Of the three Huguenot wars fought from 1562–1569, each ended in a short peace followed by worse persecutions. The second war found the Protestants victors. Once their army dispersed, the peace agreement lasted only six months, when more than ten thousand Huguenots were murdered throughout the country. A plot was devised to capture the Prince of Conde and Admiral Coligny, and put the first in prison for life and send the second to the scaffold. When they were informed of the plot they fled with their families to La Rochelle. They were saved from the king’s army by a timely flood which made the river they had crossed a barrier to their pursuers. The Queen-mother published an edict revoking the Edict of January, which had granted limited freedoms to the Protestants, and forbidding the profession of Protestantism and demanding all ministers to leave the kingdom in a fortnight. This initiated another civil war.

The winter brought many battles. The Prince of Conde was slain and the illustrious Jeanne d’Albret brought her young son Henry, Prince of Bearn and Henry the son of the fallen Conde to visit the despondent troops. She stirred the army with her promises to give her all to the cause and she gave her children to the army’s aide. Henry of Navarre, her young son, was made general of the army.

Some months later a disastrous battle nearly destroyed the Protestant army and seriously wounded Coligny. The remaining army was dispirited and mutinous. Of Coligny’s remaining friends some forsook him and others blamed him. Catherine de Medici declared Coligny an outlaw and placed a price of 30,000 crowns on his head. His estates were confiscated and his Castle of Chatillon was burned to the ground. Pope Pius V cursed him as "an infamous, execrable man," but Coligny did not bow under these multiple blows. Instead he urged the Protestants not to despair, their cause was not lost. They had more reserves and friends in England and Germany. They "must not count the soldiers of Protestantism, they must weigh its moral and spiritual forces, and, when they had done so, they would see that there was no cause to despair of its triumph." The History of Protestantism, book 17, 585.

The opening of spring brought a new army to Coligny’s side and victory on the battle field brought a new peace. The Catholic historian Davila, who had access to the secrets of the court, describes this Peace of St. Germain-en-Laye, of 1570, as a mechanism to rid France of the foreign troops of the Protestants and that with time "artifice and opportunity would enable them to take off the heads of the Protestant faction." Ibid., 586. The terms of the peace were unexpectedly favorable but the Protestants remembered the many broken agreements and the leaders declined to appear in court but went to their safe haven at La Rochelle.

The Protestants had good reason for their suspicions. This peace was just a trick. Davila again sheds light on events at court. "‘The peace having been concluded and established,’ says he, ‘the stratagem formed in the minds of the king and queen for bringing the principal Huguenots into the net . . . The king ‘being now come to the age of two-and-twenty, of a resolute nature, a spirit full of resentment, and above all, an absolute dissembler,’ scrupulously observed the treaty, and punished the Roman Catholic mobs for their infractions of it in various places, and strove by ‘other artifices to lull to sleep the suspicions of Coligny and his friends, to gain their entire confidence, and so draw them to court.’" Ibid.

The tricks were all part of a plan first agreed upon some five years before in secret meetings between the Duke of Alva, a representative of Philip of Spain, and Catherine de Medici. Philip had never ceased to call on France to use similar methods as his Spanish Inquisition to deal with the Protestants. Pope Pius V had added his council to the Queen-mother "promising her the assistance of Heaven if she would pursue the enemies of the Roman Catholic religion ‘till they are all massacred, for it is only by the entire extermination of heretics that the Roman Catholic worship can be restored.’" Ibid., 591. Catherine had sent her assurances to the Pope that she and her son had every intention of carrying out the plans, but she could not say when, as it was a difficult matter.

The great difficulties that lay in the path of carrying out the plan were largely due to the deep mistrust which the Protestants cherished toward Catherine and Charles IX. They had not enjoyed one honest peace under the French court and far more of their number had died by massacre during the years of various pacifications than had died on the battle field. The plan required that all of the chiefs of Protestantism be assembled in Paris and so their fears must be calmed. Professions, promises, and dignities were lavished on the Huguenot but above all foreign policies were instituted that coincided with the views of the Huguenot chiefs and that required their cooperation to execute. This had its desired affect for it was thought impossible that such enlightened plans could merely be part of a cunning scheme.

"The proposal of the court was that the young King of Navarre should marry Margaret de Valois, the sister of Charles IX, and that an armed intervention should be made in the Low Countries in aid of the Prince of Orange against Philip of Spain, and that Coligny should be placed at the head of the expedition." Ibid., 593. Ambassadors were sent to La Rochelle to arrange the marriage and to present the proposal for the military project to Admiral Coligny. It was no easy matter to overcome the deeply-rooted suspicions of these men, but by adroit dissembling Coligny was lured to court. He was met there by apparent rapturous joy on the part of the king and all the court. "It is remarkable, says the Popish historian Davila, after relating this ‘that a king so young should know so perfectly how to dissemble." Ibid. Coligny was admitted to council and given great dignities and flatteries. The king and the admiral were often in council together and Coligny began to have confidence in the king. He held hopes of being able to greatly assist the Protestant cause throughout Europe. This made him deaf to the warnings from friends that treachery was meditated. As these warnings were reiterated, louder and longer Coligny responded that he would rather risk massacre than to rekindle civil war and forego the hope of freeing France from the Spanish alliance.

Coligny persuaded Jeanne d’Albret to give her consent to the proposed marriage. She was invited to visit the court to make arrangements. She became ill and died during her stay there. Many historians called it poisoning while others believed her illness to result from dread and foreboding at the proposed alliance of her son with so dreadful a family.

Papists began to be suspicious that the young king was indeed becoming Protestant. Charles sent his reassurances, but these were doubted. After the massacre he was fond of saying, "‘My big sister Margot caught all these Huguenot rebels in the bird-catching style. What grieved me most is being obliged to dissimulate so long.’" Ibid., 596.

A Protestant regiment was sent out to assist the Prince of Orange against the Duke of Alva, but secret information was sent to Alva that enabled him to surprise them and cut them to pieces. The champion of toleration Chancellor l’Hopital was banished from court and the magnanimous Jeanne d’Albret was dead. All was going amiss except for the promises of the king. Protestant voices were heard crying alarm and calling for escape from the city, but on the 18th of August, 1572, the marriage took place. Festivities filled the city for four days. Then came an attempted assassination, when Coligny was shot by Maurevel the king’s assassin.

It had been hoped that by killing the Protestant leader his followers would be lead to battle and that the resulting massacre could be blamed on them. When this plan failed, the king, feigning great concern for Coligny, called for all of the gates to the city to be closed so that the assassin might be caught. This trapped the Protestants in the city. Many Protestants now called for departure from the city as they could see the transparent designs of the king but Coligny’s son-in-law over-ruled them because of his confidence in the king. Only a few Huguenot left the city.

Just before midnight on Saturday night the citizens of Paris were summoned to assembly. They had been supplied with weapons some days before. They were now told that a terrible conspiracy had been discovered, on the part of the Huguenot, against the king and royal family; an attempt to destroy the monarchy and the Roman Catholics. At the tolling of the great bell of the Palace of Justice they were to light torches and place them in every window and they were to mark themselves with a white scarf on their left arm and a white cross on their hats.

At two o’clock in the morning, Sunday the 24th of August, 1572, St. Bartholomew’s Day, the bell began to ring and scarcely had the first peal sounded than a pistol shot was heard. The massacre was to begin with Coligny. The young Duke of Guise with 300 gentlemen and soldiers galloped to the admiral’s lodgings and initiated the destruction by dispatching the admiral and his attendants. The general slaughter of every Protestant in Paris now began. Two hundred noblemen, guests in the palace, were slain. Their bodies were piled in heaps at the gates of the Louvre. The fleeing Huguenot without the protective white scarf and under the light of the multiple torches were easily recognized and cut down without mercy.

"The entire population of the French capitol was seen maddened with rage, or aghast with terror. On the wretched streets what tragedies of horror and crime were being enacted! Some were fleeing, others were pursuing; some were supplicating for life, others were responding by the murderous blow . . . Old men, and infants in their swaddling clothes, were alike butchered on that awful night." Ibid., 603. So many bodies were thrown into the Seine river that they became clogged at the bridges and there was threat of backing up the river and flooding the city.

The slaughter continued for three days unabated and was not ended for seven days. Orders were sent throughout France calling for similar butcheries and for two months Protestants died in the slaughter. The historian Sully, considered to be the most accurate because of his access to official records, has estimated the dead at 70,000 in the whole of France.

When the nations of Europe heard of the massacre, reactions were one of triumphal praises on the part of Catholics and gloomy sorrow in the Protestant lands. Geneva again opened their doors to numbers of fleeing French Protestants. In Rome the Pope has three frescoes painted to celebrate the event and numerous medals made to commemorate St. Bartholomew’s Massacre.

When the terrible storm had passed, Charles IX, the French court, Spain and the Pope were sure that the Huguenots had received their death-blow. They felt that the revolt of Wittemberg had been quelled in a common overthrow and that a new era had dawned for Popedom. In like proportion to the joy of the Romanist was the despondency of the Protestants. Their loss seemed irretrievable. "The wise counselors, the valiant warriors, the learned and pious pastors—in short, that whole array of genius, and learning, and influence that adorned Protestantism in France, and which, humanly speaking, were the bulwarks around it— had been swept away by this one terrible blow . . . But the cause was Divine; it drew its life from hidden sources, and so, flourished from what both friend and foe believed to be its grave." Ibid., 608.

While in the plains of France there were villagers where scarcely a single Protestant was left alive, yet in the mountainous regions fifty towns closed their gates and stood to their defense. There were sieges as the one of La Rochelle where twenty-nine attempted attacks were not successful in overthrowing the town. However the famine, resulting from the siege, left hundreds dead.

France had lost much abroad, for her prestige and influence were gone. No one believed Catherine de Medici’s lies—protests that the government was not responsible for the massacre. Nothing had been gained at home either. "The Huguenot in all parts of France were coming forth from their hiding-places; important towns were defying the royal arms; whole districts were Protestant; and the demands of the Huguenot were once more beginning to be heard, loud and firm as ever." Ibid., 610.

On the 24th of August, 1573, the first anniversary of the massacre, the Huguenot met to draw up their new demands which Charles and his mother listened to with mute stupefaction. The delegates boldly demanded all of the privileges that had been theirs in 1570. The royal court had to digest their mortification as best they could for with their worsted troops and anarchy filling the land and with no one in the kingdom whom they could trust and certainly no one who could trust them; the only policy open to them was one of conciliation. "The St. Bartholomew Massacre was becoming bitter even to its authors, and Catherine now saw that she would have to repeat it not once, but many times, before she could erase the ‘religion,’ restore the glories of the Roman Catholic worship in France, and feel herself firmly seated in the government of the country." Ibid. The Protestants became so bold as to form many Protestant districts with the authority to function as independent States within a State. They collected taxes and took the steps necessary to govern and protect their districts.

A new political party formed which was composed of Catholics but ones who did not approve of the tactics used against the Protestants. They were men who had listened to the enlightened views of toleration that had been proposed by the now deceased Chancellor de l‘Hopital. The crown had peace on no front, but in opposition to the new party the crown drew closer to the Huguenot and they were shielded for a time under the dubious policy of Catherine in her schemes against the new political opposition.

"While matters were hanging thus in the balance, Charles IX died. His life had been full of excitement, of base pleasures, and of bloody crimes, and his death was full of horrors." Ibid., 611.

Horrible memories of the massacre haunted him. He would awaken at night crying, "Blood, blood!" He was extremely superstitious due to his life of impieties and witchcrafts. When flocks of ravens began to alight on the roof of the Louvre every day about the same time he seemed to hear, in their cawings, the screams and cries of the slain. These incessant apprehensions led to his final illness when blood oozed from all the pores of his body. This man who had declared that not one Huguenot was to live to reproach him was waited on in his dying hours by a Huguenot nurse who sought to comfort him in his dying agonies. Charles IX died on the May 30, 1574, just twenty-one months after the massacre and living only to the age of twenty-five, having reigned for fourteen years.

Catherine now saw her favorite son ascend to the throne. The Duke of Anjou had been elected the King of Poland, but he had violated his coronation oath and brought the country to the brink of civil war. With his brothers death he stole out of Poland and was crowned the King of France under the title of Henry III. "This prince was shamelessly vicious, and beyond measure effeminate." Ibid., 614. He would shut himself up for days with a band of youths, debauches like himself, and pass the time in sexual immorality, which shocked his countrymen.

He had played a large role in the Massacre and now he opened his reign by commanding all of his subjects to conform to the religion of Rome or quit the country. His mother still held the regency and her hand can be seen in this tyrannous decree which the government had not the power to enforce. This act did make it clear to the Huguenot the peril they were in and they took measures to strengthen their position.

The Protestants were under the leadership of Henry of Navarre, who was a valiant soldier and heartily with the Protestants, but who lacked the persistence or the deep religious convictions of Coligny. They joined forces with the new political party headed by the Duke of Alencon, the youngest brother of the king. This party cared nothing for the Protestant religion, but they cared for the honor of France, and they resolved to lift the nation from the mire into which Catherine had dragged it.

With this combined political power the Protestants made bold demands which the royal court had to grant. Four years after the Massacre that was supposed to have exterminated them, the Protestants had all of their former rights restored and in ampler measure with the signing of the treaty on May 6, 1576. The Catholics were now alarmed and formed themselves into "The League" whose aim was to prevent the enforcement of the treaty just signed and the total extermination of the Huguenot. Henry III joined the League. War followed. It became clear however that the League intended to take his crown and prevent Henry of Navarre, the next heir, from ascending the throne and to place the Duke of Guise in the royal chair. The king had to flee the capitol and Guise took possession of the capitol. The king ended these schemes when he successfully plotted the assassination of his rival. Twelve days later Catherine de Medici died in the same castle where the Duke had been slain.

The king was so hated by his subjects that the Sorbonne released them from his service and the Pope excommunicated him. He was forced to accept alliance with Henry of Navarre for his protection. This unwise alliance did not prosper, for the assassination of the king saved the League and dispelled the illusions of the Huguenot. Seventeen years after the St. Bartholomew Massacre all of its authors were dead.

Henry of Navarre, the son of Jeanne d’Albret, was by right the next heir to the throne. He was now involved in war to try to win his crown. The Catholics of the nation would only accept him as king if he renounced his Protestantism. His Protestant faith was not strong, nor his life free from immorality, so after some months he chose the weak course and joined his predecessors in taking an oath to uphold his adopted religion and battle all of its enemies. He became king on July 22, 1593. The Protestants had to survive apostasy as well as defeats on the battle field and they realized anew that in God alone they could trust.

Henry IV had a wise reign in the view of French historians. He instituted wise foreign and domestic policy and made just policies for all but the Protestants. Their requests met with protests that he needed to strengthen his power before granting them privileges. Finally, when pressed sorely in war with Spain and in need of the Protestant swords he granted liberties in the Edict of Nantes, signed April 15, 1598, and styled by some as the Magna Carta of the French Reformation. "This edict inaugurated an era of tranquillity and great prosperity to France. The twelve years that followed are perhaps the most glorious in the annals of that country since the opening of the sixteenth century. Spain immediately offered terms of peace, and France, weary of civil war, sheathed the sword with joy." Ibid., 623.

From 1562 to 1598, France had seen wars, one following another. Some two million lives had been lost. Peace was welcomed and Henry’s rule prospered. He lifted the nation from deep debt and added millions to the treasury. He introduced the silk worm, encouraged agriculture and commercial trade and made foreign commercial treaties. He was attempting to further weaken the Spanish power by joining with Elizabeth of England and twenty other European states to make war against Austria, when the monk, Francois Ravaillac, assassinated him before his plans could be carried out.