The King of Navarre remained a prisoner in the Louvre while the pursuit of the Huguenots went on hotter than ever. To the terrible night had succeeded a day of massacre still more horrible.
Alexandre Dumas, LA REINE MARGOT
The massacre of St.-Bartholomew’s Day happened as follows: Henri’s Huguenot followers had been invited to Paris for his wedding to Margot. As Dumas tells it, “The spacious apartments of the Louvre were filled with those brave Protestants to whom the marriage of their young leader Henri promised an unexpected return of good fortune” after the protracted religious wars that had occupied France in the sixteenth century, when Martin Luther’s reforms continued to spread with fierce enthusiasm over Europe, entangled with the larger geopolitical ambitions of both Spain and England.
Henri of Navarre, Queen Margot’s reluctant husband, was ruler of a region which lay in both today’s Spain and France in the Pyrenees. His fiercely Huguenot and militant mother Jeanne d’Albret had recently died, so he had became the nominal head of the Protestant faction. As befits a romantic hero, Henri, at least in Dumas’s novel, had “a keen eye, black hair cut very close, thick eyebrows, and a nose curved like an eagle’s” and he was about the same age as his bride, nineteen.
Henri and his companions were mistaken about forthcoming good fortune. On the night of August 24, 1572, Catholic partisans of Catherine de Médicis and Charles IX by prearrangement fell upon and began slaughtering Protestants, initiating a period of violence in which, by some estimates, thirty thousand people were killed throughout France. Some estimates are higher.
Writing about the massacre later, Queen Margot’s account tends to excuse certain aspects of it that seem especially infamous, especially the part played by her brother Charles IX, of whom she was fond, tending to blame it on her mother: Charles, “a prince of great prudence,” and “always paying a particular deference to his mother,” and “being much attached to the Catholic religion,” agreed to do as Catherine urged and dispose of the Protestants. “Immediately every hand was at work; chains were drawn across the streets, the alarm-bells were sounded, and every man repaired to his post, according to the orders he had received.”
The newly married Margot was not told what was going on. The Huguenots were suspicious of her because she was a Catholic, and the Catholics because she had married a Huguenot. “This being the case, no one spoke a syllable of the matter to me,” she writes later. As the massacre was getting underway, she went in to say good night to her mother, and found her sister in tears. Catherine de Médicis abruptly told Margot to go to bed, but her sister said “for the love of God, do not stir out of this chamber.” This earned the sister a severe rebuke from their mother.
“My sister replied it was sending me away to be sacrificed; for, if any discovery should be made, I should be the first victim of their revenge. The Queen my mother made answer that, if it pleased God, I should receive no hurt, but it was necessary I should go, to prevent the suspicion that might arise from my staying.”
Apparently Henri of Navarre observed the custom of other kings by going to bed in a public way surrounded by courtiers. When Margot got to her room, Henri sent for her; and she found him already in bed, with thirty or forty of his men around the bed, all of them talking about the attempted assassination of a prominent Huguenot admiral by—Queen Margot does not go into this—her former lover de Guise. It appears the Protestants didn’t at first realize what was happening outside the Louvre, where the vicious slaughter was beginning.
Henri was in effect a prisoner, but was given a chance to convert to Catholicism, and gracefully did, thus escaping death on the spot. But he was confined to the Louvre. Eventually, with Queen Margot’s help, he would escape and leave the area, and Queen Margot, still suspected by him for her Catholicism and by her family because she was married, thanks to them, to him, continued to be imprisoned for some time in her quarters at the Louvre.