Her Majesty's Spymaster

by Stephen Budiansky

  Some of the victims were taken to the Seine bridges and thrown into the river. Others plunged in themselves as a last resort to escape the mob, only to be set upon by particularly determined pursuers in boats, who pushed them under until they drowned.

  And everywhere the words that Guise had uttered upon viewing his dead rival’s body were repeated, to reassure any who might hesitate with legal scruples before giving vent to long-simmering passions of religious bloodlust: “It is the King’s command.”

  For three days, the city’s gates remained locked as the slaughter continued its course. When the mob’s ardor threatened to wane, on the morning after Saint Bartholomew’s feast, a convenient miracle occurred. A Franciscan declared that an old dead hawthorn tree in the Catholic cemetery of the Holy Innocents had suddenly come to life, putting out green leaves and a profusion of flowers. It was not lost on the mob that this was the same cemetery to which Coligny had forced the authorities a half-year earlier to move an offensive cross that had marked and celebrated the spot of the hanging of a Huguenot family. The first attempt to remove the cross had set off a riot; in the end, the King’s artillery had had to seal off the street and carry out the job.

  Now God himself had sent an unmistakable sign of his approval for the revenge that his faithful had taken against such blasphemy. Word of the miracle spread with the speed that only profound idiocy can. The crowds that thronged to venerate the miracle were not in the least shaken in their faith by the refusal of a guard of soldiers to let them close enough to see the tree for themselves.

  God’s command had now overtaken the King’s command; not that anyone short of a student of Machiavelli, human desperation, or human madness could have made much sense of the King’s commands by this point. On the Sunday afternoon, he had ordered the city’s magistrates to restore order and disarm the mob. The official story issued for envoys abroad continued to claim that “all this happened through a private quarrel long fostered between these two houses”: the house of Guise had feared a revenge attack by Coligny’s followers and so had struck first; the King, as much as he would have liked to prevent the more widespread killing, “had much ado to employ my guards and other forces to maintain my security within my castle of the Louvre” and, alas, had been powerless to prevent it.

  By Tuesday, the palace had performed an impressively complete about-face. The King went forth to address the Parlement of Paris in a grand procession, and declared that the massacre of the Huguenots had been necessary to thwart a vile conspiracy hatched by Admiral Coligny and his followers. They and the members of their sect were plotting nothing less than a coup d’état. “All that has been done in Paris has been done not only with my consent, but at my command,” the King proclaimed. The lords who had been the executors of his will were not to be impugned, now or later, for their actions.

  The President of the Parlement heartily congratulated the King and quoted, in Latin, the words of Louis XI, whose reign a century before had earned him the name Louis the Cruel: “He who cannot dissimulate cannot rule.”

  The next day, the King drew up an order informing “all gentlemen and others of the so-called reformed religion that it was his mind and purpose that they shall live under his protection, with their wives and children in their houses, in as much safeguard as they did before.” The governors of the provinces were not to permit any persecution of the Protestants, upon pain of death for the offenders. The Edict of Pacification would be strictly respected. Except, that is, for its major provision, the toleration of Protestant worship, which was hereby suspended.

  At the same moment, the Papal Nuncio, Bishop Antonio-Maria Salviati, was reporting the widespread belief that the French Court was planning to reimpose Catholic unity on the entire nation. The following day, the King took part in a great jubilee and procession proclaimed by the Catholic Church to celebrate the extermination of the Huguenots. The King and his court stopped at the miraculous hawthorn to pray, and then proceeded to the gibbet at Montfaucon, where, by order of the Parlement, what was left of the Admiral’s corpse had at last been reclaimed from the mob and hung up by the feet, as a traitor. Some members of the King’s royal party were offended by the smell of the four-day-old remains, but the King, according to his personal historiographer, quoted the Roman emperor who had on a similar occasion declared, “The smell of a dead enemy is sweet and delightful.”

  Some of the Court’s gyrations no doubt reflected a desire to prevent a complete fissure of relations with England, even as it attempted to ride the wave of popular passion. On Wednesday, the 27th of August, the King had written his ambassador in London to pass on his assurances that “Le seigneur de Walsingham” had been “meticulously looked after in his home during this trouble.” The King had indeed sent a guard to the English Ambassador’s house: this time they had actually done their job of guarding.

  The same day, Francis Walsingham cautiously dispatched to London a “bearer” to whom he entrusted an oral account of the horrors of the past four days; to Burghley he explained, in a short note a few days later, that London could well guess why he forbore to commit any such account to writing while things remained so dangerous and volatile. As one observer in the English embassy recorded, the King’s visit to Montfaucon was “a spectacle what showeth what good nature is in the King.”

  If it was true that the King had not been the author of Coligny’s murder, he was nonetheless showing signs of becoming completely unhinged by the orgy of slaughter that had followed. “The King is now become so bloody that it is impossible to stay his thirst to quench the same in innocent blood,” the English embassy’s record noted. Strange tales, probably untrue, but who could say for certain, told of a deranged Charles standing on a balcony of the Louvre with an arquebus, taking aim at those who did not drown quickly enough as they floated by the palace on the river.

  More royal gyrations followed. Orders from the King to the provinces at first appeared to encourage stern measures against Protestants there, too; but then, on the 30th, he issued yet another order, canceling all previous such orders and strictly forbidding further attacks. But amid such utter confusion, the zealots in the provinces took heart, and anti-Protestant rampages spread to a dozen other cities. Though in Paris the worst of the violence had by now spent itself, small eruptions continued for weeks. Walsingham could not set foot from his door without a large escort of the King’s guards; even so he was taunted and threatened on the streets wherever he went. His wife and daughter, whom he sent home at the earliest possible moment when it at last seemed safe to do so, narrowly missed witnessing two Englishmen being hacked to death at one of the gates of the city as they departed.

  It was also several days after calm had apparently returned to the capital that Briquemault was forcibly seized from his place of refuge in the English Ambassador’s house.

  A month later, in filth and chains, Briquemault was brought forth with another of Coligny’s old aides to the front of the Hôtel de Ville, where both were hanged. They were accompanied on the gibbet by a straw effigy of the Admiral; his own remains were unavailable to participate in the occasion as they had finally been cut down and secretly buried in the night by some brave soul who had at last grown revolted by the display at Montfaucon.

  While the King celebrated at a lavish banquet within the Hôtel de Ville, the mob, glad to have one more opportunity to relive the fading excitement of Saint Bartholomew’s Day, overset the gallows and tore the corpses to pieces.

  2

  LESS PERIL AS ENEMIES

  Those who had escaped the terror of the mob in the refuge of the English Ambassador’s house were seared with a memory that would stay with them throughout their lives. Near the end of Walsingham’s life, an English Doctor of Physic, Timothy Bright, wrote him a dedication recalling the time “now sixteen years past, yet (as ever it will be) fresh with me in memory,” when “your Honor’s house at that time was a very sanctuary, not only for all of our nation, but even to many strangers then in peril …
who had all tasted of the rage of that furious tragedy, had not your Honor shrouded them” by “that right noble act.”

  Others would commemorate the events rather differently. The embalmed head of Coligny was duly delivered to His Holiness Pope Gregory XIII in Rome, who duly celebrated a Te Deum. The Pope was beside himself with praises for the French King, who by “his destruction of heretics, the enemies of Christ,” had truly earned the right to his traditional title, Most Christian. A papal medal was struck for the occasion: on one side was the Pope’s image, on the other an angel bearing a cross superintended the slaying of Coligny. In the Sala Regia, the royal hall next to the Sistine Chapel, the pontiff had a series of frescoes painted depicting the death of Coligny and his followers in gruesome detail. The completed paintings stood alongside images of another late triumph of Christian arms against infidels, the victory of Spanish and papal naval forces over the Turks at Lepanto.

  Although the Pope would later regret the shedding of innocent blood alongside that of the guilty when he learned the complete details of the popular massacres that had taken place in Paris and the provinces, he did not regret the salutary effect of the slayings in convincing the remaining heretics to return to the fold. Tomasso Sassetti, a courier and informant who often supplied the English Ambassador with gleanings from his Florentine acquaintances in and around the French Court and from Italian travelers lately arrived in Paris, reported that the priests were reaping a great harvest of souls among the survivors. The churches were packed; emblems of Catholic piety everywhere appeared on caps and clothing; during the mass, when the priest raised the host, there was now a great show of “beating on breasts and a fluttering of lips” among those who just days earlier had affected to despise the vile superstition of such Catholic rites.

  In the stunned quiet that settled on Paris the first week of September, the diplomatic community and its surrounding nether-world—Court hangers-on, knowing men of business, garden-variety household informers—teemed with rumors and theories. Sassetti had been in Lyon during the uprising in Paris, but on his return to the capital, on the 9th of September, he began at once to work his network of contacts, “persons who had been eyewitnesses and others at Court who, even if they are Catholics, make it their occupation to displease neither one side nor the other.”

  In four days, he wrote a sixty-four-page reconstruction of the events that had precipitated the massacre. Men who worked for the ambassadors of Spain, Venice, and Rome were peddling their versions, too. They were all the usual blend of scraps of undigested truth and innuendo; every possible permutation of Machiavellian conspiracy was bruited; yet all were agreed, Catholic and Protestant alike, that the King’s official version of events was nonsense. There had never been any Protestant conspiracy to seize the throne. What there had been was the craftiness and ruthlessness of the Queen Mother, Catherine de Médicis, who had long been viewed as the real power behind the throne of her weak son.

  Of course, she had long been whispered to have gone about poisoning her rivals, too; but, then, they always said that about Italians. But now even those who were bursting with approval for the murder of the heretics agreed that it had been the culmination of Catherine’s well-laid schemes. Some said the plot had been in the works for years; the Venetian envoy heard that during the long negotiations for the Navarre marriage the Queen Mother had eagerly given way on all points—just as long as it was always agreed that the wedding would take place in Paris, thereby making sure that Coligny and his men would fall into her trap. Some believed Catherine was simply jealous of the influence the Admiral had gained over her son; others, that she feared Coligny would push France into a catastrophic war with Spain if he was not removed; still others said she had an even more audacious and horrific plot in mind, to induce a final, all-out clash between Guise and Coligny, in which the leading men of both sides would be exterminated, and so remove once and for all a source of strife in the kingdom, and the challenge to royal power that the nobility of both factions represented.

  The Protestants were prepared to believe the worst such tales of treacherous premeditation, just as they would turn Coligny into a saint who mouthed pieties in his death throes; there was no crime too monstrous to blame on Catherine.

  But Walsingham, zealous Protestant and all, had no time for histrionics, and Sassetti’s account, which there was little doubt reflected his employer’s information and views, was far more icily logical in its indictment of the Queen Mother. Sassetti argued that she was indeed likely to have been behind the initial assassination attempt on Coligny; when it failed, and the risk of exposure and Protestant reprisals threatened, Catherine had persuaded the King that he had no choice but to give the Duke of Guise and the royal guard the command to finish the deed, doing away with Coligny’s top henchmen at the same time. The larger killing spree, however, could not have been premeditated, Sassetti argued; for one thing, there was the obvious chaos and confusion that had characterized it; for another, even on the very eve of the massacres, Guise and his men had had to send hurriedly to the armorers of the city for weapons, though the Protestants had for weeks been known to be well supplied with arms and horses. When events had spun out of control, not to be checked even by royal command, the King had been forced to pretend it had all been done on his order to avoid the shame of admitting himself powerless—and to reap what residual benefit he could with the Catholic side for what he could not prevent anyway.

  Walsingham had professed himself two years earlier “utterly unacquainted with that skill that the dealings in Prince’s affairs requireth,” but now, faced with a trial that would have tested the skill of any man, he was pure steel and ice: if his job demanded that he look evil in the eye, he would do so, and conceal his feelings and his knowledge of the truth, and extract what he could in the way of information and advantage, and smile if he had to while he was at it. Many of his good friends were dead; the survival of his very religion was in peril; the French King and Queen Mother were stained with the blood of the massacres; but the ambassador had his job to do.

  At the first possible moment, on the 26th of August, he had sent a messenger to the Queen Mother thanking her for his safety and that of his fellow Englishmen in “this last tumult,” then quickly coming to the point: he had heard “divers reports made of the late execution”; he would be “very loath to credit reports” without having their Majesties “send me the very truth thereof, to the end that I might accordingly advertise the Queen’s Majesty my Mistress.” In reply, the Queen Mother assured Walsingham that the French Ambassador in London had already supplied Queen Elizabeth with a report on the “late accident” here. A delicate diplomatic fencing match, just as dangerous but far more refined, now began where the cruder methods of the Paris mob left off: Catherine de Médicis had cut better men than he to ribbons in the past.

  On the 1st of September, conducted by a guard of a dozen gentlemen-at-arms, Walsingham was at last summoned to an audience at Court. Walsingham listened impassively while the King repeated his story that the Admiral had been part of a conspiracy which it had been necessary to strike against at once, without awaiting the formality of legal proceedings. The King would provide his mistress a copy of the judicial examination he had subsequently ordered, which would affirm Coligny’s guilt.

  Walsingham informed the King that three Englishmen had been killed in the riots. The King said he would make “exemplary justice” of the offenders if they could be produced. Walsingham replied to this piece of royal fatuity by blandly noting that it would be rather difficult to identify the perpetrators at this point, “the disorder being so general.” Beyond that, however, the English Ambassador held his peace, saying nothing more for now about the “late accident.”

  In England, the first news of the massacres had arrived with Protestant refugees fleeing for their lives from Dieppe. The news caught up with the Queen and her court on a great royal progress that, since July, had taken her through a succession of towns in the Midlands; she at onc
e canceled the day’s hunting, sent her musicians and dancers home, and ordered an end to the gaieties, fireworks displays, and entertainments that had marked her travels. The French Ambassador, who had hurried west from London to offer reassuring words of France’s continued goodwill toward England, was left waiting at Oxford for three days before the Queen would consent to see him. When he was allowed at last into her Majesty’s presence on the 8th of September, he found himself confronted by the entire court, dressed in mourning and silent.

  The French Ambassador’s earnest explanations of the dastardly Protestant plot that had been foiled were greeted coolly. That story was already known in England to contradict the first story put out by the French King, namely that the murder of Coligny and his men had been the work of the Guises “in the manner of sedition”—in other words, against the King’s wishes. Elizabeth replied that she feared for the King’s reputation and honor that he should have allowed the murder of a wounded man under royal protection. She trembled at the vengeance God in heaven would take should his Majesty fail to make every reparation in his power for the lives of the innocent women and children who had perished. Nevertheless, the King was an honorable man; Elizabeth assured the ambassador that she was inclined to accept his explanations. She also ordered the forts on the south coast readied for defense and the fleet sent into the Channel.

  The Queen’s desire to prevent an outright break in relations, yet to exploit her great grief over the massacre of her coreligionists as a diplomatic bargaining lever, required a deftness and subtlety on the part of her ambassador in Paris that the delays of communication across the Channel taxed to the limit; so, too, did the competing views of the other powerful men of the government. Burghley wrote to Walsingham that if it were up to him he would be recalled at once in protest. Leicester wrote a letter dripping with the religious sanctimony that he had recently acquired, having allied himself politically with the Puritan forces in England: all moral outrage, and obfuscation on the matter of practical measures. Although the massacres “doth make all Christians look for a just revenge,” this “lamentable tragedy” nonetheless had to be looked upon as the Lord’s doing, Leicester preached: “to pinch us in the meantime with the scourge of correction by the sufferance of his people to be murdered, but our sins deserve this and more.”