A book entitled Julian the Apostate was very fatal to that turbulent divine Samuel Johnson, who in the reign of Charles II. made himself famous for his advocacy of the cause of civil liberty and "no popery." He lived in very turbulent times, when the question of the rights of the Duke of York, an avowed Roman Catholic, to the English throne was vehemently disputed, and allied himself with the party headed by the Earl of Essex and Lord William Russell. He preached with great force against the advocates of popery, and (in his own words) threw away his liberty with both hands, and with his eyes open, for his country's service. Then he wrote his book in reply to a sermon by Dr. Hickes, who was in favour of passive obedience, and compared the future King to the Roman Emperor surnamed the Apostate. This made a great sensation, which was not lessened by the report that he had indited a pamphlet entitled Julian's Arts to undermine and extirpate Christianity. Johnson was subsequently condemned to a fine of one hundred marks, and imprisoned. On his release his efforts did not flag. He wrote An Humble and Hearty Address to all the Protestants in the Present Army at the time when the Stuart monarch had assembled a large number of troops at Hounslow Heath in order to overawe London. This was the cause of further misfortunes; he was condemned to stand in the pillory, to pay another five hundred marks, to be degraded from the ministry, and publicly whipped from Newgate to Tyburn. When the Revolution came he expected a bishopric as the reward of his sufferings; but he was scarcely the man for the episcopal bench. He refused the Deanery of Durham, and had to content himself with a pension and a gift of £1,000.
All men mourn the fate of Algernon Sidney, who perished on account of his political opinions; and his Discourse on the Government, a manuscript which was discovered by the authorities at his house, furnished his enemies with a good pretext. A corrupt jury, presided over by the notorious Jeffreys, soon condemned poor headstrong Sidney to death. He was beheaded in 1683. His early life, his hatred of all in authority, whether Charles I. or Cromwell, his revolutionary instincts, are well known. A few extracts from his fatal MS. will show the author's ideas:—"The supreme authority of kings is that of the laws, and the people are in a state of dependence upon the laws." "Liberty is the mother of virtues, and slavery the mother of vices." "All free peoples have the right to assemble whenever and wherever they please." "A general rising of a nation does not deserve the name of a revolt. It is the people for whom and by whom the Sovereign is established, who have the sole power of judging whether he does, or does not, fulfil his duties." In the days of "the Divine Right of Kings" such sentiments could easily be charged with treason.
Political authors in other lands have often shared the fate of our own countrymen, and foremost among these was Edmund Richer, a learned doctor of the Sorbonne, Grand Master of the College of Cardinal Le Moine, and Syndic of the University of Paris. He ranks among unfortunate authors on account of his work entitled De Ecclesiastica et Politica, potestate (1611), which aroused the anger of the Pope and his Cardinals, and involved him in many difficulties. This remarkable work, extracted chiefly from the writings of Gerson, was directed against the universal temporal power of the Pope, advocated the liberties of the Gallican Church, and furnished Protestant theologians with weapons in order to defend themselves against the champions of the Ultramontane party. He argues that ecclesiastical authority belongs essentially to the whole Church. The Pope and the bishops are its ministers, and form the executive power instituted by God. The Pope is the ministerial head of the Church; our Lord Jesus Christ is the Absolute Chief and Supreme Pastor. The Pope has no power of making canons; that authority belongs to the universal Church, and to general councils. Richer was seized by certain emissaries of a Catholic leader as he entered the college of the Cardinal, and carried off to prison, from which he was ultimately released on the intercession of his friends and of the University. But Richer's troubles did not end when he regained his freedom. Having been invited to supper by Father Joseph, a Capuchin monk, he went to the house, not suspecting any evil intentions on the part of his host. But when he entered the room where the feast was prepared he found a large company of his enemies. The door was closed behind him, daggers were drawn by the assembled guests, and they demanded from him an immediate retractation of all the opinions he had advanced in his work. The drawn daggers were arguments which our unhappy author was unable to resist. As a reward for all his labour and hard study he was obliged to live as an exile, as he mournfully complained, in the midst of a kingdom whose laws he strenuously obeyed, nor dared to set foot in the college of which he had been so great an ornament. In his latter days Richer's studies were his only comfort. His mind was not fretted by any ambition, but he died in the year 1633, overcome by his grief on account of his unjust fate, and fearful of the powerful enemies his book had raised. The age of Richelieu was not a very safe period for any one who had unhappily excited the displeasure of powerful foes.
A strange work of a wild fanatic, John de Falkemberg, entitled Diatribe contre Ladislas, Roi de Pologne, was produced at the beginning of the fifteenth century, and condemned by the Council of Constance in 1414. Falkemberg addressed himself to all kings, princes, prelates, and all Christian people, promising them eternal life, if they would unite for the purpose of exterminating the Poles and slaying their king. The author was condemned to imprisonment at Constance on account of his insane book. As there were no asylums for lunatics in those days, perhaps that was the wisest course his judges could adopt.
The hostility of the Pope to authors who did not agree with his political views has been excited by many others, amongst whom we may mention the learned Pietro Sarpi, born at Venice in 1552. He joined the order of the Servites, who paid particular veneration to the Blessed Virgin, and of that order Sarpi and a satirical writer named Doni were the most distinguished members. Sarpi adopted the name of Paul, and is better known by his title Fra Paolo. He studied history, and wrote several works in defence of the rights and liberties of the Venetian Republic against the arrogant assumptions of Pope Paul V. The Venetians were proud of their defender, and made him their consultant theologian and a member of the famous Council of Ten. But the spiritual weapons of the Pope were levied against the bold upholder of Venetian liberties, and he was excommunicated. His Histoire de l'Interdit (Venice, 1606) exasperated the Papal party. One evening in the following year, as Sarpi was returning to his monastery, he was attacked by five assassins, and, pierced with many wounds, fell dead at their feet. The authorship of this crime it was not hard to discover, as the murderers betook themselves to the house of the Papal Nuncio, and thence fled to Rome. In this book Sarpi vigorously exposed the unlawfulness and injustice of the power of excommunication claimed by the Pope, and showed he had no right or authority to proscribe others for the sake of his own advantage. Sarpi wrote also a history of the Council of Trent, published in London, 1619. His complete works were published in Naples in 1790, in twenty-four volumes.
Another Venetian statesman, Jerome Maggi, very learned in archaeology, history, mathematics, and other sciences, hastened his death by his writings. He was appointed by the Venetians a judge of the town of Famagousta, in the island of Cyprus, which was held by the powerful Republic from the year 1489 to 1571. After one of the most bloody sieges recorded in history, the Turks captured the stronghold, losing 50,000 men. Maggi was taken captive and conducted in chains to Constantinople. Unfortunately he whiled away the tedious hours of his captivity by writing two books, De equuleo and De tintinnabulis, remarkable for their learning, composed entirely without any reference to other works in the squalor of a Turkish prison. He dedicated the books to the Italian and French ambassadors to the Sublime Porte, who were much pleased with them and endeavoured to obtain the release of the captive. Their efforts unhappily brought about the fate which they were trying to avert. For when the affair became known, as Maggi was being conducted to the Italian ambassador, the captain of the prison ordered him to be brought back and immediately strangled in the prison.
The unhappy Jean Lenoir, Canon of Séez, was doomed in 1684 to a life-long servitude in the galleys, after making a public retractation of his errors in the Church of Notre-Dame, at Paris. His impetuous and impassioned eloquence is displayed in all his writings, which were collected and published under the title Recueil de Requêtes et de Factums. The titles of some of his treatises will show how obnoxious they were to the ruling powers—e.g., Hérésie de la domination épiscopale que l'on établit en France, Protestation contre les assemblées du clergé de 1681, etc. These were the causes of the severe persecutions of which he was the unhappy victim. He was fortunate enough to obtain a slight alleviation of his terrible punishment by writing a Complainte latine, in which he showed that the author, although black in name (le noir), was white in his virtues and his character. He was released from the galleys, and sent to prison instead, being confined at Saint Malo, Brest, and Nantes, where he died in 1692.
In times less remote, Simon Linguet, a French political writer (born in 1736), found himself immured in the Bastille on account of his works, which gave great offence to the ruling powers. His chief books were his Histoire Impartiale des Jésuites (1768, 2 vols., in-l2) and his Annales Politiques. After his release he wrote an account of his imprisonment, which created a great sensation, and aroused the popular indignation against the Bastille which was only appeased with its destruction. Linguet's Annales Politiques was subsequently published in Brussels in 1787, for which he was rewarded by the Emperor Joseph II. with a present of 1,000 ducats. Linguet's experiences in the Bastille rendered him a persona grata to the revolutionary party, in which he was an active agent; but, alas for the fickleness of the mob! he himself perished at the hands of the wretches whose madness he had inspired, and was guillotined at Paris in 1794. The pretext of his condemnation was that he had incensed by his writings the despots of Vienna and London.
The Jesuit controversy involved many authors in ruin, amongst others Abbé Caveirac, who wrote Appel à la Raison des Ecrits et Libelles publiés contre les Jésuites, par Jean Novi de Caveirac (Bruxelles, 1762, 2 vols., in-12). This book was at once suppressed, and its author was condemned to imprisonment in 1764, and then sent to the pillory, and afterwards doomed to perpetual exile. He was accused of having written an apology for the slaughter of the Protestants on the eve of St. Bartholomew's Day, but our last mentioned author, Linguet, endeavours to clear his memory from that charge.
A friend of Linguet, Darigrand, wrote a book entitled L'Antifinancier, ou Relevé de quelques-unes des malversations dont se rendent journellement les Fermiers-Généraux, et des vexations qu'ils commettent dans les provinces (Paris, Lambert, 1764, 2 vols., in-12). It was directed against the abominable system of taxation in vogue in France, which was mainly instrumental in producing the Revolution. Darigrand was a lawyer, and had been employed in la ferme générale. He knew all the iniquities of that curious institution; he knew the crushing taxes which were levied, and the tender mercies of the "cellar-rats," the gnawing bailiffs, who knew no pity. Indignant and disgusted by the whole business, he wrote his vehement exposure L'Antifinancier. The government wished to close his mouth by giving him a lucrative post under the same profitable system. This our author indignantly refused; and that method of enforcing silence having failed, another more forcible one was immediately adopted. Darigrand was sent to the Bastille in January 1763. His book is a most forcible and complete exposure of that horrible system of extortion, torture, and ruination which made a reformation or a revolution inevitable.