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)
The _spontaneous_ nature of the rising of the country in the summer
of 1575 is an interesting historical phenomenon. It was by no means
confined to the south of France. In Champagne, the nobles, some of
them vassals of Guise, and _peasants_ united to fall upon the reiters.
Madame de Guise fled from Joinville in fear of being surprised by a
sixteenth-century Jacquerie. In Brittany there was a similar stir
when the King attempted to confiscate the extensive lands of the duke
of Rohan upon his death. Certain things remind one of happenings in
the French Revolution. Many in Champagne left the land and went into
the borders of Germany like the “émigrés” after August 4, 1789. In
Paris there were house-to-house visits not unlike those of September,
1793. There was universal feeling against the reiters. In Normandy
an association of gentlemen was formed for the special purpose of
protecting the country from them.[1703]
The anxiety of the government was all the greater because it was
not exactly known what relations existed between the Huguenots and
Politiques and the English. The treaty which had obtained between
Charles IX and Elizabeth was renewed by the latter on April 1, 1575,
and confirmed by Henry III on May 4.[1704] But Elizabeth was not the
person to be bound by official word. On the Picardy-Flemish border
mutual distrust prevailed. In December, 1574, Requesens had advised
Philip II of his fear of the renewal of Huguenot activity in the Low
Countries, which had been dead since the Genlis disaster,[1705] and the
garrisons on the frontiers had been increased accordingly. The marriage
of Henry III to Louise de Vaudemont gave the Spanish governor great
inquietude, for the unfortunate Egmont was her uncle, and Egmont’s
eldest son, in March, visited his royal cousin of France.[1706]
Requesens was apprehensive, too, of a marriage between the duke of
Alençon and the daughter of William of Orange,[1707] and over the fact
that the French envoy in Flanders, the sieur de Mondoucet, prudently
avoided using the official post, but employed his own couriers in
dispatching missives to Paris.[1708] “All the neighboring states are
actuated by malicious intentions,” he wailed to Philip II. “The French
and the English are in correspondence, and both are inspired by the
same spirit of hostility against the Catholic religion and against your
majesty, as the sole protector thereof.”[1709]
The arrest of a secretary of Montmorency at Boulogne in March, as
he arrived from England, and who admitted he was going to find
Damville,[1710] coupled with the absence of the prince of Condé and
Charles de Meru, the youngest Montmorency, in Germany, so disquieted
the King that early in June Schomberg was dispatched across the Rhine
to discover what Condé was doing; if he found that levies of cavalry
were being made for service in France, he was instructed to enroll
8,000 soldiers for the service of the King.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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