History of the Rise of the Huguenots

Butchery at Lyons.

The important city of Lyons, inhabited by a population intensely hostile to the Reformation, had for its governor M. de Mandelot, a decided partisan of the Roman Catholic faction. The municipal authorities, however, either surpassed him in zeal, or, as is more probable, were less apprehensive of the dangers to be incurred by assuming the responsibility of a massacre; for of all the "échevins," only two opposed the violent measures of their associates. The written protest which they insisted upon entering on the official records is still extant.1104 The first tidings of the wounding of Coligny by Maurevel reached Lyons on Wednesday morning, the twenty-seventh of August, in a letter from Charles the Ninth to Governor Mandelot, similar in tenor to those which were despatched to every other part of France.1105 Although the king spoke only of displeasure at the outrage, and of his determination to avenge it, the populace interpreted the event according to their wishes, and instantly circulated reports of the murder of the admiral and all his adherents. The Roman Catholics, long discontented with the toleration extended to those who dissented from the creed of the dominant church, were jubilant and menacing; the Protestants were disheartened, but exhibited a self-control only to be accounted for by the long years of oppression which had wellnigh broken their spirit. The next day came the news of the events of Sunday, and, in the afternoon, letters from Masso and Rubys, prominent citizens of Lyons then at Paris, who said that they had been instructed by the king to order the authorities to copy the example of the capital. The fanatical party was now clamorous; but Mandelot, cautious and politic, would act on no such instructions, although he had taken the precaution of closing the gates, and of commanding the Protestants, on pain of imprisonment, to remain in their houses. Friday morning came, and with it the arrival of Sieur du Peyrat from court, bearing the royal letter written on the day of the massacre, in which it was represented as the exclusive work of the Guises, and the king strenuously enjoined the maintenance of the Edict of Pacification.1106 These were the public instructions sent to Mandelot; but they were not all. There is a suspicious little postscript to the letter: "Monsieur de Mandelot, you will give credit to the bearer respecting the matter which I have charged him to tell you."1107 What these verbal orders were which the king, not venturing to commit to paper, commissioned Du Peyrat to communicate, the reply of the governor himself distinctly reveals; it was the arrest of the Protestants and the confiscation of their property.1108 Still more perplexed as to what course to pursue, Mandelot held a long private conference with the messenger, while the échevins impatiently awaited its conclusion. The governor now called in the municipal officers for consultation, and with them agreed to order the immediate imprisonment of the Huguenots. He was not, however, even yet fully convinced of the propriety of this step, for scarcely had he given the order when he recalled it.1109 Fearing that the troops at his disposal might prove insufficient, and dreading with good reason lest the employment of the city militia for this purpose might lead to scenes of disorder which he would find himself powerless to control, he preferred to send for such reinforcements as the neighboring noblemen of the province could furnish.1110 Meantime, the commotion throughout Lyons had rapidly increased. On Thursday and Friday nights many members of the Reformed Church had been dragged from their houses as if to prison, but most of them had been barbarously despatched by the way. Among others, one of the ministers, Monsieur Jacques l'Anglois, was stabbed and thrown into the river. On Saturday morning Mandelot, seeing the confusion hourly increasing, deemed it impolitic to wait any longer for the troops he was expecting, and resolved upon effecting his purpose by ruse. He therefore published a proclamation by sound of trumpet, bidding all the Huguenots to assemble at his house to hear the good pleasure of the king. The Huguenots, deceived by the professions of his Majesty, came in great numbers; but no sooner had they all arrived, than they were seized by the soldiers and hurried away to prison. The common prison, "La Roanne," being too contracted to contain so large a multitude, three hundred or more were placed in that of the Archbishop's palace, and others in the cloisters of the Celestine Monks and the Gray Friars. At the same time an inventory was being made of all the goods belonging to Protestants throughout the city.

These measures, instead of allaying, only inflamed the passions of the populace the more. That night the murders surpassed those of the previous nights in number and atrocity, and when Sunday morning dawned the people were ready for still greater excesses. At about eight o'clock they entered unopposed the Gray Friars, and butchered every Huguenot they found. Two hours later, assuming the forms of law, a self-constituted commission, headed by André Mornieu, one of the échevins or aldermen, presenting themselves successively at the archiepiscopal prison and at the Roanne, summoned the inmates to abjure their faith and go to mass. Only thirty persons in the one, and about twenty in the other, consented. These were sent to the Celestine monastery and afterward released. Of the others a careful list was drawn up. Their fate was sealed; but an unexpected difficulty arose. The public hangman refused to execute the sentence of an unauthorized tribunal. So did the soldiers. At last assassins were obtained from the ranks of the turbulent inhabitants. About three o'clock that afternoon the archbishop's prison was visited. To describe with minuteness the scene of horror that ensued would scarcely be possible. Two hundred and sixty-three persons,1111 of the very best and most industrious part of the population of Lyons,1112 called by name according to the roll previously made, were murdered in rapid succession. Never was there an exhibition of more pitiless cruelty. Meanwhile, where was the governor? He had gone, in company with the commandant of the citadel, to suppress a threatened disturbance in the Faubourg de la Guillotière, on the left bank of the Rhône. He returned only in time to find the deed done, and to disperse those who had gone to the Roanne to repeat it there. His demonstrations of anger were loud, and a liberal reward was offered for the detection of any that had participated in the slaughter.1113 But this did not prevent the same body of cutthroats from visiting the Roanne, soon after nightfall, and despatching all the Protestants that were there, to the number of about seventy. Many of them, by an excess of barbarity, the assassins tied together by a single rope, and threw, while yet alive, into the water. On the following day the bodies which had not yet found a watery grave were carried to the other side of the Saône, where, stripped and mangled, they were about to be buried in the cemetery of the Abbaye d'Esnay, when the monks refused them admission into the consecrated ground, and pointed to the Rhône as a more fitting destination. Even now they were not spared further mutilation; for an apothecary of Lyons, having initiated the murderers into the valuable properties of human fat as a medicinal substance, the miserable remains were put to new use before being consigned to the river. Down to the Mediterranean these ghastly witnesses of the ferocity of the passions of the Lyonnese Roman Catholics carried fear and disgust, and for weeks the inhabitants of Arles and other places carefully abstained from drinking the water of the polluted stream.1114

Responsibility of Mandelot.

The part which Mandelot took in this awful tragedy has been very differently estimated, but I am inclined to think that the governor is not chargeable with any direct responsibility for the butchery in the prisons of Lyons. Certainly this seems to be established by his letter to the king, written in the morning of the day on which it occurred; for he would scarcely have expressed his great desire and hope to be able to prevent any outbreak, if he had planned, or even foreseen, the events of the evening.1115 The story must therefore be apocryphal, that Mandelot, in commissioning one of the chief assassins to execute the bloody work, blasphemously said: "I intrust the whole to you, and, as Jesus Christ said to Saint Peter, whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven."1116 It was, however, no conscientious scruple that deterred the governor from actively taking part. Mandelot was scandalously anxious to obtain his part of the plunder, and was not ashamed to appear as a suppliant for the confiscated property of the Huguenots almost before their bodies were cold.1117 But he was unwilling, without the express orders of his sovereign, written with his own hand, to commit an act which, the more successful it might be, was the more certain to be disavowed and punished. He was right: a subordinate could not be too careful in dealing with so treacherous a court.

The massacre at Rouen.

Few cities were so ripe for the massacre of the Protestants as the capital of Normandy. There the passions of the Roman Catholics, inflamed by the civil wars, had not been suffered to cool. Even in the provincial parliament the papists could hardly submit to receive into their deliberations again the five or six Huguenot counsellors who had been expelled or had fled at the outbreak of hostilities, but whom the Edict of Pacification restored to their ancient functions and dignity; and the secret registers, among other unfortunate scenes, chronicle particularly a violent discussion, degenerating into angry altercation between President Vialard and the Huguenot member Maynet.1118 The bloody assault of the populace of Rouen upon the reformed in March, 1571, mentioned in a previous page,1119 had been but slightly punished. Few of the guilty failed to escape from the city, and the sole penalty suffered had been an execution in effigy. These turbulent men had ever since that time been watching an opportunity to return. They were now burning with a desire to signalize their advent by bloody reprisals. Monsieur de Carouge, governor of the city, was, however, a just and upright man,1120 and they could not hope for countenance in their plans from him. In fact, the contemporary accounts inform us that he received from the king repeated orders to exterminate the Huguenots of Rouen,1121 which he could not bring himself to execute, and that he sent messengers to remonstrate with his Majesty who returned without succeeding in shaking his determination; and hereupon the governor found himself obliged to shut himself up in the castle, and permit the work which had been intrusted to others also, to take its course.1122 The secret records of parliament, however, reveal the fact that Carouge received from Paris the order to leave Rouen and visit other portions of Normandy, in order to restore the quiet and peace which had been much disturbed of late. The real, though perhaps not the ostensible object of this commission was to rid the city of the presence of a magistrate whose well known integrity might render it futile to attempt a massacre of the innocent. The records also show that, contrary to the current report, both the municipal authorities and the parliament, greatly alarmed at the danger menacing Rouen in case of his departure, implored him to remain;1123 but that the king's peremptory commands left him no discretion, and he was obliged to leave the unhappy city to its fate. The able historian of the Norman Parliament has rightly observed that the governor, whether he left Rouen because he could not consent to execute the barbarous injunctions that were sent him, or because his character was so well known that the court was unwilling to intrust them to him, is equally deserving of praise; and not without reason does this writer claim similar respect for the judicial body which manifested its desire to save everything, by retaining him at Rouen.1124 Here, as elsewhere, a great part of the Protestants had been arrested and placed in the prisons, to shield them from popular violence. The governor believed this to be the safest place for them; and at least one instance is known of a father who was so convinced of it that he brought thither his Huguenot son, whom he might have sent out of the city.1125

The storm, so long delayed, broke out at last on Wednesday, the seventeenth of September, and lasted four entire days. The gates were closed, and the organized bands of murderers, under the leadership of Laurent de Maromme, one of the most sanguinary of the turbulent men who had returned from banishment, and of a priest, Claude Montereul, curate of the church of St. Pierre, had undisputed possession of the city. First they slaughtered like sheep the prisoners in the spacious "conciergerie" of the parliament house and in the other prisons of the city. Next they burst into the houses, and nearly every atrocity which history is compelled at any time reluctantly to chronicle, was perpetrated on unresisting men, on tender women, on unoffending children. Not less than five hundred persons, and perhaps even more, perished in a butchery, whose details I gladly pass over in silence.1126 Grim humor and charity were incongruously mingled with the most brutal inhumanity. The assassins jocularly denominated their work one of "accommodating" their victims;1127 and the clothes of the Protestants – whose bodies were buried in great ditches outside of the Porte Cauchoise – after having been carefully washed, were piously distributed among the poor.1128 The tragedy finished, the farce of an investigation was instituted by the officers of justice, but no punishment was ever inflicted upon any Roman Catholic, other than that which could be recognized in the retributive judgments befalling a few of the most notable, and especially the cruel Maromme, at the hand of God.1129

At Toulouse.

The previous character of Toulouse, as among the most sanguinary cities of France, was already sufficiently well established. If behind some of the rest on this occasion in the number of victims, Toulouse was inferior only because its previous massacres had rendered it a suspicious place of sojourn in the eyes of the Huguenots. Here, too, notwithstanding deceitful proclamations guaranteeing safety and protection, the Protestants were gathered into the public prisons and jails attached to monasteries; and after having been reserved for several weeks, on receipt of orders from Paris were butchered to the number of two or three hundred. Among others, some Protestant members of parliament were hung in their long red gowns to the branches of a great elm growing in the court of the parliament house.1130 The miscreants that voluntarily assumed the functions of executioners were in this case drawn in great part from the more unruly class of the law students of the university.1131 It is needless to add that here, as elsewhere, the opportunity for plunder was by no means neglected.

At Bordeaux.

The procedure in Bordeaux was so extraordinary, and is so authentically related in a letter of a prominent judicial officer who was present, as well as in the records of the Parliament of Guyenne, that the story of its massacre must be added to the notices already given. At first the city was quiet, and the friends of order congratulated themselves that their efforts had been successful in removing the stigma which previous transactions had affixed to its escutcheon. Meantime this policy, united to the fear of a fate similar to that which had befallen their fellow-believers elsewhere, is said to have led to a great number of conversions to the Roman Catholic Church.1132 But there were those who were unwilling that their prey should so easily escape them. On the fifth of September, M. de Montferrand, Governor of Bordeaux, affecting to have information of a general plot on the part of the Huguenots of the city, had sought and obtained permission of the parliament to introduce three hundred soldiers from abroad. He had thereupon forbidden the celebration of Protestant worship, hitherto held at a distance of three leagues from Bordeaux, on the plain between the Garonne and the Jalle.1133 Meantime the churches resounded with the violent denunciations of a famous preacher, Friar Edmond Auger or Augier, "a great scourge for heresy," as his partisans styled him. He exhorted his hearers to imitate the example of Paris, and accused the royal officers of indolence and pusillanimity. At this juncture the governor received a visit from Monsieur de Montpézat, son-in-law of Villars, the newly appointed admiral. What the latter told him is unknown. But, on the third of October, Montferrand having given out that he had received from the king a roll of names of forty of the chief men of the place, whom he was commissioned to put to death without judge or trial, set about his bloody work. Persistently refusing to exhibit his warrant, for three days the governor butchered the citizens at will.1134 One member of parliament, against whom he bore a personal grudge, he stabbed with his own hand. The murderers wore red bonnets supplied by one of the "jurats" or aldermen of the city. They executed their commission so thoroughly that the number of the slain was reported as two hundred and sixty-four persons, all Protestants. If any one be mercifully inclined to regard this statement as an exaggeration, and to base upon this instance a general theory that throughout France the number of the victims has been grossly over-estimated, let him read the following entry made in the records of the Parliament of Bordeaux, and recently brought to light; he will learn from this not only the approximate number of the slain as given by the chief agent in the bloody work, but the anxiety which the latter felt that he should receive due credit for his share in the great undertaking of the destruction of the French Protestants: "On the ninth of October, the Sieur de Montferrand, having been summoned to the court, among other things said, 'that he had been informed that there were some members of the court who had written to the Sieur Admiral de Villars, royal lieutenant in Guyenne, that the said De Montferrand had killed, on the day of the execution by him made, October the third, only ten or twelve men, a thing (under correction of the court) wholly false, inasmuch as there had been more than two hundred and fifty slain; and he would show the list to any one who might desire to see it.'"1135

The same hand that placed upon the parliamentary registers this shameless and atrocious boast, for the benefit of those that should come after, has briefly noted the assassination of two members of parliament itself, with an absence of comment in which we can read the evidence of fear. "From the talk of to-day it appears that Messieurs Jean de Guilloche and Pierre de Sevyn were killed as belonging to the new religion."1136 The tardy and flagrantly unnecessary effusion of blood at Bordeaux exercised no mean influence in emboldening the Huguenots of La Rochelle to persevere in their refusal to admit the emissaries of Charles the Ninth.

Why the massacre was not universal.

The massacre was, however, neither universal throughout France, nor equally destructive in all places where it occurred. The reason for this is to be found partly in the geographical distribution of the Huguenots, partly in the temper of the people, partly in the policy or the humanity of the governors of cities and provinces. Where the number of Protestants was small, and especially where they had never rendered themselves formidable, it was not easy for the clergy to excite the people to that frenzy of sectarian hatred under the influence of which they were willing to imbrue their hands in the blood of peaceable neighbors. In such places – in Provins, for instance – the Huguenots generally kept themselves as far as possible out of sight, while a few of the more timid consented to place a white cross on their hats, a convenient badge of Roman Catholicism which some were willing to assume, when they would rather have died than go to mass.1137

Policy of the Guises.

In the province of Champagne the Protestants were spared any general massacre by the prudent foresight of the Guises, to whom its government was confided. The duke, in order to free himself from the imputation of being the author of the bloody plot, and to prove that his private resentment did not extend beyond Admiral Coligny and a few other chiefs, had himself taken several Huguenots in Paris under his special protection. With the same object in view, he made his province an exception to the widespread slaughter.1138

Spurious accounts of clemency.

Bishop Le Hennuyer, of Lisieux.

Others, however, were, merciful from more honorable motives. A number of instances of clemency are mentioned. It is not, indeed, always safe to accept the stories, some of which are suspicious from their very form, while others are manifest inventions of an age when tolerance had become more popular than persecution. To the category of fable we are compelled to assign the famous response which Le Hennuyer, Bishop of Lisieux, is reported, by authors writing long after the event, as having returned to the lieutenant sent to him by Charles the Ninth. History is occasionally capricious, but she has rarely indulged in a more remarkable freak than when putting into the mouth of an advocate of persecution, a courtier and the almoner of the king, who was not even in his diocese, but undoubtedly in Paris itself, at the time the incident is said to have occurred, this declamatory speech: "No, no, sir; I oppose, and shall always oppose, the execution of such an order. I am the shepherd of the church of Lisieux, and the people I am commanded to slaughter are my flock. Although at present wanderers, having strayed from the fold intrusted to me by Jesus Christ the great shepherd, they may, nevertheless, return. I do not read in the Gospel that the shepherd should suffer the blood of his sheep to be shed; on the contrary, I find there that he is bound to pour out his own blood and give his own life for them. Take the order back, for it shall never be executed so long as I live."1139

Kind offices of Matignon at Caen and Alençon;

of Longueville and Gordes;

Fortunately, there are other instances on record which are not apocryphal. Monsieur de Matignon seems to have saved Caen and Alençon from becoming the scenes of general massacres, and thus to have endeared himself to the Protestants of both places.1140 The Duke of Longueville prevented the massacre from extending to his province of Picardy.1141 Gordes, Governor of Dauphiny, who had obtained advancement by the assistance of the Montmorency influence, excused himself, when repeatedly urged to kill the Huguenots, on the plea that Montbrun and others of their leaders were alive and out of his reach, and that any attempt of the kind would only lead to still greater difficulties. He therefore waited for more direct instructions. When, in his letter of the fifth of September, in reference to a clause in the king's letter just received, he stated that he had received no verbal orders, but merely his letters of the twenty-second, twenty-fourth, and twenty-eighth of August, Charles replied bidding him give himself no solicitude as to them, as they were addressed only to a few persons who happened to be near him,1142 and enjoined upon him to enforce the royal "declaration," and cause all murder and rapine to cease in his government. Yet even here a number of Huguenots were imprisoned, and a few lost their lives at Romans.1143

of Tende in Provence.

The manly boldness of the Comte de Tende is said in like manner to have saved the Protestants of Provence. Receiving from the hands of La Mole, a gentleman of Arles and servant of the Duke of Alençon, a letter from the secret council ordering him to massacre all the Huguenots in his province, the governor replied: "I do not believe that such commands have emanated from the king's free will; but some of the members of his council have usurped the royal authority in order to satisfy their own passions. I need no more conclusive testimony than the letters which his Majesty sent me a few days ago, by which he threw upon the Guises the blame for this massacre of Paris. I prefer to obey these first letters, as more befitting the royal dignity. Besides, this last order is so cruel and barbarous, that even were the king himself in person to command me to put it into execution, I would not do it." The magnanimity of the count spared Provence the horrors of a repetition of the massacres of Mérindol and Cabrières, but perhaps cost him his own life, for he soon after died at Avignon, and rumor ascribed his death to poison. The infamous Count de Retz, Catharine's favorite, succeeded him as governor.1144 Saint Héran, Governor of Auvergne, is said to have replied in very similar words; but as he managed to induce a great part of the Protestants within his jurisdiction to apostatize, less notice was taken of his insubordination.1145