History of the Rise of the Huguenots

Pope Pius the Fifth alarmed.

The Cardinal of Alessandria sent to Paris.

The king's assurances.

It cannot be supposed that such a leaning could be manifested toward the Huguenot party, and such amity concluded with the Protestant kingdom of England, without arousing grave solicitude on the part of the Pope and other Roman Catholic sovereigns of Europe. Pius the Fifth determined, if possible, to deter Charles from permitting the hateful marriage between his sister and the heretical Prince of Navarre. He therefore promptly despatched his nephew, the Cardinal of Alessandria,874 first to Sebastian of Portugal, whom he found no great difficulty in persuading again to entertain the project of a marriage with Margaret of Valois, and thence, with the utmost haste, to the court of Charles the Ninth.875 The legate, when admitted to an audience, unfolded at great length the grievances of the pontiff – the mission of a heretic, formerly a bishop, as envoy to Constantinople, the rumored opposition of the king to the Holy League against the Turk, but especially the contemplated nuptials of a daughter of France with the son of Jeanne d'Albret. Charles replied to these charges in the most politic manner. He prayed that the earth might open and swallow him up, rather than that he should stand in the way of so illustrious and holy league as that against the infidel. As to his zeal for the Christian faith, he demonstrated it – albeit some might object that the fraternal affection which was reported to subsist between the parties hardly rendered this argument convincing – by the fact of his having exposed, in its defence, his dearest brother, the Duke of Anjou, to all the perils of war. By civil war the resources of his kingdom had been so weakened that they barely sufficed for its protection. He justified the Navarrese marriage by alleging the remarkable traits which made Henry superior to any other prince of the Bourbon family, and by the great benefit which religion would gain from his conversion. In short, Charles was profuse in protestations of his sincere determination to maintain the Catholic faith; and, drawing a valuable diamond ring from his finger, he presented it to the legate as a pledge, he said, of his unalterable fidelity to the Holy See, and a token that he would more than redeem his promises. The cardinal legate, however, declined to receive the gift, saying that he was amply satisfied with the plighted word of so great a king, a security more firm than any other pledge that could be given to him.876 Such seem to have been the assurances given by Charles on this celebrated occasion, vague and indefinite, but calculated to allay to a certain extent the anxiety of the head of the papal church.877 There is good reason to believe that the king's intention of fulfilling them, not to say his plan for doing so, was equally undefined; although, so far as his own faith was concerned, he had no thought of abandoning the church of his fathers. The expressions by means of which Charles is made to point with unmistakable clearness to a contemplated massacre,878 of which, however the case may stand with respect to his mother, it is all but certain that he had at this time no idea, can only be regarded as fabulous additions of which the earliest disseminators of the story were altogether ignorant. The fact that the cardinal legate's rejection of the ring was publicly known879 seems to be a sufficient proof that it was offered simply as a pledge of the king's general fidelity to the Holy See, not of his intention to violate his edict and murder his Protestant subjects. The government made the attempt in like manner to quiet the people, whom even the smallest amount of concession and favor to the Huguenots rendered suspicious; and the words uttered for this purpose were often so flattering to the Roman Catholics, that, in the light of subsequent events, they seem to have a reference to acts of treachery to which they were not intended to apply.

Jeanne d'Albret becomes more favorable to her son's marriage.

The doubt propounded by Jeanne d'Albret to the reformed ministers, respecting the lawfulness of a mixed marriage, having been satisfactorily answered, and the devout queen being convinced that the union of Henry and Margaret would rather tend to advance the cause to which she subordinated all her personal interests, than retard it by casting reproach upon it, the project was more warmly entertained on both sides. Yet the subject was not without serious difficulty. Of this the religious question was the great cause. To the English ambassadors, Walsingham and Smith, Jeanne declared (on the fourth of March, 1572) in her own forcible language, "that now she had the wolf by the ears, for that, in concluding or not concluding the marriage, she saw danger every way; and that no matter (though she had dealt in matters of consequence) did so much trouble her as this, for that she could not tell how to resolve." She could neither bring herself to consent that her son with his bride should reside at the royal court without any exercise of his own religion – a course which would not only tend to make him an atheist, but cut off all hope of the conversion of his wife – nor that Margaret of Valois should be guaranteed the permission to have mass celebrated whenever she came into Jeanne's own domains in Béarn, a district which the queen "had cleansed of all idolatry." For Margaret would by her example undo much of that which had been so assiduously labored for, and the Roman Catholics who had remained would become "more unwilling to hear the Gospel, they having a staff to lean to."880

Her solicitude.

It was this uncertainty about Margaret's course, and the consequent gain or loss to the Protestant faith, that rendered it almost impossible for Jeanne d'Albret to master her anxiety. "In view," she wrote to her son, "of Margaret's judgment and the credit she enjoys with the queen her mother and the king and her brothers, if she embrace 'the religion,' I can say that we are the most happy people in the world, and not only our house but all the kingdom of France will share in this happiness… If she remain obstinate in her religion, being devoted to it, as she is said to be, it cannot be but that this marriage will prove the ruin, first, of our friends and our lands, and such a support to the papists that, with the good-will the queen mother bears us, we shall be ruined with the churches of France." It would almost seem that a prophetic glimpse of the future had been accorded to the Queen of Navarre. "My son, if ever you prayed God, do so now, I beg you, as I pray without ceasing, that He may assist me in this negotiation, and that this marriage may not be made in His anger for our punishment, but in His mercy for His own glory and our quiet."881

But there were other grounds for solicitude. Catharine de' Medici was the same deceitful woman she had always been. She would not allow Jeanne d'Albret to see either Charles or Margaret, save in her presence. She misrepresented the queen's words, and, when called to an account, denied the report with the greatest effrontery. She destroyed all the hopes Jeanne had entertained of frank discussion.

The Queen of Navarre is treated with tantalizing insincerity.

"You have great reason to pity me," the Queen of Navarre wrote to her faithful subject in Béarn, "for never was I so disdainfully treated at court as I now am… Everything that had been announced to me is changed. They wish to destroy all the hopes with which they brought me."882 Catharine showed no shame when detected in open falsehood. She told Jeanne d'Albret that her son's governor had given her reason to expect that Henry would consent to be married by proxy according to the Romish ceremonial. But when she was hard pressed and saw that Jeanne did not believe her, she coolly rejoined: "Well, at any rate, he told me something." "I am quite sure of it, madam, but it was something that did not approach that!" "Thereupon," writes Jeanne in despair, "she burst out laughing; for, observe, she never speaks to me without trifling."883

She is shocked at the morals of the court.

But it was particularly the abominable immorality of the royal court that alarmed the Queen of Navarre for the safety of her only son, should he be called to sojourn there. The lady Margaret, she wrote – and her words deserve the more notice on account of the infamy into which the life as yet apparently so guileless was to lead – "is handsome, modest, and graceful; but nurtured in the most wicked and corrupt society that ever was. I have not seen a person who does not show the effects of it. Your cousin, the marquise, is so changed in consequence of it, that there is no appearance of religion, save that she does not go to mass; for, as for her mode of life, excepting idolatry, she acts like the papists, and my sister the princess still worse… I would not for the world that you were here to live. It is on this account that I want you to marry, and your wife and you to come out of this corruption; for although I believed it to be very great, I find it still greater. Here it is not the men that solicit the women, but the women the men. Were you here, you would never escape but by a remarkable exercise of God's mercy… I abide by my first opinion, that you must return to Béarn. My son, you can but have judged from my former letters, that they only try to separate you from God and from me; you will come to the same conclusion from this last, as well as form some idea respecting the anxiety I am in on your account. I beg you to pray earnestly to God; for you have great need of His help at all times, and above all at this time. I pray to Him that you may obtain it, that He may give you, my son, all your desires."884

Death of Jeanne d'Albret, June 9, 1572.

Such were the anxieties of the Queen of Navarre in behalf of a son whom she had carefully reared, hoping to see in him a pillar of the Protestant faith. She was to be spared the sight both of those scenes in his life which might have flushed her cheek with pride, and of other scenes which would have caused her to blush with shame. At length the last difficulties in the way of Henry of Navarre's marriage, so far as the court and the queen were concerned, were removed.885 Charles and Catharine no longer insisted that Margaret should be allowed the mass when in Béarn; while Jeanne reluctantly abandoned her objections to the celebration of the marriage ceremony in the city of Paris. Accordingly, about the middle of May the Queen of Navarre left Blois and came to the capital for the purpose of devoting her attention to the final arrangements for the wedding. She had not, however, been long in Paris before she fell sick of a violent fever, to which it became evident that she must succumb. We are told by a writer who regards this as a manifest provocation of Heaven, that one of her last acts before her sudden illness had been a visit to the Louvre to petition the king that, on the approaching festival of Corpus Christi (Fête-Dieu), the "idol," as she styled the wafer, might not be borne in solemn procession past the house in which she lodged; and that the king had granted her request.886 During the short interval before her death she exhibited the same devotion as previously to the purer Christianity she had embraced, mingled with affectionate solicitude for her son and daughter, so soon to be left orphans. Her constancy and fortitude proved her worthy of all the eulogies that were lavished upon her.887 On Monday, the ninth of June, she died, sincerely mourned by the Huguenots, who felt that in her they had lost one of their most able and efficient supports, the weakness of whose sex had not made her inferior to the most active and resolute man of the party. Even Catharine de' Medici, who had hated her with all her cowardly heart, made some show of admiring her virtues, now that she was no longer formidable and her straightforward policy had ceased to thwart the underhanded and shifting diplomacy in which the queen mother delighted. Yet the report gained currency that Jeanne had been poisoned at Catharine's instigation. She had, it was said, bought gloves of Monsieur René, the queen mother's perfumer888– a man who boasted of his acquaintance with the Italian art of poisoning – and had almost instantly felt the effects of some subtle powder with which they were impregnated. To contradict this and other sinister stories, the king ordered an examination of her remains to be made; but no corroborative evidence was discovered. It is true that the physicians are said to have avoided, ostensibly through motives of humanity, any dissection of the brain, where alone the evidence could have been found.889 Be this as it may, the charge of poisoning is met so uniformly in the literature of the sixteenth century, on occasion of every sudden death, that the most credulous reader becomes sceptical as to its truth, and prefers to indulge the hope that perhaps the age may not have been quite so bad as it was represented by contemporaries.

The Prince of Béarn now became King of Navarre; and, as the court went into mourning for the deceased queen, his nuptials with Margaret of Valois were deferred until the month of August.

Coligny and the boy king.

Admiral Coligny, instead of returning to La Rochelle after his friendly reception at the court at Blois, had gone to Châtillon, where his ruined country-seat and devastated plantations had great need of his presence.890 Here he was soon afterward joined by his wife, travelling from La Rochelle with a special safe-conduct from the king, the preamble of which declared Charles's will and intention to retain Coligny near his own person, "in order to make use of him in his most grave and important affairs, as a worthy minister, whose virtue is sufficiently known and tried."891 Coligny was not left long in his rural retirement. Charles expressed, and probably felt, profound disgust with his former advisers, and knew not whom to trust. On one occasion, about this time, he held a conversation with Téligny respecting the Flemish war. Téligny had just entreated his Majesty not to mention to the queen mother the details into which he entered – a promise which Charles readily gave, and swore with his ordinary profanity to observe. And then the poor young king, with a desperation which must enlist our sympathy in his behalf, undertook to explain to Coligny's son-in-law his own solitude in the midst of a crowded court. There was no one, he said, upon whom he could rely for sound counsel, or for the execution of his plans. Tavannes was prudent, indeed; but, having been Anjou's lieutenant, and almost the author of his victories, would oppose a war that threatened to obscure his laurels. Vieilleville was wedded to his cups. Cossé was avaricious, and would sell all his friends for ten crowns. Montmorency alone was good and trustworthy, but so given to the pleasures of the chase that he would be sure to be absent at the very moment his help was indispensable.892 It is not strange, under these circumstances, that Charles should have turned with sincere respect, and almost with a kind of affection, to that stern old Huguenot warrior, upright, honorable, pious, a master of the art of war, never more to be dreaded than after the reverses which he accepted as lessons from a Father's hands.

As for Coligny himself, his task was not one of his own seeking. But he pitied from his heart the boy-king – still more boyish in character than in years – as he pitied and loved France. Above all, he was unwilling to omit anything that might be vitally important for the progress of the Gospel in his native land and abroad. His eyes were not blind to his danger. When, at the king's request, he came to Paris, he received letters of remonstrance for his imprudence, from all parts of France. He was reminded that other monarchs before Charles had broken their pledges. Huss had been burned at Constance notwithstanding the emperor's safe conduct, and the maxim that no faith need be kept with heretics had obtained a mournful currency.893 To these warnings Admiral Coligny replied at one moment with some annoyance, indignant that his young sovereign should be so suspected; at another, with more calmness, magnanimously dismissing all solicitude for himself in comparison with the great ends he had in view. When he was urged to consider that other Huguenots, less hated by the papists than he was, had been treacherously assassinated – as was the general opinion then – Andelot, Cardinal Châtillon, and lately the Queen of Navarre – his reply was still the same: "I am well aware that it is against me principally that the enmity is directed. And yet how great a misfortune will it be for France, if, for the sake of my individual preservation, she must be kept in perpetual alarm and be plunged on every occasion into new troubles! Or, what benefit will it be to me to live thus in continual distrust of the king? If my prince wishes to slay me, he can accomplish his will in any part of the realm. As a royal officer, I cannot in honor refuse to comply with the summons of the king, meantime committing myself to the providence of Him who holds in his hand the hearts of kings and princes, and has numbered my years – nay, the very hairs of my head. If I succeed in going in arms to the Low Countries, I hope that I may do signal service, and change hatred into good-will. But, if I fall there, at least the enmity against me will cease, and perhaps men will live in peace, without its being needful to set a whole world in commotion for the protection of the life of a single man."894

The dispensation delayed.

The king's earnestness.

The juncture was critical, although the future still looked auspicious. Charles was resolved that the marriage of his sister should go forward, and seemed almost as resolute, when he had thus secured peace at home between Papist and Huguenot, to embark in a war against Spain – the natural enemy of French repose and greatness. Gregory the Thirteenth – for Pius the Fifth had died on the first of May, 1572, although his maxims and his counsels were unhappily still alive, and endowed with a mischievous activity – refused to grant the dispensation for the marriage except on impossible conditions.895 But Charles was too impatient to await his caprice. "My dear aunt," he once said to the Queen of Navarre, a short time before her death, "I honor you more than the Pope, and I love my sister more than I fear him. I am not indeed a Huguenot, but neither am I a blockhead; and if the Pope play the fool too much, I will myself take Margot," his common nickname for his sister, "by the hand, and give her away in marriage in full prêche."896

Charles was apparently equally in earnest in his intention to maintain his edict for the advantage of the Huguenots. Accordingly he published a new declaration to this effect, and sent it to his governors, accompanied with a letter expressive of his great gratification that the spirit of distrust was everywhere giving place to confidence, a proof of which was to be found in the recent restitution of the four cities of La Rochelle, Montauban, La Charité, and Cognac, by those in whose hands they were intrusted by the edict of St. Germain.897 And Charles's correspondence shows still further that the projects urged by Coligny, Louis of Nassau, and other prominent patriots, had made a deep impression upon his imagination, now that for the first time the prospect of a truly noble campaign opened before him. In carrying out the extensive plan against the Spanish king, it was indispensable – so thought the wisest politicians of the time – to secure the co-operation of the Turk. The extent of Philip's dominions in the Old and the New World, the prestige of his successes, the enormous treasure he was said to derive yearly from his colonial establishments in the Indies, all gave him a reputation for power which a more critical examination would have dissipated; but the time for this had not yet arrived. Consequently Charles had sent his ambassador to Constantinople, intending through him to conclude an alliance offensive and defensive with the Moslems. And his declarations to the half-Protestant prelate were explicit enough: "All my humors conspire to make me oppose the greatness of the Spaniards, and I am deliberating how I may therein conduct myself the most skilfully that I can."898 "I have concluded a league with the Queen of England – a circumstance which, with the understanding I have with the Princes of Germany, puts the Spaniards in a wonderful jealousy."899 Not only so, but he instructs the ambassador to inform the Grand Seignior that he has a large number of vessels ready, with twelve or fifteen thousand troops about to embark, ostensibly to protect his own harbors, "but in reality intended to keep the Catholic king uneasy, and to give boldness to those Beggars of the Netherlands to bestir themselves and form such enterprises as they already have done."900 If these assurances had been addressed to a Protestant prince, it would readily be comprehended that they might have had for their object to lull his co-religionists into a fatal security. But, as they were intended only for a Mohammedan ruler, I can see no room for the suspicion that Charles was at this time animated by anything else than an unfeigned desire to realize the plan of Coligny, of a confederacy that should shatter the much-vaunted empire of Philip the Second.

Mons and Valenciennes captured.

An event now occurred which for a time raised high the hopes of the French Huguenots. This was the capture of the important cities of Mons and Valenciennes. To Count Louis of Nassau the credit of this bold and successful stroke was due. With the secret connivance of Charles, he had recruited in France a body of five hundred horsemen and a thousand foot soldiers, among whom, as was natural, the Huguenot element predominated. With these he now set foot again in the Netherlands. The success that first attended his enterprise was owing, however, rather to a well executed trick than to any practical exhibition of generalship; for the gates of Mons were opened from within by a party that had entered on the previous day in the disguise of wine-merchants.901 Nevertheless the capture of Mons, the capital of the province of Hainault (on Saturday, the twenty-fourth of May), was so brilliant an exploit, coming as it did close upon the heels of other reverses of the Duke of Alva, that the French Huguenots and all who sympathized with them may be pardoned for having indulged even in somewhat extravagant demonstrations of joy. They seem to have believed that it was pretty nearly over with that hated instrument of Spanish tyranny. They fancied that, with his five hundred horse, Louis might penetrate the country by a rapid movement, and either take Alva prisoner, or, if the duke should retire to Antwerp, raise the whole country in revolt.902

Catharine's indecision.

Queen Elizabeth inspires no confidence.

For the next two months the Huguenot leaders were indefatigable in their efforts to persuade Charles to take open and decided ground against Spain; but they were met by Anjou and the party in his interest with arguments drawn from the difficulty or injustice of the undertaking, and by the suggestion that Elizabeth, as was her wont, would be likely to withdraw so soon as she saw France once engaged in war with her powerful neighbor, and to use Charles's embarrassments as a means of securing private advantages. In point of fact, Charles was personally unwilling to commit himself until sure of England's support. Meanwhile, Catharine, from whose Argus-eyed inspection nothing that was debated in the royal presence, openly or secretly, ever escaped notice, awaited with her accustomed irresolution Elizabeth's decision, before herself deciding whether to throw her influence into the scale with Coligny (of whose growing favor with her son she had begun to entertain some suspicion), or with Anjou and the Spaniards. But Elizabeth was as ever a riddle, not only to her allies, but even to her most confidential advisers. Certainly she was no friend to Philip and Alva; yet she would not abruptly enter into war against them. She could not help seeing that the interests of her person and of her kingdom, to say nothing of her Protestant faith, were bound up in the success of the Prince of Orange, who was about to cross the Rhine with twenty-five thousand Germans for the relief of Mons, now invested by Alva. For the duke wisely regarded the recapture of this place as the first step in extricating himself from his present embarrassments. In such a strife as that upon which Elizabeth must before long enter, whether with or without her consent, the cordial alliance of France would be valuable beyond computation. And yet, with a fatal perversity, she dallied with the proposal of marriage. One day she would not hear of Alençon, alleging that his age and personal blemishes placed the matter out of all consideration. On another she gave hopes, and agreed to take a month's consideration.903 Thus she tantalized her suitor. Thus she convinced the cunning Italian woman who, although she made no present show of holding the reins of power in France, was ready at any moment to resume them, that there was no reliance to be placed on England's promise of support against Philip.904