193 



CHARLES IX. 



CHARLES IX. 



191 



narrative of the St. Bartholomew, attributed to tbe Duke of Anjou, 

 afterwards Henri III., who had a large share in its design and 

 execution. He tells us that as the admiral began to speak earnestly, 

 Catherine came up and drew the king away, but not till she had heard 

 the admiral advise him not to let his mother and brother have so 

 much of his authority. 



On the first news of the admiral's wound the Huguenots repaired in 

 crowds to his residence, and offered their services, with menacing 

 language against the Guises the suspected assassins. A royal guard 

 wa-* placed to protect the house of Coligny from popular violence ; 

 and under a similar pretext of regard for his safety, the Catholics were 

 ordered to evacuate and the Protestants to occupy the quarter in 

 which he resided. 



The attempt at assassination was not the work of the Guises : it 

 was planned by the Duke of Anjou, the Duchess of Nemours, and the 

 queen-mother. The father of the Duke of Guise, and first husbaud of 

 the Duchess of Nemours, was assassinated by a Huguenot fanatic, 

 who alleged that he committed the crime under the sanction of the 

 admiral ; and since that event Coligny always felt that his life was in 

 danger from one who, whether justly or unjustly, regarded him as the 

 murderer of his father. The attempt at assassination having failed, 

 the conspirators met on the morning of Saturday the 23rci, in secret 

 conference. Baffled revenge and the dread of vindictive retaliation 

 augmented the ferocity of their counsels. On Saturday after dinner, 

 the hour for which at that time was noon, the queen-mother was seen 

 to enter the king's chamber : Anjou and some lords of the Catholic 

 party joined her there soon afterwards. According to Charles's 

 account of this meeting, as reported by his sister Margaret, he was then 

 suddenly informed of a treasonable conspiracy on the part of the 

 Huguenots against himself and family; was told that the admiral and 

 his friends were at that moment plotting his destruction, and that if 

 he did not promptly anticipate the designs of his enemies, and if he 

 waited till next morning, he and his family might be sacrificed. 

 Under this impression, he states, he gave a reluctant hurried consent 

 to the proposition of his counsellors, exclaiming, as he left the room, 

 that he hoped not a single Huguenot would be left alive to reproach 

 him with the deeil. Tbe plan of the massacre had been previously 

 arranged, and its execution instrusted to the Dukes of Guise, Anjou, 

 and Aumale, Montpensier, and Marshal Tavannes. 



It wanted two hours of the appointed time : all was still at the 

 Louvre. A short time before the signal was given, Charles, his 

 mother, and Anjou repaired to an open balcony, and awaited the 

 result in breathless silence. This awful suspense was broken by the 

 report of a pistol. Charles shook with horror his frame trembled, 

 his resolution failed him, and cold drops stood upon hia brow. But 

 the die was cast the bell of a neighbouring church tolled and the 

 work of slaughter commenced. 



This was at two o'clock in the morning. Before five o'clock the 

 admiral and his friends were murdered in cold blood, and their 

 remains treated with brutal indignity. Revenge and hatred being 

 thus satiated on the Huguenot chiefs, the tocsin was sounded from 

 the parliament house, calling on the populace of Paris to join in the 

 carnage, and protect their religion and their king against Huguenot 

 treason. It is not necessary to enter into the details of this most 

 perfidious butchery. "Death to the Huguenots treason courage- 

 our game ia in the toils Kill every man of them it is the king's 

 orders," shouted the court leaders, as they galloped through the 

 streets, cheering the armed citizens to the slaughter. "Kill! kill! 

 bleeding is as wholesome in August as in May," shouted the Marshal 

 Tavannea, another of the planners of the massacre. The fury of the 

 court was thus seconded by the long pent-up hatred of the Parisian 

 populace ; and the Huguenots were butchered in their beds, or 

 endeavouring to escape, without any regard to age, sex, or condition. 

 Nor was the slaughter wholly confined to the Protestants. Secret 

 revenge and personal hatred embraced that favourable opportunity of 

 gratification, and many Catholics fell by the hand of Catholic assassins. 



Towards eveuing the excesses of the populace became so alarming 

 that the king, by sound of trumpet, commanded every man to return 

 to his house, under penalty of death, excepting the officers of the 

 guards and the civic authorities ; and on the second day he issued 

 another proclamation, declaring, under pain of death, that no person 

 should kill or pillage another, unless duly authorised. Indeed it 

 would seem that the massacre was more extensive and indiscriminate 

 than its projectors had anticipated ; and that it waa necessary to check 

 the disorderly fury of the populace. The slaughter however partially 

 continued for three days. On the evening of the first day, Charles 

 despatched letters to his ambassadors in foreign courts, and to all his 

 governors and chief officers in France, bewailing the massacre that 

 had taken place, but imputing it entirely to the private dissension 

 between the houses of Guise and Coligny. 



On the following day, the 25th, he wrote to Schomberg, his agent 

 with the Protestant princes of Germany, that having been apprised by 

 some of the Huguenots themselves of a conspiracy formed by the 

 admiral and his friends to murder him, his mother, and brothers, he 

 Lad been forced to sanction the counter attacks of tbe house of 

 Guise, in consequence of which, the admiral, and some gentlemen of 

 his party, had been slain ; since which, the populace, exasperated by 

 the report of the conspiracy, and indignant at the restraint imposed 



upon the royal family, had been guilty of violent excesses, and, to his 

 great regret, had killed all the chiefs of the Huguenots who were at 

 Paris. 



Next day however Charles went in state to the parliament of Paris, 

 and avowed himself the author of the massacre, claiming to himself 

 the merit of having thereby given peace to his kingdom; ha denounced 

 the admiral and his adherents as traitors, and declared that he had 

 timely defeated a conspiracy to murder the royal family. 



These are the leading facts of the Bartholomew Massacre, concern- 

 ing the truth of which there is no controversy. They are admitted 

 and appealed to by historians who take the most opposite views of 

 the motives which led to them. And this brings us to the second part 

 of the subject. 



2. Two questions have arisen out of a consideration of the facts 

 which we have just narrated : 1. Was the massacre the result of a 

 premeditated plot, concealed with infinite cunning for months, accord- 

 ing to some, years, that is, since the meeting at Bayonne in 1564 ; or 

 was it the sudden consequence of the failure of the attack upon the 

 life of the admiral two days before its occurrence? 2. Admitting it 

 to have been premeditated, waa Charles privy to the plot, and conse- 

 quently, was the peace of 1570, the marriage of his sister, and his 

 friendly demeanour towards the admiral and the Huguenot chiefs, one 

 piece of the most profound treachery and dissimulation ? Volumes 

 have been written in reference to these questions ; our limits confine 

 us to a statement of their results. 



We shall dispose of the first question rather summarily. The 

 conferences at Bayonue between Catherine de' Medici and the Duke of 

 Alva were secret : if ever reduced to writing, no direct proof of the 

 decisions in which they terminated has come down to us. There is 

 however strong substantial evidence to show that they related to the 

 most effectual means of subduing the Protestants in France and 

 Flanders. Mutual succour was stipulated and afforded. Adriauo, a 

 contemporary historian of credit, and who is supposed to have derived 

 the materials of his history from the journal of Cosmo, duke of 

 Tuscany, who died in 1574, states that Alva declared for an immediate 

 extermination, and treated the proposition of France (to allure the 

 Huguenot lords and princes back to the bosom of the ancient church) 

 as faint-hearted, and treason to the cause of God. Catherine repre- 

 sented that such an extirpation as Alva contemplated was beyond tho 

 ability of the royal power in France. They agreed as to the end, but 

 differed as to the best means of accomplishing it ; and the conference 

 terminated with the parties merely agreeing as to the general principle 

 of destroying the incorrigible ringleader of the heretical faction ; each 

 sovereign being at liberty to select the opportunity and modes of 

 execution which best suited the circumstances of his own dominions. 

 This statement is adopted by the judicious De Thou. Strada, the 

 historian of Alva's government in Flanders, who wrote from the papers 

 of the House of Parma, says, in reference to the hypothesis, that tho 

 Bartholomew was planned at Bayonne, that he cannot from his own 

 knowledge either affirm or deny the accusation ; but inclines to the 

 belief that it is true (" potius inclinat animus ut credam "). It was on 

 this occasion that Alva made use of the celebrated expression men- 

 tioned by Davila and Mathieu, and which Henri IV., then Prince of 

 Beam, and a stripling, who was present at the interview, told to 

 Calignor, chancellor of Navarre, that he would rather catch the large 

 fish and let the small fry alone; "one salmon," said he, " is worth a 

 hundred frogs." " Une tete de saumon valoit mieux quo celles de cent 

 grenouilles." The subsequent conduct of Alva and the queen-mother, 

 coupled with this indirect testimony, enable us to answer the first 

 question thus far in the affirmative : that there existed, as far back as 

 the conference at Bayonne, a general determination on the part of the 

 courts of Spain and France to subdue, if not extirpate Protestantism ; 

 but no concerted plot, or settled plan of operations. 



The evidence is much more conflicting with regard to the sincerity 

 of Charles in the affair of the peace of 1570, and the events that fol- 

 lowed it, with regard to his share in devising the Bartholomew. 

 Against the supposition of hia having been perhaps the most profound 

 dissembler that the world has ever seen, there is, iu the first placp, a 

 strong objection derived from his extreme youth, and his fickle, restless, 

 vehement, and childishly ungovernable character. He was only twenty- 

 four when he died, and though nominally a king from the tenth year 

 of his age, the government was so completely iu the hands of his 

 mother, and such was the ascendancy of that remarkable and wicked 

 woman over his mind, that it is hardly possible to speak with 

 certainty as to his genuine disposition, or to affirm on what occasions 

 he was a mere puppet, and when a free agent. His vacillation of 

 purpose has been remarked by those who have stigmatised him as 

 a master of the arts of simulation ; while the cruelty of his sports, 

 and the ferocious violence of his temper when under the influ- 

 ence of passion, have been justly referred to as an argument to 

 show that an heretical enemy once in hia toils would have little to 

 hope from his humanity. " His education," says Mr. Allen, who has 

 sketched his character with no friendly hand, " had been neglected by 

 hia mother, who desired to retain the conduct of affairs, aud brought 

 him forward on those occasions only when she wished to inspire terror 

 by his furious passions. Active, or rather restless, from temperament, 

 ho was never tranquil for an instant, but was continually occupied 

 with some violent exercise or other ; and when he had nothing better 



