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“FOR WANT OF A NAIL …” “My good man, I am beside myself that if only I had had six cannons and enough ammunition to fire two thousand rounds, this town was ours,” wrote the duke of Guise to Gonnor, later Marshal Cossé, from Orléans on February 7, 1563. After pausing for rest and reorganization after the battle of Dreux, the royal army under his leadership had marched against Orléans and in a swift attack seized the faubourg of Le Portereau, and the Tournelles, the twin towers guarding the bridge which passed over the Loire to the heavily defended island of Les Mottes and thence into the city itself. But despite this initial success the attack was stillborn, for the army's heavy artillery train was missing, mired in a primitive road network made impassable by heavy winter rains. Guise's army would have to wait several weeks before receiving enough of the thirty-odd heavy guns and munitions it would eventually deploy in its preparations for a final assault on the city. But in the meantime the duke himself, mortally wounded by an assassin, would be removed from the scene, leaving the queen mother in a position to negotiate an end to the war and the peaceful surrender of Orléans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE “OLD CREW” In September, 1567, about two weeks before the Huguenot attack on the royal court at Meaux precipitated the second civil war, Melchion Gatico, commissaire extraordinaire des guerres, and Jehan Girard, commis par le roy au conteroolle de ses guerres, conducted musters of two companies of veteran French infantry stationed at the piedmontese fortress city of Pignerol. One of the units was a regular infantry company commanded by the young Count Brissac, colonel general of all French infantry stationed beyond the mountains and son of the recently deceased Marshal Brissac. The other was the garrison company of the citadel of Pignerol, commanded by its governor, Jehan de Monluc, son of the famous Blaise de Monluc, the future marshal of France. Commissioners Gatico and Girard pursued two different purposes at the muster. The first was simply to pay the men of both companies for their service during the previous months of July and August. The second was to compile a roolle signale of each company, that is, a roster containing a detailed individual description of each soldier. An order to compile such rosters had been sent earlier in 1567 to the duke of Nevers, the military governor of French Piedmont, and reissued to the commissioners a week before the muster. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE DIMENSIONS OF CIVIL WAR At first glance, the convulsions of violence that move across France during the Wars of Religion seem to deny the historian's compulsive need to impose patterns of order and meaning. Notwithstanding the title usually given to this period, much of its religious and civil conflict did not take the form of wars waged between conventionally operating military forces, nor were the wars fought exclusively over religious issues. The popular violence associated with persecution, repression, and massacres often did not wait for official declarations of war nor necessarily depend upon the presence or absence of formally organized armies. Even that most spectacular outbreak of violence, the 1572 Saint-Bartholomew's Day massacre, owed almost nothing to the formal military apparatus of the crown beyond the involvement of the king's French and Swiss guards in the killing in Paris. This said, however, the fact remains that during these years of religious conflict formal warfare did come to dominate, both directly and indirectly, much of French life. During Charles IX's reign alone there were five openly declared periods of civil war in which the royal army fought a series of conventional military campaigns against the Huguenots. During those years much of the crown's attention and most of its resources were devoted to waging war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]