Chapter XXXIII: Charles IX. and the Religious Wars. (1560-1574.) (1)

We now enter upon the era of the civil wars, massacres, and assassinations caused by religious fanaticism or committed on religious pretexts. The latter half of the sixteenth century is the time at which the human race saw the opening of that great drama, of which religious liberty is the beginning and the end; and France was then the chief scene of it. At the close of the fifteenth and at the commencement of the sixteenth centuries, religious questions had profoundly agitated Christian Europe; but towards the middle of the latter century they had obtained in the majority of European states solutions which, however incomplete, might be regarded as definitive. Germany was divided into Catholic states and Protestant states, which had established between themselves relations of an almost pacific character. Switzerland was entering upon the same course. In England, Scotland, the Low Countries, the Scandinavian states, and the free towns their neighbors, the Reformation had prevailed or was clearly tending to prevail. In Italy, Spain, and Portugal, on the contrary, the Reformation had been stifled, and Catholicism remained victorious. It was in France that, notwithstanding the inequality of forces, the struggle between Catholicism and Protestantism was most obstinately maintained, and appeared for the longest time uncertain. After half a century of civil wars and massacres it terminated in Henry IV., a Protestant king, who turned Catholic, but who gave Protestants the edict of Nantes; a precious, though insufficient and precarious pledge, which served France as a point of departure towards religious liberty, and which protected it for nearly a century, in the midst of the brilliant victory won by Catholicism. [The edict of Nantes, published by Henry IV. in 1598, was revoked by Louis XIV. in 1685.]

For more than three centuries civilized Europe has been discussing, pro or con, the question of religious liberty, but from instinct and with passion far more than with a serious understanding of what is at the bottom of things. Even in our own day it is not without difficulty that a beginning is being made to understand and accept that principle in its true sense and in all its bearings. Men were wonderfully far from it in 1560, at the accession of Charles IX., a child ten years old; they were entering, in blind confidence, upon a religious war, in order to arrive, only after four centuries of strife and misconception, at a vindication of religious liberty. “Woe to thee, O country, that hast a child for king!” said, in accordance with the Bible, the Venetian Michael Suriano, ambassador to France at that time. Around that royal child, and seeking to have the mastery over France by being masters over him, were struggling the three great parties at that time occupying the stage in the name of religion. The Catholics rejected altogether the idea of religious liberty for the Protestants; the Protestants had absolute need of it, for it was their condition of existence; but they did not wish for it in the case of the Catholics, their adversaries. The third party (_tiers parti_), as we call it nowadays, wished to hold the balance continually wavering between the Catholics and the Protestants, conceding to the former and the latter, alternately, that measure of liberty which was indispensable for most imperfect maintenance of the public peace, and reconcilable with the sovereign power of the kingship. On such conditions was the government of Charles IX. to establish its existence.

The death of Francis II. put an end to a grand project of the Guises, which we do not find expressly indicated elsewhere than in the _Memoires_ of Michael de Castelnau, one of the best informed and most intelligent historians of the time. “Many Catholics,” says he, “were then of opinion that, if the authority of the Duke of Guise had continued to be armed with that of the king as it had been, the Protestants would have had enough to do. For orders had been sent to all the principal lords of the kingdom, officers of the crown and knights of the order, to show themselves in the said city of Orleans on Christmas-day at the opening of the states, for that they might be all made to sign the confession of the Catholic faith in presence of the king and the chapter of the order; together with all the members of the privy council, reporting-masters (of petitions), domestic officers of the king’s household, and all the deputies of the estates. The same confession was to be published throughout all the said kingdom, in order to have it sworn by all the judges, magistrates, and officers, and, finally, all private persons from parish to parish. And in default of so doing, proceedings were to be taken by seizures, condemnations, executions, banishments, and confiscations. And they who did repent themselves and abjured their Protestant religion were to be absolved.” [_Memoires de Michel de Castelnau,_ book ii. chap. xii. p. 121, in the _Petitot_ collection.] It is not to be supposed that, even if circumstances had remained as they were under the reign of Francis II., such a plan could have been successful; but it is intelligible that the Guises had conceived such an idea: they were victorious; they had just procured the condemnation to death of the most formidable amongst the Protestant princes, their adversary Louis de Conde; they were threatening the life of his brother the King of Navarre; and the house of Bourbon seemed to be on the point of disappearing beneath the blows of the ambitious, audacious, and by no means scrupulous house of Lorraine. Not even the prospect of Francis II.’s death arrested the Guises in their work and their hopes; when they saw that he was near his end, they made a proposal to the queen-mother to unite herself completely with them, leave the Prince of Conde to execution, rid herself of the King of Navarre, and become regent of the kingdom during the minority of her son Charles, taking them, the Lorraine princes and their party, for necessary partners in her government. But Catherine de’ Medici was more prudent, more judicious, and more egotistical in her ambition than the Guises were in theirs; she was not, as they were, exclusively devoted to the Catholic party; it was power that she wanted, and she sought for it every day amongst the party or the mixtures of parties in a condition to give it her. She considered the Catholic party to be the strongest, and it was hers; but she considered the Protestant party strong enough to be feared, and to give her a certain amount of security and satisfaction: a security necessary, moreover, if peace at home, and not civil war, were to be the habitual and general condition of France. Catherine was, finally, a woman, and very skilful in the strifes of court and of government, whilst, on the field of battle, the victories, though won in her name, would be those of the Guises more than her own. Without openly rejecting the proposals they made to her under their common apprehension of Francis II.’s approaching death, she avoided making any reply. She had, no doubt, already taken her precautions and her measures in advance; her confidante, Jacqueline de Longwy, Duchess of Montpensier and a zealous Protestant, had brought to her rooms at night Antony de Bourbon, King of Navarre, and Catherine had come to an agreement with him about the partition of power between herself and him at the death of the king her son. She had written to the Constable de Montmorency, a rival of the Guises and their foe though a stanch Catholic, to make haste to Orleans, where his presence would be required. As soon as Chancellor de l’Hospital became aware of the proposals which were being made by the Guises to the queen-mother, he flew to her and opposed them with all the energy of his great and politic mind and sterling nature. Was she going to deliver the Prince of Conde to the scaffold, the house of Bourbon to ruin, France to civil war, and the independence of the crown and of that royal authority which she was on the point of wielding herself to the tyrannical domination of her rivals the Lorraine princes and of their party? Catherine listened with great satisfaction to this judicious and honest language. When the crown passed to her son Charles she was free from any serious anxiety as to her own position and her influence in the government. The new king, on announcing to the Parliament the death of his brother, wrote to them that “confiding in the virtues and prudence of the queen-mother, he had begged her to take in hand the administration of the kingdom, with the wise counsel and advice of the King of Navarre and the notables and great personages of the late king’s council.” A few months afterwards the states-general, assembling first at Orleans and afterwards at Pontoise, ratified this declaration by recognizing the placement of “the young King Charles IX.’s guardianship in the hands of Catherine de’ Medici, his mother, together with the principal direction of affairs, but without the title of regent.” The King of Navarre was to assist her in the capacity of lieutenant-general of the kingdom. Twenty-five members specially designated were to form the king’s privy council. [_Histoire des Etats generaux,_ by M. Picot, t. ii. p. 73.] And in the privacy of her motherly correspondence Catherine wrote to the Queen of Spain, her daughter Elizabeth, wife of Philip II., “Madame, my dear daughter, all I shall tell you is, not to be the least anxious, and to rest assured that I shall spare no pains to so conduct myself that God and everybody may have occasion to be satisfied with me. . . . You have seen the time when I was as happy as you are, not dreaming of ever having any greater trouble than that of not being loved as I should have liked to be by the king your father. God took him from me, and is not content with that; He has taken from me your brother, whom I loved you well know how much, and has left me with three young children, and in a kingdom where all is division, having therein not a single man in whom I can trust, and who has not some particular object of his own.”

The queen-mother of France, who wrote to her daughter the Queen of Spain with such firmness of tone and such independence of spirit, was, to use the words of the Venetian ambassador John Michieli, who had lived at her court, “a woman of forty-three, of affable manners, great moderation, superior intelligence, and ability in conducting all sorts of affairs, especially affairs of state. As mother, she has the personal management of the king; she allows no one else to sleep in his room; she is never away from him. As regent and head of the government, she holds everything in her hands, public offices, benefices, graces, and the seal which bears the king’s signature, and which is called the cachet (privy-seal or signet). In the council, she allows the others to speak; she replies to any one who needs it; she decides according to the advice of the council, or according to what she may have made up her own mind to. She opens the letters addressed to the king by his ambassadors and by all the ministers. . . . She has great designs, and does not allow them to be easily penetrated. As for her way of living, she is very fond of her ease and pleasure; she observes few rules; she eats and drinks a great deal; she considers that she makes up for it by taking a great deal of exercise a-foot and a-horseback; she goes a-hunting; and last year she always joined the king in his stag-chases, through the woods and thick forests, a dangerous sort of chase for anyone who is not an excellent rider. She has an olive complexion, and is already very fat; accordingly the doctors have not a good opinion of her life. She has a dower of three hundred thousand francs a year, double that of other queens-dowager. She was formerly always in money-difficulties and in debt; now, she not only keeps out of debt, but she spends and gives more liberally than ever.” [_Relations des Ambassadeurs venztzens,_ published by A. N. Tommaseo, t. i. pp. 427-429.]

As soon as the reign of Charles IX. and the queen-mother’s government were established, notice was sent to the Prince of Conde that he was free. He refused to stir from prison; he would wait, he said, until his accusers were confined there. He was told that it was the king’s express order, and was what Francis II. on his death-bed had himself impressed upon the King of Navarre. Conde determined to set out for La Fere, a place belonging to his brother Anthony de Bourbon, and there await fresh orders from the king. In February, 1561, he left La Fare for Fontainebleau. On his road to Paris his friends flocked to him and made him a splendid escort. On approaching the king’s palace Conde separated himself from his following, and advanced alone with two of his most faithful friends. All the lords of the court, the Duke of Guise amongst them, went to meet him. On the 15th of March he was admitted to the privy council. Chancellor de l’Hospital, on the prince’s own demand, affirmed that no charge had been found against him. The king declared his innocence in a deed signed by all the members of the council. On the 13th of June, in solemn session, the Parliament of Paris, sitting as a court of peers, confirmed this declaration. Notwithstanding the Duke of Guise’s co-operation in all these acts, Conde desired something of a more personal kind on his part.

On the 24th of August, at St. Germain, in presence of the king, the queen-mother, the princes, and the court, the Duke of Guise, in reply to a question from the king, protested “that he had not, and would never have desired to, put forward anything against the prince’s honor, and that he had been neither the author nor the instigator of his imprisonment.” “Sir,” said Conde, “I consider wicked and contemptible him or them who caused it.” “So I think, sir,” answered Guise, “and it does not apply to me at all.” Whereupon they embraced, and a report was drawn up of the ceremony, which was called their reconciliation. Just as it was ending, Marshal Francis de Montmorency, eldest son of the constable, and far more inclined than his father was towards the cause of the Reformers, arrived with a numerous troop of friends, whom he had mustered to do honor to Conde. The court was a little excited at this incident. The constable declared that, having the honor to be so closely connected with the princes of Bourbon, his son would have been to blame if he had acted differently. The aged warrior had himself negotiated this reconciliation; and when it was accomplished, and the Duke of Guise had performed his part in it with so much complaisance, the constable considered himself to be quits with his former allies, and free to follow his leaning towards the Catholic party. “The veteran,” says the Duke of Autnale, “did not pique himself on being a theologian; but he was sincerely attached to the Catholic faith because it was the old religion and the king’s; and he separated himself definitively from those religious and political innovators whom he had at first seemed to countenance, and amongst whom he reckoned his nearest relatives.” In vain did his eldest son try to hold him back; a close union was formed between the Constable de Montmorency, the Duke of Guise, and Marshal de Saint-Andre, and it became the Catholic triumvirate against which Catherine de’ Medici had at one time to defend herself, and of which she had at another to avail herself in order to carry out the policy of see-saw she had adopted as her chief means of government.

Before we call to mind and estimate as they deserve the actions of that government, we must give a correct idea of the moral condition of the people governed, of their unbridled passions, and of the share of responsibility reverting to them in the crimes and shocking errors of that period. It is a mistake and an injustice, only too common, to lay all the burden of such facts, and the odium justly due to them, upon the great actors almost exclusively whose name has remained attached to them in history; the people themselves have very often been the prime movers in them; they have very often preceded and urged on their masters in the black deeds which have sullied their history; and on the masses as well as on the leaders ought the just sentence of posterity to fall. The moment we speak of the St. Bartholomew, it seems as if Charles IX., Catherine de’ Medici, and the Guises issued from their grave to receive that sentence; and God forbid that we should wish to deliver them from it; but it hits the nameless populace of their day as well as themselves, and the hands of the people, far more than the will of kings, began the tale of massacres for religion’s sake. This is no vague and general assertion; and, to show it, we shall only have to enumerate, with their dates, the principal facts of which history has preserved the memory, whilst stigmatizing them, with good reason, as massacres or murders. The greater number, as was to be expected, are deeds done by Catholics, for they were by far the more numerous and more frequently victorious; but Protestants also have sometimes deserved a place in this tragic category, and when we meet with them, we will assuredly not blot them out.

We confine the enumeration to the reign of Charles IX., and in it we place only such massacres and murders as were not the results of any legal proceeding. We say nothing of judicial sentences and executions, however outrageous and iniquitous they may have been.

The first fact which presents itself is a singular one. Admiral de Coligny’s eldest brother, Odet de Chatillon, was a Catholic, Bishop of Beauvais, and a cardinal; in 1550, he had gone to Rome and had co-operated in the election of Pope Julius III.; in 1554, he had published some _Constitutions synodales_ (synodal regulations), to remedy certain abuses which had crept into his diocese, and, in 1561, he proposed to make in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper some modifications which smacked, it is said, of the innovations of Geneva. The populace of Beauvais were so enraged at this that they rose up against him, massacred a schoolmaster whom he tried to protect, and would have massacred the bishop himself if troops sent from Paris had not come to his assistance.

In the same year, 1561, the Protestants had a custom of meeting at Paris, for their religious exercises, in a house called the Patriarch’s house, very near the church of St. Medard. On the 27th of December, whilst the Reformed minister was preaching, the Catholics had all the bells of St. Medard rung in full peal. The minister sent two of his congregation to beg the incumbent to have the bell-ringing stopped for a short time. The mob threw themselves upon the two messengers: one was killed, and the other, after making a stout defence, returned badly wounded to the Patriarch’s house, and fell dead at the preacher’s feet. The provost of tradesmen was for having the bells stopped; the riot became violent; the house of the Reformers was stormed; and the provost’s archers had great difficulty in putting a stop to the fight. More than a hundred persons, it is said, were killed or wounded.

In 1562, in the month of February, whilst the Guises were travelling in Germany, with the object of concluding, in the interests of policy, alliances with some German Lutheran princes, disturbances broke out at Cahors, Amiens, Sens, and Tours, between the Protestants and the Catholics. Which of the two began them? It would be difficult to determine. The passions that lead to insult, attack, defence, and vengeance were mutually felt and equally violent on both sides. Montluc was sent to Guienne by the queen-mother to restore order there; but nearly everywhere he laid the blame on the Protestants. His Memoires prove that he harried them without any form of justice. “At Sauveterre,” says he, “I caught five or six, all of whom I had hanged without expense of paper or ink, and without giving them a hearing, for those gentry are regular Chrysostoms (_parlent d’or_).” “I was informed that at Gironde there were sixty or eighty Huguenots belonging to them of La Reole, who had retreated thither; the which were all taken, and I had them hanged to the pillars of the market-place without further ceremony. One hanged has more effect than a hundred slain.” When Montluc took Monsegur, “the massacre lasted for ten hours or more,” says he, “because search was made for them in the houses; the dead were counted and found to be more than seven hundred.” [_Memoires de Montluc,_ t. ii. pp. 442, 443-447.]

Almost at the very time at which Montluc, who had been sent to Guienne to restore order there between the Catholics and the Protestants, was treating the latter with this shocking severity, an incident, more serious because of the rank of the persons concerned, took place at Vassy, a small town in Champagne, near which the Duke of Guise passed on returning from Germany. Hearing, as he went, the sound of bells, he asked what it meant. “It is the church of the Huguenots of Vassy,” was the answer. “Are there many of them?” asked the duke. He was told that there were, and that they were increasing more and more. “Then,” says the chronicler, “he began to mutter and to put himself in a white heat, gnawing his beard, as he was wont to do when he was enraged or had a mind to take vengeance.” Did he turn aside out of his way with his following, to pass right through Vassy, or did he confine himself to sending some of his people to bring him an account of what was happening there? When a fact which was at the outset insignificant has become a great event, it is hardly possible to arrive at any certain knowledge of the truth as to the small details of its origin. Whatever may have been the case in the first instance, a quarrel, and, before long, a struggle, began between the preacher’s congregation and the prince’s following. Being informed of the matter whilst he was at table, the Duke of Guise rose up, went to the spot, found the combatants very warmly at work, and himself received several blows from stones; and, when the fight was put a stop to, forty-nine persons had been killed in it, nearly all on the Protestant side; more than two hundred others, it is said, came out of it severely wounded; and, whether victors or vanquished, all were equally irritated. The Protestants complained vehemently; and Conde offered, in their name, fifty thousand men to resent this attack, but his brother, the King of Navarre, on the contrary, received with a very bad grace the pleading of Theodore de Beze. “It is true that the church of God should endure blows and not inflict them,” said De Beze, “but remember, I pray you, that it is an anvil which has used up a great many hammers.”

The massacre of Vassy, the name which has remained affixed to it in history, rapidly became contagious. From 1562 to 1572, in Languedoc, in Provence, in Dauphiny, in Poitou, in Orleanness, in Normandy even and in Picardy, at Toulouse, at Gaillac, at Frejus, at Troyes, at Sens, at Orleans, at Amiens, at Rouen, and in many other towns, spontaneous and disorderly outbreaks between religiously opposed portions of the populace took place suddenly, were repeated, and spread, sometimes with the connivance of the local authorities, judicial or administrative, but more often through the mere brutal explosion of the people’s passions. It is distasteful to us to drag numerous examples from oblivion; but we will cite just two, faithful representations of those sad incidents, and attested by authentic documents. The little town of Gaillac was almost entirely Catholic; the Protestants, less numerous, had met the day after Pentecost, May 18, 1562, to celebrate the Lord’s Supper. “The inhabitants in the quarter of the Chateau de l’Orme, who are all artisans or vine-dressers,” says the chronicler, “rush to arms, hurry along with them all the Catholics of the town, invest the place of assembly, and take prisoners all who were present. After this capture, they separate: some remain in the meeting-house, on guard over the prisoners; the rest go into dwellings to work their will upon those of the religion who had remained there. Then they take the prisoners, to the number of sixty or eighty, into a gallery of the Abbey of St. Michael, situated on a steep rock, at the base of which flows the River Tarn; and there, a field laborer, named Cabral, having donned the robe and cape of the judge’s deputy, whom he had slain with his own hand, pronounces judgment, and sentences all the prisoners to be thrown from the gallery into the river, telling them to go and eat fish, as they had not chosen to fast during Lent; which was done forthwith. Divers boatmen who were on the river despatched with their oars those who tried to save themselves by swimming.” [_Histoire generale du Languedoc,_ liv. xxxviii. f. v., p. 227.] At Troyes, in Champagne, “during the early part of August, 1572, the majority of the Protestants of the town, who were returning from Esleau-Mont, where they had a meeting-house and a pastor under authorization from the king, were assailed in the neighborhood of Croncels by the excited populace. A certain number of individuals, accompanying a mother carrying a child which had just received baptism, were pursued with showers of stones; several were wounded, and the child was killed in its mother’s arms.” This affair did not give rise to any prosecution. “It is no use to think about it any longer,” said the delegate of the bailiff and of the mayor of Troyes, in a letter from Paris on the 27th of August. The St. Bartholomew had just taken place on the 24th of August. [_Histoire de la Ville de Troyes,_ by H. Boutiot, t. iii. p. 25.]

Where they happened to be the stronger, and where they had either vengeance to satisfy or measures of security to take, the Protestants were not more patient or more humane than the Catholics. At Nimes, in 1567, they projected and carried out, in the town and the neighboring country, a massacre in which a hundred and ninety-two Catholics perished; and several churches and religious houses were damaged or completely destroyed. This massacre, perpetrated on St. Michael’s day, was called _the Michaelade_. The barbarities committed against the Catholics in Dauphiny and in Provence by Francis de Beaumont, Baron of Adrets, have remained as historical as the massacre of Vassy, and he justified them on the same grounds as Montluc had given for his in Guienne. “Nobody commits cruelty in repaying it,” said he; “the first are called cruelties, the second justice. The only way to stop the enemy’s barbarities is to meet them with retaliation.” Though experience ought to have shown them their mistake, both Adrets and Montluc persisted in it. A case, however, is mentioned in which Adrets was constrained to be merciful. After the capture of Montbrison, he had sentenced all the prisoners to throw themselves down, with their hands tied behind them, from the top of the citadel; one of them made two attempts, and thought better of it; “Come, twice is enough to take your soundings,” shouted the baron, who was looking on. “I’ll give you four times to do it in,” rejoined the soldier. And this good saying saved his life.

The weak and undecided government of Catherine de’ Medici tried several times, but in vain, to prevent or repress these savage explosions of passion and strife amongst the people; the sterling moderation of Chancellor de l’Hospital was scarcely more successful than the hypocritical and double-faced attentions paid by Catherine de’ Medici to both the Catholic and the Protestant leaders; the great maladies and the great errors of nations require remedies more heroic than the adroitness of a woman, the wisdom of a functionary, or the hopes of a philosopher. It was formal and open civil war between the two communions and the two parties that, with honest and patriotic desire, L’Hospital and even Catherine were anxious to avoid. From 1561 to 1572 there were in France eighteen or twenty massacres of Protestants, four or five of Catholics, and thirty or forty single murders sufficiently important to have been kept in remembrance by history; and during that space of time formal civil war, religious and partisan, broke out, stopped and recommenced in four campaigns, signalized, each of them, by great battles, and four times terminated by impotent or deceptive treaties of peace which, on the 24th of August, 1572, ended, for their sole result, in the greatest massacre of French history, the St. Bartholomew.

The first religious war, under Charles IX., appeared on the point of breaking out in April, 1561, some days after that the Duke of Guise, returning from the massacre of Vassy, had entered Paris, on the 16th of March, in triumph. The queen-mother, in dismay, carried off the king to Melun at first, and then to Fontainebleau, whilst the Prince of Conde, having retired to Meaux, summoned to his side his relatives, his friends, and all the leaders of the Reformers, and wrote to Coligny, “that Caesar had not only crossed the Rubicon, but was already at Rome, and that his banners were beginning to wave all over the neighboring country.” For some days Catherine and L’Hospital tried to remain out of Paris with the young king, whom Guise, the Constable de Montmorency, and the King of Navarre, the former being members and the latter an ally of the triumvirate, went to demand back from them. They were obliged to submit to the pressure brought to bear upon them. The constable was the first to enter Paris, and went, on the 2d of April, and burned down the two places of worship which, by virtue of the decree of January 17, 1561, had been granted to the Protestants. Next day the King of Navarre and the Duke of Guise, in their turn, entered the city in company with Charles IX. and Catherine. A council was assembled at the Louvre to deliberate as to the declaration of war, which was deferred. Whilst the king was on his way back to Paris, Conde hurried off to take up his quarters at Orleans, whither Coligny went promptly to join him. They signed, with the gentlemen who came to them from all parts, a compact of association “for the honor of God, for the liberty of the king, his brothers and the queen-mother, and for the maintenance of decrees;” and Conde, in writing to the Protestant princes of Germany to explain to them his conduct, took the title of protector of the house and crown of France. Negotiations still went on for nearly three months. The chiefs of the two parties attempted to offer one another generous and pacific solutions; they even had two interviews; but Catherine was induced by the Catholic triumvirate to expressly declare that she could not allow in France more than one single form of worship. Conde and his friends said that they could not lay down their arms until the triumvirate was overthrown, and the execution of decrees granting them liberty of worship, in certain places and to a certain extent, had been secured to them. Neither party liked to acknowledge itself beaten in this way without having struck a blow. And in the early part of July, 1562, the first religious war began.

We do not intend to dwell upon any but its leading facts, facts which at the moment when they were accomplished might have been regarded as decisive in respect of the future. In this campaign there were two; the battle of Dreux, on the 19th of December, 1562; and the murder of the Duke of Guise by Poltrot, on the 18th of February, 1563.

The two armies met in the plain of Dreux with pretty nearly equal forces, the royal army being superior in artillery and the Protestant in cavalry. When they had arrived in front of one another, the triumvirs sent to ask the queen-mother’s authority to give battle. “I am astounded,” said Catherine to her favorite adviser, Michael de Castelnau, “that the constable, the Duke of Guise, and Saint-Andre, being good, prudent, and experienced captains, should send to ask counsel of a woman and a child, both full of sorrow at seeing things in such extremity as to be reduced to the risk of a battle between fellow-countrymen.” “Hereupon,” says Castelnau, “in came the king’s nurse, who was a Huguenot, and the queen, at the same time that she took me to see the king, who was still in bed, said to me with great agitation and jeeringly, ‘We had better ask the king’s nurse whether to give battle or not; what think you?’ Then the nurse, as she followed the queen into the king’s chamber according to her custom, said several times that, as the Huguenots would not listen to reason, she would say, ‘Give battle.’ Whereupon there was, at the privy council, much discourse about the good and the evil that might result therefrom; but the resolution arrived at was, that they who had arms in their hands ought not to ask advice or orders from the court; and I was despatched on the spot to tell them from the king and the queen, that, as good and prudent captains, they were to do what they considered most proper.” Next day, at ten in the morning, the armies met. “Then every one,” says La Noue, one of the bravest amongst the Reformers’ leaders, “steadied himself, reflecting that the men he saw coming towards him were not Spaniards, or English, or Italians, but Frenchmen, that is, the bravest of the brave, amongst whom there were some who were his own comrades, relatives, and friends, and that within an hour they would have to be killing one another, which created some sort of horror of the fact, without, however, diminution of courage. . . . One thing worthy of being noted,” continues La Noue, “is the long duration of the fight, it being generally seen in battles that all is lost or won within a single hour, whereas this began about one P. M., and there was no issue until after five. Of a surety, there was marvellous animosity on both sides, whereof sufficient testimony is to be found in the number of dead, which exceeded seven thousand, as many persons say; the majority whereof were killed in the fight rather than the pursuit. . . . Another incident was the capture of the two chiefs of the armies, a thing which rarely happens, because generally they do not fight until the last moment and in extremity; and often a battle is as good as won before they come to this point. But in this case they did not put it off so long, for, at the very first, each was minded to set his men an example of not sparing themselves. The Constable de Montmorency was the first taken, and seriously wounded, having always received wounds in seven battles at which he was present, which shows the boldness that was in him. The Prince of Conde was taken at the end, also wounded. As both of them had good seconds, it made them the less fearful of danger to their own persons, for the constable had M. de Guise, and the Prince of Conde Admiral de Coligny, who showed equally well to the front in the melley. . . . Finally I wish to bring forward another matter, which will be supernumerary because it happened after the battle; and that is, the courteous and honorable behavior of the Duke of Guise victorious towards the Prince of Conde a prisoner; which most men, on one side as well as on the other, did not at all think he would have been disposed to exhibit, for it is well known how hateful, in civil wars, are the chiefs of parties, and what imputations are made upon them. Nevertheless here quite the contrary happened: for, when the prince was brought before the duke, the latter spoke to him respectfully and with great gentleness of language, wherein he could not pretend that there was any desire to pique him or blame him. And whilst the prince staid in the camp, the duke often dined with him. And forasmuch as on this day of the battle there were but few beds arrived, for the baggage had been half-plundered and dispersed, the Duke of Guise offered his own bed to the Prince of Conde, which the prince would accept in respect of the half only. And so these two great princes, who were like mortal foes, found themselves in one bed, one triumphant and the other captive, taking their repast together.” [_Memoires de Francois de La Noue,_ in the _Petitot_ collection; 1st series, t. xxxiv. pp. 172-178.]

The results of the battle of Dreux were serious, and still more serious from the fate of the chiefs than from the number of the dead. The commanders of the two armies, the Constable de Montmorency, and the Prince of Conde, were wounded and prisoners. One of the triumvirs, Marshal de Saint-Andre, had been killed in action. The Catholics’ wavering ally, Anthony de Bourbon, King of Navarre, had died before the battle of a wound which he had received at the siege of Rouen; and on his death-bed had resumed his Protestant bearing, saying that, if God granted him grace to get well, he would have nothing but the gospel preached throughout the realm. The two staffs (_etats-majors_), as we should now say, were disorganized: in one, the Duke of Guise alone remained unhurt and at liberty; in the other, Coligny, in Conde’s absence, was elected general-in-chief of the Protestants. At Paris, for a while, it was believed that the battle was lost. “If it had been,” says Montluc, “I think that it was all over with France, for the state would have changed, and so would the religion; a young king can be made to do as you please;” Catherine de’ Medici showed a facile resignation to such a change. “Very well,” she had said, “then we will pray to God in French.” When the victory became known there was general enthusiasm for the Duke. of Guise; but he took only a very modest advantage of it, being more anxious to have his comrades’ merits appreciated than his own. At Blois, as he handed the queen-mother her table-napkin at dinner-time, he asked her if he might have an audience of her after the repast. “Jesu! my dear cousin,” said Catherine, “whatever are you saying?” “I say it, madame, because I would fain show you in the presence of everybody what I have done, since my departure from Paris, with your army which you gave in charge to me together with the constable, and also present to you all the good captains and servants of the king and of yourself who have served you faithfully, as well your own subjects as also foreigners, and horsemen and foot;” whereupon he discoursed about the battle of Dreux, “and painted it so well and so to the life,” says Brantome, “that you would have said that they were still about it, whereat the queen felt very great pleasure. . . . Every one listened very attentively, without the least noise in the world; and he spoke so well that there was none who was not charmed, for the prince was the best of speakers and eloquent, not with a forced and overladen eloquence, but simple and soldierly, with a grace of his own to match; so much so that the queen-mother said that she had never seen him in such good form.” [Brantome, _Tries des Brands Capitaines,_ t. ii. pp. 247-250.] The good form, however, was not enough to prevent the ill-humor and jealousy felt by the queen-mother and her youthful son the king at such a great success which made Guise so great a personage. After the victory of Dreux he had written to the king to express his wish to see conferred upon a candidate of his own choosing the marshal’s baton left vacant by the death of Saint-Andre. “See now,” said Charles IX. to his mother and some persons who were by, “if the Duke of Guise does not act the king well; you would really say that the army was his, and that victory came from his hand, making no mention of God, who, by His great goodness, hath given it us. He thrusts the bargain into my fist (dictates to me). Yet must I give him a civil answer to satisfy him; for I do not want to make trouble in my kingdom, and irritate a captain to whom my late father and I have given so much credit and authority.” The king almost apologized for having already disposed of the baton in favor of the Marquis de Vieilleville, and he sent the Duke of Guise the collar of the order for two of his minions, and at the same time the commission of lieutenant-general of the kingdom and commander-in-chief of the army for himself. Guise thanked him, pretending to be satisfied: the king smiled as he read his letter; and “_Non ti fidar, e non sarai gabbato_” (Don’t trust, and you’ll not be duped), he said in the words of the Italian proverb.

He had not to disquiet himself for long about this rival. On the 18th of February, 1563, the Duke of Guise was vigorously pushing forward the siege of Orleans, the stronghold of the Protestants, stoutly defended by Coligny. He was apprised that his wife, the Duchess Anne d’Este, had just arrived at a castle near the camp with the intention of using her influence over her husband in order to spare Orleans from the terrible consequences of being taken by assault. He mounted his horse to go and join her, and he was chatting to his aide-de-camp Rostaing about the means of bringing about a pacification, when, on arriving at a cross-road where several ways met, he felt himself struck in the right shoulder, almost under the arm, by a pistol-shot fired from behind a hedge at a distance of six or seven paces. A white plume upon his head had made him conspicuous, and as, for so short a ride, he had left off his cuirass, three balls had passed through him from side to side. “That shot has been in keeping for me a long while,” said he: “I deserve it for not having taken precautions.” He fell upon his horse’s neck, as he vainly tried to draw his sword from the scabbard; his arm refused its office.

When he had been removed to the castle, where the duchess, in tears, received him, “I am vexed at it,” said he, “for the honor of France;” and to his son Henry, Prince of Joinville, a boy of thirteen, he added, kissing him, “God grant you grace, my son, to become a good man.” He languished for six days, amidst useless attentions paid him by his surgeons, giving Catherine de’ Medici, who came daily to see him, the most pacific counsels, and taking of the duchess his wife the most tender farewells mingled with the most straightforward and honest avowals. “I do not mean to deny,” he said to her, “that the counsels and frailties of youth have led me sometimes into something at which you had a right to be offended; I pray you to be pleased to excuse me and forgive me.” His brother, the Cardinal de Guise, Bishop of Metz, which the duke had so gloriously defended against Charles V., warned him that it was time to prepare himself for death by receiving the sacraments of the church. “Ah! my dear brother,” said the duke to him, “I have loved you greatly in times past, but I love you now still more than ever, for you are doing me a truly brotherly turn.” On the 24th of February they still offered him aliment to sustain his rapidly increasing weakness but “Away, away,” said he; “I have taken the manna from heaven, whereby I feel myself so comforted that it seems to me as if I were already in paradise. This body has no further need of nourishment;” and so he expired on the 24th of February, 1563, an object, at his death, of the most profound regret amongst his army and his party, as well as his family, after having been during his life the object of their lively admiration. “I do not forget,” says his contemporary Stephen Pasquier in reference to him, “that it was no small luck for him to die at this period, when he was beyond reach of the breeze, and when shifting Fortune had not yet played him any of those turns whereby she is so cunning in lowering the horn of the bravest.”

It is a duty to faithfully depict this pious and guileless death of a great man, at the close of a vigorous and a glorious life, made up of good and evil, without the evil’s having choked the good. This powerful and consolatory intermixture of qualities is the characteristic of the eminent men of the sixteenth century, Catholics or Protestants, soldiers or civilians; and it is a spectacle wholesome to be offered in times when doubt and moral enfeeblement are the common malady even of sound minds and of honest men.

The murderer of Duke Francis of Guise was a petty nobleman of Angoumois, John Poltrot, Lord of Mere, a fiery Catholic in his youth, who afterwards became an equally fiery Protestant, and was engaged with his relative La Renaudie in the conspiracy against the Guises. He had been employed constantly from that time, as a spy it is said, by the chiefs of the Reformers--a vocation for which, it would seem, he was but little adapted, for the indiscretion of his language must have continually revealed his true sentiments. When he heard, in 1562, of the death of Anthony de Bourbon, King of Navarre, “That,” said he, “is not what will put an end to the war; what is wanted is the dog with the big collar.” “Whom do you mean?” asked somebody. “The great Guisard; and here’s the arm that will do the trick.” “He used to show,” says D’Aubigne, “bullets cast to slay the Guisard, and thereby rendered himself ridiculous.” After the battle of Dreux he was bearer of a message from the Lord of Soubise to Admiral de Coligny, to whom he gave an account of the situation of the Reformers in Dauphiny and in Lyonness. His report no doubt interested the admiral, who gave him twenty crowns to go and play spy in the camp of the Duke of Guise, and, some days later, a hundred crowns to buy a horse. It was thus that Poltrot was put in a position to execute the design he had been so fond of proclaiming before he had any communication with Coligny. As soon as, on the 18th of February, 1563, in the outskirts of Orleans, he had, to use his own expression, done his trick, he fled full gallop, so as not to bear the responsibility of it; but, whether it were that he was troubled in his mind, or that he was ill acquainted with the region, he wandered round and round the place where he had shot the Duke of Guise, and was arrested on the 20th of February by men sent in search of him. Being forthwith brought before the privy council, in the presence of the queen-mother, and put to the torture, he said that Admiral de Coligny, Theodore de Beze, La Rochefoucauld, Soubise, and other Huguenot chiefs had incited him to murder the Duke of Guise, persecutor of the faithful, “as a meritorious deed in the eyes of God and men.” Coligny repudiated this allegation point blank. Shrinking from the very appearance of hypocrisy, he abstained from any regret at the death of the Duke of Guise. “The greatest blessing,” said he, “which could come to this realm and to the church of God, especially to myself and all my house;” and he referred to conversations he had held with the Cardinal of Lorraine and the Duchess of Guise, and to a notice which he had sent, a few days previously, to the Duke of Guise himself, “to take care, for there was somebody under a bond to kill him.” Lastly, he demanded that, to set in a clear light “his integrity, innocence, and good repute,” Poltrot should be kept, until peace was made, in strict confinement, so that the admiral himself and the murderer might be confronted. It was not thought to be obligatory or possible to comply with this desire; amongst the public there was a passionate outcry for prompt chastisement. Poltrot, removed to Paris, put to the torture and questioned by the commissioners of Parliament, at one time confirmed and at another disavowed his original assertions. Coligny, he said, had not suggested the project to him, but had cognizance of it, and had not attempted to deter him. The decree sentenced Poltrot to the punishment of regicides. He underwent it on the 18th of March, 1563, in the Place de Greve, preserving to the very end that fierce energy of hatred and vengeance which had prompted his deed. He was heard saying to himself in the midst of his torments, and as if to comfort himself, “For all that, he is dead and gone,--the persecutor of the faithful,--and he will not come back again.” The angry populace insulted him with yells; Poltrot added, “If the persecution does not cease, vengeance will fall upon this city, and the avengers are already at hand.”

Catherine de’ Medici, well pleased, perhaps, that there was now a question personally embarrassing for the admiral and as yet in abeyance, had her mind entirely occupied apparently with the additional weakness and difficulty resulting to the position of the crown and the Catholic party from the death of the Duke of Guise; she considered peace necessary; and, for reasons of a different nature, Chancellor de l’Hospital was of the same opinion: he drew attention to “scruples of conscience, the perils of foreign influence, and the impossibility of curing by an application of brute force a malady concealed in the very bowels and brains of the people.” Negotiations were entered into with the two captive generals, the Prince of Conde and the Constable de Montmorency; they assented to that policy; and, on the 19th of March, peace was concluded at Amboise in the form of an edict which granted to the Protestants the concessions recognized as indispensable by the crown itself, and regulated the relations of the two creeds, pending “the remedy of time, the decisions of a holy council, and the king’s majority.” Liberty of conscience and the practice of the religion “called Reformed” were recognized “for all barons and lords high-justiciary, in their houses, with their families and dependants; for nobles having fiefs without vassals and living on the king’s lands, but for them and their families personally.” The burgesses were treated less favorably; the Reformed worship was maintained in the towns in which it had been practised up to the 7th of March in the current year; but, beyond that and noblemen’s mansions, this worship might not be celebrated save in the faubourgs of one single town in every bailiwick or seneschalty. Paris and its district were to remain exempt from any exercise of the said “Reformed religion.”