There is no reason for doubting that the massacre of St. Bartholomew was unpremeditated. It was not plotted years before, or even many days before. The light of modern investigation[1541] has proved this to the satisfaction of every unprejudiced historian, whether Protestant or Catholic. The combination of causes that led to the action; the motives of the principals; the responsibility for the massacre are today known with as much certainty as moral forces having relative and not absolute values can be. Even unprejudiced contemporaries, La Noue and Henry IV himself, did not believe the massacre to have been premeditated. A general slaughter of the Protestants was an old idea, but never regarded as a practical one, save by the papacy. The guilt of the massacre in all its monstrous proportions and consequences rests upon Catherine de Medici first of all. Fundamentally considered, it was the crime of a tigerishly hateful and essentially cowardly woman’s heart. Catherine was the author and instigator of it. The Guises entered into the plot chiefly to avenge themselves upon the admiral and really had little interest in prosecuting it beyond his death.[1542] The duke of Anjou and Tavannes were the fanatics. Charles IX was the creature of his mother’s malign influence and the victim of his own ferocious temperament which he had long indulged, and to which he now allowed monstrous license. For the rest the massacre of St. Bartholomew was perpetrated by men whose natures were compounded out of religious bigotry, political enmity, personal resentment or mere ruffianism and love of violence. The massacre of St. Bartholomew could not possibly have been of the remotest political benefit to any person. It was both a crime and a blunder. But Catherine de Medici was a ruler whose political conduct was governed by her personal feelings and prejudices. In the crisis in which she was, she had not the acumen to discern, or the courage to dare to follow, the course that lay open before her if she had had eyes to see and an understanding instead of a passionate heart. That course lay toward Italy and not toward the Netherlands. If France had reasserted her claims to Naples and Milan, then in the possession of Philip II, the nation would have been united in a common cause that would have appealed to ancient pride and achievement as well as existing animosity against Spain. England would have had no reason to be jealous, for her hand would have been free in Flanders. Moreover, in Italy France might have looked for support from Tuscany and Ferrara. Switzerland would have supported the enterprise; Venice would have made no opposition and the Emperor, for all his Spanish attachments, could not have done so. With the Turk in the Mediterranean on her side, France could have gone into war with Spain and the Pope without fear and with great promise of success.[1543] CHAPTER XVI THE FOURTH CIVIL WAR