The following work gives an American Presbyterian view of the history of Protestantism in France. It is written in a style typical of the second half of the nineteenth century, which can make it heavy going for modern readers.

It is of interest on two counts. First it demonstrates how Protestants have claimed a kinship with the Cathars. Secondly it traces the history of Protestantism, broadly correctly, from the Waldensians (or Vaudois).

It is clearly partisan in favour of Protestant theology. In this it is a mirror image of works such as those of Pierre Des Vaux-de-Cernay (Historia Albigensis) and Hilaire Belloc (The Albigensian Attack, Chapter Five of The Great Heresies ). It does however share the error of comtemporary Catholic commentators in believing that the Cathars and the Vaudois were almost identical in their beliefs - largely perhaps because they shared identical criticisms of the Roman Church.

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS 

Preface

Chapter 1    The Vaudois. Lesson of French Protestantism—The sixteenth century-Forerunners of the Reformation—Christianity ascends the throne of the Roman empire—Constantine and the "flaming cross"—St. Paul’s church under the shadow of the throne of the Caesars—It’s gradual and mighty usurpations under successive bishops—Finally crystallizes into the stupendous structure of the Papal despotism—Fearful corruptions of Christianity—The saturnalia of the church—A few true hearts revolt, and strive to reinaugurate primitive Christianity—Rome labels the preachers of the reform "heretics," and persecutes—The dissent spreads—Infects Southern France—The Paulicians—Their Manichean and Gnostic errors—Various names by which they were known—Their mission—Ecclesiastical din—The Vaudois—They clasp hands with St. Paul and bring in the epoch of Luther

Chapter 2    The Provençals. Ancient political divisions—The Count of Toulouse-Languedoc and Provence—The garden of medieval Europe—Egyptian darkness covers Western Europe through the feudal ages—The southern provinces of France an exception—Intellectual character of the Provencals—Their elegant language—Fostered letters—The exiled arts quit for their schools the old Hesperides—Their republicanism—The Moriscoes—Culture of these descendants of the Magi and the Chaldeans—The Mahometan principle of conquest surrendered—Civilization and tolerance enthroned in the Spanish peninsula—Commercial intercourse with the Moriscoes brings civilization into Southern France—The early Spaniards—Their tolerant character—The Troubadours—The minstrels level their satirical verses at the widespread abuses of the Papal see—The epigram of Pierre Cardinal—The Provencals hold the church of Rome in contempt—This preexisting prejudice prepares them to receive the primitive faith—The apostolic altar in the valleys of Piedmont—Peter of Bruys, Henry, and Arnold of Brescia light their torches at the pure Piedmontese altar, and carry the primitive light of Christianity into the Provencal territories—The reformed congregation at Orleans, in France—Its fate-Peter Waldo is converted, commences to teach, and translates the Latin Bible into the vernacular of Gaul—Romanism and Christianity contrasted—The Vaudois creed—Its pure Protestantism—Rapid spread of the Vaudois tenets

Chapter 3    The Preaching of the Crusade. Rome begins to move—Innocent III—His haughty character—Determines to exterminate the Provencal Vaudois—His wily program—Places Languedoc and Provence under an interdict—Confiscates the property of the reformers—Gives it to the faithful, and anathematizes all who refuse to seize on the usurped estates—Ecclesiastical commissions—St. Dominic—Inception of the Inquisition—Sketch of its rise and progress—Arbitrary proceedings of the Inquisitors in Languedoc—Raymond VI. count of Toulouse—Raymond Roger, viscount of Albi—Pierre de Castelnovo, the papal legate—Dictates a dishonorable policy to Count Raymond—The count withholds his assent—The legate excommunicates him—Innocent supports Castelnovo’s audacity—The Papal letter—Raymond compelled to submit to Rome—Assassination of the Legate—Fury of the pontiff—His savage bull—Origin of the Papal dogma, that "no faith is to be kept with heretics"—The word "crusade" extended to cover the atrocity of sectarian persecution.

Chapter 4    Preparations for the Sacred War. Innocent III. dispatches indulgence letters into France, and summons the faithful to take the cross against the Vaudois-The monks of Citeaux preach the crusade—Enthusiastic response to their fanatical appeals—The great nobles assume the cross—Languedoc filled with terror—The Count of Toulouse and the Viscount of Albi endeavor to avert the storm—Supercilious conduct of the Papal legate—Count Raymond’s timidity—He yields every thing, and offers to head the crusade—Heroism of the Viscount of Albi—He counsels resistance, and refuges to give his subjects over to the merciless harry of the crusaders—Retires into his states and prepares for their defense—Count Raymond applies to Philip Augustus and to Otho of Germany for assistance—His deputation to the pope—Equivocating morality of the pontiff—Raymond Roger refuses to be hoodwinked—The crusaders put themselves in motion in the spring of 1209—Their strength—The rendezvous—Count Raymond’s protest—Innocent appoints Milon, his secretary, legate—A notable admission—Servility of the Count of Toulouse—Submits to be disciplined before the altar—Assumes the cross against his subjects and against his nephew.

Chapter 5    The Commencement of the Tragedy. The crusaders wind into the valleys of the Rhone—Count Raymond meets them at Valence, and conducts them to Montpellier—The Viscount of Albi makes a last effort for peace—Avows himself a true servant of the church, but refuses to yield the principle of toleration—Imperturbability of the. legate—He does not desire an accommodation, his object is extermination—The viscount quits Montpellier sad but resolute—Throws himself into his strong-hold of Beziers, and awaits the onset—His noble conduct—The crusaders advance and burn Villemur-The siege of Chasseneuil—Its vigorous defense and final capitulation—A ghastly carnival—The crusaders press forward to the siege of Beziers—Like Attila, they leave no living thing behind them—Beziers—It is summoned to surrender—Wily harangue of the bishop of the city—The citizens are advised to save themselves by yielding their Vaudois fellow-townsmen to the avengers of the faith—Their noble reply—Unexpected capture of Beziers—Scenes of horror—The unglutted crusaders leave Beziers a smoking tomb, and lay siege to the viscount’s strong-hold and capital of Carcassonne—Situation of the city—Courage of its defenders—The king of Aragon acts as mediator—His visit to Raymond Roger—The admission of that prince—The crusaders are apprized of the desperate condition of the besieged—Terms offered by the abbot of Citeaux—The viscount’s heroic response—Departure of Don Pedro—A general assault—The crusaders are unsuccessful—The chiefs of the war resort to diplomacy—The viscount’s visit under a safe-conduct-practical application of the Jesuit doctrine, that "no faith is to be kept with heretics"—Raymond Roger a prisoner in the clutches of Simon de Montfort

Chapter 6    The Reign of Terror. Effect of the perfidy of the crusaders upon the inhabitants of Carcassonne—The yawning cavern—A midnight march through the oozy bowels of the earth—Safety at last—Amazement of the crusaders—A great city deserted—Where are the citizens?—The abbot of Citeaux’s lying proclamation—He will not be cheated of a holocaust—The states of the Viscount of Albi subdued—The crusaders begin to separate—The inquisitors, the legate, and the abbot of Citeaux not satisfied—The Vaudois are conquered, but not exterminated—The work of the Inquisitors not accomplished—They desire to obliterate the tracks of civilization—Until they do this, reform will flourish despite the sacrifice of hecatombs of victims—The legate’s council—Who will accept the conquered territories?—The duke of Burgundy’s reply—The great lords refuse the gift—Simon de Montfort is summoned to accept them—The comedy of refusal—The butcher of the Vaudois finally succumbs to the abbot’s eloquence—Greedy and fanatical ambition rewarded—The bar sinister no impediment to a foremost rank among the great feudatories—De Montfort enters upon his usurped dominions—Fears the legitimate sovereign, whom he holds in his dungeon—The poison rids him of a rival, and quiets his conscience—The close of Raymond Roger’s earthly career—Count Raymond again—A recreant troubadour—Fouquet de Marseille made bishop of Toulouse—Count Raymond’s foes—Their intrigues to prevent his reconciliation with the church—The council of St. Gilles—The count is again excommunicated, and his states are given up to pillage and devastation—The preaching of a new crusade—Alice de Montmorency—De Montfort’s new army of crusaders—Renewed atrocities—Heroism of the Vaudois—The castle of Minerva—The assembly of martyrs—How God’s children could die—The ecstasy of religious devotion—The martyr heroism of devoted womanhood—In the flames—The siege of Termes—An attempted escape—De Montfort’s orgy—The Provencal territories completely surrendered to the domination of demoniacs.

Chapter 7    The Revolt. The hunted stag at bay—The alliance—De Montfort is ready—Siege of Lavaur—A frightful massacre—The Vaudois "burned alive with the utmost joy"—De Montfort before Toulouse—The White and Black Companies—The monster baffled—The hunter hunted—De Montfort’s cry for aid—New swarms of fanatics swoop upon Languedoc—De Montfort’s ferocious activity—Death of Count Raymond’s ally, Don Pedro of Aragon—Death of Innocent III—His character—Count Raymond in the field—Re-enters Toulouse—De Montfort once more besieges it—The struggle before the city—The "Cat"—The sally—De Montfort at mass—His last charge—Death smites him in the hour of victory—Consternation of the crusaders, and end of the siege of Toulouse.

Chapter 8    The Final Massacre. A momentary respite—The gathering of another tempest—Death of Count Raymond VI—His character—An instance of Rome’s spiteful vengeance—Accession of Count Raymond VII.—Death of Philip Augustus—Fouquet, bishop of Toulouse, at Rheims at the coronation of St. Louis—He instigates the young king to proclaim a new crusade—Louis assents—The vulture on the wing once more—He swoops upon the defenseless prey—The cruelties of De Montfort’s regime are reenacted—The crusaders spare neither man in their wrath nor woman in their lust—The Inquisition established in France as a permanent institution by the Council of Toulouse in 1229—The tests of heresy—Two canons of the Council of Toulouse—The bribe—The philosophy of Rome—The Vaudois refuse to deny their Savior—The storm still rages—The conflict has a political phase—The final catastrophe—The Vaudois exterminated, or driven into exile—They continue steadfast in the faith to the last and earn a right to clasp hands with St. Paul, their elder brother in Christ Jesus.

Chapter 9    The Interregnum. The crime against the Vaudois not the separate wickedness of a single nationality, but a mosaic of infamy—Postponement of the Reformation for three centuries—Even then some of the Romanic races do not accept it—The Vaudois born out of time—Christendom not prepared to receive their truth—"From the sixth hour there was darkness over the land until the ninth hour"—The Vatican congratulates itself—Rome imagines that she has strangled the Reformation—The interregnum means postponement, not conquest—The Vaudois are scattered, not exterminated—"Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature," can separate them from the love of God which is in Jesus Christ—They become the missionaries of mediaeval Europe—They leaven Bohemia through Huss—They leaven England through Wickliffe—A historical episode—The Vaudois and Louis XII—The Piedmontese Vaudois—The rival factions in Italy—The Guelphs and the Ghibelines—Europe’s last effort to clutch the Holy Sepulchre from the Saracen—The Vaudois keep aglow the dying embers of the gospel through these dismal ages—The darkness which precedes the day—The profligacy of the Romish Babylon—A baptism of suffering prepares the way to a glorious reformation—The agents of reform—The revival of learning—The invention of printing—Vaudoisism and humanism the twin laboratories of the Reformation of the sixteenth century.

Chapter 10    The Resurrection of Reform. The resurrection of reform—Rome sets herself to subdue the new rebellion against her politics and theology, using old weapons—Leo X. intones his creed from the balcony of the Vatican—The responsive voice from the heights of Wittemberg—Salvation by faith in Christ the soul of the Reformation—The struggle of that epoch was not a movement towards materialism, as some claim, or towards the abolition of Christianity, as the papists charge—Its primary object was the reformation of the abuses which corrupted and deformed the Christian faith—It simply called on man to ground his faith, not on the word of a usurping priest, but on the infallible word of God—The Sorbonne denounces the reform—Leo anathematizes it from the pontifical throne—Rapid spread of Protestantism—Melancthon and Bucer in France—Favorable omens—The reign of Francis I—The Reformation grounds itself in France—The court and the prelates alarmed—Motives of the French bishops for opposing the Reformation—They persuade the king to issue an edict against heresy—A reformed congregation dispersed at Meaux—William Briconnet—Lefevre of Estaples—Francis I. vacillates—The shuttlecock king goes wholly over to Rome—An auto da fe—Louis de Berquin—The jeer of a Jesuit—Unconquerable vitality of faith.

Chapter 11    The Court of Francis I  Opening phases of the Reformation—Renee of Ferrara—Margaret de Valois—The sister of the king becomes a disciple of the reformed theology—Her life at the court—Devotes her life to literature and divinity—Her political talents—Her beauty—Her benefactions to the dissenters—The constable Anne of Montmorenci’s advice to the king—Francis’ reply—Margaret the mother of French reform—Her influence—Kings are dangerous missionaries—Conscience the palladium of Protestantism—Margaret marries Henry d’Albret, king of Navarre—Writes toleration on the first line of the first page of her code of laws—The "Evangelicals " have now an asylum—The persecution rages with increased vehemence—Francis personally attends at an auto da fe—The cardinal of Tournon becomes the king’s adviser after Margaret’s departure for Navarre—His pride and bigotry—Holds the king firm in his determination to exterminate heresy—Two anecdotes—The gloomy prospects of reform—The ascendancy of women at the court—Virtue and honor bartered for station and influence—The ingredients of a. gallant court—The rival factions—The Duchess D’Etampes—Diana le Poitiers—The court soil not productive of the growth of Christian principle—The saying of Diana of Poitiers—The court must spin through its giddy dance—The orgies at the capital do not stay the merciless steps of the inquisitors—"France scents burning bodies in every breeze"

Chapter 12    The Apostles of the Faith. Apostles of the faith-Count Sigismond of Haute Flamme—His conversion—Connection with Margaret of Navarre—Devotion to evangelical truth—His frank courage—A grand idea—Sigismond’s labors with the surrounding priests and nobles—Lambert’s witticism—Pierre Toussaint—Toussaint in the abbot of St. Antoine’s dungeon—Liberty at last—Repairs to Paris—Margaret offers him an asylum—The queen of Navarre is surrounded by a troop of hypocrites—Who will expose their wiles?—Toussaint’s conversation with Lefevre and Roussel—The timid scholars—Their optimism—Toussaint’s grief—Quits the court—His prayer—William Farel—His character—His life as eloquent as his sermons—Farel’s visit to Gap—An incident in his apostolic career—Over the walls—The reformation constantly gains strength—It lacks unity and symmetry—Who shall organize the Reformation?—Sigismond, Farel, and Ecolampadius are in doubt—John Calvin appears with Calvinism

Chapter 13    John Calvin. John Calvin's influence in molding the religious character of America. Calvin’s birth—Family—He is a man of the people—Calvin at the college of La Marche—Mathurine Cordier—Master and pupil.—Calvin belongs to the strictest sect of the Roman communion.—The saying at the college—The Noyon boy’s devotion to study.—The red hat and scarlet gown of a cardinal glitter before the eyes of his father—The visit home—A breeze of the gospel in the air—Does Calvin heed it?—Opposes the Reformation at the outset, in the college wrangles—Is won to examine the reformed theology—A terrible struggle—Examination means emancipation—Calvin’s conversion—His prayer—Breaks with Rome—Calvin at Orleans—At Bourses—He "wonderfully advances the kingdom of God"—A life of vicissitudes—Calvin a fugitive—Repairs to Geneva, en route for Germany—His journey summarily arrested—Geneva-Beauty of its situation—Its early history—The three strata—Liberties of the citizens—The counts of Geneva—The bishops—Their worldliness and political ambition—The conflicting jurisdictions of the counts and the bishops—Fierce and prolonged internecine conflicts—Pierre de Savoy—The paladin sails by moonlight on lake Leman.—The dukes of Savoy—They hunger for Geneva—Apply to the pope for the secular authority—Alarm of the citizens—They determine to resist—"Rome ought not to lay its paw upon kingdoms"—"No alienation of the city, or of its territories; this we swear"—The duke withdraws his petition—Pope Martin V—His tarry at Geneva—His dislike of the franchises of the citizens—"The license of popular government" incompatible with the papal rule—The pontiff’s usurpation—Installment of a bishop prince—The Genevese acquiesce for a time in sullen discontent—The revolt—Apply to the Helvetic confederacy for aid—The struggle, though at first a political one, soon assumes a religious phase—The Genevese converted to the Reformation—Farel at Geneva—His influence there—Farel constrains Calvin to stay—Calvin’s unwilling acquiescence. The two preachers are exiled on account of the strictness of their discipline—Calvin a wanderer once more—Correspondence with Melaucthon—With Bucer—With Capito—Calvin recalled to Geneva—Condition of his return—Comes back as a conqueror—Sets to work—New-models the. civil code—Education—Calvin organizes the Reformation—The "Christian Institutes"—Calvin completes the temple of God—Geneva the school of the—Reformation—Influence of its disciples—Guy de Bres, and the Netherlands—John Knox and Scotland—England and France inoculated

Chapter 14    The Valley of the Shaddow of Death. A parliamentary edict—Two martyrs—Margaret of Navarre—The "mirror of a sinful soul"—The Sorbonne in council—The syndic’s harangue—"This is deadly heresy"—A raid on the booksellers’ shops—The faculty deliberate—What shall be Margaret’s punishment?—A monk’s advice—A comedy—The king’s anger—He quells the Sorbonne—A tragedy—The end of the Vaudois—The testimony of the Abbe Anquetil and of De Thon—"The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church."

Chapter 15    French Politics. Death of Francis I—Succession of Henry II—Condition of the kingdom—French politics—The four court factions—Anne de Montmorenci—Diana de Poitiers—Catharine de Medici—The Guises—Inception of the house of Lorraine—Claude de Guise—His six sons—The rage of faction—The coalition—The selfishness of cabals—Francis Duke of Guise—His character—Montmorenci versus the confederacy—The constable persuades the princes of the blood to join his party—Anthony de Bourbon—Prince de Conde—The house of Chatillon—Odet, Cardinal de Chatillon—Gaspard Chatillon de Coligny—Francis Chatillon D’Andelot—D’Andelot joins the Reformation—The colonel-general before the king—A noble avowal—In the dungeon of Melan—Popularity of the reformed doctrines—The meeting at the Preaux Cleves—D’Andelot at liberty—Paul IV. is chagrined—Character of the Admiral de Coligny—The two brothers.

Chapter 16    Mutation. Henry’s double mission—The dishonorable truce—Abdication of Charles V.—An anecdote—The persecution renewed—King Henry and the old domestic—The tumult at Paris—The edict of Chateaubriand—The Cardinal’s scheme—The king’s assent—The Parliament and veto—Sequier’s speech—The Jesuits—Ignatius Loyola—Character of the "Society of Jesus"—Endeavor to obtain legal recognition—The bishop’s reply—Opinion of the Sorbonne—Momentary failure—Military affairs—Political charges—Treaty of Chateau Cambrisis—The Cardinal’s counsel—An atrocious plot—Henry and the Parliament—The debate—Louis IV—Anne Du Bourg—Henry’s rage—The arrest—The tournament—Death and character of Henry II—Rise of the name Huguenots.

Chapter 17    The Conspiracy. The end of a historic rivalry—The court revolutionized—The Guises. in power—Francis II. and Mary Stuart—The king in duress—The cabal—An auto da fe—Trial and execution of Anne Du Bourg—Incorporation of the "Company of Jesus"—Alarm of the Huguenots—Discontent of the nobility—The conspiracy—The castle La Ferte—Conde the chief, La Renaudie the nominal head of the confederates—The ruined chateau in the outskirts of Nantes—The conspirators at the rendezvous—La Renaudie’s harangue—The oath—The court at Blois—The king and queen—An indiscreet admission—The attorney’s perfidy—The Guises in possession of the plot—A hunting gallop from Blois to Amboise—Francis and the duke of Guise—Suspicions—Coligny and D’Andelot summoned to Amboise—Coligny’s appeal for religious enfranchisement—He is supported by the moderates of the Council—The edict—Conde at Amboise—The hour at hand—Forewarned is forearmed—The attack—The death of La Renaudie—Rout of the conspirators—The Duke Nemours and Castelnau—A cavalier’s idea of honor—The Guises triumph—Revocation of Coligny’s edict—Conde arrested—Sanguinary course of the government—Conde and the duke of Guise—The conspiracy ends with a liberation—A page from contemporaneous history.

Chapter 18    Almost a Tragedy. Assembly of the notables—Death of Olivier—L’Hopital succeeds to the chancellorship—Coligny’s appeal—Guise and the admiral—Progress of the word—Conversations—The plot—Apprehension of the Bourbon princes—The citation—Navarre and Conde at Orleans—Conde’s arrest—The trial—The condemnation—The soldier and the confessor—Conde’s firmness—The wife’s petition—Navarre’s exertions—A projected assassination—A lawyer’s stratagem—Death of Francis II.

Chapter 19    The Lost Leader. Accession of Charles IX—Regency of Catharine de Medici—Liberation of Conde—The new-modeled cabinet—First measures of the new administration—Convention of the states-general—Effort to exile the princes of Lorraine—Navarre’s motion—The Triumvirate—The Spanish ambassador—Condition of parties—The edict of July—A mock reconciliation—Colloquy of Poissy—The leading disputants—L’Hopital’s address—Beza’s plea—The response of Tournon—The cardinal of Lorraine’s harangue—Results of the colloquy—Catherine’s letter to the pope—The pontiffs alarm—The attempt to suborn the king of Navarre—His final fall—Dismay of Jane D’Albret—The two queens—Characteristic speeches—Renewed assembly of the states-general at St. Germain—The new decree.

Chapter 20    The Appeal to Arms. The intercepted letter—Conde’s confession of faith—Navarre’s intrigues—The double banishment—The results of a compromise—The scene at Vassy—Atrocities—Guise’s coup d’ etat—Movements of the Triumvirate—Conde’s manifestos—Enthusiasm of the Huguenots—An anecdote—Character of the Huguenot leaders—Conde attempts to play Machiavelli—The faux pas—Foreign alliances—Marches and counter-marches—France rent by demoniacs—The twin demons.

Chapter 21    Death's Coup D'Etat. Military operations—Siege of Rouen—Death of Navarre—His character—The advance on Paris—The battle of Dreux—Capture of Conde and the constable—Guise’s elation—Siege of Orleans—Assassination of the duke of Guise—The charge against Coligny—The halt of civil war before the bier of Francis Guise.

Chapter 22    The Hollow Truce. The Queen Mother regains her supremacy—Conde signs a peace—Consternation in Coligny’s camp—Provisions of the treaty—The admiral grounds arms—His precautions—Catherine’s chagrin—Conde’s reply—Expulsion of the English—Anger of queen Elizabeth—Wasted hours—Encroachments upon the edict of pacification—The Reformation compromised by its political chiefs—The rationale of reform—Politics of the Vatican—The pontiff’s audacity—Anger of Charles IX—Sine die adjournment of the Council of Trent—History of its sessions—Arrest of Du Moulin—Coligny’s intercession—The king proclaimed of age—The royal journey—Catherine de’ Medici and the duke of Alva—The queen mother and the Papal nuncio—First murmurs of St. Bartholomew—Alva’s epigram—Assembly of notables at Moulins—Intrigues to entrap the Huguenots-The new edict—Charles IX. and the admiral.

Chapter 23    Recommencement of the War. Unpopularity of the edict of pacification—The cardinal of Lorraine at court—Projects of the king of Spain—The plotters at Paris—Augmentation of the army—Secret council of the Huguenot chiefs at Chatillon-sur-Loing—The counterplot—Conde before the capital—Negotiations-Battle of St. Denis—Death of Montmorenci—A leaf from Brantome—The German auxiliaries—An instance of the influence of religious enthusiasm—Renewed pacification—Dissatisfaction of the Huguenot leaders—Insidious assaults upon the reformers—Conduct of the Romish clergy—"No faith need be kept with heretics"—Emeutes of the canaille—Catharine’s perfidy—The plot to seize Conde and Coligny—Their narrow escape—Consequent postponement of the St. Bartholomew—The rendezvous at Rochelle—Charles IX and the duke of Anjou—Renewed hostilities—The battle of Jarnac—Defeat of the Huguenots, and heroic death of Conde—Conde’s character—Coligny saves the army—Jealousies and intrigues of the court—Death of, the duke of Deux-Ponts—Death of D’Andelot—The Admiral’s grief—Dissensions in the Huguenot ranks—Noble conduct of Coligny—Jane D’Albret in the camp—Her appeal for union—young Conde and the prince of Bearn—Henry of Navarre proclaimed generalissimo of the Huguenots—Coligny the real chief—Popularity of the admiral—Battle of Mincontour and rout of the Huguenots—Coligny’s genius and energy repairs the defeat—The admiral’s victory at Arnay-le-Duc—Alarm of the court—Catharine dissembles—The tragic comedy of reconciliation—Pacification-The guarantees.

Chapter 24    Hoodwinked France. The court changes front—The age of craft—The wily queen mother caresses the Huguenots—Jane D’Albret and the admiral fix their residence at Rochelle—Artifices to draw them to the capital—Catharine’s consummate hypocrisy—She instructs the king to use every art to gain the confidence of the Huguenots—Marriage of Charles IX—The reformers are deceived—Numbers repair to Paris and join in the court fetes—A new scheme—Projected marriage of Margaret de Valois and the prince of Bearn—Sketch of the early life of Henry of Navarre—Reluctance of Jane D’ Albret to accede to the match—A mother’s instinct—Duplicity of the king—The wary admiral is hoodwinked—Journey of Charles IX to Louvain—Meeting of the two courts—Charles IX and Coligny—Hypocrisy of the young king—Definitive arrangements are made for the nuptials of Navarre and Margaret—The time appointed—Catharine’s sardonic satisfaction—The treacherous calm—Jane D’Albret at the Louvre—Her sudden death—Infatuation of Coligny—The warning—The admiral’s project—The French court listens to the recital of his plans with courteous but perfidious attention—The ripening holocaust.

Chapter 25    The Massacre of St. Bartholomew. A catastrophe predicted—The bloody nuptials—The wedding on the scaffold—Attempt to assassinate the admiral—The old soldier’s sang froid—Exclamation of the king—Efforts of the court to allay suspicion—Energy of the conspirators—Proposition to quit the capital—Coligny and the Vidame of Chartres—A diabolical ruse—The cordon of masked executioners—The midnight signal—The frenzied populace—"Blood! blood!"—Tavannes’ witticism—Pezon the butcher—The queen-mother’s perfumer—Cruces boast-Guise flies to the admiral—The entrance of the bravos—Coligny’s awakening—Question and answer—Coligny’s composure—He prays—"Art thou Coligny?"—The admiral’s reply—The martyrdom—Petrucci’s announcement—Incredulity of Guise—Coligny’s corpse is flung from the window—Brutality of Guise—Awful treatment of the admiral’s remains—Charles IX at the gibbet of Montfaucon—The king quotes the atrocious Latin of Vitellius—The final sepulchre—Scenes of horror—The king’s ferocity—The window of the Louvre—Charles amuses himself—Fanaticism of the abandoned beauties of the court—The courtesans transmuted into harpies—Barbarous conduct of the brazen wantons—Appalling spectacle of Paris by daylight—The massacre spreads through France—Isolated instances of humanity—Noble conduct of the Count de Tende—Of the Count de Charny—Of the governor of Auvergne—Of the commander of Bayonne—A ghastly resume-Shall Conde and Navarre be spared?—A page from the memoirs of the royal bride—The princes and the king—Conde’s candor—The decision—"The mass, death, or the Bastille"—The king’s demoniacal glee—The well-learned lesson—The trophies of the massacre—Pibrae’s query—The proclamation—Mingled atrocity and dissimulation of the king—Renewal of the "Paris matins"—Wild fantasies—Navarre’s prodigy—The clotted drops of blood upon the table—An hour at midnight by the bed-side of Charles IX—Wail of the phantom voices—The king’s agony—"Conscience does make cowards of us all."

Chapter 26    The Triumph of Rochelle. European effect of the massacre of St. Bartholomew—The news in England—Opinion of Germany—The pleas in justification—Rome greets the news with acclamations, bonfires, an illumination, and a high mass celebrated by the sovereign pontiff in person—The honorary medal—Equivocal morality—The Amen of Madrid—Ferocious joy of Philip II—Witticism of the admiral of Castile—Results of the massacre in France—Firmness and energy of the Huguenots—The confederation—The appeal to arms—The siege of Rochelle decided on—Sketch of the history of Rochelle—Preparations for the defense—The solitary sentinel—La Noue’s mission—The interview—Noble conduct of the Rochellois—Disaffection in the camp of the besiegers—Anjou’s ennui—Rochelle triumphant—The pacification of 1573—Terms of the treaty—Election of Anjou to the throne of Poland—He quits France for Warsaw—Last hours of Charles IX—The confession to Ambrose Paré—The dying monarch and Henry of Navarre—The whispered caution—An awful death-bed.

Chapter 27    Vicissitudes. The Polish courier—Regency of Catharine de Medici—Effects of despotism—The new coalition—Policy of the queen-mother—Henry III. receives intelligence of his brother’s death—The clandestine departure—The arrival—Catharine’s flattery Death of the Cardinal of Gonaive—Meeting of the insurgents at Milland—The pledge—The king before Livron—Henry is hooted—Disaffection of Alencon—Battle of Dormans—Navarre’s protestation—Peace-Brantome’s epigram—Davila’s statement—Catliarine’s subtlety.

Chapter 28    The League. General dissatisfaction—Character of Henry III—Precautions of the Huguenots—Action of the Ultramontane party—Rise of the League—The cabinet at Joinville—The covenant—Influence of Spain—Activity of the League—Meeting of the States-general at Blois—Henry’s alarm—Resolution of the king—Guise’s demand—The deputation—Navarre’s reply—Answer of Conde and D’ Amville—Recommencement of the war—Edict of Poitiers—The "Lovers war"-Renewed pacification.

Chapter 29    The War of the Three Henries. Death of Alencon—Energy of the League—Rendezvous of the conspirators—The decision—The traitorous treaty—Fears of the king—The League startled—Epernon and Navarre—The manifesto of the "Holy Union"—Henry’s counter declaration—Success of Guise—The ignominious treaty—Navarre’s astonishment—His whiskers turn white in a night—Activity of the Huguenots—The proposition—Commencement of hostilities—Death of Gregory XIII—The new pope—The brutum fulmen—Effect on the League—Moral effect—Action of the Swiss cantons—The bull in Germany—Navarre takes the field—Battle of Contras—Rout of the royalists, and death of the Duke of Joyeuse—Navarre’s criminal conduct—He plays the carpet-knight.

Chapter 30    The Double Assassination. Guise's laurels—Envy of the king-Guise's popularity-The family meeting at Nancy—Real object of the house of LorraineThe masked policy-An insolent petition—Half measuresC,uise at Paris-Mob enthusiasm-The duke and the queenmother-Guise and the king-"Vive la Hypocrisie"-Paris in the olden times-Catherine's ruse-Escape of the kingRTemville's announcement-Negotiations-Convention of the States-general-Guise's manoeuvres-Muddled condition of French politics-The advice of a soldier-A lawyer's connselAssassination of Henry de Guise-`° The king of Paris is dead "Unwonted vigor of the king-News of the tragedy at ParisFrenzy of the capital-Death of Catharine de' Medici-Henry's embarrassment-A pontiff's influence—The enraged League will not negotiate-The king appeals to the Huguenots-Meeting of Navarre and Henry III.-The advance on Parisblayenne's retreat-Siege of Paris-Famine chokes the capital-The power of fanaticism Tacques Clement-How he was heated-Assassination of Henry III.

Chapter 31    The White Plume of Navarre.  The enthronement of a Huguenot—Joy of Ultramontane France—The Pontiffs blasphemy over the murder of Henry III—Activ ity of the new king—Difficulties of the succession—Condition of the League—Military successes of Henri Quatre—Battle of Ivry—"The white plume of Navarre"—The advance upon the capital—The starving metropolis—Maneuvers of the duke of Parma—Death of a phantom king—The decision of the League—Henry’s alarm—The struggle of a human soul—The king determines to abjure Protestantism—The sad scene at St. Denis—Effect in the Huguenot ranks—Mornay’s letter—The deputies—General acquiescence in the new regime—Course of the Jesuits—Their regicidal doctrines—The attempted assassina tion of the king—Indictment of the "Society of Jesus"—Ar nauld’s plea—The address of Louis Dollé—Intense popular feeling against the Jesuits—The thwarted knife of Chatel—Banishment of the Jesuits—D’ Aubigne’s epigram—A warning and a prophecy.

Chapter 32    The Edict of Nantes. Disordered condition of the kingdom—The king devotes himself to the amelioration of internal affairs—Signature of the edict of Nantes—Its provisions—Feeling of the papists—The king and the murmurers—Sully's resume—Henry's marriage—Reentrance of the Jesuits into France—Catherine of Bourbon—She becomes the chief court pillar of the Huguenots—Mornay’s letter to the princess—The reply—Catherine's influence with her brother—The Huguenot reunion at the Louvre—The snubbed delegates—Attempt at reconciliation—Catherine's marriage—Her persistent faith—Her death—Henry's grief—The holy father's insinuation—The king's spirited answer—The royal tour—Anecdotes—Repose of the Huguenots—The reputed plot—A Jesuit babble—Henry's last years—The mysterious project—Mary de Medici—The coronation—The king's buoyancy—An after chill—The ride—The narrow street—The assassination—Seizure of Ravaillac—Precautions—The queen's terror—Consternation—An awful comedy—The rack brings forth no confession—Singular conduct of the judiciary—L'Etoil's solution of the enigma—Péréfixe's witticism.

Chapter 33    Richelieu. Henry’s family—Succession of Louis XIII—D’Epernon’s boldness secures the regency for Mary de Medici—The queen’s apartments resound with songs and laughter—Mirth on one side, the murdered dead upon the other—The Concinis—The change—Alarm of the Huguenots—Their chiefs—Bigotry and court cabal—The regency ends in a tragedy—The new favorite—Conduct of the Huguenots—The descent on Bearn—Clamors of the Romish clergy—The arrét-The king at Pau—Celebration of the mass in the ancient citadel of the Reformation—Recommencement of hostilities—Diversified nature of the contest—Pacification on the basis of the edict of Nantes—Richelieu enters the cabinet—His threefold object—The duke of Buckingham—His plans—Richelieu’s opportunity-His sagacious program—Wily diplomacy—Siege of Rochelle—The gallant defense-Capture of Rochelle—Peace again—Paens to Richelieu—The Huguenots stripped of all political importance—Momentary cessation of persecution—The cause—The synod at Charenton—The deputation—The demand.

Chapter 34    The Dragonades. The Huguenots enjoy twenty years of peace—Death of Richelieu—Regency of Anne of Austria—Mazarin—His policy—Rise of the English commonwealth—Cromwell’s intercession—Model behavior of the Huguenots—Mazarin’s testimony—D’Harconrt and the deputies of Montauban—Louis’ declaration—Death of Mazarin—Louis XIV assumes the direction of affairs—The reign of courtesans and Jesuits—The policy of corruption—Steadfastness of the middle classes—Satanic ingenuity exercised in enforcing proselytism—The infinite hard spiritual fights of God’s suffering children—The enemies of the faith—Steady progress of the government from one tyranny to another—The commencement of emigration—The prohibitory decree—Persistence of the Huguenots—"Not principalities nor powers can separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus"—The rage of persecution—Malignity of the government, priest-ridden and corrupt—Père la Chaise, the king’s confessor—The incitement—A Jesuit’s weapons—The congenial trinity—The dragonades—The army of soldiers, and the army of priests—Recommencement of emigration—Macauley’s estimate of Louis XIV.

Chapter 35   The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The "booted missionaries" extend their efforts into all the Huguenot provinces—Pellisson’s fund—The lies of the Gazette—Exultation of the court—Meeting of the Huguenot deputies at Toulouse—The determination—Rage of the king—The flutter in the courtier dove-tote—A leaf from Soulier—The testimony of Rulhiére—The alternatives—The demoralization of France—The greed for proselytes—Louvois’ letter—Noailles’ announcement—Revocation of the edict of Nantes—The lying preamble—Feature of the revocation—Its effect—The enforcement of the decree—Letellier’s Nunc dimittis—Grammont’s witticism—The Huguenot pastors—Claude—Conduct of the Huguenots—Instances of devotion—The heroism of despair—The flood-tide of emigration—Frightful depopulation of the kingdom—The victims—What it cost to suppress the truth in France—Atrocious punishments—Moral results of the proscription—The economic aspect—The compensation.

Chapter 36    A Resume.  The number of Huguenots who remained in France after the revocation—Their faithfulness—The liberalization of public opinion—The law unchanged—The Camisard war—A wholesale massacre—The reign of Louis XV—Increasing humanity of the bar—Judges obey justice in disobeying the law—The rise of infidelity—Coldness of the philosophical school towards the oppressed Huguenots—No points of resemblance between bastard philosophy and Christianity—The synod at Nismes—The yoke grows lighter—The edict of toleration—The four things which it granted—Jubilee of the congregations of the wilderness—The yawning abyss of the Revolution—The "Goddess of Reason"—The necessity of religious faith—Napoleon’s usurpation—The empire decrees limited toleration—Toleration under the restoration—Under the second empire—Present condition of French Protestantism—Reflections. 

 

 

PREFACE

THERE is no page of history which is at once so fascinating in the dramatic interest of its scenes, and so momentous as that which records the story of the Huguenots - none more worthy of the careful study of thoughtful men. Whether judged by its motive, its influence, or its episodes, it is equally grand. Sublimer than any epic, it depicts a struggle to renovate the individual, the church, and society at large.

Isolated phases of the history of the Huguenots have been often and vividly portrayed in our English letters: poets have celebrated many thrilling episodes; romancists have given full play to the imagination; biographers have recited the lives of many illustrious men; historians have dwelt upon numerous stirring scenes: but these are the mosaics of history—broken voices, telling half the tale.

Nearly all of the English histories which bear upon this subject, deal with particular periods—with the epoch of the Vaudois, with the age of Calvin, with the era of Coligny, with the times of Henri Quatre, and with collateral reformatory movements. This volume covers five of the most eventful centuries since Christ: it traces the story up through the ages from the first murmur of dissent from Rome to the revocation of the edict of Nantes; and the sketch of the Vaudois, those early but much neglected teachers, is especially full. The story of the sixteenth century, distinctively the era of the Reformation, is not as minute in this volume as in some others, but an effort has been made to give an authoritative and succinct detail of all essential incidents.

The materials for the compilation of such a work are vast, but ill-digested; to collect and glean them has been no slight task. Most of the standard authorities have been consulted, and in addition to these, a thousand pages of subsidiary matter, personal narratives, diaries, memoirs, from the graphic pens of contemporaneous actors in the drama, have been liberally used. It is not necessary to recapitulate their titles, these will be found scattered through the body of the book; and numerous notes have been added, where they seemed likely to enhance the interest or to elucidate the text.

The series of which this volume is one has not been written for the instruction of mere scholars; no effort is made to pour light culled from pedantic lore upon mooted and nice points of history; they are plain tales of momentous eras. They are sketched for the edification of the masses; written with attempted care and accuracy, but compiled from every available and authoritative source, and with no especial claim to originality. Whatever seemed vivid and important and interesting, wherever it rested, has been seized and grouped into this picture of " times that tried men's souls."

Of course a volume which covers so broad a field must be, in some sense, a summary of events, and the problem which the historian has to solve is this: How shall an epitome be made graphic, be vivified, be made to speak-to tell its own story? How shall this summary be made to reflect an accurate likeness of the past, and appear not to be a summary? "The reproduction of contemporary documents," remarks a writer whose pages have become classic, "is not the only business of the historian. He . must do more than exhume from the sepulchre in which they are sleeping, the relics of men and things of times past, that he may exhibit them in the light of day. Men value highly such a work, and those who perform it, for it is a necessary one; yet it is not sufficient. Dry bones do not faithfully represent the men of other days. They did not live as skeletons, but as beings full of life end activity. The historian is not simply a resurrectionist; he needs—strange but necessary ambition—a power that can restore the dead to life.

"When a historian comes across a speech of one of the actors in the great drama of human affairs, he ought to lay hold of it as a pearl; he should weave it into his tapestry in order to relieve the duller colors, and give more solidity and brilliancy. Whether the speech be met with in the writings of the actor himself, or in those of the chroniclers, is a matter of no importance; he should take it wherever he finds it. The history which exhibits men thinking, feeling, and acting as they did in their lifetime, is of far higher value than those purely intellectual compositions in which the actors are deprived of speech and even of life."

It is a favorite sophism of the Romanist philosophers, that Protestantism is a mushroom growth, an upstart of yesterday, without antiquity or patristical authority. But epigrammatic sneers do not overthrow plain historic facts. The lineage of Christian dissent from the tenets of the papacy is as venerable and as well ascertained as that of the Roman hierarchy. This antique dissent is essentially that form of belief which is now denominated Protestantism.

"Nothing," says Brook," has so much obstructed the progress of Christianity in the world as the absurd and selfish doctrines, the superstitious and slavish practices, which have been blended with it by the wicked wit of man. As the religion of Jesus Christ was for many centuries almost buried under so great a mass of rubbish that it could scarcely be distinguished from the foulest paganism; so to free Christianity from these heterogeneous mixtures, and to fix it on its only foundation-faith in Christ—unclouded and unencumbered by human appendages, is the noblest work of man, and the greatest benefit to society."

This was the effort of the Huguenots. They found the Bible silent, covered with the dust of ancient libraries, in some places secured by an iron chain—a sad image of the interdict under which it was placed in the Christian world. The Reformation was an enfranchisement; these words of Christ were its motto: "THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU FREE." One of the chief lessons of the history of the Huguenots, is the sinfulness and the uselessness of persecution for religious opinion. It inculcates with persuasive eloquence the sacredness of conscience; it is at once an inspiration and an admonition; descanting upon the virtuous actions of the heroes of the past who fought the " good fight" for God and liberty, it repeats the scriptural command, "Go thou and do likewise;" depicting the vicious diplomacy of the Vatican, whose motto was then, as it is now, "The end justifies the means," and that other twin maxim, that "no. faith is to be kept with heretics," it warns the present and the future to shun the vices of Babylonish Rome; as Seneca has hymned it:

"Consulere patria; parcere afflictis ; fera 
Caede abstinere ; tempus atque irae dare; 
Orbi quietem; saeculo pacem suo; 
Haec summa virtus; petitur hac coelum via."

Liberty of thought, liberty of faith, liberty of worship — this was the aspiration of the Huguenots. It is singular what an inevitable tendency there was in the movement towards republicanism — as if the democracy of Christianity necessitated the democracy of politics. But the Christ they taught was not simply the apostle of political liberty. "The greatest and most dangerous of despotisms," says D’Aubigné, "is that beneath which the depraved inclination of human nature, the deadly influence of the world, sin, miserably subjects the human conscience. In order to become free outwardly, men must first succeed in being free inwardly. In the human heart there is a vast country to be delivered from slavery — abysses which man cannot cross alone, heights which he cannot climb unaided, fortresses lie cannot take, armies he cannot put to flight. In order to conquer in this moral battle, man must unite with One stronger than himself — the Son of God."

 

CHAPTER I 

THE VAUDOIS.

THE venerable muse of history recites many lessons which are full of tears, but upon no occasion does her voice sink into deeper pathos than when she relates the story of French Protestantism. From its inception in the gray dawn of the Christian era, down through the dismal centuries to the crowning disaster of the revocation of the edict of Nantes, it is one prolonged tragedy. The night of persecution is only illuminated by the marvelous constancy, the patient meekness, the Christian heroism, and the deep devotion of these earliest Protestants, who were called the VAUDOIS at the outset, and afterwards the HUGUENOTS.

God seems to have designed their moving story to be the convincing proof not only of the vitality of Christianity, but also of the woeful cost at which it has been planted and preserved. Such a consideration adds new grandeur to a chapter of history which is indeed intrinsically momentous, and makes it still more worthy of the attentive study of thoughtful minds.

History attests that the Sixteenth century was the epoch of the Reformation. But revolutions are not made — they grow. "First the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear." The Reformation had its forerunner in the wilderness — its John the Baptist. It is not an isolated fact, a picture standing out upon the historic canvas without a background. There were preceding intellectual insurrections, which, however unhappy in their separate denouement, yet led inevitably to that triumphant movement which finally, by the aid of Faust’s type and Luther’s luminous eloquence, enfranchised Christendom.

Anterior to Luther, anterior to that Bradwardine who, in the cloister of the Oxford University, taught Wickliffe ethics, apostles were found who held tenaciously, and who zealously inculcated, both by their precepts and by their blameless lives, the essential tenets of the Reformation. And though the feudal system, which banished uniformity of laws and customs, and made each petty lord a despot in his own pocket-handkerchief territory, the obstacles to free intercourse between the nations, the prevailing ignorance, the absence of those mighty magicians, steam and the printing-press, which have conjured modern civilization into existence, and above all, the fanaticism of a priestly oligarchy, united their powerful hands to throttle the infant reform of these early teachers, we ought not for these reasons to withhold our grateful recognition of their faithful service and martyrdom; nor ought we to remain in ignorance of the momentous influence which these voices, raised in the dim twilight of Christianity, exerted upon medieval life and thought, long before Europe was animated by a murmur from the grave of Wickliffe, from the ashes of Huss, or from the vigils of Calvin.

In the fourth century, after enduring a persecution of remorseless severity with that patient, unfaltering heroism which is one of its most marked characteristics, Christianity, in the person of that Constantine who fought under the " flaming cross " which his heated imagination had descried in the heavens beneath the sun, with the inscription, " In hoc signo vinces"—By this sign thou shaft conquer—ascended the Roman throne, and thenceforward, covered by the imperial purple, secured protection and controlled the government; so that the successive bishops of that feeble church which St. Paul had planted under the shadow of the throne of the Caesars, gradually arrogated to themselves the supreme authority both in spiritual and in temporal affairs. Under Constantine, and indeed so late as Charlemagne, these bishops or popes were elected by the Priests, nobles, and people of Rome, and this election could be voided by the veto of the emperor.—But the death of Charlemagne was the signal for the most determined and unscrupulous effort on the part of the Roman bishops, not only to free themselves from the imperial trammels by securing the independence of papal election, but also to usurp dominion over the western empire, and to subdue to unquestioning vassalage the entire ecclesiastical and lay bodies. Unhappily this utter departure from the primitive simplicity and humility was acquiesced in very generally, until, under Hildebrand in the eleventh century, the stupendous structure of the papal despotism gloomed upon the misty horizon, awful and irresistible.

Then for five centuries the most atrocious vices, the most unchecked wickedness, the most unbridled sacerdotal ambition, and the most meaningless ceremonies corrupted and disgraced religion. It was the saturnalia of the church. Nominal Christianity ruled Europe and some portions of the African territory which fringed the Mediterranean sea, but vital piety lay torpid; stat nominis umbra. A priest-caste anchored itself in the prejudices and superstitions of the people; an oligarchy was built up, whose right hand was usurped authority linked with spiritual pride, and whose left hand was dogmatism and bigotry fiercer than the pagan.

Then a few true hearts revolted; they yearned to reinaugurate the primitive practice of apostolic days, and this was the first dissent. But from the germ of that feeble protest has grown the full flower modern civilization and Christianity.

It was not until the eleventh century that Rome fully awoke to the danger which menaced her unity from the new "heresy," though from the fourth century she had persecuted those isolated individuals who, through rashness or regardless zeal, had overstepped that prudence which necessitated secrecy, and ventured openly to proclaim the apostolic tenets. But now acting with her accustomed energy and greatly startled by the spread of the dissent, and by the increasing boldness of its advocates; she summoned those mailed crusaders whom she had just hurled upon the Saracen, and bade them tread out the reform under their iron heels.

The whole south of Europe was more or less infected with the dissenting tenets, but their chief seat was in southern France, that beautiful country which extends around the mouth of the Rhone, and sketches westward to the city of Toulouse, and stretches westward to the Pyrenees—a territory which comprised the old governments of Avignon, Provence, and Languedoc.

Christian liberty is indebted to a sect of eastern faction, called, from their professed imitation of St. Paul, the Paulicians, for the impulse given in these early centuries to religious inquiry. By the various chances of war, of trade, of persecution, and of missionary enterprise—for they were indefatigable proselyters—the Paulicians spread from their Asiatic cradle throughout Southern Europe with singular rapidity; and the suddenness with which they sprang into existence, their simultaneous appearance in widely separated sections, and the secrecy with which they taught, gave them an imposing air of mystery, while it magnified their power and resources in the popular estimation.

Though the Paulicians were certainly, notwithstanding their vehement disclaimers, somewhat tainted with the Manichean errors, and with the principles of Gnosticism, and though they held some doctrines which could not but render them odious to the apostolic church: as that all matter: as that all matter was intrinsically depraved and the source of moral evil; that the universe was shaped from chaos by a secondary being, by whom the Mosaic dispensation was given, and by whom the old Testament was inspired ; and that the body in which Christ appeared upon earth, and his crucifixion, were apparent, not real; yet they had not been debauched by the enormous corruptions of the Roman see, and they abhorred and incessantly inveighed against the worship of saints, the use of images, relics, pompous ceremonies, and ecclesiastical domination.

In different countries the Paulicians were known by different names. When they crossed the channel into England they were called Publicans, a probable corruption of the original designation. In Germany they were termed, from the blamelessness of their lives, Cathari, or the Pure. In France they were named Bos Homos, good men; while in Italy, and on the Alpine frontier, they were styled Paterins.*

The mission of the Paulicians appears to have been to awaken a spirit of inquiry, to accustom men to hear the haughty and fraudulent pretensions of the Roman diocese denied, and thus to prepare the way for a higher and holier ecclesiastical development. Meantime upon these bold dissenters was launched the awful malediction of the church of Rome. Nor did that merciless hierarchy content itself with simply placing them under the ban; it used every weapon which wits could suggest or which a Satanic ingenuity could devise to exterminate the heresy.

While the din of this ecclesiastical strife still resounded throughout Europe, in the middle of the twelfth century a sect which wrapped itself in the apostolic mantle, which carried in its hand the primitive taper, and which is venerated by the later Protestants, and respected even by the Romanists, reared its head and began to teach with authoritative mildness. The Vaudois commenced to propagate their tenets in the territories of the Aragonese in Southern France.

Standing midway between two mighty revolutions, the epoch of the Vaudois stretches forth a hand to both. It leans upon the period of the establishment of Christianity as its precursor, and brings forward the Reformation of the sixteenth century as its direct descendant. What then were its salient characteristics? Of what a warp and what a woof was the garment of its Christianity woven?

 

CHAPTER II 

The PROVENCALS 

FRANCE during the feudal period did not form a united monarchy. It was ruled by four independent kings; so that the north of France was Walloon, a name afterwards confined to the French Flemings, and which was then given to the language spoken by Philip Augustus; towards the west was an English France; to the east a German France; and in the south a Spanish or Aragonese France.`

Spain also was somewhat similarly divided. The Moors, an exotic race, held most of the peninsula; Castile and Aragon were still separate and often inimical kingdoms. Although Catalonia, Provence, and Languedoc had originally formed portions of the swollen and clumsy empire of Charlemagne, yet when, no longer shaped by his plastic hand, the heterogeneous mass crumbled to pieces, these territories more or less completely allied themselves to the Aragonese throne; so that it was with difficulty that even the powerful Count of Toulouse, the hereditary lord of Provence and of Forcalquier, surrounded as he was by a brilliant retinue of vassals and loyal states, could maintain his independence of the Spanish king.

These territories were then the garden of the world, bright and sunny as that Goshen of old. They were the home of the exiled arts, of poetry, of painting, of music, of sculpture. The Provencal slopes bore up an industrious and intellectual race, who, more familiar with the Greek text than with the Greek phalanx, abjured war, garnered wealth in commerce, and found culture in study. The whole Pyrenean country offered the strongest contrast to the rest of Europe, which was wrapped in a darkness to be felt and seen, like that of Egypt.

During the feudal ages, the whole intellectual horizon of northern Europe was singularly clouded. Poetry was unknown. Philosophy was proscribed, as a rebellion against religion. A barbarous jargon of provincial dialects had supplanted that sounding Latin which had preserved so many trophies of thought and taste. Commerce was unknown. A library of a hundred manuscript volumes was esteemed a magnificent endowment for the wealthiest monastery. "Not a priest south of the Thames," in king Alfred's phrase, "could translate Latin or Greek into his mother-tongue." Not a philosopher could be met with in Italy, according to Tiriboschi. Europe was

But these dismal shadows grow fainter and fainter as we advance towards the south, until, in Languedoc, in Provence, in Catalonia, the twilight reddened and broadened into day, "Knowledge," Said Lord Bacon, "is spread over the surface of a country in proportion to the facilities of education, to the free circulation of books, to the endowments and distinctions which literary attainments are found to produce, and above all, to the reward which they meet in the general respect and approbation of society." The Provencals understood this law which the great Englishman so finely states. The corner-stone of their prosperity was laid in fostered letters. "From Ganges to the Icebergs" there could be found no more civilized society. 

This singular people had elaborated a language of remarkable beauty from the old French patois. It was distinguished from all tile medieval dialects by its rich vocabulary, its picturesque phrases, and its flexibility.

The Provencal tongue, studied by all the genius of the age, consecrated to the innumerable songs of love and war, and to the stirring psalms of praise, appeared certain to become the most elegant of modern languages.

The various courts of the smaller princes among whom these Arcadian provinces were divided, aspired to be models of taste, politeness, and purity. Like all commercial communities, the Provencals were more addicted to the arts of peace than to the stern science of war. Their cities were numerous and flourishing, their governments were framed on the ancient democratic models, and consuls, chosen by a popular vote, possessed the privilege of forming communes, as did those Italian republics, Venice, Genoa, Florence, with which they traded.

To the south of the Provencals lay the dominions of the Spanish Moors, a remarkably refined and civilized people. They were already masters of a great portion of the east, of the country of the Magi and the Chaldeans, whence the first light of knowledge had shone upon the world; of that fertile Egypt, the storehouse of human science; of Asia Minor, the smiling land where poetry and the fine arts had their birth; and of burning Africa, the country of impetuous eloquence and subtle intellect. Yet, pushed by a territorial greed which knows no parallel, the Moriscoes had recently, by series of victories as brilliant as the Arabian conquests of Syria and Egypt added the Spanish peninsula to their enormous eastern domain. They had even attempted to, carry the fiery creed of their prophet from the Levant by way of the Danube to the Arctic ocean upon one side, and from the rock of Gibraltar to the English channel upon the other. Confined, however, within the limits of the Pyrenees by the prowess of Charles Martel at Tours, the Moors gave up the Mahommedan principle of conquest, and sought, by planting numerous schools and by patronizing learning, to conquer Europe by the Oriental philosophy, if they could not by Mahomet's sword; at the same time, by an admirable code of liberal laws, they strove to establish a peaceful and permanent dominion in the Spanish peninsula.

An active and profitable commercial intercourse with these polished infidels, and also with the Jews, had enlarged the capacity of the Provencals, and convinced them of the folly of the prevalent bigotry. Thus their land became the asylum of all dissenters from Rome. They respected the sacred rights of conscience at a time when the peoples to the north of the Loire not only rattled their secular chains, but when they lay lassoed at the feet of their priests, under the complete dominion of fanaticism.

At this period, the Spaniards also, afterwards the most bigoted of modern races, the unhesitating butchers of the Inquisition, the volunteer executers of the wildest caprices of the papacy, emulated the toleration of their Provencal cousins, for they still remembered the time when they had themselves been compelled to sue for religious freedom under the Moorish yoke. Indeed, a century before the Sicilian Vespers, the kings of Aragon were the declared protectors of all who were persecuted by the papal despotism. In imitation of the Castilian sovereigns, they were upon one occasion the mediators for the Vaudois at the court of Rome, and upon another, their mailed defenders in the field.

Even before the first mutter of the Vaudois dissent, the arrogant pretensions of the papal see had not imposed upon the enlightened Provencals, who despised the licentiousness of the priesthood, the credulity of the Romish believers, and the pompous ceremonies of the church.

The Troubadours, as those minstrel-poets were called who were formed in the Moorish schools of Grenada, Cordova, and Seville, and who went from castle to castle keeping aglow the embers of literature by reciting their tales and chanting their madrigals, had very early launched their satirical verses at the abuses of the papacy.

One of the most celebrated of the troubadours, Pierre Cardinal, who sang in the twelfth century, leveled this sirvente at the Roman vices: 

It will be seen from this recital how well the Catalonians and the Provencals were prepared by their simplicity of manners, by their tolerant principles, by their studious habits, by their active intelligence, by their commercial customs, and by their preexisting prejudice against the Roman usurpations, for the reception of that mild and primitive Christianity which was about to flood their valleys with its light.

Towards the middle of the fourth century, while the newly converted emperor, Constantine, was inscribing the bastard legends of a paganized Christianity upon those banners which had before been surmounted by the hungry eagles of the early empire, and cementing the foundations of the papacy, a few sincere Italian ecclesiastics of Milan, dissatisfied with the increasing corruptions of the grandly simple faith which they so dearly loved, withdrew from Italy, and erected their Ebenezer in the beautiful, secluded, and labyrinthine valleys of Piedmont.

Here, kneeling at their primitive altars, and shut out as well from the temptations of the world as from its honors, the simple invocation, "Our Father, who art in heaven," diffused light, liberty, and happiness around them, as it did around those first Christians, who were ever found, in mountain desert and in the open air, in dungeons and in fetters, yes, even in the awful Golgotha of the catacombs, with the same sublime prayer upon their lips. Though these inoffensive pilgrims were taunted by their enemies with the epithet, Manicheans, yet it has been conclusively shown, by unimpeachable historians, that their confession of faith, like that of their disciples, the Vaudois, was pure Protestantism, and would have obtained the approbation of Calvin or of Beza.

In 1124, three men, whose names ecclesiastical history loves to take upon its lips, Peter of Bruys, Henry, and Arnold of Brescia, and who are doubly dear on account of the martyrdom which they suffered for their sacred cause, lighted their torches at the pure altar of the Piedmontese, and carried the light of reformation from those obscure vales into the Provencal territories.

The first discovery of a congregation of this bind was at Orleans, in France, where several of the regular clergy, and numbers of the most respectable citizens were open adherents of the Piedmontese tenets. A council was immediately convened, which, after laboring in vain to reclaim the "Protestants," had recourse to the final argument of the Roman church, and burned them all at the stake.

Some time after this event, the conversion of Peter Waldo, one of the finest names in history, and the chief promoter of the Vaudois, as the dissenters were now called, occurred.

This medieval teacher was, in 1150, a wealthy citizen-merchant of Lyons. Amid the toils and bustle of mercantile life, he had found leisure to study the belles-lettres of the epoch; he had also looked into the Scriptures.

While engaged in consultation with several other of the principal citizens, Waldo beheld one of the group stricken with sudden death. This occurrence is said to have so impressed him with a sense of human frailty and of the divine wrath, that he renounced all worldly pursuits, and ever after devoted his immense riches, as well as his rare eloquence, to the promulgation of the gospel.

He began with his own family; and then, as his fame spread, he admitted to his hearthstone and instruction a few others, until, by the year 1165, he had quitted his elegant home, and fully embarked upon an active apostolic career.

The Roman clergy, not only of Lyons, but of the whole neighborhood, set themselves to choke Waldo's expositions of primitive Christianity, and they even opposed and prohibited his domestic instructions, but without avail; for the resolute reformer was led, by the obstacles which priestly malice threw in his path, to examine the more diligently into the opinions of the clergy, into the rites and customs of the papal régime; and then, since in his case as in that of the latter reformers examination meant emancipation from the thraldom of Rome, to oppose their antichristian usurpations the more decidedly.

That Peter Waldo was not destitute of erudition, Flacius Illyricus proves from evidence derived from the ancient writings; and perceiving, as Wickliffe did in England not many years later, and as Luther did four centuries afterwards, that since the luminous tenets of his dissent from Rome were based upon the Scriptures, it was momentously important to unlock the treasure-house of biblical knowledge to the comprehension of the Provencal people, and to prove his doctrine from the inspired pages, he translated the Latin Bible into the vernacular language of Gaul.

The irreconcilable difference between primitive Christianity, with its later manifestations, called Protestantism, and the Roman heresy — for Rome is indeed the crowned and ermined heresiarch of the ages — is in no one instance more grandly shown than in the treatment of the Bible by the respective advocates of the two systems. The priests, like the juggling augurs of pagan Rome, and like their prototypes, the mutterers of the heathen legends of Egyptian Isis and Osiris, made a mystery of their religion, carefully concealed the sources of their divinity, padlocked that Bible which the apostle commanded mankind to search, and then, having hidden the evidences of their faith, preached a bastard Christianity of forms, of images, and of human merit and omnipotence.

Protestantism, on the contrary, has nothing to hide; believes in the popularization of knowledge; is democratic in its creed; knows no caste; asks nothing but, with the ancient cynic, that inimical systems "get out of its sunlight;" makes no secret of its tenets; proclaims the worthlessness of human merit; preaches the sole reliance of the human race, "By one man's disobedience lost," upon the gracious mercy of "Christ crucified" for a "recovered paradise;" and teaches justification by faith alone: and since it culls these precious truths from the sacred oracles, it marches down through the centuries with faith aglow in its heart, and an open Bible in its hands. This was why Luther in Germany, Wickliffe, in England, and, earliest of all, Waldo of Languedoc, translated the gospels into their respective mother-tongues.

It is interesting to notice how singularly this venerable Vaudois creed agrees with the essential articles of that Protestantism which we of to-day bury in our heart of hearts.

These were the chief articles of their faith, as recited by competent historians, both friendly and inimical:

I. The Vaudois held the holy Scriptures to be the source of faith and religion, without regard to the authority of the fathers or to tradition; and though they principally used the New Testament, yet, as Usher [sic] proves from Reinier and others, they regarded the Old also as canonical scripture. From their greater use of the New Testament, their adversaries charged them however with despising the Old Testament.

II. They held the entire faith according to all the articles of the apostles' creed.

III. They rejected all the eternal rites of the dominant church, excepting baptism and the sacrament of the Lord's supper, as, for instance, temples, ventures, images, crosses, pilgrimages, the religions worship of the holy relics, and the rest of the Roman sacraments; these they considered as inventions of Satan and of the flesh, full of superstition.

IV. They rejected the papal doctrine of purgatory, with, masses, or prayers for the dead, acknowledging only two terminations of the earthly state—heaven and hell.

V. They admitted no indulgences nor confessions of sin, with any of their consequences, excepting mutual confessions of the faithful for instruction and consolation.

VI. They held the sacraments of baptism and of the eucharist to be only symbols, denying the real presence of Christ in the bread and wine, as we find in the authoritative book of the sect concerning antichrist, and as Ebrard de Bethunia accuses them in his book Antihoeresios.

VII. They held only three ecclesiastical orders: bishops, priests, and deacons; other systems they esteemed mere human figments; that monasticism, then in great vogue, was a putrid carcass, and vows the invention of men; and that the marriage of the clergy was lawful and necessary.

VIII. Finally, they denounced Rome as the whore of Babylon, denied obedience to the papal domination, and vehemently repudiated the notions that the pope had any authority over other churches, and that he had the power either of the civil or the ecclesiastical sword.

Such was the remarkably enlightened and pure Protestantism of these early teachers; such were the tenets proclaimed by Waldo and the Vaudois, in the middle of the twelfth century, upon the rich Provencal plains, and upon the listening and willing slopes of the French and Spanish Pyrenees.

Is it strange that when an abused and neglected populace, disgusted by the palpable avarice, despotism, and mummery of the Roman see, beheld a brotherhood of Christians enthusiastic in their religion, blameless in their lives, humble in. their demeanor, honest in their dealings, and disclaiming all tyranny over the consciences of men, propagating their tenets by the eloquence of their actions, many were won to embrace the salvation so sweetly taught, and that all generous souls were stirred at least to admire, if not to sympathize with a religion dear to God, but which Rome's unhallowed bulls denominated " heresy?" 

 

CHAPTER III 

The PREACHING of the CRUSADE

 

At length Rome began to move. Innocent III, who in 1198 ascended the pontifical throne in the vigor of his life, was the first who appeared to be fully impressed with the importance of crushing remorselessly that independent and inquiring spirit which was rapidly assuming the character of a universal revolt from the Roman communion.

His predecessors, engaged in a tedious and perilous struggle with the secular power, with the two Henrys, and with Frederick Barbarossa, thought their entire force not too great to defend them against the emperors; and in those times they had themselves accepted the name of the paterins, or sufferers.

But Innocent III, one of the haughtiest and most flagitious of the pontiffs, whose genius aspired to govern the universe, was as incapable of temporizing as he was of feeling pity. At the same time that he destroyed the political balance of Italy and Germany; that he menaced by turns the kings of Spain, France, and England; that he affected the tone of a master to the sovereigns of Bohemia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Norway, and Armenia; in a word, that he directed or repressed at his will the crusaders who were occupied in overturning the Greek empire, and in establishing the Latin rule and the Roman theology at Constantinople — Innocent III, as if he had no other occupation, searched for, attacked, and punished all opinions different from his own, all independence of mind, every exercise of the faculty of thinking in the august domain of religion.

Though it was in the countries where the Provencal language was spoken, and especially in Languedoc, that the Vaudois reformation counted the majority of its disciples, yet it had also spread into other portions of Christendom, into Italy, into Flanders, into Germany, and into Spain.

Innocent III, both from character and policy, judged that the church ought to keep no faith with heretics. He thought that if it did not annihilate them, if it did not, in his phrase, "exterminate the whole pestilential race," and strike Christendom with horror, their example would be speedily followed, and that the fermentation of mind would be productive of a consuming conflagration throughout the Roman world.

Instead therefore of making converts, he charged his satellites to burn the chiefs of the Vaudois, to disperse their flocks, to confiscate their property, and to consign to perdition every soul who ventured to think otherwise than as he directed.

At first the wily priest required those provinces where the Reformation had made but small progress to set the example of persecution, thus feeling his way gradually towards a wider cruelty. In this way many leaders of the reformed church perished in the flames at Nevers, in 1198, and in the succeeding years.

Innocent next requested Otho IV, his imperial puppet, who danced as his master pulled the strings, to grant him an edict for the destruction of the Italian Vaudois, who were also called Gazari.

The Roman vulture then paused a moment and plumed his wings for a higher flight. Innocent determined that the lovely Provencal territory should be delivered over in the midst of its growing prosperity to the fury of countless hordes of armed fanatics, its cities razed, its population butchered, its commerce destroyed, its arts thrown back into barbarism, and its dialect degraded from the rank of a poetic language to the condition of a vulgar jargon.

There were a number of lords and high barons in Southern France who had themselves adopted the reformed opinions, and who, instead of persecuting, protected the Vaudois. Others saw in them only enlightened and industrious vassals, whom they could not destroy without affecting prejudicially their own revenues and military strength. But when did Rome permit her cherished plans to be baffled by the intervention of human rights or weighty obstacles? Innocent instantly armed a present interest and a brutal avarice against the calculating economy of the barons. He abandoned to them the confiscated property of all heretics, exhorting them to take possession of it, after banishing or murdering those whom they had plundered. At the same time this flagitious pontiff anathematized all who refused to seize upon the estates thus confiscated by his usurped power, and placed their dominions under an interdict.

In 1198, Innocent had dispatched two legates, monks of Citeaux, brother Guy and brother Regnier, into Languedoc, and the other heretical districts; but rather, as it should seem, for the purpose of exploring and menacing than actually to commence the contest. These legates were armed with full power, and it was enjoined upon the faithful to execute scrupulously their orders. Regnier having fallen sick, Innocent joined with him Pierre de Castelnovo, whose zeal, more furious than that of any of his predecessors, is worthy of those sentiments which the very name of the Inquisition inspires.

Presently afterwards a more numerous commission, the advance of the martial array, invaded the aunts of heresy, and brought the subtleties of the schools to the support of intimidation. This body received great additional efficiency from the accession of a young Spanish monk named Dominic, the founder of the most bigoted and servile of ecclesiastical orders, and who was afterwards canonized as a reward for his diabolical cruelty in the ensuing Vaudois crusades. These itinerant spiritual missionaries were generally known by the title of Inquisitors, a name not indeed honorable or innocent even in its origin, but riot then associated with horror and infamy.

These inquisitors were at the outset empowered by the pope to discover, to convert, or to arraign before the ecclesiastical courts all guilty or suspected of heresy. But this was the limit of their mission. They did not at first constitute an independent, irresponsible tribunal, nor were they clothed with any judicial power. The process was still carried on according to the practice then prevailing, before the bishop of the diocese, and the secular arm was invited when necessary to enforce the sentence.

But this form of procedure was not found to be sufficiently rapid or arbitrary to satisfy the eagerness of the pope and his missionaries. The work of extirpation was sometimes retarded by the compunctions of a merciful prelate, sometimes by the reluctance of the barons or an unpopular sentence. In order to remove these impediments to the free course of destruction, there was no recourse but to institute in the infected provinces, with the direct cooperation of the ruling powers, a separate, independent tribunal for the trial of heresy. This was rendered more easy by the spread of the Franciscan and Dominican orders. As they were the faithful, unquestioning myrmidons of the Roman see, more devoted in their allegiance than either the secular or the regular clergy, they were invested with the separate jurisdiction. Such was the origin in the gloomy and heated brain of a fanatic pope of that ghastly court of inquisition, whose mere remembrance causes civilization to shudder.

Innocent's Languedocian inquisitors speedily offended all classes of society by their arrogance. Some bishops they accused of simony, others of negligence in the fulfillment of their duties. Under such pretences they deposed the archbishop of Narbonne, and the bishops of Toulouse and Viviers. Indeed they branded most of the regular clergy as heretics, and at the same time tormented the count of Toulouse and all the lords of the country by accusations continually renewed. Thus they deprived themselves of the means of kindling so many fires as they could have desired. However, to gain a little popularity, they took the utmost pains to confound the heretics with the routiers, or hireling soldiers, afterwards so celebrated throughout Europe as the "Free Lances."

The companies of these, generally composed in great measure of strangers, were still known in the south by the name of Catalans, as they were in the north by that of Brabancons. The routiers were lawless banditti, who pillaged the churches and the priests for purposes of plunder, but having no connection with the Vaudois, nor indeed taking any interest in theological paradoxes and doctrinal disputations. This ruse of the legates did not meet with much success. The result was, that the Catalans also were offended at the denunciations leveled at them, and in their turn they avenged themselves by plundering the ecclesiastics with heartier zest.

At the commencement of the thirteenth century, Raymond VI, count of Toulouse, was the sovereign of Languedoc and Provence, though his rule seems to have been shared to some degree by his nephew Raymond Roger, viscount of Albi, Beziers, Carcassonne, and Limoux, in Rasiz [Razès]. Although Raymond of Toulouse, of whose history before the crusade little is known, had won some fame as a soldier, he was possessed of but little strength of intellect or vigor of purpose. He had succeeded to his father, Raymond V, in 1194, in the thirty-eighth year of his age, and had already, at the head of the routiers, of whom he had made himself captain, made war upon many of his neighbors.

He had disputed with some of the barons of Baux, and with the lords of Languedoc and Provence, his own vassals. This was apparently the reason why he had sought the alliance of Peter II of Aragon, while his ancestors had constantly endeavored to repress the encroaching ambition of that house. Raymond VI married his fourth wife, Eleanor, sister of the Aragonese king, in the year 1200; and five years later he promised his son, afterwards Raymond VII, to Sancha, the infant daughter of this same sovereign.

The Viscount of Albi, Count Raymond's nephew, was made of sterner stuff. Now in his twenty-fifth year, generous, lofty, and enthusiastic, this prince was not of a temper to submit tamely to insult, nor would he stand quietly by and see his states mercilessly tarried. He had like his uncle succeeded to his father in 1194, and during his minority his dominions had been governed by guardians inclined to the Vaudois doctrines.

In the spring of 1207 these two princes were upon the borders of the Rhone, busied in quelling an insurrection of the barons of Baux, when the papal legate, Pierre de Castelnovo, ordered them to furl their banners and declare peace with the insurgents.

The legate had first visited the barons and obtained from them a promise that, if Count Raymond would acquiesce in their pretensions, they would employ their united forces in the extermination of heresy — in Castelnovo's mind, "a consummation devoutly to be wished." After agreeing with them upon the form of the treaty, the legate returned to the count of Toulouse, and required him to sign it.

But Raymond was nowise inclined to purchase, by the renunciation of his rights, the entrance into his states of a hostile army who were to pillage and kill those of his subjects whom the priests should indicate. He therefore refused his signature. Pierre de Castelnovo, in his wrath, excommunicated him, laid his country under an interdict, and wrote a hot letter to the pope, to obtain the pontifical confirmation of his sentence.

Audacious as was the conduct of his legate, Innocent III meant to uphold him. He sought for an opportunity to commence hostilities. He was desirous to adjourn the contest from the arena of argument, where his success was worse than dubious, to the arbitrament of arms. Tired of the subtleties of the schools, he invoked the subtleties of war. He was persuaded that, after the progress which it had made in public opinion, the heresy could only be destroyed by the swords of his crusaders. Accordingly he made no effort to medicine the wound, but, like a bungling surgeon, he applied an irritant.

On the 29th of May, 1207, he wrote personally to Count Raymond a letter confirming the interdiction, and beginning thus: "If we could open your heart, we should find, and would point out to you, the detestable abominations that you have committed; but as it is harder than the rock, it is in vain to strike it with the words of salvation; we cannot penetrate it. Pestilential man, what pride has seized your heart, and what is your folly, to refuse peace with your neighbors, and to brave the divine laws by protecting the enemies of the faith? If you do not fear eternal flames, ought you not to dread the temporal chastisements which you have merited by your so many crimes?"

So insulting a letter addressed to a sovereign prince must have been revolting to his pride. Nevertheless, the monk Pierre de Vaux Cernai informs us that "the wars which the barons of Baux, and others of the faithful, carried on against him through the industry of that man of God, Pierre de Castelnovo, together with the excommunication which he published in every place against the count, compelled him, at last, to accept the original terms of peace, and to engage himself by oath to their observance; but as often as he swore to observe them, so often he perjured himself."

The legate soon judged that the count did not proceed with adequate zeal. He sought Raymond, reproached him to his face with his tolerance, which he termed baseness, treated him as perjured, and again let fall upon him the bolt of excommunication. This violent scene occurred in January, 1208, at St. Gilles, where Count Raymond had granted De Castelnovo an interview.

The count of Toulouse was naturally very much provoked at the insolence of this upstart churchman, and he uttered some vague threats. The legate, disregarding his words, quitted the Provencal court without a reconciliation, and came to sleep, on the night of the 14th of January, 1208, in a little inn on the banks of the Rhone, which river he intended to cross on the, morrow.

Meantime one of the count's gentlemen chanced to meet him there, or perhaps had followed him. In the morning this gentleman entered into a dispute with Castelnovo respecting heresy and its punishment. The legate had never spared the most insulting epithets to the advocates of toleration; and at length, the noble, already heated by the Roman's insolence to his sovereign, now feeling himself personally insulted, drew his poignard, and striking Castelnovo in the side, killed him.

This unhappy event furnished Innocent with the desired pretext for instant war. Although Raymond VI had by no means so direct a part in Castelnovo's death as Henry II of England had in Thomas à Becket's, his punishment was far more terrible; for Innocent III was more haughty and implacable than Alexander III.

Neither knowing nor desiring any better preachers of his creed than war, murder, fire, and incest, the excited pontiff began to preach a crusade against the Vaudois. In the commencement of 1208, Innocent addressed a bull to all the counts, barons, knights, and yeomen of southern Gaul, in which he affirmed that it was Satan who had instigated his prime minister, Raymond of Toulouse, against the sacred person of his legate. He laid under an interdict all places which should afford a refuge to the slayer of De Castelnovo; and demanded that the count of Toulouse should be publicly anathematized in all the churches. This furious bull closed with this remarkable declaration:

"As, following the canonical sanctions of the holy fathers, we must not observe faith towards those who do not keep faith towards God, or who are separated from the communion of the faithful, we discharge, by apostolic authority, all those who believe themselves bound towards this count by any oath either of alliance or of fidelity. We permit any man to pursue his person, to occupy and to retain his territories."

From this it should seem that the famous Jesuit phrase, "No faith is to be kept with heretics," though often attributed, with similar enormities, to Ignatius Loyola, is of far older origin. The fanatic Spaniard merely stole the atrocious sentiment from the decretals of Pope Innocent III, when he incorporated it in the constitution of his protean propaganda.

Having now reduced these dissenting Christians of Southern France to the same level, in a religious estimation with the Turk and the Saracen, Innocent next let loose an infuriated multitude of fanatics against them; and the word "crusade," which had hitherto signified only religious madness, was extended to the more deliberate atrocity of sectarian persecution.

 

Chapter IV 

PREPARATIONS for the "SACRED WAR"

Innocent III had in November, 1207, exhorted Philip Augustus, the duke of Burgundy, the counts of Bar, of Nevers, of Drew, and others of the old crusaders who had fleshed their swords on the plains of Palestine, and gathered barren laurels on the Syrian shore, to marshal their hosts against the Vaudois.

But early in 1208 the flames of his hatred were fanned into increased fury by the bloody catastrophe of Castelnovo's death. The pontiff fulminated a series of epistles from the Vatican, which summoned all the faithful to the holocaust in Languedoc.

Galono, cardinal deacon of San Maria dello Portico, was dispatched into France by the crafty pontiff with these letters. He did not receive much consideration from Philip Augustus, who was now more occupied by his rivalry with the English king and with Otho of Germany than with obtaining the barren honor of heading another crusade in a sacred war. But notwithstanding the king's polite indifference, the monks of Citeaux, who had received full powers from Rome, began to preach the crusade among the nobility and the yeomen of France with a perseverance and enthusiasm which had not been surpassed by Fouldques de Neuilly, or by the fanatical eloquence of Peter the Hermit.

Innocent III offered to those who should take the cross against the Vaudois the utmost extent of indulgence which his predecessors had ever granted to those who fought for the deliverance of the Holy Land and the sepulchre of Christ. As soon as these new crusaders had assumed the sacred sign of the cross — which, to distinguish themselves from those of the East, they wore on the breast, instead of upon the shoulder — they were instantly placed under the protection of the holy see, freed from the payment of the interest of their debts, and exempted from the jurisdiction of all the tribunals; while the war which they were to wage at their doors, almost without danger or expense, was to expiate all the vices of a whole life — was warranted, by the impious usurper of the apostolic name at Rome, to efface the crimes of threescore years and ten from the heavenly records.

The belief in the efficacy of these indulgences, which in the sunlight of the nineteenth century we can scarcely comprehend, was then in its full flush. The barons of the feudal ages never doubted that, while fighting in the Holy Land, they had the full assurance of paradise.

But those distant expeditions had been attended with so many disasters; so many hundreds of thousands had perished on the scorching sands of Asia, succumbing either to the heat or to the Saracenic scimitars, or else had fallen by the way from hunger, misery, sickness, "and the thousand ills that flesh is heir to," that the boldest and most knightly hearts now wanted courage to essay the fight.

It was then with transports of joy that the faithful received these indulgences. War was their passion. The discipline of the holy wars was much less severe than that of the political, while the fruits of victory were much more alluring. In them they might without remorse, since no faith was to be kept with heretics, and without restraint from their officers, pillage and appropriate all the property, violate the women, and massacre the men of the interdicted territories.

The crusaders of the East well knew that the distance was so great as to afford them but small chance of bringing home the booty gained by their swords. But now, instead of riches which were to be sought at a distance amid great perils, and which must be torn from the resolute grasp of barbarians whose language they could not understand, the French knights were exhorted, nay, commanded, by an authoritative voice from the shekinah at Rome, to reap the bloody harvest of a neighboring field, to appropriate the spoils of a house which they might hope to carry to their own, while captives were abandoned to their desires who spoke the same language with themselves.

Never therefore had the cross been assumed amid greater enthusiasm or with a more unanimous consent. The first to engage in this atrocious harry, which was baptized with the name of a sacred war, were Eudes III, duke of Burgundy, Simon de Montfort, count of Leicester—a bloody monster who glooms yet upon the historic horizon, pilloried to the scornful horror of the ages—and the counts of Nevers, of St. Paul, of Auxerre, of Genéve, and of Foréz.

Meantime, though the crusaders were not ready to march in 1208, the din of their immense preparations resounded through Europe, and filled Languedoc with terror. Count Raymond, learning that Arnold, abbot of Citeaux, leader of the crusade, had, been appointed by the pope his legate in those provinces from which he designed to eradicate heresy, and that Arnold had convened a council of the chiefs of the sacred war at Aubenaz, in the Vivarais, 

"To advise how war may best upheld 
More by her two main nerves, iron and gold, 
In all her equipage," >

repaired thither in company with his nephew, to see if haply the storm might be averted.

The legate received them with great haughtiness; and though they both protested that they were personally strangers to the heresy, that they were innocent of the death of Pierre de Castelnovo, and that they ought not to be judged and condemned unheard, yet the insolent prelate upbraided them with stinging emphasis, declared that he could do nothing for them, and informing them that if they wished to obtain any mitigation of the measures adopted against them, they must apply to the pope, he motioned them from the council-chamber.

Then the differing characters of uncle and nephew were fully developed. Count Raymond, overwhelmed with terror, declared himself ready to submit to any terms, even to be himself the executer of the unhallowed violence of the ecclesiastics upon his best subjects, whose sole offence was their heroic devotion to primitive Christianity. The craven noble even stooped so low as to affirm his readiness to make war upon his own family, if thereby he might obtain the pontifical absolution.

Not so the heroic nephew, noblest of a noble band of martyrs. Perceiving from the legate's language that nothing was to be expected from negotiation, and determined never peacefully to admit the crusaders into his states to ravage his clients, he boldly urged upon his uncle to place strong garrisons in the larger towns, to prepare valiantly for the defence of their country, and to take the initiative by at once commencing the campaign before the invading host could don its mail or draw its sword.

But the two relatives were unable to agree upon their policy, and they separated with reproaches and menaces.

Raymond VI, after assembling his most faithful servants at Arles, engaged the archbishop of Auch, the abbot of Condom, the prior of the Hospitallers of St. Gilles, and Bernard, lord of Rabasteens in Bigorre, to proceed to Rouen, in order to offer his complete submission to Innocent III, and to receive his indulgence.

The frightened count at the same time applied to his cousin, Philip Augustus king of France, and to Otho of Germany, for their protection. Philip at the outset received him with fair words, but afterwards refused him all assistance, on the pretext of his solicitations to his rival Otho. The German emperor did not deign even to notice his prayer.

The ambassadors of Raymond to the pontiff were, on the contrary, received with apparent cordiality. But it was required of them that their master should make common cause with the crusaders; that he should personally assist them in exterminating his subjects and in desolating his own territories; and that he should surrender seven of his best castles in the heart of his dominions, as a pledge of his fidelity. Upon these conditions, Innocent bade Raymond hope that he might eventually absolve him for the heinous crime of respecting the rights of conscience, and attempting to protect his subjects from slaughter.

But notwithstanding Raymond's servile submission and his own fair words, the implacable pontiff was far from having forgiven him in the bottom of his heart. His assurances of favor were, vox et preterea nihil—went no lower than his throat. For while he was amusing the count's ambassadors with pacific declarations and paternal mandates, he wrote this real exposé of his sentiments to the bishops of Riez and Cansevans and to the abbot of Citeaux: "We counsel you, with the apostle Paul, to employ guile with regard to this same count; for in this case it ought to be called prudence. We attack separately those who are separated from our unity. Leave then the count of Toulouse for a time, employing towards him a wise dissimulation, that thus the other heretics may be more easily defeated, and that afterwards we may crush him when he shall be left alone."

Such was the equivocating morality, such the perfidious policy of a pontiff who claimed to sit as God, in the temple of God.

"We cannot but remark," says Sismondi, "that whenever ambitious and perfidious priests had any disgraceful orders to communicate, they never failed to pervert for this purpose some passage of the holy Scriptures. One would say that they had only studied the Bible to make sacrilegious applications of it."

Meantime the gallant young viscount of Albi, undeceived by the cunning politics of the Roman count, able 

"To unfold
The drift of hollow states, hard to be spelled," 

preserving his honor and his governmental oath untarnished, retired to his states, labored like a Hercules to put them in a defensive condition, and at length, having done all that enthusiasm and devotion could do to protect his territories and to save the "lives, the fortunes, and the sacred honor" of a people in whose faith he did not share; the noble prince threw himself into the city of Beziers with a body of his armed retainers, and announced his purpose to hold it to the last for "Christ and liberty."

In the spring of 1209, the swarms of fanatics whom the harangues of the monks of Citeaux and the pope's indulgence letters had persuaded to devote themselves to the sacred war, began to move.

Different historians have variously estimated the numbers of these crusaders. They have been computed to have been three, and even five hundred thousand strong. But a very competent authority reckons but fifty thousand in this first campaign.

This calculation, however, did not include the ignorant and infuriated multitude which, following each preacher, armed with scythes and clubs, and sweeping through the country with a more desolating tread than the crusaders themselves, though in no condition to combat the chivalrous knights of Languedoc, undertook at least to murder the women and children of the heretics.

Several places had been assigned for the rendezvous of these demoniac hosts. Arnold Amalric, abbot of Citeaux, legate of the pope, and chief director of the crusade, collected the greater number of combatants, principally those who had taken arms in the kingdom of Arles, and who were vassals of Otho IV, at Lyons: the archbishop of Bordeaux had assembled a second body in the Agenois; these were the subjects of the king of England: the bishop of Puy commanded a third body in the Valai, who were the subjects of Philip Augustus.

When Count Raymond learned that these terrible bands were about to be let loose, the naked sword in one hand and the blazing torch in the other, upon his beautiful states and those of his nephew, he represented to the pope that the legate Arnold, who conducted them, was his personal enemy. "It would be unjust," said he, "to profit by my submission, to deliver me up to the mercy of a man who would listen only to his resentment against me."

Then occurred another notable instance of the profound duplicity of the sovereign pontiff. In order, in appearance, to take from the count of Toulouse this motive for complaint, Innocent III named a new legate, his secretary Milon. But far from endeavoring to alleviate the woes of the Provencals by this means, or to restrain the hatred of the abbot of Citeaux, we are assured by the monkish historian Vaux Cernai, that the only aim was to deceive the Count. He adds exultingly, "For the lord pope expressly said to this new legate, 'Let the abbot of Citeaux do every thing, and be only his organ; for in fact, the count of Toulouse has suspicions concerning him, while he does not suspect thee.' "

The nearer the crusaders approached, the more the count of Toulouse gave himself up to terror. On the one hand, he endeavored to gain the affections of his subjects by granting new privileges to some, and pardoning the offences of others who had incurred his resentment; on the other hand, he consented to purchase his absolution by the most humiliating concessions. He consigned to the pontifical notary seven of his finest castles. He permitted the consuls of his best cities to engage themselves to abandon him if he should depart from the conditions imposed upon him. He submitted beforehand to any sentence which the legate should be pleased to pronounce upon fifteen unproved accusations laid against him by the inquisitors; and to crown all, he suffered himself, on the 18th of June, 1209, to be conducted into the church of St. Gilles with a cord about his neck; and there he received the discipline before the altar upon his naked shoulders. He was then, upon promising to become the guide of the invaders, allowed to take the cross against his own subjects, and against that gallant nephew who stood tranquilly awaiting the assault.

 

Chapter V 

THE COMMENCEMENT of the TRAGEDY

The jubilant host of the crusaders, in the summer of 1209, wound slowly down into the smiling valley of the Rhone, through the friendly cities of Lyons, Valence, Montelimart, and Avignon, afterwards so celebrated as the seat of one of the two pontiffs between whom the immaculate and seamless robe of Roman unity was divided. The entrapped count of Toulouse repaired to Valence to meet these ferocious forces; from which city he conducted them to Montpellier, where they rested for several days.

The viscount of Albi, though hopeless of success, still determined to make one more effort to still the tempest conjured up against his innocent subjects by the cruel necromancy of the arch-juggler at Rome. To this end he went to Montpellier, and seeking the legate, told him, according to the ancient chronicle of Toulouse, that "he had done the church no wrong; that he but walked in the well-defined footsteps of his ancestors in granting toleration in his states; that as for himself lie was a servant of the church, wishing to live and die so."

But the legate was imperturbable. Taking his cue from the master-priest of the holy see, he told young Raymond Roger that what he had to do was to defend himself as best he might, for he should show him no mercy.

The viscount quitted the ancient walls of Montpellier sad but resolute. He had done his utmost—stepped to the verge of honor to avert the impending avalanche by diplomacy. Now nothing remained but to draw the sword and fling away the scabbard.

He immediately summoned to him all his vassals, friends, and allies; laid before them the representations which he had made to the legate; informed them of the manner in which he had been received; and upon calling on them for advice, found the whole body of his retainers as resolutely determined to defend their hearth-stones as he was himself.

Nor were all those who took arms with him heretics. Let it be written for the honor of human nature, that even in that sullen and ferocious age, there were not wanting gallant spirits ready and eager to die for the toleration of a creed in whose tenets they did not share.

The knightly gentlemen of those days resided in castles which were more or less strongly fortified, while their vassals lived in little cots scattered over the estates at various distances from the fortilace. Languedoc was spotted with these chateaus; and now upon the approach of the crusaders, the yeomen rushed in vast numbers to the protection of these fortified walls; while the nobles, provisioning their larders for a siege, shut themselves up in their keeps with that nonchalance which is the offspring of long habit and danger often braved.

Some castles, as Servian and Puy-la-rouque, were abandoned ere the Roman banditti reached them. Others, among which the old historians mention Caussadi and St. Antonia, where it was not supposed that any heretics lurked, ransomed themselves by heavy contributions. Still others nobly met a sterner fate. Villeum was burned. Chasseneuil, after a vigorous defense, capitulated. The garrison, who were routiers, or "free lances," obtained permission to retire with what they could carry; but the inhabitants, who were Vaudois, were abandoned to the mercy of the legate. The ghastly carnival now began. The town was fired; men, women, and children were precipitated into the hungry flames, amid the acclamations of their fiendish conquerors, and night only closed the frightful orgies.

From this sad opening scene even the pages of the monkish historians of the foray are blotted with pitying tears. The crusaders, rendered still more ferocious by this taste of blood, pressed fiercely on towards the viscount's capital, Beziers, leaving, as was charged upon that Attila of old, no blade of grass nor any living thing behind them."

In July, 1209, they arrived under the walls of Beziers, and formally summoned it to surrender. Raymond Roger had chiefly calculated upon the defence of his two great cities, Beziers and Carcassonne. He had divided between them his most valiant knights, and the routiers who were attached to his fortune. He had at first thrown himself into Beziers; but after assuring himself that the city was provided with every thing in his power to bestow, he quitted its walls for those of Carcassonne, a town built upon a rock, partly surrounded by a river, the Aude, and whose suburbs were environed by walls and ditches.

The citizens of Beziers felt themselves intimidated, when they knew that their young lord had left them for the stronger protection of Carcassonne, and their inquietude was redoubled when they beheld the three grand divisions of the Roman army, under the legate, the archbishop of Bourdeaux, and the bishop of Puy, arrive and unite before their city.

Just before the crusaders reached Beziers, they had been visited by the bishop of that city, Reginald de Montpeyroux, who delivered to the legate a list of those in the city who were accounted Vaudois, and whom he desired to see thrown into the flames. He then returned to Beziers, assembled the inhabitants in the cathedral of St. Nicaise, and after representing to them with vivid eloquence the vast numbers of the crusaders, and the impossibility of resisting their onset, exhorted them not to draw down upon themselves, their wives, and their children the wrath of heaven and of the church by protecting their Vaudois fellow-townsmen, but to yield them up to the avengers of the faith.

"Tell the legate," replied the citizens, "that our city is good and strong, that our dear Lord God will not fail to succor us in great necessities, and that rather than commit the baseness demanded of us, we will eat our own children."

But though equal in courage and infinitely superior in generosity and Christian purpose to their savage foes, the unhappy citizens of Beziers were not equal to them in military shill or in the discipline of trained arms.

While the crusaders were occupied in tracing their camp, the citizens made a sortie, hoping thus to take their enemies by surprise. But instantly the united battalions of the besiegers precipitated themselves upon the disconcerted trainbands of the city, and forcing them to retire, pursued them so hotly that both parties entered the open gates together, and Beziers was captured before the crusaders had even formed their plan of attack.

Then the bloody orgies of Chasseneuil were reenacted on a broader theatre. Arnold Amalric, abbot of Citeaux, upon learning that he had triumphed almost without a struggle, and determined not to be baulked of the expected feast of blood, upon being asked by some of his companions in arms how the Romanist citizens were to be distinguished from the Vaudois, made that famous reply, worthy of Nero or Caligula: "KILL THEM ALL; GOD WILL WELL SHOW HIS OWN!"

The fixed population of Beziers did not perhaps exceed fifteen thousand persons; but all the inhabitants of the country, of the open villages, of the plains, and of the castles which had not been judged capable of safe defense, had taken refuge in Beziers, which was regarded as exceedingly strong. Even those who had remained to guard the strong chateaus, had, for the most part, sent their wives, their children, and their helpless ones to the city.

At the moment when the crusaders became masters of the gates, the whole multitude thronged to the churches. The great cathedral of Nicaise contained the larger number. The canons, clothed in their choral habits, surrounded the altar and sounded the bells, as if to express their prayers to their furious assailants. But these supplications of brass were as little heeded as were those of the human voice. Still the bells ceased not to sound until, of that immense multitude, not one remained. alive. The massacre spread equally to the other churches; seven thousand dead bodies were counted in that of Magdalene alone. Thus even the benefit of sanctuary, respected at that period for the vilest malefactors, was not awarded to the Vaudois.

An old Provencal historian has, by the simplicity of his language, augmented the terrors of this scene: "They entered the city of Beziers, where they murdered more people than was ever before known in the world; for they spared neither young nor old, nor infants at the breast. They killed and murdered them all, which being seen by the said people of the city, they that were able did retreat into the great church of St. Nazarius, both men and women. The chaplains thereof, when they had so retreated, caused the bells to be rung until everybody was dead. But neither the sound of the bells, nor the chaplains in their priestly habits, nor the clerks, could hinder them from being put to the sword. One only escaped, for all the rest were slain and died. Nothing so pitiable was ever heard of or done before."

When the crusaders had completely pillaged it, and massacred every living creature, the city was fired in every part at once, and reduced to a vast funeral pile.

Historians differ as to the number of victims sacrificed on this awful occasion to the greed of the insatiable demon of persecution. The abbot of Citeaux, feeling some shame for the butchery which he had ordered, in the account which he transmitted to Innocent III, reduces the number to fifteen thousand. Other and more reliable contemporary chroniclers reckon it at from forty to sixty thousand.

Having "supped full of horrors" at Beziers, yet without being satiated, the crusaders pressed on through a deserted country—for the inhabitants preferred taking refuge in caves, woods, mountains, to waiting for such enemies within the enclosure of walls which might serve as a prison—towards Carcassonne. They reached this Vaudois citadel on the 1st of August, 1209, and pitching their tents, invested it in due form.

Although the generous heart of Raymond Roger had been terribly wrung by the massacre of his loyal subjects of Beziers, and by the destruction of his capital, he "bated no jot of heart or hope;" while the brave inhabitants of Carcassonne renewed their oath of allegiance to him, and of fidelity to each other.

Carcassonne was accounted almost impregnable. Built upon one side of the river Aude, in whose waters it bathed upon the right, it had been strongly fortified by the skill of the young viscount upon the more exposed angles. It was besides defended by a numerous and devoted garrison.

The attack commenced upon one of the suburbs without the city walls. Here the combat raged fiercely for two hours, during which time Raymond Roger on one side, and Simon de Montfort upon the other, gave evidence of extraordinary personal prowess. Eventually the suburb was taken by mere stress of numbers. The besieged retreated into the second suburb, which the assailants pressed on to attack. For eight days the viscount defended this redoubt with success, but on the ninth day he evacuated it, and, having fired it, retired slowly and sullenly into the city, clanging the ponderous gates in the faces of the outwitted foe.

Meantime Raymond Roger had found means to communicate with his uncle, Don Pedro II, king of Aragon. The Aragonese sovereign had witnessed the oppression and outrage inflicted upon his relative with chagrin. He therefore quitted his kingdom, and hastening to the camp of the crusaders endeavored to negotiate a peace.

Having obtained permission of the legate to visit his nephew, the king entered Carcassonne to confer with the viscount. "My dear uncle," said the frank young soldier, "if you wish to arrange for me any honorable adjustment, I freely leave with you its form and manner, and I will ratify it without hesitation; for I see clearly that we cannot long maintain ourselves here, owing to the multitude of countrymen, women, and children who have taken refuge with us. We cannot reckon them, but they die alas, in great numbers every day. But were there only myself and my soldiers here, I swear to you that I would rather die of that ghastly famine which now stares us in the face than surrender to this same cruel legate."

The king of Aragon very injudiciously related this discourse to the wily legate, who, thus familiar with the precise condition of the viscount, was thereby enabled to offer, with some assurance of success, propositions much less generous than he would otherwise have ventured to make; for be it remembered, it was no part of this atrocious monk's purpose to accommodate affairs. He wished to glut the vengeance of a cruel faith. Still he did not dare absolutely to repel such a mediator as the king of Aragon. But knowing well the high and chivalric character of the viscount, he achieved his object by proposing terms which it wood be impossible for a gallant and knightly spirit to accept.

"Tell your nephew, sire," said the abbot of Citeaux, "that he himself, with any twelve others whom he may choose, may freely quit the city. But the remainder of the citizens and soldiers must be abandoned to our good pleasure." The king carried the message. "Now, out upon the priestly catiff," was the noble reply, "rather than submit to these disgraceful terms, I would suffer myself to be flayed alive. No, he shall not have the meanest of my people at his mercy; for it is on my account that they are now in danger."

The chivalric king approved the generous purpose of his nephew, and turning towards the assembled citizens and knights of Carcassonne, he informed them of the legate's conditions, and added, "You now know what you have to expect; mind and defend yourselves well, for he who acts the part of a brave man always finds good mercy at last."

Don Pedro of Aragon with his retinue had scarcely quitted the city ere the impatient crusaders hurled themselves upon its walls, but in vain; the gallant viscount fought as nobly as he talked. Streams of boiling water, blazing oil, immense stones, projectiles of every kind then known to the cruel skill of war—all were put in requisition; and at length, maimed, bleeding, and balked, the crusaders fell back within the entrenchments of their camp.

The greater part of the crusaders had taken the cross but for forty days. The time now approached for their service to end. General and sullen discontent reigned in the pontifical camp. The soldiers had been promised the intervention of a miracle in their favor. Yet after two prolonged and bloody assaults, they still stood without the walls of Carcassonne, while...

"Many a corpse lay ghastly pale beneath the setting sun."

The legate remarking these symptoms of demoralization, and true to the perfidious maxims of the church whose livery he wore, now determined to have recourse to stratagem, if haply he might accomplish by his arts what had been denied his sword.

Accordingly he renewed the negotiations. The viscount, ignorant of what was passing in the camp of the crusaders, and profoundly anxious for an honorable accommodation, received the legate's messenger with the utmost cordiality. Fully conscious of the rectitude of his own intentions and proceedings, he could not but believe that, when the injustice of which his country had been the victim should be known, it would excite the commiseration of the great barons and ecclesiastics arrayed against him, and stay the devastation. Filled with this Quixotic idea, and as incapable of suspecting deliberate treachery in others as he was of himself performing a perfidious deed, young Raymond offered to accompany the envoy to the camp of the crusaders, for the purpose of having a personal interview with the chiefs of the sacred war, provided his personal safety and return should be solemnly guaranteed.

The envoy flew to acquaint the legate with this offer. Arnold Amalric rubbed his hands gleefully when he heard this recital, and though he deliberately perjured himself by doing so, for he had instantly decided upon the confiding viscount's arrest, he yet sent the desired safe-conduct, to which he attached the seal of Rome.

The viscount soon made his appearance, accompanied by three hundred of his choicest chivalry. Repairing to the legate's tent, where the chiefs of the crusade were assembled, he nobly and powerfully vindicated his conduct and the policy of his ancestors, and again affirmed, that though the fast friend of religious toleration, he was still a true servant of the Roman church.

Then Rome gave another proof of the pitiless, unhallowed, and abandoned wickedness of her politics. Not only the legate, but the great lords who accompanied him, were penetrated with the diabolical maxim of Innocent III: "To keep faith with heretics is an offence against the faith." Accordingly watching for a propitious moment, the crusaders threw themselves upon the surprised and insignificant retinue of the Provencal prince, all of whom, after a brief struggle, were disarmed, and together with their young lord consigned to the care of Simon de Montfort.

 

Chapter VI

THE REIGN of TERROR

The crusaders thought that the flagitious perfidy exhibited by their chiefs towards the beloved prince of Albi would strike terror, like a dagger, into the hearts of the inhabitants of Carcassonne. It did indeed chill them with horror, but it also withdrew the entire population from the clutches of these bloodhounds of the Roman church.

There was an immense cavern, dark, freezing, and awful, which yawned in the bowels of the earth, and stretched away from the river-gate of Carcassonne three leagues, to the towers of Cabardes. To the protection of this gloomy sanctuary—for to their despair it was indeed a temple—the citizens rushed; and on, on, through the ooze of the dreadful cavern, which in happier times the boldest had shrunk from approaching, esteeming it haunted by hobgoblins, they tramped, willing to face the spirits of the yawning depth, if only they might escape the fiends who raged before their city walls.

Meantime, when the curtain of the night was lifted, and the light of day began to dazzle in the grey eastern horizon, the crusaders were astonished at not beholding the accustomed Vaudois sentries pacing the city walls. "Conscience does make cowards of us all," and remembering their own treachery of the day before, they feared that some stupendous mischief underlay the silence and desertion; for those of them who had grown greyest in the wars had never before seen a large population melt into nothing in a night.

At length however they entered Carcassonne, and the legate took possession of the spoil in the name of the church, excommunicating those of the crusaders who should have appropriated any part of it. But it long remained a mystery what had become of the teeming population which had vanished under cover of that August night.

The abbot of Citeaux thought himself obliged to dissemble the villainy to which he had had recourse, and which had succeeded so badly. Accordingly on the 15th of August, 1209, the day of the occupation of the city, he issued a proclamation, in which he unblushingly announced that he had signed a capitulation by which he had permitted all the citizens to quit Carcassonne with their lives only. And then, deeming it essential to the honor of the holy church that all the heretics should not escape him, he caused a number of Vaudois whom he had picked up upon his march, together with the knights who had accompanied the viscount of Albi and Beziers to his camp, to be collected in a group four hundred and fifty large. Then this wanton butcher selected out of that number fifty to be hanged, and the remaining four hundred were burned alive, to propitiate the malignant fury of his vengeful church.

All was now esteemed to have been accomplished. The count of Toulouse had submitted to the most degrading conditions ever before offered to or accepted by a sovereign prince. The beautiful and virgin Provencal plains had been rudely violated and soaked in blood. The gallant viscount of Albi and Beziers was a hopeless prisoner in the iron grasp of Montfort. The other Provencal nobles had published in their jurisdictions laws against the Vaudois even more severe, if that were possible, than Rome demanded.

The French lords who, to gain the indulgence of the church, had marched to the crusade, thought that they had done enough to effect the salvation of their souls; and weary of blood and ashamed of the violation of their plighted faith, they chafed to return to their castles.

All seemed satisfied, save the monks—save Dominic Guzman, and Francis d'Assise his companion in infamy, the founder of the despicable order of St. Francis, and at their head the abbot of Citeaux. The Vaudois were frozen with terror, but these fanatics thirsted for their blood. The heretics, leaving their homes to the pillage of the avaricious and to the incendiary torch of the marauder, had hidden in the mountains, and were outwardly silent; but these bigots knew that inwardly they prayed to that dear Jesus who for them had been nailed upon the tree, that the torch of primitive Christianity still smoked, if it did not blaze, and this thought would not let them rest.

The Vaudois were not exterminated. Their opinions would still secretly circulate. Resentment for outrages already suffered would alienate them yet more irreconcilably from the Roman communion. Their suffering would attach them still more devotedly to the tenets of their dissent, and the reformation would break out afresh. "To turn back the march of civilization, to obliterate the traces of a mighty progress of the human mind, to efface the foot-prints of the primitive and pure apostolic faith, it was not sufficient to sacrifice, as an example, hecatombs of victims; the nation must be destroyed. All who had participated in this grand development of evangelical knowledge, of Christian thought, of luminous science, must perish. None must be spared, save the most boorish rustics, whose intelligence was scarcely superior to the beasts whose labor they shared."

Such was the flagitious rationale of the Roman see—such the avowed policy of the abbot of Citeaux, and his twin jackals, Dominic and Francis d'Assise.

At the conclusion of the first crusade, just before the great lords separated, the legate assembled a council, and desired them to award the states of Raymond Roger, forfeit to the church, to some lord who would engage to extirpate the remnant of the Vaudois. The conquered territories were first offered to Eudes III, duke of Burgundy; but he refused them, saying that "he had plenty of domains and lordships without taking that, to disinherit this unhappy viscount; and that it appeared to him that they had done him evil enough, without despoiling him of his ancestral states."

This refusal, couched in such words, touched the honor of all the barons; and the counts of Nevers and of St. Paul, to each of whom the proffer was made, held the same language. Then the sovereignties were offered to Simon de Montfort, the most greedy and ferocious of the vengeful band. This infamous noble, then lord of but a single castle, Montfort Amaury, situated some ten leagues from Paris, though he was of an illustrious house, said to have been descended from king Robert by a natural son, after some feigned reluctance, finally accepted the bloody and usurped gift, thus by his ambition raising himself to the rank of the grand feudatories.

De Montfort had held the rightful sovereign of the states of which he had just taken possession a close prisoner in his donjon-keep ever since his capture. It now became necessary to sweep this obstacle completely from his path; for even in chains the young viscount haunted him, presaging evil to himself and to his house. Raymond Roger was a rare character. His neighbors loved him. His people idolized him, and prayed for him daily. The Vaudois especially enshrined him in their heart of hearts. Possibly his powerful and kingly relative of Aragon would be disposed to throw his royal ermine over his hapless nephew's defenseless form. Clearly it was Montfort's policy to get rid of his prisoner, too strong even in irons. With this ferocious and sullen fanatic, to decide was to act. Accordingly Montfort gave the necessary order for his death, at the same time spreading a report that the viscount had died of dysentery. But the fraud was too transparent. The public voice and conscience openly accused De Montfort of having poisoned his princely captive; and even Innocent III acknowledged that the viscount perished by violence.

Thus, in the flower of his age, ended the mortal career of Raymond Roger, viscount Albi and Beziers; chivalric as any Paladin of them all; a knight, like Bayard, sans peur et sans réproche, worthy to be a martyr in the grandest of all causes; a heroic soldier in the "good fight" which Bunyan has described; another victim added to the swollen catalogue of Roman intolerance and depravity. History takes his name from the Roman rubric of heretical malefactors, and placing it among her jewels, writes proudly, RAYMOND ROGER, THE DEFENDER OF THE VAUDOIS.

Upon the conclusion of the campaign of 1209, Count Raymond of Toulouse, having submitted in every thing to the pontifical requisition, though himself sure of reconciliation with the church; but he was surrounded by men whose interest it was to prolong his punishment, if not to perpetuate it. The bishop of Toulouse, a recreant troubadour, Foulquét de Marseille, who had in other days gained some fame by his amatory verses, but who, disgusted with the world, had retired to a cloister, where he had fostered the passions of fanaticism and persecution, was Count Raymond's open foe. The two jackal inquisitors, Dominic and Francis, hated him because he had once tolerated the Vaudois. The abbot of Citeaux was his declared enemy; while Simon de Montfort, looking from his usurped viscountal palace at Carcassonne across upon Raymond's contiguous territories, thought how goodly his heritage would be if only the countship of Toulouse could be added to it. He was urged on therefore by the double motive of religious fanaticism and political ambition. These worthies, working tirelessly and secretly, defeated every measure which Raymond of Toulouse could elaborate for the procuration of his pardon. In the early part of 1210, the count had visited Rome, and in an interview with Innocent, had learned that the consideration of his case had been confided to an ecclesiastical council about to be convened at St. Gilles.

Raymond hastened home to meet the council. Meantime the abbot of Citeaux had harangued its members, and so prejudiced them against the count, that, without granting him an opportunity to clear himself of the charges laid against him, the council again fulminated an excommunication against him in the name of the church.

Simon de Montfort, with a powerful army—for though most of the great barons had retired, many, influenced either by that fanaticism which led them to take the cross, by the hope of securing a permanent establishment in a conquered country, or by the promise of plunder and adventure, still adhered to the banner of the crusade which the new viscount carried—had now the desired pretext for entering and ravaging Count Raymond's dominions. At the same time crowds of monks headed by Guy and Arnold Amalric of Citeaux, issued from their convents, and recommenced preaching the crusade. Gathering about them troops of ferocious and superstitious warriors, they proclaimed that there was no vice so deeply rooted, no crime so black, that a gala campaign of forty days in the south of France would not obliterate. Paradise with all its glories was opened to them, without the necessity of the slightest reformation of their conduct.

Accustomed to confide their consciences to their priests, to listen to the voice of Rome as to the thunders of the dread God of Sinai, never to submit what appertained to the faith to the arbitrament of reason, these besotted crowds really regarded those beloved children of God's right hand, the Vaudois, as a nest of heretics who bred contagion.

So the roads were once more blocked with the advancing enthusiasts. Alice of Montmorency, De Montfort's wife, assumed the control of the forces raised by the exhortations of the monks.

At the commencement of Lent, 1210, her husband came to meet her at Pezenas. He no sooner found himself at the head of a large and well-appointed army, than he gave full sway to his evil passions.

A few lords still ventured to defend either the independence of their jurisdiction, or that of their conscience. De Montfort now essayed to crush this opposition by new judicial massacres. His fresh horde of fanatics swept through the country with desolating fury. The feudal state of independence had multiplied the isolated fortresses which served at once for residences and strong-holds. The smallest provinces were covered with citadels. These castles then received De Montfort's first attention. Many of them were abandoned on his approach. Others which ventured to resist, were razed, while their heroic defenders were either hanged upon gibbets, or roasted alive for the honor of the mother church. The castle of Brom being captured by the crusaders on the third day of the siege, De Montfort selected a hundred of its wretched inhabitants, Vaudois who had been denounced by the priestly spies who sped before the men-at-arms to procure lists of heretics, and having torn out their eyes and cut off their noses, sent them in this state, under the guidance of a one-eyed man, to the neighboring Vaudois castle of Cabaret, to announce to that garrison the fate which awaited them.

When De Montfort found the citadels deserted, not being able to reach human beings, he wreaked his vengeance upon the twining vines, the olive trees, and the blooming gardens which lent rare beauty to the landscape, and made Provence the queen of nations, the idyl of territories.

The pen of history falters when it follows this rude butcher upon his devastating marauds, nor is it necessary to detail with absolute minuteness the harrowing scenes of this frightful war, which yet possesses strange interest.

The siege of the castle of Minerva was one of the most remarkable of the war, and is detailed at length by the ancient chroniclers. This citadel was built upon a steep and almost inaccessible rock, surrounded by precipices, and was regarded as one of the most impregnable strong-holds in the Gauls. It belonged to Guiraud de Minerva, a Vaudois nobleman, and one of the best knights in Southern France. The crusaders brought against it their finest men-at-arms, De Montfort and the abbot of Citeaux being present in person.

The Vaudois defended themselves for seven weeks with a valor which escorted the admiration even of De Montfort. But when, on account of the heat of summer—it was under the fierce sun of July—the water in their wells and cisterns failed, they demanded a capitulation. Terms were finally agreed upon; but when they were read in the council of war, one article, which provided that those Vaudois who were converted to the Roman faith might quit the castle alive, was violently opposed. "Robert de Mauvoisin," says the monk Vaux Cernai, "a nobleman entirely devoted to the papal see, cried that 'the pilgrims would never submit to this; since it was not to convert heretics, or to show mercy to them, but to kill them, that they had taken the cross.' The abbot Arnold, better acquainted with the obstinate devotion of the heretics, replied, 'Fear not, for I believe that very few will be converted.' "

Shortly after, the crusaders entered the castle chanting the Te Deum, and preceded by the cross and by the standards of Montfort.

God's children had assembled in two Vaudois churches, the men in one, the women in the other, and while the fanatical bands of Rome began to sing the Te Denm, they calmly responded by chanting one of their simple hymns of praise, pausing between each sob of the music to encourage each other by a mute caress, or to seek new strength in fervent prayer. Not one flinched; not one made the slightest effort to escape the awful doom which each knew awaited him. The honor of becoming a martyr for the holy cause of that sweet Jesus who was himself a man of sorrow, gave unwonted dignity to the rudest carriage. It was the ecstasy of religious faith, one of the grandest sermons to which that brutal band of heated zealots, smeared with martyr-blood, ever listened.

The abbot, Guy de Vaux Cernai, to fulfill the articles of capitulation, came to these Vaudois, and began to preach the Roman faith to them. He was instantly interrupted. "Sir priest," was the unanimous cry, "we want not your exhortations. We have renounced the church of Rome; we have become the children of a purer light; we draw our consolation from a higher source, even from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, to whom be glory for evermore, Amen. Your labor is vain; desist. For neither life nor death can make us renounce that precious Bible whose truths we have embraced."

The abbot, surprised and strangely moved, nest visited the assembly of Vaudois women. He found them as resolute, and still more enthusiastic in their declarations.

The ferocious De Montfort, in his turn, visited the Vaudois. Already he had piled up enormous masses of dry wood. The executioners, in their black gowns, stood ready. The impatient soldiery clamored hoarsely for the féte to begin. "Be converted to the Roman faith," said the ruthless crusader, "or ascend this pile." None were shaken. The wood was fired; the whole square was enveloped in a tremendous conflagration. The greedy tongues of the lurid flame licked the crackling wood as if hungry and impatient for their human prey. The Vaudois were conducted to their funeral pyre, but no violence was necessary to compel them to enter the blazing, torturing fire; they voluntarily precipitated themselves into it, their sweet Provencal hymns quivering upon their lips, or else repeating that grandest of the beatitudes: "Blessed are ye when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say alt manner of evil against you. falsely, for my safe. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven; for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you." High above the fierce crackling of the flames, high above the hoarse roar of the fanatic multitude, rose the pathetic wail of the Vaudois supplication, until God came to their deliverance, and through the open and thrice welcome door of death their unfettered souls winged their way to that borne where "the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary be at rest."

The capture of Minerva was quickly followed by the siege of Termes, a strong castle upon the borders of Roussilon, which was commanded by its lord, a valiant captain named Raymond of Termes. This gallant soldier made a grand defense for "Christ and liberty." The patience of the crusaders was sorely tried, and De Montfort beheld his army terribly thinned by sickness and the Vaudois sword. He made a fresh appeal to the fanaticism of the French provinces, each of which, in response, dispatched in its turn a numerous contingent to his camp. Meantime, after four weary months of incessant combat, gaunt famine stared the Vaudois in the face, and thirst parched their throats. An attempt was made to escape from the castle into the surrounding mountains.

The Vaudois did indeed pass the first line of De Montfort's intrenchments, and dispersing in the shadowy recesses of the country, shaped their flight towards Catalonia. But soon their escape became known in the camp of the crusaders. The knights mounted in hot haste and scoured the roads; the men-at-arms, impressing peasants to guide them, searched the innermost recesses of the mountains. Each one exhorted the other not to let those who had cost the host so much sweat and blood escape their vengeance.

The unhappy Vaudois, encumbered by aged men, by women, by children, were speedily overtaken and remorselessly slaughtered where they stood. A few were conducted alive to the presence of Simon de Montfort, among the number the gallant Raymond of Termes. These, with the exception of their lord, were publicly burned alive for the edification of the crusaders. But De Montfort reserved Raymond of Termes for a more hapless lot. He confined him at the bottom of a tower in Carcassonne, in a damp dungeon whose walls were coated with ice, where, with exquisite cruelty, he suffered him to languish for many years, a prototype of the wretched prisoners of the Inquisition, or perhaps of that mysterious "iron mask," whose lineage is enshrouded with such gloomy interest in French history.

The miserable inhabitants of this unhappiest of countries found no asylum which could protect them. Neither woodland dell nor mountain cavern could screen them from the keen sight of the hunters of the Romish Babylon. Provence shivered in mute sympathy with the agony of her children. The pagan cruelty of the most monstrous of the Roman emperors was white when set against the blackness of De Montfort's infamy. Torquemada himself might have learned from him new lessons in the cruel skill of torture. Horror was heaped upon horror, until the benumbed and decimated Vaudois began to creep with languid footsteps across the borders of a territory surrendered to the ravage of demoniacs into happier lands.

 

Chapter VII

THE REVOLT

At length even the timid patience of Count Raymond of Toulouse was exhausted. He had surrendered every thing, promised every thing, submitted to every thing, in his efforts to court a reconciliation with the church. But cozened and maltreated by the perfidious minions of the pontifical see, he was now goaded to desperation, and like the hunted stag, turned at bay. Well would it have been for his knightly fame and for his Christian honor if, instead of faltering so long, he had at the outset united with his nephew in the defense of their mutual states.

He now formed a close alliance with the counts of Comiges and of Foix, with Gaston, viscount of Béarn, Savary de Mauléon, seneschal of Aquitaine, and the other lords of those provinces who were accused of heresy or of tolerance, and whose interests were united with his own.

Count Raymond also negotiated a treaty of offense and defense with Don Pedro of Aragon; and gathering his forces well in hand, dashed with gallant purpose against the invaders of his country.

De Montfort also was at the head of a fine army, inured to danger, well disciplined, and accustomed to victory.

He first advanced to Lavaur, a strong castle five leagues distant from Toulouse. This stronghold, afterwards raised to the rank of an episcopal see, was then the property of a widow named Guiraude, whom her brother Aimery de Montreal had recently joined, with eighty other knights like himself despoiled by the crusaders of their fiefs. Aimery, Guiraude, and most of their defenders, were all open believers in the Vaudois creed. They had opened an asylum to those of the reformed who were persecuted in the various adjacent villages; so that their fortress, which was kept well stored and well manned, and which was surrounded with strong walls and girded with deep ditches, was esteemed one of the principal seats of the heresy.

The defence of Lavaur was long and stubborn. But at length the fanaticism, the numbers, and the pernicious skill of the crusaders triumphed; the city was taken by assault, and De Montfort, beholding his too ardent soldiers already busied in the work of indiscriminate massacre, besought them rather to make prisoners, that the priests of the living God might not be deprived of their promised joys. "Very soon"—we here quote from the narrative of the monk of Yaux Cernai, himself an eyewitness of the scene—"they dragged out of the castle Aimery de Montreal and other knights to the number of eighty. The noble count of Montfort immediately ordered these to be hanged; but as Aimery, the stoutest of them, was strung up, the gallows fell, for in their haste the executioners had not well fixed it in the ground. The count, seeing that this would cause great delay, ordered the rest to be massacred; and the pilgrims receiving the command with the greatest avidity, very soon slew them on the spot. The lady of the castle, who was a sister of Aimery and an execrable heretic, was, by the count's order, thrown alive into a pit, which was slowly filled up with stones. Afterwards our pilgrims collected the innumerable heretics who had fled to this citadel, and burned them alive with the utmost joy.

Such is the gloating recital of an unblushing monk who was at once the witness and the panegyrist of these freezing horrors.

The crusaders quitted the rains of Lavaur to hasten forward to the siege of Toulouse, Count Raymond's capital.

"This city," says Sismondi, "was far from having been completely converted to the reformation of the Vaudois; the Romanists still composed the greater number of the inhabitants, though the Vaudois were numerous and counted their disciples among the most enlightened citizens. The magistrates, when asked why they did not drive out the heretics, replied, 'We cannot; we have been brought up among them, we have relations among them, and we daily witness the goodness of their lives.' The Romanism of Toulouse was therefore very different from that of Northern France. The proverbial imprecation, 'I would rather be a priest, than have done such a thing,' was as common in Roman as in Vaudois mouths. Indeed the Romanism of Toulouse was so unnaturally liberal, owing. to the leaven of the Reformation, as quite to justify the indignant affirmation of the most ancient historian of the crusade, that Toulouse ought rather to be called Tota dolosa."

Still the bishop Fouquét had imbued a number of the most ignorant citizens with his own fanaticism. These formed themselves into a society called The White Company, five thousand of whom had joined De Montfort beneath the walls of Lavaur. This society had erected a tribunal by its own authority, before which it dragged those who were accused by its spies of being Vaudois. The partisans of the Reformation, reinforced by the friends of toleration, formed a counter association called The Black Company, whose object it was to resist and punish the lawless outrages of the fanatics. These two troops met often in the streets, armed, and with ensigns displayed; and many towns, which belonged to one side or the other, were alternately besieged. "Thus," says William Puy Laurens, a contemporaneous chronicler, "did our Lord, by the ministry of his servant the bishop, instead of a bad peace, excite among them a good war."

But while Fouquét was striving to kindle a war among his flock, Count Raymond was busied in restoring peace among his subjects. He succeeded so well that, when De Montfort appeared before the city and summoned it to surrender, the united voice of the city spoke in the tone of the consul, who said that Toulouse refused either to renounce its fidelity to its count, notwithstanding his excommunication, or to deliver up to punishment those of its citizens who were suspected of cherishing the Vaudois tenets.

Fouquét, bitterly angered at this refusal, instantly called in his priests, assembled them in a body at the cathedral, excommunicated all the Toulousians, and then quitted the city barefoot at the head of his monks, who carried the holy sacrament in the procession and chanted litanies as they marched.

However, Toulouse did not suffer the fate to which its charitable bishop had deserted it. Onthe contrary, Count Raymond, assisted by the counts of Foix and of Comiges, so pressed De Montfort, that he was not only compelled to raise the siege of Toulouse, but to retreat in his turn before the victorious Provencal squadrons to the shelter of one of his strong-holds, Castelnaudory.

But De Montfort's cry for aid soon brought another swarm of fanatics to his assistance. Count Raymond was repulsed. The country which, in his hour of misfortune, had vented its hate against him by rising in universal insurrection and spewing forth his garrisons, was again furiously harried; while Count Raymond retired into Aragon to recruit his forces and to form a junction with his royal ally and kinsman.

Marked by these and similar vicissitudes, several years passed sadly by. In the autumn of 1213 the disastrous battle of Murét was fought, in which king Pedro of Aragon, who had generously advanced to reinstate his brother in his dignities, lost his life, and Count Raymond's star, with that of religious toleration, seemed for ever sunk below the angry horizon.

The ferocious activity of De Montfort was not decreased by the victory of Murét, or by the voluntary exile of Count Raymond in the Aragonese territories. Entering upon that unhappy nobleman's vacant countship, he ravaged it for the third time from corner to corner, and himself assuming the reins of government, with the congenial Fouquét as his adviser, gave full sway to his bigotry and insatiable ambition.

In 1216, Pope Innocent III died. His pontificate had been one of the most stormy and arbitrary in the papal annals. Possessed of remarkable executive talent, and of an ambition as far reaching as that of Lucifer, no one of the popes, excepting perhaps Hildebrand, had done so much to consolidate the Roman despotism. He was merciless in the execution of his ecclesiastical projects, steeled against the presumptuous wretch who ventured to reject his creed, impious in his profanation of God's name and of the cross of Christ, and his memory is burdened with the inception of the Inquisition, with the incorporation of the most perfidious maxims into the canons of his church, and with the curses of those innocent children of the Most High, the Vaudois, whom his stentorian voice, echoing over Europe, first taught the nations to persecute.

Meantime Count Raymond was not idle. Secretly informed of all that was passing in Provence, he learned with joy that the barbarous and iron rule of Simon de Montfort was felt to be intolerable by the most tolerant people on the face of the globe. The inhabitants of Toulouse dispatched an embassy to invite him to return to them, and pledging themselves to support him with the heartiest and most loving zeal.

Encouraged by these attestations of attachment, the count raised an army in Aragon and Catalonia, at the head of which, after some reverses, he finally marched, in 1217, into Provence, entering once more his ancient capital amid the joyous acclamations of the populace.

De Montfort's mingled fanaticism and ambition made him equal to the occasion. Instantly dispatching Fouquét, bishop of Toulouse, with James de Vitry, the historian of the last combats of the Holy Land, into France, to preach a new crusade, he summoned his brother Guy de Montfort and his son Amaury to his side, and hastening towards Toulouse, hoped to attack it before the citizens could rebuild their leveled walls, and while, haunted by the memory of former chastisements, they yet hesitated between affection and fear.

Appearing before the capital early in September, the crusaders at once made a vigorous assault. They were as vigorously hurled back into the surrounding ditches; while Simon's brother Guy, together with his nephew the count of Bigorre, fell dangerously wounded.

De Montfort then commenced a regular siege, at the same time sending his wife Alice of Montmorency to the court of Philip Augustus, to solicit his aid. Meantime the siege proved tedious. Prolonged through the winter, it dragged ineffectually into the ensuing spring and summer. Daily darting from their citadels, the Toulousians stung their besiegers with constantly increasing venom.

At length, on the 25th of June, 1218, Count Raymond made a sally, and pushing resolutely towards one of De Montfort's most destructive engines, called a "cat," because with its ponderous paw it beat breaches in the wall, captured it.

The butcher of the Vaudois was at mass when the news of the sortie was brought to him. Instantly arming himself, he headed his men-at-arms, and charged fiercely to the rescue of his favorite engine. He was successful. The Vaudois were repulsed. But while De Montfort stood with his battalion before the unwieldy paw of his strange machine, an enormous stone, cast with Titanic power and with vengeful certainty from a catapulta upon the city walls, struck the redoubted monster full upon the head, and hurled him maimed and lifeless to the ground, while his countenance was still distorted with a grin of sardonic satisfaction on account of his latest and last success.

Amaury de Montfort, the dead fanatic’s son and heir, collected his scattered and affrighted soldiers, and receiving their homage and oath of fidelity as his father's successor in the usurped courtship of Toulouse, for a little longer persisted in the siege of the jubilant city.

But in vain. In the latter days of July, 1218, he retired with his shattered cohorts into Carcassonne, where De Montfort was buried with great pomp.

 

Chapter VIII

THE FINAL MASSACRE

For a few brief years Provence enjoyed comparative repose. Its singular fertility, which the Vandal hoof of war was unable to tread out, soon made Languedoc begin once more to smile. After De Montfort's death, the demon of fanaticism fled with a shriek. Count Raymond, old and broken, delegated his government to his son Raymond VII, already rendered illustrious by high exploits, and who, possessed of a more experienced constancy and of a loftier character, seemed destined for a happier reign.

Rome, torn by internecine broils, and ruled by the irresolute scepter of Honorius III, who had succeeded the grasping Innocent, appeared to relax its vigilance. Northern Europe, engaged in preparing for another crusade against the Saracens, was for a moment oblivious of Provence, where her knights considered that they had drowned the Vaudois church in the blood of its martyrs. Philip Augustus, busied in the west in wrenching English France from the craven grasp of king John, was inclined to temporize with the Provencals. The Vaudois nobles had united and driven out Amaury de Montfort from the viscounty of Albi and Beziers, installing the son and heir of the murdered prince, Raymond Roger, in his rightful states. The horizon was lit up with a deceptive brilliancy—too soon, alas, followed by the devastating storm—and the Vaudois church, rising from the sea of gore, enjoyed an apparent resurrection, and with unshaken constancy relumed the lamp of the ancient faith.

After the extinction of a fire, some sparks will still lie concealed under the ashes. These, fanned by the gale, may kindle a new flame, which, after devouring all the combustible matter within its reach, will in its turn be quenched. So the momentary toleration in Provence recalled the preachers of the crusades, re-attracted the attention of Europe, reawoke the napping fanaticism of the faithful, and launched a new horde of brutal enthusiasts upon the Vaudois, so that those of them who had escaped the first massacre were mostly involved in the searching destruction of the second.

In 1222, while the gathering tempest soughed ominously in the scowling heavens, but before the fell fury of the storm burst, Raymond VI died suddenly at Toulouse. Though this prince had shown neither distinguished talents nor force of character; though he had been early induced to assent to what he disapproved, and to inscribe his name among those who came to ravish his country, and who cherished the secret purpose of depriving him of his heritage; though he had submitted with patient feebleness to all the ecclesiastical censures, to all the personal outrages which the legates, the pope, and the council of the Lateran could heap upon him, yet he died regretted and loved by his Vaudois subjects, who did not forget that he had incurred all this contumely by his indulgence towards them; that he had abhorred the bloodshed and racking tortures inflicted upon his states by the crusaders; and that, spite of the persuasion with which the crusaders had succeeded in inspiring him, that his religious duty as well as his temporal interest demanded these persecutions, he had always done his utmost to check the barbarous zeal of the executioners.

His administration had been gentle. Public liberty in the cities, commerce, manufactures, science, poetry—all had made rapid progress under his fostering care. But he was accused of feeling compassion for heretics. For this reason he was not only persecuted through life, but the spiteful vengeance of Rome followed him even for ages after death. His son could never obtain the honors of sepulture for his body. His coffin was deposited near the burial-ground of St. John of Toulouse, waiting the permission of the holy see for its interment. It was still there in the middle of the fourteenth century; but as it was only of wood, and as no one took care for its preservation, it was broken, and his bones were dispersed in the sixteenth century. The skull alone of the hapless count was long preserved in the chateau of the Hospitallers of St. John of Toulouse, to which order Raymond VI had once belonged.

In the year following the death of the count of Toulouse, 1223, Philip Augustus breathed his last. One of the ablest kings since the weighty scepter of Charlemagne swayed Europe, he aspired to consolidate an empire as vast as that of his great predecessor. He did indeed add materially to the grandeur of medieval France, leaving to his successor an enlarged kingdom whose resources were carefully husbanded.

The ferocious bishop Fouquét, who was at Rheims on the accession of Louis VIII, better known in history as Saint Louis, eagerly seized that opportunity to enlist the superstitious young king in a new crusade against the Vaudois. Louis listened approvingly to the seductive eloquence of the renegade troubadour, ordered the sacred war to be preached throughout France, persuaded Honorius III to kindle the zeal of Europe at large, and then, arming with avidity, swept like a vulture to the banquet of blood.

Then the cruelties of De Montfort's régime were reenacted. The crusaders had returned with seven other devils worse than the first. Hell was once more in full chorus, while all good Romanists joined in the tune. Monks marched from city to city preaching ferocity, and then facilitating by perfidy the execution of their counsels. The fanatics pillaged towns and villages and castles; outraged women, and even little girls; and then forming in circles around the blazing stakes at which the Vaudois were burning, with an impious affectation of devotion, chanted in unison the hymn Veni Creator, while the wail of their tortured victims ascended to the pitying heavens.

No human calculation can ascertain with any precision the dissipation of wealth, or the wanton destruction of innocent life, which were the consequences of these crusades against a people whose only crime was that their lives bloomed with the beatitudes. Scarcely a peasant but reckoned some member of his family cut short in the flower of his days by fanatical violence; not one but had repeatedly seen his property ravaged and his household insulted by the crusaders. More than three quarters of the knights and landed proprietors of the proscribed territories had been despoiled of their fiefs.

Yet the sanguinary fury of fanaticism was not glutted. In 1229, the council of Toulouse established the Inquisition in Provence as a permanent institution. The military power was reinforced by the subtlety of the monks. A code of procedure, framed for the express purpose of entrapping overcautious heretics into unsafe admissions, was publicly circulated among the inquisitors.

The Vaudois supported their doctrines by the authority of the holy Scriptures—the most unlearned among them could repeat large portions of the Bible by heart. Therefore the first indication of heresy was considered to be the citation either of the epistles or of the gospels; the second was any exhortation against the vices of the day, or any assertion of the necessity of a change, of spirit in order to be saved; and the third was to show any compassion to the prisoners of the Inquisition.

The Council of Toulouse decided that the reading of the sacred Scriptures should not be permitted. "We prohibit," says the fourth canon of that memorable council, "the laity from having the books of the Old and New Testaments, unless it be, at the most, that any one wishes to have, from devotion, a Psalter, a breviary, or the hours of the blessed Mary; but we forbid them, even then, to have these translated into the vulgar tongue."

Another article read thus: "We command that whosoever shall be accused of the Vaudois heresy, or be noted with suspicion, shall be deprived in sickness of the assistance of a physician. Likewise, when a sick person shall have received the holy communion of his priest, it is our will that he be watched with the greatest care to the day of death or convalescence, that no heretic, nor any one suspected of heresy, may have access to such a one.

A little later, when executions became less frequent because it was more difficult to procure Vaudois for their autos da fé, it was decreed, that the scent of the human hounds might be rendered keener by a bribe, that the confiscated property of a heretic should be shared between the spy who denounced and the judge who condemned him.

The philosophy of Rome in these measures is evident. The reform had arisen from the first advancement in literature, and from the application of judicious reason to religious instruction. By thickening the darkness, by striking the developing mind and conscience of Christendom with a blight, this fermentation could be arrested, and mankind would bow once more in blind submission to their hereditary belief. "I can never admit," wrote Pasquier to the Dominican president, Brulart, "that the material arms of De Montfort would have overcome the Vaudois without the holy exhortations and the inquisitorial compulsions of St. Dominic and St. Francis."

The Vaudois met their fate with the meek heroism of the earliest Christians. Very few renounced their faith. Blood never ceased to flow, nor the flames to devour their victims in these provinces, now completely abandoned to the dark fanaticism of the inquisitors. Tranquility was never restored, persecution was never suspended, even by the death of its victims. The Provencals lived in a protracted agony.

Still the war raged. The French king had another motive besides the extirpation of heresy for its prosecution. The struggle had a political phase. The French court desired to round the empire into symmetrical form by adding to it these provinces, which bathed their feet in the blue waters of the Mediterranean. As this object was not definitively accomplished until the year 1243, the "sacred war" continued to devastate those fields which should have been covered by the richest harvests of the south, those cities which had been animated by commerce, industry, and intelligence, and to butcher that noble population whose devotion to their faith is the grandest legacy which the history of that time has bequeathed to posterity.

Beneath the accumulated tortures to which they were subjected the Vaudois melted slowly away. Their opinions ceased to influence society. The Provencal faith was no longer molded on the primitive apostolic model. By the middle of the thirteenth century the Vaudois had apparently disappeared. Terror was still extreme, suspicion universal. Though the teaching of the proscribed doctrine had seemingly ceased, yet the sight of a book caused a shudder, and ignorance was a salutary guarantee of safety.

The Vaudois died as grandly as they lived. No refinement of torture could rack from their suffering lips a disavowal of their belief. Often they scorned to stoop even to concealment. Entering voluntarily the lurid fires of the Inquisition, they showed how martyrs could die for "Christ and liberty." Gaining strength from the devotional rapture of St. Paul, they earned a right to repeat with him,

"What shall we then say to these things? If God be for us, who can be against us? He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?

"Who shall lay any thing to the charge of God's elect? It is God that justifieth. Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died, yea rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written, For thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter. Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors, through him that loved us.

"For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." Romans 8:31-39

 

Chapter IX

THE INTERREGNUM

The crime against the Vaudois was not the separate wickedness of a single nation. It was a mosaic of infamy, the legitimate, inevitable offspring of an ecclesiasticism which had employed every art to pervert the understanding and to corrupt the heart.

The Italian, Innocent III, first gave the signal for this outrage upon human nature; and he also bestowed the recompense. He continually sharpened the swords of the murderers, blunted in slaughter. When the fanaticism of Europe drooped, weary in its madness, he aroused it once more to raving fury by his clamorous appeals.

The two Spaniards, the bishop of Ozma and St. Dominic, the founders of the Inquisition, first taught the perfidious art of seeking out in the villages those whom the priests were afterwards to tie to their stakes. The Germans, invited by their monks, flocked from the extremities of Austria to glut their faith in massacre. And the English Matthew Paris renders zealous testimony to the activity of his countrymen in the same abandoned cause, and to their triumphant joy at the miracle—for so he called the treachery of Beziers—which had avenged the Lord.

But the crime from which individual nationalities are to be absolved, is to be laid upon the conscience of Europe at large, and especially upon the pernicious counsels of the Roman church, which incited it, and juggled mankind into believing that the elect could be saved by a baptism of innocent and Christian blood.

Thus the reformation, of which the church had so much need, the light which was to illuminate the mind, to restore to morals their purity, to reason its empire, and to religion its pristine flavor and omnipotence, was repelled for three whole centuries, and even much longer with regard to those Italian and Spanish provinces which spoke the Romanesque languages.

The Vaudois taught too soon. Spreading their pure instructions through all the countries of the western empire in the superstitious infancy of Europe; called to combat with an established and arrogant ecclesiasticism—while the intellect of the Slavonic, the Latin, the Anglo-Saxon, and the Germanic nations was not yet sufficiently awake to perceive the light, but saw men as trees walking—they had no fulcrum upon which to rest their lever. Their truth was throttled by the mailed hand of Rome.

As in the impious days of the crucifixion, "from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land unto the ninth hour," so now, when Christ was crucified again in the person of his gospel, an awful darkness intervened. A frightful interregnum yawned through three hundred years.

The Vatican smiled happily. It flattered itself that it had for ever fettered the human mind, that it had for ever choked the wail of outraged conscience, that it had for ever crushed the insurrection of the soul. The Vatican was mistaken. The interregnum meant postponement, not conquest. For two hundred years the fires had been kindled, yet still at intervals Romanists abandoned the faith of their fathers to embrace that which must lead them to the flames. In vain did the Inquisition essay to compel the unfetterable mind to submission, and to establish an invariable rule of faith. It saw in the midst of the darkness which it had created some luminous points loom up on the horizon. It saw those sparks which it thought that it had for ever quenched, but scattered by its folly, to light the universe once more. It had no sooner conquered, than it was obliged to renew the combat.

The Vaudois were not exterminated, they were only dispersed. Proscribed, far from their country, now no more theirs, alas, they wandered from the shores of the Mediterranean to the borders of the frozen sea, from the Carpathian mountains to the Orkney islands. Many also found their way into those obscure Piedmontese valleys which had been the cradle of their reform.

Finding an asylum in the cottages of the peasants or poor artisans, whose labors they shared in profound secrecy, they taught their hosts to read the gospel in common, to pray in their native tongue without the ministry of priests, while they themselves continued to praise God and to submit gratefully to the chastisements which his hand had inflicted as the means of their sanctification.

The sufferings which they had endured for their sake made them cherish their tenets with the most reverential awe, and hand them down from generation to generation unaltered, uncorrupted, embalmed in the traditions of the Languedocian massacre. Unable under the jealous eye of Rome to enjoy the eternal consolations of religion, they were shut up still more to internal communion. They ceased to care for the visible world. They placed their hands in God's, and sobbed their griefs away upon His heart who is the great Consoler. They believed that heaven was the substantial world, that its joys were the real joys, even for the body and the sense, and that there was no delight except as it flowed from God into heaven, and as it descended from heaven into time.

Though robed in rags, they esteemed themselves clothed more richly than the earth is when she makes herself gay with flowers for her summer bridegroom; more richly than the firmament is when it wraps round itself the jeweled mantle of the stars, puts constellations beneath its feet and sunlight galaxies upon its head. For the joy of God is woven into garments more splendid than those which wrap the flaming spheres.

The truths of salvation which Christ had taught, which he had embalmed for ever by his sacred sufferings, by the bloody sweat, and by the death on Calvary, were to them august beyond all pictured magnificence, radiant beyond all starry and all solar splendors, sweeter than the embodied essences of all odors which the spring pours in her jeweled cup before God, more musical than the harmonies that swell in grand cathedrals, that echo from lilt and vale in summer woods, that come borne in soft sweetness in the happy talk of lovers, in the song of storied saints, in voices of rapture pulsing by moonlight over time's dim sea. Before the supernal vision of God's judgment they could only kneel in speechless adoration; if they tried to sing, the hymn wailed out but brokenly through the imperfect human instrument.

After their dispersion, the Vaudois seemed to vanish from the sullen history of the time. Seeking safety in obscurity, they no longer, to the superficial observer, appeared to impress their creed upon the human mind. Yet a deeper view discloses that they were the scatterers of God's seed in the furrows of these centuries, that they carried the unflickering taper of the gospel from which the later reformers were enabled to light their torches. They were the bridge which spanned the black abyss which yawned between the overthrow of the Vaudois church in Languedoc and the birth of Luther.

Though it is not clear that any of the Provencal Christians established themselves in England, it can hardly be doubted that Wickliffe acquired his first evangelical conceptions from their preachers. Wickliffe was a profound politician before he became a luminous teacher of divinity. A favorite at the court of St. James, he was dispatched in early life by Edward III on several diplomatic missions to the popes at Rome and Avignon. Traveling therefore through the south of France at a time when the Vaudois were hunted and burned with patient vindictiveness, his acute and inquiring mind could not but occupy itself with investigating the grounds of their dissent. A little later, Wickliffe held and publicly taught precisely the same tenets which he had seen men roasted alive for holding in Provence.

It may therefore be legitimately concluded that the Vaudois convinced the great Englishman that the church of Rome itself was wallowing in heresy.

Many of the Vaudois took refuge in Germany and in Bohemia, where Peter Waldo, their most celebrated teacher, had found an asylum when driven by priestly spite from his native Lyons, from Dauphiny, from Picardy, from Saxony; and where he had died surrounded by the Bohemian mountaineers, the ancestors of Huss and Jerome. Thus it was that God inoculated Bohemia with the truths of primitive Christianity. When Wickliffe's writings became known, the Bohemian Vaudois rallied, and resumed existence as an independent evangelical church.

An interesting historical episode proves that there were still some Vaudois remaining in Southern France in the middle of the fifteenth century. It is recorded that the Vaudois of the towns of Cabriéres and Merindole, upon being menaced by the inquisitors—always busy, always ubiquitous through these sad years—dispatched deputies to Louis XII to plead their cause before that able and just king. Although the priests strove to prevent it, they secured an audience. The Vaudois ambassadors declared that they received and taught the plenary inspiration of the holy Scriptures, the apostles' creed, the decalogue, and the Christian sacraments; but that they did not acknowledge the authority of the pope, nor adopt the antichristian dogmas of the Romish Babylon. Louis, surprised at the intelligence, moderation, and Christian appearance of the deputies, sent an envoy to inquire on the spot if their assertions were indeed correct. The commissioner, on his return, reported "that in those parts baptism was administered; that the articles of faith and the ten commandments were taught; that the Sabbath was solemnly observed; that the word of God was intelligently expounded, while portions of it were familiar to the most unlettered rustics; and that as to the fornications and poisonings of which they were accused, no instance of either could be found." "Wonderful!" ejaculated Louis, "these people are much better Christians than myself and all the rest of my orthodox subjects; let them remain undisturbed." And this fiat of the king was respected scrupulously throughout his life.

For some generations the Piedmontese Vaudois, although known to exist, were suffered to remain in despised security. But this may have been owing to the fact that the latter part of the thirteenth century and the commencement of the fourteenth were occupied with the fierce struggles between the rival factions in Italy of the Guelphs and Ghibelines. It is also possible that the preaching of another crusade in the East, Europe's last mighty effort to wring the Holy Sepulchre from the Saracen, left their persecution to abate.

But the Vaudois barely sufficed to keep aglow the sinking embers of the gospel in these dismal ages. Huss with his Bohemians, Wickliffe with his Lollards, were in too fearful a minority to inaugurate any thing but feeble local reforms, trodden down, with those who launched them, as soon as the Roman sentinels descried them from the Vatican. They were powerless to reshape the character of their epoch; their opinions did not mold society at large They could only wait and suffer and pray, floating down the centuries faith personified.

As proverbially it is darkest just before the morning smiles, so now the gloom wrapped the universe, thick, impenetrable, ominous. Then came those days never to be remembered without a blush, the age of dwarfish virtues and gigantic vices; the epoch of unreasoning superstition and unbridled wrong; the paradise of bigots. Swarms of licentious priests swept through Europe, sparing neither man in their wrath nor woman in their lust. The misshapen carcass of nominal Christianity lay huge and drunken across Christendom. Grown lazy with wicked prosperity, Rome was almost too indolent to persecute.

Decked out in her gaudy rags, gay with silk and velvet and satin, the gilded and painted strumpet of the papacy thought only of fêtes, of feasts, of dances, of pantomimes; the very services of the altar were turned into a carouse. The church traded, like a Jewish huckster, in the relics of saints, and bartered her usurped rights for gold with which to fill her coffers, emptied in debauchery. Pontiffs, like Alexander VI, bloated with wine, with murder, with adultery, with incest, sat as God, in the temple of God, with horrible profanity cursing the saints, and bestowing the apostolic benediction upon sinners with drunken gravity. Indecent orgies were daily held in the Vatican, which were openly attended by the pontifical mistresses. Europe was surrendered to the domination of demons, while pandemonium held wild jubilee.

"Thus all did turn degenerate, all depraved,
Justice and temperance, truth and faith forgot.''

But God had long been preparing the way to a glorious reformation by a baptism of suffering. This reformation was to be the result of two distinct forces, the revival of learning and the resurrection of the gospel. The latter was the great motor power, but the former was necessary as a means. The ignorance of Europe had enabled Rome to stifle the cry of the Vaudois preachers. There was no public opinion to which they could appeal. There existed but two classes in society, lawless despots and breadless serfs.

The invention of printing insured the triumph of nascent Protestantism. By emancipating Europe from the thraldom of ignorance, it secured its deliverance from the harder slavery of Roman ecclesiasticism. Faust, under God, dug Christendom out of medieval Jesuitism. Henceforth truth could not be throttled. Its voice animated ten thousand never-weary witnesses. It spoke trumpet-toned and everlasting through the press.

Then came Luther. He set before mankind...

"The paths of righteousness, how much more safe
And full of peace, denouncing wrath to come
On their impenitence."

Thus Vaudoisism and learning, the study of the classics, of Greek, of Hebrew, the dawn of an eager and discriminating intelligence through the cultivation of letters, were the two laboratories of reform. A few earnest souls had discovered the light in lowly valleys; mankind were soon to discern it upon the lofty mountain tops.

 

Chapter X

THE RESURRECTION of REFORM

The sixteenth century witnessed the resurrection of reform. The infant form of civil and religious liberty had been rocked in the cradle of an earlier epoch, only to die in its bright youth. Now the veil of the tomb was rent, and it came forth armed with new strength. That era, like a first conqueror, founded a new realm, the realm of opinion. Instantly the customary, the medieval, received a check. The scholastic methods of the universities began to recede before the progressive spirit of emancipated philosophy. The further usurpations of paganized Christianity were vetoed by the authoritative voice of primitive faith.

The new instinct was so full and active, that it bubbled over into secondary spheres. It showed itself even in architecture; and the Gothic towers of the old royal keeps were replaced by creations formed on the models of chaste ancient art. It showed itself in war, and the mailed, mounted chivalry went down before the infantry and the artillery of innovating science.

Moral and political Europe, equally rotten, began to be revolutionized. Now, as always before, Rome set herself to subdue the rebellion against her theology and her politics, using her old weapons, thumb-screws, racks, unearthly dungeons, and slow fires, invoking the grim horrors of the Inquisition to aid her in chilling the rising lava-like enthusiasm for the truth.

But God was not mocked. He sat serenely in the blue heavens, making the wrath of man to praise him. It had been decreed in His councils who is from everlasting to everlasting, that the spiteful drama in which Rome played the part of Sir Omnipotent should not be lengthened into further acts without a vigorous and successful protest.

When the pontiffs condescended to recite the articles of their belief to medieval Europe, the Amen of Christendom was fiercely fervent. But at length Leo X stepped out upon the balcony of the Vatican, and commenced to intone his creed: We believe in the observance of the minutest trifles of the ceremonial law; we believe that human nature is neither hereditarily corrupt nor intrinsically depraved; we believe that the saints and martyrs had a superfluity of merit, which they delegated to the church, and which, placed in the huge tureen of Rome, may be ladled out to those hungry souls who are willing to buy heaven with a price; we believe in the theoretical celibacy of the clergy; we believe in the dogma of monachism; we believe that there exists in the priesthood of the holy see a mediatorial caste between God and man; we believe that the pope, sitting as God, in the temple of God, cannot err; we believe that salvation is to be obtained by good works, by ave Marias, by penances, and by gold.

And when the courtly Medici's last cadence died quite away, as he ended his impious recital, while Europe stood ominously silent, a clear, resonant voice, echoing from the heights of the obscure town of Wittenberg, in semi-barbarous Germany, replied, "Oh nations, ye have listened to Pope Leo's Babylonian heresies: hark ye now to the Christian truth; for thus saith the Lord God: 'By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned. But not as the offence, so also is the free gift. For if by one man's offence death reigned by one; much more they which receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness shall reign in life by one, Jesus Christ.' "

By these words Luther launched the Reformation, whose soul was, salvation by faith in Jesus Christ.

Then the mutterers of the mass and the children of the Bible joined battle to decide which should shape the future.

That struggle was the epic of the sixteenth century. The Roman publicists have affirmed, and certain rationalistic philosophers on both sides of the water have claimed, that it meant emancipation from the dominion of the religious principle—that it meant, not a reformation, but an abolition of Christianity.

But the choral song of the Reformation was not materialism. The movement which Luther inaugurated, and which Calvin organized, did indeed clasp hands with liberty and strike off chains; but only as a logical result, not as its chief purpose. The object of the Reformation was to reopen the path by which God and man unite. This path, which Christ had opened, had been blocked up in ages of superstition by the worship paid the Virgin, the saints, the host, by meritorious, magical, supererogatory works, by ecclesiastical formalities. Men awoke to protest; Protestantism arose from the inner impulses of European life.

Religion was long the terror of the world. It was attempted to dissipate it by amusing nations, or to pile it over with strata of society—a layer of soldiers, over that a layer of lords, and a king on top, with clamps of priests and hoops of castles. But the religious sentiment would penetrate this motley mountain which lay piled huge and unshapely upon the human conscience; it would burst the hoops, and rive the earthy matter laid on top of it...

"The ethereal mould,
Incapable of stain, would soon expel
Her mischief, and purge off the baser fire,
Victorious."

The reformers recognized the cheat, believed in a real unity, heard the cry of smothered conscience beneath the mountain of priest-caste which Rome had reared with the patient labor of ages, invoked God's earthquake to topple it over; and as layer after layer fell, while society grouped itself on the level of faith in God, not in men, the angels them selves sang pæans. The overthrow of an ecclesiastical oligarchy, God and man brought face to face through faith in Christ, this was the grand work of the Reformation, whatever other beneficent results might follow in its train.

So far was Protestantism from involving a principle contradictory to religion: it simply sought to comprehend it, and to secure to mankind the liberty to understand it, in a more spiritual and unselfish disposition, in opposition to a worldly priesthood; it called on man to ground his faith, not on the word of a priest, but on the infallible word of God.

In 1519, two years after Luther had openly denied the infallibility of the church of Rome, the college of the Sorbonne, the most famous in medieval Europe, where Reuchlin had studied, where Erasmus had been graduated, but always the champion of Latin orthodoxy, denounced the new opinions. Twenty-four months later, the Parisian faculty of theology published their memorable condemnation of the Lutheran heresy.

At the same time Leo X was launching the thunderbolts of the Vatican upon the Reformation in Germany. Attracted by the universal hubbub, scholars paused in the first flush of their enthusiasm for resuscitated learning, to look up from their Greek text and inquire into the meaning of the din. The fascination of ancient letters was forgotten for a moment. Persons of the highest stations and of the lowest became curious to examine and weigh the merits of a controversy to which so much importance seemed attached. France especially was in a fever of excitement. Authentic records show that so early as 1523 there were in several of the provinces of that realm, and particularly in Southern France, Languedoc, Provence, the ancient seats of the Vaudois creed, great numbers both of the gentry and the commons who had embraced the reformed tenets; and even some of the episcopal order were tainted with Lutheranism.

In 1519, two of Luther's ablest and most eloquent disciples, Martin Bucer, all fire and energy, and Melancthon, the personification of calm, persuasive Christian philosophy, had visited France and created a desire for reform.

At the outset, the omens were favorable to the reception of the new theology in France. As the abuses of Rome were wide-spread, ripe, and pregnant, the dissenters made many and rapid converts. Francis I, who ruled the realm at the commencement of the Reformation, was the puppet of his own vanity, inordinately fond of gaiety, pomp, and dissipation. Without fixed principles of religion, he regarded questions of faith with indifference, so long as they did not trench upon the domain of policy. The historical rival of Charles V of Spain, when that cunning emperor temporized with the German dissenters, he also tolerated their brothers in France.

Thus it was that the Reformation secured time to ground itself in that kingdom; and this comparative immunity from persecution, this portentous stillness which ushered in a frightful storm, was so well employed that when the trial hour came, it was found that half of France, headed by some of the most historic names in her annals, were the devoted disciples of the reformed theology.

The numbers and influence of these disciples of a pure faith soon made them loom up into importance. It began to be thought that they might subvert the established religion. Influenced by this fear, and pushed on by the incessant solicitation of the churchmen resident at his court, as well as by the active example of Charles V in the Netherlands, Francis I was persuaded to persecute the reformers, timidly at first, but finally with Titanic energy.

The French prelates, though immersed in the lewd pleasures of the court, were too clear-sighted not to see with alarm the precipice upon which their order stood. They had sanctioned the aid furnished by Francis to foment the rebellion of the German Protestants, in order that internecine broils might weaken and perplex the political power of Charles V. But they were not disposed to tolerate the new opinions in France, lest their ascendency should despoil them of their revenues, as it had already despoiled the Germanic bishops. It was the dread of pecuniary loss, rather than care for religious unity, that urged these worldly and foppish prelates, lapped in luxury, bloated with pride, and swollen with license, to desert for an instant the arms of their mistresses, to button-hole the king, and insist upon the adoption of sanguinary measures for the extirpation of heresy; it was this which impelled them to admonish Francis that the maintenance of the old faith in its integrity would be a full atonement for all the sins he had committed or might commit—would be a passport to paradise.

The effects of this policy of the courtier prelates were soon experienced. On the 9th of June, 1523, a severe edict against the heretics was published. Then, in the autumn of the middle ages, the reapers of intolerant Rome went out into the field to glean once more a bloody harvest.

The first step of the victorious priests, under the king's decree, was to disperse an influential and numerous congregation of reformers at Meaux. This city was in the episcopal see of William Briconnét, an earnest and devout churchman, who had studied the canons of the Scripture as well as the canons of the church, and who, animated by the words of Luther, had himself ascended the pulpit, proclaimed the doctrine of salvation by faith, and conducted himself as a bishop should, by striving to instruct his flock, by identifying his interests with theirs, instead of neglecting them to immerse himself, as most of his order did, in the unhallowed dissipations of the gayest capital in Christendom. But the platforms of the Sorbonne echoed with denunciation. The "novelties" of Briconnét were placed under the ban, as the deviations of Wickliffe, of Huss, of Jerome, of Luther, had already been, and the good bishop's instructive eloquence died away in a stifled groan.

Lefèvre of Estaples was the friend and mentor of Briconnét. This patriarch of the Reformation had ventured to study the original records of the faith while Europe yet shivered in the chilly gloom of superstition. He drew from the Pauline epistles certain maxims concerning justification and faith, which a little later formed the soul of the reformed theology; and this indefatigable student, at the advanced age of eighty, preserving his vivacity and intellectual strength untouched by time, commenced a translation of the Bible, which forms the basis of the French version of the Scriptures.

For a time Francis I wavered in his determination. The fickle monarch, influenced by Erasmus, then the learned idol of lettered Europe, befriended Lefèvre, and even established a college for the cultivation of the ancient languages, in opposition to the Sorbonne. The deep religious spirit of the age touched for a moment the callous, selfish heart of the knight-errant king. With his mother and sister he frequently read the Scriptures, and they were heard to remark that the divine truth—which seemed to them to be there—ought not to be denominated heresy. Luther was frequently lauded at the court, while the Sorbonne sullenly lamented that the persecution of the followers of the heretic and the destruction of his writings, despite the king's decree of the 9th of June, met with obstructions from the Louvre.

But Francis remained for a little under the influence of his sister and the scholars of the empire. He even spoke of nullifying his edict, and was heard to regret the dispersion of the Meaux assembly; affirming at the same time that he saw no reason why Roussel and Aranda—two celebrated orators of the Reformation—should not preach at the court.

The shuttlecock king soon had a relapse. When Erasmus nudged his elbow, he was tolerant; when the prelates pointed to the rising tide of the reform, and bade him beware lest it swamp his throne, he grew alarmed.

The first symptom of the change was an auto da fé.

In the initial days of the Reformation, Louis de Berquin, one of the earliest opponents of the Sorbonne, an eminent scholar, an enthusiastic Christian, enjoyed the special favor of Francis, who, like all pedants, loved to surround himself with literati, with artists, with sculptors, and who petted Leonardo da Vinci with one hand, while he patted French scholarship upon the shoulder with the other.

Berquin's boldness soon impelled him to cross swords with the Sorbonne. The consequence was, that while his royal master, captured by Charles V at Pavia, languished in a Spanish prison, he lay in the dungeons of the Inquisition. Francis, on his return to France, liberated the incarcerated scholar, who was no sooner out however, than, making it a point of honor not to retire before his persecutors, he recommenced the combat, undertaking to convict Beda, the syndic of the Sorbonne, of himself holding heretical opinions.

Berquin relied upon the monarch's support. But meantime Francis, who had hurled himself upon Italy like an avalanche, was once more foiled by the calm tactics of the wily emperor, and returned into his kingdom with shattered health, a decimated army, and weakened authority; for, as Erasmus remarked in a warning to Berquin, the king's defeat had weakened his domestic power.

The Sorbonne saw the opportunity, seized it, actually secured the consent of the king to their program of procedure, and taking Berquin, in 1529, publicly burned him on the Place de Gréve. The Parisian populace, over whom the preachers of the Sorbonne exercised unlimited influence, are said to have shown less sympathy for this hapless victim than they ordinarily exhibited for the most abandoned criminals.

Francis I never afterwards paused. The demon of persecution took full possession of him. To the end of his life he continued to slaughter his subjects with an indiscriminate malignity which bordered on frenzy.

To this chapter of persecution, the Jesuit Fleury refers with an unfeeling jeer: "From time to time some false prophet appeared upon the scene, to publish his fanaticism or to sound the disposition of the court. But repression was prompt: it cost dear to one Berquin of Arras, to Jean Leclerc, a wool-carder of Meaux, and to Jaques Parané, a clothier of Boulogne. They were all burned alive, and a dread of the fire silenced the spirit of several oracles. History doubtless mentions these despicable names to perpetuate the reproach of their birth or their impiety, rather than to celebrate these vile founders of the Calvinistic church."

Rail on, proud mocker, at God's lowly poor. But these despised and scattered members of a torn body were made one again in Jesus Christ; while from their ashes they spoke with grander, more persuasive eloquence than that with which antique art endowed him who...

"Fulmined over Greece
To Macedon, and Artaxerxes' throne."

 

Chapter XI

THE COURT of FRANCIS I

The opening phases of the Reformation bear the impress of two illustrious women.

The first of these was Renée, duchess of Ferrara, and daughter of Louis XII. This lady had been early won to adopt the resurrected tenets of the gospel. Under the beautiful sky of fatal Italy she listened to the hurried words of the flitting reformers who ventured to mutter their opinions in an undertone even beneath the very throne of Leo X. The situation of her husband's estates in the near vicinity of Rome, made him fearful of exciting either the temporal or spiritual wrath of the pontiff, lest that arbiter both of this world and the next should pounce upon him and despoil him of his heritage.

Therefore Renée concealed her sentiments during the duke of Ferrara's life. But a little later, become a widow, she quitted the stifling atmosphere of Italy, and taking possession of the castle of Montargis, an hour's ride from Paris, openly avowed her adherence to the reformed theology, and gave the warmest of welcomes to the evangelical preachers, besides offering to the persecuted the safest of asylums.

The other of these ladies was Margaret de Valois, queen of Navarre, the daughter, the sister, the wife, the mother of kings, the greatest woman of her age.

Margaret, like Renée, had given her cordial assent to the teachings of the "evangelicals," as the French reformers were sometimes called.

The sister of Francis I lived much at the court, figured in state ceremonies and in the councils at the Louvre, at St. Germaine, at Fontainebleau; yet she preserved her sweet simplicity, her religious zeal, her calm faith, amid the wicked fascinations of her brother's court, giving her heart to the three things she loved best—the king, France, and the gospel of her Christ.

Margaret went wrapped in the respectful veneration of Europe. The scholars of Christendom were especially proud of one who had devoted her way of life to literature and divinity, who wrote and spoke with equal grace and eloquence, who was familiar with Latin, with Greek, with Hebrew; they enthroned her as their princess, they hailed her as their Mæcenas.

She had also been early initiated into politics. The diplomats counted her one of the best heads in Europe; and Dandolo, the Venetian ambassador, affirmed her to be the ablest politician in France.

Margaret is said to have been beautiful and stately in her person; and thus accomplished, influential, politic, and courageous in her Christian belief, she walked through the kingdom binding up the wounds of the hunted dissenters, succoring the needy, befriending the outlawed professors of the hated truth, earning the benediction of the sixth beatitude: "Blessed are the pure in heart; for they shall see God."

"A perfect woman, nobly planned
To warn, to comfort, and command;
And yet a spirit pure and bright,
with something of an angel's light."

After Francis had decided to fight heresy under the banners of the Sorbonne, Brantome relates that the constable, Anne of Montmorenci, when conversing with him upon the most effectual mode of extirpating heresy, did not scruple to say that "his majesty should begin with his court and his own relations," naming Margaret as one of the most dangerous of the heretics. Francis replied, "Nay, speak no more of her; she loves me too well not to believe what I believe," with which equivocating phrase he turned off his overzealous counselor.

Margaret has been finely called the mother of French reform. She did indeed by her life, by her precepts, by her station, by her enthusiasm, attract many to the gospel. Her influence in the upper tiers of society was especially marked. But there is always danger when princes turn missionaries. When the Bible spoke through the eloquent lips of the most beautiful woman of the day, there were some who yielded an apparent assent, not because they were penetrated by the truth, but because they were fascinated by the bewitching speaker; for when Margaret exhorted, who so stout as not to bow his head, and at least simulate conviction? But such Christianity was of course but superficial at the best; and when danger lowered, these fair-weather disciples skulked away. Others yielded an intellectual assent to the truths of Protestantism, but preserved the heart icy and untouched—a sad error, decomposing to the religious life of a church, destructive of the existence of nationalities.

Thus from one cause or another it chanced that there were many enlightened consciences in the upper ranks of French society, but there were few consciences which were smitten by the word of God. This weakened even the apparent strength of the Reformation in Latin Europe. For as Merle D'Aubigné has well said, "Conscience is the palladium of Protestantism, far more than the statue of Pallas was the pledge of the preservation of Troy in the heroic fable of the Odyssey."

When, a little later, Margaret, who had been already wed to the duke of Alencon—a prince of the blood, but a man without courage, amiability, or understanding, chief cause of the disaster at Pavia, from which field he lad fled in disgrace, and eventually died of shame—married again Henry d'Albrét, king of Navarre, the companion in arms of Francis, a prince brave, gay, accomplished, handsome, witty, learned, and eloquent, the young queen wrote religious toleration upon the first line of the first page of her code of laws, and opened an asylum for the persecuted "evangelicals," which even kings long hesitated to violate.

Meantime the persecution continued with increased severity. The reform saw her children around her, some already dead, some in chains, all threatened with a fatal blow. Martyrdom followed martyrdom. Such havoc was made among the "evangelicals," that an annual procession was instituted to render thanks to the Almighty that they had been permitted to spill so much heretical blood. when Dymond Leroy, with five others, suffered in 1528, Francis went personally to witness the execution, and stood bareheaded while the fires were kindled. When the fête was over, the monarch marched away from the scene at the head of a procession of monks and priests.

Of course the encouragement king's personal attendance at an auto da fé could not but be productive of increased enthusiasm in persecution. France bled from every pore. To record these sufferings would convert these pages into a martyrology.

Francois, archbishop of Lyons and cardinal of Tournon, was the chief instigator of these massacres. This haughty and intolerant prelate was the representative of an ancient family. He had entered the church at an early age, and had risen rapidly through the various ecclesiastical grades—monk; abbé, bishop, archbishop—until, in 1530, in his forty-second year, he received the red hat of a cardinal.

Tournon was celebrated as a negotiator and as a statesman, but it is as a persecutor that he achieved his widest fame. To use his panegyrist's expression, "He made it as dangerous to converse in secret as to discuss in public. Nothing escaped this great man, who seemed to multiply himself in order to discover artifice or punish temerity; so that foreign princes were accustomed to say that he alone was equal to an inquisition in France."

The overweening pride and bigotry of this inflated prelate had been sharply curbed by Margaret while she resided at the court. But upon her departure for her kingdom of Navarre, the emancipated cardinal became the confidant and adviser of the king. He was thus enabled to give loose rein to his atrocities.

Under the iron hand of Tournon, the vacillating monarch was kept sternly immovable in the policy of blood. On one occasion when Margaret had persuaded her brother to listen to a sermon by one of her favorite preachers, Lecoq, curate of St. Eustache, who ventured "to preach the doctrines of Zwingli," as we are assured by Maimbourg, "though the king could not at first discern the venom concealed under his fine phrases," the cardinal compelled Lecoq publicly to retract, and imposed a penance on Francis for listening to his sermon.

At another time the queen of Navarre so highly extolled the piety and genius of Melancthon, that Francis consented to invite him to a conference with the French divines upon the best means of restoring harmony to the divided church.

The clergy were in consternation. The prospect of contending with the learned and eloquent St. John of the Reformation alarmed them as greatly as it elated the evangelicals. Francis had already dispatched the invitation; but Tournon undertook even at the last moment to prevent the visit. His scheme for changing the king's opinion is described by Maimbourg as worthy of immortality.

He entered the royal apartment apparently absorbed in the pages of a book which he held in his land. Francis, noticing his abstraction, inquired the name of the volume which interested him so deeply. The prelate paused in his measured walk, looked up with a well-affected start, and replied, "Sire, it is a work by St. Irenaeus." He then instantly directed the monarch's attention to a passage where Irenaeus had given full scope to his feelings against heretics, showing that the apostles would not even frequent any public place where they were admitted. The wily cardinal then expressed his grief that, with such examples before him, the eldest son of the church should have sent for a heresiarch who was the most subtle and celebrated of Luther's disciples. Francis, surprised and shocked, instantly sent to revoke his invitation, protested by all the saints in the calendar that he would never renounce his hereditary faith, and, to give emphasis to the declaration, issued orders for the persecution of the heretics with additional vigor. "This sudden and generous resolution," moralizes the Jesuit who chronicles the episode, "fell like a thunderbolt upon the Protestants, who felt secure from such a reverse under the protection of the queen of Navarre."

The prospects of reform grew gloomier every day. The provinces were abandoned to the cruelty of the prelates. The capital was governed by the court. The court was controlled by two harlots.

It was during the reign of Francis I that women acquired that ascendancy at court which enabled them, under the two or three succeeding sovereigns, to nominate and to depose ministers, marshals, and judges—to dictate the policy of France. Francis, fond of gallantry and intrigue, thought that the charms of the softer sex would smooth the rough manners of his courtiers into becoming gentleness. From that idea sprang the new régime. The age of iron was succeeded by the age of debauchery. Ladies flocked to the court, each anxious to secure credit and influence, and careless of the means by which that object was gained. Chastity soon ceased to be a virtue—it became prudery; female honor was bartered for the privilege of bestowing pensions, or for the éclat of station. The authority of the ministers was merely nominal; the wives and daughters of the nobles swayed the scepter, each one retaining it so long as her beauty, talents, and intrigues enabled her to command an ascendancy.

Hence originated the excessive luxury, the super-refinement, the loose morality of the higher circles of French society. Men of letters, wits, poets, flitted through the galleries of the Louvre, each one attracted thither by avarice, by pleasure, by ambition, or by all.

The servility of these mocking letters increased the corruption of the age. The wits and poets who thronged the halls of the palace lowered the moral tone of the court circles by their nauseating flatteries, by their unchaste songs, by their profane epigrams.

They soon made themselves of use to the ladies by chanting hymns to the beauty of some favorite, and by satirizing her rivals. They held their talents to be a marketable commodity, to be knocked down to the highest bidder. Their verses conferred taste and genius upon their patrons, though nature might have denied them common-sense.

This mixture of lewd women, atheistic bishops, servile wits, and scheming courtiers, formed what was deemed a brilliant and gallant court.

The courtiers were divided into two rival factions, each of which obeyed one or the other of two beautiful but abandoned women, the Duchess d'Estampes, mistress of Francis I, and the famous Diana of Poitiers, mistress of the king's eldest son Henry, the dauphin.

Atheism might be bred by such an atmosphere; bigotry might be made to grow in such a, soil; persecution might thrive in such ground; but the austere precepts of the Reformation were too rare an exotic to be fostered there. The self-denial, the pure morality, the indifference to unlawful worldly pleasure, which characterized the "evangelicals," awoke no responsive chord in the breast of a court surrendered to dissolute levities. Nay, the courtiers soon came to hate their reproving Nathan. "We are weary," ported Diana of Poitiers, "of the declamation of the reformed preachers against the vices of the court and of the church."

And so the guilty court spun out its wild dance, unmindful, as it quaffed its brimming bowl, as it reeled and joked and laughed, of the earthquake which growled beneath its feet.

But the orgies at the capital did not stay the devastating tread of persecution. The inquisitors walked across France, from the English channel to the Pyrenees, hunting heretics and kindling autos da fé, until, to borrow the striking expression of a writer who has painted that epoch for the instruction of shuddering Christendom, "France scented burning bodies in every breeze."

 

Chapter XII

THE APOSTLES of the FAITH

Reference has been already made to several of the worthies who aided in the resurrection of the gospel in France—to Renée of Ferrara, to the beautiful Margaret of Navarre, to Lefèvre, to that Berquin who suffered in the Place de Gréve, and who, with his Testament in hand, had traversed the neighborhood of Abbeville, the banks of the Somme, the towns, manors, and fields of Artois and Picardy, filling them with love for the word of God.

But there were other apostles of the faith besides these.

A nobleman of the German city of Strasburg, Count Sigismund of Haute-Flamme, a friend and ally of queen Margaret, who called him her good cousin, had been touched by Luther's heroism and the preaching of Zell. His conscience once aroused, he endeavored to live according to the will of God. Sigismund was not one of those nobles, rather numerous then, who spoke in secret of the Savior, but before the world seemed not to know him. The reformers all bore loving testimony to his frankness and courage.

Although a dignitary of the church, and dean of a celebrated theological chapter, the count labored to spread the evangelical truth around him; and one day, while busied in revolving the best means of doing so, he conceived a grand idea.

Finding himself placed between Germany and France, and himself speaking fluently the languages of both, he resolved to undertake the task of leavening France with the precepts of Christ.

He instantly commenced his self-imposed labor. As soon as he received any new work from Luther, he had it translated into French and forwarded to Margaret.

He did more. Esteeming the queen of Navarre to be the door through which the principles of the Reformation were to enter France, he wrote Luther, urging him to pen a letter to Margaret, or to compose some pamphlet calculated to encourage her in her zealous labors.

Count Sigismund's labors with the priests and nobles who surrounded him were not crowned with success. Some few gentlemen indeed spoke brave words, but they were only lip deep. But the monks looked at him with genuine amazement. Their dreams were disturbed, their licentiousness was reproached, the dolce far niente of their lives was to be broken up. "Ah ha! The Reformation then means that we must change our easy life, give up our naps, quit our cloisters, surrender our illicit amours;" 'twas thus they reasoned. The keen eye of Lambert of Avignon, one of the ablest of the reformers, detected this commotion in the monkish dove-cotes, and turning to the count, he said with a smile, "You will not succeed here; these folks are afraid of damaging their wallets, their kitchens, their stables, and their bellies."

Sigismund succeeded better with Margaret. Soon after the defeat at Pavia, he wrote her a sympathetic letter; and again, when her sisterly affection drove her to seek Francis, when he languished in his Spanish prison, Margaret was strengthened and comforted by her good cousin's kind words.

Pierre Toussaint, prebendary of Metz, Roussel, one of queen Margaret's favorite preachers, and Farel, were also active servants in the vineyard during these initial years. They all endured great sufferings for the sake of that gospel which they loved. Still, nothing could shake their faith. They continued to tune their voices into harmony with the celestial chorus.

On one occasion, when Toussaint chanced to pass through the diocese of the abbot of St. Antoine, that violent and merciless priest seized the young evangelist, and despite his candor, sweetness, and the broken health under which he rested, plunged his fragile victim into a frightful dungeon full of stagnant water and other filth. Toussaint could hardly stand erect in this hideous den. With his back against the wall, and his feet on the only spot which the water did not reach, stifled by the poisonous vapors emitted around him, the young preacher recalled the cheerful house of his uncle the dean of Metz, and the magnificent palace of the cardinal of Lorraine, where he had been so kindly received ere he became a heretic. What a contrast! His health declined, his mind sank, his tottering limbs could scarcely support him.

Meantime poor Toussaint's friends had acquainted Margaret with his condition, and the indignant queen hastened by post to Paris, threw herself at the feet of her brother, and finally rescued this lamb from the fangs of the wild beast.

When the young evangelist came out of this fearful den, he was thin, weak, and pale as a faded flower. He stood bewildered. No one offered to receive this heretic who had just cheated the scaffold. But at length he went boldly to Paris, sought Margaret, and found an asylum with her.

Toussaint found the young queen surrounded by distinguished personages, all eager to present their homage. "Side by side with nobles and ambassadors dressed in the most costly garments, and soldiers with their glittering arms, were cardinals robed in scarlet and ermine, bishops with their satin copes, ecclesiastics of every order with long gowns and tonsured heads." These, desirous of enlisting the influence of Margaret in their favor, spoke to her of the gospel and of reform. Toussaint, a stranger to the chicaneries of politics, listened with profound astonishment to this strange court language. At the outset he was deceived, and took the religious prattle of this troop of flatterers for sound piety. It was not long, however, before his eyes were opened. When he saw the drift of their artful harangues, he burned to expose them.

Learning that Lefèvre and Roussel had arrived in Paris from Blois, Toussaint, full of respect for them, hastened to their apartments, and with impetuous eloquence urged them to assist him in unmasking the hypocrites, and in boldly preaching the whole gospel in the midst of the giddy court.

"Patience, Toussaint," replied the two scholars, both timid by nature, and whom the debilitating air of the court had perhaps still further weakened; "patience; don't spoil every thing; the time is not yet come." Then Toussaint, ardent, generous, upright, burst into tears. "Yes," he said, "be wise after your fashion; wait, put off, dissemble: you will acknowledge however at last that it is impossible to preach the gospel without bearing the cross. The banner of divine mercy is now raised; the gate of the kingdom of heaven stands wide open. God calls us. He does not mean us to receive his summons with supineness. We must hasten, lest the opportunity should escape us, and the door be closed.'' But the timid scholars could not be moved. Then he wrote Œcolampadius, "Roussel is weak; Lefèvre lacks courage; God strengthen and support them."

For himself, he was stifled at the court; the air was closer to him than in the den of the abbot of St. Antoine. Disgusted by the lewd revels of the capital, he resolved to quit it. "Farewell to the court," said he; "it is the most dangerous and seductive of harlots."

Then the young Metzer, putting behind his back certain "magnificent offers" which had been made to him if he would stay and connect himself with the mystical and timidly progressive wing of the Roman church, which Briconnét then represented, quitted the kingdom. But foreseeing that a terrible struggle was approaching, he left with a prayer that God would enable France to show herself worthy of the Reformation.

William Farel, another of those men upon whom God set the seal of his apostleship, was one whose simple, serious, earnest tones carry away the masses. "His voice of thunder made his hearers tremble. The strength of his convictions created faith in their souls; the fervor of his prayers raised them to heaven. When they listened to him, 'they felt,' as Calvin once said, 'not merely a few light pricks and stings, but were wounded to the heart, pierced with the truth; hypocrisy was dragged from those wonderful and more than tortuous hiding-places which lie deep in the heart of man.'

"He pulled down and built up with equal energy. Even his life, an apostleship full of self-sacrifice and danger and triumph, was as effectual as his sermons. He was not only a minister, he was a bishop. He was able to discern the young men best fitted to wield the weapons of the gospel, and to direct them in the great war of the age; for Farel never attacked a place, however difficult of access, which he did not take."

Farel's native place was Gap, a little village in Dauphiny. Desirous of preaching the gospel to his relatives there, on one occasion he took up his quarters in a corn-mill hard by the gates of the hamlet, where he explained a French Bible to the villagers who crowded about him.

Ere long he ventured to preach in the very heart of Gap; "desecrating," as the Capuchins phrased it, "a chapel dedicated to St. Colombe." "The magistrate forbade his preaching, and the parliament of Grenoble desired to have him burned;" so runs the record of the monks.

Farel replied by a formal refusal of obedience; upon which Benedict Olier, a zealous papist, and vice-bailiff, escorted by a posse comitatus, marched to St. Colombe. The doors were shut, and double-barred. The officers knocked. All were silent. They broke in. A large audience were assembled, but not a head was turned; all were drinking in greedily the eloquent words of the dauntless preacher. The officers went to the pulpit, seized Farel, and "with the crime in his hand," as the forcible expression of the Capuchins put it, referring to the Bible which he held, he was led through the crowd and imprisoned.

But the followers of the new doctrine were already to be found in every class—in the workman's garret, in the tradesman's shop, in the fortified chateau of the noble, and sometimes even in the bishop's palace. During the night the reformers rallied, and either by force or stratagem took the brave old man from prison, hurried him to the ramparts, let him down into the plain in a basket, and "accomplices " who awaited him sped with him to a place of safety

Although the larger part of Farel's apostleship was spent in foreign countries, for he was an exile from his dear France, yet he exercised a very marked influence upon the formation of the Gallican church.

Under the distant inspiration of Luther's eloquence, under the zealous labors of Toussaint, Sigismond, Farel, and Margaret, supported by an active host of less distinguished representatives, the reform continued to spread, despite Tournon's exertions and the denunciations of the Sorbonne. But the dissenters were scattered, often ill-informed on vital points of faith, and lacked uniformity of effort and belief. Who shall organize the Reformation? Who shall mold this heterogeneous mass of dissent into a grand unit? This loose-jointed body of reform, whose plastic hand shall reshape it into strength and symmetry? Such were the questions which Farel, Œcolampadius, Sigismond, and the other chiefs of Latin reform began to put to each other with anxious emphasis. Then the brain of French Protestantism began its work: John Calvin appeared.

 

Chapter XIII

JOHN CALVIN

John Calvin was born on the 10th of July, 1509, at Noyon, in Picardy, which was also Lefèvre’s native province. He was emphatically a man of the people. His family was not one of marked importance. His grandfather was a cooper at Pont 1'Evèque; his father was secretary to a bishop, and in the days of his greatest prosperity, apprenticed his brother Antony Calvin to a bookbinder. Simple, frugal, poor, intelligent, such were John Calvin's immediate progenitors.

His father valued letters, and he determined that his son should be liberally educated. The boy was therefore sent in his fifteenth year to the college of La Marche, at Paris.

There, pale, diffident to a painful degree, but with a look of striking intelligence, the bashful and studious boy of Noyon speedily shot to the head of his class. It was at the university that the famous friendship between Calvin and Mathurin Cordier began. Cordier, in 1523, when Calvin came to town, was a professor at La Marche. One of those men of ancient mold, who prefer the public good to their own advancement, he had neglected a brilliant career which had opened its alluring arms to welcome him, and devoted himself to the instruction of children. The professor was instantly attracted towards his singular pupil. Calvin's purity, his quickness, his thoroughness, his genius captivated him, and he lavished his instructions upon the thoughtful boy with unstinted hand. He taught him Latin and Greek and Hebrew. He initiated him into the temple of medieval culture. He imparted to him a certain knowledge of antiquity and of ancient chivalry. Indeed he inspired his pupil with his own ardor, and walked with him, arm in arm, in the "true path" of science.

In after years, when both master and scholar had been driven from France, and had taken up their abode in that little city at the foot of the Swiss Alps, whose mouth was to speak great things, Calvin, then expanded into the most celebrated doctor in Europe, loved to recall these days of his student life, and publicly announcing his indebtedness to Cordier, he said, "Oh, Master Mathurin, Oh man gifted with learning and great fear of God, when my father sent me to Paris, while still a child and possessing only a few rudiments of the Latin language, it was God's will that I should have you for my teacher, in order that I might be directed in the true path and right mode of learning; and having first commenced the course of study under your guidance, I have advanced so far that I can now in some degree profit the church of God."

But in those days both Cordier and Calvin were strangers to the evangelical doctrine, and devoutly followed the papal ritual.

"Calvin," says one of his biographers and disciples, "was at first a strict observer of the practices of the church. He never missed a fast, a retreat, a mass, or a procession." "It is a long time since Sorbonne or Montaigne had so pious a seminarist," was the common expression.

Thus Calvin, like Luther, while in the papal church, belonged to its strictest sect. "The austere exercises of a devotee's life were the schoolmaster that brought these men to Christ."

His application surprised his tutors. Absorbed in his books, he often forgot the hours for his meals, and even for sleep. The people who resided in the neighborhood were accustomed to point out to each other as they returned home late at night, a tiny, solitary gleam, a window lit up till the starry tapers of the sky were quenched in the grey of the morning. There sat John Calvin, elaborating in his august reveries thoughts which a little later were to convulse the universe.

Calvin's father, familiar with his son's genius, had marked out for hire a brilliant ecclesiastical career: an abbot's mitre, a bishop's cope, the red hat and the scarlet gown of a cardinal glittered before his eyes. Therefore when he heard from time to time of young Calvin's rapid advancement in grammar, in philosophy, in scholastic theology, he would smooth his beard and say, "Ah ha! We shall see brave things yet."

In 1527, two years after leaving home, he went back to Noyon at vacation time, and "although he had not yet taken orders, he delivered several sermons before the people." At eighteen he had a parish.

Then it was that a new light, which had but little resemblance to the false radiance of scholasticism, began to shine around him. At that time there was a breath of the gospel in the murky air, and the reviving breeze reached the scholar within the walls of his college, the priest in the recesses of his convent; no one was protected from its influence. Calvin heard people talk about the Bible, Luther, Lefèvre, Melancthon, Farel, and of what was passing in Germany.

When the rays of the sun rise in the Alps, it is the highest peaks that catch them first. In the sunrise of the Reformation, the most eminent minds were first enlightened. In the colleges there were sharp and frequent altercations. Calvin was at first among the most inflexible opponents of the evangelical doctrine; but soon he was won to study. Thoroughness was his mania. With him, as with so many others, examination meant emancipation. And at length, after a terrible struggle, he experienced that "joy and peace in believing" which had solaced Luther's torn soul in the Erfurth cloister. His conversion was hastened by witnessing several martyrdoms. He opened his Bible. Everywhere he found Christ. Instantly the scales fell from his eyes. "Oh Father," he cried, "His sacrifice has appeased thy wrath; his blood has washed away my impurities; his cross has borne my curse; his death has atoned for me. We had devised for ourselves many useless follies, but thou hast placed thy word before me like a torch, and thou hast touched my heart, in order that I may hold in abomination all other merits save those of Jesus."

Calvin then, at nineteen, broke with Rome, and quitting Paris repaired to Orleans, and later to Bourges, where he "wonderfully advanced the kingdom of God."

After a life of vicissitudes, extending from the year 1527 until 1535, frequently smitten by the bolts of excommunication, a fugitive at Angouleme, at Nevac, at Poitiers, yet preaching at Paris, and haunting the scenes of his greatest danger, Calvin repaired to Geneva en route to Germany, where, unexpectedly to himself, his journey was summarily arrested; while his name became ever after united with that of the brave Alpine city which, under his sway became the Rome of the Reformation.

And here, at the name of Geneva, it becomes not only interesting and instructive, but germain to this history, to sketch the more salient outlines of the gallant and romantic story of that immortal city, as magnificent in the beauty of its landscape, clasped to the snowy bosom of the Alps, bathing its feet in the waters of lake Leman, as in the grandeur of its moving history.

Geneva was at first simply a rural township, and as a part of Gaul it became an appendage of the Roman empire when the emperors leashed the European provinces to their car of conquest. In the fourth century, under Honorius, it became a city, receiving this title after Caracalla had extended the franchise of citizenship to all the Gauls.

From the earliest times, either before or after Charlemagne, Geneva possessed rights and liberties which guaranteed the citizens against the despotism of their feudal lords. The Genevese claimed to have been free so long that the memory of man runneth not to the contrary; and it is certain that the precise date of the birth of their freedom is shrouded in the mist of remote antiquity.

The Genevese soil was composed of three strata: the political lords, the counts of Geneva, who even so early as the eleventh century had extended their rule over an immense and magnificent territory; the bishops, who, gifted with superior intelligence, respected by the barbarians as the high-priests of Rome, and knowing how to acquire vast possessions by slow degrees, finally confiscated for a time the independence of the citizens without much ceremony, and united the quality of prince with that of bishop; and the burghers, not very numerous, but always intelligent, and resolute to maintain their parchment guarantees.

When the counts of Geneva had been hoodwinked by the cunning of the bishops into ceding the city to them, they had reserved the old palace, and part of the criminal jurisprudence, and continued to hold the secondary towns and the rural district of their countship.

But in process of time dissensions arose. The conflicting jurisdictions of the bishop-princes and the counts clashed.

Prelates who had already turned their crosiers into swords, their flocks into serfs, and their pastoral dwellings into fortified castles, hungered for more power. The battered walls of Geneva yet bear the marks of the fierce struggle which ensued, and which continued through the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries.

In the middle of the thirteenth century, Pierre de Savoy, a soldier and a politician, made a herculean effort to recover the city of his ancestors. The conflict lasted long; but eventually he was obliged to surrender his claims. Disgusted with his failure, and exhausted by his unceasing activity, Pierre finally retired to his castle of Chillon, where every day he used to sail upon the beautiful lake, luxuriously enjoying the charms of nature lavished around; while the melodious voice of his minstrel, mingling with the rippling of the waters, celebrated the lofty deeds of this illustrious paladin.

In the fifteenth century the counts of Savoy, having added several other provinces to Genevois, and become dukes, more eagerly desired the acquisition of Geneva than ever. They changed their tactics. Sheathing the ineffectual sword, they resorted to wily diplomacy. The new campaign was opened with spirit, and pope Martin V was petitioned to confer upon the dukes of Savoy the full secular authority in Geneva.

But the citizens, who in the lapse of ages had engrossed the civil government of the city, became alarmed at the news of this maneuver; and knowing that "Rome ought not to lay its paw upon kingdoms," good papists as they then were, they determined to resist the pope himself, if necessary, in the defense of their liberties. Placing their hands upon the gospels, they exclaimed, "No alienation of the city or of its territory; this we swear."

The sovereign of Savoy, balked in his best scheme, withdrew his petition. But Martin V, while staying three months at Geneva, on his return in 1418 from the Council of Constance, ran a-muck with the ancient city. There was something in the pontiff which told him that liberty did not accord with the papal rule. He was alarmed at witnessing the franchises of the Genevese. "He feared those general councils that spoil every thing," says a manuscript chronicle in the Turin library; "he felt uneasy about those turbulent folk, imbued with the ideas of the Swiss, who were always whispering in the ears of the Genevese the license of popular government."

"The pope," says D'Aubigné, "resolved to remedy this, but not in the way the dukes of Savoy proposed. These princes desired to secure Geneva in order to increase their own power. Martin thought it better to confiscate it to his benefit. At the Council of Constance it had just been decreed that episcopal elections should take place according to the canonical laws, by the chapter, unless for some reasonable and manifest cause the pontiff should think fit to name a .person more useful to the church. Martin thought that the necessity of curbing republicanism was a reasonable motive; and accordingly, as soon as he reached Turin, he translated the bishop of Geneva to the archiepiscopal see of the Tarentoise, and heedless alike of the anger of the Savoy dukes, and of the rights of the canons and the citizens, he nominated Jean de Rochetaillée, patriarch in partibus of Constantinople, bishop and prince of Geneva."

The Genevese, surprised and overawed, acquiesced in sullen discontent. Seventy odd years rolled away, and still the faithful citizens remembered their broken charters, and hugged the memory of their ancient franchises. At the commencement of the sixteenth century, driven to desperation by the tyranny of their bishop-prince, they determined to revolt, and turning towards Switzerland, whose...

"Hills, rock-ribbed, and ancient as the sun,"

had always borne up a hardy race of freemen, they invited the powerful Helvetic confederacy to assist them in expelling the usurper.

In its earlier stages the contest was a political one, but ere long it assumed a religious phase. The Reformation was preached. Its spirit took invincible hold of German Switzerland. The towns of the Helvetic confederacy had often come into collision with the grasping dukes of Savoy. Cherishing republicanism as their palladium of safety, they also hated the bishop-prince of Geneva, who had despoiled their Genevese cousins of their birthright, besides planting an inimical state upon their borders. Switzerland therefore lent a willing ear to the Genevan ambassadors, who came to solicit the assistance of the confederation. And when, a little later, the Helvetic cities had the additional motive of wishing to clutch Geneva as a trophy won to the reformed faith which they professed, they threw themselves into the contest with redoubled ardor. Precisely as the house of Savoy, backed by the pope, wished to extend its limits in a monarchical and Romanist sense, Switzerland desired to extend hers in a popular and Protestant sense.

The Genevese did not at once accept the Reformation. Numberless fierce quarrels followed its entrance within their walls. But gradually the citizens, remembering the tyranny under which they had groaned when the bishop-prince swayed the scepter of Geneva, recalling the mischief which pope Martin had worked them, and perceiving that the liberality of the reform contrasted strongly with the intolerant despotism of Latin orthodoxy, came over and ranged themselves under the Protestant banners, adjudging their franchises safer under the Reformation than under Rome.

William Farel of Gap had joined the Protestant missionaries when they undertook to extend their creed into the Romanic border lands, and by his boldness, eloquence, and unceasing energy, he gave brave help in proselyting Geneva. Instigated by him, the city council had publicly proclaimed that Geneva adhered to the Reformation; and so wonderful was the spell of his preaching, that priests were seen to throw off their vestments before the altar, and confess the Protestant creed.

Such was the posture of affairs when John Calvin entered Geneva in the year 1535. His intention was merely to visit Farel for a few days, and then seek in Germany an asylum where he might devote himself to tranquil meditation. Farel, however, perceiving his vast ability, was resolved not to permit him to depart; and when Calvin refused to remain in Geneva, he announced the wrath of Almighty God upon him should he shirk his duty, for heaven, he said, would make the quietness of study a curse to him.

Calvin afterwards said that it appeared to him as if he had seen the hand of God stretched forth from above to hold him back; he dared not resist it.

Calvin and Farel clasped hands, and immediately began to preach.

It seems that there were in Geneva certain persons who had adopted the reformed faith because they thought that it would bring them increased personal license. These latitudinarians were soon offended at the strict discipline which the two orators of the Reformation proclaimed. They intrigued so effectually that Farel and Calvin were exiled.

Calvin was far from caring too anxiously for his person. He had been obliged to endure opposition, combined with agony of conscience, which he declared were more bitter than death—the mere remembrance of which made him tremble. He began now again to wander and to learn; in particular he commenced a correspondence with the German reformers, with Melanethon, with Bucer, with Capito, and formed a closer acquaintance with them at the Diet.

It soon appeared that he could not be dispensed with at Geneva. The independence of the city was menaced in two directions: one party, which was inclined to the Vatican, were disposed to reinaugurate the old regime; the other showed a spirit of compliance with foreign dictation which imperiled the freedom of the town.

Both these factions were subdued, after long and sanguinary domestic contests, and those remained triumphant who regarded the maintenance of the strict Protestant discipline as the salvation of the city.

Deeply penetrated with this conviction, they looked upon all they had suffered as a punishment for the expulsion of their preachers. It was resolved to recall them. Although Calvin was extremely reluctant to return, yet Farel's solemn adjurations impelled him to accede to the call; and while Farel departed for Neufchatel, whither he had engaged to go, the great French divine reentered Geneva as a conqueror in 1541.

The condition of his return, though not distinctly stated, was still tacitly understood to be the adoption of his system of ecclesiastical discipline.

Calvin instantly went to work. He planted education as the basis of his state. He new-modeled the civil code, and shaped it to strict republicanism, sealing his renovation with these words of Christ: "THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU FREE." He next organized the Reformation. The Genevese reformers shaped their divinity on the model of his "Christian Institutes," which were written in 1536, and dedicated to Francis I, before the final return to Geneva. Ere long this work was scattered broadcast through Latin Europe. The Reformation lost its heterogeneous character. The conflicting sects were melted into unity, and France at last accepted the essential tenets of the despised Vaudois when she permitted the plastic hand of her great Genevan doctor to mold her into Protestantism.

The Abbé Anquétil, an old chronicler whose words at one time were in wide favor with the papists, considers the "Christian Institutes" to have been the chief support of the "heresy;" "for they systematized the Protestant doctrines, and enabled their assemblies to keep together even when their ministers were torn from them."

God, by giving in the sixteenth century a man who to the lively faith of Luther and the scriptural understanding of Zwingli joined an organizing faculty and a creative mind of rare genius, furnished the complete reformer. If Luther laid the foundation, if Zwingli and others built the walls, Calvin completed the temple of God.

Then Geneva became the school of the Latin and Anglo-Saxon, as Wittenberg was of the German and Slavonic Reformation.

As soon as Guy de Brés and many other fiery scholars returned from Geneva to the Low Countries, the momentous contest between the rights of the people and the revolutionary and bloody despotism of Philip II of Spain began; heroic struggles took place, and the creation of the republic of the United Netherlands was their glorious termination.

John Knox returned to his native Scotland from Geneva, where he studied several years; then popery, arbitrary power, and the exotic immorality of the French court, imported by queen Mary Stuart, made way on the north of the Tweed for the pure enthusiasm which bred Christian liberty and civilization.

Those Englishmen who sought an asylum in Geneva during the bitter persecutions of "Bloody Mary," imbibed there a love of the gospel and of civil liberty; and when they returned to Great Britain, these fountains gushed out beneath their footsteps.

Numberless disciples of Calvin carried with them every year into France the august principles of the Genevese school.

Even the Pilgrim Fathers of New England, who, quitting their inhospitable country in the reign of that royal pedant James I, planted on this continent their populous and mighty colonies, may in no improper sense claim Geneva as their mother. Calvin, looming through the centuries, may stretch his hand across the water from Mont Blanc, and placing it upon the head of the American Republic, murmur a proud benediction, and say, "You too are mine; I created you."

 

Chapter XIV

THE VALLEY of the SHADOW of DEATH

It will be remembered that the French king's first edict against heresy had been issued on the 9th of June, 1523. Nearly three years later, February 5, 1526, government issued another fiat. In those days all proclamations were made by a herald who traveled from city to city, trumpet in hand, and sounding his trumpet in the public squares to collect an audience, cried out his message in a loud voice.

On the morning of the 6th of February there was an unwonted stir in the streets of Paris. Crowds of excited people thronged the pavements, and with vehement gesticulation and voluble tongue harangued one another upon some question of exciting import. The great rush was towards the Louvre. There, at ten in the morning, a herald took his stand upon the palace steps, and after the customary flourish of the trumpet, cried, by order of Parliament, "All persons are forbidden to put up to sale, or translate from the Latin into French, the epistles of St, Paul, the Apocalypse, and other books. Henceforward no printer shall print any of the writings of Luther. No one shall speak of the ordinances of the church or of images otherwise than as holy church ordains. All books of the Holy Bible, translated into French; shall be given up by those who possess them, and carried within a week to the clerks of the court. All prelates, priests, and their curates, shall forbid their parishioners to have the least doubt of the Romish faith."

When the herald paused, the vast crowd began to disperse. The comments were various. "Heresy should be choked in blood," said some. "The Sorbonne fear Faust's type," said others. The majority turned away with the peculiar French shrug, and said quietly, "Patience; we shall see."

The prior of the Carthusians, the abbot of the Celestines, monks of all colors, "imps of antichrist," says an old chronicler, openly rejoiced in this brilliant triumph over heresy. "They gave help to the band of the Sorbonne," and cried, Amen, at the end of every sentence of the proclamation.

A little later the new edict was cried in Sens, Orleans, Meaux, and "in all the bailiwicks, seneschallies, provostries, viscounties, and estates of the realm." And now Cardinal Tournou's inquisitors, taking one edict in the right land and the other in the left, walked on their mission of destruction hedged about with the sanctity of public law.

France bled at every pore.

History teaches best by individual instances. Descriptions of collective cruelties lose their graphic power through the breadth of the delineation.

There was a young man about twenty-eight years of age, a licentiate of laws, William Joubert, who had been sent by his father, king's advocate at La Rochelle, to Paris to study the practice of the metropolitan courts. Notwithstanding the prohibition of the Parliament, young Joubert, who was of a thoughtful disposition, ventured to inquire into the validity of the papal faith. Conceiving doubts, he said in the presence of some friends, that "not Genevieve nor even Mary could save him, but the Son of God alone."

For these words the unhappy licentiate was thrown into prison under the proclamation. His frightened father hastened to Paris by post; his son, his hope, a heretic, and on the point of being burned!

He gave himself no rest. Never before had he so exerted himself to save a client. He went to the Sorbonne; he visited the court; he besieged the Parliament. "Ask what you please," said the miserable father; "I am ready to give any sum to save my boy's life."

Vainly did the tireless advocate struggle. On Saturday, February 17, 1526, the inquisitor came for young Joubert, helped him into the tumbril, and carried him to the front of Notre Dame: "Beg our Lady's pardon for your infidelity," he said. Joubert was silent. He drove on to the front of St. Genevieve’s church: "Ask pardon of St. Genevieve." The Rocheller was firm in his new faith.

He was then taken to the Place Market, where the people, seeing his youth and handsome appearance, deeply commiserated his fate. "Do not pity him," said the inquisitorial guard; "he has spoken ill of our Lady and of the saints in paradise; he holds to the doctrine of Luther." The executioner then approached Joubert, pierced his tongue with a red-hot iron, strangled him, and then burned the body.

A young student who already held a living faith, though not yet in priest's orders, had boldly declared that there was no other Savior but Jesus Christ, and that the Virgin Mary had no more power than the other saints. This youthful cleric of Théronanne, in Picardy, had been imprisoned in 1525, the year preceding the last edict. Terrified by that punishment, he went on Christmas eve, with a lighted torch in his hand, and stripped to his shirt, and "asked pardon of God and of Mary" before the church of Notre Dame. In consideration of this "very great penitence," it was thought sufficient to confine him for seven years on bread and water in the prison of St. Martin-des-Champs!

Alone in his dungeon, the recusant scholar heard once more the voice of God in the depths of his heart; his conscience beat loud beneath the silent porch of his prison. He began to weep hot tears at the remembrance of his denial of the faith; "and forthwith," says the chronicler, "he returned to his folly." Whenever a monk entered his cell, the young cleric proclaimed the gospel to him. The monks were astonished; the convent was in a ferment. Merlin, the grand penitentiary, went to him, and advised and entreated and stormed and menaced, all without effect. Finally, by order of the court, he was taken into the Place de Grove, where poor Berquin suffered, and burned alive.

Such were the methods employed by the Roman commission to force the abhorrent doctrines of their church back into the unwilling hearts of those who rejected them. They made use of scourges to beat them, of cords to strangle them, and, of fires to roast them alive.

But the ultramontanists did not confine themselves to hawking at untitled prey. In the year 1533 they flew at a higher quarry. Margaret of Navarre, herself a queen, and sister to the king, was venomously assailed.

Margaret, sighing after the time when a pure and spiritual religion should displace the barren ceremonials of popery, had published, first at Alencon, in 1531, and then in Paris, in 1533, a poem, entitled, "The Mirror of a Sinful Soul, in which she discovers her Faults and Sins, and also the Grace and Blessings bestowed on her by Jesus Christ her Spouse."

The poem was mild, spiritual, and inoffensive; but it was written by a queen, and it made a great sensation. Many persons read it with interest, and admired Margaret's piety and genius.

But not so the Sorbonne. Beda, the fiery syndic, absolutely devoured the little book; he had never been so charmed with any reading, for at last he had proof that the king's sister was a heretic. A diabolical plot had been laid by the ultramontane party to ruin Margaret a little before, and her household were steeped to the lips in the plot. But there was no occasion now to invoke the "Scythian ingratitude" of the queen's dependents. "Understand me well," cried the exultant syndic, holding up the volume, "this is not a dumb proof, nor a half proof, but a literal, clear, complete proof."

The Sorbonne assembled. "Listen," said Beda. The attentive doctors fixed their eyes upon the syndic. Beda read:

"Jesus, true Fisher thou of souls,
My only Saviour, only Advocate."

"Point against the accused," said Beda. He continued:

"Pain or death no more I fear,
While Jesus Christ is with me here."

"Confirmation," growled the syndic. "Listen again," said Beda:

"Not hell's black depth, nor heaven's vast height,
Nor sin, with which I wage continual fight,
Me for a single day can move,
Oh, holy Father, from thy perfect love."

The doctors were scandalized. "No one," said them, "can promise himself any thing certain as regards his own salvation unless he has learned it by special revelation from God."

"Let us proceed," said Beda, overflowing with delight:

"How beautiful is death,
That brings to weary me the hour of rest.
Oh, hear my cry, and hasten, Lord, to me,
And put an end to all my misery."

"Deadly heresy," said Beda; " what insolence!" He made his report. "Of a truth," said his colleagues, "that is enough to bring anybody to the stake."

The Sorbonne instantly prohibited the Mirror of a Sinful Soul, and put it in the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

The faculty decided that the first thing to be done was to search every bookseller's shop in the city, and seize all the copies found. A priest named Leclery made the search. Accompanied by the university beadles, he went to every bookstore, seized Margaret's poem wherever the tradesmen had put it out of sight, and returned to the Sorbonne laden with the spoil.

Then the faculty deliberated upon the measures to be taken against the queen.

Meantime insinuations and accusations against the king's sister were uttered from every pulpit. Margaret was even lampooned in a college comedy which Calvin reported.

But still the faculty hesitated. They knew that Francis loved his sister, and they dreaded punishment. The monks were everywhere exasperated. "Let us have less ceremony," cried one of them, the superior of the Grey Friars; "put the queen of Navarre into a sack, and throw her into the Seine.''

Margaret supported these insults with admirable mildness. But when Francis heard of them, his rage knew no bounds. The constable Montmorenci, who had caballed against the queen of Navarre, was publicly snubbed. The insolent prior who had proposed to sew Margaret into a bag and throw her into the river was next dealt with. "Let him suffer the punishment which he desired to inflict upon the queen," said Francis. But Margaret interceded for the wretch, and his life was spared. Stripped of his ecclesiastical dignities, he was sent to the galleys for two years. The collegians who had satirized the queen were imprisoned, and the Sorbonne was severely rated; Beda was exiled, and the faculty were advised "not to mix themselves up in such dangerous matters, or to beware of the terrible anger of the king."

Thus auspiciously to Margaret and to the reform ended this tilt with the Sorbonne doctors.

But a terrible tragedy was about to be enacted, which compensated the faithful for the mortification of this defeat. The unhappy Vaudois appear once more upon the historic stage; now, as always before, agonized as martyrs.

Some of the Vaudois remained in France even after the cessation of the atrocious harries of De Montfort and St. Louis in the thirteenth century; and reference has been made to those of Cabrières and Merindole, who were protected by the noble fiat of Louis XII. After their transitory appearance in that reign, the Vaudois had disappeared from the excited history of the succeeding ages, and wrapped in the mountain fastnesses of the French Alps, they procured the means of subsistence by pastoral industry. Thus they lived in peace with man and serving their fathers' God until the Reformation began to stir the world. Then Calvin, from his seat in Geneva, offered them his alliance. He was familiar with the hoary tenets of their ancient faith, and he endorsed them.

Then the tranquil rest of the Vaudois mountaineers was broken. Their confession of faith was reported at Paris. Eighteen of their principal teachers were cited to appear before the Parliament. But ere the summons could be obeyed, a decree of extermination was pronounced upon them without a hearing.

William du Bellay was then governor of Provence. This gentleman was appointed by Francis to execute the sanguinary edict. With a humanity rare in those cruel times, the governor determined to see the king, and if possible to turn him from his purpose. Francis, who had previously appointed Du Bellay his envoy to the conference of Smalcald, held him in high favor, and condescended to hear his representations.

"I have come, sire," said he, "to inform your majesty of the actual character of the Vaudois, which, in my official capacity, I have taken great pains to investigate. They do certainly differ from our communion in many respects; but they are a simple, irreproachable people, benevolent, temperate, humane, and of unshaken loyalty. Agriculture is their sole occupation; they have no legal contentions or party strife. Hospitality is one of their cardinal virtues; and they lave no beggars among them. No one is tempted to steal, for his wants are freely supplied by asking."

"But they are heretics," responded Francis sternly.

"I acknowledge, sire," said the governor, "that they rarely enter our churches; and if they do, that they pray with their eyes fixed on the ground. They pay no homage to saints and images; they do not use holy water; they do not acknowledge the benefit to be derived from pilgrimages, nor do they say mass either for the living or the dead."

"And is it for such men as these," said the king, "that you ask clemency? Go, go, Du Belay; for your sake they shall receive pardon, if within three months they present themselves before the archbishop of Aix, renounce their heresies, and become reconciled with the mother church. If they are still rebellious, they must expect the utmost severity. Meantime the edict stands unrepealed. Think you that we burn heretics in France only that they may be nourished in the Alps?"

The Vaudois cherished their patriarchal opinions too faithfully, they were embalmed in the tradition of too much suffering, to enable them to even to think of submitting to the king's conditions. They therefore awaited their doom in frozen despair.

But it happened that the Provencal Parliament had for its president an advocate of unrivalled legal skill, M. Chassanée, and his noble heart prompted him to use every wile known to his profession to defeat the decree; and he did indeed succeed in postponing the execution of the edict until after his death.

But Chassanée was succeeded by a fierce bigot named d'Oppede, who had no scruples to .overcome. That we may not be accused of overcoloring the woeful catastrophe which followed, we extract the account from the unfriendly pages of a Romish chronicler, the abbé, Anquétil:

"In 1545, Francis I gave permission to employ the aid of arms against the Vaudois mountaineers. It was granted at the solicitation of the Baron d'Oppede, president of the Parliament of Aix, a violent and sanguinary man, who revived against those heretics assembled in the valleys of the Alps on the side of Provence a parliamentary decree given five years before."

"Every thing was horrible and cruel," says the historian De Thou, "in the sentence denounced against them; and every thing was still more horrible and cruel in its execution. Twenty-two villages were plundered and burned, with an inhumanity of which the history of the most barbarous people scarcely affords an example. The unfortunate inhabitants, surprised during the night, and pursued from rock to rock by the lurid light of the fires which consumed their dwellings, only avoided one ambuscade to fall into another. The piteous cries of old men, of women, and of children, far from softening the hearts of the soldiery, as mad with rage as their chiefs, only served to indicate the track of the fugitives and mark their hiding-places, to which the assassins carried their fury.

"Voluntary surrender did not exempt the men from slaughter or the women from excesses of brutality which human nature blushes to record. It was forbidden, under penalty of death, to afford them any refuge. At Cabrières, the principal town of the canton, seven hundred men were murdered in cold blood; and the women who had remained in their houses were shut up in a barn, which was filled with straw and then fired. Those who attempted to escape from the window were hacked back by swords or impaled on pikes. At the last, according to the tenor of the sentence, the houses were razed, the woods cut down, the fruit-trees plucked up by the roots, and this country, so fertile and so populous, became an uninhabited desolation."

Such is the ghastly picture of this massacre, as painted by the reluctant pens of two inimical historians, De Thou and the Abbé Anquétil.

Maimbourg, in describing the scene, says that more than three thousand persons were slain, and that nine hundred houses were plundered and then burned.

Thus with a quivering wail passed this last remnant of the ancient Vaudois from the inhospitable and persecuting shores of time, to join their martyred ancestors in eternity.

But the Vaudois had accomplished their mission. They had dropped the seed which sprang up and bore a hundred-fold. Severity, far from checking the progress of the Reformation, only inspired its professors with sublimer energy. They died, on the scaffold or amid the flames, with the steadfast devotion of martyrs.

Hitherto the reformers had only ventured to assemble at night, and in the unknown byways and slums of France. Now they met openly in the light of day. They even erected a church in the heart of scoffing Paris, while the chief cities in the provinces hastened to imitate the example of the capital.

Thus was fulfilled the later saying of John Calvin, that "the kingdom of Christ is strengthened and established more by the blood of martyrs than by force of arms."

 

Chapter XV

FRENCH POLITICS

On the 31st of March, 1547, Francis I died. Vacillating in his temper, arbitrary in his rule, selfish in his policy, yet generous in his private relations, he was the Don Quixote of a vicious chivalry. By his death, one more link was broken which bound France to feudalism.

Francis was succeeded by his son Henry II, a prince who inherited many of the qualities, and who adopted the essential policy of the paladin king; but he did not sway an unvexed scepter. Schism, dangerous and ever growing, was within the temple; the court was fretted by hostile cabals; the Commons were turbulent; France bristled with rebellion; while from without, the pope had his clutch upon Henry's dominion, England fomented discord, and Spain, under Charles V,  "Forging the prodigal gold of either Ind
To arméd thunderbolts," was a perpetual menace.

Let us glance for a moment at the politics of the court at this critical epoch, and form the acquaintance of some of the grand historic figures who were destined to sway France, and to mold her future—some by their wicked ambition, others by the healthful play of their noble aspirations.

The reign of Henry II was emphatically an embryo period. It contained the roots of "many and tall trees of mischief," which afterwards covered France with an accursed shade.

Initiation into the vile mysteries of the temple of court intrigue—this is essential.

Four rival factions formed the substratum of the state.

Anne de Montmorenci, constable of France, the minister and favorite of Henry II, headed one clique. Montmorenci was able in the cabinet, and had won wide fame in the wars of the age; but his character was stained by bigotry and fierce rancor.

The leader of a second party was Diana de Poitiers, duchess of Valentinois, the king's mistress, who, through her wit and beauty, possessed boundless influence with her royal paramour.

Catharine de Medici, a daughter of the illustrious Florentine house which had given two popes to Christendom, the consort of the impetuous king Henry II, led a third faction in this scramble for power. Catharine's character had barely shown itself during the lifetime of Francis I; but now she began to emerge from her former obscurity, and during the successive reigns of her three sons, she possessed supreme influence in the government. The wily queen surpassed Machiavelli himself in tortuous statescraft. By constantly adjusting and readjusting the equilibrium of the contending factions, she prevented each from overwhelming the other; played one off against another; and by prolonging this contest, she extended the duration of her own power.

The fourth faction of the court was that of the princes of Lorraine, better known in history as the Guises. These were the greediest and most unscrupulous jackals of this courtly pack. The Guises were looked on as foreigners, and their power in France was a mushroom growth.

René de Lorraine, who fought with Charles the Bold of Burgundy, and who more than once brought the claims of his house upon Provence, Naples, and Jerusalem to remembrance, ordained in his last will that Antoine, his eldest son, should succeed him in Lorraine and Bar, and that the other, Claude, should inherit his possessions lying in France: these were estates scattered throughout Normandy, Picardy, Flanders, and the Isle of France, with the baronies of Joinville, Mayenne, Elboeuf, and the counties of Aumale and Guise, all destined a little later to give names to distinguished warriors and prelates.

Among the chivalric leaders of Francis I, this Claude, who styled himself "Guise," whose domain had been raised from a county into a dukedom, made a brilliant figure. His bravery and miraculous preservation at the battle of Marignano, the central part which he took in preserving the peace of the kingdom during the captivity of the king after the fatal rout at Pavia, the pains he took to ingratiate himself with the masses and to cement the foundations of his power, ere long made him a great name in the realm. To crown all, he made a fortunate marriage, wedding a princess of the royal blood, Antoinette de Bourbon. From this union sprang six sons, full of vital energy, three of whom devoted themselves to the church, and three to arms, all achieving fame in their respective spheres. These were Francis duke of Guise, sometimes called prince of Joinville, Charles archbishop of Rheims and cardinal of Lorraine, Claude duke d'Aumale, Louis cardinal of Guise, Francis grand prior, and René marquis d'Elboeuf.

Such was the formidable house of Guise, propped by its six stalwart pillars; and even in the reign of Francis I, their rise and prowess towards power had been so rapid and insidious, that the dying king bequeathed to Henry a legacy of distrust of their talents and ambition, which he thought—rightly, as the sequel proved—were of an order to endanger the peace of France.

Between these factions raged the utmost hate. Usually they were at open war; but when peace reigned, it was but a hollow truce—mars gravior sub pace latet, war bitterer for the disguise. A coalition had been formed between Diana de Poitiers and the constable of France; so that the chief of the Montmorencis and the courtesan duchess for a time swayed the scepter with untrammeled hands. The duchess disliked Cardinal Tournon, and one of Henry's first acts was to dismiss this personified inquisition from the public service. Montmorenci favored this move, and seeing that his only strength lay in Diana's smiles, he exerted himself to the utmost to flatter the king's passion for her.

Whatever was done or left undone owed its origin to no zeal for the public welfare, but was simply a maneuver to deceive the king, whom all parties conspired to blind, and who throughout his reign was merely the empty shadow of an authority which was really vested in powers behind the throne.

Such was the political situation at the commencement of the year 1548.

The ambitious projects of the house of Lorraine were rendered doubly dangerous and difficult to foil by the masterly tactics of Francis duke of Guise, one of the most remarkable men of that age. As a soldier, he had distinguished himself by the capture of Calais from the English, who had usurped it in a preceding century, and by his defence of Metz against the Spaniards. He possessed in an eminent degree most of those external advantages which captivate the multitude—a commanding presence, dignity, affability, an ingratiating address, and a certain chivalry. These rendered him the admiration of the populace, and made him the delight and ornament of the court.

His aspiring schemes were of course powerfully supported by his influential brothers with their hosts of retainers, all as anxious as himself to share the patronage and emoluments of office.

In pursuance of her favorite policy of an adjusted equilibrium, Catherine de Medici coalesced with the Guises, whom she both hated and feared, against Montmorenci, who stood in the path of their ambition.

It was against this powerful confederacy that the constable had to struggle. Feeling his inability to resist it single-handed, he had already, as we have seen, called Diana de Poitiers to his side. He now resolved to attach the princes of the blood to his party. The next heirs to the throne after Francis and the other sons of king Henry, were Antony de Bourbon and the prince of Condé.

Antony de Bourbon, who had become king of Navarre by his marriage with Jane d'Albrét, the daughter of the good queen Margaret, was weak, indolent, vacillating, and too fond of ease to take any active part in the troubled and stirring scenes which were soon to convulse the kingdom. He was only roused from his habitual torpor by the hope of recovering that portion of his realm which had been seized and retained by Spain. As his success in this object depended entirely upon the armed assistance of France, he was easily drawn into the ranks of the ruling party by empty professions of friendship and hollow promises of material aid.

His brother, the prince of Condé, who was connected with Montmorenci by a marriage with his niece, was a man of more determined character; and though not possessed of those high qualities which are requisite in a successful party leader, he compensated the political defect of ordinary talent by great moral courage and inflexibility of purpose.

With many others of the higher nobility, he had espoused the reformed creed; and though he was too frank and open to shine as a diplomatist in an age when fraud and mendacity were the prime merits of a negotiator, he yet brought vast strength to the ranks of Protestantism. His finances were scanty, but he was liberal to his followers; and when life was at stake or honor in peril, lie displayed a promptitude and magnanimity of bearing which commanded universal respect.

Condé was the intimate friend of the Chatillons, an ancient family which had once exercised sovereign authoritv over Nantua and Moulonét, two towns in the neighborhood of Geneva.

The marshal de Chatillon had married Louisa de Montmorenci, the constable's sister, by whom he had three sons, two of whom achieved an immortality of fame. The eldest of these, Odét, became bishop of Beauvais and Cardinal Chatillon. He was a keen observer of the world, mild in his address, polished in his manners, an adept in the intrigues of the day, and possessed of all those winning and conciliatory arts which disarm an enemy and fix a friend.

The second son was the famous Gaspard Chatillon de Coligny, admiral of France, one of the brightest and grandest names in history, doubly consecrated by a life of sublime fidelity to Christian duty, and by martyrdom.

The gallant Francis Chatillon d'Andelot was the youngest member of the family; he held the office of colonel-general of French infantry.

The two younger Chatillons, better known by their seignorial appellations of Coligny and D'Andelot, were early initiated into politics by their uncle of Montmorenci, who placed great reliance upon their counsel and discretion. The fine talents of this famous family, their influential connections, their high offices, rendered them most formidable to the vaulting house of Guise.

D'Andelot became very early an enthusiastic adherent of the Reformation. His open and generous nature made him scorn concealment, and he frequently startled the court by his liberal conversation. On one occasion Henry II, upon hearing that his colonel-general had been heard to utter heretical sentiments, sent for him, on the advice of his favorite, Charles, cardinal of Lorraine, and interrogated him upon his opinions.

"How is this, sirrah?" said the king menacingly; "have you too become moon-stricken, that you utter this vile trash of Calvin, and rant like a common heretic against our holy mother church?"

Although D'Andelot had been cautioned to use prudence in his answer, he scorned to equivocate, and he replied firmly, but respectfully, "Sire, in matters of religion I can use no disguise, nor could I deceive God should I attempt it. Dispose as you please of my life, property, and appointments; but my soul, independent of every other sovereign, is only subject to my Creator, from whom I received it, and whom alone I deem it my duty to obey in matters of conscience. In a word, sire, I would rather die than go to mass."

This calm speech roused the king to such fury, that he drew his rapier and menaced the intrepid disciple with instant death. But when his rage cooled, he stripped D'Andelot of his honors, and threw him into the prison of Mélun.

This punishment had no moral effect. It was well known that the court was tainted with Protestantism, and that many nobles were as heretical as D'Andelot, though few might have the Christian courage so openly to avow their faith. It seemed partial and ungenerous to incarcerate a gentleman who had shown so much honor and daring. So that this imprisonment increased the popularity of the persecuted doctrines of the Bible. The reformers, jubilant over the support of D'Andelot, and trusting that all the members of his powerful family would espouse his creed, fearlessly assembled at the Pré-aux-Cleves, situated in the modern Faubourg St. Germain, and at that time one of the most fashionable promenades in Paris. There they sang the Protestant psalms of Marat in the open air. It became the fashion to visit these reunions; and many an idle courtier, who had lounged down to ridicule the "fanatics," as they were called, returned with his curses turned into benedictions, and his mocking laughter choked in prayer. Antony de Bourbon, king of Navarre, and Jane d'Albret, were habitués of these gatherings; and while they animated the preachers by their presence, they did not deign to disguise their attachment to the new opinions.

Coligny was remarkable for his caution in taking a step, but when he reached a decision he was inflexible. No one possessed greater intrepidity or more perseverance. Difficulties, instead of daunting him, only spurred him to greater activity, and served only to excite his ardor to surmount them.

It was his brother D'Andelot who first persuaded him to inquire into the justice of the Protestant claims. Coligny paused long. He studied carefully. Meantime he used his utmost exertions to secure the liberation of his brother. With great difficulty he at length prevailed on D'Andelot to acknowledge that he had spoken to the king too roughly. This acknowledgment, backed by the influence of Montmorenci, obtained his dismissal from the Mélun dungeon.

Pope Paul IV was very angry when the news reached him that D'Andelot was again at liberty. He imperiously demanded that he should be burned for heresy. Easier said than done. D'Andelot's uncle was then the arbiter of France; his brother, the cardinal of Chatillon, was one of the grand inquisitors. he would doubtless hesitate long before consigning so dear a relative to the flames; so the unhappy pontiff had to content himself for a while with less distinguished victims. The Guises shared in the sadness of the holy father on this account, and they set spies upon Montmorenci while his nephew was in prison, in the foolish hope of being able to find some ground on which to base an accusation against that persecuting Saul of favoring heretics.

Coligny, like Calvin, was of the strictest sect of the papists. In an age of almost universal license, no blot has ever been found upon his moral purity. He maintained several priests at Chatillon; he also established free schools for the education of youth. Upon joining the reformers he continued the same acts, simply substituting Protestant preachers for the former monks. Girt with his conscience and armed with his principles, he would have braved the universe. When a little later he did, after long pause, declare his adherence to the Reformation, there was no more vacillation, no more timidity, no more doubt; not D'Andelot himself was more open and inflexible.

"Coligny and D'Andelot," says their biographer Brantome, " were both endowed with such imperturbable equanimity and coolness, that it was quite impossible to put them in a passion, and their countenances never betrayed their secret thoughts and inward emotions."

So admirable in their mental structure and in their moral nature were these brothers, the first political leaders of Latin Protestantism; their brilliant genius, their constancy, their unwearied zeal, their unflagging faith, made them the idols of the French reformers.

 

Chapter XVI 

MUTATION

In the field of persecution, Henry II walked in the footsteps of Francis I. He regarded the extirpation of heresy and the convention of costly and knight-errant tournaments as the double mission of his kingly career. "For the accomplishment of the one, he squandered the blood, the treasure, and the honor of France; in the pursuit of the other, he lost his life, dying "as the fool dieth."

That he might secure leisure for the gratification of his bias for pageants and autos da fé, a hollow truce of five years' duration was patched up between France and Spain, of which Henry could not say, as Francis I did on the dismal day of Pavia, "All is lost, save honor," for in this case honor went first.

Just before the declaration of this truce, in 1556, Charles V abdicated, after one of the most stormy, eventful, and checkered reigns in history. The self-deposed emperor retired into the monastery of St. Just, in Estremadura, where he spent his hours in vainly attempting to make a hundred clocks tick together, precisely as he had endeavored to wind up his subjects' consciences, and compel them to keep the time of the Vatican.

During the war just ended with Spain, in which Henry had been the ally of Maurice of Saxony and Albert of Brandenburg, who led the armed Protestantism of Germany, the cardinal of Lorraine had advised the temporary cessation of the religious persecution in France, in order to present the semblance of consistency.

Now the fires were once more lighted. Henry, to add dignity and importance to the executions, went in person to several of them. On one of these occasions he recognized an old domestic dying in the flames; his follower recognized him, and called out faintly from within the fire, "Save me, my king!" and the monarch was seized with such horror that, turning on his heel, he instantly quitted the scene, to hide his agitation and remorse in the depths of the Louvre.

But the reformers were not to be deterred from following the dictates of conscience. It was in vain that funeral piles were kindled in every town in France. The danger of martyrdom, while it excited every generous feeling in the hearts of the devout, and fanned enthusiasm to a white heat, also became a preventive to desertion. It confirmed the wavering. Many who would have acknowledged themselves persuaded in a theological dispute, would avoid the disgrace of yielding through dread of so unsatisfactory a proselyter as the fire.

In May, 1557, an event occurred which showed that the reformers were numerous even in Paris itself. Five hundred of them one night were assembled to celebrate the Lord's supper in a house in the Rue St. Jacques, opposite the College Plessis. The opportunity for a tumult was too good to be lost. The populace, instigated by the monks, gathered about the house, but no attempt was made to interrupt the service. When the assembly was dismissed, however, the reformers were assailed not only with threats and abuse, but with stones and rapiers. The darkness of the night would have enabled most of them to have escaped, had not lanterns been placed in the windows of the adjacent dwellings to illuminate the street.

Many were murdered; some few who had arms cut their way through the mob; but the old men, the women, and the children were left to massacre. In the midst of the orgie, some soldiers charged and dispersed the rioters; and while the guilty escaped, the innocent reformers, to the number of two hundred, were taken into custody.

Proceedings were immediately commenced against these, notwithstanding the fact that among them were many persons of distinguished family connections. The cardinal of Lorraine demanded that they should all be condemned to the fire; but the parliament had not so capacious a maw: they did not require a hecatomb of victims to glut their appetite; and after a long process, five of the Protestants were sentenced to the flames.

Fortunately for the others, Henry required some levies in Switzerland and Germany; the elector-palatine solicited the enlargement of these prisoners; and as it would have been inconvenient for the kind to lose the friendship of that prince, he reluctantly ordered them to be treated with moderation, to the infinite regret of the pontiff Paul IV, who loudly complained in the consistory.

While Henry was at war with Charles V, a decree, called the edict of Chateaubriand, was passed, which placed the reformers under the secular jurisdiction. But now the cardinal of Lorraine was desirous of devising some method of defeating that edict, which served as a shield to the evangelicals. Accordingly he advised the appointment of an inquisitor of the faith in France, who should leave the power to cite, interrogate, and punish suspected persons, and who should likewise possess, through a bureau of trained spies, mischievous and ubiquitous, the means of penetrating into the privacy of families, and of exercising an unsleeping surveillance over the whole kingdom, from the mountains to the sea.

The pontiff greedily seized on the idea, and appointed Matthew Oni, a Dominican monk, to that hateful office. The king and his council approved this investiture of a foreigner with absolute power within the borders of his kingdom; but the parliament, somewhat leavened with the progressive ideas, and not wholly infatuated, ventured to remonstrate. "Sire," said Sequier, one of the presidents of the parliaments, "we abhor the establishment of this tribunal of blood, where secret accusation takes the place of proof, where the accused is deprived of every means of defense, and where no judicial form is respected. Begin, sire, by procuring for the nation an edict which will not cover France with funeral piles, which will not be wetted either by the fears or the blood of your loyal subjects. At a distance, sire, from your presence, bowed down under the pressure of rural labor, or absorbed in the exercise of the arts or of trade, the people are ignorant of what is preparing against them; they do not suspect that it is proposed to separate them from your throne by the intervention of an irresponsible foreign tribunal, which shall wreak its unchallengeable will upon them, and deprive them of their natural guardian. It is for them and in their name that we now present our humble remonstrances, nay, our ardent supplications.

"As for you, sirs," continued the orator, turning towards the sycophantic crowd of counselors and ministers who surrounded the king, "you who so tranquilly hear me, and secure in the royal favor imagine that this affair does not concern you, learn that it is fit that you divest yourselves of that foolish notion. So long as you enjoy the king's friendship, you wisely make the most of your time—'tis your harvest; benefits and kindnesses are showered upon you without stint, and it enters into the mind of no one to attack you. But the more you are elevated, the nearer you are to the thunderbolt; one must be a stranger to the history of courts who does not know the trivialities which often precipitate disgrace.

"Under the present régime, even should that misfortune befall you, you could now retire with that fortune which would in a measure console you for your fall. But dating from the registration of this edict, your condition would cease to be the same. Mark! You will have for successors men poor and hungry, who, not knowing how long they may remain in office, will burn with a desire to enrich themselves at once and by whatever means. They will find a wonderful facility in doing so; for, certain of obtaining your confiscation of the king, it will only be necessary to bribe an inquisitor and two witnesses. Then, though you may be saints, you will burn as heretics."

This argumentum ad hominem of the subtle parliamentary orator, produced a profound impression upon the council, and also on the king, who was so affected that he remitted the consideration of the question to another day.

Apropos of this edict, it was just before the wily cardinal of Lorraine conceived his notable scheme for the extirpation of heresy, that the society of the Jesuits, the pests of modern Europe, commenced their machinations, under the protection of this same prelate. So early as 1550, the cardinal procured from Henry II letters patent, by which they were permitted to build an establishment in Paris.

The order of the Jesuits owed its origin to the efforts of a fanatic Spaniard, Ignatius Loyola, who, "poor, obscure, without a patron, without recommendations, entered that city—where now two temples, rich with paintings and many colored marbles, commemorate his great services to his church; where his form stands sculptured in massive silver; where his bones, enshrined amid jewels, are placed beneath the altar—and by his activity and zeal launched his protean propaganda.

"With what vehemence, with what unscrupulous policy, with what forgetfulness of the dearest private ties, with what intense and stubborn devotion to a single end, with what laity and versatility in the choice of means, the Jesuits fought the battles of their church, is written on every page of the annals of Europe during several generations. In 'the order of Jesus' was concentrated the quintessence of the Romish spirit, and its history is the history of the papal reaction against Luther. The order possessed itself of all the strong-holds which command the public mind—of the pulpit, of the press, of the confessional, of the academies. It was into the ears of the Jesuit that the powerful, the noble, the wretched, and the beautiful breaded the secret history of their lives. It was at the feet of the Jesuit that the youth of the higher and middle and lower classes were brought up, from the first rudiments to the. courses of rhetoric and philosophy."

Such was the order which, dominant in the south of Europe, now sued for admission into France. At the first their welcome was not hearty.

When Henry's letters-patent were presented to the parliament for registry, the procureur-general strongly opposed their reception, and the act of legalization was suspended in consequence of his remonstrances. But in 1552, the Jesuits obtained new letters-patent, which contained a peremptory order for their registration. The procureur-general, however, persisted in his opposition, and for two years more the question hung undecided. Finally, on the 3rd of August, 1551, the parliament decreed that, before the matter was definitely decided, the letters of the king and the papal balls which the .Jesuits had obtained, should be referred to the bishop of Paris and the dean of the Sorbonne Faculty of Theology.

The bishop, whose name was Eustace de Bellay, did not hesitate to declare "that the bulls of Paul III and of Julius III contained several articles which were contrary to reason, and which could not be tolerated or received in the Christian religion; that those in whose favor they were issued, by arrogating to themselves the title of 'Company of Jesus,' which could only be applied with propriety to the universal church, of which Christ was the head, appeared to desire to constitute themselves that church; moreover, as the principal object they proposed to themselves was the conversion of the Mohammedans, it would be better to give them a house on the frontier of the Ottoman empire, than in Paris, which was so distant from Constantinople."

The answer of the Sorbonne was not more favorable. Feeling persuaded of their ability to cope singly with heresy, and 

"...too fond to rule alone,"
able to
"Bear, like the Turk, no brother near the throne,"

that body, by a unanimous vote, declared the new society "dangerous to the holy faith, calculated to disturb the peace of the church, and more fitted to destroy than to edify."

These two replies annihilated the hopes of the Jesuits during the reign of Henry II; but they plotted in the dark, and bided their time.

Meantime the truce with Spain had been broken; both kingdoms had placed large armies in the field, and the constable, Montmorenci, after sacking the town of Sens, and pillaging Artois, came upon the Spaniards before St. Quintin, which place, the admiral Coligny, one of the ablest captains of the age, held for France.

St. Quintin had been vigorously besieged, and though it was but indifferently strong, the gallant admiral had kept it for his king, while Montmorenci was coming to succor him.

On the 10th of August, 1557, the constable reached St. Quintin, and attacking the enemy with Quixotic indiscretion, suffered a disastrous defeat, in which he was himself captured.

In consequence of Montmorenci's captivity, the cardinal of Lorraine became the administrator of the government, and the family of Guise employed their opportunity in securing the hand of the Dauphin for their niece Mary, queen of Scots, and in promoting their adherents to all the influential offices of the court, the capital, and the provinces.

But upon this occasion the Guises' lease of power was not of long duration. Philip II, tired of the French war, and familiar with Henry's friendship for Montmorenci, played upon these chords a tune of reconciliation with his "dear brother of France;" and after several ineffectual attempts, the treaty of Chateau Cambrisis was signed on the 3rd of April, 1559.

Montmorenci immediately resumed his ministerial functions, and the humiliated Guises were completely stripped of their snug stations and usurped honors. The cardinal of Lorraine, however, who had contrived to render himself necessary to the king, remained near his person, like an evil genius, ever prompting the impressible monarch to wicked and :arbitrary acts.

The cardinal's next act was atrocious. By the treaty of Chateau Cambrisis, it had been stipulated that Henry's daughter Elizabeth should marry the king of Spain. The city was now crowded with illustrious Spaniards who had come to witness the marriage ceremony, and to accompany the young queen to Madrid. Henry's penchant for magnificent follies and splendid fêtes led him to celebrate the occasion with unusual pomp, and to prepare the lists of endless tournaments.

The bias of several prominent members of the parliament towards heresy was well known; and the independent and liberal action of the legislature on several recent occasions, had disgusted the bigoted cardinal and provoked the king.

Lorraine determined to make use of the Spanish marriage to wreak his vengeance upon the obnoxious legislators.

One day he entered Henry's cabinet, and delivered this infamous harangue: "Sire, although it would serve for nothing more than to show the king of Spain that you are firm in the faith, and that you will not suffer any thing in your kingdom which will disparage your excellent title of most Christian king, still you ought to proceed about it boldly, and with great courage. You must gratify all these grandees of Spain, who have accompanied the duke of Alva for the solemnity and honor of their sovereign's marriage with your daughter, by ordering half a dozen councilors of the parliament to be burned in the public square as Lutheran heretics, which indeed they are. By so doing we shall preserve the bulk of the legislature; but if you do not take these measures, the whole court will be infected and contaminated with heresy, even to the clerks, attorneys, and tipstaves."

The cardinal then, with the craft of those Jesuits whom he befriended, persuaded the king to go to the legislative chamber as if to consult his counselors on the measures to be taken for the suppression of heresy, but really to observe the responses of the members of the parliament, and if possible to ascertain their secret sentiments, by submitting to their frank consideration and judgment some project which should draw from them an avowal of their own heresy.

Montmorenci, instead of dissuading Henry from such black treachery, approved it in open council. Vieilleville alone, who records the incident, raised his voice against it, as degrading to the royal dignity, affirming that "he was about to take upon himself the office of an inquisitor, and that the cardinal's proposal would entirely destroy the joyous feeling of the public."

But the cardinal's advice prevailed. Henry convoked the Parliament, and in a few well-disguised and gracious words, begged the advice of his counselors upon the best means for the pacification of the kingdom. The more wary judges confined their remarks to general and vague expressions, believing that the use of language was to disguise one's meaning, as one of their later countrymen, the famous Talleyrand, phrased it.

Some were less cautious, or more honest. "Let us begin," said Louis Faur, "by examining who the real author of our troubles is, lest the same answer should be made to us which Elijah made to Ahab, 'It is thou that troublest Israel,' " and a look at Cardinal Lorraine directed the application to him. The celebrated Anne Du Bourg, the son of an illustrious family in Auvergne, and nephew of the chancellor of France, next spoke. He surprised his hearers by the boldness of his speech, enlarging upon the cruelties heaped upon the reformers, and remarked with emphasis, "While men are conducted to the stake for the sole crime of praying for their prince, a shameful license encourages and multiplies blasphemies, perjuries, debaucheries, and adulteries."

The courtiers trembled, for they considered this sentence as intended for the king and the duchess de Valentinois.

When Du Bourg resumed his seat, Henry rose in a great passion, and gave vent to a torrent of reproaches against the moderate party, and especially against those who, enamoured of the beauty of plain speech, had boldly avowed their sentiments.

On quitting the chamber, he made a sign to Count Montgomery, captain of his Scotch guard, who had surrounded the convent of the Augustines, where the Parliament was then sitting, with his men-at-arms. A fierce look directed towards Faur, Du Bourg, and three others, gave sufficient instructions for him. They were arrested in the midst of a parliamentary session, and immediately thrown into a dungeon—a high-handed violation of public law and official etiquette, the mere attempt at which, in the succeeding century, cost an English king his head.

Charges were instantly huddled up against the five counsellors, the trials were pushed on with indecent haste, and so hot was the anger of the king, that "he expressed a desire to see Du Bourg burned before his own eyes."

But before this brutal wish could be gratified, Henry's own life was abridged by violence; and singularly enough too, he was doomed to die by the blundering lance of that same Montgomery whom he had just employed in outraging the higher majesty of the Parliament, in the very sanctuary of justice.

At a tournament held in the Faubourg St. Antoine, on the 27th of June, 1559, the last of a succession of jousts which Henry meant should give éclat to his daughter's marriage, the king, after contending with and vanquishing several of his politic courtiers, elated by his success, challenged Count Montgomery to enter the lists with him. The count was reluctant to comply, but Henry would not accept his refusal. Finally Montgomery entered the arena; two fresh lances were given to the champions; the trumpets sounded the charge; the knights met, with a terrific crash, in mid-career; and when the dust rolled up, Henry was seen unhorsed, and with a portion of his captain's shattered lance protruding from his visor. The shiver pierced into his brain through the left eye; and after lingering through eleven days, he expired on the 10th of July, 1559, in the forty-first year of his age, and the twelfth of his reign.

If history has not scourged the character of this puppet king so severely as it has those of his monster brothers, Charles IX and Henry III, it is not because he was less deserving of obloquy, but because he was fortunate enough to cheat history by a death which struck him at the very moment when he had matured a plan for the extermination of French Protestantism. Henry II was as weak, as deceitful, and as execrable as any scion of the Valois line. Informers were encouraged by the prospect of reward to denounce the innocent; a casual, an ambiguous phrase was a sufficient warrant for arrest; suspicion was equivalent to proof; whoever sheltered a heretic was held to be a participator in his crime; confidence between man and man was lost; members of the same family distrusted each other; the worst passions of human nature were let loose by a bribe, and France became an extended dungeon.

It was in the reign of Henry II that the soubriquét Huguenots began to be generally applied to the French reformers. Like the names "Puritan," "Methodist," and "Abolitionist," this was originally a term of reproach; but the Protestants of France, like those of England and America, were wise enough to seize an epithet hurled at them as a missile, and wear it proudly as a jewel. In a few years this designation completely superseded all others: "Protestant" and "evangelical" were swallowed up in it; and Huguenots became the honorable and universal synonym of politico-ecclesiastical reform.

 

Chapter XVII 

THE CONSPIRACY

With the death of Henry II terminated a historic rivalry. Diana of Poitiers at length succumbed to the subtleties of Catharine de' Medici, who not only drove the courtesan from the court in ignominy, and confiscated her immense estates, but who actually appropriated the fair Diana's jewels.

The politics of the Louvre were once more revolutionized. Montmorenci, whom Catharine hated because he had coalesced with Henry's mistress, and put her authority under the ban, and whom the Guises intrigued to displace because he had deposed them and himself swayed the scepter, was one morning politely advised by the boy king to quit Paris, and take the benefit of the air at his country-seat.

The Guises were reseated in power. The feeble hands of Francis II, who was but sixteen when he ascended the throne, on the 10th of July, 1559, and poor Mary Stuart, were not old or energetic enough to hold the reins of government. Their uncles of Guise and Lorraine were kind enough to perceive this, and to relieve their majesties of the cares and honors of the state.

To be sure the witty Parisians were so unkind as to frame epigrams, and to assert that this philanthropic action of the bashful and modest house of Guise, whose probity was thus slurred, really held the king in duress. But when did a generous action ever fail to be misconstrued?

The naughty Huguenots took this view of the case; and esteeming it to be their first duty as loyal subjects to emancipate their king, they immediately prepared to stereotype their opinion into action. The Huguenots caballed. The king's duress bred a conspiracy. But while the conspirators yet plotted in the dark with an immature programme, another auto da fé was kindled, which caused all France to growl ominously.

Anne du Bourg had remained in prison since the death of Henry II. The cardinal of Lorraine, securely entrenched in power, and emboldened by success, ordered that noble counselor’s trial proceed. Du Bourg, though deserted by the craven parliament which had permitted itself to be dragooned into submission, defended himself with the utmost vigor and spirit: he challenged one of his judges, president Minard, his bitter personal enemy; despite of which Minard took his seat on the judiciary bench, and presided at the trial.

Du Bourg could not resist the impulse to upbraid this French prototype of the English Jeffries; and he concluded a scathing philippic by prophesying that this base judge would soon be called to appear before a more awful bar, when he would wish to be as guiltless as his prisoner then was known to be.

These words were quickly and strangely verified. As Minard was returning home one evening from the court, he was assassinated. This occurred in the night of the 12th of December, 1559. On the morning of the 23rd, Du Bourg, despite the herculean efforts made by the Huguenots to save him, was led out to be executed.

The counselor’s firm demeanor on reaching the fatal plaza, excited the sympathetic admiration of the hardened mob which haunted the gallows. Measures were taken to prevent his addressing them; the executioner was ordered to gag him, should he attempt to speak.

At the foot of the gibbet a crucifix was held before his lips, but he refused to kiss it; after which he was immediately pulled up and strangled, amid shouts of Jesu Maria from the human tigers below.

His last words were a prayer: "Father, abandon me not; neither will I abandon thee."

"Thus," says a historian, "perished Anne Du Bourg, in his thirty-eighth year, a man of rare talents, and yet rarer integrity, loved, wept, and honored even by many of those who did not share his faith."

After hanging for some time, the body was cut down and burned, the ashes being scattered to the four winds.

As in the classic story of the Roman Gracchi, so the martyred counselor, mortally smitten, flung his dust towards heaven, calling the avenging God to witness; and from that dust sprang ere long the embattled ranks of D'Andelot and De Coligny, eager to defend their faith and liberty.

While this tragedy was being enacted, the conspiracy of Ambois ripened. History has recorded few undertakings of a similar character in which the design was more extensive, the motives more just, the plan more skilful, the means more adequate, and the failure more miserable.

The Jesuits, ever watchful to obtain a foothold in France, now that their protectors of the house of Guise were the arbiters of the kingdom, ventured to emerge from their holes, and, though denounced by the parliament, the bishop of the metropolis, and the Sorbonne, to sue for legal recognition. This, through the finesse of the cardinal of Lorraine, was at length accorded them, and the privy council distinctly declared that "the Jesuits claimed no privileges hostile to the episcopal supremacy, the authority of curates, colleges, or universities, or to the liberties of the Gallican church."

The parliament, overawed by the execution of Du Bourg, and filled with servile counsellors, did not venture to baulk the cardinal for a third time; and after sprinkling rose-water, in the shape of explanatory articles, over the charter with dainty fingers, the Corps Legislatif and the bishops agreed to the act of incorporation, though an additional clause, which plainly indicated the distrust of the court itself, was appended ere the registration, which provided that "if, in the course of time, any thing should result prejudicial to the prerogative of the crown or the rights of the people, the constitution of the Jesuits might be reformed."

The legal recognition of this hateful tribunal filled the reformers with alarm, for they justly suspected that these mysterious and ubiquitous priests, who spun their webs in the dark, who invented every thing, who denied every thing, who even seized blank paper and, "after the manner of spiders, sucked heresy from it," would ally themselves with their patrons the princes of Lorraine, in a grand effort to annihilate the Huguenot idea.

The alarm of the reformers; the discontent o£ the nobility, excluded from all posts of trust, replaced in office by the upstart retainers of the house of Guise; Montmorenci, the king of Navarre, the prince of Condé, all disgusted by the haughty behavior of the cardinal of Lorraine—these circumstances seemed at once to warrant and to guarantee the success of an insurrection against the "hated foreigners" who, through their niece, ruled the king.

The discontented nobles and the Huguenot politicians at once formed a confederacy, the former to end the political usurpations of the Guises, the latter to protect their party against the repetition of those severities which were threatened by the ugly precedent of Du Bourg.

The conspirators held their first conversations at the castle of La Ferté, which was situated on the frontier of Picardy. The prince of Condé was unanimously elected chief; but he was not to be known as a participator in the plot until the decisive moment came. Condé accepted this position, annexing this reservation: "Providing nothing be done or attempted against God, the king, my brothers, or the state."

In the mean time a gentleman named La Renaudie, of a noble family of Perigord, a Huguenot, was selected to be the nominal head of the conspiracy. La Renaudie combined every quality requisite for the elaboration and direction of such a movement. Eloquent, energetic, persevering, intelligent, brave even to rashness, familiar, through a long residence at Geneva, with those multitudinous religionists who had been expatriated for their faith, no one could be better fitted to secure the cordial cooperation of the Huguenots.

On the 1st of January, 1560, the confederates assembled in a ruined chateau in the outskirts of Names—attracted thither by the cloak to their movements which the vast concourse of people who then crowded the city to witness the holiday fêtes would be—and here the final arrangements were made.

When night had fallen, and the conspirators had all gathered at the rendezvous, La Renaudie addressed them in a low but intensely earnest voice. In a few vivid sentences he painted the tyrannies of the house of Guise, dwelt with graphic rhetoric upon the injuries which they had entailed on France, affirmed his belief that the princes of Lorraine only waited for the death of the feeble and boyish king who might die at any moment under their skilful nursing, as the orator darkly hinted—to usurp the scepter of poor Francis II, and seat one of their own family upon the throne. "For my part," he continued, forgetting in his heat to observe that cautious monotone in which he had so far spoken, and rising in vehemence, "for my own part, I protest, I swear, I call God to witness, that I will never think or say or do any thing against the king, against the queen his mother, against the princes his brothers, against any of his blood; but that I will defend to my latest breath the authority of the throne, the majesty of the laws, and the liberty of France against the hateful tyranny of foreign. usurpers."

"We swear it!" echoed the band, bathed in the swarthy light of the stars, with upraised hands and uncovered heads. The tyranny of the Guises had excited such a feeling that no intervening danger, not the dread of the block, nor the awful pangs of inquisitorial torture, could chill the ardor. All signed the oath, shook hands in unison, embraced each other weeping, and loaded with imprecations any wretch who should be perfidious enough to betray the plot. Just before the separation, the fifteenth of the following March, and Blois, were fixed on as the time and place for the execution of their programme.

Ten minutes later and the old chateau of Nantes resumed its disturbed dreams; soon the conspirators were scattered to the four corners of France, each on his mission of mischief to tyrants.

The purpose of the confederates was to possess themselves of the royal person, to arrest the princes of Lorraine, and to vest the administration of the government in the prince of Condé. There was no intention to injure the king, but simply to release him from the duress of his uncles of Guise; and the distinct avowal of this principle won the confidence of all the loyal gentlemen in France.

Francis II was of a fragile and sickly constitution; and since, in the spring of 1560, he was a greater sufferer than usual, the court physicians prescribed a change of air and scene for the royal invalid. Accordingly the Guises transported him to the town of Blois, whose climate was mild and salubrious.

It was at Blois then, where the court was yet sojourning, that the mine was to be sprung upon the Guises.

For a time "all went merry as a marriage bell;" the confederates sailed over a placid and auspicious sea. Success seemed certain. The princes of Lorraine, charmed by the syren songs of prosperous wickedness, lay lapped in supine security, when suddenly the overconfidence of the chief conspirator withdrew the veil of secrecy, and every thing was revealed.

La Renaudie quitted the rendezvous at Nantes for Paris, where he was to station himself and direct the plot.

He lodged in the house of an old friend, Avanelles, a lawyer, who, suspecting mischief from the vast number of persons who called upon his comparatively uninfluential guest, mentioned his suspicions to La Renaudie. That gentleman very indiscreetly acknowledged the existence of the conspiracy.

The meddlesome and perfidious attorney professed to be well pleased with the plan and purpose of the intrigue, and after sucking its minutiae from his overconfiding friend, he hastened to the metropolitan residence of the Guises, and unfolded the whole plot to the cardinal's secretary, who instantly posted Avanelles off to Blois to apprize the court of the volcano upon which it trembled.

The messenger arrived travel-stained and weary, and his interview with Francis duke of Guise speedily interrupted the frivolous festivities with which his ambitious relatives amused the attention of the king.

Francis, unaware of the existence both of Avanelles and his news, was strolling in the meadows of Blois, while the agitated Guises interrogated the volunteer attorney. He found his principal solace and amusement in the company of his beautiful and at that time innocent young queen, Mary Stuart. Her harp often soothed the painful restlessness engendered by disease; and though flattered and worshipped and caressed wherever she appeared, though walking upon roses, she really seemed devoted to her royal husband.

The hair of the girlish queen was singularly beautiful, and curled in natural ringlets. It was then a custom to wear low skull-caps; these, as a matter of fashion, were considered regal; but Francis was so proud of his pet's head that Mary threw them off. The king delighted to hear the tones of her voice in singing, in speaking, in reading; and often, when sleep fled from his weary pillow, Mary would patiently lean over him, and lure the truant back by low, sweet chants, or by the touching music of her own dear Scottish ballads.

This was the queen who was, in later and more dismal years, arraigned for the murder of Darnley, her own husband.

She may have been guilty, for who can spell the riddle of corrupting circumstances? Early separated from her mother, trained at a licentious court by ambitious uncles, that firm, unyielding principle, that elevation of character which is developed and strengthened by judicious education, could hardly have been acquired. Instigated by hatred, beckoned on by passion, poor Mary may have erred most sadly in the melancholy hours of her later career; but now her generous and gentle nature still controlled her.

On the morning of Avanelles' advent, Francis and Mary, together as usual, were in the fields—pausing here on an eminence which commanded a wide prospect, there by the side of the magnificent Loire, and roiling away the hours in sweet converse. Francis, looking forward to a life of regal splendor, expressed an earnest desire for the time to come when, unfretted by his uncles, he might govern his own empire. Mary chatted of her native land, of the heath-covered mountains of Scotland, and many a quaint legend gathered from the superstitious gossip of her attendants.

Suddenly the duke of Guise joined them.

"A fair morrow," said he, "for the hopes of France. What says my royal cousin, what says his consort, to a hunting gallop to-day?"

A ready acquiescence was given; and returning to the castle of Blois, where Louis XI had been born, the court-yard was speedily filled with hounds and steeds, and ere long the merry party were flying over the country at great speed.

When the walls of Blois had been left far behind, Guise reigned up beside Francis, and informed him of the discovered plot, and told him that the hunting party was only a pretence for removing him from an unfortified town to the stronger protection of the Amboise donjon.

Francis was displeased that duplicity had been used, and turning towards his guardian he said pointedly, "It is so difficult now to distinguish friends from enemies, that perhaps it had been better for us to remain at Blois."

The duke replied that "he had acted from the truest motives of tenderness, fearing that any uncommon agitation might injure him in his present feeble and broken health."

Francis made no further objection to the journey, but contented himself with saying sadly, "What can be more injurious or painful than to see one's self an object of party hatred and contention?"

The princes of Lorraine were now in possession of the chief features of the plot to unseat them from the government. They also knew the names of a number of the actors in the émuete. Beyond this all was shadowy. Suspicion began where knowledge ended. Coligny and D'Andelot were supposed to be implicated; and though Brantome distinctly declares that the admiral had no part in the conspiracy, they were summoned to present themselves before the king at the earliest moment. Both hastened to comply with this requisition; and upon being introduced into the queen mother's chamber, Coligny spoke warmly against the bad administration of affairs, pleaded the cause of the Huguenots, and recommended that the penal statutes against them be expunged from the judicial code.

The chancellor, Olivier, and the moderates of the council, seconded this bold appeal, which was finally embodied in an edict, and published on the 12th of March, 1560. The edict appeared too late to strangle the conspiracy. The outbreak was to occur upon the sixteenth instant; the time had been changed from the fifteenth by the removal to Amboise.

Every thing now looked as black for success as before La Renaudie's admission to the recreant Avanelles the auspices had appeared bright.

Nevertheless Condé, no whit discouraged, went boldly to Amboise, and picking out a band of resolute men-at-arms from the body of his retainers, introduced them as his body-guard into the donjon walls.

But the Guises, aware of the plan of attack, took every precaution, filled the tower with their adherents, and posted the Chatillons and Condé in conspicuous places, and surrounded them with confidential persons who were pledged to prevent their joining the assailants.

Forewarned was forearmed; and when the Huguenots attacked Amboise, they were repulsed with great slaughter. La Renaudie rallied the fugitives, who returned gallantly to the charge; but their chief, surrounded by a party of his foes, after slaying a number of his assailants, was struck from his saddle dead by a bullet fired from a distance. The confederates then scattered in all directions. The pursuit was pressed with vindictive fierceness, and the body of La Renaudie was placed on a gibbet with the inscription, "Chief of the Rebels."

During the battle, the duke of Nemours recognized at the head of a Huguenot squadron a gentleman named Castelnau, for whom he entertained a warm friendship. He reined in his horse, and asked the Calvinist cavalier why he had taken arms against the king. "Our intention," was the reply, "is not to war against the king, but to expel the tyrant Guises from authority."

"If that be the case," said Nemours, "sheath your sword, and I promise you on my honor that you shall speak to the king, and I pledge myself for your safe return." Castelnau accepted these terms, and Nemours reduced his engagement to writing, and signed it; on which his late foeman followed him to Amboise.

Castelnau was seized upon his entrance into the town, put into irons, and despite Nemours' urgent remonstrances, he was sentenced to death, Guise insisting that Nemours had no authority to undertake to do what he had written and sworn to do.

On this proceeding Vieilleville makes this comment: "This caused Nemours great uneasiness and vexation on account of his signature; for had he only passed his word, he would have denied it, and given the lie to any man who should charge him with having plighted it, so valiant and generous was this nobleman." "A remarkable instance," observes Anquétil, "of the point of honor badly understood, which fears a crime less than the proof."

The Guises triumphed. They revoked the edict obtained by Coligny, arrested the prince of Condé, commanded that no quarter should be given the insurgents, and hung their prisoners on a gallows erected in the Amboise square. Those who escaped this death were condemned, without trial, to be tied hand and foot, and thrown into the Loire.

Many of the confederates were racked, and especially La Bique, La Renaudie's secretary, the object of the ministers being to secure some testimony which should implicate Condé, or at least justify his arrest. They failed on both points. Only one person was found who implicated the prince, and he spoke only from report, while La Bique doggedly refused to give any specific information, affirming that La Renaudie kept his own secrets, and only entrusted him with general correspondence.

Condé, on his part, was indignant. He concluded a long speech to the king's council in these words: "If any man has the audacity to affirm that I have instigated a revolt against the sacred person of the king, I renounce the privilege of my rank, and am willing to attest my innocence by single combat."

Then occurred a notable instance of hypocritical finesse. The duke of Guise, the secret author of the arrest, rose, and unmindful of the evident application of Condé's words to himself, said with apparent heat, "And I will not suffer so great a prince to be accused of so black a crime, and entreat you to accept me as your second."

Thus ended the conspiracy of Amboise with a liberation—Guise being as convinced of the treachery of the prince, as Condé was sensible of the duplicity of the duke.

"The Prince of Condé was liberated," says an old contemporaneous historian, "in the hope that the apparent confidence thus placed in his loyalty might throw the king of Navarre, the Constable, D'Andelot, and the Vidame of Chartres off their guard, and thus enable the Guises to seize their persons; for they feared to put Condé to death, and leave so many of his friends alive to avenge him. Past examples had taught them that it is in vain to cut down the body of a tree, how high and lofty soever, if there be any quick roots left, which may shoot forth new sprouts. 

 

Chapter XVIII 

ALMOST A TRAGEDY

After their fierce suppression of the Amboise conspiracy, the Guises returned to Fontainebleau with the court in their pocket. Meantime France wailed under a grinding tyranny which could no longer be endured. Even the just choked émuete was not able with all its blood to stifle the agonized cry for relief. Something must be done; and it was determined to convene an assembly of the Notables, without reference to party or creed, for the investigation of the existing evils: all proved grievances were to be remedied—such was the burden of the Guises' syren song.

The Montmorenci's and the Chatillons attended; but fearful of being entrapped, they were accompanied by a long train of mailed cavaliers, the escort of the old constable alone numbering eight hundred men-at-arms.

The sky brightened for a moment. Chancellor Olivier, a statesman of moderate views, but weak and yielding, was so affected by the brutal policy of the princes of Lorraine, that just as the conspiracy of Amboise was definitively quelled, he died of grief at the holocaust of immolated victims. It is related of him, that when the cardinal of Lorraine called on him just before his decease, he turned his face to the wall, and refused to see him, saying, "I will look no more upon his face, for he is the accursed cardinal who is the cause of all the condemnations."

Olivier was succeeded in the chancellorship by Michael 1'Hôpital, a lawyer of distinguished fame, whom Brantome calls a second Cato, who did his utmost to inaugurate a reign of peace, and whose memory France is bound to revere as the active, unwearied friend of tolerant politics.

The king of Navarre and Condé had been urgently summoned to attend the convention; but their wiser partisans, familiar with the wily character and deadly rancor of the Guises, advised them to absent themselves, and they followed this prudent counsel.

The debates at Fontainebleau were long and animated. Coligny on his knees presented to Francis a petition from the Huguenots. The king handed it to his secretary L'Aubespine to read. He commenced: "A request of the people who address their prayers to God, according to the true rule of piety;" and when he had gotten thus far, he was interrupted by the clamors of the Guises' adherents. Francis commanded silence; and the secretary resumed reading the memorial, which contained a prayer that the prevalent persecutions for conscience' sake might cease; it showed also that those who were nicknamed heretics were quite ready to abide by the declarations of Scripture, asking only to be convicted of error from the Bible; that the pope was not a fit person to decide such matters, since his position as the leader of the hosts of error made him necessarily more partial than just; and the paper concluded by calling upon the king himself to arbitrate.

When L'Aubespine had finished, the cardinal took the floor, and opening the flood-gates of his wrathful bitterness, poured forth a torrent of vituperative epithets. "The docility, the meekness," he said, "of these perfect Christians, these new evangelicals, might be judged by the flood of libels leveled at himself; that, for his own part, having collected no less than twenty-two scandalous writings against his single self, he carefully preserved them as badges of honor." He added, that "though he pitied the ignorant, who were misled, extreme measures ought to be adopted against those who carried arms without the permission of the king."

Coligny, in his reply, said that "his voice was that of fifty thousand Huguenots." "Well then," retorted the duke of Guise with bitter emphasis, "I will break their heads with a hundred thousand papists whom I will lead against them."

This verbal tilt is said to have been the beginning of the mortal feud between the duke of Guise and the admiral, who had heretofore been warm personal friends—a hatred never appeased. Crimination and recrimination succeeded, mutual defiances were haughtily exchanged, and amid great confusion the conference was adjourned, and the convocation of the states-general was decided upon, to whom all the political and religious points of controversy were referred.

While this rude blast was rushing over France, and roaring in the antique galleries of lordly palaces, the still small voice of the Word was making its way into the homes of praying men. In private chambers, in the lecture-rooms and refectories, students, and even masters of arts, were to be seen reading the Latin Testament, Erasmus' Greek version, and even the Bible in French. Animated groups were discussing the rationale of the Reformation. "When Christ came on earth," said some, "he gave the word; and when he ascended up into heaven, he gave the Holy Spirit. These are the two forces which created the church, and these are the forces which must regenerate it." "No," replied the partisans of Rome, "it was the teaching of the apostles at first, and it is the teaching of the priests now." "The apostles," rejoined the Huguenots; "yes, 'tis true, the apostles were, during their ministry, a living scripture; but their oral teaching would infallibly have been altered by passing from mouth to mouth. God willed, therefore, that these precious lessons should be preserved to us in their writings, and thus become the ever undefiled source of truth and salvation." "To set the Scriptures in the foremost place, as your pretended reformers are doing," replied the monks and their satellites, "is to propagate heresy." "And what are the reformers doing," queried their apologists, "but what Christ did before them? The sayings of the prophets existed in the time of Jesus only as scripture, and it was to this written word that Christ appealed when he founded his kingdom. And now in like manner the teaching of the apostles exists only as scripture; and imitating Christ, it is to this written word that we in our turn appeal, in order to reestablish the kingdom of our Lord in its primitive condition. The night is far spent; the day is at hand; all is in motion—in the lofty ancestral chateaus of the nobility, in the classic aisles of our universities, in the mansions of the rich, and in the lowly dwellings of the poor. If we wish to scatter the darkness, must we light the shriveled wick of some old lamp? Or shall we not rather open the doors and shutters, and admit freely into the house the great light which God himself has hung in the heavens?"

But while by these and kindred conversations the Huguenots were burying the Romanists in their own nonsense, public events were marching towards a crisis.

Although the Bourbon princes had absented themselves from Fontainebleau, the Guises had strongly suspected that some of their emissaries were present, who were empowered to negotiate with the leaders of the court opposition, with Montmorenci, with the Chatillons, and the rest. From information received, they arrested a Gascon gentleman named La Saque; he was put to the torture, and the confession that Navarre and Condé were prepared to take the field as soon as the states-general were convened at Orleans, was wrung from his unwilling lips. "Dip the wrapper of this letter in water," faltered La Saque, enfeebled by the rack, and whose quivering sinews yet anguished him. The inquisitors hastened to comply with the direction, when lo, the whole blot lay disclosed. What had before seemed blank paper, teemed with ominous meaning. The handwriting of Dordois, the constable's secretary, became visible; a letter to the vidame of Chartres was revealed, and the Guises learned that, despite the failure of the Amboise intrigue, the hostile nobles still hoped to succeed in expelling them from France.

The Bourbons were soon apprized of the apprehension of La Saque, but they were at first uncertain whether he had made any disclosures, as his confession was kept a profound secret. But the imprisonment of the vidame of Chartres, one of their most faithful adherents, who was shut up in the Bastile and treated with great rigor, convinced them that their projects were known. They were soon specially summoned to Orleans by Francis. But traversing Gascony at the head of a considerable number of gentlemen, both Romanists and Huguenots, pledged to support them, they bade defiance to the king's mandate. However, repeated commands from the court, intimating that further disobedience would be deemed an act of overt rebellion and constructive treason, imperiling both their liberties and their lives, intimidated the feeble spirit of the king of Navarre, and he dismissed his little army, saying, "I must obey, but I will obtain your pardon of the king." "Go," said an old captain, "and ask pardon for yourself; our safety is in our good swords;" and the gentlemen who composed this nucleus force broke ranks indignantly, and separated for their homes.

In the month of October, the Bourbon princes set out for Orleans. Navarre, anxious not to make a misstep, made the greatest, faux pas. He walked straight into the net, and death touched both Condé and himself so closely, that its clammy fingers might have been felt.

The Guises were prepared for a crushing victory. They had persuaded the king, by perverting La Saque's confession, that the princes of the blood, and especially Condé, whom they most feared on account of his energy, boldness, and talents, had conspired against his life; and they urged him for his personal safety to arrest Condé as an example. To this advice the irritated monarch lent a willing ear. When Condé reached Orleans in the latter part of October, he ordered him into his presence, reproached him with his many supposed crimes, and without deigning to hear any reply, commanded his immediate imprisonment.

The trial soon followed, before the chancellor and some commissioners chosen by the Parliament, now become a mere echo of the Guises. The prince refused to plead, protested against the competence of this mushroom tribunal, and demanded, as a prince of the blood, to be tried by the king in person and by the peers of the realm. This privilege, though perfectly legal and strictly in accordance with the letter and spirit of the Constitution, was refused, and Condé was sentenced to be beheaded on the tenth of the following December.

When Condé was informed of the decision, his tranquility was unruffled. A priest was sent to him to perform mass. " What want you, reverend sir?" queried the prince. "I come to prepare you for death," was the reply. "This is a work," said Condé reverently and solemnly, "that I can safely trust with my Master; it rests between God and myself. Leave me, good father; it is time for the work to begin."

The priest retired, shocked at this blasphemy.

Then a gentleman of the court, an emissary of the Guises, came to Condé's cell. The prince received him with the courtesy which distinguished him. Having expressed his deep sympathy, the courtier hinted that possibly affairs might yet be accommodated, and requested the prince to appoint him mediator.

"I ask but one Mediator," said Condé with an upward gesture, "and that one is interceding for me now at the throne of God. Return, my lord, to your employers, and tell them you have failed in your mission."

One more trial yet awaited him. His wife was conducted to his prison. When she entered, she threw herself into her husband's arms, unable to speak.

"Now this is kind," said Condé with rare tact. "I know your errand: it is to confirm, to support, to give new strength to your husband; to tell him that you will live to perform his duties and your own; to teach our children that their father, though dying an ignominious death, still bore a true and loyal heart. And now farewell. Let us not prolong this painful interview. Nothing can be done by your means or mine; it is hopeless. Let us not add disgrace to sorrow. All things are in the hands of God; he may yet save a life that has been sincerely devoted to his cause."

Again the princess would have spoken; but Condé said, "No more, sweet wife; write all you would say. Farewell." And the hero quitted the apartment for an inner room.

When Condé's sentence was made public, his powerful relatives importuned the king for his pardon; but they plead in vain. His wife, Eleanora de Roye, Montmorenci's niece, accompanied by her children, threw herself before Francis, and with a woman's devotion endeavored to beat through the icy coldness of the king. "Madame," said the monarch, "your husband has assailed the crown, and conspired against my life; he must pay the penalty." In despair the poor princess implored the intercession of the Guises. "It is our duty," they said, "to strike off the head of heresy and rebellion at one blow."

The complete destruction of the Huguenot party was to follow the execution of Condé, and every one was to be compelled to choose between death or the signature of the confession of faith drawn up in 1542 by the Sorbonne, in response to Calvin's "Institutes."

The king of Navarre, though himself but little better than a prisoner, was for once extraordinarily active, and he made efforts constant and tireless to save his brother, even humbling himself to the cardinal of Lorraine, by whom, however, he was rudely repulsed. The duke of Guise had conceived a scheme to murder Navarre, and had even secured the king's assent to it. It was arranged that Francis should summon Navarre to his presence, and that at a sign from him some bravos, whom Guise would station behind the arms, should pierce their victim to the heart.

Navarre was indeed summoned into the king's chamber; but having received word from some quarter that to go would be to commit suicide, the reluctant prince refused to obey the citation. At length, after being summoned three times, he yielded, saying to a confidential friend as he departed on the perilous visit, "Duty compels me to go; I will defend myself, if attacked, to the last gasp. If I fall, take my shirt, stained with my blood, carry it to my son, and may life abandon him sooner than the purpose to avenge his murdered father." Navarre went to the king, listened calmly to his reproofs, replied gently, and retired unharmed: Francis' courage failed him at the critical moment. "Oh the fool, the coward; what a contemptible monarch we have!" exclaimed the incensed duke of Guise as he saw Navarre quit the royal presence unsmitten.

Disappointed in their hope of assassinating the Navarrese sovereign, the princes of Lorraine pressed with increased vehemence for Condé's early execution. The fatal day approached. Francis, unwilling to witness the ghastly spectacle, had resolved upon a tour to Chambord, when suddenly he was taken alarmingly ill. The chancellor instantly sent for Ambrose Paré, the king's physician; and upon being informed that Francis was not likely to recover, the cunning lawyer had recourse to a stratagem. He was very desirous of postponing Condé's death, and had delayed signing the order for his execution for several days by one pretext or another, using the weapons of his profession. Now the Guises hastened to him and implored him to sign; alarmed by the king's health, they feared that Condé might yet cheat the executioner. L’Hôpital pretended to be seized with a violent colic, which prevented him from examining the body of the decree, an essential preliminary to his signature; but when Francis' danger became imminent, the keen chancellor suddenly recovered from his pain, and hurrying off to the queen mother, advised her to take advantage of the posture of affairs by uniting herself closely with the princes of the blood, as the Guises had already despoiled her of power and influence. The Machiavellian Catherine agreed with L’Hôpital, and charged Coligny, who had been summoned with the other nobles to attend the assembly of the states-general, with the negotiation.

Thus stood affairs when, on the 5th of December, 1560, the thread which attached the shattered health of Francis to life, snapped, and the young king, then but seventeen, lay dead in the midst of a court which instantly gave itself up to the mockery of woe. 

 

Chapter XIX 

THE LOST LEADER

Charles IX, a fatal name, an infamous memory, succeeded in his eleventh year to the vacant throne of his dead brother. Now once more the politics of the court were completely revolutionized. The Guises had been entrenched by the influence of their niece, Mary Stuart, over Francis II. Of this support they were now of course deprived. Chaos reigned, not Charles; and the selfish struggles of the chiefs of the several factions, ambitious not for their country's honor, but for their own governmental advancement, held France a second-rate power for a quarter of a century, and made this period one of the most calamitous in its history.

Upon Charles' coronation, Catherine de' Medici assumed the position of arbiter almost without opposition. Almost the first act of the infant king, under the queen mother's direction, was to write the Parliament, on the 8th of December, 1560, a letter, in which, after announcing his brother's death, he informed that body "that, considering his youth and confiding in the virtue and wisdom of the queen mother, he had requested her to undertake the administration of affairs, with the wise counsel and assistance of the king of Navarre, and of the gentlemen of distinction in the late king's counsel."

This crafty move at once deposed the princes of Lorraine, but their real influence remained almost untouched, since they were the representatives of the reactionists of France, as the Bourbons were of the Huguenots.

Still, many changes occurred. The command of the army was taken from the duke of Guise, and confided to Antony of Bourbon, who was made lieutenant-general of the kingdom.

The prince of Condé was released from prison; and while as a matter of form he retired for a little to his government of Bearn, his innocence was openly proclaimed at court.

The nobles who had been placed under the ban by the haughty Guises in the days of their regime, were recalled with honor, and the constable Montmorenci resumed his ancient functions, and regained his former titles.

At the council board of the king the queen mother was now seated as regent, while upon either hand the princes of Bourbon, the princes of Lorraine, and Montmorenci were clustered.

Between all the members of this heterogeneous cabinet a rankling hatred still existed, which threatened at every session to inaugurate fresh convulsions. But Catharine, cozened by her favorite theory of an "adjusted equilibrium," foolishly hoped to be able to hold the scales evenly poised between these implacable enemies.

The first measures of the new administration were indeed judicious. All persons were released who had been imprisoned for heresy, and their property was restored, while a general amnesty was proclaimed.

While the reconstruction of the cabinet was being effected, the states-general continued their sittings at Orleans. L'Hôpital implored the assembly to adopt such measures as would insure domestic tranquility, burying, in devotion to the general good, the bitter feuds of the past reign, which had so nearly kindled a civil war. But this statesmanlike and noble appeal of the patriotic chancellor was not much heeded.

The nobles, taught wisdom by experience, insisted, as a sine qua non, upon the exile of the princes of Lorraine. Condé, Navarre, and Montmorenci declared that if Catharine did not concede this measure to the safety of the state, they would march to Paris, proclaim one of themselves regent in her place, and execute their purpose. But this scheme was rendered abortive by the action of the chancellor, who prevailed upon the king to command the constable to remain at court; a command which Montmorenci was too old and wily a courtier to disobey.

But a motion made about the same time by the king of Navarre in the states-general, had a more serious result. He proposed a searching examination into the financial system of the preceding reign, and that a return of all excessive gratifications in money or lands to the late court favorites be speedily ordered. This motion instantly made a flutter in the dove-cote, and alienated a powerful friend. Everyone felt that it was a blow at the extortion of the Guises, but the blow struck beyond them. It affected the gratuities of Diana de Poitiers, the marshal Saint André, an old chum of Henry II, and the servile instrument of the duchess de Va1entinois, who had battened upon the gains incident to his office of pimp, and of Montmorenci himself, since one of his sons had married a daughter of Diana, and he had shared largely in the public plunder. A community of interest made this horde of thieves, but yesterday deadly foemen, fast friends today: all minor differences were buried in the unanimous desire to preserve ill-gotten wealth; and the consequence was, an infamous coalition. The Guises, Montmorenci, and Saint André united under the name of the Triumvirate. These abandoned nobles swore at the altar to forget their old quarrels; and in order to give a religious flavor to their avaricious league, they signed a treaty by which they pledged themselves to the extermination of heresy. It was a fitting collocation; a horde of titled plunderers, met to preserve their booty from the clutch of justice, and leagued to earn a good right to their stolen gold by filching the yet more costly jewel of life from their innocent countrymen whose creed taught them better things.

The Triumvirate had a powerful ally in the Spanish ambassador, who had a seat at the council, pretending that his master, Philip II, the most bigoted king in history, had taken France under his protection. And such was the wretched and disgraceful condition of France, torn by the internecine factions, that this insolent foreigner was tamely permitted to dictate its policy. This Spaniard was personally and politically attached to the Guises, who sacrificed the honor of France and the dignity of the crown to secure his protection.

The nation was now divided into two great parties, into which all the minor factions had melted the Triumvirate, supported by the holy see and by the Romanists; the Bourb