Volume IV Part 13 (2/2)

”I have in my hands,” the Duke of Alba sent word to his king, ”a letter from the King of France which would strike you dumb if you were to see it; for the moment, it is expedient to say nothing about it.” ”News of the defeat of Senlis,” says Tavannes, ”comes flying to court, and changes hearts and counsels. Disdain, despite, is engendered in the admiral, who hurls this defeat upon the heads of those who have prevented the king from declaring himself; he raises a new levy of three thousand foot, and, not regarding who he is and where he is, he declares, in the presumption of his audacity, that he can no longer hold his partisans, and that it must be one of two wars, Spanish or civil. It is all thunder-storm at court; everyone remains on the watch at the highest pitch of resolution.”

A grand council was a.s.sembled. Coligny did not care. He had already, at the king's request, set forth in a long memorial all the reasons for his policy of a war with Spain; the king had appeared struck with them; but, ”as he only sought,” says De Thou, ”to gain time without its being perceived,” he handed the admiral's memorial to the keeper of the seals, John de Morvilliers, requesting him to set forth also all the reasons for a pacific policy. Coligny, a man of resolution and of action, did not take any pleasure in thus prolonging the discussion; nevertheless he again brought forward and warmly advocated, at the grand council, the views he had so often expressed. They were almost unanimously rejected.

Coligny did not consider himself bound to give them up. ”I have promised,” said he, ”on my own account, my a.s.sistance to the Prince of Orange; I hope the king will not take it ill if by means of my friends, and perhaps in person, I fulfil my promise.” This reservation excited great surprise. ”Madam,” said Coligny to the queen-mother, ”the king is to-day shunning a war which would promise him great advantages; G.o.d forbid that there should break out another which he cannot shun!” The council broke up in great agitation. ”Let the queen beware,” said Tavannes, ”of the king her son's secret councils, designs, and sayings; if she do not look out, the Huguenots will have him. At any rate, before thinking of anything else, let her exert herself to regain the mother's authority which the admiral has caused her to lose.”

The king was hunting at Brie. The queen-mother went and joined him; she shut herself up with him in a cabinet, and, bursting into tears, she said, ”I should never have thought that, in return for having taken so much pains to bring you up and preserve to you the crown, you would have had heart to make me so miserable a recompense. You hide yourself from me, me who am your mother, in order to take counsel of your enemies. I know that you hold secret counsels with the admiral; you desire to plunge rashly into war with Spain, in order to give your kingdom, yourself, and the persons that are yours, over as a prey to them of the religion. If I am so miserable a creature, yet before I see that, give me leave to withdraw to the place of my birth; remove from you your brother, who may call himself unfortunate in having employed his own life to preserve yours; give him at least time to withdraw out of danger and from the presence of enemies made in doing you service; Huguenots who desire not war with Spain, but with France, and the subversion of all the Estates in order to set up themselves.”

Tavannes himself terms these expressions ”an artful harangue;” but he says, ”it moved, astounded, and dismayed the king, not so much on the score of the Huguenots as of his mother and brother, whose subtlety, ambition, and power in the state he knew; he marvelled to see his counsels thus revealed; he avowed them, asked pardon, promised obedience.

Having sown this distrust, having shot this first bolt, the queen-mother, still in displeasure, withdrew to Monceaux. The trembling king followed her; he found her with his brother and Sieurs de Tavannes, de Retz, and the Secretary of State de Sauve, the last of whom threw himself upon his knees and received his Majesty's pardon for having revealed his counsels to his mother. The infidelity, the bravado, the audacity, the menaces, and the enterprises of the Huguenots were magnified with so much of truth and art that from friends behold them converted into enemies of the king, who, nevertheless, wavering as ever, could not yet give up the desire he had conceived of winning glory and reputation by war with Spain.”

A fresh incident increased the agitation in the royal circle. In July, 1572, the throne of Poland had become vacant. A Polish emba.s.sy came to offer it to the Duke of Anjou. On his part and his mother's, there was at first great eagerness to accept it; Catherine was charmed to see her favorite son becoming a king. ”If we had required,” says a Polish historian, ”that the French should build a bridge of solid gold over the Vistula, they would have agreed.” Hesitation soon took the place of eagerness; Henry demanded information, and took time to reply. He had shown similar hesitation at the time of the negotiations entered upon in London, in 1571, with a view of making him the husband of Elizabeth, Queen of England: Coligny, who was very anxious to have him away, pressed Charles IX. to insist upon a speedy solution. ”If Monsieur,” said he, ”who would not have England by marriage, will not have Poland either by election, let him declare once for all that he will not leave France.”

The relations between the two brothers became day by day more uncomfortable: two years later, Henry, for a brief period King of Poland, himself told the story of them to his physician Miron. ”When, by any chance,” he said, ”the queen-mother and I, after the admiral's departure, approached the king to speak to him of any matters, even those which concerned merely his pleasure, we found him marvellously quick-tempered and cross-grained, with rough looks and bearing, and his answers still more so. One day, a very short time before the St. Bartholomew, setting out expressly from my quarters to go and see the king, somebody told me on inquiry that he was in his cabinet, whence the admiral, who had been alone with him a very long while, had just that instant gone out. I entered at once, as I had been accustomed to do. But as soon as the king my brother perceived me, he, without saying anything to me, began walking about furiously and with long steps, often looking towards me askance and with a very evil eye, sometimes laying his hand upon his dagger, and in so excited a fas.h.i.+on that I expected nothing else but that he would come and take me by the collar to poniard me. I was very vexed that I had gone in, reflecting upon the peril I was in, but still more upon how to get out of it; which I did so dexterously, that, whilst he was walking with his back turned to me, I retreated quickly towards the door, which I opened, and, with a shorter obeisance than at my entry, I made my exit, which was scarcely perceived by him until I was outside. And straightway I went to look for the queen my mother; and, putting together all reports, notifications, and suspicions, the time, and past circ.u.mstances, in conjunction with this last meeting, we remained both of us easily persuaded, and as it were certain, that it was the admiral who had impressed the king with some bad and sinister opinion of us, and we resolved from that moment to rid ourselves of him.”

One idea immediately occurred to Catherine and her son. Two persons felt a pa.s.sionate hatred towards Coligny; they were the widow of Duke Francis of Guise, Anne d'Este, become d.u.c.h.ess of Nemours by a second marriage, and her son Henry de Guise, a young man of twenty-two. They were both convinced that Coligny had egged on Poltrot to murder Duke Francis, and they had sworn to exact vengeance. Being informed of the queen-mother's and the Duke of Anjou's intention, they entered into it eagerly; the young Duke of Guise believed his mother quite capable of striking down the admiral in the very midst of one of the great a.s.semblies at court; the fair ladies of the sixteenth century were adepts in handling dagger and pistol. In default of the d.u.c.h.ess of Nemours, her son was thought of for getting rid of Coligny. ”It was at one time decided,” says the Duke de Bouillon in his Memoires, ”that M. de Guise should kill the admiral during a tilt-at-the-ring which the king gave in the garden of the Louvre, and in which all Messieurs were to lead sides. I was on that of the duke, who was believed to have an understanding with the admiral. On this occasion, it was so managed that our dresses were not ready, and the late duke and his side did not tilt at all. The resolution against the admiral was changed prudently; inasmuch as it was very perilous, for the person of the king and of Messieurs, to have determined to kill him in that place, there being present more than four hundred gentlemen of the religion, who might have gone very far in case of an a.s.sault upon that lord, who was so much beloved by them.” Everything considered, it was thought more expedient to employ for the purpose an inferior agent; Catherine and the Duke of Anjou sent for a Gascon captain, a dependant of the house of Lorraine, whom they knew to be resolute and devoted.

”We had him shown the means he should adopt,” says the Duke of Anjou, ”in attacking him whom we had in our eye; but, having well scanned him, himself and his movements, and his speech and his looks, which had made us laugh and afforded us good pastime, we considered him too hare-brained and too much of a wind-bag to deal the blow well.” They then applied to an officer ”of practice and experience in murder,” Charles de Louviers, Sieur de Maurevert, who was called the king's slaughterman (_le tueur du roi_), because he had already rendered such a service, and they agreed with him as to all the circ.u.mstances of place, time, and procedure most likely to secure the success of the deed, whilst giving the murderer chances of escape.

In such situations there is scarcely any project the secret of which is so well kept that there does not get abroad some rumor to warn an observant mind; and when it is the fate of a religious or a popular hero that is in question, there is never any want of devoted friends or servants about him, ready to take alarm for him. When Coligny mounted his horse to go from Chatillon to Paris, a poor countrywoman on his estates threw herself before him, sobbing, ”Ah! sir, ah! our good master, you are going to destruction; I shall never see you again if once you go to Paris; you will die there, you and all those who go with-you.” At Paris, on the approach of the St. Bartholomew, the admiral heard that some of his gentlemen were going away. ”They treat you too well here,”

said one of them, Langoiran, to him; ”better to be saved with the fools than lost for the sake of being thought over-wise.” ”The admiral was beset by letters which reminded him of the queen-mother's crooked ways, and the detestable education of the king, trained to every sort of violence and horrible sin; his Bible is Macchiavelli; he has been prepared by the blood of beasts for the shedding of human blood; he has been persuaded that a prince is not bound to observe an edict extorted by his subjects.” To all these warnings Coligny replied at one time by affirming the king's good faith, and at another by saying, ”I would rather be dragged dead through the muck-heaps of Paris than go back to civil war.” This great soul had his seasons, not of doubt as to his faith or discouragement as to his cause, but of profound sorrow at the atrocious or shameful spectacles and the public or private woes which had to be gone through.

Charles IX. himself felt some disquietude as to the meeting of the Guises and Coligny at his court. The Guises had quitted it before the 18th of August, the day fixed for the marriage of King Henry of Navarre with Marguerite de Valois. When the marriage was over, they were to return, and they did. At the moment of their returning, the king said to Coligny, with demonstrations of the most sincere friends.h.i.+p, ”You know, my dear father, the promise you made me not to insult any of the Guises as long as you remained at court. On their side, they have given me their word that they will have for you, and all the gentry of your following, the consideration you deserve. I rely entirely upon your word, but I have not so much confidence in theirs; I know that they are only looking for an opportunity of letting their vengeance burst forth; I know their bold and haughty character; as they have the people of Paris devoted to them, and as, on coming hither, under pretext of the rejoicings at my sister's marriage, they have brought a numerous body of well-armed soldiers, I should be inconsolable if they were to take anything in hand against you; such an outrage would recoil upon me. That being so, if you think as I do, I believe the best thing for me is to order into the city the regiment of guards, with such and such captains (he mentioned none but those who were not objects of suspicion to Coligny); this re-enforcement,” added the king, ”will secure public tranquillity, and, if the factious make any disturbance, there will be men to oppose to them.” The admiral a.s.sented to the king's proposal. He added that he was ready to declare ”that never had he been guilty or approving of the death of Duke Francis of Guise, and that he set down as a calumniator and a scoundrel whoever said, that he had authorized it.”

Though frequently going to the palace, both he and the Guises, they had not spoken when they met. Charles had promised the Lorraine princes ”not to force them to make friends with Coligny more than was agreeable to them.” He believed that he had taken every precaution necessary to maintain in his court, for some time at least, the peace he desired.

On Friday, the 22d of August, 1572, Coligny was returning on foot from the Louvre to the Rue des Fosses--St.-Germain-l'Auxerrois, where he lived; he was occupied in reading a letter which he had just received; a shot, fired from the window of a house in the cloister of St. Germain-l'Auxerrois, smashed two fingers of his right hand and lodged a ball in his left arm; he raised his eyes, pointed out with his injured hand the house whence the shot had come, and reached his quarters on foot. Two gentlemen who were in attendance upon him rushed to seize the murderer; it was too late; Maurevert had been lodging there and on the watch for three days at the house of a canon, an old tutor to the Duke of Guise; a horse from the duke's stable was waiting for him at the back of the house; and, having done his job, he departed at a gallop. He was pursued for several leagues without being overtaken.

Coligny sent to apprise the king of what had just happened to him.

”There,” said he, ”was a fine proof of fidelity to the agreement between him and the Duke of Guise.” ”I shall never have rest, then!” cried Charles, breaking the stick with which he was playing tennis with the Duke of Guise and Teligny, the admiral's son-in-law; and he immediately returned to his room. The Duke of Guise took himself off without a word.

Teligny speedily joined his father-in-law. Ambrose Pare had already attended to him, cutting off the two broken fingers; somebody expressed a fear that the b.a.l.l.s might have been poisoned. ”It will be as G.o.d pleases as to that,” said Coligny; and, turning towards the minister, Merlin, who had hurried to him, he added, ”pray that He may grant me the gift of perseverance.” Towards midday, Marshals de Damville, De Cosse, and De Villars went to see him ”out of pure friends.h.i.+p,” they told him, ”and not to exhort him to endure his mishap with patience: we know that you will not lack patience.” ”I do protest to you,” said Coligny, ”that death affrights me not; it is of G.o.d that I hold my life; when He requires it back from me, I am quite ready to give it up. But I should very much like to see the king before I die; I have to speak to him of things which concern his person and the welfare of his state, and which I feel sure none of you would dare to tell him of.” ”I will go and inform his Majesty, . . .” rejoined Damville; and he went out with Villars and Teligny, leaving Marshal de Cosse in the room. ”Do you remember,” said Coligny to him, ”the warnings I gave you a few hours ago? You will do well to take your precautions.”

About two P. M., the king, the queen-mother, and the Dukes of Anjou and Alencon, her two other sons, with many of their high officers, repaired to the admiral's. ”My dear father,” said the king, as he went in, ”the hurt is yours; the grief and the outrage mine; but I will take such vengeance that it shall never be forgotten;” to which he added his usual imprecations. ”Then the admiral, who lay in bed sorely wounded,” says the Duke of Anjou himself, in his account of this interview, ”requested that he might speak privately to the king, which the king granted readily, making a sign to the queen my mother, and to me, to withdraw, which we did incontinently into the middle of the room, where we remained standing during this secret colloquy, which caused us great misgiving.

We saw ourselves surrounded by more than two hundred gentlemen and captains of the admiral's party, who were in the room and another adjoining, and, besides, in a ball below, the which, with sad faces and the gestures and bearing of malcontents, were whispering in one another's ears, frequently pa.s.sing and repa.s.ssing before and behind us, not with so much honor and respect as they ought to have done, and as if they had some suspicion that we had somewhat to do with the admiral's hurt. We were seized with astonishment and fear at seeing ourselves shut in there, as my mother has since many times confessed to me, saying that she had never been in any place where there was so much cause for fright, and whence she had gone away with more relief and pleasure. This apprehension caused us to speedily break in upon the conversation the admiral was having with the king, under a polite excuse invented by the queen my mother, who, approaching the king, said out loud that she had no idea he would make the admiral talk so much, and that she saw quite well that his physicians and surgeons considered it bad for him, as it certainly was very dangerous, and enough to throw him into a fever, which was, above everything, to be guarded against. She begged the king to put off the rest of their conversation to another time, when the admiral was better. This vexed the king mightily, for he was very anxious to hear the remainder of what the admiral had to say to him. However, he being unable to gainsay so specious an argument, we got the king away. And incontinently the queen-mother (and I too) begged the king to let us know the secret conversation which the admiral had held with him, and in which he had been unwilling that we should be partic.i.p.ators; which the king refused several times to do. But finding himself importuned and hard pressed by us, he told us abruptly and with displeasure, swearing by G.o.d's death that what the admiral said was true, that kings realized themselves as such in France only in so far as they had the 'power of doing harm or good to their subjects and servants, and that this power and management of affairs had slipped imperceptibly into the hands of the queen my mother and mine.' 'This superintendent domination, the admiral told me, might some day be very prejudicial to me and to all my kingdom, and that I should hold it in suspicion and beware of it; of which he was anxious to warn me, as one of my best and most faithful subjects, before he died. There, G.o.d's death, as you wish to know, is what the admiral said to me.' This, said as it was with pa.s.sion and fury, went straight home to our hearts, which we concealed as best we might, both of us, however, defending ourselves in the matter. We continued this conversation all the way from the admiral's quarters to the Louvre, where, having left the king in his room, we retired to that of the queen my mother, who was piqued and hurt to the utmost degree at this language used by the admiral to the king, as well as at the credence which the king seemed to accord to it, and was fearful lest it should bring about some change and alteration in our affairs and in the management of the state. Being unable to resolve upon any course at the moment, we retired, putting off the question till the morrow, when I went to see my mother, who was already up. I had a fine racket in my head, and so had she, and for the time there was no decision come to save to have the admiral despatched by some means or other. It being impossible any longer to employ stratagems and artifices, it would have to be done openly, and the king brought round to that way of thinking. We agreed that, in the afternoon, we would go and pay him a visit in his closet, whither we would get the Sieur de Nevers, Marshals de Tavannes and de Retz, and Chancellor de Birague to come, merely to have their opinion as to the means to be adopted for the execution, which we had already determined upon, my mother and I.”

On Sat.u.r.day, the 23d of August, in the afternoon, the queen-mother, the Duke of Anjou, Marshals do Tavannes and de Retz, the Duke of Nevers, and the Chancellor de Birague met in the king's closet, who was irresolute and still talking of exacting from the Guises heavy vengeance for the murderous attack upon Coligny. Catherine ”represented to him that the party of the Huguenots had already seized this occasion for taking up arms against him; they had sent,” she said, ”several despatches to Germany to procure a levy of ten thousand reiters, and to the cantons of the Swiss for another levy of ten thousand foot; the French captains, partisans of the Huguenots, had already, most of them, set out to raise levies within the kingdom time and place of meeting had already been a.s.signed and determined. All the Catholics, on their side,” added Catherine, ”disgusted with so long a war and hara.s.sed by so many kinds of calamities, have resolved to put a stop to them; they have decided amongst them to elect a captain-general, to form a league offensive and defensive against the Huguenots. The whole of France would thus be seen armed and divided into two great parties, between which the king would remain isolated, without any command and with about as much obedience.

For so much ruin and calamity in antic.i.p.ation and already within a finger's reach, and for the slaughter of so many thousands of men, a preventive may be found in a single sword-thrust; all that is necessary is to kill the admiral, the head and front of all the civil wars; the designs and the enterprises of the Huguenots will die with him, and the Catholics, satisfied with the sacrifice of two or three men, will remain forever in obedience to the king. . . .” ”At the beginning,” continues the Duke of Anjou, in his account, ”the king would not by any means consent to have the admiral touched; feeling, however, some fear of the danger which we had so well depicted and represented, to him, he desired that, in a case of such importance, every one should at once state his opinion.” When each of those present had spoken, the king appeared still undecided. The queen-mother then resolved ”to let him hear the truth in toto from Marshal de Retz, from whom she knew that he would take it better than from any other,” says his sister Marguerite de Valois in her Memoires, ”as one who was more in his confidence and favor than any other. The which came to see him in the evening, about nine or ten, and told him that, as his faithful servant, he could not conceal from him the danger he was in if he were to abide by his resolution to do justice on M. de Guise, because it was necessary that he should know that the attack upon the admiral was not M. de Guise's doing alone, but that my brother Henry, the King of Poland, afterwards King of France, and the queen my mother, had been concerned in it; which M. de Guise and his friends would not fail to reveal, and which would place his Majesty in a position of great danger and embarra.s.sment.” Towards midnight, the queen-mother went down to the king, followed by her son Henry and four other councillors.

They found the king more put out than ever. The conversation began again, and resolved itself into a regular attack upon the king. ”The Guises,” he was told, ”will denounce the king himself, together with his mother and brother; the Huguenots will believe that the king was in concert with the party, and they will take the whole royal family to task. War is inevitable. Better to win a battle in Paris, where we hold all the chiefs in our clutches, than put it to hazard in the field.

After a struggle of an hour and a half, Charles, in a violent state of agitation, still hesitated; when the queen-mother, fearing lest, if there were further delay, all would be discovered, said to him, 'Permit me and your brother, sir, to retire to some other part of the kingdom.' Charles rose from his seat. 'By G.o.d's death,' said he, 'since you think proper to kill the admiral, I consent; but all the Huguenots in Paris as well, in order that there remain not one to reproach me afterwards. Give the orders at once.'” And he went back into his room.

In order to relieve and satisfy her own pa.s.sions and those of her favorite son, which were fear and love of power, the queen-mother had succeeded in working her king-son into a fit of weakness and mad anger.

Anxious to profit by it, ”she gave orders on the instant for the signal, which was not to have been given until an hour before daybreak,” says De Thou, ”and, instead of the bell at the Palace of Justice, the tocsin was sounded by the bell of St.-Germain-Auxerrois, which was nearer.”

Even before the king had given his formal consent, the projectors of the outrage had carefully prepared for its execution; they had apportioned out amongst themselves or to their agents the different quarters of the city. The Guises had reserved for themselves that in which they considered they had personal vengeance as well as religious enmity to satisfy, the neighborhood of St.-Germain-l'Auxerrois, and especially Rue de Bethisy and Rue des Fosses-St.-Germain. Awakened by the noise around his house, and, before long, by arquebuse-shots fired in his court-yard, Coligny understood what was going to happen; he jumped out of bed, put on his dressing-gown, and, as he stood leaning against the wall, he said to the clergyman, Merlin, who was sitting up with him, ”M. Merlin, say me a prayer; I commit my soul to my Saviour.” One of his gentlemen, Cornaton, entered the room. ”What is the meaning of this riot?” asked Ambrose Pare, who had also remained with the admiral.

”My lord,” said Cornaton to Coligny, ”it is G.o.d calling us.” ”I have long been ready to die,” said the admiral; ”but you, my friends, save yourselves, if it is still possible.” All ran up stairs and escaped, the majority by the roof; a German servant, Nicholas Muss, alone remained with the admiral, ”as little concerned,” says Cornaton, ”as if there were nothing going on around him.” The door of his room was forced. Two men, servants of the Guises, entered first. One of them, Behme, attached to the Duke of Guise's own person, came forward, saying, ”Art thou not the admiral?” ”Young man,” said Coligny, ”thou comest against a wounded and an aged man. Thou'lt not shorten my life by much.” Behme plunged into his stomach a huge pointed boar-spear which he had in his hand, and then struck him on the head with it. Coligny fell, saying, ”If it were but a man! But 'tis a horse-boy.” Others came in and struck him in their turn. ”Behme!” shouted the Duke of Guise from the court-yard, ”hast done?” ”'Tis all over, my lord,” was the answer; and the murderers threw the body out of the window, where it stuck for an instant, either accidentally or voluntarily, and as if to defend a last remnant of life.

Then it fell. The two great lords, who were waiting for it, turned over the corpse, wiped the blood off the face, and said, ”Faith, 'tis he, sure enough.”

[Ill.u.s.tration: Henry de Guise and the Corpse of Coligny----369]

Some have said that Guise gave him a kick in the face. A servant of the Duke of Nevers cut off the head, and took it to the queen-mother, the king, and the Duke of Anjou. It was embalmed with care, to be sent, it is said, to Rome. What is certain is that, a few days afterwards, Mandelot, governor of Lyons, wrote to the king, ”I have received, sir, the letter your Majesty was pleased to write to me, whereby you tell me that you have been advertised that there is a man who has set out from over yonder with the head he took from the admiral after killing him, for to convey it to Rome, and to take care, when the said man arrives in this city, to have him arrested, and to take from him the said head.

<script>