A German, named Besme, who had been from his childhood a dependant upon the Duke of Guise, unmoved by the venerable mien and dauntless bearing of Coligny, drove his sword through his body, and, inflicting a deep gash across his face, left him in the hands of his associates, who despatched him with repeated blows. His only complaint was a regret that he should perish by the arm of a menial. To satisfy the impatient anxiety of the Duke and D'Angouleme, the bleeding corpse was thrust through a window into the court-yard, where it was spurned by the foot of his malignant foe. Meantime, the general havoc had begun; whispers were spread of a conspiracy among the reformed; the Louvre itself was one of the earliest scenes of carnage; and many of the attendants upon the King of Navarre and the Prince of Condé were put to death one by one, in cold blood, under the very eye of the King. In the tumult, which gradually extended to every part of the city, several persons of distinction fell an early sacrifice; and in one instance only, that of La Rochefoucault, did the infatuated King appear to relent.

In the gay and brilliant society of La Rochefoucault, the King professed to find extraordinary attraction; and he granted him, although a Huguenot, unreserved access to his privacy. It was near midnight, on the eve of the Massacre, that this seeming favourite prepared to retire from the Palace, after many hours spent in careless hilarity. More than once did the King urge his stay, that they might trifle, as he said, through the remainder of the night; or to obviate all difficulty, the Count, if he so pleased, might be lodged, even in the Royal Chamber. But La Rochefoucault pleaded weariness and want of sleep; and, in spite of all opposition, took leave of his perfidious friend and Sovereign in sportive words, which implied the freedom and familiarity of their intercourse. Even when he was afterwards roused from sleep by the morning tumult at his door, no misgiving crossed his mind: he imagined that the King had followed him to inflict one of those practical jokes which suited the boisterous taste both of the times and of the individual; and hastily throwing on his clothes, he assured the masked band, which he did not scruple to admit, and among whom he supposed Charles to be included, that he was not taken at advantage, that they could not now feel privileged to flog him, for he was already up and dressed. The reply was a thrust of the sword by one of the disguised company, which prostrated the unsuspicious victim at the feet of his murderers. Pp. 12, 13.

About 2,000 Huguenots are believed to have perished on the first day of the massacre; and surely nothing could have afforded a more disgusting spectacle than the evening promenade of the King and his court, including Catherine and the ladies of her suite, to view the naked bodies of the stripped and mangled victims. Charles at first declared that the slaughter had been projected by the Guises without his knowledge; but he was subsequently flattered into a public announcement that it had been perpetrated by his command, in consequence of a discovered plot, which was to end in the usurpation of the crown by the Admiral Coligny. Even the historians, Davila and Montluc, who were closely attached to the interest of the court, give but little credit to

this pretended conspiracy, for the suppression of which the court, in the mockery of devotion, attended a solemn thanksgiving. Orders were also issued, enjoining the Huguenots to abstain from all public and private assemblies, in failure whereof, the provincial governors were instructed to fall upon them and cut them in pieces, as enemies of the crown." From the day on which the messenger arrived the streets of Lyons ran with blood; and the most barbarous enormities were committed in many other parts of France. At Orleans 1000, at Rouen 500, Huguenots were put to the sword. During two months the carnage raged, in which space of time the number of victims fell little short of 30,000, whereof one third may be allotted to Paris.

When intelligence of the Massacre was first announced at Rome, the Vatican gave loose to unbounded joy. The Pope and Cardinals proceeded at once, from the Conclave in which the King's despatches had been read, to offer thanks, before the Altar, for the great blessing which Heaven had vouchsafed to the Romish See and to all Christendom. Šalvoes of artillery thundered at nightfall from the ramparts of St. Angelo; the streets were illuminated; and no victory ever achieved by the arms of the Pontificate elicited more tokens of festivity. The Pope also, as if resolved that an indestructible evidence of the perversion of moral feeling which Fanaticism necessarily generates should be transmitted to posterity, gave orders for the execution of a commemorative medal. He had already been anticipated in Paris; and the effigies of Gregory XIII. and of Charles IX. may still be seen, in Numismatic Cabinets, connected with triumphant legends and symbolical devices, illustrative of the Massacre.

The Cardinal of Lorraine presented the messenger with a thousand pieces of gold; and unable to restrain the extravagance of his delight, exclaimed that he believed the King's heart to have been filled by a sudden inspiration from God, when he gave orders for the slaughter of the Heretics. Two days afterwards, he celebrated a solemn service in the Church of St. Louis, with extraordinary magnificence; on which occasion, the Pope, the whole Ecclesiastical Body, and many resident Ambassadors assisted. An elaborate Inscription was then affixed to the portals of the Church, congratulating God, the Pope, the College of Cardinals, and the Senate and People of Rome, on the stupendous results and the almost incredible effects of the advice, the aid, and the prayers which had been offered during a period of twelve years. Pp. 34-37."

On the first day of the massacre the young King of Navarre and the Prince of Condé were arrested, and threats were employed to force from them a recantation of the reformed religion. The former was

easily tempted into compliance; but even the threat of the Bastile and of death failed to shake the constancy of Condé. At length, however, he was rather cheated than forced into compliance; and the appearance of the youthful Princes at mass, backed by the letters which they had been prevailed upon to address to the Pope, imploring his forgiveness, removed all doubt as to their change.

The last ferocious act of Charles, which grew immediately out of the St. Bartholomew, was a mock trial, instituted against the deceased Admiral and his adherents in the pretended conspiracy. The sentence passed against Coligny, as a traitor, involved confiscation of all his property, perpetual infamy, and the suppression of his name. His body, if it could be found, (and if

that were not possible, his effigy,) was to be drawn on a hurdle through the streets, and gibbeted, first in the Place de Grêve for six hours, afterwards on a loftier spot at Montfaucon. His armorial bearings were to be dragged at a horse's tail through every town in which they might have been set up, and to be defaced and broken in pieces by the common executioner; his statues, busts, and portraits were to be demolished in like manner. His chief seat at Chastillon was to be razed to the ground; no building was ever again to be founded on its site; the trees in the park were to be cut down to half their natural height; the glebe was to be sown with salt; and, in some central spot, a column was to be erected, bearing on it this Decree engraved in brass. His children had escaped the fury of the King during the Massacre; but they were now proscribed, degraded from their nobility, declared incapable of bearing witness in courts of law, stripped of all civil privileges, and the power of holding any public office, or of enjoying any property within the limits of France for ever. An annual public religious service and procession was at the same time instituted, to commemorate the mercy of Heaven, which had so signally averted calamity from the kingdom on the Festival of St. Bartholomew.

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It was not, however, on the dead only, that the vengeance of the Court was content to wreak itself in these moments of subsidence. Two living victims also were provided for sacrifice. Cavagne, a Counsellor of the Parliament of Toulouse, and Briquemaut, who at seventy years of age had retired from the profession of arms, in which he had long served with honour, were arrested as Huguenots, a short time after the Massacre. The escape of Briquemaut during the Parisian carnage, was attended with remarkable circumstances. ceiving that every outlet was blockaded, and that the murderers were in close pursuit, he stripped off his clothes, and throwing himself among a heap of bleeding corpses, lay upon his face and counterfeited death. His nakedness prevented examination and discovery by the wretches who followed in the train of the assassins, to rifle their fallen victims; and at night, wrapping round him such rags as were near at hand, he stole away unobserved, and took refuge at the house of the English Ambassador. There he found employment in the stables, and he was dressing a horse at the moment in which he was recognized and arrested.

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The charge brought against him and Cavagne, was participation in the Admiral's conspiracy; with the exception, therefore, of the merely personal clauses, their sentence was similar to that which we have just recited; and De Thou, who heard it read to them, notices the fortitude with which Briquemaut listened, notwithstanding the unusual ignominy with which one nobly born was adjudged to the gallows, till he found that in some of the penalties his children also were included. "What have they done to merit this severity?" was the inquiry of the heart-broken veteran. Between five and six in the evening of the 27th of October, the sad procession quitted the Conciergerie for the Place de Grêve. In the mouth of the straw effigy, by which the Admiral was represented, some heartless mocker had placed a tooth-pick, to increase the resemblance by imitating one of his common habits. At the windows of the Hôtel de Ville, which commanded a near view of the scaffold, were assembled Charles (to whom his Consort on that morning had presented her first-born child), the Queen Mother, and the King of Navarre who had been compelled to attend. A considerable delay took place, and some proposal appears to have been made, by which, even at the last moment, the condemned might have purchased their lives, if they would have debased themselves by treachery and falsehood. When at length the hangman had thrown them from the ladder, Charles ordered flambeaux to be held close to their faces, in order that he might distinctly view the variety of expression which each exhibited, in his parting agony. Suetonius does not record a more fiend-like anecdote of the worst of the Cæsars. The populace imitated the brutality of their Sovereign. During the long and fearful pause which had occurred on the scaffold, and the

many hours through which the bound and defenceless prisoners endured that lingering expectation far more bitter than death itself, their suffering was heightened by cruel outrages inflicted by the rabble; who, when life was extinct, dragged the bodies from the gallows, and savagely tore them in pieces.→→→ Pp. 50-54.

During these horrible and disgusting atrocities, Sir Francis Walsingham, the sagacious and penetrating councillor of Elizabeth, was the resident ambassador from England. His interview with Catherine after the massacre was of a truly interesting nature. He did not hesitate to convey to her the sense of disgust which would be felt by his mistress at such gross and criminal outrages; and his despatches notice the brutal sportiveness with which the Parisians spoke of them as a Bartholomew breakfast, and a Florence banquet." No wonder that he eagerly solicited his recall from his painful embassy. The detestation in which the name of the French court was held in England, is thus described in a strain of rude, yet powerful, eloquence, by his friend and correspondent, Sir Thomas Smith, the Queen's Secretary :

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"What warrant can the French make, now seals and words of Princes being traps to catch Innocents and bring them to butchery? If the Admiral and all those murdered on that bloody Bartholomew day were guilty, why were they not apprehended, imprisoned, interrogated, and judged? But so much made of as might be, within two hours of the assassination! Is that the manner to handle men either culpable or suspected? So is the journeyer slain by the robber; so is the hen of the fox; so the hind of the lion; so Abel of Cain; so the innocent of the wicked; so Abner of Joab! But grant they were guilty, they dreamed treason that night in their sleep; what did the innocent men, women, and children do at Lyons? What did the sucking children and their mothers at Rouen deserve? at Caen, at Rochelle? What is done yet we have not heard, but I think shortly we shall hear. Will God, think you, still sleep? Will not their blood ask vengeance? Shall not the earth be accursed that hath sucked up the innocent blood poured out like water upon it?"-P. 55.

In the general dispersion which succeeded these horrors, the Huguenots took refuge in England, in the Palatinate, and a part of them in Switzerland. A remnant, however, still remained behind; and the melancholy records of this persecuted body in their firm adherence to the Protestant cause, till the death of the succeeding monarch, Henry III., occupies a major portion of Mr. Smedley's narrative. On the death of Henry by the hand of an assassin, who acted under the instigation of a bull of excommunication, his successor, the famous Henry IV. in making every other concession to the Romanists, refused with the most decided firmness to sanction a prohibition of the exercise of the reformed religion. At length, however, alarmed by popular agitation, he announced his readiness to listen to the instruction of a certain number of Catholic Prelates, concerning the disputes which had occasioned schism in the church. The result of the conference, whatever might have been his previous sincerity of attachment to the Protestant cause, ended in his reconciliation with the Papal See; a

confession of faith was offered for his subscription; and on an appointed day he made a solemn ratification of his re-admission into communion with the Church of Rome. The concluding remarks of Mr. Smedley on this event are judicious and appropriate.

The resolution thus finally adopted by Henry, in the most important crisis of his life, occasions sorrow rather than surprise. To hesitate in pronouncing his condemnation, would be, in some degree, to become partakers of his sin; yet so dazzling are the brighter portions of his character-or, to speak with greater justice, so deservedly in many points does he command both our attachment and our admiration-that, perhaps, no one ever contemplated this his fall, without an ardent and a very pardonable anxiety to diminish its heaviness. Nor is it difficult to find palliations. A firmer sense of the paramount obligations of religious and moral duty, than that which at any season appears to have influenced his conduct, might, through God's grace, have enabled him to subdue the strong worldly temptations by which he was encompassed. But how adverse to the attainment of such a spiritual armour had been the circumstances of his life, and of the evil times upon which he was cast! It has been pleaded in his behalf, that the entanglements of state policy in great measure deprived him of free agency; and no one can read the apology which he offered to Wilkes, the special Ambassador from Elizabeth, without admitting his difficulties. He had already postponed, during nearly four years, the performance of the promise which he had given at his accession, and both parties manifested distrust on account of this long indecision. The Catholic Lords in his service began to oppose the League unsteadily and reluctantly; and many of the Reformed altogether withdrew. Eight hundred gentlemen and nine whole Huguenot Regiments had abandoned his camp; and the demands of his Romanist followers increased in proportion as they discovered his weakness. His conversion, he said, at one blow destroyed the Tiers-purti, frustrated the election of Guise, secured valuable foreign alliances, and conciliated the general affection of his subjects. So discreetly was it arranged also, that by avoiding any display of controversy, he spared the Huguenots the mortification of being dragged into a contest, in which, whatever might be its absolute result, it was necessary that their defeat should be recorded.-Pp. 361-363.

There were, indeed, obvious vices in the character of Henry, well inclining him to adopt a creed which holds out the privilege of commutation and compromise for lapses from purity; which pays the debts of conscience by observances which mere human authority has stamped with a fictitious value; and which allows the nice adjustment of a balance between pleasure and penance. But it may be reasonably doubted whether he had even thus far reflected upon the points in contest; whether in truth he had ever considered the change as more than a form, which, according to an observation of Sully in another place, he had made up his mind should not stop him. His own declaration, although made in jocular terms, was perhaps not remote from truth, when he pronounced the question what religion he himself really believed, to be one of three things inscrutable by human intelligence. The convert who unshrinkingly encounters peril, or even disadvantage, by the adoption of new opinions, will obtain a ready acknowledgment of his sincerity; although his act may, perhaps, be imputed to effervescent feeling rather than to sound discretion. But the chances are fearfully against a belief in real conviction, when self-interest and conversion appear linked hand in hand; when the act of renunciation tends to aggrandisement in wealth, power, station, or influence. The current value of motives varies according to our assurance of their freedom from alloy; and they become depreciated in the same proportion in which they become mixed.-Pp. 364, 365.

After the abjuration of Henry, the history of the Huguenot Church