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The members of the League, known as Leaguers, were so against the idea of
Protestantism that they were willing to go to great extremes to ensure a Catholic monarch,
including challenging the authority of their own king by recognizing Charles, cardinal of
Bourbon, who was the only Catholic prince of the blood, as heir to the throne. They even went
so far as to form a secret alliance with Spain’s King Philip II (1556-1598), in which the League
agreed to help Spain fight Protestantism in France and the Netherlands. 22 In addition, they
favored the papacy by claiming that the pope had supreme authority, even over secular affairs
traditionally governed by the king. For the Leaguers, a Protestant king was simply antithetical to
the history of France. French rulers had been Catholic since the time of Clovis (481-511).
Because of this, militant Catholics insisted that the king’s Catholic religion was a fundamental
law of the kingdom. In fact the Leaguers wanted so much to avoid the Protestant Henri de
Bourbon that they were willing to supersede Salic Law, a French custom requiring royal lineage
to pass from the king to the closest and eldest male heir, with a new directive requiring that the
sovereign be Catholic. 23
Despite the Leaguers’ opposition to Henri de Bourbon’s succession to the throne, the
Huguenot leader became the king of France following the death of Henri III. Taking the name
Henri IV (1589-1610), in 1593 he renounced the Protestant faith and converted to Catholicism.
But it was the king’s moderate approach to his new faith that allowed him to find the solution to
ending the Wars of Religion. Influenced by the royalist Catholics’ toleration of Protestantism,
Henri IV issued the Edict of Nantes in 1598 that granted the Huguenots limited rights to worship.
This measure along with the king’s willingness to forgive the Leaguers was instrumental in
helping the battle-weary country end the civil wars and embark on a period of domestic peace.
Nonetheless, a sense of division remained among the Catholics. The militant Catholics who had
been intent on ridding the country of Protestantism gave up their military campaigns against the
heretics, but in their overarching goal to reunite the country in the Catholic confession they
maintained close ties with Habsburg Spain and the Papal States. In contrast the moderate
Catholics pushed ahead with their policy to ensure the stability of the French state, which meant
protecting it from foreign threats. This discord did not disappear after the death of Henri IV.
Instead it continued during the reigns of Maria de’ Medici and Louis XIII, and as a key influence
on the political strategies adopted by each monarch, it would affect each monarch’s reason for
supporting religious foundations.
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