Pius V. and Charles IX. had been too precipitate in regarding the position of the Huguenots as desperate. Coligny still remained to them. He was seconded by Jeanne d’Albret, who, holding in her hand her son, Henry of Béarn, then fifteen years of age, and her nephew Henry, son of the prince of Condé, came to Saintes to “offer to the cause,”—an expression in vogue among the Calvinists—and prayed to God never to suffer them to swerve from their duty. The young Béarnais was proclaimed generalissimo and protector of the churches. “I swear,” said he, “to defend the religion, and to persevere in the common cause, until either death or victory has restored to us the liberty we seek.”
On the 23rd June, 1569, Coligny gained the advantage in the fight of the Roche-Abeille; but he lost many of his men at the siege of Poitiers, which he had been forced to undertake at the instance of the gentlemen of the province. On the 3rd of October following, he was beaten at Moncontour. The German soldiers had mutinied, and the Admiral could not avoid a conflict with the enemy, as he had intended. The battle lasted but three-quarters of an hour, and the disaster was terrible. Out of twenty-five thousand soldiers, only six or eight thousand remained under his standard. Entire companies had been put to the sword. The lansquenets cried for mercy, saying, “I am a good Papist! I am a good Papist!” but no one was spared.
Coligny received three wounds at the commencement of the action, and the blood which flowed under his visor was nigh choking him. He had to be carried off the field. In the evening, when some officers proposed to embark, he roused their courage by his calm and decisive words. Never was Coligny so great as in misfortune; he had always calculated the consequences beforehand.
Another trait of his character deserves to be recorded. “As the Admiral was carried in a litter,” says Agrippa D’Aubigné, “Lestrange, an old gentleman, and one of his principal councillors, also wounded and borne in a similar equipage, had it brought up in front of the other at a point where the road widened, and then putting his head out of the curtain, he looked intently upon his chief, and parted from him with tears in his eyes, with these words: ‘God is very good.’ They then bade each other farewell, united in thought, but unable to say more. This great captain confessed to his intimate friends that this little word from such a friend had raised him up, and turned him into the path of good thoughts and firm resolutions for the future.”[53]
Every misfortune seemed to fall at once upon Coligny. He had lost his brother D’Andelot. The Parliament of Paris had just declared him guilty of lèse-majesté, a traitor and a felon, inviting any one to attack him, with a promise of fifty thousand crowns to any one who should deliver him up, dead or alive; in fact, he had been exposed to several attempts at assassination. Bands of miscreants had burned his château and devastated his domains. Lastly, as if to overwhelm him with a final blow, Pius V. had addressed letters to the king and queen-mother, in which he described him as “a detestable, infamous, and execrable man, if indeed he deserved the name of man!”
Behold, then, this great unfortunate, outlawed by the government of his country, and, in a manner, by the human and divine law, by the chief of (Roman) Catholicity, covered with wounds, despoiled of all he possessed, with mutinied mercenaries, an army struck down by defeat, abandoned by many of his friends, blamed by a great number, and having to contend against adversaries without mercy and without faith! Behold him thus, and then read this letter, so pious and so calm, which he wrote to his children on the 16th of October, 1569, thirteen days after the disaster of Moncontour: it is one of the most beautiful pages of the history of humanity:—
“We must not count upon what is called property, but rather place our hope elsewhere than on earth, and acquire other means than those which we see with our eyes, or touch with our hands. We must follow Jesus Christ, our Chief, who has gone before us. Men have taken from us all they can; if such is always the will of God, we shall be happy, and our condition good, since this loss has happened to us through no injury that has been done to those who caused it, but simply for the hatred borne to me, because it has pleased God to make use of me to help His Church.... For the present, it is enough for me to admonish and conjure you, in the name of God, to persevere with courage in the practice of virtue.”
Coligny did not confine himself to writing: he collected together another army. At his voice, from every mountain of Béarn, of Cevennes, of Dauphiné, of Vivarais, of the county of Foix, there came down intrepid gentlemen, and warlike peasants, who promised to defend their faith and their liberty to the death. He traversed the half of France, passed the Loire, defeated the (Roman) Catholics near Arnay-le-Duc, and marched towards Paris, saying, “The Parisians would incline to peace when they found the war at their gates.”
The court was seized as much with astonishment as with fear, at finding Coligny at the head of a third army, as numerous as those he had lost, and better disciplined. It once more offered conditions of peace, and a treaty was signed at St. Germain-en-Laye, on the 8th of August, 1570. It was more favourable to the Reformed than the preceding ones. It gave them liberty of worship in all the places which were in their possession; in addition, two towns for every province for the celebration of service, an amnesty for the past, equal right of admission to public offices, permission to reside in any part of the kingdom without being molested on account of religion, and four hostage-towns,—La Rochelle, La Charité, Cognac, and Montauban.
The queen Catherine showed herself generous. The (Roman) Catholic historian Davila, who well knew the secrets of this court, assures us that she was agreed with the Cardinal de Lorraine and the duke of Anjou about the project of the massacre of Saint Bartholomew. “It was determined,” he says, “to return to the project already formed so many times, and so often abandoned, to free the country of foreign troops, and then to employ artifices to get rid of the chiefs, in the hope that the party would yield of itself, as soon as they saw themselves deprived of this support.”[54]