A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times Volume IV Part 14

Whereupon I incontinently gave such strict orders, that, if he presents himself, the command which it pleases your Majesty to lay upon me will be acted upon. There hath not pa.s.sed, for these last few days, by way of this city, any person going Romewards save a squire of the Duke of Guise's, named Paule, the which had departed four hours previously on the same day on which I received the said letter from your Majesty."

We do not find anywhere, in reference to this incident, any information going further than this reply of the governor of Lyons to Charles IX.

However it may be, the remains of Coligny's body, after having been hung and exposed for some days on the gibbet of Montfaucon, were removed by Duke Francis de Montmorency, the admiral's relative and friend, who had them transferred to Chantilly and interred in the chapel of the castle.

After having been subjected, in the course of three centuries, at one time to oblivion and at others to divers transferences, these sad relics of a great man, a great Christian, and a great patriot, have been resting, for the last two and twenty years, in the very castle of Chatillon-sur-Loing, his ancestors' own domain having once more become the property of a relative of his family, the Duke of Luxembourg, to whom Count Anatole de Montesquiou transferred them, and who, in 1851, had them sealed up in a bit of wall in ruins, at the foot of an old tower, under the site of the bed-chamber of the d.u.c.h.esses of Chatillon, where, in all probability, Coligny was born. The more tardy the homage, the greater.

The actual murderers of Coligny, the real projectors of the St. Bartholomew, Catherine de' Medici and her son the Duke of Anjou, at the very moment when they had just ordered the ma.s.sacre, were seized with affright at the first sound of their crime. The Duke of Anjou finishes his story with this page "After but two hours' rest during the night, just as the day was beginning to break, the king, the queen my mother, and I went to the frontal of the Louvre, adjoining the tennis-court, into a room which looks upon the area of the stable-yard, to see the commencement of the work. We had not been there long when, as we were weighing the issues and the consequence of so great an enterprise, on which, sooth to say, we had up to that time scarcely bestowed a thought, we heard a pistol-shot fired. I could not say in what spot, or whether it knocked over anybody; but well know I that the sound wounded all three of us so deeply in spirit that it knocked over our senses and judgment, stricken with terror and apprehension at the great troubles which were then about to set in. To prevent them, we sent a gentleman at once and with all haste to M. de Guise, to tell him and command him expressly from us to retire into his quarters, and be very careful to take no steps against the admiral, this single command putting a stop to everything else, because it had been determined that in no spot in the city should any steps be taken until, as a preliminary, the admiral had been killed.

But soon afterwards the gentleman returning told us that M. de Guise had answered him that the command came too late, that the admiral was dead, and the work was begun throughout the rest of the city. So we went back to our original determination, and let ourselves follow the thread and the course of the enterprise."

The enterprise, in fact, followed its thread and natural course without its being in the power of anybody to arrest or direct it. It had been absolutely necessary to give information of it the evening before to the provost of tradesmen of Paris, Le Charron, president in the court of taxation (Board of Excise), and to the chief men of the city. According to Brantome, "they made great difficulties and imported conscience into the matter; but M. de Tavannes, in the king's presence, rebuked them strongly, and threatened them that, if they did not make themselves busy, the king would have them hanged. The poor devils, unable to do aught else, thereupon answered, 'Ha! is that the way you take it, sir, and you, monsieur? We swear to you that you shall hear news thereof, for we will ply our hands so well right and left that the memory shall abide forever of a right well kept St. Bartholomew.'" "Wherein they did not fail,"

continues Brantome, "but they did not like it at first." According to other reports, the first opposition of the provost of tradesmen, Le Charron, was not without effect; it was not till the next day that he let the orders he had received take their course; and it was necessary to apply to his predecessor in his office, the ex-provost Marcel, a creature of the queen-mother's, to set in motion the turbulent and the fanatical amongst the populace, "which it never does to 'blood,' for it is afterwards more savage than is desirable." Once let loose upon the St. Bartholomew, the Parisian populace was eager indeed, but not alone in its eagerness, for the work of ma.s.sacre; the gentlemen of the court took part in it pa.s.sionately, from a spirit of vengeance, from religious hatred, from the effect of smelling blood, from covetousness at the prospect of confiscations at hand. Teligny, the admiral's son-in-law, had taken refuge on a roof; the Duke of Anjou's guards make him a mark for their arquebuses. La Rochefoucauld, with whom the king had been laughing and joking up to eleven o'clock the evening before, heard a knocking at his door, in the king's name; it is opened; enter six men in masks and poniard him. The new Queen of Navarre, Marguerite de Valois, had gone to bed by express order of her mother Catherine. "Just as I was asleep," says she, "behold a man knocking with feet and hands at the door and shouting, Navarre! Navarre! My nurse, thinking it was the king my husband, runs quickly to the door and opens it. It was a gentleman named M. de Leran, who had a sword-cut on the elbow, a gash from a halberd on the arm, and was still pursued by four archers, who all came after him into my bedroom. He, wishing to save himself, threw himself on to my bed; as for me, feeling this man who had hold of me, I threw myself out of bed towards the wall, and he after me, still holding me round the body. I did not know this man, and I could not tell whether he had come thither to offer me violence, or whether the archers were after him in particular, or after me. We both screamed, and each of us was as much frightened as the other. At last it pleased G.o.d that M. de Nanqay, captain of the guards, came in, who, finding me in this plight, though he felt compa.s.sion, could not help laughing; and, flying into a great rage with the archers for this indiscretion, he made them begone, and gave me the life of that poor man who had hold of me, whom I had put to bed and attended to in my closet, until he was well."

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Queen of Navarre and the Huguenot----372]

We might multiply indefinitely these anecdotical scenes of the ma.s.sacre, most of them brutally ferocious, others painfully pathetic, some generous and calculated to preserve the credit of humanity amidst one of its most direful aberrations. History must show no pity for the vices and crimes of men, whether princes or people; and it is her duty as well as her right to depict them so truthfully that men's souls and imaginations may be sufficiently impressed by them to conceive disgust and horror at them; but it is not by dwelling upon them and by describing them minutely, as if she had to exhibit a gallery of monsters and madmen, that history can lead men's minds to sound judgments and salutary impressions; it is necessary to have moral sense and good sense always in view, and set high above great social troubles, just as sailors, to struggle courageously against the tempest, need to see a luminous corner where the sky is visible, and a star which reveals to them the port. We take no pleasure, and we see no use, in setting forth in detail the works of evil; we should be inclined to fear that, by familiarity with such a spectacle, men would lose the perception of good, and cease to put hope in its legitimate and ultimate superiority. Nor will we pause either to discuss the secondary questions which meet us at the period of which we are telling the story; for example, the question whether Charles IX. fired with his own hand on his Protestant subjects whom he had delivered over to the evil pa.s.sions of the aristocracy and of the populace, or whether the balcony from which he is said to have indulged in this ferocious pastime existed at that time, in the sixteenth century, at the palace of the Louvre, and overlooking the Seine. These questions are not without historic interest, and it is well for learned men to study them; but we consider them incapable of being resolved with certainty; and, even were they resolved, they would not give the key to the character of Charles IX. and to the portion which appertains to him in the deed of cruelty with which his name remains connected. The great historic fact of the St. Bartholomew is what we confine ourselves to; and we have attempted to depict it accurately as regards Charles IX.'s hesitations and equally feverish resolutions, his intermixture of open-heartedness and double-dealing in his treatment of Coliguy, towards whom he felt himself drawn without quite understanding him, and his puerile weakness in presence of his mother, whom he feared far more than he trusted. When he had plunged into the orgies of the ma.s.sacre, when, after having said, "Kill them all!" he had seen the slaughter of his companions in his royal amus.e.m.e.nts, Teligny and La Rochefoucauld, Charles IX. abandoned himself to a fit of mad pa.s.sion. He was asked whether the two young Huguenot princes, Henry of Navarre and Henry de Conde, were to be killed also; Marshal de Retz had been in favor of it; Marshal de Tavannes had been opposed to it; and it was decided to spare them. On the very night of the St. Bartholomew, the king sent for them both. "I mean for the future," said he, "to have but one religion in my kingdom; the ma.s.s or death; make your choice." Henry of Navarre reminded the king of his promises, and asked for time to consider; Henry de Conde "answered that he would remain firm in the true religion though he should have to give up his life for it." "Seditious madman, rebel, and son of a rebel," said Charles, "if within three days you do not change your language, I will have you strangled." At this first juncture, the king saved from the ma.s.sacre none but his surgeon, Ambrose Pare, and his nurse, both Huguenots; on the very night after the murder of Coligny, he sent for Ambrose Pare into his chamber, and made him go into his wardrobe, says Brantome, "ordering him not to stir, and saying that it was not reasonable that one who was able to be of service to a whole little world should be thus ma.s.sacred." A few days afterwards, "Now," said the king to Pare, "you really must be a Catholic." "By G.o.d's light," answered Pars, "I think you must surely remember, sir, to have promised me, in order that I might never disobey you, never, on the other hand, to bid me do four things--find my way back into my mother's womb, catch myself fighting in a battle, leave your service, or go to ma.s.s." After a moment's silence Charles rejoined, "Ambrose, I don't know what has come over me for the last two or three days, but I feel my mind and my body greatly excited, in fact, just as if I had a fever; meseems every moment, just as much waking as sleeping, that those ma.s.sacred corpses keep appearing to me with their faces all hideous and covered with blood. I wish the helpless and the innocent had not been included." "And in consequence of the reply made to him," adds Sully in his (_Economies royales_ t. i. p. 244, in the Pet.i.tot collection), "he next day issued his orders, prohibiting, on pain of death, any slaying or plundering; the which were, nevertheless, very ill observed, the animosities and fury of the populace being too much inflamed to defer to them."

The historians, Catholic or Protestant, contemporary or researchful, differ widely as to the number of the victims in this cruel ma.s.sacre; according to De Thou, there were about two thousand persons killed in Paris the first day; D'Aubigne says three thousand; Brantome speaks of four thousand bodies that Charles IX. might have seen floating down the Seine; La Popeliniere reduces them to one thousand. There is to be found, in the account-books of the city of Paris, a payment to the grave-diggers of the cemetery of the Innocents for having interred eleven hundred dead bodies stranded at the turns of the Seine near Chaillot, Auteuil, and St. Cloud; it is probable that many corpses were carried still farther, and the corpses were not all thrown into the river. The uncertainty is still greater when one comes to speak of the number of victims throughout the whole of France; De Thou estimates it at thirty thousand, Sully at seventy thousand, Perefixe, Archbishop of Paris in the seventeenth century, raises it to one hundred thousand; Papirius Ma.s.son and Davila reduce it to ten thousand, without clearly distinguishing between the ma.s.sacre of Paris and those of the provinces; other historians fix upon forty thousand. Great uncertainty also prevails as to the execution of the orders issued from Paris to the governors at the provinces; the names of the Viscount d'Orte, governor of Bayonne, and of John le Hennuyer, Bishop of Lisieux, have become famous from their having refused to take part in the ma.s.sacre; but the authenticity of the letter from the Viscount d'Orte to Charles IX. is disputed, though the fact of his resistance appears certain; and as for the bishop, John le Hennuyer, M. de Formeville seems to us to have demonstrated in his _Histoire de l'ancien Eveche-comte de Lisieux_ (t. ii. pp. 299-314), "that there was no occasion to save the Protestants of Lisieux, in 1572, because they did not find themselves in any danger of being ma.s.sacred, and that the merit of it cannot be attributed to anybody, to the bishop, Le Hennuyer, any more than to Captain Fumichon, governor of the town. It was only the general course of events and the discretion of the munic.i.p.al officers of Lisieux that did it all." One thing which is quite true, and which it is good to call to mind in the midst of so great a general criminality, is that, at many spots in France, it met with a refusal to be a.s.sociated in it; President Jeannin at Dijon, the Count de Tende in Provence, Philibert de la Guiche at Macon, Tanneguy le Veneur de Carrouge at Rouen, the Count de Gordes in Dauphiny, and many other chiefs, military or civil, openly repudiated the example set by the murderers of Paris; and the munic.i.p.al body of Nantes, a very Catholic town, took upon this subject, as has been proved from authentic doc.u.ments by M. Vaurigaud, pastor of the Reformed Church at Nantes [in his _Essai sur l'Histoire des Eglises reformees de Bretagne,_ t. i. pp. 190-194], a resolution which does honor to its patriotic firmness as well as to its Christian loyalty.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Chancellor Michael de l'Hospital----376]

A great, good man, a great functionary, and a great scholar, in disgrace for six years past, the Chancellor Michael de l'Hospital, received about this time, in his retreat at Vignay, a visit from a great philosopher, Michael de Montaigne, "anxious," said the visitor, "to come and testify to you the honor and reverence with which I regard your competence and the special qualities which are in you; for, as to the extraneous and the fortuitous, it is not to my taste to put them down in the account."

Montaigne chose a happy moment for disregarding all but the personal, and special qualities of the chancellor; shortly after his departure, L'Hospital was warned that some sinister-looking hors.e.m.e.n were coming, and that he would do well to take care of himself. "No matter, no matter," he answered; "it will be as G.o.d pleases when my hour has come."

Next day he was told that those men were approaching his house, and he was asked whether he would not have the gates shut against them, and have them fired upon, in case they attempted to force an entrance. "No," said he, "if the small gate will not do for them to enter by, let the big one be opened." A few hours afterwards, L'Hospital was informed that the king and the queen-mother were sending other hors.e.m.e.n to protect him.

"I didn't know," said the old man, "that I had deserved either death or pardon." A rumor of his death flew abroad amongst his enemies, who rejoiced at it. "We are told," wrote Cardinal Granvelle to his agent at Brussels (October 8, 1572), "that the king has had Chancellor de l'Hospital and his wife despatched, which would be a great blessing."

The agent, more enlightened than his chief, denied the fact, adding, "They are a fine bit of rubbish left, L'Hospital and his wife." Charles IX. wrote to his old adviser to rea.s.sure him, "loving you as I do." Some time after, however, he demanded of him his resignation of the t.i.tle of chancellor, wishing to confer it upon La Birague, to reward him for his co-operation in the St. Bartholomew. L'Hospital gave in his resignation on the 1st of February, 1573, and died six weeks afterwards, on the 18th of March. "I am just at the end of my long journey, and shall have no more business but with G.o.d," he wrote to the king and the queen-mother.

"I implore Him to give you His grace, and to lead you with His hand in all your affairs, and in the government of this great and beautiful kingdom which He hath committed to your keeping, with all gentleness and clemency towards your good subjects, in imitation of Himself, who is good and, patient in bearing our burdens, and prompt to forgive you and pardon you everything."

From the 24th to the 31st of August, 1572, the bearing and conduct of Charles IX. and the queen-mother produced nothing but a confused ma.s.s of orders and counter-orders, affirmations and denials, words and actions incoherent and contradictory, all caused by a habit of lying and the desire of escaping from the peril or embarra.s.sment of the moment. On the very first day of the ma.s.sacre, about midday, the provost of tradesmen and the sheriffs, who had not taken part in the "Paris matins," came complaining to the king "of the pillage, sack, and murder which were being committed by many belonging to the suite of his Majesty, as well as to those of the princes, princesses, and lords of the court, by n.o.blemen, archers, and soldiers of the guard, as well as by all sorts of gentry and people mixed with them and under their wing." Charles ordered them "to get on horseback, take with them all the forces in the city, and keep their eyes open day and night to put a stop to the said murder, pillage, and sedition arising," he said, "because of the rivalry between the houses of Guise and Chatillon, and because they of Guise had been threatened by the admiral's friends, who suspected them of being at the bottom of the hurt inflicted upon him." He, the same day, addressed to the governors of the provinces a letter in which he invested the disturbance with the same character, and gave the same explanation of it.

The Guises complained violently at being thus disavowed by the king, who had the face to throw upon them alone the odium of the ma.s.sacre which he had ordered. Next day, August 25, the king wrote to all his agents, at home and abroad, another letter, affirming that "what had happened at Paris had been done solely to prevent the execution of an accursed conspiracy which the admiral and his allies had concocted against him, his mother, and his brothers;" and, on the 26th of August, he went with his two brothers to hold in state a bed of justice, and make to the Parliament the same declaration against Coligny and his party. "He could not," he said, "have parried so fearful a blow but by another very violent one; and he wished all the world to know that what had happened at Paris had been done not only with his consent, but by his express command." Whereupon it was enjoined upon the court, says De Thou, "to cause investigations to be made as to the conspiracy of Coligny, and to decree what it should consider proper, conformably with the laws and with justice." The next day but one, August 28, appeared a royal manifesto running, "The king willeth and intendeth that all n.o.blemen and others whosoever of the religion styled Reformed be empowered to live and abide in all security and liberty, with their wives, children, and families, in their houses, as they have heretofore done and were empowered to do by benefit of the edicts of pacification. And nevertheless, for to obviate the troubles, scandals, suspicion, and distrust, which might arise by reason of the services and a.s.semblies that might take place both in the houses of the said n.o.blemen and elsewhere, as is permitted by the aforesaid edicts of pacification, his Majesty doth lay very express inhibitions and prohibitions upon all the said n.o.blemen and others of the said religion against holding a.s.semblies, on any account whatsoever, until that, by the said lord the king, after having provided for the tranquillity of his kingdom, it be otherwise ordained. And that, on pain of confiscation of body and goods in case of disobedience."

These tardy and lying accusations officially brought against Coligny and his friends; these promises of liberty and security for the Protestants, renewed in the terms of the edicts of pacification, and, in point of fact, annulled at the very moment at which they were being renewed; the ma.s.sacre continuing here and there in France, at one time with the secret connivance and at another notwithstanding the publicly-given word of the king and the queen-mother; all this policy, at one and the same time violent and timorous, incoherent and stubborn, produced amongst the Protestants two contrary effects: some grew frightened, others angry.

At court, under the direct influence of the king and his surroundings, "submission to the powers that be" prevailed; many fled; others, without abjuring their religion, abjured their party. The two Reformer-princes, Henry of Navarre and Henry de Conde, attended ma.s.s on the 29th of September, and, on the 3d of October, wrote to the pope, deploring their errors and giving hopes of their conversion. Far away from Paris, in the mountains of the Pyrenees and of Languedoc, in the towns where the Reformers were numerous and confident, at Sancerre, at Montauban, at Nimes, at La Roch.e.l.le, the spirit of resistance carried the day. An a.s.sembly, meeting at Milhau, drew up a provisional ordinance for the government of the Reformed church, "until it please G.o.d, who has the hearts of kings in His keeping, to change that of King Charles IX. and restore the state of France to good order, or to raise up such neighboring prince as is manifestly marked out, by his virtue and by distinguishing signs, for to be the liberator of this poor afflicted people." In November, 1572, the fourth religious war broke out. The siege of La Roch.e.l.le was its only important event. Charles IX. and his councillors exerted themselves in vain to avoid it. There was everything to disquiet them in this enterprise: so sudden a revival of the religious war after the grand blow they had just struck, the pa.s.sionate energy manifested by the Protestants in asylum at La Roch.e.l.le, and the help they had been led to hope for from Queen Elizabeth, whom England would never have forgiven for indifference in this cause. Marshal de Biron, who was known to favor the Reformers, was appointed governor of La Roch.e.l.le; but he could not succeed in gaining admittance within the walls, even alone and for the purpose of parleying with the inhabitants. The king heard that one of the bravest Protestant chiefs, La Noue _Ironarm,_ had retired to Mons with Prince Louis of Na.s.sau. The Duke of Longueville, his old enemy, induced him to go to Paris. The king received him with great favor, gave up to him the property of Teligny, whose sister La Noue had married, and pressed him to go to La Roch.e.l.le and prevail upon the inhabitants to keep the peace. La Noue refused, saying that he was not at all fitted for this commission. The king promised that he would ask nothing of him which could wound his honor. La Noue at last consented, and repaired, about the end of November, 1572, to a village close by La Roch.e.l.le, whither it was arranged that deputies from the town would come and confer with him. And they came, in fact, but at their first meeting, "We are come," they said, "to confer with M. de La Noue, but we do not see him here." La Noue got angry. "I am astonished," he said, "that you have so soon forgotten one who has received so many wounds and lost an arm fighting for you." "Yes, there is a M. de La Noue, who was one of us, and who bravely defended our cause; but he never flattered us with vain hopes, he never invited us to conferences to betray us." La Noue got more fiercely angry. "All I ask of you is, to report to the senate what I have to say to them." They complied, and came back with permission for him to enter the town. The people looked at him, as he pa.s.sed, with a mixture of distrust and interest. After hearing him, the senate rejected the pacific overtures made to them by La Noue. "We have no mind to treat specially and for ourselves alone; our cause is that of G.o.d and of all the churches of France; we will accept nothing but what shall seem proper to all our brethren. For yourself, we give you your choice between three propositions: remain in our town as a simple burgess, and we will give you quarters; if you like better to be our commandant, all the n.o.bility and the people will gladly have you for their head, and will fight with confidence under your orders; if neither of these propositions suits you, you shall be welcome to go aboard one of our vessels and cross over to England, where you will find many of your friends." La Noue did not hesitate; he became, under the authority of the mayor Jacques Henri, the military head of La Roch.e.l.le, whither Charles IX. had sent him to make peace. The king authorized him to accept this singular position. La Noue conducted himself so honorably in it, and everybody was so convinced of his good faith as well as bravery, that for three months he commanded inside La Roch.e.l.le, and superintended the preparations for defence, all the while trying to make the chances of peace prevail. At the end of February, 1573, he recognized the impossibility of his double commission, and he went away from La Roch.e.l.le, leaving the place in better condition than that in which he had found it, without either king or Roch.e.l.lese considering that they had any right to complain of him.

Biron first and then the Duke of Anjou in person took the command of the siege. They brought up, it is said, forty thousand men and sixty pieces of artillery. The Roch.e.l.lese, for defensive strength, had but twenty-two companies of refugees or inhabitants, making in all thirty-one hundred men. The siege lasted from the 26th of February to the 13th of June, 1573; six a.s.saults were made on the place; in the last, the ladders had been set at night against the wall of what was called Gospel bastion; the Duke of Guise, at the head of the a.s.sailants, had escaladed the breach, but there he discovered a new ditch and a new rampart erected inside; and, confronted by these unforeseen obstacles, the men recoiled and fell back. La Roch.e.l.le was saved. Charles IX. was more and more desirous of peace; his brother, the Duke of Anjou, had just been elected King of Poland; Charles IX. was anxious for him to leave France and go to take possession of his new kingdom. Thanks to these complications, the peace of La Roch.e.l.le was signed on the 6th of July, 1573. Liberty of creed and worship was recognized in the three towns of La Roch.e.l.le, Montauban, and Nimes. They were not obliged to receive any royal garrison, on condition of giving hostages to be kept by the king for two years. Liberty of worship throughout the extent of their jurisdiction continued to be recognized in the case of lords high-justiciary. Everywhere else the Reformers had promises of not being persecuted for their creed, under the obligation of never holding an a.s.sembly of more than ten persons at a time. These were the most favorable conditions they had yet obtained.

Certainly this was not what Charles IX. had calculated upon when he consented to the ma.s.sacre of the Protestants. "Provided," he had said, "that not a single one is left to reproach me." The ma.s.sacre had been accomplished almost without any resistance but that offered by certain governors of provinces or towns, who had refused to take part in it. The chief leader of French Protestantism, Coligny, had been the first victim.

Far more than that, the Parliament of Paris had accepted the royal lie which accused Coligny of conspiring for the downfall of the king and the royal house; a decree, on that very ground, sentenced to condemnation the memory, the family, and the property of Coligny, with all sorts of rigorous, we should rather say atrocious, circ.u.mstances. And after having succeeded so well against the Protestants, Charles IX. saw them recovering again, renewing the struggle with him, and wresting from him such concessions as he had never yet made to them. More than ever might he exclaim, "Then I shall never have rest!" The news that came to him from abroad was not more calculated to satisfy him.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The St. Bartholomew----383]

The St. Bartholomew had struck Europe with surprise and horror; not only amongst the princes and in the countries that were Protestant, in England, Scotland, and Northern Europe, but in Catholic Germany itself, there was a very strong feeling of reprobation; the Emperor Maximilian II. and the Elector Palatine Frederic III., called the Pious, showed it openly; when the Duke of Anjou, elected King of Poland, went through Germany to go and take possession of his kingdom, he was received at Heidelberg with premeditated coolness. When he arrived at the gate of the castle, not a soul went to meet him; alone he ascended the steps, and found in the hall a picture representing the ma.s.sacre of St. Bartholomew; the elector called his attention to the portraits of the princ.i.p.al victims, amongst others that of Coligny, and at table he was waited upon solely by French Protestant refugees. At Rome itself, in the midst of official satisfaction and public demonstrations of it exhibited by the pontifical court, the truth came out, and Pope Gregory XIII. was touched by it when certain of my lords the cardinals who were beside him "asked wherefore he wept and was sad at so goodly a despatch of those wretched folk, enemies of G.o.d and of his Holiness: 'I weep,' said the pope, 'at the means the king used, exceeding unlawful and forbidden of G.o.d, for to inflict such punishment; I fear that one will fall upon him, and that he will not have a very long bout of it (will not live very long). I fear, too, that amongst so many dead folk there died as many innocent as guilty.'" [_Brantome,_ t. iv. p. 306. He attributes this language to Pope Pius V., who died four months before the St. Bartholomew. Gregory XIII., elected May 15, 1572, was pope when the ma.s.sacre took place.] Only the King of Spain, Philip II., a fanatical despot, and pitiless persecutor, showed complete satisfaction at the event; and he offered Charles IX. the a.s.sistance of his army, if he had need of it, against what there was remaining of heretics in his kingdom.

Charles IX. had not mind or character sufficiently sound or sufficiently strong to support, without great perturbation, the effect of so many violent, repeated, and often contradictory impressions. Catherine de Medici had brought up her three sons solely with a view of having their confidence and implicit obedience. "All the actions of the queen-mother," said the Venetian amba.s.sador Sigismund Cavalli, who had for a long while resided at her court, "have always been prompted and regulated by one single pa.s.sion, the pa.s.sion of ruling." Her son Charles had yielded to it without an effort in his youth. "He was accustomed to say that, until he was five and twenty, he meant to play the fool; that is to say, to think of nothing but of enjoying his heyday; accordingly he showed aversion for speaking and treating of business, putting himself altogether in his mother's hands. Now, he no longer thinks and acts in the same way. I have been told that, since the late events, he requires to have the same thing said more than three times over by the queen, before obeying her." It was not with regard to his mother only that Charles had changed. "His looks," says Cavalli, "have become melancholy and sombre; in his conversations and audiences he does not look the speaker in the face; he droops his head, closes his eyes, opens them all at once, and, as if he found the movement painful, closes them again with no less suddenness. It is feared that the demon of vengeance has possessed him; he used to be merely severe; it is feared that he is becoming cruel. He is temperate in his diet; drinks nothing but water.

To tire himself at any price, is his object. He remains on horseback for twelve or fourteen consecutive hours; and so he goes hunting and coursing through the woods the same animal, the stag, for two or three days, never stopping but to eat, and never resting but for an instant during the night." He was pa.s.sionately fond of all bodily exercises, the practice of arms, and the game of tennis. "He had a forge set up for himself,"

says Brantome, "and I have seen him forging cannon, and horseshoes, and other things as stoutly as the most robust farriers and forgemen." He, at the same time, showed a keen and intelligent interest in intellectual works and pleasures. He often had a meeting, in the evening, of poets, men of letters, and artists--Ronsard, Amadis Jamin, Jodelle, Daurat, Baif; in 1570 he gave them letters patent for the establishment of an Academy of poetry and music, the first literary society founded in France by a king; but it disappeared amidst the civil wars. Charles IX.

himself sang in the choir, and he composed a few hunting-airs. Ronsard was a favorite, almost a friend, with him; he used to take him with him on his trips, and give him quarters in his palace, and there was many an interchange of verse between them, in which Ronsard did not always have the advantage. Charles gave a literary outlet to his pa.s.sion for hunting; he wrote a little treatise ent.i.tled La Cha.s.se royale, which was not published until 1625, and of which M. Henry Chevreul brought out, in 1857, a charming and very correct edition. Charles IX. dedicated it to his lieutenant of the hunt, Mesnil, in terms of such modest and affectionate simplicity that they deserve to be kept in remembrance.

"Mesnil," said the king, "I should feel myself far too ungrateful, and expect to be chidden for presumption, if, in this little treatise that I am minded to make upon stag hunting, I did not, before any one begins to read it, avow and confess that I learnt from you what little I know.

. . . I beg you, also, Mesnil, to be pleased to correct and erase what there is wrong in the said treatise, the which, if peradventure it is so done that there is nothing more required than to re-word and alter, the credit will be firstly yours for having so well taught me, and then mine for having so well remembered. Well, then, having been taught by so good a master, I will be bold enough to essay it, begging you to accept it as heartily as I present it and dedicate it to you."

These details and this quotation are allowable in order to shed full light upon the private and incoherent character of this king, who bears the responsibility of one of the most tragic events in French history.

In the spring of 1574, at the age of twenty-three years and eleven months, and after a reign of eleven years and six months, Charles IX.

was attacked by an inflammatory malady, which brought on violent hemorrhage; he was revisited, in his troubled sleep, by the same b.l.o.o.d.y visions about which, a few days after the St. Bartholomew, he had spoken to Ambrose Pare. He no longer retained in his room anybody but two of his servants and his nurse, "of whom he was very fond, although she was a Huguenot," says the contemporary chronicler Peter de l'Estoile. "When she had lain down upon a chest, and was just beginning to doze, hearing the king moaning, weeping, and sighing, she went full gently up to the bed. 'Ah, nurse, nurse,' said the king, 'what bloodshed and what murders! Ah! what evil counsel have I followed! O, my G.o.d! forgive me them and have mercy upon me, if it may please Thee! I know not what hath come to me, so bewildered and agitated do they make me. What will be the end of it all? What shall I do? I am lost; I see it well.' Then said the nurse to him, 'Sir, the murders be on the heads of those who made you do them! Of yourself, sir, you never could; and since you are not consenting thereto, and are sorry therefor, believe that G.o.d will not put them down to your account, and will hide them with the cloak of justice of His Son, to whom alone you must have recourse. But for G.o.d's sake, let your Majesty cease weeping!' And thereupon, having been to fetch him a pocket-handkerchief, because his own was soaked with tears, after that the king had taken it from her hand, he signed to her to go away and leave him to his rest."

On Sunday, May 30, 1574, Whitsunday, about three in the afternoon, Charles IX. expired, after having signed an ordinance conferring the regency upon his mother Catherine, "who accepted it," was the expression in the letters patent, "at the request of the Duke of Alencon, the King of Navarre, and other princes and peers of France." According to D'Aubigne, Charles used often to say of his brother Henry, that, "when he had a kingdom on his hands, the administration would find him out, and that he would disappoint those who had hopes of him." The last words he said were, "that he was glad not to have left any young child to succeed him, very well knowing that France needs a man, and that, with a child, the king and the reign are unhappy."

CHAPTER x.x.xIV.----HENRY III. AND THE RELIGIOUS WARS. (1574-1589.)

[Ill.u.s.tration: Henry III----388]

Though elected King of Poland on the 9th of May, 1573, Henry, Duke of Anjou, had not yet left Paris at the end of the summer. Impatient at his slowness to depart, Charles IX. said, with his usual oath, "By G.o.d's death! my brother or I must at once leave the kingdom: my mother shall not succeed in preventing it." "Go," said Catherine to Henry; "you will not be away long." She foresaw, with no great sorrow one would say, the death of Charles IX., and her favorite son's accession to the throne of France. Having arrived in Poland on the 25th of January, 1574, and been crowned at Cracow on the 24th of February, Henry had been scarcely four months King of Poland when he was apprised, about the middle of June, that his brother Charles had lately died, on the 30th of May, and that he was King of France. "Do not waste your time in deliberating," said his French advisers; "you must go and take possession of the throne of France without abdicating that of Poland: go at once and without fuss." Henry followed this counsel. He left Cracow, on the 18th of June, with a very few attendants. Some Poles were apprehensive of his design, but said nothing about it. He went a quarter of a league on foot to reach the horses which were awaiting him, set off at a gallop, rode all night, and arrived next day early on the frontier of Moravia, an Austrian province.

The royal flight created a great uproar at Cracow; the n.o.blemen, and even the peasants, armed with stakes and scythes, set out in pursuit of their king. They did not come up with him; they fell in with his chancellor only, Guy du Faur, Sieur de Pibrac, who had missed him at the appointed meeting-place, and who, whilst seeking to rejoin him, had lost himself in the forests and marshes, concealed himself in the osiers and reeds, and been obliged now and then to dip his head, in the mud to avoid the arrows discharged on all sides by the peasants in pursuit of the king. Being arrested by some people who were for taking him back to Cracow and paying him out for his complicity in his master's flight, he with great difficulty obtained his release and permission to continue his road.

Destined to become more celebrated by his writings and by his Quatrains moraux than by his courtly adventures, Pibrac rejoined King Henry at Vienna, where the Emperor Maximilian II. received him with great splendor. Delivered from fatigue and danger, Henry appeared to think of nothing but resting and diverting himself; he tarried to his heart's content at Vienna, Venice, Ferrara, Mantua, and Turin. He was everywhere welcomed with brilliant entertainments, which the Emperor Maximilian and the senators of Venice accompanied with good advice touching the government of France in her religious troubles; and the nominal sovereign of two kingdoms took nearly three months in going from that whence he had fled to that of which he was about to take possession. Having started from Cracow on the 18th of June, 1574, he did not arrive until the 5th of September at Lyons, whither the queen-mother had sent his brother, the Duke of Alencon, and his brother-in-law, the King of Navarre, to receive him, going herself as far as Bourgoin in Dauphiny, in order to be the first to see her darling son again.

The king's entry into France caused, says De Thou, a strange revulsion in all minds. "During the lifetime of Charles IX., none had seemed more worthy of the throne than Henry, and everybody desired to have him for master. But scarcely had he arrived when disgust set in to the extent of auguring very ill of his reign. There was no longer any trace in this prince, who had been nursed, so to speak, in the lap of war, of that manly and warlike courage which had been so much admired. He no longer rode on horseback; he did not show himself amongst his people, as his predecessors had been wont to do; he was only to be seen shut up with a few favorites in a little painted boat which went up and down the Saone he no longer took his meals without a bal.u.s.trade, which did not allow him to be approached any Hearer; and if anybody had any pet.i.tions to present to him, they had to wait for him as he came out from dinner, when he took them as he hurried by. For the greater part of the day he remained closeted with some young folks, who alone had the prince's ear, without any body's knowing how they had arrived at this distinction, whilst the great, and those whose services were known, could scarcely get speech of him. Showiness and effeminacy had taken the place of the grandeur and majesty which had formerly distinguished our kings." [De Thou, _Histoire universelle,_ t. vii. p. 134.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Indolence of Henry III---390]

"The time was ill chosen by Henry III. for this change of habits and for becoming an indolent and voluptuous king, set upon taking his pleasure in his court and isolating himself from his people. The condition and ideas of France were also changing, but to issue in the a.s.sumption of quite a different character and to receive development in quite a different direction. Catholics or Protestants, agents of the king's government or malcontents, all were getting a taste for and adopting the practice of independence and a vigorous and spontaneous activity. The bonds of the feudal system were losing their hold, and were not yet replaced by those of a hierarchically organized administration. Religious creeds and political ideas were becoming, for thoughtful and straightforward spirits, rules of conduct, powerful motives of action, and they furnished the ambitious with effective weapons. The theologians of the Catholic church and of the Reformed churches--on one side the Cardinal of Lorraine, Cardinals Campeggi and Sadolet, and other learned priests or prelates, and on the other side Calvin, who had been nursed, so to speak, in the lap of war, of that manly and warlike courage which had been so much admired. He no longer rode on horseback; he did not show himself amongst his people, as his predecessors had been wont to do; he was only to be seen shut up with a few favorites in a little painted boat which went up and down the Saone he no longer took his meals without a bal.u.s.trade, which did not allow him to be approached any nearer; and if anybody had any pet.i.tions to present to him, they had to wait for him as he came out from dinner, when he took them as he hurried by. For the greater part of the day he remained closeted with some young folks, who alone had the prince's ear, without anybody's knowing how they had arrived at this distinction, whilst the great, and those whose services were known, could scarcely get speech of him. Showiness and effeminacy had taken the place of the grandeur and majesty which had formerly distinguished our kings." [De Thou, Histoire universelle, t. vii.

p. 134.]

The time was ill chosen by Henry III. for this change of habits and for becoming an indolent and voluptuous king, set upon taking his pleasure in his court and isolating himself from his people. The condition and ideas of France were also changing, but to issue in the a.s.sumption of quite a different character and to receive development in quite a different direction. Catholics or Protestants, agents of the king's government or malcontents, all were getting a taste for and adopting the practice of independence and a vigorous and spontaneous activity. The bonds of the feudal system were losing their hold, and were not yet replaced by those of a hierarchically organized administration.

Religious creeds and political ideas were becoming, for thoughtful and straightforward spirits, rules of conduct, powerful motives of action, and they furnished the ambitious with effective weapons. The theologians of the Catholic church and of the Reformed churches--on one side the Cardinal of Lorraine, Cardinals Campeggi and Sadolet, and other learned priests or prelates, and on the other side Calvin, Theodore de Beze, Melancthon, and Bucer--were working with zeal to build up into systems of dogma their interpretations of the great facts of Christianity, and they succeeded in implanting a pa.s.sionate attachment to them in their flocks.

Independently of these religious controversies, superior minds, profound lawyers, learned scholars were applying their energies to founding, on a philosophical basis and historic principles, the organization of governments and the reciprocal rights of princes and peoples. Ramus, one of the last and of the most to be lamented victims of the St. Bartholomew; Francis Hotman, who, in his Franco-Gallia, aspired to graft the new national liberties upon the primitive inst.i.tutions of the Franks; Hubert Languet, the eloquent author of the _Vindicice contra tyrannos, or de la Puissance legitime du Prince cur le Peuple et du Peuple sur le Prince;_ John Bodin, the first, in original merit, amongst the publicists of the sixteenth century, in his _six livres de LA REPUBLIQUE;_ all these eminent men boldly tackled the great questions of political liberty or of legislative reforms. _Le Contre-un,_ that republican treatise by De la Boetie, written in 1546, and circulated, at first, in ma.n.u.script only, was inserted, between 1576 and 1578, in the _Memoires de l'Etat de France,_ and pa.s.sionately extolled by the independent thinker Michael de Montaigne in his Essais, of which nine editions were published between 1580 and 1598, and evidently very much read in the world of letters. An intellectual movement so active and powerful could not fail to have a potent effect upon political life.

Before the St. Bartholomew, the great religious and political parties, the Catholic and the Protestant, were formed and at grips; the house of Lorraine at the head of the Catholics, and the house of Bourbon, Conde, and Coligny at the head of the Protestants, with royalty trying feebly and vainly to maintain between them a hollow peace. To this stormy and precarious, but organized and clearly defined condition, the St. Bartholomew had caused anarchy to succeed. Protestantism, vanquished but not destroyed, broke up into provincial and munic.i.p.al a.s.sociations without recognized and dominant heads, without discipline or combination in respect of either their present management or their ultimate end. Catholicism, though victorious, likewise underwent a break-up; men of mark, towns and provinces, would not accept the St. Bartholomew and its consequences; a new party, the party of the policists, sprang up, opposed to the principle and abjuring the practice of persecution, having no mind to follow either the Catholics in their outrages or royalty in its tergiversations, and striving to maintain in the provinces and the towns, where it had the upper hand, enough of order and of justice to at least keep at a distance the civil war which was elsewhere raging. Languedoc owed to Marshal de Damville, second son of the Constable Anne de Montmorency, this comparatively bearable position.

But the degree of security and of local peace which it offered the people was so imperfect, so uncertain, that the break-up of the country and of the state went still farther. In a part of Languedoc, in the Vivarais, the inhabitants, in order to put their habitations and their property in safety, resolved to make a league amongst themselves, without consulting any authority, not even Marshal de Damville, the peace-seeking governor of their province. Their treaty of alliance ran, that arms should be laid down throughout the whole of the Vivarais; that none, foreigner or native, should be liable to trouble for the past; that tillers of the soil and traders should suffer no detriment in person or property; that all hostilities should cease in the towns and all forays in the country; that there should everywhere be entire freedom for commerce; that cattle which had been lifted should be immediately restored gratis; that concerted action should be taken to get rid of the garrisons out of the country and to raze the fortresses, according as the public weal might require; and finally that whosoever should dare to violate these regulations should be regarded as a traitor and punished as a disturber of the public peace. "As soon as the different authorities in the state, Marshal de Damville as well as the rest, were informed of this novelty,"

says De Thou, "they made every effort to prevent it from taking effect.

'Nothing could be of more dangerous example,' they said, 'than to suffer the people to make treaties in this way and on their own authority, without waiting for the consent of his Majesty or of those who represented him in the provinces.' The folks of the Vivarais, on the contrary, presumed to justify themselves by saying that the step they had taken did not in any way infringe the king's authority; that it was rather an opening given by them for securely establishing tranquillity in the kingdom; that nothing was more advantageous or could contribute more towards peace than to raze all those fortresses set up in the heart of the state, which were like so many depots of revolt; that by a diminution of the garrisons the revenues of his Majesty would be proportionately augmented; that, at any rate, there would result this advantage, that the lands, which formed almost the whole wealth of the kingdom, would be cultivated, that commerce would flourish, and that the people, delivered from fear of the many scoundrels who, found a retreat in those places, would at last be able to draw breath after the many misfortunes they had experienced."

It was in this condition of disorganization and red-hot anarchy that Henry III., on his return from Poland, and after the St. Bartholomew, found France; it was in the face of all these forces, full of life, but scattered and excited one against another, that, with the aid of his mother, Catherine, he had to re-establish unity in the state, the effectiveness of the government, and the public peace. It was not a task for which the tact of an utterly corrupted woman and an irresolute prince sufficed. What could the artful manoeuvrings of Catherine and the waverings of Henry III. do towards taming both Catholics and Protestants at the same time, and obliging them to live at peace with one another, under one equitable and effective power? Henry IV. was as yet unformed, nor was his hour yet come for this great work. Henry III. and Catherine de' Medici failed in it completely; their government of fifteen years served only to make them lose their reputation for ability, and to aggravate for France the evils which it was their business to heal. In 1575, a year only after Henry III.'s accession, revolt penetrated to the royal household. The Duke of Alencon, the king's younger brother, who, since his brother's coronation, took the t.i.tle of Duke of Anjou, escaped on the 15th of September from the Louvre by a window, and from Paris by a hole made in the wall of circ.u.mvallation. He fled to Dreux, a town in his appanage, and put himself at the head of a large number of malcontents, n.o.bles and burgesses, Catholic and Reformed, mustered around him under this name of no religious significance between the two old parties. On the 17th of September, in his manifesto, he gave as reasons for his revolt, excessive taxation, waste of the public revenues, the feebleness of the royal authority, incapable as it was of putting a stop to the religious troubles, and the disgrace which had been inflicted upon himself "by pernicious ministers who desire to have the government in their sole patronage, excluding from it the foremost and the most ill.u.s.trious of the court, and devouring all that there is remaining to the poor people." He protested his devotion to the king his brother, at the same time declaring war against the Guises.

King Henry of Navarre, testifying little sympathy with the Duke of Anjou, remained at court, abandoning himself apparently to his pleasures alone.

Two of his faithful servants (the poet-historian D'Aubigne was one of them) heard him one night sighing as he lay in bed, and humming half aloud this versicle from the eighty-eighth Psalm:--

"Removed from friends, I sigh alone, In a loathed dungeon laid, where none A visit will vouchsafe to me, Confined past hope of liberty."

"Sir," said D'Aubigne eagerly, "it is true, then, that the Sprit of G.o.d worketh and dwelleth in you still? You sigh unto G.o.d because of the absence of your friends and faithful servants; and all the while they are together, sighing because of yours and laboring for your freedom. But you have only tears in your eyes, and they, arms in hand, are fighting your enemies. As for us two, we were talking of taking to flight tomorrow, when your voice made us draw the curtain. Bethink you, sir, that, after us, the hands that will serve you would not dare refuse to employ poison and the knife." Henry, much moved, resolved to follow the example of the Duke of Anjou. His departure was fixed for the 3d of February, 1576. He went and slept at Senlis; hunted next day very early, and, on his return from hunting, finding his horses baited and ready, "What news?" he asked. "Sir," said D'Aubigne, "we are betrayed; the king knows all; the road to death and shame is Paris; that to life and glory is anywhere else." "That is more than enough; away!" replied Henry.

They rode all night, and arrived without misadventure at Alencon. Two hundred and fifty gentlemen, having been apprised in time, went thither to join the King of Navarre. He pursued his road in their company. From Senlis to the Loire he was silent but when he had crossed the river, "Praised be G.o.d, who has delivered me!" he cried; "at Paris they were the death of my mother; there they killed the admiral and my best servants; and they had no mind to do any better by me, if G.o.d had not had me in his keeping. I return thither no more unless I am dragged. I regret only two things that I have left behind at Paris--ma.s.s and my wife. As for ma.s.s, I will try to do without it; but as for my wife, I cannot; I mean to see her again." He disavowed the appearances of Catholicism he had a.s.sumed, again made open profession of Protestantism by holding at the baptismal font, in the conventicle, the daughter of a physician amongst his friends. Then he reached Bearn, declaring that he meant to remain there independent and free. A few days before his departure he had written to one of his Bearnese friends, "The court is the strangest you ever saw. We are almost always ready to cut one another's throats. We wear daggers, shirts of mail, and very often the whole cuira.s.s under the cape. I am only waiting for the opportunity to deliver a little battle, for they tell me they will kill me, and I want to be beforehand."

Mesdames de Carnavalet and de Sauve, two of his fair friends, had warned him that, far from giving him the lieutenant-generalship, which had been so often promised him, it had been decided to confer this office on the king's brother, in order to get him back to court and seize his person as soon as he arrived.

It was the increasing preponderance of the Guises, at court as well as in the country, which caused the two princes to take this sudden resolution.

Since Henry III.'s coming to the throne, war had gone on between the Catholics and the Protestants, but languidly and with frequent suspensions through local and shortlived truces. The king and the queen-mother would have been very glad that the St. Bartholomew should be short-lived also, as a necessary but transitory crisis; it had rid them of their most formidable adversaries, Coligny and the Reformers of note who were about him. Henry and Catherine aspired to no more than resuming their policy of manoeuvring and wavering between the two parties engaged in the struggle; but it was not for so poor a result that the ardent Catholics had committed the crime of the St. Bartholomew; they promised themselves from it the decisive victory of their church and of their supremacy. Henry de Guise came forward as their leader in this grand design; there are to be read, beneath a portrait of him done in the sixteenth century, these verses, also of that date:--

"The virtue, greatness, wisdom from on high, Of yonder duke, triumphant far and near, Do make bad men to shrink with coward fear, And G.o.d's own Catholic church to fructify.

In armor clad, like maddened Mars he moves; The trembling Huguenot cowers at his glance; A prop for holy church is his good lance; His eye is ever mild to those he loves."