There is not time to tell the story of the events leading up to that
fateful night, August 24, 1572. Impelled always by her fear and dread
of the Guises, Catharine had been vacillating in her policy with the
Huguenots. Charles IX. was now King: impressible, easily influenced,
yet stubborn, intractable, incoherent, passionate, and unreliable;
sometimes inclining to the Guises, sometimes to Coligny and the
Huguenots, and always submitting at last after vain struggle to his
imperious mother's will, in her efforts to free him from both. We see
in him a weak character, not naturally bad, torn to distraction by the
cruel forces about him, who when compelled to yield, as he always did
in the end, to that terrible woman, would give way to fits of impotent
rage against the fate which allowed him no peace.
A time arrived when Catharine feared the influence of the Protestant
Coligny more than the Guises. Brave, patriotic, magnetic, he had
succeeded in winning Charles' consent to declare war against Spain.
Philip II. of Spain was Catharine's son-in-law and closest ally. Her
entire policy would be undermined. At all hazards Coligny must be
gotten rid of. The young King of Navarre, adored leader of the
Protestants, was a constant menace; he too must in some way be disposed
of.
There were sinister conferences with Philip of Spain and with his
Minister, that incarnation of cruelty and of the Inquisition, the Duke
of Alva.
God knows France was not guiltless in what followed; but the
initiative, the inception of the horrid deed, was not French. It was
conceived in the brain of either this Italian woman or her Spanish
adviser and co-conspirator, the Duke of Alva. We will never know the
inside history of the massacre of St. Bartholomew. It must ever remain
a matter of conjecture just how and when it was planned, but the
probabilities point strongly one way.
Charles was to be gradually prepared for it by his mother, the plot
revealed to him as he was in condition to bear it; by working upon his
fears, his suspicions, by stories of plottings against his life and his
kingdom, to infuriate him, and then--before his rage was exhausted--to
act. The marriage of Charles' sister Margaret with the young
Protestant leader Henry of Navarre, with its promise of future
protection to the Huguenots, was part of the plot. It would lure all
the leaders of the cause to Paris. Coligny, Conde, all the heads of
the party were urgently invited to attend the marriage-feast which was
to inaugurate an era of peace.
Admiral Coligny was requested by Catharine, simply as a measure of
protection to the Protestants, to have an additional regiment of guards
in Paris, to act in case of any unforeseen violence.
Two days after the marriage and while the festivities were at their
height, an attempt upon the life of the old Admiral awoke suspicion and
alarm. But Catharine and her son went immediately in person to see the
wounded old man, and to express their grief and horror at the event.
They commanded that a careful list of the names and abode of every
Protestant in Paris be made, in order, as they said, "to take them
under their own immediate protection." "My dear father," said the
King, "the hurt is yours, the grief is mine."
At that moment, the knives were already sharpened, every man instructed
in his part in the hideous drama, and the signal for its commencement
determined upon. Charles did not know it, but his mother did. She
went to her son's room that night, artfully and eloquently pictured the
danger he was in, confessed to him that she had authorized the attempt
upon Coligny, but that it was done because of the Admiral's plottings
against him, which she had discovered. But the Guises--her enemies and
his--they knew it, and would denounce her and the King! The only thing
now is to finish the work. He must die.
Charles was in frightful agitation and stubbornly refused. Finally
with an air of offended dignity she bowed coldly and said to her son,
"Sir, will you permit me to withdraw with my daughter, from your
kingdom?" The wretched Charles was conquered. In a sort of insane
fury he exclaimed, "Well, let them kill him, and all the rest of the
Huguenots too. See that not one remains to reproach me."
This was more than she had hoped. All was easy now. So eager was she
to give the order before a change of mood, that she flew herself to
give the signal, fully two hours earlier than was expected. At
midnight the tocsin rang out upon the night, and the horror began.
Lulled to a feeling of security by artfully contrived circumstances,
husbands, wives, sons, daughters, peacefully sleeping, were awakened to
see each other hideously slaughtered.
The stars have looked down upon some terrible scenes in Paris, her
stones are not unacquainted with the taste of human blood, but never
had there been anything like this. The carnage of battle is merciful
compared with it. Shrieking women and children, half-clothed, fleeing
from knives already dripping with human blood; frantic mothers
shielding the bodies of their children, and wives pleading for the
lives of husbands; the living hiding beneath the bodies of the dead.
The cry that ascended to Heaven from Paris that night was the most
awful and despairing in the world's history. It was centuries of
cruelty crowded into a few hours.
The number slain can never be accurately stated; but it was thousands.
Human blood is intoxicating. An orgie set in which laughed at orders
to cease. Seven days it continued and then died out for lack of
material. The provinces had caught the contagion, and orders to slay
were received and obeyed in all except two, the Governor of Bayonne, to
his honor be it told, writing to the King in reply: "Your Majesty has
many faithful subjects in Bayonne, but not one executioner."
And where was "His Majesty" while this work was being done? How was it
with Catharine? She was possibly seeing to the embalming of Coligny's
head, which we learn she sent as a present to the Pope. We hear of no
regrets, no misgivings, that she was calm, collected, suave and
unfathomable as ever, but that Charles in a strange, half-frenzied
state was amusing himself by firing from the windows of the palace at
the fleeing Huguenots. Had he killed himself in remorse, would it not
have been better, instead of lingering two wretched years, a prey to
mental tortures and an inscrutable malady, before he died?
Europe was shocked. Christendom averted her face in horror. But at
Madrid and Rome there was satisfaction.
Catharine and the Duke of Alva had done their work skilfully, but the
result surprised and disappointed them. Tens of thousands of Huguenots
were slain, which was well; but many times that number remained, with
spirit unbroken, which was not well.
They had been too merciful! Why had Henry of Navarre been spared? Had
not Alva said, "Take the big fish and let the small fry go. One salmon
is worth more than a thousand frogs."
But Charles considered the matter settled when he uttered those
swelling words to Henry of Navarre the day after the massacre: "I mean
in future to have one religion in my kingdom. It is mass or death."
Catharine's third son now wore the crown of France. In Henry III. she
had as pliant an instrument for her will as in the two brothers
preceding him; and, like them, his reign was spent in alternating
conflict with the Protestants and the Duke de Guise. At last, wearied
and exasperated, this half-Italian and altogether conscienceless King
quite naturally thought of the stiletto. The old Duke, as he entered
the King's apartment by invitation, was stricken down by assassins
hidden for that purpose.
Henry had not counted on the rebound from that blow. Catholic France
was excited to such popular fury against him that he threw himself into
the arms of the Protestants, imploring their aid in keeping his crown
and his kingdom; and when himself assassinated, a year later, in the
absence of a son he named Henry, King of Navarre, his successor. A
Protestant and a Huguenot was King of France.