te befell
the shipwrecked French from the fleet. Those who declared
themselves Roman Catholics were almost the only persons spared
by their pitiless assailants. A few women and children were
granted their lives; also a drummer, a hornblower, and a few
carpenters and sailors, whose services were valuable.
Laudonniere and a handful of men escaped to the woods, and
subsequently to Europe. About two hundred soldiers, who
threatened to entrench themselves and make a formidable
resistance, were able to obtain from Menendez a pledge that
they should be treated as prisoners of war, which, strange to
say, was observed. The rest--many hundreds--were consigned to
indiscriminate slaughter; Ribault himself was flayed and
quartered; and over the dead Huguenots was suspended a tablet
with this inscription: "Hung, not as Frenchmen, but as
Lutherans" (Gaffarel, 229; De Thou, iv. 113; Ag. d'Aubigne, i.
248). Spain and Rome had achieved a grand work. The chaplain
Mendoza could piously write: "The greatest advantage from our
victory, certainly, is the triumph our Lord grants us, which
will cause His Holy Gospel to be introduced into these
regions." (Mendoza, _apud_ Gaffarel, 214).

The report of these atrocities, tardily reaching the Old
World, called forth an almost universal cry of horror.
Fair-minded men of both communions stigmatized the conduct of
Menendez and his companions as sheer murder; for had not the
French colonists of Florida been attacked before being
summoned to surrender, and butchered in cold blood after being
denied even such terms as were customarily accorded to Turks
and other infidels? Among princes, Philip alone applauded the
deed, and seemed only to regret that faith had been kept with
any of the detested Huguenots (Gaffarel, 234, 245). It has
been commonly supposed that whatever indignation was shown by
Catharine de' Medici and her son, was merely assumed in
deference to the popular clamor, and that but a feeble
remonstrance was really uttered. This supineness would be
readily explicable upon the hypothesis of the long
premeditation of the massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day. If the
treacherous murder of Admiral Coligny and the other great
Huguenot leaders had indeed been deliberately planned from the
time of the Bayonne c