vorable conditions they had yet obtained.

Certainly this was not what Charles IX. had calculated upon when he
consented to the massacre of the Protestants. "Provided," he had said,
"that not a single one is left to reproach me." The massacre had been
accomplished almost without any resistance but that offered by certain
governors of provinces or towns, who had refused to take part in it. The
chief leader of French Protestantism, Coligny, had been the first victim.
Far more than that, the Parliament of Paris had accepted the royal lie
which accused Coligny of conspiring for the downfall of the king and the
royal house; a decree, on that very ground, sentenced to condemnation the
memory, the family, and the property of Coligny, with all sorts of
rigorous, we should rather say atrocious, circumstances. And after
having succeeded so well against the Protestants, Charles IX. saw them
recovering again, renewing the struggle with him, and wresting from him
such concessions as he had never yet made to them. More than ever might
he exclaim, "Then I shall never have rest!" The news that came to him
from abroad was not more calculated to satisfy him.

[Illustration: The St. Bartholomew----383]

The St. Bartholomew had struck Europe with surprise and horror; not only
amongst the princes and in the countries that were Protestant, in
England, Scotland, and Northern Europe, but in Catholic Germany itself,
there was a very strong feeling of reprobation; the Emperor Maximilian
II. and the Elector Palatine Frederic III., called the Pious, showed it
openly; when the Duke of Anjou, elected King of Poland, went through
Germany to go and take possession of his kingdom, he was received at
Heidelberg with premeditated coolness. When he arrived at the gate of
the castle, not a soul went to meet him; alone he ascended the steps, and
found in the hall a picture representing the massacre of St. Bartholomew;
the elector called his attention to the portraits of the principal
victims, amongst others that of Coligny, and at table he was waited upon
solely by French Protestant refugees. At Rome itself, in the midst of
official satisfaction and public demonstrations of it exhibited by the
pontifical court, the truth came out, and Pope Gregory XIII. was touched
by it when certain of my lords the cardinals who were beside him "asked
wherefore he wept and was sad at so goodly a despatch of those wretched
folk, enemies of God and of his Holiness: