“If I had known the time of my trial in the country,” she pursued, “I could have had the testimony of those persons of honour for me. But, my lord, I have been told, and so I thought it would have been, that I should not have been tried for harbouring Mr. Hicks until he should himself be convict as a traitor. I did abhor those that were in the plot and conspiracy against the King. I know my duty to my King better, and have always exercised it. I defy anybody in the world that ever knew contrary to come and give testimony.”
His voice broke harshly upon the pause. “Have you any more to say?”
“As to what they say to my denying Nelthorp to be in the house,” she resumed. “I was in very great consternation and fear of the soldiers, who were very rude and violent. I beseech your lordship to make that construction of it, and not harbour an ill opinion of me because of those false reports that go about of me, relating to my carriage towards the old King, that I was anyways consenting to the death of King Charles I; for, my lord, that is as false as God is true. I was not out of my chamber all the day in which that king was beheaded, and I believe I shed more tears for him than any other woman then living.
“And I do repeat it, my lord, as I hope to attain salvation, I never did know Nelthorp, nor did I know of anybody’s coming but Mr. Hicks. Him I knew to be a Nonconformist minister, and there being, as is well known, warrants out to apprehend all Nonconformist ministers, I was willing to give him shelter from these warrants, which I knew was no treason.”
“Have you any more to say for yourself?” he asked her.
“My lord,” she was beginning, “I came but five days before this into the country.”
“Nay,” he broke in, “I cannot tell when you came into the country, nor I don’t care. It seems you came in time to harbour rebels.”
She protested that if she would have ventured her life for anything, it would have been to serve the King.
“But, though I could not fight for him myself, my son did; he was actually in arms on the King’s side in this business. It was I that bred him in loyalty and to fight for the King.”
“Well, have you done?” he asked her brutally.
“Yes, my lord,” she answered; and resumed her seat, trembling a little from the exertion and emotion of her address.
His charge to the jury began. It was very long, and the first half of it was taken up with windy rhetoric in which the Almighty was invoked at every turn. It degenerated at one time into a sermon upon the text of “render unto Caesar,” inveighing against the Presbyterian religion. And the dull length of his lordship’s periods, combined with the monotone in which he spoke, lulled the wearied lady at the bar into slumber. She awakened with a start when suddenly his fist crashed down and his voice rose in fierce denunciation of the late rebellion. But she was dozing again — so calm and so little moved was she — before he had come to apply his denunciations to her own case, and this in spite of all her protests that she had held the rebellion in abhorrence.
It was all calculated to prejudice the minds of the jurymen before he came to the facts and the law of the case. And that charge of his throughout, far from being a judicial summing-up, was a virulent address for the prosecution, just as his bearing hitherto in examining and cross-examining witnesses had been that of counsel for the Crown. The statement that she had made in her own defence he utterly ignored, save in one particular, where he saw his opportunity further to prejudice her case.
“I am sorry,” he said, his face lengthening, “to remember something that dropped even from the gentlewoman herself. She pretends to religion and loyalty very much — how greatly she wept at the death of King Charles the Martyr — and owns her great obligations to the late king and his royal brother. And yet no sooner is one in the grave than she forgets all gratitude and entertains those that were rebels against his royal successor.
“I will not say,” he continued with deliberate emphasis, “what hand her husband had in the death of that blessed martyr; she has enough to answer for her own guilt; and I must confess that it ought not, one way or other, to make any ingredient into this case what she was in former times.”
But he had dragged it in, protesting that it should not influence the case, yet coldly, calculatingly intending it to do so. She was the widow of a regicide, reason and to spare in the views of himself and his royal master why she should be hounded to her death upon any pretext.
Thereafter he reviewed the evidence against her, dwelt upon the shuffling of Dunne, deduced that the reason for so much lying was to conceal the damning truth — namely, that she knew Hicks for a rebel when she gave him shelter, and thus became the partner of his horrible guilt. Upon that he charged them to find their verdict “without any consideration of persons, but considering only the truth.”
Nevertheless, although his commands were clear, some of the jury would seem to have feared the God whom Jeffreys invoked so constantly. One of them rose to ask him pertinently, in point of law, whether it was treason to have harboured Hicks before the man had been convicted of treason.
Curtly he answered them that beyond doubt it was, and upon that assurance the jury withdrew, the Court settled down into an expectant silence, and her ladyship dozed again in her chair.
The minutes passed. It was growing late, and Jeffreys was eager to be done with this prejudged affair, that he might dine in peace. His voice broke the stillness of the court, protesting his angry wonder at the need to deliberate in so plain a case. He was threatening to adjourn and let the jury lie by all night if they did not bring in their verdict quickly. When, at the end of a half-hour, they returned, his fierce, impatient glance found them ominously grave.
“My lord,” said Mr. Whistler, the foreman, “we have to beg of your lordship some directions before we can bring our verdict. We have some doubt upon us whether there be sufficient proof that she knew Hicks to have been in the army.”
Well might they doubt it, for there was no proof at all. Yet he never hesitated to answer them.
“There is as full proof as proof can be. But you are judges of the proof. For my part, I thought there was no difficulty in it.”
“My lord,” the foreman insisted, “we are in some doubt about it.”
“I cannot help your doubts,” he said irritably. “Was there not proved a discourse of the battle and of the battle and of the army at supper-time?”
“But, my lord, we are not satisfied that she had notice that Hicks was in the army.”
He glowered upon them in silence for a moment. They deserved to be themselves indicted for their slowness to perceive where lay their duty to their king.
“I cannot tell what would satisfy you,” he said; and sneered. “Did she not inquire of Dunne whether Hicks had been in the army? And when he told her he did not know, she did not say she would refuse if he had been, but ordered him to come by night, by which it is evident she suspected it.”
He ignored, you see, her own complete explanation of that circumstance.
“And when Hicks and Nelthorp came, did she not discourse with them about the battle and the army?” (As if that were not at the time a common topic of discussion.) “Come, come, gentlemen,” he said, with amazing impudence, “it is plain proof.”
But Mr. Whistler was not yet satisfied.
“We do not remember, my lord, that it was proved that she asked any such question.”
That put him in a passion.
“Sure,” he bellowed, “you do not remember anything that has passed. Did not Dunne tell you there was such a discourse, and she was by? But if there were no such proof, the circumstances and management of the thing are as full proof as can be. I wonder what it is you doubt of!”
Mrs. Lisle had risen. There was a faint flush of excitement on her grey old face.
“My lord, I hope—” she began, in trembling tones, to get no further.
“You must not speak now!” thundered her terrible judge; and thus struck her silent.
The brief resistance to his formi
dable will was soon at an end. Within a quarter of an hour the jury announced their verdict. They found her guilty.
“Gentlemen,” said his lordship, “I did not think I should have occasion to speak after your verdict, but, finding some hesitancy and doubt among you, I cannot but say I wonder it should come about; for I think, in my conscience, the evidence was as full and plain as it could be, and if I had been among you, and she had been my own mother, I should have found her guilty.”
She was brought up for sentence on the morrow, together with several others subsequently convicted. Amid fresh invectives against the religion she practised, he condemned her to be burned alive — which was the proper punishment for high treason — ordering the sheriff to prepare for her execution that same afternoon.
“But look you, Mrs. Lisle,” he added, “we that are the judges shall stay in town an hour or two. You shall have pen, ink, and paper, and if, in the mean time, you employ that pen, ink, and paper and that hour or two well — you understand what I mean it may be that you shall hear further from us in a deferring of this execution.”
What was this meaning that he assumed she understood? Jeffreys had knowledge of Kirke’s profitable traffic in the West, and it is known that he spared no means of acquiring an estate suitable to his rank which he did not possess by way of patrimony. Thus cynically he invited a bribe.
It is the only inference that explains the subsequent rancour he displayed against her, aroused by her neglect to profit by his suggestions. The intercession of the divines of Winchester procured her a week’s reprieve, and in that week her puissant friends in London, headed by the Earl of Abergavenny, petitioned the King on her behalf. Even Feversham, the victor of Sedgemoor, begged her life of the King — bribed to it, as men say, by an offer of a thousand pounds. But the King withheld his mercy upon the plea that he had promised Lord Jeffreys he would not reprieve her, and the utmost clemency influential petitions could wring from James II was that she should be beheaded instead of burned.
She suffered in the market-place of Winchester on September 2d. Christian charity was all her sin, and for this her head was demanded in atonement. She yielded it with a gentle fortitude and resolution. In lieu of speech, she left with the sheriff a pathetic document wherein she protests her innocence of all offence against the King, and forgives her enemies specifically — the judge, who prejudiced her case, and forgot that “the Court should be counsel for the prisoner,” and Colonel Penruddock, “though he told me he could have taken those men before they came to my house.”
Between those lines you may read the true reason why the Lady Alice Lisle died. She died to slake the cruelly vindictive thirst of King James II on the one hand, and Colonel Penruddock on the other, against her husband who had been dead for twenty years.
V. THE NIGHT OF MASSACRE — The Story Of The Saint Bartholomew
There are elements of mystery about the massacre of Saint Bartholomew over which, presumably, historians will continue to dispute as long as histories are written. Indeed, it is largely of their disputes that the mystery is begotten. Broadly speaking, these historians may be divided into two schools — Catholic and anti-Catholic. The former have made it their business to show that the massacre was purely a political affair, having no concern with religion; the latter have been equally at pains to prove it purely an act of religious persecution having no concern with politics. Those who adopt the latter point of view insist that the affair was long premeditated, that it had its source in something concerted some seven years earlier between Catherine of Medicis and the sinister Duke of Alva. And they would seem to suggest that Henry of Navarre, the nominal head of the Protestant party, was brought to Paris to wed Marguerite de Valois merely so that by this means the Protestant nobles of the kingdom, coming to the capital for the wedding, should be lured to their destruction.
It does not lie within the purview of the present narrative to enter into a consideration of the arguments of the two schools, nor will it be attempted.
But it may briefly be stated that the truth lies probably in a middle course of reasoning — that the massacre was political in conception and religious in execution; or, in other words, that statecraft deliberately made use of fanaticism as of a tool; that the massacre was brought about by a sudden determination begotten of opportunity which is but another word for Chance.
Against the theory of premeditation the following cardinal facts may be urged:
(a) The impossibility of guarding for seven years a secret that several must have shared;
(b) The fact that neither Charles IX nor his mother Catherine were in any sense bigoted Catholics, or even of a normal religious sincerity.
(c) The lack of concerted action — so far as the kingdom generally was concerned — in the execution of the massacre.
A subsidiary disproof lies in the attempted assassination of Coligny two days before the massacre, an act which might, by putting the Huguenots on their guard, have caused the miscarriage of the entire plan — had it existed.
It must be borne in mind that for years France had been divided by religious differences into two camps, and that civil war between Catholic and Huguenot had ravaged and distracted the country. At the head of the Protestant party stood that fine soldier Gaspard de Chatillon, Admiral de Coligny, virtually the Protestant King of France, a man who raised armies, maintaining them by taxes levied upon Protestant subjects, and treated with Charles IX as prince with prince. At the head of the Catholic party — the other imperium in imperio — stood the Duke of Guise. The third and weakest party in the State, serving, as it seemed, little purpose beyond that of holding the scales between the other turbulent two, was the party of the King.
The motives and events that precipitated the massacre are set forth in the narration of the King’s brother, the Duke of Anjou (afterwards Henri III). It was made by him to Miron, his physician and confidential servant in Cracow, when he ruled there later as King of Poland, under circumstances which place it beyond suspicion of being intended to serve ulterior aims. For partial corroboration, and for other details of the massacre itself, we have the narratives, among others, of Sully, who was then a young man in the train of the King of Navarre, and of Lusignan, a gentleman of the Admiral’s household. We shall closely follow these in our reconstruction of the event and its immediate causes.
The gay chatter of the gallants and ladies thronging the long gallery of the Louvre sank and murmured into silence, and a movement was made to yield a free passage to the King, who had suddenly made his appearance leaning affectionately upon the shoulder of the Admiral de Coligny.
The Duke of Anjou, a slender, graceful young man in a gold-embroidered suit of violet, forgot the interest he was taking in his beautiful hands to bend lower over the handsome Madame de Nemours what time the unfriendly eyes of both were turned upon the Admiral.
The King and the great Huguenot leader came slowly down the gallery, an oddly contrasting pair. Coligny would have been the taller by a half-head but for his stoop, yet in spite of it there was energy and military vigour in his carriage, just as there was a severe dignity amounting to haughtiness in his scarred and wrinkled countenance. A bullet that had pierced his cheek and broken three of his teeth at the battle of Moncontour had left a livid scar that lost itself in his long white beard. His forehead was high and bald, and his eyes were of a steely keenness under their tufted brows. He was dressed with Calvinistic simplicity entirely in black, and just as this contrasted with the King’s suit of sulphur-coloured satin, so did the gravity of his countenance contrast with the stupidity of his sovereign’s.
Charles IX, a slimly built young man in his twenty-fourth year, was of a pallid, muddy complexion, with great, shifty, greenish eyes, and a thick, pendulous nose. The protruding upper lip of his long, thin mouth gave him an oafish expression, which was increased by his habit of carrying his head craned forward.
His nature was precisely what you would have expected from his appearance — dull and gross. He w
as chiefly distinguished among men of birth for general obscenity of speech and morphological inventiveness in blasphemy.
At the end of the gallery Coligny stooped to kiss the royal hand in leave-taking. With his other hand Charles patted the Admiral’s shoulder.
“Count me your friend,” he said, “body and soul, heart and bowels, even as I count you mine. Fare you well, my father.”
Coligny departed, and the King retraced his steps, walking quickly, his head hunched between his shoulders, his baleful eyes looking neither to left nor right. As he passed out, the Duke of Anjou quitted the side of Madame de Nemours, and went after him. Then at last the suspended chatter of the courtiers broke loose again.
The King was pacing his cabinet — a simple room furnished with a medley of objects appertaining to study, to devotion, and to hunting. A large picture of the Virgin hung from a wall flanked on either side by an arquebus, and carrying a hunting-horn on one of its upper corners. A little alabaster holy-water font near the door, crowned by a sprig of palm, seemed to serve as a receptacle for hawk-bells and straps. There was a writing-table of beautifully carved walnut near the leaded window, littered with books and papers — a treatise on hunting lay cheek by jowl with a Book of Hours; a string of rosary beads and a dog-whip lay across an open copy of Ronsard’s verses. The King was quite the vilest poetaster of his day.
Charles looked over his shoulder as his brother entered. The scowl on his face deepened when he saw who came, and with a grunt he viciously kicked the liver-coloured hound that lay stretched at his feet. The hound fled yelping to a corner, the Duke checked, startled, in his advance.
“Well?” growled the King. “Well? Am I never to have peace? Am I never to be alone? What now? Bowels of God! What do you want?”
His green eyes smouldered, his right hand opened and closed on the gold hilt of the dagger at his girdle:
Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini Page 670