More or less happily, the treaty of Cateau-Cambreis had regulated all those questions of external policy which were burdensome to France; she was once more at peace with her neighbors, and seemed to have nothing more to do than to gather in the fruits thereof. But she had in her own midst questions far more difficult of solution than those of her external policy, and these perils from within were threatening her more seriously than any from without. Since the death of Francis I., the religious ferment had pursued its course, becoming more general and more fierce; the creed of the Reformers had spread very much; their number had very much increased; permanent churches, professing and submitting to a fixed faith and discipline, had been founded; that of Paris was the first, in 1555; and the example had been followed at Orleans, at Chartres, at Lyons, at Toulouse, at Rochelle, in Normandy, in Touraine, in Guienne, in Poitou, in Dauphiny, in Provence, and in all the provinces, more or less. In 1561, it was calculated that there were twenty-one hundred and fifty reformed, or, as the expression then was, rectified (dressees), churches. “And this is no fanciful figure; it is the result of a census taken at the instigation of the deputies who represented the reformed churches at the conference of Poissy on the demand of Catherine de’ Medici, and in conformity with the advice of Admiral de Coligny.” [La Reformation en France pendant sa premiere periode, by Henri Luttheroth, pp. 127-132.] It is clear that the movement of the Reformation in the sixteenth century was one of those spontaneous and powerful movements which have their source and derive their strength from the condition of men’s souls and of whole communities, and not merely from the personal ambitions and interests which soon come and mingle with them, whether it be to promote or to retard them. One thing has been already here stated and confirmed by facts; it was specially in France that the Reformation had this truly religious and sincere character; very far from supporting or tolerating it, the sovereign and public authorities opposed it from its very birth; under Francis I. it had met with no real defenders but its martyrs; and it was still the same under Henry II. During the reign of Francis I., within a space of twenty-three years, there had been eighty-one capital executions for heresy; during that of Henry II., twelve years, there were ninety-seven for the same cause, and at one of these executions Henry II. was present in person, on the space in front of Notre-Dame: a spectacle which Francis I. had always refused to see. In 1551, 1557, and 1559, Henry II., by three royal edicts, kept up and added to all the prohibitions and penalties in force against the Reformers. In 1550, the massacre of the Vaudians was still in such lively and odious remembrance that a noble lady of Provence, Madame de Cental, did not hesitate to present a complaint, in the name of her despoiled, proscribed, and murdered vassals, against the Cardinal de Tournon, the Count de Grignan, and the Premier President Maynier d’Oppede, as having abused, for the purpose of getting authority for this massacre, the religious feelings of the king, who on his death-bed had testified his remorse for it. “This cause,” says De Thou, “was pleaded with much warmth, and occupied fifty audiences, with a large concourse of people, but the judgment took all the world by surprise. Guerin alone, advocate-general in 1545, having no support at court, was condemned to death, and was scape-goat for all the rest. D’Oppede defended himself with fanatical pride, saying that he only executed the king’s orders, like Saul, whom God commanded to exterminate the Amalekites. He had the Duke of Guise to protect him; and he was sent back to discharge the duties of his office. Such was the prejudice of the Parliament of Paris against the Reformers that it interdicted the hedge-schools (ecoles buissonnieres), schools which the Protestants held out in the country to escape from the jurisdiction of the precentor of Notre-Dame de Paris, who had the sole supervision of primary schools. Hence comes the proverb, to play truant (faire l’ecole buissonniere—to go to hedge school). All the resources of French civil jurisdiction appeared to be insufficient against the Reformers. Henry II. asked the pope for a bull, transplanting into France the Spanish Inquisition, the only real means of extirpating the root of the errors.” It was the characteristic of this Inquisition, that it was completely in the hands of the clergy, and that its arm was long enough to reach the lay and the clerical indifferently. Pope Paul IV. readily gave the king, in April, 1557, the bull he asked for, but the Parliament of Paris refused to enregister the royal edict which gave force in France to the pontifical brief. In 1559 the pope replied to this refusal by a bull which comprised in one and the same anathema all heretics, though they might be kings or emperors, and declared them to have “forfeited their benefices, states, kingdoms, or empires, the which should devolve on the first to seize them, without power on the part of the Holy See itself to restore them.” [Magnum Bullarium Romanum, a Beato Leone Magno ad Paulum IV., t. i. p. 841: Luxembourg, 1742.] The Parliament would not consent to enregister the decree unless there were put in it a condition to the effect that clerics alone should be liable to the inquisition, and that the judges should be taken from amongst the clergy of France. For all their passionate opposition to the Reformation, the Magistrates had no idea of allowing either the kingship or France to fall beneath the yoke of the papacy.
Amidst all these disagreements and distractions in the very heart of Catholicism, the Reformation went on growing from day to day. In 1558, Lorenzo, the Venetian ambassador, set down even then the number of the Reformers at four hundred thousand. In 1559, at the death of Henry II., Claude Haton, a priest and contemporary chronicler on the Catholic side, calculated that they were nearly a quarter of the population of France. They held at Paris, in May, 1559, their first general synod; and eleven fully established churches sent deputies to it. This synod drew up a form of faith called the Gallican Confession, and likewise a form of discipline. “The burgess-class, for a long while so indifferent to the burnings that took place, were astounded at last at the constancy with which the pile was mounted by all those men and all those women who had nothing to do but to recant in order to save their lives. Some could not persuade themselves that people so determined were not in the right; others were moved with compassion. ‘Their very hearts,’ say contemporaries, ‘wept together with their eyes.’” It needed only an opportunity to bring these feelings out. Some of the faithful one day in the month of May, 1558, on the public walk in the Pre-aux-Clercs, began to sing the psalms of Marot. Their singing had been forbidden by the Parliament of Bordeaux, but the practice of singing those psalms had but lately been so general that it could not be looked upon as peculiar to heretics. All who happened to be there, suddenly animated by one and the same feeling, joined in with the singers, as if to protest against the punishments which were being repeated day after day. This manifestation was renewed on the following days. The King of Navarre, Anthony de Bourbon, Prince Louis de Conde, his brother, and many lords took part in it together with a crowd, it is said, of five or six thousand persons. It was not in the Pre-aux-Clercs only and by singing that this new state of mind revealed itself amongst the highest classes as well as amongst the populace. The Queen of Navarre, Jeanne d’Albret, in her early youth, “was as fond of a ball as of a sermon,” says Brantome, “and she had advised her spouse, Anthony de Bourbon, who inclined towards Calvinism, not to perplex himself with all these opinions.” In 1559 she was passionately devoted to the faith and the cause of the Reformation. With more levity, but still in sincerity, her brother-in-law, Louis de Conde, put his ambition and his courage at the service of the same cause. Admiral de Coligny’s youngest brother, Francis d’Andelot, declared himself a Reformer to Henry II. himself, who, in his wrath, threw a plate at his head, and sent him to prison in the castle of Melun. Coligny himself, who had never disguised the favorable sentiments he felt towards the Reformers, openly sided with them on the ground of his own personal faith, as well as of the justice due to them. At last the Reformation had really great leaders, men who had power and were experienced in the affairs of the world; it was becoming a political party as well as a religious conviction; and the French Reformers were henceforth in a condition to make war as well as die at the stake for their faith. Hitherto they had been only believers and martyrs; they became the victors and the vanquished, alternately, in a civil war.
A new position for them, and as formidable as it was grand. It was destined to bring upon them cruel trials and the worth of them in important successes; first, the Saint-Bartholomew, then the accession of Henry IV. and the edict of Nantes. At a later period, under Louis XIII. and Louis XIV., the complication of the religious question and the political question cost them the advantages they had won; the edict of Nantes disappeared together with the power of the Protestants in the state. They were no longer anything but heretics and rebels. A day was to come, when, by the force alone of moral ideas, and in the name alone of conscience and justice, they would recover all the rights they had for a time possessed, and more also; but in the sixteenth century that day was still distant, and armed strife was for the Reformers their only means of defence and salvation. God makes no account of centuries, and a great deal is required before the most certain and the most salutary truths get their place and their rights in the minds and communities of men.
On the 29th of June, 1559, a brilliant tournament was celebrated in lists erected at the end of the street of Saint-Antoine, almost at the foot of the Bastille. Henry II., the queen, and the whole court had been present at it for three days. The entertainment was drawing to a close. The king, who had run several tilts “like a sturdy and skilful cavalier,” wished to break yet another lance, and bade the Count de Montgomery, captain of the guards, to run against him. Montgomery excused himself; but the king insisted. The tilt took place. The two jousters, on meeting, broke their lances skilfully; but Montgomery forgot to drop at once, according to usage, the fragment remaining in his hand; he unintentionally struck the king’s helmet and raised the visor, and a splinter of wood entered Henry’s eye, who fell forward upon his horse’s neck. All the appliances of art were useless; the brain had been injured. Henry II. languished for eleven days, and expired on the 10th of July, 1559, aged forty years and some months. An insignificant man, and a reign without splendor, though fraught with facts pregnant of grave consequences.
CHAPTER XXXII.
FRANCIS II., JULY 10, 1559—DECEMBER 5, 1560.
During the course, and especially at the close of Henry II.‘s reign, two rival matters, on the one hand the numbers, the quality, and the zeal of the Reformers, and on the other, the anxiety, prejudice, and power of the Catholics, had been simultaneously advancing in development and growth. Between the 16th of May, 1558, and the 10th of July, 1559, fifteen capital sentences had been executed in Dauphiny, in Normandy, in Poitou, and at Paris. Two royal edicts, one dated July 24, 1558, and the other June 14, 1559, had renewed and aggravated the severity of penal legislation against heretics. To secure the registration of the latter, Henry II., together with the princes and the officers of the crown, had repaired in person to Parliament; some disagreement had already appeared in the midst of that great body, which was then composed of a hundred and thirty magistrates; the seniors who sat in the great chamber had in general shown themselves to be more inclined to severity, and the juniors who formed the chamber called La Tournelle more inclined to indulgence towards accusations of heresy. The disagreement reached its climax in the very presence of the king. Two councillors, Dubourg and Dufaure, spoke so warmly of reforms which were, according to them, necessary and legitimate, that their adversaries did not hesitate to tax them with being Reformers themselves. The king had them arrested, and three of their colleagues with them. Special commissioners were charged with the preparation of the case against them. It has already been mentioned that one of the most considerable amongst the officers of the army, Francis d’Andelot, brother of Admiral Coligny, had, for the same cause, been subjected to a burst of anger on the part of the king. He was in prison at Meaux when Henry II. died. Such were the personal feelings and the relative positions of the two parties when Francis II., a boy of sixteen, a poor creature both in mind and body, ascended the throne.