Gaspard de Coligny
Admiral of France and a leader of the French Protestants. He was shot and wounded in Paris on 22 August 1572 and killed in his lodging at the start of the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre; the Parlement of Paris afterwards condemned his memory for treason.
Coligny, called simply “the Admiral” in the sources, stood high with Charles IX of France in the summer of 1572. Marguerite de Valois says that the king esteemed him for his bravery and that he had won influence by proposing a campaign in Flanders; she also reports what was held against him: that he had caused the old duke of Guise to be killed, and that he had deprived the queen mother of a trusted servant by assassination (Marguerite de Valois, Memoirs letter 4).
On 22 August 1572 he was shot from a window in Paris as he returned from court, losing a finger and taking two wounds in the arm (Calendar of State Papers Foreign, Elizabeth, vol. 10, no. 538). At the start of the massacre armed men broke into his lodging. De Thou, drawing on the report of one of them, says that Coligny sent his companions away, told the man who came at him to respect his white hairs, and was run through; his body was thrown from the window, mutilated and hung on the public gibbet (De Thou, History of His Own Time extract in Robinson, Readings, vol. 2, pp. 180–183). In October the Parlement of Paris declared him guilty of treason and of a conspiracy against the king and ordered his arms broken and his house razed (Calendar of State Papers Foreign, Elizabeth, vol. 10, no. 622). See the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.
In the timeline
- 24 August 1572, firm dateThe St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre
After the king’s Catholic sister marries the Protestant Henry of Navarre, the Huguenot leader Coligny is shot in Paris. From 24 August 1572 he and thousands of French Protestants are killed there and in other towns. Accounts of who decided it differed from the first.