Castle St. André, Avignon
Fortress and prison used by the popes when Avignon was the papal residence, in the fourteenth century. Avignon remained the property of the popes after their return to Rome, until its annexation by the French in 1791.
The persecution of the Huguenots began in the reign of Francis I, who from the first declared himself on the side of the Pope. Protestantism as preached by Martin Luther took another form in France, and the Geneva doctrines of Calvin, which went much further, were followed. Calvin, it may be said here, rejected the Episcopate which Luther had retained. He recognised only two sacraments,—Baptism and the Last Supper, and desired his disciples to imitate the early Christians in the austerity of their morals. The French Protestants were styled Calvinists and more generally Huguenots, a name taken from the German word, “Eidgenossen,” or “confederates.” Calvinism made slow progress in France although it numbered amongst its adherents some of the best heads in the nation, men of letters, savants, great lawyers and members of the highest aristocracy. They were persecuted pitilessly. In 1559 Berquin, a king’s councillor, a man of much learning, was burned alive in Paris and many shared his fate as martyrs to the new faith in the great cities such as Lyons, Toulouse, and Marseilles. The most horrible atrocities were perpetrated against the Vaudois, a simple, loyal population residing in the towns and villages around Avignon and on the borders of the Durance. Two fanatical prelates of the Guise family, the Cardinal de Tournon and the Cardinal de Lorraine, headed the movement in the course of which 3,000 persons were massacred,—men, women and children, and any who escaped were condemned to the galleys for life. Nevertheless the reformed religion gained ground steadily. The new ideas appealed to the people despite opposition. Neither persecution, nor the threats fulminated by the Council of Trent, nor the energies of the new order of Jesuits, could stamp out the new faith; and religious intolerance, backed by the strong arm of the Church was destined to deluge France with bloodshed in the coming centuries.
Henry II, who followed his father Francis on the throne, redoubled the persecution which was stained with incessant and abominable cruelties. The ordinary process of law was set aside in dealing with the Huguenots who were brought under ecclesiastical jurisdiction. An edict published in 1555, enjoined all governors and officers of justice to punish without delay, without examination and without appeal, all heretics condemned by the judges. The civil judge was no longer anything but the passive executant of the sentences of the Church. The Parliament of Paris protested, but the King turned a deaf ear to these remonstrances and summoned a general meeting of all the Parliaments, which he attended in person and where he heard some home truths. One of the most outspoken was a great nobleman, one Anne Du Bourg, who defended the Protestants, declaring that they were condemned to cruel punishment while heinous criminals altogether escaped retribution. Du Bourg and another, Dufaure, were arrested and were conveyed to the Bastile where they were soon joined by other members of the Parliament. After many delays Du Bourg was brought to trial, convicted and sentenced to be burnt to death. “It is the intention of the Court,” so ran the judgment, “that the said Du Bourg shall in no wise feel the fire, and that before it be lighted and he is cast therein he shall be strangled, yet if he should wish to dogmatise and indulge in any remarks he shall be gagged so as to avoid scandal.” He was executed on the Place de la Grève on the top of a high gallows under which a fire was lighted to receive the dead body when it fell.
Henry II had been a weak and self-indulgent king. Ostentatious and extravagant, he wasted large sums in the expenses of his court and lavished rich gifts on his creatures, a course which emptied the treasury and entailed burdensome taxation. He was entirely under the thumb of his mistress, Diane de Poitiers, a cold-blooded, selfish creature, who ruled him and the country with unquestioned supremacy, before whom even the lawful queen, Catherine de Medicis, humiliated herself and paid abject court. The King’s ministers, the Constable Montmorency and the Duc de Guise, were at first rivals in power with Diane, but soon joined with her in riding roughshod over the country, and in bestowing all good things, places, governments and profitable charges on their friends and creatures. Foreign adventure, external wars, famine and pestilence constantly impoverished France. The people rose frequently in insurrection and were always suppressed with sanguinary cruelty. Constable Montmorency, above mentioned, dealt so severely with Bordeaux, that in a short space of time no fewer than four hundred persons were beheaded, burned, torn asunder by wild horses or broken on the wheel.
A prominent figure of those days was Mary Stuart, better known as Mary, Queen of Scots, that fascinating woman who was “a politician at ten years old and at fifteen governed the court.” She was the child-wife of Francis II, who unexpectedly came to the throne on the sudden death by mischance of Henry II at a tournament held in front of the Bastile. He had challenged Montgomery, an officer of the Scottish Guard, to break a lance with him and in the encounter a splinter entered Henry’s eye and penetrated to the brain.
The tragic death of Francis II was another of those instances in which the Salic Law was evaded and a woman held supreme power. Catherine de Medicis has already appeared on the scene in the sanguinary suppression of the conspiracy of Amboise. This was only one of the atrocities that stained her long tenure of power as Regent of France during the minority of her son Charles IX. Her character has been already indicated. Evil was ever in the ascendant with her and in her stormy career she exhibited the most profound cunning, a rare fertility of resource, and the finished diplomacy of one trained in the Machiavellian school. She was double-faced and deceitful beyond measure. Now the ally of one political party, now of the other, she betrayed both. She even affected sympathy at times with the Protestants and often wept bitter crocodile tears over their sufferings. For a time liberty of conscience was conceded to the Huguenots but Catherine desired always to conciliate the Catholics and concerted measures with Philip of Spain to bring about a new persecution. A fresh conflict ensued in which successes were gained on both sides, but the Huguenots showed so firm a front that peace could not be denied them. They were always prepared to rise, offering a hydra-headed resistance that might be scotched but could not be killed. To crush them utterly Catherine planned the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew, in which the Admiral Coligny and 10,000 Protestants were murdered in Paris alone and 30,000 more in the provinces. This ineffaceable crime to which Charles IX had weakly consented, seemed to paralyse the Huguenot cause and many of their principal leaders abjured the new faith. Charles IX, tortured by remorse, constantly haunted by superstitious terrors, rapidly succumbed to wasting disease and died penitent, acknowledging his guilt.
Some time previously Henri d’Anjou had been elected King of Poland and on his departure, efforts were made to secure the succession for his younger brother, the Duc d’Alençon, who was to own himself the protector of the Huguenots. The plot failed and served only to fill the prisons of Vincennes and Bastile. Montgomery, the Huguenot leader, was implicated. He had surrendered on a vague promise of safe conduct which ended in his torture to compel confession of complicity in the plot. He was on the point of being secretly strangled when Catherine de Medicis, who had gone to the Bastile to be present at his execution, suddenly changed her mind and set the surprised prisoner free.
Another class was committed to the Bastile by Catherine de Medicis. She waged war constantly against coiners and issuers of false money; their chief ringleader was sent to the Bastile with special instructions for his “treatment.” He was transferred secretly to Paris from Rouen and shut up alone in an especially private place where no news could be had of him. This order was signed by Catherine herself. Next year (1555) a defaulting finance officer was committed and the lieutenant of the Bastile was ordered to forbid him to speak to a soul or write or give any hint where he was. Again, a Gascon gentleman, named Du Mesnil, was taken in the act of robbing and murdering a courier on his way to Italy, the bearer of 30,000 crowns worth of pearls. Du Mesnil’s accomplices, two simple soldiers, were hanged at the Halles but he himself was sent to the Bastile and recommended to its governor for “good discipline.” This prisoner seems to have preferred liberty to the favor shown him, such as it was, for in November, 1583, he made a desperate attempt to escape. The account given by L’Estoile in his memoirs, is that Du Mesnil, weary of his close confinement, burned down the door of his cell, got out, became possessed of a rope from the well in the court, climbed to the top of the terrace (the Bastion), fastened his rope through an artillery wheel and lowered himself into the ditch. The rope had been lengthened by another made from his sheets and bedding, but it was still too short to reach the bottom, and letting himself fall he was caught on a window below and making outcry was recaptured and re-imprisoned. A more distinguished prisoner was Bernard Palissy, the famous potter who was committed to gaol as a Protestant and died in the Bastile in 1590 when eighty years of age. L’Estoile tells us that Palissy at his death bequeathed him two stones, one of them, part of a petrified skull which he accounted a philosopher’s stone, the other, a stone he had himself manufactured. “I have them still,” says L’Estoile, “carefully preserved in my cabinet for the sake of the good old man whom I loved and relieved in his necessity,—not as much as I could have wished, but to the full extent of my power.”
When Henry III assassinated the Duc de Guise at Blois, Paris took it greatly to heart and swore vengeance. The “Sixteen” held the Bastile, and its governor, Bussy-Leclerc, an ex-fencing master, sought to coerce the Parliament, seizing at once upon all with royalist leanings and driving them into the Bastile. President Auguste de Thou was arrested and with him his wife, who is said to have been the first female occupant of this prison. Now the King, in despair, turned to the Huguenots and formed an alliance with Henry of Navarre. The two kings joined forces to recover Paris and the Parisians, alarmed, feeling they could not make long resistance, accepted the worst. Some said there would be a second St. Bartholomew, for the “Leaguers” and the Royalists boasted that so many should be hanged that the wood for gibbets would run short. But the situation suddenly changed, for Henry III was unexpectedly assassinated by a fanatical monk, Clément, in the very heart of the royal apartments.