successors were not the lawful sovereigns of
England. It would have done more than
this, but for Elizabeth's moderation.

Since the Reformation, there had come to
be three great sects of religious people—or
people who called themselves so—in England;
that is to say, those who belonged to the
Reformed Church, those who belonged to the
unreformed Church, and those who were called
the Puritans, because they said that they
wanted to have everything very pure and
plain in all Church service. These last were
for the most part an uncomfortable people,
who thought it highly meritorious to dress
in a hideous manner, talk through their
noses, and oppose all harmless enjoyments.
But they were powerful too, and very much
in earnest; and they were, one and all, the
determined enemies of the Queen of Scots.
The Protestant feeling in England was
further strengthened by the tremendous
cruelties to which Protestants were exposed
in France and in the Netherlands. Scores of
thousands of them were put to death in those
countries with every cruelty that can be
imagined, and at last, in the autumn of the
year one thousand five hundred and seventy-
two, one of the greatest barbarities ever
committed in the world took place at
Paris.

It is called in history, THE MASSACRE OF
SAINT BARTHOLOMEW, because it took place on
Saint Bartholomew's Eve. It fell on Saturday
the twenty-third of August. On that day all
the great leaders of the Protestants (who were
there called HUGUENOTS) were assembled
together, for the purpose, as was represented
to them, of doing honour to the marriage of
their chief, the young King of Navarre, with
the sister of CHARLES THE NINTH: a miserable
young king who then occupied the French
throne. This dull creature was made to
believe by his mother and other fierce Catholics
about him that the Huguenots meant to
take his life; and he was persuaded to give
secret orders that, on the tolling of a great
bell, they should be fallen upon by an
overpowering force of armed men, and slaughtered
wherever they could be found. When the
appointed hour was close at hand, the stupid
wretch, trembling from head to foot, was
taken into a balcony by his mother to see the
atrocious work begun. The moment the bell
tolled, the murderers broke forth. During all
that night and the two next days, they broke
into the houses, fired the houses, shot and
stabbed the Protestants, men, women and
children, and flung their bodies into the
streets. They were shot at in the streets as
they passed along, and their blood ran down
the gutters. Upwards of ten thousand
Protestants were killed in Paris alone; and
in all France four or five times that number.
To return thanks to Heaven for these
diabolical murders, the Pope and his train
actually went in public procession at Rome;
and as if this were not shame enough for
them, they had a medal struck to
commemorate the event. But, however comfortable
the wholesale murders were to those
high authorities, they had not that soothing
effect upon the doll-King. I am happy to
state that he never knew a moment's peace
afterwards; that he was continually crying
out that he saw the Huguenots covered with
blood and wounds falling dead before him;
and that he died within a year, shrieking and
yelling and raving to that degree that if all
the Popes who had ever lived had been
rolled into one, they would not have afforded
His guilty Majesty the slightest consolation.

When the terrible news of the massacre
arrived in England, it made a powerful
impression indeed upon the people. If they
began to run a little wild against the
Catholics at about this time, this fearful
reason for it, coming so soon after the days
of Bloody Queen Mary, must be remembered
in their excuse. The Court was not quite so
honest as the people—but perhaps it
sometimes is not. It received the French
ambassador, with all the lords and ladies
dressed in deep mourning and keeping a
profound silence. Nevertheless, a proposal of
marriage which he had made to Elizabeth
only two days before the eve of Saint
Bartholomew, on behalf of the Duke of
Alençon, the French King's brother, a boy
of seventeen, still went on; while on the
other hand, in her usual crafty way, the
Queen secretly supplied the Huguenots with
money and weapons.

I must say that for a Queen who made
all those fine speeches, of which I have
confessed myself to be rather tired, about
living and dying a Maiden Queen, Elizabeth
was " going " to be married pretty often.
Besides always having some English favorite
or other, whom she by turns encouraged, and
swore at, and knocked about—for the maiden
Queen was very free with her fists—she held
this French Duke off and on through several
years. When he at last came over to England,
the marriage articles were actually drawn up,
and it was settled that the wedding should
take place in six weeks. The Queen was then
so bent upon it, that she prosecuted a poor
Puritan named STUBBS, and a poor bookseller
named PAGE, for writing and publishing a
pamphlet against it. Their right hands were
chopped off for this crime; and poor Stubbs
—more loyal than I should have been myself
under the circumstances—immediately pulled
off his hat with his left hand and cried,
"God save the Queen! " Stubbs was cruelly
treated, for the marriage never took place after
all, though the Queen pledged herself to the
Duke with a ring from her own finger. He
went away, no better than he came, when
the courtship had lasted some ten years
altogether; and he died a couple of years
afterwards, mourned by Elizabeth, who appears to
have been really fond of him. It is not much