Climax of the Collaborative Policy, 1548-1550

The new king was very different in temperament and in habits from le roi chevalier . Less active in the physical sense, Henri II tended to stay near the capital, usually at Fontainebleau, instead of moving from one château to another for good hunting; less changeable in his affections, he remained faithful to one mistress, many years his senior, and allowed her to interfere in all aspects of royal policy, instead of playing his favorites (all definitely his creatures) off against one another. The same contrast can be seen in their approaches to the religious issue: where François had favored some accused and treated others with ruthless severity, Henri II was consistent in his opposition to unorthodoxy of any kind, in any degree. He replaced his father's advisers with his own, and they all stood at the conservative end of the spectrum. Constable Anne de Montmorency, a "bluff soldier" according to all who knew him, was an old-fashioned traditional Catholic, while twenty-two-year-old Charles, cardinal de Lorraine, was a highly sophisticated politician, a master of both polemics and strategy. At the coronation, he emphasized the primacy of the king's religious obligation, "to exterminate all those whom the Church designates as given to error." Lorraine asked God "to make the king's sword the terror of all the enemies of the Church." Henri II embraced this goal. Edicts against blasphemers were implemented with greater physical violence; press censorship was tightened. Between April and November 1547, Parlement passed seventy arrêts against heresy in the Loire valley, the greatest single number in Blois, where Antoine Le Coq was carrying out an inquisitorial commission with exceptional zeal. Henri II's response to a delegation of Parlement that waited on him for instructions, on December 3, 1547, as reported by conseiller

Robert Bonete was, "the king charges messieurs of the court to administer good justice, and chiefly to act in the matter of the Lutherans."^[15]

The Sorbonne articles, the suppression of the Vaudois, the fervor of the parlementaire commissaires , the whole-hearted dedication of the new administration—all contributed to a climate of opinion dominated by fear; in the "infested" areas, suspects multiplied. Moreover, there were now more visible targets, organized groups that had in fact withdrawn from the Roman church to form new congregations to worship in a different way. The phrase "French Reformed Churches" in midcentury is shorthand that covers congregations in various stages of development. Calvin distinguished between églises plantées and églises dressées . Only the latter were fully constituted, though often having to share the services of a pastor with others; églises plantées were emerging groups, usually self-generated, that would appeal to Geneva to send them a pastor. There were always more congregations than pastors. Calvin tended to give priority to calls from great nobles for chaplains—consistent with his belief that the best chance for the reform in France lay in the conversion of the top echelons of the social order. The reformed congregations were small and apt to be clandestine, to meet at night in open fields. The lay leaders and pastors needed pseudonyms and were frequently in flight.^[16]

There were poles of religious opinion in France in the reign of Henri II, ultra-Catholics at one extreme and Calvinists at the other, but it would be inaccurate to describe the country as polarized thereby. The great majority of French believers was Catholic, sufficiently alarmed by the "menace of heresy" to go along with the right-wing argument that harsh measures were necessary to save the church, and the state. And as is usually the case, the majority was disorganized. In two respects the Parlement of Paris did not reflect the country in this period; there were no declared Protestants in the court, and the ultra-Catholics were much more highly organized than in the general population. The court accurately reflected the country in one respect, however; the traditionalist majority of both was leaderless.