Excerpt from The Life of Henry the Fourth, King of France and Navarre, Vol. 2 of 3
No doubt can exist that in the massacre, which commenced in Paris on' St. Bartholomew's day, it was the intention of the court of France, not only to weaken the Huguenot party, by the loss of the distinguished Calvinists who had been collected in the capital, but actually to extirpate the Reformed religion from the land, by the slaughter of all the Protestants in the kingdom. The monarch and his counsellors, however, shewed all that vacillation and infirmity of purpose, which the perpetration of great and unheard-of crimes generally brings with it. Terror and cruelty usually go hand in hand, till long impunity in wickedness has calmed -the cowardly part of tyranny; and it is evident that the brutal assassins of the metropolis felt afraid, that the first news of the massacre might find the Protestants of the provinces better prepared to resist, and the governors less ready to execute, the work of slaughter than had been the case in Paris.
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