The Elizabethans (21 page)

Cecil urged Walsingham upon his arrival in Paris to obtain a portrait of the youth to send back to London. No one could pretend that the Queen was contracting a love match, but they did not want a repetition of what happened when Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII, had taken one look at his fourth bride, Anne of Cleves, and brutally concluded that she was a Flanders mare. The portrait in paint not being found, Walsingham resorted to mere words, and they were the grovelling, circumlocutory words of a man who queasily knew that if his grotesque mission were successful, the tiny duke would become the King of England. ‘In structure,’ wrote Walsingham, ‘by judgment of others that viewed us together, he was esteemed three fingers higher than myself.’ As for the deep pockmarks of the duke’s acned face, ‘in complexion somewhat sallow, his body of very good shape, his leg long and small, but reasonably well-proportioned’.
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It would have been a strange match indeed, had it come to anything. Preposterous as it seems with hindsight that the two should have married, it remained a possibility, on and off, throughout the decade, and even when events appeared to scupper the chances of a French match for ever in 1572, the marriage with François became something that clearly excited Elizabeth herself in 1579.

Yet it was far from being a matter of personal fulfilment, still less of love. The Alençon match, if it took place at all, would have been a matter of politics, a diplomatic alliance played out against the volatile religio-political climate of Europe in the 1570s. The diplomatic preliminary to an Anglo-French marriage was painstakingly worked out in the Treaty of Blois (April 1572): the English tried to make the French accept the Earl of Mar as rightful regent of Scotland and to drop their support for the restoration of Mary Stuart; both sides agreed to supply as much as 6,000 troops and eight ships in defence of the other, in the event of their being attacked by Spain. England and France were now at least notionally allied against Spain. But the treaty had scarcely been signed before the flaw was shown in the alliance: the lack of religious sympathy between the ruling French dynasty and England. The Duke of Alva put down a Protestant rebellion with the utmost severity in the Netherlands, and Elizabeth offered covert help to the Dutch Protestants. It is not as if the Dutch Protestants had no allies in France; but, rather, that the obvious preference of Elizabeth, Cecil and the great weight of opinion in the Council were with these Huguenots – and completely at odds with the family of her suitor.

Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, a prominent Huguenot, urged his government to make war against the Spaniards in the Low Countries. It would have been a brilliant tactic as far as France was concerned – witness the anxiety occasioned by the very idea in England. In June 1572 Cecil wrote to Walsingham warning that French control of Flemish ports would mean severe restrictions on English trade. The next month Queen Elizabeth sent Sir Humphrey Gilbert with more than 1,000 volunteer soldiers to occupy the Zeeland towns of Flushing and Sluys against the Spanish, to prevent their occupation by the French. It was a typical example of Elizabeth not wishing her left hand to know what was being done by her right, since the expedition was unofficial and, if it failed, Gilbert knew that the Queen would disown him.

Meanwhile in France, Catherine de’ Medici had cold feet about the war, and worried about the influence that the Huguenots were having on French foreign policy. (Clearly, to defeat Spain in the Low Countries would be to strengthen Dutch Protestants and was in the interests of their prince, William of Orange.) The King of France married his daughter, Marguerite of Valois, to the Protestant Prince of Navarre, an alliance that was deeply unpopular with Catholics. (A generation would pass before the young man, as Henri IV, would convert to Catholicism with the cynical observation that Paris is worth a Mass.)

Four days after the wedding, on 22 August 1572, Coligny was walking along the rue de Béthisy after meeting the Duc d’Anjou at the Louvre. He bent to adjust an overshoe that he wore as protection against the filth of the Parisian street, and the action saved his life. At that very moment a bullet from an arquebus was fired at the admiral from the iron grille of a window in the house of Canon Pierre de Pille, former preceptor to the Duc de Guise. The would-be assassin escaped through the cloister of the nearby church, and Coligny, who had been hit, was carried home with a shattered left elbow, bleeding profusely.

Playing tennis in the Louvre, the King had heard the gunshot. When he heard of the assassination attempt he feigned anger and sent his physician, Ambrose Paré, to tend to the wounded man. But the King knew what was planned for the capital’s Protestant population, of whom Coligny was a figurehead.

At dawn on the feast of St Bartholomew, 24 August, the tocsin was rung and the well-primed mob were set to their task. Coligny was the first to die, stabbed in the chest as he lay in a bedroom supposedly guarded by royal troops. His murderer was a Bohemian follower of the Ducs de Guise, known as Dianovitz or Besme. Coligny’s body was thrown out of the window into the street. The Duc de Guise himself and the bastard brother of the King, the Duc d’Angoulême, watched as Coligny’s head was hacked from its body, which was hung from chains on a public gibbet at Montfaucon. A dozen other Huguenot leaders were murdered in swift succession. François, Comte de La Rochefoucauld, who had been chatting and joking only hours before with the King, was stabbed. The Seigneur de la Force and one of his sons had their throats slashed.

By now the mob was busily at work, looting Huguenot houses and killing Protestants. No accurate tally has ever been made of the exact count of those slaughtered. It seems as though at least 3,000 were killed in Paris alone. As the carnage, lasting two or three months, spread to other parts of France – to Toulouse, to Bordeaux, to Lyons, Rouen and Orléans – some say that 10,000 were killed.
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A recent history places the death count as high as 70,000.
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Certainly, France had never seen such an orgy of violence, and it would wait until the Terror of 1793–4 until it saw such a thing again. (Thereafter periodic internecine massacres have been a bloody feature of French life, as in the Paris Commune of 1870 and the retributory epidemic of murder after the Liberation in 1944.) The massacre lived in the French collective psyche, a terrible smoking crater, never quite extinct, ever likely to erupt with hate-filled destruction. (Three years before the Terror itself began, there was a massacre of Protestants by Catholics in Montauban, prompting the pamphleteers to see it as ‘la nouvelle Saint-Barthélemy’,
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but it was Robespierre’s full-blown Terror that truly reminded the French of the terrible legacy of St Bartholomew’s Day, 1572.)

‘But yet, O man, rage not beyond thy needs.’ This was the advice to kings and tyrants given by Philisides in Philip Sidney’s
Old Arcadia
:

Deem it no gloire to swell in tyranny

Thou art of blood; joy not to make things bleed.
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Sidney knew what he was talking about. As a young man just down from Oxford and about to start his Grand Tour of the continent, he was staying with Walsingham (as it happens, his future father-in-law) in the English Ambassador’s residence on the quai de Bernadins in Faubourg Saint-Germain. Walsingham eventually managed to smuggle his wife and infant daughter Frances, then aged about five, out of the city, but not before they had witnessed scenes of blood in which friends were killed. The Huguenot general François de Beauvais, Sieur de Briquemault, tried to take refuge with the Walsinghams, but was dragged out of the house by royal troops and later hanged.
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A new friend of Sidney’s, Pierre de la Ramée, a distinguished logician, tried to take refuge in a bookshop in the rue Saint-Jacques. After two days it seemed as if the coast was clear, but when he returned to his lodgings at the Collège de Presles, he was repeatedly stabbed as he knelt at prayer.
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In the mayhem three Englishmen were killed. Others were forced by the mob to ride through the streets of Paris to admire the piles of corpses of their fellow Protestants, and to see them floating in the Seine.
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Timothy Bright was a young Englishman who was staying at the embassy at the same time as Sidney. Bright, then a medical student, was the first Englishman to invent a system of shorthand. Fourteen years after the Paris massacre, he was to publish a classic
Treatise on Melancholy
, as well as an abridgement of Foxe’s
Book of Martyrs
. He was one of the many Englishmen who had reason to regard Foxe’s book – ghoulish as it may seem to modern taste – to be no more than an accurate account of the Counter-Reformation, red in tooth and claw. He owed his life to Walsingham, to whom he wrote, ‘Many of my countrymen, partly of acquaintance and partly of the noble houses of this realm . . . had all tasted of the rage of that furious tragedy, had not your honour shrouded them.’
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Walsingham, throughout his negotiations over the potential marriage of Queen Elizabeth to the Duc d’Alençon, had tried to convince himself that the King of France and Catherine de’ Medici had been genuine in their protestations of friendship. Now, Paris and several other French towns were awash with blood. Englishmen had been killed. The reaction of the new Pope, Gregory XIII (Ugo Boncompagni, elected 14 May 1572), was to order a solemn
Te Deum
to be sung in St Peter’s and a medal to be struck, depicting an angel holding a cross in one hand and a drawn sword in the other, with which he was massacring Protestants.
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Of King Charles IX, Walsingham wrote to Burghley, ‘I never knew so deep a dissembler.’
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Walsingham protested to the French court about the killings, and to the Council in London he reported back:

Seeing the King persecuteth that religion with all extremity that her Majesty professes . . . seeing that they that now possess his ear are sworn enemies unto her Majesty . . . seeing that the King’s own conscience . . . maketh him to repute all those of the religion, as well at home as abroad, his enemies . . . I leave it to your Honours now to judge what account you may make of the amity of this crown. If I may without presumption or offence say my opinion, considering how things presently stand, I think less peril to live with them as enemies than as friends.
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In the immediate aftermath of the massacre, the possibility of the Queen of England marrying the duc d’Alençon looked less than inviting. It dimmed Elizabeth’s hopes for an Anglo-French alliance. English foreign policy now switched from a slightly false flirtation with the House of Guise to more or less open encouragement of any Huguenot rebellion against the French Crown.

More immediately unsettling than events abroad was the threat posed by the Counter-Reformation to English stability at home. ‘Can we think,’ Walsingham asked, ‘that the fire kindled here in France will extend itself no further? . . . Let us not deceive ourselves but assuredly think that the two great monarchs of Europe together with the rest of the Papists do mean shortly to put in execution . . . the resolutions of the Council of Trent.’
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Since one Pope excommunicated Queen Elizabeth in 1570, and his successor celebrated the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre two years later with a
Te Deum
, there could be no doubt of the threat. This was felt especially warily in the North, so recently a scene of Roman Catholic insurgency. Sir Thomas Gargrave, Speaker of the House of Commons, was Vice President of the Council of the North, where he was considered ‘a great stay for the good order of these parts’ by the Earl of Huntingdon.
¹⁷
He wrote to Burghley from the North, a month after the Massacre of St Bartholomew, ‘The people here are, as I think, like others in other parts of the realm; one sort is pleased with the late affront in France, another sort lament and are appalled at it; others would seem indifferent, and those be the greatest number; they are dissemblers, and yet many of them obedient subjects, and to be led by authority, and by their landlords and officers.’ In a ‘List of the principal gentlemen in the East, North and West Ridings of Yorkshire’ Gargrave reckoned that ‘26 are Protestants, 15 doubtful or neuter, of more or less evil, and 11 of the worst sort’.
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It just was not possible to know, any more than the government of a Western nation today knows how many, among its potential terrorist population, are ‘more or less evil’ – that is, intent on murdering their fellow citizens for the sake of religion, and how many are ‘obedient subjects’. The idea of the Elizabethan Settlement in religion was that Catholics and Protestants should be prepared to come together in one national Church, which was both Catholic and Reformed. By 1572 it was by no means easy to tell how successful the experiment had been, and how much religious conformity was really a cloak for a set of divisions that could at any moment turn into an English version of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.

No wonder even moderate men such as Matthew Parker wanted Mary, Queen of Scots beheaded. He was less outright in his demand for it than was the Bishop of London,
¹⁹
but in wanting this they were asking not for vengeance against Catholics so much as the lancing of a dangerous boil. An anonymous correspondent of Leicester’s begged the Queen to remove Mary Stuart:

For God’s sake, my Lord, let not her Majesty in these great sorrows forget the greatest danger. Let her Highness be prayed to remember conscience and eternity. Let her not bring on England murders, rapes, robberies, violence, and barbarous slaughters, and the damnation of so many seduced souls by the advancement of papistry; and all for piteous pity and miserable mercy in sparing one horrible woman, who carries God’s work wherever she goes.
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