VIII.
Having set forth the course of general affairs, it is now necessary to cast a glance at what had been going on in the provinces. War was waged not only between party chiefs and regular armies; it also broke out in a thousand forms throughout the kingdom. It was a great and fearful struggle of province against province, town against town, house against house, and man against man. Never was it so clearly seen that the worst of all wars are civil wars, and of all civil wars the wars of religion.
The excesses of the revolution would convey but a faint idea [of the then state of things]. Fanaticism had converted France into a band of cannibals, and the gloomiest imagination may be defied to conceive all the kinds of refined, revolting, execrable, and obscene punishments which were then practised. But there is in this spectacle a great lesson to be learned: it is that the principle of religious liberty is one of the most precious possessions of humanity.
A detailed recital of these horrors is not here to be expected. They fill a volume of Theodore de Bèze. Jacques de Thou devotes to them several books of his history. Crespin, Jean de Serres, the memoirs of Montluc, of Tavanes, of Condé, of Lanoue, and of fifty others are full of them. Whoever wishes to investigate the details may seek for them there. Were we to attempt the task, the pen would again and again fall from our hand.
The Huguenots had observed a rigid discipline at the outset of the campaign. Having newly taken up the cross and risen at the call of their conscience, they wished to absolve their arms by the austerity of their lives. There were no women in their camps; no cards or dice; no blasphemy; no profane discourse; no maurauding or pillage. The nobles paid in money for all that they took for themselves or for their followers. Those who committed violence were punished. A lord of Dammartin, who had outraged the daughter of a villager, narrowly escaped execution. Another was hanged at Orleans for adultery; and this, much more than any differences of doctrine had done, aroused the dissolute court of Catherine de Medicis.
At morning and evening, public prayers were said. The ministers, distributed by companies, maintained good order by their exhortations. A prayer has been preserved which was repeated in the army. The Calvinists addressed supplications to God for the king, the queen-mother, the princes of the royal blood, and the members of the council.
The same discipline prevailed at Orleans. “Besides the ordinary sermons and the prayers to the corps de garde,” says Theodore de Bèze, “extraordinary general prayers were said at six o’clock in the morning, after which, the ministers and the people without exception went to work at the fortifications with all their strength, each one returning at four o’clock in the evening to prayers; a place was also set apart for the wounded, who were most humanely tended by the most distinguished ladies of the town, who spared neither their money nor their labour.”[44]
Unfortunately this lasted only for a few months; Coligny had foreseen it. “This discipline is indeed a noble thing,” said he, “as long as it lasts; but I fear these people will throw down all their goodness at once. I have commanded infantry, and I know them; they often fulfil the proverb which says: ‘out of a young hermit grows an old devil.’”
Religious passions, added to the want of money, drove the Huguenots to carry off the ornaments of the churches. They broke the sacred vessels, mutilated the statues of the saints, and dispersed the relics. These excesses excited in the hearts of the (Roman) Catholics a rage impossible to be described. “You knock down the images,” they said; “you destroy the relics of the dead; well! we will knock down as many living images as fall into our hands.”
The decrees of the Parliaments added fuel to the popular fury, by giving it a semblance of justice. The peasant left his plough, the artisan his trade. The [Roman Catholic bands] consisted of people of no calling, vagabonds, and beggars, and free companies armed with reaping-hooks, knives, and pikes. They chose a captain at hazard, some famous brigand, or else a monk, or curate; sometimes even a bishop; and these bands, drunk with fanaticism and revenge, respected neither law, modesty, nor pity. In Champagne they were called “naked-feet” (pieds-nus).
They fell upon the Calvinists by surprise, massacred the men, outraged the women, demolished the houses, tore down the vines, rooted up the trees, and desolated entire cantons. “There are too many people in France,” cried out a leader of these ruffians, “I will kill a sufficient number to make provisions cheap.”
The Huguenots, it may be believed, also resorted to reprisals; but being less numerous, and mostly belonging to the more cultivated classes, they did less harm than they suffered.
The excesses, serious everywhere, were especially so to the south of the Loire, on account of the great number of the Reformed, and the ardent character of the population. At Cahors, five hundred Huguenots were attacked one Sunday while they were at service, and the bishop, Pierre Bertrandi, had them all butchered to the last man. At Montauban the inhabitants had quitted their town at the approach of the (Roman) Catholic bands; but having been massacred in crowds, the survivors returned within their walls, and sustained three sieges with heroic constancy.
The events which happened at Toulouse in May, 1562, will serve to characterize what was passing throughout the whole extent of the southern provinces.
This town contained from twenty-five to thirty thousand of the Reformed, for the most part, burghers, merchants, professors of the university, men of letters, students, and magistrates. They had chosen municipal officers of their own persuasion. “Toulouse,” says an old chronicle, “is governed by a mixture of magistrates of three kinds: Catholics, Huguenots, and Temporizers—people, however, of elevated minds, adorned with many graces, rich and opulent; and there is even a fourth kind, namely, that of the ancient heresy (probably that of the Albigeois), which had already taken root.”[45]
After the publication of the Edict of January, the Reformed had built a wooden church outside the gates of the town, which would hold from five to six thousand persons. They went there in open day, and the women were not less zealous than the men. “They had laid aside with their prayer-books and the beads which they had worn at their girdles,” says our chronicler, “their ample robes, and dissolute garments, dances, and worldly songs, as if they had been guided by the Holy Ghost: all of which our preachers could not obtain from the Catholics with all their holy admonitions.”[46]
The majority of the Parliament continued to protect the ancient worship; and the people, goaded by the imprecations of the monks, attacked the Calvinists on the least pretext and pillaged their houses. All was violence, disorder, anarchy!
Driven to extremes, and headed by some of their municipal magistrates, the Reformed took possession of the Maison-de-Ville, or Capitol, on the night of the 11th or 12th of May.
The councillors of the Parliament immediately passed a sentence of arrest against the magistrates who had taken part in this affair, and sent round to demand the armed assistance of all the captains and gentlemen of the surrounding country. Then they presented themselves to the people in red robes, commanding them to take arms and seize the heretics dead or alive. “Pillage, kill boldly, with the approval of the pope, of the king, and of the court,” cried out five or six frenzied councillors, whilst traversing the streets.
The struggle became horrible. The Calvinists who had not been able to take refuge in the Hôtel de Ville were seized in their houses, thrown out of the windows, or dragged to the Garonne. Wretches, whom the constables were taking to prison, were massacred on their way, whilst no mercy was shown to well-dressed passengers! It was taken for granted that every one, who was not a labouring man, a member of the Parliament, a monk or a priest, must be a heretic.
Another characteristic circumstance of the struggle, was that the people, imagining all cultivation of the mind to be a commencement of heresy, crowded at once around the shops of the booksellers, and burned all the books they contained in the public places. These wretched men, who could not read, thought they were thus doing the work of good (Roman) Catholics.
The tocsin rang from all the churches, for five or six leagues round. Bands of peasantry poured into the town, attracted by the hope of plunder. The Reformed, besieged in the Capitol, had cannon, and defended themselves, from the Monday to the Saturday, with all the courage of despair.
Reduced at length to the last extremity, without food for their wives and children, or powder to load their arms, the people having also fired the whole quarter near the Capitol, they demanded a parley, crying: Vive la Croix! Vive la Croix! They were promised their lives, on condition of leaving their arms and effects in the Maison-de-Ville. Before, however, they departed, they celebrated the Holy Communion with many prayers and tears, and began, between eight and nine in the evening, to retreat by the gate of Villeneuve. But the labourers and peasants, whom the priests had taught that it was not binding on them to keep faith with heretics, fell on them, and it is reckoned that three thousand five hundred persons perished in these conflicts.
The Parliament next proceeded to judicial executions. They first mutilated their own body, by excluding twenty-two councillors, who, without being Huguenots, had allowed their wives, or other members of their families, to frequent the sermons. Up to the month of March, 1563, the provost of the town and three hundred other heretics had been put to death, and four hundred persons were also condemned to the same penalty for contumacy. The clergy had published a monition enjoining, under pain of excommunication and eternal damnation, not only the denunciation of heretics, but even of those, who had given them counsel, help, or favour.
Acts of atrocious fanaticism were committed. It is related that a boy of twelve or thirteen years, who had come from Montauban to Toulouse, was called upon to recite the Ave Maria. He answered that it had not been taught him, and for that reason alone he was taken to the gallows.
In the midst of so many frightful crimes, Blaise de Montluc and the Baron des Adrets had still the frightful honour of distinguishing themselves by their cruelty. The first, a rude and ignorant soldier, was the most ferocious of all the (Roman) Catholic chiefs of the south. He seemed to enjoy a wild and insatiable delight in spectacles of blood, and he has himself related in his Commentaries, with the utmost coolness, all the executions he had ordered. He was constantly attended by two executioners armed with hatchets well sharpened, who were called his laquais. He ordered the Huguenots to be hanged or beheaded without interrogation; “for they,” he said, “have a golden tongue.” The roads, by which he passed, were known by the bodies hanging on the trees. Nor did he neglect to take care of his fortune; he knew how to pick up gold out of blood. “He who, heretofore, had but little mercy,” says Brantôme, “found himself at the end of the war possessed of a hundred thousand crowns.”[47] He was rewarded for his exploits by the bâton of a marshal of France.
But pitiless as he was, he once encountered men who surpassed him. They were Spaniards, whom Philip II. had sent to the assistance of the (Roman) Catholic party. Having taken a little town in Agenois, Montluc put all those to the sword who had defended the castle, and sent back the women by a staircase hollowed out of the wall. The Spaniards, who were waiting for them in the court, butchered them all together, with the little children they carried in their arms. When Montluc reproached them for this, they answered with sang-froid, “We thought they were Lutherans in disguise (todos Luteranos tapados).”
The Baron des Adrets, who led some of the Huguenot bands, showed himself no less barbarous than Montluc. He had embraced the new religion on account of an action, which he accused the duke of Guise of having caused him to lose. He spread terror in the Lyonnais, Dauphiné, Provence, and the county of Avignon. But the chiefs of the Calvinist party were soon ashamed of, and shocked at his crimes, and sent Soubise to Lyons to restrain him. They even made him prisoner at Valence, and he was only set at liberty at the conclusion of the peace, which he resented so much, that he returned to the Romish communion and died a Papist.