Attacks on Protestants, Paris, 1572

Sidney and Languet probably first met in Paris in the politically charged year of 1572. Sidney, then 17, had travelled there with Edward Fiennes de Clinton's delegation for the signing of the Treaty of Blois, by which France and England agreed to set aside their traditional differences and join forces against Spain. Languet, who was then 54, had been sent by the Elector of Saxony to congratulate Charles IX on the peace of Saint-Germain, which, in granting concessions to the Huguenots, marked a brief pause in the French wars of religion. Protestant hopes in Europe rode high, but by August of that year were dashed by the events of St Bartholomew's Day. The Huguenot leader Admiral de Coligny, who in June had entertained Sidney at a supper party in honour of the English delegation, was shot at in the street, then, two days later, killed in his lodgings, his body thrown from an upper window and decapitated by those waiting below. In the bloodbath that followed, two thousand Protestants were slaughtered in Paris and another three thousand in provincial France. The humanist scholar Peter Ramus, a convert to Protestantism whom Sidney had recently met at the residence of[…]

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25 April 2013. "London Review of Books." LRB Ltd., 2013-04-18T12:53:57+00:00. iBooks.
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