THE MASSACRE OF ST. BARTHOLOMEW.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXVII, Issue 8364, 18 September 1890, Page 3

THE MASSACRE OF ST. BARTHOLOMEW.

TO THE EDITOR. Sir,—l am sorry to have to trouble you with another letter on this subject; but from a report in to-day's Hereld of a meeting held in Auckland last night, it would seem that one of the speakers had missed the point of my communication published by you in the Herald of the 12th instant. In my desire to be brief I suppose I must have become obscure. My one purpose in my former letter was to defend the statement that I had made, namely, that the Huguenots were murdered on account of their religious opinions, and to confute the assertion, made at the Catholic Literary Society, that " religion had nothing whatever to do with the crime." In further support of my statement, allow me to call attention to the following facts :— 1. In the inscription hung over the portico of the church in Rome, where special thanks were offered for the massacre, it was expressly stated that " in one massacre nearly all the heretics of his (Charles IX.) kingdom had been killed," and that their slaughter was the result of the advice, the aid, and the prayers which had been offered during a period of twelve years [duo decennalium precum et votorum). 2. Cardinal Loraine at Rome declared that the massacre was an inspiration of God in the King's heart, and Catherine de Medici told Sir Francis Walsingham, the English Ambassador in Paris at the time, that " King Charles IX. would have but one religion in his realm." She also said to him, in answer to a protest from Queen Elizabeth's Council, " We may treat Protestants in France with the same severity as your Queen has treated the Catholics in England." The ambassador also wrote that Charles IX. regarded " all those of the religion, as well at home as abroad, as his enemies, and so consequently did not wish one of them to live." The above are samples of the innumerah' historical facts that might bo adduced .nfutation of the assertion that "religion had nothing whatever to do with the massacre of St. Bartholomew." In disparagement of my statement, that the inscription had been carefully removed from a painting in the Pope's palace, commemorating the massacre, the speaker at the Institute referred to the inscription that had been erased from The Monument in the city of London. That reference was most apposite. The citizens of London, after the great fire of 1666, set up an inscription, which their successors wore ashamed of and removed. In like manner, in recent times a successor of Gregory XIII. has defaced an inscription in the Vatican Palace, of which all Christian men of these days would be ashamed. That is exactly my contention. The French Calvinists of Charles IX.'s time were described, at last night's meeting, as of a factious and hostile spirit." No doubt they were so considered ; as I and many others in Auckland would now be considered, if we were tyrannised over by an overwhelming majority, headed by a ruler who " would have only one religion in his realm." As to the numbers slain in the massacre of 1572, a Roman Catholic Archbishop of Paris, Perefixe, reckoned their number at 100,000, including all the victims slaughtered in the provinces ; and a wellknown historian speaks of "the thousands of bodies floating down the Rhone, so shocking and even terrifying the inhabitants of Aries and the other towns on the river, that they refrained from drinking its water. "—I am, &c, W. G. Auckland, Bishop.