Prince of Orange, strong, and soon to be strengthened, boast that the
Netherlands were free, and that Alva was in his power. He had a right
to be sanguine, for nothing less than a miracle could now destroy his
generous hopes--and, alas! the miracle took place; a miracle of perfidy
and bloodshed such as the world, familiar as it had ever been and was
still to be with massacre, had not yet witnessed. On the 11th of August,
Coligny had written thus hopefully of his movements towards the
Netherlands, sanctioned and aided by his King. A fortnight from that
day occurred the "Paris-wedding;" and the Admiral, with thousands of his
religious confederates, invited to confidence by superhuman treachery,
and lulled into security by the music of august marriage bells, was
suddenly butchered in the streets of Paris by royal and noble hands.

The Prince proceeded on his march, during which the heavy news had been
brought to him, but he felt convinced that, with the very arrival of the
awful tidings, the fate of that campaign was sealed, and the fall of Mons
inevitable. In his own language, he had been struck to the earth "with
the blow of a sledge-hammer,"--nor did the enemy draw a different augury
from the great event.

The crime was not committed with the connivance of the Spanish
government. On the contrary, the two courts were at the moment bitterly
hostile to each other. In the beginning of the summer, Charles IX. and
his advisers were as false to Philip, as at the end of it they were
treacherous to Coligny and Orange. The massacre of the Huguenots had
not even the merit of being a well-contrived and intelligently executed
scheme. We have seen how steadily, seven years before, Catharine de
Medici had rejected the advances of Alva towards the arrangement of a
general plan for the extermination of all heretics within France and the
Netherlands at the same moment. We have seen the disgust with which Alva