“We wish that our subjects of the pretended reformed religion, both male and female, having attained the age of seven years, may, and it is hereby made lawful for them to embrace the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman religion; and that, to this effect, they may be allowed to abjure the pretended reformed religion, without their fathers and mothers and other kinsmen being allowed to offer them the least hinderance under any pretext whatever.”
This law enabled any one to go before a Catholic court, and testify that any child had made the sign of the cross, or kissed an image of the Virgin, or had expressed a desire to enter a Catholic church, and that child was immediately wrested from its parents, and placed in a convent for education, while the parents were compelled to defray all the expenses.
A decree was then issued, that all Protestants who would abjure their faith might defer the payment of their debts for three years; should be exempt from taxation, and from the burden of having soldiers quartered upon them. Those who refused were punished with a double portion of taxation and a double quartering of soldiers. Officers were sent to the sick-beds of Protestants, that, by importunity and urgent solicitation, they might convert them to the Catholic faith. Physicians were ordered, under a heavy penalty, to give notice if any Protestants were sick. If any convert from Catholicism were received into any Protestant church, that church edifice was immediately closed, and the further privilege of public worship prohibited; while the Catholic convert was punished with confiscation of property, and banishment from the realm.
From four to ten dragoons were lodged in the house of every Protestant. These fanatic and cruel men were ordered not to kill the Protestants with whom they lodged, but to do every thing in their power to constrain them to abjure their Christian faith.
“They attached crosses to the muzzles of their muskets to force the Protestants to kiss them. When any one resisted, they thrust these crosses against the face and breasts of the unfortunate people. They spared children no more than persons advanced in years.Without compassion for their age, they fell upon them with blows, and beat them with the flat of their swords and the butt of their muskets.They did this so cruelly, that some were crippled for life.”[213]
The Protestants were prohibited from attempting to leave the kingdom, under penalty of perpetual consignment to the galleys. Every book in advocacy of Protestantism, which themost rigorous search could find, was burned. When a representation was made to the king of the terrible suffering these enactments were inflicting upon two millions of Protestants, he replied,—
“To bring back all my subjects to Catholic unity, I would willingly with one hand cut off the other.”
The king flattered himself that he was thus absolutely exterminating Protestantism from France. His officers wrote him very flattering but false accounts of the success which was attending their efforts. It was reported to him, that, by the persuasive energies of this rigorous persecution, sixty thousand Protestants in the district of Bordeaux, and twenty thousand in Montauban, had been converted to the Catholic faith.
In September, 1685, Louvois wrote to the king,—
“Before the end of the month, there will not remain ten thousand Protestants in all the district of Bordeaux, where there were a hundred and fifty thousand the 15th of last month.”