Chapter 26

Fig. 317.—Exorcism of a person possessed with a devil in the Church of Notre-Dame, at Laon, by the bishop of that city, on the 8th of February, 1566.—Reduced Fac-simile of an Engraving in the “Manuel de la Victoire du Corps de Dieu sur l’Esprit malin,” by Jean Boulaese: 16mo., Paris, 1575.

The ecclesiastical authority, seconded as it was by the orthodox sovereigns, had been nearly always sufficient to suppress the heretical movements, which were circumscribed within a few provinces or dioceses; but the violent dissensions of Rome with the Empire, the two rival camps, formed during two centuries between the popes and the anti-popes, the independent position acquired by the communes after reiterated uprisings against their bishops and nobles, rendered necessary the intervention of a judicial authority in the religious quarrels and contentions springing out of the heresies and schisms which were constantly arising. The creation of this authority, half civil and half ecclesiastical, emanating from the throne, was mainly with a view to protect the legacy of the past against the encroachments and the audacious claims of the future. This is how it came to pass that, from the fourteenth century, the courts styled Cours des Grand Jours, the presidentialtribunals, the parliaments, and even the bailiwicks, together with the Châtelet of Paris, intervened in matters of worship, though their rulings were not always in accordance with canonical law. The Inquisition failed to effect a permanent lodgment in France, but the ordinary tribunals claimed for themselves the right to take cognizance of crimes of heresy without having recourse to the aid of the ecclesiastical authorities.

Fig. 318.—Allegorical Picture of the Excesses committed by the Huguenots.—The lion bound and tamed represents France reduced to a deplorable position by the heretics, as much by civil war, pillage, violence, and bloodshed, as by the impiety of which they left traces everywhere, profaning churches, breaking the sacred vessels, and treading under foot the crosses, the images, and the relics of the saints.—After a Drawing from the Manuscript “De Tristibus Franciæ,” preserved in the Library of Lyons. (Sixteenth Century.)

Fig. 319.—John Knox, Propagator of the Reformed Religion, so-called, in Scotland; born at Gifford in 1504, died in 1572.

Fig. 320.—Ulrich Zwingle, the first champion of religious reform in Switzerland; born and died at Wildhaus, in the Canton of St. Gall, 1484–1531.From the “Vrais Pourtraits des Hommes Illustres:” Jean de Laon, Geneva, 1581.

Fig. 320.—Ulrich Zwingle, the first champion of religious reform in Switzerland; born and died at Wildhaus, in the Canton of St. Gall, 1484–1531.

From the “Vrais Pourtraits des Hommes Illustres:” Jean de Laon, Geneva, 1581.

Fig. 321.—The Massacre of St. Bartholomew, Paris, August 24th, 1572.—The principal subject is the murder of Coligny. To the left, the admiral is leaving the Louvre, and while reading a memorandum is wounded by an arquebuse fired by Maurevert from a window (August 22nd); in the background, one of his equerries is communicating this fact to King Charles IX., whom he finds playing at tennis. To the right, Coligny, attacked by soldiers in his hotel, Rue Béthisy, is assassinated by Besme, and his body, thrown from the window, falls at the Duc de Guise’s feet. In the next house Téligny and other Protestants are being massacred.—After a German Engraving, a reprint of one of the Supplementary Plates of the Collection engraved by Jean Tortorel and Jacques Perrissin.

When Luther’s protests against Rome and Catholicism (1517) first burst upon the world, the heresy of Reform had long slumbered in a chrysalis state, so to speak, awaiting only some circumstance to favour its development. “The egg was laid,” as Erasmus remarked, “Luther had but to incubate and hatch it.” The corruption of the higher classes, of the clergy,and of the people, increased his chances of success. The suppression of celibacy amongst the clergy, and of monastic vows, was looked upon with secret favour by the depraved among the bishops, priests, and monks; the prospect of seeing all the property of the Church fall into their possession excited the cupidity of the princes and nobles; and the rejection of ecclesiastical teaching flattered the vanity of the people, who were made supreme judges of the dogmas through the right which had been given to them, themselves to interpret the Bible, now translated into the vulgar tongue. For two centuries Rationalism had been disseminating the leaven of revolt against the authority of the past, and the advent of printing lent it fresh force. The apostle of the new doctrine had only to pronounce the word negation, and an army of disciples rose up to follow him and fight under his banner—disciples who, at first obedient to his command, soon became rebellious, and impatient to obtain for themselves the liberty of inquiry and the independence of principles which Luther despotically endeavoured to reserve exclusively forhimself. Carlstadt, Œcolampadius, Hutten, Zwingle (Fig. 320), Schwenckfeld, Munzer, Staupitz, Knox (Fig. 319), and many others, while following in the footsteps of the famous Wittenberg professor, had their own school: “The teachings crashed like avalanches, the doctrines rattled like the tempest; there was a dark abyss of neologies, inconsistencies, and contradictions, amidst which no ray of the eternal sun of grace was visible,” to quote the poetic simile of Wieland. The intellectual movement was none the less gigantic, especially in Germany and in the countries bordering on the Moselle. A deluge of statements, of pamphlets, and of stories, some true and others false, issuing, most of them anonymously, from an infinity of printing-presses, were rapidly disseminated, and made their way into every district; the allegorical eucharist of Zwingle, the revolutionary appeal of Munzer to the Franconian monks, the restoration of theletterby Schwenckfeld, thetropeof Carlstadt against Luther, assumed a thousand different forms; while the indefatigable Luther himself, in turn a Demosthenes, a Petronius, a Danubian peasant, a beer-sodden drunkard, spun out in fifteen thousand folio pages his senseless Protestant theories—a chaos of eloquence, poesy, impassioned similes, tangible truths, audacious falsehoods, venom, hatred, jealousy, and filth. The famous Leipsic dispute, the sessions of Worms and of Augsburg, the war of extermination of the peasantry, the quarrel about images, the interview of Mauburg, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew in France (Fig. 321)—in a word, the numerous revolutions of this great religious drama which Europe was watching with nervous anxiety, are brought into less marked relief in the large works since published by learned controversialists, than in these desultory pages, scattered to the winds, sung at the street-corners, accompanied by denunciations, threats and sanguinary struggles between the irreconcilable factions of Catholic and Huguenot.

Fig. 322.—Martin Luther.—Reduced Fac-simile of a Portrait by Lucas de Cranach (1520), published in the fly-leaf of a sermon preached by Luther against the authority of the Roman Church (in octavo, Wittenberg, 1522), when he threw off his garb of an Augustine monk. The Latin distich renders famous both the artist and the original in these words:—“If Luther leaves imperishable traces of his genius, Lucas (Cranach) perpetuates for ever the features which death will efface.”

Lutheranism, in consequence of a revolt in the cloister, had led to anarchy in the Church, to the exile of Carlstadt, who was compelled to beg his bread from village to village, to the persecutions against Œcolampadius and Schwenckfeld, and to the massacre of a hundred thousand rebellious peasants in Thuringia and Swabia. A multitude of sects—the Sacramentarians, the Œcolampadians, the Antinomians, the Majorists, and the Anabaptists were given birth to by the heresy of Luther; there were as many popes as there were dissenting churches. The Lutheran creed was still confinedto the countries on the other side of the Rhine, when the French sectaries, Farel and Froment (Fig. 324), set out to revolutionise Geneva and the neighbouringcountry. An unjust hatred for the House of Savoy attracted to their standard a large body of patriots, who, aspiring after a democratic independence, hoped to rid themselves of hereditary monarchy and to break with Catholicism, its main ally.

Fig. 323.—John Calvin, called the Pope of Geneva, chief of the so-called Reformed Church; born at Noyon in 1509, died at Geneva in 1564.—Fac-simile of a Wood Engraving from the works of Theodore Beza, translated from the Latin by Simon Goulart—“Les Vrais Pourtraits des Hommes Illustres” (4to, Jean de Laon, Geneva, 1581).—One of the engraved frontispieces of this collection bears the monogram of Jean Cousin.

In England, the king separated himself from the Roman Church.Henry VIII., unable to obtain from Pope Clement VIII. a bull annulling his marriage with Catherine of Arragon, and permitting him to espouse Anne Boleyn, declared himself to be the supreme and only head of the Church in his own kingdom, but he did not touch upon the dogmas which he had defended against Luther; thus it was a schism rather than a heresy. Under his successors, in conformity with a decision of the English Parliament, a synod assembled in London drew up the Confession of Faith for the Anglican Church, which differs less than any other, in regard to dogma and discipline, from the traditions of the Catholic Church.

Fig. 324.—William Farel, preacher of the so-called Reformed faith; born at Gap in 1489, died at Geneva in 1565.—From the “Vrais Pourtraits des Hommes Illustres:” 4to, Jean de Laon, Geneva, 1581.

Calvin, upon arriving at Geneva, his mind imbued with those evangelical novelties which constituted a heresy essentially French, found the Reformation already accomplished there. Its passage was marked only too plainly by ruins and blood-stains; the stripping of the vanquished by their conquerors had turned a religious reform into a social revolution. Calvin, a jealous and inflexible sectary, laid hold upon reform as an instrument of despotism. In order to become head of the Church as well as head of the State, he proclaimed the doctrinal negation of authority, thus beginning where Luther ended. To the Saxon-like creed of the great Reformer, he adapted a mixed system concerning the Lord’s Supper borrowed from Zwingle and Œcolampadius; he was ardent and pitiless, as the sad fate of Servet and of Gruet too clearly prove; he was determined to reign by terror, for he was a slave of politics rather than of spiritual ideas. This it is which constitutes so marked and characteristic a difference between the two champions of Protestantism, between the rebellious monk of Wittenbergand the apostate priest of Noyon. Calvin entered upon an overt struggle with all the renegades of the Catholic school, with Gentilis, Ochino, Castalion, and Westphalz; his doctrine and his teaching were alike divergent from those of Zwingle in the mountains of Switzerland, of Melancthon in the University of Wittenberg, of Œcolampadius at the foot of the Hauenstein, of Martin Bucer at Strasburg, and of Brentzen at Tubingen. Amongst the Geneva sectaries, two friends, Farel and Beza, alone remained faithful to him, more through compatibility of temperament than from identity of principles. The French Huguenots had, however, accepted as their supreme chief a theocrat like Calvin, who, for four-and-twenty years, never stepped without an escort of swords, of faggots, and of executioners (Fig. 325).

Fig. 325.—Violence of the French Huguenots against the Catholics.—A. Noble lady of Montbrun (Charente) being tortured by soldiers whom she had hospitably welcomed. They are burning the soles of her feet with red-hot irons, and with the sharp edges of the irons cutting the skin from her legs in strips.—B. Master Jean Arnould, Procureur-Royal at Angoulême, after having had his limbs mutilated, is strangled in his own house.—C. The widow of the Procureur at the criminal court of that city, seventy years of age, being dragged by the hair through the streets.—Fac-simile of a Copper-plate in the “Theatrum Crudelitatum nostri Temporis” (4to, Antwerp, 1587).

Fig. 326.—Seal of an imaginary Bull of Lucifer, taken from the “Roi Modus,” a Manuscript of the Fifteenth Century, in the Burgundian Library, Brussels. The inscription on the seal seems to be cabalistic; at any rate, it is unintelligible.

It is therefore to Calvin and his personal influence that must be attributed the violent and merciless character which reform took during the sixteenth century, when the horrors of religious warfare were excused by the necessity of preaching the word of God to Christians who were anxious to hear it!

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