Charles IX. became king, with his mother, Catharine de Medicis, as regent, and she sought to weaken the power of the Guises. Condé was released from prison, his brother Anthony made lieutenant-general of the kingdom. An assembly of the Three Estates was convened, but dissolved without effecting any good. Throughout the land, the Huguenots employed abuse and violence, drawing on themselves fearful punishment.
Still, under Catharine's fickle favor, the Huguenots were steadily gaining ground, and the Colloquy at Poissy, in 1562, where Beza appeared in person, was, in its actual result and in moral effect, a victory to the reformers. The countenance of the court gave them boldness. The Catholic party saw the evident danger and were loud in their complaints, but this only made collisions more frequent: one party elate with hope and triumph, the other seeing naught but treachery and violence.
It needed but a spark to kindle a conflagration; at last it came. On Corpus Christi, in 1561, as the procession of the blessed sacrament moved through the streets of Lyons, a Huguenot rushed upon the officiating clergyman and endeavored to wrest the consecrated host from his hands. So daring an outrage roused the Catholics to fury. In an instant the whole city was in arms, and the innocent atoned in blood for the madness of one. Even in Paris itself similar riots took place, and fifty Catholics were killed or wounded at the church of St. Medard, into which D'Andelot rode on horseback at the head of the Huguenots.
The edict of January, 1562, came at last to effect a peace. By its provisions the Protestants were to restore the churches they had seized, to cease their abuse of the Catholic ceremonies in print or discourse, and, in return, were allowed to hold meetings unarmed outside the city, but their ministers were not to go from town to town preaching. The measure of toleration thus granted may not seem excessive, but it was far greater than any Protestant power then, or long subsequently, granted to such subjects as preferred not to change their creed.
The measure, however, failed to produce tranquillity. The Huguenots, far from restoring what they had seized, continued their acts of violence. At Nismes the churches and convents were attacked and profaned, while in Gascony and Languedoc the reformers had established such a reign of terror that for forty leagues around no Catholic priest durst show himself. Montpellier, Montauban, and Castres beheld similar profanations of churches.
Coligny, a prototype of Cromwell in apparent fanaticism, in military skill, in relentless cruelty toward the Catholic clergy, like the Puritan leader of the next century, looked beyond the Atlantic. He had projected a Protestant colony of refuge in Brazil; its failure did not prevent his renewing the attempt in Florida. In the month following that in which the edict was issued, he despatched John Ribaut to lay the foundation of a French colony in America. He seems to have been planning a retreat against sudden disaster in the war they were rapidly preparing. The fate of that colony is well known. At Vassy, in March, a Huguenot congregation came into collision with the Duke of Guise; accounts differ widely as to the details. The duke asserted that his men were attacked. On being struck in the face with a stone, he cried to his men to show no quarter, and, according to White, fifty or sixty were killed and two hundred wounded.
In a moment the affair was taken up and echoed through France. It was worth an army to the cause of rebellion. The military churches rose. So complete was their organization that almost simultaneously thirty-five cities were taken, the Cevennes, the Vivarrais, and the Comté Venaissin were in revolt. Everywhere the Catholic worship was suppressed, the churches stripped, the clergy banished, while the riches torn from the shrines and altars enabled them to maintain the war.
The shrine of St. Martin of Tours, venerated and enriched by the piety of France during a thousand years, gave Condé, prince of the blood, a million two thousand livres to devastate France. To add to their strength, the Huguenots then formed the treaty of Hampton Court with Elizabeth, and by it agreed to restore Calais to England.
As we have seen, they took Lyons, and, after massacring priests and religious, abolished the Mass, and with the same breath declared that every one should be free in his religion. As the Catholics were unprepared, city after city fell into their hands, till no less than two hundred were swept by these devastating hordes, fiercer than Goth or Vandal. The history of every French city marks at this epoch the destruction of all that the past had revered. Orleans, Mans, Troyes, Tours, Bayeux, all repeat the same story. Everywhere priests, religious of both sexes, Catholic laity, were butchered and mutilated with every barbarity. The Baron des Adrets stands forth as the terrible butcher of this period, who made his barbarity a sport, and trained the mind of France to savage inhumanity. In the little town of Montbrison, in August, 1562, he slaughtered more than eight hundred men, women, and children.
The recent French historian, Martin, whose work is in process of publication in this country, glosses over this period by merely alluding to the profanation and pillage of the Catholic churches and religious houses. Every local history in France, however, attests the slaughter and mutilation of the clergy, the last infamy always popularly ascribed to the order of Coligny. Beza, writing in January, 1562, admits that the Protestants of Aquitaine, though enjoying full religious liberty, massacred priests and wished to exterminate their enemies.