BOOK urgencies that the court of France made to the neighboring courts to imitate its example.' v. 1. p. €2. II. From these facts, the discriminating reader can draw his own inferences as to the propriety of distinguishing the first attack on the admiral, and even the murder of him and his noble friends, from the subsequent general massacre in Paris, which lasted three days; and still more from the general massacres in the provinces, which from Meaux, on 25th August, extended thro September in various parts, up to the 3d of October at Bourdeaux. The first slaughter of the admiral and gentry began at two in the morning, and appears to have been effected by five o'clock, as at that time Beza states the tidings of it to have been taken over the river to Montgomery, and at seven o'clock they were pursued. p. 62. But as it was not until after this, that the tocsin was sounded for destruction of the nobility, the promiscuous massacre of all sorts and ages, and as this lasted till the king's trumpets at five in the afternoon ordered all to retire, and was repeated on the two following days, (ib. 64.) the two separate acts of the horrible drama seem to have been distinct from each other, as if resulting from different councils, and achieved by different authors. The Guises appear to have been contented with the first; and a more hidden and implacable party to have proceeded to the latter. This seems to be the more apparent, from Walsingham's dispatch of the 8th October, which mentions, that Guise, since the late murder, seemed to have some mis-contentment,' p. 269; but on that date, which was after the last act of horror at Bourdeaux, had resumed his influence; for the ambassador adds, that he was never to the outward show in greater favor, nor in greater jollity,' ib. The expressions of Tavannes seem also to imply a great distinction between the first and second acts of the sad catastrophe: The resolution to kill ONLY the chiefs is infringed. Many women and children were killed by the popular fury.' p. 272. But the populace had no share in the first part of the transaction, when the chiefs were killed. The duke of Guise and his friends achieved this. It was not until the tocsin called out the people, that they began to act. It seems therefore, from this account, that a second resolution was made by some unacknowleged party, not only additional to the first, but also counteracting its humaner limitation. The effect on the expedition of the prince of Orange, of thus losing the co-operation of France, was soon visible; and the triumph of the Guises on its failure, implies one great object of their atrocity. Passing the Rhine on 8th July, he took Mechlin on 29th August, Digges, p. 251; marched to Mons, p. 240, and defeated the duke of Alva, p. 245, and threatened Antwerp, p. 251; but for want of the expected co-operation, we find from the dispatch of 8th October, that he had been forced to retreat. Walsingham then stated from Paris, The duke of Guise was never in greater jollity than presently he is, especially since the news of the prince of Orange's retiring.' p. 267. He also reported, that since the news of the prince's retiring out of Flanders,' the French court seemed not to be desirous of the match with Elizabeth, p. 270. On 18th December, we find the prince to have taken his winter station at Dordrecht; 'where he maketh collection of money, for the levying of forces for the next Spring.' ib. 295. It coincides with these ideas, that Laboureur states from his facts which he had seen, that Charles listened to the sugges tions given to him by the admiral, to make war in Flanders, in order to receive under his obedience the cities of the Low Countries, which the cruelty of the duke of Alva was revolting, and that this was le plus pressant motif qui les determina au massacre de la St. Bartholemy.' Add. Castel. v. 3. p. 31. From the hour that Charles IX. assented to the perpetration, his mind was visibly unseated. He became a realized personification of a man possessed. Beza was told that he fired himself an arquebuss at the flying Huguenots. p. 62. So one who had been page to the king told the marshal de Tesse, that he had loaded the instrument for Charles to fire it-a frantic action, if true. Terror and fury became the governors of his spirit. On 24th September, we read in Walsingham's report, The king's own conscience, so common a companion is fear with tyranny, maketh him to repute all those of the religion, as well at home as abroad, his enemies, and so consequently not to wish one of them alive.' Digges, 257. On the 1st November, his appetite, like the tiger's, had become more eager for his sanguinary banquet. Sir Francis then wrote from Paris, 'It was thought that there should have been another general day of execution, the stay whereof, I am credibly informed, was procured by the queen mother, who with no small difficulty and intercession obtained the same at the king's hands, who protested that the same was but deferred for a time. The king is grown now so bloody CHAP. XXX. BOOK minded, that THEY WHO ADVISED HIM THERETO do repent the II. same, and do fear that the old saying will prove true, Malum consilium, consultatori pessimum.' Digges, 279. The duc de Sully declares that Charles at first threw it all on the Guises, and wished it to be considered as an effect of their hatred to the admiral, and so stated in his private letters to foreign states; but within eight days afterwards so altered his language, that he held a bed of justice in parliament, and had his letters patent registered, which affirmed the whole to have been done by his orders.' But the duke adds, ' Charles soon felt violent remorse. From the evening of the 24th August it was seen that he shivered, malgre lui, at the recital of the thousand traits of cruelty which every one came to boast of in his presence.' p. 70. He told his surgeon Paré, a Huguenot, I do not know what has come over me, but I find both my mind and body as affected as if I had a fever. I seem every moment, whether waking or sleeping, as if the murdered bodies presented themselves before me, with hideous faces, and covered with blood. I wish THEY had not included les imbecilles et les innocens' p. 72. The order on the next day to stop the massacres was the fruit of this conversation.' ib. Sully adds, that they reckoned 70,000 Protestants to have been massacred, in the whole kingdom, during eight days.' ib. p. 75. Davila's account of the numbers slain is, During the first two days there perished in the capital above 10,000 persons. The same cruelties followed in the provinces; so that in the space of a few days there perished more than 40,000 Huguenots.' Hist. v. 1. p. 417. 6 It was the bishop of Orleans who advised Charles to avow the massacre, and not to charge it on the duke of Guise, partly to prevent the duke's aggrandizement from it in the Catholic estimation, as if the bishop was acting with a different party. Labou reur's Add. to Castelnau, v. 1. p. 501. From the preceding facts it appears, that the chief authors of the first part of these massacres were, the duc d'Anjou, afterwards Henry III. and the duc de Guise; and that the latter was an active executioner in them. The end of both leads us to recollect the lines of Juvenal, which Creech has thus translated: The gods take aim before they strike the blow; for never was the moral retribution more signally exacted than on XXX. had the duc de Guise, and his brother the cardinal, suddenly CHAP. murdered at Blois: the duke exclaiming most truly after his first fury was exhausted on receiving the mortal stabs, with his dying voice, My sins have deserved this.' Hardw. State Pap. 288. And Henry himself perished sometime afterwards under the dagger of Jacques Clement, as we have before noticed from Mariana's approving description. St. Goar, the French ambassador in Spain, in a letter dated the 12th September 1572, gives Catherine of Medicis the following account of Philip the Second's behaviour on receiving the news of the massacre of St. Bartholomew: 'On the evening of the 7th, king Philip, by a courier of don Diego's, received the tidings of St. Bartholomew's night. Hereupon, contrary to his nature and wont, he has shown as much or more joy than at all the good fortune or success he has ever met with. He assembled his whole court, and said that he now saw your majesty was his good brother. The next day I had an audience of the king, when he (who never uses to laugh) began to laugh, displaying the highest delight and the greatest satisfaction. He extolled the resolution in itself, and the long dissimulation of so great an undertaking, saying that the whole world could hardly conceive how you could, so exactly at the right time, contrary to all appearances and the hopes of so many excellent peace loving persons, effect your purpose, at a moment when the one party was nearly extinct, from fear of an unsuccessful war, and the other was already preparing to satisfy their ambition and insolence. But God had chosen your majesty as a defender and bulwark against the misery about to break in thro the means of so many tyrants, who had conspired against the honor and the laws of kings.' Philip further ordered ecclesiastical processions and Te Deums; he even commanded all the bishops, each in his own diocese, to hold such processions and thanksgivings, to the especial honor of the king of France. He has every where distinctly expressed his opinion of the transaction, and testified his displeasure towards those who sought to persuade him that the whole had happened unpremeditatedly, and not through deliberation.' Raumer's Letters from Paris, in the History of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, cited in F. Q. Rev. No. 22. CHAP. XXXI. II. DEATH OF CHARLES IX.-FOURTH CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE.- BOOK THE destructions of the Bartholomew massacres prevented the ascendancy of the Protestant religion in France, but consolidated and extended it in Europe. If they had not been perpetrated, Charles would have patronized it in his own dominions and in Flanders; and might have adopted it himself; but, 'It is remarked of Charles IX. but not as one of his merits, for Masson entitles the passage afflictio ecclesiastici ordinis,' It is uncertain WHETHER HE or the Calvinists most vexavit the ecclesiastical order. They spoiled the temples of their precious ornaments, and slew a few priests: but HE made money from the consecrated vessels ; gave ecclesiastical prefectiones and monasteries to boys, to soldiers and to women; exacted as long as he lived decimas quaternas, the fourth part of the revenues of church property; abstracted not a few latifundia, or fonds des benefices, and got by the sale of them two millions of gold.' Masson's Hist. Car. in Lab. Castel. v. 3. p. 19–27. A king who would do this before he was 24, was in fair way to become a French Henry VIII. as to the papal hierarchy, if he had not been agitated at an overwhelming moment to commit himself irrecoverably into its clutches. I think it was this real tendency to Protestant ideas which has occasioned his conduct to be thought dissimulation. What he did from real inclination to the Huguenots was, after St. Bartholomew, referred to fraudulent artifice. Even his successor, Henry III. one of the authors of St. Bartholomew, sought to abstract some part of the exuberant wealth of the French hierarchy, on which we have before quoted even the pope's sneer at the cardinal Lorrain's having an income of 300,000 crowns. On 1st December 1583, sir E. Strafford wrote from Paris, 'The king seeketh to draw more from the clergy than they will ever grant but by force,' Hardwicke, v. 1. p. 201; and sent the duc de Joyeuse to Rome, to obtain dispensation of the pope for the king to sell 100,000 crowns yearly revenue of church land.' p. 207. |