...Paris. Coligny returns to the French court…
1571 CE
...Paris.
Coligny returns to the French court and presses pressing for a combined army of Catholics and Huguenots to fight against the Spanish in the Netherlands.
Such Huguenot aid in driving the Spanish from Flanders would secure their position within the realm, or so hopes Coligny, who rises rapidly in royal favor and begins to exert considerable influence over the the policies of King Charles IX.
The King, jealous of the victories of his brother, the Duc d'Anjou, over the Huguenots at Jarnac and Moncontour in 1569, sanctions a defensive alliance with England and Huguenot aid to the Dutch rebels.
Alarmed at the new policy and Coligny’s ascendancy, the Queen mother and the ultra-Catholic Cardinal of Lorraine, who want no war with Spain, their ally, fear for their own influence over the king.
When it becomes clear that the king is bent on a full-scale alliance with England and the Dutch rebels, Catherine plots the assassination of Coligny.
François de Belleforest, a prolific French author, poet and translator, and from 1568 historiographer to the king, had been born in a poor family and his father (a soldier) had been killed when he was seven.
After spending some time in the court of Marguerite of Navarre, and traveling to Toulouse and Bordeaux (where he had met George Buchanan), Belleforet Paris had moved to Paris, where he has come into contact with members of the young literary generation, including Pierre de Ronsard, Jean Antoine de Baïf, Jean Dorat, Remy Belleau, Antoine Du Verdier and Odet de Turnèbe.
He had in 1568 become historiographer to the king.
In his most successful work, he retells the Norse myth of Hamlet, prince of Denmark, in his translation and adaptation of the "histoires tragiques" by the Italian Matteo Bandello, which had built on the work of Pierre Boaistuau.
It will eventually amount to seven volumes.
Belleforest has written on cosmography, morals, literature and history, and has also translated the works of Boccaccio, Antonio de Guevara, Francesco Guicciardini, Polydore Vergil, Saint Cyprian, Sebastian Münster, Achilles Tatius, Cicero and Demosthenes into French.
He is also the author of the first French pastoral novel, La Pyrénée (or La Pastorale amoureuse) (1571) modeled on the Diana of Jorge de Montemayor.
His Grandes Annales are a polemic tract against French Protestant lawyer and writer François Hotman, associated with the legal humanists and with the monarchomaques, who struggle against absolute monarchy.