History of the Rise of the Huguenots. Baird Henry Martyn
of war more remorsely inflicted.178 But the barbarities of a licentious army were exceeded in atrocity by the cooler deliberations of the Norman parliament. That supreme court, always inimical to the Protestants, had retired to the neighboring city of Louviers, in order to maintain itself free from Huguenot influence. It now returned to Rouen and exercised a sanguinary revenge. Augustin Marlorat, one of the most distinguished among the reformed ministers of France, and the most prominent pastor of the church of Rouen, had been thrown into prison; he was now brought before the parliament, and with others was sentenced to death as a traitor and a disturber of the public repose, then dragged on a hurdle to the place of execution and ignominiously hung.179
The ferocity of the Norman parliament alarming the queen mother, she interfered to secure the observance of the edict of amnesty she had recently prepared. But serious results followed in the case of two prominent partisans of Guise who had fallen into Condé's hands, and were in prison when the tidings reached Orleans. On the recommendation of his council, the prince retaliated by sending to the gallows Jean Baptiste Sapin, a member of the Parisian parliament, and the Abbé de Gastines, who had been captured while travelling in company with an envoy whom the court were sending to Spain.180
Death of Antoine de Bourbon, King of Navarre.
The fall of Rouen was followed within a few weeks by the death of the King of Navarre. His painful wound was not, perhaps, necessarily mortal, but the restless and vainglorious prince would not remain quiet and allow it to heal. He insisted on being borne in a litter through the breach into the city which had been taken under his nominal command. It was a sort of triumphal procession, marching to the sound of cymbals, and with other marks of victory. But the idle pageant only increased the inflammation in his shoulder. Even in his sick-room he allowed himself no time for serious thought; but, prating of the orange-groves of Sardinia which he was to receive from the King of Spain, and toying with Rouhet, the beautiful maid of honor by whom Catharine had drawn him into her net, he frittered away the brief remnant of an ignoble life. When visibly approaching his end, he is said, at the suggestion of an Italian physician, to have confessed himself to a priest, and to have received the last sacraments of the Romish Church. Yet, with characteristic vacillation he listened, but a few hours later, with attention and apparent devoutness, to the reading of God's Word, and answered the remonstrances of his faithful Huguenot physician by the assurance that, if he recovered his health, he would openly espouse the Augsburg Confession, and cause the pure Gospel to be preached everywhere throughout France.181 His death occurred on the seventeenth of November, 1562, at Les Andelys, a village on the Seine. He had insisted, contrary to his friends' advice, upon being taken by boat from Rouen to St. Maur-des-Fossés, where, within a couple of leagues of Paris, he hoped to breathe a purer air; but death overtook him before he had completed half his journey.182
Had Antoine embraced with sincerity and steadfastly maintained either of the two phases of religious belief which divided between them the whole of western Christendom, his death would have left a void which could have been filled with difficulty. He was the first prince of the blood, and entitled to the regency. His appearance was prepossessing, his manners courteous. He was esteemed a capable general, and was certainly not destitute of administrative ability. If, with hearty devotion, he had given himself to the reformed views, the authority of his great name and eminent position might have secured for their adherents, if not triumph, at least toleration and quiet. But two capital weaknesses ruined his entire course. The love of empty glory blinded him to his true interests; and the love of sensual pleasure made him an easy dupe. He was robbed of his legitimate claims to the first rank in France by the promise of a shadowy sceptre in some distant region, which every sensible statesman of his time knew from the first that Philip the Second never had entertained the slightest intention of conferring; while, by the siren voices of her fair maids of honor, Catharine de' Medici was always sure of being able to lure him on to the most humiliating concessions. Deceived by the emissaries of the Spanish king and the Italian queen mother, Antoine would have been an object rather of pity than of disgust, had he not himself played false to the friends who supported him. As it was, he passed off the stage, and scarcely left a single person to regret his departure. Huguenots and papists were alike gratified when the world was relieved of so signal an example of inconstancy and perfidy.183 Antoine left behind him his wife, the eminent Jeanne d'Albret, and two children – a son, the Prince of Béarn, soon to appear in history as the leader of the Huguenot party, and, on the extinction of the Valois line, to succeed to the throne as Henry the Fourth; and a daughter, Catharine, who inherited all her mother's signal virtues. The widow and her children were, at the time of Antoine's death, in Jeanne's dominions on the northern slopes of the Pyrenees, whither they had retired when he had first openly gone over to the side of the Guises. There, in the midst of her own subjects, the Queen of Navarre was studying, more intelligently than any other monarch of her age, the true welfare of her people, while training her son in those principles upon which she hoped to see him lay the foundations of a great and glorious career.
The English in Havre.
The sagacity of the enemy had been well exhibited in the vigor with which they had pressed the siege of Rouen. Condé, with barely seven thousand men, had several weeks before shut himself up in Orleans, after despatching the few troops at his disposal for the relief of Bourges and Rouen, and could do nothing beyond making his own position secure, while impatiently awaiting the long-expected reinforcements from England and Germany.184 The dilatoriness that marked the entire conduct of the war up to this time had borne its natural fruit in the gradual diminution and dispersion of his forces, in the loss of one important city after another, and almost of entire provinces, and, worst of all, in the discouragement pervading all classes of the Huguenot population.185 Now, however, he was on the eve of obtaining relief. Two days after the fall of Rouen, on the twenty-eighth of October, a second detachment of the English fleet succeeded in overcoming the contrary winds that had detained them ten days in crossing the channel, and landed three thousand troops at the port of Havre.186 D'Andelot had finally been able to gather up his German "reiters" and "lansquenets,"187 and was making a brilliant march through Alsace, Lorraine, Burgundy, and Champagne, skilfully avoiding the enemy's forces sent out to watch and intercept him.188 On the sixth of November, he presented himself before the gates of Orleans, and was received with lively enthusiasm by the prince and his small army.189
Now at length, on the seventh of November, Condé could leave the walls which for seven months had sheltered him in almost complete inaction, and within which a frightful pestilence had been making havoc among the flower of the chivalry of France; for, whilst fire and sword were everywhere laying waste the country, heaven had sent a subtle and still more destructive foe to decimate the wretched inhabitants. Orleans had not escaped the scourge. The city was crowded with refugees from Paris and from the whole valley of the Loire. Among these strangers, as well as among the citizens, death found many victims. In a few months it was believed that ten thousand persons perished in Orleans alone; while in Paris, where the disease raged more than an entire year, the number of deaths was much larger.190
Condé takes the field.
With the four thousand lansquenets and the three thousand reiters brought him from Germany,191 Condé was able to leave a force, under command of D'Andelot, sufficient to defend the city of Orleans, and himself to take the field with an army of about fifteen thousand men.192 "Our enemies," he said, "have inflicted two great losses upon us in taking our castles" – meaning Bourges and Rouen – "but I hope that now we shall have their knights, if they move out upon the board."193
As
The plundering lasted eight days. While the Swiss obeyed orders, and promptly desisted, "the French suffered themselves to be killed rather than quit the place whilst there was anything left." Castelnau, liv. iii., c. 13. The
On the siege of Rouen, see the graphic account of De Thou, iii. (liv. xxxiii.) 328-335; the copious correspondence of the English envoys in France, Forbes, State Papers, vol. ii.; the Hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. 389-396 (and Marlorat's examination and sentence
It is to be noted, however, that the order of the Prince of Condé, in the case of Sapin (November 2, 1562), makes no mention of the judicial murder of Marlorat, but alleges only his complicity with parliament in imprisoning the king, his mother, and the King of Navarre, in annulling royal edicts by magisterial orders, in constraining the king's officers to become idolaters, in declaring knights of the Order of St. Michael and other worthy gentlemen rebels, in ordering the tocsin to be rung, and inciting to assassination, etc. Hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. 115, 116. See Bruslart, Mém. de Condé, i. 100. When Condé was informed that the Parisian parliament had gone in red robes to the "Sainte Chapelle," to hear a requiem mass for Counsellor Sapin, he laughed, and said that he hoped soon to multiply their
As early as October 27th, Navarre sent a gentleman to Jeanne d'Albret, then at Pau in Béarn, "desiring to have her now to cherish him, and do the part of a wife;" and the messenger told Sir Thomas Smith, with whom he dined that day in Evreux, "that the king pretendeth to him, that this punishment [his wounds] came to him well-deserved, for his unkindness in forsaking the truth." Forbes, State Papers, ii. 167. The authenticity of the story of Antoine of Navarre's death-bed repentance is sufficiently attested by the letter written, less than a year later (August, 1563), by his widow, Jeanne d'Albret, to the Cardinal of Armagnac: "Où sont ces belles couronnes que vous luy promettiés, et qu'il a acquises à combattre contre la vraye Religion et sa conscience; comme la confession dernière qu'il en a faite en sa mort en est seur tesmoignage, et les paroles dites à la Royne, en protestation de faire prescher les ministres par tout s'il guerissoit." Pierre Olhagaray, Histoire de Foix, Béarn, et Navarre (Paris, 1609), p. 546. See also Brantôme (edition Lalanne), iv. 367, and the account, written probably by Antoine's physician, De Taillevis, among the Dupuy MSS. of the Bibliothèque nationale, ibid., iv. 419.
Lestoile (Collection Michaud et Poujoulat), 15; Hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. 397, 406-408; De Thou, 336, 337; Relation de la mort du roi de Navarre, Cimber et Danjou, iv. 67, etc.
I am convinced that the historian De Thou has drawn of this fickle prince much too charitable a portrait (iii. 337). It seems to be saying too much to affirm that "his merit equalled that of the greatest captains of his age;" and if "he loved justice, and was possessed of uprightness," it must be confessed that his dealings with neither party furnish much evidence of the fact. (I retain these remarks, although I find that the criticism has been anticipated by Soldan, ii. 78). Recalling the earlier relations of the men, it is not a little odd that, when the news of Navarre's death reached the "holy fathers" of the council then in session in the city of Trent, the papal legates and the presidents paid the Cardinal of Lorraine a formal visit to
Letter of Beza to Bullinger, Sept. 1, 1562, Baum, iii., App., 190. The Huguenots had sustained a heavy loss also in the utter defeat and dispersion by Blaise de Montluc of some five or six thousand troops of Gascony, which the Baron de Duras was bringing to Orleans.
The sentiments of well-informed Huguenots are reflected in a letter of Calvin, of September, 1562, urging the Protestants of Languedoc to make collections to defray the expense entailed by D'Andelot's levy. "D'entrer en question ou dispute pour reprendre les faultes passées, ce n'est pas le temps. Car, quoy qu'il en soit, Dieu nous a réduicts à telle extrémité que si vous n'estes secourus de ce costé-là, on ne voit apparence selon les hommes que d'une piteuse et horrible désolation." Bonnet, Lettres franç., ii. 475.
Hist. ecclés., ii. 421.
See "Capitulation des reytres et lansquenetz levez pour monseigneur le prince de Condé, du xviii. d'aoust 1562," Bulletin, xvi. (1867), 116-118. The reiters came chiefly from Hesse.
Claude Haton, no friend to Catharine, makes the Duke d'Aumale, in command of eight or nine thousand troops, avoid giving battle to D'Andelot, and content himself with watching his march from Lorraine as far as St. Florentin, in obedience to secret orders of the queen mother, signed with the king's seal. Mémoires, i. 294, 295. The fact was that D'Andelot adroitly eluded both the Duke of Nevers, Governor of Champagne, who was prepared to resist his passage, and Marshal Saint André, who had advanced to meet him with thirteen companies of "gens-d'armes" and some foot soldiers. Davila, bk. iii. 76; De Thou, iii. (liv. xxxiii.) 356.
Hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. 114, 115. The writer ascribes the fall of Rouen to the delay of the reiters in assembling at their rendezvous. Instead of being ready on the first of October, it was not until the tenth that they had come in sufficient numbers to be mustered in.
Eighty thousand, according to the Hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. 91, 92; twenty-five thousand, according to Claude Haton, Mémoires, 332, 333.
Letter of Beza to Bullinger, Sept. 1st, Baum, ii., App., 191; Hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. 114, 115; Davila, bk. iii., 77; De Thou, iii. 355, 356.
Letter of Beza to Calvin, Dec. 14, 1562, Baum, ii., App., 196. The authority of Beza, who had recently returned from a mission on which he had been sent by Condé to Germany and Switzerland and who wrote from the camp, is certainly to be preferred to that of Claude Haton, who states the Huguenot forces at 25,000 men (Mémoires, i. 298). The prince's chief captains – Coligny, Andelot, La Rochefoucauld, and Mouy – Haton rates as the best warriors in France after the Duke of Guise. According to Throkmorton's despatches from Condé's camp near Corbeil, the departure from Orleans took place on the 8th of November, and the prince's French forces amounted only to six thousand foot soldiers, indifferently armed, and about two thousand horse. Forbes, State Papers, ii. 195. But this did not include the Germans – some seven thousand five hundred men more. Ibid., ii. 196. Altogether, he reckons the army at "6,000 horsemen of all sorts and nations, and 10,000 footmen." Ibid., ii. 202.
Mém. de La Noue, c. viii., p. 602.