CENTURY OF TOLERATION IN FRANCE: REACTION.
The Church forfeited the wizard's property to the judge and the
prosecutor. Wherever the Canon Law was enforced the trials for
witchcraft waxed numerous, and brought much wealth to the clergy.
Wherever the lay tribunals claimed the management of these trials they
grew scarce and disappeared, at least for a hundred years in France,
from 1450 to 1550.
The first gleam of light shot forth from France in the middle of the
fifteenth century. The inquiry made by Parliament into the trial of
Joan of Arc, and her after reinstalment, set people thinking on the
intercourse of spirits, good and bad; on the errors, also, of the
spiritual courts. She whom the English, whom the greatest doctors of
the Council of Basil pronounced a Witch, appeared to Frenchmen a saint
and sibyl. Her reinstalment proclaimed to France the beginning of an
age of toleration. The Parliament of Paris likewise reinstalled the
alleged Waldenses of Arras. In 1498 it discharged as mad one who was
brought before it as a wizard. None such were condemned in the reigns
of Charles VIII., Louis XII., and Francis I.
* * * * *
On the contrary, Spain, under the pious Isabella (1506) and the
Cardinal Ximenes, began burning witches. In 1515, Geneva, being then
under a Bishop, burned five hundred in three months. The Emperor
Charles V., in his German Constitutions, vainly sought to rule, that
"Witchcraft, as causing damage to goods and persons, is a question for
_civil_, not ecclesiastic law." In vain did he do away the right of
confiscation, except in cases of treason. The small prince-bishops,
whose revenues were largely swelled by trials for witchcraft, kept on
burning at a furious rate. In one moment, as it were, six hundred
persons were burnt in the infinitesimal bishopric of Bamberg, and nine
hundred in that of Wurtzburg. The way of going to work was very
simple. Begin by using torture against the witnesses; create witnesses
for the prosecution by means of pain and terror; then, by dint of
excessive kindliness, draw from the accused a certain avowal, and
believe that avowal in the teeth of proven facts. A witch, for
instance, owns to having taken from the graveyard the body of an
infant lately dead, that she might use it in her magical compounds.
Her husband bids them go the graveyard, for the child is there still.
On being disinterred, the child is found all right in his coffin. But
against the witness of his own eyes the judge pronounces it _an
appearance_, a cheat of the Devil. He prefers the wife's confession to
the fact itself; and she is burnt forthwith.[77]
[77] For this and other facts regarding Germany, see Soldan.
So far did matters go among these worthy prince-bishops, that after a
while, Ferdinand II., the most bigoted of all emperors, the emperor of
the Thirty Years' War, was fain to interfere, to set up at Bamberg an
imperial commissary, who should maintain the law of the empire, and
see that the episcopal judge did not begin the trial with tortures
which settled it beforehand, which led straight to the stake.
* * * * *
Witches were easily caught by their confessions, sometimes without the
torture. Many of them were half mad. They would own to turning
themselves into beasts. The Italian women often became cats, and
gliding under the doors, sucked, they said, the blood of children. In
the land of mighty forests, in Lorraine and on the Jura, the women, of
their own accord, became wolves, and, if you could believe them,
devoured the passers by, even when nobody had passed by. They were
burnt. Some girls, who swore they had given themselves to the Devil,
were found to be maidens still. They, too, were burnt. Several seemed
in a great hurry, as if they wanted to be burnt. Sometimes it happened
from raging madness, sometimes from despair. An Englishwoman being led
to the stake, said to the people, "Do not blame my judges. I wanted to
put an end to my own self. My parents kept aloof from me in their
dread. My husband had disowned me. I could not have lived on without
disgrace. I longed for death, and so I told a lie."
The first words of open toleration against silly Sprenger, his
frightful Handbook, and his Inquisitors, were spoken by Molitor, a
lawyer of Constance. He made this sensible remark, that the
confessions of witches should not be taken seriously, because it was
the very Father of Lies who spoke by their mouths. He laughed at the
miracles of Satan, affirming them to be all illusory. In an indirect
way, such jesters as Hutten and Erasmus dealt violent blows at the
Inquisition, through their satires on the Dominican idiots. Cardan[78]
said, straightforwardly, "In order to obtain forfeit property, the
same persons acted as accusers and judges, and invented a thousand
stories in proof."
[78] A famous Italian physician, who lived through the
greater part of the sixteenth century.--TRANS.
That apostle of toleration, Chatillon, who maintained against
Catholics and Protestants both, that heretics should not be burnt,
though he said nothing about wizards, put men of sense in a better
way. Agrippa,[79] Lavatier, above all, Wyer[80]] the illustrious
physician of Clèves, rightly said that if those wretched witches were
the Devil's plaything, we must lay the blame on the Devil, not on
them; must cure, instead of burning them. Some physicians of Paris
soon pushed incredulity so far as to maintain that the possessed and
the witches were simply knaves. This was going too far. Most of them
were sufferers under the sway of an illusion.
[79] Cornelius Agrippa, of Cologne, born in 1486, sometime
Secretary of the Emperor Maximilian, and author of two works
famous in their day, _Vanity of the Sciences_, and _Occult
Philosophy_.--TRANS.
[80] A friend of Sir Philip Sydney, who sent for him when
dying.--TRANS.
The dark reign of Henry II. and Diana of Poitiers ends the season of
toleration. Under Diana, they burn heretics and wizards again. On the
other hand, Catherine of Medici, surrounded as she was by astrologers
and magicians, would have protected the latter. Their numbers
increased amain. The wizard Trois-Echelles, who was tried in the reign
of Charles IX., reckons them at a hundred thousand, declaring all
France to be one Witch.
Agrippa and others affirm, that all science is contained in magic. In
white magic undoubtedly. But the fears of fools and their fanatic
rage, put little difference between them. In spite of Wyer, in spite
of those true philosophers, Light and Toleration, a strong reaction
towards darkness set in from a quarter whence it was least expected.
Our magistrates, who for nearly a century, had shown themselves
enlightened and fair-dealing, now threw themselves into the Spanish
Catholicon[81] and the fury of the Leaguists,[82] until they waxed
more priest-like than the priests themselves. While scouting the
Inquisition from France, they matched, and well-nigh eclipsed it by
their own deeds: the Parliament of Toulouse alone sending four hundred
human bodies at one time to the stake. Think of the horror, the black
smoke of all that flesh, of the frightful melting and bubbling of the
fat amidst those piercing shrieks and yells! So accursed, so sickening
a sight had not been seen, since the Albigenses were broiled and
roasted.
[81] Catholicon, or purgative panacea: _i. e._ the
Inquisition.--TRANS.
[82] The wars of the Catholic League against Henry of Navarre
began in 1576.--TRANS.
But this is all too little for Bodin, lawyer of Angers, and a violent
adversary to Wyer. He begins by saying that the wizards in Europe are
numerous enough to match Xerxes' army of eighteen hundred thousand
men. Then, like Caligula, he utters a prayer, that these two millions
might be gathered together, so as he, Bodin, could sentence and burn
them all at one stroke.
* * * * *
The new rivalry makes matters worse. The gentry of the Law begin to
say that the priest, being too often connected with the wizard, is no
longer a safe judge. In fact, for a moment, the lawyers seem to be yet
more trustworthy. In Spain, the Jesuit pleader, Del Rio; in Lorraine,
Remy (1596); Boguet (1602) on the Jura; Leloyer (1605) in Anjou; are
all matchless persecutors, who would have made Torquemada[83] himself
die of envy.
[83] The infamous Spanish Inquisitor, who died at the close
of the fifteenth century, after sixteen years of untold
atrocities against the heretics of Spain.--TRANS.
In Lorraine there seemed to be quite a dreadful plague of wizards and
visionaries. Driven to despair by the constant passing of troops and
brigands, the multitude prayed to the Devil only. They were drawn on
by the wizards. A number of villagers, frightened by a twofold dread
of wizards on the one hand, and judges on the other, longed to leave
their homes and flee elsewhither, if Remy, Judge of Nancy, may be
believed. In the work he dedicated (1596) to the Cardinal of Lorraine,
he owns to having burnt eight hundred witches, in sixteen years. "So
well do I deal out judgements," he says, "that last year sixteen slew
themselves to avoid passing through my hands."
* * * * *
The priests felt humbled. Could they have done better than the laity?
Nay, even the monkish lords of Saint Claude asked for a layman, honest
Boguet, to sit in judgment on their own people, who were much given to
witchcraft. In that sorry Jura, a poor land of firs and scanty
pasturage, the serf in his despair yielded himself to the Devil. They
all worshipped the Black Cat.
Boguet's book had immense weight. This Golden Book, by the petty judge
of Saint Claude, was studied as a handbook by the worshipful members
of Parliament. In truth, Boguet is a thorough lawyer, is even
scrupulous in his own way. He finds fault with the treachery shown in
these prosecutions; will not hear of barristers betraying their
clients, of judges promising pardon only to ensure the death of the
accused. He finds fault with the very doubtful tests to which the
witches were still exposed. "Torture," he says, "is needless: it never
makes them yield." Moreover, he is humane enough to have them
strangled before throwing them to the flames, always except the
werewolves, "whom you must take care to burn alive." He cannot believe
that Satan would make a compact with children: "Satan is too sharp;
knows too well that, under fourteen years, any bargain made with a
minor, is annulled by default of years and due discretion." Then the
children are saved? Not at all; for he contradicts himself, and holds,
moreover, that such a leprosy cannot be purged away without burning
everything, even to the cradles. Had he lived, he would have come to
that. He made the country a desert: never was there a judge who
destroyed people with so fine a conscience.
But it is to the Parliament of Bourdeaux that the grand hurrah for lay
jurisdiction is sent up in Lancre's book on _The Fickleness of
Demons_. The author, a man of some sense, a counsellor in this same
Parliament, tells with a triumphant air of his fight with the Devil in
the Basque country, where, in less than three months, he got rid of I
know not how many witches, and, better still, of three priests. He
looks compassionately on the Spanish Inquisition, which at Logroño,
not far off, on the borders of Navarre and Castille, dragged on a
trial for two years, ending in the poorest way by a small
_auto-da-fé_, and the release of a whole crowd of women.