History of the Rise of the Huguenots, Vol. 2

by Henry Martyn Baird

The results of the war on the king's side were certainly very meagre. To have fought for the greater part of a year with the miserable Huguenots that had escaped the massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day, and then to conclude the war by such a peace, was certainly ignominious enough for Charles and his mother. For the Huguenot party was now, more than ever, a recognized power in the state, with three strongholds—one in the west and two in the south. Into no one of these could a royal garrison be introduced. La Rochelle, in particular, having repulsed every assault of the best army that could be brought against it, was acknowledged invincible by the exemptions accorded to it in common with Nismes and Montauban. It was hardly by such expectations that Charles had been prevailed upon to throw down the gage of war to his subjects of the reformed faith.

The siege and famine of Sancerre continue.

Meanwhile, the inhabitants of Sancerre, not even named in the edict,[1308] had been sustained under appalling difficulties by the confident hope of assistance from the south. But the hope was long deferred, and they grew sick at heart. The prospect was already dark enough, when, on the second of June, a Protestant soldier, who had made his way into the city through the enemy's lines, brought the depressing announcement that no aid must be expected from Languedoc for six weeks. As but little wheat remained in Sancerre, the immediate effect of the intelligence was that liberty was given to some seventy of the poor to leave the city walls. At the same time the daily ration was limited to half a pound of grain. A week later it was reduced to one-quarter of a pound. Not long after only a single pound was doled out once a week, and by the end of the month the supply entirely gave out. The beginning of July reduced the besieged to the necessity of tasking their ingenuity to make palatable food of the hides of cattle, next of the skins of horses, dogs, and asses. The stock of even this unsavory material soon became exhausted; whereupon, not very unnaturally, parchment was turned to good account. Manuscripts a good century old were eaten with relish. Soaked for a couple of days in water, and afterward boiled as much longer, when they became glutinous they were fried, like tripe, or prepared with herbs and spices, after the manner of a hodge-podge. The writer who is our authority for these culinary details, informs us that he had seen the dish devoured with eagerness while the original letters written upon the parchment were still legible.[1309] But the urgent necessities of their situation did not suffer the half-famished inhabitants to stop here. With the proverbial ingenuity of their nation, they turned their attention to the parchment on old drums, and subjected to the skilful hands of cooks the discarded hoofs, horns, and bones of animals, the harness of horses, and even refuse scraps of leather. There seemed to be nothing they could not lay under contribution to furnish at least a little nutriment.

And yet ghastly hunger little by little tightened her relentless embrace. Almost all the children under twelve years of age died. In the universal reign of famine there were at last found those who were ready to repeat the horrible crime of feeding upon the flesh of their own kindred. It was discovered that a husband and wife, with a neighboring crone, had endeavored to satisfy the gnawings of hunger by eating a newly dead child. Their guilt came speedily to light, and was punished according to the severe code of the sixteenth century. The father was sentenced by the council to be burned alive; his wife to be strangled and her body consigned to the flames; while the corpse of the old woman who had instigated the foul deed but had meanwhile died, was ordered to be dug up and burned. But the feeling of the great majority of the besieged was far removed from that despair which prompts to an inhuman disregard of natural decency and affection. Near the close of July a boy of barely ten years, as he lay on his death-bed, said to his weeping parents: "Why do you weep thus at seeing me die of hunger? I do not ask bread, mother; I know you have none. But since God wills that I die thus, we must accept it cheerfully. Was not that holy man Lazarus hungry? Have I not so read in the Bible?"[1310]

The catastrophe could not much longer be deferred. Within the city speedy death stared every man in the face. Permission had, we have seen, been accorded to the poor, early in June, to go forth from the city walls; but the besieging force had mercilessly driven them back when they attempted to gain the open country. Numbers, unwilling to accept a second time the fatal hospitality of the city, preferred to remain in their exposed situation, miserably dragging out a precarious existence by subsisting upon snails, buds of trees and shrubs—even to the very grass of the field.

Sancerre capitulates.

Happily for Sancerre, the political exigencies of the royal court insured for the besieged Protestants, in the inevitable capitulation, more favorable terms than they might otherwise have obtained. As early as the eighteenth of July, Léry had been informed at a parley, by a former acquaintance on the Roman Catholic side, that a general peace had been concluded, and that Henry of Anjou had been elected to the throne of Poland. This first intimation was discredited by the cautious Protestants, not unused to the wiles of the enemy. But when, some twenty days later (on the sixth of August), the statement was confirmed, and the Sancerrois received the additional assurance that they would be mildly treated, their surprise knew no bounds. The terms of surrender were easily arranged. A ransom of forty thousand livres was to be exacted from the city. On the thirty-first of August, M. de la Chastre made his solemn entry into Sancerre, accompanied by a band of Roman Catholic priests chanting a Te Deum over his success. As was too frequently the case, the promise of immunity to the inhabitants was but poorly kept. Scarcely had two weeks passed before the "bailli" Johanneau,[1311] summoned from his house by the archers of the prévôt, on the plea that M. de la Chastre desired his presence, was treacherously murdered on the way to the governor's house. Besides assassination, other infractions of the capitulation were committed; the gates of the city were burned, the walls dismantled, many of the houses torn down. In fact, so unmercifully was Sancerre harried, partly by the troops, partly by the peasantry of the neighborhood, and by the "bailli" of Berry, that the reformed church of this place seems to have been, for the time, completely dispersed.[1312]

Thus ended a siege which had lasted some eight months. The besieged had lost only eighty-four men by the direct effects of warfare; but more than five hundred persons perished during the last six weeks of sheer starvation.[1313]

Sancerre owed its release from the horrors of the siege in great part to the same causes that had powerfully contributed to the conclusion of the peace. The Polish ambassadors, coming to proffer the crown to the king's brother, Henry of Anjou, were about to reach the French court. They were already not a little surprised at the discovery that the statements and promises made in the king's name by that not over-scrupulous negotiator, Montluc, Bishop of Valence, were impudent impostures, fabricated for no other purpose than to secure at all hazards the success of the French candidate for the Polish throne. To exhibit to them at this critical juncture the edifying spectacle of a royal governor of the province of Berry engaged in the reduction of a city the only crime of which was its desire to enjoy religious liberty—this would have been a dangerous venture. Consequently it was no fortuitous coincidence that Sancerre capitulated the very day the Polish ambassadors made their appearance.

Reception of the Polish ambassadors.