Henry of Navarre and the Huguenots in France

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HENRY IV.

Contents

CHAPTER PAUE

I. — THE REFORMATION IN FRANCE — THE WARS OF RELIGION BEFORE THE DEATH OF

II. THE PARENTAGE OF HENRY OF BOURBON

Chapter I

THE REFORMATION IN FRANCE — THE WARS RELIGION BEFORE THE DEATH OF CONDE.

O'F

1 5 12-1569.

RENCH historians, anxious to vindicate* in all things the priority of their nation, point out that in 1 5 12, five years before Luther denounced the sale of indulgences, Lefevre, a lecturer on theology and letters at Paris, published a commentary on the Epistles of St. Paul in which he taught the doctrine of justification by faith.

But an isolated theologian might deny the efficacy of good works without danger to the established system, so long as the logical consequences of such doctrine were not pressed vigorously home against

I the abuses of Rome. Lefevre had nothing of the passionate activity of a successful reformer; his teaching produced Httle effect till the minds of men were stirred by the great events taking place in Germany.

Lefevre and his friends did little more than give expression to the general desire that the Church should be reformed from within. They were supported by the sympathy of the scholars and men of letters who had long been engaged in a bitter quarrel with the monkish pedants, to whom the system and the maxims of the schoolmen were not less sacred than the cardinal doctrines of the Church.

The false renderings, the spurious documents, the historical frauds and obsolete philosophy, on which the Catholic theologians of the day relied, hardly allowed a learned man to be orthodox.

But these cultivated men had not the fervour and their doctrine lacked the emphasis needed to stir popular enthusiasm ; the real impulse to the Reformation in France was given by men of more decided views, who at first, with the exception of Farel, a friend of Lefevre, belonged to a lower class.

The growth of heresy did not escape the notice of the University of Paris, the acknowledged judge and champion of orthodoxy throughout Latin Christendom. In the 14th century the University had interfered in politics with the authority of a Fourth Estate and had lectured kings and princes. In the 15th century at the Councils of Constance and Basleits doctors had been the acknowledged leaders of the Western Church. As if foreseeing the approaching struggle, the faculty of theology, the Sorbonne, as it was called from the name of the College founded by Lewis IX. for the support of the teachers of divinity, appointed a permanent committee to watch over the purity of the faith.

Heresy was in France an offence against the Common Law, and those accused of it were tried before the ordinary courts of justice ; but these courts never entered into the question of what constituted heresy, allowing the decision of the Sorbonne to be final on that point. Hence their function seemed to be little more than the punishment of whomsoever the theologians chose to pronounce guilty.

In 1 52 1 the Sorbonne solemnly condemned the doctrines of Luther, declaring that they ought to be extirpated by fire and sword ; yet the new sectaries were little molested till after the fatal day of Pavia.

Francis L was not sorry to have a convenient bugbear wherewith to frighten the clergy. He was also disposed to toleration by more worthy motives, by the influence of his sister Margaret, and by his unfeigned sympathy with letters and culture, the best trait in a character which has been saved from well deserved infamy by the gratitude of the Muses. But when the King was captive in Spain the Regent, his mother, was anxious to secure the co-operation of the Pope and clergy in her efforts for his liberation, and the heretics, who it was said had drawn down the wrath of heaven on their country, had a foretaste of the severities which awaited them. Lewis de Berquin a young man of great promise, a scholar and a courtier, was thrown into prison, al-

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though a favourite of the King. On the return of Francis, Berquin was released. Erasmus, whose Colloquies had been condemned by the Sorbonne, was invited to Paris, but preferred to revenge himself on his opponents by satire from a safe distance. He criticised a book published by Beda, the leader of the bigots of the University, and proved that that pillar of orthodoxy had been guilty of eighty lies, three hundred calumnies, forty-seven blasphemies. Lefevre now in his eightieth year, who had recently completed his translation of the New Testament into French, was recalled from Strasburg and appointed tutor of the King's youngest son. The hopes of the reforming party ran high. Zwingli the most amiable and tolerant of the great fathers of the Reformation dedicated his book on true and false religion to the King of France.

But the tide of court favour was already turning : the influence of Margaret over her brother was in the wane. The Chancellor Duprat, who aspired to the Papacy, and the King's favourite the Constable Anne of Montmorency, urged the repression of heresy. Yet Francis hesitated to sanction active persecution — when an event occurred which at once gave the preponderance to the fanatical party.

One evening (June i, 1528) an image of the Virgin at a street corner in Paris was thrown down and mutilated. The whole town was in an uproar ; the numerous guilds formed in honour of Our Lady looked upon the outrage as a personal insult. The ignorant mob was infuriated by such sacrilege to their favourite deity, the better classes were alarmed by this proof of the audacity of the sectaries, the King was indignant at an act which seemed an abuse of his indulgence and which was Hkely to provoke disorder. For a whole week there were expiatory processions — processions of the University, of the clergy, of the King and his courtiers. The partisans of persecution triumphed, and Lewis de Berquin was one of their first victims.

Henceforth the history of French Protestantism is that of an oppressed minority, never safe from legal persecution and from public and private violence, except when, from time to time, their own valour and resolution or political expediency obtained for them a partial and precarious respite.

Persecution compelled the French Reformers to become a church militant, yet it may be doubted whether any organisation or discipline would have enabled them to increase their numbers and their influence during the remainder of the reign of Francis I. and that of Henry H., exposed as they were to the rigour of the law and the hatred of the mob, had they not found a leader and an inexpugnable citadel — Calvin and Geneva.

Calvin threw the doctrines of the French Reformers into the most definite and logical form possible — he organised their churches, his personal influence gave unity to their councils.

Under the anagram of Alcuin, Calvin published in 1555, after he had fled from Paris to Basle, a book called Institution de la Religion Chretienne dedicated to Francis I. It professed to be an exposition of the doctrines of the Reformers, and to point out how undeserving they were of persecution, and how untainted by all doctrines dangerous to society. In this book — amplified in later editions — Calvin laid the foundations of the religion of the Huguenots, of the Dutch, of the Scotch, of the Puritans in England and America, in short of the most heroic, the most militant and the most characteristic form of Protestantism.

In the dogmatic part of the treatise Calvin does not originate, he only presses the doctrines of others to their logical conclusions. The fundamental dogma — justification by faith of those elected by grace — is borrowed from Luther and Lefevre. But Calvin draws from their premises the irrefutable conclusion, that those predestined to salvation by the certain foreknowledge of God must of necessity be saved. More original than his dogmatic theology was the combination by Calvin of views about church government far more revolutionary than those of the Lutherans with the High Church doctrine of the independence of the Church and of its authority over the State. '' He saw," says a French historian, " the Church among the Lutherans fallen from the control of the Pope to that of the princes, and that the great maxim of Luther, ^ Every man is a priest,' was interpreted in practice to mean, ' Every prince is a Pope.' Even in Switzerland, where there were no princes, the magistrates took upon themselves to legislate for the Church, which appeared to be upon the point of becoming wholly merged in the State." Calvin endeavoured to secure her independence and spiritual authority. He insists upon the importance and power of the ministry, who are to be elected with the consent and approval of the people, the pastors presiding over the election. The Consistory, the assembly of ministers and elders, must admonish and censure all breaches of discipline and morality. The Church, as represented by this assemblage, has the power of the keys, the right of excommunication — surely an empty terror to the Elect ? There is no remission of sins for those who are outside the pale of Christ's Church, we must therefore beware of separating ourselves from it, because we may have been offended by some trifling imperfections. The true Church is that in which the Gospels are faithfully and simply preached, in which the sacraments are administered according to the ordinance of Christ, as interpreted by Calvin, and in which new articles of faith are not devised ; those who separate themselves from the true Church, like the Anabaptists, those who adhere to a false church like the Papists, are alike apostates from the faith and irrevocably damned.

It might be supposed that a careless despair, or a self-satisfied and inactive acquiescence in the conviction of personal election would result from rigid predestinarianism. But this has not been the case. No doctrine has proved more capable of nerving men for great efforts, of sustaining them in moments of doubt and difificulty and isolation. The feeling that we are but the puppets, or the passive instruments of an- overruHng fate — identified with the Divine Will — has enabled the soldier to advance undaunted to a hopeless struggle, the reformer to

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attack institutions which have the sanction of centuries, the martyr to believe in his cause amid the execration of a unanimous crowd.

The Papacy had upheld monarchical principles in the Church. CEcumenical councils had asserted the authority of an hierarchical aristocracy. The constitution of Calvinism was representative and democratic. It is therefore natural that no other religious system should have shown itself so favourable to political freedom. The struggles for liberty and constitutional government made by the European nations during the i6th and 17th centuries are unmistakably connected with Calvinism. In the Netherlands, as in Scotland, the return of the Protestant exiles who had. taken refuge at Geneva was the signal for resistance to the excesses of arbitrary power. The English refugees who fled from the persecution of Mary Tudor became the founders of the great Puritan party. Nowhere — not evert at his own Geneva — were the principles of Calvin more energetically carried out than in New England, by the Pilgrim Fathers, the founders of the freest as well as the greatest repubHc the world is ever likely to see.

In France, as elsewhere, the Calvinists were the opponents of despotism, the champions of popular government. That some historians should have failed to see this must be explained by the accident, that the prince whom the Huguenots recognised as their leader, happened to be the claimant of the throne by indefeasible hereditary right, so that his and their enemies naturally appealed to the elective

1569] The Reformation in France. g

and popular theory of sovereignty ; while their alliance with the populace of the big towns gave a spurious air of democracy to these defenders of the Papacy and clients of the Spanish tyrant.

Calvin became the legislator, the acknowledged leader of the French Reformers, yet even Calvin could have effected little without Geneva. That little town, situated on the confines of three nationalities and inhabited by a French-speaking population, was admirably adapted by its position to interpret the teaching of Germany and Switzerland to France. For a hundred years Geneva was the citadel of the Evangelical religion. There were the printing-presses which, as St. Francis de Sales complained, scattered their pestilential produce over all the world ; there was the Seminary, where the ministers were trained who preached the Gospel to congregations assembled by stealth on desert mountain or heath, or in towns amid the more dangerous fanaticism of the crowd, whose least hazardous service was to invoke the blessing of heaven while they accompanied their flock into battle. There exiles and pilgrims from every part of Europe met and took council for the common interests of the Cause.

The influence of Calvin and of his doctrines was needed to give the French Reformers the energy and the organisation which enabled them to sustain an unequal and unavoidable conflict ; yet that conflict was embittered, the issue enlarged and a compromise made impossible by the extreme and aggressive form assumed by French dissent. The majority of Englishmen who conformed with equal readiness to lo Henry of Navarre, [1512-

the religion by law established under Mary Tudor or Elizabeth probably saw no essential difference between a service said in Latin or in English, but the most careless Gallio could not but perceive something more than a dissimilarity in forms between the prayers in a Calvinist meeting-house and the ''idolatrous sacrifice " of the Mass.

Francis I. had long shrunk from persecution, but having once begun he showed no further hesitation. During the remainder of his reign and the whole of that of his son Henry II. (1534-15 59) the cruelty of the sufferings inflicted on the Reformers increased with the number of the victims. At first they were strangled and burnt, then burnt alive, then hung in chains to roast over a slow fire. It was found that this last method of prolonging their agony gave them time to sing their psalms and to pray for their persecutors from the midst of the flames. Even the stupid ferocity of the mob might be touched ; it was therefore ordered that they should be gagged ; but the fire snapped the cords, the gag fell out and the ejaculations of the half-charred lips excited pity : it seemed a safer plan to cut out the tongues of the heretics before they were led to execution.

The Edict of Chateaubriand ( 1 5 5 1 ), taking away all right of appeal from those convicted of heresy, was followed by an attempt to introduce an Inquisition on the model of that of Spain, and when this failed owing to the opposition of the lawyers, the Edict of Compiegne (1557) denounced capital punishment against all who in public or private professed any heterodox doctrine.

It is a commonplace that persecution avails nothing against the truth — that the true Church springs from the blood of martyrs. Yet the same cause which triumphed over persecution in France was crushed by it in Spain and in the Walloon Netherlands. Was it therefore not the truth ? The fact would rather seem to be, that there is no creed, no sect which cannot be extirpated by force. But that it may prevail, persecution must be without respect of persons, universal, continuous, protracted. Not one of these conditions was fulfilled in France. The opinions of the greater nobles and princes, and of those who were their immediate followers, were not too narrowly scanned, nor was the persecution equally severe at all times and in all places. Some governors and judges and not a few of the higher clergy inclined to toleration. Sadolet, Bishop of Carpentras, protected the Vaudois, and Du Chatel of Macon saved for a time Stephen Dolet, the learned friend of Rabelais. ** Do you, a Catholic bishop, dare to defend a Lutheran and an atheist ? " asked the pitiless Cardinal Tournon. '' I am a bishop and I speak like a bishop," was the undaunted reply ; " but you — you play the hangman." At the worst the preachers of the Word found a sure refuge at Geneva, in the dominions of the Bourbons and at Montargis, where Renee of France, the Duchess of Ferrara, kept her court.

The cheerful constancy of the French martyrs was admirable. Men, women and children walked to execution singing the psalms of Marot and the Song of Simeon, This boldness confounded their enemies.

Hawkers distributed in every part of the country the books issued from the press of Geneva and which it was a capital offence even to possess. Preachers taught openly in streets and market-places. One of these missionaries of the Gospel was asked when in prison, how it came that he laughed and rejoiced in the prospect of death, although our Saviour in His agony sweated blood and prayed that the cup might pass from Him ? Still smiling, he replied, '' Christ had taken upon Him all human infirmities and felt the bitterness of death, but I, who by faith possess such a blessing, the assurance of salvation, what can I but rejoice ? " Such men died in ecstasy, insensible to the diaboHcal ingenuity of the punishments inflicted on them. The sight of sufferings thus endured could not be without an effect. More than one judge was stricken to death wath horror and remorse ; others embraced the faith of their victims. The executioner of Dijon proclaimed his conversion at the foot of the scaffold.

The increasing numbers of their converts and the high position of some among them gave confidence to the Protestants. Delegates from the reformed congregations of France were on their way to Paris to take part in the deliberations of the first national Synod on the very day (April 2, 1559) when the peace of Cateau Cambresis was signed, a peace which was to be the prelude to a vigorous and concerted effort to root out heresy on the part of the kings of France and Spain. The object of the meeting was twofold : first to draw up a detailed profession of faith, which was submitted to Calvin —

1569] The Refor7naiion in France, 13

there was, he said, .Httle to add, less to correctsecondly to determine the "ecclesiastical discipline" of the new Church. The ministers were to be chosen by the elders and deacons, but approved by the whole congregation. The affairs of each congregation were placed under the control of the Consistory, a court composed of the pastors, elders and deacons ; more important matters were reserved for the decision of the provincial '' colloques " or synods, which were to meet twice a year, and in which each church was represented by its pastor and at least one elder. Above all was the national Synod also composed of the clergy and of representative laymen.

This organisation was thoroughly representative and popular, the elected delegates of the congregations, the elders and deacons, preponderated in all the governing bodies, and all ministers and churches were declared equal.

The Reformed churches, which although most numerous in the South spread over almost the whole country, are said at this time to have counted some 400,000 members (1559). These were of almost all classes, except perhaps the lowest, although even among the peasantry there were some martyrs for the faith. Coligny truly said that the lowly had been the first to show the way of salvation to the rich and powerful ; the vast majority of the earliest converts belonged to the middle classes, the better educated artisans and traders and to the lower ranks of the professions ; but the upper classes had not been slow to follow. Little is proved by Michelet's assertion that he could find only three men of noble

14 Henry of N avarice. Wb\l-

birth among the lists of victims who perished before 1555, except that the privileged classes escaped the persecution the weight of which fell on their poorer brethren.

The first minister of the Church of Paris, which was founded by a noble, was the son of a rich and dignified magistrate of Dijon ; honourable women were among its earliest martyrs. The first converts in Dauphiny were of gentle birth. The Edict of Fontainebleau (1540) speaks of the favour and support received by the heretics from men of rank. In Brittany the nobles welcomed the new teaching which was rejected by the ignorant and superstitious peasantry.

The rapid diffusion of their doctrines among the upper classes and the consciousness of the sympathy and support of men of great position probably gave the Huguenots a boldness remarkable in a small and persecuted minority : but it would be altogether erroneous to imagine that they were an oligarchical faction. The strength of the Protestants always lay among the trading and professional classes and the country gentry. From these classes came the men who were the first to embrace a simpler faith and who clung to it after great nobles, courtiers and statesmen had fallen away. At the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes not many Schombergs and Ruvignys passed the frontiers, but thousands of skilful artisans, frugal tradesmen and honourable merchants.

The most significant, and to the orthodox the most alarming, symptom of the diffusion of the new opinions and of the sympathy with which they were regarded, was that the Parhament of Paris, long the uncompromising opponent of dissent, hesitated to enforce the laws against heresy.

Henry II. determined himself to be present at a general meeting of the members of the various courts of law, at which it was proposed to decide how the laws against heresy should be applied. It was thought that the King's presence would overawe those who were in favour of toleration. But the most respectable magistrates disdained to conceal their opinions. Anne du Bourg thanked God that his Majesty was present at the decision of a matter which concerned the cause of our Saviour. '' It was," he said, "no light thing to condemn those who from the midst of the flames call upon His name. What ! Crimes most worthy of death, blasphemy, adultery, horrible sins and perjuries are committed day by day with impunity in the face of heaven, while day by day new tortures are devised for men whose only crime is that by the light of the Scriptures they have discovered the corruptions of the Church of Rome ! " " Let us clearly understand," said another judge, '^ who they are that trouble the Church, lest it should be said, as Elijah cried to King Ahab, 'Thou art he that troublest Israel.* " The indignation of the King exceeded all measure. He ordered Du Bourg and seven others to be at once committed to the Bastille ; he swore he would see Du Bourg burn with his own eyes.

But before his vengeance could take effect Henry II. tilting with the Captain of his Guards was killed

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by the splinter of a lance. Some bold believer who had access to the room where the King's body lay, threw over the corpse a piece of tapestry : Saul falling from his horse on the road to Damascus, as the terrible words sounded in his ears, " Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me ? "

Although the Protestants saw the judgment of God in the King's death, the more farsighted among them must have doubted whether that event was likely to improve their position. Two policies had divided the councils of Henry II. The Constable Montmorency had been in favour of alliance with Spain, an alliance the necessary consequence of which was the violent suppression of heresy. Montmorency's rivals, the Guises, although not less hostile to the Reformers, were opposed to the Spanish connection. They wished to support the claims of their niece Mary Stuart to the English throne, and dreamt of uniting France, Scotland and England into a monarchy capable of balancing the Austro- Spanish power. Thus it came that Philip II. was compelled to protect the heretic Elizabeth, while the Guises were placed in the difficult position of being at once the enemies of Spain and of Protestantism.

The Guises, ignoring the elder branch of their family, which sought to maintain itself peaceably and unambitiously in Lorraine, and to provoke as little as might be the interference of more powerful neighbours, claimed to be the representatives of the ambitious and unfortunate House of Anjou, from which they were descended in the female line. Duke

Francis signed his marriage contract '' Francis of Anjou " ; he obtained from Henry II. when Dauphin a promise of the investiture, or as he preferred to call it the " restitution " of Provence ; he sacrificed, when commanding an army in Italy, the interests of France to some chimerical plan for asserting the old Angevin claim to the Crown of Naples. This baseless assumption was the prelude to bolder flights of ambitious fancy. The time was not far distant when the agents and pamphleteers of the House of Lorraine strove to establish that the Crown of France might more justly be worn by the descendants of Charles the Great than by any member of the usurping House of Capet.

The Duke of Guise had the reputation of a great and popular captain. He had been successful in war, his bravery was undoubted, and he affected magnanimity in success and a soldierly directness of bearing and conduct. The pliant disposition of his brother the Cardinal, his experience in every form of intrigue, maintained the influence of the family at Court, and enabled the Duke to stand aloof from a contest of meanness and duplicity, alien not so much to his real character as to an ostentatious display of chivalrous pride and independence.

The Cardinal of Lorraine was of graceful and commanding presence, gifted with refined and persuasive eloquence, an accomplished scholar and singularly successful in winning the confidence of those with whom he conversed ; but he was as meanspirited and despondent in adversity as he was arrogant and presumptuous in success, and the

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lustre of many splendid qualities was dimmed by a sordid avarice unusual in a man of such lofty ambition ; and not to be excused in one who enjoyed the revenues of three archbishoprics, nine bishoprics and numerous other benefices.

The accession of Francis 11. threw the whole government of the State into the hands of the Guises. The new King was a sickly boy, weak in body and mind, the slave of his wife Mary Stuart, who was herself ruled by her uncles.

The Cardinal of Lorraine was so elated to find himself in the undisputed control of the royal power that he disdained to conciliate his rivals and enemies. The Princes of the Blood were treated with contempt, the Queen-Mother was neglected, no attempt was made to disarm the hostility of the nobles, who hated the Guises as foreign favourites and upstarts. The Protestants were persecuted with increased severity. All who attended their meetings, all who knew of such meetings and did not at once denounce them, were to be punished by death. Du Bourgwas burnt, notwithstanding the urgent intercessions of the Elector Palatine and the Swiss.

The authority of the Guises depended on the frail life of the King ; their power was not firmly enough established to render hopeless the thoughts of resistance which it provoked. These Lotheringians, it was muttered, had usurped the Government ; if the King was himself incapable of ruling he ought to be assisted by the natural advisers of the Crown, the Princes of the Blood, the great officers of state, the representatives of the Three Estates of the Realm.

Calvin persistently inculcated the passive endurance of persecution, and the majority of the ministers of the French Church were his obedient disciples, but it became more and more difficult for them to restrain their flocks. The early Christians had suffered themselves to be led unresistingly to martyrdom, and had not cared to attempt to reform — except by their prayers and example — a state and a society of which they scarcely felt themselves to be members, and the end of which they believed to be at hand. There was little of this patient spirit about the Huguenots — as the French Protestants began to be called."^ Those of them who belonged to the middle classes had not yet forgotten the struggles of their ancestors for municipal independence ; the country people had, it is true, been accustomed to oppression, but there were few proselytes among the peasantry, except where, as in Languedoc and the country of the Vaudois, the ground was prepared by older traditions of resistance ; least of all were the Protestant noblemen and gentlemen, whose numbers were rapidly increasing, disposed quietly to submit to persecution. By what arguments could Calvin restrain them ? He might appeal to a few isolated texts in the New Testament, but the Huguenots, like the Puritans, considered themselves a chosen people, and could find warrant enough in Holy Writ for smiting the enemies of the Lord. If any scruple was still felt in resisting a

* The derivation of this name is very obscure. According to the most probable guess it is a corruption of the German, " Eidgenossen,^" confederates.

20 Herny of Navarre. [1512-

lawfully constituted authority, this, it was urged, did not apply to the tyranny of the Guises. Moreover, the Protestants were dragged before extraordinary tribunals unknown to the laws, or hunted down by riotous mobs. It was afterwards their boast, that they had patiently submitted so long as they had been butchered under the forms of law and by sentence of the established courts.