Amboise conspiracy

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Execution of the Amboise conspirators on an engraving by Frans Hogenberg

The Amboise conspiracy was a plot in the run-up to the looming religious wars between Protestant Huguenots and French Catholics, which plunged France into a civil war lasting several decades from 1562 onwards. Dissatisfied nobles and Protestants wanted to try in 1560 to overthrow the two influential royal advisers from the House of Guise and to usurp the person of King Francis II , in order to then appoint Louis de Bourbon-Condé as governor- general of the crown on the estates- general .

prehistory

After the death of Henry II , the crown of France passed to his only 15-year-old son Franz II. The affairs of government of this young and sickly monarch were carried out by the two uncles of his wife Maria Stuart , François de Lorraine and his brother, Cardinal Charles de Lorraine. Guise , run.

Even under Henry II, the French crown followed a strict and relentless policy to ensure the predominance of the Catholic faith in France. This policy was now continued by the Catholic Guisen. They ruled with a hard hand and were ruthless against the Reformed. However, through their authoritarian behavior and the resulting legal enactments, the regents created numerous enemies not only among the French Protestants, but also in aristocratic circles.

Franz's mother, Catherine de Medici , had appointed François de Lorraine as governor-general of the kingdom and thus offended Antoine de Bourbon , King of Navarre , and his younger brother Louis I de Bourbon, because traditionally it was the Princes of the Blood who were responsible for To exercise the reign in France. To make matters worse, the French aristocrats considered the Guisen to be “foreigners” because their family came from Lorraine .

January to March 1560

So it happened that Huguenots, who fought for more religious concessions, and moderate, aristocratic Catholics, who were dissatisfied with the government of the Guise brothers, united. They planned to take the young king under their control on March 6 or 10, 1560 at Blois Castle and submit a petition of the Faith to him. Should he reject this decree of tolerance, the conspirators wanted to overthrow the two Guises and have Louis I de Bourbon, one of their leaders, appointed governor-general by the Estates-General. However, the plans of the conspiracy found not only supporters among the followers of the Reformed faith. Antoine de Bourbon was just as unwilling to participate in the plot as did Admiral Gaspard II. De Coligny , who prevented the Protestant nobles of Normandy from joining the conspiracy. When John Calvin was informed of the plans, he distanced himself from them. Especially its main organizer, Godefroy de Barry, Seigneur de La Renaudie, a nobleman from the Périgord , was repugnant to Calvin. About the military leader, who had previously been sentenced to prison for counterfeiting, he said: "I dislike the matter [the conspiracy], but I hate the person of La Renaudie even more." ("Si le fait [la conjuration] me deplaisait, la personne de La Renaudie m'en dégoûtait encore plus. ")

The Protestant La Renaudie hated the two Guises because he held them responsible for the death of his brother-in-law, Gaspard de Heu, sieur de Buy, in September 1558. In January 1560 he assembled an armed force of Reformed people and moved with them to Tours . From there it should go to the actual destination in March, to Blois, the residence of the court. Doctors had advised the ailing king because of his poor health to spend the winter on the Loire.

A first meeting of the leaders of the conspiracy took place on February 1, 1560 in Nantes . There they agreed on the measures that would follow if they had succeeded in taking control of the king. In February, La Renaudie gathered his troops in Mérindol . Among them were also hired mercenaries who - if the later Guisen propaganda is to be believed - had been paid by the English queen. However, there is no evidence that Elizabeth I , her ambassador Sir Nicholas Throckmorton or his secretary Henry Killingrew had anything to do with the Amboise conspiracy.

The two Guise brothers had heard of a possible conspiracy as early as February 1, 1560, but at first they did not take the rumors seriously. Nevertheless, they arranged for King Francis II to move on to the much better fortified Amboise Castle with his court on February 5th . Since the 12th of the same month, the Guisen then had certainty. The Paris lawyer Pierre des Avenelles, an acquaintance of La Renaudie, had informed her personally of the planned plot. Amboise was then placed under siege, assistance from royal troops requested and scouts sent into the surrounding forests.

The Huguenot conspirators are arrested in the vicinity of Amboise, engraving by Frans Hogenberg

The move of the court forced the conspirators to postpone their plan to March 17th in order to move their troops to the more distant Amboise. Around 200 people attacked the city early in the morning, but the city was prepared for an attack and could easily repel the attackers. The conspirators retreated into the woods around the city, but were wiped out by the summoned royal troops. In the following three days, scattered groups of Reformed people and the king's men engaged in numerous skirmishes in the surrounding area, in which the majority of the Huguenots were killed. The few prisoners were taken to the castle, where they were awaiting execution. La Renaudie also died during these fighting. He was killed by a bullet from an arquebus near Châteaurenault . His body was brought to Amboise in triumphal procession and hung in the market square for a day. He was then quartered and beheaded, the head displayed on the Loire bridge and the four parts nailed to different gates of the city.

The first conspirators were picked up and arrested on March 10, 1560 in the vicinity of Amboise. Further arrests followed up to and including March 16. But after the attack by the conspirators on March 17th, the previous prisoners were executed without much reading. The Guisen have granted no mercy since that attack. Low-ranking conspirators were drowned in the Loire, but most of them were hanged in the town's market square or on the battlements of the castle plateau. For the execution of the 52 highest-ranking agitators who were supposed to die by an executioner's sword, a grandstand was even set up in the castle courtyard. However, there is no evidence to support the claim that Catherine de Medici displayed numerous hanged persons on the balcony of the castle as a deterrent; it was merely disseminated by non-contemporary reports.

aftermath

Those executed were stylized as martyrs by the Protestant side. Although only about 100 death sentences were carried out after March 17, the Huguenot propaganda painted the picture of maddened murder. The Guise brothers meanwhile let it be spread that the other side wanted to murder the king. The court left the dead-strewn city and moved on to Chenonceau Castle .

The two Bourbon brothers, to whom the Guisen could not prove active participation in the conspiracy, continued to be closely watched by them in the following years, because they wanted to bring down their bitterest opponents for good. They were finally arrested on flimsy grounds and Louis I de Bourbon was sentenced to death. Then, however, Francis II died in December 1560, and Catherine de Medici assumed the reign of her second son, Charles IX. , even in the hand. In order to weaken the Guisen party, the two formerly most powerful men of the French kingdom were removed from their offices, the two princes of the blood were released from prison and Antoine de Bourbon was appointed governor-general of the crown.

literature

  • Victor Boreau: La Renaudie ou La Conjuration d'Amboise. Chroniques de 1560 . LF Hivert, Paris 1834 ( volume 1 online , volume 2 online ).
  • Elizabeth AR Brown: La Renaudie se venge. L'autre face de la conjuration d'Amboise . In: Yves-Marie Bercé (Ed.): Complots et conjurations dans l'Europe modern . École française de Rome, Rome 1996, ISBN 2-7283-0362-2 , pp. 451-474.
  • Michel de Castelnau: Mémoires de Michel de Castelnau . In: Joseph François Michaud, Jean Joseph François Poujoulat: Nouvelle collection des mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de France: depuis le XIIIe siècle jusqu'à la fin du XVIIIe. Volume 9. L'Editeur du commentaire analytique du code civil, Paris 1838, pp. 407-554 (here especially pp. 414-420) ( online ).
  • Robert Jean Knecht: The Rise and Fall of Renaissance France: 1483-1610 . 2nd Edition. Blackwell, Oxford et al. 2001, ISBN 0-631-22729-6 , pp. 280-285 ( online ).
  • Louis-Raymond Lefèvre: Les Français pendant les guerres de religion. Le Tumulte d'Amboise . Gallimard, Paris 1949.
  • Henri Naef: La conjuration d'Amboise et Genève . Jullien, Geneva 1922.
  • Charles-Hippolyte Paillard: Additions critiques à l'histoire de la conjuration d'Amboise . In: Revue historique . No. 14, 1880, pp. 61-108 ( online ).
  • Pierre Rain: Les chroniques des châteaux de la Loire . Pierre Roger et Cie, Paris 1921, pp. 91-112 ( online ).
  • Lucien Romier: La Conjuration d'Amboise. L'aurore sanglante de la liberté de conscience, le règne et la mort de François II . Perrin et Cie, Paris 1923.
  • James Westfall Thompson: The Wars of Religion in France 1559 to 1576. The Huguenots, Catherine de Medici and Philip II . Reprint of the 1959 edition. Kessinger Publishing, Whitefish MT 2005, ISBN 1-4179-7435-4 , pp. 1-40 ( online ).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ H. Paillard: Additions critiques à l'histoire de la conjuration d'Amboise , p. 67.
  2. ↑ In some publications he is also called Georges or Jean.
  3. ↑ a b renaissance-amboise.com ( Memento from January 6, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
  4. ↑ JW Thompson: The Wars of Religion in France 1559 to 1576 , p. 30.
  5. ↑ See Kenneth Bruce McFarlane: England in the Fifteenth Century: Collected Essays . Hambledon, London 1981, ISBN 0-907628-01-X , pp. 97-112.
  6. ^ H. Paillard: Additions critiques à l'histoire de la conjuration d'Amboise , p. 66.
  7. ^ H. Paillard: Additions critiques à l'histoire de la conjuration d'Amboise , p. 83.
  8. ^ P. Rain: Les chroniques des châteaux de la Loire , p. 106.
  9. ↑ Bernard Champigneulle: Loire castles . 6th edition. Prestel, Munich 1980, ISBN 3-7913-0276-0 , p. 165.