The two armies met in the plain of Dreux with pretty nearly equal forces, the royal army being superior in artillery and the Protestant in cavalry. When they had arrived in front of one another, the triumvirs sent to ask the queen-mother’s authority to give battle. “I am astounded,” said Catherine to her favorite adviser, Michael de Castelnau, “that the constable, the Duke of Guise, and Saint-Andre, being good, prudent, and experienced captains, should send to ask counsel of a woman and a child, both full of sorrow at seeing things in such extremity as to be reduced to the risk of a battle between fellow-countrymen.” “Hereupon,” says Castelnau, “in came the king’s nurse, who was a Huguenot, and the queen, at the same time that she took me to see the king, who was still in bed, said to me with great agitation and jeeringly, ‘We had better ask the king’s nurse whether to give battle or not; what think you?’ Then the nurse, as she followed the queen into the king’s chamber according to her custom, said several times that, as the Huguenots would not listen to reason, she would say, ‘Give battle.’ Whereupon there was, at the privy council, much discourse about the good and the evil that might result therefrom; but the resolution arrived at was, that they who had arms in their hands ought not to ask advice or orders from the court; and I was despatched on the spot to tell them from the king and the queen, that, as good and prudent captains, they were to do what they considered most proper.” Next day, at ten in the morning, the armies met. “Then every one,” says La Noue, one of the bravest amongst the Reformers’ leaders, “steadied himself, reflecting that the men he saw coming towards him were not Spaniards, or English, or Italians, but Frenchmen, that is, the bravest of the brave, amongst whom there were some who were his own comrades, relatives, and friends, and that within an hour they would have to be killing one another, which created some sort of horror of the fact, without, however, diminution of courage. . . . One thing worthy of being noted,” continues La Noue, “is the long duration of the fight, it being generally seen in battles that all is lost or won within a single hour, whereas this began about one P. M., and there was no issue until after five. Of a surety, there was marvellous animosity on both sides, whereof sufficient testimony is to be found in the number of dead, which exceeded seven thousand, as many persons say; the majority whereof were killed in the fight rather than the pursuit. . . . Another incident was the capture of the two chiefs of the armies, a thing which rarely happens, because generally they do not fight until the last moment and in extremity; and often a battle is as good as won before they come to this point. But in this case they did not put it off so long, for, at the very first, each was minded to set his men an example of not sparing themselves. The Constable de Montmorency was the first taken, and seriously wounded, having always received wounds in seven battles at which he was present, which shows the boldness that was in him. The Prince of Conde was taken at the end, also wounded. As both of them had good seconds, it made them the less fearful of danger to their own persons, for the constable had M. de Guise, and the Prince of Conde Admiral de Coligny, who showed equally well to the front in the melley. . . . Finally I wish to bring forward another matter, which will be supernumerary because it happened after the battle; and that is, the courteous and honorable behavior of the Duke of Guise victorious towards the Prince of Conde a prisoner; which most men, on one side as well as on the other, did not at all think he would have been disposed to exhibit, for it is well known how hateful, in civil wars, are the chiefs of parties, and what imputations are made upon them. Nevertheless here quite the contrary happened: for, when the prince was brought before the duke, the latter spoke to him respectfully and with great gentleness of language, wherein he could not pretend that there was any desire to pique him or blame him. And whilst the prince staid in the camp, the duke often dined with him. And forasmuch as on this day of the battle there were but few beds arrived, for the baggage had been half-plundered and dispersed, the Duke of Guise offered his own bed to the Prince of Conde, which the prince would accept in respect of the half only. And so these two great princes, who were like mortal foes, found themselves in one bed, one triumphant and the other captive, taking their repast together.” [Memoires de Francois de La Noue, in the Petitot collection; 1st series, t. xxxiv. pp. 172-178.]
The results of the battle of Dreux were serious, and still more serious from the fate of the chiefs than from the number of the dead. The commanders of the two armies, the Constable de Montmorency, and the Prince of Conde, were wounded and prisoners. One of the triumvirs, Marshal de Saint-Andre, had been killed in action. The Catholics’ wavering ally, Anthony de Bourbon, King of Navarre, had died before the battle of a wound which he had received at the siege of Rouen; and on his death-bed had resumed his Protestant bearing, saying that, if God granted him grace to get well, he would have nothing but the gospel preached throughout the realm. The two staffs (etats-majors), as we should now say, were disorganized: in one, the Duke of Guise alone remained unhurt and at liberty; in the other, Coligny, in Conde’s absence, was elected general-in-chief of the Protestants. At Paris, for a while, it was believed that the battle was lost. “If it had been,” says Montluc, “I think that it was all over with France, for the state would have changed, and so would the religion; a young king can be made to do as you please;” Catherine de’ Medici showed a facile resignation to such a change. “Very well,” she had said, “then we will pray to God in French.” When the victory became known there was general enthusiasm for the Duke. of Guise; but he took only a very modest advantage of it, being more anxious to have his comrades’ merits appreciated than his own. At Blois, as he handed the queen-mother her table-napkin at dinner-time, he asked her if he might have an audience of her after the repast. “Jesu! my dear cousin,” said Catherine, “whatever are you saying?” “I say it, madame, because I would fain show you in the presence of everybody what I have done, since my departure from Paris, with your army which you gave in charge to me together with the constable, and also present to you all the good captains and servants of the king and of yourself who have served you faithfully, as well your own subjects as also foreigners, and horsemen and foot;” whereupon he discoursed about the battle of Dreux, “and painted it so well and so to the life,” says Brantome, “that you would have said that they were still about it, whereat the queen felt very great pleasure. . . . Every one listened very attentively, without the least noise in the world; and he spoke so well that there was none who was not charmed, for the prince was the best of speakers and eloquent, not with a forced and overladen eloquence, but simple and soldierly, with a grace of his own to match; so much so that the queen-mother said that she had never seen him in such good form.” [Brantome, Tries des Brands Capitaines, t. ii. pp. 247-250.] The good form, however, was not enough to prevent the ill-humor and jealousy felt by the queen-mother and her youthful son the king at such a great success which made Guise so great a personage. After the victory of Dreux he had written to the king to express his wish to see conferred upon a candidate of his own choosing the marshal’s baton left vacant by the death of Saint-Andre. “See now,” said Charles IX. to his mother and some persons who were by, “if the Duke of Guise does not act the king well; you would really say that the army was his, and that victory came from his hand, making no mention of God, who, by His great goodness, hath given it us. He thrusts the bargain into my fist (dictates to me). Yet must I give him a civil answer to satisfy him; for I do not want to make trouble in my kingdom, and irritate a captain to whom my late father and I have given so much credit and authority.” The king almost apologized for having already disposed of the baton in favor of the Marquis de Vieilleville, and he sent the Duke of Guise the collar of the order for two of his minions, and at the same time the commission of lieutenant-general of the kingdom and commander-in-chief of the army for himself. Guise thanked him, pretending to be satisfied: the king smiled as he read his letter; and “Non ti fidar, e non sarai gabbato” (Don’t trust, and you’ll not be duped), he said in the words of the Italian proverb.
He had not to disquiet himself for long about this rival. On the 18th of February, 1563, the Duke of Guise was vigorously pushing forward the siege of Orleans, the stronghold of the Protestants, stoutly defended by Coligny. He was apprised that his wife, the Duchess Anne d’Este, had just arrived at a castle near the camp with the intention of using her influence over her husband in order to spare Orleans from the terrible consequences of being taken by assault. He mounted his horse to go and join her, and he was chatting to his aide-de-camp Rostaing about the means of bringing about a pacification, when, on arriving at a cross-road where several ways met, he felt himself struck in the right shoulder, almost under the arm, by a pistol-shot fired from behind a hedge at a distance of six or seven paces. A white plume upon his head had made him conspicuous, and as, for so short a ride, he had left off his cuirass, three balls had passed through him from side to side. “That shot has been in keeping for me a long while,” said he: “I deserve it for not having taken precautions.” He fell upon his horse’s neck, as he vainly tried to draw his sword from the scabbard; his arm refused its office.
When he had been removed to the castle, where the duchess, in tears, received him, “I am vexed at it,” said he, “for the honor of France;” and to his son Henry, Prince of Joinville, a boy of thirteen, he added, kissing him, “God grant you grace, my son, to become a good man.” He languished for six days, amidst useless attentions paid him by his surgeons, giving Catherine de’ Medici, who came daily to see him, the most pacific counsels, and taking of the duchess his wife the most tender farewells mingled with the most straightforward and honest avowals. “I do not mean to deny,” he said to her, “that the counsels and frailties of youth have led me sometimes into something at which you had a right to be offended; I pray you to be pleased to excuse me and forgive me.” His brother, the Cardinal de Guise, Bishop of Metz, which the duke had so gloriously defended against Charles V., warned him that it was time to prepare himself for death by receiving the sacraments of the church. “Ah! my dear brother,” said the duke to him, “I have loved you greatly in times past, but I love you now still more than ever, for you are doing me a truly brotherly turn.” On the 24th of February they still offered him aliment to sustain his rapidly increasing weakness but “Away, away,” said he; “I have taken the manna from heaven, whereby I feel myself so comforted that it seems to me as if I were already in paradise. This body has no further need of nourishment;” and so he expired on the 24th of February, 1563, an object, at his death, of the most profound regret amongst his army and his party, as well as his family, after having been during his life the object of their lively admiration. “I do not forget,” says his contemporary Stephen Pasquier in reference to him, “that it was no small luck for him to die at this period, when he was beyond reach of the breeze, and when shifting Fortune had not yet played him any of those turns whereby she is so cunning in lowering the horn of the bravest.”
It is a duty to faithfully depict this pious and guileless death of a great man, at the close of a vigorous and a glorious life, made up of good and evil, without the evil’s having choked the good. This powerful and consolatory intermixture of qualities is the characteristic of the eminent men of the sixteenth century, Catholics or Protestants, soldiers or civilians; and it is a spectacle wholesome to be offered in times when doubt and moral enfeeblement are the common malady even of sound minds and of honest men.
The murderer of Duke Francis of Guise was a petty nobleman of Angoumois, John Poltrot, Lord of Mere, a fiery Catholic in his youth, who afterwards became an equally fiery Protestant, and was engaged with his relative La Renaudie in the conspiracy against the Guises. He had been employed constantly from that time, as a spy it is said, by the chiefs of the Reformers—a vocation for which, it would seem, he was but little adapted, for the indiscretion of his language must have continually revealed his true sentiments. When he heard, in 1562, of the death of Anthony de Bourbon, King of Navarre, “That,” said he, “is not what will put an end to the war; what is wanted is the dog with the big collar.” “Whom do you mean?” asked somebody. “The great Guisard; and here’s the arm that will do the trick.” “He used to show,” says D’Aubigne, “bullets cast to slay the Guisard, and thereby rendered himself ridiculous.” After the battle of Dreux he was bearer of a message from the Lord of Soubise to Admiral de Coligny, to whom he gave an account of the situation of the Reformers in Dauphiny and in Lyonness. His report no doubt interested the admiral, who gave him twenty crowns to go and play spy in the camp of the Duke of Guise, and, some days later, a hundred crowns to buy a horse. It was thus that Poltrot was put in a position to execute the design he had been so fond of proclaiming before he had any communication with Coligny. As soon as, on the 18th of February, 1563, in the outskirts of Orleans, he had, to use his own expression, done his trick, he fled full gallop, so as not to bear the responsibility of it; but, whether it were that he was troubled in his mind, or that he was ill acquainted with the region, he wandered round and round the place where he had shot the Duke of Guise, and was arrested on the 20th of February by men sent in search of him. Being forthwith brought before the privy council, in the presence of the queen-mother, and put to the torture, he said that Admiral de Coligny, Theodore de Beze, La Rochefoucauld, Soubise, and other Huguenot chiefs had incited him to murder the Duke of Guise, persecutor of the faithful, “as a meritorious deed in the eyes of God and men.” Coligny repudiated this allegation point blank. Shrinking from the very appearance of hypocrisy, he abstained from any regret at the death of the Duke of Guise. “The greatest blessing,” said he, “which could come to this realm and to the church of God, especially to myself and all my house;” and he referred to conversations he had held with the Cardinal of Lorraine and the Duchess of Guise, and to a notice which he had sent, a few days previously, to the Duke of Guise himself, “to take care, for there was somebody under a bond to kill him.” Lastly, he demanded that, to set in a clear light “his integrity, innocence, and good repute,” Poltrot should be kept, until peace was made, in strict confinement, so that the admiral himself and the murderer might be confronted. It was not thought to be obligatory or possible to comply with this desire; amongst the public there was a passionate outcry for prompt chastisement. Poltrot, removed to Paris, put to the torture and questioned by the commissioners of Parliament, at one time confirmed and at another disavowed his original assertions. Coligny, he said, had not suggested the project to him, but had cognizance of it, and had not attempted to deter him. The decree sentenced Poltrot to the punishment of regicides. He underwent it on the 18th of March, 1563, in the Place de Greve, preserving to the very end that fierce energy of hatred and vengeance which had prompted his deed. He was heard saying to himself in the midst of his torments, and as if to comfort himself, “For all that, he is dead and gone,—the persecutor of the faithful,—and he will not come back again.” The angry populace insulted him with yells; Poltrot added, “If the persecution does not cease, vengeance will fall upon this city, and the avengers are already at hand.”
Catherine de’ Medici, well pleased, perhaps, that there was now a question personally embarrassing for the admiral and as yet in abeyance, had her mind entirely occupied apparently with the additional weakness and difficulty resulting to the position of the crown and the Catholic party from the death of the Duke of Guise; she considered peace necessary; and, for reasons of a different nature, Chancellor de l’Hospital was of the same opinion: he drew attention to “scruples of conscience, the perils of foreign influence, and the impossibility of curing by an application of brute force a malady concealed in the very bowels and brains of the people.” Negotiations were entered into with the two captive generals, the Prince of Conde and the Constable de Montmorency; they assented to that policy; and, on the 19th of March, peace was concluded at Amboise in the form of an edict which granted to the Protestants the concessions recognized as indispensable by the crown itself, and regulated the relations of the two creeds, pending “the remedy of time, the decisions of a holy council, and the king’s majority.” Liberty of conscience and the practice of the religion “called Reformed” were recognized “for all barons and lords high-justiciary, in their houses, with their families and dependants; for nobles having fiefs without vassals and living on the king’s lands, but for them and their families personally.” The burgesses were treated less favorably; the Reformed worship was maintained in the towns in which it had been practised up to the 7th of March in the current year; but, beyond that and noblemen’s mansions, this worship might not be celebrated save in the faubourgs of one single town in every bailiwick or seneschalty. Paris and its district were to remain exempt from any exercise of the said “Reformed religion.”
During the negotiations and as to the very basis of the edict of March 19, 1563, the Protestants were greatly divided; the soldiers and the politicians, with Conde at their head, desired peace, and thought that the concessions made by the Catholics ought to be accepted. The majority of the Reformed pastors and theologians cried out against the insufficiency of the concessions, and were astonished that there should be so much hurry to make peace when the Catholics had just lost their most formidable captain. Coligny, moderate in his principles, but always faithful to his church when she made her voice heard, showed dissatisfaction at the selfishness of the nobles. “To confine the religion to one town in every bailiwick,” he said, “is to ruin more churches by a stroke of the pen than our enemies could have pulled down in ten years; the nobles ought to have recollected that example had been set by the towns to them, and by the poor to the rich.” Calvin, in his correspondence with the Reformed churches of France, severely handled Conde on this occasion. At the moment when peace was made, the pacific were in the right; the death of the Duke of Guise had not prevented the battle of Dreux from being a defeat for the Reformers; and, when war had to be supported for long, it was especially the provincial nobles and the people on their estates who bore the burden of it. But when the edict of Amboise had put an end to the first religious war, when the question was no longer as to who won or lost battles, but whether the conditions of that peace to which the Catholics had sworn were loyally observed, and whether their concessions were effective in insuring the modest amount of liberty and security promised to the Protestants, the question changed front, and it was not long before facts put the malcontents in the right. Between 1563 and 1567 murders of distinguished Protestants increased strangely, and excited amongst their families anxiety accompanied by a thirst for vengeance. The Guises and their party, on their side, persisted in their outcries for proceedings against the instigators, known or presumed, of the murder of Duke Francis. It was plainly against Admiral de Coligny that these cries were directed; and he met them by a second declaration, very frank as a denial of the deed which it was intended to impute to him, but more hostile than ever to the Guises and their party. “The late duke,” said he, “was of the whole army the man I had most looked out for on the day of the last battle; if I could have brought a gun to bear upon him to kill him, I would have done it; I would have ordered ten thousand arquebusiers, had so many been under my command, to single him out amongst all the others, whether in the field, or from over a wall, or from behind a hedge. In short, I would not have spared any of the means permitted by the laws of war in time of hostility to get rid of so great an enemy as he was for me and for so many other good subjects of the king.”