The Evolution of an Empire: A Brief Historical Sketch of France by Mary Platt Parmele

Author:Mary Platt Parmele [Parmele, Mary Platt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, General, World
ISBN: 9781596058507
Google: BkDd5UiE_Q0C
Publisher: Cosimo, Inc.
Published: 2006-05-15T00:51:36+00:00

CHAPTER VIII.

Table of Contents

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, passionate, 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.

God 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 massacre 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, Condé, 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.

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