692. Elizabeth I vs The Catholics: A Massacre in Paris (Part 2)

The Rest Is History

This episode explores the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572, a brutal Catholic-led pogrom against French Huguenots, and its impact on Elizabethan England’s Protestant identity. It examines how the massacre fueled an

Key takeaways

• Massacre was premeditated, not spontaneous

Transcript preview

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I just a boy, a boy, habanthak yo in this wild night, a pyrrero in my voice, that's just a boy. The new Honda City isn't just made to drive, it's made to feel. The new Honda City, all new vibe. Cousin is he, I know him by his look. See where my soldier shot him through the arm. He missed him near, but we have struck him now. Ah, thou base degenerate, chief standard bearer to the Lutherans. Thus, in despite of thy religion, the Duke of Gies stamps on thy life, us bulk. Away with him. Cut off his head and hands and send them for a present to the Pope. And when this just revenge is finished, unto Mount Focon will we drag his corpse, and he that living hated so the cross shall being dead be hanged thereon in chains. Now no delay. Go and shoot the ordinance off, that they which have already set the street may know their watchword, and then told the bell. And so, let's forward to the massacre. Chilling. So that was the sinister Henry or Henry, Duke of Gies, as ventriloquized by Christopher Marlowe in his tragedy, The Massacre at Paris, which he wrote in 1593. And what that play describes is the most infamous bloodbath in all 16th century European history. It is the massacre, the pogrom against French Protestants, or Huguenots, they were called, which began on the 24th of August 1572, St. Bartholomew's Day. And Marlowe was writing his play two decades later, but the events of that day, the bloodshed in the streets of Paris, were still stamped onto the imagination. of English Protestants. They haunted their dreams. Because this was the proof, proof beyond any possible doubt, that Catholics were set on extirpating the true religion, the true Protestant faith, that they were plotting and conspiring to destroy Protestantism, and that if they were ever given the opportunity, there was no atrocity, no barbarism, no crime, no cruelty that they would not commit in the name of their hellish fanatical devotion to the Bishop of Rome and his underlings. And Tom, people may be thinking, well, this is very overstated and very melodramatic. But actually, what the Duke of Gies is promising in that speech, the massacre, you know, he's punished this bloke. What's happened to this one guy is going to happen to thousands of other people. I mean, this is not so far from the reality of what actually did happen that day in Paris, is it? Yeah, as we'll see, Marlowe is drawing on contemporaneous accounts for his drama. And even though in the play, the Duke of Gies is a kind of classic Tudor, dramatic Machiavelle, kind of cackling and all of that. The words in his speech do correspond, as you said, to what happened. So the guy who was shot through the arm at the beginning of that speech, and then he gets dispatched by Gies' men and the Duke of Gies himself, of jumps on him. So that is the Admiral of France, and we talked about him in our previous episode. He's a very distinguished soldier called Gaspar de Coligny. And the reason that the Duke of Gies is so triumphant as he stands over the corpse of Coligny, as he is in the play, is because Gis, although by now he's 21, so still a very, very young man, he is the most powerful Catholic nobleman in France, and Colony is the leader of the Huguenots, the French Protestants. But as we also mentioned in our previous episode, Gies's hatred for Colony is personal as well as sectarian, because he blames the Admiral for having sponsored the assassination of his father nine years before. And so listeners may be wondering, well, there is this intense ideological and personal hatred between the Duke of Gies and Colony. What on earth are they doing, you know, in the same? same city? Why are they in the same place if there's this civil war raging on? They are there because a ritual has been celebrated, which it is hoped may end the civil war in France between Catholics and Protestants. And it's a wedding between a Catholic and a Protestant. So the Catholic is the sister of the French king, Charles VIII, Charles VIII. And she has married the Protestant King of Navarre, who inevitably is also called Henry. And as a rule of thumb in this period in France, almost everyone important is called Henry. And there will be more to come. People will be excited to learn. A colony, the Protestant, has been invited as a particular guest of honour. So there's this idea that Catholics and Protestants are going to be reconciled. Now, Gies, who strongly disapproved of this wedding, he has seized his chance for vengeance. So first of all, he sponsored this assassination attempt on colony. And this was the shooting that had left Colony, as Marley puts it, shot through the arm. And then two days later, Gies sends a death squad to attack Colony directly in his rooms. And they arrived there and they find that a unit of musketeers have been stationed outside the doorway leading up to Colony's quarters. And they've been sent there by the King on Charles the Ninth's orders to protect Colony against any threats from Catholic intruders. But the musketeers, when the Duke of Geese's men arrive, they go, brilliant, let's kill him. And so they force the door, they clatter their way up the steps, they burst into Colony's room, they murder him, and then they hurl the body out from the window down into the street where the Duke of Geese is standing, and the Duke of Geese then tramples Colony's corpse down. And worse is to follow, and it's described by a Huguenot by a Huguenot, called François Utman, and he writes, Colony remained exposed to all sorts of ignominy, with some of his limbs cut off. He was dragged through the mud and finally, after three days, was strung up by the feet at Montfosson, where he remained for several days as a trophy and a mark of the cruelty and rage, which the people of Paris exacted on him, not just in life, but also on his dead body. And Oudman's account of this massacre was one of many that were translated into English, and it was very, very influential, and you can tell how Marlowe drew on it very precisely for his play. So that's the end of Colony. But meanwhile, Gies's men are hunting down colonies, lieutenants, and killing them. And at the same time, there's a kind of trigger effect, because in the Louvre, the Swiss guards who protect the king have woken up all the Protestant noblemen who are staying in the Louvre as Charles Inais guests. They have disarmed these Protestant noblemen and then slaughtered them en masse. And all the while, as described in Mali's play, so there's this kind of tolling of the bell, the toxin of the Church of Saint-Germain is sounding and it's a signal for a wholesale massacre, an uprising of Catholics across Paris against their Protestant neighbours. So this is this extraordinary dramatic event. that plays such a massive part in the story of Europe in the 16th century, but also Elizabethan England's relationship with its neighbours. So we're going to get right into the details of the massacre. This is a classic sectarian mob violence, but it's been mastermind it, right? There are signals. There are very powerful people who are controlling it. And there's a sort of deliberate cold-bloodedness to it, that there's been these years of tension and violence between Catholics and Protestants, but this is a genuine premeditated attempt to settle accounts once and for all, and basically to kill all the Protestants in Paris? Is that the, was that too strong? Well, I mean, the details of the slaughter are hideous. So maybe up to 5,000 Protestants murdered in Paris, tens of thousands more in copycat massacres across France. And as you say, I mean, it is undoubtedly fueled by sectarian hatred. And a measure of this, I mean, it's really horrible, is that a lot of the slaughter that is inflicted on the Huguenots, and I'm quoting here from the definitive new book on the massacre by Joanna Alet, and she writes that the Catholic slaughter of the Huguenots corresponded to a wish to destroy all chances of proliferation by the group that their murderers sought to eliminate. And so what that meant in effect was that Protestant men were not just murdered, they were castrated, that pregnant women had their bellies slashed open and the fetuses pulled out. And that children were targeted for wholesale butchery, which was framed by Protestants understandably as a new massacre of the innocence. So when Herod sent his soldiers to slaughter the innocence in Bethlehem. And one of the Protestant narratives described how the Sen was full of empty children's cradles from which the assassins had torn the newborn in order to steal their swaddling clothes before drowning them. And there's another very notorious account written by a Calvinist pastor who described seeing a young child being held by a Catholic with a large beard. And this child was kind of gurgling with delight as reached with his tiny fingers. to play with the curls of the Catholic's beard, and then the Catholic hurled this small child to his death into the Sen. People may be saying, well, I mean, God, we've heard stories like this a thousand times on the rest of history, and is this not just pure Protestant propaganda, rather like the propaganda that you had in the 1640s about the Catholic uprising in Ireland, and there were claims that, you know, lots of Protestants were being massacred and these hideous kind of, often sexual kind of crimes and whatnot. Is this more of the same or is there genuine substance in these claims? Well, Protestants are definitely writing these terms, but so too are Catholics. So here is a Catholic witness. Naked bodies lay pierced by a thousand stabs in the streets. No distinction was made for sex, age or the status of people. And there are scenes of completely emblematic horror which haunt the age. And they are described by Catholics as well as by Protestants. So to give you some of these scenes of horror, it's a famous professor at the University of Paris who was murdered, defenestrated as Colony had been chucked out of a window and disemboweled. And his corpse is then lashed with whips by schoolboys. So it's a kind of emblem of order turned upside down. There's a Protestant bookseller who is burnt alive on a pyre fashioned out of the books from his shop. And there is a woman who was tied by her hair to the arch of the bridge by Notre Dame. And she hung there for three days before the corpse of her husband was dropped on top of her and dragged her down into the seine. Thus, they were united in their burial. I mean, some of these stories sound kind of too emblematic, perhaps to be true. But I think that you don't get stories like those coming from both sides of the sectarian divide unless the scenes of sloth really are horrific. Isn't one of the things that adds to it? The fact that when the news of the massacre first breaks, the reaction of a lot of French Catholics is not one of embarrassment or shame or anything like that, but unbridled delight and joy. Well, in France, I mean, the Catholics are, I mean, not all of them, but across cities in France, they are doing copycat massacres. But I think what's really shocking, and particularly to Protestants, but also actually to a lot of Catholics as well, is the reaction from the leading figures in the Catholic world. So the Pope ordered a te deum to be sung. And he issued a commemorative medal, which showed an angel with a cross and a drawn sword killing heretics. So he's basically saying, this is great, fantastic. Here's a medal. And Philip, the second of Spain, the most powerful Catholic king, when he receives the news of the massacre, he goes through a monastery to pray and to give thanks to God. And then he returns to court, and he speaks to the French ambassador and laughs and says that Your master, Charles the 9th, while he truly deserves his title of most Christian king for this godly massacre. So that's the initial response. But I do think that in due course, when the full details of what has happened starts to emerge, that there is a kind of feeling of embarrassment among Catholics who had celebrated the massacre as a kind of godly cleansing. And the excitement comes to be replaced almost by a sense of shame. And in fact, even at the time in Paris, there were Catholics who were. were appalled by the slaughter. So monasteries in the capital had provided shelter to Huguenotives. And individual Catholics, too, had very bravely offered shelter and refuge to Protestants who were fleeing mobs. And intriguingly, and this really complicates the kind of the sense that we have from Elizabethan propaganda about the Gies, this very powerful Catholic family, the Duke of Gies offered shelter to fugitive Catholics. And is this because Basically, it had got out of hand from what it originally planned. He'd planned this as an internal aristocratic, a settling account in an aristocratic feud. And actually it had then turned into something much bigger. He'd lost control of it in a way. I think also by offering Protestant nobleman against whom he doesn't have a grudge, shelter, he's getting, you know, he's building up credit with them. So he's always kind of calculating. So to that extent, it may be a slightly kind of Machiavellian tactic. I mean, but it may also reflect a kind of genuine sense of compassion. But, I mean, he wasn't very compassionate when he was trampling down the corpse of colony, it has to be said. I know. The fact that Gies can commission the assassination of colony and then offer shelter to Huguenotives later on, I think implies the fact that what we call the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre wasn't just a single massacre. It was a whole kind of confluence of blood feuds and pogroms. So Gies' attack on colony and his followers had fused with Charles the Ninth's very opportunistic murder of the Protestant nobleman in his care. And the news of these murders, I think then had in turn inspired a kind of sectarian bloodlust that had gripped the whole of Paris. And so lots of the Protestants who are killed, I mean, they're killed maybe because they're Protestant, but they're also killed probably. Maybe there was a kind of rival bookseller who got rid of that, you know, the Huguenot bookseller or whatever. They're the worst, aren't they booksellers? Catholic booksellers. And this is what Joanna Arlette in her recently published book argues. And I think it's, you know, it's been a kind of revelatory text. People have kind of really accepted the force of that argument. But if you're looking at it from England, come on. If you're looking at it from England, though, I mean, you're not saying, oh, well, the extenuating circumstances. And actually, there are lots of different massacres here. And let's not conflate them. You're looking at this and you're saying, come on, we've been telling you for years that Catholics are evil conspirators who are plotting to kill us all. And guess what? They've just done it in Paris. Yeah. I mean, we know that if you see people from a different religious tradition as a kind of mass and you're telling that they're going to do terrible things and then something terrible does get done in the name of that religion, of course you're tempted to feel