Gaspard de Coligny

Gaspard de Coligny was Admiral of France, the political head of the Huguenots, and the first man killed in the massacre of St Bartholomew's Day. He came from the high nobility, was a soldier under Francis I and Henry II, held Saint-Quentin against the Spanish in 1557 until the town was starved out, and converted to Protestantism during his captivity afterwards. It was Coligny who sponsored the French Protestant attempts at colonies in the Americas - Villegagnon's settlement in the bay of Rio de Janeiro in 1555, and the Florida expeditions of Ribault and Laudonniere that the Spanish destroyed at Fort Caroline in 1565 - conceived as refuges from a persecution he expected to worsen and as a strategic nuisance to Spain. He led Huguenot armies through the first three wars of religion, lost the battles and kept the movement in being, and after Conde was shot at Jarnac he was its undisputed commander. The peace of Saint-Germain in 1570 brought him to court, where he acquired real influence over the young Charles IX and pressed for the one policy that might have united the country: intervention in the Netherlands against Spain, a foreign war to end a civil one. Catherine de' Medici and the Guises regarded that as ruin. He was shot and wounded in the street on 22 August 1572, four days after the wedding meant to seal the peace, and in the early hours of 24 August the king's guards came to his lodging, killed him in his bed and threw the body from the window. The killing of the Huguenot leadership gathered in Paris for the wedding followed within the hour, and the provinces within weeks. His body was hung by the feet at Montfaucon, where the king went to look at it. Charles IX first blamed the Guises for the massacre, then claimed it in his own name a few days later. Coligny's assassination was formally reversed by the Parlement in 1576 and his confiscated estates restored to his children.

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