the presidents of the parliaments of Paris, son of the late Andrew
Charreton, who was first Baron of Champagne, and counsellor to the high
chamber of the Parliament of Paris; Madam Antoinette Charreton, widow of
Noel Renouard, former master in the chamber of the courts of Paris, and
daughter of the late Hugh Charreton, Lord of Montauzon; and John
Charreton, Sieur de la Terriere; all three cousins, and grandchildren of
Hugh Charreton--certify that we have frequently heard from our fathers
that the aforesaid Sieur Hugh Charreton had several times told them that
under the reign of Francis I, while the court was at Fontainebleau,
Calvin, who had a benefice at Noyon, came there and took lodgings in the
hotel where the aforesaid Sieur Charreton was lodging, who,
understanding that Calvin was a man of letters and of great erudition,
and being very fond of the society of learned men, informed him that he
would be delighted to have some interviews with him; to this Calvin the
more willingly consented under the belief that the aforesaid Sieur de
Charreton might be able to assist him in the affair which had brought
him to Fontainebleau; that after several interviews the aforesaid Sieur
de Charreton demanded from Calvin the object of his journey, to which he
answered that he had come to solicit a priory from the King, for which
there was but one rival, who was a relative of the Constable.
"The Sieur de Charreton asked him if he thought this nothing. He replied
that he was aware of the high consideration enjoyed by the Constable,
but he also knew that the King, in disposing of benefices, was wont to
choose the most proper persons, and that the relative of the Constable
was of very poor capacity. To which the aforesaid Sieur de Charreton
rejoined that this was no obstacle, since no great capacity was needed
to hold a simple benefice; whereupon Calvin exclaimed and cried out that
if such wrong was done him he would find means to make them speak of him
for five hundred years; and the aforesaid Sieur de Charreton having
urged him strongly to tell him how he would do this, Calvin conducted
him to his room and showed him the commencement of his _Institutes_; and
after having read a portion of them, Calvin demanded his opinion; he
answered _that it was poison well put in sugar_, and advised him not to
continue a work which was only a false interpretation of the Scriptures
and of everything which the holy fathers had written; and as he
perceived that Calvin remained firm in his wicked purpose, he gave
notice thereof to the Constable, who declared that Calvin was a fool and
should soon be brought to his senses. But two days after, the benefice
having been bestowed on the relative of the Constable, Calvin departed
and began to propagate his sect, which, being very convenient, was
embraced by many persons, some through libertinism, others from weakness
of mind.
"That some time after, the Constable was going to his government of
Languedoc, and passed through Lyons, where the aforesaid Sieur de
Charreton paid him a visit, and was asked if he did not belong to the
sect of Calvin, with whom he had lodged. He answered that he would be
very sorry to embrace a religion the father and founder of which he had
seen born.
"In testimony whereof we have given our signatures, at Paris, this 20th
of September, 1682.
"Signed: Charreton, President; A. Charreton, Widow Renouard; and
Charreton de la Terriere."
After having published his _Psychopannychia_, in 1534, at Orleans,
Calvin left that city. He felt a desire to visit Basel, at that time the
Athens of Switzerland, a city of renown, so long the abode of Erasmus,
famous for its _literati_, its celebrated printers, and its theologians
amorous of novelties; where Froben had published his fine edition of the
works of St. Jerome; where Holbein had painted his picture of Christ
ready for the sepulchre, where Capito taught Hebrew, and Oecolampadius
commented on the Psalms.
He set out from Orleans in company with his friend Du Tillet; near Metz
their domestic robbed them and fled with their sacks and valises, and
they were forced to seek Strasburg on foot, nearly destitute of
clothing, and with but ten crowns in their pockets. Calvin spent some
time in Strasburg, studying the different transformations which the
reformed gospel had undergone during the brief space of fifteen years.
He entered into intimate relations with some of the most celebrated
representatives of Protestantism. Anyone else, who had arrived there
free from prejudices against Catholicism, would have found salutary
instruction in the ceaseless agitations of that city, which knew not
where to poise itself in order to find repose, and which, since 1521,
had become Lutheran, Anabaptist, Zwinglian, and, at that very moment,
was dreaming of a new transfiguration, to be accomplished by the aid of
Bucer, one of its new guests.
At Basel, Calvin found Simon Grynaeus and Erasmus. Calvin could not
neglect this opportunity of visiting the Batavian philologist, whose
fame was European. After a short interview they separated. Bucer, who
had assisted at the meeting, was solicitous to know the opinion of the
caustic old man. "Master," said he, "what think you of the new-comer?"
Erasmus smiled, without answering. Bucer insisted. "I behold," said the
author of the _Colloquies_, "a great pest, which is springing up in the
Church, against the Church."
On the next day Du Tillet, clerk of the Parliament of Paris, arrived at
Basel and, by dint of tears and entreaties, brought with him his
brother Louis, who repented, made his abjuration, and was shortly after
elected archdeacon, a dignity disputed with him by Renaudie, who was to
be used by the Reformation for the execution of the plot of Amboise.
The _Psychopannychia_, the first controversial work of Calvin, is a
pamphlet directed against the sect of Anabaptists, whom the bloody day
of Frankenhausen had conquered, but not subdued. The spirit of Munzer
lived again in his disciples, who were parading their mystic reveries
through Holland, Flanders, and France. Luther had essayed his powers
against Munzer, imagining that by his fiery language, his Pindaric
wrath, his flames and thunders, he would soon overwhelm the chief of the
miners, as he had defeated, it is said, those theological dwarfs who
were unable to stand before him. From the summit of the mountain he had
appeared to Munzer in the midst of lightnings, but those lightnings did
not alarm his adversary, who was bold enough to face him with unquailing
eye.
Munzer also possessed a fiery tongue, which he used with admirable
skill, to inflame and arouse the peasants; this time victory remained
with the man of the sledge-hammer. And Luther, who wished to terminate
the affair at any cost, was reduced, as is well known, to avail himself
of the sword of one of his electors. The wrecks which escaped from the
funeral obsequies of Thuringia took refuge in a new land. France
received and listened to the prophets of Anabaptism.
These Anabaptists maintained seducing doctrines. They dreamed of a sort
of Jerusalem, very different from the Jewish Jerusalem; a Jerusalem
quite spiritual, without swords, soldiers, or civil magistracy: the true
city of the elect. Their speech was infected with Pelagianism and
Arianism; on several points of dogma they agreed with Catholics--on
predestination, for example, and on the merit of works. Some of them
taught the sleep of the soul till the day of judgment. It was against
these "sleepers" that Calvin determined to measure himself.
The _Commentary on Seneca_ is a philological work, a book of the
revival, a rhetorical declamation, in which Calvin is evidently aspiring
to a place among the humanists, and making his court, in sufficiently
fine Latin, to all the Ciceronians of the age: this was bringing himself
forward with skill and tact. The Latin language was the idiom of the
Church, of the convents, colleges, universities, and parliaments. The
_Psychopannychia_ is a religious pamphlet, and now Calvin must expect a
rival in the first pamphleteer of Germany, Luther himself. It is certain
that Calvin was acquainted with the writings of the Saxon monk against
Eck, Tetzel, Prierias, Latomus, and the Sorbonnists. He must be praised
for not having dreamed of entering the lists against a spirit of such a
temper as his rival. Had he desired, after Luther's manner, to deal in
caricature, he would certainly have failed. Sallies, play upon words,
and conceits did not suit a mind like his, whose forte was finesse. By
nature sober, he could not, like the Saxon monk, fertilize his brain in
enormous pots of beer; moreover, beer was not as yet in use beyond the
Rhine.
Nor had he at his service those German smoking-houses, where, of an
evening, among the companions of gay science, his weary mind might have
revived its energies. In France the monks did not resort to taverns.
Calvin was, therefore, everything he was destined to become: an adroit,
biting disputant, ready at retort, but without warmth or enthusiasm. He
loves to bear testimony in his own behalf, that "he did not indulge his
wrath, except modestly; that he always made it a rule to set aside
outrageous or biting expressions; that he almost always moderated his
style, which was better adapted to instruct than to drive forcibly, in
such sort, however, that it may ever attract those who would not be
led." One must see that, with such humor and style, Calvin might have
died forgotten, in some little benefice of Swabia, and that he was never
formed for raising storms, but only for using them.
At this epoch the grand agitator of society was first, society itself,
and then Luther, that great pamphleteer, "whose books are quite full of
demons," who drove humanity into the paths of a revolution, for which
all the elements had been prepared years before. Luther had sown the
wind, Calvin came to reap the whirlwind. Not that the latter does not
sometimes rise even to wrath, but it is a wrath which savors of labor
and which he pursues as a rhymester would a rebellious epithet. Besides,
he is good enough to repent for it, as if this wrath burned the face
over which it glowed. "I have presented some things," he murmurs, "a
little sharply, even roughly said, which, peradventure, may offend the
delicate ears of some. But, as I am aware there are some good persons
who have conceived such affection for this dream of the sleep of souls,
I would not have them offended with me." Where Calvin is concerned we
must not allow our admiration to be too easily awaked; we must note that
he is speaking of an Anabaptist, that is, of a soul which has thrown off
the "papism." But let a Catholic appear--a priest unknown to fame, who,
as editor, shall have reprinted a new edition of the work of Henry VIII,
"_Assertio Septem Sacramentorum_"--for instance, Gabriel de Sacconay,
precentor of Lyons, and you shall then behold Calvin, under the form of
a dithyrambic or congratulatory epistle, without the least regard for
delicate ears, throw into the face of the Catholic the most filthy
expressions of offence.
Calvin has himself given a correct estimate of the value of his
_Psychopannychia_, and of his treatise against the Anabaptists, which
one of his historians desires to have reprinted in our time, purged of
all its bitterness of style. He was right in saying, "I have reproved
the foolish curiosity of those who were debating these questions, which,
in fact, are but vexations of mind."
One day this question, about the sleep of souls--one that in the ancient
Church had long since been examined, by Metito--was presented to Luther,
who disposed of it in few words. "These," said he, "are picked
nutshells."
FOOTNOTES:
[43] Michael Servetus was a controversialist in matters of philosophy
and religion. For many years he was the object of attack by the
different orthodox schools on account of his heretical speeches and
writings. In 1553 he published a work which led to his arrest by order
of the inquisitor-general at Lyons. Servetus escaped, but was again
taken, at the instance of Calvin, and was burned at Geneva, October 27,
1553.--ED.
ENGLAND BREAKS WITH THE ROMAN CHURCH
DESTRUCTION OF THE MONASTERIES
A.D. 1534
JOHN RICHARD GREEN
Following the fall of Wolsey, Sir Thomas More became lord
chancellor of England, but the real power of Wolsey passed
to another and perhaps even more able minister, Thomas
Cromwell. Henry VIII needed always some strong, able, crafty
guide to show him a path through the intricacies of European
politics, and enable him at the same time to follow the
savage dictates of his passion and his whims.
Such a helper he found now in Cromwell. Few men have ever
been so daring or so ruthless as this great statesman. He
helped Henry in all his evil schemes, though Green and other
critics as well have thought to discern a larger, wiser
policy in the impenetrable mind of the subtle minister. As
secretary of state he drove England at his own pace through
the vast religious changes of the period. For the ruin he
brought upon Catholicism, and more especially for his
destruction of the thousand monasteries that dotted England,
he has been called the "hammer of the monks." Of even lower
birth than Wolsey, and rising to almost equal power,
Cromwell began life as a son of a blacksmith.
He wandered over Europe and especially Italy as a soldier,
merchant, and general adventurer of the lower and wilder
type. He became Wolsey's right-hand man, and held loyally by
his chief even after the latter's overthrow.
It had been Henry's passion for Anne Boleyn, and the
resulting necessity for divorce from his wife Catherine,
that caused Wolsey's fall. On the same passion did Cromwell
build his rise. He secretly urged the King to break with
Rome entirely and declare himself sole head of the English
Church. Thus he could divorce himself. Henry first tried a
last negotiation with the Pope; that failing, he turned to
his new adviser.
Cromwell was again ready with his suggestion that the King should
disavow the papal jurisdiction, declare himself head of the Church
within its realm, and obtain a divorce from his own ecclesiastical
courts. But the new minister looked on the divorce as simply the prelude
to a series of changes which he was bent upon accomplishing. In all his
checkered life, that had left its deepest stamp on him in Italy. Not
only in the rapidity and ruthlessness of his designs, but in their
larger scope, their admirable combination, the Italian statecraft
entered with Cromwell into English politics. He is in fact the first
English minister in whom we can trace through the whole period of his
rule the steady working out of a great and definite aim, that of raising
the King to absolute authority on the ruins of every rival power within
his realm.
It was not that Cromwell was a mere slave of tyranny. Whether we may
trust the tale that carries him in his youth to Florence or not, his
statesmanship was closely modelled on the ideal of the Florentine
thinker whose book was constantly in his hand. Even as a servant of
Wolsey he startled the future Cardinal, Reginald Pole, by bidding him
take for his manual in politics the _Prince_ of Machiavelli. Machiavelli
hoped to find in Caesar Borgia or in the later Lorenzo de' Medici a
tyrant who, after crushing all rival tyrannies, might unite and
regenerate Italy; and, terrible and ruthless as his policy was, the
final aim of Cromwell seems to have been that of Machiavelli, an aim of
securing enlightenment and order for England by the concentration of all
authority in the Crown.
The first step toward such an end was the freeing the monarchy from its
spiritual obedience to Rome. What the first of the Tudors had done for
the political independence of the kingdom, the second was to do for its
ecclesiastical independence. Henry VII had freed England from the
interference of France or the house of Burgundy; and in the question of
the divorce Cromwell saw the means of bringing Henry VIII to free it
from the interference of the papacy. In such an effort resistance could
be looked for only from the clergy. But their resistance was what
Cromwell desired. The last check on royal absolutism which had survived
the Wars of the Roses lay in the wealth, the independent synods and
jurisdiction, and the religious claims of the Church; and for the
success of the new policy it was necessary to reduce the great
ecclesiastical body to a mere department of the state in which all
authority should flow from the sovereign alone, his will be the only
law, his decision the only test of truth.
Such a change, however, was hardly to be wrought without a struggle;
and the question of national independence in all ecclesiastical matters
furnished ground on which the Crown could conduct this struggle to the
best advantage. The secretary's first blow showed how unscrupulously the
struggle was to be waged. A year had passed since Wolsey had been
convicted of a breach of the Statute of Provisors. The pedantry of the
judges declared the whole nation to have been formally involved in the
same charge by its acceptance of his authority. The legal absurdity was
now redressed by a general pardon, but from this pardon the clergy found
themselves omitted. In the spring of 1531 a convocation was assembled to
be told that forgiveness could be bought at no less a price than the
payment of a fine amounting to a million of our present money, and the
acknowledgment of the King as "the chief protector, the only and supreme
lord, and head of the Church and clergy of England."
Unjust as was the first demand, they at once submitted to it; against
the second they struggled hard. But their appeals to Henry and Cromwell
met only with demands for instant obedience. A compromise was at last
arrived at by the insertion of a qualifying phrase, "So far as the law
of Christ will allow"; and with this addition the words were again
submitted by Warham to the convocation. There was a general silence.
"Whoever is silent seems to consent," said the Archbishop. "Then are we
all silent," replied a voice from among the crowd.
There is no ground for thinking that the "headship of the Church" which
Henry claimed in this submission was more than a warning addressed to
the independent spirit of the clergy, or that it bore as yet the meaning
which was afterward attached to it. It certainly implied no independence
of Rome, for negotiations were still being carried on with the papal
court. But it told Clement plainly that in any strife that might come
between himself and Henry the clergy were in the King's hand, and that
he must look for no aid from them in any struggle with the Crown. The
warning was backed by an address to the Pope from the lords and some of
the commons who assembled after a fresh prorogation of the houses in the
spring.
"The cause of his majesty," the peers were made to say, "is the cause of
each of ourselves." They laid before the Pope what they represented as
the judgment of the universities in favor of the divorce; but they
faced boldly the event of its rejection. "Our condition," they ended,
"will not be wholly irremediable. Extreme remedies are ever harsh of
application; but he that is sick will by all means be rid of his
distemper." In the summer the banishment of Catherine from the King's
palace to a house at Ampthill showed the firmness of Henry's resolve.
Each of these acts was no doubt intended to tell on the Pope's decision,
for Henry still clung to the hope of extorting from Clement a favorable
answer; and at the close of the year a fresh embassy, with Gardiner, now
Bishop of Winchester, at its head, was despatched to the papal court.
But the embassy failed like its predecessors, and at the opening of 1532
Cromwell was free to take more decisive steps in the course on which he
had entered.
What the nature of his policy was to be, had already been detected by
eyes as keen as his own. More had seen in Wolsey's fall an opening for
the realization of those schemes of religious and even of political
reform on which the scholars of the New Learning had long been brooding.
The substitution of the lords of the council for the autocratic rule of
the cardinal-minister, the break-up of the great mass of powers which
had been gathered into a single hand, the summons of a parliament, the
ecclesiastical reforms which it at once sanctioned, were measures which
promised a more legal and constitutional system of government. The
question of the divorce presented to More no serious difficulty.
Untenable as Henry's claim seemed to the new Chancellor, his faith in
the omnipotence of parliament would have enabled him to submit to any
statute which named a new spouse as queen and her children as heirs to
the crown. But as Cromwell's policy unfolded itself he saw that more
than this was impending.
The Catholic instinct of his mind, the dread of a rent Christendom and
of the wars and bigotry that must come of its rending, united with
More's theological convictions to resist any spiritual severance of
England from the papacy. His love for freedom, his revolt against the
growing autocracy of the Crown, the very height and grandeur of his own
spiritual convictions, all bent him to withstand a system which would
concentrate in the king the whole power of church as of state, would
leave him without the one check that remained on his despotism, and
make him arbiter of the religious faith of his subjects. The later
revolt of the Puritans against the king-worship which Cromwell
established proved the justice of the provision which forced More in the
spring of 1532 to resign the post of chancellor.
But the revolution from which he shrank was an inevitable one. Till now
every Englishman had practically owned a double life and a double
allegiance. As citizen of a temporal state his life was bounded by
English shores, and his loyalty due exclusively to his English King. But
as citizen of the state spiritual, he belonged not to England, but to
Christendom. The law which governed him was not a national law, but a
law that embraced every European nation, and the ordinary course of
judicial appeals in ecclesiastical cases proved to him that the
sovereignty in all matters of conscience or religion lay, not at
Westminster, but at Rome.
Such a distinction could scarcely fail to bring embarrassment with it as
the sense of national life and national pride waxed stronger; and from
the reign of the Edwards the problem of reconciling the spiritual and
temporal relations of the realm grew daily more difficult. Parliament
had hardly risen into life when it became the organ of the national
jealousy, whether of any papal jurisdiction without the realm or of the
separate life and separate jurisdiction of the clergy within it. The
movement was long arrested by religious reaction and civil war. But the
fresh sense of national greatness which sprang from the policy of Henry
VIII, the fresh sense of national unity as the monarchy gathered all
power into its single hand, would have itself revived the contest even
without the spur of the divorce.
What the question of the divorce really did was to stimulate the
movement by bringing into clearer view the wreck of the great Christian
commonwealth of which England had till now formed a part, and the
impossibility of any real exercise of a spiritual sovereignty over it by
the weakened papacy, as well as by outraging the national pride through
the summons of the King to a foreign bar and the submission of English
interests to the will of a foreign emperor.
With such a spur as this the movement, which More dreaded, moved forward
as quickly as Cromwell desired. The time had come when England was to
claim for herself the fulness of power, ecclesiastical as well as
temporal, within her bounds; and, in the concentration of all authority
within the hands of the sovereign which was the political characteristic
of the time, to claim this power for the nation was to claim it for the
king. The import of that headship of the Church which Henry had assumed
in the preceding year was brought fully out in one of the propositions
laid before the convocation of 1532.