Huguenots (the “Reformed”)

The Edict of Fontainebleau states that the Protestant heresy is "high treason against God and mankind" and so deserves the appropriate punishments of torture, loss of property, public humiliation, and death.

Issued June 1, 1540, by Francis I of France while at his Palace of Fontainebleau, this occurs after the insulting "Affair of the Placards" had turned royal policy from one of tolerance to the persecution of the Protestants.

Thus, the Edict of Fontainebleau codifies the persecution of the French Protestants or Huguenots and is the first of many edicts in France to persecute the Huguenots.

The next major edict will be the Edict of Châteaubriant issued by Francis’s son and successor, Henry II.

French persecution of Protestants has increased during the past decade under King Francis.

The royal court has divided into factions under the influence of Francis' favorites and his mistress, the duchesse d'Etampes.

War with the Holy Roman Empire, together with arts patronage, has so strained the royal resources that François has had to adopt devices such as the sale of government offices and the prosecution of his own financiers.

The sixty-year-old king dies at Rambouillet on March 31, 1547, the twenty-eighth birthday of his son, who succeeds him as Henry II.

Henry, married for fourteen years to Catherine de’ Medici, whom he neglects, is dominated by his mistress, the beautiful, intelligent, and cultured Diane de Poitiers.

When Francis I was still alive, Diane had to compete at the court with Anne de Pisseleu, the king's favorite.

She had had the latter exiled on her lands upon Francis I's death.

Anne, duc de Montmorency, the constable of France, returns to favor at the accession of Henry and is restored to authority.

The French court soon becomes a center of rivalry between the families of Montmorency and Guise, and Henry’s administration expands the practice of selling government offices.

France’s new king, a bigoted Roman Catholic and rigorous in the repression of the growing Protestant movement in France, in 1547 promotes the Chambre Ardente ("burning chamber"), in the Parlement of Paris for trying heretics.

Originated by the Cardinal of Lorraine, the first of them meeting in 1535 under Francis I, the name is perhaps an allusion to the fact that the proceedings take place in a room from which all daylight is excluded, the only illumination being from torches, or there may be a reference to the severity of the sentences in ardente, suggesting the burning of the prisoners at the stake.

These courts had been originated by the Cardinal of Lorraine, the first of them meeting in 1535 under Francis I.

The Chambre Ardente cooperates with an inquisitorial tribunal also established by Francis, the duty of which is to discover cases of heresy and hand them over for final judgment to the Chambre Ardente.

Henry’s reign will be particularly infamous for the cruelties perpetrated on the Huguenots by this court, which will not be abolished until 1682.

French Protestantism, largely inspired by Martin Luther, now has its chief center in the Alsatian city of Strasbourg.

Protestantism spreads rapidly through the initial ambivalence of the French crown and the enthusiastic activities of preachers; by 1550, it may include among its converts as much as one-fourth of all Frenchmen.

The leadership of the movement is increasingly taken over by Jean Calvin, who dispatches teams of missionary preachers from Geneva into France, skirmishers in the coming French Wars of Religion that will rend the civil fabric of France until the end of the century.

Henry II promulgates the Edict of Châteaubriant, issued from the seat of Anne, duc de Montmorency in Brittany, on June 27, 1551.

The Edict is one of an increasingly severe series of measures taken by Henry II against Protestants, whom he regards as heretics.

In the preamble, the Edict frankly reports that previous measures against heresy in the kingdom have proved ineffectual.

"Heretics,” the Edict reports, meet in conventicles, infect schools, invade the judicial bench and force toleration upon judges.

To ensure more rigorous judgments, Henry had in 1547 already created a special judicial chamber drawn from members of the parlements, solely to judge cases of heresy, (called by Protestants the Chambre Ardente (the "Burning Chamber").

The Edict contains quite detailed provisions, calling upon the civil and ecclesiastical courts to detect and punish all heretics.

It places severe restrictions on Protestants, including loss of one-third of property granted to informers, who are also granted immunity and confiscations of property both moveable and immovable belonging to those who had fled to Geneva, with whom the king's subjects are forbidden to correspond or to send money.

Fourteen of its forty-six articles are concerned with censorship; its terms strictly regulate the press by prohibiting the sale, importation or printing of any book unapproved by the Faculty of Theology at the University of Paris, then or, now it is implied, in the future.

Booksellers are to display a copy of the Faculty's printed list of prohibited books alongside a list of books for sale.

Delegates of the Faculty are to make visits twice a year to each bookseller to ensure that the provisions are complied with.

Since 1542, it has been a requirement that any shipment of books into France be opened and unpacked in the presence of delegates from the Faculty of Theology, which now, according to Roger Doucet, "assumed the intellectual direction of the kingdom."

Though the Edict goes so far as to forbid the discussion of religious topics at work, in the fields, or over meals, it will prove insufficient to stem the rising tide of reform in religion.

Sterner measures will be taken in the next edict of the series, the Edict of Compiègne, 1557, which applies the death penalty for all convictions of heresy.

John Foxe, educated at Oxford and a fellow of Magdalen College, had been hired by Mary Fitzroy, Duchess of Richmond, as tutor to the orphan children of her brother, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, a Catholic who had been executed for treason in January 1547.

(The children are Thomas, who will become the fourth duke of Norfolk and a valuable friend of Foxe's; Jane, later Countess of Westmorland; Henry, later earl of Northampton; and Charles, who will later command the English fleet against the Spanish Armada.)

Foxe had been ordained deacon by Nicholas Ridley on June 24, 1550, and his circle of friends, associates, and supporters included John Hooper, William Turner, John Rogers, William Cecil, and most importantly John Bale, who was to become a close friend and "certainly encouraged, very probably guided, Foxe in the composition of his first martyrology.

From 1548 to 1551, Foxe had brought out one tract opposing the death penalty for adultery and another supporting ecclesiastical excommunication of those whom he thought "veiled ambition under the cloak of Protestantism."

He also worked unsuccessfully to prevent the two burnings for religion that had occurred during the reign of Edward VI.

On the accession of Mary I in July 1553, Foxe had lost his tutorship when the children's grandfather, the Duke of Norfolk, was released from prison.

Foxe walked warily, as befitted one who had published Protestant books in his own name.

As the political climate worsened, Foxe believed himself personally threatened by Bishop Stephen Gardiner.

Just ahead of officers sent to arrest him, he had sailed with his pregnant wife from Ipswich to Nieuwpoort, then traveled to Antwerp, Rotterdam, Frankfurt and Strasbourg, which he reaches by July 1554.

In Strasbourg, Foxe publishes a Latin history of the Christian persecutions, the draft of which he had brought from England and "which became the first shadowy draft of his Acts and Monuments."

Coligny has secretly focused on protecting his coreligionists, by attempting to establish colonies abroad in which Huguenots could find a refuge.

He organizes the expedition of a colony of Huguenots to Brazil, under the leadership of his friend and navy colleague, Vice-Admiral Nicolas Durand de Villegaignon, who establishes the colony of France Antarctique in Rio de Janeiro, in 1555.

Two ships carrying five to six hundred French soldiers and Huguenots dispatched by Admiral Gaspard de Coligny establish a colony, to the great displeasure of the Catholic Portuguese in Brazil, at the site of present Rio de Janeiro in 1555.

Led by French admiral Nicolas Durand de Villegaignon, who desires to help the Huguenots find a refuge against persecution, the settlers occupy one of the islands of Guanabara Bay, now called Villegagnon Island.

Villegagnon builds Fort Coligny on the island when attempting to establish the France Antarctique colony.

To the still largely undeveloped mainland village, Villegaignon gives the name of Henriville, in honor of Henry II, the King of France, who also had known of and approved the expedition, and has provided the fleet for the trip.

Villegaignon secures his position by making an alliance with the Tamoio and Tupinambá Indians of the region, who are fighting the Portuguese.

The French crown will fail, however, to make good use of Villegaignon's exploits to expand the reach of the French kingdom into the New World, as is being done at this time with the claims of Jacques Cartier in the present-day province of Québec, Canada.

All of these settlements are in violation of the Papal bull of 1493, which had divided the New World between Spain and Portugal, a division defined more exactly in 1494 by the Treaty of Tordesillas.

The source of the "contagion", as French court pamphleteers put it, is ever Geneva, where the former Frenchman John Calvin achieves undisputed religious supremacy in 1555, the very year that the French Reformed Church organizes itself at a synod under the king's nose, as it were, in Paris.

At the Peace of Augsburg signed in September in Germany, the essential concept is cuius regio eius religio, "Whose region, his religion".

In other words, the religion of the king or other ruler would be the religion of the people.

The petty princes of Germany are enabled to dictate the religion of their subjects, and it comes to be sensed as a mark of weakness that the King of France cannot do so: "One King, One Faith" is to become the rallying cry of the ultra-Catholic party of the Guise faction.

The Parlement de Paris is deeply divided on the issues.

When the King approaches the Parlement for its formal advice beforehand on the best means of punishing and stamping out heresy, the moderate voices of président Pierre Séguier and conseiller du Drac urge against the proposed new edict (as unnecessary) and specifically oppose the introduction of an Inquisition into France, an innovation that would appear to circumvent the king's justice, vested in the parlement.