History of the Rise of the Huguenots, Vol. 2

by Henry Martyn Baird

We have already been admitted to the secret of the instructions sent by the Duke of Anjou, through Puigaillard, to M. de Montsoreau, for the destruction of the Huguenots of Saumur and Angers. Certainly there was on his part no lack of readiness to fulfil his sanguinary commission; but the local officers were less zealous, and many of the Protestants were merely thrown into prison. Montsoreau's first exploit at Angers deserves particular mention. M. de la Rivière, the first reformed pastor of Paris, of whom I have spoken in a previous chapter, was at this time residing in Angers, and Montsoreau seems to have been acquainted with him. Going straight to his house, the governor met the pastor's wife, whom, according to the gallant custom prevailing, especially among the Trench courtiers, he first kissed, and then inquired for her husband. He was told that he was walking in his garden, and thither his hostess led him. After courteously embracing him, Montsoreau thus abruptly disclosed the object of his visit: "Monsieur de la Rivière, do you know why I am come? The king has ordered me to kill you, and that at once. I have a special commission to this effect, as you will know from these letters." While saying this he exhibited a pistol which he held in his hand. "I know of no crime that I have done," calmly replied De la Rivière; and then, after obtaining permission to offer a brief prayer to God, he fearlessly presented his breast to the cowardly assassin. Montsoreau did not complete the extermination of the Huguenots of Angers, and Puigaillard soon after arrived to prosecute it; but the Protestant prisoners whom he was to have murdered knew his venal disposition, and found little difficulty in purchasing their liberation.[1103]

Butchery at Lyons.

The important city of Lyons, inhabited by a population intensely hostile to the Reformation, had for its governor M. de Mandelot, a decided partisan of the Roman Catholic faction. The municipal authorities, however, either surpassed him in zeal, or, as is more probable, were less apprehensive of the dangers to be incurred by assuming the responsibility of a massacre; for of all the "échevins," only two opposed the violent measures of their associates. The written protest which they insisted upon entering on the official records is still extant.[1104] The first tidings of the wounding of Coligny by Maurevel reached Lyons on Wednesday morning, the twenty-seventh of August, in a letter from Charles the Ninth to Governor Mandelot, similar in tenor to those which were despatched to every other part of France.[1105] Although the king spoke only of displeasure at the outrage, and of his determination to avenge it, the populace interpreted the event according to their wishes, and instantly circulated reports of the murder of the admiral and all his adherents. The Roman Catholics, long discontented with the toleration extended to those who dissented from the creed of the dominant church, were jubilant and menacing; the Protestants were disheartened, but exhibited a self-control only to be accounted for by the long years of oppression which had wellnigh broken their spirit. The next day came the news of the events of Sunday, and, in the afternoon, letters from Masso and Rubys, prominent citizens of Lyons then at Paris, who said that they had been instructed by the king to order the authorities to copy the example of the capital. The fanatical party was now clamorous; but Mandelot, cautious and politic, would act on no such instructions, although he had taken the precaution of closing the gates, and of commanding the Protestants, on pain of imprisonment, to remain in their houses. Friday morning came, and with it the arrival of Sieur du Peyrat from court, bearing the royal letter written on the day of the massacre, in which it was represented as the exclusive work of the Guises, and the king strenuously enjoined the maintenance of the Edict of Pacification.[1106] These were the public instructions sent to Mandelot; but they were not all. There is a suspicious little postscript to the letter: "Monsieur de Mandelot, you will give credit to the bearer respecting the matter which I have charged him to tell you."[1107] What these verbal orders were which the king, not venturing to commit to paper, commissioned Du Peyrat to communicate, the reply of the governor himself distinctly reveals; it was the arrest of the Protestants and the confiscation of their property.[1108] Still more perplexed as to what course to pursue, Mandelot held a long private conference with the messenger, while the échevins impatiently awaited its conclusion. The governor now called in the municipal officers for consultation, and with them agreed to order the immediate imprisonment of the Huguenots. He was not, however, even yet fully convinced of the propriety of this step, for scarcely had he given the order when he recalled it.[1109] Fearing that the troops at his disposal might prove insufficient, and dreading with good reason lest the employment of the city militia for this purpose might lead to scenes of disorder which he would find himself powerless to control, he preferred to send for such reinforcements as the neighboring noblemen of the province could furnish.[1110] Meantime, the commotion throughout Lyons had rapidly increased. On Thursday and Friday nights many members of the Reformed Church had been dragged from their houses as if to prison, but most of them had been barbarously despatched by the way. Among others, one of the ministers, Monsieur Jacques l'Anglois, was stabbed and thrown into the river. On Saturday morning Mandelot, seeing the confusion hourly increasing, deemed it impolitic to wait any longer for the troops he was expecting, and resolved upon effecting his purpose by ruse. He therefore published a proclamation by sound of trumpet, bidding all the Huguenots to assemble at his house to hear the good pleasure of the king. The Huguenots, deceived by the professions of his Majesty, came in great numbers; but no sooner had they all arrived, than they were seized by the soldiers and hurried away to prison. The common prison, "La Roanne," being too contracted to contain so large a multitude, three hundred or more were placed in that of the Archbishop's palace, and others in the cloisters of the Celestine Monks and the Gray Friars. At the same time an inventory was being made of all the goods belonging to Protestants throughout the city.

These measures, instead of allaying, only inflamed the passions of the populace the more. That night the murders surpassed those of the previous nights in number and atrocity, and when Sunday morning dawned the people were ready for still greater excesses. At about eight o'clock they entered unopposed the Gray Friars, and butchered every Huguenot they found. Two hours later, assuming the forms of law, a self-constituted commission, headed by André Mornieu, one of the échevins or aldermen, presenting themselves successively at the archiepiscopal prison and at the Roanne, summoned the inmates to abjure their faith and go to mass. Only thirty persons in the one, and about twenty in the other, consented. These were sent to the Celestine monastery and afterward released. Of the others a careful list was drawn up. Their fate was sealed; but an unexpected difficulty arose. The public hangman refused to execute the sentence of an unauthorized tribunal. So did the soldiers. At last assassins were obtained from the ranks of the turbulent inhabitants. About three o'clock that afternoon the archbishop's prison was visited. To describe with minuteness the scene of horror that ensued would scarcely be possible. Two hundred and sixty-three persons,[1111] of the very best and most industrious part of the population of Lyons,[1112] called by name according to the roll previously made, were murdered in rapid succession. Never was there an exhibition of more pitiless cruelty. Meanwhile, where was the governor? He had gone, in company with the commandant of the citadel, to suppress a threatened disturbance in the Faubourg de la Guillotière, on the left bank of the Rhône. He returned only in time to find the deed done, and to disperse those who had gone to the Roanne to repeat it there. His demonstrations of anger were loud, and a liberal reward was offered for the detection of any that had participated in the slaughter.[1113] But this did not prevent the same body of cutthroats from visiting the Roanne, soon after nightfall, and despatching all the Protestants that were there, to the number of about seventy. Many of them, by an excess of barbarity, the assassins tied together by a single rope, and threw, while yet alive, into the water. On the following day the bodies which had not yet found a watery grave were carried to the other side of the Saône, where, stripped and mangled, they were about to be buried in the cemetery of the Abbaye d'Esnay, when the monks refused them admission into the consecrated ground, and pointed to the Rhône as a more fitting destination. Even now they were not spared further mutilation; for an apothecary of Lyons, having initiated the murderers into the valuable properties of human fat as a medicinal substance, the miserable remains were put to new use before being consigned to the river. Down to the Mediterranean these ghastly witnesses of the ferocity of the passions of the Lyonnese Roman Catholics carried fear and disgust, and for weeks the inhabitants of Arles and other places carefully abstained from drinking the water of the polluted stream.[1114]

Responsibility of Mandelot.

The part which Mandelot took in this awful tragedy has been very differently estimated, but I am inclined to think that the governor is not chargeable with any direct responsibility for the butchery in the prisons of Lyons. Certainly this seems to be established by his letter to the king, written in the morning of the day on which it occurred; for he would scarcely have expressed his great desire and hope to be able to prevent any outbreak, if he had planned, or even foreseen, the events of the evening.[1115] The story must therefore be apocryphal, that Mandelot, in commissioning one of the chief assassins to execute the bloody work, blasphemously said: "I intrust the whole to you, and, as Jesus Christ said to Saint Peter, whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven."[1116] It was, however, no conscientious scruple that deterred the governor from actively taking part. Mandelot was scandalously anxious to obtain his part of the plunder, and was not ashamed to appear as a suppliant for the confiscated property of the Huguenots almost before their bodies were cold.[1117] But he was unwilling, without the express orders of his sovereign, written with his own hand, to commit an act which, the more successful it might be, was the more certain to be disavowed and punished. He was right: a subordinate could not be too careful in dealing with so treacherous a court.

The massacre at Rouen.

Few cities were so ripe for the massacre of the Protestants as the capital of Normandy. There the passions of the Roman Catholics, inflamed by the civil wars, had not been suffered to cool. Even in the provincial parliament the papists could hardly submit to receive into their deliberations again the five or six Huguenot counsellors who had been expelled or had fled at the outbreak of hostilities, but whom the Edict of Pacification restored to their ancient functions and dignity; and the secret registers, among other unfortunate scenes, chronicle particularly a violent discussion, degenerating into angry altercation between President Vialard and the Huguenot member Maynet.[1118] The bloody assault of the populace of Rouen upon the reformed in March, 1571, mentioned in a previous page,[1119] had been but slightly punished. Few of the guilty failed to escape from the city, and the sole penalty suffered had been an execution in effigy. These turbulent men had ever since that time been watching an opportunity to return. They were now burning with a desire to signalize their advent by bloody reprisals. Monsieur de Carouge, governor of the city, was, however, a just and upright man,[1120] and they could not hope for countenance in their plans from him. In fact, the contemporary accounts inform us that he received from the king repeated orders to exterminate the Huguenots of Rouen,[1121] which he could not bring himself to execute, and that he sent messengers to remonstrate with his Majesty who returned without succeeding in shaking his determination; and hereupon the governor found himself obliged to shut himself up in the castle, and permit the work which had been intrusted to others also, to take its course.[1122] The secret records of parliament, however, reveal the fact that Carouge received from Paris the order to leave Rouen and visit other portions of Normandy, in order to restore the quiet and peace which had been much disturbed of late. The real, though perhaps not the ostensible object of this commission was to rid the city of the presence of a magistrate whose well known integrity might render it futile to attempt a massacre of the innocent. The records also show that, contrary to the current report, both the municipal authorities and the parliament, greatly alarmed at the danger menacing Rouen in case of his departure, implored him to remain;[1123] but that the king's peremptory commands left him no discretion, and he was obliged to leave the unhappy city to its fate. The able historian of the Norman Parliament has rightly observed that the governor, whether he left Rouen because he could not consent to execute the barbarous injunctions that were sent him, or because his character was so well known that the court was unwilling to intrust them to him, is equally deserving of praise; and not without reason does this writer claim similar respect for the judicial body which manifested its desire to save everything, by retaining him at Rouen.[1124] Here, as elsewhere, a great part of the Protestants had been arrested and placed in the prisons, to shield them from popular violence. The governor believed this to be the safest place for them; and at least one instance is known of a father who was so convinced of it that he brought thither his Huguenot son, whom he might have sent out of the city.[1125]

The storm, so long delayed, broke out at last on Wednesday, the seventeenth of September, and lasted four entire days. The gates were closed, and the organized bands of murderers, under the leadership of Laurent de Maromme, one of the most sanguinary of the turbulent men who had returned from banishment, and of a priest, Claude Montereul, curate of the church of St. Pierre, had undisputed possession of the city. First they slaughtered like sheep the prisoners in the spacious "conciergerie" of the parliament house and in the other prisons of the city. Next they burst into the houses, and nearly every atrocity which history is compelled at any time reluctantly to chronicle, was perpetrated on unresisting men, on tender women, on unoffending children. Not less than five hundred persons, and perhaps even more, perished in a butchery, whose details I gladly pass over in silence.[1126] Grim humor and charity were incongruously mingled with the most brutal inhumanity. The assassins jocularly denominated their work one of "accommodating" their victims;[1127] and the clothes of the Protestants—whose bodies were buried in great ditches outside of the Porte Cauchoise—after having been carefully washed, were piously distributed among the poor.[1128] The tragedy finished, the farce of an investigation was instituted by the officers of justice, but no punishment was ever inflicted upon any Roman Catholic, other than that which could be recognized in the retributive judgments befalling a few of the most notable, and especially the cruel Maromme, at the hand of God.[1129]

At Toulouse.