In Protestant England, the ongoing influx of thousands of French Huguenot refugees and the continuing specter of religious conflict rendered the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre a vivid symbol of Catholic threats past, present, and future.
The first two sections of the poem recount episodes in the French civil wars prior to 1572; the third part is Dowriche's narration of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, for which she relied heavily on several sources, especially the French author Jean de Serress Commentaries on the Civil Wars of France (1574) that had been translated into English by Thomas Timme.
One of my great grandfathers by the name of Munch was among those slain during the
St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre. Actually the massacre continued for two to three weeks.
The cover illustration of The Long Truce is Robert-Fleury's painting
St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre. It depicts members of the French Catholic subcommunity lustily impaling on their swords members of the Protestant subcommunity.
The article fails to recount the atrocities which Roman Catholics committed on Huguenot men, women and children during the
St. Bartholomew's Day massacre of 1572, which are not unlike those committed by Jacobin radicals who turned on the Roman Church of their day.
Protestants recalled such anti-Protestant events as the
St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre (1572) and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), while Catholics linked Protestantism after 1789 with the "revolutionary spirit." After the papal pronouncement on the dogma of the Immaculate Conception and the publication of the Syllabus of Errors (1864), further retrenchment occurred on both sides.
He fled Paris for Oxford after the
St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in 1572; left Oxford for London after being accused of Pelagianism; was turned out of the Italian congregation there after public disputes with its Calvinist pastor about whether Christ's death had redeemed all humanity or just an elect minority; moved to Basel in 1577 where his universalism impressed Faustus Socinius but led the Senate to exile him in 1578; and returned to England, where a proposal for a secret international society of true believers earned him prison in 1581 and a ticket to Holland the next year.
Certain themes and events inevitably are treated more than once in different chapters, from different points of view (
St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, the Memoires of Marguerite, dissolution of her marriage to Henri IV, etc.).
At all levels of French society, from the king down to the lowest militiaman, there was a willingness to use violence to settle religious differences, culminating in the
St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572.