others who lodged in the Louvre, had been disarmed by Nancay, captain of
the guard. In this defenceless condition ten or twelve of their number
were conducted, one by one, to the gate of the building. Here soldiers
stood in readiness, and despatched them with their halberds as they
successively made their appearance. Such was the fate of the brave
Pardaillan, of St. Martin, of Boursis, of Beauvais, former tutor of Henry
of Navarre, and of others; some of whom in a loud voice called upon
Charles, whom they saw at a window, an approving spectator of the
butchery, to remember the solemn pledges he had given them. M. de
Piles--that brave Huguenot captain, whose valor, if it did not save St.
Jean d'Angely in the third civil war, had at least detained the entire
Roman Catholic army for seven weeks before fortifications that were none
of the best, and rendered Moncontour a field barren of substantial
fruits[1002]--was the object of special hatred, and his conduct was
particularly remarked for its magnanimity. Observing among the bystanders
a Roman Catholic acquaintance in whose honor he might perhaps confide, he
stripped himself of his cloak, and would have handed it to him, with the
words: "De Piles makes you a present of this; remember hereafter the death
of him who is now so unjustly put to death!" "Mon capitaine," answered the
other, fearful of incurring the enmity of Catharine and Charles, "I am not
of the company of these persons. I thank you for your cloak; but I cannot
take it upon such conditions." The next moment M. de Piles fell, pierced
by the halberd of one of the archers of the guard. "These are the men,"
cried the murderers at their bloody work, "who resorted to violence, in
order to kill the king afterward."[1003] One of the victims marked out for
the slaughter escaped the death of his fellows. Margaret of Valois had not
been long asleep, when her slumbers were rudely disturbed by loud blows
struck upon the door, and shouts of "Navarre! Navarre!" Her attendant,
supposing it to be Henry himself, hastily opened the door; when there
rushed in instead, a Huguenot nobleman, the Viscount de Leran,[1004]
wounded in the arm by sword and halberd, and pursued by four archers. In
his terror he threw himself on Margaret's bed, and when she jumped up, in
doubt of what could be the meaning of this strange incident, he clung to
her night-dress which was drenched with his blood. Nancay angrily
reproved the indiscretion of his soldiers, and Margaret, leaving the
Huguenot in her room to have his wounds dressed, suffered herself to be
conducted to the chamber of her sister, the Duchess of Lorraine. It was
but a few steps; but, on the way, a Huguenot was killed at three paces'
distance from her, and two others--the first gentleman of the King of
Navarre, and his first valet-de-chambre--ran to her imploring her to save
their lives. She sought and obtained the favor on her knees before
Catharine and Charles.[1005] A few other Huguenots who were in the Louvre
were ready to purchase their lives at any price, even to that of abjuring
their faith. They obtained pardon on promising the king to comply with all
his commands; and this, we are told, "the more easily, as Charles very
well knew that they had little or no religion."[1006]
[Sidenote: Navarre and Conde spared.]
The King of Navarre and the Prince of Conde were spared, although there
were not wanting those who would gladly have seen the ruin of the family
of Bourbon. Navarre was brother-in-law of Charles, and Conde of the Duke
of Nevers; this may have guaranteed their safety. Both of the young
princes, however, were summoned into the king's presence, where Charles,
acknowledging the murder of Coligny, the great cause of disturbances, and
the similar acts then perpetrated throughout the city, as sanctioned by
his authority, sternly told the two youths that he intended no longer to
tolerate two religions in his dominions. He desired them, therefore, to
conform to that creed which had been professed by all his predecessors,
and which he intended to uphold. They must renounce the profane doctrines
they had embraced, and return to the Catholic and Roman religion. If they
refused, they must expect to suffer the treatment which had just been
experienced by so many others.[1007]
The replies of the two princes were singularly unlike. Henry of Navarre,
bold enough where only physical bravery was demanded, exhibited for the
first time that lamentable absence of moral courage which was to render
his life, in its highest relations, a splendid failure. His countenance
betrayed agitation and faint-heartedness.[1008] With great
"humility"--almost whining, it would appear--he begged that his own life
and the life of Conde might be spared, and reminded Charles of his
promised protection. "He would act," he said, "so as to satisfy his
Majesty; yet he besought him to remember that conscience was a great
thing, and that it was hard to renounce the religion in which one had been
brought up from infancy." On the other hand, Henry of Conde, in no way
abashed,[1009] declared "that he could not believe that his royal cousin
intended to violate a promise confirmed by so solemn an oath. As to
fealty, he had always been an obedient subject of the king, and would ever
be. Touching his religion, if the king had given him the exercise of its
worship, God had given him the knowledge of it; and to Him he must needs
give up an account. So far as his body and his possessions were concerned,
they were in the king's hands to dispose of as he might choose. Yet it was
his own determination to remain constant in his religion, which he would
always maintain to be the true religion, even should he be compelled to
lay down his life for it." So stout an answer kindled the anger of
Charles, who was in no mood to meet with opposition. He called Conde "a
rebel," "a seditious man," and "the son of a seditious father," and warned
him that he would lose his head, if, within three days, he should not
think better of the matter.[1010]
[Sidenote: The massacre becomes general.]
And now the great bell of the "Palais de Justice" pealed forth the tocsin.
About the Louvre the work of blood had begun when Catharine, impatient,
and fearful lest Charles's resolution should again waver at the last
moment, gave orders to anticipate the appointed time by ringing the bell
of the neighboring church of St. Germain l'Auxerrois. But now the loud and
unusual clangor from the tower of the parliament house carried the warning
far and wide. All Paris awoke. The conspirators everywhere recognized the
stipulated signal, and spread among the excited townsmen the wildest and
most extravagant reports. A foul plot, formed by the Huguenots, against
the king, his mother, and his brothers, had come to light. They had killed
more than fifteen of the royal guards. The king, therefore, commanded that
quarter should not be given to a single Huguenot.[1011]
Nothing more was needed to inflame the popular hatred of the Huguenots,
nor to prepare the rabble for an indiscriminate slaughter of the
Protestants.
[Sidenote: La Rochefoucauld and Teligny fall.]
Among the earliest victims of this day of carnage was Count de la
Rochefoucauld. This witty and lively young noble had been in the Louvre
until a late hour on Saturday night, diverting himself with the king, with
whom he was a great favorite. Apparently in his anxiety to save La
Rochefoucauld's life, Charles invited, and even urged him, to spend the
night in the royal "garde-robe;" but the count, suspecting no danger,
insisted on returning to his lodgings, while the king reluctantly
abandoned his boon companion to his fate, rather than betray his secret.
Early awakened from his sleep at his lodgings by loud knocking at the door
and by demands for admission in the king's name, and seeing a band of
masked men enter, he recalled Charles's threat at parting, that he would
come and administer to him a whipping. The practical joke would not have
been unlike many of the mad antics of the royal jester, and La
Rochefoucauld, addressing himself to the person whom he supposed to be his
Majesty in disguise, begged him to treat him with humanity. His deception
was not long continued; for the maskers, after rifling his trunks, drew
him from his place of concealment and murdered him. His lifeless body was
dragged through the streets of Paris.[1012]
Teligny was, perhaps, even more unfortunate than the rest, because he
awoke too late to the fact that his own blind confidance in the word of a
faithless prince had been a chief instrument of involving his
father-in-law and his friends in destruction. He was among the first to
pay the penalty of his credulity. More than one of the parties sent to
destroy him, it is said, overcome by compassion for his youth and manly
beauty, or by respect for his graceful manners and extraordinary learning,
left their commission unexecuted. To avoid further peril, he ascended to
the roof, from which he made his way to an adjoining house; but he had not
gone far before he was seen and shot with an arquebuse by one of the Duke
of Anjou's guards.[1013]
[Sidenote: Self-defense of a few nobles.]
The Huguenots, attacked in the midst of their slumbers by the courtiers
and the soldiers of the royal guard,[1014] among whom were prominent the
Swiss of Charles or his brother, or by the people of Paris, who every
moment swelled the ranks of the assassins, were too much taken by
surprise to offer even the slightest resistance. Guerchy, the same
gentleman who had offered his services to Coligny the night before, is
almost the only man reported to have fought for his life. With his sword
in his right hand, and winding his cloak around his left arm, he defended
himself for a long time, though the breastplates of his enemies were proof
against his blows. At last, he fell, overborne by numbers.[1015] The
Lieutenant de la Mareschaussee, if not more determined, was better
prepared for the combat. All day long, with a single soldier as his
comrade, he defended his house against the assailants, expecting at every
moment to be relieved from his perilous situation by the king. But, far
from meriting such confidence on the part of his subjects, Charles was
indignant at his prolonged resistance, and sent a powerful detachment of
guards, with orders to bring him the lieutenant's head. The brave
Huguenot, however, still maintained the unequal siege, and fought till his
last breath. The soldiers had only the poor satisfaction of pillaging his
house, of dragging his sick daughter naked through the streets until she
died of maltreatment, and of wounding and imprisoning his wife.[1016]
[Sidenote: Victims of personal hatred.]
Personal hatred, jealousy, cupidity, mingled with religious and political
zeal, and private ends were attained in fulfilling the king's murderous
commands. Bussy d'Amboise, meeting his Protestant cousin, the Marquis de
Renel (half-brother of the late Prince of Porcien), by a well-directed
blow with his poniard rid himself of an unpleasant suit at law which Renel
had come to Paris to prosecute.
[Sidenote: Adventure of young La Force.]
The case of Caumont de la Force was still more revolting. His daughter,
Madame de la Chataigneraie, in accordance with the shameless code of
morals in vogue at the French court, had taken for her lover Archan,
captain of the guard of Henry of Anjou; and it was to gratify her
covetousness that Archan obtained from the Duke the order to despatch La
Force and his two sons. The plan was successfully executed so far as the
father and his elder son were concerned. The second, a boy of twelve,
escaped by his remarkable presence of mind and self-control. Certain that
his youth would excite no pity in the breast of his inhuman assailants,
when his father and his brother fell at his side and he perceived himself
covered with their blood, he dropped down with the exclamation that he was
dead. So perfectly did he counterfeit death, all that long day, that,
although his body was examined by successive bands of plunderers, and
deprived not only of every valuable, but even of its clothing, he did not
by a motion betray that he was alive. Most of these persons applauded the
crime. It was well, they said, to kill the little wolves with the greater.
But, toward evening, a more humane person came, who, while engaged in
drawing off a stocking which had been left on the boy's foot, gave
expression to his abhorrence of the bloody deed. To his astonishment the
boy raised his head, and whispered, "I am not dead." The compassionate man
at once commanded him not to stir, and went home; but as soon as it was
dark he returned with a cloak, which he threw about young La Force's
shoulders, and bade him follow. It was no easy matter to thread the
streets unmolested; but his guide dispelled the suspicions of those who
questioned him respecting the boy by declaring that it was his nephew whom
he had found drunk, and was going to whip soundly for it. In the end the
young nobleman reached the arsenal, where his relative, Marshal Biron, was
in command. Even there, however, the avarice of his unnatural sister
pursued him. Vexed that, on account of his preservation, she must fail to
secure the entire inheritance of the family, Madame de la Chataigneraie
tried to effect herself what she had not been able to do by means of
another; she visited the marshal in the arsenal, and, after expressing
great joy that her brother had been saved, begged to be permitted to see
and care for him. Biron thought it necessary, in order to preserve the
boy's life, to deny her request.[1017]
[Sidenote: Pitiless butchery.]
The frenzy that had fallen upon Paris affected all classes alike. Every
feeling of pity seemed to have been blotted out. Natural affection
disappeared. A man's foes were those of his own household. On the plea of
religious zeal the most barbarous acts were committed. Spire Niquet, a
poor bookbinder, whose scanty earnings barely sufficed to support the
wants of his seven children, was half-roasted in a bonfire made of his own
books, and then dragged to the river and drowned.[1018] The weaker sex was
not spared in the universal carnage, and, as in a town taken by assault,
suffered outrages that were worse than death. Matron and maiden alike
welcomed as merciful the blow that liberated them from an existence now
rendered insupportable. Women approaching maternity were selected for more
excruciating torments, and savage delight was exhibited in destroying the
unborn fruit of the womb. Nor was any rank respected. Madame d'Yverny, the
niece of Cardinal Briconnet, was recognized, as she fled, by the costly
underclothing that appeared from beneath the shabby habit of a nun which
she had assumed; and, after suffering every indignity, upon her refusal to
go to mass, was thrown from a bridge into the Seine and drowned.[1019]
Occasionally the women rivalled the cruelty of the men. A poor carpenter,
of advanced age, with whom the author of the "Tocsain contre les
massacreurs" was personally acquainted, had been taken by night and cast
into the river. He swam, however, to a bridge, and succeeded in climbing
up by its timbers, and so fled naked to the house of a relative near the
"Cousture Sainte Catherine," where his wife had taken refuge. But,
instead of welcoming him, his wife drove him away, and he was soon
recaptured and killed.[1020] It is related that the daughter of one Jean
de Coulogne, a mercer of the "Palais," betrayed her own mother to death,
and subsequently married one of the murderers.[1021] The very innocence of
childhood furnished no sufficient protection--so literally did the pious
Catholics of Paris interpret the oft-repeated exhortations of their holy
father to exterminate not only the roots of heresy, but the very fibres of
the roots.[1022] Two infants, whose parents had just been murdered, were
carried in a hod and cast into the Seine. A little girl was plunged naked
in the blood of her father and mother, with horrible oaths and threats
that, if she should become a Huguenot, the like fate would befall her. And
a crowd of boys, between nine and ten years of age, was seen dragging
through the streets the body of a babe yet in its swaddling-clothes, which
they had fastened to a rope by means of a belt tied about its neck.[1023]
[Sidenote: Shamelessness of the court ladies.]
[Sidenote: Anjou encourages the assassins.]
The bodies of the more inconspicuous victims lay for hours in whatever
spot they happened to be killed; but the court required ocular
demonstration that the leaders of the Huguenots who had been most
prominent in the late wars were really dead. Accordingly the naked corpses
of Soubise, of Guerchy, of Beaudine, d'Acier's brother, and of others,
were dragged from all quarters to the square in front of the Louvre.
There, as an indignant contemporary writes, extended in a long row, they
lay exposed to the view of the varlets, of whom when alive they had been
the terror.[1024] Cruelty and lust are twin sisters: when the one is at
hand, the other is generally not far distant. The court of Catharine de'
Medici was noted for its impurity, as it was infamous for its recklessness
of human life. It was not out of keeping with its general reputation that
toward evening a bevy of ladies--among them the queen mother--tripped down
the palace stairs to feast their eyes upon the sight of the uncovered
dead.[1025] Indeed, the king, the queen mother, and their intimate friends
seemed to be in an ecstasy of joy. They indulged in boisterous
laughter[1026] as the successive reports of the municipal authorities,
from hour to hour, brought in tidings of the extent of the massacre.[1027]
"The war is now ended in reality," they were heard to say, "and we shall
henceforth live in peace."[1028] The Duke of Anjou took a more active
part. In the street and on the Pont de Notre Dame he was to be seen
encouraging the assassins.[1029] The Duke of Montpensier was surpassed by
no one in his zealous advocacy of the murderous work. "Let every man exert
himself to the utmost," he cried, as he rode through the streets, "if he
wishes to prove himself a good servant to the king."[1030] Tavannes, if we
may believe Brantome's account, endeavored to rival him, and, all day
long, as he rode about amid the carnage, amused himself by facetiously
crying to the people: "Bleed! Bleed! The doctors say that bleeding is as
good in the month of August as in May."[1031]
Of the Duke of Alencon it was noticed that, alone of Catharine's sons, he
took no part in the massacre. The Protestants even regarded him as their
friend, and the rumor was current that the pity he exhibited excited the
indignation of his mother and brothers. Indeed, Catharine, it was said,
openly told him that, if he ventured to meddle with her plans, she would
put him in a sack and throw him into the river.[1032]
[Sidenote: Wonderful escapes.]
Of the pastors of the Church of Paris, it was noticed as a remarkable
circumstance that but two--Buirette and Desgorris--were killed; for it was
certain that no lives were more eagerly sought than theirs.[1033] But
several Protestant pastors had wonderful escapes. The celebrated
D'Espine--the converted monk who took part in the Colloquy of Poissy--was
in company with Madame d'Yverny when her disguise was discovered, but he
was not recognized.[1034] In the case of Merlin, chaplain of Admiral
Coligny, the divine interposition seemed almost as distinct as in that of
the prophet Elijah. After reluctantly leaving Coligny, at his earnest
request, and clambering over the roof of a neighboring house, he fell
through an opening into a garret full of hay. Not daring to show himself,
since he knew not whether he would encounter friends or foes, he remained
for three days in this retreat, his sole food an egg which a hen daily
laid within his reach.[1035]
The future minister of Henry the Fourth, Maximilien de Bethune, Duke of
Sully, at this time a boy of twelve and a student in the college of
Burgundy in Paris, has left us in his "Economies royales" a thrilling
account of his escape. Awakened, about three o'clock in the morning, by
the uproar in the streets, his tutor and his valet-de-chambre went out to
learn the occasion of it, and never returned. They were doubtless among
the first victims. Sully's trembling host--a Protestant who consented
through fear to abjure his faith--now came in, and advised the youth to
save his life by going to mass. Sully was not prepared to take this
counsel, and, so putting on his scholar's gown, he ventured upon the
desperate step of trying to reach the college. A horrible scene presented
itself to view. Everywhere men were breaking into houses, or slaughtering
their captives in the public streets, while the cry of "Kill the
Huguenots" was heard on all sides. Sully himself owed his preservation to
two thick volumes of "Heures"--Romish books of devotion--which he had the
presence of mind to take under his arm, and which effectually disarmed the
suspicions of the three successive bands of soldiers that stopped him. At
the college, after with difficulty gaining admission, he incurred still
greater danger. Happily the principal, M. Du Faye, was a kind-hearted man.
In vain was he urged, by two priests who were his guests, to surrender the
Huguenot boy to death, saying that the order was to massacre even the very
babes at the breast. Du Faye would not consent; and after having secretly
kept Sully locked up for three days in a closet, he found means to restore
him to his friends.[1036]
[Sidenote: Death of the philosopher Ramus.]
No loss was more sensibly felt by the scientific world than that of the
learned Pierre de la Ramee, or Ramus, a philosopher second to none of his
day. The professor might possibly have escaped if his only offence had
been his Protestant views; but Ramus had had the temerity to attack
Aristotle, and to attempt to reform the faulty pronunciation of the Latin
language. For these unpardonable sins he was tracked to the cellar in
which he had hidden, by a band of robbers under the guidance of Jacques
Charpentier, a jealous rival, with whom he had had acrimonious
discussions. After being compelled to give up a considerable sum of money,
he was despatched with daggers, and thrown from an upper window into the
court of his college. Never was philosophic heterodoxy more thoroughly
punished; for if the whipping, dragging through the filthy streets, and
dismembering of a corpse by indignant students with the approval of their
teachers, could atone for such grave errors, the anger of the illustrious
Stagirite must have been fully appeased. If anything can clearly exhibit
the depth of moral degradation to which Roman Catholic France had fallen,
it is the fact that Charpentier unblushingly accepted the praise which was
liberally showered upon him for his participation in this disgraceful
affair.[1037]
[Sidenote: President Pierre de la Place.]
Scarcely less signal a misfortune to France was the murder of Pierre de la
Place, president of the Cour d'Aides, whose excellent "Commentaries on the
State of Religion and the Republic" constitute one of our best guides
through the short reign of Francis the Second and the early part of the
reign of Charles the Ninth. This eminent jurist, even more distinguished
as a writer on Christian morals than as a historian, had first embraced
the Reformation at a time when the recent martyrdom of Anne du Bourg
served as a significant reminder of the perils attending a profession of
Protestant views. President de la Place had been visited in his house
early in the morning, on the first day of the massacre, by Captain Michel,
an arquebusier of the king, who, entering boldly with his weapons and with
the white napkin bound on his left arm, informed him of the death of
Coligny, and the fate in reserve for the rest of the Huguenots. The
soldier pretended that the king wished to exempt La Place from the general
slaughter, and bade him accompany him to the Louvre. However, a gift of a
thousand crowns induced the fellow instead to lead the president's
daughter and her husband to a place of safety in the house of a Roman
Catholic friend. But La Place himself, after having applied at three
different houses belonging to persons of his acquaintance and been denied
admission, was compelled to return to his home and there await his doom. A
day passed, during which La Place and his wife were subjected to constant
alarms. At length new orders came in the king's name, enjoining upon him
without fail to repair instantly to the palace. The meaning was
unmistakable; it was the road to death. But neither the Huguenot's piety
nor his courage failed him. He gently raised his wife, who had fallen on
her knees to beg the messenger to save her husband's life, and reminded
her that she should have recourse to God alone, not to an arm of flesh.
And he sternly rebuked his eldest son, who, in a moment of weakness, had
placed a white cross on his hat, in the hope of saving his life. "The true
cross we must wear," he said, "is the trials and afflictions sent to us by
God as sure pledges of the bliss and eternal life He has prepared for His
own followers." It was with unruffled composure that he bade his weeping
friends farewell. His apprehensions were soon realized; he was despatched
by murderers who had been waiting for him, and before long his body was
floating down the Seine toward the sea.[1038]
[Sidenote: Regnier and Vezins.]
From such instances of inhumanity it is a relief to turn to one of a few
incidents wherein the finer feelings triumphed over prejudice, difference
of religious tenets, and even personal hatred. There were in Paris two
gentlemen, named Vezins and Regnier, of good families in the province of
Quercy in southern France. Both were equally distinguished for their
valor; but their dispositions were singularly unlike, for while the
Huguenot Regnier was noted for his gentle manners, the Roman Catholic
Vezins, who was lieutenant of the governor, the Viscount of Villars, had
acquired unenviable notoriety because of his ferocity. Between the two
there had for some time existed a mortal feud, which their common friends
had striven in vain to heal. While the massacre was at its height, Regnier
was visited by his enemy, Vezins. The latter, after effecting an entrance
into the house by breaking down the door, fiercely ordered the
Huguenot--who, well assured that his last hour was come, had fallen upon
his knees to implore the mercy of God--to rise and follow him. A horse
stood saddled at the door, upon which Regnier was told to mount. In his
enemy's train he rode unharmed through the streets of Paris, then through
the gates of the city. Still Vezins, without vouchsafing a word of
explanation, kept on his way toward Cahors, the capital of Quercy, whither
he had been despatched by the government.[1039] For many successive days
the journey lasted. The prisoner was well guarded, but he was also well
lodged and fed. At last the party reached the very castle of Regnier, and
here his captor broke the long silence. "As you have seen," said he, "it
would have depended only on myself to take advantage of the opportunity
which I have long been seeking; but I should be ashamed to avenge myself
in this way upon a man so brave as you. In settling our quarrel I desire
that the danger shall be equal. Be well assured that you will find me as
ready to decide our dispute in a manner becoming gentlemen, as I have been
eager to save you from inevitable destruction." It need scarcely be said
that the Huguenot could not find words sufficiently strong to express his
gratitude; but Vezins merely replied: "I leave it to you to choose whether
you wish me to be your friend or your enemy; I saved your life only to
enable you to make your election." With these words he abruptly left him
and rode away, nor would he ever consent even to take back the horse upon
which he had brought Regnier in safety so many leagues.[1040]
[Sidenote: Escape of Montgomery and Chartres.]
[Sidenote: Charles himself fires at them from the Louvre.]
A number of the Huguenot noblemen were lodged on the southern side of the
Seine, outside of the walls, in the Faubourg Saint Germain. Count
Montgomery, the Vidame of Chartres, Beauvoir la Nocle, and Frontenay, a
member of the powerful Rohan family, were among the most distinguished.
After the admiral, there were certainly no Huguenots whom Catharine was
more anxious to destroy than Montgomery and Chartres. Accordingly the
massacre, which began near the Louvre, was to have been executed
simultaneously upon them, and the work was intrusted to M. de Maugiron.
But the delay of the Roman Catholics saved them. Marcel, the former prevot
des marchands, who had been instructed to furnish one thousand men, was
not ready in time; and Dumas, who was to have acted as guide, overslept
the appointed hour. About five o'clock in the morning a Huguenot succeeded
in swimming across the river, and carried to Montgomery the first tidings
of the events of the last two hours. The count at once notified his
comrades, but, although there were among them those who had been most
urgent to leave Paris immediately after Maurevel's attack upon Coligny,
few of the nobles would harbor the thought that Charles was so lost to
honor as to have plotted the assassination of his invited guests. They
preferred to believe that the king was himself in danger through a sudden
commotion occasioned by the Guises. Acting upon this theory, the Huguenots
proceeded in a body toward the Seine, intending to cross and lend
assistance to the royal cause; but, on reaching the river's bank, they
were speedily undeceived. They saw a band of two hundred soldiers of the
royal guard coming toward them in boats, and discharging their arquebuses,
with cries of "_Tue! Tue!_"--"Kill! Kill!" Charles himself was descried at
a window of the Louvre, looking with approval upon the scene. There is
good authority also, for the story that, in his eagerness to exterminate
the Huguenots, Charles snatched an arquebuse from the hand of an
attendant, and fired at them, exclaiming, "Let us shoot, _mort Dieu_, they
are fleeing!"[1041]
Montgomery and his companions had by this time recognized their mistake,
and hesitated no longer to flee from the perfidious capital. They promptly
took to horse, and rode hard to reach Normandy and the sea. This part of
the prey was, however, too precious to be permitted to escape.
Accordingly, Guise, Aumale, the Bastard of Angouleme, and a number of
"gentilhommes tueurs," started in pursuit. But an accident prevented them
from overtaking the Huguenots. When Guise and his party reached the Porte
de Bussy[1042]--the gate leading from the city into the faubourg in which
the Protestants had been lodging--which was closed in accordance with the
king's orders, they found that they had been provided by mistake with the
wrong key, and the delay experienced in finding the right one afforded
Montgomery an advantage in the race, of which he made good use.[1043]
[Sidenote: The massacre continues.]
The carnival of blood, which had been so successfully ushered in on that
ill-starred Sunday of August, was maintained on the succeeding days with
little abatement of its frenzied excitement. Paris soon resembled a vast
charnel-house. The dead or dying lay in the open streets and squares, they
blocked the doors and carriage-ways, they were heaped in the courtyards.
When the utmost that impotent passion could do to these lifeless remains
was accomplished, the Seine became the receptacle. Besides those Huguenots
whom their murderers dragged to the bridges or wharves to despatch by
drowning, both by day and by night wagons laden with the corpses of men
and women, and even of young children, were driven down to the river and
emptied of their human freight. But the current of the crooked Seine
refused to carry away from the capital all these evidences of guilt. The
shores of its first curve, from Paris to the bridge of St. Cloud, were
covered with putrefying remains, which the municipality were compelled to
inter, through fear of their generating a pestilence. And so we read, in
the registers of the Hotel-de-Ville, of a payment of fifteen livres
tournois, on the ninth of September, for the burial of the dead bodies
found near the Convent of Chaillot, and of a second payment of twenty
livres on the twenty-third, for the burial of eleven hundred more, near
Chaillot, Auteuil, and St. Cloud.[1044]
[Sidenote: Not a popular movement.]
[Sidenote: Plunder of the rich.]
The massacre was not in its origin a popular outbreak. It sprang from the
ambition and vindictive passions of the queen mother, and others, whom the
ministers of a corrupt religion had long accustomed to the idea that the
extermination of heretics is not a sin, but the highest type of piety. The
people were called in only as assistants. Probably the first intention was
only to hold the municipal forces in readiness to overcome any resistance
which the Protestants might offer. But the massacre succeeded beyond the
most sanguine expectations of the conspirators. Very few of the victims
defended themselves or their property; scarcely one Roman Catholic was
slain. And now the populace, having had a taste of blood, could no longer
be restrained. Whether the plunder of the Protestants entered into the
original calculations of Catharine and her advisers, may perhaps be
doubted. But there is no question as to the turn which the affair soon
took in the minds of those engaged in it. Pillage was not always
countenanced by church and state: as a violation of the second table of
the Law, it was, under ordinary circumstances, atoned for by penance and
ecclesiastical censures; as a breach of the royal edicts, it was likely to
be punished with hanging or still more painful modes of execution.
Consequently, when by furnishing arms the civil power authorized the most
severe measures against those whom it accused of foul conspiracy against
the king, and when the professed minister of Christ and His gospel of
peace blessed the work of exterminating God's enemies and the king's,
there was no lack of men willing to profit by the rare and unexpected
opportunity. Nor did the courtiers disdain dishonest gain. The Duke of
Anjou was known to have enriched himself by the plunder of the shop of
Baduere, the king's jeweller.[1045] Noblemen, besides robbing their
victims of money, extorted from them, in return for a promise to spare
their lives, deeds of valuable lands, or papers resigning in their favor
high offices in the government. It was frequently the case that, after
giving such presents, the Huguenot was put out of the way at once, in
order to prevent him from ever retracting. Thus, Martial de Lomenie, a
secretary of the king, was murdered in prison, after having resigned his
office in favor of Marshal Retz, and sold to him his estate of Versailles,
at such a price as the latter chose to name, in the vain hope that this
would secure him liberty and life.[1046] The extent to which robbery was
carried on the occasion of the massacre is reluctantly conceded in the
pamphlet, which was published immediately after, as an apology of the
court for the hideous crime; and an attempt is made to justify it, which
is worthy of the source from which it drew its inspiration: "Now this
good-will of the people to sustain and defend its prince, to espouse his
quarrel, and to hate those who are not of his religion, is very
praiseworthy; and if in this execution [the massacre] some pillaging has
taken place, we must excuse the fury of a people impelled by a worthy
zeal--a zeal hard to be restrained and bridled when once excited."[1047]
[Sidenote: Orders issued to lay down arms.]
[Sidenote: Little heed given to them.]
But, despite panegyrists, the massacre had not been in progress many hours
before the very magistrates of the city appear to have become apprehensive
lest the movement might assume dangerous dimensions. It was only about
eleven o'clock on Sunday morning, as the registers of the Hotel de Ville
inform us, when Charles was waited upon by the prevot des marchands and
the echevins. They came to inform him that "a number of persons, partly
belonging to the suite of his Majesty, partly to that of the princes,
princesses, and lords of the court--gentlemen, archers of the king's
body-guard, soldiers of his suite, as well as all sorts of people mingled
with them and under their authority--were plundering and pillaging many
houses and killing many persons in the streets." This was certainly no
news to Charles; but as he desired, now that the massacre had begun, not
to enrich the Roman Catholic inhabitants of Paris, but to fill his own
coffers, he deemed it best to prohibit any further action on their part,
and to leave the rest of the work to his own commissioned servants.
Accordingly the municipal authorities were directed to ride through the
city with all the troops at their disposal, and to see to it, both by day
and night, that the bloodshed and robbery should cease. "Sir William
Guerrier"--thus runs one of the commissions to the "quarteniers" issued
from the central bureau of the city, in pursuance of these
directions--"give commandment to all burgesses and inhabitants of your
quarter, who to-day have taken up arms _according to the king's order_, to
lay them down, and to retire and remain quietly in their houses, ...
according to the king's command conveyed to us by my Lord of Nevers." And
this document is accompanied with another, of the same date, applying to
soldiers of the guard or others, who should pillage or maltreat
Protestants, and threatening them with punishment. Such a proclamation, it
is well known, was made by trumpet at about five o'clock that afternoon.
The registers tell us that the instructions were so well carried out that
all disorder "was at once appeased and ceased." They contain, however, a
distinct refutation of this falsehood, in the frequent repetition of
similar orders and the variety of forms in which the same statements are
made on subsequent days. Again and again does the king direct that
soldiers be placed at the head of every street to prevent robbery and
murder;[1048] the guards either were never posted, or, as is more likely,
became foremost in the work which they were sent to repress. Indeed, the
instructions given on Monday to visit all the houses in the city and its
suburbs where there were any Protestants, and obtain their names and
surnames,[1049] afforded an opportunity which was not permitted to slip by
unimproved, for the exaction of heavy bribes, as well as for more open
plunder and violence. So notorious was it, nearly a week after the
butchery began, that the massacre had only abated in intensity, that, on
the thirtieth of August, measures were adopted to prevent any wrong from
being done to foreign merchants sojourning in Paris, and especially to the
German, English, and Flemish students of the university.[1050]
[Sidenote: Miracle of the "Cimetiere des Innocents."]
The smile of Heaven, it was said by the Roman Catholic clergy, rested upon
the effort to extirpate heresy in France. They convinced the people of the
truth of their assertion by pointing to an unusual phenomenon which they
declared to be evidently miraculous. In the Cimetiere des Innocents and
before a small chapel of the Virgin Mary, there grew a white hawthorn,
which, according to some accounts, had for several years been to all
appearance dead. Great then was the surprise of those who, on the eventful
St. Bartholomew's Day, beheld the tree covered with a great profusion of
blossoms as fragrant as those flowers which the hawthorn usually puts
forth in May. It was true that no good reason could be assigned why the
wonder might not with greater propriety be explained, as the Protestants
afterward suggested, rather as a mark of Heaven's sympathy with oppressed
innocence. But no doubts entered the minds of the Parisian ecclesiastics.
They spread abroad the fame of the prodigy. They rang the church-bells in
token of joy, and invited the blood-stained populace to witness the sight,
and gain new courage in their murderous work. It may well be doubted
whether either the hawthorn or the virgin of the neighboring chapel
wrought the wonderful cures recorded by the curate of Meriot.[1051] But
certainly the reported intervention of Heaven setting its seal upon
treacherous assassination prolonged the slaughter of Huguenots. "It
seemed," says Claude Haton, reflecting the popular belief, "that God, by
this miracle, approved and accepted as well-pleasing to Him the Catholic
uprising and the death of His great enemy the admiral and his followers,
who for twelve years had been audaciously rending His seamless coat, which
is His true Church and His Bride."[1052] And so, what with the
encouragement afforded by the wonderful thorn-tree of the Cimetiere des
Innocents--what with the continuous fair weather, which was interpreted
after the same manner, the task of extirpating the heretical Huguenots was
prosecuted with a perseverance that never flagged. It is true that the
greater part of the work was done in the first three or four days; but it
was not terminated for several weeks, and many a Huguenot, coming out of
his place of concealment with the hope that time might have caused the
passions of his enemies to become less violent, was murdered in cold blood
by those who coveted his property. Several thousand persons were butchered
in Paris alone during the first few days, besides these later victims;
precisely how many, it is useless and perhaps impossible to fix with
certainty.[1053]
[Sidenote: The king's first letter to Mandelot.]
Meantime it became necessary to explain to the world the extraordinary
tragedy which had been enacted on so conspicuous a stage. Each of the
different parties to the nefarious compact, with that easy faith which
characterizes great criminals, had expected to satisfy its own resentment
at the sole expense of the honor and reputation of the others. The king
and his mother, while securing the death of Coligny and a few other
personal enemies, were not unwilling to have the world believe that the
entire occurrence had been an outburst of the old animosity of the Guises
against the Chatillons. In fact, this was distinctly stated in the
circular letter of Charles IX., despatched on the very Sunday on which the
massacre began, to the governors of the principal cities of the realm.
"Monsieur de Mandelot"--so runs one of these extraordinary epistles--"you
have learned what I wrote to you, the day before yesterday, respecting the
wounding of the admiral, and how that I was about to do my utmost in the
investigation of the case and the punishment of the guilty, wherein
nothing has been forgotten. Since then it has happened that the members of
the house of Guise, and the other lords and gentlemen who are their
adherents, and who have no small influence in this city, as everybody
knows, having received certain information that the friends of the admiral
intended to avenge this wound upon them--since they suspected them of
being its cause and occasion--became so much excited that, between the one
party and the other, there arose a great and lamentable commotion. The
body of guards which had been posted around the admiral's house was
overpowered, and he was killed with some other gentlemen, as there have
also been others massacred in various parts of this city. This was done so
furiously that it was impossible to apply such a remedy as could have been
desired; for I had as much as I could do in employing my guards and other
forces to retain my superiority in this castle of the Louvre,[1054] so as
afterward to take measures for allaying the commotion throughout the city.
At the present hour it has, thank God, subsided! It occurred through the
private quarrel which has long existed between these two houses. Always
foreseeing that some bad consequences would result from it, I have
heretofore done all that I could to appease it, as every one knows. There
is in this nothing leading to the rupture of the Edict of Pacification,
which, on the contrary, I intend to be maintained as much as ever."[1055]
In view of the undeniable fact that Charles affixed his signature to this
letter in the midst of a horrible massacre for which he himself had given
the signal, which he still directed, and concerning whose progress he
received hourly bulletins from the municipal authorities, it must be
admitted that the king showed himself no novice in the ignoble art of
shameless misrepresentation.
[Sidenote: Guise throws the responsibility on the king.]
Guise, on his part, was not less solicitous to relieve himself of
responsibility, and to lay the burden upon the king's shoulders. We have
seen that, at the very moment of Coligny's assassination, he began to
repeat the words: "It is the king's pleasure; it is his express command!"
as his warrant for the crime. As the massacre grew in extent he and his
associates became more reluctant to be held accountable for it,[1056] and
at last they forced Charles to acknowledge himself its sole author. The
queen mother and Anjou, it is said, were mainly instrumental in leading
the monarch to take this unexpected step. His original intention had been
to compel the Guises to leave the capital immediately after the death of
Coligny--a movement which would have given color to the theory of their
guilt. But it was not difficult for Catharine and Henry to convince him
that by so doing he would only render more irreconcilable the enmity
between the Guises and the Montmorencies, who plainly exhibited their
intention to exact vengeance for the death of their illustrious kinsman,
the admiral. In short, he would purchase brief respite from trouble at the
price of a fresh civil war, more cruel than any which had preceded.[1057]
[Sidenote: The king accepts it.]
[Sidenote: The "Lit de Justice."]
It was on Tuesday morning, the twenty-sixth of August, that the king
formally and publicly assumed the weighty responsibility. After hearing a
solemn mass, to render thanks to Almighty God for his happy deliverance
from his enemies, Charles, accompanied by his brothers, the Dukes of Anjou
and Alencon, by the King of Navarre, and by a numerous body of his
principal lords, proceeded to the parliament house, and there, in the
presence of all the chambers, held his "Lit de Justice."[1058] He opened
this extraordinary meeting by an address, in which he dilated upon the
intolerable insults he had, from his very childhood, experienced at the
hands of Coligny, and many other culprits, who had made religion a pretext
for rebellion. His attempts to secure peace by large concessions had
emboldened Coligny so far that he had at last ventured to conspire to kill
him, his mother, and his brothers, and even the King of Navarre, although
a Huguenot like himself; intending to place the Prince of Conde upon the
throne, and subsequently to put him also out of the way, and appropriate
the regal authority after the destruction of the entire royal family. In
order to ward off so horrible a blow, he had, he said, been compelled to
resort to extreme measures of rigor. He desired all men to know that the
steps taken on the preceding Sunday for the punishment of the guilty had
been in accordance with his orders. He is even reported to have gone
farther, and to have invoked the aid of parliament in condemning the
memory and confiscating the property of those against whom he had alleged
such abominable crimes.[1059]
[Sidenote: Servile reply of parliament.]
[Sidenote: Christopher de Thou.]
To this allocution the parliament replied with all servility. Christopher
de Thou, the first president, lauded the prudence of a monarch who had
known how to bear patiently repeated insults, and at last to crush a
conspiracy so dangerous to the quiet of the realm. And he quoted with
approval the infamous apothegm of Louis the Eleventh: "_Qui nescit
dissimulare, nescit regnare._" The solitary suggestion that breathed any
manly spirit was that of Pibrac, the "avocat-general," to the effect that
orders should be published to put an end to the work of murder and
robbery--a request which Charles readily granted.[1060] Never had the
supreme tribunal of justice abased itself more ignobly than when it
listened so complaisantly to the king, and approved without qualification
an organized massacre perpetrated unblushingly under its very eyes. As for
the distinguished man who lent himself to be the mouthpiece of adulation
worse than slavish, we are less inclined to commiserate the difficulty of
his position than to pity the ingenuous historian who strives to touch
leniently upon a fault of his father which he can neither conceal nor
palliate.[1061] We may credit his assertion that his father remonstrated
with the king in private with respect to that for which he had praised him
in public, and that Christopher de Thou marked his detestation of that
ill-starred day by applying to it the lines of Statius:
Excidat illa dies aevo, ne postera credant
Saecula: nos certe taceamus, et obruta multa
Nocte tegi propriae patiamur crimina gentis.
But we cannot forget that this was not the first time that Christopher de
Thou "accommodated" his words or his actions to the supposed "exigencies
of the times." He was a member of that commission that sentenced Louis of
Conde to death, in deference to the desires of another king and his
uncles, the Guises; and the prince would doubtless have lost his head in
consequence, but for the sudden death of Francis the Second. Since that
time he had repeatedly acquiesced in the bloody sentences of the Parisian
parliament. His voice was never heard opposing the proscription instituted
in the late civil wars, even in the case of the atrocious sentence against
Gaspard de Coligny. If we concede to his son that no one was of a less
sanguinary or of a milder disposition than President De Thou, we must also
insist that few judges on the bench displayed less magnanimity or
conscientiousness.[1062]
[Sidenote: Ineffectual effort to inculpate Coligny.]
But it was not a simple congratulatory address that Charles, or his
mother, required of his parliament. Tyrannical power is rarely satisfied
with the mere acquiescence of servile judges; it demands, and ordinarily
obtains from them, a positive indorsement of its schemes of successful
villainy. It was necessary--especially, as we shall see later, after the
cry of horror was heard that rose toward heaven from all parts of Europe
on receipt of the tidings of the massacre in Paris and elsewhere--to
palliate its atrocity by affixing to the slain Huguenots, and above all to
Coligny, a note of rebellious and murderous designs against the king and
the royal family. And here again the Parliament of Paris was as pliant as
its rulers could desire. Coligny's papers, both in Paris and at
Chatillon-sur-Loing, were subjected to close scrutiny; but nothing could
be discovered to warrant the suspicion that any seditious design had ever
been entertained by him. In default of something better, therefore, the
queen mother endeavored to make capital out of two passages of these
private manuscripts. In one--it was, we are told, the will of the admiral,
written toward the end of the third civil war[1063]--he dissuaded Charles
from assigning to his brothers appanages that might diminish the authority
of the crown. Catharine triumphantly showed it to Alencon. "See!" said
she; "this is your good friend the admiral, whom you so greatly loved and
respected!" "I know not," replied the young prince, "how much of a friend
he was to me; but certainly he showed by this advice how much he loved the
king."[1064] With Walsingham a similar attempt was made to deprive the
murdered hero of Queen Elizabeth's sympathy, but with as little success.
"To the end you may see how little your mistress was beholden to him,"
said Catharine de' Medici one day to the English ambassador, "you may see
a discourse found with his testament, made at such time as he was sick at
Rochel, wherein, amongst other advices that he gave to the king my son,
this is one, that he willed him in any case to keep the queen, your
mistress, and the King of Spain as low as he could, as a thing that tended
much to the safety and maintenance of this crown." "To that I answered,"
says Walsingham, "that in this point, howsoever he was affected towards
the queen my mistress, he showed himself a most true and faithful subject
to the crown of France, and the Queen's Majestie, my mistress, made the
more account of him, for that she knew him faithfully affected to the
same."[1065]
[Sidenote: Coligny's memory declared infamous.]
[Sidenote: Petty indignities.]
The complete absence of proof of all designs save the most patriotic,
and, on the other hand, the clear evidence that Coligny sought for the
quiet and growth of the religious community to which he belonged, only in
connection with the honor and prosperity of his own country, did not deter
the pliant parliament from pursuing the course prescribed for it. A little
more than two months after the Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day (October
the twenty-seventh, 1572), the admiral's sentence was formally pronounced.
He was proclaimed a traitor and the author of a conspiracy against the
king; his goods were confiscated, his memory declared infamous. His
children were degraded from their rank as nobles, and pronounced "ignoble,
villains, _roturiers_, infamous, unworthy, and incapable of making a will,
or of holding offices, dignities or possessions in France." It was ordered
that his castle of Chatillon-sur-Loing should be razed to the ground,
never to be rebuilt, and that the site should be sown with salt; that the
trees of the park should be cut down to half their height, and a
monumental pillar be erected on the spot, with a copy of this decree
inscribed upon it. His portraits and statues were to be destroyed; his
arms, wherever found, to be dragged at the horse's tail and publicly
destroyed by the hangman; his body--if any fragments could be obtained,
or, if not, his effigy--was to be dragged on a hurdle, and hung first on
the Greve and then on a loftier gibbet at Montfaucon. Finally, public
prayers and a solemn procession were ordered to take place in Paris on
every successive anniversary of the feast of St. Bartholomew.[1066]
Thus was the memory of one of the noblest characters that illustrated the
sixteenth century pursued with envenomed hatred, after death had placed
Coligny himself beyond the power of the murderous queen mother to inflict
more substantial injury upon him. To his mortal remains all that malice
could do had already been done. What remained of a mutilated body had been
taken from the hands of those precocious criminals, the boys of Paris,
and hung up by the feet upon the gallows at Montfaucon.[1067] A great part
of the capital had gone out to look upon the grateful sight. Charles the
Ninth was of the number of the visitors, and, when others showed signs of
disgust at the stench arising from the putrefaction of a corpse long
unburied, is said to have exclaimed "that the smell of a dead enemy is
very sweet."[1068] Great was the merriment of the low populace; copious
were the effusions of wit. Jacques Copp de Vellay, in his poetical
diatribe, published with privilege--"Le Deluge des Huguenotz"--sings with
great delight of
Mont-Faulcon, ou les attend
Ce grand Gaspar au curedent,
Attache par les piedz sans teste.[1069]
At last, four or five days after Coligny's death, a body of thirty or
forty horse, sent by Marshal Montmorency, took down the remains by night,
and gave them decent burial.[1070]
[Sidenote: A jubilee procession.]
[Sidenote: Charles declares that he will maintain his edict.]
Not content with the public admission of his responsibility for the
massacre which he had made before the parliament, Charles with his court
participated two days later (Thursday, the twenty-eighth of August) in the
celebration of a jubilee, and walked in a procession through the streets
of Paris; at successive "stations" rendering thanks to Heaven, with fair
show of devotion, for the preservation of his own life, and the lives of
his brothers and of _the King of Navarre_. It would have served greatly to
give a color of plausibility to the report of the conspiracy of the
Huguenots, could Navarre and Conde have been prevailed upon to appear in
the king's company on this occasion. But it must be mentioned to their
honor, that they were proof against the persuasions as well as the threats
of Charles.[1071] The same day a royal declaration was published,
reiterating the allegations made in the Palais de Justice, but protesting
that the king was determined to maintain his edict of pacification. As,
however, the Protestants were forbidden for the present from holding any
public or private assemblies for worship, it must be admitted that they
were not far wrong in regarding the declaration as only another part of
the trap cunningly devised for their destruction.[1072]
[Sidenote: Forced conversion of Navarre and Conde.]
Although the conversion of the young King of Navarre and his cousin, the
Prince of Conde, did not occur until some weeks later, it may be
appropriately mentioned here. No means were left untried to gain them over
to the Roman Catholic religion. The sophistries of monks were
supplemented by the more dangerous persuasions of a renegade Protestant
minister, Hugues Sureau du Rosier, formerly one of the pastors of the
church of Orleans.[1073] Whatever excuse his arguments may have furnished
by covering their renunciation of their faith with the decent cloak of
conviction, _fear_ was certainly the chief instrument in effecting the
desired change in the Huguenot princes. There is no room for doubt that
the character of Charles underwent a marked change, as we shall see later,
from the time that he consented to the massacre. He became more sullen,
more violent, more impatient of contradiction or opposition. It is not at
all unlikely that a mind never fully under control of reason, and now
assuredly thrown from its poise by a desperation engendered of remorse for
the fearful crime he had reluctantly approved, at times formed the
resolution to kill the obstinate King of Navarre and his cousin. On one
occasion Charles is said to have been deterred by the supplications of his
young wife from going in person to destroy them.[1074] At length, when the
alternative of death or the Bastile was the only one presented, the
courage of the Bourbons began to falter. Navarre was the first to yield,
and his sister, the excellent Catharine de Bourbon, followed his example.
On the thirteenth of September the ambassador Walsingham wrote: "They
prepare Bastile for some persons of quality. It is thought that it is for
the Prince of Conde and his brethren."[1075] But three days later (the
sixteenth of September) he wrote again: "On Sunday last, which was the
fourteenth of this month, the young Princess of Conde was constrained to
go to mass, being threatened otherwise to go to prison, and so
consequently to be made away. The Prince of Conde hath also yielded to
hear mass upon Sunday next, being otherwise threatened to go to the
Bastile, where he is not like long to serve."[1076] Such conversions did
not promise to prove very sincere. They were accepted, however, by the
king and his mother; although both Navarre and Conde were detained at
court rather as prisoners than as free princes. Pope Gregory the
Thirteenth received the submission of both cousins to the authority of the
See of Rome, recognized the validity of their marriages, and formally
admitted them to his favor, by a special bull of the twenty-seventh of
October, 1572.[1077] In return for these concessions Henry of Navarre
repealed the ordinances which his mother had made for the government of
Bearn, and re-established the Roman Catholic worship.[1078]
FOOTNOTES:
[925] Memoires de Marguerite de Valois, 25, 26.
[926] No dispensation was ever granted until _after_ the marriage, and
after Henry of Navarre's simulated conversion to Roman Catholicism. Then,
of course, there was no need of further hesitation, and the document was
granted, of which a copy is printed in Documents historiques inedits, i.
713-715. The bull is dated Oct. 27, 1572. There is, then, no necessity for
Mr. Henry White's uncertainty (Massacre of St. Bartholomew, 370): "The new
pope, Gregory XIII., appears to have been more compliant, or the letter
stating that a dispensation was on the road must have been a forgery."
[927] De Thou, iv. (liv. lii.), 569; Lo stratagema di Carlo IX. re di
Francia, contro gli Ugonotti, rebelli di Dio e suoi; descritto dal signor
Camillo Capilupi, e mandato di Roma al signor Alfonzo Capilupi. Ce
stratageme est cy apres mis en Francois avec un avertissement au lecteur.
1574. Orig. ed., p. 22.
[928] Memoires de l'estat de France sous Charles IX. (Cimber et Danjou,
vii. 78.)
[929] "Avec certain formulaire que les uns et les autres n'improuvoyent
point." Mem. de l'estat, _ubi supra_, vii. 79.
[930] As De Thou here speaks as an eye-witness of the marriage, I follow
his description very closely. Histoire univ., iv. (liv. lii.) 469, 470.
Agrippa d'Aubigne was not in Paris (Memoires, edit. Pantheon, p. 478), and
his account is meagre and deficient in originality. Hist. univ., ii. 12
(liv. i., c. 3). It is quite in keeping with the brave Gascon's character,
that, having come to Paris some days before, in order to obtain a
commission to command a company of soldiers which he had raised for the
war in Flanders, he had been obliged to leave almost instantly upon his
arrival, because he had acted as the second of a friend in a duel, and
wounded in the face an archer who endeavored to arrest him. Tavannes makes
Coligny suggest the removal of the ensigns taken from the Protestants as
"marques de troubles," and playfully claim for himself the 50,000 crowns
promised to any one who should bring the admiral's head. Memoires, ed.
Petitot, iii. 293.
[931] Memoires de l'Etat, _ubi supra_, pp. 79, 80; De Thou, _ubi supra_. I
have not deemed it out of place to describe some of the diversions with
which the French court occupied itself on the eve of the massacre. The
connection between reckless merriment and cold-blooded cruelty is often
startlingly close. Besides this, the finances of the country were so
hopelessly involved, as the consequence of the late civil wars, that this
lavish expenditure was particularly ill-timed. If old Gaspard de Tavannes
was as blunt as his son represents him to have been, he gave Charles some
good, but, like most good, unheeded advice. "Sire," said he, a propos of
the extravagance of the court at Guise's marriage in 1570, "you should
make a feast, and instead of the singers who are brought in artificial
clouds, you should bring those who would tell you this truth: 'You are
dolts! You spend your money in festivals, in pomps and masks, and do not
pay your men-at-arms nor your soldiers; foreigners will beat you!'"
Memoires, ed. Petitot, iii. 183.
[932] I had translated this letter from the copy given by the Memoires de
l'estat de France (_apud_ Archives curieuses, vii. 80, 81), which agrees
substantially with, and was probably derived from, the version given in
Hotman's Gasparis Colinii Vita (1575), 106, 107. On comparing it, however,
with the transcript of the original autograph in the remarkable collection
of the late Col. Henri Tronchin, given by M. Jules Bonnet in the Bulletin
de la Soc. de l'hist. du prot. francais, i. (1853), 369, I discover
extraordinary discrepancies, and find that, in addition to a different
phraseology in every sentence, one clause is inserted by Hotman of which
there is not a trace in the Tronchin MS. I refer to the words: "Soyez
asseuree de ma part que, parmi ces festins et passe-temps, _je ne donneray
fascherie a personne_"--which would, of course, point to the prevailing
fears of a collision between the admiral and the young Duke of Guise, or
his retainers, whose hatred of Coligny was so well known that Charles IX.
had issued a special injunction to the parties to keep the peace. The
letter contains at the commencement of the postscript a playful allusion
to the hope of his wife soon to be a mother.
[933] Mem. de l'estat, _ubi supra_, 88, 89; De Thou, iv. (liv. lii.) 570.
The mechanical part of these exhibitions was well executed. In the
"_enfer_" there were "un grand nombre de diables et petis diabloteaux
faisans infinies singeries et tintamarres avec une grande roue tournant
dedans ledit enfer, toute environnee de clochettes." The singer, Etienne
le Roy, was again the "deus ex machina," coming from heaven and returning
thither, in the character of Mercury mounted upon a gigantic bird. The
final explosion inspired so much consternation among the spectators, that
it effectually cleared the hall.
[934] They were married at Blandy, a castle belonging to the Marquise de
Rothelin, near Melun, where its ruins are still to be seen (Saint-Fargeau,
Dict. des communes de France, s. v.), about a week before the marriage of
Navarre, August 10, 1572. Tocsain contre les massacreurs (Arch. curieuses,
vii. 42). Marie of Cleves was a daughter of the Duke of Nevers, and sister
of Catharine of Cleves, Prince Porcien's widow, whom Henry of Guise had
married in Sept., 1570. Journal de Jehan de la Fosse, 146.
[935] It is astonishing to see what considerable distances the Protestants
were obliged to go in order to enjoy any religious privileges, and what
fatigue they willingly underwent in order to avail themselves of them. In
1563, immediately after the close of the first civil war, instead of being
assigned a place for worship in the suburbs, according to the terms of the
edict, the Protestants of Troyes were told to go to Ceant-en-Othe--full
_eight leagues_, or about _twenty-four miles_; nor could they obtain
justice by any remonstrances with the court! As they went to Ceant, in
spite of its inconvenient distance, and of the death of several children
taken thither to be baptized, the Romanists, in 1570, actually proposed to
remove the Protestant _preche_ still farther off, to Villenauxe, _thirteen
leagues from Troyes!_ Happily, after a while, they availed themselves of
the hospitality of a feudal lord nearer by. Recordon, Le protestantisme en
Champagne (MSS. of N. Pithou), 136, etc., 149, 163.
[936] Ibid., pp. 168, 169. The Roman Catholics of Troyes sent, about the
middle of August, two deputies to get the Protestant place of worship
removed from Isle-au-Mont, who were present at the massacre.
[937] Baschet, La diplomatie venitienne, p. 540.
[938] This confession exists in manuscript in the National Library of
Paris (Fonds de Bouhier, 59), under the heading: "Discours du Roy Henry
troisiesme a un personnage d'honneur et de qualite estant pres de sa
majeste, sur les causes et motifs de la St. Barthelemy." It is printed in
an appendix to the Memoires de Villeroy (Petitot ed., xliv. 496-510). Its
authenticity is vouched for by Matthieu, the historiographer of Louis
XIII., and is corroborated by its remarkable agreement with what we can
learn from other sources. Cf., especially, Soldan, Frankreich und die
Bartholomaeusnacht, 224-226. Some suppose that M. de Souvre, and not Miron,
was the person with whom the conversation at Cracow was held. Martin,
Hist. de France, x. 315.
[939] Discours du Roy Henry III., Mem. de Villeroy, 499, 500.
[940] See J. Bonnet, Vie d'Olympia Morata (Paris, 1850), 20, etc.
[941] Discours du Roy Henry III., ibid., p. 501. The nuncio, Salviati,
informs us that young Guise urged his mother herself to kill Coligny.
[942] The article on the massacre in the North British Review for October,
1869--an article to which I shall have occasion more than once to
refer--brings forward a number of passages in the diplomatic
correspondence, especially of the minor Italian states, pointing in this
direction. They can all, I am convinced, be satisfactorily explained,
without admitting the conclusion, to which the writer evidently leans, of
a _distinct_, though not a _long_ premeditation.
[943] "Mad. la Regente venuta in differenza di lui, risolvendosi pochi
giorni prima, gli la fece tirare, e senza saputa del Re, ma con
participatione di M. di Angiu, di Mad. de Nemours, e di M. di Guisa suo
figlio; e se moriva subito non si ammazzava altri," etc. Salviati, desp.
of Sept. 22, 1572, _apud_ Mackintosh, Hist. of England, vol. iii.,
Appendix K. It will be remembered that these despatches were given to Sir
James Mackintosh by M. de Chateaubriand, who had obtained them from the
Vatican. I need not say how much more trustworthy are the secret
despatches of one so well informed as the nuncio, than the sensational
"Stratagema" of Capilupi, which pretends (ed. of 1574, p. 26) that
_Charles_ placed Maurevel in the house from which he shot at Coligny, on
discovering that the admiral had formed the plan of firing Paris the next
night. To believe these champions of orthodoxy, the Huguenots were born
with a special passion for incendiary exploits. It does not seem to strike
them that burning and pillaging Paris would not be likely to appear to
Coligny a probable means of furthering the war in Flanders. Besides, what
need is there of any such Huguenot plot, even according to Capilupi's own
view, since he carries back the premeditation of the massacre on the part
of Charles at least four years?
[944] Le Reveille-Matin des Francois, etc., Archives curieuses, vii. 173;
Eusebii Philadelphi Dialogi (1574), i. 33. It has been customary to
interpret this language and similar expressions as covertly referring to
the massacre which was then four days off. But this seems absurd.
Certainly, if Charles was privy to the plan for Coligny's murder, he must
have expected him to be killed on Friday--that is, within less than two
days. If so, what peculiar significance in the _four_ days? For, if a
general massacre had been at first contemplated, no interval of two days
would have been allowed. Everybody must have known that if the arquebuse
shot had done its work, and Coligny had been killed on the spot, every
Huguenot would have been far from the walls of Paris long before Sunday.
As it was, it was only the admiral's confidence, and the impossibility of
moving him with safety, that detained them.
[945] Capilupi, Lo stratagema di Carlo IX., 1574. Orig. ed., pp. 24, 25,
and the concurrent French version, pp. 42, 43. This version is
incorporated _verbatim_ in the Memoires de l'estat de France sous Charles
IX. (Archives curieuses), vii. 89, 90. In like manner the "Memoires,"
which are in great part a mere compilation, take page after page from the
"Reveille-Matin."
[946] "Ainsi qu'il sortoit presentement du Louvre, pour aller disner en
son logis." Charles's letter of the same day to La Mothe Fenelon, Corresp.
dipl., vii. 322.
[947] It is of little moment whether the assassin at his window was
screened by a lattice, or by a curtain, as De Thou says, or by bundles of
straw, as Capilupi states. I prefer the account of the "Reveille-Matin,"
as the author tells us that he was one of the twelve or fifteen gentlemen
in Coligny's suite--"entre lesquels j'estoy" (p. 174). So the Latin ed.,
Euseb. Philad. Dialogi, i. 34.
[948] The Rue de Bethisy was the continuation of the Rue des Fosses Saint
Germain l'Auxerrois, through which he was walking when he was shot. In the
sixteenth century the street bore the former name, beginning at the Rue de
l'Arbre Sec, at the corner of which Coligny appears to have lodged. In
later times the name was confined to the part east of Rue de Roule.
Dulaure, Histoire de Paris, iv. 259. The extension of the Rue de Rivoli,
under the auspices of Napoleon III., has not only destroyed the house in
which Coligny was murdered, but obliterated the Rue de Bethisy itself.
[949] "Qu'il n'aviendroit que ce qu'il plairoit a Dieu." Reveille-Matin,
175; Euseb. Philad. Dialogi (1574), i. 35; Memoires de l'estat, 94.
[950] See _ante_, chapter xvi.
[951] Reveille-Matin, _ubi sup._, 175; and Euseb. Philad. Dialogi. i. 34,
35; Memoires de l'estat, _ubi sup._, 93, etc.; Jean de Serres (1575), iv.
fol. 25; Tocsain contre les Massacreurs (orig. ed.), 113, etc.; Registres
du Bureau de la ville de Paris (Archives curieuses, vii. 211); despatch of
Salviati of Aug. 22. App. F to Mackintosh, Hist. of England, iii. 354; De
Thou, iv. (liv. lii.) 574; Jehan de la Fosse, 147, 148; Baschet. La
diplomatie venit., 548.
[952] Memoires de l'estat, _ubi sup._, 94; Jean de Serres (1575), iv.,
fols. 25, 26; Reveille-Matin, 176; Euseb. Philad. Dial., i. 35; De Thou,
iv. (liv. lii.) 574.
[953] Tocsain contre les massacreurs, Archives cur., vii. 45;
Reveille-Matin, 177; Memoires de l'estat, 98.
[954] Gasparis Colinii Vita (1574), 108-110; Memoires de l'estat de
Charles IX., _ubi supra_, 94-98. The two accounts are evidently from the
same hand.
[955] Memoires de l'estat, _ubi supra_, 98.
[956] Damville, Meru and Thore, were sons of the constable. Their eldest
brother, Marshal Francis de Montmorency, whose greatest vice was his
sluggishness and his devotion to his ease, had left Paris a few days
before, on the pretext of going to the chase. His absence at the time of
the massacre was supposed to have saved not only his life, but that of his
brothers. The Guises would gladly have destroyed a family whose influence
and superior antiquity had for a generation been obnoxious to their
ambitious designs; but it was too hazardous to leave the head of the
family to avenge his murdered brothers.
[957] There was no need of going far, Coligny responded, to discover the
author. "Qu'on en demande a Monsieur de Guise, il dira qui est celuy qui
m'a preste une telle charite; mais Dieu ne me soit jamais en aide si je
demande vengeance d'un tel outrage." Mem. de l'estat, _ubi supra_, 104,
105.
[958] Gasparis Colinii Vita, 114-121; Memoires de l'estat, _ubi supra_,
102-106. The two accounts agree almost word for word. There is a briefer
narrative in Reveille-Matin, 178, 179; and Euseb. Philad. Dialogi, i. 37.
[959] Discours du roy Henry III., _ubi supra_, 502-505.
[960] Le roi a Mandelot, 22 aout, Correspondance du roi Charles IX. et du
sieur de Mandelot (Paris, 1830), 36, 37.
[961] Corresp. dipl. de La Mothe Fenelon, vii. 322, 323.
[962] Memoires de l'estat, _ubi supra_, 106, 107.
[963] Ibid., 108.
[964] There is here, however, a direct contradiction, which I shall not
attempt to reconcile, between the account of Henry and that of the younger
Tavannes, who represents Retz as one of the most violent in his
recommendations. According to Tavannes, it was his father, Marshal
Tavannes, that advocated moderation. In other respects the two accounts
are strongly corroborative of each other.
[965] Discours du roy Henry III., 505-508.
[966] Memoires de Gaspard de Saulx, seigneur de Tavannes, by his son, Jean
de Saulx, vicomte de Tavannes (Petitot edition), iii. 293, 294.
[967] "Reginam quidem certum est dictitare solitam, edita strage, 'se
tantum _sex_ hominum interfectorum sanguinem in suam conscientiam
recipere.'" Jean de Serres (ed. of 1575), iv., fol. 29. The whole passage
is interesting.
[968] "Le roy Henry quatriesme disoit que ce qu'il ne m'avoit tenu
promesse estoit en vengeance des services faicts par le sieur de Tavannes
mon pere aux batailles de Jarnac et Montcontour, mais le principal, parce
qu'il l'accusoit d'avoir conseille la Sainct Barthelemy; ce qu'il disoit a
ses familiers, et a tort, parce que ledict sieur de Tavannes en ce
temps-la fut cause qu'il ne courust la mesme fortune que le sieur admiral
de Coligny." Memoires de Tavannes (Petitot edit.), iii. 222.
[969] To ascribe the conduct of Catharine de' Medici herself to any such
motive is the extreme of absurdity. Even the author of the "Tocsain contre
les massacreurs" rejects the supposition without hesitation. (Original
edition, p. 157.) Catharine was certainly a free-thinker, probably an
atheist.
[970] Memoires de l'estat, _ubi supra_, 108.
[971] Ibid., 109.
[972] Memoires de l'estat, _ubi supra_, 110, 111.
[973] Ibid., 111; Gasparis Colinii Vita (1575), 124.
[974] Memoires de l'estat, _ubi supra_, 112.
[975] Reveille-Matin, _ubi supra_, 179; Memoires de l'estat, _ubi sup._,
113.
[976] Capilupi, 30, 31; Mem. de l'estat, _ubi sup._, 107, 108.
[977] Extrait des Registres et Croniques du Bureau de la ville de Paris,
Archives curieuses, vii. 213.
[978] The successive orders are given in the Archives curieuses, vii.
215-217.
[979] Discours du roy Henry III., 509.
[980] Tocsain contre les massacreurs, 121; Mem. de l'estat, _ubi sup._,
116; Jean de Serres, iv. (1575), fol. 31.
[981] Jean de Serres, iv. (1575), fol. 30.
[982] Mem. de l'estat, _ubi sup._, 117, 118; Jean de Serres (1575), iv.
32.
[983] The startling inconsistency evidently struck Capilupi very strongly,
for he tries to reconcile it, but succeeds only poorly. According to him,
it was either a ruse to throw Charles IX. off his guard by a pretence of
confidence in his good faith, or an act of consummate folly. Any way,
great thanks are due to Heaven! "Et sia stato fatto questo da lui, o con
arte, per dimostrar di non dubitare della fede del Re, per tanto piu
assicurar sua Maesta, fin che fosse in termine d'effettuar i diabolici
suoi pensieri; o vero scioccamente, non diffidando veramente di cosa
alcuna; in tutti modi si ha da riconoscer da gratia particolare di Dio,"
etc. Lo stratagema di Carlo IX., 1574, 80.
[984] The topography of the massacre is made the subject of a paper,
entitled: "Les victimes de la Saint-Barthelemy," Bulletin de la Soc. de
l'hist. du prot. fr., ix. (1860) 34-44.
[985] G. Colinii Vita (1575), 127. Mem. de l'estat, _ubi sup._, 114.
[986] Mem. de l'estat, 118, 119; Jean de Serres (1575), iv., fol. 32;
Reveille-Matin, 180; Euseb. Philad. Dialogi (1574), 39, 40.
[987] Joh. Wilh. von Botzheim, in his narrative, gives several versions of
the words. According to one they were: "_Behem_--'N'est tu pas Admiral?'
_Admiralius_--'Ouy, je le suis. Mais vous estes bien un jeune souldat pour
parler ainsi avec un vieil capitaine, pour le moins au respect de ma
vielesse.' _Behem_--'Je suis assez aage (age) por te faire ta reste.'"
Cyclopica illa atque inaudita hactenus detestanda atque execranda laniena,
quae facta est Lutetia, Aureliis, etc., published in F. W. Ebeling,
Archivalische Beitraege zur Geschichte Frankreichs unter Carl IX. (Leipsic,
1872), 107, 108.
[988] Capilupi puts in Besme's mouth the words: "Now, traitor, restore to
me the blood of my master, which thou didst impiously take away from me!"
It is not at all improbable that he used some such expression. Lo
stratagema di Carlo IX., 34.
[989] Jean de Serres, De statu reipub. et rel. (1575), iv., fols. 32, 33;
Memoires de l'estat, _ubi supra_, 119-122; Vita Gasparis Colinii
Castellonii, magni quondam Franciae Amirallii (_sine loco_, 1575), pp.
127-131; 178-180. These latter accounts, which agree perfectly, are the
best. Reveille-Matin, _ubi sup._, 182, and Euseb. Philad. Dialogi (1574),
i. 39, 40; Tocsain contre les massacreurs (Rheims, 1579), 121-123;
Capilupi, Lo stratagema di Carlo IX. (1574), 33, etc.; Journal d'un cure
ligueur (Jehan de la Fosse), 148, 149; Relation of Olaegui, secretary of
D. de Cuniga, Spanish ambassador at Paris; Particularites inedites sur la
St. Barthelemi, Gachard in Bulletins de l'Academie royale de Belgique,
xvi. (1849), 252, 253; Alva's bulletin prepared for distribution, ibid.,
ix. (1842), 563. Both are very inaccurate. De Thou, iv. (liv. lii.) 584,
585; Agrippa d'Aubigne, ii. 16 (liv. i., c. 4).
[990] "Le lundy d'apres, ayant la teste ostee et les parties honteuses
coupees _par les petits enfans_, fut d'iceulx petits enfans qui estoient
jusques au nombre de 2 ou 300, traine, le ventre en haut, parmy les
ruisseaux de la ville de Paris." Jehan de la Fosse, 149. See the long
account in Von Botzheim's narration, _ubi supra_, 113.
[991] Memoires de l'estat, _ubi supra_, 122.
[992] Letter of Mandelot to Charles IX., Sept. 5, 1572, Correspondance du
roi Charles IX. et du sieur de Mandelot (Edited by P. Paris, Paris, 1830),
56-58.
[993] Of this memorable enterprise Coligny has left "Memoires" which are
contained in the collection of Petitot, etc. It is the only military
treatise we possess coming from the admiral's hand, and it enters into the
subject with technical minuteness. The destruction by his royal murderers
of the admiral's papers (including diaries that would have thrown great
light upon the transactions of the last two years of his life), see Vita
Gasparis Colinii (1575), i. 138, was an irretrievable loss to history. We
are told also of a much more recent act of vandalism, not even palliated
by the miserable excuse of political expediency: "In 1810, an inhabitant
of Chatillon having discovered in the solitary remaining tower of the old
castle a walled chamber wherein were the archives of the Coligny family
and of the family of Luxemburg, burned all the papers from motives of
private interest. Some fragments that escaped this conflagration, and
which are preserved in the mairie, prove that a correspondence between
Catharine de' Medici and Coligny had been laid away in this repository."
Bulletin de la Societe de l'histoire du prot. francais, iii. (1854) 351.
[994] _Ante_, chapter xiii.
[995] Testament olographe de l'amiral Coligny, Bulletin de la Soc. de
l'hist. du prot. francais, i. (1852) 263, etc. The authenticity of this
document, though called in question on historical grounds, has been
conclusively established by M. Jules Bonnet, Bulletin, xxiv. (1875)
332-335.
[996] Alberi, Relazioni Venete, vol. iv., 1st series, _apud_ Baschet, La
diplomatie venitienne, i. 536, 537. There is, however, the greatest
improbability in the story that Coligny advanced such claims in his own
behalf as his admirers made for him. We may reject as apocryphal--for they
stand in palpable contradiction with the whole tenor of his
utterances--the words ascribed by Lord Macaulay to the great Huguenot hero
(History of England, New York, 1879, iv. 488): "'In one respect,' said the
Admiral Coligni, 'I may claim superiority over Alexander, over Scipio,
over Caesar. They won great battles, it is true. I have lost four great
battles; and yet I show to the enemy a more formidable front than ever.'"
Cf. Davila, bk. v., p. 179.
[997] Vita Gasparis Colinii (1575), pp. 133-137, translated by D. D.
Scott, under the title, "Memoirs of the Admiral de Coligny," 183-187. I
have abridged the account by omitting some less important particulars.
[998] Discours sur les causes de l'execution faicte es personnes de ceux
qui avoient conjure contre le Roy et son estat. A Paris, a l'olivier de P.
l'Huillier, rue St. Jacques. 1572. _Avec privilege._ (Archives curieuses,
vii. 231-249.) Capilupi, Lo stratagema di Carlo IX., 1574, p. 26.
[999] Memoires de l'estat, _ubi supra_, 123; Jean de Serres (1575), iv.,
fol. 30; Reveille-Matin, 182; Eusebii Philadelphi Dialogi, i. 40.
[1000] "La Royne ma mere respond, que s'il plaisoit a Dieu je n'auroit
point de mal; mais quoy que ce fust, il falloit que j'allasse, de peur de
leur faire soupconner quelque chose qui empeschast l'effect."
[1001] Memoires de Marguerite de Valois, 32, 33.
[1002] See _ante_, chapter xvi.
[1003] Memoires de l'estat, _ubi supra_, 123, 124; Jean de Serres (1575),
iv., fol. 34; Reveille-Matin, 182; Eusebii Philadelphi Dialogi, i. 40;
Tocsain contre les massacreurs, 125, 126.
[1004] Agrippa d'Aubigne, ii. 18 (liv. i., c. 4).
[1005] Memoires de Marguerite de Valois, 345.
[1006] Reveille-Matin, _ubi supra_, 183; Euseb. Philad. Dialogi, i. 40;
Mem. de l'estat, _ubi supra_, 126. Charles was not generally so
complaisant. Fervaques in vain interceded for his friend Captain Moneins.
Tocsain, 126.
[1007] Mem. de l'estat, _ubi sup._, 124; Jean de Serres (1575), iv., fol.
35; Reveille-Matin, 182; Euseb. Philadelphi Dial., i. 40; De Thou, iv.
(liv. lii.) 590.
[1008] "Avec une contenance fort esmeue et abatue." Mem. de l'estat.
"Humilissimo animo et consternate ore." Jean de Serres, _ubi supra_.
[1009] Jean de Serres's "_consternatiori_ tamen animo" is an evident
misprint for "_constantiori_ tamen animo."
[1010] Memoires de l'estat, 124, 125; Jean de Serres, iv., fol. 35
_verso_; Reveille-Matin, 183; Eusebii Philad. Dial. (1574), i. 40; De
Thou, iv. (liv. lii.) 590; Agrippa d'Aubigne, Hist. univ., ii. 19 (liv.
i., c. 4).
[1011] Eusebii Phil. Dialogi, i. 40, 41; Reveille-Matin, _ubi sup._, 183,
copied _verbatim_ in Mem. de l'estat, 126. The Reveille-Matin removes the
apparent contradiction between the various accounts respecting the bell
that gave the signal for the massacre by showing that _both_ bells were
rung. So also Agrippa d'Aubigne, ii. 16 (liv. i., c. 4), after mentioning
how Catharine, for the time being, removed Charles's hesitation by
alleging the necessity of cutting off the corrupt members in order to save
the Church, the Bride of Christ, and citing the saying: "Che pieta lor ser
crudele. Che crudelta lor ser pietosa," adds: "Le roi se resout, et elle
avance le tocsain du Palais, en faisant sonner _une heure et demie_ devant
celui de Sainct Germain de l'Auxerrois." By neglecting the clue thus
given, the chronological order of the events of the day has been lost by a
number of historians. It will be noticed that the number of the royal
guards reported to have been slain was, strangely enough, derived from
that of the Huguenot gentlemen butchered in the Louvre by those very
guards. The story may have been perpetuated by misapprehension of the
facts; it could have arisen only from wilful falsehood.
[1012] Tocsain contre les massacreurs (Rheims, 1579), 124, 125;
Reveille-Matin, 126; Eusebii Philadelphi Dialogi, i. 41; Agrippa
d'Aubigne, ii. 18; De Thou, iv. (liv. lii.) 586.
[1013] Tocsain contre les massacreurs, 125; Agrippa d'Aubigne, ii. 18; De
Thou, iv. (liv. lii.) 586; Euseb. Philad. Dialogi, _ubi supra_.
[1014] "The courtiers and the soldiers of the royal guard were the
executioners of this commission on the (Huguenot) noblesse, terminating,
they said, by the sword and general disorder, those processes which pens
and paper and the order of justice had hitherto failed to bring to an
issue." Reveille-Matin, _ubi supra_, 184; Eusebii Philad. Dialogi, i 41;
Memoires de l'estat, 127.
[1015] Agrippa d'Aubigne, ii. 18.
[1016] Tocsain contre les massacreurs, 136, 137.
[1017] Reveille-Matin, _ubi supra_, 184, 185; Eusebii Philad. Dial., i.
42; Mem. de l'estat, 127; Jean de Serres (1575), iv. 38; De Thou, iv.
(liv. lii.) 588; Agrippa d'Aubigne, ii. 18. The minor details of the story
are given, with variations, by different authors. D'Aubigne gives us
Biron's answer to the commands and menaces with which Madame de la
Chataigneraie sought to gain possession of young La Force: "I would
certainly intrust him in the hands of his relative, in order to take care
of him, but not in the hands of his next heir, who took too great care of
him yesterday morning," ii. 21. It must be noted, however, that the
"Memoires authentiques de Jacques Nompar de Caumont, Duc de la Force,
Marechal de France, recueillis par le Marquis de la Grange" (Paris, 1843),
i. 2-37, so far from accusing the sister of La Force, ascribe the
persistent attempts to secure his death solely to Archan (or Larchant),
who had _married_ this sister; and they state that, at her death, she left
her property, including what she had inherited from her husband, to her
brother.
[1018] Memoires de l'estat, _ubi supra_, 146
[1019] Mem. de l'estat, 146; Tocsain contre les massacreurs, 129, 130; De
Thou, iv. (liv. lii.) 592; Claude Haton, ii. 678; Agrippa d'Aubigne, ii.
20.
[1020] Tocsain, 136.
[1021] Mem. de l'estat, 146.
[1022] "Radices, atque etiam radicum fibras, funditus evellas." Pii Quinti
Epistolae, 111. See _ante_, chapter xvi., p. 308.
[1023] Mem. de l'estat, 147. The children of other cities emulated the
example of those of Paris. In Provins, in the month of October, 1572, a
Huguenot, Jean Crespin, after having been hung by the officers of justice,
was taken down from the gallows by "les petis enfans de Provins, _de l'age
de douze ans et au dessoubz_," to the number of more than one hundred. By
these mimic judges he was declared unworthy to be dragged save by his
feet, and, his punishment by hanging being reckoned too light, he was
roasted in a fire of straw, and presently thrown into the river. Numbers
of older persons looked on, approving and encouraging the children; a few
good Catholics were grieved to see such cruelty practised on a dead body.
Mem. de Claude Haton, ii. 704-706.
[1024] Mem. de l'estat, _ubi supra_, 128.
[1025] "On en remarqua qui avoient les yeux attaches sur le corps du Baron
du Pont, pour voir si elles y trouveroient quelque cause ou quelque marque
de l'impuissance qu'on lui reprochoit." De Thou, iv. (liv. lii.) 587. See
Euseb. Philadelphi Dial., i. 45, and Jean de Serres (1575) iv., fol. 39.
[1026] "Le Roy, la Royne mere, et leurs courtisans, rioyent a gorge
desployee." Mem. de l'estat, _ubi supra_, 132.
[1027] The prevot, echevins, etc., "du tout, auroient, d'heure en heure,
rendu compte et tesmoignage a sadicte Majeste." Extrait des registres et
croniques du bureau de la ville de Paris, Archives curieuses, vii. 215.
[1028] Mem. de l'estat, _ubi supra_.
[1029] Tocsain contre les massacreurs, Rheims, 1579, p. 140.
[1030] Ibid., _ubi supra_.
[1031] Brantome, Homines illustres francais, M. de Thavannes.
[1032] "Declarant (Alencon) qu'il ne pouvoit approuver vn tel desordre, ny
qu'on rompit si ouvertement la foy promise, qui fut cause que sa mere luy
dit en termes clairs que s'il bougeoit elle le feroit ietter dans vn sac
aual l'eau." Tocsain contre les massacreurs, 141.
[1033] Ib., 133.
[1034] De Thou, iv. 592.
[1035] His son, Jacques Merlin, at a later time pastor at La Rochelle,
although he does not mention the particulars of his father's escape, in
the journal published for the first time by M. Gaberel in an appendix to
the second vol. of his Histoire de l'eglise de Geneve, pp. 153-207,
alludes to it--"fut deliure par une grace de Dieu speciale" (p. 155).
[1036] Memoires de Sully (London, 1748), i. pp. 29, 30.
[1037] Tocsain contre les massacreurs, 131; Mem. de l'estat, _ubi supra_,
142, etc. De Thou, iv. (liv. lii.) 592, 593. Strange to say, Von Botzheim
was so far misinformed, that he makes Charpentier _weep_ for the fate of
Ramus! Archival. Beitraege, p. 117.
[1038] De Thou, iv. (liv. lii.) 596; Memoires de l'estat de France sous
Charles IX. (Cimber et Danjou, vii. 137-142, and in M. Buchon's
biographical notice prefixed to the "Commentaires"). An appreciative
chapter on Pierre de la Place and his works may be read in Victor Bujeaud,
Chronique protestante de l'Angoumois (Angouleme, 1860), 50-66.
[1039] Cahors is over 300 miles in a straight line from Paris, more than
400 miles--153 leagues--by the roads.
[1040] De Thou, iv. (liv. lii.) 594, 595; Agrippa d'Aubigne, Hist. univ.,
ii. 23.
[1041] The incident of Charles IX.'s firing upon the Huguenots has been of
late the subject of much discussion. M. Fournier and M. Mery have denied
the existence, in 1572, of the pavilion at which tradition makes the king
to have stationed himself. See Bulletin de la Soc. de l'hist. du prot.
francais, v. (1857) 332, etc. It has, I think, been conclusively shown
that they are mistaken. The pavilion _was_ in existence. But, besides,
there is no reason why an incident should be deemed apocryphal because of
a popular mistake in assigning the spot of its occurrence. The
"Reveille-Matin" and the Eusebii Philadelphi Dialogi, published in 1574,
are the earliest documents that refer to it. They place Charles at the
window of his own room. So does Brantome, writing considerably later. Jean
de Serres (in the fourth vol. of his Commentaria de statu, etc. (fol. 37),
published in 1575) says: "Regem quoque ex hypaethrio (_i.e._, from a
covered gallery) aiunt, adhibitis, ut solebat, diris contenta voce
conclamare, et tormento etiam ipsum ejaculari." Agrippa d'Aubigne alludes
to it not only in his Histoire universelle (ii. 19, 21), but in his
Tragiques (Bulletin, vii. 185), a poem which he commenced as early as in
1577 (See Bulletin, x. 202). M. Henri Bordier has been so fortunate as to
discover and has reprinted a contemporary engraving of the massacre, in
which Charles is represented as excitedly looking on the slaughter from a
window in the Louvre, while behind him stand two halberdiers and several
noblemen (Bulletin, x. 106, 107). The question is discussed in an able and
exhaustive manner by MM. Fournier, Ludovic Lalanne, Bernard, Berty,
Bordier, and others, in the Bulletin, v. 332-340; vi. 118-126; vii.
182-187; x. 5-11, 105-107, 199-204.
[1042] The Porte de Bussy, or Bucy, was the first gate toward the west on
the southern side of the Seine. During the reign of Francis I. and his
successors of the house of Valois, the walls of Paris were of small
compass. In this quarter their general direction is well marked out by the
Rue Mazarine. The circuit started from the Tour de Nesle, which was nearly
opposite the eastern front of the Louvre--the short Rue de Bussy fixes the
situation of the gate where Guise was delayed. A little west of this is
the abbey church of St. Germain-des-Pres, which gave its name to the
suburb opposite the Louvre and the Tuileries. This quaint pile--the oldest
church, or, indeed, edifice of any kind in Paris--after being built in the
sixth century, and injured by the Normans in the ninth, was rebuilt and
dedicated in 1163 A.D., by Alexander III. in person. On that occasion the
Bishop of Paris was not even permitted by the jealous monks to be present,
on the ground that the abbey of St. Germain-des-Pres was exempt from his
jurisdiction. The pontiff confirmed their position, and his sermon,
instead of being an exposition of the Gospel, was devoted to setting forth
the privileges accorded to the abbey by St. Germain, Bishop of Paris, in
886. Dulaure, Histoire de Paris, ii. 79-84.
[1043] Tocsain contre les massacreurs, 138, 139; Reveille-Matin, 186-188;
Mem. de l'estat, 129-131.
[1044] See Henry White, Massacre of St. Bartholomew, p. 460.
[1045] Valued at from 100,000 to 200,000 crowns, Reveille-Matin, 190; Mem.
de l'estat, 151. The interesting anonymous letter from Heidelberg, Dec.
22, 1573, published first by the Marquis de Noailles in his "Henri de
Valois et la Pologne en 1572" (Paris, 1867), iii. 533, from the MSS. of
Prince Czartoryski, alludes to the costly jewels which Henry, now
king-elect of Poland, made to the elector palatine, his host, and remarks:
"Fortasse magna haec fuisse videbitur liberalitas et rege digna, at parva
certe vel nulla potius fuit, si vel sumptibus quos illustrissimus noster
princeps in deducendo et excipiendo hoc hospite sustinuit conferamus, vel
si unde haec dona sint profecta expendamus. Ipse siquidem rex (Henry) ne
teruncium pro iis solvisse, sed ex taberna cujusdam praedivitis aurifabri
Parisiensis, quam scelerati sui ministri in strage illa nobilium ut alias
multas diripuerunt, accepisse ea fertur."
[1046] Memoires de l'estat, _ubi supra_, 150. Versailles, which thus
passed into the hands of the family of Marshal Retz--the Gondi family--was
an old castle situated in the midst of an almost unbroken forest. The
Gondi family sold it to Louis XIII., who built a hunting lodge, afterward
transmuted by Louis XIV. into the magnificent palace, which, for more than
a century, was the favorite residence of the most splendid court in
Europe. The mode in which the title was acquired did not augur well for
the justice or the morality which was to reign there. M. L. Lacour has
contributed an animated sketch, "Versailles et les protestants de France,"
to the Bulletin de la Soc. de l'hist. du prot. fr., viii. (1859) 352-367.
[1047] Discours sur les causes de l'execution, _ubi supra_, 249.
[1048] Royal orders of Aug. 25th, Aug. 27th, etc. Order of the Prevot des
marchands, Aug. 30th. Registres du bureau de la ville, Archives curieuses,
vii. 222-230. Euseb. Philadelphi Dialog., i. 45.
[1049] Registres du bureau de la ville, pp. 222, 223.
[1050] Ibid., p. 227.
[1051] "Aucuns malades languissans, ayant ouy ce miracle, se firent porter
audit cymetiere pour veoir laditte espine; lesquelz, estans la avec ferme
foy, firent leur priere a Dieu en l'honneur de nostre dame la vierge Marie
et devant son ymage qui est en laditte chapelle, pour recouvrer leur
sante, et, apres leur oraison faicte, s'en retournerent en leurs maisons
sains et guaris de leur maladie, chose tres-veritable et bien approuvee."
Mem. de Claude Haton, ii. 682.
[1052] Ibid., _ubi supra_; Tocsain contre les massacreurs, 146;
Reveille-Matin, 193, 194; Mem. de l'estat, 155; Jean de Serres, iv., fol.
41; De Thou, iv. (liv. lii.) 596.
[1053] Dr. White (Massacre of St. Bartholomew, 459) has tabulated the
estimates, nine in number, afforded by twenty-one distinct authorities.
The lowest estimate--1,000 victims--is that of the Abbe Caveyrac, whose
undisguised aim was to place the number as low as possible, so as to
palliate the atrocity of the massacre. Being based apparently upon the
number of the _names_ of victims that have been recorded, it may be
dismissed as unworthy of consideration. The highest estimate, of 10,000,
though adopted by such writers as the authors of the Reveille-Matin and
the Memoires de l'estat de France, is vague or excessive. The Tocsain and
Agrippa d'Aubigne are, perhaps, too moderate in respectively stating the
number as 2,000 and 3,000. On the whole, it appears to me, the
contribution of Paris to the massacre of the Huguenots may be set down
with the greatest probability at between 4,000 and 5,000 persons of all
ages and conditions. Von Botzheim, who estimates the total at 8,000 (F. W.
Ebeling, Archivalische Beitraege, p. 120), makes 500 of these to be women
(Ibid., p. 119).
[1054] In other letters Charles had even the effrontery to represent the
King of Navarre as having been in like danger with his brothers and
himself. See Eusebii Philadelphi Dialog. (1574), i. 45: "se quidem metu
propriae salutis in arcem Luparam (the Louvre) compulsum illic se
continuisse, una cum fratre charissimo Rege Navarrae, et dilectissimo
Principe Condensi, ut in communi periculo eundem fortunae exitum
experirentur!"
[1055] Correspondance du roi Charles IX. et du sieur de Mandelot, 39-41.
Letter to the Governor of Burgundy, _apud_ Mem. de l'estat, _ubi sup._,
133-135.
[1056] It was undoubtedly with the object of showing that they were not
the prime movers in the massacre, or, as the author of the Mem. de l'estat
expresses himself, that they had no particular quarrel save with Admiral
Coligny, that Henry of Guise and his uncle actually rescued a few
Huguenots from the hands of those who were about to put them to death.
Reveille-Matin, 188; Memoires de l'estat, 150.
[1057] Mem. de l'estat, _ubi supra_, 154, from Reveille-Matin, 192; De
Thou, iv. (liv. lii.) 597, 598; Euseb. Philad. Dial., i. 47.
[1058] It was while Charles was on his way to the Palais de Justice that a
gentleman in his train, and not far from him, was recognized as being a
Protestant, and was killed. The king, hearing the disturbance, turned
around; but, on being informed that it was a Huguenot whom they were
putting to death, lightly said: "Let us go on. Would to God that he were
the last!" Reveille-Matin, 194 (copied in Mem. de l'estat, 157); Euseb.
Philad. Dial., i. 50.
[1059] De Thou, whom I have chiefly followed, iv. (liv. lii.) 599; Tocsain
contre les massacreurs, 142; Reveille-Matin, 193, 194; Euseb. Phil. Dial.,
i. 49; Mem. de l'estat, 156; Jean de Serres (1575), iv., fol. 43;
Capilupi, 45; Relation of Olaegui, secretary of Don Diego de Cuniga,
Spanish ambassador at Paris, to be laid before Philip II., Simancas MSS.,
_apud_ Bulletins de l'Acad. Roy. des Sciences, etc., de Belgique, vol.
xvi. (1849) 254.
[1060] De Thou, Tocsain, etc., _ubi supra_.
[1061] Returning to the unpleasant theme in a subsequent book of his noble
history (iv. (liv. liii.) 644), Jacques Auguste de Thou remarks, with an
integrity which cannot swerve even out of consideration for filial
respect: "Ce qu'il y avoit de deplorable, etoit de voir des personnes
respectables par leur piete, leur science, et leur integrite, revetues des
premieres charges du Royaume, ennemies d'ailleurs de tout deguisement et
de tout artifice, tels que Morvilliers, de Thou, Pibrac, Montluc et
Bellievre, louer contre leurs sentimens, ou excuser par complaisance une
action qu'ils detestoient dans le coeur, sans y etre engages par aucun
motif de crainte ou d'esperance; mais dans la fausse persuasion ou ils
etoient que les circonstances presentes et le bien de l'Etat demandoient
qu'ils tinssent ce langage."
[1062] The case stands much worse if we accept the statement of the author
of the Memoires de l'estat de France sous Charles IX., who, after
contrasting the honorable conduct of President La Vaquerie, in the time of
Louis XI., with that of Christopher de Thou, adds: "Mais cestui-ci n'avoit
garde de faire le semblable; il prend trop de plaisir a toute sorte
d'injustice pour s'y vouloir opposer." (_Ubi supra_, pp. 156, 157.) So,
also, Euseb. Philad. Dial., i. 50: "Nam quomodo sese injustitiae viriliter
opponeret, qui ex ea tam uberes fructus colligit?" The Mem. de l'estat
accuse him of having instigated the murder of Rouillard--a counsellor of
parliament and canon of Notre Dame, and one of a very few Roman Catholics
that were assassinated--because the latter loved justice, and had
prosecuted one of the first president's friends (p. 148). According to the
historian De Thou, on the other hand (iv. 593), Rouillard was "homme
inquiet, querelleux, et ennemi des officiers des compagnies de ville."
[1063] The passage is not in the will in the admiral's own handwriting,
dated Archiac, June 5, 1569, a facsimile of which has been accurately
lithographed by the French Protestant Historical Society, and which has
also been printed in the Bulletin, i. (1852) 263-268. See _ante_, p. 461,
462.
[1064] Memoires de l'estat, _ubi supra_, 153; Gasparis Colinii Vita
(1575), 131.
[1065] "The said discourse was all written with his own hand." Walsingham
to Smith, Sept. 14, 1572; Digges, 241, 242; Mem. de l'estat, _ubi supra_,
153; Gasparis Colinii Vita, 131, 132.
[1066] Jean de Serres (1575), iv., fols. 57, 58; Eusebii Philadelphi Dial.
(1574), i. 82, 83; Reveille-Matin, 203-205; De Thou, iv. (liv. liii.) 645,
646. For many years the disgraceful commemorative procession was
faithfully observed.
[1067] The slight eminence of Montfaucon, the Tyburn of Paris, was between
the Faubourg St. Martin and the Faubourg du Temple, near the site of the
Hopital St. Louis. See Dulaure, Atlas de Paris.
[1068] "Il les en reprit et leur dist: 'Je ne bousche comme vous autres,
car l'odeur de son ennemy est tres-bonne'--odeur certes point bonne et la
parolle aussi mauvaise." Brantome, Le Roy Charles IX., edit. Lalanne, v.
258. The original authority for this odious remark is Papyrius Masson
(1575) in his life of Charles IX., which Brantome had under his eyes:
"Servis foetorem non ferentibus, hostis mortui odor bonus est inquit." Le
Laboureur, iii. 16.
[1069] Le deluge des Huguenots avec leur Tumbeau, 1572. Reprinted in
Archives curieuses, vii. 251-259.
[1070] Tocsain contre les massacreurs, Rheims, 1579, p. 143. It has been
well remarked by a writer in the Bulletin de la Soc. de l'hist. du prot.
francais (iii. 346) as one of the paradoxes of history, that Coligny's
mangled remains, "after being carefully subjected to the most ignominious
treatment, were saved from the annihilation to which they appeared to be
infallibly condemned, and have been transmitted from place to place, and
from hand to hand, until our own days, and better preserved for three
centuries than many other illustrious corpses carefully laid up in costly
mausoleums!" Marshal Montmorency placed the admiral's body in a lead
coffin in his castle of Chantilly, whence he sent it to Montauban.
Francois de Coligny brought it back to Chatillon-sur-Loing, when, in 1599,
the sentence of parliament was formally rescinded. In 1786 it was taken to
Maupertuis and placed in a black marble sarcophagus. Since 1851 it has
been resting in its new tomb under the ruins of that part of the castle of
Chatillon where Coligny was probably born. Bulletin, iii. 346-351.
[1071] Tocsain contre les Massacreurs, 146; Reveille-Matin, 195; Euseb.
Philadelphi Dial., i. 51; Mem. de l'estat, 161; Jean de Serres, iv., fol.
44 _verso_.
[1072] The text of the declaration is to be found in the Memoires de
Claude Haton, ii. 683-685, in the Recueil des anciennes lois francaises
(Isambert), xiv. 257, etc., and in the Memoires de l'estat, _ubi supra_,
162-164. See De Thou, iv. (liv. lii.) 600. The Reveille-Matin calls
attention (p. 196) to the circumstance that in the first copies of the
document the name of Navarre did not occur; but that in the next issue the
admiral's unhappy and detestable conspiracy was represented as directed
against "la personne dudit sieur roy et contre son estat, la royne sa
mere, messieurs ses freres, _le roy de Navarre_, princes et seigneurs
estans pres d'eulx." The policy of introducing Navarre, and, by
implication, Conde, among the proposed victims of the Huguenots, was
certainly sufficiently bold and reckless. See _ante_, p. 490.
[1073] See De Thou, iv. (liv. liii.), 630; Jean de Serres, iv., fols. 53,
54.
[1074] Euseb. Philadelphi Dial., i. 52.
[1075] Digges, 239, 240.
[1076] Ibid., 245
[1077] Documents historiques inedits, i. 713-715.
[1078] Agrippa d'Aubigne, Hist. univ., ii. 30; Jean de Serres (1575), iv.,
fol. 55.
CHAPTER XIX.
THE MASSACRE IN THE PROVINCES, AND THE RECEPTION OF THE TIDINGS ABROAD.
[Sidenote: The massacre in the provinces.]
The massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day would have been terrible enough had
it been confined to Paris, for its victims in that single city were to be
reckoned by thousands. Charles the Ninth himself, on the third day,
admitted in a letter to Mondoucet, his envoy in the Netherlands, that "a
very great number of the adherents of the new religion who were in this
city had been massacred and cut to pieces."[1079] But this was little in
comparison with the multitudes that were yet to lose their lives in other
parts of France. Here, however, the enterprise assumed a different
character. Not only did it not commence on the same day as in the capital,
but it began at different dates in different places. It is evident that
there had been no well-concerted plan long entertained and freely
communicated to the governors of the provinces and cities. On the
contrary, the greatest variety of procedure prevailed--all tending,
nevertheless, to the same end of the total destruction of the Protestants.
And this was intended from the very moment the project of the Parisian
butchery was hastily and inconsiderately adopted by the king. Charles
meant to be as good as his word when he announced his determination that
not a single Huguenot should survive to reproach him with what he had
done. More frightful than his most passionate outburst of bloodthirsty
frenzy is the cool calculation with which he, or the minister who wrote
the words he subscribed, predicts the chain of successive murders in
provincial France, scarcely one of which had as yet been attempted. "_It
is probable_," he said, in the same letter of the twenty-sixth of August,
that has just been cited, "_that the fire thus kindled will go coursing
through all the cities of my kingdom_, which, following the example of
what has been done in this city, will assure themselves of all the
adherents of the said religion."[1080]
[Sidenote: Verbal orders.]
No mere surmise, founded upon the probable effects of the exhibition of
cruelty in Paris, led to the penning of this sentence. Charles had
purposely fired the train which was to explode with the utmost violence at
almost every point of his wide dominions. "As it has pleased God," he
wrote to Mondoucet, "to bring matters to the state in which they now are,
I do not intend to neglect the opportunity not only to re-establish, if I
shall be able, lasting quietness in my kingdom, but also to serve
Christendom."[1081] Accordingly, secret orders, for the most part verbal,
had already been sent in all directions, commanding the provinces to
imitate the example set by Paris. The reality of these orders does not
rest upon conjecture, but is attested by documentary evidence over the
king's own hand. As we have seen in the last chapter, Charles published,
on the twenty-eighth of August, a declaration of his motives and
intentions. This was despatched to the governors of the provinces and to
other high officers, in company with a circular letter, of which the final
sentence deserves particular notice. "Moreover," says the king, "whatever
verbal command I may have given to those whom I sent to you, as well as to
my other governors and lieutenants-general, at a time when I had just
reason to fear some inauspicious events, from having discovered the
conspiracy which the admiral was making against me, I have revoked and
revoke it completely, intending that nothing therein contained be put into
execution by you or by others; for such is my pleasure."[1082]
[Sidenote: Instructions to Montsoreau at Saumur.]
What was the import of these orders? The manuscripts in the archives of
Angers seem to leave no room for doubt. This city was the capital of the
Duchy of Anjou, given in appanage to Henry, the king's brother, and was,
consequently, under his special government. On Tuesday, the twenty-sixth
of August, the duke sent to the Governor of Saumur a short note running
thus: "Monsieur de Montsoreau, I have instructed the sieur de Puigaillard
to write to you respecting a matter that concerns the service of the king,
my lord and brother, as well as my own. You will, therefore, not fail to
believe and to do whatever he may tell you, just as if it were I myself."
In the same package with these credentials Montsoreau[1083] received a
letter from Puigaillard, like himself a knight of the royal order of St.
Michael, which reveals only too clearly the purpose of the king and his
Brother. "Monsieur mon compagnon, I will not fail to acquaint you with the
fact that, on Sunday morning the king caused a very great execution to be
made against the Huguenots; so much so that the admiral and all the
Huguenots that were in this city were killed. And his Majesty's will is
that the same be done wherever there are any to be found. Accordingly, if
you desire ever to do a service that may be agreeable to the king and to
Monsieur (the Duke of Anjou), you must go to Saumur with the greatest
possible number of your friends, and put to death all that you can find
there of the principal Huguenots.... Having made this execution at Saumur,
I beg you to go to Angers and do the same, with the assistance of the
captain of the castle. And you must not expect to receive any other
command from the king, nor from Monseigneur, for they will send you none,
inasmuch as they depend upon what I write you. You must use diligence in
this affair, and lose as little time as possible. I am very sorry that I
cannot be there to help you in putting this into execution."[1084]
[Sidenote: Two kinds of letters.]
The statement of the author of the Memoires de l'estat de France is,
therefore, in full agreement with the ascertained facts of the case. He
informs us that, soon after the Parisian massacre commenced, the secret
council by which the plan had been drawn up despatched two widely
differing kinds of letters. The first were of a private character, and
were addressed to governors of cities and to seditious Roman Catholics
where there were many Protestants, by which they were instigated to murder
and rapine;[1085] the others were public, and were addressed to the same
functionaries, their object being to amuse and entrap the professors of
the reformed faith. And in addition to the double sets of written
instructions, the same author says that messengers were sent to various
points, to give orders for special executions.[1086] We shall not find it
very difficult to account for the rapidity with which the massacre spread
to the provincial towns--of which the secretary of the Spanish ambassador,
in his hurried journey from Paris to Madrid, was an eye-witness[1087]--if
we bear in mind the previous ripeness of the lowest classes of the Roman
Catholic population for the perpetration of any possible acts of insult
and injury toward their Protestant fellow-citizens. The time had come for
the seed sown broadcast by monk and priest in Lenten and Advent discourses
to bear its legitimate harvest in the pitiless murder of heretics.
[Sidenote: The massacre at Meaux.]
Meaux was naturally one of the first of smaller cities to catch the
contagion from the capital. Not only was it the nearest city that
contained any considerable body of Huguenots, but, if we may credit the
report current among them, Catharine, in virtue of her rank as Countess of
Meaux, had placed it first upon the roll. It is not impossible that the
circumstance that this was the cradle of Protestantism in France may have
secured it this distinction. About the middle of Sunday afternoon a
courier reached Meaux, and at once made his way to the residence of the
procureur-du-roi, one Cosset. The nature of the message he bore may be
inferred from the fact that secret orders were at once given to those
persons upon whom Cosset thought that he could rely, to be in readiness
about nightfall. So completely had every outlet from Paris been sealed,
that it had proved almost impossible for a Protestant to find the means of
escaping to carry the tidings abroad. Consequently the adherents of the
reformed faith were yet in ignorance of the impending catastrophe. At the
time appointed, Cosset and his followers seized the gates of Meaux. It was
the hour when the peaceable and unsuspecting people were at supper. The
Protestants could now easily be found, and few escaped arrest, either that
evening or on the succeeding day. Happily, however, a large number of
Huguenots resided in a quarter of Meaux known as the "Grand Marche," and
separated from the main part of the town by the river Marne. The
inhabitants of the Grand Marche received timely warning of their danger;
and the men fled by night for temporary refuge to the neighboring
villages. It was scarcely dawn on Monday morning when the work of plunder
begun. By eight o'clock little was left of the goods of the Huguenots on
this side of the Marne, and the pillagers crossed the bridge to the Grand
Marche. Finding only the women, who had remained in the vain hope of
saving their family possessions, the papists wreaked their fury upon them.
About twenty-five of these unhappy persons were murdered in cold
blood;[1088] others were so severely beaten that they died within a few
days; a few were shamefully dishonored. In most cases, if not in all,
outward acquiescence in the ceremonies of the Roman Catholic Church would
have saved the lives of the victims, but the Huguenot women were constant
and would yield no hypocritical consent. One poor woman, the wife of
"Nicholas the cap-maker," was being dragged to mass, when her bold and
impolitic expressions of detestation of the service so enraged her
conductors, that, being at that moment upon the bridge which unites the
two portions of the city, they stabbed her and threw her body into the
river. In a short time the Grand Marche, which the precise chronicler
tells us contained more than four hundred houses, was robbed of everything
which could be removed, for not the most insignificant article escaped the
cupidity of the Roman Catholic populace.[1089]
These were but the preliminaries of the general massacre. The prisons were
full of Huguenots, whom it was necessary to put out of the way. Late in
the day, on Tuesday the twenty-sixth, Cosset and his band made their
appearance. They were provided with a list of their destined victims, more
than two hundred in number. Of a score or two the names have been
preserved, with their respective avocations. They were merchants, judicial
officers, industrious artisans--in short, the representatives of the
better class of the population of Meaux. Not one escaped. The murderous
band were stationed in the courtyard of the prison, while Cosset, armed
with a pistol in either hand, mounted the steps, and by his roll summoned
the Protestants to the slaughter awaiting them below. The bloody work was
long and tedious. The assassins adjourned awhile for their supper, and,
unable to complete the task before weariness blunted the edge of their
ferocity, reserved a part of the Protestants for the next day. None the
less was the task accomplished with thoroughness, and the exultant
cutthroats now had leisure to pursue the fugitives of the Grand Marche to
the villages in which they had taken refuge.[1090]
[Sidenote: The massacre at Troyes.]
The news of the Parisian massacre reached Troyes, the flourishing capital
of Champagne, on Tuesday, the twenty-sixth of August, and spread great
alarm among the Protestants, who, with the recent disturbances[1091] still
fresh in their memories, apprehended immediate death. But their enemies
for the time confined themselves to closing the gates to prevent their
escape. It was not until Saturday, the thirtieth, that the "bailli," Anne
de Vaudrey, sieur de St. Phalle, sent throughout the city and brought all
the Protestants to the prisons. Meantime one of the most turbulent of the
Roman Catholics, named Pierre Belin, had been in Paris, having been
deputed, some weeks before, to endeavor to procure the removal of the
place of worship of the reformed from the castle of Isle-au-Mont, two or
three leagues from the city, to some more distant and inconvenient spot.
He remained in the capital until the Saturday after the massacre, and
started that day for Troyes, with a copy of the declaration of Thursday
forbidding injury to the persons and goods of unoffending Protestants, and
ordering the release of any that might have been imprisoned. It was
believed, indeed, that he was commissioned to give the declaration to the
bailli for publication. On Wednesday, the third of September, he reached
Troyes. As he rode through the streets, he inquired again and again
whether the Huguenots at Troyes were all killed as they were elsewhere.
When interrogated by peaceable Roman Catholics respecting a rumor that
the king had revoked his sanguinary orders, he boldly denied its truth,
accompanying his words with oaths and imprecations. Finding the bailli, he
had no difficulty in persuading him to suppress the royal order, and to
convene a council, at which Belin was introduced as the bearer of verbal
instructions, and a bishop was brought forward to confirm them. Belin and
the bishop maintained that the royal pleasure was that the heretics of
Troyes should all be murdered on the following Saturday night, without
distinction of rank, sex, or age, and their bodies be exposed in the
streets to the sight of those who should on the morrow join in a solemn
procession to be held in honor of the achievement. A writing attached to
the neck of each was to contain the words: "Seditious persons and rebels
against the king, who have conspired against his Majesty."
The task of butchering the helpless Huguenots in the prison was first
proposed to the public hangman. He refused to take any part in it: this,
he said, was no duty of his office, and he would consent to perform it
only when all the forms of law should have been observed. Other persons
were found more pliable, and, under the leadership of one Perremet, the
bloody scenes of the prison of Meaux were re-enacted, on Thursday, the
fourth day of September, in that of Troyes. How many were the victims we
know not; we have, however, the names of over thirty, apparently the most
prominent of the number. Others were assassinated in the streets. At last,
when all had been done that malice could effect, the king's declaration,
which promised protection to the Huguenots, was published on Friday, the
fifth of September.[1092]
[Sidenote: The great bloodshed at Orleans.]
In Orleans, a city once the headquarters of the Huguenots, where their
iconoclastic assaults upon the churches during the first civil war had
left permanent memorials of their former supremacy, the massacre assumed
the largest proportions. One of the king's court preachers, Arnauld
Sorbin, better known as M. de Sainte Foy, had written from Paris letters
instigating the inhabitants of Orleans to imitate the example of the
capital, and the letters came to hand with the earliest tidings of the
Parisian massacre. The first murder took place on Monday. M. de Champeaux,
a royal counsellor and a Protestant, who as yet was in ignorance of the
events of St. Bartholomew's Day, received late on Monday the visit of
Tessier, surnamed La Court, the leader of the assassins of Orleans, and
some of his followers. Imagining it to be a friendly call--for they were
acquaintances--Champeaux received them courteously, and invited them to
sup with him. The meal over, his guests recounted the story of the tragic
occurrence at Paris, and, before he was well over his surprise and horror,
asked him for his purse. The unhappy host, still mistaking the character
of those whom he had entertained, at first regarded the demand as a
pleasantry; but when he had been convinced of his error and had complied,
his treacherous visitors instantly stabbed him to death in his very
dining-room.[1093] The general butchery began on Tuesday night, in the
neighborhood of the ramparts, where the Protestants were most numerous,
and from Wednesday to Saturday there was no intermission in the slaughter.
Here, more even than elsewhere, the murderers distinguished themselves by
their profanity and their undisguised hatred of the Protestant faith and
worship. "Where is your God?" "Where are your prayers and your psalms?"
"Where is the God they invoke so much? Let Him save, if He can." Such were
the expressions with which the blows of the assassin were interlarded. At
times he thought to aggravate his victim's sufferings by singing snatches
of favorite psalms from the Huguenot psalm-book. It might be the
forty-third, so appropriate to the condition of oppressed innocence, in
its quaint old French garb:
Revenge-moi, pren la querelle
De moi, Seigneur, de ta merci,
Contre la gent fausse et cruelle:
De l'homme rempli de cautelle,
Et en sa malice endurci,
Delivre moi aussi.
Or it might be the fifty-first--the words never more sincerely accepted,
even when chanted to all the perfection of choral music, in the Sistine
Chapel or in St. Peter's, than when, in the ears of constant sufferers for
their Christian faith, ribald voices contemptuously sang or drawled the
familiar lines:
Misericorde au povre vicieux,
Dieu tout-puissant, selon ta grand' clemence.[1094]