Part 12

After that the brave Grillon, Maitre de Camp of the regiment of guards, had generously refused to kill the Duke of Guise, unless in single duel, and in an honourable way, the king had recourse to Lognac, the first gentleman of his chamber, and captain of the forty-five, who promised him eighteen or twenty of the most resolute amongst them, and for whom he durst be answerable. They were of the number of those whom the Duke of Guise, who had always a distrust of those Gascons, as creatures of the Duke of Espernon, had formerly demanded that they might be dismissed, from which request he had afterwards desisted; insomuch that it may be said he foresaw the misfortune that attended him, without being able to avoid it. For, on Friday the twenty-third of December, being entered about eight of the clock in the morning into the great hall, where the king had intimated on Thursday night, that he intended to hold the council very early, that he might afterwards go to _Nostre dame de Clery_; some came to tell him that his majesty expected him in the old closet, yet he was not there, but in the other which looks into the garden. Upon this, he arose from the fireside, where, finding himself somewhat indisposed, he had been seated; and passed through a narrow entry, which was on one side the hall, into the chamber, where he found Lognac, with seven or eight of the forty-five; the King himself having caused them to enter into that room very secretly before daybreak: the rest of them were posted in the old closet, and all of them had great poniards hid under their cloaks, expecting only the coming of the Duke of Guise, to make sure work with him, whether it were in the chamber or in the closet, in case he should retire thither for his defence.

There needed not so great a preparation for the killing of a single man, who came thither without distrust of any thing that was designed against him; and who, holding his hat in one hand, and with the other the lappet of his cloak, which he had wrapt under his left arm, was in no condition of defence. In this posture he advanced towards the old closet, saluting very civilly, as his custom was, those gentlemen who made show of attending him out of respect, as far as the door. And as in lifting up the hangings, with the help of one of them, he stooped to enter, he was suddenly seized by the arms, and by the legs; and at the same instant struck into the body before, with five or six poniards, and from behind, into the nape of the neck, and the throat, which hindered him from speaking one single word of all that he is made to say, or so much as drawing out his sword. All that he could do, was to drag along his murderers, with the last and strongest effort that he could make, struggling and striving till he fell down at the beds-feet, where some while after, with a deep groan, he yielded up his breath.

The cardinal of Guise, and archbishop of Lyons, who were in the council hall, rising up at the noise, with intention of running to his aid, were made prisoners by the marshals D’Aumont and de Retz; at the same time, the cardinal of Bourbon was also seized in the castle, together with Anne d’Este Duchess of Nemours, and mother of the Guises, and the Prince of Joinville, the Dukes of Elbeuf, and Nemours, Brissac, and Boisdauphin, with many other lords, who were confidents of the Duke, and Pericard his secretary. And in the meantime the grand prevost of the king’s house went with his archers to the chamber of the third estate, in the town-house, and there arrested the president Neuilly, the prevost of merchants, the sheriffs Compan and Cotte-Blanch, who were deputies for Paris, and some other notorious Leaguers.

This being done, the king himself brought the news of it to the queen-mother; telling her that now he was a real king, since he had cut off the Duke of Guise. At which that princess being much surprised and moved, asking him if he had made provision against future accidents, he answered her in an angry kind of tone, much differing from his accustomed manner of speaking to her, that she might set her heart at rest, for he had taken order for what might happen, and so went out surlily to go to mass; yet before he went, he sent particularly to cardinal Gondi, and to the cardinal Legat Morosini, and informed them both of what had passed, with his reasons to justify his proceedings.

THE POSTSCRIPT OF THE TRANSLATOR.

That government, generally considered, is of divine authority, will admit of no dispute; for whoever will seriously consider, that no man has naturally a right over his own life, so as to murder himself, will find, by consequence, that he has no right to take away another’s life; and that no pact betwixt man and man, or of corporations and individuals, or of sovereigns and subjects, can intitle them to this right; so that no offender can lawfully, and without sin, be punished, unless that power be derived from God. It is He who has commissioned magistrates, and authorised them to prevent future crimes, by punishing offenders, and to redress the injured by distributive justice; subjects therefore are accountable to superiors, and the superior to Him alone. For, the sovereign being once invested with lawful authority, the subject has irrevocably given up his power, and the dependance of a monarch is alone on God. A king, at his coronation, swears to govern his subjects by the laws of the land, and to maintain the several orders of men under him, in their lawful privileges; and those orders swear allegiance and fidelity to him, but with this distinction, that the failure of the people is punishable by the king, that of the king is only punishable by the King of kings. The people then are not judges of good or ill administration in their king; for it is inconsistent with the nature of sovereignty that they should be so; and if at some times they suffer, through the irregularities of a bad prince, they enjoy more often the benefits and advantages of a good one, as God in his providence shall dispose, either for their blessing or their punishment. The advantages and disadvantages of such subjection, are supposed to have been first considered, and upon this balance they have given up their power without a capacity of resumption; so that it is in vain for a commonwealth party to plead, that men, for example, now in being, cannot bind their posterity, or give up their power; for if subjects can swear only for themselves, when the father dies the subjection ends, and the son, who has not sworn, can be no traitor or offender, either to the king or to the laws. And at this rate, a long-lived prince may outlive his sovereignty, and be no longer lawfully a king; but in the mean time, it is evident, that the son enjoys the benefit of the laws and government, which is an implicit acknowledgment of subjection. It is endless to run through all the extravagancies of these men, and it is enough for us that we are settled under a lawful government of a most gracious prince; that our monarchy is hereditary; that it is naturally poised by our municipal laws, with equal benefit of prince and people; that he governs, as he has promised, by explicit laws; and what the laws are silent in, I think I may conclude to be part of his prerogative; for what the king has not granted away, is inherent in him. The point of succession has sufficiently been discussed, both as to the right of it, and to the interest of the people: one main argument of the other side is, how often it has been removed from the right line? as in the case of King Stephen, and of Henry the Fourth, and his descendants of the house of Lancaster. But it is easy to answer them, that matter of fact, and matter of right, are different considerations: both those kings were but usurpers in effect, and the providence of God restored the posterities of those who were dispossessed. By the same argument, they might as well justify the rebellion and murder of the late king; for there was not only a prince inhumanly put to death, but a government overturned; and first an arbitrary commonwealth, then two usurpers set up against the lawful sovereign; but, to our happiness, the same providence has miraculously restored the right heir, and, to their confusion, as miraculously preserved him. In this present history, to go no further, we see Henry the Third, by a decree of the Sorbonne, divested, what in them lay, of his imperial rights: a parliament of Paris, such another as our first Long Parliament, confirming their decree; a pope authorising all this by his excommunication; and an Holy League and Covenant prosecuting this deposition by arms: yet an untimely death only hindered him from reseating himself in glory on the throne, after he was in manifest possession of the victory.[20] We see also the same Sorbonists, the same pope, parliament, and league, with greater force opposing the undoubted right of King Henry the Fourth; and we see him in the end, surmounting all these difficulties, and triumphing over all these dangers. God Almighty taking care of his own anointed, and the true succession; neither the Papist nor Presbyterian Association prevailing at the last in their attempts, but both baffled and ruined, and the whole rebellion ending, either in the submission, or destruction of the conspirators.

It is true, as my author has observed in the beginning of his history, that before the Catholic League, or Holy Union, which is the subject of this book, there was a league or combination of Huguenots, against the government of France, which produced the conspiracy of Amboise; and the Calvinist preachers (as Mezeray, a most impartial historian, informs us) gave their opinion, that they might take up arms in their own defence, and make way for a free access to the king, to present their remonstrances. But it was ordered at the same time, that they should seize on the Duke of Guise, and the Cardinal of Lorraine, his brother, who were then chief ministers, that they might be brought to trial by process before the States; but he adds immediately, who could answer for them, that the prisoners should not have been killed out of hand, and that they would not have made themselves masters of the queen-mother’s person, and of the young king’s, which was laid afterwards to their charge? The concealed heads of this conspiracy, were Lewis Prince of Conde, and the famous Admiral de Coligny: who being discontented at court, because their enemies, the Guises, had the management of affairs under the Queen Regent, to their exclusion, and being before turned Calvinists, made use of that rebellious sect, and the pretence of religion, to cover their ambition and revenge. The same Mezeray tells us in one of the next pages, that the name of Huguenots or Fidnos, (from whence it was corrupted,) signifies, League or Association, in the Swiss language; and was brought, together with the sect, from Geneva into France. But from whencesoever they had their name, it is most certain that pestilent race of people cannot, by their principles, be good subjects; for whatever enforced obedience they pay to authority, they believe their class above the king; and how they would order him if they had him in their power, our most gracious sovereign has sufficiently experienced when he was in Scotland.[21] As for their boast that they brought him in, it is much as true as that of the Calvinists, who pretend, as my author tells you in his preface, that they seated his grandfather, Henry IV. upon the throne. For both French and English Presbyterians were fundamentally and practically rebels; and the French have this advantage over ours, that they came in to the aid of Henry III. at his greatest need, or rather were brought over by the king of Navarre, their declared head, on a prospect of great advantage to their religion; whereas ours never inclined to the king’s restoration, till themselves had been trodden underfoot by the independent party, and till the voice of three nations called aloud for him, that is to say, when they had no possibility of keeping him any longer out of England. But the beginning of leagues, unions, and associations, by those who called themselves God’s people, for reformation of religious worship, and for the redress of pretended grievances in the state, is of a higher rise, and is justly to be dated from Luther’s time; and the private spirit, or the gift of interpreting scriptures by private persons without learning, was certainly the original cause of such cabals in the reformed churches; so dangerous an instrument of rebellion is the holy scripture in the hands of ignorant and bigotted men.

The Anabaptists of Germany led up the dance, who had always in their mouths, faith, charity, the fear of God, and mortifications of the flesh: prayers, fastings, meditations, contempt of riches and honours, were their first specious practices. From thence they grew up, by little and little, to a separation from other men, who, according to their pharisaical account, were less holy than themselves; and decency, civility, neatness of attire, good furniture, and order in their houses, were the brands of carnal-minded men. Then they proceeded to nick-name the days of the weeks, and Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, &c. as heathen names, must be rejected for the first, second, and third days, distinguishing only by their numbers. Thus they began to play, as it were, at cross purposes with mankind; and to do every thing by contraries, that they might be esteemed more godly and more illuminated. It had been a wonder, considering their fanciful perfections, if they had stopped here. They were now knowing and pure enough to extend their private reformation to the church and state; for God’s people love always to be dealing as well in temporals as spirituals; or rather, they love to be fingering spirituals, in order to their grasping temporals. Therefore they had the impudence to pretend to inspiration in the exposition of scriptures; a trick which since that time has been familiarly used by every sect in its turn, to advance their interests. Not content with this, they assumed to themselves a more particular intimacy with God’s holy spirit; as if it guided them, even beyond the power of the scriptures, to know more of him than was therein taught. For now the Bible began to be a dead letter of itself; and no virtue was attributed to the reading of it, but all to the inward man, the call of the Holy Ghost, and the engrafting of the word, opening their understanding to hidden mysteries by faith. And here the mountebank way of canting words came first in use; as if there were something more in religion than could be expressed in intelligible terms, or nonsense were the way to heaven. This of necessity must breed divisions amongst them; for every man’s inspiration being particular to himself, must clash with another’s, who set up for the same qualification; the Holy Ghost being infallible in all alike, though he spoke contradictions in several mouths. But they had a way of licking one another whole; mistakes were to be forgiven to weak brethren; the failing was excused for the right intention; he who was more illuminated, would allow some light to be in the less, and degrees were made in contradictory propositions. But godfathers and godmothers, by common consent, were already set aside, together with the observation of festivals, which they said were of antichristian institution. They began at last to preach openly, that they had no other king but Christ, and by consequence earthly magistrates were out of doors. All the gracious promises in scripture they applied to themselves, as God’s chosen, and all the judgments were the portion of their enemies. These impieties were at first unregarded, and afterwards tolerated by their sovereigns; and Luther himself made request to the Duke of Saxony, to deal favourably with them, as honest-meaning men who were misled. But in the end, when, by these specious pretences, they had gathered strength, they who had before concluded, that Christ was the only king on earth, and at the same time assumed to themselves, that Christ was theirs; inferred by good consequence, that they were to maintain their king; and not only so, but to propagate that belief in others; for what God wills, man must obey; and for that reason, they entered into a league of association amongst themselves, to deliver their Israel out of Egypt; to seize Canaan, and to turn the idolaters out of possession. Thus you see by what degrees of saintship they grew up into rebellion, under their successive heads, Muncer, Phifer, John of Leyden, and Knipperdolling, where what violences, impieties, and sacrileges, they committed, those who are not satisfied may read in Sleidan.[22] The general tradition is, that after they had been besieged in Munster, and were forced by assault, their ringleaders being punished, and they dispersed, two ships-lading of these precious saints was disembogued in Scotland, where they set up again, and broached anew their pernicious principles. If this be true, we may easily perceive on what a noble stock presbytery was grafted. From Scotland they had a blessed passage into England; or at least arriving here from other parts, they soon came to a considerable increase. Calvin, to do him right, wrote to King Edward VI. a sharp letter against these people; but our Presbyterians after him, have been content to make use of them in the late civil wars, where they and all the rest of the sectaries were joined in the good old cause of rebellion against his late Majesty; though they could not agree about dividing the spoils, when they had obtained the victory: and it is impossible they ever should, for all claiming to the spirit, no party will suffer another to be uppermost, nor indeed will they tolerate each other; because the scriptures, interpreted by each to their own purpose, is always the best weapon in the strongest hand: observe them all along, and Providence is still the prevailing argument. They who happen to be in power, will ever urge it against those who are undermost; as they who are depressed, will never fail to call it persecution. They are never united but in adversity, for cold gathers together bodies of contrary natures, and warmth divides them.

How Presbytery was transplanted into England, I have formerly related out of good authors.[23] The persecution arising in Queen Mary’s reign, forced many Protestants out of their native country into foreign parts, where Calvinism having already taken root (as at Frankfort, Strasburg, and Geneva,) those exiles grew tainted with that new discipline; and returning in the beginning of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, spread the contagion of it both amongst the clergy and laity of this nation.

Any man who will look into the tenets of the first sectaries, will find these to be more or less embued with them: Here they were supported underhand by great men for private interests. What trouble they gave that queen and how she curbed them, is notoriously known to all who are conversant in the histories of those times. How King James was plagued with them, is known as well to any man who has read the reverend and sincere Spottiswoode:[24] And how they were baffled by the church of England, in a disputation which he allowed them at Hampton-Court,[25] even to the conversion of Dr Sparks, who was one of the two disputants of their party, and afterwards writ against them; any one who pleases may be satisfied.

The agreement of their principles with the fiercest Jesuits, is as easy to be demonstrated, and has already been done, by several hands: I will only mention some few of them, to show how well prepared they came to that solemn covenant of theirs, which they borrowed first from the Holy League of France, and have lately copied out again in their intended association against his present majesty.

Bellarmine,[26] as the author of this history has told you, was himself a preacher for the League in Paris during the rebellion there, in the reign of King Henry the Fourth. Some of his principles are these following:[27]

“In the kingdoms of men, the power of the king is from the people, because the people make the king.” Observing that he says, “In the kingdoms of men;” there is no doubt but he restrains this principle to the subordination of the pope; for his Holiness, in that rebellion, as you have read, was declared Protector of the League: So that the pope first excommunicates, (which is the outlawry of the church,) and, by virtue of this excommunication, the people are left to their own natural liberty, and may, without farther process from Rome, depose him.

Accordingly, you see it practised, in the same instance: Pope Sixtus first thunderstruck King Henry the Third and the King of Navarre; then the Sorbonne make decrees, that they have successively forfeited the crown; the parliament verifies these decrees, and the pope is petitioned to confirm the sense of the nation, that is, of the rebels.

But I have related this too favourably for Bellarmine; for we hear him, in another place, positively affirming it as matter of faith, “If any Christian prince shall depart from the Catholic religion, and shall withdraw others from it, he immediately forfeits all power and dignity, even before the pope has pronounced sentence on him; and his subjects, in case they have power to do it, may and ought to cast out such an heretic from his sovereignty over Christians.”

Now, consonant to this is Buchanan’s principle, “That the people may confer the government on whom they please;” and the maxim of Knox, “That if princes be tyrants against God and his truth, their subjects are released from their oath of obedience.” And Goodman’s, “That when magistrates cease to do their duties, God gives the sword into the people’s hands: evil princes ought to be deposed by inferior magistrates; and a private man, having an inward call, may kill a tyrant.”[28]

It is the work of a scavenger, to rake together and carry off all these dunghills; they are easy to be found at the doors of all our sects, and all our atheistical commonwealth’s men. And, besides, it is a needless labour; they are so far from disowning such positions, that they glory in them; and wear them like marks of honour, as an Indian does a ring in his nose, or a Soldanian a belt of garbage. In the meantime, I appeal to any impartial man, whether men of such principles can reasonably expect any favour from the government in which they live, and which, viper-like, they would devour.