5 - The Synod of Tonneins

Summary

Beginning in late 1609, King James became more closely associated with Protestantism on the European continent. His action was consistent with the position he had taken as a defender of the Protestant faith against the papacy in the Oath of Allegiance controversy. It also resulted from the adroit diplomacy of Henry IV of France, who sought to form a coalition of states strong enough to counter the power of the Habsburgs in Spain and Austria and to resolve a succession crisis in Cleves–Jülich. Henry hoped that such a coalition would, as the English agent William Becher wrote from Paris in early 1610, “assure the succession and tranquility of the Dolphin [dauphin or prince, later Louis XIII], agaynst the practises or violence of the Spaniarde.” James followed these developments closely. In 1609, he joined a coalition including France, the United Provinces of the Netherlands, and the recently formed Union of Evangelical States in Germany, an alliance formed by Henry IV to assure that Rudolph II, the Holy Roman emperor, would not deny the rights of three claimants, all Protestants, to Cleves–Jülich, formerly ruled by a Catholic. The disputed territory lay strategically on both sides of the Rhine near the border of the divided Netherlands. When the assassination of Henry IV in May 1610 forestalled an allied invasion of the disputed territory, James's ambassador in France, Sir Thomas Edmondes, urged the new French ruler, the Queen Regent Marie de Medici, to carry out her late husband's plan to liberate the town of Jülich from Imperial control by the Archduke Leopold.