Volume IV Part 13 (1/2)

said Charles IX., savagely, ”we will kill him;” and he gave such peremptory orders on this subject, that Henry de Guise, somewhat disquieted, avoided for a while taking part in the royal hunts, and thought it well that there should be resumed on his behalf a project of marriage with Catherine of Cleves, widow of the Prince of Portien (Le Porcien) and the wealthy heiress to some great domains, especially the counts.h.i.+p of Eu. So long as he had some hope of marrying Marguerite de Valois, the Duke of Guise had repudiated, not without offensiveness, all idea of union with Catherine of Cleves. ”Anybody who can make me marry the Princess of Portien,” said he, ”could make me marry a negress.” He, nevertheless, contracted this marriage, so greatly disdained, on the 4th of October, 1570; and at this price recovered the good graces of Charles IX. The queen-mother charged the Cardinal Louis de Lorraine, him whom the people called Cardinal Bottles (from his conviviality), to publicly give the lie to any rumor of a possible engagement between her daughter Marguerite and Henry de Guise; and a grand council of the kings, after three holdings, adopted in principle the marriage of Marguerite de Valois with ”the little Prince of Bearn.”

Charles IX. at once set his hand to the work to turn this resolution to good account, being the only means, he said, of putting a stop at last to this incessantly renewed civil war, which was the plague of his life as well as of his kingdom. He first of all sent Marshal de Cosse to La Roch.e.l.le, to sound Coligny as to his feelings upon this subject, and to urge him to thus cut short public woes and the Reformers' grievances.

”The king has always desired peace,” said the marshal; ”he wishes it to be lasting; he has proved only too well, to his own misery and that of his people, that of all the evils which can afflict a state, the most direful is civil war. But what means this withdrawal, since the signing of peace at St. Germain, of the Queen of Navarre and her children, of the Prince of Conde, and so many lords and distinguished n.o.bles, still separated from their houses and their families, and collected together in a town like Roch.e.l.le, which has great advantages by land and sea for all those who would fain begin the troubles again? Why have they not returned home? During the hottest part of the war, they ardently desired to see once more their houses, their wives, and their children; and now, when peace leaves them free to do so, they prefer to remain in a land which is in some sort foreign, and where, in addition to great expenses, they are deprived of the conveniences they would find at home. The king cannot make out such absurdity; or, rather, he is very apprehensive that this long stay means the hatching of some evil design.” The Protestants defended themselves warmly against this supposition; they alleged, in explanation of their persistent disquietude, the very imperfect execution of the conditions granted by the peace of St. Germain, and the insults, the attacks which they had still to suffer in many parts of the kingdom, and quite recently at Rouen and at Orange. The king attempted, without any great success, to repress these disorders amongst the populace. The Queen of Navarre, the two princes, Coligny, and many Protestant lords remained still at La Roch.e.l.le, where was being held at this time a general synod of the Reformed churches. Charles IX. sent thither Marshal de Biron, with formal orders to negotiate the marriage of Marguerite de Valois and the Prince of Navarre, and to induce that prince, his mother the Queen of Navarre, and Coligny to repair to the court in order to conclude the matter. The young prince was at that time in Warn. The queen, his mother, answered, ”That she would consult her spiritual advisers, and, as soon as her conscience was at rest, there were no conditions she would not accept with a view of giving satisfaction to the king and the queen, of marking her obedience and respect towards them, and of securing the tranquillity of the state, an object for which she would willingly sacrifice her own life. . . . But,” she added, ”I would rather sink to the condition of the humblest damoisel in France than sacrifice to the aggrandizement of my family my own soul and my son's.”

In September, 1571, Charles IX. and the queen-mother repaired to Blois; and at their urgent request Coligny went thither to talk over the projected marriage and the affairs of Europe. The king received him with emotional satisfaction, calling him my father, and saying to him, ”Now we have you, and you shall not escape us when you wish to.” Jeanne d'Albret, more distrustful, or, one ought rather to say, more clear-sighted, refused to leave La Roch.e.l.le, and continued to negotiate vaguely and from a distance. Catherine de' Medici insisted. ”Satisfy,”

she wrote to her, ”the extreme desire we have to see you in this company; you will be loved and honored therein as accords with reason and with what you are.” Jeanne still waited. It was only in the following year, at the end of January, that, having earnestly exhorted her son ”to remain Bearn-wards whilst she was at the court of France,” she set out for Blois, where Charles IX. received her most affectionately, calling her my good aunt, my dear aunt, and lavis.h.i.+ng upon her promises as well as endearments. Jeanne was a strict and a judicious person; and the manners and proceedings of the court at Blois displeased her. On the 8th of March, 1572, she wrote to her son, ”I find it necessary to negotiate quite contrariwise to what I had expected and what had been promised me; I have no liberty to speak to the king or my Lady Marguerite, only to the queen-mother, who treats me as if I were dirt. . . . Seeing, then, that no advance is made, and that the desire is to make me hurry matters, and not conduct them orderly, I have thrice spoken thereof to the queen, who does nothing but make a fool of me, and tell everybody the opposite of what I told her; in such sort that my friends find fault with me, and I know not how to bring her to book, for when I say to her, 'Madame, it is reported that I said so-and-so to you,' though it was she herself who reported it, she denies it flatly, and laughs in my face, and uses me in such wise that you might really say that my patience pa.s.ses that of Griselda. . . . Thenceforward I have a troop of Huguenots, who come to converse with me, rather for the purpose of being spies upon me than of a.s.sisting me. Then I have some of another humor, who hamper me no less, and who are religious hermaphrodites. I defend myself as best I may. . . I am sure that if you only knew the trouble I am in, you would have pity upon me, for they give me empty speeches and raillery instead of treating with me gravely, as the matter deserves; in such sort that I am bursting, because I am so resolved not to lose my temper that my patience is a miracle to see. . . . I found your letter very much to my taste; I will show, it to my Lady Marguerite if I can. She is beautiful, and discreet, and of good demeanor, but brought up in the most accursed and most corrupt society that ever was. I would not, for anything in the world, have you here to remain here. That is why I desire to get you married, and you and your wife withdraw from this corruption; for though I believed it to be very great, I find it still more so. Here it is not the men who solicit the women; it is the women who solicit the men. If you were here, you would never escape without a great deal of G.o.d's grace.”

[Ill.u.s.tration: Admiral Gaspard de Coligny----346]

Side by side with this motherly and Christianly scrupulous negotiation, Coligny set on foot another, n.o.ble and dignified also, but even less in harmony with the habits and bent of the government which it concerned.

The puritan warrior was at the same time an ardent patriot: he had at heart the greatness of France as much as he had his personal creed; the reverses of Francis I. and the preponderance of Spain in Europe oppressed his spirit with a sense of national decadence, from which he wanted France to lift herself up again. The moment appeared to him propitious; let the king ally himself with Queen Elizabeth of England, the Prince of Orange in the Low Countries, and the Protestant princes of Germany; here was for France a certain guarantee of power in Europe, and at the same time a natural opportunity for conquering Flanders, a possession so necessary to her strength and her security. But high above this policy, so thoroughly French, towered a question still more important than that of even the security and the grandeur of France; that was the part.i.tion of Europe between Catholicism and Protestantism; and it was in a country Catholic in respect of the great majority, and governed by a kings.h.i.+p with which Catholicism was hereditary, that, in order to put a stop to civil war between French Catholics and Protestants, Coligny pressed the king to put himself at the head of an essentially Protestant coalition, and make it triumphant in Europe. This was, in the sixteenth century, a policy wholly chimerical, however patriotic its intention may have been; and the French Protestant hero who recommended it to Charles IX. did not know that Protestantism was on the eve of the greatest disaster it would have to endure in France.

A fact of a personal character tended to mislead Coligny. By his renown, by the loftiness of his views, by the earnest gravity of his character and his language he had produced a great effect upon Charles IX., a young king of warm imagination and impressible and sympathetic temperament, but, at the same time, of weak judgment. He readily gave way, in Coligny's company, to outpourings which had all the appearance of perfect and involuntary frankness. ”Speaking one day to the admiral about the course of conduct to be adopted as to the enterprise against Flanders, and well knowing that the queen-mother lay under his suspicion, 'My dear father,' said he, 'there is one thing herein of which we must take good heed; and that is, that the queen, my mother, who likes to poke her nose everywhere, as you know, learn nothing of this enterprise, at any rate as regards the main spring of it, for she would spoil all for us.' 'As you please, sir; but I take her to be so good a mother, and so devoted to the welfare of your kingdom, that when she knows of it she will do nothing to spoil it.' 'You are mistaken, my dear father,' said the king; 'leave it to me only; I see quite well that you do not know my mother; she is the greatest meddler in all the world.'” Another time, when he was speaking likewise to Teligny, Coligny's son-in-law, about this enterprise against Flanders, the king said, ”Wouldst have me speak to thee freely, Teligny?

I distrust all these gentry; I am suspicious of Tavannes' ambition; Vieilleville loves nothing but good wine; Cosse is too covetous; Montmorency cares only for his hunting and hawking; the Count de Retz is a Spaniard; the other lords of my court and those of my council are mere blockheads; my Secretaries of State, to hide nothing of what I think, are not faithful to me; insomuch that, to tell the truth, I know not at what end to begin.” This tone of freedom and confidence had inspired Coligny with reciprocal confidence; he believed himself to have a decisive influence over the king's ideas and conduct; and when the Protestants testified their distrust upon this subject, he reproached them vehemently for it; he affirmed the king's good intentions and sincerity; and he considered himself in fact, said Catherine de' Medici with temper, ”a second king of France.”

How much sincerity was there about these outpourings of Charles IX. in his intercourse with Coligny, and how much reality in the admiral's influence over the king? We are touching upon that great historical question which has been so much disputed: was the St. Bartholomew a design, long ago determined upon and prepared for, of Charles IX. and his government, or an almost sudden resolution, brought about by events and the situation of the moment, to which Charles IX. was egged on, not without difficulty, by his mother Catherine and his advisers?

We recall to mind here what was but lately said in this very chapter as to the condition of minds and morals in the sixteenth century, and as to the tragic consequences of it. Ma.s.sacre, we add no qualifying term to the word, was an idea, a habit, we might say almost a practice, familiar to that age, and one which excited neither the surprise nor the horror which are inseparable from it in our day. So little respect for human life and for truth was shown in the relations between man and man! Not that those natural sentiments, which do honor to the human race, were completely extinguished in the hearts of men; they reappeared here and there as a protest against the vices and the crimes of the period; but they were too feeble and too rare to struggle effectually against the sway of personal pa.s.sions and interests, against atrocious hatreds and hopes, against intellectual aberrations and moral corruption. To betray and to kill were deeds so common that they caused scarcely any astonishment, and that people were almost resigned to them beforehand.

We have cited fifteen or twenty cases of the ma.s.sacres which in the reign of Charles IX., from 1562 to 1572, grievously troubled and steeped in blood such and such a part of France, without leaving any lasting traces in history. Previously to the ma.s.sacre called the St. Bartholomew, the ma.s.sacre of Va.s.sy is almost the only one which received and kept its true name. The ma.s.sacre of Va.s.sy was, undoubtedly, an accident, a deed not at all forecast or prepared for. The St. Bartholomew ma.s.sacre was an event for a long time forecast and announced, promised to the Catholics and thrown out as a threat to the Protestants, written beforehand, so to speak, in the history of the religious wars of France, but, nevertheless, at the moment at which it was accomplished, and in the mode of its accomplishment, a deed unexpected so far as the majority of the victims were concerned, and a cause of contest even amongst its originators.

Accordingly it was, from the very first, a subject of surprise and horror, throughout Europe as well as in France; not only because of the torrents of blood that were shed, but also because of the extraordinary degree in which it was characterized by falsehood and ferocious hatred.

We will bring forward in support of this double a.s.sertion only such facts and quotations as appear to us decisive.

In 1565, Charles IX. and Catherine de' Medici had an interview at Bayonne with the Duke of Alba, representative of Philip II., to consult as to the means of delivering France from heretics. ”They agreed at last,” says the contemporary historian Adriani [continuer of Guicciardini; he had drawn his information from the _Journal of Cosmo de' Medici,_ Grand Duke of Tuscany, who died in 1574], ”in the opinion of the Catholic king, who thought that this great blessing could not have accomplishment save by the death of all the chiefs of the Huguenots, and by a new edition, as the saying was, of the Sicilian Vespers. 'Take the big fish,' said the Duke of Alba, 'and let the small fry go; one salmon is worth more than a thousand frogs.' They decided that the deed should be done at Moulins in Bourbonness, whither the king was to return. The execution of it was afterwards deferred to the date of the St. Bartholomew, in 1572, at Paris, because of certain suspicions which had been manifested by the Huguenots, and because it was considered easier and more certain to get them all together at Paris than at Moulins.”

Catherine de' Medici charged Cardinal Santa Croce to a.s.sure Pope Pius V.

”that she and her son had nothing more at heart than to get the admiral and all his confidants together some day and make a ma.s.sacre (_un macello_) of them; but the matter,” she said, ”was so difficult that there was no possibility of promising to do it at one time more than at another.”

La Noue bears witness in his _Memoires_ to ”the resolution taken at Bayonne, with the Duke of Alba aiding, to exterminate the Huguenots of France and the beggars (_gueux_) of Flanders; whereof warning had been given by those about whom there was no doubt. All these things, and many others as to which I am silent, mightily waked up those,” he adds, ”who had no desire to be caught napping. And I remember that the chiefs of the religion held, within a short time, three meetings, as well at Valeri as at Chatillon, to deliberate upon present occurrences, and to seek out legitimate and honorable expedients for securing themselves against so much alarm, without having recourse to extreme remedies.”

De Thou regards these facts as certain, and, after having added some details, he sums them all up in the words, ”This is what pa.s.sed at Bayonne in 1565.”

In 1571, after the third religious war and the peace of St. Germain-en-Laye, Marshal de Tavaunes wrote to Charles IX., ”Peace has a chance of lasting, because neither of the two parties is willing or able to renew open war; but, if one of the two sees quite a safe opportunity for putting a complete end to what is at the root of the question, this it will take; for to remain forever in the state now existing is what n.o.body can or ought to hope for. And there is no such near approximation to a complete victory as to take the persons. For to surprise what they (the Reformers) hold, to put down their religion, and to break off all at once the alliances which support them--this is impossible. Thus there is no way but to take the chiefs all together for to make an end of it.”

Next year, on the 24th of August, 1572, when the St. Bartholomew broke out, Tavannes took care to himself explain what he meant in 1571 by those words, to take the chiefs all together for to make an end of it. Being invested with the command in Paris, ”he went about the city all day,”

says Brantome, ”and, seeing so much blood spilt, he said and shouted to the people, 'Bleed, bleed; the doctors say that bleeding is as good all through this month of August as in May.'”

In the year which preceded the outbreak of the ma.s.sacre, when the marriage of Marguerite de Valois with the Prince of Navarre was agreed upon, and Coligny was often present at court, sometimes at Blois and sometimes at Paris, there arose between the king and the queen-mother a difference which there had been up to that time nothing to foreshadow.

It was plain that the union between the two branches, Catholic and Protestant, of the royal house and the patriotic policy of Coligny were far more pleasing to Charles IX. than to his mother.

On the matrimonial question the king's feeling was so strong that he expressed it roughly. Jeanne d'Albret having said to him one day that the pope would make them wait a long while for the dispensation requested for the marriage, ”No, no, my clear aunt,” said the king; ”I honor you more than I do the pope, and I love my sister more than I fear him. I am not a Huguenot, but no more am I an a.s.s. If the pope has too much of his nonsense, I will myself take Margot by the hand and carry her off to be married in open conventicle.” Toligny, for his part, was so pleased with the measures that Charles IX. had taken in favor of the Low Countries in their quarrels with Philip II., and so confident himself of his influence over the king, that when Tavannes was complaining in his presence ”that the vanquished should make laws for the victors,” Coligny said to his face, ”Whoever is not for war with Spain is not a good Frenchman, and has the red cross inside him.” The Catholics were getting alarmed and irritated. The Guises and their partisans left the court. It was near the time fixed for the marriage of Henry of Navarre and Marguerite de Valois; the new pope, Gregory XIII., who had at first shown more pliancy than his predecessor Pius V., attached to the dispensation conditions to which neither the intended husband nor King Charles IX. himself was inclined to consent. The Queen of Navarre, Jeanne d'Albret, who had gone to Paris in preparation for the marriage, had died there on the 8th of June, 1572; a death which had given rise to very likely ill-founded accusations of poisoning. ”A princess,” says D'Aubigne, ”with nothing of a woman but the s.e.x, with a soul full of everything manly, a mind fit to cope with affairs of moment, and a heart invincible in adversity.” It was in deep mourning that her son, become King of Navarre, arrived at court, attended by eight hundred gentlemen, all likewise in mourning.

”But,” says Marguerite de Valois herself, ”the nuptials took place a few days afterwards with such triumph and magnificence as none others of my quality; the King of Navarre and his troop having changed their mourning for very rich and fine clothes, and I being dressed royally, with crown and corset of tufted ermine, all blazing with crown-jewels, and the grand blue mantle with a train four ells long borne by three princesses, the people choking one another down below to see us pa.s.s.” The marriage was celebrated on the 18th of August, by the Cardinal of Bourbon, in front of the princ.i.p.al entrance of Notre-Dame. When the Princess Marguerite was asked if she consented, she appeared to hesitate a moment; but King Charles IX. put his hand a little roughly on her head, and made her lower it in token of a.s.sent. Accompanied by the king, the queen-mother, and all the Catholics present, Marguerite went to hear ma.s.s in the choir; Henry and his Protestant friends walked about the cloister and the nave; Marshal de Damville pointed out to Coligny the flags, hanging from the vaulted roof of Notre-Dame, which had been taken from the vanquished at the battle of Moncontour. ”I hope,” said the admiral, ”that they will soon have others better suited for lodgement in this place.” He was already dreaming of victories over the Spaniards.

Meanwhile Charles IX. was beginning to hesitate. He was quite willing to disconnect himself from the King of Spain, and even to incur his displeasure, but not to be actively embroiled with him and make war upon him; he could not conceal from himself that this policy, thoroughly French though it was, was considered in France too Protestant for a Catholic king. Coligny urged him vehemently. ”If you want men,” he said, ”I have ten thousand at your service;” whereupon Tavannes said to the king, ”Sir, whoever of your subjects uses such words to you, you ought to have his head struck off. How is it that he offers you that which is your own? It is that he has won over and corrupted them, and that he is a party-leader to your prejudice.” Tavannes, a rough and faithful soldier, did not admit that there could be amongst men moral ties of a higher kind than political ties. Charles IX., too weak in mind and character to think and act with independence and consistency in the great questions of the day, only sought how to elude them, and to leave time, that inscrutable master, to settle them in his place. His indecision brought him to a state of impotence, and he ended by inability to do anything but dodge and lie, like his mother, and even with his mother. Whilst he was getting his sister married to the King of Navarre and concerting his policy with Coligny, he was adopting towards the three princ.i.p.al personages who came to talk over those affairs with him three different sorts of language; to Cardinal Alessandrino, whom Pope Pius V.

had sent to him to oppose the marriage, he said, ”My lord cardinal, all that you say to me is sound; I acknowledge it, and I thank the pope and you for it; if I had any other means of taking vengeance on my enemies, I would not make this marriage; but I have no other.” With Jeanne d'Albret, he lauded himself for the marriage as the best policy he could pursue. ”I give my sister,” he said, ”not to the Prince of Navarre, but to all the Huguenots, to marry them as it were, and take from them all doubt as to the unchangeable fixity of my edicts.” And to humor his mother Catherine, he said to her, on the very evening of his interview with Jeanne d'Albret, ”What think you, madam? Do I not play my partlet well?” ”Yes, very well; but it is nothing if it is not continued.” And Charles continued to play his part, even after the Bartholomew was over, for he was fond of saying with a laugh, ”My big sister Margot caught all those Huguenot rebels in the bird-catching style. What has grieved me most is being obliged to dissimulate so long.”

His contemporary Catholic biographer, Papirius Ma.s.son, who was twenty-eight years old at the time of the St. Bartholomew, says of him, ”He is impatient in waiting, ferocious in his fits of anger, skilfully masked when he wishes, and ready to break faith as soon as that appears to his advantage.”

[Ill.u.s.tration: Charles IX. and Catherine de' Medici----354]

Such was the prince, fiery and flighty, inconsistent and artful, accessible to the most opposite sympathies as well as hatreds, of whom Catherine de' Medici and Admiral Coligny were disputing the possession.

In the spring of 1572 Coligny might have considered himself the victor in this struggle; at his instance Charles IX. had written on the 27th of April to Count Louis of Na.s.sau, leader of the Protestant insurrection in Hainault, ”that he was determined, so far as opportunities and the arrangements of his affairs permitted him, to employ the powers which G.o.d had put into his hands for the deliverance of the Low Countries from the oppression under which they were groaning.” Fortified by this promise of the king's, Coligny had raised a body of French Protestants, and had sent it under the command of La Noue to join the army of Louis of Na.s.sau. The Reformers had at first had some successes; they had taken Valenciennes and Mons; but the Duke of Alba restored the fortunes of the King of Spain; he re-entered Valenciennes and he was besieging Mons. Coligny sent to the aid of that place a fresh body of French under the orders of Senlis, one of his comrades in faith and arms. Before setting out, Senlis saw Charles IX., received from him money together with encouragement, and, in the corps he led, some Catholics were mixed with the Protestants. But from the very court of France there came to the Duke of Alba warnings which put him in a position to surprise the French corps; and Senlis was beaten and made prisoner on the 10th of July.