POISONING OF THE REFORMERS—CONVERSION OF THE HEAD OF THE FRANCISCANS.
(SPRING, 1535.)
[Sidenote: ULTRAMONTANE PLOTS.]
The ultramontanes were more zealous than ever. Many would only employ
lawful arms; but there were some who were by no means scrupulous as to
the means adopted to vanquish the enemies of Rome. Fanatics make a false
conscience for themselves, and then look upon culpable actions as good
ones. Empire was slipping from the hands of the Church; it must, at any
cost, be restored to her, thought the extravagant Roman-catholics of
Geneva. Canon Gruet, in particular—his _famulus_, Gardet the priest, and
Barbier, in the service of the bishop of Maurienne, thought that, as
neither duke, bishop, nor mameluke could do anything, other means must
be devised to check that furious torrent which threatened to sweep away
papacy, temples, priests, and images. Fanatics, whom the wise men of
catholicism are unanimous in condemning, were plotting in the dark and
muttering softly that as Farel, Viret, and Froment were all living in
the same house, they could easily be got rid of at one blow. Some
inkling of these guilty designs got abroad, and the Reformers were
warned to be on their guard; but such plots did not trouble them. 'If we
were all three dead,' said Froment, 'God would soon raise up others. Out
of stones can He not raise up children unto Abraham?' The work of
darkness began.[494]
There lived in Geneva at that time a married woman and mother of a
family, Antonia Vax by name; she was of quick perception, melancholy
temperament, enthusiastic imagination, weak rather than depraved. In
those days poison was much used; Bonivard had often related, 'how pope
Alexander VI., wishing to have the money and benefices of two or three
cardinals, had drunk in mistake from the flagon in which stood the
poisoned wine, and had been caught in his own trap.' Antonia had seen
poison employed. When in service at Lyons, nine years before, she had
remarked that one of her companions always carried with him a little box
piously covered with an _Agnus Dei_: 'It contains sublimate,' he had
told her. More than once after this, when the unfortunate woman, of dark
and dreamy temperament, felt the vapors rise to her brain, she had cried
out: 'How wretched I am! how I should like to be out of this world! If I
only had some sublimate!' At Bourg she had seen her mistress, in
complicity with a Spanish doctor, give her husband poison; and entering
afterwards the household of an illustrious family, the Seigneur de
Challe, nephew to the bishop of Maurienne, she had seen her master
poison his mother's husband. After this Antonia came to Geneva with her
husband and children.[495]
[Sidenote: ANTONIA AND THE PRIESTS.]
Barbier, one of the chief instigators of the plot, had known Antonia
when she was in M. de Challe's service. On his return from a conference
held at Thonon, he cast his eyes upon her to carry out the guilty
designs formed by him and his accomplices. At Geneva, as in England, it
was a woman whom the misguided priests selected to strike the blow which
they hoped would destroy the Reformation. Neither of those wretched
women was deprived of all moral sentiment; but the heated imaginations
of the maid of Kent and of Antonia, and their unhealthy sensibility,
made them embrace enthusiastically the schemes of wicked and crafty men.
Barbier accosted the woman Vax, spoke to her of the preachers, and of
the ills which threatened Holy Church; and when he thought he had
sufficiently prepared the ground, he represented to her the great
service she would do to religion, if she freed Geneva from the heretics.
'If any suspicions should be aroused,' he added, 'you will only have to
remove to Canon Gruet's, secretary to Monseigneur of Maurienne.' Antonia
hesitated. Some monks of the abbey of Ambournay, in Bresse, whom she had
known, and who were then at Geneva, got round her, and endeavored to
persuade her that such an action would merit the glory of heaven. She
appeared sensible to their persuasions, and yet the deed was repugnant
to her. To decide her, Barbier took her to D'Orsière, a canon held in
great esteem. 'Act, act boldly,' said the canon; 'you need not be
anxious.' The unhappy woman yielded.[496]
The next step was to prepare the means: by representing her as a poor
woman who fled to Geneva for the Gospel, they contrived to get her
admitted into Claude Bernard's house, where Farel, Viret, and Froment
lodged. Bernard's heart was touched, and he engaged Antonia to wait upon
his three guests, who took their meals apart. She knew so well how to
play her part, that she was in fact regarded as one of the more fervent
seekers of the Gospel. To procure poison was not difficult: she had
lived for some time with Michael Vallot, the apothecary, and continued
to go there. One day she paid him a visit, and, at a propitious moment,
caught up some poison in a box and ran away.
When the poison was in her hands, she had still (as it would appear) a
moment of uneasiness; but the wretches, whose tool she was, pressed her
to deliver Geneva from heresy. Accordingly, on the 8th of March,
Antonia, taking courage, prepared some spinach soup, which she made very
thick, for fear the poison should be noticed, threw in the sublimate,
and, entering the room where Farel, Viret, and Froment were at table,
put the deadly broth before them. Farel looked at it, found it too thick
for his taste, and, though he had no suspicion, asked for some household
soup. Froment, less dainty than Farel, had taken the spoon, and was
about to lift it to his mouth, when some one came in and informed him
that his wife and children had just arrived in Geneva. He rose hastily,
'leaving everything,' and ran off to meet them. Viret was left, still
pale and suffering from the sword-cut he had received from a priest near
Payerne. The perfidious Antonia had told him that she would make him
some soup 'good for his stomach,' and he therefore ate tranquilly the
food she had 'dressed to kill him.'[497]
The crime was accomplished. If the good providence of God had
miraculously saved two of the evangelists, the third was to all
appearance lost. At this moment the wretched woman suddenly became
agitated; her conscience reproached her with her crime; and bursting
into tears, she ran hurriedly to the kitchen, where she began to moan.
'What is the matter with you?' asked her companions: but she made no
answer. Unable to resist her remorse, and believing pure water to be a
good antidote to the poison, she formed the resolution of saving her
victim, poured some water into a glass, hurried up-stairs, and desired
Viret to drink it. The latter was astonished, and wanted at least to
know the reason of such a request. She refused to tell him, but did not
cease begging him until he had drunk. Froment, much irritated against
the woman, regarded her emotion as 'mere crocodile's tears;' he says so
in his Chronicle. We are inclined to believe them sincere.
[Sidenote: FLIGHT OF ANTONIA.]
Viret became ill, and his friends were heart-broken. 'Alas!' said
Froment, 'we expect death for him, and not life.' People asked the cause
of this sudden illness, and Antonia, suspected of knowing something
about it, was seized with terror. She felt herself already caught and
sentenced. 'I know very well that it is no _sport_,' she exclaimed. Her
imagination was heated; she went to the house where her children lived,
and, taking the youngest in her arms, leading a second by the hand, the
others following her, she ran with alarm to the shore of the lake,
wishing to escape, and her little ones with her. 'Take me away from the
city,' she said to the boatmen. They carried her as far as Coppet, about
three leagues off. Claude Bernard and one or two of his friends, who had
reasons for mistrusting the woman, jumped into a boat, and, having found
her, brought her back. They did not, however, charge her with anything;
but her conscience accused her: her agitation kept increasing during the
passage; and her haggard eyes were fixed upon her old master, his
friends, and the boatmen. 'You are betraying me,' she said: 'you are
playing me a trick.' At length they arrived. Antonia got out of the boat
first, and while Bernard and his friends were occupied in landing the
children, she slipped away lightly, plunged into a dark alley between
the Molard and the Fusterie, hurried through it, climbed the Rue de la
Pélisserie, and reached the house of Canon D'Orsière, who had said to
her: 'Act, act boldly, you need not be anxious.'—'Save me!' she
exclaimed. The canon hid her in his cellar. But some people had seen a
woman pass hurriedly along: the officers of justice searched the canon's
house, found Antonia crouching in a dark underground cellar, and took
her away to prison, where she confessed everything.
Meanwhile Viret was in peril of death, and, as there was no woman at
Bernard's to tend him, Dame Pernette, a pious Christian, and wife of the
councillor Michael Balthasard, begged that he might be removed to her
house, which was done. Froment, who went to see him often, said:
'Really, Dame Pernette is doing him a great service, and showing him
great kindness.' One doctor said he was poisoned, another denied it. The
whole city was filled with the affair: men and women assembled and
expressed their sorrow. 'Must the Church be robbed of such a pearl,'
they said, 'by such a miserable creature?... Poor Viret! Poor
reformers!... Sword-cuts in the back, poison in front.... Such are the
rewards of those who preach the Gospel!' Viret was saved, but he felt
the effects of the poison all his life.[498]
The investigation began on the 13th of April. Antonia was not of a
character to conceal her crime: the _vénéfique_, as they called the
poisoner, declared openly she was led into it by the 'round caps (the
clergy).'[499] The priests, and even the canon who had ruined her, were
arrested and taken to prison. A canon arrested by laymen! All the clergy
were in commotion: Aimé de Gingins, the bishop's vicar-general,
represented to the syndics that a canon ought not to be imprisoned by
anybody, not being a subject of the State, but only of the chapter. The
magistrates declared that the investigation of criminal matters belonged
to them, and the priests were forced to submit to be tried according to
the common law—a great innovation in the sixteenth century.
[Sidenote: EXECUTION OF ANTONIA.]
Antonia was condemned to have her head cut off, her body hung on the
gibbet of Champel, and her head fixed on a nail. At first she remained
firm. 'Take care, my lords,' she said, 'that your servants do not poison
you, for there are many who practise it.' But when she had returned to
prison, she became quite prostrated. Pale and speechless, she rolled her
haggard eyes around her. It was still worse when she was led to the
place of execution. Her mind wandered: she was like one of those
personages spoken of in antiquity, who were said to be pursued by the
Furies. Although surrounded by an immense crowd, she did not observe it:
her eyes seemed fixed on some mysterious beings. She fancied she saw the
priests of Geneva and the monks of Ambournay standing round her. 'Take
them away, take them away!' she exclaimed, waving her hand; and as the
guards showed by their looks of astonishment that they did not know what
she meant, 'Take them away,' she resumed, pointing with her finger at
what she believed she saw; 'in heaven's name take away those
_round-caps_ who are before me; ... it is they who are the cause of my
death!' Having mounted the scaffold, she cried out again in great
anguish: 'Take them away!' and her head fell.[500] She paid dearly for
her crime—a crime too frequent in those days, when fanatics thought it
their duty to serve by violence the cause which they said was the cause
of God. The adversaries of the Reformation, in the countries which it
reached, have too frequently employed the arms of iniquity against it.
The guilty project of getting rid of the three Reformers at once had the
opposite consequences to what its authors had hoped. The atrocity of the
attempt increased the love of the people for the Reform, and detracted
greatly from the reputation of the priests. The most sinister reports
were circulated about them. It was said that they had tried to poison
the bread and wine of the Lord's Supper, in order to cut off all the
reformed at a blow. People shrank from them in the streets as they
passed, as if their simple approach could inflict death.[501]
All Geneva was in commotion: a transformation of that little state
became imminent. At this time ambitious popes and despotic princes
exercised absolute power. Two kinds of enfranchisement were necessary
for Christendom: that of the nation and that of the Church. The Genevese
sought after both: some rallied round the banner of faith, others round
that of liberty; but the more enlightened minds saw that these two holy
causes should never be separated; and that the political awakening of a
nation can only succeed so far as the awakening of the conscience tends
to prevent disorder.[502] In no country, perhaps, were these two
movements so simultaneous as in Geneva. Certain natural phenomena are
studied in microscopic animalcules: a moral phenomenon may be
illustrated in the history of this small city which may be enunciated in
these words: 'He who desires to be free must believe.'[503]
The Gospel, however, was not as yet triumphant. While the
Roman-catholics always had their parishes, their churches, and numerous
priests, the reformed had but one place of worship, and three ministers.
Such a state of things could not last long. An important event occurred
to hasten the victory of the Gospel and of liberty.
[Sidenote: JACQUES BERNARD CONVERTED.]
At the very moment when a pious reformer was descending near to the
gates of death, the head of the Franciscans in Geneva was taking the new
road 'that leadeth unto life.' The three brothers Bernard—Claude, the
elder, in whose house the reformers received a Christian hospitality;
Louis, priest of St. Pierre; and Jacques, guardian or superior of the
Franciscan convent—were among the most notable citizens of Geneva. The
two elder had for some time embraced the Reform; but the third, a monk,
had remained a zealot for popery. Ere long he himself was shaken. Seeing
the three ministers closely at his brother Claude's, he learnt by their
life to esteem their doctrine, and their virtues struck him so much the
more, as he had lived in popery a life by no means regular himself. He
examined himself seriously whether he would not do well to renounce
monasticism.[504] The light of the Gospel began to shine into his heart.
Nothing struck him so much as the thought that Christ, in his great
love, had procured for his followers by his death a _perfect_
reconciliation with God. The character which popery ascribed to the mass
appeared to him to do injury to the infinite price of the Saviour's
passion. 'I am convinced,' said he to Farel, at the end of one of their
conversations. 'I am one of you!'—'Good!' answered the reformer, 'but if
faith is kindled in your heart, it is necessary that the light should be
shown abroad. Confess your faith publicly before men.' Jacques was
determined not to spare himself, and not only to declare for the Gospel,
but, further, to endeavor to make it known to his fellow-citizens. He
posted up bills on February 19th, that during Lent he would preach every
afternoon in the convent church.
This was something new: a numerous crowd filled the place. 'Men and
women, catholics and Lutherans, crowded in,' says the nun of Ste.
Claire, 'and that during all the first week.' Some fancied that the
guardian was going to thunder against the Reform; but all doubts were
soon dispersed. He spoke, and the astonishment was universal. The
reformed were surprised at seeing one who formerly had rejected so
rudely the grace of Christ, now rushing like a common soldier into the
midst of the battle and defending it. The catholics were still more
amazed. 'This scandalized them so much,' adds the sister, 'that they
never went afterwards.'[505] It seemed impossible to come to an
understanding, and the confusion continued increasing.
How could they get out of a struggle which looked as if it would never
end? There appeared one very natural means which does honor to the epoch
in which men had recourse to it. The magistrates of the sixteenth
century, whether in Switzerland or elsewhere, studied their charters
when there was a question of establishing what was right, and
assimilated the principles which had dictated them. But their love of
the right was not a platonic love, as among enervated jurists. These
notable men wished to realize in the government of the people what was
in its constitution. Now if the book of the _Liberties, Franchises,
Immunities, Uses, and Customs_ of Geneva was the charter of the state,
the _Holy Scriptures_ were the charter of the Church: the Bible was the
grand muniment of their spiritual franchises. Nothing must be decided,
therefore, except by this sovereign rule.[506] While such thoughts
occupied the syndics, the same desire animated the Reformers. 'We will
forfeit our lives,' they said, 'if we do not prove by Holy Scripture
that what we preach is true.' A conference, at which, with the divine
charter before them, the faith, duties, and rights of Christians should
be established, seemed the wisest way of getting out of the difficulty.
[Sidenote: A PUBLIC DISCUSSION DEMANDED.]
One thing stopped the members of the council: they were reluctant that
foreigners—two Frenchmen and a Vaudois—should be at the head of the
disputation. Farel respected such a feeling, and desired that the name
of an old Genevan should be inscribed first in Geneva on the list of the
Reformation. He went to Jacques Bernard: 'Brother,' said he, 'it is
necessary that your change of life should turn to the edification of the
people.[507] Write down some propositions; announce that you are ready
to answer all men in a public disputation, and defend your theses by
clear and manifest reasons. They would refuse us this favor, for we are
foreigners; but you are a citizen of Geneva,[508] and superior of an
important order. They will grant your request.' The recent epoch of
Bernard's conversion, his want of Christian experience, the annoyances,
the dangers to which he would be exposed, might have induced him to
refuse this demand. But he knew that in the new life on which he had
entered, the rule was, that every one, forgetful of himself, should work
for the good of others; and that with regard to his insufficiency, God
would provide. The head of the Cordeliers asked the council's permission
to maintain publicly the evangelical doctrine in a conference to which
all the learned in the city and abroad should be invited. The syndics,
who desired that the Reformation should be accomplished by reason and
not by force, granted his prayer, and everything was got ready for this
important action. For a long time Geneva had seen the parties armed from
head to foot, crossing their swords and halberds: now minds were to be
ranged in battle-array, and the spiritual combat would, to all
appearance, decide the future of the Reformation.
[494] Froment, _Gestes de Genève_, p. 94.
[495] Froment, _Gestes de Genève_, p. 95.—Le Curé Besson, _Mémoires du
Diocèse de Genève et de Maurienne_, p. 303.—Sommaire des aveux d'Antoina
(Archives de Berne). Gaberel, i., Pièces, p. 80.
[496] Sommaire de ce que la poisonnière a confessé entre les mains de la
justice. (Archives de Berne.)—Gaberel, Pièces, p. 80.
[497] Sommaire de ce que la poisonnière a confessé entre les mains de la
justice. (Archives de Berne.)—Gaberel, Pièces, p. 80.
[498] Froment, _Gestes de Genève_, pp. 104, 105.—Chron. MSC. de Roset,
liv. iii. ch. 21.
[499] Chron. MSC. de Roset.
[500] Registres du Conseil du 14 Juillet 1535.—Archives de
Berne.—Froment, _Gestes de Genève_, p. 95.—Chron. MSC. de Roset,
liv. iii. ch. 21.
[501] Registres du Conseil des 20 Avril, 7 Mai, 30 Août 1535.
[502] 'Nullum libertati publicæ, nisi in civibus evangelicis,
præsidium.'—_Geneva Restituta_, p. 77.
[503] M. de Tocqueville.
[504] 'Bernardus cogitabat de exuenda cuculla.'—Farel to Calvin, _Epp.
Calv._ p. 77.
[505] Jeanne de Jussie, _Commencement de l'Hérésie dans Genève_, p.
106.—Lettre de Farel à Calvin.
[506] Froment, _Gestes de Genève_, pp. 131, 135.
[507] 'Parum est nisi cum ædificatione majori id faceret.'—Farellus
Calvino.
[508] 'Bernardus civis erat.'—_Ibid._