A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times Volume IV Part 7

Nevertheless, when the new holder of the cure at Meudon, shortly after his installation, made up his mind to publish the fourth book of the _Faits et Dicts heroiques du bon Pantagruel,_ the work was censured by the Sorbonne and interdicted by decree of Parliament, and authority to offer it for sale was not granted until, on the 9th of February, 1552, Rabelais had given in his resignation of his cure at Meudon, and of another cure which he possessed, under the t.i.tle of benefice, in the diocese of Le Mans. He retired in bad health to Paris, where he died shortly afterwards, in 1553, "in Rue des Jardins, parish of St. Paul, in the cemetery whereof he was interred," says Colletet, "close to a large tree which was still to be seen a few years ago."

Such a life, this constant change of position, profession, career, taste, patron, and residence, bore a strong resemblance to what we should nowadays call a Bohemian life; and everything shows that Rabelais'

habits, without being scandalous, were not more regular or more dignified than his condition in the world. Had we no precise and personal information about him in this respect, still his literary work, _Gargantua and Pantagruel,_ would not leave us in any doubt: there is no printed book, sketch, conversation, or story, which is more coa.r.s.e and cynical, and which testifies, whether as regards the author or the public for whom the work is intended, to a more complete and habitual dissoluteness in thought, morals, and language. There is certainly no ground for wondering that the Sorbonne, in proceeding against the _Vie tres-horrifique du grand Gargantua, pere de Pantagruel,_ should have described it as "an obscene tale;" and the whole part of Panurge, the brilliant talker of the tale,

"Take him for all in all the best boy in the world,"

fully justifies the Sorbonne. But, by way of striking contrast, at the same time that the works of Rabelais attest the irregularity of men's lives and minds, they also reveal the great travail that is going on and the great progress that has already been made in the intellectual condition of his day, in the influence of natural and legitimate feelings, and in the appreciation of men's mutual rights and duties.

Sixty-two years ago M. Guizot published, in a periodical collection ent.i.tled _Annales de l'Education,_ a Study of Rabelais' ideas compared with the practice and routine of his day in respect of Education; an important question in the sixteenth as it is in the nineteenth century.

It will be well to quote here from that Study certain fragments which will give some notion of what new ideas and tendencies were making their way into the social life of France, and were coincident with that great religious and political ferment which was destined to reach bursting-point in the reign of Francis I., and to influence for nearly a century the fortunes of France.

"It was no easy matter," were the words used by M. Guizot in 1811, "to speak reasonably about education at the time when Rabelais wrote. There was then no idea of home-education and the means of rendering it practicable. As to public education, there was no extensive range and nothing really useful to the community in the instruction received by children at college; no justice and no humanity in the treatment they experienced; a fruitless and ridiculously prolonged study of words succeeded by a no less fruitless study of interminable subtilties, and all this fruitless knowledge driven into the brains of children by help of chastis.e.m.e.nts, blows, and that barbarous severity which seems to regard the _Compelle intrare_ as the princ.i.p.al law and object of instruction. How proceed, in such a state of things, to conceive a plan of liberal, gentle, and reasonable education? Rabelais, in his book, had begun by avoiding the danger of directly shocking received ideas; by transporting both himself and his heroes to the regions of imagination and extravagance he had set himself at liberty to bring them up in quite a different fashion than that of his times; the rectors of colleges could not pretend that Pantagruel, who was hardly born before he sucked down at every meal the milk of four thousand six hundred cows, and for whose first shirt there had been cut nine hundred ells of Chatellerault linen, was a portrait of any of the little boys who trembled at their ferules.

. . . Pantagruel is in his cradle; he is bound and swathed in it like all children at that time; but, ere long, Gargantua, his father, perceives that these bands are constraining his movements, and that he is making efforts to burst there; he immediately, by advice of the princes and lords present, orders the said shackles to be undone, and lo!

Pantagruel is no longer uneasy. . . . And thus became he big and strong full early. . . . There came, however, the time when his instruction must begin. 'My will,' said Gargantua, 'is to hand him over to some learned man for to indoctrinate him according to his capacity, and to spare nothing to that end.' He, accordingly, put Pantagruel under a great teacher, who began by bringing him up after the fashion of those times. He taught him his charte (alphabet) to such purpose that he could say it by heart backwards, and he was five years and three months about it. Then he read with him Donotus and Facetus (old elementary works on Latin grammar), and he was thirteen years, six months, and two weeks over that. Then he read with him the De Modis significandi, with the commentaries of Hurtebisius, Fasquin, and a heap of others, and he was more than eighteen years and eleven months over them, and knew them so well that he proved on his fingers to his mother that _de modis signifieandi non erat scientia_. After so much labor and so many years, what did Pantagruel know? Gargantua was no bigot: he did not shut his eyes that he might not see, and he believed what his eyes told him. He saw that Pantagruel worked very hard and spent all his time at it, and yet he got no good by it. And what was worse, he was becoming daft, silly, dreamy, and besotted through it. So Pantagruel was taken away from his former masters and handed over to Ponocrates, a teacher of quite a different sort, who was bidden to take him to Paris to make a new creature of him and complete his education there. Ponocrates was very careful not to send him to any college. Rabelais, as it appears, had a special aversion for Montaigu College. 'Tempeste,' says he, 'was a great boy-flogger at Montaigu College. If for flogging poor little children, unoffending school-boys, pedagogues are d.a.m.ned, he, upon my word of honor, is now on Ixion's wheel, flogging the dock-tailed cur that turns it.' Pantagruel's education was now humane and gentle. Accordingly he soon took pleasure in the work which Ponocrates was at the pains of rendering interesting to him by the very nature and the variety of the subjects of it. . . . Is it not a very remarkable phenomenon that at such a time and in such a condition of public instruction a man should have had sufficient sagacity not only to regard the natural sciences as one of the princ.i.p.al subjects of study which ought to be included in a course of education, but further to make the observation of nature the basis of that study, to fix the pupil's attention upon examination of facts, and to impress upon him the necessity of applying his knowledge by studying those practical arts and industries which profit by such applications? That, however, Rabelais did, probably by dint of sheer good sense, and without having any notion himself about the wide bearing of his ideas. Ponocrates took Pantagruel through a course of what we should nowadays call practical study of the exact and natural sciences as they were understood in the sixteenth century; but, at the same time, far from forgetting the moral sciences, he a.s.signs to them, for each day, a definite place and an equally practical character. 'As soon as Pantagruel was up,' he says, 'some page or other of the sacred Scripture was read with him aloud and distinctly, with p.r.o.nunciation suited to the subject. . . . In accordance with the design and purport of this lesson, he at frequent intervals devoted himself to doing reverence and saying prayers to the good G.o.d, whose majesty and marvellous judgments were shown forth in what was read. . . . When evening came, he and his teacher briefly recapitulated together, after the manner of the Pythagoreans, all that he had read, seen, learned, and heard in the course of the whole day. They prayed to G.o.d the Creator, worshipping Him, glorifying Him for his boundless goodness, giving Him thanks for all the time that was past, and commending themselves to His divine mercy for all that was to come. This done, they went to their rest.' And at the end of this course of education, so complete both from the worldly and the religious point of view, Rabelais shows us young Pantagruel living in affectionate and respectful intimacy with his father Gargantua, who, as he sees him off on his travels, gives him these last words of advice: Science without conscience is nought but ruin to the soul; it behooves thee to serve, love, and fear G.o.d. Have thou in suspicion the abuses of the world; set not thine heart on vanity, for this life is transitory, but the word of G.o.d abideth forever. Reverence thy teachers; flee the company of those whom thou wouldest not resemble. . . . And when thou feelest sure that thou hast acquired all that is to be learned yonder, return to me that I may see thee and give thee my blessing ere I die.'"

After what was said above about the personal habits and the works of Rabelais, these are certainly not the ideas, sentiments, and language one would expect to find at the end and as the conclusion of his life and his book. And it is precisely on account of this contrast that more s.p.a.ce has been accorded in this history to the man and his book than would in the natural course of things have been due to them. At bottom and, beyond their mere appearances the life and the book of Rabelais are a true and vivid reflection of the moral and social ferment characteristic of his time. A time of innovation and of obstruction, of corruption and of regeneration, of decay and of renaissance, all at once. A deeply serious crisis in a strong and complicated social system, which had been hitherto exposed to the buffets and the risks of brute force, but was intellectually full of life and aspiration, was in travail of a double yearning for reforming itself and setting itself in order, and did indeed, in the sixteenth century, attempt at one and the same time a religious and a political reformation, the object whereof, missed as it was at that period, is still at the bottom of all true Frenchmen's trials and struggles. This great movement of the sixteenth century we are now about to approach, and will attempt to fix its character with precision and mark the imprint of its earliest steps.

CHAPTER x.x.x.----FRANCIS I. AND THE REFORMATION.

Nearly half a century before the Reformation made any noise in France it had burst out with great force and had established its footing in Germany, Switzerland, and England. John Huss and Jerome of Prague, both born in Bohemia, one in 1373 and the other in 1378, had been condemned as heretics and burned at Constance, one in 1415 and the other in 1416, by decree and in the presence of the council which had been there a.s.sembled.

But, at the commencement of the sixteenth century, Luther in Germany and Zwingle in Switzerland had taken in hand the work of the Reformation, and before half that century had rolled by they had made the foundations of their new church so strong that their powerful adversaries, with Charles V. at their head, felt obliged to treat with them and recognize their position in the European world, though all the while disputing their right. In England, Henry VIII., under the influence of an unbridled pa.s.sion, as all his pa.s.sions were, for Anna Boleyn, had, in 1531, broken with the church of Rome, whose pope, Clement VII., refused very properly to p.r.o.nounce him divorced from his wife Catherine of Aragon, and the king had proclaimed himself the spiritual head of the English church without meeting either amongst his clergy or in his kingdom with any effectual opposition. Thus in these three important states of Western Europe the Reformers had succeeded, and the religious revolution was in process of accomplishment.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The First Protestants----178]

In France it was quite otherwise. Not that, there too, there were not amongst Christians profound dissensions and ardent desires for religious reform. We will dwell directly upon its explosion, its vicissitudes, and its characteristics. But France did not contain, as Germany did, several distinct states, independent and pretty strong, though by no means equally so, which could offer to the different creeds a secure asylum, and could form one with another coalitions capable of resisting the head of that incohesive coalition which was called the empire of Germany. In the sixteenth century, on the contrary, the unity of the French monarchy was established, and it was all, throughout its whole extent, subject to the same laws and the same master, as regarded the religious bodies as well as the body politic. In this monarchy, however, there did not happen to be, at the date of the sixteenth century, a sovereign audacious enough and powerful enough to gratify his personal pa.s.sions at the cost of embroiling himself, like Henry VIII., with the spiritual head of Christendom, and, from the mere desire for a change of wife, to change the regimen of the church in his dominions. Francis I., on the contrary, had scarcely ascended the throne when, by abolishing the Pragmatic Sanction and signing the Concordat of 1516, he attached himself more closely to the papacy. The nascent Reformation, then, did not meet in France with either of the two important circ.u.mstances, politically considered, which in Germany and in England rendered its first steps more easy and more secure. It was in the cause of religious creeds alone, and by means of moral force alone, that she had to maintain the struggles in which she engaged.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, there lived, at a small castle near Gap in Dauphiny, in the bosom of a n.o.ble and unostentatiously pious family, a young man of ardent imagination, fiery temperament, and energetic character, who shared his relatives' creeds and joined in their devotions, but grew weary of the monotony of his thoughts and of his life. William Farel heard talk of another young man, his contemporary and neighbor, Peter du Terrail, even now almost famous under the name of Bayard. "Such sons," was said in his hearing, "are as arrows in the hand of a giant; blessed is he who has his quiver full of them!" Young Farel pressed his father to let him go too and make himself a man in the world.

The old gentleman would willingly have permitted his son to take up such a life as Bayard's; but it was towards the University of Paris, "that mother of all the sciences, that pure and shining mirror of the faith,"

that the young man's aspirations were directed. The father at first opposed, but afterwards yielded to his wishes; and, about 1510, William Farel quitted Gap and arrived at Paris. The questions raised by the councils of Bale and Florence, and by the semi-political, semi-ecclesiastical a.s.sembly at Tours, which had been convoked by Louis XII., the instruction at the Parisian University, and the attacks of the Sorbonne on the study of Greek and Hebrew, branded as heresy, were producing a lively agitation in the public mind. A doctor of theology, already advanced in years, of small stature, of mean appearance, and of low origin, Jacques Lefevre by name, born at Etaples in Picardy, had for seventeen years filled with great success a professorship in the university. "Amongst many thousands of men," said Erasmus, "you will not find any of higher integrity and more versed in polite letters." "He is very fond of me," wrote Zwingle about him; "he is perfectly open and good; he argues, he sings, he plays, and be laughs with me at the follies of the world." Some circ.u.mstance or other brought the young student and the old scholar together; they liked one another, and soon became friends. Farel was impressed by his master's devotion as well as learning; he saw him on his knees at church praying fervently; and, "Never," said he, "had I seen a chanter of ma.s.s who chanted it with deeper reverence." But this old-fashioned piety did not interfere at all with the freedom of the professor's ideas and conversations touching either the abuses or the doctrines of the church. "How shameful it is,"

he would say, "to see a bishop soliciting people to drink with him, caring for nought but gaming, constantly handling the dice and the dice-box, constantly hunting, hallooing after birds and game, frequenting bad houses! . . . Religion has but one foundation, but one end, but one head, Jesus Christ blessed forever; he alone trod the wine-press.

Let us not, then, call ourselves by the name of St. Paul, or Apollos, or St. Peter." These free conversations worked, not all at once, but none the less effectually, upon those who heard them. "The end was," says Farel, "that little by little the papacy slipped from its place in my heart; it did not come down at the first shock." At the same time that he thus talked with his pupils, Lefevre of Etaples published a commentary on the Epistles of St. Paul, and then a commentary on the Gospels.

"Christians," said he, "are those only who love Jesus Christ and His word.

May everything be illumined with His light! Through it may there be a return of times like those of that primitive church which devoted to Jesus Christ so many martyrs! May the Lord of the harvest, foreseeing a new harvest, send new and diligent laborers! . . . My dear William,"

he added, turning to Farel and taking his hand, "G.o.d will renew the world, and you will see it!"

It was not only professors and pupils, scholars grown old in meditation and young folks eager for truth, liberty, action, and renown, who welcomed pa.s.sionately those boundless and undefined hopes, those yearnings towards a brilliant and at the same time a vague future, at which they looked forward, according to the expression used by Lefevre of Etaples to Farel, to a "renewal of the world." Men holding a social position very different from that of the philosophers, men with minds formed on an acquaintance with facts and in the practice of affairs, took part in this intellectual and religious ferment, and protected and encouraged its fervent adherents. William Briconnet, Bishop of Meaux, a prelate who had been Louis XII.'s amba.s.sador to Pope Julius II., and one amongst the negotiators of Francis I.'s Concordat with Leo X., opened his diocese to the preachers and writers recommended to him by his friend Lefevre of Staples, and supported them in their labors for the translation and propagation, amongst the people, of the Holy Scriptures.

They had at court, and near the king's own person, the avowed support of his sister, Princess Marguerite, who was beautiful, sprightly, affable, kind, disposed towards all lofty and humane sentiments as well as all intellectual pleasures, and an object of the sometimes rash attentions of the most eminent and most different men of her time, Charles V., the Constable de Bourbon, Admiral Bonnivet, and Clement Marot. Marguerite, who was married to the Duke d'Alencon, widowed in 1525, and married a second time, in 1527, to Henry d'Albret, King of Navarre, was all her life at Pau and at Nerac, as well as at Paris, a centre, a focus of social, literary, religious, and political movement. "The king her brother loved her dearly," says Brantome, "and always called her his darling. . . Very often, when he had important business, he left it to her, waiting for her definitive and conclusive decision.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Castle of Pau----183]

The amba.s.sadors who talked with her were enchanted by her, and always went to see her after having paid their first amba.s.sadorial visit. She had so great a regard and affection for the king, that when she heard of his dangerous illness she said, 'Whosoever shall come to my door, and announce to me the recovery of the king my brother, such courier, should he be tired, and worn out, and muddy, and dirty, I will go and kiss and embrace as if he were the sprucest prince and gentleman of France; and, should he be in want of a bed and unable to find one whereon to rid him of his weariness, I would give him mine, and I would rather lie on the hard, for the good news he brought me.' . . . She was suspected of inclining to the religion of Luther, but she never made any profession or sign thereof; and, if she believed it, she kept it in her heart very secret, inasmuch as the king did hate it sorely." . . . "The heresy was seen glimmering here and there," says another contemporary witness [Florimond de Raimond in his _Histoire de l'Heresie_], "but it appeared and disappeared like a nightly meteor which has but a flickering brightness."--At bottom this reserve was quite in conformity with the mental condition of that cla.s.s, or as one might he inclined to say, that circle of Reformers at court. Luther and Zwingle had distinctly declared war on the papacy; Henry VIII. had with a flourish separated England from the Romish church; Marguerite de Valois and Bishop Briconnet neither wished nor demanded so much; they aspired no further than to reform the abuses of the Romish church by the authority of that church itself, in concert with its heads and according to its traditional regimen; they had no idea of more than dealing kindly, and even sympathetically, with the liberties and the progress of science and human intelligence. Confined within these limits, the idea was legitimate and honest enough, but it showed want of foresight, and was utterly vain. When, whether in state or church, the vices and defects of government have lasted for ages and become habits not only inveterate but closely connected with powerful personal interests, a day at last comes when the deplorable result is seen in pig-headedness and weakness. Then there is an explosion of deep-seated and violent shocks, from which infinitely more is expected than they can accomplish, and which, even when they are successful, cost the people very dear, for their success is sullied and incomplete. A certain amount of good government and general good sense is a necessary preface and preparation for any good sort of reform. Happy the nations who are spared by their wisdom or their good fortune the cruel trial of only obtaining such reforms as they need when they have been reduced to prosecute them beneath the slings and arrows of outrageous revolution!

Christian France in the sixteenth century was not so favorably situated.

During the first years of Francis I.'s reign (from 1515 to 1520) young and ardent Reformers, such as William Farel and his friends, were but isolated individuals, eager after new ideas and studies, very favorable towards all that came to them from Germany, but without any consistency yet as a party, and without having committed any striking act of aggression against the Roman church. Nevertheless they were even then, so far as the heads and the devoted adherents of that church were concerned, objects of serious disquietude and jealous supervision.

[Ill.u.s.tration: William Farel----181]

The Sorbonne, in particular, p.r.o.nounced vehemently against them. Luther and his progress were beginning to make a great noise in France. After his discussion with Dr. Eck at Leipzig in 1519 he had consented to take for judges the Universities of Erfurt and Paris; on the 20th of January, 1520, the quoestor of the nation of France bought twenty copies of Luther's conference with Dr. Eck to distribute amongst the members of his committee; the University gave more than a year to its examination. "All Europe," says Crevier, "was waiting for the decision of the University of Paris." Whenever an incident occurred or a question arose, "We shall see," said they of the Sorbonne, "what sort of folks hold to Luther.

Why, that fellow is worse than Luther!" In April, 1521, the University solemnly condemned Luther's writings, ordering that they should be publicly burned, and that the author should be compelled to retract. The Syndic of the Sorbonne, Noel Bedier, who, to give his name a cla.s.sical tw.a.n.g, was called _Beda,_ had been the princ.i.p.al and the most eager actor in this procedure; he was a theologian full of subtlety, obstinacy, harshness, and hatred. "In a single Beda there are three thousand monks," Erasmus used to say of him. The syndic had at court two powerful patrons, the king's mother, Louise of Savoy, and the chancellor, Duprat, both decided enemies of the Reformers. Louise of Savoy, in consequence of her licentious morals and her thirst for riches; Duprat, by reason of the same thirst, and of his ambition to become an equally great lord in the church as in the state; and he succeeded, for in 1525 he was appointed Archbishop of Sens. They were, moreover, both of them, opposed to any liberal reform, and devoted, in any case, to absolute power.

Beaucaire de Peguilhem, a contemporary and most Catholic historian,--for he accompanied the Cardinal of Lorraine to the Council of Trent,--calls Duprat "the most vicious of bipeds." Such patrons did not lack hot-headed executants of their policy; friendly relations had not ceased between the Reformers and their adversaries; a Jacobin monk, De Roma by name, was conversing one day at Meaux with Farel and his friends; the Reformers expressed the hopes they had in the propagation of the gospel; De Roma all at once stood up, shouting, "Then I and all the rest of the brotherhood will preach a crusade we will stir up the people; and if the king permits the preaching of your gospel, we will have him expelled by his own subjects from his own kingdom." Fanatical pa.s.sions were already at work, though the parties were too unequal as yet to come to actual force.

Against such pa.s.sions the Reformers found Francis I. a very indecisive and very inefficient protector. "I wish," said he, "to give men of letters special marks of my favor." When deputies from the Sorbonne came and requested him to put down the publication of learned works taxed with heresy, "I do not wish," he replied, "to have those folks meddled with; to persecute those who instruct us would be to keep men of ability from coming to our country." But in spite of his language, orders were given to the bishops to furnish the necessary funds for the prosecution of heretics, and, when the charge of heresy became frequent, Francis I. no longer repudiated it. "Those people," he said, "do nothing but bring trouble into the state." Troubles, indeed, in otherwise tranquil provinces, where the Catholic faith was in great force, often accompanied the expression of those wishes for reform to which the local clergy themselves considered it necessary to make important concessions. A serious fire took place at Troyes in 1524. "It was put down," says M.

Boutiot, a learned and careful historian of that town, "to the account of the new religious notions, as well as to that of the Emperor Charles V.'s friends and the Constable de Bourbon's partisans. As early as 1520 there had begun to be felt at Troyes the first symptoms of repressive measures directed against the Reformation; in 1523, 1527, and 1528, provincial councils were held at Meaux, Lyons, Rouen, Bourges, and Paris, to oppose the Lutherans. These councils drew up regulations tending to reformation of morals and of religious ceremonies; they decided that the administration of the sacraments should take place without any demand for money, and that preachers, in their sermons, should confine themselves to the sacred books, and not quote poets or profane authors; they closed the churches to profane a.s.semblies and burlesques (fetes des fous); they ordered the parish priests, in their addresses (au p.r.o.ne), to explain the gospel of the day; they ruled that a stop should be put to the abuses of excommunication; they interdicted the publication of any book on religious subjects without the permission of the bishop of the diocese.

. . . Troyes at that time contained some enlightened men; William Bude (Budaeus) was in uninterrupted communication with it; the Pithou family, represented by their head, Peter Pithou, a barrister at Troyes and a man highly thought of, were in correspondence with the Reformers, especially with Lefevre of Etaples." [_Histoire de la Ville de Troyes et de la Champagne meridionale,_ by T. Boutiot, 1873, t. iii. p. 379.] And thus was going on throughout almost the whole of France, partly in the path of liberty, partly in that of concessions, partly in that of hardships, the work of the Reformation, too weak as yet and too disconnected to engage to any purpose in a struggle, but even now sufficiently wide-spread and strong to render abortive any attempt to strangle it.

The defeat at Pavia and the captivity of Francis I. at Madrid placed the governing power for thirteen months in the hands of the most powerful foes of the Reformation, the regent Louise of Savoy and the chancellor Duprat. They used it unsparingly, with the harsh indifference of politicians who will have, at any price, peace within their dominions and submission to authority. It was under their regimen that there took place the first martyrdom decreed and executed in France upon a partisan of the Reformation for an act of aggression and offence against the Catholic church. John Leclerc, a wool-carder at Meaux, seeing a bull of indulgences affixed to the door of Meaux cathedral, had torn it down, and subst.i.tuted for it a placard in which the pope was described as Antichrist. Having been arrested on the spot, he was, by decree of the Parliament of Paris, whipped publicly, three days consecutively, and branded on the forehead by the hangman in the presence of his mother, who cried, "Jesus Christ forever!" He was banished, and retired in July, 1525, to Metz; and there he was working at his trade when he heard that a solemn procession was to take place, next day, in the environs of the town. In his blind zeal he went and broke down the images at the feet of which the Catholics were to have burned incense. Being arrested on his return to the town, he, far from disavowing the deed, acknowledged it and gloried in it. He was sentenced to a horrible punishment; his right hand was cut off, his nose was torn out, pincers were applied to his arms, his nipples were plucked out, his head was confined in two circlets of red-hot iron, and, whilst he was still chanting, in a loud voice, this versicle from the cxvth Psalm,--

"Their idols are silver and gold, The work of men's hands."

his bleeding and mutilated body was thrown upon the blazing f.a.gots. He had a younger brother, Peter Leclerc, a simple wool-carder like himself, who remained at Meaux, devoted to the same faith and the same cause.

"Great _clerc,_" says a contemporary chronicler, playing upon his name, "who knew no language but that which he had learned from his nurse, but who, being thoroughly grounded in the holy writings, besides the integrity of his life, was chosen by the weavers and became the first minister of the gospel seen in France." An old man of Meaux, named Stephen Mangin, offered his house, situated near the market-place, for holding regular meetings. Forty or fifty of the faithful formed the nucleus of the little church which grew up. Peter Leclerc preached and administered the sacraments in Stephen Mangin's house so regularly that, twenty years after his brother John's martyrdom, the meetings, composed partly of believers who flocked in from the neighboring villages, were from three to four hundred in number. One day when they had celebrated the Lord's Supper, the 8th of September, 1546, the house was surrounded, and nearly sixty persons, men, women, and children, who allowed themselves to be arrested without making any resistance, were taken.

They were all sent before the Parliament of Paris; fourteen of the men were sentenced to be burned alive in the great marketplace at Meaux, on the spot nearest to the house in which the crime of heresy had been committed; and their wives, together with their nearest relatives, were sentenced to be present at the execution, "the men bare-headed and the women ranged beside them individually, in such sort that they might be distinguished amongst the rest." The decree was strictly carried out.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Burning of Reformers at Meaux----188]

It costs a pang to recur to these hideous exhibitions, but it must be done; for history not only has a right, but is bound to do justice upon the errors and crimes of the past, especially when the past had no idea of guilt in the commission of them. A wit of the last century, Champfort, used to say, "There is nothing more dangerous than an honest man engaged in a rascally calling." There is nothing more dangerous than errors and crimes of which the perpetrators do not see the absurd and odious character. The contemporary historian, Sleidan, says, expressly, "The common people in France hold that there are no people more wicked and criminal that heretics; generally, as long as they are a prey to the blazing f.a.gots, the people around them are excited to frenzy and curse them in the midst of their torments." The sixteenth century is that period of French history at which this intellectual and moral blindness cost France "Their idols are silver and gold, The work of men's hands,"-- most dear; it supplied the bad pa.s.sions of men with a means, of which they amply availed themselves, of gratifying then without scruple and without remorse. If, in the early part of this century, the Reformation was as yet without great leaders, it was not, nevertheless, amongst only the laborers, the humble and the poor, that it found confessors and martyrs. The provincial n.o.bility, the burgesses of the towns, the magistracy, the bar, the industrial cla.s.ses as well as the learned, even then furnished their quota of devoted and faithful friends. A n.o.bleman, a Picard by birth, born about 1490 at Pa.s.sy, near Paris, where he generally lived, Louis de Berquin by name, was one of the most distinguished of them by his social position, his elevated ideas, his learning, the purity of his morals, and the dignity of his life.

Possessed of a patrimonial estate, near Abbeville, which brought him in a modest income of six hundred crowns a year, and a bachelor, he devoted himself to study and to religious matters with independence of mind and with a pious heart. "Most faithfully observant," says Erasmus, "of the ordinances and rites of the church, to wit, prescribed fasts, holy days, forbidden meats, ma.s.ses, sermons, and, in a word, all, that tends to piety, he strongly reprobated the doctrines of Luther." He was none the less, in 1523, denounced to the Parliament of Paris as being on the side of the Reformers. He had books, it was said; he even composed them himself on questions of faith, and he had been engaged in some sort of dispute with the theologian William de Coutance, head of Harcourt College.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Erasmus----194]

The attorney-general of the Parliament ordered one of his officers to go and make an examination of Berquin's books as well as papers, and to seize what appeared to him to savor of heresy. The officer brought away divers works of Luther, Melancthon, and Carlostadt, and some original treatises of Berquin himself, which were deposited in the keeping of the court. The theological faculty claimed to examine them as being within their competence. On being summoned by the attorney-general, Berquin demanded to be present when an inventory was made of his books or ma.n.u.scripts, and to give such explanations as he should deem necessary; and his request was granted without question. On the 26th of June, 1523, the commissioners of the Sorbonne made their report. On the 8th of July, Peter Lizet, king's advocate, read it out to the court. The matter came on again for hearing on the 1st of August. Berquin was summoned and interrogated, and, as the result of this interrogatory, was arrested and carried off to imprisonment at the Conciergerie in the square tower. On the 5th of August sentence was p.r.o.nounced, and Louis de Berquin was remanded to appear before the Bishop of Paris, as being charged with heresy, "in which case," says the Journal d'un Bourgeois de Paris, "he would have been in great danger of being put to death according to law, as he had well deserved." The public were as ready as the accusers to believe in the crime and to impatiently await its punishment.

It was not without surprise or without displeasure that, on the 8th of August, just as they had "made over to the Bishop of Paris, present and accepting" the prisoner confined in the Conciergerie, the members of the council-chamber observed the arrival of Captain Frederic, belonging to the archers of the king's guard, and bringing a letter from the king, who changed the venue in Berquin's case so as to decide it himself at his grand council; in consequence of which the prisoner would have to be handed over, not to the bishop, but to the king. The chamber remonstrated; Berquin was no longer their prisoner; the matter had been decided; it was the bishop to whom application must be made. But these remonstrances had been foreseen; the captain had verbal instructions to carry off Louis de Berquin by force in case of a refusal to give him up.

The chamber decided upon handing over the bishop's prisoner to the king, contenting themselves with causing the seized books and ma.n.u.scripts to be burned that very day in the s.p.a.ce in front of Notre Dame. It was whilst repairing to the scene of war in Italy, and when he was just entering Melun, where he merely pa.s.sed through, that the king had given this unexpected order, on the very day, August 5, on which the Parliament p.r.o.nounced the decree which sent Berquin to appear before the Bishop of Paris. There is no clear trace of the vigilant protect, or who had so closely watched the proceedings against Berquin, and so opportunely appealed for the king's interference. In any incident of this sort there is a temptation to presume that the influence was that of Princess Marguerite; but it is not certain that she was at this time anywhere near the king; perhaps John du Bellay, Bishop of Bayonne, acted for her.

Francis I. was, moreover, disposed to extend protection, of his own accord, to gentlemen and scholars against furious theologians, when the latter were not too formidable for him. However that may be, Berquin, on becoming the king's prisoner, was summoned before the chancellor, Duprat, who, politely reproaching him with having disquieted the church, confined himself to requesting that he would testify some regret for it. Berquin submitted with a good grace, and, being immediately set at liberty, left Paris and repaired to his estate in Picardy.

Whilst he there resumed his life of peaceful study, the Parliament continued to maintain in principle and openly proclaim its right of repression against heretics. On the 12th of August, 1523, it caused notice to be given, by sound of trumpet, throughout the whole of Paris, that clergy and laymen were to deposit in the keeping of the Palace all Luther's books that they possessed. Laymen who did not comply with this order would have their property confiscated; clergymen would be deprived of their temporalities and banished. Toleration, in a case of suspected heresy, was an act of the king's which itself required toleration; proceedings against heresy remained the law of the land, constantly hanging over every head.

Eighteen months later, in May, 1525, there seemed to be no further thought about Berquin; but the battle of Pavia was lost; Francis I. was a prisoner at Madrid; Louise of Savoy and the chancellor, Duprat, wielded the power. The question of heretics again came to the front. "The queen must be told," said Peter Lizet, king's advocate, "as St. Gregory told Brunehaut, Queen of the Franks, that the best way of driving away the enemies of the kingdom is to drive away from it the enemies of G.o.d and His spouse, the Church." On the 10th of April, 1525, on occasion of giving the regent some counsel as to her government, the Parliament strongly recommended her to take proceedings against the heretics. "The court," they said to her, "has before now pa.s.sed several provisional decrees against the guilty, which have not been executed because of the evil disposition of the times and the hinderances effected by the delinquents, who have found means of suspending and delaying the judgments given against them, as well by transference of the venue to the grand council as by seizure and removal of certain of them, prisoners at the time, whom they have had withdrawn from their prisons by exercise of sovereign and absolute power, which has given the rest occasion and boldness to follow the evil doctrine." It was impossible to reproach the king more broadly with having set Berquin at liberty. The Parliament further advised the regent to ask the pope to send over to France pontifical delegates invested with his own powers to watch and to try in his name "even archbishops, bishops, and abbots, who by their deeds, writings, or discourses, should render themselves suspected of a leaning towards heresy." Louise of Savoy, without any appearance of being hurt by the attack made by the Parliament on the acts of the king her son, eagerly followed the advice given her; and on the 20th of May, 1525, Clement VII., in his turn, eagerly appointed four delegates commissioned to try all those suspected of heresy, who, in case of condemnation, were to be left to the secular arm. On the very day on which the pope appointed his delegates, the faculty of theology at Paris pa.s.sed censure upon divers writings of Erasmus, translated and spread abroad in France by Berquin; and on the 8th of January, 1526, the Bishop of Amiens demanded of the Parliament authority "to order the body to be seized of Louis de Berquin, who resided in his diocese and was scandalizing it by his behavior." The Parliament authorized his arrest; and, on the 24th of January, Berquin was once more a prisoner in the Conciergerie, at the same time that orders were given to seize all his books and papers, whether at his own house or at that of his friend the Lord of Rambure at Abbeville. The great trial of Berquin for heresy was recommenced, and in it the great name of Erasmus was compromised.

When the question was thus solemnly reopened, Berquin's defenders were much excited. Defenders, we have said; but, in truth, history names but one, the Princess Marguerite, who alone showed any activity, and alone did anything to the purpose. She wrote at once to the king, who was still at Madrid "My desire to obey your commands was sufficiently strong without having it redoubled by the charity you have been pleased to show to poor Berquin according to your promise; I feel sure that He for whom I believe him to have suffered will approve of the mercy which, for His honor, you have had upon His servant and yours." Francis I. had, in fact, written to suspend until his return the proceedings against Berquin, as well as those against Lefevre, Roussel, and all the other doctors suspected of heresy. The regent transmitted the king's orders to the pope's delegates, who presented themselves on the 20th of February before the Parliament to ask its advice. "The king is as badly advised as he himself is good," said the dean of the faculty of theology. The Parliament answered that "for a simple letter missive" it could not adjourn; it must have a letter patent; and it went on with the trial.

Berquin presented several demands for delay, evidently in order to wait for the king's return and personal intervention. The court refused them; and, on the 5th of March, 1526, the judgment was read to him in his prison at the Conciergerie. It was to the effect that his books should be again burned before his eyes, that he should declare his approval of so just a sentence, and that he should earn the compa.s.sion of the church by not refusing her any satisfaction she might demand; else he should himself go to the stake.

Whilst Berquin's trial was thus coming to an end, Francis I. was entering France once more in freedom, crying, "So I am king again!" During the latter days of March, amongst the numerous personages who came to congratulate him was John de Selve, premier president of the Parliament of Paris. The king gave him a very cold reception. "My lords," wrote the premier president to his court, "I heard, through M. de Selve, my nephew, about some displeasure that was felt as regards our body, and I also perceived it myself. I have already begun to speak of it to Madame [the king's mother]. I will do, as I am bound to, my duty towards the court, with G.o.d's help." On the 1st of April the king, who intended to return by none but slow stages to Paris, wrote from Mont-de-Marsan, to the judges holding his court of Parliament at Paris:--

"We have presently been notified how that, notwithstanding that, through our dear and much-loved lady and mother, regent in France during our absence, it was written unto you and ordered that you would be pleased not to proceed in any way whatever with the matter of Sieur Berquin, lately detained a prisoner, until we should have been enabled to return to this our kingdom, you have, nevertheless, at the request and pursuance of his ill-wishers, so far proceeded with his business that you have come to a definitive judgment on it. Whereat we cannot be too much astounded.

. . . For this cause we do will and command and enjoin upon you . .

that you are not to proceed to execution of the said judgment, which, as the report is, you have p.r.o.nounced against the said Berquin, but shall put him, himself and the depositions and the proceedings in his said trial, in such safe keeping that you may be able to answer to us for them. . . . And take care that you make no default therein, for we do warn you that, if default there be, we shall look to such of you as shall seem good to us to answer to us for it."

Here was not only a letter patent, but a letter minatory. As to the execution of their judgment, the Parliament obeyed the king's injunction, maintaining, however, the principle as well as the legality of Berquin's sentence, and declaring that they awaited the king's orders to execute it. "According to the teaching of the two Testaments," they said, "G.o.d ever rageth, in His just wrath, against the nations who fail to enforce respect for the laws prescribed by Himself. It is important, moreover, to hasten the event in order as soon as possible to satisfy, independently of G.o.d, the people who murmur and whose impatience is becoming verily troublesome." Francis I. did not reply. He would not have dared, even in thought, to attack the question of principle as to the chastis.e.m.e.nt of heresy, and he was afraid of weakening his own Authority too much if he humiliated his Parliament too much; it was sufficient for him that he might consider Berquin's life to be safe.

Kings are protectors who are easily satisfied when their protection, to be worth anything, might entail upon them the necessity of an energetic struggle and of self-compromise. "Trust not in princes nor their children," said Lord Strafford, after the Psalmist [_Nolite confidere principibus et filiis eorum, quia non est sales in illis,_ Ps. cxlvi.], when, in the seventeenth century, he found that Charles I. was abandoning him to the English Parliament and the executioner. Louis de Berquin might have felt similar distrust as to Francis I., but his nature was confident and hopeful; when he knew of the king's letter to the Parliament, he considered himself safe, and he testified as much to Erasmus in a long letter, in which he told him the story of his trial, and alluded to "the fresh outbreak of anger on the part of those hornets who accuse me of heresy," said he, "simply because I have translated into the vulgar tongue some of your little works, wherein they pretend that they have discovered the most monstrous pieces of impiety." He transmitted to Erasmus a list of the paragraphs which the pope's delegates had condemned, pressing him to reply, "as you well know how.

The king esteems you much, and will esteem you still more when you have heaped confusion on this brood of benighted theologians whose inept.i.tude is no excuse for their violence." By a strange coincidence, Berquin's most determined foe, Noel Beda, provost of the Sorbonne, sent at the same time to Erasmus a copy of more than two hundred propositions which had been extracted from his works, and against which he, Beda, also came forward as accuser. Erasmus was a prudent man, and did not seek strife; but when he was personally and offensively attacked by enemies against whom he was conscious of his strength, he exhibited it proudly and ably; and he replied to Beda by denouncing him, on the 6th of June, to the Parliament of Paris itself, as an impudent and ignorant calumniator. His letter, read at the session of Parliament on the 5th of July, 1526, was there listened to with profound deference, and produced a sensation which did not remain without effect; in vain did Beda persist in accusing Erasmus of heresy and in maintaining that he was of the brotherhood of Luther; Parliament considered him in the wrong, provisionally prohibited the booksellers from vending his libels against Erasmus, and required previous authorization to be obtained for all books destined for the press by the rectors of the Sorbonne.

The success of Erasmus was also a success for Berquin; but he was still in prison, ill and maltreated. The king wrote on the 11th of July to Parliament to demand that he should enjoy at least all the liberties that the prison would admit of, that he should no longer be detained in an unhealthy cell, and that he should be placed in that building of the Conciergerie where the court-yard was. "That," was the answer, "would be a bad precedent; they never put in the court-yard convicts who had incurred the penalty of death." An offer was made to Berquin of the chamber reserved for the greatest personages, for princes of the blood, and of permission to walk in the court-yard for two hours a day, one in the morning and the other in the evening, in the absence of the other prisoners. Neither the king nor Berquin was inclined to be content with these concessions. The king in his irritation sent from Beaugency, on the 5th of October, two archers of his guard with a letter to this effect: "It is marvellously strange that what we ordered has not yet been done. We do command and most expressly enjoin upon you, this once for all, that you are incontinently to put and deliver the said Berquin into the hands of the said Texier and Charles do Broc, whom we have ordered to conduct him to our castle of the Louvre." The court still objected; a prisoner favored by so high a personage, it was said, would soon be out of such a prison. The objection resulted in a formal refusal to obey.

The provost of Paris, John de la Barre, the king's premier gentleman, was requested to repair to the palace and pay Berquin a visit, to ascertain from himself what could be done for him. Berquin, for all that appears, asked for nothing but liberty to read and write. "It is not possible,"

was the reply; "such liberty is never granted to those who are condemned to death." As a great favor, Berquin was offered a copy of the Letters of St. Jerome and some volumes of history; and the provost had orders not to omit that fact in his report: "The king must be fully a.s.sured that the court do all they can to please him."