The Evolution of an Empire: A Brief Historical Sketch of France Part 3

And Charles, sitting upon the throne she had rescued for him, what was he doing to save her? Nothing--to his everlasting shame be it said, nothing. He might not have succeeded; the effort at rescue, or to stay the event, might have been unavailing. But where was his knighthood, where his manhood, that he did not try, or utter pa.s.sionate protest against her fate?

Twenty-five years later we see him erecting statues to her memory, and "rehabilitating" her desecrated name. And to-day, the Church which condemned her for blasphemy is placing her upon the calendar of saints, while all political parties alike are using her name as a thing to conjure with.

CHAPTER VII.

The early part of the sixteenth century must ever be memorable in the history of Europe. Ferdinand and Isabella had given to the human race a new world. Luther had hurled his defiance at Rome--had arraigned Leo X. for blasphemy and corrupt practices. Henry V., grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella (and nephew of Katharine, wife of Henry VIII.) was Emperor of Germany. Astute and powerful though he was, he had been unable to stay the Protestant flood. His empire, apparently hungering for the new heresy, was divided already into States Protestant and States Catholic. England was Protestant. The conversion of her King, because the Pope refused to annul his marriage with Katharine, was not one of the proudest triumphs of the new faith, but one of the most important. Had Katharine's charms been fresher, or Anne Boleyn's less alluring, the course of history might have been strangely changed.

Henry VIII. as persecutor of heretics would have found congenial occupation for his ferocious instincts, and Protestantism would have been long delayed. Spain was unchangeably Catholic, while France offered congenial soil for the new faith. The germs of heresy, long slumbering, were everywhere stirred into life.

Francis I. was King; sumptuous in tastes, suave and elegant in manners, as handsome as an Apollo, gay, pleasure-loving, as vicious as he was false, and if need be with a cruelty which matched his ambition, such was the man who held the destinies of France at this time.

A rival claimant for the throne of Germany, he was destined to spend his life in fruitless contest with the more able, wily, and astute Henry V., the possession of that Empire the ignis-fatuus ever luring him on; an end to which all other ends were simply the means. The religious question upon which Europe was divided meant nothing to him, except as he could use it in his duel with the Emperor. He was in turn the ally of Henry VIII. or the willing tool of Henry V. If he needed the English King's friends.h.i.+p, the Protestants had protection. If he desired to placate Henry V., the roastings and torturings commenced again.

In 1547 Francis and Henry VIII. each went to his reward, and a few years later Henry V. had laid down his crown and carried his weary, unsatisfied heart to St. Yuste. The brilliant pageant was over; but Protestantism was expanding.

The question at issue was deeper than any one knew. Neither Luther nor Leo X. understood the revolution they had precipitated. Protestants and Papists alike failed to comprehend the true nature of the struggle, which was not for supremacy of Romanist or Protestant; not whether this dogma or that was true, and should prevail; but an a.s.sertion of the right of every human soul to choose its own faith and form of wors.h.i.+p.

The great battle for human liberty had commenced; the struggle for religious liberty was but the prelude to what was to follow. There was abundant proof later that Protestants no less than Papists needed only opportunity and power to be as cruel and intolerant as their persecutors had been. Before the Reformation was fifty years old, Servetus, one of the greatest men of his age, a scholar, philosopher, and man of irreproachable character, was burned at Geneva for heretical views concerning the nature of the Trinity, Calvin, the great organizer of Protestant theology, giving, if not the order for this crime, at least the nod of approval.

Huguenot, that name of tragic a.s.sociation, was a corruption of the German _Eidgenossen_--meaning a.s.sociates. By the way of Switzerland it came into France as _Eguenots_, and the transition to its present form was simple. The Huguenots were no longer a timorous band hiding in darkness as in the time of Francis I. A party with such leaders as Anthony de Bourbon, Prince of Conde (his brother), and Admiral Coligny, was not to be put down by a few roastings and stranglings here and there. Anthony de Bourbon (King of Navarre) was next in succession should the House of Valois become extinct, with a young son valiant as himself (the future Henry IV.) pressing on toward manhood.

Catholic France needed plenty of comfort from Rome and Madrid in dealing with this formidable body of heretics which had fastened upon her vitals, and which was in turn receiving aid and comfort from the young Protestant Queen across the Channel.

When that fair princess Catharine de Medici became the wife of Henry, second son of Francis I., no one suspected the tremendous import of the event. Powerless to win the affection or even confidence of her husband, she remained during his reign almost un.o.bserved, but, as the event proved, not un.o.bservant. Her alert faculties were not idle, and when upon the death of Henry II. she found herself Queen-Regent, with only a frail boy of sixteen to obstruct her will, she quickly gathered the threads she already knew so well, and her supple hand closed upon them with a grasp not to be relinquished while she lived.

Another young Princess had been tossed across the Channel. This time it was her most serene little highness, Marie Stuart, Queen of Scotland, intended for the dauphin, who was to be Francis II.

In order to be prepared for this high destiny, the little maid was brought when only six years old to the Court of France to be trained under the direct supervision of her future mother-in-law, Catharine de Medici. Poor little Marie Stuart--predestined to sin and to tragedy!

Who could be good, with the blood of the Guises in her veins, and with Catharine de Medici as preceptress?

This marriage was planned before Catharine's advent to power, or it would never have been. Marie was the niece of the Duke of Guise, and the central thought of Catharine's policy was the exclusion of this ambitious, intriguing family from every avenue to power in the state.

Now, Marie would be Queen, and who so natural advisers as her uncles of the house of "Lorraine"?

The marriage of the two children had taken place--the sickly boy with only a modest portion of intelligence was Francis II. Marie, his Queen, whom he adored, controlled him utterly, and was in turn controlled by her uncles, the Guises. The wily Catharine saw herself defeated by a beautiful girl of sixteen.

The family of Guise was the self-appointed head of the Catholic party in France and represented the most extreme views regarding the treatment of heretics. So the strange result was, that Catharine, if she looked for any allies in her fight with the house of Lorraine, of which the Duke of Guise was the head, must make common cause with the Protestants, whom she hated a little less than she did the uncles of Marie Stuart. But events were soon to change the situation. Did she hasten them? Such a suspicion may never have existed. But may one not suspect anything of a woman capable of a St. Bartholomew?

Francis II. was dead. Marie Stuart had pa.s.sed out of French history.

The fates were fighting on the side of Catharine, who wasted no regrets upon the death of a son, which made her Queen-Regent during the minority of her second son Charles. She entered upon her fight with the Guises with renewed energy, and became to some extent protector of the Protestants. Realizing that her time was brief, she prepared Charles for the position he would soon hold.

What can be said of a mother who seeks to exterminate every germ of truth or virtue in her son--who immerses him in degrading vices in order to deaden his too sensitive conscience and make him a willing tool for her purposes? Inheriting the splendid intelligence as well as genius for statecraft of the de Medici, nourished from her infancy upon Machiavellian principles, cold and cruel by nature, this Florentine woman has written her name in blood across the pages of French history.

CHAPTER VIII.

There is not time to tell the story of the events leading up to that fateful night, August 24, 1572. Impelled always by her fear and dread of the Guises, Catharine had been vacillating in her policy with the Huguenots. Charles IX. was now King: impressible, easily influenced, yet stubborn, intractable, incoherent, pa.s.sionate, and unreliable; sometimes inclining to the Guises, sometimes to Coligny and the Huguenots, and always submitting at last after vain struggle to his imperious mother's will, in her efforts to free him from both. We see in him a weak character, not naturally bad, torn to distraction by the cruel forces about him, who when compelled to yield, as he always did in the end, to that terrible woman, would give way to fits of impotent rage against the fate which allowed him no peace.

A time arrived when Catharine feared the influence of the Protestant Coligny more than the Guises. Brave, patriotic, magnetic, he had succeeded in winning Charles' consent to declare war against Spain.

Philip II. of Spain was Catharine's son-in-law and closest ally. Her entire policy would be undermined. At all hazards Coligny must be gotten rid of. The young King of Navarre, adored leader of the Protestants, was a constant menace; he too must in some way be disposed of.

There were sinister conferences with Philip of Spain and with his Minister, that incarnation of cruelty and of the Inquisition, the Duke of Alva.

G.o.d knows France was not guiltless in what followed; but the initiative, the inception of the horrid deed, was not French. It was conceived in the brain of either this Italian woman or her Spanish adviser and co-conspirator, the Duke of Alva. We will never know the inside history of the ma.s.sacre of St. Bartholomew. It must ever remain a matter of conjecture just how and when it was planned, but the probabilities point strongly one way.

Charles was to be gradually prepared for it by his mother, the plot revealed to him as he was in condition to bear it; by working upon his fears, his suspicions, by stories of plottings against his life and his kingdom, to infuriate him, and then--before his rage was exhausted--to act. The marriage of Charles' sister Margaret with the young Protestant leader Henry of Navarre, with its promise of future protection to the Huguenots, was part of the plot. It would lure all the leaders of the cause to Paris. Coligny, Conde, all the heads of the party were urgently invited to attend the marriage-feast which was to inaugurate an era of peace.

Admiral Coligny was requested by Catharine, simply as a measure of protection to the Protestants, to have an additional regiment of guards in Paris, to act in case of any unforeseen violence.

Two days after the marriage and while the festivities were at their height, an attempt upon the life of the old Admiral awoke suspicion and alarm. But Catharine and her son went immediately in person to see the wounded old man, and to express their grief and horror at the event.

They commanded that a careful list of the names and abode of every Protestant in Paris be made, in order, as they said, "to take them under their own immediate protection." "My dear father," said the King, "the hurt is yours, the grief is mine."

At that moment, the knives were already sharpened, every man instructed in his part in the hideous drama, and the signal for its commencement determined upon. Charles did not know it, but his mother did. She went to her son's room that night, artfully and eloquently pictured the danger he was in, confessed to him that she had authorized the attempt upon Coligny, but that it was done because of the Admiral's plottings against him, which she had discovered. But the Guises--her enemies and his--they knew it, and would denounce her and the King! The only thing now is to finish the work. He must die.

Charles was in frightful agitation and stubbornly refused. Finally with an air of offended dignity she bowed coldly and said to her son, "Sir, will you permit me to withdraw with my daughter, from your kingdom?" The wretched Charles was conquered. In a sort of insane fury he exclaimed, "Well, let them kill him, and all the rest of the Huguenots too. See that not one remains to reproach me."

This was more than she had hoped. All was easy now. So eager was she to give the order before a change of mood, that she flew herself to give the signal, fully two hours earlier than was expected. At midnight the tocsin rang out upon the night, and the horror began.

Lulled to a feeling of security by artfully contrived circ.u.mstances, husbands, wives, sons, daughters, peacefully sleeping, were awakened to see each other hideously slaughtered.

The stars have looked down upon some terrible scenes in Paris, her stones are not unacquainted with the taste of human blood, but never had there been anything like this. The carnage of battle is merciful compared with it. Shrieking women and children, half-clothed, fleeing from knives already dripping with human blood; frantic mothers s.h.i.+elding the bodies of their children, and wives pleading for the lives of husbands; the living hiding beneath the bodies of the dead.

The cry that ascended to Heaven from Paris that night was the most awful and despairing in the world's history. It was centuries of cruelty crowded into a few hours.

The number slain can never be accurately stated; but it was thousands.

Human blood is intoxicating. An orgie set in which laughed at orders to cease. Seven days it continued and then died out for lack of material. The provinces had caught the contagion, and orders to slay were received and obeyed in all except two, the Governor of Bayonne, to his honor be it told, writing to the King in reply: "Your Majesty has many faithful subjects in Bayonne, but not one executioner."

And where was "His Majesty" while this work was being done? How was it with Catharine? She was possibly seeing to the embalming of Coligny's head, which we learn she sent as a present to the Pope. We hear of no regrets, no misgivings, that she was calm, collected, suave and unfathomable as ever, but that Charles in a strange, half-frenzied state was amusing himself by firing from the windows of the palace at the fleeing Huguenots. Had he killed himself in remorse, would it not have been better, instead of lingering two wretched years, a prey to mental tortures and an inscrutable malady, before he died?

Europe was shocked. Christendom averted her face in horror. But at Madrid and Rome there was satisfaction.

Catharine and the Duke of Alva had done their work skilfully, but the result surprised and disappointed them. Tens of thousands of Huguenots were slain, which was well; but many times that number remained, with spirit unbroken, which was not well.

They had been too merciful! Why had Henry of Navarre been spared? Had not Alva said, "Take the big fish and let the small fry go. One salmon is worth more than a thousand frogs."

But Charles considered the matter settled when he uttered those swelling words to Henry of Navarre the day after the ma.s.sacre: "I mean in future to have one religion in my kingdom. It is ma.s.s or death."

Catharine's third son now wore the crown of France. In Henry III. she had as pliant an instrument for her will as in the two brothers preceding him; and, like them, his reign was spent in alternating conflict with the Protestants and the Duke de Guise. At last, wearied and exasperated, this half-Italian and altogether conscienceless King quite naturally thought of the stiletto. The old Duke, as he entered the King's apartment by invitation, was stricken down by a.s.sa.s.sins hidden for that purpose.

Henry had not counted on the rebound from that blow. Catholic France was excited to such popular fury against him that he threw himself into the arms of the Protestants, imploring their aid in keeping his crown and his kingdom; and when himself a.s.sa.s.sinated, a year later, in the absence of a son he named Henry, King of Navarre, his successor. A Protestant and a Huguenot was King of France.