In the year 1559, when Prince Henri of Béarn and Navarre was barely six years old, a bizarre medieval accident transformed the history of modern France. In royal celebrations for the marriage of a princess, King Henri II entered a jousting tournament. He succeeded in smashing his opponent’s lance, but a splinter from the shattered weapon pierced the king’s eye. The wound festered, and Henri II died suddenly at the peak of his considerable powers.19 That chance event came at a bad moment. Most people throughout the country shared an ideal of Christian unity: une foi, une loi, un roi—one faith, one law, one king, but the reality was very different. The kingdom was divided against itself. The population of France was growing beyond its means. In a time of rapid inflation, extremes of wealth and poverty were increasing, and social orders were moving apart.20
The political situation was highly unstable. Authority was divided among kings and nobles, regional parlements and estates, autonomous towns and cities, chartered companies and religious institutions. All were deeply jealous of their privileges and united only in their hostility to expanded royal power. Especially hostile to the monarchy were the great noble families, who were rivals for dominion. Bitter conflicts developed between the Catholic House of Guise in the east, the Protestant House of Condé to the west, and the more moderate Houses of Montmorency and Bourbon to the south. All dreamed of succeeding the House of Valois, which had ruled France for three centuries.
These dynastic rivalries were deepened by religious divisions. Most people in France were Roman Catholic in 1559, but Protestants were making converts everywhere, even within leading Catholic families. Adherents of the old church were deeply disturbed by the challenge of a new faith. On both sides, religious leaders aroused feelings of intense fear and hatred.
This was the dangerous moment when Henri II died suddenly from the splintered lance. He was succeeded by his young son Francis II, barely fifteen years old, frail of body and weak of mind. This child-king was dominated by his formidable adolescent wife, sixteen-year-old Mary Queen of Scots, and also by her French relatives in the Catholic house of Guise. They hated Protestants with a passion and chose the path of violent repression. The result was a disaster for France.
Protestant evangelists were rounded up and tried for heresy, which was a capital offense. Catholic judges inflicted barbaric tortures on Protestants who refused to recant. Victims who continued to protest their innocence had their tongues cut out before they were tortured and burned, so they could not preach to the people who gathered to watch their agony. Even these judicial atrocities were not cruel enough to satisfy sadistic crowds, who seized the suffering victims and mutilated them in unspeakable ways. In the streets of Paris, roving gangs of Catholic youths erected images of the Virgin Mary, and passersby who failed to genuflect were assaulted in rituals of bloody violence. The horror of religious persecution came both from the top down and the bottom up.21
After eighteen months of growing disorder, young Francis II died in 1560 and was succeeded by his even younger brother Charles IX, who was ten years old. Power passed to his Italian mother, Catherine de Medici, and for a time she ruled the kingdom from a small study in her beautiful château of Chenonceau. In 1562, Catherine tried to restore peace to France by proclaiming limited toleration of dissenters. It was not enough to please Protestants, and too much for Roman Catholics.
A fatal incident followed. On March 1, 1562, a quiet Sunday morning, the militant Catholic duc de Guise was on the road from his estates to court, with a large escort of men-at-arms. As he approached the town of Vassy in Champagne, he heard a bell calling Huguenots to worship in a grange. As the soldiers approached there was an exchange of epithets, then a volley of stones. The duke’s men stormed the grange, killed and wounded more than a hundred Protestant men, women, and children, and burned the building.22
The result was the first war of religion, which set the pattern for many wars to follow. The Protestant House of Condé raised a Huguenot army, and called for help from English and German Protestants. This Huguenot army began to capture strategic towns throughout the country. The violence was beyond imagining. Catholic atrocities happened in Sens and Tours where two hundred Huguenots were bludgeoned and drowned in the River Loire. Those terrible scenes were followed by a Protestant outrage called the sauterie of Montbrison, when Huguenots hurled hundreds of Catholic prisoners from a high tower into fires that were burning below.23
The Catholics brought in Swiss and Spanish troops, and won a terrible battle at Dreux, where a surgeon eyewitness estimated that 25,000 were killed on both sides in two hours of fighting. The victorious army moved on to attack the city of Rouen, and sacked it in three days of rapine that left more than a thousand dead in the first of many such scenes. As the Catholic army began yet another siege at Orléans, the Huguenots struck back by killing the duc de Guise—the beginning of many such assassinations by both sides.24
After a Catholic atrocity started the first war of religion on March 1, 1562, the town of Montbrison was the scene of a Protestant crime. Huguenots sacked it in June 1562 and hurled its Catholic defenders from a tower onto spikes and bonfires below.
This first war of religion ended in a shaky truce at Amboise in 1563, but the violence quickly resumed. A new leader of the House of Guise, the cardinal of Lorraine, gained control of King Charles IX and brought Spanish troops into France. Protestants tried to kidnap the Catholic king. This desperate effort failed and started a second civil war in 1567–68, which left a “trail of destruction” across France. The killing continued until the exhausted combatants were too weary to continue. The result was a precarious truce called the Peace of Longjumeau.25
That peace also failed, and was followed by a third and even larger religious war in 1568–70. The violence spread to the south and west of France during Champlain’s childhood. Some of it rose from angry acts of aggression by French Protestants against Catholics. Much of it came from popular violence by Catholic “confraternities” against Huguenots and anyone who tried to stay neutral. The people of Bordeaux lived in mortal fear of a sadistic gang called the Bande Cardinal, who wore the bonnet rouge and tortured, raped, and murdered Huguenots, all in the name of Christ. Some Catholic leaders tried to suppress these atrocities, but others encouraged them.26
Saintonge became a theater of war, and Champlain’s town of Brouage changed hands many times while he was a child. In 1568 Protestants controlled much of Saintonge and a Huguenot garrison occupied Brouage. The next year, Catholic forces and Italians took the town. The Protestants recovered it in 1570, but it was returned to Catholics by peace treaty and became a base for operations against the Protestant fortress of La Rochelle. Protestants later regained control of Brouage, then lost it again. Warring armies marched and countermarched through Saintonge. They foraged and plundered in a time of famine, plague, and suffering. In the midst of these horrors, Champlain was probably baptized a Protestant, in a world of intense religious hatred and incessant war.27
The worst was yet to come. In 1571, Catherine de Medici and Jeanne d’Albret arranged a dynastic marriage between their children, the attractive Catholic Princess Marguerite de Valois and the handsome Protestant Prince Henri de Béarn and Navarre. It was to be a “marriage of two religions,” in the hope of lasting peace. A sumptuous wedding was planned for Paris, and Henri rode into town with 1,500 Huguenot leaders. The Catholic nobility turned out in even greater numbers. The ceremony of betrothal took place with outward harmony on August 17, 1572, and the wedding the next day was a brilliant affair. Marguerite de Valois wrote in her splendid memoirs, “I blazed in diamonds.” Margot, as she was called, was beautiful, intelligent, and bitterly unhappy. She was reported to be in love with the Catholic duc de Guise, and it is said that she refused to say yes at the wedding until her infuriated brother King Charles IX intervened, and bent her crowned head forward by brute force in an unwilling gesture of assent.28
Four days of celebration followed, but behind the scenes the leaders of the House of Guis
e and the Catholic Church were outraged by the wedding and appalled by the ecumenical spirit that it symbolized. Agents of the English secret service warned Huguenot leaders to be on their guard, and the atmosphere grew heavy with foreboding. On the last day of the marriage festivities, as the great Huguenot leader Admiral Gaspard de Coligny was riding through a Paris street, a shot rang out. This leader of the Protestant cause was severely wounded. But Charles IX promised protection to the Huguenots and they remained in town.29
Rumors spread that Protestant assassins were planning to cut the king’s throat and seize the throne. A great fear swept through the city of Paris, and the frightened king was caught up in it. On the night of August 23, 1572, Catholic leaders persuaded the terrified monarch to make a preemptive strike against the Huguenots. He agreed. The gates of the city were closed. Boats in the Seine were chained to their moorings, and the Catholic militia of the city was armed. The next night Prince Henri de Béarn and the Protestant duc de Condé were summoned to the king’s chamber and arrested. Early in the morning the wounded de Coligny was murdered in his bed. That was the signal for a massacre. Huguenot nobles who had gathered for the wedding of Henri were attacked. Nearly 1,500 were killed, many with their families, in what was to be remembered as the Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day.30
The slaughter spread through the city. Catholics wearing white crosses and armbands turned against Protestant neighbors and murdered three thousand people in a frenzy of fear and rage. Young children were brought into it. Catholic children were given the task of castrating and disemboweling the body of Admiral de Coligny, and dragging the remains through the streets of Paris in a ritual of degradation. Similar scenes spread to the provinces of France.31
In the king’s chamber, Prince Henri de Béarn and Navarre was given a choice: immediate conversion or instant death. On September 26, 1572, he rejoined the Catholic Church. The Catholics kept him at court in luxurious captivity, closely guarded and carefully watched. The Protestant movement suffered a shattering blow but it survived, and persecution strengthened it. Huguenot armies withdrew into strongholds such as La Rochelle and held their ground. At court, Prince Henri appeared to lose himself in dissipation, but he was biding his time.
An opportunity came after 1574, when Charles IX died and Henri III de Valois came to the throne. A new attempt at coexistence followed. Protestants were granted safe havens. Prince Henri de Béarn and Navarre was allowed to leave the court, and was given the government of Guyenne in southwestern France. Once at large, he abjured Catholicism on June 13, 1576, and went to La Rochelle, where Protestant leaders received him without enthusiasm. Both sides distrusted him.32
Henri began to go a third way, looking for a middle path between the contending parties. In Guyenne he cracked down on violence by Protestants and Catholics alike, and recruited an army from men of both faiths. To a Catholic officer he wrote, “those who unswervingly follow their conscience are of my religion, as I am of all who are brave and virtuous.”33
Extremists on both sides thought this middle way was merely an expedient, and regarded Henri as ondoyant, like his unreliable father. But this was something else. Henri’s middle way was not merely a political expedient. It was an act of high principle and Christian faith. The prince said to Protestants and Catholics alike, “We believe in one God, we recognize Jesus Christ, and we draw on the same gospel.” He told zealots on both sides that wars of religion were “unworthy among Christians, and specially those who call themselves doctors of the gospel.” This idea became an article of Christian faith for him. He deeply believed that nothing could be more un-Christian than the atrocities that had been perpetrated by both sides in the name of Christ. He stood for the unity and pride of France, and for the welfare of its afflicted people.34
In Guyenne, people of all faiths began to rally to Henri’s cause. He demonstrated a gift of political judgment and a genius for war. Henri created a formidable army with sturdy French infantry and Gascon cavalry. His aide the duc de Sully provided him with the best artillery in Europe. When towns and nobles tried to fight him, he moved against them with courage, energy, and quick decision. He began to expand his control over southwestern France. In war and peace, Prince Henri was a man that other men followed.
Then came another bizarre event. The reigning king of France, Henri III of Valois, began to take notice of the growing popularity of Prince Henri of Béarn and Navarre, as did the leader of the high Catholic party, Henri of Guise. The result was yet another cycle of violence that culminated in the War of the Three Henris, and five more years of strife (1584–89). In this bloody struggle, Prince Henri of Béarn and Navarre skillfully divided Henri of Valois from Henri of Guise. In 1587 he defeated them in open battle. After bitter fighting, two of the three leaders were assassinated. Of the three Henris, only Prince Henri of Béarn and Navarre was left standing. In 1589 he became King Henri IV, the first monarch of a new Bourbon dynasty that would rule France for more than two centuries.
While Samuel Champlain passed from youth to young adulthood, Henri IV began to unite France as it had never been united before. He found himself the Protestant king of a predominantly Catholic people. To the surprise of friends and enemies alike, he decided to convert once again to Catholicism. On Sunday, July 25, 1593, he appeared at the abbey of Saint Denis. In the presence of a huge crowd, Henri knelt before the altar, and swore a vow of obedience to the Church. In the moment of the king’s conversion a great flock of doves took flight from the roof of the abbey, which was received as a sign of Providence for the king and his realm.
Many Catholics did not trust Henri IV, and with reason. This was his third conversion to Catholicism, and twice he had returned to his Protestant beliefs. The leaders of the Catholic League alleged that Henri had remarked cynically before the ceremony, “Paris is worth a mass.” No evidence exists that he actually said any such thing, which would have been impious, impolitic, and false to his own intentions. Henri IV had larger purposes in mind. He was filled with genuine horror by the wars of religion, which he believed to be deeply inhumane and anti-Christian. He was not a secular man. His object was to recover the true spirit of Christ, to rebuild a broken state, and to unite a divided people. As the leader of that noble cause, the king set a powerful example. On the inspiration of his obeisance at Saint Denis, a large number of Protestants also converted to Catholicism. Among them were many major figures who would loom large in the history of France and New France.35
On February 27, 1594, Henri IV prepared to take the Catholic city of Paris by storm, but Governor Charles de Cossé-Brissac opened its gates. The triumphant king marched to Notre Dame, took mass in the Cathedral, and the healing began in France.
In Saintonge, Samuel Champlain may also have converted to Catholicism at this time. He was certainly a Catholic by 1598, and probably by 1595. He may have become one in 1593, after Henri abjured Protestantism in his dramatic public ceremony.36 Champlain also followed the example of the king in the substance of his Christian beliefs. Both men had little interest in theology. They disliked doctrinal disputes, despised religious bigotry, and hated religious persecution. They became men of deep and abiding personal faith, and cultivated a spirit of Christian piety. In 1603, it was reported of Henri IV that he “daily grows in piety, acknowledging that he owes everything to God. The Queen says that every morning he prays for half an hour, before speaking to anybody, and does the same at night.”37
Champlain changed in the same way. As he grew older, he also became more devout. The inventory of his estate included a large collection of religious books, sturdily bound in heavy vellum and designed for daily use. Prominent among them were the Fleurs des Sainetz, La Triple couronne de la bienheureuse Vierge, a Chronique et instruction du père Sainct-François, a collection of Figures des Pères Hermites, a handbook on the Pratique de la Perfection chrestienne, and other books of that genre. Some of these works celebrated the Virgin Mary and the Catholic saints. Most were guides to practical Christianity. Many
offered models of piety, humility, and good works. Champlain detested religious controversy and despised bigotry. Most of all, he hated intolerance as fundamentally un-Christian, even anti-Christian. In their spiritual lives, Henri IV and Champlain matured in similar ways.38
Champlain, like Henri IV, also embraced the universal ideal of the Catholic Church, which taught that all people were the children of God, recipients of Christ’s mercy, and wards of the universal Church. That religious idea was very different from the Calvinist idea of limited atonement, which held that Christ died only for a small elite. The Catholic idea of a universal religion would be a spiritual key to the kingship of Henri IV, and to Champlain’s colonial enterprise in New France.
These men also recognized the urgent importance of religious practice and the significance of sacred ritual. They believed that the observance of religion was vital to the stability of society and the state in the sixteenth century. When Henri came to the throne he carefully performed the public rituals of Christian kingship: visiting the sick, washing the feet of paupers on Maundy Thursday, pardoning criminals on Good Friday, and touching hundreds of sufferers in the healing ceremonies on Easter Sunday.39
Henri IV and Champlain lived in an age when western civilization was deeply divided by a common ideal of One True Faith. Many people in the western world shared this obsession, but they did so in different ways. By comparison with other Christians, Henri’s and Champlain’s way of faith was something special and distinct—even unique to a small circle of leaders in France. It was very much a product of their personal experience and their country’s history. Most of all it was a reaction against the cruelty, bloodshed, and oppression of the wars of religion. That experience made Henri IV and Champlain the men they were, and New France the place that it became.
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