THE REFORMATION
The Reformation occurred simultaneously with the political revolution;
and the informal historian, who is under no compulsion to take a side,
is inevitably impressed less by the piety of the Reformers than by
their uproarious behaviour. Their leader--the ringleader in their
disturbances--was Farel, a hot-headed Frenchman from Gap, in Dauphiné.
He hounded the people on to wreck the churches; he invaded the pulpits
of other preachers without invitation, and confuted them therefrom; he
once broke up an ecclesiastical procession, and, snatching an image
out of the priest’s hand, threw it over the bridge into the river.
Moreover, as was natural, he included among his devoted followers many
evangelists whose zeal was, like his own, conspicuously in excess of
their discretion. Of one of them, Pastor Malingre of Yverdon, it is
recorded by a contemporary chronicler that ‘his methods were not very
evangelical--he used to crown the Roman Catholic priests with cow-dung.’
Reform was already in the air when Farel came to Geneva to preach. The
new doctrine had been bruited abroad by pedlars from Nuremberg, who ate
meat on Fridays, and expressed the opinion that ‘the members of the
religious Orders ought to be set to work in the fields, that the saints
were dead and done for, and that it was nonsense to pray to them,
seeing that they could render no assistance.’ So we read in Bonivard’s
‘Chronicle’; but, even so, Geneva was not quite prepared to receive
Farel with open arms. He was haled before an ecclesiastical court,
and accused of preaching the Gospel in an inappropriate costume--‘got
up like a gendarme or a brigand.’ One burly monk gave him a ‘coup de
pied, quelque part,’ and the monks collectively proposed to throw him
into the Rhone; and, though the laity protected him from clerical
violence, the Syndic ordered him to quit the town within six hours, as
an alternative to being burnt alive. He went, and three years passed
before he returned and triumphed in a theological disputation held in
the great hall of the Couvent de la Rive.
The result of that disputation was, as has been written, that
‘religious liberty was taken away from the Roman Catholics and given
to the Protestants.’ The celebration of the Mass, so recently a solemn
duty, now became a high crime and misdemeanour; and the victorious
Reformers proceeded, like the French anti-clericals of our own day, to
the expulsion of monks and nuns. The first to go were the Sisters of
the Convent of Sainte-Claire, founded in 1476 by Yolande, wife of Duke
Amadeus IX. of Savoy and sister of Louis XI. of France. We have a full
account of their ejection from the pen of one of them, Sister Jeanne de
Jussie, afterwards Lady Superior of a convent at Annecy.