Among the people of importance, who had remained faithful to the Reformation, we may cite the Count de Schomberg, who had been commander-in-chief of the armies; the Duke de la Force and his house; a younger branch of the family of La Rochefoucault; several descendants of Duplessis-Mornay; the Marquises de Ruvigny, of whom one was minister-plenipotentiary at London, and the other deputy-general of the churches. The lesser nobility in the provinces had been more firm than the great noblemen. Languedoc, Guienne, Quercy, Saintonge, Poitou, Normandy, still reckoned thousands of gentlemen devoted to the faith of their fathers, and who, in return for the good services they rendered to the king in his armies and his fleets, asked only for a little justice and protection.
XIII.
The abjuration of Turenne renewed the projects of reunion, which had never been entirely abandoned since the attempt of Cardinal de Richelieu. The Prince de Conti, governor of Bas-Languedoc, desirous of making himself agreeable to Louis XIV., had already renewed the endeavour in 1661. The provincial synod of Nismes answered him, in the rude language of the period, by the mouth of their moderator Claude, that the Reformed would be guilty of unpardonable cowardice if they consented to “unite light with darkness, Christ with Belial.”
The project assumed a more serious turn from 1670 to 1673. The Marshal de Turenne took it up with the approbation of the king, and tried to obtain the adhesion of the pastors. An agent of the court visited one after another those who were dependent upon the national synod of Charenton; and partly by threats of the king’s displeasure, and partly by the promise of accomplishing the reunion upon an equitable basis, this emissary succeeded in extorting from several ministers the verbal or written promise of supporting the plan in the next synodal assembly.
It was stated that the king was disposed to extirpate the abuses in the Romish church, which most shocked the Reformed; that the worship of images, purgatory, prayers for the dead, the invocation of saints, would be either suppressed or at least sensibly corrected; that theologians freely chosen from both sides, would have the mission of contriving a mutual understanding upon the doctrine of the Lord’s Supper; that the use of the cup would be restored to the laity, and the religious service would be celebrated in the vernacular; finally, that if the pope sought to oppose these changes, the king would go further, having the word of forty-two bishops upon these articles, and knowing the means of bringing the others to the same opinion.
This was evidently a falsehood. Louis XIV. could not execute what the subaltern agents promised in his name; and if the bishops had refused to make this concession at the colloquy of Poissy, when the Reformation was widely extended throughout the whole kingdom, how could one among them have made such concessions to a small minority, shut up in its places of worship, without political authority, shorn of all power of religious expansion, and well-nigh extirpated?
Nor did the wisest of the Reformed fall into the snare; for they knew that Rome uses two very different languages: the first, when she wishes to gain over heretics; the second, when she has them under her hoof. They knew, moreover, that the accord would, in the end, be limited to an entire submission on their part, followed by a merciful pardon on the other. For this reason, the provincial synod convoked at Charenton, in the month of May, 1673, opposed the new project of reunion with an energetic refusal, and the five pastors, who had promised to support it, solemnly declared their determination against it.
The same attempts produced the like results in Saintonge, Languedoc, and the Vivarais. The court and the clergy at length recognised that there was no rational hope of reducing the Reformed in this direction, and were driven to seek other means for the extermination of heresy.
Two methods, very different in their principle and line of action, were indicated by the adversaries of the Huguenots. The Jansenists, and the most enlightened and most pious of the (Roman) Catholics generally, proposed to convert them by persuasion, fair treatment, and good examples, thinking that it was better to leave the erring without the pale of the Church than to force hypocrites to enter it. The Jesuits and their friends said, on the contrary, that it was incumbent to use both the authority of the king and the Parliaments without reserve, to exact acts of Catholicity at any price, and then to retain folks by the fear of executions, upon the fundamental maxim, that if the new (Roman) Catholics had little faith, their children would have more, and their grandchildren still more. The court balanced a long time between these two systems, which serves to explain its alternatives of mildness and rigour. But in the end, the advice of the Jesuits prevailed.
Ordinances, declarations, decrees, and other acts of the council followed, striking the heretics blow upon blow. Their number was so great that it is impossible to indicate even the substance of them. The Reformed were successively forbidden to raise supplies for the maintenance of their ministers, and the expense of sending them to the synods; to except against suspected judges, although this right was preserved to other Frenchmen; to print religious books without the authorization of the magistrates of the Romish communion; to suborn and corrupt, that is to say, to seek to convert (Roman) Catholics, under pain of a fine of a thousand livres; to celebrate their worship in the places and on the days when the bishops made their tours; to have more than one school and one master in each of the districts where they exercised their religion; to teach by this master anything else than writing, reading, and the elements of arithmetic; and so on. The Reformed were oppressed in their religious faith, their civil person, their political rights, their domestic condition, the education of their children, and each iniquity necessarily produced others. Thus evil ever begets evil.