Heretic Queen

by Susan Ronald

  Coligny, in a race against time, urged Charles to strike openly in the Netherlands with a new French force. Catherine, who had been away from Paris to meet her daughter Claude near Châlon, railed against Charles’s stupidity on her return on August 4. Anjou, meanwhile, sought the advice of the Duke of Guise. Incandescent with rage, Catherine threatened to retire from her son’s court, taking Anjou with her. After all she had done for Charles, she let him know in no uncertain terms that he had spat upon her work to make France strong again. He had invaded Spanish territory. It was an overt act of war against Spain, by far the mightiest empire of their day. Though too little, too late, Charles penned and sent a hasty letter congratulating Philip on his success. The thought of losing his mother’s knowledge and influence made Charles fear for his very life and crown. The thought of losing his precious Coligny did not bear contemplating.

  A series of emergency council meetings was held on Saturday and Sunday, August 9–10, 1572. Charles humbly kissed his mother’s hand, begging her forgiveness in his greatest hour of need. At first Catherine refused, leaving Charles desolate. He sought solace and advice from his council members. They were united in their criticism of Coligny, recalling “the disloyalty, the audacity, prowess, menaces and violence of the Huguenots … magnified and exaggerated by such an infamy of mingled truths and artifices that from being the friends of the king, His Majesty was led to regard them as his enemies.”12 Charles would have to accept this version of the truth or lose his mother’s guiding hand.

  Once the charade led by Catherine was successful, and Charles meekly reined in, she resolved with Anjou on a plan to deliver France from “all future apprehension” by Coligny. They agreed the admiral must die. Charles, of course, would need to be kept out of the loop, since he was too malleable. The moment to strike would be at the wedding of Marguerite to Henry of Navarre.

  As the wedding approached, Catherine whispered more poison in her son’s ear. Henry of Navarre was a Protestant. The capital would become overrun with Huguenots and a potential killing field if they were allowed to go about armed. Charles of course concurred, and a royal proclamation forbidding arms and the molestation of any foreigner or Navarre follower was issued. Protestants throughout Europe, including Elizabeth, took this as an act of great kindness and reconciliation in keeping with the marriage treaty and the Treaty of Blois signed only four months earlier.

  On the morning of Friday, August 22, 1572, a week after the wedding of Henry to Marguerite, Coligny wended his way back to his lodgings in rue de Béthisy after watching the king play tennis at the Louvre Palace. Just as an assassin took aim and fired from a third-floor window, Coligny stooped down to adjust his shoe. The first shot blew off most of Coligny’s right-hand index finger. The next lodged in his left arm, and the third missed altogether. Coligny was rushed to his lodgings while the king was advised. Charles, seemingly outraged, sent his personal physician to attend the admiral and vowed to find his would-be assassin.

  Coligny’s wounds were not considered grievous. The Huguenots who were standing vigil in the street below rejoiced to “see the king so careful as well for the curing of the admiral, as also for searching out the party that hurt him.”13 To show full support for the convalescing Coligny, the king, his brothers, and his mother visited the admiral later that day. Yet Henry of Navarre and his uncle the Prince de Condé smelled danger.

  As they calmed their Huguenot supporters, a man named Maurevert hired to assassinate the admiral was caught along with an accomplice. The man who had held the would-be assassin’s horse for a quick getaway was a veteran servant of Henry, Duke of Guise. His weapon, a harquebus, had been “borrowed” from the personal armory of Francis, Duke of Alençon, the proposed bridegroom for Elizabeth. The link between Henry of Anjou, his brother Francis of Alençon, and Henry, Duke of Guise, was unmistakable. Having come so close to regaining favor at court, Henry of Guise was not going to allow power to slip from his grasp once again.

  At four in the morning, Guise and his Swiss mercenaries forced their way into the admiral’s lodgings. Coligny was already on his knees in prayer. While he knelt, the mercenaries stabbed him repeatedly, then tossed his bloodied body out the window. In an orchestrated action throughout the capital, Huguenot houses were attacked. Men, women, and children were slaughtered, their bodies thrown into the streets or the River Seine. Huguenots to whom Charles had granted asylum at the Louvre were murdered, their two hundred corpses piled high in the splendid palace courtyard. Catherine seemingly lied to Charles that the Huguenots had planned to seize his throne and kill them all.

  According to the Spanish ambassador Zuñiga, fanatics had entered the English embassy, where Francis Walsingham resided. Other English notables like the young poet Philip Sidney and Thomas Smith hid within the embassy from the mob. Some Dutch, German, Italian, and even French Protestants fled to the comparative safety of the English embassy. Yet only once the danger had passed was a royal guard posted outside Walsingham’s ambassadorial home. In the first blood orgy of St. Bartholomew’s Day, a conservative estimate of Huguenots slain exceeded two thousand.

  This was the first such massacre of Christian against Christian. The suddenness, viciousness, and ferocity stunned all of Europe. Elizabeth, after long, hard reflection, wrote to Walsingham in December 1572:

  We are sorry to hear, first, the great slaughter made in France of noblemen and gentlemen, unconvicted and untried, so suddenly (as it is said at his [the king’s] commandment), did seem with us so much to touch the honor of our good brother as we could not but with lamentation and with tears of our heart hear it of a prince so well allied unto us … We do hear it marvelously evil taken and as a thing of a terrible and dangerous example; and are sorry that our good brother was so ready to condescend to any such counsel, whose nature we took to be more humane and noble.

  … Women, children, maids, young infants, and sucking babes were at the same time murdered and cast into the river, and that liberty of execution was given to the vilest and basest sort … without punishment or revenge of such cruelties done afterwards by law upon those cruel murderers of such innocents … It doth appear by all doings, both by the edicts and otherwise, that the rigor is used only against them of the religion reformed … At the least, all the strangers of all nations and religions so doth interpret it, as may appear by the triumphs and rejoicing set out as well in the realm of France and other.14

  * * *

  In the months following the massacre, Elizabeth learned how her embassy had been invaded by the Parisian mob, how Walsingham and the others were reduced to hiding within the house to prevent their own murders, and just how much Walsingham’s life was in danger. In his official correspondence on the massacre, he requested to be recalled to London. Elizabeth responded kindly but told him he might have to wait until 1573, when a replacement could be found. Only when messengers came to tell Elizabeth just how much Walsingham was risking his life in staying on did she officially recall him. Walsingham received the letter from Burghley on September 17, advising “you have been presently revoked and only a secretary left there.”15

  On September 21, Walsingham met with Catherine.16 She didn’t want to discuss ambassadorial recalls, or the massacre, but rather the continued negotiations for the marriage of Queen Elizabeth to her dwarfish son, Francis of Alençon. Walsingham stuck to the point. Elizabeth, he said, marveled that Charles could have countenanced the unadulterated violence by a Parisian mob, led by royal courtiers, particularly as the Huguenots had come to Paris under the king’s express protection. Catherine wove a yarn of sundry Huguenot plots to kill the royal family and said she had needed to act swiftly. Walsingham countered immediately by asking, if they were so formidable, why were they unarmed and so easily killed? The queen mother answered that there was no time for due process of law, as the plots had been set in motion on the very evening they were discovered.

  The audience with Charles hardly went any better. He was outraged that Elizabeth would dare to withdra
w her ambassador, claiming some sleight of hand by Walsingham. So Walsingham showed the king her letter. Charles stormed about, threatening to recall his ambassador from London, too, shouting that if he did that, then where would they all be? Walsingham said that it had happened before, and yet there he was; so in the end, things do eventually sort themselves out. Charles threatened if Walsingham told anyone else about his plans to leave that he would consider it an act of war. If Walsingham remained silent, then he would have the king’s protection.17 It is unlikely, given what had occurred weeks earlier, that Charles’s promise provided Walsingham with any solace.

  * * *

  For England and all other Protestant nations, the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Paris was a watershed. Without any viable Huguenot leadership their cause was temporarily in abeyance at best, at worst ultimately lost. Much would depend on the leadership of Henry of Navarre. The ultra-Catholic, pro-papal, pro-Spanish, pro–Mary Stuart Guise factions were once again in the ascent, with Henry of Guise playing the part of Catherine’s and Anjou’s new best friend. Guise was a shallow, self-serving adventurer, and his fervent Catholicism was based on power and becoming Philip’s and the pope’s instrument in France—for a price. Nowhere is this better stated than in Christopher Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris:

  To burst abroad those never-dying flames

  Which cannot be extinguish’d but by blood.

  Oft have I levelled, and at last have learned

  That peril is the chiefest way to happiness,

  And resolution honour’s fairest aim …

  For this I wake, when others think I sleep;

  For this I wait, that scorns attendance else.

  For this, my quenchless thirst, whereon I build,

  Hath often pleaded kindred to the King;

  For this, this head, this heart, this hand and sword,

  Contrives, imagines, and fully executes,

  Matters of import aimed at by many,

  Yet understood by none.

  For this, hath heaven engender’d me of earth …

  For this, from Spain the stately Catholic

  Sends Indian gold to coin me French écues;

  For this, have I a largess from the Pope,

  A pension and a dispensation too;

  And by that privilege to work upon,

  My policy hath framed religion.

  Religion: O Diabole!18

  This was the man who would determine French policy regarding the queen of Scots in the coming years. Is it any wonder that Gregory XIII, pope for a mere three months, celebrated a Te Deum and struck a special medal commemorating the massacre in Paris in honor of the king?

  SIXTEEN

  The Puritan Underworld of London

  It is no small comfort brother … to brethren of one nation to understand the state of the brethren in other nations.

  —Letter to John Field, 1572

  The killing fields of France did not stop at the Parisian suburbs. As word of the massacre spread, so did the violence. Crisscrossing the country, religiously motivated genocide continued at La Charité, Meaux, Bourges, Saumur, Angers, Lyon, Troyes, Rouen, Bordeaux, Toulouse, and Gaillac. Those who carried out the atrocities believed that they did so in the name of the king. While Charles IX had eventually admitted to the planned murder of Coligny and the Huguenot leadership, he cowered before the prospect of yet another rise into civil war and the ire of his formidable mother. Naturally, his heir and firebrand brother, Henry of Anjou, prolonged the bloodshed by urging the governor of Saumur and others to help the mobs kill Protestants.1

  What of the bridegroom King Henry of Navarre? The shock and awe of the massacre in Paris was followed up by the forced conversion to Catholicism of both Henry and his younger brother. For the next three and a half years (until February 1576), both would be held virtual prisoners at court. Navarre was, as Charles IX knew full well, only third in line to the throne behind the king’s two brothers. By forcing Henry of Navarre’s abjuration, Charles not only deprived the Huguenots of their last vestige of credible leadership but also took away any excuses for the ultra-Catholic Guise faction to murder Navarre.

  Unsurprisingly, by the autumn of 1572, religious war broke out once more. Those who could escape the carnage did, fleeing to Orange-held Holland and Zeeland in the Low Countries or to England. Those who went to the Dutch provinces did so to fight against Spain for the Calvinist cause. Huguenots fleeing to England simply hoped to resume some vestige of their previous lives. In exiling themselves from France, the court believed it had vanquished the Huguenots. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

  * * *

  One of the most spectacularly overlooked aspects of the Dutch and French civil wars was the part these exiles played in the affairs of their home countries and their adopted ones. As early as 1560, the French church in London had a blinding brilliance when Nicholas des Gallars, who would soon serve as chaplain to the queen of Navarre, took up his role as senior pastor there. Indeed, when John Calvin released des Gallars from Geneva to go on his mission to England, he wrote to Edmund Grindal, bishop of London, that “I deplore wholeheartedly that the Churches of the entire realm [of England] have not been organised as the godly people would have wished it at the outset.”2 By the time des Gallars left, Bishop Grindal wrote to Calvin that he had found des Gallars “of great use both to myself and our churches.”3 It was the personal relationship between des Gallars and Grindal, built on friendship, mutual trust, and common beliefs, that catapulted the reputation of the French church to rise even further.

  The history of the “stranger,” or foreign, churches stretched back to the reign of Edward VI (1547–53), when the Polish reformer John à Lasco received generous church privileges from the king.4 It was a natural consequence of these good relations between the stranger French church and the English crown that several thousand Huguenot immigrants flooded into London seeking asylum, both before and after August 1572. After all, the status of their church and the welcome they would receive from its superintendent, Edmund Grindal, had been widely known.

  The truth was that England needed these immigrants. They were no idle or economic asylum seekers. They were skilled merchants, courtiers, civil servants, printers and stationers, shipwrights, lawyers, accountants, or doctors who fled the seemingly unending waves of genocide. Elizabeth knew that in opening her arms to the “poor and hungry masses yearning to be free” she would strengthen England economically and politically.

  Edmund Grindal, the superintendent in charge of “looking after,” or perhaps better phrased as “looking into,” his stranger churches and their flocks, was a moderate bishop. Grindal assured the leaders of these churches that he would not interfere with their ceremonies or rites but would remain available to them should they require his guidance for disciplinary purposes. While this may seem extraordinary, Grindal had been a Marian exile and was well acquainted with the Geneva doctrine. He also remained sympathetic to its teachings.

  Consequently, it became natural for the heart and soul of the exiled Calvinist and Huguenot community in England to be centered on London. Émigrés from Spain, the Netherlands, France, Italy, and Austria all made their homes there and were allowed to worship in their own form of Protestantism under special license from Elizabeth, denied to them in their countries of origin. As the 1570s progressed, the time was ripe to proliferate their beliefs on the winds of change blowing throughout the realm. Arguably, nothing could be more natural than for their organizations and liberties to create an overwhelming urge among English Protestants to strive for their golden example.

  * * *

  The role of women in the new religious communities was even more often overlooked. Yet within both the English and stranger framework, women played an unusually significant role. Just as London was the center for exploring different Protestant forms of worship, the home and hearth dominated by women became the crucible for Protestant church reform. While the role played by Catholic women, such as the
ladies of the Vaux family, has long been acknowledged, the contribution of godly women to the Protestant cause has by and large been ignored.

  This may be in part due to bishops like John Whitgift who felt that their influence was exaggerated, with many women preachers being of the “lower sort.” However, Bishop Grindal harkened back to the Vestments Controversy of the 1560s when women “hooted at” him with cries of “wear horns” at St. Anne’s Blackfriars. It was a bitter memory. At times, the moderate Grindal recalled that he had had to distance himself from the “eagerness of their affection, that maketh them, which way soever they take, diligent in drawing their husbands, children, servants, friends and allies in the same way.”5

  Yet women believed themselves to be the “weaker vessel,” the descendants of Eve, who brought man down from the Garden of Eden. They were the perpetrators of the Original Sin, or so at least the Bible said and everyone believed. Most of these “activist” women found the Church of England perplexing and nonresponsive to their needs. With the Puritan emphasis on personal preaching and their public prophesyings, where laity and clergy were taught and exchanged ideas openly, suddenly women were able to ask meaningful questions and receive answers. Women like Lady Elizabeth Russell, Lady Walsingham, and the Countess of Sussex (foundress of Sidney Sussex College at Cambridge) all sought private as well as public solace from their male preacher counterparts. The Puritan preacher Thomas Wilcox wrote to one of his lady correspondents who was in the “fearful tempest of her perplexities … most heartily” beseeching her to go “forward and faint not in the course of godliness.”6 These were no wayward innkeepers’ wives or strumpets. They were well-educated women who reflected an overwhelming need to communicate directly with their preachers on a highly personal level. Among the most notable activist women was the exceptional Anne Locke.