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.
Exasperated by these delays, the impetuous Paul IV., whose head, it is said, was deranged with old age, fulminated a bull, in which he declared that all who lapsed into heresy, prelates, princes, even kings and emperors, should be shorn of their benefices, dignities, states, and empires, which he would bestow upon the first Catholic occupant, without even retaining to the Holy See the power of restitution. Paul IV. mistook the age: under the pontificate of Gregory VII. or of Innocent III., such a bull would have set all Europe on fire; under his, it was only an act of folly.
But in default of the Inquisition, the Sorbonne and the clergy, who had constituted hatred of heretics the first, and the most sacred of duties, neglected nothing to inflame every mind with implacable fanaticism. Its effects may be seen in the affair of the Rue Saint Jacques, which happened in the beginning of the month of September, 1557.
The battle of Saint Quentin had just been lost. Arms had been distributed among the people with orders to be ready for any event. Every one fancied the Spaniard at the gates of Paris, and general terror ascribed the disaster to the mildness with which the heretics had been treated. “We have not sufficiently avenged the honour of God, and God takes vengeance upon us,” cried with the same voice both the populace and churchmen. So, when Rome was attacked by the barbarians, the Pagans accused themselves of having been too considerate towards the Christians. So, when Paris was menaced in 1792, after the taking of Verdun, the self-accusation was that the aristocracy and clergy had been too much spared, and the result was the days of September. The raging of the passions is always the same.
Three or four hundred of the faithful had met together one evening to celebrate the Supper, in a house of the Rue Saint Jacques, behind the Sorbonne. Among them were many gentlemen and men of the law. The ladies belonged, with the exception of four or five, to noble families; many of them were of the court.
Some bachelors or doctors of theology, lodging at the Sorbonne, had watched and given the signal of alarm. Fearing lest the assembly might separate before they were sufficiently strong in numbers, they had heaped up a great quantity of stones to overwhelm those who should come out. About midnight, the service being over, the faithful opened the door; but, at the threshold, they were assailed with a shower of missiles accompanied by frightful vociferations, and were compelled to retreat within.
The whole quarter was awakened by the tumult. The cry “to arms” was raised. Sinister rumours agitated the crowd. “Have the Spaniards surprised the town?” “No, not yet;” some replied, “but there are wretches who have sold the kingdom.” “Not so,” answered others, “they are Lutherans, damnable heretics, who rejoice in the misfortunes of France. Death, death to the heretics!” The street was filled with men armed with halberts, pikes, javelins, arquebuses, with everything that came to hand.
The faithful, momentarily expecting to be massacred, fell upon their knees and supplicated God to come to their aid. Then they deliberated upon what they should do. To barricade themselves until the arrival of the serjeants, would be to devote themselves to almost certain death. To cut a passage through that furious multitude was scarcely less perilous. Upon this, however, the most daring decided, persuaded that the only way to daunt their adversaries was to front them boldly. The gentlemen drew their swords and marched foremost: the others followed. They traversed the crowd in the midst of a shower of stones, and through the pikes of their assailants. Favoured by the night, they escaped with their lives, though sorely wounded. One alone fell; he was trodden underfoot, and so mutilated as to have lost all likeness to the human form.
But what was the fate of those who had not the courage to leave the building? They were nearly all women and children. They sought to fly by the garden, but all the issues were watched. At break of day they tried to gain the street, but were beaten and driven back. The women, counting upon the pity their helplessness commanded, presented themselves at the windows and with clasped hands implored the compassion of the wretches who had begun to force the doors; but they might as successfully have supplicated rocks as these pitiless miscreants. Already, offering back their life to God, they were preparing to die, when in the morning, the civil-lieutenant arrived with a troop of serjeants.
He inquired into the cause of the disturbance, and learning that the meeting had been held for reading the Bible, to celebrate the Supper, to pray for the king and the prosperity of the kingdom, he was moved to tears. Yet he must acquit himself of his duty. He had the men brought forth first bound two and two: they were insulted and beaten, those above all who, by their beards or their long dresses, seemed to be preachers. He would have kept the women in the house; but the populace threatened to fire it. They came out in their turn, to be overwhelmed with cowardly outrages, their clothes rent to shreds, their hair torn from their heads, to reach the prison of the Châtelet, covered with dirt and gore, to the number of about a hundred and forty victims.
The most execrable aspersions were hawked about against the new believers, in the pulpits, in the confessionals, in the colleges, in the market-places, at the court itself. Invention had not been much taxed: it was word for word the old calumnies of the Pagans against the meetings of the early Christians. The heretics were accused of not believing in God, of immolating little children, of extinguishing the lights.... I desist from saying more: let the history of the primitive church be read!
And as it seems necessary that in human affairs the ridiculous should always place itself beside the tragic, a certain bishop of Avranches distributed a tract throughout all Paris, in which, comparing the sound of the bells of the Catholic service to that of the arquebuses which had interrupted the Lutheran worship, he detailed a tissue of antitheses: “The bells ring, and the arquebuses thunder; those have a soft sound, and these a sound of fear; those open heaven, these open hell....” And thence this prelatical buffoon inferred that (Roman) Catholicism has all the signs of the true church.
The Reformers published apologies, which they secretly scattered abroad, even in the king’s chamber. But they sought in vain for a serious inquiry. Their enemies did not by any means desire this; they judged it better to applaud the bands of wretches, who, crowding each day to the places appointed for capital punishments, shouted with bloodthirsty cries, “Death to the heretics!”
Before the end of September, three prisoners were brought to the scaffold: an old man, a young one, and a woman, Madame de Graveron, of the family of Luns, in Périgord. She was only twenty-three years of age, and had been a widow but a few months. On quitting the prison for the scene of execution, she exchanged her mourning weeds, says Crespin, for the velvet hood and other festal garments, as if to receive a happy triumph.
After these three victims, four others were sacrificed. But by this time, Protestant Europe had been stirred up by the voice of Calvin and of Farel. The Swiss cantons, the County Palatine, the elector of Saxony, the duke of Wurtemburg, the marquis of Brandenburg, interceded for the prisoners. Henry II. wanted the support of the Protestants, and granted their request. Everything in this affair was therefore to overflow with disgrace, even down to the act of amnesty wrenched from a king of France by the intervention of the foreigner.