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 about 300 horsemen, 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, which John Rickard calls a Catholic victory with little long-term impact, 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 given up his sword, and the manner of it echoed through both camps for years.2
The third war
In September 1568 the crown banned Protestant worship by the edict of Saint-Maur. For the Huguenots it amounted to a declaration of war: Condé and Admiral Gaspard de Coligny withdrew to La Rochelle, and with help from William of Orange they took towns in Poitou and Saintonge. When the winter truce ended, a clash with the royal army seemed unavoidable.3 › Battle of Heiligerlee, 1568
In the spring of 1569 the Huguenots planned to unite their main army with a southern army, the Army of the Viscounts. Condé moved south from Niort to the Charente and held Cognac and the smaller town of Châteauneuf upstream. The royal army, commanded in name by Henry, Duke of Anjou, the king's brother and the future Henry III, and in practice advised by the veteran Marshal Gaspard de Saulx-Tavannes, came south from its winter quarters on the Loire, crossed the Charente upstream at Ruffec and took Châteauneuf, whose bridge it began to repair. Anjou, Rouget notes, was barely eighteen.4
Across the river by night
The Huguenots were dangerously spread out. Coligny and the vanguard were around Bassac, downstream of Châteauneuf; Condé was farther down at Jarnac. On the night of 12 to 13 March the royal army crossed the Charente undetected, by a bridge rebuilt the day before near Châteauneuf. Rouget puts its strength at 20,000, with a question mark.5
When Coligny realized that Anjou was across the river, he ordered his units to fall back toward Condé, but the order was slow to reach them. The royal army pushed in his rearguard around Vibrac, Bassac and Triac, captured La Noue and threatened Coligny's brother d'Andelot. Unable to retreat, Coligny called for help.6
Three hundred horse
Condé answered with the 300 horsemen he had at hand. His arm was in a sling and his leg had just been broken by a kick from a horse, La Rochefoucauld's according to Rouget, yet he led the charge into a much larger royal force. After a sharp fight he was cut off and forced to surrender, raising his visor and handing his sword to a Catholic gentleman.7
Moments later he was shot in the head from behind. Rickard says the killer was possibly Montesquiou, the captain of Anjou's guards; Herodote.net names him as Joseph de Montesquiou, while the literary historian François Rouget gives François de Montesquiou. Rouget notes that contemporaries judged the act differently: Agrippa d'Aubigné as cowardly cruelty, Brantôme as an incident of war. Anjou then had Condé's body carried on the back of a donkey, to the mockery of the crowd.8
Defeat, but not the end
Only the Huguenot cavalry had been engaged. When their infantry came up and saw that the battle was lost, it crossed to the south bank and fell back to Cognac; Coligny escaped west to Saintes. Rouget, who counts about 400 soldiers beaten in the rearguard, calls the losses relatively modest, but the blow to the Protestant cause was heavy, with many men killed or captured and the loss of its leader. Besides La Noue, the Huguenot leaders La Loue and Soubise were taken prisoner.9
Coligny and Jeanne d'Albret, Queen of Navarre, restored the army's spirit; her son Henry, the future Henry IV, was with the Protestant forces. Anjou's siege of Cognac failed and the war went on. Catholic France rang with Te Deums and court poets such as Ronsard and Dorat celebrated Anjou, while Huguenot verse mourned Condé and promised that the admiral was still in the saddle; the royal triumph was only complete after Moncontour in October.10
The name Jarnac had another life. In French a coup de Jarnac is a treacherous or unexpected blow. Herodote.net notes that some historians trace it to Montesquiou's shot, others to a judicial duel fought by the Baron de Jarnac in 1547.11
Notes
A number in the text points to a note; each note names the works that paragraph draws on, listed in full under Sources.
- John Rickard, “Battle of Jarnac, 13 March 1569”; François Rouget, “De bruit et de fureur”. ↩
- John Rickard, “Battle of Jarnac, 13 March 1569”; François Rouget, “De bruit et de fureur”. ↩
- François Rouget, “De bruit et de fureur”; Herodote.net, “13 mars 1569”. ↩
- John Rickard, “Battle of Jarnac, 13 March 1569”; François Rouget, “De bruit et de fureur”. ↩
- John Rickard, “Battle of Jarnac, 13 March 1569”; François Rouget, “De bruit et de fureur”. ↩
- John Rickard, “Battle of Jarnac, 13 March 1569”; François Rouget, “De bruit et de fureur”. ↩
- John Rickard, “Battle of Jarnac, 13 March 1569”; François Rouget, “De bruit et de fureur”; Herodote.net, “13 mars 1569”. ↩
- John Rickard, “Battle of Jarnac, 13 March 1569”; François Rouget, “De bruit et de fureur”; Herodote.net, “13 mars 1569”. ↩
- John Rickard, “Battle of Jarnac, 13 March 1569”; François Rouget, “De bruit et de fureur”. ↩
- John Rickard, “Battle of Jarnac, 13 March 1569”; Herodote.net, “13 mars 1569”; François Rouget, “De bruit et de fureur”. ↩
- Herodote.net, “13 mars 1569”. ↩
Sources
- John Rickard, HistoryOfWar.org, “Battle of Jarnac, 13 March 1569”
- François Rouget, Revue d'histoire du protestantisme 3, no. 3 to 4, 2018, pp. 351 to 373, “De bruit et de fureur: échos poétiques, catholiques et protestants, de la bataille de Jarnac (13 mars 1569)” (in French)
- Herodote.net, “13 mars 1569: les protestants sont défaits à Jarnac” (in French)
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