History of the Protestants of France, from the commencement of the Reformation to the present time

by G. de Félice

A declaration of the king, published on the 10th November, ordained the re-establishment at La Rochelle of the exercise of the (Roman) Catholic religion, and the restitution to the clergy of their churches and their property. A place of worship was to be designated for the Reformers. The privileges of the town were abolished, its franchises annulled, and its fortifications demolished, except those facing the sea. The Cardinal de Richelieu and the bishop Henri de Sourdis, who had plied the trade of the soldier during the siege, celebrated the first mass at La Rochelle, after having purified the churches. Perhaps the hands which had just quitted the sword, ought to have been first purified themselves before touching the host of the Prince of peace. But the history of mankind is replete with such violent contradictions.

There were great rejoicings at Rome upon the reduction of La Rochelle. Pope Urban VIII. sang a solemn Te Deum, made an extraordinary distribution of indulgences, and addressed to the king briefs of the most flattering kind. “Great prince,” he thus apostrophized Louis XIII., “God sits upon your right hand. May He ever aid and sustain the power and strength of your spear!”

The Duke de Rohan kept the field in the south, until the middle of the following year. He displayed courage, constancy, and self-denial, worthy of a better fate. An assembly of provincial deputies, convoked at Nismes, energetically protested against the overthrow of the political guarantee of the Reformation. It was too late. The Calvinist party had ceased to exist. Each town and village refused obedience to the assembly, and claimed to transact its affairs by itself: then division, defections, and treason, completed the ruin of the general cause.

The royal army presented itself before the little town of Privas, in the month of May, 1629. The inhabitants, seized with terror, amounting to a panic, fled to the fields; and the garrison, which retired to the fort, were soon forced to capitulate. At the moment of the troops entering, the explosion of a powder-magazine caused the suspicion of an ambush. The eight hundred Huguenot soldiers forming the garrison were murdered, fifty burghers hanged, the others sent to the galleys, the town sacked and burnt, and the property of the inhabitants confiscated to the crown. The missionaries, who followed in the rear of the army to convert the heretics, ascribed this catastrophe to the anger of God.

The merciless butchery at Privas spread consternation and dismay. The king marched upon Cevennes without meeting with any resistance; and the Duke de Rohan, seeing that the affairs of his party were desperate, sued for peace, in concert with the general assembly transferred to Anduze. Richelieu imposed as the first condition, that all the fortifications of the Huguenot towns should be razed to the ground. Anduze, and the province of Cevennes, submitted after some difficulty; and the king, being then at Nismes, published the Edict of Grace, in the month of July, 1629.

The name alone of this edict marked a new order of things. It was no longer a pacification—it was a grace, a grace granted by the good-will of the sovereign to his vanquished subjects. The preamble spoke of nothing but their rebellion, and of the goodness of the king: “to which we are the more easily disposed,” Louis XIII. was made to say, “because we have been desirous, by a rare instance of clemency, after so many relapses, the more advantageously to win the hearts of our subjects, spare the effusion of blood, the devastation of the province, and all the disorders and calamities of war; and we are moved to this solely by compassion for their misery and love for their well-being.”

The Reformers were reinstated in the possession of their places of worship, their cemeteries, and the exercise of their religion in the places they had before used, pending their return to the bosom of the (Roman) Catholic church, “in which,” adds Louis XIII., “for more than eleven hundred successive years, the kings, our predecessors, have lived without interruption or change; there being no possible way of so well testifying to the affection we bear them, than by desiring to find them in the same road of salvation that we keep and follow ourselves.”

There was a threat expressed in this hope, and the priests did not fail to avail themselves of it at the opportune time. There was also, as we shall see, a pretence of the Cardinal de Richelieu, who, aspiring to every kind of glory, flattered himself that he would be able to unite the two religions.

The conditions of the Edict of Grace were less severe than had been feared, except as regarded the political guarantees, and some authors have loudly extolled the clemency of the cardinal. If it be sought to establish the opinion that he was more tolerant than other churchmen, because he had more genius, and that he was a better statesman, we shall accord with such an opinion without difficulty. But it must not be forgotten that Richelieu, being leagued with the Swedish and German Protestants for the humiliation of the house of Austria by the sword of Gustavus Adolphus, could not treat the French Reformers with excessive rigour. Nor must it be forgotten that, in France itself, having to combat against the great (Roman) Catholic noblemen, against the king’s brother, the queen-mother, and the reigning queen, the prime minister of Louis XIII. would have been mad to have pushed a whole people to despair, who, in a case of extremity, might have compromised his fortunes and those of the kingdom itself. Richelieu was generous perhaps, but he was, above all, prudent.