The queen of Navarre was poisoned by orders from the court; the admiral was dangerously wounded by an assassin: yet Charles, redoubling his dissimulation, was still able to retain the Hugonots in their security; till, on the evening of St.
Bartholomew, a few days after the marriage, the signal was given for a general massacre of those religionists, and the king himself in person led the way to these assassinations.

The hatred long entertained by the Parisians against the Protestants, made them second, without any preparation, the fury of the court; and persons of every condition, age, and sex, suspected of any propensity to that religion, were involved in an undistinguished ruin.

The admiral, his son-in-law Teligni, Soubize, Rochefoucault, Pardaillon, Piles, Lavardin, men who, during the late wars, had signalized themselves by the most heroic actions, were miserably butchered without resistance; the streets of Paris flowed with blood; and the people, more enraged than satiated with their cruelty, as if repining that death had saved their victims from further insult, exercised on their dead bodies all the rage of the most licentious brutality.

About five hundred gentlemen and men of rank perished in this massacre; and near ten thousand of inferior condition.[*] Orders were instantly despatched to all the provinces for a like general execution of the Protestants; and in Rouen, Lyons, and many other cities, the people emulated the fury of the capital.

Even the murder of the king of Navarre, and prince of Conde, had been proposed by the duke of Guise; but Charles, softened by the amiable manners of the king of Navarre, and hoping that these young princes might easily be converted to the Catholic faith, determined to spare their lives, though he obliged them to purchase their safety by a seeming change of their religion.
Charles, in order to cover this barbarous perfidy, pretended that a conspiracy of the Hugonots to seize his person had been suddenly detected; and that he had been necessitated, for his own defence, to proceed to this severity against them.