Vol. VIII., No. 43 October, 1868.

The Massacre Of St. Bartholomew—
its Origin And Character.

[Footnote 1]

[Footnote 1: The Massacre of St. Bartholomew: preceded by a History of the Religious Wars in the Reign of Charles IX. By Henry White. London: John Murray. 1868. 8vo, pp. xviii.-505.
La St. Barthélemy, ses Origines, son Vrai Caractère, ses Suites. Par George Gandy. Revue des Questions Historiques. Tome ier, pp. 11-91, 32-391.]

Few historical events have been more persistently used in arguments against the Catholic Church than the massacre of Admiral Coligny, and a great number of Protestant nobles and people, at Paris, on St. Bartholomew's day, 1572, by orders emanating from the court.

Isolated from the religious wars in which it is but one of the darkest episodes, this affair has been set forward as an independent act—a deliberate scheme of the Catholic party in France—king, nobles, and clergy—to extinguish Protestantism at a single blow. The numbers of the victims have been exaggerated to an extent incompatible with all contemporary statistics of population; and the massacre of St. Bartholomew has thus been transmitted, as if by a series of distorting mirrors, from the pamphlets of the time to the histories, sermons, periodicals, and school-books of our days, each reflection but a distortion of the last, and so exceeding it in unreality that at length truth had become utterly hopeless.

In fact, we might as well expect to have Bibles throw out the long-sanctioned misprint of "strain at a gnat," and print, correctly, "strain out a gnat," or omit the intrusive words at the end of the Lord's Prayer, which all Protestant Biblical scholars admit to be spurious, as to expect popular accounts of St. Bartholomew's day to come down to what is really certain and authentic.

Even among writers of a higher stamp, there seemed to be a disposition to avoid research that would break the charm. Historical scholars made little effort to free the subject from the mists and fables with which it has been encompassed, and set down only well-attested facts with authorities to sustain them. It is, therefore, with no less surprise than gratification that we find in the recent work of Henry White a laborious and thorough examination of the evidence still extant as to the originators of the dark deed, their motives and object, the extent of the slaughter, and the reasons assigned at the moment and subsequently. It is one of those subjects in which no work will be accepted entirely by readers of an opposite faith, inasmuch as it is almost impossible to avoid drawing inferences, and ascribing motives for acts, to real or supposed modes of thought in the religious body to which the actors belonged.

"Respecting the massacre of St. Bartholomew there are also two theories. Some contend that it was the result of a long-premeditated plot; and this view was so ably maintained by John Allen, in the Edinburgh Review, (vol. xliv.—1826,) that nothing further was left to be said on the subject. Others are of opinion that it was the accidental result of a momentary spasm of mingled terror and fanaticism, caused by the unsuccessful attempt to murder Coligny. This theory has been supported by Ranke, in a review of Capefigue's Histoire de la Réforme; by Soldan; by Baum, in his Life of Beza; and by Coquerel, in the Revue Théologique, in 1859."

Such is White's statement of the position of the question; and his work has been justly styled "able and unpretentious."

In France, the anti-Christian writers of the last century—Voltaire and his school—were all loud in denunciation of the affair, and painted it in its worst colors. It was too good a weapon, in their war against religion, to be easily laid down; and it was made to do such good service that later Catholic apologists have till recently scarcely ventured on any examination of the question that would seem at all favorable. The discussion by Gandy is, in extent and research, as well as in soundness of principle, by far the best review of the subject. Yet, as a close historical argument, the force is sometimes destroyed by the citation of comparatively weak and undecisive authorities.

In English, the best Catholic tract on St. Bartholomew was that of Dr. Lingard.

Some of his positions were not well taken, and do not stand when confronted with authorities brought forward by later research. Yet his essay compelled a real historic investigation by subsequent writers, and has led, indirectly at least, to the work of Mr. White.

This writer says, not inaptly (p. 200): "It is easy to prove any historical untruth by a skilful manipulation of documents." This skilful manipulation need not be done with the consciousness of guilt. It may be the result of prejudice, party spirit, bias; and he himself is not free from objection. With an evident endeavor to be impartial, his education and prejudices lead him to slur over some acts and expatiate on others; to ascribe to exalted piety all the deeds of one party, and deny to the other any real religious feeling.

This taints all his introductory chapters on the religious wars in France, prior to 1572, giving a false light and color to the whole. It gives the impression that real piety, devotion, religious feeling, were not to be found at all among the Catholics of France, but were the peculiar attributes of the disciples gained by the emissaries sent from Geneva by Calvin.

Biassing the reader thus, he keeps back the real exterminating, destructive, and intolerant spirit of the Huguenots, and, while detailing here and there excesses, treats as insignificant the conspiracy of Amboise, Coligny's complicity in Poltrot's assassination of the Duke of Guise, Queen Jane's ruthless extirpation of Catholicity, the Michelade, and the fearful butchery enacted by Montgomery at Orthez, a small place where, nevertheless, the Catholic victims numbered, according to his own figures, three thousand, halt what he claims as the number of Protestant victims at Paris on the bloody day of St. Bartholomew.

Nor is he more happy in depicting the theories and ideas of the two parties.

Compare the Protestants in France with the early Christians and the difference will be seen. The Reformers everywhere were aggressive and intolerant. They did not ask merely liberty to adopt new religious views and practise them. They did, indeed, raise the cry of religious freedom—freedom of worship—freedom of conscience; but what did these words really mean? They meant the suppression of the Catholic worship, the extermination of the priesthood and religious orders, the pillage and defacing of Catholic churches, and the destruction of paintings, statues, relics, and crosses. When this was done, they proclaimed religious liberty. Thus, at Lyons, in 1562, "the Mass was abolished, liberty of conscience proclaimed," in two consecutive clauses.

The utter absurdity of such a connection does not strike Mr. White, nor will it strike many English readers as it does a Catholic ear. The Protestant spirit has so falsified ideas that we constantly hear the same inconsistency. The enthusiastic son of New England claims that the Puritan fathers established "freedom to worship God according to the dictates of conscience," when, in fact, they claimed only the right to worship for themselves and denied it to all others; the son of Rhode Island claims Roger Williams as the real founder of toleration, and yet his fanatical opposition to the slightest semblance to Catholicity was such that he exhorted the trained bands not to march under the English flag because it had the cross on it; the historian of New York, or the more elaborate historian of the Netherlands, will claim for Holland the honor of establishing religious freedom, and we read their pages with the impression that the people of the Netherlands were Protestant, as a unit; and that the republic established after throwing off the Spanish yoke made the land one where all creeds met in harmony, and all men were equal in the eye of the law in their religious rights. Yet what is the real fact? From that time till the present nearly one half of the people of the Netherlands have been Catholics. The Protestants, possessing a slight numerical advantage, ruled, and to the Catholics their rule was one of iron. They were deprived of all churches, prohibited from erecting others, confined to certain quarters, subjected to penal laws. Where then was the freedom of worship? In the reformers' minds these words had no application to Catholics.

Now, it was this aggressive, intolerant spirit of the reformers that made the civil governments in countries which elected to remain Catholic so severe on the new religionists. The moment a foreign emissary from Geneva gathered a few proselytes, enough to form a body of any size, then began coarse songs, ridiculing and scoffing at the holiest doctrines of the Catholics; then crosses would be broken down, crucifixes, statues of the blessed Virgin and the saints, defaced or destroyed; as their numbers grew, priests would be driven from their churches or shot down, and the edifices themselves plundered and appropriated to the new creed. That such things could be borne tamely was impossible. In France the government was weak and vacillating. The humbler and less instructed portions of the Catholic body retaliated in the same measure that they saw meted out, and resisted a creed that used abuse and violence, by abuse and violence. They had not the cant of their antagonists, but true religion is not to be measured by that standard.

Alarmed by the excesses of the Reformers elsewhere, the French government attempted to repress their entrance into France by penal laws, a course that seldom attains the end proposed. The progress of error was to be checked by more assiduous teaching of the people by their pastors, by zeal in reforming morals, by institutions practically exercising the spiritual and corporal works of mercy.

Yet, while conceding the general deficiency of power in penal laws to check the progress of religious opinions, it must be remembered that the destructive tenets we have alluded to made the increase of the Calvinists a danger to the peace and well-being of France. Beza, in his Profession of Faith, (v. Point p. 119,) advised the extermination of priests. Calvin (Apud Becan, t. v. opusc. 17, aph. 15, De modo propagandi Calvinismi) declares that the Jesuits must be killed or crushed by falsehood and calumny. The destruction of all representations of Christ and his saints was the constant theme of the reformed preachers, and under this war against idols, as they termed them, they included insult and outrage to the remains of those illustrious men of the past whose exalted virtues had endeared them to the Christian people.

From that day to this Protestantism has sanctioned the outrages thus advised and thus committed. The right of Protestants to demolish, on any slight pretext, Catholic churches, convents, shrines, monuments, or pictures, seems even now a sort of self-evident axiom, its exercise being regulated merely by grounds of expediency. England and the United States can show their examples of this, even in the present century; in the last, the outrages committed by New England troops in Canada and Acadia whenever a Catholic church fell into their power; the careful aiming of cannon at the monastic buildings in the siege of Quebec; the expedition against Louisburg, with the chaplain bearing an axe to demolish the idols; at once suggest themselves to the mind.

That Catholics possessed any right to their own churches, their own ideas of worship, was never entertained for a moment.

The civil law might justly repress such men, if not on the simple ground of teaching false doctrines, at least for their claim of right to destroy the liberty of those who professed the religion of their ancestors.

For some years the reform gained slowly in France, the emissaries of Calvin never relaxing their efforts, and finally winning to their side Queen Jane of Navarre, the Prince of Condé and the three famous brothers of the house of Chatillon, D'Andelot, Admiral Coligny, find the profligate Cardinal Odet. By this time the Protestant churches, true to their aggressive character, assumed a military organization, as White (p. 23) and Fauriel, a recent French Protestant author, admit, and aimed at the overthrow alike of Catholicity and royalty. This secret preparation for an armed attempt to secure the mastery of France had, by 1560, attained its full development.[Footnote 2] The moment had come for a grand effort which was to exterminate Catholicity from France as utterly as it has been from Sweden, where not even gratitude for their foremost struggle for independence saved the Catholic Dalecarlians from annihilation.

[Footnote 2: Consult Mémoires de Saulx Tavannes, p. 29; Lavallée, Histoire des Français, i. p. 575; Fauriel, Essai sur les Evénements qui ont précédé et antené le St. Barthélemy, p. 19-]

The position of affairs in France justified the hopes of the reformers. There were three parties in the state—the earnest Catholic party, headed by the Guises of Lorraine; the Huguenot party, directed by Calvin, with Condé in France as its future king, and Coligny as its master-spirit; and, as usual in such cases, a third party of weak men, who hampered the Catholics, and thus strengthened their opponents, by hesitation, uncertainty, and fitfulness.

The queen mother, Catharine de Medicis, disliked the house of Lorraine more than she loved Catholicity; and, jealous of the growing power of the Guises, was not disinclined to see the party of Condé counterbalance it. Hence, she generally threw her influence into the third party, in which figured the Duke d'Alençon, the Montmorencies, Cossé, Biron, and to which men like the famous Chancellor l'Hopital gave their influence. How little the true Catholic spirit, as we understand it now, prevailed among the higher nobility, may be inferred from the fact that the two great Protestant leaders, Condé and Coligny, were brothers of cardinals, their close relationship to princes of the Roman Church exerting no influence. One of these cardinals apostatized, and, after defying the pope, fled to England, to be poisoned by his valet; the other was a mere figure in the stirring scenes and times in which he lived.

Francis II., husband of Mary, Queen of Scots, on ascending the throne, placed the control of affairs in the hands of his uncles, the Cardinal of Lorraine and the Duke of Guise. This meant a firm government, not one to tolerate an imperium in imperio—a power able to put in the field, as Coligny boasted, one hundred and fifty thousand men.

Encouraged by the edict of January, 1560, the masses of the reformed party were, everywhere that their numbers permitted it, seizing Catholic churches and monasteries, expelling the inmates, demolishing every vestige of the ancient faith. While they were thus committing themselves, and overawing the Catholics, the leaders formed the celebrated plot of Amboise to assassinate the Guises, seize the person of the king, and, of course, the control of the government. In spite of his disavowal, made after it had failed, Calvin really approved of it at first. This White denies, (p. 82;) but the letter to Sturm, cited by Gandy, (p. 28,) is decisive; and in the very letter where he seems to condemn his followers, he says: "Had they not been opposed, in time our people would have seized many churches; … but there, too, they yielded with the same weakness." (Bulletin de la Société de l'Histoire du Protestantisme Français, i. p. 250.) Coligny's complicity is as evident. The ostensible leader was Bary de la Renaudie, "whose enmity to Guise," says White, "probably made him renounce his religion and join the reformers."

Protestant writers all admit that the plot of Amboise would, if successful, have overthrown Catholicity for ever in France. The Guises saw the danger to themselves, to Catholicity, and to royalty, and acted with promptness and energy. Every road and avenue leading to the place was guarded, and the separate bands of the conspirators as they came up were met and crushed, la Renaudie, the ostensible leader, being slain.

Then followed a series of terrible criminal proceedings. The partisans of the rebellion were tried, condemned, and executed with as little mercy as English rulers ever manifested to Irish rebels. White puts the number executed at one thousand two hundred, but cites no authorities to justify so large an estimate.

After this affair at Amboise, "the political character of the Huguenots," as White admits, "became more prominent, and proved the temporary destruction of French Protestantism." The reformers committed many outrages on the Catholics after the failure at Amboise, especially in the districts where Montbrun and Mouvans swept through with the hand of destruction, till the latter perished miserably at Draguignan. Then followed a new Huguenot plot, formed by Condé and his brother Anthony, but Francis II. raised a considerable force, and, marching down, overawed them. Condé and the other Huguenot leaders were summoned to appear before him. D'Andelot fled; Condé appeared, was tried, and condemned; but before any other steps were taken Francis II. died in November. "Did you ever hear or read of anything so opportune as the death of the little king?" wrote Calvin; and Beza gloried over "the foul death of the miserable boy."

Charles IX. became king, with his mother, Catharine de Medicis, as regent, and she sought to weaken the power of the Guises. Condé was released from prison, his brother Anthony made lieutenant-general of the kingdom. An assembly of the Three Estates was convened, but dissolved without effecting any good. Throughout the land, the Huguenots employed abuse and violence, drawing on themselves fearful punishment.

Still, under Catharine's fickle favor, the Huguenots were steadily gaining ground, and the Colloquy at Poissy, in 1562, where Beza appeared in person, was, in its actual result and in moral effect, a victory to the reformers. The countenance of the court gave them boldness. The Catholic party saw the evident danger and were loud in their complaints, but this only made collisions more frequent: one party elate with hope and triumph, the other seeing naught but treachery and violence.

It needed but a spark to kindle a conflagration; at last it came. On Corpus Christi, in 1561, as the procession of the blessed sacrament moved through the streets of Lyons, a Huguenot rushed upon the officiating clergyman and endeavored to wrest the consecrated host from his hands. So daring an outrage roused the Catholics to fury. In an instant the whole city was in arms, and the innocent atoned in blood for the madness of one. Even in Paris itself similar riots took place, and fifty Catholics were killed or wounded at the church of St. Medard, into which D'Andelot rode on horseback at the head of the Huguenots.

The edict of January, 1562, came at last to effect a peace. By its provisions the Protestants were to restore the churches they had seized, to cease their abuse of the Catholic ceremonies in print or discourse, and, in return, were allowed to hold meetings unarmed outside the city, but their ministers were not to go from town to town preaching. The measure of toleration thus granted may not seem excessive, but it was far greater than any Protestant power then, or long subsequently, granted to such subjects as preferred not to change their creed.

The measure, however, failed to produce tranquillity. The Huguenots, far from restoring what they had seized, continued their acts of violence. At Nismes the churches and convents were attacked and profaned, while in Gascony and Languedoc the reformers had established such a reign of terror that for forty leagues around no Catholic priest durst show himself. Montpellier, Montauban, and Castres beheld similar profanations of churches.

Coligny, a prototype of Cromwell in apparent fanaticism, in military skill, in relentless cruelty toward the Catholic clergy, like the Puritan leader of the next century, looked beyond the Atlantic. He had projected a Protestant colony of refuge in Brazil; its failure did not prevent his renewing the attempt in Florida. In the month following that in which the edict was issued, he despatched John Ribaut to lay the foundation of a French colony in America. He seems to have been planning a retreat against sudden disaster in the war they were rapidly preparing. The fate of that colony is well known. At Vassy, in March, a Huguenot congregation came into collision with the Duke of Guise; accounts differ widely as to the details. The duke asserted that his men were attacked. On being struck in the face with a stone, he cried to his men to show no quarter, and, according to White, fifty or sixty were killed and two hundred wounded.

In a moment the affair was taken up and echoed through France. It was worth an army to the cause of rebellion. The military churches rose. So complete was their organization that almost simultaneously thirty-five cities were taken, the Cevennes, the Vivarrais, and the Comté Venaissin were in revolt. Everywhere the Catholic worship was suppressed, the churches stripped, the clergy banished, while the riches torn from the shrines and altars enabled them to maintain the war.

The shrine of St. Martin of Tours, venerated and enriched by the piety of France during a thousand years, gave Condé, prince of the blood, a million two thousand livres to devastate France. To add to their strength, the Huguenots then formed the treaty of Hampton Court with Elizabeth, and by it agreed to restore Calais to England.

As we have seen, they took Lyons, and, after massacring priests and religious, abolished the Mass, and with the same breath declared that every one should be free in his religion. As the Catholics were unprepared, city after city fell into their hands, till no less than two hundred were swept by these devastating hordes, fiercer than Goth or Vandal. The history of every French city marks at this epoch the destruction of all that the past had revered. Orleans, Mans, Troyes, Tours, Bayeux, all repeat the same story. Everywhere priests, religious of both sexes, Catholic laity, were butchered and mutilated with every barbarity. The Baron des Adrets stands forth as the terrible butcher of this period, who made his barbarity a sport, and trained the mind of France to savage inhumanity. In the little town of Montbrison, in August, 1562, he slaughtered more than eight hundred men, women, and children.

The recent French historian, Martin, whose work is in process of publication in this country, glosses over this period by merely alluding to the profanation and pillage of the Catholic churches and religious houses. Every local history in France, however, attests the slaughter and mutilation of the clergy, the last infamy always popularly ascribed to the order of Coligny. Beza, writing in January, 1562, admits that the Protestants of Aquitaine, though enjoying full religious liberty, massacred priests and wished to exterminate their enemies.

This sudden rebellion was the work of Coligny, who, with his army of religious enthusiasts, and "all the restless, factious, and discontented, who linked their fortunes to a party whose triumph would involve confiscation of the wealth of the church," with German mercenaries and English plunderers, swept through the land with prayer on his lips and treason in his heart.

He cloaked his treason under the hypocritical pretext that he was in arms not against the king, but against the king's advisers. White allows himself to be deluded by this hypocritical sham, and in several places censures the treasonable conduct of the Cardinal of Lorraine and others, who wrote to the King of Spain soliciting his aid to save Catholicity in France, while Coligny, in arms against his king, making treaties with Elizabeth of England, introducing into France English and German mercenaries, is never branded as a traitor at all. And if Condé and Coligny merely sought to banish the Guises, how was that to be effected by pillaging Catholic churches? They took up arms to exterminate the leaders of the Catholic party and the clergy, suppress the Catholic worship, and place Condé on the throne. White, too, censures the pope for interfering, but neglects to put before his reader the fact that part of France, the Comté Venaissin, then belonged to the Holy See, and that in that part the Huguenots were committing the same ravages. Meanwhile the royal armies rallied; and, as a first step, endeavored to induce the Huguenot leaders to lay down their arms. Condé was so far influenced by the offers made, that he agreed to leave France if Guise would do the same, but Beza traversed the projects of peace. He besought the prince, says White, "not to give over the good work he had begun, which God, whose honor it concerned, would bring to perfection."

Negotiation failing, the royal troops began the campaign to recover the conquered cities. Blois, Tours, Poitiers, Angers, Bourges, and Rouen were at once retaken, and Orleans, the stronghold of reform, besieged. In the battle of Dreux, fought on the 19th of December, the rebels were utterly defeated, Condé remaining a prisoner in the hands of the royal forces.

While besieging Orleans, (February 18th,) Guise was assassinated by Jean Méré de Poltrot, a man whom Coligny aided with money, and who had revealed to that nobleman his project of murder. White's endeavor to exculpate Coligny is very lame. He deems it suspicious that Poltrot was executed at once without his being confronted with Coligny; as though the rebel general would have come into court for the purpose, in the very heat of the civil war. He finally, however, admits: "This leaves no doubt that Coligny assented, if he did not consent, to the crime. He was not unwilling to profit by it, though he would do nothing to further it. This may diminish the lofty moral pedestal on which some writers have placed the Protestant hero; but he was a man, and had all a man's failings, though he may have controlled them by his religious principles. Nor was assassination considered at all cowardly or disgraceful in those days; not more so than killing a man in a duel was, until very recently, among us."

As he knew the project and gave money, it is hard to see how "he would do nothing to further it." That he had all a man's failings is a very loose form of speech; so loose and broad that, if assassination was not then deemed cowardly or disgraceful, the subsequent killing of Coligny himself, "a man with all a man's failings," can scarcely be deemed cowardly or disgraceful. In fact, at the time, the Protestant party openly defended the murder of Guise, and Beza, not exempt himself from suspicion of complicity, "conferred on Poltrot the martyr's crown."

The Catholic party, thus deprived of its best military leader, (for Montmorency was a prisoner, and St. Andre was butchered in cold blood after the battle of Dreux,) again inclined to peace. A negotiation, opened through Condé, resulted in the pacification of Amboise, March 19th, 1563. This gave each man liberty to profess the religion of his choice in his own domicile, but restricted public worship of the Protestants more than the edict of January had done.

The conference at Bayonne between the French and Spanish courts has often been represented as a plot for the utter extermination of the Huguenots. White shows that it was but a series of festivities; and though the troubles were spoken of, neither court counselled violent measures. Even Alva went no further than suggesting the seizure of the most turbulent leaders.

Charles himself, favorable at Bayonne, became embittered against the reformers, as White himself states, by what he saw as he returned through the states of the Queen of Navarre, who had, with relentless fury, extirpated Catholicity from her territory.

The pacification could not restore peace to the excited public mind while the two antagonistic parties stood face to face. The favor shown to Condé after he joined in expelling his English allies from Havre, as well as to Coligny, whom Montmorency summoned to garrison Paris, emboldened the reformers. The remaining Catholic churches began to undergo the terrible profanation that visited so many, and with this came retaliation. The Protestant princes in Germany at this time appealed to Charles to show lenity to their fellow-believers in his kingdom. The French monarch rebuked their intermeddling, and added, "I might also pray them to permit the Catholics to worship freely in their own cities." And White admits that the Catholics there fared no better than the Huguenots in France.

Meanwhile the Huguenot party was preparing for a new effort to obtain complete control. A force raised to watch the Spanish movements in the Low Countries was made the pretext. A plot was formed to seize the king and his mother, and Coligny, to blind the court, remained superintending his vineyards. But on the 28th of September, 1567, all France was in flames. Fifty towns were seized, and a strong force of Huguenot cavalry dashed upon Meaux to seize the king. Charles, nearly entrapped by the specious L'Hopital, reached Paris, protected by a body of gentlemen under the Duke de Nemours, but Condé pressed so close that Charles more than once turned on his pursuers, and fought at the head of his little body-guard.

As before, the Catholics were without union or plan, while the Huguenots were an organized body of secret conspirators, acting on a well-concerted plan.

Protestant allegiance to a Catholic monarch has never been very strong; indeed, it seems simply a creature of circumstance, not a matter of obligation. The attempt to set aside a Catholic sovereign after the death of Edward VI. and of Charles II. has never been treated as a crime. In the same spirit, White sees nothing wrong in Condé except failure: "His failure (to seize the king's person) made him a traitor as well as a rebel." And yet, with that strange perversity of ideas that seems inherent in his school, he at once brands the Cardinal of Lorraine as a traitor for inviting in the King of Spain, as Condé had Elizabeth.

The battle of St. Denis, under the walls of Paris, cost the royal party the life of Montmorency, while it gave them a doubtful victory. The usual horrors again desolated France. Nismes, in 1567, witnessed its famous Michelade, or massacre of the Catholics. It was a deliberate act. White says none has attempted to justify it. He puts the number of victims at seventy or eighty, but cites no authority. Mesnard, in his Histoire de Nismes; and Vaissette, in his Histoire Générale de Languedoc, make it from one hundred and fifty to three hundred.

The military operations continued until Catharine visited the Huguenot camp, and effected the treaty of Longjumeau, (March 20th, 1568.) But this peace was as hollow as the rest. White charges that the Catholics put numbers of Protestants to death. The Huguenots certainly continued their destruction of Catholic churches. "Brequemant, one of their leaders," says White, "cheered them on to murder, wearing a string of priests' ears around his neck."

At last the Catholics saw the necessity of organizing, and in June, 1568, a Christian and Royal League was formed at Champagne, "to maintain the Catholic Church in France, and preserve the crown in the house of Valois, so long as it shall govern according to the Catholic and Apostolic religion."

This White qualifies as "a formidable league that shook the throne, and brought France to the brink of destruction:" while he has no such terms to apply to the military organization of the Huguenot churches, which was endeavoring to seize the government, and raise Condé to the throne under the name of Louis XIII.

The Catholics did not act too soon. The Huguenots were again ripe for action. The leaders retired to Rochelle, and France was again in arms. Elizabeth sent to Rochelle men, arms, and money; the Prince of Orange also promised aid.

The first great battle was fought at Jarnac, March 13th, 1569, where Condé was defeated and killed. Andelot died soon after, in May, and Duke Wolfgang, of Deux Ponts, who brought fourteen thousand Germans to swell the Huguenot ranks, soon followed. Coligny gained some advantage in the action at Roche Abeille, showing terrible cruelty to the prisoners; but in the battle of Moncontour his army of eighteen thousand was scattered to the winds, scarcely a thousand being left around him. Then cries for quarter were met by shouts of "Remember Roche Abeille!"

Retreating, Coligny was joined by Montgomery, fresh from that terrible massacre of Orthez, before which St. Bartholomew itself pales, three thousand Catholics having been butchered, without regard to age or sex, and the river Gave being actually dammed up by the bodies of the Catholics. The indecisive action of Arnay le Due led to negotiations resulting in the treaty of St. Germain, August, 1570.

These treaties are differently viewed. The proposal for them always came from the court, and followed every victory gained by the Catholic party. White would make them out to be traps laid by Catharine; Gandy seems to lean to the same solution in attributing them to her, though he makes her object to have been to prevent the Guises from being complete masters.

But may we not suppose the Catholic party sincere in their wish for peace? They were never first to take up arms; they were unorganized; the court was wavering, and always contained a number of secret allies of the Huguenot cause. That the Huguenot leaders, after a defeat, should through these raise a peace party at court would be a matter of course. The peace gave them all they needed—time to prepare for a new campaign.

Charles IX. was sincere in his wish to make the treaty of St. Germain a reality. In the interval of tranquillity he married, and turned his thoughts to foreign affairs, proposing to aid the Netherlands against the King of Spain. But the Huguenot leaders kept together in the strong city of Rochelle, ready for prompt action. At last, however, Coligny, in September, 1571, repaired to court, where he was received by Charles with great cordiality. Two marriage schemes were now set on foot to strengthen the Protestant cause—the marriage of Henry of Navarre with Margaret, sister of Charles IX., and the marriage of his brother, D'Alençon, to Queen Elizabeth. Even Jane, Queen of Navarre, came to Blois to negotiate in regard to the marriage of her son.

Coligny so far gained Charles that a French force took Mons, and an army under Genlis, marching to that place, was defeated by the Spaniards, under Don Federigo de Toledo. The marriage of Henry took place on the 18th of August, and seemed to confirm Coligny's paramount influence at court.

This influence, thus suddenly acquired, is in itself a great mystery. Why Charles should thus take to his confidence a man who had so recently and so repeatedly organized armed treason, who had ravaged and desolated half his kingdom, who had laid in ruins nearly half the churches and religious establishments of France, has never been satisfactorily explained.

That Charles was a mere hypocrite, and that his conduct was part of a concerted plot, does not seem at all warranted by any evidence that deserves consideration. That he could really have conceived so sudden an attachment, confidence, and respect for the admiral can be explained only as one of the sudden freaks of a man whose mind was eccentric to the very verge of insanity. But Coligny really ruled in the councils of France; the Guises were, in a manner, banished from court. Catharine and Anjou saw their influence daily decrease. Coligny insisted on war with Spain, and plainly told Charles that he must fight Spain or his own subjects—use the Huguenots to aid Holland against Philip II., or behold civil war again ravaging France.

Catharine strongly opposed this warlike spirit, and sought means to regain her lost power.

The arrogant attitude of Coligny was fast uniting all whom jealousy or personal interest had divided. As often happens, it needed but a spark to kindle a vast conflagration.

One of the great historical questions has been as to the premeditation of the massacre of St. Bartholomew. The Huguenot pamphleteers of the day, followed by the overrated De Thou, Voltaire and his school, and the less temperate Catholic writers, maintain that the plot was long before concerted. White, by his chain of authorities, shows that it was at first aimed at Coligny only, and that the general massacre was not premeditated.

Anjou expressly states that, finding the influence of the admiral dangerous to himself and his mother, they determined to get rid of him, and to concert means with the Duchess of Nemours, "whom alone we ventured to admit into the plot, because of the mortal hatred she bore to the admiral," in her mind the real murderer of her husband, the Duke of Guise.

This statement of Anjou is supported by the testimony of Michieli (Baschet, Diplomatie Venetienne, p. 541) and of the nuncio Salviati.

This makes the first move one of the court party against Coligny personally. The Catholic party, then a recently formed organization, had no part in it; and yet, if we may credit the statement of Cretineau Joly, who has never deceived as to a document he professes to possess, Catholicity in France was in imminent peril, Coligny having, in a letter of June 15th, 1572, to the Prince of Orange, given notice of an intended general execution of the Catholics in September. If a general massacre was plotted, the Catholic party were to be victims, not actors.

Coligny's death having been decided on, Henry de Guise was admitted to the plot, and the execution assigned to him. It needed little to stimulate him to shoot down one who had been privy to his father's assassination. An officer, either Maurevert or Tosinghi, was stationed in a vacant house belonging to Canon Villemur, and as Coligny rode past fired at him, cutting off the first finger of the right hand, and burying a ball in his left arm.

Charles was, as all admit, not only not privy to this act, but was deeply incensed at it. He ordered the assassin to be pursued, and, in despatches to other parts of the kingdom, gave assurance of his intention to adhere to the edict of pacification and to punish all who infringed it. Accompanied by his mother and his brother Henry, he went, that same afternoon, to see the admiral. There a long private conversation ensued between the king and Coligny. White gives this at length from a life of Coligny, published in 1576, but which cannot surely be held as authority. It rests probably on no better source than the Mémoires de l'Etat de France.

Charles, in his letter to the French ambassador at London, tells him that this "vile act proceeds from the enmity between Coligny's house and the house of Guise. I will take steps to prevent their involving my subjects in their quarrels."

Whether the interview changed the king's mind as to the source of the attempt, of course is only conjectural. Still acting in good faith, he appointed a commission of inquiry, including members of both religions, the Huguenots apparently suggested by Coligny.

Charles returned to his palace moody and incensed. He ordered guards to protect Coligny against any further violence, and by his demeanor alarmed his mother and Henry. The Duke d'Aumale and Henri de Guise, foreseeing a tempest, withdrew to the Hotel de Guise, and shut themselves up.

The position of affairs was strange enough. The admiral was not wounded so as to excite any alarm as to his recovery; the loss of a finger and a bullet-wound in the arm, injuries not requiring, one would suppose, the nine physicians and eleven surgeons called in. But it was an attempt on the life of the leader of their party, and the Huguenots determined to pursue it at all hazards. The more violent of them marched through the streets in military array, threatening not only the Guises, who were considered the prime movers, but Anjou, the queen-mother, and even the king himself. They passed the Hotel de Guise with every mark of defiance, and proceeding to the Louvre, made their way to the king's presence as he sat at supper, fiercely demanding vengeance: "If the king refuses us justice," they cried, "we will take the matter into our own hands."

This violence could not but have had its effect on the king. At all events, it must have made him ready to credit any charge of violence brought against them. Catharine was clearly overjoyed at the false step of the Huguenots, as offering her a means of escape from her critical position.

On Saturday, after dinner, a cabinet council was held, and here, according to Tavannes, Anjou, and Queen Margaret of Navarre, it was for the first time proposed to Charles to put an end to all the troubles by cutting off Coligny and the leaders of the party. The council was composed, it is said, of Catharine, Anjou, Nevers, Tavannes, Retz, and the chancellor Birague. Of Catharine and Anjou, afterward Henry III., we need say nothing. Tavannes was little but a soldier, ready for action. The rest, strangely enough, were Italians. Louis de Gonzaga, Duke of Nevers by marriage, was timid and easily led; Albert de Gondi, Marshal de Retz, foster-brother of the king, was a schemer; René de Birague is represented by Mezeray as one who bent before every breath of wind from the court.

Not only in this council was there no one of the Huguenot party so recently restored to favor, but no one of the moderate party, none even of the old French nobility. All but Tavannes were bound to Catharine, and would naturally support her.

According to Anjou and Tavannes, Catharine urged the necessity of the blow to prevent a new civil war, for which the Huguenots were preparing, having sent for ten thousand Germans and six thousand Swiss, their object being to place Henry of Navarre on the throne. Margaret states that they made the king believe his life in danger. The nuncio Salviati, in his despatch of September 2d, also ascribes the king's ultimate action to the instigation of Catharine, impelled by her fears.

Charles hesitated long, and at last yielded, crying: "Kill all, then, that none may live to reproach me." The words of 'the weak king, wrought to madness by his perplexities, seem to have been accepted at once; and the scheme of murder took a wider scope. The Huguenots were doomed.

The question arises, Had Catharine any ground for charging the Huguenots with a plot against the king? A despatch of the Duke of Alva had been received, announcing it. White derides the idea as preposterous. Gandy examines the subject, and admits that the charge lacks all requisite proof. He ascribes the whole to fear. But this does not seem to explain it sufficiently.

The fact of a plot formed after Coligny's wound must have been established in some degree at least, to have brought the king to the policy of the queen-mother. The bed of justice on the 26th, the solemn declaration of Charles, the action of the Parliament, may have been rash and unsupported by proper testimony, but were to all appearance sincere. Charles was not a hypocrite. The declarations of Bouchavannes as to what was proposed at Coligny's house were doubtless more than justified by the loud threats of some of the leaders, like De Pilles and Pardaillan, whose words and deeds make La Noue call them stupid, clumsy fools.

The solution of this historical question is made the more difficult from the speedy termination of the house of Valois. That family and the League come down to us under a heavy cloud of odium; the succession of Henry IV. to the throne made them the only parties on whom all might safely lay the burden of an act at once a crime and a blunder, while it was equally necessary to shield the party with which Henry then acted from any charge of conspiracy. Interest raised up apologists for him and his associates: there was none to do reverence to the name of Catharine or the fallen house of Valois.

Once that the council had decided on its bloody course, the action was prompt. Guise, from being a prisoner in his house, was summoned to command. To the leaders of the people of Paris he repeated the charge of a Huguenot conspiracy against the king, of Swiss and German invaders, adding the approach of a force under Montmorency to burn the city. At four in the afternoon Anjou rode through the streets. At ten, another council was held, to which Le Charron, provost of the merchants, was summoned. To him the king repeated the same charges, giving him orders to put the able-bodied men in each ward under arms, and take precaution for the safety of the city.

Meanwhile, Huguenot gentlemen entered the palace as usual, and Catholics mingled with the Huguenots who called upon Coligny.

White makes an observation that must strike all: "It is strange that the arrangements in the city, which must have been attended with no little commotion, did not rouse the suspicion of the Huguenots."

At midnight another council was held in the palace. Charles was violent and wavered, but Catharine held him to his decision, and Guise went forth to complete the work.

Between three and four in the morning, Guise, Aumale, Angoulême, Nevers, with some German and Italian soldiery, proceeded to Coligny's house. Admission was gained in the king's name, and Carl Dianowitz, or Behm, ran the admiral through, others finishing him as he fell to the floor. The body was then thrown from the window, where Guise and Angoulême treated it contemptuously. Petrucci cut off the head. The mob mutilated the body, as priests had been, by the admiral's orders, and it was finally hung on the public gallows at Montfauçon. All the occupants of the house were slain but two, Merlin and Cornaton. In the adjoining dwellings were Teligny, Rochefoucault, and others, who were all slain.

Then came the signal from Saint Germain l'Auxerrois, and the massacre became general. The Huguenot gentlemen in the Louvre were slain before the eyes of the king to the number of two hundred, says White in his text, although his footnote, citing Queen Margaret's account, says her estimate of thirty or forty is more probable.

In the city, the houses in which Huguenots lodged had been registered, and were thus easily found. The soldiers burst in, killing all they found; but the citizens seem to have gone too far. At five in the afternoon, they were ordered to lay down their arms, although the work of blood was continued for two days by the soldiery.

The details of the massacre would extend this article much too far.

Among the questions that have arisen, is the alleged firing of Charles on the drowning Huguenots thrown into the Seine. It is asserted in the party pamphlets, the Réveille-Matin, 1574, Le Tocsin, 1579, but rests chiefly on what Froude calls "the worthless authority of Brantome."

A more important point is the number of victims. The estimates differ widely:

La Popelinière, a Huguenot contemporary1,000
Kirkaldy of Grange, in a letter to Scotland at the time, and the Tocsin, a pamphlet of the day, as well as Tavannes, a main actor in the slaughter2,000
Aubigné, another Huguenot author, and Capilupi…3,000
The estimates of ambassadors at Paris are higher.
Alva's bulletin3,500
Gomez de Silva, and the Simancas archives5,000
Neustadt letter6,000
Réveille-Matin, a party pamphlet10,000

White bases his estimate on a curious calculation. An entry in the registers of the Hôtel de Ville states that on the 9th of September certain persons received 15 livres for burying dead bodies, and on the 23d the same men received 20 livres for burying 1100. He concludes that the 15 livres represented 1500, by what rule he does not explain, "giving," he says, "a known massacre of 2600." Even on his basis, 35 livres would really represent only 1925. But according to Caveirac, who first cites this entry, 35 livres were paid for interring 1100, which would give only about 1600 in all.

Gandy concludes his view of the matter by giving 1000 or 1200 as the nearest approach to the truth; but the estimate of Tavannes, an actor, Kirkaldy, a witness, and the Tocsin, a Huguenot pamphlet, would seem to be most authentic.

Thus fell the great admiral, the Cromwell of France, in religion less fanatical than hypocritical, a soldier of a high order, aiming under Calvin's teaching to make France a commonwealth with a religious tyranny that would brook no opposition. A man who occupied long a prominent position as one of the high nobility and rulers of the land, but who was simply a destroyer, not a creator; for no great work, no line of sound policy, no important reform, is connected with his name. His life was most injurious to the country, and but for the cowardly and cruel circumstances attending his death, he would occupy but a subordinate place in French history. Few other victims were eminent: Peter Ramus, the learned professor, Pierre de la Place, President of the Court of Ans, and some say Goujon, the sculptor. In fact, the more able leaders of the party had not come to Paris, and this renders the deed indefensible even on the ground of policy. The few nobles who hastened to bask in the sunshine of the court, were not the men most to be dreaded. The slaughter of men and women belonging to the lower classes could but rouse the sympathies of Europe.

The work of blood was not confined to Paris. Throughout France, as the news spread of a Huguenot conspiracy against the king, the scene was reenacted. Of this, White remarks: "The writers who maintain that the tragedy of Saint Bartholomew's day was the result of a long premeditation support their opinion by what occurred in the provinces; but it will be found, after careful examination, that these various incidents tend rather to prove the absence of any such premeditation."

Were orders sent from court to massacre the Huguenots? White, on the authority of Davila, De Thou, and expressions in certain letters, inclines to the opinion that verbal orders were sent. Gandy as positively asserts that no such orders were given. The provincial registers show no trace of such orders. Yet he admits secret orders, subsequently recalled by Charles, and gives a letter addressed to Montsoreau, dated August 26th, which is explicit. The massacres took place as follows: Meaux, August 25th; La Charité, August 27th; Saumur and Angers, August 29th; Lyons, August 30th; Troyes, September 2d; Bourges, September 15th; Rouen, September 17th; Romans, September 20th; Toulouse, September 23d; Bordeaux, October 3d; Poitiers, October 27th. They were thus continued from time to time for two months; long after Charles formally revoked any secret orders given on the spur of the moment. This point is involved in as great obscurity as any other connected with the affair.

Several letters current as to the matter, including those of De Tende and Orthez, are manifest forgeries. As to Saumur, White represents Montsoreau as killing all the Huguenots in that town. The only authority, Mémoires de l'Etat de France, says he killed all he could, and the whole charge rests on this feeble foundation. There is similar exaggeration elsewhere. White, speaking of Lyons, says: "In this city alone 4000 persons are estimated to have been killed;" but in his note adds that one authority says that they were all killed in one day, "which is not probable." He then cites another contemporary brochure setting down the total at Lyons at 1800; and he corrects the error of De Thou, who asserted that the Celestine canons allowed Huguenots to be killed in their monastery, when Protestant authorities admit that the religious saved the lives of those very fugitives.

What was the number slain in the provinces? The martyrologies, by a detailed estimate, make those killed in Paris 10,000, elsewhere 5168, and names 152 as identified in Paris, 634 in the provinces; but the estimate for Paris is of the very highest, and should, as we have seen, not exceed 2000. The very fact that, with researches and personal recollections, only 152 names could be recalled, being one in a hundred out of 10,000, while elsewhere one in eight was known, is very suspicious. Taking his figures for the provinces, it would reduce the whole number in France to about 7000.

After giving the calculations or guesses of various authors, ranging from 2000 to 100,000, White says: "If it be necessary to choose from these hap-hazard estimates, that of De Thou is preferable, from the calm, unexaggerating temper of the man." De Thou's estimate for all France was 30,000. Gandy thinks the number given by Popelinière (2000) nearer the truth.

Under the examination of impartial history, the massacre of St. Bartholomew dwindles really to far less in numbers, extent, and brutality than the massacre of the Irish Catholics under Cromwell; and does not greatly exceed the number of victims of the Huguenot outbreak in 1563.

One other point remains. Charles, on the 25th, represented the massacre in Paris as a collision between the houses of Guise and Chatillon; but from the 26th he uniformly charges a conspiracy against his person. This he announced to all the foreign courts in explanation. His letter to Gregory XIII. announced the escape of the royal family and the punishment of the conspirators. The nuncio Salviati, in his letters, shows a belief in the reality of the plot. At Rome, the Cardinal of Lorraine, brother of the murdered Guise, was high in influence. What his views and feelings would be on the receipt of the tidings of the discovery of a plot, and the sudden action of the king, it is easy to conceive. In his eyes it was a triumph of justice, religion, loyalty, and law. The pope received the same impression, and under it proceeded to chant a Te Deum at Santa Maria Maggiore. Processions followed. A medal, well known from its frequent reproduction, was struck. But in all this there is nothing to show that Rome knew of the intended massacre or counselled it. Gregory XIII. approved it, only as represented in the brief despatches of Charles IX. and the verbal statements of Beauvillé, to which they refer.

Nor did the clergy in France take any part. No bishop shared in the council, no priest or religious roused the minds of the people. They figure, indeed, in romances, but history is silent. Even in the most virulent pamphlets of the time only three are ever mentioned, the Bishop of Troyes, Sorbin, king's confessor at Orleans, and Father Edmond Auger, at Bordeaux. The Bishop of Troyes is charged with having approved the massacre there, but White does not even name the bishop in connection with the murders at that place, and says they were done by a drunken mob, and "filled the humane Catholics with horror."

At Orleans, White reduces the 1850 of the Martyrologe to 1400, and gives details, but is silent as to any action of Sorbin, or the terrible Franciscan who insulted the Huguenots, received their abjuration, and said Mass for them. Evidently, White found the charges against these clergymen too frivolous even for a stray allusion.

He attributes the massacre at Bordeaux to the preaching of Father Auger, but cites no authority. Fortunately, Auger is not an unknown man. His life has long been in circulation. He was a missionary, known for years among the Protestants, amid whom he had prosecuted his labors. He had suffered imprisonment for the faith; he had even been led to the gallows by order of the Baron des Adrets. So notorious were his charity, his virtue, and his merit, that the voice of Protestant and Catholic alike was raised to save him. Are we to believe on the vaguest of grounds that such a man suddenly became a monster of intolerance? White blushed to give his authority; he should have been ashamed to make the charge.

But it would scarcely do to let his book go forth without lugging in at least one priest. Of the proceedings at Rome he makes more capital. After stating what was done, and mistranslating a Latin phrase to make Charles IX. an angel, he says: "With such damning evidence against the Church of Rome, a recent defender of that church vainly contends that the clergy had no part in the massacre, and that the rejoicings were over rebels cut off in the midst of their rebellion, and not heretics murdered for their religion." The logic of this is admirable. The pope and cardinals ordered rejoicings on receiving despatches from the King of France, announcing that, having discovered a plot against his life and throne, he had put the rebels to the sword; therefore the Catholic clergy had a part in the massacre.

Apply the same to Drogheda. Parliament thanked God for Cromwell's massacre of the Irish after granting quarter, and rewarded a captain for throwing prisoners overboard at sea; therefore the Puritan clergy had a part in the massacre, and the evidence is damning.

The labors of Mr. White, however, on the whole, will do good. The wild assertions that fill our school-books and popular histories must give place to statements that will be justified by his work. It gives a standard to which we may appeal, and, if not all that we would claim, is so far on the way to impartiality that we may feel thankful for it.

It is not little to have wrung from the London Athenaeum the admission that the common view of St. Bartholomew is "one of the great historical errors which has been transmitted from teachers to taught during a long course of years."

From the French of Erckmanm and Chatrian.