V.
The defection of the king of Navarre, lending weight to the triumvirate, bore the fruit which the (Roman) Catholic party expected. Coligny and his brothers, seeing that they were treated with mistrust, withdrew from court. The prince of Condé, who had hitherto been kept at a distance, went and fixed himself at Paris; and the Guises thus had full liberty to commit acts, which in more settled times would have been esteemed as high treason against the chief of the state. They concluded an alliance with the king of Spain and the duke of Savoy, and undertook to open to them the gates of the kingdom for the extermination of heretics. At the same time, they tore up the Edict of January at the sword’s point, by the massacre of Vassy.
Vassy was a small, but strong town in the county of Champagne. It contained about three thousand inhabitants, the third of whom, without counting the surrounding villages, professed the Reformed faith. This change of religion irritated the Lorraines, who were established near the town, in their dominion of Joinville, and in particular a very aged lady, the dowager-duchess of Guise, who could not understand why the Huguenots had not already been put an end to. She pretended that the inhabitants of Vassy had no right, as vassals of her grand-daughter Mary Stuart, to choose a new religion without her permission. She therefore threatened them with a terrible vengeance, and as they gave no heed to her violence, she invited her son, the duke Francis of Guise, to make a striking example of such insolent rebels.
On the 28th of February, 1562, the duke, having received from the king of Navarre an invitation to return to Paris to suppress the Huguenots, left the Château of Joinville with an escort of several gentlemen, and two hundred horsemen. Arriving the next morning at Brousseval, a village a quarter of a league distant from Vassy, he heard the sound of the bells. “What is that?” he asked of one of his attendants. “That is for the service of the Huguenots.” “By the mort-Dieu!” exclaimed the duke, “we will Huguenot them presently after a different fashion.”
On Sunday, the 1st of March, on entering Vassy, he was joined by sixty horsemen and bowmen. He dismounted in front of the hall, and sent for the prior and the provost—both bitter enemies of the new doctrine. During this time the Reformed had assembled, to the number of about twelve hundred, in a barn, and were celebrating their worship under the protection of the Edict of January. Not one of them was armed, with the exception of two strangers, probably gentlemen, who had their swords.
The soldiers of the duke, placed at the head of the escort, approaching the barn, commenced crying out: “Huguenots, heretics, dogs, rebels against the king and God!” The faithful hastened to close the doors, but the assailants leaped from their horses, crying: “Kill, kill, mort-Dieu! kill these Huguenots!” The first they met with was a poor hawker of wine. “In whom do you believe?” they demanded. “I believe in Jesus Christ,” answered the man; and he was instantly speared upon the spot. Two others were killed near the door, and those who showed themselves at the openings of the barn were fired at from the outside. The Calvinists had collected stones to defend themselves.
On hearing the tumult, Guise hastened to the spot, and threw himself into the conflict. He received a blow in the face from a stone; his blood flowed. His men became exasperated, and he was beside himself. No pity was shown for age or sex: a horrible butchery ensued. Some fell on their knees, their hands clasped, calling for mercy in the name of Jesus Christ. The answer was: “You call upon your Christ, where is He now?” Others lifted up the roof, and sought to escape over the walls of the town. “They were shot down,” says an old historian, “like pigeons on a roof.”
The pastor, Leonard Morel, was on his knees in his pulpit, calling upon the God of Mercies. He was fired at when he sought to fly; but when near the door he tripped over a corpse, and instantly received several sword-cuts on his right shoulder, and on his head. Thinking himself fatally wounded, he cried out: “Lord, into Thy hands I yield my spirit, for Thou hast redeemed me.”
Two gentlemen, who were near, exclaimed, “This is the minister; let us take him before M. de Guise.” They dragged him, for he was not able to walk, and the duke thus addressed him: “Minister, come here; are you the minister here? What makes you so bold as to seduce these people?” “I am no seducer,” answered Morel, “I have preached the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” “Mort-Dieu,” replied the duke, “does the Gospel preach sedition? Thou art the cause of the death of all people; thou shalt be hanged. Provost, up with a gibbet to hang him!” Happily, out of these hundreds of cut-throats, no one could be found to fill the office of executioner. Morel was kept under strict guard, and the delay saved him.
Sixty persons were left upon the floor after this butchery, and two hundred more were wounded, several fatally. The corpses were stripped, and some days after, the footmen of the duke sold their property in open market, “crying them aloud,” says Crespin, “as a bailiff would who had taken furniture in execution.”
During this carnage, the Bible of the Calvinists was brought to the duke. He gave it to his brother the Cardinal Louis de Guise, who had remained on the walls of the cemetery. “Here,” said he, “see the titles of the books of these Huguenots.” “There is no harm in this,” answered the cardinal; “it is the Holy Scriptures.” “How, sang-Dieu! the Holy Scriptures! It is fifteen hundred years and more since they were made, and these books have only been printed a year. By the mort-Dieu! it is good for nothing.” The cardinal could not help saying: “My brother is wrong.”
This circumstance is not unworthy of history: it exhibits, once more, how profound and degrading was the ignorance in religious matters of the principal defender of the Romish church.
The duke was walking up and down, biting his beard, a sign with him of furious anger. He summoned the judge of the district, and upbraided him for having suffered these conventicles. The judge pleaded the Edict of January. “The Edict of January!” said Guise, laying his hand upon his sword; “this steel shall speedily cut asunder this edict, however tightly bound.”
The following day, being at Eclairon, his people informed him that the Huguenots of Vassy had sent complaints to the king. “Let them go,” he said with scorn; “they will find neither their admiral, nor their chancellor.”
Reflection, however, made him understand that it was no trifling matter to have authorized this butchery in a time of perfect peace, and he therefore sent a lawyer to Vassy to commence a sort of inquiry. A tale that the Huguenots had been the aggressors was invented, as if it were likely that such an extravagant notion could be believed, that people unarmed, assembled at the foot of the pulpit with women and children, should be the first to attack the numerous escort of François de Guise!
In the following year, when upon his death-bed, the duke protested that he had neither premeditated, nor ordered the massacre of Vassy. We are willing to take him at his word, notwithstanding the overwhelming remarks of Bayle; it would grieve us to witness an ignoble leader of a band of assassins in this brave and valiant captain, the defender of Metz, the conqueror of Renty. But had he not a firm resolve to use at least some violence against the Huguenots of Vassy? What did he do to prevent the massacre? Was he the man to be disobeyed? Towards the end of the affair, he ordered, at the request of the duchess of Guise, that the women with child should be spared, but nothing more. Moreover did he prosecute, did he so much as disclaim any one of the murderers? Even the charge of premeditation he set aside; his consent to the massacre cannot be denied. The blood of Vassy is on his head: it has been visited upon him, his son, and his race. “All they who take the sword, shall perish by the sword.”
The news of the massacre of Vassy created an extraordinary impression throughout the kingdom; it roused all the Reformed to indignation and horror. This was not the crime of a vile populace led on by some contemptible priests, or abject monks. Here was one of the greatest lords of France, who had, in contempt of the law, shed the blood of the faithful in torrents. If this offence were to go unpunished, where would justice be henceforth, and who could be secure against assassination?
At Paris the agitation was so great that an immediate resort to arms was apprehended, and the Marshal de Montmorency, the governor of the town, invited the faithful to suspend their assemblies. But they answered that this would be to give up the cause to their enemies, and to acknowledge that there existed a power superior to that of the law in the kingdom. They, however, restricted themselves to demanding from the marshal the compulsory observance of the edict.
The prince of Condé and the principal members of the party addressed themselves to Catherine de Medicis. They represented to her the insolence of the triumvirate, the league of the Lorraine princes with the king of Spain, the growing audacity of their enterprises, the dangers which threatened the royal authority, and protested that they were ready to sacrifice their possessions and their lives for the cause of the throne, which was now linked with the Reformed faith. Catherine employed her usual dissimulation, gave evasive answers, and tried to penetrate the secrets of the Calvinists, in order to turn them to her own account, as occasion might serve, for or against them.
The consistory of Paris resolved to exhaust every legal means before opposing force to force, and sent Theodore de Bèze to the court to demand the exemplary punishment of the murderers. The king of Navarre, who was present at the audience, and who wished to give some testimony of his zeal to his new allies, exclaimed: “They threw stones at my brother, the duke of Guise; he could not restrain the fury of his people; and mark me, whosoever shall touch but the end of his finger, shall touch my whole body.” “Sire,” Bèze answered, “it is indeed the part of the Church of God, in whose name I speak, to endure blows and not to give them; but you will also please to remember that it is an anvil, which has used up many hammers.”
Theodore de Bèze spoke the truth. Anthony of Bourbon and his have fallen; the persecutors rest in their sepulchre, but the French Reformation still lives.