The ambassador Lamothe-Fénélon, charged to justify the massacre at the court of London, on accusing the Admiral of having conspired against Charles IX., cried out in the bitterness of his spirit that he blushed to bear the name of a Frenchman. “Never,” says Hume, “was there a spectacle more terrible and more touching than that of the solemnity of this audience. A gloomy grief sat on every countenance; the profound silence of night seemed to reign in all the apartments of the queen. The lords and ladies of the court, in long mourning apparel, suffered the ambassador to pass between them without saluting him, or deigning to give him so much as a look.”[64] On coming near the queen, Lamothe-Fénelon stammered out his odious apology, and retired in confusion. The justification of the massacre was not an easier matter in Germany. The ambassador Schomberg did what he could to support the fable of the plot of Coligny. They refused even to treat with him otherwise than in writing, so much did they mistrust an envoy of Charles IX.; so deeply degraded was the word, the honour, and the name of France! When the duke of Anjou traversed Germany in 1573, the Elector Palatine led him into his cabinet, and showing him the portrait of Coligny, said to him, “You know this man; you have killed the greatest captain of Christendom, and you ought not to have done it; for he had rendered great services to you and the king.” The duke of Anjou answered that it was the Admiral who had sought to destroy them all. “We know that tale, sir,” was the cold reply of the Elector. If all the circumstances of the massacre of Saint Bartholomew be well weighed,—the premeditation, the intervention of the court and of the councils of the king, the snares that were laid to entrap the Calvinists, the solemn oaths which had drawn them to Paris, the royal marriage ceremony stained with blood, the dagger put into the hands of the people by the chiefs of the state, the hecatombs of human victims immolated at a time of universal peace, the carnage prolonged for two months in the provinces, and lastly, the priests and the princes of the priests, ankle-deep in blood, lifting their hands to heaven to thank God,—if, we say, we ponder upon all these circumstances, we cannot escape the conviction that the slaughter of Saint Bartholomew is the greatest crime of the Christian era since the invasion of the men of the North. The Sicilian Vespers, the extermination of the Albigeois, the tortures of the Inquisition, the murders committed by the Spaniards in the New World, odious though they be, do not unite in the same degree the violation of all laws, human and divine. And frightful calamities have sprung from this monstrous crime. Individuals may indeed commit crimes, which remain unpunished in this world; but dynasties, castes, and nations, never go unrewarded.