DU PLESSIS-MORNAY, Philippe (Seigneur du Plessis-Marly)

(1549-1623)

Philippe Du Plessis-Mornay was a French Protestant or Huguenot leader, statesman, political theorist, and prominent spokesman for the Protestant cause during the French Wars of Religion (1562-98). Born in Buhy, Normandy, under his Protestant mother's influence he studied law and Hebrew in Heidelberg and while in Cologne wrote two Remonstrances (1571-72) exhorting the Nether­lands to resist Spanish rule. After his father's death, his family became Protestant in 1559, and after study in Paris and service under de Conde in the Second War of Religion, he escaped the 1572 St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre by fleeing to England. He served over the next decade as a military leader in the Huguenot cause and as a diplomat for William of Orange and Henri de Navarre. He en­couraged and supported the Synods of the French Reformed church and sought a wider union of all Protestant communions under the leadership of James I.* In 1589 he was appointed governor of Saumur, where he built a Protestant church and in 1593 established a Protestant academy. Despite the conversion of Henri IV, to whom he was a counsellor, in 1593, he continued to seek religious toleration and was instrumental in having the Edict of Nantes, guaranteeing religious liberty to Protestants, promulgated in 1598. He engaged in public de­bate with Bishop Jacques Davy Duperron before Henri IV at Fontainebleau on the nature of the Mass in 1600. However, after the renewal of persecution under Louis XIII, he was deprived of his governorship of Saumur and retired to his castle at Poitou, where he died.

Du Plessis-Mornay wrote important political tracts, including Discours au Roi Charles (Discourse to King Charles) and Remonstrances aux estats pour la paix (Remonstrances on the Conditions for Peace, 1572). The most important tract, though its authorship is disputed, was Vindiciae contra tyrannos (A Defense of liberty, 1579), a classical Protestant political tract that posits a contract between the ruler and the ruled and the right of the latter to revolt if the sovereign becomes tyrannical or rejects true religion. He was also an able theologian apol­ogist for the Huguenot cause, publishing while in London in 1578 his Traiteéde l'eéglise (published in English the following year as Treatise on the Church), and in 1579 his De la veériteé de la religion chreétienne appeared in Antwerp (in English in 1587 as Concerning the Truth ofthe Christian Religion). His major theological work was the treatise on the Eucharist, De l'institution, usage, et doctrine du saint sacrement de l'eucharistie en l'eglise ancienne (Concerning the Institution, Usage, and Doctrine of the Holy Sacrament in the early church), which appeared in 1598 and was the occasion for the public debate two years later. In 1611 he published at Saumur his Mysterium iniquitatis seu historia papatus (The Mystery of Iniquity, or History of the Papacy), in which he at­tacked the positions of Caesar Baronis and Robert Bellarmine and which swiftly appeared in French (1611) and English (1612) editions. He was chosen to rep­resent French Protestants at Dort in 1618, but King Louis XIII forbade his attendance.

Bibliography

J. Figgis, Studies of Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius, 1414-1625, 1907. Q. Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 1978.

Iain S. Maclean