[Footnote 56: Garnier, continuateur de Vellay et Villaret, Histoire de France, vol. xxiv. pp. 536-540.]
[Footnote 57: He was not made Constable of France until 1538.]
On the 29th of January an edict was promulgated which condemned those who harboured heretics, 'Lutherans and others,' to the same penalties as 'the heretics aforesaid,' unless they gave up their guests to justice. An accuser received one-fourth of the victim's goods which were confiscated. A few days before this, on the 13th of January, 1535, Francis I. signed an edict which was still more extraordinary as the work of a king who was a patron of literature: he decreed the abolition of printing because it was the means of propagating heresy, and forbade the printing of any book on pain of death. Six weeks later, however, on the 26th of February, the king was ashamed of such a decree, and delayed its execution indefinitely. [Footnote 58 ]
[Footnote 58: Garnier, Histoire de France, vol. xxiv. p. 140. Henri Martin, Histoire de France, vol. viii. p. 223.]
These edicts were preceded and accompanied by numerous punishments. 'The Journal of a Citizen of Paris,' the writer of which was a Catholic of the period, enumerates with a certain satisfaction twenty-four heretics burnt alive in Paris between the 10th of November, 1534, and the 3rd of May, 1535, without taking into account many who were condemned to less cruel sufferings. The trials were now conducted with great rapidity. The judge of criminal causes in the Court of the Châtelet, passed summary judgment, and the 'Parlement' confirmed his sentence. At first the victims had been strangled before they were burnt, but before long they were burnt alive, in accordance with the custom of the Spanish Inquisition. Even this was not enough, and those who were condemned to die were suspended by iron chains to a kind of seesaw, which 'swung them high into the air and then lowered them' into the fire until at length the executioner cut the rope and the victim fell into the flames. The records of these trials were burnt together with the victims, in order that the reformers might not be able to obtain any reliable account of their martyrs.
Some Protestant historians, both ancient and modern, have asserted that Francis I. was present on several occasions at these horrible spectacles, and they have specially named as one of them the 21st of January, 1535. Not one of the principal contemporary chronicles, either Catholic or Protestant, confirms this imputation; [Footnote 59] we find no mention of it in the 'Journal du Bourgeois de Paris,' nor in Beza, nor in Jean Crespin, the compiler of 'The Book of Martyrs from John Huss to those of the year 1534.' Florimond de Ræmond, a chronicler of the sixteenth century, who was for a short time a Protestant, but very speedily returned to the Catholic faith, and in 1572 was counsellor to the 'Parlement' of Bordeaux, asserts that the sight of these tortures was far from producing that satisfaction and approbation in the public mind which was expected from them.
[Footnote 59: I think M. Michelet and M. Henri Martin were right in rejecting it.]
'Everywhere,' he says, 'the fires were lighted; and although on the one hand the justice and severity of the laws restrained not a few and kept them to their duty, yet on the other hand the stubborn resolution of those who were dragged to execution greatly astonished many. For they saw simple, silly women seeking fierce torments in order to make trial of their faith, and going to their death singing psalms, and with no other cry than Christ, the Saviour; young maidens walking more gaily to the place of torture than they would have done to the nuptial couch; men rejoicing when they saw the terrible implements and preparations for death, and although half-burnt and roasted, yet immoveable as rocks when the waves of torture dashed over them. These sad and incessant sights excited some disquietude not only in the minds of simple folk, but among those of the higher classes, for they could not persuade themselves that these people had not reason on their side, since they maintained their opinions with so much resolution and at the cost of life. Others had compassion upon them, were grieved to see them so persecuted, and when they beheld the remains of those sufferers, their blackened corpses hanging in vile chains in the public streets, they could not restrain their tears; nay, their very hearts wept as well as their eyes.'
It was in the presence of such facts as these, and under the influence of the horror and terror with which they inspired the reformers, that Calvin resolved to leave his own country and to seek elsewhere safety, liberty, and the possibility of defending a cause which had become all the dearer to him because it was so cruelly persecuted. He was too shrewd not to perceive that he must quickly exhaust the different asylums open to him: Queen Margaret did not wish to go too far in opposition to the king her brother; the canon Louis du Tillet was half afraid that his fine library might be compromised through the use made of it by his guest, who was expounding and preaching in the neighbourhood of Angoulême; Gérard Roussel, the Queen's chaplain, thought Calvin was going too far, and was afraid that if the Reformation succeeded completely, the bishopric of Oléron, which he wanted and at a later period obtained, would be suppressed; Le Fèvre d'Etaples, who had more sympathy with Calvin than any of the others, was seventy-nine years old, and desired that his days might end in peace.