In France the same diabolical spirit prevailed. After a succession of cruelties, practised in various forms, a most violent persecution broke out in the year 1572, in the reign of Charles the Ninth. Many of the principal Protestants were invited to Paris, under a solemn oath of safety, upon occasion of the marriage of the King of Navarre with the sister of the French monarch. The queen dowager of Navarre, a zealous Protestant, was, however, poisoned by a pair of gloves before the marriage was solemnized. Coligni, Admiral of France, a brave and virtuous man, was basely murdered in his own house, and then thrown out of the window, to gratify the malice of the popish Duke of Guise. The admiral’s head was afterwards cut off, and sent to the queen-mother; and his body, after having been submitted to a thousand indignities, was hung up by the feet on a gibbet. After this, the murderers ravaged the whole city of Paris, and in the course of three days, butchered above ten thousand persons, among whom were several of the nobility and gentry, and others of high moral reputation. The streets and passages resounded with the noise of those who met together for murder and plunder; and a prodigious multitude of men, women with child, maidens, and children, were involved in one common destruction. From the city of Paris the massacre spread through the whole kingdom. In the city of Meaux two hundred Protestants were thrown into prison, and after the persecutors had ravished and killed a great number of women, and secured piles of plunder, they executed their fury upon those in confinement. Calling them out one by one, they were killed, like sheep appointed for the slaughter. In Orleans they murdered above five hundred men, women, and children, and enriched themselves with their spoil. Similar cruelties were practised at Angers, Troyes, Bourges, La Charité, and especially at Lyons, where above eight hundred Protestants were inhumanly destroyed. Children were killed while hanging on their parents’ necks; parents were torn from the embraces of their offspring, and put to death; ropes were put about some, who were dragged inhumanly about the streets, and thrown half dead into the rivers.
RIDLEY.
What aggravated the cruelty of these scenes, and is demonstrative of the sanguinary spirit of papacy, is, that the news of these excesses was received at Rome with boundless satisfaction. When the letters of the pope’s legate were read in the assembly of the cardinals, by which he assured the pope that all was transacted by the express will and command of the king, it was immediately decreed that the pope should march with his cardinals to the church of St. Mark, and in the most solemn manner give thanks to God for so great a blessing conferred on the see of Rome and the Christian world; and that on the Monday after, solemn mass should be celebrated in the church of Minerva, at which the pope, Gregory the Thirteenth, and cardinals were present; and that a jubilee should be published throughout the whole Christian world, to return thanks to God for the extirpation of the enemies of the truth, and of the Church in France. In the evening the cannon of the castle of St. Angelo were fired, to testify the public joy; the whole city was illuminated with bonfires; and no one sign of joy was omitted that was usually made for the greatest victories obtained in favour of the Romish Church.
But these persecutions, though black as Erebus, were far exceeded in cruelty by those which took place in the time of Louis the Fourteenth. The troopers and dragoons, hired for the purpose, went into the houses of Protestants, where they destroyed the furniture, broke the looking-glasses, wasted their corn and wine, and sold what they could not destroy; so that in four or five days the Protestants had been plundered of property worth a million of money. But this was only the beginning of sorrows. They turned the dining-rooms of gentlemen into stables for horses, and treated the owners of the houses where they quartered with the greatest insolence and cruelty, lashing them about, and depriving them of food. In several places the soldiers applied red-hot irons to the hands and feet of men, and to the breasts of women. Mothers that gave suck they bound to posts, and let their perishing infants lie languishing in their sight, crying, and gasping for life. Some they bound before a great fire, and, when half dead, let them go. Amidst a thousand other till then unheard-of cruelties, they hung up men and women by the hair, and some by their feet, on hooks in chimneys, and smoked them with wisps of wet hay till they were suffocated. Others they plunged repeatedly into wells; and many they bound, and then with a funnel forced them to drink wine till the fumes destroyed their reason, when they made them say they were Catholics. If any, to escape these barbarities, endeavoured to save themselves by flight, they were pursued into the fields and woods, where they were shot like wild beasts. On these scenes the popish clergy feasted their eyes, and derived astonishing amusement from them.
LATIMER.
Nor did England escape. Though Wickliffe, the first Reformer, died peaceably in his bed, yet such was the malice of persecuting Rome, that his bones were ordered to be dug up, and cast on a dunghill. The remains of that excellent man, which had rested undisturbed four-and-forty years, were accordingly disinterred; his bones were burnt, and the ashes cast into an adjacent brook. In the reign of Henry the Eighth, Bilney and many Reformers were burnt; and when Queen Mary came to the throne, persecution was let loose with ten-fold terror. Hooper and Rogers were burned in a slow fire. Saunders was cruelly tormented at the stake a long time before he expired. Taylor was put into a barrel of pitch, and fire was set to it. Ferrar, Bishop of St. David’s, with seven other illustrious persons, were sought out and burnt by the infamous Bonner, in a few days. Sixty-seven persons were burnt in the year 1555, among whom were the famous Protestants, Bradford, Ridley, Latimer, and Philpot. In the following year, eighty-five persons were burnt. Ireland has also been drenched with the blood of Protestants, nearly fifty thousand of whom were murdered in a few days in different parts of the kingdom, in the reign of Charles the First. What shall we say, also, of South America? It is computed that, of the natives residing in the extensive Spanish territory, fifteen millions were sacrificed in forty years to the genius of Popery. In fine, it is supposed that, at different times, not fewer than fifty millions of Protestants have been the victims of the persecutions of the Papists, and put to death for their religious profession. Such is mystic Babylon! ‘And I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held: and they cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost Thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?’ ... ‘And in her was found the blood of prophets, and of saints, and of all them that were slain upon the earth.’
