XX.
The act of abjuration did not immediately bring back the Leaguers to submission. The Spanish ambassador distributed gold with lavish hands. The legate pretended that to the pope alone belonged the right of reconciling one, who had been excommunicated by the Church, and the States-General of the League swore to obey the decrees of the Holy See. Boucher delivered nine sermons against the simulated conversion of the Béarnese, saying that the bishops of St. Denis were traitors, their prayers anathemas, and the mass sung before the heretics a miserable farce. All the preachers of the faction of the Sixteen (de la faction des seize) declared openly for regicide; and the fruit of their provocation was soon apparent. Jean Banière in 1593, and the year following Jean Châtel, attempted to assassinate the king. A decree of the Parliament drove the society of Loyola from the kingdom; it returned to give birth to Ravaillac.
But the mass of the nation accepted the abjuration of Henry IV. as real and sincere, because it thirsted for repose. The chiefs of the League, having lost all hope of vanquishing, now only thought of selling themselves as dearly as possible. It cost the king enormous sums, and the Reformed were nearly everywhere sacrificed in the capitulations. Rouen, Meaux, Poitiers, Agen, Beauvais, Amiens, Saint Malo, and many other cities, both large and small, stipulated, in making submission, that the preaching of the Huguenots should be banished from within their walls and their suburbs. Paris claimed an extension of the interdict to ten leagues from its gates. The king opposed some resistance to these demands, but he finished by granting all of them.
The least mark of attachment which the Béarnese might show towards his old co-religionists, was watched with an eye of jealousy, and he was unable openly to press the hand of those faithful servants, who had defended his crown at the expense of their blood.
A new protector was again begun to be spoken of, notwithstanding the energetic expressions of Henry IV., who called himself the natural and legitimate protector of his subjects. Duplessis loyally supported the remonstrances of the king; however, he, in his turn, preferred to him heavy complaints: “See, sire,” he wrote to him, “by what steps you have been conducted to the mass. Those, who do not believe in God, have made you swear by images and relics, purgatory and indulgences. Your poor subjects see you go further still, by this same road. They see you send to make your submission to Rome. They know that there cannot be absolution without penance. The pope, on the first opportunity, will send you the sacred sword, and will impose upon you the law of making war against heretics; and under this name will be comprehended the most Christian and the most loyal of the French.”
Clement VIII., in truth, demanded as the price of absolution, the abrogation of the edicts of toleration, the exclusion of heretics from all offices, and the promise of exterminating them, so soon as peace should be concluded with the League and with Spain. On this occasion Henry IV. rebelled. He caused a reply to be returned by D’Ossat and Duperron, to the effect that he should be accused of indecency and ingratitude, if, after having experienced so many services from those of the (Reformed) religion, he reduced them to extremity, and forced them to take arms against his person.
The pope and the king, by the aid of equivocation, finished with a mutual understanding, and on the 16th September, 1595, the two ambassadors of Henry IV. were kneeling under the portico of Saint Peter. They sang the Miserere, and at each verse they received for their master blows from a rod or switch, on the shoulders. The Spaniards ridiculed them, and the more estimable of the French papists were indignant at this humiliation.
The king continued to give the Reformed nothing but fair words. He told them privately that he trusted in them more than in the others, and he endeavoured even to justify the privileges which he had granted to the (Roman) Catholics, by the parable of the prodigal son, for whom the father caused the fatted calf to be killed: “It is well,” replied the deputies of the churches, “but treat us also as the son who has always been faithful, and to whom the father said, ‘All my goods are thine.’ To despoil the obedient son of his legitimate rights, in order to give them to him who has trodden underfoot the paternal authority, is not the spirit of Christ’s parable.”
To this the king could only reply by new exhortations to patience. “You shall have satisfaction,” said he to them, “when I am master at home.” Truly it was very difficult to exercise patience in the unhappy condition of the Reformed. Excluded from all offices, maltreated, persecuted, without anywhere being able to invoke the Almighty in peace, without security in their own houses, having no longer their ancient protector, and forbidden to name another, they at length resolved, with the tacit authority of the king, to manage their own affairs, and convoked political assemblies. The first was held at Sainte Foy, in the month of May, 1594.
These assemblies must not be confounded with the synods. In the synods, the clergy and laity were equal in number, and were always occupied with the interests of the Church. In the political assemblies, the laity were greatly in the majority, and they treated also concerning state affairs.
Assemblies of this kind had been held during the religious wars, but they then took a more regular organization, and adopted the plan of uniting at periodical intervals.
France was divided into ten departments, each of which named a deputy to form the General Council. Their distinction of three orders was borrowed from the States-General. The General Council was to be composed of four noblemen, four members of the Third Estate, and of two pastors. When the number of members was raised to thirty, there were twelve delegates of the nobility, twelve representatives of the Third Estate, and six clergymen. The president was to be a layman, the vice-president an ecclesiastic. One half of the council was re-elected every six months. Dukes, lieutenant-generals, and other personages of high rank, took part in the deliberations without being deputies, provided they were not objected to by the assembly.
The provincial councils were next in authority to the General Council, and were composed of from five to seven members, chosen equally from the three orders. They were to include at least one resident governor and a clergyman.
These councils were to promote peace between those of their own religion, to levy rates for the necessities of the cause, and to regulate the disposal of them, to watch over the stores and munitions of fortified towns; in a word, to do everything that was necessary for the defence of their common interests. The deputies took the oath of obedience, and the members of the Church were obliged to respect the decisions of the general and private assemblies. A permanent fund of forty-five thousand crowns was supplied by the contributions of the faithful.
The General Council received memorials and complaints from the provincial councils, sent them to court, discussed the terms of the new edicts with the commissioners of the king, and sought to establish the free exercise of religion upon a more solid basis.
Judging according to present ideas, nothing could be more contrary to good order than this organization; it was, as we have already remarked, a state within a state. But to appreciate as we ought the institution of these political assemblies, we must recollect that the Reformed were excluded in France from the common right. The intolerant dogmas of (Roman) Catholicism did not recognise them as Frenchmen. They were looked upon as foreigners, or rather as enemies, and were treated as such. The king was obliged to capitulate with some of his subjects at the expense of the others. The pope demanded their extermination. The bishops had forced Henry to say at his coronation, “I will, in good faith, do all in my power to drive all heretics, denounced by the Church, out of my jurisdiction and territory;” and this was only a mitigated formula, that the priests had sanctioned after much hesitation. Public authority attacked and condemned the Reformed as malefactors. If then they established a distinct society amongst themselves, it is because they were cut off from society in general; and it would be absurd, as well as odious, to accuse those in the name of the law, who had been put out of its pale.
The Leaguers had also formed a state within the state, but with this difference, that they were associated together in order to oppress the Calvinists, whilst the latter united that they might not be oppressed; and cruel experience proved to them, under the reign of Louis XIV., that in losing their political organization, they were exposed to the loss of everything.
The council of the king heard with astonishment of the decision of the assembly of Sainte Foy. It had imagined that the great Calvinist body, deprived of its ancient protector, would be destroyed. Catherine of Medicis and Charles IX. fell into the same error after the massacre of Saint Bartholomew. Seeing the Reformed rise up under the strokes of persecution to take a firmer attitude than ever, statesmen began to think that it was necessary to temporize with them.
The king feigned to be discontented, but secretly encouraged the political assemblies. He preferred them to a protector, who might have made himself too conspicuous in the kingdom, and he made use of them with the Leaguers, and even with his advisers at Rome, to grant more favourable conditions to his former friends. The Edict of Nantes, one of the most glorious acts of Henry IV., would never have been agreed to in council, nor registered by Parliament, if it had not been for the assemblies of the Reformed.
The negotiations were long, laborious, and intermixed with incidents which would offer little or no interest [to be here related]. Political assemblies were held at Saumur, Loudun, and Vendôme, and again at Saumur and Châtellerault in the years 1595, 1596, and 1597. The court addressed them with menaces or words of encouragement, according to circumstances. Commissioners were appointed to treat with the Calvinists; but they only possessed limited powers, and even within these limits they were not authorized to conclude a definitive arrangement. There was a perpetual interchange of communications, much playing at cross-purpose, between the two parties; some were only willing to grant the Edict of Poitiers, with amendments of no importance; others demanded the full and free exercise of their religion; the former alleging state reasons, the latter principles of justice and conscience.
In the midst of these sterile disputes, persecution continued to be violent in some places, and vexatious in others. At Châtaigneraie, upon the confines of Poitou and Brittany, the Leaguers, encouraged by the Duc de Mercœur, had fallen suddenly upon the faithful, whilst they were at prayers, in 1595. Two hundred persons, of every age, men and women, had been cowardly butchered. It was a repetition of the massacre at Vassy.
Amongst the victims was an infant brought to be baptized A poor boy, eight years of age, in the simplicity of his heart, offered eightpence, the contents of his little purse, in the hope of ransoming his life; but the murderers loved his blood better; whilst the Lady of Châtaigneraie afterwards amused herself with the butchers in counting the dead.
This cold-blooded butchery revolted even the most violent of Henry IV.’s advisers, and the authors of the massacre were expressly exempted in cases of amnesty. Nevertheless, it may be seen in a publication of 1597, under the title, Complaints of the Reformed Churches of France, how much oppression, injustice, and violence, had to be submitted to. These grievances would alone fill a volume; but we will only cite a few examples.
The Reformed were forbidden the free exercise of their religion throughout such provinces as Burgundy and Picardy; they had but a solitary place of worship in Brittany, and two in Provence; they were ill-treated, stoned, or thrown into the river on their return from worship; cannons were fired against their meetings; the king’s own sister was constrained to set out for Rouen, to take the sacrament, because the legate disapproved of her receiving it in the city; Bibles and the Book of Psalms were burnt by the hand of the executioner; they were forbidden to comfort the sick; and at Saint Quentin, for example, a man was outlawed for having relieved one infected with the plague in the street; children were carried off or baptized by force in the houses by priests, accompanied by officers of justice. The curate of Saint Etienne starved an old man in prison to extort an abjuration, and forced him to sign a deed in the presence of a notary, by which he condemned himself to banishment if he renounced the (Roman) Catholic faith; cities, given as hostages, were taken away or ransacked; the poor were neglected and driven away, even where the Reformed contributed the most to the common fund; there was systematic exclusion from all appointments, even from the magistracy of the city, from the freedom of companies, from the offices of notary and attorney; there was no justice before the tribunals; exorbitant fines and imprisonments [were inflicted] for the slightest cause; [as well as] disinterment of the dead, even of those who had been buried in the tombs of their ancestors, &c. &c. &c.
In terminating this long list of grievances, the Reformed said to the king, “But, sire, we have amongst us neither Jacobins nor Jesuits, who aim at your life, nor Leaguers, who desire your crown. We have never presented the points of our swords instead of petitions. We are paid by political considerations. They tell us the time is not yet come for granting an edict. And this, great God, after thirty-five years of persecutions, ten years of banishment by the edicts of the League, eight years of the king’s reign, and four years’ entreaty. We only ask of your majesty an edict which would permit us to enjoy that which is common to all your subjects. The glory of God, the safety of our property and lives, would be the summit of our wishes and the end of our petitions.”
The king and his council were again for temporizing with them; however, the fresh dangers which menaced the kingdom, the surprise of Amiens by the Spaniards, the resolution of many Huguenot noblemen to remain inactive, instead of drawing their swords for a king who had abandoned them, the conscience of many of their most celebrated men, which at last began to trouble them, caused the Edict of Nantes to be granted in the month of April, 1598, which took its name from the place where it was first published.
In the preamble of this celebrated act, the king acknowledged that God is adored and worshipped by all his subjects, if not in the same form, at least with the same intentions, in such manner that his kingdom will always merit and preserve the glorious title of “very Christian.” The edict was declared perpetual and irrevocable, as being the principal foundation of the union and tranquillity of the state.
This great charter of the French Reformation briefly consisted of what follows under the ancient régime—entire liberty of conscience in the domestic circle; the public exercise of religion in all places where it was established in 1597, and in the suburbs of the towns; permission to lords of high rank to have service performed in their castles, and to noblemen of second rank, the right of admitting thirty persons to their private worship; the admission of the Reformed to public employment, of their children to the schools, of their invalids to the hospitals, of their poor to partake of the alms; the right of printing their books in certain towns; equal representation in some of the Parliaments; a chamber of the edict at Paris, entirely composed of (Roman) Catholics, except a single member, but offering sufficient guarantee by its particular object; four academies for scientific and theological instruction; authorization to convoke synods according to discipline; and lastly, a certain number of places of surety.
The (Roman) Catholic church had also its share in this edict. The property of the clergy was to be everywhere restored, tithes paid, and the exercise of (Roman) Catholicism re-established throughout the kingdom. This last article, which restored the mass in two hundred and fifty towns, and two thousand country parishes, narrowly missed exciting an insurrection at La Rochelle.
Yet this was not religious liberty, nor even simple toleration, as we understand it now; it was still a treaty of peace between two people juxtaposed upon the same soil. There was a twofold law; there were two armies, two judicial establishments, and each party had its places of hostage. Henry IV., the head of the whole state, had filled the office of arbitrator between the two camps. But this was already a great step in advance of the past.
The false maxim that there should be only one faith, as there are only one king and one government, had cost France three millions of actual money, and two millions of men. It had erected the scaffold and the stake during sixty years, kindled civil war during thirty-five years, provoked the massacres of Mérindol, of Vassy, and of Saint Bartholomew, and inspired spoliations and murders, and crimes without number. At the termination of the wars, half of the towns and castles were in ashes, commerce destroyed, and the country so devastated that thousands of the peasantry had resolved to emigrate, having no longer the wherewithal to live upon the soil which had nourished their forefathers.
Humanity has achieved the principle of religious liberty through rivers of blood and over heaps of ruins: it has been too dearly purchased to be lost.