HAP. VI.] PART PLAYED BY THE GUISES. 217 he interests of his country to his own life, and he declared, that he would rather that his corpse should be dragged through the treets of Paris, than that the civil war should be renewed." 85 If njou and Tavannes were acquainted with Charles's hypocrisy, it as not for them to tell it. We have already touched on this oint; but, in fact, Charles himself, as we have said, seems to ave been occasionally carried away with the Admiral's magnifient plans, though in the long run, the treacherous part of his chaacter prevailed. That the King should have visited the wounded dmiral does not prove him innocent, or the same fact would also rove Catherine and Anjou innocent, who accompanied him; and ho, by Dr. Lingard's showing, were the authors of Coligni's ssassination; nor was there any danger from the Hugonots, who elieved the assassin to have been hired not by the Court, but by he Guises. Catherine's jealousy of the Admiral has doubtless een exaggerated in order to make out a plausible story; and here gain it might be justified by the circumstance that Charles ocasionally wavered in his plans. The last two allegations, that it was absurd to attack the Admiral first, and to defer the attack so ong, lead to a view of the subject not hitherto developed, and which we shall here briefly state. A grand clue to the dénouement of the plot is afforded by the art played in it by the Guises, who were to be the instrumentsve might rather say the tools of the Court; for, after they had been used, they were to be thrown aside and denounced, and the First of the King's falsehoods in endeavouring to evade the responibility of the massacre was to lay it to them. Guise and his rother d'Aumale came to Paris towards the end of May or beginning of June, when the marriage of Henry and Margaret was about to take place, and experienced a most flattering reception. They were no doubt as ready then to assassinate the Admiral as they were two months later; but this did not suit the views of the Court. It was premature. The death of Henry's mother, Jeanne d'Albret, on the 10th of June, caused his marriage to be postponed for several weeks, and the Court had good reasons for connecting the assassination with the marriage: all the Hugonots of note would of course come to Paris on the occasion, and would be thrown off their guard by the accomplishment of an event which 85 Thuanus, lib. lii. ap. Martin, t. ix. p. 304. Martin adds: "Coligni ne fermait donc pas entièrement les yeux sur le danger; mais les caresses du roi lui avaient inspiré une affection et une confiance qui percent le cœur. Il semblait au vieux soldat que l'heureux naturel de Charles IX surmountait peu à peu les vices reçus du dehors, que le sang de France parlait plus haut que les leçons des Birague et des Gondi!" 218 THE MASSACRE HOW TIMED. [BOOK III. seemed to afford indisputable proof of the King's sincerity, as well as by the fêtes which followed the auspicious union. Two months more of irksome dissimulation for the Court, of vengeance deferred for the Lorraine princes! Meanwhile Charles kept up their spirits, and entertained them, says the Spanish ambassador, writing to his Court on the 14th of June," with some equivocal conversations which put them in good hopes." 86 At length, one by one, the weary days of expectation disappear; the marriage is celebrated on the 18th of August, and next morning Maurevert, posted with his arquebuse in a house belonging to the Guises, is lying in wait for the Admiral! Is any further proof needed that the time of the assassination was determined by the time of the marriage? We may now answer the question why the attempt on Coligni was so long deferred? It was because all the Hugonots should be assembled together; because they might probably be irritated by the murder to some act of violence, and thus afford a pretext for their massacre; and because there would be an opportunity of transferring the blame of it from the Court to the Guises. A further proof of the connection between the marriage and the massacre is afforded by Charles IX. insisting that the marriage should be celebrated at Paris.87 Jeanne d'Albret was very anxious that it should be performed in Béarn; and if the object of the union had been merely to cement a friendship between the Court and the Hugonots, it mattered not where the ceremony took place. But in Béarn the massacre could not have been perpetrated.8 The news of the St. Bartholomew resounded throughout Europe like a clap of thunder, but the sensations it awakened were widely different. In all Protestant countries there was a silence 86 "Le roi et les princes faisaient beaucoup plus d'accueil au Duc de Guise qu'à l'Amiral, et le roi tenait aux Lorrains des propos équivoques qui leur donnaient bonne espérance."-Dépêche de l'ambassadeur d'Espagne du 14 Juin. Papiers de Simancas, B. xxxiv. p. 30, ap. Martin, Hist. de France, t. ix. p. 296. 87 Mém de l'Estat de France, t. i. fol. 152, ap. Martin, t. ix. p. 294. 88 The consentient opinion of all historians, that the St. Bartholomew was a premeditated crime, was first questioned by the Abbé de Caveyrac, in 1758, in a Dissertation appended to a Defence which he published of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The Abbe's theory, however, seems to have met with little attention till it was revived by Dr. Lingard in a note at the end of the fifth volume of his Hist. of England. A cri tique on Dr. Lingard's statements, published by Dr. Allen in the Edinburgh Review, No. lxxxvii., produced a Vindication from the historian, and a Reply from the reviewer. These pieces, with the account of the St. Bartholomew in Sir J. Mackintosh's Hist. of England, vol. iii., and the notes appended to it, pretty nearly exhaust the subject, with the exception of such fresh light as may have been thrown upon it from the dr chives of Simancas and other new sources, from which a few notices have been adduced in the preceding examination. All the circumstances antecedent to the massacre have been carefully collected by Professor Soldan of Giessen, in a work which has been translated into French by M. Schmidt, under the title of La France et la St. Barthélemi. CHAP. VI.] HOW RECEIVED IN EUROPE. 219 of horror and indignation, while in those of the Catholic faith, the event was hailed with exultation and gladness. Pope Gregory XIII., urged on by Cardinal Alessandrino and the Cardinal of Lorraine, who wrote from Rome a letter full of joy and thanks, celebrated the massacre as one of the most signal triumphs ever gained by the Church. The guns were fired from the castle of St. Angelo, bonfires were lighted in all the streets of Rome, a solemn procession was made to the church of St. Louis, and a medal was ordered to be struck with the head of Gregory, and having on the reverse the exterminating angel slaying the Hugonots, with the legend Hugonotorum Strages. Gregory also caused a picture of the massacre to be painted in fresco in the Hall of Kings in the Vatican. The celebrated Muretus afterwards addressed to Gregory a bombastic panegyric on that execrable day, in which he adverts to the Pontiff having gone on foot to return thanks to God and St. Louis.89 The King of Spain was still more delighted than the Pope. When St. Goard, the French envoy at Madrid waited on him with the news of the massacre, Philip laughed for the first time in his life, sarcastically remarking that Charles well deserved his title of "Most Christian," and that there was no King to compare with him for valour or prudence.90 Not only was the bigotry of Philip gratified; he also saw that Charles had committed in his favour a great political blunder. On the other hand, a fast was ordered at Geneva, which was afterwards annually observed on the 24th of August. The virtuous Emperor Maximilian II. shed tears over the crime of his son-in-law, and lamented it in a touching letter to Lazarus Schwendi.91 Fénélon, the French ambassador at London, as he passed through the ranks of courtiers and ladies, all clothed in deep mourning, to communicate the dreadful event to Queen Elizabeth, was received with a dead silence, more cutting than the bitterest reproaches; and the Queen herself conveyed to him with all that dignity which she so well knew how to assume her sentiments of abhorrence for his master's deed. Political considerations, however, obliged her to moderate her indignation and resentment; being fearful that the Reformation was entirely suppressed in France, and that Charles IX. might now be induced to 220 EFFECT IN THE NETHERLANDS. [BOOK III. unite his arms with those of the Spanish King. The effect of so unexpected a blow was above all terrible in the Netherlands, where an exactly contrary policy had been expected from the French Court. The weapons fell from the hands of the Flemish patriots; the army of the Prince of Orange was dissolved, and the news was soon followed by the surrender of Mons. But in order to lay these things before the reader it will be necessary to take a review of the insurrectionary movement which had some years. been going on in the Netherlands. CHAP. VII.] STATE OF THE SEVENTEEN PROVINCES. 221 CHAPTER VII. THE revolt of the Netherlands and the establishment of the Dutch Republic, the first-fruits of that spirit of civil and religious liberty which the Reformation had engendered, form an episode of exceeding interest. Fortitude the most enduring, courage the most heroic, struggling for rational freedom against the narrowest and most obstinate bigotry enforced by bloody and ferocious tyrants, and at length emerging victorious from the strife such are the materials from which history draws her brightest and most cheering as well as her most instructive pages. Before entering on the narrative of these momentous events, let us briefly recapitulate the situation of the Netherlands. The seventeen provinces comprehended under that name 1, although, as we have said, they had been annexed by Charles V. to the German empire, never formed any very integral portion of the German body politic; from which they were still further disunited by the passing of the imperial sceptre to a younger branch of the House of Austria. Of these provinces, the four which adjoined the French border, and in which a French dialect was spoken, were called Walloon; in the other provinces a dialect, more or less resembling German, prevailed, that of the midland ones being Flemish, that of the northern, Dutch. They differed still more in their laws and customs than in language. Each province was an independent state, having its own constitution, which secured more liberty to those who lived under it, than was then commonly enjoyed in most other parts of Europe. Brabant, in particular, possessed singular political rights, so that it was not uncommon for women to come from other provinces to lie in there, in order to secure these privileges to their offspring 2; and, on the accession of a new sovereign, at what was called his Blyde Inkomst, or Joyeuse Entrée, when 1 They consisted of 4 duchies: Brabant, Limburg, Luxemburg, and Guelderland;-7 counties: Artois, Hainault,' Flanders, Namur, Zutphen, Holland, and Zealand; -5 Seigniories or lordships: Friesland, Mechlin, Utrecht, Overyssel. Strada, De Bello Belg. lib. ii. p. 35 (ed. 1640). |