66 rage," said Guise to his blood-hounds, our game is in the toils*: it is the king's order." The devoted huguenots were massacred in their beds, or shot on the roofs of houses † as they endeavoured to escape. The memoirs of the time and succeeding histories have described the savage yells of the murderers, the agonised cries of the victims, the crashing of forced doors, the dull echo of human bodies flung from windows, or fallen from house-tops on the pavement below, as a horrid concert, the like of which was never heard. The morning sun of the 24th of August discovered the streets of Paris and the court and apartments of the Louvre choked with dead bodies, or streaming with blood. Guise, Aumale, and the bastard of Angoulême directed and shared the work of death in one quarter; Anjou, Montpensier, Nevers, and Tavanes in another. Charles discharged his long arquebuse from the Louvre upon the fugitives beyond the Seine; "but in vain," says Brantôme: "it did not carry so far." Massacre and pillage went on with intermittent fury for eight days and nights. Catholics were involved in the slaughter. Private interests and personal animosities borrowed the poniard and the mask of religious fury, and (flebile ludibrium !) the logic of the schools shed blood. Peter Ramus the antistagyrite was massacred by his antagonist Charpentier. The lives of the king of Navarre and the prince of Condé were spared, but at the expense of their consciences. After witnessing the massacre of their attendants, they appeared before Charles, who, with fury in his voice and looks, bade them choose between death and the mass.‡ Henry submitted with trembling humility, Condé in a manlier tone §; and both were handed over for religious instruction to the cardinal of Bourbon. The mutilated trunk of Coligny, after being subjected to indignities the most revolting, was exposed on a gibbet at Montfaucon "Feram habemus irretitam."- Thuan. lib. lii. The word used in some of the memoirs of the time, and adopted by Mezeray, is "canardes," (taken down like wild ducks, by a long shot.) + Sully, Econ. Roy. Dav. Istor. Mezeray, Hist. de France. Salviati, Extracts made by M. de Châteaubriand. to a slow fire; while the head was despatched by the duke of Guise to his uncle the cardinal of Lorraine, at Rome.* Charles IX., startled by the aspect, or shrinking from the odium, of the carnage around him, towards evening on the first day proclaimed that the massacre, originating in the mutual hatred of two irreconcilable factions, was the work of the Guises, and that he was prepared to make common cause with his brother the king of Navarre, and his cousin the prince of Condé, in quelling the tumult, and avenging the death of "his cousin the admiral." + But either the queen-mother and secret council thought it impolitic to declare that the court was unable to control a faction; or the Guises, repudiating the exclusive odium, insisted upon Charles's avowing his counsels and his orders; and he, on the following Tuesday, after hearing mass, claimed for himself, in full parliament, the merit of having given peace to his kingdom, and defeated a conspiracy against his own, his mother's, and his brother's precious lives, by cutting off an incorrigible faction and inveterate traitor. Christopher de Thou, first president, a man, says his illustrious son, of mild character, and wholly averse to blood, accommodating himself to the time, praised the king's prudence, and expatiated on the maxim of Louis XI., qui nescit dissimula renescit regnare.§ The king's most gracious speech was recorded in the archives; the mock conspiracy was made the subject of a mock enquiry; and the business closed with a melancholy spectacle of human infirmity, in a procession of thanksgiving by the high court of parliament, with Charles at its head. It was ordered that the ceremony should be annually re *Despatch of Mandelôt, governor of Lyons, to Charles IX., who had ordered the head to be stopped in transitu (MSS. Bib. du Roi.). But one of Guise's esquires had already passed with it before the order reached Lyons. + Mém. de l'Estat. Thuan. Hist. lib. lii. There is, in the State Paper Office, a despatch of Dale, the successor of Walsingham as English ambassador at Paris, in which it is stated, that twelve months after the massacre the cardinal of Lorraine publicly ap plauded Charles to his face for his "holy dissimulation," (saincte dissimuÎation.) peated, and medals were struck in æternam rei memoriam. But, though fanaticisın may flatter itself with being eternal, and though, in truth, it seems to have grown up as a new passion in human nature, with the succession of revealed truth to the mythology of the pagans, reason soon obtained the ascendancy, the procession was not repeated, " excidat ille dies" became its epitaph, and the medals remain in the cabinets of the curious, to remind men of what they may be made by wicked rulers and their own passions. Similar massacres followed at Meaux, Troyes, Orléans, Toulouse, Bourdeaux, Lyons, and other towns throughout France. Some local governors generously declined compliance with the orders of the court. * To estimate in detail the conflicting evidence for and against the conclusion of pre-existing malice and design which pervades the foregoing sketch, would be to retard the narrative, swell the text to an inadmissible compass, and go over the ground trodden in a controversy of recent date.† There is, however, a new and unpublished testimony against premeditation discovered, relied on, and privately communicated by one who is himself a high authority in every sense, which for these reasons demands particular notice and respect. "When the library of the Vatican," says Châteaubriand ‡, "was at Paris (an inva luable treasure, which almost nobody thought of), I caused researches to be made in it, and discovered documents the most precious respecting St. Bartholomew's day. If truth be to be met any where, it is assuredly in letters written in cipher to the sovereign pontiff, and condemned to eternal secrecy. It results positively from these letters, that the St. Bartholomew was not premeditated; that it was but the sudden consequence of the admiral's being wounded; and that the number of victims (always too great, no doubt,) was below the accounts of some his * See Appendix (E.) و + Sec note, p. 212. If the force of evidence and argument, brought to bear upon the question by Mr. Allen, has not settled it, the reason may be, that it is one of those questions which are incapable of being settled. + Mél. Litt. torians." The documents described as thus precious and conclusive are the despatches of the papal nuncio Salviati, written between the 5th of July and the 27th of November, 1572, from Paris to his court. It is necessary to give an idea of the state of the question, before this new witness is introduced.* One of the first objections to the supposition of design is the attack on the single life of the admiral, which, by alarming the huguenots, would, it is urged, defeat the purpose of a general massacre. The objection is met by two contemporary and classic historians, De Thou and Davila, the one charged with a leaning to the huguenots, the other openly favourable to Catherine of Medicis, his benefactress, and the court. The plan, they state, of the secret council was, that Coligny should be assassinated, under such circumstances as to throw suspicion on the Guises; and that the huguenots, who, it was calculated, would be sure to rise in arms to avenge the death of their chief on its supposed authors, should be overpowered and massacred. This conception, far from being improbable, accords with the finesse, and the inhumanity of Catherine of Medicis; and, what is still more important, if not absolutely decisive, it accords with the first version put forward by Charles on the first day of the massacre. On the other side, it is alleged that the admiral only was to be taken off; that the attempt upon his life was made without the knowledge of Charles; and that its failure led to the general massacre. The testimony of three persons, Margaret, Tavanes, and Anjou, the two last participators, the first an eye-witness, -is adduced in support of this account. It may be dismissed very briefly. The memoirs of Margaret of Valois, queen of Navarre, are entertaining as a sort of historical romance, * M. de Châteaubriand communicated his copies and extracts from the despatches of Salviati to the late sir James Mackintosh; and, upon the death of sir James, had the kindness to transfer them to Dr. LARDNER. There is some hardihood in differing with the judgment formed of them by M. de Châteaubriand, but they left unshaken the previous conviction of sir James Mackintosh; and the impression made by them upon a Frenchman distinguished for his generous character, would naturally be affected by a regard for the honour of his religion, his country, and humanity itself. in which that gay princess vindicates her life, and gauzes over her gallantries, with an arch simplicity and a negligent grace of style, which make the informed reader smile at her want of truth. As an historical authority they scarcely deserve mention. She, indeed, avows her ignorance of the massacre * until a wounded man, pursued by the king's archers, rushed into her bed-chamber, clasped her in his arms, covered her with his blood, implored her to save him, and was rescued at her request by the captain of these assassins. The memoirs of marshal Tavanes are next relied on. They deny premeditation; and the testimony of a man who figured in the war, the pacification, the marriage, and the massacre, might be important, though still not conclusive. But the testimony is not his. The memoirs were composed by his son, many years after his death, without a particle of information, verbal or written, derived from him. So reserved was Tavanes on the subject of the part played by him in the St. Bartholomew, as it is called, that he declined touching upon it when he made his confession as a catholic on his death-bed. The conduct and sentiments which, in different situations, these memoirs assign to him, clash so violently with other and accredited accounts, that they are repudiated expressly by his biographer, a writer of acknowledged integrity and research. § Tavanes was an ambitious, daring adventurer, who, to make his fortune at court, stopped at nothing, however desperate in hazard or atrocity. He began his career by offering Catherine of Medicis his services, to cut off the nose of Diana of Poitiers, her husband's mistress; and his last signal act was to halloo on the assassins of St. Bartholomew with the cry of "Bleed, bleed! the doctors say bleeding does good in August as in May." || The evidence of the Pour moy l'on ne me disait rien de tout ceci. Les huguenots me tenoient suspecte parceque j'estais catholique, et les catholiques parceque j'avais espousé le roy de Navarre qui estait huguenot."-Mém. de Marg. de Val. Pref. Mém. de Tav. Mém. de Tav. Abbé Perau, Vies des Hom. Ill.; Vie de Tav. 3 |