‘Huguenot Networks’ by Penny Roberts review

Jean Tivinat was out of the house when the authorities seized his suspicious basket of cheese. Tivinat, a merchant, was preparing to travel from Dieppe to London in early May 1570. It was a journey he had undertaken four or five times over the previous two years but this time it wasn’t going to happen. A quick rummage through the fromage revealed concealed bundles of letters which he was due to carry across the Channel to the community of exiled French Protestants living in England. Tivinat was taken to the Château de Dieppe, where he was subjected to interrogation as the authorities scrambled to identify the authors and recipients of the letters – and to sift them for evidence of conspiracy and espionage.

Huguenot Networks begins with Penny Roberts’ discovery of the manuscript record of Tivinat’s interrogation in the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris. It proceeds outwards from the interrogation room in Dieppe where Tivinat was grilled by Michel Vialar, the president of the parlement of Rouen who seems to have had a knack for alienating all sides, both Protestant and Catholic: he complained in one letter that ‘it is unreasonable that I should be so hated and little loved’. As the gateway to England and its exiled French community, Dieppe was in the grip of the febrile religious politics of 16th-century Normandy.

Perhaps the most prominent member of London’s French community was Odet de Coligny, the cardinal de Châtillon. Brother of the Huguenot commander Gaspard de Coligny and a former patron of literary superstars Ronsard and Rabelais, Châtillon was excommunicated by the pope in 1563, married in 1564, and went into exile in 1568. From his home near Richmond he served as a kind of unofficial Huguenot ambassador to Elizabeth’s court, offering the queen’s advisers a steady supply of political intelligence and French wine. Many of the letters Tivinat carried were to be delivered to Châtillon at Richmond, with some to be sent onwards from there to other Huguenots in England.

Tivinat was just a postman: his frustrated interrogator came to realise that the merchant wasn’t lying when he said that he knew nothing about the contents of the letters. The French authorities really needed to unmask the mysterious ‘man named Changy’ – sometimes signing himself ‘SM’ – who had given Tivinat the letters and written many of them himself. Changy emerges from Tivinat’s packets as an important broker of information and intelligence in an international Huguenot network. It’s a cliché to describe careful archival scholarship as detective work, but in this case it’s fair, since Roberts succeeds where Tivinat’s interrogators failed and has produced a secure identification for Changy: the minister Hugues de Regnard, seigneur de Saint-Martin.

By reconstructing, as far as possible, the contents of Tivinat’s packets and the network they illuminate, Roberts shows that Saint-Martin was one of a number of ministers who shared information throughout the Huguenot international, from London to Switzerland, Germany, and the Netherlands. The French authorities only transcribed the letters with contents that concerned them, but the copied letters which survive range from personal updates and theological controversies to news on diplomatic negotiations. The correspondents operated ‘underground, and in disguise, like a shadow network feeding intelligence and information to, and liaising between, the leaders of their cause’. Through tracking senders and recipients before and after the interrogation of this packet, Roberts shows how they were implicated in international alliance-building, while arguing convincingly that people such as Saint-Martin were essential in creating a sense of purpose among the exiled Huguenot diaspora.

Clandestine correspondence was a risky business: couriers were arrested and even executed, while the English diplomat Nicholas Throckmorton complained that one of his messengers had been ‘spoiled and robbed by the way and was stripped stark naked to have been thrown in the river to be drowned if he had not escaped their fury by swimming’. Remarkably, Saint-Martin, the figure at the heart of the Châtillon correspondence network, seems never to have been unmasked by the authorities. Others were not so lucky. Edmund Mather, a courier used by the English ambassador to Paris, was found to have betrayed Huguenot secrets to the French, and English secrets to the supporters of Mary Queen of Scots. A letter places Mather in Dieppe in early 1570, raising the possibility that he may have betrayed Tivinat and his cache of letters that spring. After he had been executed for treason in 1571, one English observer wrote: ‘God send grace that there be no more Mathers.’

The arrest of Tivinat at Dieppe took place at a charged moment in Europe’s religious wars. In France, where wars of religion had raged intermittently across the previous decade and much of the period 1567-70 was marked by intense violence, a fragile peace was in the air, and it seemed as though negotiations might result in a more lasting break in conflict. An edict of peace was duly published in August 1570 and the cardinal of Châtillon began to pack up his London household in preparation to travel home to France. His and his wife’s ill-health delayed their crossing, and he died in Canterbury in March of the following year. In 1572 the cardinal’s brother, Gaspard de Coligny, would become the first victim of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and the orgy of violence which followed, decapitating the Huguenot movement and signalling a bloody new phase of the conflict.

From a single interrogation document, through the transcriptions of some of the letters which were preserved by the French authorities, Roberts maps that moment in Huguenot history balanced between hope and disaster. This microhistory of one moment in the French wars of religion and Europe’s confessional politics gives us the whole Huguenot world in one bag of letters. 

• Huguenot Networks: Truth and Secrecy in Sixteenth-Century Europe
  Penny Roberts
  Cambridge University Press, 264pp, £95
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

John Gallagher is Associate Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Leeds.