[35] Cecil to Smith, 4 June, 1563.
[36] Ibid.
[37] J. A. Froude, “History of England.”
[38] Notre-Dame.
[39] The Porte Saint-Antoine.
[40] The name of the unfortunate gentleman was Couppé.
[41] Middlemore to Cecil, 17 June, 1563, State Papers (Elizabeth), Foreign Series. The dé noûment of this affair is a singular illustration of the impotence or unwillingness of the Law to punish crimes committed against the Protestants by the ferocious rabble of the capital.
On the day following the outrage, the King sent for the Provost of the Merchants and ordered him to bring the murderers to justice, under pain of answering for them himself, adding that “if any more of such insolences were done in Paris, he would send the four marshals of France there to see better order kept.” The provost, trembling in his shoes, returned home, and, next day, the authorities caused one Garnier, a captain of the city militia, and another person to be arrested, on suspicion of being concerned in the crime. Whereupon “the rest of the captains and lieutenants of Paris gathered themselves together to 4000 or 5000, and made such ado that they were glad to let them go.” No further attempt to execute justice was made, nor could the authorities even secure decent burial for the murdered gentleman. By a decree of the Châtelet, the body was ordered to be interred in the cemetery of the Innocents, together with that of an unknown Huguenot, “whom also on the Thursday, in the worship of that holy day, the Parisians had sacrificed and, after their manner, thrown into the water (the Seine). But certain women and boys (for they are now the judges and executioners of Paris) digged them up again; which being known, to avoid danger they were buried there again by the watch, and were again unburied, and no man knows what is done with them.”—“Journal of Sir Thomas Smith,” State Papers (Elizabeth), Foreign Series.
[42] Smith to Cecil, 22 May, 1563.
[43] “Histoire des Princes de Condé.”