“Notwithstanding all your protestations, the deed will certainly be laid to your charge. Civil war will be again enkindled. The chiefs of the Protestants are now all in Paris. You had better gain the victory at once here than incur the hazard of a new campaign.”
“Well, then,” replied Charles, petulantly, “since you approve the murder of the admiral, I am content. But let all the Huguenots also fall, that there may not be one left to reproach me.”
While the young king of Navarre was by the bedside of his wounded friend, the Admiral Coligni, recounting to him the assurances of faith and honor given by Catherine and Charles IX., these two were in secret council, debating whether this Henry, the newly-made husband of the daughter of one and the sister of the other, should be included in the dreadful doom appointed for the Protestants. It was at length decided that his life should be spared, but that he should be kept in a kind of imprisonment, and that he should be forced to abjure his Protestant faith.
The young Duke of Guise was to take the lead of this terrible carnage. As he believed that Coligni was a party to the murder of his father, some years before, he determined that he should be the first victim of this awful night. He had issued secret orders for all the Catholics “to wear a white cross on the hat, and to bind a piece of white cloth around the arm,” that they might be thus distinguished in the darkness of the night. The alarm-bell in the tower of the Palace of Justice was to toll the dire signal for the indiscriminate massacre of the Protestants. The conspiracy extended throughout the provinces of France. Men, women, and children were to be cut down without mercy.
“The storm was to burst at the same moment upon the unsuspecting victims in every city and village of the kingdom. Beacon-fires, with their lurid midnight glare, were to flash the tidings from mountain to mountain. The peal of alarm was to ring along from steeple to steeple, from city to hamlet, from valley to hillside, till the whole Catholic population should be aroused to obliterate every vestige of Protestantism from the land.”
While Catherine and Charles were arranging every detail of this monstrous crime, they lavished the warmest and most flattering attention upon the Protestant generals and nobles, whom they had lured within their insidious power. The very day before that dreadful night Charles entertained many of the most illustrious of the doomed guests at a sumptuous feast in the Louvre, and detained them in the palace all night by the most courteous and pressing invitations to accept his hospitality.
Henry of Navarre had his suspicions aroused; but though he was well aware of the utter depravity of Catherine and Charles, he knew not where the blow would fall. The young bride of Henry had not been informed of this vile plot, and when about to retire to her apartments in the palace, her sister Claude, who knew of the coming danger, tried to detain her lest she might suffer harm. Catherine sternly rebuked her daughter, and bade her be silent. But Claude still held Margaret by the arm, and said to Catherine, “It is a shame to send her to be sacrificed, for if anything is discovered, they (meaning the Catholics) will be sure to avenge themselves upon her.” But the fiend-like Catherine, preferring that her own child should risk danger and perhaps death, rather than that her hellish work should be thwarted, replied:—
“No harm will befall the queen of Navarre, and it is my pleasure that she retire to her own apartments, lest her absence should create suspicion.” Henry, Prince of Joinville, who now held the title of the Duke of Guise, was to be the chief leader of this infernal massacre.
He had ordered the tocsin, the signal for the massacre, to be tolled at two o’clock in the morning. Meanwhile Catherine and Charles watched in one of the apartments of the Louvre for the fatal knell. Charles was wildly excited. And at last, his mother fearing that his determination to carry out this night’s hellish work was wavering, she urged him to send a servant at once to sound the alarm. Charles hesitated, and a cold sweat covered his forehead. For with all his depravity he had still remaining a slight spark of humanity; but the fiend incarnate, his shameful mother, tauntingly exclaimed: “Are you a coward?” Whereupon the tortured king cried, “Well, then begin.”
And so upon the early morning air of a calm Sabbath, Aug. 24, 1572, the direful tocsin pealed forth its death-doom; and at this signal armed men rushed forth into the streets shouting, “Vive Dieu et le roi!”