History of the Reformation in Europe in the Time of Calvin, Vol. 6 (of 8)

by J. H. Merle d'Aubigné

The three fugitives having been summoned with sound of trumpet, for three days in succession, and failing to appear, the solicitor-general presented their indictment in seventy-four counts. Thirty-two witnesses made their depositions; and on June 5 De Chapeaurouge, Lullin, and Monathon, were condemned by default to be beheaded, as forgers and rebels, who had been the cause and might again be the cause of great evils to the state. Capital punishment was readily inflicted in the sixteenth century; but the accused had fled, and it was a long way from the sentence to the execution.

JEAN PHILIPPE.

The party which was favorable to the three articulants and hostile to the reformers continued to exist in Geneva, and had for its chief a capable man, the captain-general Jean Philippe, who was syndic in 1538, with Jean Lullin and Ami de Chapeaurouge. These three men, with the violent Richardet, had, as we have seen, got Farel and Calvin banished, and after having done much harm to the Church, had not hesitated to involve the state in the most cruel perplexities. Jean Philippe, by his violence, was on the point of still further increasing the troubles of the city. ‘A rich man, and not niggardly,’ says Bonivard, ‘he was very liberal to his comrades, especially those of the sword; and this made him beloved of all. A man of courage for action, he was not prudent in his projects, and he no more hesitated to risk his person than his purse. Imprudent and impudent, hasty to believe, slow to disbelieve, as soon as any hectoring fellow, among those whom he thought fit for the battle, made a report to him, he believed it. And he was hard to be undeceived because he had not capacity for appreciating a sound reason; and this caused him to do many rash things.’ Such was the man who had at his beck the party which, after having been supreme in Geneva, had just received so severe a check. Jean Philippe could not, without annoyance, see the sentence carried out against his colleagues; and he understood that the result of it must be the ruin of his whole party, unless he succeeded in arresting the course of the popular torrent which was now rushing in a direction opposed to them. Discontented and murmuring against those who had obliged Lullin and De Chapeaurouge to take flight, he was a prey to the bitterest apprehensions. After the sentence, Philippe and his adherents ‘banded themselves together,’ says Bonivard, ‘and waited for an opportunity of vengeance and of reinstating the three in their former honors. Their party, in defiance of their opponents, held banquets in the public places. After all this thunder there must needs be rain, hail, and fall of thunderbolts, to clear the sky.’ The storm indeed did not fail to burst forth.

A RIOT.

A phenomenon was at this time visible at Geneva which has been produced in almost all nations; the conquerors were divided amongst themselves. The party which in 1538 had banished the reformers was divided into two. The more fiery minds were for pushing their victory to an extreme, the more discreet, on the other hand, slackened their pace and restrained their passions. The impetuous young men of Geneva were irritated at seeing the leaders under whom they had fought condemned to death and fugitives. On the day after their condemnation, Sunday, June 16, many Genevese, according to custom, were assembled on the plain of Plainpalais, situated at the gates of the town, and were practising archery. Some of them meeting Jean Philippe and his friends, shouted at them, ‘Artichokes!’ It will not be forgotten that this was the popular nickname given to the articulants. This little word did a great deal of mischief. ‘The tongue,’ says Calvin, ‘carries a man away and sweeps him along like a flood, just as wild unbroken horses whirl along a chariot with such force and swiftness that nothing can stop it.’ This is what now occurred at Geneva. The nickname greatly annoyed the captain-general, and he swore to take vengeance. ‘There are three hundred of us who will one day arise and hamstring so many of these evangelists and Lutherans that it shall be a thing never to be forgotten.’ This saying was attributed to him, but he afterwards denied it. The captain-general, on returning from Plainpalais, went to sup with some of his friends at the hotel de l’Ange; while other adherents of his were eating and drinking at his expense at the hotel du Brochet. Some of them, after leaving the table, met some citizens of the opposite party on the bridge over the Rhone. ‘Nothing more than hard words passed between them,’ says Bonivard, ‘with the exception of Jean Philippe, who seized a halberd, and, as though he were out of his mind, without distinguishing friend from foe, struck blows right and left, and wounded two or three persons.’ Then this fierce partisan crossed the Rhone to go to St. Gervais, where most of his familiar associates lived. He summoned and got them together, a grave proceeding for a captain-general, and passing the bridge with them, reached the square of La Fusterie. There he found a large body of his adversaries. A conflict began. Jean Philippe struck other blows. ‘With the point of his halberd he wounded one Jean d’Abères in the breast,’ says Bonivard, ‘so seriously that he had to be carried to his house.’ One Jean de Lesclefs gave with his partisan a blow on the head to Ami Perrin, ‘a citizen,’ says Bonivard, ‘who was fond of being splendidly attired and of good living, and who at this time belonged to the party of honest men.’ Claude of Geneva, a friend of Perrin, discharged a pistol at Lesclefs, and the shot entering near the heart killed him. The captain-general, repulsed, withdrew to his own house with his adherents, who kept firing their arquebuses from within. The syndic Philippin, wishing to allay the disturbance, was wounded by these men, and a servant of one of their own number, putting his head out at the window, was also struck. It was very generally believed that the captain-general had formed a conspiracy to upset the government which had just condemned his friends. It is difficult to decide. We may, however, suppose that it was a riot rather than a conspiracy.[831]

At nine o’clock in the evening of the same day the council convoked the Two Hundred, and gave orders to guard the town-gates to prevent the flight of the culprits. The next day, at five in the morning, the Council of the Two Hundred held a sitting, gave orders that the citizens should assemble in arms before the town-house to support their decisions, and commanded the officers of justice to go to the house of the captain-general to arrest him and all who should be with him. But Jean Philippe, well aware that the position of a commander-in-chief of the Genevese militia, who placed himself in open and armed revolt against the government, was a very grave one, had quitted his house, escaped by the roofs, and thus reached the hostelry of the Tour Perce, which belonged to a brother of Lullin. As the agents of the council did not find him either at home or elsewhere, proclamation was made in the town with sound of trumpet, that whosoever might know where he was, was to disclose it. The magistrate was informed, it is not known by whom, that the captain-general was concealed in the Tour Perce. ‘At once everybody was off thither,’ says Bonivard; ‘then they searched for Philippe from cellar to garret, and he was at last found lying in the stable under the hay.’ They led him immediately to the syndics, who were waiting for him at the door. They had him seized by the guards and taken to the Evêché (a prison). But it was effected with great difficulty, for it was all that the guards with their halberds and the syndics with their bâtons could do to prevent the people from killing him in their hands. ‘Here we may see an instance,’ adds the prisoner of Chillon, ‘of the trust we should place in a people.’[832]

TRIAL OF JEAN PHILIPPE.

The witnesses were heard, and Jean Philippe underwent an examination on the criminal acts with which he stood charged. These acts were proved and he confessed them. The whole town was stirred. The people cried aloud for justice and said ‘that they would do execution on the murderers if the tribunals failed to do it. The preachers themselves exhorted to pray and to execute justice.’[833] A scene at once pathetic and terrible occurred to raise still higher the general excitement. Jean d’Abères having sunk under his wounds, ‘his wife caused the body of her husband to be carried on a bench to the front of the town-house, and accompanied it crying incessantly, Justice! justice! justice! weeping and smiting herself.’[834] Her children were round her, weeping and crying out as she did. A dead body, and especially the body of a husband and father, surrounded by those who loved him, has always great power to touch the heart. The solicitor-general presented his bill of indictment. It set forth that Jean Philippe ‘had always been esteemed a seditious man, who had been accustomed to gather round him all the restless spirits; that he had assembled them on the previous Sunday, taking up arms against the city of Geneva; that in order to accomplish his murderous intentions he had placed armed men in his house; that he was a murderer and voluntary homicide, his hands dyed with blood; that out of the fulness of his heart he had uttered these words or the like of them, ‘I will kill so many people that I shall be surfeited.’ The solicitor-general moved in conclusion that the council should execute justice immediately, ‘as shameless and tumultuous proceedings and horrid enterprises, and in the same manner as in cases of high treason.’ Sentence was pronounced by the syndic Etienne de Chapeaurouge, nephew of one of the fugitives. Philippe was condemned ‘to have his head severed from shoulders till the soul was separated from the body.’ The execution took place the same day. De Chapeaurouge, after having pronounced sentence, absented himself from the council, and one or two others likewise withdrew.

Thus, of the four syndics who had decreed the banishment of Farel and Calvin, two had been condemned as forgers and rebels, and a third had just been executed as a mover of sedition and a homicide. There remained the fourth of them, Richardet. He had united force with ridicule, and had said ironically to Calvin when expelling him, ‘The gates of the town are wide enough for you to go out.’ As he had taken part in the sedition of Jean Philippe, he took fright and wished to make his escape. Unwilling to go out by the gates of the town, however wide they were, for fear of being recognized and arrested, ‘he let himself down through a window in the town walls,’ says Rozet, ‘burst (se creva) because he was heavy, and did not live long after.’ ‘As he was very fat,’ says Gautier, ‘the rope broke, and the fall caused him a contusion of which he shortly after died.’[835]

It is hardly possible to avoid being struck with the fate of these four men. The Greeks conceived the idea of a goddess, Nemesis, charged with the duty of overthrowing an insolent prosperity and of avenging crimes, who winged her way through the air, encompassed by serpents, provided with torches and inflicting terrible vengeance. ‘We cannot pass over,’ says Rozet, ‘the remarkable judgment of God on the four syndics of the year 1538, who being elected by the people as adversaries of the religion of the reformation sworn to, had banished the ministers and routed their friends. Two years later, in one and the same year, in the month of June, all four of them, at the instigation of the people themselves, came to confusion and ruin by their crimes.’[836] History can hardly furnish a more striking illustration of the truth proclaimed by the great poet, ‘Punishment, though lame, seldom fails to overtake the guilty.’