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cordingly she reminded him of the revenge that she had predicted, and neither in December, 1571, nor in August, 1572, was Salviati verj' expHcit in his corre- spondence with the Court of Rome as, on 8 Sep- tember, 1572, three weeks after the massacre. Car- dinal Como, Secretary of State to Gregory XIII, wrote to Salviati: "Your letters show that you were aware of the preparations for the blow against the Huguenots long before it was dealt. You would have done well to inform His Holiness in time." In fact on 5 August, Salviati had written to Rome: "The Queen will rap the Admiral's knuckles if he goes too far" {donnera a U Admiral sur les ongles), and on 11 August: "Finally, I hope that God will give me the grace soon to announce to you something that will fill His Holiness with joy and satisfaction." This was all. A subsequent letter from Salviati revealed that this covert allusion was to the scheme of vengeance that Catherine was then projecting in regard to Co- ligny's assassination and that of a few Protestant leaders: however, it seems that at the Court of Rome the reference was supposed to be to a re-establi.sh- ment of cordial relations between France and Spain. The replies of the Cardinal of Como to Salviati show that this last idea was what absorbed the attention of Gregory' XIII and that the Court of Rome gave but little heed to Catherine's threats against the Protes- tants. Notwithstanding that Salviati was Cathe- rine's relative and that he was maintaining a close watch, all documents prove, as Soldan, the German Protestant historian, says, that the events of 24 Au- gust were accomplished independently of Roman in- fluence. Indeed, so little did Salviati foresee the Massacre of St. Bartholomew itself that he wrote to Rome the day after the event: "I cannot believe that so many would have perished if the Admiral had died of the musket-shot fired at him. ... I cannot be- lieve a tenth of what I now see before my ver>' eyes." D. The attitude of Gregory XIII on receiving the news of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. — It was on 2 Sep- tember that the first rumours of what had occurred in France reached Rome. Danes, secretary- to Mande- lot. Governor of Lyons, bade AI. de Jou, Commander at Saint-Antoine, to inform the pope that the chief Protestant leaders had been killed in Paris, and that the king had ordered the governors of the provinces to seize all Huguenots. Cardinal de Lorraine, when thus informed, gave the courier 200 ecus and Gregory' XIII gave him 1000. The pope wanted bonfires lighted in Rome, but Ferals, the French Ambassador, objected on the ground that official communication should first be received from the king and the nuncio. On 5 Sep- tember Beauvillier reached Rome, having been sent thither by Charles IX. He gave an account of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew and begged Gregory XIII to grant, antedating it, the dispensation re- quired for the legitimacy of the marriage of Margaret of Valois and Henry of Navarre, solemnized three weeks previously. Gregory XIII deferred discu.ssing the subject of the dispensation and a letter from the Cardinal de Bourbon dated 26 August and a despatch from Salviati, both received at this time, duly in- formed him of what had taken place in France. "Said Admiral," wTote the Cardinal de Bourbon, "was so wicked as to have conspired to kill said King, his mother, the Queen and his brothers. ... He (the Admiral) and all the ringleaders of his sect were slain. . . . And what I most commend is the resolu- tion taken by His Majesty to exterminate this ver- min." In his letter describing the massacre Salviati said: "I rejoice that it has pleased the Divine Maj- esty to take under His protection the King and tlie Queen-mother." Thus all the information received from France gave Gregory XIII the impression that Charles IX and his family had been saved from great danger. The verj- morning of the day that Beau- villier had brought him Salviati's letter, the pope held XIII.— 22

a consistorj^ and announced that "God had been pleased to be merciful". Then with all the cardinals he repaired to the Church of St. Mark for the Te Deum, and prayed and ordered prayers that the Most Christian King might rid and purge his entire king- dom of the Huguenot plague. He believed that the Valois had just escaped a most terrible conspiracy which, had it succeeded, would have unfitted France for the struggle of Christian against Turk. On 8 Sep- tember a procession of thanksgiving took place in Rome, and the pope, in a praj'er after mass, thanked Gk)d for having "granted the Cathohc people a glori- ous triumph over a perfidious race " (gloriosam de per- fidis gentihus populo caiholico Icetitiam tribuisti).

A suddenly discovered plot, an exemplary chastise- ment administered to insure the safety of the royal family, such was the light in which Gregory XIII viewed the St. Bartholomew massacre, and such was likewise the idea entertained by the Spanish Ambas- sador who was there with him and who, on 8 Sep- tember, WTote as follows: "I am certain that if the musket-shot fired at the Admiral was a matter of several days' premeditation and was authorized by the King, what followed was inspired by circum- stances." These circumstances were the threats of the Huguenots, "the insolent taunts of the whole Huguenot party", alluded to by Salviati in his despatch of 2 September; to put it briefly, these circumstances constituted the conspiracy. However, the Cardinal of Lorraine, who belonged to the House of Guise and resided in Rome, wished to insinuate that the massacre had been planned long ahead by his family, and had a solemn inscription placed over the entrance to the Church of St. Louis des Frangais, pro- claiming that the success achieved was an answer "to the prayers, supphcations, sighs and meditation of twelve years"; this hypothesis, according to which the massacre was the result of prolonged hypocri.sy, the outcome of a protracted ruse, was shortly after- wards maintained with great audacity in a book by Capilupi, Catherine's Italian panegyri-st. But the Spanish Ambassador refuted this interpretation: "The French," wrote he, "would have it understood that their King meditated this stroke from the time that he concluded the peace with the Huguenots, and they attribute to him trickery that does not seem permissible even against heretics and rebels." And the ambassador was indignant at the Cardinal of Lorraine's folly in giving the Guises credit for having set a trap. The pope did not believe any more than did the Spanish Ambassador in a snare laid by Cath- ohcs, but was rather convinced that the conspiracy had been hatched by Protestants.

Just as the Turks had succumbed at Lepanto, the Protestants had succumbed in France. Gregory XIII ordered a jubilee in celebration of both events and engaged Vasari to paint side by side in one of the Vatican apartments scenes commemorative of the victory of Lepanto and of the triumph of the Most Christian King over the Huguenots. Finally, he had a medal struck representing an exterminating angel sniiting the Huguenots with his sword, the inscrip- tion reading: Hugonottorum strages. There had been a slaughter of conspirators (strages) and the informa- tion that reached the pope was identical with that spread throughout Europe by Charles IX. On 21 September Charles IX wrote to Elizabeth of England concerning the "imminent danger" from the plot that he had baffled; on the next day he wrote as follows to La Mothe-Fenelon, his amba.ssador at London: "Cohgny and his followers were all ready to visit upon us the same fate that we dealt out to them"; and to the German princes he sent similar information. Certainlj' all this seemed justified by the decree of the French magistracy ordering the admiral to be burned in effig\' and prayers and pro- cessions of thanksgiving on each recurring 24 August,