What happened at the Battle of Jarnac?
On 13 March 1569, during the third French War of Religion, the royal army of the young Duke of Anjou crossed the Charente by night and fell on the scattered Huguenot rearguard near Bassac, between Châteauneuf and Jarnac. The Prince of Condé, the Huguenot leader, charged to its rescue with a small body of horse, was surrounded and surrendered, and was then shot dead. The royal army won, but most of the Huguenot army got away.1
Jarnac is remembered less for the fighting than for one death. Louis de Bourbon, Prince of Condé, a prince of the blood and the military leader of the French Protestants, was killed after he had surrendered, and the manner of it echoed through both camps for years.2
Background: the third war
The French Wars of Religion began in 1562, when partisans of the Catholic Duke of Guise massacred a Protestant congregation gathered for a sermon at Wassy in Champagne. The killing set off a rising in the provinces, and for more than thirty years France was torn between Catholics and Calvinists, between rival noble houses and between a crown that wavered between compromise and repression. Short wars ended in uneasy settlements, in 1563, 1568 and 1570, and each settlement broke down.3
The Edict of Longjumeau of March 1568 ended the second War of Religion and gave the Protestants, the Huguenots, a limited right to worship, but the peace lasted only months. At court the Catholic party around the Cardinal of Lorraine and the Guise family regained the upper hand, and in 1568, warned of a plan to arrest them, Condé and Admiral Gaspard de Coligny fled to the Protestant stronghold of La Rochelle, which they reached in September.4
Later that month the crown answered with the edict of Saint-Maur, which banned Protestant worship and stripped Protestants of royal office; the Musée protestant and Rouget date it to 23 September. Jeanne d'Albret, Queen of Navarre, joined the rebels with her young son Henry, the future Henry IV, and the Huguenots took towns in Poitou and Saintonge. On the other side, Pope Pius V threw his weight behind the crown. When the winter truce ended, a clash with the royal army seemed unavoidable.5
Armies and commanders
The royal army was commanded in name by Henry, Duke of Anjou, the king's younger brother and the future Henry III. In practice he was guided by the veteran soldier Gaspard de Saulx-Tavannes. Its strength is uncertain: the literary historian François Rouget gives 20,000 men for the day of Jarnac, with a question mark, while A. W. Whitehead, following the local historian Gigon, gives it 8,000 horse and 15,000 foot on 8 March.6
The Huguenots were led by Condé, a prince of the blood of the house of Bourbon, and by Coligny, Admiral of France. The war had become an international affair: both sides hired foreign troops, Swiss for the crown and Germans for the Huguenots, and William of Orange, the leader of the Dutch revolt, threw in his lot with the Protestant leaders.7
In the spring of 1569, Thompson and Whitehead write, the Huguenots aimed to link up with the southern Protestant forces of the Viscounts and then turn toward the upper Loire. Their army was gathering around Saint-Jean-d'Angély, and the Charente from Saintes to Angoulême was in Protestant hands. The royal army had wintered at Chinon. Whitehead, following Gigon, has it circle round Angoulême, camp south of the town on 8 March and reach Châteauneuf the following day; there it repaired the bridge.8
The battle in phases
Across the river by night. The Huguenots were dangerously spread out. Coligny, whose vanguard had become the rearguard, gathered it around Bassac, about halfway between Châteauneuf and Jarnac; Condé was at Jarnac. In the night of 12 to 13 March the royal army crossed the Charente by the rebuilt bridge near Châteauneuf and a bridge of boats, while the Huguenot pickets had left their posts for shelter. Aumale has the crossing begin at two in the morning, Whitehead two hours before daybreak.9
The rearguard caught. Coligny had passed on Condé's orders to fall back at dawn, but, according to Aumale, his messengers went astray and the orders arrived late or not at all. The royal army pushed in his rearguard around Vibrac, Bassac and Triac, beating some 400 soldiers in Rouget's count. Aumale writes that La Noue, sent with four cornets to free it, was taken, and that Coligny's brother d'Andelot retook Bassac for a time before being driven out. Unable to break off, Coligny called on Condé for help.10
Three hundred horse. Condé answered the call. The Duc d'Aumale writes that he brought no infantry and no guns, only about 300 horsemen, and that as he was handed his helmet a kick from La Rochefoucauld's horse broke a bone in his leg; he had already hurt an arm in a fall. Rouget also names La Rochefoucauld's horse. Whitehead, following Gigon, gives Condé perhaps 2,000 foot and 1,000 horse in all. Condé charged into a much larger royal force and broke the first squadrons, but he was surrounded. According to Aumale and to the Huguenot account that Whitehead cites, he surrendered to two Catholic gentlemen, Saint-Jean and d'Argence; Aumale has him raise his visor and hold out his gauntlets.11
Turning point: the pistol shot
Moments later Condé was shot in the head with a pistol. The Huguenot account and the Duc d'Aumale name the killer as Montesquiou, the captain of Anjou's guards; Rouget writes that it was perhaps François de Montesquiou, while Whitehead cites the historian Denys d'Aussy's reasons for thinking that Montesquiou did not fire the shot.12
The shot broke the noble code of honor, which spared a prisoner who had given up his sword, and contemporaries judged it differently. Rouget notes that Agrippa d'Aubigné saw it as cowardly cruelty, while Brantôme treated it as an incident of war. Anjou then had Condé's body carried on the back of a donkey, Rouget writes, to the mockery of the crowd.13
With their leader dead, the Huguenots had lost the battle. Only part of their army had been engaged: Aumale writes that most of its infantry never reached the fight and that its artillery was safe in Cognac by evening. The rest of the army fell back to Cognac and Saintes, where Coligny joined the young princes.14
Aftermath
Rouget calls the losses relatively modest, and Aumale judges that they do not seem to have exceeded 400 men, adding that La Noue and Soubise were taken prisoner; but the blow to the Protestant cause was heavy, with many men killed or captured and the loss of its leader. The Protestant leaders regrouped at Tonnay-Charente, where Jeanne d'Albret presented her son Henry to the army, and Whitehead records that an attack by Anjou on Cognac failed. The war went on.15
In Catholic France, Rouget shows, the victory was celebrated with Te Deums across the kingdom, and court poets such as Ronsard and Jean Dorat sang the praises of Anjou, while Huguenot verse mourned Condé and promised that the admiral was still in the saddle. The royal triumph was only complete after the campaign's later battles.16
The summer brought mixed fortunes. Reinforced by German troops, Coligny won a small victory at La Roche-l'Abeille in June and laid siege to Poitiers, which he had to give up in September. On 3 October Anjou and Tavannes caught him at Moncontour and won a crushing victory.17 › Battle of Moncontour, 1569
Even Moncontour did not end the war. Coligny beat a royal force at Arnay-le-Duc in June 1570 and threatened Paris, and in August 1570 the Peace of Saint-Germain gave the Huguenots freedom of conscience, worship where it already existed and four security towns for two years: La Rochelle, Cognac, La Charité-sur-Loire and Montauban. The peace lasted two years, until the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew in August 1572.18
Legacy and memory
For the victor, Jarnac was the start of a career. Anjou's victories at Jarnac and Moncontour made his name as a commander, and in 1572 he became a candidate for the vacant Polish throne. Elected king of Poland in May 1573, he fled the country in June 1574, after his brother Charles IX died, to become king of France as Henry III.19
Coligny, who had escaped Jarnac and led the Protestants for the rest of the war, did not live to see its end. He was murdered in the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew in August 1572, the slaughter that reopened the civil war, and the Wars of Religion dragged on until 1598.20
For the Huguenots the death of Condé was a wound and a beginning. Rouget sets the killing in a cycle of revenge among the great nobles, a Catholic answer to the deaths of the Duke of Guise at Orléans and the Constable of Montmorency at Saint-Denis earlier in the wars. The leadership of the Protestant cause passed to Coligny and, in time, to the boy who had joined the army at La Rochelle, Henry of Navarre, the future Henry IV.21
The battle also lives on in pictures. Within a year or two of the fighting, Jean Perrissin and Jacques Tortorel published a woodcut of the encounter between Cognac and Châteauneuf, the print at the head of this page, which shows Condé being shot, and Rouget notes that Jarnac was important enough to inspire two prints in their series.22
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