Preliminaries to the Massacre of St. Bartholomew's.
At the news from Vassy the Huguenots rose in arms, and for ten years all France was filled with civil discord; the factories were closed, the seats of industry sunk into decay, and the vigor of the nation was wasted in a useless warfare; the duke of Guise, fierce, ambitious, full of physical and mental power, fell, in the opening of the contest which he had begun, by the hand of an assassin. His death was charged upon Coligny, who denied the accusation, but scarcely condemned the act. The war raged with new violence, and the Huguenots repaid, with dreadful retaliations, the savage deeds of their foes. Frequent truces were made; the nation sighed for peace; and even Catherine herself would have consented to grant toleration to reform, would have aided in giving harmony and prosperity to France. But the pope and the Italian faction still ruled in the divided nation, and saw without a sentiment of pity or regret the horrors they had occasioned, the fierce passions they had aroused, the holy impulses they had stifled forever. They called incessantly for the total extermination of the Huguenots; they lamented every truce as impious, denounced every effort toward conciliation; they inculcated a merciless cruelty, an undying hatred. Paul IV., maddened with strong wine and the insanity of a corrupt old age, had instigated the latest persecutions that had led to the civil wars of France. His successors, Pius IV. and V., fanned the fires of strife, and called incessantly for blood; they aimed the assassin's dagger, or roused the evil passions of devout Catholics, by insisting upon the duty of repressing heresy by force; nor can there be found in history, except, perhaps, among their own predecessors, three sovereigns who have so increased the sum of human misery—three potentates, in any age, who have less deserved the name of Christians. The teachings of the popes and the violence of the Catholic faction led to the massacre of St. Bartholomew's. Catherine de' Medici, weary of incessant civil war, guided, perhaps, by her malignant star, had resolved to gratify the court of Rome, the Guises, and the Parisians by a total extermination of all those eminent and generous chiefs who had so long defied the armies of their Catholic foes. Within her dark, inscrutable breast had been matured a plot of singular efficacy for drawing into her toils the leaders of the Huguenots; and the lessons she had learned in the school of Macchiavelli were exemplified with matchless power. It is impossible, indeed, to believe that St. Bartholomew's571was not premeditated; it seems certain that a rumor of the approaching horror had filled the extreme faction of the Catholics with secret joy. A hollow pacification had been arranged. Catherine proposed to Jeanne d'Albret and the Huguenot chiefs to complete the union of the two parties by marrying her daughter Marguerite with young Henry of Navarre. Catherine's son, Charles IX., consented to the match, and pressed it in spite of the opposition of the pope; and in the summer of 1572 the ominous wedding was celebrated at Paris with rare pomp and boundless ostentation. Young Henry of Navarre, at nineteen, frank, generous, a Huguenot in faith if not in practice, was brought up by his mother, Jeanne, queen of Navarre, to be married to the daughter of her bitterest foe, and to mingle with a society and a court whose profligacy and corruption she had ever shrunk from with disdain. It would have been well for the austere queen had she still repelled the advances of her rival. But Jeanne seems to have yielded to the arts of Catherine, and to have believed that some trace of womanly tenderness lingered in the breast of the new Medea. She consented, for the sake of the oppressed Huguenots, to suffer her son to marry the child of the house of Valois, and ventured to come up to Paris, the citadel of her foes. Her death soon followed. Whether premature age filled with sorrows and doubts had weighed her down, sudden disease, or secret poison, the annalists of the period could not determine; but among the Huguenots, shocked at the suddenness of their loss, arose a dark suspicion that their favorite queen had died by the Italian arts of Catherine. It was said that the mother of the expected bride had poisoned the mother of the bridegroom by presenting her with a pair of perfumed gloves, prepared with a deadly powder; it was believed that the austere and spotless queen of Navarre had been lured into the Circean circle of the French court to be made away with the more securely. Yet Jeanne d'Albret died, as she had lived, a stern reformer, an example, and a warning. The corrupt ladies of Catherine's court, who visited her in her last hours, saw with wonder that the courageous queen needed none of the customary ceremonies of the papal church. She asked only the prayers of the Huguenot pastors and the simple rites of the apostolic faith. Meantime Paris was filled with a throng of the bravest and noblest of the reformers, who had been lured into the center of their foes. Coligny, loyal, and trusting the word of his king, rode boldly into the fatal snare. Wise and faithful friends had warned him of his imprudence; a devoted peasant woman clung to his horse's rein and begged him not to trust to the deceivers; but no entreaties or warnings could shake his resolution. He was followed by his companions in arms, the heroes of many a brilliant contest. But it was noticed that as the Huguenots entered the city no cheer of reconciliation arose from the bigoted citizens; that the streets were filled with menacing faces; that every eye was averted in hatred and gloom. Henry of Navarre and his cousin, the prince of Condé, came to Paris in the first days of August, and were lodged in the palace of the Louvre. Coligny and his followers occupied an inn or hotel on the street of Bresse. The king, Charles IX., Catherine, and the young duke of Guise received their victims with eager civility, and Charles welcomed Coligny almost as a father. The city rang with revelry; the young princes, Henry, Condé, the dukes of Anjou and Alençon, and Charles IX., joined with ardor in the revels and sports; and Catherine, surrounded by a corrupt train of beautiful women, inspired the dreadful hilarity. Paris, in the sixteenth century, possessed few of those attractions that have made it, in the nineteenth, the most magnificent of cities. It was renowned chiefly for its narrow and filthy streets, not paved or lighted, the perpetual haunt of fever or plague; for its sordid and often starving population; and for the fierce superstition of its monks and priests. Several grand hotels of the nobility, each a well-garrisoned fortress, arose amidst its meaner dwellings. The new palace of the Louvre, lately built by Francis I., was the residence of the court; but the Tuileries was unfinished, and the Palais Royal did not yet exist; and high walls, pierced by lofty gates, shut in the medieval city from the free air of the surrounding plains. Yet in the hot summer of 1572 its streets were filled with a brilliant multitude come up to witness the marriage of Henry and Marguerite, of the Protestant and the Catholic, and every eye was fixed with curiosity and expectation upon the preparations for the splendid ceremony. Henry, the generous son of the mountains, was already renowned for his courage and his manly grace; Marguerite was known only as the child of the corrupt Catherine. Her life had been passed in ceaseless terror under the iron sway of her mother, the enmity of her brother of Anjou, and the doubtful favor of Charles. Yet she had wit and talent, a pleasing manner, a graceful person, a natural duplicity encouraged by her early training; and few of the virtues of her namesake, the elder and purer Marguerite, had descended to her luckless grandniece. But the young pair were still in the bloom of youth when all Paris attended their nuptials. The wedding was celebrated on the 18th of August, beneath a pavilion richly adorned, in front of the church of Notre Dame. It was performed with neither Protestant nor Catholic rites. Henry, attended by the king, Charles IX., and the two royal dukes, all dressed alike in yellow satin, covered with precious stones, and followed by a long array of princes and nobles, attired in various colors, ascended the platform; the king led in his sister, who was robed in violet velvet, embroidered with the lilies of France and glittering with pearls and diamonds. Catherine de' Medici followed, surrounded by a fair, frail circle of maids of honor. A bright summer sun shone on the gay pageant and gleamed over the towers of Notre Dame. The ceremony was performed by the Cardinal Bourbon; but no sooner was it ended than the bride left her husband to witness mass in the cathedral, while Henry turned sternly away from the unscruptural rite. In the evening a grand entertainment was given in the Louvre; maskers and royal and noble revelers filled its wide saloons, and for several days afterward Paris was a scene of strange merriment, and of feasts and tourneys, upon which the wiser Huguenots looked with grave disdain. But the dreadful day was near when the secret purpose of the wild revels was to be perfectly fulfilled. The week which had opened with the wedding-feast and carousal was to close in more than funeral gloom. Charles and Catherine had constantly assured the pope that the marriage was only designed to insure the destruction of the Huguenots. Orders were sent to the governor of Lyons to allow no couriers to pass on to Rome until the 24th of August. It was intended that the news of the wedding and the massacre should reach the holy father at the same moment. The Huguenots, unconscious of danger, still remained in Paris. On Friday, the 22d, they were startled from their security by the first deed of crime. Coligny was shot at by order of the young duke of Guise, and was borne back to his inn wounded, though not mortally, amidst the rage of his companions and the secret joy of his foes. In the hot days of August, amidst the noisome streets of Paris, the admiral lay on his couch, surrounded by his bravest followers in arms. He was surprised by a visit from the king, who came to express his sympathy for his suffering friend—his rage at his treacherous foe. But with him came also Catherine, who wept over the wounded Coligny, and the duke of Anjou, apparently equally grieved, but who were only spies upon the impulsive king. They feared that the wise and good Coligny might succeed in awakening the better element in the nature of the unhappy Charles. From this moment a gloom settled upon the crowded city, and its Catholic people, no doubt, felt that the hour of vengeance drew near. On Saturday, the 23d, the Huguenots could scarcely go into the streets without danger. They gathered around the bedside of Coligny, or in the chamber of Henry of Navarre, but seem never to have thought of escape. They breathed out threats against the assassin, Guise; yet they still trusted to the professions of Catherine and the word of the king. Nor does Charles seem to have been altogether resolute in his horrible design. He wavered, he trembled, he was weary of bloodshed. His feeble, imperfect intellect seems to have turned to his friend Coligny for support, and Catherine saw with secret rage that some traits of humanity and softness still lingered in the breast she had striven to make as cold and malevolent as her own.—Historical Studies.