Valois’ publishers were the Société de l’Histoire de France. Established by François Guizot in 1833, and recognised by Louis Napoleon Bonaparte in 1851 ‘comme établissement d’utilité publique’, the Society had declared in the second article of its Règlement that its purpose was to publish ‘documents originaux relatifs à l’histoire de France, pour les temps antérieurs aux Etats généraux de 1789’. Valois’ work was fit for purpose: the three manuscripts he had studied, penned in the seventeenth century, offered significant fresh insights on the Ligue years, ‘cette époque si discutée’. Valois was connected with the Society by family. His father, Noël Valois (1855-1915), was one of only three men to have served as secretary to the Society since its inception. Figure 1 : The Secretaries of the Société de l’Histoire de France up to World War 1 Secrétaire Secrétaire-adjoint Jules Desnoyers (1833-85) Arthur de Boislisle (1873-85) Arthur de Boislisle (1885-1908) Noël Valois (1885-1908) Noël Valois (1908-15) At the Society’s Annual General Meeting on 16 May 1916, the president, Paul Guilhiermoz, drew his listeners’ attention to the importance of the secretary’s role: ‘Seul parmi les membres de votre bureau, le secrétaire est élu pour quatre ans. C’est dire qu’il est en droit l’organe permanent, la pierre angulaire de la Société...’ Thus Noël Valois had a crucial role in the Society at the time that his son was working on the Histoire. Noël Valois knew the first secretary of the Society, and worked closely with the second for over two decades. In an address to the Society in 1897 this second secretary, Arthur de
What was it like for Charles to have this man as father? Was an academic career his own choice? Did he experience doubts when, one year after the ‘triumph’ of his first book, news arrived that his brother Jean had just received la croix de guerre and had been nominated for la Légion d’honneur for action in the Dardanelles? We can be sure that Charles was aware of the expectations of his father’s friends. Langlois pointed out that the manuscript of the work on Charles IX should not be lost: ‘les soins pieux d’un fils accompli, très bien préparé pour procéder à une revision nécessaire par ses études personnelles à l’Ecole des Chartes, le mettront, aussitôt après la guerre, en état d’être publié’. It was in June 1908 that Charles Valois, a newly qualified archiviste-paléographe, made known to the Société de l’Histoire his desire to produce an edition of the Histoire de la Ligue. He already knew the text well: it had been the subject of his thesis at the Ecole. He had noted Albert Gérard’s use of passages from the Histoire in the late historian’s unfinished work, La Révolte et le siège de Paris, published posthumously in 1907. Charles’s proposal to the Society was full of youthful enthusiasm for the text – ‘[une] vaste et intéressante compilation écrite par un contemporain anonyme et restée jusqu’à ce jour presque inconnu’. His goal was to produce ‘une édition partielle... environ un quart du texte.’ In his proposal he noted that the writer had been not only a Ligueur, but also one of the few who had not renounced their former affiliations. The text offered insights that other writers had, ‘par calcul ou par négligence’, omitted. In addition, it carried ‘certaines relations contemporaines des faits, aujourd’hui perdues...’.
Unable in 1914 to lift the mask of anonymity, Valois was nonetheless able to demonstrate convincingly that the writer had penned his work in in 1620 or shortly after. Possibly a man of the cloth but more probably a lawyer – using good French but lengthy and sometimes laboured sentences – the writer had been above all well-read. Valois discovered that his seventeenth-century predecessor had used a wide range of material: the well-known contemporary histories, both Catholic and Protestant, as well as al decrees, declarations, letters, arrêts, speeches and dialogues. traced the deployment of these sources attentively, passing judgement along the way, and noting with enthusiasm what was ‘new’. The ‘new’ included a letter, ‘peu connue’, written by Henri de Guise to Pope Sixtus V in late 1588, and, ‘pour les annales militaires du Mans, de Melun, de Sens et de Paris, pour l’histoire du duc de Mayenne, de Jean Boucher, du parti des Zélés et de celui des Politiques, plusieurs sources importantes, jusqu’à présent ignorées’. As for the writer’s views, we soon find ourselves in the company of a man who well reminds us of those bourgeois Ligueurs who had carried the argument against Dominique de Vic and François d’O. It was Valois’ view that the Histoire constituted the best defence of the Catholic Ligue – ‘le plaidoyer le plus complet et plus sérieux’ – to have been written in three centuries. The moderate nature of its writer’s Ligue affiliation was obvious from the way he had closed his account. By ending with Henry IV’s triumphant entry into , he had managed to conceal ‘la phase injustifiable’ of the civil war, ‘les convulsions sanglantes de l’agonie de la Ligue’. The writer had lamented the fact that many Catholics had been concerned more with worldly success than with spiritual wealth. He had respected the papacy but had had no compunction about criticising Sixtus V. Robust in his dislike of
heretics, and denouncing their atrocities, he had distrusted edicts of tion and believed that Protestantism had to be repelled by force. In this work, the Politiques too are dangerous, claiming that the state matters more than religion, and failing to see the Catholic faith as the very foundation of the state. Yet the writer had not been on the fanatical wing of the Ligue: he had been reticent, even evasive, about Spanish intentions. It is clear that he had not wanted ’s national integrity to be jeopardised: the only few lines of poetry in the whole text carry the message that no invaders, be they Spanish, English or German, would have been welcome. Nor was he a republican. The writer had believed in monarchy, reconciling respect for the king with support for the Ligue by reminding his readers that Henri III had supported the movement before being misled by poor advisers. The writer had not supported Ligue leaders iscriminately: the duc de Nemours had served the cause, but the duc de Mayenne had ruined it. In all, we have a work single-mindedly devoted to restoring the reputation of the Catholic Ligue. This purity of purpose was emphasised by the writer’s refusal to be drawn into topical allusions relevant to 1620. The Histoire, wrote Valois, was no ‘œuvre de circonstance’, and he brought this part of the Introduction to a close by reiterating the rare nature of the text: ‘L’intérêt des manuscrits que nous publions est d’émaner d’un de ces vaincus [Ligueurs] dont la voix s’était perdue parmi les cris de triomphe des royaux revenus au pouvoir’. Publication would rehabilitate the Ligue. Valois was well-read. In addition to being versed in the works of the early royalist writers – especially Matthieu, de Thou, L’Estoile, Palma-Cayet, d’Aubigné and Goulart – he was familiar both with lesser-known early writings and with well-known later histories by Dupleix, Maimbourg, Voltaire, Michelet, Poirson and others. He read monographs about the Oratoire as well as the school’s unpublished records. He was equally at home in the vast
Chapter 2: The Work During its protracted emergence from obscurity the text that came to absorb Charles Valois’ interest was given several titles. In 1897 Arthur de Boislisle referred to that part of the work contained in ms. 10270 as a Journal. In the previous year the fragment had been catalogued under the title Journal historique du temps de la Ligue. Earlier still, someone had scribbled ‘un recueil…’ on the document’s cover. To complicate matters, we find that the only manuscripts containing the whole (copied) text (mss 23295-96 in the fonds français of the Bibliothèque nationale) carry the words Hist. de la Ligue on their covers; the same four words (with Hist. now expanded to Histoire) appear also at the head of the first side of writing. Thus, before Valois, several titles had been given to the same work: Histoire… Recueil… Journal historique… Journal. In 1908 Valois wrote a short piece introducing the work as Une histoire inédite de la Ligue: œuvre d’un contemporain anonyme – a title which he refined in 1914 to read Histoire de la Ligue: œuvre inédite d’un contemporain. Robert Descimon’s wording – Histoire anonyme – is short and pleasing to the ear; but for reasons that will become clear in the next chapter, I will be referring to the work as simply the Histoire. Happily, the Histoire has been more appreciated in recent years. In the 1970s Peter Ascoli judged it to be by far the most informative source on the siege; J.H.M. Salmon identified neglect of the work as one of the reasons for historians’ limited understanding of the Seize, and Denis Pallier found it valuable on points of detail. Later, Philip Benedict acclaimed this ‘anonymous work’ as ‘one of the best sources available on the League in the provinces’. In 1983, Robert Descimon consulted this ‘remarquable texte’ in his ground-breaking analysis of the leadership group in the Paris Ligue. Pierre Chevallier found the work indispensable
Chapter 3: The Historian Lost to view along with the manuscript was its author until Charles Valois placed the spotlight on the former and found he could make some deductions also about the latter. His reading of the Histoire led him to believe that its author was neither born into nor bound by allegiance to any great family. He was well read, and he knew Latin and Italian. He thought and wrote like a cleric, from time to time lamenting the licence of the times, but he was not necessarily a man of the cloth, for ‘tant de laics... parlaient, à cette époque, la même langue que les prêtres’. A Parisian, he no doubt helped defend the city walls – yet, as noted in the previous chapter, he was surely no professional soldier. Valois noted that the historian was well acquainted with the Palais and he believed that he probably worked there, perhaps as a secrétaire or greffier; he also considered it likely that the historian was a member of the Oratoire. As noted in chapter 2, by the time Valois encountered the Histoire others had already – long before – surmised that its author was perhaps Pierre de L’Estoile, or Louis Maimbourg. Valois was unimpressed. The idea that L’Estoile had penned the Histoire could be dismissed at once: such a resolute defence of the Ligue could hardly have come from a staunchly Politique writer. In any case, the earliest part of the original text of which mss 23295-96 were a copy had been composed (at the earliest) in 1616, five years after L’Estoile’s death. For similar reasons Valois could dismiss Maimbourg – the Jesuit historian had considered Ligueurs to have been dangerous enemies; moreover the early part of the Histoire (350 pages at least) had been composed at the latest by 3 August 1621 – when Maimbourg was eleven. century
main’. Also he observed that the ‘z’ in the Rozée signature on the end-paper of ms. 23295 was conspicuously similar in shape to the ‘z’ in the marginal addition on page 407 (ms. 23296) of the phrase ‘un Parisien nommé Rozée, advocat’. Then he noted that the author, anonymous and discreet (‘Non seulement aucune signature, mais point de préface’), risked ‘quelques allusions fugitives à sa vie’ which allowed a calculation of when the work was composed: the 1620s, a decade ‘qui coïncide singulièrement avec le début de la carrière de Jean Rosée’. In the 1980s Robert Descimon took the quest further. It was through the publication of the results of his scientific approach to identifying the Seize that a truly reliable corpus of these Paris Ligueurs became available. Within the ranks of the Seize was Pierre Rozée, avocat. Descimon offered the view – ‘sous toute réserve’ – that Rozée would prove to be the historien anonyme. Later, and on the basis of his studies of actes notariés, Descimon was able to construct a family-tree showing Pierre to be the uncle of Jean, ‘prêtre de l’Oratoire’. The circle was almost complete. ‘Proof’ of Pierre’s authorship will only be definitively established if it can be shown that the handwriting in ms.10270 matches any examples of Pierre Rozée’s signature which might be located in the notarial records of the minutier central, or in other records of the municipality of Paris. Relevant features of the historian’s letter-formation in ms. 10270 are shown in Figure 3 (p. 64). At the time of writing a match has not been achieved, but the balance of probability currently seems sufficiently strong for us to be able in this thesis to regard the Histoire as indeed the work of Pierre Rozée.
he seems nonetheless to have been a man of sober judgement, one who approved of good order in society and of integrity in individuals. In early seventeenth-century France the connection between law and historiography was well established. As a lawyer writing history in the 1620s, Rozée was continuing a tradition that had become particularly apparent at least seventy years earlier. Lawyers accounted for about eighty per cent of the French (male) writers whose books made a significant contribution to the culture of their age and whose first books were published between 1540 and 1584. Along with clerics they were also amongst the most avid readers. The men responsible for the transformation of historiography after the 1550s had generally supplemented their initial studies in ancient languages and texts with higher studies in law. The contribution of lawyers was decisive ‘in shifting attention from drum and trumpet history to institutional, social and cultural studies.’ Lawyers brought political history to the fore. Unlike earlier military histories written by the nobility and ecclesiastical histories written by the clergy, political history offered an integrated account, ‘dans la mesure où la vie politique coiffe toutes sortes d’activités dont chacune n’est que partie d’un tout.’ The Histoire provides a political history in so far as Rozée concentrated on struggles for power and authority: Royalists are pitted against the Ligue (at national, provincial and municipal levels), the Seize against Barnabé Brisson – and then against Mayenne, Claude de Sainctes against royalist parlements, gallicans against ultramontanists, preacher against preacher... Lawyers were trained to be critical. They sifted evidence and reached verdicts. Three notable theoreticians of historiography – Loys Le Roy, Jean Bodin and La Popelinière – all studied law in . The men writing new histories of the distant past – Estienne Pasquier,
‘Interrogé’, Bourgoing had answers that would have saved him ‘s'il eut esté en lieu ou il eut eu moyen d'en faire preuve’. This poor cleric knew little of ‘[les] formalitez de la justice’ and made the mistake of trusting in ‘son innocence’. After undergoing ‘la question ordinaire et extraordinaire’ (two degrees of torture), Bourgoing was led away. In the short time that he had left, he reflected upon ‘la fausse deposition des temoins’ and observed that the judges’ verdict would have been valid if ‘les preuves eussent esté veritables’. Rozée was troubled by Bourgoing’s fate; he noted that later ‘plusieurs publierent les argumens de son innocence’. Unlike the Palais de Justice where he worked, the Oratoire, another Paris institution near Rozée’s home, was founded in the historian’s lifetime. The Oratoire’s first congregation met in Paris in the rue St Jacques in 1611; its founder had been educated in the rue de la Harpe. Both streets were a two-minute walk from Rozée’s home. After 1616 the priests moved to the Hôtel du Bouchage, across the street from the Louvre. This was close to where Rozée worked. Our historian’s nephew Jean joined the Oratoire. Sébastien Raynssant, son of one of Rozée’s colleagues in the Seize, became its librarian. These are striking links – but they cannot alone explain why the Histoire was welcome in the Oratoire. For that, we look for closeness in the thinking of Rozée and the founder of the new congregation. Pierre de Bérulle was born into an aristocratic family in 1575. He studied philosophy and theology at the recently founded Jesuit Collège de Clermont. Before long he was participating in his cousin Barbe Acarie’s circle of mystically inclined believers, and in 1599 he was ordained a priest. His subsequent support for the French Carmelite sisters,
contemporary views were hard to find. The defeated were swift to destroy incriminating evidence. Pro-Ligue writing after 1598 was a lonely – and potentially risky – enterprise. The significance of Rozée’s work – understandably not written until some of the dust had settled, and left anonymous and unpublished – lies largely in the rarity of its sympathy for the Seize. Though occasionally unable to resist exposing what he considered to be the failings of royalists, the historian sensibly chose proclamation of the merits of the Ligue as the safest means of dissenting from prevailing opinion. Acting only ever with integrity, the Paris Ligue had brought about a deep transformation of society. As evidence of this reading of the troubled years Rozée drew not only on the Seize-inspired resilience shown during the long siege but also on the apparently spontaneous turning to God of ordinary people after the Blois murders: ‘Pendant que les uns travailloient a paris a l’asseurance de leur party,’ he wrote, ‘… combien de luxe y fut reformé; et certes ces actions de devotion, et de pieté si ferventes et si frequentes, exercées par toutes sortes de personnes, ne monstroient que l’ambition eust porté ces gens ala rebellion’. Far from being rebels, the Ligue had been the salt of the earth. Rozée’s voice went unheard. With the king’s entry into on 22 March 1594 the Ligue had collapsed. Many of its leaders swiftly fled the capital, and over one hundred more were expelled a few days later. Only bishops – notably Rose of Senlis – were allowed to stay. In the following months the Sainte Union across the country disintegrated. With the Béarnais on the throne, it was to be only a matter of time until his former co-religionaries would be granted a range of religious, civil and political privileges. All seemed lost, but the seed
Are we dealing with the view of an individual or with widely held opinion? And again, was Rozée listening to or reading ce que ‘on a dit’? Put simply, are we dealing here with one, two or three texts – or none? On this occasion it turns out that the unnamed man qui a médit was Jacques-Auguste de Thou, and that we are dealing with written text. But elsewhere dire (also parler, discourir…) refers to spoken rumour, hearsay – and we will find that what Rozée heard was an important source. Meanwhile, more problems arise from the example above. Why did the historian not name de Thou? Was it out of respect for a renowned author with whom he was about to disagree? Had he simply forgotten where he had read the story? Why did Rozée name some contemporary writers but not others, and why – in some cases – did his practice vary regarding individual authors? Comparison of Rozée’s account of the Normandy episode with de Thou’s raises another difficulty: it becomes obvious that the point of Rozée’s account was to take issue with de Thou’s claim that for a brief interval Chicot managed to hold Chaligny prisoner. ‘Pour estre creu,’ observed Rozée, ‘il falloit rendre le conte probable et monstrer comment un homme blessé d’un coup mortel a la teste en avoit pu prendre un autre prisonnier qui n’estoit blessé qu’en la jambe.’ This observation is encouraging – we are dealing with an author who took the trouble to interrogate his sources – but it also raises the question of the extent to which the historian’s source selection was driven by the desire to correct perceived misrepresentations, especially any that might taint the reputation of the Sainte Union (or of the house of Lorraine, from whom Chaligny issued). There is throughout the text a remarkable clustering of sources around key controversies. Was Rozée’s text merely reactive? Would he have written if others had not done so first? Given his handling of the Chicot-Chaligny encounter, we will need to consider how often and how subtly he adapted the material at his disposal, and for what reasons? And why did he write about what could
Déclaration of December 1592, had attributed the death of Henry III to ‘un coup du ciel’. Presumably Rozée sensed malice behind the ‘error’, for the implication was that the duke had been covering up a Ligue conspiracy in which Clément was a mere pawn. Rozée corrected the error by quoting Mayenne’s precise words: the regicide resulted from ‘un coup malheureux d’un seul homme, sans l’ayde ny sçeu de ceux qui n’avoient que trop de passion dela desirer’. Elsewhere too, Rozée had his red pen at hand. Those who wrote that the troops accompanying Caetani to France ate meat during Lent (1590) were evidently wrong: civic leaders had already welcomed Caetani to Paris on 8 January. Allegations that during the great siege the Paris clergy had a year’s supply of food hidden away were based on ‘de mauvaises mémoires’. Even in the darkest days, children were not eaten: ‘ceux qui l’ont escrit ne le sçavoient pas bien’. And, contrary to what some had written, Mayenne and Parma parted on good terms after the siege: ‘ceux qui ont dit le contraire se sont fort trompez et ils confondent le premier voyage avec le second voyage quand le duc de parme vint au secours de Rouen’. Inaccuracy was not the only focus of Rozée’s criticism of the writings of others about the Ligue. In an extensive passage he explored the tension which emerged in 1591 between royalist Catholics and Ligueur ultramontanists. Rozée sought to expose the triviality and woolly thinking of royalist Catholics by interrogating their witnesses: the rulings from their Parlements at Châlons and Tours (6 June and 5 August respectively) and the declaration issued by royalist clergy at Chartres in September. Why did they bother to score points against Gregory XIV (‘se disant pape’, according to the judges at Tours) when they intended in any case to use the device of appel comme d’abus to disregard papal bulls? If they believed the pope was self-styled, and if the procureur-général at Châlons required a
Again, Rozée was dismissive: the work exemplified the licence and confusion of the times, and demonstrated how ‘beaucoup de gens coururent pour tirer la barbe du lion qui estoit abbatu’. Rozée played his trump-card regarding the 1591 jurisdictional stand-off by producing as his own witness Matteo Zampini, an Italian jurist (and ardent Ligueur) who had been in the entourage of Catherine de Medici and who, according to de Thou, wrote Ad Calumnias, …responsio at the behest of the Ligue. De Thou was not impressed by Zampini’s treatise: ‘il défendit une mauvaise cause par des raisons encore plus mauvaises’. By contrast, Rozée evidently found Zampini’s views helpful. Popes were not chosen through the intrigue of powerful nations, but rather were called by God. Excommunication of French kings in the past had been profitable in bringing them to repentance and thence to absolution. Those bishops who in the past had argued that the pope’s powers of excommunication were limited had themselves been schismatics; consequently their views could be discounted. Royalists who asserted that French kings had special privileges always stopped short of revealing their sources, for, in truth, ‘ne pouvoir estre excommunié d’aucun, mesme du pape, n’est pas un privilege duqu’el un chrestien et baptisé soit capable’. Analysis of Rozée’s exploration of sources regarding the 1591 controversy has vindicated Valois’ 1914 observations: Rozée drew on a range of sources (and source-types) from both sides of a major debate. At the same time he has treated them unevenly – Zampini was named whilst royalist polemicists were not, and the presentation of the Italian’s views occupied three times the number of words devoted to the collective views of Faye,
Godefroy and de Clary. Our author has demonstrated both his flawless Catholic orthodoxy and his caution when dealing with the king’s party. Rozée knew the dangers of both supposition and exaggeration: ‘ie n’escris point les circonstances de cette execution [the punishment of Brisson’s assassins], ...pourceque… ceux qui, a la relation d’autruy, en ont escrit selon leur passion, ont dit sur ce suiet comme sur beaucoup d’autres plus qu’il n’en a esté.’ Elsewhere he accused earlier writers of displaying ‘trop de vicieuse passion’. Allegations in an unnamed discours that in the winter of 1587-88 in the comté de Montbéliard troops under the command of the duc de Guise had committed ‘toutes les cruautez qu’un esprit sans religion se peut imaginer’ had to be refuted; not only were the claims ‘contre vérité’, they had been maliciously characterised in the discours as ‘les inhumanitez et fureurs brutales de la ligue’. Outraged, Rozée rounded on the authors: ‘à ces gens là, les heretiques sont impecables, et ils ne veulent pas reconnoistre qu’il n’y a point de cruautez au monde qui esgallent celles des heretiques, car l’heresie et la cruauté engendrées en l’abisme de l’enfer furent produites au monde en un mesme moment’. Seeking to reinforce the point, the historian later named a Ligue pamphlet that charged the Protestants with committing terrible cruelties at Niort in December 1588. Rozée acknowledged that Protestant historians had denied the charges – but not before provocatively observing that a description of the atrocities ‘seroit horreur au lecteur et scandale à la douceur naturelle des françois’. Of course, in suppressing the title of the source and advertising that of the one attacking the Huguenots, Rozée manifested his own partiality. It is to this issue that we now turn.
at not being consulted in advance, the simple answer was that if their views had been sought, the Ligue would never have got off the ground. In clawing back many of the liberties extended to Protestants by the Edict of Monsieur, and by banning leagues, the 1577 Edict of Poitiers rendered the 1576 League largely redundant and ushered in a period of relative calm. ‘Mais la Ligue, si elle hiberne, est loin d’être mourante’. In June 1584 the heir apparent, the duc d’Anjou, died. ‘[L]e funeste accident arrivé au prince,’ wrote the historian, ‘…ouvrit la boîte de laquelle sont sortis tant de maux, qui ont depuis affligé ce Royaume.’ Defending the re-formation of the princely Ligue, Rozée focused on the obvious danger of a Protestant succession (Henri III had no sons and little likelihood of any in the future) and on the integrity of the Ligue’s leaders – particularly of Henri duc de Guise. His main interest, however, lay in developments in the capital; it was where he lived, and what he experienced. There, in the years 1584-89, the efforts of the Ligue were largely directed against the king himself. At the least, Henri III must name a Catholic successor and create some form of ongoing union of Catholics. Writing in the early 1620s, a time when the Bourbon monarchy was struggling to assert royal authority, Rozée exercised his customary caution; instead of directly criticising Henri III he targeted those advisers who, in apparently caring more for matters of state than for religion, had been called Politiques. For Rozée, Politiques were Catholics ‘qui n'estoient point de la ligue’. They thought more about earthly than heavenly matters, and they considered religion to be a mere adjunct of the state. They held that, because men could not be compelled to believe, warfare against heretics was pointless, even counter-productive. With no claims to personal expertise in
The assassinations of the duc and cardinal de Guise took place on 23-24 December 1588. Rozée was in no doubt about their importance. He considered the four hundred or so pages he had written up to that point to be just one side of a coin; ‘il y avoit de la peine à escrire d’une mesme plume ce qui est gravé sur le revers’; the king’s actions gave ‘au théâtre une nouvelle face’. The elimination of the Guise brothers was a defining moment; it may be considered to bring to a close the first volume of the Histoire. When writing about the Blois assassinations, Rozée was confronting an event which seems to have had a personal impact upon him but whose significance had been overlaid in the subsequent restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. Writing with that monarchy uppermost in his mind, Rozée proceeded with prudence: ‘il y a des choses dont la memoire est deffendüe et le recit en est ennuyeux’. He spread the blame. The king’s ‘hayne extreme contre le duc et son frère le Cardinal’ (undeniable) had been ‘eschaufée par les artifices de leurs ennemis’; besides, Guise’s ‘jalousie concüe de la bien veillance publique’ had been evident. Such restraint was not to be shown in Ligueur Paris after news of the atrocities was brought to the capital by one Verdiveau in the afternoon of 24 December. Shock soon gave place to outrage – and fear – as it became known that in the very place they had been received as guests – the château at Blois – the Guise brothers, one of them a senior cleric, had been cut down. Unlike after the journée des barricades, this time there would be no willingness to treat with the king. The Ligue’s focus would switch ‘from reform to revenge’.
Thus the conseil de la Ligue that Rozée remembered numbered more than sixteen, and any confusion about this had arisen from the existence at the same time of sixteen informers – one for each quartier. At least some of these informers had been operating covertly since 1585. Probably in January 1589 their activities became overt. It is likely that these men were not just informers but were also pro-active on behalf of the Ligue in the quartiers, and that the conseil perceived them as supplementing the work of the quarteniers, the traditional local leaders. If the quarteniers felt undermined by the Ligue’s key men in the quartiers, they must also have been dismayed by Aumale’s decision, suggested by the Seize, that each district should also have a conseil des neuf. These local cells were intended to supervise, possibly even to supersede, the quarteniers, though Salmon’s suggestion that they had the opportunity to build up electoral support for the Seize is open to question, being dependent upon the number of places in the Bureau de la Ville that they might have been allocated, had they survived. Made up of quelques notables bourgeois, the conseils des neuf were given responsibilities. They were also tasked with handling any disputes in their quartier; those they could not settle were to be passed on to the échevins – a procedure that would undermine the role of the Parlement. By early 1589 the new conseils were in place, but they were destined not to last, for before long they were being infiltrated by Politiques – the very rivals whose influence their existence was presumably supposed to minimise. The king’s unpopularity in Paris increased markedly after the murders of the Guise brothers, and during the seven weeks before Mayenne arrived the Seize ruled without check to their power. The tone was confident and authoritative, their business forged in regular
authority by God clearly could not, in the last resort, be demanded of subjects of a heretical ruler. Rozée generally avoided engagement with politically contentious ideas. Did not the atrocity against the Guise brothers speak for itself? It was to Blois, not to Péronne, that one should look for explanations of France’s plight. Far from being a pretext for rebellion, religion was all about according honour to God. The Ligue sought not to bring change but to save the Catholic monarchy from ‘l’aristocratie protestante’. The absence from this text of any engagement with Ligueur political thought suggests the compactness of Rozée’s world view. It may be significant that he offered no opinion when recording the potentially explosive assertion made at the Christmas Day meeting that the people had always had the right to defend their interests through an Estates-General. This author did not welcome, perhaps barely noticed, any deviation from the principle of hereditary monarchy provided it complied with what he considered to be the more fundamental law of Catholicity. Rozée was deeply impressed by the religious fervour of clergy and people in Paris in early 1589: ‘on eust dit qu’ils exercoient les actions de la religion comme si c’eust esté la dernière fois, et que le lendemain la religion eust deü estre perdüe’. Many memorial services were held for the murdered brothers, the most notable being at Notre Dame at the end of January. There had been a particularly poignant occasion a few days earlier when a posthumous son to the duc de Guise was baptised François. Penitential processions – often spontaneous in the early weeks – took place in the winter cold. Prayers were recited through day and night. Other cities – Rouen, Orléans – followed suit. Even non-Ligueurs
on reconnaissait bien à ce souci l’esprit communal bourguignon’. Dijon had appeared to have no trouble-makers, ‘pas de “caboches”’. Yet by spring 1589, there was ‘un désordre social… [u]ne guerre sociale’; and ‘quant à l’hostilité des “ligueux” de mairie contre les gentilshommes, tous les gentilshommes, et contre les officiers, c’est là fait certain’. In essence, Drouot discerned – in Burgundy – serious conflict within the bourgeoisie. The lower ranks – ‘les bourgeoisies mineurs’, later more felicitously called ‘la bourgeoisie seconde’ – found themselves unable to rise to join the privileged few who constituted ‘les grands bourgeois’. For them the way forward seemed to lie in espousing the Ligue cause. In overturning the royalist tradition of a Ligue led by n’er-do-wells (at least for Burgundy) Drouot’s work marked a break from the past. In fact, what was truly new was the ‘scientific’ method used, for the significance of frustrations within the bourgeoisie had been noted before. ‘Ainsi que l’observe Palma-Cayet,’ wrote one nineteenth-century essayist, ‘ce qui avait poussé bien des gens à se mettre du parti de l’union, c’était l’espoir d’arriver par une révolution dans l’état à des charges plus élevées, à des emplois plus lucratifs que ceux qu’ils occupaient’. Drouot’s thesis did not win universal acceptance. Whilst noting the evident significance of social tension, Mousnier considered religion to be the key determinant of affiliation to the Ligue. More recently Mack P. Holt has cast doubt upon the degree and impact of social tension in Dijon and has suggested that a more critical factor there was Mayenne’s patronage. Nonetheless, broadly speaking, Drouot’s work marked a sea-change in Ligue studies and stimulated debate. Although focused on Burgundy, its relevance to investigations into Ligueur Paris was apparent to J.H.M. Salmon and to Robert Descimon.
Given that the Seize had to win the Hôtel de Ville if they were to control the city, we might expect Rozée to trace the events that unfolded there.At first sight there is disappointment. The historian’s version of the Seize assumption of power in the Hôtel de Ville in 1588 is brief, vague and sanitised. Subsequent elections all pass unmentioned. However, if we focus on those prévôts and échevins whom Rozée named, an impression emerges of a historian determined to record what he considered was best about the Paris Ligue. Exactly half of the municipal leaders in the years 1589-93 are named in the Histoire. Figure 5A : Leaders of the Bureau de la Ville, May 1588 – March 1593 (alphabetical) (Those named in the Histoire are shown in bold type; members of the Seize are underlined) Bordeaux, Guillaume de Desprez, Robert Luillier, Jehan Brethe, Jacques Desprez, Robert II Marteau, Michel Boucher, Charles Drouart, Jehan Néret, Denis Compans, Jehan de Hotman, Antoine Pichonnat, Jehan Costeblanche, François Langlois, Martin Poncher, Pierre Crucé, Oudin Lemoine , Denis Roland, Nicolas Some of the named men appear not to have greatly interested the historian. Elsewhere, Rozée’s attention was lively. We learn that in August 1590 Compans, one of the Seize, was active as colonel of the quartier de la Cité, helping to deal with plots, and that towards the end of the siege he was carrying out orders to prevent the avocats from reaching the Palais de Justice. Again in 1590 Crucé was a hero for the Seize when he and the men he captained repelled royalist attackers near the abbaye de Sainte-Geneviève in the late summer. In the case of municipal leaders from outside the Seize, Rozée could be dismissive. Charles Boucher, cousin of the preacher and prévôt des marchands for the two years from October 1590, received only one mention: he sent a note to the duc de Mayenne, assuring him of his ongoing allegiance – provided he was properly paid.
modest people in the movement. Roland Hacte lived round the corner from Rozée and held Ligueur meetings in his home in 1587 prior to the journée de Saint-Séverin. Was it at such a meeting that Rozée committed himself to the cause? Nicolas Taconnet (wine-merchant) and Jehan Messier (draper) both attended a general assembly at the Hôtel de Ville (14 June, 1591). Rozée was there too. Did they meet? We can know so little of this – but for our historian these were outstanding men: Taconnet refused overtures from the Politiques, while Messier helped Joseph Bourdereul track down artillery with which Paris might be defended. And the commissaire Jacques Bazin made do with horse-flesh while his Politique neighbour indulged in beef. We come last to Robert Legoix, ‘Seize assez discret, n’eût été sa mort tragique’. Legoix died because the conspiracy of the journée du pain ou la paix was launched prematurely. The Ligueur captain found himself isolated and surrounded by armed enemies who accused him of disturbing the peace; ‘il respondit que le Roy estant heretique il ne falloit point de paix avec luy; mais endurer toutes les misères qu’il plairoit a dieu de leur envoyer’. The words could have been spoken by our historian. They represent exactly what the Ligue meant to him. We do not know why Rozée made no mention of seven in every nine of the Seize. It may have been memory-loss, or fear of consequences for the descendants of those whose company he had joined. It is possible that he himself joined late and remained on the fringe, a likelihood suggested by the weak correlation between what we know of Rozée and the criteria established by Descimon in 1983 for identification of the Seize. Rozée’s portrayal of the Seize is flawed because it rests on an inadequate sample. But as the representation of a pure, simple and integrated strand of Ligueur thought it is invaluable.
response to the Paris Ligueurs’ self-disqualification from normal political life. It was a move that weakened the Seize both as public policy-makers and as guardians over towns across the country. The Seize felt snubbed, treated as ‘gens de basse qualité’. Initially, they reacted quietly – but they were hurt. At the same time, the duke appointed four secretaries of state and chose to reserve the granting of publication privilèges to himself and the Parlement. Arlette Jouanna has claimed that, if one is to use the anachronistic term Thermidor, then it is at least as applicable at the close of 1589 as in the aftermath of the Brisson affair. Meanwhile, a consequence of Mayenne’s defeat at Arques was an attack on Paris by royal troops (at Toussaint): ‘800 ligueurs furent tués, autant faits prisonniers’. Despite the recent difficulties, 1590 began well. The arrival of the papal legate Enrico Caetani boosted morale. Mayenne was conciliatory: ‘[J]'ay telle espérance de votre fidelité que je me repose de tout sur votre vigilance et diligence pour la conservation de la ville,’ he told the leaders of the Seize – ‘ses anciens amis’ – as he left for the siege of Meulan in January. A few weeks later, it was they who reassured him that despite the disaster of Ivry he retained their confidence. Meanwhile, aware that they were under surveillance, Paris royalists kept a low profile. The Seize-led harassment of the receveur François de Vigny played on the minds of some of the king’s advisers. There was no hope, said one of them, of a successful plot in the city, ‘a cause de la perpetuelle vigilance, diligence et exacte recherche de ces seize, lesquels estoient ordinairement avertis comme a point nommé de tout ce qui se passoit dans la ville’. It was a statement that would be vindicated during the long siege, a time of such travail that, for a few months, friction between the duke and the Seize, and suspicion between Ligueurs and Politiques, both waned.
their attention to the militia colonels. The formerly reliable François Costeblanche was replaced by Jehan-Baptiste de Machault, but attempts to remove Claude Daubray were unsuccessful. In summer, the Seize tried once again to make progress at the institutional level. Thinking ahead to the Estates-General that Mayenne habitually promised but never seemed to deliver they considered but failed to agree upon whom they would elect as king. In the August municipal contest, despite forcing a second electoral assembly to be convened, and despite the consolation prize of securing the resignations of Martin Langlois and Robert Desprez, the Seize failed to prevent Mayenne’s moderates from holding the Bureau de la Ville. As the end of the year approached, simmering tensions bolied over. ‘Je me noie et ne m’en puis sauver’; it is with Barnabé Brisson’s cry of despair amidst a political storm that we approach a critical juncture in the history of the Ligue. In 1591, Brisson and two other lawyers – Claude Larcher and Jean Tardif – were arrested by the Seize, charged with conspiracy, and summarily executed. It was an act of intimidation that Mayenne, lieutenant-général du Royaume, could not ignore. In December, the duke arrived in Paris to deal with the perpetrators, four of whom were hanged. Thereafter the Seize existed only on the duke’s sufferance. We consider this reverse in Ligue fortunes by comparing the accounts left by Rozée and Pierre de L’Estoile. These two contemporary commentators, respectively avocat and audiencier, had very different views. Rozée produced his cautious but firm defence of the Seize years after the dust had settled. In L’Estoile’s lively and engaging journal we have the
Chapter 7: Political leaders A large union of devout Catholic believers working together for an honourable cause was how Rozée best liked to remember the Seize, but their history in the difficult years after 1589 could not be written without reference to influential leaders and supporters. The contributions of Mayenne, of two renowned ambassadors (Enrico Caetani and Bernardino de Mendoza) and of an outstanding general (Alexandre Farnèse, prince de Parme) are the focus of this chapter. We consider both the nature of the help they brought and Pierre Rozée’s assessment of its value. The Histoire does not yield easy answers. Rozée cared more for integrity than for status. Unlike other contemporary historians, he was not close to high politics. Moreover, he had ‘une timidité avouée… vis-à-vis des grands personnages du temps’. Rozée considered the motives of les grands to be inscrutable; he would therefore limit himself to reporting their actions and public statements. Perhaps he was naïve, but his approach also allowed the hiding of uncomfortable truths. Rozée surely knew – and did not wish to remind his readers – that the imaginative writers of La satyre ménippée had had a field day exposing the supposed motives of prominent Ligue supporters. Under the influence of the Spanish-administered drug catholicon, a standard galenical medical treatment, Mayenne had (by this fiction) declared: ‘[D]epuis que j’ai pris les armes pour la Sainte Ligue, j’ai toujours eu ma conservation en telle recommandation, que j’ai préféré de très bon cœur mon intérêt particulier, à la cause de [Dieu]’. Later in the same speech he had ‘honoured’ his sister, madame de Montpensier, and Caetani ‘[qui] ont fait de signalés services à l’Union, par subtiles nouvelles & Te Deum chantés à propos, …qui ont donné occasion à plusieurs de mourir allégrement de mal rage de faim, plutôt que parler de paix’.
In deciding to avoid examining Ligue leaders’ motives, Rozée took a line that was inconsonant with the historian’s duty to reveal and explain; fortunately, particularly with respect to Mayenne, he let down his guard. Moreover, his humble station gave him an advantage over contemporaries whose published views might be affected by closeness to their superiors. A matter of great importance to Mayenne and Parma, and to the ambassadors, was the state of relations between France and Spain. Mendoza and Parma were in Philip II’s employ. The cardinal legate Caetani was cautiously sympathetic to Spain’s support for the Ligue. Mayenne distrusted Spanish intentions while being heavily dependent on Philip’s financial aid. In 1559 the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis had ended sixty-five years of warfare between France and Spain, but it had not brought trust. The saddleback Pyrennean kingdom of Navarre and parts of the Flemish border remained disputed territories, and the religious situation in France – the spread of Protestantism, with its potential to inflame the deeply troublesome revolt in the Netherlands – chagrined the Catholic king. In the 1560s and ’70s relations were uneasy. Catherine de Medici’s willingness to negotiate with the Huguenots seriously worried Madrid. Philip II’s ambassadors in Paris kept in close touch with the Guise; the queen mother distrusted the first and had the second recalled. Later, the duc d’Anjou’s activities in the Spanish Netherlands aggravated the situation, particularly when Catherine made it clear that Cambrai, seized in August 1581, would not be returned. Anjou’s death in June 1584 introduced the inevitability that a Huguenot would in due course inherit the French throne, and presented Philip II with an opportunity that he could
from Lyon, heading north through Burgundy to Dijon, a route which inevitably exposed him to a bombardment of the Ligueur opinions of a small group of hard-liners, rather than crossing first into the Nivernais (as instructed by Sixtus V) to hold talks with the duc de Nevers, a man who had the credentials to mediate between Tours and the legate. The journey dragged on: three weeks were ‘lost’ in Dijon. Perhaps Caetani began to lose confidence in the feasibility of his mission. Drouot concluded: ‘[la] traversée de la Bourgogne … ébranle son autorité et ses volontés d’arbitre. Elle prépare l’échec de sa mission.’ Rozée made little mention of the legate’s journey, but what he did write was accurate in detail: he noted the diversion of the first escort, the comte de Brissac, to Le Mans; the neutralisation of the second, led by La Bourdaisière, before it reached Dijon; and the eventual arrival of lansquenets provided by Charles III, duc de Lorraine, and led by St Paul, to accompany the legate on his final stage to Paris. It is here that Rozée also took the opportunity to dismiss de Thou’s allegation that these troops made light of the legate’s presence amongst them by eating meat during Lent. What the historian did not do at this stage was reveal his opinion of the legate’s visit. Caetani’s stay in France lasted nine months. After spending the night of Saturday 20 January in the Paris faubourg of Saint-Jacques, he entered the city next day to a rapturous welcome. A few days later, he presented his credentials before the Parlement. It soon became obvious where his sympathies lay. Having been himself castigated in royal declarations against his legation, he in turn scuppered a plan floated by the Navarrist cardinal de Vendôme to convene a conciliatory assembly of all French bishops at Tours. In
writing: the accounts differ on which day the legate received his visitors, and the pamphlet supplies no names of his companions. Given his disappointment with the pope it is uncertain in any case that Rozée would have enjoyed reading it: its text constituted ‘preuves de l’affection du pape pour l’Union’. L’Estoile, d’Aubigné, Palma-Cayet, de Thou: none of these authors – not even all of them cumulatively – provided the dense detail of the Histoire. Nor did the registers from the Hôtel de Ville. After the weekend’s celebrations, it was down to business on the Monday, as the legate began meetings with the dukes of Mayenne and Nemours. Rozée noted, perhaps with some pride, that amongst the visitors were ‘les docteurs de la theologie et les principaux des Seize’; these men informed Caetani of the ‘peu d’ordre’ that beset the capital. Then, on Friday 26 January, the legate presented to the Parlement sitting in Paris the bull issued in Rome in September 1589 whereby the pope authorised him to exercise a range of ministries in France. Registration of the bull ensued in early February and the event was marked at once by pamphlets on sale in Paris and Lyon. Due process mattered to our avocat-author. He noted that Caetani needed the court’s sanction of his activities, and that in addition to considering the bull, along with a separate document stating the legate’s mandate, the magistrates paid attention both to letters they had recently received from the pope and to Caetani’s spoken harangue. Thus, it was with ample evidence and ‘aprez mûre deliberation’ that the magistrates moved to registration. There is little doubt that Rozée was glad of Caetani’s performance before the judges; it is evident from what he included in – and omitted from – his narrative. He noted that the pope’s letters commended the legate for ‘sa religion, integrité, dexterité au maniment des afaires les plus serieuses d'un Etat, pour la grandeur de sa maison et de sa noblesse, de son sçavoir et de son bon jugement’. He
recalled the part of Brisson’s speech where the premier président noted Caetani’s qualities: ‘son eloquence… sa doctrine… ses doctes ecrits’. On the other hand, he was silent about de Thou’s subsequent opinion that the papal bull amounted to an infringement of national liberties, and about the royalist historian’s remembrance of Caetani’s ‘orgueilleux dessein’ in trying to sit in a highly prominent position in court’. Just as it was the leaders of the Seize who had updated Caetani on the plight of Paris, so it was probably they who arranged the pageant that took place the following Sunday. Rozée proceeded cautiously – ‘On jugea estre expédient que le peuple entendit l'intention du pape’ – before recalling that there was a ‘procession générale’ involving ‘le corps des eccelésiastiques… toutes les paroisses… tous les moines’, with preaching by Francesco Panigarola (at Nôtre-Dame, in the presence of the legate) and Pierre Christin (‘prédicateur fort célebre’) at St-Estienne du Mont. We know that, although popular among moderate Ligueurs, Panigarola did not always have the support of the Seize. Our author gave more space to Christin: this Niçois preacher made specific mention of ‘ceux qui s'estoient unis pour la defence et la conservation de la religion catholique, apostolique et romaine’, insisted that only a Catholic could be king of France, and assured his listeners that papal assistance was at hand. It was not just in Paris that awareness of the pope’s steadfastness encouraged Catholics. While Caetani had still been journeying north, the Ligueur Estates-General of Languedoc had declared that they would never accept Henri of Navarre as King of France, a decision that the Toulouse Parlement had promptly registered. Quoting word-for-word from a Ligueur pamphlet, Rozée was apparently pleased that decisions were being made in an
the Netherlands sooner than he deemed wise. After saving Paris, he spurned crude attempts by the Ligue to keep him attached to French interests. In February 1592, following Villars’ astonishing sortie during the Rouen siege, Parma conducted what he feared was a premature withdrawal from the region because Mayenne insisted. Two months later, he had to forgo what he considered an excellent opportunity to harry the royalist forces, again on account of Mayenne. Rozée’s account of Parma’s activities in France derived from his reading of Palma-Cayet and de Thou. He greatly admired the general. Aware of the delay in Parma’s arrival in 1590 – ‘la longueur du secours prommis’ – he contrived to paint a positive picture: Philip II’s command was ‘promptement executé’; Parma moved ‘aussy tost que l’esquipage de l’artillerie fut prest’. Approaching Lagny in September the general showed charisma: ‘quand cete ville seroit assize sur la moustache du prince de Bearn, il la prendroit devant qu’il put lever le bras pour la secourir’. But Parma also displayed admirable caution – the attack on Lagny was preceded by painstaking preparation – and he showed restraint – there was no need to sack Caudebec (in spring 1592), for it sufficed to send their ‘vivres et munitions’ to Rouen. Rozée was surely impressed by Parma’s focus when the general declared in late summer 1590 ‘qu’il estoit inutil de luy proposer aucun traité avec le roy heretique, estant envoyé dela part du Roy Catholique son Maistre, au secours des catholiques de france, a l’extirpation de l’heresie et deffence dela religion catholique’. And wounded at Caudebec, Parma displayed courage: ‘[C]e coup ne luy fit pas seulement changer de couleur; il ne laissa de continuer son propos jusques a ce que le sang coulant hors la manche de son pourpoint, il ne le put plus celer a ceux qui estoient aupres de luy, lesqu’els le prierent de se retirer’.
Royalists were well aware of the Ligue propaganda campaign of early1591. On 7 April noblemen with Navarre at Chartres wrote to the pope explaining that he was being duped by mis-information from the Ligue; they added that ‘Dieu donne les roys et n’est pas permi aux subiectz d’en choisir à leur volonté’. The royalist envoy to Rome, François de Luxembourg, wrote the next day beseeching the pope not to judge hastily; replying on 4 June, the pope conceded no ground. Indeed he could not, for by then his assistance to the Ligue had gone far beyond moral support. Landriano had reached Paris; 15,000 écus per month had been made available to the Ligue for the upkeep of a garrison in . More money had followed. Next had come news that infantry from Switzerland and cavalry from Naples would soon set off for France under the leadership of Ercole Sfondrati, duke of Montemarciano, a nephew of the Pope. ‘Les Ligueurs applaudirent,’ wrote L’Epinois. Referring probably to Ligue influence, Rozée noted that the army had been procured through ‘les agents qui estoient a Rome’. In chapter four we noted that when Rozée imported long passages from contemporary writings – typically several sides – it was because the views expressed in them mirrored his own. A key import on the 1591 gallican controversy was the Supplication et advis fait au Roy de se faire Catholique which sought with an array of arguments to bring Navarre to conversion. There was the force of antiquity: the Catholic church had outlasted all others, its doctrines unchanged, and all previous kings had professed the Catholic faith. Then there were political arguments: if the king remained Protestant, all his key men would be in a different church, meaning that they would have more support from the people than the king himself. As for the Protestants they would surely remain loyal to a converted Navarre (‘s’ils ont obey au deffunct Roy, ils vous obeiront a plus forte raison’). Conversion would also
In his attachment to the Tridentine decrees and his sympathy for the Jesuits Rozée showed ultramontanist leanings. Never, of course, disaffected from the papacy, he nonetheless felt free to judge popes’ deeds. His disappointment with Sixtus V issued not from his own but from the pope’s betrayal of principle. During the 1591 stand-off the historian found fault with the royalist parlements, not with Rome. Yet for all this, Rozée was not devoid of gallican sentiment. His interest in the Supplication et advis suggests that he believed Navarre needed only to convert to be eligible for the throne, and when Clément VIII’s 1592 bull requiring Sega to procure a Catholic king was rejected by the royalist parlements, Rozée reflected on ‘la grace que dieu a fait a l’esglise gallicane, de l’avoir retirée du precipice ou elle estoit’. Popes influenced the mood of the Ligue leadership, but it fell to local priests to win popular support. Of these, the foremost was, of course, the bishop of Paris, Pierre de Gondi, cardinal de Retz. Rozée considered Gondi a disappointment, principally because the bishop had remained loyal to Henri III after Blois. In 1590, when the besieged city knew intense suffering, it was Gondi who called on the Paris Parlement to launch peace talks. Rozée was suspicious; was the cardinal motivated ‘par la compassion qu’il avoit du peuple, ou pour ne laisser perdre une bonne occasion de servir le roy’? The Paris Ligue operated under ‘[un] magistère clérical’; the Ligue knew ‘[une] dépendance spirituelle’ and was ‘assimilée à une construction d’essence religieuse’. Descimon meant that the Catholic church was the very heart of the Ligue, giving life to the movement through a range of means – ‘la prédication, la procession, sans compter le serment, le secret et, naturellement, la confession’. The potential significance of preaching was well
were to attend ordinary church services in the mornings, and to listen to the preaching of the word. Processions might take place only in the afternoons, each parish being allocated just one afternoon per week. It was by no means the end of public enthusiasm. Rozée was well aware of the rapturous welcome given to Caetani in January 1590. The occasion was a good example of what Ann Ramsey has called ‘performativity’ – the shared performance of religious rituals. In so far as the welcomers encompassed several social levels of both laity and clergy it reinforced unity in Ligue ranks. At the same time the presence of dignitaries gave the occasion legitimacy and enhanced the plausibility of the Ligue. Though the Blois assassinations provoked a mood in Paris that left preachers temporarily redundant, the Seize were generally glad of support from clerics. But their organisational structure they borrowed from the laity. Using the term ‘Ligue-confrérie’, Descimon has suggested that the 1585 founders of the Paris Ligue had in mind the devotional lay confraternities that had been engaged in the struggle against Protestantism for a quarter of a century. Thus, ‘[i]l n’est pas de meilleur définition du mouvement des Seize que celle qui l’assimile à une confrérie laïque’. One of four confraternities discussed in an article by Robert Harding, the Confrérie du Saint Nom de Jésus appeared in Paris, and then shortly afterwards in Orléans, in 1590. Its goal was ‘la manutention de la Religion Catholique, Apostolique, & Romaine, sous l’authorité du Roy, des Princes, & magistrats Catholiques’. Claiming to have ‘aucune esperance d’honneur mondain, ou proffit particulier’, the ‘brothers’ pledged themselves to personal holiness. They vowed obedience to the Pope, the bishop and other senior clergy, to Charles X, Mayenne and the leaders of the Sainte Union. They would seek help from the Catholic King and never recognise Henri de Navarre as King of .
‘Victoire, Victoire, Victoire!’ wrote Etienne Pasquier. Equally triumphalist was the poet du Bartas: He Dieu! quel beau soleil va sur nous rayonăt? Quel hymne triumphal va sur nous resonant Dans les temples voutez? quel bruit court par les rues? … [La?] victoire est donc notre, et la iuste rigueur [Du?] ciel est cheute en fin dessus le . But for Rozée, Ivry was ‘une si grande disgrace’. He noted the mood in Paris – ‘les uns esperans, les autres desesperans la conservation de la ville’. He distanced himself from those Ligueurs who had lost hope, ‘qui n’atendoient point de Dieu des miracles pour leur conservation, …[qui] remontroient l’impossibilité de defendre cette ville’. But at the same time he was sceptical of the purely spiritual response emerging from the theologians at the Sorbonne: ‘leurs raisons estoient plus speculations, et vessant [visant?] mieux une sainte contemplation, qu’une solide pratique et experience des afaires’. Rozée seems to have favoured the course of action advocated by the papal legate Caetani: should keep its nerve and await Mayenne’s arrival. Large battles were rare. After the spate of urban defections to the Ligue, 1588-89, royalists had no choice but to engage in siege warfare. How Ligueurs responded under siege mattered enormously to Rozée, and in places his accounts are absorbing, even inspirational. In what circumstances, if any, a Ligue town might surrender, and under what terms a settlement might be deemed acceptable, were critical issues. We will see that for Rozée a settlement might be honourable if it saved soldiers for future combat (and even then, only provided it secured liberty for the practice of Catholicism); but more commonly his sympathies lay with those who fought on in the knowledge that they were part of a union
years, he often quoted proverbs. Here we meet regret. Rozée understood the sadness of (‘l’on croit facillement ce que l’on désire’). He knew about misplaced hopes (‘souvent par un malheur on mesure les conseils par la qualité de ceux qui le donnent’). He was aware that good times might not last (‘un soleil de mars… ne dure gueres’), and, with a certain fatalism, he understood that men could achieve only so much (‘on dit qu’en vain les hommes se fournissent de prudence contre le ciel et d’intelligence contre le Roy’). Through writing, Rozée objectivised his experiences, perhaps mellowed the disappointment, achieved catharsis. It is particularly in the Histoire’s final eighty-or-so pages that we sense the historian’s disillusionment. Post-Brisson, the Seize were demoralised; they found it harder to keep the fire burning. Reading the Rouen siege-narrative we sense Rozée raking through embers, searching for live coals. Parma left France – to die. After a string of imported texts a short paragraph abruptly puts an end to the work. Of course, all had not been in vain. The sacredness of Paris had been preserved against massive odds, a Protestant succession had been avoided and there were countless tales of individual Ligueurs’ courage and integrity. But heresy had not been expunged, and the Ligue, rent by division, had been ‘betrayed’ by its leader, and then maligned by royalist historians. Perhaps Rozée yearned for the short years during which, in fellowship with others, he had joined a noble cause. In the 1620s, like a man preparing for death, Rozée was coming to terms with his past and putting his affairs in order. The task was hampered – or perhaps facilitated – by the inscrutability of his God. ‘O que dieu est reculé loin de nous,’ he lamented; and, much later, ‘Dieu dispose par un ordre qui nous est inconnu les moyens par lesquels il veut puis après