Edict of Amboise
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The Edict of Amboise also known as the Edict of Pacification, was signed at the Château of Amboise on 19 March 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[1] and in one suburb of a pre-determined town in each baillage or sénéchaussée.[2]
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, shortly after his thirteenth birthday), 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.
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- ↑ 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.
- ↑ Terms of the Edict of Amboise are discussed in N.M. Sutherland, The Huguenot Struggle for Recognition (New Haven: Yale University Press) 1980:356f.