General Richard Montgomery and the American Revolution. Hal T. Shelton
Catherine, acting as regent, attempted to reconcile the two religious factions; however, her actions proved to be ineffectual. France experienced a protracted cycle of pacification followed by violent outbreaks of armed conflict between the two sets of antagonists. Historians have differentiated up to eight separate wars during this turbulent period of nearly four decades of domestic strife. Met with this series of rebuffs, Catherine then exercised her matriarchal influence with Charles to align the monarchy with the Catholics and the established church. The conflict turned into a civil war, pitting the royalists and Catholics against the Protestants or Huguenots.14
Montgomery soon established himself as the most successful Huguenot military commander. Condé and Coligny suffered frequent defeat by the Catholics, and Condé lost his life after being captured in March 1569. Although Montgomery’s forces were usually outnumbered by the opposition, they raided extensively in western France. Montgomery had many narrow escapes as the Catholic army harried his troops, but he managed to elude the ponderous and disorganized adversary. Because of these victories, Montgomery increased the size of his force from the areas in which he campaigned. Many of his followers came from Normandy, where he was well known. He was also instrumental in causing mutiny in the ranks of the Scotch Royal Guard, thirty of whom deserted to their former commander. This necessitated a reorganization of the guard in which the monarchy replaced the rebellious Scotch troops with Swiss soldiers. The King’s Swiss Guard remained until the French Revolution.15
On St. Bartholomew’s Day, August 24, 1572, Catherine attempted to accomplish by assassination what the Catholics had failed to do by military action—the overthrow of the Huguenot movement. By this time, she was convinced that the Huguenots constituted a real threat to the throne and that their activities might result in foreign intervention. In what is commonly referred to as the St. Bartholomew Massacre, the monarchy and Catholic forces plotted the murder of all the principal Huguenot leaders in a mass killing.
Conciliation toward the Protestants in the previous year had allowed Coligny to return to court. He was the first victim slain in Paris. Montgomery, quartered across the Seine River in St. Germain, was also a primary target for assassination that day. However, by the time assassins reached his location outside of Paris, Montgomery had received warnings of the danger and managed to foil his attackers. He escaped to Normandy and thence to England. The selected massacre soon raged out of hand into a general slaughter, with mobs roaming throughout Paris streets killing suspected heretics. In the next several days the carnage spread from Paris to the provinces. Thousands of individuals lost their lives in this brutal event.16
Of the chief leaders of the Huguenot armies, only Montgomery survived. His dramatic avoidance of the St. Bartholomew Massacre frustrated the French monarchy’s plan to undermine the Huguenot movement. Therefore, Catherine and Charles were most anxious to apprehend Montgomery. However, Queen Elizabeth I of England maintained an active interest in Montgomery and his cause. Fancying herself as the upholder of Protestantism, she gave aid and encouragement to the Huguenots. She also forced mediation several times during the Religious Wars by threatening English intervention. Elizabeth had offered sanctuary and a sympathetic ear before to Montgomery. Thus, when Montgomery arrived safely in England, Elizabeth offered him refuge.
In its frantic attempt to use every means to dispatch Montgomery, the French monarchy disregarded Elizabeth’s previous compassion for the Huguenots and sought her cooperation. When Charles’s ambassador delivered a message to her requesting assistance in the capture of Montgomery, Queen Elizabeth employed subterfuge by citing an instance when King Henry II refused to surrender some English fugitives upon the request of Queen Mary. Queen Elizabeth responded thus: “I would answer your master as his father answered my sister, Queen Mary, when he said, ‘I will not consent to be the hangman of the Queen of England.’ So his Majesty, the King of France, must excuse me if I can no more act as executioner of those of my religion than King Henry would discharge a similar office in the case of those that were not of his religion.”17
Montgomery soon returned to France and continued the Huguenot crusade. He and his followers eventually mounted a stout resistance to the French crown. The Huguenots established control over the province of Normandy by holding the strategic towns of St. Lo and Domfront. At this time, Montgomery threatened to bring extensive French territory under the power of the Protestants. In 1574, Charles IX tried to negotiate an armistice with the count, promising him protection if he would lay down his arms. However, Montgomery replied that the memory of St. Bartholomew prevented him from doing so.18
Montgomery’s remarkable military career was destined to be brief. The royalists and Catholics finally organized a strong suppressive force and launched a sustained attack on the Huguenot stronghold of St. Lô. Since he was outnumbered and besieged, with little hope of success or escape, Montgomery’s situation became desperate. Although suffering tremendous losses, he evaded destruction. However, the loyalist forces overtook Montgomery a few days later at Domfront and forced him to surrender the remnants of his command. Montgomery’s apprehension occurred three days before King Charles IX finally succumbed to a long illness.19
The capture of Count Montgomery was particularly gratifying to Catherine de’ Medici, who had never forgiven the unfortunate knight for her husband’s death. Montgomery’s warring against her son who succeeded the late king further exasperated her feelings. Therefore, Catherine did not wait for her other son, Henry III, to assume the throne before venting her rage against Montgomery. Assuming the position of regent once again, she ordered an immediate trial in Paris. The court found Montgomery guilty of treason and sentenced him to death by decapitation.20
On June 26, 1574, Gabriel Montgomery died, facing death as courageously as he had lived. Proud and defiant until the end, he maintained silence under torture when his captors tried to extract a confession. He also remained constant to the faith that he embraced after his initial flight to England. To a friar who attempted to convince him that he had been deceived by his conversion, he replied: “If I have been deceived, it was by members of your own order; for the first person that ever gave me a bible in French, and bade me to read it, was a Franciscan like yourself. And therein I learned the religion that I now hold, which is the only true religion. Having lived in it ever since, I wish, by the grace of God, to die in it today.”21
On the scaffold, Montgomery addressed the spectators, speaking movingly in support of his religious principles. He also requested “that they would tell his children, whom the judges had declared to be degraded to the rank of ‘roturiers,’ that, if they had not virtue of nobility enough to reassert their position, their father consented to the act.”22 Refusing a blindfold, he then offered his neck to the executioner’s sword. Gabriel Montgomery thus entered martyrdom. His military exploits and the manner in which he conducted himself during his execution served as inspiration to the remaining Huguenots. Instead of destroying the Huguenot sect as Catherine had expected, Montgomery’s death had just the opposite effect. It infused new life into the cause, which at that time was at its lowest ebb.
Gabriel Montgomery’s legacy of loyal devotion to heartfelt convictions apparently served as an incentive for his family to regain their noble status. By 1583, in Normandy, young Count Montgomery had succeeded to the rank of his father and taken up arms in the Protestant cause.23 The wars continued until 1598. At that time, Henry of Navarre, who gained decisive military victories as a Protestant leader, brought political as well as military unity and peace to France by embracing the Catholic religion as King Henry IV.
Another more direct Montgomery descendant, Sir Hugh Montgomery, went to England with William III of Orange in 1689 and commanded a regiment during the wars with Ireland (1690–1691). William rewarded him with vast land grants in Ireland. Many of his relations migrated to live on the Montgomery landholdings in Ireland, and this period gave rise to the Irish branch of the Montgomery family.24
Also during this era, the Montgomery kin devised the heraldic armorial insignia, which Richard Montgomery would later inherit. Some sources record that Gabriel Montgomery emblazoned on his shield a man impaled by a lance, in grim memory of the mortal wound that he delivered to Henry II. However, evidence indicates that this account was a fabrication, invented by the Catholics to rally loyalist hatred and opposition to Montgomery during the