CHAPTER 1

THE WARS OF RELIGION

‘O France désolée! O terre sanguinaire …’

Agrippa d’Aubigné¹

‘C’est la Réligion dont le zèle inhumain

Met à tous les François les armes à la main …’

Voltaire²

Few modern scientists attain to that awesome prestige and influence which belonged to astrologers in the sixteenth century. Of these the greatest was Nostradamus. In October 1564 the French court on a royal progress through southern France came to Salon-de-Crau where the sage lived and, as often before, the Queen Mother, Catherine de Medici, sought his advice; he had prophesied the death of her husband Henri II and would err only once in foretelling her children’s fate. With the court was a boy of eleven, Henri de Bourbon, Prince of Navarre and Béarn and premier peer of France, a Prince of the Blood Royal but without any hope of the throne for his Valois cousin King Charles IX had good health and two lively brothers. The master of Henri’s household was therefore amazed when Nostradamus visited him secretly, begging to see the young Prince. Afterwards the old seer told him: ‘If you live, you will have for master a King of France and Navarre.’³

From his birth at Pau Henri’s life has a quality of legend. When his mother was with child, her father, King Henri d’Albret, made her promise that while in labour she would sing him a song ‘so that’, he told her, ‘you will not bear a puling, sulky infant.’ Jeanne d’Albret sang in her own language the song of all Béarnais mothers,

Nouste Dame deu cap deu pount

Adyudatz-me ad aqueste hore

Pregatz au Diu deu ceu …⁴

imploring the Virgin, whose chapel stood on the bridge over the river at Pau, to pray God for a speedy delivery and the gift of a son. Lying beneath the Pyrenees Jeanne herself prayed ‘tout denq au haut deus mountz’—from the very tops of the mountains. Henri was born in the early morning of 13 December 1553, neither weeping nor crying. His delighted grandfather wrapped the baby in a fold of his cloak and gave a gold box containing his will to the exhausted mother, saying ‘that’s for you but this is for me’. Then he rubbed the child’s lips with a clove of garlic and made it sip some wine from his gold cup, to ensure ‘that his temperament would be manly and vigorous’; the wine was eagerly swallowed—‘You will be a real Béarnais’ pronounced Henri d’Albret.⁵ Then this hopeful heir to a lost kingdom was enshrined in his cradle, a turtle’s carapace.⁶ By some instinct the exiled, disappointed King of Navarre was confident that the little boy was going to avenge all his wrongs.

The christening was regal enough. In March 1554 the infant Henri was baptized in a silver gilt font, specially constructed for the occasion. The godfathers were two kings, both Henris, his grandfather, who was Henri II of Navarre, with Henri II of France, his godmother being that Madame Claude de France, who later became Duchesse de Guise. A local poet wrote how his faithful people would help him ‘far vasals toutz autres en batalha’,⁷ a polite compliment which became a prophecy.

However, when the Baron de Dourcoedipe spoke of making vassals he meant in Navarre, not France. Until the advent of Ferdinand and Isabella that ancient and once great kingdom had been one of the Five Spains, a small, mountainous land stretching from the northern slopes of the Pyrenees to the Ebro, inhabited by Latinized Basques, fierce hillmen who were noted for their attachment to old customs. Then in 1512, southern Navarre, the greater part of the realm, was overrun, and henceforward a tiny strip of territory north of the mountains constituted the entire Kingdom. Yet this minute border state retained considerable influence. Its ruling family, the d’Albrets, had for centuries been rich and powerful lords in the area between Dax and Bayonne and the little kingdom was buttressed by the Counties of Béarn, Grailly, Albret, Foix, Armagnac and Bigorre, so that Henri d’Albret could style himself ‘Henric Second, Rey de Navarra et Senhor Souviran de Béarn’.⁸ Nor was it impossible that his subjects north of the Pyrenees might one day be reunited to their southern brothers; as late as 1559 Spanish grandees advised Philip II to restore southern Navarre to the King at Pau. But King Henri had died in 1555, stipulating that he must be buried at Pamplona when his parents’ capital had been recovered. To his descendants he bequeathed his hatred of the Habsburg usurpers.

The new King and Queen of Navarre had made a love match in 1548 when Jeanne’s first marriage to the Duke of Cleves was annulled, for non-consummation. Her husband was Antoine de Bourbon, eldest son of the Duc de Vendôme, a descendant of Robert de Clermont, sixth son of St Louis, and claimant to the French throne should the Valois fail. He was a man of enormous charm, generous, enthusiastic, witty, sympathetic as much to inferiors as to equals, and very brave. Unfortunately he was also wildly unstable and just as he adored women he loved a lost cause; his father-in-law made him determined to recover Navarre. A charming blue stocking, in her youth the exquisite Jeanne had been called ‘la mignonne des rois’ because both her father and her uncle, François I, were excessively fond of her. Gay yet melancholy, in her later years stern Protestant dévote, she was always an enigma, perhaps even to her dutiful son. This was a poetess who could reply to a tribute from Joachim du Bellay in no less graceful lines. She and Antoine were devoted to their Prince de Viana, whose title had been born by all heirs of Navarre since 1423 even if the Béarnais knew him as Duc de Beaumont.⁹ It is odd that this supreme man of action should have inherited such a world of dreams.

He had forbears no less colourful than his parents. Among them was a paladin of the Hundred Years War, Gaston III of Foix, that host of Froissart who refused to pay homage to the Black Prince and was surnamed Phoebus for his beauty and magnificence. Henri’s grandmother, Marguerite d’Angoulême, wife of Henri d’Albret and sister to François I, was perhaps the most gifted of all. This half-Lutheran mystic who had protected Calvin and been reverenced by Clément Marot belonged as much to the Renaissance as to the Reformation; her Heptameron was another Decameron, but less bawdy. These mingled strains of Valois, Bourbon, Albret and Foix were a potent, indeed an explosive heritage.

Yet Henri’s earliest years were spent in a world neither courtly nor intellectual. He was a difficult child to wean, requiring eight wet nurses, before his governess, Suzanne d’Albret, took him to her husband’s castle of Coarraze in the Pyrenees. Here, by command of his grandfather, Henri was not treated as a prince or given toys but brought up à la Béarnoise with the local peasant children, running barefoot among the mountains and eating the same food of coarse bread, beef, cheese and garlic.¹⁰ His time at the castel was the foundation of an unfailing common touch, and of iron health. His first language was Bernes, a form of Provençal which was still a written as well as a spoken tongue. Later, like his mother, Henri learnt to speak French, in which his correspondence was always conducted. The people of the Midi continued to refer to France as distinct from their own country while the northern French regarded them as foreigners. It cannot be too much emphasized that Henri was essentially a man of the south.

At the end of 1556 he visited ‘France’. Paris, the largest city of northern Europe, must have been a bewildering experience for a small boy from rustic Béarn. Despite the new Louvre it still belonged to the Middle Ages, not the Renaissance. Behind crenellated ramparts a maze of narrow streets, dark alleys, turreted bridges and embattled watergates traversed a vast Gothic warren of tall, steep roofed wooden houses surrounding innumerable stone churches, convents and halls, gabled, buttressed, crocketed and pinnacled, each with its own spire or bell tower, a spectacle so beautiful as to be almost magical, yet also menacing. The dirt and the noise were overpowering. If its palaces and hôtels housed the greatest lords and prelates in the land and if its stalls sold the richest wares, Villon’s underworld remained untamed while the mob could show staggering ferocity. Henceforward, this gorgeous, sinister city would always be in Henri’s mind even when he was absent from it. One day Paris would deny him a throne.

In February 1557 he was presented to Henri II who took a great fancy to him, asking if he would like to become his son.¹¹ ‘Quet es lo senhor pay’—that’s my father, replied the small Béarnais, pointing to Antoine. ‘My son-in-law, then?’ laughed the King. ‘O bé’—Oh yes, came the reply and thus Henri of Navarre was affianced to Marguerite de Valois. Next year he returned to Pau where, as Regent and Lieutenant-General of the King and Queen of Navarre, he remained for three eventful years until 1561.

On 2 April 1559 France and Spain signed the Treaty of Câteau-Cambresis. For Spain it meant political and military dominance for almost a century. For France it was disaster; though in the previous year she had regained Calais from England, Spain’s Catholic ally, she had not recovered from her terrible defeat at St Quentin in 1557. Further, she was bankrupt; in an era of chronic and bewildering inflation the French Crown had staked its entire resources and lost them. The Lyons money market collapsed, the whole machinery of government was imperilled, and vast numbers of Frenchmen were ruined. The nobility, which in France included the gentry, suffered most, many of its members being forced to sell their lands while peace closed the only profession open to them, military service. The country swarmed with discharged soldiery, officers and men, all without hope of employment.

Antoine de Bourbon was outraged that France should conveniently forget his claims to southern Navarre. Taking matters into his own maladroit hands he summoned the muster of Guyenne, of which he was Governor, and marched on Fonterrabia, the key to the Navarrese frontier, deaf to anguished pleas from Paris which saw the peace in jeopardy. But the autumn of 1559 was unusually wet and mountain roads became torrents of impassable mud, fortunately as it turned out, for the army’s guide was a Spanish agent leading them into a trap.¹² Antoine turned back, his great expedition ending in farce. A new scheme was still more harebrained; he negotiated with the Sherif of Fez for a north African base from whence he could conquer territory to offer Spain in exchange for Navarre—but the response of Philip II was not encouraging. However, Henri II had died in July 1559, mortally wounded in a tournament by a lance thrust, so Antoine’s fanciful ambition saw glittering opportunities in France itself.

François II was a sickly fifteen year old and, although he was legally of age and as no one yet understood ‘that Florentine shopkeeper’ the Queen Mother, Catherine de Medici, three factions had high hopes of winning control of the King and France. The firstgroup was that of the stern old Constable, Anne, Duc de Montmorency, and his three Chatillon nephews: Gaspard, Admiral de Coligny, a notable hero of the recent wars, Odon, Cardinal de Chatillon, and François, Sieur d’ Andelot. However, they could hardly match the might of the house of Guise whose estates spread over all northern France and which as a cadet line of the Dukes of Lorraine enjoyed immense respect. Its six gifted brothers were led by the two eldest: François, Duc de Guise, named le Balafré or Scarface after a lance-thrust in the face and France’s most redoubtable soldier, and Charles, the Cardinal of Lorraine, renowned for avarice and intrigue, who as Archbishop of Rheims had the right of crowning the King. These mighty feudatories were uncles to King François’ young consort, Mary, Queen of Scots. None of the three Bourbon brothers could command such power. Antoine received scant respect, the Cardinal de Bourbon was a timid, retiring nonentity, while the youngest, Louis, Prince de Condé, was a hunchback with insufficient means to support his rank. Nonetheless Condé with his feverish ambition was a born leader whose drive and latent panache were reinforced by personal magnetism. And the Bourbons let no one forget that they were Princes of the Blood Royal, that the throne must be theirs should the Valois line fail.

France was threatened by a return of its Wars of the Roses, that struggle between Armagnac and Burgundy which made the Kingdom incapable of resisting Henry V. Feudal appanages were still very much of a reality, their lords wielding life and death, levying taxes, tolls and customs; frequently the Crown gave them the governorship of a province. France had never curbed the private armies of these magnates who, from the later Middle Ages, had been accustomed to hire troops with the rents their tenants gave instead of military service; veterans of the Spanish war now looked to such patrons for rich pickings. Bastard feudalism was in full noxious flower.

Another source of strife menaced the Kingdom, heresy, more dangerous than any feudal revival. Hitherto the Reformation had made scant headway in France, its converts being mainly academics. But the doctrines of Geneva with their terrible logic and simplicity had inherent appeal for cerebral Frenchmen and towards the close of the late King’s reign had begun to spread through the universities, then down the rivers, the period’s railways, to the provincial towns. Noblemen and bourgeois were converted but comparatively few peasants; the latter clung to their Catholicism, especially to those semi-pagan rites which tied it so closely to the soil. Henri II took fright, reacting in the same tragic fashion as Mary Tudor; one reason for ending the lost war with Spain was the need to extirpate heresy at home. Under François II the Guises, convinced, uncomplicated Catholics, rigorously implemented Henri’s ferocious Edict of Ecouen against heretics; the Cardinal wished to bring back the Inquisition. Fewer were burnt than in England, and at the stake were often shown mercy of strangling, but France was horrified. The Reform found a whole host of ardent converts.

Even so they were not so numerous as the Cardinal feared; he believed that two-thirds of the Kingdom had turned heretic. In 1559 the Calvinist divine, Theodore Beza, thought that ‘the Religion’ numbered four hundred thousand, though this may well have been too modest a figure. Probably there were never more than a million Huguenots in the period of their greatest success. They were therefore a comparatively small proportion of the total French population, variously estimated at between sixteen and twenty million, a ratio less than that of Recusant Catholics to Anglicans in the England of the Armada. But these Huguenots included many of the most able and influential elements in the country while political and social circumstances gave them a strength out of all proportion to their numbers. If they were few they nonetheless hoped to establish the Reform as the state church, even though their immediate object was freedom of worship. Calvinism was no more tolerant than Romanism.

In the sixteenth century most educated men—and many who were illiterate—had a Byzantine familiarity with theology. Every Protestant knew how to analyse and refute such Romish errors as Transubstantiation or the Sacrificial Priesthood while Catholics could skilfully demolish the heresies of predestination or justification by faith alone. For issues of this sort men fought and died with sublime courage. Nowadays their fanaticism is incomprehensible but it becomes understandable when related to the psychology of the age. Protestantism’s strength lay in its annihilation of the guilt complex. The century preceding the Reformation had, in northern Europe, been one of morbid gloom, until Luther wrote ‘Pecca fortiter, crede fortius’; a modern disciple has re-written this doctrine of justification by faith as ‘Man cannot accept himself, therefore God accepts him’.¹³ To this the Calvinist added the conviction that from all eternity he had been predestined to be saved. The Catholic’s inspiration was the embattled barque of Peter, launched by Christ Himself, which would ride out the storm raised by Satan and carry the Faithful safely through this world’s sorrows and temptations. Those who took part in the Wars of Religion did not fight for metaphysical abstractions but for the meaning of life itself, for their very sanity.

War did not come in François II’s reign. During this time the Guises were all powerful; the Duke commanded the royal armies and the Cardinal Archbishop directed the actual machinery of government. Their position seemed impregnable. Condé, poor, proud and resentful was too hotheaded to suffer this insulting dominance; Princes of the Blood could not take second place. He would overthrow the Balafré and that priest. In any case Condé and his brother had been converted to the reformed faith.

So early as 1558 Antoine had been involved with Calvinists and in 1559 he accepted the Reform, giving Henri a Protestant tutor, the Sieur de la Gaucherie, who was told to instruct the child in the faith of Geneva. From his correspondence it is clear that Antoine was genuinely religious and there is no need to doubt the sincerity of his conversion even if he afterwards reneged. But there were compelling secular reasons why he should turn Huguenot. First, the Reform was making ground in his own domains; there is to this day a strong element of puritanism in the southern French and it is significant that Albigensians had once flourished in this area. Secondly, he would establish a bond with many of those opposed to the Guises; the Chatillon brothers were in process of conversion. Thirdly, and most promisingly, the Huguenots constituted a political party with an ideology and structure no less dynamic than those of Fascists or Communists in the 1930s; a cell system of consistories (the governing bodies of the local churches), colloquies,provincial synods and a national synod, was organized with formidable efficiency. Each consistory had not only a minister but also a captain, each colloquy its colonel, experienced soldiers who were responsible for their protection, while there was an invaluable intelligence network. With the Huguenots the Bourbons might well capture France. No doubt Antoine still hoped for a policy which might regain southern Navarre, Condé for a no less substantial reward.

Condé’s first bid for power ended in disaster. With English money he hired troops to seize the King. On 20 March 1560 the little force was discovered near Amboise by royal troops and quickly routed, a skirmish named the ‘tumult of Amboise’ for it was hardly more than an armed brawl. Nothing could be proved against Condé but he was tried for his life while bloody reprisals followed among the less mighty. Catholics and Huguenots began to murder each other.

Now the Queen Mother began to assert herself. Protestant hagiographers and Alexandre Dumas portray Catherine de Medici as an amoral virago while Jean Heritier has discerned a tolerant bourgeoise mother whose sole ambition was to preserve her children’s heritage. In his later years Henri himself inclined to this latter view, in a mood of particularly extravagant tolerance: ‘I ask you, what could she have done, the poor woman, left at her husband’s death with five small children and two families in France—ours and the Guises—who hoped to get the Crown for themselves? Wasn’t it necessary for her to play some strange roles, to deceive each and everybody to defend her sons [as she did] who reigned in turn by the wise guidance of that wily woman? You are going to say that she did harm to France. The marvel is that she didn’t do worse.’¹⁴ In many ways ‘cette rusée femme’, though not so fortunate and certainly more human, resembled Elizabeth of England; neither Queen lacked religion nor scruple while sharing a genius for politics and a taste for Machiavelli, and if she never had the Tudor majesty, as a matriarch with ineffectual sons Catherine acquired all the Tudor lust for power. Sometimes too clever but always resourceful the Florentine did in fact employ the famous escadron volant of court beauties to ensnare susceptible opponents, though she was never a poisoner. This plump little woman with her white face and black clothes, her passion for good food, astrology and horsemanship, and her careful charm, would one day be Henri’s greatest and most dangerous opponent.

In the spring of 1560, though the Cardinal was still in full control, she obtained the appointment of a like-minded Chancellor of France, Michel de L’Hôpital, the first of the ‘Politiques’, those Catholics who preferred peace to religious war. Desperately he and Catherine worked for an understanding between Huguenot and Papist. The glacier left by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation has only just begun to recede so it is seldom realized that the sixteenth century had its own ecumenists. Among Catholics Cardinal Contarini was the most positive while Pope Adrian VI could admit that his Church bore much guilt. The Emperor Charles V did not despair of rapprochement and there were such concessions as that of the cup to Bohemian laity. Most optimistic of all was the Flemish theologian, Georges Cassander. It was inevitable that Reformers and Papists would part company yet many contemporaries thought co-existence was possible. L’Hôpital, a devout Catholic and an ambassador for France at the Council of Trent, believed that whatever their differences Christians ought to be able to live together in peace: ‘Let us get rid of these devilish words, these names of party, of faction, of sedition—Lutheran, Huguenot, Papist—let us keep unadulterated the name of Christian.’¹⁵ Politiques were not yielding to expediency when they wished to recognize Protestant Baptism, a proposal which outraged Tridentine hardliners: today the Roman Church accepts the common Baptism of all Christians. Even if it did not prevail and was disowned by the majority of theologians an ecumenical solution undoubtedly existed. The ultimate heir of Michel de L’Hôpital would be Henri IV.

It was tragic and timely that François II should die in 1560, struck down by mastoiditis. His young widow returned to Scotland and a destiny which ended on the block at Fotheringay. The Guise rule was over: there had to be a Regent, as Charles IX was not of age. This might have been Antoine de Bourbon in his capacity as First Prince of the Blood but he let Catherine have the Regency, taking for himself the second greatest position in the Kingdom, that of Lieutenant-General. A policy of compromise succeeded one of extermination.

King Antoine has rarely been given credit for commonsense yet he recognized Catherine’s ability and avoided a head-on clash with the Guises. His next step, in 1561, is usually regarded as one of shallow inconstancy, his return to Catholicism. No doubt he detested the Papacy which had obliged Spain by excommunicating King Jean d’Albret in 1512 when she invaded Navarre; and like many Frenchmen in the 1550s, Antoine, who was probably nearer Lutheranism than Calvinism, had regarded the Reform as a reform of Gallicanism, not as a rival church, preferring to retain the bulk of Catholic doctrine; in England he would have been an Anglican. But the prospect of jacqueries—there was trouble with his own southwestern peasants—and a growing realization that most Frenchmen opted for Catholicism had made him believe that the Church must be reformed from within and that Protestantism meant war. Further, Spain now dangled the bait of Navarre before this resilient optimist’s credulous eyes.¹⁶ Alas, his statesmanlike attitude was not well received by his wife who, the previous year, had herself been received into the Reform; in her memoirs she wrote that her husband’s apostasy was ‘une dure espine, je ne diray pas au pied, mais au coeur …’.¹⁷ Poor Jeanne’s sorrow was hardly assuaged by Antoine’s many and notorious adulteries, for which he was rebuked by Calvin himself. The love match had foundered in noisy recrimination.

Young Henri had good cause to ponder on his father’s spiritual volte face. He was brought to Paris and entrusted to a new tutor, who would instruct him in the Catholic faith. But Henri, at eight, was a staunch Protestant for La Gaucherie had been a preceptor of genius. His methods were far removed from the period’s brutal pedagogy; instead the boy was taught by ‘discourses and entertainments’. Some of the aphorisms learnt from La Gaucherie remained with Henri all his life, e.g. ‘Ou vaincre avec justice ou mourir avec gloire’¹⁸ It was some months before the little Huguenot would go to Mass, a long time for a child, and then only after Jeanne d’Albret had been ordered from the Court in March 1562.

The first of the French Wars of Religion had begun at the end of the same month despite frantic efforts by Catherine and L’Hôpital which had even included debate; the Colloquy of Poissy in September 1561 was a brave attempt to find a compromise, but Protestant and Catholic theologians, the latter led by the Cardinal de Lorraine, wrangled implacably. The Colloquy proved a disaster; stated differences hardened into insurmountable barriers, making conflict inevitable. On Sunday, 1 March 1562, a Congregation of Reformers were holding their service at Wassy, outside the town walls in accordance with the law. The Duc de Guise, who was staying near by, arrived with his retinue, ordering them to disperse. They refused whereupon over seventy unarmed men and women were massacred. Though the Huguenots had themselves perpetrated worse slaughters during recent months Condé called upon the Religion to be ready for war; he wanted a Rubicon. Ordered to leave Paris he was soon at Orléans with Coligny, d’Andelot and an army of Reformers. Meanwhile the Queen turned to the Catholic Triumvirat: the Duc de Guise, the Constable de Montmorency and the Marshal de St André. Throughout France members of the rival creeds attacked each other, killing, burning, raping, torturing, and looting. As Pascal said, a hundred years later, ‘Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.’

The atrocities were as outrageous as they were cruel. In a frenzy of Protestant iconoclasm churches were desecrated and their clergy hunted down like vermin; one Huguenot captain wore a necklace of priests’ ears while the infamous Baron des Adrets made Catholic prisoners leap to their death from a high tower. Even the dead were attacked; at Orléans a Reformist mob burnt the heart of poor François II and threw Joan of Arc’s statue into the river. The Counter-Reformation was not yet in evidence so Papist fanatics were rare but nonetheless Catholics were goaded into fury. At Tours two hundred Huguenots were drowned in the Loire while the bodies of those slaughtered at Sens came floating down to Paris. That grim old soldier Blaise de Montluc made Protestant captives jump from the battlements¹⁹ and remarked with satisfaction that all knew where he had passed by the trees which bore his livery—a hanged Huguenot;²⁰ on one occasion he strangled a pastor with his own hands.

The Triumvirs petitioned Spain for help. Philip II was neither the brooding demon of the Escorial conjured up by English Protestantism and Verdi’s Don Carlos, nor the hero King of Spanish tradition, but an arch-bureaucrat trying to play an impossible world role. His own domains included Spain and the Americas, with from 1580, Portugal and her empire in America, Africa and Asia, besides the Two Sicilies, Milan, Franche Comté, the Netherlands and many lesser territories, while his cousin held the Habsburg lands in Austria together with Hungary, Bohemia and the Imperial Crown. Protestantism within these vast possessions meant political as well as spiritual disruption, so it was inevitable that Habsburg hegemony should become the secular axis of the Counter-Reformation with Philip as Catholic champion, even if he sometimes put Spain before Rome. His attitude towards France was complex; while he welcomed her weakness and growing division he also dreaded not only a Protestant France but a France whose King, swayed by Huguenots, might aid dissident Netherlanders. Ceaselessly he urged Catherine to crush her heretics without mercy, advice which held a tacit threat of invasion. Spanish pikemen remained the most important external factor throughout the French Wars of Religion. However, fear of uniting France by a national war would deter Philip for many years yet.

Condé took a desperate step. The English ambassador, that zealous Reformer Sir Nicholas Throckmorton,²¹ was a loud advocate of a Protestant Front. On his advice Elizabeth graciously accepted Le Havre from the Huguenot leaders at the secret treaty of Richmond in September; it was to be exchanged for Calais. An English garrison occupied the port, waiting to be reinforced by a detachment of German Protestants under d’Andelot, but even Huguenots regarded this International Brigade with mixed feelings.

Rouen, held by the Religion and the most important city of Normandy, was besieged by the Triumvirs. In October the Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom, ‘pissant aux trenchée’²² as Agrippa d’Aubigné puts it, was shot and mortally wounded, expiring a month later in the arms of his most recent mistress and dying not a Catholic or a Calvinist but a Lutheran. This amiable weathercock, who till the very end was deluded by the ignis fatuus of a Navarrese restoration, has seldom been taken seriously, yet Antoine had a good deal in common with his son who must have mourned him.

In December the Reformers were defeated at Dreux and Condé was captured. The Guises had triumphed. But in February 1563 the Sieur Poltrot de Méré pistolled le Balafré as he was attacking Orléans; under torture he confessed, falsely, that he had been commissioned by Coligny. Next month the Peace of Amboise ended the war, Condé settling for freedom of worship for noblemen of the Religion. Le Havre was taken from the English in July; despite plague it was bravely defended but Huguenots joined with Catholics to expel the ancient enemy and as the Constable said, ‘d’ici à Bayonne tout crie “Vive France”.’²³

The peace was an uneasy one. Persecution and counter-persecution continued, especially in Béarn where Jeanne d’Albret had been establishing the Reform since 1562; ‘the Catholics there were very badly treated, pillaged and massacred, Churches and Monasteries reduced to ashes, and Priests cruelly martyred and hunted down by the new reformers.’²⁴ In September 1563 Pius IV excommunicated her, but, thanks to the Queen Regent’s protection, Jeanne was unscathed though she promised Catherine to treat her Catholics more kindly. Nonetheless some Basque gentry rose, unsuccessfully, to defend their clergy. Meanwhile Henri remained at the French court where he was allowed to rejoin the Reform and La Gaucherie became his tutor once more.

During the first War of Religion and for most of the years which followed the young Prince of Navarre was in Paris away from his mother. If the Valois looked for a political settlement between the rival creeds they nonetheless practised Catholicism and were surrounded by Catholics while the capital itself was Papist. Henri had to grow up in an atmosphere which was covertly hostile and this must have induced a feeling of isolation in an enthusiastic boy, at his age naturally partisan, as well as developing aggressive instincts; no doubt he welcomed eagerly every victory of his uncle Condé, praying for the Religion’s ultimate triumph which with the innate optimism of childhood he probably assumed to be inevitable, while Huguenot reverses would have bewildered him. From an early age the little Béarnais had a sharp nose for politics; at eleven he attended the Bayonne conference, unregarded, and afterwards warned Queen Jeanne of Spanish pressure on Catherine to crush the heretics. His adolescence was passed in an atmosphere of intrigue and sectarian hatred. Yet somehow he learnt how to compromise and how not to give way to bitterness. To mature in such a hostile and fearful world into a balanced, tolerant human being was a considerable achievement.

The young Prince attended classes at the Collège de Navarre, together with the new Duc de Guise and the future Henri III. This college on the hill of St Geneviève had been founded by Philippe le Bel and was a notable ornament of the Paris University. Henri learnt to speak, read and write Latin and Greek with some fluency, obtaining a thorough knowledge of the Classics, including Plutarch’s Lives in the much admired translation by Catherine’s chaplain, Jacques Amyot; in these troubled times the statesmen and soldiers of antiquity were excellent models for apprentice princes. It must never be forgotten that despite its optimism the Renaissance looked to the past, to the Golden Age of Antiquity; Bernini and Palladio believed that they built in the purest Graeco-Roman style, while Machiavelli could advocate arming soldiers as Roman legionaries or equipping the Venetian navy with triremes. The Prince of Navarre was also well grounded in theology, both devotional and polemic; in the early summer of 1566 he wrote to his mother about a parcel of Protestant books, ‘fine artillery to frighten Romans’. He was beginning to write letters of real literary merit, so much so that he has been called a writer without knowing it. In March 1567 Henri returned to Béarn to complete his education.

In 1567 he visited Bordeaux from where a magistrate wrote to the Duc de Nevers that ‘it must be confessed he is a pretty youth’.²⁵ At thirteen Henri seemed more like a boy of nineteen and ‘enters into conversation like a polished gentleman’. And it was all too prophetic that ‘though his hair be a little red the ladies do not think him the less agreeable for that. His face is finely shaped, his nose neither too large nor too small, his eyes full of sweetness, his skin brown but very clear and his whole mien animated with an uncommon vivacity so that if he is not well with the ladies he is very unfortunate.’²⁶

At Pau he had found a new tutor, Florent Chrestian, ‘homme de très agréable conversation et fort versé aux belles lettres, mais tout-à-fait Huguenot’.²⁷ Though no record survives one may surmise what other instruction he received besides letters. Naturally war came first. He was taught to be a skilled swordsman in the fashionable Italian manner, his lengthy rapier balanced by a poignard, and also to handle pole-axe, halberd or spontoon, or even the great infantry spear, eighteen foot long, in an age when gentlemen did not disdain ‘to trail the puissant pike’. For shooting he had only the arquebus with its clumsy firing rest and spluttering match. On active service ‘three quarters armour’ was worn, his reins’ hand holding a dag or wheel-lock pistol while the rapier was discarded for a heavy broadsword. To carry this weight Renaissance warriors still rode the mediaevaldestrier, more like a cart horse than a cavalry charger, and spent long hours at battle drill; understandably tilting remained a useful exercise.

Fighting instincts and powers of endurance were developed by hunting to which Henri like all Bourbons was passionately addicted.²⁸ Thirty-mile points after buck or stag inured him to hard riding, while the valet de limier or harbourer taught him to pit his wits against elusive quarry. This was especially true of otter hunting; wading through perilous mountain streams, great skill and patience were required before a dim shape could be speared beneath the water. Courage was needed when killing boar or wolf; the animal had to be dispatched with a short sword—which meant seizing one of its legs and stabbing upwards—or in the case of boar with a spear, one’s back against a tree, butt on one’s foot, point aimed at the charging brute’s forehead. To face half a ton of grey bristled wrath wielding blood-stained tusks, unshaken by disembowelled hounds, was dangerous sport yet not so perilous as bear hunting, in which Pyrennean mountaineers traditionally dispatched the beast with a knife. No doubt stalking birds with a crossbow or a primitive fowling piece improved Henri’s marksmanship, but hawking took the place of modern shooting, Iceland falcons or peregrines being the equivalent to a pair of Purdeys. This sport brought out other qualities; patience while training, persistence in retrieving lost hawks and a knack of judging wind and rain. French forests were a trackless waste infested with outlaws and savage animals, as were the mountains. It was easy to lose one’s way and lonely sportsmen faced many hazards; in rainy autumns streams became unfordable and marshes turned into evil quagmires while sport in the winter snow was more hazardous still—huntsmen often died from cold or in avalanches.

Besides arms and venery a young magnate’s education included heraldry and genealogy, a most practical study; in an age without directories an encyclopaedic knowledge of the influential families of each province and their relationships was indispensable. Henri would also have learnt manners and dancing, singing, and such parlour games as chess, dice and backgammon. He played skittles and became very fond of royal tennis, for which there was a court in the château at Pau.

These pleasant pursuits were interrupted by the Second and Third Wars of Religion. In September 1567 the Huguenots who had become increasingly suspicious of the Queen Mother, tried to seize her and Charles IX at Meaux, a plot which miscarried lamentably though François de la Noue—Bras-de-Fer—and fifteen horsemen seized Orléans.²⁹ The Religion desecrated more churches and slaughtered more Papists; in Nîmes, at Michaelmas, the Huguenot mob threw eighty-eight of them down wells, monks, priests and laymen, then heaped earth on top, a horror commemorated as the Michelade. Catholics retaliated in like fashion. A pitched battle was fought at St Denis, outside Paris, in November, where the old Constable de Montmorency, last of the Papist Triumvirs, was killed. In March 1568 peace was made at Longjumeau, an unreal peace, for the Queen was still determined to discipline these insolent heretics. The Third War broke out in the autumn, Catherine’s plot to seize Condé and Coligny having failed in its turn, and the Prince and the Admiral fled to La Rochelle, now the citadel of French Protestantism and soon in a state of siege. Hither came Jeanne d’Albret and her son, Jeanne writing to that other Protestant Queen, Elizabeth of England, to beg for advice and munitions, and sending her jewels and tapestry as a pledge of repayment.³⁰ Charles IX announced his intention of invading Béarn, and though the invasion never took place this was going to be a more serious war than the previous two whose desultory raids and skirmishes were replaced by full-scale campaigns conducted by large and well equipped armies. Bloodshed flared all over France, worse than before, while Michel de l’Hôpital was forced to leave court for ever; on 28 September 1568 the Religion was forbidden all public worship and, shortly afterwards, its members were excluded from any public office.

The Counter-Reformation did not begin to make itself felt in northern Europe until the late 1560s; hence the failure of the Marian reaction in England and the early success of the French Reform. However, when at length it came, the balance of religious power changed dramatically. Long before, an implacable Jesuit General had denounced Beza and his friends as ‘loupi, volpi, serpenti, assassini’.³¹ Now at a time when Protestantism was losing its initial momentum Catholic theologians, who had hitherto been hopelessly inadequate, became the equals and often the masters of their Calvinist adversaries, while Jesuits, together with revitalized friars, roused mobs no less efficiently than Protestant ministers. In France’s first two Wars of Religion Rome was on the defensive; by the Third she had gone over to the attack so that the Huguenots would be hard put to hold their ground despite a brave spirit and an iron party system. For Catholics compromise had become a sin.³²

King Charles was growing up into a violent, nervous youth and had conceived a peculiar hatred for Condé; it seems that the previous year the Prince had a medal struck bearing his own effigy with the legend ‘Louis XIII, first Christian King of the French’. After this year’s mutual plots neither Royal family nor Princes of the Blood dared trust each other. Now the army was given a Royal commander, the King’s seventeen-year-old brother Henri, Duc d’Anjou, known as Monsieur. With the aid of experienced advisers he engaged and smashed the Protestant rearguard at Jarnac on 13 March 1569. Condé, unhorsed and helpless after leading a charge with the splintered bones of a shattered leg sticking through his boot, was taken prisoner, but an officer of Anjou’s Guards blew his brains out; the body was paraded on a donkey through the Catholic camp by the Duke’s order. The Huguenot Prince Rupert left much to his nephew, panache, ambition and an inability to admit defeat. Also he bequeathed the leadership of the Religion. Queen Jeanne presented her fifteen-year-old son to the Huguenot army who acclaimed him, but the real leader was that grim zealot, the Admiral de Coligny. Henri accompanied the army throughout, showing fine spirit, though one must discount tales of precocious military talent.

The war continued. Both sides were aided by co-religionists from Germany, Italy and Spain. The Reform’s troops numbered 25,000, mainly cavalry, German schwarz-reiters or diables noirs—‘armoured pistoleers’—and Huguenot squires. The Catholics had 30,000, including Spanish infantry, the most formidable soldiers of their day. The wretched conflict raged throughout France, not merely in sieges or on the battlefield but in countless bestial riots and man-hunts. In September the Admiral was tortured and beheaded in effigy at Paris, his coat-of-arms debruised and a rich price laid on his body, while the same month the Duc d’Anjou caught him at Montcontour; 10,000 Protestants were killed or wounded, the Catholics losing only 200, though that strange young man, Monsieur, was as merciful as he had been pitiless at Jarnac, ordering that the wounded Huguenots be given medical care. Coligny and the Prince of Navarre limped away but they were still able to fight at Arnay-le-Duc in June 1570. Catherine and King Charles now sought a compromise, as both sides were bled white. On 8 August the Peace of St Germain restored the Religion’s right of public worship, guaranteeing the settlement with four places de sûreté, Huguenot strongholds manned by Huguenot garrisons—La Rochelle, Montauban, La Charité and Cognac.³³ The Reiters were sent home, while Catholic Béarnais were given freedom of worship. The Reformers, though still hopeful of ultimate triumph, were exhausted and ready to try co-existence until they regained their strength.

Much of the Reform’s ardour came from the nearness of Calvin’s Geneva; Huguenot ministers were trained in this French-speaking city where God’s Kingdom had been set up. However, no minister had more burning zeal than Gaspard de Coligny. Middle-aged, but a patriarch before his time, the Admiral with this thick grey beard, sober clothes and quiet, reflective eyes was no cavalier like Condé, but a Calvinist missionary who thought only of converting France. Over cautious as a soldier, Coligny was a bold and imaginative politician. In view of the Huguenots’ relatively small numbers—perhaps one in every fifteen Frenchmen—it may be supposed that their leader would have been content with freedom of worship, yet he hoped for nothing less than the evangelization of the entire Kingdom and the extirpation of ‘idolatry’. This pious hope did not depend on purely supernatural factors. The triumph of the Reformation in England had been won by the personal faith of the Sovereign; Coligny believed that even if Charles IX were not converted the ambitions of the Guise party might force Catherine to give him control of the government, that he could then ensure the Huguenots’ success by declaring war on Spain—Le Havre had shown how national sentiment could conquer religious division. But the sense of divine mission impaired the Admiral’s judgement and he could not see that Catherine would never entrust herself and her children to a minority, let alone go to war with Spain.

Henri returned to Pau. His residence befitted the Prince of a proud minority for it was the château where he had been born, a Renaissance palace from the Loire valley built by his grandparents which had once sheltered such reformers as Clément Marot. In this splendid setting Queen Jeanne held her sober court, far removed from Love’s Labour Lost;³⁴ her time was given up to the Religion—even carnivals were frowned upon. Henri’s two brothers had died in infancy so, apart from his eleven-year-old sister Catherine de Bourbon, he enjoyed his mother’s undivided attention and there must have been clashes between the gay young sensualist and the stern dévote who worried about his salvation. In view of his name for wenching the pious Queen had good cause for concern. Anxious that he should find healthy outlet for his youthful energy she had the tennis court at Pau rebuilt in 1571. When she died Henri was deeply upset, writing of his ‘deuil et angoisse’,³⁵ of his unbearable grief.

He was now a short slender youth with dark hair, no longer reddish, brushed up en brosse from a long brown face with a long nose, a full mouth and amused eyes; already he gave an impression of strength and amiability.³⁶

Queen Jeanne died in June 1572 as her son was on his way to his marriage, probably of tuberculosis though rumour claimed she had been murdered by Catherine’s perfumer—with poisoned gloves whose noxious scent penetrated the brain.³⁷ Even Henri seems to have suspected poison. When he rode into Paris that same month, in mourning with eight hundred horsemen in black,³⁸ he came as a King, occupier of the lost throne of the d’Albrets; for Huguenots he was a Gideon, to Catholics a King out of Moab. He had grown up amid hatreds which would continue to rend France for another quarter of a century and he must now start on the long road to her salvation through the same enemies who had overcome his father and his uncle. Few men have inherited so daunting a destiny. To survive, let alone succeed, this son of a weathercock trimmer and nephew of a bitter hunchback adventurer would have to be a veritable David. It was lucky that he could not foresee what lay immediately in store, for seldom has a bridegroom hasted to a wedding which would end in such infamy and horror.