7 - Epilogue: the last war of religion, 1610–1629

Summary

The previous chapter attempted to revise the traditional view that the Edict of Nantes was intended to be a permanent settlement of religious toleration. Equally untenable is the notion that the Huguenot ‘state within the state’ would have survived intact only had Henry IV not been assassinated and replaced by first a regent and then a new monarch, neither of whom was as sympathetic to the Protestants as was Henry. To begin with, when Henry reluctantly renewed the brevet guaranteeing the Huguenot fortified towns, he halved the annual subsidy provided by the crown to garrison them. Moreover, the annual subsidies were already well in arrears, and nowhere near the sums promised in the brevet were ever disbursed to the Huguenots. Second, the judicial components of the edict, particularly the bi-partisan chambres mi-parties, proved not to be as effective in enforcing the rest of the edict as the Protestants had hoped. Not only did the magistrates in the various parlements procrastinate and drag their feet in implementing the new chambers, but there was institutional resistance to the Protestant judges throughout the sovereign courts. Although Henry himself never made any advance against the Huguenots' freedom of conscience, it is simply not true that the many concessions they won in the edict only began to erode after Henry's assassination. The irony, of course, is that to Henry's murderer, François Ravaillac, and many ultra-Catholics, the king had not done nearly enough to force the Huguenots' return to the mother church.