Volume I Part 46 (2/2)
[Footnote 836: La Planche, 257, 263.]
[Footnote 837: Throkmorton, _ubi supra_.]
[Footnote 838: La Planche, 263, 265; La Place, 34, 35; Hist. du tumulte d'Amboise, _apud_ Mem. de Conde, i. 327; D'Aubigne, _ubi supra_.]
[Footnote 839: Ibid., 254-258; La Place, 35; Hist. du tumulte, _ubi supra_; Throkmorton, _ubi supra_, i. 380.]
[Footnote 840: La Planche, 258.]
[Footnote 841: Memoires de Theodore Agrippa d'Aubigne (Ed. Pantheon lit.), 472.]
[Footnote 842: La Planche, 267.]
[Footnote 843: I have followed in the text the account of La Planche. La Place, 36, represents Conde as voluntarily making his appearance and declaration before the king and the princes and knights that were present, on hearing that the amba.s.sadors of several foreign princes had named him in their despatches as the author of the enterprise.]
[Footnote 844: La Planche, 268, 269; La Place, 36; Hist. eccles., i.
171; De Thou, ii. 773, 774; Mem. de Castelnau, liv. i., c. 11. The Cardinal of Lorraine, however, was deeply mortified and vexed. ”El cardenal estava presente teniendo los ojos en tierra, sin hablar palabra, mostrando solamente descontentemiento de lo que pa.s.sava.” MSS.
Simancas, _apud_ Mignet, Journal des Savants, 1857, 479.]
[Footnote 845: The accusation referred to occurs, for instance, in a private diary, part of which has recently come to light, begun by one Friar Symeon Vinot, Sept. 10, 1563. He notes: ”L'an 1561 ”--an error for 1560--”commenca a, s'elever en France la secte des Hugguenotz, ou (a mieulx dire) Eygnossen, pour ce qu'il [ils] vouloient fayre les villes franches, et s'allier ensemble, comme les villes des Schwysses, qu'on dict en allemand Egnossen, cest a dire Aliez,” etc. Bulletin de l'hist.
du prot. fr., xxv. (1876) 380.]
[Footnote 846: Histoire du parlement de Bordeaux, depuis sa creation jusqu'a sa suppression (1541-1790), uvre posthume de C. B. F.
Boscheron des Portes, president honoraire de la cour d'appel de Bordeaux, etc. (Bordeaux, 1877), i. 130.]
CHAPTER X.
THE a.s.sEMBLY OF NOTABLES AT FONTAINEBLEAU, AND THE CLOSE OF THE REIGN OF FRANCIS THE SECOND.
[Sidenote: Rise of the name ”Huguenots.”]
[Sidenote: Various explanations given.]
The tempest which had threatened to overwhelm the Guises at Amboise had been successfully withstood; but quiet had not returned to the minds of those whose vices were its princ.i.p.al cause. The air was still thick with noxious vapors, and none could tell how soon or in what quarter the elements of a new and more terrible convulsion would gather.[847] The recent commotion had disclosed the existence of a body of malcontents, in part religious, in part also political, scattered over the whole kingdom and of unascertained numbers. To its adherents the name of _Huguenots_ was now for the first time given.[848] What the origin of this celebrated appellation was, it is now perhaps impossible to discover. Although a number of plausible derivations have been given, it is not unlikely that all are equally far removed from the truth, and that the word arose from some trivial circ.u.mstance that has completely pa.s.sed into oblivion. It has been traced back to the name of the _Eidgenossen_ or _confederates_, under which the party of freedom figured in Geneva when the authority of the bishop and duke was overthrown;[849] or to the _Roy Huguet_, or _Huguon_, a hobgoblin supposed to haunt the vicinity of Tours, to whom the superst.i.tious attributed the nocturnal a.s.semblies of the Protestants;[850] or to the gate _du roy Huguon_ of the same city, near which those gatherings were wont to be made.[851] Some of their enemies maintained the former existence of a diminutive coin known as a _huguenot_, and a.s.serted that the appellation, as applied to the reformed, arose from their ”not being worth a _huguenot_” or farthing.[852] And some of their friends, with equal confidence and no less improbability, declared that it was invented because the adherents of the house of Guise secretly put forward claims upon the crown of France in behalf of that house as descended from _Charlemagne_, whereas the Protestants loyally upheld the rights of the Valois sprung from _Hugh_ Capet.[853] In the diversity of contradictory statements, we may perhaps be excused if we suspend our judgment of their respective merits, and prefer to look upon this partisan name as one with whose original import not a score of persons in France besides its fortuitous inventor may have been acquainted, and which may have had nothing to recommend it to those who so readily adopted it, save novelty and the recognized need of some more convenient name than ”Lutherans,” ”Christaudins,” or the awkward circ.u.mlocution, ”those of the religion.” Be this as it may, not a week had pa.s.sed after the conspiracy of Amboise before the word was in everybody's mouth. Few knew or cared whence it arose.[854]
[Sidenote: Its sudden rise.]
A powerful party, whatever name it might bear, had sprung up, as it were, in a night. There was sober truth conveyed in the jesting letter of some fugitives to the Cardinal of Lorraine. Twenty or thirty Huguenots succeeded in breaking the bars of their prison at Blois, and, letting themselves down by cords, escaped. Some others at Tours, a few days later, were equally fortunate. Scarcely had the latter regained their liberty when they wrote a letter to the prelate who was supposed to take so deep an interest in their concerns, informing him that, having heard of the escape of his prisoners at Blois, they had been so grieved, that, for the love they bore him, they had immediately started out in search. And they begged him not to distress himself on account of their absence; for they a.s.sured him that _they would all soon return to see him, and would bring with them not only these, but all the rest of those that had conspired to take his life_.[855]
[Sidenote: How to be accounted for.]
No feature of the rise of the Reformation in France is more remarkable than the sudden impulse which it received during the last year or two of Henry the Second's life, and especially within the brief limits of the reign of his eldest son. The seed had been sown a.s.siduously for nearly forty years; but the fruit of so much labor had been comparatively slight and unsatisfactory. Much of the return proved to be of a literary and philosophical, rather than of a religious character, and tended to intellectual development instead of the purification of religions belief and practice. Much of the seed was choked by relentless persecution.
Bishops and preachers, the gay poet, and the time-serving courtier, fell away with alarming facility, when the blight of the royal displeasure fell upon those who professed a desire to abolish the superst.i.tious observances of the established church.
[Sidenote: A sudden harvest.]
But now, within a few brief months, the harvest seemed, as by a miracle, to be approaching simultaneously over the whole surface of the extended field. The grains of truth long since lodged in an arid soil, and apparently dest.i.tute of all vitality, had suddenly developed all the energy of life. France to the reformers, whose longing eyes were at length permitted to see this day, was ”white unto the harvest,” and only the reapers were needed to put forth the sickle and gather the wheat into the garner. There was not a corner of the kingdom where the number of incipient Protestant churches was not considerable. Provence alone contained sixty, whose delegates this year met in a synod at the blood-stained village of Merindol. In large tracts of country the Huguenots had become so numerous that they were no longer able or disposed to conceal their religious sentiments, nor content to celebrate their rites in private or nocturnal a.s.semblies. This was particularly the case in Normandy, in Languedoc, and on the banks of the Rhone.
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