Her Majesty's Spymaster

by Stephen Budiansky

  But at the crucial instant, as the Admiral entered the rue des Fossés-Saint-Germain late on a bright summer’s morning on his usual route from the Louvre, he had bent down to adjust an ill-fitting shoe, or perhaps to consult more closely a letter he was reading, or perhaps just to spit; and the arquebus balls that struck him merely carried away a right index finger and ploughed a furrow in his left forearm up to the elbow.

  A party of the Admiral’s men ran to the house from which the shots had come and broke down the front door; they rushed in just in time to hear, through a back door that stood swinging open, the sound of clattering hoofs as the would-be assassin made good his escape on a horse that, subsequent investigation would reveal, had been left saddled and bridled in the cloister of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois just to the rear. The still-smoking arquebus lay on a bed in a chamber on the ground floor.

  In view of the bewilderingly contradictory royal statements that would emanate from the palace in the ensuing days—righteous indignation one day, bloodthirsty approval the next—the initial reaction of his Most Christian Majesty Charles IX to the news that Gaspard de Coligny, seigneur de Châtillon, Admiral of France, adviser to the King, had been shot in broad daylight not a hundred paces from the Palace of the Louvre at least had the virtue of petulant frankness. The twenty-two-year-old King cursed, smashed his tennis racket, screamed, “What, nothing but trouble?” and went off to sulk.

  The royal surgeon, having snipped off the mangled end of Coligny’s severed finger and painfully extracted the copper ball from his arm, declared his patient out of danger.

  A medical diagnosis: not a political one.

  Later in the day, the King, his composure recovered, made the grand gesture of calling upon the wounded Admiral at his lodgings on the rue de Béthisy, to pay his respects in person. The King swore he would see justice done. In a letter dispatched to his ambassador in London the same day, he hastened to reassure his English allies that “this wicked act stems from the enmity between Coligny’s house and that of the Duke of Guise,” nothing more. That the Admiral was the military hero of the Protestants in the late, terrible civil wars of religion, that the Guises were the most powerful and vehement Catholic party, was not to be considered. The Edict of Pacification that had ended the war two years before was to continue to be “observed in all points,” including the Catholic state’s extraordinary concession of toleration of Protestant worship. A feud between two families would not be permitted to reopen wounds so recently healed. He, the King, had given an order that “they shall not drag my subjects into their quarrels.”

  All very fine and magnificent, but the subjects had their own ideas. Throughout that sweltering August, Paris—Catholic, ruined, hungry, poor—had filled with strutting Huguenot noblemen, many openly carrying arms, many wearing the austere, dark, somber clothing of Calvinist believers, in its own way just as ostentatious and maddening as if they had flaunted their wealth and newly recovered status with a brilliant display of silk, lace, and jewels. Their coming was to seal a final act of religious reconciliation, the wedding of their Protestant Prince of Navarre with the Catholic King’s sister. Instead, it had brought every fanatic out of the woodwork. “God will not suffer this execrable coupling!” Franciscan preachers screamed, prophesying torrents of blood, urging the mob to grasp salvation by slaughtering the heretics.

  The ceremony itself, a carefully orchestrated compromise of the two faiths, picked at all the old scabs, reminded everyone of the incendiary insults that had been traded for decades, the single words and gestures that had the power to flash into white-hot hatred and violence in a second; the leaves of the Protestant Bible that had been stuffed into the mouths of Huguenot corpses by a Catholic mob in Provence, the desecration of the host in Tournai (“God of paste!” mocked the Protestant mob as they crumbled and trampled the wafers), or the murder of a hapless baker guarding the holy wafers inside a church in Paris; the rumors of sexual orgies that the Protestants practiced after their nocturnal psalm-singing, or the hundreds of concubines said to be kept for the pleasure of the priests and canons in Lyon; the “vermin” of heresy, the “vile filth” of the mass.

  Two bishops had refused outright to assist in a marriage that the Pope himself had condemned as “an insult to God and a danger to souls.” The Cardinal of Bourbon, pressured to preside, finally agreed, on condition that it was understood he would bless the union not in his capacity as a priest but merely as uncle of the bridegroom. Two Italian prelates (“rather dubious characters,” the Spanish Ambassador observed) were found to assist. The marriage itself would be consecrated not inside a church but on a dais set up on the porch of Notre Dame; when mass was said inside the cathedral beforehand, Navarre and the Protestants would absent themselves.

  That compromise had not, however, anticipated the Catholic mobs that gathered outside Notre Dame to heckle and taunt the waiting Protestants when they withdrew to avoid being present during the mass they so abhorred: “We will make you go in!” the mob shouted over and over.

  The four days of official festivities following the wedding had been a succession of more subtle and courtly taunts. The King’s brother Henry, the twenty-year-old Duke of Anjou—“Monsieur,” he was always called—arranged a series of elaborate pageants and tournaments that somehow always ended in the humiliation of the Huguenot lords. At the Petit-Bourbon, the King and his noble guests enacted The Mystery of the Three Worlds; the Protestants found themselves held “prisoner” by Tartarus and his devils for an hour while their ladies, cast as nymphs in Paradise, danced and held hands with the angels, Monsieur, and his royal brothers. The night before the attempted assassination of Coligny, Monsieur staged yet another tournament; this time the Protestant lords were cast as infidel Turks, duly trounced by the King and his brothers—dressed as Amazons, women warriors, no less.

  The wedding guests seethed; the Catholic zealots of Paris seethed; the city’s vast army of beggars, thieves, and cutthroats that emerged each night from the “Court of Miracles” seethed. And then the hero of the Protestant church militant was shot from ambush in broad daylight on a busy street in the heart of Paris, but not, alas, killed outright.

  The Admiral was shot late on the morning of Friday, the 22nd of August 1572, at the end of the week of the wedding festivities. By the following day, the judicial investigation ordered by the King had, to the surprise of absolutely no one, inculpated the Duke of Guise. The house from which the shot had been fired belonged to a Guise retainer, the Canon Villemur, former tutor of the Duke himself. Villemur was away on a journey, but the supervisor of the Guise household had appeared a few days before to introduce to Villemur’s house-keeper a man who would be staying there in the Canon’s absence. This was the man who was seen galloping off in a gray cloak leaving a smoking arquebus and a heavy purse of money behind him.

  Rumors swirled through the city that Saturday. The Huguenots were planning to avenge themselves. The Catholics were preparing to appoint their own captain-general if the King did not act to neutralize the threat. Monsieur, traveling forth in his coach to see for himself the reports that Paris was on the brink of riot, was greeted by crowds chanting the names of famous Catholic victories in the recent civil wars.

  An order went out from the palace forbidding citizens to take up arms. A royal guard of fifty French and Swiss arquebusiers was commanded to protect the wounded Admiral against any further outrages. The governors of the provinces were instructed to maintain order.

  But as night closed over Paris, with the shadows came whispers of other, stealthy preparations. The district captains of the town militia were to have a man in every house armed, with a white scarf tied to his left arm and a torch at the ready, prepared to assemble when the tocsin sounded. The gates of the city were shut, the keys secured. The boats across the Seine were quietly gathered, artillery moved into place before the Hôtel de Ville, the seat of the Paris city government.

  More ominously, the King’s guard at the Louvre were to let none of N
avarre’s retinue leave.

  Strangest of all, when the royal guard that had been charged with the Admiral’s safety arrived to take up their position in the rue de Béthisy, they were under the command of one Captain Cosseins—an old and sworn personal enemy of Coligny’s.

  Francis Walsingham had been England’s ambassador to the Court of Charles IX for nineteen months. It was the first foray for this rather ascetic, undoubtedly Protestant, and notably clear-thinking gentleman of forty into the perils and complexities of high office. He had not had a particularly happy time of it.

  “My private life hath made me utterly unacquainted with that skill that the dealings in Prince’s affairs requireth,” Walsingham confided to a friend. His embassy had been a maximum of tedium and a minimum of results; daily the English Ambassador had to negotiate a labyrinth of courtly dissimulation. The nominal alliance between France and England, and the nominal peace between France’s warring factions, wound in and out through religious, and party, and family intrigue that would have confounded Machiavelli himself. For months on end, Walsingham had painstakingly pursued negotiations for a marriage between his mistress Elizabeth the Queen of England and one of the French King’s younger brothers—first Monsieur, then the eighteen-year-old Duke of Alençon. At every turn there were diplomatic and political pitfalls. In Paris, the Papal Nuncio and the Spanish Ambassador were constantly intriguing behind Walsingham’s back to break up any projected liaison between the Protestant Queen of England and the Catholic royal house of France. So, too, for his own reasons, was one of Walsingham’s own superiors on the Privy Council, the Earl of Leicester: if any native English nobleman had hopes of carrying away the prize himself, it was Leicester, ever the Queen’s favorite courtier. Back in London, the Earl was simultaneously assuring both the Queen and the French Ambassador, with the same insinuating confidence to each, that if only each would hold firm the other would be sure to give way on the remaining points of contention holding up the intricate negotiations.

  Walsingham, Protestant Puritan that he was, had sought to wend a careful way through his own labyrinth of private and public allegiances by scrupulously declining to express his own opinion of the Queen’s projected marriage to a Catholic, by doing not one iota more or less than he was instructed. Everyone around the Court in Paris tried to get him to tip his hand as to what he truly thought of the matter, and to all he presented the same impassive face. “My general answer,” he carefully explained to Leicester, “is that I left my private passions behind me, and do here submit to the passions of my Prince, to execute whatsoever she shall command me, as precisely as I may. And as for her marriage, whensoever it shall please God to incline her to that change I should forget my duty towards her and my country if I should not like very well thereof.”

  But then there was the maddening factor that it had never been clear whether the Queen herself, a past master at diplomatic dissimulation, wanted the negotiations to succeed or not. To her dutiful ambassador she sent one contradictory hint after another. It might have been subtle politics, for as long as the hope for a marriage was alive the French would remain friendly, and the irksome advisers at home who kept urging upon her the need to marry, and produce an heir, and so safeguard the royal succession, would be silenced; a good strategy if at heart she had no intention of marrying.

  But then at times it seemed that she was merely uncertain herself, or that she was enjoying her prerogative to act like a woman, and a queen, and coyly keep everyone guessing. Either way, her poor ambassador was frequently left bewildered. In late July 1572, Elizabeth had sent Walsingham a letter instructing him to tell the French King that the twenty-year age difference between her Majesty and the young Alençon made a marriage impossible. Four days later, she sent a second letter stating that she believed the age difference might well be overcome—and instructing Walsingham to show the King both of these mutually contradictory letters at the same time.

  “I see your negotiation shall be full of perplexities,” William Cecil, Elizabeth’s Principal Secretary, sympathized.

  Meanwhile, the job of ambassador was destroying Walsingham, financially and physically. The expenses of the office, which he was expected to cover mostly from his own private income as a landowning gentleman, were crippling: like “to bring me to beggary,” he said. In March 1571, after a mere two months at the post, Walsingham had written Cecil—Lord Burghley, as he had just become—beseeching his Lordship to save him from the financial ruin that already seemed a certainty.

  “Your Lordship knoweth that necessity hath no law,” Walsingham began, by way of apology for broaching so unseemly a topic; but her Majesty’s allowance of £10 per week was not enough to cover even the minimal costs of maintaining his household, though he spent less on food and kept fewer horses than his predecessor. He had brought £800 of his own money with him; already he had less than £300 left.

  Things had only gotten worse since. A year into his job, Walsingham told Burghley he had so far spent £1,600 beyond his income in meeting his ambassadorial expenses; he had been forced to sell some land and borrow £730 against his future salary. Now his expenses were running £200 a month, “notwithstanding my diet is thin, my family reduced to as small a proportion as may be, and my horse being only twelve.”

  The ambassador’s health had been a trial to him, too. An attack of the stone the previous autumn had left him unable to pass water, almost despairing of his life, begging to London to send a replacement before he was beyond “the reach of cure.” For two months he had recuperated under the care of physicians in Paris. On other occasions he had tried to take matters into his own hands and cope with this recurring ill, and its associated griping colics, by dosing himself with copious quantities of one dubious physic or another that left him out of commission for days.

  And so each month that passed added another £160 to the ambassador’s debts, and the perplexities of serving a ruler who had long since perfected the fine art of calculated bafflement deepened, and so the night of Saturday the 23rd of August 1572 found Mr. Ambassador Walsingham, his wife and four-year-old daughter, his reduced establishment of servants and his twelve horses, and a young visiting Englishman by the name of Philip Sidney ensconced at the English ambassador’s lodgings on the Quai des Barnardins, across the Seine and upriver from official Paris. It was the eve of the feast day of Saint Bartholomew: Bartholomew, who had the distinction in the Gospels of being enumerated among the Apostles of Jesus and then never being mentioned again; though later tradition had it that he met his end by being flayed alive, and so the more enthusiastic martyrologists of the Catholic Church were ever wont to depict him carrying his own skin.

  It was at four in the morning when the unexpected sound of the ringing bells of the church of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois, halfway between the Louvre and the rue de Béthisy, broke the still of the ominous night.

  By dawn the clash of other bells, punctuated now by gunfire and the unmistakable bruit of a city in full riot, could be heard at the ambassador’s residence, coming from across the river.

  The first reports to arrive were reassuring. The King was acting quickly to suppress the disorder. The Admiral was being safely guarded by the King’s own men.

  But there soon came rather more tangible and contradictory evidence: terrified Englishmen pounding on the door, seeking sanctuary from the ravening mob, a mob whose fury had only grown as the day went on. And then, disguised as a groom, came Coligny’s own lieutenant, François de Beauvais, seigneur de Briquemault. He had made his way over rooftops, across the river, God alone knew how. The tale he bore completely altered the complexion of things. This was no riot; it was a systematic massacre, and it had begun in the dead of the night with the horrific murder of Coligny himself.

  The story was soon everywhere. Shortly before four o’clock in the morning, Cosseins and his men had suddenly pounded on the door of Coligny’s house, demanding to be admitted in the name of the King. They instantly stabbed one of the Admiral’s gentlem
en who had been guarding the door from the inside, cleared the stairway with a volley of arquebus fire, then rushed the stair and burst into the Admiral’s bedchamber. Two of the Duke of Guise’s henchmen rushed in along with Cosseins’s Swiss: they finished off the Admiral with a pike thrust through his body.

  The Duke himself, who had come to make sure the job was done right this time, shouted up from the street below to throw the body out the window. He briefly surveyed the lifeless form of his dead adversary lying on the street in front of him, then kicked it in the face. One of his men cut off the head to take back to the Louvre. And then the crowd of hundreds of street urchins that had instantly gathered to cheer the proceedings set upon what was left, hacking off the hands and genitals and dragging the remainder on a macabre tour through the city that would continue for the next three days.

  Troops of Guise’s men and the King’s guard then fanned out through the surrounding streets to hunt down other Protestant lords who lodged nearby. The ringing of the bells of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois had been the signal for a simultaneous massacre of the King’s guests at the Louvre to begin. Swiss guards went from room to room, methodically seizing the Huguenots, disarming them, and pushing them into the inner courtyard of the palace, where they were run through with pikes and added to a growing pile of corpses.

  And then the mob and the city militia began; methodical, too, but far less discriminating. “The sword being given to the common people,” as Francis Walsingham would later describe it, they went from house to house through the city’s commercial quarter dispatching any Huguenots they found; all the better if their victims were booksellers or binders or printers who had helped spread heretical ideas, better still if they were goldsmiths or jewelers or bankers to whom the opprobrium of heresy was added the attraction of movable wealth.