History of the Rise of the Huguenots, Vol. 2

by Henry Martyn Baird

Flight of the refugees to Sancerre.

The tragic end of the Huguenots at Orleans warned the Protestants of the villages and open country of the dangers to which they were exposed. Many fled with their wives and children to Montargis, where the aged Renée of Ferrara was still living, the unwilling spectator of commotions which she had foreseen and predicted, and which she had striven to prevent. Her palace was still what Calvin had called it in the time of the first war, "God's hostelry." Renée's royal descent, her connection by marriage with the Guises—for Henry, the present duke, was her grandson—her well-known aversion to civil war,[712] and, added to these, that demeanor which ever betrayed a consciousness that she was a king's daughter, had thus far protected her from direct insult, staunch and avowed Protestant as she was, and had enabled her to extend to a host of fugitives for religion's sake a hospitality which had not yet been invaded. But, the rancor entertained by the two parties increasing in bitterness as the third conflict advanced, it became more and more difficult to repress the impatience felt by the fanatics of Paris to rid themselves of an asylum for the adherents of the hated faith within so short a distance—about seventy miles—of the orthodox capital. Montargis was narrowly watched. Early in March the duchess was warned, in a letter, of pretended plans formed by the refugees on her lands to succor their friends elsewhere in the vicinity—the writer being no other than the adventurer Villegagnon, the former vice-admiral, the betrayer of Coligny's Huguenot colony to Brazil, who was now in the Roman Catholic service, under the Duke of Anjou.[713] But the fresh flood of refugees to Montargis rendered further forbearance impossible. The preachers stirred up the people, and the people incited the king. Renée was told that she must dismiss the Huguenot preachers, or submit to receiving a Roman Catholic garrison in her castle; that the exercise of the Protestant religion could no longer be tolerated, and the fugitives must find another home. The duchess could no longer resist the superior forces of her enemies, and tearfully she provided the miserable Huguenots for their journey with such wagons as she could find. The company consisted of four hundred and sixty persons, two-thirds women and infants in the arms of their mothers. Scarcely knowing whither to direct their steps, they fled toward the Loire, and hastened to place the river between them and their pursuers. The precaution availed them little. They had barely reached the vicinity of Châtillon-sur-Loire,[714] when the approach of Cartier with a detachment of light horse and mounted arquebusiers was announced; and the defenceless throng, knowing that no pity could be expected from men whose hands had already been imbrued in the blood of their fellow-believers, and being exhorted by their ministers to meet death calmly, knelt down upon the ground and awaited the terrible onset. At that very instant, between the hillocks in another direction, and somewhat nearer to the fugitives, a band of cavalry made its appearance. They numbered some one hundred and twenty men, and, as they rode up, were taken for the advance guard of their persecutors. But, on coming nearer and recognizing some of the kneeling suppliants, the knights threw off their cloaks and displayed their white cassocks, the badge of the adherents of the house of Navarre. They were two cornets of Huguenot horse, on their way from Berry to La Charité, under the command of Bourry, Teil, and other captains. In the midst of the tearful acclamations of the women, their new friends turned upon the exultant pursuers, and so bravely did they fight that the Roman Catholics soon fled, leaving eighty men and two standards on the field. The Huguenot knights, who had so providentially become their deliverers, escorted the fugitives from Montargis to Sancerre and La Charité, where they remained in safety until the conclusion of peace.[715]

The "Croix de Gastines."

Meantime the courts of justice emulated the example of cruelty set them by the government and the mob. In May they began by sending to the gallows on the Place Maubert, in Paris, a student barely twenty-two years of age, for having taught some children the Huguenot doctrines (huguenoterie), "without any other crime," the candid chronicler adds. After so fair a beginning there was no difficulty in finding good subjects for hanging. Accordingly, on the thirtieth of June, three victims more were sacrificed on the old Place de Grève, "partly for heresy and for celebrating the Lord's Supper in their house; partly"—so it was pretended—"for having assisted in demolishing altars." In the great number of similar executions with which the sanguinary records of Paris abound, the fate of Nicholas Croquet and the two De Gastines—father and son—would have been forgotten, but for the extraordinary measures taken in respect to the house where the impiety had been committed of celebrating the Lord's Supper according to the simple scheme of its first institution. The Parisian parliament ordered that "the house of the Five White Crosses, belonging to the De Gastines, situated in the Rue Saint Denis," should be razed to the ground, and that upon the site a stone cross should be placed, with an inscription explanatory of the occasion of its erection. That spot was to serve as a public square for all time, and a fine of 6,000 livres, with corporal punishment, was imposed upon any one who should ever undertake to build upon it.[716] It was not foreseen that military exigencies might presently render imperative a reconciliation with the Huguenots, and that the "perpetual" decree of parliament, like the "irrevocable" edicts of the king, might be somewhat abridged by stern necessity.

Ferocity of parliament against Coligny and others.

A price set on the head of the admiral.

The work of blood continued. In July two noblemen were decapitated—the Baron de Laschêne and the Baron de Courtène—and denunciation of reputed heretics was vigorously prosecuted, by command of parliament and of the city curates.[717] Two months later a cowardly but impotent blow was struck at a more distinguished personage. Parliament undertook to try Gaspard de Coligny, and, having found him guilty of treason (on the thirteenth of September), pronounced him infamous, and offered a reward of fifty thousand gold crowns for his apprehension, with full pardon for any offences the captor might have committed. Lest the exploit, however, should be deemed too difficult for execution, a few days later (on the twenty-eighth of September) the same liberal terms were held out to any one who should murder him. As it was not so easy to capture or assassinate a general who was at that moment in command of an army not greatly inferior to that of the Duke of Anjou, the court gave the Parisian populace the cheaper spectacle of a hanging of the admiral in effigy. It was the eve of the festival of "the Exaltation of the Cross"—Tuesday, the thirteenth of September—and the time was deemed appropriate for the execution of so determined an enemy of the worship of that sacred emblem. While Coligny's escutcheon was dragged in dishonor through the streets by four horses, the hangman amused the mob by giving to his effigy the traditional tooth-pick, which he was said to be in the habit of continually using—a facetious trait which the curate of St. Barthélemi, of course, does not forget to insert in his brief diary.[718] Nevertheless, that the decree of parliament setting a price upon the admiral's head was no child's play, appeared about this time from the abortive plot of one Dominique d'Albe, who confessed that he had been hired to poison the Huguenot chief, and was hanged by order of the princes.[719] Nor was it without practical significance that the decree itself had been translated into Latin, Italian, Spanish, German, Flemish, English, and Scotch, and scattered broadcast through Europe by the partisans of Guise.

The Huguenots weakened.

Meantime the condition of the rival armies in western France promised again, in the view of the court, a speedy solution of the military problem. The Duke of Anjou had of late been heavily reinforced. With the old troops that had returned to his standard, and the new troops that poured in upon him, he had a well-appointed army of about twenty-seven thousand men, of whom one-third were cavalry. Coligny, on the contrary, had been so weakened by his losses at the siege of Poitiers, and by the desertion of those whom disappointment at the delays and the expense of the service had rendered it impossible to retain, that he was inferior to his antagonist by nine or ten thousand men. He had only eleven or twelve thousand foot and six thousand horse.[720] The Roman Catholic general resolved to employ his preponderance of forces in striking a decisive blow. This appeared the more desirable, since it was known that Montgomery was returning from the reduction of Béarn, bringing with him six or seven thousand veterans—an addition to the Huguenot army that would nearly restore the equilibrium.

Leaving Chinon, where he had been for some time strengthening himself, the Duke of Anjou crossed the swollen river Vienne, on the twenty-sixth of September, and started in pursuit of the Huguenots. Coligny had been resting his army at Faye, a small town about midway between Chinon and Châtellerault. It was here that the attempt upon his life, to which allusion has just been made, was discovered. And it was from this point that the Prince of Orange started in disguise, and undertook, with forty mounted companions, a perilous journey across France by La Charité to Montbéliard, for the purpose of raising in Germany the fresh troops of which the admiral stood in such pressing need.[721]