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.