The St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre

Marguerite de Valois, the Catholic sister of King Charles IX of France, was married at Notre-Dame in Paris to the Protestant king of Navarre, the later Henry IV of France, who had come to the city with eight hundred gentlemen (Marguerite de Valois, Memoirs letter 4). Among the French Protestants, the Huguenots, in Paris in August 1572 was Admiral Gaspard de Coligny (Calendar of State Papers Foreign, Elizabeth, vol. 10, no. 538).

On 22 August Coligny was shot from a window as he walked back from the court to his lodging and was wounded in the hand and arm. An Englishman who saw him in bed that day wrote that the king took it “very grievously” (Calendar of State Papers Foreign, Elizabeth, vol. 10, no. 538). Marguerite, writing many years later, puts the wound in the shoulder. She says that the king blamed the duke of Guise and meant to punish him, and was then told that his mother, Catherine de’ Medici, and his brother Anjou had had their share in the attempt. The Huguenots, she says, were threatening to take justice for themselves, and the king gave his consent to what followed only with the greatest difficulty, persuaded that his life and his kingdom depended on it (Marguerite de Valois, Memoirs letter 4) (Marguerite de Valois, Memoirs letter 5).

The historian De Thou, who was in Paris as a young man, writes that it was decided to “exterminate all the Protestants”, that the queen mother approved, and that Navarre was to be spared. Guise told the captains it was the king’s will. Armed men broke into Coligny’s lodging, Besme, a retainer of the house of Guise, ran him through, and the body was thrown from the window, mutilated, dragged to the river and hung on the gibbet at Montfaucon (De Thou, History of His Own Time extract in Robinson, Readings, vol. 2, pp. 180–183). Marguerite tells how a wounded man fled into her bedchamber with archers at his heels, and how another was killed at her feet (Marguerite de Valois, Memoirs letter 5).

Reports sent to England in September said that the killing in Paris lasted more than eight days and that “the opinion is” that above 3,000 died there, besides 400 gentlemen. They tell of more killing at Orléans, Lyon, Meaux and Rouen, and name the queen mother, Anjou, the duke of Nevers and Tavannes as those who devised it (Calendar of State Papers Foreign, Elizabeth, vol. 10, no. 583) (Calendar of State Papers Foreign, Elizabeth, vol. 10, no. 584). The French authorities gave other accounts. A proclamation in Normandy on 28 August put the slaughter in Paris down to the private quarrel between Guise and the admiral (Calendar of State Papers Foreign, Elizabeth, vol. 10, no. 545). In October the Parlement of Paris declared the dead Coligny guilty of treason and of a conspiracy against the king, and ordered a yearly thanksgiving in Paris on St Bartholomew’s Day (Calendar of State Papers Foreign, Elizabeth, vol. 10, no. 622).

The same English reports say that the prince of Condé was to hear mass and that Navarre was being pressed to follow, and that Protestants in the south, no longer safe in their houses, had gathered at Nîmes and Montauban and were holding Catholics as hostages (Calendar of State Papers Foreign, Elizabeth, vol. 10, no. 567).