Part 14 (1/2)
For a time it seemed that the need of leaders.h.i.+p was to be supplied by William Farel. His learning, his eloquence, and his zeal, together with the perfect safety of action that he found in Switzerland, were the necessary qualifications. The need for a Bible was at first met by the version of Lefevre, printed in 1532. But the Catholic spirit of this work, based on the Vulgate, was distasteful to the evangelicals.
Farel asked Olivetan, an excellent philologist, to make a new version, which was completed by February 1535. Calvin wrote the preface for it.
It was dedicated to ”the poor little church of G.o.d.” In doctrine it was thoroughly evangelical, replacing the old ”eveques” and ”pretres”
by ”surveillants” and ”anciens,” and omitting some of the Apocrypha.
Encouraged by their own growth the Protestants became bolder in their attacks on the Catholics. The situation verged more and more towards violence; {197} neither side, not even the weaker, thought of tolerance for both. On the night of October 17-18 some placards, written by Anthony de Marcourt, were posted up in Paris, Orleans, Rouen, Tours and Blois and on the doors of the king's chamber at Amboise. They excoriated the sacrifice of the ma.s.s as a horrible and intolerable abuse invented by infernal theology and directly counter to the true Supper of our Lord. The government was alarmed and took strong steps.
Processions were inst.i.tuted to appease G.o.d for the sacrilege. Within a month two hundred persons were arrested, twenty of whom were sent to the scaffold and the rest banished after confiscation of their goods.
But the government could not afford to continue an uninterruptedly rigorous policy. The Protestants found their opportunity in the exigencies of the foreign situation. In 1535 Francis was forced by the increasing menace of the Hapsburgs to make alliance not only with the infidel but with the Schmalkaldic League. He would have had no scruples in supporting abroad the heresy he suppressed at home, but he found the German princes would accept his friends.h.i.+p on no terms save those of tolerance to French Protestants. Accordingly on July 16, 1535, Francis was obliged to publish an edict ordering persecution to cease and liberating those who were in prison for conscience's sake.
But the respite did not last long. New rigors were undertaken in April 1538. Marot retracted his errors, and Rabelais, while not fundamentally changing his doctrine, greatly softened, in the second edition of his _Pantagruel_, [Sidenote: 1542] the abusive ridicule he had poured on the Sorbonne. But by this time a new era was inaugurated. The deaths of Erasmus and Lefevre in 1536 gave the _coup de grace_ to the party of the Christian {198} Renaissance, and the publication of Calvin's _Inst.i.tutes_ in the same year finally gave the French Protestants a much needed leader and standard.
[1] _Harvard Theological Review_, 1919, p. 209. Margaret had died several years before, but Rabelais was called her poet because he had claimed her protection and to her wrote a poem in 1545. _Oeuvres de Rabelais_, ed. A. Lefranc, 1912, i, pp. xxiii, cx.x.xix. _Cf_. also Calvin's letter to the Queen of Navarre, April 28, 1545. _Opera_, xii, pp. 65 f.
SECTION 2. THE CALVINIST PARTY. 1536-1559
[Sidenote: Truce of Nice, 1538]
The truce of Nice providing for a cessation of hostilities between France and the Hapsburgs for ten years, was greeted with much joy in France. Bonfires celebrated it in Paris, and in every way the people made known their longing for peace. Little the king cared for the wishes of his loyal subjects when his own dignity, real or imagined, was at stake. The war with Charles, that cursed Europe like an intermittent fever, broke out again in 1542. Again France was the aggressor and again she was worsted. The emperor invaded Champagne in person, arriving, in 1544, at a point within fifty miles of Paris. As there was no army able to oppose him it looked as if he would march as a conqueror to the capital of his enemy. But he sacrificed the advantage he had over France to a desire far nearer his heart, that of crus.h.i.+ng his rebellious Protestant subjects. Already planning war with the League of Schmalkalden he wished only to secure his own safety from attack by his great rival. [Sidenote: Treaty of Crepy, 1544] The treaty made at Crepy was moderate in its terms and left things largely as they were.
[Sidenote: Henry II, 1547-59]
On March 31, 1547, Francis I died and was succeeded by his son, Henry II, a man of large, strong frame, pa.s.sionately fond of all forms of exercise, especially of hunting and jousting. He had neither his father's versatility nor his fickleness nor his artistic interests.
His policy was influenced by the aim of reversing his father's wishes and of disgracing his father's favorites.
[Sidenote: 1533]
While his elder brother was still alive, Henry had married Catharine de' Medici, a daughter of Lorenzo {199} II de' Medici of Florence. The girl of fourteen in a foreign country was uncomfortable, especially as it was felt, after her husband became Dauphin, that her rank was not equal to his. The failure to have any children during the first ten years of marriage made her position not only unpleasant but precarious, but the birth of her first son made her una.s.sailable. In rapid succession she bore ten children, seven of whom survived childhood.
Though she had little influence on affairs of state during her husband's reign, she acquired self-confidence and at last began to talk and act as queen.
[Sidenote: Diana of Poitiers]
At the age of seventeen Henry fell in love with a woman of thirty-six, Diana de Poitiers, to whom his devotion never wavered until his death, when she was sixty. Notwithstanding her absolute ascendancy over her lover she meddled little with affairs of state.
[Sidenote: Admiral Coligny, 1519-72]
The direction of French policy at this time fell largely into the hands of two powerful families. The first was that of Coligny. Of three brothers the ablest was Gaspard, Admiral of France, a firm friend of Henry's as well as a statesman and warrior. Still more powerful was the family of Guise, the children of Claude, Duke of Guise, who died in 1527. [Sidenote: Francis of Guise] The eldest son, Francis, Duke of Guise, was a great soldier. His brother, Charles, Cardinal of Lorraine, won a high place in the councils of state, and his sister Mary, by her marriage with James V of Scotland, brought added prestige to the family. The great power wielded by this house owed much to the position of their estates, part of which were fiefs of the French king and part subject to the Empire. As suited their convenience they could act either as Frenchmen or as foreign n.o.bles.
[Sidenote: Expansion]
Under Henry France enjoyed a period of expansion such as she had not had for many years. The {200} perpetual failures of Francis were at last turned into substantial successes. This was due in large part to the civil war in Germany and to the weakness of England's rulers, Edward VI and Mary. It was due in part to the irrepressible energy of the French bourgeois and gentlemen, in part to the genius of Francis of Guise. The co-operation of France and Turkey, rather an ident.i.ty of interests than a formal alliance, a policy equally blamed by contemporaries and praised by historians, continued. But the successes achieved were due most of all to the definite abandonment of the hope of Italian conquests and to the turning of French arms to regions more suitable for incorporation under her government.
War having been declared on Charles, the French seized the Three Bishoprics, at that time imperial fiefs, Metz, Verdun, and Toul. A large German army under Alva besieged Metz, but failed to overcome the brilliant defence of Francis of Guise. Worn by the attrition of repulsed a.s.saults and of disease the imperial army melted away. When the siege was finally raised Guise distinguished himself as much by the humanity with which he cared for wounded and sick enemies as he had by his military prowess.
Six years later Guise added fresh laurels to his fame and new possessions to France by the conquest of Calais and Guines, the last English possessions in French territory. The loss of Calais, which had been held by England since the Hundred Years War, was an especially bitter blow to the islanders. These victories were partly counterbalanced by the defeats of French armies at St. Quentin on the Somme [Sidenote: 1557] and by Egmont at Gravelines. [Sidenote: 1558]
When peace was signed at Cateau-Cambresis, [Sidenote: Peace of Cateau-Cambresis, 1559] France renounced all her conquests in the south, but kept the Three Bishoprics and Calais, all of which became her permanent possessions.
[Sidenote: Calvinism]
{201} While France was thus expanding her borders, the internal revolution matured rapidly. The last years of Francis and the reign of Henry II saw a prodigious growth of Protestantism. What had begun as a sect now became, by an evolution similar to that experienced in Germany, a powerful political party. It is the general fate of new causes to meet at first with opposition due to habit and the instinctive reaction of almost all minds against ”the pain of a new idea.” But if the cause is one suited to the spirit and needs of the age, it gains more and more supporters, slowly if left to itself, rapidly if given good organization and adequate means of presenting its claims. The thorough canva.s.sing of an idea is absolutely essential to win it a following. Now, prior to 1536, the Protestants had got a considerable amount of publicity as well through their own writings as through the attacks of their enemies. But not until Calvin settled at Geneva and began to write extensively in French, was the cause presented in a form capable of appealing to the average Frenchman.