Читать книгу History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Baird Henry Martyn - Страница 2

Inconsistencies of the Edict of January.

The Edict of January was on its very face a compromise, and as such rested on no firm foundation. Inconsistent with itself, it fully satisfied neither Huguenot nor Roman Catholic. The latter objected to the toleration which the edict extended; the former demanded the unrestricted freedom of worship which it denied. If the existence of two diverse religions was compatible with the welfare of the state, why ignominiously thrust the places of Protestant worship from the cities into the suburbs? If the two were irreconcilable, why suffer the Huguenots to assemble outside the walls?

Huguenot leaders urge the observance of the edict.

Yet there was this difference between the attitude assumed by the rival parties with reference to the edict: while the Roman Catholic leaders made no secret of their intention to insist upon its repeal,1 the Huguenot leaders were urgent in their advice to the churches to conform strictly to its provisions, restraining the indiscreet zeal of their more impetuous members and exhibiting due gratitude to Heaven for the amelioration of their lot. To the people it was, indeed, a bitter disappointment to be compelled to give up the church edifices, and to resort for public service to the outskirts of the town. Less keen was the regret experienced by others not less sincerely interested in the progress of the purer doctrines, who, on account of their appreciation of the violence of the opposition to be encountered, had not been so sanguine in their expectations. And so Beza and other prominent men of the Protestant Church, after obtaining from Chancellor L'Hospital some further explanations on doubtful points, addressed to their brethren in all parts of France a letter full of wholesome advice. "God," said they, "has deigned to employ new means of protecting His church in this kingdom, by placing those who profess the Gospel under the safeguard of the king, our natural prince, and of the magistrates and governors established by him. This should move us so much the more to praise the infinite goodness of our Heavenly Father, who has at length answered the cry of His children, and lovingly to obey the king, in order that he may be induced to aid our just cause." The provisional edict, they added, was not all that might yet be hoped for. As respected the surrender of the churches, those Huguenots who had seized them on their own individual authority ought rather to acknowledge their former indiscretion than deplore the necessity for restitution. In fine, annoyance at the loss of a few privileges ought to be forgotten in gratitude for the gain of many signal advantages.2 The letter produced a deep impression, and its salutary advice was followed scrupulously, if not cheerfully, even in southern France, where the Huguenots, in some places, outnumbered the adherents of the Romish Church.

Seditious Sermons.

The papal party was less ready to acquiesce. The Edict of January was, according to its representative writers, the most pernicious law for the kingdom that could have been devised. By forbidding the magistrates from interfering with the Protestant conventicles held in the suburbs, by permitting the royal officers to attend, by conferring upon the ministers full liberty of officiating, a formal approval was, for the first time, given to the new sect under the authority of the royal seal.3 The pulpits resounded with denunciations of the government. The King of Navarre and the queen mother were assailed under scriptural names, as favoring the false prophets of Baal. Scarcely a sermon was preached in which they did not figure as Ahab and Jezebel.4 A single specimen of the spirited discourses in vogue will suffice. A Franciscan monk – one Barrier – the same from whose last Easter sermon an extract has already been given5 – after reading the royal ordinance in his church of Sainte-Croix, in Provins, remarked: "Well now, gentlemen of Provins, what must I, and the other preachers of France, do? Must we obey this order? What shall we tell you? What shall we preach? 'The Gospel,' Sir Huguenot will say. And pray, stating that the errors of Calvin, of Martin Luther, of Beza, Malot, Peter Martyr, and other preachers, with their erroneous doctrine, condemned by the Church a thousand years ago, and since then by the holy œcumenical councils, are worthless and damnable – is not this preaching the Gospel? Bidding you beware of their teaching, bidding you refuse to listen to them, or read their books; telling you that they only seek to stir up sedition, murder, and robbery, as they have begun to do in Paris and numberless places in the realm – is not this preaching 'the Gospel?' But some one may say: 'Pray, friar, what are you saying? You are not obeying the king's edict; you are still talking of Calvin and his companions; you call them and those who hold their sentiments heretics and Huguenots; you will be denounced to the courts of justice, you will be thrown into prison – yes, you will be hung as a seditious person.' I answer, that is not unlikely, for Ahab and Jezebel put to death the prophets of God in their time, and gave all freedom to the false prophets of Baal. 'Stop, friar, you are saying too much, you will be hung.' Very well, then there will be a gray friar hung! Many others will therefore have to be hung, for God, by His Holy Spirit, will inspire the pillars of His church to uphold the edifice, which will never be overthrown until the end of the world, whatever blows may be struck at it."6

Opposition of the parliaments.

The parliaments exhibited scarcely less opposition to the edict than did the pulpits of the Roman Catholic churches. One – the Parliament of Dijon – never registered it at all;7 while that of Paris instituted a long and decided resistance. "Non possumus, nec debemus," "non possumus, nec debemus pro conscientia," were the words in which it replied when repeatedly pressed to give formal sanction.8 The counsellors were equally displeased with the contents of the edict, and with the irregularity committed in sending it first to the provincial parliaments. Even when the king, yielding to their importunity, by a supplementary "declaration," interpreted the provision of the edict relative to the attendance of royal officers upon the reformed services, as applicable only to the bailiffs, seneschals, and other minor magistrates, and strictly prohibited the attendance of the members of parliament and other high judicatories,9 the counsellors, instead of proceeding to the registry of the obnoxious law, returned a recommendation that the intolerant Edict of July be enforced!10 It was not possible until March to obtain a tardy assent to the reception of the January Edict into the legislation of the country, and then only a few of the judges vouchsafed to take part in the act.11 The delay served to inflame yet more the passions of the people.

New conference.

Scarcely had the edict which was to adjust the relations of the two religious parties been promulgated, when a new attempt was made to reconcile the antagonistic beliefs by the old, but ever unsuccessful method of a conference between theologians. On the twenty-eighth of January a select company assembled in the large council-chamber of the royal palace of St. Germain, and commenced the discussion of the first topic submitted for their deliberation – the question of pictures or images and their worship. Catharine herself was present, with Antoine of Navarre and Jeanne d'Albret, Michel de l'Hospital, and other members of the council. On the papal side appeared the Cardinals of Bourbon, Tournon, and Ferrara, and a number of less elevated dignitaries. Beza and Marlorat were most prominent on the side of the reformed. The discussion was long and earnest, but it ended leaving all the disputants holding the same views that they had entertained at the outset. Beza condemned as idolatrous the practice of admitting statues or paintings into Christian churches, and urged their entire removal. The Inquisitor De Mouchy, Fra Giustiniano of Corfu, Maillard, dean of the Sorbonne, and others, attempted to refute his positions in a style of argument which exhibited the extremes of profound learning and silly conceit. Bishop Montluc of Valence,12 and four doctors of theology – Salignac, Bouteiller, D'Espense, and Picherel – not only admitted the flagrant abuses of image-worship, but drew up a paper in which they did not disguise their sentiments. They recommended the removal of representations of the Holy Trinity, and of pictures immodest in character, or of saints not recognized by the Church. They reprobated the custom of decking out the portraits of the saints with crowns and dresses, the celebration of processions in their honor, and the offering of gifts and vows. And they yielded so far to the demands of the Protestants as to desire that only the simple cross should be permitted to remain over the altar, while the pictures should be placed high upon the walls, where they could neither be kissed nor receive other objectionable marks of adoration.13 It was a futile task to reconcile views so discordant even among the Roman Catholic partisans. Two weeks were spent in profitless discussion, and, on the eleventh of February, the new colloquy was permitted to dissolve without having entered upon any of the more difficult questions that still remained upon the programme marked out for it.14 The cardinals had prevailed upon Catharine de' Medici to refer the settlement to the Council of Trent.15 The joy of De Mouchy, the inquisitor, and of his companions, knew no bounds when Chancellor L'Hospital declared the queen's pleasure, and requested the members to retire to their homes, and reduce their opinions to writing for future use. They were ready to throw themselves on Beza's neck in their delight at being relieved of the necessity of debating with him!16

Defection of Antoine and its results.

Constancy of Jeanne.

But, in truth, the time for the calm discussion of theological differences, the time for friendly salutation between the champions of the rival systems of faith, was rapidly drawing to a close. If some rays of sunshine still glanced athwart the landscape, conveying to the unpractised eye the impression of quiet serenity, there were also black and portentous clouds already rising far above the horizon. Those who could read the signs of the times had long watched their gathering, and they trembled before the coming of the storm. Although they were mercifully spared the full knowledge of the overwhelming ruin that would follow in the wake of that fearful war of the elements, they saw the angry commotion of the sky, and realized that the air was surcharged with material for the most destructive bolts of heaven. And yet it is the opinion of a contemporary, whose views are always worthy of careful consideration, that, had it not been for the final defection of the King of Navarre at this critical juncture, the great woes impending over France might still have been delayed or averted.17 That unhappy prince seemed determined to earn the title of the "Julian Apostate" of the French Reformation. Plied by the arts of his own servants, D'Escars (of whom Mézeray pithily remarks that he was ready to sell himself for money to anybody, save his master) and the Bishop of Auxerre; flattered by the Triumvirate, tempted by the Spanish Ambassador, Cardinal Tournon, and the papal legate, he had long been playing a hypocritical part. He had been unwilling to break with the Huguenots before securing the golden fruit with which he was lured on, and so he was at the same time the agent and the object of treachery. Even after he had sent in his submission to the Pope by the hands of D'Escars, he pretended, when remonstrated with by his Protestant friends, that "he would take care not to go so far that he could not easily extricate himself."18 He did not even show displeasure when faithfully rebuked and warned.19 Yet he had after long hesitation completely cast in his lot with the papal party. He was convinced at last that Philip was in earnest in his intention to give him the island of Sardinia, which was depicted to him as a terrestrial paradise, "worth four Navarres."20 It was widely believed that he had received from the Holy See the promise of a divorce from his heretical consort, which, while permitting him to retain the possessions which she had justly forfeited by her spiritual rebellion, would enable him to marry the youthful Mary of Scots, and add a substantial crown to his titular claims.21 But we would fain believe that even Antoine of Bourbon had not sunk to such a depth of infamy. Certain it is, however, that he now openly avowed his new devotion to the Romish Church, and that the authority of his name became a bulwark of strength to the refractory parliament in its endeavor to prevent the execution of the edict of toleration.22 But he was unsuccessful in dragging with him the wife whom he had been the instrument of inducing first to declare herself for the persecuted faith of the reformers. And when Catharine de' Medici, who cared nothing for religion, tried to persuade her to arrange matters with her husband, "Sooner," she said, "than ever go to mass, had I my kingdom and my son in my hand, I would cast them both into the depth of the sea, that they might not be a hinderance to me."23 Brave mother of Henry the Fourth! Well would it have been, both for her son and for France, if that son had inherited more of Jeanne d'Albret's devotion to truth, and less of his father's lewdness and inconstancy!

Immense crowds at Huguenot preaching.

The canons of Sainte Croix.

As early as in February, Beza was of the opinion that the King of Navarre would not suffer him to remain longer in the realm to which he himself had invited him so earnestly only six months before. At all events, he would be publicly dismissed by the first of May, and with him many others. With this disquieting intelligence came also rumors of an alliance between the enemies of the Gospel and the Spaniard, which could not be treated with contempt as baseless fabrications.24 But meanwhile the truth was making daily progress. At a single gathering for prayer and preaching, but a few days before, twenty-five thousand persons, it was computed, had been in attendance, representing all ranks of the population, among whom were many of the nobility.25 In the city of Troyes, a few weeks later, eight or nine thousand persons assembled from the neighboring country to celebrate the Lord's Supper, and the number of communicants was so great that they could not all partake on a single day; so the services were repeated on the morrow.26 Elsewhere there was equal zeal and growth. Indeed, so rapid was the advance of Protestantism, so pressing the call for ministers, that the large and flourishing church of Orleans, in a letter written the last day of February, proclaimed their expectation of establishing a theological school to supply their own wants and those of the adjacent regions; and it is no insignificant mark of the power with which the reformatory movement still coursed on, that the canons of the great church of Sainte Croix had given notice of their intention to attend the lectures that were to be delivered!27 In such an encouraging strain did "the ministers, deacons, and elders" of the most Protestant city of northern France write on the day before that deplorable massacre of Vassy, which was to be the signal for an appeal from argument to arms, upon which the newly enkindled spirit of religious inquiry was to be quenched in partisan hatred and social confusion. Within less than two months the tread of an armed host was to be heard in the city which it had been hoped would be thronged by the pious students of the gospel of peace, and frenzied soldiers would be hurling upon the floors of Sainte Croix the statues of the saints that had long occupied their elevated niches.

We must now turn to the events preceding the inauspicious occurrence the fruits of which proved so disastrous to the French church and state.

The Guises meet the Duke of Würtemberg at Saverne.

Having at length made sure of the co-operation of the King of Navarre in the contest upon which they had now resolved with the view of preventing the execution of the Edict of January, the Guises desired to strengthen themselves in the direction of Germany, and secure, if not the assistance, at least the neutrality of the Protestant princes. Could the Protestants on the other side of the Rhine be made indifferent spectators of the struggle, persuaded that their own creed resembled the faith of the Roman Catholics much more than the creed of the Huguenots; could they be convinced that the Huguenots were uneasy and rebellious radicals, whom it were better to crush than to assist; could, consequently, the "reiters" and "lansquenets" be kept at home – it would, thought the Guises, be easy, with the help of the German Catholics, perhaps of Spain also, to render complete the papal supremacy in France, and to crush Condé and the Châtillons to the earth. Accordingly, the Guises extended to Duke Christopher of Würtemberg an invitation to meet them in the little town of Saverne (or Zabern, as it was called by the Germans), in Alsace, not far from Strasbourg.28 The duke came as he was requested, accompanied by his theologians, Brentius and Andreä; and the interview, beginning on the fifteenth of February,29 lasted four days. Four of the Guises were present; but the conversations were chiefly with Francis, the Duke of Guise, and Charles, the Cardinal of Lorraine; the Cardinal of Guise and the Grand Prior of the Knights of St. John taking little or no active part. Christopher and Francis had been comrades in arms a score of years back, for the former had served several years, and with no little distinction, in the French wars. This circumstance afforded an opportunity for the display of extraordinary friendship. And what did the brothers state, in this important consultation, respecting their own sentiments, the opinions of the Huguenots, and the condition of France? Happily, a minute account, in the form of a manuscript memorandum taken down at the time by Duke Christopher, is still extant in the archives of Stuttgart.30 Little known, but authentic beyond the possibility of cavil, this document deserves more attention than it has received from historians; for it places in the clearest light the shameless mendacity of the Guises, and shows that the duke had nearly as good a claim as the cardinal, his brother, to the reputation which the Venetian ambassador tells us that Charles had earned "of rarely telling the truth."

Lying assurances.

Duke Christopher made the acquaintance of Charles of Lorraine as a preacher on the morning after his arrival, when he heard him, in a sermon on the temptation in the wilderness, demonstrate that no other mediators or intercessors must be sought for but Jesus Christ, who is our only Saviour and the only propitiation for our sins. That day Christopher had a long conversation with Guise respecting the unhappy condition of France, which the latter ascribed in great part to the Huguenot ministers, whose unconciliatory conduct, he said, had rendered abortive the Colloquy of Poissy. Würtemberg corrected him by replying that the very accounts of the colloquy which Guise had sent him showed that the unsuccessful issue was owing to the prelates, who had evidently come determined to prevent any accommodation. He urged that the misfortunes that had befallen France were much rather to be ascribed to the cruel persecutions that had been inflicted on so many guiltless victims. "I cannot refrain from telling you," he added, "that you and your brother are strongly suspected in Germany of having contributed to cause the death, since the decease of Henry the Second – and even before, in his lifetime – of several thousands of persons who have been miserably executed on account of their faith. As a friend, and as a Christian, I must warn you. Beware, beware of innocent blood! Otherwise the punishment of God will fall upon you in this life and in the next." "He answered me," writes Würtemberg, "with great sighs: 'I know that my brother and I are accused of that, and of many other things also. But we are wronged,31 as we shall both of us explain to you before we leave.'"

The cardinal entered more fully than his brother into the doctrinal conference, talking now with Würtemberg, now with his theologian Brentius, and trying to persuade both that he was in perfect accord with them. While pressing his German friends to declare the Zwinglians and the Calvinists heretics – which they carefully avoided doing – and urging them to state the punishment that ought to be inflicted on heretics, there seemed to be no limit to the concessions which Lorraine was willing to make. He adored and invoked only Christ in heaven. He merely venerated the wafer. He acknowledged that his party went too far in calling the mass a sacrifice, and celebrating it for the living and the dead. The mass was not a sacrifice, but a commemoration of the sacrifice offered on the altar of the cross ("non sacrificium, sed memoria sacrificii præstiti in ara crucis"). He believed that the council assembled at Trent would do no good. When the Romish hierarchy, with the Pope at its head, as the pretended vicar of God on earth, was objected to, he replied that that matter could easily be adjusted. As for himself, "in the absence of a red gown, he would willingly wear a black one."

The Guises deceive no one.

He was asked whether, if Beza and his colleagues could be brought to consent to sign the Augsburg confession, he also would sign it. "You have heard it," he replied, "I take God to witness that I believe as I have said, and that by God's grace I shall live and die in these sentiments. I repeat it: I have read the Confession of Augsburg, I have also read Luther, Melanchthon, Brentius, and others; I entirely approve their doctrines, and I might speedily agree with them in all that concerns the ecclesiastical hierarchy. But I am compelled still to dissemble for a time, that I may gain some that are yet weak in the faith." A little later he adverted to Würtemberg's remarks to Guise. "You informed my brother," he said, "that in Germany we are both of us suspected of having contributed to the execution of a large number of innocent Christians during the reigns of Henry and of Francis the Second. Well! I swear to you, in the name of God my Creator, and pledging the salvation of my soul, that I am guilty of the death of no man condemned for religion's sake. Those who were then privy to the deliberations of state can testify in my favor. On the contrary, whenever crimes of a religious character were under discussion, I used to say to King Henry or to King Francis the Second, that they did not belong to my department, that they had to do with the secular power, and I went away."32 He even added that, although Du Bourg was in orders, he had begged the king to spare him as a learned man. "In like manner," says Würtemberg, "the Duke of Guise with great oaths affirmed that he was innocent of the death of those who had been condemned on account of their faith. 'The attempt,' he added, 'has frequently been made to kill us, both the cardinal and myself, with fire-arms, sword, and poison, and, although the culprits have been arrested, I never meddled with their punishment.'" And when the Duke of Würtemberg again "conjured them not to persecute the poor Christians of France, for God would not leave such a sin unpunished," both the cardinal and the Duke of Guise gave him their right hands, promising on their princely faith, and by the salvation of their souls, that they would neither openly nor secretly persecute the partisans of the "new doctrines!" Such were the barefaced impostures which this "par nobile fratrum" desired Christopher of Würtemberg to publish for their vindication among the Lutherans of Germany. But the liars were not believed. The shrewd Landgrave of Hesse, on receiving Würtemberg's account, even before the news of the massacre of Vassy, came promptly to the conclusion that the whole thing was an attempt at deception. Christopher himself, in the light of later events, added to his manuscript these words: "Alas! It can now be seen how they have kept these promises! Deus sit ultor doli et perjurii, cujus namque res agitur."33

Throkmorton's account of the French court.

Meanwhile events of the greatest consequence were occurring at the capital. The very day after the Saverne conference began, Sir Nicholas Throkmorton wrote to Queen Elizabeth an account of "the strange issue" to which affairs had come at the French court since his last despatch, a little over a fortnight before. His letter gives a vivid and accurate view of the important crisis in the first half of February, 1562, which we present very nearly in the words of the ambassador himself. "The Cardinal of Ferrara," says Throkmorton, "has allured to his devotion the King of Navarre, the Constable, Marshal St. André, the Cardinal of Tournon, and others inclined to retain the Romish religion. All these are bent to repress the Protestant religion in France, and to find means either to range [bring over to their side] the Queen of Navarre, the Prince of Condé, the Admiral, and all others who favor that religion, or to expel them from the court, with all the ministers and preachers. The queen mother, fearing this conspiracy might be the means of losing her authority (which is as dear to her as one religion or the other), and mistrusting that the Constable was going about to reduce the management of the whole affair into the King of Navarre's hands, and so into his own, has caused the Constable to retire from the court, as it were in disgrace, and intended to do the like with the Cardinal of Tournon and the Marshal St. André. The King of Navarre being offended with these proceedings, and imputing part of her doings to the advice of the Admiral, the Cardinal Châtillon, and Monsieur D'Andelot, intended to compel those personages to retire also from the court. In these garboils [commotions] the Prince of Condé, being sick at Paris, was requested to repair to the court and stand her [Catharine] in stead. In this time there was great working on both sides to win the house of Guise. So the Queen Mother wrote to them – they being in the skirts of Almain – to come to the court with all speed. The like means were made [use of] by the King of Navarre, the Cardinal of Ferrara and the Constable, to ally them on their part. During these solicitations the Duke D'Aumale arrived at the court from them, who was requested to solicit the speedy repair to the court of the Duke of Guise and the Cardinal of Lorraine.

"The Prince of Condé went from hence in a horse litter to the court of St. Germain, where he found the Protestant preachers prohibited from preaching either in the King's house or in the town, and that the King of Navarre had solemnly vowed to retain and maintain the Romish religion, and had given order that his son should be instructed in the same. The Prince, finding the Queen of Navarre and the house of Châtillon ready to leave the court, fell again dangerously sick. Nevertheless his coming so revived them, as by the covert aid of the Queen Mother, they attempted to make the Protestant preachers preach again at the town's end of St. Germain, and were entreated to abide at the court, where there is an assembly which is like to last until Easter. The Cardinal of Ferrara assists daily at these disputes. The King of Navarre persists in the house of Châtillon retiring from the court, and it is believed the Queen of Navarre, and they, will not tarry long there."34

Such was the picture drawn by the skilful pencil of the English envoy. It was certainly dark enough. Catharine and Navarre had sent Lansac to assure the Pope that they purposed to live in and defend the Roman Catholic religion. Sulpice had gone on a like mission to Spain. It was time, Throkmorton plainly told Queen Elizabeth, that she should show as great readiness in maintaining the Protestant religion as Ferrara and his associates showed in striving to overthrow it. And in a private despatch to Cecil, written the same day, he urged the secretary to dissuade her Majesty from longer retaining candles and cross on the altar of the royal chapel, at a time when even doctors of the Sorbonne consented to the removal of images of all sorts from over the altar in places of worship.35

From Saverne the Cardinal of Lorraine returned to his archbishopric of Rheims, while the duke, accompanied by the Cardinal of Guise, proceeded in the direction of the French capital. On his route he stopped at Joinville, one of the estates of the family, recently erected in their favor into a principality. Here he was joined by his wife, Anne d'Este; here, too, he listened to fresh complaints made by his mother, Antoinette of Bourbon, against the insolence of the neighboring town of Vassy, where a considerable portion of the inhabitants had lately had the audacity to embrace the reformed faith.

Vassy in Champagne.

Origin of the Huguenot Church.

Vassy, an important town of Champagne – though shorn of much of its influence by the removal of many of its dependencies to increase the dignity of Joinville – and one of the places assigned to Mary of Scots for her maintenance, had apparently for some time contained a few professors of the "new doctrines." It was, however, only in October, 1561, after the Colloquy of Poissy, that it was visited by a Protestant minister, who, during a brief sojourn, organized a church with elders and deacons. Notwithstanding the disadvantage of having no pastor, and of having notoriously incurred the special hatred of the Guises, the reformed community grew with marvellous rapidity. For the Gospel was preached not merely in the printed sermons read from the pulpit, but by the lips of enthusiastic converts. When, after a short absence, the founder of the church of Vassy returned to the scene of his labors, he came into collision with the Bishop of Châlons, whose diocese included this town. The bishop, unaccustomed to preach, set up a monk in opposition; but no one would come to hear him. The prelate then went himself to the Protestant gathering, and sat through the "singing of the commandments" and a prayer. But when he attempted to interrupt the services and asserted his episcopal authority, the minister firmly repelled the usurpation, taking his stand on the king's edict. Then, waxing warm in the discussion, the dauntless Huguenot exposed the hypocrisy of the pretended shepherd, who, not entering the fold by canonical election, but intruding himself into it without consulting his charge, was more anxious to secure his own ease than to lead his sheep into green pastures. The bishop soon retired from a field where he had found more than his match in argument: but the common people, who had come to witness his triumph over the Huguenot preacher, remained after his unexpected discomfiture, and the unequal contest resulted in fresh accessions to the ranks of the Protestants. Equally unsuccessful was the Bishop of Châlons in the attempt to induce the king to issue a commission to the Duke of Guise against the unoffending inhabitants, and Vassy was spared the fate of Mérindol and Cabrières. At Christmas nine hundred communicants, after profession of their faith, partook of the Lord's Supper according to the reformed rites; and in January, 1562, after repeated solicitations, the church obtained the long-desired boon of a pastor, in the person of the able and pious Leonard Morel. Thus far the history of Vassy differed little from that of hundreds of other towns in that age of wonderful awakening and growth, and would have attracted little attention had not its proximity to the Lorraine princes secured for it a tragic notoriety.36

Approach of the Duke of Guise.

On the twenty-eighth of February, Guise, with two hundred armed retainers, left Joinville. That night he slept at Dommartin-le-Franc. On Sunday morning, the first of March, he continued his journey. Whether by accident or from design, it is difficult to say, he drew near to Vassy about the time when the Huguenots were assembling for worship, and his ears caught the sound of their bell while he was still a quarter of a league distant. The ardor of Guise's followers was already at fever-heat. They had seen a poor artisan apprehended in a town that lay on their track, and summarily hung by their leader's order, for the simple offence of having had his child baptized after the reformed rites. When Guise heard the bell of the Vassy church, he turned to his suite to inquire what it meant. "It is the Huguenots' preaching," some one replied. "Par la mort-Dieu," broke in a second, "they will soon be huguenotted after another fashion!" Others began to make eager calculations respecting the extent of the plunder. A few minutes later an unlucky cobbler was espied, who, from his dress or manner, was mistaken for a Huguenot minister. It was well that he could answer the inquiries of the duke, before whom he was hurried, by assuring him that he was no clergyman and had never studied; otherwise, he was told, his case had been an extremely ugly one.37

The massacre.

On entering Vassy Guise repaired to the monastery chapel to hear mass said. He was followed by some of the gentlemen of his suite. Meantime, their valets found their way to the doors of the building in which the Protestants were worshipping, scarcely more than a stone's throw distant. This motley crowd was merely the vanguard of the Papists. Soon two or three gentlemen sent by Guise, according to his own account, to admonish the Huguenot assembly of their want of due obedience, entered the edifice, where they found twelve hundred persons quietly listening to the word of God. They were politely invited to sit down: but they replied by noisy interruption and threats. "Mort-Dieu, they must all be killed!" was their exclamation as they returned to report to Guise what they had seen. The defenceless Huguenots were thrown into confusion by these significant menaces, and hastened to secure the entrance. It was too late. The duke himself was approaching, and a volley from the arquebuses of his troop speedily scattered the unarmed worshippers. It is unnecessary to describe in all its details of horror the scene that ensued. The door of the sheep-fold was open and the wolf was already upon his prey. All the pent-up hatred of a band of fanatical and savage soldiers was vented upon a crowd of men, women, and children, whose heterodoxy made them pleasing victims, and whose unarmed condition rendered victory easy. No age, no sex was respected. It was enough to be a Huguenot to be a fit object for the sword or the gun. To escape from the doomed building was only possible by running the gauntlet of the troops that lay in wait. Those who sought to climb from the roof to the adjacent houses were picked off by the arquebuses of the besieging party. Only after an hour and a half had elapsed were the soldiers of Guise called off by the trumpet sounding a joyful note of victory. The evidence of their prowess, however, remained on the field of contest, in fifty or sixty dead or dying men and women, and in nearly a hundred more or less dangerously wounded.38

In a few hours more Guise was resuming his journey toward Paris. He was told that the Huguenots of Vassy had forwarded their complaints to the king. "Let them go, let them go!" he exclaimed. "They will find there neither their Admiral nor their Chancellor."39

Upon whose head rests the guilt of the massacre of Vassy? This was the question asked by every contemporary so soon as he realized the startling fact that the blow there struck was a signal that called every man to take the sword, and stand in defence of his own life. It is the question which history, more calm and dispassionate, because farther removed from the agitations of the day, now seeks to solve, as she looks back over the dreary torrents of blood that sprang from that disastrous source. The inquiry is not an idle one – for justice ought to find such a vindication in the records of past generations as may have been denied at the time of the commission of flagrant crimes.

The Huguenots declared Guise to be a murderer. Theodore Beza, in eloquent tones, demanded the punishment of the butcher of the human race. So imposing was the cry for retribution that the duke himself recognized the necessity of entering a formal defence, which was disseminated by the press far and wide through France and Germany. He denied that the massacre was premeditated. He averred that it was merely an unfortunate incident brought about by the violence of the Protestants of Vassy, who had provided themselves with an abundant supply of stones and other missiles, and assailed those whom he had sent to remonstrate courteously with them. He stated the deaths at only twenty-five or thirty. Most of these had been occasioned by the indignant valets, who, on seeing their masters wounded, had rushed in to defend them. So much against his will had the affair occurred, that he had repeatedly but ineffectually commanded his men to desist. When he had himself received a slight wound from a stone thrown by the Huguenots, the sight of the blood flowing from it had infuriated his devoted followers.

The Duke's plea of want of premeditation we may, perhaps, accept as substantially true – so far, at least, as to suppose that he had formed no deliberate plan of slaughtering the inhabitants of Vassy who had adopted the reformed religion.40 It is difficult, indeed, to accept the argument of Brantôme and Le Laboureur, who conceive that the fortuitous character of the event is proved by the circumstance that the deed was below the courage of Guise. Nor, perhaps, shall we give excessive credit to the asseverations of the duke, repeated, we are told, even on his death-bed. For why should these be more worthy of belief than the oaths with which the same nobleman had declared to Christopher of Würtemberg that he neither had persecuted, nor would persecute the Protestants of France? But the Duke of Guise admits that he knew that there was a growing community of Huguenots at Vassy – "scandalous, arrogant, extremely seditious persons," as he styles them. He tells us that he intended, as the representative of Mary Stuart, and as feudal lord of some of their number, to admonish them of their disobedience; and that for this purpose he sent Sieur de la Bresse (or Brosse) with others to interrupt their public worship. He accuses them, it is true, of having previously armed themselves with stones, and even of possessing weapons in an adjoining building; but what reason do the circumstances of the case give us for doubting that the report may have been based upon the fact that those who in this terror-stricken assembly attempted to save their lives resorted to whatever missiles they could lay their hands upon? If the presence of his wife, and of his brother the cardinal, is used by the duke as an argument to prove the absence of any sinister intentions on his part, how much stronger is the evidence afforded to the peaceable character of the Protestant gathering by the numbers of women and children found there? But the very fact that, as against the twenty-five or thirty Huguenots whom he concedes to have been slain in the encounter, he does not pretend to give the name of a single one of his own followers that was killed, shows clearly which side it was that came prepared for the fight. And yet who that knows the sanguinary spirit generally displayed by the Roman Catholic masses in the sixteenth century, could find much fault with the Huguenots of Vassy if they had really armed themselves to repel violence and protect their wives and children – if, in other words, they had used the common right of self-preservation?41

The fact is that Guise was only witnessing the fruits of his instructions, enforced by his own example. He had given the first taste of blood, and now, perhaps without his actual command, the pack had taken the scent and hunted down the game. He was avowedly on a crusade to re-establish the supremacy of the Roman Catholic religion throughout France. If he had not hesitated to hang a poor pin-dealer for allowing his child to be baptized according to the forms of Calvin's liturgy; if he was on his way to Paris to restore the Edict of July by force of arms, it is idle to inquire whether he or his soldiers were responsible for the blood shed in peace. "He that sowed the seed is the author of the harvest."

Condé appeals to the king.

The news quickly flew to Condé that the arch-enemy of the Protestants had begun the execution of the cruel projects he had so long been devising with his fanatical associates; that Guise was on his way toward seditious Paris, with hands yet dripping with the blood of the inhabitants of a quiet Champagnese town, surprised and murdered while engaged in the worship of their God. Indignant, and taking in the full measure of the responsibility imposed upon him as the most powerful member of the Protestant communion, the prince, who was with the court at the castle of Monceaux – built for herself by Catharine in a style of regal magnificence – laid before the king and his mother a full account of the tragic occurrence. It was a pernicious example, he argued, and should be punished promptly and severely. Above all, the perpetrators ought not to be permitted to endanger the quiet of France by entering the capital. Catharine was alarmed and embarrassed by the intelligence; but, her fear of a conjunction between Guise and Navarre overcoming her reluctance to affront the Lorraine family, induced her to consent; and she wrote to the Duke, who had by this time reached his castle of Nanteuil, forbidding him to go to Paris, but inviting him to visit the court with a small escort. At the same time she gave orders to Saint André to repair at once to Lyons, of which he was the royal governor. But neither of the triumvirs showed any readiness to obey her orders. The duke curtly replied that he was too busy entertaining his friends to come to the king; the marshal promptly refused to leave the king while he was threatened by such perils.42

Beza's remonstrance.

An anvil that has worn out many hammers.

The King of Navarre now came from Paris to Monceaux, to guard the interests of the party he had espoused. He was closely followed by Theodore Beza and Francour, whom the Protestants of Paris had deputed, the former on behalf of the church, the latter of the nobility, to demand of the king the punishment of the authors of the massacre. The queen mother, as was her wont, gave a gracious audience, and promised that an investigation should be made. But Navarre, being present, seemed eager to display a neophyte's zeal, and retorted by blaming the Huguenots for going in arms to their places of worship. "True," said Beza, "but arms in the hands of the wise are instruments of peace, and the massacre of Vassy has shown the necessity under which the Protestants were laid." When Navarre exclaimed: "Whoever touches my brother of Guise with the tip of his finger, touches my whole body!" the reformer reminded him, as one whom Antoine had himself brought to France, that the way of justice is God's way, and that kings owe justice to their subjects. Finally, when he discovered, by Navarre's adoption of all the impotent excuses of Guise, that the former had sold himself to the enemies of the Gospel, Theodore Beza made that noble reply which has become classic as the motto of the French Reformation: "Sire, it is, in truth, the lot of the Church of God, in whose name I am speaking, to endure blows and not to strike them. But also may it please you to remember that it is an anvil that has worn out many hammers."43

Guise's entry into Paris.

At Nanteuil, Guise had been visited by the constable, with two of his sons, by Saint André, and by other prominent leaders. Accompanied by them, he now took the decided step of going to Paris in spite of Catharine's prohibition. His entry resembled a triumphal procession.44 In the midst of an escort estimated by eye-witnesses at two thousand horse, Francis of Guise avoided the more direct gate of St. Martin, and took that of St. Denis, through which the kings of France were accustomed to pass. Vast crowds turned out to meet him, and the cries of "Vive Monsieur de Guise!" sounding much like regal acclammations, were uttered without rebuke on all sides. The "prévost des marchands" and other members of the municipal government received him with great demonstrations of joy, as the defender of the faith. At the same hour the Prince of Condé, surrounded by a large number of Protestant noblemen, students, and citizens, was riding to one of the preaching-places.45 The two cavalcades met, but no collision ensued. The Huguenot and the papist courteously saluted each other, and then rode on. It is even reported that between the leaders themselves less sincere amenities were interchanged. Guise sent word to Condé that he and his company, whom he had assembled only on account of the malevolent, were at the prince's commands. Condé answered by saying that his own men were armed only to prevent the populace of Paris from making an attack upon the Protestants as they went to their place of worship.46

Anxieties of Catharine de' Medici.

For weeks the position of the queen mother had been one of peculiar difficulty and anxiety. That she was "well inclined to advance the true religion," and "well affected for a general reformation in the Church," as Admiral Coligny at this time firmly believed,47 is simply incredible. But, on the other hand, there can be little doubt that Catharine saw her interest in upholding the Huguenot party, of which Condé and the three Châtillon brothers were acknowledged leaders. Unfortunately, the King of Navarre, "hoping to compound with the King of Spain for his kingdom of Navarre," had become the tool of the opposite side – he was "all Spanish now"48– and Chantonnay, Philip's ambassador, was emboldened to make arrogant demands. The envoy declared that, "unless the house of Châtillon left the court, he was ordered to depart from France." Grave diplomatists shook their heads, and thought the menace very strange, "the rather that another prince should appoint what counsellors should remain at court;" and sage men inferred that "to such princes as are afraid of shadows the King of Spain will enterprise far enough."49 None the less was Catharine deeply disturbed. She felt distrust of the heads of the Roman Catholic party, but she feared to break entirely with them, and was forced to request the Protestant leaders to withdraw for a time from the vicinity of Paris. That city itself presented to the eye a sufficiently strange and alarming aspect, "resembling more a frontier town or a place besieged than a court, a merchant city, or university." Both sides were apprehensive of some sudden commotion, and the Protestant scholars, in great numbers, marched daily in arms to the "sermons," in spite of the opposition of the rector and his council.50 The capital was unquestionably no place for Catharine and her son, at the present moment.

She removes the king to Melun.

and thence to Fontainebleau.

Her painful indecision.

At length, Catharine de' Medici, apprehensive of the growing power of the triumvirate, and dreading lest the king, falling into its hands, should become a mere puppet, her own influence being completely thrown into the shade, removed the court from Monceaux to Melun, a city on the upper Seine, about twenty-five miles south-east of Paris.51 She hoped apparently that, by placing herself nearer the strongly Huguenot banks of the Loire, she would be able at will to throw herself into the arms of either party, and, in making her own terms, secure future independence. But she was not left undisturbed. At Melun she received a deputation from Paris, consisting of the "prévost des marchands" and three "échevins," who came to entreat her, in the name of the Roman Catholic people of the capital, to return and dissipate by the king's arrival the dangers that were imminent on account of Condé's presence, and to give the people the power to defend themselves by restoring to them their arms. Still hesitating, still experiencing her old difficulty of forming any plans for the distant future, and every moment balancing in her mind what she should do the next, she nevertheless pushed on ten miles farther southward, to the royal palace of Fontainebleau, and found herself not far from half the way to Orleans. But change of place brought the vacillating queen mother no nearer to a decision. Soubise, the last of the avowed Protestants to leave her, still dreamed he might succeed in persuading her. Day after day, in company with Chancellor L'Hospital, the Huguenot leader spent two or three hours alone with her in earnest argument. "Sometimes," says a recently discovered contemporary account, "they believed that they had gained everything, and that she was ready to set off for Condé's camp; then, all of a sudden, so violent a fright seized her, that she lost all heart." At last the time came when the triumvirs were expected to appear at Fontainebleau on the morrow, to secure the prize of the king's person. Soubise and the indefatigable chancellor made a last attempt. Five or six times in one day they returned to the charge, although L'Hospital mournfully observed that he had abandoned hope. He knew Catharine well: she could not be brought to a final resolution.52 It was even so. Soubise himself was forced to admit it when, at the last moment – almost too late for his own safety – he hurriedly left, Catharine still begging him to stand by her, and made his way to his friends.

She implores Condé's aid.

It seems to have been during this time of painful anxiety that Catharine wrote at least the last of those remarkable letters to Condé which that prince afterward published in his own justification, and respecting the authenticity of which the queen would have been glad had she been able to make the world entertain doubts. They breathed a spirit of implicit confidence. She called herself his "good cousin," that was not less attached to him than a mother to a son. She enjoined upon him to remember the protection which he was bound to give to "the children, the mother, and the kingdom." She called upon him not to desert her. She declared that, in the midst of so many adverse circumstances, she would be driven almost to despair, "were it not for her trust in God, and the assurance that Condé would assist her in preserving the kingdom and service of the king, her son, in spite of those who wished to ruin everything." More than once she told him that his kindness would not go unrequited; and she declared that, if she died before having an opportunity to testify her gratitude, she would charge her children with the duty.53

In Paris events were rapidly succeeding each other. Marshal Montmorency, the constable's eldest son, was too upright a man to serve the purposes of the triumvirs; and, with his father's consent and by Navarre's authority, he was removed, and Cardinal Bourbon installed in his place as governor of the city.54 A few days after Antoine himself came to Paris and lodged in the constable's house. Here, with Guise, Saint André, and the other chief statesmen who were of the same party, conferences were held to which Condé and his associates were not invited; and to these irregular gatherings, notwithstanding the absence of the king, the name of the royal council was given.55

Condé retires to Meaux.

There were nine or ten thousand horse – Papist and Huguenot – under arms in Paris.56 It was evident that Condé and Guise could not longer remain in the city without involving it in the most bloody of civil contests. Under these circumstances the prince offered, through his brother, the Cardinal of Bourbon, to accede to the wish of Catharine, and leave Paris by one gate at the same moment that the triumvirs should leave by another. Indeed, without waiting to obtain their promise, he retired57 with his body of Protestant noblesse to Meaux, where he had given a rendezvous to Admiral Coligny and others whom he had summoned from their homes. This step has generally been stigmatized as the first of Condé's egregious mistakes. Beza opposed it at the time, and likened the error to that of Pompey in abandoning Rome;58 and the "History of the Reformed Churches" has perpetuated the comparison.59 The same historical parallel was drawn by Étienne Pasquier.60 But the judicious François de la Noue, surnamed Bras-de-Fer, thought very differently; and we must here, as in many other instances, prefer the opinion of the practical soldier to that of the eminent theologian or the learned jurist. Parliament, the clergy, the municipal government, the greater part of the university, and almost all the low populace, with the partisans and servants of the hostile princes and noblemen, were intensely Roman Catholic.61 The three hundred resident Protestant gentlemen, with, as many more experienced soldiers, four hundred students, and a few untrained burgesses, were "but as a fly matched with an elephant." The novices of the convents and the priests' chambermaids, armed only with sticks, could have held them in check.62 It were better to lose the advantages of the capital than to be overwhelmed within its walls by superior forces, being completely cut off from that part of France where the main strength of the Protestants lay.

The Huguenot summons.

From Meaux messengers were sent to the Protestant churches in all parts of France to request their aid, both in money and in men. "Since," said the letter they bore, "God has brought us to such a point that no one can disturb our repose without violating the protection it has pleased our king to accord us, and consequently without declaring himself an enemy of his Majesty and of this kingdom's peace, there is no law, divine or human, that does not permit us to take measures for defence, calling for help on those whom God has given the authority and the will to remedy these evils."63

Admiral Coligny's reluctance.

Happily for the Huguenot cause, however, the nobles and gentry that favored it had not waited to receive this summons, but had, many of them, already set out to strengthen the forces of the prince. Among others, and by far more important than all the rest, came Gaspard de Coligny, whose absence from court during the few previous weeks has been regarded as one of the most untoward circumstances of the time. At his pleasant castle of Châtillon-sur-Loing, surrounded by his young family, he received intelligence, first, of the massacre, then of the ominous events that had occurred at the capital. Condé sent to solicit his support; his brothers and many friends urged him to rush at once to the rescue. But still, even after the threatening clouds had risen so high that they must soon burst over the devoted heads of the Huguenots, the admiral continued to hesitate. Every instinct of his courageous nature prompted the skilful defender of St. Quentin to place himself at once at the post of danger. But there was one fear that seemed likely to overcome all his martial impulses. It was the fear of initiating a civil war. He could not refer to the subject without shuddering, for the horrors of such a contest were so vividly impressed upon his mind that he regarded almost anything as preferable to the attempt to settle domestic difficulties by an appeal to the sword. But the tears and sighs of his wife, the noble Charlotte de Laval, at length overmastered his reluctance. "To be prudent in men's esteem," she said, "is not to be wise in that of God, who has given you the science of a general that you might use it for the good of His children." When her husband rehearsed again the grounds of his hesitation, and, calling upon her seriously to consider the suffering, the privations, the anxiety, the bereavements, the ignominy, the death which would await not only those dearest to her, but herself, if the struggle should prove unsuccessful, offered her three weeks to make her decision, with true womanly magnanimity she replied: "The three weeks are already past; you will never be conquered by the strength of your enemies. Make use of your resources, and bring not upon your head the blood of those who may die within three weeks. I summon you in God's name not to defraud us any more, or I shall be a witness against you at His judgment." So deep was the impression which these words made upon Coligny, that, accepting his wife's advice as the voice of heaven, he took horse without further delay, and joined Condé and the other Protestant leaders.64

The king seized and brought to Paris.

It was unfortunate that the prince, for a week after leaving Paris, should have felt too feeble to make any movement of importance. Otherwise, by a rapid march, he might, according to his plan,65 have reached Fontainebleau in advance of his opponents, and, with the young king and his mother under his protection, have asserted his right as a prince of the blood to defend Charles against those who had unjustly usurped the functions of royalty. As it was, the unlucky delay was turned to profit by his enemies. These now took a step that put further deliberation on Catharine's part out of the question, and precluded any attempt to place the person of the king in Condé's hands. Leaving a small garrison in Paris, Guise proceeded with a strong body of troops to Fontainebleau, determined to bring the king and his mother back to Paris. Persuasion was first employed; but, that failing, the triumvirate were prepared to resort to force. Navarre, acting at Guise's suggestion, at length told Catharine distinctly that, as guardian of the minor king, he must see to it that he did not fall into his brother's hands; as for Catharine, she might remain or follow him, as she pleased.66 Tears and remonstrances were of no avail.67 Weeping and sad, Charles is said to have repeatedly exclaimed against being led away contrary to his will;68 but the triumvirs would not be balked of their game, and so brought him with his mother first to Melun, then, after a few days, to the prison-like castle of Vincennes, and finally to the Louvre.69

The constable's exploits at the "temples."

D'Andelot and Condé throw themselves into Orleans.

The critical step had been taken to demonstrate that the reign of tolerance, according to the prescriptions of the Edict of January, was at an end. The constable, preceding the king to Paris, immediately upon his arrival instituted a system of arbitrary arrests. On the next morning (the fourth of April) he visited the "temple of Jerusalem,"70 one of the two places which had been accorded to the Huguenots for their worship outside of the walls. Under his direction the pulpit and the benches of the hearers were torn up, and a bonfire of wood and Bibles was speedily lighted, to the great delight of the populace of Paris. In the afternoon the same exploits were repeated at the other Huguenot church, known from its situation, outside of the gate of St. Antoine, as "Popincourt." Here, however, not only the benches, but the building itself was burned, and several adjacent houses were involved in the conflagration. Having accomplished these outrages and encouraged the people to imitate his lawless example, the aged constable returned to the city. He had well earned the contemptuous name which the Huguenots henceforth gave him of "Le Capitaine Brûlebanc."71 If the triumvirate succeeded, it was plain that all liberty of worship was proscribed. It was even believed that the Duchess of Guise had been sent to carry a message, in the king's name, to her mother, the aged Renée of France, to the effect that if she did not dismiss the Huguenot preachers from Montargis, and become a good Catholic, he would have her shut up for the rest of her life in a convent.72 Whatever truth there may have been in this story, one thing was certain: in Paris it would have been as much as any man's life was worth to appear annoyed at the constable's exploit, or to oppose the search made for arms in suspected houses. Every good Catholic had a piece of the Huguenots' benches or pulpit in his house as a souvenir; "so odious," says a contemporary, "is the new religion in this city."73 Meantime, on Easter Monday (the thirtieth of March) Condé left Meaux at the head of fifteen hundred horse, the flower of the French nobility, "better armed with courage than with corselets" – says François de la Noue. As they approached the capital, the whole city was thrown into confusion, the gates were closed, and the chains stretched across the streets.74 But the host passed by, and at St. Cloud crossed the Seine without meeting any opposition. Here the news of the seizure of the person of Charles by the triumvirs first reached the prince, and with it one great object of the expedition was frustrated.75 The Huguenots, however, did not delay, but, instead of turning toward Fontainebleau, took a more southerly route directly for the city of Orleans. D'Andelot, to whom the van had been confided, advanced by a rapid march, and succeeded by a skilful movement in entering the city, of which he took possession in the name of the Prince of Condé, acting as lieutenant of the king unlawfully held in confinement. Catharine de' Medici, who, having been forced into the party of the triumvirs, had with her usual flexibility promptly decided to make the most of her position, sent messengers to Condé hoping to amuse him with negotiations while a powerful Roman Catholic detachment should by another road reach Orleans unobserved.76 But the danger coming to Andelot's knowledge, he succeeded in warning Condé; and the prince, with the main body of the Protestant horse, after a breakneck ride, threw himself, on the second of April, into the city, which now became the headquarters of the religion in the kingdom.77 The inhabitants came out to meet him with every demonstration of joy, and received him between double lines of men, women, and children loudly singing the words of the French psalms, so that the whole city resounded with them.78

Condé's justification.

No sooner had the Prince of Condé established himself upon the banks of the Loire, than he took measures to explain to the world the necessity and propriety of the step upon which he had ventured. He wrote, and he induced the Protestant ministers who were with him to write, to all the churches of France, urging them to send him reinforcements of troops and to fill his empty treasury.79 At the same time he published a "declaration" in justification of his resort to arms. He recapitulated the successive steps that revealed the violent purposes of the triumvirs – the retreat of the Guises and of the constable from court, Nemours's attempt to carry the Duke of Orleans out of the kingdom, the massacre at Vassy, Guise's refusal to visit the royal court and his defiant progress to the capital, the insolent conduct of Montmorency and Saint-André, the pretended royal council held away from the king, the detention of Charles and of his mother as prisoners. And from all these circumstances he showed the inevitable inference to be that the triumvirs had for one of their chief objects the extirpation of the religion "which they call new," "either by open violence or by the change of edicts, and the renewal of the most cruel persecutions that have ever been exercised in the world." It was not party interest that had induced him to take up arms, he said, but loyalty to God, to his king, and to his native land, a desire to free Charles from unlawful detention, and a purpose to insist upon the execution of the royal edicts, especially that of January, and to prevent new ministers of state from misapplying the sums raised for the payment of the national debts. He warned all lovers of peace not to be astonished at any edicts that might emanate from the royal seal so long as the king remained a prisoner, and he begged Catharine to order the triumvirs to lay down their arms. If they did so, he declared that he himself, although of a rank far different from theirs, would consent to follow their example.80

Stringent articles of association.

The Huguenots had thrown off the shackles which a usurping party about the king endeavored to fasten upon them; but they had not renounced the restraints of law. And now, at the very commencement of a great struggle for liberty, they entered into a solemn compact to banish licentious excesses from their army. Protesting the purity of their motives, they swore to strive until the king's majority to attain the objects which had united them in a common struggle; but they promised with equal fervor to watch over the morals of their associates, and to suffer nothing that was contrary to God's honor or the king's edicts, to tolerate no idolatrous or superstitious practices, no blasphemy, no uncleanness or theft, no violation of churches by private authority. They declared their intention and desire to hear the Word of God preached by faithful ministers in the midst of the camps of war.81

Huguenot nobles and cities.

The papal party was amazed at the opposition its extreme measures had created. In place of the timid weakling whom the triumvirate had expected, they saw a giant spring from the ground to confront them.82 To Orleans flocked many of the highest nobles of the land. Besides Condé – after Navarre and Bourbon, the prince of the blood nearest to the crown – there were gathered to the Protestant standard the three Châtillons, Prince Porcien, Count de la Rochefoucauld, the Sieurs de Soubise, de Mouy, de Saint Fal, d'Esternay, Piennes, Rohan, Genlis, Grammont, Montgomery, and others of high station and of large influence and extensive landed possessions.83 And, what was still more important, the capture of Orleans was but the signal for a general movement throughout France. In a few weeks the Huguenots, rising in their unsuspected strength, had rendered themselves masters of cities in almost every province. Along the Loire, Beaugency, Blois, Tours, and Angers declared for the Prince of Condé; in Normandy, Rouen, Havre, Dieppe, and Caen; in Berry and the neighboring provinces, Bourges, La Rochelle, Poitiers; along the Saône and Rhône, Châlons, Mâcon, Lyons, Vienne, Valence, Montélimart, Tournon, Orange; Gap and Grenoble in Dauphiny; almost the whole of the papal "Comtât Venaissin;" the Vivarais; the Cevennes; the greater part of Languedoc and Gascony, with the important cities of Montauban, Castres, Castelnaudary, Beziers, Pézénas, Montpellier, Aiguesmortes, and Nismes.84 In northern France alone, where the number of Protestants was small, the Huguenots obtained but a slight foothold.85

Can iconoclasm be repressed?

In the midst of this universal movement there was one point in the compact made by the confederates at Orleans, which it was found impossible to execute. How could the churches, with their altars, their statues, their pictures, their relics, their priestly vestments, be guaranteed from invasion? To the Huguenot masses they were the temples and instruments of an idolatrous worship. Ought Christians to tolerate the existence of such abominations, even if sanctioned by the government? It was hard to draw a nice line of distinction between the overthrow of idolatry by public authority and by personal zeal. If there were any difference in the merit of the act, it was in favor of the man who vindicated the true religion at the risk of his own life. Nay, the Church itself had incontrovertibly given its sanction to this view by placing among the martyrs those primitive Christians who had upon their own responsibility entered heathen temples and overthrown the objects of the popular devotion. In those early centuries there had been manifested the same reckless exposure of life, the same supreme contempt for the claims of art in comparison with the demands of religion. The Minerva of Phidias or Praxiteles was no safer from the iconoclastic frenzy of the new convert from heathenism than the rude idol of a less cultivated age. The command, "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image," had not excepted from its prohibition the marvellous products of the Greek chisel.

It was here, therefore, that the chief insubordination of the Huguenot people manifested itself – not in licentious riot, not in bloodshed, not in pillage. Calvin, with his high sense of law and order, might in his letters reiterate the warnings against the irregularity which we have seen him uttering on a previous occasion;86 the ministers might threaten the guilty with exclusion from the ordinances of the Church; Condé might denounce the penalty of death. The people could not restrain themselves or be restrained. They must remove what had been a stumbling-block to them and might become a snare to others. They felt no more compunction in breaking an image or tearing in pieces a picture, than a traveller, whom a highwayman has wounded, is aware of, when he destroys the weapons dropped by his assailant in his hurried flight. Indeed, they experienced a strange satisfaction in visiting upon the lifeless idol the punishment for the spiritual wrongs received at the hands of false teachers of religion.87

It bursts out at Caen.

We have an illustration of the way in which the work of demolition was accomplished in events occurring about this time at Caen. Two or three inhabitants of this old Norman city were at Rouen when the churches were invaded and sacked by an over-zealous crowd of sympathizers with the "new doctrines." On their return to their native city, they began at once to urge their friends to copy the example of the provincial capital. The news reaching the ears of the magistrates of Caen, these endeavored – but to no purpose, as the sequel proved – to calm the feverish pulse of the people. On a Friday night (May eighth), the storm broke out, and it raged the whole of the next day. Church, chapel, and monastery could testify to its violence. Quaint windows of stained glass and rich old organs were dashed in pieces. Saints' effigies, to employ the quaint expression of a Roman Catholic eye-witness, "were massacred." "So great was the damage inflicted, without any profit, that the loss was estimated at more than a hundred thousand crowns." Still less excusable were the acts of vandalism which the rabble – ever ready to join in popular commotions and always throwing disgrace upon them – indulged. The beautiful tombs of William, Duke of Normandy and conqueror of England, and of the Duchess-queen Mathilda, the pride of Caen, which had withstood the ravages of nearly five hundred years, were ruthlessly destroyed. The monument of Bishop Charles of Martigny, who had been ambassador under Charles the Eighth and Louis the Twelfth, shared the same fate. The zealous Roman Catholic who relates these occurrences claims to have striven, although to no purpose, to rescue the ashes of the conqueror from dispersion.88

The "idol" of Sainte Croix.

The contagion spread even to Orleans. Here, as in other places where the Huguenots had prevailed, there were but few of the inhabitants that had not been drawn over to the reformed faith, or at least pretended to embrace it. Yet Condé, in his desire to convince the world that no partisan hatred moved him, strictly prohibited the intrusion of Protestants into the churches, and assured the ecclesiastics of protection so long as they chose to remain in the city. For a time, consequently, their services continued to be celebrated in the presence of the faithful few and with closed doors; but soon, their fears getting the better of their prudence, the priests and monks one by one made their retreat from the Protestant capital. On the twenty-first of April, word was brought to Condé that some of the churches had been broken into during the preceding night, and that the work of destruction was at that very moment going forward in others. Hastening, in company with Coligny and other leaders, to the spacious and imposing church of the Holy Rood (Sainte Croix), he undertook, with blows and menaces, to check the furious onslaught. Seeing a Huguenot soldier who had climbed aloft, and was preparing to hurl from its elevated niche one of the saints that graced the wall of the church, the prince, in the first ebullition of his anger, snatched an arquebuse from the hands of one of his followers, and aimed it at the adventurous iconoclast. The latter had seen the act, but was in no wise daunted. Not desisting an instant from his pious enterprise, "Sir," he cried to Condé, "have patience until I shall have overthrown this idol; and then let me die, if that be your pleasure!"89

The Huguenot soldier's fearless reply sounded the knell of many a sacred painting and statue; for the destruction was accepted as God's work rather than man's.90 Henceforth little exertion was made to save these objects of mistaken devotion, while the greatest care was taken to prevent the robbery of the costly reliquaries and other precious possessions of the churches, of which inventories were drawn up, and which were used only at the last extremity.91

Massacre of Huguenots at Sens.

Far different in character from the bloodless "massacres" of images and pictures in cities where the Huguenots gained the upper hand, were the massacres of living men wherever the papists retained their superiority. One of the most cruel and inexcusable was that which happened at Sens – a city sixty-five or seventy miles toward the south-east from Paris – where, on an ill-founded and malicious rumor that the reformed contemplated rising and destroying their Roman Catholic neighbors, the latter, at the instigation, it is said, of their archbishop, the Cardinal of Guise, and encouraged by the violent example of Constable Montmorency at Paris,92 fell on the Protestants, murdered more than a hundred of both sexes and of every age, and threw their dead bodies into the waters of the Yonne.93 While these victims of a blind bigotry were floating on under the windows of the Louvre toward the sea, Condé addressed to the queen mother a letter of warm remonstrance, and called upon her to avenge the causeless murder of so many innocent men and women; expressing the fear that, if justice were denied by the king and by herself, the cry of innocent blood would reach high heaven, and God would be moved to inflict those calamities with which the unhappy realm was every day threatened.94

A few days before Condé penned this appeal, the English ambassador had written and implored his royal mistress to seize the golden opportunity to inspirit the frightened Catharine de' Medici, panic-stricken by the violent measures of the Roman Catholic party; assuring her that "not a day passed but that the Spanish ambassador, the Bishop of Rome, or some other papist prince's minister put terror into the queen mother's mind."95 But Throkmorton's words and Cecil's entreaties were alike powerless to induce Elizabeth to improve her advantage. The opportunity was fast slipping by, and the calamities foretold by Condé were coming on apace.

Disorders in Provence and Dauphiny.

In truth, few calamities could exceed in horror those that now befell France. In the south-eastern corner of the kingdom, above all other parts, civil war, ever prolific in evil passions, was already bearing its legitimate fruits. For several years the fertile, sunny hills of Provence and Dauphiny had enjoyed but little stable peace, and now both sides caught the first notes of the summons to war and hurried to the fray. Towns were stormed, and their inhabitants, whether surrendering on composition or at the discretion of the conqueror, found little justice or compassion. The men were more fortunate, in being summarily put to the sword; the women were reserved for the vilest indignities, and then shared the fate of their fathers and husbands. The thirst for revenge caused the Protestant leaders and soldiers to perpetrate deeds of cruelty little less revolting than those which disgraced the papal cause; but there was, at least, this to be said in their favor, that not even their enemies could accuse them of those infamous excesses of lewdness of which their opponents were notoriously guilty.96 Their vengeance was satisfied with the lives, and did not demand the honor of the vanquished.

The city of Orange.

The little city of Orange, capital of William of Nassau's principality, contained a growing community of Protestants, whom the prince had in vain attempted to restrain. About a year and a half before the outburst of the civil war, William the Silent, then a sincere Roman Catholic,97 on receiving complaints from the Pope, whose territories about Avignon – the Comtât Venaissin – ran around three sides of the principality, had expressed himself "marvellously sorry to see how those wicked heresies were everywhere spreading, and that they had even penetrated into his principality of Orange."98 And when he received tidings that the Huguenots were beginning to preach, he had written to his governor and council, "to see to it by all means in the world, that no alteration be permitted in our true and ancient religion, and in no wise to consent that those wicked men should take refuge in his principality." As Protestantism advanced in Orange, he purposed to give instructions to use persuasion and force, "in order to remedy a disorder so pernicious to all Christendom."99 While he was unwilling to call in French troops, lest he should prejudice his sovereign rights, he declared his desire to be authorized to employ the pontifical soldiers in the work of repression.100 But in spite of these restrictive measures, the reformed population increased rather than diminished, and the bishop of the city now called upon Fabrizio Serbelloni, a cousin of Pope Pius the Fourth, and papal general at Avignon, to assist him by driving out the Protestants, who, ever since the massacre of Vassy, had feared with good reason the assault of their too powerful and hostile neighbors, and had taken up arms in self-defence. They had not, however, apprehended so speedy an attack as Serbelloni now made (on the fifth of June), and, taken by surprise, were able to make but a feeble resistance. The papal troops entered the city through the breach their cannon had effected. Never did victorious army act more insolently or with greater inhumanity. None were spared; neither the sick on their beds, nor the poor in their asylums, nor the maimed that hobbled through the streets. Those were most fortunate that were first despatched. The rest were tortured with painful wounds that prolonged their agonies till death was rather desired than dreaded, or were hurled down upon pikes and halberds, or were hung to pot-hooks and roasted in the fire, or were hacked in pieces. Not a few of the women were treated with dishonor; the greater part were hung to doors and windows, and their dead bodies, stripped naked, were submitted to indignities for which the annals of warfare, except among the most ferocious savages, can scarcely supply a parallel. That the Almighty might not seem to be insulted in the persons only of living creatures formed in His own image, the fresh impiety was perpetrated of derisively stuffing leaves torn from French Bibles into the gaping wounds of the dead lying on this field of carnage. Nor did the Roman Catholics of Orange fare much better than their reformed neighbors. Mistaken for enemies, they were massacred in the public square, where they had assembled, expecting rather to receive a reward for their services in assisting the pontifical troops to enter, than to atone for their treachery by their own death.101

François de Beaumont, Baron des Adrets.

But the time for revenge soon came around. The barbarous warfare initiated by the adherents of the triumvirate in Dauphiny and Provence bred or brought forward a leader and soldiers who did not hesitate to repay cruelty with cruelty. François de Beaumont, Baron des Adrets, was a merciless general, who affected to believe that rigor and strict retaliation were indispensable to remove the contempt in which the Huguenots were held, and who knew how by bold movements to appear where least expected, and by vigor to multiply the apparent size of his army. Attached to the Reformation only from ambition, and breathing a spirit far removed from the meekness of the Gospel, he soon awakened the horror of his comrades in arms, and incurred the censure of Condé for his barbarities; so that, within a few months, becoming disgusted with the Huguenots, he went over to the papal side, and in the second civil war was found fighting against his former associates.102 Meantime, his brief connection with the Huguenots was a blot upon their escutcheon all the more noticeable because of the prevailing purity;103 and the injury he inflicted upon the cause of Protestantism far more than cancelled the services he rendered at Lyons and elsewhere. At Pierrelate he permitted his soldiers to take signal vengeance on the garrison for the recent massacre. At Mornas the articles of the capitulation, by which the lives of the besieged were guaranteed, were not observed; for the Protestant soldiers from Orange, recognizing among them the perpetrators of the crimes which had turned their homes into a howling desert, fell upon them and were not – perhaps could not be – restrained by their leader.104 The fatal example of Orange was but too faithfully copied, and precipitating the prisoners from the summit of a high rock became the favorite mode of execution.105 Only one of the unfortunates, who happened to break his fall by catching hold of a wild fig-tree growing cut of the side of the cliff, was spared by his enemies.106 A number of the naked corpses were afterward placed in an open boat without pilot or tiller, and suffered to float down the Rhône with a banner on which were written these words: "O men of Avignon! permit the bearers to pass, for they have paid the toll at Mornas."107

Blaise de Montluc.

Massacre at Toulouse.

The atrocities of Des Adrets and his soldiers in the East were, however, surpassed by those which Blaise de Montluc inflicted upon the Huguenots of the West, or which took place under his sanction. His memoirs, which are among the most authentic materials for the history of the wars in which he took part, present him to us as a remorseless soldier, dead to all feelings of sympathy with human distress, glorying in having executed more Huguenots than any other royal lieutenant in France,108 pleased to have the people call the two hangmen whom he used to take about with him his "lackeys."109 It is not surprising that, under the auspices of such an officer, fierce passions should have had free play. At Toulouse, the seat of the most fanatical parliament in France, a notable massacre took place. Even in this hot-bed of bigotry the reformed doctrines had made rapid and substantial progress, and the great body of the students in the famous law-school, as well of the municipal government, were favorable to their spread.110 The common people, however, were as virulent in their hostility as the parliament itself. They had never been fully reconciled to the publication of the Edict of January, and had only been restrained from interference with the worship of the Protestants by the authority of the government. Of late the Huguenots had discovered on what treacherous ground they stood. A funeral procession of theirs had been attacked, and several persons had been murdered. A massacre had been perpetrated in the city of Cahors, not far distant from them. In both cases the entire authority of parliament had been exerted to shield the guilty. The Huguenots, therefore, resolved to forestall disaster by throwing Toulouse into the hands of Condé, and succeeded so far as to introduce some companies of soldiers within the walls and to seize the "hôtel de ville." They had, however, miscalculated their strength. The Roman Catholics were more numerous, and after repeated conflicts they were able to demand the surrender of the building in which the Protestants had intrenched themselves. Destitute alike of provisions and of the means of defence, and menaced with the burning of their retreat, the latter accepted the conditions offered, and – a part on the day before Pentecost, a part after the services of that Sunday, one of the chief festivals of the Reformed Church – they retired without arms, intending to depart for more hospitable cities. Scarce, however, had the last detachment left the walls, when the tocsin was sounded, and their enemies, respecting none of their promises, involved them in a horrible carnage. It was the opinion of the best informed that in all three thousand persons perished on both sides during the riot at Toulouse, of whom by far the greater number were Huguenots. Even this effusion of blood was not sufficient. The next day Montluc appeared in the city. And now, encouraged by his support, the Parliament of Toulouse initiated a system of judicial inquiries which were summary in their character, and rarely ended save in the condemnation of the accused. Within three months two hundred persons were publicly executed. The Protestant leader was quartered. The parliament vindicated its orthodoxy by the expulsion of twenty-two counsellors suspected of a leaning to the Reformation; and informers were allured by bribes, as well as frightened by ecclesiastical menaces, in order that the harvest of confiscation might be the greater.111

Such were the deeds which the Roman Catholics of southern France have up to our times commemorated by centenary celebrations;112 such the pious achievements for which Blaise de Montluc received from Pope Pius the Fourth the most lavish praise as a zealous defender of the Catholic faith.113

Foreign alliances sought.

Meanwhile, about Paris and Orleans the war lagged. Both sides were receiving reinforcements. The ban and rear-ban were summoned in the king's name, and a large part of the levies joined Condé as the royal representative in preference to Navarre and the triumvirate.114 Charles the Ninth and Catharine had consented to publish a declaration denying Condé's allegation that they were held in duress.115 The Guises had sent abroad to Spain, to Germany, to the German cantons of Switzerland, to Savoy, to the Pope. Philip, after the abundant promises with which he had encouraged the French papists to enter upon the war, was not quite sure whether he had better answer the calls now made upon him. He was by no means confident that the love of country of the French might not, after all, prove stronger than the discord engendered by their religious differences, and their hatred of the Spaniard than their hatred of their political rivals.116 "Those stirrings," writes Sir Thomas Chaloner from Spain, "have here gevyn matter of great consultation day by day to this king and counsaile. One wayes they devise howe the Gwisans may be ayded and assisted by them, esteming for religion sake that the prevaylment of that syde importithe them as the ball of theire eye. Another wayes they stand in a jelousie whither theis nombers thus assembled in Fraunce, may not possibly shake hands, and sett upon the Lowe Countries or Navarre, both peecs, upon confidence of the peace, now being disprovided of garisons. So ferfurthe as they here repent the revocation of the Spanish bands owt of Flanders… So as in case the new bushops against the people's mynd shall need be enstalled, the Frenche had never such an opertunyte as they perchauns should fynd at this instant."117 To the Duke of Würtemberg the Guises had induced Charles and Catharine to write, throwing the blame of the civil war entirely upon Condé;118 but Christopher, this time at least, had his eyes wide open, and his reply was not only a pointed refusal to join in the general crusade against the Calvinists, but a noble plea in behalf of toleration and clemency.119

Queen Elizabeth's aid invoked.

The Huguenots, on the other hand, had rather endeavored to set themselves right in public estimation and to prepare the way for future calls for assistance, than made any present requisitions. Elizabeth's ambassador, Throkmorton, had been carefully instructed as to the danger that overhung his mistress with all the rest of Protestant Christendom. He wrote to her that the plot was a general one, including England. "It may please your Majesty the papists, within these two days at Sens in Normandy, have slain and hurt two hundred persons – men and women. Your Majesty may perceive how dangerous it is to suffer papists that be of great heart and enterprise to lift up their crests so high."120 In another despatch he warned her of her danger. "It standeth your Majesty upon, for the conservation of your realm in the good terms it is in (thanks be to God), to countenance the Protestants as much as you may, until they be set afoot again, I mean in this realm; for here dependeth the great sway of that matter."121

Cecil's urgency and schemes.

Divided sympathies of the English.

Cecil himself adopted the same views, and urged them upon Elizabeth's attention. Not succeeding in impressing her according to his wish, he resorted to extraordinary measures to compass the end. He instructed Mundt, his agent in Germany, to exert himself to induce the Protestant princes to send "special messengers" to England and persuade Elizabeth to join in "a confederacy of all parts professing the Gospel." In fact, the cunning secretary of state went even farther, and dictated to Mundt just what he should write to the queen. He was to tell her Majesty "that if she did not attempt the furtherance of the Gospel in France, and the keeping asunder of France and Spain, she would be in greater peril than any other prince in Christendom," for "the papist princes that sought to draw her to their parts meant her subversion" – a truth which, were she to be informed of by any of the German princes, might have a salutary effect.122 But the vacillating queen could not be induced as yet to take the same view, and needed the offer of some tangible advantages to move her. No wonder that Elizabeth's policy halted. Every occurrence across the channel was purposely misrepresented by the emissaries of Philip, and the open sympathizers of the Roman Catholic party at the English court were almost more numerous than the hearty Protestants. A few weeks later, a correspondent of Throkmorton wrote to him from home: "Here are daily bruits given forth by the Spanish ambassador, as it is thought, far discrepant from such as I learn are sent from your lordship, and the papists have so great a voice here as they have almost as much credit, the more it is to be lamented. I have not, since I came last over, come in any company where almost the greater part have not in reasoning defended papistry, allowed the Guisians' proceedings, and seemed to deface the prince's quarrel and design. How dangerous this is your lordship doth see."123 The Swiss Protestant cantons were reluctant to appear to countenance rebellion. Berne sent a few ensigns to Lyons at the request of the Protestants of that city, but wished to limit them strictly to the defensive, and subsequently she yielded to the urgency of the Guises and recalled them altogether.124 But as yet no effort was made by Condé to call in foreign assistance. The reluctance of Admiral Coligny, while it did honor to the patriotism which always moved him, seems to have led him to commit a serious mistake. The admiral hoped and believed that the Huguenots would prove strong enough to succeed without invoking foreign assistance; moreover, he was unwilling to set the first example of bringing in strangers to arbitrate concerning the domestic affairs of France.125 And, indeed, had his opponents been equally patriotic, it is not improbable that his expectation would have been realized. For, if inferior to the enemy in infantry, the Huguenots, through the great preponderance of noblemen and gentlemen in their army, were at first far superior in cavalry.

Diplomatic manœuvres.

The beaten path of diplomatic manœuvre was first tried. Four times were messengers sent to Condé, in the king's name, requiring his submission. Four times he responded that he could not lay down his arms until Guise should have retired from court and been punished for the massacre of Vassy, until the constable and Saint André should have returned to their governments, leaving the king his personal liberty, and until the Edict of January should be fully re-established.126 These demands the opposing party were unwilling to concede. It is true that a pretence was made of granting the last point, and, on the eleventh of April, an edict, ostensibly in confirmation of that of January, was signed by Charles, by the advice of Catharine, the King of Navarre, the Cardinals of Bourbon and Guise, the Duke of Guise, the constable, and Aumale. But there was a glaring contradiction between the two laws, for Paris was expressly excepted from the provisions. In or around the capital no exercises of the reformed religion could be celebrated.127 Such was the trick by which the triumvirs hoped to take the wind out of the confederates' sails. Though the concession could not be accepted by the Protestants, it might be alleged to show foreigners the unreasonableness of Condé and his supporters. Meantime, in reply to the prince's declaration as to the causes for which he had taken up arms, the adherents of Guise published in their own vindication a paper, wherein they gravely asserted that, but for the duke's timely arrival, fifteen hundred Huguenots, gathered from every part of the kingdom, would have entered Paris, and, with the assistance of their confederates within the walls, would have plundered the city.128

The month of May witnessed the dreary continuation of the same state of things. On the first, Condé wrote to the queen mother, reiterating his readiness to lay down the arms he had assumed in the king's defence and her's, on the same conditions as before. On the fourth, Charles, Catharine, and Antoine replied, refusing to dismiss the Guises or to restore the Edict of January in reference to Paris, but, at the same time, inviting the prince to return to court, and promising that, after he should have submitted, and the revolted cities should have been restored to their allegiance, the triumvirs would retire to their governments.129

On the same day two petitions were presented to Charles. Both were signed by Guise, Montmorency, and Saint André. In the first they prayed his Majesty to interdict the exercise of every other religion save the "holy Apostolic and Roman," and require that all royal officers should conform to that religion or forfeit their positions; to compel the heretics to restore the churches which had been destroyed; to punish the sacrilegious; to declare rebels all who persisted in retaining arms without permission of the King of Navarre. Under these conditions they would consent, they said, to leave France – nay, to go to the ends of the world. In the second petition they demanded the submission of the confederates of Orleans, the restitution of the places which had been seized, the exaction of an oath to observe the royal edicts, both new and old, and the enforcement of the sole command of Navarre over the French armies.130

Condé's reply to the pretended petition.

Condé's reply (May twentieth) was the most bitter, as well as the ablest and most vigorous paper of the initiatory stage of the war. It well deserves a careful examination. The pretended petition, Louis of Bourbon wrote to the queen mother, any one can see, even upon a cursory perusal, to be in effect nothing else than a decree concocted by the Duke of Guise, Constable Montmorency, and Marshal Saint André, with the assistance of the papal legate and nuncio and the ministers of foreign states. Ambition, not zeal for the faith, is the motive. In order to have their own way, not only do the signers refuse to have a prince of the blood near the monarch, but they intend removing and punishing all the worthy members of the royal privy council, beginning with Michel de l'Hospital, the chancellor. In point of fact, they have already made a ridiculous appointment of six new counsellors. The queen mother is to be banished to Chenonceaux, there to spend her time in laying out her gardens. La Roche-sur-Yon will be sent elsewhere. New instructors are to be placed around the king to teach him riding, jousting, the art of love – anything, in short, to divert his mind from religion and the art of reigning well. The conspiracy is more dangerous than the conspiracy of Sulla or Cæsar, or that of the Roman triumvirs. Its authors point to their titles, and allege the benefits they have conferred; but their boasts may easily be answered by pointing to their insatiable avarice, and to the princely revenues they have accumulated during their long connection with the public administration. They speak of the present dangerous state of the country. What was it before the massacre of Vassy? After the publication of the Edict of January universal peace prevailed. That peace these very petitioners disturbed. What means the coalition of the constable and Marshal Saint André? What mean the barbarities lately committed in Paris, but that the peace was to be broken by violent means? As to the obedience the petitioners profess to exhibit to the queen, they showed her open contempt when they refused to go to the provinces which they governed under the king's orders; when they came to the capital contrary to her express direction, and that in arms; when by force they dragged the king, her son, and herself from Fontainebleau to the Louvre. They have accused the Huguenots of treating the king as a prisoner, because these desire that the decree drawn up by the advice of the three estates of the realm should be made irrevocable until the majority of Charles the Ninth; but how was it when three persons, of whom one is a foreigner and the other two are servants of the crown, dictate a new edict, and wish that edict to be absolutely irrevocable? There is no need of lugging the Roman Catholic religion into the discussion, and undertaking its defence, for no one has thought of attacking it. The demand made by the petitioners for a compulsory subscription to certain articles of theirs is in opposition to immemorial usage; for no subscription has ever been exacted save to the creed of the Apostles. It is a second edict, and in truth nothing else than the introduction of that hateful Spanish inquisition. Ten thousand nobles and a hundred thousand soldiers will not be compelled either by force or by authority to affix their signatures to it. But, to talk of enforcing submission to a Roman Catholic confession is idle, so long as the Duke of Guise and the Cardinal of Lorraine do not retract their own adhesion to the Augsburg Confession lately given in with such protestations to a German prince. The charge of countenancing the breaking of images the prince would answer by pointing to the penalties he has inflicted in order to repress the irregularity. And yet, if it come to the true desert of punishment, what retribution ought not to be meted out for the crimes perpetrated by the petitioners, or under their auspices and after their examples, at Vassy, at Sens, at Paris, at Toulouse, and in so many other places? For the author of the petition should have remembered that it is nowhere written that a dead image ever cried for vengeance; but the blood of man – God's living image – demands it of heaven, and draws it down, though it tarry long. As for the accusation brought against Condé and the best part of the French nobility, that they are rebels, the prince hopes soon to meet his accusers in the open field and there decide the question whether a foreigner and two others of such a station as they are shall undertake to judge a prince of the blood. To allege Navarre's authority comes with ill-grace from men who wronged that king so openly during the late reign of Francis the Second. Finally, the Prince of Condé would set over against the petition of the triumvirate, one of his own, containing for its principal articles that the Edict of January, which his enemies seek to overturn, shall be observed inviolate; that all the king's subjects of every order and condition shall be maintained in their rights and privileges; that the professors of the reformed faith shall be protected until the majority of Charles; that arms shall be laid down on either side; above all, that foreign arms, which he himself, so far from inviting to France, has, up to the present moment, steadfastly declined when voluntarily offered, and which he will never resort to unless compelled by his enemies, shall be banished from the kingdom.131

Third National Synod.

While the clouds of war were thus gathering thick around Orleans, within its walls a synod of the reformed churches of France had assembled on the twenty-fifth of April, to deliberate of matters relating to their religious interests. Important questions of discipline were discussed and settled, and a day of public fasting and prayer was appointed in view of the danger of a declared civil war.132

Interview of Catharine and Condé.

The actual war was fast approaching. The army of the Guises, under the nominal command of the King of Navarre, was now ready to march in the direction of Orleans. Before setting out, however, the triumvirs resolved to make sure of their hold upon the capital, and royal edicts (of the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh of May) were obtained ordering the expulsion from Paris of all known Protestants.133 Then, with an army of four thousand foot and three thousand horse, the King of Navarre marched toward the city of Châteaudun.134 On hearing of the movement of his brother's forces, the Prince of Condé advanced to meet him at the head of six thousand foot and two thousand horse. There were those, however, who still believed it to be possible to avert a collision and settle the matters in dispute by amicable discussion. Of this number was Catharine de' Medici. Hastily leaving the castle of Vincennes, she hurried to the front, and at the little town of Toury, between the two armies, she brought about an interview between Condé, the King of Navarre, and herself. Such was the imbittered feeling supposed to animate both sides, that the escorts of the two princes had been strictly enjoined to avoid approaching each other, lest they should be tempted to indulge in insulting remarks, and from these come to blows. But, to the great surprise of all, they had no sooner met than papist and Huguenot rushed into each other's arms and embraced as friends long separated. While the principals were discussing the terms of union, their followers had already expressed by action the accord reigning in their hearts, and the white cloaks of Condé's attendants were to be seen indiscriminately mingled with the crimson cloaks of his brother's escort. Yet, after all, the interview came to nothing. Neither side could accept the only terms the other would offer, and Catharine returned disappointed to Paris, to be greeted by the populace with the most insulting language for imperilling the orthodoxy of the kingdom.135 Not, however, altogether despairing of effecting a reconciliation, Condé addressed a letter to the King of Navarre, entreating him, before it should be too late, to listen to his brotherly arguments. The answer came in a new summons to lay down his arms.136

The "loan" of Beaugency.

Yet, while they had no desire for a reconciliation on any such terms as the Huguenots could accept, there were some substantial advantages which the Roman Catholic leaders hoped to reap under cover of fresh negotiations. All the portion of the valley of the Loire lying nearest to Paris was in the hands of the confederates of Orleans. It was impossible for Navarre to reach the southern bank, except by crossing below Amboise, and thus exposing the communications of his army with Paris to be cut off at any moment. To attain his end with less difficulty, Antoine now sent word to his brother that he was disposed to conclude a peace, and proposed a truce of six days. Meanwhile, he requested Condé to gratify him by the "loan" of the town of Beaugency, a few miles below Orleans, where he might be more comfortably lodged than in his present inconvenient quarters. The request was certainly sufficiently novel, but that it was granted by Condé may appear even more strange.

Futile negotiations.

This was not the only act of folly in which the Huguenot leaders became involved. Under pretence of showing their readiness to contribute their utmost to the re-establishment of peace, the constable, Guise, and Saint André, after obtaining a declaration from Catharine and Antoine that their voluntary retreat would do no prejudice to their honor,137 retired from the royal court, but went no farther than the neighboring city of Châteaudun. The Prince of Condé, swallowing the bait, did not hesitate a moment to place himself, the very next day, in the hands of the queen mother and his brother, and was led more like a captive than a freeman from Beaugency to Talsy, where Catharine was staying. Becoming alarmed, however, at his isolated situation, he wrote to his comrades in arms, and within a few hours so goodly a company of knights appeared, with Coligny, Andelot, Prince Porcien, La Rochefoucauld, Rohan, and other distinguished nobles at their head, that any treacherous plans that may have been entertained by the wily Italian princess were rendered entirely futile. She resolved, therefore, to entrap them by soft speeches. With that utter disregard for consistency so characteristic both of her actions and of her words, Catharine publicly138 thanked the Huguenot lords for the services they had rendered the king, who would never cease to be grateful to them, and recognized, for her own part, that her son and she herself owed to them the preservation of their lives. But, after this flattering preamble, she proceeded to make the unpalatable proposition that they should consent to the repeal of the edict so far as Paris was concerned, under the guarantee of personal liberty, but without permission to hold public religious worship. The prince and his associates could listen to no such terms. Indeed, carried away by the fervor of their zeal, they protested that, rather than surrender the rights of their brethren, they would leave the kingdom. "We shall willingly go into exile," they said, "if our absence will conduce to the restoration of public tranquillity." This assurance was just what Catharine had been awaiting. To the infinite surprise of the speakers themselves, she told them that she appreciated their disinterested motives, and accepted their offer; that they should have safe-conducts to whatever land they desired to visit, with full liberty to sell their goods and to receive their incomes; but that their voluntary retirement would last only until the king's majority, which would be declared so soon as he had completed his fourteenth year!139 It needs scarcely be said that, awkward as was the predicament in which they had placed themselves, the prince and his companions had little disposition to follow out Catharine's plan. On their return to the Protestant camp, the clamor of the soldiers against any further exposure of the person of their leader to peril, and the opportune publication of an intercepted letter said to have been written by the Duke of Guise to his brother, the Cardinal of Lorraine, on the eve of his departure for Châteaudun, and disclosing treacherous designs,140 decided the Huguenot leaders to break off the negotiations.141

The long period of comparative inaction was now succeeded by a spasmodic effort at energetic conduct. The six days' truce had scarcely expired when the prince resolved to throw himself unexpectedly upon the neighboring camp of the Roman Catholics, before Montmorency, Guise, and Saint André had resumed their accustomed posts. One of those nocturnal attacks, which, under the name of camisades, figure so frequently in the military history of the period, was secretly organized, and the Protestant soldiers, wearing white shirts over their armor, in order that they might easily recognize each other in the darkness of the night, started with alacrity, under D'Andelot's command, on the exciting adventure. But their guides were treacherous, or unskilful, and the enterprise came to naught.142 Disappointed in this attempt, and unable to force the enemy to give battle, Condé turned his attention to Beaugency, which the King of Navarre had failed to restore, and carried it by storm. He would gladly have followed up the advantage by laying siege to Blois and Tours, which the triumvirate had taken and treated with the utmost cruelty; but heavy rains, and the impossibility of carrying on military operations on account of the depth of the mud, compelled him to relinquish his project, and reduced the main army to renewed inactivity.143

The protracted delays and inexcusable sluggishness of the leaders had borne their natural fruits. Many of the Protestant gentlemen had left the camp in disgust at the mistakes committed; others had retired to their homes on hearing that their families were exposed to the dangers of war and stood in need of their protection; a few had been corrupted by the arts of the enemy. For it was a circumstance often noticed by contemporaries, that no envoy was ever sent from Orleans to the court who did not return, if not demoralized, yet so lukewarm as to be incapable of performing any good service in future.144 Yet the dispersion of the higher rank of the reformed soldiers, and the consequent weakening of Condé's army in cavalry, were attended with this incidental advantage, that they contributed greatly to the strengthening of the party in the provinces, and necessitated a similar division of the opposing forces.145

Huguenot discipline.

Never, perhaps, was there an army that exhibited such excellent discipline as did the army of the Protestants in this the first stage of its warfare. Never had the morals and religion of soldiers been better cared for. It was the testimony of a soldier, one of the most accomplished and philosophical writers of his times – the brave "Bras de Fer" – that the preaching of the Gospel was the great instrument of imbuing the army with the spirit of order. Crimes, he tells us, were promptly revealed; no blasphemy was heard throughout the camp, for it was universally frowned upon. The very implements of gambling – dice and cards – were banished. There were no lewd women among the camp-followers. Thefts were unfrequent and vigorously punished. A couple of soldiers were hung for having robbed a peasant of a small quantity of wine.146 Public prayers were said morning and evening; and, instead of profane or indelicate songs, nothing was heard but the psalms of David. Such were the admirable fruits of the careful discipline of Admiral Coligny, the true leader of the Protestant party; and they made a deep impression upon such enthusiastic youths as François de la Noue and Téligny. Their more experienced author, however, was not imposed upon by these flattering signs. "It is a very fine thing," he told them, "if only it last; but I much fear that these people will spend all their goodness at the outset, and that, two months hence, nothing will remain but malice. I have long commanded infantry, and I know that it often verifies the proverb which says: 'Of a young hermit, an old devil!' If this army does not, we shall give it a good mark."147 The prediction was speedily realized; for, although the army of the prince never sought to rival the papal troops in the extent of its license, the standard of soldierly morality was far below that which Coligny had desired to establish.148

Severities of the parliament.

So far as cruelty was concerned, everything in the conduct of their antagonists was calculated to provoke the Protestants to bitter retaliation. The army of Guise was merciless. If the infuriated Huguenots selected the priests that fell into their hands for the especial monuments of their retribution, it was because the priesthood as a body had become the instigators of savage barbarity, instead of being the ministers of peace; because when they did not, like Ronsard the poet, themselves buckle on the sword, or revel in blood, like the monks of Saint Calais,149 they still fanned, as they had for years been fanning, the flame of civil war, denouncing toleration or compromise, wielding the weapons of the church to enforce the pious duty of exterminating every foul calumny invented to the disadvantage of the reformers. No wonder, then, that the ecclesiastical dress itself became the badge of deadly and irreconcilable hostility, and that in the course of this unhappy war many a priest was cut down without any examination into his private views or personal history. Parliament, too, was setting the example of cruelty by reckless orders amounting almost to independent legislation. By a series of "arrêts" succeeding each other rapidly in the months of June and July, the door was opened wider and wider for popular excess. When the churches of Meaux were visited by an iconoclastic rabble on the twenty-sixth of June, the Parisian parliament, on the thirtieth of June, employed the disorder as the pretext of a judicial "declaration" that made the culprits liable to all the penalties of treason, and permitted any one to put them to death without further authorization. The populace of Paris needed no fuller powers to attack the Huguenots, for, within two or three days, sixty men and women had been killed, robbed, and thrown into the river. Parliament, therefore, found it convenient to terminate the massacre by a second order restricting the application of the declaration to persons taken in the very act.150 A few days later (July, 1562), other arrêts empowered all inhabitants of towns and villages to take up arms against those who molested priests, sacked churches, or "held conventicles and unlawful assemblies," whether public or secret; and to arrest the ministers, deacons, and other ecclesiastical functionaries for trial, as guilty of treason against God as well as man.151 Not content with these appeals to popular passion,152 however, the Parisian judges soon gave practical exemplifications of their intolerant principles; for two royal officers – the "lieutenant general" of Pontoise, and the "lieutenant" of Senlis – were publicly hung; the former for encouraging the preaching of God's word "in other form than the ancient church" authorized, the latter for "celebrating the Lord's Supper according to the Genevese fashion." These were, according to the curate of St. Barthélemi, the first executions at Paris for the simple profession of "Huguenoterie" since the pardon proclaimed by Francis the Second at Amboise.153 A few days later, a new and more explicit declaration pronounced all those who had taken up arms, robbed churches and monasteries, and committed other sacrilegious acts at Orleans, Lyons, Rouen, and various other cities mentioned by name, to be rebels, and deprived them of all their offices. Yet, by way of retaliation upon Condé for maintaining that he had entered upon the war in order to defend the persons of the king and his mother, unjustly deprived of their liberty, parliament pretended to regard the prince himself as an unwilling captive in the hands of the confederates; and, consequently, excepted him alone from the general attainder.154 But the legal fiction does not seem to have been attended with the great success its projectors anticipated.155 The people could scarcely credit the statement that the war was waged by the Guises simply for the liberation of their mortal enemy, Condé, especially when Condé himself indignantly repelled the attempt to separate him from the associates with whom he had entered into common engagements, not to add that the reputation of the Lorraine family, whose mouthpiece parliament might well be supposed to be, was not over good for strict adherence to truth.

Meanwhile the triumvirs were more successful in their military operations than the partisans of the prince. Their auxiliaries came in more promptly, for the step which Condé now saw himself forced to take, in consequence of his opponents' course, they had long since resolved upon. They had received reinforcements from Germany, both of infantry and cavalry, under command of the Rhinegrave Philip of Salm and the Count of Rockendorf; while Condé had succeeded in detaching but few of the Lutheran troopers by a manifesto in which he endeavored to explain the true nature of the struggle. Soldiers from the Roman Catholic cantons had been allowed a free passage through the Spanish Franche-Comté by the regent of the Low Countries, Margaret of Parma. The Pope himself contributed liberally to the supply of money for paying the troops.156 But the Protestant reinforcements from the Palatinate and Zweibrücken (Deux-Ponts), and from Hesse, which D'Andelot, and, after him, Gaspard de Schomberg, had gone to hasten, were not yet ready; while Elizabeth still hesitated to listen to the solicitations of Briquemault and Robert Stuart, the Scotchman, who had been successively sent to her court.157

Military successes of the triumvirs.

Fall of Bourges.

After effecting the important capture of the city of Poitiers, Marshal Saint André, at the head of a Roman Catholic army, had marched, about the middle of August, toward Bourges, perhaps the most important place held by the Protestants in central France. Beneath the walls of this city he joined the main army, under Navarre's nominal command, but really led by the Duke of Guise. The siege was pressed with vigor, for the king was present in person with the "Guisards." To the handful of Huguenots their assailants appeared to be "a marvellous army of French, Germans, reiters, Spaniards, and other nations, numbering in all eighty or a hundred thousand men, with the bravest cavalry that could be seen."158 And, when twenty or twenty-five cannon opened upon Bourges with balls of forty or fifty pounds' weight, and when six hundred and forty discharges were counted on a single day, and every building in the town was shaken to its very foundations, the besieged, numbering only a few hundred men, would have been excusable had they lost heart. Instead of this, they obstinately defended their works, repaired the breach by night, and inflicted severe injury on the enemy by nocturnal sallies. To add to the duke's embarrassment, Admiral Coligny, issuing from Orleans, was fortunate enough to cut off an important convoy of provisions and ammunition coming from Paris to the relief of the besiegers.159 Despairing of taking the city by force, they now turned to negotiation. Unhappily, M. d'Ivoy, in command of the Huguenot garrison, was not proof against the seductive offers made him. Disregarding the remonstrances of his companions in arms, who pointed to the fact that the enemy had from day to day, through discouragement or from sheer exhaustion, relaxed their assaults, he consented (on the thirty-first of August) to surrender Bourges to the army that had so long thundered at its gates. D'Ivoy returned to Orleans, but Condé, accusing him of open perfidy, refused to see him; while the Protestants of Bourges shared the usual fate of those who trusted the promises of the Roman Catholic leaders, and secured few of the religious privileges guaranteed by the articles of capitulation.160

With the fall of Bourges, the whole of central France, as far as to the gates of Orleans, yielded to the arms of Guise. Everywhere the wretched inhabitants of the reformed faith were compelled to submit to gross indignities, or seek safety in flight. To many of these homeless fugitives the friendly castle of Montargis, belonging to the Duchess of Ferrara, to which reference will shortly be made, afforded a welcome refuge.161

Help from Queen Elizabeth.

The necessity of obtaining immediate reinforcements had at length brought Condé and the other great Huguenot lords to acquiesce in the offer of the only terms upon which Elizabeth of England could be persuaded to grant them actual support. As the indispensable condition to her interference, she demanded that the cities of Havre and Dieppe should be placed in her hands. These would be a pledge for the restoration of Calais, that old English stronghold which had fallen into the power of the French during the last war, and for whose restoration within eight years there had been an express stipulation in the treaties Cateau-Cambrésis. This humiliating concession the Huguenots reluctantly agreed to make. Elizabeth in turn promised to send six thousand English troops (three thousand to guard each of the cities), who should serve under the command of Condé as the royal lieutenant, and pledged her word to lend the prince and his associates one hundred and forty thousand crowns toward defraying the expenses of the war.162 On the twentieth of September the Queen of England published to the world a declaration of the motives that led her to interfere, alleging in particular the usurpation of the royal authority by the Guises, and the consequent danger impending over the Protestants of Normandy through the violence of the Duke of Aumale.163

The tidings of the alliance and of some of its conditions had already reached France, and they rather damaged than furthered the Protestant cause. As the English queen's selfish determination to confine her assistance to the protection of the three cities became known, it alarmed even her warmest friends among the French Protestants. Condé and Coligny earnestly begged the queen's ambassador to tell his mistress that "in case her Majesty were introduced by their means into Havre, Dieppe, and Rouen with six thousand men, only to keep those places, it would be unto them a great note of infamy." They would seem wantonly to have exposed to a foreign prince the very flower of Normandy, in giving into her hands cities which they felt themselves quite able to defend without assistance. So clearly did Throkmorton foresee the disastrous consequences of this course, that, even at the risk of offending the queen by his presumption, he took the liberty to warn her that if she suffered the Protestants of France to succumb, with minds so alienated from her that they should consent to make an accord with the opposite faction, the possession of the cities would avail her but little against the united forces of the French. He therefore suggested that it might be quite as well for her Majesty's interests, "that she should serve the turn of the Huguenots as well as her own."164 Truly, Queen Elizabeth was throwing away a glorious opportunity of displaying magnanimous disinterestedness, and of conciliating the affection of a powerful party on the continent. In the inevitable struggle between Protestant England and papal Spain, the possession of such an ally as the best part of France would be of inestimable value in abridging the contest or in deciding the result. But the affection of the Huguenots could be secured by no such cold-blooded compact as that which required them to appear in the light of an unpatriotic party whose success would entail the dismemberment of the kingdom. To make such a demand at the very moment when her own ambassador was writing from Paris that the people "did daily most cruelly use and kill every person, no age or sex excepted, that they took to be contrary to their religion," was to show but too clearly that not religious zeal nor philanthropic tenderness of heart, so much as pure selfishness, was the motive influencing her.165 And yet the English queen was not uninformed of, nor wholly insensible to, the calls of humanity. She could in fact, on occasion, herself set them forth with force and pathos. Nothing could surpass the sympathy expressed in her autograph letter to Mary of Scots, deprecating the resentment of the latter at Elizabeth's interference – a letter which, as Mr. Froude notices, was not written by Cecil and merely signed by the queen, but was her own peculiar and characteristic composition. "Far sooner," she wrote, "would I pass over those murders on land; far rather would I leave unwritten those noyades in the rivers – those men and women hacked in pieces; but the shrieks of the strangled wives, great with child – the cries of the infants at their mothers' breasts – pierce me through. What drug of rhubarb can purge the bile which these tyrannies engender?"166

The news of the English alliance, although not unexpected, produced a very natural irritation at the French court. When Throkmorton applied to Catharine de' Medici for a passport to leave the kingdom, the queen persistently refused, telling him that such a document was unnecessary in his case. But she significantly volunteered the information that "some of his nation had lately entered France without asking for passports, who she hoped would speedily return without leave-taking!"167

Siege of Rouen, October.

Meanwhile the English movement rather accelerated than retarded the operations of the royal army. After the fall of Bourges, there had been a difference of opinion in the council whether Orleans or Rouen ought first to be attacked. Orleans was the centre of Huguenot activity, the heart from which the currents of life flowed to the farthest extremities of Gascony and Languedoc; but it was strongly fortified, and would be defended by a large and intrepid garrison. A siege was more likely to terminate disastrously to the assailants than to the citizens and Protestant troops. The admiral laughed at the attempt to attack a city which could throw three thousand men into the breach.168 Rouen, on the contrary, was weak, and, if attacked before reinforcements were received from England, but feebly garrisoned. Yet it was the key of the valley of the Seine, and its possession by the Huguenots was a perpetual menace of the capital.169 So long as it was in their hands, the door to the heart of the kingdom lay wide open to the united army of French and English Protestants. Very wisely, therefore, the Roman Catholic generals abandoned their original design170 of reducing Orleans so soon as Bourges should fall, and resolved first to lay siege to Rouen. Great reason, indeed, had the captors of such strongholds as Marienbourg, Calais, and Thionville, to anticipate that a place so badly protected, so easily commanded, and destitute of any fortification deserving the name, would yield on the first alarm.171 It was true that a series of attacks made by the Duke of Aumale upon Fort St. Catharine, the citadel of Rouen, had been signally repulsed, and that, after two weeks of fighting, on the twelfth of July he had abandoned the undertaking.172 But, with the more abundant resources at their command, a better result might now be expected. Siege was, therefore, a second time laid, on the twenty-ninth of September, by the King of Navarre.

The forces on the two sides were disproportionate. Navarre, Montmorency, and Guise were at the head of sixteen thousand foot and two thousand horse, in addition to a considerable number of German mercenaries. Montgomery,173 who commanded the Protestants, had barely eight hundred trained soldiers.174 The rest of the scanty garrison was composed of those of the citizens who were capable of bearing arms, to the number of perhaps four thousand more. But this handful of men instituted a stout resistance. After frequently repulsing the assailants, the double fort of St. Catharine, situated near the Seine, on the east of the city, and Rouen's chief defence, was taken rather by surprise than by force. Yet, after this unfortunate loss, the brave Huguenots fought only with the greater desperation. Their numbers had been reinforced by the accession of some five hundred Englishmen of the first detachment of troops which had landed at Havre on the third of October, and whom Sir Adrian Poynings had assumed the responsibility of sending to the relief of the beleaguered capital of Normandy.175 With Killigrew of Pendennis for their captain, they had taken advantage of a high tide to pass the obstructions of boats filled with stone and sand that had been sunk in the river opposite Caudebec, and, with the exception of the crew of one barge that ran ashore, and eleven of whom were hung by the Roman Catholics, "for having entered the service of the Huguenots contrary to the will of the Queen of England," they succeeded in reaching Rouen.176

These, however, were not the only auxiliaries upon whom the Huguenot chief could count. The women were inspired with a courage that equalled, and a determination that surpassed, that of their husbands and brothers. They undertook the most arduous labors; they fought side by side on the walls; they helped to repair at night the breaches which the enemy's cannon had made during the day; and after one of the most sanguinary conflicts during the siege, it was found that there were more women killed and wounded than men. Yet the courage of the Huguenots sustained them throughout the unequal struggle. Frequently summoned to surrender, the Rouenese would listen to no terms that included a loss of their religious liberty. Rather than submit to the usurpation of the Guises, they preferred to fall with arms in their hands.177 For fall they must. D'Andelot was on his way with the troops he had laboriously collected in Germany; another band of three thousand Englishmen was only detained by the adverse winds; Condé himself was reported on his way northward to raise the siege – but none could arrive in time. The King of Navarre had been severely wounded in the shoulder, but Guise and the constable pressed the city with no less decision. At last the walls on the side of the suburbs of St. Hilaire and Martainville were breached by the overwhelming fire of the enemy. The population of Rouen and its motley garrison, reduced in numbers, worn out with toils and vigils, and disheartened by a combat which ceased on one day only to be renewed under less favorable circumstances on the next, were no longer able to continue their heroic and almost superhuman exertions.

Fall of Rouen.

The Norman parliament.

On Monday, the twenty-sixth of October, the army of the triumvirate forced its way over the rubbish into Rouen, and the richest city of France, outside of Paris, fell an unresisting prey to the cupidity of an insubordinate soldiery. Rarely had so tempting a prize fallen into the hands of a conquering army; rarely were the exactions of war more remorsely inflicted.178 But the barbarities of a licentious army were exceeded in atrocity by the cooler deliberations of the Norman parliament. That supreme court, always inimical to the Protestants, had retired to the neighboring city of Louviers, in order to maintain itself free from Huguenot influence. It now returned to Rouen and exercised a sanguinary revenge. Augustin Marlorat, one of the most distinguished among the reformed ministers of France, and the most prominent pastor of the church of Rouen, had been thrown into prison; he was now brought before the parliament, and with others was sentenced to death as a traitor and a disturber of the public repose, then dragged on a hurdle to the place of execution and ignominiously hung.179

The ferocity of the Norman parliament alarming the queen mother, she interfered to secure the observance of the edict of amnesty she had recently prepared. But serious results followed in the case of two prominent partisans of Guise who had fallen into Condé's hands, and were in prison when the tidings reached Orleans. On the recommendation of his council, the prince retaliated by sending to the gallows Jean Baptiste Sapin, a member of the Parisian parliament, and the Abbé de Gastines, who had been captured while travelling in company with an envoy whom the court were sending to Spain.180

Death of Antoine de Bourbon, King of Navarre.

The fall of Rouen was followed within a few weeks by the death of the King of Navarre. His painful wound was not, perhaps, necessarily mortal, but the restless and vainglorious prince would not remain quiet and allow it to heal. He insisted on being borne in a litter through the breach into the city which had been taken under his nominal command. It was a sort of triumphal procession, marching to the sound of cymbals, and with other marks of victory. But the idle pageant only increased the inflammation in his shoulder. Even in his sick-room he allowed himself no time for serious thought; but, prating of the orange-groves of Sardinia which he was to receive from the King of Spain, and toying with Rouhet, the beautiful maid of honor by whom Catharine had drawn him into her net, he frittered away the brief remnant of an ignoble life. When visibly approaching his end, he is said, at the suggestion of an Italian physician, to have confessed himself to a priest, and to have received the last sacraments of the Romish Church. Yet, with characteristic vacillation he listened, but a few hours later, with attention and apparent devoutness, to the reading of God's Word, and answered the remonstrances of his faithful Huguenot physician by the assurance that, if he recovered his health, he would openly espouse the Augsburg Confession, and cause the pure Gospel to be preached everywhere throughout France.181 His death occurred on the seventeenth of November, 1562, at Les Andelys, a village on the Seine. He had insisted, contrary to his friends' advice, upon being taken by boat from Rouen to St. Maur-des-Fossés, where, within a couple of leagues of Paris, he hoped to breathe a purer air; but death overtook him before he had completed half his journey.182

Had Antoine embraced with sincerity and steadfastly maintained either of the two phases of religious belief which divided between them the whole of western Christendom, his death would have left a void which could have been filled with difficulty. He was the first prince of the blood, and entitled to the regency. His appearance was prepossessing, his manners courteous. He was esteemed a capable general, and was certainly not destitute of administrative ability. If, with hearty devotion, he had given himself to the reformed views, the authority of his great name and eminent position might have secured for their adherents, if not triumph, at least toleration and quiet. But two capital weaknesses ruined his entire course. The love of empty glory blinded him to his true interests; and the love of sensual pleasure made him an easy dupe. He was robbed of his legitimate claims to the first rank in France by the promise of a shadowy sceptre in some distant region, which every sensible statesman of his time knew from the first that Philip the Second never had entertained the slightest intention of conferring; while, by the siren voices of her fair maids of honor, Catharine de' Medici was always sure of being able to lure him on to the most humiliating concessions. Deceived by the emissaries of the Spanish king and the Italian queen mother, Antoine would have been an object rather of pity than of disgust, had he not himself played false to the friends who supported him. As it was, he passed off the stage, and scarcely left a single person to regret his departure. Huguenots and papists were alike gratified when the world was relieved of so signal an example of inconstancy and perfidy.183 Antoine left behind him his wife, the eminent Jeanne d'Albret, and two children – a son, the Prince of Béarn, soon to appear in history as the leader of the Huguenot party, and, on the extinction of the Valois line, to succeed to the throne as Henry the Fourth; and a daughter, Catharine, who inherited all her mother's signal virtues. The widow and her children were, at the time of Antoine's death, in Jeanne's dominions on the northern slopes of the Pyrenees, whither they had retired when he had first openly gone over to the side of the Guises. There, in the midst of her own subjects, the Queen of Navarre was studying, more intelligently than any other monarch of her age, the true welfare of her people, while training her son in those principles upon which she hoped to see him lay the foundations of a great and glorious career.

The English in Havre.

The sagacity of the enemy had been well exhibited in the vigor with which they had pressed the siege of Rouen. Condé, with barely seven thousand men, had several weeks before shut himself up in Orleans, after despatching the few troops at his disposal for the relief of Bourges and Rouen, and could do nothing beyond making his own position secure, while impatiently awaiting the long-expected reinforcements from England and Germany.184 The dilatoriness that marked the entire conduct of the war up to this time had borne its natural fruit in the gradual diminution and dispersion of his forces, in the loss of one important city after another, and almost of entire provinces, and, worst of all, in the discouragement pervading all classes of the Huguenot population.185 Now, however, he was on the eve of obtaining relief. Two days after the fall of Rouen, on the twenty-eighth of October, a second detachment of the English fleet succeeded in overcoming the contrary winds that had detained them ten days in crossing the channel, and landed three thousand troops at the port of Havre.186 D'Andelot had finally been able to gather up his German "reiters" and "lansquenets,"187 and was making a brilliant march through Alsace, Lorraine, Burgundy, and Champagne, skilfully avoiding the enemy's forces sent out to watch and intercept him.188 On the sixth of November, he presented himself before the gates of Orleans, and was received with lively enthusiasm by the prince and his small army.189

Now at length, on the seventh of November, Condé could leave the walls which for seven months had sheltered him in almost complete inaction, and within which a frightful pestilence had been making havoc among the flower of the chivalry of France; for, whilst fire and sword were everywhere laying waste the country, heaven had sent a subtle and still more destructive foe to decimate the wretched inhabitants. Orleans had not escaped the scourge. The city was crowded with refugees from Paris and from the whole valley of the Loire. Among these strangers, as well as among the citizens, death found many victims. In a few months it was believed that ten thousand persons perished in Orleans alone; while in Paris, where the disease raged more than an entire year, the number of deaths was much larger.190

Condé takes the field.

With the four thousand lansquenets and the three thousand reiters brought him from Germany,191 Condé was able to leave a force, under command of D'Andelot, sufficient to defend the city of Orleans, and himself to take the field with an army of about fifteen thousand men.192 "Our enemies," he said, "have inflicted two great losses upon us in taking our castles" – meaning Bourges and Rouen – "but I hope that now we shall have their knights, if they move out upon the board."193

As he was leaving Orleans, he was waited upon by a deputation of fifty reformed ministers, who urged him to look well to the discipline and purity of the army. They begged him, by salutary punishment, to banish from the camp theft and rapine, and, above all, that more insidious and heaven-provoking sin of licentiousness, which, creeping in, had doubtless drawn down upon the cause such marked signs of the Lord's displeasure, that, of all the congregations in France, only the churches of a few islands on the coasts, and the churches of Montauban, Havre, Orleans, Lyons, and of the cities of Languedoc194 and Dauphiny, continued to rear their heads through the storm that had prostrated all the rest; and, to this end, they warned him by no means to neglect to afford his soldiers upon the march the same opportunities of hearing God's Word and of public prayer which they had enjoyed in Orleans.195

The Huguenot army directed its course northward, and the different divisions united under the walls of Pluviers, or Pithiviers, a weak place, which surrendered after six hours of cannonading, with little loss to the besieging party. The greater part of the garrison was dismissed unharmed, after having been compelled to give up its weapons. Two of the officers, as guilty of flagrant breach of faith and other crimes, were summarily hung.196 And here the Huguenot cause was stained by an act of cruelty for which no sufficient excuse can be found. Several Roman Catholic priests, detected, in spite of their disguise, among the prisoners, were put to death, without other pretext save that they had been the chief instigators of the resistance which the town had offered. Unhappily, the Huguenot regarded the priest, and the Roman Catholic the reformed minister, as the guilty cause of the civil war, and thought it right to vent upon his head the vengeance which his own religion should have taught him to leave to the righteous retribution of a just God. After the fall of Pithiviers, no resistance was attempted by Étampes and other slightly garrisoned places of the neighborhood, the soldiers and the clergy taking refuge, before the approach of the army, in the capital.

The prince appears before Paris.

The prince was now master of the country to the very gates of Paris, and it was the opinion of many, including among them the reformer, Beza, that the city itself might be captured by a sudden advance, and the war thus ended at a blow.197 They therefore recommended that, without delay, the army should hasten forward and attack the terrified inhabitants before Guise and the constable should have time to bring the army and the king back from Normandy, where they still lingered. The view was so plausible, indeed, that it was adopted by most of the reformed historians, and, being indorsed by later writers, has caused the failure to march directly against the capital to be regarded as a signal error of Condé in this campaign. But it would certainly appear hazardous to adopt this conclusion in the face of the most skilful strategists of the age. It has already been seen that François de la Noue, one of the ablest generals of whom the Huguenots could ever boast, regarded the idea of capturing Paris at the beginning of the struggle, with the comparatively insignificant forces which the prince could bring to the undertaking, as the most chimerical that could be entertained. Was it less absurd now, when, if the Protestant army had received large accessions, the walls of Paris could certainly be held by the citizens for a few days, until an army of fully equal size, under experienced leaders, could be recalled from the lower Seine? Such, at least, was the conclusion at which Admiral Coligny, the commanding spirit in the council-chamber and the virtual head of the Huguenot army, arrived, when he calmly considered the perils of attacking, with twelve or fifteen thousand men and four pieces of artillery, the largest capital of continental Europe – a city whose population amounted to several hundred thousand souls, among whom there was now not a single avowed Protestant, and whose turbulent citizens were not unaccustomed to the use of arms. He resolved, therefore, to adopt the more practicable plan of making the city feel the pressure of the war by cutting off its supplies of provisions and by ravaging the surrounding country. Thus, Paris – "the bellows by whose blasts the war was kept in flames," and "the kitchen that fed it" – would at last become weary of sustaining in idleness an insolent soldiery, and of seeing its villages given over to destruction, and compel the king's advisers to offer just terms of peace, or to seek a solution of the present disputes on the open field.198

But, whatever doubt may be entertained respecting the propriety of the plan of the campaign adopted by the Prince of Condé, there can be none respecting the error committed in not promptly carrying that plan into execution. The army loitered about Étampes instead of pressing on and seizing the bridges across the Seine. Over these it ought to have crossed, and, entering the fruitful district of Brie, to have become master of the rivers by which the means of subsistence were principally brought to Paris. With Corbeil and Lagny in his possession, Condé would have held Paris in as deadly a grasp as Henry the Fourth did twenty-eight years later, when Alexander of Parma was forced to come from Flanders to its assistance.199 When, at last, the Huguenot army took the direction of Corbeil, commanding one of the bridges, the news arrived of the death of Antoine of Navarre. And with this intelligence came fresh messengers from Catharine, who had already endeavored more than once by similar means to delay the Huguenots in their advance. She now strove to amuse Condé with the hope of succeeding his brother as lieutenant-general of the kingdom during Charles's minority.200

In vain did the soldiers chafe at this new check upon their enthusiasm, in vain did prudent counsellors remonstrate. There was a traitor even in the prince's council, in the person of Jean de Hangest, sieur de Genlis (brother of D'Ivoy, the betrayer of Bourges), whose open desertion we shall soon have occasion to notice, and this treacherous adviser was successful in procuring a delay of four days.201 The respite was not thrown away. Before the Huguenots were again in motion, Corbeil was reinforced and rendered impregnable against any assaults which, with their feeble artillery, they could make upon it. Repulsed from its walls, after several days wasted in the vain hope of taking it, the prince moved down the left bank of the Seine, and, on the twenty-eighth of November, encamped opposite to Paris in the villages of Gentilly and Arcueil.202 New proffers came from Catharine; there were new delays on the road. At Port à l'Anglais a conference with Condé had been projected by the queen mother, resulting merely in one between the constable and his nephew Coligny – as fruitless as any that had preceded; for Montmorency would not hear of tolerating in France another religion besides the Roman Catholic, and the Admiral would rather die a thousand deaths than abandon the point.203

Under the walls of Paris new conferences took place. The Parisians worked night and day, strengthening their defences, and making those preparations which are rarely completed except under the spur of an extraordinary emergency. Meanwhile, every day brought nearer the arrival of the Spanish and Gascon auxiliaries whom they were expecting. At a windmill near the suburb of St. Marceau, the Prince of Condé, Coligny, Genlis, Grammont, and Esternay met the queen mother, the Prince of La Roche-sur-Yon, the constable, his son Marshal Montmorency, and Gonnor, at a later time known as Marshal Cossé. On both sides there were professions of the most ardent desire for peace, and "Huguenot" and "papist" embraced each other cordially at parting. But the dangerous intimacy soon bore the bitter fruit of open treachery. A camisade had been secretly planned by the Huguenots, and the attack was about to be made on the enemy's works, when word was brought that one of the chiefs intrusted with the knowledge of all their plans – the same Genlis, who had been the principal advocate of the delays upon the route – had gone over to the enemy, and the enterprise was consequently abandoned.204

The deliberations being set on foot by the one party, at least, only in order to gain time, it is not surprising that they accomplished nothing. The court would concede none of the important demands of the prince. It was resolved to exclude Protestantism not only from Paris, but from Lyons, from all the seats of parliaments, from frontier towns, and from cities which had not enjoyed the right of having preaching according to the Edict of January. The exercises of the reformed worship could not be tolerated in any place where the court sojourned – a cunning provision which would banish from the royal presence all the princes and high nobility, such as Renée of France, Condé, and the Châtillons, since these could not consent to live without the ordinances of their faith for themselves and their families and retainers. The triumvirs would not agree to the recall of those who had been exiled. They were willing to have all proceedings against the partisans of Condé suspended; but they would neither consent that all edicts, ordinances, and sentences framed against the Huguenots be declared null and void, nor assent to the restoration of those dignities which had been taken from them. In other words, as the prince remarked, the Protestant lords were to put a halter about their own necks for their enemies to tighten whenever the fancy should take them so to do.205

At last the Parisian defences were completed, and the Spanish and Gascon troops, to the number of seven thousand men, arrived. Then the mask of conciliation was promptly laid aside. Two weeks of precious time had been lost, the capital was beyond doubt impregnable, and the unpleasant fact stared the prince in the face that, after leaving a sufficient force to garrison it, the constable and Guise might still march out with an army outnumbering his own.206 On the tenth of December the Huguenot army broke up its encampment, and moved in the direction of Chartres, hesitating at first whether to lay siege to that city or to press on to Normandy in order to obtain the needed funds and support of the English. The decision was made in a few days to adopt the latter course, and Condé had proceeded as far as the vicinity of Dreux on the river Eure, when he found himself confronted by the enemy, who, enjoying the advantage of possessing the cities and bridges on the route, could advance with greater ease by the principal roads. The triumvirs, so lately declining battle in front of Paris, were now as eager as they had before been reluctant to try their fortunes in the open field. No longer having the King of Navarre behind whose name and authority to take shelter, they desired to cover their designs by the queen mother's instructions. So, before bringing on the first regular engagement, in which two armies of Frenchmen were to undertake each other's destruction, they had sent Michel de Castelnau, the well-known historian, on the fifteenth of December, to inquire of Catharine de' Medici whether they should give the Huguenots battle. But the queen was too timid, or too cunning, to assume the weighty responsibility which they would have lifted from their own shoulders. "Nurse," she jestingly exclaimed, when Castelnau announced his mission, calling to the king's old Huguenot foster-mother who was close at hand, "the generals have sent to ask a woman's advice about fighting; pray, what is your opinion?" And the envoy could get no more satisfactory answer than that the queen mother referred the whole matter to themselves, as experienced military men.207

The battle of Dreux, December 19, 1562.

On the nineteenth of December, 1562, the armies met. The enemy had that morning crossed the Eure, and posted himself with sixteen thousand foot and two thousand horse, and with twenty-two cannon, between two villages covering his wings, and with the city of Dreux and the village of Tréon behind him as points of refuge in case of defeat. The constable commanded the main body of the army. Guise, to rebut the current charge of being the sole cause of the war, affected to lead only his own company of horse in the right wing, which was under Marshal Saint André. The prince's army was decidedly inferior in numbers; for, although he had four thousand horse,208 his infantry barely amounted to seven thousand or eight thousand men, and he had only five pieces of artillery. Yet the first movements of the Huguenots were brilliant and effective. Condé, with a body of French horse, fell upon the battalion of Swiss pikes. It was a furious onset, long remembered as one of the most magnificent cavalry charges of the age.209 Nothing could stand before it. The solid phalanx was pierced through and through, and the German reiters, pouring into the way opened by the French, rode to and fro, making havoc of the brave but defenceless mountaineers. They even penetrated to the rear, and plundered the camp of the enemy, carrying off the plate from Guise's tent. Meanwhile Coligny was even more successful than the prince. With a part of the Huguenot right he attacked and scattered the troops surrounding his uncle, the constable. In the mêlée Montmorency himself, while fighting with his usual courage, had his jaw fractured by a pistol-shot, and was taken prisoner. But now the tide turned. The Swiss, never for a moment dreaming of retreat or surrender, had promptly recovered from their confusion and closed their ranks. The German infantry, or lansquenets, were brought up to the attack, but first hesitated, and then broke before the terrible array of pikes. D'Andelot, ill with fever, had thus far been forced to remain a mere spectator of the contest. But now, seeing the soldiers whom he had been at such pains to bring to the scene of action in ignominious retreat, he threw himself on his horse and labored with desperation to rally them. His pains were thrown away. The lansquenets continued their course, and D'Andelot, who scarcely escaped falling into the enemy's hands, probably concurred in the verdict pronounced on them by a contemporary historian, that no more cowardly troops had entered the country in fifty years.210 It was at this moment that the Duke of Guise, who had with difficulty held his impatient horse in reserve on the Roman Catholic right, gave the signal to his company to follow him, and fell upon the French infantry of the Huguenots, imprudently left unprotected by cavalry at some distance in the rear. The move was skilfully planned and well executed. The infantry were routed. Condé, coming to the rescue, was unable to accomplish anything. His horse was killed under him, and, before he could be provided with another, he was taken prisoner by Damville, a son of the constable. The German reiters now proved to be worth little more than the lansquenets. Returning from the pursuit of the fugitives of the constable's division, and perceiving the misfortunes of the infantry, they retired to the cover of a wood, and neither the prayers nor the expostulations of the admiral could prevail on them to face the enemy again that day.211 But Guise could not follow up his advantage. The battle had lasted five hours. Almost the whole of the Huguenot cavalry and the remnants of the infantry had been drawn up by Coligny in good order on the other side of a ravine; and the darkness would not allow the Duke, even had he been so disposed, to renew the engagement.212

On either side the loss had been severe. Marshal Saint André, Montbéron – one of the constable's sons – and many other illustrious Roman Catholics, were killed. Montmorency was a prisoner. The Huguenots, if they had lost fewer prominent men and less common soldiers, were equally deprived of their leading general. What was certain was, that the substantial fruits of victory remained in the hands of the Duke of Guise, to whom naturally the whole glory of the achievement was ascribed. For, although Admiral Coligny thought himself sufficiently strong to have attacked the enemy on the following day,213 if he could have persuaded his crestfallen German auxiliaries to follow him, he deemed it advisable to abandon the march into Normandy – difficult under any circumstances on account of the lateness of the season – and to conduct his army back to Orleans. This, Coligny – never more skilful than in conducting the most difficult of all military operations, a retreat in the presence of an enemy – successfully accomplished.214

The first tidings of the battle of Dreux were brought to Paris by fugitives from the constable's corps. These announced the capture of the commanding general, and the entire rout of the Roman Catholic army. The populace, intense in its devotion to the old form of faith, and recognizing the fatal character of such a blow,215 was overwhelmed with discouragement. But Catharine de' Medici displayed little emotion. "Very well!" she quietly remarked, "then we shall pray to God in French."216 But the truth was soon known, and the dirge and the miserere were rapidly replaced by the loud te deum and by jubilant processions in honor of the signal success of the Roman Catholic arms.217

Riotous conduct of the Parisian mob.

Recovering from their panic, the Parisian populace continued to testify their unimpeachable orthodoxy by daily murders. It was enough, a contemporary writer tells us, if a boy, seeing a man in the streets, but called out, "Voylà ung Huguenot," for straightway the idle vagabonds, the pedlers, and porters would set upon him with stones. Then came out the handicraftsmen and idle apprentices with swords, and thrust him through with a thousand wounds. His dead body, having been robbed of clothes, was afterward taken possession of by troops of boys, who asked nothing better than to "trail" him down to the Seine and throw him in. If the victim chanced to be a "town-dweller," the Parisians entered his house and carried off all his goods, and his wife and children were fortunate if they escaped with their lives. With the best intentions, Marshal Montmorency could not put a stop to these excesses; he scarcely succeeded in protecting the households of foreign ambassadors from being involved in the fate of French Protestants.218 Yet the same men that were ready at any time to imbue their hands in the blood of an innocent Huguenot, were full of commiseration for a Roman Catholic felon. A shrewd murderer is said to have turned to his own advantage the religious feeling of the people who had flocked to see him executed. "Ah! my masters," he exclaimed when already on the fatal ladder, "I must die now for killing a Huguenot who despised our Lady; but as I have served our Lady always truly, and put my trust in her, so I trust now she will show some miracle for me." Thereupon, reports Sir Thomas Smith, the people began to murmur about his having to die for a Huguenot, ran to the gallows, beat the hangman, and having cut the fellow's cords, conveyed him away free.219

Orleans invested.

Coligny returns to Normandy.

Of the triumvirs, at whose instigation the war had arisen, one was dead,220 a second was a prisoner in the hands of the enemy, the third – the Duke of Guise – alone remained. Navarre had died a month before. On the other hand, the Huguenots had lost their chief. Yet the war raged without cessation. As soon as the Duke of Guise had collected his army and had, at Rambouillet, explained to the king and court, who had come out to meet him, the course of recent events, he followed the Admiral toward Orleans. Invested by the king with the supreme command during the captivity of the constable, and leading a victorious army, he speedily reduced Étampes and Pithiviers, captured by Condé on his march to Paris. Meantime, Coligny had taken a number of places in the vicinity of Orleans, and his "black riders" had become the terror of the papists of Sologne.221 Not long after Guise's approach, fearing that his design was to besiege the city of Orleans, Coligny threw himself into it. His stay was not long, however. His German cavalry could do nothing in case of a siege, and would only be a burden to the citizens. Besides, he was in want of funds to pay them. He resolved, therefore, to strike boldly for Normandy.222 Having persuaded the reiters to dispense with their heavy baggage-wagons,223 which had proved so great an incumbrance on the previous march, he started from Orleans on the first of February with four thousand troopers, leaving his brother D'Andelot as well furnished as practicable to sustain the inevitable siege. The lightness of his army's equipment precluded the possibility of pursuit; its strength secured it an almost undisputed passage.224 In a few days it had passed Dreux and the scene of the late battle, and at Dives, on the opposite side of the estuary of the Seine from Havre, had received from the English the supplies of money which they had long been desirous of finding means to convey to the Huguenots.225 The only considerable forces of the Guise faction in Normandy were on the banks of the river, too busy watching the English at Havre to be able to spare any troops to resist Coligny. Turning his attention to the western shores of the province, he soon succeeded in reducing Pont-l'Evêque, Caen, Bayeux, Saint Lo, and the prospect was brilliant of his soon being able, in conjunction with Queen Elizabeth's troops, to bring all Normandy over to the side of the prince.226 Meanwhile, however, there were occurring in the centre of the kingdom events destined to give an entirely different turn to the relations of the Huguenots and papists in France. To these we must now direct our attention.

François de Guise, relieved of the admiral's presence, had begun the siege of Orleans four days after the departure of the latter for Normandy (on the fifth of February), and manifested the utmost determination to destroy the capital city, as it might be regarded, of the confederates. Indeed, when the court, then sojourning at Blois, in alarm at the reports sent by Marshal de Brissac from Rouen, respecting Coligny's conquests and his own impotence to oppose him, ordered Guise to abandon his undertaking and employ his forces in crushing out the flames that had so unexpectedly broken forth in Normandy, the duke declined to obey until he should have received further orders, and gave so cogent reasons for pursuing the siege, that the king and his council willingly acquiesced in his plan.227 From his independent attitude, however, it is evident that Guise was of Pasquier's mind, and believed he had gained as much of a victory in the capture of the constable, his friend in arms, but dangerous rival at court, taken by the Huguenots at Dreux, as by the capture of the Prince of Condé, his enemy, who had fallen into his hands in the same engagement.228

Capture of the Portereau.

The city of Orleans, on the north bank of the Loire, was protected by walls originally of no great worth, but considerably strengthened since the outbreak of the civil war. On the opposite side of the river, a suburb, known as the Portereau, was fortified by weaker walls, in front of which two large bastions had recently been erected. The suburb was connected with Orleans by means of a bridge across the Loire, of which the end toward the Portereau was defended by two towers of the old mediæval construction, known as the "tourelles," and that toward the city by the city wall and a large square tower.229 Against the Portereau the duke directed the first assault, hoping easily to become master of it, and thence attack the city from its weakest side. His plan proved successful beyond his expectations. While making a feint of assailing with his whole army the bastion held by the Gascon infantry, he sent a party to scale the bastion guarded by the German lansquenets, who, being taken by surprise, yielded an entrance almost without striking a blow. In a few minutes the Portereau was in the hands of Guise, and the bridge was crowded with fugitives tumultuously seeking a refuge in the city. Orleans itself was nearly involved in the fate of its suburb; for the enemy, following close upon the heels of the fleeing host, was at the very threshold of the "tourelles," when D'Andelot, called from his sick-bed by the tumult, posting himself at the entrance with a few gentlemen in full armor, by hard blows beat back the troops, already sanguine of complete success.230 A few days later the "tourelles" themselves were scaled and taken.231

After so poor a beginning, the small garrison of Orleans had sufficient reason to fear the issue of the trial to which they were subjected. But, so far from abandoning their courage, they applied themselves with equal assiduity to their religious and to their military duties. "In addition to the usual sermons and the prayers at the guard-houses, public extraordinary prayers were made at six o'clock in the morning; at the close of which the ministers and the entire people, without exception, betook themselves to work with all their might upon the fortifications, until four in the evening, when every one again attended prayers." Everywhere the utmost devotion was manifested, women of all ranks sharing with their husbands and brothers in the toils of the day, or, if too feeble for these active exertions, spending their time in tending the sick and wounded.232

"A new and very terrible device."

Not only did the Huguenots, when they found their supply of lead falling short, make their cannon-balls of bell-metal – of which the churches and monasteries were doubtless the source – and of brass, but they turned this last material to a use till now, it would appear, unheard of. "I have learned this day, the fifteenth instant, of the Spaniards," wrote the English ambassador from the royal court, which was at a safe distance, in the city of Blois, "that they of Orleans shoot brass which is hollow, and so devised within that when it falls it opens and breaks into many pieces with a great fire, and hurts and kills all who are about it. Which is a new device and very terrible, for it pierces the house first, and breaks at the last rebound. Every man in Portereau is fain to run away, they cannot tell whither, when they see where the shot falls."233

Huguenot reverses.

It could not, however, be denied that there was much reason for discouragement in the general condition of the Protestant cause throughout the country. Of the places so brilliantly acquired in the spring of the preceding year, the greater part had been lost. Normandy and Languedoc were the only bright spots on the map of France. Lyons still remained in the power of the Huguenots, in the south-east; but, though repeated assaults of the Duke of Nemours had been repulsed, it was threatened with a siege, for which it was but indifferently prepared.234 Des Adrets, the fierce chieftain of the lower Rhône, had recently revealed his real character more clearly by betraying the cause he had sullied by his barbarous advocacy, and was now in confinement.235 Indeed, everything seemed to point to a speedy and complete overthrow of an undertaking which had cost so much labor and suffering,236 when an unexpected event produced an entire revolution in the attitude of the contending parties and in the purposes of the leaders.

Assassination of François de Guise.

This event was the assassination of François de Guise. On the evening of the eighteenth of February, 1563, in company with a gentleman or two, he was riding the round of his works, and arranging for a general attack on the morrow. So confident did he feel of success, that he had that morning written to the queen mother, it is said, that within twenty-four hours he would send her news of the capture of Orleans, and that he intended to destroy the entire population, making no discrimination of age or sex, that the very memory of the rebellious city might be obliterated.237 At a lonely spot on the road, a man on horseback, who had been lying in wait for him, suddenly made his appearance, and, after discharging a pistol at him from behind, rode rapidly off, before the duke's escort, taken up with the duty of assisting him, had had time to make any attempt to apprehend the assassin. Three balls, with which the pistol was loaded, had lodged in Guise's shoulder, and the wound, from the first considered dangerous, proved mortal within six days. The murderer had apparently made good his escape; but a strange fatality seemed to attend him. During the darkness he became so confused that, after riding all night, he found himself almost at the very place where the deed of blood had been committed, and was compelled to rest himself and his jaded horse at a house, where he was arrested on suspicion by some of Guise's soldiers. Taken before their superior officers, he boldly avowed his guilt, and boasted of what he had done. His name he gave as Jean Poltrot, and he claimed to be lord of Mérey, in Angoumois; but he was better known, from his dark complexion and his familiarity with the Spanish language, by the sobriquet of "L'Espagnolet." He was an excitable, melancholy man, whose mind, continually brooding over the wrongs his country and faith had experienced at the hands of Guise, had imbibed the fanatical notion that it was his special calling of God to rid the world of "the butcher of Vassy," of the single execrable head that was accountable for the torrents of blood which had for a year been flowing in every part of France.

After having been a page of M. d'Aubeterre, father-in-law of the Huguenot leader Soubise, Mérey, at the beginning of the civil war, had been sent by the daughter of D'Aubeterre to her husband, then with Condé at Orleans. Subsequently he had accompanied Soubise on his adventurous ride with a few followers from Orleans to Lyons, when the latter assumed command in behalf of the Huguenots. Soubise appears to have valued him highly as one of those reckless youths that court rather than shun personal peril, while he shared the common impression that the lad was little better than a fool. True, for years – ever since the tumult of Amboise, where his kinsman, La Renaudie and another relative had been killed – Mérey had been constantly boasting to all whom he met that he would kill the Duke of Guise; but those who heard him "made no more account of his words than if he had boasted of his intention to obtain the imperial crown."238

He had given expression to his purpose at Lyons, in the presence of M. de Soubise, the Huguenot governor, and again to Admiral Coligny before he started on his expedition to Normandy. But the Huguenot generals evidently imagined that there was nothing in the speech beyond the prating of a silly braggart. Soubise, indeed, advised him to attend to his own duties, and to leave the deliverance of France to Almighty God; but neither the admiral nor the soldiers, to whom he often repeated the threat, paid any attention to it. In short, he was regarded as one of those frivolous characters, of whom there is an abundance in every camp, who expect to acquire a cheap notoriety by extravagant stories of their past or prospective achievements, but never succeed in earning more, with all their pains, than the contempt or incredulity of their listeners. Still, Poltrot was a man of some value as a scout, and Coligny had employed him239 for the purpose of obtaining information respecting the enemy's movements, and had furnished him at one time with twenty crowns to defray his expenses, at another with a hundred, to procure himself a horse. The spy had made his way to the Roman Catholic camp, and, by pretending to follow the example of others in renouncing his Huguenot associations, had conciliated the duke's favor to such an extent that he excited no suspicion before the commission of the treacherous act.

Execution of Poltrot.

But, if Poltrot was a fanatic, he was not of the stuff of which martyrs are made. When questioned in the presence of the queen and council to discover his accomplices, his constancy wholly forsook him, and he said whatever was suggested. In particular he accused the admiral of having paid him to execute the deed, and Beza of having instigated him by holding forth the rewards of another world. La Rochefoucauld, Soubise, and others were criminated to a minor degree. During his confinement in the prisons of the Parisian parliament, to which he was removed, he continually contradicted himself. But his weakness did not save him. He was condemned to be burned with red-hot pincers, to be torn asunder by four horses, and to be quartered. Before the execution of this frightful sentence, he was, by order of the court, put to torture. But, instead of reiterating his former accusations, he retracted almost every point.240 To purchase a few moments' reprieve, he sought an interview with the first president of the parliament, Christopher de Thou; and we have it upon the authority of that magistrate's son, the author of an imperishable history of his times, that, entering into greater detail, Poltrot persisted constantly in exculpating Soubise, Coligny, and Beza. A few minutes later, beside himself with terror and not knowing what he said in his delirium, he declared the admiral to be innocent; then, at the very moment of execution, he accused not only him, but his brother, D'Andelot, of whom he had said little or nothing before.241

Beza and Coligny are accused, but vindicate themselves.

Coligny heard in Normandy the report of the atrocious charges that had been wrung from Poltrot. Copies of the assassin's confession were industriously circulated in the camp, and he thus became acquainted with the particulars of the accusation. With Beza and La Rochefoucauld, who were with him at Caen, he published, on the twelfth of March, a long and dignified defence. The reformer for himself declared, that, although he had more than once seen persons ill-disposed toward the Duke of Guise because of the murders perpetrated by him at Vassy, he had never been in favor of proceeding against him otherwise than by the ordinary methods of law. For this reason he had gone to Monceaux to solicit justice of Charles, of his mother, and of the King of Navarre. But the hopes which the queen mother's gracious answer had excited were dashed to the earth by Guise's violent resort to arms. Holding the duke to be the chief author and promoter of the present troubles, he admitted that he had a countless number of times prayed to God that He would either change his heart or rid the kingdom of him. But he appealed to the testimony of Madame de Ferrare (Renée de France, the mother-in-law of Guise), and all who had ever heard him, when he said that never had he publicly mentioned the duke by name. As for Poltrot himself, he had never met him.

The admiral himself was not less frank. Ever since the massacre of Vassy he had regarded Guise and his party as common enemies of God, of the king, and of the public tranquillity; but never, upon his life and his honor, had he approved of such attacks as that of Poltrot. Indeed, he had steadfastly employed his influence to deter men from executing any plots against the life of the duke; until, being duly informed that Guise and Saint André had incited men to undertake to assassinate Condé, D'Andelot, and himself, he had desisted from expressing his opposition. The different articles of the confession he proceeded to answer one by one; and he forwarded his reply to the court with a letter to Catharine de' Medici, in which he earnestly entreated her that the life of Poltrot might be spared until the restoration of peace, that he might be confronted with him, and an investigation be made of the entire matter before unsuspected judges. "But do not imagine," he added, "that I speak thus because of any regret for the death of the Duke of Guise, which I esteem the greatest of blessings to the realm, to the Church of God, to myself and my family, and, if improved, the means of giving rest to the kingdom."242

The admiral's frankness was severely criticised by some of his friends. He was advised to suppress those expressions that were liable to be perverted to his injury, but he declared his resolution to abide by the consequences of a clear statement of the truth. And indeed, while the worldly wisdom of Coligny's censors has received a species of justification in the avidity with which his sincere avowals have been employed as the basis of graver accusations which he repelled, the candor of his defence has set upon his words the indelible impress of veracity which following ages can never fail to read aright. That Catharine recognized his innocence is evident from the very act by which she endeavored to make him appear guilty. He had begged that Poltrot might be spared till after the conclusion of peace, that he might himself have an opportunity to vindicate his innocence by confronting him in the presence of impartial judges. It was Catharine's interest, she thought, to confirm her own power by attaching a stigma to the honor of the Châtillons, and so depriving them of much of their influence in the state.243 Accordingly, on Thursday, the eighteenth of March, Poltrot was put to death and his mouth sealed forever to further explanations. The next day the Edict of Pacification was signed at Amboise.244 After all, it is evident that Coligny's innocence or guilt, in this particular instance, must be judged by his entire course and his well-known character. If his life bears marks of perfidy and duplicity, if the blood of the innocent can be found upon his skirts, then must the verdict of posterity be against him. But if the careful examination of his entire public life, as well as the history of his private relations, reveals a character not only above reproach, but the purest, most beneficent, and most patriotic of all that France can boast in political stations in the sixteenth century, the confused and contradictory allegations of an enthusiast who had not counted the cost of his daring attempt – allegations wrung from him by threats and torture – will not be allowed to weigh for an instant against Coligny's simple denial.245

Various estimates of Guise.

Of the Duke of Guise the estimates formed by his contemporaries differed as widely as their political and religious views. With the Abbé Bruslart he was "the most virtuous, heroic, and magnanimous prince in Europe, who for his courage was dreaded by all foreign nations." To the author of the history of the reformed churches his ambition and presumption seemed to have obscured all his virtues.246 The Roman Catholic preachers regarded his death as a stupendous calamity, a mystery of Divine providence, which they could only interpret by supposing that the Almighty, jealous of the confidence which His people reposed rather in His creature than in Himself, had removed the Duke of Guise in order to take the cause of His own divinity, of His spouse the Church, of the king and kingdom, under His own protection.247 The Bishop of Riez wrote and published a highly colored account of the duke's last words and actions, in the most approved style of such posthumous records, and introduced edifying specimens of a theological learning, which, until the moment of his wounding, Guise had certainly never possessed, making him, of course, persist to the end in protesting his innocence of the guilt of Vassy.248 The Protestants, while giving him credit for some compunctions of conscience for his persecuting career, and willingly admitting that, but for his pernicious brother, the Cardinal of Lorraine, he might have run a far different course, were compelled to view his death as a great blessing to France.249

Renée de France at Montargis.

A famous incident, illustrating the perils to which the Huguenots of the central provinces were subjected during the siege, is too characteristic to be passed over in silence. More than once, in the course of the war, the town and castle of Montargis, the Duchess of Ferrara's residence, had been threatened on account of the asylum it afforded to defenceless Protestants flocking thither from all quarters. When the minds of the Roman Catholics had become exasperated by nine or ten months of civil war, they formed a settled determination to break up this "nest of Huguenots." Accordingly the Baron de la Garde – Captain Poulain, of Mérindol memory – brought an order, in the king's name, from the Duke of Guise, at that time before the walls of Orleans, commanding Renée to leave Montargis, which had become important for military purposes, and to take up her abode at Fontainebleau, St. Germain, or Vincennes. The duchess replied that it was idle to say that so weak a place as Montargis could, without extensive repairs, be of any military importance; and that to remove to any place in the vicinity of Paris would be to expose herself to assassination by the fanatical populace. She therefore sent Poulain back to the king for further instructions. Meantime, Poulain was followed by Malicorne, a creature of the duke's, at the head of some partisan troops. This presumptuous officer had the impertinence to demand the immediate surrender of the castle, and went so far as to threaten to turn some cannon against it, in case of her refusal. But he little understood the virile courage of the woman with whom he had to do. "Malicorne," she answered him, "take care what you undertake. There is not a man in this kingdom that can command me but the king. If you attempt what you threaten, I shall place myself first upon the breach, that I may find out whether you will be audacious enough to kill a king's daughter. Moreover, I am not so ill-connected, nor so little loved, but that I have the means of making the punishment of your temerity felt by you and your offspring, even to the very babes in the cradle." The upstart captain was not prepared for such a reception, and, after alleging his commission as the excuse for the insolence of his conduct, delayed an enterprise which the wound and subsequent death of Guise entirely broke off.250 Montargis continued during this and the next civil wars to be a safe refuge for thousands of distressed Protestants.

A great obstacle to the conclusion of peace was removed by Guise's death. There was no one in the Roman Catholic camp to take his place. The panegyric pronounced upon the duke by the English ambassador, Sir Thomas Smith, may perhaps be esteemed somewhat extravagant, but has at least the merit of coming from one whose sympathies were decidedly adverse to him. "The papists have lost their greatest stay, hope, and comfort. Many noblemen and gentlemen did follow the camp and that faction, rather for the love of him than for any other zeal or affection. He was indeed the best captain or general in all France, some will say in all Christendom; for he had all the properties which belong [to], or are to be wished in a general: a ready wit and well advised, a body to endure pains, a courage to forsake no dangerous adventures, use and experience to conduct any army, much courtesy in entertaining of all men, great eloquence to utter all his mind. And he was very liberal both of money and honor to young gentlemen, captains, and soldiers; whereby he gat so much love and admiration amongst the nobility and the soldiers in France, that I think, now he is gone, many gentlemen will forsake the camp; and they begin to drop away already. Then he was so earnest and so fully persuaded in his religion, that he thought nothing evil done that maintained that sect; and therefore the papists again thought nothing evil bestowed upon him; all their money and treasure of the Church, part of their lands, even the honor of the crown of France, they could have found in their hearts to have given him. And so all their joy, hope, and comfort one little stroke of a pistolet hath taken away! Such a vanity God can show men's hope to be, when it pleaseth Him."251

Of the four generals on the Roman Catholic side under whose auspices the war began, three were dead and the fourth was in captivity. The treasury was exhausted. The interest of old debts was left unpaid; new debts had been contracted. Less than half the king's revenues were available on account of the places which the Huguenots held or threatened. The alienation of one hundred thousand livres of income from ecclesiastical property had been recently ordered, greatly to the annoyance of the clergy. The admiral's progress had of late been so rapid that but two or three important places of lower Normandy remained in friendly hands. After the reduction of these he would move down through Maine and Anjou to Orleans, with a better force than had been marshalled at Dreux;252 the English would gain such a foothold on French soil as it would be difficult to induce them to relinquish. And where could competent generals be secured for the prosecution of hostilities? The post of lieutenant-general, now vacant, had, indeed, been offered to the Duke Christopher of Würtemberg; but what prospect was there that a Protestant would consent to conduct a war against Protestants?253

Deliberations for peace.

Catharine was urgent for an immediate conclusion of peace. For the purpose of fixing its conditions, Condé was brought, under a strong guard, to the camp of the army before Orleans, and, on the small "Isle aux Bouviers" in the middle of the Loire, he and the constable, released on their honor, held a preliminary interview on Sunday, the seventh of March, 1563.254 At first there seemed little prospect of harmonizing their discordant pretensions; for, if the question of the removal of the triumvirs had lost all its practical importance, the old bone of contention remained in the re-establishment of the Edict of January. On this point Montmorency was inflexible. He had been the prime instrument in expelling Protestantism from Paris, and had distinguished himself by burning the places of worship. It could hardly be expected that he should rebuild what he had so laboriously torn down. And, whatever had been his first intentions, Condé proved less tenacious than might have been anticipated from his previous professions. The fact was, that the younger Bourbon was not proof against the wiles employed with so much success against his elder brother. Flattered by Catharine, he was led to suppose that after all it made little difference whether the full demands of the Huguenots were expressly granted in the edict of pacification or not. The queen mother was resolved, so he was assured, to confer upon him the dignity and office of lieutenant-general, left vacant by Navarre's death. When this should be his, it would be easy to obtain every practical concession to which the Huguenots were entitled. So much pleased was the court with the ardor he displayed, that he was at last permitted to go to Orleans on his own princely parole, in order to consult his confederates.

The Huguenot ministers whose advice he first asked, seeing his irresolution, were the more decided in opposing any terms that did not expressly recognize the Edict of January. Seventy-two united in a letter (on the ninth of March, 1563), in which they begged him not to permit the cause to suffer disaster at his hands, and rather to insure an extension, than submit to an abridgment of the liberty promised by the royal ordinance.255 From the ministers, however, Condé went to the Huguenot "noblesse," with whom his arguments of expediency had more weight, and who, weary of the length and privations of the war, and content with securing their own privileges, readily accepted the conditions reprobated by the ministers. The pacification was accordingly agreed upon, on the twelfth of March, and officially published in the form of a royal edict, dated at Amboise, on the nineteenth of March, 1563.

Edict of Pacification, March 12, 1563.

Charles the Ninth, by advice of his mother, the Cardinal of Bourbon, the Princes of Condé and La Roche-sur-Yon, the Dukes of Montmorency, Aumale, and Montpensier, and other members of his privy council, grants, in this document, to all barons, châtellains, and gentlemen possessed of the right to administer "haute justice," permission to celebrate in their own houses the worship of "the religion which they call reformed" in the presence of their families and retainers. The possessors of minor fiefs could enjoy the same privilege, but it extended to their families only. In every bailiwick or sénéchaussée, the Protestants should, on petition, receive one city in whose suburbs their religious services might be held, and in all cities where the Protestant religion was exercised on the seventh of March of the present year, it should continue in one or two places inside of the walls, to be designated hereafter by the king. The Huguenots, while secured in their liberty of conscience, were to restore all churches and ecclesiastical property which they might have seized, and were forbidden to worship according to their rites in the city of Paris or its immediate neighborhood. The remaining articles of the peace were of a more personal or temporary interest. Foreign troops were to be speedily dismissed; the Protestant lords to be fully reinstated in their former honors, offices, and possessions; prisoners to be released; insults based upon the events of the war to be summarily punished. And Charles declared that he held his good cousin, the Prince of Condé, and all the other lords, knights, gentlemen, and burgesses that had served under him, to be his faithful subjects, believing that what they had done was for good ends and for his service.256

Sir Thomas Smith's remonstrance.

Such was the Edict of Amboise – a half-way measure, very different from that which was desired on either side. The English ambassador declared he could find no one, whether Protestant or papist, that liked the "accord," or thought it would last three weeks. And he added, by way of warning to Coligny and Condé: "What you, who are the heads and rulers, do, I cannot tell; but every man thinketh that it is but a traine and a deceipt to sever the one of you from another, and all of you from this stronghold [Orleans], and then thei will talke with you after another sorte."257 He urged the Huguenots to learn a lesson from the fate of Bourges, Rouen, and other cities which had admitted the "papists," and to consider that these fine articles came from the queen mother, the Cardinals of Bourbon, Ferrara, and Guise, and others like them, who desired to take the Protestants like fish in a net. And he gave D'Andelot the significant hint – very significant it was, in view of what afterwards befell his brother Gaspard – that the report spread by the enemy respecting Poltrot's confession was only a preparation that, in case any of the Huguenot noblemen should be assassinated, it might be said that the deed had been done in just revenge by the Guises, who would not hesitate to sacrifice them either by force or by treason.258

Coligny's disappointment.

Of the other party, Catharine de' Medici alone was jubilant over the edict. On the contrary, the Roman Catholic people of Paris regarded it as an approval of every sort of impiety and wicked action, and the parliament would register it only after repeated commands (on the twenty-seventh of March), and then with a formal declaration of its reluctance.259 But no one was so much disappointed as the admiral. Hastening from Normandy to Orleans, he reached that city on the twenty-third of March, only to find that the peace had been fully concluded several days before. In the council of the confederates, the next day, he spoke his mind freely. He reminded Condé that, from the very commencement of hostilities, the triumvirs had offered the restoration of the Edict of January with the exclusion of the city of Paris; and that never had affairs stood on a better footing than now,260 when two of the three chief authors of the war were dead, and the third was a prisoner. But the poor had surpassed the rich in devotion; the cities had given the example to the nobles. In restricting the number of churches to one in a bailiwick, the prince and his counsellors had ruined more churches by a single stroke of the pen than all the forces of their enemies could have overthrown in ten years. Coligny's warm remonstrance was heard with some regret for the precipitancy with which the arrangement had been made; but it was too late. The peace was signed. Besides, Condé was confident that he would soon occupy his brother's place, when the Huguenots would obtain all their demands.

But while the prince refused to draw back from the articles of peace to which he had pledged himself, he consented to visit the queen mother in company with the admiral, and endeavor to remove some of the restrictions placed upon Protestant worship. And Catharine was too well satisfied with her success in restoring peace, to refuse the most pressing of the admiral's requests. However, she took good care that none of her promises should be in writing, much less be incorporated in the Edict of Pacification. "The prince and the admyrall," wrote the special envoy Middlemore to Queen Elizabeth, "have bene twice with the quene mother since my commynge hyther, where the admirall hath bene very earnest for a further and larger lybertye in the course of religion, and so hath obtayned that there shall be preachings within the townes in every balliage, wheras before yt was accordyd but in the suburbs of townes only, and that the gentylmen of the visconte and provoste of Parys shall have in theyr houses the same libertye of religion as ys accordyd elzwhere. So as the sayd admyrall doth now seame to lyke well inoughe that he shewyd by the waye to mislyke so muche, which was the harde articles of religion concludyd upon by the prince in his absence."261

On Sunday, the twenty-eighth of March, 1563 – the anniversary of that Sunday which they had kept with so much solemnity at Meaux, on the eve of their march to Orleans – the Huguenot nobles and soldiers celebrated the Lord's Supper, in the simple but grand forms of the Geneva liturgy, within the walls of the church of the Holy Rood, long since stripped of its idolatrous ornaments, and on the morrow began to disperse to the homes from which for a year they had been separated.262 The German reiters, at the same time, set out on their march toward Champagne, whence they soon after retired to their own country.

Results of the war.

The war that had just closed undoubtedly constituted a turning-point in the Huguenot fortunes. The alliance between the persecuted reformers, on the one hand, and the princes of the blood and the nobility of France, on the other, had borne fruit, and it was not altogether good fruit. The patient confessors, after manfully maintaining their faith through an entire generation against savage attack, and gaining many a convert from the witnesses of their constancy, had grasped the sword thrust into their hands by their more warlike allies. In truth, it would be difficult to condemn them; for it was in self-defence, not against rightful authority, but against the tyranny of a foreign and hostile faction. Candidly viewing their circumstances at the distance of three centuries, we can scarcely see how they could have acted otherwise than as they did. Yet there was much that, humanly speaking, was unfortunate in the conjuncture. War is a horrible remedy at any time. Civil war super-adds a thousand horrors of its own. And a civil war waged in the name of religion is the most frightful of all. The holiest of causes is sure to be embraced from impure motives by a host of unprincipled men, determined in their choice of party only by the hope of personal gain, the lust of power, or the thirst for revenge – a class of auxiliaries too powerful and important to be altogether rejected in an hour when the issues of life or death are pending, even if by the closest and calmest scrutiny they could be thoroughly weeded out – a process beyond the power of mortal man at any time, much more in the midst of the tumult and confusion of war. The Huguenots had made the attempt at Orleans, and had not shrunk from inflicting the severest punishments, even to death, for the commission of theft and other heinous crimes. They had endeavored in their camp to realize the model of an exemplary Christian community. But they had failed, because there were with them those who, neither in peace nor in war, could bring themselves to give to so strict a moral code any other obedience than that which fear exacts. Such was the misery of war. Such the melancholy alternative to which, more than once, the reformed saw themselves reduced, of perishing by persecution or of saving themselves by exposing their faith to reproach through alliance with men of as little religion or morality as any in the opposite camp.

It prevents France from becoming Huguenot.

The first civil war prevented France from becoming a Huguenot country. This was the deliberate conclusion of a Venetian ambassador, who enjoyed remarkable opportunities for observing the history of his times.263 The practice of the Christian virtue of patience and submission under suffering and insult had made the reformers an incredible number of friends. The waging of war, even in self-defence, and the reported acts of wanton destruction, of cruelty and sacrilege – it mattered little whether they were true or false, they were equally credited and produced the same results – turned the indifference of the masses into positive aversion. It availed the Huguenots little in the estimate of the people that the crimes that were almost the rule with their opponents were the exception with them; that for a dozen such as Montluc, they were cursed with but one Baron des Adrets; that the barbarities of the former received the approbation of the Roman Catholic priesthood, while those of the latter were censured with vehemence by the Protestant ministers. Partisan spirit refused to hold the scales of justice with equal hand, and could see no proofs of superior morality or devotion in the adherents of the reformed faith.

Huguenot ballads and songs.

Besides their psalms, hallowed by so many thrilling associations, the Huguenots possessed a whole cycle of song. The meagre portion of this that has come down to us is among the most valuable of the monuments illustrative of their modes of thought and their religious and political aspirations. At the same time it brings vividly before us the great crises of their history. M. Henri Bordier has done a service not easily estimated at its full worth, by the publication of a considerable collection of the popular songs of the Protestants, under the title, "Le Chansonnier Huguenot du XVIe Siècle" (Paris, 1871). These songs are grouped in four divisions: religious songs, polemic and satirical songs, songs of war, and songs of martyrdom.

The three oldest Huguenot songs known to exist belong to the first two divisions, and have been saved from destruction by the enemies of their authors, in the very attempt to secure their suppression. They have recently been found upon the records of the Parliament of Paris, where they obtained a place, thanks to the zeal of the "lieutenant général" of Meaux in endeavoring to ferret out the composers of anti-papal ballads. They were entered, without regard to metre, as so much prose. A stanza or two of the song entitled Chanson nouvelle sur le chant: "N'allez plus au bois jouer," and evidently adapted to the tune of a popular ballad of the day, may suffice to indicate the character of the most vigorous of these compositions. It is addressed to Michel d'Arande, a friend of Farel, whom Bishop Briçonnet had invited to preach the Gospel in his diocese of Meaux, and begins:

The "chants religieux," of which M. Bordier's collection reproduces twenty-five, are partly poetical paraphrases of the Ten Commandments, the Lord's Prayer, etc., and partly original compositions on a variety of themes, such as patient endurance of insult, etc. They display great familiarity with the Holy Scriptures, and sometimes not a little poetic fire.

The "chants polémiques" treat of a number of subjects, prominent among which are the monks and nuns, and the doctrines of the papal church. In one the expiring papacy is represented as summoning to her bedside cardinals, bishops, and other members of the clergy, to witness her last struggles. In another the Sorbonne is held up to ridicule, in company with all the mediæval doctors of theology. In a third the poet more seriously combats the belief in purgatory as unscriptural. But it is the mass that bears the brunt of attack. The Host figures under the designation, current in the literature of the sixteenth century,264 of Le Dieu de Pâte, or Le Dieu de Farine. The pompous and complicated ceremonial, with its repetitions devoid of meaning for the illiterate spectator, is, on the whole, the favorite object of satire. In strict accordance with the spirit of the rough controversy of the times, little mercy is shown to religious antagonists. There is a good specimen of this style of treatment in an interesting song dating from about 1564, entitled "Noel nouveau de la description ou forme et manière de dire la Messe, sur ce chant: Hari, bouriquet." Of the fifteen stanzas of which it is composed, two or three may serve as samples. The preliminary service over, the priest comes to the consecration of the wafer:

A somewhat older song (written before 1555) purports to be the dirge of the Mass uttered by itself —Désolation de la Messe expirant en chantant. The Mass in perplexity knows not how to begin the customary service:

Me faudra-il ainsi périr?

Pope and cardinals are summoned in vain. No one comes, no one will bring reliquary or consecrated wafer. The Mass must finally resign all hope and die:

The "chants de guerre" furnish a running commentary upon the military events of the last forty years of the sixteenth century, which is not devoid of interest or importance. The hopeful spirit characterizing the earlier ballads is not lost even in the latest; but the brilliant anticipations of a speedy triumph of the truth, found before the outbreak of the first civil war, or immediately thereafter, are lacking in other productions, dating from the close of the reign of Henry the Third. In a spirited song, presumably belonging to 1562, the poet, adopting the nickname of Huguenots given to the Protestants by their opponents, retaliates by applying an equally unwelcome term to the Roman Catholics, and forecasting the speedy overthrow of the papacy:

The current expectation of the Protestants is attested in a long narrative ballad by Antoine Du Plain on the siege of Lyons (1563), in which Charles the Ninth figures as another Josiah destined to abolish the idolatrous mass:

It is noticeable that the words "va chasser l'Idole" are an anagram of the royal title Charles de Valois– an anagram which gave the Huguenots no little comfort. The same play upon words appears with a slight variation in a "Huictain au Peuple de Paris, sur l'anagrammatisme du nom du tres-Chrestien Roy de France, Charles de Valois IX. de ce nom" (Recueil des Choses Mémorables, 1565, p. 367), of which the last line is,

"O Gentil Roy qui chassa leur idole."

But after the massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day the hopes of the Huguenots were blighted. If the king is not referred to by name, his mother figures as the guilty cause of all the misfortune of France. She is a second Helen born for the ruin of her adopted country, according to Étienne de Maisonfleur.

"Léon" is Catharine's uncle, Pope Leo the Tenth, who was said to have predicted the total destruction of whatever house she should be married into. See also the famous libel "Discours merveilleux de la vie de Catherine de Medicis" (Ed. of Cologne, Pierre du Marteau, 1693), p. 609.

The massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day naturally contributes a considerable fund of laments, etc., to the Huguenot popular poetry of the century. A poem apparently belonging to a more remote date, discovered by Dr. Roullin, and perhaps the only Breton song of the kind that has come down to us, is as simple and unaffected a narrative as any of the modern Greek mœrologia (Vaurigaud, Essaie sur l'hist. des églises réf. de Bretagne, 1870, i. 6). It tells the story of a Huguenot girl betrayed to the executioner by her own mother. In spite of a few dialectic forms, the verses are easily understood.