Calvin has been strongly blamed for giving up these private letters and marginal notes to the Catholic authorities, who had already commenced proceedings against Servetus. It has been said that he laid the whole plot, and caused Servetus to be denounced, in order to destroy a religious adversary and personal enemy, by the instrumentality of the Catholic Church. His hesitation as to whether he ought to give up the papers and allow them to be sent to Lyons, shows that he had some doubt as to the moral rectitude of his conduct; but it shows an extraordinary misapprehension of his character to imagine that this hesitation was an act of hypocrisy, and that the surrender of the papers was a piece of premeditated perfidy. There are no errors, or rather no vices, with which it is so impossible to charge Calvin as with untruth and hypocrisy. During the whole course of his life he openly avowed his thoughts and acknowledged his actions; he left his native country for ever, and the country of his adoption for a long period, just because he was resolved to assert his opinions, and to act according to his opinions. In his transactions with Servetus, he was brought into contact with a man who, whilst he aimed at becoming the most radical of reformers, lived for twelve years at Vienne as a strict Catholic, and secretly printed and distributed a profoundly anti-Christian book; then, seeing that he was in danger, denied his work and his acts, and protested 'that he had never desired to teach or maintain any doctrine opposed to the Church or the Christian religion.' Calvin felt the greatest contempt for so much untruth and cowardice; he openly condemned the book and the conduct of Servetus from the very first; he considered it both a right and a duty to prove the truth of that which he had affirmed, and to show at Lyons as well as at Geneva that the opinions of Servetus were the same as those put forward in the condemned volume, and that Servetus was really the author of it. 'It is reported,' said he, 'that I have contrived to have Servetus taken prisoner in the Papal dominions, that is at Vienne; and thereupon many say that I have not acted honourably in exposing him to the deadly enemies of the faith. There is no need to insist on my vigorously denying such a frivolous calumny, which will fall flat when I have said in one word that there is no truth in it. … If there were any truth in the charge, I should not deny it, and I do not think that it would be at all discreditable to me.' [Footnote 119]
[Footnote 119: Bungener, p. 362.]
The effect produced by this information was what might have been expected. The proceedings at Vienne were at once resumed. Servetus was called upon to explain the marginal notes in the 'Christian Institutes,' and the letters he had written to Calvin. He was greatly troubled, and fell into all kinds of strange and contradictory statements and denials: 'He says that, at first sight, it is impossible for him to say if the letter is his or not, because it has been written so long; however, having looked at it more closely, he certainly thinks that he must have written it; and says that whatever is found in it contrary to the faith, he submits to the decision of our holy Mother Church, from which he has never wished, nor would ever consent to be separated. And if he has written any such things, he says that he wrote them heedlessly, by way of argument and without serious thought.' And then he is said to have burst into tears and uttered the most unexpected lie, denying that he was Servetus: 'I will tell you the whole truth. Twenty-five years ago, when I was in Germany, a book by a certain Servetus, a Spaniard, was published at Aganon (Hagenau); I do not know where he was then living. When I entered into correspondence with Calvin, he charged me with being Servetus, on account of the similarity of our views, and after that I assumed the character of Servetus.' [Footnote 120]
[Footnote 120: Henry, iii. 146.]
This incoherent mass of untruth and confession caused the proceedings to be carried on in a more serious manner. Servetus was arrested and imprisoned. The gaoler received orders to watch him carefully. Nevertheless he was treated with an indulgence by no means common at that time. He was allowed to have his own servant, to keep possession of a gold chain and some rings which he wore, and to send a demand for the payment of 300 crowns which were due to him. He had undoubtedly many staunch friends; probably the vice-Bailli of Vienne, whose sick daughter he had cured, was one, and possibly Monsieur de Montgiron, the Lieutenant-Général in whose service he had been, was another. It was afterwards proved that a servant of the gaoler had said to the servant of Servetus, 'Go and tell your master to escape by the garden.' On the 7th of April, 1553, two days after his imprisonment, Servetus did, in fact, escape in the early morning by a garden which led into the courtyard of the Palais de Justice. He hurried across the bridge over the Rhone, and thus passed from Dauphiné into Lyonnais; at least this was the account given by a peasant, who had met him but was not interrogated until three days after his escape. [Footnote 121]
[Footnote 121: Henry, iii. 147; Gaberel, ii. 248; Revue des deux Mondes, 1848, i. 824.]
No traces of him can be discovered between April and July 1553. He was wandering either in French or Swiss territory; and when, at a later period, he was asked where he had intended to go after his escape from Vienne, he varied in his answers, sometimes naming Spain and at others Italy as his proposed place of refuge. I am inclined to believe that from the very first he intended to make his way to a much nearer spot. Be that as it may, whilst he was wandering from place to place, either undecided as to his future course, or waiting for a fitting opportunity of carrying out his plan, sentence was pronounced upon him by the Catholic judges at Vienne; and on the 17th of June he was condemned 'to be burnt alive over a slow fire, at the place of public execution, so that his body should be reduced to cinders as well as his book.'