The Girls' Book of Famous Queens

Around this brave queen of Navarre the Protestants rallied their forces anew. Her son, Prince Henry, pledged himself to consecrate all his energies to the defence of the Reformation. Jeanne d’Albret presented a gold medal to each of the chiefs of the army, with her own name, together with that of her son, upon one side, while on the other were inscribed the words, “Certain peace, complete victory, or honorable death.” The heroic queen became almost an object of adoration in the enthusiastic hearts of her soldiers.

Catherine de’ Medici, noting the effect of the presence of the queen of Navarre upon the Protestant troops, also visited her army; and though she lavished presents and harangued the soldiers, none admired and all secretly despised her, even though they courted her through fear.

Again the opposing forces met upon the field of battle. The Protestants were defeated with awful carnage. Coligni, who led the soldiers of the Reformation, was severely wounded, and carried off the field as dying, having received a bullet wound in the jaw. The Catholics were jubilant, but much to their surprise, in a few weeks Coligni, whom they supposed to be dead, headed another force against them. The brave queen of Navarre had rallied a third army, and this time the tide turned in favor of the reformers. Prince Henry of Navarre himself took part in this battle, which was so greatly to the advantage of the Protestants that Catherine offered them peace, which was gladly accepted. This perfidious peace on Catherine’s side “was but the first act in the awful tragedy of St. Bartholomew.”

And now Catherine de’ Medici entered upon the second act of this bloody drama. Death and a marriage were to be her weapons in this scene. With flattering caresses she lavished attentions upon the young prince of Navarre, inviting him to her court, where she and her son Charles, whom by this time she had so corrupted in mind and morals that he was a submissive dupe in her Mephistophelian plans, concocted their criminal schemes to entrap him. About this time Charles was married to Elizabeth, daughter of the Emperor Maximilian II. of Austria; and Catherine improved the opportunity of the nuptial festivities to lure Prince Henry and Jeanne d’Albret into her power. Having secured this marriage for Charles, Catherine now declared that Henry must be her son, and offered him the hand of her daughter Marguerite. This princess was beautiful, but was as devoid of principle as her unrighteous mother.

Jeanne d’Albret was much opposed to this match, but state considerations prevailed at last to gain her consent. It was urged upon her that this marriage would protect the Protestants from persecution, and save France from further bloodshed. Thus did the malevolent but cunning Catherine lure Jeanne to her doom, and entangle Henry in the strong net of her evil designs, which should so long imprison him.

Even the Admiral Coligni was deceived by the friendly protestations of Catherine de’ Medici, and her son, Charles IX., who by this time had become almost evil enough in nature to suit the satanic desires of his atrocious mother.

Though Catherine and Charles IX. were plotting the entire destruction of the Protestants, using this marriage but as a cloak to cover their sinister plans, Charles IX. with consummate perjury declared: —

“I give my sister in marriage, not only to the prince of Navarre, but, as it were, to the whole Protestant party. This will be the strongest and closest bond for the maintenance of peace between my subjects, and a sure evidence of my good-will towards the Protestants.”

At this very time he and his mother had planned to lure the leaders of the Protestants to Paris as their guests for the celebration of the wedding festivities; when at the dire signal they were to be butchered in cold blood. After receiving the queen of Navarre with every manifestation of love, when the French king quite overacted his part, calling Jeanne d’Albret, “his great aunt, his all, his best beloved,” the following dialogue is said to have occurred between Catherine and Charles, after the queen of Navarre had retired.

“Well, mother,” said Charles laughing, “what do you think of it? Do I play my little part well?”

“Yes,” replied Catherine, “well; but it is of no use unless it continues.”

“Allow me to go on,” said this debased king, “and you will see that I shall ensnare them.”

And ensnare them they did truly. Hardly had the queen of Navarre entered the sumptuous apartments provided for her in the court of Catherine, ere she was seized with a violent fever which continued nine days, when she died.

Henry, her son, had not yet arrived in Paris, but was travelling there more slowly with his retinue. Catherine exhibited the most ostentatious demonstrations of grief. Charles IX. uttered the loudest lamentations, and displayed the most poignant sorrow. Notwithstanding these efforts to allay suspicions, the report spread through France and Europe that the queen of Navarre had been perfidiously poisoned by Catherine de’ Medici. The Protestant writers assert that Jeanne d’Albret fell a victim to poison, communicated by a pair of perfumed gloves. The Catholics as firmly declare that she died from natural causes. The truth cannot be ascertained.

But after events make the supposition very strong that Jeanne d’Albret was the first victim in the massacre of St. Bartholomew. Her death necessarily delayed the marriage for a short time, but at length the nuptial day arrived. The Admiral Coligni was with other prominent Protestants lured to Paris. When friends urged him to remain at home and not trust the protestations of the perfidious queen, Coligni, who was much attached to Henry, now the king of Navarre, replied: —

“I confide in the sacred word of his majesty.”

But poor Henry was as great a dupe as any, and he was completely deceived by the cunning wiles of this diabolical mother and son.

Protestants and Catholics of the highest rank, from all parts of Europe, gathered in Paris to celebrate this marriage, which was looked upon as a great stroke of policy for the furtherance of peace between the conflicting parties. But the haughty spirit of the Princess Margaret had well-nigh defeated the nefarious schemes of her unprincipled mother and brother. Piqued that Henry of Navarre should show so little admiration for his betrothed, whom he married only for state reasons, she vowed vengeance, and took a peculiar time to display her unconquerable pride. In the midst of the imposing nuptial ceremony, when the officiating bishop asked her if she willingly received Henry of Bourbon for her husband, she pouted coquettishly, threw back her proud head in defiance, and remained silent. Again the question was repeated; but not all the powers of Europe could break her will. Her brother, Charles IX., knowing well his sister’s obstinacy, relieved this embarrassing situation by coolly walking up behind the haughty beauty, and placing his hand upon the back of her head, compelled an involuntary nod. The confused bishop quickly took the hint, and smilingly proceeded with the ceremony. And thus this fatal marriage was completed.

The Pope, not aware of the treachery which had been planned, was aghast at such friendly relations between the Catholics and the hated Protestants, and he sent a legate to remonstrate with the French king. As the moment had not arrived to reveal the hellish plot, Charles replied: “I do wish that I could tell you all; but you and the Pope shall soon know how beneficial this marriage shall prove to the interests of religion. Take my word for it, in a little time the holy father shall have to praise my designs, my piety, and my zeal in behalf of the faith.”

Thus did Catherine de’ Medici and Charles dare to mask their infernal schemes under the sacred name of religion. But the end was not yet. Admiral Coligni was the next victim. As he was passing through the streets of Paris, a musket was discharged from the window of a house, and two balls struck Coligni, one entering his left arm and the other cutting off a finger of his right hand. The assassin escaped. The wounded admiral was conveyed to his apartments, and Henry of Navarre and his Protestant friends gathered around the suffering Coligni. Again Catherine and Charles declared their utter abhorrence of the deed, and were even blasphemous in their noisy protestations of sorrow.

Meanwhile this guilty pair thus consulted together. Some circumstances seem to indicate that Charles was not a party to the attempt on the life of the admiral; but Catherine is said to have thus moved him to enter into her brutal plots: —

“Notwithstanding all your protestations, the deed will certainly be laid to your charge. Civil war will be again enkindled. The chiefs of the Protestants are now all in Paris. You had better gain the victory at once here than incur the hazard of a new campaign.”

“Well, then,” replied Charles, petulantly, “since you approve the murder of the admiral, I am content. But let all the Huguenots also fall, that there may not be one left to reproach me.”

While the young king of Navarre was by the bedside of his wounded friend, the Admiral Coligni, recounting to him the assurances of faith and honor given by Catherine and Charles IX., these two were in secret council, debating whether this Henry, the newly-made husband of the daughter of one and the sister of the other, should be included in the dreadful doom appointed for the Protestants. It was at length decided that his life should be spared, but that he should be kept in a kind of imprisonment, and that he should be forced to abjure his Protestant faith.

The young Duke of Guise was to take the lead of this terrible carnage. As he believed that Coligni was a party to the murder of his father, some years before, he determined that he should be the first victim of this awful night. He had issued secret orders for all the Catholics “to wear a white cross on the hat, and to bind a piece of white cloth around the arm,” that they might be thus distinguished in the darkness of the night. The alarm-bell in the tower of the Palace of Justice was to toll the dire signal for the indiscriminate massacre of the Protestants. The conspiracy extended throughout the provinces of France. Men, women, and children were to be cut down without mercy.

“The storm was to burst at the same moment upon the unsuspecting victims in every city and village of the kingdom. Beacon-fires, with their lurid midnight glare, were to flash the tidings from mountain to mountain. The peal of alarm was to ring along from steeple to steeple, from city to hamlet, from valley to hillside, till the whole Catholic population should be aroused to obliterate every vestige of Protestantism from the land.”

While Catherine and Charles were arranging every detail of this monstrous crime, they lavished the warmest and most flattering attention upon the Protestant generals and nobles, whom they had lured within their insidious power. The very day before that dreadful night Charles entertained many of the most illustrious of the doomed guests at a sumptuous feast in the Louvre, and detained them in the palace all night by the most courteous and pressing invitations to accept his hospitality.

Henry of Navarre had his suspicions aroused; but though he was well aware of the utter depravity of Catherine and Charles, he knew not where the blow would fall. The young bride of Henry had not been informed of this vile plot, and when about to retire to her apartments in the palace, her sister Claude, who knew of the coming danger, tried to detain her lest she might suffer harm. Catherine sternly rebuked her daughter, and bade her be silent. But Claude still held Margaret by the arm, and said to Catherine, “It is a shame to send her to be sacrificed, for if anything is discovered, they (meaning the Catholics) will be sure to avenge themselves upon her.” But the fiend-like Catherine, preferring that her own child should risk danger and perhaps death, rather than that her hellish work should be thwarted, replied: —

“No harm will befall the queen of Navarre, and it is my pleasure that she retire to her own apartments, lest her absence should create suspicion.” Henry, Prince of Joinville, who now held the title of the Duke of Guise, was to be the chief leader of this infernal massacre.

He had ordered the tocsin, the signal for the massacre, to be tolled at two o’clock in the morning. Meanwhile Catherine and Charles watched in one of the apartments of the Louvre for the fatal knell. Charles was wildly excited. And at last, his mother fearing that his determination to carry out this night’s hellish work was wavering, she urged him to send a servant at once to sound the alarm. Charles hesitated, and a cold sweat covered his forehead. For with all his depravity he had still remaining a slight spark of humanity; but the fiend incarnate, his shameful mother, tauntingly exclaimed: “Are you a coward?” Whereupon the tortured king cried, “Well, then begin.”

And so upon the early morning air of a calm Sabbath, Aug. 24, 1572, the direful tocsin pealed forth its death-doom; and at this signal armed men rushed forth into the streets shouting, “Vive Dieu et le roi!”

The awful carnage which followed is known in history as the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, because it occurred upon the anniversary of a festival in honor of St. Bartholomew, which had long been celebrated.

As the solemn dirge from the steeple rang out upon the air, the king stood at the window of the palace trembling in every limb, but the demoniacal Catherine was aroused to a frenzy of delight. The first victim was the wounded Coligni. The Duke of Guise with three hundred soldiers hastened to the lodgings of the admiral, and the gates were forced and the assassins entered the sick man’s chamber. Helpless, and abandoned by his frightened servants, he was brutally butchered, and his bleeding body was thrown out of the window at the command of the Duke of Guise, who desired to look upon his dead enemy. Giving the mangled corpse a kick in the face, the duke exclaimed: “Courage, comrades, we have happily begun. Let us now go for others. The king commands it.”

Sixteen years from that time the Duke of Guise was himself assassinated, and received a kick in the face from Henry III., the brother of Charles IX., in whose service he was performing these diabolical deeds.

The streets everywhere resounded with the cries of “Kill! kill!”

At the commencement of the carnage, the queen of Navarre was awakened by a cry at her door: “Navarre! Navarre!” Supposing it was her husband, she ordered her attendants to open the door, whereupon a bleeding Huguenot rushed to her bedside and clasped the queen’s arm, begging for his life. He was followed by Catholic soldiers; but at the entreaty of the princess his life was spared. Words are weak to describe the horrors of that direful night. Gory bodies were suspended from the windows; the dead were piled in heaps in the streets; the pavements were slippery with the streaming blood; human heads were kicked as footballs along the boulevards, by the bestial fiends who had become frenzied with the sight of blood. And in the midst of this awful scene of terror, priests paraded in their sacerdotal robes, bearing aloft the crucifixes, and shouting their blasphemous hymns of rejoicing, and inciting the demoniacal murderers to fresh deeds of hellish hate. Catholic nobles and generals rode through the streets with gorgeous retinues, and called upon the people to wreak their vengeance upon the helpless Protestants. For a whole week the massacre continued, and it is estimated that one hundred thousand Protestants perished throughout the kingdom.

When the morning was well advanced, Catherine, Charles, and a profligate band of lords and ladies walked through the reeking streets, and gazed with calmness and satisfaction upon the heaps of dead piled up before the Louvre; and they even indulged in ribald jest and merriment.

The Catholic pulpits resounded with exultant harangues after this hellish work was ended, and in honor of the event a medallion was struck off, with the inscription, “La Piété a reveillé la Justice.”

From every part of Protestant Europe arose a cry of horror. Queen Elizabeth shrouded her court in mourning, and refused to give audience to the French ambassador, who exclaimed in mortification and chagrin, “I am ashamed to acknowledge myself a Frenchman.”

But Philip of Spain, the “Demon of the South,” wrote to the infamous Catherine de’ Medici: —

“These tidings are the greatest and the most glorious I could have received.”

Amid all the fiend-like deeds of men on earth, the awful Massacre of St. Bartholomew stands without a parallel.

The massacre of the priests of France during the dreadful tragedy of the Revolution was human retaliation. In the mysterious providence of God, the “iniquities of the fathers are visited upon the children.” “The 24th of August, 1572, and the 2d of September, 1792, though far apart in the records of time, are consecutive days in the government of God.”

Upon the morning of St. Bartholomew’s day a band of armed men entered the apartments of the king of Navarre, and conveyed him to the presence of the king of France. Frenzied with the scenes of blood he had already witnessed, Charles with curses and blasphemous imprecations commanded the king of Navarre, as he valued his life, to abjure the Protestant faith. Charles gave him three days to consider the question, and declared that at the end of that time if he did not obey he should be strangled. Henry yielded, and this blot upon his name was only removed when, in 1598, as Henry IV. of France, he issued his famous Edict of Nantes, which granted the Protestants full liberty of conscience.

Two years after the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, Charles IX. lay upon his death-bed. Not one hour of peace had he known since that fatal event. His nights had been filled with spectres of blood and murder, his troubled sleep had been haunted with visions of horror. His old nurse, though a Huguenot, had been saved by the king’s order, and she now watched with him in these last moments. One night, hearing the king moaning, weeping, and sighing, she went gently up to his bed and drew aside the curtains. “Ah, nurse, nurse,” cried the king, “what bloodshed and what murders! Ah, what evil counsel have I followed! O, my God! forgive me them, and have mercy upon me! What shall I do? I am lost; I see it well!” And with this hopeless wail of remorse, Charles IX. expired.

But no emotions of regret or sorrow moved the stony heart of Catherine de’ Medici. Having debased this son to her foul designs, she now spurned him in contempt for his exhibitions of remorse. When her third and favorite son, Henry, departed for Poland, of which kingdom he had been elected king, she said to him: “Go, you will not be long away.” For even before Charles was dead she was looking forward with satisfaction to that probable event, as a means of giving the throne of France to her favorite child. But when, in 1574, Henry ascended the French throne as Henry III., Catherine’s power was already weakened, and she found that her son would not be a pliant tool in her wicked hands. Not that he was aught but worthless and vicious, but their evil plans no longer harmonized. Their government for fifteen years served only to make them lose their reputation for ability. The tact of this utterly corrupted woman, and the weakness of this irresolute prince, were feeble instruments in taming the Catholics and Protestants who were now both rising in rebellion around them.

The Catholics formed a League under the brave but infamous Duke of Guise.

There were now three Henrys. Henry III., king of France, Henry, king of Navarre, and Henry, duke of Guise. The war which followed between those parties is called the War of the Three Henrys.

We cannot give details, but during these contests, which became religious wars, Henry of Guise was assassinated and the corpse was kicked in the face by Henry III., who afterwards repaired to the sick-bed of Catherine de’ Medici, and exclaimed: —

“I have made myself this morning king of France by putting to death the king of Paris,” which was the title given to the Duke of Guise.

“Take care,” replied his heartless mother, “that you do not soon find yourself king of nothing!”

And king of nothing he soon was, though Catherine de’ Medici did not live to see his downfall. In twelve days after she had thus heard, without the slightest emotion, of the assassination of the duke who had been her most zealous worker in the infamous Massacre of St. Bartholomew, this iniquitous queen, – the personification of every vice, who had lured all around her to destruction, who had been always accompanied by bands of the most profligate but beautiful women, known as her infamous Flying Squadron, who by their fascinating wiles should secure the victims her own cunning could not reach; this woman, – without a single redeeming virtue, despised by the Catholics, and hated by the Protestants, and execrated by the world, – this fiendish spirit was at length the prey of the grim conqueror, Death.

Seven months after the death of Catherine de’ Medici, Henry III. was assassinated by a monk, and Henry of Navarre was proclaimed king of France as Henry IV. Thus had all Catherine de’ Medici’s vile scheming come to naught. She and her sons died with the curses of the nation on their heads, while the son of the illustrious and faithful Huguenot, Jeanne d’Albret, sat upon the throne of France.