Similar language was held on this subject both by Leicester and Burleigh; but the former was perhaps no more in earnest on the subject than his mistress; and finally all parties, except the French protestants, who looked to the conclusion of these nuptials as their best security, seem to have been not ill pleased when, the marriage treaty being at length laid aside, a strict league of amity between the two countries was agreed upon in its stead.
Splendid embassies were reciprocally sent to receive the ratifications of this treaty; and Burleigh writes to a friend, between jest and earnest, that an unexpected delay of the French ambassador was cursed by all the husbands whose ladies had been detained at great expense and inconvenience in London, to contribute to the splendor of the court on his reception. On the 9th of June 1572 the duke de Montmorenci and his suite at length arrived. His entertainment was magnificent; all seemed peace and harmony between the rival nations; and Elizabeth even instructed her ambassadors to give favorable ear to a hint which the queen-mother had dropped of a matrimonial treaty between the queen of England and her youngest son, the duke d'Alençon, who had then scarcely attained the age of seventeen.
Lulled by these flattering appearances of tranquillity, her majesty set out on her summer progress, and she was enjoying the festivities prepared by Leicester for her reception at his splendid castle of Kennelworth, when news arrived of the execrable massacre of Paris;—an atrocity not to be paralleled in history! Troops of affrighted Hugonots, who had escaped through a thousand perils with life, and life alone, from the hands of their pitiless assassins, arrived on the English coast, imploring the commiseration of their brother protestants, and relating in accents of despair their tale of horrors. After such a stroke, no one knew what to expect; the German protestants flew to arms; even the subjects of Elizabeth trembled for their countrymen travelling on the continent and for themselves in their island-home. The pope applauded openly the savage deed; the court of Spain showed itself united hand and heart with that of France,—to the astonishment of Elizabeth, who had been taught to believe them at enmity;—and it seemed as if the signal had been given of a general crusade against the reformed churches of Europe.
For several days fears were entertained for the safety of Walsingham himself, who had not dared to transmit any account of the event except one by a servant of his own, whose passage had been by some accident delayed. Even this minister, cautious and crafty and sagacious as he was, assisted by all the spies whom he constantly kept in pay, had been unable to penetrate any part of the bloody secret;—he was completely taken by surprise. But of his personal safety the perfidious young king and his detestable mother were, for their own sakes, careful; and not only were himself and his servants protected from injury, but every Englishman who had the presence of mind to take shelter in his house found it an inviolable sanctuary. Two persons only of this nation fell victims to the fury of that direful night, but the property of many was plundered. The afflicted remnant of the French protestants prepared to stand upon their defence with all the intrepidity of despair. They closed the gates of Rochelle, their strong hold, against the king's troops, casting at the same time an imploring eye towards England, where thousands of brave and generous spirits were burning with impatience to hasten to their succour.
No act would have been hailed with such loud and general applause of her people as an instant renunciation by Elizabeth of all friendship and intercourse with the perjured and blood-stained Charles, the midnight assassin of his own subjects; and it is impossible to contemplate without disdain the coldness and littleness of that character which, in such a case, could consent to measure its demonstrations of indignation and abhorrence by the narrow rules of a self-interested caution. But that early experience of peril and adversity which had formed the mind of this princess to penetration, wariness, and passive courage, and given her a perfect command of the whole art of simulation and dissimulation, had at the same time robbed her of some of the noblest impulses of our nature; of generosity, of ardor, of enterprise, of magnanimity. Where more exalted spirits would only have felt, she calculated; where bolder ones would have flown to action, she contented herself with words.
Charles and his mother, while still in uncertainty how far their master-stroke of policy,—so they regarded it,—would be successful in crushing entirely the Hugonots, prudently resolved to spare no efforts to preserve Elizabeth their friend, or to prevent her at least from becoming an open enemy. Instructions had therefore been in the first instance dispatched to La Mothe Fenelon, the French ambassador in England, to communicate such an account of the massacre and its motives as suited these views, and to solicit a confirmation of the late treaty of amity. His reception at court on this occasion was extremely solemn: the courtiers and ladies who lined the rooms leading to the presence-chamber were all habited in deep mourning, and not one of them would vouchsafe a word or a smile to the ambassador, though himself a man of honor, and one whom they had formerly received on the footing of cordial intimacy. The queen herself, in listening to his message, assumed an aspect more composed, but extremely cold and serious. She expressed her horror at the idea that a sovereign could imagine himself under a necessity of taking such vengeance on his own subjects; represented the practicability of proceeding with them according to law, and desired to be better informed of the reality of the treasonable designs imputed to the Hugonots. She also declared that it would be difficult for her to place reliance hereafter on the friendship of a prince who had shown himself so deadly a foe to those who professed her religion; but, at the suit of the ambassador, she consented to suspend in some degree her judgement of the deed till further information.
Even these feeble demonstrations of sensibility to crime so enormous were speedily laid aside. In spite of Walsingham's declared opinion, that the demonstrations of the French court towards her were so evidently treacherous that its open enmity was less to be dreaded than its feigned friendship, Elizabeth suffered her indignation to evaporate in a few severe speeches, restrained her subjects from carrying such aid to the defenders of Rochelle as could be made a ground of serious quarrel, and even permitted a renewal of the shocking and monstrous overtures for her marriage with the youngest son of Catherine de' Medici herself. By this shameless woman various proposals were now made for bringing about a personal interview between herself and Elizabeth. She first named England as the place of meeting, then the sea between Dover and Calais, and afterwards the isle of Jersey; but from the first plan she herself departed, and the others were rejected in anger by the English council, who remarked, with a proper and laudable spirit, that they who had ventured upon such propositions must imagine them strangely careless of the personal safety of their sovereign.
Charles IX. was particularly anxious that Elizabeth, as a pledge of friendship, should consent to stand sponsor to his new-born daughter; and with this request, after some difficulties and a few declarations of horror at his conduct, she had the baseness to comply. She refused however to indulge that king in his further desire, that she would appoint either the earl of Leicester or lord Burleigh as her proxy;—not choosing apparently to trust these pillars of state and of the protestant cause within his reach; and she sent instead her cousin the earl of Worcester, "a good simple gentleman," as Leicester called him, and a catholic.
All this time Elizabeth was in her heart as hostile to the court of France as the most zealous of her protestant subjects; for she well knew that it was and ever must be essentially hostile to her and her government; and in the midst of her civilities she took care to supply to the Hugonots such secret aids as should enable them still to persevere in a formidable resistance.
It is worth recording, on the subject of these negotiations between Elizabeth and the royal family of France, that Burleigh seems to have been encouraged to expect a successful issue by a calculation of the queen's nativity, seen by Strype in his own handwriting, from which it was foretold that she should marry, in middle life, a foreign prince younger than herself; and probably be the mother of a son, who should be prosperous in his middle age. Catherine de' Medici also, to whom some female fortune-teller had predicted that all her sons should be kings, hoped, after the election of her second son to the throne of Poland, to find the full accomplishment of the prophecy in the advancement of the youngest to the matrimonial crown of England. So serious was the belief of that age in the lying oracles of judicial astrology!