honour to the marriage of their chief, the young King of Navarre,
with the sister of CHARLES THE NINTH: a miserable young King who
then occupied the French throne. This dull creature was made to
believe by his mother and other fierce Catholics about him that the
Huguenots meant to take his life; and he was persuaded to give
secret orders that, on the tolling of a great bell, they should be
fallen upon by an overpowering force of armed men, and slaughtered
wherever they could be found. When the appointed hour was close at
hand, the stupid wretch, trembling from head to foot, was taken
into a balcony by his mother to see the atrocious work begun. The
moment the bell tolled, the murderers broke forth. During all that
night and the two next days, they broke into the houses, fired the
houses, shot and stabbed the Protestants, men, women, and children,
and flung their bodies into the streets. They were shot at in the
streets as they passed along, and their blood ran down the gutters.
Upwards of ten thousand Protestants were killed in Paris alone; in
all France four or five times that number. To return thanks to
Heaven for these diabolical murders, the Pope and his train
actually went in public procession at Rome, and as if this were not
shame enough for them, they had a medal struck to commemorate the
event. But, however comfortable the wholesale murders were to
these high authorities, they had not that soothing effect upon the
doll-King. I am happy to state that he never knew a moment’s peace
afterwards; that he was continually crying out that he saw the
Huguenots covered with blood and wounds falling dead before him;
and that he died within a year, shrieking and yelling and raving to
that degree, that if all the Popes who had ever lived had been
rolled into one, they would not have afforded His guilty Majesty
the slightest consolation.
When the terrible news of the massacre arrived in England, it made
a powerful impression indeed upon the people. If they began to run
a little wild against the Catholics at about this time, this
fearful reason for it, coming so soon after the days of bloody
Queen Mary, must be remembered in their excuse. The Court was not
quite so honest as the people – but perhaps it sometimes is not.
It received the French ambassador, with all the lords and ladies
dressed in deep mourning, and keeping a profound silence.
Nevertheless, a proposal of marriage which he had made to Elizabeth
only two days before the eve of Saint Bartholomew, on behalf of the
Duke of Alen‡on, the French King’s brother, a boy of seventeen,
still went on; while on the other hand, in her usual crafty way,
the Queen secretly supplied the Huguenots with money and weapons.
I must say that for a Queen who made all those fine speeches, of
which I have confessed myself to be rather tired, about living and
dying a Maiden Queen, Elizabeth was ‘going’ to be married pretty
often. Besides always having some English favourite or other whom
she by turns encouraged and swore at and knocked about – for the
maiden Queen was very free with her fists – she held this French
Duke off and on through several years. When he at last came over
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to England, the marriage articles were actually drawn up, and it
was settled that the wedding should take place in six weeks. The
Queen was then so bent upon it, that she prosecuted a poor Puritan
named STUBBS, and a poor bookseller named PAGE, for writing and
publishing a pamphlet against it. Their right hands were chopped
off for this crime; and poor Stubbs – more loyal than I should have
been myself under the circumstances – immediately pulled off his
hat with his left hand, and cried, ‘God save the Queen!’ Stubbs
was cruelly treated; for the marriage never took place after all,
though the Queen pledged herself to the Duke with a ring from her
own finger. He went away, no better than he came, when the