On the third day of the massacre, the priests led the king in royal state to the cathedral of Notre Dame, when high mass was performed; and then solemn thanksgivings to God were rendered, as for the victory which he had thus granted over the enemies of the church! This melancholy tragedy was known to have been contrived by the Romish inquisitors. The announcement of it was received by the clergy, at Rome and in Spain, with expressions of unbounded exultation. The messenger who brought the news to Rome was rewarded with a thousand crowns; and when the letters from the papal legate residing at the French court were read in the assembly of cardinals, it was decreed, that the Pope should march with his cardinals to the church of St. Mark, to offer solemn thanks to God for so signal a blessing conferred upon the see of Rome! Medals to commemorate this horrid deed were struck in Paris and in Rome, by order of the Governments; and that of Pope Gregory XIII., though proclaiming the everlasting dishonour of the papacy and the Inquisition, may still be obtained at the mint of Rome!
Charles IX. raged in savage cruelty against the Protestants. Even the king of Navarre and the prince of Condé were devoted to the same destruction; but their lives were spared on their professing to be reconciled to the Romish church; the king of France, with a terrible oath, proposing to them, “mass, death, or the Bastile for life!” This royal bigot, however, fell a victim to guilt and remorse; for he died, May 30th, 1574, in the twenty-fifth year of his age, after suffering dreadful bodily and mental anguish, poisoned, as many believed, by the hand of his own mother!
As to the sacrifices of the Protestants in France, it is collected from authentic records that during forty years, in the middle of this century, not less than a million were the victims of the unrelenting bigotry of the Romish inquisitors!
Protestantism still survived in France; and many again took up arms in their own defence, until 1598, when Henry IV., of Navarre, succeeded to the throne. He granted the famous “Edict of Nantes,” which was called “Irrevocable!” and by which the Protestants were allowed liberty of conscience, the free exercise of their religion, and access to all places of public trust and dignity. But the Papists continued by all kinds of intrigues to annoy them. One shameful invasion of their rights succeeded another, by the enactment of inhuman laws, until the reign of Louis XIV., who was prevailed on, in 1685, by the Popish bishops and the Jesuits, contrary to the most solemn obligations which human or divine laws can frame, to revoke the “Irrevocable Edict of Nantes.”
By this means it was intended, in one grand effort, to extirpate the very remembrance of the Protestant profession in France. Reconciliation with Rome was required, or banishment from the kingdom. Fifteen days were allowed to the preachers and professors, and many of them fled. About eight hundred thousand, chiefly artisans, escaped from the dragoons, who were commissioned to destroy those who would not conform. Many of the exiles, being weavers, were well received in England, where they contributed greatly to the wealth and prosperity of the nation, by their woollen factories in Yorkshire and the west, and by their silk works in Spitalfields, London.
Those who could not escape were treated with every species of brutality. “The troopers, soldiers and dragoons,” says a French Protestant author, in 1686, “went into the Protestants’ houses, where they marred and defaced their household stuff, broke their looking-glasses, and other utensils and ornaments. Those things which they could not destroy in this manner—such as furniture of beds, linens, wearing apparel, plate, &c.,—they carried to the market-place, and sold them to the Jesuits and other Roman Catholics. They turned the dining-rooms of gentlemen into stables for their horses; and treated the owners of the houses where they were quartered with the highest indignity and cruelty, lashing them about from one to another, day and night, without intermission, not suffering them to eat or drink. In several places the soldiers applied ret-hot irons to the hands and feet of men and breasts of women. At Nantes they hung up several women and maids by their feet, and others by their arm-pits, and thus exposed them to public view, stark naked. They bound to posts mothers that gave suck, and let their sucking infants lie languishing in their sight for several days and nights, crying, mourning, and gasping for life. Some they bound before a great fire, and, being half-roasted, let them go—a punishment worse than death. Amidst a thousand hideous cries and blasphemies, they hung up men and women by the hair, and some by their feet, on hooks in chimneys, and smoked them with wisps of wet hay till they were suffocated. They tied some under the arms with ropes, and plunged them again and again into wells; they bound others like criminals, put them to the tortures, and, with a funnel, filled them with wine, till the fumes of it took away their reason, when they made them say they consented to be Catholics. They stripped them naked, and, after a thousand indignities, stuck them with pins and needles from head to foot. They cut and slashed them with knives; and sometimes with red-hot pincers took hold of them by the nose and other parts of the body, and dragged them about the rooms till they promised to be Catholics. They beat them with staves, and thus bruised, and with broken bones, dragged them to the church, where their forced presence was taken for abjuration. In some places they tied fathers and husbands to their bed-posts, and, before their eyes, ravished their wives and daughters with impunity. With these scenes of desolation and horror the popish clergy feasted their eyes, and made them only a matter of laughter and sport. Though my heart aches, I beg the reader’s patience to lay before him two other instances, which, if he hath a heart like mine, he will not be able to read without watering these sheets with tears. The first is of a young woman, who being brought before the council, upon refusing to abjure her religion, was ordered to prison. There they shaved her head, singed off the hair from other parts of her body; and having stripped her stark naked, led her through the streets of the city, where many a blow was given her, and stones flung at her; then they set her up to the neck in a tub of water for awhile; they took her out, and put on her a shift dipped in wine, which, as it dried and stuck to her sore and bruised body, they snatched off again, and then had another ready dipped in wine to clap on her. This they repeated six times, thereby making her body exceeding raw and sore. When all these cruelties could not shake her constancy, they fastened her by the feet in a kind of gibbet, and let her hang in that posture, with her head downward, till she expired!
“The other is of a man in whose house were quartered some of these missionary dragoons. One day, having drunk plentifully of his wine, and broken their glasses at every health, they filled the floor with fragments, and by often walking over them reduced them to very small pieces. This done, in the insolence of their mirth they resolved on a dance, and told their Protestant host that he must be one of their company; but as he would not be of their religion, he must dance quite bare-foot; and thus bare-foot they drove him about the room, treading on the sharp points of the broken glasses. When he was no longer able to stand, they laid him on a bed, and, in a short time, stripped him stark naked, and rolled him from one end of the room to the other, till every part of his body was full of the fragments of glass. After this they dragged him to his bed; and, having sent for a surgeon, obliged him to cut out the pieces of glass with his instruments, thereby putting him to the most exquisite and horrible pains that can be possibly conceived!
“These, fellow Protestants, were the methods used by the ‘Most Christian King’s’ apostolic dragoons to convert his heretical subjects to the Roman Catholic faith! These, and many other of the like nature, were the torments to which Louis XIV. delivered them over to bring them to his own church; and as popery is unchangeably the same, these are the tortures prepared for you, if ever that religion should be permitted to become settled amongst you; the consideration of which made Luther say of it, what every man that knows anything of Christianity must agree with him in:—‘If you have no other reason to go out of the Roman church, this alone would suffice, that you see and hear how, contrary to the law of God, THEY SHED INNOCENT BLOOD. This single circumstance shall, God willing, ever separate me from the papacy. And if I was now subject to it, and could blame nothing in any of their doctrines; yet, for this crime of cruelty, I would fly from her communion, as from a den of thieves and murderers!’”
CHAPTER IX.
THE INQUISITION IN ENGLAND.
Spiritual Courts—Henry VIII.—His zeal for Popery—Martyrdom of Anne Askew—Queen Mary marries Philip of Spain—The Inquisition and Martyrs—High Commission—Martyrs under Elizabeth—Archbp. Whitgift’s cruelty—Udall—Archbishop Laud—Sufferings of Dr. Leighton—Abolition of Spiritual Courts under William III.