Note 44 — Chapter XII · THE REFORMATION AND FREETHOUGHT

The main part of the charges against Gruet was political; and the most circumstantial was based upon a draft, found among his papers, of a speech which he had ostensibly proposed to make in the General Council calling for reform of abuses. The speech contained nothing seditious, but the intention to deliver it without official permission was described as lèse-majesté—a term now newly introduced into Genevan procedure. The other documentary proofs were trivial. In one fragment of a letter there was an ironical mention of “notre galant Calvin”; and in a note on a margin of Calvin’s book against the Anabaptists he had written in Latin “All trifles.” For the rest, he was accused of writing two pages in Latin “in which are comprised several errors,” and of being “inclined (plutôt enclin) to say, recite and write false opinions and errors as to the true words of Our Saviour.”44 Concerning his errors the only documentary proof preserved is from an alleged scrap of his writing in corrupt Latin, cited by Calvin as a sample of his inability to write Latin correctly: Omnes tam humane quam divine que dicantur leges factae sunt ad placitum hominum, which may be rendered, “All so-called laws, divine as well as human, are made at the will of men.” In the act of sentence, he is declared further to have written obscene verses justifying free love; to have striven to ruin the authority of the consistory, menaced the ministers, and abused Calvin; and to have “conspired with the king of France against the safety of Calvin and the State.”