Henry II: The Chivalrous King and the Wars of Religion (1547-1559)
1547 à 1559
The death of Francis I, on 31 March 1547, brought to the throne a man whom nothing, in the imagination of the court, destined to resemble his father. Crowned at Reims three months later, on 25 July 1547, Henry II, twenty-eight years old, immediately imposed a graver, more reserved style of government, yet one just as determined to defend the standing of the French monarchy on the European stage.
This inheritance was anything but settled. Henry II received from his father a dynastic rivalry with the House of Habsburg that remained very much alive, embodied in the person of Charles V, finances already strained by thirty-two years of war and lavish patronage, and a religious question that the growing spread of Calvin’s ideas made more pressing every year. As early as 1548, a tax revolt in the Southwest — the Pitauds’ jacquerie — reminded the young king of the fragility of the social balance underpinning his war taxation.
The dominant trait of these twelve years was a kind of constancy in confrontation: unlike the spectacular reversals of the previous reign, that of Henry II unfolded along a more linear trajectory, marked by a succession of victories and setbacks in Italy and Flanders, until the mutual exhaustion of the two rival crowns. The capture of the Three Bishoprics and the heroic resistance of Metz were followed by a Tuscan disaster at Marciano, then by a fresh setback at Saint-Quentin — offset by the resounding recapture of Calais.
Beyond the battlefields, the reign was organised around several lasting themes: an institutionalised religious repression, with the creation of the Chambre ardente as early as 1547 and the Edict of Compiègne in 1557, which unwittingly paved the way for the outbreak of the Wars of Religion; an artistic patronage that remained vigorous, carried by Diane de Poitiers and figures such as Philibert de l’Orme or the poets of the Pléiade; a royal administration rationalised by the creation of the présidiaux, even as the crown’s credit collapsed with the failure of the Grand Parti de Lyon; and, finally, an opening onto the New World with the short-lived founding of France Antarctique in Brazil.
The Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis, signed in April 1559, closed sixty years of Italian Wars on a balanced compromise, but the king’s accidental death three months later, during a tournament held to celebrate that peace, deprived the kingdom, just as a new era was opening, of the experienced sovereign the coming religious crisis would call for. Henry II left to his son Francis II, barely fifteen years old, a kingdom at peace abroad but eaten away from within by a confessional divide that no repression had managed to contain. This chapter traces this course in five stages: the accession and the early years of the court, the shift towards Protestant powers and the victory of Metz, Corsica and the Truce of Vaucelles, Saint-Quentin and the recapture of Calais, then the general peace and the king’s tragic death.
I. 1547–1550: The Accession of Henry II, the Pitauds’ Crisis and the Early Court
Francis I died on 31 March 1547. His son Henry, twenty-eight years old, was proclaimed king on 23 May under the name Henry II — his coronation at Reims followed on 25 July 1547. That same year, he established, under the Parlement of Paris, a special jurisdiction, the Chambre ardente, tasked with judging cases of heresy as a court of last resort — an early sign of his determination to stem the spread of Calvin’s ideas, then in full expansion in the kingdom. In Italy, a first sign of the tensions to come appeared on 10 September 1547: Pier Luigi Farnese was assassinated in Parma, and Ferrante Gonzaga, imperial governor of Milan, seized the city on behalf of Charles V — an episode that would, four years later, resurface in the new king’s Italian policy.
The young reign also had to face a domestic fiscal crisis. The Edict of Châtellerault of 1541 had extended the gabelle (salt tax) to the Angoumois and the Saintonge, provinces where salt had until then circulated freely; the riot broke out in May 1548 at Barbezieux, over the release of arrested insurgents, before spreading across the region as far as Bordeaux — the Pitauds’ jacquerie thus gathered close to twenty thousand participants, led notably by the burgher Bois-Menier and Antoine Bouchard, lord of Puymoreau. Anne de Montmorency personally led the repression: about one hundred and forty executions took place in Bordeaux, including a hundred or so burghers and magistrates, the city was disarmed, stripped of its privileges, and its parlement suspended. The crown nonetheless had to compromise: as early as June 1549, the gabelle was abolished in these provinces, now made into “redeemed lands,” in exchange for a general amnesty.
The young king’s court organised itself at once around his favourite, Diane de Poitiers, to whom he gave, as early as 1547, the château of Chenonceau, and who was granted the title of duchess of Valentinois the following year.
Château de Chenonceau: Ra-smit, GNU Free Documentation License 1.2 http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html, via Wikimedia Commons
Diane de Poitiers Posing for Primaticcio: Nicaise de Keyser, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Under her patronage, the architect Philibert de l’Orme, the first to bear the title of “architect to the king,” began in 1547 the construction of the château of Anet, completed in 1555, while at the Louvre the sculptor Jean Goujon carried out, after the designs of Pierre Lescot, a decorative programme that would continue until 1556 — the Fountain of the Innocents in 1549, the Caryatids gallery in 1551.
Diane de Poitiers Visiting the Workshop of Jean Goujon: Alexandre-Évariste Fragonard, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
That same year, 1549, Joachim du Bellay published the Défense et illustration de la langue française, the founding manifesto of the group of poets soon to be called the Pléiade, gathered around him and Pierre de Ronsard.
On the diplomatic front, Henry II took up and expanded his father’s marriage policy. On 19 July 1548, a treaty sealed the betrothal of the dauphin Francis to the young queen of Scots Mary Stuart, who left her kingdom on 7 August to join the French court — a move continuing the military support already given to Scotland against the English “Rough Wooing.” France had already sent six thousand men there in 1548. This rivalry with England led to open conflict: on 8 August 1549, France declared war on her for the restitution of Boulogne, occupied since 1544 in violation of the Treaty of Ardres of 1546. Hard-fought negotiations at Fort Outreau, from 24 February to 6 March 1550, led to an agreement over four hundred thousand écus payable in two instalments; the Treaty of Outreau was signed on 24 March 1550, ratified by Scotland on 18 April, and English troops evacuated Boulogne as early as 25 April.
🔍 Zoom – The Renewal of the Court and the Royal Entry into Paris (1547-1549)
🔍 Zoom – The Court of Henry II and Cultural Life
🔍 Zoom – The Marriage Policy of Henry II
II. 1551–1553: The Shift Towards Protestant Powers, the Three Bishoprics and the Victory of Metz
On 27 June 1551, the Edict of Châteaubriant strengthened the kingdom’s repressive arsenal against the spread of Calvinist ideas: every work now had to bear the name of its printer and its author, and producing, selling or simply possessing a banned book became punishable by death — a policy of control that was nonetheless not to halt the progress of the Reformation. It was also towards Italy that the bulk of the kingdom’s forces turned that year: on 27 May 1551, the Treaty of Amboise committed Henry II to the side of Ottavio Farnese — Charles V’s son-in-law, threatened by both Pope Julius III and the Empire — in exchange for two thousand infantry, two hundred light lances and an annual subsidy of twelve thousand gold écus. Gonzaga retaliated by seizing Brescello and Colorno as early as June 1551, while Marshal Brissac took, on the Piedmontese front, Chieri and San Damiano on 3 and 4 September 1551, the defence of Parma proper being entrusted to Piero Strozzi and Paul de La Barthe de Thermes. The conflict closed with a two-year truce concluded on 29 April 1552, restoring the Duchy of Castro to the Farnese.
It was in the wake of this Italian crisis that the diplomatic move with the heaviest consequences of the reign was made. A secret agreement signed at Friedewald on 5 October 1551 was ratified on 15 January 1552 at the château of Chambord by three Protestant German princes — Maurice of Saxony, John Albert I of Mecklenburg-Schwerin and William IV of Hesse-Kassel: in exchange for a payment of seventy thousand gold écus a month, Henry II obtained the cession of the vicariate of the Three Bishoprics — Toul, Verdun and Metz — and took the title of “imperial vicar, protector of German liberties.” Strengthened by this agreement, he entered Metz on 18 April 1552 at the end of his “German journey,” durably expanding the kingdom eastward. That same period also saw a lasting judicial reform: an edict created the présidiaux, sixty new courts intermediate between bailliages and parlements, intended to relieve the burden on royal justice.
Charles V could not let this annexation go unanswered. He gathered before Metz an imperial army of sixty thousand men and one hundred and fifty cannon — Germans, Spaniards, Italians, Czechs, Walloons and Flemings, reinforced by twelve thousand men under Margrave Albert of Brandenburg — against a garrison commanded by François de Guise, numbering fewer than seven thousand men, including a thousand pioneers and seven hundred cavalry. Even before the enemy’s arrival, Guise had five suburbs and some forty religious buildings razed — including the Cordeliers quarter —, raised an artillery bastion at Bellecroix, had a ditch dug along the Seille, and expelled the “useless mouths” from the city before 21 October.
The Cordeliers, an Episode from the Siege of Metz: Laurent Charles Maréchal, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The encirclement began on 19 October 1552; the bombardment intensified from 9 November, with about fifteen thousand cannonballs fired at the ramparts, opening on 17 November a forty-metre breach near the Serpenoise Gate, then damaging, on 27 and 28 November, three hundred metres of fortifications — without ever breaching the city’s double medieval rampart, mining attempts failing against a water table too high. In the besieged city, the surgeon Ambroise Paré, summoned by Guise to treat the wounded of the siege, there perfected the ligature of arteries, replacing the cauterisation by red-hot iron then in use to stop haemorrhages — an innovation that would durably mark the history of military surgery.
Ambroise Paré Performing the Ligature of Arteries at the Siege of Metz: Théobald Chartran, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Eaten away by typhus, hunger, cold and mass desertions, the imperial army had to give up: Charles V, “disheartened and ill,” lifted the siege on 1 January 1553 and withdrew towards Thionville the very next day, the French diplomatically sparing the wounded left behind — a stinging failure that humiliated the emperor and established, in the very first years of the reign, Henry II’s military stature.
The Lifting of the Siege of Metz in 1553: Lucien-Étienne Mélingue, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
🔍 Zoom – The Administration and Reforms of Henry II
III. 1553–1556: Corsica, the Tuscan Setback, the Truce of Vaucelles and France Antarctique
Emboldened by his success at Metz, Henry II sought to open a new front against the Genoese possessions, allies of the emperor, in the Mediterranean. On 23 August 1553, Marshal Paul de Thermes landed in Corsica with a Franco-Ottoman squadron alongside Sampiero Corso, who at once seized the citadel of Ajaccio and raised the standard of revolt, rallying local populations and allied families such as the Ornano clan; Thermes reinforced the stronghold and coordinated the whole operation against the Genoese admiral Andrea Doria. But despite initial successes, the campaign lost momentum: absorbed by the Anglo-Spanish rapprochement then taking shape, France let the situation drift, and Thermes was recalled in 1555 under an armistice.
The Italian theatre, for its part, proved frankly unfavourable. In January 1554, Henry II sent Blaise de Monluc to govern Siena, then threatened by Hispano-Florentine troops. On 2 August 1554, at Marciano (Scannagallo), the Franco-Sienese forces of Piero Strozzi — twelve to fourteen thousand infantry, a thousand cavalry, French, Corsican and Turkish mercenaries — clashed with the Hispano-Florentines of Gian Giacomo de’ Medici, marquis of Marignano, better organised with their twelve thousand infantry, thirteen hundred cavalry and four cannon. A repositioning by Strozzi towards higher ground, for lack of access to water, was read by Medici as a retreat; his arquebusiers opened fire, Strozzi sent in his pikemen in response and at first gained the advantage, before the Franco-Sienese cavalry of Ludovico Pico della Mirandola, attacked by Count Sforza di Santa Fiora, collapsed and dragged the whole army into a rout: more than four thousand dead and one hundred and three standards lost, against about four hundred dead in the opposing camp, Strozzi himself wounded by an arquebus shot. This disaster hastened the fall of Siena, besieged since July 1554: Monluc, “sick and without relief,” nonetheless held out for close to nine months, forcing the Spaniards to mobilise substantial troops and to grant him the honours of war at his capitulation, in April 1555. On his return, Henry II received him in triumph and made him a knight of the Order of Saint Michael.
This Tuscan disaster was offset, on the northern front, by a resounding victory. On 13 August 1554, at Renty, the French army led by François de Guise — with, at his side, Henry II in person, Marshal Gaspard de Saulx (Tavannes), Admiral Gaspard II de Coligny, Antoine de Bourbon and Francis I of Nevers — faced imperial forces commanded this time by Charles V himself. After a bombardment of the château of Renty, the imperial vanguard, driven back to the Bois Guillaume, gave way when Coligny entered it at the head of a thousand men and seized the Spanish artillery; the imperial army lost about two thousand men, against two hundred and forty on the French side. Henry II decorated Gaspard de Saulx with the Order of Saint Michael on the battlefield itself — but for lack of ammunition, the French army had to lift the siege of the stronghold as early as 15 August, without fully exploiting its success.
Battle of Renty: Nicolas-Guy Brenet, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The following year marked a decisive turning point for the whole conflict. On 25 October 1555, in Brussels, Charles V abdicated his rights over the Netherlands in favour of his son Philip II; on 16 January 1556, he also ceded him Spain, before transferring, between 1556 and 1558, the imperial dignity and the Austrian lands to his brother Ferdinand — thereby completing the definitive partition of the Habsburg empire between its two branches. Three weeks after this first abdication, on 5 February 1556, the Truce of Vaucelles was signed at the abbey of the same name, in the Scheldt valley, between Henry II and Charles V: intended to last five years, it recognised France’s territorial gains — the Three Bishoprics, several strongholds between Luxembourg and Flanders, as well as the kingdom’s possessions in Piedmont, central Italy and Corsica.
That same period also saw Henry II finance a colonial venture of a new kind. At the end of 1554, he handed ten thousand livres tournois to the vice admiral Nicolas Durand de Villegagnon, whose oversight he entrusted to Gaspard de Coligny; departing from Le Havre on 12 July 1555 with about six hundred colonists, the latter reached Guanabara Bay, in Brazil, on 15 November, where he founded Fort Coligny — giving birth to France Antarctique, the first lasting French settlement in the New World since Jacques Cartier’s expeditions.
🔍 Zoom – The Americas and France Antarctique
IV. 1557–1558: Saint-Quentin, Religious Repression and the Recapture of Calais
The Truce of Vaucelles did not survive the summer of 1556: Pope Paul IV, fiercely hostile to the Habsburgs, excommunicated Charles V and Philip II while promising Naples to the French, precipitating the invasion of the Papal States by imperial troops. Hostilities between France and Spain resumed officially on 31 January 1557. Henry II at once sent François de Guise to Rome, where he entered on 2 March at the head of an expedition meant to reconquer Naples; but the siege of Civitella del Tronto, conducted from 24 April to 15 May 1557 against the Duke of Alba, ended in failure, and Guise had to be recalled to France in September to redress a situation that had suddenly turned critical on an entirely different front.
That front was Saint-Quentin, where, on 10 August 1557, the reign’s worst military disaster occurred. The Hispano-Savoyard forces of Emmanuel Philibert of Savoy, lieutenant general to Philip II, and of Ferdinand Gonzaga — sixty thousand infantry, five thousand cavalry and eighty pieces of artillery — crushed the army of Constable Anne de Montmorency and Admiral Coligny, numbering only eighteen thousand infantry, six thousand cavalry and eighteen cannon. Underestimating his opponent, Montmorency brought his troops out of the woodland cover to cross the Somme; the Spaniards at once crossed the Rouvroy bridge and threw a further pontoon bridge, encircling the exposed French army. The toll was catastrophic: about six thousand dead and six thousand prisoners on the French side, among them Montmorency himself, the dukes of Montpensier and Longueville, and Coligny — against only a thousand men on the Spanish side. The road to Paris now lay open, but Philip II chose to prolong the siege of Saint-Quentin two weeks longer rather than march on the capital, a strategic hesitation that gave the French time to regroup.
Surrender of the French Army at Saint-Quentin: After Luca Giordano (copy), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
That same year, 1557, also saw the kingdom’s religious policy harden. In February, Henry II had asked Pope Paul IV to establish an Inquisition in France on the Spanish model; the Parlement of Paris, jealous of its judicial prerogatives, opposed this and prevented its implementation. On 24 July, the Edict of Compiègne nonetheless generalised the death penalty for any proven case of heresy, and six weeks later, on the night of 4 September, the Affair of the Rue Saint-Jacques broke out: a clandestine Calvinist assembly of about four hundred people, gathered opposite the Collège du Plessis, was caught by surprise; one hundred and twenty-eight of its members were arrested, including several noblewomen, while most of the faithful managed to escape. Eight people ended up at the stake, including Philippe de Luns, demoiselle de Graveron, the only woman executed.
It was this tense context that Guise, recalled from Italy, managed to reverse with a spectacular stroke. In January 1558, he gathered about thirty thousand men from Compiègne, Montreuil and Boulogne-sur-Mer to march on Calais, whose English garrison, under Lord Thomas Wentworth, numbered only about two thousand five hundred defenders. The offensive was lightning-fast: on 1 January, the French vanguard took Sangatte, Fréthun and Nielles; Fort Risban fell the next day; artillery was set up at Forts Nieulay and Risban as early as 3 January; and Wentworth capitulated on 7 January, at two in the morning. Henry II made a ceremonial entry into the city on 23 January, ending two hundred and ten years of continuous English presence on French soil, since Calais had been taken by Edward III in 1347 — the region was renamed “Pays reconquis” (“Reconquered Land”) and its English inhabitants repatriated.
The Siege of Calais. 9 January 1558: François-Édouard Picot, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Guise built on his momentum: at the head of twelve to fourteen thousand men, with Marshal Strozzi, he laid siege to Thionville from mid-April, defended by a Spanish garrison of three thousand soldiers. The town capitulated on 23 June 1558, followed that same season by the capture of Arlon, before the first stirrings of the general peace halted the French advance toward Luxembourg.
The Capture of Thionville, 23 June 1558: Hortense Haudebourt-Lescot, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
🔍 Zoom – The Protestant Reformation and the Persecutions
V. 1558–1559: Gravelines, the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis and the Death of the King
The improvement at Calais was nonetheless followed by a fresh setback, and by a financial crisis. In February 1558, the unilateral reduction of interest rates decided by Henry II to ease his debt caused the collapse of the Grand Parti de Lyon, the crown’s principal credit mechanism, durably closing off the royal Treasury’s access to this source of financing. On the ground, Marshal Paul de Thermes, after seizing Dunkirk, Bergues and Nieuport, undertook the siege of Gravelines, but found himself overwhelmed by a Spanish army under Count Egmont, reinforced by Flemings exasperated by French depredations; forced to retreat towards Calais along the coast, he was caught up with on 13 July 1558: the Spaniards — twelve to fifteen thousand men and three thousand cavalry — attacked his left flank while an allied English fleet shelled his right flank from the sea, and “caught between two fires, the French army broke apart.” Thermes, taken prisoner for a year, left behind more than a thousand dead and close to twelve thousand five hundred men killed, wounded or captured in total — Count Egmont, though badly wounded, emerged from it governor of Flanders and Artois. Weary of a war that had become exhausting for both crowns, and deprived of his means of financing, Henry II now favoured the path of negotiation.
These led, in the spring of 1559, to the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis, concluded in two separate treaties: one Franco-English, signed on 12 March and 2 April with the new queen Elizabeth I, the other Franco-Spanish, negotiated at the abbey of Cercamp and signed on 3 April 1559 with Philip II. France thereby kept Calais, the Three Bishoprics — Metz, Toul, Verdun — and several strongholds in Picardy, including Saint-Quentin, Ham and Le Catelet, but had to give up the Duchy of Savoy and most of Piedmont, Corsica, returned to Genoa, as well as its claims on Milan and Franche-Comté, keeping only Pinerolo and the marquisate of Saluzzo as Italian footholds. Two diplomatic marriages sealed this general peace, which closed more than sixty years of Italian Wars: Elisabeth of France, Henry II’s eldest daughter, was promised to Philip II of Spain, and Margaret of France, the king’s sister, to Duke Emmanuel Philibert of Savoy.
The wedding celebrations sealing this peace were nonetheless darkened by tragedy. On 30 June 1559, during a tournament held on the Rue Saint-Antoine in Paris to celebrate them, Henry II was mortally wounded in the eye by a splinter of lance during a joust against Gabriel de Montgommery, captain of his Scottish Guard.
The Death of King Henry II at the Tournament of the Hôtel des Tournelles (detail): Édouard Detaille, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Despite the care of Ambroise Paré and the Spanish surgeon André Vésale, summoned urgently from Brussels, the king died “in atrocious suffering” on 10 July 1559. After a funeral celebrated according to the traditional ceremonial of the kings of France — the royal effigy displayed on 29 July, burial at the basilica of Saint-Denis on 13 August —, his eldest son Francis II succeeded him at once, at fifteen, at once delegating power, with the agreement of his mother Catherine de’ Medici, to the uncles of his wife Mary Stuart, the Guises — a veritable palace revolution that opened, with the general peace barely signed, a new chapter as uncertain as it was perilous for the kingdom.
🔍 Zoom – The Death of Henry II and the End of the Reign
🧠 Key Takeaways
- 31 March 1547: death of Francis I; Henry II, crowned at Reims on 25 July, succeeds him at twenty-eight
- 1547: creation of the Chambre ardente; beginning of the patronage of Diane de Poitiers and Philibert de l’Orme (château of Anet); 1549, founding manifesto of the Pléiade
- 1548: Pitauds’ jacquerie suppressed by Montmorency; marriage alliance with Scotland (Mary Stuart promised to the dauphin)
- 1552: Treaty of Chambord with the German Protestant princes, conquest of the Three Bishoprics (Metz, Toul, Verdun), creation of the présidiaux
- 2 January 1553: humiliating failure of Charles V before Metz, defended by François de Guise
- 1553-1556: occupation of Corsica, Tuscan defeat at Marciano, abdication of Charles V, Truce of Vaucelles, founding of France Antarctique in Brazil
- 1557: disaster at Saint-Quentin (Montmorency and Coligny captured); religious hardening (Inquisition refused by the Parlement, Edict of Compiègne, Affair of the Rue Saint-Jacques)
- 8 January 1558: recapture of Calais by Guise, end of two centuries of English presence in continental France
- 1558: collapse of the Grand Parti de Lyon; defeat at Gravelines
- 3 April 1559: Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis, end of the Italian Wars, double diplomatic marriages
- 30 June - 10 July 1559: accidental death of Henry II, wounded in a tournament by Gabriel de Montgommery; accession of Francis II under the tutelage of the Guises
- A reign that closed the cycle of the Italian Wars but handed his son a kingdom on the brink of religious explosion
Next chapter: Francis II and the beginnings of the Wars of Religion