Massacre of Saint Bartholomew's Day

“ From the moment of his arrival at Poissy, he preached publicly at the court, before an attentive and select assembly. This was on the 24th of August, 1561. Eleven years later, to the very day, Charles IX. and Catherine de Medicis caused [105] the tocsin of the [massacre of] Saint Bartholomew to knell. The inconstancy of human things! O profound mysteries of the future!
The same evening, meeting the Cardinal de Lorraine in the apartments of the king of Navarre, they held a conversation upon the articles of doctrine, and especially upon the Communion. ”

“ The barrel is richly chased in high relief, with a stag-hunt amid foliage. The stock is inlaid with ivory, sculptured into a series of hunting scenes, knights on horseback.
The dreadful massacre of Saint Bartholomew commenced at Paris on the night of the festival of that saint, August 24th, 1572. Above 500 persons of rank, and 10,000 of inferior condition, perished in Paris alone, besides those slaughtered in the provinces. ”

“ Such was the awful massacre of St. Bartholomew. When contemplated in all its aspects of perfidy, cruelty, and cowardice, it must be pronounced the greatest crime recorded in history. The victims were invited under the guise of friendship to Paris. They were received with solemn oaths of peace and protection. The leading men in the nation placed the dagger in the hands of an ignorant and degraded people. The priests, professed ministers of Jesus Christ, stimulated the benighted multitude by all the appeals of fanaticism to exterminate those whom they denounced as the enemies of God and man. ”

“ With the capital cleared of Huguenots, orders were issued to the principal cities of France to purge themselves in like manner of heretics. In many places the instincts of humanity prevailed over fear of the royal resentment, and the decree was disobeyed. But in other places the orders were carried out, and frightful massacres took place. The entire number of victims throughout the country was probably between 20,000 and 30,000.
The massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day raised a cry of execration in almost every part of the civilized world, among Catholics and Protestants alike. ”

“ It is scarcely less remarkable as being one of those historic crimes which defeat their own purpose by reacting against the perpetrators and advancing the cause of those who suffer outrage.
The tragedy of St. Bartholomew's Day marked the culmination of the great struggle which devastated France in the latter half of the sixteenth century. ”

“ Sure of their power over the king, the orders for the massacre were already given when, near midnight of August 24, St. Bartholomew's day, the queen, with some of her leading councillors, sought the king's room and made a determined assault upon the feeble defences of his intellect.
"The slaughter of many thousands of men may be prevented by a single sword-thrust," they argued. "Only kill the admiral, the head and front of the civil wars, and the strength of his party will die with him. ”

“ The "Popish Plot" (1678) .—A rumor was started that the Catholics had planned for England a St. Bartholomew massacre. The king, the members of Parliament, and all Protestants were to be massacred, the Catholic Church was to be reëstablished, and the king's brother James, the Duke of York, a zealous Catholic, was to be placed on the throne. Each day the reports of the conspiracy grew more exaggerated and wild. Informers sprang up on every hand, each with a more terrifying story than the preceding. ”

“ There are such days in the life of a nation, when it stains its own integrity, commits treason against mankind, and sin against the most high God; when a proud king, or wicked minister,—his rare power consorting with a vulgar aim,—misled the people’s heart, abused the nation's strength, organized iniquity as law, condensing a world of wicked will into a single wicked deed, and wrought some hideous Bartholomew massacre in the face of the sun. The anniversary of such events is a day of horror and of shivering to mankind ”

“ He inherits and maintains the tyrannous and oppressive feudal system, that prevents the common people from acquiring ownership of land. His career has been described, "as an hideous abortion and mistake of nature, the use and meaning of which is not yet known." The persecution of Bible readers, or Protestants, is begun with a general massacre at Paris, on the anniversary of Saint Bartholomew in 1572. Those who escape the bloody horrors of that occasion, are commanded to emigrate from France, on pain of [Pg 420] death. ”

“ Is our treacherous assault upon a weak people distressing a nation which contributed Bartholomew’s Day to human history? Is our ruthless spirit offending the sensibilities of the nation which gave us the Reign of Terror to read about? ”

“ Bartholomew's day, 1572, by orders emanating from the court.
Isolated from the religious wars in which it is but one of the darkest episodes, this affair has been set forward as an independent act—a deliberate scheme of the Catholic party in France—king, nobles, and clergy—to extinguish Protestantism at a single blow. The numbers of the victims have been exaggerated to an extent incompatible with all contemporary statistics of population; and the massacre of St. ”

“ It was an age that in Italy could breed a Cenci, and in France could tolerate the massacre of St. Bartholomew as a legitimate stroke of statecraft. But when we consider whether crime be a fit subject for tragedy, we must distinguish. Merely as crime, it is vulgar, as are the waxen images of murderers with the very rope round their necks with which they were hanged. ”

“ In the year 1554, two men of the reformed religion, with the son and daughter of one of them, were apprehended and committed to the castle of Niverne. On examination, they confessed their faith, and were ordered for execution; being smeared with grease, brimstone, and gunpowder, they cried, "Salt on, salt on this sinful and rotten flesh!" Their tongues were then cut out, and they were afterward committed to the flames, which soon consumed them, by means of the combustible matter with which they were besmeared. [57]
The Bartholomew Massacre at Paris, &c. ”

“ These were the real authors of the Saint Bartholomew massacre, and this is the manner in which they prepared and accomplished it.
The court saw with displeasure that the chiefs of the Reformed, Jeanne d’Albret, Henry of Bourbon, Henry of Condé, Coligny, Larochefoucauld, Lanoue, Briquemant, and Cavagnes, had retired to La Rochelle, or to their provinces. It was necessary to draw them out, in order to get them into their power. Men of the third party were sent to them, who, without raising their distrust, might induce them to approach nearer to Paris. ”

“ True friends of mankind and haters of intolerance have their rheumatism or colic on August 24th, the day of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. Voltaire always timed his boils so and got a rash or the itch on May 14th for good measure. ”

“ If they are in arms against the king, I must be in arms for him; but I hope none the less that, when arms are laid down, there will be a cessation of persecution--at any rate, a cessation of massacre. It is bringing disgrace on us in the eyes of all Europe, and I trust that there may be a league made among us to withstand the Guises; and to insist that there shall be, in France, no repetition of the atrocities by which Philip of Spain, and the Duke of Alva, are trying to stamp out the reformed religion in the Netherlands. ”

“ The King, it is said, is sadly disturbed; women pity him, while men shake their heads in discontent. The French dislike all killing by night. In the stormy days of the Revolution the most terrible deeds were perfectly public and executed by day. As for the horrors of the night of Saint Bartholomew, they were planned and executed by Roman Catholic priests. [15]
How far the concierge of the Louvre was involved in the conspiracy of February 2nd, I have not yet precisely ascertained. Some say that he at once gave the alarm to the police as soon as money was offered to him for the keys. ”

“ We may have crusades without a Holy Land to recover—as we have had a Bartholomew massacre; we have had, and may have again, in civilised Europe, the political massacres which, in reading history in our closets in our own peaceful homes, we had fondly deemed passed away for ever. ”

“ St Bartholomew’s Massacre The dreadful massacre of the Huguenots, begun in Paris on St Bartholomew’s day 1572, excited consternation and horror in Scotland. Believing that all the other Protestants in Europe were to be similarly dealt with, the Privy Council summoned a convention, to be held at Edinburgh on the 20th of October, to consider the impending danger and the means by which it might be averted. ”

“ But Paris knows not Argonne, and terror is in her streets, with defiance and frenzy. From a Sunday night to Thursday are a hundred hours, to be reckoned with the Bartholomew butchery; prisoners dragged out by sudden courts of wild justice to be massacred. These are the September massacres, the victims one thousand and eighty-nine; in the historical fantasy "between two and three thousand"--nay, six, even twelve. They have been put to death because "we go to fight the enemy; but we will not leave robbers behind us to butcher our wives and children." ”

“ To betray and to kill were deeds so common that they caused scarcely any astonishment, and that people were almost resigned to them beforehand. We have cited fifteen or twenty cases of the massacres which in the reign of Charles IX., from 1562 to 1572, grievously troubled and steeped in blood such and such a part of France, without leaving any lasting traces in history. Previously to the massacre called the St. Bartholomew, the massacre of Vassy is almost the only one which received and kept its true name. ”

“ Such might have been supposed by a moralist to be the punishment, inflicted, even upon this earth, on him, who, if he did not instigate, ordained and prosecuted the horrible massacre of St Bartholomew.
The state of the miserable Charles grew hourly worse, and he rapidly approached his last moments. None knew better than his heartless mother, as she had herself admitted, that he must die ”

“ Bartholomew, preceded by a History of the Religious Wars in the Reign of Charles IX,’ London, 8vo, a work of genuine research. White's was the first English treatise to show that the massacre was the result of a sudden resolution, and not of a long-prepared conspiracy. ”

“ The nobles leagued against them, the royal forces were set in motion; the White Hoods were defeated and butchered without compunction, and the society founded for a good purpose came to an end, and its disappearance gave free scope for the great Companies to reorganise and resume their depredations.
When the massacre of S. Bartholomew was determined on in 1572, sealed orders were sent to the Count-Bishop of Le Puy as to all other governors to order a butchery of the Huguenots. Antoine de S. Nectaire was bishop at the time. ”

“ Bartholomew. I am the Inquisition of Spain. I do not say that we have never gone mad, but I say that we are fit to act as keepers to our enemies. Massacre is wicked even with a provocation, as in the Bartholomew. ”