Coligni's situation now seemed desperate. His German mercenaries in arrear of pay, threatened to desert him; the funds which he had been able to collect for the conduct of the war were exhausted; and he was utterly unable to encounter the numerous and well-appointed forces of Guise. In this emergency he formed the bold plan of leaving his brother, Dandelot, with the bulk of the infantry to defend Orleans, while he himself led the cavalry and a few companies of foot again to Normandy, and again attempted to avail himself of the English supplies of money and troops. In spite of the mutinous murmurings of the German reisters, in spite of the attempts which the Roman Catholic commanders made to intercept him, Coligni executed his daring scheme. Havre was reached. The English subsidies were secured, and the rich and powerful city of Caen voluntarily placed itself in Coligni's power. Meanwhile Orleans had been well defended by Dandelot; and the great chief of the Roman Catholics, the Duke of Guise, had died by the hand of an assassin. Some attempts were made to implicate Coligni in the guilt of this murder, but the Admiral indignantly denied the charge; nor is there any ground for believing him to have had the least cognizance of Poltrot's crime.
The death of Guise made a temporary pacification easy; and the edict of Amboise, on March 19, 1563, by which a narrow and restricted permission for the exercise of the Protestant religion was allowed, closed the first war.
This peace on the part of the Royalists was only a hollow and a treacherous truce. Fresh communications with Philip II. were opened; and an interview took place in 1564 at Bayonne, between Catherine, her son Charles IX., and the Duke of Alva. There is every reason to believe that at that meeting the destruction of the Protestants by craft or by force was concerted. The treaty of Amboise was now openly and repeatedly violated by the fanatic party of the French Roman Catholics; and the Huguenots were again driven to take up arms in self-defence. Condé and Coligni advanced upon Paris, and fought on November 10, 1567, the sanguinary battle of St. Denys against the Royalist forces. The Huguenots were beaten, but Coligni rallied them, and marching toward the Meuse, effected a junction with fresh bands of German auxiliaries. The war now raged with redoubled horror in every district of France. Alarmed at the strength of the Huguenot army, Catherine tried and successfully exerted her powers of persuasion and deceit over Condé, and a second faithless peace, called the treaty of Longjumeau, was concluded; but when the Huguenot forces were disbanded, and their German auxiliaries dismissed, the Royalists renewed the war.
In 1569, the indiscreet spirit of Condé brought the Protestants into action at Jarnac, under heavy disadvantages, against the flower of the Catholic army. Condé was killed in the battle, and a large part of his forces routed with heavy slaughter; but Coligni was again the Ajax of the cause, covered the retreat, and reorganized the fugitives for fresh exertions. But the waves of calamity were not yet spent. The hostile armies met again at Moncontour, and the Protestants sustained the most complete and murderous overthrow that had been dealt to them throughout the war. Coligni's brother, the gallant Dandelot, was mortally wounded in this disastrous field; many of his stanchest friends had fallen; many abandoned him; and he found himself a fugitive, with only a few bands of mutineers around him, the wreck of the gallant army that he had lately led.
But it was in this depth of gloom that the true heroic lustre of his soul was seen. Fearless himself of what man could do unto him, he calmed the panic of his followers, and inspired them with his own energy. He who has innate strength to stand amid the storm, will soon find others flock around and fortify him while they seek support for themselves. When it was known that Coligni's banner still was flying, the Protestants of France and Eastern Germany, who at first had been stunned by the report of Moncontour, thronged to him as to a strong tower in the midst of trouble. While the Royalists were exulting at the fancied annihilation of their foe, they suddenly learned that Coligni was approaching the capital, at the head of the largest army that the Huguenots had yet sent into the field. Again the device of a treacherous pacification was attempted, and again it prevailed. Coligni was warned of the personal danger that he incurred by trusting the faith of a Medici and a Guise; but he replied that he would rather lay down his life, than see France continue the victim of the woes of civil war.
The treaty of St. Germains was signed on August 8, 1570, and on August 24, 1572, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew attested with what worse than Punic faith the crowned conspirators of the French Court had planned it. In the interval, the most detestable and elaborate hypocrisy was employed to lull the suspicions of the Huguenot chiefs, and to bring them defenceless into the power of their enemies. At last, in the summer of 1572, they were collected in Paris, under the pretence of being the honored guests of the French king, at the nuptials of his sister with Henry of Navarre. An attempt was made on the life of Coligni by an assassin, in which the Admiral was severely wounded. The king and his courtiers affected the utmost indignation at this crime, and the warmest sympathy with the suffering veteran. But in the early dawn of the day appointed for the most unchristian carnage that ever defiled the earth, a party of murderers, headed by the young Duke of Guise himself, broke open the doors of the house where Coligni lay, and Besme, one of the duke's domestics, entered with a drawn sword, into the room where the Admiral was sitting in an arm-chair.
"Young man," said he, undisturbed, "you ought to respect my gray hairs; but do as you please, you can only shorten my life a few days."
Besme thrust him through in many places, and then threw his body, still breathing, out of the window into the court, where it fell at the feet of the Duke of Guise. The minions of the Louvre flocked around in hideous glee, to insult the lifeless form of him, before whom they had so long quailed and trembled. They gibbeted their own infamy in vainly seeking to dishonor the illustrious dead. His memory is at once the glory and the shame of France: and the very land of the St. Bartholomew is, to some extent, hallowed by having been the birthplace of Coligni, and the scene of his heroic career.
I do not pause to describe the tardy homage which his countrymen afterward paid to the name and relics of the fallen great. These obsequies and panegyrics may be looked on as some small expiation for the national guilt of France, but Coligni needed them not.[Back to Contents]