Huguenots in the context of "Ulster Protestants"

France, officially the French Republic, is a country primarily located in Western Europe. Its overseas regions and territories include French Guiana in South America, Saint Pierre and Miquelon in the North Atlantic, the French West Indies, and many islands in Oceania and the Indian Ocean, giving it the largest discontiguous exclusive economic zone in the world. Metropolitan France shares borders with Belgium and Luxembourg to the north; Germany to the northeast; Switzerland to the east; Italy and Monaco to the southeast; Andorra and Spain to the south; and a maritime border with the United Kingdom to the northwest. Its metropolitan area extends from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean and from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea. Its 18 integral regions—five of which are overseas—span a combined area of 632,702 km (244,288 sq mi) and have an estimated total population of over 68.6 million as of January 2025. France is a semi-presidential republic. Its capital, largest city and main cultural and economic centre is Paris.

Metropolitan France was settled during the Iron Age by Celtic tribes known as Gauls before Rome annexed the area in 51 BC, leading to a distinct Gallo-Roman culture. In the Early Middle Ages, the Franks formed the kingdom of Francia, which became the heartland of the Carolingian Empire. The Treaty of Verdun of 843 partitioned the empire, with West Francia evolving into the Kingdom of France. In the High Middle Ages, France was a powerful but decentralised feudal kingdom, but from the mid-14th to the mid-15th centuries, France was plunged into a dynastic conflict with England known as the Hundred Years' War. In the 16th century French culture flourished during the French Renaissance, and a French colonial empire emerged. Internally, France was dominated by the conflict with the House of Habsburg and the French Wars of Religion between Catholics and Huguenots. France was successful in the Thirty Years' War and further increased its influence during the reign of Louis XIV.

The French Wars of Religion were a series of civil wars between French Catholics and Protestants (called Huguenots) from 1562 to 1598. Between two and four million people died from violence, famine or disease directly caused by the conflict, and it severely damaged the power of the French monarchy. One of its most notorious episodes was the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in 1572. The fighting ended with a compromise in 1598, when Henry of Navarre, who converted to Catholicism in 1593, was proclaimed King Henry IV of France and issued the Edict of Nantes, which granted substantial rights and freedoms to the Huguenots. However, Catholics continued to disapprove of Protestants and of Henry, and his assassination in 1610 triggered a fresh round of Huguenot rebellions in the 1620s.

Tensions between the two religions had been building since the 1530s, exacerbating existing regional divisions, and quests for power among the nobles. The sudden accidental death of Henry II of France in July 1559 initiated a prolonged struggle for power between his widow Catherine de' Medici and powerful nobles. These included a fervently Catholic faction led by the Guise and Montmorency families, and Protestants headed by the House of Condé and the Navarrese queen, Jeanne d'Albret. Both sides received assistance from external powers, with Spain and Savoy supporting the Catholics, and England and the Dutch Republic backing the Protestants.

The Edict of Fontainebleau (18 October 1685, published 22 October 1685) was an edict issued by French King Louis XIV and is also known as the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The Edict of Nantes (1598) had granted Huguenots the right to practice their religion without state persecution. Protestants had lost their independence in places of refuge under Cardinal Richelieu on account of their supposed insubordination, but they continued to live in comparative security and political contentment. From the outset, religious tolerance in France had been a royal, rather than popular, policy.

The lack of universal adherence to his religion did not sit well with Louis XIV's vision of perfected autocracy.

The Edict of Nantes (French: édit de Nantes) was an edict signed in April 1598 by King Henry IV and granted the minority Calvinist Protestants of France, also known as Huguenots, substantial rights in the nation, which was predominantly Catholic.

While upholding Catholicism as the established religion, and requiring the re-establishment of Catholic worship in places it had lapsed, it granted certain religious toleration to the Protestant Huguenots, who had been waging a long and bloody struggle for their rights in France.

The Dragonnades was a policy implemented by Louis XIV in 1681 to force French Protestants known as Huguenots to convert to Catholicism. It involved the billeting of dragoons of the French Royal Army in Huguenot households, with the soldiers being given implied permission to mistreat the inhabitants and damage or steal their possessions. Soldiers employed as part of this policy were derisively referred to as "missionary dragoons".

Henry IV (French: Henri IV; 13 December 1553 – 14 May 1610), also known by the epithets Good King Henry (le Bon Roi Henri) or Henry the Great (Henri le Grand), was King of Navarre (as Henry III) from 1572 and King of France from 1589 to 1610. He was the first monarch of France from the House of Bourbon, a cadet branch of the Capetian dynasty. He pragmatically balanced the interests of the Catholic and Protestant parties in France, as well as among the European states. He was assassinated in Paris in 1610 by a Catholic zealot, and was succeeded by his son Louis XIII.

Henry was baptised a Catholic but raised as a Huguenot in the Protestant faith by his mother, Queen Jeanne III of Navarre. He inherited the throne of Navarre in 1572 on his mother's death. As a Huguenot, Henry was involved in the French Wars of Religion, barely escaping assassination in the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre. He later led Protestant forces against the French royal army. Henry inherited the throne of France in 1589 upon the death of Henry III. Henry IV initially kept the Protestant faith (the only French king to do so) and had to fight against the Catholic League, which refused to accept a Protestant monarch. After four years of military stalemate, Henry converted to Catholicism, reportedly saying that "Paris is well worth a Mass". As a pragmatic politician (politique), he promulgated the Edict of Nantes (1598), which guaranteed religious liberties to Protestants, thereby effectively ending the French Wars of Religion.

The English people are an ethnic group and nation native to England, who speak the English language, a West Germanic language, and share a common ancestry, history, and culture. The English identity began with the Anglo-Saxons, when they were known as the Angelcynn, meaning "Angle kin" or "English people". Their ethnonym is derived from the Angles, one of the Germanic peoples who settled in Britain around the 5th century AD.

The English largely descend from two main historical population groups: the West Germanic tribes, including the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who settled in eastern and southern Britain following the withdrawal of the Western Roman Empire, and the Romano-British Brittonic speakers who already lived there. Collectively known as the Anglo-Saxons, they founded what was to become the Kingdom of England by the 10th century, in response to the invasion and extensive settlement of Danes and other Norsemen that began in the late 9th century. This was followed by the Norman Conquest and limited settlement of Normans in England in the late 11th century and a sizeable number of French Protestants who emigrated between the 16th and 18th centuries. Some definitions of English people include, while others exclude, people descended from later migration into England.