Volume I Part 28 (1/2)
D'Oppede and the four commissioners were summoned to Paris. Count De Grignan himself barely escaped being put on trial--as responsible for the misdeeds of his lieutenant--by securing the advocacy of the Duke of Guise, which he purchased with the sacrifice of his domains at Grignan.
For fifty days the trial of the other criminals was warmly prosecuted before the Parliament of Paris; and so ably and lucidly did Auberi present the claims of the oppressed before the crowded a.s.sembly, that a severe verdict was confidently awaited.
[Sidenote: Meagre effect.]
The public expectation, however, was doomed to disappointment. Only one of the accused, the advocate Guerin, being so unfortunate as to possess no great influence at court, was condemned to the gallows. D'Oppede escaped with De Grignan, through the protection of the Duke of Guise, and, like his fellow-defendants, was reinstated in office.[506] For the rendering of a decision so flagrantly unjust the true cause must be sought in the sanguinary character of the Parisian judges themselves, who, while they were reluctant, on the one hand, to derogate from the credit of another parliament of France, on the other, feared lest, in condemning the persecuting rage of others, they might seem to be pa.s.sing sentence upon themselves for the uniform course of cruelty they had pursued in the trial of the reformers.[507]
The oppressed and persecuted of all ages have been ready, not without reason, to recognize in signal disasters befalling their enemies the retributive hand of the Almighty himself lifting for a moment the veil of futurity, to disclose a little of the misery that awaits the evil-doer in another world. But, in the present instance, it is a candid historian of different faith who does not hesitate to ascribe to a special interposition of the Deity the excruciating sufferings and death which, not long after his acquittal, overtook Baron d'Oppede, the chief actor in the mournful tragedy we have been recounting.[508]
[Sidenote: New persecution at Meaux.]
The ashes of Merindol and Cabrieres were scarcely cold, before in a distant part of France the flame of persecution broke out with fresh energy.[509] The city of Meaux, where, under the evangelical preachers introduced by Bishop Briconnet, the Reformation had made such auspicious progress, had never been thoroughly reduced to submission to papal authority. ”The Lutherans of Meaux” had pa.s.sed into a proverb.
Persecuted, they retained their devotion to their new faith; compelled to observe strict secrecy, they multiplied to such a degree that their numbers could no longer be concealed. Twenty years after their destruction had been resolved upon, the necessity of a regular church organization made itself felt by the growing congregations. Some of the members had visited the church of Strasbourg, to which John Calvin had, a few years before, given an orderly system of government and wors.h.i.+p--the model followed by many Protestant churches of subsequent formation. On their return a similar polity was established in Meaux. A simple wool-carder, Pierre Leclerc, brother of one of the first martyrs of Protestant France, was called from the humble pursuits of the artisan to the responsible post of pastor. He was no scholar in the usual acceptation of the term; he knew only his mother-tongue. But his judgment was sound, his piety fervent, his familiarity with the Holy Scriptures singularly great. So fruitful were his labors, that the handful of hearers grew into a.s.semblies often of several hundreds, drawn to Meaux from villages five or six leagues distant.
[Sidenote: A woman's pointed remark.]
[Sidenote: A favorite psalm.]
Betrayed by their size, the conventicles came to the knowledge of the magistrates, and on the eighth of September, 1546, a descent was made upon the wors.h.i.+pping Christians. Sixty-two persons composed the gathering. The lieutenant and provost of the city, with their meagre suite, could easily have been set at defiance. But the announcement of arrest in the king's name prevented any attempt either at resistance on their part, or at rescue on that of their friends. Respecting the authority of law, the Protestants allowed themselves to be bound and led away by an insignificant detachment of officers. Only the pointed remark of one young woman to the lieutenant, as she was bound, has come down to us: ”Sir, had you found me in a brothel, as you now find me in so holy and honorable a company, you would not have used me thus.” As the prisoners pa.s.sed through the streets of Meaux, their friends neither interfered with the ministers of justice, nor exhibited solicitude for their own safety; but accompanying them, as in a triumphal procession, loudly gave expression to their trust in G.o.d, by raising one of their favorite psalms, in Clement Marot's translation:[510]
Les gens entrez sont en ton heritage: Ils ont pollu, Seigneur, par leur outrage, Ton temple sainct, Jerusalem destruite, Si qu'en monceaux de pierres, l'on reduite.
It was neither the first time, nor was it destined to be by any means the last, that those rugged, but nervous lines thrilled the souls of the persecuted Huguenots of France as with the sound of a trumpet, and braced them to the patient endurance of suffering or to the performance of deeds of valor.
[Sidenote: The ”Fourteen of Meaux.”]
Dragged with excessive and unnecessary violence to Paris, the prisoners were put on trial, and, within a single month, sentence was pa.s.sed on them. The crime of having celebrated the Lord's Supper was almost inexpiable. Fourteen men, with Leclerc their minister, and etienne Mangin, in whose house their wors.h.i.+p had been held, were condemned to torture and the stake; others to whipping and banishment; the remainder, both men and women, to public penance and attendance upon the execution of their more prominent brethren. Upon one young man, whose tender years alone saved him from the flames, a sentence of a somewhat whimsical character was p.r.o.nounced. He was to be suspended under the arms during the auto-da-fe of his brethren, and, with a halter around his neck, was from his elevated position to witness their agony, as an instructive warning of the dangerous consequence of persistence in heretical errors.
Mangin's house was to be razed, and on the site a chapel of the Virgin erected, wherein a solemn weekly ma.s.s was to be celebrated in honor of the sacramental wafer, the expense being defrayed by the confiscated property of the Protestants.
Neither in the monasteries to which they were temporarily allotted, nor on their way back to Meaux, did the courage of the ”Fourteen” desert them. It was even enhanced by the boldness of a weaver, who, meeting them in the forest of Livry, cried out: ”My brethren, be of good cheer, and fail not through weariness to give with constancy the testimony you owe the Gospel. Remember Him who is on high in heaven!”[511]
[Sidenote: Their execution.]
On the seventh of October, Mangin and Leclerc on hurdles, the others on carts, were taken to the market-square, where fourteen stakes had been set up in a circle. Here, facing one another, amid the agonies of death, and in spite of the din made by priests and populace frantically intoning the hymns ”_O salutaris hostia_” and ”_Salve Regina_” they continued till their last breath to animate each other and to praise the Almighty Giver of every blessing. But if the humane heart recoils with horror from the very thought of the b.l.o.o.d.y holocaust, the scene of the morrow inspires even greater disgust; when Picard, a doctor of the Sorbonne, standing beneath a canopy glittering with gold, near the yet smoking embers, a.s.sured the people that it was essential to salvation to believe that the ”Fourteen” were condemned to the lowest abyss of h.e.l.l, and that even the word of an angel from heaven ought not to be credited, if he maintained the contrary. ”For,” said he, ”G.o.d would not be G.o.d did He not consign them to everlasting d.a.m.nation.” Upon which charitable and pious a.s.sertions of the learned theologian the Protestant chronicler had but a simple observation to make: ”However, he could not persuade those who knew them to be excellent men, and upright in their lives, that this was so. Consequently the seed of the truth was not destroyed in the city of Meaux.”[512]
[Sidenote: Wider diffusion of the reformed doctrines.]
Far from witnessing the extinction of the Reformation in his dominions, the last year of the life of Francis the First was signalized by its wider diffusion. At Senlis, at Orleans, and at Fere, near Soissons, fugitives from Meaux planted the germs of new religious communities.
Fresh fires were kindled to destroy them; and in one place a preacher was burned in a novel fas.h.i.+on, with a pack of books upon his back.[513]
Lyons and Langres, in the east, received reformed teachers about the same time; although from the latter place the pastor and four members of his flock were carried to the capital and perished at the stake. Even Sens, see of the primate, contributed its portion of witnesses for the Gospel, who sealed their testimony in their blood.[514]
[Sidenote: The printer, Jean Chapot, before parliament.]
In Paris itself parliament tried a native of Dauphiny, Jean Chapot, who, having brought several packages of books from Geneva, had been denounced by a brother printer. His defence was so apt and learned that the judges were nearly shaken by his animated appeals. It fared ill with three doctors of the Sorbonne, Dean Nicholas Clerici, and his a.s.sistants, Picard and Maillard, who were called in to refute him; for they could not stand their ground, and were forced, avoiding proofs from the Holy Scriptures, to have recourse to the authority of the church. In the end the theologians covered their retreat with indignant remonstrances addressed to parliament for listening to such seductive speakers; and the majority of the judges, mastering their first inclination to acquit Chapot, condemned him to the stake, reserving for him the easier death by strangling, in case he recanted. An unusual favor was allowed him. He was permitted to make a short speech previously to his execution. Faint and utterly unable to stand, in consequence of the tortures by which his body had been racked, he was supported on either side by an attendant, and thus from the funeral cart explained his belief to the by-standers.
But when he reached the topic of the Lord's Supper, he was interrupted by one of the priests. The milder sentence of the halter was inflicted, in order to create the impression that he had been so weak as to repeat the ”_Ave Maria_.” But the practice henceforth uniformly followed by the ”_Chambre ardente_” of parliament, of cutting out the tongues of the condemned before sending them to public execution, confirmed the report that Maillard had exclaimed that ”all would be lost, if such men were suffered to speak to the people.”[515]
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 449: This was true particularly of the wealthy n.o.ble family to whom belonged the fief of Cental, perhaps at a somewhat later date.
Among the Waldensian villages owned by it were those of La Motte d'Aigues, St. Martin, Lourmarin, Peypin, and others in the same vicinity. Bouche, Histoire de Provence, i. 610.]
[Footnote 450: Crespin, Actiones et Monimenta (Geneva, 1560), fols. 88, 90, 100.]