Volume I Part 62 (2/2)
[Sidenote: Beza secures a favorable royal order.]
To restrain the impatience of so numerous a body as the Protestants, while waiting for the a.s.sembly of the notables which was to confer the full measure of liberty they desired, was the task imposed upon Beza. He was to serve as a _hostage_ for the obedience of the reformed churches.[1222] But the sagacious theologian recognized the difficulty of the position he was called to fill. He warned the government accordingly against disappointing the hopes it aroused in the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of his fellow Protestants, and he urged that if they must be temporarily denied the use of the places of wors.h.i.+p which they had occupied wherever they const.i.tuted the bulk of the population, the present rigor must be somewhat abated during the interval before their formal emanc.i.p.ation.
After much importunity a mandate was obtained, addressed to the royal officers, in which they were instructed to interpret the previous edicts with leniency, permitting different degrees of liberty, according to the various circ.u.mstances in which they were placed. In Normandy and Gascony the religious meetings might be open and unrestricted. In Paris they must be held secretly in private houses, and not more than two hundred persons could be gathered together.[1223] Everywhere, however, the Protestants were to be protected, and this was a great step gained. For those very officers, whose task it had not unfrequently been to drag the Huguenots to prison, were now const.i.tuted the guardians of their lives and property.[1224]
[Sidenote: How to restrain Huguenot impetuosity.]
[Sidenote: Foix.]
[Sidenote: Chalons-sur-Marne.]
Yet, how to restrain the impetuosity, how to check the demands of the mult.i.tudes recently converted to the reformed faith, how to induce them to give up the churches where whole generations of their ancestors had wors.h.i.+pped before them, and in which they believed that they had the clearest right of property, and hand them over to a mere handful of ignorant or interested persons who would not listen to reason or Scripture--this was the problem that seemed even beyond the power of Beza's wit to solve. The young vine, in whose branches the full sap of spring was rapidly circulating, must have room for healthy growth. From all parts of France the constant cry was for the Word of G.o.d and for liberty. Although the number of daily attendants on Calvin's lectures was roughly estimated at a thousand,[1225] it was impossible for Geneva to supply the drafts made upon her, when there were three hundred parishes, apparently in a single province, which had thrown off the ma.s.s, but had as yet been unsuccessful in their quest of pastors;[1226]
when the history of hundreds of towns and villages was the counterpart of the history of Foix, where, in two months, an infant church of thirty or forty members had grown to have five or six hundred, and the Protestant population was almost in the majority in the town, although as yet, notwithstanding incessant efforts to obtain a pastor, the only public service consisted of the repet.i.tion by a layman of the prayers contained in the liturgy of Calvin[1227]--when many a minister met with success similar to that which attended Pierre Fornelet, who could point to fifteen villages in the vicinity of Chalons-sur-Marne, begging for Huguenot pastors, and all this the fruit of seven weeks of apostolic labours; and could record the fact that poor men and women flocked to the city from a distance of seven or eight leagues, when they simply heard that the Gospel was preached there[1228]--when it was estimated by competent witnesses that from four to six thousand ministers could be profitably employed within the bounds of the kingdom.[1229]
[Sidenote: Troyes.]
[Sidenote: Paris.]
In some places, by strenuous exertion, the ministers were successful in persuading their flocks to refrain from overt acts tending to provoke outbursts of hostility. At Troyes, in Champagne, a thousand persons convened by day or by night, not summoned by the sound of bells, but quietly notified by an ”_advertisseur_” of the daily changing place of meeting. Yet even there, on Sunday and on public holidays, the Huguenots took pains to hold their ”a.s.semblee” in the open day, before the eyes of their enemies.[1230] At Paris, the Protestants, compelled to go some distance into the country for wors.h.i.+p, on their return (Sunday, the twelfth of October), found the gates closed against them, and were attacked by a mob composed of the dregs of the populace. Many of their number were killed or wounded. The a.s.sailants retreated when the Huguenot gentry, with swords drawn, rallied for the defence of their unarmed companions, whom they could not, however, guarantee from the stones and other missiles hurled at them. For a few days the public services were intermitted at the earnest request of the Prince of La Roche-sur-Yon, in the interest of good order and to prevent disturbance.[1231] But a month later the Huguenots a.s.sembled openly, and in still greater numbers. On reaching the suburbs, the women were placed in the centre, with the men who had come on foot around them, while those who were mounted on horseback s.h.i.+elded the whole from attack. A body of guards was posted by the prince in the immediate neighborhood.[1232]
[Sidenote: Montpellier.]
[Sidenote: Churches visited and stripped.]
In the south of France the people were less easily curbed, and the indiscretion or treachery of their enemies often furnished provocation for acts which the sober judgment of their pastors refused to sanction.
The chapter of the cathedral of Montpellier, with the view of overawing the city, had, in October, introduced a garrison into the commanding Fort St. Pierre. On a Sunday (the nineteenth of October) the Protestants laid siege, and on the succeeding day the chapter entered into a composition with the citizens, by which the canons retained the liberty of celebrating their services, but bound themselves to lay down their arms and dismiss the soldiers they had called in. When, however, a soldier, as he was leaving, drew a pistol and killed one of the Protestants, the fury of the latter could not be repressed. They cried that treacherous designs were on foot, and madly killed many of the canons and their sympathizers. Then, directing their indignation against the churches, where the doctrine that no faith need be kept with heretics had been inculcated, they overturned in a few hours the work of four or five centuries. The next day, of sixty churches and chapels in Montpellier or its neighborhood, not one was open. Not a priest, not a monk, dared to show his face. Yet this same excitable populace, which had been wrought up to frenzy by a soldier's treacherous act, submitted without resistance when, on the twentieth of November, Joyeuse, in the king's name, published the obnoxious edict for the rest.i.tution of all churches within twenty-four hours. The cathedral was given up, and the services according to the rites of the reformed church were held in the s.p.a.cious ”ecole mage,” until, by a new arrangement with the canons, the Protestants were once more put in possession of two of the old ecclesiastical edifices. Yet the edict did not arrest the rapid progress of the new faith. The ma.s.s was not reinstated, and the small Roman Catholic minority remained at home on the feast-days. Even the lowest cla.s.s of the population--elsewhere, from ignorance and prejudice, the stronghold of the papal religion--here seemed to share in the universal tendency, and, unfortunately, as a local chronicler, to whom we are indebted for these particulars, informs us, took no better way of testifying its devotion than by ”mutilating sepulchral monuments, unearthing the dead, and committing a thousand acts of folly.” Carrying their hatred of everything that reminded them of the period of judicial abuse to the length of detesting even the insignia of office, the people compelled the ministers of the law to doff their traditional square cap and a.s.sume a hat such as was worn by the rest of the population.[1233]
Thus the strength of the reformatory current could be gauged by the mud and rubbish which it tore from the banks on either side--an addition to its bulk that contributed nothing to its power, while marring its purity and sullying its fair antecedents. A cla.s.s of persons attached themselves to the Huguenot community that could not be brought into subjection to the discipline inst.i.tuted with such difficulty at Geneva.
It would seem invidious to lay their excesses to the account of the Huguenot leaders, whether religious or political, since those excesses met with the severe reprobation of the latter.[1234]
[Sidenote: The rein, and not the spur, needed.]
[Sidenote: Marriages and baptisms at court, ”after the fas.h.i.+on of Geneva.”]
”Would that our friends might restrain themselves at least for two months!” was the e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n of Beza, in view of the natural impatience exhibited on all sides. ”I fear our own party more than I do our adversaries.”[1235] The rein was needed, not the spur. When, instead of two hundred persons, the Parisian a.s.semblies of Huguenots often consisted of six thousand, a fanatical populace, accustomed for a whole generation to see the very suspicion of Lutheranism expiated in the flames of the Place de Greve or of the Halles, could ill brook the sight of such open gatherings for the reformed wors.h.i.+p. How much greater the popular indignation when it became known that Chancellor L'Hospital had authorized _two_ places for public wors.h.i.+p according to the rites of the reformed churches, in the neighborhood of the Gate of St. Antoine and the Gate of St. Marceau! Added to these palpable proofs of the court's complicity with the heretics, was the no less scandalous fact that marriages and baptisms, celebrated ”after the fas.h.i.+on of Geneva,” were of frequent occurrence; that the nuptials of young De Rohan, cousin of Antoine of Navarre, and Mademoiselle de Brabancon, niece of the d.u.c.h.ess d'etampes, had been performed on St. Michael's Day, and in the presence of Conde and the Queen of Navarre, by Theodore Beza himself; and that in a masquerade in the royal palace Charles the Ninth had worn a cap which bore an unmistakable resemblance to a bishop's mitre![1236]
[Sidenote: Tanquerel's seditious declaration.]
While legate and nuncio labored to put an end to these hateful manifestations by personal solicitation addressed to Catharine, to Cardinal Chatillon, and others,[1237] the priests and monks were no less active in stirring up the pa.s.sions of the people to open resistance. In the scholastic halls of the College de Harecourt, one Tanquerel, a doctor of the Sorbonne, enunciated the dangerous maxim that ”the Pope can depose heretical kings and emperors.” At this menacing declaration, which, under a king in his minority and a regency divided in its sentiments on religious questions, was much more than a theoretical abstraction, the government took alarm. The Parliament of Paris investigated the offence, and the doctrine of Tanquerel was severely condemned. Tanquerel himself having fled from the city to avoid the consequences of his rashness, the Dean of the Sorbonne was required, by order of the supreme court, to utter in his name a solemn recantation in the presence of the a.s.sembled theologians and of a committee of parliament; and two theologians were deputed to St. Germain to beg the king's forgiveness.[1238]
[Sidenote: Jean de Hans.]
The preachers were not behind the doctors in the use of seditious language. They attacked the government and its entire policy; and one of their number--Jean de Hans--while delivering Advent discourses in the church of St. Barthelemi, in the very neighborhood of the palace, so distinguished himself for the extravagance of his denunciations, that he was arrested and carried off to the court at St. Germain. Yet such was his well-known popularity with the Parisians, that it was found necessary to effect his capture by a troop of forty armed men; and the powerful intercession made in his behalf induced the government to forget his disrespectful language respecting the princes, and to release him after barely a week's imprisonment.[1239]
[Sidenote: Philip threatens to interfere in French affairs.]
[Sidenote: ”A true defender of the faith.”]
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