Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 2.djvu/497

] her murderous associates held a secret conclave at the Louvre, the result of which was that about noon she entered the king's apartment, followed by Anjou, Guise, and other nobles, when they assured the weak and horrified king that the Huguenots, thirsting for revenge of the attempt on Coligny, were about to massacre him and all the Royal family, and that the only means of safety was to anticipate them by allowing the people to defend him and destroy their rabid enemies.

The king, greatly terrified, gave a reluctant consent; and Guise, Anjou, Aumale, Montespan, and Marshal Tavannes, were sent out to do the work of carnage. On Sunday, the 24th of August, 1572, the festival of St. Bartholomew, at the tolling of a bell, the infuriated Papists, headed by the chief princes and nobles of the realm, rushed forth and commenced the butchery of the capital. That the whole had been carefully and completely planned, was shown by the like outburst and bloody massacre taking place in Rouen, Lyons, and other cities simultaneously. The first thing done in Paris was to rush in a crowd to the house of Coligny, and, bursting in, massacre him and every soul that was in it. The murderers threw the bodies of the admiral and his family out of the windows into the midst of the brutal mob, where they were trampled on and treated with every species of indignity. Charles IX. is said to have been induced to give the first signal for the massacre by firing a gun from his palace window; and then he and his wicked mother went out and stood on the balcony to watch the progress of the carnage.

The tocsin sounded from the Parliament house; and the Papists, yelling with the fury of anticipated blood, rushed along the streets crying, "Down with the Huguenots! Kill every man of them! Kill! kill! kill!" And with that cry commenced a terrible carnage. Men, women, children, without regard to age, sex, or rank, were butchered in cold blood, with every circumstance of devilish cruelty. All day the massacre went on, many a man seizing the opportunity to murder the object of his hatred, whether Protestant or no. Towards evening the king proclaimed by sound of trumpet that the destruction should cease. But it was much easier to let loose such a mob of assassins than to stop them: and the slaughter went on through the night and the two succeeding days. There have been many different estimates of the numbers which perished in this horrible massacre. La Popilione calculates them at 20,000; Adriani, De Serres, and De Thou, at 30,000; Dairla, at 40,000; Sully, at 70,000; and Péréfixe, at 100,000! In Paris alone 500 persons of rank and 10,000 of a lower grade fell; and probably the total, in the capital and the provinces, is not far short of Sully's estimate, which is the received one.

When the terrible deed was perpetrated, the king became overwhelmed by the magnitude of the crime. He exclaimed, "Whether I sleep or whether I wake, every moment I am haunted by visions of murdered men, all covered with blood, and hideous to behold." In the letters written to the provinces, the cause was ascribed to the ancient feud of the houses of Guise and Coligny; but the Duke of Guise would not accept so large a share of the infamy; and the king was obliged in Parliament to avow that he had himself signed the order for the death of Coligny, and for the commencement of the massacre.

A sensation of horror was diffused all over Europe by the news of this unexampled atrocity of bigotry, which was greatly augmented in England by the crowds of Protestants who fled thither for refuge. The body of the nation called for instant war, to avenge on the sanguinary French Government this infamous treatment of the Reformed church. La Mothe Fenelon hastened to apologise to the Queen of England for what he termed this unfortunate accident. Elizabeth hesitated for a day or two to receive the ambassador, who was greatly disconcerted by his position in the midst of a people who denounced, in just terms, this frightful transaction. At length, when she had had time to array herself and her Court in deep mourning, she gave him an audience in the presence of her Council and the chief ladies of the realm. The deepest silence accompanied his entrance, and the queen, after a pause, advanced ten or twelve paces to meet him, solemn and stern, but with her accustomed courtesy. She then led him to a window, and asked him whether "it were possible that the strange news which she had heard of a prince whom she so much loved, honoured, and confided in, could be true."

Fenelon confessed that he was overwhelmed by the tidings of this sad accident, but that an accident it was; that his Royal master had not the slightest idea of such an event till the evening before it, when it was disclosed to him that the admiral and his party had formed a design to make themselves master of the Louvre, to seize the Royal family, and put to death the Duke of Guise and the other leaders of the party; that in the hurry and excitement of the moment he had given orders to the Duke of Guise and his friends to prevent the traitorous design by putting to death the admiral and his friends; and that nothing could exceed his regret that the ungovernable passions of the populace had produced such a catastrophe, which had pained him as much as if he had cut off his arms to save his whole body.

Elizabeth declared herself influenced by this favourable view of the case, but expressed an earnest hope that the king, whom, though she had not been able to accept him as a husband, she still continued to love and revere as if she were his wife, would be able to satisfy the world that it was not by any premeditation of his own that this catastrophe had happened, but by some strange accident which time would elucidate.

The ambassador, who had approached this interview with great misgiving, was wonderfully reassured by this language of the queen, and did not hesitate, in the very midst of an audience burning with indignation at the commission of a wholesale murder of a people by their king which has no parallel in history, to present her with a love-letter from the Duke of Alençon, which she accepted graciously, and read with apparent satisfaction.

Burleigh hastened to impress upon Elizabeth the necessity of the death of Mary as "the only means of preventing her own deposition and murder;" and Sandys, the Bishop of London, sent in a paper of necessary precautions to be adopted, the first and foremost of which was to "forthwith cut off the Scottish queen's head." This exemplary bishop of Christ's Church wrote to Burleigh, who was with the Court at Woodstock, that "the citizens of London in these dangerous days needed to be prudently dealt withal." He was very much afraid that