Volume II Part 46 (1/2)

Not content with the public admission of his responsibility for the ma.s.sacre which he had made before the parliament, Charles with his court partic.i.p.ated two days later (Thursday, the twenty-eighth of August) in the celebration of a jubilee, and walked in a procession through the streets of Paris; at successive ”stations” rendering thanks to Heaven, with fair show of devotion, for the preservation of his own life, and the lives of his brothers and of _the King of Navarre_. It would have served greatly to give a color of plausibility to the report of the conspiracy of the Huguenots, could Navarre and Conde have been prevailed upon to appear in the king's company on this occasion. But it must be mentioned to their honor, that they were proof against the persuasions as well as the threats of Charles.[1071] The same day a royal declaration was published, reiterating the allegations made in the Palais de Justice, but protesting that the king was determined to maintain his edict of pacification. As, however, the Protestants were forbidden for the present from holding any public or private a.s.semblies for wors.h.i.+p, it must be admitted that they were not far wrong in regarding the declaration as only another part of the trap cunningly devised for their destruction.[1072]

[Sidenote: Forced conversion of Navarre and Conde.]

Although the conversion of the young King of Navarre and his cousin, the Prince of Conde, did not occur until some weeks later, it may be appropriately mentioned here. No means were left untried to gain them over to the Roman Catholic religion. The sophistries of monks were supplemented by the more dangerous persuasions of a renegade Protestant minister, Hugues Sureau du Rosier, formerly one of the pastors of the church of Orleans.[1073] Whatever excuse his arguments may have furnished by covering their renunciation of their faith with the decent cloak of conviction, _fear_ was certainly the chief instrument in effecting the desired change in the Huguenot princes. There is no room for doubt that the character of Charles underwent a marked change, as we shall see later, from the time that he consented to the ma.s.sacre. He became more sullen, more violent, more impatient of contradiction or opposition. It is not at all unlikely that a mind never fully under control of reason, and now a.s.suredly thrown from its poise by a desperation engendered of remorse for the fearful crime he had reluctantly approved, at times formed the resolution to kill the obstinate King of Navarre and his cousin. On one occasion Charles is said to have been deterred by the supplications of his young wife from going in person to destroy them.[1074] At length, when the alternative of death or the Bastile was the only one presented, the courage of the Bourbons began to falter. Navarre was the first to yield, and his sister, the excellent Catharine de Bourbon, followed his example.

On the thirteenth of September the amba.s.sador Walsingham wrote: ”They prepare Bastile for some persons of quality. It is thought that it is for the Prince of Conde and his brethren.”[1075] But three days later (the sixteenth of September) he wrote again: ”On Sunday last, which was the fourteenth of this month, the young Princess of Conde was constrained to go to ma.s.s, being threatened otherwise to go to prison, and so consequently to be made away. The Prince of Conde hath also yielded to hear ma.s.s upon Sunday next, being otherwise threatened to go to the Bastile, where he is not like long to serve.”[1076] Such conversions did not promise to prove very sincere. They were accepted, however, by the king and his mother; although both Navarre and Conde were detained at court rather as prisoners than as free princes. Pope Gregory the Thirteenth received the submission of both cousins to the authority of the See of Rome, recognized the validity of their marriages, and formally admitted them to his favor, by a special bull of the twenty-seventh of October, 1572.[1077] In return for these concessions Henry of Navarre repealed the ordinances which his mother had made for the government of Bearn, and re-established the Roman Catholic wors.h.i.+p.[1078]

FOOTNOTES:

[925] Memoires de Marguerite de Valois, 25, 26.

[926] No dispensation was ever granted until _after_ the marriage, and after Henry of Navarre's simulated conversion to Roman Catholicism. Then, of course, there was no need of further hesitation, and the doc.u.ment was granted, of which a copy is printed in Doc.u.ments historiques inedits, i.

713-715. The bull is dated Oct. 27, 1572. There is, then, no necessity for Mr. Henry White's uncertainty (Ma.s.sacre of St. Bartholomew, 370): ”The new pope, Gregory XIII., appears to have been more compliant, or the letter stating that a dispensation was on the road must have been a forgery.”

[927] De Thou, iv. (liv. lii.), 569; Lo stratagema di Carlo IX. re di Francia, contro gli Ugonotti, rebelli di Dio e suoi; descritto dal signor Camillo Capilupi, e mandato di Roma al signor Alfonzo Capilupi. Ce stratageme est cy apres mis en Francois avec un avertiss.e.m.e.nt au lecteur.

1574. Orig. ed., p. 22.

[928] Memoires de l'estat de France sous Charles IX. (Cimber et Danjou, vii. 78.)

[929] ”Avec certain formulaire que les uns et les autres n'improuvoyent point.” Mem. de l'estat, _ubi supra_, vii. 79.

[930] As De Thou here speaks as an eye-witness of the marriage, I follow his description very closely. Histoire univ., iv. (liv. lii.) 469, 470.

Agrippa d'Aubigne was not in Paris (Memoires, edit. Pantheon, p. 478), and his account is meagre and deficient in originality. Hist. univ., ii. 12 (liv. i., c. 3). It is quite in keeping with the brave Gascon's character, that, having come to Paris some days before, in order to obtain a commission to command a company of soldiers which he had raised for the war in Flanders, he had been obliged to leave almost instantly upon his arrival, because he had acted as the second of a friend in a duel, and wounded in the face an archer who endeavored to arrest him. Tavannes makes Coligny suggest the removal of the ensigns taken from the Protestants as ”marques de troubles,” and playfully claim for himself the 50,000 crowns promised to any one who should bring the admiral's head. Memoires, ed.

Pet.i.tot, iii. 293.

[931] Memoires de l'etat, _ubi supra_, pp. 79, 80; De Thou, _ubi supra_. I have not deemed it out of place to describe some of the diversions with which the French court occupied itself on the eve of the ma.s.sacre. The connection between reckless merriment and cold-blooded cruelty is often startlingly close. Besides this, the finances of the country were so hopelessly involved, as the consequence of the late civil wars, that this lavish expenditure was particularly ill-timed. If old Gaspard de Tavannes was as blunt as his son represents him to have been, he gave Charles some good, but, like most good, unheeded advice. ”Sire,” said he, a propos of the extravagance of the court at Guise's marriage in 1570, ”you should make a feast, and instead of the singers who are brought in artificial clouds, you should bring those who would tell you this truth: 'You are dolts! You spend your money in festivals, in pomps and masks, and do not pay your men-at-arms nor your soldiers; foreigners will beat you!'”

Memoires, ed. Pet.i.tot, iii. 183.

[932] I had translated this letter from the copy given by the Memoires de l'estat de France (_apud_ Archives curieuses, vii. 80, 81), which agrees substantially with, and was probably derived from, the version given in Hotman's Gasparis Colinii Vita (1575), 106, 107. On comparing it, however, with the transcript of the original autograph in the remarkable collection of the late Col. Henri Tronchin, given by M. Jules Bonnet in the Bulletin de la Soc. de l'hist. du prot. francais, i. (1853), 369, I discover extraordinary discrepancies, and find that, in addition to a different phraseology in every sentence, one clause is inserted by Hotman of which there is not a trace in the Tronchin MS. I refer to the words: ”Soyez a.s.seuree de ma part que, parmi ces festins et pa.s.se-temps, _je ne donneray fascherie a personne_”--which would, of course, point to the prevailing fears of a collision between the admiral and the young Duke of Guise, or his retainers, whose hatred of Coligny was so well known that Charles IX.

had issued a special injunction to the parties to keep the peace. The letter contains at the commencement of the postscript a playful allusion to the hope of his wife soon to be a mother.

[933] Mem. de l'estat, _ubi supra_, 88, 89; De Thou, iv. (liv. lii.) 570.

The mechanical part of these exhibitions was well executed. In the ”_enfer_” there were ”un grand nombre de diables et petis diabloteaux faisans infinies singeries et tintamarres avec une grande roue tournant dedans ledit enfer, toute environnee de clochettes.” The singer, etienne le Roy, was again the ”deus ex machina,” coming from heaven and returning thither, in the character of Mercury mounted upon a gigantic bird. The final explosion inspired so much consternation among the spectators, that it effectually cleared the hall.

[934] They were married at Blandy, a castle belonging to the Marquise de Rothelin, near Melun, where its ruins are still to be seen (Saint-Fargeau, Dict. des communes de France, s. v.), about a week before the marriage of Navarre, August 10, 1572. Tocsain contre les ma.s.sacreurs (Arch. curieuses, vii. 42). Marie of Cleves was a daughter of the Duke of Nevers, and sister of Catharine of Cleves, Prince Porcien's widow, whom Henry of Guise had married in Sept., 1570. Journal de Jehan de la Fosse, 146.

[935] It is astonis.h.i.+ng to see what considerable distances the Protestants were obliged to go in order to enjoy any religious privileges, and what fatigue they willingly underwent in order to avail themselves of them. In 1563, immediately after the close of the first civil war, instead of being a.s.signed a place for wors.h.i.+p in the suburbs, according to the terms of the edict, the Protestants of Troyes were told to go to Ceant-en-Othe--full _eight leagues_, or about _twenty-four miles_; nor could they obtain justice by any remonstrances with the court! As they went to Ceant, in spite of its inconvenient distance, and of the death of several children taken thither to be baptized, the Romanists, in 1570, actually proposed to remove the Protestant _preche_ still farther off, to Villenauxe, _thirteen leagues from Troyes!_ Happily, after a while, they availed themselves of the hospitality of a feudal lord nearer by. Recordon, Le protestantisme en Champagne (MSS. of N. Pithou), 136, etc., 149, 163.

[936] Ibid., pp. 168, 169. The Roman Catholics of Troyes sent, about the middle of August, two deputies to get the Protestant place of wors.h.i.+p removed from Isle-au-Mont, who were present at the ma.s.sacre.

[937] Baschet, La diplomatie venitienne, p. 540.

[938] This confession exists in ma.n.u.script in the National Library of Paris (Fonds de Bouhier, 59), under the heading: ”Discours du Roy Henry troisiesme a un personnage d'honneur et de qualite estant pres de sa majeste, sur les causes et motifs de la St. Barthelemy.” It is printed in an appendix to the Memoires de Villeroy (Pet.i.tot ed., xliv. 496-510). Its authenticity is vouched for by Matthieu, the historiographer of Louis XIII., and is corroborated by its remarkable agreement with what we can learn from other sources. Cf., especially, Soldan, Frankreich und die Bartholomausnacht, 224-226. Some suppose that M. de Souvre, and not Miron, was the person with whom the conversation at Cracow was held. Martin, Hist. de France, x. 315.

[939] Discours du Roy Henry III., Mem. de Villeroy, 499, 500.

[940] See J. Bonnet, Vie d'Olympia Morata (Paris, 1850), 20, etc.

[941] Discours du Roy Henry III., ibid., p. 501. The nuncio, Salviati, informs us that young Guise urged his mother herself to kill Coligny.