227In France the same diabolical spirit prevailed. After a succession of cruelties, practised in various forms, a most violent persecution broke out in the year 1572, in the reign of Charles the Ninth. Many of the principal Protestants were invited to Paris, under a solemn oath of safety, upon occasion of the marriage of the King of Navarre with the sister of the French monarch. The queen dowager of Navarre, a zealous Protestant, was, however, poisoned by a pair of gloves before the marriage was solemnized. Coligni, Admiral of France, a brave and virtuous man, was basely murdered in his own house, and then thrown out of the window, to gratify the malice of the popish Duke of Guise. The admiral’s head was afterwards cut off, and sent to the queen-mother; and his body, after having been submitted to a thousand indignities, was hung up by the feet on a gibbet. After this, the murderers ravaged the whole city of Paris, and in the course of three days, butchered above ten thousand persons, among whom were several of the nobility and gentry, and others of high moral reputation. The streets and passages resounded with the noise of those who met together for murder and plunder; and a prodigious multitude of men, women with child, maidens, and children, were involved in one common destruction. From the city of Paris the massacre spread through the whole kingdom. In the city of Meaux two hundred Protestants were thrown into prison, and after the persecutors had ravished and killed a great number of women, and secured piles of plunder, they executed their fury upon those in confinement. Calling them out one by one, they were killed, like sheep appointed for the slaughter. In Orleans they murdered above five hundred men, women, and children, and enriched themselves with their spoil. Similar cruelties were practised at Angers, Troyes, Bourges, La Charité, and especially at Lyons, where above eight hundred Protestants were inhumanly destroyed. Children were killed while hanging on their parents’ necks; parents were torn from the embraces of their offspring, and put to death; ropes were put about some, who were dragged inhumanly about the streets, and thrown half dead into the rivers. 228 RIDLEY.