Margaret of Angoulême, Queen of Navarre (Robinson 1886)/Chapter 15
(1544–1545.)
DOWNFALL.
No sooner were the overtures to peace begun than Martin de Guzman, the Emperor's confessor, and the King's mistress, Madame d'Étampes, met to discuss between themselves the provisions of the treaty. Each was eager to secure a personal advantage from it: De Guzman, the glory of a triumph over heresy, and Madame d'Étampes a place of shelter when the King should be no more. For many a weary month the pretty, cowardly, distracted Duchess had revolved her plans, and found no safety from the wrath to come, when Henry and Diana should reign. Bitterly she remembered the years of insults that she had heaped on "La Vieille," as she had nick-named the Dauphin's beautiful goddess, and she remembered her open antagonism to the victorious Emperor. And, even now, she could not stay her bitter tongue. Day after day added some new revilement to the list. For she could not bring herself to repent. And since she would not amend, she must endeavour to escape.
Anne de Pisseleu was a Huguenot in politics, and it was believed that she shared the New Ideas; but when De Guzman demanded the suppression of heresy, we do not hear that she made any opposition. On her side she demanded: a court out of France and a princely revenue for her young champion the Duke of Orleans; a place for her to fly to and live in safety and brilliance when Francis should be dead. Let De Guzman settle this with his master, and she would answer for the scourging of the heretics.
Then each of these honourable negotiators went to his work; the monk to his Imperial penitent, the pretty Duchess to her King. Each carried the point, for each had bargained for a thing his master specially desired. The heretics were as odious to the Most Christian Charles as to the Dominican himself. Not many years were to elapse before the Emperor should take the cowl; and the monkish temper was already strong in him. Moreover, not only from motives of faith, but for reasons of policy he wished to subdue the Lutherans. Since the Treaty of Smalkald in 1530 the Protestants of Germany had grown too strong. Anxious to avert an open rebellion, Charles had granted the Treaty of Nuremburg, allowing liberty of conscience to the Lutherans; and the remembrance of this concession was a thorn in his flesh. Since then, also, the Protestants had gained in strength; they would be hard subjects to master. Yet, till he had them at his feet, Charles could not be absolutely sure of his tenure. The league of Lutheran cities was strong. It included Constance, Nuremburg, Ulm, Strasburg, and Heilbronn, with eight other rich Imperial towns, backed by the states of Saxony, Hesse, Brandenburg, Anhalt, and the two Luneburgs. Charles, ever long-sighted and keen, trembled lest the Kings of France and England should join this Protestant Confederation. Henry VIII. had already shaken off the yoke of the Church. Francis was already too well with the Lutherans; constantly irritated by the Sorbonne, constantly influenced by his semi-Lutheran sister, it was possible that he might dare the wrath of the Church and of the Empire to make the head of a league which should include both the Protestants and Soliman.
Fatally blind to the larger interests of his kingdom, Francis, too, saw cause for gratulation in the peace. Firstly, it secured the Milanese, or, at worst, the Netherlands. The treaty also rid the kingdom of two powerful armies drawn up within a few leagues of Paris. However confident the Dauphin might be in his successful generalship, Francis knew very well that Paris had hitherto been saved, not by the Dauphin, but by the disunion between the Emperor and Henry VIII. The treaty would free his kingdom of their dangerous conjunction; and it would bring many advantages to the court; a glorious provision for young Charles, a surcease from trouble to the King, whose wife lay in a nervous fever while her brother made war on her husband. Her dangerous illness had touched her kind-hearted though unfaithful consort; he could not but remember how much he owed this nervous and saddened woman. Anne de Pisseleu, who was not so patient under disappointment, would be satisfied. And what, after all, would Francis resign? His word of honour, his influence in Europe, his independence, and the glory of his people. But none of these things can be seen or weighed; none of them can be kept without continual struggle. Francis was old and tired. He found peace and plenty preferable to them all.
So, on the 18th of September 1544, Charles and Francis met at Crépy in Laonnois, Madame d'Étampes and Martin de Guzman, doubtless, among the attendant company. Between the King and the Emperor lay the treaty, yet unsigned. By its provisions the Emperor ceded to the young Duke of Orleans, at the expiration of two years, either his daughter Mary with the Netherlands, or Anne, his niece, dowered with the Milanese. The King, on his side, promised to bestow upon his second son a yearly revenue of a hundred thousand livres, secured on Bourbon, Orleans, Angoulême, and Chatellerault. In case these duchies did not yield the sum desired, that of Alençon should be taken from the much-enduring Margaret and added to the list. All mutual conquests since the Treaty of Nice were to be restored. It was further provided that the King should renounce his alliance with Soliman II., and withdraw his protection from the Protestant princes of Germany; and that he should undertake to subdue the power of the Turks, and arrest the progress of Heresy. So ran the treaty, with it promises of gold and treason. The King and the Emperor read it through. First one signed it, then the other.
From that moment the influence of Spain was paramount in Europe; France was no longer a rival. From that moment the Inquisition triumphed; that treaty authorized the Vaudois massacres, and decided the doom of the twelve hundred Huguenot gentlemen of Amboise; the knife was ground then that should serve to stab Coligny, and the signal given for the slaughter of Saint Bartholomew. And, at the same time, the political influence of France was destroyed. She was made to ruin herself in the eyes of her natural allies. In reducing France to the condition of an Imperial province, Charles could afford to promise the King a governorship for his younger son.
So the short war ended in far more perilous amity. All celebrated the occasion with rejoicings: Francis, Leonor, the young Duke, even Margaret herself, Margaret the champion of the oppressed. In a long poem to her brother, she entreats him not to forget, in suppressing heresy, to reform the Church. She sings a pæan, strange in her mouth, over the triumph of the Holy Church, and the reunion of Charles and Francis. No words are rich enough to express her rapture: "All other good or gain, compared to this, appears imperfect." And she concludes: "This peace is of God, we are very sure." Little did Margaret divine over what graves she was chanting her hymns of victory.
The Dauphin alone was angry and suspicious. His vanity as a general, his jealousy of his brother, were cruelly stung by this treaty, which closed a fortunate campaign with an ignoble truce, and gave the gain of the war to the Duke of Orleans, and all the loss to France. Gathering his nobles round him at Fontainebleau, he signed a solemn act of protest, witnessed by the Count of Anguien and the Duke of Guise. Though no high motives illumined him, at least he saw the iniquity of this treaty, and did his utmost to prevent it. But there was no one to listen to him. The King was hunting at Romorantin. The Queen of Navarre was writing stories in her castle at Alençon.
Very soon the treaty began to bear its natural fruit; this treaty which Margaret praised in prose and verse; this pact of treason and derogation which she declared should give peace, "not to us alone, but to all Christendom." Whom the gods doom, first they madden. Surely some lunacy of vain belief infected France that day when she signed away her independence among such rejoicings; surely some craze had filmed the brain of the tolerant Queen of Navarre, when, laying will and conscience and judgment at her brother's feet, she praised the infamy which doomed so many innocent to death.
The peace was signed on the 18th of September. No sooner was the King pledged to the cause of the Inquisition than Cardinal de Tournon began to supplicate him to exterminate the Vaudois from his kingdom, and by the 1st of January the King was convinced.
Who were these Vaudois—this tiny people, springing from Lyons in the twelfth century, and settled among the valleys of the Alps of Piedmont—this scanty, timid herd of mountain folk, for whose destruction the Inquisition was invented? They were, indeed, a remnant, pursued with fire and sword from their earliest days; burned alive in the twelfth century; hacked to death in the thirteenth; suffocated by hundreds under Francis I.; roasted slowly, tortured, hurled like stones down the mountains, slaughtered in every diabolic fashion through the whole diabolic seventeenth century; yet still surviving, unobtrusive and gentle as ever, with their simple faith and their plain, humble worship, unexterminated by the cruelty of ages.
One Peter de Waldo, a merchant of Lyons, is said to be the ancestor of their faith. Before his death, in 1170, this man, one of the numerous reformers who preceded the Reformation, had impressed the people of Lyons with his pure and noble faith. After his death the sect flourished, and in the thirteenth century it was found necessary to invent the Inquisition to destroy it. In his History of Popular Pantheism, M. Auguste Jundt has printed a singular account of the Vaudois left by Étienne de Belleville, a Dominican, who had charge of this Inquisition of 1233.
"They absolutely refuse," the Inquisitor relates, "to obey the Roman Church, which they call the impure Babylon of the Apocalypse. For them, all good men are priests, having received from God the ordination which ecclesiastics receive from men. They teach that it is sufficient to confess to God, and that God alone has the right to excommunicate."
Splendid and difficult saying! Often enough must the innocent and persecuted Vaudois have laid this precept, in sore extremity, to heart! "God alone has the right to excommunicate."
"And," proceeds De Belleville, "they believe not in prayers for the dead, since for them Purgatory is only in this life."
Ah! Étienne de Belleville, worthy Inquisitor, do you believe that any dogma could declare more crucial sufferings to purify a tainted soul than those with which you visited these Vaudois on earth? What else to them, indeed, did you make their life but one long Purgatory, one perpetual fear and horror, one lasting torment?
"For them Purgatory is in this world alone. They reject alike oaths and lies. They deny the right to execute justice or to make war, except on evil spirits. They allow meat on fast days and work on Saints' days; for, according to them, there are no other Saints than good men and women, here on earth. Likewise, they hold it for a sin to adore the cross or the body of Christ, or to pay Peter's pence; they call rich priests the children of the Devil, and refuse to consider the Church or the churchyard a holier place than other ground, for they say the whole earth is equally blessed of God. They mock the singing of hymns and the tapers burning before the holy images; and the days when churches and altars are consecrated they call, in derision, 'the Holy Days of Stones.'
"Every good and holy man, they say, is the son of God, even as Christ Himself. They acknowledge the Incarnation, Nativity, Passion, and Resurrection of Christ; but by this they understand the conception, birth, and spiritual resurrection of the man made perfect through penitence. For them the true Passion of Jesus is the martyrdom of the just, and the veritable Sacrament is the conversion of man, for in that manner is made the Body of Christ.
"Nevertheless, they differ much among themselves, according as they be more or less attainted by these errors. Nearly all agree that the soul of every good man is the Holy Spirit, that is to say, God. But there are some among them of less evil sentiments, whose error is that every worthy man can make the Body of Christ in the Eucharist in pronouncing the words prescribed. I have seen one such heretic in the flames, who, placed before the altar, believed herself able to consecrate the bread and wine, and she a woman. I have heard a mother and daughter, attainted with these same errors, although not of one mind on certain points, make proof of a profound knowledge of the propositions they defended. Both of them were burned."
It will be seen that these persecuted Vaudois had much in common with the modern sect of Quakers. Like their younger and more fortunate brethren, they would not swear and would not lie. War was no less to them than murder. They believed in no hierarchy, but only in the inspiration of the Holy Ghost. And for holding these tenets they were slaughtered and tormented throughout five centuries.
Like the Quakers, the Vaudois were a quiet, even a timid people. They did not seek the notice or the glory of the world. The life they loved the best was that of their lonely Alpine valleys, the simple days of shepherding among the fairy-haunted hills, the evenings when the head of every house read, in his own dialect, the Bible to his assembled children; the bursting of the flowers in spring (flowers which the Fantines, the Vaudois fairies, watch and water every day until they blow); the long days out on the hills in summer, when the cattle are led to the upper meadows; the cheerful harvest, when all work together, fathers, sons, daughters, and mothers, and the mother sets her baby's cradle among the standing corn for the fairies to guard during her absence, for the fairies to rock and sing to sleep, and to brush the flies from his forehead with their gauzy wings; lastly, the bitter winter, when the whole household sit in the stables for warmth, while the father reads the psalms and the women sing songs of elves and fairies.
They are still left, some of the Vaudois fairy-songs. Innocent, charming little ballads, as simple as nursery-rhymes, it is strange to find them, so sweet and harmless, among the gaunt and horrible memories of crime, slaughter, and agony, with which the Inquisition has seared the pleasant Vaudois meadows. They are more touching than any tale of martyrdom, these happy, childish little songs, which sprang up so sweetly in the gentle Vaudois hearts. Two of them shall stand here, and remind us of the life these quiet people led in their interval of quiet before the early spring of 1545.
For many years there had been peace. True, that in 1540 the Cardinal de Tournon had secured a writ condemning the head of every household to flame and sword; but before the fearful execution had been carried out, the good William du Bellay had obtained a reprieve, and the quiet of the green Vaudois valleys was still unspotted and calm. By their children's cots the mothers sang, and the maidens sang over their churning and spinning, the old, sweet, monotonous fairy-songs. Sometimes the young voices sang in question and answer. One would take the fairy's part—
"What are you doing here, you fair little bride?"
And the sister would answer—
"I have lost my way; I have torn my frock beside.
I have lost my way in the gorse; it tore my feet,
And never, never I 'll reach the village street."
And the first voice would ring out clear again—
"Come, little shepherdess, come; it is not near;
Yet, reach your hand and come along, my Dear."
Or in her long solitudes, when all the household was out of doors and she alone in the dark little house, with the baby at her breast—the mother would sing a strange little song of the Vaudois mountains, with their mists and rainbows, and clouds that suddenly blot the fields from sight and as suddenly pass away. Of course it is all in fairy guise:—
'T was I who saw the fairy;
She stood and spread around
Her misty skirts in vapour
On the crests of Bariound.
Where'er the fairy wandered
A serpent went as well:
A rainbow-coloured serpent,
On the summit of Castel.
Like Traveller's Joy in blossom,
Like snow upon the pass,
She drifted o'er the mountain,
Nor ever touched the grass.
Now all my sheep had rambled.
"Come hither up the steep,
Come hither," cried the fairy,
"And I will find the sheep."[1]
A timid, gentle, visionary race, they lived in their secluded upland valleys, thankful when the cruel world forgot them for a time. A race of shepherds and martyrs, not of heroes. They could not do battle for their faith and wrestle for centuries with a stronger power, like the indomitable Huguenots of La Rochelle. They could not fight, but they could suffer. And their mild persistence it was impossible to subdue.
In 1530 the tidings of the Reform had penetrated into these quiet valleys. The Vaudois heard with delight that the faith which they had held through pain and death for centuries had arisen, stronger and more able, in the crowded world outside. They opened a correspondence with Bucer and Farel, and in 1536 they formally gave in their adhesion to the Church of Geneva. Thus, the Vaudois thought to strengthen their position; to make themselves more redoubtable to their enemies, and to avoid the introduction of strange doctrines into their belief; for they remembered still, how, in the thirteenth-century, the insidious pantheism of Amaury de Bène had won nearly half the Vaudois from their early faith. They took Geneva for a standard and defence. In reality, by allying themselves with the Reform, they made themselves doubly obnoxious in the eyes of Rome.
Since that year of 1536, the Cardinal de Tournon had kept an angry watch upon them. In 1540 he nearly gained his ends. There were at that moment ten thousand Vaudois households. The Cardinal believed he had made a good bag. But, before the writ could be carried out, Francis had projected his alliance with the Porte, in which case he would need to conciliate the German Lutheran princes. The King willingly let himself be led by Du Bellay into cancelling the writ. He had no natural taste for murder; and he was glad to let these Vaudois live; these Vaudois, whom the good King Louis XII. had declared to be better Christians than himself.
But, as soon as the Treaty of Crépy was signed, the Cardinal saw his chance. Political necessity no longer bound the Most Christian King to curry favour with heretics; on the contrary, he was pledged to conciliate Spain, to forward the holy office of the Inquisition. A campaign against the Vaudois would push his chances not only in Heaven but on earth. Thus argued the Cardinal, not without effect; and about Christmas-time he clinched his argument with a most plausible and likely proof of treachery on the part of this nest of heretics. They were not only heretics, but most contumacious rebels, so the Cardinal affirmed. And he assured the King of a plot laid among them, discovered by D'Oppède, the fanatic governor of Provence, to seize the city of Marseilles and make it a centre for heresy and rebellion.
It is scarcely possible that either Francis or the Cardinal could have believed these simple shepherds capable, or even anxious, to secure a town which had defied the greatest strength of France and Spain. The plea was absurd; but it suited the purpose of the Cardinal to affect belief in it. And the King had not the courage to contradict him. William du Bellay had died the year before. Margaret was away at Alençon, and De Tournon was at hand. The King was weak, ill, sorely in need of peace and quiet. He felt that a proof of his devotion to the Catholic faith was really desirable after his clemency at La Rochelle, and his alliance with the Turks. By the Treaty of Crépy he was bound to crush out heresy, and if the treaty were not carried out, there would be no Milanese for Charles. Besides, if these people were rebels and heretics, they deserved a punishment. So the King let himself be fatally persuaded to a crime which casts an everlengthening horror on his name. On New Year's Day he signed the writ. It was a "revocation" he was told. The King did not read it, but he signed his name.
It was more difficult to procure the other necessary signatures. The Secretary of State refused. He was not old and ill and weak; he had no younger son to place; he could afford a conscience, and refused. The Cardinal made L'Aubespin sign instead. It was necessary also that the Procureur-du-Roi should sign it. He refused. His substitute refused. The Chancellor's signature must also witness the writ, and he again refused. The Cardinal set a chance seal to it and gave it to the messenger of the Parliament of Provence, who stood waiting for it at the door.
When the President, D'Oppède, read the paper, he found it better than a mere revocation of the pardon of 1541. For the writ of 1540 had merely condemned to death the head of every household, confiscated the property of the heretics, ordered every house to be razed, every orchard to be uprooted, every tree to be burned as accursed. But this new writ, which the King had never read, condemned all to death alike: all men and women, children and babies at the breast. The heretics were to be exterminated, root and branch.
D'Oppède no sooner received the writ than swiftly and silently he marched upon the seventeen Vaudois villages. Several of them were situate in the Papal territory of Avignon, but he easily procured permission to invade them in so good a cause. D'Oppède marched on at the head of a strange and ferocious army; they were the soldiers from the galleys whom he led, a fierce and reckless crowd. Yet even they paused when they discovered that no war but sheer slaughter was before them. D'Oppède had, at first, some difficulty in cheering them on to the general pillage, slaughter and rapine. But having once tasted blood, they entered into the spirit of their crusade. They began by destroying Cabrières and Mérindol with fire. All that ran out of the flames were cut down by the soldiery.
In one church four hundred women and children, who had sheltered there, were slaughtered in one day. The rude galley soldiers learned new devices and caprices in the art of murder; they discovered a thousand ways to send a heretic to hell. On they marched, leaving behind them smoking ruins and uprooted orchards, skeletons and corpses, where they had found the pious shepherds content in their fairy-haunted homes. The poor Fantines must have fled aghast from this new world of flames and shrieking. No home was safe; even under the earth the soldiers found their victims, in the deep recesses of the mountain caves.
The Vaudois, it seemed, were silenced for ever. Even the Cardinal de Tournon was satisfied. And from the whole of Europe went up a tremendous shout of praise or blame.
Spain praised loudly. Spain, continually persecuting two entire nations, the Jews and the Moors; Spain whose autos daily sent the smoke of their human sacrifice to the blue heaven; whose Inquisition in forty years condemned over forty thousand heretics; whose armies, in one year (1570), sent fifty thousand Moors to death or slavery; Spain, the cruel, pure-eyed fanatic, piously setting a world in flames for the greater glory of God; Spain applauded.
But Switzerland, Germany, England, the natural allies of France, shrank back from her in horror. The Treaty of Crépy had already done its worst. France was France no longer; France which in 1543 could afford to say, "for the last thousand years and more I have been the haven and refuge of the afflicted and oppressed,"[2] France, in 1545, became a mere feeble copy and hanger-on of Spain.
Meanwhile, France herself was sorely divided. The Cardinal de Tournon, the Sorbonne, and its adherents triumphed. Margaret must have wept, I think; though, strangely enough, we possess no letter of hers interceding for the hunted Vaudois. Perhaps, in her northern castle, she did not hear the news until too late; the King, we may be sure, would keep silence. Perhaps, remembering the treaty just witnessed, she knew that she had lost the right to intercede. Perhaps, believing De Tournon's report, she thought of these Vaudois not as martyrs, but as rebels who would wage a civil war against her brother; and for her brother's sake she could be very hard. We remember the marriage of the brave little Jeanne; and we know that Margaret had no mercy in her heart for those who questioned the authority of the King. But, in any case, she must have been most miserable, whether because her brother's kingdom seemed crumbling to ashes in his hand; or because of a cruel unnecessary sacrifice of innocent lives, a sacrifice that once she might have prevented, and which she had no longer the influence to prevent. These must have been wretched days to Margaret, for her life, it appeared, had been used in vain.
The King himself was aghast, ashamed. When the tidings of the massacre reached him, he sent for D'Oppède; and it required all the influence of De Tournon to save that violent baron from a violent end. Francis declared that his commands had been cruelly exceeded; and though D'Oppède escaped with his life, he left the Court a disgraced and branded man.
The ruins of the Vaudois villages were still warm and smoking, the eagles and vultures still swooped down on the unburied corpses in the trampled Vaudois meadows, the fierce autumn heats made that place of desolation a place of pestilence and danger till, when Francis and his favourite son, the Duke of Orleans (for whose sake all these things were done), set out for Boulogne to make one last effort to recover the port from the English, before signing the treaty with Henry VIII. The plague ravaged the French and English camps, so that more than a hundred soldiers died every day in the huddled army before Boulogne. There was no time to dig graves for the dead. With a terrible sang froid the sick were laid together in thatched huts outside the camp; and then, when all were dead, the walls and roofs were battered down over the corpses, and this was all their burial. No wonder that the dreadful sickness spread throughout the country. Having arrived at Forêt-Moutier, a little town close to Abbeville, the young Duke of Orleans was not pleased with the quarters allotted to him for the night. In the same house he found a finer suite of rooms, and was about to establish himself in them, when the host, in great alarm, begged him to go back to his old lodging, for, in the rooms which he had chosen, several people had lately died of the plague. "Well and good!" cried Charles. "Never a son of France has died of the pest!" And, laughing at the horror of his host, the madcap youth called to his companions to come and show how little he was afraid. The wild young nobles drew their swords, and, tossing on their rapiers the infected pillow of the bed, they played at ball, till the feathers flew all over the room, and covered the rash players as with snow. Aghast the host looked on in the doorway.
When night came on, the young Duke retired to rest in this infected chamber. About two hours later, he awoke with violent thirst and pains in the head and limbs. "I am ill," he cried. "It is the plague, and I shall die." He then asked for a glass of water. For two or three days he lay in thirst, in pain and delirium; Francis lay in another chamber of that house, ill with anxiety and fatigue. But, on the third day, the Duke recovered consciousness, and earnestly requested to see his father. The message was taken, and Francis rose from his bed and declared that he would go. The Cardinal de Tournon remonstrated in vain, urging that the fever was fatally contagious. But Francis was not to be moved from his purpose; he entered the chamber of his son alone.
The young Duke, haggard, exhausted, could not raise himself upon his pillows. But he bade his attendants lift him up, and, stretching out his arms to the poor, half-fainting King, he cried, "Ah, Sire, I am dying! But now that I see you again, I die content." The effort was too much; the Duke fell back on his pillow, too weak to utter another word. In a few minutes he was dead; and the King, stricken as by a thunderbolt, was carried from the room in a swoon. It was the 13th September 1545.
So ended the fair promises of Crépy; exactly one year and ten days after the signing of the treaty: exactly a year before any benefit could have accrued to France therefrom.