Chapter IV.

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. {167} 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. {169} 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. {171} 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. {172} 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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