A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times Charles IX. And The Religious Wars. (1560-1574.) byGuizot, M.
We now enter upon the era of the civil wars, massacres, and
assassinations caused by religious fanaticism or committed on religious
pretexts. The latter half of the sixteenth century is the time at which
the human race saw the opening of that great drama, of which religious
liberty is the beginning and the end; and France was then the chief scene
of it. At the close of the fifteenth and at the commencement of the
sixteenth centuries, religious questions had profoundly agitated
Christian Europe; but towards the middle of the latter century they had
obtained in the majority of European states solutions which, however
incomplete, might be regarded as definitive. Germany was divided into
Catholic states and Protestant states, which had established between
themselves relations of an almost pacific character. Switzerland was
entering upon the same course. In England, Scotland, the Low Countries,
the Scandinavian states, and the free towns their neighbors, the
Reformation had prevailed or was clearly tending to prevail. In Italy,
Spain, and Portugal, on the contrary, the Reformation had been stifled,
and Catholicism remained victorious. It was in France that,
notwithstanding the inequality of forces, the struggle between
Catholicism and Protestantism was most obstinately maintained, and
appeared for the longest time uncertain. After half a century of civil
wars and massacres it terminated in Henry IV., a Protestant king, who
turned Catholic, but who gave Protestants the edict of Nantes; a
precious, though insufficient and precarious pledge, which served France
as a point of departure towards religious liberty, and which protected it
for nearly a century, in the midst of the brilliant victory won by
Catholicism. [The edict of Nantes, published by Henry IV. in 1598, was
revoked by Louis XIV. in 1685.]
For more than three centuries civilized Europe has been discussing, pro
or con, the question of religious liberty, but from instinct and with
passion far more than with a serious understanding of what is at the
bottom of things. Even in our own day it is not without difficulty that
a beginning is being made to understand and accept that principle in its
true sense and in all its bearings. Men were wonderfully far from it in
1560, at the accession of Charles IX., a child ten years old; they were
entering, in blind confidence, upon a religious war, in order to arrive,
only after four centuries of strife and misconception, at a vindication
of religious liberty. "Woe to thee, O country, that hast a child for
king!" said, in accordance with the Bible, the Venetian Michael Suriano,
ambassador to France at that time. Around that royal child, and seeking
to have the mastery over France by being masters over him, were
struggling the three great parties at that time occupying the stage in
the name of religion. The Catholics rejected altogether the idea of
religious liberty for the Protestants; the Protestants had absolute need
of it, for it was their condition of existence; but they did not wish for
it in the case of the Catholics, their adversaries. The third party
(tiers parti), as we call it nowadays, wished to hold the balance
continually wavering between the Catholics and the Protestants, conceding
to the former and the latter, alternately, that measure of liberty which
was indispensable for most imperfect maintenance of the public peace, and
reconcilable with the sovereign power of the kingship. On such
conditions was the government of Charles IX. to establish its existence.
The death of Francis II. put an end to a grand project of the Guises,
which we do not find expressly indicated elsewhere than in the Memoires
of Michael de Castelnau, one of the best informed and most intelligent
historians of the time. "Many Catholics," says he, "were then of opinion
that, if the authority of the Duke of Guise had continued to be armed
with that of the king as it had been, the Protestants would have had
enough to do. For orders had been sent to all the principal lords of the
kingdom, officers of the crown and knights of the order, to show
themselves in the said city of Orleans on Christmas-day at the opening of
the states, for that they might be all made to sign the confession of the
Catholic faith in presence of the king and the chapter of the order;
together with all the members of the privy council, reporting-masters (of
petitions), domestic officers of the king's household, and all the
deputies of the estates. The same confession was to be published
throughout all the said kingdom, in order to have it sworn by all the
judges, magistrates, and officers, and, finally, all private persons from
parish to parish. And in default of so doing, proceedings were to be
taken by seizures, condemnations, executions, banishments, and
confiscations. And they who did repent themselves and abjured their
Protestant religion were to be absolved." [Memoires de Michel de
Castelnau, book ii. chap. xii. p. 121, in the Petitot collection.]
It is not to be supposed that, even if circumstances had remained as they
were under the reign of Francis II., such a plan could have been
successful; but it is intelligible that the Guises had conceived such an
idea: they were victorious; they had just procured the condemnation to
death of the most formidable amongst the Protestant princes, their
adversary Louis de Conde; they were threatening the life of his brother
the King of Navarre; and the house of Bourbon seemed to be on the point
of disappearing beneath the blows of the ambitious, audacious, and by no
means scrupulous house of Lorraine. Not even the prospect of Francis
II.'s death arrested the Guises in their work and their hopes; when they
saw that he was near his end, they made a proposal to the queen-mother to
unite herself completely with them, leave the Prince of Conde to
execution, rid herself of the King of Navarre, and become regent of the
kingdom during the minority of her son Charles, taking them, the Lorraine
princes and their party, for necessary partners in her government. But
Catherine de' Medici was more prudent, more judicious, and more
egotistical in her ambition than the Guises were in theirs; she was not,
as they were, exclusively devoted to the Catholic party; it was power
that she wanted, and she sought for it every day amongst the party or the
mixtures of parties in a condition to give it her. She considered the
Catholic party to be the strongest, and it was hers; but she considered
the Protestant party strong enough to be feared, and to give her a
certain amount of security and satisfaction: a security necessary,
moreover, if peace at home, and not civil war, were to be the habitual
and general condition of France. Catherine was, finally, a woman, and
very skilful in the strifes of court and of government, whilst, on the
field of battle, the victories, though won in her name, would be those of
the Guises more than her own. Without openly rejecting the proposals
they made to her under their common apprehension of Francis II.'s
approaching death, she avoided making any reply. She had, no doubt,
already taken her precautions and her measures in advance; her
confidante, Jacqueline de Longwy, Duchess of Montpensier and a zealous
Protestant, had brought to her rooms at night Antony de Bourbon, King of
Navarre, and Catherine had come to an agreement with him about the
partition of power between herself and him at the death of the king her
son. She had written to the Constable de Montmorency, a rival of the
Guises and their foe though a stanch Catholic, to make haste to Orleans,
where his presence would be required. As soon as Chancellor de
l'Hospital became aware of the proposals which were being made by the
Guises to the queen-mother, he flew to her and opposed them with all the
energy of his great and politic mind and sterling nature. Was she going
to deliver the Prince of Conde to the scaffold, the house of Bourbon to
ruin, France to civil war, and the independence of the crown and of that
royal authority which she was on the point of wielding herself to the
tyrannical domination of her rivals the Lorraine princes and of their
party? Catherine listened with great satisfaction to this judicious and
honest language. When the crown passed to her son Charles she was free
from any serious anxiety as to her own position and her influence in the
government. The new king, on announcing to the Parliament the death of
his brother, wrote to them that "confiding in the virtues and prudence of
the queen-mother, he had begged her to take in hand the administration of
the kingdom, with the wise counsel and advice of the King of Navarre and
the notables and great personages of the late king's council." A few
months afterwards the states-general, assembling first at Orleans and
afterwards at Pontoise, ratified this declaration by recognizing the
placement of "the young King Charles IX.'s guardianship in the hands of
Catherine de' Medici, his mother, together with the principal direction
of affairs, but without the title of regent." The King of Navarre was to
assist her in the capacity of lieutenant-general of the kingdom.
Twenty-five members specially designated were to form the king's privy
council. [Histoire des Etats generaux, by M. Picot, t. ii. p. 73.]
And in the privacy of her motherly correspondence Catherine wrote to the
Queen of Spain, her daughter Elizabeth, wife of Philip II., "Madame, my
dear daughter, all I shall tell you is, not to be the least anxious, and
to rest assured that I shall spare no pains to so conduct myself that
God and everybody may have occasion to be satisfied with me. . . .
You have seen the time when I was as happy as you are, not dreaming of
ever having any greater trouble than that of not being loved as I should
have liked to be by the king your father. God took him from me, and is
not content with that; He has taken from me your brother, whom I loved
you well know how much, and has left me with three young children, and
in a kingdom where all is division, having therein not a single man in
whom I can trust, and who has not some particular object of his own."
The queen-mother of France, who wrote to her daughter the Queen of Spain
with such firmness of tone and such independence of spirit, was, to use
the words of the Venetian ambassador John Michieli, who had lived at her
court, "a woman of forty-three, of affable manners, great moderation,
superior intelligence, and ability in conducting all sorts of affairs,
especially affairs of state. As mother, she has the personal management
of the king; she allows no one else to sleep in his room; she is never
away from him. As regent and head of the government, she holds
everything in her hands, public offices, benefices, graces, and the seal
which bears the king's signature, and which is called the cachet
(privy-seal or signet). In the council, she allows the others to speak;
she replies to any one who needs it; she decides according to the advice
of the council, or according to what she may have made up her own mind
to. She opens the letters addressed to the king by his ambassadors and
by all the ministers. . . . She has great designs, and does not
allow them to be easily penetrated. As for her way of living, she is
very fond of her ease and pleasure; she observes few rules; she eats and
drinks a great deal; she considers that she makes up for it by taking a
great deal of exercise a-foot and a-horseback; she goes a-hunting; and
last year she always joined the king in his stag-chases, through the
woods and thick forests, a dangerous sort of chase for anyone who is not
an excellent rider. She has an olive complexion, and is already very
fat; accordingly the doctors have not a good opinion of her life. She
has a dower of three hundred thousand francs a year, double that of
other queens-dowager. She was formerly always in money-difficulties and
in debt; now, she not only keeps out of debt, but she spends and gives
more liberally than ever." [Relations des Ambassadeurs venztzens,
published by A. N. Tommaseo, t. i. pp. 427-429.]
As soon as the reign of Charles IX. and the queen-mother's government
were established, notice was sent to the Prince of Conde that he was
free. He refused to stir from prison; he would wait, he said, until his
accusers were confined there. He was told that it was the king's express
order, and was what Francis II. on his death-bed had himself impressed
upon the King of Navarre. Conde determined to set out for La Fere, a
place belonging to his brother Anthony de Bourbon, and there await fresh
orders from the king. In February, 1561, he left La Fare for
Fontainebleau. On his road to Paris his friends flocked to him and made
him a splendid escort. On approaching the king's palace Conde separated
himself from his following, and advanced alone with two of his most
faithful friends. All the lords of the court, the Duke of Guise amongst
them, went to meet him. On the 15th of March he was admitted to the
privy council. Chancellor de l'Hospital, on the prince's own demand,
affirmed that no charge had been found against him. The king declared
his innocence in a deed signed by all the members of the council. On the
13th of June, in solemn session, the Parliament of Paris, sitting as a
court of peers, confirmed this declaration. Notwithstanding the Duke of
Guise's co-operation in all these acts, Conde desired something of a more
personal kind on his part.
On the 24th of August, at St. Germain, in presence of the king, the
queen-mother, the princes, and the court, the Duke of Guise, in reply to
a question from the king, protested "that he had not, and would never
have desired to, put forward anything against the prince's honor, and
that he had been neither the author nor the instigator of his
imprisonment." "Sir," said Conde, "I consider wicked and contemptible
him or them who caused it." "So I think, sir," answered Guise, "and it
does not apply to me at all." Whereupon they embraced, and a report was
drawn up of the ceremony, which was called their reconciliation. Just as
it was ending, Marshal Francis de Montmorency, eldest son of the
constable, and far more inclined than his father was towards the cause of
the Reformers, arrived with a numerous troop of friends, whom he had
mustered to do honor to Conde. The court was a little excited at this
incident. The constable declared that, having the honor to be so closely
connected with the princes of Bourbon, his son would have been to blame
if he had acted differently. The aged warrior had himself negotiated
this reconciliation; and when it was accomplished, and the Duke of Guise
had performed his part in it with so much complaisance, the constable
considered himself to be quits with his former allies, and free to
follow his leaning towards the Catholic party. "The veteran," says the
Duke of Autnale, "did not pique himself on being a theologian; but he
was sincerely attached to the Catholic faith because it was the old
religion and the king's; and he separated himself definitively from
those religious and political innovators whom he had at first seemed to
countenance, and amongst whom he reckoned his nearest relatives." In
vain did his eldest son try to hold him back; a close union was formed
between the Constable de Montmorency, the Duke of Guise, and Marshal de
Saint-Andre, and it became the Catholic triumvirate against which
Catherine de' Medici had at one time to defend herself, and of which she
had at another to avail herself in order to carry out the policy of
see-saw she had adopted as her chief means of government.
Before we call to mind and estimate as they deserve the actions of that
government, we must give a correct idea of the moral condition of the
people governed, of their unbridled passions, and of the share of
responsibility reverting to them in the crimes and shocking errors of
that period. It is a mistake and an injustice, only too common, to lay
all the burden of such facts, and the odium justly due to them, upon the
great actors almost exclusively whose name has remained attached to them
in history; the people themselves have very often been the prime movers
in them; they have very often preceded and urged on their masters in the
black deeds which have sullied their history; and on the masses as well
as on the leaders ought the just sentence of posterity to fall. The
moment we speak of the St. Bartholomew, it seems as if Charles IX.,
Catherine de' Medici, and the Guises issued from their grave to receive
that sentence; and God forbid that we should wish to deliver them from
it; but it hits the nameless populace of their day as well as themselves,
and the hands of the people, far more than the will of kings, began the
tale of massacres for religion's sake. This is no vague and general
assertion; and, to show it, we shall only have to enumerate, with their
dates, the principal facts of which history has preserved the memory,
whilst stigmatizing them, with good reason, as massacres or murders. The
greater number, as was to be expected, are deeds done by Catholics, for
they were by far the more numerous and more frequently victorious; but
Protestants also have sometimes deserved a place in this tragic category,
and when we meet with them, we will assuredly not blot them out.
We confine the enumeration to the reign of Charles IX., and in it we
place only such massacres and murders as were not the results of any
legal proceeding. We say nothing of judicial sentences and executions,
however outrageous and iniquitous they may have been.
The first fact which presents itself is a singular one. Admiral de
Coligny's eldest brother, Odet de Chatillon, was a Catholic, Bishop of
Beauvais, and a cardinal; in 1550, he had gone to Rome and had
co-operated in the election of Pope Julius III.; in 1554, he had
published some Constitutions synodales (synodal regulations), to remedy
certain abuses which had crept into his diocese, and, in 1561, he
proposed to make in the celebration of the Lord's Supper some
modifications which smacked, it is said, of the innovations of Geneva.
The populace of Beauvais were so enraged at this that they rose up
against him, massacred a schoolmaster whom he tried to protect, and would
have massacred the bishop himself if troops sent from Paris had not come
to his assistance.
In the same year, 1561, the Protestants had a custom of meeting at Paris,
for their religious exercises, in a house called the Patriarch's house,
very near the church of St. Medard. On the 27th of December, whilst the
Reformed minister was preaching, the Catholics had all the bells of St.
Medard rung in full peal. The minister sent two of his congregation to
beg the incumbent to have the bell-ringing stopped for a short time. The
mob threw themselves upon the two messengers: one was killed, and the
other, after making a stout defence, returned badly wounded to the
Patriarch's house, and fell dead at the preacher's feet. The provost of
tradesmen was for having the bells stopped; the riot became violent; the
house of the Reformers was stormed; and the provost's archers had great
difficulty in putting a stop to the fight. More than a hundred persons,
it is said, were killed or wounded.
In 1562, in the month of February, whilst the Guises were travelling in
Germany, with the object of concluding, in the interests of policy,
alliances with some German Lutheran princes, disturbances broke out at
Cahors, Amiens, Sens, and Tours, between the Protestants and the
Catholics. Which of the two began them? It would be difficult to
determine. The passions that lead to insult, attack, defence, and
vengeance were mutually felt and equally violent on both sides. Montluc
was sent to Guienne by the queen-mother to restore order there; but
nearly everywhere he laid the blame on the Protestants. His Memoires
prove that he harried them without any form of justice. "At Sauveterre,"
says he, "I caught five or six, all of whom I had hanged without expense
of paper or ink, and without giving them a hearing, for those gentry are
regular Chrysostoms (parlent d'or)." "I was informed that at Gironde
there were sixty or eighty Huguenots belonging to them of La Reole, who
had retreated thither; the which were all taken, and I had them hanged to
the pillars of the market-place without further ceremony. One hanged has
more effect than a hundred slain." When Montluc took Monsegur, "the
massacre lasted for ten hours or more," says he, "because search was made
for them in the houses; the dead were counted and found to be more than
seven hundred." [Memoires de Montluc, t. ii. pp. 442, 443-447.]
Almost at the very time at which Montluc, who had been sent to Guienne to
restore order there between the Catholics and the Protestants, was
treating the latter with this shocking severity, an incident, more
serious because of the rank of the persons concerned, took place at
Vassy, a small town in Champagne, near which the Duke of Guise passed on
returning from Germany. Hearing, as he went, the sound of bells, he
asked what it meant. "It is the church of the Huguenots of Vassy," was
the answer. "Are there many of them?" asked the duke. He was told that
there were, and that they were increasing more and more. "Then," says
the chronicler, "he began to mutter and to put himself in a white heat,
gnawing his beard, as he was wont to do when he was enraged or had a mind
to take vengeance." Did he turn aside out of his way with his following,
to pass right through Vassy, or did he confine himself to sending some of
his people to bring him an account of what was happening there? When a
fact which was at the outset insignificant has become a great event, it
is hardly possible to arrive at any certain knowledge of the truth as to
the small details of its origin. Whatever may have been the case in the
first instance, a quarrel, and, before long, a struggle, began between
the preacher's congregation and the prince's following. Being informed
of the matter whilst he was at table, the Duke of Guise rose up, went to
the spot, found the combatants very warmly at work, and himself received
several blows from stones; and, when the fight was put a stop to,
forty-nine persons had been killed in it, nearly all on the Protestant
side; more than two hundred others, it is said, came out of it severely
wounded; and, whether victors or vanquished, all were equally irritated.
The Protestants complained vehemently; and Conde offered, in their name,
fifty thousand men to resent this attack, but his brother, the King of
Navarre, on the contrary, received with a very bad grace the pleading of
Theodore de Beze. "It is true that the church of God should endure
blows and not inflict them," said De Beze, "but remember, I pray you,
that it is an anvil which has used up a great many hammers."
The massacre of Vassy, the name which has remained affixed to it in
history, rapidly became contagious. From 1562 to 1572, in Languedoc, in
Provence, in Dauphiny, in Poitou, in Orleanness, in Normandy even and in
Picardy, at Toulouse, at Gaillac, at Frejus, at Troyes, at Sens, at
Orleans, at Amiens, at Rouen, and in many other towns, spontaneous and
disorderly outbreaks between religiously opposed portions of the populace
took place suddenly, were repeated, and spread, sometimes with the
connivance of the local authorities, judicial or administrative, but more
often through the mere brutal explosion of the people's passions. It is
distasteful to us to drag numerous examples from oblivion; but we will
cite just two, faithful representations of those sad incidents, and
attested by authentic documents. The little town of Gaillac was almost
entirely Catholic; the Protestants, less numerous, had met the day after
Pentecost, May 18, 1562, to celebrate the Lord's Supper. "The
inhabitants in the quarter of the Chateau de l'Orme, who are all artisans
or vine-dressers," says the chronicler, "rush to arms, hurry along with
them all the Catholics of the town, invest the place of assembly, and
take prisoners all who were present. After this capture, they separate:
some remain in the meeting-house, on guard over the prisoners; the rest
go into dwellings to work their will upon those of the religion who had
remained there. Then they take the prisoners, to the number of sixty or
eighty, into a gallery of the Abbey of St. Michael, situated on a steep
rock, at the base of which flows the River Tarn; and there, a field
laborer, named Cabral, having donned the robe and cape of the judge's
deputy, whom he had slain with his own hand, pronounces judgment, and
sentences all the prisoners to be thrown from the gallery into the river,
telling them to go and eat fish, as they had not chosen to fast during
Lent; which was done forthwith. Divers boatmen who were on the river
despatched with their oars those who tried to save themselves by
swimming." [Histoire generale du Languedoc, liv. xxxviii. f. v., p.
227.] At Troyes, in Champagne, "during the early part of August, 1572,
the majority of the Protestants of the town, who were returning from
Esleau-Mont, where they had a meeting-house and a pastor under
authorization from the king, were assailed in the neighborhood of
Croncels by the excited populace. A certain number of individuals,
accompanying a mother carrying a child which had just received baptism,
were pursued with showers of stones; several were wounded, and the child
was killed in its mother's arms." This affair did not give rise to any
prosecution. "It is no use to think about it any longer," said the
delegate of the bailiff and of the mayor of Troyes, in a letter from
Paris on the 27th of August. The St. Bartholomew had just taken place
on the 24th of August. [Histoire de la Ville de Troyes, by H. Boutiot,
t. iii. p. 25.]
Where they happened to be the stronger, and where they had either
vengeance to satisfy or measures of security to take, the Protestants
were not more patient or more humane than the Catholics. At Nimes, in
1567, they projected and carried out, in the town and the neighboring
country, a massacre in which a hundred and ninety-two Catholics perished;
and several churches and religious houses were damaged or completely
destroyed. This massacre, perpetrated on St. Michael's day, was called
the Michaelade. The barbarities committed against the Catholics in
Dauphiny and in Provence by Francis de Beaumont, Baron of Adrets, have
remained as historical as the massacre of Vassy, and he justified them on
the same grounds as Montluc had given for his in Guienne. "Nobody
commits cruelty in repaying it," said he; "the first are called
cruelties, the second justice. The only way to stop the enemy's
barbarities is to meet them with retaliation." Though experience ought
to have shown them their mistake, both Adrets and Montluc persisted in
it. A case, however, is mentioned in which Adrets was constrained to be
merciful. After the capture of Montbrison, he had sentenced all the
prisoners to throw themselves down, with their hands tied behind them,
from the top of the citadel; one of them made two attempts, and thought
better of it; "Come, twice is enough to take your soundings," shouted the
baron, who was looking on. "I'll give you four times to do it in,"
rejoined the soldier. And this good saying saved his life.
The weak and undecided government of Catherine de' Medici tried several
times, but in vain, to prevent or repress these savage explosions of
passion and strife amongst the people; the sterling moderation of
Chancellor de l'Hospital was scarcely more successful than the
hypocritical and double-faced attentions paid by Catherine de' Medici to
both the Catholic and the Protestant leaders; the great maladies and the
great errors of nations require remedies more heroic than the adroitness
of a woman, the wisdom of a functionary, or the hopes of a philosopher.
It was formal and open civil war between the two communions and the two
parties that, with honest and patriotic desire, L'Hospital and even
Catherine were anxious to avoid. From 1561 to 1572 there were in France
eighteen or twenty massacres of Protestants, four or five of Catholics,
and thirty or forty single murders sufficiently important to have been
kept in remembrance by history; and during that space of time formal
civil war, religious and partisan, broke out, stopped and recommenced in
four campaigns, signalized, each of them, by great battles, and four
times terminated by impotent or deceptive treaties of peace which, on the
24th of August, 1572, ended, for their sole result, in the greatest
massacre of French history, the St. Bartholomew.
The first religious war, under Charles IX., appeared on the point of
breaking out in April, 1561, some days after that the Duke of Guise,
returning from the massacre of Vassy, had entered Paris, on the 16th of
March, in triumph. The queen-mother, in dismay, carried off the king to
Melun at first, and then to Fontainebleau, whilst the Prince of Conde,
having retired to Meaux, summoned to his side his relatives, his friends,
and all the leaders of the Reformers, and wrote to Coligny, "that Caesar
had not only crossed the Rubicon, but was already at Rome, and that his
banners were beginning to wave all over the neighboring country." For
some days Catherine and L'Hospital tried to remain out of Paris with the
young king, whom Guise, the Constable de Montmorency, and the King of
Navarre, the former being members and the latter an ally of the
triumvirate, went to demand back from them. They were obliged to submit
to the pressure brought to bear upon them. The constable was the first
to enter Paris, and went, on the 2d of April, and burned down the two
places of worship which, by virtue of the decree of January 17, 1561, had
been granted to the Protestants. Next day the King of Navarre and the
Duke of Guise, in their turn, entered the city in company with Charles
IX. and Catherine. A council was assembled at the Louvre to deliberate
as to the declaration of war, which was deferred. Whilst the king was on
his way back to Paris, Conde hurried off to take up his quarters at
Orleans, whither Coligny went promptly to join him. They signed, with
the gentlemen who came to them from all parts, a compact of association
"for the honor of God, for the liberty of the king, his brothers and the
queen-mother, and for the maintenance of decrees;" and Conde, in writing
to the Protestant princes of Germany to explain to them his conduct, took
the title of protector of the house and crown of France. Negotiations
still went on for nearly three months. The chiefs of the two parties
attempted to offer one another generous and pacific solutions; they even
had two interviews; but Catherine was induced by the Catholic triumvirate
to expressly declare that she could not allow in France more than one
single form of worship. Conde and his friends said that they could not
lay down their arms until the triumvirate was overthrown, and the
execution of decrees granting them liberty of worship, in certain places
and to a certain extent, had been secured to them. Neither party liked
to acknowledge itself beaten in this way without having struck a blow.
And in the early part of July, 1562, the first religious war began.
We do not intend to dwell upon any but its leading facts, facts which at
the moment when they were accomplished might have been regarded as
decisive in respect of the future. In this campaign there were two; the
battle of Dreux, on the 19th of December, 1562; and the murder of the
Duke of Guise by Poltrot, on the 18th of February, 1563.
The two armies met in the plain of Dreux with pretty nearly equal forces,
the royal army being superior in artillery and the Protestant in cavalry.
When they had arrived in front of one another, the triumvirs sent to ask
the queen-mother's authority to give battle. "I am astounded," said
Catherine to her favorite adviser, Michael de Castelnau, "that the
constable, the Duke of Guise, and Saint-Andre, being good, prudent, and
experienced captains, should send to ask counsel of a woman and a child,
both full of sorrow at seeing things in such extremity as to be reduced
to the risk of a battle between fellow-countrymen." "Hereupon," says
Castelnau, "in came the king's nurse, who was a Huguenot, and the queen,
at the same time that she took me to see the king, who was still in bed,
said to me with great agitation and jeeringly, 'We had better ask the
king's nurse whether to give battle or not; what think you?' Then the
nurse, as she followed the queen into the king's chamber according to her
custom, said several times that, as the Huguenots would not listen to
reason, she would say, 'Give battle.' Whereupon there was, at the privy
council, much discourse about the good and the evil that might result
therefrom; but the resolution arrived at was, that they who had arms in
their hands ought not to ask advice or orders from the court; and I was
despatched on the spot to tell them from the king and the queen, that, as
good and prudent captains, they were to do what they considered most
proper." Next day, at ten in the morning, the armies met. "Then
every one," says La Noue, one of the bravest amongst the Reformers'
leaders, "steadied himself, reflecting that the men he saw coming towards
him were not Spaniards, or English, or Italians, but Frenchmen, that is,
the bravest of the brave, amongst whom there were some who were his own
comrades, relatives, and friends, and that within an hour they would have
to be killing one another, which created some sort of horror of the fact,
without, however, diminution of courage. . . . One thing worthy of
being noted," continues La Noue, "is the long duration of the fight, it
being generally seen in battles that all is lost or won within a single
hour, whereas this began about one P. M., and there was no issue until
after five. Of a surety, there was marvellous animosity on both sides,
whereof sufficient testimony is to be found in the number of dead, which
exceeded seven thousand, as many persons say; the majority whereof were
killed in the fight rather than the pursuit. . . . Another incident
was the capture of the two chiefs of the armies, a thing which rarely
happens, because generally they do not fight until the last moment and in
extremity; and often a battle is as good as won before they come to this
point. But in this case they did not put it off so long, for, at the
very first, each was minded to set his men an example of not sparing
themselves. The Constable de Montmorency was the first taken, and
seriously wounded, having always received wounds in seven battles at
which he was present, which shows the boldness that was in him. The
Prince of Conde was taken at the end, also wounded. As both of them had
good seconds, it made them the less fearful of danger to their own
persons, for the constable had M. de Guise, and the Prince of Conde
Admiral de Coligny, who showed equally well to the front in the melley.
. . . Finally I wish to bring forward another matter, which will be
supernumerary because it happened after the battle; and that is, the
courteous and honorable behavior of the Duke of Guise victorious towards
the Prince of Conde a prisoner; which most men, on one side as well as on
the other, did not at all think he would have been disposed to exhibit,
for it is well known how hateful, in civil wars, are the chiefs of
parties, and what imputations are made upon them. Nevertheless here
quite the contrary happened: for, when the prince was brought before the
duke, the latter spoke to him respectfully and with great gentleness of
language, wherein he could not pretend that there was any desire to pique
him or blame him. And whilst the prince staid in the camp, the duke
often dined with him. And forasmuch as on this day of the battle there
were but few beds arrived, for the baggage had been half-plundered and
dispersed, the Duke of Guise offered his own bed to the Prince of Conde,
which the prince would accept in respect of the half only. And so these
two great princes, who were like mortal foes, found themselves in one
bed, one triumphant and the other captive, taking their repast together."
[Memoires de Francois de La Noue, in the Petitot collection; 1st
series, t. xxxiv. pp. 172-178.]
The results of the battle of Dreux were serious, and still more serious
from the fate of the chiefs than from the number of the dead. The
commanders of the two armies, the Constable de Montmorency, and the
Prince of Conde, were wounded and prisoners. One of the triumvirs,
Marshal de Saint-Andre, had been killed in action. The Catholics'
wavering ally, Anthony de Bourbon, King of Navarre, had died before the
battle of a wound which he had received at the siege of Rouen; and on his
death-bed had resumed his Protestant bearing, saying that, if God granted
him grace to get well, he would have nothing but the gospel preached
throughout the realm. The two staffs (etats-majors), as we should now
say, were disorganized: in one, the Duke of Guise alone remained unhurt
and at liberty; in the other, Coligny, in Conde's absence, was elected
general-in-chief of the Protestants. At Paris, for a while, it was
believed that the battle was lost. "If it had been," says Montluc,
"I think that it was all over with France, for the state would have
changed, and so would the religion; a young king can be made to do as
you please;" Catherine de' Medici showed a facile resignation to such a
change. "Very well," she had said, "then we will pray to God in French."
When the victory became known there was general enthusiasm for the Duke.
of Guise; but he took only a very modest advantage of it, being more
anxious to have his comrades' merits appreciated than his own. At Blois,
as he handed the queen-mother her table-napkin at dinner-time, he asked
her if he might have an audience of her after the repast. "Jesu! my dear
cousin," said Catherine, "whatever are you saying?" "I say it, madame,
because I would fain show you in the presence of everybody what I have
done, since my departure from Paris, with your army which you gave in
charge to me together with the constable, and also present to you all the
good captains and servants of the king and of yourself who have served
you faithfully, as well your own subjects as also foreigners, and
horsemen and foot;" whereupon he discoursed about the battle of Dreux,
"and painted it so well and so to the life," says Brantome, "that you
would have said that they were still about it, whereat the queen felt
very great pleasure. . . . Every one listened very attentively,
without the least noise in the world; and he spoke so well that there was
none who was not charmed, for the prince was the best of speakers and
eloquent, not with a forced and overladen eloquence, but simple and
soldierly, with a grace of his own to match; so much so that the
queen-mother said that she had never seen him in such good form."
[Brantome, Tries des Brands Capitaines, t. ii. pp. 247-250.] The good
form, however, was not enough to prevent the ill-humor and jealousy felt
by the queen-mother and her youthful son the king at such a great success
which made Guise so great a personage. After the victory of Dreux he had
written to the king to express his wish to see conferred upon a candidate
of his own choosing the marshal's baton left vacant by the death of
Saint-Andre. "See now," said Charles IX. to his mother and some persons
who were by, "if the Duke of Guise does not act the king well; you would
really say that the army was his, and that victory came from his hand,
making no mention of God, who, by His great goodness, hath given it us.
He thrusts the bargain into my fist (dictates to me). Yet must I give
him a civil answer to satisfy him; for I do not want to make trouble in
my kingdom, and irritate a captain to whom my late father and I have
given so much credit and authority." The king almost apologized for
having already disposed of the baton in favor of the Marquis de
Vieilleville, and he sent the Duke of Guise the collar of the order for
two of his minions, and at the same time the commission of
lieutenant-general of the kingdom and commander-in-chief of the army for
himself. Guise thanked him, pretending to be satisfied: the king smiled
as he read his letter; and "Non ti fidar, e non sarai gabbato" (Don't
trust, and you'll not be duped), he said in the words of the Italian
proverb.
He had not to disquiet himself for long about this rival. On the 18th of
February, 1563, the Duke of Guise was vigorously pushing forward the
siege of Orleans, the stronghold of the Protestants, stoutly defended by
Coligny. He was apprised that his wife, the Duchess Anne d'Este, had
just arrived at a castle near the camp with the intention of using her
influence over her husband in order to spare Orleans from the terrible
consequences of being taken by assault. He mounted his horse to go and
join her, and he was chatting to his aide-de-camp Rostaing about the
means of bringing about a pacification, when, on arriving at a cross-road
where several ways met, he felt himself struck in the right shoulder,
almost under the arm, by a pistol-shot fired from behind a hedge at a
distance of six or seven paces. A white plume upon his head had made him
conspicuous, and as, for so short a ride, he had left off his cuirass,
three balls had passed through him from side to side. "That shot has
been in keeping for me a long while," said he: "I deserve it for not
having taken precautions." He fell upon his horse's neck, as he vainly
tried to draw his sword from the scabbard; his arm refused its office.
When he had been removed to the castle, where the duchess, in tears,
received him, "I am vexed at it," said he, "for the honor of France;" and
to his son Henry, Prince of Joinville, a boy of thirteen, he added,
kissing him, "God grant you grace, my son, to become a good man." He
languished for six days, amidst useless attentions paid him by his
surgeons, giving Catherine de' Medici, who came daily to see him, the
most pacific counsels, and taking of the duchess his wife the most tender
farewells mingled with the most straightforward and honest avowals. "I
do not mean to deny," he said to her, "that the counsels and frailties of
youth have led me sometimes into something at which you had a right to be
offended; I pray you to be pleased to excuse me and forgive me." His
brother, the Cardinal de Guise, Bishop of Metz, which the duke had so
gloriously defended against Charles V., warned him that it was time to
prepare himself for death by receiving the sacraments of the church.
"Ah! my dear brother," said the duke to him, "I have loved you greatly in
times past, but I love you now still more than ever, for you are doing me
a truly brotherly turn." On the 24th of February they still offered him
aliment to sustain his rapidly increasing weakness but "Away, away," said
he; "I have taken the manna from heaven, whereby I feel myself so
comforted that it seems to me as if I were already in paradise. This
body has no further need of nourishment;" and so he expired on the 24th
of February, 1563, an object, at his death, of the most profound regret
amongst his army and his party, as well as his family, after having been
during his life the object of their lively admiration. "I do not
forget," says his contemporary Stephen Pasquier in reference to him,
"that it was no small luck for him to die at this period, when he was
beyond reach of the breeze, and when shifting Fortune had not yet played
him any of those turns whereby she is so cunning in lowering the horn of
the bravest."
It is a duty to faithfully depict this pious and guileless death of a
great man, at the close of a vigorous and a glorious life, made up of
good and evil, without the evil's having choked the good. This powerful
and consolatory intermixture of qualities is the characteristic of the
eminent men of the sixteenth century, Catholics or Protestants, soldiers
or civilians; and it is a spectacle wholesome to be offered in times when
doubt and moral enfeeblement are the common malady even of sound minds
and of honest men.
The murderer of Duke Francis of Guise was a petty nobleman of Angoumois,
John Poltrot, Lord of Mere, a fiery Catholic in his youth, who afterwards
became an equally fiery Protestant, and was engaged with his relative La
Renaudie in the conspiracy against the Guises. He had been employed
constantly from that time, as a spy it is said, by the chiefs of the
Reformers—a vocation for which, it would seem, he was but little
adapted, for the indiscretion of his language must have continually
revealed his true sentiments. When he heard, in 1562, of the death of
Anthony de Bourbon, King of Navarre, "That," said he, "is not what will
put an end to the war; what is wanted is the dog with the big collar."
"Whom do you mean?" asked somebody. "The great Guisard; and here's the
arm that will do the trick." "He used to show," says D'Aubigne, "bullets
cast to slay the Guisard, and thereby rendered himself ridiculous."
After the battle of Dreux he was bearer of a message from the Lord of
Soubise to Admiral de Coligny, to whom he gave an account of the
situation of the Reformers in Dauphiny and in Lyonness. His report no
doubt interested the admiral, who gave him twenty crowns to go and play
spy in the camp of the Duke of Guise, and, some days later, a hundred
crowns to buy a horse. It was thus that Poltrot was put in a position to
execute the design he had been so fond of proclaiming before he had any
communication with Coligny. As soon as, on the 18th of February, 1563,
in the outskirts of Orleans, he had, to use his own expression, done his
trick, he fled full gallop, so as not to bear the responsibility of it;
but, whether it were that he was troubled in his mind, or that he was ill
acquainted with the region, he wandered round and round the place where
he had shot the Duke of Guise, and was arrested on the 20th of February
by men sent in search of him. Being forthwith brought before the privy
council, in the presence of the queen-mother, and put to the torture, he
said that Admiral de Coligny, Theodore de Beze, La Rochefoucauld,
Soubise, and other Huguenot chiefs had incited him to murder the Duke of
Guise, persecutor of the faithful, "as a meritorious deed in the eyes of
God and men." Coligny repudiated this allegation point blank. Shrinking
from the very appearance of hypocrisy, he abstained from any regret at
the death of the Duke of Guise. "The greatest blessing," said he, "which
could come to this realm and to the church of God, especially to myself
and all my house;" and he referred to conversations he had held with the
Cardinal of Lorraine and the Duchess of Guise, and to a notice which he
had sent, a few days previously, to the Duke of Guise himself, "to take
care, for there was somebody under a bond to kill him." Lastly, he
demanded that, to set in a clear light "his integrity, innocence, and
good repute," Poltrot should be kept, until peace was made, in strict
confinement, so that the admiral himself and the murderer might be
confronted. It was not thought to be obligatory or possible to comply
with this desire; amongst the public there was a passionate outcry for
prompt chastisement. Poltrot, removed to Paris, put to the torture and
questioned by the commissioners of Parliament, at one time confirmed and
at another disavowed his original assertions. Coligny, he said, had not
suggested the project to him, but had cognizance of it, and had not
attempted to deter him. The decree sentenced Poltrot to the punishment
of regicides. He underwent it on the 18th of March, 1563, in the Place
de Greve, preserving to the very end that fierce energy of hatred and
vengeance which had prompted his deed. He was heard saying to himself in
the midst of his torments, and as if to comfort himself, "For all that,
he is dead and gone,—the persecutor of the faithful,—and he will not
come back again." The angry populace insulted him with yells; Poltrot
added, "If the persecution does not cease, vengeance will fall upon this
city, and the avengers are already at hand."
Catherine de' Medici, well pleased, perhaps, that there was now a
question personally embarrassing for the admiral and as yet in abeyance,
had her mind entirely occupied apparently with the additional weakness
and difficulty resulting to the position of the crown and the Catholic
party from the death of the Duke of Guise; she considered peace
necessary; and, for reasons of a different nature, Chancellor de
l'Hospital was of the same opinion: he drew attention to "scruples of
conscience, the perils of foreign influence, and the impossibility of
curing by an application of brute force a malady concealed in the very
bowels and brains of the people." Negotiations were entered into with
the two captive generals, the Prince of Conde and the Constable de
Montmorency; they assented to that policy; and, on the 19th of March,
peace was concluded at Amboise in the form of an edict which granted to
the Protestants the concessions recognized as indispensable by the crown
itself, and regulated the relations of the two creeds, pending "the
remedy of time, the decisions of a holy council, and the king's
majority." Liberty of conscience and the practice of the religion
"called Reformed" were recognized "for all barons and lords
high-justiciary, in their houses, with their families and dependants;
for nobles having fiefs without vassals and living on the king's lands,
but for them and their families personally." The burgesses were treated
less favorably; the Reformed worship was maintained in the towns in
which it had been practised up to the 7th of March in the current year;
but, beyond that and noblemen's mansions, this worship might not be
celebrated save in the faubourgs of one single town in every bailiwick
or seneschalty. Paris and its district were to remain exempt from any
exercise of the said "Reformed religion."
During the negotiations and as to the very basis of the edict of March
19, 1563, the Protestants were greatly divided; the soldiers and the
politicians, with Conde at their head, desired peace, and thought that
the concessions made by the Catholics ought to be accepted. The majority
of the Reformed pastors and theologians cried out against the
insufficiency of the concessions, and were astonished that there should
be so much hurry to make peace when the Catholics had just lost their
most formidable captain. Coligny, moderate in his principles, but always
faithful to his church when she made her voice heard, showed
dissatisfaction at the selfishness of the nobles. "To confine the
religion to one town in every bailiwick," he said, "is to ruin more
churches by a stroke of the pen than our enemies could have pulled down
in ten years; the nobles ought to have recollected that example had been
set by the towns to them, and by the poor to the rich." Calvin, in his
correspondence with the Reformed churches of France, severely handled
Conde on this occasion. At the moment when peace was made, the pacific
were in the right; the death of the Duke of Guise had not prevented the
battle of Dreux from being a defeat for the Reformers; and, when war had
to be supported for long, it was especially the provincial nobles and the
people on their estates who bore the burden of it. But when the edict of
Amboise had put an end to the first religious war, when the question was
no longer as to who won or lost battles, but whether the conditions of
that peace to which the Catholics had sworn were loyally observed, and
whether their concessions were effective in insuring the modest amount of
liberty and security promised to the Protestants, the question changed
front, and it was not long before facts put the malcontents in the right.
Between 1563 and 1567 murders of distinguished Protestants increased
strangely, and excited amongst their families anxiety accompanied by a
thirst for vengeance. The Guises and their party, on their side,
persisted in their outcries for proceedings against the instigators,
known or presumed, of the murder of Duke Francis. It was plainly against
Admiral de Coligny that these cries were directed; and he met them by a
second declaration, very frank as a denial of the deed which it was
intended to impute to him, but more hostile than ever to the Guises and
their party. "The late duke," said he, "was of the whole army the man I
had most looked out for on the day of the last battle; if I could have
brought a gun to bear upon him to kill him, I would have done it; I would
have ordered ten thousand arquebusiers, had so many been under my
command, to single him out amongst all the others, whether in the field,
or from over a wall, or from behind a hedge. In short, I would not have
spared any of the means permitted by the laws of war in time of hostility
to get rid of so great an enemy as he was for me and for so many other
good subjects of the king."
After three years of such deadly animosity between the two parties and
the two houses, the king and the queen-mother could find no other way
of stopping an explosion than to call the matter on before the privy
council, and cause to be there drawn up, on the 29th of January, 1566,
a solemn decree, "declaring the admiral's innocence on his own
affirmation, given in the presence of the king and the council as before
God himself, that he had not had anything to do with or approved of the
said homicide. Silence for all time to come was consequently imposed
upon the attorney-general and everybody else; inhibition and prohibition
were issued against the continuance of any investigation or prosecution.
The king took the parties under his safeguard, and enjoined upon them
that they should live amicably in obedience to him." By virtue of this
injunction, the Guises, the Colignies, and the Montmorencies ended by
embracing, the first-named accommodating themselves with a pretty good
grace to this demonstration: "but God knows what embraces!" [Words used
in La Harenga, a satire of the day in burlesque verse upon the Cardinal
of Lorraine.] Six years later the St. Bartholomew brought the true
sentiments out into broad daylight.
At the same time that the war was proceeding amongst the provinces with
this passionate doggedness, royal decrees were alternately confirming and
suppressing or weakening the securities for liberty and safety which the
decree of Amboise, on the 19th of March, 1563, had given to the
Protestants by way of re-establishing peace. It was a series of
contradictory measures which were sufficient to show the party-strife
still raging in the heart of the government. On the 14th of June, 1563,
Protestants were forbidden to work, with shops open, on the days of
Catholic festivals. On the 14th of December, 1563, it was proclaimed
that Protestants might not gather alms for the poor of their religion,
unless in places where that religion was practised, and nowhere else.
On the 24th of June, 1564, a proclamation from the king interdicted the
exercise of the Reformed religion within the precincts of any royal
residence. On the 4th of August, 1564, the Reformed churches were
forbidden to hold synods and make collections of money, and their
ministers to quit their places of residence and to open schools. On the
12th of November, 1567, a king's ordinance interdicted the conferring of
judiciary offices on non-Catholics. In vain did Conde and Coligny cry
out loudly against these violations of the peace of Amboise; in vain, on
the 16th of August, 1563, at the moment of proclaiming the king's
majority, was an edict issued giving full and entire confirmation to the
edict of the 19th of March preceding, with the addition of prescriptions
favorable to the royal authority, as well as, at the same time, to the
maintenance of the public peace; scarcely any portion of these
prescriptions was observed; the credit of Chancellor de l'Hospital was
clearly very much on the decline; and, whilst the legal government was
thus falling to pieces or languishing away, Gaspard de Tavannes, a proved
soldier and royalist, who, however, was not yet marshal of France, was
beginning to organize, under the name of Brotherhood of the Holy Spirit,
a secret society intended to renew the civil war "if it happened that
occasion should offer for repressing and chastising them of the religion
called Reformed." It was the League in its cradle. At the same time,
the king had orders given for a speedy levy of six thousand Swiss, and
an army-corps was being formed on the frontiers of Champagne. The
queen-mother neglected no pains, no caresses, to hide from Conde the true
moving cause at the bottom of all these measures; and as "he was," says
the historian Davila, "by nature very ready to receive all sorts of
impressions," he easily suffered himself to be lulled to sleep. One day,
however, in June, 1567, he thought it about time to claim the fulfilment
of a promise that had been made him at the time of the peace of
Amboise of a post which would give him the rank and authority of
lieutenant-general of the kingdom, as his late brother, the King of
Navarre, had been; and he asked for the sword of constable which
Montmorency, in consequence of his great age, seemed disposed to resign
to the king. Catherine avoided giving any answer; but her favorite son,
Henry, Duke of Anjou, who was as yet only sixteen, repudiated this idea
with so much haughtiness that Conde felt called upon to ask some
explanations; there was no longer any question of war with Spain or of
an army to be got together. "What, pray, will you do," he asked, "with
the Swiss you are raising?" The answer was, "We shall find good
employment for them."
It is the failing of a hypocritical and lying policy, however able, that,
if it do not succeed promptly, a moment arrives when it becomes
transparent and lets in daylight. Even Conde could not delude himself
any longer; the preparations were for war against the Reformers. He
quitted the court to take his stand again with his own party. Coligny,
D'Andelot, La Rochefoucauld, La Noue, and all the accredited leaders
amongst the Protestants, whom his behavior, too full of confidence or of
complaisance towards the court, had shocked or disquieted, went and
joined him. In September, 1567, the second religious war broke out.
It was short, and not decisive for either party. At the outset of the
campaign, success was with the Protestants; forty towns, Orleans,
Montereau, Lagny, Montauban, Castres, Montpellier, Uzes, &c., opened
their gates to them or fell into their hands.
They were within an ace of surprising the king at Monceaux, and he never
forgot, says Montluc, that "the Protestants had made him do the stretch
from Meaux to Paris at something more than a walk." It was around Paris
that Conde concentrated all the efforts of the campaign. He had posted
himself at St. Denis with a small army of four thousand foot and two
thousand horse. The Constable de Montmorency commanded the royal army,
having a strength of sixteen thousand foot and three thousand horse.
Attempts were made to open negotiations; but the constable broke them off
brusquely, roaring out that the king would never tolerate two religions.
On the 10th of November, 1567, the battle began at St. Denis, and was
fought with alternations of partial success and reverse, which spread joy
and sadness through the two hosts in turn; but in resisting a charge of
cavalry, led to victory by Conde, the constable fell with and under his
horse; a Scot called out to him to surrender; for sole response, the aged
warrior, "abandoned by his men, but not by his manhood," says D'Aubigne,
smashed the Scot's jaw with the pommel of his broken sword; and at the
same moment he fell mortally wounded by a shot through the body. His
death left the victory uncertain and the royal army disorganized. The
campaign lasted still four months, thanks to the energetic perseverance
of Coligny and the inexhaustible spirits of Conde, both of whom excelled
in the art of keeping up the courage of their men. "Where are you taking
us now?" asked an ill-tempered officer one day. "To meet our German
allies," said Conde. "And suppose we don't find them?" "Then we will
breathe on our fingers, for it is mighty cold." They did at last, at
Pont-a-Mousson, meet the German re-enforcements, which were being brought
up by Prince John Casimir, son of the elector-palatine, and which made
Conde's army strong enough for him to continue the war in earnest. But
these new comers declared that they would not march any farther unless
they were paid the hundred thousand crowns due to them. Conde had but
two thousand. "Thereupon," says La Noue, "was there nothing for it but
to make a virtue of necessity; and he as well as the admiral employed all
their art, influence, and eloquence to persuade every man to divest
himself of such means as he possessed for to furnish this contribution,
which was so necessary. They themselves were the first to set an
example, giving up their own silver plate. . . . Half from love and
half from fear, this liberality was so general, that, down to the very
soldiers' varlets, every one gave; so that at last it was considered a
disgrace to have contributed little. When the whole was collected, it
was found to amount, in what was coined as well as in plate and gold
chains, to more than eighty thousand livres, which came in so timely,
that without it there would have been a difficulty in satisfying the
reiters. . . . Was it not a thing worthy of astonishment to see an
army, itself unpaid, despoiling itself of the little means it had of
relieving its own necessities and sparing that little for the
accommodation of others, who, peradventure, scarcely gave them a thankee
for it?" [Memoires de La Noue, in the Petitot collection, 1st Series,
t. xxxiv. p. 207.]
So much generosity and devotion, amongst the humblest as well as the most
exalted ranks of the army, deserved not to be useless: but it turned out
quite differently. Conde and Coligny led back to Paris their new army,
which, it is said, was from eighteen to twenty thousand strong, and
seemed to be in a condition either to take Paris itself, or to force the
royal army to enter the field and accept a decisive battle. To bring
that about, Conde thought the best thing was to besiege Chartres, "the
key to the granary of Paris," as it was called, and "a big thorn,"
according to La Noue, "to run into the foot of the Parisians." But
Catherine de' Medici had quietly entered once more into negotiations with
some of the Protestant chiefs, even with Conde himself. Charles IX.
published an edict in which he distinguished between heretics and rebels,
and assured of his protection all Huguenots who should lay down arms.
Chartres seemed to be on the point of capitulating, when news came that
peace had just been signed at Longjumeau, on the 23d of March. The king
put again in force the edict of Amboise of 1563, suppressing all the
restrictions which had been tacked on to it successively. The Prince of
Conde and his adherents were reinstated in all their possessions,
offices, and honors; and Conde was "held and reputed good relative,
faithful subject, and servant of the king." The Reformers had to
disband, restore the new places they had occupied, and send away their
German allies, to whom the king undertook to advance the hundred thousand
gold crowns which were due to them. He further promised, by a secret
article, that he too would at a later date dismiss his foreign troops and
a portion of the French.
This news caused very various impressions amongst the Protestant camp and
people. The majority of the men of family engaged in the war, who most
frequently had to bear the expense of it, desired peace. The personal
advantages accruing to Conde himself—made it very acceptable to him.
But the ardent Reformers, with Coligny at their head, complained bitterly
of others being lured away by fine words and exceptional favors, and not
prosecuting the war when, to maintain it, there was so good an army and
the chances were so favorable. A serious dispute took place between the
pacific negotiators and the malcontents. Chancellor de l'Hospital wrote,
in favor of peace, a discourse on the pacific settlement of the troubles
of the year 1567, containing the necessary causes and reasons of the
treaty, together with the means of reconciling the two parties to one
another, and keeping them in perpetual concord; composed by a high
personage, true subject, and faithful servant of the French crown. But,
if the chancellor's reasons were sound, the hopes he hung upon them were
extravagant; the parties were at that pitch of passion at which reasoning
is in vain against impressions, and promises are powerless against
suspicions. Concluded "through the vehemence of the desire to get home
again," as La Noue says, the peace of Longjumeau was none the less known
as the little peace, the patched-up peace, the lame and rickety peace;
and neither they who wished for it nor they who spurned it prophesied its
long continuance.
Scarcely six months having elapsed, in August, 1568, the third religious
war broke out. The written guarantees given in the treaty of Longjumeau
for security and liberty on behalf of the Protestants were misinterpreted
or violated. Massacres and murders of Protestants became more numerous,
and were committed with more impunity than ever: in 1568 and 1569, at
Amiens, at Auxerre, at Orleans, at Rouen, at Bourges, at Troyes, and at
Blois, Protestants, at one time to the number of one hundred and forty or
one hundred and twenty, or fifty-three, or forty, and at another singly,
with just their wives and children, were massacred, burned, and hunted by
the excited populace, without any intervention on the part of the
magistrates to protect them or to punish their murderers. The
contemporary Protestant chroniclers set down at ten thousand the number
of victims who perished in the course of these six months, which were
called a time of peace: we may, with De Thou, believe this estimate to be
exaggerated; but, without doubt, the peace of Longjumeau was a lie, even
before the war began again.
During this interval Conde was living in Burgundy, at Noyers, a little
fortress he possessed through his wife, Frances of Orleans, and Coligny
was living not far from Noyers, at Tanlay, which belonged to his brother
D'Andelot. They soon discovered, both of them, not only what their party
had to suffer, but what measures were in preparation against themselves.
Agents went and sounded the depth of the moats of Noyers, so as to report
upon the means of taking the place. The queen-mother had orders given to
Gaspard de Tavannes to surround the Prince of Conde at Noyers. "The
queen is counselled by passion rather than by reason," answered the old
warrior; "I am not the sort of man to succeed in this ill-planned
enterprise of distaff and pen; if her Majesty will be pleased to declare
open war, I will show how I understand my duty." Shocked at the
dishonorable commands given him, Tavannes resolved to indirectly raise
Conde's apprehensions, in order to get him out of Burgundy, of which he,
Tavannes, held the governorship; and he sent close past the walls of
Noyers bearers of letters containing these words: "The stag is in the
toils; the hunt is ready." Conde had the bearers arrested, understood
the warning, and communicated it to Coligny, who went and joined him at
Noyers, and they decided, both of them, upon quitting Burgundy without
delay, to go and seek over the Loire at La Rochelle, which they knew to
be devoted to their cause, a sure asylum and a place suitable for their
purposes as a centre of warlike operations. They set out together on the
24th of August, 1568. Conde took with him his wife and his four
children, two of tender age. Coligny followed him in deep mourning; he
had just lost his wife, Charlotte de Laval, that worthy mate of his, who,
six years previously, in a grievous crisis for his soul as well as his
cause, had given him such energetic counsels: she had left him one young
daughter and three little children, the two youngest still in the nurse's
arms. His sister-in-law, Anne do Salm, wife of his brother D'Andelot,
was also there with a child of two years, whilst her husband was scouring
Anjou and Brittany to rally the friends of his cause and his house. A
hundred and fifty men, soldiers and faithful servants, escorted these
three noble and pious families, who were leaving their castles to go and
seek liberties and perils in a new war. When they arrived at the bank of
the Loire, they found all points in the neighborhood guarded; the river
was low; and a boatman pointed out to them, near Sancerre, a possible
ford. Conde went over first, with one of his children in his arms.
They all went over singing the psalm, When Israel went out of Egypt,
and on the 16th of September, 1568, Conde entered La Rochelle. "I fled
as far as I could," he wrote the next day, "but when I got here I found
the sea; and, inasmuch as I don't know how to swim, I was constrained to
turn my head round and gain the land, not with feet, but with hands." He
assembled the burgesses of La Rochelle, and laid before them the pitiable
condition of the kingdom, the wicked designs of people who were their
enemies as well as his own: he called upon them to come and help; he
promised to be aidful to them in all their affairs, and, "as a pledge of
my good faith," said he, "I will leave you my wife and children, the
dearest and most precious jewels I have in this world." The mayor of La
Rochelle, La Haise, responded by offering him "lives and property in the
name of all the citizens," who confirmed this offer with an outburst of
popular enthusiasm. The Protestant nobles of Saintonge and Poitou
flocked in. A royal ally was announced; the Queen of Navarre, Jeanne
d'Albret, was bringing her son Henry, fifteen years of age, whom she was
training up to be Henry IV. Conde went to meet them, and, on the 28th of
September, 1568, all this flower of French Protestantism was assembled at
La Rochelle, ready and resolved to commence the third religious war.
It was the longest and most serious of the four wars of this kind which
so profoundly agitated France in the reign of Charles IX. This one
lasted from the 24th of August, 1568, to the 8th of August, 1570, between
the departure of Conde and Coligny for La Rochelle and the treaty of
peace of St. Germain-en-Laye: a hollow peace, like the rest, and only two
years before the St. Bartholomew. On starting from Noyers with Coligny,
Conde had addressed to the king, on the 23d of August, a letter and a
request, wherein, "after having set forth the grievances of the
Reformers, he attributed all the mischief to the Cardinal of Lorraine,
and declared that the Protestant nobles felt themselves constrained, for
the safety of the realm, to take up arms against that infamous priest,
that tiger of France, and against his accomplices." He bitterly
reproached the Guises "with treating as mere policists, that is, men who
sacrifice religion to temporal interests, the Catholics inclined to make
concessions to the Reformers, especially the Chancellor de l'Hospital and
the sons of the late Constable de Montmorency." The Guises, indeed, and
their friends did not conceal their distrust of De l'Hospital, any more
than he concealed his opposition to their deeds and their designs.
Whilst the peace of Longjumeau was still in force, Charles IX. issued a
decree interdicting all Reformers from the chairs of the University and
the offices of the judicature; L'Hospital refused to seal it: "God save
us from the chancellor's mass!" was the remark at court. L'Hospital,
convinced that he would not succeed in preserving France from a fresh
civil war, made up his mind to withdraw, and go and live for some time at
his estate of Vignay [a little hamlet in the commune of Gironville, near
Etampes, Seine-et-Oise]. The queen-mother eagerly took advantage of his
withdrawal to demand of him the seals, of which, she said, she might have
need daily. L'Hospital gave them up at once, at the same time retaining
his title of chancellor, and letting the queen know "that he would take
pains to recover his strength in order to return to his post, if and when
it should be the king's and the queen's pleasure." From his rural home
he wrote to his friends, "I am not downhearted because the violence of
the wicked has snatched from me the seals of the kingdom. I have not
done as sluggards and cowards do, who hide themselves at the first show
of danger, and obey the first impulses of fear. As long as I was strong
enough, I held my own. Deprived of all support, even that of the king
and the queen, who dared no longer defend me, I retired, deploring the
unhappy condition of France. Now I have other cares; I return to my
interrupted studies and to my children, the props of my old age and my
sweetest delight. I cultivate my fields. The estate of Vignay seems to
me a little kingdom, if any man may consider himself master of anything
here below. . . . I will tell you more; this retreat, which satisfies
my heart, also flatters my vanity; I like to imagine myself in the wake
of those famous exiles of Athens or Rome whom their virtues rendered
formidable to their fellow-citizens. Not that I dare compare myself with
those great men, but I say to myself that our fortunes are similar. I
live in the midst of a numerous family whom I love; I have books; I read,
write, and meditate; I take pleasure in the games of my children; the
most frivolous occupations interest me. In fine, all my time is filled
up, and nothing would be wanting to my happiness if it were not for the
awful apparition hard by which sometimes comes, bringing trouble and
desolation to my heart."
This "apparition hard by" was war, everywhere present or imminent in the
centre and south-west of France, accompanied by all those passions of
personal hatred and vengeance which are characteristic of religious wars,
and which add so much of the moral sufferings to the physical calamities
of life. L'Hospital, when sending the seals to the queen-mother, who
demanded them of him, considered it his bounden duty to give her without
any mincing, and the king whom she governed, a piece of patriotic advice.
"At my departure," he says in his will and testament, "I prayed of the
king and queen this thing, that, as they had determined to break the
peace, and proceed by war against those with whom they had previously
made peace, and as they were driving me from the court because they had
heard it said that I was opposed to and ill content with their
enterprise, I prayed them, I say, that if they did not acquiesce in my
counsel, they would, at the very least, some time after they had glutted
and satiated their hearts and their thirst with the blood of their
subjects, embrace the first opportunity that offered itself for making
peace, before that things were reduced to utter ruin; for, whatever there
might be at the bottom of this war, it could not but be very pernicious
to the king and the kingdom." During the two years that it lasted, from
August, 1568, to August, 1570, the third religious war under Charles IX.
entailed two important battles and many deadly faction-fights, which
spread and inflamed to the highest pitch the passions of the two parties.
On the 13th of March, 1569, the two armies, both about twenty thousand
strong, and appearing both of them anxious to come to blows, met near
Jarnac, on the banks of the Charente; the royal army had for its chief
Catherine de' Medici's third son, Henry, Duke of Anjou, advised by the
veteran warrior Gaspard de Tavannes, and supported by the young Duke
Henry of Guise, who had his father to avenge and his own spurs to win.
The Prince of Conde, with Admiral de Coligny for second, commanded the
Protestant army. We make no pretension to explain and discuss here the
military movements of that day, and the merits or demerits of the two
generals confronted; the Duke of Aumale has given an account of them and
criticised them in his Histoire des Princes de Conde, with a complete
knowledge of the facts and with the authority that belongs to him. "The
encounter on the 13th of March, 1569, scarcely deserves," he says, "to be
called a battle; it was nothing but a series of fights, maintained by
troops separated and surprised, against an enemy which, more numerous to
begin with, was attacking with its whole force united.". A tragic
incident at the same time gave this encounter an importance which it has
preserved in history. Admiral de Coligny, forced to make a retrograde
movement, had sent to ask the Prince of Conde for aid; by a second
message he urged the prince not to make a fruitless effort, and to fall
back himself in all haste. "God forbid," answered Conde, "that Louis de
Bourbon should turn his back to the enemy!" and he continued his march,
saying to his brother-in-law, Francis de la Rochefoucauld, who was
marching beside him, "My uncle has made a 'clerical error' (pas de
clerc, a slip); but the wine is drawn, and it must be drunk." On
arriving at the battle-field, whither he had brought with him but three
hundred horse, at the very moment when, with this weak escort, he was
preparing to charge the deep column of the Duke of Anjou, he received
from La Rochefoucauld's horse a kick which broke one of the bones of his
leg; and he had already crushed an arm by a fall. We will borrow from
the Duke of Aumale the glorious and piteous tale of this incident.
"Conde turned round to his men-at-arms, and showing first his injured
limbs and then the device, 'Sweet is danger for Christ and for
fatherland!' which fluttered upon his banner in the breeze, 'Nobles of
France,' he cried, 'this is the desired moment Remember in what plight
Louis de Bourbon enters the battle for Christ and fatherland!' Then,
lowering his head, he charges with his three hundred horse upon the eight
hundred lances of the Duke of Anjou. The first shock of this charge was
irresistible; such for a moment was the disorder amongst the Catholics
that many of them believed the day was lost; but fresh bodies of
royalists arrive one after another. The prince has his horse killed
under him; and, in the midst of the confusion, hampered by his wounds, he
cannot mount another. In spite of all, his brave comrades do not desert
him; Soubise and a dozen of them, covered with wounds, are taken; an old
man, named La Vergne, who had brought with him twenty-five sons or
nephews, is left upon the field with fifteen of them, 'all in a heap,'
says D'Aubigne. Left almost alone, with his back against a tree, one
knee upon the ground, and deprived of the use of one leg, Conde still
defends himself; but his strength is failing him; he sees two Catholic
gentlemen to whom he had rendered service, Saint-Jean and D'Argence; he
calls to them, raises the vizor of his helmet, and holds out to them his
gauntlets. The two horsemen dismount, and swear to risk their lives to
save his. Others join them, and are eager to assist the glorious
captive. Meanwhile the royal cavalry continues the pursuit; the
squadrons successively pass close by the group which has formed round
Conde. Soon he spies the red cloaks of the Duke of Anjou's guards. He
points to them with his finger. D'Argence understands him, and, 'Hide
your face!' he cries. 'Ah D'Argence, D'Argence, you will not save me,'
replies the prince. Then, like Caesar, covering up his face, he awaited
death the poor soul knew only too well the perfidious character of the
Duke of Anjou, the hatred with which he was hunting him down, and the
sanguinary orders he would give. The guards had gone by when their
captain, Montesquion, learned the name of this prisoner. 'Slay, slay,
mordioux!' he shouted; then suddenly wheeling his horse round, he returns
at a gallop, and with a pistol-shot, fired from behind, shatters the
hero's skull." [Histoire des Princes de Conde, by M. le Duc d'Aumale,
t. ii. pp. 65-72.]
The death of Conde gave to the battle of Jarnac an importance not its
own. A popular ditty of the day called that prince "the great enemy of
the mass." "His end," says the Duke of Aumale, "was celebrated by the
Catholics as a deliverance; a solemn Te Deum was chanted at court and in
all the churches of France. The flags taken were sent to Rome, where
Pope Pius IV. went with them in state to St. Peter's. As for the Duke of
Anjou, he showed his joy and his baseness together by the ignoble
treatment he caused to be inflicted upon the remains of his vanquished
relative, a prince of the blood who had fallen sword in hand. At the
first rumor of Conde's death, the Duke of Montpensier's secretary,
Coustureau, had been despatched from headquarters with Baron de Magnac to
learn the truth of the matter. 'We found him there,' he relates, 'laid
upon an ass; the said sir baron took him by the hair of the head for to
lift up his face, which he had turned towards the ground, and asked me if
I recognized him. But as he had lost an eye from his head, he was
mightily disfigured; and I could say no more than it was certainly his
figure and his hair, and further than that I was unable to speak.'
Meanwhile," continues the Duke of Aumale, "the accounts of those present
removed all doubt; and the corpse, thus thrown across an ass, with arms
and legs dangling, was carried to Jarnac, where the Duke of Anjou lodged
on the evening of the battle. There the body of Conde was taken down
amidst the sobs of some Protestant prisoners, who kissed, as they wept,
the remains of their gallant chief. This touching spectacle did not stop
the coarse ribaldry of the Duke of Anjou and his favorites; and for two
days the prince's remains were left in a ground-floor room, there exposed
to the injurious action of the air and, to the gross insults of the
courtiers. The Duke of Anjou at last consented to give up the body of
Conde to the Duke of Longueville, his brother-in-law, who had it interred
with due respect at Vendome in the burial-place of his ancestors."
When in 1569 he thus testified, from a mixture of hatred and fear, an
ignoble joy at the death of Louis de Conde, the valiant chief of
Protestantism, the Duke of Anjou did not foresee that, nearly twenty
years later, in 1588, when he had become Henry III., King of France, he
would also testify, still from a mixture of hatred and fear, the same
ignoble joy at sight of the corpse of Henry de Guise, the valiant chief
of Catholicism, murdered by his order and in his palace.
As soon as Conde's death was known at La Rochelle, the Queen of Navarre,
Jeanne d'Albret, hurried to Tonnay-Charente, whither the Protestant army
had fallen back; she took with her her own son Henry, fifteen years old,
and Henry de Bourbon, the late Prince of Conde's son, who was seventeen;
and she presented both of them to the army. The younger, the future
Henry IV., stepped forward briskly. "Your cause," said he, "is mine;
your interests are mine; I swear on my soul, honor, and life, to be
wholly yours." The young Conde took the same oath. The two princes were
associated in the command, under the authority of Coligny, who was
immediately appointed lieutenant-general of the army. For two years
their double signature figured at the bottom of the principal official
acts of the Reformed party; and they were called "the admiral's pages."
On both of them Jeanne passionately enjoined union between themselves,
and equal submission on their part to Coligny, their model and their
master in war and in devotion to the common cause. Queen, princes,
admiral, and military leaders of all ranks stripped themselves of all the
diamonds, jewels, and precious stones which they possessed, and which
Elizabeth, the Queen of England, took in pledge for the twenty thousand
pounds sterling she lent him. The Queen of Navarre reviewed the army,
which received her with bursts of pious and warlike enthusiasm; and
leaving to Coligny her two sons, as she called them, she returned alone
to La Rochelle, where she received a like reception from the inhabitants,
"rough and loyal people," says La Noue, "and as warlike as mercantile."
After her departure, a body of German horse, commanded by Count Mansfeld,
joined Coligny in the neighborhood of Limoges. Their arrival was an
unhoped-for aid. Coligny distributed amongst them a medal bearing the
effigy of Queen Jeanne of Navarre with this legend: "Alone, and with the
rest, for God, the king, the laws, and peace."
With such dispositions on one side and the other, war was resumed and
pushed forward eagerly from June, 1569, to June, 1570, with alternations
of reverse and success. On the 23d of June, 1569, a fight took place at
Roche l'Abeille, near St. Yrieix in Limousin, wherein the Protestants had
the advantage. The young Catholic noblemen, with Henry de Guise at their
head, began it rashly, against the desire of their general, Gaspard de
Tavannes, to show off their bravery before the eyes of the queen-mother
and the Cardinal of Lorraine, both of whom considered the operations of
the army too slow and its successes too rare. They lost five hundred men
and many prisoners, amongst others Philip Strozzi, whom Charles IX. had
just made colonel-general of the infantry. They took their revenge on
the 7th of September, 1569, by forcing Coligny to raise the siege of
Poitiers, which he had been pushing forward for more than two months, and
on the 3d of October following, at the battle of Moncontour in Poitou,
the most important of the campaign, which they won brilliantly, and in
which the Protestant army lost five or six thousand men and a great part
of their baggage. Before the action began, "two gentlemen on the side of
the Catholics, being in an out-of-the-way spot, came to speech," says La
Noue, "with some of the (Protestant) religion, there being certain
ditches between them.
'Sirs,' said they, 'we bear the marks of enemies, but we do not hate you
in any wise, or your party. Warn the admiral to be very careful not to
fight, for our army is marvellously strong by reason of re-enforcements
that have come in to it, and it is very determined withal. Let the
admiral temporize for a month only, for all the nobles have sworn and
said to Monseigneur that they will not wait any longer, that he must
employ them within that time, and they will then do their duty. Let the
admiral remember that it is dangerous to stem the fury of Frenchmen, the
which, however, will suddenly ooze away; if they have not victory
speedily, they will be constrained to make peace, and will offer it you
on advantageous terms. Tell him that we know this from a good source,
and greatly desired to advertise him of it.' Afterwards they retired.
The others," continues La Noue, "went incontinently to the admiral for to
make their report, which was to his taste. They told it also to others
of the principals; and some there were who desired that it should be
acted upon; but the majority opined that this notice came from suspected
persons, who had been accustomed to practise fraud and deceit, and that
no account should be made of it." The latter opinion prevailed; and the
battle of Moncontour was fought with extreme acrimony, especially on the
part of the Catholics, who were irritated by the cruelties, as La Noue
himself says, which the Protestants had but lately practised at the fight
of La Roche l'Abeille. Coligny was wounded in the action, after having
killed with his own hand the Marquis Philibert of Baden; and the melley
had been so hot that the admiral's friends found great difficulty in
extricating him and carrying him off the field to get his wound attended
to. Three weeks before the battle, on the 13th of September, Coligny had
been sentenced to death by the Parliament of Paris, and hanged in effigy
on the Place de Greve; and a reward of fifty thousand gold crowns had
been offered to whosoever should give him up to the king's justice dead
or alive, words added, it is said, to the decree at the desire of Charles
IX. himself. Family sorrows were in Coligny's case added to political
reverses; on the 27th of May, in this same year 1569, he had lost his
brother D'Andelot, his faithful comrade in his religious as well as his
warlike career. "He found himself," says D'Aubigne, "saddled with the
blame due to accident, his own merits being passed over in silence; with
the remnant of an army which, when it was whole, was in despair even
before the late disaster; with weak towns, dismayed garrisons, and
foreigners without baggage; himself moneyless, his enemies very powerful,
and pitiless towards all, especially towards him; abandoned by all the
great, except one woman, the Queen of Navarre, who, having nothing but
the title, had advanced to Niort in order to lend a hand to the afflicted
and to affairs in general. This old man, worn down by fever, endured all
these causes of anguish and many others that came to rack him more
painfully than his grievous wound. As he was being borne along in a
litter, Lestrange, an old nobleman, and one of his principal counsellors,
travelling in similar fashion, and wounded likewise, had his own litter,
where the road was broad, moved forward in front of the admiral's, and
putting his head out at the door, he looked steadily at his chief,
saying, with tears in his eyes, 'Yet God is very merciful.' Thereupon
they bade one another farewell, perfectly at one in thought, without
being able to say more. This great captain confessed to his intimates
that these few friendly words restored him, and set him up again in the
way of good thoughts and firm resolutions for the future." He was so
much restored, that, between the end of 1569 and the middle of 1570, he
marched through the south and the centre of France the army which he had
reorganized, and with which, wherever he went, he restored, if not
security, at any rate confidence and zeal, to his party.
On arriving at Arnay-le-Duc, in Burgundy, he found himself confronted by
Marshal de Cosse with thirteen thousand men of the king's troops.
Coligny had barely half as many; but he did not hesitate to attack, and
on the 13th of June, 1570, he was so near victory that the road was left
open before him. On the 7th of July he arrived at Charite-sur-Loire.
Alarm prevailed at Paris. A truce for ten days was signed, and
negotiations were reopened for a fresh attempt at peace.
"If any one, in these lamentable wars, worked hard, both with body and
mind," says La Noue, "it may be said to have been the admiral, for, as
regards the greatest part of the burden of military affairs and
hardships, it was he who supported them with much constancy and buoyancy;
and he was as respectful in his bearing towards the princes his superiors
as he was modest towards his inferiors. He always had piety in singular
esteem, and a love of justice, which made him valued and honored by them
of the party which he had embraced. He did not seek ambitiously for
commands and honors; they were thrust upon him because of his competence
and his expertness. When he handled arms and armies, he showed that he
was very conversant with them, as much so as any captain of his day, and
he always exposed himself courageously to danger. In difficulties, he
was observed to be full of magnanimity and resource in getting out of
them, always showing himself quite free from swagger and parade. In
short, he was a personage worthy to re-establish an enfeebled and a
corrupted state. I was fain to say these few words about him in passing,
for, having known him and been much with him, and having profited by his
teaching, I should have been wrong if I had not made truthful and
honorable mention of him." [Memoires de La Noue, in the Petitot
collection, 1st series, t. xxxiv. p. 288.]
The negotiations were short. The war had been going on for two years.
The two parties, victorious and vanquished by turns, were both equally
sick of it. In vain did Philip II., King of Spain, offer Charles IX. an
aid of nine thousand men to continue it. In vain did Pope Pius V. write
to Catherine de' Medici, "As there can be no communion between Satan and
the children of the light, it ought to be taken for certain that there
can be no compact between Catholics and heretics, save one full of fraud
and feint." "We have beaten our enemies," says Montluc, "over and over
again; but notwithstanding that, they had so much influence in the king's
council that the decrees were always to their advantage. We won by arms,
but they won by those devils of documents." Peace was concluded at St.
Germain-en-Laye on the 8th of August, 1570, and it was more equitable and
better for the Reformers than the preceding treaties; for, besides a
pretty large extension as regarded free exercise of their worship and
their civil rights in the state, it granted "for two years, to the
princes of Navarre and Conde and twenty noblemen of the religion, who
were appointed by the king, the wardenship of the towns of La Rochelle,
Cognac, Montauban, and La Charite, whither those of the religion who
dared not return so soon to their own homes might retire." All the
members of the Parliament, all the royal and municipal officers, and the
principal inhabitants of the towns where the two religions existed were
further bound over on oath "to maintenance of the edict."
Peace was made; but it was the third in seven years, and very shortly
after each new treaty civil war had recommenced. No more was expected
from the treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye than had been effected by those of
Amboise and Longjumeau, and on both sides men sighed for something more
stable and definitive. By what means to be obtained and with what
pledges of durability? A singular fact is apparent between 1570 and
1572; there is a season, as it were, of marriages and matrimonial
rejoicings. Charles IX. went to receive at the frontier of his kingdom
his affianced bride, Archduchess Elizabeth of Austria, daughter of the
emperor, Maximilian II., who was escorted by the Archbishop of Treves,
chancellor of the empire; the nuptials were celebrated at Mezieres, on
the 26th of November, 1570; the princes and great lords of the Protestant
party were invited; they did not think it advisable to withdraw
themselves from their asylum at La Rochelle; but Coligny wrote to the
queen-mother to excuse himself, whilst protesting his forgetfulness of
the past and his personal devotion. Four months afterwards, Coligny
himself married again; it was three years since he had lost his noble
wife, Charlotte de Laval, and he had not contemplated anything of the
kind, when, in the concluding weeks of 1570, he received from the castle
of St. Andre de Briord, in Le Bugey, a letter from a great lady, thirty
years of age, Jacqueline de Montbel, daughter of Count d'Entremont,
herself a widow, who wrote to him "that she would fain marry a saint and
a hero, and that he was that hero." "I am but a tomb," replied Coligny.
But Jacqueline persisted, in spite of the opposition shown by her
sovereign, Emmanuel Philibert, Duke of Savoy, who did not like his fair
subjects to marry foreigners; and in February, 1571, she furtively
quitted her castle, dropped down the Rhone in a boat as far as Lyons,
mounted on horseback, and, escorted by five devoted friends, arrived at
La Rochelle. All Coligny's friends were urgent for him to accept this
passionate devotion proffered by a lady who would bring him territorial
possessions valuable to the Protestants, "for they were an open door to
Geneva." Coligny accepted; and the marriage took place at La Rochelle on
the 24th of March, 1571. "Madame Jacqueline wore, on this occasion,"
says a contemporary chronicler, "a skirt in the Spanish fashion, of black
gold-tissue, with bands of embroidery in gold and silver twist, and,
above, a doublet of white silver-tissue embroidered in gold, with large
diamond-buttons." She was, nevertheless, at that moment almost as poor as
the German arquebusiers who escorted her litter; for an edict issued by
the Duke of Savoy on the 31st of January, 1569, caused her the loss of
all her possessions in her own country. She was received in France with
the respect due to her; and when, five months after the marriage,
Charles; IX. summoned Coligny to Paris, "to serve him in his most
important affairs, as a worthy minister, whose virtues were sufficiently
known and tried," he sent at the same time to Madame l'Amirale a
safe-conduct in which he called her my fair cousin. Was there any one
belonging to that august and illustrious household who had, at that time,
a presentiment of their impending and tragic destiny?
At the same period, the Queen of Navarre, Jeanne d'Albret, obtained for
her young nephew, Henry de Bourbon, Prince of Conde, son of the hero of
Jarnac, and companion of Henry of Navarre, the hand of his cousin, Mary
of Cleves; and there was still going on in London, on behalf of one of
Charles IX.'s brothers,—at one time the Duke of Anjou and at another the
Duke of Alencon,—the negotiation which was a vain attempt to make Queen
Elizabeth espouse a French prince.
Coincidently with all these marriages or projects of marriage amongst
princes and great lords came the most important of all, that which was to
unite Henry of Navarre and Charles IX.'s sister, Marguerite de Valois.
There had already, thirteen or fourteen years previously, been some talk
about it, in the reign of King Henry II., when Henry of Navarre and
Margaret de Valois, each born in 1553, were both of them mere babies.
This union between the two branches of the royal house, one Catholic and
the other Protestant, ought to have been the most striking sign and the
surest pledge of peace between Catholicism and Protestantism. The
political expediency of such a step appeared the more evident and the
more urgent in proportion as the religious war had become more direful
and the desire for peace more general. Charles IX. embraced the idea
passionately. At the outset he encountered an obstacle. The young Duke
of Guise had already paid court to Marguerite, and had obtained such
marked favor with her that the ambassador of Spain wrote to the king,
"There is no public topic in France just now save the marriage of my Lady
Marguerite with the Duke of Guise." People even talked of a tender
correspondence between the princess and the duke, which was carried on
through one of the queen's ladies, the Countess of Mirandola, who was
devoted to the Guises and a favorite with Marguerite. "If it be so,"
said Charles IX., savagely, "we will kill him;" and he gave such
peremptory orders on this subject, that Henry de Guise, somewhat
disquieted, avoided for a while taking part in the royal hunts, and
thought it well that there should be resumed on his behalf a project of
marriage with Catherine of Cleves, widow of the Prince of Portien (Le
Porcien) and the wealthy heiress to some great domains, especially the
countship of Eu. So long as he had some hope of marrying Marguerite de
Valois, the Duke of Guise had repudiated, not without offensiveness, all
idea of union with Catherine of Cleves. "Anybody who can make me marry
the Princess of Portien," said he, "could make me marry a negress." He,
nevertheless, contracted this marriage, so greatly disdained, on the 4th
of October, 1570; and at this price recovered the good graces of Charles
IX. The queen-mother charged the Cardinal Louis de Lorraine, him whom
the people called Cardinal Bottles (from his conviviality), to publicly
give the lie to any rumor of a possible engagement between her daughter
Marguerite and Henry de Guise; and a grand council of the kings, after
three holdings, adopted in principle the marriage of Marguerite de Valois
with "the little Prince of Bearn."
Charles IX. at once set his hand to the work to turn this resolution to
good account, being the only means, he said, of putting a stop at last to
this incessantly renewed civil war, which was the plague of his life as
well as of his kingdom. He first of all sent Marshal de Cosse to La
Rochelle, to sound Coligny as to his feelings upon this subject, and to
urge him to thus cut short public woes and the Reformers' grievances.
"The king has always desired peace," said the marshal; "he wishes it to
be lasting; he has proved only too well, to his own misery and that of
his people, that of all the evils which can afflict a state, the most
direful is civil war. But what means this withdrawal, since the signing
of peace at St. Germain, of the Queen of Navarre and her children, of the
Prince of Conde, and so many lords and distinguished nobles, still
separated from their houses and their families, and collected together in
a town like Rochelle, which has great advantages by land and sea for all
those who would fain begin the troubles again? Why have they not
returned home? During the hottest part of the war, they ardently desired
to see once more their houses, their wives, and their children; and now,
when peace leaves them free to do so, they prefer to remain in a land
which is in some sort foreign, and where, in addition to great expenses,
they are deprived of the conveniences they would find at home. The king
cannot make out such absurdity; or, rather, he is very apprehensive that
this long stay means the hatching of some evil design." The Protestants
defended themselves warmly against this supposition; they alleged, in
explanation of their persistent disquietude, the very imperfect execution
of the conditions granted by the peace of St. Germain, and the insults,
the attacks which they had still to suffer in many parts of the kingdom,
and quite recently at Rouen and at Orange. The king attempted, without
any great success, to repress these disorders amongst the populace. The
Queen of Navarre, the two princes, Coligny, and many Protestant lords
remained still at La Rochelle, where was being held at this time a
general synod of the Reformed churches. Charles IX. sent thither Marshal
de Biron, with formal orders to negotiate the marriage of Marguerite de
Valois and the Prince of Navarre, and to induce that prince, his mother
the Queen of Navarre, and Coligny to repair to the court in order to
conclude the matter. The young prince was at that time in Warn. The
queen, his mother, answered, "That she would consult her spiritual
advisers, and, as soon as her conscience was at rest, there were no
conditions she would not accept with a view of giving satisfaction to the
king and the queen, of marking her obedience and respect towards them,
and of securing the tranquillity of the state, an object for which she
would willingly sacrifice her own life. . . . But," she added, "I
would rather sink to the condition of the humblest damoisel in France
than sacrifice to the aggrandizement of my family my own soul and my
son's."
In September, 1571, Charles IX. and the queen-mother repaired to Blois;
and at their urgent request Coligny went thither to talk over the
projected marriage and the affairs of Europe. The king received him with
emotional satisfaction, calling him my father, and saying to him, "Now we
have you, and you shall not escape us when you wish to." Jeanne
d'Albret, more distrustful, or, one ought rather to say, more
clear-sighted, refused to leave La Rochelle, and continued to negotiate
vaguely and from a distance. Catherine de' Medici insisted. "Satisfy,"
she wrote to her, "the extreme desire we have to see you in this company;
you will be loved and honored therein as accords with reason and with
what you are." Jeanne still waited. It was only in the following year,
at the end of January, that, having earnestly exhorted her son "to remain
Bearn-wards whilst she was at the court of France," she set out for
Blois, where Charles IX. received her most affectionately, calling her my
good aunt, my dear aunt, and lavishing upon her promises as well as
endearments. Jeanne was a strict and a judicious person; and the manners
and proceedings of the court at Blois displeased her. On the 8th of
March, 1572, she wrote to her son, "I find it necessary to negotiate
quite contrariwise to what I had expected and what had been promised me;
I have no liberty to speak to the king or my Lady Marguerite, only to the
queen-mother, who treats me as if I were dirt. . . . Seeing, then,
that no advance is made, and that the desire is to make me hurry matters,
and not conduct them orderly, I have thrice spoken thereof to the queen,
who does nothing but make a fool of me, and tell everybody the opposite
of what I told her; in such sort that my friends find fault with me, and
I know not how to bring her to book, for when I say to her, 'Madame, it
is reported that I said so-and-so to you,' though it was she herself who
reported it, she denies it flatly, and laughs in my face, and uses me in
such wise that you might really say that my patience passes that of
Griselda. . . . Thenceforward I have a troop of Huguenots, who come
to converse with me, rather for the purpose of being spies upon me than
of assisting me. Then I have some of another humor, who hamper me no
less, and who are religious hermaphrodites. I defend myself as best I
may. . . I am sure that if you only knew the trouble I am in, you
would have pity upon me, for they give me empty speeches and raillery
instead of treating with me gravely, as the matter deserves; in such sort
that I am bursting, because I am so resolved not to lose my temper that
my patience is a miracle to see. . . . I found your letter very much
to my taste; I will show, it to my Lady Marguerite if I can. She is
beautiful, and discreet, and of good demeanor, but brought up in the most
accursed and most corrupt society that ever was. I would not, for
anything in the world, have you here to remain here. That is why I
desire to get you married, and you and your wife withdraw from this
corruption; for though I believed it to be very great, I find it still
more so. Here it is not the men who solicit the women; it is the women
who solicit the men. If you were here, you would never escape without a
great deal of God's grace."
Side by side with this motherly and Christianly scrupulous negotiation,
Coligny set on foot another, noble and dignified also, but even less in
harmony with the habits and bent of the government which it concerned.
The puritan warrior was at the same time an ardent patriot: he had at
heart the greatness of France as much as he had his personal creed; the
reverses of Francis I. and the preponderance of Spain in Europe oppressed
his spirit with a sense of national decadence, from which he wanted
France to lift herself up again. The moment appeared to him propitious;
let the king ally himself with Queen Elizabeth of England, the Prince of
Orange in the Low Countries, and the Protestant princes of Germany; here
was for France a certain guarantee of power in Europe, and at the same
time a natural opportunity for conquering Flanders, a possession so
necessary to her strength and her security. But high above this policy,
so thoroughly French, towered a question still more important than that
of even the security and the grandeur of France; that was the partition
of Europe between Catholicism and Protestantism; and it was in a country
Catholic in respect of the great majority, and governed by a kingship
with which Catholicism was hereditary, that, in order to put a stop to
civil war between French Catholics and Protestants, Coligny pressed the
king to put himself at the head of an essentially Protestant coalition,
and make it triumphant in Europe. This was, in the sixteenth century, a
policy wholly chimerical, however patriotic its intention may have been;
and the French Protestant hero who recommended it to Charles IX. did not
know that Protestantism was on the eve of the greatest disaster it would
have to endure in France.
A fact of a personal character tended to mislead Coligny. By his renown,
by the loftiness of his views, by the earnest gravity of his character
and his language he had produced a great effect upon Charles IX., a young
king of warm imagination and impressible and sympathetic temperament,
but, at the same time, of weak judgment. He readily gave way, in
Coligny's company, to outpourings which had all the appearance of perfect
and involuntary frankness. "Speaking one day to the admiral about the
course of conduct to be adopted as to the enterprise against Flanders,
and well knowing that the queen-mother lay under his suspicion, 'My dear
father,' said he, 'there is one thing herein of which we must take good
heed; and that is, that the queen, my mother, who likes to poke her nose
everywhere, as you know, learn nothing of this enterprise, at any rate as
regards the main spring of it, for she would spoil all for us.' 'As you
please, sir; but I take her to be so good a mother, and so devoted to the
welfare of your kingdom, that when she knows of it she will do nothing to
spoil it.' 'You are mistaken, my dear father,' said the king; 'leave it
to me only; I see quite well that you do not know my mother; she is the
greatest meddler in all the world.'" Another time, when he was speaking
likewise to Teligny, Coligny's son-in-law, about this enterprise against
Flanders, the king said, "Wouldst have me speak to thee freely, Teligny?
I distrust all these gentry; I am suspicious of Tavannes' ambition;
Vieilleville loves nothing but good wine; Cosse is too covetous;
Montmorency cares only for his hunting and hawking; the Count de Retz is
a Spaniard; the other lords of my court and those of my council are mere
blockheads; my Secretaries of State, to hide nothing of what I think, are
not faithful to me; insomuch that, to tell the truth, I know not at what
end to begin." This tone of freedom and confidence had inspired Coligny
with reciprocal confidence; he believed himself to have a decisive
influence over the king's ideas and conduct; and when the Protestants
testified their distrust upon this subject, he reproached them vehemently
for it; he affirmed the king's good intentions and sincerity; and he
considered himself in fact, said Catherine de' Medici with temper,
"a second king of France."
How much sincerity was there about these outpourings of Charles IX. in
his intercourse with Coligny, and how much reality in the admiral's
influence over the king? We are touching upon that great historical
question which has been so much disputed: was the St. Bartholomew a
design, long ago determined upon and prepared for, of Charles IX. and his
government, or an almost sudden resolution, brought about by events and
the situation of the moment, to which Charles IX. was egged on, not
without difficulty, by his mother Catherine and his advisers?
We recall to mind here what was but lately said in this very chapter as
to the condition of minds and morals in the sixteenth century, and as to
the tragic consequences of it. Massacre, we add no qualifying term to
the word, was an idea, a habit, we might say almost a practice, familiar
to that age, and one which excited neither the surprise nor the horror
which are inseparable from it in our day. So little respect for human
life and for truth was shown in the relations between man and man! Not
that those natural sentiments, which do honor to the human race, were
completely extinguished in the hearts of men; they reappeared here and
there as a protest against the vices and the crimes of the period; but
they were too feeble and too rare to struggle effectually against the
sway of personal passions and interests, against atrocious hatreds and
hopes, against intellectual aberrations and moral corruption. To betray
and to kill were deeds so common that they caused scarcely any
astonishment, and that people were almost resigned to them beforehand.
We have cited fifteen or twenty cases of the massacres which in the reign
of Charles IX., from 1562 to 1572, grievously troubled and steeped in
blood such and such a part of France, without leaving any lasting traces
in history. Previously to the massacre called the St. Bartholomew, the
massacre of Vassy is almost the only one which received and kept its true
name. The massacre of Vassy was, undoubtedly, an accident, a deed not at
all forecast or prepared for. The St. Bartholomew massacre was an event
for a long time forecast and announced, promised to the Catholics and
thrown out as a threat to the Protestants, written beforehand, so to
speak, in the history of the religious wars of France, but, nevertheless,
at the moment at which it was accomplished, and in the mode of its
accomplishment, a deed unexpected so far as the majority of the victims
were concerned, and a cause of contest even amongst its originators.
Accordingly it was, from the very first, a subject of surprise and
horror, throughout Europe as well as in France; not only because of the
torrents of blood that were shed, but also because of the extraordinary
degree in which it was characterized by falsehood and ferocious hatred.
We will bring forward in support of this double assertion only such facts
and quotations as appear to us decisive.
In 1565, Charles IX. and Catherine de' Medici had an interview at Bayonne
with the Duke of Alba, representative of Philip II., to consult as to the
means of delivering France from heretics. "They agreed at last," says
the contemporary historian Adriani [continuer of Guicciardini; he had
drawn his information from the Journal of Cosmo de' Medici, Grand Duke
of Tuscany, who died in 1574], "in the opinion of the Catholic king, who
thought that this great blessing could not have accomplishment save by
the death of all the chiefs of the Huguenots, and by a new edition, as
the saying was, of the Sicilian Vespers. 'Take the big fish,' said the
Duke of Alba, 'and let the small fry go; one salmon is worth more than a
thousand frogs.' They decided that the deed should be done at Moulins in
Bourbonness, whither the king was to return. The execution of it was
afterwards deferred to the date of the St. Bartholomew, in 1572, at
Paris, because of certain suspicions which had been manifested by the
Huguenots, and because it was considered easier and more certain to get
them all together at Paris than at Moulins."
Catherine de' Medici charged Cardinal Santa Croce to assure Pope Pius V.
"that she and her son had nothing more at heart than to get the admiral
and all his confidants together some day and make a massacre (un
macello) of them; but the matter," she said, "was so difficult that
there was no possibility of promising to do it at one time more than at
another."
La Noue bears witness in his Memoires to "the resolution taken at
Bayonne, with the Duke of Alba aiding, to exterminate the Huguenots of
France and the beggars (gueux) of Flanders; whereof warning had been
given by those about whom there was no doubt. All these things, and many
others as to which I am silent, mightily waked up those," he adds, "who
had no desire to be caught napping. And I remember that the chiefs of
the religion held, within a short time, three meetings, as well at Valeri
as at Chatillon, to deliberate upon present occurrences, and to seek out
legitimate and honorable expedients for securing themselves against so
much alarm, without having recourse to extreme remedies."
De Thou regards these facts as certain, and, after having added some
details, he sums them all up in the words, "This is what passed at
Bayonne in 1565."
In 1571, after the third religious war and the peace of
St. Germain-en-Laye, Marshal de Tavaunes wrote to Charles IX., "Peace
has a chance of lasting, because neither of the two parties is willing
or able to renew open war; but, if one of the two sees quite a safe
opportunity for putting a complete end to what is at the root of the
question, this it will take; for to remain forever in the state now
existing is what nobody can or ought to hope for. And there is no such
near approximation to a complete victory as to take the persons. For to
surprise what they (the Reformers) hold, to put down their religion, and
to break off all at once the alliances which support them—this is
impossible. Thus there is no way but to take the chiefs all together
for to make an end of it."
Next year, on the 24th of August, 1572, when the St. Bartholomew broke
out, Tavannes took care to himself explain what he meant in 1571 by those
words, to take the chiefs all together for to make an end of it. Being
invested with the command in Paris, "he went about the city all day,"
says Brantome, "and, seeing so much blood spilt, he said and shouted to
the people, 'Bleed, bleed; the doctors say that bleeding is as good all
through this month of August as in May.'"
In the year which preceded the outbreak of the massacre, when the
marriage of Marguerite de Valois with the Prince of Navarre was agreed
upon, and Coligny was often present at court, sometimes at Blois and
sometimes at Paris, there arose between the king and the queen-mother a
difference which there had been up to that time nothing to foreshadow.
It was plain that the union between the two branches, Catholic and
Protestant, of the royal house and the patriotic policy of Coligny were
far more pleasing to Charles IX. than to his mother.
On the matrimonial question the king's feeling was so strong that he
expressed it roughly. Jeanne d'Albret having said to him one day that
the pope would make them wait a long while for the dispensation requested
for the marriage, "No, no, my clear aunt," said the king; "I honor you
more than I do the pope, and I love my sister more than I fear him. I am
not a Huguenot, but no more am I an ass. If the pope has too much of his
nonsense, I will myself take Margot by the hand and carry her off to be
married in open conventicle." Toligny, for his part, was so pleased with
the measures that Charles IX. had taken in favor of the Low Countries in
their quarrels with Philip II., and so confident himself of his influence
over the king, that when Tavannes was complaining in his presence "that
the vanquished should make laws for the victors," Coligny said to his
face, "Whoever is not for war with Spain is not a good Frenchman, and has
the red cross inside him." The Catholics were getting alarmed and
irritated. The Guises and their partisans left the court. It was near
the time fixed for the marriage of Henry of Navarre and Marguerite de
Valois; the new pope, Gregory XIII., who had at first shown more pliancy
than his predecessor Pius V., attached to the dispensation conditions to
which neither the intended husband nor King Charles IX. himself was
inclined to consent. The Queen of Navarre, Jeanne d'Albret, who had gone
to Paris in preparation for the marriage, had died there on the 8th of
June, 1572; a death which had given rise to very likely ill-founded
accusations of poisoning. "A princess," says D'Aubigne, "with nothing of
a woman but the sex, with a soul full of everything manly, a mind fit to
cope with affairs of moment, and a heart invincible in adversity." It
was in deep mourning that her son, become King of Navarre, arrived at
court, attended by eight hundred gentlemen, all likewise in mourning.
"But," says Marguerite de Valois herself, "the nuptials took place a few
days afterwards with such triumph and magnificence as none others of my
quality; the King of Navarre and his troop having changed their mourning
for very rich and fine clothes, and I being dressed royally, with crown
and corset of tufted ermine, all blazing with crown-jewels, and the grand
blue mantle with a train four ells long borne by three princesses, the
people choking one another down below to see us pass." The marriage was
celebrated on the 18th of August, by the Cardinal of Bourbon, in front of
the principal entrance of Notre-Dame. When the Princess Marguerite was
asked if she consented, she appeared to hesitate a moment; but King
Charles IX. put his hand a little roughly on her head, and made her lower
it in token of assent. Accompanied by the king, the queen-mother, and
all the Catholics present, Marguerite went to hear mass in the choir;
Henry and his Protestant friends walked about the cloister and the nave;
Marshal de Damville pointed out to Coligny the flags, hanging from the
vaulted roof of Notre-Dame, which had been taken from the vanquished at
the battle of Moncontour. "I hope," said the admiral, "that they will
soon have others better suited for lodgement in this place." He was
already dreaming of victories over the Spaniards.
Meanwhile Charles IX. was beginning to hesitate. He was quite willing
to disconnect himself from the King of Spain, and even to incur his
displeasure, but not to be actively embroiled with him and make war upon
him; he could not conceal from himself that this policy, thoroughly
French though it was, was considered in France too Protestant for a
Catholic king. Coligny urged him vehemently. "If you want men," he
said, "I have ten thousand at your service;" whereupon Tavannes said to
the king, "Sir, whoever of your subjects uses such words to you, you
ought to have his head struck off. How is it that he offers you that
which is your own? It is that he has won over and corrupted them, and
that he is a party-leader to your prejudice." Tavannes, a rough and
faithful soldier, did not admit that there could be amongst men moral
ties of a higher kind than political ties. Charles IX., too weak in mind
and character to think and act with independence and consistency in the
great questions of the day, only sought how to elude them, and to leave
time, that inscrutable master, to settle them in his place. His
indecision brought him to a state of impotence, and he ended by inability
to do anything but dodge and lie, like his mother, and even with his
mother. Whilst he was getting his sister married to the King of Navarre
and concerting his policy with Coligny, he was adopting towards the three
principal personages who came to talk over those affairs with him three
different sorts of language; to Cardinal Alessandrino, whom Pope Pius V.
had sent to him to oppose the marriage, he said, "My lord cardinal, all
that you say to me is sound; I acknowledge it, and I thank the pope and
you for it; if I had any other means of taking vengeance on my enemies,
I would not make this marriage; but I have no other." With Jeanne
d'Albret, he lauded himself for the marriage as the best policy he could
pursue. "I give my sister," he said, "not to the Prince of Navarre, but
to all the Huguenots, to marry them as it were, and take from them all
doubt as to the unchangeable fixity of my edicts." And to humor his
mother Catherine, he said to her, on the very evening of his interview
with Jeanne d'Albret, "What think you, madam? Do I not play my partlet
well?" "Yes, very well; but it is nothing if it is not continued." And
Charles continued to play his part, even after the Bartholomew was over,
for he was fond of saying with a laugh, "My big sister Margot caught all
those Huguenot rebels in the bird-catching style. What has grieved me
most is being obliged to dissimulate so long."
His contemporary Catholic biographer, Papirius Masson, who was
twenty-eight years old at the time of the St. Bartholomew, says of him,
"He is impatient in waiting, ferocious in his fits of anger, skilfully
masked when he wishes, and ready to break faith as soon as that appears
to his advantage."
Such was the prince, fiery and flighty, inconsistent and artful,
accessible to the most opposite sympathies as well as hatreds, of whom
Catherine de' Medici and Admiral Coligny were disputing the possession.
In the spring of 1572 Coligny might have considered himself the victor in
this struggle; at his instance Charles IX. had written on the 27th of
April to Count Louis of Nassau, leader of the Protestant insurrection in
Hainault, "that he was determined, so far as opportunities and the
arrangements of his affairs permitted him, to employ the powers which God
had put into his hands for the deliverance of the Low Countries from the
oppression under which they were groaning." Fortified by this promise of
the king's, Coligny had raised a body of French Protestants, and had sent
it under the command of La Noue to join the army of Louis of Nassau. The
Reformers had at first had some successes; they had taken Valenciennes
and Mons; but the Duke of Alba restored the fortunes of the King of
Spain; he re-entered Valenciennes and he was besieging Mons. Coligny
sent to the aid of that place a fresh body of French under the orders of
Senlis, one of his comrades in faith and arms. Before setting out,
Senlis saw Charles IX., received from him money together with
encouragement, and, in the corps he led, some Catholics were mixed with
the Protestants. But from the very court of France there came to the
Duke of Alba warnings which put him in a position to surprise the French
corps; and Senlis was beaten and made prisoner on the 10th of July.
"I have in my hands," the Duke of Alba sent word to his king, "a letter
from the King of France which would strike you dumb if you were to see
it; for the moment, it is expedient to say nothing about it." "News of
the defeat of Senlis," says Tavannes, "comes flying to court, and changes
hearts and counsels. Disdain, despite, is engendered in the admiral, who
hurls this defeat upon the heads of those who have prevented the king
from declaring himself; he raises a new levy of three thousand foot, and,
not regarding who he is and where he is, he declares, in the presumption
of his audacity, that he can no longer hold his partisans, and that it
must be one of two wars, Spanish or civil. It is all thunder-storm at
court; everyone remains on the watch at the highest pitch of resolution."
A grand council was assembled. Coligny did not care. He had already, at
the king's request, set forth in a long memorial all the reasons for his
policy of a war with Spain; the king had appeared struck with them; but,
"as he only sought," says De Thou, "to gain time without its being
perceived," he handed the admiral's memorial to the keeper of the seals,
John de Morvilliers, requesting him to set forth also all the reasons for
a pacific policy. Coligny, a man of resolution and of action, did not
take any pleasure in thus prolonging the discussion; nevertheless he
again brought forward and warmly advocated, at the grand council, the
views he had so often expressed. They were almost unanimously rejected.
Coligny did not consider himself bound to give them up. "I have
promised," said he, "on my own account, my assistance to the Prince of
Orange; I hope the king will not take it ill if by means of my friends,
and perhaps in person, I fulfil my promise." This reservation excited
great surprise. "Madam," said Coligny to the queen-mother, "the king is
to-day shunning a war which would promise him great advantages; God
forbid that there should break out another which he cannot shun!" The
council broke up in great agitation. "Let the queen beware," said
Tavannes, "of the king her son's secret councils, designs, and sayings;
if she do not look out, the Huguenots will have him. At any rate, before
thinking of anything else, let her exert herself to regain the mother's
authority which the admiral has caused her to lose."
The king was hunting at Brie. The queen-mother went and joined him; she
shut herself up with him in a cabinet, and, bursting into tears, she
said, "I should never have thought that, in return for having taken so
much pains to bring you up and preserve to you the crown, you would have
had heart to make me so miserable a recompense. You hide yourself from
me, me who am your mother, in order to take counsel of your enemies. I
know that you hold secret counsels with the admiral; you desire to plunge
rashly into war with Spain, in order to give your kingdom, yourself, and
the persons that are yours, over as a prey to them of the religion. If I
am so miserable a creature, yet before I see that, give me leave to
withdraw to the place of my birth; remove from you your brother, who may
call himself unfortunate in having employed his own life to preserve
yours; give him at least time to withdraw out of danger and from the
presence of enemies made in doing you service; Huguenots who desire not
war with Spain, but with France, and the subversion of all the Estates in
order to set up themselves."
Tavannes himself terms these expressions "an artful harangue;" but he
says, "it moved, astounded, and dismayed the king, not so much on the
score of the Huguenots as of his mother and brother, whose subtlety,
ambition, and power in the state he knew; he marvelled to see his
counsels thus revealed; he avowed them, asked pardon, promised obedience.
Having sown this distrust, having shot this first bolt, the queen-mother,
still in displeasure, withdrew to Monceaux. The trembling king followed
her; he found her with his brother and Sieurs de Tavannes, de Retz, and
the Secretary of State de Sauve, the last of whom threw himself upon his
knees and received his Majesty's pardon for having revealed his counsels
to his mother. The infidelity, the bravado, the audacity, the menaces,
and the enterprises of the Huguenots were magnified with so much of truth
and art that from friends behold them converted into enemies of the king,
who, nevertheless, wavering as ever, could not yet give up the desire he
had conceived of winning glory and reputation by war with Spain."
A fresh incident increased the agitation in the royal circle. In July,
1572, the throne of Poland had become vacant. A Polish embassy came to
offer it to the Duke of Anjou. On his part and his mother's, there was
at first great eagerness to accept it; Catherine was charmed to see her
favorite son becoming a king. "If we had required," says a Polish
historian, "that the French should build a bridge of solid gold over the
Vistula, they would have agreed." Hesitation soon took the place of
eagerness; Henry demanded information, and took time to reply. He had
shown similar hesitation at the time of the negotiations entered upon in
London, in 1571, with a view of making him the husband of Elizabeth,
Queen of England: Coligny, who was very anxious to have him away, pressed
Charles IX. to insist upon a speedy solution. "If Monsieur," said he,
"who would not have England by marriage, will not have Poland either by
election, let him declare once for all that he will not leave France."
The relations between the two brothers became day by day more
uncomfortable: two years later, Henry, for a brief period King of Poland,
himself told the story of them to his physician Miron. "When, by any
chance," he said, "the queen-mother and I, after the admiral's departure,
approached the king to speak to him of any matters, even those which
concerned merely his pleasure, we found him marvellously quick-tempered
and cross-grained, with rough looks and bearing, and his answers still
more so. One day, a very short time before the St. Bartholomew, setting
out expressly from my quarters to go and see the king, somebody told me
on inquiry that he was in his cabinet, whence the admiral, who had been
alone with him a very long while, had just that instant gone out. I
entered at once, as I had been accustomed to do. But as soon as the king
my brother perceived me, he, without saying anything to me, began walking
about furiously and with long steps, often looking towards me askance and
with a very evil eye, sometimes laying his hand upon his dagger, and in
so excited a fashion that I expected nothing else but that he would come
and take me by the collar to poniard me. I was very vexed that I had
gone in, reflecting upon the peril I was in, but still more upon how to
get out of it; which I did so dexterously, that, whilst he was walking
with his back turned to me, I retreated quickly towards the door, which I
opened, and, with a shorter obeisance than at my entry, I made my exit,
which was scarcely perceived by him until I was outside. And straightway
I went to look for the queen my mother; and, putting together all
reports, notifications, and suspicions, the time, and past circumstances,
in conjunction with this last meeting, we remained both of us easily
persuaded, and as it were certain, that it was the admiral who had
impressed the king with some bad and sinister opinion of us, and we
resolved from that moment to rid ourselves of him."
One idea immediately occurred to Catherine and her son. Two persons felt
a passionate hatred towards Coligny; they were the widow of Duke Francis
of Guise, Anne d'Este, become Duchess of Nemours by a second marriage,
and her son Henry de Guise, a young man of twenty-two. They were both
convinced that Coligny had egged on Poltrot to murder Duke Francis, and
they had sworn to exact vengeance. Being informed of the queen-mother's
and the Duke of Anjou's intention, they entered into it eagerly; the
young Duke of Guise believed his mother quite capable of striking down
the admiral in the very midst of one of the great assemblies at court;
the fair ladies of the sixteenth century were adepts in handling dagger
and pistol. In default of the Duchess of Nemours, her son was thought of
for getting rid of Coligny. "It was at one time decided," says the Duke
de Bouillon in his Memoires, "that M. de Guise should kill the admiral
during a tilt-at-the-ring which the king gave in the garden of the
Louvre, and in which all Messieurs were to lead sides. I was on that of
the duke, who was believed to have an understanding with the admiral. On
this occasion, it was so managed that our dresses were not ready, and the
late duke and his side did not tilt at all. The resolution against the
admiral was changed prudently; inasmuch as it was very perilous, for the
person of the king and of Messieurs, to have determined to kill him in
that place, there being present more than four hundred gentlemen of the
religion, who might have gone very far in case of an assault upon that
lord, who was so much beloved by them." Everything considered, it was
thought more expedient to employ for the purpose an inferior agent;
Catherine and the Duke of Anjou sent for a Gascon captain, a dependant of
the house of Lorraine, whom they knew to be resolute and devoted.
"We had him shown the means he should adopt," says the Duke of Anjou,
"in attacking him whom we had in our eye; but, having well scanned him,
himself and his movements, and his speech and his looks, which had made
us laugh and afforded us good pastime, we considered him too hare-brained
and too much of a wind-bag to deal the blow well." They then applied to
an officer "of practice and experience in murder," Charles de Louviers,
Sieur de Maurevert, who was called the king's slaughterman (le tueur du
roi), because he had already rendered such a service, and they agreed
with him as to all the circumstances of place, time, and procedure most
likely to secure the success of the deed, whilst giving the murderer
chances of escape.
In such situations there is scarcely any project the secret of which is
so well kept that there does not get abroad some rumor to warn an
observant mind; and when it is the fate of a religious or a popular hero
that is in question, there is never any want of devoted friends or
servants about him, ready to take alarm for him. When Coligny mounted
his horse to go from Chatillon to Paris, a poor countrywoman on his
estates threw herself before him, sobbing, "Ah! sir, ah! our good master,
you are going to destruction; I shall never see you again if once you go
to Paris; you will die there, you and all those who go with-you." At
Paris, on the approach of the St. Bartholomew, the admiral heard that
some of his gentlemen were going away. "They treat you too well here,"
said one of them, Langoiran, to him; "better to be saved with the fools
than lost for the sake of being thought over-wise." "The admiral was
beset by letters which reminded him of the queen-mother's crooked ways,
and the detestable education of the king, trained to every sort of
violence and horrible sin; his Bible is Macchiavelli; he has been
prepared by the blood of beasts for the shedding of human blood; he has
been persuaded that a prince is not bound to observe an edict extorted by
his subjects." To all these warnings Coligny replied at one time by
affirming the king's good faith, and at another by saying, "I would
rather be dragged dead through the muck-heaps of Paris than go back to
civil war." This great soul had his seasons, not of doubt as to his
faith or discouragement as to his cause, but of profound sorrow at the
atrocious or shameful spectacles and the public or private woes which had
to be gone through.
Charles IX. himself felt some disquietude as to the meeting of the Guises
and Coligny at his court. The Guises had quitted it before the 18th of
August, the day fixed for the marriage of King Henry of Navarre with
Marguerite de Valois. When the marriage was over, they were to return,
and they did. At the moment of their returning, the king said to
Coligny, with demonstrations of the most sincere friendship, "You know,
my dear father, the promise you made me not to insult any of the Guises
as long as you remained at court. On their side, they have given me
their word that they will have for you, and all the gentry of your
following, the consideration you deserve. I rely entirely upon your
word, but I have not so much confidence in theirs; I know that they are
only looking for an opportunity of letting their vengeance burst forth; I
know their bold and haughty character; as they have the people of Paris
devoted to them, and as, on coming hither, under pretext of the
rejoicings at my sister's marriage, they have brought a numerous body of
well-armed soldiers, I should be inconsolable if they were to take
anything in hand against you; such an outrage would recoil upon me. That
being so, if you think as I do, I believe the best thing for me is to
order into the city the regiment of guards, with such and such captains
(he mentioned none but those who were not objects of suspicion to
Coligny); this re-enforcement," added the king, "will secure public
tranquillity, and, if the factious make any disturbance, there will be
men to oppose to them." The admiral assented to the king's proposal. He
added that he was ready to declare "that never had he been guilty or
approving of the death of Duke Francis of Guise, and that he set down as
a calumniator and a scoundrel whoever said, that he had authorized it."
Though frequently going to the palace, both he and the Guises, they had
not spoken when they met. Charles had promised the Lorraine princes "not
to force them to make friends with Coligny more than was agreeable to
them." He believed that he had taken every precaution necessary to
maintain in his court, for some time at least, the peace he desired.
On Friday, the 22d of August, 1572, Coligny was returning on foot from
the Louvre to the Rue des Fosses—St.-Germain-l'Auxerrois, where he
lived; he was occupied in reading a letter which he had just received;
a shot, fired from the window of a house in the cloister of
St. Germain-l'Auxerrois, smashed two fingers of his right hand and
lodged a ball in his left arm; he raised his eyes, pointed out with his
injured hand the house whence the shot had come, and reached his
quarters on foot. Two gentlemen who were in attendance upon him rushed
to seize the murderer; it was too late; Maurevert had been lodging there
and on the watch for three days at the house of a canon, an old tutor to
the Duke of Guise; a horse from the duke's stable was waiting for him at
the back of the house; and, having done his job, he departed at a
gallop. He was pursued for several leagues without being overtaken.
Coligny sent to apprise the king of what had just happened to him.
"There," said he, "was a fine proof of fidelity to the agreement between
him and the Duke of Guise." "I shall never have rest, then!" cried
Charles, breaking the stick with which he was playing tennis with the
Duke of Guise and Teligny, the admiral's son-in-law; and he immediately
returned to his room. The Duke of Guise took himself off without a word.
Teligny speedily joined his father-in-law. Ambrose Pare had already
attended to him, cutting off the two broken fingers; somebody expressed a
fear that the balls might have been poisoned. "It will be as God pleases
as to that," said Coligny; and, turning towards the minister, Merlin, who
had hurried to him, he added, "pray that He may grant me the gift of
perseverance." Towards midday, Marshals de Damville, De Cosse, and De
Villars went to see him "out of pure friendship," they told him, "and not
to exhort him to endure his mishap with patience: we know that you will
not lack patience." "I do protest to you," said Coligny, "that death
affrights me not; it is of God that I hold my life; when He requires it
back from me, I am quite ready to give it up. But I should very much
like to see the king before I die; I have to speak to him of things which
concern his person and the welfare of his state, and which I feel sure
none of you would dare to tell him of." "I will go and inform his
Majesty, . . ." rejoined Damville; and he went out with Villars and
Teligny, leaving Marshal de Cosse in the room. "Do you remember," said
Coligny to him, "the warnings I gave you a few hours ago? You will do
well to take your precautions."
About two P. M., the king, the queen-mother, and the Dukes of Anjou and
Alencon, her two other sons, with many of their high officers, repaired
to the admiral's. "My dear father," said the king, as he went in, "the
hurt is yours; the grief and the outrage mine; but I will take such
vengeance that it shall never be forgotten;" to which he added his usual
imprecations. "Then the admiral, who lay in bed sorely wounded," says
the Duke of Anjou himself, in his account of this interview, "requested
that he might speak privately to the king, which the king granted
readily, making a sign to the queen my mother, and to me, to withdraw,
which we did incontinently into the middle of the room, where we remained
standing during this secret colloquy, which caused us great misgiving.
We saw ourselves surrounded by more than two hundred gentlemen and
captains of the admiral's party, who were in the room and another
adjoining, and, besides, in a ball below, the which, with sad faces and
the gestures and bearing of malcontents, were whispering in one another's
ears, frequently passing and repasssing before and behind us, not with so
much honor and respect as they ought to have done, and as if they had
some suspicion that we had somewhat to do with the admiral's hurt. We
were seized with astonishment and fear at seeing ourselves shut in there,
as my mother has since many times confessed to me, saying that she had
never been in any place where there was so much cause for fright, and
whence she had gone away with more relief and pleasure. This
apprehension caused us to speedily break in upon the conversation the
admiral was having with the king, under a polite excuse invented by the
queen my mother, who, approaching the king, said out loud that she had no
idea he would make the admiral talk so much, and that she saw quite well
that his physicians and surgeons considered it bad for him, as it
certainly was very dangerous, and enough to throw him into a fever, which
was, above everything, to be guarded against. She begged the king to put
off the rest of their conversation to another time, when the admiral was
better. This vexed the king mightily, for he was very anxious to hear
the remainder of what the admiral had to say to him. However, he being
unable to gainsay so specious an argument, we got the king away. And
incontinently the queen-mother (and I too) begged the king to let us know
the secret conversation which the admiral had held with him, and in which
he had been unwilling that we should be participators; which the king
refused several times to do. But finding himself importuned and hard
pressed by us, he told us abruptly and with displeasure, swearing by
God's death that what the admiral said was true, that kings realized
themselves as such in France only in so far as they had the 'power of
doing harm or good to their subjects and servants, and that this power
and management of affairs had slipped imperceptibly into the hands of the
queen my mother and mine.' 'This superintendent domination, the admiral
told me, might some day be very prejudicial to me and to all my kingdom,
and that I should hold it in suspicion and beware of it; of which he was
anxious to warn me, as one of my best and most faithful subjects, before
he died. There, God's death, as you wish to know, is what the admiral
said to me.' This, said as it was with passion and fury, went straight
home to our hearts, which we concealed as best we might, both of us,
however, defending ourselves in the matter. We continued this
conversation all the way from the admiral's quarters to the Louvre,
where, having left the king in his room, we retired to that of the queen
my mother, who was piqued and hurt to the utmost degree at this language
used by the admiral to the king, as well as at the credence which the
king seemed to accord to it, and was fearful lest it should bring about
some change and alteration in our affairs and in the management of the
state. Being unable to resolve upon any course at the moment, we
retired, putting off the question till the morrow, when I went to see my
mother, who was already up. I had a fine racket in my head, and so had
she, and for the time there was no decision come to save to have the
admiral despatched by some means or other. It being impossible any
longer to employ stratagems and artifices, it would have to be done
openly, and the king brought round to that way of thinking. We agreed
that, in the afternoon, we would go and pay him a visit in his closet,
whither we would get the Sieur de Nevers, Marshals de Tavannes and de
Retz, and Chancellor de Birague to come, merely to have their opinion as
to the means to be adopted for the execution, which we had already
determined upon, my mother and I."
On Saturday, the 23d of August, in the afternoon, the queen-mother, the
Duke of Anjou, Marshals do Tavannes and de Retz, the Duke of Nevers, and
the Chancellor de Birague met in the king's closet, who was irresolute
and still talking of exacting from the Guises heavy vengeance for the
murderous attack upon Coligny. Catherine "represented to him that the
party of the Huguenots had already seized this occasion for taking up
arms against him; they had sent," she said, "several despatches to
Germany to procure a levy of ten thousand reiters, and to the cantons of
the Swiss for another levy of ten thousand foot; the French captains,
partisans of the Huguenots, had already, most of them, set out to raise
levies within the kingdom time and place of meeting had already been
assigned and determined. All the Catholics, on their side," added
Catherine, "disgusted with so long a war and harassed by so many kinds of
calamities, have resolved to put a stop to them; they have decided
amongst them to elect a captain-general, to form a league offensive and
defensive against the Huguenots. The whole of France would thus be seen
armed and divided into two great parties, between which the king would
remain isolated, without any command and with about as much obedience.
For so much ruin and calamity in anticipation and already within a
finger's reach, and for the slaughter of so many thousands of men, a
preventive may be found in a single sword-thrust; all that is necessary
is to kill the admiral, the head and front of all the civil wars; the
designs and the enterprises of the Huguenots will die with him, and the
Catholics, satisfied with the sacrifice of two or three men, will remain
forever in obedience to the king. . . ." "At the beginning," continues
the Duke of Anjou, in his account, "the king would not by any means
consent to have the admiral touched; feeling, however, some fear of the
danger which we had so well depicted and represented, to him, he desired
that, in a case of such importance, every one should at once state his
opinion." When each of those present had spoken, the king appeared still
undecided. The queen-mother then resolved "to let him hear the truth in
toto from Marshal de Retz, from whom she knew that he would take it
better than from any other," says his sister Marguerite de Valois in her
Memoires, "as one who was more in his confidence and favor than any
other. The which came to see him in the evening, about nine or ten, and
told him that, as his faithful servant, he could not conceal from him the
danger he was in if he were to abide by his resolution to do justice on
M. de Guise, because it was necessary that he should know that the attack
upon the admiral was not M. de Guise's doing alone, but that my brother
Henry, the King of Poland, afterwards King of France, and the queen my
mother, had been concerned in it; which M. de Guise and his friends would
not fail to reveal, and which would place his Majesty in a position of
great danger and embarrassment." Towards midnight, the queen-mother went
down to the king, followed by her son Henry and four other councillors.
They found the king more put out than ever. The conversation began
again, and resolved itself into a regular attack upon the king. "The
Guises," he was told, "will denounce the king himself, together with his
mother and brother; the Huguenots will believe that the king was in
concert with the party, and they will take the whole royal family to
task. War is inevitable. Better to win a battle in Paris, where we hold
all the chiefs in our clutches, than put it to hazard in the field.
After a struggle of an hour and a half, Charles, in a violent state of
agitation, still hesitated; when the queen-mother, fearing lest, if there
were further delay, all would be discovered, said to him, 'Permit me and
your brother, sir, to retire to some other part of the kingdom.' Charles
rose from his seat. 'By God's death,' said he, 'since you think proper
to kill the admiral, I consent; but all the Huguenots in Paris as well,
in order that there remain not one to reproach me afterwards. Give the
orders at once.'" And he went back into his room.
In order to relieve and satisfy her own passions and those of her
favorite son, which were fear and love of power, the queen-mother had
succeeded in working her king-son into a fit of weakness and mad anger.
Anxious to profit by it, "she gave orders on the instant for the signal,
which was not to have been given until an hour before daybreak," says De
Thou, "and, instead of the bell at the Palace of Justice, the tocsin was
sounded by the bell of St.-Germain-Auxerrois, which was nearer."
Even before the king had given his formal consent, the projectors of the
outrage had carefully prepared for its execution; they had apportioned
out amongst themselves or to their agents the different quarters of the
city. The Guises had reserved for themselves that in which they
considered they had personal vengeance as well as religious enmity to
satisfy, the neighborhood of St.-Germain-l'Auxerrois, and especially Rue
de Bethisy and Rue des Fosses-St.-Germain. Awakened by the noise around
his house, and, before long, by arquebuse-shots fired in his court-yard,
Coligny understood what was going to happen; he jumped out of bed, put on
his dressing-gown, and, as he stood leaning against the wall, he said to
the clergyman, Merlin, who was sitting up with him, "M. Merlin, say me a
prayer; I commit my soul to my Saviour." One of his gentlemen, Cornaton,
entered the room. "What is the meaning of this riot?" asked Ambrose
Pare, who had also remained with the admiral.
"My lord," said Cornaton to Coligny, "it is God calling us." "I have
long been ready to die," said the admiral; "but you, my friends, save
yourselves, if it is still possible." All ran up stairs and escaped, the
majority by the roof; a German servant, Nicholas Muss, alone remained
with the admiral, "as little concerned," says Cornaton, "as if there were
nothing going on around him." The door of his room was forced. Two men,
servants of the Guises, entered first. One of them, Behme, attached to
the Duke of Guise's own person, came forward, saying, "Art thou not the
admiral?" "Young man," said Coligny, "thou comest against a wounded and
an aged man. Thou'lt not shorten my life by much." Behme plunged into
his stomach a huge pointed boar-spear which he had in his hand, and then
struck him on the head with it. Coligny fell, saying, "If it were but a
man! But 'tis a horse-boy." Others came in and struck him in their
turn. "Behme!" shouted the Duke of Guise from the court-yard, "hast
done?" "'Tis all over, my lord," was the answer; and the murderers threw
the body out of the window, where it stuck for an instant, either
accidentally or voluntarily, and as if to defend a last remnant of life.
Then it fell. The two great lords, who were waiting for it, turned over
the corpse, wiped the blood off the face, and said, "Faith, 'tis he, sure
enough."
Some have said that Guise gave him a kick in the face. A servant of the
Duke of Nevers cut off the head, and took it to the queen-mother, the
king, and the Duke of Anjou. It was embalmed with care, to be sent, it
is said, to Rome. What is certain is that, a few days afterwards,
Mandelot, governor of Lyons, wrote to the king, "I have received, sir,
the letter your Majesty was pleased to write to me, whereby you tell me
that you have been advertised that there is a man who has set out from
over yonder with the head he took from the admiral after killing him, for
to convey it to Rome, and to take care, when the said man arrives in this
city, to have him arrested, and to take from him the said head.
Whereupon I incontinently gave such strict orders, that, if he presents
himself, the command which it pleases your Majesty to lay upon me will be
acted upon. There hath not passed, for these last few days, by way of
this city, any person going Romewards save a squire of the Duke of
Guise's, named Paule, the which had departed four hours previously on the
same day on which I received the said letter from your Majesty."
We do not find anywhere, in reference to this incident, any information
going further than this reply of the governor of Lyons to Charles IX.
However it may be, the remains of Coligny's body, after having been hung
and exposed for some days on the gibbet of Montfaucon, were removed by
Duke Francis de Montmorency, the admiral's relative and friend, who had
them transferred to Chantilly and interred in the chapel of the castle.
After having been subjected, in the course of three centuries, at one
time to oblivion and at others to divers transferences, these sad relics
of a great man, a great Christian, and a great patriot, have been
resting, for the last two and twenty years, in the very castle of
Chatillon-sur-Loing, his ancestors' own domain having once more become
the property of a relative of his family, the Duke of Luxembourg, to whom
Count Anatole de Montesquiou transferred them, and who, in 1851, had them
sealed up in a bit of wall in ruins, at the foot of an old tower, under
the site of the bed-chamber of the Duchesses of Chatillon, where, in all
probability, Coligny was born. The more tardy the homage, the greater.
The actual murderers of Coligny, the real projectors of the
St. Bartholomew, Catherine de' Medici and her son the Duke of Anjou, at
the very moment when they had just ordered the massacre, were seized with
affright at the first sound of their crime. The Duke of Anjou finishes
his story with this page "After but two hours' rest during the night,
just as the day was beginning to break, the king, the queen my mother,
and I went to the frontal of the Louvre, adjoining the tennis-court, into
a room which looks upon the area of the stable-yard, to see the
commencement of the work. We had not been there long when, as we were
weighing the issues and the consequence of so great an enterprise, on
which, sooth to say, we had up to that time scarcely bestowed a thought,
we heard a pistol-shot fired. I could not say in what spot, or whether
it knocked over anybody; but well know I that the sound wounded all three
of us so deeply in spirit that it knocked over our senses and judgment,
stricken with terror and apprehension at the great troubles which were
then about to set in. To prevent them, we sent a gentleman at once and
with all haste to M. de Guise, to tell him and command him expressly from
us to retire into his quarters, and be very careful to take no steps
against the admiral, this single command putting a stop to everything
else, because it had been determined that in no spot in the city should
any steps be taken until, as a preliminary, the admiral had been killed.
But soon afterwards the gentleman returning told us that M. de Guise had
answered him that the command came too late, that the admiral was dead,
and the work was begun throughout the rest of the city. So we went back
to our original determination, and let ourselves follow the thread and
the course of the enterprise."
The enterprise, in fact, followed its thread and natural course without
its being in the power of anybody to arrest or direct it. It had been
absolutely necessary to give information of it the evening before to the
provost of tradesmen of Paris, Le Charron, president in the court of
taxation (Board of Excise), and to the chief men of the city. According
to Brantome, "they made great difficulties and imported conscience into
the matter; but M. de Tavannes, in the king's presence, rebuked them
strongly, and threatened them that, if they did not make themselves busy,
the king would have them hanged. The poor devils, unable to do aught
else, thereupon answered, 'Ha! is that the way you take it, sir, and you,
monsieur? We swear to you that you shall hear news thereof, for we will
ply our hands so well right and left that the memory shall abide forever
of a right well kept St. Bartholomew.'" "Wherein they did not fail,"
continues Brantome, "but they did not like it at first." According to
other reports, the first opposition of the provost of tradesmen, Le
Charron, was not without effect; it was not till the next day that he let
the orders he had received take their course; and it was necessary to
apply to his predecessor in his office, the ex-provost Marcel, a creature
of the queen-mother's, to set in motion the turbulent and the fanatical
amongst the populace, "which it never does to 'blood,' for it is
afterwards more savage than is desirable." Once let loose upon the
St. Bartholomew, the Parisian populace was eager indeed, but not alone in
its eagerness, for the work of massacre; the gentlemen of the court took
part in it passionately, from a spirit of vengeance, from religious
hatred, from the effect of smelling blood, from covetousness at the
prospect of confiscations at hand. Teligny, the admiral's son-in-law,
had taken refuge on a roof; the Duke of Anjou's guards make him a mark
for their arquebuses. La Rochefoucauld, with whom the king had been
laughing and joking up to eleven o'clock the evening before, heard a
knocking at his door, in the king's name; it is opened; enter six men in
masks and poniard him. The new Queen of Navarre, Marguerite de Valois,
had gone to bed by express order of her mother Catherine. "Just as I was
asleep," says she, "behold a man knocking with feet and hands at the door
and shouting, Navarre! Navarre! My nurse, thinking it was the king my
husband, runs quickly to the door and opens it. It was a gentleman named
M. de Leran, who had a sword-cut on the elbow, a gash from a halberd on
the arm, and was still pursued by four archers, who all came after him
into my bedroom. He, wishing to save himself, threw himself on to my
bed; as for me, feeling this man who had hold of me, I threw myself out
of bed towards the wall, and he after me, still holding me round the
body. I did not know this man, and I could not tell whether he had come
thither to offer me violence, or whether the archers were after him in
particular, or after me. We both screamed, and each of us was as much
frightened as the other. At last it pleased God that M. de Nanqay,
captain of the guards, came in, who, finding me in this plight, though he
felt compassion, could not help laughing; and, flying into a great rage
with the archers for this indiscretion, he made them begone, and gave me
the life of that poor man who had hold of me, whom I had put to bed and
attended to in my closet, until he was well."
We might multiply indefinitely these anecdotical scenes of the massacre,
most of them brutally ferocious, others painfully pathetic, some generous
and calculated to preserve the credit of humanity amidst one of its most
direful aberrations. History must show no pity for the vices and crimes
of men, whether princes or people; and it is her duty as well as her
right to depict them so truthfully that men's souls and imaginations may
be sufficiently impressed by them to conceive disgust and horror at them;
but it is not by dwelling upon them and by describing them minutely, as
if she had to exhibit a gallery of monsters and madmen, that history can
lead men's minds to sound judgments and salutary impressions; it is
necessary to have moral sense and good sense always in view, and set high
above great social troubles, just as sailors, to struggle courageously
against the tempest, need to see a luminous corner where the sky is
visible, and a star which reveals to them the port. We take no pleasure,
and we see no use, in setting forth in detail the works of evil; we
should be inclined to fear that, by familiarity with such a spectacle,
men would lose the perception of good, and cease to put hope in its
legitimate and ultimate superiority. Nor will we pause either to discuss
the secondary questions which meet us at the period of which we are
telling the story; for example, the question whether Charles IX. fired
with his own hand on his Protestant subjects whom he had delivered over
to the evil passions of the aristocracy and of the populace, or whether
the balcony from which he is said to have indulged in this ferocious
pastime existed at that time, in the sixteenth century, at the palace of
the Louvre, and overlooking the Seine. These questions are not without
historic interest, and it is well for learned men to study them; but we
consider them incapable of being resolved with certainty; and, even were
they resolved, they would not give the key to the character of Charles
IX. and to the portion which appertains to him in the deed of cruelty
with which his name remains connected. The great historic fact of the
St. Bartholomew is what we confine ourselves to; and we have attempted to
depict it accurately as regards Charles IX.'s hesitations and equally
feverish resolutions, his intermixture of open-heartedness and
double-dealing in his treatment of Coliguy, towards whom he felt himself
drawn without quite understanding him, and his puerile weakness in
presence of his mother, whom he feared far more than he trusted. When he
had plunged into the orgies of the massacre, when, after having said,
"Kill them all!" he had seen the slaughter of his companions in his royal
amusements, Teligny and La Rochefoucauld, Charles IX. abandoned himself
to a fit of mad passion. He was asked whether the two young Huguenot
princes, Henry of Navarre and Henry de Conde, were to be killed also;
Marshal de Retz had been in favor of it; Marshal de Tavannes had been
opposed to it; and it was decided to spare them. On the very night of
the St. Bartholomew, the king sent for them both. "I mean for the
future," said he, "to have but one religion in my kingdom; the mass or
death; make your choice." Henry of Navarre reminded the king of his
promises, and asked for time to consider; Henry de Conde "answered that
he would remain firm in the true religion though he should have to give
up his life for it." "Seditious madman, rebel, and son of a rebel," said
Charles, "if within three days you do not change your language, I will
have you strangled." At this first juncture, the king saved from the
massacre none but his surgeon, Ambrose Pare, and his nurse, both
Huguenots; on the very night after the murder of Coligny, he sent for
Ambrose Pare into his chamber, and made him go into his wardrobe, says
Brantome, "ordering him not to stir, and saying that it was not
reasonable that one who was able to be of service to a whole little world
should be thus massacred." A few days afterwards, "Now," said the king
to Pare, "you really must be a Catholic." "By God's light," answered
Pars, "I think you must surely remember, sir, to have promised me, in
order that I might never disobey you, never, on the other hand, to bid me
do four things—find my way back into my mother's womb, catch myself
fighting in a battle, leave your service, or go to mass." After a
moment's silence Charles rejoined, "Ambrose, I don't know what has come
over me for the last two or three days, but I feel my mind and my body
greatly excited, in fact, just as if I had a fever; meseems every moment,
just as much waking as sleeping, that those massacred corpses keep
appearing to me with their faces all hideous and covered with blood. I
wish the helpless and the innocent had not been included." "And in
consequence of the reply made to him," adds Sully in his (Economies
royales t. i. p. 244, in the Petitot collection), "he next day issued
his orders, prohibiting, on pain of death, any slaying or plundering; the
which were, nevertheless, very ill observed, the animosities and fury of
the populace being too much inflamed to defer to them."
The historians, Catholic or Protestant, contemporary or researchful,
differ widely as to the number of the victims in this cruel massacre;
according to De Thou, there were about two thousand persons killed in
Paris the first day; D'Aubigne says three thousand; Brantome speaks of
four thousand bodies that Charles IX. might have seen floating down the
Seine; La Popeliniere reduces them to one thousand. There is to be
found, in the account-books of the city of Paris, a payment to the
grave-diggers of the cemetery of the Innocents for having interred eleven
hundred dead bodies stranded at the turns of the Seine near Chaillot,
Auteuil, and St. Cloud; it is probable that many corpses were carried
still farther, and the corpses were not all thrown into the river. The
uncertainty is still greater when one comes to speak of the number of
victims throughout the whole of France; De Thou estimates it at thirty
thousand, Sully at seventy thousand, Perefixe, Archbishop of Paris in the
seventeenth century, raises it to one hundred thousand; Papirius Masson
and Davila reduce it to ten thousand, without clearly distinguishing
between the massacre of Paris and those of the provinces; other
historians fix upon forty thousand. Great uncertainty also prevails as
to the execution of the orders issued from Paris to the governors at the
provinces; the names of the Viscount d'Orte, governor of Bayonne, and of
John le Hennuyer, Bishop of Lisieux, have become famous from their having
refused to take part in the massacre; but the authenticity of the letter
from the Viscount d'Orte to Charles IX. is disputed, though the fact of
his resistance appears certain; and as for the bishop, John le Hennuyer,
M. de Formeville seems to us to have demonstrated in his Histoire de
l'ancien Eveche-comte de Lisieux (t. ii. pp. 299-314), "that there was
no occasion to save the Protestants of Lisieux, in 1572, because they did
not find themselves in any danger of being massacred, and that the merit
of it cannot be attributed to anybody, to the bishop, Le Hennuyer, any
more than to Captain Fumichon, governor of the town. It was only the
general course of events and the discretion of the municipal officers of
Lisieux that did it all." One thing which is quite true, and which it is
good to call to mind in the midst of so great a general criminality, is
that, at many spots in France, it met with a refusal to be associated in
it; President Jeannin at Dijon, the Count de Tende in Provence, Philibert
de la Guiche at Macon, Tanneguy le Veneur de Carrouge at Rouen, the Count
de Gordes in Dauphiny, and many other chiefs, military or civil, openly
repudiated the example set by the murderers of Paris; and the municipal
body of Nantes, a very Catholic town, took upon this subject, as has been
proved from authentic documents by M. Vaurigaud, pastor of the Reformed
Church at Nantes [in his Essai sur l'Histoire des Eglises reformees de
Bretagne, t. i. pp. 190-194], a resolution which does honor to its
patriotic firmness as well as to its Christian loyalty.
A great, good man, a great functionary, and a great scholar, in disgrace
for six years past, the Chancellor Michael de l'Hospital, received about
this time, in his retreat at Vignay, a visit from a great philosopher,
Michael de Montaigne, "anxious," said the visitor, "to come and testify
to you the honor and reverence with which I regard your competence and
the special qualities which are in you; for, as to the extraneous and the
fortuitous, it is not to my taste to put them down in the account."
Montaigne chose a happy moment for disregarding all but the personal, and
special qualities of the chancellor; shortly after his departure,
L'Hospital was warned that some sinister-looking horsemen were coming,
and that he would do well to take care of himself. "No matter, no
matter," he answered; "it will be as God pleases when my hour has come."
Next day he was told that those men were approaching his house, and he
was asked whether he would not have the gates shut against them, and have
them fired upon, in case they attempted to force an entrance. "No," said
he, "if the small gate will not do for them to enter by, let the big one
be opened." A few hours afterwards, L'Hospital was informed that the
king and the queen-mother were sending other horsemen to protect him.
"I didn't know," said the old man, "that I had deserved either death or
pardon." A rumor of his death flew abroad amongst his enemies, who
rejoiced at it. "We are told," wrote Cardinal Granvelle to his agent at
Brussels (October 8, 1572), "that the king has had Chancellor de
l'Hospital and his wife despatched, which would be a great blessing."
The agent, more enlightened than his chief, denied the fact, adding,
"They are a fine bit of rubbish left, L'Hospital and his wife." Charles
IX. wrote to his old adviser to reassure him, "loving you as I do." Some
time after, however, he demanded of him his resignation of the title of
chancellor, wishing to confer it upon La Birague, to reward him for his
co-operation in the St. Bartholomew. L'Hospital gave in his resignation
on the 1st of February, 1573, and died six weeks afterwards, on the 18th
of March. "I am just at the end of my long journey, and shall have no
more business but with God," he wrote to the king and the queen-mother.
"I implore Him to give you His grace, and to lead you with His hand in
all your affairs, and in the government of this great and beautiful
kingdom which He hath committed to your keeping, with all gentleness and
clemency towards your good subjects, in imitation of Himself, who is good
and, patient in bearing our burdens, and prompt to forgive you and pardon
you everything."
From the 24th to the 31st of August, 1572, the bearing and conduct of
Charles IX. and the queen-mother produced nothing but a confused mass of
orders and counter-orders, affirmations and denials, words and actions
incoherent and contradictory, all caused by a habit of lying and the
desire of escaping from the peril or embarrassment of the moment. On the
very first day of the massacre, about midday, the provost of tradesmen
and the sheriffs, who had not taken part in the "Paris matins," came
complaining to the king "of the pillage, sack, and murder which were
being committed by many belonging to the suite of his Majesty, as well as
to those of the princes, princesses, and lords of the court, by noblemen,
archers, and soldiers of the guard, as well as by all sorts of gentry and
people mixed with them and under their wing." Charles ordered them "to
get on horseback, take with them all the forces in the city, and keep
their eyes open day and night to put a stop to the said murder, pillage,
and sedition arising," he said, "because of the rivalry between the
houses of Guise and Chatillon, and because they of Guise had been
threatened by the admiral's friends, who suspected them of being at the
bottom of the hurt inflicted upon him." He, the same day, addressed to
the governors of the provinces a letter in which he invested the
disturbance with the same character, and gave the same explanation of it.
The Guises complained violently at being thus disavowed by the king, who
had the face to throw upon them alone the odium of the massacre which he
had ordered. Next day, August 25, the king wrote to all his agents, at
home and abroad, another letter, affirming that "what had happened at
Paris had been done solely to prevent the execution of an accursed
conspiracy which the admiral and his allies had concocted against him,
his mother, and his brothers;" and, on the 26th of August, he went with
his two brothers to hold in state a bed of justice, and make to the
Parliament the same declaration against Coligny and his party. "He could
not," he said, "have parried so fearful a blow but by another very
violent one; and he wished all the world to know that what had happened
at Paris had been done not only with his consent, but by his express
command." Whereupon it was enjoined upon the court, says De Thou, "to
cause investigations to be made as to the conspiracy of Coligny, and to
decree what it should consider proper, conformably with the laws and with
justice." The next day but one, August 28, appeared a royal manifesto
running, "The king willeth and intendeth that all noblemen and others
whosoever of the religion styled Reformed be empowered to live and abide
in all security and liberty, with their wives, children, and families, in
their houses, as they have heretofore done and were empowered to do by
benefit of the edicts of pacification. And nevertheless, for to obviate
the troubles, scandals, suspicion, and distrust, which might arise by
reason of the services and assemblies that might take place both in the
houses of the said noblemen and elsewhere, as is permitted by the
aforesaid edicts of pacification, his Majesty doth lay very express
inhibitions and prohibitions upon all the said noblemen and others of the
said religion against holding assemblies, on any account whatsoever,
until that, by the said lord the king, after having provided for the
tranquillity of his kingdom, it be otherwise ordained. And that, on pain
of confiscation of body and goods in case of disobedience."
These tardy and lying accusations officially brought against Coligny and
his friends; these promises of liberty and security for the Protestants,
renewed in the terms of the edicts of pacification, and, in point of
fact, annulled at the very moment at which they were being renewed; the
massacre continuing here and there in France, at one time with the secret
connivance and at another notwithstanding the publicly-given word of the
king and the queen-mother; all this policy, at one and the same time
violent and timorous, incoherent and stubborn, produced amongst the
Protestants two contrary effects: some grew frightened, others angry.
At court, under the direct influence of the king and his surroundings,
"submission to the powers that be" prevailed; many fled; others, without
abjuring their religion, abjured their party. The two Reformer-princes,
Henry of Navarre and Henry de Conde, attended mass on the 29th of
September, and, on the 3d of October, wrote to the pope, deploring their
errors and giving hopes of their conversion. Far away from Paris, in the
mountains of the Pyrenees and of Languedoc, in the towns where the
Reformers were numerous and confident, at Sancerre, at Montauban, at
Nimes, at La Rochelle, the spirit of resistance carried the day. An
assembly, meeting at Milhau, drew up a provisional ordinance for the
government of the Reformed church, "until it please God, who has the
hearts of kings in His keeping, to change that of King Charles IX. and
restore the state of France to good order, or to raise up such
neighboring prince as is manifestly marked out, by his virtue and by
distinguishing signs, for to be the liberator of this poor afflicted
people." In November, 1572, the fourth religious war broke out. The
siege of La Rochelle was its only important event. Charles IX. and his
councillors exerted themselves in vain to avoid it. There was everything
to disquiet them in this enterprise: so sudden a revival of the religious
war after the grand blow they had just struck, the passionate energy
manifested by the Protestants in asylum at La Rochelle, and the help they
had been led to hope for from Queen Elizabeth, whom England would never
have forgiven for indifference in this cause. Marshal de Biron, who was
known to favor the Reformers, was appointed governor of La Rochelle; but
he could not succeed in gaining admittance within the walls, even alone
and for the purpose of parleying with the inhabitants. The king heard
that one of the bravest Protestant chiefs, La Noue Ironarm, had retired
to Mons with Prince Louis of Nassau. The Duke of Longueville, his old
enemy, induced him to go to Paris. The king received him with great
favor, gave up to him the property of Teligny, whose sister La Noue had
married, and pressed him to go to La Rochelle and prevail upon the
inhabitants to keep the peace. La Noue refused, saying that he was not
at all fitted for this commission. The king promised that he would ask
nothing of him which could wound his honor. La Noue at last consented,
and repaired, about the end of November, 1572, to a village close by La
Rochelle, whither it was arranged that deputies from the town would come
and confer with him. And they came, in fact, but at their first meeting,
"We are come," they said, "to confer with M. de La Noue, but we do not
see him here." La Noue got angry. "I am astonished," he said, "that you
have so soon forgotten one who has received so many wounds and lost an
arm fighting for you." "Yes, there is a M. de La Noue, who was one of
us, and who bravely defended our cause; but he never flattered us with
vain hopes, he never invited us to conferences to betray us." La Noue
got more fiercely angry. "All I ask of you is, to report to the senate
what I have to say to them." They complied, and came back with
permission for him to enter the town. The people looked at him, as he
passed, with a mixture of distrust and interest. After hearing him, the
senate rejected the pacific overtures made to them by La Noue. "We have
no mind to treat specially and for ourselves alone; our cause is that of
God and of all the churches of France; we will accept nothing but what
shall seem proper to all our brethren. For yourself, we give you your
choice between three propositions: remain in our town as a simple
burgess, and we will give you quarters; if you like better to be our
commandant, all the nobility and the people will gladly have you for
their head, and will fight with confidence under your orders; if neither
of these propositions suits you, you shall be welcome to go aboard one of
our vessels and cross over to England, where you will find many of your
friends." La Noue did not hesitate; he became, under the authority of
the mayor Jacques Henri, the military head of La Rochelle, whither
Charles IX. had sent him to make peace. The king authorized him to
accept this singular position. La Noue conducted himself so honorably in
it, and everybody was so convinced of his good faith as well as bravery,
that for three months he commanded inside La Rochelle, and superintended
the preparations for defence, all the while trying to make the chances of
peace prevail. At the end of February, 1573, he recognized the
impossibility of his double commission, and he went away from La
Rochelle, leaving the place in better condition than that in which he had
found it, without either king or Rochellese considering that they had any
right to complain of him.
Biron first and then the Duke of Anjou in person took the command of the
siege. They brought up, it is said, forty thousand men and sixty pieces
of artillery. The Rochellese, for defensive strength, had but twenty-two
companies of refugees or inhabitants, making in all thirty-one hundred
men. The siege lasted from the 26th of February to the 13th of June,
1573; six assaults were made on the place; in the last, the ladders had
been set at night against the wall of what was called Gospel bastion; the
Duke of Guise, at the head of the assailants, had escaladed the breach,
but there he discovered a new ditch and a new rampart erected inside;
and, confronted by these unforeseen obstacles, the men recoiled and fell
back. La Rochelle was saved. Charles IX. was more and more desirous of
peace; his brother, the Duke of Anjou, had just been elected King of
Poland; Charles IX. was anxious for him to leave France and go to take
possession of his new kingdom. Thanks to these complications, the peace
of La Rochelle was signed on the 6th of July, 1573. Liberty of creed and
worship was recognized in the three towns of La Rochelle, Montauban, and
Nimes. They were not obliged to receive any royal garrison, on condition
of giving hostages to be kept by the king for two years. Liberty of
worship throughout the extent of their jurisdiction continued to be
recognized in the case of lords high-justiciary. Everywhere else the
Reformers had promises of not being persecuted for their creed, under the
obligation of never holding an assembly of more than ten persons at a
time. These were the most favorable conditions they had yet obtained.
Certainly this was not what Charles IX. had calculated upon when he
consented to the massacre of the Protestants. "Provided," he had said,
"that not a single one is left to reproach me." The massacre had been
accomplished almost without any resistance but that offered by certain
governors of provinces or towns, who had refused to take part in it. The
chief leader of French Protestantism, Coligny, had been the first victim.
Far more than that, the Parliament of Paris had accepted the royal lie
which accused Coligny of conspiring for the downfall of the king and the
royal house; a decree, on that very ground, sentenced to condemnation the
memory, the family, and the property of Coligny, with all sorts of
rigorous, we should rather say atrocious, circumstances. And after
having succeeded so well against the Protestants, Charles IX. saw them
recovering again, renewing the struggle with him, and wresting from him
such concessions as he had never yet made to them. More than ever might
he exclaim, "Then I shall never have rest!" The news that came to him
from abroad was not more calculated to satisfy him.
The St. Bartholomew had struck Europe with surprise and horror; not only
amongst the princes and in the countries that were Protestant, in
England, Scotland, and Northern Europe, but in Catholic Germany itself,
there was a very strong feeling of reprobation; the Emperor Maximilian
II. and the Elector Palatine Frederic III., called the Pious, showed it
openly; when the Duke of Anjou, elected King of Poland, went through
Germany to go and take possession of his kingdom, he was received at
Heidelberg with premeditated coolness. When he arrived at the gate of
the castle, not a soul went to meet him; alone he ascended the steps, and
found in the hall a picture representing the massacre of St. Bartholomew;
the elector called his attention to the portraits of the principal
victims, amongst others that of Coligny, and at table he was waited upon
solely by French Protestant refugees. At Rome itself, in the midst of
official satisfaction and public demonstrations of it exhibited by the
pontifical court, the truth came out, and Pope Gregory XIII. was touched
by it when certain of my lords the cardinals who were beside him "asked
wherefore he wept and was sad at so goodly a despatch of those wretched
folk, enemies of God and of his Holiness: 'I weep,' said the pope, 'at
the means the king used, exceeding unlawful and forbidden of God, for to
inflict such punishment; I fear that one will fall upon him, and that he
will not have a very long bout of it (will not live very long). I fear,
too, that amongst so many dead folk there died as many innocent as
guilty.'" [Brantome, t. iv. p. 306. He attributes this language to
Pope Pius V., who died four months before the St. Bartholomew. Gregory
XIII., elected May 15, 1572, was pope when the massacre took place.] Only
the King of Spain, Philip II., a fanatical despot, and pitiless
persecutor, showed complete satisfaction at the event; and he offered
Charles IX. the assistance of his army, if he had need of it, against
what there was remaining of heretics in his kingdom.
Charles IX. had not mind or character sufficiently sound or sufficiently
strong to support, without great perturbation, the effect of so many
violent, repeated, and often contradictory impressions. Catherine de
Medici had brought up her three sons solely with a view of having their
confidence and implicit obedience. "All the actions of the
queen-mother," said the Venetian ambassador Sigismund Cavalli, who had
for a long while resided at her court, "have always been prompted and
regulated by one single passion, the passion of ruling." Her son Charles
had yielded to it without an effort in his youth. "He was accustomed to
say that, until he was five and twenty, he meant to play the fool; that
is to say, to think of nothing but of enjoying his heyday; accordingly he
showed aversion for speaking and treating of business, putting himself
altogether in his mother's hands. Now, he no longer thinks and acts in
the same way. I have been told that, since the late events, he requires
to have the same thing said more than three times over by the queen,
before obeying her." It was not with regard to his mother only that
Charles had changed. "His looks," says Cavalli, "have become melancholy
and sombre; in his conversations and audiences he does not look the
speaker in the face; he droops his head, closes his eyes, opens them all
at once, and, as if he found the movement painful, closes them again with
no less suddenness. It is feared that the demon of vengeance has
possessed him; he used to be merely severe; it is feared that he is
becoming cruel. He is temperate in his diet; drinks nothing but water.
To tire himself at any price, is his object. He remains on horseback for
twelve or fourteen consecutive hours; and so he goes hunting and coursing
through the woods the same animal, the stag, for two or three days, never
stopping but to eat, and never resting but for an instant during the
night." He was passionately fond of all bodily exercises, the practice
of arms, and the game of tennis. "He had a forge set up for himself,"
says Brantome, "and I have seen him forging cannon, and horseshoes, and
other things as stoutly as the most robust farriers and forgemen." He,
at the same time, showed a keen and intelligent interest in intellectual
works and pleasures. He often had a meeting, in the evening, of poets,
men of letters, and artists—Ronsard, Amadis Jamin, Jodelle, Daurat,
Baif; in 1570 he gave them letters patent for the establishment of an
Academy of poetry and music, the first literary society founded in France
by a king; but it disappeared amidst the civil wars. Charles IX.
himself sang in the choir, and he composed a few hunting-airs. Ronsard
was a favorite, almost a friend, with him; he used to take him with him
on his trips, and give him quarters in his palace, and there was many an
interchange of verse between them, in which Ronsard did not always have
the advantage. Charles gave a literary outlet to his passion for
hunting; he wrote a little treatise entitled La Chasse royale, which was
not published until 1625, and of which M. Henry Chevreul brought out, in
1857, a charming and very correct edition. Charles IX. dedicated it to
his lieutenant of the hunt, Mesnil, in terms of such modest and
affectionate simplicity that they deserve to be kept in remembrance.
"Mesnil," said the king, "I should feel myself far too ungrateful, and
expect to be chidden for presumption, if, in this little treatise that I
am minded to make upon stag hunting, I did not, before any one begins to
read it, avow and confess that I learnt from you what little I know.
. . . I beg you, also, Mesnil, to be pleased to correct and erase what
there is wrong in the said treatise, the which, if peradventure it is so
done that there is nothing more required than to re-word and alter, the
credit will be firstly yours for having so well taught me, and then mine
for having so well remembered. Well, then, having been taught by so good
a master, I will be bold enough to essay it, begging you to accept it as
heartily as I present it and dedicate it to you."
These details and this quotation are allowable in order to shed full
light upon the private and incoherent character of this king, who bears
the responsibility of one of the most tragic events in French history.
In the spring of 1574, at the age of twenty-three years and eleven
months, and after a reign of eleven years and six months, Charles IX.
was attacked by an inflammatory malady, which brought on violent
hemorrhage; he was revisited, in his troubled sleep, by the same bloody
visions about which, a few days after the St. Bartholomew, he had spoken
to Ambrose Pare. He no longer retained in his room anybody but two of
his servants and his nurse, "of whom he was very fond, although she was a
Huguenot," says the contemporary chronicler Peter de l'Estoile. "When
she had lain down upon a chest, and was just beginning to doze, hearing
the king moaning, weeping, and sighing, she went full gently up to the
bed. 'Ah, nurse, nurse,' said the king, 'what bloodshed and what
murders! Ah! what evil counsel have I followed! O, my God! forgive me
them and have mercy upon me, if it may please Thee! I know not what hath
come to me, so bewildered and agitated do they make me. What will be the
end of it all? What shall I do? I am lost; I see it well.' Then said
the nurse to him, 'Sir, the murders be on the heads of those who made you
do them! Of yourself, sir, you never could; and since you are not
consenting thereto, and are sorry therefor, believe that God will not put
them down to your account, and will hide them with the cloak of justice
of His Son, to whom alone you must have recourse. But for God's sake,
let your Majesty cease weeping!' And thereupon, having been to fetch him
a pocket-handkerchief, because his own was soaked with tears, after that
the king had taken it from her hand, he signed to her to go away and
leave him to his rest."
On Sunday, May 30, 1574, Whitsunday, about three in the afternoon,
Charles IX. expired, after having signed an ordinance conferring the
regency upon his mother Catherine, "who accepted it," was the expression
in the letters patent, "at the request of the Duke of Alencon, the King
of Navarre, and other princes and peers of France." According to
D'Aubigne, Charles used often to say of his brother Henry, that, "when he
had a kingdom on his hands, the administration would find him out, and
that he would disappoint those who had hopes of him." The last words he
said were, "that he was glad not to have left any young child to succeed
him, very well knowing that France needs a man, and that, with a child,
the king and the reign are unhappy."