These tardy and lying accusations officially brought against Coligny and his friends; these promises of liberty and security for the Protestants, renewed in the terms of the edicts of pacification, and, in point of fact, annulled at the very moment at which they were being renewed; the massacre continuing here and there in France, at one time with the secret connivance and at another notwithstanding the publicly-given word of the king and the queen-mother; all this policy, at one and the same time violent and timorous, incoherent and stubborn, produced amongst the Protestants two contrary effects: some grew frightened, others angry. At court, under the direct influence of the king and his surroundings, “submission to the powers that be” prevailed; many fled; others, without abjuring their religion, abjured their party. The two Reformer-princes, Henry of Navarre and Henry de Conde, attended mass on the 29th of September, and, on the 3d of October, wrote to the pope, deploring their errors and giving hopes of their conversion. Far away from Paris, in the mountains of the Pyrenees and of Languedoc, in the towns where the Reformers were numerous and confident, at Sancerre, at Montauban, at Nimes, at La Rochelle, the spirit of resistance carried the day. An assembly, meeting at Milhau, drew up a provisional ordinance for the government of the Reformed church, “until it please God, who has the hearts of kings in His keeping, to change that of King Charles IX. and restore the state of France to good order, or to raise up such neighboring prince as is manifestly marked out, by his virtue and by distinguishing signs, for to be the liberator of this poor afflicted people.” In November, 1572, the fourth religious war broke out. The siege of La Rochelle was its only important event. Charles IX. and his councillors exerted themselves in vain to avoid it. There was everything to disquiet them in this enterprise: so sudden a revival of the religious war after the grand blow they had just struck, the passionate energy manifested by the Protestants in asylum at La Rochelle, and the help they had been led to hope for from Queen Elizabeth, whom England would never have forgiven for indifference in this cause. Marshal de Biron, who was known to favor the Reformers, was appointed governor of La Rochelle; but he could not succeed in gaining admittance within the walls, even alone and for the purpose of parleying with the inhabitants. The king heard that one of the bravest Protestant chiefs, La Noue Ironarm, had retired to Mons with Prince Louis of Nassau. The Duke of Longueville, his old enemy, induced him to go to Paris. The king received him with great favor, gave up to him the property of Teligny, whose sister La Noue had married, and pressed him to go to La Rochelle and prevail upon the inhabitants to keep the peace. La Noue refused, saying that he was not at all fitted for this commission. The king promised that he would ask nothing of him which could wound his honor. La Noue at last consented, and repaired, about the end of November, 1572, to a village close by La Rochelle, whither it was arranged that deputies from the town would come and confer with him. And they came, in fact, but at their first meeting, “We are come,” they said, “to confer with M. de La Noue, but we do not see him here.” La Noue got angry. “I am astonished,” he said, “that you have so soon forgotten one who has received so many wounds and lost an arm fighting for you.” “Yes, there is a M. de La Noue, who was one of us, and who bravely defended our cause; but he never flattered us with vain hopes, he never invited us to conferences to betray us.” La Noue got more fiercely angry. “All I ask of you is, to report to the senate what I have to say to them.” They complied, and came back with permission for him to enter the town. The people looked at him, as he passed, with a mixture of distrust and interest. After hearing him, the senate rejected the pacific overtures made to them by La Noue. “We have no mind to treat specially and for ourselves alone; our cause is that of God and of all the churches of France; we will accept nothing but what shall seem proper to all our brethren. For yourself, we give you your choice between three propositions: remain in our town as a simple burgess, and we will give you quarters; if you like better to be our commandant, all the nobility and the people will gladly have you for their head, and will fight with confidence under your orders; if neither of these propositions suits you, you shall be welcome to go aboard one of our vessels and cross over to England, where you will find many of your friends.” La Noue did not hesitate; he became, under the authority of the mayor Jacques Henri, the military head of La Rochelle, whither Charles IX. had sent him to make peace. The king authorized him to accept this singular position. La Noue conducted himself so honorably in it, and everybody was so convinced of his good faith as well as bravery, that for three months he commanded inside La Rochelle, and superintended the preparations for defence, all the while trying to make the chances of peace prevail. At the end of February, 1573, he recognized the impossibility of his double commission, and he went away from La Rochelle, leaving the place in better condition than that in which he had found it, without either king or Rochellese considering that they had any right to complain of him.
Biron first and then the Duke of Anjou in person took the command of the siege. They brought up, it is said, forty thousand men and sixty pieces of artillery. The Rochellese, for defensive strength, had but twenty-two companies of refugees or inhabitants, making in all thirty-one hundred men. The siege lasted from the 26th of February to the 13th of June, 1573; six assaults were made on the place; in the last, the ladders had been set at night against the wall of what was called Gospel bastion; the Duke of Guise, at the head of the assailants, had escaladed the breach, but there he discovered a new ditch and a new rampart erected inside; and, confronted by these unforeseen obstacles, the men recoiled and fell back. La Rochelle was saved. Charles IX. was more and more desirous of peace; his brother, the Duke of Anjou, had just been elected King of Poland; Charles IX. was anxious for him to leave France and go to take possession of his new kingdom. Thanks to these complications, the peace of La Rochelle was signed on the 6th of July, 1573. Liberty of creed and worship was recognized in the three towns of La Rochelle, Montauban, and Nimes. They were not obliged to receive any royal garrison, on condition of giving hostages to be kept by the king for two years. Liberty of worship throughout the extent of their jurisdiction continued to be recognized in the case of lords high-justiciary. Everywhere else the Reformers had promises of not being persecuted for their creed, under the obligation of never holding an assembly of more than ten persons at a time. These were the most favorable conditions they had yet obtained.
Certainly this was not what Charles IX. had calculated upon when he consented to the massacre of the Protestants. “Provided,” he had said, “that not a single one is left to reproach me.” The massacre had been accomplished almost without any resistance but that offered by certain governors of provinces or towns, who had refused to take part in it. The chief leader of French Protestantism, Coligny, had been the first victim. Far more than that, the Parliament of Paris had accepted the royal lie which accused Coligny of conspiring for the downfall of the king and the royal house; a decree, on that very ground, sentenced to condemnation the memory, the family, and the property of Coligny, with all sorts of rigorous, we should rather say atrocious, circumstances. And after having succeeded so well against the Protestants, Charles IX. saw them recovering again, renewing the struggle with him, and wresting from him such concessions as he had never yet made to them. More than ever might he exclaim, “Then I shall never have rest!” The news that came to him from abroad was not more calculated to satisfy him.
The St. Bartholomew had struck Europe with surprise and horror; not only amongst the princes and in the countries that were Protestant, in England, Scotland, and Northern Europe, but in Catholic Germany itself, there was a very strong feeling of reprobation; the Emperor Maximilian II. and the Elector Palatine Frederic III., called the Pious, showed it openly; when the Duke of Anjou, elected King of Poland, went through Germany to go and take possession of his kingdom, he was received at Heidelberg with premeditated coolness. When he arrived at the gate of the castle, not a soul went to meet him; alone he ascended the steps, and found in the hall a picture representing the massacre of St. Bartholomew; the elector called his attention to the portraits of the principal victims, amongst others that of Coligny, and at table he was waited upon solely by French Protestant refugees. At Rome itself, in the midst of official satisfaction and public demonstrations of it exhibited by the pontifical court, the truth came out, and Pope Gregory XIII. was touched by it when certain of my lords the cardinals who were beside him “asked wherefore he wept and was sad at so goodly a despatch of those wretched folk, enemies of God and of his Holiness: ‘I weep,’ said the pope, ‘at the means the king used, exceeding unlawful and forbidden of God, for to inflict such punishment; I fear that one will fall upon him, and that he will not have a very long bout of it (will not live very long). I fear, too, that amongst so many dead folk there died as many innocent as guilty.’” [Brantome, t. iv. p. 306. He attributes this language to Pope Pius V., who died four months before the St. Bartholomew. Gregory XIII., elected May 15, 1572, was pope when the massacre took place.] Only the King of Spain, Philip II., a fanatical despot, and pitiless persecutor, showed complete satisfaction at the event; and he offered Charles IX. the assistance of his army, if he had need of it, against what there was remaining of heretics in his kingdom.
Charles IX. had not mind or character sufficiently sound or sufficiently strong to support, without great perturbation, the effect of so many violent, repeated, and often contradictory impressions. Catherine de Medici had brought up her three sons solely with a view of having their confidence and implicit obedience. “All the actions of the queen-mother,” said the Venetian ambassador Sigismund Cavalli, who had for a long while resided at her court, “have always been prompted and regulated by one single passion, the passion of ruling.” Her son Charles had yielded to it without an effort in his youth. “He was accustomed to say that, until he was five and twenty, he meant to play the fool; that is to say, to think of nothing but of enjoying his heyday; accordingly he showed aversion for speaking and treating of business, putting himself altogether in his mother’s hands. Now, he no longer thinks and acts in the same way. I have been told that, since the late events, he requires to have the same thing said more than three times over by the queen, before obeying her.” It was not with regard to his mother only that Charles had changed. “His looks,” says Cavalli, “have become melancholy and sombre; in his conversations and audiences he does not look the speaker in the face; he droops his head, closes his eyes, opens them all at once, and, as if he found the movement painful, closes them again with no less suddenness. It is feared that the demon of vengeance has possessed him; he used to be merely severe; it is feared that he is becoming cruel. He is temperate in his diet; drinks nothing but water. To tire himself at any price, is his object. He remains on horseback for twelve or fourteen consecutive hours; and so he goes hunting and coursing through the woods the same animal, the stag, for two or three days, never stopping but to eat, and never resting but for an instant during the night.” He was passionately fond of all bodily exercises, the practice of arms, and the game of tennis. “He had a forge set up for himself,” says Brantome, “and I have seen him forging cannon, and horseshoes, and other things as stoutly as the most robust farriers and forgemen.” He, at the same time, showed a keen and intelligent interest in intellectual works and pleasures. He often had a meeting, in the evening, of poets, men of letters, and artists—Ronsard, Amadis Jamin, Jodelle, Daurat, Baif; in 1570 he gave them letters patent for the establishment of an Academy of poetry and music, the first literary society founded in France by a king; but it disappeared amidst the civil wars. Charles IX. himself sang in the choir, and he composed a few hunting-airs. Ronsard was a favorite, almost a friend, with him; he used to take him with him on his trips, and give him quarters in his palace, and there was many an interchange of verse between them, in which Ronsard did not always have the advantage. Charles gave a literary outlet to his passion for hunting; he wrote a little treatise entitled La Chasse royale, which was not published until 1625, and of which M. Henry Chevreul brought out, in 1857, a charming and very correct edition. Charles IX. dedicated it to his lieutenant of the hunt, Mesnil, in terms of such modest and affectionate simplicity that they deserve to be kept in remembrance. “Mesnil,” said the king, “I should feel myself far too ungrateful, and expect to be chidden for presumption, if, in this little treatise that I am minded to make upon stag hunting, I did not, before any one begins to read it, avow and confess that I learnt from you what little I know. . . . I beg you, also, Mesnil, to be pleased to correct and erase what there is wrong in the said treatise, the which, if peradventure it is so done that there is nothing more required than to re-word and alter, the credit will be firstly yours for having so well taught me, and then mine for having so well remembered. Well, then, having been taught by so good a master, I will be bold enough to essay it, begging you to accept it as heartily as I present it and dedicate it to you.”
These details and this quotation are allowable in order to shed full light upon the private and incoherent character of this king, who bears the responsibility of one of the most tragic events in French history. In the spring of 1574, at the age of twenty-three years and eleven months, and after a reign of eleven years and six months, Charles IX. was attacked by an inflammatory malady, which brought on violent hemorrhage; he was revisited, in his troubled sleep, by the same bloody visions about which, a few days after the St. Bartholomew, he had spoken to Ambrose Pare. He no longer retained in his room anybody but two of his servants and his nurse, “of whom he was very fond, although she was a Huguenot,” says the contemporary chronicler Peter de l’Estoile. “When she had lain down upon a chest, and was just beginning to doze, hearing the king moaning, weeping, and sighing, she went full gently up to the bed. ‘Ah, nurse, nurse,’ said the king, ‘what bloodshed and what murders! Ah! what evil counsel have I followed! O, my God! forgive me them and have mercy upon me, if it may please Thee! I know not what hath come to me, so bewildered and agitated do they make me. What will be the end of it all? What shall I do? I am lost; I see it well.’ Then said the nurse to him, ‘Sir, the murders be on the heads of those who made you do them! Of yourself, sir, you never could; and since you are not consenting thereto, and are sorry therefor, believe that God will not put them down to your account, and will hide them with the cloak of justice of His Son, to whom alone you must have recourse. But for God’s sake, let your Majesty cease weeping!’ And thereupon, having been to fetch him a pocket-handkerchief, because his own was soaked with tears, after that the king had taken it from her hand, he signed to her to go away and leave him to his rest.”
On Sunday, May 30, 1574, Whitsunday, about three in the afternoon, Charles IX. expired, after having signed an ordinance conferring the regency upon his mother Catherine, “who accepted it,” was the expression in the letters patent, “at the request of the Duke of Alencon, the King of Navarre, and other princes and peers of France.” According to D’Aubigne, Charles used often to say of his brother Henry, that, “when he had a kingdom on his hands, the administration would find him out, and that he would disappoint those who had hopes of him.” The last words he said were, “that he was glad not to have left any young child to succeed him, very well knowing that France needs a man, and that, with a child, the king and the reign are unhappy.”