Huguenots and the French Reformation

in this lecture we're looking at French Calvinism or the French Reformed movement and the highs and the lows and the persecutions and the wars that occurred there throughout the sixteenth century and on into the 17th century and one of the things we have to again note is that the reform movement was you might say promiscuous it always reached out it always attempted to ingratiate itself with members of Protestant churches from other countries you see this and people like Calvin and Bollinger Beza and others who are always really writing to those throughout Europe who might be partners with them for their faith at times it is a bit of an apologetics they're trying to make sure that people move more in the reformed direction say on the sacraments then towards the Lutheran direction but it's mostly about making friends and colleagues and allies because in part the Swiss are more isolated than the Lutheran Movement and just their natural bent is to reach out to others well one of the first groups that really begins to take on a new sort of Verve and interest with the Reformed movement or these French Reformed people or French Calvinists as they're sometimes called now these folks go by another name and in fact the name we're going to use throughout this lecture is probably preferred because when you say French Calvinism it makes it sound as if the French folks are entirely derived or dependent upon Calvin's thinking and that's to simply not true the name that is often used for these folks is the Hyuga nose or if you want to anglicize it you can call them the Huguenots there really is no distinction however you want to pronounce it go right ahead I'm gonna call them the Hyuga nose because I have a teachers voice in my head who taught me this word when he was lecturing on it long ago and so I always say Hugo no but plenty of people in particularly the english-speaking world say she would not who are these folks well these are by and large a group of folks who depending on the decade or a ragtag group of minority figures who are reformed and Protestant but who for whatever reason are unable to flee to areas that are overwhelmingly Protestant and so they end up staying in a Catholic country in France but other points throughout the sixteenth century they actually become a pretty significant percentage of the population particularly in urban centres places like Paris estimates range from two to two and a half million at its heyday in the 1560s which would make the Hyuga nose roughly 1/8 to one-tenth of the population now that might sound like small numbers small beans but in actuality when you look at this from just a cultural or a sociological standpoint to have one in 10 be devoutly or at least by name part of the Protestant Reformed movement is frankly significant a modern comparison is that some estimates about the modern Chinese church in particularly the underground church is that they have reached a point where they are roughly one out of 10 now modern numbers of course harder to dictate but historical ones are also hard but you should know that one out of 10 is from the Protestant perspective a significant number we're talking about millions of Protestants throughout France this also explains why the Catholic faith was so concerned about the Hyuga knows it's not that they are few and far between and that they just simply ethnically cleanse the human eyes from their midst there is and in particular by the 1560s a real significant concern amongst the Catholic majority that the Hyuga knows we're going to take over and this is particularly the case whenever the human nose began to infiltrate the noble ranks and the noble houses now one myth to go out and get rid of if you've ever heard this a lot of the propaganda about the Hyuga knows a lot of the foundation you might say for the persecution of them rested in large part on this claim by Catholic but the Hyuga knows were entirely militant something like guerrilla warriors in their midst always lurking about trying to overthrow the government as will say here this lecture of course there is a sense in which the human knows our militarized they actually go to war times they participate in battles they have blood on their hands at times as much as the Catholics have blood on their hands but we need to be careful not to see the human owes as a sort of bristling armed to the teeth group who are ready to overthrow and murder everybody in sight a lot of that impression again is driven by the propaganda against them which is never a sure whenever you're attempting to understand a populace what what's the backstory what is the origin of a lot of this fight well in the life of Calvin we see a bit of a microcosm as to what is going on in France there were all throughout France from even before the Reformation a real robust humanist movement that at times sparked and inspired folks to become Protestant now this is more at the elite level meaning at the academic level or at the level of the leaders of society we have to have a fair amount of Education frankly to be a humanist this is not the average layperson we're talking about here but the microcosm for what Calvin went through is he a number of others during his education had a great deal of freedom to explore and to delve into all kinds of humanist works and they were even free at least in terms of Noah looking over the shoulder to read Luther whenever they came across his works you can contrast that with Henry the eighth's England and it's banning of books and its imposition of Catholicism and it's not allowing any of these texts or ideas to come into their country if they could stop it the French King at the time in the early days Francis the first Saul himself as a humanist King he saw himself as a thoughtful reasonable you might say moderate though that word is used and abused today to mean somebody doesn't care about anything but Frances is not this draconian really sort of tyrannical Catholic for a number of years up until the 1530s know that but his sister Marguerite of Navarre is one of the most important Aven Jellicle x' in the entirety of france his own sister in other words has though covertly and she never leaves the Catholic Church officially she's right there on the edge though but she actually supports in lobbies for Protestants to not be persecuted under her brother's regime well a lot of this again is driving and inspiring folks to come right up to the line of Protestantism by and large again not in mass numbers but there are certainly a wide group of folks that are doing this and this really speaks to something about the Reformation that we can acknowledge which is whenever the clergy and whenever those in power whatever the educated groups begin to really get affected by something whenever they say become more Protestant or lean that way you immediately see or you tend to see at least a trickling down of this into the laity this is not an age in general of widespread cynicism amongst a lady about whether or not they're supposed to follow their clergies ideas when they're preaching often folks would listen to their pastors and would go along with them at the very least you have Protestants or people leaning that way beginning to instill or plant seeds might say in favor of at least a trajectory towards Protestantism well all this comes to a head in 1534 in something called the affair of the placards this is a famous moment this is actually one of the main instigating moments that drives Calvin from France for the remainder of his life down to Switzerland there were a number of folks who got a bit punchy about their Protestantism in Paris and on one night in 1534 they printed off and they posted a number of placards all throughout the city that mocked the mass and in part spoke ill of some of the veneration of the Virgin Mary that's bad enough doing these kinds of covert things against the Kings wishes or against the mayor of the city the worst part of it though is someone at some point snuck in and put one on the Kings bedchamber door now that's treasonous frankly and it might not feel like so we're thinking it's just a poster you know it's just a piece of paper why would this be treason well just imagine someone sneaking into the White House in the middle of night and posting some anti-american propaganda onto the door of the White House bedroom chamber as the president and his wife were in there sleeping essentially what it is saying is we differ with you you Catholics and hey by the way we can get to you while you're sleeping with this kind of scary treasonous sense of a strongly worded phrase that has some ominous undertones to it as a result Francis turns on those who are evangelical there was a burning of a number of known evangelicals there in Paris just outside of Notre Dom and it goes back and forth for a while a number flee heading down to places like Switzerland and other places a number of them conform and hide their faith and go into hiding well again over time the Hyuga knows as they come to be known as develop and evolve until the point where they are really beginning to rise up the ranks and become really an established group not established in the sense of being an institution but established in the sense of being so large and so unwieldy that the Catholic Church and the nobility have to take note now to understand what's about to happen from roughly 1560 on you have to realize that there are three houses and three names that we're gonna have to get familiar with here what we have here is we have a ruling family the Valois family and the Valois family again is the lineage from whom the monarchy comes from so Francis the first is part of the Valois family now the ruling family always always always in the kingdom will have convictions but rarely will be the bludgeoning tool that tries to root out all kinds of heresies and problems and kill the populace ruling families and Kings often care more about taxes stability and order than they do about righteous vengeance on all their subjects so you have to see the Valois in part as leaning Catholic very strongly Catholic actually but they are going to really be unwilling at least for a period of time to allow or to open the floodgates for other Catholic noble houses or groups to really go after the Hyuga knows so at times when you see the Valois kind of pumping the brakes you have to say okay they're still Catholic they're still on the side of those who are Catholic but they're trying to maintain order and peace without bloodshed at least in general though as we'll see by the end they let that go the two other families are the ghee and the Bourbons the ghee household is again a noble house not the ruling family at this point they have a claim to the throne if you were to go back in time and ask any of the ghee should they be on the throne they would be unanimous and saying yes but they don't have the throne at this point they are part of the nobility though the ghee or hardline Catholic you might say not kneel Catholic or excessively Catholic in terms of their doctrine but their hardline in the sense that they want to truck no nonsense with these evangelical who are in their midst they want them either executed purged or removed the other group is the Bourbons the Bourbon family the bourbon line and there are others as well I'm just giving you one major one here are those who become really influenced and taken over you might say by this reformed Protestantism so as we go through this I'm going to stop at every point whenever I can if you see someone who's Valois or ruling family if it's the Queen Mother if it's the king or somebody you're talking about a Valois if you see someone who is Catholic attacking human owes who's not part of the ruling house they're going to be gay and often the name gay will be in their name but if you see the Bourbons you can assume these are Protestants now one little caveat the story here of the Hyuga notes is not simply a matter of dynastic squabbles or fights the Hyuga notes are powerful because they have reached the laity there are widespread numbers of just lay folk and your common everyday workhorse workmen pastors who are simply attempting to Shepherd the flock and feed them however the fate of the Hyuga nose is going to rest on this political tussling back and forth a lot of the reason why the human nose eventually have to flee into exile is because in a lot of ways the guy managed to convince the Valois to let them go after these huge nose in 1560 there was something called the M laws conspiracy and the emboss conspiracy was in part something of a theological move as well as a political move and this is done by the Bourbons and the idea here is they want to really take ownership lay their hands upon the boy King who had just come to the throne what happened was the King dies in a freak accident is out jousting one day and a lance actually shatters and it Pierce's his eye boom he falls over dead he was still on the steel of his youth he had a number of years left sort of illness or some other freak accident but what this did is it left a bit of a power vacuum because the King was just a boy at this point and as a result Mary Queen of Scots and after her catherine de medici really take a heavy hand in terms of running the kingdom we saw something like this of course in England with Edward the six boys were not allowed to be Kings despite the fairy tales of boy Kings throughout all of medieval history well this is again going to create a power vacuum and really those who control the boy King and who can instill in him a sense of their perspective will have the upper hand whenever he reaches his majority you actually see this kind of action a lot throughout history again we saw with Edward his tutors instilled in him Protestantism until the day he died he was increasingly fervent about being a Protestant the same by the way will happen we'll see when we get to James the first of England King James the one who gave us the King James Bible his mother and father were Catholic his mother was Mary Queen of Scots and a controversy erupted when she killed her husband and ran off with her lover and so they expelled her and then they raised James just a baby to be a Protestant and lo and behold for the rest of his life he was well the Amboise conspiracy was by the Bourbons by the more Calvinistic leaning folks - you might say take control the Kings person and to take control of all kinds of things related to his education is upbringing it's something like a kidnapping that is in play here though it's not a kidnapping per se rather it's an attempt to insinuate themselves within the life of this boy well that move there in the 1560s is what sparks so much of the violence and the persecution and the civil wars thereafter and it is for this reason that at times again the caricature of the Hyuga knows as militant and is hostile has a certain grain of truth to it because they are they are attempting to win the throne or at least to win the influence of the throne well there are attempts initially to try to calm things down between Catholics and Protestants there in France there's something there in the 1560s right after the Amboise conspiracy known as the colloquy of Poissy and in this colloquy you see a number of Protestants and Catholics come together mostly theologians men like Pisa the successor to Calvin as well as a number of others come together in the attempt to come to some grounding where they might stand as at least equals within the country now it fails there is no way to bring these two sides together in fact most ecumenical councils during the 16th century come to very little conclusion on anything and those that do the conclusions made are eventually rejected by both sides but it's an honest attempt to calm the passions down well in 1562 and from that point on the key family begins to get a lot more aggressive there is a Duke from the ghee family the second Duke actually of the ghee household named Francis now I'm sorry here part of the problem in French history is just about everyone is named Francis or onry or something like this but in this case again it's Francis the 2nd Duke of G so there's that name the key family the hardline Catholics and Francis is on tour throughout southern France and it comes across the city of Si and he notices that there are a number of Hugo knows a number since worshiping while he is there and what Francis decides is he's going to execute and murder them now these are honest pastors and lay folks any murders and slaughters some say high double digits somewhere around 80 other estimates go as high as 200 folks but it's a staggeringly large number of unarmed lay folks that are killed and roughly a hundred or wounded there at the massacre of Vassy so here we are standing Terra Firma in 1563 and we've had aggression from both sides you might say from this point on it only spirals downward back and forth back and forth you have a series of frankly eight unique discrete civil wars that happen now will usually love all these decades into one large meta bracket that we call the French Wars of Religion and the French Wars religion are part of the wider Wars of Religion which we've talked about before but when you get down to it there are really a lot of skirmishes I often use the analogy this is a bit like a mafia war if one clan lacking one of the other side and then well you got to have vengeance so they come back and whack somebody on their side and it only gets worse and worse well in 1563 again immediately after a lot of these hostilities are getting pretty bad you have an edict the Edict of Amboise 1563 which attempts to call a ceasefire but it doesn't call for the laying down of arms in fact people have at times called this an armed peace which as history has shown us armed peace is really not much of a peace at all and it's only just sort of a prelude to another war or another skirmish at least on and on and on it goes though and I'm not going to give you all the dirty details but it all comes to a head when you get to 1570 and you have a Protestant who was at the core or at the heart of power for France a man by the name of Admiral Gaspard de Collini Collini is as the title indicates he's Admiral he is a high-ranking member of the military forces for France well Gaspard begins to form a relationship with Charles the ninth as he has grown older he becomes really a father figure and Collini begins to in gray she ate himself and become friendly with Charles and this begins to make again the catholics very uncomfortable but colonies influence is pretty significant and the next step is there is proposed and approved a marriage between the princess margaret the sister of charles the ninth with Henry of Navarre now that name Navarre should again ring a bell because margarita Navarre the sister to Francis the first back in the 1520's and 30s who herself was have angelical this is where Henry comes from well Henry is a Protestant cenotes Protestant nobleman marrying into the actual Valois family marrying the princess and given the Charles the ninth was still relatively young there was no indication no guarantee that he wouldn't either be tossed aside maybe killed covertly or should he die of natural causes there was at least some indication some plausibility at least that you have a Protestant who is now in the Valois family and he could maybe reach the throne as a result the geese eyed the hardline Catholics make a pitch to the Queen Mother Catherine de Medici asking her if they might both ruin this wedding and take out Collini in the same stroke well faithfully Catherine de Medici agrees she takes away the blocks that are stopping the ghee from doing everything they want and she allows for an execution you might say street style of Collini and some others there during the wedding between Henry of Navarre and the Princess Margaret what this flood gate opening does is it leads to one of the greatest massacres in at least the 16th century and really for centuries thereafter the st. Bartholomew's Day Massacre late-summer in 1570 now this begins as an attempt to take out Collini and some of his entourage as they are walking through the streets of Paris during the wedding and a wedding during this time would be a week could be a lot of festivities and parties and things a lot of people with their guard down you might say well a Scalini is walking through the streets of Paris someone at a second-story window or this is a pistol in fires upon and he is wounded wounded quite badly in fact his men scooped him up they flee they get to his apartments where he was staying and they take him up there onto the second floor well a mob a Catholic mob breaks in goes up to the second floor they finished the deed of taking up Collini as well as calinas men they then castrate him because obviously that's what you do to embarrass somebody I suppose then they didn't throw his dead body out of the window down onto the street what did ensues over the next weeks and months from this single act of aggression is something like a widespread panic all throughout Paris and even through other parts of France people just go slap mad they start murdering anyone who is said to be Hyuga no estimates at this point or that somewhere in the neighborhood of 25,000 people are murdered in Paris alone throughout the countryside somewhere in the neighborhood of ten to fifteen thousand are also murdered now if you did do the math we have a couple million people and they've only lost twenty thirty thousand but this is bloodshed at its worst these are serious massacres you end up having essentially mass graves to deal with all the bodies that they've created through these massacres a lot of what this does is it breaks you might say the spirit of the Hyuga knows while they had attempted and they will still continue to attempt at the political level to take France for themselves at the lay level they are all too vulnerable there is no stopping a mob from descending upon a human a church even if it's meeting in relative peace and burning it down with people inside it this kind of a thing and it's the ongoing tussles of the 1560s and in particular the st. Bartholomew's Day Massacre that forces Hyuga knows to flee frankly all throughout the known world to this day in fact you can find Hyuga no churches and establishments and little pockets all throughout much of the known world for example there's a human oh establishment in Rio de Janeiro down in Brazil and if you know anything about the Brazilian Church the Protestant Turks there you know it has a pretty significant influence from the reform Calvinistic perspective a lot of it can be traced back at least in part to this genealogy the Hyuga knows fleeing and landing there in Brazil in my own life my own context I live in Jacksonville Florida well Jacksonville was a human establishment in some ways in some small ways huge nose landed here in they established Fort Caroline along the banks of the st. Johns River and for Caroline again was a human establishment you can go through all areas of England the Netherlands South America places like Brazil South Africa in all up and down the east coast of modern North America in fine places where humans landed to escape the real serious persecution of their peoples so the lay level you might say there was a scattering there was a fleeing of the Hyuga nose of these French Calvinists in order to find a better place for themselves and everything this is worth noting because a lot of people in the modern American world think that only the Puritans although the English were somewhat persecuted when they fled on boats like the Mayflower for the New World well the Hyuga nose came first for Caroline for example was established in the 1560s a good number of decades before even the first pure it ins or pilgrims you might say begin to leave England for the new world and as I'll say when we get to those lectures the Puritans of the pilgrims were hardly being persecuted anywhere close to the amount to the reality that the Huguenots were experiencing in France well how did this end what about the political level Maude ends with a really duplicitous kind of fellow a guy who's gone down in history as a real kind of cynic Henry the fourth Henry the fourth was again the same Henry who had married the Princess Margaret he does at some point lay claim to the throne and believe that it's his and the civil wars carry on and Henry marches step by step on his way to take Paris which in part in a very significant way would mean that he would capture the throne well at some point the 1590s Henry converts to Catholicism and historians have long tried to figure out why he would do this he kind of rides on the wave of protestantism and then at the end he converts there is one unfortunate phrase that he uttered which is that quote Paris is worth at least a mass and but probably the majority opinion is though again there are challenges to this theory is it Henry comes to the conclusion that at some point he is not going to rule France as a Protestant and what he wants more than anything is to rule and to be king and for him the religious factor whether his Catholic or Protestant was maybe not irrelevant but to him it was worth becoming Catholic in order to take Paris and to take the throne and that is what he does now one last piece not all of the French Protestants fled it's not as if everyone left there were for centuries French Protestants still there in Paris and they were subject to time to persecution sometimes violent sometimes suppression oppression you might say and so the long story of the French Calvinists of the French Reformed folks the Hyuga knows is frankly one of the most underappreciated stories at a popular level we have heroes like Luther and Calvin and Cranmer and others but frankly when you look at good shepherding pastors who are leading a flock in the midst of real serious doubt and a trial on their life many died for their faith here it is hard to find people who deserve our respect more than the Hyuga knows

Channel: Ryan Reeves

Views: 333,826

Rating: 4.77879 out of 5

Keywords: Huguenot (Religion), Protestant Reformation (Event), Religion (TV Genre), Ryan M. Reeves, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (College/University), Protestantism (Religion), Henry IV Of France (Monarch), Catherine De' Medici (Noble Person), La Rochelle (City/Town/Village)

Id: 1wOgMLZlF1Y

Length: 28min 31sec (1711 seconds)

Published: Wed May 27 2015