Meanwhile the day fixed for the general massacre drew near. Between two and three o'clock in the morning of the 24th of August-the feast of St. Bartholomew-as the king sat in his chamber with his mother and the duke of Anjou, the great bell of St. Germain rang to early prayers. This was the preconcerted signal. Scarcely had its first peal disturbed the silent hour of midnight, when the firing commenced. Charles was greatly agitated: a cold sweat stood upon his forehead; he started, and sent word to the duke of Guise to precipitate nothing. It was too late. The queen-mother, distrusting the constancy of her son, had commanded that the hour for a signal should be anticipated. In a few moments every steeple in Paris was sending forth its peals, and with the clamor of a hundred bells, there mingled the shoutings, cursings, and howlings of the assassins; and the shrieks, groans, and cries for mercy of the surprised Huguenots. To distinguish the assailants in the dark, they wore a white sash on their left arm, and a white cross on their hats. At the sound of the tocsin armed men rushed out from every door, shouting, "For God and the king." The streets of Paris flowed with human blood, and the savage ferocity of the Catholics knew no bounds.
The duke of Guise, accompanied by three hundred soldiers, hastened to the dwelling of Coligny. He had been awakened by the noise of firing, and, dreading the worst, was engaged in prayer with his minister Merlin. His servants came rushing into his room, exclaiming, "Sire! the house is broken into, and there is no means of escape!" "I have been long prepared to die," answered the admiral calmly, "as for you, save yourselves if you can; you cannot save my life." Behem, a servant of the duke of Guise, was the first to enter the room. "Are you not the admiral?" he demanded. "Yes, I am," replied Coligny, looking with great composure on the naked sword of the assassin; and began to say a few serious words to the young man, who instantly plunged his sword into the veteran's breast, and gave him a second blow on the head. Guise who was waiting impatiently in the courtyard, called aloud, "Behem, hast thou done it?" "It is done, my lord," was the reply. "But we must see it to believe it: throw him out at the window." In lifting up the body of the admiral, who was still breathing, he clutched the window-frame, but was instantly flung into the courtyard. The duke of Guise, wiping off the blood from his face, said; "I know him, it is he;" and kicking the dead body with his foot, he hastened into the streets, exclaiming, "Courage, comrades; we have begun well-now for the rest." Sixteen years afterward, in the castle of Blois, this same Henry of Guise was assassinated by order of Henry III., who, when the dead body lay before him, kicked it in the face. Oh! the sovereign retributive justice of God!
In that awful night, Teligny, son-in-law of the admiral, and five hundred of the Protestant nobility and gentry, were sacrificed to the Moloch of bigotry, and that in the sacred name of religion. "Thick grass is more easily mown than thin," was the proverb acted upon, and the leading Protestants were lodged in the same quarter of Paris. This field was kept as the special preserve for the grim, cruel duke of Guise. The retinue of the young king of Navarre were lodged in the Louvre, as the special guests of the monarch, but with the Satanic intention of having them all conveniently murdered. They had come in the train of their royal chief to be present at the celebration of his marriage with the sister of the king. One by one they were called by name from their rooms, marched down unarmed into the quadrangle, where they were hewn down before the very eyes of their royal host, and piled in heaps at the gates of the Louvre. A more perfidious cold-blooded butchery is not to be found in the annals of mankind.
Over all Paris the work of massacre by this time extended. Ruffians by thousands-armed with the poignard, the pike, the knife, the sword, the arquebuse, every weapon of the soldier and the brigand-rushed through the streets murdering all they met who had not the white cross on their hats. They forced their way into the houses of the Protestants, slaughtered the inmates in their night-clothes, men, women, and children, and threw their mangled bodies into the streets. No pitiful wail for mercy was heard; the ebscurest haunts were searched, and nobody was spared. By-and-by the sun rose upon Paris. The wretched Charles, who had shuddered for some moments at the commencement of the massacre, had tasted the blood of the saints, and became as ravenous for slaughter as the lowest of the mob. He and his blood-stained Italian mother, at the break of day went out on the palace balcony to feast their eyes on the slaughtered heaps. Rivers of blood flowed in the streets; corpses of men, women, and children blocked up the doorways; on all sides the groans and death-cries of the dying were heard, and the blasphemies and imprecations of the maddened populace.
Some, however, who had managed to escape were seen struggling in the river, in their efforts to swim across; and Charles seizing an arquebuse, fired on his subjects, shouting, "Kill! Kill!" "Two hundred and twenty-seven years afterward," says Felice, "Mirabeau picked the arquebuse of Charles IX out of the dust of ages to turn it against the throne of Louis XVI." Satan may rule for a time, but God overrules! On the same Sunday morning, Charles sent for Henry of Havarre, his new brother-in-law, and Henry of Conde; and, in the most furious tone said to them: "The Mass, death, or the Bastile." After some resistance, the princes consented to attend mass, but no one believed in their sincerity. On the fourth day, when the fury of the assassins had become satiated, and the Huguenots were for the most part slain; there fell a dead silence on the streets of Paris. The priests now followed the tragic scene with a play. On the Thursday, ankle-deep in blood, the clergy celebrated an extraordinary jubilee, and made a general procession to keep up the excitement. The pulpits also re-echoed with thanksgiving, and a medal was struck with this legend, "Piety has awakened justice."
Massacre In The Provinces
But the thirst of Jezebel for blood was far from being satisfied. Orders were sent from the court to all the provinces and principal cities to pursue the same course. About a dozen of the provincial governors refused, and one priest whose name deserves to be mentioned with thankfulness to the Lord. When the king's lieutenant called on John Hennuyer, bishop of Lisieux, and gave him the order for the massacre of the Huguenots, he answered, "No, no, sir; I oppose, and will always oppose the execution of such an order. I am the pastor of Lisieux, and these people whom you command me to slaughter are my flock. Although they have at present strayed, having quitted the pasture which Jesus Christ, the sovereign Shepherd, has confided to my care, they may still come back. I do not see in the gospel that the shepherd can permit the blood of his sheep to be shed; on the contrary, I find there, that he is bound to give his blood and his life for them." The lieutenant asked him for his refusal in writing, which the bishop readily gave him.
At Rouen, Toulouse, Orleans, Lyons, and in nearly all the great towns of the kingdom, the work of blood was renewed with undiminished fury; the carnage went on without pity and without remorse for about six weeks. Thousands of dead bodies were thrown into the rivers, which were either washed on shore at different bends of the rivers, or borne to the sea. The faithful of Meaux-our early friends-were slaughtered in the prisons; and, the sword being too slow, iron hammers were employed. Four hundred houses in the most handsome quarter of the town were pillaged and devastated. But we grow weary, weary of this recital; and were it not that the St. Bartholomew massacre is the greatest and darkest crime of the christian era-and gives us, as nothing else does, a true picture of the essential principles of popery-we should willingly have ended our notice of the Reformation in France before coming to it. If ever the depths and wiles of Satan were seen in human wickedness, it is here. The premeditation, the solemn oaths of the king-which drew the Calvinists to Paris-the royal marriage, and the dagger put into the hands of the mob by the chiefs of the state, at a time of universal peace, represent a plot which has no parallel in history. And then, from the pope downwards, the Catholic community lifting up their hands to heaven, and thanking God for the glorious triumph!
At Rome the news was received with transports of joy. The bearer of the glad tidings was rewarded with a present of a thousand pieces of gold. The pope caused the guns of the castle of St. Angelo to be fired, declared a jubilee, and struck a medal in honor of the event. Philip II. of Spain, the duke of Alva, and the cardinal of Lorraine, shared in these transports of joy. But the impression produced by the massacre in Protestant countries was altogether different. In England, Germany, and Switzerland, numbers of exiles arrived, horror-struck and half-dead, to tell the sad tale; and the petrified nations cursed the name of France. Geneva, tenderly related to the seventy thousand victims whose bodies covered the plains of France, or lay stranded on the banks of its rivers, instituted a day of fasting and prayer, which is still observed. In Scotland, the aged Knox, in prophetic strains, pronounced the divine vengeance against the house of Valois in the following terms: "The sentence is gone forth against this murderer, the king of France, and the vengeance of God will not be withdrawn from his house. His name shall be held in execration by posterity; and no one who shall spring from his loins shall possess the kingdom in peace, unless repentance come to prevent the judgment of God." In England, Elizabeth put her court into mourning, and when the French ambassador sought an audience to offer his hypocritical explanation, he was received with profound silence. The lords and ladies of the court, in long mourning apparel, suffered the ambassador to pass between them without saluting him, or deigning to give him so much as a look.