Volume I Part 3 (2/2)
[Sidenote: Barbarous punishments.]
The character or the punishments inflicted for the commission of crime furnishes a convenient test of national civilization. If France in the sixteenth century be tried by this criterion, the conclusion is inevitable that for her the age of barbarism had not yet completely pa.s.sed away. The catalogue of crimes to which death was affixed as the penalty is frightfully long; some of them were almost trivial offences.
A boy less than sixteen years of age was hung for stealing jewelry from his master.[74] On the other hand, with flagrant inconsistency, a n.o.bleman, Rene de Bonneville, superintendent of the royal mint, for the murder of his brother-in-law, was dragged to the place of execution on a hurdle, but suffered the less ignominious fate of decapitation. A part of his property was given to his sister, and the rest confiscated to the crown, with the exception of four hundred livres, reserved for the purchase of ma.s.ses to be said for the benefit of the soul of his murdered victim.[75]
[Sidenote: Especially for heresy.]
For other culprits extraordinary refinements of cruelty were reserved.
The _aventuriers_, when so ill-starred as to fall into the hands of justice, were customarily burned alive at the stake.[76] The same fate overtook those who were detected in frauds against the public treasury.
More frightful than all the rest was the vengeance taken by the law upon the counterfeiter of the king's coin. The legal penalty, which is said to have become a dead letter on the pages of the statute-book long before the French revolution, was in the sixteenth century rigidly enforced: on the 9th of November, 1527, a rich merchant of Paris, having been found guilty of the crime in question, was boiled alive before the a.s.sembled mult.i.tude in the _Marche-aux-pourceaux_.[77] Heresy and blasphemy were treated with no greater degree of leniency than the most infamous of crimes. Even before the reformation a lingering death in the flames had been the doom p.r.o.nounced upon the person who dared to accept or promulgate doctrines condemned by the church. But when the bitterness of strife had awakened the desire to enhance the punishment of dissent, new or extraordinary tortures were resorted to, of the application of which this history will furnish only too many examples. The forehead was branded, the tongue torn out, the hand cut off at the wrist, or the agonies of death prolonged by alternately dropping the wretched victim into the fire and drawing him out again, until exhausted nature found tardy release in death.
But if we can to some extent account for the excess of cruelty which blind frenzy inflicted on the inflexible martyr to his faith, it is certainly more difficult to explain the severity exercised upon the more pliable, whom the arguments of ghostly advisers, or the terrors of the _Place de Greve_, had induced to recant. Generally the judge did nothing more in their behalf than commute their punishment by ordering them to be strangled before their bodies were consigned to the flames.[78] Yet in one exceptional case--that of a servant whose master, a gentleman and one of the men-at-arms of the Regent of Scotland, was burned alive--the court went to such a length of leniency as to let the repentant heretic off with the sentence that he first be beaten with rods at the cart's end, and afterwards have his tongue cut out.[79] Even the clearest evidence of insanity did not suffice to remove or even mitigate the penalties of impiety. A poor, crazy woman, who had broken the consecrated wafer when administered to her in her illness, and had applied to it some offensive but absurd epithet, was unhesitatingly condemned to the stake. An appeal to a superior court procuring no reversal of her sentence, she was burned at Tours in the year 1533.[80]
[Sidenote: Belief in astrology.]
[Sidenote: Predictions of Nostradamus.]
Other marks of a low stage of civilization were not wanting. The belief in judicial astrology was almost universal.[81] Pretenders like Nostradamus obtained respect and wealth at the hands of their dupes. All France trembled with Catharine de' Medici, when the astrologer gave out that the queen would see all her sons kings, and every one foreboded the speedy extinction of the royal line. The ”prophecy,” as it was gravely styled, obtained public recognition, and was discussed in diplomatic papers. When two of the queen's sons had in fact become kings of France, and a third had been elected to the throne of Poland, while the marriage of the fourth with Queen Elizabeth was under consideration, Catharine's allies saw grounds to congratulate her that the prediction which had so disquieted her was likely to obtain a more pleasing fulfilment than in the successive deaths of her male descendants.[82]
A still more pernicious form of superst.i.tion was noticeable in the credit enjoyed by charms and incantations, not merely among illiterate rustics, but even with persons of high social station. No phase of the magic art led to the commission of more terrible crimes or revealed a worse side of human character than that which pretended to secure the happiness or accomplish the ruin, to prolong the life or hasten the death, of the objects of private love or hatred. While systematically practising upon the credulity of his dupes, the professed master of this ill-omened art frequently resorted to a.s.sa.s.sination by poison or dagger in the accomplishment of his schemes. Sorcery by means of waxen images was particularly in vogue. Thus, the Queen of Navarre, the sister of Francis the First, in her singular collection of tales, the ”Heptameron,” gives a circ.u.mstantial account of the mode in which her own life was sought by this species of witchcraft.[83] Five puppets had been provided: three, representing enemies (the queen being one of the number), had their arms hanging down; the other two, representing persons whose favor was desired, had them raised aloft. With certain cabalistic words and occult rites the puppets were next secretly hidden beneath an altar whereon the ma.s.s was celebrated, and the mysterious ”sacrifice” was believed to complete the efficacy of the charm. It was no new superst.i.tion imported from abroad, but one that had existed in France for centuries.[84]
[Sidenote: Reverence for relics.]
The French were behind no other nation in reverence for relics of saints and for pictures and images representing them. In the partial list, compiled by a contemporary, of the curiosities of this nature scattered through Christendom,[85] the majority of the relics mentioned are selected from the immense treasures laid up in the thousands of cathedrals, parish churches, and abbeys within the domains of the ”Very Christian King.” In one place the hair of the blessed Virgin was carefully preserved; in another the sword of the archangel Michael, or the entire body of St. Dionysius. It was true that the Pope had by solemn bull, about a century before, declared, in the presence of the French amba.s.sador, that the entire body of this last-named saint was in the possession of the inhabitants of Ratisbon; but, had any one been so rash as to affirm at Saint Denis, near Paris, that the veritable remains were not there, he would certainly have been stoned.[86] At Notre-Dame de l'Ile, above Lyons, no little account was made of the _twelve combs_ of the apostles![87]
The reflecting man who found, by a comparison of the treasures of different churches within his own personal observation, that some of the pretended relics were frivolous or impossible, and that the same members of some favorite saint were reproduced at points widely distant, might well speculate upon the probable benefits to Christendom from a complete inventory of the contents of the churches of two or three thousand bishoprics, of twenty or thirty thousand abbeys, and of more than forty thousand convents.[88] He might find difficulty in believing that our Lord was crucified with fourteen nails; that ”an entire hedge” should have been requisite to plait the crown of thorns; that a single spear should have begotten three others; or that from a solitary napkin there should have issued a whole brood of the same kind.[89] He would be scandalized on learning that each apostle had more than four bodies, and the saints at least two or three apiece.[90] And his faith in the genuineness of the objects of popular adoration would be still further shaken, if, on subjecting them to a closer examination, he discovered that, as was the case at Geneva, he had been wors.h.i.+pping a bone of a deer as the arm of Saint Anthony, or a piece of pumice for the brain of the apostle Peter.[91]
But, whatever sceptical conclusions might be reached by the learned and discerning, the devotion of the common people showed no signs of flagging. In the parish church of St. Stephen at Noyon, it was not the Christian proto-martyr alone that was decorated with a cap and other gewgaws, when his yearly festival came around, but likewise the ”tyrants,” as they were styled by the people, who stoned him. And the poor women, seeing them thus adorned, took them to be companions of the saint, and each one had his candle. The devil with whom St. Michael contended fared equally well.[92] The very stones that were the instruments of St. Stephen's death were adored at Arles and elsewhere.[93] It was, however, to the Parisians that the palm in this species of superst.i.tion rightfully belonged. The knife wherewith an impious Jew had stabbed a consecrated wafer was held in higher esteem than the wafer itself! And so marked was the preference that it aroused the displeasure of one of the most bigoted doctors of the Sorbonne, De Quercu, who reproached the Parisians for being worse than the Jews themselves, ”inasmuch as they adored the knife that had served to rend the precious body of Jesus Christ.”[94]
[Sidenote: The consecrated wafer.]
When such superst.i.tious respect was paid to the relics of saints, it is not surprising that the consecrated wafer or host received the most extravagant marks of adoration. The king himself was often foremost in public demonstrations in its honor. Louise de Savoie, mother of Francis the First, relates in her quaint diary the pompous ceremonial observed in restoring to its original position a pyx containing the host which had been stolen from the chapel of the palace of St. Germain-en-Laye.
The culprit had suffered the customary penalty, having had his hand cut off and being afterward burned alive. In the expiatory procession which took place a few days later, Francis himself walked with uncovered head and carrying a lighted taper in his hand, from Nanterre to St. Germain.
If we may credit his mother's somewhat partial account, the sight of the monarch's signal piety was so touching as to bring tears to the eyes of admiring spectators.[95]
In view of the general prevalence of debasing forms of superst.i.tion among the people, it is not inappropriate to consider the condition of that cla.s.s of the population which is wont to exert the most potent influence in forming the moral sentiments and moulding the character of the unlettered ma.s.ses. We have already touched upon the external relations of the clergy to the king and to the Pope; let us now look more narrowly into its internal state.
[Sidenote: Wealth and power of the clergy.]
At the period of which I am now treating, the clergy, both regular and secular, had attained unprecedented wealth and power. Never, perhaps, had France been more fully represented in the ”Sacred College.”
a.s.suredly never since the residence of the Popes in Avignon had the French members possessed such immense riches. Thirteen French cardinals sat in the papal consistory at one time in the reign of Francis the First; twelve at the accession of his son to the throne.[96] Their influence in the kingdom was almost beyond conception, both on account of the mult.i.tude of benefices they held, and the distinction of the families from whom they sprang and whose t.i.tles they retained. Some were the inc.u.mbents of as many as _ten_ bishoprics and abbeys; while the cardinals of Bourbon, of Lorraine, of Chatillon, of Du Bellay, and of Armagnac were of the best blood in the realm, and enjoyed in their own right, or by reason of their office, very extensive jurisdiction.
[Sidenote: Non-residence of the prelates.]
A standing reproach against the prelates was their non-residence in the dioceses committed to their pastoral supervision. In fact, when the Council of Trent, by one of its first decrees, forbade a plurality of benefices and enjoined residence, its action was regarded as an open declaration of war against the French episcopate.[97] But if this abuse is deplored by Roman Catholic historians as the fruitful cause of the introduction and rapid progress of Protestantism,[98] the reformers, viewing their work as an instrument specially designed by heaven for the purification of a corrupt church, might well be justified in regarding the negligence of the bishops as a wise providential arrangement. Many a feeble germ of truth was spared the violence of persecution until the kindly sun and the plentiful showers had conferred greater powers of endurance. Happily for the reformers, the duty of watching for the first appearance of reputed heresy, which belonged properly to the bishops, was but poorly discharged by many of the deputies to whom they entrusted it. Nor could a delegated authority always accomplish what might have been done by a princ.i.p.al.[99]
[Sidenote: Revenues of the clergy.]
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