Calendar of State Papers, Foreign Series, of the Reign of Elizabeth
Summaries, with extracts, of the letters and reports on foreign affairs that reached Elizabeth I’s government. Volume 10 holds the dispatches from Paris on the shooting of Admiral Coligny and the massacre of August 1572, and copies of French royal acts.
A calendar is a printed digest: for each document in the archive the editor gives the date, the writer and recipient, and a summary of the contents, with passages of special interest quoted in the writer’s own words between quotation marks. The entries are therefore close to the originals but are not transcripts, and the headings, such as “Massacre of St. Bartholomew”, are the editor’s.
The papers of August to October 1572 include a letter written from Paris on the day Coligny was shot, unsigned reports of the killings sent to England in September, a proclamation issued in Normandy four days after the massacre began, and the sentence of the Parlement of Paris against the dead admiral. The reports were written by or for English Protestants and are hostile to the French court; they repeat hearsay about numbers and about who gave the orders, and they say so (“the opinion is”). The French official documents give the crown’s own explanation. Read together they show what was being said on both sides within weeks of the event.
Cited in
- 24 August 1572, firm date