History of the Rise of the Huguenots Volume I Part 53

[Footnote 967: The words in the text are those of Calvin, in a letter to Sturm, written Dec. 16, 1560, not many days after the receipt of the astonis.h.i.+ng intelligence. "Did you ever read or hear," he says, "of anything more opportune than the death of the king? The evils had reached an extremity for which there was no remedy, when suddenly G.o.d shows himself from heaven! He who pierced the eye of the father has now stricken the ear of the son." Bonnet, Calvin's Letters, Am. ed., iv.

152.]

CHAPTER XI.

THE REIGN OF CHARLES THE NINTH, TO THE PRELIMINARIES OF THE COLLOQUY OF POISSY.

[Sidenote: The death of Francis saves the Huguenots.]

[Sidenote: Transfer of power.]

If the sudden catastrophe which brought to an end the b.l.o.o.d.y rule of Henry was naturally interpreted as a marked interposition of Heaven in behalf of the persecuted "Lutherans," it is not surprising that the unexpected death of his eldest son, in the flower of his youth, and after the briefest reign in the royal annals, seemed little short of a miracle. Had Francis lived but a week longer, the ruin of the Huguenots might perhaps have been consummated. Conde would have been executed at the opening of the States General. Navarre and Montmorency, if no worse doom befell them, would have been incarcerated at Loches and Bourges.

The Estates, deprived of the presence of these leaders, and overawed by the formidable military preparations of the Guises,[968] would readily have acquiesced in the most extreme measures. Liberty and reform would have found a common grave.[969] But a few hours sufficed to disarrange this programme. The political power was, at one stroke, transferred from the hands of Francis and Charles of Lorraine to those of Catharine de'

Medici and the King of Navarre; and the Protestants of Paris recognized in the event a direct answer to the pet.i.tions which they had offered to Almighty G.o.d on the recent days of special humiliation and prayer.[970]

[Sidenote: Alarm of the Guises.]

[Sidenote: Funeral obsequies of Francis II.]

The altered posture of affairs was equally patent to the princes of late complete masters of the destinies of the country. In the first moments of their excessive terror, they are said to have shut themselves up in their palaces, and to have declined to leave this refuge until a.s.sured that no immediate violence was contemplated.[971] Even after the immediate danger had pa.s.sed, however, they were too shrewd to pay to the remains of their nephew the tokens of respect exacted of the constable in behalf of Henry's corpse,[972] preferring to provide for their own safety and future influence by being present at the meeting of the States. The paltry convoy of Francis from Orleans to the royal vaults of St. Denis presented so unfavorable a contrast to the pompous ceremonial of his father's interment, that it was wittily said, "that the mortal enemy of the Huguenots had not been able to escape being himself buried like a Huguenot."[973] A bitter taunt aimed at the unfaithfulness and ingrat.i.tude of the Guises fell under their own eyes. A slip of paper was found pinned to the velvet funereal pall, on which were written--with allusion to that famous chamberlain of Charles the Seventh, who, seeing his master's body abandoned by the courtiers that had flocked to do obeisance to his son and successor, himself buried it with great pomp and at his own expense--the words: "Where is Messire Tanneguy du Chastel? _But he was a Frenchman!_"[974]

[Sidenote: Navarre's opportunity.]

[Sidenote: His contemptible character.]

[Sidenote: Adroitness and success of Catharine.]

Never had prince of the blood a finer opportunity for maintaining the right, while a.s.serting his own just claims, than fell to the lot of Antoine of Navarre. The sceptre had pa.s.sed from the grasp of a youth of uncertain majority to that of a boy who was incontestably a minor.

Charles, the second son of Henry the Second, who now succeeded his older brother, was only ten years of age. It was beyond dispute that the regency belonged to Antoine as the first prince of the blood. Every sentiment of self-respect dictated that he should a.s.sume the high rank to which his birth ent.i.tled him,[975] and that, while exercising the power with which it was a.s.sociated, in restraining or punis.h.i.+ng the common enemies both of the public liberties and of the family of the Bourbons, he should protect the Huguenots, who looked up to him as their natural defender. But the King of Navarre had, unfortunately, entered into the humiliating compact with the queen mother, to which reference was made in the last chapter. From this agreement he now showed no disposition to withdraw. The utopian vision of a kingdom of Navarre, once more restored to its former dimensions, still flitted before his eyes, and he preferred the absolute sovereignty of this contracted territory to the influential but dangerous regency which his friends urged him to seize. Besides, he was sluggish, changeable, and altogether untrustworthy. "He is an exceedingly weak person"--_suggetto debolissimo_--said Suriano. "As to his judgment, I shall not stop to say that he wears rings on his fingers and pendants in his ears like a woman, although he has a gray beard and bears the burden of many years; and that in great matters he listens to the counsels of flatterers and vain men, of whom he has a thousand about him."[976] Liberal in promises, and exhibiting occasional sparks of courage, the fire of Antoine's resolution soon died out, and he earned the reputation of being no more formidable than the most treacherous of advocates.

Sensual indulgence had sapped the very foundations of his character.[977] It is true that his friends, forgetting the disappointment engendered by his recent displays of timidity, reminded him again of the engagements into which he had entered, to interfere in defence of the oppressed, of his glorious opportunity, and of his accountability before the Divine Tribunal.[978] But their appeals accomplished little. Catharine was able to boast, in a letter to the French Amba.s.sador at Madrid, just a fortnight after the death of Francis, that "she had great reason to be pleased" with Navarre's conduct, for "he had placed himself altogether in her hands, and had despoiled himself of all power and authority." "I dispose of him," she said, "just as I please."[979] And to her daughter, Queen Isabella of Spain, she wrote by the same courier: "He is so obedient; he has no authority save that which I permit him to exercise."[980] The apprehensions felt by Philip the Second regarding the exaltation of a heretic, in the person of his hated neighbor of Navarre, to the first place in the vicinage of the French throne, might well be quieted after such rea.s.suring intelligence.

[Sidenote: Financial embarra.s.sment.]

[Sidenote: The religions situation.]

[Sidenote: Catharine's neutrality.]

Yet the position of Catharine, it must be admitted, was by no means an easy one. The ablest statesman might have shrunk from coping with the financial difficulties that beset her. The crown was almost hopelessly involved. Henry the Second had in the course of a dozen years acc.u.mulated, by prodigal gifts and by needless wars, a debt--enormous for that age--of forty-two millions of francs, besides alienating the crown lands and raising by taxation a larger sum of money than had been collected in eighty years previous.[981] The Venetian Michele summed up the perplexities of the political situation under two questions: How to relieve the people, now thoroughly exhausted;[982] and, how to rescue the crown from its poverty. But, in reality, the financial embarra.s.sment was the least of the difficulties of the position Catharine had a.s.sumed.

The kingdom was rent with dissensions. Two religions were struggling--the one for exclusive supremacy, the other at least for toleration and recognition. Catharine had no strong religious convictions to actuate her in deciding which of the two she should embrace. Two powerful political parties were contending for the ascendency--that of the princes of the blood and of const.i.tutional usage, and that of an ambitious family newly introduced into the kingdom, but a family which had succeeded in attaching to itself most, if not all, of the favorites of preceding kings. Catharine's ambition, in the absence of any convictions of right, regarded the success of either as detrimental to her own authority. She had, therefore, resolved to play off the one against the other, in the hope of being able, through their mutual antagonism, to become the mistress of both. Under the reign of Francis the Second she had gained some notion of the humiliation to which the Guises, in their moment of fancied security, would willingly have reduced her. Yet, after all, the illegal usurpation of the Guises, who might, from their past experience, be more tolerant of her ambitious designs, was less formidable to her than the claims of the Bourbon princes, based as were these claims upon ancestral usage and right, and equally fatal to her pretensions and to those of their rivals. It was a situation of appalling difficulty for a woman sustained in her course by no lofty consciousness of integrity and devotion to duty--for a woman who was by nature timid, and by education inclined to resort for guidance to judicial astrology or magic rather than to religion.[983]

[Sidenote: Opening of the States General, Dec. 13, 1560.]

A brief delay in the opening of the sessions of the States General was necessitated by the sudden change in the administration. At length, on the thirteenth of December, the pompous ceremonial took place in the city of Orleans. It was graced by the presence of the boy-king, Charles the Ninth, and of his mother, his brother, the future Henry the Third, and his sister Margaret. The King of Navarre, the aged Renee of Ferrara, and other members of the royal house, also figured here with all that was most distinguished among the n.o.bility of the realm.

[Sidenote: Address of Chancellor De l'Hospital.]

[Sidenote: Co-existence of two religions impossible.]

To the chancellor was, as usual, entrusted the honorable and responsible duty of laying before the representatives of the three orders the reasons of their present convocation. This office he discharged in a long and learned harangue. If the hearers were treated without stint to that profusion of ancient learning, upon which the orators of the age seem to have rested a great part of their claim to patient attention, they also listened to much that was of more immediate concern to them, respecting the origin of the States General, and the occasions for which they had from time to time been summoned by former kings. L'Hospital announced that the special object of the present meeting was to devise the means of allaying the seditions which had arisen in consequence of religious differences. "These," said L'Hospital, "are the causes of the most serious dissensions. It is folly to hope for peace, rest, and friends.h.i.+p between persons of opposite creeds. A Frenchman and an Englishman holding a common faith will entertain stronger affection for each other than two citizens of the same city who disagree about their theological tenets."[984] So powerful was still the prejudice of the age with one who was among the first to catch a glimpse of the true principles of religious toleration! That two discordant religions should permanently co-exist in a state, he agreed with most of his contemporaries in regarding as utterly impossible. For how could the adherents of the papacy and the disciples of the new faith conceal their differences under the cloak of a common charity and mutual forbearance?[985]

[Sidenote: Names of factions must be abolished.]

Yet the dawn of more enlightened principles could be detected in a subsequent part of the chancellor's speech. After prescribing a universal council--that panacea which all the state doctors of the day offered for the cure of the ills of the body politic--he advocated the employment, meantime, of persuasion instead of force, of gentleness rather than rigor, of charity and good works, as more effective than the most trenchant of material weapons. And, while he recommended his hearers to pray for the conversion of the erring, he exclaimed: "Let us remove those diabolical words, names of parties, factions, and seditions--'Lutherans,' 'Huguenots,' and 'Papists'--and let us retain only the name of 'Christians.'"[986] In concluding his address, he did not forget to dwell upon the lamentable condition of the royal finances, thrown into almost inextricable confusion by twelve or thirteen years of continuous war and the expenses attending three magnificent weddings. He begged the estates, while they exposed their grievances, not to fail to provide the king with means for meeting his obligations.[987]

[Sidenote: Effrontery of Cardinal Lorraine.]

[Sidenote: De Rochefort orator for the n.o.blesse.]

[Sidenote: L'Ange for the tiers etat.]

It now devolved upon the deputies to prepare a statement of their grievances, and for this purpose the "n.o.blesse" retired to the Dominican, the clergy to the Franciscan, and the "tiers" to the Carmelite convents.[988] The Cardinal of Lorraine had had the effrontery to solicit, through his creatures, the honor of representing the three orders collectively; but the proposition had been rejected with undissembled derision. Loud voices were heard from among the deputies of the people, crying, "We do not choose to select _him_ to speak for us of whom we intend to offer our complaints!"[989] Three orators were deputed to speak for the three orders.[990] The Sieur de Rochefort, in behalf of the n.o.bles, declared their approval of the government of Catharine, but insisted at some length upon the necessity of conciliating their good will by a studious regard for their privileges. He likened the king to the sun and the "n.o.blesse" to the moon. Any conflict between the two would produce an eclipse that would darken the entire earth. He denounced the chicanery of the ecclesiastical courts and the non-residence of the priests;[991] and he closed by presenting a pet.i.tion, which was read aloud by one of the secretaries of state, demanding the grant of churches for the use of those n.o.bles who preferred the purer wors.h.i.+p.[992] The Bordalese lawyer, Jean L'Ange, in the name of the people, dwelt chiefly on the three capital vices of the clergy--ignorance, avarice, and luxury,[993] and portrayed very effectively the general disorders, the intolerable tyranny of the Guises, the exhausted state of the public treasury, and the means of restoring the Church to purity of faith and regularity of discipline.

[Sidenote: Arrogant speech of Quintin for the clergy.]

[Sidenote: Presumption in favor of the Catholic Church.]

But it was the clerical delegate, Jean Quintin, that attracted most attention. Standing between the other two orators, he delivered a speech of great length and insufferable arrogance. He admitted that the clergy might need reformation; but the Church with its hierarchy must not be touched--that was the body of Christ. Charles must defend the Church against heresy--against that Gospel falsely and maliciously so called, which consisted in profaning churches, in breaking the sacred images, in the marriage of priests and nuns. He must not suffer the Reformation to affect the articles of faith, the sacraments, traditions, ordinances, or ceremonial. Should any one venture to resuscitate heresies long dead and buried, he begged the king to declare him a champion of heresy and to proceed against him. He insisted on the presumption in favor of the Catholic Church, and demanded the unconditional submission of its opponents. "They must believe us, without waiting for a council; not we them." He was warm in his praise of the Emperors Theodosius II. and Valentinian III., who confiscated the goods of heretics, banished them, and deprived them of the right of conveying or receiving property by will. He raised his voice particularly in behalf of Burgundy and of his own diocese of Autun, whose inhabitants "were well-nigh drowned by the much too frequent inundations of pestilent books from the infected lagoons of Geneva."[994]

[Sidenote: Temporal interests.]

[Sidenote: Sad straits of the clergy.]

[Sidenote: A word for the down-trodden people.]

In the midst of this tirade against the inroads of Calvinism, the prudent doctor of canon law did not, however, altogether lose sight of the temporal concerns of the priesthood. He proffered an urgent request for the restoration of canonical elections, laying the growth of heresy altogether to the account of the abrogation of the Pragmatic Sanction by the Concordat in 1517. The sanction being re-established, "the detestable and d.a.m.nable sects, the execrable and accursed heresies of to-day" would incontinently flee from the church. If he painted the portrait of the prelate elected by the suffrages of his diocese in somewhat too nattering colors, he certainly gave a vivid picture of the sad straits to which the clergy were reduced by the imposition of the repeated t.i.thes on their revenues, now become customary. Ma.s.ses were unsaid, churches had been stripped of their ornaments. Missals and chalices even had, in some places, been sold at auction to meet the exorbitant demands of royal officers. It was to be feared that, if Christian kings continued to lay sacerdotal possessions under contribution, the Queen of the South would rise up in judgment with this generation, and would condemn it. Lest, however, this commination should not prove terrible enough, the examples of Belshazzar and others were judiciously subjoined. On the other hand, Charles was urged to acquire a glory superior to that of Charlemagne, and to earn the surname of _Clerophilus_, or _Maximus_, by freeing the clergy of its burdens. By a very remarkable condescension, after this lofty flight of eloquence, the clerical advocate deigned to utter a short sentence or two in the interest of the "n.o.blesse," and even of the poor, down-trodden people--begging the king to lighten the burdens which that so good, so obedient people had long borne patiently, and not to suffer this third foot of the throne to be crushed or broken.[995] When the crown had returned to this course of just action, the Church would pray very devoutly in its behalf, the n.o.bility fight valiantly, _the people obey humbly_. It would be paradise begun on earth.[996]

[Sidenote: The clergy alone makes no progress.]

Thus spoke the chosen delegates of the three orders when summoned into the royal presence for the first time after the lapse of seventy-seven years. The n.o.bility and clergy vied with each other in extolling their own order; the people made little pretension, but had a large budget of grievances demanding redress. Nearly forty years had the Reformation been gaining ground surely and steadily. It had found, at last, recognition more or less explicit in the n.o.blesse and the "tiers etat."

But the clergy had made no progress, had learned nothing. The speech of Quintin, their chosen representative, on this critical occasion, was long and tiresome; but, instead of convincing, it only excited shame and disgust.[997]

Indeed, an allusion of his to the favorers of heresy daring to present pet.i.tions in behalf of the Huguenots, who demanded places in which to wors.h.i.+p G.o.d, was taken by Admiral Coligny as a personal insult to himself, for which Quintin was compelled to make a public apology.[998]

[Sidenote: Coligny presents a Huguenot pet.i.tion.]

The incredible supineness of Antoine of Navarre prevented the States from demanding with much decision that the regency should be entrusted in the hands of him to whom it belonged of right. For how could enthusiasm be manifested in a matter regarding which the person chiefly interested showed such utter indifference? But the religious demands of the Huguenots were made distinctly known. As expressed in a pet.i.tion presented in their name to the queen mother by the Admiral's hands, these demands were comprehended under three heads: the convocation of a free universal council, which should decide definitely respecting the religious questions in dispute; the immediate liberation of all prisoners whose only crime was of a religious character--even if disguised under the false accusation of sedition; and liberty of a.s.sembling for the purpose of listening to the preaching of G.o.d's word, and for the administration of the sacraments, under such conditions as the royal council might deem necessary for the prevention of disorder.[999] So gracious was Catharine's answer, so brilliant were the signs of promise, that there were those who hoped soon to behold in France a king "very Christian" in fact no less than in name.[1000]

[Sidenote: The estates prorogued.]

[Sidenote: Meanwhile prosecutions for religion to cease.]

It was, however, no easy matter to grant these reasonable requests. The Roman Catholic party resisted, with all the energy of desperation, the concession of any places for wors.h.i.+p according to the reformed faith.

Catharine was loth to take the decided step of disregarding their remonstrances. It seemed more convenient to avail herself of the representations of the majority of the delegates of the "tiers etat,"

who regarded it as necessary to apply for new powers from their const.i.tuents, in consequence of the death of the monarch who had summoned them. The estates were accordingly prorogued to meet again at Pontoise on the first of May.[1001] The matter of the "temples" was adjourned until that time. Meanwhile, in order to conciliate the Huguenots, orders were issued that all prosecutions for religious offences should surcease, and that the prisoners should at once be liberated, with the injunction to live in a Catholic fas.h.i.+on for the future.[1002] This concession, poor as it was, met with opposition on the part of the Parisian parliament, and was only registered--after more than a month's refusal--because of the king's express desire.[1003] But it was far from satisfying the Protestants; for, in answer to their very first demand, they were referred to the Council of Trent, which the pontiff had recently ordered to rea.s.semble at the coming Easter. Such a convocation--neither convened in a place of safe access, nor consisting of the proper persons to represent Christendom, nor under free conditions[1004]--could not be recognized by the Huguenots of France as a competent tribunal to act in the final adjudication of their cause.

They must refuse to appear either at Trent or at the a.s.sembly of French prelates, to be held as a preliminary to their proceeding to the universal council, in accordance with the resolutions of the notables at Fontainebleau.[1005]