Menendez: De Gourges and Guise

So was concluded the savage and unchristian work of retaliating upon the innocent the crimes of the guilty. Could the blow have fallen upon King Philip of Spain, or Menendez his executioner, or Mendoza his apologist and coadjutor, and not upon the mere machines of government--the common soldiers--retributive justice would have been more divinely vindicated. But we must judge Philip, and Menendez, Mendoza and De Gourges, leniently, in the light of the spirit of the age in which they lived. No Spanish monarch now; no military chief, no truly Christian minister in any Christian country, to-day, would do such horrid work for such a cause. The seminal idea of the protest at Spires has worked beneficent wonders in making men less savage and more divine, since it was projected into human society.

Too weak to brave the wrath of Menendez, who was at St. Augustine, De Gourges, with the assistance of the Indians, utterly destroyed the forts on the St. John's, and then sailed for France, where he arrived just in time to avoid vessels which Philip had sent out to intercept him. He was received with coldness at court. Philip had demanded of the weak Charles the head of De Gourges, and the Queen-mother, Catharine, had espoused the cause of the opponents of the Huguenots. In poverty De Gourges concealed himself for some years, declining an invitation of the Queen of England (Elizabeth) to enter her service. At length he died, whilst on his way to a seaport to take command of a fleet that was about to wage war on Philip.

Menendez firmly planted a colony at St. Augustine, and sent an expedition, with Jesuit missionaries, to explore the waters of Chesapeake Bay, plant a settlement there, and scatter the seeds of Christianity among the pagans. But his death in 1574, when he was High Admiral of the Spanish navy, arrested this enterprise, and no further attempts seem to have been made by the Spaniards to plant settlements within the domain of our Republic.

Coligni was deserted by his sovereign and his inhuman mother, and became a martyr. Catharine, with a strange perversion of a mother's natural instincts, after she became regent, plunged all of her children, in the flower of their youth, into a whirl of sensual pleasure, that soon weakened their minds and bodies beyond recovery, as she intended they should be. Her royal son, when he reached his majority, seemed incapable of resisting any temptation put in his way by his mother, and he was easily persuaded by her to order the destruction of the Protestants throughout France, on the eve of St. Bartholomew, in August, 1572. She had failed in a plot to bring the Duke of Guise to the scaffold, and now she had joined the league against the Huguenots, of which he was a leader. Coligni was selected as one of the first victims for sacrifice on that fatal night. Behme, a German assassin in the employ of the Duke of Guise, led a band of murderers to the room of Coligni, with concealed weapons excepting a boar-spear which he held in his hand. When he entered, the majestic presence of the Admiral and the serenity and dignity of his deportment so abashed the leader, that he was about to retire, when one of his followers whispered in his ear, "Coward!" Behme instantly recovered his self-possession and plunged the spear into the heart of Coligni, who fell dead at the feet of his murderers. His body was thrown out of the window into a court, where the Duke of Guise was waiting for the consummation of the crime. The Admiral's head was severed from his body and carried to Catharine, who had it embalmed and sent as a present to Pope Gregory the Thirteenth, at Rome. The Admiral's body was dragged through the streets of Paris amidst the execration of an infuriated mob, and then was hanged on a gibbet where Charles the Ninth and his courtiers viewed it.