CHAPTER XVI.
THE THIRD CIVIL WAR
Relative advantages of the Roman Catholics and Huguenots.
Enthusiasm of Huguenot youth.
Enlistment of Agrippa d'Aubigné.
Having narrowly escaped falling into the hands of their treacherous enemies, and finding themselves compelled once more to take up arms in defence of their own lives and the liberties of their fellow-believers, the Prince of Condé and Admiral Coligny resolved to institute a vigorous contest. A single glance at the situation, the full dangers of which were now disclosed by the tidings coming from every quarter, was sufficient to convince them that in a bold and decided policy lay their only hope of success. The Roman Catholics had, it is true, enjoyed rare opportunities for maturing a comprehensive plan of attack; although the sequel seemed to prove that they had turned these opportunities to little practical use. But the Huguenots possessed countervailing advantages, in close sympathy with each other, in fervid zeal for their common faith, as well as in an organization all but perfect. Simultaneously with their flight from Noyers, the prince and the admiral had sent out a summons addressed to the Protestants in all parts of the kingdom, and this was responded to with enthusiasm by great numbers of those who had been their devoted followers in the two previous wars. Multitudes of young men, also, with imaginations inflamed by the recital of the exploits of their fathers and friends, burned to enroll themselves under such distinguished leaders. Many were the stratagems resorted to by these aspirants for military honors. Among others, the eminent historian, Theodore Agrippa d'Aubigné, has left an amusing account of the adventures he passed through in reaching the Huguenot recruiting station. His prudent guardian had taken the precaution to remove Agrippa's clothes every evening, in order to prevent him from carrying out his avowed purpose of entering the army; but one night, on hearing the report of the arquebuse – which a number of his companions, bent on the same course, had fired as a signal near his place of confinement – the youth boldly lowered himself to the ground by the sheets of his bed, and, with bare feet and no other clothing than a shirt, made his way to Jonzac. There, after receiving an outfit from some Protestant captains, he jotted down at the bottom of the receipt which he gave them in return, the whimsical declaration "that never in his life would he blame the war for having stripped him, since he could not possibly leave it in a sorrier plight than that in which he entered it."587
The court proscribes the reformed religion.
The resolution and enthusiasm of the Huguenots were greatly augmented by the imprudent course of the court. Notwithstanding their own guilty designs, Catharine and the Cardinal of Lorraine were taken by surprise when the news reached them that Condé and Coligny had escaped, and that the Huguenots were everywhere arming. So sudden an outbreak had not been expected; and, while awaiting the muster of that portion of the troops that had been dismissed, but was now summoned to assemble at Étaples on the 10th of September,588 it was thought best to quiet the agitated minds of the people. A declaration was accordingly published, assuring all the adherents of the reformed faith who remained at home and furnished no assistance to the enemy, of the royal protection, Charles promising, at the same time, to give a gracious hearing to their grievances.589 But, as soon as the Roman Catholic forces began to collect in large numbers, and the apprehension of a sudden assault by the Huguenots died away, the court threw off the mask of conciliation, and Charles was made to sign two laws unsurpassed for intolerance. The first purported to be "an irrevocable and perpetual edict." It rehearsed the various steps taken by Charles the Ninth and his brother Francis in reference to the "so-called reformed religion," from the time of the tumult of Amboise. It alluded to the edicts of July and of January – the latter adopted by the queen mother, by advice of the Cardinals of Bourbon and Tournon, of the constable, of Saint André, and others, because less objectionable than an edict tolerating the worship of that religion within the walls of the cities. None of these concessions, it asserted, having satisfied the professors of the new faith, who had collected money and raised troops with the intent of establishing another government in place of that which God had instituted, the king now repealed the edicts of toleration, and henceforth prohibited his subjects, of whatever rank and in all parts of his dominions, on pain of confiscation and death, from the exercise of any other religious rites than those of the Roman Catholic Church. All Protestant ministers were ordered to leave France within fifteen days. Quiet and peaceable laymen were promised toleration until such time as God should deign to bring them back to the true fold; and pardon was offered to all who within twenty days should lay down their arms.590 The second edict deprived all Protestant magistrates of the offices they held, reserving, however, to those who did not take part in the war, a certain portion of their former revenues.591
In order to give greater solemnity to the transaction, Charles, clothed in robes of state and with great pomp, repaired to the parliament house, to be present at the publication of the new edicts, and with his own hands threw into the fire and burned up the previous edicts of pacification. "Thus did his Royal Highness of France," writes a contemporary German pamphleteer with intense satisfaction, "as was seemly and becoming to a Christian supreme magistrate, pronounce sentence of death upon all Calvinistic and other heresies."592
Impolicy of this course.
Nothing devised by the papal party could have been better adapted to further the Huguenot cause than the course it had adopted. The wholesale proscription of their faith united the Protestants, and led every able-bodied man to take up arms against a perfidious government, whose disregard of treaties solemnly made was so shamefully paraded before the world. "These edicts," admits the candid Castelnau, "only served to make the whole party rise with greater expedition, and furnished the Prince of Condé and the admiral with a handle to convince all the Protestant powers that they were not persecuted for any disaffection to the government, but purely for the sake of religion."593
Attempts to make capital of the proscriptive measures.
Efforts were not spared by the Guisard party to make capital abroad out of the new proscriptive measures. Copies of the edicts, translated from the French, were put into circulation beyond the Rhine, accompanied by a memorial embodying the views presented by an envoy of Charles to some of the Roman Catholic princes of the empire. The king herein justified himself for his previous clemency by declaring that he had entertained no other idea than that of allowing his subjects of the "pretended" reformed faith time and opportunity for returning to the bosom of the only true church. Lovers of peace and good order among the Germans were warned that they had no worse enemies than the insubordinate and rebellious Huguenots of his Very Christian Majesty's dominions, while the adherents of the Augsburg Confession were distinctly given to understand that Lutheranism was safer with the Turk than where Calvin's doctrines were professed.594
To influence the princes the offices of skilled diplomatists were called into requisition, but to no purpose. When Blandy requested the emperor, in Charles's name, to prevent any succor from being sent to Condé from Germany, Maximilian replied by counselling his good friend the king to seek means to restore concord and harmony among his subjects, and professing his own inability to restrain the levy of auxiliary troops. And from Duke John William, of Saxony, the same envoy only obtained expressions of regret that the war so lately suppressed had broken out anew, and of discontent on the part of the German princes at the rumor that Charles had been so ill advised as to join in a league made by the Pope and the King of Spain, with the view of overwhelming the Protestants.595
A "crusade" preached at Toulouse.
On the other hand, the new direction taken by Catharine met with the most decided favor on the part of the fanatical populace, and the pulpits resounded with praise of the complete abrogation of all compacts with heresy. The Roman Catholic party in Toulouse acted so promptly, anticipating even the orders of the royal court, as to make it evident that they had been long preparing for the struggle. On Sunday, the twelfth of September, a league for the extermination of heresy was published, under the name of a crusade. A priest delivered a sermon with the consent of the Parliament of Toulouse. Next day all who desired to join in the bloody work met in the cathedral dedicated to St. Stephen – the Christian protomartyr having, by an irony of history, more than once been made a witness of acts more congenial to the spirit of his persecutors than to his own – and prepared themselves for their undertaking by a common profession of their faith, by an oath to expose their lives and property for the maintenance of the Roman Catholic religion, and by confession and communion. This being done, they adopted for their motto the words, "Eamus nos, moriamur cum Christo," and attached to their dress a white cross to distinguish them from their Protestant fellow-citizens. Of success they entertained no misgivings. Had not Attila been defeated, with his three hundred thousand men, not far from Toulouse? Had not God so blessed the arms of "our good Catholics" in the time of Louis the Eighth, father of St. Louis, that eight hundred of them had routed more than sixty thousand heretics? "So that we doubt not," said the new crusaders, "that we shall gain the victory over these enemies of God and of the whole human race; and if some of us should chance to die, our blood will be to us a second baptism, in consequence of which, without any hinderance, we shall pass, with the other martyrs, straight to Paradise."596 A papal bull, a few months later (on the fifteenth of March, 1569), gave the highest ecclesiastical sanction to the crusade, and emphasized the complete extermination of the heretics.597
Fanaticism of the Roman Catholic preachers.
The faithful, but somewhat garrulous chronicler, who has left us so vivid a picture of the social, religious, and political condition of the city of Provins during a great part of the second half of this century, describes a solemn procession in honor of the publication of the new ordinance, which was attended by over two thousand persons, and even by the magistrates suspected of sympathy with the Protestants. Friar Jean Barrier, when pressed to preach, took for his text the song of Moses: "I will sing unto the Lord, for He hath triumphed gloriously: the horse and his rider hath He thrown into the sea." His treatment of the verse was certainly novel, although the exegesis might not find much favor with the critical Hebraist. The Prince of Condé was the horse, on whose back were mounted the Huguenot ministers and preachers – the riders who drove him hither and thither by their satanic doctrine. Although they were not as yet drowned, like Pharaoh and his army in the Red Sea, France had great reason to rejoice and praise God that the king had annulled the Edict of January, and other pernicious laws made during his minority. As for himself, said the good friar, he was ready to die, like another Simeon, since he had lived to see the edicts establishing "the Huguenotic liberty" repealed, and the preachers expelled from France.598
The Huguenot places of refuge.
Similar rejoicings with similar high masses and sermons by enthusiastic monks, were heard in the capital599 and elsewhere. But the jubilant strains were sounded rather prematurely; for the victory was yet to be won. The Huguenot nobles, invited by Condé, were flocking to La Rochelle; the Protestant inhabitants of the towns, expelled from their homes, were generally following the same impulse. But others, reluctant, or unable to traverse such an expanse of hostile territory, turned toward nearer places of refuge. Happily they found a number of such asylums in cities whose inhabitants, alarmed by the marks of treachery appearing in every quarter of France, had refused to receive the garrisons sent to them in the king's name. It was a wonderful providence of God, the historian Jean de Serres remarks. The fugitive Huguenots of the centre and north found the gates of Vézelay and of Sancerre open to them. Those of Languedoc and Guyenne were safe within the walls of Montauban, Milhau, and Castres. In the south-eastern corner of the kingdom, Aubenas, Privas, and a few other places afforded a retreat for the women and children, and a convenient point for the muster of the forces of Dauphiny.600
Jeanne d'Albret and D'Andelot reach La Rochelle.
Meantime, the Queen of Navarre, with young Prince Henry and his sister Catharine, started from her dominions near the Pyrenees. The court had in vain plied her with conciliatory letters and messages sent in the king's name. Gathering her troops together, and narrowly escaping the forces despatched to intercept her, she formed a junction with a very considerable body of troops raised in Périgord, Auvergne, and the neighboring provinces, under the Seigneur de Piles, the Marquis de Montamart, and others, and, after meeting the Prince of Condé, who came as far as Cognac to receive her, found safety in the city of La Rochelle.601
From an opposite direction, François d'Andelot, whom the outbreak of hostilities overtook while yet in Brittany, was warned by Condé to hasten to the same point. With his accustomed energy, the young Châtillon rapidly collected the Protestant noblemen and gentry, not only of that province, but of Normandy, Touraine, Maine, and Anjou, and with such experienced leaders as the Count of Montgomery, the Vidame of Chartres, and François de la Noue, had reached a point on the Loire a few miles above Angers. It was his plan to seize and hold the city and bridge of Saumur, and thus secure for the Huguenots the means of easy communication between the two sides of the important basin intervening between the smaller basins of the Seine and the Garonne. His expectations, however, were frustrated principally by the good fortune of M. de Martigues, who succeeded in making a sudden dash through D'Andelot's scattered divisions, and in conveying to the Duke of Montpensier at Saumur so large a reinforcement as to render it impossible for the Huguenots to dream of dislodging him.602 For a time D'Andelot was in great peril. With only about fifteen hundred horse and twenty-five hundred foot,603 he stood on the banks of a river swollen by autumnal rains and supposed to be utterly impassable, and in the midst of a country all whose cities were in the hands of the enemy. He had even formed the desperate design of retiring twenty or thirty miles northward, in hope of being able to entice Montpensier to follow him so incautiously that he might turn upon him, and, after winning a victory, secure for himself a passage to the sources of the Loire or to his allies in Germany. At this moment the joyful announcement was made by Montgomery that a ford had been discovered. The news proved to be true. The crossing was safe and easy. Not a man nor a horse was lost. The interposition of heaven in their behalf was so wonderful, that, as the Huguenot troopers reached the southern bank, the whole army, by common and irresistible impulse, broke forth in praise to Almighty God, and sang that grand psalm of deliverance – the seventy-sixth.604 Never had those verses of Beza been sung by more thankful hearts or in a nobler temple.605
Success in Poitou, Angoumois, etc.
Full of courage, the exultant troops of D'Andelot now pressed southward. First the city of Thouars fell into their hands; then the more important Partenay surrendered itself to the Huguenots. Here, according to the cruel rules of warfare of the sixteenth century, they deemed themselves justified in hanging the commander of the place, who had thrown himself into the castle, for having too obstinately insisted upon standing an assault in a spot incapable of defence, together with some priests who had shared his infatuation.606 Admiral Coligny now met his brother, and the united army, with three cannon brought from La Rochelle, forming his entire siege artillery, demanded and obtained the surrender of Niort, the size and advantageous position of which made it a bulwark of La Rochelle toward the east. Angoulême, Blaye, Cognac, Pons, and Saintes, were still more valuable acquisitions. In short, within a few weeks, so large a number of cities in the provinces of Poitou, Angoumois, and Saintonge had fallen under the power of the Protestants, that they seemed fully to have retrieved the losses they had experienced through the treacherous peace of Longjumeau. "In less than two months," writes La Noue of his fellow-soldiers, "from poor vagabonds that they were, they found in their hands sufficient means to continue a long war."607 And the veteran Admiral Coligny, amazed at the success attending measures principally planned by himself, was accustomed to repeat with heartfelt thankfulness the exclamation attributed to Themistocles: "I should be lost, if I had not been lost!"608
Affairs in Dauphiny, Provence, and Languedoc.
Powerful Huguenot army in the south.
It effects a junction with Condé's forces.
Meantime, in the south-eastern part of France, the provinces of Dauphiny, Provence, and Lower Languedoc, the Huguenots had not been slow in responding to the call of the Prince of Condé. The difficulty was rather in assembling their soldiers than in raising them; for there was little lack of volunteers after the repeal of the royal edicts in favor of the Protestants. With great trouble the contingents of Dauphiny and Provence were brought across the Rhône, and at Alais the Baron d'Acier609 mustered an army to go to the succor of the Prince of Condé at La Rochelle. A Roman Catholic historian expresses his profound astonishment that the Huguenots of this part of the kingdom, when surprised by the violation of the peace, should so speedily have been able to mass a force of twenty-five thousand men, well furnished and equipped, and commanded by the most excellent captains of the age – Montbrun, Mouvans, Pierre-Gourde, and others.610 The abbé's wonder was doubtless equalled by the consternation which the news spread among the enemies of the Huguenots. The Roman Catholics could bring no army capable of preventing the junction of D'Acier's troops with those of Condé; but the Duke of Montpensier succeeded, on the twenty-fifth of October, in inflicting a severe loss upon one of the divisions at Messignac, near Périgueux. Mouvans and Pierre-Gourde, who were distant from the main body, were attacked in their quarters, by a force under Brissac, which they easily repulsed. D'Acier, suspecting the design of the enemy, had commanded the Huguenot captains to make no pursuit, and to await his own arrival. But brave Mouvans was as impatient of orders as he was courageous in battle. Disregarding the authority which sat so lightly upon him, he fell into an ambuscade, where he atoned for his rashness by the loss of his own life and the lives of more than a thousand of his companions. After this disaster, D'Acier experienced no further opposition, and, on the first of November, he met the advancing army of Condé at Aubeterre, on the banks of the Dronne.611
With the new accessions to his army, the prince commanded a force very considerably larger than any he had led in the previous wars. Among the conflicting statements, we may find it difficult to fix its numbers. Agrippa d'Aubigné says that, after the losses consequent upon the defeat of Messignac and those resulting from camp diseases, Condé's army consisted of only seventeen thousand foot soldiers, and two thousand five hundred horsemen.612 A Huguenot bulletin, sent from La Rochelle for the information of Queen Elizabeth and the Protestants of England, may have given somewhat too favorable a view of the prince's prospects, but was certainly nearer the truth, in assigning him twenty-five thousand arquebusiers and a cavalry force of five or six thousand men.613 On the other hand, Henry of Anjou, who had been placed in nominal command of the Roman Catholic army, had not yet been able to assemble a much superior, probably not an equal, number of soldiers. The large forces which, according to his ambassador at the English court, Charles the Ninth could call out,614 existed only on paper. The younger Tavannes, whose father was the true head of the royal army, gives it but about twenty thousand men.615
It was already nearly winter when the armies were collected, and their operations during the remainder of the campaign were indecisive. In the numerous skirmishes that occurred the Huguenots usually had the advantage, and sometimes inflicted considerable damage upon the enemy. But the Duke of Anjou, or the more experienced leaders commanding in his name, studiously avoided a general engagement. The instructions from the court were to wear out the courage and enthusiasm of Condé's adherents by protracting a tame and monotonous warfare.616 The prince's true policy, on the contrary, lay in decided action. His soldiers were inferior to none in France. The flower of the higher nobility and the most substantial of the middle classes had flocked to his standard so soon as it was unfurled. But, without regular commissariat, and serving at their own costs, these troops could not long maintain themselves in the field.617 The nobles and country gentlemen, never too provident in their habits, soon exhausted their ready funds, with their crowd of hungry retainers, and became a more pitiable class than even the burgesses. The latter, whom devotion to their religious convictions, rather than any thirst for personal distinction, had impelled to enter the service, could not remain many months away from their workshops and counting-rooms without involving their families in great pecuniary distress. It was not, however, possible for Condé and Coligny to bring about a combat which the duke was resolved to decline, and the unparalleled severity of the season suspended, at the same time, their design of wresting from his hands the city of Saumur, a convenient point of communication with northern France. Early in December the vines were frozen in the fields,618 disease broke out in either camp, and the soldiers began to murmur at a war which seemed to be waged with the elements rather than with their fellow-men. While Anjou's generals, therefore, drew off their troops to Saumur, Chinon on the Vienne, and Poitiers, Condé's army went into winter quarters a little farther west, at Montreuil-Bellay, Loudun and Thouars, but afterward removed, for greater commodity in obtaining provisions, to Partenay and Niort.619
Huguenot reprisals and negotiations.
It was while the Huguenots lay thus inactive that their leaders deliberated respecting the best means of providing for their support during the coming campaign. Jeanne d'Albret, whose masculine vigor620 had never been displayed more conspicuously than during this war, was present, and assisted by her sage counsels. It was determined, in view of the cruelties exercised upon the Protestants in those parts of the kingdom where they had no strongholds, and of the confiscation of their property by judicial decisions, to retaliate by selling the ecclesiastical possessions in the cities that were now under Huguenot power, and applying the proceeds to military uses. The order of sale was issued under the names of the young Prince of Navarre, of Condé, Coligny, D'Andelot and La Rochefoucauld, and a guarantee was given by them. As a reprisal the measure was just, and as a warlike expedient nothing could be more prudent; for, while it speedily filled the coffers of the Huguenot army, it cut off one great source of the revenues of the court, which had been authorized both by the Pope and by the clergy itself to lay these possessions under contribution.621
Already the temper of the Protestant leaders had been sounded by an unaccredited agent of Catharine de' Medici, who found Condé at Mirebeau, and entreated him to make those advances toward a peace which would comport better with his dignity as a subject than with that of Charles as a king. But the prince, who saw in the mission of an irresponsible mediator only a new attempt to impede the action of the confederates, had dismissed him, after declaring, in the presence of a large number of his nobles, that he had been compelled to resort to arms in order to provide for his own defence. The war was, therefore, directed not against the king, but against those capital enemies of the crown and of the realm, the Cardinal of Lorraine and his associates. All knew his own vehement desire for peace, of which his late excessive compliance was a sufficient proof; but, since the king was surrounded by his enemies, he intended, with God's favor, to come and present his petitions to his Majesty in person.622
William of Orange attempts to aid the Huguenots.
Abroad the Huguenots had not been idle in endeavoring to secure the support of advantageous alliances. So early as in the month of August, after the disastrous defeat of Louis of Nassau, at Jemmingen, the Prince of Orange had contemplated the formation of a league for common defence with the Prince of Condé and Admiral Coligny. A draft of such an agreement has been preserved; but it is unsigned, and may be regarded rather as indicative of the friendly disposition of the French and Dutch patriots than as a compact that was ever formally adopted.623 That same autumn William of Orange had undertaken an expedition intended to free the Netherlands from the tyranny of Alva. He had been met with consummate skill. The duke refused to fight, but hung remorselessly on his skirts. The inhabitants of Brabant extended no welcome to their liberator. The prince's mercenaries, vexed at their reception, annoyed by the masterly tactics of their enemy, and eager only to return to their homes, clamored for pay and for plunder. Orange, outgeneralled, was compelled to abandon the campaign, and would gladly have turned his arms against the oppressors of his fellow-believers in France; but his German troops had enlisted only for the campaign in the Netherlands, and peremptorily declined to transfer the field of battle to another country. However, the depth of the Meuse, which had become unfordable, furnished more persuasive arguments than could be brought forward by Genlis and the Huguenots who with him had joined the Prince of Orange, and the army of the patriots was forced to direct its course southward and to cross the French frontier.
Consternation and devices of the court.
Declaration of the Prince of Orange.
Great was the consternation at the court of Charles. Paris trembled for its safety, and vigorous were the efforts made to get rid of such dangerous guests. Marshal Cossé, who commanded for his Majesty on the Flemish border, was too weak to copy successfully the tactics of Alva; but he employed the resources of diplomacy. His secretary, the Seigneur de Favelles, not content with remonstrating against the prince's violation of the territory of a king with whom he was at peace, endeavored to terrify him by exaggerating the resources of Charles the Ninth and by fabricating accounts of Huguenot reverses. Condé, he said, had been forced to recross the river Vienne in great confusion; and there was a flattering prospect that he would be compelled to shut himself up in La Rochelle; for "Monseigneur the Duke of Anjou" had an irresistible army of six thousand horse and twenty-five or thirty thousand foot, besides the forces coming from Provence under the Count de Tende, the six thousand newly levied Swiss brought by the Duke d'Aumale, and other considerable bodies of troops.624 Gaspard de Schomberg625 was despatched on a similar errand by Charles himself, and offered the prince, if he came merely desiring to pass in a friendly manner through the country, to furnish him with every facility for so doing. In reply, William of Orange, although the refusal of his soldiers to fight against Charles626 left him no alternative but to embrace the course marked out for him, did not disguise his hearty sympathy with his suffering brethren in France. In view of the attempts made, according to his Majesty's edict of September last, to constrain the consciences of all who belonged to the Christian religion, and in view of the king's avowed determination to exterminate the pure Word of God, and to permit no other religion than the Roman Catholic – a thing very prejudicial to the neighboring nations, where there was a free exercise of the Christian religion – the prince declared his inability to credit the assertions of his Majesty, that it was not his Majesty's intention to constrain the conscience of any one. He avowed his own purpose to give oppressed Christians everywhere all aid, comfort, counsel, and assistance; asserting his conviction that the men who professed "the religion" demanded nothing else than the glory of God and the advancement of His Word, while in all matters of civil polity they were ready to render obedience to his Majesty. He averred, moreover, that if he should perceive any indications that the Huguenots were pursuing any other object than liberty of conscience and security for life and property, he would not only withdraw his assistance from them, but would use the whole strength of his army to exterminate them.627 After this declaration, the prince prosecuted his march to Strasbourg, where he disbanded his troops, pawning his very plate and pledging his principality of Orange, to find the means of satisfying their demands. Great was the delight of the royalists, great the disappointment of the Huguenots, on hearing that the expedition had vanished in smoke. "The army of the Prince of Orange," wrote an agent of Condé in Paris, "after having thrice returned to the king's summons a sturdy answer that it would never leave France until it saw religion re-established, has retreated, in spite of our having given it notice of your intention to avow it. I know not the cause of this sudden movement, for which various reasons are alleged."628 William the Silent had not, however, relinquished the intention of going to the assistance of the Huguenots, whose welfare, next to that of his own provinces, lay near his heart. Retaining, therefore, twelve hundred horsemen whom he found better disposed than the rest, he patiently awaited the departure of the new ally of the French Protestants, Wolfgang, Duke of Deux-Ponts (Zweibrücken), in whose company he had determined to cross France with his brothers Louis and Henry of Nassau.629