Henry M. Baird · 211 of 379

CHAPTER IX · The young king visibly affected.

But it was at Amboise that the vengeance of the Guises found its widest scope. Day and night the execution of the prisoners stayed not. Their punishment was ingeniously diversified. Some were decapitated, others hung; still others were drowned in the waters of the Loire. The streets of Amboise ran with blood, and the stench of the unburied corpses threatened a pestilence. Ten or twelve dead bodies, in full clothing and tied to a single pole, floated down from time to time toward the sea, and carried tidings of the wholesale massacre to the cities on the lower Loire. Neither trial nor publication of the charge preceded the summary execution. Most frequently the victims were placed in the hangman's hand immediately after the hour for dinner, that their dying agonies might furnish an agreeable diversion to the ladies of the court, who watched the gibbet from the royal drawing-rooms. Few, besides the Duchess of Guise, daughter of Renée of Ferrara, manifested any disgust at the repulsive spectacle. Some of the prisoners who importunately insisted on seeing the king, and making before him a profession of their faith, were summarily hanged from the castle windows. One intrepid reformer had been so fortunate as to be admitted to the queen mother's presence, and there, by his ready and cogent reasoning, had well-nigh brought the Cardinal of Lorraine to admit that his view of the Lord's Supper was correct. Catharine's attention having been for a moment withdrawn, when she returned to the discussion the man had disappeared. Actuated by curiosity or by a desire to spare his life, she requested him to be sent for. It was too late; he had already been despatched. For the most part, the victims displayed great constancy and courage. Many died with the words of the psalms of Marot and Beza on their lips. Castelnau, after having in his interrogatory made patent to all the hypocrisy of the cardinal and the cowardice of the chancellor, died maintaining that, before he was pronounced guilty of treason, the Guises ought to be declared kings of France. Villemongys, upon the scaffold, dipped his hands in the blood of his companions, and, raising them toward heaven, exclaimed in a loud voice: "Lord, this is the blood of Thy children, unjustly shed. Thou wilt avenge it!" The body of La Renaudie was first hung upon one of the bridges of Amboise, with the superscription: "La Renaudie, styling himself Laforest, author of the conspiracy, chief and leader of the rebels." Afterward it was quartered, and his head, in company with the heads of others, was exposed upon a pole on a public square. The sight of these continually recurring executions, succeeding a fearful struggle in which so many of his subjects had taken part, is said to have affected even the young king, who asked, with tears, what he had done to his people to animate them thus against him. It is even reported that, catching for an instant, through the mist with which his advisers sought to keep his mind enshrouded, a glimpse of the true cause of the discontent, he made a feeble suggestion, which was easily parried, that the Guises should for a time retire from the court, in order that he might find out whether the popular enmity was in reality directed against him, or against his uncles. Their fertile invention, however, was not slow in concocting a story that turned his short-lived pity into settled hatred of the "Huguenot heretics."