Preliminaries to the Massacre of St. Bartholomew's.
KING FRANCIS, the chivalric, died of his own excesses; his son, Henry II., succeeded the husband of Catherine de' Medici. He was even more vicious and cruel than his father; he persecuted with Italian severity; he died amidst the thanksgivings of the Huguenots, pierced by the lance of a rival knight, at a magnificent tourney. His death made way for the rule of his widow, Catherine de' Medici, and their three miserable sons. Nor can one reflect without a shudder of disgust upon that wretched group of depraved men and more monstrous women into whose hands now fell the destiny of the Huguenots and of fair and progressive France. Touched by the genial impulse of reform, filled with a brilliant generation of poets, scholars, accomplished artisans, and gifted statesmen, such as the world has seldom known, the unhappy realm was checked in the moment of its advance by the follies and the crimes of Catherine, the popes, and the Guises. Rome ruled at Paris, and in the peaceful and holy communities described by Palissy and Beza was soon aroused a dreadful discord that ended in their destruction. The workman fled from his forge or his loom to die upon the battle-field; the scholar, the musician, and the poet, carried the fruits of their genius to foreign lands; the Italian prelate, with malevolent touch, blighted the dawning civilization of France. Catherine de' Medici led the revelries, the fashions, and the politics of the age. Her youth had been singularly unfortunate. No friendly voice, no fond or tender counsels, had awakened in her cold heart a trace of filial or maternal love. Her father, Lorenzo de' Medici, had deserved by his vices the miseries he endured; her mother was no less unhappy; and Catherine, the descendant of the wealthiest mercantile house in Europe, was born penniless and a child of evil omen. It was foretold of her at her birth that she would bring destruction to the city where she was born; the towns-people of Florence would have exposed the infant in a basket to the balls of their enemies. But she was preserved alive, was shut up in a convent, and in the school of Macchiavelli and of Rome learned dissimulation and self-control. Her uncle became pope; and Francis I., anxious to win the support of Clement, married his son Henry to the portionless orphan, then a girl of fourteen. But misfortune still followed the child of evil omen. The pope, her uncle, soon died; Francis reaped no benefit from the hasty marriage; and Catherine came into the family of Valois only to be neglected by her husband for Diana of Poitiers, and to be contemned by her regal relatives as the impoverished descendant of a race of merchants. For many years she lived powerless and obscure, the nominal wife of a depraved king. Yet she was singularly beautiful. Her brilliant complexion, her large and lustrous eyes, the inheritance of the Medicean family, her graceful form, her hand and arm that no painter or sculptor could imitate, were set off by manners so soft and engaging as to win the esteem even of her foes. Few left her presence without being charmed by that graceful courtesy which had descended to her from Lorenzo the Magnificent; few could believe that her placid countenance concealed the passions, the resentments, the unsparing malice of the most ambitious of women. From Lorenzo Catherine had inherited, too, a love for exterior beauty in dress or form, a taste for lavish elegance. She shone at tourneys, and glittered in stately processions. From him, perhaps, came that passion for political intrigue that seemed the only vigorous impulse of her placid nature, and for which at times she became a murderess, reveling in the spectacle of her bleeding victims, or meditated and prepared the corruption, the degradation, or the death of her own sons. By some ardent Roman Catholic writers Catherine is adorned with all saintly virtues as the guardian and defender of the church; by most historians she is looked upon as an incomprehensible mystery. Not even her contemporaries could penetrate that chill and icy heart, where no maternal or friendly affections ever dwelt, where pity and compassion never came, which was dead to the sufferings of others, and even to her own, and discover the secret springs that guided her erratic policy of vacillation and crime. Yet it is possible that the true mystery lay in her boundless superstition. For the common modes of belief she had nothing but skepticism. She toyed with the Huguenots; she was not afraid to cajole or defy the Catholics and the pope. But before the sorcerer or the fortune-teller all her narrow intellect was bowed in abject submission. Her credulity was, perhaps, the cause of her impassive cruelty. She obeyed implicitly the decrees of the stars; she consulted with awe the famous seer of Salon, Nostradamus, whose name and writings are still cherished by the lovers of curious mysteries, and whose rude oracles were freely purchased by the noble and the great of his superstitious age. She wore a mystic amulet or chain that still exists; she kept around her astrologers and alchemists, and possibly believed that in all her cruelties and crimes she was governed by an overruling fate. It is probable that a secret insanity clouded the active mind of the French Medea. Yet at the age of thirty-nine Catherine held in her unsteady hand the destiny of France. By her side had grown up into rare beauty and equal dissimulation and pride a woman scarcely less mysterious than herself. The character of Mary Queen of Scots is still the subject of animated debate. She was the wife of Francis II., Catherine's eldest son, now king of France. He was a feeble, mindless boy of sixteen; but the acute and brilliant Mary was a year or two older, full of graces and accomplishments, of ambition and pride. In the splendid dawn of her mournful career Mary was rightful queen of France and Scotland, and the popish claimant of the crown of England. She seemed the most powerful and prosperous of living women, and, in the petulance of youthful pride, was accustomed to taunt her mother-in-law, Catherine, whom she hated, with being the daughter of a race of Florentine shop-keepers. The two acute and heartless women struggled for power; but the contest was soon ended by the death of Francis and the reluctant retreat of Mary from the palaces and revels of Catholic France to the barren wilds of her Northern kingdom. At the head of the violent faction of the Catholics stood the ambitious family of the Guises. The feeble kings, and even the aspiring Catherine, were forced to submit to the impetuous and overbearing policy of these devoted adherents of the papacy. It was the favorite aim of the Guises to exterminate the Huguenots, and to lay at the feet of the Roman pontiff, France, purified by a general massacre of his foes. Yet the power of the Guises was only of recent origin. Their father, Duke Claude, had come up to the French court an impoverished adventurer, and had died leaving enormous wealth, the fruit of a corrupt but successful career. His family of six sons were the inheritors of his fortune and power. His daughter was the mother of Mary of Scotland. His eldest son, Duke Francis, ruled over the family, the court, and the king; the second, Charles, cardinal of Lorraine, had engrossed innumerable benefices, and was almost the pope of France; his rare eloquence and vigorous intellect were employed with fatal effect in the cause of persecution; his sonorous voice had chanted at the Council of Trent a perpetual anathema against heresy. The two Guises, Duke Francis and the cardinal, were called by their contemporaries "the butchers." Nothing stirred their savage breasts with such real joy as the spectacle of Huguenots dying by torture. It was the custom of the cardinal, after a stately dinner at his regal palace, to show his guests a fair array of martyrs executed for their entertainment, or sometimes to hang up a tall and stalwart reformer in the banqueting chamber itself. Such monsters as the Guises, Catherine, or her children, have never been produced in any form of Christianity except the Roman Catholic, and are the necessary result of the Romish doctrine of force. As if in happy contrast to Catherine and Mary, two women of singular piety and decorum ruled over the chiefs of the Huguenots. Jeanne d'Albret, queen of Navarre, and mother of Henry IV., governed her little kingdom with masculine vigor, expelled the priests and the mass, corresponded with Calvin, and scoffed at the malice of the pope. To Jeanne the Huguenots owed their best counsels and their final success; for she educated her son in the valleys of the Pyrenees to bear toil and hunger, to feed on the coarsest food, to play barefoot and bareheaded with the children of the villages, and to prepare himself by early deprivations for the duties of camp and court. Henry descended from his native mountains robust, tall, strong in mind and will, tender-hearted, and benevolent, the direct opposite of the three malicious and degraded kings, his predecessors, who had been moulded by the corrupting hand of their mother, Catherine de' Medici. Another pure and courageous woman, Charlotte de Laval, wife of the great Coligny, inspired the most eminent of the Huguenots with her own heroic zeal. She urged, she implored her husband to take up arms in defense of reform; and when Coligny pointed out to her, with wise and tender words, the dangers and sufferings that must fall upon them both if he yielded to her advice, she nobly promised to bear all without a murmur. The Huguenot mothers, in fact, in this hour of danger, seemed to emulate the heroism of Jeanne d'Albret and the wife of Coligny, and bid their husbands and their sons go forth to battle, followed by their blessings and their prayers.556 Yet the Huguenots were fearfully outnumbered. They formed scarcely a twentieth part of the population of France. Paris, the chief city of the realm, was intensely Catholic. The court and the Guises held in their power the capital and the government of the nation. Calvin and the Protestant pastors urged submission upon the persecuted Huguenots, and it was with sincere reluctance that Coligny and the chiefs of his party raised at last the standard of a religious warfare. A terrible atrocity suddenly aroused them to action. On Sunday, March 1, 1562, the bells rang for service in the little town of Vassy, in Champagne, and a congregation of twelve hundred Huguenots had gathered in a large barn to celebrate their simple worship. Duke Francis of Guise rode into the village at the head of a party of soldiers, on his way to Paris. The peal of the Huguenot bells enraged the fanatical chief, and after dinner he led out his soldiers to disturb or destroy the peaceful worshipers. They broke into the barn; the Huguenots, unarmed, threw stones at the intruders, and one struck the duke on the cheek. He gave orders for a general massacre of the Protestants; men, women, and children were cut down or shot by the merciless assassins; few escaped unharmed from the dreadful scene; the duke, covered with the blood of innocence, rode on in triumph to Paris. He was received in the most Catholic city as the avenger of the church. Surrounded by a body-guard of twelve hundred gentlemen on horseback, he entered the city by the St. Denis gate amidst the applause of a vast throng of citizens; the streets rang with songs and ballads composed in his honor. He was from this time the consecrated leader of the papal party; and the priests and bishops from every pulpit celebrated that "noble lord" who had instigated and guided the massacre of the heretics at Vassy. A year later the duke lay on his dying-bed, his ambition stilled forever, his furious rage quenched in the last agonies; and in the varying accounts of his dying hours it is at least certain that there rose up before him the picture of the pious congregation he had so ruthlessly destroyed—a memory of the wickedest of all his evil deeds.—Historical Studies.