The St Bartholomew's Day massacre, no.2, by Frans Hogenberg, c.1572. 

In later sixteenth-century Europe, violence was part of everyday life. States and local authorities across the continent imposed savage punishments in the name of maintaining the law and the social order; war and armed rebellion occurred with dismal regularity and with ferocious and far-reaching effect.  But the atrocity which occurred exactly 450 years ago in Paris on 24 August 1572 appalled even hardened contemporaries. Copy-cat and revenge killings erupted in the provinces, and the ghastly news spread far beyond France’s borders.

The massacre took place as people from different communities gathered for what was meant to be an act of reconciliation.  The backdrop was a civil war in France between the forces of the Catholic League, led by Henri, duc de Guise, and of the Calvinist Protestants (starting to be called Huguenot).  At the centre was the Valois monarchy, its power weakened by the successive occupation of the throne by two sickly young brothers, François II (born 1544; reigned 1559-1560) and Charles IX (born 1550; reigned 1560-1574), and by the contested political influence of their mother, Italian princess Catherine de’ Medici.  After several unsuccessful attempts to broker peace between the warring groups, in 1570 a by-product of the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye was the arrangement of a marriage between Charles IX’s sister Marguerite de Valois and Henri de Bourbon, heir to the throne of Navarre and a prominent Huguenot.  It was their wedding that brought community leaders to predominantly Catholic Paris in August 1572.

As religious and political antagonisms continued to simmer and tension mounted, on 22 August, as he left the Louvre palace, an assassination attempt was made on Admiral of France Gaspard de Coligny, a Huguenot leader, whose recent closeness to Charles IX had provoked jealousy. It failed, but within 48 hours the wounded Coligny was murdered by Henri de Guise.  That spark lit a sectarian conflagration.  In several days of mob violence and pillage which started on the 24th, somewhere between 2,000 and 6,000 Protestants were killed in the city.  As previously stated, the violence spread, causing several thousand further deaths across France.

Civil war between the Catholic League and the Calvinists was reignited. When Charles IX died from tuberculosis in 1574, he was succeeded by his younger brother, yet another Henri, but assassination terminated the reign of Henri III in 1589.  Since no Valois heirs survived, the throne went next to Henri de Bourbon, by now king of Navarre.  Twenty years after the St Bartholomew’s day massacre, Henri IV effected his own religious reconciliation and an end to war by converting to Catholicism in 1592.  It was he who in 1598 issued the Edict of Nantes, which gave limited, but by the standards of the time generous, rights to the minority Huguenot community.  These conferred a certain amount of security, autonomy and freedom of religion.

Meanwhile, surrounding Protestant states had reacted with horror and fear.  ‘The massacre of St Bartholomew’ evoked terrible images of what might happen if their enemies got the upper hand.  Among foreigners in Paris who witnessed the killing first-hand was the English MP and poet Philip Sidney, who went on to fight for and lose his life in the Protestant cause in the Netherlands.  His family were to maintain links with Huguenots into the seventeenth century; Robert Sidney, 2nd earl of Leicester, who served as ambassador to Paris, among other acts of solidarity, sent his son to the Protestant academy at Saumur.

As is well-known, the government of Elizabeth I was acutely sensitive to the threat of assassination or of invasion by Catholic powers.  In 1570 Pius V had issued a papal bull excommunicating the queen and depriving her of her sovereignty over England and Ireland, effectively declaring open season on plots against her.  The massacre two years later put its potential dangers in stark relief.  In the light of the threat, in October 1572 the Church of England issued forms of prayers for use on Wednesdays, Fridays and holy days seeking repentance, forgiveness, the protection of the queen and deliverance from enemies.  One asked God to ‘deliver those that be oppressed, defend suche as are in feare of crueltie … and comfort all that be in sorowe and heavinesse, that be thy ayde and strength, they and we may obtayne suertie from our enemies, without sheddynge of Christian & innocent blood’.  Acknowledging that God had ‘commaunded us to pray for our enimies’, it beseeched him ‘to abate theyr pryde, & to staye the furie and crueltie of such as eyther of malice or ignorance do persecute them whiche put theyr trust in thee’.  Finally, it asked ‘that all Christian Realmes’ might ‘enioy perfite peace, quietnesse and securitie’ and that all Christians might come ‘ioyntly all togeather in one godly concorde and unitie’ [National Prayers, vol. 1, p. 137].

On a secular level, the horror felt twenty years later by playwright Christopher Marlowe found expression in his play The Massacre at Paris, which strongly implicated the Guise.  Written in 1593, it was first thought to have been performed in January 1594. The event still resonated more than a century afterwards, when Nathaniel Lee’s The Massacre of Paris was premiered at Drury Lane just after the Glorious Revolution. Incidental music to the play was composed by Henry Purcell.

Following earlier waves of religious refugees from the Low Countries, the 1572 massacre prompted a new influx into England from France.  On 23 August 2022 a group from the Huguenot Society are attending a special evensong at St Bartholomew the Great, Smithfield, to commemorate its 450th anniversary.

Vivienne Larminie

Further reading:

Robert J. Knecht, The French Wars of Religion, 1559-1599 (1989 and subsequent editions)

Barbara Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Protestants in Sixteenth-Century Paris (Oxford, 1991)

Stuart Carroll, Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe  (Oxford, 2009)

National Prayers: Special Worship since the Reformation vol. 1, ed. Natalie Mears et al. (Church of England Record Society 20, 2013)