was his opinion that God has ordained
that no mercy shall be shown to heretics, that Charles was bound in
conscience to do what he did, and that leniency would have been as
censurable in his case as precipitation was in that of Theodosius. What
the Calvinists called perfidy and cruelty seemed to him nothing but
generosity and kindness.[101] These were the sentiments of the man from
whose hands Charles IX. received the last consolations of his religion.
It has been related that he was tortured in his last moments with
remorse for the blood he had shed. His spiritual adviser was fitted to
dispel such scruples. He tells us that he heard the last confession of
the dying King, and that his most grievous sorrow was that he left the
work unfinished.[102] In all that bloodstained history there is nothing
more tragic than the scene in which the last words preparing the soul
for judgment were spoken by such a confessor as Sorbin to such a
penitent as Charles.

Edmond Auger, one of the most able and eloquent of the Jesuits, was at
that time attracting multitudes by his sermons at Bordeaux. He denounced
with so much violence the heretics and the people in authority who
protected them, that the magistrates, fearing a cry for blood, proposed
to silence or to moderate the preacher. Montpezat, Lieutenant of
Guienne, arrived in time to prevent it. On the 30th of September he
wrote to the King that he had done this, and that there were a score of
the inhabitants who might be despatched with advantage. Three days
later, when he was gone, more than two hundred Huguenots were
murdered.[103]

Apart from these two instances it is not known that the clergy
interfered in any part of France to encourage the assassins.

The belief was common at the time, and is not yet extinct, that the
massacre had been promoted and sanctioned by the Court of Rome. No
evidence of this complicity, prior to the event, has ever been produced;
but it seemed consistent with what was supposed to have occurred in the
affair of the dispensation. The marriage of Margaret of Valois with the
King of Navarre was invalid and illicit in the eyes of the Church; and
it was known that Pius V. had sworn that he would never permit it. When
it had been celebrated by a Cardinal, in the presence of a splendid
court, and no more was heard of resistance on the part of Rome, the
world concluded that the dispensation had been obtained. De Thou says,
in a manuscript note, that it had b