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France in the Wars of Religion
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France – The Reign of Henry IV, 1589-1610
In this course, Dr Tom Hamilton (University of Cambridge) explores the life and reign of Henry IV of France, the king celebrated for his role in ending the Wars of Religion. The first lecture considers Henry's early life in the civil wars and especially his role in the events surrounding the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre (24 August 1572). The second lecture traces Henry's political career as he became heir presumptive in 1584 then king of France in 1589, focusing in particular on the Catholic League that opposed his succession. In the third and fourth lectures, we consider how Henry and his ministers attempted to resolve the religious conflict in France, evaluating his relations with the papacy and the Protestants – especially through the Edict of Nantes (30 April 1598) – as well as the means by which he rebuilt the French economy. In the final module, we turn to Henry's assassination by François Ravaillac before thinking about Henry's legacy in the seventeenth century and beyond.
Further Reading:
Greengrass, Mark, France in the Age of Henri IV: The Struggle for Stability (London, 1995, first edition 1984)
Holt, Mack P., The French Wars of Religion, 1562-1629 (Cambridge, 2005)
Mousnier, Roland, The Assassination of Henri IV: The Tyrannicide Problem and the Consolidation of the French Absolute Monarchy in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1973)
France in the Wars of Religion
In this module, we introduce Henry of Navarre, thinking in particular about his Protestant upbringing and his role in the events leading up to the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in 1572. We also think about his unlikely journey from near-assassination in the Wars of Religion to heir presumptive to the French throne, after the death of Francis, Duke of Anjou, the last surviving son of Henry II in June 1584.
Hello.
00:00:02My name is Tom Hamilton,
00:00:03and I'm a junior research fellow in history
00:00:04at Trinity College at the University of Cambridge.
00:00:06I specialise in French and European history in the 16th and 17th centuries,
00:00:08and especially the wars of religion
00:00:12in this course are going to introduce you to France in the reign of Henry the fourth.
00:00:14This period is a crucial turning point in French history.
00:00:18Looking back, it marks the end of the wars of religion.
00:00:20From 15 62 or 15 98 the French people lived through eight civil wars.
00:00:23These legs explore how the succession and policies of Henry,
00:00:28the fourth and his government brought an end to the
00:00:31conflict and established the Bourbon Dynasty on the throne.
00:00:33Looking forward,
00:00:36the reign of Henry the Fourth is a foundational moment in the making.
00:00:37The old regime in France
00:00:39the reforms that Henry, as ministers, put in place at the end.
00:00:41The civil wars established institutions,
00:00:44the French monarchy that lasted until the revolution.
00:00:46The lectures in this course first set the scene in France during
00:00:49the wars of religion and then move on to consider the political,
00:00:52financial and religious settlements that brought the civil war
00:00:55to an end and accelerated the making the old regime
00:00:58into the 17th century
00:01:00in conclusion are considered more generally
00:01:02how historians Minnesota's period ever since,
00:01:04and especially whether we can separate the categories of
00:01:06politics and religion in early modern Europe at all.
00:01:09To introduce his course,
00:01:12I'm first going to explain how the reign of Henry the fourth marked the end
00:01:13of the wars of religion and was shaped by the experience of civil wars.
00:01:17Henry of Navarre.
00:01:20The future Henry, the fourth of France,
00:01:21grew up surrounded by the political and
00:01:23religious conflicts of the early civil wars.
00:01:25He was born in 15 53 to Antoine Obama and John
00:01:27King and Queen of Navarre,
00:01:31a small kingdom in the southwest of France
00:01:33near the Pyrenees on the border with Spain.
00:01:35the location of are very important for working out what is going to
00:01:38happen in the 15 sixties in the beginning of the wars of religion.
00:01:41Because it's relatively independent principality,
00:01:44the king, Queen of Navarre can determine their own policies of taxation,
00:01:48of government, finance, of military and, crucially, questions of religion.
00:01:51So Antoine
00:01:55is one of the first important nobleman in
00:01:56the French kingdom to convert to Protestantism.
00:01:59He's in contact with the Geneva theologian John Calvin,
00:02:01discussing questions of salvation of the Eucharist and all these
00:02:04new theological opinions that are
00:02:08spreading throughout the Protestant Reformation.
00:02:09And he converts, and so does his wife, Jean degree.
00:02:11So the kingdom of Navarre becomes an important Protestant territory
00:02:14relatively separate from the French kingdom also went on the Balkans.
00:02:19Brother Louis, the bottom of the prince of Conde,
00:02:23converted to Protestantism more at the same time in the mid 15 fifties,
00:02:25and in the 15 sixties he went on to be the leading Protestant general
00:02:29for the Army's.
00:02:33During the civil wars, he directed the party's military strategy,
00:02:34but also as a major nobleman in his own right.
00:02:37He supplied a proportion of the troops
00:02:40for the Protestant armies and also its finances
00:02:41and resources through his own noble retinue.
00:02:45So the Prince of Conde he would raise nobleman
00:02:47associated with his household to fight in the army's.
00:02:50They would use their own resources to recruit troops,
00:02:52and so the Protestant cause,
00:02:55which didn't have the same sort of financial strength of
00:02:56the French monarchy with his range of taxation possibilities.
00:02:59Nevertheless, the Protestants could,
00:03:03through this means raise some sort of an army
00:03:05to rise up against the monarchy and try and
00:03:08achieve its aims are taking over the French kingdom
00:03:10in creating what they called a new world.
00:03:12So following the outbreak of the Civil wars in 15
00:03:1562 Henri Navarre grew up knowing that he is firmly in
00:03:17the Protestant camp with a clear sense of the confessional
00:03:21division between Protestants and Catholics that went through French society.
00:03:24So I'm not going to go into detail on all of the ins and outs of the early civil wars.
00:03:28There are three of them in the 15 sixties.
00:03:32They have their own independent histories and rather complicated.
00:03:33But I will focus on the central, tragic moments of this first phase of civil wars.
00:03:36And that's the same autonomous day massacre on the 24th of August 15 72.
00:03:41It's an extraordinarily tragic event,
00:03:46after which the bodies are thousands of Protestants
00:03:48lay in the streets of Paris and the river Seine ran red with blood.
00:03:50The young Prince Henry of Navarre, the future Henry the fourth,
00:03:54was a key figure in the events leading up to the
00:03:57massacre in Paris on the 18th of August 15 72.
00:03:59There was a marriage took place in Paris,
00:04:03and this is the kind of starting point for the events leading up to the massacre.
00:04:04The marriage is intended to bring peace between the Catholics and the Protestants.
00:04:08It's between Margarita Zavala, the sister of the King Charles the ninth.
00:04:12This is the monarchy leading Catholic family in the kingdom.
00:04:16And she was going to marry Henry of Navarre,
00:04:20the future Henry the fourth, the son of the King, Queen and Nevada,
00:04:23and to the leading Protestant heir in the kingdom.
00:04:26The marriage is supposed to bring peace between the two parties and the civil wars,
00:04:29and it shows really the importance of dynastic alliances
00:04:32and family politics in arranging diplomatic and political events.
00:04:35It was brokered by Catherine the Medicine, the Queen Mother,
00:04:40Marguerite de Valois, mother
00:04:44and John Debris, queen of Navarre, Henry Navarro's mother.
00:04:46And again, it shows the importance of women elite women in early modern politics.
00:04:49In broken this sort of arrangement, the matter is supposed to symbolise
00:04:54the unity of the two parties and civil wars, a collect
00:04:57agreement to move beyond the conflicts
00:05:01and live in peace and harmony together.
00:05:04This was the part of the symbolism of the festivities that followed the marriage.
00:05:06But events quickly took a different term,
00:05:11and it didn't happen as the monarchy planned. It would.
00:05:14On the 22nd of August,
00:05:17there was an assassination attempt against gas back to the colony.
00:05:19Who is the album of the French fleet
00:05:22and a significant royal councillor. Crucially, a Protestant,
00:05:24many Catholic nobleman,
00:05:28especially the Duke of G's who was a prominent Catholic in the Royal Council,
00:05:30really resented the fact that there was a Protestant at all anywhere near the king,
00:05:34able to counsel him on political affairs.
00:05:39Crucially,
00:05:41Colony was trying to push Charles and and and the monarchy to
00:05:42support the rebel Protestants in the
00:05:45Netherlands for political advantage for France.
00:05:47But you can see how the kind of confessional politics that split the council
00:05:50feeds directly into the kind of concerns that people
00:05:55throughout France had after a decade of civil wars.
00:05:58No history knows exactly who was behind the assassination attempt of colony.
00:06:02Most of the thinking, perhaps, was the drink of keys.
00:06:06But anyway, on the 22nd of August,
00:06:08when gas part of the economy left the Royal Palace of the Louvre.
00:06:10He was shot at from a high window.
00:06:13He bent down either to tie his shoelace or to pick up a letter.
00:06:15Anyhow, the shot did not kill him, and he was taken back to his apartment.
00:06:19The nearby parish of Sandra Endo looks Iowa,
00:06:22where he was looked after by his retinue and really fear, then spread on both sides.
00:06:25The Protestants were concern.
00:06:29This assassination attempt was the beginning of a Catholic plot that the
00:06:31Protestants were lured to Paris for the marriage to celebrate peace.
00:06:34But in fact it was an excuse and a pretence to relaunch the civil wars
00:06:38from a kind of political intrigue leading to events of violence in the capital.
00:06:42The Catholics, on the other hand,
00:06:46seeing the Protestants concern
00:06:48and fear and suspicion, wondered if the Protestants were planning
00:06:50a repost,
00:06:54some kind of reply to the attempted violence to
00:06:55kill colony that would itself be yet another civil war
00:06:58to try and get ahold of situation.
00:07:02The monarchy came to an agreement on the 24th of August that night.
00:07:04Some autonomy is date night,
00:07:07and they would decide to assassinate 10 leading Protestants
00:07:09in Paris in order to forestall any kind of rebellion
00:07:14that may have occurred.
00:07:17Henri Navarre, crucially, was not on the list. He was a Protestant, no woman.
00:07:19He he just married the king's sister, so he already protected
00:07:24the people. He grew up with his parents, friends. They were on the list to be killed.
00:07:28So on the morning of ST Bartholomew's Day 24th of August, when the toxin,
00:07:32the parish bells of Paris, rang out,
00:07:37groups of Catholic nobleman, a militia, were sent out across the capital
00:07:39to target and kill those 10 leading Protestant nobleman.
00:07:44Colony was first, and the duke of G's
00:07:47threw him out the window and butchered him on the streets below.
00:07:49People in Paris heard the Duke of G's say, the king wills it,
00:07:52and they thought this was a signal from more general massacre.
00:07:57Nobody outside of the Royal council knew of
00:08:00this plan to kill the leading Protestant nobleman,
00:08:03and people in Paris thought that the king had ordered them
00:08:06to commit a general massacre of the Protestants.
00:08:09So over the course of the day,
00:08:12especially led by the Parisian civic militia,
00:08:14many more hundreds, if not thousands of Protestants were killed in Paris,
00:08:17and the rumours spread to the provinces and nearby cities so that across
00:08:20the so called season of ST Bartholomew over the following weeks and months,
00:08:24thousands up to perhaps 100,000 Protestants were killed throughout France.
00:08:28And, of course, the numbers depend on whose account you're listening to.
00:08:32The Catholics tend to minimalize the number of deaths
00:08:35the Protestants, who are looking for support
00:08:37from diplomatic allies throughout Europe
00:08:39from Protestant princes exaggerated perhaps,
00:08:42the number of deaths.
00:08:44Nevertheless, they are extremely significant.
00:08:46Henri Navarre remained at the royal court.
00:08:49He converted to Catholicism
00:08:51to save his life.
00:08:53The royal family looked after him so long as he stayed at
00:08:55court and did not make contact with Protestant allies and family members.
00:08:58He stayed there until 15 74 when Charles the ninth died and his brother, Henry,
00:09:02the third, became king of France.
00:09:07Henry, third came back from Poland, had previously been elected the king there,
00:09:08and he brought with him his own noble retinue,
00:09:12counsellors who were his own creation,
00:09:14people he could trust because their careers depended on him as Henry a third.
00:09:16But Navarre felt himself ostracized from the court.
00:09:20He eventually escaped and went to the southwest of France, waited up court at Nerac
00:09:23nearby his Kingdom novel,
00:09:29and there he created a sort of centre of Protestant courtly activity activism.
00:09:30The Protestant nobleman who survived
00:09:36economies
00:09:38congregated around him. There
00:09:39he emerges, really, as the leader of the Protestant party.
00:09:41Because he left the court, he'd re converts to Protestantism, and he was
00:09:45the heir to the throne of Navarre.
00:09:50He became a symbol of national politics
00:09:52in 15 84. That's when Henry, the third's brother, the Duke of Anjou,
00:09:54died.
00:09:58The death of Duke of Anjou meant there was no Catholic heir to the French crown,
00:09:59and this caused all sorts of problems because
00:10:04the nearest air by descent became Henri Navarre.
00:10:06So what happens when the heir to the throne of France is actually a Protestant?
00:10:10And that's the
00:10:14subject of the next lecture
00:10:15
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Hamilton, T. (2018, August 15). France – The Reign of Henry IV, 1589-1610 - France in the Wars of Religion [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/france-in-the-reign-of-henry-iv-1589-1610
MLA style
Hamilton, T. "France – The Reign of Henry IV, 1589-1610 – France in the Wars of Religion." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 15 Aug 2018, https://massolit.io/courses/france-in-the-reign-of-henry-iv-1589-1610