Protestant Delegations: 1576-1583

Protestant services had been suspended for four years following St. Bartholomew's Day and the outbreak of another of the wars of religion. A peace treaty in 1576  encouraged an attempt to reconstitute the church. The Catholic town council in the minutes of its Deliberations took worried note in this document of a gathering of 15 to 20 Protestants in the home of a Protestant widow.

“It was reported that fifteen or twenty of the so-called reformed religion met in the house of a widow near the Vert Moisne where they engaged in some readings and prayers without permission…” Deliberations of the Amiens Town Council, Series BB.

The effort to reconstitute the church as an urban ministry gathered steam following the meeting in the unnamed widow's home.  The leaders included a minister Pierre D'Ordes or Despoir, originally from Toulouse but also an exile from Amiens after 1572 and several artisans from Amiens who had been refugees for three to four years in London.

The Protestant spokesperson called before an Assembly of Catholic leaders was Jehan Talle, a wool comber, whose signature I have tried to capture (see #91 and #92 — unluckily there were two wool combers with the same name!). The town council wanted the Protestant delegation to submit a complete list of the persons they claimed to represent. Talle, sensing the objective to gather more intelligence on the community, responded that it would be "too long and tedious to do something like that. Their numbers (he said) were large and continually growing.”

The town councilors for their part commented  that "the bulk of the Protestant membership had returned to the Catholic fold [after 1572 St. Bartholomew]” particuarly  "the richest and most prominent"and that “people were content and did not want to revive old disputes." It is hard to know how entirely accurate this claim was but it is clear that the town councillors were determined to cast the Protestant movement as appealing to "low-class folks" with “nothing to lose."

See the text of this confrontation on the Translations page of the web site toward the end of the page.

Protestant efforts to create an ongoing urban worship space despite the efforts in 1576 and following years fell short.. We hear of services outside the city at Coisy on the estate of a nobleman Guillaume le Grand, two hours on foot north of the city.  Even a meeting outside the city was blocked by the authorities who got the King to agree to the measure by alleging security concerns for a frontier city such as Amiens. In 1581, a Protestant delegation was summoned before the town council where they were essentially commanded not to attend services on the estate of the  d'Heucourt family at Allonville because of the military situation. 

A striking aspect of the document recording this interaction is the unusual  page layout.  The Protestants are listed one per line, with their "qualities" (i.e occupation, social standing) pointedly included:  We see that of the twelve delegates 4 are woolcombers (houppiers) 4 are weavers (sayeteurs), one is a vinegar maker, one a shoemaker and the remaining two have no indicated occupation.The two men whose occupation was not specified were in effect quite creditable merchants, however, the town council was seemingly bent on continuing to cast the Reform adherents as low-class folk "with nothing to lose.”

The signatures of most members of this delegation are included in the exhibit.