# Protestant Exiles from France/Historical Introduction - section I

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HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION.
Section I.
THE PERSECUTIONS WHICH DROVE FRENCH-SPEAKING PROTESTANTS INTO EXILE, EXPLAINED AND SKETCHED AS FAR AS 1680.
Louis XII., King of France, who died in 1515, being no lover of the Pope of Rome or his authority, was favourably impressed by a representation addressed to him by the Vaudois of Dauphiny and Provence, which declared that they held the essentials of real religion, but did not believe in the Pope or his doctrines. Royal Commissioners visited their Alpine homes, and reported to the King to the following effect: — “Among these people baptism is administered, the articles of faith and the ten commandments are taught, the Sabbath is solemnly observed and the word of God is expounded; as to the unchastity and the poisonings of which they are accused, not a single case is to be found.” Louis exclaimed, “These people are much better than myself and than all my catholic subjects.” This king was the responsible author of a medal with the inscription, “Perdam Babylonis nomen” [I will destroy the name of Babylon], occasioned by the domineering and warlike spirit of the sovereign Pontiff.
These Vaudois of France, the next king, Francis I., almost exterminated by military executions and wholesale massacres, which the inhabitants of Cabrieres, in Provence, resisted by force of arms, driving a regiment of papal mercenaries to the very gates of Avignon. This was a small foretaste of the future civil wars, necessitated by the unprovoked substitution of dragoon-law for regular and genuine government.
Louis XII. was the father of Renée (or in Italian speech, Renata), consort of Hercules, Duke of Ferrara. She was born in 1510, and was a year younger than her countryman, Jean Cauvin, whom we call John Calvin. Protestants, as literati, found refuge from persecution in the ducal palace during the early years of her marriage, namely, from 1528 to 1536. Calvin was there for a few months, under the assumed name of Charles D’Espeville. But it is on account of her influence during her widowhood, from 1559 to 1578, as an inhabitant of France, that the Duchess of Ferrara is here mentioned. She then ceased to make any concealment of her attachment to the reformed faith. Her castle of Montargis became a stronghold of Protestantism. It was the asylum of many reformed pastors, who called it Hotel Dieu.
Francis I., the other son-in-law, and the successor of Louis XII., had a sister, Marguerite de Valois, born in 1492, who married Henri I., King of Navarre, in 1527.
She gave effect to her religious convictions by receiving Calvin and similar refugees at her Court. Her royal brother did not discourage her personal belief; but she often considered it necessary to conceal her faith, and to conform to Popish worship, either through fear of persecution, or through attachment to her brother and to his political interests. She is more celebrated as the mother of Jeanne d’Albret (who became Queen of Navarre in her own right, in 1555), and as the grandmother of Henri II. of Navarre (afterwards Henri IV. of France), who was born in 1553, to Queen Jeanne and Antoine de Bourbon, her husband.
Antoine boldly professed the reformed faith, while Jeanne dissembled. He was sentenced to death in France in 1560. This affliction awakened his queen’s remorse, and she proclaimed her faith. King Francis II.’s death put a stop to the execution of the fatal sentence, and then Antoine recanted. Thus the royal couple exchanged their professed creeds, and the better half stood firm to Protestantism. At this ​period (says Beza, Calvin’s biographer) the Reformers had 2000 congregations in France, and 400,000 worshippers.
The above details show how a Protestant faith got some visible footing in France.
Through the memory of the Vaudois, as well as the instructions of a few gifted pastors, men could understand the main errors of the Romish system, especially in its debarring the people from the reading of the Scriptures, and in exalting ceremonies above moral conduct. And any suspension of the fear of persecution was likely to change such inward notions into public inquiry and attendance upon the preaching of religious reformers.
People who stigmatize the Reformers as rebels, on account of their occasional armed resistance to persecution, should remember that if assassins come upon us, though they be the emissaries of what is called government, no scriptural principle of loyal subjection compels us to give them our lives; and if we save or sell our lives dear, we break no law. And laws that connive at, or virtually encourage and suggest, the molestation of quiet citizens on the roadside, are laws only in name, and can be enforced not by right, but by might alone. Up to 1561, such was the molestation to which French Protestants were exposed.
In 1561 the Protestants obtained a breathing time, through the influence of a great General and Statesman, the Grand Admiral of France, Gaspard de Coligny, born in 1516, and a convert to “the religion” in 1557. The notorious queenmother, Catherine de Medicis, widow of Henry II., continued Regent during the minority of Charles IX. However rejoiced she might otherwise have been at the recantation of Antoine de Bourbon, she resented it as an effect of the influence of the Guises, whose party it strengthened. To counteract the political derangements which she feared, Catherine encouraged Coligny, in 1561 , to promote measures for the toleration of the Reformed.
And now the Protestants were for the first time protected from personal molestation. And it was arranged that their assembling to hear preachings was not to be a ground for legal accusations. Such was the Edict of January 1562. For the civil war, which the infractions of this edict produced, the law-breakers are responsible, namely, the Roman Catholics. The leader of the Protestants was Antoine Bourbon’s brother, the Prince of Conde. During the lull after the auspicious January, and under the protection of the edict, he had made a public profession of the Protestant religion. After his example, many persons of rank had done the same; and the number of persons who came to the Faubourgs of Paris to hear the preaching had in a short time amounted to fifty thousand.
In the summer of 1562 the Queen of Navarre found that she could aid her own Protestant subjects only by arming them for self-defence. But becoming a widow in October of that year, she, in 1563, established Protestantism in Navarre. From the Papal citation, which followed that step, the French Court sheltered her for political reasons. In order, however, to retain the custody of her son and daughter, she fled with them in 1568, and took refuge within the fortifications of La Rochelle, from whence she would not remove till September 1571. The same city of refuge was the sanctuary of many other leading Protestants. The pacification of August 1570 was hastened by this circumstance. It was the beginning of those blandishments from the Court towards the Huguenots, which ended in the massacre on St. Bartholomew’s day, 1572, in Paris. The Massacre of St. Bartholomew spread through France; and in it Coligny was the chief victim among 70,000 slain.
In order to understand the justification of civil war in France at this period, we must consider some points of difference from our views of law and loyalty, belonging to the very constitutions of ancient government as compared with more modern monarchy and executive authority. After considering that the Bartholomew massacre made personal self-defence a Huguenot’s only protection, the reader must picture a French Protestant congregation, forbidden to carry any arms, yet surrounded by Roman Catholics, armed with weapons which a raging priesthood stirs them up to use against the unarmed worshippers, the law not visiting such murderous assaults with any punishment. It must also be realised that it was consistent with loyalty for a noble to have a fortress over which the king had no active jurisdiction, and for a town such as La Rochelle to be equally independent of the sovereign. Such a town, by feudal right, was as effectual a sanctuary against the king’s emissaries as any ecclesiastical building. It was as lawless for the king to go to war with the town, as for the town to send an invading army against Paris. The independent rulers of a fort or walled town had some duties to their own dependents, to which even the king’s claims must be postponed. The supreme authority of a king over all towns and castles was a state of things which in theory the King of France ​might wish: but it was not the constitution of France; and therefore such coveting was a species of radicalism on his part.
The inhabitants of La Rochelle owed to their independence their escape from the St. Bartholomew massacre. The Queen of Navarre, though decoyed to Paris, escaped by the visitation of God, who removed her “from the evil to come,” and to the heavenly country, about two months before. A very great Huguenot soldier, second to none but Coligny, survived the massacre, namely, Francois, Seigneur de la Noue. This “Francis with the Iron Arm” had been Governor of La Rochelle. He was at Mons at the date of the massacre, but was spared, and graciously received by the king. Assuming that he would recant in return for his life, the Court sent him to La Rochelle to see if the citizens, on their liberty of conscience being promised, would surrender to royal authority. La Noue, as an envoy, was coldly received. Finding the citizens firm and courageous, he again accepted the chief command in the Protestant interest, and the Royalist besiegers withdrew in the summer of 1573.
An edict, dated 11th August 1573, conceded to the Huguenots liberty of domestic worship and the public exercise of their religion in La Rochelle, Montauban, and Nismes. The Government relieved its feelings of chagrin at such concessions by inventing, as the one legal designation of French Protestantism for all time coming, the contemptuous title, “La Religion Pretendue Reformée” (the pretended reformed religion), or “La R. P. R.” Charles IX., the responsible director of the St. Bartholomew massacre, died in 1574, and was succeeded by his brother, Henry III.
Catherine de Medicis, the mother of three successive Kings of France, was aiso the mother-in-law of Philip II., King of Spain and the Netherlands. It was in the kingdom of the Netherlands that the Protestantism of the European Continent was most vigorous, the Dutch-speaking inhabitants being influenced by the reformers of Germany, while the French reformers influenced the French-speaking inhabitants, who were called Walloons, on account of their dialect of the language. Although France and Spain were irreconcilable as kingdoms, yet Catherine and Philip had been literally one as Romanists and persecutors. Philip’s agent in the Netherlands was that incarnation of cruelty whom the English people called “Duke Alva.” Alva’s wholesale murders and the French massacres were but successive acts of one drama. In 1564 Queen Elizabeth of Spain, accompanied by Alva, had received a brilliant reception from the Queen-mother at Bayonne. On that occasion Catherine and Aiva had entered into secret negotiations for the extermination of heresy in Western Europe, the Duke promising, on behalf of Philip, to give a tremendous example of the most sanguinary and relentless methods. The object of the mysterious interviews, though not divulged, had been suspected; and the French Protestants had resolved to continue their attitude of armed observation.
The term “Walloon” designated (as I have already mentioned) an ancient dialect of the French language. The designation, “The Walloons,” belonged to all Philip’s French-speaking subjects, whether Romanist or Protestant. The Protestant Walloons received and accepted the nickname of “The Beggars” — les Gueux, called by an English translator, the Gueuxes. A similar name was given to the French Protestants — les Huguenots. That this was a nickname — a name given in pleasantry — appears, from Bishop Jewel’s “Defence of the Apology of the Church of England” (chap. xvi. Div. 2). Jewel’s Jesuit opponent, Harding, having used the expression, “Your brethren, the Huguenots of France,” the Bishop rejoined, “Our brethren in France, whom in your pleasant manner ye call Huguenots? The grand modern historian, Merle d’Aubigné, says that this name was imported from Switzerland, where in the year 1518 the Duke of Savoy’s party coined a French word from the German Eidesgenossen (confederates), and gave the name to the independent Genevans. The spelling varied in different chronicles of Geneva in those early times: Bonivard in 1518 wrote Eiguenots; the Genevan registers in 1520, Eyguenots; Galiffe in 1526, Eguenot. “Michel Roset, the most respectable of these authorities of the sixteenth century, generally wrote Huguenots.” “We (D’Aubigné continues) adopt that form because it is the only one that has passed into our language, it is possible that the name of the citizen, Besançon Hugues, who became the principal leader, may have contributed to the preference of this form overall the others.
In any case it must be remembered, that until after the Reformation this sobriquet had a purely political meaning — in no respect, religious — and designated simply the friends of independence. Many years after, the enemies of the Protestants of France called them by this name, wishing to impute to them a foreign, republican, and heretical origin.” Having the same enemies and the same creed, the same life ​and the same warfare, the Walloon and Huguenot martyrs, who are memorialised in this volume, may be fitly united by the one designation of Huguenot refugees.
I shall go into some details concerning the sufferings of the Protestant Walloons in my chapter i., and shall now proceed with Huguenot history.
The reign of Henry III. must here be passed over. When he was assassinated in the camp near Paris in 1589, the Protestants under King Henry of Navarre were in his army, taking the loyal side against the rebellious Roman Catholic League.
The Papists continued the rebellion, with a view to displace Henry of Navarre from the throne of France, which was his rightful inheritance; and thus the Protestants, being evidently loyal still, require no apologist.
It is alleged, however, that by now becoming a party to a treaty with the king of the country, the Protestant Church of France assumed an imperial position which no civilised empire can tolerate, and that, therefore, the suppression of that Church by Louis XIV., though executed with indefensible cruelty, was the dictate of political necessity.
The reply to this allegation is, that this treaty was only the re-enactment and further extension of a peculiar method of tolerating Protestants, devised by the kings of France as the only plan to evade the necessity of being intolerant, which the coronation oath made them swear to be. The plea that Protestants, as religionists, were not implicitly subject to the King, but were to be negotiated with like a foreign power, was the only apology for tolerating them, consistent even with the modified oath sworn by Henri IV. — “I will endeavour, to the utmost of my power, and in good faith, to drive out of my jurisdiction and from the lands under my sway all heretics denounced by the Church” of Rome. As to this political treaty with the Huguenots in its first shape, Professor Anderson remarks, “Instead of religious toleration being secured to them by a powerfully administered law, their protection was left in their own hands, ... as if there was something in their creed which must for ever render them incapable of amalgamating with other Frenchmen.”
Royalty, which planned the treaty, was at least as guilty as the Protestant Church, which entered into the plan. If persecution and extinction were the righteous wages of the transaction, the humbler accomplice was not the only party that had earned them. The only crime was consent to a royal programme, to which the successors of Henri IV. made themselves parties by deliberate and repeated declarations. The treaty to which we allude is the celebrated Edict of Nantes, dated April 1598, as a pledge of the observance of which the Protestants were confirmed in the possession of several towns, with garrisons and ammunition, to be held and defended by their own party in independent feudal style.
That this was a political eye-sore in a statesman-like view, is now acknowledged. But that it was the last chance for religious peace and tolerance in France, cannot be denied on the other hand. And to say that it was the cause of the Great Persecution would be a historical blunder.
The bigotry of the Roman Catholics was the cause. In the provinces persecution was perpetual. Illegal treatment of individuals and congregations of the Protestant party was rarely punished; while the local magistrate, instead of a protector, was often a leading persecutor. Through priestly instigation and intimidation, the atmosphere of France was heated with uncontrollable and unextinguishable malignity against the Protestants, who gained nothing by fighting with truce-breakers.
It was in the reign of Henri’s son, Louis XIII., that fighting in defence of edictal rights came to an end. The majority of the Protestants grew weary of fruitless battles and sieges. Being always conscientiously loyal, they began to wish to make an ostentation of their loyalty, and to rely upon that for fair and paternal treatment from their King and his Cabinet. Undoubtedly, the King’s animus was against the feudalism as well as the Protestantism of the cautionary towns. The former was their special offensiveness to the powerful Prime Minister of France, Cardinal Richelieu.
Another argument against Protestants resorting to civil war, was that political malcontents, bigots of the Roman Catholic creed, often joined their ranks, and gave ​a bad colour to their designs. Such a malcontent made advances to them in 1615 — viz., the Prince of Conde, who induced the justly-honoured Protestant Henri, Due de Rohan, to take the field. But their greatest and best counsellor, the sainted Du Plessis Mornay, entreated his fellow-Protestants to keep back. He said, “The Court will set on foot a negotiation, which will be carried on till the Prince has gained his own ends, when he will leave our churches in the lurch and saddled with all the odium.” Such actually was the result. (“Histoire des Protestants,” par De Felice, p. 294, 2de edit.) Pierre du Moulin, the staunch Protestant champion, was opposed to the civil war. (See Bates’ Vitae.) From a letter dated Paris, 18/8 Feb. 1617, written to our far-famed Camden by M. F. Limiers, we may formulate the dictum, “Arma Protestantium meliora sunt preces et vota.” If the fall of La Rochelle and the other cautionary towns has been ascribed to the lukewarmness of the Huguenots themselves, it may, with at least equal reason, be inferred that there was a principle in their inaction. To exchange the appearance of feudal defiance for statutory subjection to their king was a lawful suggestion and experiment. Accordingly, not only did the majority of the Protestants stay at home, but many of them served in the royal armies. And after the pacification of 1629, when Louis XIII. enacted the Edict of Nismes, they rested all their hopes of religious liberty upon that monarch’s satisfaction with their complete subjection to royal jurisdiction, and with the very strong loyalty of their principles and manifestoes. During the minority of Louis XIV., their fidelity and good services were acknowledged by the Premier of France, Cardinal Mazarin, under whose administration they enjoyed much tranquillity, and by whose recommendation they filled many important offices in the financial department of his Majesty’s Government.
Any right or privilege rendering the Edict of Nantes theoretically dangerous, as inconsistent with regal domination, had no being after 1629. The monarch who carried out the great and terrible persecution of the seventeenth century had no such materials wherewith to fabricate a political justification.
The Protestants had liberty, from 1577 and thereafter, to build houses for public worship, though not to call them “churches;” they were “temples.” But in 1661, when the death of Mazarin was a signal for mutilating the edict by perverse misinterpretations, a very large proportion of these “temples” was appropriated by the Roman Catholics, or thrown down, on the plea that there were no written title-deeds, or that during the civil wars they had been forfeited and consecrated to Roman worship. With such explanations or with none, Louis XIV. took about one-half of their temples from the Huguenots from 1661 to 1673. Locke writes in his Journal in 1676 as to the Protestants of Usez in Languedoc, “Their temple is ordered to be pulled down, the only one they have left there, though three-quarters of the town be Protestants. The pretence given is, that their temple being too near the Papist church, their singing of psalms disturbed the service.” Such arbitrary spoliation was a motive to be “converted.” So was the exclusion of Huguenots, first from learned professions, and gradually from every trade. The impossibility of earning a livelihood was a chastisement of the unconverted, to last until their conversion. The Protestants at Nismes (says Locke) “had built themselves an hospital for their sick, but that is taken from them; a chamber in it is left for their sick, but never used, because the priests trouble them when there.” But priests and monks had liberty to enter private houses wherever there was a sick or dying Protestant. The suffering and the languishing were thus tortured with arguments and upbraidings; with combined threatenings and entreaties to pray to the Virgin and to abandon their faith and hope concerning Christ and salvation. We can understand how Mademoiselle de Cire, niece of the Marquis de Ruvigny, was, when dying in London, “ever magnifying the goodness of God that she died in a country where she could in peace give up her soul to him that made it.” [Lady Russell’s Letters.]
Note.
The Edict of Henry IV., King of France and Navarre, which he called Letters of Edict for the establishment of good order and peace between our Catholic subjects and those of the Pretended Reformed Religion (commonly called The Edict of Nantes), dated April 1598, consists of a preamble and ninety-two articles (there are fifty-six additional articles, dated 2d May 1598). Henri IV., in the preamble, declared, after referring to his peaceable possession of the throne : “We could not better employ ourselves than in what concerneth the glory of God’s holy name and service, and in providing that He may be adored and supplicated by all our subjects ; and if it hath not pleased Him to permit at this time that it shall be in one and the same form of religion, yet at least that it may be in one and the same intention, with such regulations that there shall be no trouble or tumult among our subjects." The conclusion of this preamble is Nous “avons par cet édit perpétuel et irrevocable dit, déclaré, et ordonné, disons, declarons, et ordonnons.”
Refraining from quoting what was political and diplomatical, I call my readers’ attention to one or two articles specially accordant with the King’s expressed wish, that we and this kingdom may always merit and preserve the glorious title of Most Christian:”
1. That the memory of all matters passed both on the one side and the other from the beginning of March in the year 1585, and during the other preceding troubles, shall be quenched and hushed.
17. We forbid all preachers, readers, and other persons who speak in public, to use any words, discourses, or talk which tendeth to stir up the people to sedition.
18. We also forbid all our subjects, of whatever quality and condition, to take away by force or enticement, against the will of their parents, the children of those of the Pretended Reformed Religion, in order to their being baptised or confirmed in the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Church.
19. The adherents of the said Pretended Reformed Religion shall not be in any manner constrained, nor shall they stand obliged, by reason of abjuration, promises, and oaths which heretofore they have made.
26. All disinheritings or deprivations, whether verbal or testamentary, uttered out of mere hatred, or on account of religion, shall be abolished among our subjects.
70. The children of those who departed from this kingdom on account of religion, and of the troubles, since the death of Henri II., our most honoured lord and father-in-law — even though the said children were born out of this kingdom — shall be reputed true Frenchmen and natives; and we have declared, and do declare them, to be such (provided that, if born in foreign parts, they return within ten years after the date of this edict), without requiring letters of naturalisation.
73. If there be any prisoners or galley-slaves still detained by judicial authority or otherwise, who were sentenced during the troubles or on account of the said religion, they shall be discharged and set at full liberty.
* ↑ D’Aubigné’s “Reformation in Europe in the Time of Calvin” (in eight volumes), vol. i. p. 118.
* ↑ Introductory Essay by William Anderson, Professor in the Andersonian University, Glasgow (1852), prefixed to his translation of “Jean Migault; or the Trials of a French Protestant Family during the period of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.”
* ↑ It is remarkable that that year is also the date of the death of Philip II. of Spain. For thirty-six years that monarch had been an active enemy of Henry of Navarre (Henri IV. of France), and a substantial supporter of the Roman Catholic League, especially since the year 1585, when he concluded a treaty with the rebellious Cuises, “to extirpate all heresy both in France and in the Netherlands, and to exclude from the French throne any prince who will profess, favour, or tolerate the pernicious doctrines of the so-called Reformers.” — Student’s History of France.
* ↑ “Spero in fide et officio erga Regem perstituros, arma etenim Protestantes meliora sua esse preces et vota non rarò sunt expetti.” — Camdeni et ad Camdenum Epistolae, No. 138.
* ↑ The Edictal liberties which the Protestants deemed essential were five, namely: — I. Liberty to themselves and all who shall profess their religion to live in all towns and places in the King’s dominions, without liability to inquisitorial visitation, and without being compelled to do anything against their consciences. II. Permission to exercise their religion publicly in certain places, and privately in their houses everywhere. III. Power to fathers and mothers to make their own arrangements for their own children’s education. IV. An ordinance to all officers of justice to hold Protestants, indifferently with Catholics, eligible to all employments and places of trust. V. The right of appeal in all disputes to the Chambers (or Courts), presided over by a mixed bench of Catholic and Protestant judges, called the Chambers of the Edict [i.e., instituted by the Edict of Nantes]. — Memorial to the King of France in 1658.