History of the Rise of the Huguenots. Baird Henry Martyn
provision which would banish from the royal presence all the princes and high nobility, such as Renée of France, Condé, and the Châtillons, since these could not consent to live without the ordinances of their faith for themselves and their families and retainers. The triumvirs would not agree to the recall of those who had been exiled. They were willing to have all proceedings against the partisans of Condé suspended; but they would neither consent that all edicts, ordinances, and sentences framed against the Huguenots be declared null and void, nor assent to the restoration of those dignities which had been taken from them. In other words, as the prince remarked, the Protestant lords were to put a halter about their own necks for their enemies to tighten whenever the fancy should take them so to do.205
At last the Parisian defences were completed, and the Spanish and Gascon troops, to the number of seven thousand men, arrived. Then the mask of conciliation was promptly laid aside. Two weeks of precious time had been lost, the capital was beyond doubt impregnable, and the unpleasant fact stared the prince in the face that, after leaving a sufficient force to garrison it, the constable and Guise might still march out with an army outnumbering his own.206 On the tenth of December the Huguenot army broke up its encampment, and moved in the direction of Chartres, hesitating at first whether to lay siege to that city or to press on to Normandy in order to obtain the needed funds and support of the English. The decision was made in a few days to adopt the latter course, and Condé had proceeded as far as the vicinity of Dreux on the river Eure, when he found himself confronted by the enemy, who, enjoying the advantage of possessing the cities and bridges on the route, could advance with greater ease by the principal roads. The triumvirs, so lately declining battle in front of Paris, were now as eager as they had before been reluctant to try their fortunes in the open field. No longer having the King of Navarre behind whose name and authority to take shelter, they desired to cover their designs by the queen mother's instructions. So, before bringing on the first regular engagement, in which two armies of Frenchmen were to undertake each other's destruction, they had sent Michel de Castelnau, the well-known historian, on the fifteenth of December, to inquire of Catharine de' Medici whether they should give the Huguenots battle. But the queen was too timid, or too cunning, to assume the weighty responsibility which they would have lifted from their own shoulders. "Nurse," she jestingly exclaimed, when Castelnau announced his mission, calling to the king's old Huguenot foster-mother who was close at hand, "the generals have sent to ask a woman's advice about fighting; pray, what is your opinion?" And the envoy could get no more satisfactory answer than that the queen mother referred the whole matter to themselves, as experienced military men.207
The battle of Dreux, December 19, 1562.
On the nineteenth of December, 1562, the armies met. The enemy had that morning crossed the Eure, and posted himself with sixteen thousand foot and two thousand horse, and with twenty-two cannon, between two villages covering his wings, and with the city of Dreux and the village of Tréon behind him as points of refuge in case of defeat. The constable commanded the main body of the army. Guise, to rebut the current charge of being the sole cause of the war, affected to lead only his own company of horse in the right wing, which was under Marshal Saint André. The prince's army was decidedly inferior in numbers; for, although he had four thousand horse,208 his infantry barely amounted to seven thousand or eight thousand men, and he had only five pieces of artillery. Yet the first movements of the Huguenots were brilliant and effective. Condé, with a body of French horse, fell upon the battalion of Swiss pikes. It was a furious onset, long remembered as one of the most magnificent cavalry charges of the age.209 Nothing could stand before it. The solid phalanx was pierced through and through, and the German reiters, pouring into the way opened by the French, rode to and fro, making havoc of the brave but defenceless mountaineers. They even penetrated to the rear, and plundered the camp of the enemy, carrying off the plate from Guise's tent. Meanwhile Coligny was even more successful than the prince. With a part of the Huguenot right he attacked and scattered the troops surrounding his uncle, the constable. In the mêlée Montmorency himself, while fighting with his usual courage, had his jaw fractured by a pistol-shot, and was taken prisoner. But now the tide turned. The Swiss, never for a moment dreaming of retreat or surrender, had promptly recovered from their confusion and closed their ranks. The German infantry, or lansquenets, were brought up to the attack, but first hesitated, and then broke before the terrible array of pikes. D'Andelot, ill with fever, had thus far been forced to remain a mere spectator of the contest. But now, seeing the soldiers whom he had been at such pains to bring to the scene of action in ignominious retreat, he threw himself on his horse and labored with desperation to rally them. His pains were thrown away. The lansquenets continued their course, and D'Andelot, who scarcely escaped falling into the enemy's hands, probably concurred in the verdict pronounced on them by a contemporary historian, that no more cowardly troops had entered the country in fifty years.210 It was at this moment that the Duke of Guise, who had with difficulty held his impatient horse in reserve on the Roman Catholic right, gave the signal to his company to follow him, and fell upon the French infantry of the Huguenots, imprudently left unprotected by cavalry at some distance in the rear. The move was skilfully planned and well executed. The infantry were routed. Condé, coming to the rescue, was unable to accomplish anything. His horse was killed under him, and, before he could be provided with another, he was taken prisoner by Damville, a son of the constable. The German reiters now proved to be worth little more than the lansquenets. Returning from the pursuit of the fugitives of the constable's division, and perceiving the misfortunes of the infantry, they retired to the cover of a wood, and neither the prayers nor the expostulations of the admiral could prevail on them to face the enemy again that day.211 But Guise could not follow up his advantage. The battle had lasted five hours. Almost the whole of the Huguenot cavalry and the remnants of the infantry had been drawn up by Coligny in good order on the other side of a ravine; and the darkness would not allow the Duke, even had he been so disposed, to renew the engagement.212
On either side the loss had been severe. Marshal Saint André, Montbéron – one of the constable's sons – and many other illustrious Roman Catholics, were killed. Montmorency was a prisoner. The Huguenots, if they had lost fewer prominent men and less common soldiers, were equally deprived of their leading general. What was certain was, that the substantial fruits of victory remained in the hands of the Duke of Guise, to whom naturally the whole glory of the achievement was ascribed. For, although Admiral Coligny thought himself sufficiently strong to have attacked the enemy on the following day,213 if he could have persuaded his crestfallen German auxiliaries to follow him, he deemed it advisable to abandon the march into Normandy – difficult under any circumstances on account of the lateness of the season – and to conduct his army back to Orleans. This, Coligny – never more skilful than in conducting the most difficult of all military operations, a retreat in the presence of an enemy – successfully accomplished.214
The first tidings of the battle of Dreux were brought to Paris by fugitives from the constable's corps. These announced the capture of the commanding general, and the entire rout of the Roman Catholic army. The populace, intense in its devotion to the old form of faith, and recognizing the fatal character of such a blow,215 was overwhelmed with discouragement. But Catharine de' Medici displayed little emotion. "Very well!" she quietly remarked, "then we shall pray to God in French."216 But the truth was soon known, and the dirge and the miserere were rapidly replaced by the loud te deum and by jubilant processions in honor of the signal success of the Roman Catholic arms.217
Riotous conduct of the Parisian mob.
Recovering from their panic, the Parisian populace continued to testify their unimpeachable orthodoxy by daily murders. It was enough, a contemporary writer tells us, if a boy, seeing a man in
"Par ce moyen, un chacun de nous trainera son licol, jusques à ce que les dessusdits le serrent à leur appetit." Hist. ecclés. des égl. réf., ii. 126. The details of the conferences, with the articles offered on either side, are given at great length, pp. 121-136.
"The queene mother and hyr councelours," wrote Throkmorton to Elizabeth, four or five days later (Dec. 13, 1562), "have at the length once agayne showed, howe sincerely they meane in their treatyes. For when their force out of Gascoigne together with two thousand five hundred Spainardes were arrived, and when they had well trenched and fortefyed the faulxbourges and places of advantage of Paris; espienge, that the prince coulde remayne no longer with his campe before Paris for lack of victuaill and fourrage, having abused him sufficiently with this treaty eight or ten dayes: the sayd queene mother … refused utterly the condicions before accorded." Forbes, State Papers, ii. 226. It is not strange that the ambassador, after the meagre results of the past five weeks, "could not hope of any great good to be done, until he saw it;" although he was confident that "if matters were handled stoutly and roundly, without delay," the prince might constrain his enemies to accord him favorable conditions.
Mém. de Castelnau, liv. iv., c. iv.
Five thousand, according to the Duke d'Aumale (Les Princes de Condé, i. 190).
"Quatre-vingtz salades … lesquels sembloient estre
"Etant chose certaine qu'il n'entra de cinquante ans en France des plus couards hommes que ceux-là, bien qu'ils eussent la plus belle apparence du monde." Hist. ecclés. ii. 144.
It ought perhaps, in justice to the reiters, to be noticed that Coligny attributes their failure not to cowardice, as in the case of both the French and the German infantry, but to their not understanding orders, and to the occasional absence of an interpreter.
La Noue in his commentaries (Ed. Mich., c. x., p. 605 seq.) makes some interesting observations on the singular incidents of the battle of Dreux. The author of the Histoire ecclés., ii. 140, and De Thou, iii. 367, criticise both the Roman Catholic and the Protestant generals. They find the former to blame for not waiting to engage the Huguenots until they had reached the rougher country they were approaching, where the superiority of Condé in cavalry would have been of little avail. They censure the latter for leaving his own infantry unprotected, and for attacking the enemy's infantry instead of his cavalry. If this had been routed, the other would have made no further resistance.
He had, according to Beza's letter to Calvin, Dec. 27th (Baum, ii. Appendix, 202), lost only one hundred and fifty of his horsemen; or, according to the Histoire ecclés. (ii. 146), only twenty-seven.
For details of the battle of Dreux, see Hist. ecclés., ii. 140-148; Mém. de Castelnau, liv. ii., c. v.; De Thou, iii. 365, etc.; Pasquier, Lettres (Ed. Feugère), ii. 251-254; Guise's relation, reprinted in Mém. de Condé, iv. 685, etc., and letters subsequently written, ibid. iv. 182, etc.; Coligny's brief account, written just after the battle, ibid. iv. 178-181; the Swiss accounts, Baum, ii. Appendix, 198-202; Vieilleville, liv. viii., c. xxxvi.; Davila, 81, seq. Cf. letter of Catharine,
"Et non sans cause," says Abbé Bruslart; "d'autant que de ceste bataille despendoit tout l'estat de la religion chrestienne et du royaume." Mém. de Condé, i. 105. A despatch of Smith to the Privy Council, St. Denis, Dec. 20, 1562, gives this first and incorrect account. MS. State Paper Office.
H. Martin, Hist. de France, x. 156. Le Laboureur, ii. 450. Catharine's own account to her minister at Vienna, it is true, is very different. "J'en demeuray près de 24 heures
The Council of Trent, on receiving an account of the battle, Dec. 28th, offered solemn thanksgivings. Acta Concil. Trid.