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.