The Inquisition revealed

by Thomas Timpson

Francis returned to Paris in the character of a doubly perjured vassal of the Pope, bound to assume the office of the persecutor, and take the lead in devoting to tortures and to death the most virtuous, enlightened and faithful of his subjects. The great change which had taken place in the temper of Francis on his return from Spain, became remarkably manifest on his delivering up Louis Berquin, called “the most learned of the nobility,” to the vengeance of the inquisitors. His books were seized, and, in order to strike at the root of the heresy, Luther’s writings were publicly burnt before the cathedral of Notre Dame. Berquin remained faithful; he refused to purchase life by the sacrifice of his faith; and Francis ceased to be protector and king. When the parliament interfered with his early schemes of policy, his haughty reply had been, “There is a king in France;” and when the court, responding to the proud spirit of the sovereign, interfered on the former arrest of Berquin, the king exclaimed, “Of what is he accused? Of challenging the custom of invoking the Virgin in place of the Holy Ghost! Is it for such trifles that they imprison a king’s officer? It is an attack, aimed at literature, true religion, the nobility, nay, the crown itself.” But Francis had descended from this kingly standing to become the wretched tool of a bigoted priesthood. Berquin, the “king’s officer,” was abandoned to his enemies. He was condemned to have his tongue pierced and to be burnt alive; and the sentence was executed with the most merciless severity. Berquin held fast his faith; and his execution was followed by that of fourteen other reformers, who were burnt at the stake, maintaining, to their latest breath, the true faith of Christ.

Francis not only allowed a free course to the inquisitors, and abandoned the nobles of France to their fury, he was drawn to be their humble agent among the executioners of their cruelties. At the beginning of 1535, Jean Morin, the surintendant-criminel, flung into prison immense numbers of men, women, and children, who attended the religious meetings of the evangelicals. They were betrayed by a man named Guainier, who had been employed to keep watch at their secret religious assemblies. These furnished victims for a solemn procession, which the king ordered at Paris, January 21, 1535, in expiation of the offence pretended to have been committed in certain placards, which denied the Romish doctrine of transubstantiation.

Laval, in his “History of the Protestant Reformation in France,” describes this procession, thus expressed by a modern writer:—“Between the hours of eight and nine in the morning the procession began to issue from the church of Saint Geneviéve. There was a long line of priests, dressed in their gorgeous garments; the streets were strewed with flowers, and the windows were crowded with spectators. First were borne the bodies and relics of all the martyrs preserved in the different churches of Paris,—St. Germain, St. Merry, St. Marceau, St. Geneviéve, St. Opportune, St. Landré, St. Honoré; and all those relics of the Holy Chapel which had never been exposed to the public gaze since the grand and mournful day of the funeral of Saint Louis. Then followed a great number of cardinals in their scarlet robes; of bishops, abbés, and other prelates, and all the members of the University of Paris, marching in regular order. Then came Du Bellay, bishop of Paris, carrying in his hands the holy sacrament. Then the king, with his head bare, and bearing a large waxen taper in his hand; then the queen; the princes of the blood; two hundred gentlemen; the king’s guard; the court of parliament; the master of requests, and all the officers of justice. The ambassadors of the emperor, of England, of Venice, &c., were present. The procession, in grave order, proceeded through all the larger streets of Paris; and at six principal places there were erected at each a reposoir, or temporary altar, adorned with flowers, crucifixes, candlesticks, &c., &c. Little children, dressed as angels, or holding the lamb of peace, are usually to be seen at these reposoirs; but here was now a terrible spectacle prepared. At each altar a scaffold and a pile had been arranged, where were very cruelly burned six people, amid the marvellous shouts and rejoicings of the populace, so highly excited, that it was with difficulty they were prevented from snatching the victims out of the hands of the executioners and tearing them in pieces. But if the fury of these was great, the constancy of the martyrs was greater still. The cruelty of the people, in tearing these sufferers to atoms, would have been mercy, compared to the barbarity of the king. He had commanded that these victims should be fastened to a very lofty machine, the beam of which projecting, was, by means of pulleys, raised and lowered alternately; and as it rose and fell it plunged the martyr into a blazing pile below, and raised him up again in order to prolong his sufferings. This continued till the flames had destroyed the cords which bound him, and the body sank into the fire. This horrible machine was not set in motion till the king, queen, and all present might enjoy the satisfaction of seeing the heretic tormented with the flames; during which time the king, handing his torch to the Cardinal de Loraine, joined his hands, and prostrating himself humbly, called down the blessing of heaven upon his people; and in this attitude remained until the agonies of the victim had terminated.

“The procession ended where it began, at the church of St. Geneviéve. The holy sacrament was replaced in the tabernacle, and the mass was sung by the archbishop of Paris. After this there was a splendid dinner, at which the archbishop received the king, the peers, the ambassadors, the courts of parliament, &c., &c. At the conclusion of which entertainment, the king, addressing the numerous guests, after expressing his grief at the execrable opinions that were disseminated in his dominions, said ‘that he had determined and commanded that the most rigorous punishment should be inflicted upon the delinquents; and he required all his subjects to denounce every one whom they should know to be adherents unto, or accomplices in such blasphemies, without regard to alliance, lineage, or friendship. As for himself, if his very arm were thus corrupted, he would tear it from his body; and if his own children were found guilty of falling into such enormities, he would at once yield them up as a first sacrifice to God!’ To give force to his words, the king ordered the executions of the sacramentaries to continue; and from that time the numbers who perished by the balançoire (or swing) is appalling.”

Europe was filled with the reports of these cruelties on the French reformers, and the Protestant princes remonstrated with the king. But Francis had become the slave of superstition and priestly intolerance, and governed by the inquisitors of Rome. He continued his cruel and impolitic course, under the counsel of the inquisitors; and issued a terrible edict, in 1540, against the Vaudois, requiring “that the villages of Mirandol, Cabrieres, Les Aignes, and other places shall all be destroyed, the houses razed to the ground; their caverns and other subterranean retreats demolished; their forests cut down; their fruit trees torn up by the roots; the principal chiefs executed; and the women and children exiled for perpetuity.”

These people were reported as exemplary in their industry; that “they never say mass for the dead; they have prayer in the vulgar tongue; they have no bishops, nor priests, but men whom they elect as simple ministers.” The Papists, therefore, hated their religion, and envied their prosperity, resulting from industry; so that they prevailed on the king to abandon his deserving subjects to the exterminating sword and fire of the inquisitors. Men, women, and children were massacred with fiendish cruelty. Towns, villages, and hamlets were devoted to the flames. Death was threatened to all who should offer food or shelter to the fugitives, so that those who escaped the sword of the persecutors, perished in the mountains.

Francis is said to have been stung with remorse on reflecting upon this infamous massacre, especially on his death-bed. He died in 1547, as the persecutor dies,—despairing, dishonoured, and undeplored. His eldest son, the dauphin, died of poison, administered by his cup-bearer; and his own death is believed to have been caused by the same instrument of revenge, administered by the husband of a lady whom he had dishonoured. His character, therefore, was worthy of “the mystery of iniquity,” the Romish Antichrist.

France exhibited a long series of the most bloody scenes, after the decease of Francis I., the horrid fruit of the Inquisition, the detail of which would require a volume. Notwithstanding persecution, the Protestants increased greatly; so that, in 1570, it is recorded, there were two thousand one hundred and fifty congregations of Protestants in France, some of them containing two thousand members! Papal intrigues were long employed, under the direction of the inquisitors, for their extirpation; and the pages of history do not contain such another record of monstrous treachery and malignant barbarity, as that of St. Bartholomew, in 1572. It is to be remembered that the deed was perpetrated in the name of the religion of Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace!

Charles IX., king of France, guided by his wicked mother, the infamous Catherine de Medicis, was induced, by the agents of the Pope, to resolve upon exterminating, by one decisive effort, all the dissenters from the Romish church. For this purpose, many of the principal Protestants were invited to Paris, under a solemn oath of safety, to celebrate the marriage of the king of Navarre with the French king’s sister. The queen dowager of Navarre, a zealous Protestant, was destroyed before the marriage was solemnised, by means of poison, concealed in a pair of gloves. The inhuman butchery commenced at the tolling of the bell of the Palais de Justice, at two o’clock in the morning of the 24th of August (the Sabbath), by the murder of the Admiral Coligny, who had been shot at and wounded two days previously. The hypocritical king of France visited him, and declared the admiral’s wound was his own. But the shocking work was conducted by the Duke of Guise, urged on by the king himself in person!

Most dreadful was the scene. The shrieks of women and children rent the air, mingled with the shouts and blasphemous execrations of their murderers. “Imagine,” says a French author, “sixty thousand assassins, armed with pistols, stakes, cutlasses, poniards, knives, and other deadly weapons, rushing along the streets, blaspheming and abusing the sacred name of God, and murdering and mutilating the innocent and defenceless, amid a horrible tempest of yells and savage cries, and the piteous shrieks of those whom they dragged through the mire, or flung headlong into the bloody Seine!” Five hundred gentlemen, and ten thousand of the common people are believed to have been sacrificed in this horrid massacre, in three days, within the walls of Paris alone. But the bloody work extended to all places where these evangelical dissenters were known; and it is calculated that not less than a hundred thousand Protestants were at this time destroyed in France!