History of the Rise of the Huguenots, Vol. 2

by Henry Martyn Baird

Servile reply of parliament.

Christopher de Thou.

To this allocution the parliament replied with all servility. Christopher de Thou, the first president, lauded the prudence of a monarch who had known how to bear patiently repeated insults, and at last to crush a conspiracy so dangerous to the quiet of the realm. And he quoted with approval the infamous apothegm of Louis the Eleventh: "Qui nescit dissimulare, nescit regnare." The solitary suggestion that breathed any manly spirit was that of Pibrac, the "avocat-général," to the effect that orders should be published to put an end to the work of murder and robbery—a request which Charles readily granted.[1060] Never had the supreme tribunal of justice abased itself more ignobly than when it listened so complaisantly to the king, and approved without qualification an organized massacre perpetrated unblushingly under its very eyes. As for the distinguished man who lent himself to be the mouthpiece of adulation worse than slavish, we are less inclined to commiserate the difficulty of his position than to pity the ingenuous historian who strives to touch leniently upon a fault of his father which he can neither conceal nor palliate.[1061] We may credit his assertion that his father remonstrated with the king in private with respect to that for which he had praised him in public, and that Christopher de Thou marked his detestation of that ill-starred day by applying to it the lines of Statius:

Excidat illa dies ævo, ne postera credant Sæcula: nos certe taceamus, et obruta multa Nocte tegi propriæ patiamur crimina gentis.

But we cannot forget that this was not the first time that Christopher de Thou "accommodated" his words or his actions to the supposed "exigencies of the times." He was a member of that commission that sentenced Louis of Condé to death, in deference to the desires of another king and his uncles, the Guises; and the prince would doubtless have lost his head in consequence, but for the sudden death of Francis the Second. Since that time he had repeatedly acquiesced in the bloody sentences of the Parisian parliament. His voice was never heard opposing the proscription instituted in the late civil wars, even in the case of the atrocious sentence against Gaspard de Coligny. If we concede to his son that no one was of a less sanguinary or of a milder disposition than President De Thou, we must also insist that few judges on the bench displayed less magnanimity or conscientiousness.[1062]

Ineffectual effort to inculpate Coligny.

But it was not a simple congratulatory address that Charles, or his mother, required of his parliament. Tyrannical power is rarely satisfied with the mere acquiescence of servile judges; it demands, and ordinarily obtains from them, a positive indorsement of its schemes of successful villainy. It was necessary—especially, as we shall see later, after the cry of horror was heard that rose toward heaven from all parts of Europe on receipt of the tidings of the massacre in Paris and elsewhere—to palliate its atrocity by affixing to the slain Huguenots, and above all to Coligny, a note of rebellious and murderous designs against the king and the royal family. And here again the Parliament of Paris was as pliant as its rulers could desire. Coligny's papers, both in Paris and at Châtillon-sur-Loing, were subjected to close scrutiny; but nothing could be discovered to warrant the suspicion that any seditious design had ever been entertained by him. In default of something better, therefore, the queen mother endeavored to make capital out of two passages of these private manuscripts. In one—it was, we are told, the will of the admiral, written toward the end of the third civil war[1063]—he dissuaded Charles from assigning to his brothers appanages that might diminish the authority of the crown. Catharine triumphantly showed it to Alençon. "See!" said she; "this is your good friend the admiral, whom you so greatly loved and respected!" "I know not," replied the young prince, "how much of a friend he was to me; but certainly he showed by this advice how much he loved the king."[1064] With Walsingham a similar attempt was made to deprive the murdered hero of Queen Elizabeth's sympathy, but with as little success. "To the end you may see how little your mistress was beholden to him," said Catharine de' Medici one day to the English ambassador, "you may see a discourse found with his testament, made at such time as he was sick at Rochel, wherein, amongst other advices that he gave to the king my son, this is one, that he willed him in any case to keep the queen, your mistress, and the King of Spain as low as he could, as a thing that tended much to the safety and maintenance of this crown." "To that I answered," says Walsingham, "that in this point, howsoever he was affected towards the queen my mistress, he showed himself a most true and faithful subject to the crown of France, and the Queen's Majestie, my mistress, made the more account of him, for that she knew him faithfully affected to the same."[1065]

Coligny's memory declared infamous.

Petty indignities.