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.