History of the Rise of the Huguenots

Forced conversion of Navarre and Condé.

Although the conversion of the young King of Navarre and his cousin, the Prince of Condé, did not occur until some weeks later, it may be appropriately mentioned here. No means were left untried to gain them over to the Roman Catholic religion. The sophistries of monks were supplemented by the more dangerous persuasions of a renegade Protestant minister, Hugues Sureau du Rosier, formerly one of the pastors of the church of Orleans.1073 Whatever excuse his arguments may have furnished by covering their renunciation of their faith with the decent cloak of conviction, fear was certainly the chief instrument in effecting the desired change in the Huguenot princes. There is no room for doubt that the character of Charles underwent a marked change, as we shall see later, from the time that he consented to the massacre. He became more sullen, more violent, more impatient of contradiction or opposition. It is not at all unlikely that a mind never fully under control of reason, and now assuredly thrown from its poise by a desperation engendered of remorse for the fearful crime he had reluctantly approved, at times formed the resolution to kill the obstinate King of Navarre and his cousin. On one occasion Charles is said to have been deterred by the supplications of his young wife from going in person to destroy them.1074 At length, when the alternative of death or the Bastile was the only one presented, the courage of the Bourbons began to falter. Navarre was the first to yield, and his sister, the excellent Catharine de Bourbon, followed his example. On the thirteenth of September the ambassador Walsingham wrote: "They prepare Bastile for some persons of quality. It is thought that it is for the Prince of Condé and his brethren."1075 But three days later (the sixteenth of September) he wrote again: "On Sunday last, which was the fourteenth of this month, the young Princess of Condé was constrained to go to mass, being threatened otherwise to go to prison, and so consequently to be made away. The Prince of Condé hath also yielded to hear mass upon Sunday next, being otherwise threatened to go to the Bastile, where he is not like long to serve."1076 Such conversions did not promise to prove very sincere. They were accepted, however, by the king and his mother; although both Navarre and Condé were detained at court rather as prisoners than as free princes. Pope Gregory the Thirteenth received the submission of both cousins to the authority of the See of Rome, recognized the validity of their marriages, and formally admitted them to his favor, by a special bull of the twenty-seventh of October, 1572.1077 In return for these concessions Henry of Navarre repealed the ordinances which his mother had made for the government of Béarn, and re-established the Roman Catholic worship.1078

CHAPTER XIX.

THE MASSACRE IN THE PROVINCES, AND THE RECEPTION OF THE TIDINGS ABROAD

The massacre in the provinces.

The massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day would have been terrible enough had it been confined to Paris, for its victims in that single city were to be reckoned by thousands. Charles the Ninth himself, on the third day, admitted in a letter to Mondoucet, his envoy in the Netherlands, that "a very great number of the adherents of the new religion who were in this city had been massacred and cut to pieces."1079 But this was little in comparison with the multitudes that were yet to lose their lives in other parts of France. Here, however, the enterprise assumed a different character. Not only did it not commence on the same day as in the capital, but it began at different dates in different places. It is evident that there had been no well-concerted plan long entertained and freely communicated to the governors of the provinces and cities. On the contrary, the greatest variety of procedure prevailed – all tending, nevertheless, to the same end of the total destruction of the Protestants. And this was intended from the very moment the project of the Parisian butchery was hastily and inconsiderately adopted by the king. Charles meant to be as good as his word when he announced his determination that not a single Huguenot should survive to reproach him with what he had done. More frightful than his most passionate outburst of bloodthirsty frenzy is the cool calculation with which he, or the minister who wrote the words he subscribed, predicts the chain of successive murders in provincial France, scarcely one of which had as yet been attempted. "It is probable," he said, in the same letter of the twenty-sixth of August, that has just been cited, "that the fire thus kindled will go coursing through all the cities of my kingdom, which, following the example of what has been done in this city, will assure themselves of all the adherents of the said religion."1080

Verbal orders.

No mere surmise, founded upon the probable effects of the exhibition of cruelty in Paris, led to the penning of this sentence. Charles had purposely fired the train which was to explode with the utmost violence at almost every point of his wide dominions. "As it has pleased God," he wrote to Mondoucet, "to bring matters to the state in which they now are, I do not intend to neglect the opportunity not only to re-establish, if I shall be able, lasting quietness in my kingdom, but also to serve Christendom."1081 Accordingly, secret orders, for the most part verbal, had already been sent in all directions, commanding the provinces to imitate the example set by Paris. The reality of these orders does not rest upon conjecture, but is attested by documentary evidence over the king's own hand. As we have seen in the last chapter, Charles published, on the twenty-eighth of August, a declaration of his motives and intentions. This was despatched to the governors of the provinces and to other high officers, in company with a circular letter, of which the final sentence deserves particular notice. "Moreover," says the king, "whatever verbal command I may have given to those whom I sent to you, as well as to my other governors and lieutenants-general, at a time when I had just reason to fear some inauspicious events, from having discovered the conspiracy which the admiral was making against me, I have revoked and revoke it completely, intending that nothing therein contained be put into execution by you or by others; for such is my pleasure."1082

Instructions to Montsoreau at Saumur.

What was the import of these orders? The manuscripts in the archives of Angers seem to leave no room for doubt. This city was the capital of the Duchy of Anjou, given in appanage to Henry, the king's brother, and was, consequently, under his special government. On Tuesday, the twenty-sixth of August, the duke sent to the Governor of Saumur a short note running thus: "Monsieur de Montsoreau, I have instructed the sieur de Puigaillard to write to you respecting a matter that concerns the service of the king, my lord and brother, as well as my own. You will, therefore, not fail to believe and to do whatever he may tell you, just as if it were I myself." In the same package with these credentials Montsoreau1083 received a letter from Puigaillard, like himself a knight of the royal order of St. Michael, which reveals only too clearly the purpose of the king and his Brother. "Monsieur mon compagnon, I will not fail to acquaint you with the fact that, on Sunday morning the king caused a very great execution to be made against the Huguenots; so much so that the admiral and all the Huguenots that were in this city were killed. And his Majesty's will is that the same be done wherever there are any to be found. Accordingly, if you desire ever to do a service that may be agreeable to the king and to Monsieur (the Duke of Anjou), you must go to Saumur with the greatest possible number of your friends, and put to death all that you can find there of the principal Huguenots… Having made this execution at Saumur, I beg you to go to Angers and do the same, with the assistance of the captain of the castle. And you must not expect to receive any other command from the king, nor from Monseigneur, for they will send you none, inasmuch as they depend upon what I write you. You must use diligence in this affair, and lose as little time as possible. I am very sorry that I cannot be there to help you in putting this into execution."1084

Two kinds of letters.

The statement of the author of the Mémoires de l'estat de France is, therefore, in full agreement with the ascertained facts of the case. He informs us that, soon after the Parisian massacre commenced, the secret council by which the plan had been drawn up despatched two widely differing kinds of letters. The first were of a private character, and were addressed to governors of cities and to seditious Roman Catholics where there were many Protestants, by which they were instigated to murder and rapine;1085 the others were public, and were addressed to the same functionaries, their object being to amuse and entrap the professors of the reformed faith. And in addition to the double sets of written instructions, the same author says that messengers were sent to various points, to give orders for special executions.1086 We shall not find it very difficult to account for the rapidity with which the massacre spread to the provincial towns – of which the secretary of the Spanish ambassador, in his hurried journey from Paris to Madrid, was an eye-witness1087– if we bear in mind the previous ripeness of the lowest classes of the Roman Catholic population for the perpetration of any possible acts of insult and injury toward their Protestant fellow-citizens. The time had come for the seed sown broadcast by monk and priest in Lenten and Advent discourses to bear its legitimate harvest in the pitiless murder of heretics.

The massacre at Meaux.

Meaux was naturally one of the first of smaller cities to catch the contagion from the capital. Not only was it the nearest city that contained any considerable body of Huguenots, but, if we may credit the report current among them, Catharine, in virtue of her rank as Countess of Meaux, had placed it first upon the roll. It is not impossible that the circumstance that this was the cradle of Protestantism in France may have secured it this distinction. About the middle of Sunday afternoon a courier reached Meaux, and at once made his way to the residence of the procureur-du-roi, one Cosset. The nature of the message he bore may be inferred from the fact that secret orders were at once given to those persons upon whom Cosset thought that he could rely, to be in readiness about nightfall. So completely had every outlet from Paris been sealed, that it had proved almost impossible for a Protestant to find the means of escaping to carry the tidings abroad. Consequently the adherents of the reformed faith were yet in ignorance of the impending catastrophe. At the time appointed, Cosset and his followers seized the gates of Meaux. It was the hour when the peaceable and unsuspecting people were at supper. The Protestants could now easily be found, and few escaped arrest, either that evening or on the succeeding day. Happily, however, a large number of Huguenots resided in a quarter of Meaux known as the "Grand Marché," and separated from the main part of the town by the river Marne. The inhabitants of the Grand Marché received timely warning of their danger; and the men fled by night for temporary refuge to the neighboring villages. It was scarcely dawn on Monday morning when the work of plunder begun. By eight o'clock little was left of the goods of the Huguenots on this side of the Marne, and the pillagers crossed the bridge to the Grand Marché. Finding only the women, who had remained in the vain hope of saving their family possessions, the papists wreaked their fury upon them. About twenty-five of these unhappy persons were murdered in cold blood;1088 others were so severely beaten that they died within a few days; a few were shamefully dishonored. In most cases, if not in all, outward acquiescence in the ceremonies of the Roman Catholic Church would have saved the lives of the victims, but the Huguenot women were constant and would yield no hypocritical consent. One poor woman, the wife of "Nicholas the cap-maker," was being dragged to mass, when her bold and impolitic expressions of detestation of the service so enraged her conductors, that, being at that moment upon the bridge which unites the two portions of the city, they stabbed her and threw her body into the river. In a short time the Grand Marché, which the precise chronicler tells us contained more than four hundred houses, was robbed of everything which could be removed, for not the most insignificant article escaped the cupidity of the Roman Catholic populace.1089

These were but the preliminaries of the general massacre. The prisons were full of Huguenots, whom it was necessary to put out of the way. Late in the day, on Tuesday the twenty-sixth, Cosset and his band made their appearance. They were provided with a list of their destined victims, more than two hundred in number. Of a score or two the names have been preserved, with their respective avocations. They were merchants, judicial officers, industrious artisans – in short, the representatives of the better class of the population of Meaux. Not one escaped. The murderous band were stationed in the courtyard of the prison, while Cosset, armed with a pistol in either hand, mounted the steps, and by his roll summoned the Protestants to the slaughter awaiting them below. The bloody work was long and tedious. The assassins adjourned awhile for their supper, and, unable to complete the task before weariness blunted the edge of their ferocity, reserved a part of the Protestants for the next day. None the less was the task accomplished with thoroughness, and the exultant cutthroats now had leisure to pursue the fugitives of the Grand Marché to the villages in which they had taken refuge.1090

The massacre at Troyes.

The news of the Parisian massacre reached Troyes, the flourishing capital of Champagne, on Tuesday, the twenty-sixth of August, and spread great alarm among the Protestants, who, with the recent disturbances1091 still fresh in their memories, apprehended immediate death. But their enemies for the time confined themselves to closing the gates to prevent their escape. It was not until Saturday, the thirtieth, that the "bailli," Anne de Vaudrey, sieur de St. Phalle, sent throughout the city and brought all the Protestants to the prisons. Meantime one of the most turbulent of the Roman Catholics, named Pierre Belin, had been in Paris, having been deputed, some weeks before, to endeavor to procure the removal of the place of worship of the reformed from the castle of Isle-au-Mont, two or three leagues from the city, to some more distant and inconvenient spot. He remained in the capital until the Saturday after the massacre, and started that day for Troyes, with a copy of the declaration of Thursday forbidding injury to the persons and goods of unoffending Protestants, and ordering the release of any that might have been imprisoned. It was believed, indeed, that he was commissioned to give the declaration to the bailli for publication. On Wednesday, the third of September, he reached Troyes. As he rode through the streets, he inquired again and again whether the Huguenots at Troyes were all killed as they were elsewhere. When interrogated by peaceable Roman Catholics respecting a rumor that the king had revoked his sanguinary orders, he boldly denied its truth, accompanying his words with oaths and imprecations. Finding the bailli, he had no difficulty in persuading him to suppress the royal order, and to convene a council, at which Belin was introduced as the bearer of verbal instructions, and a bishop was brought forward to confirm them. Belin and the bishop maintained that the royal pleasure was that the heretics of Troyes should all be murdered on the following Saturday night, without distinction of rank, sex, or age, and their bodies be exposed in the streets to the sight of those who should on the morrow join in a solemn procession to be held in honor of the achievement. A writing attached to the neck of each was to contain the words: "Seditious persons and rebels against the king, who have conspired against his Majesty."

The task of butchering the helpless Huguenots in the prison was first proposed to the public hangman. He refused to take any part in it: this, he said, was no duty of his office, and he would consent to perform it only when all the forms of law should have been observed. Other persons were found more pliable, and, under the leadership of one Perremet, the bloody scenes of the prison of Meaux were re-enacted, on Thursday, the fourth day of September, in that of Troyes. How many were the victims we know not; we have, however, the names of over thirty, apparently the most prominent of the number. Others were assassinated in the streets. At last, when all had been done that malice could effect, the king's declaration, which promised protection to the Huguenots, was published on Friday, the fifth of September.1092

The great bloodshed at Orleans.

In Orleans, a city once the headquarters of the Huguenots, where their iconoclastic assaults upon the churches during the first civil war had left permanent memorials of their former supremacy, the massacre assumed the largest proportions. One of the king's court preachers, Arnauld Sorbin, better known as M. de Sainte Foy, had written from Paris letters instigating the inhabitants of Orleans to imitate the example of the capital, and the letters came to hand with the earliest tidings of the Parisian massacre. The first murder took place on Monday. M. de Champeaux, a royal counsellor and a Protestant, who as yet was in ignorance of the events of St. Bartholomew's Day, received late on Monday the visit of Tessier, surnamed La Court, the leader of the assassins of Orleans, and some of his followers. Imagining it to be a friendly call – for they were acquaintances – Champeaux received them courteously, and invited them to sup with him. The meal over, his guests recounted the story of the tragic occurrence at Paris, and, before he was well over his surprise and horror, asked him for his purse. The unhappy host, still mistaking the character of those whom he had entertained, at first regarded the demand as a pleasantry; but when he had been convinced of his error and had complied, his treacherous visitors instantly stabbed him to death in his very dining-room.1093 The general butchery began on Tuesday night, in the neighborhood of the ramparts, where the Protestants were most numerous, and from Wednesday to Saturday there was no intermission in the slaughter. Here, more even than elsewhere, the murderers distinguished themselves by their profanity and their undisguised hatred of the Protestant faith and worship. "Where is your God?" "Where are your prayers and your psalms?" "Where is the God they invoke so much? Let Him save, if He can." Such were the expressions with which the blows of the assassin were interlarded. At times he thought to aggravate his victim's sufferings by singing snatches of favorite psalms from the Huguenot psalm-book. It might be the forty-third, so appropriate to the condition of oppressed innocence, in its quaint old French garb:

Revenge-moi, pren la querelle

De moi, Seigneur, de ta merci,

Contre la gent fausse et cruelle:

De l'homme rempli de cautelle,

Et en sa malice endurci,

Delivre moi aussi.

Or it might be the fifty-first – the words never more sincerely accepted, even when chanted to all the perfection of choral music, in the Sistine Chapel or in St. Peter's, than when, in the ears of constant sufferers for their Christian faith, ribald voices contemptuously sang or drawled the familiar lines:

Misericorde au povre vicieux,

Dieu tout-puissant, selon ta grand' clemence.1094

"These execrable outrages," adds the chronicler who gives us this interesting information, "did not in the least unnerve the Protestants, who died with great constancy; and, if some were shaken (as were some, but in very small numbers), this in no wise lessened the patience and endurance of the rest."1095 The number of the killed was great. The murderers themselves boasted of the slaughter of more than twelve hundred men and of one hundred and fifty women, besides a large number of children of nine years old and under. And there was a dreary uniformity in the method of their death. They were shot with pistols, then stripped, and dragged to the river, or thrown into the city moat.1096 But it is, after all, not the numbers of nameless victims whose honorable deaths leave no distinct impression upon the mind, but the individual instances of Christian heroism, teaching lessons of imitable human virtues, that speak most directly to the sympathies of the reader of an age so long posterior. The records of French Protestantism are full of these, and one or two of the most striking that occurred in Orleans deserve mention. M. de Coudray – whom the Roman Catholics had in vain endeavored on previous occasions to shake – seeing his house beset and no prospect of deliverance, himself opened the door of his dwelling to the murderers, telling them, with wonderful assurance of faith: "You do but hasten the coming of that blessedness which I have long been expecting."1097 Whereupon they killed him, in the midst of his invocation of his God. Another Huguenot, De St. Thomas, a schoolmaster, died uttering words as courageous as ever fell from lips of early Christian martyrs: "Why! do you think that you move me by your blasphemies and acts of cruelty? It is not within your power to deprive me of the assurance of the grace of my God. Strike as much as you please; I fear not your blows."1098 Sometimes the dying men were allowed a few moments to utter a final prayer; but, if their zeal led them too far, their impatient murderers cut short their devotions with oaths and curses, and exclaimed: "Here are people that take a great while to pray to their God!"1099 Of resistance there was little, so far were the Huguenots from having collected arms and prepared for such a conspiracy as was imputed to them. If a Huguenot teacher of fencing killed one or two of his assailants, or if a few gentlemen at different places kept them at bay awhile with stones or other missiles, this, so far from proving their evil intentions, on the contrary, furnishes undeniable proof of the very different results that might have ensued had their means of defence been equal to their courage. For fifteen days after the principal massacre the work went on more quietly, the dead bodies being still thrown into the ditch – where wolves, which in the sixteenth century abounded in the valley of the Loire, were permitted to feed upon them undisturbed – or into the river, of whose fish, fattened upon this human carrion, the people feared to eat.1100

Massacre at Bourges.

At Bourges the news of the massacre was received late on Tuesday. Meantime, some of the more sagacious of the Huguenots (among others, the celebrated Francis Hotman, at this time a professor of law in the University of Bourges), alarmed by the wounding of Admiral Coligny, had fled from the city. Even after the news came, the massacre was but partial. Although the mayor, Jean Joupitre, had received sealed orders (lettres de cachet) instructing him as to the part he was to take, the municipal officers, knowing the ill-will the Guises had always borne to the Huguenots, were in doubt how far the king countenanced the bloody work. But the royal letter of the thirtieth of August, accompanying the declaration of the twenty-eighth, to which reference was made above,1101 so far from putting an end to the disorder, only rendered it more general. Bourges became the scene of another of those butcheries of Huguenots first gathered in the public prisons, of which there are so many similar instances that it seems impossible to avoid the conclusion that the orders to effect them emanated from a single source at court.1102

At Angers.

We have already been admitted to the secret of the instructions sent by the Duke of Anjou, through Puigaillard, to M. de Montsoreau, for the destruction of the Huguenots of Saumur and Angers. Certainly there was on his part no lack of readiness to fulfil his sanguinary commission; but the local officers were less zealous, and many of the Protestants were merely thrown into prison. Montsoreau's first exploit at Angers deserves particular mention. M. de la Rivière, the first reformed pastor of Paris, of whom I have spoken in a previous chapter, was at this time residing in Angers, and Montsoreau seems to have been acquainted with him. Going straight to his house, the governor met the pastor's wife, whom, according to the gallant custom prevailing, especially among the Trench courtiers, he first kissed, and then inquired for her husband. He was told that he was walking in his garden, and thither his hostess led him. After courteously embracing him, Montsoreau thus abruptly disclosed the object of his visit: "Monsieur de la Rivière, do you know why I am come? The king has ordered me to kill you, and that at once. I have a special commission to this effect, as you will know from these letters." While saying this he exhibited a pistol which he held in his hand. "I know of no crime that I have done," calmly replied De la Rivière; and then, after obtaining permission to offer a brief prayer to God, he fearlessly presented his breast to the cowardly assassin. Montsoreau did not complete the extermination of the Huguenots of Angers, and Puigaillard soon after arrived to prosecute it; but the Protestant prisoners whom he was to have murdered knew his venal disposition, and found little difficulty in purchasing their liberation.1103