History of the Rise of the Huguenots

The massacre continues.

The carnival of blood, which had been so successfully ushered in on that ill-starred Sunday of August, was maintained on the succeeding days with little abatement of its frenzied excitement. Paris soon resembled a vast charnel-house. The dead or dying lay in the open streets and squares, they blocked the doors and carriage-ways, they were heaped in the courtyards. When the utmost that impotent passion could do to these lifeless remains was accomplished, the Seine became the receptacle. Besides those Huguenots whom their murderers dragged to the bridges or wharves to despatch by drowning, both by day and by night wagons laden with the corpses of men and women, and even of young children, were driven down to the river and emptied of their human freight. But the current of the crooked Seine refused to carry away from the capital all these evidences of guilt. The shores of its first curve, from Paris to the bridge of St. Cloud, were covered with putrefying remains, which the municipality were compelled to inter, through fear of their generating a pestilence. And so we read, in the registers of the Hôtel-de-Ville, of a payment of fifteen livres tournois, on the ninth of September, for the burial of the dead bodies found near the Convent of Chaillot, and of a second payment of twenty livres on the twenty-third, for the burial of eleven hundred more, near Chaillot, Auteuil, and St. Cloud.1044

Not a popular movement.

Plunder of the rich.

The massacre was not in its origin a popular outbreak. It sprang from the ambition and vindictive passions of the queen mother, and others, whom the ministers of a corrupt religion had long accustomed to the idea that the extermination of heretics is not a sin, but the highest type of piety. The people were called in only as assistants. Probably the first intention was only to hold the municipal forces in readiness to overcome any resistance which the Protestants might offer. But the massacre succeeded beyond the most sanguine expectations of the conspirators. Very few of the victims defended themselves or their property; scarcely one Roman Catholic was slain. And now the populace, having had a taste of blood, could no longer be restrained. Whether the plunder of the Protestants entered into the original calculations of Catharine and her advisers, may perhaps be doubted. But there is no question as to the turn which the affair soon took in the minds of those engaged in it. Pillage was not always countenanced by church and state: as a violation of the second table of the Law, it was, under ordinary circumstances, atoned for by penance and ecclesiastical censures; as a breach of the royal edicts, it was likely to be punished with hanging or still more painful modes of execution. Consequently, when by furnishing arms the civil power authorized the most severe measures against those whom it accused of foul conspiracy against the king, and when the professed minister of Christ and His gospel of peace blessed the work of exterminating God's enemies and the king's, there was no lack of men willing to profit by the rare and unexpected opportunity. Nor did the courtiers disdain dishonest gain. The Duke of Anjou was known to have enriched himself by the plunder of the shop of Baduère, the king's jeweller.1045 Noblemen, besides robbing their victims of money, extorted from them, in return for a promise to spare their lives, deeds of valuable lands, or papers resigning in their favor high offices in the government. It was frequently the case that, after giving such presents, the Huguenot was put out of the way at once, in order to prevent him from ever retracting. Thus, Martial de Loménie, a secretary of the king, was murdered in prison, after having resigned his office in favor of Marshal Retz, and sold to him his estate of Versailles, at such a price as the latter chose to name, in the vain hope that this would secure him liberty and life.1046 The extent to which robbery was carried on the occasion of the massacre is reluctantly conceded in the pamphlet, which was published immediately after, as an apology of the court for the hideous crime; and an attempt is made to justify it, which is worthy of the source from which it drew its inspiration: "Now this good-will of the people to sustain and defend its prince, to espouse his quarrel, and to hate those who are not of his religion, is very praiseworthy; and if in this execution [the massacre] some pillaging has taken place, we must excuse the fury of a people impelled by a worthy zeal – a zeal hard to be restrained and bridled when once excited."1047

Orders issued to lay down arms.

Little heed given to them.

But, despite panegyrists, the massacre had not been in progress many hours before the very magistrates of the city appear to have become apprehensive lest the movement might assume dangerous dimensions. It was only about eleven o'clock on Sunday morning, as the registers of the Hôtel de Ville inform us, when Charles was waited upon by the prévôt des marchands and the échevins. They came to inform him that "a number of persons, partly belonging to the suite of his Majesty, partly to that of the princes, princesses, and lords of the court – gentlemen, archers of the king's body-guard, soldiers of his suite, as well as all sorts of people mingled with them and under their authority – were plundering and pillaging many houses and killing many persons in the streets." This was certainly no news to Charles; but as he desired, now that the massacre had begun, not to enrich the Roman Catholic inhabitants of Paris, but to fill his own coffers, he deemed it best to prohibit any further action on their part, and to leave the rest of the work to his own commissioned servants. Accordingly the municipal authorities were directed to ride through the city with all the troops at their disposal, and to see to it, both by day and night, that the bloodshed and robbery should cease. "Sir William Guerrier" – thus runs one of the commissions to the "quarteniers" issued from the central bureau of the city, in pursuance of these directions – "give commandment to all burgesses and inhabitants of your quarter, who to-day have taken up arms according to the king's order, to lay them down, and to retire and remain quietly in their houses, … according to the king's command conveyed to us by my Lord of Nevers." And this document is accompanied with another, of the same date, applying to soldiers of the guard or others, who should pillage or maltreat Protestants, and threatening them with punishment. Such a proclamation, it is well known, was made by trumpet at about five o'clock that afternoon. The registers tell us that the instructions were so well carried out that all disorder "was at once appeased and ceased." They contain, however, a distinct refutation of this falsehood, in the frequent repetition of similar orders and the variety of forms in which the same statements are made on subsequent days. Again and again does the king direct that soldiers be placed at the head of every street to prevent robbery and murder;1048 the guards either were never posted, or, as is more likely, became foremost in the work which they were sent to repress. Indeed, the instructions given on Monday to visit all the houses in the city and its suburbs where there were any Protestants, and obtain their names and surnames,1049 afforded an opportunity which was not permitted to slip by unimproved, for the exaction of heavy bribes, as well as for more open plunder and violence. So notorious was it, nearly a week after the butchery began, that the massacre had only abated in intensity, that, on the thirtieth of August, measures were adopted to prevent any wrong from being done to foreign merchants sojourning in Paris, and especially to the German, English, and Flemish students of the university.1050

Miracle of the "Cimetière des Innocents."

The smile of Heaven, it was said by the Roman Catholic clergy, rested upon the effort to extirpate heresy in France. They convinced the people of the truth of their assertion by pointing to an unusual phenomenon which they declared to be evidently miraculous. In the Cimetière des Innocents and before a small chapel of the Virgin Mary, there grew a white hawthorn, which, according to some accounts, had for several years been to all appearance dead. Great then was the surprise of those who, on the eventful St. Bartholomew's Day, beheld the tree covered with a great profusion of blossoms as fragrant as those flowers which the hawthorn usually puts forth in May. It was true that no good reason could be assigned why the wonder might not with greater propriety be explained, as the Protestants afterward suggested, rather as a mark of Heaven's sympathy with oppressed innocence. But no doubts entered the minds of the Parisian ecclesiastics. They spread abroad the fame of the prodigy. They rang the church-bells in token of joy, and invited the blood-stained populace to witness the sight, and gain new courage in their murderous work. It may well be doubted whether either the hawthorn or the virgin of the neighboring chapel wrought the wonderful cures recorded by the curate of Mériot.1051 But certainly the reported intervention of Heaven setting its seal upon treacherous assassination prolonged the slaughter of Huguenots. "It seemed," says Claude Haton, reflecting the popular belief, "that God, by this miracle, approved and accepted as well-pleasing to Him the Catholic uprising and the death of His great enemy the admiral and his followers, who for twelve years had been audaciously rending His seamless coat, which is His true Church and His Bride."1052 And so, what with the encouragement afforded by the wonderful thorn-tree of the Cimetière des Innocents – what with the continuous fair weather, which was interpreted after the same manner, the task of extirpating the heretical Huguenots was prosecuted with a perseverance that never flagged. It is true that the greater part of the work was done in the first three or four days; but it was not terminated for several weeks, and many a Huguenot, coming out of his place of concealment with the hope that time might have caused the passions of his enemies to become less violent, was murdered in cold blood by those who coveted his property. Several thousand persons were butchered in Paris alone during the first few days, besides these later victims; precisely how many, it is useless and perhaps impossible to fix with certainty.1053

The king's first letter to Mandelot.

Meantime it became necessary to explain to the world the extraordinary tragedy which had been enacted on so conspicuous a stage. Each of the different parties to the nefarious compact, with that easy faith which characterizes great criminals, had expected to satisfy its own resentment at the sole expense of the honor and reputation of the others. The king and his mother, while securing the death of Coligny and a few other personal enemies, were not unwilling to have the world believe that the entire occurrence had been an outburst of the old animosity of the Guises against the Châtillons. In fact, this was distinctly stated in the circular letter of Charles IX., despatched on the very Sunday on which the massacre began, to the governors of the principal cities of the realm. "Monsieur de Mandelot" – so runs one of these extraordinary epistles – "you have learned what I wrote to you, the day before yesterday, respecting the wounding of the admiral, and how that I was about to do my utmost in the investigation of the case and the punishment of the guilty, wherein nothing has been forgotten. Since then it has happened that the members of the house of Guise, and the other lords and gentlemen who are their adherents, and who have no small influence in this city, as everybody knows, having received certain information that the friends of the admiral intended to avenge this wound upon them – since they suspected them of being its cause and occasion – became so much excited that, between the one party and the other, there arose a great and lamentable commotion. The body of guards which had been posted around the admiral's house was overpowered, and he was killed with some other gentlemen, as there have also been others massacred in various parts of this city. This was done so furiously that it was impossible to apply such a remedy as could have been desired; for I had as much as I could do in employing my guards and other forces to retain my superiority in this castle of the Louvre,1054 so as afterward to take measures for allaying the commotion throughout the city. At the present hour it has, thank God, subsided! It occurred through the private quarrel which has long existed between these two houses. Always foreseeing that some bad consequences would result from it, I have heretofore done all that I could to appease it, as every one knows. There is in this nothing leading to the rupture of the Edict of Pacification, which, on the contrary, I intend to be maintained as much as ever."1055

In view of the undeniable fact that Charles affixed his signature to this letter in the midst of a horrible massacre for which he himself had given the signal, which he still directed, and concerning whose progress he received hourly bulletins from the municipal authorities, it must be admitted that the king showed himself no novice in the ignoble art of shameless misrepresentation.

Guise throws the responsibility on the king.

Guise, on his part, was not less solicitous to relieve himself of responsibility, and to lay the burden upon the king's shoulders. We have seen that, at the very moment of Coligny's assassination, he began to repeat the words: "It is the king's pleasure; it is his express command!" as his warrant for the crime. As the massacre grew in extent he and his associates became more reluctant to be held accountable for it,1056 and at last they forced Charles to acknowledge himself its sole author. The queen mother and Anjou, it is said, were mainly instrumental in leading the monarch to take this unexpected step. His original intention had been to compel the Guises to leave the capital immediately after the death of Coligny – a movement which would have given color to the theory of their guilt. But it was not difficult for Catharine and Henry to convince him that by so doing he would only render more irreconcilable the enmity between the Guises and the Montmorencies, who plainly exhibited their intention to exact vengeance for the death of their illustrious kinsman, the admiral. In short, he would purchase brief respite from trouble at the price of a fresh civil war, more cruel than any which had preceded.1057

The king accepts it.

The "Lit de Justice."

It was on Tuesday morning, the twenty-sixth of August, that the king formally and publicly assumed the weighty responsibility. After hearing a solemn mass, to render thanks to Almighty God for his happy deliverance from his enemies, Charles, accompanied by his brothers, the Dukes of Anjou and Alençon, by the King of Navarre, and by a numerous body of his principal lords, proceeded to the parliament house, and there, in the presence of all the chambers, held his "Lit de Justice."1058 He opened this extraordinary meeting by an address, in which he dilated upon the intolerable insults he had, from his very childhood, experienced at the hands of Coligny, and many other culprits, who had made religion a pretext for rebellion. His attempts to secure peace by large concessions had emboldened Coligny so far that he had at last ventured to conspire to kill him, his mother, and his brothers, and even the King of Navarre, although a Huguenot like himself; intending to place the Prince of Condé upon the throne, and subsequently to put him also out of the way, and appropriate the regal authority after the destruction of the entire royal family. In order to ward off so horrible a blow, he had, he said, been compelled to resort to extreme measures of rigor. He desired all men to know that the steps taken on the preceding Sunday for the punishment of the guilty had been in accordance with his orders. He is even reported to have gone farther, and to have invoked the aid of parliament in condemning the memory and confiscating the property of those against whom he had alleged such abominable crimes.1059

Servile reply of parliament.

Christopher de Thou.

To this allocution the parliament replied with all servility. Christopher de Thou, the first president, lauded the prudence of a monarch who had known how to bear patiently repeated insults, and at last to crush a conspiracy so dangerous to the quiet of the realm. And he quoted with approval the infamous apothegm of Louis the Eleventh: "Qui nescit dissimulare, nescit regnare." The solitary suggestion that breathed any manly spirit was that of Pibrac, the "avocat-général," to the effect that orders should be published to put an end to the work of murder and robbery – a request which Charles readily granted.1060 Never had the supreme tribunal of justice abased itself more ignobly than when it listened so complaisantly to the king, and approved without qualification an organized massacre perpetrated unblushingly under its very eyes. As for the distinguished man who lent himself to be the mouthpiece of adulation worse than slavish, we are less inclined to commiserate the difficulty of his position than to pity the ingenuous historian who strives to touch leniently upon a fault of his father which he can neither conceal nor palliate.1061 We may credit his assertion that his father remonstrated with the king in private with respect to that for which he had praised him in public, and that Christopher de Thou marked his detestation of that ill-starred day by applying to it the lines of Statius:

Excidat illa dies ævo, ne postera credant

Sæcula: nos certe taceamus, et obruta multa

Nocte tegi propriæ patiamur crimina gentis.

But we cannot forget that this was not the first time that Christopher de Thou "accommodated" his words or his actions to the supposed "exigencies of the times." He was a member of that commission that sentenced Louis of Condé to death, in deference to the desires of another king and his uncles, the Guises; and the prince would doubtless have lost his head in consequence, but for the sudden death of Francis the Second. Since that time he had repeatedly acquiesced in the bloody sentences of the Parisian parliament. His voice was never heard opposing the proscription instituted in the late civil wars, even in the case of the atrocious sentence against Gaspard de Coligny. If we concede to his son that no one was of a less sanguinary or of a milder disposition than President De Thou, we must also insist that few judges on the bench displayed less magnanimity or conscientiousness.1062

Ineffectual effort to inculpate Coligny.

But it was not a simple congratulatory address that Charles, or his mother, required of his parliament. Tyrannical power is rarely satisfied with the mere acquiescence of servile judges; it demands, and ordinarily obtains from them, a positive indorsement of its schemes of successful villainy. It was necessary – especially, as we shall see later, after the cry of horror was heard that rose toward heaven from all parts of Europe on receipt of the tidings of the massacre in Paris and elsewhere – to palliate its atrocity by affixing to the slain Huguenots, and above all to Coligny, a note of rebellious and murderous designs against the king and the royal family. And here again the Parliament of Paris was as pliant as its rulers could desire. Coligny's papers, both in Paris and at Châtillon-sur-Loing, were subjected to close scrutiny; but nothing could be discovered to warrant the suspicion that any seditious design had ever been entertained by him. In default of something better, therefore, the queen mother endeavored to make capital out of two passages of these private manuscripts. In one – it was, we are told, the will of the admiral, written toward the end of the third civil war1063– he dissuaded Charles from assigning to his brothers appanages that might diminish the authority of the crown. Catharine triumphantly showed it to Alençon. "See!" said she; "this is your good friend the admiral, whom you so greatly loved and respected!" "I know not," replied the young prince, "how much of a friend he was to me; but certainly he showed by this advice how much he loved the king."1064 With Walsingham a similar attempt was made to deprive the murdered hero of Queen Elizabeth's sympathy, but with as little success. "To the end you may see how little your mistress was beholden to him," said Catharine de' Medici one day to the English ambassador, "you may see a discourse found with his testament, made at such time as he was sick at Rochel, wherein, amongst other advices that he gave to the king my son, this is one, that he willed him in any case to keep the queen, your mistress, and the King of Spain as low as he could, as a thing that tended much to the safety and maintenance of this crown." "To that I answered," says Walsingham, "that in this point, howsoever he was affected towards the queen my mistress, he showed himself a most true and faithful subject to the crown of France, and the Queen's Majestie, my mistress, made the more account of him, for that she knew him faithfully affected to the same."1065

Coligny's memory declared infamous.

Petty indignities.

The complete absence of proof of all designs save the most patriotic, and, on the other hand, the clear evidence that Coligny sought for the quiet and growth of the religious community to which he belonged, only in connection with the honor and prosperity of his own country, did not deter the pliant parliament from pursuing the course prescribed for it. A little more than two months after the Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day (October the twenty-seventh, 1572), the admiral's sentence was formally pronounced. He was proclaimed a traitor and the author of a conspiracy against the king; his goods were confiscated, his memory declared infamous. His children were degraded from their rank as nobles, and pronounced "ignoble, villains, roturiers, infamous, unworthy, and incapable of making a will, or of holding offices, dignities or possessions in France." It was ordered that his castle of Châtillon-sur-Loing should be razed to the ground, never to be rebuilt, and that the site should be sown with salt; that the trees of the park should be cut down to half their height, and a monumental pillar be erected on the spot, with a copy of this decree inscribed upon it. His portraits and statues were to be destroyed; his arms, wherever found, to be dragged at the horse's tail and publicly destroyed by the hangman; his body – if any fragments could be obtained, or, if not, his effigy – was to be dragged on a hurdle, and hung first on the Grève and then on a loftier gibbet at Montfaucon. Finally, public prayers and a solemn procession were ordered to take place in Paris on every successive anniversary of the feast of St. Bartholomew.1066

Thus was the memory of one of the noblest characters that illustrated the sixteenth century pursued with envenomed hatred, after death had placed Coligny himself beyond the power of the murderous queen mother to inflict more substantial injury upon him. To his mortal remains all that malice could do had already been done. What remained of a mutilated body had been taken from the hands of those precocious criminals, the boys of Paris, and hung up by the feet upon the gallows at Montfaucon.1067 A great part of the capital had gone out to look upon the grateful sight. Charles the Ninth was of the number of the visitors, and, when others showed signs of disgust at the stench arising from the putrefaction of a corpse long unburied, is said to have exclaimed "that the smell of a dead enemy is very sweet."1068 Great was the merriment of the low populace; copious were the effusions of wit. Jacques Copp de Vellay, in his poetical diatribe, published with privilege – "Le Déluge des Huguenotz" – sings with great delight of

Mont-Faulcon, où les attend

Ce grand Gaspar au curedent,

Attaché par les piedz sans teste.1069

At last, four or five days after Coligny's death, a body of thirty or forty horse, sent by Marshal Montmorency, took down the remains by night, and gave them decent burial.1070

A jubilee procession.

Charles declares that he will maintain his edict.

Not content with the public admission of his responsibility for the massacre which he had made before the parliament, Charles with his court participated two days later (Thursday, the twenty-eighth of August) in the celebration of a jubilee, and walked in a procession through the streets of Paris; at successive "stations" rendering thanks to Heaven, with fair show of devotion, for the preservation of his own life, and the lives of his brothers and of the King of Navarre. It would have served greatly to give a color of plausibility to the report of the conspiracy of the Huguenots, could Navarre and Condé have been prevailed upon to appear in the king's company on this occasion. But it must be mentioned to their honor, that they were proof against the persuasions as well as the threats of Charles.1071 The same day a royal declaration was published, reiterating the allegations made in the Palais de Justice, but protesting that the king was determined to maintain his edict of pacification. As, however, the Protestants were forbidden for the present from holding any public or private assemblies for worship, it must be admitted that they were not far wrong in regarding the declaration as only another part of the trap cunningly devised for their destruction.1072