The three inquisitors-general.
Odet, Cardinal of Châtillon.
His Protestant proclivities.
Paul, who was in the constant habit of saying that the inquisition was the sole weapon suited to the Holy See, the only battering-ram by means of which heresy could be demolished,[620] did not decline the royal invitation. On the twenty-sixth of April he published a bull appointing a commission consisting of the Cardinals of Lorraine, Bourbon, and Châtillon, with power to delegate their authority to others. Of the three prelates, the first was the real instigator of the cruelties practised during this and the subsequent reigns. The Cardinal of Bourbon was known to be as ignorant as he was inimical to the Reformation, and could be depended upon to support his colleague. The Cardinal of Châtillon, brother of Admiral Coligny and of D'Andelot, was added, it is not improbable, from motives of policy. He was already suspected of favoring the reformed doctrines, which subsequently he openly espoused. Indeed, nearly six years before, the English ambassador, Pickering, after alluding to new measures of persecution devised against the Protestants, wrote: "Cardinal Châtillon, as I hear, is a great aider of Lutherans, and hath been a great stay in this matter, which otherwise had been before now concluded, to the destruction of any man that had almost spoken of God's Word. Nevertheless, the Protestants here fear that it cannot come to a much better end, where such a number of bishops and cardinals bear the swing."[621] Châtillon's enemies hoped, by placing him on this inquisitorial commission, where his vote would be powerless in opposition to that of the other two cardinals, to compel him either to enter the rank of persecutors, or declare himself openly for the Reformation, and thus destroy his own credit and that of his powerful family.[622]
The bull confirmed by Henry II.
The papal bull was promptly confirmed by the king, who, in a declaration given at Compiègne, on the twenty-fourth of July, 1557, permitted "his very dear cousins," the three cardinals, to exercise the office of inquisitors-general throughout the monarchy. From sentences given by their subalterns, this document permitted an appeal to be taken, but it was to a body appointed for the purpose by the inquisitors themselves.[623] Parliament, however, again interposed the prerogative it had assumed, of remonstrance and delay, and the king's declaration, as well as the papal bull, remained inoperative.[624]
Judicial sympathy with the victims.
Edict of Compiègne, July 24, 1557.
It is not surprising, perhaps, that the institution of the sacred office, with its bloody code and relentless tribunal, was pressed so repeatedly upon the French monarch and parliament for their acceptance. The number of the Protestants was not only increasing in a most alarming manner,[625] but the very judges before whom, when discovered, the Protestants were brought, began to show signs of compassion, if not of sympathy. So it happened that, in one provincial town, two persons caught with the packages of "Lutheran" books they had brought into France, after they had made an explicit confession of their faith, were condemned, not to the flames, but to the trifling punishment of public whipping; and scarcely had the blows begun to fall upon the backs of the pedlers, when some of the magistrates themselves threw their cloaks around the culprits, whose confiscated books were afterward secretly returned to them, or bought and paid for.[626] To such a formidable height had this irregularity grown, that, on the very day upon which the confirmation of the three proposed inquisitors-general was made, Henry published a new edict (at Compiègne, on the twenty-fourth of July, 1557) intended to secure an adherence to the penalties prescribed by previous laws. The reader of this edict, remembering the frequency with which the estrapade had done its bloody work for the last quarter of a century, will not be astonished to read that the punishment of death is affixed to the secret or public profession of any other religion than the Roman Catholic. But he will rejoice, for the sake of our common humanity, to learn that "it very frequently happens that our said judges are moved with pity by the holy and malicious words of those found guilty of the said crimes;" and that, to secure the uniform infliction of the extreme penalty upon the professors of the reformed faith, it was now necessary for the king to remove from the judges the slightest pretext or authority for mitigating the sentence that condemned a Protestant to the flames or gallows.[627]
Defeat of St. Quentin, Aug. 10, 1557.