The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself (28 page)

By this time the beginnings of what became a flood of refugees were arriving at Geneva's gates. As of 4 September Beza had pieced together a remarkably accurate narrative of Coligny's death.
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But despite the availability of eyewitness reports, wild rumours continued to circulate. Refugees from Lyon reported that three thousand Protestants had been killed in the city. It was widely thought that Henry of Navarre and the young Prince of Condé had been put to death: in fact they had been spirited away for their own safety. Beza reported to his correspondents that a French fleet had been gathered at Bordeaux for the subjugation of England; a week later he had heard talk of a parallel plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth. The tales of horror were leavened only by the arrival in Geneva of some friends previously thought lost. The French jurist and political thinker François Hotman had escaped from Bourges and walked to Geneva. The following day he shared his belief that ‘fifty thousand people have been slaughtered in France in the space of eight or ten days’.
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Traumatised refugees only added to the sense of despair that seems at this time to have overcome the normally resilient Genevan pastors. Only the urgent requirement to attend to the physical needs of the new arrivals helped shake Beza from a torpor in which he longed for death and martyrdom.

Among the appalled eyewitnesses to the events in Paris was the English ambassador Francis Walsingham, later Queen Elizabeth's principal secretary and de facto head of intelligence. The English residence was some way from the epicentre of the violence, but Walsingham was soon aware of what was afoot, first from the sound of gunfire, then from the stream of terrified refugees seeking sanctuary in the embassy.
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Conscious that some Englishmen were among the dead, it was only on 26 August that Walsingham dared venture out,
and the following day before he despatched a messenger back to England. He thought it best not to entrust his thoughts to paper, and instead left the courier to make a verbal report. In fact, by the time this rider had made his way across the Channel, the massacre was common knowledge in London, brought by returning merchants and the first refugees. The condemnation of the French Crown, so recently welcomed as allies in the fight against Spain, was swift and universal. The French ambassador Fénélon was obliged to report:

It was not until 8 September that the ambassador had the chance to put the French government's perspective in a frosty interview with Queen Elizabeth, and subsequently before the sceptical Privy Council. By this point English opinion was immovable. ‘As to the Ambassador's negotiation with us here,’ wrote William Cecil, Lord Burghley, ‘to seek to persuade us that the King was forced for safety of his own life to cause the execution to be done as it was, you may imagine how hard a thing it is to us to be so persuaded against all our natural senses.’
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The Council was under strong pressure to strike back by the first available means. Among the recommended actions forwarded to Burghley by the bishop of London was ‘Forthwith to cut off the Scottish Queen's head’. Mary, Queen of Scots had been an awkward English prisoner for several years, and a natural focus for Catholic disaffection. More sober counsels prevailed. There was little to be gained by severing all connections with France, when it was widely believed that Spain had been instrumental in orchestrating the massacres. Such suspicions only hardened when Protestants became aware of the glee that had greeted news of the massacres in Spain and Rome.

The first news arrived in Rome on 2 September, brought by a special courier from Lyon. The messenger carried two letters, both written by the governor of Lyon's secretary: one was addressed to a local French contact, the other to the Pope. The news was passed to leading members of the French diplomatic community, who now accompanied the Cardinal of Lorraine to share the glory of the tidings with Pope Gregory. ‘What is the news,’ Lorraine is said to have asked the Pope, ‘that your highness desires above all others?’ ‘For the
exaltation of the Catholic faith, the extermination of the Huguenots’ was the Pope's reply. This provided the cue for Lorraine's triumphant climax: ‘It is precisely that that we can now announce to you for the glory of God and the majesty of the Holy Church.’
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At this point the French ambassador counselled Pope Gregory against premature effusions of public joy. He should rather wait for official confirmation, which arrived on 5 September, in letters borne by special couriers from the French king, and the papal nuncio in Paris, Antonio Maria Salviati. The nuncio's courier brought a detailed despatch, written on 27 August, along with a duplicate of a first hurried report from the day of the massacre itself. The original of this first letter had been entrusted to the French king's messenger, and thus arrived a couple of hours after the duplicate. The other despatches carried by the king's envoy allow us to reconstruct the rapid evolution of the official explanation of the massacre. Charles IX's first despatch, written on 24 August, presents the massacre as the unhappy consequence of the long feud between Coligny and Guise. By 26 August, however, the decision had been made to accept full responsibility: the massacre was now presented as an extra-judicial execution designed to pre-empt an imminent Protestant attack. For Pope Gregory, the cause or motivation was not, at this point, the principal issue at stake. The nuncio's account was read aloud to the assembled cardinals, and Gregory ordered a solemn
Te Deum
to be sung in celebration.

From this point news about the massacres in France was conveyed to Rome in a flood of bulletins from diverse sources. The papal nuncios in Venice, Vienna, Madrid, Turin and Florence added their reflections to those of Salviati in Paris. Most offered important observations on the political fallout; the nuncio in Florence was able in addition to offer a digest of the
avvisi
and other reports passing through this crucial information crossroads. In addition papal officials had access to a series of commercial newsletters despatched from Paris and Lyon from 24 August onwards. These provided both a developing picture of the true extent of the killing and reports of the speculation in France as to the causes. The Lyon
avviso
of 8 September mentioned 5,000 dead in the capital, 1,200 in Orléans and 500 in Lyon. Most other reports put the number of victims in Paris at around 2,000.
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It should be noted that the prevailing estimates in the commercial newsletters were much closer to the truth than the overheated rumours circulating in the Protestant cities.

The first firm news reached Madrid only on 6 September. King Philip, then residing at the monastery of St Jerónimo, called over a secretary to have him translate a French account of the disposal of the Huguenot grandees. Shortly thereafter letters arrived from the Spanish ambassador in Paris, and a personal communication from Catherine of Medici written on 25 August. For Philip
this was indeed a bounteous gift from a loving God. The looming threat of a French intervention in support of his Netherlandish rebels disappeared at a stroke. On 7 September he summoned the French ambassador St Gouard to witness his joy. In the ambassador's subsequent report of the audience, Philip ‘began to laugh, with signs of extreme pleasure and satisfaction. He said he had to admit that he owed his Low Countries of Flanders to your Majesty.’ Philip was in similar celebratory mood in his reply to his own ambassador in Paris. ‘I had one of the greatest moments of satisfaction that I have had in all my life, and will have yet another if you continue writing to me of what is happening in the other parts of that realm. If things go as they did today, it will set the seal on the whole business.’
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Even the normally restrained Duke of Alva, writing from the Netherlands, caught the mood:

It is noticeable that the Catholic reaction, in both Madrid and Rome, concentrates almost exclusively on the decapitation of the Huguenot leadership: the scale of the subsequent killings concerned them hardly at all. The solitary exception on the Catholic side was the Emperor Maximilian, who, living among Protestants in the Empire, faced a more delicate political canvas. German Lutherans fully shared the horror of their Calvinist co-religionists, and Maximilian had to take strenuous steps to deny that he shared in the responsibility for the widely rumoured international Catholic conspiracy.
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This disjunction, between a Catholic concentration on the political aspect and Protestant horror at the scale of the subsequent violence, was critical in shaping the ensuing narrative of events. Given the amount of time historians have devoted to reconstructing the train of events that led to the massacre, it is notable that contemporaries were almost unanimous in concluding that the destruction of the Huguenot nobility represented a deliberate act of policy. The Spanish ambassador was in no doubt that the strike against the Huguenot leadership was the responsibility of King Charles and Catherine of Medici; the papal nuncio reported in similar terms. The commercial newsletters from Paris and Lyon concurred in affirming the king's responsibility. The royal proclamation issued by Charles explaining that he had felt obliged to take action by the evidence of imminent treachery seemed to settle the issue.
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7.4 The military aftermath of St Bartholomew. A Parisian broadsheet view of the fortifications of the Protestant stronghold of La Rochelle, under close siege by the royal army.

That might have been the case had it not been widely suspected that the events of the summer were the result of a long-gestated plot, through which the too trusting Coligny and the Huguenot nobility had been lured to congregate in Paris. The Paris
avviso
of 27 August reported that the decision to eliminate the Huguenots had been taken by the king nine months previously, in conference with the Queen Mother, and at the instigation of the Duke of Guise.
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The Cardinal of Lorraine added fuel to the fire by speaking in Rome of a shadowy Protestant plot, and indicating that the French court had formulated plans in advance to neutralise the threat. The theme of premeditation found its most developed articulation in a work of the papal courtier Camillo Capilupi, who penned a letter, ostensibly to his brother, setting out a plan to eliminate the Huguenots going back to 1570. The letter, which was published as a pamphlet under the striking title,
The Stratagem of Charles IX against the Huguenots
, cited several documents that purported to show Catherine and the king revealing their preparations to key contacts, including the Venetian ambassador. Although Capilupi, like all the Catholic observers who discussed the massacre, had nothing but praise for the French king, his tract was a propaganda windfall for the Calvinists, who made swift arrangements to have it republished in Geneva with a French translation.
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This was one of a succession of pamphlets rolling off the French Protestant presses that execrated the French court for their scheming perfidy, their abuse of the honourable Coligny, their bad faith and cruelty. As French armies gathered to finish by military force what the massacre had begun, a new generation of writings called openly for resistance, articulating a novel vision of contractual monarchy in which the rights of abused citizens might lead ultimately to the deposition of a tyrannical ruler.
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But nothing spoke louder than the events themselves. By far the most influential writings of the day were the simple narratives of events: of the trusting, noble Coligny who greeted his killers from his bed, and the numerous men, women and children who had met death with courage and faith.
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To Philip II this was irrelevant collateral damage from an essentially political event. In the Protestant consciousness these ordinary victims were the heart of the story. And it was a story that persuaded Protestant Europe of the unbridgeable gulf that now separated Catholics and Protestants.