the wretched young King at Bayonne, when he expressed the opinion that to take arms against his own subjects was wholly out of the question, and could only be followed by general ruin. “’Tis easy to see that he has been tutored,” wrote Alva to his master.  Unfortunately, the same mother; who had then instilled those lessons of hypocritical benevolence, had now wrought upon her son’s cowardly but ferocious nature with a far different intent.  The incomplete assassination of Coligny, the dread of signal vengeance at the hands of the Huguenots, the necessity of taking the lead in the internecine snuggle; were employed with Medicean art, and with entire success.  The King was lashed into a frenzy.  Starting to his feet, with a howl of rage and terror, “I agree to the scheme,” he cried, “provided not one Huguenot be left alive in France to reproach me with the deed.”

That night the slaughter commenced.  The long premeditated crime was executed in a panic, but the work was thoroughly done.  The King, who a few days before had written with his own hand to Louis of Nassau, expressing his firm determination to sustain the Protestant cause both in France and the Netherlands, who had employed the counsels of Coligny in the arrangement, of his plans, and who had sent French troops, under Genlis and La None, to assist their Calvinist brethren in Flanders, now gave the signal for the general massacre of the Protestants, and with his own hands, from his own palace windows, shot his subjects with his arquebuss as if they had been wild beasts.

Between Sunday and Tuesday, according to one of the most moderate calculations, five thousand Parisians of all ranks were murdered.  Within the whole kingdom, the number of victims was variously estimated at from twenty-five thousand to one hundred thousand.  The heart of Protestant Europe, for an instant, stood still with horror.  The Queen of England put on mourning weeds, and spurned the apologies of the French envoy with contempt.  At Rome, on the contrary, the news of the massacre created a joy beyond description.  The Pope, accompanied by his cardinals, went solemnly to the church of Saint Mark to render thanks to God for the grace thus singularly vouchsafed to the Holy See and to all Christendom; and a Te Deum was performed in presence of the same august assemblage.

But nothing could exceed the satisfaction which the event occasioned in the mind of Philip the Second.  There was an end now of all assistance from the French government to the Netherland Protestants.  “The news of the events upon Saint Bartholomew’s day,” wrote the French envoy at Madrid, Saint Goard, to Charles IX., “arrived on the 7th September.  The King, on receiving the intelligence, showed, contrary to his natural custom, so much gaiety, that he seemed more delighted than with all the good fortune or happy incidents which had ever before occurred to him.  He called all his familiars about him in order to assure them that your Majesty was his good