and inferior towns, who were to pronounce judgment CHAP. without appeal.* The promised assemblies, however, met soon after, that of the twenty-six delegates of commons and nobles at Pontoise, July 26, 1861, the other at Poissy, early in August. Both towns are at a short distance from the royal château of St. Germains, where the estates united, and where their sittings were opened by the king in person. There seemed good reason for keeping them separate both before and after; for the members of the lay orders were decidedly Protestant and anti-ecclesiastic. They were for maintaining the edict of Orleans to its full extent. Religion, they declared was a thing of the heart, compulsion producing nothing but hypocrisy. To this grand assertion of tolerance the estates added the proposal of selling the lands of the clergy, so as to pay two-thirds of the debt, and confiscating the revenue of the prelates above a certain sum. A papal legate was announced, in the person of the Cardinal of Ferrara, who had benefices in France to the amount of 60,000 crowns a year. The assembly proposed to fix the maximum of what cardinals should receive at 12,000. To carry out such measures the Commons demanded to be convened every two years. They insisted on the right to name a regent during the king's minority, and they declared the validity of the Salic law-fearing that in the weakly state of the family of the Valois, the crown of France might perhaps pass to the House of Austria. Catherine and De l'Hôpital had found a representative assembly imbued with far more than their own sentiments of tolerance and popular government. But it was more prodigal of advice than of support. It consented to no tax, save a small increase of the octroi upon wines, and merely pointed to the property of the clergy *The Presidial Courts and judges, which were a great diminution of both seignorial and municipal judi cature, were appointed by Henry the XXIII. СНАР. as a convenient fund to be confiscated for the necessities of the state. What material power was to be employed, or might be reckoned upon, in accomplishing so daring an act of spoliation against the clergy, in opposition to Pope, Spain, and the triumvirate, the estates or their orators refrained from indicating. Had Catherine had a soldier for her councillor, a man of energy and action, instead of the legist De l'Hôpital, a way might have been found for acting on the advice of the estates or their delegates. Had even the King of Navarre been kept firm and largely bribed, he, with the aid of the Huguenots, might have achieved the task. But Catherine, unable to satisfy his greed or keep pace with his fickleness, wanted the skill to conciliate, or the courage to brave, so powerful an enemy. She then turned to see what might be the result of the Colloquy or ecclesiastical conference, to which Peter Martyr and some of the most eminent German Protestants had been invited. Either from his own variability, or for some profound purpose, the Cardinal of Lorraine favoured this conference, at which Rome stormed, and the Spanish envoy was horrified. He had frequent conversations with Beza, and went so far, according to La Place, as to allow, that although the Roman Catholic view of transubstantiation was the right one, it need not have been so categorically insisted on. Was this hypocrisy? Did it proceed from the same desire which the cardinal afterwards evinced to conciliate the German Protestants? Did the prelate share the fears, then so generally entertained, of being despoiled by the estates and the Huguenots*, and seek to win over Catherine by affecting equal tolerance, well knowing that the result of disputation must be a wider breach than ever with the Reformers? If such were his expectations, they were accomplished. * As the advocate of the Cardinal's sincerity, see Guillemin, Cardinal de Lorraine. For Beza himself, all moderate as he was, was carried away even in his opening discourse, so far as to declare that the body of the Saviour in the Holy Sacrament, was as far from the elements consecrated as heaven is from earth. This crude way of putting the chief difference between Protestants and Catholics shocked the assembly, and when the Cardinal De Tournon rose to denounce it, Catherine was obliged to interrupt the sitting. But had Beza been ever so ambiguous and mild, reconciliation between the creeds was impossible. On questions of abstract dogma differences might be smoothed away. But the sacrifice of the mass, for example, how could the Catholics abandon an old traditional rite with which their whole sacerdotal system was bound up? Or how could the Protestants bow down to or accept what they were taught to consider idolatry? Catherine, Beza, and Peter Martyr were closeted with the more liberal of the Catholic divines. When the results of their joint labours were laid before the court or colloquy, they were instantly scouted (October). Catherine saw at once the hopelessness of her aim, and merely sought to turn circumstances to present advantage. The fears of the clergy were such, that a large grant was to be obtained from them at the price of breaking up the colloquy and not acting upon the recommendation of the states. This Catherine promised to do on obtaining a vote of sixteen millions of livres from the clergy, payable in twelve years. She at the same time sanctioned the clergy sending delegates to Trent, whilst Coligny in vain besought the young king to join Elizabeth in disavowing that council altogether.* Catherine, however, did her utmost to obviate the results of Protestant disappointment, retaining Beza, and promising to modify the edict of July, hoping "to keep both religions quiet till the convocation of a general *Calvin's Letters. CHAP. XXIII. XXIII. CHAP. council." Her concessions to Rome were important. Cancelling the chief clauses of the ordonnance of Orleans, she allowed the Papal nuncio again to levy and send annates to the Pope, as well as sell the reversion of benefices. She admits having made these concessions, in order to prevent the Pope and Philip the Second from levying war against France, a threat they had seriously made.* But Catherine's efforts could not mollify the Guises, who, after formally demanding in vain the closing of the prêches, withdrew to Lorraine to make preparations for recovering authority by force; whilst the Huguenots, perceiving no satisfactory results follow the colloquy or the estates, became more prone to rely on their own energy and numbers, than upon a false and feeble court, for the recovery of their rights.† The refusal of several of the provincial parliaments to register the tolerant ordonnance of Orleans, and of the magistrates to act upon them, had excited not a few disturbances early in the year (1561). Still the Huguenots took advantage of the pardon held out to them, and returned, though not without difficulties and risk, to their habitations and property. This increased their strength and number, and they proceeded in many places to seize with a strong hand what parliament refused and governors disputed. The exasperation was augmented when the edict of July recalled previous concessions. Still hopes were entertained that the estates and the colloquy might lead to a satisfactory and final settlement. The independent and froward attitude of provinces was, however, alarming to Catherine, and led from day to day to most contradictory orders and resolutions. Since the failure of Condé's attempt at Lyons, the lieu * Catherine's letters from St. Germains to her envoy at the Imperial Court, Nov. 1, 1561. MSS. Bethune, 8690, fol. 27. † For the Colloquy see St. Croix's account in the Archives The XXIII. tenant of the Duke of Guise had invaded Dauphiné, CHAP. hanging the factious at Valence and other towns. Huguenot chiefs and Mouvans, the most able of them, fled to the Waldensian valleys of Piedmont, where they aided and encouraged the inhabitants to resist the Duke of Savoy. Hence this prince was obliged to grant the Protestants tolerance and peace in June 1561. These turned their views to recovering the towns of Dauphiné and the Rhone. The triumvirate had no sooner gained the ascendant in Paris than they interrupted the truce which had been established in Provence, by appointing Sommerive governor, with orders to put down the religionists.* In September the whole province was in a flame; the greatest atrocities being committed upon the Huguenots, even upon the young women at Aix, whilst the "faithful" met at Riez to organise resistance.† But it was in Languedoc and Guyenne that the greatest effervescence prevailed. In October (1561) the Huguenots of Cahors received a pastor from Montauban, and proceeded to establish their church. On the 16th of the following month the Catholics, indignant, attacked them when at prayers, au son de cloche, and slew all. A Catholic seigneur of the neighbourhood, named Fumel, who was ardent against the Huguenots, was put to death in revenge by his own peasantry some time after, a circumstance which enabled the opponents of the Reformers to represent it as a democratic movement of peasants against their lords. Conflicts became frequent. At Carcassonne the Protestants were the victims, as well as at Grenade near Toulouse. At Montauban on the contrary, the Protestants attacked the convents, turned out the monks, destroyed the images of the saints, and burnt a famous relic called the St. Suaire. At Agen the Reformers enlisted the services of the executioner to decapitate the images of † De Bèze. La Popelinière. *De Thou. |