When, therefore, Protestantism and Lutheranism began to show head in France, they had no friends at once powerful and zealous. Before Luther, in 1512, Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples laid down in the commentary on his Latin translation of the Pauline Epistles the Lutheran doctrine of grace, and in effect denied the received doctrine of transubstantiation.[114] In 1520 his former pupil, Guillaume Briçonnet, Bishop of Meaux, invited him and some younger reformers, among them Guillaume Farel, to join him in teaching in his diocese; and in 1523 appeared Lefèvre’s translation of and commentary on the gospels, which effectually began the Protestant movement in France.[115]
Persecution soon began. The king’s adoring sister, Margaret, Duchess of Alençon (afterwards Queen of Navarre), was the friend of Briçonnet, but was powerless to help at home even her own intimates.[116] At first the king and his mother encouraged the movement at Meaux while sending out a dozen preachers through France to combat the Lutheran teaching;[117] but in 1524, setting out on his Italian campaign, the king saw fit to conciliate his clergy, and his clerical chancellor Du Prat began measures of repression, the queen-mother assenting, and Briçonnet’s own brother assisting. Already, in 1521, the Sorbonne had condemned Luther’s writings, and the Parlement of Paris had ordered the surrender of all copies. In 1523 the works of Louis de Berquin, the anti-clerical friend of Erasmus, were condemned, and himself imprisoned; and Briçonnet consented to issue synodal decrees against Luther’s books and against certain Lutheran doctrines preached in his own diocese. Only by the king’s intervention was Berquin at this time released.
The first man slain was Jean Chastellain, a shoemaker of Tournay, burned at Vic in Lorraine on January 12, 1525. The next was a wool-carder of Meaux,[118] who was first whipped and branded for a fanatical outrage, then burned to death, with slow tortures, for a further outrage against an image of the Virgin at Metz (July, 1525). Later, an ecclesiastic of the Meaux group, Jacques Banvan of Picardy, was prosecuted at Paris for anti-Lutheran heresy, and publicly recanted; but repented, retracted his abjuration, and was burned on the Place de Grève, in August, 1526; a nameless “hermit of Livry” suffering the same death about the same time beside the cathedral of Notre Dame.[119] Meantime Lefèvre had taken refuge in Strasburg, and, despite a letter of veto from the king, now in captivity at Madrid, his works were condemned by the Sorbonne. When released, the king not only recalled him but made him tutor to his children. Ecclesiastical pressures, however, forced him finally to take refuge under the Queen of Navarre at Nérac, in Gascony, where he mourned his avoidance of martyrdom.[120]
So determined had been the persecution that in 1526 Berquin was a second time imprisoned, and with difficulty saved from death by the written command of the captive king, sent on his sister’s appeal.[121] And when the released king, to secure the deliverance of his hostage sons, felt bound to conciliate the Pope, and to secure funds had to conciliate the clergy, Marguerite, compelled to marry the king of Navarre, could do nothing more for Protestantism,[122] being herself openly and furiously denounced by the Catholic clergy.[123] Bought by a clerical subsidy, the king, on the occasion of a new outrage on a statue of the Virgin (1528),[124] associated himself with the popular indignation; and when the audacious Berquin, despite the dissuasions of Erasmus, resumed his anti-Catholic polemic, and in particular undertook to prove that Béda, the chief of the Sorbonne, was not a Christian,[125] he was re-arrested, tried, and condemned to be publicly branded and imprisoned for life. On his announcing an appeal to the absent king, and to the pope, a fresh sentence, this time of death, was hurriedly passed; and he was strangled and burned (1529) within two hours of the sentence,[126] to the intense joy of the ecclesiastical multitude.
After various vacillations, the king in 1534 had the fresh pretext of Protestant outrage—the affixing of an anti-Catholic placard in all of the principal thoroughfares of Paris, and to the door of the king’s own room[127]—for permitting a fresh persecution after he had refused the Pope’s request that he should join in a general extermination of heresy,[128] and there began at Paris a series of human sacrifices. It will have been observed that Protestant outrages had provoked previous executions; and there is some ground for the view that, but for the new and exasperating outrage of 1534, the efforts which were being officially made for a modus vivendi might have met with success.[129] This hope was now frustrated. In November, 1534, seven men were condemned to be burned alive, one of them for printing Lutheran books. In December others followed; and in January, 1535, on the occasion of a royal procession “to appease the wrath of God,” six Lutherans (by one account, three by another) were burned alive by slow fires, one of the victims being a school-mistress.[130] It was on this occasion that the king, in a public speech, declared: “Were one of my arms infected with this poison, I would cut it off. Were my own children tainted, I should immolate them.”[131]
Under such circumstances religious zeal naturally went far. In six months there were passed 102 sentences of death, of which twenty-seven were executed, the majority of the condemned having escaped by flight. Thereafter the individual burnings are past counting. On an old demand of the Sorbonne, the king actually sent to the Parlement an edict abolishing the art of printing;[132] which he duly recalled when the Parlement declined to register it. But the French Government was now committed to persecution. The Sorbonne’s declaration against Luther in 1521 had proclaimed as to the heretics that “their impious and shameless arrogance must be restrained by chains, by censures—nay, by fire and flame, rather than confuted by argument”;[133] and in that spirit the ruling clergy proceeded, the king abetting them. In 1543 he ordained that heresy should be punished as sedition;[134] and in 1545 occurred the massacres of the Vaudois, before described. The result of this and further savageries was simply the wider diffusion of heresy, and a whole era of civil war, devastation, and demoralization.
Meantime Calvin had been driven abroad, to found a Protestant polity at Geneva and give a lead to those of England and Scotland. The balance of political forces prevented a Protestant polity in France; but nowhere else in the sixteenth century did Protestantism fight so long and hard a battle. That the Reformation was a product of “Teutonic conscience” is an inveterate fallacy.[135] The country in which Protestantism was intellectually most disinterested and morally most active was France. “The main battle of erudition and doctrine against the Catholic Church,” justly contends Guizot, “was sustained by the French reformers; it was in France and Holland, and always in French, that most of the philosophic, historical, and polemic works on that side were written; neither Germany nor England, certainly, employed in the cause at that epoch more intelligence and science.”[136] Nor was there in France—apart from the provocative insults to Catholics above mentioned—any such licence on the Protestant side as arose in Germany, though the French Protestants were as violently intolerant as any. Their ultimate decline, after long and desperate wars ending in a political compromise, was due to the play of socio-economic causes under the wise and tolerant administration of Richelieu, who opened the royal services to the Protestant nobles.[137] The French character had proved as unsubduable in Protestantism as any other; and the generation which in large part gradually reverted to Catholicism did but show that it had learned the lesson of the strifes which had followed on the Reformation—that Protestantism was no solution of either the moral or the intellectual problems of religion and politics.
§ 7. The Political Process in Britain
It was thus by no predilection or faculty of “race” that the Reformation so-called came to be associated historically with the northern or “Teutonic” nations. They simply succeeded in making permanent, by reason of more propitious political circumstances, a species of ecclesiastical revolution in which other races led the way. As Hussitism failed in Bohemia, Lollardism came to nothing in England in the same age, after a period of great vogue and activity.[138] The designs of Parliament on the revenues of the Church at the beginning of the fifteenth century[139] had failed by reason of the alliance knit between Church and Crown in the times when the latter needed backing; and at the accession of Henry VIII England was more orthodox than any of the other leading States of Northern Europe.[140] Henry was himself passionately orthodox, and was much less of a reformer in his mental attitude than was Wolsey, who had far-reaching schemes for de-Romanizing the Church alike in England and France, and who actually gave the king a handle against him by his plans for turning Church endowments to educational purposes.[141] The personal need of the despotic king for a divorce which the pope dared not give him was the first adequate lead to the rejection of the papal authority. On this the plunder of the monasteries followed, as a forced measure of royal finance,[142] of precaution against papal influence, and for the creation of a body of new interests vitally hostile to a papal restoration. The king and the mass of the people were alike Catholics in doctrine; the Protestant nobles who ruled under Edward VI were for the most part mere cynical plunderers, appropriating alike Church goods, lands, and school endowments more shamelessly than even did the potentates of Germany; and on the accession of Queen Mary the nation gladly reverted to Romish usages, though the spoil-holders would not surrender a yard of Church lands.[143] Had there been a succession of Catholic sovereigns, Catholicism would certainly have been restored. Protestantism was only slowly built up by the new clerical and heretical propaganda, and by the state of hostility set up between England and the Catholic Powers. It was the episode of the Spanish Armada that, by identifying Catholicism with the cause of the great national enemy, made the people grow definitely anti-Catholic. Even in Shakespeare’s dramas the old state of things is seen not yet vitally changed.