FYI January 17, 2021

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On This Day

1562 – France grants religious toleration to the Huguenots in the Edict of Saint-Germain.[4]
The Edict of Saint-Germain, also known as the Edict of January, was a decree of tolerance promulgated by the regent of France, Catherine de’ Medici, in January 1562. It provided limited tolerance to the Protestant Huguenots in the Roman Catholic realm.

It was among Catherine’s first voyages of her regency, which began after the death of Francis II in December 1560. Consistent with Catherine’s maneuvering, it attempted to steer a middle course between Protestants and Catholics in order to strengthen royal dominion. Without threatening the privileged position of the Catholic Church in France, the Edict recognized the existence of the Protestants and guaranteed freedom of conscience and private worship. It forbade Huguenot worship within towns (where conflicts flared up too easily) but permitted Protestant synods and consistories. The crown found it hard to register the edict, however, a process which required the Parlement of Paris to ratify and add the edict to the statutes. The judges of the Parlement were allowed to make remonstrances to the crown and specify areas where the new law conflicted with the old before it was published, and they made the process protracted enough that it was not registered until after the Massacre of Vassy on March 1, 1562, which initiated the first religious war. This lag made the Huguenot worship interrupted by Francis, Duke of Guise at Wassy (“Vassy”) of questionable legality as there was no consensus on when a law came into effect. The Protestants claimed that as they worshiped outside of the town they were following the rules of the edict, and thus the Duke’s attack was illegitimate.

Though no non-partisan contemporary accounts were possible in the heated atmosphere[1] sources concur that the massacre occurred when the Duke of Guise, with a large armed band of retainers came upon a Huguenot service in progress at Vassy. Some of the duke’s party attempted to push their way into the barn where the service was being held and were repulsed. Stones began to fly and the Duke was struck. His men fired upon the unarmed crowd, killing some sixty out of six or seven hundred, and wounding more. Significantly, there were more contemporary reactions expressed to the massacre at Vassy than to the Edict of January. Huguenots were as intransigent as Catholics: Theodore Beza remarked to the royal envoy that persecutions are futile and that the Reformed church was like an anvil on which many hammers have been broken.[2]

The Huguenots soon seized Orléans, then towns along the Rhône and other rivers, and Catherine declared that two religions could not exist in France: “un roi, une loi, une foi”[3] was the contemporary catchphrase. By the summer, events had outpaced the Edict.

 
 

Born On This Day

1814 – Ellen Wood, English author (d. 1887)
Ellen Price (17 January 1814 – 10 February 1887), was an English novelist, better known as Mrs. Henry Wood. She is best remembered for her 1861 novel East Lynne, but many of her books became international bestsellers and widely read also in the United States. In her time, she surpassed the fame of Charles Dickens in Australia.[1]

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