§ 139.7. Ireland.—Hadrian IV., himself an Englishman (§ [96, 14]), on the plea that the donation of Constantine (§ 87, 4) embraced also the “islands,” gave over Ireland to King Henry II. as a papal fief in A.D. 1154. Yet the king only managed to conquer the eastern border, the Pale, during the years 1171-1175. Henry VIII. introduced the Reformation into this province in A.D. 1535, by the help of his Archbishop of Dublin, George Brown. The ecclesiastical supremacy of the Crown was proclaimed, monasteries closed and their property impropriated, partly divided among Irish and English peers. But in matters of faith there was little change. More opposition was shown to the sweeping reformation of faith and worship of Edward VI. The bishops, Brown included, resisted, and the inferior clergy, who now were required to read the Book of Common Prayer in a language to most of them strange, diligently fostered the popular attachment to the old faith. The ascension of Queen Mary therefore was welcomed in Ireland, while Elizabeth’s attempt to reintroduce the Reformation met with opposition. Repeated outbreaks, in which also the people of the western districts took part, ended in A.D. 1601 in the complete subjugation of the whole island.By wholesale confiscation of estates the entire nobility was impoverished and the church property was made over to the Anglican clergy; but the masses of the Irish people continued Catholic, and willingly supported their priests out of their own scanty resources.[386]—Continuation, § 153, 6.
§ 139.8. Scotland.—Patrick Hamilton, who had studied in Wittenberg and Marburg, first preached the gospel in Scotland, and died at the stake in his twenty-fourth year in A.D. 1528.[387] Amid the political confusions of the regency during the minority of James V., A.D. 1513-1542, a sister’s son of Henry VIII. of England, the Reformation obtained firm root among the nobles, who hated the clergy, and among the oppressed people, notwithstanding that the bishops, with David Beaton, Archbishop of St. Andrew’s at their head, sought to crush it by the most violent persecution. When Henry VIII. called on his nephew to assist him in his Reformation work, James refused, and yielding to Beaton’s advice formed an alliance with France and married Mary of Guise. This occasioned a war in A.D. 1540, the disastrous issue of which led to the king’s death of a broken heart. According to the king’s will Beaton was to undertake the regency, for Mary Stuart was only seven days old. But the nobles transferred it to the Protestant Earl of Arran, who imprisoned Beaton and had the royal child affianced to Henry’s son Edward. Beaton escaped, by connivance of the queen-mother got possession of the child, and compelled the weak regent, in A.D. 1543, to abjure the English alliance. The persecution of the Protestants by fire and sword now began afresh. After many others had fallen victims to his persecuting rage, Beaton had a famous Protestant preacher, George Wishart, burnt before his eyes; but was soon after, in A.D. 1546, surprised in his castle and slain. When in A.D. 1548 Somerset, the English regent after Henry’s death, sought to renew negotiations about the marriage of Mary, now five years old, with Edward VI., her mother had her taken for safety to France, where she was educated in a convent and affianced to the dauphin, afterwards Francis II. By hypocritical acts she contrived to have the regency transferred in A.D. 1554 from Arran to herself. For two years the Reformation progressed without much opposition. In December, A.D. 1557, its most devoted promoters made a “covenant,” pledging themselves in life and death to advance the word of God and uproot the idolatry of the Romish church. The queen-regent, however, after the marriage of her daughter with the dauphin in A.D. 1558, felt herself strong enough to defy the Protestant nobles. The old strict laws against heretics were renewed, and a tribunal established for the punishment of apostatizing priests.The last victim of the persecution was Walter Mill, a priest eighty-two years old, who died at the stake at Perth (?) in A.D. 1559.[388] The country now rose in open revolt. The regent was thus obliged to make proclamation of universal religious toleration. But instead of keeping her promise to have all French troops withdrawn, their number was actually increased after Francis II. ascended the French throne. Elizabeth, too, was indignant at the assumption by the French king and queen of the English royal title, so that she aided the insurgents with an army and a fleet. During the victorious progress of the English the regent died, in A.D. 1560. The French were obliged to withdraw, and the victory of the Scotch Protestants was decisive.
§ 139.9. There was one man, whose unbending opposition to the constitution, worship, doctrine, and discipline of the Church of Rome, manifested with a rigid determination that has scarcely ever been equalled, left its indelible impress upon the Scottish Reformation. John Knox, born in A.D. 1505, was by the study of Augustine and the Bible led to adopt evangelical views, which in A.D. 1542 he preached in the south of Scotland. Persecuted in consequence by Archbishop Beaton, he joined the conspirators after that prelate’s assassination, in A.D. 1546, was taken prisoner, and in A.D. 1547 served as slave in the French galleys. The ill treatment he thus endured developed his naturally strong and resolute character and that fearlessness which so characterized all his subsequent life. By English mediation he was set free in A.D. 1549, and became in A.D. 1551 chaplain to Edward VI., but took offence at the popish leaven allowed to remain in the English Reformation, and consequently declined an offered bishopric. When the Catholic Mary ascended the throne in A.D. 1553, he fled to Geneva, where he enjoyed the closest intimacy with Calvin, whose doctrine of predestination, rigid presbyterianism, and rigorous discipline he thoroughly approved. After presiding for some time over a congregation of English refugees at Frankfort-on-the-Maine, he returned in A.D. 1555 to Scotland, but in the following year accepted a call to the church of English refugees at Geneva that had meanwhile been formed. The Scottish bishops, who had not ventured to touch him while present, condemned him to death after his departure, and burned him in effigy. But Knox kept up a lively correspondence with his native land by letters, proclamations, and controversial tracts, and with the help of several friends translated the Scriptures into English. In A.D. 1558 he published with the title, “The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women,” the most violent of all his controversial works, directed mainly against the English Queen Mary, who was now dead. It roused against him the unconquerable dislike of her successor, and increased the hatred of the other two Maries against him to the utmost pitch. Yet he accepted the call of the Protestant lords, and returned next year to Scotland, and was the heart and soul of the revolution that soon thereafter broke out. Images and mass-books were burnt, altars in churches broken in pieces, and 150 monasteries were destroyed; for said Knox, “If the nests be pulled down, the crows will not come back.” After the death of the regent in A.D. 1560, the Parliament proclaimed the abolition of the papacy, ratified the strictly Calvinistic Confessio Scotica, and forbade celebrating the mass on pain of death. Then in December, the first General Assembly prescribed, in the “First Book of Discipline,” a strictly presbyterial constitution under Christ as only head, with a rigidly puritan order of worship (§ 163, 3).
§ 139.10. In Aug., A.D. 1561, Queen Mary Stuart, highly cultured and high-spirited, returned from France to Scotland, a young widow in her 19th year. Brought up in a French convent in fanatical attachment to the Romish Church, and at the French court, with absolutist ideas as well as easy-going morals, the severe Calvinism and moral strictness of Scottish Puritanism were to her as distasteful as its assertion of political independence. At the instigation of her half-brother James Stuart, whom she raised to the earldom of Moray, and who was head of the ministry as one of the leaders of the reformed party, she promised on her arrival not to interfere with the ecclesiastical arrangements of the country, but refused to give royal sanction to the proceedings of A.D. 1560, held Catholic service in her court chapel, and on all hands favoured the Romanists. By her marriage, in A.D. 1565, with the young Catholic Lord Darnley, grandson by a second marriage of her grandmother Margaret of England, who now assumed the title of king, Moray was driven from his position, and the restoration of Catholicism was vigorously and openly prosecuted by negotiations with Spain, France, and the pope. The director of all those intrigues was the Italian musician David Rizzio, who came to the country as papal agent, and had become Mary’s favourite and private secretary. The rudeness and profligacy of the young king had soon estranged from him the heart of the queen. He therefore took part in a conspiracy of the Protestant lords, promising to go over to their faith. Their first victim was the hated Rizzio. He was fallen upon and slain on 9th March, A.D. 1566, while he sat beside the queen, already far advanced in pregnancy. Darnley soon repented his deed, was reconciled to the queen, fled with her to the Castle of Dunbar, and an army gathered by the Protestant Earl of Bothwell soon suppressed the rising. The rebels and assassins were at Mary’s entreaty almost all pardoned. Darnley, now living in mortal enmity with the heads of the Protestant nobility, and again on bad terms with the queen, fell sick in Dec., A.D. 1566, at Glasgow. On his sick-bed a reconciliation with his wife was effected, and apparently in order that she might the better nurse him, he was brought to a villa near Edinburgh. But on the night of 9th Feb., A.D. 1567, while Mary was present at the marriage of a servant, the house with its inhabitants was blown up by an explosion of gunpowder. Public opinion charged Bothwell and the queen with contriving the horrible crime. Bothwell was tried, but acquitted by the lords. Suspicion increased when soon after Bothwell carried off the queen to his castle, and married her on 15th May. In the civil war that now broke out Mary was taken prisoner, and on 24th July obliged to abdicate in favour of her one-year old son James VI., for whom Mary undertook the regency. Bothwell fled to Denmark, where he died in misery and want; but Mary was allowed to escape from prison by the young George Douglas. He also raised on her behalf a small army, which, however, in May, A.D. 1568, was completely destroyed by Moray at the village of Langside. The unhappy queen could now only seek protection with her deadly enemy Elizabeth of England, who, after twenty years’ imprisonment, sent her to the scaffold in A.D. 1587, on the plea that she was guilty of murdering her own husband and of high treason in plotting the death of the English queen.—Mary’s guilt would be conclusively established, if a correspondence with Bothwell, said to have been found in her desk, should be accepted as genuine. But all her apologists, with apparently strong conviction, have sought to prove that these letters are fabrications of her enemies.The thorough investigation given to original documents, however, by Bresslau [Breslau], has resulted in recognising only the second of these as a forgery, and so proving, not indeed Mary’s complicity in the murder of her husband, but her adulterous love for Bothwell, and showing too that her apparent reconciliation with Darnley on his sick-bed was only hypocritical.[389]
§ 139.11. The young queen had at first sought to win by her fair speeches the bold and influential reformer John Knox, who was then preacher in Edinburgh. But his heart was cased in sevenfold armour against all her flatteries, as afterwards against her threats; even her tears found him as stern and cold as her wrath. When he called an assembly of nobles to put a stop to the Catholic worship introduced by her at court, he was charged with high treason, but acquitted by the lords. The marriage with Darnley and all that followed from this unhappy union only increased his boldness. He publicly preached without reserve against the papacy and the light carriage of the queen, on the outbreak of the civil war urged her deposition, and demanded her execution for adultery and the murder of her husband. The assassination of Regent Moray in A.D. 1570 threw the country into further confusion, which was only overcome by his third successor, Morton. The fugitive Knox now returned to Edinburgh, and soon after died, on 24th Nov., A.D. 1572. Of his extant writings the most important is his “History of the Reformation,” reaching down to A.D. 1567. Morton’s vigorous government completely destroyed Mary’s party, but also restricted the pretensions of Presbyterianism. After his overthrow in A.D. 1578, James VI., now in his 12th year, himself undertook the government at the head of a council of state. His weakness of character showed itself in his vacillating between an alliance with Catholic Spain and one with Protestant England, as well as between secret favouring of Catholicism and open endeavouring to supersede puritan Presbyterianism by Anglican-Protestant episcopacy. In A.D. 1584 the parliament, enlarged by the introduction of the lower orders of the nobility, so defined the royal supremacy as to deprive the Presbyterian church of several of her rights and privileges. But in A.D. 1592 the king was obliged absolutely to restore these.After Elizabeth’s death in A.D. 1603, as the great-grandson of Henry VII., he united the kingdoms of England and Scotland under the title of James I.[390]—Continuation, § 153, 6.
§ 139.12. The Netherlands.—By the marriage of Mary of Burgundy, the heiress of Charles the Bald, with Maximilian I., in A.D. 1478, the Netherlands passed over to the house of Hapsburg, and after Maximilian’s death, in A.D. 1519, went to his grandson Charles V. Even in the previous period the ground was broken in these regions for the introduction of the Reformation of the 16th century by means of the Brothers of the Common Life (§ [112, 9]) and the Dutch precursors of the Reformation (§ [119, 10]), working as they did among an intrepid and liberty loving people. The writings of Luther were introduced at a very early date into Holland, and the first martyrs from the Lutheran Confession (§ [128, 1]) were led to the stake at Antwerp, in A.D. 1523. The alliance with France and Switzerland, however, was the occasion of subsequently securing the triumph of the Reformed Confession (see § 160, 1). But fanatical Anabaptists soon followed in the wake of the reform movement, and sent forth their emissaries into Germany and Switzerland. As the emperor had here an authority as absolute as his heart could desire, he proceeded to execute unrelentingly the edict of Worms, and multitudes of witnesses for the gospel as well as fanatical sectaries were put to death by the sword and at the stake. Still more dreadful was the havoc committed by the Inquisition after Charles’ abdication, in A.D. 1555, under his son and successor Philip II. of Spain, which had for its aim the overthrow alike of ecclesiastical and political liberty. In order the more successfully to withstand the Reformation, the four original bishoprics were increased by the addition of fourteen new bishoprics, and three were raised into archbishoprics, Utrecht, Mechlin, and Cambray. But even these measures failed in securing the end desired, because the Dutch, even those who hitherto had remained faithful to the Romish Church, saw in them simply an instrument for advancing Spanish despotism.—In A.D. 1523 Luther’s translation of the N.T. had already been rendered into Dutch and printed at Amsterdam. In A.D. 1545 Jacob van Liesfield translated the whole Bible, and was for this sent to the scaffold in A.D. 1545. A Calvinistic symbol was set forth in A.D. 1562 in the Belgic Confession. The league formed by the nobles, in A.D. 1566, to offer resistance to the tyranny of the Spaniards, to which their oppressors gave the contemptuous designation of the Beggars—a name which they themselves adopted as a title of honour—increased in strength and importance from day to day, and the people, thirsting for revenge, tore down churches, images, and altars. The prudent regent, however, Margaret of Parma, Philip’s half-sister, would have been more successful in preventing an outburst of rebellion by her conciliatory manœuvres, had her brother given her greater freedom of action. Instead of doing so he sent to her aid, in A.D. 1587, the terrible Duke of Alva, with a standing army of 10,000 Spaniards. The “Bloody Council” instituted by him for stamping out the revolt now began its horrible proceedings, sending thousands upon thousands to the rack and the scaffold. The regent, protesting against such acts, demanded her recall, and Alva was put in her place. The bloody tribunal moved now from city to city; all the leading throughfares were covered with victims hanging from gibbets, and when Alva at last, in A.D. 1573, was at his own request recalled, he could boast of having carried out in six years 18,600 executions. Meanwhile the great Prince of Orange, William the Silent, formerly royal governor of the Dutch Provinces, but since A.D. 1568 a fugitive under the ban, had now openly signified his adhesion to Protestantism, and in 1572 placed himself at the head of the revolt. After gaining several victories by land and by sea, he succeeded, in the so called Pacification of Ghent, of A.D. 1576, in uniting almost all the provinces, Protestant and Catholic, under a resolution to exercise toleration to one another and show resistance to the common foe. The new governor, Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma, managed indeed to detach the southern Catholic provinces from the league, but all the more closely did the seven northern provinces bind themselves together in the Union of Utrecht of A.D. 1579, promising to fight to the end for their religious and political liberty. William’s truest friend, counsellor, and director of his political actions, since the formation of the league of A.D. 1566, was Philip van Marnix, Count of St. Aldegonde. He had drawn up the articles of the league, and was equally celebrated as a statesman and soldier, and as theologian, satirist, orator, and poet. He was pre-eminently an ardent patriot, and an enthusiastic adherent of Calvin’s Reformation. He had been himself a pupil of the great Genevan. Besides a spirited material version of the Psalter, his chief satirico-theological work was “The Beehive of the Holy Roman Church,” written in the Flemish dialect.—After William’s assassination by the hand of a Catholic, in A.D. 1584, he was succeeded by his son Maurice, who after long years of bloody conflict succeeded, in A.D. 1609, in completely freeing his country from the Spanish yoke.[391]
§ 139.13. France.—The Reformation in France had its beginning from Wittenberg, but subsequently the Genevan reformers obtained a dominating influence. Even in A.D. 1521, the Sorbonne issued a Determinatio super doctr. Luth., pronouncing Luther’s teaching and writings heretical, which Melanchthon in the same year answered with unusual vigour in his Apologia adv. furiosum Parisiensium theologastrorum decretum.Everything depended upon the attitude which the young king Francis I., A.D. 1515-1547, might assume in reference to the various religious parties. His love of humanist studies, now flourishing in France, whose zealous promoter and protector he was against the attacks of the scholastic Sorbonne (§ [120, 8]), as well as the traditional policy of his family in ecclesiastical matters since the time of St. Louis (§ [96, 21]), seemed to favour the hope that he would not prove altogether hostile to the ideas of the Reformation. But even as early as A.D. 1516 he had, in his concordat with the pope (§ [110, 14]), surrendered the acquisitions of the Basel Council by the revocation of the Pragmatic Sanction of Charles VII., and in this way, by the right given him to nominate all the bishops and abbots, he obtained a power over all the clergy of his realm which was too much in accordance with his dynastic ideas to allow of his sacrificing it in favour of the Lutheran autonomy in the management of the church, let alone the yet more radical demands of the Calvinistic constitution. Even in his antagonism to the emperor (§§ [126, 5], [6]; [133, 7]), which led him to befriend in a very decided manner the German Protestants, his interests crossed one another, inasmuch as he required to retain the goodwill of the pope. Suppression of Protestantism in his own land and the fostering of it in Germany were thus the aims of his crooked policy. He did indeed for a time entertain the idea of introducing a moderate Reformation into France after the Erasmian model, in order to secure closer attachment to and union with German Protestantism. He entered into negotiations with Philip the Magnanimous, and had Melanchthon invited in A.D. 1535 to attend a conference on these matters in France. Melanchthon was not indisposed to go, but was interdicted by his prince the elector, who feared lest he might make too great concessions. And just about this time fanatically violent pamphlets and placards were published, which were even thrown into the royal apartments, and thus the anger of the king was roused to the utmost pitch. The persecutions, which, from A.D. 1524, had already brought many isolated witnesses to the scaffold and the stake, now assumed a systematic and general character. In A.D. 1535, an Inquisition tribunal was set up, with members nominated by the pope, and as supplementary thereto there was instituted in the Parliament of Paris the so-called chambre ardente: the former drew up the process against the heretics, the latter pronounced and executed the sentence. Thousands of heroic confessors died under torture, on the gallows, by sword, or by fire.Under Henry II., A.D. 1547-1559, who continued his father’s crooked policy, the chambre ardente became more and more active, and the cruelty of the persecution increased. Among the sworn foes of the Reformation, Diana of Poitiers, an old love of his father’s, had for a time the greatest influence over the king. He raised her to the rank of duchess. With diabolic satisfaction she gloated upon the spectacle of autos-de-fé carried out at her request, and enriched herself with the confiscated goods of the victims. Side by side with her, inspired by a like hate of Protestantism, stood the great marshal and all-powerful minister of state, the Constable Montmorency. These two were further backed up by all the influence of the powerful ducal family of the Guises, a branch of a Lorraine house naturalized in France, consisting of six brothers, at their head the two eldest, the Cardinal Charles of Lorraine, Archbishop of Rheims, who died in A.D. 1574, and Francis, the conqueror of Calais. The least influential in the league at that time was the queen, Catharine de Medici.
§ 139.14. In spite of all persecutions, the Reformed church made rapid progress, especially in the southern districts.Its adherents came to be known by the name of Huguenots, meaning originally Leaguers, Covenanters, on account of their connection with Geneva. A popular etymology of the word derives it from the nightly assemblies in a locality haunted by the spirit of King Hugo. Calvin and Beza, as sons of France, assisted the young church with counsel and help. But even within the bounds of the kingdom it had very important political supporters. Certain members of the house of Bourbon, a powerful branch of the royal family, Anton, who married the brilliant heiress of Navarre, Jeanne d’Albret, and his brother Louis de Condé, had attached themselves to the Protestant cause. Also other distinguished personages, e.g. the noble Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, a nephew of Montmorency, and several prominent members of Parliament, were enthusiastically devoted to Protestantism, and, withdrawing from the frivolous and licentious court, gave to the profession of the reformed faith a wide reputation for strict morality and deep piety. The first general synod of the reformed church was held in Paris from 25th to 28th May, A.D. 1559. It adopted a Calvinistic symbol, the Confessio Gallicana, and, as a directory for the constitution and discipline of the church, forty articles, also inspired by the spirit of Calvin.—Henry II. was followed in succession by his three sons, Francis, Charles, and Henry, all of whom died without issue.Under Francis II., A.D. 1559, 1560, who ascended the throne in his sixteenth year, the two Guises, the uncles of his queen Mary Stuart, held unlimited sway and gave abundance of work to the chambre ardente. A conspiracy directed against them in A.D. 1560 led to the execution of 1,200 persons implicated in it. Even the two Bourbons were cast into prison, and the younger condemned to death. The king’s early death, however, prevented the execution of the sentence.The queen-mother, Catharine de Medici, now succeeded in breaking off the yoke of the Guises and securing to herself the regency during the minority of her son Charles IX., A.D. 1560-1574. But the attempts of the Guises to undermine her authority obliged her to seek supporters meanwhile among the Protestants. Coligny was able in A.D. 1560 to demand religious toleration of the imperial Parliament, and succeeded at last so far that in A.D. 1561 an edict was issued abolishing capital punishment for heresy. In order to bring about wherever that was possible an understanding between the two great religious parties, a five weeks’ religious conference was held in September of that same year in the Abbey of Poissy, near Paris, to which on the evangelical side Beza from Geneva and Peter Martyr from Zürich, besides many other theologians, were invited. On the Catholic side, the Cardinal of Lorraine represented the doctrine of his church, and subsequently also the general of the Jesuits, Lainez. The proceedings, in which Beza’s learning, eloquence, and praiseworthy courtesy toward his opponents had great weight, were concentrated on the doctrines of the Church and the Lord’s Supper, but yielded no result. In order that they might be able to inflame the Lutherans and the Reformed against one another, the Catholics endeavoured to bring forward supporters of the Augsburg Confession into the discussions on those points. Five German theologians were actually brought forward, among them Jac. Andreä of Württemberg, but too late to take part in the conference. On 17th January, A.D. 1562, the regent issued an edict, by which the Protestants were allowed to hold religious services outside of the towns, and also to have meetings of synod under the supervision of royal commissioners.
§ 139.15. The rage of the Guises and their fanatical party at this edict knew no bounds. Francis of Guise swore to cut it up with his sword, and on 1st March, A.D. 1562, at Passy in Champagne, he fell upon the Huguenots assembled there for worship in a barn, and slew them almost to a man. At Cahors, a Huguenot place of worship was surrounded by a Catholic mob and set on fire. None of those gathered together there survived, for those who escaped the flames were waylaid and murdered. At Toulouse, the oppressed Protestants, with wives and children, to the number of 4,000, had betaken themselves to the capitol. They were promised a free outlet, and were then slaughtered, because no one, it was said, should keep his word with a heretic (§ 200, 3). Louis Condé summoned his fellow Protestants to take up arms in their own defence against such atrocities, entrenched himself in Orleans, and obtained, by the help of the Landgrave Philip of Hesse, German auxiliaries. The Guises, on the other hand, won over to their side the king and his mother. And now the strict legitimist Coligny placed himself at the head of the Huguenot movement. The battle of Dreux in Dec., A.D. 1562, resulted unfavourably to the Protestants, but during the siege of Orleans Francis of Guise was assassinated by a Huguenot nobleman. The regent now, in the peace edict of Amboise, of 19th Nov., A.D. 1563, allowed to the Protestants liberty of worship except in certain districts and cities, of which Paris was one. After securing emancipation from the yoke of the Guises, however, she soon began openly to show her old hatred of the Protestants. She joined in a league with Spain for the extirpating of heresy, restricted in A.D. 1564 by the Edict of Roussillon her previous concessions, and laid incessant plots in order to effect the capture or murder of the two great leaders of the Huguenot party. The threatening incursions of the Duke of Alva upon the neighbouring provinces of the Netherlands, in A.D. 1567, occasioned the outbreak of the second religious war. The projected removal of the court to Monceaux fell through indeed, in consequence of the hasty flight of the king to Paris, but the overthrow of the royal army in the battle of St. Denys, in Nov., A.D. 1567, in which Montmorency fell, as well as the reinforcement of the Huguenot army by an auxiliary corps under the leadership of John Casimir, the prince of the Palatinate, led Catharine to conclude the Peace of Longjumeau, of March, A.D. 1568, which guaranteed anew all previous concessions. But when the persecution of the Huguenots was continued in numberless executions, before the year was out they had again, for the third time, to have recourse to arms. England supported them with money and ammunition, and Protestant Germany gave them 11,000 auxiliaries; while Spain helped their opponents. Louis Condé fell by the hand of an assassin in A.D. 1569, but the Huguenots had so evidently the best of it, that the king and his mother found themselves obliged to grant them complete liberty of conscience and of worship in the peace treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye, on 8th of Aug., A.D. 1570, excepting in Paris and in the immediate surroundings of the palace. As a guarantee for the treaty, four strongholds in southern France were surrendered to them. It was further stipulated, in order to confirm for ever the good undertaking, that Henry of Navarre, son of Jeanne d’Albret, should marry Margaret, the sister of Charles IX.
§ 139.16. At the marriage, consummated on 18th of August, A.D. 1572, subsequently known as the Bloody Marriage, the chiefs of the Huguenot party were gathered together at Paris. Jeanne d’Albret had died at the court, probably by poison, on 9th June, and Coligny had been fatally wounded by a shot on 22nd August. On the night of St. Bartholomew, between the 23rd and 24th August, the castle bell tolled. This was the concerted signal for the destruction of all the Huguenots present in Paris. For four days the carnage was unweariedly carried on by the city militia appointed for the purpose, the royal Swiss guards, and crowds of fanatical artisans. Coligny fell praying amid the blows of his murderers. No Huguenot was spared, neither children, nor women, nor the aged. Their princely chiefs, Henry of Navarre and Henry Condé, the son of Louis, were offered the choice between death and taking part in the celebration of mass. They decided for the latter. Meanwhile messengers had hasted into the provinces with the death-warrants, and there the slaughter began afresh. The whole number of victims is variously estimated at from 10,000 to 100,000; in Paris alone there fell from 1,000 to 10,000.—The death decree was not indeed so much the result of long planned and regularly conceived conspiracy, as a sudden resolve suggested by political circumstances. The queen-mother was at variance with her son with respect to his anti-Spanish policy, which had always inclined him favourably to Coligny; and so, in concert with her favourite son, Henry of Anjou, she succeeded in dealing a deadly stroke at the great admiral by the hand of an assassin. The king swore to take fearful vengeance on the unknown perpetrators of this crime. Catharine now made every effort to avert the threatened blow. She managed to convince the king, by means of her fellow conspirators, that the Huguenots regarded him as an accomplice in the perpetrating of the outrage, and that so his life was in danger because of them. He now swore by God’s death that not merely the chiefs, to whom Catharine and her auxiliaries had directed special attention, but all the Huguenots in France, should die, in order that not one should remain to bring this charge against him. On the other hand, it is all but certain that the thought of such a diabolical deed had previously suggested itself, if indeed expression had not been explicitly given to it. To the Spanish and Romish courts, the French government represented the deed as an acte prémédité, to the German court as an acte non prémédité. But even before this a letter from Rome to the Emperor Maximilian II. (§ [137, 8]) had contained the following: “At that hour (referring to the marriage festivities) when all the birds are in the cage, they can seize upon them altogether, and can have any one that they desire.” He was profoundly excited about the villany of the transaction, while Philip II. of Spain on hearing of it is said to have laughed for the first time in his life. Pope Gregory XIII. indeed feared the worst consequences, but soon changed his mind, and had Rome illuminated, all the bells rung, the cannons fired, a Te Deum performed, processions made, and a medal struck, with the inscription, Ugonottorum strages.He instructed the French ambassador to inform his king that this performance was a hundred times more grateful to him than fifty victories over the Turks.[392]