Volume I Part 15 (2/2)
[Sidenote: The punishment of heretics.]
More practical were the prescriptions of the council's decrees respecting the punishment of offenders against the unity of the faith.
Heretics who, after conviction, refused to be ”united to the church,”
were to be consigned to prison for life, priests to be degraded, the relapsed to be given over to the secular arm without a hearing.
Heretical books, including translations of the Bible, were to be surrendered to the bishop. Indeed, it was stipulated that every book treating of the faith, and printed within the past twenty years, should be submitted to him for examination. Nor was the council satisfied to leave the discovery of heresy to accident. It was particularly enjoined upon every bishop that he, or some competent person appointed by him, should visit any portion of his diocese in which the taint of unsound doctrine was reported to exist, and compel three or more persons of good standing, or even the entire body of the inhabitants of a neighborhood, to denounce under oath those who entertained heretical views, the frequenters of secret conventicles, and even those who merely held aloof from the conversation of the faithful. Lest this stimulus to informers should prove insufficient to extract the desired knowledge, the threat was added that persons refusing to testify would be treated as suspected, and themselves proceeded against.[283]
[Sidenote: The councils of Bourges and Lyons.]
Not less severe toward the ”Lutheran” doctrines did the other two provincial councils show themselves. At the Council of Bourges, the Cardinal of Tournon presided as archbishop--a prelate who was to attain unenviable notoriety as the prime instigator of the ma.s.sacre of Merindol and Cabrieres, of which an account will be given in a subsequent chapter. Besides the usual regulations for the censure of heretical books and the denunciation of ”Lutherans,” the decrees contain the significant direction that the professors in the University of Bourges shall employ in their instructions no authors calculated to divert the students from the ceremonies of the church--a caution deriving its importance from the circ.u.mstance that the university, under the patronage of Margaret of Angouleme, now d.u.c.h.ess of Berry as well as Queen of Navarre, had become a centre of reformatory activity.
The letter in which the king had called upon the Archbishop of Lyons to convene the clergy of his province, declared that Francis had ever held the accursed sect of the ”Lutherans” in hatred, horror, and abomination, and that its extirpation was an object very near his heart, for the accomplishment of which he would employ all possible means;[284] and the Council of Lyons responded by cordial approval and by the enactment of fresh regulations to suppress conventicles, to prevent the farther dissemination of Luther's writings, and, indeed, to forbid all discussion of matters of faith by the laity. At the same time the council unconsciously revealed the necessity imposed on the private Christian to investigate for himself the nature and grounds of his belief, by strongly reprobating the disastrous custom of admitting into sacred orders a host of illiterate, uncultivated persons of low antecedents--beardless youths--and by confessing that this wretched practice had justly excited the contempt of the world.[285]
[Sidenote: Financial help bought by persecution.]
Everywhere the clergy conceded the subsidy required by the exigencies of the kingdom. But they left Francis in no doubt respecting the price of their complaisance. This was nothing less than the extermination of the new sect that had made its appearance in France. And the king comprehended and fell in with the terms upon which the church agreed to loosen its purse-strings. No doubtful policy must now prevail! No more Berquins can be permitted to make their boast that they have been able, protected by the king's panoply, to beard the lion in his den!
[Sidenote: Insult to an image.]
An incident occurring in Paris, before the adjournment of the Council of Sens, gave Francis a specious excuse for inaugurating the more cruel system of persecution now demanded of him, and tended somewhat to conceal from the king himself, as well as from others, the mercenary motive of the change. Just after the solemnities of Whitsunday, an unheard of act of impiety startled the inhabitants of the capital, and fully persuaded them that no object of their devotions was safe from iconoclastic violence. One of those numerous statues of the Virgin Mary, with the infant Jesus in her arms, that graced the streets of Paris, was found to have been shockingly mutilated. The body had been pierced, and the head-dress trampled under foot. The heads of the mother and child had been broken off and ignominiously thrown in the rubbish.[286] A more flagrant act of contempt for the religious sentiment of the country had perhaps never been committed. The indignation it awakened must not be judged by the standard of a calmer age.[287] In the desire to ascertain the perpetrators of the outrage, the king offered a reward of a thousand crowns. But no ingenuity could ferret them out. A vague rumor, indeed, prevailed, that a similar excess had been witnessed in a village four or five leagues distant, and that the culprits when detected had confessed that they had been prompted to its commission by the promise of a paltry recompense of one hundred _sous_ for every image destroyed. But, since no one seems ever to have been punished, it is probable that this report was a fabrication; and the question whether the mutilation of the Virgin of the _Rue des Rosiers_ was the deliberate act of a religious enthusiast, or a freak of drunken revellers, or, as some imagined, a cunning device of good Catholics to inflame the popular pa.s.sions against the ”Lutherans,” must, for the present, at least, remain a subject of profound doubt.
[Sidenote: Expiatory processions.]
But, whoever may have been the author, pains were taken to expiate the sacrilege. Successive processions visited the spot. In one of these, five hundred students of the university, chosen from different colleges and belonging to the first families, bore lighted tapers, which they placed on the temporary altar erected in front of the image. The clergy, both secular and regular, came repeatedly with all that was most precious in attire and relics. To add still more to the pomp of the propitiatory pilgrimages, Francis himself took part in a magnificent display, made on the _Fete-Dieu_, or Corpus Christi (the eleventh of June). He was preceded by heralds and by the Dukes of Cleves and Ferrara and other n.o.blemen of high rank, while behind him walked the King of Navarre, the Cardinal of Lorraine, the Amba.s.sadors of England, Venice, Florence, and other foreign states, the officers of parliament, and a crowd of gentlemen of the king's house, archers and persons of all conditions bringing up the rear. On reaching the spot where the mutilated statue still occupied its niche, Francis, after appropriate religious exercises, ascended the richly carpeted steps, and reverently subst.i.tuted an effigy in solid silver, of similar size, in place of the image which had been the object of insult.[288]
[Sidenote: Other icoconoclastic excesses.]
From this time forward, iconoclastic demonstrations became more common.
Paintings, also, when exposed to the public view, shared the perils to which unprotected statues were subjected. The Virgin, and such reputable saints as St. Roch and St. Fiacre, depicted on the walls of the Rue St.
Martin, were wantonly disfigured, some two years later; so that at last, the Parliament of Paris, in despair of preventing the repet.i.tion of the act, or of discovering its authors, adopted the prudent course of forbidding that any sacred representation should be placed on the exterior walls of a house _within ten feet of the ground_![289]
[Sidenote: Berquin's third arrest.]
[Sidenote: He disregards the cautions of Erasmus.]
The repeated a.s.surances whereby Francis had conciliated the clergy, and secured their contributions to the exchequer, embarra.s.sed him in the exercise of leniency toward Louis de Berquin, now for the third time arraigned for heresy. Moreover, the audacity and violence of the iconoclasts, characteristics a.s.sumed by him to be indicative of a disposition to overturn all government, probably took away any inclination he would otherwise have had to interfere in the intrepid n.o.bleman's behalf. De Berquin had no sooner been released from his former imprisonment than he set himself to prepare for new conflicts with his bigoted antagonists. He even resolved to a.s.sume the offensive.
In vain did Erasmus entreat him to be prudent, suggest the propriety of his temporarily going abroad, and propose that he should apply for some diplomatic commission as a plausible excuse for absenting himself. Beda, he told him, was a monster with many heads, each breathing out poison, while in the ”Faculty” he had to do with an _immortal_ antagonist. The monks would secure his ruin were his cause more righteous than that of Jesus Christ. Finally, the tremulous scholar begged him, if no consideration of personal safety moved him, at least not to involve so ardent a lover of peace as Erasmus in a conflict for which he had no taste. But his reasoning had no weight with a man of high resolve and inflexible principle, who could see no honorable course but openly meeting and overthrowing error. ”Do you ask,” wrote Erasmus to a correspondent interested in learning De Berquin's fate, ”what I accomplished? By every means I employed to deter him I only added to his courage.”[290] If we may believe Erasmus's strong expressions--for his own writings have very nearly disappeared--De Berquin a.s.sailed the monks with a freedom almost equal to that employed by the Old Comedy in holding up to merited derision the foibles of Athenian generals and statesmen. He even extracted twelve blasphemous propositions from Beda's utterances, and obtained a letter from the king enjoining the Sorbonne either to pa.s.s sentence of condemnation on their syndic's a.s.sertions, or to prove their truth from the Holy Scriptures.[291] The Dutch philosopher, aghast at his friend's incredible temerity, besought him instantly to seek safety in flight; and, when this last appeal proved as ineffectual as all his frequent efforts in the past, he confessed that he almost regretted that a friends.h.i.+p had ever arisen which had occasioned him so much trouble and disquiet.[292]
A third time Louis de Berquin was arrested, on application of the officer known as the _Promoteur de la foi_. His trial was committed to twelve judges selected by parliament, among whom figured not only the first president and the vicar-general of the Bishop of Paris, but, strange to say, even so well-disposed and liberal a jurist as Guillaume Bude, the foremost French scholar of the age for broad and accurate learning.[293] The case advanced too slowly to meet De Berquin's impatience. In the a.s.surance of ultimate success, he is even accused by a contemporary chronicler of having offered the court two hundred crowns to expedite the trial.[294] It soon became evident, however, from, the withdrawal of the liberties at first accorded, that Be Berquin would scarcely escape unless the king again interposed--a contingency less likely to occur in view of the incessant appeals with which Francis was plied, addressed at once to his interest, his conscience, and his pride.
But the more desperate the cause of Berquin, and the more uncertain the king's disposition, the more urgent the intercessions of Margaret of Angouleme, whose character is nowhere seen to better advantage than in her repeated letters to her brother about this time.[295]
[Sidenote: Berquin sentenced to public penance, branding, and imprisonment.]
The sentence was rendered on the sixteenth of April, 1529. De Berquin, being found guilty of heresy, was condemned to do public penance in front of Notre Dame, with lighted taper in hand, and crying for mercy to G.o.d and the blessed Virgin. Next, on the Place de Greve, he was to be ignominiously exhibited upon a scaffold, while his books were burned before his eyes. Taken thence in a cart to the pillory, and again exposed to popular derision on a revolving stage, he was to have his tongue pierced and his forehead branded with the ineffaceable _fleur-de-lis_. His public disgrace over, De Berquin was to be imprisoned for life in the episcopal jail.[296]
[Sidenote: He appeals, is sentenced to death, and is executed.]
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