Henri IV and the Saint Barthelemew Massacre: how this episode fits into the life of this king. This article follows “The disrupted youth of Henri IV by religious conflicts“.

The story of Henri IV cannot be summed up in a single article. We have therefore divided it into 5 articles that follow and complement each other:

• The disrupted youth of Henri IV by religious conflicts
• Henri IV and the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre
• Henri IV and the reconquest of the throne
• Henri IV up to and beyond his assassination
• Ravaillac, Henri IV’s parricide

A 5-day respite before the Saint-Bartholomew’s Day massacre and the resumption of civil war

A lot has happened in just 5 days: between Henri de Navarre marriage and the massacre of the St Bartholomew

The wedding of Henri III de Navarre with the sister of the king Henri III de France

The marriage of Henri de Navarre and Marguerite de Valois took place as planned on 18 August 1572 despite the sudden death of Jeranne d’Albret on June 9, 1572 (There were rumors that she had been poisoned). The marriage contract between Henri and Marguerite was signed on April 11. It was a marriage of convenience, which Jeanne d’Albret (Mother of Henri de Navarre) reluctantly accepted, arranged between her son Henri of Navarre and the sister of King Charles IX, Marguerite of France (1553-1615), the third daughter of Catherine de Médicis (Mother of Charles IX). Marguerite de France went down in history as “Queen Margot”.

The wedding was the occasion for grandiose festivities to which all the great and good of the kingdom were invited, including the Protestants, in a spirit of concord and reconciliation.

A large number of Protestant gentlemen came to escort their prince. But Paris proved to be a fiercely anti-Huguenot city, and the Parisians, Catholics in the extreme, did not accept their presence. On the eve of the massacre, 10% of the French population was Protestant.

But the atmosphere is heavy with threats

Attendees at the wedding, both Catholics and Huguenots (the nickname for Protestants), are in an uproar over rumors of a coming war against King Philip II’s Catholic Spain.
For several months, Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, leader of the Protestant faction and the king’s main advisor, had been trying to convince the king to invade Flanders, a Spanish possession.
But the leaders of the Catholic faction, the de Guise brothers and the Duc d’Anjou, brother of King Charles IX (who would later succeed him as Henri III), would have nothing to do with the war. Nor did Queen Mother Catherine de Médicis.

Rivalries between the great families also reappeared. The Guises were not ready to give way to the Montmorencies. François, Duke of Montmorency and Governor of Paris, was unable to control the urban unrest. Giving in to the danger in Paris, he preferred to leave the city a few days after the wedding.

And it was against this uncertain backdrop that the attack on the Huguenot Coligny took place 4 days after the wedding, followed on day 5 by the massacre of Protestants on St. Bartholomew’s Day.

The attempted assassination of the Huguenot Coligny

The attempted assassination of the Huguenot Coligny by a Gascony captain, was the event that triggered the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre. Four days after the wedding, shortly before noon on 22 August 1572, an arquebus attack attributed to a certain Maurevert was carried out on Gaspard de Coligny (leader of the Huguenots) as he left the Louvre on his way to his hotel on rue Béthizy.

The admiral escaped with the index finger of his right hand torn off and his left arm ploughed by a bullet that remained embedded in it. Despite Coligny’s recommendations, Protestant leaders demanded justice. At the Louvre palace, where the King of France resides, Catherine de Médicis fears being overwhelmed by the Catholic leaders, who criticize the monarchy for going too easy on the Protestants.

Suspicions quickly turned to people close to the Guise family (Catholic party) and the complicity of the Queen Mother, Catherine de Médicis, was named (probably wrongly). Why was this attack carried out? Perhaps to sabotage the peace process begun with the marriage of Henri de Navarre. But the most exalted saw it as divine punishment …

The Saint-Bartholomew’s Day massacre

On the evening of Saturday August 23, 1572, the king Charles IX held a meeting with his advisors (the “narrow council”) to decide on the course of action to be taken. In attendance were the Duc d’Anjou, the Garde des Sceaux René de Birague, the Maréchal de Tavannes, the Baron de Retz and the Duc de Nevers.

It was most probably this council that decided to carry out “extraordinary justice” and eliminate the Protestant leaders (although there are no documents to confirm with certainty that this decision was taken at this meeting). The idea was to assassinate the Protestant war captains, while deciding to spare the young princes of the blood, namely the King Henri III of Navarre and the Prince of Condé.

On the night of Saturday August 23, 1572, the massacre of Protestant leaders began. The Duc de Guise’s “commando” was led to rue de Béthizy, to the home of Admiral de Coligny, who was dragged from his bed, finished off and defenestrated. Protestant nobles housed in the Louvre were evacuated from the palace and massacred in the surrounding streets (including Pardaillan, Saint-Martin, Bources, Armand de Clermont de Piles, Beaudiné, Puy Viaud, Berny, Quellenec, baron du Pons). They massacred two hundred Huguenot nobles who had come from all over France to attend the royal wedding, gathering their corpses in the courtyard of the Louvre. Their bodies were gathered in front of the palace, stripped naked, dragged through the streets and thrown into the Seine. Some Protestant leaders, warned in time, managed to escape with the Guise guards on their heels.

Guise’s troops then attacked the Protestant leaders housed in the Faubourg Saint-Germain (which at the time was still outside the city). The setback caused by the closing of the city gates and the disappearance of its keys enabled the Protestants to organize a riposte and flee (like Jacques Nompar de Caumont or Gabriel de Montgommery).

These assassinations constituted the “second act” of the massacre.

Saint-Barthelemew massacre spreads to the whole population

Sunday August 24: the situation gets out of hand. This “third act” began during the night. When the people of Paris, awakened by the tocsin, take to the streets, they learn of the massacre. There was an immediate outcry. In the streets of the capital, everyone attacked the Protestants they met. The assassinations of Protestant leaders turned into a general massacre of all Protestants, regardless of age, sex or social rank. On the morning of August 24, 1572, the King ordered the massacre to stop, but to no avail. He took various measures to restore order, in a vain attempt to protect the lives of those threatened. In particular, he sent the Duke of Guise and the Duke of Nevers to protect Protestants with special status or rank. The slaughter lasted several days, despite the King’s attempts to stop it.

Tuesday August 26: Charles IX makes a statement before the Paris parliament. He took responsibility for the assassination of the Protestant leaders. He declares that he wanted to: “prevent the execution of an unfortunate and detestable conspiracy made by the said admiral [Coligny], leader and author of the same, and his adherents and accomplices in the person of the said lord king and against his State, the queen his mother, Messrs. his brothers, the king of Navarre, princes and lords being near them.”

In Paris, the corpses were thrown into the blood-reddened Seine. The river made a bend at the height of today’s Eiffel Tower; an island, l’île Maquerelle, acted as a dam. Hundreds of dead had accumulated there, and were hastily buried in a mass grave.

Many of the bodies had been mutilated, castrated and their faces disfigured.

Provincial towns unleashed their own massacres. On August 25, the slaughter reached Orléans (where some 1,000 people are thought to have died) and Meaux; on August 26, La Charité-sur-Loire; on August 28 and 29, Saumur and Angers; on August 31, Lyon, and so on.

Over the next two months, the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacres spread to other towns across the country. In all, some 10,000 Protestants (Evaluation can go up to 30 000) are thought to have been killed throughout the kingdom during these events. St. Bartholomew’s Day tore apart the kingdom, its families and its social fabric.

Henri IV and the Saint-Barthelemew’day

Henri IV and Saint Bartholomew’s Day: the day he almost died.

Spared from the slaughter by his status as a prince, Henri was forced to convert to Catholicism a few weeks later. Under house arrest at the French court, he became politically involved with the king’s brother François d’Alençon, and took part against the Huguenot in the siege of La Rochelle (1573).

Sully: Henri IV’s most loyal companion also escapes the Saint-Barthelemew massacre

Born into a Protestant family in northern France, Maximilien de Béthune (Known as Sully) escaped the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre (1572) at an early age, hidden by his teachers at the Collège de Bourgogne.
He soon became a member of the entourage of Henri de Navarre, the future Henri IV. He followed him when the latter managed to escape from the court in 1576. In 1590, he was seriously wounded at the battle of Ivry during the eighth war of religion.

Henri III of Navarre imprisoned at the French Court

For almost four years, since the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, Henri de Navarre remained a prisoner at the Court of France.

The “Malcontents” party

The day after Saint Bartholomew’s Day saw the formation of a third party, the “Malcontents”*, also known as the “Politiques”. Moderate Catholics, they condemned the excesses of the League, rejected Spain’s hold on the kingdom of France, and wished to re-establish the unity of the country under the authority of the king. Their leaders were the Duke of Anjou and the Montmorency family. The Edict of Beaulieu was their first major victory. In the years to come, they would favor the accession of Henri IV.

*The Conjuration des Malcontents was a failed plot to break François d’Alençon (brother of the king) and Henri de Navarre (future King Henri IV) out of the French court. It was carried out on two occasions in late February and early April 1574 by a group of Catholic and Protestant nobles dissatisfied with government policy.
The conspirators’ aim was to take power away from Catherine de Médicis, overthrow the government and make François d’Alençon heir to the French throne in place of his elder brother Henri d’Anjou, who had become King of Poland the previous year (and would eventually become King of France under the name Henri III).The conspiracy followed on from the outcry over the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, and marked the start of the Fifth War of Religion (1574-1576).

Henri de Navarre takes part in a failed coup attempt

After taking part in the Malcontents plots, he was held prisoner with the Duc d’Alençon at the Vincennes dungeon (April 1574). Duc d’Alençon was the king’s brother, who died prematurely of tuberculosis in 1584, making at his death Henri de Navarre the official heir to the French crown. On the accession of Henri III (brother of Charles IX who died on May 30, 1574), he received a new pardon from the king in Lyon and took part in the coronation ceremony of Henri III in Reims on February 13, 1575, which spared him the death penalty, but he remained detained at court.

Henri III of Navarre’s escape from the French court

Hostage to Catherine de Médicis, he lived in the Louvre, displaying a cheerful indifference and disinterest in the affairs of the kingdom. But now it was time for the heir to the Bourbon family to hold his own and decisively influence the course of events. If the future Henri IV fled, it was to join his people and lead the Huguenot party.

The escape of the Duc d’Alençon

Monsieur, Duc d’Alençon, fled the Court on September 15, 1575, leaving Henri de Navarre, his brother-in-law and ally, in the hands of Catherine de Médicis and Henri III. Since then, his supporters, the moderate Catholics, have drawn closer to the Protestants. The presence of the king’s brother, Duc d’Alençon and heir to the throne, at the head of the coalition forces Catherine de Médicis to negotiate. The Duke dictated his terms and, in November 1575, a truce was signed. Henri de Navarre knew he had to join the coalition if he wanted to play a leading role.

But how to escape the Court? Henri de Navarre, since Monsieur’s escape, has been watched even more closely by Catherine de Medici’s most trusted guards and the elite of her “flying squadron”, in the person of Madame de Sauve. It seemed impossible to thwart this plan.

Henri de Navarre’s false escape

In the weeks leading up to his escape, Henri de Navarre sowed doubts about his possible departure. On February 1, 1576, he pretended to disappear. The Court was worried. They swear that the Béarnais has joined the coalition. But the next day, he appeared, looking cheerful and booted as if returning from the hunt. To Henri III, he points out the indignity of these rumors and assures them that he will never stray from His Majesty. That very evening, however, the Béarnais was actively preparing his escape.

Henri de Navarre’s real escape

To divert attention, he went to see the Duc de Guise at his hotel in the Marais. Once the meeting is over, Le Balafré goes to report to the king. It was clear that Henri de Navarre wanted to remain at Court.

On February 3, 1576, Navarre sent word that he would be hunting in the forest north of Senlis. This was his custom. Accompanied by the lieutenant and captain of the guards, spies of the Queen Mother, he hunted deer. The next morning, he dismisses the two henchmen, instructing them to deliver a bill to the king, in which he explains that he can no longer tolerate the baseness of the Court and therefore prefers to leave Paris. Henri III bows. Le Béarnais and his companions set off through the Montmorency forest. After spending more than three years as a hostage at the French Court, he took advantage of the unrest of the Fifth War of Religion to flee on February 5, 1576. That day, Henri de Navarre and his companions crossed the Seine and galloped west. Henri de Navarre was finally free to join his family.

Three months of wandering before deciding

For the next three months, the King of Navarre gave the impression that he did not want to join the Protestant camp, and hesitated. His hesitation was short-lived. The arrival of his sister Catherine seemed to restore his faith in victory. As he gallops towards his friends, Henri ponders the fate of the kingdom of France. King Henri III still has no descendants, and his health is precarious. Monsieur, his brother and heir to the throne, is not much better. Henri de Navarre is now certain that his future lies ahead.

Follow the story of Henri IV in “Henri IV and the reconquest of the throne”.