During the negotiations and as to the very basis of the edict of March 19, 1563, the Protestants were greatly divided; the soldiers and the politicians, with Conde at their head, desired peace, and thought that the concessions made by the Catholics ought to be accepted. The majority of the Reformed pastors and theologians cried out against the insufficiency of the concessions, and were astonished that there should be so much hurry to make peace when the Catholics had just lost their most formidable captain. Coligny, moderate in his principles, but always faithful to his church when she made her voice heard, showed dissatisfaction at the selfishness of the nobles. "To confine the religion to one town in every bailiwick," he said, "is to ruin more churches by a stroke of the pen than our enemies could have pulled down in ten years; the nobles ought to have recollected that example had been set by the towns to them, and by the poor to the rich." Calvin, in his correspondence with the Reformed churches of France, severely handled Conde on this occasion. At the moment when peace was made, the pacific were in the right; the death of the Duke of Guise had not prevented the battle of Dreux from being a defeat for the Reformers; and, when war had to be supported for long, it was especially the provincial nobles and the people on their estates who bore the burden of it. But when the edict of Amboise had put an end to the first religious war, when the question was no longer as to who won or lost battles, but whether the conditions of that peace to which the Catholics had sworn were loyally observed, and whether their concessions were effective in insuring the modest amount of liberty and security promised to the Protestants, the question changed front, and it was not long before facts put the malcontents in the right. Between 1563 and 1567 murders of distinguished Protestants increased strangely, and excited amongst their families anxiety accompanied by a thirst for vengeance. The Guises and their party, on their side, persisted in their outcries for proceedings against the instigators, known or presumed, of the murder of Duke Francis. It was plainly against Admiral de Coligny that these cries were directed; and he met them by a second declaration, very frank as a denial of the deed which it was intended to impute to him, but more hostile than ever to the Guises and their party. "The late duke," said he, "was of the whole army the man I had most looked out for on the day of the last battle; if I could have brought a gun to bear upon him to kill him, I would have done it; I would have ordered ten thousand arquebusiers, had so many been under my command, to single him out amongst all the others, whether in the field, or from over a wall, or from behind a hedge. In short, I would not have spared any of the means permitted by the laws of war in time of hostility to get rid of so great an enemy as he was for me and for so many other good subjects of the king."

After three years of such deadly animosity between the two parties and the two houses, the king and the queen-mother could find no other way of stopping an explosion than to call the matter on before the privy council, and cause to be there drawn up, on the 29th of January, 1566, a solemn decree, "declaring the admiral's innocence on his own affirmation, given in the presence of the king and the council as before God himself, that he had not had anything to do with or approved of the said homicide. Silence for all time to come was consequently imposed upon the attorney-general and everybody else; inhibition and prohibition were issued against the continuance of any investigation or prosecution. The king took the parties under his safeguard, and enjoined upon them that they should live amicably in obedience to him." By virtue of this injunction, the Guises, the Colignies, and the Montmorencies ended by embracing, the first-named accommodating themselves with a pretty good grace to this demonstration: "but God knows what embraces!" [Words used in La Harenga, a satire of the day in burlesque verse upon the Cardinal of Lorraine.] Six years later the St. Bartholomew brought the true sentiments out into broad daylight.

At the same time that the war was proceeding amongst the provinces with this passionate doggedness, royal decrees were alternately confirming and suppressing or weakening the securities for liberty and safety which the decree of Amboise, on the 19th of March, 1563, had given to the Protestants by way of re-establishing peace. It was a series of contradictory measures which were sufficient to show the party-strife still raging in the heart of the government. On the 14th of June, 1563, Protestants were forbidden to work, with shops open, on the days of Catholic festivals. On the 14th of December, 1563, it was proclaimed that Protestants might not gather alms for the poor of their religion, unless in places where that religion was practised, and nowhere else. On the 24th of June, 1564, a proclamation from the king interdicted the exercise of the Reformed religion within the precincts of any royal residence. On the 4th of August, 1564, the Reformed churches were forbidden to hold synods and make collections of money, and their ministers to quit their places of residence and to open schools. On the 12th of November, 1567, a king's ordinance interdicted the conferring of judiciary offices on non-Catholics. In vain did Conde and Coligny cry out loudly against these violations of the peace of Amboise; in vain, on the 16th of August, 1563, at the moment of proclaiming the king's majority, was an edict issued giving full and entire confirmation to the edict of the 19th of March preceding, with the addition of prescriptions favorable to the royal authority, as well as, at the same time, to the maintenance of the public peace; scarcely any portion of these prescriptions was observed; the credit of Chancellor de l'Hospital was clearly very much on the decline; and, whilst the legal government was thus falling to pieces or languishing away, Gaspard de Tavannes, a proved soldier and royalist, who, however, was not yet marshal of France, was beginning to organize, under the name of Brotherhood of the Holy Spirit, a secret society intended to renew the civil war "if it happened that occasion should offer for repressing and chastising them of the religion called Reformed." It was the League in its cradle. At the same time, the king had orders given for a speedy levy of six thousand Swiss, and an army-corps was being formed on the frontiers of Champagne. The queen-mother neglected no pains, no caresses, to hide from Conde the true moving cause at the bottom of all these measures; and as "he was," says the historian Davila, "by nature very ready to receive all sorts of impressions," he easily suffered himself to be lulled to sleep. One day, however, in June, 1567, he thought it about time to claim the fulfilment of a promise that had been made him at the time of the peace of Amboise of a post which would give him the rank and authority of lieutenant-general of the kingdom, as his late brother, the King of Navarre, had been; and he asked for the sword of constable which Montmorency, in consequence of his great age, seemed disposed to resign to the king. Catherine avoided giving any answer; but her favorite son, Henry, Duke of Anjou, who was as yet only sixteen, repudiated this idea with so much haughtiness that Conde felt called upon to ask some explanations; there was no longer any question of war with Spain or of an army to be got together. "What, pray, will you do," he asked, "with the Swiss you are raising?" The answer was, "We shall find good employment for them."

It is the failing of a hypocritical and lying policy, however able, that, if it do not succeed promptly, a moment arrives when it becomes transparent and lets in daylight. Even Conde could not delude himself any longer; the preparations were for war against the Reformers. He quitted the court to take his stand again with his own party. Coligny, D'Andelot, La Rochefoucauld, La Noue, and all the accredited leaders amongst the Protestants, whom his behavior, too full of confidence or of complaisance towards the court, had shocked or disquieted, went and joined him. In September, 1567, the second religious war broke out.

It was short, and not decisive for either party. At the outset of the campaign, success was with the Protestants; forty towns, Orleans, Montereau, Lagny, Montauban, Castres, Montpellier, Uzes, &c., opened their gates to them or fell into their hands.

They were within an ace of surprising the king at Monceaux, and he never forgot, says Montluc, that "the Protestants had made him do the stretch from Meaux to Paris at something more than a walk." It was around Paris that Conde concentrated all the efforts of the campaign. He had posted himself at St. Denis with a small army of four thousand foot and two thousand horse. The Constable de Montmorency commanded the royal army, having a strength of sixteen thousand foot and three thousand horse. Attempts were made to open negotiations; but the constable broke them off brusquely, roaring out that the king would never tolerate two religions. On the 10th of November, 1567, the battle began at St. Denis, and was fought with alternations of partial success and reverse, which spread joy and sadness through the two hosts in turn; but in resisting a charge of cavalry, led to victory by Conde, the constable fell with and under his horse; a Scot called out to him to surrender; for sole response, the aged warrior, "abandoned by his men, but not by his manhood," says D'Aubigne, smashed the Scot's jaw with the pommel of his broken sword; and at the same moment he fell mortally wounded by a shot through the body. His death left the victory uncertain and the royal army disorganized. The campaign lasted still four months, thanks to the energetic perseverance of Coligny and the inexhaustible spirits of Conde, both of whom excelled in the art of keeping up the courage of their men. "Where are you taking us now?" asked an ill-tempered officer one day. "To meet our German allies," said Conde. "And suppose we don't find them?" "Then we will breathe on our fingers, for it is mighty cold." They did at last, at Pont-a-Mousson, meet the German re-enforcements, which were being brought up by Prince John Casimir, son of the elector-palatine, and which made Conde's army strong enough for him to continue the war in earnest. But these new comers declared that they would not march any farther unless they were paid the hundred thousand crowns due to them. Conde had but two thousand. "Thereupon," says La Noue, "was there nothing for it but to make a virtue of necessity; and he as well as the admiral employed all their art, influence, and eloquence to persuade every man to divest himself of such means as he possessed for to furnish this contribution, which was so necessary. They themselves were the first to set an example, giving up their own silver plate. . . . Half from love and half from fear, this liberality was so general, that, down to the very soldiers' varlets, every one gave; so that at last it was considered a disgrace to have contributed little. When the whole was collected, it was found to amount, in what was coined as well as in plate and gold chains, to more than eighty thousand livres, which came in so timely, that without it there would have been a difficulty in satisfying the reiters. . . . Was it not a thing worthy of astonishment to see an army, itself unpaid, despoiling itself of the little means it had of relieving its own necessities and sparing that little for the accommodation of others, who, peradventure, scarcely gave them a thankee for it?" [Memoires de La Noue, in the Petitot collection, 1st Series, t. xxxiv. p. 207.]

So much generosity and devotion, amongst the humblest as well as the most exalted ranks of the army, deserved not to be useless: but it turned out quite differently. Conde and Coligny led back to Paris their new army, which, it is said, was from eighteen to twenty thousand strong, and seemed to be in a condition either to take Paris itself, or to force the royal army to enter the field and accept a decisive battle. To bring that about, Conde thought the best thing was to besiege Chartres, "the key to the granary of Paris," as it was called, and "a big thorn," according to La Noue, "to run into the foot of the Parisians." But Catherine de' Medici had quietly entered once more into negotiations with some of the Protestant chiefs, even with Conde himself. Charles IX. published an edict in which he distinguished between heretics and rebels, and assured of his protection all Huguenots who should lay down arms. Chartres seemed to be on the point of capitulating, when news came that peace had just been signed at Longjumeau, on the 23d of March. The king put again in force the edict of Amboise of 1563, suppressing all the restrictions which had been tacked on to it successively. The Prince of Conde and his adherents were reinstated in all their possessions, offices, and honors; and Conde was "held and reputed good relative, faithful subject, and servant of the king." The Reformers had to disband, restore the new places they had occupied, and send away their German allies, to whom the king undertook to advance the hundred thousand gold crowns which were due to them. He further promised, by a secret article, that he too would at a later date dismiss his foreign troops and a portion of the French.

This news caused very various impressions amongst the Protestant camp and people. The majority of the men of family engaged in the war, who most frequently had to bear the expense of it, desired peace. The personal advantages accruing to Conde himself—made it very acceptable to him. But the ardent Reformers, with Coligny at their head, complained bitterly of others being lured away by fine words and exceptional favors, and not prosecuting the war when, to maintain it, there was so good an army and the chances were so favorable. A serious dispute took place between the pacific negotiators and the malcontents. Chancellor de l'Hospital wrote, in favor of peace, a discourse on the pacific settlement of the troubles of the year 1567, containing the necessary causes and reasons of the treaty, together with the means of reconciling the two parties to one another, and keeping them in perpetual concord; composed by a high personage, true subject, and faithful servant of the French crown. But, if the chancellor's reasons were sound, the hopes he hung upon them were extravagant; the parties were at that pitch of passion at which reasoning is in vain against impressions, and promises are powerless against suspicions. Concluded "through the vehemence of the desire to get home again," as La Noue says, the peace of Longjumeau was none the less known as the little peace, the patched-up peace, the lame and rickety peace; and neither they who wished for it nor they who spurned it prophesied its long continuance.

Scarcely six months having elapsed, in August, 1568, the third religious war broke out. The written guarantees given in the treaty of Longjumeau for security and liberty on behalf of the Protestants were misinterpreted or violated. Massacres and murders of Protestants became more numerous, and were committed with more impunity than ever: in 1568 and 1569, at Amiens, at Auxerre, at Orleans, at Rouen, at Bourges, at Troyes, and at Blois, Protestants, at one time to the number of one hundred and forty or one hundred and twenty, or fifty-three, or forty, and at another singly, with just their wives and children, were massacred, burned, and hunted by the excited populace, without any intervention on the part of the magistrates to protect them or to punish their murderers. The contemporary Protestant chroniclers set down at ten thousand the number of victims who perished in the course of these six months, which were called a time of peace: we may, with De Thou, believe this estimate to be exaggerated; but, without doubt, the peace of Longjumeau was a lie, even before the war began again.

During this interval Conde was living in Burgundy, at Noyers, a little fortress he possessed through his wife, Frances of Orleans, and Coligny was living not far from Noyers, at Tanlay, which belonged to his brother D'Andelot. They soon discovered, both of them, not only what their party had to suffer, but what measures were in preparation against themselves. Agents went and sounded the depth of the moats of Noyers, so as to report upon the means of taking the place. The queen-mother had orders given to Gaspard de Tavannes to surround the Prince of Conde at Noyers. "The queen is counselled by passion rather than by reason," answered the old warrior; "I am not the sort of man to succeed in this ill-planned enterprise of distaff and pen; if her Majesty will be pleased to declare open war, I will show how I understand my duty." Shocked at the dishonorable commands given him, Tavannes resolved to indirectly raise Conde's apprehensions, in order to get him out of Burgundy, of which he, Tavannes, held the governorship; and he sent close past the walls of Noyers bearers of letters containing these words: "The stag is in the toils; the hunt is ready." Conde had the bearers arrested, understood the warning, and communicated it to Coligny, who went and joined him at Noyers, and they decided, both of them, upon quitting Burgundy without delay, to go and seek over the Loire at La Rochelle, which they knew to be devoted to their cause, a sure asylum and a place suitable for their purposes as a centre of warlike operations. They set out together on the 24th of August, 1568. Conde took with him his wife and his four children, two of tender age. Coligny followed him in deep mourning; he had just lost his wife, Charlotte de Laval, that worthy mate of his, who, six years previously, in a grievous crisis for his soul as well as his cause, had given him such energetic counsels: she had left him one young daughter and three little children, the two youngest still in the nurse's arms. His sister-in-law, Anne do Salm, wife of his brother D'Andelot, was also there with a child of two years, whilst her husband was scouring Anjou and Brittany to rally the friends of his cause and his house. A hundred and fifty men, soldiers and faithful servants, escorted these three noble and pious families, who were leaving their castles to go and seek liberties and perils in a new war. When they arrived at the bank of the Loire, they found all points in the neighborhood guarded; the river was low; and a boatman pointed out to them, near Sancerre, a possible ford. Conde went over first, with one of his children in his arms.



They all went over singing the psalm, When Israel went out of Egypt, and on the 16th of September, 1568, Conde entered La Rochelle. "I fled as far as I could," he wrote the next day, "but when I got here I found the sea; and, inasmuch as I don't know how to swim, I was constrained to turn my head round and gain the land, not with feet, but with hands." He assembled the burgesses of La Rochelle, and laid before them the pitiable condition of the kingdom, the wicked designs of people who were their enemies as well as his own: he called upon them to come and help; he promised to be aidful to them in all their affairs, and, "as a pledge of my good faith," said he, "I will leave you my wife and children, the dearest and most precious jewels I have in this world." The mayor of La Rochelle, La Haise, responded by offering him "lives and property in the name of all the citizens," who confirmed this offer with an outburst of popular enthusiasm. The Protestant nobles of Saintonge and Poitou flocked in. A royal ally was announced; the Queen of Navarre, Jeanne d'Albret, was bringing her son Henry, fifteen years of age, whom she was training up to be Henry IV. Conde went to meet them, and, on the 28th of September, 1568, all this flower of French Protestantism was assembled at La Rochelle, ready and resolved to commence the third religious war.

It was the longest and most serious of the four wars of this kind which so profoundly agitated France in the reign of Charles IX. This one lasted from the 24th of August, 1568, to the 8th of August, 1570, between the departure of Conde and Coligny for La Rochelle and the treaty of peace of St. Germain-en-Laye: a hollow peace, like the rest, and only two years before the St. Bartholomew. On starting from Noyers with Coligny, Conde had addressed to the king, on the 23d of August, a letter and a request, wherein, "after having set forth the grievances of the Reformers, he attributed all the mischief to the Cardinal of Lorraine, and declared that the Protestant nobles felt themselves constrained, for the safety of the realm, to take up arms against that infamous priest, that tiger of France, and against his accomplices." He bitterly reproached the Guises "with treating as mere policists, that is, men who sacrifice religion to temporal interests, the Catholics inclined to make concessions to the Reformers, especially the Chancellor de l'Hospital and the sons of the late Constable de Montmorency." The Guises, indeed, and their friends did not conceal their distrust of De l'Hospital, any more than he concealed his opposition to their deeds and their designs. Whilst the peace of Longjumeau was still in force, Charles IX. issued a decree interdicting all Reformers from the chairs of the University and the offices of the judicature; L'Hospital refused to seal it: "God save us from the chancellor's mass!" was the remark at court. L'Hospital, convinced that he would not succeed in preserving France from a fresh civil war, made up his mind to withdraw, and go and live for some time at his estate of Vignay [a little hamlet in the commune of Gironville, near Etampes, Seine-et-Oise]. The queen-mother eagerly took advantage of his withdrawal to demand of him the seals, of which, she said, she might have need daily. L'Hospital gave them up at once, at the same time retaining his title of chancellor, and letting the queen know "that he would take pains to recover his strength in order to return to his post, if and when it should be the king's and the queen's pleasure." From his rural home he wrote to his friends, "I am not downhearted because the violence of the wicked has snatched from me the seals of the kingdom. I have not done as sluggards and cowards do, who hide themselves at the first show of danger, and obey the first impulses of fear. As long as I was strong enough, I held my own. Deprived of all support, even that of the king and the queen, who dared no longer defend me, I retired, deploring the unhappy condition of France. Now I have other cares; I return to my interrupted studies and to my children, the props of my old age and my sweetest delight. I cultivate my fields. The estate of Vignay seems to me a little kingdom, if any man may consider himself master of anything here below. . . . I will tell you more; this retreat, which satisfies my heart, also flatters my vanity; I like to imagine myself in the wake of those famous exiles of Athens or Rome whom their virtues rendered formidable to their fellow-citizens. Not that I dare compare myself with those great men, but I say to myself that our fortunes are similar. I live in the midst of a numerous family whom I love; I have books; I read, write, and meditate; I take pleasure in the games of my children; the most frivolous occupations interest me. In fine, all my time is filled up, and nothing would be wanting to my happiness if it were not for the awful apparition hard by which sometimes comes, bringing trouble and desolation to my heart."

This "apparition hard by" was war, everywhere present or imminent in the centre and south-west of France, accompanied by all those passions of personal hatred and vengeance which are characteristic of religious wars, and which add so much of the moral sufferings to the physical calamities of life. L'Hospital, when sending the seals to the queen-mother, who demanded them of him, considered it his bounden duty to give her without any mincing, and the king whom she governed, a piece of patriotic advice. "At my departure," he says in his will and testament, "I prayed of the king and queen this thing, that, as they had determined to break the peace, and proceed by war against those with whom they had previously made peace, and as they were driving me from the court because they had heard it said that I was opposed to and ill content with their enterprise, I prayed them, I say, that if they did not acquiesce in my counsel, they would, at the very least, some time after they had glutted and satiated their hearts and their thirst with the blood of their subjects, embrace the first opportunity that offered itself for making peace, before that things were reduced to utter ruin; for, whatever there might be at the bottom of this war, it could not but be very pernicious to the king and the kingdom." During the two years that it lasted, from August, 1568, to August, 1570, the third religious war under Charles IX. entailed two important battles and many deadly faction-fights, which spread and inflamed to the highest pitch the passions of the two parties. On the 13th of March, 1569, the two armies, both about twenty thousand strong, and appearing both of them anxious to come to blows, met near Jarnac, on the banks of the Charente; the royal army had for its chief Catherine de' Medici's third son, Henry, Duke of Anjou, advised by the veteran warrior Gaspard de Tavannes, and supported by the young Duke Henry of Guise, who had his father to avenge and his own spurs to win.



The Prince of Conde, with Admiral de Coligny for second, commanded the Protestant army. We make no pretension to explain and discuss here the military movements of that day, and the merits or demerits of the two generals confronted; the Duke of Aumale has given an account of them and criticised them in his Histoire des Princes de Conde, with a complete knowledge of the facts and with the authority that belongs to him. "The encounter on the 13th of March, 1569, scarcely deserves," he says, "to be called a battle; it was nothing but a series of fights, maintained by troops separated and surprised, against an enemy which, more numerous to begin with, was attacking with its whole force united.". A tragic incident at the same time gave this encounter an importance which it has preserved in history. Admiral de Coligny, forced to make a retrograde movement, had sent to ask the Prince of Conde for aid; by a second message he urged the prince not to make a fruitless effort, and to fall back himself in all haste. "God forbid," answered Conde, "that Louis de Bourbon should turn his back to the enemy!" and he continued his march, saying to his brother-in-law, Francis de la Rochefoucauld, who was marching beside him, "My uncle has made a 'clerical error' (pas de clerc, a slip); but the wine is drawn, and it must be drunk." On arriving at the battle-field, whither he had brought with him but three hundred horse, at the very moment when, with this weak escort, he was preparing to charge the deep column of the Duke of Anjou, he received from La Rochefoucauld's horse a kick which broke one of the bones of his leg; and he had already crushed an arm by a fall. We will borrow from the Duke of Aumale the glorious and piteous tale of this incident. "Conde turned round to his men-at-arms, and showing first his injured limbs and then the device, 'Sweet is danger for Christ and for fatherland!' which fluttered upon his banner in the breeze, 'Nobles of France,' he cried, 'this is the desired moment Remember in what plight Louis de Bourbon enters the battle for Christ and fatherland!' Then, lowering his head, he charges with his three hundred horse upon the eight hundred lances of the Duke of Anjou. The first shock of this charge was irresistible; such for a moment was the disorder amongst the Catholics that many of them believed the day was lost; but fresh bodies of royalists arrive one after another. The prince has his horse killed under him; and, in the midst of the confusion, hampered by his wounds, he cannot mount another. In spite of all, his brave comrades do not desert him; Soubise and a dozen of them, covered with wounds, are taken; an old man, named La Vergne, who had brought with him twenty-five sons or nephews, is left upon the field with fifteen of them, 'all in a heap,' says D'Aubigne. Left almost alone, with his back against a tree, one knee upon the ground, and deprived of the use of one leg, Conde still defends himself; but his strength is failing him; he sees two Catholic gentlemen to whom he had rendered service, Saint-Jean and D'Argence; he calls to them, raises the vizor of his helmet, and holds out to them his gauntlets. The two horsemen dismount, and swear to risk their lives to save his. Others join them, and are eager to assist the glorious captive. Meanwhile the royal cavalry continues the pursuit; the squadrons successively pass close by the group which has formed round Conde. Soon he spies the red cloaks of the Duke of Anjou's guards. He points to them with his finger. D'Argence understands him, and, 'Hide your face!' he cries. 'Ah D'Argence, D'Argence, you will not save me,' replies the prince. Then, like Caesar, covering up his face, he awaited death the poor soul knew only too well the perfidious character of the Duke of Anjou, the hatred with which he was hunting him down, and the sanguinary orders he would give. The guards had gone by when their captain, Montesquion, learned the name of this prisoner. 'Slay, slay, mordioux!' he shouted; then suddenly wheeling his horse round, he returns at a gallop, and with a pistol-shot, fired from behind, shatters the hero's skull." [Histoire des Princes de Conde, by M. le Duc d'Aumale, t. ii. pp. 65-72.]

The death of Conde gave to the battle of Jarnac an importance not its own. A popular ditty of the day called that prince "the great enemy of the mass." "His end," says the Duke of Aumale, "was celebrated by the Catholics as a deliverance; a solemn Te Deum was chanted at court and in all the churches of France. The flags taken were sent to Rome, where Pope Pius IV. went with them in state to St. Peter's. As for the Duke of Anjou, he showed his joy and his baseness together by the ignoble treatment he caused to be inflicted upon the remains of his vanquished relative, a prince of the blood who had fallen sword in hand. At the first rumor of Conde's death, the Duke of Montpensier's secretary, Coustureau, had been despatched from headquarters with Baron de Magnac to learn the truth of the matter. 'We found him there,' he relates, 'laid upon an ass; the said sir baron took him by the hair of the head for to lift up his face, which he had turned towards the ground, and asked me if I recognized him. But as he had lost an eye from his head, he was mightily disfigured; and I could say no more than it was certainly his figure and his hair, and further than that I was unable to speak.' Meanwhile," continues the Duke of Aumale, "the accounts of those present removed all doubt; and the corpse, thus thrown across an ass, with arms and legs dangling, was carried to Jarnac, where the Duke of Anjou lodged on the evening of the battle. There the body of Conde was taken down amidst the sobs of some Protestant prisoners, who kissed, as they wept, the remains of their gallant chief. This touching spectacle did not stop the coarse ribaldry of the Duke of Anjou and his favorites; and for two days the prince's remains were left in a ground-floor room, there exposed to the injurious action of the air and, to the gross insults of the courtiers. The Duke of Anjou at last consented to give up the body of Conde to the Duke of Longueville, his brother-in-law, who had it interred with due respect at Vendome in the burial-place of his ancestors."

When in 1569 he thus testified, from a mixture of hatred and fear, an ignoble joy at the death of Louis de Conde, the valiant chief of Protestantism, the Duke of Anjou did not foresee that, nearly twenty years later, in 1588, when he had become Henry III., King of France, he would also testify, still from a mixture of hatred and fear, the same ignoble joy at sight of the corpse of Henry de Guise, the valiant chief of Catholicism, murdered by his order and in his palace.

As soon as Conde's death was known at La Rochelle, the Queen of Navarre, Jeanne d'Albret, hurried to Tonnay-Charente, whither the Protestant army had fallen back; she took with her her own son Henry, fifteen years old, and Henry de Bourbon, the late Prince of Conde's son, who was seventeen; and she presented both of them to the army. The younger, the future Henry IV., stepped forward briskly. "Your cause," said he, "is mine; your interests are mine; I swear on my soul, honor, and life, to be wholly yours." The young Conde took the same oath. The two princes were associated in the command, under the authority of Coligny, who was immediately appointed lieutenant-general of the army. For two years their double signature figured at the bottom of the principal official acts of the Reformed party; and they were called "the admiral's pages." On both of them Jeanne passionately enjoined union between themselves, and equal submission on their part to Coligny, their model and their master in war and in devotion to the common cause. Queen, princes, admiral, and military leaders of all ranks stripped themselves of all the diamonds, jewels, and precious stones which they possessed, and which Elizabeth, the Queen of England, took in pledge for the twenty thousand pounds sterling she lent him. The Queen of Navarre reviewed the army, which received her with bursts of pious and warlike enthusiasm; and leaving to Coligny her two sons, as she called them, she returned alone to La Rochelle, where she received a like reception from the inhabitants, "rough and loyal people," says La Noue, "and as warlike as mercantile." After her departure, a body of German horse, commanded by Count Mansfeld, joined Coligny in the neighborhood of Limoges. Their arrival was an unhoped-for aid. Coligny distributed amongst them a medal bearing the effigy of Queen Jeanne of Navarre with this legend: "Alone, and with the rest, for God, the king, the laws, and peace."

With such dispositions on one side and the other, war was resumed and pushed forward eagerly from June, 1569, to June, 1570, with alternations of reverse and success. On the 23d of June, 1569, a fight took place at Roche l'Abeille, near St. Yrieix in Limousin, wherein the Protestants had the advantage. The young Catholic noblemen, with Henry de Guise at their head, began it rashly, against the desire of their general, Gaspard de Tavannes, to show off their bravery before the eyes of the queen-mother and the Cardinal of Lorraine, both of whom considered the operations of the army too slow and its successes too rare. They lost five hundred men and many prisoners, amongst others Philip Strozzi, whom Charles IX. had just made colonel-general of the infantry. They took their revenge on the 7th of September, 1569, by forcing Coligny to raise the siege of Poitiers, which he had been pushing forward for more than two months, and on the 3d of October following, at the battle of Moncontour in Poitou, the most important of the campaign, which they won brilliantly, and in which the Protestant army lost five or six thousand men and a great part of their baggage. Before the action began, "two gentlemen on the side of the Catholics, being in an out-of-the-way spot, came to speech," says La Noue, "with some of the (Protestant) religion, there being certain ditches between them.



'Sirs,' said they, 'we bear the marks of enemies, but we do not hate you in any wise, or your party. Warn the admiral to be very careful not to fight, for our army is marvellously strong by reason of re-enforcements that have come in to it, and it is very determined withal. Let the admiral temporize for a month only, for all the nobles have sworn and said to Monseigneur that they will not wait any longer, that he must employ them within that time, and they will then do their duty. Let the admiral remember that it is dangerous to stem the fury of Frenchmen, the which, however, will suddenly ooze away; if they have not victory speedily, they will be constrained to make peace, and will offer it you on advantageous terms. Tell him that we know this from a good source, and greatly desired to advertise him of it.' Afterwards they retired. The others," continues La Noue, "went incontinently to the admiral for to make their report, which was to his taste. They told it also to others of the principals; and some there were who desired that it should be acted upon; but the majority opined that this notice came from suspected persons, who had been accustomed to practise fraud and deceit, and that no account should be made of it." The latter opinion prevailed; and the battle of Moncontour was fought with extreme acrimony, especially on the part of the Catholics, who were irritated by the cruelties, as La Noue himself says, which the Protestants had but lately practised at the fight of La Roche l'Abeille. Coligny was wounded in the action, after having killed with his own hand the Marquis Philibert of Baden; and the melley had been so hot that the admiral's friends found great difficulty in extricating him and carrying him off the field to get his wound attended to. Three weeks before the battle, on the 13th of September, Coligny had been sentenced to death by the Parliament of Paris, and hanged in effigy on the Place de Greve; and a reward of fifty thousand gold crowns had been offered to whosoever should give him up to the king's justice dead or alive, words added, it is said, to the decree at the desire of Charles IX. himself. Family sorrows were in Coligny's case added to political reverses; on the 27th of May, in this same year 1569, he had lost his brother D'Andelot, his faithful comrade in his religious as well as his warlike career. "He found himself," says D'Aubigne, "saddled with the blame due to accident, his own merits being passed over in silence; with the remnant of an army which, when it was whole, was in despair even before the late disaster; with weak towns, dismayed garrisons, and foreigners without baggage; himself moneyless, his enemies very powerful, and pitiless towards all, especially towards him; abandoned by all the great, except one woman, the Queen of Navarre, who, having nothing but the title, had advanced to Niort in order to lend a hand to the afflicted and to affairs in general. This old man, worn down by fever, endured all these causes of anguish and many others that came to rack him more painfully than his grievous wound. As he was being borne along in a litter, Lestrange, an old nobleman, and one of his principal counsellors, travelling in similar fashion, and wounded likewise, had his own litter, where the road was broad, moved forward in front of the admiral's, and putting his head out at the door, he looked steadily at his chief, saying, with tears in his eyes, 'Yet God is very merciful.' Thereupon they bade one another farewell, perfectly at one in thought, without being able to say more. This great captain confessed to his intimates that these few friendly words restored him, and set him up again in the way of good thoughts and firm resolutions for the future." He was so much restored, that, between the end of 1569 and the middle of 1570, he marched through the south and the centre of France the army which he had reorganized, and with which, wherever he went, he restored, if not security, at any rate confidence and zeal, to his party.

On arriving at Arnay-le-Duc, in Burgundy, he found himself confronted by Marshal de Cosse with thirteen thousand men of the king's troops. Coligny had barely half as many; but he did not hesitate to attack, and on the 13th of June, 1570, he was so near victory that the road was left open before him. On the 7th of July he arrived at Charite-sur-Loire. Alarm prevailed at Paris. A truce for ten days was signed, and negotiations were reopened for a fresh attempt at peace.

"If any one, in these lamentable wars, worked hard, both with body and mind," says La Noue, "it may be said to have been the admiral, for, as regards the greatest part of the burden of military affairs and hardships, it was he who supported them with much constancy and buoyancy; and he was as respectful in his bearing towards the princes his superiors as he was modest towards his inferiors. He always had piety in singular esteem, and a love of justice, which made him valued and honored by them of the party which he had embraced. He did not seek ambitiously for commands and honors; they were thrust upon him because of his competence and his expertness. When he handled arms and armies, he showed that he was very conversant with them, as much so as any captain of his day, and he always exposed himself courageously to danger. In difficulties, he was observed to be full of magnanimity and resource in getting out of them, always showing himself quite free from swagger and parade. In short, he was a personage worthy to re-establish an enfeebled and a corrupted state. I was fain to say these few words about him in passing, for, having known him and been much with him, and having profited by his teaching, I should have been wrong if I had not made truthful and honorable mention of him." [Memoires de La Noue, in the Petitot collection, 1st series, t. xxxiv. p. 288.]

The negotiations were short. The war had been going on for two years. The two parties, victorious and vanquished by turns, were both equally sick of it. In vain did Philip II., King of Spain, offer Charles IX. an aid of nine thousand men to continue it. In vain did Pope Pius V. write to Catherine de' Medici, "As there can be no communion between Satan and the children of the light, it ought to be taken for certain that there can be no compact between Catholics and heretics, save one full of fraud and feint." "We have beaten our enemies," says Montluc, "over and over again; but notwithstanding that, they had so much influence in the king's council that the decrees were always to their advantage. We won by arms, but they won by those devils of documents." Peace was concluded at St. Germain-en-Laye on the 8th of August, 1570, and it was more equitable and better for the Reformers than the preceding treaties; for, besides a pretty large extension as regarded free exercise of their worship and their civil rights in the state, it granted "for two years, to the princes of Navarre and Conde and twenty noblemen of the religion, who were appointed by the king, the wardenship of the towns of La Rochelle, Cognac, Montauban, and La Charite, whither those of the religion who dared not return so soon to their own homes might retire." All the members of the Parliament, all the royal and municipal officers, and the principal inhabitants of the towns where the two religions existed were further bound over on oath "to maintenance of the edict."

Peace was made; but it was the third in seven years, and very shortly after each new treaty civil war had recommenced. No more was expected from the treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye than had been effected by those of Amboise and Longjumeau, and on both sides men sighed for something more stable and definitive. By what means to be obtained and with what pledges of durability? A singular fact is apparent between 1570 and 1572; there is a season, as it were, of marriages and matrimonial rejoicings. Charles IX. went to receive at the frontier of his kingdom his affianced bride, Archduchess Elizabeth of Austria, daughter of the emperor, Maximilian II., who was escorted by the Archbishop of Treves, chancellor of the empire; the nuptials were celebrated at Mezieres, on the 26th of November, 1570; the princes and great lords of the Protestant party were invited; they did not think it advisable to withdraw themselves from their asylum at La Rochelle; but Coligny wrote to the queen-mother to excuse himself, whilst protesting his forgetfulness of the past and his personal devotion. Four months afterwards, Coligny himself married again; it was three years since he had lost his noble wife, Charlotte de Laval, and he had not contemplated anything of the kind, when, in the concluding weeks of 1570, he received from the castle of St. Andre de Briord, in Le Bugey, a letter from a great lady, thirty years of age, Jacqueline de Montbel, daughter of Count d'Entremont, herself a widow, who wrote to him "that she would fain marry a saint and a hero, and that he was that hero." "I am but a tomb," replied Coligny. But Jacqueline persisted, in spite of the opposition shown by her sovereign, Emmanuel Philibert, Duke of Savoy, who did not like his fair subjects to marry foreigners; and in February, 1571, she furtively quitted her castle, dropped down the Rhone in a boat as far as Lyons, mounted on horseback, and, escorted by five devoted friends, arrived at La Rochelle. All Coligny's friends were urgent for him to accept this passionate devotion proffered by a lady who would bring him territorial possessions valuable to the Protestants, "for they were an open door to Geneva." Coligny accepted; and the marriage took place at La Rochelle on the 24th of March, 1571. "Madame Jacqueline wore, on this occasion," says a contemporary chronicler, "a skirt in the Spanish fashion, of black gold-tissue, with bands of embroidery in gold and silver twist, and, above, a doublet of white silver-tissue embroidered in gold, with large diamond-buttons." She was, nevertheless, at that moment almost as poor as the German arquebusiers who escorted her litter; for an edict issued by the Duke of Savoy on the 31st of January, 1569, caused her the loss of all her possessions in her own country. She was received in France with the respect due to her; and when, five months after the marriage, Charles; IX. summoned Coligny to Paris, "to serve him in his most important affairs, as a worthy minister, whose virtues were sufficiently known and tried," he sent at the same time to Madame l'Amirale a safe-conduct in which he called her my fair cousin. Was there any one belonging to that august and illustrious household who had, at that time, a presentiment of their impending and tragic destiny?

At the same period, the Queen of Navarre, Jeanne d'Albret, obtained for her young nephew, Henry de Bourbon, Prince of Conde, son of the hero of Jarnac, and companion of Henry of Navarre, the hand of his cousin, Mary of Cleves; and there was still going on in London, on behalf of one of Charles IX.'s brothers,—at one time the Duke of Anjou and at another the Duke of Alencon,—the negotiation which was a vain attempt to make Queen Elizabeth espouse a French prince.

Coincidently with all these marriages or projects of marriage amongst princes and great lords came the most important of all, that which was to unite Henry of Navarre and Charles IX.'s sister, Marguerite de Valois. There had already, thirteen or fourteen years previously, been some talk about it, in the reign of King Henry II., when Henry of Navarre and Margaret de Valois, each born in 1553, were both of them mere babies. This union between the two branches of the royal house, one Catholic and the other Protestant, ought to have been the most striking sign and the surest pledge of peace between Catholicism and Protestantism. The political expediency of such a step appeared the more evident and the more urgent in proportion as the religious war had become more direful and the desire for peace more general. Charles IX. embraced the idea passionately. At the outset he encountered an obstacle. The young Duke of Guise had already paid court to Marguerite, and had obtained such marked favor with her that the ambassador of Spain wrote to the king, "There is no public topic in France just now save the marriage of my Lady Marguerite with the Duke of Guise." People even talked of a tender correspondence between the princess and the duke, which was carried on through one of the queen's ladies, the Countess of Mirandola, who was devoted to the Guises and a favorite with Marguerite. "If it be so," 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 countship 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 Rochelle, 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 nobles, still separated from their houses and their families, and collected together in a town like Rochelle, 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 Rochelle, 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 Rochelle, 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 lavishing 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 passes 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 assisting 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 God's grace."



Side by side with this motherly and Christianly scrupulous negotiation, Coligny set on foot another, noble 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 partition of Europe between Catholicism and Protestantism; and it was in a country Catholic in respect of the great majority, and governed by a kingship 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. Massacre, 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 passions 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 massacres 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 massacre called the St. Bartholomew, the massacre of Vassy is almost the only one which received and kept its true name. The massacre of Vassy was, undoubtedly, an accident, a deed not at all forecast or prepared for. The St. Bartholomew massacre 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 assertion 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 assure 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 massacre (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 passed 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 nobody 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 massacre, 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 ass. 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 sex, 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 pass." The marriage was celebrated on the 18th of August, by the Cardinal of Bourbon, in front of the principal 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 assent. Accompanied by the king, the queen-mother, and all the Catholics present, Marguerite went to hear mass 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 principal 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 Masson, 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."



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 Nassau, 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 God 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 Nassau. 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. "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 assembled. 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 assistance 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; God 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 embassy 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 fashion 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 circumstances, 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 passionate hatred towards Coligny; they were the widow of Duke Francis of Guise, Anne d'Este, become Duchess 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 assemblies at court; the fair ladies of the sixteenth century were adepts in handling dagger and pistol. In default of the Duchess 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 assault 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 circumstances 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 friendship, "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 assented 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 balls might have been poisoned. "It will be as God 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 friendship," 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 God 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."