CHRISTENDOM’S NEW FRONTIERS
In the wake of the Reformation, Christendom was compromised. Its universal ideal had become tarnished, its infrastructure weakened. The Roman Church initially was left without a coherent response to the Protestant assault upon it. The emperor, seeking to defend Christendom, had become an instrument in its divisions. Incapable of rallying forces against the Ottomans, he had also failed to prevent the spread of Protestantism in the empire. The splits in Christendom seemed unbridgeable. Even the notion of ‘religion’ reflected the divisions which lay at its core. Before 1500, the ‘religious’ were the monks, those who were in regular orders, and whose vocation was to pray for Christendom. Following the texts of Roman Antiquity, Christian humanists used the term ‘religion’ to describe beliefs in a god who was not necessarily Christian. Protestant reformers adopted the term to sharpen the distinction between the ‘true’ religion of Christians and the ‘false’ religion of their critics. ‘New religion’ and ‘Reformed religion’ became common parlance. Catholics, by contrast, continued to see one faith, the rest being ‘heretical’ and ‘schismatic’, judging, as the English Jesuit Robert Persons put it, ‘all other religions besides their own, false, and damnable’.
There was, of course, a polemic concerning which Church the inheritance of Christendom rightfully belonged to. The Royal Injunctions, drafted by William Cecil and issued by Queen Elizabeth I in 1559, demanded of English congregations: ‘You shall pray for Christ’s holy Catholic Church; that is, for the whole congregation of Christian people, dispersed throughout the whole world, and specially for the Church of England and Ireland.’ Everyone subscribed to the belief that there was only one, true, Catholic Church, but whether the latter rested on the Roman claims to Apostolic Succession or on the grace of God, dispersed through individual congregations, was the point at issue. When an English recusant Catholic was interrogated on his religion, he was asked: ‘Art thou a Papist, a Protestant, a Puritan or what Religion art thou?’ At a loss to know how to respond, he answered that he was ‘but a poore Catholique’, that reply being taken as a sign of his popish tendencies. Precisely because ‘religion’ had become a confused category, ‘confessional’ statements alongside disciplinary injunctions to define outward conformity became significant. Religion became what a creed said it was.
A new religious frontier emerged; or rather, since the Reformation was a movement in Christianity’s tectonic plates, it was more like the jagged fault-lines created by a violent tremor. Borders in the post-Reformation religious world were, like its politics, unstable and complicated. Rulership consisted of concatenations of rights which did not add up to a contiguous landmass. Diocesan boundaries rarely matched political frontiers. Patronage rights to appoint clerics ended up having been sold or transferred into the hands of aristocrats and others who might not follow the religious convictions of the ruler in whose land those benefices belonged. Anyway, people no longer necessarily adopted the beliefs of their overlords.
As time went on, the frontiers which mattered most were those in people’s minds, the result of conflicting religious identities constructed into boundaries by an oppositional process. These boundaries were erected through education and indoctrination – the preaching, catechizing, Ten Commandments, churchgoing and religiously impregnated conformities that dominated public life. In divided communities, they took shape as negotiated agreements and legal enactments, arrived at in the shadow of contestations which had made them necessary in the first place. For those growing up with the politico-religious contentions of the later sixteenth century, there was nothing irreversible about the political and religious choices that they made, especially in the earthquake zone between an emerging Protestant northern Europe and Catholic southern Europe. From Scotland in the west (which was where the tremors of a Calvinist Reformation first shook a monarchical state to its foundations in 1560) to Hungary and Transylvania in the east, religious loyalties lay in doubt, and the affiliation of communities and states in question was fought over. These contestations afflicted Christian commonwealths in France, Scotland, Savoy and the Netherlands in the 1560s, but they were annealed to broader and internationalized conflicts in the last decade of the sixteenth century, ones which also reflected the end of the silver age, emerging economic dislocations and weakening social cohesion. The seismograph of military activity registers a spike of unusual intensity in the 1590s, a prelude to the peak of even greater intensity in the mid-seventeenth century.
CHRISTIAN COMMONWEALTHS IN STATE AND CHURCH
The Christendom which survived the Reformation earthquake was attenuated. Its universalist claims were maintained within the orbit of the Counter-Reformed Catholic Church, although they would be effectively reworked into a global Christianity. Christendom still existed in common parlance, especially when vocalizing the anxiety raised by the Ottomans. It also continued within the weaker notion of a collectivity of Christian commonwealths, each exemplifying different versions of what it meant to live in a belief-community. The ‘Christian prince’ and ‘Christian commonwealth’ were dominant political ideals, expressed in works claiming to be mirrors for princes and instructions for magistrates. ‘Magistrate’ was the contemporary term for whoever had the ‘power of the sword’ (ius gladii) in a commonwealth, the right to punish and chastise.
Advice literature for rulers emphasized that it was not intended exclusively for them. Every reader – citizen – could hold such a text in their hand, as one would hold a mirror to one’s face, and learn from its pages. Such literature offered an ideal of rulership in order to show how reality was distanced from it. Machiavelli’s The Prince was regarded as ever more scandalous as the century wore on precisely because it subverted the genre, approximating the virtues of rulership to the reality. Seneca’s ‘The love of the people constitutes the prince’s most impregnable fortress’ was a favourite dictum. Machiavelli justified the opposite proposition: ‘It is better for a prince to be feared than loved.’ Erasmus’s Institution of a Christian Prince (1516) turned the ‘people’ into more than a rhetorical trope. Their interests determined whether a ruler was to be judged a tyrant or not. The ruler is ‘born for the common good’. In times gone by, he was ‘appointed by popular agreement’ – the ‘power to punish’ being assigned to magistrates by the commonwealth. As humanist antiquarians in the sixteenth century discovered more about the early history of the ‘Gauls’, ‘Saxons’, ‘Scots’ and ‘Sarmatians’ (the myth adopted by the Polish szlachta about their origins), they broadened the evidence for the origins of power lying with the people.
By contrast, a tyrant assumed power by usurpation or conquest, ignored the good of the people and followed his own fancy in pursuit of private gain. Appearing on almost every page of Erasmus’s treatise, the people are like the chorus in a Greek tragedy, echoing the mutual obligations between ruler and ruled. In a Christian commonwealth, he said, ‘there is a mutual interchange between the prince and the people’. The public good legitimated power in a Christian commonwealth, rendering it virtuous and moral. The people (as a public construct) were the fact of life upon which government rested.
German historians prefer to call this a period of ‘confessionalization’. The confessions were not simply Catholic and Protestant. Set against the Lutheran Augsburg Confession were the Reformed (Calvinist) Confessions. By the early 1560s the latter included those for Basel (1534) and Geneva (1536), the Consensus Tigurinus (1549), the Hungarian (1557), Gallican (1559) and Belgic (1561–2), and the English ‘Thirty-nine Articles of Religion’ (1563). The animosity between Lutheran and Reformed Protestant Christianity was, in polemical terms, at least as venomous as that between Protestants and Catholics. The Tridentine Profession of Faith (issued by Pope Pius IV’s bull Iniunctum Nobis of November 1565) offered a united Catholic response. Alongside the desire to unify beliefs came a desire to impose the same religious observances: to sing the same psalms, recite the same prayers, celebrate the same feast-days. These were defined through Church disciplines, synods and councils. The question for Christian commonwealths was: to what extent were they going to become confessionally Christian? Not to do so threatened the existence of the notion of ‘right religion’. To do so risked being pulled apart by religious divisions and destroying the commonwealth’s values of concord, peace and harmony. There was no answer to that conundrum.
What made the puzzle more perplexing was that the commonwealths were evolving. State and Church became more closely aligned in the wake of the Reformation. The enlargement of state control over Church affairs was a growing reality in Protestant Christendom. Not only did states assume a greater role in the appointment and supervision of clerics, they also took on responsibilities for poor relief, education and (with police regulations governing marriage, family life and moral behaviour in public) the daily lives of their subjects. In some places this amounted to a conscious process of state-building – bureaucratic, top–down conformity working better in a smaller state like Württemberg than in a larger entity such as Elizabethan England. Confessionalization became a way of projecting a sharper sense of religiously conceived identity – whether in the hands of aristocrats who sought to rally support for their cause, or in those of godly rulers, presenting themselves as leading an elect nation.
Yet sharpened religious identities did not always lead to political unity. There was no more powerful political myth in the later sixteenth century than English anti-Catholicism. It had coalesced quickly around the dynastic succession of Elizabeth I, in doubt throughout her reign. Its resurgence owed a great deal to her excommunication by Pope Pius V (Regnans in Excelsis, 25 February 1570). English Protestants projected an image of Catholicism which displayed, as though in a mirror, their own unease. Far from reflecting national unity, they felt disunited in comparison with the perceived enemy. The various conspiracies to unseat Elizabeth, inspired among English Catholic exiles abroad in the late 1570s and 80s – some with papal encouragement – gave weight to their fears. The Spanish Armada amply confirmed every one of them. But those in Elizabeth’s councils of state tended to exaggerate the unity of their enemies and misread their intentions. Sir Francis Walsingham, her principal secretary of state, placed a heavy reliance on networks of spies, code-breakers and agents provocateurs, whose intelligence served to reinforce prevailing anxieties. The latter risked permanently alienating the significant minority of the English population, which had remained loyal to the old faith but was prepared to stay loyal to the new regime. English anti-Catholicism led to a psychosis of fear about dissembling Jesuits, that ‘mischievous broode of caterpillars’ whose powers of persuasion were almost magical. Each victory over a perceived threat from this insidious enemy – the defeat of the Spanish Armada (1588) and the Gunpowder Plot (1605) – became the occasion not to rejoice in the name of Protestant England, but to fret about the narrow escape which had just been avoided. Each success was turned into an instrument of perpetual memory to the disaster which might have been. English Protestants did not find their religion led to national unity. Instead it was the expression of their doubts and anxieties.
Was there also a commonwealth in the Church? The notion of a Christian commonwealth was a battleground in post-Reformation ecclesiology as well, a central focus to the conflicts of the later sixteenth century. The Roman Catholic Church championed sacerdotal power, making it a central plank of the decisions at the Council of Trent. Calvinists, by contrast, developed a model of the Church as a commonwealth, in which the Church was responsible for, and overseen by, its presbyterium (Calvin’s term for the office of bishop). There was only one true Catholic Church but it was divided into congregations, each chosen by God’s grace, with Christ as their head. A true Church was one where, according to Calvin, the Word of God was purely announced and the sacraments properly administered. His successor in Geneva, Théodore de Bèze (Beza), added a third category, Church discipline, emphasizing their ecclesiological distinctiveness. A true Church was also one where there was a godly order. That was embodied by the officers of the Church – pastors and elders, making up the ‘consistory’ (translation of the Latin for ‘Church senate’) – carrying the charge of the presbyterium. Elders, in particular, had the power to make and enforce the laws of the congregation and to elect the pastors in a ‘free and legitimate [i.e. public] election’, seeking the consent of the congregation for the choice they made. They also had the authority to depute to Church assemblies (synods) in the model Gallican Discipline (1559). Consistorial-synodical Church government posed a threat to divine-right episcopacy and traditionally conceived sacerdotal power (to which other forms of power were related), which is why Calvinism was at the core of the contentions in Christendom in the later sixteenth century.
WARS OF RELIGION
This period is commonly called the time of Europe’s ‘wars of religion’. In reality, these were political contentions in which religion was the way by which conflicts in the commonwealths of state and Church were manifested. The divisions over religious beliefs and practices were polymorphic and unpredictable, a cause and a consequence of religion becoming a central dynamic in public and private affairs. Dissension manifested itself at different levels, pulling apart the mutual obligations between the ruler and the ruled. Virulent doctrinal and dogmatic conflicts took on new forms, often concentrating on where the ‘true Church’ was to be found. Armed conflicts descended into civil wars, iconoclastic uprisings, local civil disorders, noble-led rebellions and peasant revolts. ‘Symbolic’ confrontations (burning in effigy, the organized destruction of books and so on), verbal and visual aggression, judicial repression, extreme physical violence (massacre) all contributed to what destroyed Christian commonwealths and tested Christian churches. Martyrologies narrated and commemorated suffering in the face of extreme violence. Antagonism over religious buildings, rights of worship, contested social space, prayers, processions and ceremonies were the outward manifestations of conflicts which challenged the authority of magistrates, pastors and priests within the commonwealth, and led people to question whether Christendom still represented any common values.
Managing the potential for divisions on the grounds of religion was complicated. ‘Toleration’ was not what was expected of a Christian magistrate, still less of a minister of the Word. Luther introduced the term into the German vocabulary, only to dismiss what it implied. ‘Faith suffers nothing, and the Word tolerates nothing’ was one of Luther’s paradoxes, meaning that God’s Word allowed no compromises. A magistrate was no more expected to tolerate the existence of another religion than to permit the existence of demonic forces and witchcraft. To tolerate something was to allow an evil to be perpetuated because one did not have the conviction or authority to stamp it out. None of the religious confessions was fundamentally tolerant of the existence of other religions. Magistrates were repeatedly exhorted to use the power of the sword to maintain the authority and status of the Church and its confession in their dominions to the exclusion of others. Rulers needed little persuasion of the righteousness as well as the right-mindedness of uniting their lands and peoples under one uncontested faith. The widespread conviction was, as the French lawyer Étienne Pasquier put it, that the ‘general foundation [of a state] is principally dependent on the establishment of religion, because the fear and reverence of religion keeps all subjects within bounds more effectively than even the presence of the prince. Therefore the magistrate must above all other things prevent the mutation of religion or the existence of diverse religions in the same state.’ Heterodoxy was an invitation to God’s wrath.
Calling the later sixteenth century the era of the wars of religion underestimates the polymorphy of religious dissent and the degree to which religion became the prism through which questions of power and identity were viewed. It excludes the equally significant experience of religious pluralism. Religious dissent did not necessarily lead to conflict. Contemporaries appreciated that religion was a superficial rallying cry for people’s loyalties, a smokescreen behind which people could pursue their individual interests. If anything, the conflicts made them hypersensitive to the squalid hypocrisy of their opponents. Everyone could agree that the bitter and divisive conflicts of the period were part of the disarray of Christendom, but, for many, religious pluralism was an even more insidious sign of its decay and imminent demise.
RELIGION AND POLEMIC
In 1566, a satire appeared from the Genevan presses. It offered a wall-map and description of the ‘Papal World’ identifying the various cities and provinces (the ‘Kingdom of Good Works’, the ‘Clerical Provinces’, and so on). The papal prison is depicted as ‘Purgatory’ and the Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome as the seat of the Antichrist. This was an infernal cosmography in which the world is divided between good and evil. All around are the tentacles of an octopus with a gaping mouth, holding in its clutches the vulnerable Protestant kingdoms, led by twenty-four ‘Reformers’ (an allusion to the Elders of the Apocalypse), protecting truth with their fists. The engraving set out to shock, exaggerating the power of its opponents to create a syndrome of anxiety. By presenting Rome as an international menace its authors looked to eschatology. In the struggle against the forces of darkness, the righteous armies of Protestant truth were justified in taking up arms, for were they not God’s agents in a global conflict?
The authors of the work hid behind a pseudonym: ‘Frangidelphe Escorche-Messes’ (‘Freedom-Loving Scorch-Mass’ or, with Rabelaisian transposition, ‘Scorch-Bum’). In reality, it was written by Jean-Baptiste Trento, whose career was a paradigm for Protestant controversialists of the later sixteenth century, a refugee from Vicenza who smuggled Protestant books into Italy disguised as a fur-merchant, before ending up in the London house of the English spy-master Francis Walsingham, the executor of his will. Its engraver was Pierre Eskrich, German by origin and an immigrant to Lyon, who took up refuge in Geneva as a Protestant. Responsible for the maps in Genevan Bibles, he knew how to draw an octopus because he had done so for Guillaume Rondelet’s natural history of fishes. Trento and Eskrich belonged to a small world of well-educated and talented migrants whose religious convictions contributed to Reformation polemic. Suspicious of those in authority, they directed their anger at what they saw as abuses of power and untruth.
By the end of the century, the Latin-derived word ‘controversy’ had acquired a new resonance, and the Greek-derived word ‘polemic’ appeared to describe the war of words over dogma and ceremonies. Contemporaries listed words calculated to give offence. The Catholic Willem van der Lindt published a catalogue of them (over a hundred) in Cologne (1579). Beside the familiar ‘Lutheran’, ‘Zwinglian’, ‘Papist’ and ‘Anabaptist’, it included ‘innovator’, ‘libertine’ and ‘middle of the roader’ (moyenneur). Blasphemy, too, was seen through the lens of heresy or dissimulation, for the power of words to hurt was itself rewritten. Images and music charged words in new ways. Liturgical chants and canticles were parodied. Protestant martyrologists report their victims defying the authorities by singing psalms or spirituals. The French Protestant Psalter, translated into verse by Clément Marot, was the runaway bestseller from the ‘wonder years’ of the French Reformation (1560–62). In Antwerp, those who forced open the gates of the city in August 1566 did so with Psalters in their hands. In 1561, Mary Queen of Scots was escorted back from France to Holyroodhouse through the streets of Edinburgh with Catholic litanies from the assembled crowds. Later on, during the League in Paris, a Catholic song-book was published so that those engaged in mass processions could follow the words. The civil wars in France and the revolt in the Low Countries acquired their character through pamphlets. On the streets, in military skirmishes, in the print-shops, conflict was about words as well as actions.
THE ‘YEAR OF WONDER’ IN THE NETHERLANDS AND A TIME OF TROUBLES
An Antwerp contemporary christened 1566 the ‘year of wonder’ (jaer van wonder), that ‘atrocious disturbance’ of the Christian religion and the ‘great mutiny’ of the nobility. It began in southern Flanders when a hat-maker (Sebastiaan Matte) led an outdoor Protestant prayer-meeting at Steenvoorde, outside the monastery of St Lawrence on 10 August, the saint’s feast-day. When Matte finished, the crowd went into the convent and smashed any religious image they could find. The ‘Iconoclastic Fury’ (Beeldenstorm) had begun.
From West Flanders, the movement spread. Richard Clough, an English observer in Antwerp on 20–21 August, wrote that it was like ‘hell, where were above 10,000 torches burning, and such a noise as if heaven and earth had got together’. Next day in Ghent there was a riot on market-day and image-breakers set to work. Children set up saints’ statues in the street and ordered them to say: ‘“Long live the Beggars” or we’ll cut your head off’ – before executing them. Cloth-working towns and villages around Lille followed suit before the movement spread northwards into Holland and Gelderland. The local authorities were left on their own to deal with a crisis the scale and nature of which had no precedent. Ill and ‘sick at heart’, the regent, Margaret of Parma, agreed to a Declaration on 23 August in which she temporized with the nobles. Lamoral, count of Egmont, Stadholder of Flanders and Artois, reported rumours of armed uprisings, open-air meetings and demands for a full ‘religious peace’ (Religionsvrede) like the Augsburg settlement in Germany. Philip de Montmorency, count of Horn, Stadholder of Gelderland and Admiral of Flanders, received reports of image-breaking and insurrection, as did William, prince of Orange. In a further revolutionary move, from Valenciennes and Tournai came plans to raise 3 million florins with which these towns hoped simply to buy their freedom from Philip II. In December 1566, Protestant synods at Antwerp and elsewhere mobilized for a general insurrection, while towns loyal to the regent looked to their own security. In the showdown that followed, the rebels were routed outside Antwerp, while the movement collapsed further north. Valenciennes held out for a time, hoping for aid from French Protestants, but it never came.
With hindsight, the uprising is more predictable than it was at the time. In the cloth-working villages and towns of Flanders, what you sold in half-finished cloth determined the food you could buy for the week ahead. In the winter of 1565–6, the markets for cloth and grain were disrupted by trouble in the Baltic. But these were not just food-riots that went wrong. Frustrations, long-standing anticlerical sentiments and more immediate anxieties were channelled into the movement. Thousands of people congregated behind hedges or in fields to hear preachers. Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s painting entitled The Preaching of John the Baptist captured these moments. Men, women and children, dressed in their best, crowd around the preacher. The miracle was that these self-proclaimed preachers spearheaded such an organized movement.
High politics fomented the upheaval. Horn, Egmont and Orange set themselves in opposition to Antoine Perrenot, Cardinal Granvelle, the minister whom Philip II put in charge to instigate the Inquisition and apply heresy laws strictly. Sensing themselves marginalized, the aristocrats sought to involve the States General in opposing fiscal innovations that were heading their way from Spain, putting together an informal league. Within a year, anti-Granvelle handbills appeared from nowhere. Dunce’s caps (in imitation of the cardinal’s biretta) and buttons with the insignia of six arrows tied about the middle (‘strength through unity’) followed. Their campaign worked and Granvelle was removed in 1564. Building on this success, the aristocrats deputed Egmont to go to Spain in January 1565 to negotiate further concessions. He returned with oral promises, believing that Philip II was so preoccupied with the Ottoman siege of Malta that he would acquiesce to the concessions they asked for. In reality, Egmont was duped. With Malta secured and a laden silver fleet from the Indies, Philip signed the ‘Segovia Letters’ (17 and 20 October 1565, from his palace of El Bosque de Segovia) signalling no compromise.
The grandees reacted to their sense of the public mood. Within days pamphlets and handbills appeared and the aristocrats mustered support for a national petition (known as the ‘Compromise’). Signatories turned up in person, and onlookers cheered the nobles who went to the palace to present it. Three days later, Brederode appropriated a description of the ‘Compromisers’ as ‘beggars’ (gueux), declaring himself the founder-member of a new Order of Beggar Knights. Gueux souvenirs went on sale. One might call this a political party if expectations had not run ahead of organization or objectives. The noble adventure into mass politics contributed to the volatility of the situation, which, in turn, demonstrated that the nobles did not control events.
The rebellion collapsed of its own accord in early 1567. In Spain it was decided that the ‘heretic rebellion’ had to pay a heavy price. Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, duke of Alba, led the repression. With half a lifetime of service in the Hispanic empire to his name, he entered Brussels on 22 August 1567 at the head of regiments of tercios (infantry units in Spain’s army). The Netherlands had entertained Charles V’s military forces in the past, but never as an army of occupation. Alba then masterminded the arrest of Egmont and Horn at the council table in Brussels. They were tried and publicly beheaded in the main square of Brussels on 5 June 1568. He instigated a commission (known to contemporaries as the ‘Council of Troubles’) in September 1567 to mete out punishment to those implicated in the rebellion. The arrests began on Ash Wednesday, 3 March 1568, pictured in Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s Massacre of the Innocents. The executions continued as William of Orange and his brother, Louis of Nassau, launched unsuccessful military offensives from Germany in 1568 and 1569. The documents of the Council of Troubles record a total of 12,302 tried – an underestimate since many of those investigated locally did not make it into their files. Of these, over 1,000 were executed and 9,000 had their property confiscated. Alba later claimed that repression had earned 500,000 ducats for the Spanish treasury. A diocesan reform was carried through, the first stage to re-Catholicization. Communities were made to repair damaged churches and to pay for the occupation through new taxes, of which the most controversial was the ‘Tenth Penny’, an excise tax of 10 per cent. The Estates played for time, voting a temporary levy in 1569. When that expired in July 1571, Alba raised it on his own authority, billeting troops on those who refused to pay.
The memories of revolt and repression were nurtured among fugitives in Germany and England. They joined those who had already left before 1566 to set up Calvinist churches in exile. A general assembly (Konvent) convened at Wesel in October 1568, attended by sixty-three Calvinists from the exiled groups. Three years later, twenty-nine leaders congregated in a synod at Emden in October 1571, where they agreed fifty-three articles which defined the discipline, theology and framework of the Dutch Reformed Church. Officially, they did not support Orange’s military invasion to topple Alba. Unofficially, they became the guardians of a memory of what had happened and an impetus to what followed.
MASSACRES IN FRANCE AND AN UNREALIZABLE PEACE
In 1559–60, dynastic crisis, financial meltdown and religious dissension shook the French monarchy. France became beset by conflict that turned to civil war, beginning in 1562 and continuing thereafter in a cycle that was partly driven by its own inner dynamic. Destructive and divisive, hard fought on both sides, the first phase of the civil wars lasted only thirteen months. The Peace of Amboise (March 1563), which brought it to a close, was brokered by a monarchy that sought to recover the initiative that peace represented. But fighting broke out anew in 1567. The pacifications at Longjumeau (March 1568) and Saint-Germain (August 1570) followed, both of them shortlived. War irrupted again in 1573 and the pacifications which succeeded them – the Peace of Beaulieu of May 1576 (soon called the ‘Peace of Monsieur’ after the king’s brother, who had mostly secured it), the Peace of Bergerac (September 1577) and the Pacification of Nantes (April 1598) – drew lessons from their predecessors.
King Henry II was accidentally killed in a tournament in Paris on 30 June 1559, held to celebrate the marriages which sealed the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis. The kingdom passed to his fifteen-year-old son, Francis, but Francis II lived only another eighteen months before succumbing to an ear infection. In December 1560 his ten-year-old younger brother succeeded him as Charles IX. A decade of minority rule/tutelage was in prospect. French Protestants interpreted these events as God’s judgement upon the Valois, a question mark over their rule.
That question mark was accentuated by unassigned royal debt and the repression of Protestant heresy which failed to deliver the unity that it promised. In another Valois showcase wedding in April 1558, Francis had married Mary Stuart, the daughter of James V of Scotland and Mary of Guise. Breaking with the past, Francis II looked to his ultra-Catholic in-laws to chart the way forward. These were his uncles by marriage, Charles of Guise, cardinal of Lorraine, and his brother, François, duke of Guise. Their rise to power signalled the eclipse of Anne de Montmorency, who had dominated the court for most of three decades. Montmorency’s family and circle of influence embraced all those who would emerge as the military leaders of the French Protestant movement over the next decade. They included Louis de Bourbon, prince of Condé and a cadet prince of the blood, Jeanne d’Albret, queen of Navarre and the wife of Condé’s elder brother, Antoine de Bourbon, and Gaspard de Coligny, sieur de Châtillon. Anonymous libels, verses and handbills made their first appearance in 1560, alluding to the Guise ‘ivy’ that sucked the lifeblood from the Valois monarchy, and the Lorraine ‘pyramid’ that would supplant it.
These aristocrats made common cause with the emerging Protestant movement. Calvin courted them in 1558. Jeanne d’Albret had become a closet Protestant, perhaps as early as 1555. Louis, prince of Condé, visited Geneva in August 1558. Coligny and his brother François used their captivity after the battle of St-Quentin to read Calvin’s works, and to reflect. But many remained undecided, including Antoine de Bourbon, who, although he arrived at court in March 1558 accompanied by a Protestant chaplain, even attending a Protestant rally, kept his options open. He, more than others, seems to have been alert to the difficulties opening up for France.
Those dangers manifested themselves in March 1560 in a plot to ‘free’ the king from his ‘imprisonment’ by the Guises. The plotters’ leader was a squire from the Périgord (Jean du Barry, seigneur de La Renaudie) whose Protestantism went not much deeper than his disgruntlement at a failed lawsuit and a visceral hatred of the Guises. He rallied together discontents and contacted Protestant preachers in Paris. The prince of Condé and Calvin gave him no overt encouragement. To gain access, Renaudie’s plot used the excuse of presenting a Protestant petition to the king at Amboise. Foiled at the last minute, the leaders were hanged from the castle gate. The resulting repression fostered resentments and a myth of Guise tyranny. In late May 1559, French Calvinists held their first synod, where delegates from sixty-two churches approved the Confession and Discipline for a presbyterian and synodical Church government. By the time of their second synod at Poitiers in March 1561, there were hundreds of congregations. They focused on towns but achieved a critical mass in Lower Normandy and an arc from La Rochelle south and east towards Geneva. Their movement’s growth seemed unstoppable, and so, too, did the sectarian tensions that accompanied it. ‘Huguenot’, a term of abuse, came to prominence in 1560, probably deriving from a neighbourhood in Tours, around whose gate (la Porte Hugon) Protestants congregated.
Catherine de Médicis, who assumed power as regent in the name of her son Charles IX in December 1560, tried to build a consensus to tackle rising sectarian tensions and the government’s debts. She did so through summoning the Estates General, the kingdom’s Parliament, to Orléans in December 1560. Chancellor Michel de l’Hôpital dressed up the ancient wisdom of amicitia and caritas in a famous opening speech to the Estates General in December 1560. ‘Gentleness,’ he said, ‘will serve better than rigour. Let us shun these diabolic words, the names of parties, factions and seditions: “Lutherans”, “Huguenots”, “Papists”, keeping only the name of “Christian”.’ Failing to agree about anything, delegates were recalled to Pontoise in the summer of 1561. Under pressure, the clergy (one of the estates in the Estates General) reluctantly offered to repay debts. But that offer came at the price of refusing a formula for religious concord.
Catherine’s ‘gentleness’ had to be undertaken without the support of the Estates General. Religious repression was dismantled, culminating in the edict of January 1562, which offered Protestants the rights to meet and worship. Each move became a stimulus to the Protestants to ask for more and an invitation to local confrontation. Image-breaking, which already exposed the anarchist and sacrilegious tendencies of the French Reformation, became more organized, in some places with an anti-monarchical gloss. At Orléans, the heart of the recently deceased Francis II was disinterred and fried before being thrown to the dogs. At Bourges, the tomb of Jeanne de France, the daughter of Louis XI and a proto-saint, was dismembered and burned.
Catholics reacted violently. The first massacre of Protestants took place at Sens, which was where a Dominican (‘Jacobin’) friar inflamed the local population. On 12 April 1562, over a hundred Protestants were tied to poles and drowned. At Toulouse, thousands perished after the city was retaken in May 1562 following a brief Protestant ascendancy, their assailants degrading their victims. Some believed that they were acting on God’s behalf, thinking the Last Days to be at hand. Many more perished in the ensuing war. Protestant forces, some raised and funded by local churches, fought against royal troops. At the siege of Rouen (September–October 1562) Antoine de Bourbon was a victim. At the battle close by Dreux (19 December 1562) thousands perished and Condé and Montmorency were captured. At the siege of Orléans, military headquarters of Condé, the duke of Guise was shot dead by Jean Poltrot de Méré, a Protestant who had infiltrated the royal army. Under torture, he said that he was acting for Gaspard de Coligny. True or not, a feud between Coligny and the Guise family resulted – one of many vendettas in the civil wars.
The early edicts of pacification underestimated the task in hand. That of 1563 consisted of fifteen articles; that promulgated at Nantes thirty-five years later had ninety-five articles and a further fifty-six particular clauses to regulate issues of detail. In 1563, the ‘privileges’ accorded the Protestants were limited, and mainly directed to satisfying the Protestant nobility. Detailed application was left to royal commissioners who relied, where they could, on governors and lieutenants to assist them. They referred many matters to the council of state, which found itself overwhelmed. Royal legislation ventured into controversial terrain – controlling, for example, what preachers said in the pulpit, or how many (of which religion) should sit in municipal councils. Places of worship and burial became contentious issues. Many Protestants suspected that they were the victims of the peace. Only gradually did local communities learn how to live with their differences. In some places local councillors were elected from both confessions. In others, especially where there was a real or imagined threat to a local community from without, its leaders agreed to ‘live in union and friendship’ with one another. France was not irretrievably ruptured into two opposing groups.
Catherine de Médicis drew these positive elements together in a royal progress round the kingdom with Charles IX. The court left Paris in January 1564 and did not return there until the spring of 1566, the comprehensive Ordinance of Moulins (February 1566) aiming to rebuild the monarchy on the basis of ‘piety’ and ‘justice’ whose twin pillars served as the motto of the young king. At Moulins the royal council reconciled Henri de Guise and Coligny, the latter swearing that he ‘had never, or caused, nor yet approved of, Guise’s assassination’. The evidence was, however, that the pacification had not taken deep roots. In September 1567, the Protestant leadership mounted a further plot (the Conspiracy of Meaux) to ‘liberate’ the young king. Condé, Coligny and his brothers were unsettled by Alba’s repression in the Netherlands, and discomfited by their own failure to come to the aid of their co-religionists. They were additionally nervous at rumours of a plan to eliminate them, one they deduced must have been the subject of the discussions between the French and Spanish courts at Bayonne. Pope Pius V’s condemnation in June 1567 of the Huguenots was assumed to be its opening salvo. But the Huguenots were always good at imagining conspiracies against themselves, and never much good at carrying out their own. The Conspiracy of Meaux was foiled at the last moment, and it left Charles IX and Catherine de Médicis with a sense that the Huguenots’ real aim was to kill the king in the pursuit of their ambitions.
Following the death of the Constable Anne de Montmorency at the battle of St-Denis (10 November 1567), the command of the royal army was given to the king’s younger brother, Henri de Valois, duke of Anjou, later Henry III. Barely sixteen years of age, he attracted the service of young Catholic activists. Leading a campaign to southwestern France, Anjou’s forces defeated the Huguenot army at Jarnac on 13 March 1569. Wounded, Condé prepared to surrender, but one of Anjou’s officers stabbed him in cold blood. Those serving Anjou felt let down by the Peace of Saint-Germain (August 1570). By its terms, Protestants were accorded four stronghold fortresses in the kingdom as guarantees of their security. Pope Pius V, who made no secret of his desire to exterminate Protestant heresy by force, told Catherine the following month: ‘The day will come when Your Majesty will repent of having agreed to such a dangerous peace.’ Protestants, too, their leadership now in the hands of Coligny and Jeanne d’Albret, sneered at the ‘limping, badly-seated peace’ (it had been negotiated by the gammy-legged Marshal Biron and the sieur de Malassise). Hard-line Catholics looked for the moment when it could be undermined.
Paris offered them the opportunity to do so. It had provided loans to the king and paid for its own fortifications. The demands upon its citizens to mobilize for their defence and protection moved authority in the capital away towards those who organized its local militia. Its parishes sustained independent-minded Catholic clergy, who identified their cause with that of their city. In 1569, three Parisians were condemned to death for having held illegal Protestant assemblies privately. After their execution, their house was dismantled and a commemorative pyramid erected in its place. Following the pacification of 1570, the king reluctantly agreed to the pyramid’s relocation. On 2 December 1571, the masons set to work but a crowd prevented them. It was finally moved at night on 19–20 December under armed guard, which sparked off a riot the following day. Paris was combustible.
That does not explain the massacre that began before morning light on 24 August 1572, the feast-day of St Bartholomew. The dynamic of events went beyond anyone’s ability to control. Catherine de Médicis negotiated a marriage between her daughter Marguerite (‘la Reine Margot’) and the Protestant son of Queen Jeanne d’Albret, Henry of Navarre. It was a high-profile, confessionally mixed marriage to cement the pacification. Henry entered Paris on 8 July and the marriage itself was solemnized on 18 August at Notre-Dame. Music, poetry and pageantry created a marriage-fantasy in which a ‘Paradise of Love’ (the tournament of 20 August) brought together Protestant and Catholic nobility in a charade.
Then, on 22 August Admiral Gaspard de Coligny was shot and wounded as he walked towards his lodging after attending the king’s council. Coligny wanted to recover French anti-Habsburg momentum abroad. He and Condé signed an agreement of mutual cooperation in August 1568 with William of Nassau and his brother Louis. They aided the French Protestants in 1569 and served in their high command. This was an obligation to be reciprocated when, on 24 May 1572, French forces launched an expedition into Flanders in support of the Sea Beggars, who had taken Brill the previous month. Philippe Duplessis-Mornay drew up a memorandum justifying intervention in the Netherlands as the way to unite France in an expedition abroad. The royal council considered Coligny’s proposition just as the French forces became bogged down, and rejected it. As Coligny pursued the idea, international tensions placed him in the spotlight.
His would-be assassin was Charles de Louviers, sieur de Maurevert, who shot him from a house belonging to the duke of Guise’s tutor. Maurevert was a killer with past form and no one knows whether he was acting on his own account or (as the Huguenots surmised) for the Guises. Sensing their vulnerability, the Huguenot nobility threatened reprisals. Those around the council table of Charles IX took the threats seriously and, at a meeting or meetings held sometime on 23 August, opted for a selective elimination of the Huguenot leadership – a collective decision, taken to protect the king and his state. Catherine de Médicis certainly participated, but (equally certainly) she was not alone. Contemporaries pointed the finger at the king’s younger brother, Henry, duke of Anjou, and the Italians in royal service. The execution was hasty and improvised. The Provost of Paris was told to close the gates of the city, chain all the boats in the Seine to the right bank, guard the bridges and summon the militia. During the night, the young duke of Guise and others set out from the Louvre for Coligny’s lodgings with an armed contingent. A captain from Bohemia assassinated Coligny, then the body was thrown into the street, emasculated and beheaded, and taken towards the river. Other senior Protestant figures met similar fates. For three days, the city gates remained closed while the massacre continued, the Seine turning red with the blood of the victims. A partial enumeration of the bodies picked out from the Seine downstream gives no real way of estimating the number of victims – there may well have been up to 3,000 Parisians killed. Surviving Protestants later reluctantly described their harrowing experiences.
The king acknowledged his part in the events, declaring before the Parlement on 26 August that ‘what has happened has been by his express command, and in no way because of Religion, and not in contravention of his edicts of pacification [...] but to forestall and prevent the carrying out of a wicked and detestable conspiracy by the Admiral [...] against the person of the king and against his State’. For Protestants this was a tyrannical act, and its victims were martyrs. The massacre became an international controversy and fatally undermined the monarchy’s efforts at pacification in the next reign.
The Paris carnage inspired massacres in a score of other towns and cities, where at a minimum estimate a further 3,000 Protestants met their death (and the figure may well have been double that number). In Bordeaux, the Jesuit Edmond Auger, author of a manual on religious warfare, preached from the cathedral pulpit on Michaelmas Day 1572: ‘Who has carried out the judgment of God in Paris? The angel of God. Who has done so in Orléans? The angel of God [ . . .] Who will do so in the town of Bordeaux? It will be the angel of God.’ Over thirty years later, the Catholic League pamphleteer Louis Dorléans referred to the St Bartholomew massacre as a ‘propitious holocaust’. Many Protestants in northern France returned to the Catholic faith. But Protestantism’s dynamic was sustained in southern France. It could still count on prominent noble families. Above all, the movement had urban strongholds south of the Loire. La Rochelle, a maritime port of some 20,000 inhabitants, refused to obey royal authority and organized its defences. Surrounded by the sea and marshland, it was vulnerable only to the north. Royal forces concentrated their attack at that point in a siege that lasted six months (February–July 1573) before it was abandoned.
The Huguenots already had the rudiments of a military and political wing. In December 1573, they went a stage further, calling delegates to Millau. Ninety-seven deputies attended, mostly from the Midi, a mixture of gentry, pastors, officers and urban notables. Criticizing princes and charging magistrates with the responsibility of limiting the excesses of those in power, they agreed a corporate structure for their ‘party’. Using the model of the Estates General as well as their own synodical government, they vested authority in a general assembly consisting of deputies chosen by provincial assemblies and which would convene every six months. Its role was to legislate, decide war and peace, fix levels of taxation, agree loans in their name, and appoint delegates to a council which would oversee the activities of their elected political leader. For a time, local activists were in command. When the assembly met again at Millau in July 1574, they elected Henri de Bourbon-Condé (the son of Louis) as their ‘chief, governor-general and protector’. Within months, they made common cause for tactical reasons with the ‘malcontent’ governor of Languedoc, Henri de Montmorency-Damville, and, a year later, with another leading Catholic prince of the blood, the king’s brother, François d’Alençon. There was little that anyone could teach those Protestant activists about how to use their know-how of local terrain and resources. Even so, they were among the ‘lesser’ of the ‘lesser magistrates’, people from small towns and communities without wider experience and confidence in public affairs. They knew that the pattern of the civil wars in France was one of short-term conflict followed by rapprochement, and they were not interested in forming a new state on their own.
So the civil wars in France intensified for a while post-1572. Yet the malcontent and Protestant aristocratic leadership kept the door open to reconciliation and, in due course, the French monarchy responded. The Peace of Beaulieu of May 1576 came unstuck within months. That of Bergerac (the ‘King’s Peace’) of September 1577 was compromised by the faltering authority of the king in question (Henry III) and his misunderstood efforts at reform. An entire generation was overshadowed by the fears generated in the civil wars, relived in new conflicts in the later 1580s. Only in retrospect was it a dry-run for the processes of remembering and forgetting, reconciliation and reconstruction that would begin in earnest in France with the signing of the Peace of Nantes in 1598.
HUGUENOTS AND BEGGARS AT SEA
The most militarized contentions over religion in later sixteenth-century Europe occurred where the state was most developed. That was because the authority of the state was so often contracted out to individual parties in complex ways – through office-holding, tax-farming, the hiring of mercenary soldiers or the privateering of naval warfare. Religious parties opposed to the state battened onto that privatized power, internationalizing it and turning it to their own purposes. Nothing illustrates that process better than what happened in Atlantic waters. It was already common practice for riverine states to encourage merchants to build ships that were leased to the state in time of war through ‘letters of reprisal’ or allowed to prey upon foreign vessels in return for a portion of the prize being returned to the state. That opened the door to private endeavour after the establishment of the overseas empires and their rulers’ unsuccessful attempts to limit direct trade with their colonies to themselves. Privateers and their backers regarded that colonization as based on an arbitrary division of the world, decided by Pope Alexander VI in 1494 ‘as if God had made the sea and land only for the Spaniards and Portuguese’. Those were the sentiments of Henri Lancelot de Voisin, sieur de La Popelinière, a Protestant historian and would-be buccaneer. In a book that fostered the popular notion of a ‘terra australis’ or ‘southern world’ that lay yet undiscovered, he totally refuted the idea that Spain and Portugal could treat the rest of the world as a private fief. He supported the activities of his fellow-countrymen from the 1550s onwards who undertook expeditions to establish other colonies and profit from seized Hispanic ships.
Privateering became part of the developing conflicts in France and the Netherlands. English-based buccaneers became very active in the 1560s, Elizabeth I and her ministers being economical with the truth when they denied their involvement. French Protestants used privateering to defray their war costs. They were joined by Dutch contingents after the failure of the first revolt. Count Louis of Nassau needed ships to support his planned invasion of Friesland in 1568. But its failure deprived the privateers (‘Sea Beggars’ or Watergeuzen, as William of Orange called them) of their base on the Ems estuary and they joined the French and English in the Channel. By 1570, there were about thirty Dutch privateers in operation, working out of English ports and responsible to William of Orange as and when they felt like it. In 1571, Elizabeth I came under pressure to expel them from English ports and, on 1 March 1572, she obliged. The Beggars had to find a new base of operations. La Rochelle was closed off, and on 1 April 1572 they landed in the small fishing port of Brill on the island of Voorne in the Maas estuary. The town was taken, its church ransacked. It was not a popular uprising, but it triggered an insurrection against the hated Spanish tax known as the ‘Tenth Penny’.
The resentment against the Tenth Penny and Alba’s regime was concentrated in Holland, north of the river Ij, and in Amsterdam. The Spanish withdrew their forces to defeat the Huguenot-led expedition to the south. Then, from his ancestral lands at Dillenburg in the Rhineland, William of Orange began another invasion on 7 July. Still more towns, this time in Brabant and Flanders, declared for the revolt. The tide turned back in Alba’s favour as military reinforcements arrived and Orange’s men failed to relieve the siege on Mons while Alba’s sacked Mechelen. Alba justified the latter as a legal reprisal. On 11 December 1572 Spanish forces began their siege of Haarlem, the gateway by land to Holland’s ‘Northern Quarter’, which was where Orange retreated with his remaining troops, having ‘decided to make that province my tomb’.
IN HELL’S DESPAIR
Contemporaries followed these events with bewilderment. What should they call the deputies of the provincial States of Holland, summoned to The Hague by Alba but who had chosen to meet at Dordrecht instead? To Philip II and the government in Madrid, they were rebels. Elizabeth I regarded their representatives with condescension. Philip van Marnix appeared before them on Orange’s behalf with the simple objective: ‘to see the day when these Low Countries may recover their former bloom, prosperity and ancient liberty’. He outlined a provisional government for which Orange would be the Stadholder and in which Protestants and Catholics would live together. But it was just a sketch. The financial arrangements were inadequate, and events proved how difficult a confessionally unaligned commonwealth would be. Convinced that Alba was a ‘tyrant’, they sent envoys to Gouda ‘to obtain access to the charters of Holland’ and make copies of their privileges. In 1575, the States of Holland created their own university (Leiden) and signed an act of union between themselves and Zeeland. Dutch pamphleteers accused Philip II of wanting to rule the Low Countries ‘freely and absolutely’. In his published Apology of 1581, William of Orange defended himself against Philip II’s condemnation, in turn branding the Spanish king a tyrant. ‘Let him be a King in Castile, in Aragon, at Naples, amongst the Indians, and in every place where he commands at his pleasure: yea let him be a king if he will in Jerusalem, and a peaceable governor in Asia and Africa, yet for all that I will not acknowledge him in this country . . . whose power is limited according to our privileges, which he swore to observe.’
In July 1581, the States General issued the Act of Abjuration (Plakkaat van Verlatinghe), declaring the rulership of the Netherlands vacant because Philip had ‘deserted’ the Dutch. It prohibited the use of his name on legal documents, released magistrates from their allegiance and proclaimed a new oath to the States General. The act’s preamble, drawn from Duplessis-Mornay’s Vindication against Tyrants (1579), offered a legal basis for their decision, reinforced by arguments from the Frisian humanist Aggaeus van Albada and Gouda’s leading politician, François Vranck. Albada’s starting-point (drawn from Spanish sources) was that ‘all forms of government, kingdoms, empires and legitimate authorities are founded for the common utility of the citizens, and not of the rulers’. The community had been oppressed by its prince and, since it had no other overlord from whom to seek redress, it ‘is entitled to take up arms’. Vranck argued the case for the delegated powers of the States General, a body reflecting ‘the whole state and entire body of the inhabitants’.
The Dutch Revolt turned into a nasty civil war whose memories became historicized in the foundation myth for an emerging Dutch Republic. In St Bavo church at Haarlem, behind the Calvinist communion table, stands a painting where the altar once was. Texts, painted on a black background, describe Christ’s Last Supper, a reminder to Calvinists of the bread and wine they were about to receive. On the back of the painting, facing the ambulatory where non-confessing townspeople walked, was another reminder, headed ‘If only hunger had offered no struggle/Spanish violence would have fled from Haarlem’. Sixty-seven lines of poetry testified to the hardships endured in an eight-month siege (December 1572–July 1573). When the city capitulated, sixty burghers and most of its garrison were hanged, the siege becoming integral to Haarlem’s identity, evoked in a new civic motto (‘Virtue conquers Strength’) and linked to the crusading tradition of Haarlemeers who had relieved the siege at the port of Damietta in the thirteenth century. Through memorials like this, the defence of Calvinism and civic liberties became the dominant narrative of the revolt.
Religious high-mindedness and political principle took second place to the sieges, ransacking, flooding, treason, exile and endurance that were the truth of it. Wouter Jacobszoon, an Augustinian prior from Stein, near Gouda, fled to Amsterdam when the Beggars took over in June 1572. He kept a detailed record of what he saw and heard. ‘Marvel,’ he said, ‘at this troubled, tormented and wild, desolate time in which we have lived’, convinced that God was visiting a terrible judgement upon the Netherlands. ‘As long as people have been assured about their external freedom and their own welfare,’ he commented on 4 September 1572 on the Beggar atrocities, ‘they care not whether God’s temples are despoiled, the holy statues broken, whether God’s servants, the priests . . . are mocked . . . God has abandoned us.’ In Amsterdam, he reported Beggar bravado on the streets, recorded the satirical coins they minted, the songs they sang, the plots they dreamed up, even the games that children played. On 3 June 1574, Father Wouter’s diary records the fires he saw burning in the ‘waterland’ to the north of Amsterdam, from where a traveller reported finding thirty bodies naked in a ditch, killed by the Beggars in an ambush. He thought it was worse than living under the Turks.
How would it end? For Philip II, the answer was with the defeat of the rebels. He recognized, however, that this was a matter of politics as well as military force. Alba had understood the latter but not the former, and he was replaced by the governor of Spanish Lombardy, Don Luis de Requesens, who arrived in November 1573 with an army of 60,000, and was convinced he could win quickly in the Northern Quarter so long as he could open the dykes and flood it. But Philip II rejected the idea on the grounds of the ‘reputation for cruelty that it would earn us’. Requesens was instead engulfed by a tide of army mutinies for lack of pay. Mutiny was a problem on both sides, but because of the size of the Flanders Army and because it was garrisoned in towns, this had greater impact. Mutinies started with veterans advertising their grievances in meetings, and then holding inhabitants to ransom. Requesens died on 5 March 1576, knowing that it was only a matter of time before, following Philip II’s decision to suspend interest payments on his debts in November 1575, catastrophe struck.
On 25 July 1576, Spanish mutineers sacked the town of Aalst and made common cause with other contingents. On Sunday 4 November, Requesens’s replacement Don John of Austria arrived in Luxembourg with powers from Philip II to send home the army and concede whatever was necessary to make peace. That same day, Spanish troops invaded the rebel-held town of Antwerp. In several days of burning and looting, over 1,000 houses were destroyed and 7,000 people lost their lives. As with the massacre of St Bartholomew, engravings and newsletters broadcast the event, making the ‘Spanish Fury’ part of the anti-Spanish ‘Black Legend’. Four days later (8 November) the States General (including representatives from Holland and Zeeland) agreed to the Pacification of Ghent and to expel the occupying army. That might have settled the Dutch Revolt had the decision not been taken to postpone discussion of differences over religion, for it was over those that it came unstuck less than three years later.
A religious peace had been a feature of the accords signed between Orange and the towns of Holland and Zeeland who joined the Beggar cause. Although Catholic worship in public was forbidden by the States of Holland in February 1573, Catholics, Lutherans, Anabaptists and others were in practice left alone to worship as they wished in private. The ‘authorized Church’ in the new order, however, was Calvinist. Reformed churches emerged with speed, taking over ecclesiastical fabric and putting it into the hands of pastors, deacons and elders. But it appeared more solid on paper than in situ. The letters from consistories to London tell another story: a shortage of ministers, the impossibility of meeting because of the war, and the tiny numbers in the congregations. Holland and Zeeland were Calvinist only in the sense that parts of western Europe today are Christian. The Ecclesiastical Ordinances of the States of Holland (1576) made it clear, too, that the magistrates had the final say in who should be pastor, what preaching went on and the upkeep of church fabric. Baptism was open to all, not just confessing members of the Calvinist community, so churches and cemeteries became, in some sense, civic space.
That ‘civic Calvinism’ was not the kind that motivated pro-Orange forces that emerged in 1577 in the urban southern Netherlands. Orange’s popularity there focused the widespread disenchantment with everything that had made a mess of people’s lives over the previous decade. In Ghent, two Calvinist magistrates arrested the duke of Aerschot and his servants on 28 October 1577 and staged a municipal revolution, putting in their place a special committee (‘The Eighteen’) of artisans. In February 1578, the Calvinists of Ghent exported their revolution, marching on Oudenaarde and engineering little revolutions at Kortrijk, Bruges and Ieper. Wherever they were successful, magistrates were removed from office and replaced with Calvinists, Catholics were summarily expelled and images smashed. Most significantly of all, on 26 May 1578, the Calvinists of Amsterdam staged a coup, arresting Catholic magistrates and clergy, and expelling them from the city. Philip II’s concessions to the States General now, a year later, looked like a mistake. His worst fears about the nature of ‘heretic rule’ were coming to pass in a Calvinist revolution in Flanders. With peace in the Mediterranean and a treasure fleet of fifty-five ships conveying over 2 million ducats of silver from the New World in August 1577, he had the resources to intervene once more. In addition, after the death of Don John in September 1578, Philip could appoint someone in his place who was both a brilliant general and an able political strategist: Alexander Farnese, Prince (in 1586, Duke) of Parma and Piacenza.
Farnese was Philip’s cousin, and had been educated at the Spanish court with Don John. Serving as the latter’s attaché from 1577 he understood the problems at first hand. His strategy was to allow time and the logic of events to work in his favour. So they did, beginning with the decision of the provincial Estates of Hainaut, Artois and Walloon Flanders (6 January 1579) to secede from the Estates General, blaming the ‘heretics’ who had shown ‘such fury’. Nine months later, the Estates signed a treaty at Arras with Farnese, reaffirming their obedience to Philip II and their Catholicity in return for the removal of Spanish troops. Farnese obliged, knowing that they would eventually need him. From his fortress base at Namur, he responded to calls for aid from towns, and after each successful intervention he made an accord with the citizens in question. There were no reprisals. In return, each town agreed to re-Catholicize and grant a right of exile (ius emigrandi) to Protestants. Meanwhile, he lured the nobility back with promises of pardons and pensions, Philip II’s ‘golden bullets’ as one frustrated Dutch commander called them. Farnese’s strategy, involving a reconquest of the towns along the Scheldt (Mechelen, Antwerp, Ghent) to create a line of defence for the provinces of Flanders and Brabant, began to emerge.
Most daring was Parma’s siege of Antwerp. The sack of 1576 created lasting resentments and the city would not be won back with concessions. The siege lasted for over a year (July 1584–August 1585) and involved the construction of a pontoon bridge across the Scheldt (2,400 feet long) with defensive earthworks at both ends. Despite Dutch efforts to ram the bridge with fire-ships and a battleship (the Finis Belli), they did not succeed. Spanish troops behaved themselves when they entered the city, and Protestants were given two years to emigrate. Tens of thousands left Antwerp alone and, although estimates differ, well over 100,000 migrated from the southern Netherlands northwards overall. Leiden and Amsterdam swelled with thousands of Walloons, Brabanters and Flemings. Farnese determined the contours of the new split Netherlands with the establishment of a re-Catholicized south. Clerical authority was re-established and that of the magistrates reaffirmed. They in turn proclaimed loyalty to the Habsburgs. It was not quite business as usual, however, because the Dutch blockaded the Scheldt and post-war reconstruction took years. Farnese’s troops remained in place despite his promises to remove them. A new wave of mutinies in the 1590s caused major unrest. As elsewhere in Europe, they were a decade of food shortages in the southern Netherlands. For contemporary diarists, dearth was headline news, not the military campaigns tending to a stalemate with the north.
The future of the northern Netherlands remained undetermined for longer. The provisional government of Holland and Zeeland, established back in 1572, was the model for the document which the provinces of Holland, Zeeland and Gelderland signed on 23 January 1579 at Utrecht, agreeing to act in perpetuity ‘as if they were a single province’ on matters of peace and war. The Union of Utrecht necessitated the appointment of a council, a treasurer and other officers, but in other respects, the right of each province to govern itself as it saw fit was expressly safeguarded. Whether other provinces would join the union would depend on what happened. Acting together through what remained of the authority of the States General, they abjured the sovereignty of Philip II on 26 July 1581. That was supposed to smooth the way for a transfer of power to the king of France’s youngest brother, François d’Alençon, now duke of Anjou, who arrived on cue with a small army in August 1581.
But Holland and Zeeland refused to sign up to Anjou’s ‘sovereignty’ (Jean Bodin, the expert on that issue was one of his advisers) and the States General could not deliver the authority that he would need to govern. He seized Dunkirk, Diksmuide and Ostend from the Spanish on 17 January 1583 but failed at Bruges and Antwerp. The principal casualties of the ‘French Fury’ in the latter were not the citizens but the French troops – perhaps 2,000 of whom were slaughtered. Anjou’s intervention in the Netherlands merely enlarged Farnese’s reconquest options. Anjou’s death on 10 June 1584 was followed a month later by the murder of William of Orange, assassinated in the Prinsenhof, the palace (formerly a convent) that the city of Delft gave him as the centre for his provisional government. The hired Spanish assassin shot three bullets, two of which missed. Who would direct, with what resources and on what basis, the war against Farnese remained to be determined.
Those issues were clarified in the two decades after 1585 in decisions made in the context of the broadening conflict with Spain, encompassing England, Ireland and France. The seven provinces of the United Provinces of the Netherlands were not united by religion. The religious peace that had been proposed by Orange in July 1578, and which was tacitly acknowledged in the Union of Utrecht, was not a rallying cry. Indeed, towns and provinces in the north often found local reasons to expel Catholics as risks to security. Their southward exodus (less numerous than migrants the other way) consolidated Catholic Flanders. The Netherlands was not the haven of religious liberty that it imagined itself to be later in the seventeenth century. Yet, on the basis of a political culture and the memory of recent strife, and drawing strength from the military victories orchestrated by Mauritz of Nassau, William of Orange’s son, as well as his cousin William Louis, the United Provinces of the Netherlands learned to be a state-like structure with which the rest of Europe had to deal.
THE SPANISH MONARCHY AND ITS DOMINIONS
Philip II came to the Spanish throne in 1556, inheriting dominions in Europe and overseas. He had grown up knowing nothing else and adapted himself to its service and ideals. He relished the opportunities that empire afforded. Regent in Spain since 1543, he had a good working knowledge of affairs as duke of Milan (from 1540) and king in Sicily and Naples (from 1554). He spent several months in England as king consort to Mary Tudor in 1554. From there, he crossed the Channel to attend the ceremony in Brussels on 25 October 1555 when his father surrendered power. Less than two years later, Philip’s army routed the French at St-Quentin on 10 August 1557. With the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis (April 1559), he set off south to Castile by way of his Italian possessions.
His advisers had some difficulty giving conceptual shape to Philip II’s rule. To call it an empire would have further strained the delicate relationships with Philip’s uncle Ferdinand, whose election to the emperorship of the Holy Roman Empire had finally been accepted by the Diet in 1558. Yet they believed in Christendom, and thought Philip II was pre-eminent over other powers in it, and that on the basis of undeniable fact. Fernando Vázquez witnessed Spanish legates in the closing sessions of the Council of Trent in 1563 claiming precedence over the French on just those grounds. A year later he wrote a treatise explaining that Spanish ‘power, dominion and extended territories’ justified its preferential status (praelatio) among Christian commonwealths. Not only that, the Spanish monarchy’s precedence was warranted by the extent of the service that Philip II could render to Christendom, and by his ability to represent the voice (vox populi) of its Catholic people. Not only France but the Holy Roman Empire should acknowledge Spain’s pre-eminence.
Philip’s decision to locate his monarchy in Castile cemented the resource logistics of his father’s empire, but it begged more questions than it answered, given that so many of his inherited dominions lay outside the Spanish peninsula. Castilian humanists absorbed the notions of mutual obligation in a Christian commonwealth but it was not clear how that could work on such a scale. Castilian jurists emphasized instead the importance of kingship as the source of law. That provided the basis for Philip II’s use of edicts (pragmáticas) issued under the king’s ‘absolute royal power’. The capacity of Philip II to provide a single law that ran throughout his various kingdoms gave the Spanish monarchy its conceptual framework and legitimacy. Royal image-makers fleshed out the details in tapestries, engravings, statues, ceremonial entries, architecture and music.
Their themes included dynastic continuity and inheritance, wrapped up in the traditions of the Catholic kings of Spain, with a dose of Habsburg mythology. Monarchical traditions in Spain did not include rituals of enthronement, anointment and the royal touch. So the monarchical image was fabricated from the events themselves, reaching its apogee in the annexation of Portugal. The royal entry into Lisbon (1581) included a triumphal arch with Janus surrendering the keys of his temple ‘as if to the lord of the world’, while another carried the message: ‘The world, which was divided [...] is now linked into one, since you are lord of everything East and West.’ Alonso de Ercilla, who had served at St-Quentin and then gone to Peru, composed his epic narrative poem on the Araucanian war as an epitome to Philip II’s monarchy. A medal was struck in 1583, showing the king in portrait on the face and, on the reverse, a terrestrial globe with the inscription NON SUFFICIT ORBIS (‘The World is not Enough’) around it.
This globalizing myth – a universal monarchy which did not dare to call itself an empire – was encapsulated in the Escorial, the heart of Philip’s monarchy. Constructed over twenty-one years from 1563 onwards, it was a monastery, a palace and a mausoleum, with architectural allusions to Solomon’s Temple. Its liturgical, ceremonial and physical space was organized in such a way that the king was the intermediary between God and the world, the guardian of the martyr Church and the descendant of Hispanic kings and saints. It emphasized the unquestioned power of rulers as the reflection of God’s will. Philip II declined to go on progress round his kingdom on the grounds that it demeaned his majesty, and increasingly withdrew from the world. A late portrait of him by Pantojà de la Cruz hung in the Escorial library. It depicts a pale figure in black and grey within an ethereal space: abstract power, devoid of context. The Escorial embodied an idea of power that conjoined secular and sacred, hierarchical and hieratic. Small wonder that the image of empire of which it was the microcosm should be the focus of Protestant fears – or that its notion of power should have become an imprisonment.
The paradox was that, although the imperial idea Philip II came to embody was particularly Spanish, the empire was not. It was a conjoint enterprise because Spain (the Castilian and Aragonese dominions until 1580, the whole Hispanic peninsula afterwards) lacked the human and natural resources upon which to build it. These lay in abundance in its other dynastic inheritances, in its overseas dominions and in the territories of its satellites. Only 12 per cent of the army that fought at St-Quentin were Spanish; the majority were Germans (53 per cent), Netherlanders (23 per cent) and English (12 per cent). Of the 67,000 troops in the Army of Flanders that Alba mobilized in 1572, about 18,000 were Germans, a further 29,000 were Netherlanders; only 10,000 were Spanish. Such diverse recruitment was normal for the armies of the period. The difference was that the Spanish had served and trained elsewhere in the empire beforehand. That was particularly the case for the Spanish tercios, ‘the sinews of the army’, who were accorded the privileges that went with empire.
Specialist skills and services for the empire often came from Italy – the accountants, map-makers, geographers, armament manufacturers, shipbuilders, pilots and engineers. The pontoon bridge over the Scheldt at the siege of Antwerp in 1585 would have been impossible without the technical expertise of two Italian engineers (Gianbattista Piatti and Properzio Boracci) who were able to realize what Farnese wanted. In 1581, the king was told by one of his officials that all the royal engineers in Spain were foreigners. It was a German who supervised the making of bronze cannon in the Spanish peninsula in the 1590s, Portuguese, Basques and Germans who provided the pilots for the Atlantic voyages and French pilots that steered the Armada up the Channel. The majority of the ships that fought the Ottomans at Lepanto had been built in the Italian peninsula. The financial sinews of empire were in non-Spanish (mainly Genoese) hands.
Distance and resources dictated the habits of empire. The superiority of Philip’s intelligence services was recognized. On 15 October 1569, he told the French ambassador at his court ‘with a smile on his face’ of the victory at Jarnac, the news from his own government arriving a week later. Spanish diplomats trafficked for information at the highest level in Europe’s courts. Thanks to information from the English ambassador in Paris, Sir Edward Stafford (on the secret Spanish payroll from January 1587), Philip II had precise details of English naval preparations. His forces would have forestalled Drake’s raid on Cádiz harbour on 29 April 1587 had the information arrived sooner.
Distance remained the enemy of the Spanish empire because of its geographical extent and diversity. The challenges it faced were simply beyond anyone’s capacities. The more the commitments and engagements in its name needed management, the stronger the idea of empire became. The more frequently its soldiers, diplomats, clerics and administrators travelled the dominions, the more that idea was invested in their hands. The Spanish empire in the Americas was run as an administrative state, which meant decisions had to be taken thousands of miles away. The more information came in the more difficult it was to sift, analyse and decide. The solution was to procrastinate. The pressures are revealed in Philip II’s annotations on the stream of despatches which passed through his study. He expressed his hesitations and reflected on the burdens of office which his instincts of duty amplified into micro-management on an imperial scale.
Opportunities existed for those with a vivid imagination to elaborate plots against the Spanish which then became part of the imperial rumour-mill. They gained credibility in the circumstances of heightening international tensions, exacerbated by the suspicions caused by religious differences. Usual diplomatic channels were often disrupted by the withdrawal or summary dismissal of ambassadors. Others wanted to expand the frontiers of empire to their own advantage, pressures which were difficult to control. Juan de Oñate, son of a Conquistador, who married the granddaughter of Hernán Cortés, presented the viceroy of New Spain, Luis de Velasco, with a proposition to move the northern limits of Mexico 1,000 miles northwards into the Rio Grande. He promised to provide resources for the expedition. The viceroy, in consultation with Madrid, offered priests and artillery and awarded him the title of governor (adelantado) of the new land. Setting out in January 1598, he laid claim to ‘New Mexico’, accepting the ‘obedience’ of the Pueblo Indians to Spain and suppressing resistance with brutality. What logic justified this expansion of the empire? Even the viceroy in New Spain thought it was ‘worthless land’. New Spain’s existence in the empire depended on the meekness (and sickness) of the Pueblo in the face of their new rulers.
Meekness was not the response in Chile to the south of the Biobío river. Pedro de Valdivia and followers built a fort and founded Concepción on the northern banks of the river in 1550. From there, they moved south, inflicting defeats on the local population and dividing them into overlordships. Prospectors and miners from Santiago followed in search of gold deposits. The Indians of Tucapel were less impressed, and contrived a trap for Valdivia, who was killed and eaten, leading to an uprising which initially lasted four years, and almost drove the Spaniards out of Chile. In 1598, the governor of Chile was in turn ambushed by the Indians of Arauco, captured and eaten, the prelude to a spontaneous rebellion of subjugated Indians in southern Chile in which Spanish towns were wiped out. By 1600 perhaps half the Spanish population in Chile had been killed. That was the year when a Spanish captain, Alonso González de Nájera, set out for Chile to report on the Araucanian conflict. His solution: a line of forts, a permanent army, the extermination of the local Indians and their replacement by more quiescent Africans. The war with the Araucanians went on, and his report was buried in the archives of a global empire, one of hundreds of problems on which Madrid wanted to have the last word, but over which it was obliged – by distance, logistics and exhaustion – to prevaricate.
The burden of sustaining the universal monarchy required an appeal to common endeavour. In reality, and for most of the time, the empire rested on the resources of Castile and its overseas dominions. The resulting game of robbing Peter to pay Paul passed for ‘grand strategy’. The initial tensions stemmed from demands to protect the empire against the Ottomans in the Mediterranean. In the summer of 1560, the Ottoman fleet ambushed a Habsburg force sent by the viceroy of Sicily to the island of Djerba in North Africa. Spanish intelligence indicated that Ottoman power posed a threat to its communications in the western Mediterranean. The resulting galley construction was colossal, rising from fifty-five in 1562 to 155 in 1574. The costs of the galley fleet in the early 1570s matched those of the entire Flanders Army, a war on two fronts which was unsustainable; Philip II’s suspension of payments (bankruptcy) of September 1575 was the result.
The ‘resource envelope’ of the Spanish empire expanded with the acquisition of the Portuguese dominions in 1580. In 1578, King Sebastian of Portugal died at the battle of Alcácer-Quibir in Morocco. Sebastian had no direct heirs (he was rumoured to have been so afraid of being impotent that he refused to have sex) and that spelt the end of the reigning House of Aviz. Sebastian was succeeded by his great-uncle, Cardinal Henry, who was sixty-six years of age and childless (see opposite).
The pretenders were numerous. António, known as the ‘Prior of Crato’, was the only direct male heir, but he was the illegitimate son of an elder uncle. When Henry died, the dynastic strength of António’s case was recognized by the deputies of the Third Estate in the Portuguese Cortes of June 1580 but it was not matched by political forces on the ground, and he spent the rest of his life as a pretender in exile. Catherine de Médicis, whose lawyers thought she had a claim too, assembled a naval force in 1582 in defence of the Prior only for it to be shipwrecked off the coast of the Azores. An English expedition sent for the same purpose suffered the same fate in 1589. The only other native Portuguese claimant was Catherine, duchess of Braganza. They were all outmatched by Philip II of Spain, whose father (Charles V) had married Isabella of Portugal, Cardinal Henry’s sister. Philip besieged Lisbon by sea and invaded by land, forcing António to flee in August 1580. He was installed as King Philip I of Portugal at Tomar in April 1581. There would be ‘false Sebastians’ thereafter, pretenders who legitimated popular revolts against Spanish overlordship. But Philip II respected Portuguese institutions. Portuguese aristocrats (already intermarried with the Spanish) were nurtured and the country’s merchant colonial élites protected. Even Portuguese dynastic traditions were blended into those of the Spanish Habsburgs.
The demands to maintain the Hispanic empire grew in the wake of the Portuguese acquisition. Although mainland Portugal was a peaceful transition, the Azores archipelago acknowledged Dom António, Prior of Crato, Sebastian’s illegitimate cousin. With French and English support the Azores held out until a Spanish expeditionary force of sixty ships destroyed Dom António’s larger fleet in a battle off the island of São Miguel. In 1583, an even larger armada (ninety-eight ships and over 15,000 men) took the last remaining island of Terceira.