Popular Mobilization and the Coming of Civil War

In the first half of the sixteenth century the cumulative effect of the many and various attempts to suppress evangelical dissent in France and the Low Countries was the criminalization of not only a wide range of religious beliefs but also a variety of fairly commonplace behaviors. Indeed, in France by the 1550s heretical belief could legally be inferred from the behavior of the subject being investigated. This might include interpreting Scripture without official sanction, attending secret meetings of all kinds, attacking sacred images, selling and distributing forbidden books, even speaking “words contrary to the Catholic faith and the Christian religion.” Individuals were also, not surprisingly, forbidden to associate with the French exile community in Geneva, and those who were found to possess books or letters from Geneva were subject to arrest as “heretics and disturbers of the public peace and tranquility” (Greengrass 1987: 34; see also Sutherland 1980). In short, virtually any outward sign of affinity or association with evangelical ideas in general and with Geneva in particular was equated with public unrest and even sedition, which was, of course, punishable by death (cf. Duke 1990: 73–74).

In this climate of heightened fear and suspicion, becoming a member of an underground church or even attending an evangelical worship service must be considered a deliberate act of defiance of, if not quite outright rebellion against, both civil and ecclesiastical authority. But this is precisely what thousands of ordinary French and Netherlandic subjects did during the “wonderyears” of the 1560s. Though there were only a handful of churches represented at the clandestine Synod of Paris in 1559, evangelical preachers were attracting increasingly large numbers of enthusiastic followers, some of whom defied authorities by openly chanting psalms in the evangelical fashion or holding public worship services (prêches) outside the towns. By March 1562 one of the most prominent patrons of the French evangelical movement, Admiral de Coligny, tried to assemble a list of more than two thousand churches then extant. Even a much more conservative estimate of the number of organized congregations (see Garrisson 1980) yields an estimate of the adult Protestant population in the neighborhood of two million or perhaps 10 percent of the total population of France (Greengrass 1987: chap. 6; see also Benedict 1981: appendix 1).

Likewise, in the Low Countries there was an explosion of openly defiant evangelical activity. The first Calvinist church was formally organized at Antwerp in 1555, and before the decade was out there were churches in all the major towns of Flanders; in 1561 in the Walloon towns of Valenciennes and Tournai psalm-singing crowds of evangelicals even demonstrated publicly in the streets (Duke 1990; Steen 1985; cf. Le Barre 1989). Even more impressively, however, beginning in May 1566 evangelicals began to hold open-air services (so-called hagepreken, or hedgepreaching) just outside the walls of the cities; at first these bold demonstrations of popular support drew modest crowds, but by July they had swelled in some places to more than twenty thousand.^[19] Then, in August, there began the wave of iconoclastic attacks, described above, that spread from Flanders all the way to Groningen, permanently damaging hundreds of churches as well as the relative calm that had prevailed under the cloak of official repression.

How are we to understand these sudden demonstrations of evangelical strength in both France and the Low Countries? Though the religious appeal of evangelical theology in general and of Calvinism in particular may be considered to have remained relatively constant, the perceived opportunities for individual religious choice and for open dissent had changed so dramatically as to set off what may usefully be considered a cycle of religious protest analogous to that which had begun in Germany in the early 1520s (see chap. 2). In the first instance, the sweeping claims that both the Valois and Habsburg regimes made for an unprecedented degree of control over religious ritual and belief belied the obvious limits of royal/princely repression, even if that was significantly more potent than imperial control in Germany. Despite evidence of the pervasive recourse to exemplary justice, indeed, the rulers of these relatively novel composite states were necessarily dependent on a variety of more or less independent institutions, with variously pliant personnel, to implement their repressive policies. In the Netherlands, for example, municipal governments insisted on the primacy of their own jurisdictions in the face of a threatened Spanish-style Inquisition, but they remained reluctant to persecute even small cultural minorities within the very populations on whose immediate goodwill the viability of their rule depended. Likewise, the growing attraction of the high French nobility to Calvinist ideas clearly compromised the repressive capacity of the Valois regime in those places where religiously suspect nobles, by virtue of their positions of local and regional authority, were the filter through which royal policy necessarily passed. This was especially true in those regions with functioning provincial estates, the pays d’etat, which were clustered especially in the south and west of France.^[20] Thus it was clear that at the peripheries of these extensive and variegated domains—especially in the north of the Low Countries and the south of France—the reach of princely pretensions to control religious practice and belief far exceeded their effective grasp.

Closely related to these structural constraints on royal action, another factor that appeared more immediately to open significant new opportunities for religious experimentation and choice, if not general reform, was the availability to the clandestine religious movements of politically influential allies. In some places in the north and south significant numbers of both urban notables and rural nobles were attracted to the new evangelical spirituality as well as to Calvin’s emphasis on lay religious leadership, but even where that was not so obviously the case, any attempt by the central administration to perform judicial and ecclesiastical end runs around locally and regionally powerful elites might easily invoke a familiar sort of resistance in the name of established privilege and traditional rights. For Brabant and Flanders, in the heart of the Habsburg domain, Wim Blockmans (1988) has described a “Great Tradition” of revolt that helped to establish both the political and the ideological foundations of the Dutch Revolt. In this view the many important urban centers of the Low Countries not only anchored an ongoing resistance to Burgundian/Habsburg fiscal and political ambitions but also actively developed institutionalized, practical alternatives to monarchical centralization in the Low Countries. More recently, Marc Boone and Maarten Prak (1995) have argued that this Great Tradition of urban revolt was complemented by an equally long-standing and impressive “Little Tradition” of internal opposition to the domination of powerful and wealthy oligarchs in both town and countryside. Indeed, from the Flemish Peasants’ Revolt of the early fourteenth century (1323–1328)^[21] to the tragic revolt of Ghent against Charles V in 1540,^[22] the complementary traditions of elite and popular revolt had revealed myriad possible alliances against an unwanted consolidation of central authority or administration. As embedded in both historical memory and constitutional reality, then, the multiple histories of political insurrection or revolt afforded the new evangelical communities with a repertoire of fairly familiar collective actions that might complement the organization of independent churches and some very powerful allies, if not always spiritual brothers, when the long-standing traditions of local autonomy and self-government were at stake.

Though these urban-centered models of the “Great” and “Little” traditions of revolt are clearly rooted in the most urbanized provinces of the Low Countries, they may still be useful in thinking about the more rural provinces of the Low Countries and the kingdom of France more generally.^[23] Rural insurrections are, not surprisingly, more clearly the dominant theme of French history from the fourteenth-century Jacquerie onward, but it is clear from Henry Heller’s (1991) survey that French history, too, betrayed elements of multiple traditions of revolt—of internal division and conflict within communities as well as collective resistance to outside control. Heller presents an impressively diverse collection of tax protests, food riots, and peasant insurrections with peaks of activity in the 1520s and 1540s (ibid., 42–44 table), but he notes, in addition, the appearance in the mid-1540s of religious issues amid the political agitation, especially in the cities. The more general point may be that, in both France and the Low Countries, corporate communities—whether rural communes or chartered towns—could (and frequently did) serve as an arena for local political contention as well as the bedrock for a more generalized opposition to the intrusion of unwanted outside authority (cf. Blickle 1986).

In the short term, however, the precipitant for this new cycle of religious protest was neither the structural limits of dynastic state making nor the long tradition of opposition to it; rather, it appears to have been a genuine uncertainty about the government’s commitment to the policy of repression. Despite the announced intentions of Philip II and Henry II to redouble their efforts to suppress heresy after the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559, a constellation of forces pushed central authorities in precisely the opposite direction in both France and the Low Countries. Following the untimely death of Henry II, the enfeebled government of Francis II (1559–1560) briefly renewed the government’s long-standing commitment to enforcing religious uniformity, but under the regency of Catherine of Medici during the minority of Charles IX (1560–1563), government policy moved decisively in the direction of moderation and compromise. By the Edict of Amboise (March 1560), the government effectively admitted that the persecution of Protestants had become unenforceable. Then after the regent failed, amid increasing tumult and political pressure, to achieve a theological compromise between Catholics and Protestants in the famous Colloquy at Poissy (September 1561), the Edict of St. Germain (January 1562) granted a limited toleration of evangelical worship (see Christin 1995, 1997). It was precisely in this context that an increasingly organized religious protest movement was emboldened not only to petition formally for official sanction but also to demonstrate its popular strength more openly and defiantly on the local level.

Likewise, following Philip II’s departure from the Netherlands to Spain in 1559, although the government of Margaret of Parma was formally committed to his policies of repression, a series of unforeseen challenges brought that policy into serious question. In particular, broad elite opposition after 1561 to a plan to reform the primitive ecclesiastical structure of the region—reforms that undermined or threatened a broad range of local and regional officials in favor of a starkly centralized ecclesiastical regime—resulted in the dismissal in 1564 of Cardinal Granvelle, one of Philip’s most trusted advisers in Brussels. Inasmuch as many local officials were refusing to enforce the government’s heresy laws against otherwise law-abiding subjects, several high-ranking noblemen strongly urged revision of the heresy legislation in favor of a more tolerant policy. When Philip steadfastly refused all compromise, however, some four hundred lesser noblemen, who were derisively called “Beggars,” pledged to unite in opposition to the Inquisition, and in the spring of 1566 Margaret secretly agreed to moderate temporarily the enforcement of the heresy laws (Parker 1985; Van Nierop 1991).^[24] It was thus amid exaggerated reports of Margaret’s “concessions” that the enormous potential for a popular evangelical movement burst into full view.

What began in the 1560s in both France and the Low Countries, then, was a new, generalized cycle of religious protest that revealed both the weaknesses of government repression and the availability to popular religious dissenters of influential political allies. In this heady atmosphere, news of (successful) popular demonstrations traveled quickly and invited imitation elsewhere. For example, news of prêches in northern France emboldened evangelicals to do the same (the so-called hedgepreaching) in the southern Low Countries; notorious incidents of iconoclasm also begat imitation across a broad terrain. For a time, indeed, it seemed to Catholics and Protestants alike as if the established religious regime might be destroyed along with the harshest elements of dynastic political consolidation. To the extent that this seemed to be the fulfillment of apocalyptic hopes and visions nurtured in the darkest days of repression—the answer to fervent prayer—it helped to underwrite ever bolder evangelical action in a variety of contexts. Yet to the extent that it awakened the worst fears of those dedicated to, if not personally invested in, the ecclesiastical establishment, it sparked a vigorous countermobilization in defense of the old regime. And very quickly in both north and south, what began as a spectacular series of relatively independent local mobilizations was overshadowed by the formation of political and religious alliances and the subsequent explosion of armed conflict on a much broader scale.

In France the first round of civil war followed quickly on the first public recognition of the Protestant movement. A massacre in March 1562 of evangelical worshipers at Vassy by the duc de Guise precipitated a massive military mobilization by the Huguenot leadership, and by summer civil war had begun in earnest. Indeed, the conspiracies and strategies of “national” leaders—that is, of high-ranking nobles or influential notables who could deploy military resources on a grand scale and who claimed to speak for far-flung alliances on one side or the other—are almost necessarily the principal mileposts for any coherent account of the long decades of conflict that ensued.^[25] Likewise, in the Low Countries the massive hedgepreaching and iconoclasm of 1566 quickly gave way to an equally massive military repression under the duke of Alva in 1567 and the first military countermobilization by the rebels—the so-called Beggars—in 1568. These military conflicts were at first closely linked, and in retrospect, 1572 can be seen as a significant turning point in both cases: in France, the disastrous Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre of Huguenots in Paris signaled the stagnation and eventual decline of the Huguenot party;^[26] in the Low Countries, by contrast, the Beggars achieved their first military success in the seizure of the small city of Den Briel in southern Holland.^[27] In both cases the rebels began after 1572 to take concrete steps toward the creation of independent, revolutionary governments, but in the long run these complex religious/political/military conflicts gradually separated into relatively discrete “national” histories, though outside intervention remained an important element in both the French civil wars and the Dutch Revolt.^[28]