“Henry IV had adjured his mother’s faith, in the hope of thereby purchasing from Rome the sure tenure of his crown and the peaceful possession of his kingdom. He fancied that he had got what he bargained for; and being, as he supposed, firmly seated on the throne, he was making prodigious efforts to lift France out of the abyss in which he had found her.” Wylie 309, 310. The so called “civil wars” which were in fact crusades by the government against the Protestants, had left the nation scarred. Henry IV had gone far to efface these frightful traces and to rid the nation of debt. He had, however, also formed political alliances with Protestant nations and was preparing to go to war against the House of Austria, a strong Catholic force. “His heretical foreign policy excited a suspicion that although he was outwardly a Roman Catholic, he was at heart a Huguenot. In a moment, a Hand was stretched forth from the darkness, and all was changed.” Ibid. The dagger of Ravaillac, the monk, brought him and his policy to an end.
His eight year old son, Louis XIII, succeeded him on the throne and Parliament immediately made his mother, Maria de Medici, regent. “Maria de Medici lacked the talent of her famous predecessor, Catherine de Medici, but she possessed all her treachery, bigotry, and baseness. She was a profound believer in witchcraft, and guided the vessel of the State by her astrological calculations. When divination failed her she had recourse to the advice of the Pope’s nuncio, of the Spanish ambassador, and of Concini, a man of obscure birth from her native city of Florence.” Ibid., When Louis XIII grew a few years older he hoped to break his bonds, so he banished his mother to Blois and hired assassins to rid him of Concini. Soon he was under the influence of a favorite, equally worthless. With the court caught up in intrigue and blood, the nobles retired to their estates and lived like independent kings and awaited the civil broils yet to come on their unhappy land.
Evil Tidings
There were many signs to warn the Huguenot of the sure approach of evil times. One was the reversal of the foreign policy of Henry IV. Louis XIII disconnected himself from his father’s allies, and joined himself to his father’ enemies by a double marriage. He took the hand of the Spanish Infanta and his sister he offered to the Prince of Austria. This renewed influence of Rome and Spain, once more in France, boded of persecution and war, and some reported that the price of this double alliance was the suppression of heresy.
The court continued to speak soft words to the Protestants but the priests wanted all of the rights gained by the Edict of Nantes to be abrogated one by one. There were still voices calling for toleration, but the clergy was ever reminding those who voiced such opinions that the king had taken an oath to exterminate heretics. Parliament was told that “all treaties sworn to the Huguenot were provisional; in other words, that it was the duty of Government always to persecute and slay Protestants, except in one case—namely, when it was not able to do it.” Ibid., 311.
War was not long in coming. First the king placed himself at the head of an army whose mission was to retake the territory of Lower Navarre and Bearn in the mountains of the Pyrenees, the hereditary kingdom of Jeanne dAlbret. This kingdom was one of the most flourishing in all of Christendom and was nine-tenths Protestant. A decree was issued giving all of the ecclesiastical property to the Romish clergy. The Jesuit Arnoux, the King’s confessor, reasoned that since this property belonged to God it could not be lawfully held by any but his priests. The Bearnese were not silent but the King’s army forced their submission to the reestablishment of the Popish religion by use of the cudgel, the dagger and a multitude of violences. This was the first of the dragonnades which were repeated afterwards in France at large.
The Protestant now divided France into eight circles and appointed a governor over each with the power to impose taxes, raise armies, and engage in battle. The majority, however, opposed hostilities and determined to fight only in self-defense. The pope and cardinals came to the King’s aid with 1,400,000 crowns to defray war expenses. In the battles that followed, the king was very successful. The Protestants lost all but two of their cautionary towns: La Rochelle and Montauban.
Cardinal Richelieu
The queen-mother introduced Cardinal Richelieu to the council-table of her son and the cardinal quickly rose to the top place. “He put down every rival, became the master of his sovereign, and governed France as he pleased.” Ibid., 316. He was a man of great schemes with genius and activity to carry them out. He resolved to make the throne a greater power in France and to break the power of the nobles. He also sought to reduce the Austrian power and was dear to the anger and alarm his policy awakened in Rome. But he felt that before he could accomplish any of these projects he must first subdue the Huguenot, for their political rights were an obstacle in his path.
He determined to strike a fatal blow at La Rochelle. He saw this city as a symbol of the political and religious power of the Huguenot. Richelieu raised vast land and naval armaments and besieged the city in 1627. He raised a dike to close the channel to the sea and prevent help from that route. Attempts by the Duke of Rohan to raise an army of Huguenot to come to the aid of their brethren in La Rochelle fell on deaf ears. After fifteen months of siege, with two-thirds of the population dead from starvation and battle, the city surrendered. The Huguenot fell as a political power in France. All ancient privileges were annulled. Cardinal Richelieu put off his armaments, washed his hands and sang the first mass to reestablish the Roman Catholic religion in the city.
The Roman Catholic nobles had assisted Richelieu in putting down the Huguenot. Now they found that they had cleared the way for their own suppression. “It was the design of God to humble one class of his enemies by the instrumentality of another, and so Richielieu prospered in all he undertook. He weakened the emperor; he mightily raised the prestige of the French arms, and he made the throne the one power in the kingdom.” Ibid., 320 Having succeeded in all of his goals and having triumphed over all attempts to end his life by assassination, he held power until his death. “The cardinal first, and six months after, the king, were both stricken, in the mid-time of their days and in the height of their career. They returned to their dust, and that day their thoughts perished.” Ibid.
“We have now arrived at the end of the religious wars. What has France gained by her vast expenditure of blood and treasure? Peace? No; despotism. The close of the reign of Louis XIII shows us the nobles and the mob crushed in their turn, and the throne rising in autocratic supremacy above all rights and classes. One class, however, is exempted from the general serfdom. The Church shares the triumph of the throne. The hand of a priest has been laid upon the helm of the State, and the king and the clergy together sway the destinies of a prostrate people. This ill-omened alliance is destined to continue—for, though one cardinal minister is dead, another is about to take his place—and the tyranny which has grown out of it is destined to go on, adding year by year to its own prerogatives and the people’s burdens, until its existence and exactions shall terminate together by the arrival of the Revolution, which will mingle all four—the throne, the priesthood, the aristocracy, and the commonality—in one common ruin.” Ibid.
Cardinal Mazarin
Louis XIV, a child of four and a half years, is now king. His mother, Anne of Austria is sole regent and she calls upon Richelieu’s disciple Cardinal Mazarin to aid as prime minister. His work was to keep all that Richelieu had won and this was no easy matter. “Extravagance created debts; debts necessitated new taxes; the taxes were felt to be grievous burdens by the people. First murmurs were heard; then, finally, insurrection broke out.” Ibid., 321. In this War of the Fronde, the nobles and the mob were not successful in throwing off the yoke, however, the troubles of the country were a shield for a time over the small remnant of Protestantism which had been spared in France.
Shut out from political activity, the Protestants transferred their talents and activity to the pursuits of agriculture, of trade, and of manufactures where they excelled. In agriculture the crops of the Huguenot seemed to produce seven fold, in manufacture their craft and skill made them superior, in trade their honesty, especially in contrast to the doubtful integrity of the Catholics, placed almost all foreign trade in their hands. Protestants took a foremost place among the learned physicians, the great lawyers, and the illustrious orators of France. As a religious body, they were under constant threat of extermination and so their courage and zeal for building up their churches was weak. They were weak. Despite spiritual decay in French Protestantism as a whole, there were still individual Protestants whose names and labors drew the attention of Europe and French Protestant literature blossomed in the stormy seventeenth century.
Mazarin succeeded in war, not only against his own citizens but also in war against Spain and Austria, humbling both and transferring to France their political and military preponderance. It is interesting to note “that two princes of the Roman Catholic Church were employed in weakening a power which was the main support of that Church, and in paving the way for that great Revolution which was to reverse the position of all the kingdoms of Europe, striping the Papal nations of their power, and lifting up the Protestant kingdoms to supremacy.” Ibid., 327. Mazarin prospered in his plans but like Richelieu he died before he could enjoy the fruits of his anxious labors.
Louis XIV
When the death of Mazarin, Louis XIV, who had been on the throne for eighteen years, now began to govern. He told his ministers that they were to give council only and he would reign as he pleased. Seldom has a monarch had more power. His own well-known words express it— “The State, it is I.” He was the sole master of the rights, liberties, and consciences of his subjects. His reign would be either a source of blessing or of far-reaching misery.
“The error of Louis XIV, as a man, was his love of pleasure. He lived in open and unrestrained licentiousness. This laid him at the feet of his confessor, and sank him into a viler vassalage than that of the meanest vassal in all his dominions. The ‘Great’ Louis, the master of a mighty kingdom, whose will was law to the millions who called him their sovereign, trembled before a man with a shaven crown. From the feet of his confessor he went straight to the commission of new sins; from these he came back to the priest, who was ready with fresh penances, which, alas! Were but sins in a more hideous form. A more miserable and dreadful life there never was. Guilt was piled upon guilt, remorse upon remorse, till at length life was passed, and the great reckoning was in view.” Ibid., 327.
Since the penances imposed by the King’s confessor often involved treachery against the Protestants, conditions of the Huguenot became worse from the moment Mazarin breathed his last and Louis XIV began to reign. Throughout his reign his policy toward the Protestants was to work toward their extinction and to revoke the Edict of Nantes. His first act in this line was to send out commissioners two by two—one Protestant and one Catholic—into all of the provinces to hear grievances and settle quarrels. In every case they found for the Catholics and against the Protestants. Next came a decree against “Relapsed Heretics.” This enabled the state to seize and bring to tribunals any person who entered a Protestant church if they had ever at any time in their life had any relationship with the Catholic church or given any suspicion of having leanings toward Catholicism. Other ordinances authorized a priest and a magistrate to visit every dying person and urge them to join Catholicism on their death bed. Children could adjure Protestantism at the age of seven and their parents were required to pay for their maintenance under a Catholic roof. Spies haunted Protestant sermons and any minister who spoke a word against the Virgin or any saint was indicted for blasphemy. Protestants were excluded from all public office and from the practice of law or medicine and in fact from all of the professions. They were forbidden to sing psalms nor could they bury their dead except before dawn and at the edge of night and not more than ten mourners could attend a burial. But the priests declared that more must be done to cause this “formidable monster of heresy to expire completely.” Under this tyranny Protestants began to flee from their native land.
Persecutions heightened. New ordinances and arrests struck the Protestants. Protestants could only print books with permission; worship had to be suspended if a bishop was visiting; their domestic privacy was invaded and parental rights were violated; their temples were demolished. “But perhaps the most extraordinary means employed was the creation of a fund for the purchase of conscience.” Pellison, a former Calvinist, was in charge of this office which had clerks and books and “daily published lists of articles purchased, these articles being the bodies and souls of men…The daily lists of adjurations amounted to many hundreds; but those who closely examined the names said that the majority were knaves, or persons who, finding conversion profitable, thought it not enough to be once, but a dozen times converted.” Ibid., 329
“Louis XIV was now verging on old age, but his bigotry grew with his years…No fitter tool than Louis XIV could the Jesuits have found. His Spanish mother had educated him not to hesitate at scruples, but to go forward without compunction to the perpetration of enormous crimes.” He now fell under the influence of Madame de Maintenon the granddaughter of the Protestant historian Agrippa d’Aubigne and a former Calvinist. The king secretly married her after his queen died and she and Father la Chaise, his confessor, became counselors and partners in deeds of tyranny and blood that brought further darkness and horror over the life of the king. “It was deemed bad economy, perhaps, to do with money what could be done by the sword. Accordingly the dragonnades were now set on foot.” A regiment of cavalry was sent into each province and the majority of the soldiers were quartered in Protestant homes where they were given permission to carry out any type of horror short of killing the family. “The details must be suppressed; they are too horrible to read…Thousands rose to flee from a land where nothing awaited them but misery. The court attempted to arrest the fugitives by threatening them with the galleys for life. The exodus continued despite this terrible law.” Ibid., 329
Revocation of the Edict of Nantes
“Everywhere there was a Reign of Terror; and the populace, entirely in the hands of ruffians, who, if they forbore to kill, did so that they might practice excruciating and often unnamable tortures upon their victims, now came in crowds to the priests to adjure. ‘Not a post arrives,’ wrote Madame deMaintenon, in September, 1685, ‘without bringing tidings that fill him [the king] with joy; the conversions take place every day by the thousands.’ Twenty thousand adjured in Bearn, sixty thousand in the two dioceses of Nimes and Montpelier: and while this horrible persecution went on the Edict of Nantes was still law…
“The king, on the 18th of October, 1685, signed the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The Revocation swept away all rights and liberties which Henry IV and Louis XIII had solemnly guaranteed to the Protestants.” Ibid., 332 The execution of the edict began immediately.
“The Protestants amounted to between one and two million; their factories and workshops were to be found in nearly all parts of France; their commerce and merchandise upheld its great cities, their energy and enterprise were the life of the nation; and to be all at once flung beyond the pale of law, beyond the pale of humanity! They were stupefied. Their churches were laid in ruins and everywhere “booted apostles” scoured the land carrying on the work of “converting” as Louis XIV reasoned, “for had not the Saviour said, ‘Compel them to come in?’ ” Ibid., 333
One clause of the Revocation demanded that all Protestant pastors leave the country while another made it a death penalty for a layman to flee. “The frontiers were jealously guarded; sentinels were placed at all the great outlets of the kingdom; numerous spies kept watch at the seaports; officers patrolled the shore; and ships of war hovered off the coast to prevent escape.” Ibid., 334. But despite all of these efforts it is estimated that upwards of one half a million Protestants emigrated. Nearly every country in Europe became their refuge with England, Holland and Germany receiving the largest numbers. “The Duke of Saint Simon says in his Memoirs that all branches of trade were ruined, and that a quarter of the kingdom was perceptibly depopulated.” Ibid., 335. “In short, not an art was cultivated, not a trade was carried on in France which did not suffer from this blow; not a province was there where the blight it had inflicted was not to be seen in villages half-depopulated, in habitations deserted, in fields lying unploughed, and in gardens and vineyards overgrown with weeds and abandoned to desolation.” Ibid., 336. The fleets of foreign ships all but disappeared as the trade of the Protestants took this foreign trade and wealth to the lands where they fled.
By this act Louis XIV drove away the genius and learning, the art and glory of his realm, and scattered it among the nations of Europe. He did more to weaken France than all that Richelieu and Mazarin had done to strengthen her and in this his folly is as conspicuous and as stupendous as his wickedness. It was not alone in France that the effect of the Revolution worked against those who had invoked it. “It was the treachery and cruelty of the Revocation that, above most things, aroused the Protestant spirit of Europe, and brought about that great Revolution which, three short years afterwards, placed William of Orange on the throne of Great Britain.” Ibid., 338.
The Prisons and the Galleys
The sincerity of the conversions of the “New Catholics” was seriously doubted by the Jesuits even though they loudly boasted publicly of their successes. So, new ordinances were enjoined requiring frequent examination of those who have adjured their Protestantism. There proved to be an insufficient number of priests to perform this task, so Capuchins were called upon to instruct the new converts. These men proved to be so ignorant that a mere youth could silence them. “To gorss ignorance they not infrequently added a debauched life, and in the case of Protestants of riper years, their approach awakened only disgust, and their teaching had no other effect on those to whom they were given, than to deepen their aversion to a Church which employed them a her ministers.” Ibid., 339
“When the first stunning shock of the edict had spent itself, there came a recoil. The more closely ‘the new converts’ viewed the Church into which they had been driven, the stronger became their dislike of it. Shame and remorse for their apostasy began to burn within them.” Ibid. They began to desire their old religion again and so they withdrew from the cities in numbers and began to seek the mountain wildernesses and forests that they might practice their worship in the caves and on the tops of mountains. “There they promised one another to live and die in the Reformed faith.” Ibid.
When the king and his counselors learned of this, they were enraged. ” ‘Afterwards,’ says Quick, ‘they fell upon the persons of the Protestants, and there was no wickedness, though ever so horrid, which they did not put in practice, that thy might enforce them to change their religion…In Paris there was a desire to conceal from Louis the formidable proportions of the actual horrors. But in other parts of France no check was put upon the murderous passions, and the brutal lusts, and the plundering greed of the soldiery.” Ibid., 340. The prisons were filled with those who tried to escape and when there was not room to contain them they were shipped to Canada. If they survived the horrors of the trip they were sold into a slavery so cruel that in most cases they soon perished. “Those who were thus dragged from the pleasant fields of France, and put under the lash of barbarous taskmasters in a foreign land, were not the refuse of French society; on the contrary, they were the flower of the nation.” Ibid., 341. Others were sent into the galleys to suffer indescribable tortures. Hundreds suffered this fate. “It was not till 1775, in the beginning of Louis XVI’s reign, that the galleys released their two last Protestant prisoners.” Ibid., 343.
The Church in the Desert
The hidden churches were ministered to by men who had not received their training in any school or college but who had the anointing of the Holy Spirit. “More arrests, more dragoons, more sentences to the galleys, more scaffolds; such were the means by which they sought to crush the ‘Church of the Desert.’ ” When companies were found they were slaughtered. Exact lists of the massacred in different places included encounters where 300-400 old men, women and children were left dead upon the spot. “But no violence could stop these field-preachings. They grew ever larger in numbers, and ever more frequent in time, till at last, we are assured, it was nothing uncommon, in traversing the mountain-side or forest where they had met, to find, at every four paces, dead bodies dotting the sward, and corpses hanging suspended from the trees.” Ibid., 345. Years of persecution could not extinguish them. They continued though in chains. “At last, amid the clouds of sevenfold blackness, and the thunderings and lightenings of a righteous wrath, came the great Revolution, which with one strike of awful justice rent the fetters of the French Protestants, and smote into the dust the throne which had so long oppressed them.” Ibid., 347.