Note 842 — Chapter XVII

A few months before the admiral's departure from La Rochelle, there had been held in this Huguenot asylum a convocation of historical importance. The sessions of the seventh national synod, lasting from the second to the eleventh of April, 1571, were consumed in important deliberations respecting the doctrines and discipline of the reformed church (see Aymon, Tous les synodes, i. 98-111). The Queen of Navarre, the Princes of Navarre and Condé, Count Louis of Nassau, and Admiral Coligny were present. At the request of the synod, they added their signatures to those of the ministers and elders, upon three copies of the Confession of Faith, engrossed on parchment, which were to be kept at La Rochelle, in Béarn, and at Geneva respectively (see the eighth general article). The moderator on this occasion was Theodore Beza, who had been specially invited to France. The reformer was certainly not destitute of courage, for he could not have forgotten the dangers to which he had been exposed on previous visits to France. They were even greater than Beza himself probably knew. In June, 1563, after the conclusion of the first civil war, there was a rumor at Brussels that Beza could not return to Geneva, because of a quarrel he had had with Calvin. Thereupon, the Duchess of Parma, Regent of the Netherlands, suspecting that he might be tempted to come through the Spanish dominions, issued secret orders that the frontiers should be watched, and offered a reward of one thousand florins to any one who should bring him, dead or alive. He was described as "homme de moïenne stature, ayant barbe à demy blanche, et le visage hault et large." Letters of the Duchess of Parma, June 11th and 25th, 1563, apud Charles Paillard, Histoire des troubles religieux de Valenciennes (Paris and Brussels, 1875, 1876), iii. 339, 340, 356.