The Protestants were headed by the King of Navarre, father of Henry IV., the Prince of Condé, his brother, and Admiral Coligny; and they had the sympathy of the university, the parliaments, and the Protestants of Germany and England.
Between these parties a struggle lasted for forty years, with various success. Persecution provoked resistance, but resistance did not lead to liberty. Civil War in France. Civil war in France did not secure the object sought. Still the Protestants had hope, and, as they could always assemble a large army, they maintained their ground. Their conduct was not marked by the religious earnestness which characterized the Puritans, or by the same strength of religious principle. Moreover, political motives were mingled with religious. The contest was a struggle for the ascendency of rival chiefs, as well as for the establishment of reformed doctrines. The Bourbons hated the Guises, and the Guises resolved to destroy the Bourbons. In the course of their rivalry and warfare, the Duke of Guise was assassinated, and the King of Navarre, as well as the Prince of Condé, were killed.
Charles IX. was fourteen years of age when the young king of Navarre—at that time sixteen years of age—and his cousin, the Prince of Condé, became the acknowledged heads of the Protestant party. Their education was learned in the camp and the field of battle.
Charles IX., under the influence of his hateful mother, finding that civil war only destroyed the resources of the country, without weakening the Protestants, made peace, but formed a plan for their extermination by treachery. In order to cover his designs he gave his sister, Margaret de Valois, in marriage to the King of Navarre, first prince of the blood, then nineteen years of age. Admiral Coligny was invited to Paris, and treated with distinguished courtesy.
It was during the festivities which succeeded the marriage of the King of Navarre that Coligny was murdered, and the signal for the horrid slaughter of Massacre of St. Bartholomew. St. Bartholomew was given. At midnight, August 23, 1572, the great bell at the Hotel de Ville began to toll; torches were placed in the windows, chains were drawn across the streets, and armed bodies collected around the hotels. The doors of the houses were broken open, and neither age, condition, nor sex was spared, of such as were not distinguished by a white cross in the hat. The massacre at Paris was followed by one equally brutal in the provinces. Seventy thousand people were slain in cold blood. The King of Navarre and the Prince of Condé only escaped in consequence of their relationship with the king, and by renouncing the Protestant religion.
Most of the European courts expressed their detestation of this foulest crime in the history of religious bigotry; but the pope went in grand procession to his cathedral, and ordered a Te Deum to be sung in commemoration of an event which steeped his cause in infamy to the end of time.
The Protestants, though nearly exterminated, again rallied, and the King of Navarre and his cousin the Prince of Condé escaped, renounced the religion which had been forced on them by fear of death, and prosecuted a bloody civil war, with the firm resolution of never abandoning it until religious liberty was guarantied.
Meanwhile, Charles IX. died, as it was supposed, by poison. His last hours were wretched, and his remorse for the massacre of St. Bartholomew filled his soul with agony. He beheld spectres, and dreamed horrid dreams; his imagination constantly saw heaps of livid bodies, and his ears were assailed with imaginary groans. He became melancholy and ferocious, while his kingdom became the prey of factions and insurrections. But he was a timid and irresolute king, and was but the tool of his infamous mother, the grand patroness of assassins, against whom, on his death bed, he cautioned the king of Navarre.
He was succeeded by his brother, the King of Poland, under the title of Henry III.—Henry IV. Henry III. The persecutions of the Huguenots were renewed, and the old scenes of treachery, assassination, and war were acted over again. The cause of religion was lost sight of in the labyrinth of contentions, jealousies, and plots. Intrigues and factions were endless. Nearly all the leaders, on both sides, perished by the sword or the dagger. The Prince of Condé, the Duke of Guise, and his brother, the Cardinal of Lorraine, were assassinated. Shortly after, died the chief mover of all the troubles, Catharine de Medicis, a woman of talents and persuasive eloquence, but of most unprincipled ambition, perfidious, cruel, and dissolute. She encouraged the licentiousness of the court, and even the worst vices of her sons, that she might make them subservient to her designs. All her passions were subordinate to her calculations of policy, and every womanly virtue was suppressed by the desire of wielding a government which she usurped.
Henry III. soon followed her to the grave, being, in turn, assassinated by a religious fanatic. His death (1589) secured the throne to the king of Navarre, who took the title of Henry IV.
Henry IV., the first of the Bourbon line, was descended from Robert, the sixth son of St. Louis, who had married the daughter and heiress of John of Burgundy and Agnes of Bourbon. He was thirty-six years of age when he became king, and had passed through great experiences and many sorrows. Thus far he had contended for Protestant opinions, and was the acknowledged leader of the Protestant party in France. But a life of contention and bloodshed, and the new career opened to him as king of France, cooled his religious ardor, and he did not hesitate to accept the condition which the French nobles imposed, before they would take the oaths of allegiance. This was, that he should abjure Protestantism. "My kingdom," said he, "is well worth a mass." It will be ever laid to his reproach, by the Protestants, that he renounced his religion for worldly elevation. Nor is it easy to exculpate him on the highest principles of moral integrity. But there were many palliations for his conduct, which it is not now easy to appreciate. It is well known that the illustrious Sully, his prime minister, and, through life, a zealous Protestant, approved of his course. It was certainly clear that, without becoming a Catholic, he never could peaceably enjoy his crown, and France would be rent, for another generation, by those civil wars which none lamented more than Henry himself. Besides, four fifths of the population were Catholics, and the Protestants could not reasonably expect to gain the ascendency. All they could expect was religious toleration, and this Henry was willing to grant. It should also be considered that the king, though he professed the reform doctrines, was never what may be called a religious man, being devoted to pleasure, and to schemes of ambition. It is true he understood and consulted the interests of his kingdom, and strove to make his subjects happy. Herein consists his excellence. As a magnanimous, liberal-minded, and enterprising man, he surpassed all the French kings. But it is ridiculous to call him a religious man, or even strongly fixed in his religious opinions. "Do you," said the king to a great Protestant divine, "believe that a man may be saved by the Catholic religion?" "Undoubtedly," replied the clergyman, "if his life and heart be holy." "Then," said the king, "prudence dictates that I embrace the Catholic religion, and not yours; for, in that case, according to both Catholics and Protestants, I may be saved; but, if I embrace your religion, I shall not be saved, according to the Catholics."
But the king's conversion to Catholicism did not immediately result in the tranquillity of the distracted country. The Catholics would not believe in his sincerity, and many battles had to be fought before he was in peaceable enjoyment of his throne. But there is nothing so hateful as civil war, especially to the inhabitants of great cities; and Paris, at last, and the chief places in the kingdom, acknowledged his sway. The king of Spain, the great Catholic prelates, and the pope, finally perceived how hopeless was the struggle against a man of great military experience, with a devoted army and an enthusiastic capital on his side.
The peace of Verviens, in 1598, left the king without foreign or domestic enemies. From that period to his death, his life was devoted to the welfare of his country.
His first act was the celebrated Edict of Nantes. Edict of Nantes, by which the Huguenots had quiet and undisturbed residence, the free exercise of their religion, and public worship, except in the court, the army, and within five leagues of Paris. They were eligible to all offices, civil and military; and all public prosecutions, on account of religion, were dropped. This edict also promulgated a general amnesty for political offences, and restored property and titles, as before the war; but the Protestants were prohibited from printing controversial books, and were compelled