Abstract
These words convey Queen Elizabeth’s disgust with King Charles IX of France over the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre in which Catholics murdered thousands of Protestants throughout France. On August 24, 1572, two nights after a lone assassin wounded Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, the leader of the French Calvinist Huguenots, a group of French Catholics finished the job by brutally stabbing, decapitating, and burning him.2 Other Huguenots shared his terrible fate; an immense mob murdered men, women, and children and tossed them in the Seine until it ran red with the blood of 3,000 dead Protestant Parisians.3 The killings quickly spread throughout the French countryside, and when they finally ceased in October as many as 10,000 Huguenots lay dead. Understandably, Protestant England was shocked by the government-sponsored killings of their Huguenot brethren across the channel, but Queen Elizabeth had a far more nuanced reaction to the bloodshed.
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Notes
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© 2011 Charles Beem
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Probasco, N. (2011). Queen Elizabeth’s Reaction to the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. In: Beem, C. (eds) The Foreign Relations of Elizabeth I. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118553_4
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