The Wars of Religion in France 1559-1576: The Huguenots, Catherine de Medici and Philip IIThompson, James Westfall
History
The Wars of Religion in France 1559-1576: The Huguenots, Catherine de Medici and Philip II
Thompson, James Westfall
France -- History -- Wars of the Huguenots, 1562-1598; Sainte Ligue (1576-1593)
As so often appears elsewhere in history, the economic distress and
strain of poverty was followed by psychological manifestations of
a religio-sociological sort, among the lower and poor classes. In
1565, in the villages of Champagne and Brie and especially in the
bailiwicks of Sens, Melun, Montereau, Nogent, Troyes, Châlons, Rheims,
Epernay, Château-Thierry, Meaux, and Provins, the belief spread among
the peasantry that in honor of the Virgin they ought to refrain from
working in the fields on Saturday after midday, and that this Saturday
rest had been formally ordered by the Virgin in revelations and
apparitions. A young girl of Charly-sur-Marne, near Epernay, boasted
of having received these confidences, and showed miraculous signs of
her mission. But the cardinal of Lorraine caused her to be arrested and
questioned, and she was burned alive as a witch.[997]
Instead of going to Paris, the court passed the winter at Moulins in
Bourbonnais,[998] where the famine was most slightly felt. By this
time the expectations of the Catholics and the fears of the Huguenots
were beginning to bear their bitter fruit, and in the state of public
tension every incident was magnified. At Angers, in November, the
Rohans, having forbidden Catholic worship upon their domains, the King
had had to compel them to reinstate it by threatening to dispossess
them of their châteaux; at Blois the cardinal Bourbon reproached the
queen mother for suffering the edict to be violated by permitting the
queen of Navarre and the prince of Condé to maintain court-preachers
in their entourage. The Catholics of Dijon demanded that in future
Calvinist ministers be forbidden to attend the last hours of the dying,
a petition which the cardinal of Lorraine supported in order to make
the chancellor L’Hôpital commit himself. The answer of the latter
sustained the edict’s grant of the right of selection in the matter of
religion. Of greater anxiety still was the influx of Huguenots into
the town of Moulins, Montgomery among the rest, who for the first time
since the fatal tournament of June 30, 1559, looked upon the court.[999]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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