Volume II Part 45 (2/2)
Meantime it became necessary to explain to the world the extraordinary tragedy which had been enacted on so conspicuous a stage. Each of the different parties to the nefarious compact, with that easy faith which characterizes great criminals, had expected to satisfy its own resentment at the sole expense of the honor and reputation of the others. The king and his mother, while securing the death of Coligny and a few other personal enemies, were not unwilling to have the world believe that the entire occurrence had been an outburst of the old animosity of the Guises against the Chatillons. In fact, this was distinctly stated in the circular letter of Charles IX., despatched on the very Sunday on which the ma.s.sacre began, to the governors of the princ.i.p.al cities of the realm.
”Monsieur de Mandelot”--so runs one of these extraordinary epistles--”you have learned what I wrote to you, the day before yesterday, respecting the wounding of the admiral, and how that I was about to do my utmost in the investigation of the case and the punishment of the guilty, wherein nothing has been forgotten. Since then it has happened that the members of the house of Guise, and the other lords and gentlemen who are their adherents, and who have no small influence in this city, as everybody knows, having received certain information that the friends of the admiral intended to avenge this wound upon them--since they suspected them of being its cause and occasion--became so much excited that, between the one party and the other, there arose a great and lamentable commotion. The body of guards which had been posted around the admiral's house was overpowered, and he was killed with some other gentlemen, as there have also been others ma.s.sacred in various parts of this city. This was done so furiously that it was impossible to apply such a remedy as could have been desired; for I had as much as I could do in employing my guards and other forces to retain my superiority in this castle of the Louvre,[1054] so as afterward to take measures for allaying the commotion throughout the city.
At the present hour it has, thank G.o.d, subsided! It occurred through the private quarrel which has long existed between these two houses. Always foreseeing that some bad consequences would result from it, I have heretofore done all that I could to appease it, as every one knows. There is in this nothing leading to the rupture of the Edict of Pacification, which, on the contrary, I intend to be maintained as much as ever.”[1055]
In view of the undeniable fact that Charles affixed his signature to this letter in the midst of a horrible ma.s.sacre for which he himself had given the signal, which he still directed, and concerning whose progress he received hourly bulletins from the munic.i.p.al authorities, it must be admitted that the king showed himself no novice in the ign.o.ble art of shameless misrepresentation.
[Sidenote: Guise throws the responsibility on the king.]
Guise, on his part, was not less solicitous to relieve himself of responsibility, and to lay the burden upon the king's shoulders. We have seen that, at the very moment of Coligny's a.s.sa.s.sination, he began to repeat the words: ”It is the king's pleasure; it is his express command!”
as his warrant for the crime. As the ma.s.sacre grew in extent he and his a.s.sociates became more reluctant to be held accountable for it,[1056] and at last they forced Charles to acknowledge himself its sole author. The queen mother and Anjou, it is said, were mainly instrumental in leading the monarch to take this unexpected step. His original intention had been to compel the Guises to leave the capital immediately after the death of Coligny--a movement which would have given color to the theory of their guilt. But it was not difficult for Catharine and Henry to convince him that by so doing he would only render more irreconcilable the enmity between the Guises and the Montmorencies, who plainly exhibited their intention to exact vengeance for the death of their ill.u.s.trious kinsman, the admiral. In short, he would purchase brief respite from trouble at the price of a fresh civil war, more cruel than any which had preceded.[1057]
[Sidenote: The king accepts it.]
[Sidenote: The ”Lit de Justice.”]
It was on Tuesday morning, the twenty-sixth of August, that the king formally and publicly a.s.sumed the weighty responsibility. After hearing a solemn ma.s.s, to render thanks to Almighty G.o.d for his happy deliverance from his enemies, Charles, accompanied by his brothers, the Dukes of Anjou and Alencon, by the King of Navarre, and by a numerous body of his princ.i.p.al lords, proceeded to the parliament house, and there, in the presence of all the chambers, held his ”Lit de Justice.”[1058] He opened this extraordinary meeting by an address, in which he dilated upon the intolerable insults he had, from his very childhood, experienced at the hands of Coligny, and many other culprits, who had made religion a pretext for rebellion. His attempts to secure peace by large concessions had emboldened Coligny so far that he had at last ventured to conspire to kill him, his mother, and his brothers, and even the King of Navarre, although a Huguenot like himself; intending to place the Prince of Conde upon the throne, and subsequently to put him also out of the way, and appropriate the regal authority after the destruction of the entire royal family. In order to ward off so horrible a blow, he had, he said, been compelled to resort to extreme measures of rigor. He desired all men to know that the steps taken on the preceding Sunday for the punishment of the guilty had been in accordance with his orders. He is even reported to have gone farther, and to have invoked the aid of parliament in condemning the memory and confiscating the property of those against whom he had alleged such abominable crimes.[1059]
[Sidenote: Servile reply of parliament.]
[Sidenote: Christopher de Thou.]
To this allocution the parliament replied with all servility. Christopher de Thou, the first president, lauded the prudence of a monarch who had known how to bear patiently repeated insults, and at last to crush a conspiracy so dangerous to the quiet of the realm. And he quoted with approval the infamous apothegm of Louis the Eleventh: ”_Qui nescit dissimulare, nescit regnare._” The solitary suggestion that breathed any manly spirit was that of Pibrac, the ”avocat-general,” to the effect that orders should be published to put an end to the work of murder and robbery--a request which Charles readily granted.[1060] Never had the supreme tribunal of justice abased itself more ign.o.bly than when it listened so complaisantly to the king, and approved without qualification an organized ma.s.sacre perpetrated unblus.h.i.+ngly under its very eyes. As for the distinguished man who lent himself to be the mouthpiece of adulation worse than slavish, we are less inclined to commiserate the difficulty of his position than to pity the ingenuous historian who strives to touch leniently upon a fault of his father which he can neither conceal nor palliate.[1061] We may credit his a.s.sertion that his father remonstrated with the king in private with respect to that for which he had praised him in public, and that Christopher de Thou marked his detestation of that ill-starred day by applying to it the lines of Statius:
Excidat illa dies aevo, ne postera credant Saecula: nos certe taceamus, et obruta multa Nocte tegi propriae patiamur crimina gentis.
But we cannot forget that this was not the first time that Christopher de Thou ”accommodated” his words or his actions to the supposed ”exigencies of the times.” He was a member of that commission that sentenced Louis of Conde to death, in deference to the desires of another king and his uncles, the Guises; and the prince would doubtless have lost his head in consequence, but for the sudden death of Francis the Second. Since that time he had repeatedly acquiesced in the b.l.o.o.d.y sentences of the Parisian parliament. His voice was never heard opposing the proscription inst.i.tuted in the late civil wars, even in the case of the atrocious sentence against Gaspard de Coligny. If we concede to his son that no one was of a less sanguinary or of a milder disposition than President De Thou, we must also insist that few judges on the bench displayed less magnanimity or conscientiousness.[1062]
[Sidenote: Ineffectual effort to inculpate Coligny.]
But it was not a simple congratulatory address that Charles, or his mother, required of his parliament. Tyrannical power is rarely satisfied with the mere acquiescence of servile judges; it demands, and ordinarily obtains from them, a positive indors.e.m.e.nt of its schemes of successful villainy. It was necessary--especially, as we shall see later, after the cry of horror was heard that rose toward heaven from all parts of Europe on receipt of the tidings of the ma.s.sacre in Paris and elsewhere--to palliate its atrocity by affixing to the slain Huguenots, and above all to Coligny, a note of rebellious and murderous designs against the king and the royal family. And here again the Parliament of Paris was as pliant as its rulers could desire. Coligny's papers, both in Paris and at Chatillon-sur-Loing, were subjected to close scrutiny; but nothing could be discovered to warrant the suspicion that any seditious design had ever been entertained by him. In default of something better, therefore, the queen mother endeavored to make capital out of two pa.s.sages of these private ma.n.u.scripts. In one--it was, we are told, the will of the admiral, written toward the end of the third civil war[1063]--he dissuaded Charles from a.s.signing to his brothers appanages that might diminish the authority of the crown. Catharine triumphantly showed it to Alencon. ”See!” said she; ”this is your good friend the admiral, whom you so greatly loved and respected!” ”I know not,” replied the young prince, ”how much of a friend he was to me; but certainly he showed by this advice how much he loved the king.”[1064] With Walsingham a similar attempt was made to deprive the murdered hero of Queen Elizabeth's sympathy, but with as little success.
”To the end you may see how little your mistress was beholden to him,”
said Catharine de' Medici one day to the English amba.s.sador, ”you may see a discourse found with his testament, made at such time as he was sick at Rochel, wherein, amongst other advices that he gave to the king my son, this is one, that he willed him in any case to keep the queen, your mistress, and the King of Spain as low as he could, as a thing that tended much to the safety and maintenance of this crown.” ”To that I answered,”
says Walsingham, ”that in this point, howsoever he was affected towards the queen my mistress, he showed himself a most true and faithful subject to the crown of France, and the Queen's Majestie, my mistress, made the more account of him, for that she knew him faithfully affected to the same.”[1065]
[Sidenote: Coligny's memory declared infamous.]
[Sidenote: Petty indignities.]
The complete absence of proof of all designs save the most patriotic, and, on the other hand, the clear evidence that Coligny sought for the quiet and growth of the religious community to which he belonged, only in connection with the honor and prosperity of his own country, did not deter the pliant parliament from pursuing the course prescribed for it. A little more than two months after the Ma.s.sacre of St. Bartholomew's Day (October the twenty-seventh, 1572), the admiral's sentence was formally p.r.o.nounced.
He was proclaimed a traitor and the author of a conspiracy against the king; his goods were confiscated, his memory declared infamous. His children were degraded from their rank as n.o.bles, and p.r.o.nounced ”ign.o.ble, villains, _roturiers_, infamous, unworthy, and incapable of making a will, or of holding offices, dignities or possessions in France.” It was ordered that his castle of Chatillon-sur-Loing should be razed to the ground, never to be rebuilt, and that the site should be sown with salt; that the trees of the park should be cut down to half their height, and a monumental pillar be erected on the spot, with a copy of this decree inscribed upon it. His portraits and statues were to be destroyed; his arms, wherever found, to be dragged at the horse's tail and publicly destroyed by the hangman; his body--if any fragments could be obtained, or, if not, his effigy--was to be dragged on a hurdle, and hung first on the Greve and then on a loftier gibbet at Montfaucon. Finally, public prayers and a solemn procession were ordered to take place in Paris on every successive anniversary of the feast of St. Bartholomew.[1066]
Thus was the memory of one of the n.o.blest characters that ill.u.s.trated the sixteenth century pursued with envenomed hatred, after death had placed Coligny himself beyond the power of the murderous queen mother to inflict more substantial injury upon him. To his mortal remains all that malice could do had already been done. What remained of a mutilated body had been taken from the hands of those precocious criminals, the boys of Paris, and hung up by the feet upon the gallows at Montfaucon.[1067] A great part of the capital had gone out to look upon the grateful sight. Charles the Ninth was of the number of the visitors, and, when others showed signs of disgust at the stench arising from the putrefaction of a corpse long unburied, is said to have exclaimed ”that the smell of a dead enemy is very sweet.”[1068] Great was the merriment of the low populace; copious were the effusions of wit. Jacques Copp de Vellay, in his poetical diatribe, published with privilege--”Le Deluge des Huguenotz”--sings with great delight of
Mont-Faulcon, ou les attend Ce grand Gaspar au curedent, Attache par les piedz sans teste.[1069]
At last, four or five days after Coligny's death, a body of thirty or forty horse, sent by Marshal Montmorency, took down the remains by night, and gave them decent burial.[1070]
[Sidenote: A jubilee procession.]
[Sidenote: Charles declares that he will maintain his edict.]
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