11

Wars of Religion
1560–1660

St Bartholomew’s Day massacre

As the three princes departed the scene, they left Europe’s conflicts unresolved. The Habsburgs remained at odds with the French House of Valois. Philip of Spain remained at odds with Elizabeth of England. Protestant north Europe was at odds with Catholic Rome. The crucial compromises reached at the 1555 Peace of Augsburg relied on the senior personalities of the Holy Roman Empire to respect them. That was a fragile reliance.

In 1559 first blood of a new era was spilled by Philip with an auto-da-fé in Valladolid. Thirty-one Protestants were burned alive in the main square. Philip, rebuffed as a suitor by England’s Elizabeth, became ever more isolated. Unlike his father, who was constantly on the move, Philip ruled his vast empire chiefly from his Escorial apartment. He was obsessed with heresy. The Inquisition had all but eradicated Islam and Judaism from Spain, though not from the Spanish Netherlands. In the Americas Spanish rule now stretched south from Mexico to Peru and Chile and north to Florida. Its Roman Catholic Church had become, intermittently, a force for the humane treatment of the local population. It was a ban on the enslavement of native Americans throughout the Spanish empire that encouraged the importing into the Americas of African slaves.

In France, Catherine de’ Medici as queen had long been forced to live in the shadow of her husband’s mistress, Diane de Poitiers. On his death in 1559, she ruled France as regent of his young successors, effectively for thirty years. A true Medici, she upheld the Renaissance tradition of her father-in-law, Francis. She built the Tuileries palace in Paris, amassed a large art collection and is credited with devising and producing dances in the form of modern ballet. She was fascinated by the occult, under the influence of the fortune-teller Nostradamus.

Catherine’s most intractable problem was Calvinism, which had spread to at least ten per cent of an otherwise solidly Catholic country, predominantly to the Huguenots. Her task was to mediate between the Huguenots, entrenched in sections of the aristocracy, and the Catholic House of Guise, pretenders to the French throne. In 1561–2 her attempts to grant the Huguenots freedom of worship led to Catholic riots in Paris, answered by Huguenot risings in Rouen, Lyon and Orléans. In 1563 Catherine achieved a compromise Edict of Amboise, which proved more a pause than a settlement.

Tension returned as Philip of Spain began the suppression of Protestantism in Flanders. The introduction of the Inquisition, requiring every Dutch citizen to adhere to the Council of Trent, was the last straw. The Netherlands, a crucial source of revenue to the Spanish crown, rose in revolt, and in 1567 Philip dispatched the Duke of Alva to enforce his Inquisition. Alva condemned to death several Dutch rebels, who died in Brussels’ main square. The Dutch leader, William ‘the Silent’ of Orange (lived 1533–84), had been a favourite of Philip’s father, Charles V, even holding his arm during his abdication speech. Alva’s heavy hand turned William into a champion of rebellion, to wage what became an eighty-year war of independence of the Netherlands from Spain.

Philip’s beleaguered realm was briefly diverted by its loyalty to Rome into a confrontation with a renewed Ottoman advance in the Mediterranean. Suleiman had died in 1566, having conquered most of the old Byzantine empire. The Ottomans’ capture of Cyprus in 1570 led the pope to form a Holy Alliance to oppose them. Ships were contributed principally from Barcelona, Genoa and Venice, under the command of Philip’s twenty-six-year-old half-brother, Don John of Austria.

In 1571 John confronted the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto, off Corinth, in what was the last set-piece battle between oared warships. Some five hundred vessels were crammed into confined waters, where they soon became gridlocked, their decks forming a continuous bloodstained battlefield. The Christian victory was overwhelming and much celebrated across Europe. Its strategic significance was limited, though it confined the Ottomans to the eastern Mediterranean.

Philip’s campaign in the Netherlands now went from bad to worse. In France Catherine had sought a conciliatory marriage between her daughter, Elizabeth, and Philip’s son, Don Carlos – supplying the plot to Verdi’s eponymous opera – but politics dictated that in 1559 she instead marry Philip, widower of Mary of England. Catherine was now enmeshed in France’s religious civil wars. As if to balance Elizabeth’s marriage, she proposed another daughter, Margaret, to the Huguenot leader and claimant to the throne, Henry of Navarre. But in 1572, during the Paris wedding festivities, a prominent Huguenot, Admiral Coligny, was wounded in an assassination attempt. In the ensuing chaos, and fearing Huguenot reprisals, Catherine panicked and recklessly gave the Guise faction licence to assassinate Huguenot leaders.

The order was carried out on St Bartholomew’s Day, 24 August 1572, and developed into a full-blown massacre. No one knows how many died, between 3,000 and 10,000 by various accounts. Protestant Europe was horrified, while Catholic Europe saluted a triumph. Philip declared it ‘of such service, glory and honour to God and universal benefit to all Christendom’ and ‘the best and most cheerful news which at present could come to me’. The pope sent Catherine a golden rose, and ordered a Te Deum to be sung. He also commissioned Vasari to paint a set of frescoes in celebration of the massacre, which he ranked in importance with the victory at Lepanto. Europe’s religious divide deepened.

Many Huguenots fled to the safety of the northern Netherlands, now in open rebellion against Spain, and to England. Elizabeth offered asylum but refused military aid. Indeed, just before the massacre in 1572, Elizabeth had agreed the Treaty of Blois with Catherine against Spain. She unleashed her ‘privateer’ sea captains to prey on Spanish galleons, in what amounted to state-sponsored piracy, with Elizabeth taking a personal cut from their winnings.

In the Netherlands, the rebellion of William of Orange gained strength. In 1576 Philip sent his brother John to assess the rebellion, and he reported back that ‘the Prince of Orange has bewitched the minds of all men. They love him and fear him and wish to have him as their lord.’ Philip had no option but to capitulate. William was elected stadtholder, or de facto monarch, of a breakaway Dutch republic. Spain was left with just Catholic Flanders – part of modern Belgium – in the south. In 1581 the Protestant Dutch United Provinces declared formal independence.

The Spanish Armada

Mortified by the loss of his Dutch territory but uplifted by Catherine’s scourge of the Huguenots, Philip raised his crusade against heresy to a new and spectacular level. As widower of Mary I, he still claimed England’s throne. Elizabeth’s Catholic cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, was also a claimant. French educated and daughter of a Guise mother, she had also been married to Francis II, briefly king of France (1559–60). Fleeing plots against her in Scotland, she in England became the focus of rumoured Catholic plots against Elizabeth. Her execution at Fotheringay Castle in 1587 outraged Catholic Europe and gave Philip a casus belli for his long-planned assault on Elizabeth.

To Philip, such an expedition would honour his father’s memory, win the blessing of the pope and deliver a blow against Protestantism. The plan involved a slow-moving Armada of 130 ships, laden with soldiers and priests to convert the English. It was to sail from Lisbon to Calais, where it would collect the Duke of Parma’s Flanders army and cross to England. Parma would defeat Elizabeth, link up with a rising of English Catholics and put a Spanish infanta on the English throne. It was by no means an implausible venture. England’s troops would have been no match for Parma’s.

From the moment in 1588 that the Armada set sail it met disaster. It was assailed by English fireships when at anchor at Gravelines off the Flemish coast. Adverse winds then blew it up the North Sea and round the north coasts of Scotland and Ireland. Few ships were sunk by the English navy, but only half of the original fleet returned to Spain. Some 5,000 Spaniards perished.

The failure of the Armada greatly enhanced Elizabeth’s reputation. Aided by the creation of an intelligence service under Sir Francis Walsingham, she contrived to balance personal and national security with a degree of religious tolerance. Above all, and despite pleas from at home and abroad, she struggled to limit her involvement in Europe’s ongoing wars, though this did not prevent her indulging her favourites, the Earl of Leicester and the Earl of Essex, in a series of ill-fated expeditions to the Netherlands, France and Ireland. At the same time, England edged sideways into Europe’s cultural Renaissance, honoured in the architecture of Robert Smythson and the music of William Byrd and Thomas Tallis. One Elizabethan Englishman did manage to cross every border and put a girdle round the continent. William Shakespeare’s imaginative scope – from Greece to Rome, from Paris to Venice, from Scotland to Cyprus – embraced the commonality of the European experience in an emergent humanism.

The failure of the Armada humiliated Philip, further aggravated by the refusal of Pope Sixtus V to pay him the large subsidy promised for the conversion of the English. His advisers were single-minded. They attributed the fiasco to Philip’s supposed leniency towards non-Catholics still in Spain. Yet the Spanish people seemed comfortable in their faith and loyal to their king. It was a remarkably peaceable country.

Paris worth a Mass

Spain’s Catholic rival, France, experienced no such popular compliance. In 1589 its king, Henry III, was assassinated and his mother, Catherine de’ Medici, died. A Jesuit-influenced Catholic League, led by the Guise party, ruled Paris but in an ongoing civil war with the Huguenots, who were led by the Bourbon successor to the throne, Henry of Navarre. This saw Henry’s eventual victory at the Battle of Ivry in 1590. Though now formally king of France, he was refused entry into Paris unless he agreed to become a Catholic. After intense negotiation, Henry finally did so. On entering Paris he was said to have looked out from the hill of Montmartre and remarked, ‘Paris is well worth a Mass,’ one of history’s many supposed quotations well-suited to the man but not known to be true.

Henry IV (1589–1610) was an unusual French monarch, wise, temperate and at times humorous. He said of Catherine’s much-criticized reign, ‘I am surprised that she never did worse.’ He in 1598 negotiated France’s version of Germany’s Peace of Augsburg, the Edict of Nantes, ordaining religious freedom and tolerance for Protestants in public office and before the law. The edict was a compromise that did little to cross France’s religious divide, and in 1610 it resulted in Henry’s assassination by a Catholic fanatic. He had been a popular figure. In Paris he built the Pont Neuf, now adorned by his statue. As the first monarch of the House of Bourbon he was a French royalist hero after the Revolution, and is still regularly nominated in polls as France’s favourite monarch.

As France struggled to secure peaceful coexistence between Catholics and Protestants, the Peace of Augsburg had brought the Holy Roman Empire half a century of relative calm. The king of Bohemia and Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolph II (1576–1612), made his capital of Prague, home of Jan Hus, the embodiment of Renaissance civility and taste. His collection of Mannerist art was celebrated, notably a portrait of himself as an arrangement of fruit and vegetables, painted by Arcimboldo. He was a reserved man who never married and was fascinated by science and the occult. Under pressure from his brother, Archduke Matthias, Rudolph in 1609 signed a Letter of Majesty conceding formal religious freedom to Bohemia’s Protestants. Since Rudolph was a Catholic, this went beyond even the settlements of Augsburg.

The Thirty Years War

This emergent tolerance across northern Europe at the start of the seventeenth century was promising but insecure. In 1617 Augsburg abruptly fell apart. The Bohemian crown passed to a Jesuit-trained Habsburg, Ferdinand II (1617–37), who became Holy Roman Emperor in 1619. No succession could have been more disastrous for the peace of Europe. Ferdinand shared the missionary zeal of his cousin, Philip of Spain. But whereas Philip shared his faith with that of his own countrymen, Ferdinand’s Bohemia was overwhelmingly Protestant, their freedom to remain so recently confirmed by Rudolph.

When news that Ferdinand meant to replace Bohemia’s Protestant governors with Catholics reached Prague in 1618, it led to instant revolt. Ferdinand’s emissaries were dragged to an upper window of Prague Castle and thrown into the ditch fifty feet below, the so-called Defenestration of Prague. Their remarkable survival was variously attributed to the wings of Catholic angels and the depth of dung in the ditch. The Bohemians promptly appointed Frederick V, the Elector Palatine of a small Rhineland state, in Ferdinand’s stead. Frederick was a Calvinist married to Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of James I of England. Dubbed ‘the jewel of Europe’, she was to be a lasting object of Protestant veneration.

Ferdinand now summoned Catholic monarchs and mercenaries from across Europe to wage a war of faith on his Protestants. Spain, Poland and the papacy joined with him in a Catholic League, in effect an intra-European crusader force. Frederick on his side was backed by the Dutch Protestants, the Scandinavians, the French (deviously) and the English (half-heartedly). The ensuing Thirty Years War abrogated the Peace of Augsburg and all other edicts of toleration and non-intervention in the affairs of members of the Holy Roman Empire reached over previous centuries. It showed how far one man’s faith could dictate the fate of nations.

The war’s peculiar tragedy was to turn what had been Germany’s strength – its detachment from Europe’s dynastic wars – into a weakness. Most of Europe at least had a putative ruler to mediate between Catholics and Protestants. Germany had none. The Habsburgs had long guaranteed the autonomy of its disparate principalities. Now they were the enemy of autonomy. They set German against German. It meant catastrophe.

The first battle of the war, the Battle of White Mountain in 1620, took place outside Prague, and saw the Bohemians soundly defeated. Frederick fled, and he and Elizabeth became refugees in The Hague, known for the brevity of their one-year reign as the ‘winter king and queen’. Rather than conciliate, Ferdinand reacted to his victory with brutality. Twenty-seven Bohemian leaders were executed in Prague’s Old Town Square. All Bohemia’s non-Catholic nobles had their lands confiscated and all Protestants were evicted, most fleeing west into Germany. Within ten years, the progeny of Hus’s Reformation fell from three million to 800,000. So complete was this religious cleansing that Bohemia remains largely Catholic to this day, though a statue of Hus adorns Prague’s Old Town Square.

Ferdinand soon found he could not pay the wages of his mostly Spanish mercenary army, which duly marauded beyond Bohemia into Germany. War became banditry, with soldiers living off the land in a state of medieval debauchery. Gradually all Europe was sucked into the conflict. The king of France, Louis XIII, and his adviser, Cardinal Richelieu, followed French policy in siding with any foe of a Habsburg, even a Protestant one. James I of England, an eager Protestant but with a Parliament averse to expense, sent a small detachment of soldiers.

More substantial allies of the Protestant cause were Denmark and Sweden, with Sweden’s soldier-king, Gustavus Adolphus (1611–32), emerging in the lead. Gustavus had won fame as an innovative field commander. He would reposition his infantry, light artillery and cavalry constantly round the battlefield, keeping them well supplied. This was in contrast to the Spaniards’ cumbersome guns and hard-to-manoeuvre tercios, blocks of pikemen twenty ranks deep. The Swedes won a victory at the Battle of Breitenfeld in 1631, but Gustavus was killed fighting a year later, a catastrophe that dashed hopes of an early end to the conflict.

In 1637, after nineteen years of war, Ferdinand died, but by then it had a momentum of its own. Concerned that Spain’s Philip IV (1621–65) would use the war to reunite Charles V’s Spanish and Austrian Habsburg empires, Louis and Richelieu officially declared France’s war on Madrid. It was now not just Catholic against Protestant, but Catholic Bourbon against Catholic Habsburg. At first the French fared ill and Spanish forces reached the outskirts of Paris. In return the French threatened Spanish Flanders and sent reinforcements to the Swedes in the north. The Ottomans were then involved, invited by the Protestants to attack Austria from the east. Europe was in turmoil.

Back in Germany the contest was no longer between dynasties and religions. It was a primitive struggle of people to survive. Undisciplined troops tore principalities apart and created conflicts where none existed before. One historian of the war, Veronica Wedgwood, wrote that there was little point to the fighting: ‘Almost all [combatants] were actuated rather by fear than by lust of conquest or passion of faith. They wanted peace.’ Eventually, in 1643, a charismatic French general, the twenty-three-year-old Duc d’Enghien, took the field against a Flemish army at Rocroi in the Ardennes, where he massacred the tercios and ended Spanish participation. Philip of Spain now realized that supporting Ferdinand might cost him Flanders and its revenues. Rocroi was the last pitched battle of the war.

For another five years, bands of soldiers wandered across central Europe, leaderless, hungry and desperate. German trade and manufacture collapsed. Sowing and harvesting ceased. A third to a half of twenty million German-speakers died. The Elbe city of Magdeburg had 20,000 inhabitants in 1620 and 450 in 1649. The medieval library of Heidelberg University was carried off to the Vatican. A Swedish general wrote home from Bohemia, ‘I did not expect to find the kingdom so lean, wasted and spoiled, for between Prague and Vienna everything has been razed to the ground and hardly a living soul can be seen on the land.’ The war is regarded as Europe’s bloodiest before the twentieth century. To Wedgwood it was ‘confused in its causes, devious in its course, futile in its result, the outstanding example in European history of meaningless conflict’.

The Peace of Westphalia

Diplomats representing the parties involved, eventually 109 in all, met in 1643 in the aftermath of Rocroi, camping separately in two adjacent towns in Westphalia, Osnabrück and Münster. Emissaries rode back and forth between the sides, reaching not one treaty but a series of local deals, designed to roll into a collective peace. Agreement took five years, being finally signed in 1648. It was in essence a reversion to Augsburg, to the principle of national self-determination in politics and faith, cuius regio, eius religio, to each country its faith.

As at Augsburg, Lutherans and Calvinists agreed to share parts of Europe with Catholics. There was to be a restitution of all, or most, confiscated property. The Catholic status of Austria and of now destitute Bohemia was recognized. Spain conceded formal independence to her lost provinces in northern Netherlands, and Jews were granted safe refuge there.

Westphalia restored the autonomy of German states and, once again, denied authority over them to the Holy Roman Empire. Though often awarded credit for fathering the concept of the nation state, it was more significant for its internationalism, for reasserting the autonomy of states and the legal sanctity of treaties. In this it was hardly a lasting success. None the less the participants celebrated their achievement in Gerard ter Borch’s great portrait of them crowded into Münster town hall, the painting now owned by the National Gallery in London. England was one European country not involved.

The Peace accepted the reality of a Europe that had fought itself to exhaustion. France did well, gaining land deep into Germany in Alsace and the Rhine basin. This was the most unwise of the treaty’s provisions, creating a lasting grievance among the region’s German-speaking population. To the north, Sweden emerged as a regional power, winning a number of north-German territories. Germany was left ruined, a desert still of some fifty ‘free cities’, sixty ecclesiastical principalities and two hundred and fifty (some said a thousand) autonomous cities and statelets. It took a century for them to recover.

Protestant Prussia was the fastest to re-emerge, under the Hohenzollern family of the ‘Great Elector’ Friedrich Wilhelm (1640–88). His domain lay outside the Holy Roman Empire and was notionally a vassal of Poland. But during the war it had merged with Brandenburg, whose duke had long been a Holy Roman Empire elector. Since its capital of Berlin had lost half its population in the war, Friedrich Wilhelm opened its gates to refugees of all faiths, allowing the economic tonic of immigration (as it was to do again in 1945 and 2015).

Spain was left a shattered realm, decoupled for ever from the Holy Roman Empire. In the 1640s it had seen revolts in Catalonia and Portugal, protesting demands that they finance Philip’s role in the war. Even Catholic Flanders was at risk, since Spain’s antique navy was no match for growing Dutch sea power. No less shattered was the proxy instigator of the war, the papacy. Pope Innocent X was unrepresented at Westphalia, and denounced it as ‘null, void, invalid, iniquitous, unjust, damnable, reprobate, inane and devoid of meaning’. Such papal edicts no longer carried force. Innocent took consolation in creating Rome’s exquisite Piazza Navona, and in patronizing the genius of baroque architecture, Borromini. His stern portrait by Velázquez hangs in his family’s Palazzo Doria Pamphilj in Rome.

Civil war in England

As the Thirty Years War drew to a close, a lesser encounter erupted in normally placid England. Though the issue was not freedom of worship as such, the antipathy of Catholic and Protestant was not far below the surface. The father of Elizabeth of Bohemia, James I (1603–25), was a Protestant and proud commissioner of the King James Bible. All Catholics remained suspect – unsurprisingly, given the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 – but suspect too were extreme Puritans, such as the Mayflower voyagers who emigrated to America in 1620. Almost alone in Europe, England was devoted to the assiduous pursuit of a middle way.

James might have been Protestant, but he was an advocate of the divine right of kings and of ‘God’s mandate’, which he interpreted as a mandate to overrule Parliament. Trouble began on James’s death in 1625, with the marriage of James’s successor Charles I (1625–49) to the devoutly Catholic Henrietta Maria of France. It confirmed widespread fears that the House of Stuart was unreliable in its commitment to Protestantism. In 1628 a Petition of Right to Charles reiterated parliamentary supremacy. It refused him revenue and also a standing army, both prerogatives of Parliament. Its author, Chief Justice Sir Edward Coke, declared, ‘Magna Carta is such a fellow that he will have no sovereign.’ Charles’s reply was that ‘kings are not bound to give account of their actions, but to God alone’. This was no basis for stable government.

In 1629 Charles dissolved Parliament and refused to summon another for eleven years, a period of the so-called ‘tyranny’. To pay his expenses, he tried to impose an extra-parliamentary tax, ‘ship money’, but this proved uncollectable. Then, in 1637, Charles’s conservative archbishop, William Laud, imposed what was widely seen as a Catholic prayer book on Calvinist Scotland. The Bishop of Brechin had to read it with two loaded pistols on his pulpit. Riots ensued. In Scotland thousands signed a ‘covenant’ asserting their reformed faith.

England now proceeded to compress into two decades a revolution that was to take two centuries in most of Europe. The Parliament elected in 1640 was overwhelmingly opposed to the king. It was unlike any yet seen, embracing landowners and civic leaders, merchants and professionals, in sum the new middle class that had been created and prospered under Henry’s Reformation and Elizabeth’s peace. They converted the Petition of Right into a Great Remonstrance, and demanded full parliamentary sovereignty over church and state. While the weak Charles might have assented to this, his Catholic wife was his implacable adviser.

In 1642 king and Parliament went to war. As in Germany the nation was deeply split. Royalist and parliamentarian stood proxy, if not for Catholic and Protestant at least for high church and Calvinist. Parliament’s forces soon cohered under the austere Oliver Cromwell. Most armies at the time were rough assemblages of local levies, led by sons of aristocrats. Cromwell’s New Model Army, largely drawn from Calvinist East Anglia, was recruited and paid as a professional force. The king suffered a series of reverses, culminating in Marston Moor in 1644 and Naseby a year later. The royalist army disintegrated and the king was later captured by the Scots and turned over to Parliament.

In 1647, as Westphalia reached its conclusion, Cromwell’s soldiers met in a Putney church. For the first time European men in positions of power argued the fundamentals of politics in a manner still recognizable today. They debated universal suffrage, an end to conscription and the status of private property. The radical Colonel Thomas Rainsborough asserted that ‘the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest … every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government’.

Cromwell argued for retaining the monarchy, and even offered Charles emollient terms for ending the rebellion. But the king in captivity plotted a return to war, and as a result was tried for treason. In 1649 judgment was given for his execution, which took place outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall on a cold January afternoon. The king declared to the end that ‘a subject and a sovereign are clean different things’. A groan went up from the crowd when the king’s head was separated from his body. There was no revolutionary delight in victory or revelling in blood. A line had been crossed and it sat on the nation’s conscience for years to come.

Under Cromwell, England never sought a stable basis for democratic rule. He attacked the Scots for switching sides to support the king, and treated Catholic Ireland with atrocious brutality, defying all claims to a tolerant Protestantism. For the first time he bound the nations of the British Isles under one central assembly, abolishing bishops and eventually dissolving Parliament itself. With the blind John Milton in support, Cromwell sought to rule his ‘commonwealth’ with prudence and justice. He invited Jews to return to England after three centuries of banishment, and he pursued a trade war with the Dutch on behalf of the City of London. For all the democratic pretensions of the English Revolution, its outcome was five years of dictatorship, a regime of ‘grim godliness’. Before his death in 1658, Cromwell took refuge in kingly heredity, and appointed his son Richard as his successor.

Two years later, the army’s General Monck consulted Parliament and invited the nation, in effect, to change its mind. Parliament did so, inviting the dead king’s son, Charles II (1660–85), to return from exile on the clear understanding that he came at its will, not his. Monarchy was in its gift. The Church of England was re-established with its rights and property. Freedom of worship and parliamentary sovereignty were, supposedly, entrenched. A European nation had passed through the valley of revolution, tasting regicide, autocracy and commonwealth, and rejecting them all. England’s ‘constitutional monarchy’ was a liberal state, at least in embryo.

Anne of Austria and the Fronde

Such a state was the last thing under discussion in France. Louis XIII and Richelieu were dead and Paris was ruled by Anne of Austria, Louis’s estranged wife and third in a line of cosmopolitan women to rule France in this period. She followed Catherine de’ Medici and Marie de’ Medici, mother of and regent for Louis XIII. Anne was for seventeen years regent for her son, Louis XIV. For much of the century from the 1560s, France was led by a woman.

Anne governed in collaboration and possible cohabitation with Richelieu’s dashing protégé, Cardinal Mazarin. Both Richelieu and Mazarin were masters of the ruthless art of French politics. They were able, feared and pragmatic. With the end of the Thirty Years War, Anne faced a rebellion by an aristocratic faction known as the Fronde against taxes levied to pay for France’s part in the war. The dispute threatened the House of Bourbon with a coup, but was eventually crushed in 1653. Though dubbed Paris’s answer to England’s civil war, the uprising left France with none of the political reforms won in both England and the Netherlands at the time.

In 1661 Mazarin died and the twenty-two-year-old Louis XIV took power from Anne. He was a shrewd young man, who had watched closely how his mother ruled, and learned what he regarded as a crucial lesson, that a monarch should never delegate power to others. Autocracy meant what it said. Later, Louis is alleged to have said, ‘l’état, c’est moi’. The golden orb of Le Roi Soleil rose over the horizon. It was to dazzle all Europe.