A SKETCH OF THE REFORMATION IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.
When learning began to revive, and the understandings of mankind
became more enlightened, there was a general complaint of errors and
abuses, and every one acknowledged the complaint to be just.
Pope Alexander VI. made a public purchase of the pontifical crown,
and his five bastards shared with him the profits. His son, the
Cardinal Duke of Borgia, in concert with the pope, his father, caused
the noble families of Vitelli, Urbino, Gravina, and Oliveretto,
together with a hundred other lords, to be made away with, in order
to seize upon their estates. Julius II., full of the same spirit,
excommunicated Louis XII. of France, while he himself, armed
cap-a-pie, ravaged a part of Italy with fire and sword. Leo X., in
order to raise money to pay the expenses of his pleasures, made a
sale of indulgences, like goods in a common market. Those who opposed
such shameful impositions were certainly right in a moral view; let
us see how far they were so with regard to us, in a political one.
They asserted that as Jesus Christ had never exacted annats, nor
reversions, nor sold dispensations for this world nor indulgences for
the next, they saw no reason why they should pay a foreign prince
his price for these things. Supposing that the annats, the law
proceedings in the pope’s court, and the dispensations which still
subsist were to cost us no more than five hundred thousand crowns a
year; it is clear that since the time of Francis I., that is, in two
hundred and fifty years, we have paid a hundred and twenty millions;
and if we calculate the different value of the mark of silver, we
shall find that this sum amounts to about two hundred and fifty
millions of the present money. It may therefore, I think, without any
blasphemy be allowed that the heretics in proposing the abolition of
these extraordinary taxes, which will be the admiration of posterity,
did, in that respect, no great injury to the kingdom, and showed
themselves good calculators rather than bad subjects. Add to this,
that they were the only persons who understood the Greek language,
or had any knowledge of antiquity; let us own likewise, without
dissimulation, that with all their errors, we are indebted to them
for the opening of our understandings, which had been long buried
beneath the most barbarous obscurity.
But as they denied the doctrine of purgatory, concerning which no
one ought to have the least doubt, and which, moreover, brought in
a comfortable revenue to the monks; as they paid no reverence to
relics which every one ought to reverence, and which brought in still
greater profits; and lastly, as they attacked the most respectable
tenets,[7] their adversaries made them no other reply than by
committing them to the stake. The king, who styled himself their
protector, and who kept a body of them in pay in Germany, marched at
the head of a procession through Paris, which was concluded by the
execution of a number of these unhappy wretches, in the following
manner:
They were suspended at the end of a long beam, which played upon
a pole erected for that purpose, and underneath them was kindled a
large fire, into which they were alternately lowered and then raised
up again, by which they experienced the most excruciating torments,
till a lingering death at last put an end to the longest and most
dreadful punishment that cruelty ever invented.
A short time before the death of Francis I., the members of the
Parliament of Provence, whom the clergy had incensed against the
inhabitants of Mirandol and Cabrière, applied to the king for a body
of troops to attend the execution of nineteen persons of that country
who had been condemned by them; with the assistance of this armed
force they massacred about six thousand souls, without sparing sex
or age, and reduced thirty villages to ashes. The people who were
the objects of these executions, and who had, till then, been in a
manner unknown, were doubtless to blame for having been born Vaudois,
but this was their only crime. They had been settled for upwards
of three hundred years in deserts and on mountains, which they had
rendered fertile by incredible labor, and led a pastoral and quiet
life, the perfect image of the innocence which we find attributed to
the first ages of the world. They had no acquaintance with the towns
or villages round about them, except that obtained by carrying the
produce of their grounds thither to sell. Totally ignorant of all
military operations, they made no defence, but were slaughtered like
timorous animals, whom we drive into a net and then knock them on the
head.[8]
After the death of Francis I., a prince who, it must be confessed,
was more remarkable for his gallantries and his misfortunes than for
his cruelty, the execution of a thousand heretics, and in particular
that of Dubourg, a counsellor of the parliament, together with the
massacre of Vassy, made the persecuted fly to arms. Their sect
multiplied in proportion with the fires lighted for them, and the
swords of executioners drawn against them, patience gave way to rage,
and they followed the example of their enemies in cruelty. Nine civil
wars filled France with carnage, and a peace, more fatal than war
itself, produced the day of St. Bartholomew, which stands without
example in the annals of crime.
Henry III. and Henry IV. fell victims to the league, the one by the
hand of a Dominican friar, and the other by that of a monster who had
been a brother of the mendicant order. There are those who pretend
that humanity, indulgence, and liberty of conscience are horrible
things; I would ask such persons seriously, if they could have
produced calamities comparable to those I have just related?