PERSECUTIONS AND MARTYRDOMS.
A Peace of Twenty-eight Years--Flourishing State--Bersour--A
Martyr--Martyrdom of Pastor Gonin--Martyrdoms of a Student
and a Monk--Trial and Burning of a Colporteur--A List of
Horrible Deaths--The Valleys under the Sway of France--
Restored to Savoy--Emmanuel Philibert--Persecution
Renewed--Carignano--Persecution Approaches the Mountains--
Deputation to the Duke--The Old Paths--Remonstrance to the
Duke--to the Duchess--to the Council.
The Church of the Alps had peace for twenty-eight years. This was
a time of great spiritual prosperity. Sanctuaries arose in all her
Valleys; her pastors and teachers were found too few, and men of
learning and zeal, some of them from foreign lands, pressed into
her service. Individuals and families in the cities on the plain of
Piedmont embraced her faith; and the crowds that attended her worship
were continually growing.[41] In short, this venerable Church had
a second youth. Her lamp, retrimmed, burned with a brightness that
justified her time-honoured motto, “A light shining in darkness.” The
darkness was not now so deep as it had been; the hours of night were
drawing to a close. Nor was the Vaudois community the only light that
now shone in Christendom. It was one of a constellation of lights,
whose brilliance was beginning to irradiate the skies of the Church
with an effulgence which no former age had known.
The exemption from persecution, which the Waldenses enjoyed during this
period, was not absolute, but comparative. The lukewarm are seldom
molested; and the quickened zeal of the Vaudois brought with it a
revival of the persecutor’s malignity, though it did not find vent in
violences so dreadful as the tempests that had lately smitten them.
Only two years after the synod--that is, in 1534--wholesale destruction
fell upon the Vaudois Churches of Provence; but the sad story of their
extinction will more appropriately be told elsewhere. In the valleys of
Piedmont events were from time to time occurring that showed that the
inquisitor’s vengeance had been scotched, not killed. While the Vaudois
as a race were prosperous, their churches multiplying, and their faith
extending its geographical area from one year to another, individual
Vaudois were being at times seized, and put to death, at the stake, on
the rack, or by the cord.
Three years after, the persecution broke out anew, and raged for a
short time. Charles III. of Savoy, a prince of mild manners, but under
the rule of the priests, being solicited by the Archbishop of Turin and
the inquisitor of the same city, gave his consent to “hunting down” the
heretics of the Valleys. The commission was given to a nobleman of the
name of Bersour, whose residence was at Pinerolo, near the entrance of
the Valley of Perosa. Bersour, a man of savage disposition, collected
a troop of 500 horse and foot, and attacked the Valley of Angrogna. He
was repulsed, but the storm which had rolled away from the mountains
fell upon the plains. Turning to the Vaudois who resided around his
own residence, he seized a great number of persons, whom he threw into
the prisons and convents of Pinerolo and the Inquisition of Turin.
Many of them suffered in the flames. One of these martyrs, Catalan
Girard, quaintly taught the spectators a parabolic lesson, standing
at the pile. From amid the flames he asked for two stones, which were
instantly brought him. The crowd looked on in silence, curious to know
what he meant to do with them. Rubbing them against each other, he
said, “You think to extinguish our poor Churches by your persecutions.
You can no more do so, than I with my feeble hands can crush these
stones.”[42]
Heavier tempests seemed about to descend, when suddenly the sky cleared
above the confessors of the Alps. It was a change in the politics of
Europe in this instance, as in many others, that stayed the arm of
persecution. Francis I. of France demanded of Charles, Duke of Savoy,
permission to march an army through his dominions. The object of the
French king was the recovery of the Duchy of Milan, a long-contested
prize between himself and Charles V. The Duke of Savoy refused the
request of his brother monarch; but reflecting that the passes of the
Alps were in the hands of the men whom he was persecuting, and that
should he continue his oppressions, the Vaudois might open the gates
of his kingdom to the enemy, he sent orders to Bersour to stop the
persecution in the Valleys.
In 1536, the Waldensian Church had to mourn the loss of one of the
more distinguished of her pastors. Martin Gonin, of Angrogna--a man of
public spirit and rare gifts--who had gone to Geneva on ecclesiastical
affairs, was returning through Dauphiné, when he was apprehended on
suspicion of being a spy. He cleared himself of that charge, but the
gaoler searching his person, and discovering certain papers upon him,
he was convicted of what the Parliament of Grenoble accounted a much
greater crime--heresy. Condemned to die, he was led forth at night,
and drowned in the river Isère. He would have suffered at the stake
had not his persecutors feared the effect of his dying words upon the
spectators.[43]
There were others, also called to ascend the martyr-pile, whose names
we must not pass over in silence. Two pastors returning from Geneva to
their flocks in the Valleys, in company of three French Protestants,
were seized at the Col de Tamiers, in Savoy, and carried to Chambéry.
There all five were tried, condemned, and burned. The fate of Nicolas
Sartoire is yet more touching. He was a student of theology at Geneva,
and held one of those bursaries which the Lords of Bern had allotted
for the training of young men as pastors in the Churches of the
Valleys. He set out to spend his holiday with his family in Piedmont.
We know how Vaudois heart yearns for its native mountains; nor would
the coming of the youth awaken less lively anticipations on the part
of his friends. The paternal threshold, alas! he was never to cross;
his native Valleys he was to tread no more. Travelling by the pass of
St. Bernard, and the grand valley of Aosta, he had just passed the
Italian frontier, when he was apprehended on the suspicion of heresy.
It was the month of May, when all was life and beauty in the vales and
mountains around him; he himself was in the spring-time of existence;
it was hard to lay down life at such a moment; but the great captain
from whose feet he had just come, had taught him that the first duty
of a soldier of Christ is obedience. He confessed his Lord, nor could
promises or threats--and both were tried--make him waver. He continued
steadfast unto the end, and on the 4th of May, 1557, he was brought
forth from his dungeon at Aosta, and burned alive.[44]
The martyr who died thus heroically at Aosta was a youth, the one we
are now to contemplate was a man of fifty. Geofroi Varaile was a native
of the town of Busco, in Piedmont. His father had been a captain in
that army of murderers who, in 1488, ravaged the Valleys of Lucerna
and Angrogna. The son in 1520 became a monk, and possessing the gift
of a rare eloquence, he was sent on a preaching tour, in company with
another cowled ecclesiastic, yet more famous, Bernardo Ochino of
Sienna, the founder of the order of the Capuchins. The arguments of the
men he was sent to convert staggered Varaile. He fled to Geneva, and in
the city of the Reformers he was taught more fully the “way of life.”
Ordained as a pastor, he returned to the Valleys, where “like another
Paul,” says Leger, “he preached the faith he once destroyed.” After a
ministry of some months, he set out to pay a visit of a few days to
his native town of Busco. He was apprehended by the monks who were
lying in wait for him. He was condemned to death by the Inquisition of
Turin. His execution took place in the castle-piazza of the same city,
March 29th, 1558. He walked to the place where he was to die with a
firm step and a serene countenance; he addressed the vast multitude
around his pile in a way that drew tears from many eyes; after this, he
began to sing with a loud voice, and so continued till he sank amid the
flames.[45]
Two years before this, the same piazza, the castle-yard at Turin, had
witnessed a similar spectacle. Barthelemy Hector was a bookseller in
Poictiers. A man of warm but well-tempered zeal, he travelled as far as
the Valleys, diffusing that knowledge that maketh wise unto salvation.
In the assemblage of white peaks that look down on the Pra del Tor is
one named La Vêchera, so called because the cows love the rich grass
that clothes its sides in summer-time. Barthelemy Hector would take
his seat on the slopes of the mountain, and gathering the herdsmen
and agriculturists of the Pra round him, would induce them to buy his
books, by reading passages to them. Portions of the Scriptures also
would he recite to the grandames and maidens as they watched their
goats, or plied the distaff. His steps were tracked by the inquisitor,
even amid these wild solitudes. He was dragged to Turin, to answer for
the crime of selling Genevese books. His defence before his judges
discovered an admirable courage and wisdom.
“You have been caught in the act,” said his judge, “of selling books
that contain heresy. What say you?”
“If the Bible is heresy to you, it is truth to me,” replied the
prisoner.
“But you use the Bible to deter men from going to mass,” urged the
judge.
“If the Bible deters men from going to mass,” responded Barthelemy, “it
is a proof that God disapproves of it, and that the mass is idolatry.”
The judge, deeming it expedient to make short shrift with such a
heretic, exclaimed, “Retract.”
“I have spoken only truth,” said the bookseller, “can I change truth as
I would a garment?”
His judges kept him some months in prison, in the hope that his
recantation would save them the necessity of burning him. This
unwillingness to have resort to the last penalty was owing to no
feeling of pity for the prisoner, but entirely to the conviction
that these repeated executions were endangering the cause of their
Church. “The smoke of these martyr-piles,” as was said with reference
to the death of Patrick Hamilton, “was infecting those on whom it
blew.” But the constancy of Barthelemy compelled his persecutors to
disregard these prudential considerations. At last, despairing of his
abjuration, they brought him forth and consigned him to the flames. His
behaviour at the stake “drew rivers of tears,” says Leger, “from the
eyes of many in the Popish crowd around his stake, while others vented
reproaches and invectives against the cruelty of the monks and the
inquisitors.”[46]
These are only a few of the many martyrs by whom, even during this
period of comparative peace and prosperity, the Church of the Valleys
was called to testify against Rome. Some of these martyrs perished
by cruel, barbarous, and most horrible methods. To recite all these
cases would be beyond our purpose, and to depict the revolting and
infamous details would be to narrate what no reader could peruse. We
shall quote only part of the brief summary of Muston. “There is no
town in Piedmont,” says he, “under a Vaudois pastor, where some of our
brethren have not been put to death.... Hugo Chiamps of Finestrelle had
his entrails torn from his living body, at Turin. Peter Geymarali of
Bobbio, in like manner, had his entrails taken out at Lucerna, and a
fierce cat thrust in their place to torture him further; Maria Romano
was buried alive at Rocco-patia; Magdalen Foulano underwent the same
fate at San Giovanni; Susan Michelini was bound hand and foot, and left
to perish of cold and hunger at Saracena. Bartholomew Fache, gashed
with sabres, had the wounds filled up with quicklime, and perished thus
in agony at Fenile; Daniel Michelini had his tongue torn out at Bobbio
for having praised God. James Baridari perished covered with sulphurous
matches, which had been forced into his flesh under the nails, between
the fingers, in the nostrils, in the lips, and over all his body, and
then lighted. Daniel Revelli had his mouth filled with gunpowder,
which, being lighted, blew his head to pieces. Maria Monnen, taken at
Liousa, had the flesh cut from her cheek and chin bone, so that her
jaw was left bare, and she was thus left to perish. Paul Garnier was
slowly sliced to pieces at Rora. Thomas Margueti was mutilated in an
indescribable manner at Miraboco, and Susan Jaquin cut in bits at La
Torre. Sara Rostagnol was slit open from the legs to the bosom, and so
left to perish on the road between Eyral and Lucerna. Anne Charbonnier
was impaled and carried thus on a pike, as a standard, from San
Giovanni to La Torre. Daniel Rambaud, at Paesano, had his nails torn
off, then his fingers chopped off, then his feet and his hands, then
his arms and his legs, with each successive refusal on his part to
abjure the Gospel.”[47] Thus the roll of martyrs runs on, and with each
new sufferer comes a new, a more excruciating and more horrible mode of
torture and death.
We have already mentioned the demand which the King of France made
upon the Duke of Savoy, Charles III., that he would permit him to
march an army through his territories. The reply was a refusal;
but Francis I. must needs have a road into Italy. Accordingly he
seized upon Piedmont, and held possession of it, together with the
Waldensian valleys, for twenty-three years. The Waldenses had found
the sway of Francis I. more tolerant than that of their own princes;
for though Francis hated Lutheranism, the necessities of his policy
often compelled him to court the Lutherans, and so it came to pass
that while he was burning heretics in Paris he spared them in the
Valleys. But the general peace of Château Cambrésis, April 3rd, 1559,
restored Piedmont, with the exception of Turin, to its former rulers
of the House of Savoy.[48] Charles III. had been succeeded in 1553 by
Emmanuel Philibert. Philibert was a prince of superior talents and
humane disposition, and the Vaudois cherished the hope that under him
they would be permitted to live in peace, and to worship as their
fathers had done. What strengthened these just expectations was the
fact that Philibert had married a sister of the King of France, Henry
II., who had been carefully instructed in the Protestant faith by her
illustrious relations, Margaret, Queen of Navarre, and Rénée of France,
daughter of Louis XII. But, alas! the treaty that restored Emmanuel
Philibert to the throne of his ancestors, contained a clause binding
the contracting parties to extinguish heresy. This was to send him
back to his subjects with a dagger in his hand.
Whatever the king might incline--and, strengthened by the counsels
of his Protestant queen, he would doubtless, if he could, have dealt
humanely by his faithful subjects, the Vaudois--his intentions were
overborne by men of stronger wills and more determined resolves. The
inquisitors of his kingdom, the nuncio of the Pope, and the ambassadors
of Spain and France, united in urging upon him the purgation of his
dominions, in terms of the agreement in the Treaty of Peace. The
unhappy monarch, unable to resist these powerful solicitations, issued
on the 15th February, 1560, an edict forbidding his subjects to hear
the Protestant preachers in the Valley of Lucerna, or anywhere else,
under pain of a fine of 100 dollars of gold for the first offence, and
of the galleys for life for the second. This edict had reference mainly
to the Protestants on the plain of Piedmont, who resorted in crowds
to hear sermon in the Valleys. There followed, however, in a short
time, a yet severer edict, commanding attendance at mass under pain
of death. To carry out this cruel decree, a commission was given to a
prince of the blood, Philip of Savoy, Count de Raconis, and with him
was associated George Costa, Count de la Trinita, and Thomas Jacomel,
the Inquisitor-General, a man as cruel in disposition as he was
licentious in manners. To these was added a certain Councillor Corbis,
but he was not of the stuff which the business required, and so, after
witnessing a few initial scenes of barbarity and horror, he resigned
his commission.[49]
The first burst of the tempest fell on Carignano. This town reposes
sweetly on one of the spurs of the Apennines, about twenty miles to
the south-west of Turin. It contained many Protestants, some of whom
were of good position. The wealthiest were selected and dragged to the
burning-pile, in order to strike terror into the rest. The blow had not
fallen in vain; the professors of the Protestant creed in Carignano
were scattered; some fled to Turin, then under the domination of
France, some to other places, and some, alas! frightened by the tempest
in front, turned back and sought refuge in the darkness behind them.
They had desired the “better country,” but could not enter in at the
cost of exile and death.
Having done its work in Carignano, this desolating tempest held its
way across the plain of Piedmont, towards those great mountains which
were the ancient fortress of the truth, marking its track through the
villages and country communes in terror, in pillage, and blood. It
moved like one of those thunder-clouds which the traveller on the Alps
may often descry beneath him, traversing the same plain, and shooting
its lightnings earthwards as it advances. Wherever it was known that
there was a Vaudois congregation, thither did the cloud turn. And now
we behold it at the foot of the Waldensian Alps--at the entrance of the
Valleys, within whose mighty natural bulwarks crowds of fugitives from
the towns and villages on the plain have already found asylum.
Rumours of the confiscations, arrests, cruel tortures, and horrible
deaths which had befallen the Churches at the foot of their mountains,
had preceded the appearance of the crusaders at the entrance of the
Valleys. The same devastation which had befallen the flourishing
Churches on the plain of Piedmont, seemed to impend over the Churches
in the bosom of the Alps. At this juncture the pastors and leading
laymen assembled to deliberate on the steps to be taken. Having fasted
and humbled themselves before God, they sought by earnest prayer the
direction of his Holy Spirit.[50] They resolved to approach the throne
of their prince, and by humble remonstrance and petition, set forth the
state of their affairs and the justice of their cause. Their first
claim was to be heard before being condemned--a right denied to no
one accused, however criminal. They next solemnly disclaimed the main
offence laid to their charge, that of departing from the true faith,
and of adopting doctrines unknown to the Scriptures, and the early ages
of the Church. Their faith was that which Christ Himself had taught;
which the apostles, following their Great Master, had preached; which
the Fathers had vindicated with their pens, and the martyrs with their
blood, and which the first four Councils had ratified, and proclaimed
to be the faith of the Christian world. From the “old paths,” the Bible
and all antiquity being witnesses, they had never turned aside; from
father to son they had continued these 1,500 years to walk therein.
Their mountains shielded no novelties; they had bowed the knee to no
strange gods, and, if they were heretics, so too were the first four
Councils; and so too were the apostles themselves. If they erred, it
was in the company of the confessors and martyrs of the early ages.
They were willing any moment to appeal their cause to a General
Council, provided that Council were willing to decide the question by
the only infallible standard they knew, the Word of God. If on this
evidence they should be convicted of even one heresy, most willingly
would they surrender it. On this, the main point of their indictment,
what more could they promise? Show us, they said, what the errors are
which you ask us to renounce under the penalty of death, and you shall
not need to ask a second time.[51]
Their duty to God did not weaken their allegiance to their prince. To
piety they added loyalty. The throne before which they now stood had
not more faithful and devoted subjects than they. When had they plotted
treason, or disputed lawful command of their sovereign? Nay, the more
they feared God, the more they honoured the king. Their services, their
substance, their life, were all at the disposal of their prince; they
were willing to lay them all down in defence of his lawful prerogative;
one thing only they could not surrender--their conscience.
As regarded their Romanist fellow-subjects of Piedmont, they had lived
in good-neighbourhood with them. Whose person had they injured--whose
property had they robbed--whom had they over-reached in their bargains?
Had they not been kind, courteous, honest? If their hills had vied
in fertility with the naturally richer plains at their feet, and if
their mountain-homes had been filled with store of corn, and oil, and
wine, not always found in Piedmontese dwellings, to what was this
owing, save to their superior industry, frugality, and skill? Never had
marauding expedition descended from their hills to carry off the goods
of their neighbours, or to inflict retaliation for the many murders
and robberies to which they had had to submit. Why, then, should their
neighbours rise against them to exterminate them, as if they were a
horde of evildoers, in whose neighbourhood no man could live in peace;
and why should their sovereign unsheathe the sword against those who
had never been found disturbers of his kingdom, nor plotters against
his government, but who, on the contrary, had ever striven to maintain
the authority of his law, and the honour of his throne? “One thing is
certain, most serene prince,” they said, in conclusion, “that the Word
of God will not perish, but will abide for ever. If, then, our religion
is the pure Word of God, as we are persuaded it is, and not a human
invention, no human power will be able to abolish it.”[52]
Never was there a more solemn, or a more just, or a more respectful
remonstrance presented to any throne. The wrong about to be done them
was enormous, yet not an angry word, nor a single accusatory sentence,
do the Vaudois permit themselves to utter. But to what avail this
solemn protest, this triumphant vindication? The more complete and
conclusive it is, the more manifest does it make the immense injustice
and the flagrant criminality of the House of Savoy. The more the
Vaudois put themselves in the right, the more they put the Church of
Rome in the wrong; and they who have already doomed them to perish are
but the more resolutely determined to carry out their purpose.
This document was accompanied by two others: one to the queen, and one
to the Council. The one to the queen is differently conceived from that
to the duke. They offer no apology for their faith: the queen herself
was of it. They allude in a few touching terms to the sufferings they
had already been subjected to, and to the yet greater that appeared
to impend. This was enough, they knew, to awaken all her sympathies,
and enlist her as their advocate with the king, after the example of
Esther, and other noble women in former times, who valued their lofty
station less for its dazzling honours, than for the opportunities it
gave them of shielding the persecuted confessors of the truth.[53]
The remonstrance presented to the Council was couched in terms more
plain and direct, yet still respectful. They bade the counsellors of
the king beware what they did; they warned them that every drop of
innocent blood they should spill they would one day have to account
for; that if the blood of Abel, though only that of one man, cried with
a voice so loud that God heard it in heaven, and came down to call its
shedder to a reckoning, how much mightier the cry that would arise from
the blood of a whole nation, and how much more terrible the vengeance
with which it would be visited! In fine, they reminded the Council that
what they asked was not an unknown privilege in Piedmont, nor would
they be the first or the only persons who had enjoyed that indulgence
if it should be extended to them. Did not the Jew and the Saracen live
unmolested in their cities? Did they not permit the Israelite to build
his synagogue, and the Moor to read his Koran, without annoyance or
restraint? Was it a great thing that the faith of the Bible should be
placed on the same level in this respect with that of the Crescent,
and that the descendants of the men who for generations had been the
subjects of the House of Savoy, and who had enriched the dominions with
their virtues, and defended them with their blood, should be treated
with the same humanity that was shown to the alien and the unbeliever?
These petitions the confessors of the Alps dispatched to the proper
quarter, and having done so, they waited an answer with eyes lifted up
to heaven. If that answer should be peace, with what gratitude to God
and to their prince would they hail it! should it be otherwise, they
were ready to accept that alternative too; they were prepared to die.