the hands of the League. Many people did not trust the conversion, including some Protestants.

Still, some of Henri's hardcore Protestant followers withdrew from him. In the end, he won over enough moderate Catholics to strengthen his position. In the spring of 1594, Henri the Fourth entered Paris without firing a shot, and the Spanish garrison walked out. It wasn't over yet but Henri was in possession of his capital. He began a vigorous campaign of winning over support of moderate Catholics with a combination of charm, money, and promises. A great amount of money was spent guaranteeing nobles pensions and positions in exchange for the support, and a great deal of money was given to the towns in exchange for their support.

In the end Henri considered it a bargain compared to the costs of war. Meanwhile the king of Spain continued his offensive in the northern territories, hoping to unite with the rebellious League lords. Cambrai, Doullens and Calais were all taken in 1595 and 1596. Henri the Fourth besieged La Fere, a Spanish outpost in French territory. In 1597, the Spanish took Amiens. The king fought back quite vigorously.

Finally, in 1598, faced with financial problems of their own, the Spanish signed the treaty of Verviens, which restored the captured towns of France. Of the League leaders, Mayenne capitulated in '96, the young Guise in '95, and Mercoeur at last in '98.1598 saw the publication of the Edict of Nantes, which granted Huguenots freedom of worship and civil rights for nearly a century, until Henri the Fourth's descendant Louis the Fourteenth revoked it in 1685..