All great efforts are followed by a reaction. We have seen how Protestantism had been spreading over France during the last forty years, the attempts to crush it serving but to give it greater vitality. We are now approaching a period of counter-revolution; the tide of reform has reached its flood and will soon begin to ebb, slowly, irregularly, but certainly, so that at last we entirely lose sight of religion in the political struggle that ensued.

Attempts have been made to fix upon the Huguenots the terrible responsibility of beginning the civil strife. It is easy to prove this, or any other historical untruth, by a skillful manipulation of documents; but the evidence of eye-witnesses of, and actors in, the events of the spring of 1562, points to the opposite conclusions. La Noue, who was present at Meaux, positively affirms that there was no plan or previous arrangement. “Most of the nobility,” he says, “hearing of the slaughter at Vassy, partly of a voluntary good-will, and partly for fear, determined to draw toward Paris, imagining that their protectors might stand in some need of them.”[284] And that there was good ground for this fear appears certain from a contemporary letter, in which the writer says: “Every thing is in such confusion at court that, if God does not lend a helping hand, I fear that in less than ten days you will have news of the prettiest (plus beau) massacre that ever was.”[285]

Is it wonderful if in such a state of things the Protestant gentry thought it necessary to take counsel together? Of their deliberations we know nothing, but the result was a resolution to take up arms. Coligny alone appears to have held back, and without his countenance and support the chances of success were very small. There is a story told of him, which we could hope to be true, though it is at variance with certain known facts. He had long kept aloof, notwithstanding the entreaties of his brothers Andelot and the Cardinal of Chatillon that he would take the field; and when his wife added her entreaties to theirs, he drew a terrible picture of civil war and the possible fate of herself and their children, and begged her take three weeks to weigh the matter deliberately in her mind. “The three weeks are already past,” replied the heroic dame; “you will never be conquered by the virtue of your enemies; employ your own, and do not take upon your head the murders of three weeks.” He hesitated no longer, and the next day set off to join Condé at Meaux, where the Huguenot gentlemen held rendezvous. That prince had already committed himself too far not to see that none but the boldest measures could save him: “It is all over,” he said; “we have plunged in so deep that we must either drink or drown.”

The confederate, knowing how greatly success depended upon prompt action, spent but few moments in deliberation. Their first step must be to secure some strong town, in which they could make a safe stand until reinforcements arrived. For obvious strategical and political reasons they selected Orleans, and thitherward, to the number of two thousand, they turned their horses’ heads. As the delay of even a few minutes might be dangerous, they rode on like a fierce whirlwind, not stopping to pick up any one who fell on the road. Once in Orleans, which they entered on the 2d April, 1562, they sent secret orders to their co-religionists all over France, and their first measures were crowned with success. Almost on the same day the Huguenots made themselves masters of Havre, Rouen, Caen, and Dieppe in Normandy; Blois, Tours, and Angers on the Loire; Poitiers and Rochelle in Poitou; Chalons and Troyes in Champagne; Macon in Burgundy; Gap and Grenoble in Dauphiny; and Nismes, Montpellier, Béziers, and Montauban in Languedoc; as well as a large number of castles in the north, west, and south, with the Cevennes district between Lyons and Toulouse.

From all these quarters the best gentlemen in France rallied round Condé in defense of the rights of their body and the princes of the blood-royal against the usurpation and violence of the Guises, who were foreigners. Many of them were related to Condé: the three Chatillons were the uncles of his wife; Prince Porcien the husband of his niece; La Rochefoucault had married his sister-in-law. Viscount Rohan represented the nobles of Dauphiny; Andelot the Pays de France; the Count of Grammont led the Gascons; Montgomery the Normans; and Genlis the sober and industrious Picards. Their first step was to sign a Covenant of Association, binding them to spend their goods and their lives in restoring the king to liberty, and procuring freedom of worship to all Frenchmen. They necessarily made Condé their leader, and then sent off letters (7th May) to all the churches, desiring them “in God’s name” to furnish both men and money. “We have taken up arms,” said the confederates, “that we may deliver the King and Queen from the hands of their enemies, and secure the full execution of the Edict of January.” Condé also thought it his duty to dispatch a messenger to the queen-mother, with an explanation of the motives which had driven him to such extreme measures. Catherine would not commit herself to a written answer, but desired the Baron de la Garde to tell the Prince, “that she would never forget what he might do for the king her son.”

The Catholics, if less prompt, were not less vigorous in their proceedings. In 1561 the citizens of Paris had been disarmed as a measure of precaution; now every member of the “ancient Catholic religion,” capable of bearing arms, was ordered to procure them and attend drill.[286] By this means fifteen corps of infantry, amounting to the almost incredible number[287] of 30,000 men (others say 24,000), were placed at the disposal of the Triumvirate for the protection of the capital. By another order, issued by Marshal Brissac, who had succeeded Montmorency as governor, all persons, “notoriously famed as being of the new religion,” were ordered to leave the city within twenty-four hours, or they would be hanged; as for such as were “suspected” only, they were required to get a certificate of confession.[288] The populace did not fail to take advantage of the opportunity thus placed within their reach, by informing against those whom, from any personal or other motive, they wanted to turn out of their houses; and if the Huguenots did not go, they were plundered and ill-used.

And now began a war of manifestoes and remonstrances. The walls of the capital were covered with placards in which the Huguenots declared that they had taken up arms in self-defense and not for plunder, and the Catholics replied in terms that exhausted the vocabulary of abuse. The Lorraine party, or the Triumvirate, was the Ultramontane or foreign party; the Protestant party was especially that of national independence. The Huguenots, like the English Parliamentarians of 1642, represented the middle classes, and were (perhaps unconsciously) democratic in their tendencies; the Royalists (as we may call them, since they held the king’s person, although they were not more loyal than their opponents) were supported by the clergy, the ignorant rural population, and the poverty of the towns. Both parties sought political power to carry out their views.

It may be said that, if ever there was a time when Christians were justified in resorting to the sword, it was the present. The laws in favor of the Huguenots were constantly and systematically broken. The massacre at Vassy was only the first of a series of outrages equally barbarous. At Sens in Burgundy, a Huguenot having insulted a Catholic procession, the tocsin was rung, and there was a general onslaught upon the Reformed, without regard either to age or sex. The bodies of the victims, stripped and fastened to planks, were thrown into the river and floated down to Paris, twenty leagues distant. One of them, that of a Gascon officer, was dragged through the streets by boys leaping and shouting: “Take care of your pigs, for we have got the pigkeeper.” The fanatic populace destroyed every thing, even rooting up the vines in the Calvinist vineyards. For three days the hideous carnival of murder went on, and ceased only from want of victims.[289]

The massacre of Sens took place in April, while the Baron de la Garde was on his mission of peace in the Protestant camp. It was said to have been perpetrated at the instigation of the Cardinal of Lorraine, who was archbishop of that city, and who took no steps to prevent the murders. As soon as the news reached the ears of Condé, he broke off all negotiations, and declared that he would not lay down his arms “until he had driven his most cruel enemies (the Guises) out of France.” The nuncio Santa Croce seems to allude to two massacres: “Since the massacre at Sens, of which I wrote in my last, another great slaughter of eighty Huguenots has happened, and some thirty of their houses have been burned in that city.” Perrenot de Chantonnay, the Spanish embassador, writes exultingly: “Already in many parts of this kingdom, as at Sens, Toulouse, Castel-Navarre, and Villefranche, the Catholics have risen against the Huguenots, who have had the worst of it; and in some places the preachers were burned in the market-place.”

All over France, from the Channel to the Mediterranean, similar ferocious outbreaks occurred. At Sisteron, beneath the shadow of the Lower Alps, three hundred women and children, refugees from all parts of Provence, were pitilessly murdered, the men having made their escape. One poor woman with a baby in her arms was taken outside the town and put to death, and her body buried beneath the ruins of the house where she used to worship.

All comment on these things[290] would be superfluous. Is it wonderful that in such a state of lawlessness the Reformed nobles and gentlemen armed in self-defense? With indignant eloquence, Agrippa d’Aubigné vindicates the rebellion in which the Huguenots sought to protect themselves: “So long as the adherents of the new religion were destroyed merely under the form of law, they submitted themselves to the slaughter, and never raised a hand in their own defense against those injuries, cruel and iniquitous as they were. But when the public authorities and the magistracy, divesting themselves of the venerable aspect of justice, put daggers into the hands of the people, abandoning every man to the violence of his neighbors; and when public massacres were perpetrated to the sound of the drum and of the trumpet, who could forbid the unhappy sufferers to oppose hand to hand, and sword to sword, and to catch the contagion of a righteous fury from a fury unrestrained by any sense of justice?”

This appeal to arms was quite contrary to the principles of the founder of the French Church. In 1556, when Calvin had reason to fear that the Reformed would resist if they were attacked, he wrote to the church of Angers: “I pray you put aside such counsels; they will never be blessed by God, or come to a good issue.” And to the church at Paris he wrote in the same strain: “Show yourselves like lambs against the rage of the wolves, for you have the promise of the Good Shepherd, who will never fail you. It is better that we be all destroyed than for the Gospel to be reproached with leading the people to sedition and tumult. God will always fructify the ashes of his servants, whilst violence and excess will bring nothing but barrenness.”[291]

It is with great hesitation that I venture to differ from so high an authority as Calvin; but—to oppose authority to authority—St. Augustine acknowledges that overwhelming necessity may justify Christians in drawing the sword.[292] And Knox went still farther, maintaining in his “Appellation” that it was not only the duty of a nation to resist a persecuting sovereign, but (as in the case of the Marian persecutions) also to depose the queen, and even “punish her to death, with all the sort of her idolatrous priests.” But the propriety of arming in defense of religion can hardly in these days be maintained on such grounds. The Huguenots of 1562 felt that their only choice lay between extermination, hypocritical conformity, or rebellion. They were contending against intolerable oppression; the laws were no protection to them; and in such circumstances they believed resistance to be justifiable. Why should they apostatize, or be burned, while they had strength to wield the sword, especially as the letter of the law was in their favor? Such a line of argument may fall below the great ideal of the Founder of Christianity, in which the highest victory is gained through suffering: “Unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek, offer also the other.” But how can we apply such a rule to a whole nation, the mass of which consists of ordinary individuals? Upon men of low moral constitutions persecution has a searing, hardening, revengeful effect. It would not raise the victims into martyrs, or lift them up to the divine spirit of the Crucifixion. To forbid the use of the sword for any and every cause, as one very narrow sect does, is intelligible; but to say that we may draw it in defense of our homes and our goods, but not in defense of our faith, is to count the latter of less value than the former. Those who sympathize with Calvin argue that the midnight assassin, or the violator of woman’s purity, may be lawfully resisted, even unto death; not so another who would force a man to abjure his faith. This is putting the purse above the conscience. Calvin had never been tested in the fire. Brentius and Languet, who had both been face to face with the enemy, thought differently.[293] The latter, speaking of a meeting at La Cerisaye, which had been attacked, says: “There were some who would have rather been beaten than draw their swords, but I was not of their opinion.”[294] It may indeed be urged that the differences between the Romanists and Huguenots were not important enough to justify armed resistance; but the alternative appeal is to the conscience; and if men and women, young and old, rich and poor, through a long series of years, held their faith as dearer than their life, we must infer that the differences to them were vital.

There is, however, a potent element of evil in armed resistance. When Christians unite into armies, they are too apt to become a political party, and losing sight of the motives and principles which first banded them together, to contend for mere temporal objects like any other body of men. It was perhaps a misfortune that the Reformed were so numerous in France; had they been a small, insignificant body, they would hardly have created such malignant animosity, and might have escaped being mixed up in the civil war, which was sooner or later inevitable between the political parties.

Both armies now began to prepare for the coming struggle. Never before in all history, and only once since, has any thing been seen like the discipline at first maintained among the Huguenots. A form of prayer, drawn up by Beza, was repeated every night and morning; and the troops were “to beware of oppressing the poor commons.” As they marched over the open country, “they neither spoiled nor misused their hosts, but were content with a little.... Most of them paid honestly for all things.” La Noue aptly describes it as a “well-ordered disorder.” Speaking of the discipline of the army while it lay for a fortnight in the camp at Vassadonne near Orleans, he says: “Among all this great troop, ye should never hear God’s name blasphemed. There was not a pair of dice or cards, the fountains of many brawls and thefts, walking in any quarter.... Truly, many wondered to see them so well-disposed, and my late brother the Lord of Teligny and myself, discoursing thereof with the Lord Admiral, did greatly commend it. Whereupon he said unto us: ‘It is indeed a goodly matter if it would continue; but I fear this people will pour forth all their goodness at once, so as within these two months they will have nothing but malice left. I have a great while governed the footmen, and do know them. They will fulfill the proverb: A young saint, an old devil. If this fail, we may make a cross upon the chimney.’ We smiled, but took no farther heed thereof, until experience taught us that herein he was a prophet.” The admiral had not long to wait for the fulfillment of his prophecy. At Beaugency, the Huguenot force treated with more cruelty the Protestants who had been unable to escape than they did the Catholic soldiers who had held the town against them. “Thus,” continues the amusing chronicler, “thus did our footmen lose their virginity, and of this unlawful conjunction ensued the procreation of Lady Picoree, who is since grown into such dignity that she is now termed madame; yea, if this civil war continue, I doubt she will become a princess. Of the Catholics, I will say that at the beginning they were likewise well ordered, and did not much annoy the commons.” The Huguenots were the first to make the war support itself by contributions levied upon the enemy. When the admiral was in Normandy, the Catholic population of Caen was required to furnish the sum of 10,000, not, however, until Beza’s appeal to his co-religionists for money had utterly failed.[295]

Before the two armies came into actual collision, Catherine interposed as a peace-maker. She saw plainly that, whichever side conquered, the crown must suffer, and that it would be ruinous to her power to allow one party to exterminate the other. Accordingly, several attempts were made to induce the Huguenots to lay down their arms. Montluc and Vieilleville were successively dispatched to Orleans, and as they could obtain nothing from the confederated nobles, Catherine determined to try the effect of her own power of persuasion.

A conference took place on the 2d of June between her and Condé at Thoury in Beauce, ten leagues from Orleans. La Noue describes the armed escorts on each side, sitting on horseback and looking at each other for half an hour, “each coveting to see, one his brother, another his uncle, cousin, friend, or old companion.” At last they got leave from their respective commanders to speak with one another. They met with great “demonstrations of amity.” “The Catholics, imagining the Protestants to be lost, exhorted them to see to themselves, and not to enter obstinately into this miserable war, wherein near kinsmen must murder one another. Hereto they answered that they detested it; howbeit, if they had no recourse to their defense, they were assured of like entreaty as many other Protestants had received, who were cruelly slain in sundry parts of France. Each provoked the other to peace, and to persuade their superiors to hearken thereto.” An eye-witness writes: “On the 17th of June the queen set off again from the forest of Vincennes in great haste, and it was believed this time that she would conclude a peace before her return. She had taken medicine and been bled the day before, being ill through a fall from her hackney, going and coming with such dispatch.”

At a subsequent interview at Talcy[296] (28th June, 1562), Condé, yielding to the persuasions of Montluc, Bishop of Valence, offered to show his good faith by leaving the country, provided the Guises would do the same; and a meeting was fixed for the next day at which the conditions of this singular agreement were to be arranged. La Noue tells us how “the prince returned to his camp laughing (but between his teeth) with the chief of his gentlemen who had heard all his talk; some scratching their heads where they itched not, others shaking them; some were pensive; and the younger sort gibed at one another, each one devising with what occupation he should be forced to get his living in a foreign land.” With similar lightness of heart, but not with equal chivalry, the gentlemen of France forsook their country in 1789, trusting to return in a few weeks to a land which most of them never saw again.

Condé’s officers refused to follow him. Coligny supposed the queen-mother meant no harm, but thought that “those who had weapons in their hands did circumvent her to the end to betray them.” Andelot said to the prince: “If you forsake us now, it will be said that you do it for fear. The best way of coming to an agreement is to lead us within sight of the enemy. We can never be perfect friends, before we have skirmished a little together.” The Lord of Boucarde, one of the bravest gentlemen in the realm, “whose head was fraught with fire and lead,” declared: “I would be loth to walk up and down a foreign land with a tooth-pick in my mouth, and in the mean time see some flattering neighbor be the master of my house, and fatten himself with my revenues.” These opinions being generally approved of, Condé gave way, and “they all shook hands in confirmation thereof.” Beza, who was present at this council, afterward besought the prince “not to give over the good work he had begun which God, whose honor it concerned, would bring to perfection.” Thus the conference came to nothing; the queen-mother and Condé separated, “each very sorry that they had no better success.”

The Huguenots had lost much valuable time by this attempted mediation; while the clergy and Parliament of Paris, improving the opportunity, issued an order for those of the true Church to take up arms and kill the heretics like mad dogs. A contemporary denounces this proclamation as “a means to arm thieves, vagabonds, and villains. It made the ploughman to leave the plough, and the craftsman to shut up his shop; it changed the multitude into tigers and lions, and fleshed them against their own countrymen.”[297] Woe to the vanquished, for atrocity begets atrocity! A manuscript journal of this year, kept by some person attached to the court, describes the fearful state of Paris. Every day had its tale of outrage and murder by sword, rope, or water. Houses were pillaged and razed to the ground; cemeteries were broken open, and the relics of the dead scattered to the winds. The voice of the law was silent, and the government looked on, as if powerless to prevent, but in reality pleased to see their enemies exterminated. On one occasion, a child, hardly six months old, who had been christened by a Huguenot pastor, was rechristened at the Church of St. Germain l’Auxerrois. More than 10,000 spectators were witnesses of the ceremony: the bells rang out joyous peals from every steeple, and the crowd shouted: “Praised be God for the recovery of the poor little soul.” These profanations of the holy rite of baptism were not confined to Paris. At Le Puy the infant of “an apostate” was christened with great pomp of minstrels, arquebusiers, and “taborins,” the lord-bishop of the city being godfather.[298]

On the last day of June several persons were murdered, and among them a woman accused of not going to mass for ten years. She was cruelly beaten and then flung into the Seine, when the boatmen knocked her on the head with oars and poles. Two men also were killed and thrown into the river, charged with being Huguenots. The blood-stained doublet of one of them was fastened to a stick and carried in procession through the streets of Paris by a troop of noisy children. “This, or something of the sort, was done every day,” says the court chronicler, “so that no one could be punished.”[299] The blood-thirstiness of the multitude spread even to the young. Santa Croce writes to Cardinal Borromeo: “Monsieur d’Enghien, who is only a little boy of seven, is always saying that we must no longer delay to burn all the Huguenots without mercy.... This I learned from the constable, who expressed how greatly he was pleased to hear it.”

The Constable Montmorency, who, as governor of Paris, should have supported the authority of the law, was one of the foremost to break it. He took such pleasure in destroying the Huguenot places of worship, that even the Catholics nicknamed him Mr. Burn-bench. In one day he pulled down the two meeting-houses at Popincourt,[300] and the mob bringing the timber to the square in front of the Hotel-de-Ville, burned it there with shouts of “God has not forgotten the city of Paris.” The pulpit was used with great effect to inflame the multitude. At the Fête Dieu, Charles of Guise, “the bloody cardinal,”[301] told his hearers “it was better to shed the last drop of their blood than permit God’s honor and his Church to be defiled by the presence of any other religion in France than that of their ancestors.”[302] Matters became so bad that at last Queen Elizabeth instructed her embassador to leave Paris, “because he could not witness such great cruelties.” What the queen-mother said or did to conciliate her royal sister is not known; but it is certain that Catherine was much grieved at this state of affairs—diu multumque flevit. There is a story of her adopting a rather oriental manner of learning the opinions of the citizens. Putting on a mask, such as the Italian ladies were accustomed to wear, she walked through the streets, accompanied by the Queen of Navarre. They went into the shops, pretending to purchase, and, as may be imagined, heard many strange things about themselves and the government.[303]

All efforts at conciliation having failed, each party tried to strengthen itself by foreign alliances. Guise, Montmorency, and St. André had already, as we have seen, entered into a treasonable arrangement with Philip II., by which that monarch bound himself to aid with money and men in the extirpation of heresy in France; “on no pretense to spare the life of any heretic,” says the Sommaire.[304] The duke was specially charged “to blot out entirely the name, family, and race of Bourbon, lest from them some one should arise hereafter to restore the new religion.” In pursuance of this agreement the King of Spain wrote to the queen-mother offering military support.[305] Pius V. ordered collections to be made in the states of the Church, gathered contributions from the Italian princes, and sent a small force of mercenaries across the Alps.[306]

In self-defense the Huguenots were forced to appeal to their brother Protestants for help; nor were Swiss, Germans, or English deaf to their appeal. By the treaty of Hampton Court (20th Sept., 1562) Elizabeth agreed to furnish 6000 men, of whom one-half were to garrison Havre, as a material guarantee until the end of the war. This was an impolitic concession on the part of the Huguenots; it turned many friends into enemies, and necessarily drove Catherine into the arms of the coalition. The Duke of Guise, only a few years before, had by the capture of Calais expelled the English from the “sacred soil” of France; and now the Huguenots were traitorously inviting them back. Unfortunately Elizabeth’s behavior only served to strengthen the suspicions of the French people. Her declared object was “to check the aspirations of the Guisian conspirators, who would never be satisfied until Scotland and England were united under one crown, and that worn by Mary Stuart.”[307] To the King of Spain she wrote, immediately after signing the treaty, that her aim was to preserve peace “by securing such ports as be next us from them (Guisians), without intent of offense to the king.”[308] But she did not preserve peace, and her actions did offend.

Hostilities broke out long before these negotiations were concluded. By the middle of June the two armies were in the field and ready for action. They were not large: that under Navarre consisting of 4000 foot and 3000 horse, that under Condé of 6000 foot and 2000 horse. The first movements were favorable to the Catholics. Having frustrated an attempt to surprise them, the royal forces prepared to attack Orleans, the Huguenot head-quarters, by cutting it off from the surrounding country. They retook Blois, Tours, Poitiers, Angers, and Bourges, almost without striking a blow, signalizing the capture of these cities by atrocities which could have been perpetrated only when the passions of a fierce soldiery were inflamed by religious fanaticism. At Blois a woman found praying with some neighbors was thrown into the water, and as she floated was beaten with sticks and pelted with stones until she died. An old man of seventy caught reading the Bible was immediately massacred; another had his eyes plucked out and was then knocked on the head; another was paraded through the city on an ass, with his face to the tail, pelted, hooted, and drowned. The pastor Chassebœuf was, by Guise’s express order, hung up to a tree without any form of trial.[309] There was much in the appearance of Tours to rouse the fanaticism of the soldiery. For some weeks the town had been in the hands of the Huguenots, who seized upon the churches, stole the plate, broke the images and ornaments, burned the service-books, desecrated the relics, and ordered every ecclesiastic to leave the place in twenty-four hours under pain of imprisonment. Contemporary records describe the destruction of a “Calvary” of gold and azure, one of the wonders of the world, which sixty years before had cost the large sum of ten thousand ducats. The plunder of the churches served to keep up the war. That of St. Martin at Tours furnished Condé with 1,200,000 livres, without counting the jewels in the shrines.[310]

When the king’s authority was restored in Tours, mass was ordered to be sung in St. Martin’s Church, but every thing in it had been broken or destroyed, except the stalls in the choir and a few of the painted windows. This was on the 13th June, and on the 14th and 15th of the following month the massacre occurred. The interval is sufficient to show that it was caused by something more than the usual military license of those rough days. We shall find a horrible sameness in these stories: men and women, young and old, were murdered indiscriminately; even children were not spared. Boats filled with victims were sunk in the river; thus anticipating, by more than two centuries, the noyades of the infamous Carrier. Three hundred persons were shut up in a church, and after being kept there for three days without food, were bound two and two and taken to the escorcherie (the knacker’s yard) and there killed. “Little children (whose parents had been murdered) could be bought for a crown apiece,” adds D’Aubigné. In five or six days the banks of the river down to Angers were covered with dead bodies, “dont les bestes mêmes s’espouvantoyent,” says Crespin, “at which even the wild beasts were horror-stricken.” After order had been restored by the Duke of Montpensier, a minister was hanged for preaching a sermon not to the taste of his hearers. Because the fronts of certain houses had not been decorated with hangings during the procession of Corpus Christi, some of the inhabitants were drowned, others imprisoned, and in every case the houses were thoroughly gutted. Two women were dragged to the river and flung into water so shallow, that they could not drown, whereupon they were beaten to death with oars and poles. Jean Bourgeau, president of the city, was caught while attempting to escape in a boat (30th Nov., 1562). He was first drowned and then hanged to a tree and disemboweled, “because not only had he been averse to punishing the heretics, but had moreover favored them by adhering to their erroneous opinions and oppressing the Catholics.”[311]

From Tours the king’s forces marched to Poitiers, which fell after three days’ cannonade, and Bourges surrendered after a siege of ten days. The terms of capitulation conceded to the inhabitants were an amnesty for the past and liberty of conscience according to the Edict of January. Orleans was now quite insulated; but the Catholic chiefs, instead of following up their successes in that direction, drew off their army to Rouen, through which they feared that English forces might be poured into the country. Rouen was at that time one of the most important cities of France: there was none in the north to equal it in commerce, wealth, and population. Situated on the Seine, midway between its mouth and Paris, it commanded the main highway into the interior; and, so long as it was in hostile hands, no serious attempt could be made upon the strong city of Orleans. Strategical and political reasons being thus in favor of attacking Rouen, the royal army, now 18,000 strong, under the orders of the constable, sat down before the city on the 25th September. The Count of Montgomery’s garrison was about 4000 men, of whom nearly half were English. The trenches were opened to the sound of music, as was done more than once in the time of Louis XIV. In the town, as in the Huguenot armies generally, all was serious and severe; prayer-meetings and sermons with psalm-singing were the amusements of the garrison, who, like the Covenanters and Puritans, fought none the worse because they had bent the knee to God before marching to battle. The siege was pressed vigorously, for the cold nights and heavy rains of autumn were approaching, when the royal army would be unable to keep the field. The citizens of Paris, who were anxious to recover a city which interrupted all traffic with the sea, offered the king 200,000 crowns to pay and victual the besieging force.[312] Catherine, attended by her licentious maids of honor—her “flying squadron,” as they were afterward called—visited the army to encourage the troops by her presence. It is said that she went every day to Fort St. Catherine, where the fire was hottest; and when the constable and Guise remonstrated with her, representing that it was not her duty to expose her life, she answered: “Why should I spare myself more than you? Have I less interest in the result, or less courage? True, I have not your strength of body, but I have equal resolution of mind.” The soldiers called her “mater castrorum.”

On the 26th October the breach was stormed. The fatigued and overmatched garrison made but a feeble resistance, and the city was won. Montgomery escaped, but those who remained had to suffer all the extremities of a town abandoned to the passions of an unscrupulous soldiery. The commanders had forbidden all pillage—for the besieged, though rebels, were still the king’s subjects—but the indiscipline of the army was too strong. The Swiss mercenaries obeyed the order, “but the French soldiers would sooner be killed than come away so long as there was any thing to take.” For three days the license endured, when the king, attended by his mother and the parliament, made his triumphal entry through the breach, and put an end to the outrages of the soldiery.[313]

And now the hour of vengeance had come. The Catholics remembered how, one Sunday in May, the Huguenots, in the exultation of their triumph, had sacked and defaced the cathedral and thirty-six parish churches. “They made such work,” says Beza, “that they left neither altar nor image, font nor benitier.”[314] That this was not the act of a lawless mob, or of a sudden excitement, but of calmness and deliberation, is probable from what happened about the same time at Caen, in the same province, where the minister Cousin told the judges “that this idolatry had been put up with too long, and that it must be trampled down.” And here the destroyers, after scattering the ashes of William the Conqueror, breaking organs, pictures, pulpits, and statues, to the estimated value of 100,000 crowns, had the impudence to ask the town council to pay them for their two days’ work—which was done.[315] At Rouen, the anger of the Catholic soldiery was increased by the conduct of the Huguenot clergy, who had refused the honorable terms of surrender which had been offered them, declaring that Heaven would work a miracle, if all human means should fail, to prevent their falling into the hands of the Romanists. That miracle was not worked, and one of the first victims of this tampering with the Divine will was Marlorat, chief pastor of the city. He had been an Augustine monk, and, leaving his convent, escaped to Geneva, where he abjured Romanism. Apostate as he was in the eyes of the Catholics, he was permitted to appear at the conference of Poissy, where he acted as the Protestant leader until Beza arrived. Such an instance of toleration ought not to be overlooked.

When Rouen fell, Marlorat hid himself, but his hiding-place was betrayed, and he was imprisoned. The constable went to visit him in his dungeon, and charged him with seducing the people. “If I have, God seduced me first,” he answered; “for I have preached nothing but his pure word.” He suffered in company with two of his flock, exhorting them to the last. The high bailiff swore a terrible oath, and struck him with his official staff to make him hold his tongue; and, as he was hanging, a soldier hacked his legs. Beza, who records these things, traces the finger of God in the misfortunes that subsequently befell Marlorat’s persecutors: “The captain who betrayed him was killed three weeks after; two of his judges died of strange diseases; the soldier who hacked his legs was killed by a sword; and the high bailiff in his cups quarreled with Marshal Vieilleville, who cut off the hand with which he had struck the martyr.” Many other victims fell besides the pastors, and the prisons were so crammed with pious men and women that Brevedent, the lieutenant of police, thought it his duty to remonstrate: “Why do you crowd the dungeons?” he asked. “Can you doubt what you ought to do? Is the river yet full?”

In the course of the siege, Anthony of Navarre received a bullet wound in his shoulder, of which he died on the 17th November at Andelys.[316] During his feverish wanderings, he talked to his attendants of the orange groves of his expected kingdom of Sardinia, and of the golden sands of its rivers. No wife with loving hand smoothed his dying-pillow. She was far away in the south, training up her children in all godliness; but his mistress, Louise de Rouet, stayed with him to the last. Her character of him is by no means flattering: “The prince (she said) changed his religion and party almost as easily as he changed mistresses.” After he had received extreme unction, his uneasy conscience would not let him rest. “Read me a chapter of the Bible,” he said to his physician; and after the latter had read a portion of Scripture, Anthony interrupted him, and with tears in his eyes exclaimed: “If I do but get well, I will cause the Gospel to be preached throughout France.” But his good resolutions, if sincere, came too late; and, at the age of forty-four, he died regretted by neither party. Garnier mentions a curious peculiarity of this unworthy king without a kingdom: he was so irresistibly given to pilfering that, after he had gone to bed, the pages used to search his pockets in order to restore the property he had stolen.

Condé was much grieved at the Rouen cruelties, particularly with the hanging of Marlorat and others, and ordered three persons to be hanged in retaliation.[317] The army, also, was so exasperated, that they massacred all the priests they found in Pluviers; and when the Catholics contended that the king might hang his rebellious subjects, they replied that “his name shrouded other men’s malice, wherefore, according to the proverb, they would make such bread such brewisse.” The prince’s jest is well known: “Our enemies have given us two shrewd checks in taking our rooks (meaning Rouen and Bourges), but I hope that now we may catch their knights, if they take the field.” But he was caught himself.

The fall of Rouen not only did not restore peace, but the province of Normandy became more disturbed than ever. Both parties were equally violent, equally unscrupulous. They burned or plundered each other’s houses and farmsteads. The neighborhood of Rouen became a wide waste, and the people were reduced to beggary.[318] The government took advantage of their success to make a display of generosity which, had it been sincere, might have terminated the war. A royal edict promised a full and complete amnesty to all who had taken up arms, on condition that they ceased to attend Protestant sermons, and conformed outwardly to Catholicism. The numerous exceptions to this act of grace included the heads of the party, persons notoriously seditious, and such as had profaned the churches. A few gentlemen accepted these terms, but the vast majority saw that the edict was a mere trick to separate the army from its leaders.

Battles and sieges now followed in quick succession, and in all parts of France at once. Condé, who had been reinforced by 4000 lansquenets and 300 reiters, brought from Germany by Andelot, after threatening Paris had moved into Normandy, in order to meet the auxiliaries, about 3000 in number, promised by Queen Elizabeth. He was followed by the Duke of Guise, who came up with him on the banks of the Eure, a long narrow plain separating the two armies. The force under Condé amounted to 5000 foot and 8000 horse, while that under Guise consisted of 16,000 foot and 3000 horse.[319] The latter fortified “against all chances” the petty town of Dreux, at the foot of a hill on whose top there stood a castle even then of some antiquity. A small stream ran through the plain, which was covered with wood, with here and there a hamlet of a few houses. Early in that dark winter’s morning (19th December) Condé prepared for battle. The prince went through the ranks exhorting his followers to do their duty as became Christians and loyal subjects, for they were fighting not against the king, but against his evil advisers; and reminded them of their parents and friends burned and massacred. After singing a psalm, wherein the God of Israel summons his people to avenge his cause, the troops knelt down in prayer, and as soon as the chaplain had ended, the whole army thundered out Amen! For two hours the armies remained face to face within cannon-shot. “Every man stood fast,” says La Noue, “imagining in himself that they that came against him were no Spaniards, Englishmen, or Italians, but Frenchmen, and those of the bravest; among whom were their companions, friends, and kinsfolks, and also that within one hour they were to slay each other. This bred some horror, nevertheless, without quailing in courage, they thus stayed until the armies moved to join.” About one o’clock, Condé gave the signal to advance: before sunset it was all over. Heading the attack in person, he cut through the enemy’s line, captured some of his cannon, and took the constable prisoner. But, like Rupert at Edgehill, he followed up the pursuit so eagerly and so far, that he left his infantry exposed.[320] The Duke of Guise saw the opportunity, and sweeping down upon them with the cry of “They are ours! they are ours!” drove the German footmen off the field.[321] The native Huguenot infantry, now uncovered, resisted stoutly, but suffered in proportion. Meanwhile Condé, who was making his way back to the point of danger, fell to the ground in a small hedge-row, and before he could extricate himself from his horse, which had been knocked down by a bullet, a troop of Damville’s[322] brigade came up and took him prisoner. Coligny, who had been trying to make up for the prince’s rashness, saw that all was over, and made preparations to save the relics of the defeated army. Gathering round him the few troops that remained unbroken, he flung himself between the fugitives and the pursuing foe, to whom he presented such a resolute face that Guise dared not attack him. There is a story to the effect, that when the duke’s friends advised him to pursue the Huguenots, he said, “Peace, peace; I have to fight with a worse beast than all the Huguenots put together.” He meant Catherine de Medicis. Several fierce charges were made upon the Huguenot rear-guard, in one of which St. André was captured, and afterward murdered in cold blood.[323] Although a drawn battle[324] the number of killed and wounded, according to a statement by Ambrose Paré, was enormous: “I saw the earth covered for a good league all round,” he says; “they were reckoned at 2500 men at the outside. All that had been polished off in less than two hours.”[325] Until 1789 a solemn procession took place every year at Dreux to commemorate this triumph of the Catholic cause.

When the news of this battle reached Paris, the citizens gave way to transports of delight. The houses were illuminated; Te Deums were sung in the churches; salvos of artillery were fired from the Bastille. The Duke of Guise was made lieutenant-general and decorated with the Order of the Holy Ghost. Catherine shared the common joy, and when the good tidings reached Trent, where the council was sitting, they clapped their hands in exultation. The Catholics had, indeed, every reason to exult, for if victory had declared in favor of the Huguenots, the fortunes of France might have changed with its religion. “Well, then, we still have to say our prayers in French,” said Catherine, when the first reports of the battle assigned the victory to Condé.

Both armies now retired to winter-quarters: Coligny leading the remnant of the Huguenot forces to Orleans, and Guise returning to Paris with an escort of 2400 Spanish arquebusiers. Now that St. André was killed and Montmorency a prisoner, the duke found himself the most powerful man in the kingdom. Reorganizing his troops and being strongly reinforced, he marched out early next year to lay siege to Orleans, for winter brought little cessation to the strife. Coligny, who was in great want of money, had moved into Normandy, to re-open his communications with England, having left his brother Andelot in command of the city. The latter, though suffering severely from a quartan ague, took the most active measures of defense; but Guise was no mean soldier, and had had large experience in sieges. He captured one of the suburbs by assault; his lines drawing closer every day effectually cut off all succor; the admiral was too weak to attempt to raise the siege, and the duke had fixed the final attack for the 19th February. Writing to the queen-regent, he expressed a hope that she would not be displeased if he destroyed every thing within the walls, “even to the dogs and rats,” and sowed the foundations of the city with salt. It is probable that there would have been a terrible massacre; but just as all hope seemed lost, the hand of an assassin brought deliverance (18th February, 1563). On his death-bed Duke Francis attempted to justify himself for the atrocities at Vassy, protesting that he had neither premeditated nor ordered them. But death-bed confessions are rarely authentic enough to be relied on: they are too often colored by the report of interested witnesses.[326] On this point Maimbourg and Varillas are at variance—the latter affirming that the duke prayed God to pardon all his faults, “except that of Vassy.” He is also reported to have sent a message to the queen-regent, advising her to make peace without delay, adding that “the man who would prevent it is an enemy to the king and state.” The near approach of death had probably brought that wisdom and calm judgment in which he was so deficient, for only a month earlier Throckmorton wrote of him: “The duke will in no wise accord to peace till the Protestants be utterly exterminated.”[327] When Catherine heard the news of his murder, she spoke her mind pretty plainly about him: “The man is dead I hated most of all the world.” And when Condé characterized his death as the removal of a burden, she continued: “If the kingdom has been relieved of one burden, ten have been taken off my bosom.”

The murderer was Jean Poltrot de Méré, a gentleman of Angoumois and a convert to the Reformed faith, whose temper had been soured by misfortune. Imagining the Duke of Guise to be the great obstacle to the victory of the Huguenot cause, he determined upon his assassination, and after watching him for several days, succeeded in shooting his victim as he was passing, slenderly escorted, through a wood.[328] Poltrot fled, and would probably have escaped; but not knowing the country, he rode round and round until he returned nearly to the spot where he had fired at the duke. He was soon captured and taken to Paris, where, after being tortured to force him to reveal the names of his accomplices, he was sentenced to a cruel death. He was dragged to the place of execution on a hurdle, surrounded by a strong guard to prevent his being torn in pieces by the populace. His right hand was cut off, his flesh torn by pincers, and melted lead poured into the wounds. His limbs were then tied to four horses, who, pulling in opposite directions, endeavored to tear him asunder; but they pulled in vain, until the hangman severed the muscles with a sword. Finally his head was cut off and his body burned to ashes.

While stretched upon the rack in the torture-chamber, Poltrot acknowledged that he had been bribed by Coligny to kill the duke. It is true he had been much in the Huguenot camp, and the admiral had given him money to purchase a horse—circumstances that tended to corroborate his confession; but his hasty execution, without confronting him with the admiral, or giving the latter an opportunity of vindicating himself, was highly suspicious. Some persons have supposed that the queen-regent had a share in the murder, on the ground that she once said (or is reported to have said) to Tavannes: “The Guises wished to make themselves kings, but I took good care of them before Orleans.” Both suspicions are equally baseless, but the Guise family persisted in charging Coligny with the murder; and it must be acknowledged that the admiral’s conduct and language were not altogether satisfactory. In his remarks on Poltrot’s interrogatory he says, that when some one declared he would kill the duke in the midst of his soldiers, he had not discouraged him (ne l’avait point détourné), adding that he remembered well his last meeting with Poltrot, who went so far as to say that it would be easy to kill M. de Guise, and that he (Coligny) had made no reply to it, “considering it to be mere idle talk.” In a letter to the queen-mother, which accompanied these remarks, he says: “During the last few months, I have no longer contested the matter against those who displayed such intentions, because I had information that certain persons had been practiced upon to kill me.... Do not imagine, however, that what I say proceeds from any regret which the duke’s death occasions me. No, far from that, I esteem it the greatest blessing that could possibly have befallen this kingdom, the Church of God, and more especially myself and all my house.”[329] This leaves no doubt that Coligny assented, if he did not consent to the crime. He was not unwilling to profit by it, though he would do nothing to further it. This may diminish the lofty moral pedestal on which some writers have placed the Protestant hero; but he was a man, and had all a man’s failings, though he may have controlled them by his religious principles. Nor was assassination considered at all cowardly or disgraceful in those days; not more so than killing a man in a duel was until very recently among us.

The news of the duke’s murder was received with a cry of horror among the Catholic party. Pius IV. ordered a magnificent funeral ceremony to be performed in St. Peter’s, and Julius Poggianus, in his sermon on the occasion, comparing Francis to Judas Maccabæus, called him the preserver of France. In a funeral service at Notre Dame in Paris, the vicar-general of Rouen extolled the duke, but would not pray for him, “car fait injure au martyr qui prie pour le martyr.” He treated Guise as a sort of demi-god, and declared that nothing restrained him from reckoning the murdered man among the saints but his respect for the pope, who had not yet canonized him.[330] On the other hand, these honors only served to call forth a torrent of vituperation from his enemies. The murder was openly defended, Poltrot was compared to Judith, and ballads were sung in his praise.[331] He was called