The Huguenots in France Part 4

Another meeting was held about a fortnight later at Bezaudun, which was attended by many persons from Bourdeaux, a village about half a league distant. While the meeting was at prayer, intelligence was brought that the dragoons had entered Bourdeaux, and that it was a scene of general pillage. The Bourdeaux villagers at once set out for the protection of their families. The troopers met them, and suddenly fell upon them. A few of the villagers were armed, but the princ.i.p.al part defended themselves with stones. Of course they were overpowered; many were killed by the sword, and those taken prisoners were immediately hanged.

A few, who took to flight, sheltered themselves in a barn, where the soldiers found them, set fire to the place, and murdered them as they endeavoured to escape from the flames. One young man was taken prisoner, David Chamier,[23] son of an advocate, and related to some of the most eminent Protestants in France. He was taken to the neighbouring town of Montelimar, and, after a summary trial, he was condemned to be broken to death upon the wheel. The sentence was executed before his father's door; but the young man bore his frightful tortures with astonis.h.i.+ng courage.

[Footnote 23: The grandfather of this Chamier drew up for Henry IV. the celebrated Edict of Nantes. The greater number of the Chamiers left France. Several were ministers in London and Maryland, U.S. Captain Chamier is descended from the family.]

The contumacious att.i.tude of the Protestants after so many reports had reached Louis XIV. of their entire "conversion," induced him to take more active measures for their suppression. He appointed Marshal Saint-Ruth commander of the district--a man who was a stranger to mercy, who breathed only carnage, and who, because of his ferocity, was known as "The Scourge of the Heretics."

Daniel de Cosmac, Bishop of Valence, had now the help of Saint-Ruth and his twenty thousand troops. The instructions Saint-Ruth received from Louvois were these: "Amnesty has no longer any place for the Viverais, who continue in rebellion after having been informed of the King's gracious designs. In one word, you are to cause such a desolation in that country that its example may restrain all other Huguenots, and may teach them how dangerous it is to rebel against the King."

This was a work quite congenial to Saint-Ruth[24]--rus.h.i.+ng about the country, scourging, slaughtering, laying waste, and suppressing the a.s.semblies--his soldiers rus.h.i.+ng upon their victims with cries of "Death or the Ma.s.s!"

[Footnote 24: Saint-Ruth was afterwards, in 1691, sent to Ireland to take the command of the army fighting for James II. against William III. There, Saint-Ruth had soldiers, many of them Huguenots banished from France, to contend with; and he was accordingly somewhat less successful than in Viverais, where his opponents were mostly peasants and workmen, armed (where armed at all) with stones picked from the roads.

Saint-Ruth and his garrison were driven from Athlone, where a Huguenot soldier was the first to mount the breach. The army of William III., though eight thousand fewer in number, followed Saint-Ruth and his Irish army to the field of Aughrim. His host was there drawn up in an almost impregnable position--along the heights of Kilcommeden, with the Castle of Aughrim on his left wing, a deep bog on his right, and another bog of about two miles extending along the front, and apparently completely protecting the Irish encampment.

Nevertheless, the English and Huguenot army under Ginckle, bravely attacked it, forced the pa.s.s to the camp, and routed the army of Saint-Ruth, who himself was killed by a cannon-ball. The princ.i.p.al share of this victory was attributed to the gallant conduct of the three regiments of Huguenot horse, under the command of the Marquess de Ruvigny (himself a banished Huguenot n.o.bleman) who, in consequence of his services, was raised to the Irish peerage, under the t.i.tle of Earl of Galway.]

Tracking the Protestants in this way was like "a hunt in a great enclosure." When the soldiers found a meeting of the people going on, they shot them down at once, though unarmed. If they were unable to fly, they met death upon their knees. Antoine Court recounts meetings in which as many as between three and four hundred persons, old men, women, and children, were shot dead on the spot.

De Cosmac, the bishop, was very active in the midst of these ma.s.sacres. When he went out to convert the people, he first began by sending out Saint-Ruth with the dragoons. Afterwards he himself followed to give instructions for their "conversion," partly through favours, partly by money. "My efforts," he himself admitted, "were not always without success; yet I must avow that the fear of the dragoons, and of their being quartered in the houses of the heretics, contributed much more to their conversion than anything that I did."

The same course was followed throughout the Cevennes. It would be a simple record of cruelty to describe in detail the military proceedings there: the dispersion of meetings; the hanging of persons found attending them; the breaking upon the wheel of the pastors captured, amidst horrible tortures; the destruction of dwellings and of the household goods which they contained. But let us take the single instance of Homel, formerly pastor of the church at Soyon.

Homel was taken prisoner, and found guilty of preaching to his flock after his temple had been destroyed. For this offence he was sentenced to be broken to death upon the wheel. To receive this punishment he was conducted to Tournon, in Viverais, where the Jesuits had a college. He first received forty blows of the iron bar, after which he was left to languish with his bones broken, for forty hours, until he died. During his torments, he said: "I count myself happy that I can die in my Master's service. What! did my glorious Redeemer descend from heaven and suffer an ignominious death for my salvation, and shall I, to prolong a miserable life, deny my blessed Saviour and abandon his people?" While his bones were being broken on the wheel, he said to his wife: "Farewell, once more, my beloved spouse! Though you witness my bones broken to s.h.i.+vers, yet is my soul filled with inexpressible joy." After life was finally extinct, his heart was taken to Chalencon to be publicly exhibited, and his body was exposed in like manner at Beauchatel.

De Noailles, the governor, when referring in one of his dispatches to the heroism displayed by the tortured prisoners, said: "These wretches go to the wheel with the firm a.s.surance of dying martyrs, and ask no other favour than that of dying quickly. They request pardon of the soldiers, but there is not one of them that will ask pardon of the King."

To return to Claude Brousson. After his eloquent defence of the Huguenots of Montauban--the result of which, of course, was that the church was ordered to be demolished--and the inst.i.tution of processes for the demolition of fourteen more Protestant temples, Brousson at last became aware that the fury of the Catholics and the King was not to be satisfied until they had utterly crushed the religion which he served.

Brousson was repeatedly offered the office of counsellor of Parliament, equivalent to the office of judge, if he would prove an apostate; but the conscience of Brousson was not one that could be bought. He also found that his office of defender of the doomed Huguenots could not be maintained without personal danger, whilst (as events proved) his defence was of no avail to them; and he resolved, with much regret, to give up his profession for a time, and retire for safety and rest to his native town of Nismes.

He resided there, however, only about four months. Saint-Ruth and De Noailles were now overawing Upper Languedoc with their troops. The Protestants of Nismes had taken no part in "The Project;" their remaining temple was still open. But they got up a respectful pet.i.tion to the King, imploring his consideration of their case. Roman Catholics and Protestants, they said, had so many interests in common, that the ruin of the one must have the effect of ruining the other,--the flouris.h.i.+ng manufactures of the province, which were mostly followed by the Protestants, being now rapidly proceeding to ruin. They, therefore, implored his Majesty to grant them permission to prosecute their employments unmolested on account of their religious profession; and lastly, they conjured the King, by his piety, by his paternal clemency, and by every law of equity, to grant them freedom of religious wors.h.i.+p.

It was of no use. The hearts of the King, his clergy, and his ministers, were all hardened against them. A copy of the above pet.i.tion was presented by two ministers of Nismes and several influential gentlemen of Lower Languedoc to the Duke de Noailles, the governor of the province. He treated the deputation with contempt, and their pet.i.tion with scorn. Writing to Louvois, the King's prime minister, De Noailles said: "Astonished at the effrontery of these wretched persons, I did not hesitate to send them all prisoners to the Citadel of St. Esprit (in the Cevennes), telling them that if there had been _pet.i.tes maisons_[25] enough in Languedoc I should not have sent them there."

[Footnote 25: The prisons of Languedoc were already crowded with Protestants, and hundreds had been sent to the galleys at Ma.r.s.eilles.]

Nismes was now placed under the same ban as Vivarais, and denounced as "insurrectionary." To quell the pretended revolt, as well as to capture certain persons who were supposed to have been accessory to the framing of the pet.i.tion, a detachment of four hundred dragoons was ordered into the place. One of those to be apprehended was Claude Brousson. Hundreds of persons knew of his abode in the city, but notwithstanding the public proclamation (which he himself heard from the window of the house where he was staying), and the reward offered for his apprehension, no one attempted to betray him.

After remaining in the city for three days, he adopted a disguised dress, pa.s.sed out of the Crown Gate, and in the course of a few days found a safe retreat in Switzerland.

Peyrol and Icard, two of the Protestant ministers whom the dragoons were ordered to apprehend, also escaped into Switzerland, Peyrol settling at Lausanne, and Icard becoming the minister of a Huguenot church in Holland. But although the ministers had escaped, all the property they had left behind them was confiscated to the Crown.

Hideous effigies of them were prepared and hung on gibbets in the market-place of Nismes by the public executioner, the magistrates and dragoons attending the sham proceeding with the usual ceremony.

At Lausanne, where Claude Brousson settled for a time, he first attempted to occupy himself as a lawyer; but this he shortly gave up to devote himself to the help of the persecuted Huguenots. Like Jurieu and others in Holland, who flooded Europe with accounts of the hideous cruelties of Louis XIV. and his myrmidons the clergy and dragoons, he composed and published a work, addressed to the Roman Catholic party as well as to the Protestants of all countries, ent.i.tled, "The State of the Reformed Church of France." He afterwards composed a series of letters specially addressed to the Roman Catholic clergy of France.

But expostulation was of no use. With each succeeding year the persecution became more bitter, until at length, in 1685, the Edict was revoked. In September of that year Brousson learnt that the Protestant church of his native city had been suppressed, and their temple given over to a society of female converters; that the wives and daughters of the Protestants who refused to abjure their faith had been seized and imprisoned in nunneries and religious seminaries; and that three hundred of their husbands and fathers were chained together and sent off in one day for confinement in the galleys at Ma.r.s.eilles.

The number of Huguenots resorting to Switzerland being so great,[26]

and they often came so dest.i.tute, that a committee was formed at Lausanne to a.s.sist the emigrants, and facilitate their settlement in the canton, or enable them to proceed elsewhere. Brousson was from the first an energetic member of this committee. Part of their work was to visit the Protestant states of the north, and find out places to which the emigrants might be forwarded, as well as to collect subscriptions for their conveyance.

[Footnote 26: Within about three weeks no fewer than seventeen thousand five hundred French emigrants pa.s.sed into Lausanne. Two hundred Protestant ministers fled to Switzerland, the greater number of whom settled in Lausanne, until they could journey elsewhere.]

In November 1685, a month after the Revocation, Brousson and La Porte set out for Berlin with this object. La Porte was one of the ministers of the Cevennes, who had fled before a sentence of death p.r.o.nounced against him for having been concerned in "The Project." At Berlin they were received very cordially by the Elector of Brandenburg, who had already given great a.s.sistance to the Huguenot emigrants, and expressed himself as willing to do all that he could for their protection. Brousson and La Porte here met the Rev. David Ancillon, who had been for thirty-three years pastor at Metz,[27] and was now pastor of the Elector at Berlin; Gaultier, banished from Montpellier; and Abbadie, banished from Saumur--all ministers of the Huguenot Church there; with a large number of banished ministers and emigrant Protestants from all the provinces of France.

[Footnote 27: Ancillon was an eminently learned man. His library was one of the choicest that had ever been collected, and on his expulsion from Metz it was pillaged by the Jesuits. Metz, now part of German Lorraine, was probably not so ferociously dragooned as other places. Yet the inhabitants were under the apprehension that the ma.s.sacre of St.

Bartholomew was about to be repeated upon them on Christmas Day, 1685, the soldiers of the garrison having been kept under arms all night. The Protestant churches were all pulled down, the ministers were expelled, and many of their people followed them into Germany. There were numerous Protestant soldiers in the Metz garrison, and the order of the King was that, like the rest of his subjects, they should become converted. Many of the officers resigned and entered the service of William of Orange, and many of the soldiers deserted. The bribe offered for the conversion of privates was as follows: Common soldiers and dragoons, two pistoles per head; troopers, three pistoles per head. The Protestants of Alsace were differently treated. They const.i.tuted a majority of the population; Alsace and Strasbourg having only recently been seized by Louis XIV. It was therefore necessary to be cautious in that quarter; for violence would speedily have raised a revolution in the province which would have driven them over to Germany, whose language they spoke.

Louvois could therefore only proceed by bribing; and he was successful in buying over some of the most popular and influential men.]

The Elector suggested to Brousson that while at Berlin he should compose a summary account of the condition of the French Protestants, such as should excite the interest and evoke the help of the Protestant rulers and people of the northern States. This was done by Brousson, and the volume was published, ent.i.tled "Letters of the Protestants of France who have abandoned all for the cause of the Gospel, to other Protestants; with a particular Letter addressed to Protestant Kings, Electors, Rulers, and Magistrates." The Elector circulated this volume, accompanying it with a letter written in his name, to all the princes of the Continent professing the Augsburg Confession; and it was thus mainly owing to the Elector's intercession that the Huguenots obtained the privilege of establis.h.i.+ng congregations in several of the states of Germany, as well as in Sweden and Denmark.

Brousson remained nearly five months at Berlin, after which he departed for Holland to note the progress of the emigration in that country, and there he met a large number of his countrymen. Nearly two hundred and fifty Huguenot ministers had taken refuge in Holland; there were many merchants and manufacturers who had set up their branches of industry in the country; and there were many soldiers who had entered the service of William of Orange. While in Holland, Brousson resided princ.i.p.ally with his brother, a banished Huguenot, who had settled at Amsterdam as a merchant.

Having accomplished all that he could for his Huguenot brethren in exile, Brousson returned to Lausanne, where he continued his former labours. He bethought him very much of the Protestants still remaining in France, wandering like sheep without shepherds, deprived of guidance, books, and wors.h.i.+p--the prey of ravenous wolves,--and it occurred to him whether the Protestant pastors had done right in leaving their flocks, even though by so doing they had secured the safety of their own lives. Accordingly, in 1686, he wrote and published a "Letter to the Pastors of France at present in Protestant States, concerning the Desolation of their own Churches, and their own Exile."

In this letter he says:--"If, instead of retiring before your persecutors, you had remained in the country; if you had taken refuge in forests and caverns; if you had gone from place to place, risking your lives to instruct and rally the people, until the first shock of the enemy was past; and had you even courageously exposed yourselves to martyrdom--as in fact those have done who have endeavoured to perform your duties in your absence--perhaps the examples of constancy, or zeal, or of piety you had discovered, might have animated your flocks, revived their courage, and arrested the fury of your enemies." He accordingly exhorted the Protestant ministers who had left France to return to their flocks at all hazards.

This advice, if acted on, was virtually condemning the pastors to death. Brousson was not a pastor. Would _he_ like to return to France at the daily risk of the rack and the gibbet? The Protestant ministers in exile defended themselves. Benoit, then residing in Germany, replied in a "History and Apology for the Retreat of the Pastors."

Another, who did not give his name, treated Brousson's censure as that of a fanatic, who meddled with matters beyond his vocation. "You who condemn the pastors for not returning to France at the risk of their lives," said he, "_why do you not first return to France yourself?_"

Brousson was as brave as his words. He was not a pastor, but he might return to the deserted flocks, and encourage and comfort them. He could no longer be happy in his exile at Lausanne. He heard by night the groans of the prisoners in the Tower of Constance, and the noise of the chains borne by the galley slaves at Toulon and Ma.r.s.eilles. He reproached himself as if it were a crime with the repose which he enjoyed. Life became insupportable to him and he fell ill. His health was even despaired of; but one day he suddenly rose up and said to his wife, "I must set out; I will go to console, to relieve, to strengthen my brethren, groaning under their oppressions."

His wife threw herself at his feet. "Thou wouldst go to certain death," she said; "think of me and thy little children." She implored him again and again to remain. He loved his wife and children, but he thought a higher duty called him away from them. When his friends told him that he would be taken prisoner and hung, he said, "When G.o.d permits his servants to die for the Gospel, they preach louder from the grave than they did during life." He remained unshaken. He would go to the help of the oppressed with the love of a brother, the faith of an apostle, and the courage of a martyr.

Brousson knew the danger of the office he was about to undertake.

There had, as we have seen, been numerous attempts made to gather the Protestant people together, and to administer consolation to them by public prayers and preaching. The persons who conducted these services were not regular pastors, but only private members of their former churches. Some of them were very young men, and they were nearly all uneducated as regards clerical instruction. One of the most successful was Isaac Vidal, a lame young man, a mechanic of Colognac, near St.

Hypolite, in the Cevennes. His self-imposed ministrations were attended by large numbers of people. He preached for only six months and then died--a natural death, for nearly all who followed him were first tortured and then hung.

We have already referred to Fulcran Rey, who preached for about nine months, and was then executed. In the same year were executed Meyrueis, by trade a wool-carder, and Rocher, who had been a reader in one of the Protestant churches. Emanuel Dalgues, a respectable inhabitant of Salle, in the Cevennes, also received the crown of martyrdom. Ever since the Revocation of the Edict, he had proclaimed the Gospel o'er hill and dale, in woods and caverns, to a.s.semblies of the people wherever he could collect them. He was executed in 1687.

Three other persons--Gransille, Mercier, and Esclopier--who devoted themselves to preaching, were transported as slaves to America; and David Mazel, a boy twelve years of age, who had a wonderful memory, and preached sermons which he had learned by heart, was transported, with his father and other frequenters of the a.s.semblies, to the Carribee Islands.

At length Brousson collected about him a number of Huguenots willing to return with him into France, in order to collect the Protestant people together again, to pray with them, and even to preach to them if the opportunity occurred. Brousson's companions were these: Francis Vivens, formerly a schoolmaster in the Cevennes; Anthony Bertezene, a carpenter, brother of a preacher who had recently been condemned to death; and seven other persons named Papus, La Pierre, Serein, Dombres, Poutant, Boisson, and M. de Bruc, an aged minister, who had been formerly pastor of one of the churches in the Cevennes. They prepared to enter France in four distinct companies, in the month of July, 1689.

CHAPTER IV.

CLAUDE BROUSSON, PASTOR AND MARTYR.

Brousson left Lausanne on the 22nd of July, accompanied by his dear friend, the Rev. M. de Bruc. The other members of the party had preceded them, crossing the frontier at different places. They all arrived in safety at their destination, which was in the mountain district of the Cevennes. They resorted to the neighbourhood of the Aigoual, the centre of a very inaccessible region--wild, cold, but full of recesses for hiding and wors.h.i.+p. It was also a district surrounded by villages, the inhabitants of which were for the most part Protestant.

The party soon became diminished in number. The old pastor, De Bruc, found himself unequal to the fatigue and privations attending the work. He was ill and unable to travel, and was accordingly advised by his companions to quit the service and withdraw from the country.

Persecution also destroyed some of them. When it became known that a.s.semblies for religious observances were again on foot, an increased force of soldiers was sent into the district, and a high price was set on the heads of all the preachers that could be apprehended. The soldiers scoured the country, and, helped by the paid spies, they shortly succeeded in apprehending Boisson and Dombres, at St. Paul's, north of Anduze, in the Cevennes. They were both executed at Nismes, being first subjected to torture on the rack, by which their limbs were entirely dislocated. They were then conveyed to the place of execution, praying and singing psalms on the way, and finished their course with courage and joy.

When Brousson first went into the Cevennes, he did not undertake to preach to the people. He was too modest to a.s.sume the position of a pastor; he merely undertook, as occasion required, to read the Scriptures in Protestant families and in small companies, making his remarks and exhortations thereupon. He also transcribed portions of his own meditations on the Scriptures, and gave them away for distribution from hand to hand amongst the people.

When it was found that his instructions were much appreciated, and that numbers of people a.s.sembled to hear him read and exhort, he was strongly urged to undertake the office of public instructor amongst them, especially as their ministers were being constantly diminished by execution.