Marguerite’s sympathetic joy was as natural as touching; she must have thought Berquin safe; he was free and in the service of one who was fundamentally a sovereign-prince, though living in France and in dependence upon the King of France, whose sister he had just married. In France, Berquin was under the stigma of having been condemned to death as a heretic, and was confronted by determined enemies. In so perilous a position his safety depended upon his courting oblivion. But instead of that, and consulting only the dictates of his generous and blind confidence in the goodness of his cause, he resolved to assume the offensive and to cry for justice against his enemies. “Beneath the cloak of religion,” he wrote to Erasmus, “the priests conceal the vilest passions, the most corrupt morals, and the most scandalous infidelity. It is necessary to rend the veil which covers them, and boldly bring an accusation of impiety against the Sorbonne, Rome, and all their flunkies.” Erasmus, justly alarmed, used all his influence to deter him: but “the more confidence he showed,” says he, “the more I feared for him. I wrote to him frequently, begging him to get quit of the case by some expedient, or even to withdraw himself on the pretext of a royal ambassadorship obtained by the influence of his friends. I told him that the theologians would probably, as time went on, let his affair drop, but that they would never admit themselves to be guilty of impiety. I told him to always bear in mind what a hydra was that Beda, and at how many mouths he belched forth venom. I told him to reflect well that he was about to commit himself with a foe that was immortal, for a faculty never dies, and to rest assured that after having brought three monks to bay, he would have to defend himself against numerous legions, not only opulent and powerful, but, besides, very dishonest and very experienced in the practice of every kind of cheatery, who would never rest until they had effected his ruin, were his cause as just as Christ’s. I told him not to trust too much to the king’s protection, the favor of princes being unstable and their affections easily alienated by the artifices of informers. . . . And if all this could not move him, I told him not to involve me in his business, for, with his permission, I was not at all inclined to get into any tangle with legions of monks and a whole faculty of theology. But I did not succeed in convincing him; whilst I argued in so many ways to deter him from his design, I did nothing but excite his courage.”
Not only did Berquin turn a deaf ear to the wise counsels of Erasmus, but his protectress, Marguerite, being moved by his courage, and herself also as imprudent as she was generous, persuaded herself that he was in the right, and supported him in his undertaking. She wrote to the king her brother, “Poor Berquin, who, through your goodness, holds that God has twice preserved his life, throws himself upon you, having no longer any one to whom he can have recourse, for to give you to understand his innocence; and whereas, Monseigneur, I know the esteem in which you hold him and the desire he hath always had to do you service, I do not fear to entreat you, by letter instead of speech, to be pleased to have pity on him. And if it please you to show signs of taking his matter to heart, I hope that the truth, which he will make to appear, will convict the forgers of heretics of being slanderers and disobedient towards you rather than zealots for the faith.”
In his complaisance and indifference Francis I. attended to his sister’s wishes, and appeared to support Berquin in his appeal for a fresh and definite investigation of his case. On the other hand, Parliament, to whom the matter was referred, showed a disposition to take into account the king’s good will towards Berquin, lately convicted, but now become in his turn plaintiff and accuser. “We have no wish to dispute your power,” said the president, Charles de Guillard, to the king at a bed of justice held on the 24th of July, 1527: “it would be a species of sacrilege, and we know well that you are above the laws, and that neither laws nor ordinances can constrain you. Your most humble and most obedient court is comforted and rejoiced at your presence and advent, just as the apostles were when they saw their God after the resurrection. We are assured that your will is to be the peculiar protector and defender of religion, and not to permit or suffer in your kingdom any errors, heresies, or false doctrines.”
The matter thus reopened pursued its course slowly; twelve judges were appointed to give a definite decision; and the king himself nominated six, amongst whom he placed Berquin’s friend, William Bude. Various incidents unconnected with religious disputes supervened. The Queen of Navarre was brought to bed at Pau, on the 7th of January, 1528, of a daughter, Jeanne d’Albret, the future mother of Henry IV. The marriage of Princess Renee of France, daughter of Louis XII., with Duke Hercules of Ferrara, was concluded, and the preparations for its celebration were going on at Fontainebleau, when, on Monday, June 1, 1528, the day after the Feast of Pentecost, “some heretics came by night,” says the Journal d’un Bourgeois de Paris, “to an image of Notre-Dame de Pierre, which is at a corner of the street behind the church of Petit St. Antoine; to the which image they gave several blows with their weapons, and cut off her head and that of her little child, Our Lord. But it was never known who the image-breakers were.
The king, being then at Paris, and being advertised thereof, was so wroth and upset that, it is said, he wept right sore. And, incontinently, during the two days following, he caused it to be proclaimed by sound of trumpet throughout the cross-roads of the city that if any persons knew who had done it they should make their report and statement to justice and to him, and he would give them a thousand crowns of gold. Nevertheless nothing could be known about it, although the king showed great diligence in the matter, and had officers commissioned to go from house to house to make inquiry. . . . On Tuesday and other days following there were special processions from the parish churches and other churches of the city, which nearly all of them went to the said place. . . . And on the day of the Fete-Dieu, which was the 11th day of the said month of June, the king went in procession, most devoutly, with the parish of St. Paul and all the clergy, to the spot where was the said image. He himself carried a lighted waxen taper, bareheaded, with very great reverence, having with him the band and hautbois with several clarions and trumpets, which made a glorious show, so melodiously did they play. And with him were the Cardinal of Lorraine, and several prelates and great lords, and all the gentlemen, having each a taper of white wax in their hands, and all his archers had each a waxen taper alight, and thus they went to the spot where was the said image, with very great honor and reverence, which was a beautiful sight to see, and with devotion.” [Journal d’un Bourgeois de Paris, pp. 347-351.]
In the sixteenth century men were far from understanding that respect is due to every religious creed sincerely professed and practised; the innovators, who broke the images of the Virgin Mary and the Infant Jesus, did not consider that by thus brutally attacking that which they regarded as a superstition, they were committing a revolting outrage upon Christian consciences. Such an incident was too favorable for Berquin’s enemies not to be eagerly turned to profit by them. Although his prosecution had been resumed, he had hitherto remained at large, and been treated respectfully; he repaired without any guard over him from the Louvre to the Palace of Justice. But now he was arrested, and once more confined in the tower of the Conciergerie. Some books of his, seized hap-hazard and sent to the syndic Beda, were found covered with notes, which were immediately pronounced to be heretical. On the 16th of April, 1529, he was brought before the court. “Louis Berquin,” said the president to him, “you are convicted of having belonged to the sect of Luther, and of having made wicked books against the majesty of God and of His glorious Mother. In consequence, we do sentence you to make honorable amends, bareheaded and with a waxen taper alight in your hand, in the great court of the palace, crying for mercy to God, the king, and the law, for the offence by you committed. After that, you will be conducted bareheaded and on foot to the Place de Greve, where your books will be burned before your eyes. Then you will be taken in front of the church of Notre-Dame, where you will make honorable amends to God and to the glorious Virgin His Mother. After which a hole will be pierced in your tongue, that member wherewith you have sinned. Lastly, you will be placed in the prison of Monsieur de Paris (the bishop), and will be there confined between two stone walls for the whole of your life. And we forbid that there be ever given you book to read or pen and ink to write.” This sentence, which Erasmus called atrocious, appeared to take Berquin by surprise; for a moment he remained speechless, and then he said, “I appeal to the king:” whereupon he was taken back to prison. The sentence was to be carried out the same day about three P. M. A great crowd of more than twenty thousand persons, says a contemporary chronicler, rushed to the bridges, the streets, the squares, where this solemn expiation was to take place. The commissioner of police, the officer of the Chatelet, the archers, crossbowmen, and arquebusiers of the city had repaired to the palace to form the escort; but when they presented themselves at the prison to take Berquin, he told them that he had appealed to the king, and that he would not go with them. The escort and the crowd retired disappointed. The president convoked the tribunal the same evening, and repairing to the prison, he made Berquin sign the form of his appeal. William Bude hurried to the scene, and vehemently urged the prisoner to give it up. “A second sentence,” said he, “is ready, and it pronounces death. If you acquiesce in the first, we shall be able to save you later on. All that is demanded of you is to ask pardon: and have we not all need of pardon?” It appears that for a moment Berquin hesitated, and was on the point of consenting; but Bude remained anxious. “I know him,” said he; “his ingenuousness and his confidence in the goodness of his cause will ruin him.” The king was at Blois, and his sister Marguerite at St. Germain; on the news of this urgent peril she wrote to her brother, “I for the last time, make you a very humble request; it is, that you will be pleased to have pity upon poor Berquin, whom I know to be suffering for nothing but loving the word of God and obeying yours. You will be pleased, Monseigneur, so to act that it be not said that separation has made you forget your most humble and most obedient subject and sister, Marguerite.” We can discover no trace of any reply whatever from Francis I. According to most of the documentary evidence, uncertainty lasted for three days. Berquin persisted in his resolution. “No,” he to his friend Bude, who again came to the prison, “I would rather endure death than give my approval, even by silence only to condemnation of the truth.” The president of the court went once more to pay him a visit, and asked him if he held to his appeal. Berquin said, “Yes.” court revised its original sentence, and for the penalty of perpetual imprisonment substituted that of the stake. On the 22d of April, 1529, according to most of the documents, but on the 17th, according to the Journal d’un Bourgeois de Paris, which the details of the last days render highly improbable, the officers of Parliament entered Berquin’s gloomy chamber. He rose quietly and went with them; the procession set out, and at about three arrived at the Place de Greve; where the stake was ready. “Berquin had a gown of velvet, garments of satin and damask, and hosen of gold thread,” says the Bourgeois de Paris. “‘Alas!’ said some as they saw him pass, ‘he is of noble lineage, a mighty great scholar, expert in science and subtile withal, and nevertheless he hath gone out of his senses.’” We borrow the account of his actual death from a letter of Erasmus, written on the evidence of an eye-witness: “Not a symptom of agitation appeared either in his face or the attitude of his body: he had the bearing of a man who is meditating in his cabinet on the subject of his studies, or in a temple on the affairs of heaven. Even when the executioner, in a rough voice, proclaimed his crime and its penalty, the constant serenity of his features was not at all altered. When the order was given him to dismount from the tumbrel, he obeyed cheerfully without hesitating; nevertheless he had not about him any of that audacity, that arrogance, which in the case of malefactors is sometimes bred of their natural savagery; everything about him bore evidence to the tranquillity of a good conscience. Before he died he made a speech to the people; but none could hear him, so great was the noise which the soldiers made, according, it is said, to the orders they had received. When the cord which bound him to the post suffocated his voice, not a soul in the crowd ejaculated the name of Jesus, whom it is customary to invoke even in favor of parricides and the sacrilegious, to such extent was the multitude excited against him by those folks who are to be found everywhere, and who can do anything with the feelings of the simple and ignorant.” Theodore de Beze adds that the grand penitentiary of Paris, Merlin, who was present at the execution, said, as he withdrew from the still smoking stake, “I never saw any one die more Christianly.” The impressions and expressions of the crowd, as they dispersed, were very diverse; but the majority cried, “He was a heretic.” Others said, “God is the only just Judge, and happy is the man whom He absolves.” Some said below their breath, “It is only through the cross that Christ will triumph in the kingdom of the Gauls.” A man went up to the Franciscan monk who had placed himself at Berquin’s side in the procession, and had entreated him without getting from him anything but silence, and asked him, “Did Berquin say that he had erred?” “Yes, certainly,” answered the monk, “and I doubt not but that his soul hath departed in peace.” This expression was reported to Erasmus; but “I don’t believe it,” said he; “it is the story that these fellows are obliged to invent after their victim’s death, to appease the wrath of the people.”
We have dwelt in detail upon these two martyrs, Leclerc and Berquin, the wool-carder and the scholarly gentleman, because they are faithful and vivid representatives of the two classes amongst which, in the sixteenth century, the Reformation took root in France. It had a double origin, morally and socially, one amongst the people and the other amongst the aristocratic and the learned; it was not national, nor was it embraced by the government of the country. Persecution was its first and its only destiny in the reign of Francis I., and it went through the ordeal with admirable courage and patience; it resisted only in the form of martyrdom. We will give no more of such painful and hideous pictures; in connection with this subject, and as regards the latter portion of this reign, we will dwell upon only those general facts which bear the impress of public morals and the conduct of the government rather than of the fortunes and the feelings of individuals. It was after Francis I.‘s time that the Reformation, instead of confining itself to submitting with dignity to persecution, made a spirited effort to escape from it by becoming a political party, and taking up, in France, the task of the opposition—a liberal and an energetic opposition, which claims its rights and its securities. It then took its place in French history as a great public power, organized and commanded by great leaders, and no longer as a multitude of scattered victims falling one after another, without a struggle, beneath the blows of their persecutors.
The martyrdom of Berquin put a stop to the attempt at quasi-tolerance in favor of aristocratic and learned Reformers which Francis I. had essayed to practise; after having twice saved Berquin from a heretic’s doom, he failed to save him ultimately; and, except the horrible details of barbarity in the execution, the scholarly gentleman received the same measure as the wool-carder, after having been, like him, true to his faith and to his dignity as a man and a Christian. Persecution thenceforward followed its course without the king putting himself to the trouble of applying the drag for anybody; his sister Marguerite alone continued to protect, timidly and dejectedly, those of her friends amongst the reformers whom she could help or to whom she could offer an asylum in Bearn without embroiling herself with the king, her brother, and with the Parliaments. We will not attempt to enumerate the martyrdoms which had to be undergone by the persevering Reformers in France between 1529 and 1547, from the death of Louis de Berquin to that of Francis I.; the task would be too long and intermingled with too many petty questions of dates or proper names; we will confine ourselves to quoting some local computations and to conning over the great historic facts which show to what extent the persecution was general and unrelenting, though it was ineffectual, in the end, to stifle the Reformation and to prevent the bursting out of those religious wars which, from the death of Francis I. to the accession of Henry IV., smothered France in disaster, blood, and crime.