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.- TREASONABLE PRACTICES. 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. XXXI. driven from it by the dreadful criminality into which CHAP. he was hurried, he lived for a brief space a sceptered wretch of remorse and misery; and died prematurely in personal agony, amid self-upbraidings, with groans of repentance which could neither remedy nor recal, and in great mental terror." 3 The indignation excited by such a catastrophe, caused a momentary desire in some of the German states to retaliate the murders of the Protestants in France, by a similar extermination of the Roman Catholics elsewhere. This monstrous suggestion was but a meteor flame of indignation, which vanished as soon as it had arisen; and the excited minds of the reformers, rejecting the idea of combating crime by imitating what they abhorred, assumed the wise and more upright resolution to maintain, with new energy and unshrinking fortitude, their He expired on Whitsunday 1574, in less than two years after his day of crime. The duke of Sully says he died in the most severe pains, and bathed in his own blood. In this state, the miserable day of St. Bartholomew was, without ceasing, present to his mind, and he shewed, by his transports of regret, and by his fears, how much he repented of it.' Mem. p. 83. D'Aubigny mentions the same fact: 'Ever since St. Bartholomew's day the prince had no repose but what was interrupted by starts and groans, which ended in exclamations tending to despair. He often expressed how much he detested the massacre. He had already moved those who had given him the bad counsel, and even wished to send away the queen mother.' v. 2. p. 129. Born in June 1550, he was scarcely 24 at his death. The guilty instigator, d'Anjou, afterwards Henry III. was not much happier; for during one of his unresting nights he called a friend to him, and said, I have caused you to come here to disclose to you my inquietudes and agitations to-night, which have troubled my rest, in thinking of the execution of St. Bartholomew.' Mem. Viller, 2. p. 62. He perished himself by the dagger of an assassin. 3 Walsingham mentioned from Paris, on 5th December 1572, By letters out of Germany, they write, that it was determined, upon the news of the execution of those of the religion here, to have slain as many Catholics of the French as were found there, which afterwards, upon better consideration, was stayed.' Digges, p. 301. BOOK improved faith and system, as the true bulwark of II. intellectual freedom, and of personal security. 4 Charles endeavored to renew his intercourse of friendship with Elizabeth, who, avoiding all conduct and language which might plunge the two countries into an useless war of vindictive passion and mutual calamity; yet expressed, with great dignity and force, her moral review and rebuking sense of the atrocious transaction, while she acquiesced in his proposal that their national amity should remain undisturbed." The Huguenots, in the parts to which the massacres had not extended, soon found themselves under the necessity of taking up arms for their preservation; on which the fourth civil war arose in France. The duc d'Anjou besieged Rochelle: but losing before it, the greatest part of his army, a fourth pacification ensued, which shewed the continuing strength of the reformers in those districts of the kingdoms where they chicfly lived; and the inability of the Catholic government to suppress them. But the sanguinary event which had destroyed their noble leaders, and the settled animosity of the court, discouraged and prevented the dissemination of their system. The ambitious and the worldly, the timid and the cautious; and those who The French king sent Mannesire to the queen, to urge three points: The continuance of their amity; that she would be godmother to his child; that she would pursue her marriage with the duke d'Alençon. Digges, p. 297. See her recapitulation to Walsingham, of what she had stated, in Digges, 297-9, who also himself steadily repeated them to the king at his audience. Lett. 25th December, ib. p. 304. The queen directed the same language to be held, on his request to her not to receive the French who had fled for safety, even by the ambassador whom she sent to attend his christening. ib. 319. preferred a quiet life, or their enjoyments, or were indifferent about their religious tenets, kept aloof from the new doctrines and worship, which were now to be professed in discountenanced seclusion, with ever-impending danger and persecution, and with an abandonment of all state preferment, of official dignities, and of much social reputation and pecuniary advantages. Anjou was elected king of Poland while he lay before Rochelle, and his absence was beneficial to those whose destruction he still sought. His brother, d'Alençon, attempted to raise a new moderate party against the courtly system; but the death of Charles recalling Anjou from Poland, he became king of France in 1574, under the name of Henry III. and soon renewed the hostilities against the Protestants, whom he had already so deeply injured. D'Alençon at length became one of their leaders in 1575, and Elizabeth, whose hand he was still soliciting, assisted him with some succors. The next year, Henry IV. escaping from Paris, joined their forces, and a pacification was made in May 1576, the most advantageous they had obtained, which allowed them the public exercise of their religion, and for a while procured them peace and safety; but which led the Catholic party to form that celebrated confederacy which has become known in history, as it was at the time, by the caricaturing name of the Holy League; and from which, a few years afterwards, the last civil war on the subject of the Reformation severely desolated the best provinces of France. In these events, Elizabeth interfered by aiding the Huguenots with occasional succors, and by allowing the treaty СНАР, XXXI. |