Guernsey, Bailiwick of
Substate | Active
1204 CE to 2057 CE
Guernsey, officially the Bailiwick of Guernsey, is a British Crown dependency in the English Channel off the coast of Normandy.
As a bailiwick, Guernsey embraces not only all ten parishes on the Island of Guernsey, but also the islands of Alderney and Sark – each with its own parliament – and the smaller islands of Herm, Jethou and Lihou.
Although its defense is the responsibility of the United Kingdom, the Bailiwick is not part of the United Kingdom but rather a possession of the British Crown.
It lies within the Common Travel Area of the British Isles and is not a member of the European Union, but has a special relationship with it, being treated as part of the European Community for the purposes of free trade in goods.
Together, the Bailiwick of Guernsey and Bailiwick of Jersey form the geographical grouping known as the Channel Islands.
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Henri de Bourbon-Condé, Prince of Condé, has became rather an embarrassment to his colleague Henry of Navarre in the recent civil wars in France, setting himself up as chief of the most fanatical Huguenots and failig conspicuously in his travels abroad in search of foreign help (1580).
He fails also in his campaign of 1585 in western France—when he is driven to take refuge in Guernsey.
Burgundian poet Pontus de Tyard, seigneur (lord) of Bissy-sur-Fley and an associate of the Lyonese poets, especially Maurice Scève, had in 1551 translated León Hebreo's Dialoghi di amore (“Dialogues of Love”), the breviary of sixteenth-century philosophic lovers.
His poetry collection Erreurs amoureuses (1549; “Mistakes in Love”), which includes one of the first French sonnet sequences, had also revived the sestina in France.
The Erreurs has been augmented in successive editions, as has his important prose work, Discours philosophiques (“Philosophical Discourses”), a Neoplatonic encyclopaedia finally completed in 1587.
Its first treatise, the Solitaire premier (1552), complements Joachim du Bellay's Défense et illustration de la langue française (1549), which expounded the theories on poetic diction and language reform of La Pléiade.
Tyard had in 1578 been given the bishopric of Chalon-sur-Saône.
A member of the literary circle known as La Pléiade as well as a forthright theorist and a popularizer of Renaissance learning for the elite, Tyard, in his enthusiasm for enriching the French language and adapting classical imagery and genre, shares the contempt for the masses felt by his associates.
In the Solitaire premier he had praised those poets who decorated their verse so richly with the ornaments of antiquity that the ignorant could not comprehend them.
He had remarked that the purpose of the poet is not to be understood by nor to lower himself to accommodate a popular audience still fond of medieval genres.
It was this hauteur and this sense of mission without contact beyond the protective society of the court that caused La Pléiade to shine so briefly and to become within a generation as dead as the Greek poets from whom they took their name.
The Catholic League, led by the ultra-Roman Catholic Henri I de Lorraine, third duc de Guise, forces the moderate but devious King Henry III to ban Protestantism and attempts to exclude from the succession his brother-in-law, the Huguenot leader Henry of Bourbon, king of Navarre and heir presumptive to the French throne.
The result is the War of the Three Henrys.
Anne, the eldest son of Guillaume, Viscount de Joyeuse, when very young had been admitted to the royal court, where he had carried the title of Marquis d'Arques (after one of his father's lands).
King Henry III, having just lost his former favorites, had taken a great liking to Anne and in 1581 had created him Duke de Joyeuse with precedence over all other peers of the realm except for princes of the blood and certain sovereign families.
Henry had also made Anne admiral of France in 1582 and governor of Normandy in 1586 and married him to Marguerite de Lorraine-Vaudémont, younger sister of the queen.
A champion of Roman Catholic reaction against Henri I de Montmorency's tolerant policy toward the Huguenots in Languedoc, Anne leads an army against the Huguenots in Guyenne and ...
...massacres some of them at Mont-Saint-Éloi.
Duke Anne is recalled to court at this inopportune moment because of the intrigues of jealous rivals, and, when he marches a second time against Henry of Navarre, he is captured and killed on October 20 at the Battle of Coutras, which Henry, with English financial aid, wins.
Condé, on returning from Guernsey to France, had in 1586 married Charlotte de La Trémoille, who has renounced Catholicism for him and in 1587 bears him a daughter, Éléonore.
Wounded in October 1587 at the Battle of Coutras, Condé will die within months.