BOOK I.

FROM THE BEGINNING OF THE REFORMATION IN FRANCE TO THE OPENING OF THE CONFERENCE OF POISSY.

(1521-1561.)

I.

Meaux was the first town in France that heard the doctrines of the Reformation publicly expounded. This was in 1521, four years after Luther had affixed his theses against indulgences upon the doors of his cathedral, and the very year in which he appeared before the diet of Worms.

Two preachers attracted, beyond all others, the attention of the inhabitants of Meaux: Jacques Lefevre and Guillaume Farel; the one aged nearly seventy, but still full of activity in a green old age; the other, young, decided, ardent, and, according to the testimony of his contemporaries, making the public places and the temples resound with a voice of thunder.

Jacques Lefevre was born at Etaples, a small town of Picardy. Endowed with an expansive and inquiring mind, he had embraced all things in his studies,—the ancient tongues, _belles lettres_, history, mathematics, philosophy, theology; and in the course of his long travels, he had acquired everything that could be learned at the end of the fifteenth century. On his return to France, he was nominated to a professorship in the university of Paris, and gathered round his chair a numerous body of scholars. The doctors of the Sorbonne, distrustful of his learning, and jealous of his reputation, watched him with a hostile eye. Yet he displayed great devotion, being one of the most assiduous at mass, and at processions, passing whole hours at the foot of the images of Mary, and delighting in adorning them with flowers.

Lefevre had even undertaken to rewrite the Legend of the Saints, but he did not reach the end; for having attentively read the Bible to complete his work, he discovered that the holiness of most of the heroes of the Roman calendar bears but very little resemblance to the ideal of Christian virtue. Once on this new ground, he never quitted it; and always as sincere with his students as with his conscience, he openly attacked some of the errors of the (Roman) Catholic Church. To the justification of outward works he opposed justification by faith, and announced the advent of a new birth in the religion of the people. This happened in 1512.

It is important to notice these dates, because they prove that the notions of reform, not only in worship, or in discipline, but in the very fundamental principles, manifested themselves at the same time in several places, without its being possible that the men, who put themselves at the head of the movement, could have acted in concert. When a political or religious revolution is ripe, it appears on all sides, and no one can say who was the first to move in it.

Among those who heard the new opinions of Jacques Lefevre with avidity, was Guillaume Farel, whom we have already named. Born near Gap in 1489, and instructed in the faithful observance of devout practices, he had sought in them, like his master, peace of heart. Night and day, as he has himself related it in a confession addressed _to all lords and peoples_, he invoked the Virgin and the saints; he scrupulously conformed to the fasts prescribed by the Church, held the pontiff of Rome to be a god upon earth, saw in the priests the sole channel of all celestial blessings, and treated as infidels whoever did not exhibit an ardour similar to his own.

When he heard his venerated master teach that these practices were of small avail, and that salvation comes from faith in Jesus Christ, he experienced a deep agitation. The combat was long and terrible. On one side were the lessons and the habits of his home, so many recollections, so many prayers, so many hopes! On the other, the declarations of the Bible, the duty of subjecting everything to the search after truth, the promise of everlasting redemption. He studied the original tongues, in order to seize more correctly the sense of the Scriptures, and after the pains of the struggle, he became fixed in new and firmer convictions.

Farel and Lefevre conceived for each other a close friendship, because there was at the same time between them a similarity of principles, and a contrast of character. The old man moderated the impetuosity of the youth, and the latter strengthened the somewhat timid heart of his senior. The one inclined toward mystic speculation, the other to action, and they mutually bestowed upon one another that of which each was deficient.

There was at Meaux a third person, of higher rank, who encouraged them by his countenance and his words. This was the bishop himself, Guillaume Briçonnet, count of Montbrun, formerly ambassador of Francis I. to the Holy See. Like Luther, he had brought back with him from Rome little esteem for the papacy, and without desiring a complete secession (as we shall see), he sought to correct its abuses.

When he returned to his diocese, he was disgusted with the disorders which reigned there. Most of the curates appropriated the revenues of their benefices, without discharging the duties. They generally dwelt in Paris, spending their money in licentious living, and sending in their place wretched vicars without instruction or authority. Then, on the occurrence of the high feasts, came the mendicant monks, who, preaching from parish to parish, disgraced the pulpit by low buffooneries, and troubled themselves less about edifying the faithful than about filling their scrip.

Briçonnet attempted to put an end to these scandals, and to compel the curates to reside. As their only answer, they commenced actions against him before the metropolitan. Then the bishop, turning towards men, who did not belong to his clergy, called around him, not only Lefevre d’Etaples and Farel, but also Michel d’Arande, Gérard Roussel, François Vatable, professors or priests of exemplary conduct, who agreed in teaching a purified religion.

At first their preaching began in private assemblies; then, their courage increasing with the number of their auditors, they ascended the public pulpits. The bishop preached in his turn; and as if he had a presentiment that he would deny himself in the day of persecution, “he had, in preaching, begged the people, that if he ever changed his opinion, they would take heed not to change theirs like him.”[7]

On hearing these discourses, which invited them to give, not their purse to the Church, but their heart to God, the surprise of the inhabitants of Meaux became extreme. They were, in general, mechanics, wool-carders, fullers, cloth-workers, and other artisans. The people flocked to the churches from the town and surrounding country, and there was no talk but of the new doctors.

Desirous of basing their teaching upon the only authority recognised by the Reformation, Lefevre d’Etaples and Briçonnet published the four Gospels in French. The bishop commanded his receiver to distribute them gratuitously to the poor, and to do so, _spared_, says Crespin, _neither gold nor silver_. Every one began to read them. Sundays and feast-days were devoted to this study. The Testament was even carried into the fields and workshops, to be at hand at meal-times; and these poor people asked each other: “How can they help us, these saints, when they have so much to do to help themselves? Our only mediator is Jesus Christ.”

As they became serious in their religious views, a reformation of manners followed. Blasphemy, drunkenness, quarrels, disorders of all kinds, gave way to a pure and more decent habit of living. The movement spread far and near. The day-labourers of Picardy and other places, who came at harvest-time to work in the neighbourhood of Meaux, returned home with the seeds of the doctrines they had heard preached. Hence the beginnings of several churches. This influence was so great, that it became a proverbial way of speaking in France, in the first half of the sixteenth century, to designate all the opponents of Rome by the name of heretics of Meaux.

At the same period, Briçonnet sent the translation of the Bible to the sister of Francis I., Marguérite de Valois, who read and caused it to be read by those around her. Everything thus augured a very rapid success for the French Reformation, when the hand of persecution interfered to arrest it.

II.

The priests and monks of the diocese of Meaux, seeing their credit daily weakened, and their revenues diminishing, carried their complaints before the Sorbonne. They met with a favourable reception. The Sorbonne, railed at by men of letters, and attacked by the innovators, was in the difficult position of an ancient institution outstripped by public opinion. It felt that if it did not hasten to strike a great blow, it would be lost.

At the head of this faculty of theology was one Noël Beda, or Bedier, a doctor with no great learning, but active, bold, sharp in disputation, capable of upsetting everything for a theological point, and ready to look to the populace for support, in the absence of more creditable allies. His acolytes were the Masters Duchène and Lecouturier, who wholly swayed their brethren by the violence of their passions and their language.

Luther was invited to the Sorbonne, in 1521, for an examination of his book upon the _Captivity of Babylon_. This company declared that his doctrine was blasphemous, insolent, impious, shameful, and that it ought to be opposed with no other arguments than fire and sword. They compared Luther to the great heresiarchs, and to Mahomet himself, and demanded that he should be compelled by every possible means to make a public retractation. The mild Melancthon forgot his accustomed moderation in answering this sentence, which he termed _the mad decree of the theologasters of Paris_. “How unfortunate is France,” he said, “to have such doctors as these!”

The theologians of the Sorbonne received the complainants of Meaux with open arms, and as a bishop was implicated in the cause, they demanded that the Parliament of Paris should interpose with a strong hand.

The Parliament had no affection for the monks, and distrusted the priests. It had maintained and defended against them, with persevering energy, the rights of lay jurisdiction. But it held for a fundamental maxim of the state this motto of the olden times: _Une foi, une loi, un roi_;—one faith, one law, one king,—and did not believe that there ought to be tolerated in the same country two religions, any more than two governments.

The chancellor, Antoine Duprat, used all his authority to urge the magistrature to violent measures—a man without religion, without morals, bishop and archbishop; without having ever put foot in his dioceses, inventor of the venality of incumbencies, a subscriber to the Concordat which excited the indignation of the Parliaments and even of the clergy, elected cardinal for having humiliated the kingdom before the Holy See—he accused himself on his death-bed of having followed no other law than his own interest, and the interest of his king only next to his own. Antoine Duprat had amassed enormous riches; and when he built, at the Hôtel Dieu of Paris, the new hall for the sick, Francis I. said, “He must enlarge it indeed, if it is to hold all the poor he has made.”

The court, which desired the support of the pope in the Italian wars, also favoured the spirit of persecution. Louise de Savoie, who governed the kingdom in the absence of her son, then a prisoner at Madrid, proposed, in 1523, the following question to the Sorbonne: _By what means the damnable doctrine of Luther might be crushed and extirpated from this very-Christian kingdom, and utterly purged therefrom_. Beda and his coadjutors replied, that the heresy must be persecuted with the extremest rigour; if not, there would result a great injury to the honour of the king and of Madame Louise de Savoie; and that it was the opinion of many, it had already been borne with too long. These theologians took care, we see, to mix up the cause of the throne with their own.

Pope Clement VII. had recourse, two years after, to the same tactics: “It behoves,” he wrote to the Parliament of Paris, “in this great and marvellous disorder, which flows from the rage of Satan and from the rage and wickedness of his imps, that all the world should strive their utmost to guard the common safety, seeing that this abomination would not only embroil and destroy religion, but moreover all principality, nobility, laws, orders, and degrees.”

The clergy held councils at Paris, under the presidency of the cardinal Duprat, and at Bourges under that of the archbishop François de Tournon, at which the Reformers were accused of having plotted an _execrable conjuration_, and the very-Christian king was exhorted to smother in his dominions these _viperous dogmas_. The obstinate heretics were to be exterminated, and the less guilty to undergo in prison a perpetual penitence, with _the bread of grief and the water of affliction_.

We have somewhat anticipated our recital, in order to show who were the first authors of persecution in France. It will be seen that Italy played the chief part therein, by means of the regent, Louise de Savoie, with the cardinals, who are above all Roman princes, and with the monks and the priests, who profess to be the subjects of the Holy See, before any tie to their own country. This observation will reappear in different parts of this history, and we shall prove in its place, that the massacre of St. Bartholomew was, to use the expression of a modern writer, an _Italian crime_. Let us return now to the church of Meaux.

The bishop of Briçonnet at first made head against the storm: he had even the hardihood to call the Sorbonnists Pharisees and hypocrites; but this firmness was of short duration; and when he found that he would have to answer for his acts before the Parliament, he retreated. It is unknown to what extent he abjured the faith he had preached. Everything was conducted with closed doors before a commission composed of two clerical counsellors, and of two lay counsellors of the Parliament. After having been condemned to pay a fine of two hundred livres, Briçonnet returned to his diocese, and tried so to live that there should be no more question about him (1523-1525).

The new converts of Meaux were more resolute. One of them, Jean Leclerc, having affixed a placard to the cathedral door, in which he accused the pope of being Antichrist, was condemned, in 1523, to be whipped during three days in the crossways of the town, and branded on the forehead. When the executioner imprinted on him the stamp of infamy, a voice resounded from the crowd, saying, “Long live Jesus Christ and his tokens!” The astonished people looked around: it was the voice of his mother.

The following year Jean Leclerc suffered martyrdom at Metz, which had not yet become a town of France.

The first of those who were burned for heresy within the old limits of the kingdom, was a native of Boulogne, Jacques Pauvent, or Pavannes. A disciple of Lefevre, whom he had accompanied to Meaux, he was accused of having written theses against purgatory, the invocation of the Virgin and of the saints, and holy water. Crespin says: “He was a man of great earnestness and integrity.”[8]

He was condemned, in 1524, to be burned alive in the Place de Grève. Pavannes, yet a young man, had, in a moment of weakness, uttered a kind of recantation. But he soon regained his courage, and walked to execution with a calm front, happier to die confessing his faith, than to live by denying it. At the stake, he discoursed on the sacrament of the supper with so much power, that a doctor said: “I would that Pavannes had not spoken, even had it cost the Church a million of gold.”

The executions multiplied. One of the most illustrious victims of those times was Louis de Berquin, of whom Theodore de Bèze has said, doubtless with some exaggeration, that he would have been another Luther for France, if he had found in Francis I. another Elector of Saxony. The history of his life and death throws a great light upon the early days of the Reformation in France.

Louis de Berquin came of a noble family of Artois. Unlike the knights of old, acquainted only with the helm and the sword, he applied himself without intermission to exercises of the mind: frank, loyal, openhearted, generous to the poor, he arrived at the age of forty, without having been married, or incurred the slightest suspicion of incontinence: _a wonderfully rare thing among courtiers_, says an old chronicle.

Like Lefevre and Farel, he was very devout. “Before the Lord had given him to know His Gospel, he was,” according to Crespin’s recital, “a great partisan of the papistical constitutions, a constant auditor of masses and sermons, and an observer of fasts and feast-days.... The doctrine of Luther, then quite new in France, he held in utter abomination.” (p. 96.)

But two things detached him from (Roman) Catholicism. His enlightened mind despised the gross ignorance of the doctors of the Sorbonne; his guileless heart revolted against their dark manœuvres; and as he had free speech at the court, he descanted unconstrainedly before Francis I., who entertained a great affection for him and for his character, and also on account of his contempt for the monks.

A controversy which he held on scholastic subtleties with Doctor Duchène, or Master of Quercû, as he was called, led him to open the Bible. Berquin was altogether astonished not to find therein what he sought, and to discover what he did not seek,—nothing about the invocation of the Virgin Mary; nothing about many of the dogmas considered fundamental in the Romish church; yet, on the other side, important articles of which Rome scarce makes mention in her formularies. What he thought thereupon, the knight declared by word of mouth and by writing. The Sorbonnists, eager to catch him at fault, denounced him before the Parliament in 1523, and annexed to their complaints some extracts from his books, of which they had made _venom, after the manner of spiders_, says again our chronicle. But how, upon such complaints, could they condemn a councillor and a favourite of the king? He was acquitted. The doctors of the Sorbonne pretended that this was a favour, which should excite him to repentance; Berquin answered, it was simply justice that had been done.

The quarrel increased in bitterness. The knight having applied himself to translate some treatises of Luther and Melancthon, Noël Beda and his underlings made a seizure of his library. New complaint arose before the Parliament, and citation before the bishop of Paris. Fortunately Francis removed the matter before his council, and restored Berquin to freedom, with an exhortation to be more prudent for the future.

But to this he paid no heed; strong convictions never keep silence. Then followed the third imprisonment of Berquin. This time, the Sorbonnists hoped he would not escape them. Francis I. was at Madrid. Louise de Savoie supported the persecutors. The Parliament was resolved to proceed to extremities. The days of Berquin were already numbered, when a royal order, dated the 1st of April, 1526, commanded the suspension of the matter until the king’s return.

When again at liberty, the lukewarm and the timid beset him with their counsel. Erasmus, in particular, who, according to the historians of his time, wished _to remain neutral between the Gospel and Popery, and to swim between two waters_, having learned that he was about to publish a translation of one of his Latin works, with the addition of notes, wrote to him letter upon letter, to persuade him to desist. “Leave these hornets alone,” he said; “above all, do not mix me up in these things. My burden is already heavy enough. If it is your pleasure to dispute, be it so; as for me, I have no desire of the kind.” And elsewhere: “Ask for an embassy to some foreign country: travel in Germany. You know Beda and his familiars; a thousand-headed hydra is shooting out its venom on all sides. The name of your enemies is legion. Were your cause better than that of Jesus Christ, they will not let you go until they have brought you to a cruel end. Do not trust in the protection of the king. But in any case, do not commit me with The Faculty of Theology.”[9]

Erasmus had exhausted his common-place rhetoric to dissuade the brave knight. “And do you know how much I effected?” he naively asked one of his friends; “I have redoubled his courage.” In effect, Berquin resolved to adopt the offensive, and like the ancient king, to attack Rome in Rome itself. He drew out from the books of Beda and his brethren, twelve propositions, which he accused before Francis of being false, contrary to the Bible, and heretical.

The outcry was tremendous. What! even the defenders of the faith, the pillars of the Church, taxed with heresy by a Lutheran, who had deserved death a thousand times! and after having prosecuted others, reduced to justify themselves!

The king, who was not sorry to humiliate these turbulent doctors, wrote to the Sorbonne, commanding them to censure the twelve propositions denounced by Berquin, or to establish them upon texts of the Bible. The matter was assuming a grave turn, and no one knows what might have happened, if an image of the Virgin had not been mutilated at that time in one of the quarters of Paris.

The Sorbonnists immediately laid hold of the accident. “It is a vast plot; it is,” they cried, “a great conspiracy against religion, against the prince, against the order and tranquillity of the country! All laws will be overthrown, all dignities abolished! This is the fruit of the doctrines preached by Berquin!” At the cries of the Sorbonne and of the priests, the Parliament, the people, the king himself, are greatly excited. Death to the image-breakers! No quarter to the heretics! And Berquin is in prison a fourth time!

Twelve commissioners, delegated by the Parliament, condemn him to make a public abjuration, then to remain incarcerated for the rest of his life, after having had his tongue pierced with a hot iron. “I appeal to the king,” exclaimed Berquin. “If you do not submit to our sentence,” replied one of the judges, “we will find means to stop your appeals for ever.” “I would rather die,” said Berquin, “than only approve by my silence that the truth is thus condemned.” “Let him then be strangled and burned upon the Place de Grève!” said the judges with one voice.

The execution was delayed until Francis was absent; for it was feared lest a last remnant of affection should be awakened in the heart of the monarch for his loyal servant. On the 10th of November, 1539, six hundred soldiers escorted Berquin to the place of execution. He showed no sign of depression. “You would have said” (it is Erasmus, who recounts it on the testimony of an eyewitness), “that he was in a library pursuing his studies, or in a temple meditating upon things divine. When the executioner, with husky voice, read to him his sentence, he never changed countenance. He alighted from the tumbril with a firm step. His was not the brutal indifference of the hardened criminal; it was the serenity, the peace of a good conscience.”

Berquin tried to speak to the people. He was not heard; the monks had posted bands of wretches to drown his voice with their clamour. Thus the Sorbonne of 1529 gave the populace of Paris of 1793 the dastard example of smothering upon the scaffold the sacred words of the dying.

After the execution, Doctor Merlin, the grand penitentiary, said aloud before the people, that no one in France for perchance a hundred years had died so good a Christian.

III.

In spite of the persecutions, a great number of Lutherans had remained in the town of Meaux.[10]

These faithful, deserted by their preachers, and disavowed by the bishop, assembled in secret. An isolated hut, the garret of a woolcarder, the cover of a wood, anything sufficed, so that they might read the Scriptures and pray together. From time to time, one of them, torn from his humble asylum, went to seal his faith with his blood.

The preachers were dispersed. Jacques Lefevre, after long journeyings, terminated his career at Nérac, under the protection of Marguérite de Valois. Too old to play an active part in the French Reformation, he followed its progress from afar. On his death-bed, he said: “I leave my body to the earth, my soul to God, and my goods to the poor.” These words were carved, it is said, upon his gravestone.

Guillaume Farel was neither of an age nor character to be stopped by persecution. On quitting Meaux, he went to preach the Gospel in the mountains of Dauphiny. Three of his brothers shared his faith. Encouraged by this success, he went preaching from town to town and place to place.

His appeals agitating the whole country, the priests sought to excite it against him; but his ardour increased with the peril. Wherever there was a place to plant his foot,—on the border of the rivers, on the points of the rocks, in the bed of the torrents,—he found one to announce the new doctrine. If he was threatened, he stood firm; if surrounded, he escaped; if thrust from one spot, he reappeared in another. At last, when he saw himself environed on all sides, he retreated by mountain-paths into Switzerland, and arrived at Basle in the commencement of the year 1524. Here, to supply the deficiency of the living word, he multiplied the written word, and caused thousands of New Testaments to be printed and disseminated through France by the hands of pedlars. The Bible is a preacher which may be also burned, no doubt, but it is a preacher which rises again from its ashes.

Here and there other missionaries of the Reformation arose. History must preserve their names: at Grenoble, Pierre de Sebville; at Lyon, Amédée Maigret; at Mâçon, Michel d’Arande; at Annonay, Etienne Machopolis and Etienne Renier; at Bourges and Orleans, Melchior Wolmar, a learned Hellenist from Germany; at Toulouse, Jean de Caturce, a licentiate and professor of law.

The last suffered martyrdom, and its circumstances are memorable. Three capital charges had led to his seizure in the month of January, 1532. He had proposed on the eve of the feast of the Kings, to replace the usual dances, by reading the Bible. Instead of saying: _The king drinks_; he had cried: _Let Jesus Christ reign in our hearts_. At length, he had held a religious meeting at Lemoux, his native town.

Brought before the judges, he said to them: “I am ready to justify myself upon every point. Send hither learned men with books: we will discuss the cause article by article.” But such a trial was dreaded. Jean de Caturce was a man of great power of mind: he had a clear wit and ready speech, and quoted the Scriptures with marvellous aptitude. A pardon was offered to him, on condition that he would retract in a public lecture. He refused, and was condemned to death as an obstinate heretic.

Led soon after to the square of St. Stephen, he was degraded from the tonsure, and next of his title of licentiate. During this ceremony, which occupied three hours, he explained the Bible to the assistants. A monk interrupted him to pronounce the _sermon of the Catholic faith_, after the manner of the inquisitors. He had taken for his text these words of the apostle Paul: “Now the Spirit speaketh expressly that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of devils ...,” and he stopped there. “Go on, pursue the text,” said Caturce. But the other not opening his mouth, the martyr pronounced with a loud voice the rest of the passage: “Speaking lies in hypocrisy, having their conscience seared with a hot iron, forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats, which God hath created to be received with thanksgiving of them, which believe and know the truth.”[11] The monk was silent with shame, and the people admired the singular readiness and presence of mind of Caturce.

He was made to don the dress of a buffoon, according to the custom introduced by the old persecutors of the Albigenses; and brought back to his judges, who read to him his sentence of death, when he shouted: “O palace of iniquity! O seat of injustice!” Two hundred and thirty years after, Jean Calas might have pronounced the same words, as he descended the steps of the same palace of Toulouse.

However, the violence of persecution did not impede the multiplication of proselytes. They were of all ranks, and they were already so numerous in one canton of Normandy, that it was called _Little Germany_, as we read in a letter of Bucer, addressed to Luther in 1530. More than one of the religious orders threw off the gown to embrace the reformed faith. I will cite one example, which will be, to a certain extent, a type of a crowd of others.

François Lambert, born at Avignon in 1487, had conceived from his childhood, a profound veneration for the Franciscans, who daily passed before his door. “I admired,” says he, “their severe costume, their sedate countenance, their downcast eyes, their devoutly-crossed arms, their grave demeanour; but I knew not that under these sheepskins, foxes and wolves were hidden.”

The monks had also remarked the naïve exaltation of the young man. “Come among us,” they said to him; “the convent has an ample income: you will live in peace in your cell, and may there pursue your studies at your ease.” He was received as a novice when he was fifteen years and three months old. His period of trial soon passed. The monks took care to conceal from him their quarrels and licentiousness. “The following year I pronounced my vows,” adds Lambert, “not having the slightest idea of what I was doing.”

In effect, as soon as it was no longer feared that he would go away, what sad discoveries! what cruel misconceptions were there! He hoped to live among saints, and found only abandoned and impious men. When he expressed his regret, he was ridiculed.

That he might leave the convent without breaking his vows, he got himself nominated _apostolic preacher_; but his position was not thereby improved. He was accused of neglecting the interests of the order. “When I returned wearied with my rounds,” he says, “reproaches and maledictions generally seasoned my repast.” His brethren blamed him above everything else for censuring too severely those who harboured them, although many of these were vile usurers, or haunters of evil resorts. “What are you doing!” they would say to him; “those people will get angry; they will give us no longer either board or lodging.” “That is to say,” continues Lambert, “that these slaves of their bellies are less afraid of destroying the souls of their hosts, than of losing their dinners.”

In despair, he conceived the thought of becoming a Chartreux, that he might write, if he could no longer preach. But a new storm, and the most terrible of all, burst upon him. The monks discovered in his cell some treatises of Luther—“Luther in a religious house!” they vociferated with one voice: “Heresy! heresy!” and burned these writings without reading a line. “As for me,” says Lambert, “I believe that Luther’s books contain more true theology than could be found in all the books of the monks ever since monks came into the world.”

He was ordered, in 1523, to carry letters to the general of the order; but suspecting some perfidy, he profited by his freedom to pass the frontiers of Germany, and went to seat himself at the foot of Luther’s pulpit. “I renounce,” says he, in concluding his recital, “all the rules of the Brethren, persuaded that the Holy Gospel should be my only rule, and that of all Christians. I retract everything I may have taught contrary to the revealed faith, and I entreat those who have heard me, to reject it as I do. I release myself from all the ordinances of the pope, and I consent to be excommunicated by him, knowing that he is himself excommunicated by the Lord.”[12]

He married in the same year (1523), and was the first of the religious orders of France who broke the vow of celibacy. He returned to the frontiers, at Metz and at Strasbourg, and wished also to go to Besançon. But, having met great obstacles everywhere, he returned to Germany, was appointed professor at Marbourg, and helped to spread the reformed faith in the country of Hesse. He died there in 1530, with the reputation of a true Christian and a learned theologian.

While the new religion made proselytes in the towns, in the country, and even in the convents of the provinces, it began to penetrate into Paris. It found there a powerful protector in Marguérite de Valois. “Her name,” says Theodore de Bèze, “is deserving of perpetual honour, because of her piety, and of the holy affection she has shown for the advancement and preservation of the church of God; so much so, that we are indebted to her for the lives of many worthy persons.”[13]

Having heard of a reform which was shaking off the yoke of human traditions, she wished to know it, and conversed thereupon with Lefevre d’Etaples, Farel, and Briçonnet. Their ideas pleased her: she read the Bible, and adopted the new doctrines, at the same time with that tincture of mysticism, which characterized some of those, whose lessons she heard.[14]

The volume of poems which she published under the title of _Marguérite de la Marguérite des Princesses_, contains many touching revelations upon the state of her mind. She protected the preachers of the Reformation, gave them money for their voyages, sheltered them in secure retreats, and obtained the liberation of many from prison. Therefore, in their correspondence, they called her the good lady, the very excellent, and very dear Christian.

Intelligent and devoted, she had rendered her brother Francis I., during his captivity at Madrid, services not to be forgotten, and had acquired over him an influence which she turned to the profit of the new ideas.

Francis I. never well knew what he was, or what he wished, on the subject of religion. Endowed with qualities more brilliant than solid, he often mistook the variations of his humour for profound calculations. Proud, beyond all things, of being thought a knightly king, he had a passion for arms and adventures of gallantry, which distinguished the older chivalry, but without its stern loyalty and nice sense of honour. The Italy of the Borgias and the Machiavels had corrupted him, and if he had not protected the men of letters, who have acquitted themselves before posterity most generously of their debt to him, one might ask if he had anything but the appearance of the virtues, which have gained for him the appellation of a great king.

The Reformation pleased him as an engine for attacking the monks, whom he contemned; but it repulsed, by its austere maxims, a prince who had filled his court with female favourites. The priests, beside, never ceased to represent to him the followers of the new religion as the enemies of all social order. The historian Seckendorf cites a letter, dated from the French court in 1530, where they are accused of seeking the fall of princes, perfect equality of rights, and even the rupture of marriages and the community of goods. Francis I. was much alarmed at these calumnies, and Brantôme reports that he said: “These novelties have no other aim than the destruction of all monarchy, human and divine.”

This enables us to understand why, in certain moments of his reign, although he was not naturally cruel, he showed such pitiless hostility against the Reformers. He was impressed with the notion that he was acting as a statesman, and he sought to smother in a sea of blood, the sinister phantoms with which the (Roman) Catholic clergy had peopled his imagination.

Otherwise, it was a strange and interesting scene to witness the struggle between Marguérite de Valois and her brother, upon the conduct to be pursued towards the Reformers. At one time the Christian woman had the sway. Francis resisted the Sorbonne. He promised to take from the Lutherans all he could, and to the utmost. He would give them, what has been called, _the mass of seven points_, or the suppression of seven abuses in the worship of the Romish church. At another time it was the Catholic or politic prince, who seemed to triumph. Marguérite de Valois bent before the stormy temper of her brother, shrouded herself in docility and silence, resumed even certain practices of Catholicism, and finally veiled her faith in such a manner that it is still a matter of dispute whether she died in the old or the new communion.

IV.

It appeared, in 1533, as if better days were about to dawn upon the French Reformation. The queen-mother, Louise de Savoie, who hoped to redeem by fanatic bigotry the libertinism of her youth, had just died. Francis I. had made an alliance with the Protestants of the League of Smalcald, and the credit of Marguérite de Valois had thence increased. She took advantage of the occasion to open the pulpits of Paris to Gérard Roussel, Courault, and Bertault, who leaned towards the Reformed doctrines. The bishop, Jean du Bellay, offered no opposition. He was a man of great reading, and in his letters to Melancthon signed himself: _yours cordially_.

The churches were crowded. Noël Beda, and other doctors of the Sorbonne, tried to raise the people; but they were banished by the Parliament. At this, the rage of the monks grew boundless. They performed, at their college of Navarre, a representation in which Marguérite de Valois, reading the Bible while spinning, was suddenly changed into an infernal fury. The Sorbonnists condemned at the same time one of her books, entitled _The Mirror of the Sinful Soul_, where no mention was made either of saints, or of purgatory, or of any other redemption than that of Jesus Christ. A Cordelier declared in a public sermon, that Marguérite deserved to be inclosed in a sack and thrown into the river.

Such insolence was too great for the king’s endurance. He had the regents of the college of Navarre punished, and the censure of the Sorbonne disavowed by the university in a body. He even threatened to inflict upon the Cordelier the penalty with which the monk had menaced Marguérite de Valois; but she interceded for him, and the punishment was commuted.

This disposition of Francis did not last long. Having had an interview with Clement VII. at Marseilles, in the month of October, 1533, for the marriage of his son Henry with Catherine de Medici, the pope’s niece, and being desirous of an alliance with this pontiff for the conquest of the Milanese, the dream of his life, he returned to Paris with a mind bent against the heretics. Many Lutherans, or Sacramentarians, as they were then called, were cast into prison, and the three suspected preachers interdicted from preaching.

All the new converts, already very numerous, did not bear the stroke of persecution patiently, and were sorely grieved to be deprived of their pastors. At this juncture one Féret arrived, bringing from Switzerland placards against the mass, which he proposed to disseminate throughout the kingdom. The most prudent opposed the design, affirming that too much precipitation would ruin everything. But the enthusiasts, as always happens in moments of crisis, prevailed.

On the 18th of October, 1534, the inhabitants of Paris found on the public places, in the crossways, on the palace-walls, on the doors of the churches, a placard with this title: “Truthful articles concerning the horrible, great, and unbearable abuses of the Popish Mass, invented directly against the Holy Supper of our Lord, the only Mediator, and only Saviour, Jesus Christ.”

This document was written in a bitter and violent style. Popes, cardinals, bishops, and monks were attacked with the sharpest invectives. It thus concluded: “In fine, truth has deserted them, truth threatens them, truth chases them, truth fills them with fear; by all which shall their reign be shortly destroyed for ever.”

The people gathered in groups around the placards. Horrible rumours circulated, such as the masses invent in their days of rage. The Lutherans, it was said, had laid a frightful plot for burning the churches, firing the town, and massacring every one. And the multitude shouted: _Death! death to the heretics!_ The priests and monks, who were perhaps the first deceived, kindled the rage. The magistrates, although more calm, were irritated by so daring an attack upon the ecclesiastical order of the kingdom.

The tempest burst with equal violence at the Château de Blois, where Francis I. was at the time. A placard had been posted (many suspected, by the hand of an enemy) on the very door of the king’s apartment. The prince saw therein an insult, not only against his authority, but against his person, and the Cardinal de Tournon imbedded this notion so deep in his heart, that he deliberated, says an historian, upon destroying all, had it been in his power.

Orders were immediately issued to seize the Sacramentarians, dead or alive. The criminal-lieutenant, Jean-Morin, obtained the assistance of a certain sheath or scabbard-maker, who had been a summoner for the secret meetings, and whose life had been promised him on condition that he should lead the serjeants to the houses of the heretics. Some, warned in time, took flight; the others, men and women, those who had condemned the placards, as well as those who had approved them, were thrust alike pell-mell into the prisons.

It is reported that the civil-lieutenant, having entered the house of one of them, Barthélemy Milon, a cripple, wholly helpless of body, said to him: “Come, get thee up.” “Alas, sir,” replied the paralytic, “it must be a greater master than you to raise me up.” The serjeants carried him off, and the courage of his companions in captivity grew firm through his exhortations.

Their trial was soon over. But for the Sorbonne and the clergy, the blood of the heretics was not enough. Their object was to strike the imagination of the people by a _generalissimo_ procession, and, by persuading the king to be present, to bind him decisively to the system of persecution. This _fête_ marks an important date in our recital; for it was from this moment that the Parisian populace took part in the contest against the heretics; and, once mounted on the stage, they never quitted it until the end of the League. In the chain of events, this procession, intermingled with executions, was the first of the bloody days of the sixteenth century; the massacre of St. Bartholomew, the Barricades, the murder of Henry III., and the assassination of Henry IV., could but follow.

A chronicler of the time, Simon Fontaine, a doctor of the Sorbonne, has left us a long description of this event. It took place on the 29th of January, 1535. An innumerable concourse had come from all the surrounding country. “There was not the smallest piece of wood or stone jutting from the walls which was not occupied, provided there was room on it for anybody. The house-tops were covered with men, great and small, and one might have supposed the streets to have been paved with heads.”

Never had so many relics been paraded through the streets of Paris. The reliquary of the Sainte-Chapelle was then first brought out. Priests bore the head of St. Louis, a piece of the holy cross, the true crown of thorns, a real nail, and also the spear-head which had pierced the side of our Lord. The shrine of St. Geneviéve, the patron saint of Paris, was carried by the corporation or company of butchers, who had fitted themselves for the holy office by a fast of several days, and each one was bent upon touching the precious relic with the tip of his finger, or with his handkerchief, or cap.

Cardinals, archbishops, and bishops, coped and mitred, figured in their places. Then came the king, bareheaded, holding a burning torch of wax in his hand; after him walked all the princes, knights, counsellors of the Parliaments, companies of the trades, and fraternities. In front of their houses stood the burgesses with lighted tapers, who sank on their knees as the holy sacrament went by.

After mass, the king dined at the palace of the bishop, with his sons, the queen, and the princes of the blood royal. At the conclusion of the repast, he called together the clergy, ambassadors, lords, presidents of the courts of justice, all the notables; and having seated himself on a throne, he protested that he would not pardon, even in his children, the crime of heresy; and that if he knew that one of the members of his body were infected with it, he would cut it off with his own hands.

The same day, six Lutherans were burned. The most courageous had had their tongues cut out beforehand, lest a word of faith or a prayer, issuing from the flames, might move the conscience of the executioners. They were suspended on a moveable gibbet, which, rising and falling by turns, plunged them into the fire or drew them out, until they were entirely consumed. This was the punishment of the _estrapade_. The ferocious emperor of Rome, who wished that his victims might feel themselves die, had not invented that cruelty, and the Inquisition of Spain accorded to the Saracens and the Jews the favour of being more quickly burned.

On his return to the Louvre, Francis saw these executions. The hangmen waited for his passing, that he might witness the show.

An ordinance was soon published, decreeing the extermination of heretics, with pain of death against those who should conceal them, and a reward of a fourth of the goods of the victims to informers.

Francis I. had soon occasion to repent of having yielded to this excess of frenzy. The Protestants of Germany were indignant, and threatened to ally themselves against him, with the House of Austria. He sent them explanations through his ambassador, Guillaume de Langey, to say that those whom he had put to death were rebels, Sacramentarians, and not Lutherans. He even resumed, in order to effect a reconciliation with the League of Smalcald, the overtures which had been made to Melancthon, to attract him to Paris; and he published a milder edict, directing the release of persons suspected of heresy, on condition that they should abjure within six months. This edict of Coucy, drawn for diplomatic reasons, was never carried into execution.

Marguérite de Valois retired to Béarn, where her little court became the asylum of the celebrated men who escaped from persecution. Many refugee families brought thither their industry and their fortunes. Everything assumed a new face. The laws were corrected, the arts cultivated, agriculture was improved, schools were established, and the people were prepared to receive the teaching of the Reformation.

The queen of Navarre died in 1549, wept for by the Béarnese, who loved to repeat her generous saying: “Kings and princes are not the lords and masters of their inferiors, but only ministers whom God has set up to serve and to keep them.”

Marguérite de Valois was the mother of Jeanne d’Albret, and grandmother of Henry IV.

V.

The prey of calumnies that descended from the throne, and from thence spread throughout all Europe; accused of sedition, blasphemy, enmity to God and to man; judged and condemned with closed doors; their tongues mutilated before undergoing their final sentence, the Reformers of France had no means of justification, and their very martyrdom was dishonoured.

It was then that the most energetic of apologies appeared in the _Institutes of the Christian Religion_. “This,” says Calvin, in the preface to his commentary on the Psalms, “is what led me to publish the _Institutes_: first, to relieve my brethren from an unjust accusation, whose death was precious before the Lord; and moreover, that, as the same sufferings were suspended over the heads of many poor faithful, foreign nations might be touched with commiseration for their woes, and might afford them a shelter.”

This book announced the true leader of the French Reformation. Luther was too distant, and his German genius could not wholly sympathize with that of France. Guillaume Farel was too ardent; he had not that firm and solid character which was necessary for great undertakings. The others were obscure. The growing churches awaited a man able to place himself at their head, and Calvin was this man.

His life is everywhere; I will only recount that which enters into the plan of this history.

Jean Calvin was born in 1509 at Noyon, in Picardy. Destined from his infancy to the priesthood, he was presented with an ecclesiastical benefice at the age of twelve. But his own will and that of his father led him from theology to the law, which he went to study at Bourges and at Orleans. He distinguished himself there by his precocious intelligence and the severity of his manners.

The Reformation agitated at that time all the schools of learning. Masters and students occupied themselves with nothing else, either through a spirit of curiosity, or through the yearning of conscience and faith. Calvin was among these last, and the Bible which he received from the hands of one of his relations, Pierre Robert Olivétan, detached him from Catholicism, as it had already rescued Zwinglius and Luther. The three great Reformers arrived at the same end by the same road.

He was not of those who are silent on what they believe. Listeners flocked round him, and the solitude he loved became impossible for him. “As for me,” he says again, in the preface to his commentary on the Psalms, “inasmuch as being naturally diffident and retiring I have always preferred repose and tranquillity; I began to seek for some hiding-place, and means of withdrawing myself from the world; but so far from obtaining my wish, every retreat and every secluded spot were to me so many public schools.”

Calvin comprehended that his time and his powers were no longer his own. He preached in the secret meetings at Bourges and at Paris. Theodore de Bèze says: “He advanced wonderfully the cause of God in many families, teaching the truth not with an affected language, to which he was always opposed, but with a depth of knowledge and so much gravity of speech, that no man heard him without being filled with admiration.”[15] He was at that time twenty-four years of age.

A discourse which he composed, in 1533, for the rector of the university of Paris, and which was condemned for heresy by the Sorbonne, compelled him to fly. It is said that he escaped by a window, a few moments before the serjeants broke into his chamber.

He withdrew, under the name of Charles d’Espeville, to Angoulême, and was received into the house of the canon Louis du Tillet, where he had a rich library at his service.

He was already occupied with his great work on the Christian religion, and laboured upon it with such ardour that he frequently passed nights without sleeping, and days without eating. When he had finished a chapter, he read it to his friends; and on opening the manuscript, he was wont to say: “Let us find the truth.”

He sowed the doctrines of the Reformation in Poitou and Saintonge, publicly when he could, secretly when persecution was too violent. There is still shown near Poitiers an excavation to which popular tradition gives the name of _Calvin’s cave_. When there one day with several of his disciples, one of them represented that there must be truth in the sacrifice of the Mass, since it was celebrated in every place in Christendom. “My mass is there,” replied Calvin, pointing to the Bible. Then throwing down upon the table his cap, and raising his eyes to heaven, he exclaimed: “O Lord, if on the day of judgment Thou reprehendest me for that I have been to Mass and that I have deserted it, I will say to Thee with reason: Lord, Thou hast not bidden me to it. There is Thy law; there is the Scripture Thou hast given me, in the which I have found no other sacrifice than Thy immolation on the altar of the cross.”

The supper was celebrated in the depth of the cavern by Calvin and his friends. So, fourteen centuries before, the Christians communicated in the catacombs of Rome; so, two centuries after, the Reformers of France have held communion in the wilderness; and still later, in the days of the Revolution, (Roman) Catholic priests have erected their altars amidst the woods.

Constantly in peril of his life, Calvin went to fix himself at Bâle, the city of refuge for the French, when the Geneva of the Reformation did not yet exist. There the last touch was put to his _Institutes of the Christian Religion_, and it appeared in the month of August, 1535.

This was the first theological and literary monument of the French Reformation. There may be disputes about Calvin’s notions (he belonged to his time, as we do to ours), but his genius cannot be contested. His premises, which corresponded to the intellectual and moral level of his times, once laid down, he pursued them with an incomparable vigour of logic. His system was completed.

Spreading abroad in the schools, the castles of the gentry, the houses of the burghers, even the workshops of the people, the _Institutes_ became the most powerful of preachers. Round this book the Reformers arrayed themselves as round a standard. They found in it everything—doctrine, discipline, ecclesiastical organization; and the apologist of the martyrs became the legislator of their children.

We will not dwell upon the lofty style of the _Institutes_; Calvin cared little for literary fame, whatever Bossuet may have said. He went straight to the point, and the expression came clear, energetic, full of life, from the very circumstance of his only troubling himself about the correctness of his thoughts.

In his dedicatory epistle to Francis I., he refuted the following objections addressed to the disciples of the Reformation: “Your doctrine is new and untried; you confirm it by no miracle; you are in contradiction with the Fathers; you overthrow tradition and custom; you make war upon the Church; you engender sedition.” In concluding, Calvin supplicated the king to examine the confession of faith of the Reformers, so that, beholding them to be in accordance with the Bible, he might treat them no longer as heretics. “It is your duty, sire,” he says to the king, “to close neither your understanding nor your heart against so just a defence, especially when the question is of such high import, namely, how the glory of God shall be maintained on earth.... A matter worthy of your ears, worthy of your jurisdiction, worthy of your royal throne!”

We are assured that the king did not deign even to read this epistle. Some court intrigue, or a caprice of the Duchess d’Etampes, absorbed, it would appear, his leisure. If one considered, not the hand of God, that orders all things, but the visible causes of events, upon what would depend the religious and political destiny of nations?

His _Institutes_ were scarcely finished before Calvin went to Italy to see Rénée de France, daughter of Louis XII. and duchess of Ferrara, who had, like Marguérite de Valois, opened her heart to the Reformed faith. This visit established a correspondence which was never interrupted, and Calvin still wrote to her when on his death-bed.

In 1536 he was appointed pastor and professor at Geneva. The religious, moral, intellectual, and even political revolution he brought into that town with him, is beside our work. Let us only add, that from his new country he never ceased to act upon France by his books, his letters, and by the numerous students, who, after having received his lessons, carried back to their churches what he had taught them. Calvin was the guide of the French Reformers, their counsellor, the soul of their first synods; and the immense authority he exercised over them was so well recognised, that the name of _Calvinists_ was given to them about the middle of the sixteenth century.

“He was most restless for the advance of his sect,” says Etienne Pasquier. “When our prisons were gorged with victims, he incessantly exhorted, consoled, confirmed them by his letters, and never wanted messengers, to whom the doors were open, despite whatever trouble the gaolers might take.”[16]

Considering the irreparable loss the Romish church has suffered through this Reformer, we are little astonished at the anathemas she poured upon him, and with which she still pursues him. She has measured the strength of her blows according to the magnitude of her wounds. We are not penning Calvin’s apology, but some short explanations may not be out of place here. Calvin has been accused of ambition. He had only that which is common to men of genius, who are thrust into the foremost rank by the instinct of ordinary minds, and by the force of circumstances. Did they refuse to ascend, they would not be humble; they would be unfaithful to their mission, and prevaricators. The vulgar herd, which sees their lofty position, raises the cry of pride: it judges the vocation of great souls by its own.

It is also said that Calvin was absolute and inflexible in his ideas. Yes, because he had strong convictions, with the consciousness of his own superiority. And if we consider the wants of his time, it will be acknowledged, perhaps, that this was the only way of preventing the new doctrines from failure in every sense, and being lost.

That he should appear to us, at the distance we are from him, with our opinions and our manners, to have fallen into grave errors, may be conceived. But to judge him properly, it is from his own point of view, and from that of his age, that we must observe him—not from our own.

We are constantly reminded of the execution of Michel Servet. If it be said that this was an act to be deeply deplored, the remark is just; but if Calvin is accused of contradicting his own maxims, it will only be proved that those who make the accusation have never studied them. The Protestants claimed the right of citizenship in Germany, in Switzerland, in France, in the name, in the sole name of the Divine truth of which they judged themselves to be the faithful interpreters, and never in the name of liberty of belief and of worship. To convince oneself of this, it is only necessary to read the detail of their trials. Not a single word could be found in the whole volume of _Crespin’s Martyrs_, expressive of toleration understood in the sense of Bayle, Locke, and modern ideas. They justify themselves by texts from the Bible, and summon their adversaries to prove that their faith is not conformable to it, or able to absolve them. Their defence is here, and here only. If it had been proposed to them to accord similar rights to those whom they themselves regarded as impious or heretics, they would have beheld herein a rebellion against the will of God. It is not, therefore, Calvin who set up the stake of Michel Servet: it is the whole sixteenth century.[17]

If Rome beholds in this act an excuse for her own intolerance, we do not deny it. But it is no excuse for her refinements of cruelty; it is none for her slaughters _en masse_, nor for her perpetual violations of plighted faith. Either no treaty of peace, no contract between the two worships ought to have been accepted, or, when they were accepted, they ought to have been kept.

We will further observe, that if the two communions were intolerant in the sixteenth century, the one was so by virtue of its principles, the other was so in spite of itself. The Reformation, by granting the right of private judgment, had indirectly established religious liberty. It did not perceive at once all the consequences of this principle, because the Reformers had carried over with them a part of the prejudices of their first education; but these consequences were to become apparent sooner or later, and it is therefore justly regarded as the mother of all modern liberty.

Calvin had a share in only one execution. His heart was not cruel, and he was horrified at all the sanguinary acts unauthorized by a regular judicial sentence. He more than once restrained the hands of those who would have shed the blood of François de Guise, the cut-throat of Vassy. “I can protest,” he wrote to the duchess of Ferrara, “that it alone depended upon me that men of resolve and action, before the war, who were only restrained by my exhortation, did not devote themselves to exterminate him from the world.”

Calvin was sometimes impatient and irascible, and he has accused himself of being so. But the soft and affectionate sentiments that one would scarcely expect to find in the austere soul of the Reformer, were not strangers to him. Read his correspondence with his intimate friends Farel and Viret: how one hears the voice of the man, who reposed in the bosom of friendship from the grievous duties of his charge! and with what emotion the minister Des Gallards, who had spent sixteen years near him, speaks of his goodness!

He died poor. His disinterestedness was so great that the sceptic Bayle, on relating that he had left only three hundred crowns, inclusive of his library, could not repress a cry of admiration. “It is one of the rarest victories,” says he, “that virtue and grandeur of soul can obtain over nature in those who exercise the apostolic mission.”

The prodigious labours of Calvin oppress our imagination. “I do not believe,” Theodore de Bèze states, “that his equal can be found. Beside preaching every day from week to week, most frequently and whenever he could, he preached twice every Sunday. He lectured three times a week on theology. He made the remonstrances at the consistory, and gave an entire lecture every Friday in the conference of the Scripture, which we call Congregation; and he so persisted in this course to his death, that he never missed once, except when extremely ill. For the rest, who can recount his other works, ordinary and extraordinary? I do not think any man of our time has had more to hear, to answer, to write, or things of greater importance to deal with. The multiplicity and quality of his writings are alone sufficient to astound every man who looks at them, and still more those who read them. And what makes his labours more astonishing is, that his frame was naturally so weak, so attenuated by watching and too great abstinence, and what is more, subject to so many disorders, that any man who saw him could not have thought but that he had a very short while to live; and yet, notwithstanding all this, he never ceased to labour night and day in the Lord’s work. Many a time we urged him to take more care of himself; but his constant answer was that he did next to nothing, and that we ought to let him be, so that God might find him watching and working his best, until his last breath.”[18]

Calvin died on the 27th of May, 1564, aged fifty-five years all but one month. He was of the middle height, and had a pale face, brown complexion, and serene, brilliant eyes. He was neat and plain in his dress; and he ate so little, that for many years he took but one meal a day.

A few weeks before his death he dictated his will, in which he takes God to witness as to the sincerity of his faith, and offers his thanksgivings that he should have been employed in the service of Jesus Christ and the truth.

VI.

The persecutions we have seen until now, appear moderate beside those of which the Vaudois of Provence were the victims. To find a parallel for so fearful a butchery, we must go back to the extermination of the Albigeois.

On the 18th of November, 1540, the parliament of Aix passed a decree to the following effect: Seventeen inhabitants of Mérindol shall be burned alive. Their wives, children, parents, and servants, shall be arrested and brought to trial, and if they cannot be taken, they shall be banished the kingdom for ever. The houses of Mérindol shall be burned and razed to the ground, the woods cut down, the fruit-trees uprooted, and the place rendered uninhabitable, and no one shall be allowed to build there. “As exorbitant, cruel, and inhuman a decree,” says a contemporary, “as any parliament ever made, and like in every respect to the edict of the king Ahasuerus against the people of God.”

A cry of horror arose throughout Provence. It is sad to relate that the priests were the most unrelenting in urging the execution of the sentence. And when the chief president Chassanée represented to them that the king might be displeased at so great a destruction of his subjects, a bishop said to him: “If the king should think ill of it at first, we will soon cause him to approve it: we have the cardinals with us, and particularly Cardinal Tournon, to whom nothing could be more pleasing.”

The Vaudois presented a petition to Francis I., who being then desirous of keeping on good terms with the Protestant princes of the empire, commissioned Guillaume de Langey, the same who had been his ambassador to Germany, to cause an inquiry to be made respecting this devastation.

These Vaudois formed a population of about eighteen thousand souls. They had come from Piedmont and Dauphiny into Provence, and had dwelt there for three hundred years. When they first settled in the country, it was uncultivated, and overrun with brigands; but, under the tillage of their hands, it was covered with plentiful harvests. A domain which before their establishment would not have let for four crowns, fetched from three to four hundred. They had built Mérindol, Cabrières, and twenty other towns or villages.

They were a peaceable, well-ordered people, loved by their neighbours, faithful to their promise, just in the payment of their debts, careful of their poor, and charitable to strangers. Never could they be drawn into any kind of swearing or blasphemy: they never used an oath, but when required to do so in the administration of the law. They were also distinguished for this, that if they chanced to be in any company where improper conversation was heard, they immediately withdrew, in order to signify their displeasure.

There was nothing to reproach them with, unless it was that when they frequented the towns and the markets, they seldom visited the conventual churches, and if they did, they offered their prayers without reference to the saints. They passed by the crosses and images on the roadside without showing any reverence. They said no Mass, nor _Libera me_, nor _De profundis_; they took no holy water, and if it were offered them in any house, they set no store by it. They undertook no pilgrimage for the sake of pardons. When it thundered, they never made the sign of the cross, and they presented no offerings either for the living or the dead.

For a long time unknown, the Vaudois excited neither the cupidity of the priests nor the hatred of the great, and the gentry, whose incomes they augmented, gave them their protection. They chose among themselves their pastors, or _Barbes_, as they termed them, to instruct them in the knowledge and the practice of the Scriptures.

As he was passing through Dauphiny in 1501, these heretics were denounced to King Louis XII., who caused an inquiry to be instituted; but after having read it, he ordered that the processes already begun should be thrown into the Rhone, saying: “These people are much better Christians than myself.”

When they heard, about the year 1530, of the preaching of Luther and Zwinglius, they sent some of their pastors to Switzerland and Germany, who recognised in the Reformation a sister of their own communion. Encouraged by these new friends, they caused the first edition of the Bible, translated into French by Robert Olivétan, to be printed at Neufchâtel, in 1535. It is said that they expended upon it many hundred gold crowns.

The ire of the Romish clergy was excited against this heresy, and the more so as many of the gentry, advocates, counsellors of justice, and even theologians, showed a leaning towards it. A decree was pronounced, in 1535, against the Vaudois. A second decree—that which we have cited—was delivered in 1540. Francis I., adopting the advice of Guillaume de Langey, granted them letters of pardon, but upon condition that they should return to the church of Rome before the expiration of three months. This was to withdraw with one hand, what he had given with the other.

This courageous people, however, did not lose courage. They sent to the parliament of Aix, and to Francis, their confession of faith, in which they took care to establish all their doctrines, article by article, on texts from the Scriptures. When this confession was read to him by his order, the king, _quite amazed_, says Crespin, asked where fault could be found; and no one had the hardihood to offer a contradiction.

The bishops of Provence, finding themselves unsupported in their system of persecution, commissioned three doctors of theology to convert the Vaudois; but, marvel of marvels! all three were themselves converted to the proscribed religion: “I am compelled to confess,” said one of these doctors, after his interrogatories to some catechumens, “that I have often been to the Sorbonne to hearken to the disputations of the theologians, and that I have not learned there so much as I have done from listening to these little children.”

The rage of the priests was now at its height; and the chief president Chassanée being dead, they persuaded his successor, Jean Meynier, baron d’Oppède, to prosecute the heretics without mercy. Memorials were sent at the same time to the king, in which the Vaudois were accused of an intention to seize upon Marseilles, to form a sort of republican canton, in imitation of the Swiss. Francis did not become a dupe to this ridiculous fable; he knew very well that a few thousand poor peasants could not convert Provence into a republic. But he had just concluded a treaty with Charles V., through the mediation of Paul III., by which the two monarchs engaged themselves to exterminate heresy. This prince lay, moreover, dangerously ill, and the Cardinal de Tournon, seconded by several bishops, beseeched him, in the name of his eternal salvation, to revoke his letters of pardon. He thereupon wrote to the Parliament of Aix, on the 1st of January, 1545, to execute the decree pronounced against the Vaudois.

The Baron d’Oppède, who appears to have imported into this horrible enterprise motives of jealousy and personal vengeance, collected bands of mercenaries, who had been accustomed in the Italian wars to the most frightful brigandage. He placed over them some officers of Provence, and took the field on the 2nd of April. Then began a horrible carnage. “They were no longer,” says an historian, “either gentlemen or soldiers: they were butchers.”

The Vaudois were surprised and massacred, like the deer in a hunt; their houses were burned, their cornfields laid waste, trees uprooted, wells choked, bridges destroyed. All were put to the fire and the sword; and the peasants of the surrounding country, joining the executioners, completed the pillage of the miserable remnants of the devastation.

Those of the Vaudois who could fly, wandered about the woods and mountains; but the weaker, the old men and children and women, were forced to stay, and were slain by the soldiery, after having satiated their brutal passions. At Mérindol there only remained one poor idiot, who had promised two crowns to a soldier for his ransom. D’Oppède purchased from his purse the fate of the unhappy wretch, and causing him to be tied to a tree, had him shot. Scarce a gentleman present could restrain his tears.

On the 19th of April, in obedience to the summons of the vice-legate, this army of executioners entered the county of Venasque, belonging to the pope, and fresh bodies of banditti hastened thither under the guidance of priests. The town of Cabrières was besieged. Sixty men, who alone had remained there, held out for twenty-four hours. On the promise of their lives, they came forth unarmed, and were immediately hacked to pieces. Their women, shut up in a barn, were burned alive. A soldier, moved to pity, tried to open them a passage, but they were driven back into the flames with the halbert. The church of Cabrières was profaned with infamous debauches; and the steps of the altar were inundated with blood. The clergy of Avignon blessed the murderers: they had pronounced a sentence decreeing no quarter. The day was to come when the _glacière_ of Avignon should count other victims. There is justice upon earth for the privileged classes, who abuse their power: it is sometimes tardy, but it is sure.

The Vaudois perished in numbers in their wild retreats. The vice-legate and the Parliament of Aix had forbidden, under pain of death, that any shelter or food should be given them, “which,” says Bouche, the historian of Provence, “was the means of killing a very great many.” Numbers of the unhappy people supplicated D’Oppède to accord them permission to depart, even with nothing but their shirts. “I know what I have to do with this people of Mérindol and their like,” answered he: “I will send them to dwell in hell, them and their children.”

Two hundred and fifty prisoners were put to death, after a mock trial; a more atrocious act than the massacre, since it was committed in cold blood. Others, the youngest and more robust, were sent to the galleys. A few succeeded in gaining the frontiers of Switzerland.

The name of the Vaudois disappeared almost entirely from Provence, and their country relapsed into as desolate a wilderness as it was three centuries before.

History has preserved the pious words uttered by the Vaudois, who had taken refuge with their pastors in the mountain gorges. Prepared for death, and beholding in the distance the blazing ruins of their dwellings, the old and young thus exhorted each other: “The least of our cares should be for our property and our lives; the greatest and chiefest fear that ought to fill us with emotion, is lest we fail in the confession of our Lord Jesus Christ and his holy Gospel. Let us call on God, and he will have pity upon us.”

The massacre of the Vaudois raised the indignation of all France; the souls of the people were not yet merciless, as they became during the religious wars. The king complained that his orders had been exceeded; but, sick and almost dying, he gave way to the representations of the Cardinal de Tournon, and had not the courage to punish the assassins. But, in his last moments, he adjured his son to take vengeance upon them, adding that if he failed therein, his memory would be execrated throughout the world.

In effect, the matter was brought before the Parliament of Paris in 1550, where it occupied fifty audiences. The advocate of the Vaudois, or rather of the Lady du Cental, who complained that she had been ruined, spoke for seven days consecutively, with a force which was said to have shown the things, instead of relating them. The Baron d’Oppède defended himself, and had the audacity to commence his pleading with these words of the Psalmist: “Judge me, O God, and plead my cause against an ungodly nation.” He was acquitted. The advocate-general Guérin only was condemned to death, and care was taken to specify in the sentence that he had been guilty of misappropriating the king’s money; as if a whole people murdered was not a sufficient crime in the eyes of these judges.

VII.

Towards the end of the reign of Francis I., and under that of his son Henry II., the Reformation made such rapid progress, that it becomes impossible to follow it in all its details. Men of letters, of the law, of the sword, of the Church itself, hastened to its banner. Several great provinces,—Languedoc, Dauphiny, the Lyonnese, Guienne, Saintonge, Poitou, the Orleanese, Normandy, Picardy, Flanders; the most considerable towns of the kingdom,—Bourges, Orleans, Rouen, Lyons, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Montpellier, La Rochelle, were peopled with Reformers. It is calculated that they comprised in a few years nearly a sixth of the population, of whom they were the _élite_. They might have repeated the saying of Tertullian: “We date only from yesterday, and are, yet, everywhere.”

If the persecution kept some aloof, it brought the accession of a greater number, through that instinct, which impels the human conscience to rise against injustice, and incline to the side of the victim. Moreover, the faith, the constancy, and the serenity of the martyrs soared above the ferocity of the executioner.

The impulse once given to the movement, everything was shaken. There was in the understanding, in the heart, and, so to say, in the air one breathed, an immense want of religious reforms. People began to reflect that religion is not to be transmitted, like a name or an estate which one inherits, but that, before accepting it, one is bound to examine it by and for oneself. People also began to consider more minutely the enormous abuses of the Romish church, and crowds separated themselves from that degenerated communion.

The ecclesiastical benefices were distributed, particularly after the Concordat, which had abolished the electoral forms, among court favourites, soldiers, intriguers, and even children; all incapable of fulfilling the duties of their offices. There were supernumerary prelates, who were derisively called flying, or portative bishops. The cardinals set the example of disorder. The prelates lived a scandalous life at Paris. The members of the lower clergy were, in general, immoral and greedy, the monks ignorant and shameless. This conduct was compared with that of the preachers of the Reformation, men of simple habits, for the most part poor and grave; and the contrast was so striking, that honest hearts could not resist it. Without some great lords on one side, and the lowest of the people on the other, the church of Rome was lost in France.

The provincial nobility, which had not been depraved in the atmosphere of the royal household, were all inclined to the new ideas. They entertained against the privileges of the priests, and against their territorial encroachments, an old, though suppressed hostility, that only waited an occasion to burst forth. They had, beside, considerable leisure in their castles, since the severe interdiction of wars of lord against lord; and reading at eve, around the feudal hearth, the Holy Scriptures, they were drawn, almost without being aware of it, to the teachings of Luther and Calvin.

The people of the third estate, who had received a lettered education,—advocates, legists, professors, notable burghers,—were already won beforehand, by their very studies, to these opinions. “Above all,” says with great simplicity an historian devoted to Catholicism, “painters, watchmakers, sculptors, goldsmiths, booksellers, printers, and others, who, from their callings, have some nobility of mind, were among the first easily surprised.”[19]

Traders, who voyaged in foreign countries, brought back impressions favourable to the Reformation. They recognised that this religion, by correcting the manners of the people, developed at the same moment their commerce, and contributed to the advance of their industry.

Many secular and regular ecclesiastics in the provinces were also shaken. Having taken orders without having learned any other thing than the barbarous theology of the schools, they had taught their dogmas in good faith. But placed face to face with the new dogma, they saw the stamp of truth upon it. They then betook themselves to some business for a livelihood, and, working at their handicraft, preached in secret the doctrines of the Reformation. They were encouraged by the thought that Rome would sooner or later come to an understanding with the Reformers in a general council. Hence those contradictions among some of them, which have not been sufficiently comprehended by our older historians.

The hawkers of Bibles and religious tracts aided powerfully in these conquests of the new faith. They were called bale-bearers, basket or library-carriers. They belonged to different classes of society: many were students in theology, or even ministers of the Gospel.

The printing-presses of Geneva, Lausanne, Neufchâtel, specially established to inundate France with religious writings, furnished them with books. And then, staff in hand, basket on back, through heat and cold, by lonely ways, through mountain-ravines and dreary morasses, they went from door to door, often ill received, always at the hazard of their lives, and knowing not in the morning where to lay their head at night. It was chiefly through them that the Bible penetrated into the manor of the noble, and beneath the hut of the villager.

Exposed, like the old Vaudois of Piedmont, to cruel pursuit, the new pedlars imitated their ingenuity, by placing at the top of their packs pieces of stuff or other unsuspicious objects, while they concealed beneath, the prohibited wares. “To gain easier access in the towns, in the country, in the houses of the nobility,” says again Florimond de Rémond, “some of them went as hawkers of little trinkets for the ladies, hiding in the depth of their bales the little books, which they presented to girls; but this was done furtively, as if they were things of great rarity, to make them better relished.”[20] From the many victims they furnished to the scaffold and the stake, we must suppose these humble packmen to have been very numerous. We cannot dwell upon this subject; but history owes it to their heroic devotedness, that we should recount the martyrdom of one among them at least.

A Dauphinese, named Pierre Chapot, after a short sojourn at Geneva, found employment as a compositor at Paris, and in his hours of leisure sold religious books. A spy of the Sorbonne surprised him in 1546, and Chapot was cited before the _Chambre ardente_ of the Parliament. His mild air, modest behaviour, his appeals to the justice of the counsellors, the Bible that he invoked with such assurance, softened the judges, and he obtained permission to enter upon a disputation with three doctors of theology. These last acceded with reluctance, saying that to discuss with heretics was a thing of evil consequence.

Chapot relied upon scriptural texts, and the others answered him with councils and traditions. Then, turning to the counsellors, the prisoner begged them not to allow a reference to anything but the declarations of the Gospel. Cut to the quick, the Sorbonnists said to the judges: “Why do you permit yourselves to be dictated to by a wicked and wily heretic? Why have you brought us hither to discuss articles already censured and condemned by the theological faculty? We will carry our complaint before those whom it concerns.” And they all departed deeply angered.

After they had left, the hawker said, with a calm voice: “You see, gentlemen, that these people proffer no other reasons than shouts and menaces; I want nothing more than to persuade you of the justice of my cause.” And falling upon his knees, with clasped hands, he implored God to inspire all the company with a right judgment, for the honour and glory of His name. Some of the judges, touched with compassion, would have acquitted him. But the contrary opinion prevailed, and the only favour he obtained, was not to have his tongue cut out before being burned alive.

He was taken to the Place Maubert, supported in a cart by two men, for the torture had broken his limbs. From the height of this new pulpit, he cried: “Christian people, although you see me here carried to die like a malefactor, and although I feel guilty of all my sins, I pray each of you to understand, that I am now about to depart from life like a true Christian, and not for any heresy, or because I am without God. I believe in God the Father Almighty, and in Jesus Christ, who, by His death, has delivered us from everlasting death. I believe that he was conceived of the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary....”

He was interrupted by the doctor Maillard, one of those with whom he had disputed before the Parliament: “Master Pierre,” he said to him, “it is here that you ought to implore pardon of the Virgin Mary, whom you have so grievously offended.” “Sir, I pray you,” replied the sufferer, “let me speak; I will say nothing that is unfitting a good Christian. As for the Virgin Mary, I have offended her in nothing, nor would I wish to have done it.” “Then say but one _Ave Maria_.” “No, I will not say it.” And he repeated without ceasing: “Jesus, son of David, have mercy upon me.” At this moment the doctor ordered the executioner to tighten the cord, and the martyr gave up his soul to God.

After the execution, the theologians of the Sorbonne complained loudly to the _Chambre ardente_, and declared that if heretics were permitted to speak, everything would be lost. The Parliament therefore resolved that all the condemned should have, without exception, their tongues cut out.

The disciples of the new religion had among them signs of recognition; and when they were too numerous to form one assembly, they divided themselves into _small bands_. The most resolute, or the best informed, undertook to explain the Bible. They were sometimes poor artisans, who made their exhortations by turn. The meetings took place in the evening, or at night, or in the morning, in order to escape the eye of the enemy. Anything served for these assemblies: a barn, a cellar, a garret, the bosom of a wood, an opening of a rock in the mountain-side.

The object of assembling was in some places concealed by means, which reveal at the same time the simplicity and the rigour of the period. “For the purpose of these meetings,” says Florimond de Rémond, speaking of those of Paris, “they chose some house with secret doors, so as to be able on necessity to fly, and also to enter by different ways. And he who was to preach, brought with him dice and cards, that he might throw them upon the carpet instead of the Bible, and conceal their deed by gaming.... The minister of Mantes was better advised, when secretly preaching in Paris, at the Croix-Verte, near the Louvre, he had counters and tale-books put upon the table, in order to deceive those who might suddenly come upon them, if they did not belong to his flock.”[21]

When a pastor visited, in passing, these meetings, the rejoicing was very great. He was listened to for hours; the symbols of the Holy Supper were received from his hands; the persecutions they had mutually suffered told of those which yet awaited them; and in separating, the adieus spoken were for the scaffold and for heaven.

So long as a regular form of church government was not established, and in the absence of a minister of the Gospel, the administration of the sacrament was abstained from. Calvin and the pastors of the Reformation would not authorize each little assembly to receive the communion at the hands of a man without a recognised call. “We by no means approve that you should begin in this way, or even that you should be hasty to have the Holy Supper, until you have an established order among you,” wrote Calvin, in 1553, to the faithful dispersed in Saintonge.

But if the sacraments were wanting at the beginning, they preserved a great rigidity of manners and discipline. Sinners were reproved, the erring admonished, and the authors of scandals excluded from the communion. “They declared themselves,” says the historian, whom I am never weary of citing, because he seems to have well understood the disciples of the Reformation,—“they declared themselves enemies of luxury, of public debauches, and of the frivolities of the world, too much in vogue among the Catholics. In their feasts and assemblies, instead of dancing and hautboys, they had readings from the Bibles, that were placed upon the table, and spiritual songs, especially the Psalms put into verse. The women, by their decent carriage and modest dress, appeared in public like mourning Eves or repentant Magdalens, as says Tertullian of those of his time. The men, all subdued, seemed stricken with the Holy Ghost.”[22]

The popular opinion was not ill-founded, and Catherine de Medicis affirmed it one day in her trifling way: “I shall turn to the new religion, that I may pass for a pious prude.”

This was the most flourishing and purest period of the French Reformation. There were, no doubt, among the faithful, some unquiet, restless minds, who only joined it out of an empty passion for novelty; there were among them also many differences, which compromised the general cause, and many lukewarm, that were called temporisers, middle-course men, or Nicodemites. But the rivalries of the great houses of the kingdom, and political quarrels, had not yet mixed themselves up with religion. The Reformers suffered, and took no vengeance; they received death without a desire to retaliate, and displayed more severity against themselves than their enemies.

VIII.

In a more enlightened age, the great progress of the Reformation would soon have brought about a crisis. Unfortunately, the minds of the people were not yet ripe, and no one comprehended that there might be two religions at once in the same state.

Francis I., besieged by women and priests, had died in 1547, little regretted by the Catholics, who reproached him for not having done enough for the Church, and still less regretted by the Protestants, who accused him of having cruelly persecuted them. His son, Henry II., who succeeded him, was nineteen years of age. His nature was mild, his countenance open, his speech easy and ready, his manners graceful; but he was deficient in all the high qualities of a king. Ill instructed in business, and incapable of constant application to it, he chiefly passed his time in diversion with his courtiers. The government fell into the hands of favourites of both sexes,—Anne de Montmorency, the duke François de Guise, the Marshal de Saint André, Diane de Poitiers, duchess of Valentinois; and it is under his reign that the great factions, which covered France with ruins and blood, commenced.

Henry II., in concert with his Italian wife, Catherine de Medicis, opened the court to the arts of magic and sorcery, whence arose acts of the most shameful credulity amongst some, and of cold impiety among others. “Two great sins,” says an old historian, “crept into France in the reign of this prince; namely, atheism and magic.”[23]

At the _fêtes_ of the coronation of the queen, in 1549, Henry II. displayed great magnificence; and as voluptuousness and cruelty have much natural affinity, he determined upon combining with the pomp of the tournaments the spectacle of the execution of four Lutherans.

One of them was a poor tailor, or _sempster_, who had been thrown into prison for having worked on forbidden days, and spoken ill words against the Church of Rome. The king having expressed a desire to question, by way of pastime, some one of the heretics, the Cardinal de Lorraine had this sempster brought before him, supposing that he could not utter a sensible word. He was deceived. The sempster held his ground against the king and the priests with great presence of mind. “The favourite, Diane de Poitiers,” according to the narrative of Crespin, “would also interpose her raillery; but the sempster soon cut her cloth in a different fashion to that she expected. For he, not being able to endure such inordinate arrogance in her whom he knew to be the cause of such cruel persecutions, said to her: ‘Rest contented, Madam, that you have infected all France, without mixing your venom and filth in so sacred and holy a thing as the religion and truth of our Lord Jesus Christ.’”[24]

Henry II. was so angered with this boldness, that he resolved to see him burned alive. He placed himself, for the purpose, at a window fronting the stake. The poor sempster, having recognised him, turned upon him a look so firm, so fixed, impressed with so much calm and courage, that the king could not sustain this mute, but terrible accusation. He withdrew, frightened, his whole soul disturbed, and for many nights he imagined his couch was haunted by the sinister image of the victim. He swore never to be present again at these fearful executions, and he kept his word. A more truly Christian prince would have abolished them.

The persecution, far from ceasing, raged more strongly. In 1551 appeared the famous Edict of Châteaubriant, which empowered both the secular and the ecclesiastical judges separately to take cognizance of the crime of heresy, so that by a complete reversal of all justice, the accused absolved before one tribunal, might be condemned before another. All intercession on their behalf was forbidden, and the sentences were to be executed in spite of appeal. The third of the goods of the convicts was to go to the informers. The king confiscated to himself the property of all those, who took refuge out of France. It was prohibited to send money or letters to the fugitives. And, lastly, the obligation of presenting a certificate of Catholic orthodoxy, was imposed upon all suspected persons. This atrocious legislation was imitated by the men of the Reign of Terror, but with modifications.

The most infamous baseness ensued. Such and such a favourite, such and such a courtesan, obtained as the price of the most disgraceful services, the spoils of a family, or even of an entire canton. The property of the victims was fought for and disputed in open day, before the whole country. Heretics were denounced, and in default were invented, that there might be more goods to confiscate; and many abbeys and noble families by this means enlarged their domains, as they did later on the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. They have since lost their ill-gotten acquisitions. The judgments of God have their day of execution!

The Edict of Châteaubriant was not enough. Pope Paul IV., the Cardinal de Lorraine, the Sorbonne, a multitude of priests, demanded that France should become a land of inquisition. A bull to this effect was despatched in 1557, and the king confirmed it by an edict. But in vain did he attempt to force it upon the Parliament in session: the lay magistrates temporized, adjourned, and in the midst of so many disgraces, France was spared this one at least.

Exasperated by these delays, the impetuous Paul IV., whose head, it is said, was deranged with old age, fulminated a bull, in which he declared that all who lapsed into heresy, prelates, princes, even kings and emperors, should be shorn of their benefices, dignities, states, and empires, which he would bestow upon the first Catholic occupant, without even retaining to the Holy See the power of restitution. Paul IV. mistook the age: under the pontificate of Gregory VII. or of Innocent III., such a bull would have set all Europe on fire; under his, it was only an act of folly.

But in default of the Inquisition, the Sorbonne and the clergy, who had constituted hatred of heretics the first, and the most sacred of duties, neglected nothing to inflame every mind with implacable fanaticism. Its effects may be seen in the affair of the Rue Saint Jacques, which happened in the beginning of the month of September, 1557.

The battle of Saint Quentin had just been lost. Arms had been distributed among the people with orders to be ready for any event. Every one fancied the Spaniard at the gates of Paris, and general terror ascribed the disaster to the mildness with which the heretics had been treated. “We have not sufficiently avenged the honour of God, and God takes vengeance upon us,” cried with the same voice both the populace and churchmen. So, when Rome was attacked by the barbarians, the Pagans accused themselves of having been too considerate towards the Christians. So, when Paris was menaced in 1792, after the taking of Verdun, the self-accusation was that the aristocracy and clergy had been too much spared, and the result was the days of September. The raging of the passions is always the same.

Three or four hundred of the faithful had met together one evening to celebrate the Supper, in a house of the Rue Saint Jacques, behind the Sorbonne. Among them were many gentlemen and men of the law. The ladies belonged, with the exception of four or five, to noble families; many of them were of the court.

Some bachelors or doctors of theology, lodging at the Sorbonne, had watched and given the signal of alarm. Fearing lest the assembly might separate before they were sufficiently strong in numbers, they had heaped up a great quantity of stones to overwhelm those who should come out. About midnight, the service being over, the faithful opened the door; but, at the threshold, they were assailed with a shower of missiles accompanied by frightful vociferations, and were compelled to retreat within.

The whole quarter was awakened by the tumult. The cry “to arms” was raised. Sinister rumours agitated the crowd. “Have the Spaniards surprised the town?” “No, not yet;” some replied, “but there are wretches who have sold the kingdom.” “Not so,” answered others, “they are Lutherans, damnable heretics, who rejoice in the misfortunes of France. Death, death to the heretics!” The street was filled with men armed with halberts, pikes, javelins, arquebuses, with everything that came to hand.

The faithful, momentarily expecting to be massacred, fell upon their knees and supplicated God to come to their aid. Then they deliberated upon what they should do. To barricade themselves until the arrival of the serjeants, would be to devote themselves to almost certain death. To cut a passage through that furious multitude was scarcely less perilous. Upon this, however, the most daring decided, persuaded that the only way to daunt their adversaries was to front them boldly. The gentlemen drew their swords and marched foremost: the others followed. They traversed the crowd in the midst of a shower of stones, and through the pikes of their assailants. Favoured by the night, they escaped with their lives, though sorely wounded. One alone fell; he was trodden underfoot, and so mutilated as to have lost all likeness to the human form.

But what was the fate of those who had not the courage to leave the building? They were nearly all women and children. They sought to fly by the garden, but all the issues were watched. At break of day they tried to gain the street, but were beaten and driven back. The women, counting upon the pity their helplessness commanded, presented themselves at the windows and with clasped hands implored the compassion of the wretches who had begun to force the doors; but they might as successfully have supplicated rocks as these pitiless miscreants. Already, offering back their life to God, they were preparing to die, when in the morning, the civil-lieutenant arrived with a troop of serjeants.

He inquired into the cause of the disturbance, and learning that the meeting had been held for reading the Bible, to celebrate the Supper, to pray for the king and the prosperity of the kingdom, he was moved to tears. Yet he must acquit himself of his duty. He had the men brought forth first bound two and two: they were insulted and beaten, those above all who, by their beards or their long dresses, seemed to be preachers. He would have kept the women in the house; but the populace threatened to fire it. They came out in their turn, to be overwhelmed with cowardly outrages, their clothes rent to shreds, their hair torn from their heads, to reach the prison of the Châtelet, covered with dirt and gore, to the number of about a hundred and forty victims.

The most execrable aspersions were hawked about against the new believers, in the pulpits, in the confessionals, in the colleges, in the market-places, at the court itself. Invention had not been much taxed: it was word for word the old calumnies of the Pagans against the meetings of the early Christians. The heretics were accused of not believing in God, of immolating little children, of extinguishing the lights.... I desist from saying more: let the history of the primitive church be read!

And as it seems necessary that in human affairs the ridiculous should always place itself beside the tragic, a certain bishop of Avranches distributed a tract throughout all Paris, in which, comparing the sound of the bells of the Catholic service to that of the arquebuses which had interrupted the Lutheran worship, he detailed a tissue of antitheses: “The bells ring, and the arquebuses thunder; those have a soft sound, and these a sound of fear; those open heaven, these open hell....” And thence this prelatical buffoon inferred that (Roman) Catholicism has all the signs of the true church.

The Reformers published apologies, which they secretly scattered abroad, even in the king’s chamber. But they sought in vain for a serious inquiry. Their enemies did not by any means desire this; they judged it better to applaud the bands of wretches, who, crowding each day to the places appointed for capital punishments, shouted with bloodthirsty cries, “Death to the heretics!”

Before the end of September, three prisoners were brought to the scaffold: an old man, a young one, and a woman, Madame de Graveron, of the family of Luns, in Périgord. She was only twenty-three years of age, and had been a widow but a few months. On quitting the prison for the scene of execution, she exchanged her mourning weeds, says Crespin, for the velvet hood and other festal garments, as if to receive a happy triumph.

After these three victims, four others were sacrificed. But by this time, Protestant Europe had been stirred up by the voice of Calvin and of Farel. The Swiss cantons, the County Palatine, the elector of Saxony, the duke of Wurtemburg, the marquis of Brandenburg, interceded for the prisoners. Henry II. wanted the support of the Protestants, and granted their request. Everything in this affair was therefore to overflow with disgrace, even down to the act of amnesty wrenched from a king of France by the intervention of the foreigner.

IX.

Beaten without by the most violent storms, the French Reformation did not neglect anything by which it might strengthen itself within. Its organization was necessarily long defective and incomplete. At first, as we have seen, there were simple gatherings, without fixed pastors or regular administration of the sacraments. No churches then existed, in the dogmatic sense of the word, but only the seeds and scattered elements of churches. This lasted about thirty years.

Then the flocks had a consistory, ministers, a stable authority, a recognised discipline. The example had been set by the faithful of Paris, in 1555. A gentleman who received them at his house, M. de la Ferrière, proposed that they should appoint a pastor. Many objections were urged; but his representations prevailed, and the meeting nominated a minister, elders, and deacons. The same organization was adopted at Poitiers, Angers, Bourges, and other places. And thus was constituted the local church or ecclesiastical community.

A great step remained to be taken. The churches were isolated and independent of each other. They were to be confederated and united into one general church, whether for the maintenance of unity of belief and discipline, or to oppose a stronger barrier against the attacks of the enemy.

Such was the subject of the discussion, held with his colleagues, by the pastor Antoine de Chandieu, who had come to Poitiers from Paris about the end of the year 1558. All resolved upon convoking a general synod as soon as possible at Paris, with the consent of the consistory, “not to attribute any pre-eminence or dignity to that church,” as Theodore de Bèze expressly observes, “but because it was then the most convenient town for collecting secretly a great number of ministers and elders.”[25]

In face of the gibbets erected on the public places, and of the sanguinary laws that crushed the Reformers, the difficulties of executing their project were immense. The result was, that only thirteen churches sent their deputies to this synod: Paris, Saint Lô, Dieppe, Angers, Orleans, Tours, Poitiers, Saintes, Marennes, Châtellerault, Saint Jean d’Angély. These delegates assembled under the presidency of the pastor François Morel, lord of Collonges, the 25th of May, 1559.

There was in the deliberations of this assembly a simplicity and moral grandeur that fill us with respect. Nothing of declamation or violence, but a calm dignity, a tranquil and serene force prevailed, as if the members of the synod debated in a profound peace, under the guardianship of the laws. And yet the historian De Thou says that they braved an almost certain death! Much admiration has been bestowed upon the constituent assembly for its resumption of the discussion upon a judiciary law, after the flight of Louis XVI.; here the spectacle is much more grand, for it required far more energy and self-denial.

The foundations of the French Reformation were then laid. Ensuing synods have only changed a few terms of the confession of faith, and developed points of discipline. The essential was established at the first stroke. The dogmatic and ecclesiastical code were the expression of what has been called Calvinism. Our task must be here only that of the narrator.

The confession of faith was composed of forty articles, embracing all the dogmas, considered fundamental in the sixteenth century. God and His word; the Trinity; the fall of man and his state of condemnation; the decree of the Lord towards the elect; gratuitous redemption through Jesus Christ, very God and very man; participation in this grace through the faith given by the Holy Ghost; the characters of the true church; the number and signification of the Sacraments. The Bible was taken as the sole and absolute rule of all truth.

The discipline also contained forty articles. It has been since extended in the synodal assemblies; and it has ended by a division into fourteen chapters or sections, comprising two hundred and twenty articles; but all the chief ideas were in the primitive draft.

We will give a short glance at this ecclesiastical constitution. Wherever there were a sufficient number of the faithful, they were to constitute themselves into a church; that is to say, to name a consistory, appoint a minister, establish the regular celebration of the sacraments and the practice of discipline. Everything was to be begun with this first step.

The consistory was elected at first by the common voice of the people; it was completed afterwards by the suffrages of its own members; but the new selections were always to be submitted for the approval of the flock, and if there were any opposition, the debate was to be settled either at the colloquy or at the provincial synod. To be eligible for the consistory imposed no condition of fortune, or of any other kind.

The election of the pastors was notified to the people in the same way, after having been made by the provincial synod or the colloquy. The newly elected minister preached during three consecutive Sundays. The silence of the people was held to signify their consent. If there were any reclamations, these were carried before the bodies charged with the choice of pastors. There was no further appeal against the voice of the majority.

A certain number of churches formed the conscription of a colloquy. The colloquies assembled twice a year at least. Each church was represented by a pastor and an elder. The office of these companies was to arrange any difficulties that might arise, and generally to provide for whatever was conformable to the welfare of their flocks.

Beyond the colloquies were the provincial synods, also composed of a pastor and an elder of each church. They assembled once in each year at least. They decided upon whatever had not been settled in the colloquies, and upon all the important matters of their province. The number of these synods has varied. Sixteen has been the general number, since the union of Béarn to France.

Lastly, at the summit of the hierarchy was placed the national synod. It was, whenever it was possible, to be convoked year by year; which, however, scarcely ever took place, owing to the misfortunes of the times.

Composed of two pastors, and of two elders of each particular synod, the national synod was the supreme court for all great ecclesiastical matters, and every one was bound to render it obedience. The deliberations commenced by reading the confession of faith and of discipline. The members of the assembly must adhere to the first, but might propose amendments of the other. The presidency belonged of right to a pastor. The duration of the sessions was indeterminate. Before the closing of each session, the province in which the following synod would be holden, was designated.

This constitution had been dictated by Calvin. It attests the power and extent of his genius for organization. Throughout the whole the elective principle was the guarantee of liberty; throughout the whole power supported authority; and thence, order arose from the combination of these two elements. Moreover, an equilibrium between the pastors and the laity was preserved; the periodical and frequent renewal of provincial and national synods was settled; and churches were strongly united without the least trace of primacy. It was a Presbyterian government in its essential features. In these times it would, doubtless, be required that the part of the people should not be limited to a simple right of veto, and that the number of the laity should prevail over that of the pastors in the different degrees of jurisdiction. But if we recur to the ideas which were current in the sixteenth century, it will be seen that this ecclesiastical charter immensely surpassed the civil institutions. The principle of the equality of believers, pastors or laymen, great or little, was at its base, and out of this naturally arose the equality of the citizens; for the State and the Church ever tend to be, in their respective attributes, the counterpart of each other.

We must add, that all these elective bodies, from the consistories to the national synod, formed a sort of jury, which had authority to take cognisance of private errors, and to inflict spiritual penalties. These penalties were individual admonition, remonstrance in consistory, suspension from the Lord’s Supper, and lastly, for great scandals, excommunication and excision from the Church. The heads of the highest must bend like the most humble, under this religious penalty, and, in certain cases, make public confession of their offences. Henry IV., already king of Navarre, submitted to it on more than one occasion.

We are astonished in our times at this interference with private actions; but in those days few people thought of complaining. The ecclesiastical power penetrated without obstacle and without effort into fireside life. It was believed that the religious law ought to inquire into the faults which the civil law could not reach, and for the Reformers it was still more requisite that they should have recourse to this kind of penalty, as they were accused of having left the Romish church only the more unrestrictedly to satisfy their passions.

On the 29th of May, 1559, when the deputies of the first general synod, before separating, mingled their souls in prayer, that they might bless God for the work he had permitted them to accomplish, the French Reformation was constituted.

X.

The Parliament of Paris began to exhibit signs of hesitation before the growing host of the Calvinists. It had split into three parties: the ultra-Catholics, headed by the chief president, Gilles Lemaître, who were bent upon persisting in the old system of persecution; the men of middle course, already styled Politicians, among whom figured Christophe de Harlay, Seguier, and De Thou, the father of the historian, who sought to approximate the two religions by mutual concessions; lastly, the secret Reformers, whose chiefs were Anne Dubourg and Louis Dubourg, who from day to day declared themselves more openly. These divisions produced between the two chambers a diversity of jurisprudence, the great chamber continuing to pursue the heretics with severity, and the Tournelle seeking means to acquit them.

These symptoms of indulgence alarmed the clergy. “If the secular arm fails in its duty,” said the Cardinal de Lorraine to the king, “all the malcontents will throw themselves into this detestable sect; they will destroy the ecclesiastical power, and afterwards it will be the turn of the regal power.”

Henry II. listened to him with greater readiness, because he had just concluded with the king of Spain the shameful peace of Cateau-Cambrésis, when the two monarchs engaged by a secret article, to exterminate heresy; and as a pledge of this treaty, his daughter Elizabeth was to espouse Philip II. It was therefore arranged that the king should go in person to the Parliament, in order to put an end at once to the divisions by an act of authority. It was also, as the cardinal further observed, the most agreeable exhibition to offer to the Spanish ambassadors, who had arrived in Paris to fetch away the betrothed princess, to burn before the people half a dozen Lutheran counsellors. “We must,” to use his expression, “give this junket to these grandees of Spain.”

Henry II. proceeded to hold a bed of justice, on the 10th of August, 1559, and invited the counsellors to give him frankly their advice upon the means of appeasing the religious differences. The chief president, Gilles Lemaître, lauded the zeal of Philip Augustus, who had in one day caused six hundred of the Albigenses to be burned. The men of middle course confined themselves to vague generalities. The secret Calvinists, Anne Dubourg in particular, demanded religious reforms by means of a national council. “Every day,” said he, “we see committed crimes that go unpunished, while new torments are invented against men who have committed no crime. It is not a matter of little importance to condemn those who, in the midst of the flames, invoke the name of Jesus Christ.”

The irritated prince ordered him to be arrested in full Parliament, by the captain of his guards, and said aloud, that he would see him burned with his own eyes. But wounded, by the splinter of a lance, in a tournament, he died a month afterwards; and we are assured that in his last moments he remembered Anne Dubourg with grief, and the other counsellors confined in the Bastille. “They are innocent,” he cried, “and God punishes me for having persecuted them.” The Cardinal de Lorraine hastened to quiet his conscience, by saying that this was a suggestion of the devil.

Anne Dubourg was born, in 1521, at Riom, in Auvergne, and belonged to a family of consideration. His uncle had been chancellor of France. After having studied theology, received orders, and entered the law at Orleans, he occupied, since the year 1557, a seat in the Parliament of Paris. He was a man of great learning, integrity, and devotion to his duties; and the only accusation that could be brought against him was, that he had sided with the new religion.

The death of the king did not suspend his trial. The bishop of Paris had him degraded from his orders, and, contrary to custom, the matter was brought, not before the assembled chambers, but commissioners. Some magistrates would have persuaded him to make a confession of faith in ambiguous terms, so that, without wounding his own conscience, he might satisfy that of the judges. Dubourg refused: he even disavowed his advocate Marillac, who had defended him with equivocal phrases, and he was condemned to be burned alive.

He heard his sentence read without a change of countenance, and prayed God to pardon his judges. “Happen what will,” said he, “I am a Christian; yes, I am a Christian; and I will shout still louder, dying for the glory of my Lord Jesus Christ.”

As the Reformers had tried to provide him with the means of escape, he was inclosed in an iron cage, an old implement of Louis XI.’s fetched from the Bastille. Dubourg’s resignation was not disturbed: he sang the praises of God in this narrow prison.

It was the usage to reserve for grand occasions the execution of criminals of the deepest dye, and that of Anne Dubourg was fixed for the 23rd of December, 1559, the day before Christmas-eve. Six hundred men were put under arms. The crossways of the streets were even inclosed with strong posts and barriers, in order that the place of execution might not be ascertained until the last hour. Dubourg wished to divest himself of his clothes: “My friends,” said he to the people, “I am not here to die like a thief, or a murderer, but for the Gospel.” He was offered a crucifix, but he rejected it, and when suspended on the gibbet he cried: “My God, my God, forsake me not, that I may not forsake Thee.”

Thus died, at the age of thirty-eight, this pious and illustrious magistrate. “His execution,” says Mézeray, “inspired many persons with the conviction that the belief professed by so good and so enlightened a man, could not be evil;”[26] and Florimond de Rémond, then a student, avows that every one in the colleges was moved to tears, that they pleaded his cause after his death, and that this execution did more harm than a hundred ministers could have done with all their preaching.

The year following, the Chancellor Olivétan pronounced the name of Anne Dubourg with despair upon his death-bed; and on the approach of the Cardinal de Lorraine, he said to him: “Ah! Cardinal, thou hast caused the damnation of us all.”

In the midst of these persecutions, the affairs of the nation were daily becoming more critical. The new king, Francis II., was hardly six years old. Feeble in body and mind, his person, according to the energetic expression of an old historian, was exposed to the first occupant. Catherine de Medicis, the Guises, Châtillons, Bourbons, the Constable Anne de Montmorency, all worked to their own advantage this impotent fiction of the royalty of a child, and mingled with the religious discussions, the quarrels of their political ambition. We shall only speak of that which is immediately connected with our subject.

Catherine de Medicis, who had now been in France six-and-twenty years, had brought from the country of Machiavelli the art of dissimulation, for which she had found such ample opportunity of exercise during the long humiliations, to which she had been subjected under the reign of the female favourites of Henry II. Artful and vindictive, licentious without having even the excuse of passion, ambitious of power, as much from the love of intrigue as from the pride of command, she had, nevertheless, abilities of a high order, which, directed to the pursuit of a good object, might have accomplished great designs; but having no longer either faith or moral feeling, and constantly engaged in ruining the authority of others in order to consolidate her own, she by turns embraced and deserted all parties alike. No wife and mother of our kings, Isabeau de Bavière excepted, has done so much injury to France as this Italian.[27]

The Guises, even more than Catherine de Medicis, were during forty years the real leaders of the (Roman) Catholic party in France, and without them, as Mézeray remarks, the new religion would perhaps have become dominant. This family, which was a younger branch of that of the dukes of Lorraine, had only established itself in France since the reign of Louis XII. Claude de Lorraine came hither in 1513, to seek his fortune, _with a valet and a walking-stick_. He had by Antoinette de Bourbon six sons and four daughters, who all succeeded in raising themselves to offices of consideration.

Francis I. distrusted them in the latter days of his life, and counselled his son to keep the Lorraines at a distance; but Henry II. had too little haughtiness of mind and force of character to follow this wise counsel. He allowed these foreigners, who had interests quite distinct from those of his race and kingdom, to get into their hands the public business; and after the accession of Francis II., who espoused their niece Mary Stuart, two years older than himself, the Guises became all-powerful.

The Cardinal Charles de Lorraine, archbishop of Rheims, and the possessor, in ecclesiastical benefices, of a revenue of three hundred thousand crowns (many millions of our present money), had some learning, affable manners, great facility of speech, and much dexterity in the management of men and affairs, a deep policy, and a vast ambition. He aspired to nothing less than the crown of France for his brother, and to the tiara for himself. So, Pius V., somewhat anxious concerning the part he was playing in the Church, habitually called him the pope on the other side of the mountains. For the rest, he was a priest without settled convictions, and half preached the Confession of Augsburg, _to please my good masters the Germans_, as says Brantôme; he was decried for his evil habits, which he did not even care to hide, and raised the hooting of the populace on quitting the dwelling of a courtesan; lastly, he was as pusillanimous in the face of danger, as he was arrogant in prosperity.

His brother, the Duke François de Guise, less informed, and less eloquent, had higher qualities. A great warrior, intrepid and liberal, he had served France nobly at the defence of Metz, the capture of Calais and Thionville, and the victory of Renty. His character was naturally elevated and generous, but irascible, even cruel, when he encountered an obstacle; and as he comprehended nothing of religious controversies or of political diplomacy, he placed his valiant sword at the service of the cardinal.

The two brothers were in a favourable position for reciprocally assisting, without interfering with each other. The one could not hope for the crown of France, nor could the other expect the tiara. The priest gained for their house the support of the churchmen, and the soldier, that of the military. Abroad they were aided by Philip II. and the Holy See, and these foreigners contracted alliances with foreigners, not as subjects, but as sovereigns.

Under Francis II. the cardinal got himself named Superintendent of the Exchequer. The Duke de Guise obtained, notwithstanding the protestations of the Constable, the command-in-chief of the army; and being at the same time grand chamberlain, master of the hounds, grand master, generalissimo, uncle of a king of sixteen, and brother of the cardinal, he wielded an authority at least as great as that of the ancient mayors of the palace.

On the other side were the Bourbons, princes of the blood, but in a distant degree, of narrow fortune, and suspected by the Crown since the treason of the ancient Constable, who had taken arms against his king.

Antoine de Bourbon, the head of his race, had espoused Jeanne d’Albret, who had conferred upon him the title of king of Navarre, without giving him the kingdom. He was an irresolute, indolent prince; and, timid by character, though occasionally courageous, he floated between the two doctrines, sometimes causing the Reformed faith to be preached in Béarn, Saintonge, and Poitou, and going to sing psalms at the Pré-aux-Clercs, in 1558, in spite of the shouts of the Sorbonne; sometimes returning towards the (Roman) Catholic religion and persecuting the faithful. The first and last passion of his life was to recover the kingdom of Navarre, or equivalent domains. He died without succeeding, and this long dream only begat for him the mockery and desertion of every one.

His brother, the prince Louis de Condé, had a more penetrating genius and a more masculine character. Witty, merry, sometimes trifling, but intrepid above all, and loved by the soldiery, he valiantly defended the cause of the Reformers, without ever inspiring them with full confidence. Instructed in the new opinions by his wife and his stepmother, he showed more ambition than religion, and the looseness of his manners has always left a doubt upon the sincerity of his faith.

It may be asked whether the Bourbons, Henry IV. included, did not damage more than profit the French Reformation. They launched it into politics, drove it into the battle-field, dragged it into their particular quarrels; and then, when it had gained them the crown, they denied it.

Another family, less high in rank, but more eminent for its virtues,—that of the Châtillons, served the cause with more fidelity. It consisted of three brothers: Odet de Châtillon, François d’Andelot, and Gaspard de Coligny. Their mother, Louise de Montmorency, sister of the Constable, leaned to the Reformation. She was virtuous, in those times of license, a rare example of chastity. In her dying moments she refused the presence of a priest, saying that God had given her the grace of fearing and loving Him.

François d’Andelot, the youngest of the three brothers, was the first to declare himself frankly for the new religion. Made prisoner in the wars of Italy, and detained in the castle of Milan, he had received some pious books from the hands of Rénée de France. Sent afterwards to Scotland, he had the opportunity of studying more closely the doctrine and practices of the Reformation. He was a brave and loyal knight, without fear or reproach, the worthy successor of Bayard.

Going to Brittany, where the property of his house was situated, he took with him a pastor who preached from town to town, with open doors: an unheard-of thing in 1558. Henry II. reproached him sharply for it. “Sire,” answered D’Andelot, “you must not think it strange that, after doing my duty in your service, I employ the rest of my time for the safety of my soul. Wherefore I supplicate you to leave my conscience safe, and to keep for your service my body and my goods, which are entirely yours.” “But I did not give you that order,” said the king, pointing to the collar about his neck, “to use it thus. You have promised and sworn to go to mass and to follow your religion.” “I did not then know,” replied the knight in his integrity, “what it was to be a Christian, and I would not have accepted it on that condition, had God touched my heart as He has since.”

The king, who could contain himself no longer, threw across the table his plate, which struck the dauphin, and he would have pierced D’Andelot with his sword. He had him imprisoned, and took away from him his commission of colonel-general of the infantry, which was given to Blaise de Montluc.

This matter made a great noise. Calvin wrote to the prisoner to felicitate him on his courage, and Pope Paul IV. was indignant that the offender had not been led straight to execution. The ambassador of France represented to him in vain that it was out of the question to treat a Châtillon in this way, the nephew of the Constable, the brother of the Admiral. The intractable pontiff exclaimed, “A heretic never repents; it is an evil for which there is no remedy but the fire.”

Relations and friends intervened; D’Andelot consented to allow a mass to be said in the chamber of his prison, but without taking any part in it, and he was set at liberty.

Gaspard de Coligny, the greatest layman of the French Reformation, will detain us longer. We shall endeavour above all to describe the religious side of his character, and the details of private life neglected by other historians.

Born at Châtillon-sur-Loing in 1516, Coligny received his education from Nicolas Bérault, a renowned professor of the age, and he exhibited such taste for his studies, that he was compelled to interrupt them, lest he should be turned from the career of arms. At twenty-five he was made colonel-general of the French infantry, and through his regulations he introduced a severe discipline among these bands of mercenaries, who before his time were more like brigands than soldiers. “These ordinances,” says Brantôme, “were the most elegant and the wisest that were ever made in France, and I believe that since they were made, the lives of a million of persons have been preserved, and as much of their goods and faculties; for before there was nothing but pillage, theft, brigandage, ransomings, murders, quarrels, and disorder among these bands. This, then, is the obligation the world owes to this eminent person.”[28]

At what time Coligny made the first step towards the new doctrine is not known. From the year 1555, we find him seconding the enterprise of the Chevalier de Villegagnon, for founding a colony of French Reformers in Brazil. The Admiral, who perceived in the proposal the twofold advantage of opening a place of retreat for the persecuted people, and of enriching his country with a colonial establishment, gave Villegagnon two ships with a sum of ten thousand livres: the expedition, however, did not succeed.

Taken prisoner by the Spaniards after the disastrous battle of Saint Quentin, he asked for a Bible and other religious books. He gave himself wholly up to this study, and it was then that he seems to have acquired firm and deep convictions upon the principles of the Reformation.

When he had paid his ransom, he retired to his manor of Châtillon-sur-Loing; and wishing to apply himself to religious matters, he resigned to his brother D’Andelot, with the king’s permission, the appointment of colonel-general of the infantry. He also gave up in favour of his cousin, the Marshal de Montmorency, son of the Constable, the government of Paris and the Isle of France, and besought Henry II. in the most earnest manner, to designate a successor for his government of Picardy. “All which from that time,” says the author of the _Mémoires de Coligny_, “led many to suspect that he had changed his religion: it being true that he made it evident his mind was altogether drawn off from all coveting of honour and power.”[29]

Yet this is the man, whom several historians have accused of taking up arms and fomenting rebellions from a spirit of ambition! History thus written is one of the darkest shames of humanity.

Coligny was encouraged in his pious resolutions by Charlotte de Laval, his wife, who never ceased to invite him to declare himself openly. “Wherefore the Admiral, seeing himself pressed by her so often and with so much affection, resolved to tell her once for all, how it really was with him, representing in the fullest manner that, for many years, he had neither seen nor heard say of any one, whether in Germany or in France, who had made open profession of the religion, that they had not been overwhelmed with evils and calamities; that by the edicts of Francis I. and of Henry II., rigorously observed by the Parliament, those who were convicted were to be burned alive by a slow fire in public, and their property confiscated to the king; that notwithstanding, if she were bent so confidently upon not refusing the condition common to those of the (Reformed) religion, he on his part would not be found wanting in his duty.”[30]

Charlotte de Laval having answered that this had been the lot of true Christians in all ages, Coligny hesitated no longer. He professed his creed before those who came to visit him, exhorted his servants to follow his example, gave them the Scriptures to read, engaged men of piety to govern his children, and entirely reformed the habits of his house. He also began to frequent the meetings, but he did not participate yet in the Supper, having doubts upon this matter. He had discussed the point with learned ministers, asking for explanations upon the real presence and other similar subjects, without having seen his way clear in this doctrine.

One day, therefore, being at a meeting at Vatteville, he rose, when the Supper was about to be celebrated; and after having beseeched the congregation not to take offence at his infirmity, he invited the minister to explain himself a little more at length upon the matter. “The Admiral, instructed by his discourse, first returned thanks to God, and from that time resolved to participate in this sacred and holy mystery on the first day of its celebration. The news of this having been spread throughout France, it is impossible to describe the joy and consolation all the churches thence received.”[31]

He persevered during his whole life in his pious habits, and practised them more freely, as the liberty of the believers gradually enlarged. “As soon as he left his bed, early in the morning, having taken his dressing-gown and knelt with all his household, he himself repeated prayers in the customary form of the churches of France; after which, pending the interval before the hour of preachment, which took place every second day with psalm-singing, he gave audiences to the deputies from the churches who had been sent to him, or occupied himself on public matters, of which he continued still to treat awhile after the sermon, until dinner-hour.

“Standing at the table, with his wife by his side, a psalm was sung, if there had been no preaching, and then followed the ordinary benediction: of which an infinity, not only of Frenchmen, but of German captains and colonels, can bear testimony of his having kept this observance, without a single intermission, not only in his house and at his ease, but also when with the army. The cloth having been removed, he, rising with all present, then returned thanks himself, or had them returned by his minister.”

The same thing was practised at supper; and perceiving that all his household could not without inconvenience be present in the evening at bedtime, he ordered that every one should come at the conclusion of supper, and that when the psalms had been sung, prayers should be said. And it would not be easy to say how many of the French nobility began to establish in their families this devout rule of the Admiral, who often exhorted them to the true practice of piety, saying that it was not enough that the father of a family lived holily and religiously, if he did not by his example induce others to follow the same rule.

“When it was near the time of supper, he summoned all his people, representing to them that he would not have to render to God an account of his own life only, but also of their conduct, and he reconciled them together, if there had happened to be any dissension among them.”

“He was of the middle height, his limbs were well-proportioned, his countenance calm and serene, his voice soft and pleasing, but rather slow and hesitating, his complexion clear, his carriage and demeanour grave, yet full of grace and kindness. Of wine, he drank very little; he ate sparingly, and slept, at the most, but seven hours.”[32]

The character that Gaspard de Coligny displayed in public affairs, is familiar to all. Endowed with qualities the most diverse, and of the highest order, severe toward himself indulgent to others, never inflated by prosperity nor cast down by misfortune, a lover of his country, devoted to his king in whatever did not contravene his conscience, the most illustrious statesmen, as well as the most able captains, have esteemed it an honour to be compared with him. Perhaps he had defects in these qualities. He appeared to be sometimes wanting in resolution, because he was too loyal to pursue to the utmost his advantages against royalty, and to be sometimes wanting in foresight, because he suspected with difficulty in others that perfidy which he found not in his own heart.

If we search in times near our own, and in a different system of things, for a parallel character with his, we shall, doubtless, pronounce the name of General Lafayette. The man of the sixteenth century and he of the eighteenth had a full belief in the justice of their cause. Each made the most generous sacrifices to it, and to the end adhered to it with the most unshaken constancy. Both had in their hands, on many occasions, the greatest interests of the state. Both were held to be the most honourable persons of their age. But Lafayette had the popular masses with him; Coligny had against him three-fourths of France; and also, with a higher political and military genius, he had less success.

The third brother, Odet de Châtillon, was the eldest of the family. Made by Clement VII. a cardinal at seventeen, he demanded reforms without completely adopting the Reformation. He ended by marrying a lady of a noble house, Isabelle de Hauteville, who was styled _Madame la Cardinal_, or _Madame la Comtesse de Beauvais_, when she took her seat in the apartments of the court in the quality of wife of a peer of France: a curious singularity, even in that time! Odet de Châtillon died in England some years after, being poisoned by one of his servants. Brantôme and De Thou speak in high terms of his judgment and integrity.

XI.

Catherine de Medicis had expressed in her days of disappointment some sentiments favourable to the Reformation, and those of the (new) religion supposed at first that she would lend them her support with her son Francis II. Coligny and other Calvinist lords wrote to her that they hoped to find in her a second Esther. But her favourable disposition was only apparent. “I comprehend nothing of this doctrine,” she would say; “what enlisted my sympathy for them, was rather my woman’s pity and compassion than a desire to be informed if their doctrine were true or false.”

In concert with the queen-mother and the court of Madrid, the Guises held the Bourbons in the background, and sent forth new edicts for exterminating heretics. In each Parliament _chambres ardentes_ were instituted, so called because they condemned to the fire without pity, all those who were accused of the crime of heresy. There was a vast system of terror, where even the shadow of justice no longer appeared. Delations, confiscations, pillages, sentences of death, atrocious executions—the same scenes affrighted in the beginning of 1560, the principal towns of France,—Toulouse, Bordeaux, Lyons, Grenoble, Poitiers, and their dependent provinces.

At Paris, the commissaries of the quarters made daily visits to the suspected houses. One Démochères, or Mouchy, who has given the French language the term of _mouchard_ (spy), took the field with a band of wretches, whose object was to surprise the heretics eating meat on the prohibited days, or assembling in meetings. They kept particular watch on the Faubourg Saint Germain, which at that time received the name of Little Geneva.

Many persons were seized and maltreated. Those, who were able to fly, quitted the place, leaving furniture, money, provisions, all their goods, at the mercy of the bandits, who were intrusted with the office of serjeants; and houses were pillaged and sacked, according to the relation of Theodore de Bèze, as in a town taken by assault; the rabble gleaned and devastated what the first plunderers had omitted to take. “But what was most to be deplored,” adds this historian, “was to see the poor little children, who had no dwelling but the flagstones, crying, ahungered, in the most piteous manner, and begging about the streets, without any one daring to relieve or shelter them, for fear of falling into the like danger; so that they were less cared for than dogs.”[33]

Abominable contrivances had been put to work to fan the fury of the people of Paris. There may be still seen, in old collections, engravings which represent the heretics slaying priests with the arquebuse, casting monks into the water, slaughtering children, strangling women and old men, and persons were posted about the public squares to comment upon these infamies.

The people answered these dastard provocations by erecting images of the Virgin at the corners of the streets. They scrutinized the countenances of the passengers, and woe to him who did not lift his hat! woe to him who refused to put a piece of money into the trunks, or _épargne-mailles_, which were held out to him in order to provide for the payment of the tapers! The shout of “A heretic!” was raised; he was dragged to the Châtelet, and the prisons were so crowded that it was necessary to hurry the executions, that new victims might be accommodated.

One trait will depict the state of feeling. Two miserable apprentices, who had been won over, declared that turpitudes were committed in the secret meetings of the Calvinists. The Cardinal de Lorraine went straight to relate this to the queen-mother, aggravating his recital with all the abominations with which in former times the Gnostics, the Mersalians, the Borborites, and the Manichæans, had been reproached, so that the Reformers might seem to have combined, as in a common sewer, the vices of every age.

Among the persons mentioned, were the wife and two daughters of a celebrated advocate of Paris. They voluntarily gave themselves up to justice, preferring death to dishonour. They were confronted with the two apprentices, who coloured, stammered, and so contradicted themselves in their statements, that it became evident they had invented an execrable lie. Some indignant magistrates were for imprisoning them instead of the outraged women. Just the contrary happened: the calumniators were absolved, and the females were sent back to their dungeons.

At the same time the Guises created other malcontents, who made an approach to the Calvinists, whence resulted the enterprise known by the name of the Conspiracy of Amboise.

Many gentlemen had come to the court to claim compensation for their blood spilled in the king’s service, or for their properties, which had been despoiled in these times of confusion and anarchy. The Cardinal de Lorraine, dreading the presence of so many soldiers, caused a proclamation to be published, which commanded all the petitioners, of whatever rank, to quit the place within twenty-four hours, under pain of death. A gibbet was even erected at the gates of the castle, to confirm the menace. The gentlemen departed, deeply angered at an affront, which no king of France had ever passed upon his brave nobility.

The war began by pamphlets, in which the Lorraines were accused of having usurped the rights of princes of the blood, of keeping the crown in pupilage, although they were foreigners, and of treading underfoot all the ancient laws of the kingdom. “France can abide it no longer,” is the language of one of these pamphlets, “and demands the convocation of the States-General to reduce these affairs to order.”

The malcontents soon passed from words to acts. Those of the religion felt scruples. Could they have recourse to force to obtain redress for their grievances? They consulted the divines of Switzerland and Germany, who replied that it was lawful to oppose the government usurped by the Lorraines, provided one of the legitimate chiefs, namely, a prince of the blood, were at their head, and the support of the States-General were secured.

Notwithstanding this, the greater number of the Reformed refused to participate in this enterprise, in which, says Brantôme, “_there was not less discontent than Huguenotism_.” Coligny was not initiated into it, and those who were concerned, had expressly reserved the person and authority of the king. They proposed nothing more than to expel the Lorraines, and to replace the government of France in the hands of French princes. Louis de Condé was the invisible or _mute_ chief of the conspiracy; La Renaudie, who represented the political malcontents, rather than the religious malcontents, was its visible chief.

Informed of the plot, through the treachery of the advocate Des Avenelles, the Guises hastened from the town of Blois, and shut themselves up with Francis II. in the Château d’Amboise. The poor young king said to them, weeping: “What have I done to my people that they thus pursue me? I will hear their complaints, and redress them. I should wish that, for a time, you would absent yourselves, that I might see whether it is you or me against whom they rage.” The Lorraines took good care not to accede to this advice; for, once out of the court, they would have seen the whole nobility of France rise to prevent their return.

In the first moments of his fear, the Cardinal de Lorraine had sent to the Parliament an ordinance of amnesty, from which the preachers, and those who had conspired under pretext of religion, alone were excepted. But when he was certain of triumph, he made his revenge an even balance against his terror, and it was terrible. Twelve hundred of the conspirators perished at Amboise. The public place was covered with gallows; blood flowed in streams through the streets. No inquiry, no form of trial, was permitted; and as there were not executioners enough, the prisoners were thrown by hundreds, tied hand and foot, into the waves of the Loire. This same river was destined to engulf other victims: across the abyss of centuries, the Cardinal Charles de Lorraine and Carrier de Nantes may shake hands.

There was worse than this done in 1560. The Cardinal reserved the chiefs for after dinner, as Regnier de la Planche tells us, that he might afford a pastime to the ladies, whom he perceived to be weary of their long stay in this fortress. The queen-mother and the courtiers placed themselves at the windows, _as if they were about to witness some mummery, or jugglers show_. “And the Cardinal pointed out to them the sufferers, with all the signs of a man greatly pleased, that he might so much the more animate the prince against his subjects.”[34]

Many of the condemned displayed wonderful firmness. A gentleman named Villemongis, having dipped his hands in the blood of his companions, raised them to heaven, crying: “Lord, this is the blood of Thy children unrighteously spilled: Thou wilt avenge it.”

The Baron de Castelnau, who, having been taken by the Spaniards in the Flemish wars, had spent, like the Admiral Coligny, the long days of his captivity in reading the Bible, was examined in the prison of Amboise by the Guises and the Chancellor Olivier. The latter inquired of him, mockingly, what it was that could have made, of a soldier, so learned a divine. “When I came to see you on my return from Flanders,” said Castelnau, “I told you how I had passed my time. You approved of it then, and we were good friends. Why are we not so now? It is that, being then disgraced and out of favour, you spoke with sincerity. To-day, in order to please a man whom you despise, you are a traitor to your God and your conscience.” The Cardinal wished to come to the aid of the Chancellor, saying that it was he who had fortified him in the faith, and he set himself to expound a controversial thesis. Castelnau appealed to the duke François de Guise, who answered that he understood nothing about it. “Would to Heaven it were otherwise!” cried the prisoner; “for I esteem you well enough to think that if you were as enlightened as your brother, you would follow better things.”

Having been condemned to death for treason: “I ought, then,” said he, with bitterness, “to have said the Guises were kings of France.” And bending his head to the axe, he appealed from the injustice of man to the justice of his Maker.

These barbarous executions inflamed the hatred of the parties, and opened the door to civil war. The conspiracy of Amboise became popular among the Reformers. Brantôme relates, that many said, “Yesterday, we belonged not to the conspiracy, and we would not have been of it for all the gold in the universe; to-day, we would be so for the smallest coin, and we say that the enterprise was good and holy.”

The Lorraines, however, endeavoured to turn the affairs of Amboise to the profit of their ambition. On the 17th of March, the Duke de Guise had himself named lieutenant-general of the kingdom. Francis II. promised to comply with everything that his uncle might do, order, and execute. This was to abdicate the throne; or, to speak more correctly, to replace fiction by reality.

The Cardinal de Lorraine even ventured upon re-attempting his favourite project of establishing the Inquisition in France, as in Spain. He had already obtained the adhesion of the privy council, and drawn the reluctant consent of the queen-mother. But the blow was warded off by the Chancellor Michel de l’Hospital, who procured, in the month of May, 1560, the adoption of the edict of Romorantin, by which he restored to the bishops the cognizance of the crime of heresy. This edict was prodigal of the most cruel penalties; but, at least, the foot of the inquisitor did not contaminate the soil of France.

XII.

This same year, 1560, so full of violence and blood, witnessed a new step of the French Reformation—the establishment of public worship. This was in the nature of things. When towns, and nearly entire provinces, had embraced the faith of the Reformers, secret meetings became impossible. A whole people does not shut itself up in forests and caverns to invoke its God. From whom, moreover, should it hide itself? From itself? The idea is absurd.

Not only did necessity compel this step on the part of the Reformers; they were also driven to it by the calumnies, with which their secret meetings were attacked. What better means had they of convicting their enemies of untruth, than by assembling in the light of day, and by saying: “Come and see?”

Thus the primitive Christians had come out of the Catacombs, in spite of the edicts of the emperors, as soon as they had become numerous. The same causes produce ever the same effects.

Calvin, and other prudent men, without absolutely disapproving of these manifestations, foresaw more clearly the results, and gave the counsel of caution. But the popular impulse was too strong. Nîmes, Montpellier, Aigues-Mortes, set the example, and the public worship soon spread far and near through Languedoc, Dauphiny, Provence, Béarn, Guienne, Saintonge, Poitou, and Normandy.

Being informed of this decision by the Count de Villars, the Marshal de Termes, and the other governors of the provinces, the Guises replied that the preachers should be hanged without trial, that criminal instructions should be taken against the Huguenots, who attended the preachings, and that “_the country must be swept clean of this multitude of rabble, who lived like the Genevese_.” These orders were not strictly executed, nor could they be so. The Lorraines did not recognise the difference of the times: what was possible against a few thousand obscure sectarians without credit, was no longer possible before millions of proselytes, among whom were numbered more than half the great families of the kingdom.

In some places in Dauphiny, at Valence, at Montélimart, at Romans, those of the religion appropriated the (Roman) Catholic churches to their use; another imitation of the ancient Christians, who had invaded the temples of Paganism. This was also inevitable, in the places where the population had wholly changed their doctrine. The stones of the sanctuary belong to a religion only so long as it is believed in; if the people give it credence no longer, those stones become its property again, and the people reconsecrates them to its new worship.

The Duke de Guise felt so much the more disappointed at the state of affairs in Dauphiny, because he was the governor of that province. The enterprises of the heretics were in his eyes so many personal affronts, and he despatched one Maugiron, who surprised the towns of Valence and Romans, gave them up to pillage, hanged the principal inhabitants, and decapitated two ministers, with this inscription suspended from their necks: “_These are the chiefs of the rebels._” These atrocities provoked reprisals. Two gentlemen of the religion, Montbrun and Mourans, made incursions into Dauphiny and Provence, at the head of armed bands, sacked the churches, maltreated the priests, who had urged the slaughter of the Reformers, and celebrated their worship sword in hand.

Such a state of things could not long exist. It was neither peace nor war, neither the freedom of (the two) religions, nor the absolute domination of one alone. A remedy must be found, or the whole kingdom would be given up to complete anarchy, and the king’s council therefore resolved to convoke the assembly of Notables at Fontainebleau. The Guises consented to this measure with reluctance; but, alarmed themselves at the dangers of a situation they could no longer direct, they yielded to the influence of the politicians, or _tiers-parti_, which had begun to be formed under the direction of the Chancellor L’Hospital.

The 21st of August, 1560, had been fixed for the opening of the assembly. The young king took his seat on the throne, in the great hall of the palace of Fontainebleau, having near him his wife, Mary of Scotland, the queen-mother, and his brothers. Cardinals, bishops, members of the privy council, knights of the order, masters of the requests, the dukes of Guise and Aumale, the Constable, the Admiral, the Chancellor, all were there, except the Bourbon princes, who, fearing a snare, had refused to be present.

The Duke de Guise gave an account of the administration of the army, the Cardinal de Lorraine of that of the finances. But, notwithstanding the importance of these matters, the Notables bestowed little attention upon them: they felt that the sole great affair of the moment was the religious question.

Coligny had promised the Reformers to give the signal. On a sudden, he rose, approached the throne, made a respectful obeisance, and presented two petitions, one to the king, the other to the queen-mother bearing this inscription: “_The supplication of those, who, in divers provinces, invoke the name of God according to the rule of piety._” All present were astonished at such boldness; for the penalty of death hung always over the head of the heretics. But the king, François II., who could not have been taught his lesson beforehand, on this emergency graciously received the petitions, and handed them to be read, to his secretary.

The faithful attested that their faith was that of the creed of the Apostles, that they had always acted as loyal subjects of the king, and that they had been most shamefully calumniated by the accusation of being fautors of disturbance and sedition. “The Gospel, which we profess, teaches us just the contrary,” said they; “and we even do not hesitate to confess, that we never understood so well our duty towards your majesty as we have understood it by means of the holy doctrine that is preached to us.” In conclusion, they asked permission to meet in open day, and submitted to be treated as rebels, if they should thenceforth be found meeting by night, or unlawfully.

It was remarked, that these documents were unsigned. “It is true,” answered the Admiral; “but give us leave to assemble, and, in one day, I will bring fifty thousand signatures from the province of Normandy alone.” “And I,” interrupted the Duke de Guise, in an arrogant tone, “will find a hundred thousand who will sign the reverse with their blood.”

The debates were resumed on the 23rd of August.

Two prelates—it is a pleasure to state it—Jean de Montluc, bishop of Valence, and Charles de Marillac, archbishop of Vienne, proposed means of conciliation. Both had filled embassies in Italy, and visited the Protestant countries. It is a memorable fact, that the bishops of France, who had compared Rome and the Reformation, should have generally inclined to the new ideas!

Jean de Montluc depicted with energy the disorders which filled the Church. He compared the Calvinist ministers,—lettered, diligent men, having always the name of Jesus Christ on their lips, fearing not to die to confirm their doctrine,—to the (Roman) Catholic priests; and at this point he pronounced words, which deserve to find a place in history.

“The bishops (I speak of the greater number) have been idlers, having no fear of giving account to God of the flock intrusted to their charge, and their chief care has been to preserve their revenue, and to abuse it in foolish and scandalous expenses; so true is this, that we have seen forty residing in Paris, while the fire was blazing in their dioceses; and at the same time we see bishoprics given over to children and ignorant persons, who have neither the will, nor the knowledge, to uphold their condition. The ministers of this sect have not failed to show this to those, who were willing to listen to them.

“The curates are ignorant, greedy, busy with everything but their duties, and, for the most part, have procured their benefices by illicit means. And at a time which should call to our assistance men of learning, virtue, and strong zeal, as many double crowns as the bankers have sent to Rome, so many curates have they sent to us.

“The cardinals and the bishops have made no difficulty of conferring benefices upon their major-domos, and, what is more, upon their valets, cooks, barbers, and lackeys. The common priests have by their avarice, ignorance, and dissolute life, rendered themselves odious and despised by all the world. Such are the charming remedies that have been used to procure peace for the Church!”

Montluc suggested two means of resolving the existing difficulties: one was to preach every day before the king, the queen, and the lords of the court, and to replace the “_foolish songs_” of the maids of honour by the Psalms of David; the other, to convoke, without delay, a universal free council, and, if the pope refused, a national council.

The Archbishop Marillac uttered the same complaints, supported the advice of Montluc, and proposed to decide, moreover, that nothing should be done in the Church for money, seeing that it is not lawful to make merchandise of spiritual things.

The next day, August 24th, it was the turn of the Admiral Coligny to speak. He required, like the two bishops, the convocation of a free council, either general or national, and added that permission should be given in the meanwhile to those of the religion to meet for the worship of God. “Give them churches, or other edifices in each place” said he, “and send thither people to see that nothing is done against the authority of the king and the public tranquillity. If you were to act in this way, the kingdom would be peaceable directly, and the subjects content.”

But the Cardinal de Lorraine rejected this request without consideration. “Is it reasonable,” he asked, “that we should be of the opinion of these people rather than of that of the king? And as to concede to them churches or places of assembly, this would be to approve of their heresy, which the king could not do without being everlastingly damned.” The Cardinal saw no greater necessity for convoking a council, since all that was required was to reform the manners of the churchmen, which could be done by general or private admonitions.

Nevertheless the Guises, being unsupported in the meeting at Fontainebleau, both by the Chancellor and by the Constable, consented to the convocation of the States-General for the following December, and announced that preparatory steps would be taken for holding a national council.

Pope Pius IV. was exceedingly disturbed by the mere idea of this council, being apprehensive of seeing either a schism result from it, or at least the re-establishment of the Pragmatic Sanction. He wrote to the king of France to tell him that his crown would be in danger, and to the king of Spain to beg him to intervene. But meeting with no satisfactory answer, he resolved to reopen the sessions of the Council of Trent, which had been for a long time suspended. The pontiff of Rome preferred an assembly, the majority of which was Italian, and under his control, to a national Council of France, which could deliberate without him, and perhaps against him.

It will be remarked that the most enlightened men of both communions,—Montluc, Marillac, L’Hospital, Coligny,—were of the same opinion about convoking a national council. We must not deceive ourselves as to what was really at the bottom of this project. It was not religious liberty, as we understand it in our day; it was simply the hope that by mutual concessions, (Roman) Catholicism and the Reformation might unite upon a common ground. The principle that two religions might not exist in one state, still held sway over the best minds.

XIII.

In joining hands with the convocation of the States-General, the Lorraines entertained more than one secret thought. They flattered themselves that they should come to a conclusion with the Bourbons, envelop the Huguenots in the ruin of their chiefs, and win the majority in the States by seduction or intimidation.

Antoine de Bourbon and the Prince de Condé were invited to take their seats as princes of the blood royal. They were aware that great dangers awaited them, but a refusal would have been represented as an open rupture with the regal authority. The opposite characters of the two princes also concurred in inducing them to accept the invitation. The king of Navarre was too weak to brave the crown in so evident a manner; Louis de Condé was of too bold a nature to expose himself to the imputation of fear. The one started on the journey because he was not daring enough, the other, because his daring was too great.

Hardly had Condé entered Orleans, before he was arrested on a charge of high treason, and commissioners were appointed to try him. He refused to answer, on the plea that a prince of the blood royal could be tried only by the king and his peers, with all the assembled houses of Parliament. The Lorraines showed him an ordinance, by which he was declared guilty of lese-majesty, if he, persisted in his refusal. “We must not tolerate,” said the Duke de Guise, “the bravadoes of this young gallant, prince though he be; we must crush the head of heresy and rebellion at one blow.”

The chief of the house of Bourbon humbled himself before the duke and the cardinal, to solicit the pardon of his brother. They received him with lofty coldness, and had a strict watch kept over him. All historians relate that they conceived the project of assassinating him. As they dared not bring him to trial, it was resolved to summon him before Francis II., and so to induce a quarrel, by which the king should be led to draw his sword upon him. At this signal the courtiers were to throw themselves upon Antoine de Bourbon, and poniard him.

When informed of the plan, the extent of the danger inspired him with a degree, of courage, and he said to the Captain Rente: “I am going to a place where my death has been sworn. If I perish, take the shirt I now wear; carry it to my wife, since my son is not yet old enough to take vengeance for my death; and let her send it to the Christian princes, who will avenge me.” He then entered the king’s chamber, and the Cardinal de Lorraine shut the door behind him. The king made some insulting observations to him; but either from the timidity of youth, or from pity, he was afraid to give the signal. “The coward! the poltroon!” murmured Francis de Guise, who was hidden behind the door. A king of seventeen commissioned to assassinate his uncle! What manners! What a reign! What a court![35]

The Cardinal de Lorraine had also conceived a plan for the extermination of heretics, resembling those executed against the Albigeois of Languedoc, or the Moors of Spain. Would that for the honour of the human race, it were possible to deny such detestable designs; but they are attested by (Roman) Catholic writers, and even by the Jesuit Maimbourg.

The Cardinal had therefore resolved to make all Frenchmen sign a formula of faith drawn up by the Sorbonne in 1542; a formula which, says Jean de Serres, “_no man of the religion would for a thousand livres have approved or signed_.”

The king was to present this document on Christmas-day to all the princes, officers, and chevaliers of the court; the queen was to present it to all the ladies of the palace; the Chancellor to the deputies of the States-General and to the _maîtres des requêtes_; the chiefs of the Parliaments and of the bailiwicks to their subordinates; the governors of the provinces to the gentry; the curates to all the inhabitants of their parishes; the heads of houses to their servants. Whosoever should refuse to sign, or who should even request time, was to be put to death on the following day; or, according to the milder version of Maimbourg, to be despoiled of all his goods and banished from the kingdom. Four marshals were to scour the provinces with their troops, to assist by force of arms in carrying out this law of extermination. The Cardinal adding burlesque to atrocity, called this formula of faith the rat-trap of the Huguenots.

Never before had those of the reformed faith in France been reduced to such a terrible extremity: when suddenly Francis II. was taken dangerously ill. The Cardinal de Lorraine had public processions made in Paris for his recovery. The young prince called upon the Virgin and the saints, saying, with the imbecile fanaticism in which he had been tutored, that if it pleased God to restore him to health, he would spare neither wife, nor mother, nor sisters, nor brothers, if they were ever so little suspected of heresy. These vows were fruitless. Francis II. died in his seventeenth year, after a reign of seventeen months, on the 5th December, 1560.

No one cared for his burial, so much were the queen-mother, the Bourbons, the Guises, the cardinals, and the courtiers engrossed by their own affairs. Francis II. was escorted to Saint Denis by an old blind bishop and two ancient servitors of his house.

Before he had given up his last breath, the Lorraines had barricaded themselves in their dwelling; and there they remained for thirty-six hours, until they were reassured as to the intentions of the queen-mother and of the king of Navarre. Their governments and dignities were preserved to them, but they were no longer masters of the state. Charles IX, ten years and a half old, was proclaimed king, Catherine de Medicis regent, and Anthony de Bourbon lieutenant-general of the kingdom. He might, as first prince of the blood, have claimed the regency; but he lost his opportunity for want of vigour. The prince of Condé came out of prison; the Constable Anne of Montmorency resumed his office of grand master near the new king; and Admiral Coligny, asking nothing for himself, endeavoured to secure the free exercise of religion. The whole aspect of affairs was changed. The faithful (once more) breathed.

The States-General opened at Orleans on the 13th December. The Chancellor Michel de l’Hospital, the first to speak in the name of the infant king and the regent, declared that the disorder of the Church had given birth to heresy, and that a good reformation alone could extinguish it. He advised the (Roman) Catholics to _adorn themselves with virtues and a good life_, and to attack their adversaries with the arms of charity, of prayer, and of persuasion. “The knife” he said, “avails but little against the mind; gentleness will do more than severity. Give up those fiendish names—the symbols of parties, factions, and seditions—Lutherans, Huguenots, Papists. Let us not change the name of Christian.” He ended by proposing the reunion of a national council for the settlement of all religious differences.

The orator of the Third Estate, Jean Lange, advocate of the Parliament of Bordeaux, keenly attacked three vices of the (Roman) Catholic clergy—ignorance, avarice, and luxury—intimating that troubles would cease when these abuses should be corrected.

Jacques de Silly, lord of Rochefort, spoke for the nobility, and did not spare the priests any more than did the orator of the Third Estate. He complained of their meddling in the administration of justice, of their enormous possessions, of the non-residence of the bishops, of their want of zeal for the instruction of their flocks, and finished by asking for churches for the gentlemen of the reformed religion.

Some months later, at the meeting of the States at Saint Germain, another orator of the Third Estate, the first magistrate of Autun, went so far as to propose the alienation of the goods of the Church, which he estimated at one hundred and twenty millions of livres; that the king should sell these possessions, and reserve forty-eight millions, which at an interest of one in twelve, would yield a yearly revenue of four millions, sufficient for the support of the priests; that then seventy-two millions would remain, of which forty-two millions might be employed in paying off the debts of the crown, and the remainder might be spent in the encouragement of agriculture and commerce. As to religious differences, the same orator proposed to discuss them in a national council, legalized and free, to and from which, safe access and return should be guaranteed.

We are astonished at finding, in 1560, thoughts which were not fulfilled till 1789. It was the great voice of the people which was (then) heard. Civil wars had not yet fanaticised their minds and rendered their hearts inaccessible to pity. It was one of those short moments when the Reformation might have obtained the ascendant in France. Three-fourths of the nobility was gained over; the _bourgeoisie_ was prepared; the magistracy was waiting; and would not the lower orders, already favourable to the new ideas in one part of the kingdom, have communicated an impulse to the other? What then was it that arrested this vast movement, whence a new France, a new Europe, might have sprung? First let us look to the Almighty, whose ways are wrapt in mystery. But in looking to men, what do we find? Among many, no doubt, sincere convictions, the weight of ancient traditions, respect for old recollections and customs. Let us not attribute to selfish motives the great events of mankind; but we must not omit to point out the tortuous policy of Catherine de Medicis, the ambition of the Guises, the intrigues of the king of Spain, the designs and the cupidity of the clergy.

The position of the priests at the States-General of Orleans was a difficult one, and the more they felt their weakness, the greater was the violence they displayed. The orator they had chosen, Jean Quintin, professor of Canon Law, began by regretting that the nobility and the Third Estate had thought proper to speak on their own behalf, when the States-General formed a body, of which the king was the head, and of which _the Church was the mouth_. He accused the heretics of having no other Gospel than that of destroying altars, of evading ecclesiastical obedience, and of overthrowing the civil laws. Upon the strength of this, he invited his majesty to persecute them to the uttermost, as the sword was in his hand for no other purpose. He added, that since they were excommunicated, it was unlawful to dwell with them, to converse with them, to deal with them; but it was lawful to beat them, and to put them to death, for fear of sharing in their sin.

“Sire,” said he, in conclusion, “all the clergy of your kingdom, on their bended knees, body and heart, humbly prostrate before your majesty, beseech you to be their protector and defender. They pray that if any excavator of dead and buried heresies should take upon him to revive a sect already condemned, and should to this end present a request, and demand churches and leave to inhabit the kingdom (here all eyes were turned upon Coligny, who sat opposite to the orator), we supplicate that he be held and declared a heretic, and proceeded against with all the rigour of the law, canon and civil, in order that the wicked wretch be driven from amongst us.”

Although not unaccustomed to the declamations and invectives of the priests, this harangue, prompted by a savage fanaticism, astonished the States-General. The admiral demanded satisfaction from the queen-mother for the insult to himself, and Jean Quintin was compelled to offer him an apology. “A few days after,” says Jean de Serres, “he died of mortification, on finding himself exposed by several published replies to his harangue, in which his calumnies and falsehoods were clearly refuted.”[36]

XIV.

The States-General had served the cause of the Reformation. The Cardinal de Lorraine, annoyed at having played only a secondary part, withdrew to his archbishopric at Rheims. The Duke de Guise retired from the court; and the queen-mother, seeing that the two orders of the laity disapproved of religious persecutions, manifested, in concert with the Chancellor L’Hospital, a favourable disposition towards the Calvinists.

Coligny caused the reformed faith to be preached in his apartments, and Catherine de Medicis opened the pulpit of the palace of Fontainebleau to the bishop Montluc, the same who had so forcibly exclaimed against the abuses of the Roman church in the assembly of Notables. The courtiers, ever ready to range themselves on the side of fortune and power, flocked around the new preachers, and left a Jacobin monk to preach the Lent sermon to himself.

“It seems to me,” said the Jesuit Maimbourg bitterly of the queen-mother, “that, on the most favourable construction, it may be fearlessly said, that if all she did upon this occasion was but a pretence, she did ill to feign so well as to give ground to believe that she belonged to the new sect. For she not only allowed the ministers to preach in the apartments of the prince, where all the world crowded to hear him, whilst a poor Jacobin, who preached the Lent sermon at Fontainebleau, was deserted; but she went so far as to take part herself with all her ladies at the sermons of the bishop of Valence, who preached openly, in one of the rooms of the château, the new dogmas he had drawn from the heresies of Luther and Calvin. So sudden and so strange a change took place at court, that one would have said she was quite a Calvinist. Although it was Lent, meat was publicly sold, and spread upon every table. They talked no more of attending Mass, and the young king, who was still taken there to keep up appearances, went almost alone. They scoffed at the authority of the Popes, at the worship of the saints and of images, at indulgences, and at the ceremonies of the Church, which they treated as superstitions.”[37]

If the Jesuit was right in saying that the queen-mother’s going to the sermon was only a feint, he might have added, that it was also a feint on her part when she went to Mass. Sceptical, as for the most part were the upper classes of Italy in her time, Catherine de Medicis still perhaps believed in magic and sorcery, although not in Christian truth. Instead of serving God, she turned God to her service.

At any rate, the impulse spread to the provinces. How was it possible to interdict the public gatherings of the religious, when they could point to the example of the court? The timid grew bold, temporizers made up their minds. The enthusiasm was general. Controversial writings inundated the land. We possess an ample collection, under the titles of “Apologetic Complaint of the Churches,” “Christian Exhortation to the King of France,” “Remonstrances to the Queen and to the King of Navarre,” and many others of a similar kind.

In these days of fervour and of hope, the faithful believed that the triumph of the Reformation was completely in the hands of the leaders of the state. “It rests with you alone,” they wrote to Catherine de Medicis and Antoine de Bourbon, “that Jesus Christ be known and worshipped throughout the kingdom, in all truth, righteousness, and holiness. For if you ordain that all superstitions and idolatries be extirpated, it will be done without let or hindrance. A single word from your lips will banish all those, who have been guilty of malversation in the Church. This single word will deprive them of strength, virtue, and power.”

There were now not pastors enough. Switzerland was written to for more. Geneva, the Pays de Vaud, the canton of Neufchâtel, supplied as many as they could. They even deprived themselves of those, whose services were most useful to them, in order to satisfy wants more pressing than their own. Many young men, instructed under the eye of Calvin, and others of mature age, of different professions, were consecrated to the ministry of the Gospel. All saw, in the ardour of their faith, a great nation to be conquered.

On their side, the priests, it may easily be believed, were not asleep; and as they found no support at court, they turned their attention to the people. Disturbances arose at several towns,—at Pontoise, at Amiens, and particularly at Beauvais. The Cardinal Odet de Châtillon, who was accused of having celebrated the communion of the Lord’s Supper, on Easter-day, 1561, after the fashion of Geneva, was assailed by the populace, and Marshal de Montmorency had to come from Paris, with a numerous escort, to quell the sedition.

L’Hospital sent to the bailiffs and seneschals letters patent commanding them to liberate all prisoners on account of religion, and not again to visit the interiors of houses under the pretext of illicit meetings. But the Parliament of Paris, angry that the letters had been despatched before they had been registered, and ill disposed to the Reformation, since, by a stroke of authority, Anne Dubourg and six or seven other counsellors had been removed, demanded that the preexisting statutes should be rigidly observed.

But this opposition would have been impotent, had not another arisen out of it, under the name of the triumvirate. This was composed of the Duke de Guise, of the Constable de Montmorency, and of the Marshal de Saint André. Behind this association was the Cardinal de Lorraine with the mass of the clergy; above them, the pope and Philip II.; beneath them the people, especially those of the north and west. The triumvirate, which succeeded in winning over even the king of Navarre, was the most serious obstacle to the progress of the Reformation in France: it is essential, therefore, to explain its origin and character.

The Duke de Guise, kept at a distance by Catherine de Medicis, and hated by the princes of the blood, could not by himself recover the authority, of which the death of Francis II. had deprived him. He, therefore, sought assistance abroad, and formed a close alliance with the Spanish ambassador, who had received from Philip II. instructions to keep up troubles in the kingdom, in order to weaken it, and hand it over to his mercy. This ambassador, as is correctly observed by the Abbé d’Anquetil, acted the part of a French minister of state; he gave his advice in all matters of business, praised, blamed, and corrected; whilst the Guises in all things were with him.

The support of Spain, however, would not have sufficed for the Lorraines. An abandoned woman, the former favourite of Henry II., Diana of Poitiers, who feared lest the spoils of the Huguenots should be demanded back from her, undertook to reconcile the old constable with the Duke de Guise.

Anne de Montmorency was at that time sixty-four years old. This companion in arms of Francis I., who had made him constable in 1538, was a brave cavalier, a loyal servant of the crown, and able to bear disgrace with courage; but of a narrow mind, rough in character, mistaking obstinacy for strength, and rudeness for dignity. In religion he only knew that he was the first Christian baron, and that the kings, his masters, were (Roman) Catholics. He concluded that he was bound to give no quarter to heresy.

Brantôme tells us what was the singular piety of Anne de Montmorency. He fasted with punctilious regularity on Friday, and failed not to repeat his _pater-noster_ morning and evening; but sometimes he broke off, saying, “Go and hang me such a one; hang up this one to a tree; set fire to everything for a mile round.” And then he would continue his devotions, as if nothing were the matter.

His hands were not quite clean in his conduct of the financial affairs under Henry II., and when he learned that the States-General were going to call upon him for his accounts, he conceived that it was an intrigue of the Bourbons, who had a design against his honour, as well as his purse. From that moment he kept aloof from them.

In vain did his eldest son, the Marshal de Montmorency, esteemed, says Mézeray, as _one of the wisest nobles of the kingdom_, represent to him that he could not, and ought not to separate himself from the princes of the blood, and from his nephews the Châtillons, to become the tool of the house of Lorraine; the obstinate constable always replied: “I am a good servant of the king and of my little masters (so he called the young brothers of Charles IX.), and for the honour of his majesty, I will not suffer the actions of the dead king to be impeached.”

The wife of the constable, Madeline of Savoy, who _was usually surrounded by priests and monks_, according to the history of Jean de Serres, _inflamed him by her outcries_. She pandered to his vanity as first Christian baron. “As the first officer of the crown,” she said to him, “and descended not only from the first baron, but from the first Christian of France, you are bound not to suffer the diminution of the Roman church: the ancient device of the house of De Montmorency is, ‘_Dieu aide au premier Chrétien!_’”

Diana of Poitiers, Madeline of Savoy, the Lorraines, the priests, and the ambassador of Philip II., managed so well, that the Duke de Guise and Anne de Montmorency took counsel together on Easter-day. The skilful contrivers of the affair took care to forget the conscience of the old man.

The third member of the triumvirate was Jacques d’Albon, Marshal de Saint André. Notwithstanding his great military command, he had no strength by himself, and sought for allies to acquire a position. He was an epicurean, who had wasted the goods confiscated from the Huguenots. Brantôme, so indulgent towards the vices of courtiers, says of him: “He was always given to consult his ease, to pleasures, and to excessive luxuries of the table. He was the first to introduce them at court, and truly they surpassed all bounds. He was a very Lucullus in ostentation and magnificence.”[38]

These were the authors of the triumvirate, and the pretended friends of the (Roman) Catholic religion. Worldly motives united them; religion was only their pretext.

The Guises had gathered confidence and courage. This clearly appeared in the language held by the Cardinal de Lorraine after the consecration of Charles IX., in the month of May, 1561. He uttered grave complaints of the meetings of the Huguenots, which went on growing, and he demanded that a new edict should be discussed and drawn up in full Parliament, before the princes, the lords, and all the members of the privy council.

The sittings lasted twenty days. An order resulted, which, while giving an amnesty for the faults committed on either side, and inviting the priests no longer to excite the people, forbade the public meetings of the religion until the reunion of a national council, under pain of confiscation and banishment. This order, which was only adopted by a majority of three voices, bore the name of the Edict of July.

The (Roman) Catholic party congratulated itself upon having obtained a great victory, and the Duke de Guise said, on coming out of the court of the Parliament: “To maintain this edict, my sword shall never be sheathed.” But was it not madness to hope that men, who for forty years had braved the scaffold and the stake, would hesitate before the pain of banishment? What followed will show; France had yet to go through many terrible catastrophes before the two parties were disposed to make peace on more equitable conditions.