_Rise of the Guises--Huguenot and Catholic--the Massacre of St.
Bartholomew_
"Beware of Montmorency and curb the power of the Guises," was the
counsel of the dying Francis to his son. Henry II., dull and
heavy-witted that he was, neglected the advice, and the Guises
flourished in the sun of royal favour. The first Duke of Guise and
founder of his renowned house was Claude, a poor cadet of Rene II.,
Duke of Lorraine. He succeeded in allying by marriage his eldest son
and successor, Francis, to the House of Bourbon; his second son,
Charles, became Cardinal of Lorraine, and his daughter, wife to James
V. of Scotland. Duke Francis, by his military genius and wise
statesmanship; Charles, by his learning and subtle wit, exalted their
house to the lofty eminence it enjoyed during the stirring period that
now opens. In 1558, after the disastrous defeat of Montmorency at St.
Quentin, when Paris lay at the mercy of the Spanish and English
armies, the duke was recalled from Italy and made Lieutenant-General
of the realm. By a short and brilliant campaign, he expelled the
English from Calais, and recovered in three weeks the territory held
by them for more than two hundred years. Francis gained an unbounded
popularity, and rose to the highest pinnacle of success; but short
time was left to his royal master wherein to enjoy a reflected glory.
On the 27th June 1559, lists were erected across the Rue St. Antoine,
between the Tournelles and the Bastille. The peace with Spain, and the
double marriage of the king's daughter to Philip II. of Spain and of
his sister to the Duke of Savoy, were to be celebrated by a
magnificent tournament in which the king, proud of his strength and
bodily address, was to hold the field with the Duke of Guise and the
princes against all comers. For three days the king distinguished
himself by his triumphant prowess, and at length challenged the Count
Montgomery de Lorge, captain of the Scottish Guards; the captain
prayed to be excused, but the king insisted and the course was run.
Several lances were broken, but in the last encounter, the stout
captain failed to lower his shivered lance quickly enough, and the
broken truncheon struck the royal visor, lifted it and penetrated the
king's eye. Henry fell senseless and was carried to the palace of the
Tournelles, where he died after an agony of eleven days. Fifteen years
later, Montgomery was captured fighting with the Huguenots, and
beheaded on the Place de Greve while Catherine de' Medici looked on
"_pour gouter_," says Felibien quaintly, "_le plaisir de se voir
vangee de la mort de son mary_." The tower in the interior of the
Palais de Justice, where the unhappy Scottish noble was imprisoned
after his capture, was known as the Tour Montgomery, until demolished
in the reign of Louis XVI. There was, however, little love lost
between Henry's queen, Catherine de' Medici, and her royal husband,
who had long neglected her for the maturer charms of his mistress,
Diane de Poitiers.
[Illustration: WEST WING OF LOUVRE BY PIERRE LESCOT.]
Henry saw Lescot's admirable design for the reconstruction of the west
wing of the Louvre completed. The architect had associated a famous
sculptor, Jean Goujon, with him, who executed the beautiful figures in
low relief which still adorn the quadrangle front between the Pavilion
de l'Horloge and the south-west angle, and the noble Caryatides, which
support the musicians' gallery in the Salle Basse, or Grande Salle of
Charles V.'s Louvre, now known as the Salle des Caryatides. The
agreement, dated 5th September 1550, awards forty-six livres each for
the four plaster models and eighty crowns each for the four carved
figures. Lescot preserved the external wall of the old chateau as the
kernel of his new wing, and the enormous strength of the original
building of Philip Augustus may be estimated by the fact that the
embrasures of each of the five casements of the first floor looking
westwards now serve as offices. So _grandement satisfait_ was Henry
with the perfection of Lescot's work, that he determined to continue
it along the remaining three wings, that the court of the Louvre might
be a _cour non-pareille_. The south wing was, however, only begun when
his tragic death occurred, and the present inconsequent and huge
fabric is the work of a whole tribe of architects, whose intermittent
activities extended over the reigns of nine French sovereigns.
Lescot and Goujon were also associated in the construction of the most
beautiful Renaissance fountain in Paris, the Fontaine des Innocents,
which formerly stood against the old church of the Innocents at the
corner of the Rue aux Fers. It was while working on one of the figures
of this fountain that Jean Goujon is traditionally said to have been
shot as a Huguenot during the massacre of St. Bartholomew.[111]
[Footnote 111: A document recently discovered at Modena however,
proves that Goujon, after the massacre of Vassy, fled to Italy with
other Protestants and died in obscurity at Bologna.]
[Illustration: TRITONS AND NEREIDS FROM THE OLD FONTAINE DES
INNOCENTS. _Jean Goujon._]
Europe was now in travail of a new era, and unhappy France reeled
under the tempest of the Reformation. A daring spirit of enquiry and
of revolt challenged every principle on which the social fabric had
been based, and the only refuge in the coming storm in France was the
Monarchy. Never had its power been more absolute. The king's will was
law--a harbour of safety, indeed, if he were strong and wise and
virtuous: a veritable quicksand, if feeble and vicious. And to
pilot the state of France in these stormy times, Henry II. left a
sickly progeny of four princes, miserable puppets, whose favours were
disputed for thirty years by ambitious and fanatical nobles, queens
and courtesans.
Francis II., a poor creature of sixteen years, the slave of his wife
Marie Stuart and of the Guises, was called king of France for
seventeen months. He it was who sat daily by Mary in the royal garden,
on the terrace at Amboise overlooking the Loire, and, surrounded by
his brothers and the ladies of the court, gazed at the revolting and
merciless executions of the Protestant conspirators,[112] who, under
the Prince of Conde, had plotted to destroy the Guises and to free the
king from their influence. It was the first act in a horrible drama, a
dread pursuivant of the civil and religious wars which were to
culminate in the massacre of St. Bartholomew at Paris. The stake was a
high one, for the victory of the reformers would sound the death-knell
of the Catholic cause in Europe. There is little reason to doubt that
the queen-mother, Catherine de' Medici, who now emerges into
prominence, was genuinely sincere in her disapproval of the horrors of
Amboise, and in her efforts to bring milder counsels to bear in
dealing with the Huguenots whom she feared less than the Guises; but
the fierce passions roused by civil and religious hatred were
uncontrollable. When the Huguenot noble, Villemongis, was led to the
scaffold at Amboise, he dipped his hands in the blood of his
slaughtered comrades, and, lifting them to heaven, cried: "Lord,
behold the blood of Thy children; Thou wilt avenge them." It has been
truly said that the grass soon grows over blood, shed on the
battle-field; never over blood shed on the scaffold. Treachery and
assassination were the interludes of plots and battles, and the
thirst for vengeance during thirty years was never slaked. In 1563 the
Duke of Guise was shot in the back by a fanatical Huguenot, and as the
wounded Prince of Conde was surrendering his sword to the Duke of
Anjou after the defeat of 1569, the Baron de Montesquieu, _brave et
vaillant gentilhomme_, says Brantome, rode up, exclaiming: "Mort Dieu!
kill him! kill him!" and blew out the wounded captive's brains with a
pistol shot.
[Footnote 112: One thousand two hundred are said to have suffered
death during the month of vengeance.]
The treaty of St. Germain, which has so often been charged on
Catherine as an act of perfidy, was rather an imperative necessity, if
respite were to be had from the misery into which the land had fallen.
Its conditions were honourably carried out, and Catholic excesses were
impartially and severely repressed. Charles IX., who was now twenty
years of age and strongly attached to Coligny, began to assert his
independence of the queen-mother and of the Guises,[113] and his first
movement was in the direction of conciliation. The young king offered
the hand of his fair sister, Princess Marguerite, to Henry of Navarre,
and received the Admiral and Jeanne of Navarre with much honour at
court. Pressure was brought to bear upon him, but, pope or no pope,
said Charles, he was determined to conclude the marriage and himself
would take Margot by the hand in open church and give her away. The
party of the Guises, and especially Paris, were furious. The capital,
with the provost, the Parlement, the university, the prelates, the
religious orders, had always been hostile to the Huguenots. The people
could with difficulty be restrained at times from assuming the office
of executioners as Protestants were led to the stake. Any one who did
not uncover as he passed the image of the Virgin at the street
corners, or who omitted to bend the knee as the Host was carried by,
was attacked as a Lutheran. When the heralds published the peace with
the Huguenots at the crossways of Paris, filth and mud were thrown at
them, and they went in danger of their lives: now Coligny and his
Huguenots were holding their heads high in Paris, proud and insolent
and a heretic prince of Navarre was to wed the king's sister.
[Footnote 113: Henry of Guise had succeeded to the dukedom after his
father's assassination.]
Jeanne of Navarre died soon after her arrival at court,[114] but the
alliance was hurried on. The betrothal took place in the Louvre, and
on Sunday, 17th August 1572, a high dais was erected outside Notre
Dame for the celebration of the marriage. When the ceremony had been
performed by the Cardinal de Bourbon, Henry conducted his bride to the
choir of the cathedral, and went walking in the bishop's garden while
mass was sung. The office ended, he returned and led his wife to the
bishop's palace to dinner, and a magnificent state supper at the
Louvre concluded this momentous day. Three days of balls, masquerades
and tourneys followed, amid the murmuring of a sullen populace. These
were the _noces vermeilles_--the red nuptials--of Marguerite of France
and Henry of Navarre.
[Footnote 114: Suspicions of poison were entertained by the Huguenots.
Jeanne, in a letter to the Marquis de Beauvais, complained that holes
were made in her rooms and wardrobes that she might be spied upon.]
Meanwhile Catherine and Charles had differed on a matter of foreign
policy. Her support of the Prince of Orange against Spain in the
Netherlands was conditional on an alliance with England and the
marriage of her son the Duke of Alencon with Elizabeth. But the
English Queen's habitual duplicity made any reliance on her word
impossible and when Marie learned that Elizabeth, while professing her
inclination for the Duke and her desire to aid the Protestant cause
in Flanders, was protesting to her Council that she would never marry
a boy with a pock-spoiled face, and was in secret communication with
Alva, to turn the situation to her own profit, she flung herself into
Guise's arms and abandoned Coligny and the Huguenots: for the
disastrous defeat of the Protestants at Mons and the growing fury of
the Catholic fanatics at Paris, threatened to wreck the throne, and
while Elizabeth was toying with these tremendous issues the furies
were let loose. Charles still chivalrously determined to stand by
Coligny. Catherine, terrified at the result of her own work, and
resolved to regain her ascendency, conspired with her third son, the
Prince of Anjou, the future Henry III., to destroy and have done with
the Protestants. Coligny had often been warned of the danger he would
run in Paris, but the stout old soldier knew no fear, and came to take
part in the festivities of the wedding. The sounds of revelry had
barely died away when Coligny, who was returning from the Louvre, by
the east gate, the Porte Bourbon, to his hotel, walking slowly and
reading a petition, was fired at from a window as he passed the
cloister of St. Germain l'Auxerrois, and wounded in the arm. He
stopped and noted the house whence the smoke came: it was the house of
the preceptor of the Duke of Guise. The king was playing at tennis
when the news reached him: he flung down his racquet, exclaiming,
"What! shall I never be in peace? must I suffer new trouble every
day?" and went moody and pensive to his chamber. In a few moments the
Prince of Conde and Henry of Navarre burst in, uttering indignant
protests, and begged permission to leave Paris. Charles assured them
he would do justice, and that they might safely remain: in the
afternoon he went with his mother and the princes to visit the
admiral. The king asked to be left alone in the wounded man's chamber,
remained a long time with him, and protesting that though the wound
was his friend's, the grief was his own, swore to avenge him.
Coligny once again was warned by his friends to beware of the court,
but he refused to distrust Charles. Many and conflicting are the
reports of what followed. We shall not be accused of any Protestant
bias if we base our story mainly on that of the two learned
Benedictine priests[115] who are responsible for five solid tomes of
the _Histoire de la Ville de Paris_. On the morrow of the attempt on
Coligny's life, the queen-mother invited Charles and his brother of
Anjou to walk, after dinner, in the garden of her new palace in the
Tuileries:[116] they were joined by the chief Catholic leaders, and a
grand council was held. The queen dwelt on the perilous situation of
the monarchy and the Catholic cause, and urged that now was the time
to act: Coligny lay wounded; Navarre and Conde were in their power at
the Louvre; for ten Huguenots in Paris the Catholics could oppose a
thousand armed men; rid France of the Huguenot chiefs and a formidable
evil were averted. Her course was approved, but the leaders shrank
from including the two princes of Navarre and Conde: they were to be
given their choice--recantation or death. By order of the king 12,000
arquebusiers were placed along the river and the streets, and arms
were carried into the Louvre. The admiral's friends, alarmed at the
sinister preparations, protested to Charles but were reassured and
told to take Cosseins and fifty arquebusiers to guard his house. The
provost of Paris was then summoned by the Duke of Guise and ordered to
arm and organise the citizens and proceed to the Hotel de Ville at
midnight. The king, Guise said, would not lose so fair an opportunity
of exterminating the Huguenots. The Catholic citizens were to tie a
piece of white linen on their left arm and place a white cross in
their caps that they might be recognised by their friends. At midnight
the windows of their houses were to be illuminated by torches, and at
the first sound of the great bell at the Palais de Justice the bloody
work was to begin. Meanwhile Catherine, doubtful of Charles, repaired
to his chamber with Anjou and her councillors to fix his wavering
purpose; she heaped bitter reproaches upon him, worked on his fears
with stories of a vast Huguenot conspiracy and hinted that cowardice
prevented him from seizing the fairest opportunity that God had ever
offered, to free himself from his enemies. She repeated an Italian
prelate's vicious epigram: "_Che pieta lor ser crudel, che crudelta
lor ser pietosa_,"[117] and concluded by threatening to leave the
court with the Duke of Anjou rather than witness the destruction of
the Catholic cause. Charles, who had listened sullenly, and, if we may
believe Anjou, for a long while angrily refused to sacrifice Coligny,
was at length stung by the taunt of cowardice and broke into a
delirium of passion; he swore by _la mort dieu_ to compass the death
of every Huguenot in France, that none might be left to reproach him
afterwards.
[Footnote 115: Felibien and Lobineau, 1725.]
[Footnote 116: Catherine was accustomed to treat of important state
matters requiring absolute secrecy in her new garden. The
_pourparlers_ between her and Lord Buckhurst, relative to the proposed
marriage of Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Anjou, took place under
the trees in the Tuileries garden.]
[Footnote 117: "That to show pity was to be cruel to them: to be cruel
to them was to show pity."]
[Illustration: CATHERINE DE' MEDICI.
_French School, 16th Century._]
Catherine gave him no time for farther vacillation. The great bell of
St. Germain l'Auxerrois was rung, and at two in the morning of Sunday,
St. Bartholomew's Day, 24th August 1572, the Duke of Guise and his
followers issued forth to do their Sabbath morning's work. Cosseins
saw his leader coming and knew what was expected of him. Guise, who
believed the blood of his murdered father lay on Coligny's head,
made sure of his vengeance. The admiral's door was forced, his
servants were poignarded, and Besme, a German in the service of Guise,
followed by others, burst into his room. The old man stood erect in
his _robe de chambre_, facing his murderers. "Art thou the admiral?"
demanded Besme. "I am he," answered Coligny with unfaltering voice
and, gazing steadily at the naked sword pointed at his breast, added,
"Young man, thou shouldst show more respect to my white hairs; yet
canst thou shorten but little my brief life." For answer he was
pierced by Besme's sword and stabbed to death by his companions. Guise
stood waiting in the street below and the body was flung down to him
from the window. He wiped the blood from the old man's face, looked at
it, and said, "It is he!" Spurning the body with his foot he cried,
"Courage, soldiers! we have begun well; now for the others, the king
commands it." Meanwhile the bell of the Palais de Justice, answering
that of St. Germain, was booming forth its awful summons, and the
citizens hastened to perform their part.
All the Huguenot nobles dwelling near the admiral were pitilessly
murdered, and a similar carnage took place at the Louvre. Marguerite,
the young bride of Navarre, in her Memoirs, tells of the horrors of
that morning, how, when half-asleep, a wounded Huguenot nobleman
rushed into her chamber, pursued by four archers, and flung himself on
her bed imploring protection, followed by a captain of the guard from
whom she gained his life. She entreated the captain to lead her to her
sister's room, and as she fled thither, more dead than alive, another
fugitive was hewn down by a hallebardier only three paces from her;
she fell fainting in the captain's arms. Meanwhile Charles, the
queen-mother, and Anjou, after the violent scene in the king's
chamber, had lain down for two hours' rest and then went to a window
which overlooked the _basse-cour_ of the Louvre, to see the "beginning
of the executions." If we may believe Henry's story, they had not been
there long before the sound of a pistol shot filled them with dread
and remorse, and a messenger was sent to bid Guise spare the admiral
and stay the whole undertaking; but the nobleman who had been sent
returned saying that Guise had told him it was too late: the admiral
was dead, and the executions had begun all over the city. A dozen
Protestant nobles of the suites of Conde and Navarre, who at the
king's invitation had taken up their quarters in the Louvre, were
seized; one was even dragged from a sick-bed: all were taken to the
courtyard and hewn in pieces by the Swiss guards under the eyes of
Charles, who cried: "Let none escape." Meantime the Catholic leaders
had been scouring the streets on horseback, shouting to the people
that a Huguenot conspiracy to murder the king had been discovered, and
that it was the king's wish that all the Huguenots should be
destroyed.
A list of the Huguenots in Paris had been prepared and all their
houses marked. None was spared. Old and young, women and children,
were pitilessly butchered. All that awful Sunday the orgy of slaughter
and pillage went on; every gate of the city had been closed and the
keys brought to the king. Night fell and the carnage was not stayed.
Two days yet and two nights the city was a prey to the ministers of
death, and some Catholics, denounced by personal enemies, were
involved in the massacre. The resplendent August sun, the fair sky and
serene atmosphere were held to be a divine augury, and a white thorn
in the cemetery of the Innocents blooming out of season was hailed as
a miracle and a visible token from God that the Catholic religion was
to blossom again by the destruction of the Huguenots. The murders did
not wholly cease until September. Various were the estimates of the
slain--20,000, 5,000, 2,000. A goldsmith named Cruce went about
displaying his robust arm and boasting that he had accounted for 400
Huguenots. The streets, the front of the Louvre, the public places
were blocked by dead bodies; tumbrils[118] were hired to throw them
into the Seine, which literally for days ran red with blood.
[Footnote 118: The municipality gave presents of money to the archers
who had taken part in the massacre, to the watermen who prevented the
Huguenots from crossing the Seine, and to grave-diggers for having
buried in eight days about 1,100 bodies.]
[Illustration: PETITE GALERIE OF THE LOUVRE.]
The princes of Navarre and Conde saw the privacy of their chambers
violated by a posse of archers on St. Bartholomew's morning; they were
forced to dress and were haled before the king, who with a fierce look
and glaring eyes, swore at them, reproached them for waging war upon
him, and ordered them to change their religion. On their refusal he
grew furious with rage, and by dint of threats wrung from them a
promise to go to mass.
Charles is said to have stood at a window in the Petite Galerie of the
Louvre and to have fired across the river with a long arquebus on some
Huguenots who, being lodged on the southern side, in the Huguenot
quarter, known as _la petite Geneve_, had escaped massacre, and were
riding up to learn what was passing. The statement is much canvassed
by authorities. It is at least permissible to doubt the assertion,
since the first floor[119] of the Petite Galerie, where the king is
traditionally believed to have placed himself, was not in existence
before the time of Henry IV. If the ground floor be meant, a further
difficulty arises from the fact that the southern end was not
furnished with a window in Charles IX.'s time.
[Footnote 119: Now known as the Galerie d'Apollon.]
On the 26th of August the king was forced to avow responsibility
before the Parlement for measures which he alleged had been necessary
to suppress a Huguenot insurrection aiming at the assassination of
himself and the royal family and the destruction of the Catholic
religion in France. The ears of the Catholic princes of Europe and of
the pope were abused by this specious lie; they believed that the
Catholic cause had been saved from ruin; the so-called victory was
hailed with transports of joy, and a medal was struck in Rome to
celebrate the defeat of the Huguenots.[120]
[Footnote 120: _Ugonottorum strages._ Inscription on the obverse of
the medal.]
Such was the massacre of St. Bartholomew in Paris. The death-roll of
the victims is known to the Recording Angel alone. It was a tremendous
folly no less than an indelible crime, for it steeled the heart of
every Protestant to avenge his slaughtered brethren. To "take Paris
justice" became synonymous with assassination all over Protestant
Europe.
Many of the Huguenot leaders escaped from Paris while the soldiers
sent to despatch them were pillaging, and the flames of civil strife
burst forth fiercer than ever. The court had prepared for massacre,
not for war; and while the king was receiving the felicitations of the
courts of Spain and Rome, he was forced by the Peace of La Rochelle to
concede liberty of conscience to the Protestants and to restore their
sequestered estates and offices. After two years of agony of mind and
remorse, Charles IX. lay dying of consumption, abandoned by all save
his faithful Huguenot nurse. The blood flowing from his nostrils
seemed a token of God's wrath; and moaning "Ah! _ma mie_, what
bloodshed! what murders! I am lost! I am lost!" the poor crowned
wretch passed to his account. He had not yet reached his twenty-fourth
year.