CHAPTER III. A SKETCH OF THE REFORMATION IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.
When learning began to revive, and the understandings of mankind became more enlightened, there was a general complaint of errors and abuses, and every one acknowledged the complaint to be just.
Pope Alexander VI. made a public purchase of the pontifical crown, and his five bastards shared with him the profits. His son, the Cardinal Duke of Borgia, in concert with the pope, his father, caused the noble families of Vitelli, Urbino, Gravina, and Oliveretto, together with a hundred other lords, to be made away with, in order to seize upon their estates. Julius II., full of the same spirit, excommunicated Louis XII. of France, while he himself, armed cap-a-pie, ravaged a part of Italy with fire and sword. Leo X., in order to raise money to pay the expenses of his pleasures, made a sale of indulgences, like goods in a common market. Those who opposed such shameful impositions were certainly right in a moral view; let us see how far they were so with regard to us, in a political one.
They asserted that as Jesus Christ had never exacted annats, nor reversions, nor sold dispensations for this world nor indulgences for the next, they saw no reason why they should pay a foreign prince his price for these things. Supposing that the annats, the law proceedings in the pope’s court, and the dispensations which still subsist were to cost us no more than five hundred thousand crowns a year; it is clear that since the time of Francis I., that is, in two hundred and fifty years, we have paid a hundred and twenty millions; and if we calculate the different value of the mark of silver, we shall find that this sum amounts to about two hundred and fifty millions of the present money. It may therefore, I think, without any blasphemy be allowed that the heretics in proposing the abolition of these extraordinary taxes, which will be the admiration of posterity, did, in that respect, no great injury to the kingdom, and showed themselves good calculators rather than bad subjects. Add to this, that they were the only persons who understood the Greek language, or had any knowledge of antiquity; let us own likewise, without dissimulation, that with all their errors, we are indebted to them for the opening of our understandings, which had been long buried beneath the most barbarous obscurity.
But as they denied the doctrine of purgatory, concerning which no one ought to have the least doubt, and which, moreover, brought in a comfortable revenue to the monks; as they paid no reverence to relics which every one ought to reverence, and which brought in still greater profits; and lastly, as they attacked the most respectable tenets,[7] their adversaries made them no other reply than by committing them to the stake. The king, who styled himself their protector, and who kept a body of them in pay in Germany, marched at the head of a procession through Paris, which was concluded by the execution of a number of these unhappy wretches, in the following manner:
They were suspended at the end of a long beam, which played upon a pole erected for that purpose, and underneath them was kindled a large fire, into which they were alternately lowered and then raised up again, by which they experienced the most excruciating torments, till a lingering death at last put an end to the longest and most dreadful punishment that cruelty ever invented.
A short time before the death of Francis I., the members of the Parliament of Provence, whom the clergy had incensed against the inhabitants of Mirandol and Cabrière, applied to the king for a body of troops to attend the execution of nineteen persons of that country who had been condemned by them; with the assistance of this armed force they massacred about six thousand souls, without sparing sex or age, and reduced thirty villages to ashes. The people who were the objects of these executions, and who had, till then, been in a manner unknown, were doubtless to blame for having been born Vaudois, but this was their only crime. They had been settled for upwards of three hundred years in deserts and on mountains, which they had rendered fertile by incredible labor, and led a pastoral and quiet life, the perfect image of the innocence which we find attributed to the first ages of the world. They had no acquaintance with the towns or villages round about them, except that obtained by carrying the produce of their grounds thither to sell. Totally ignorant of all military operations, they made no defence, but were slaughtered like timorous animals, whom we drive into a net and then knock them on the head.[8]
After the death of Francis I., a prince who, it must be confessed, was more remarkable for his gallantries and his misfortunes than for his cruelty, the execution of a thousand heretics, and in particular that of Dubourg, a counsellor of the parliament, together with the massacre of Vassy, made the persecuted fly to arms. Their sect multiplied in proportion with the fires lighted for them, and the swords of executioners drawn against them, patience gave way to rage, and they followed the example of their enemies in cruelty. Nine civil wars filled France with carnage, and a peace, more fatal than war itself, produced the day of St. Bartholomew, which stands without example in the annals of crime.
Henry III. and Henry IV. fell victims to the league, the one by the hand of a Dominican friar, and the other by that of a monster who had been a brother of the mendicant order. There are those who pretend that humanity, indulgence, and liberty of conscience are horrible things; I would ask such persons seriously, if they could have produced calamities comparable to those I have just related?