Edict of Amboise

The Edict of Amboise was signed at the Château of Amboise on March 19, 1563 by Catherine de' Medici, acting as regent for her son Charles IX of France. The treaty officially ended the first phase of the French Wars of Religion. Moreover, the treaty restored peace to France by guaranteeing the Huguenots religious privileges and freedoms.

Though the Edict was not as generous as the Edict of Saint-Germain (January 1562), it still allowed open and unregulated Protestant services in the private households of nobles [Part of the Catholic establishment's fear of Calvinism was as an agent of radical grass-roots reforms (see Jonathan Powis, "Order, religion, and the magistrates of a provincial parlement in sixteenth-century France", "Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte" 81 [1980:180-96] ). A noble household could be assumed to have a moderating influence.] and in one suburb of a pre-determined town in each "baillage" or "sénéchaussée". [Terms of the Edict of Amboise are discussed in N.M. Sutherland, "The Huguenot Struggle for Recognition" (New Haven: Yale University Press) 1980:356f.]

The Parlement of Paris, which had expelled its Huguenot members, resisted registering the Edict—as did the provincial parlements— but capitulated after remonstrances, adding the proviso that the Edict was to have limited application until the King should achieve his majority, when a national council would decide the religious question. When the King announced his majority (17 August 1563, at the beginning of his fourteenth year), he chose the provincial Parlement of Rouen as the unprecedented site of his "lit de justice" and published at the same time a more comprehensive version of the Edict.

ee also

*List of treaties
*French Wars of Religion

Notes

External links

* [http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09209b.htm Catholic Encyclopedia: Michael de L'Hospital]