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The lower classes are rarely ever the only casualties of war. No matter how far from the frontlines they place themselves, how carefully their bodyguard surrounds them, or how otherwise prudent they are with their own politically valuable lives, the nobility is never fully safe from the strain and misery of battle. Such was unfortunately the case for a great number of the vainglorious French nobility, and it had taken its toll on two very significant individuals, both princes du sang. The first had been Charles de Montpensier, the 3rd duke of Bourbon, who became one of the early casualties of the Third Italian War in 1525 when he broke his neck after his horse was shot out from under him by a Swiss arquebusier at Vesoul. The second would be François d’Angoulême, first in line to the French throne and duke of Valois, who succumbed unexpectedly to a carefully watched wound inflicted by a crossbow bolt at the siege of Thionville in 1546. As the untimely deaths mounted, Charles IX had begun taking greater precautions in preserving his successors (the loss of François d’Angoulême, a man in whom he had much confidence, had left him particularly devastated) by reserving positions of command for the peers of France that were not of the royal male line, but he had been too late in squaring away the French succession and he was powerless to prevent it from becoming a matter of ever greater anxiety. What had made matters even more complicated for the royal succession was a worrying trend in progeny. The cadet branches of the Valois dynasty had been struck in the 16th century by what both contemporary and future historians would refer to as a “plague of daughters.” Between Charles IX and the next three princes du sang in line to the French throne, only one of them had produced a son: the 4th duke of Alençon, Charles. What this meant was that the deaths of Charles de Montpensier and François d’Angoulême had left the 57 year old Charles d’Alençon as the first in line to the French throne. Further uncertainty arrived with the death of Charles de Bourbon, duke of Vendôme and now third in line to the throne, in 1549, which brought his 31 year old son Antoine to his father’s place in the succession.

The natural procession of the two Valois-Alençons - Charles IV and his son - to the French throne seemed fairly secure until the former’s death in 1552. When the League of Fulda and the Hapsburgs had declared their truce at Darmstadt in 1554, the lords of France urgently beseeched Charles IX to agree to a similar truce as soon as possible so that he might reconvene the Estates General for the first time in 68 years. Although Charles IX would agree to establishing such a ceasefire - sending his representatives to Ferdinand von Hapsburg’s camp at Masevaux to declare their observance of the Darmstadt truce - he would not attempt any break with past decades’ tradition and would not convene the Estates General, opting instead to continue scouring the duchy of Lorraine, the Trois-Évêchés, and the Franche-Comte in the hopes that those he might more confidently bring those territories to the negotiation table. Yet Charles IX would never see such negotiations, as he was caught by a sudden spell of tuberculosis and died unexpectedly in his tent outside of Épinal on February 2nd of 1556.


Events at home in the years leading up to this misfortune had made a great many important Frenchmen ill at ease with the thought of a d’Alençon ascendancy. Charles IV d’Alençon’s eldest son by his marriage to Marguerite d’Angoulême, René, had died in 1544 at the age of 18, and as of 1547 the duke was left with a 28 year old daughter, Marguerite, and another son, the 14 year old Charles, both by his second marriage to Marie de Guise. This was a troublesome parentage. Marie was the older sister of François de Guise, the most influential aristocrat in northeastern France and a committed adherent of orthodox Catholicism and active opponent of Protestantism. François de Guise had become more aggressive in his dealings with Protestants as the 1540s and 1550s dragged on, and by Charles IX’s death he had become the leading exemplar of militant Catholicism in France and the de facto leader of its political arm both at court and on the field.

For those likeminded, François de Guise was an ideal representative: a war hero who had suffered facial scarring on the battlefield for his king, and the best of both worlds - both uncompromising in his Catholic faith and unapologetic in his French patriotism. Even amongst his most contemptuous rivals, François de Guise commanded respect, bearing the evidence of the measure of his devotion to the French monarchy on his very face - which he had earned at the siege of Metz. Yet, there was no small number of elites from the highest echelons of French society for whom the whole Guise family posed a serious concern. For one, Protestantism already had an outsized representation amongst the French nobility, and the Guise family's flat refusal to compromise with the Farelards could - if taken up by the younger Charles d’Alençon - easily spell disaster, the defensive resolve of the French Protestants being proven daily in the south of France. Even if he were not so black-and-white in his approach to France's religious issues, François de Guise caused enough alarm with his open ambition and occasionally overbearing attitude, and there were substantial fears of him turning a d’Alençon monarch into his puppet.


During his reign, Charles IX had built up a vigorous old guard that shared his unbridled hatred for the Hapsburgs, and it now held sway in his absence. Centered on the ministers of France and the knighted members of the "Ordre de Saint Eustache" (formed by Charles IX in 1525), this old guard refused to let 14 years of spilled French blood amount to nothing, and, as such, were willing to appoint the closest in line to the throne that would not threaten the war’s continuation - as any less to them would have seemed in essence to be handing the Hapsburgs the keys of Paris. These men would gradually enter into an informal partnership with a number of French nobles, statesmen, and clergymen to form a web of co-conspirators intent on seeing the house of Bourbon climb the throne. This shadow government, known to posterity as “les Arbitres” - the “Arbitrators” - was comprised of such figures as the Cardinal Odet de Coligny, son of the late French general and Seigneur de Châtillon, Gaspard de Coligny, while the rest were primarily close attendants of the deceased king and thus were almost universally soldiers (an unsurprising number of whom were Protestants): Louis, the Bourbon duke of Montpensier, Honorat de Savoie, the marquis of Villars, Louis II d'Orléans, the duke of Longueville, and Jean de Foix, duke of Nemours and son of the late marshal of France, Gaston de Foix. The marshal of France, Blaise de Montluc, would reluctantly fall in with these conspirators later on after much supplication from his crypto-Farelard brother Jean de Montluc. They would find their chief mouthpiece and coordinator in the erudite Michel de l'Hôpital, the Chancellor of France since 1553 who was quick to cooperate in order to earn the trust of France's powerbrokers.

The fears of France’s hitherto ignored Protestants led radical Farelards amongst the nobility and bourgeoisie to make two attempts in 1555 and 1556 to kidnap Charles IV d’Alençon’s son, in order to pressure him and his supporters into ensuring Protestant emancipation should he ascend the throne. While both attempts would be unsuccessful, the Guise family was sufficiently alarmed and took measures to protect the younger d’Alençon, first sending him to François’ brother Claude’s estate in Aumale after the first attempt, then to Joinville after the second, as François wanted the prince close at hand. No word whatsoever was heard of d’Alençon after March of 1556, and, amidst the plague and the rampaging soldiery that followed the collapse of the Masevaux ceasefire, the Arbitres contended that he was either captured or dead.

The laws of succession rather clearly pointed to d’Alençon as the rightful heir to the throne, but his very convenient absence, combined with Antoine de Bourbon’s seniority and the many anxieties concerning a Guise ascendancy (and the effects it would have on relations with France’s Protestant populace and German allies) had allowed a subversion of protocol to take place in April of 1556, with Antoine de Bourbon chosen to succeed Charles IX by an emergency session of the Estates-General which had been largely forced by the Arbitres. Antoine I would ascend the throne with the blessing of the French moderates and Protestants, who would remember the Bourbon monarch as “Antoine le Bon.”


There were a few additional coincidences that Antoine could claim authenticated his kingship. Charles IX had left the front in August of 1545 to convene a military council regarding Spain’s entry into the war and also to make a formal announcement as to who should succeed him, for which he named François d’Angoulême. When François died the very next year, Charles IX was unable to make known his preferred successor until early 1548 when he chose - quite predictably - the elder Charles d’Alençon. Salic law could determine the French succession simply enough, but the choice of a living king carried enormous symbolic weight - so much so, that it played a part in the enormous confusion that followed Charles IX’s death. Antoine had met privately with Charles IX twice before the late king’s death, and there was much speculation as to what the two discussed or if such private audiences implied that Charles IX was preparing Antoine to take the throne. What is more likely, however, is that he was instructing Antoine to merely be a counterweight to the Guise family and their coalition after the late king’s death - something that was perhaps insufficient for Antoine’s conceit and could not disprove the rumors that he had been tapped by Charles IX directly to lead France. On a less significant note, the deceased son of Charles IV d’Alençon, René, had originally been betrothed to François d’Angoulême’s elder daughter, his cousin Madeleine (4 years his senior) - an expected and inoffensive match - but their marriage was never consummated and René’s bride had passed to Antoine de Bourbon, who could now claim an even greater coalescence of royal blood to pass on to his would-be heirs.

However, there were difficulties with Antoine that soon became impossible to dismiss. For one, Antoine was vain and unstable, an emotionally abusive man who was more taken by hunting and dining than attending to the grievous state of his realm. Antoine lived the life of a French duke that never seriously anticipated being king, basking in the delights of the French monarchy while never once appearing in person on the battlefield - a marked departure from his gallant predecessor. Additionally - and more importantly - while Antoine had always declared himself Catholic, his actions seemed to speak otherwise for the more suspicious French Catholics. One of the primary reasons Antoine was put on the throne was due to his moderate approach to dealing with his Protestant subjects (something he had displayed in his highly ecumenical court as duke of Vendôme), an approach which - although preferable to the hardline stance of the Guise family - was even more liberal than that of his predecessor Charles IX. The late Charles, while having turned a blind eye on many a notorious occasion to the goings-on of the emergent Protestant communities of France, often publicly reaffirmed his staunch Catholicism and left no reason to doubt that he considered a permanent Protestant element within the French state to be unthinkable. As the traditional rituals of the king of France’s coronation made explicit the imbrication of the French monarchy and orthodox Catholicism, this was an extremely important tenet of the legitimacy of the French crown bearer, and thus for said crown bearer not to actively pursue the suppression of heresy - whether Protestant or otherwise - was to call his own right to the throne into question. There is no reason to believe that François de Guise or his cohorts ever openly challenged Antoine de Bourbon’s accession in any measure , and although they might have liked for him to denounce Protestantism more immediately and decisively, they seem to have been willing to cooperate with Charles IX’s successor. There was still common ground to be found amidst these parties in their desire for stability and their hatred of the Hapsburgs, but this was about to change.

While favored by many, if not most, of his own subjects, Antoine was decided to be an unacceptable successor to Charles IX for both Juan Pelayo and Charles V. Antoine’s unwillingness to end the war was exasperating enough for the Hapsburg emperor, especially with French forces in the north fighting uphill to keep Hapsburg forces from routing them completely. For Juan Pelayo, better terms could always be pursued and re-entry into southern France would be easy enough. Additionally, Henry II of Navarra had died a harried refugee in 1552, leaving behind no children of his own and passing his kingdom by law to his sister Isabel d’Albret, the second queen of Charles IX (allowing the French monarch to enjoy the title of “King Consort of Navarre” for the short years that remained to him). This meant that, by 1556, Charles IX’s youngest child, the 14 year old Jeanne, was both a yet unmarried daughter of the most recent king of France and the heir apparent to the kingdom of Navarra. Antoine had all but made it publicly known that he intended to make the young Jeanne his bride (if not for his pesky living wife, Madeleine), most certainly to see if she could provide him with a much needed son. For obvious geopolitical reasons, Juan Pelayo could not afford to let Navarra fall back into the sphere of France, especially not when Spaniards had bled and died to attain it and when France’s de facto monarch gave the Spanish crown such unease.

The Parisian mob had definitively embraced militant Catholicism by the mid 1530s - owed partly to the Italian links afforded to Paris by the French monarchy’s expansionism in the earlier part of the century, which brought the counter-Protestant movement to the city sooner than elsewhere. By the time of Antoine’s coronation, the Parisians had long since taken matters into their own hands in expelling the city’s Protestants by force and burning their literature, effectively driving the only traces of Protestantism that remained into the catacombs. Paris thus formed the most immediate and hostile source of scrutiny for the new, religiously ambivalent king, and the overwhelming tide of popular devotion would eventually have dire consequences for him. Further afield, Farelards were beginning to make up a disproportionate share of the French military at all levels during the late 1550s, a conversion process accelerated by both the austerities of army life and by hatred for the Hapsburgs and Spanish. By late 1558, virtually all of Antoine’s Protestant officers had begun threatening mutiny unless they were to receive a royal safeguard against the escalating accusations and aggressions of their Catholic comrades. On the advice of Blaise de Montluc - who was desperately trying to control the fallout of France’s northeastern front - Antoine announced in October of 1559 a set of strictures prohibiting violence and unprovoked acts of malice between soldiers of the crown under pain of death.

This proclamation, the “Peace of Sens,” was enforceable in only a handful of cases and on the ground was too little, too late. While it provided the Farelards a brief reconciliation with the crown and returned their willingness to continue fighting, it was predictably less well-received by others. In early November of 1559, while proceeding from mass one Sunday morning in Paris, Antoine’s carriage was mobbed by a large and unruly gathering of Catholic zealots. While he and his cavalcade would manage to maneuver past the crowd with a little difficulty, Antoine decided that it might be best for him to withdraw to Fontainebleau to let matters subside. They would not subside quickly enough, however. While out hunting one early afternoon a week after the incident in Paris, someone nearby fired off a wheellock pistol, the sudden ruckus of which sent Antoine’s horse into a panic, tossing the king violently down the wooded slope and into the side of a tree. Antoine would be brought back to his palace unconscious, the beginning of a coma in which he would linger for two months before finally breathing his last, sonless. Whether or not the gunman was a member of Antoine’s hunting party or a complete stranger was never determined, nor was his possible affiliation with the Hapsburgs or dissenters amongst the French nobility. An emissary from Charles V would arrive at Paris a few short weeks later, to inform the gentlemen of the French realm that Charles V d'Alençon was alive and well; what is more, he was a prisoner of the emperor's in Besançon.