Sincerity of the peace.
A problem of cardinal importance here confronts us, in the inquiry whether the peace which had at length dawned upon France was or was not concluded in good faith by the young king and his advisers. Was the treaty a necessity forced upon the court by the losses of men and treasure sustained during three years of almost continual civil conflict? Were the queen mother and those in whose hands rested the chief control of affairs, really tired of a war in which nothing was to be gained and everything was in jeopardy, a war whose most brilliant successes had been barren of substantial fruits, and had, in the sequel, been stripped of the greater part of their glory by the masterly conduct of a defeated opponent? Or, was the peace only a prelude to the massacre—a skilfully devised snare to entrap incautious and credulous enemies?
The latter view is that which was entertained by the majority of the contemporaries of the events, who, whether friends or foes of Charles and Catharine, whether Papists or Protestants, could not avoid reading the treaty of pacification in the light of the occurrences of the "bloody nuptials." The Huguenot author of the "Tocsin against the murderers" and Capilupi, author of the appreciative "Stratagem of Charles the Ninth"—however much they may disagree upon other points—unite in regarding the royal edict as a piece of treachery from beginning to end. It was even believed by many of the most intelligent Protestants that the massacre was already perfected in the minds of its authors so far back as the conference of Bayonne, five years before the peace of St. Germain, in accordance with the suggestions of Philip the Second and of Alva. This last supposition, however, has been overthrown by the discovery of the correspondence of Alva himself, in which he gives an account of the discussions which he held with Catharine de' Medici on that memorable occasion. For we have seen that, far from convincing the queen mother of the necessity for adopting sanguinary measures to crush the Huguenots, the duke constantly deplores to his master the obstinacy of Catharine in still clinging to her own views of toleration. It seems equally clear that the peace of St. Germain was no part of the project of a contemplated massacre of the Protestants. The Montmorencies, not the Guises, were in power, and were responsible for it. The influence of the former had become paramount, and that of the latter had waned. The Cardinal of Lorraine had left the court in disgust and retired to his archbishopric of Rheims, when he found that the policy of war, to which he and his family were committed, was about to be abandoned. Even in the earlier negotiations he had no part, while the queen mother and the moderate Morvilliers were omnipotent.[792] And when Francis Walsingham made his appearance at the French court, to congratulate Charles the Ninth upon the restoration of peace, he found his strongest reasons of hope for its permanence, next to the disposition and the necessities of the king, in the royal "misliking toward the house of Guise, who have been the nourishers of these wars,"[793] and in the increase of the royal "favor to Montmorency, a chief worker of this peace, who now carrieth the whole sway of the court, and is restored to the government of Paris."[794]
At home and abroad, the peace was equally opposed by those who could not have failed to be its warmest advocates had it been treacherously designed. We have already seen that both Pope Pius the Fifth, and the King of Spain insisted upon a continuance of the war, and offered augmented assistance, in case the government would pledge itself to make no compact with the heretical rebels. The pontiff especially was unremitting in his persuasions and threats; denouncing the righteous judgment of God upon the king who preferred personal advantage to the claims of religion, and reminding him that the divine anger was wont to punish the sins of rulers by taking away their kingdoms and giving them to others.[795] The project of a massacre of Protestants, had it in reality been entertained by the French court while adopting the peace, could scarcely have been kept so profound a secret from the king and the pontiff who had long been urging a resort to such measures, nor would Pius and Philip have been suffered through ignorance to persist in so open a hostility to the compact which was intended to render its execution feasible.
The designs of Catharine de' Medici.
If the Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day, as enacted on the fatal Sunday of August, was not premeditated in the form it then assumed—if the peace of St. Germain was not, as so many have imagined, a trick to overwhelm the Huguenots taken unawares—are we, therefore, to believe that the idea of such a deed of blood was as yet altogether foreign to the mind of Catharine de' Medici? I dare not affirm that it was. On the contrary, there is reason to believe that the conviction that she might some day find herself in a position in which she could best free herself from entanglement by some such means had long since lodged in her mind. It was not a strange or repulsive notion to the careful student of the code of morality laid down in "Il Principe." Alva had familiarized her with it, and the civil wars had almost invested it in her eyes with the appearance of justifiable retaliation. She had gloated in secret over the story of the Queen Blanche, mother of Louis the Ninth, and her successful struggle with her son's insubordinate nobles, telling her countryman, the Venetian ambassador Correro, with a significant laugh such as she was wont occasionally to indulge in, that she would be very sorry to have it known that she had been reading the old manuscript chronicle, for they would at once infer that she had taken the Castilian princess as her pattern.[796] More unscrupulous than the mother of St. Louis, she had revolved in her mind various schemes for strengthening her authority at the expense of the lives of a few of the more prominent Huguenot chiefs, convinced, as she was, that Protestantism would cease to exist in France with the destruction of its leaders. But, despite pontifical injunctions and Spanish exhortations, she formed no definite plans; or, if she did, it was only to unravel on the morrow what she had woven the day before. What Barbaro said of her at one critical juncture was true of her generally in all such deliberations: "Her irresolution is extreme; she conceives new plans from hour to hour; within the compass of a single day, between morning and evening, she will change her mind three times.[797]"
Charles the Ninth in earnest.
He tears out the record against Cardinal Châtillon.