e wrote with some disgust to his master, "it is
all but impossible to get it out of the heads of the Protestants, that
your Majesty's intention is to join the rest of the Catholic princes, in
order by force to put (the decrees of) the Council of Trent into execution
in their countries." They would not be satisfied entirely by Bellievre's
plausible explanations. "Simple and rude people are violently excited by
such things, and are very difficult to be reassured."[1222]

[Sidenote: Medals and vindications.]

Charles the Ninth stood convicted in the eyes of the world of a great
crime. No elaborate vindications, by their sophistry, or by barefaced
misstatements of facts, could clear him, in the judgment of impartial men
of either creed, from the guilt of such a butchery of his subjects as
scarcely another monarch on record had ever perpetrated. Medals were early
struck in honor of the event, upon which "valor and piety"--the king's
motto--were represented as gloriously exhibited in the destruction of
rebels and heretics.[1223] But the wise regarded it as "a cruelty worse
than Scythian," and deplored the realm where "_neither piety nor justice_
restrained the malice and sword of the raging populace."[1224] The
Protestants of all countries--and they were his natural allies against
Spanish ambition for world-empire--had forever lost confidence in the
honor of Charles of Valois.

Multis minatur, qui uni facit, injuriam.

"If that king be author and doer of this act," wrote the Earl of
Leicester, expressing the common judgment of the civilized world, "shame
and confusion light upon him; be he never so strong in the sight of men,
the Lord hath not His power for naught.... If he continue in confirming
the fact, and allowing the persons that did it, then must he be a prince
detested of all honest men, what religion soever they have; for as his
fact was ugly, so was it inhumane. For whom should a man trust, if not his
prince's word; and these men he hath put to slaughter, not only had his
word, but his writing, and not public, but private, with open
proclamations and all other manner of declarations that could be devised
for the safety, which now being violated and broken, who can believe and
trust him?"[1225]

[Sidenote: Disastrous effects of the massacre on Charles himself.]

Upon the king himself the results of the fearful atrocities which he had
been induced by his mother and brother to sanction, were equally lasting