The Elizabethans and St. Bartholomew

Abstract

Certain anecdotes of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew have long been enshrined in the established canon of the political history of the reign of Elizabeth. Readers of Froude will scarcely need to be reminded how Sir Francis Walsingham, then our man in Paris, heard from his house across the Seine the blood-chilling tumult around the Louvre. Another famous Englishman, Walsingham’s young protégé Philip Sidney (who had recently been hobnobbing with Henri de Navarre), must somehow have repressed a heroic impulse to take on the population of Paris single-handed, and so stayed put in the embassy, or perhaps under the protection of the duc de Nevers. Soon afterwards in England, Glo- riana, dressed in mourning from head to foot, gave the cold shoulder to the embarrassed French ambassador La Mothe-Fénelon, a treatment which English ladies clad in the porcupine-costume of that day must have found so easy to accord, even to French gentlemen. From 1570 to 1582 Elizabeth was engaged in encouraging and repelling the advances of two French princes, first the duc d’Anjou, then François duc d’Alençon — who, if Burghley had had his way, might have terminated the aging queen’s career in childbed, or else turned into an even more troublesome consort than Mary’s Philip. As I shall show, that persistent specter, the French match, has acquired for social historians the utmost relevance.