refore, was not flattering. The
most that he could do was to correct the impression that the massacre was
only a part of a more general plan for the extirpation of Protestantism
everywhere. But when the news came of the barbarous butchery of Huguenots
in Lyons and elsewhere; when Villiers, Fuguerel, and other Protestant
ministers escaping from France, brought to London the report that one
hundred thousand victims to religious intolerance had fallen since St.
Bartholomew's Day;[1189] when English merchants who had witnessed the
scenes of horror at Rouen returned, bringing a true account of what had
occurred; when they overturned the audacious assertion that religion had
nothing to do with the deed, by declaring that the Huguenots whose lives
were spared were constrained to go to mass; that numbers had lost their
lives who might have saved them by consenting to take part in services
which they regarded as idolatrous; that there were instances of children
taken from their parents, and forcibly rebaptized; when, in short, every
assertion of La Mothe Fenelon was disproved, the irritation of the English
grew deeper. And at last the French ambassador was forced to confess that
they would believe neither him nor the despatches that he occasionally
produced, saying that the event, which is wont to give the lie to words
and letters, showed them what they had to fear.[1190] The life of Mary,
Queen of Scots, was in danger. There were many who regarded it as a
measure of self-defence to put to death so open a sympathizer with the
work of persecution. La Mothe Fenelon, disheartened, promised Catharine
de' Medici to do all that he could to promote the interests of France, but
the chief influence must come from the king and herself. "Otherwise," he
said, "your word will come to be of no authority, and I shall become
ridiculous in everything that I tell them or promise them in your
name."[1191]

[Sidenote: Letter of Sir Thomas Smith.]

About the same time one of the most acute statesmen, one of the most
vigorous writers of the age, Sir Thomas Smith, himself a former ambassador
at the French court, correctly and eloquently expressed the universal
feeling of true Protestants in England, in a letter to Walsingham which
has become deservedly famous. "What warrant can the French make, now seals
and words of princes being traps to catch innocents and bring them to the
butchery? If the admiral and all those murdered on that bloody Bartholomew