Protestant Exiles from France/Book First - Chapter 3 - Section I
Chapter III.
CELEBRATED REFUGEES FROM THE ST BARTHOLOMEW MASSACRE.
I. Odet De Chatillon.
The name among the victims of the St. Bartholomew massacre, that is remembered with the greatest admiration and commiseration, is Admiral Coligny. My younger readers should be informed that he was a great military commander (the title of admiral not having been then made over to the Naval Service); also that Coligny was his title of nobility, and not his surname. The family name was De Chatillon; there were three brothers in that generation. The youngest was Francois de Chatillon, Sieur d’Andelot, and usually called Andelot; he died in 1569. Gaspard de Chatillon, Comte de Coligny, the second brother, was the Admiral of France. The eldest brother, although he died before the massacre, deserves a memoir among Protestant exiles.
Odet de Chatillon, commonly called the Cardinal de Chatillon, was born on the 10th July 1517. It must be remembered that this date is antecedent to the Protestant Reformation; and that all the brothers, being born during the undisturbed reign of Romanist superstition, were converted to Protestantism. The dignity of Cardinal, with which Odet was invested, was no better than a temporal honour — a decoration or compliment conferred on him on the 7th November 1533, that is to say, when he was only sixteen years of age, by Pope Clement VII. At the same date he was consecrated as Archbishop of Toulouse. In 1535 he obtained the Bishopric of Beauvais, which, along with ample revenues, included the dignity and privileges of a Peer of France. In 1544, being so well endowed as an ecclesiastic, he resigned all his own heritage to his brothers. His tendencies towards Protestantism arose from aspirations after religious life. In 1554, he issued his Constitutions Synodales, in order to reform ecclesiastical abuses in his diocese. In 1564 he appeared as a doctrinal reformer. In the month of April of that year, he administered the Lord’s Supper according to the rites of the French Protestant Church in his palace at Beauvais. His neighbours raised a riot, in which his own life was threatened, and a schoolmaster as as his protege was killed. He then deliberately renounced his ecclesiastical dignities, and assumed the title of Comte de Beauvais. The Pope cited him to appear before the Inquisition; but he took an early opportunity to wear his Cardinal’s dress among the King’s Councillors, in order to proclaim his defiance of the Papal authority. And on the 1st of December he married Elizabeth, daughter of Samson de Haute- ville (a Norman gentleman) and Marguerite de Lore. As during this year, so afterwards, he openly acted as a leading Huguenot negotiator.
In 1568 he negociated the peace of Longjumeau, avoiding all Bourbon schemes, and confining his demands to the free exercise of the Protestant religion. Queen Catherine de Medicis attempted, in violation of the peace, and by a coup d’ etât, to seize the Protestant leaders, who, however, got secret information, and Conde and Coligny retired precipitately within La Rochelle, whither the Queen of Navarre and her son quickly followed them. The Cardinal, in August 1568, hurried from his Chateau of Brele (near Beauvais), hotly pursued. Disguised as a sailor, he barely succeeded in embarking at Sainte-Marie-du-Mont for England. His countess accompanied him, and their voyage was safely accomplished. At Dover, on the 8th September, the Cardinal de Chatillon’s arrival was announced. The government of England had ordered every attention to be paid to him. “Haste, haste, haste, haste, with all haste — vii. of the clocke in the morning,” were the words written on the cover enclosing the despatch (signed Rowland Mekly), sent to Lord Cobham at Cobham Hall, who was Lord Warden and Admiral of the Cinque-ports. Lord Cobham, besides attending to his own duties in the matter, forwarded the Despatch to Mr. Secretary Cecil. On the ioth inst., it was announced that the illustrious visitor “was, at Canterbury, being accompanied with thirtye persons; of best accompte is Monsieur de Lygy.” He proceeded by land to Gravesend, and thence by water to London. On the 13th, Sir Thomas Gresham announced that “my Lord Cardinall Chastillon arrived at the Tower wharf at 4 p.m.” Royal authority in those days made great demands upon the nobility for entertaining strangers at their country mansions. The Bishop of London [Grindal] was excused on account of the scantiness of his furniture. There is in the State Paper Office a long letter, interesting to lovers of house-holding and house-keeping antiquities, in which Lord Buckhurst explained apologetically that having received only very short notice, he had entertained the Cardinal and the Bishop [of Aries] in very plain style at his country seat at Shene (30th September 1568).
Queen Elizabeth received the noble Frenchman as a Prince, lodged him in Sion House, and gave him audiences on Huguenot affairs. Dressed in black flowing garments, and conspicuous with his noble brow and venerable aspect, he was always treated by our Queen with demonstrative affection as one of her intimate friends — so much so, that the Londoners declared that the ambassador from the Prince of Conde was a greater man than the veritable French Ambassador. As he was always styled the Cardinal de Chatillon, the English were not certain as to his creed, and cautiously designated him “a favourer, if not a member, of the Protestant Church.” But inquirers knew his decided profession, his Protestant chaplain, and his worship in Protestant Churches. In the beginning of 1571, during the interval of treacherous tranquillity in his native country, his friends in France summoned him home. He set out for Hampton Court to report himself to our Queen at a farewell audience.
His last appearance in public was on the occasion of our queen’s visit to the Royal Exchange in February 1571 (n.s.). An unaccountable and depressing indisposition seized him. He proceeded as far as Canterbury, and there, in the house of Mr. John Burgey, he died about the 14th of March. Though poison was suspected, the criminal who administered the poisoned apple did not confess the deed until more than a year afterwards. At the time all that could be said is preserved in our State Papers. “2d March 1570. — Sir H. Killigrew could not see the Cardinal, who was indisposed, but Mrs. Walsingham saw his wife in the evening; it appeared that his sickness is not without danger, the rather for that in his conceit it is accompanied with much melancholy.” Canterbury, Friday, 30th March 1571, was the date of the report from Mr. Roger Marwood and Mr. Thomas Leighton, after conference with the widow regarding the cause of the death of the Cardinal of Chastillon. Her opinion was that some sudden illness had seized him in London on the occasion of the queen’s visit to the Royal Exchange, after which his health seemed to fail, he complaining of a burning greife at his stomake. On a post-mortem examination a certain unnatural spot was found in the inner part of his stomach, but after examining persons as had access and were doing about him, suspicion could be attached to none.
Odet de Chatillon lies buried in Canterbury Cathedral — the spot is described in Dart’s History of the Cathedral, as being “at the feet of Bishop Courtney, between two of the pillars bending circularly.” It is marked by “a plain tomb of bricks, made like a round-lidded chest, or not much unlike a turf grave, but higher, and composed of bricks plastered over and painted with a lead colour.”
The Bishop of Winchester (Robert Horn) wrote to Henry Bullinger of Zurich, from London, August 8, 1571 — “The Cardinal, a nobleman of first rank, a pious man and an exile here among us for the sake of religion, while he was sojourning some days at Canterbury, waiting for a wind for his prosperous and safe return, was taken off (as they report, and is indeed credible) by the deadly poison of the Papists, and wasted away, destroyed by wickedness and crime.”