The Anglo-French Entente in the Seventeenth Century

by Charles Bastide

With James i. the political preoccupations fell into the background; the King sought the company of the most famous Continental scholars. In 1611 he invited to his Court Isaac Casaubon, and three years later, at the instance of his Huguenot physician, Sir Théodore Mayerne, Pierre Du Moulin, the minister at Charenton. In the train of the scholars came over the men of letters, among them Jean de Schélandre, the future author of the epic La Stuartide, inscribed to James I.

In 1642, on the eve of the Civil War, there died in London the notorious Benjamin de Rohan, Lord of Soubise, who had survived in exile an age that belonged to the past. With the fall of La Rochelle, the political power of the Huguenots was struck down, and there remained no further check on the path of absolute monarchy. Protestant historians are wont to lament the lukewarm faith that marked the period extending from 1629 to the Revolution. Indeed, the outward manifestations of Huguenot zeal had then ceased to be characteristic of the Church militant. The Bearnese or Languedocian gentleman no longer left his castle for the wars, bearing as a twofold symbol of his sect and party the Bible in the one hand and the sword in the other; and the time was yet to come when in the wild Cévennes mountains, in the "Desert," as they said in their highly-coloured language, arose the heroic witnesses of the persecuted Church. The accidental causes that had temporarily given the Huguenots an undue influence in the State ceasing to operate, they appeared from a formidable party suddenly to shrink into insignificance. But their intellectual development meanwhile must not be overlooked. Alone in France, with those that a popular dogmatism, no doubt justified in some cases, contemptibly nicknamed libertines, they were prepared by a suitable mental training to act as a check on the natural bias of the majority regarding its own infallibility. And over the libertines they had the advantage both of general austereness of life and of a certain readiness to suffer for their convictions.

No doubt the discipline exercised by the Calvinistic organisation discouraged individual eccentricity. The struggle for emancipation over, the leaders who had upheld against the Church of Rome their right of judging in spiritual matters concluded that no further encroachments of individualism on authority were permissible. The Confession of Faith lay heavy upon the Churches; the Synod of Dort, whose decisions had become laws for the French Synods, was singularly like a Reformed Council of Trent. Still, there remained in the early seventeenth century a wide difference between the mental attitude of a Huguenot and a contemporary Scotch Presbyterian. A minority in France, the Huguenot leaders could not cut off their flocks from the outer world; they mixed with the Catholics, who outnumbered them; they shared in the development of thought in their country; they were not all scholars and divines: some made bold to be men of letters, poets, even libertines.[149] In the literary coteries of the capital, in the incipient French Academy, over which the Protestant Conrart presided, abbés and pastors were reconciled in common admiration for an elegant alexandrine or a correct period.

In his own country, Calvin's system was imperfectly carried out. "The pastors," wrote Richard Simon, the Catholic Hebrew scholar, "subscribe their names to the Confession of Faith only by policy, persuaded as they are that Calvin and the other Reformers did not perceive everything, and effected but an imperfect Reformation."[150] "It cannot be denied," said Du Moulin the elder of a very influential contemporary divine, "that a third of Cameron's works are devoted to a confutation of Calvin, Beza, and our other famous Reformers."[151] Due allowance being made for the prejudice of a Roman Catholic or of an alarmed Orthodox, these statements are borne out by facts. For instance, the Huguenots had none of the Scotch Presbyterian's superstition for the Calvinistic system of Church government. "I think," said Samuel Bochart, the author of the Geographia Sacra, "that those who maintain the divine right either of Episcopacy or of Presbytery are equally in the wrong, and that the heat of the dispute makes them overstate their position; if we are asked which is the better and the fitter for the Church of these two forms of government, it is as though we were asked if it is better for a State to be ruled by monarchs, the nobility, or the people, which is not a question to be decided on the spur of the moment, for that there are nations to which Monarchy is more suitable, to others Aristocracy, and to others Democracy, and that the same laws and customs are not followed everywhere."[152] When Bishop Henchman, in 1680, asked the ministers at Charenton their opinion on the respective merits of Episcopacy and Presbytery, Claude and De l'Angle answered that the question of Church government was one of expediency.[153]

The same detachment appeared in a more important matter. The Reformation, certainly against the wish of its promoters, opened the flood-gates of free inquiry. From the Church of Rome the Reformers appealed to Scripture, but underlying that appeal was a right given to reason to decide what construction should be put upon the divine message. The inconvenience of the process was not felt at first. In an age of faith, reason is docile and asks no questions. On the points upon which the Reformers had made no innovation, reason accepted the traditional teaching; on the others, it had free play without arousing the suspicions of Synods. But soon the teaching of the Reformers came to be questioned. Once the horse held the bit in his mouth, he could not be restrained in his headlong progress. So it came to pass that in France, as in England and Holland, through the same cause, latitudinarians followed in natural sequence the Reformers. A Royal Edict of 1623 forbidding the students to the ministry to leave France, while severing the tie that bound the Huguenots to Geneva, hurried on the revolutionary movement. The students flocked to the Academies of Sedan and Saumur, and soon two schools of divinity flourished opposed to each other, that of Sedan upholding orthodoxy, while that of Saumur became the nucleus of French latitudinarianism. Neither Cameron nor his disciple Amyraut, the two luminaries of the latter school, were Arminians—their philosophy was an offshoot of Cartesianism; like the English latitudinarians, they drew a distinction between fundamentals and accidentals, and dreamed the generous dream—a dream at most—of a Church so comprehensive as to include all the Christians accepting the Apostles' Creed.

A little book published anonymously at Saumur in 1670, under the title of La Réunion du Christianisme ou la manière de rejoindre tous les Chrestiens sous une seule Confession de Foy, sets forth in a bold ingenuous form the aspirations of this school. "Some time ago a method of reasoning and of making sure progress towards truth was proposed in philosophy.[154] To that effect it is asserted that we must rid ourselves of all preconceived notions and of all preoccupations of mind. We must receive at first only the most simple ideas and such propositions as no one can dispute who hath the slightest use of reason. Might we not imitate the process in religion? Might we not set aside for a time all the opinions that we upheld with so much ardour, to examine them afterwards with an open unimpassioned mind, adhering always to our common principle, which is Holy Scripture?"[155]

D'Huisseau, the author of the book, answered with a young man's confidence the most obvious objection. On a few simple dogmas all Christians would be agreed; there would be no difference between a "Doctor of the Church" and a poor man, since primitive Christianity is understood of all men. Then, with Gallic faith in the efficacy of State intervention, he added: "Above all, I think that those who can strike the hardest blows on that occasion, are the Princes and those who rule the States and manage the public affairs. They can add the weight of their authority to that of the reasons alleged in that undertaking; and their power will be most efficacious in giving value to the exhortations of others."[156]

In spite of this appeal to secular aid, the school of Saumur furthered toleration. By the distinction they drew between fundamentals and accidentals, they tended to deprive the Churches of some pretexts for persecuting. No doubt they examined the question from the ecclesiastical and not the political point of view, but their freedom from the prejudices of their gown was a signal service to progress.

Another instance of detachment, all the more noticeable because of its consequences in England, was Daillé's attitude towards the Fathers. Published in 1632, his Traité de l'emploi des Saints-Pères pour le jugement des différends qui sont aujourd'hui en la religion was translated into English in 1651. It is no exaggeration to state that to this book was due the scant reverence shown in the seventeenth century by Protestant theology for the authority of the Fathers. The Bible, as the Saumur school desired, became the rule of faith, until in the early eighteenth century its authority came to be questioned in its turn.

The development of theological thought followed therefore in France about the same lines as in England. When considered from a merely intellectual point of view, the speculative activity of the Huguenots, in the period intervening between the fall of La Rochelle and the Revocation, gives the impression of an orchard in April, in which the trees covered with blossoms promise abundance of fruit. The impending frost blasted those hopes. What fruit ripened was not gathered in France.