Calvin A Fugitive.
Persecution Of The Protestants In Paris.
For more than a year Calvin led a wandering and unsettled life;
he took refuge first of all at the Château d'Hazeville, near
Mantes; next at Angoulême, with the canon Louis du Tillet, who
cautiously befriended religious reform; and then at Nérac, where
Margaret of Valois, Queen of Navarre and sister of Francis I.,
held her court, and offered a welcome asylum to all more or less
openly avowed reformers. Calvin met there the learned Le Fèvre
d'Etaples, or Faber Stapulensis, at that time an old man, and one
of the first who had sown the seeds of the Reformation in France.
Thanks to the friendship which the bishop, William Briçonnet,
entertained for him, he had begun the good work in the diocese of
Meaux, but had not dared to carry it on, or to call it by its
true name. Twelve years previously, one of the boldest and most
ardent reformers, William Farel, had been staying with him at
Meaux, and one day Le Fèvre said to him, with a burst of
prophetic conviction: 'My dear William, God will renew the face
of the earth, and you will see it, even you.' When he saw Calvin
at Nérac in 1533, he often conversed with him, and had a
presentiment of his destiny; he 'looked at this young man with a
favourable eye,' says Beza, 'as if he foresaw that he would be
the author of the restoration of the Church of France.'
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Another guest, who was also Queen Margaret's chaplain at Nérac,
Gérard Roussel, had much conversation with Calvin, and
endeavoured to persuade him that it was necessary 'to purify the
house of God, but not to destroy it.' But Calvin had already
abandoned that notion; and subsequent events, as well as
reflection, confirmed him more and more in the belief that any
such attempt would be fruitless.
Whilst he was thus wandering from one place of refuge to another,
sheltered by sincere but timorous friends, the contest on both
sides and the passions of both parties were becoming daily more
and more violent. Charles V. had just granted some concessions to
the German Protestants; Francis I. became, in consequence, more
hostile to the Protestants of France, in the hope of thereby
winning over the recently elected Pope, Paul III. The excesses of
the Anabaptists, and their outburst at Munster in 1534, had given
rise to great irritation and alarm at the new doctrines and their
abettors; and these feelings, although they were strongest in the
Catholic governments, were yet general in all. A very rash and
indiscreet manifestation on the part of certain French
Protestants furnished their enemies with new weapons, by means of
which they influenced both the king and the public. Violent
placards against the mass and the doctrine of transubstantiation
were printed at Neufchâtel, in Switzerland, and in October, 1534,
were posted up by night at all the crossways in Paris, and were
even affixed to the chamber-door of Francis I. in the castle of
Blois.
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The king's anger knew no bounds: he determined to make the most
ample reparation to the Catholic faith, and at the same time to
give a terrible lesson to Protestant audacity. On the 21st of
January, 1535, a solemn procession left the church of St. Germain
l'Auxerrois; John du Bellay, Bishop of Paris, bore the sacred
elements in his hands, whilst the three royal princes of France
and the Duke de Vendôme walked on either side, and held the
canopy over him; the king followed with a lighted torch in his
hand, walking between the Cardinals de Bourbon and de Lorraine.
At every oratory which they passed, the king gave his torch to
the Cardinal de Lorraine, and then joining his hands, he humbly
prostrated himself and implored the forgiveness of God for his
people. When the procession was ended, the king stayed to dinner
with John du Bellay, and there was afterwards a meeting of the
leading members of all the religious orders. The king took his
seat upon a kind of throne which had been erected for him. From
thence he uttered a discourse which breathed sorrow for his
realm, and curses on the authors of an outrage against the faith
and the Church. He ended by saying, 'Whatever progress this
contagion may have made already, the remedy is still easy, if all
of you are animated by the same zeal which is felt by me--if you
forget the ties of flesh and blood, remember only that you are
Christians, and denounce without pity all those who are partisans
or abettors of this heresy. As for me, if my right arm was
gangrened, I would cut off my right arm; and if my sons who now
hear me were to suffer so great a calamity as to fall into these
cursed and detestable opinions, I would give them up, and offer
them as a sacrifice to God.' [Footnote 56] At these words the
Constable de Montmorency [Footnote 57] said to the king, 'Sire,
you must begin with your sister.' 'Oh, as for her,' answered the
king, 'she loves me so well that she will never believe anything
except what I wish.'
[Footnote 56: Garnier, continuateur de Vellay et Villaret,
_Histoire de France_, vol. xxiv. pp. 536-540.]
[Footnote 57: He was not made Constable of France until
1538.]
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On the 29th of January an edict was promulgated which condemned
those who harboured heretics, 'Lutherans and others,' to the same
penalties as 'the heretics aforesaid,' unless they gave up their
guests to justice. An accuser received one-fourth of the victim's
goods which were confiscated. A few days before this, on the 13th
of January, 1535, Francis I. signed an edict which was still more
extraordinary as the work of a king who was a patron of
literature: he decreed the abolition of printing because it was
the means of propagating heresy, and forbade the printing of any
book on pain of death. Six weeks later, however, on the 26th of
February, the king was ashamed of such a decree, and delayed its
execution indefinitely. [Footnote 58 ]
[Footnote 58: Garnier, _Histoire de France_, vol. xxiv.
p. 140. Henri Martin, _Histoire de France_, vol. viii.
p. 223.]
These edicts were preceded and accompanied by numerous
punishments. 'The Journal of a Citizen of Paris,' the writer of
which was a Catholic of the period, enumerates with a certain
satisfaction twenty-four heretics burnt alive in Paris between
the 10th of November, 1534, and the 3rd of May, 1535, without
taking into account many who were condemned to less cruel
sufferings.
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The trials were now conducted with great rapidity. The judge of
criminal causes in the Court of the Châtelet, passed summary
judgment, and the 'Parlement' confirmed his sentence. At first
the victims had been strangled before they were burnt, but before
long they were burnt alive, in accordance with the custom of the
Spanish Inquisition. Even this was not enough, and those who were
condemned to die were suspended by iron chains to a kind of
seesaw, which 'swung them high into the air and then lowered
them' into the fire until at length the executioner cut the rope
and the victim fell into the flames. The records of these trials
were burnt together with the victims, in order that the reformers
might not be able to obtain any reliable account of their
martyrs.
Some Protestant historians, both ancient and modern, have
asserted that Francis I. was present on several occasions at
these horrible spectacles, and they have specially named as one
of them the 21st of January, 1535. Not one of the principal
contemporary chronicles, either Catholic or Protestant, confirms
this imputation; [Footnote 59] we find no mention of it in the
'Journal du Bourgeois de Paris,' nor in Beza, nor in Jean
Crespin, the compiler of 'The Book of Martyrs from John Huss to
those of the year 1534.' Florimond de Ræmond, a chronicler of the
sixteenth century, who was for a short time a Protestant, but
very speedily returned to the Catholic faith, and in 1572 was
counsellor to the 'Parlement' of Bordeaux, asserts that the sight
of these tortures was far from producing that satisfaction and
approbation in the public mind which was expected from them.
[Footnote 59: I think M. Michelet and M. Henri Martin were
right in rejecting it.]
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'Everywhere,' he says, 'the fires were lighted; and although on
the one hand the justice and severity of the laws restrained not
a few and kept them to their duty, yet on the other hand the
stubborn resolution of those who were dragged to execution
greatly astonished many. For they saw simple, silly women seeking
fierce torments in order to make trial of their faith, and going
to their death singing psalms, and with no other cry than
_Christ, the Saviour;_ young maidens walking more gaily to
the place of torture than they would have done to the nuptial
couch; men rejoicing when they saw the terrible implements and
preparations for death, and although half-burnt and roasted, yet
immoveable as rocks when the waves of torture dashed over them.
These sad and incessant sights excited some disquietude not only
in the minds of simple folk, but among those of the higher
classes, for they could not persuade themselves that these people
had not reason on their side, since they maintained their
opinions with so much resolution and at the cost of life. Others
had compassion upon them, were grieved to see them so persecuted,
and when they beheld the remains of those sufferers, their
blackened corpses hanging in vile chains in the public streets,
they could not restrain their tears; nay, their very hearts wept
as well as their eyes.'
It was in the presence of such facts as these, and under the
influence of the horror and terror with which they inspired the
reformers, that Calvin resolved to leave his own country and to
seek elsewhere safety, liberty, and the possibility of defending
a cause which had become all the dearer to him because it was so
cruelly persecuted.
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He was too shrewd not to perceive that he must quickly exhaust
the different asylums open to him: Queen Margaret did not wish to
go too far in opposition to the king her brother; the canon Louis
du Tillet was half afraid that his fine library might be
compromised through the use made of it by his guest, who was
expounding and preaching in the neighbourhood of Angoulême;
Gérard Roussel, the Queen's chaplain, thought Calvin was going
too far, and was afraid that if the Reformation succeeded
completely, the bishopric of Oléron, which he wanted and at a
later period obtained, would be suppressed; Le Fèvre d'Etaples,
who had more sympathy with Calvin than any of the others, was
seventy-nine years old, and desired that his days might end in
peace.
Calvin left Angoulême and Nérac, and stayed for a time at
Poitiers, where the friends of religious reform who gathered
round him, eager for his words, celebrated for the first time the
Lord's Supper according to the evangelical rites, in a cave near
the town, which is called to this day Calvin's Cave. He was soon
compelled to leave Poitiers, and went to Orleans and thence
secretly to Paris, where he saw a man whose name was one day to
spread a dark stain over his own, the Spaniard, Michael Servetus,
a guilty heretic in his eyes. Calvin offered to meet him at a
conference, and discuss with him the doctrine of the Trinity,
which the Spaniard had just then openly attacked. Servetus
accepted the challenge, but did not appear when the appointed
time arrived. Possibly some angry scorn lingered in Calvin's
heart, who left Paris and went to Noyon, to take final leave of
his family. At length he set out for Strasburg, already one of
the strongholds of the Reformation, where he had many
friends--among others, the learned Bucer, with whom he had been
in constant correspondence.
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He arrived there probably about the beginning of the year 1535;
but he did not settle at Strasburg; he preferred Basle, the place
where men of letters, scholars, theologians, and celebrated
printers were to be found--Erasmus, Simon Grynæus, and Froben--
and where he hoped to find the leisure which he needed in order
to produce the great work which he had projected, his "Institutes
of the Christian Religion."
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