The situation of the Reformers grew worse, in spite of the reiterated declarations of the council respecting the faithful execution of the edicts. Their rights were continually disregarded in the courts of justice, in the nominations to public offices, hospitals, the dole of alms, places of worship, everywhere and wherever it was possible to vex and harass them without too openly violating the laws.
In the States-General, assembled in 1614, the orator of the Tiers-parti spoke in favour of toleration. But the clergy and even the nobility gave the meeting to understand that, sooner or later, the king would fulfil the oath of his coronation, by which he had promised to expel all heretics denounced by the Church from the countries of his jurisdiction. Cardinal Duperron declared that the edicts were only provisional or suspensive, and that all that had been granted was a simple reprieve to rebellious subjects.
It would be difficult in our time to conceive to what extent the demands of the clergy against heretics proceeded, on being preferred to the king, after they had deliberated upon them in their general assemblies. They embraced a prohibition to write against the sacraments of the Romish church and the authority of the pope; prohibition to keep schools in the cities, and even in the suburbs of episcopal towns; prohibition for the ministers to enter hospitals to console the sick of their communion; prohibition for foreigners to teach anything but (Roman) Catholicism; prohibition for the judges of chambers, equally divided by an equality of votes, to adopt the less rigorous sentence; lastly, a speedy interdiction of all exercise of the pretended Reformed religion. These demands were periodically renewed, with clauses increasingly harsh and oppressive, until the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and afterwards down to 1787. It was not until the great voice of the nation raised itself in the Constituent Assembly, that that of the priests was finally silenced.
The project of a double marriage—between the young king with an infanta of Spain, and of the prince of the Asturias with a daughter of France—a project supported by the Holy See—redoubled the fears of the Huguenots. It was generally rumoured that one of the conditions of the alliance between the two courts, was the destruction of heresy, and the (Roman) Catholic preachers took this as the text of their sermons. “If the Jesuits,” wrote Duplessis-Mornay to the chancellor De Sillery, “preach without circumlocution, that the design of this double marriage with Spain is to be the extirpation of heresy, can any one be surprised that our churches should take alarm, and that the minutes of the assemblies should speak of it?”
The Prince de Condé, a bigoted (Roman) Catholic, as we have seen, tried to turn the disquietude of the Calvinist party to the advantage of his personal cause, by invoking the memory of his father and grandfather. He published a manifesto in 1615, in which he told the Reformers that the Edict of Nantes would be abolished, and that the king’s only object in collecting his troops was their extermination. These provocations carried away some gentlemen of the political assemblies of Grenoble and Nismes. The Duke de Rohan took the field on the side of Saintonge; but the body of the Calvinists, including Lesdiguières, Châtillon, Sully, and Mornay, did not rise. The last wrote on this occasion, that “a negotiation would be renewed, by means of which the prince would be contented; while their churches would remain behind, loaded with all the odium, and perhaps also with the war itself.” This is exactly what happened. Condé made his peace with the court, without any regard for the position or the interests of his allies.
A more serious event—the oppression of the Reformation in Béarn—occurred to furnish more weighty motives for the recommencement of the wars of religion.
The principality of Basse-Navarre and Béarn, annexed to France by Henry IV., was more closely re-united in 1617. Three-fourths of the population, some say nine-tenths, belonged to the Reformed communion. They were nevertheless ordered to reinstate the priests in all the ecclesiastical property which had been applied, since the year 1569, to the use of the churches, schools, hospitals, and poor.
The Jesuit Arnoux said that this property “belonged to God, who was its owner,” and that consequently no one had the power or the right to take it.
The States of Béarn, the nobility, the magistrates of the towns, the people, all protested energetically, but in vain. The king took the field at the head of an army, and the Béarnese not being able to oppose more than a short resistance, he entered the town of Pau on the 15th October, 1620. He remained there no longer than two days, “for there was no church there,” says an historian of the time, “where he might thank God, from whom he held this inheritance, and he therefore went to have the mass chanted before his soldiers, at Navarreins, where it had not been solemnized for fifty years previously. Bishops, abbots, and curates re-entered into possession of the property of the church, the Jesuits taking a goodly share.”
The course of the royal troops was marked with cruel violence. “Nothing was heard to escape from the mouth of the most moderate,” says Elie Benoît, “but threats of exemplary punishment; of hanging, decapitating, and abolishing the Reformed religion throughout the whole kingdom, which they called accursed; of banishing all who professed it, or of compelling them to wear some badge of infamy.” The soldiers shattered the doors of the churches, demolished the walls, tore the books and the tables where the commandments of God were written. They robbed and maltreated the peasants with their staves and their swords, who came to the market of Pau, adjudging them beforehand to be all Huguenots. They forced the Reformers, who fell into their hands, to make the sign of the cross, and to kneel when the procession [of the host] passed by. The women dared not venture into the streets.... Some, who were with child, they compelled to swear to baptize their infants at the Romish church. “Children were carried off, the parents knew not whither, or how to recover them; and all this was done under the eyes of the king, who refused even to listen to the complaints of the injured. In the other parts of the country, the soldiers lived as they pleased; publicly told that the king had given the Huguenots up to them for pillage, they expelled the ministers, outraged their wives, and drove men and women to mass with blows and with curses.”[75]