In the same year, 1561, the Protestants had a custom of meeting at Paris, for their religious exercises, in a house called the Patriarch’s house, very near the church of St. Medard. On the 27th of December, whilst the Reformed minister was preaching, the Catholics had all the bells of St. Medard rung in full peal. The minister sent two of his congregation to beg the incumbent to have the bell-ringing stopped for a short time. The mob threw themselves upon the two messengers: one was killed, and the other, after making a stout defence, returned badly wounded to the Patriarch’s house, and fell dead at the preacher’s feet. The provost of tradesmen was for having the bells stopped; the riot became violent; the house of the Reformers was stormed; and the provost’s archers had great difficulty in putting a stop to the fight. More than a hundred persons, it is said, were killed or wounded.
In 1562, in the month of February, whilst the Guises were travelling in Germany, with the object of concluding, in the interests of policy, alliances with some German Lutheran princes, disturbances broke out at Cahors, Amiens, Sens, and Tours, between the Protestants and the Catholics. Which of the two began them? It would be difficult to determine. The passions that lead to insult, attack, defence, and vengeance were mutually felt and equally violent on both sides. Montluc was sent to Guienne by the queen-mother to restore order there; but nearly everywhere he laid the blame on the Protestants. His Memoires prove that he harried them without any form of justice. “At Sauveterre,” says he, “I caught five or six, all of whom I had hanged without expense of paper or ink, and without giving them a hearing, for those gentry are regular Chrysostoms (parlent d’or).” “I was informed that at Gironde there were sixty or eighty Huguenots belonging to them of La Reole, who had retreated thither; the which were all taken, and I had them hanged to the pillars of the market-place without further ceremony. One hanged has more effect than a hundred slain.” When Montluc took Monsegur, “the massacre lasted for ten hours or more,” says he, “because search was made for them in the houses; the dead were counted and found to be more than seven hundred.” [Memoires de Montluc, t. ii. pp. 442, 443-447.]
Almost at the very time at which Montluc, who had been sent to Guienne to restore order there between the Catholics and the Protestants, was treating the latter with this shocking severity, an incident, more serious because of the rank of the persons concerned, took place at Vassy, a small town in Champagne, near which the Duke of Guise passed on returning from Germany. Hearing, as he went, the sound of bells, he asked what it meant. “It is the church of the Huguenots of Vassy,” was the answer. “Are there many of them?” asked the duke. He was told that there were, and that they were increasing more and more. “Then,” says the chronicler, “he began to mutter and to put himself in a white heat, gnawing his beard, as he was wont to do when he was enraged or had a mind to take vengeance.” Did he turn aside out of his way with his following, to pass right through Vassy, or did he confine himself to sending some of his people to bring him an account of what was happening there? When a fact which was at the outset insignificant has become a great event, it is hardly possible to arrive at any certain knowledge of the truth as to the small details of its origin. Whatever may have been the case in the first instance, a quarrel, and, before long, a struggle, began between the preacher’s congregation and the prince’s following. Being informed of the matter whilst he was at table, the Duke of Guise rose up, went to the spot, found the combatants very warmly at work, and himself received several blows from stones; and, when the fight was put a stop to, forty-nine persons had been killed in it, nearly all on the Protestant side; more than two hundred others, it is said, came out of it severely wounded; and, whether victors or vanquished, all were equally irritated. The Protestants complained vehemently; and Conde offered, in their name, fifty thousand men to resent this attack, but his brother, the King of Navarre, on the contrary, received with a very bad grace the pleading of Theodore de Beze. “It is true that the church of God should endure blows and not inflict them,” said De Beze, “but remember, I pray you, that it is an anvil which has used up a great many hammers.”
The massacre of Vassy, the name which has remained affixed to it in history, rapidly became contagious. From 1562 to 1572, in Languedoc, in Provence, in Dauphiny, in Poitou, in Orleanness, in Normandy even and in Picardy, at Toulouse, at Gaillac, at Frejus, at Troyes, at Sens, at Orleans, at Amiens, at Rouen, and in many other towns, spontaneous and disorderly outbreaks between religiously opposed portions of the populace took place suddenly, were repeated, and spread, sometimes with the connivance of the local authorities, judicial or administrative, but more often through the mere brutal explosion of the people’s passions. It is distasteful to us to drag numerous examples from oblivion; but we will cite just two, faithful representations of those sad incidents, and attested by authentic documents. The little town of Gaillac was almost entirely Catholic; the Protestants, less numerous, had met the day after Pentecost, May 18, 1562, to celebrate the Lord’s Supper. “The inhabitants in the quarter of the Chateau de l’Orme, who are all artisans or vine-dressers,” says the chronicler, “rush to arms, hurry along with them all the Catholics of the town, invest the place of assembly, and take prisoners all who were present. After this capture, they separate: some remain in the meeting-house, on guard over the prisoners; the rest go into dwellings to work their will upon those of the religion who had remained there. Then they take the prisoners, to the number of sixty or eighty, into a gallery of the Abbey of St. Michael, situated on a steep rock, at the base of which flows the River Tarn; and there, a field laborer, named Cabral, having donned the robe and cape of the judge’s deputy, whom he had slain with his own hand, pronounces judgment, and sentences all the prisoners to be thrown from the gallery into the river, telling them to go and eat fish, as they had not chosen to fast during Lent; which was done forthwith. Divers boatmen who were on the river despatched with their oars those who tried to save themselves by swimming.” [Histoire generale du Languedoc, liv. xxxviii. f. v., p. 227.] At Troyes, in Champagne, “during the early part of August, 1572, the majority of the Protestants of the town, who were returning from Esleau-Mont, where they had a meeting-house and a pastor under authorization from the king, were assailed in the neighborhood of Croncels by the excited populace. A certain number of individuals, accompanying a mother carrying a child which had just received baptism, were pursued with showers of stones; several were wounded, and the child was killed in its mother’s arms.” This affair did not give rise to any prosecution. “It is no use to think about it any longer,” said the delegate of the bailiff and of the mayor of Troyes, in a letter from Paris on the 27th of August. The St. Bartholomew had just taken place on the 24th of August. [Histoire de la Ville de Troyes, by H. Boutiot, t. iii. p. 25.]
Where they happened to be the stronger, and where they had either vengeance to satisfy or measures of security to take, the Protestants were not more patient or more humane than the Catholics. At Nimes, in 1567, they projected and carried out, in the town and the neighboring country, a massacre in which a hundred and ninety-two Catholics perished; and several churches and religious houses were damaged or completely destroyed. This massacre, perpetrated on St. Michael’s day, was called the Michaelade. The barbarities committed against the Catholics in Dauphiny and in Provence by Francis de Beaumont, Baron of Adrets, have remained as historical as the massacre of Vassy, and he justified them on the same grounds as Montluc had given for his in Guienne. “Nobody commits cruelty in repaying it,” said he; “the first are called cruelties, the second justice. The only way to stop the enemy’s barbarities is to meet them with retaliation.” Though experience ought to have shown them their mistake, both Adrets and Montluc persisted in it. A case, however, is mentioned in which Adrets was constrained to be merciful. After the capture of Montbrison, he had sentenced all the prisoners to throw themselves down, with their hands tied behind them, from the top of the citadel; one of them made two attempts, and thought better of it; “Come, twice is enough to take your soundings,” shouted the baron, who was looking on. “I’ll give you four times to do it in,” rejoined the soldier. And this good saying saved his life.
The weak and undecided government of Catherine de’ Medici tried several times, but in vain, to prevent or repress these savage explosions of passion and strife amongst the people; the sterling moderation of Chancellor de l’Hospital was scarcely more successful than the hypocritical and double-faced attentions paid by Catherine de’ Medici to both the Catholic and the Protestant leaders; the great maladies and the great errors of nations require remedies more heroic than the adroitness of a woman, the wisdom of a functionary, or the hopes of a philosopher. It was formal and open civil war between the two communions and the two parties that, with honest and patriotic desire, L’Hospital and even Catherine were anxious to avoid. From 1561 to 1572 there were in France eighteen or twenty massacres of Protestants, four or five of Catholics, and thirty or forty single murders sufficiently important to have been kept in remembrance by history; and during that space of time formal civil war, religious and partisan, broke out, stopped and recommenced in four campaigns, signalized, each of them, by great battles, and four times terminated by impotent or deceptive treaties of peace which, on the 24th of August, 1572, ended, for their sole result, in the greatest massacre of French history, the St. Bartholomew.
The first religious war, under Charles IX., appeared on the point of breaking out in April, 1561, some days after that the Duke of Guise, returning from the massacre of Vassy, had entered Paris, on the 16th of March, in triumph. The queen-mother, in dismay, carried off the king to Melun at first, and then to Fontainebleau, whilst the Prince of Conde, having retired to Meaux, summoned to his side his relatives, his friends, and all the leaders of the Reformers, and wrote to Coligny, “that Caesar had not only crossed the Rubicon, but was already at Rome, and that his banners were beginning to wave all over the neighboring country.” For some days Catherine and L’Hospital tried to remain out of Paris with the young king, whom Guise, the Constable de Montmorency, and the King of Navarre, the former being members and the latter an ally of the triumvirate, went to demand back from them. They were obliged to submit to the pressure brought to bear upon them. The constable was the first to enter Paris, and went, on the 2d of April, and burned down the two places of worship which, by virtue of the decree of January 17, 1561, had been granted to the Protestants. Next day the King of Navarre and the Duke of Guise, in their turn, entered the city in company with Charles IX. and Catherine. A council was assembled at the Louvre to deliberate as to the declaration of war, which was deferred. Whilst the king was on his way back to Paris, Conde hurried off to take up his quarters at Orleans, whither Coligny went promptly to join him. They signed, with the gentlemen who came to them from all parts, a compact of association “for the honor of God, for the liberty of the king, his brothers and the queen-mother, and for the maintenance of decrees;” and Conde, in writing to the Protestant princes of Germany to explain to them his conduct, took the title of protector of the house and crown of France. Negotiations still went on for nearly three months. The chiefs of the two parties attempted to offer one another generous and pacific solutions; they even had two interviews; but Catherine was induced by the Catholic triumvirate to expressly declare that she could not allow in France more than one single form of worship. Conde and his friends said that they could not lay down their arms until the triumvirate was overthrown, and the execution of decrees granting them liberty of worship, in certain places and to a certain extent, had been secured to them. Neither party liked to acknowledge itself beaten in this way without having struck a blow. And in the early part of July, 1562, the first religious war began.
We do not intend to dwell upon any but its leading facts, facts which at the moment when they were accomplished might have been regarded as decisive in respect of the future. In this campaign there were two; the battle of Dreux, on the 19th of December, 1562; and the murder of the Duke of Guise by Poltrot, on the 18th of February, 1563.